seeking a new reality

online: 17 april 2017

27 august 2016 seeking a new reality(close to a house in Parliament Hill where George Orwell once lived)

[these dates and text may be incomplete and incorrect... the result of my pressing several keys accidentally... while rewriting this partly from memory at 5am... and to a surprising result!]

... it was late summer afternoon... i was picking blackberries and eating home made ice cream at the edge of the heath... (the ice-cream people asked me to be photographed as an old man eating ice cream but i declined the invitation... nice as their ice cream is)...

...then (while still on the heath) i received an email asking me to sign a protest against Toshiba being given permission to build a nuclear power plant in Northern Britain... but i could not find the protest button...

i'm more astonished by the presence of these messages (in a city forest walk) than by their contents... (home-made ice cream, nuclear power plant, what next?...)

...a bird sings a single phrase and then ceases... human couples (some with babies or infants or dogs) pass close to this seat about once a minute along the secluded path where i am sitting... from most places the planet seems to move... but from here it appears completely still...

...and now i walk towards the nearby civil engineering work of raising the height of some of the many ponds and dams on Hampstead Heath... for fear of huge but improbable floods in the distant future..

...when i saw one of the new dams (between ponds 2 and 3) i was surprised at the smallness of the difference (before and after)... (did our imaginations exaggerate?)... the new dam and the added platform and railings now look to me like signs of visual improvement!...

...what if our perception as protestors was faulty... and the fail-safe caution of our engineering selves was quite wise... and not exaggerated or ridiculous!...

...for suddenly i ask how would it be if all artificial changes and human actions were wiser and better than is presently supposed?...

[...without more ado i decide to reimagine such a radical utopia... this could be the new reality i've been seeking (or even finding) for a lifetime!... yes yes...]

...yes at last the new world... that has escaped the creative attention of self/other (of all of us as people... not only as specialists)

next day

...correcting typing errors and half remembering accidental deletions in the last few paragraphs... and remembering that both unconventional and conventional reality could be partly mistaken... i await words more appropriate to such people as all of us...

...capable of 'the imaginative jump from present facts to future possibilities' *

*words spoken by J. K. Page in 1965 at a governmental conference about the future of building in Britain... (though he does not remember speaking them) they appear in my notes of the occasion... and on the opening page (2) of Design Methods... ... and i am reminded of similar words by John Cowper Powys (and others) that appear as epigraphs to this website...

I touch here upon what is to me one of the profoundest philosophical mysteries: I mean the power of the individual mind to create its own world, not in complete independence of what is called "the objective world," but in a steadily growing independent attitude of other minds towards this world. [...] The point is that we have the power of re-creating the universe from the depths of ourselves. In doing so we share the creative force that started the whole process*

...at which the whole website began metaphorically to shake and to crackle... as if this were the film of a cosmic disturbance... the story of which is being written as it happens... this is it!

*John Cowper Powys, Autobiography, first published 1934, Macdonald Publishers, Picador Pan edition, London 1967 (page 62 for a different version of this quotation).

homepage

You may transmit this text to anyone for any non-commercial purpose if you include the copyright line and this notice and if you respect the copyright of quotations.

If you wish to reproduce any of this text commercially please send a copyright permission request to jcj at publicwriting.net