Golgonooza

I watched "I Know Where I'm Going" by Powell and Pressburger. It is a beautiful film with their striking marks, not least the remarkable dream sequence depicted here. Every time I see one of their works, I am struck by how 'modern' and 'experimental' they are and yet wholly woven into the fabric of contemporary cinema. They manage to be both serious and entertaining. Within the fabric of a romance, they manage here to set two sets of values starkly against each other: a traditional culture of  the Hebredes and a way of being modern (of knowing where one is going) that is both narrowly individualistic and stratified by class. There are lovely set-pieces - most notably a ceilidh celebrating a diamond wedding celebration that quietly celebrates both a marriage and one rooted in community, made in community. It speaks of a community that is shaped by a common inheritance of shared life and art.

I re-read David Malouf's Imaginary Life on the plane back from Nairobi. Originally, it was given to me by a friend suggesting I would not realise fully why until completion. It is so lyrical and on the surface simple. Ovid is in exile. He lives on the very edge of the empire, amongst 'barbarians' in rude simplicity. He meets and befriends a child, the Child, nurtured by animals: wolves or deer, it is never made definite. After months of mutual tutoring and failing to lay the suspicion of the tribes people towards the Child, he goes with him into the steppes and dies. It is, however, a profound meditation on language and its ability to create humanity and to veil direct contact with the suchness of things. They offer each a gift - the shaping creativity of language is the poet's gift, only slightingly realized before his death. The wholeness of a shaping world made of particular things, sounded and tasted, felt and sensed is the Child's gift to the poet. It is ...

As part of the innovation event I was helping to run this week, we were given an introduction to a process of encouraging disruptive social innovation. As part of this, we were given the tool of a graph. Across the vertical access we listed all the organizational forms we had imagined addressing the problem (we had chosen) and along the horizontal access all the characteristics the organization would need to present an optimal solution. This helps you identify, as you plot the organizational form against the characteristics (on a scale of optimal to not), under utilized opportunities. An example would be the 'netbook' where people recognized that current computing left a space where simplicity and accessibility and inexpensiveness were not occupied by any current offering. My partner and I and another couple chose 'big themes'. We chose inequality and they chose our consumerism and its ecological consequences. Both recognized similar gaps - current solutions are...

I first wrote to the poet, Kathleen Raine, at university.  It was one of her books on Blake (Blake and the New Age) that had at school given me a key to understanding him. I used to feign colds, when bored, and take the odd afternoon off and lie on my bed reading this alluring, powerful and incomprehensible poetry, and getting shards of understanding. It was Kathleen's work that enabled me to begin assembling the shards into some resemblance of the whole I sensed but had yet to see (and to this seeing, as Yeats said, there is no end for Blake is a prophet: one who speaks out of the divine). I loved her poetry and her autobiographies too. They spoke of a world that was mine: a common inheritance of all, obscured to us by our own limitations and that of the world's common, materialist assumptions. I wrote and she replied and in her reply left the door ajar for further correspondence. For three years it flowed and then at the first Temenos conference at Dartington Hall,...

I went today on a programme visit to a Nairobi slum. They are tight packed, of corrugated iron houses, often owned by slum landlords with deep pockets and political connections. Narrow lanes wind between blocks of houses with dirt packed walkways now dry, later to be flowing mud. Rubbish is strewn everywhere including human waste, collected in 'flying toilets' - plastic bags with ties, dispensed with by hurling onto nearest designated (or customary) dump, hopefully. They are violence wracked - both domestic that is amplified by the stresses of living in such uncertain and difficult circumstances, criminal as gangs proliferate; and, political as the tensions between political blocks remain, co-habiting uncomfortably in government. Yet it is a place where hope emerges. A cluster of youth groups who have come together to recycle plastic, navigating the perceptions of city government and the general  populace as idling sources of threat, to produce a credible source of inco...

It was a early morning, and the mist was clearing at Great Zimbabwe. At the exit sat a fallen tree that was being carved by an extrovert sculptor willingly sharing of his work in progress. It was to be an image of the Zimbabwe king, sheltering his people, a king after the order of David, restoring peace to his country. A king out of time, redeeming time. Peace would descend if the statue were shaped, raised and honoured aright. This effortless blend of traditions - African and Biblical - creating a sacred harmony, embodying Tradition is what Yeats found in Ireland. The sculptor reminded me of Paddy Flynn, from whom Yeats gleaned most of the stories in The Celtic Twilight: "A little bright eyed man who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisdore...He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romances knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no les...

In England all Thai restaurants strive after the ambiance of the exotic 'East': all carved wood and paintings on silk and low ambient lighting. In Bangkok many Thia restaurants seem to strive after replicas of 60s cafeterias: all brightly lit fluorescent places of utilitarian eating. We each pursue the image of the other and miss!