Blogging Volumes

  Behind everything, there’s an eye. Up and to its right it looks, pupil dilated to fill almost all of its iris, transfixed by a small salmon circle in the upper left corner. The ‘everything’ this eye ignores is very similar to the eye itself. Circles, within circles, orbiting circles, all of them defiantly kaleidoscopic against the dark smears of the background. Each perfect circumference holds its own sense of gravity; they bend the black around themselves like tap water might curve around a spoon. Reflected in the iris there is a tentative dusting of white. Bright dots that could each portray another circle, if only we could reach the origin of their light more intimately, to take them in up close. This painting is Kandinsky exploding at me. This is also Kandinsky sitting next to me, excitedly pointing out at the fourth dimension, and whispering ‘look. Look how wonderful this is.’ / Looking through this painting I see scouts, my friends, camping. We’ve been taken out of tents, into

‘Sanity is not statistical!’ is the cry of Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , rejecting the Party’s notion that the ‘truth’ is whatever a majority of people believe it to be. With the wealth of information available to us in the 21st century, we’re more equipped than ever to deviate from the commonly accepted narratives of broader society. But is it bringing us closer to Winston’s definite assurance of the truth? Or is the internet unavoidably Orwellian? Currently the statistics of sanity are rather worrying. Research by Hope Not Hate found this year that 1 in 4 Britons believe “secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites”, with even more believing that there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together” regardless of who is in government. This often antisemitic idea has become popularised recently via Facebook groups like QAnon. But how, in our ‘post truth’ age, are we to say that such claims are unfounded? After all,