Quiet Fire
A Living Framework for Meaning
This is the framework I return to when I need clarity. It isn’t finished—it evolves as I do. I’m sharing it here as a way of orienting myself, and maybe others, too.
I’ve spent years trying to articulate what I believe, how my creative work and life interweave, and what kind of compass I’m using when I make choices. Dogma never fit. Neither did nihilism. So instead of declaring truths, I’ve stayed close to a few recurring questions: What is real? How do I know what I know? What matters? What is a human being?
Any framework that touches these has to be porous enough for the psyche to breathe, yet strong enough to hold real weight. I’ve always found Jung’s resistance to formal systems compelling. His “working hypothesis”—that the psyche is real—was a place to begin observing, not to end in theory. This isn’t a manifesto, exactly. It’s more like an evolving sketchbook of principles.
What Is Real?
When I strip back the noise—literal and otherwise—I don’t arrive at one clear reality, but a layered field. There’s the physical world I inhabit: waveforms, frequencies, vinyl hiss, the low-end thump of a kick drum. Then there’s the symbolic: memory, myth, dream—images that sometimes feel more “true” than any waveform.
Beneath both is a kind of substrate or potential—the quiet, high-resolution void Ryoji Ikeda gestures toward when he reduces sound and light to sine waves and data. I think that’s why I gravitate toward minimalism. It hints that by removing, you might reveal.
This doesn’t mean I see matter and spirit as separate. They move. They oscillate. Grain and silence shape each other. A decaying reverb tail and a blank page feel equally real to me. Reality isn’t fixed. It’s the interplay—of perception, pattern, symbol, and sensation.
What Is My Myth?
My myth isn’t my biography—it’s the deeper story I live by. I call it the “Quiet Fire” myth.
A boy from the Mornington Peninsula with Urquhart roots and a family tree traced back to T.E. Lawrence. A kid who lost his hair at twenty and found refuge in both noise and silence. A husband learning how to care, live, and love in the ordinary dailiness of it all.
Like most myths, there’s a shape to it: growth (finding kinship in Jung, Sakamoto, Rimbaud, Hemingway), departure (leaving Australia and adolescence), descent (isolation, Maya’s illness, depression), initiation (finding my voice and confidence as a mastering engineer), and return (bringing something back—offering what I’ve made out of the raw material).
The myth gives coherence to disruption. It helps me see the chaos not as failure, but as arc.
How Do I Know What I Know?
I trust what I can hear and test—A/B comparisons, frequency curves, the calibration that comes from years of trying to make a mix translate. But I also trust intuition. Recurring dreams. Patterns that show up again and again in my journals.
My INTJ brain craves clarity and structure. My love of poetry thrives on ambiguity. I used to think that was a problem. Now I see it as a tension that keeps me honest.
Rimbaud said poets should “make oneself a seer” through deliberate derangement of the senses—a disruption that lets new insight through. Christopher Hitchens, by contrast, insisted on confrontation with fact. My working method lives somewhere in that tension: embrace paradox, but test it. I interrogate my own certainties—in sound, in love, in grief—and learn to sit inside not-knowing when answers don’t come. Doubt, pattern recognition, intuition, confrontation are all tools in a survival kit.
What Matters?
Wabi-sabi has become a compass for me: a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.
I hear it in Burial’s fog. I see it in Pollock’s splatter. I feel it in the scratch of an old LP. Clean perfection feels sterile. Texture, by contrast, moves me. Honesty over ideal.
Hitchens reminded me that growth requires confrontation. Avoidance—of myself, of others—stalls everything. And love? Love is not softness. It’s precision. It’s radical attention. Van Gogh wrote to his brother, “there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” I believe that to my core. I try to live it. In mastering. In marriage. In friendship.
Mastery matters—not as control, but care. I rerun songs, re-read poems—not to perfect them, but to be with them. To reconnect.
What Is a Human Being?
I don’t think you can talk about human nature without talking about personal history. Mine includes neurodivergence. It includes grief. It includes lineage.
I see humans as wounded pattern-makers. We carry trauma. We inherit stories. And we build from both. “I is someone else,” Rimbaud said—and that rings true. Hemingway wrote that we become strong at the broken places. I think about that a lot.
My neurodivergence has made me more sensitive than most, sometimes rigid. Family legacy has made me reverent. I used to see those traits as obstacles. Now I think of them as texture. A human being is not a stable identity, but a dynamic composition—ancestral, archetypal, intentional.
How Should I Live?
Philosophy doesn’t mean much to me unless it shapes behavior.
In practice, that looks like being honest every day and cultivating peace. Speaking plainly. Making work that feels alive. Choosing depth over breadth. Keeping my circle close—and being there fully for the people in it.
Routine helps me feel grounded. Stagnation, though, scares me. So I experiment: a new sound, a different shirt, a week of Meshuggah followed by a week of Chihei Hatakeyama. I trust variation. It resets things.
I’m still learning how to care for my body. The pandemic made me sedentary. My moods swing—chemical seesaws mediated by Prozac, cannabis, gin. Lately, my praxis includes light movement, breathwork, slowing down. If I claim to value imperfection, I have to let the rough edges stay in my work. If I say love matters, I need to actually stop and listen.
Naming and Evolving the Framework
Whatever I call this, the name isn’t the point. What matters is that I keep returning to it.
Jung never claimed to pin down the psyche. He let it remain alive. That’s how I want to treat this document—as something evolving. Something I can annotate, argue with, revise. As I change, so will this. That’s the point.
Closing Note
This isn’t a philosophy of “the world.” It’s a way of positioning myself within it.
It reminds me that loving attention is an art. That beauty often hides in what’s cracked. That facing evidence sharpens clarity. That the psyche deserves reverence.
It helps me see mastering not just as a job, but as a form of care. It helps me see marriage not just as a role, but as a work of art. It helps me hold my own wounds not as liabilities, but as openings—places where light gets in.
And if this framework continues to evolve, I hope it does what fire does: stays rooted and alive. Quiet, but warm.
After all, “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
Ten Principles
1. I believe attention is love.
To notice something fully—without agenda or interruption—is a supreme kind of devotion.
2. I value coherence over consistency.
I’d rather be whole than predictable.
3. I believe in the reality of the psyche.
Inner life isn’t metaphor. It’s terrain, worth mapping, tending, and trusting.
4. I value restraint as a creative force.
Limits aren’t restrictions, they’re the frame.
5. I believe memory is a medium.
We don’t just recall the past, we reshape it every time we return to it.
6. I value silence as more than absence.
It’s not just the space between sounds—it is a sound, with its own weight.
7. I believe in the beauty of imperfection.
Cracks, smudges, and wounds are where the soul shines through.
8. I value myth as psychological truth.
Even if it never happened, it can still be real.
9. I believe art is how I metabolize experience.
Not just expression but transformation. Turning the unspoken into form.
10. I value care over control.
Mastering, like living, isn’t about power. It’s about presence.
Last updated: August 2025