FACTUAL ALBEIT IRRELEVANT, PROBABLY

Gamete shuffle about 5 months before April, 1961.

Biological Council Award 1979. Educated at Newnham College, Cambridge: BA in the History & Philosophy of Science, First Class (Jacob Bronowski Prize 1984).

PhD, Cambridge : “The palingenesis of ancient wisdom & the kingdom of God: towards an historical interpretation of Schelling’s earliest philosophy 1792-1797”.

Legal qualifications; corporate tax lawyer in the city of London.

Welsh artist of the year (student award) 2003.  BA hons Drawing at Camberwell, 2008, First Class.

Shortlisted for the DLA PIPER Art Award, 2009. Solo exhibition at the London Art Fair 2009, represented by Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, transferred to the gallery in 2010:

“The various lives of thoughts: fictional machines, thought droppings & mental maps”.

Currently represented by The Bethlem Gallery. Has exhibited widely both locally & internationally.

HUGS & CHUCKLES

A reaction, from a low-level metaphysical assistant at Breathing is Difficult Enough UK, to questions of identity, resilience & vulnerability, in the context of making marks on paper & other excretions of the head.

If identity were to partly characterised by what I do, then clearly my head is in a bit of a muddle. If someone were to ask me, at a (fictional) cocktail party

WHAT DO YOU DO

then my response would be, & has been, & still is (though without the cocktail party)

I HAVEN’T DECIDED YET

This answer is supposed to be amusing, given that my body has been non-intentionally thrown around the sun many, many times, & surely enough times to have decided what it is that I do, or want to do, or wanted to do.

(The last verb, wanted, will still apply when I am dead).

But is it amusing? Should not the answer have been:

IT’S TOO LATE TO DECIDE NOW…..(sigh)

This response would be in the context of a planet & a body the path of which (speaking of the latter only) has been re-routed on so many occasions that it is difficult, in fact probably nonsensical, to speak of the concept of decision at all.  Though that moderate expression of self-pity (the sigh was included above) triggers in my head a distinctive condemnation of the toxic obsession with the individual, & a concomitant conclusion that self-consciousness is over-rated (& not just by non-materialist philosophers of mind). ( The question is asked, by neuroscientists & philosophers: what is the function of consciousness.  I could go on).

STILL.  Visual excretion turned out to be one way to re-calibrate how I was to survive inside the brutality of the planet (wide definition) & in a body, or perhaps I mean head, inhabited by disgusting black otherness (or ITSELF, if I am to believe the psychiatric profession).

But it means that I can go no further in the examination of the questions posed.

(That I am still breathing may be an indication of resilience. Though if a body is trapped in a deep pit of sand where it is necessary to keep digging it away just to remain unsuffocated, I am both appalled & amazed that the body does not give up. That the body keeps on breathing in the absence of any ladders out of the pit, & with only toothpicks & buckets with holes to clear away the sand, well perhaps that is an indication of the benefits of visual excretions. That I am even writing this is a sign of vulnerability, but I do not wish to talk about that). (1)

MORE hugs & chuckles, though, I would like to add that into the mix. Plus more pens & pencils & paper.

(1) This imagery is derived from the novel The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe.