Academic work and essays
The spiral of consciousness
The spiral of consciousness: academic project in English
“The Spiral of Consciousness” is an ambitious long-form philosophical and literary project that explores one of the oldest and most urgent human questions: how awareness comes into being, transforms itself, and seeks meaning through history, myth, science, and art. Rather than treating consciousness as a purely scientific mechanism or a vague spiritual abstraction, the project approaches it as a living structure—something that unfolds through symbolic forms, perception, memory, embodiment, and culture. The spiral serves as its guiding image: not a closed circle, but a movement of return and renewal in which each stage revisits what came before on a new level of depth.
The work brings together a wide range of sources and traditions: phenomenology, cosmology, sacred geometry, mythology, literature, psychology, architecture, and visual art. It moves freely between thinkers such as Bergson, Whitehead, Gebser, and Bohm, while also engaging the symbolic intelligence of ancient traditions and the creative insights of artists from Leonardo to modern cinema. In this way, the project offers an alternative to fragmented specialization. It proposes a language in which science, imagination, and lived experience can once again speak to one another.
Structured across multiple volumes, The Spiral of Consciousness includes themes such as the birth of awareness, geometry and resonance, darkness and shadow, covenant and crisis, architecture as the search for the mind’s home, mythology as cultural memory, and art as the human face of becoming. Each volume can stand alone, yet together they form a coherent intellectual and poetic architecture.
The project is designed for readers who seek more than information. It invites participation, reflection, and inner movement. It can function as a book series, lecture cycle, essay platform, or interdisciplinary teaching resource. At its heart lies a simple conviction: consciousness is not static. It grows through encounter, through crisis, through form, and through the courage to imagine more deeply what it means to be human.
Kamer en bewustwording
Chamber and Consciousness: academic work in Flemish.
“Chamber and Consciousness” is a major research project dedicated to the poetry of the Belgian writer Charles Ducal. It investigates how poetic language can reveal the hidden structures of inner life: guilt, desire, power, embodiment, memory, and transformation. At the centre of the study stands one recurring image—the chamber. The chamber is at once room, psyche, social order, emotional enclosure, and symbolic stage. Through it, poetry becomes a place where consciousness confronts its own limits.
The project combines close reading with broader philosophical interpretation. Rather than reducing poems to biography or theory, it treats them as dynamic forms of thinking. Rhythm, repetition, silence, spatial imagery, voice shifts, and symbolic motifs are read as expressions of psychic and cultural movement. Questions of masculinity, authority, maternal presence, spiritual absence, and the search for incarnation are explored through the evolving architecture of Ducal’s oeuvre.
Spanning multiple collections, the research traces a gradual transformation: from controlled, geometric, often claustrophobic spaces toward more open, earthly, and resonant modes of language. The work draws on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, myth criticism, and poetics, yet remains grounded in the texture of the poems themselves. It seeks to show how literature can think through form—not only through concepts.
What makes this project distinctive is its scale and method. It is both a scholarly dissertation and an intellectual archive: a carefully constructed body of close readings, structural maps, thematic syntheses, and interpretive essays. It is suitable for academic publication, public lectures, university teaching, or modular digital editions.
Ultimately, Chamber and Consciousness argues that poetry is not ornamental culture. It is a laboratory of awareness. In the work of Charles Ducal, language becomes a site where the modern self can be diagnosed, challenged, and perhaps renewed.
Boon St - the essay
Boon St - the essay: academic essay in English
“Boon St” is a creative-critical project that unites literature, cinema, and reflective essay writing. Inspired by the work of Louis Paul Boon, it explores how classic texts can be reimagined for contemporary audiences without losing their moral force, psychological depth, or social intelligence. The title suggests both lineage and movement: a street of inheritance, where older voices meet new forms.
At its practical core lies adaptation. Rather than simply transferring a novel to screen, Boon St. treats adaptation as interpretation through image, rhythm, silence, framing, and perspective. Narrative becomes cinematic thought. Characters are not only represented but re-experienced through atmosphere, gesture, and visual tension. The project experiments with multi-perspective storytelling, fractured viewpoints, dark humour, and emotional realism, showing how literature can evolve when translated into another medium.
Alongside screenplay development stands the essay dimension. Here, adaptation becomes a philosophical question: What remains of a work when its form changes? How can fidelity mean creative truth rather than literal copying? What does a modern audience need in order to feel the urgency of older texts? Through these questions, Boon St. becomes more than homage. It becomes a method.
The project also reflects on Belgian and European cultural identity, postwar realism, class consciousness, intimacy, and the fragile ethics of ordinary life—key concerns associated with Louis Paul Boon and still relevant today. It is suited for film schools, literature departments, cultural institutes, festivals, or readers interested in the future of storytelling.
In a time when content is often produced quickly and forgotten quickly, Boon St. argues for another path: careful transformation. It shows that adaptation can be an act of intelligence, respect, and renewal—where the past is not repeated, but made alive again in the present.
