Ruskin

Well it's a step away from stallions - or maybe not? For some reason Ruskin is on my mind at the moment and I think I have a funny homogenized cornflake box understanding of Ruskin and in my mind it somehow connects to what we are trying to do with our work on Parson X and just my struggles with art generally. I think at heart I'm a hopeless romantic who without a god of any form looks for some sort of spirituality in the everyday. This gets wrapped up in the giant parcel of earning a living, art college training and the hope to do and be something different. So with no god I try and replace it with art - I was raised a good positivist, honed on the wheels of science and engineering taught to believe that everything was understandable if we only tried hard enough to understand it and gathered enough evidence to prove we understand it. But like a never quite believing lapsed catholic I find this world of facts and singular truths completely unsatisfying. The rock which was offered to me by my parents was always very small and was inevitably going to vanish in the floods and complexity of adulthood.

So Ruskin I will need to read more but what I feel now and before I read is that perhaps as a man who sits at the edge of enlightenment and the cusp of the false dawn of the new science offers us a way to explore whether things can mean more than they say and people can grow to be more than they are.