John Dunn

From Welney to Wisbech

Tuesday, 26 March 2024 at 21:27

The original Toby

Continuing my A1101 ride, the content of which will be added to my YouTube channel shortly. In the meantime I'm adding a part of the draft commentary to the video, just to keep the home page fresh as much as anything.

From Welney to Wisbech

Here’s an old Milestone at Lake’s End, just beyond Welney, placed here by the Wisbech Turnpike Trust.

The Inscription reads:-
: ELY / 13 : : UPWELL : : WISBECH / 11 :

Travellers on this road get to Ely via Littleport.

Here at Lot’s Bridge the A1101 is crossed by the Fen Causeway, a Roman road that runs between Denver, Norfolk in the east and Peterborough in the west. Its path covers 24 miles.

Three Holes - why?

There was once a bridge here in the 1600s with three arches with doors to shut or open depending on water requirements down river..

This modern concrete bridge crosses over The Middle Level Main Drain cut in the nineteenth century, there on the left, and Popham's Eau on the right, a drain financed by Sir John Popham in the early 17th century.

Still in Norfolk, here at Upwell. And very pretty it looks today, with its daffodil strewn canals.

This village along with the adjoining village of Outwell, was built along the old course of the River Nene.

(In front of church) Until a few years ago I would have been stood here in Cambridgeshire, whilst the church opposite would have been in Norfolk. Today I’m stood in Norfolk.

The older tower was surmounted by a later top storey, and there was even a spire which fell in the 1840s. The clerestory as it’s called, that upper story of windows, was added inthe 1460s, when medieval merchant prosperity around here was at its peak.

Just a quick ride beside the canals. The buildings are functional, the product of an industrial and agricultural settlement whose modern prominence dates from the late 17th century, and which still has the puritan flavour of a Flanders town.

Here at the old canal basin of Outwell. From this point, an arm of the canal used to continue on to Wisbech. It was opened in 1797, abandoned in 1926, and filled in during the 1970s.

From here the modern A1101 runs on top of the filled in canal, bypassing the winding course of the old road.

The road at this point runs along the border between Norfolk and Cambridge.

From 1883 a tramway cum railway used to run near the canal to Wisbech.

The steam tram engine that worked on the line is pictured above.

Aficionados of Thomas the Tank engine will know this unusual steam engine as Toby the tram engine. The Rev. W. Awdry was the vicar of Emneth, a village near Wisbech and took his inspiration from the Wisbech tramway.

Sadly for Toby, the tramway closed in 1966.

In Wisbech now. The start of this dual carriageway, Churchill Road, marks where I cross from Norfolk into Cambridgeshire.

Churchill Road was built on top of the filled in canal, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, following its course right up to the point that it met the River Nene.

That’s where I am now, by the River Nene, near the old junction with the canal.

© John Dunn.

Littleport's Harley

Saturday, 23 March 2024 at 22:29

Littleport's Harley

One interesting stop-off place in Littleport on my A1101 ride recentley, the whole of which is soon to be a Youtube video.

William Harley, father of the William Sylvester Harley who founded Harley-Davidson motorcycles in 1903, was born in Littleport in 1835. The connection to the famous biking brand (if possibly a little tenuous?), is commemorated with a stainless steel sculpture of a Harley, on the edge of a little park, by the roadside, across the road from the south side of the church. This monument was unveiled in 2003 and depicts a 1937 Knucklehead bike. It was commissioned to celebrate the 100th birthday of the company Harley-Davidson company in 2003. The inscription reads: "William Harley, whose son William S. Harley co-founded the Harley-Davidson Motor Company". Some relatives of the Harley family still live in the area.

© John Dunn.

Neither can history exist apart from me



Friday, 22 March 2024 at 21:48

Interventionist Demonstration (Manifestazione Interventista), 1914, by Carlo Carrà

I am past, present and futurism

Neither can history exist apart from me



Everything I know about the world is the being of my living thinking, not what is determinately thought and passed down from generation to generation as knowledge or history. The being of my living thinking is the Logos, or Originatory Principle, that thinks the whole of human thinking, never renouncing the source from which it arises. 


Nature and history appear to be two different types of reality, other than myself. The other than my mind, which is outside of my mind, appears to be nature; and
the other in my mind appears to be history. For example, the American continent is a natural fact, and the discovery of America by Columbus is an historical fact. Granted, historical facts exist within a socio-lawful framework, which every one who submits to the history must respect, and it is this law which establishes an absolute form of otherness, but nature and history are not different in themselves as facts. Nature and history coincide in so far as they imply a form of otherness from me who knows. This otherness is abstraction. The truth is that if nature and history are to have a concrete reality they cannot exist apart from the being of my living thinking.

