youth as an uncollapsed wave function

Youth is like an uncollapsed wave function. Much that is alluring in a youthful thing—a child, a young woman, the bud of a rose, even a fresh morning—is that each has the potential to become so many forms of itself; that, in a way, all those possibilities exist at that moment in superposition. We can imagine any number of futures for a young man: he can become all sorts of people, have all sorts of …

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 …

life and art in one gear

In writing, and in other art forms whose expression occurs across a span of time, pace is important, however I feel that we are, as a culture, somewhat obsessed with it, and I would like to lightly explore why this may be so. Let me admit from the outset that some of my work has been criticized as moving along at too slow a pace, and so you may say: I would say this, wouldn’t …

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 …

who wants to live for ever…?

I used to passionately desire immortality. I would argue its benefits: the ability to experience so much more, to achieve so much more, to produce so much more artistic work. I wanted this so much that I remember getting quite manic reading Raymond Kurzweil who believes that we’re on the verge of being capable of halting ageing – and that, once this is achieved, it would only be a matter of time before rejuvenation became …

slow thinking

I increasingly feel that being quick-witted is overrated. What is it for? Being funny? We seem to be obsessed with speed in everything and that includes thinking. Perhaps this is part of our fixation with youth. Certainly, when I was younger, I was far more quick witted than I am now. One aspect of this was a ‘switch-blade’ memory: where I never found myself unable to retrieve the exact word when I needed it. I …

the curse of mirrors and photographs

Mirrors and photographs of a person can be a curse. Why? Well, it seems to me that it is not natural for a person to see themselves from the ‘outside’. We see ourselves better and more ‘truly’ either from the ‘inside’ – or reflected in the faces and reactions of others to us. Other people, our friends and family, are the best mirrors

IVF and global warming

IVF is a sign of our times: society encourages us to remain non-adult ever longer, but our bodies ignore this cultural infantilizing of our minds. It strikes me that there is a parallel here with our response to something like global warming. We have created a virtual reality (the human world) and imagine that it IS reality. Meanwhile the world continues to turn, global warming approaches inexorably, and we don’t realize that there is a …

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