Description

By Nigel Pearce

Published: 2021
Pages: 226
Key Themes: Mental Health, Poetry, Prose

Description

This new collection from Nigel encompasses his believes and loves. From non-fiction to prose-fiction as well as creative non-fiction and his true love, poetry. It is broad and, in parts, challenging. But he notes that the Situationist International in their first publication in 1958 argued:
‘A new form of mental illness has swept the planet: banalisation. Everyone is hypnotized by work and comfort: by the…washing machine. The liberation of man from material cares (has) become a life-destroying obsession.’
– Gilles Ivain. ‘Internationale Situationist’, 1, 1958.

Therefore, to paraphrase William Morris, I want literature, freedom, and liberty for not the few but everyone.

About the Author

Nigel is now 61 and the beliefs that motivated and sustained a journey which was often darkened by circumstances remain with him to this day. A belief in a society not of a uniform Nietzschean herd or a one where individuals are atomised and alone but rather one in which, to quote Karl Marx:
‘In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’

– Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program’.

Also, his belief in the unity of art and life, literature and practice remain at the core of his being. He continues to study at the Open University having gained two Bachelors of Arts (Hons) 2:1 and a Master of Art in English with Merit. At present he is halfway through their Masters’ Program in Creative Writing. This academic discipline and being published by Chipmunkapublishing helped transform his life.