Plain Journeys 1. Viakal, The Universe & Everything

 

I apologise in advance if what you are about to read seems familiar.

I realise that I can be quite monotonous about some things. For example I write often about - 'Systems That Are Utterly Useless' - (Politics, Banking, Airport Security). 'An Institutionalised Lack Of Creativity' (School, Business, Politics) - and 'My Own Curiosity About Random Things' (Systems, Creativity, Viakal).

So this little ramble finds me sitting on a plane killing old e-mails. I just came across a draft entitled - 'Things that should inspire me to riff on/off.' - basically very worthy odds and sods from things - blogs, articles, signs in streets - that I fall over and keep to inspire me. So I am. Let's see what happens?

"The allure of a great mind is the startling originality of the insights it produces." - Dean Simonton 

Isn't it wonderful when you find a small fragment – a sentence like that one that just has enough unusual but right words in it to spark another thought or a visual idea in your head? - Allure and mind, originality and insight all crashed together to create a mighty fine phrase that fashions a new axiom. 

Dean was on fine form - in whatever I was reading (and I don't know who Dean is by the way) - because he went on to espouse very profoundly - 

"With rare exceptions, the lone genius is a myth. Creative genius is almost always embedded in a rich network of distinguished predecessors and contemporaries."

Corr-ect! And to me very interesting that it can happen at all just now. Especially given the permanently intense and increasingly bizarre – impossible to navigate - web of a world we've all gone and created. Part train wreck of competing societies – each sitting unhappily beside one another. Part humans trying to understand an ever more chaotic world - newly filled with mind-boggling technologies and gadgets themselves quickly becoming the next commodity. And finally part Frankenstein – demonically interconnected, constructed by hideous designers - wrought in a completely unfathomable way by generations of sinister conditioning – we often call that consumerism. Take it away Steve -

"A great mind has to make the connections - to bring together apparently unrelated bits of information into a coherent whole. It's an ability to make intellectual leaps between seemingly unconnected subjects." - Steve Jones

Bring 'em on! I seriously hope we find some new great minds and fast. I am optimistic that they are out there. In fact I would guarantee it. The concern I have is that they won't step forward in time to save us. More worrying is that they would rightly fear the intense media scrutiny over whether they once smoked a doll, bit some leather thong, or supported the use of the apostrophe in Waterstones - rendering them sub-human and the fair object of derision and water boarding. 

"Ninety-nine percent of all the species that ever lived are now extinct." - E.O.Wilson

To be continued…

Posted via email from Just Thinking!