Some Images in Paint and Pencil

 

A few images created over time 2010-2018. Mostly acrylic on wood blocks, but also pencil sketches and a couple of  larger pieces 

Augustine's Ordo Amoris and Keller's Counterfeit Gods

Augustine’s ordo amoris and Keller’s Jacob together: the painful wrestling that reorders desire, leaving us dependent on God’s grace.

In his book "Counterfeit Gods",  Timothy Keller ( 1950 – 2023: American Presbyterian pastor, preacher, theologian, and Christian Apologist) references  Jacob's nocturnal wrestling match in Genesis 32. Far from a curious or marginal episode, Keller presents it as a paradigm for how human beings truly encounter God.

Read alongside Augustine's doctrine of ordo amoris--the right ordering of love--the story becomes not merely dramatic, but diagnostic: it exposes how spiritual transformation occurs through the painful reordering of desire.

Augustine's central claim is that sin is not best understood as loving evil things, but as loving good things wrongly. Created goods--security, success, approval, even blessing--become destructive when they are elevated to ultimate status. "My weight is my love," Augustine writes in the Confessions; what we love most pulls us in a particular direction, shaping our character and destiny. The problem is not that the heart loves too much, but that it loves in the wrong order.

Jacob is a vivid embodiment of this condition. His life has been defined by cunning, manipulation, and self-reliance. He seeks blessing, but on his own terms; he wants security without vulnerability, promise without dependence. In Keller's striking phrase, Jacob is a "con artist," not because he loves bad things, but because he attempts to extract blessing from God without surrendering control.

Augustine would say that Jacob's loves are mis-ranked: God is useful, but not supreme.

The wrestling match at the Jabbok becomes the moment when this disorder is confronted. Crucially, Jacob meets God alone. The encounter is personal, stripped of props and strategies. And it is not serene or contemplative, but agonistic. Keller stresses that real engagement with God feels like wrestling precisely because God contradicts us. Augustine anticipates this psychological realism: the reordering of love involves inner conflict because the will resists the loss of its idols. Conversion is not a gentle adjustment but a profound disturbance.

The turning point comes when Jacob is wounded. God touches his hip, and Jacob's strength collapses. Paradoxically, this is not the end of the struggle but its resolution. Jacob stops striving and starts clinging. He no longer wrestles to win; he holds on in dependence. Augustine's theology of grace is unmistakably present here. The human will cannot heal or reorder itself; it must be acted upon. Grace does not merely assist our projects--it dismantles them. Jacob's limp is the bodily sign that his deepest love has been dethroned.

Yet Jacob is also blessed and renamed. He becomes Israel, "the one who struggles with God and prevails." Keller emphasises the paradox: Jacob wins by losing. Augustine would recognise this as the restoration of right order. God is no longer a means to an end, but the end itself. Other goods may still be loved, but now in relation to God rather than in competition with Him. True freedom, for Augustine, is not autonomy but rightly ordered dependence.

The lasting limp matters. Jacob is not perfected; he is transformed. Augustine is equally insistent that conversion leaves marks. The soul bears the memory of its reordering; humility replaces confidence, gratitude replaces control. Spiritual maturity is not marked by triumphalism, but by a certain vulnerability--a way of walking that remembers grace.

Read together, Keller and Augustine converge on a single insight: spiritual change occurs not when we try harder, but when we love differently. Jacob's struggle is the drama of ordo amoris enacted in flesh and bone.  We might conclude, then that to encounter God is to be wounded in our false strengths, so that our loves may be healed and reordered. The promise then becomes: what we lose is self-sufficiency; what we gain is God Himself.

References:

• Augustine. (1998). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work ca. 397–400 CE)
• Keller, T. (2009). Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. Dutton.
• Produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

Three Revolutions, One Story: How Interfaces, Networks, and Games Shaped the Digital World

 

Here is a summary of the intertwined origins of personal computing, showing how breakthroughs at Xerox PARC and the countercultural ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog converged to redefine technology. Engineers envisioned computers as intimate tools for thought, while idealists promoted access to empowering tools for everyday life. Together, these movements laid both the technical and philosophical foundations of modern computing, shaping a vision of technology as personal, creative, and transformative.

In the second half of the twentieth century, three technological revolutions unfolded in parallel. Each began in a different place, driven by different communities, and aimed at different problems. Yet together they converged to create the digital environment we now inhabit. These revolutions were: the invention of human‑computer interfaces, the creation of computer‑computer networks, and the rise of computer games as a cultural form. Their stories intertwine in surprising ways.

