Arts

"Come inside, see my mind...in kaleidoscope" - the governing metaphor of this website owes its origin to the late, great - gone-far-too-soon - Steve Harley.

Saw him in concert many times and in many places and it was always an intimate, unforgettable experience. A top singer, poet and raconteur.

His legacy? Enormous, and perhaps encapsulated in the crowd's reaction to these lines on the double live Face to Face album, a much-played, much-treasured possession of mine since teenagehood:

You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star - Friedrich Nietzsche

Ah, Nietzsche. Always so fashionable, always so little understood and even so little read, although the young man I vaguely remember being enjoyed Beyond Good and Evil, in which he argues that the good person is not the opposite of the evil person; good and evil, rather, are different expressions of the same nature, which bubble to the surface by complex and nuanced currents of potentiality and choice.

Award-winning social psychologist Dacher Keltner believes he’s found the answer to happiness: finding awe. In his book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, he shows how this elusive, but powerful, emotion can have physical and psychological effects, impacting our bodies and brains.

In a talk with the RSA in January 2023, Keltner identified opportunities such as introducing "awe design" into hospitals, in order to turn clinical, tiled, bright but sterile environments into contemplative spaces where people can peacefully live...and die.

Above and beyond the (too?) many unread volumes I already have, there are many other books that I'd still like to read, given sufficient life and leisure, including the following:

Hollowness, characterised by anxiety, depression, fear, isolation and low self-esteem, continues to silently stalk those devoid of meaning or purpose.

Except where professional help in terms of healthcare or even therapy can necessary, perhaps the nurturing of positive values is the best day-to-day response.

T.S. Eliot's legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.

In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.

I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.

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According to the always interesting Maria Popova, artist and writer Austin Kleon was invited to give a talk to students, the backbone for which was a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard as a young creator:

So widely did the talk resonate that Kleon decided to deepen and enrich its message in Steal Like an Artist. While all 10 tips illustrated above make sense, nos. 2, 3, 4, 6 and 10 resonate with me in particular.

I guess I've been aware of Walt Whitman as an American national icon since I was at university, and have long admired what I may be his most famous poem, I Sing the Body Electric.

It's probably been said many times before, and much more profoundly, and studied and dissected, but the poet's words do indeed seem to crackle with electricity, with vitality, with what Robert Pirsig called in Lila, "dynamic quality". This is a celebration of connecting, of being alive.

"Examine these limbs, red, black, or white—they are so cunning in tendon and nerve; 

They shall be stript, that you may see them.