You Know You Know

-

I'm still searching for a referencing methodology that suits my scattergun approach to learning and organising the accumulated data that I amass daily; and as I prefer to work mostly in analogue, enhanced by digital aids, I decided I'd go back to basics and give the old heuristic approach a go once again, and throw in my old college favourite, the slightly unhinged collage approach: pulling together references between articles, papers, books and images using photocopies, scissors, Pritt Stick and highlighters, as well as hand-written scribbles, to cross-reference from one to many and back again. As you can imagine, this will have no actual formal structure, but it will include URLs, Dewey Decimal classifications, i.p numbers and just about anything that seems appropriate at any given moment. The idea - vague though it is - is roughly to 'organise' my stuff in such a form as suits me, but which might give others a glimpse into my world of thought at some point in the future, and maybe even prove to be of some utility to others when I'm long gone.

This task is obviously going to be Sisyphean, as I pull in material constantly, and at a far greater rate than I can reasonably deal with. But I don't consider that to be a negative characteristic: far from it. I hate the idea of mentally standing still, and by that I don't mean that I don't relish those moments of true [empty] mindfulness that are an essential part of being human and living in the [only] now, but that there is a crucial difference between the state of engaging directly with the world and all its manifest wonders and histories; and the state of switching back into one's utterly personal, internal place and simply being. I suppose what I'm suggesting is that we need to exercise [our minds and bodies] in order to enjoy our simply being in the world all the more...

Comments

Post a Comment

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

Messiah Complex

-
Image
A spectre is haunting... America; and it isn't communism. It isn't radical Islamism. It isn't even capitalism itself. It's Christianity. A particularly pernicious, politicised Christianity. 'In God We Trust', One Nation Under God', etc., etc., are the tropes of a 'nation' that is the result of the colonisation of a foreign continent by a motley bunch of assorted European disaffects several hundred years ago. That much is history, and the native peoples of America are still struggling to cling on to what is, after all, their birthright. Whatever good was squeezed from the sour pith of colony in the middle part of the last century: civil rights, racial emancipation and equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people of all stripes, is not now simply being eroded, but actually bulldozed over the cliff edge that separates human rights & freedoms, and the return of enslavement by difference. Difference of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality: a pick 'n...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more