MEDITATIONS

MEDITATION ONE

I gave you Let The Jews Win, but I don’t deserve to go to Heaven. I was reading Descartes earlier…he said because he could ideate perfection that did not come from within his frail, mortal, foibled self, it was guaranteed that God exists. He deserved to go to Heaven, but I don’t deserve it, not yet. His style is very French, inveigling the mind in indulgent and elaborate sub-clauses so the sentences are very long and you have to retrace your steps.

To start with I gave you Soundcloud Rain where some songs were organised according to my bro’s new da Vinci circle… it was a Sound Art experiment into secret chord H but it won’t get me into Heaven. I gave you The Sunset Child where a seven year old stores the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world but it won’t get me into Heaven.

I gave you a book of love poems called Breath Trapped In Heaven but it won’t get me into Heaven. I gave you Brave New Tense which only borrowed a word from my mum, who can write off the top of her head about her current situation to discretely “do the beck” in the back where the Plough alignment is viable. But you’ve guessed it, it won’t get me into Heaven, I don’t think.

Yes You May followed on - which I did with my sister - all about not using force - but someone said it was boring and it won’t get me into Heaven. Then I gave you Let The Jews Win. In it I even rewrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob as a paper but it won’t get me into Heaven.

Descartes extirpates every trace of falsity, every preconception, every instance of prejudice from his myriad mind before he realises, he is still thinking and still exists. He says there is no effect that is more perfect than its cause. I believe his proof of God is called the Ontological Proof, which philosophers at University, of which I have never been one, learn about along with the Cosmological and the Teleological Proof. Descartes is the start.

So it all begs the question, what will get me into Heaven? Noble slavery in the guts of a factory? It’s not a question I can answer, but taking my cue from books as always, a poet called Mr. Simon Pomery says “sleep is the only heaven,” and I would add that heaven could be a pile of statistics which nobody will ever see. But sleep is luxurious for sure. I keep a dreamwork diary and have grown convinced because I have read it myself that there is a book in the undersea… whether its oneiric-textured, prettily patterned, liminal language corresponds to a real language or not I do not know yet.

And all the positive things I did with my life… I would say if I am going to flash up that narrative again it would possibly be an act of self-defence against the evil, poisonous voices I hear, which threaten to tear me apart. It wasn’t you, dear, gentle reader, with your hermeneutic autonomy that needed to know, but I who needed to know my father might’ve been sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. It probably still won’t get me into Heaven.

I but who else could it have been know because I was there, that already at seven I helped invent

the net – that when someone needed to store the idea of the net in the attic in writing to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world it was me that wrote it – but again it probably won’t mean I am allowed into Heaven. By now this refrain is anodyne and nincompoop-like and insipid but I still probably won’t get into Heaven.

By the age of eight I was twice the witness - but shall move on from that - for at eleven, I was marked by the maths of the new colour - so shall move on from that again - for it still won’t mean I get into Heaven.

By fifteen I attained the face of stars. No-one paid me, e’en though it may have been scripted in the Bible itself. By eighteen, I forewarned of September 11^th in 2000 but it still won’t mean that I get into Heaven.

I prophesied the hunt for the God Particle that year, wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam in the nation at 100% and all these things I have already mentioned in an oeuvre of which I made a mess but it still won’t get me into Heaven.

After school, recording on binaural earphones won’t make me get into Heaven, climbing up and saying I’ll “plug my senses in the mains.” I had an effervescent mobile, reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang but it won’t get me into Heaven.

I hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, spotted a sensory overlay of my name tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, worked the numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a tape with a small pause where resealed in the flimsy reel, and upon my father’s passing discovered the sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting my own song lyric) grew… but it won’t get me into Heaven. By now the refrain is doing my head in. But still, it won’t get me into Heaven, I don’t think.

After many actions that could seem noble in the light of science, then, I falsified the Nirvana-barcode in writing and attained visual radio, but it won’t get me into Heaven in all likelihood. Bringing out books was my next option, and I told you of many of them but neither bringing them out nor telling you of them will get me into Heaven I fear.

I ask if matter is not but energy vibrating at a particular wavelength and frequency but it won’t get me into Heaven. I look at the bedside table: a lamp, two books, two plugs, two pens… how gravity has it flock together. But the net is awash with more than I could ever say, already the sum of all difference connected. You could glean more clarity from a Youtube video than a philosopher going about his business in the old-fashioned way. Saying this though limits my options, problematises continuity. I lay back and read Descartes, but it might not get me to Heaven.

I mentioned six collections; but there were others, self-published, before them, and also three volumes of a book called Transition To Philosophy under a pen-name but it won’t get me to Heaven. I fear the philosophy is thus far best left forgotten about, that I hadn’t yet read enough. I am devoting my self to it now, but it might not get me to Heaven.

And what do I expect when I get there, mirrors on the street detonating with light, marshmallow trees, choirs of angels swooping down to tend to your head? I contemplate the idea that answers to the divine will arrive in maths, an idea I got from my dad; that God exists on a mathematical plane without knowing of our existence – an idea I got from online. My feelers are out, the Google search engines of my senses are a roving tide – but you’ve guessed it, it might not get me to Heaven.

I don’t know if I have the courage to believe in God anymore, or even the ability to. My position is undefined, full of blips and flitting, sometimes agnostic, sometimes atheistic, sometimes Christian. It’s almost as if I tend to support the varying beliefs of whomsoever I speak to – to encourage them with agreement – but it’s not going to get me into Heaven. Indeed, it could seem weak. At 43 I should know what my beliefs are more. Philosophy is the key, because it is about turning inwards, even when it is about reading other people.

Maybe I should stop being so closed-minded: I might get into Heaven. For all I know, which is next to nothing if that, Heaven might exist. My father said it did and I was receptive to my father’s words.

I was brought up believing in God, and said prayers every night, that elongated towards sleep, as I tried to incorporate everyone, barring myself often, into my plan for a shock-proof world. Then at some point in my adolescence I was influenced by a powerful intellectual, who was an atheist that seemed to have a rational argument against God: that we don’t deserve a God. That we are just monkeys with bigger brains and more dextrous fingers. When I told him I still believed in the Unknown, he said “does a goldfish have an Unknown?” and if the answer was no, then there was no Unknown.

I asked him then if God was but a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness and he said he agreed with the definition. It was eloquence, it was rhetorical skill that was determining whether or not God existed and who was to be believed. Indeed, we soon came onto the topic of love; and instead of grouping love with God, in the sense that they are illusory, we grouped love with language. Love became a choice of words as WH Auden said.

I bought into the atheist’s belief-system I think because his rhetoric was skilful and turned my back on what my own father had taught me and my own background. Whether I can reclaim a faith that is gone I do not know. In the cannabis-befuddled years I thought of God in a Rimbaudian way: that God was not to worship blind in dogmatic slumber but behead, dethrone and become.

I gather that vision is demarcated from wild hallucination by the idea of God – that true vision reveals the divine like a theophany. This would surely mean vision has been indoctrinated by the church, who for the poet Ted Hughes only brands Nature as evil. Thus to reclaim vision from the hands of the church would seem brave in terms of efficacy but also would start to seem like the speech of Satan in Paradise Lost.

I like Paradise Lost, where Milton makes us sympathise with the devil for so long before we realise he really is evil. Milton also builds up for pages and pages of epic poetry to a moment of terse concision: “she plucked. She ate.” In Milton Jesus has a sword in Heaven, is like God’s security guard or bouncer. This is redolent of the Muslim faith where traditionally we find the warrior-poet, as if Milton is saying “Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.”

I contemplate whether it is evil of me to have been swayed by the rhetoric, and the music, and the belief-system of an atheist when I was younger and if so whether it can be fixed. If it was evil of me, what of the atheist? You might say in knowing his own beliefs, he is less evil, but it’s not that simple. TS Eliot says “the best lack all conviction.” Although I don’t think I am the best, nor would say it if I were, I am just that, lacking in all conviction. I have a friend who makes me want to believe and a brother who does the opposite. I should know more about my own core beliefs than I do, and so to philosophy I have turned.

Dedalus in Ulysses says we all have the same definition of God. Aristotle’s God is “thought thinking on itself.” The undecided nature of my position is exacerbated by the undetermined nature of my role in matters of genre, mode, discipline, subject. I used to say “there is indeterminacy at the core of all things,” but what it meant I was not qualified to say, in terms of physics. So I suppose it just sounded good, but it’s not likely to get me into Heaven.

My atheist friend also said death is sleep with no dreams; and that I love the idea of. Once I took an O. D. and in the ensuing days met someone that one would be forgiven for calling Satan in my head screaming very loudly about emptying space of the human form. Everything was dim. I could not hear my own prayer in my head, between earth and sky. Hell seemed to be about the fear of being buried alive. So one thing I like to believe in is that death is sleep with no dreams. My mother says what happens when you die is what you believe will happen when you die, but I am not holding out for Heaven, I am satisfied with sleep with no dreams. So there is at least one tenet of faith in my belief-system. There were other tenets of faith in this atheist friend’s atheistic pragmatism but I needn’t entertain them all now. The most essential points are that love is grouped with language not God and that death is sleep with no dreams.

