Journal - Self Implied

08Dec

The Heart

In Life by Antony / December 8, 2025 / No Comments

It was a Saturday evening May 3rd 2025, I was gasping for breath.

I was on WhatsApp with my dear friend Mary. I asked her to stay online while I rang 111. In 10 minutes, a first responder team was at my door. They gave me oxygen. In another 10 minutes, an ambulance arrived. Within 40 minutes, I was in the Cardiac Emergency unit at Southampton University Hospital. I don’t remember much of the following week as I was kept alive, while tests were carried out, before I was given a heart bypass and aortic valve replacement on the 9th.

6 months later, I am almost completely recovered, taking an hour of Tai Chi classes twice a week and going to the swimming pool. This is all thanks to the NHS and the amazing skill of the Cardiac team who cared for me. The heart is also a metaphor, of course, conjuring love and compassion out of suffering. I also have to thank the pig whose aortic valve sustains me now.

20Oct

1972

In Life by Antony / October 20, 2025 / No Comments

I was at the Bickershaw Festival with the greatest line-up I can remember. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

I travelled up north from London, with a bunch of mates. At some point a guy had wandered off, as you do. Everyone was stoned. His friend started calling out for him: ‘Wally, Wally, Wally…’

Then the cry was taken up by others in the vicinity: ‘Wally, Wally, Wally…’ Not too long before the Whole crowd, maybe 20,000 to 30,000 people relatively (they were small festivals in those days) were shouting: ‘Wally, Wally, Wally…’ I had never heard the expression ‘Wally’ as slang for ‘idiot’ before.

In a few years it became ubiquitous.

06Jun

Kaleidoscope

In Art & Photography by Antony / June 6, 2025 / No Comments

When I was very small, I was given a toy kaleidoscope. It was a little tin can with a lens to look through at one end. There little coloured shapes in the can that could be shaken to change the image.

By turning the lens the kaleidoscopic image would transform, delighting my infant eye.

10May

In a dream, I dreamt…

In Life by Antony / May 10, 2025 / No Comments

In a dream, I dreamt that I woke up in a hospital bed and the concerned medics were explaining that I was awake, but they did not know that I was dreaming them.
I was concerned too, that they could not see.

05May

In the 1990s

In Art & Photography by Antony / May 5, 2025 / No Comments

In the 1990s, I took an MA in Contemporary Art and Theory at Winchester School of Art.
This brought together a host of ideas, including, post-modernism, deconstruction, feminism and social theory.
I chose the ontology of performance art as the theme for my thesis. This allowed me to break down the elements of the art object as a transitory performance with a schema or artistic vision and profiles consisting of the audiences’ multiplicity of interpretations. At same time the digital universe was rapidly expanding and fractal technology enabled developments in my artistic practice….

07Mar

So I’ve got my shopping list

In Art & Photography by Antony / March 7, 2025 / No Comments

So I’ve got my shopping list: what I’ve got to do and maybe acquire. It’s a lot of hassle of course.

Then there are the formulae, theoretical constructs, to be applied by the subject ‘I’ to the intangible object.

Interesting perhaps, for the conceptual mind to ponder.

Then beyond these two forms of mental activity, there is a third: beyond all points of reference, mere awareness.

There is no time. Relax.

19Jan

And what about the viewer?

In Art & Photography by Antony / January 19, 2025 / No Comments

And what about the viewer?

Art exists externally, in the past this was always a physical object. Latterly, it is more likely to display digitally.
But art objects also exist in the mind of the recipient.

There may be a collective experience, at a concert or the theatre, yet each member of the audience sees and hears the same performance but interprets individually. Also, each performance is unique and the individual creates a unique profile, influenced by their cultural condition.

This may seem determined, as fixed and immutable but that is not the case here. Returning to a book that I haven’t read for a while, there is another profile. The book is the same collection of words yet the perceptual ‘I’ has changed.

Is the profile I create the artwork or me?
So what about the viewer?

12Jan

And the question & so…

In Buddhism & Philosophy by Antony / January 12, 2025 / No Comments

And the question is

And the question is:

Am I just adding to the confusion of perceptions
Or helping to liberate them, as they arise?

The desire to solidify experience is reflected here;
a grasping at a fleeting moment as mine, a process of self identification
that fails again and again as time subverts it.

Embrace the failure as perception shifts…

And So

And so

Watch the watching, as I am a construct

31Dec

About this time #2

In Uncategorized by Antony / December 31, 2024 / No Comments

Cultures are partly about geography but mostly about history and the passages of time, shifting sands. Impermanence underlies all this self justification and clinging to any belief that fits. I will put myself into this box. Initially, it’s comfortable but, given time, may become a prison.

And what of this transient self: I, me, mine are labels such as actor, body and possession, mostly fiction. I am the stories I tell myself. Even this is a story. Gone in an instant of the irrecoverable present.

18Dec

Right and Wrong

In Life by Antony / December 18, 2024 / No Comments

Perhaps the most divisive elements of consciousness that engender distrust and intolerance.

So you’re not like me, how could you be?

These are the rules and you will obey or be punished. These are the dictates of power, whose justification is social cohesion but are more accurately social controls.

Empathy, that transcends difference, is intrinsic to the mind free of judgement. But how can I maintain an identity, without the judgemental mind? With an awareness of ceaseless change, there is no need to. Interconnection is the key to understanding that ultimately there is no me and mine.