Description
This is a book written in a diary form, in 44 instalments spanning the years 1994 to 2005, with a glimpse into the future summarised in two imaginary letters dated 2015. It combines a description of rebuilding the author’s farm in Poland with thoughts on wider aspects of interaction of communities and nations. The combination is original. Forty-Four Bells suggests a social, political and economic response to present-day world problems, rather than seeing them as a perennial context of human spiritual inadequacy. It proposes Idsanism, where the members, grouped in units known as Hundreds would promote the awareness of political dangers facing the world such as the transformation of the environment into a hegemonic continuum, static, manageable and directed by an Oligarchy of the Rich. Few people in the UK really understand what drives these changes – the author documents the hidden under-text of the power forces of today, in a polemic with images of1984 and of Iron Heel.
Matthew Wallis was born in 1925 in Poland a veteran from Normandy landings where he was wounded and decorated. He graduated in Architecture in 1950 at Edinburgh College of Art and worked for Hertfordshire CC and Coventry Corp. Received a prestigious one year fellowship working on productivity in design and subsequently lectured at Regent St. Polytechnic and Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Ulm. He set up his own practice in 1964 working in London as well as abroad. In 1994 he bought old family land in Poland where he is farming on a pre-war grain farm. In 2008, his ‘Forty-Four Bells’ book was published simply to show ‘how it really is now’ and to visualise a dream of True Civilization.