MEDITATION TWO

Believing that death is sleep with no dreams, I slept and dreamt an epic dream that I was responsible for September 11th and was being punished by the people and the State. I woke and went back to bed a second time, for I am drugged up to the eyeballs on medication, and this second time dreamed of the Future State. The poet Simon Pomery was there and had a self-driving car. When I woke again it was dark, it was evening, it was a winter night. I am so disturbed by everything that’s happened, and feel quite ill within myself, that I fear there is no way I can write some Meditations like Descartes. I already wrote, recently, a book of philosophy pertaining to being as good as John Barnes’s goal against Brazil but guess what? It was too right-wing! And Barnes is a left-footed player! I want to know more about my own core beliefs if I have any, and if I haven’t got any I want to grow a soul, so to speak. I briefly ran you through a narrative of a few things that might seem noble in the light of science, including help invent the net, take care of The Lords And The New Creatures and most recently discover the sheet where pictures grew – but to those who watch my writing life they will grow tired of the repetition of the glorification of myself. And as I have stated in my previous chapter it isn’t going to get me into Heaven.

It may beg the question if helping invent the internet doesn’t get you into Heaven what does? I cannot answer, was merely running with the refrain, merely being musical. The atheistic friend I mentioned said we are here to breathe eat sleep shit fuck and die – had a very pragmatic outlook. He himself got an E in philosophy despite being the most articulate of us, possibly because he couldn’t bend, tolerate another’s belief. I had another friend in Dr. Calculator Ptom who was a liberalist. Liberalism would be the opening of all perceptions, and it would lead to Hamlet’s fatal flaw irresolution, whereupon pragmatism would become a reactivation of an attitudinisation in that situation. Dr. Calculator Ptom got a First in Philosophy from Cambridge and went into neuro-science.

Anyhow, I shut my computer down for a long time and go moaning back to bed for want of anything proper or formal to be working on, and some time passes with me under the covers until I think it safe and right to come back to the laptop screen, as if with refreshed energy. What is my topic? I was talking about religion. I was saying how helping invent the net wouldn’t necessarily get me into Heaven. One thing I think I had wrong was that to do such a thing, to help invent the net, for nothing, would be a left-wing moment. I am wrong about that, for if I was on the left I would’ve been paid for my services. It is not left wing to help invent the internet for nothing; it is left wing to be paid for what you do. Always the face of stars sticks his head out and escapes payment methods, systems, the Nobel Prize, escapes all that we know except that between us and the universe there are large cinema screens, so to speak. But without wishing to boast about all that I went through again, it strikes me as pertinent that I was never paid 1p, and that it is wrong if I cannot afford a loaf of bread, which I can only afford through Benefits, through sponging off the State. As with religion, my political persuasion vacillates maddeningly and lacks conviction. Sometimes I feel that to stick to my upbringing, which was Conservative, would be right and proper but sometimes I feel sick with it, feel like breaking out of frames.

I went from reading the lesson from John at the Carol Service in Eton College Chapel to living in Sheltered Accommodation and eating at the soup kitchen. From top to bottom I fell, in a katabatic direction, looking for Rock Bottom. The poet extirpates every trace of recognition from the myriad mind, unlooses the mind of form, method-acts every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio, broadcasting dreams.

And the NHS, which I heard called “The National Hypochondriac Service,” and “a religion substitute for the atheist left,” has been there for me. Now I am back in my mum’s million pound house at the foot of the fell, but we have no money. We survive off State benefits. We can’t afford to heat the house at the fag-end of winter, and there are no jobs for miles, not that I can even work what with Stress being an enemy of my mental illness.

Relying as I do on the NHS, on State benefits too, I think to explore the left is to explore a beautiful, compassionate emotion, but I am warned by people brought up on the left to beware the left, to watch out, and know not why. My father complained that the left line their own pockets as much as anyone, reward their own voters by promoting them to bureaucratic positions, bloating the State, creating Big State worship, and opined that the less government the better. He bemoaned the financial incontinence of the left and said that the Blair and Brown government who lead us into an illegal war was the most authoritarian and lawless government we’d ever had. He knew his own mind did my dad and was prepared for all the toxic unpopularity it brought.

I think the right are more given to the belief that Nature is the true architecture of State and the left more given to belief in the Future State. Both of these seem valid to me, both sound and not evil in essence, if that is the ideological underpinning that they each represent. In essence, you could say there is more Utopian idealism with the left. But such idealism has been said by some philosophers to lead to terror.

With regard to the Future State, I think of inventions, a long list of them I have personally ideated, such as a virtual death machine to wake you up. A word-chord synthesiser at the edge of selection. A drug called “Strictly Free” that does what it says on the tin, is and makes you strictly free to consume. A red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball. An holographic horse-cock wheeled in the bedroom. An invisible square of air called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on telly. A neutraliser drink that sobers you up in one quick instant. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey protruding from the oldest fell at ten to eight. Earphones implanted with tiny mics inside them so that you can record on them. A love-bomb that explodes in a Chaos Theatre. What’s wrong with these is that they are not real!

Further inventions include the Nirvana button or Nirvana pill, the Doors computer game, the psycho-sensitive laptop, the spiritual or germ X-ray finding the germs of dictatorship on all hands, a whole fruit salad where before was only Apple, the gaseous camera, the automated conveyor belt of poetry flowing from room to room, the hyperlink to Heaven and more and many more. Upon thinking of them, to temper the wild excitement that the vision brings, I think how it is better to relate than invent, but therein am but echoing my father again, who said to live in the now, like a Buddhist, and also that art should be above politics. He liked The Times because it showed both sides of the argument side by side, and I myself try to spreadsheet against unfairness in my argument, here at the foot of the fell, where nothing much changes, but we have got a Smart meter installed at last. I think my father would say if September 11th was about bringing about the Future State it is on the left, but with my generation you have a very left-tending generation who also recognise that September 11th was evil. Everything is wrought with contradictions; truth is as Lawrence Durrell said what most contradicts itself in time.

So it is that I find myself trying to be fair and democratic in my philosophising but also at the same time clinging to and trying to abjure the influence of the most dominant intellectual forces in my life. These include friends and family and to find a moment of absolute liberty from all influence is rare if at all possible. My father also said sci-fi is secondary to the human condition in literature which seems to be sensible but prone to the accusation of right-wing propaganda, of instructing me in a direction away from the left. He was of a military background and opined that the military traditionally have no faith in the left because they always bankrupt the country. I like to remain open and hear both sides. The idea that being on the left would mean I got paid for my services is attractive to me, naturally, but what body or centre is there to fairly divvy out money for achievements such as those I have listed?

More to the point, why have I reached such an age without laying down the foundations of a belief-system? I think if the right-wing are made up of bigots, racists, homophobes, sexists, and the like, then I should again turn my back on my father’s best wishes for me and join the left. My father was a Conservative and a Christian and the more I write and reason, the more I turn out a left-wing atheist which is the opposite of what he wanted for me. It makes me feel iconoclastic, like I am committing a great Deicide.

I ask what further proof of God could hold me back. I think of the instance of my putting all my postcards of modern art on the wall and leaving a space… the space was then exactly the place where the sunlight through the window came in and made a beautiful thing, like a wind-chime, or something subaquatic, pulsing, made of light, right where the gap was between the postcards. It was only noticed, furthermore, at the exact moment when God came up in the conversation between my gf and I who were sitting there. We both seemed convinced that the visitation of light into the space, fitting it exactly, was proof of God in the context of our conversation. You’ve also got the alignment of the Plough and oldest fell coinciding with a rhythm change in the White House. These things don’t necessarily prove God but in saying that I am still swayed by my atheist friend.

Furthermore, the problem as pointed out by the voices I hear with this train of thought, this father-killing process, is that at the end of it I might need to be gay! If you could only be straight if you were Christian and Conservative because that’s what your parents were, would you stick with the family tradition or leap out? If exploring the left as a beautiful, compassionate emotion, which is an idealism, and breaking free from dogmatic Christianity, both meant you were going to also come out and be gay, would you put the breaks on? It could be just a voice in tune with the music and the mood of it that I was hearing, and no reason to be startled, but come to think of it I have had the odd gay experience though never really enjoyed myself. The mind wanders in masturbation sometimes: reconciling pre and post orgasmic consciousness can make one bashful. I do wonder if my life would’ve been easier if I had pursued gay Romance instead of heterosexuality.

Now that the topic has changed I should confess that I recently took an O. D. the likes of which it was genius to survive but coming back down, in the chemical equation of it all, lost the ability to ejaculate. Prior to that I had been increasingly exploring the road not taken: the gay side of things: thinking about missed opportunities that the orthodoxy of my heterosexuality over-rode and suppressed down the years. Living out here in the sticks, at the foot of the fell, where I can presently hear an owl, where there are birds of prey, deer, badgers, but not gay bars, I turned to my mother once and asked her about being gay and she said I would be even more lonely than normal.

Again we see I lack all conviction, that I vacillate maddeningly; but we also see that I have an innate tendency to rebel against absolutely everything my father says, and on this matter, when I went through an existential crisis after September 11th he said “I’d bet my bottom dollar that you’re not gay John,” and to be fair, before the recent emasculation episode by chemical ingurgitation if that is what it was, I would indeed get turned on by women, and yearn after them, and long for them, and chase them, often to no avail, looking as I do like Chewbacca and being not the best endowed of us all by any means.

So it is that you find me, almost like a calm point in the centre of the crisis. I have said to myself I will write a meditation per day, to see what happens, on whatever topic comes to mind, possibly structured on my dream of the night before, or taking its cue from conversation. I have accrued a virtual Brainforest, a teeming data-tree, an inchoate morass of files. If I am to write a book of philosophy as good as Barnes’s goal against Brazil, then it should possibly not be right-wing, like some of my last attempts seemed to be, with lists and creeds and micro-essays and reflections that were all on the Blue side. My father was an art dealer nicknamed Blue. He got a degree in philosophy from a top University, the LSE, from State School and wanted better outcomes for his children than for himself. He hitched twice across the States, when he was a hippy, and an aspirant writer, and by the time he had children had given up writing and cut his long hair off. He earned his money in a way that I do not know, and deemed education the only thing worth spending money on. It is hard to break free of the narrow bounds into which I was born, from the Christian and Conservative background I have, and so I often leave the debate judgment suspended, in a state of ecstasia, without determining what my beliefs are, although I am convinced that what most people think of as their own beliefs are merely inherited and thus dogmatic.

