To give you just an initial flavour of what is in store: I have the following unfinished projects underway, and have already made substantial headway on some of these over many years before launching this website – and I will continue to work on these and other projects, sharing my latest samples at this website as I go (and feel free to share in a comment which of my projects, if any, you would prefer me to prioritize for completion first!):
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BOOKS ABOUT MEANING IN OUR LIVES:
I have recently launched a project of grand scope: a series of three non-fiction books, exploring how people generate meaning in their lives, with a groundbreaking new model I have developed. I anticipate this to be a life-changing series of books! They will be relevant to people everywhere, and will be very exciting, incorporating many interviews with people around the world at the forefront of their respective fields, ranging from scientific pioneers to artistic mavericks and more. Watch this space for news.
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MUSIC:
Six albums of music, spanning at least four genres. This music includes, for example: original pop/rock songs; original music for piano in various styles including a modern classical style; original music for multiple instruments, including voice, drums, piano, harp and others; progressive rock; experimental music and soundscapes, incorporating elements such as the sounds of wind blowing through sails of moored boats in the harbour; romantic ballads; comic music; famous poetry set to music (including a double album of songs based on lyrics from the poetry of Thomas Hardy, under the title “Compassionate Witness”); and more.
I began writing melodies and rhythms at around the age of 7 or 8, and set up a band around that time with some schoolfriends, with a number of songs which I wrote and tried to get them (admittedly with difficulty!) to play or sing along to, such as “The Man in the Black Coat”, “Lucy in Love” and my personal favourite from that period: “Umm. . . What Was That I Was Saying?”. At that time I had not yet learned the piano or any other instruments, but my father gave me a little synthesizer and I loved to write music on it.
From the age of 10 I began to use a tape-to-tape recorder to dub multiple layers of singing, speech and noises on top of one another, in a “wall of sound” way. As a result of this, together with my fevered imagination, some of my early songs were quite quirky. One of these (“Boris the Hedgehog”) involved multiple layers of grunting noises which I made myself as what sounded like a gang of apes providing backing voices to the main tune. It was played to the class by my music teacher Mr Sears when I was 11 or 12 after he accidentally heard it upon walking into the classroom during a break, at which it elicited a very broad grin from him. Over 20 years later a friend told me that hearing this song played to the class was his favourite memory from 7 years of secondary school, which surprised and touched me!
I remember dreaming in my early childhood bedroom – sometime before the age of 10 – with the most amazing complex music playing out in the dream – a heavenly type of music, with many different lines of sound and various instruments playing – only to awake thinking, “What on Earth was that amazing music in the dream? It’s nothing I’ve ever heard before. My mind must have made it up while it was dreaming.” And then I reached for a tape recorder to try and capture even a trace of it, but by then I had lost all memories of the dream. Sometimes it feels like all the music I have made since then has been a feeble effort to try and recapture the memory of that magical music hidden somewhere deep inside!
I share these old memories to show how music has always felt close to my consciousness, since an early age. And when I learned how to compile songs onto mix tapes, I started being late for meals, and I remember a visiting Spanish aunt when I was aged 9 or 10 remarking about me, in quite a decisive tone of voice: “Ah, Simon. . . music is his food!”
At any rate, I see music as a flow which moves with the tide of life, carving out shapes in the coastline that become coves, cliffs, headlands and beaches. Music is so broad that it can single-handedly capture almost the entire range of human experience, and recycle it back to our ears and our hearts as art in its purest form.
Before we ever opened our eyes or mouths, when all we could feel was the pulsation of the universe around us which was transmitted to us through our mother’s womb, the most primal experience was one of vibration and sound. In some translations, “In the beginning was the Word” has been re-phrased as, “In the beginning was the Sound”. Either way, we know that sounds, words and meanings all lie at the head of the spring of life, and much else in our lives is downstream from there. Therefore, where better to develop a full range of artistic expression, and to explore and experience the nature of what it means to be human, than in music?
And why restrict yourself to one favourite genre, style or mood, when there is such a wide range to rhapsodize over?
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POETRY:
Three books of poetry, on different thematic cycles. This ranges from “metaphysical” poems – to those exploring and exposing many aspects of modern life and the status quo – to poetry of the soul – to poems of romantic passion – to poems about relationships and sexuality – to poems diving into the emotional experience and travails of an imaginary character in one of my forthcoming books, who goes by the name of “The Sailor”.
