TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY

[available as paperback and e-book from Chipmunka]

TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY

BY JOHANNES BERGFORS

In dedication to the memory of my father.

PREFACE

They say the only Reason I haven’t written a timeless classic is that I keep flitting from file to file, capriciously, changing my mind; and I don’t get out of bed on the soporific medication. The early bird catches the worm. This morning I am out of bed early. Birds are smuggling supercars to an Iranian overlord through Persia and over the mnts. Listen - tin is their usual merchandise. The weather is clement, the day a good one, but I am not trying to sell it to you. Even the air seems to be peopled by guests.

Last night I dreamed it was Roald Dahl VS the evil empire and I was on Roald Dahl’s side. He lived in a cabin with very little there, or maybe it was a bookshop; and when we saw the war waged against us outside I had complete faith in Dahl winning. I woke to some actually quite loud and close-up voices, telling me why my writing was failing. Things can be slow going when there is no choice but to hear voices, especially when they speak in muffled, associative word-chords. The ones this morning though sounded on the same side as me. They sounded and sound still like they could be a fanbase. One of them says I might do well to explain why I have a fanbase; and I don’t know is the honest answer; and then another says not to tell you everything about my life already.

In my dream Roald Dahl was using books against the evil empire. It was working. I think I was there as a child who wanted to be a writer like him and was “purchasing ideas” or even giving him ideas to write about but am not entirely sure of that. In other words we looked at books and only had to look at books in order to keep the evil empire at bay. They were outside the cabin in the sea with their aircraft carriers and bombs. All we needed to do was turn away to the world of books and we were guaranteed victory.

********

TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY

1. Everything is slow progress in writing a work of philosophy, breeding doubt enough to penetrate a subject matter, mixing micro-analysis and flair no longer necessarily, stirring one’s tea in the meantime both clockwise and then the reverse. It makes it more efficacious to change the spoon’s rotational direction, because of the purchase and the traction, because of the friction of the spoon against the liquid. It makes the tea-bag stain the hot water quicker when the rotation of the stirring action is inverted; and it’s not just the speed at which the tea gets made but also that the strength and full-bodied flavour of the tea is greater when the stirring action changes.

2. No, you cannot teach another to think. You should aim to be like Dedalus from Ulysses – “a horrible example of free thinking.” Such was my father’s stance to God-botherers: “I’ve got a degree in Philosophy from London University and I don’t need you to teach me how to think.” Indeed, to change another’s religious beliefs makes you a proselytiser; and to change another’s political beliefs a propagandist. It is only in art and aesthetics where it is laudable to change another’s view, and even then it’s more about de-familiarisation of perception, or ostranenie as the Russian Formalists called it. Here I would cite neuro-science which says if it fires it wires meaning the brain creates new synaptic branches when you read a startling image.

3. When I first read the line “I look forward to the future with rapt uncertainty - and I can’t stand the suspense,” for some unknown reason it chimed like bells, reverberating up in the fells and struck a warm, psychic chord. I even conjured lines to rhyme with it before I knew what it meant like:

[John is dancing with aliens in collective ecstasy].

4. The following proposition is not the philosophy of mathematics:

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

But there is an intended meaning behind the words that puts it in a similar area. In fact that is what I mean by “the proposition” itself.

5. There is a difference between philosophy and sophistry which could lie in the tone of mind and mode of address. I think of the idea that the former has grown analytic in style and approach which means it may possess a sterility of discourse whereas the latter could be “but fanciful speech.” Magniloquence is to be guarded against; but to make language seem more alive is a good, kinetic thing. Wittgenstein says philosophy is a process of elucidation not a dogmatic set of rules to live by. All too often I get it wrong. Philosophy for me (from Greek etymology meaning “love of wisdom”) is also an ontological mode, that is characterised to my meagre mind by pacifism, love of quietude and reflection… at some point, things need to be written down and that is when an ontology becomes an epistemology as Sartre put it.