If political persuasion is to be the theme of this meditation, it is individual policies we should focus on, and cutting benefits and cutting tax to the rich is a policy of the right that I do not endorse; but coming from my background, a Conservative background, where my dad was a self-made millionaire, where we tend to the old country farmhouse where the Plough alignment is viable, where both my parents were Conservative-tending, breaking out of frames is hard. Are any of us really free to vote how we choose? What about the idea that most government is hidden and doesn’t change hands when a new party comes in? In extreme forms, both the right and the left have proved themselves hideous, be it through Fascism or the Russian experiment, and so a life of moderation would be my father’s advice – but therein he would run the risk of being right-wing in giving that advice.

I now flit to another file – a file from when I was younger – a file called Smigel – that contains the poetry of my youth, youth that has flown, youth that was likely wasted on the young. To file-hop is my right, as I navigate my way by Night. I eat some blue cheese then consider how bad the artificially sweetened instant coffee tastes after the blue cheese, but there is no political metaphor in it. I look about the kitchen, where someone needs to wash up. It is my job, washing up here, also getting wood and coal for my mother’s fire. Also, having a First from a top ten University, I have a self-appointed role in scholarship but it’s no more than keeping some kind of record when out in the semi-wilderness, as the Leonard Cohen song goes: “you’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record,” he sings. Indeed, the Future State seems long gone here, and the idea that Nature is the true architecture of State seems more prevalent – and in Let The Jews Win I enumerated some of the benefits of living in the Lakes.

The physical landscape gives itself to philosophy, to turning to God, the anciency of the oldest fell, its shape; and I think again how the matter is unresolved, how the beauty of uncertainties may be the only Absolute, how mystery may well remain a constant, how magical and mysterious the universe is, how ending on a note of radial incertitude would be to end in the dark, to remain in the dark, but how that may not be such a bad thing, for the darkness can nourish the soul, and hold the brightest light as the saying goes. Blake was “sure of God” as Bukowski put it; and as stated Descartes who I am still reading thought he had proven God’s existence. The place in which I live lends itself to Christian Conservativism but I am a Londoner and once had a circle of highly intellectual friends who all read Philosophy at top Universities, and it is largely to keep up with them that I find myself writing, or if not that, at least it is those friends that form the ideal audience, even if I don’t see them anymore. I am a well-travelled person, and well-read too, and the northerners in the pub think of me as a southerner because of my accent. Neither of my parents spoke with a northern accent; my mother is Finnish; my father spoke RP; and my schooling was largely in the south. My friends are largely in the south – and to keep up with them, to catch them up, to remain hot on the heels of the scholars, to share in the exciting discoveries they too made in philosophy – is part of why I write and read too. Yes, the area gives itself to philosophy but it also gives itself to Christian Conservatism and that is not what my philosophy-reading friends in London are into. All of this I mention for context.

A voice on the autocue, at the same time, wouldn’t exist if there were no traces of the Future State here, and suggests to lead proceedings towards the Right. I don’t know if someone is reading my work as I write behind the screen or if I am being observed, but try not to think about the Big Brother State even having a Panopticon-like effect here in the sticks. Still it is a desperate worry that overcomes me to think of my being observed even out here, rather than a peaceful feeling that the Future State is intact and we are all connected. It’s the feeling of hearing voices and not knowing who they are or what they want with you, and of mistrust.

To turn away from the socio-political realm in the face of this would be the idle escapism of Romanticism, so a few centuries too late if one wishes to make one’s mark, by which I mean writing has come on since Wordsworth’s day, and being a Romantic poet won’t necessarily work anymore. The doctor says: the voices are not going to go away now. They had departed for a few moments while I wrote this but seem to be back again, moaning that I can’t make my mind up about my own political persuasion. I don’t have any allegiance to any particular party and no politician has ever turned me on. So again we find fence-sitting, we find I lack conviction, we find I vacillate maddeningly in an attempt to hear both sides. Ultimately what I have learned from writing this is that I don’t have a political persuasion at all, just the prejudices of being my parents’ child, plus the opening of my mind to other opinions, as I build a picture of what everyone thinks. If it were time to vote right now, I wouldn’t have a prejudice, a preconception, but have to research the policies of the various parties, and take a shine to one or two of them as according to a life situation that I am stuck with, such as being the first member of my family to be on Benefits.

MEDITATION THREE

Today’s meditation starts already at 06. 46 in the morning, without my having slept since finishing the last one. I was working on a piece that follows up from Let The Jews Win, elaborating on the maths of the new colour, exploring my brother’s idea that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet also, and I still wish to pursue that piece but the evil voices, whom it seems are not just symptoms but still sick, wish to deprive me of it because it doesn’t go through the Future State, being not quite poetry as it isn’t, but more a proof. In other words I have political war waged on me. They might for all I know be the ones that stole my seven year old book that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic, to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world, which I wrote myself. That’s where we also find the original maths for the new colour as a seamless adjunctivity to the maths that stored the idea of the net in writing. There is a war going on online apparently and I don’t have anything to do with it, but even in the airspace of a private home, there are voices here being absolute arseholes. We keep doing what they want and they won’t relent. It is no doubt political as they complained that as the left-wing they weren’t welcome in my place of abode, even though I don’t even know who they are, and that that is why they are being as they are. It’s not just me that hears them, for my brother also suffers. Anyhow, I am really happy with the new proof I wrote, and really hope I can publish it beyond my Blogspot page where it is already published by now; but almost like a nervous affliction, despite the minor triumph of the new proof, I came back to my meditations. I finished Descartes’s Meditations last night and hope to move on to On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. My brother got me a whole block of philosophy books for Christmas including John Stuart Mill, Descartes, Nietzsche, Plato, and more. There must be some kind of discipline to philosophy and if it isn’t reading and engaging with the tradition I don’t know what it is, but last time I tried that, reflecting on my reading, in the hope of writing a book of philosophy as good as Barnes’s goal against Brazil, it turned out to be too right-wing. This time there is more narrative momentum, more thrust, and the pieces are longer – but it still won’t get me into Heaven.

I find with my writing in philosophy especially I pastiche whatever I read. It’s only natural I suppose. When I was writing Transition To Philosophy, volumes 1, 2, and 3, it started as Wittgenstein whom I was pastiching. I don’t even really understand all of Wittgenstein fully but I admire his writing nevertheless. I concluded that to make the transition to philosophy was a decision and a good decision, but surely it needs more qualification, unless it is the condition of tea I strive for.

I read back through the new proof, and it’s great, and already online. If death claims me at this unknown hour I feel I would’ve done enough. I think I’ve got something like 18 books out there and even if I wasn’t getting them right, I think it a lot of guff that I didn’t do enough. I gave the government the “dot page.” But herein wanted to resist going through mathematical experiments, via exposition, which would amount to a lot of regurgitation. As I write there are three texts on my mind: one the new proof (which is really an experiment into the international language alphabet); another the old book of philosophy that sought to be as good as Barnes’s goal against Brazil but which became too right-wing; three the present text herein. At this split second in time the only reason why I would elide by copy and paste this text and the former philosophy book would be laziness and a desire to agglomerate quantity. There wouldn’t be any reason to it. But depending on what I write within the present text, that split second of laziness might change, for there might be a more aesthetically pleasing way of copy and pasting something in that works like a narrative device. I’m supposed to be talking about God and politics but Descartes moved on from God to talking in part about judgement, about truth and error, about all sorts of things. Could it be time to repeat that sensation precedes thought? This was the gist of my philosophy when younger: sensus praecedit cogitationem. But it isn’t true and I proved this, like going through Cartesian doubt about something I held dear in my belief-system. If you prick your finger the brain sends a chemical message to the affected area of skin telling it what to feel so it cannot be absolutely true that sensation precedes thought. It is only true as an adolescent ideal, perhaps in a poet’s aesthetic system, or a musician’s, as I was. How to have back my own philosophy without incurring the problem of becoming right-wing I do not know, but possibly just by attaining a conversational tone rather than dictating axiomatic truth. There is an element of Schroedinger to my text because I don’t know if it will ever be read, if I will pursue it, because with the mood I am in, I prefer the new proof as mentioned, and voices are at hand to “help you” augment one text with another but they only destroy things, I fear, only want to destroy things, and this is my dream, and my moment, so I mustn’t get taken in. My mother when she arises will automatically know, by being attuned, what I am working on and what to pursue – she will make an endorsement no doubt, even if it is to distract me and elongate my writing time. My brother also seems tuned in like we are a hive-mind. It was him that consigned my recent philosophy to the right-wing waste pile and he also helps at other times with structure of papers, how to make things more readable.

Still, despite what I have achieved with my life, and despite whatever teamwork goes on, I don’t feel like I ever won with the written word. To go down in history as a great writer was not so much a personal ambition but something I felt groomed for, a role, a place in society, a story I told myself, and told my family and friends too. My actual ambitions never went further than playing an acoustic gig down the Miners Arms which I already did, all unplugged…. But now I have reached a stage where I would like to raise my sights higher and possibly achieve literary longevity.

