About Broken Postcard

I started writ­ing Bro­ken Post­card sev­eral years ago. Since then I’ve taken the blog down twice to work on the ideas, the think­ing in it and its pur­pose. At first the blog con­tained a mix­ture of essays, thoughts and many of the ideas that will now appear in its pages.

Bro­ken Post­card now has a sim­ple pur­pose. That pur­pose is to cre­ate a plat­form for one line of think­ing. That line goes back sev­eral years. The blog is con­cerned with human expe­ri­ence. It is a a sin­gle piece of rea­son­ing that explores top­ics of con­scious­ness, his­tory, soci­ety, cul­ture and the self. It does this to syn­the­size ideas that have evolved in the west­ern tra­di­tion, to extend and work through them. Mostly how­ever, it is a plat­form that is itself evolv­ing. As I write, read, learn and develop so will the con­tents of this blog. As that hap­pens the ideas them­selves will grow and as they do the line of thought with which they are all con­cerned will them­selves come together.

When I started writ­ing the blog I was inspired by trips I used to take to London’s South Bank. There I would visit the Tate Mod­ern, buy post­cards and read between watch­ing peo­ple walk by. As I read I would take notes on the back of those post­cards. They would become book­marks, first in the books I was read­ing and then note­books I col­lected and filled up; I never threw them away but, they did become worn. In a very clear sense they were both for­got­ten and remem­bered at the same time. I knew they were there but, I neglected them to get on with the task of living.

In this way the blog’s name became my homage to the idea of the ideas on those post­cards. They came to rep­re­sent the cen­tral the­sis of this blog; the uni­fy­ing con­cept. That is that there is a point of syn­the­sis across sci­ence, art, phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture and soci­ety. That point of syn­the­sis is cen­tered in our expe­ri­ence; that our expe­ri­ence is an expres­sion of the human condition.

This blog there­fore is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of all of those post­cards and it is a pause for thought. Thought present, remem­bered and forgotten.

The blog is not designed to be pop­u­lar. The posts are longer than many blogs and the ideas are not always intu­itive. How­ever, as I write I do my best to make them acces­si­ble if not for you, some­one read­ing, then at least for me; as a lit­mus test of the clar­ity with which I am thinking.

How­ever, if you do find your­self read­ing, inter­ested and you want to com­ment and com­mu­ni­cate then, as the writer of the blog and the keeper of the post­cards I can assure that your con­tact, com­ments and thoughts will be appre­ci­ated. The human in me likes the idea that some­one is read­ing and maybe has an inter­est in the same ideas that have inspired me since I was a student.

With Kind Regards,
Alex Crockett