Quiet Fire
A Living Framework for Meaning
This is the framework I return to when I need clarity. It isn’t finished — it changes as I do. I’m sharing it to orient myself, and maybe to offer a point of reference for others.
I’ve spent years trying to name what I believe, how my creative work and life interweave, and what 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 handful of 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 been drawn to Jung’s resistance to fixed systems. His “working hypothesis” — that the psyche is real — was a place to begin observing, not a theory to settle into.
This isn’t a manifesto. It’s an evolving sketchbook of principles.
What Is Real?
When I strip back the noise—literal and otherwise—I don’t find one fixed reality, but a layered field. There’s the physical world I inhabit: waveforms, frequencies, vinyl hiss, the low-end thump of a kick drum. There’s the symbolic: memory, myth, dream—images that can feel more “true” than any waveform.
Beneath both is a kind of substrate—the quiet, high-resolution void Ryoji Ikeda gestures toward when he reduces sound and light to sine waves and data. Minimalism draws me for this reason: by removing, you might reveal.
Matter and spirit aren’t separate here. They move. They oscillate. Grain and silence shape each other. A decaying reverb tail and a blank page feel equally real. Reality is the interplay—perception, pattern, symbol, 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, descended from T.E. Lawrence. A kid who lost his hair at twenty and found refuge in both noise and silence. A husband learning to care, live, and love in the dailiness of it all.
Like most myths, it has a shape: alienation (dropping out of secondary school), growth (finding kinship in Jung, Sakamoto, Rimbaud, Hemingway), departure (leaving Australia and adolescence), descent (isolation, Maya’s illness, depression), initiation (finding my voice as a mastering engineer), and return (offering something made from the raw material).
The myth gives coherence to disruption. Chaos becomes arc.
How Do I Know What I Know?
I trust what I can hear and test—A/B comparisons, frequency curves, the calibration built from years of chasing translation. I also trust intuition: recurring dreams, patterns in my journals.
My INTJ mind craves clarity. My love of poetry thrives on ambiguity. I used to see that as conflict; now I see it as tension that keeps me honest.
Rimbaud urged poets to “make oneself a seer” through derangement of the senses; Christopher Hitchens insisted on confrontation with fact. My method lives in the space between: embrace paradox, but test it. Doubt, pattern recognition, intuition, confrontation—they’re all tools in the kit.
What Matters?
Wabi-sabi guides me: beauty in things imperfect, impermanent, 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 moves me.
Hitchens taught me growth requires confrontation. Avoidance stalls everything. And love? Love is not softness. It’s precision. Radical attention. Van Gogh wrote, “there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” I believe that 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.
What Is a Human Being?
You can’t talk about human nature without personal history. Mine includes neurodivergence, grief, lineage.
Humans are wounded pattern-makers. We carry trauma, inherit stories, build from both. “I is someone else,” Rimbaud said. Hemingway wrote we become strong at the broken places. Both feel true.
My sensitivities and rigidity come from neurodivergence; my reverence from family legacy. I used to see them as obstacles. Now they’re texture. A human is not a fixed identity, but a dynamic composition—ancestral, archetypal, intentional.
How Should I Live?
Philosophy matters only if it shapes behavior.
For me, that means honesty, cultivating peace, making work that feels alive, choosing depth over breadth, keeping my circle close.
Routine grounds me; stagnation scares me. So I vary: a new sound, a different shirt, a week of Meshuggah followed by a week of Chihei Hatakeyama. Variation resets things.
I’m learning to care for my body—light movement, breathwork, slowing down. If I value imperfection, I have to let rough edges stay. If love matters, I have to stop and listen.
Naming and Evolving the Framework
Whatever this is called, the name isn’t the point. What matters is returning to it. Jung never pinned the psyche down; he kept it alive. I want this document to do the same—something I can annotate, argue with, revise.
Closing Note
This isn’t a philosophy of “the world,” but a way of positioning myself within it.
It reminds me that loving attention is an art. That beauty hides in the cracked. That facing evidence sharpens clarity. That the psyche deserves reverence.
It helps me see mastering as care, marriage as art, my own wounds as openings. And if it evolves, I hope it stays as fire does: rooted and alive. Quiet, but warm.
After all, “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
Ten Principles
Attention is love.
To notice fully—without agenda—is a rare and supreme devotion.Coherence over consistency.
Better to be whole than predictable.The psyche is real.
Inner life isn’t metaphor; it’s terrain worth mapping, tending, trusting.Restraint is a creative force.
Limits aren’t restrictions—they’re the frame.Memory is a medium.
We reshape the past each time we return to it.Silence has weight.
It’s not just between sounds—it is a sound.Imperfection is beautiful.
Cracks and wounds are where the soul shows through.Myth holds psychological truth.
Even if it never happened, it can still be real.Art metabolizes experience.
Not just expression, but transformation—the unspoken into form.Care over control.
Mastering, like living, is about presence, not power.
Last updated: August 2025