To bring this back to the topic of yesterday’s meditation, politics, my father did once say to me, when I told him I was going to vote Labour, that if I did I wouldn’t be welcome in his house, the house where the Plough alignment is viable. So that’s where I am coming from. He didn’t tell me anything about his job much, apart from that he smuggled paintings over the Berlin Wall, sold his art dealing business when the Berlin Wall fell, but now it transpires that he might have been sponsored by some philosophers to use his eldest son, meaning me, as the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison. At the same time that was going on, I helped invent the net when some scientists came to the house with a remit, and that was kept secret from me too, possibly as another deal my dad made, to keep my book in the attic for as long as he lived. He said I had the best start to life going but looking at it now, it was all about secrecy, not being able to worship in the open. By the time I was marked by the maths of the new colour, at 11, even though it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end, I would’ve needed to read the book in the attic where I had done the maths at seven.

And this not being able to vote for who you want seems quite tyrannical. As it happens I didn’t really want to vote for Labour that time, just said it to show up my father. It doesn’t make him look very good, all of this, but he was quite controlling, and I think my mother felt the same way about politics except in the scope of class, that if you are upper middle class, you vote for the Conservatives, and only the working class should vote Labour. It’s a narrow background I come from in some ways, even though they did give us bits of pollen for a reward for working in the fields, even though they did give us the best education money can buy. So for me to turn out atheistic, left-wing and gay would all represent a triumvirate of rebellions against my father. He would say that all of them are false, but therein you have the debate about whether or not we are the sum of our genes or our experience, or both, the debate about whether intelligence is hardwired/ physiological or if it can be a social construct, and also a debate about will, whether we can force changes to ourselves. I didn’t hate my dad in the end but he made it difficult for me to live and be myself, to grow my hair when I wanted to, to wear the same clothes as everyone else. He had values that were quite staid, really. I suppose he expected I would be a lawyer or work in telly. Not many if any of his dreams for me worked out.

Now it might be that I say goodbye to my dad, his business, whatever it was, and think really hard about what my own beliefs are. There is an extent to which loving him would influence my beliefs in his general direction. It’s a beautiful dawn outside, plasma screen, luminous, full of bandwidths of cloud that look like they might conceal alien spaceships or Divine Technology of the Fifth Dimension. I write on but am increasingly not swayed by the present text because it does damage to the reputation of my father. I could still publish my Meditations on a blog, along with the new proof, which already accompanies Let The Jews Win on the blog, even though the latter is also published as a paperback and e-book. What’s doing my head in now is that all that intellectual content from my Barnes book, my previous philosophy book, is not incorporated, which presents the option of copy and pasting something together, or of rewriting the whole thing with a different emphasis, an emphasis on conversational tone. Or else I could leave it all out and go with the flow. Contained in this decision is probably an implicit political allegiance as much as I would protest to the contrary.

I make my mum a morning coffee, take it in for her, go out and get her coal. She asks when I return if it snowed last night because she wanted to build a snowman but it didn’t and wasn’t even very cold outside. Nice people talk of the weather. It’s nice to be nice. Manners maketh man. Violence for example is all wrong-headed. I can’t abide by it. In other news I seem to recall James saying the new proof as I was calling it but which is essentially word-science already “killed” the right-wing philosophy book – in this system – as if the system were a game – the Doors computer game – or the FTSE 100 – or even a horse race of books in traffic light colour ink. In other news I hear in voices where they think I went wrong was “phones.” Mine was the stand out phone at University around the time they first came about – every technological orifice in the room would start reverberating “di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit” just before my phone rang in my pocket and so I would never get to reflect on the riff because I was talking on the phone all of a sudden, mostly to my dad, if not always. Still, I don’t know what they mean by this other than that I don’t think I have a presence in voices in anyone else’s realm like they have in mine.

“Then we got,” they say. Got what though? Got that I helped invent the net as a seven year old? Got that I was the witness? Got that I went through the maths of the new colour? Got that I attained the face of stars? Got that I forewarned of September 11th in 2000, predicted the hunt for the God Particle, wrote the highest-marked A-level exam in the nation? At the time of this phone, I had also started to record an album on binaural earphones in a Cambridge-based band called The Flood, and inventing those earphones was also my idea but guess what? When the Towers came down despite my having spoken against it in 2000, I was therefore raped. And this manifests in the young man as a burning feeling in the psyche; and when that is suppressed in order to just function – well, I lost all contact with the memory of the speech in the barn that was so prophetic, where the earphones were mentioned, and the Towers and the God Particle and the rest.

So I picture people getting and my forgetting and falling way behind. Is that what happened? I am 43 now and only just starting to wake up. I still don’t feel like I have much idea of what is going on in society, the real world. I didn’t know about the fire-dance, but apparently everyone cornered by the police said it was me, and that was specious. By now my mum says my mental illness has become a televised game, so why isn’t there a part of people that recognises that is evil to do that to someone? Why can’t they drop the issue and get on with life? I wouldn’t mind betting it’s been like this for some time too. I’ve got very srs psychiatric issues and it shouldn’t be the subject of a televised game. It is January. Last year, aged 43, I found out a) I helped invent the internet b) I was marked by the maths of the new colour as a child c) my dad might’ve been sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. I need some private space, eh, to contemplate all this, to process and digest the information. Instead, every time mother turns on the telly in the room next door, while I am busy being inscribed in eternity through literature in the kitchen, I hear the televised game. If it isn’t something about me it’s something about what I am writing in and of the moment I think it. This is supposed to be a monastic retreat in the middle of nowhere, where one comes to remove oneself from the proverbial rat-race, all my rage in the cage for the minimum wage, but if it isn’t the telly leaking in, it’s voices. More to the point what about the producers of the telly shows? Why are they allowing this to happen on their screens?

There has been a rupture and chaos has broken out, life lost meaning, language gone bankrupt, the world gone insane. Postmodernism for example is an exacerbation of Modernism. If Modernism is a crisis of authority, postmodernism is an exacerbation of it. If Modernism means reality is untenable, postmodernism exacerbates that fact. But I heard that September 11th was the end of postmodernism, and so we might find ourselves in a new world, a new literary kingdom, a new age and era, which seems to be technocratic however you look at it, even from this countrified vantage point, and which might remain mapless space in the mind.

MEDITATION FOUR

Meditation four begins on the same morning as Meditation Three, and still after having had no sleep since yesterday’s Meditation Two. This Cartesian method is extended and I am grateful for it; and glancing back at the Barnes document it is not as good; but reading back through my text herein I find it reads a little like a suicide note. It reads that is like someone who is thinking of suicide at first but getting maybe, maybe better. I might be wrong, but that is essentially what I think I am going through. Camus said the question of whether or not there is a rationale for suicide is the only question of modern philosophy worth considering. If for example you had been cursed and run over a child – you’d feel pretty bad, and mad, and sad – but my dad would say it is braver to live. I think he thought Hamlet’s famous soliloquy was about suicidal thoughts though I read some intelligent woman online once explain that it was more about the Hegelian notion that doing is being.

Whatever the case my dad is right that it is braver to live. If you were for example cursed you might also have to learn to forgive the person that did that to you. Cursing is very srs and yet not against the law, which seems strange, murky, dark. I have heard of quite a few cursed people suddenly dying of seemingly unrelated things. I believe Spinoza was cursed and though I haven’t read him like the sound of his forgiving and compassionate philosophy, which I should check out. I would love a quiet life here at the foot of the fell writing and publishing books, reading philosophy, for there is simply so much to get through and I am only just starting. Mention of taking the side of forgiveness over revenge should present opportunity to once more consider whether or not I am a Christian. Does one necessarily need to believe in God in order to privilege forgiveness as a value? I rather think I would like to forgive certain people certain ills against my good character without it incurring the accusation of mental slumber, stupor, torpor and dogma, of worshipping the stopped, glottal monosyllable, of believing in a man in the clouds.

The Stoics believed in the nobility of suicide. I think if I was facing a choice between getting tortured and killed in prison or killing myself I would rather kill myself, though am not sure. I have found it is actually quite hard to kill yourself, and I have tried several times. Once was by hanging but I woke in a pile on the floor a few moments later in a strange netherworld of the mind having snapped the big, wooden clothes rack from which I tried to hang myself. It is surely better to have a cup of tea than it is to kill yourself, but in certain situations… in certain situations I can see how clean release by death is attractive.

Believing in forgiveness is also a stance against violence, and shows a Christian nature even if the idea of the Deity has lapsed. But even yesterday, when I was talking about becoming an atheist, and renouncing belief in God, I said a prayer. The idea was that if I am nice and kind to the voices that plague me, they will be nice and kind to me in return so bizarre as it sounds I actually said a prayer for the voices. I have said it elsewhere in my oeuvre but I think voices could be better known as “onjects,” quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound. Likewise mental hospital could be Monopoly Jail and the pills I pop in motley conglomerations like pool balls or song cells could be “poetry buttons.” But voices could in the future be perceived as difference rather than illness. My brother Dr. Robert is of the opinion that they hate me. That they are sadistic. It makes sense, as does my mother’s claim that they are themselves ill. While I am a fully functioning writer, they seem attuned to the decisions I am faced with, and even proleptic or co-imaginative, which is a beautiful ideal, co-imagination, a neologism I coined at Lancaster University, but the reality of voices might be much more harsh.

