Halcyon In Kaleidoscope

This page will contain regular updates about A Mundane Comedy, Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published later in 2024. Please see below an introductory extract.

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To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they control it, wish to influence its direction - Theodore Zeldin, Intimate History of Humanity

This book is about what goes wrong in our lives, and about how we can try to make things better, even if temporarily and contingently. It’s not about imaginary progress, which John Gray in Straw Dogs punctured definitively.

Now online, Paul Hillier et al's Proensa interpretations of the troubadours have long enchanted me - although perhaps not some of the dinner party guests on whom I inflicted the vinyl version at various times during my more earnest past.

Is it really as long ago as the mid 1980s that I specialised in Medieval Provençal and wrote my dissertation on the amour de loinh of Peire Vidal? 

Rupert Gordon and I were the only students at Edinburgh to choose the option in many a year (perhaps since the 1950s, judging by the stamps in some of the books I borrowed!), and having been back in the George Square library many times since when two of my daughters were studying at Edinburgh, I've wondered whether anyone else has borrowed (m)any of these books since?

I finished primary school half a century ago today. My memories of that last day at St Helen's are still vivid (in part) and very positive. 

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

See also:

• Novelty and heresy

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 is for you and about you...all of you.

This evolving paper starts to imagine and sketch out Personal Development Goals (PDGs) that could complement the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

We will also draw ideas and inspirations from the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) not for profit and open source initiative. (See also Can the Inner Development Goals help us create a more sustainable future? and Start working on your Inner Development Goals now.)

Introduction

Please see below significant recent changes across the more than 150 elements of life that we monitor actively and please contact us for help in dealing with change.

Four decades ago this  month I left Aubagne, without any photos - which I sometimes regret, but I was young and stubborn and romantic and weird - but with images imprinted on my mind, and maybe my heart, forever.

Indeed, over the intervening years, these images have grown much stronger in relative terms, and moved closer and closer to the front and centre of the painting of my life, even as other, once seemingly permanent formative experiences have gradually faded.

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, our small charter will be primarily a call for inner change, leading to outer change. We want to help people think more about how they can nurture key values. 

According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published.  The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book.  It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world. However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and 1984.

See also:

• George Orwell: A Life in Pictures
• Orwell vs. Kafka

Indigenous peoples who have never even listened to the radio can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music. A studied suggested that the expression of emotions is a basic feature of Western music, whereas in other musical traditions, music has traditionally more often been appreciated for other qualities, such as group coordination in rituals.

Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology. was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies.

Jung was a pioneer in his field who established analytical psychology as a discipline. As a young man, he was seen as Freud’s intellectual heir, but their differences in approach soon became apparent and they went their separate ways

Please see below "talking change" pages, containing a wide range of quotes - some famous, many unavailable anywhere else - covering each of the 150+ elements of life that Halcyon writes about.

This is a work-in-progress and many more talking change pages will be added in late 2024.

See also:

• Talking Change - Acceptance
• Talking Change - Activism
• Talking Change - Animals

“This is happiness,” Willa Cather’s fictional narrator gasps as he sinks into his grandmother’s garden, “to be dissolved into something complete and great.” A generation later, in a real-life counterpart, Virginia Woolf arrived at the greatest epiphany of her life  - and to this day perhaps the finest definition of what it takes to be an artist - while contemplating the completeness and greatness abloom in the garden.

Would you travel across the land, in the hour of the summer solstice? 

- from Ancient Dream, by Aeolian Songspell

The veil is thin now.

A time for the half-remembered inner pagan to re-emerge, dancing widdershins in the pre-dawn dew around the celebrity stones, or the authentic stones, or wherever one finds oneself this solstice-time. 

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone - Herman Hesse

As a member of The Woodland Trust, I regularly signed petitions to preserve ancient woodlands and unique trees. Does this make a difference? The battle is an ongoing one, but worth fighting, if necessary tree by tree.

Michel de Montaigne's Essais help us better frame and address the fundamental question: "how to live?"

"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself", said 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.

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

OCTOPUS part 9 by Adam Leonard

Happy 83th birthday on 12th June 2024 to "the great Roy Harper".

Wonderful to watch Roy entrance a packed London Palladium in March 2019 and very sorry that the pandemic caused him to postpone his 80th gig at The Royal Albert Hall in 2021.

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 was still going strong beyond 80 until his death in late 2016. 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.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts...half owing to the numbers who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs - George Eliot, Middlemarch

Authoritative lists of supposed global role models provoke approval and controversy in equal measure, but also raise the more important question: who is honouring the vastly greater number of non-celebrity role models among our human family of perhaps 7.8 billion alive today?

Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" is an epic poem written in the early 14th century, divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Inferno:

• Dante finds himself lost in a dark forest and guided by the Roman poet Virgil.
• The pair descends through the nine circles of Hell, each representing different sins and their corresponding punishments.
• Notable figures from history and mythology are encountered, and Dante learns about the consequences of sin.
• Satan resides at the centre of Hell, and Dante and Virgil eventually climb down Satan's body to reach the other side of the Earth.

Purgatorio:

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...

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And it's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace
And a wound that will never heal

- from Tom Traubert's Blues, by Tom Waits

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(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift

- The Uses of Sorrow, by Mary Oliver