online: 27 august 2005
modified: 26 august 2005

12 august 2005 an unconscious softopia


17:02 ...while sitting in a park... and hearing the sounds of a jazz festival... i remembered the one-hour version of softopia that i attempted to define and begin yesterday as 'post-industrial living'...

...i am thinking that though we have all lived our lives within the sounds and imperatives of industrial culture (as it was), we have yet to construct and to experience a culture beyond it... but... here in this tiny but globally shared experience of softopian writing, and reading, and in this or any such festival in a public park, we are perhaps already within it!

...as i watch a white butterfly move irregularly over the lawn before me, and rise to the tops of the surrounding trees, i am thankful for this early 19th century mansion and landscaped garden, with canals and water birds, and with its intimations of constructed public leisure-space as antidote to industrial regularity... an early model, i think now, of the new culture that is needed and is already forming (its significance unperceived) before us and around...

...'have a good evening' said the jazz person who informed me that it would cost me 20 euros to enter the festival enclosure but that i could continue my walk if i went round the edge of the festivity...

So my first question (supposing that this festival and this park are already an unconscious softopia) is to ask what it will take for these and perhaps other such seedlings of new culture to become evident to everyone...?

Perhaps the first move (as Confucius is supposed to have advised) is to 'rectify the names'!





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