CosmiKnot

There used to be a running gag on tour with David Devant and his Spirit Wife. One of us would simply say the word “comedy” and it somehow summed up the bitter sweet struggle of being a member of our ensemble and yet at the same time somehow also said our pain is not so bad (this last part was probably implied mainly through the adoption of a W. C. Fields twang). I’ve just this moment started writing about comedy and the ring-fencing man in my head has just said you know very little about comedy you just turn up and do your big silly laugh you don’t even watch much comedy. Hold on I retort the whole TV schedule has become comedy. Comedy is the new rationalism. Comedians are the new Thomas Paine’s of this world very often pointing out our “idiosyncratic follies”. On the whole they are more Poussin than Fragonard (ask your granddad -he’s as likely to be as baffled as you by that comparison but ask him any way). Fragonnard was very much a product of the Fête Galante genre of painting...

In his Manual of the Warrior of Light Paolo Coelho sets down the teaching that a Warrior never backs out of something he has agreed to do. Otherwise he will spend his life making feeble more and more convoluted excuses. There is a very simple clear lesson here about learning to say no. I think as a middle aged man I   have learnt this but even so sometimes things all come together at the same time making me wish I had said no more often. This is by no means a slur on the activities I was involved in its just that I am a homebody who needs to get out more. In a week where I have to go out more than once I get nervous. So I get nervous quite a lot. I realise that fear is not conducive to a happy or fulfilling life so I try not to be nervous. It’s just that my head is happier floating up in the clouds and going out means connecting with other people. It’s a bit like taking the boys to the park – they always enjoy it when we get there. I really do enjoy conversation. No no really...

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Utopia is not even popular speculative holiday destination these days. It's so deeply unfashionable that they have stopped evening brochures. The climate is deemed too warm and fuzzy for our cleanly defined clarity seeking fragile psyches. Twenty years ago my friend foz lent me Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Early on in the book Wilson lays out an idea of the thinker prover mode of research. In short we discover what fits with the tunnel.reality we have constructed for ourselves. since then I have always tried tones beyond the end of my nose even when lying to myself. The rest of the book was slightly baffling and a little unnerving in their apparent inpenatrability. Recently I picked the book up again and found myself skipping through its overviews of expanded consciousness with that ineffable joy that cometh falling in love writing beautifully clear and such like phrases in the margins. The book felt even more current despite being almost thirty years old. the reason I...

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When I read that an artist such as Oscar Tuazon tries to avoid "all that stuff" when asked about metaphor my hunch is that they mean simile. Metaphor is not a controlled adjunct to the creative act, rather it occurs inspite of the artists desire to control every aspect of their work. The story called the Fugitive by Primo Levi beautifully illustrates how the poet can never retain control over a piece of inspiration. Increasingly I feel like artists are turning into town planners who are not generally employed for their ability to create something that adds up more than the Sum of its parts. We seem to adopt the model of Duchmpian forward thinker but just as I am sure Aristotle did not envisage himself as the godfather of compartmentalised ring-fencing I also suspect that Duchamp did not himself as the assassin of intuitive thought processes in art. I like to imagine that in the future we will look back at this time as the era of The Art Cage and laugh softly at how rigidly w...

There has been a recent surge of interest in empathy if my reading habits are anything to go by. I was struck by a link between two articles in this weeks observer magazine. This in itself is quite unusual as it is rare that I find one article that sets my synapses firing. The first of the two was about a man who lived as a hermit in a stone cottage without facilities on the Welsh hills miles from the nearest town. In this articles he describes how rather than become introspective as one might expect under these circumstances, he found his sense of self disolving into the nature he inhabited and eventually documented. This reminded me very strongly of Iain McGilchrist's description of the expansion of human awareness in greek culture. In the Master and His Emissary he describes how the narratives from the earlier part of this awakening make little use of the first person - there is no depiction of a seperate individual self. I would say that this is the goal of the reflective pro...