6. I. Space is likely to be emptied of the human form one day, according to science: whether the sun will expire or the earth’s course take it into the sun we are not all agreed – but there are other causal factors too (potentially). Still this is not the end of the world, or rather if it is the end of the world it isn’t the end of love poems for Flora. If the pretext is that “if a flower-press ending on cannabis = a

dialysis a love poem hoping to impress poor Flora = a motor” then that will surely live on in the elemental realm in terms of the dialysis even after space is emptied of the human form. There will still be, say, a romance of stones, a chemical love affair, the orgasm of a galaxy of stars exploding into being, waves that make gentle love to the shore and all those alchemical things. Water is clear unlike my vision of the future, but I can say I believe space will be emptied of the human form in the end and resigning ourselves to this must be part of attaining Nirvana. I don’t mean to be evil, but find great solace in the idea that Flora’s pretext will still, still be unfinished, even when space is emptied of the human form. The idea is that we never get to see the end of Flora’s pretext. Even upon that black flake of infinity, that abstract painting hung on God’s wall, the pretext will still be extant to the extent of there being matter. This is why I say we should not fear, should not fear the end of our lives and arts either, because they will carry on of their own accord, even as the universe expands and contracts. It is why when I first formulated the notion that “if a flower-press ending on cannabis = a dialysis a love poem only hoping to impress her = a motor” I thought I had lucked in – only to find that she had already been with my younger brother! Well, there is no sense in begrudging your own brother something you’d want for yourself. There is no sense in coming out and being gay “for a logical reason” just because your brother gets all the girls. There may be sense in leaving the topic alone, but then mother comes in the kitchen chopping vegetables for her soup! She was the one that made the flower-press and it was more about leaves! Is there no state of matter (organic) that is exempt from punishment? I think there is not – I think it all grist for the mill – all part and parcel of her florid pretext. The flower-press ending on cannabis itself extends beyond the end of the world; so why not the love poem hoping to impress Flora too? If not our love is invested in and stored in the logic of things, of matter, of the elemental realm which will one day again reign supreme even when there are no more mouths to utter “Oh!” I suppose she would’ve been a transcendent signifier like Daisy unto Gatsby, a blind, metaphysical objective, an evergreen light; and the same thing is even going strong while I drink tea! I look at the dawn to my left. The mixture of clouds and sunlight seems like robes draped in a still sky, like silkyfolded cloths – and the luminescence reminds me of her. I found this on mad pilgrimages in the night-time - like John Clare – setting off in the middle of the night with a backpack to try and walk 300 miles in her general direction without even contacting her – by dawn I would be so shattered I’d stop in a lay-by and make a fire using all my poetry as fire paper – and just stare at the pink in the dawn and think of her. My philosophy was ragged and Naturalistic as when Rimbaud lay down outside in the Green Inn and let roads go through his head. My hair was cumulo-nimbus; my powers-that-be were clouds floating by on their sky-blue roads, wearing ripped genes adorned with peace, love and anarchy signs, wearing also DM’s on their protest march high up above. As for finding my true philosophy it is essentially that there never be violence here again. I feel a shudder of evil, tainted with regret that is hard to absolve, and take the stance of Dedalus in Ulysses, when I even think of violence done unto someone I love. I’d wade into ten foot flames to save someone I love. I’d do it for my bro even though he’s been with the Flo’. I’d do it for her too. She likes the Italian way and thinks they should’ve kissed, those two bodies, standing in a boarding school corridor, hugging. So it is that we are all flying into the filament of bird, and a pot of pot costs a pot of tea.

*I’m the best*

6. II. We can only hope the universe is not in a hearse; that the universe-hearse is not in your soul-hole; that the universe-hearse is not in your soul-hole whole. Nabokov asks the question as to whether or not the universe is a corpse and whether or not, if it is, it is at least a luminous corpse. One would hope that with love in it, it is a luminous corpse, if a corpse it must be.

7. As if even Natural things are given over once again to a Barthesian world of product placement, it might be instructive to consider the healing of my busted, dusty Hooverbag lungs… once I was away with the Fairy Liquid. I became interested in the switch thrown. There were new maps sprawled on the point of a pin. I hungered after The Snowbell Prize. My brief fling with the politics of flight kept me up all through the Ancient Night. Another high-powered dawn was born but what was the WATTAGE? Well, I felt a leaf, I fell out of life, probably no-one else knew, but then there may be some. I wallowed in my lazy swamp, languishing, lizarding, long. Interstellar Artois was the effect of fat, planetary raindrops beating down on sad, Lucozade lights, lying lambent on the paving stones. DogMuckels was not what it seemed. Quantity Streets were typical of consumer culture. By now, the National Hypochondriac Service have sorted me out. My mood is made stable on a sterilised table. Fakeazade does not come free from the kitchen Tap as yet, but we are working on it. Erase the Dettol. There’s no such thing as cinnamon, but then again that is not strictly true. Well-weird this ward: words woke it: walls broke it: Weirds walk it: or they should, break it open to the light of day, straight away. There’s little to do except listen to the snap, crackle and pop of the cereal, cereal in the morning after a dark night of the soul in winter.