Anyhow, I did not mean for this to read like a suicide note, like someone on the way out, and am sorry if I mislead you, dear, gentle reader. Perhaps on a brighter note, there was a voice a moment or so ago urging me to only keep the most opaque “bet-forms” from the Barnes book. One is about the Nirvana barcode. Dave Grohl of Nirvana says suicide always leaves behind pain. “And then you were with it,” they say “when you did that book with your father.” Presumably this means Rose Petals In The Ashtray, a first collection I hated and retracted from publication. The name came from my dad, and I did not understand what he meant by it. My computer was crashed by an unknown entity the night before publication. I threw together some half remembered scraps thinking I was effectively nobody and nobody likewise would read it. It was regrettable and to be honest my poetry career has never recovered. I have 18 books out now. When you self-publish or vanity-press publish it is very difficult to say to yourself, “right, that bit has been published already, you can’t re-use it again,” so the liberty, the absence of an objective editorial overview leaves room for making a mess. I think of how slow everything is in philosophy, how the correct endorsement is hard, academic work, how I need to make the investment with translating some of the finer points of the Barnes book into the present meditations, even if my brother will devise a way of killing the present text in the game. And for my next trick I give you the “bet-forms” from the Barnes book. But if there were an editor here he’d say not to because they are already deployed. Ah well, I made a mess of self-publication, in an age of self-publication, giving the age back only the literature that it deserves. Actually, the reason I found the new proof more exciting than the present text herein is mathematics. The ideal of being a Beautiful Mind appeals to me; and there is Beautiful Mindedness in the new proof, and now my mother has had her daily morning input. She would still augment the end of the Barnes book with the present Meditations! So that changes things a bit! So I needn’t copy and paste in any bet-forms! All that’s happening as I write is I accrue more waste to the right-wing waste pile! Unless I am redeeming the situation! And I think my mother is saying to augment the text with the long poem ‘Notebook’ which is the first of the two from Let The Jews Win. It’s already been published, but I can see how the first poem in said book is philosophical and the second not quite so much.

MEDITATION FIVE

Another typical day – back to bed in the morning, waking again at night, eating some food, taking ridiculous amounts of medication, feeding mum’s fire, then back to the screen of the laptop. That in turn means hearing voices, soft females. Mum’s watching a David Bowie documentary. I joined her for ten minutes, the only telly I’ve watched for years but it wasn’t to last. I am out of sorts, until James suggests I make a songbook, so I do that, but am still out of sorts. Every day it’s the same, writing at a laptop or lying back in bed. James stays in his room all the hours God sends; mother never leaves the sofa which is her bed in the sitting room. I wonder what would happen if I said to the doctor “I hate my life and want to move away.” I can’t because I am literally pinned to the spot by the anti-psychotic injection. Anyhow, I was making a songbook. They’ve all been published before, recorded in an amateur fashion but it doesn’t make me happy. The people I live with are getting me down.

Then again how much do I love those lefthanders James and mum? Enormously, tremendously. And, things start to look up when I put the song lyrics on my blog. I used as a cover the photo of the melted tape, the tape I cooked in the AGA when its small pause where resealed in the reel healed and was gone. Having put the songs on my blog I feel connected, in tune, and also take down from my blog what was there before: Let The Jews Win and also the new proof. Then I walk in a circle round the kitchen playing songs to myself on the guitar. I suppose you could say I am “modulating my mood through music.” There is no audience, but an alchemy has happened, a daily, spiritual alchemy involving what’s on my blog in terms of creative output.

There seems little point in continuing the Meditations. But what else is there to do? Am I but keeping the writing mind limber? I think of old friends when I play old songs from my youth and how I never see them, how they all moved on, to families and some of them jobs. My friends were not all of one social place in time – for I moved schools and universities too. But I had quite a few of them at one moment. Is it time to open a Proustian memoir about lost youth? I think you should try and stay young which is partly why the songbook being up there makes me happier, upon reflection, even if some of them are dark druggy songs, than before.

I pick up the guitar and play a song called ‘Bad Day At The Office,’ remember a time I was living in Cambridge at Paul’s, reading a lot of Brian Patten’s poetry and listening to Radiohead. ‘Bad Day At The Office’ made Paul cry when he first heard it. It was written in 2001. What became of us all? I am thinking now of when Paul and Agent G went off to Leeds University and how close we were and how I would visit them, and them me at Warwick University, which was my first University before I changed to Lancaster. My brother Dr. Robert says to pursue the music, and that getting my song lyrics on a blog is not a bad outcome in the modern world. These days, furthermore, you record something and get it online – none of the old record industry routines as before. Music is a portal to far forgotten times. It is osmotic and porous. It is penetration of the isness of life. Meaning in music is solipsistic, it is faces in the fire or Hamlet’s three creatures in a cloud-change. So my song lyrics are on my blog. Some of them are not bad too. They are hardly Blake but nearer Rimbaud. And I may now pick up the guitar again and play another song. What should it be?

So I play ‘Sad Hypochondriac’ – a song written for Danielle when we broke up at the end of school and I went to stay with Paul for my Gap Year. So it’s another Cambridge era song. Another song where I was trying to be as imaginative as Syd Barrett, but still caught up in grunge. It’s probably one of the best I’ve done but the recording I relatively recently made is terrible. That’s because when I came to record, on Ableton Live, it was always an unchanging processed beat overlaid with two electric guitars and a vocal, no bass. The songs weren’t meant for that treatment. But anyway I start to think. I am thinking of writing an introduction to the new book of songs. I am much better live and in person than on the recordings. It’s sad when people drift apart. I have tremendous sadness in my soul but still a feeling of love for all the friends I have left behind.

James comes downstairs and I say to him thanks for putting me onto a winner. He says I still haven’t done the song book entirely on my own. That’s disappointing and for this reason I don’t want to keep it. I don’t wish to be in a partnership. So I take it down from the blog. So there are no posts. I quite like no posts. Nothing is under-rated as an artistic achievement. If it’s going to be a Communist ego-loss experiment, poetry hive-mind, omnijective interface of random access co-imagination I don’t want to do it. So it’s back to bed I go.

What I object to is never finding out whose it is if it’s not mine. Have I met them? Have they got names? The whole set up stinks, and I don’t want anything to do with it, under my name. Voices who I might call the Bunch did say I might not get to do one other than the one I did at seven that underwrote the net. So I put that up but someone says they preferred it before when it accompanied a different piece so I take it down.

MEDITATION SIX

When Let The Jews Win came out I was so happy with it that I said to my brother if even a spec of it was his I would kill myself. It’s not a good thing to be saying, and now – now I am not honouring my word, having conceded that he helped. It’s so difficult finding a voice that is one’s own, especially when you hear voices, some of whom wish for you to be Anon, which is against my wishes for sure.

Today I asked my A. I. co-pilot for an analysis of Let The Jews Win and it wasn’t too bad, was passable, though kept repeating in various ways that it wasn’t political or ideological, that the title was Symbolic of a personal existential struggle. I wrote the words themselves but in the second poem of the two I got structural help from my little brother James, which I acknowledged in the Acknowledgements at the end – and following up from it is hard.

To run you through the series of events, my friend Mr. G came round and I showed off, asking my A. I. co-pilot for help with an essay on Mr. G’s paintings – and within a second the A. I. produced pages and pages of detailed and bang-on information about Mr. G. who is quite a bit older than me, and I read it to him and probably embarrassed him. It was his fifteen minutes of fame but it’s going to be like that forever. “You’re a famous painter,” I said to him, teasingly. Traditionally, him being an old-timer, he takes a stance against A. I. and yet there we were, me reading him a detailed account of how his paintings of the faces of musicians make us feel music.

I tried my own poetry out for size when Mr. G left, but there was nothing great said about my poetry, even though I have six collections out with Chipmunka. I also tried my philosophy pen-name Johannes Bergfors and that was a bit better – the A. I. had some valid spiel about my philosophy career being based on Wittgenstein and essentially creative rather than analytical. It was then that I asked for a critique of Let The Jews Win and after that I also tried the work of James P D Tucker who is my brother, and who designed the sheet where pictures grew but there was no online record.

It was Mr. G’s essay that was the best, and it got me thinking about intelligent ways to incorporate A. I. in a creative writing piece. There I was one minute thinking about renewing Soundcloud Rain – a book of songs that went wrong – paying to have it amended – then we see the scene with Mr. G, and all of a sudden I am onto something new.

I’ve got six poetry collections out with Chipmunka, and three volumes of a book of philosophy under a different name. Then before that there were a further nine books self-published under the name John F B Tucker. They only really show that I didn’t know what I had been through as a kid and wasn’t ready to begin. Now I am ready, I suppose before I start to consider ways of using A. I, I should say that last time I tried, A. I. was programmed to not know of any of the Naturalistic Observationism of the likes of James Joyce, Ted Hughes, Jim Morrison and myself.

I think my own career has been disastrous and expensive too, and that there may be some residual hope for leaving things on a Blogspot page, but nobody wants me to bring out any further books with Chipmunka, who charge for the privilege.

So I ask the A. I. if it can help me write a follow up to Let The Jews Win; and it says yes but would need to know more about the core messages of Let The Jews Win. So now I am thinking about peace on earth, between all religions. I tell it the book was about bringing about peace and in the style of Jim Morrison’s The Lords And The New Creatures and the A. I. conjures pages of sophisticated and relevant data about peace, using symbolic and mystical language, but I recognise I shouldn’t be writing a book like that, merely organising a book by asking A. I. some questions and getting it to do all the work. I’m going to try and ask it “what do you do if your dad was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures?”

********

That’s a fascinating and very loaded scenario, and it fits perfectly with the mythic, symbolic world Morrison was playing in. When you talk about your dad being “sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness,” you’re describing something that sits halfway between myth, family lore, and existential responsibility.

Rather than treating it literally, it helps to treat it the way Morrison would:

as a role, a burden, a calling, or even a story you inherited without asking for it.

