I remember when I first encountered anthropocentrism. I was in primary school and, in preparation for our confirmation, the class was learning about the afterlife.
Many of the birds Audubon painted are now extinct, and still we go on killing them, more or less casually, with our pesticides and wires and machinery.
What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a great, living wave of animal life all around us, covering the earth.
As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.
It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.
One of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen was a Yupik wolf mask, made in Nunivak in around 1890.
People will occasionally ask me if I understand what it's like to be lonely. And the truth is I don't, because for me, solitariness is a blessing, a gift. Me, I get on fine with myself.
I don't like the term 'mental illness.' I'd rather just say 'mad.' Just like I always say 'loony bin,' not 'mental hospital.'
The conventional, and painfully artificial, separation of the human realm from the natural other is bound to perish, albeit over a period of time, until we are obliged to learn how to cultivate our gardens under the most demanding conditions.
With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.
When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.
The only pleasure in redecorating or moving house comes from stumbling across books that I'd almost forgotten I owned.
