If you are in the Serengeti, and you look across the sea of grass, for that is what Serengeti means and is, a sea of grass, you will see how boundless is that space, the Eastern African plains. It stretches on forever and the eye cannot take in the vastness of it. Faraway, the air…
Literature
Flashes of colour
Hibiscus is the motif of mood disorders. There are several variants. Rude red, white streaked with pink, light and dark purple, orange. Then bushes and hedges. Even trees. When I was a boy, our front garden had a red hibiscus hedge. The leaves had that glossy, luscious green colour that in the evening darkened into…
Bird of Paradise Lily
The fusion of the images of a bird and a lily is an example of how glorious language is, in depicting the world we live in. But, it is not the extraordinary and awesome power of language in this sense that I am after. Neither the mystery of metaphor nor how it is the basis…
Another walk
The weather that weekend had been cold! The temperature hardly rising above freezing. But thankfully the snow had been mainly a light dusting of talcum powder. Nonetheless the hills were darkly defined against the fields. The stream plashed and glistened as it flowed downhill. The light now fading was a gray, mellow, bluish light. Sombre,…
The drive to Art
We drove from Kalgoorlie to Lake Ballard in search of Anthony Gormley’s sculptures. This is an account of the trip itself and it asks what is it that drives us to art? Kalgoorlie is a mining town, actually it is an out back town 7 hours by train from Perth, the nearest metropolis. It is…
Travelling and the Other
My theme is travel. Travel, travelling, making a journey is often a metaphor for the journey of life. The great narratives, Homer’s Odyssey & Virgil’s Aeneid are both about journeys. In the Odyssey, Ulysses returns to Ithaca after the Trojan War & it takes 30 years to do so. His trials and his successes are…
Funes the Memorious
In ‘Funes the Memorious’ Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote about Ireneo Funes whose memory was prodigious. Funes had been 'chronometrical', (that is he was able to know the exact time without the aid of a clock) before an accident in which he was thrown by a half-tamed horse and paralysed. After the accident he became…
Karl Jaspers
It is the centenary of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology (Allgemeine Psychopathologie)this year. Jaspers (1883-1969) was only 30 years old when this influential text was published. Yet, the book has endured and is still in publication. So, what is it about this book, a textbook of descriptive psychopathology that continues to make it relevant to contemporary…
MindReadings 