A Product of History
Piel Castle, Piel Island, situated between Roa Island and Hilpsford Point, Morecambe Bay. August 2024. The island has its own king, apparently.
Correct Ideas
You know when you know that you are getting swept along and you just don’t care? You have been waiting for this and you are ready. What you have in front of you; these are surely the correct ideas.
The Big Fat Elephant in the Room
I do have a bond to the mainstream; a stake in the state. Up in the air, where our ideas take flight, it just makes sense. It’s the covenant, isn’t it; the solemn pledge. Together, we are the village, and I always believed in that and loved being part of it - this has sustained me. The problem, as I now see, is that it was always a product of history rather than science, and it was built on dark aims. And though light gets in through multiplying cracks in the edifice, it’s just water freezing in the fissures: it’s flaws are now fundamental and fatal, and it’s shattering and splintering and eventual collapse is only a matter of time. But while it’s properly broken, fixing it won’t fix it. And loving it is no longer enough. This is the big fat elephant in the room.
Burning to Learn
From here and now, it’s chilling to think that it was never really intended to emancipate learners and learning. It was never designed to free the human spirit or empower the weak. Its original dark themes were of enshacklement and servitude, and its infrastructure built to complement this. At its heart, paradoxically, it was both anti-human and very human indeed. Things have changed, of course, but too much remains the same. And too many of those charged with thinking the big thoughts struggle to conjure up a new imaginary, or worse, don’t really want to. I always strove to engage and empower and challenge those I worked with; to motivate and inspire by pursuing work that really I thought mattered to us and the world around us, but now I fear that what I saw as liberation, was perhaps little more than a loosening of the ties that bound us. What we need to do is cut them off all together and release the energy. I mean, we are all literally burning to learn.
Seek Permission
The infamous 1991 shark-in-a-tank sculpture by Brit Art’s enfant terrible Damien Hirst has a title that I often think about: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. It perfectly captures how hard it is to conjure up, let alone hold in the imagination, an alternative and opposite reality, particularly in a moment of crisis when there are plenty of other things to be thinking about. But conjure we must if we are to honour our birthright as beautiful learning machines, hardwired as we are into the joy and purpose of powerful learning. Those of us who know, in our heart of hearts, what we want to do for the best but are genuinely afraid to do so might usefully remember what it is to agonise and fret over the name of a first born only to realise on its arrival that it was ever thus. And that it can be easier to ask for forgiveness than seek permission.