Halcyon In Kaleidoscope

The entries below 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.

I have always been attracted by the veil, by seeing through a glass darkly:

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half heard, in the stillness

Between the two waves of the sea

- from Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now

Dave Pollard wrote thought-provokingly of the "Now Time”, a multidimensional recursive eternal present familiar to aboriginal cultures the world over, and recalling Friedrich Nietzche's desire to be a "yes-sayer" to each moment.

This recalls Camus' celebration of Sisyphus starting afresh each day and more recently, Eckhart Tolle's "power of now".

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?

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.

This page will contain regular updates about A Mundane Comedy, Halcyon founder Dominic Kelleher's new book, which we hope will be published in early 2021. 

We will share extracts on this website and across social media from the final quarter of 2020 onwards. Please see below a first short, introductory extract.

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

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 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).

Very few have overcome greater obstacles than Helen Keller, who learned to communicate through the eyes and ears of others after a fever left her deaf and blind as an infant.

In The Light Of A Brighter Day, an essay first broadcast in 1951, the author activist and lecturer discussed her vision of faith.

Below is a small selection of some of Helen Keller's most inspiring ideas.

This evolving paper examines 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.

However, ethical considerations need to play a more central role in the implementation of the SDGs, according to a coalition of countries who co-sponsored a meeting at UN headquarters in January 2016; the meeting heard that despite unprecedented collaboration, many businesses still need key ethical reforms.

“I wonder about the trees,” Robert Frost wrote. Monumental in size, alive but inert, they inhabit a different temporality than ours. Some species’ life spans can be measured in human generations. We wake to find that a tree’s leaves have turned, or register, come spring, its sturdier trunk. But such changes are always perceived after the fact. We’ll never see them unfold, with our own eyes, in human time.

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:

Halcyon's 52 ideas: 52 weeks campaign will start in late 2020, featuring a range of responses to issues you may be facing at the personal, organisational and/or societal levels (see examples below).

"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.

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

Our lives are characterised, above all, by change.

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.

One inspiring example is from the late Robert Muller.

MY CREED

1. 1 believe in the absolute sacredness, uniqueness and prodigy of each human life;

Living, as I have done for most of the past 17 years, just 5km or so from the battlefields of Waterloo, means that I have visited the site often.

Only recently, however, following last year's commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the battle, and a visit in March 2016 to the excellent new visitor centre, did its full ongoing significance become clearer to me, not least the suffering of the wounded and dead, many of whose final resting places have never been discovered...RIP all who fought there.

See also:

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.

See also:

• The oldest song in the world

Theodore Zeldin believes in the powerfully transformative role of conversation:

"Individuals are no longer what they used to be, each is unique. That makes a big difference to how they work. Each one is an enigma. There are six billion people whom we need to discover. We are now in the same position as the scientists of the last century, discovering the different elements and molecules of the natural world. So there is no need to feel lost or aimless. There is a wonderful adventure before us."

Value pluralism (Isaiah Berlin) is linked to fallibility since there is no way to avoid conflict between different values and aspirations - George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered - p157

There is a crucial need for society and the world's political leaders to strengthen the role of values - such as love, respect, tolerance and creativity - and finance organisations that teach them.  That could prevent or perhaps reverse the spread of hatred and violence originating from neglect and alienation - Ildi Trencsenyi, Budapest, letter to Time, 28/11/05

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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