The web is still there, but the emphasis is now on clearing 35 years of accumulation so as to make the transition more clearly. I'm finding patience really hard: waiting for calls, scaffolders, auctioneers, evaluations, reactions from e-mails, and decisions, decisions, decisions. Poor brains, trying to hold and juggle so much uncertainty and so many tasks, which all have to fit together like jigsaw puzzles in time.
And worry for V. in Lahore, where bloody jihadists seem to kill with impunity.
Donne on the box last night: why ruin "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God" with panting on the beach? The rest was a treat and a revelation. Did his love survive 12 children and poverty? My favorite was not aired:
Where, like a pillow on a bed,
A Pregnant banke swel'd up, to rest
The violets reclining head,
Sat we two, one anothers best.

Our hands were firmely cimented
With a fast balme, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred
Our eyes, upon one double string.....

And so on for many magical verses.

The clingy net is shrinking around me. So many possibilities open up but this great spiders web of neediness, with death just there.... And I'm longing for escape, but also torn with sad affection and knowing that I am a good guide in times of trouble. But the amount of stuff I need to shift, the looming health problem, the mass of polish baggage, the mass of W. & his stuff.... I feel like a Greek donkey struggling up a mountain under a mountainous load.

PSI still shrinking. Can we meet in June and will we be able to keep it alive?
And contemplating the fuzzy dot that represents a 13 billion year old gamma burst: a huge explosion that took place when the universe was only 600 million years old.... Is there actually anything still out there? What we see are immeasurably ancient echoes and who knows what has happened to these event signatures in 13 billion years?

Adam and Eve

Adam and Eve: Supposing Eve and Paris, prince of Troy, went off with their apples (arguing over whose was most delicious), leaving God, the Serpent, Adam, Helen, the three godesses and the heavenly gateway angels all fuming under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.... What a lot of trouble we would have avoided.... Adam could have been the father of Eros with Athena and Hera as godmothers, and the rest would have been joyfully
%@#$?&"# history!

Tate with Chris. He sucks up gaudy, flashing Altermodern while I graze Moore, Nicholson & Rothko. Worship at the shrine of Rothko's most poetic red and mist gates.

Thoughts on Altermodern
Our icons
Our detritus
Our living spaces remade exactly as they are
Our failed utopias
new ways of seeing old images (Spartacus Chetwynd's baroque p#rn)
Experiencing experiencing culture (recording reading a book)
Activism aestheticised
Every sort of involvement from discussions with the curator becoming art to volunteers performing songs
Heroes with young turks
Suicide
The impossibility of nature (Ackerman and Coates)
Reproduction - what does it mean? (the singing faces and the Simon Starling)

Psycho-Spiritual Initiative: The earthquake has happened. Are we still alive? Our "mother" has acquired a 30 years younger partner and we cannot compete with that. So the beautiful house, full of angelic spirits, is on the market. The water meadows, 14th c. shrine, the divinely perfumed rose in the garden, the adorable sausage dogs, all gone. And Alan abandoned in the graveyard.
And did she say she would miss us.... or wish us well.... Alas not. Rather like the "father", who also dumped us because he fell in love with cycling and being grand....

God as Anti-Depressant

What is 'God'? The great creative source, origin of everything. "Let there be life" from which everything develops and continues developing. All development is adaptation to the environment for survival. This does not negate a "creator". The planet changes continually and all life must change and adapt or perish. The creation was not a fixed anything, but a great rolling stream that appears to evolve and develop towards consciousness. Like all creators, there's something new every day!

What is this life without a transcendant? We seem to have a built-in recognition and need for something bigger and better than ourselves - something that outlasts us. Humans set themselves up as Gods but rapidly crash. Crowds adore and cheer and then demolish and kill. What meaning does this have if there is no agreed structure to mediate all this flow of need and energy? If the value of human life is reduced to 70 pence worth of chemicals, or to a 400,000 pound house, car, fancy gear, dissatisfaction rules. There is no limit to bigger and more. The hollow at the centre is filled with transient distractions and addiction.
"If we observe the general behaviour of archaic man, we are struck by the following fact: neither the objects of the external world nor human acts... have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in doing so become real, because they participate ... in a reality that transcends them." (Eliade, 1954, Bollingen Foundation). This amounts to 'living by projection' and by myth: assignment of value and meaning coming down from ancestors and gods. The few remaining tribes that still embody these ways are destroyed by our cash-register values.

This does not deny the values of the scientific-materialist world. But science measures and analyses, explains life in chemical and mathematical terms, and assigns values by the cash register. These are supremely useful in creating the cash-register society, but they do not satisfy the spirit. I see no conflict between the spiritual and the scientific, as they address completely different aspects of life: the scientific numbering and dissecting of it, giving explanations of its mechanisms vs.the metaphorical stories that point to the purpose and value of human life.

A belief in a supreme principle gives a feeling of inner solidity, of purpose, and of calm, which measured by brain chemistry is seen to benefit the organism. Living through the heart radiates through the self and others and promotes altruism. Love strengthens and solidifies, but also exposes the lovers to loss and pain. Where does comfort come, in the cash-register world, where loss and pain, and depression, are seen as 'failure'? (In 25 years of bereavement counselling, I could count the believers on the fingers of one hand).
Aetheism - the denial of a supreme principle - is profoundly negative. It denies there is a purpose and value to life, both in Nature and in Humanity. We are all more than the sum of our synapses and chemistry, and life has more value than just fodder for industry and the accumulation of wealth.