Cave-Paintings

Writing for the Mind

Cave paintings reflect the extraordinarily primordial nature of story telling. On these pages you will find a gradual deposit of my writings in various genres, from micro- and flash-fiction to short stories, from lectures to poetry, and from brief commentaries to formal white papers on various subjects. Stories and essays, blogs and poems, and in fact all the arts and every form of human expression, are all variations on our story-telling instinct, although the story inside an essay or a painting may be disguised as formal reasoning or pure image. Ultimately, every thought we have is a kind of femto-story, an elemental combination of subject and predicate, a statement, reflecting the connection between ourselves and some thing. Sentences, the basic units of content, have much the same structure: subject, verb, object. It seems likely that nature itself operates on units of those same three fundamental principles: the self, the thing perceived, and the connection between them. I hope you will enjoy these recent shadows from the walls of my Platonic cave.

Allen Cobb