Words — Nothing Serious

Music Is a Focused Form of Conscious Feeling

Curtis Winkelmann August 17, 2025

Music is a focused form of conscious feeling. This is music. Cosmic occurrence colonised by human thought. It’s branded bird song, electrified, digitised, remixed, re-rationalised. We are not the definitive reason for music. Notes and tones are natural things, they never rely on our intervention to exist. Rather, were are the ones who realise music, reorganise it, redefine it.

Sipping The Vast Spring: Potential Beyond Boundaries

Sarah Currivan May 2, 2025

Eros and antinomian behaviour are fundamental to many branches of tantra. Eros is the indwelling energy of the feminine face of God in our bodies (also known as kundalini energy) that wants to unite us with the masculine face of God that resides above our head…

Creativity Is Not a Talent. It Is a Way of Operating (1991)

John Cleese April 22, 2025

So, as you play, you can deliberately try inventing these random juxtapositions, and then use your intuition to tell you whether any of them seem to have significance for you. That's the bit the computer can't do. It can produce millions of new connections, but it can't tell which one smells interesting…

A Really Nice Ending To Everything I’ve Ever Known

Curtis Winkelmann December 25, 2024

Between a grim urinal gone brown from years of concentrated piss and the sick of some, a closed stall door, and the stiff eyes of a bathroom attendant beneath a baseball cap which communicated no sense of uniform nor provided any proof that it was indeed the man’s job to stand there by the sinks, you told me about your new position at one of the leading accountancy firms in the country…

Comedy Is Philosophy

Curtis Winkelmann November 22, 2024

When people are asked what’s important in their lives, they often mention humour. If we go back far enough, we see ancient Greek thinkers like Seneca, Plato, Aristotle, all thinking and writing about humour. And this trend continues throughout the ages, with nearly all notable intellectuals and thinkers touching on the topic at least once in their career, for however a brief a time.

Circle 2

Curtis Winkelmann October 16, 2024

When greased with an even skin of daylong rain, the new concrete pathways of Kingstown Baths become a mirror. Strewn reflections so crystal that all eventide strollers are free to gaze upon the sky’s heliotrope patterns with relaxed neck. A beautiful scene if it wasn’t for the almost palpable repression, the ubiquitous greyness staining the air sombre and dead, presenting puddles as too designed in their distraction, a part of something sinister, a conspiracy of sorts, an entombment of something natural and shameful.

The Smiling Skull

Curtis Winkelmann August 26, 2024

Let’s talk about us for a second. And not us in the sense of our egos and personalities and opinions. Not us in the sense of ourselves and the mental constructions and narratives pertaining to those selves. But us in the physical, the biological. The us beneath our fleshy groomed exterior. The bones of us. The skeleton head. The lifeless human-shaped reaper we all forget is there, propped up behind our eyes like some kind of inanimate stranger assigned to carry our lips through life. Let’s talk about the actual thing of us…

Finding Your Way into an Idea Is Like Falling Asleep

Curtis Winkelmann August 21, 2024

Fellini once described the creative process as trying to recall a dream. Visual bits and emotional fragments hang on the tip of the mind in clouded form, shifting in and out of clarity. Well, what if it was the inverse for those who are trying to enter a dream? What if the resonation with a piece of art, the finding of one’s own way into its ideas, and the forming of a genuine connection with the piece, what if this was just like trying to fall asleep?

A Crisis of Consciousness

Curtis Winkelmann July 10, 2024

I kind of just stand there, motionless, tongue half-out of a head half-inside the cold fluorescent coffin-shaped box which predates me in this house by a comfortable margin. Behind my dead unblinking eyes a brain simultaneously tries to decide what it is I feel like and what it is I have the motivation to make. But I’m also not really thinking about anything. I’m not even looking inside the fridge. My head just sort of leans up against the side of the door as I gaze out into the middle distance of the kitchen, frozen in the moment…

A Lesson in Driving Me Absolutely Fucking Mental

Curtis Winkelmann June 15, 2024

And so he wears this little like dress thing, or whatwouldja call it, a hooded cloak or a cape sort of thing with his nails all painted and his lips stapled and his eyes blackened goin round the house callin himself the fuckin Grim Soul Eater or somethin. Now is that normal like? To be doin that? Lad his age? Could that be considered — second gear — by you now to be a normal aul thing? And be honest…

This Is Nothing Serious

A Manifesto on Modern Existence

Dearest Being, this is Nothing Serious. I have become increasingly aware that my craving to know what is right from wrong is in no way connected to any pursuit of truth. And to accept this means to accept a terrifying bewilderment: I am not now what I sense somehow I am meant to be, should be, want to be. I do not know what I feel at the bottom of my heart. And perhaps, this is the beginning of some kind of personal wisdom. If I can just leave the wound open, stop distracting myself from its emptiness and instead wait in it, then maybe I can heal from the inside out.