I have been writing poetry since I was 14, at which time I went through a phase when I sympathized with what I thought of as “the William Blake syndrome”: he worked in a factory by day and then became short of sleep working on his poetry at night, because he had no other time to do it; and as for me, I was just a teenager impassioned with life and wanting to rhapsodize about it in literally hundreds of pages of poems and philosophy, but had no time to do it at school, and not enough time in the evenings to make progress, and so there were periods when the night-time became the only haven where it was possible to make decent headway.
Alas, poetry is not exactly popular these days. It seems that nobody has time for it any more. That’s a great shame. I have bought my first Christmas present for this year already: for myself. Aren’t I selfish! Well, when it comes to poetry, I know what I like and so I decided to treat myself to one of the best presents ever – the Norton Anthology, with over 2000 pages of stunning verse in the English language, brilliantly selected from over a millennium. . . and my mouth is already watering!
I would love to inspire the same passion about poetry in a few of my readers, and help reawaken a passion for life which poetry can tap into perhaps better than any other medium!
So, no matter what you think of poetry, as you read this, let me know how you fare with my poems, and in particular how I can help you feel the same passion that I feel for poetry, if you don’t already! Do you wake each morning feeling thrilled to be alive? Sometimes I think of poetry as a quality of life itself, and of each day having its own “poetry barometer”. If there was ever a patron saint of poetry needed, I would volunteer for the job if I could.
Also, did you know that Plato made a specific ban on poets in his imaginary Utopian Republic? Out of all the many professions, he singled out poets! Think about it. . . and you may begin to feel the same excitement about poetry that I do: what type of human activity is more subversive than allowing the mind and heart to roam freely through the realms of the imagination – potentially rewriting the scripts of internal and social conditioning, and liberating what Werner Erhard has described as The Realm of Possibility? Many activities can achieve such aims in different ways, yet it could be said that it is the degree to which each of those activities ascends to become a form of poetry that it manages to liberate itself from the constraints of the limited horizons and impoverished imagination of a robotic life.
That said, music has similarly subversive potential – and I find it interesting that at my father’s boarding school he was allowed to play composers such as Bach and Mozart on the piano, whereas it was forbidden to play Chopin! Extraordinary! I wonder if the reason for such a ban might have been the same anxiety that Plato must have felt, when he realized that one free-thinking, free-feeling poet could overthrow the robotic routines of his entire “Utopian” civilization, by planting seeds of liberation and imagination in the minds and hearts of its citizens?
Imagination is perhaps the most important asset of our humanity. What’s more, and as Einstein correctly stated, it is more important than knowledge.
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POETRY SET TO MUSIC:
I love to set poetry to music: I see music as a fine yet mostly untapped avenue to explore the essential emotion and rhythms of life embedded in condensed form in poetry, and particularly with musical bard-like poets like Thomas Hardy. I think that one of the main reasons many people can’t be bothered with poetry is because the meanings of the words are presented in a very condensed form, and the modern eye is trained to glide over the page too quickly. . . and as for the modern ear, it mostly couldn’t “care a cucumber”, as the Spanish say! Enter music: here we have a fine companion to help us slow down, open the heart and develop new eyes and ears for poetry, and the emotional experience distilled in it, that we might have otherwise missed.
If poetry is a fine palace, with many unmissable surprises in nooks and crannies, I see music as a family butler who can take our coats and lead us through the palace. Of course, we do not always need a butler to escort us, and often it is much better to have none – and let the poetry speak for itself! But sometimes with the butler’s help we will discover aspects of the palace that could easily otherwise have escaped our attention altogether, or which we would have noticed but which the butler has helped to bring to life for us.
I completely reverse the way poetry is usually set to music: typically, when it is done (which is not often), people slot the words into a particular musical genre and musical construct, with the result that it sounds like an unhappy marriage, and the poetry sounds at best like an afterthought or at worst like it was flushed down the loo; whereas – in stark contrast to this – I sit first with the poem, in deep meditation, to feel its essence or soul as best I am able, and then I wait to see if any musical forms echo up out of that inner well to capture something of that soul of the poem – and so in the process I seek to use music more flexibly and receptively to go on a quest to the heart of a poem.
