The entries below highlight Dom Kelleher's subjective views on an ever-changing range and scope of subjects.
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. The writing is provisional, always open to change as new thoughts and ideas emerge.
The kaleidoscope is Halcyon's prime metaphor, embracing constant change and viewing the world through ever-moving lenses.
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 more than 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).
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.
---
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.
Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology. was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies.
Jung, like Freud, comes under the psychodynamic approach to counselling. He worked a lot with archetypes – recurring images or patterns that represent a typical human experience.
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.
This is a work in progress. Please contact us to discuss further.
See also:
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.
Please see below significant recent changes across the more than 150 elements of life that we monitor actively, Please contact us for help in dealing with change.
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...
-------------------------
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
------------------------
(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
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 80th birthday on 12th June 2021 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.
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.
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
Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God have been a constant companion to me for more than 30 years, while his The Hero with a Thousand Faces outlines the common journey of the archetypal hero across a wealth of ancient myths from around the world.
A short animation from TED Ed presents a synthesis of Campbell’s foundational framework for the eleven stages of the hero’s quest - from the call to adventure to the crisis to the moment of return and transformation.
At least until the transhumanist dream becomes a reality, which according to one leading modern philosopher may be never, we will cling on to whatever we can that reminds us of our loved ones.
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.
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 2023.
See also:
Halcyon's 52 ideas: 52 weeks campaign will start in mid 2024, featuring a range of responses to issues you may be facing at the personal, organisational and/or societal levels (see examples below).
The period around and following the Spring Equinox, celebrated in Christianity as Easter, or in pagan circles as Ostara, one of the eight main feast days on the Wheel of the Year, is usually a hopeful time.
See also:
The modern age equates a good life with being extraordinary and distinguished. But the truth is likely to be quite different: learning to cherish and appreciate an ordinary life belongs to wisdom and the art of living, notes The School of Life.
"Come inside, see my mind...in kaleidoscope" - the governing metaphor of this website owes its origin to the late, great - gone-far-too-soon - Steve Harley.
Saw him in concert many times and in many places and it was always an intimate, unforgettable experience. A top singer, poet and raconteur.
His legacy? Enormous, and perhaps encapsulated in the crowd's reaction to these lines on the double live Face to Face album, a much-played, much-treasured possession of mine since teenagehood:
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