I wondered about emergence, thinking it was a sense or thing greater than the lumping together of its component parts. But this week I read a gestalt writer and spotted the misquote, for he said the whole is other than its combined parts. Systems combine to produce new, unexpected different things. There’s a freshness to that rather than common profligacy, it tallies with the gestalt idea of living in the stripped-down moment, trying to understand the forces and ties that are working on you. It tallies with the journey being so much better than the arrival and settling. But I reckon Buddhism said it all a long time ago and the Berliners borrowed like Picasso. Thank the gods for the library, and the ideas, and all the journeys yet to be made.
This was the view from Tito’s cave, out on his Adriatic island HQ. Where did he see himself going from here, with the warmongers and bargainers whispering in his ear? Seventy years on it barely seems real, like a fairytale. I drank the same wines, saw the same sun. The way we fix ourselves in the maps and changes of history are all balance and imagination, spiderweb dreams.
