I started with May Sinclair, my short story. It made me think of Mandelbrot and fractals, and I encountered Idealistic Monism; I have roamed very far across philosophical fields and have compressed this into a see-saw between embodied reality, shared experience, and paradoxically the boundless, indefinite and unknowingness of life it engenders; and reality perceived as representation, where the authority of experience emanates from self, supporting the cult of the individual and separating our consciousness from the external world. This can be seen as a division of the brain itself, a war between the right and left hemispheres, as argued by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and the Emissary, a book which has helped me make sense of the world.
I have had to leave out stories (in March 1917 a modernist painter George Biddle hired a 42-year old German woman as a model. When she threw open her coat, she was nude apart from a bra made from two tomato cans and green string, a small birdcage housing a despondent canary, and a large number of curtain rings recently stolen - Baroness Elsa). I also wanted to shoehorn in: ‘The strange attractor lives in phase space…’ (a feature of chaos theory) but this lonely character I will write about separately.
