They say it is an endurance to perform at the Edinburgh Festival. It is. And I didn’t quite have the pressure of expectant faces, paying, if only with the preciousness of their time, to be continuously entertained for a full-on hour no matter my mood or energy felt, but I certainly put in the time. Doors opened at 10 am and remained so until 8 that evening, affording me a little nature time (usually up on Arthur’s Seat), shopping, and perhaps a show before sleep and meal preparations the following morning; one of which was usually eaten ‘out’ on my much cherished half-hour dinner break at four-thirty.
As you entered Cowgate Gallery (which, to possibly save you the trouble, is not now a gallery, had never been before and I rather suspect never will again; it’s now a nail bar) you’d meet the core of the diagram (the core of life, I would humbly add) immediately to the left. It was the first part of the wall you’d confront and it seemed appropriate as a greeting for punters and it afforded slightly more space than its adjacent offering, which was connected by a slither of a mesh-like pattern (to offer symbolical consistency to the philosophical idea that everything’s connected) to the more psychological side of evolution, once it is able and willing to think about things, as it clearly sometimes can.
Naturally, I met a few pessimistic giggles but mostly I found intrigue. That I came across with such confidence in at least trying to answer the many questions, seems a little ironic today. I knew much less back then (including humility, I could almost say with regret), yet it’s also true that the diagram — which is really to say the ideas and how they fit together — hasn’t really changed too much. Many insights have come since but they’re more of a periphery, its essential core lays unshaken.
This may be my greatest confidence: that it remains a beautiful vision and an intelligent one after all the reading, thinking, and meditating. These few straightforward ideas make a lot of sense. And not just intuitively but logically, into wonderous philosophical consistency. Now I’m not saying they are ‘true’, it’s important to note for many reasons, but I’m comfortable to say that they solve some of the biggest ideas — problems, they’ve often been called — of the most profound ideas about life.
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Yet there was a question that I had absolutely no response for what exactly I was going to do next? What should I do with this thing? What can I? I had no business plan, nothing to sell (partly because I wanted to give it away), I had a website with simple explanatory descriptions (that were mirrored on a tiny wall next to my chair space and living shelf, I used to call it), a PayPal donation link, and nothing more than there a written promise that I indeed intended the exhibition to not be the end of my Diagram Of Life, and left it at that. So it came with quite a renewed sense of purpose, quite late on in the event as it happened, when a visitor suggested I should write it. (Her academically informed suggestion that I ought to consider its content for a doctorate in philosophy is one I’m glad I didn’t take; not to at all discredit the discipline. We’ve been good friends ever since).
And so it is that after I don’t know how many revisions, re-edits, and one publication (if only on Amazon with no promotion but it did have an ISBN) — fifteen years later it manages to find its way into your conscious awareness. /
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/ But why create an interconnected diagram of life in the first place? you may well wonder.