8. I’m really disappointed by my own CV. I know, it’s almost got everything in – in terms of the main moves I made in life and art – but I rather think it would amount to more if I said less. If I just said at seven I helped invent the net; at eight became the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures twice; at eleven was marked on the hand by an experiment into the maths of the new colour; at fifteen attained the face of stars; at eighteen spoke against September 11th in 2000 and got 100% in an A-level exam – well, it may be more punchy, concise, terse - and then you’d know who I was, like I would too, which makes me drunk with vertigo and bored rigid as well; but at least I would know before I start to set out on an Homeric quest: working out what one’s philosophy is.

9. I mentioned already the idea that here in this particular spatio-temporal context:

The powers-that-be could be clouds

floating by on their sky-blue roads.

Here in this idyllic and bucolic semi-wilderness, the beck is also a fountain pen. Mood is a bracken frond drooping down. Up the rear side of Black Combe once I went and met a rare red kite that just waited for me on the fence, open to inspection, and it seemed like a messenger, saturnine and broody, in its neighbouring otherworld. It wasn’t until I decided to leave the encounter to continue my walk that it decided it too would fly away. I didn’t know what the bird was at the time, but knew it wasn’t a buzzard. It wasn’t until I’d been all the way up the fell and all the way down and home and came to the books on the shelves that I could test the image I had stored in my mind against the pictures of birds in the books and know it was a rare red kite. For some reason the encounter was cloaked in the aura of special perception almost as if the thing were an extension of my eye, a reward or a visitation.

10. There’s nowt so dead as an important thing – poetry thus finds its resources in discrepancies, contingencies, inklings, nuances, subtleties – and to factor in, say, helping with the invention of the net at 7, The Lords And The New Creatures coming true or not, the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, the face of stars, the prophesy of September 11th, The Plough alignment, the sheet where pictures grew, and so on, into verse just doesn’t seem logistically possible.

11. If I ask myself “when you were younger what did you want to be when you grew up?” I can’t say for certain but one version was the new Roald Dahl, another an English teacher, another a sports journalist, but a man of words whatever the case. I think the level on which the answer is “philosopher” is the logical level of thinking. There never was any logic in being a musician. If there was in being a poet, well, I think as a poet I arraigned and inveighed against logic and science as a tyranny. Now that I am turning to philosophy I think that the desire lies on the logical level of thinking. It is logical when faced with my options to conclude philosopher, even if I am a neophyte. The level of your thinking on which you find the desire to be a philosopher is logic itself. It is not therefore a Romantic quest; and the most logical thing to do is therefore read philosophy, even if you never studied it, or pursued it before.

12. Wittgenstein’s a good philosopher – it’s like he is locating a part of your body you have never noticed before – when he locates the function of logic. Even if it is deep-lying he brings it down from the higher echelons of thinking and dusts it down and researches it. He says logic is tautological which isn’t quite the same as pleonastic but almost.

13. Take the example of my crude, spontaneous, teenage mnemonic for the guitar strings. Even a dick gets big erections. If the mnemonic is not disclosed when the audience take a liking to the interesting style of guitar, I would say there is an underlying logic to the fact that the guitarist is an interesting guitarist. This is more so than had the mnemonic been, say, Every acid dealer gets busted eventually.

14. I. Permutation games can be a rehearsal for death. Not sine wave with minus sign coursing through. Tony Eade, the gay maths teacher, stood with his arms in a T and spoke in a strange tone. Intention – what is my intention? I should declare an intended efficacy of healing the soul of the world! In this world we are all equals. Life could be a mid-death crisis or a dull throb of loneliness in your breast, not just a colourful spew going on outside the cave walls of the skull. At seven helping invent the net was just something I had to do – when someone needed to store the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to bloom all round the world [please see The Sunset Child]. As I have stated already, at eight I was also made to be the witness from Jim Morrison’s book twice; at eleven was marked albeit only slightly on the hand by an experiment into the maths of the new colour, although it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end; at fifteen attained the face of stars which I think was scripted in the Bible for we were three gathered in the name; at eighteen forewarned of September 11th and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%.

