Halcyon In Kaleidoscope

These pages highlight our founder Dominic's subjective views on the ever-changing range and scope of subjects that Halcyon focuses on.

This is less a blog than a set of irregularly updated and often fragmentary views - on ideas and values, places and people - evolving over time into mini essais which pay humble homage to the peerless founder of the genre. Our writing is provisional, always open to change as new thoughts and ideas emerge.

The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, encouraging us to embrace change and to view issues through an ever-moving series of lenses.

This is a work in progress. Please contact us to discuss further.

Related elements: Kindness-Empathy-Compassion-Love; Anxiety-Depression-Therapy-Self-Esteem; Charity-Activism; Conflict-Peace; Space-Time; Environment-Climate-Sustainability;

On an alternative world view

The sheer novelty of the ideas of such leaders not only addresses the issues at hand and but gives the world a new perspective to address issues of the future. The outmoded ways of leadership, of securing selfish interests and of exploiting public sentiments, should be relinquished. The new age leaders must look forward to lead the global thought rather than leading only a particular country or a section of society - Club of Amsterdam

This page will contain regular updates about A Mundane Comedy, Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid-late 2019. Please feel free to contact us with any questions about the book.

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 = #Acceptance: on unrequited love as a vital force http://bit.ly/1Sl7Eh0 

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 #Acceptance: on why it may pay to be pessimistic https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/on-pessimism/

52 responses to issues you may face over next 52 weeks. Week 1 #Acceptance: on living with the psychology of regret http://bit.ly/2ieps5l 

This is an evolving manifesto, more modest than great charters calling for widespread political change, or updated commandments for our time, or even simple poems for our time.

Instead, Halcyon's small charter is primarily a call for inner change, leading to outer change.

We want to help people think more about how they can nurture key values, chief amongst them kindness.

Kindness

I share below (without comment...which is a personal act that belongs in the real, not the virtual world), an evolving, far from exhaustive, but from an emotional point-of-view, highly illustrative and authentic selection of my favourite poetry and lyrics...

When I loved you
And you loved me,
You were the sea,
The sky, the tree.

Now skies are skies,
And seas are seas,
And trees are brown
And they are trees.

– Charles A. Wagner

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In spite of spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers - Martin Luther King

This evolving paper will examine the overall Ethical Development Goals (EDGs) that Halcyon is developing to complement the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Introduction

The EDGs are inspired by the SDGs, officially known as ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, an intergovernmental set of aspiration Goals with 169 targets.

Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism

Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I studied at university and whose work has interested me ever since, introduces us to the idea of our absolute freedom. While he admits that we are limited by some physical and social circumstances, he places us utterly in charge of ourselves.

Halcyon's 52:52:52 campaign will launch in early 2019 and will feature 52 fast-changing issues and 52 possible responses, over 52 weeks.

Is it possible to appreciate fully Dante’s work without understanding the man himself and the society in which he lived? A recent book attempted to shed new light on what some have called the greatest of all European poems.

See also:

I remember snow falling quietly on 14th Street in January 1999. 

I've long held a (completely invented) theory that one can distinguish not only people, but also places, in fact almost anything, by whether it is major- or minor- key dominant.  Here I focus on the minor, which has always felt like my spiritual home...

• "Last night I read those letters, and they made me feel one hundred years old...", from Stolen Car, Bruce Springsteen

I first heard the album Odessa at New Year 1978, and it filled me with excitement immediately.  Its eponymous title track was no.1 in my many (unsent, but circulated within a very small, select group) Radio Caroline Personal Top 30 listings. 

What attracted me too was the coincidence that the opening lines of my then favourite song - "Fourteenth of February, eighteen ninety nine, the British ship Veronica was lost without a sign" - so closely echoed my then favourite film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, set exactly 12 months later, on Valentine's Day 1900.

I was first attracted by Camus, "prince of the absurd" when I was 16.  Camus still fascinates me, now well beyond what would have been his 100th birthday, and close to 60 years after his premature death in a car crash in Burgundy (it's said that he was found with an unused train ticket in his pocket - he'd planned to go by rail to Paris to rejoin his wife and children, but had accepted at the last minute the offer of a lift from his publisher).

"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself", said Michel de Montaigne, describing his own poor memory, his ability to solve problems and mediate conflicts without truly getting emotionally involved, his disgust for man's pursuit of lasting fame, and his attempts to detach himself from worldly things to prepare for death.

I was relatively late in properly getting into Dylan...into my early 20s - although before that I'd appreciated individual songs, such as Lay Lady Lay, Like A Rolling Stone and others.

However, when his force finally it hit me, it hit me hard. Chimes of Freedom, To Ramona and Ballad in Plain D all affected me on a deep emotional level in different ways, while the likes of One More Cup of Coffee had a beguiling exoticism.

See also:

T.S. Eliot died over 50 years ago now. His 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 at least once a quarter, sometimes more often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.

Ode argued compellingly that marking time with natural rhythms and seasons can grow compassion and commitment to all life.  The underlying wistfulness and enhanced "sensitivity to the passage of the seasons" is embodied in the likes of Monty Don, who combines a kanyini-like love for the soil and place, with a sense of gratitude that seems to come "from the other side of sorrow and despair".

And the town label makers stare down with their gallery eyes
And point with computer stained fingers each time you arise
To the rules and the codes and the system that keeps them in chains
Which is where they belong with no poems no love and no brains 

- from McGoohan's Blues

Wonderful to watch Roy entrance a packed London Palladium in March 2019.

Roy is, for me, among the most singular poets of this or any age, someone whose songs and messages have been with me, through all emotions, for more years than I care to remember. 

Welcome back, Roy; hopefully you've got many years of creativity still ahead; after all, my other great musical hero, Leonard Cohen, was still going strong beyond 80.  Indeed, great to see one true genius recognising another.  In "Uncut", Roy chose his 10 favourite albums. Under the sub-heading "The Perfect Record for a Mid-Life Crisis", he picked Lenny's "I'm Your Man" and had this to say about it: "What a great record - and what a crisis I had.  Cohen is the best songwriter of them all. I don't think I'm overstating that.  He has the spirit and is a man who cares about his poetry more than any other songwriter that I know."

Roy was honoured by Glastonbury Festival founder Michael Eavis at the 2013 BB Folk Awards. Great to see this truly unique talent finally getting some of the five-star plaudits he has long deserved. Roy's latest (hopefully not last) concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London in October 2013 did not disappoint. Roy followed this up with a session on 6 Music.

After a three-year hiatus, for unfortunate reasons well documented elsewhere, Roy returned in triumph to the Royal Festival Hall in September 2016.