What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
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   Friday, October 10, 2003

WRAP YOUR BRAIN AROUND THIS ONE

During all the millennial hype in 2000, one of the most persistent comments about the close of the twentieth century was that it was a century of bloodshed and breakdown -- all the old orders fell, the centre cannot hold, yada yada yada. Conservatives and liberals alike now decry the collapse of all the old traditions and institutions and we all feel as though we're adrift at sea without a sail, rudder, compass or north star. Just look at that wheezy Pope desperately trying to maintain Order while the people of the world stock up on gas masks and build bomb shelters. We just can't seem to handle the new complexity.

Not that I can, mind you -- I'm as lost as anyone else -- but, long ago, I became quite fond of the idea of paradox as a guide. It always seems to me that the more vulnerable you allow yourself to be, the stronger you become; the more you focus on solving on your own problems, the more help you are to others; the tighter you hold on to people, the quicker you lose them; and so on and so forth. In a culture that seeks to force everything into a duality of opposites -- light, dark; good, evil; forward, backward -- recognizing how these so-called opposites blend into and create one another is a good first step towards a more rational understanding of life's multiplicities.

Two writers -- working in wildly different genres -- have been enormously helpful to me. Charles Handy is a business thinker and consultant whose book The Age of Paradox is a remarkable examination of the trends and pitfalls facing people, business, governments and other organizations in our new 'information age' of globalization. In this interview, he also comes across as a warm and engaging man, as well.

Lawrence Miles is a sharp and witty fantasy author who created Faction Paradox, a pack of time-travelling voodoo cultists who deliberately distort established history in order to create true paradoxes in hopes of unravelling time itself. And they're the good guys. In this interview, it seems that Miles himself has trouble explaining the meaning or even purpose of this ongoing series of interlocking novels, comic books and audio plays. Which of course means, as Charles Handy might approve, that the audience has to work a bit in sorting out all the contradictions and mobius-strip plot threads. Sort of like real life, no?