© John Dunn.

Absolute I and absolute world


Thursday, 21 March 2024 at 20:52

Absolute I and absolute world



Even if I try to think of nature as a concrete reality, as an object in itself, the only object I can think is an aspect of me. The object is then no other than the life of my thinking, it is the absolute I. As such it is the ultimate reality. I may try and tap into it for separate objective knowledge, but ultimately I will find only the absolute I.



As the absolute, I have nothing to counterpose to myself and find all in myself. I am therefore the actual concrete universal. I am the absolute is, in so far as I affirm myself. Deprived of my internal causality I would be annulled, pulled down by the fallen angels. But in causing myself I, create a world which is the most complete that I can think, the absolute world.

© John Dunn.

Isis unveiled


Wednesday, 20 March 2024 at 12:34

The unveiling of a statue of Isis as a personification of nature, depicted as the climactic moment of an Isiac initiation, in an 1803 engraving by Henry Fuseli

Isis unveiled


Once I left the false standpoint of fallen thought I rid myself of a delusional slavishness to natural reality. The forms of nature are no longer my reality, desire, or thought. Instead, they are means for my thinking to become conscious of being. Nature might manifests as forms that feign life, but they are merely the sign of life. Life is never perceived by me, but only thought by me.



The common herd represents nature as concrete and actual reality. It ignores entirely the true character of thinking as absolute reality. Naturalism is the necessary consequence of such ignorance, a naturalism which is the fallen thought of fallen angels. Fallen thought is the conception of a reality which is the opposite, and nothing but the opposite, of mind. If my mind had such independent reality confronting it, I could only know it by presupposing it as already realised, thereby limiting myself to the role of simple spectator.



What is this apparent other-than-mind that so seduces the common herd? It alone is nature, one which fallen thought does not require to be deduced from anything. To fallen thought nature is itself the first principle. This is idolatry. The fallen angels worship a god apart, whereas God walks the Earth as Love. Love, the mystery that will have no explanation, is the Originatory Principle. 



As soon as I had rid myself of the illusion of a natural reality then this mysterious nature, impenetrable to the light of the intellect, appeared as the perpetual Beginning of my living thinking. Isis, the spirituality of the cosmos, was unveiled in all her purity as soon as I began to think of her in the concrete from which I had previously abstracted her. I can no longer be surprised by a natural reality, because it is I who posit it as an idea in the first place, and I know that the seeming solidity of nature is no less than the translucent inwardness of my living thinking.

© John Dunn.

Oneness of nothing becomes the oneness of everything


Tuesday, 19 March 2024 at 21:01

Oneness of nothing becomes the oneness of everything




By ‘my thinking is the Logos’ I mean thinking which is absolutely mine, in which the ‘I’ is realised. My thinking in the process of realising everything is my Beginning, always, and, therefore, the Beginning, always. My thinking is self-caused and therefore it is freedom. My thinking is Love. My thinking is the Originatory Principle, the mystery which will not be explained.



That of which I am thinking is a thing of nature. The thing of nature is one amongst many, in relationship to other things, which implies multiplicity, number. This indeed is the Creation, that which overcomes the oneness of Ananke’s realm of nothing.



My thinking, on the contrary, is realised in itself as other. It is therefore a relation with itself, an absolute, infinite unity, without multiplicity. In the Beginning, with the violation of Ananke, the oneness of nothing becomes the oneness of everything.



This contrasts with, on the one hand, any transcendental idealism like Plato’s, which has the ideal outside the mind, or the crudest materialistic naturalism on the other, which has everything outside the mind, or the most sacrilegious idolatry, which kicks its god upstairs. For were there to be a reality outside the infinite unity without multiplicity of my thinking, then there is no Beginning, there is no Creating, no being. And for being to be there must be Beginning always, the repeated violation of Ananke.

© John Dunn.

My thinking is the Beginning

Monday, 18 March 2024 at 21:12

My thinking is the Beginning

My thinking is the Beginning, the Absolute, the Logos and no less. It is not a thought, or a moment in my thinking, or my thinking now, for now is a moment always gone. It is my thinking, always. Anything less leaves matter outside of my thinking. How could my thinking be absolute if it has something outside it on which it is based? My thinking is the foundation of everything and has the whole within itself. Were my thinking not the process through which the cosmos is, then it would leave something outside it as a presupposition, which is the stuff of idolatry and mysticism, the chasm into which the Platonists, Berkeley, Kant, Fichte and Hegel ultimately fell. My thought comes not from nature and nature from the Logos, but rather my thinking is the Logos.


© John Dunn.