To every perspective there belongs practical and factual intricacies which serve to reinforce the perspective by demanding full and exclusive participation in reality in its own terms, which induces what I will call, perspectival amnesia through occupation and displacement.

Full participation in any one perspective makes all other perspectives unintelligible. In fact, it conceals the phenomenon of perspective itself (pluralism), and reduces pluralism to mere diversity of opinion on fact, feeling, custom, temperament, moral character, etc.

Full participation in one perspective creates ideal conditions for naive realism, which is the environment most practical people need to feel safe and sane. Wherever you find compulsively busy people, compelled to play hard (or intoxicate themselves) the second they’re finished working hard, you are witnessing the mechanics of self-preservation.

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A perspective that develops into an ethos fully-equipped with an ethic, a language, a history and a catalog of categories, facts, techniques and well-worn paths of inquiry creates a pocket of stable naive realism. This is my cynical definition of a brand, and it is the goal of my work: to create nice habitable delusions for people who crave shelter from chaos, anxiety, perplexity and mystery. A deep brand is actually a philosophy pregnant with ethical, practical and factual possibilities, capable of creating fulfilling (fully-filling) social relationships between people and things.

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For all these reasons, I resist getting bogged down in the development of details. My job is to go in precisely the opposite direction from preservation and refinement. For the sake of creating concrete plurality, I try to navigate out of pockets of naive realism that belong to whole industries, in order to discover and stake out new pockets of naive realism that belong to smaller organization who which to differentiate themselves. But discovering and staking out is not the same as settling and establishing. Once a new vision has taken root, it is time for the next project.

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“Abraham”

The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham
Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture
Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks
With the meandering art of wavering water
That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way.
He came, rested and prospered, and went on,
Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,
And over each one its own particular sky,
Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,
That went with him but when he rested changed.
His mind was full of names
Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,
And all that was theirs one day he would inherit.
He died content and full of years, though still
The Promise had not come, and left his bones,
Far from his father’s house, in alien Canaan.

– Edwin Muir