What’s a Broken Postcard

Postcards Are Like Bookmarks With Notes

I read a lot, and I love images. The thing is the two together, in my book, get broken. But broken in a good way.

A broken postcard has an image, usually from a gallery or some place I wanted to remember – I use it as a bookmark. So it gets crumpled with notes and scrawls and page references. Sometimes the notes are never to be seen again.

Somehow, the postcards history is just that bit richer the more it breaks, the notes give it an identity, a significance and some kind of a memory. Each new word to look up, each new tear on the side, they are days in my life, pages that I’ve turned and things I’ve told myself I will remember.

So there you have it Modigliani, Giacometti, Francis Bacon, you have all inspired me to pause from reading, look at your images, turn the picture around and carry on. They are my postcards, no one would want them, they’re broken. But, each time I see them I fall in love, again and again with all the ideas they represent.

I started a blog early in 2009 using wordpress.com, soon however, I realized that I wanted a lot more control than I had

. So, after helping a friend set up a blog she hosted I started again. In the original blog I had written mainly about Philosophy, I had wanted a space where I could develop essays & ideas, slowly building up a view that I thought would be coherent.

Starting again has meant that I’ve had to make a psychological shift and start the whole project again. Instead of knowing where I am, now I am finding that the process, from server to site is a lot more organic. It’s now about growing ideas, finding a way to see things through in what feels like a blurry lens a lot of the time. A bit like life feels when you’re faced with the immediacy of it.

So what about me? I do have a view of the world, I have political inclinations, loves and dislikes, proclivities and imperfections. But, well that’s not what I want to express. Though I think all of those things will come out. I still want to build a whole. That’s what a ‘worldview’ is all about. This blog now is about discovering that whole, from aesthetics to morals all the way to a foundation for it all. Because, in essence that is who I am, and who, in part I think, we all are.

So there you have it. A broken postcard is a constellation of ideas. Ideas which are essentially subjective, but ideas which through their expression find some inter-subjectivity in the minds of the people who read this blog. This blog is in effect my broken postcard, a postcard that I would like to send to all the readers who take an interest.