online: 21 may 2006
modified: 20, 21, 22, 23 may 2006

20 may 2006 magenta


For once i'm writing this indoors, not on a handheld (or pda) but on a desktop computer... and i imagine it will be of a different character...

16:18 An autumnal afternoon in early summer, grey sky, dark in places, treetops (seen through a venetian blinds) moving in the wind, and, as i began to type, the faint sound of thunder (heard through double glass)...

...i've just been reading slowly through recent entries to the diary... while clicking and reading these pages which are linked to them:

the feasibility of the new
design methods in 250 words
literature of design methods
xdm
creative democracy

...i'm attempting as i read to grasp something of the connective whole that is i hope emerging as i write, piece-by-piece, these parts of softopia, seemingly blind to other than the words and circumstances of each...


magenta
not knowing what i am doing in this review i decided to make the chance-chosen colour (of the title) its name, or even its content, not realising that (with the help of Google) this colour would connect such surprising and encouraging things as these:

the name of a brilliant crimson aniline dye discovered shortly after the date 1859, the battle of Magenta, named after a town in Northern Italy...

the name of 'the premier female-fronted band in the UK' (Welsh), whose lead singer is Christina Maria Booth...

a musical of love between psychology students...

a character in the Rocky Horror Show...

a flight simulator software...

an anti-racial foundation...

and in all 25,800,000 results...




So now, after noting those surprising connections of colour-as-content, what do i recall of the most recent entries to the digital diary?

...despite the superabundance of all this, i still have a feeling of impatience at being 'a man who is alone and waiting' (a description by someone who attended several of my lectures in Argentina about 25 years ago)... while no one, it sometimes seems, accompanies me in this slow walk towards an as yet fictional new culture, or collective mind-change, which may be necessary to solve and realise our so-called global problems...

...but alongside that, a still existing joy in letting go of our collective worries... so as to experience directly the pleasure and the humour, the wonder and the sorrow, of the ever-present world as it is, and the whole connective liberty of letting the mind be itself, be its own measure, be the continually superceded totality of things as they are, as they were, as they evernever can be while we hold in fear and blindness to a less than adequate world as we made it...

...i guess that's another of my improvised sequences of words left almost to themselves - but in which there is surely something that i if not others can learn and enact...

...at which i realise a need to go walking, and shopping...



19:49 ...glad to be outdoors again, on the edge of the heath, on the way to a supermarket:

...lookout seat towards the Ridgeway... tall growths of fern, vertical, anti-gravity, with leaves uncoiling slowly after fast growth of stems... grey sky all over London but a strip of sunlit cloud along the horizon to the northwest... one small bird chirping nearby and several crows cawing as they fly slowly overhead from tree to tree... and two birds that i cannot identify fly fast between the trees towards the horizon...

...and what was i saying... perhaps i should just stop looking back and continue to trust in the moment...





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