The first revolution began with a simple but radical idea: that computers should be tools for individuals. In the late 1960s, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the mouse, hypertext, and windowed interfaces — a vision of interactive computing that would profoundly influence the next generation of researchers. In 1970, Xerox founded the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a place designed to explore “new information technologies” far beyond the company’s copier business. PARC’s researchers created the Alto, the first computer with a graphical user interface, a bitmapped screen, and WYSIWYG text editing. These innovations transformed computing from a command‑line activity into a visual, intuitive experience. The Alto was never sold commercially, but its ideas would later shape the Macintosh, Windows, and every modern interface.

At the same moment, a second revolution was taking shape — one that focused not on how humans interacted with computers, but on how computers interacted with each other. In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defence established the ARPANET, the first wide‑area packet‑switched network and the first to implement what would become the TCP/IP protocol suite. ARPANET’s design was shaped by Cold War concerns: military planners wanted a communication system without a central point of failure, one that could survive attacks or outages. Packet switching — breaking messages into small pieces that could travel independently across the network — was the key innovation. The first nodes came online in 1969, linking UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. The network was declared operational in 1971, and soon supported remote login, file transfer, and early email.

By the mid‑1970s, ARPANET had expanded rapidly, and in 1975 operational control passed to the Defence Communications Agency. Researchers like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed the Transmission Control Program, which evolved into TCP/IP — the protocol that allowed multiple networks to interconnect. On January 1, 1983, ARPANET officially adopted TCP/IP, a moment widely considered the birth of the modern Internet. That same year, ARPANET split into two networks: ARPANET for academic research and MILNET for military communications. The foundations of today’s global network were in place.

While these two revolutions — interfaces and networks — were unfolding, a third revolution was quietly emerging: computer games. The earliest games were experiments in interactive computing. Spacewar! (1962) was created by MIT students exploring the capabilities of a new PDP‑1 computer. In the 1970s, arcade games like Pong and home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey introduced gaming to the public. Text adventures such as Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork explored narrative and imagination through pure text. By the 1980s, games had become a major cultural force, with titles like Pac‑Man, Super Mario Bros., and SimCity shaping the imaginations of millions.

These three revolutions influenced one another in subtle but profound ways. PARC’s work on graphical interfaces made games more expressive and accessible. ARPANET’s packet‑switching concepts laid the groundwork for online multiplayer gaming. The rise of home computers in the 1980s created a generation of programmers who learned to code by making games. And the emergence of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s — built on top of the Internet’s TCP/IP foundation — created new spaces for game distribution, community building, and online play.

By the mid‑1990s, the convergence was unmistakable. The Mosaic browser made the Web accessible to ordinary users. Doom popularized online multiplayer gaming. The WELL and early Internet forums created communities that blended gaming culture, hacker culture, and the countercultural ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog. .

First published in 1968, the Whole Earth Catalog was the brainchild of Stewart Brand, a countercultural thinker who believed that access to tools — intellectual, mechanical, and technological — could empower individuals to build better lives and communities. The Catalog’s pages were filled with everything from woodworking kits to ecological theory, from Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes to early computing devices. Its ethos was simple: tools give people agency.

Though PARC and the Whole Earth Catalog emerged from different worlds, they shared a common belief: that technology could be personal, empowering, and transformative. This shared vision helped create a bridge between the counterculture and the nascent computer industry. Many early computer hobbyists — including members of the Homebrew Computer Club — were steeped in the Catalog’s ethos of experimentation and self‑reliance. They saw computers not as corporate machines but as instruments for creativity and liberation.

And so, building on this ethos, the Macintosh and Windows 95 brought graphical interfaces to hundreds of millions of people. And massively multiplayer online games like Ultima Online and EverQuest created persistent virtual worlds that depended on both sophisticated interfaces and robust networks

By the 2000s, the three revolutions had merged into a single digital ecosystem. Broadband Internet enabled online worlds like World of Warcraft. Consoles like the Xbox integrated networking directly into their design. Smartphones introduced touch interfaces that reshaped both computing and gaming. And the Web became the platform through which culture, communication, and play flowed.

Looking back, it is striking how these revolutions — interface, network, and game — emerged independently yet converged so completely. PARC’s vision of personal computing, ARPANET’s vision of distributed networking, and the game industry’s vision of interactive play all contributed to the digital world we now take for granted. Each revolution solved a different problem, but together they created a new kind of environment: one where humans interact with computers, computers interact with each other, and people interact with one another through computers.

The modern digital world is not the product of a single invention or a single institution. It is the result of decades of parallel experimentation, cross‑pollination, and cultural imagination. The interface revolution made computing personal. The network revolution made it global. The game revolution made it playful, social, and immersive. Together, they transformed not just technology, but the way we think, communicate, and live.

