Junior Campbell

Thanks for visiting my Amazon author page. Here you will not only find useful information about my writing - particularly my poetry and prose - but also about my song-writing, visual arts "adventures" and other forms of creative activity (and activism) in which I'm involved.

As I explain on the Intelek International website (www.intelek.net), I trade as a holistic communications and education specialist.

By 'holistic', I mean that I communicate and educate by using an array of methods and media. These include the spoken and written word, music and various visual and kinaesthetic arts - for example dance and body language.

I also use the term holistic to emphasize my awareness that language - especially spoken and written language - can be an obstacle to communication. The critical element in communication, for me, is thought.

This is the simple yet profound principle I explore in my poem "Think". It goes:

How do you measure thought? Let me think.

Can you truly outline it on paper, as a writer does, with ink?

Do we really communicate it in the spoken word?

Plato might say that idea, is absurd.

You measure thought in deeds of thoughtfulness.

A true thought may be more but it is certainly no less.

Actually, as far as I'm concerned, the purest, least obscure or pretentious kind of communication may be dance.

Dance, I think, usually comes closest to striking the right balance between giving and receiving attention.

Hence my credo "I Think, Therefore I Jam", a reformulation of European renaissance thinker Rene Descartes' rationalist formula "I think therefore I am".

I have a deep appreciation for Descartes' rationalist contribution to humanist traditions - especially his contribution to the humane theology of the 17th century.

And in my PR and other work with individuals, business', charities (as in my book The Bible: beauty and terror reconciled), I stress the need for self-awareness that Descartes, Protestant reformer Martin Luther and other thinkers of that era typify.

But as one who thinks quite a lot myself - and not solely of myself, most crucially - I value the selflessness of dance very highly.

I value the conscious-thought transcending, self surrender and abandon that dance can facilitate deeply. (One of my favourite comic book images is that of Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy, doing his "dance of joy".)

I am in this sense, more a child of the Harlem Renaissance, than I am of the European one.

But as a Pan Humanist first - a Pan Africanist after - I own all the ancestors (African, Arabic, Asian, European and American) on whose shoulders I stand.

I own all my mothers and fathers, of every land.