WWII Poems

And you, my friends from the latest call-up!
My life has been spared to mourn for you.
Not to freeze over your memory as a weeping willow,
But to shout all your names to the whole world!
But never mind names!
None of that matters - You are with us!
Everyone down on your knees!
A crimson light pours!
And the Leningraders come through the smoke in even rows
The living and the dead: for glory never dies.

August 1942. Dyurmen

Gervase Phinn

From the classroom rolled the great expanse of the Dale.
The sad child in the corner stared out like a rabbit in a trap.
“He has special needs,” explained the teacher, in a hushed, maternal voice.
“Real problems with his reading, and his number work is weak. Spelling non-existent, writing poor. He rarely speaks. He’s one of the less able in school.”

The lad could not describe the beauty that surrounded him,
the soft green dale and craggy hills.
He could not spell the names
Of those mysterious places which he knew so well.
But he could tickle a trout, ride a horse,
Repair a fence and dig a dyke,
Drive a tractor, plough a field,
Milk a cow and lamb a ewe,
Name a bird by a faded feather,
Smell the seasons and predict the weather.
Yes, that less able child could do all those things.

-Gervase Phinn,
The other side of the dales

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream? 

Edgar Allan Poe

Since Feeling is First

Since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis.


E.E.Cummings

Architecture and Us

"We fall in love with types of architecture with what we dont have enough of in our selves."

 Alain de Botton on Wilhelm Worringer

"We shape our buildings; thereafter, our buildings shape us."

 Winston Churchill

American Pastorals

" I was a biography in perceptual motion, memory to the morrow of my bones."
Phillip Roth p45

Philip Roth

And yet, what are we to do about this terrible significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision another's interior workings and invisible aims?

Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1998: 35)


The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.

Hans Haacke

'I allow the process to have its way.. i am not aiming for a particular look, so visual terms do not apply... i was concerened with change' Regarding Public Space 2005 p142

The Mosaic Rooms - Hans Ulrich Obrist & Adonis

‘The ‘I’ does not exist without the ‘other’, and also, if I want to go in search of myself, I must go in search of the other’ Adonis (2009)

The Rise of the Network Society

When the net switches off the self, the self, individual or collective constructs its meaning without global, instrumental reference; the process of disconnection becomes reciprocal, following the refusal by the excluded of the one-sided logic of structural domination and social exclusion.” Manuel Castells

Theory Culture Society (Visibility) - Thompson

We can begin to analyse them by distinguishing several basic types of interaction.

One type is what we can call face-to-face interaction. In this type of interaction,

the participants are immediately present to one another and share a common

spatial-temporal framework; in other words, the interaction takes place in a

context of co-presence. Face-to-face interaction is ‘dialogical’ in character,

in the sense that it generally involves a two-way flow of information and

communication; one individual speaks to another (or others) and the

addressee can respond (at least in principle), and so the dialogue unfolds.

A further characteristic of face-to-face interaction is that it generally

involves a multiplicity of symbolic cues; words can be supplemented by

gestures, facial expressions, changes in intonation, etc. in order to convey

messages and to interpret the messages of others.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I'd like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.


by Richard Brautigan

Sensation is Virtual

Parables of The Virtual - Massumi, B, p30

Parables for the Virtual - Brian Massumi 'p36'

 One's 'sense of aliveness' is a continuous, nonconscious self-perception (unconscious self-reflection). It is the perception of this self-perception, its naming and making conscious, that allows affect to be effectively analysed - as long as a vocabulary can be found for that which is imperceptible but whose escape from perception cannot but be perceived, as long as one is alive.
The Autonomy of Affect 'p36'

Logics of Disintegration - Peter Dews 1987

"Simple violence, as we have seen, fails to conquer madness for Foucault, who is closer to Satre than Nietzsche in suggesting that it is only concrete exposure to the gaze of the other which makes possible the corresponding self surveillance....the condition for the internalization of morality."

Identity; Coversations with Benedetto Vecchi

‘i.e , they allow us to explore and invent multiple selves rather than discover a self.' 

What is Singularity

"we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals."


Vernor Vinge

Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology

“The illusion is irresistible. Behind every face there is a self. We see the signal of consciousness in a gleaming eye and imagine some ethereal space beneath the vault of the skull, lit by shifting patterns of feeling and thought, charged with intention. An essence. But what do we find in that space behind the face, when we look?

The brute fact is there is nothing but material substance: flesh and blood and bone and brain. I know, I’ve seen. You look down into an open head, watching the brain pulsate, watching the surgeon tug and probe, and you understand with absolute conviction that there is nothing more to it. There‘s no one there. It‘s a kind of liberation,”

Paul Broks

Self and Others 'Collusion' R.D. LAING

It was a beautiful evening in early autumn. As he sat watching the lovers together, and the sun setting, he began to feel at one with the whole scene, with the whole of nature, with the cosmos. He got up and ran home in panic. With relief he 'came to himself' again. Richards identity could be sustained only in isolation. Relationship threatened loss of identity - being engulfed, fused, merged, losing separate distinctiveness.

(J.Woods-Marsden -Yale press 1998 p25)

In portraiture, the relationship between painter and sitter is the crucial component informing the work of art, and all portraiture implies a silent dialogue between these two agents.