François Matarasso

After eight months unable to work—the longest caesura of my life—I feel the process of transformation beginning to fulfil its purpose in me. Like mercury warming, thought and energy become fluid again. Synapses start to fire. Possibilities reveal themselves. 

Knowledge resides in this body, in this mind (and where is there one without the other?) It feels good to recover the muscle memory of my self. Better still to become aware of a new self whose resources and capabilities are still forming and mysterious. Like the newly regenerated Doctor, I have to learn about the latest version of myself, this shapeshifted me.

Some of my recent posts seem to me confused and confusing. They mark a change in my thinking that demands an equivalent change in how it is expressed that I’m still searching for. But that is the principle of ‘thinking in public’ and the deconstruction of authority this blog serves. Was closing my other sites inconsistent with that principle? Perhaps, but it was necessary at the time and cannot be undone. A notebook is the record of a journey, in all its inconsistencies and failures.

The suspension of work enforced by illness did allowed me to read more intensively and more widely than for many years, and to think too, more deeply I hope. I’ll start writing again this week, and I’m curious to see how I now inhabit a regenerated language. I still don’t know if A Selfless Art will have a public future beyond what I share here, but how dull (and terrifying) would it be if we knew what was coming? For now, I’m happy making new wings from the wreck of what was.