Writer's Update: Rubbish Blogger

Hey, I know I've been rubbish at getting blogs out recently, but then at times recently it feels like I've been rubbish at quite a lot of things in my private life too. I'm getting there: and if I owe you an email, a phone call, an invitation round, an Ask The Philosophical Muser reply, or a meet up elsewhere, apologies, I'll get to it.

As for the writing, well that's been highly unproductive of late. If you have a lot on your mind, it's easy to get little done by way of writing. Sometimes I sit there thinking about things and I look up and 2 hours have passed in a flash. I shout to the clock "You must be lying!!" (I don't really, I'm not a madman!!).

 

But there have been glimmers of progress. What I'm principally working on is tweaking a couple of the knobs on my mathematical bias theory (specifically the ones associated with gravity, entropy and mathematical disorder), and in doing so trying to come up with some analogies that help explain the highly complex stuff in terms that people can relate to more easily. Analogies, as always, don't convey the whole truth - but they serve as beneficial echoes of melodies we are trying to hear.

I've also been adding bits and bobs to my book on love - and it's an extraordinary time to be doing that, as I've arrived at a strange paradox, in that I currently feel I know less about love than at any time in my life previously, yet at the same time, by some weird contradistinction, I feel like I've never understood love better.

If that sounds oddly unlikely, don't be so sure: it's possible that both could be simultaneously true, rather like how Niels Bohr observed that “The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” We know repeated instances of this: "My yoke is easy and my burden light, but you must pick up your cross to follow me"; "Be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves"; "The more things change the more they stay the same" - you know the kind of thing.

There's a great line by William Somerset Maughan in his short story The Judgement Seat - he says: "I sometimes think that the stars never shine more brightly than when reflected in the muddy waters of a wayside ditch." What he means, I think, is that when the decorative trappings of the good things in life are blocked out, we get to see something profound and deep about reality even more clearly - that, rather like with Emerson in his "In the woods, we return to reason and faith" sentiment, leads us outside of ourselves into something beyond this world.

I'm also trying to capture in the book on love the intimations in John 12:24, about how a thing doesn't truly live until it dies. Bound up in this is this notion of things changing by staying the same. Watch a river flow, or snow falling, or a fire burning, and you'll notice that very little appears to be changing, while at the same time, the whole experience is nested in continuous changing states. So that will be the next chapter in the book on love - the more things change the more they stay the same.

Right, on that note, I must crack on.