PARIJAH DIARIES 8 My life is a dream. That’s what it feels like, more and more. Has done for a while; the last few years, at least. Paradoxically, I think that’s how life should feel; how reality feels if you are actually in it. It’s a measure: the more you live in reality, the more […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 5 That gruesome quiet got inside me too, eventually. I have to shake it off. I had a friend who worked in theatre, and between jobs he used to drive trucks, and sometimes he had to drive a truck-load of cattle to the abbatoir. Most of the journey was on the motorway, but […]
“The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world — lies in its ability to shut the masses from the real world. The only signs which the real world still offers […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 7 I spent my first five years in a Legoland suburb of London at the end of the Piccadilly Line. I was born at home, 2am on a Tuesday morning, I believe, with a transparent membrane covering my head — a ‘cowl’, the midwife called it, explaining to my mother the traditional belief […]
Parijah Diaries 11 “Such a caring for death, an awakening that keeps vigil over death, a conscience that looks death in the face, is another name for freedom.” ― Jacques Derrida After their gig the Filipinos like to go skate-boarding at midnight down on the beach road. It’s their new craze, and a great way to […]
COFFEE WITH GIOVANNI, Brixton 2014 I’m sitting outside the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, one of the few places in London I enjoy. I lived here in the early eighties, when the immigrant population was still predominantly Caribbean and Portuguese. Thirty years on, I’m waiting for my daughter, all grown up and successful now. She slept […]
“When I came upon the myth of objectivity in certain modern thinkers, it made me angry. So there was only one world for these people, the same for everyone. And all the other worlds were to be counted as illusions left over from the past. Or why not call them by their name — hallucinations?” […]
“Science isn’t really about truth, it’s about power.” This comes close to an admission that his own mechanistic-materialist outlook, too, is predicated not on science but on power. And when he announces in this grandiose and scientistic fashion the end of soul, spirit and free will, he is speaking not for truth but for power.
“It’s the end of the world, my friend,” said Muhammed Zafrul Yilmaz. The road was fast and empty, long bends snaking between dark, forested hills. The half-moon, floating on its back, scudded through cloud in a halo of petroleum colours; seeing the moon at this angle always reminded me that I was half a world […]
‘Normal men don’t know that everything is possible.’ David Rousset, The Other Kingdom, 1947 Whenever I get into a deep conversation with someone, where we’re exploring what is and what isn’t in this world, as we go deeper into the subject, sooner or later we hit bedrock — the point where rational argument takes you […]