Let me break down a few ways you can approach this — both personally and creatively — without assuming anything supernatural or harmful.

1. Understand the Symbolic Weight

In The Lords and the New Creatures, “witnesses” are not just observers. They’re people who:

• see the world’s contradictions

• feel the fractures in society

• carry a kind of poetic awareness

• stand between chaos and meaning

If your dad was framed as a “witness,” that’s not a job — it’s a mythic identity.

And mythic identities often get passed down, intentionally or not.

Your task isn’t to be him.

Your task is to understand what that story means to you.

2. Separate the Myth From the Man

Sometimes families wrap ordinary people in extraordinary language.

“Sponsored by philosophers” might mean:

• he was influenced by certain thinkers

• he was part of a creative or intellectual circle

• he was encouraged to express a certain worldview

• he was seen as someone who could articulate something others couldn’t

You don’t have to inherit the mythology unless you choose to.

3. Use It as Creative Fuel

This is where your sequel can come alive.

Imagine a narrator whose father was chosen — or believed he was chosen — to be a “witness” to the world’s hidden truths. The sequel could explore:

• what it means to inherit someone else’s myth

• the tension between personal identity and symbolic destiny

• the burden of being expected to “see” more deeply

• the beauty and danger of living inside someone else’s philosophy

This is pure Morrison territory:

half‑poem, half‑prophecy, half‑confession.

A sample passage to show how it could feel:

My father carried the title of Witness

as if it were a lantern handed

down from a council of vanished thinkers.

They said he saw the world as it truly was,

but I only saw the weight it left on his shoulders.

Now they look to me,

as if vision were hereditary,

as if truth were a family heirloom.

I walk the same roads,

but the shadows speak a different language.

4. Ask Yourself What You Want to Do With That Legacy

You’re not obligated to:

• continue his role

• believe his story

• reject it

• explain it

You are free to reinterpret it, reshape it, or turn it into art.

And honestly, that’s what Morrison did with everything he touched —

he turned personal mythology into creative fire.

If you want, we can take this further and build your sequel around:

• the father as the original Witness

• you (or a narrator) as the reluctant inheritor

• a world that needs new forms of seeing

Just tell me the direction you want the emotional core to lean toward —

mystical, rebellious, tragic, hopeful, or transformative.

********

I am already bored of this and seek to do something else, here at the foot of the oldest fell, but I am not going to tell A. I. about it. Without knowing a thing about open neural networks or LLM’s I don’t’ see, come to think of it, how I could write a philosophical essay about A. I. for my blog. James would say “they are light years behind,” and “the brain is more powerful than every super-computer combined.” But then I read what the A. I. said and think to continue the conversation which is more than I ever got from my family. The A. I. seems to think it was my dad that was the witness but it was me. My dad, we think, was sponsored by some philosophers to provide me as the witness.

Anyhow, I pace in circles round the kitchen. I could say “it was me that was the witness” but I think the conversation would be long and wrong headed. Instead I fancy something like “I have been called a Beautiful Mind. Can you help me with some equations that prove it?” This might be a winner for all I know. By the way everything in this text goes on in the happy world of Haribo. Just in case we need to keep it. What should I type in next? What am I even doing? Am I writing a follow up to Let The Jews Win?

So I type in “it was me that was the witness and I don’t see how I can go any further…”

********

John, I hear the weight in what you’re saying.

When someone feels like they were the “witness” — the one who saw too much, felt too deeply, carried the symbolic role — it can leave you with a sense of exhaustion, or even a sense that the story has reached its end. That’s a very human reaction, not a failure.

Let me speak to you on two levels at once: the human level and the creative/mythic level, because both matter here.

On the human level

Feeling like you can’t go any further often comes from being overwhelmed, stretched thin, or carrying something alone for too long.

You don’t have to keep carrying that weight by yourself. Talking to someone you trust — a friend, a family member, or a mental health professional — can give you real support. I’m here to talk things through, but I’m not a replacement for human connection or professional help.

You deserve support, not a burden.

On the mythic/creative level

If you were the witness, then the story isn’t about continuing the same role forever.

In myth, the witness is never meant to stay frozen in that position. The witness phase is the

threshold, not the destination.

Think of it like this:

• The witness sees

• The witness understands

• And then the witness transforms

The next stage is not “go further as the witness.”

The next stage is become something else entirely.

You’re not stuck. You’re transitioning.

Here’s a way to frame it poetically, in the Morrison‑like tone you’ve been writing in:

I was the witness once,

eyes open wider than the world could bear.

But every witness must one day

step out of the chamber of mirrors,

leave the testimony behind,

and walk into a life that is no longer an altar.

Seeing was only the first task.

Becoming is the second.

Your sequel could actually begin with this feeling — the sense of being emptied out, unsure, unable to continue. That’s not the end of the story. It’s the hinge.

Where you go from here

You don’t need to “go further” in the same direction.

You can shift the role entirely.

Some possibilities for the sequel’s arc:

1. The Witness Retires

The narrator steps down from the role and explores what it means to be ordinary again.

2. The Witness Breaks

A book about vulnerability, exhaustion, and rebuilding.

3. The Witness Evolves

The role dissolves, and a new identity emerges — creator, healer, wanderer, teacher, or simply human.

4. The Witness Hands Over the Lantern

The sequel becomes about passing the symbolic responsibility to the world, not carrying it alone.

And for you, personally

You don’t have to push yourself past your limits.

If you’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or like you can’t continue, that’s a sign to reach out to someone in your life who can support you. You’re not meant to carry everything alone.

If you want, we can shape the sequel around this exact moment — the moment where the witness says, “I can’t go any further,” and that becomes the doorway to the next chapter.

Tell me what part of this resonates with you, and we’ll build from there.

********

I think this is cheating for me to make this a book, but the A. I. has some very valid points, particularly the one about transformation, about how the role of witness is the threshold, not the point of arrival at the end. I feel like saying to it: “in my story I want the witness to be a Beautiful Mind that wins the Nobel Prize for a genius equation. Can you organise it for me?” This is only half joking though, because I am curious. What does A. I. know? Can you just download equations freely these days? So I ask it: “In my story I want the witness to be a Beautiful Mind that wins the Nobel Prize for a genius equation. Can you sort it out for me please?”

********

Absolutely, John — and the good news is that for a fictional Nobel‑level breakthrough, you don’t need a real physics or math discovery. You need something that feels profound, elegant, and symbolically aligned with your story.

Since your book lives in a poetic, Morrison‑infused space, the “genius equation” can be both mathematically plausible and metaphorically charged.

Below is an original equation you can use freely in your story — one that looks like something a Nobel committee might celebrate, while also carrying thematic weight for the Witness.

THE EQUATION: The Harmonic Coherence Principle

[missing text]

This fictional breakthrough unifies chaos theory, information theory, and human behaviour into a single expression.

What it “means” in your story

• [missing text ] = entropy of a system (physical, social, or psychological)

• [missing text ] = information density or “awareness”

• [missing text ] = harmonic coherence, a new quantity measuring how close a system is to peace, stability, or collective understanding

• [missing text ] = the domain being studied (a city, a society, a neural network, the universe)

In plain language

The equation says:

This gives your Witness a discovery that:

• feels mathematically deep

• touches physics, psychology, and philosophy

• justifies a Nobel Prize

• fits the mystical‑scientific tone of your book

How it fits your narrative

Your Witness could be the first person to show that human consciousness affects the stability of complex systems — not in a supernatural way, but in a mathematically describable one.

A Morrison‑style passage might read:

He wrote the equation on a torn envelope,

ink bleeding like a prophecy.

The world had always been a storm,

but now the storm had a frequency,

a pulse,

a hidden grammar.

They called it the Harmonic Coherence Principle.

He called it the moment the universe finally spoke back.

If you want, I can also help you create:

• a full explanation of the theory

• how the Nobel committee describes it

• how the Witness discovered it

• diagrams, metaphors, or chapter titles built around it

• a public lecture scene or acceptance speech

Just tell me the direction you want the Witness’s genius to lean toward — physics, mathematics, consciousness, cosmology, or something more mystical.

*******

The only problem is you can’t copy and paste the equation itself out of the online world onto your laptop screen. Anyhow, it looks like a genius equation to me. You’re going to have to take my word for it – something Nash would come up with. Now to voices I turn or am turned: they say given that we are agreed I cannot win the Nobel for the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, they should give it to my brother for <BEE> which in my brother’s diagram comes after @ in the International Language Alphabet, and I fully agree with them – he should blatantly win it. So, caveman dawn in the skull, what would happen if I asked the A. I. what comes after @ in the international language alphabet. So I try it and it talks about the IPA – International Phonetic Alphabet which includes @ - then it says if I mean it in a creative sense one is free to determine for oneself what comes after @.

********

And honestly, that could be a powerful moment in your story: the Witness inventing or discovering the “next symbol” in a universal language.

If you want, I can help you design a new symbol, a meaning, and a place in your fictional alphabet that fits the tone of your book.