To give a classic example of what I mean, a famous Irish poem, “Down By The Salley Gardens”, has already been set to music with a typical traditional Irish musical sound, and when I have listened to it, it basically conjures up the typical emotions of (one strain of) traditional Irish music – a rich musical tradition that I love as a musical form – but which in this case involves emotions and sounds that only partly relate to the poem itself! The words concern the later regrets of a young lover who was filled with impatient yearning, and yet you do not feel ANY of that impatience in the classic version of the song, which focuses only on the sadness!
What makes this little poem so potent is that in a few bare lines it contains a heady mix which is sad, yes, and hints at tragedy, but which at the same time captures the intense passion of youth, the young man who “with her does not agree” when he is told to take it easy. Where in the classic musical rendition can that uneasy passion be heard? It just sounds like soft weeping. In contrast, I sat with the poem one day and a different musical vibe began to flow into my ears. I was myself in love, but did not yet realize it, so it was easy to get into the mood. What came out was not confined to genre, i.e., it was not based on a superficial analysis which goes: “this is an Irish poem, so let’s give it a typical Irish sound.” Not at all! And I take pride in sharing that the end result – for better or for worse I do not know – is at least more closely in keeping with the actual soul of the poem.
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BOOK ON ENERGETIC SENSITIVITY:
A non-fiction book on the subject of so-called “energetic sensitivity” between people (as well as animals): what is it, exactly, that can be felt during meditation, hands-on healing, sex and other forms of touch or even just proximity? I am developing a new model to explain and teach applications of this type of sensitivity, and to help people develop and apply it themselves.
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HUMOUR:
Two books of humour: a volume of original epitaphs and other mock-morbid humour; and a volume of silliness based on a magazine I once co-produced with a friend, called “The Daily Dung Weekly (Monthly Edition)”, and for which I have been described as everything from “insane” to “idiotic” to “puerile” to, I admit, at least one positive accolade which was generated from quite a few of our readers – “genius” – which, however misplaced, I share here only by way of explaining why I decided, at long last, that perhaps I should resurrect some of the old “idiocy” for a new readership, and see how I am branded next – “anti-hero”? “nutcase”? “OMG is this guy for real?” / “daily what?”
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HANDBOOK FOR MODERN LIFE:
A non-fiction “handbook” on modern life, aimed at summarizing many health- and life-saving tips in one volume, along with an entire new philosophy of how to live happily and thrive as a human being. While preparing the first draft of this book, I became so excited about the far-reaching implications of the content, that I wrote a preface entitled (deliberately provocatively!) “This Book Is Worth A Million Pounds” – but not with the aim of selling it at such a pricetag, of course; only with the intention of starting a debate about how we define value.
You will understand what I mean when you hear about the real case example from one of my medical mentors of a lady who, after an environmental trigger, developed a neurological condition which then caused 307,198.58 dollars in conventional hospital fees, over a three-month period, after which the only end result was a prescription of steroids to partly manage the still-unexplained symptoms, and an anti-depressant which added the new symptom of suicidal depression (a side effect listed in the packet, would you believe) to her previous state.
This example is shared here only to illustrate the unfathomable cost to us, financially and in every other way, which can be engendered from making simple errors of judgement in our lives, about health and a number of other key issues. In a world which has been rapidly industrialized, globalized and “technologized”, the judgement calls which we are called upon to make in the course of a “normal” life nowadays are very different to decisions our ancestors faced. The question is: how can we make sensible decisions, and to what sciences can we turn to inform those decisions? I plan to reveal all in this handbook. . .
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FICTION:
Two books of fiction: many unpublished short stories; and an unfinished novel on the subject of a man accused unfairly in the public domain of many vile things – or perhaps not unfairly? You, the reader, must decide who to believe, and what the man’s true motives really were, and what he really did or didn’t do, as I take you on a journey through many points of view.
I was inspired back in 1998 to start writing this by reading the wonderful classic novel, “The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins, in which there is not just one narrative voice, but several! A great mystery is introduced, and the reader is exposed to rather different versions of reality – and very different styles of writing – from different characters in the story who have written different passages that form part of Collins’ novel. I decided to expand on the same overall idea, and apply it to a totally different mystery and plotline. I found it a mesmerizing idea to explore the great variance between different people’s accounts of the same events, and the ways we all view the world through such different eyes.
