The ringing of your laughter...

Ghin asleep looks just like my dad. It's weird. He does nominally have Peter's eyes, but everything else is me. His snubby nose, his lips, and the shape of his face. However, when he's awake, he looks far more Irish than Oisin does. So perhaps in the same way Oisin is an Asian version of Peter, Ghin will be an Irish version of me. Our children...i was reading Soul Economy and Waldorf Education - a series of lectures delivered by Steiner and it was striking how at the start of the modern age, Steiner had already identified the problems we would be facing today. High Modernism, which began with industrialisation and reached it's highest expression just before WWII, and has really attained victory in our present day, was something which was still activity and creativly resisted by people then. However, we have bought into it full time now and only pockets of resistence remain.

For instance, the environmentalist movement, the activist scene, now only dabbles at the edges. We have embraced corporate speak and universities have accepted that they are businesses like any other. In fact, i take that back - there is very good work done at some edges, but universities especially are really now bastions of conservatism. They remind me of sumo wrestlers, indulged and maintained by the corrupt samurai lords. There is the odd pricipled academic, but i see nothing worthy or noble about learning any longer. All learning is now tends to be instrumentalist and subjects can no longer just be studied for bettering the individual, but must fit into some business plan, to obtain a job at the end of the process, whose main aim is to enrich the rich further. Perhaps this was always the case - but i would prefer not to think so. I studied literature not so that i could make loads of money, but because i loved the written word...and it reminds me of an incident while i was still studying...

I was spending three days in London with Laurence at this house of a family friend of his. It was this mansion in the middle of London. It must have been very posh, but i remember it as being mostly very dark. The entire house was occupied by one person, this business man from Sinagpore, who sent his kids to Eton. So many people sent their children to Eton then that i just thought this was probably more normal than it was. Anyway, we had gone to this restaurant, i suppose he thought he was being kind treating the university students and i recall the most dull conversation that consisted about the businesses he had in the place. Laurence had informed me that somehow he wasn't allowed back into Singapore for some reason or other - or have i mixed it up with someone else's dad that he knew...anyhow, we plodded through dinner, and then he asked me, what are you studying? I said, Literature. Literature, he sneered, fiddling with this lighter, how are you going to make money with that? I looked at him and thought pityingly, what a small, ugly soul you must have, the way a self-righteous 20 year old idealist could only have. How could you buy the blackbird's song? What could you pay the nightingale to sing? But the years have past and i don't think my assessment his sort has changed much - except i'd probably have a bit more sympathy, and less disgust. what's the point of being angry with someone like him. If he has no real love, then the ringing of the change in his pocket will be the only happiness he knows.

The whole world has gone a bit mad with money. The happiness they believe that can be bought with it. And it has to do with the poor cultivation of the soul. If the soul isn't happy, then how can we find intrinsic happinesses? I believe that if we have never experienced love, then how can we begin to create an unselfish love? In the same way, if you have no template for happiness, then you are lost when it comes to finding it. I passed the window of SpaceNK Apothecary today and they had this jar of cream in the window. A Eva Lom cleanser , a brand i had never heard of, promising perfect skin if you used it. The price? £70 for 200 ml...Somewhere, someone must be laughing...