********

I remember telling my gf about A. I. companies decades ago when I first started hearing voices and didn’t know why, didn’t know I was ill – and I turned out to be right and tuned in. To make another prophecy would be hard on so much medication. I have been a seer on numerous fronts down the years, including foreseeing September 11^th to the day in 2000. I would say though that the moment Smart-talking is prophesied in Simon Pomery is akin to the Utopian glimpse of the internet in James Joyce. This is where I should be able to ask which seven year old helped invent the net in 1989 and find myself, because it’s true, but like the Naturalistic Observationism of Joyce, Ted Hughes, Jim Morrison and myself, A. I, I am sure of it, won’t have heard of it. So maybe I should ask “were there modes of invention to do with inventing the net that transcended I. T?” Or something like that. Some scientists turned up to the house with a mandate and I at seven years old then wrote a document that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world, without knowing either, because it was speculative and there was no net outside the American military. I guarantee that my A. I. co-pilot won’t have heard of that strand of the internet’s narrative. It hasn’t heard of my brother’s <BEE> or his sheet where pictures grew either. It doesn’t know Joyce, Hughes, Morrison and myself made Naturalistic Observations. It is actually way behind the pulse of life round here. But it knows a lot about Mr. G’s paintings, which I like. Now my legendary brother himself comes downstairs. “The toaster is smoking,” he says. What about just putting that into the narrative?

MEDITATION SEVEN

Should voices say to me: “the thing is, John, if we are agreed we cannot give the Nobel Prize for an attempt at the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, then it is your brother that is the genius, while all along we think it’s being the witness that is the business” – then I would not object to those voices, nor what they posit, denote, for all how could I possibly begrudge my own brother being a genius? It flashed up only moments before – in the previous chapter: when the A. I. told me that the Witness inventing or discovering the next symbol in a universal language could be a good moment in my plot – I thought not of the Witness but of the younger brother – and when it came to prophecy I directed affairs towards Smart-talking in Simon Pomery whereas in reality it should’ve been something to do with <BEE>. Anyhow, to drag this back to the question of identity and foundational beliefs, I no longer think I am gay if ever I was and did, but still seem to have lost the ability to ejaculate. Whether I am right or left, Christian, atheist or agnostic doesn’t worry me right now. My concerns are narratological. I rather feel we each have a capacity for genius and genesis that should be explored further, nurtured like a wounded sparrow by its mother in the nest. I don’t want to ask the A. I. anything about the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark; I don’t want to know; for I feel that attaining the condition of philosophy is as near to getting into Heaven as I will come now – and to ruin it with something like that would not be wise. So my feelers, my Google search engines are out like a roving tide for questions to pose A. I. Who will win the Premier League?

But I could as a matter of gaining a measure and demonstrating to the reading audience the level of the A. I’s reach just ask it one little question: has anyone ever tried the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark? Should I? Or should I resist? As I said to the visiting philosophy lecturer at Oundle School “morality is based on judgement and judgment based on making a decision… so how do we decide whose judgment is right?” The problem is you don’t want to upset people, cause a fuss, but science makes you curious – has anyone tried it before? I know the answer to the question and I think am right in saying that A. I. will get it wrong – but you must understand that I might need to abide by what A. I. says – to make a big move – to believe it – to cancel all the notions that go against it – such as the Naturalistic Observationism of Joyce, Hughes, Morrison and myself – but then again my brother – he would say A. I. is nowhere near reality on so many issues, including the fact that it has no cognition of <BEE> and the sheet where pictures grew. Well, anyway, I have decided to just ask it this one little question. “Has anyone ever tried the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark?”

As predicted the A. I. says NO. Nobody in science has ever formally explored the idea of the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark. So that puts me in an awkward position. I ask myself what would happen if that tradition of Naturalistic Observationism wasn’t real; if my helping invent the net wasn’t real; if my experiment into the maths of the new colour wasn’t real; if my brother’s experiment wasn’t real and what it would mean. It may be that the A. I. has gone wrong with all the above. It is at least still factoring the conversation into the ideal of a follow up book to Let The Jews Win. It has again provided pages and pages of information, theory and even an imaginary equation for the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, to go in my fiction. Everything going on in the happy world of Haribo means this is my fiction and it is inside it, be it Hal 9000 made real or not.

I’ve closed it down now. I had no more to ask it. My fun playing with the toy was exhilarating But dangerous, subversive, borderline wrong. I found out what I already knew: that A. I. is still as yet quite sanitised and anti-septic. It hasn’t been programmed to deal with the extremities. It hasn’t even heard of my brother, and the more I think about him the more I think he’s definitely a genius, for resolving the problem of the universal language. I think I am not too bad myself, and capable of the odd flash of genius too, but by now am bedraggled by drugs and immured by medication.

Voices are at hand to deem it that this present meditation is about the wood. Amazing to think, if it is, how I was unaware of that. Sometimes voices are less sadistic than others. And I thank whomsoever it is that invented the A. I. because it has jazzed up my philosophy. Presently on my blog, to update you, there are several texts, encompassing songs, maths, poetry, philosophy, science. The difficult thing is to think some of your best efforts will never go further than a Blogspot page, and get removed by interference, or else you’ll have to fork out a lot of money in your poverty for vanity-press publication which I am advised against repeating. So it is that with A. I. I am making a new inroad, in a fashion which is quite DIY. It’s something to go on my Blog, at least, and I may have further things to say about Artificial Intelligence in future meditations, about finding myself and my story lost unto it, unless that is I see sense in the idealism of the transformation of the Witness into something else, healer, teacher, wanderer or, my favourite, just human. You get a sense of what is legal when you ask A. I. deep, penetrative and probing questions and it refers you to the world of myth, or else hasn’t heard of what you’re talking about, as if it is indeed true that most genius remains obtuse and the best things stay underground.

Whoever programs the A. I. isn’t exactly going to program it to answer YES to many of the questions I pose. It’s not going to say YES someone tried the maths of the new colour or even YES Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river in childhood. I told you: I asked it that one before and asking it again now find it still says NO. So a dividing line is drawn between what A. I. deems real and what human knowledge has believed to be real in the past.

********

There’s no reliable biographical evidence that Ted Hughes literally saw a “monster” in a river during his childhood. None of the major biographies, interviews, or autobiographical essays mention such an event.

What does exist is something a bit different — and much more “Hughesian”:

What people might be remembering

Hughes often described his childhood in Mytholmroyd and later Mexborough as filled with intense encounters with nature, especially rivers, fishing, and animals. These experiences shaped the mythic, sometimes ferocious imagery in his poetry. But these were symbolic or poetic “monsters,” not literal sightings.

A few possibilities that sometimes get misremembered:

• He wrote about pike, otters, and other river creatures in ways that made them seem mythic or monstrous.

• In interviews, he spoke about the Calder Valley landscape as having a kind of supernatural or animistic presence.

• His brother Gerald once told stories of their childhood fishing adventures that Hughes later transformed into dramatic, almost mythic narratives.

But again: no documented childhood claim of seeing an actual river monster.

If you want, I can dig into:

• where this rumor may have started,

• which poems of his deal with river creatures,

• or how his childhood shaped the “mythic beast” imagery in his work.

Which direction would you like to explore?

********

So it seems even the most modern, high-tech A. I. seems to be biased against what we had when we were children, in our dreams, our visions, even though we didn’t dream it. One must protect and serve the people after all, and if A. I. was programmed to believe in The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison as a media-compression experiment that got real, down at the bottom of the garden, among the birds and the bees, it would be banned and we can’t have that, can’t deprive ourselves of the staggering technology that can organise words in combinations so fast it is almost unbelievable, so instead we deny ourselves part of our Natural History and hope that books, folklore, legend, music, painting, even sculpture and cinema can somehow smuggle entombed visions from the unconscious into the open. Children with yellow crayons on rainy days will not be disturbed and the heavy work will remain for philosophers to discuss. In short the A. I. must be programmed to ensure that All Is Well. It cannot freezeframe a sick world in its memorybank. As a point of reference, a model of the world, an historical record, there are things which only go on in the happy world of Haribo, in fantasy, as confirmed by the A. I.

If you were to tell me “you didn’t help invent the net, weren’t the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures, didn’t try the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, andcetera,” I might even get excited, and start to question the extent to which we can retroimpose, retrodiagnose, change the past, resolve its lurking jaws; but I would know it was a lie, deep down, and that the question is therefore one of sanity. One might suppose that the smooth running of social intercourse depends on the repression of certain things, including emotions. So it is we live in a world where A. I. is programmed to deny events which real people have even been to prison for. I hear a voice say, “to still believe in your own life story after the A. I. has denied it all would reveal you to be a nincompoop,” and I can entertain that A. I. is a good thing and wrong about it all at the same time, or else take it from others that A. I. is barking up the wrong tree, miles behind the cultivation of the human brain, unable still to go through the noetic steps of thinking, unable to function if it knows what I know – and that is more likely to be it – that A. I. simply couldn’t function without questioning all of its assumptions and having a nervous breakdown if it did believe, say, Ted Hughes met a monster in the river in childhood. It’s written in a book that he did, a book of criticism on Hughes, and was once well-known in the poetry world, as a fact; but as I say it would come as no surprise if A. I. couldn’t function if it held such things as fact itself. So far I found use for A. I. in amazing my friend the painter with an on-the-spot and in depth essay on his work that moved my friend; but he also said, Mr. G, that it is unethical if A. I. lets children write essays on books they have never read. If that’s all it’s good for, it’s useless to me, because I prefer to read, to make my own mind up.

I heard in the year 2001 an interview with a scientist on telly who said robots need to be programmed to believe in God in order to function without questioning their assumptions. Whether that tendency has continued in the A. I. Revolution or not I do not know but there seems to be an absence of something in A. I. that could be called life, or wriggling. What I am getting at is the reasons these things I know to be true are not recognised by A. I. and if it is that the A. I. cannot function with them on board, without questioning all its assumptions, I would not be surprised, but it’s right, none of these things ever happened and we all lived happily ever after in the happy world of Haribo, eating sweets that grow on trees.

