Flowers of the Mind

Flowers of the Mind 6. Asvina (week 4) 2021

Glenn Greenwald, Havana Syndrome and Anglophone Russophobia. Vladimir Putin, Nikolai Berdyaev and the Free Academy of the Infinite Conversation. The return of history and the last democracy. Woke cults. Saint Thomas More and Thomas a Kempis. Elena Shvarts. Culaincourt and the retreat from Moscow.... and Afghanistan. Gideon Haigh, Melbourne lockdowns, wastelands, and the false freedom event.

history, The Burning Archive Podcast

Podcast #19 – Vaclav Havel’s Letter to a Locked Down World

This episode of The Burning Archive podcast explores how Havel's writing, ideas and the model of his way of living in truth remains meaningful to us today. This episode sets out the main events of Havel's life and the ideas of his political essays. It looks in depth at the "Letter to Gustav Husak" (1975), and its uncanny evocation of aspects of our lives today in a locked down world.

culture, the real world today

Letter from Melbourne: mirror to the post-democratic world

Things are very serious here in Australia. There is a mental health crisis. We have endured a state of emergency since March 2020. Normal rules of government decision making have not applied. We have pursued a medical utopia of COVID Zero at stunning cost. It is really something that should never happen again, and hopefully, at the right time in the right way by the right people, will be deeply investigated and reflected on.

the real world today

Dr Cogito endures Melbourne’s fifth … and sixth and seventh… lockdown

I am reposting this post from maybe May or June. In Melbourne now all the weeks bleed into one. Do not forget us, world - we were a people with soul once, and a few of us can still find the courage to resist. **** Dr Cogito, a persona I know who inhabits the ghost… Continue reading Dr Cogito endures Melbourne’s fifth … and sixth and seventh… lockdown

the real world today

Report from a besieged city (Melbourne)

Today 12 February, Melbourne and all the citizens of Victoria have been thrown, with eleven hours notice, again into a futile, fickle lockdown that is not founded in evidence of effectiveness. The reason? Five people who have tested positive and are assumed to have acquired the traces of the virus locally when over 24 000… Continue reading Report from a besieged city (Melbourne)

Personal story

Fragments from my diaries – the year in review

Throughout the year I have kept a diary in a an A5 black notebook of 200 pages or so. I have followed this practice for quite some years now, and when I write the first entry in the notebook will give it a title. This year's notebooks I titled , "The view from Thucydides Tower"… Continue reading Fragments from my diaries – the year in review

the real world today

Viral Meltdown – Year in Review

As part of my The Kaeleidoscope of 2020: Year in Review post I have updated with my reflections on the pandemic and lockdowns in this section, Viral Meltdown Viral Meltdown How could the year in review not begin with the pandemic and the virus? Since January I have followed the story of the coronavirus and… Continue reading Viral Meltdown – Year in Review

literature, the real world today

Captain Ahab and Lockdown in Melbourne

Historians (and I am one) will search for cultural archetypes that explain the strange delusions of power that have inflicted a captivity on the citizens of Melbourne and Victoria. In a state of 6.5 million people, there have been, on this day, 20 September 2020, a mere 14 positive tests for the presence of fragments,… Continue reading Captain Ahab and Lockdown in Melbourne

literature, the real world today

Poem: Curfew, Melbourne 2020

Curfew, Melbourne 2020 Unimaginable city, locked down in its dark tomb,Its streets masked for an uncommon cold. Now all movement and strangeness stopped at 8 pm.Some turn in in fear; we turn inward in defiance. We will not be interred within five kilometres of home,Not by the impatient doctors and erring statisticians Who mutter the… Continue reading Poem: Curfew, Melbourne 2020

culture, the real world today

Public Health Rulez, OK?

The psychology of power is enigmatic and poisonous, and it infects more than just the ruthless and the mercenary. Principled men and women of medicine succumb, even at their moment of apparent triumph, when a whole society kneels in submission before their authority in the hope of a cure or more miraculously yet, a vaccine… Continue reading Public Health Rulez, OK?

literature, the real world today

Poem: Lockdown

Lockdown If you can tell lies, you must stay home.If you can live your life, you must stop now.If you want to free your heart, you must lock down.And if you lock down, the mad doctors will not let you out. If you can model numbers, you must derange hopeIf you can wash your hands,… Continue reading Poem: Lockdown