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The Common with Phil Smith
Meet the authors who are writing about walking and the landscapes through which we walk, at walk · listen · create’s Walking Writers Salons. We start the new year in the company of acclaimed walking artist, Phil Smith discussing his collection of poetry "The Common".
• The Common
The assembling of these poems is an attempt to create a singular entity in the face of the cancellation of the future by which to navigate subjectivity through a landscape haunted by ghost dictators, political and cultural malaise and hyper-lively crows. Unexpectedly finding myself on a platform I did not make, privileged to speak at
Mind the Gaps
What if the universe is stitched together with absences? What if our deepest realities – personal, political, cosmic – are not shaped by grand ideas or all-encompassing ‘explanations’, but by the tiny, unremarkedgaps between them? In this kaleidoscopic essay, Phil Smith covers some unlikely terrain: from the quantum unevenness of the cosmos to the haunted ruins of mines and the fragile misadventures of
Mind the Fields offers a bridge between the embattled camps of empirical and experiential knowing; of science and noetics (here meaning inward, intuitive or participatory knowing); of Newtonian and Quantum; of rational and a-rational; of the Old Order and the New Age.
It respects the discipline of evidence and the need for intellectual rigour, while refusing to dismiss intuition, embodiment, folklore and the strangeness of experience. Rather than choosing between a flat, mechanistic worldview and a woolly spiritual one, it asks whether consciousness, creativity and perception may belong to a deeper field of reality that both science and more intuitive traditions glimpse from different sides.
Phil Smith’s argument is not that ‘anything goes’, but that our current habits of explanation are too narrow to account for the full texture of lived reality. By treating intuition as a serious mode of engagement rather than a soft indulgence, the book suggests a way in which scepticism and receptivity, evidence and imagination, can be held in the same frame.
A companion to Mind the Gaps, this essay addresses the problem of consciousness in terms that we can all understand.
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