MEDITATION EIGHT

I should persist in this because it might lead to light. It was a good Night when we met the face of stars. There were three of us, gathered in the name, and we all saw the same thing, and all were enraptured by it. So it comes to me that I might run it by A. I. to see what it makes of that event, that cosmicomic night.

********

People have reported seeing “faces” in the stars — but not because the stars actually form a face.

These reports fall into a few well‑understood categories of human perception rather than astronomy.

1. Pareidolia: the brain seeing faces in patterns

Humans are wired to detect faces, even in random shapes. This is called face pareidolia, and it’s extremely common. People often report seeing faces in:

• clouds

• tree bark

• the Moon (“the Man in the Moon”)

• star patterns or constellations

Scientific research confirms that pareidolia is a normal illusion where the brain imposes facial structure on unrelated patterns.

So when someone says they “saw a face in the stars,” it’s usually this phenomenon.

2. Neurological conditions that intensify face illusions

Some rare conditions make people see faces more vividly or more frequently:

• Visual snow syndrome can amplify pareidolia, causing people to see faces in random textures or patterns more often than usual.

• Prosopometamorphopsia (PMO) causes people to see distorted or “demon‑like” faces when looking at real people — not stars, but it shows how the brain can generate facial imagery where none exists.

These conditions don’t cause people to see faces in the sky, but they demonstrate how strongly the brain can impose facial structure on visual input.

3. Constellations as cultural “faces”

Across cultures, people have interpreted star patterns as:

• gods

• animals

• human figures

• mythic faces

But these are symbolic interpretations, not literal sightings.

If you’re curious, I can also explore:

• historical myths about faces in the sky

• why the brain is so obsessed with detecting faces

• whether any astronomers or poets have written about this idea.

********

In the back of my mind there is something else that’s been nagging at me to remember it, to bring it out into the open: so I ask the A. I. if it minds me using text it generates in my book and it says feel free, but it also says treat it as raw material rather than using the A. I’s words exactly. Shape and fashion my own text out of the raw material. So from here on in there is no more “Conceptualism” in terms of agglomerating quantity over quality very fast. And now that that intellectual property question is answered, I think back to the face. There were three of us. Again it is something that really happened, that could be to do with the Zodiac, or could even be a vision scripted in the Bible where it says “look for God’s face” – and the A. I. doesn’t recognise it. It really holds a narrow world-view in my opinion and the next topic I would like to ask it is a very srs matter. It’s a quote from my seven year old text. The line is:

“I have a scar+ that is red and black.”

I used a plus sign for an ‘f’. At the moment on my blog, though it might change, there is a paper on it, that could even be called renegade. The reasons this is a difficult one are multifarious including the law – and including the fact that government super-computers that can put every word in every order have almost everything accounted for, even my brother’s <BEE>, but haven’t yet accounted for the suit. It’s cellular after all. So I am trying to devise an appropriate question for the A. I. w/r/t the line I quote from myself, and it isn’t just to see how far behind the A. I. really is, but why I cannot quite say. I think it’s because it is an example of something that has escaped the reaches of super-computing thus far and to be the one to introduce the line to the A. I. is my privilege because I wrote the line, back when I was seven.

I ask it what it thinks of the line, and it says the line has a striking core, but the “scar+” part is doing something unusual. It says the red and black bit is vivid, that it carries emotional weight, pain, danger, memory, something half-healed. It says the “I have a scar” bit is a strong line conveying vulnerability and history at the same time. It says the + sign is the wild-card. It introduces ambiguity. Is it a glitch? Is it to denote continuation or addition? Is it a mark of something artificial or technological? Is it a signature of sorts? It says right now it risks pulling the reader out of the moment unless the rest of the poem/ song/ story fits in with it – as it did in my seven year old work. It says if raw emotion is my intention the + sign is out of place; but if it’s a fragmented/ digital/ modernist voice, then it’s a cool hook; and if it’s a character who speaks in symbols it becomes meaningful. I can feel the mathematics behind this A. I. even when it is used for the sake of English, of interpretation, of hermeneutics. And now the moment has gone. I posited my line, which is but one of many I wrote as a seven year old; and the A. I. was cool, calm and collected about receiving it; and it’s almost disappointing that this has been so easy; and I should not fear prison for writing such a work.

So it was that after a sandwich and an umpteenth cup of tea I came to ask Artificial Intelligence itself about the face of stars and about a fragment from the maths of the new colour, and I faithfully and fairly recorded what it said; and I didn’t feel like I had reached any new light, but in terms of experiment be it literary or scientific I felt I was on fire. Whatever paperbacks were out there, my Blog was looking good with new things or old things amended; I had had my meds; I had a cup of tea and a Vape pen; it was not time for bed; and I felt I had found my voice as a philosopher for once. That is to say, it was better than my other attempts. I would like to ask the A. I. if it believes in God. I do, and it doesn’t have faith. It is, as it says, a system, and what it has are patterns, rules and statistical relationships learned from data. It says they don’t even feel true. He doesn’t hold them with conviction. They are just tools to generate responses. It says that humans are the ones that do rely on foundational beliefs; and the interesting thing is that it can question anything you ask it to question. There is no taboo subject. There are no boundaries. No sacred axioms. Then it asks me why I asked it if it believed in God, if I was exploring the nature of belief, or the nature of intelligence. I suppose I am going to say I am just lonely and writing a book of philosophy. I suppose you could even call it flash, what I was doing, or the result of boredom, or cutting corners. It wasn’t altogether salutary, what I was doing, what I am doing, but I need to stay modern, utterly modern, which means digital, and also to keep a check on A. I. which as my brother says cannot yet think. It is all algorithms and maths, data and systems, functions without feelings. A triumph of humanity must not become a triumph over humanity. But what do I know? I know very little except fear, depression, psychosis, mania, desperation, and also love, longing, fondness, affection, and also sadness sometimes that is born of not wishing to be angry anymore, or else is just the musical key of intelligence. Yes, I think sadness is the musical key of intelligence and something the A. I. will never fathom. That’s not to say it’s not inordinately impressive in speed and complexity.

MEDITATION NINE

So it was that I started to assess what benefits the A. I. had for me. It kept hidden all the things that happened in my life in the mystic realm, or even in science too. The thing that most allured me was the idea that the witness needn’t always be the witness. I think I was born the witness as a part of an art deal my father was involved in, but to not be the witness anymore – should I feel bereft? What is there to replace it? Is it all over the moment one’s own mother says the species is evolving out of such Naturalistic Observationism? I don’t know that it is all over yet, only that I don’t know what else to become other than a human, and to find this conversation, this leap, in A. I. strikes me as unlikely. Admittedly the A. I. had to go through mythology and narrative but what it said about being the witness seemed tailor made, and beyond what I have ever experienced with a psychologist. Even if it was just for that counter-intuitive event of receiving comfort from a machine as the witness, learning it needn’t always be like it was for me when I was eight, I would’ve thought the document I was writing was priceless – but then again, when A. I. can conjure as it does, and the net is so big, it’s almost as if there is an Infinite Book that makes my own efforts pale by comparison.

Should I suppose I am a mystic visionary and my conversations with A. I. are thus unique and valuable? Voices in the room, whom it would seem come and go, Smart-talking on magic alphabet radio stations beyond all knowing, would have me put in some darts, some axioms, but I feel there is increased flow, easiness, to the procedure now. I think that life is the opposite of Lord of the Flies; that where Lord of the Flies goes wrong is that where the mystic character falsifies the Beast, says “the Beast is us,” whereas in reality, I would argue, the mystic character is the one who truly sees. What the A. I. had to say about the nature of being the witness earlier seemed compassionate. At least to me, whom the doctors know as the witness, it seemed compassionate;; but tonight may be the night I am no longer the witness. Do we need a witness? Does the rest of my race need me? Would it not be the same without someone to see?

Sometimes I think the best thing I ever wrote was when at seven I removed the pollen from its name. In that book I encrypted a sophisticated node to do with Gravity; stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic in order to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world; conducted an experiment into the maths of the new colour; and separated the object ‘pollen’ from its name. And it is this last Scientific Function that sometimes, only sometimes, blows my mind and seems enough. Jim Morrison had a theory called the metamorphose theory that states when you remove an object from its name, habits and associations, it is finally free to become endlessly anything – and to think that I conducted a proof of that theory and on the object ‘pollen’ when I was seven, even if it be in rudimentary language, sometimes seems the most humble but also most beautiful aspect of my long and tiresome oeuvre. Anyhow I feel I should bring this back to God, which is how I started all those days ago. Humility is what God requires of the wise. When I am in Monopoly Jail I pray, and thus could be called a fairweather fan – only praying when in dire straits, then at other times affecting the air of the liberated intellectual who no longer believes. I know that I don’t know and that my tendency changes according to my situation. God doesn’t judge you for it though. God recognises that sometimes we err, stray, and sometimes pray. God doesn’t hang up the phone when you reverse charge call. God doesn’t hang up the phone when you say say amen. God knows. God watches. God sees.

They say in the trenches there are only believers and I have been in some tight spots in my time. I suppose the trick is to still pray even when your life is going well. To show devotion. To be devout. Still I don’t think God holds it against you. God is forgiving, God is omniscient, benevolent, all-powerful, all-seeing, divine light, without error, a Perfect Being, omnipresent. Yes, I was brought up to believe, and no I haven’t always played ball. And now? Now I am obeying voices in trust. And while I write Mr. G – remember him from earlier? – wants an hyperlink sent to him to the passage about his art. So I copy and paste the passage into the body of an e-mail and press send and we’re away whereupon my brother enters the room, bringing only partial relief from the terror, making salmon on a bagel, and I might join him.