The Life-Illusion

Here is another old blog post from a while back. I've always been interested in literature and art as a way of documenting locality and home. Home is a concept central to the discourse of modernity and one that is often weaponised by reactionaries. In this piece, I'm attempting to illustrate how home is really a space of mutuality, a place where borders can be let down and new social bonds forged. 'The Peasant Wedding' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567) “You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.” (From The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin) Home is a different mode of being to travel, a different velocity of perception. Like getting off a bike and walking, you enter a different state of consciousness altogether, your thoughts seem to slow down, spread out. At home, you fill the corners of the room, memories and feelings hang about certain objects,...

(front cover to the 1982 Picador edition of Autobiography) I have decided to delay my PhD application. I am perfectly happy with my subject and my proposed thesis, but I don’t think it’s the right time in my life to be doing it. When I start a project, I usually have to focus all my thoughts on just that one project. Every waking moment will revolve around rehearsing the argument, finding faults or cracks in the logic, changing perspectives, absorbing new information etc. And, with the other projects and elements of my life vying for attention, I simply do not think I can fully dedicate myself to several years of just this project. I think that I have always had a spatialised way of thinking. To me a project, be it an essay, a piece of fiction, or even a book I’m reading, exists as a world in my imagination. To dedicate myself to this project is to dwell in and explore this world and, in this sense, it is like keeping a house. Satisfaction comes ultimately not from the ful...

I recently came across some old writing I did for a previous blog, one that I discontinued because of academic pressures. I have been thinking about the concept of "place" and "home" for quite a while. One of the central projects of my thinking and writing has been to re-think the idea of "home" as a space of excess and exuberance, a commons of the imagination and well-being. The idea of "re-enchantment" comes into this in some form, in another recently-unearthed blog post that I will re-share soon.  Since writing this old post, my project has twisted and morphed into something slightly different. I do wish to return to the ideas I started here, though, not just to integrate them into my current work but also to develop them further. The "Commons of the Imagination" is a central part of my current project, Round Tower Collective , albeit imbued with a more Folk Horror/Gothic aesthetic.   Here is the post: (Shoebu...

'Red Landscape' by Graham Sutherland (1942) I’ve been picking my way through Herbert Read’s poetry and flicking through his only novel, The Green Child (1935). As I have found with John Cowper Powys, I feel a sort of magnetism towards not just his work but the totality of his craft, his ideas, him as a person. Despite the imperfections of his poetry and prose (his non-fiction writing I have yet to read), there is an underlying set of ideas, images and a sense of character I can connect with. His Vitalist philosophy, his dislike of culture being separated and elevated from society, but also the many contradictions of his personality place him in a lineage of anarchist thinkers/artists (same thing) particular to the British Isles. Whilst in many senses a Cosmopolitan, helping to bring Surrealism to Britain from continental Europe, there is also apparent in his work a deep adoration of locality. The plot of The Green Child sees its protagonist, Olivero, return to his...

'The Wedding Dance' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1566) I am a pessimist in the sense that I don’t believe in a grand, totalising theory. My favourite philosophers tend to be pessimists who write in fragments and aphorisms; Schopenhauer, Cioran, John Gray. Somewhere along the way it blurs into poetry or even story; Nietzsche, Borges, the Tao Te Ching... “ To live signifies to believe and to hope – to lie and to lie to oneself .” -        From E.M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay There isn’t a border between story, poetry and philosophy rather, they are all part of the same expression. Humans are made for survival, not for truth, and stories are, in a sense, all that we have. Reality must pass through the lens of human sensibility, filtered into something tangible, rational. Our sensory impressions are like words, reducing the truth into a sign. This is a basic philosophical idea, but it forms the foundation of my understanding. Stories ma...

'The Hunters in the Snow' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565) Place is inescapable. Place, situation, locality, is the only constant of human existence. It is a flesh, a prison, an endowment, an anchor, a load to bear. It is impossible to transcend and it is sublime.  A part of our species being is the relentless search for ancient wisdom. We invoke a spiritual (transcendental, divine) dimension to this found wisdom. However, the old wisdom is not the Word, but words. The truth cannot be contained in a single book, but is an ongoing process of many books. A vast multiverse of culture, art, writing, music; this is the wisdom. And what we share with the old wisdom is an earthly existence. The old wisdom, the old gods, the pagan gods, are human attributes made divine. A supernatural dimension between subject and object which explain the former’s orientation towards the latter. Landscape, art, text; these things are not separate categories but all part of the same ...

I've been progressing at a leisurely pace through Alexandra Harris' Romantic Moderns (2013). Unlike many of the other academic studies I have proposed to read which much of the time weave some wilfully obscure, theoretical line of reasoning, flexing their scholarly credentials in the process, Harris' thesis seems relatively simple by comparison, perhaps even academically naïve. However, what it lacks in depth it makes up for enormously in scope. Simply put, I have learnt a huge amount since I started reading it, savouring the rich variety and nuance of each chapter. It imbues its subjects with life and colour, written with documentary clarity. 'Stonehenge, Wiltshire' by John Piper (1981) Indeed, each chapter is like a little world in itself and much of my satisfaction emanates from how Harris disentangles the bundle of colours, feelings and ideas which constitute my understanding of that cultural milieu. Ranging across...