mirror mirror on the wall

Mirrors have a sinister reputation that I feel is well deserved. I may have an explanation as to why this may be so – and it has nothing to do with Narcissus!

domestic katas, time and freedom

Eastern martial arts – and other ‘physical motion disciplines’, Kabuki for example – are taught through forms, or katas. These are ways to train the subconscious so that it assimilates a particular linked pattern of motion – a pattern that is a distillation of a ‘system’. If we consider T’ai Chi, a martial art I studied for years, there are a fixed number of these katas that appear to be a complex dance, performed solo …

how pulp becomes art?

Is the following observation obvious? works of pulp that excited the passion of a child, are often translated, in later life, into art… When I was 10 I found, in a corner of my schoolroom, a pile of magazines that happened to contain a comic strip entitled The Trigan Empire – I couldn’t get enough of them. A few years ago I obtained these same strips in book form. As I reread them, I began …

like the sun

Carl Jung compared a human life to a single day, in which we are the sun rising, reaching to the heights, then slipping down to night. Today I am 51, and this image strikes me again now, as it did the first time I read about it. Jung maintained that the first half of life, for all its confusion and dissonance, is relatively easy, as, like the sun, we rise ever higher, casting our light …

50 in New York

Something I’ve rabbited on about before is how the world is homogenising – the more I travel, the more it seems to me that everywhere is becoming the same. If this is even true for Sri Lanka, then how much more so is it for travelling between the UK and New York? But before I go into that (I think this is going to become quite a ramble, but hopefully you will forgive me, now …

psychic origins…

Been somewhat busy of late engaging with a massive restructuring of my garden – involving the moving of many tonnes of earth and the building (by stone masons) of some rather lovely retaining walls of local stone… but that’s for a future blog – when I shall attempt to express my delight in natural materials and the skill and craft of human hands… Now I would like to share what I believe about an aspect …

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