Dear all - or more accurately, dear void - because no body is reading this but me.
the intentions for this blog are:
1. to keep me to the discipline of making a blog entry every week - as i will ask my future students to do in my new enterprise, but that's another story
2. to read Montaigne - finally, after all these years - i've got several copies of the essays in translation, i've got friends who say i'll like it - which has been the case for more than 20 years and still i haven't read him.
3. to create a more structured, productive life by committing to weekly posts.
recently, i read the Sarah Bakewell book, Montaigne: a Life & 20 Attempts at an Answer and instantly thought this is for me. & i still haven't started reading the essays. the copy i've got is a big old hardback, not something you can read in the bath. after years of a structureless life brought about through illness (hello CFS/ME sufferers - yup, i'm in that club), being much better, i hope that this blog will help me create a much more structured approach to life so that i can actually implement some of the ideas i have, and through implementing them, find out whether they are any good or not.
i think that ideas are easy, being creative is simple - implementation is what is hard, what makes the difference, so i have much more respect for anyone who implements than for anyone who wants to be - or is - creative. in my many years of work, i know how much people want to be seen as creative in this life. it is just a word, make it true by making something. it doesn't seem that hard to me. it depends what creative is, whether it is at least partly in the making, turning an idea or ideas into something else whatever medium that is delivered in, words, images, experiences, sound etc or whether the creative bit is solely the idea. one of the places where this is discussed is in conceptual art. there was a flare up in the media - evidently a slow news week the first week or two of 2012 in the UK - when an interview with Hockney in the Radio Times was widely reported as expressing Hockney's disdain for artists without craft, mainly seen as Hockney 'dissing Damien Hirst, well known for developing ideas that others turn into objects which are sold under his name, the artist as a brand if you like. the interesting question for me is whether being creative is just about having the ideas and how much the expression of those ideas is part of the idea itself. which would take us straight back to the old dilemma, well possibly the quantum dilemma i must investigate - the effect of the observer on the reaction.
So this blog is about implementing, setting out to do something then following it through. it is about doing, not about creating as such. Montaigne's essays vary tremendously in length, so i might have to take a few weeks to read the Raymond Sebond one which is 200+ pages long. Welcome to my journey - & please accept my apologies for using the journey word. i'd be delighted to hear from anyone about any of this - Montaigne, any rival philosophers (Socrates always makes my teeth grind, i always want to say 'get back here now and argue properly'), living with a chronic condition, creativity v implementation, or whatever sparks you've found in whatever i've written that rouses a response. It's never going to be a big tribe, so it will be a joy to converse.