Also, I developed a character who is proving especially interesting in the story arc (the aunt of the accused), who throughout the novel seeks – sometimes against overwhelming evidence to the contrary – to keep alive her memory of her nephew as a man of good nature and pure motives. How will she keep alive her faith in him, and which is ultimately more important: one’s intuition and knowledge about a person, or the mountain of evidence contradicting what one knows about that person? My fledgeling novel turned out to have quite an involved and enthralling storyline, with many characters and twists, so it is an ongoing project! Hopefully one day I will have it ready to publish.
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PHOTOGRAPHY:
I have never undergone any formal study of art or photography, but I keep thinking I would like to. And strangely, although my family has a rich vein of musical heritage, there is not much in the way of visual arts – and yet, untutored and without any family influence or precedent, I adore the visual arts in my own artistically illiterate way.
I do not yet know how, or if, I will share it, besides at this blog, but amateur photography is a personal passion. The first time I remember realizing it was at the age of 12, when I spent a while carefully composing a shot of the Blue Mountains, with wooded hills fading into distant valleys under lingering swathes of mist – which later my uncle, a professor at Sydney University, proudly declared was his own work, which always secretly tickled me. I never corrected him – and in any case for much of my life I was not in the habit of drawing attention to or taking credit for my own work; which is why this website marks a deliberate dramatic change of attitude where I am challenging myself to “go against the grain”! I learned early on to “hide my light under a bushel” in response to the bullying attentions of an elder brother who sometimes resented my existence and at times sought to destroy things that I made; so it’s been a hard habit to break – yet here I am, breaking it now!
As for my uncle – he just couldn’t remember which of the photos had been taken by him, as he borrowed my camera that day to take a few snaps! So he automatically assumed that the bad ones were taken by the 12-year-old, and selected my shot of the Blue Mountains as a demonstration of how to do it properly, with all his superior experience and know-how. I found it ironic that the “bad ones” he was condemning were in fact his own snaps taken at the same location as where I took my single shot.
In my teens, my father noticed how long I would spend on composing a shot: he commented that whereas people usually take several snaps and hope that one of them turns out okay, I would take a while composing a single shot the way I wanted it to be. Now, my approach to photography, for what it’s worth, flies in the face of the norm. I stand opposed to the common trend in photography, which I liken to the habit of certain women to abuse make-up: where little thought goes into the actual “photography”, and then a lot of thought goes instead into over-adjusting digital images afterwards, to try and make them appear to be something they were not, beyond a limit of credulity or aesthetic context. Not only do the “adjustments” often fall short (or, too often, add cringe-inducing artificiality to the final image), but in addition they may distract the artist from his/her primary function of giving energy to the original task of composition of the shot.
Below I share an example of one of my recent photos, to demonstrate what I mean. Whether you will like it or not, I cannot predict, of course. . . but at least I can say that it came out the way I intended! – with the rainbow contrasting a play of dark and light in the sky and background town, and an overall “storyline” I was hoping to capture by juxtaposing the lantern, faded prohibition sign, distant sunny hill, rainbow, clouds, pier, harbour boats, water, land and sky in this configuration. I was also captivated by the play of shapes: the various vertical objects contrasting the circularity of the lantern, and the various diagonals, curves and things “coming to a head”; the flat water contrasting the hills behind; etc. If you knew the town, you might also catch a bit of social observation in relation to its history and current tide of opinion: old vs new buildings and structures; upmarket yachts vs fishermen. At any rate, I spent a little time and energy pausing to compose the shot with my senses alert, and then did only minimal judicious digital editing afterwards, so what you see is in large part what I saw through the lens, in the chosen location and moment.
I hasten to add that the town in the picture is a popular English tourist destination filled with postcards and framed pictures offered by street-sellers which, collectively, tend to make me squirm when I have looked at their quality! – ranging from sloppy at one end, to grossly artificialized at the other, and usually targeting clichéd scenes that don’t “speak” about much of interest. Whether I fare any better or not, I do not know, and will have to leave you to judge, but at least I can rest contented in the knowledge that I didn’t produce anything suitable for the local postcard sellers. For a start, there is no blue sky, there are no beach bums in sight, and in the foreground is a quaint piece of faded, rusty Victorian England which the local council of this town tries so hard to abolish from the “local image”. Art has been much misunderstood! You can read more about that on my page about art.
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