References:

• Move Fast and Break Things - Jonathan Taplin (2017)
• Research at Hatfield Polytechnic (Now University of Hertfordshire) (1989-1990)
• Produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

Envy Redeemed

 

An Allegorical Poem in Three Movements

THE ARGUMENT

The Poet, musing on the torment of envy, conceives it as a fallen spirit, self-consumed and wandering through the wastes of the soul. Envy laments its curse before the bright Spirit of Charity, who rebukes and then redeems it. In the end, the fires of malice are turned to light, and the two ascend together toward the dawn of Grace.

i. THE VOICE OF ENVY

Lo, I arise from caverns of the mind,
Where never dawn hath shone, nor quiet dwelt.
I am the worm that feedeth on the root,
When yet the fruit is green upon the bough;
The canker hid, that drinketh of the sap,
And turneth sweetness into dust and gall.

ii. THE DIALOGUE OF ENVY AND CHARITY

ENVY
I wander as a shadow ’mid the blest,
A spirit self-consuming, bound in spite.

CHARITY
O child unblest, thou hast not known thy thirst.
It is not others’ plenty that condemns,
But thine own emptiness that maketh pain.

ENVY
I walk among them, yet I cannot rest,
Each joy I see doth wound my heart with fire.

CHARITY
Then yield thy stings; lay down thy fires to rest.
Their heat shall serve the altar, not the pit.

ENVY
Can such as I be turned to light and peace?

CHARITY
Yea, by contrition, by love’s gentle might.
Thy thousand serpents change to threads of light,
And every coil is loosed into a star.

ENVY
What grace is this? I feel the chains unbind,
The weight of many ages melt away.

iii. THE REDEMPTION OF ENVY

So shall it be for all who envy’s snare
Have felt, and by contrition are made clean.
For love is stronger than the serpent’s guile,
And mercy keepeth watch where pride is tamed.

A Miltonic riff, produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

Oct 2025

Dragonfly Sonnet

It is the cave of me, its emptiness,
Which hollows your own imperfections free.
The echo shapes a shadowed tenderness,
Where absence learns the art of memory.

Yet in the damp, where silence clings like stone,
A fragile nymph stirs restlessly unseen;
It dreams of wings it cannot call its own,
A shimmer waiting where the dark has been.

And so it breaks — the thin skin of the past,
Shedding the weight of oldness in the night;
The cave dissolves, its hold undone at last,
A body glimmers, born of hidden flight.

Innocent now, it hovers, fierce and small,
A dragonfly that knows no cave at all.

• Produced with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

A Kelling Memory

 

Autumn and winter days at our cottage in Kelling were marked occasionally by the arrival of guests of the Kelling estate. These guests - paying guests - came for the entertainment offered by the regular pheasant shoots. Here is a reflection, written as the spent pellets rained upon our cottage conservatory. It was completed in Oxfordshire sunshine a few days ago.

The Reluctant Sportsman

The guns speak a fate. Keep 
Brave as the birds break cover.
Squeeze the trigger. The flock in disarray
Hovers then darts loose over the fields.
Shame hinges on a miss. This
Is what we expected. The land over stiles
Marks an escape. I am reptile.

The guns settle. Held, not fired.
Brave as the birds break cover.
Finger stays curled. The flock in disarray
Hovers then darts loose over the fields.
No one sees the stillness. This
Is not what was expected. The land over stiles
Marks a passage. I stay human.

The grass parts. A rustle speaks.
Brave as the sky calls danger.
Muscle recalls the flint of air
As bodies scatter, low and rising.
A crack behind. Not struck. This
Time, still breathing. The land over stiles
Means a distance. I am creature.

Kelling October 2015/Oxon July 2025

• Stanzas 2 and 3 developed with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

Treescape in Watercolour 2022

Tracks: A Revision after a Decade

 

The tracks hold signs of wisdom planted
Full deep in the way. Here a flame
Burns and flickers, flickers, burns
And lights rocks against rock,
Another shadow, a different shade,
A shiver of memory thrust to mind.

At the broken stile, a figure stood.
Not stranger, not guide.
He said:
What you carry was not gathered,
But given—before the path began.

To survive in this wild place
In this wilderness scaffold, simply face
The shades as they speak of times made strange
By current tread.

The dead speak in fire,
Not in voice or name.
Hold fast to that light. It shines
Miraculous, though too often maligned.

 

-          -    Kelling July 2015/Oxon July 2025

• Stanza 2 developed with  assistance of Co-Pilot AI, with reference to Eliot's "Compound ghost" in "Little Gidding"

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