14. II. Later after they invented the TV show Big Brother, I went on to do much more including: record an album on binaural earphones; host the Plough alignment; get a First; build the Tower; work at a numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen; conduct an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where stuck together in the flimsy reel; and most importantly discover the sheet where pictures grew. The latter belongs to my younger brother because he designed it even if the pictures, as they do, seem to depict the lyric to some old rock song I wrote when I was 15. At least, even if there was no reward for anything I ever did, I know how radically the co-ordinates of the possible can be re-calibrated.

15. Alas it is not all mine own intellectual property, the title McTruth And Flies, otherwise I would’ve used it by now as the title of a book of philosophy about the convergence of the postmodern and mystical. I would say that isomorphic in their imputation of speciousness, there is ironic equipoise held in their seemly collocation.

16. I have said it before but it could be instructive to consider again that the yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park could be the postmodern church-spire in the spiritual vacuum, postmodernism theme dissolved into message. I have said it before but semantics is a road sign not a place. I have said it before but the effects of acid and of acid rain on an imaginary species should = the same, nothing but then again there can be no more proof of something being real than saying it was imagined so the effect of global warming on the unicorn should still be a postmodern “id” in that Freudian sense of the word.

17. Postmodern McTheory states that the McDevices of postmodernism were not McNew in themselves but newly McGlobal in the way they sprang up overnight everywhere. One of the many McDefinitions I could mention is that the meta-narratives have dissolved and the micro-narratives taken over.

18. I. Speaking of narratives: I have something else to say. Well, talk about super-imposing a one-size-fits-all, top-down morality system: I can remember buying my brother’s baby boy a jigsaw as primitive as a cave painting. So they say in mental illness not to become too seduced by linear myths of teleology. They say history is a way of thinking about history without thinking about history. They say we see what we want, isolate moments to form a narrative, cherry-pick data. They say desire’s shadow falls across the page. To me these statements about memory, morality, history, narrative, science and there may be other examples too – all situate themselves on the same level of analysis and conform to one trend.

18. II. We isolate moments of history to form a narrative when really back then in history “Everything” happened.

18. III. Isness is the centre of Everything.

18. IV. Isness is the quiddity and suchness of existence.

18. V. There is indeterminacy at the core of all things. Uncertainty prevails. Waiting in darkness is nourishing for the soul. Ending in darkness is ending on a note of radical incertitude. The beauty of uncertainties could be the only Absolute.

19. Unlike one character says in the movie Waking Life (which I heard described as a philosophical essay), we are not vacant pedestrians with screensaver faces and answer phone manners walking around in somnambulist trances, rich antennae drooping to the ground, watching where we tread for dog-muck and glass – dead pedestrians thinking fumes, besuited slaves with briefcase blues – while the sensuous mode of being is gone under Gondwanaland.

20. Sensus praecedit cogitationem. If that isn’t my philosophy in a nutshell, it must be something else. Its origin is my Art History A-level essay on Andy Warhol, the pop artist, in which I copied the textbook verbatim all except for inserting the words “sensation precedes thought.” I got the highest marks in the class, possibly because my essay was demonstrative and made Warhol’s method of presenting readymade and mass-produced copies self-evident.

21. Yet what could be more traditionally empirical than our formulation which seems to echo Locke’s distinction between ideas arrived at through sensory-data and ideas arrived at through reflection? The formulation even seems to unite Locke’s division into a flowing sequence of cause and effect; and you could even argue that the formulation arrives at the condition of thought like the ultimate condition of existence.

22. Berkeley would say the sensation is preceded by a cause and the cause by a will, which is spiritual, i.e. the will of God. In the other direction thought is refined into feeling which lands us back with Romanticism. So the demarcation that is made in the formulation “sensation precedes thought” has something about it that is elliptical, and something contradictory too, even tautological, for it is tracing back the origins of sensation, in a temporal sense, that we find the idea of God, which is of course a thought.

23. Sensation can precede thought without thinking becoming dogmatic.

24. As soon as you take the discussion to the realm of nerve, it becomes a matter of science. As stated philosophy has been called “an analytic branch of science” [Quine]. It could also be pasta. It could also be an abstract prison.

25. If sensation precedes thought, that could be the motto of the LSE’s P. P. E. Department – but as they may ask you in turn, “what happens when you write it down?” One might suppose it depends on your treatment of it, in terms of whether the ossification of something liberal makes it something restrictive.

26. Colour could be called a sensation. Colour as Neil Curry the poet says could also be called “a spectacular event.” Philosophers according to Maggie Nelson in Bluets often turn to the subject of colour as they approach death. Yellow is a colour that could be called a sensation; and is a colour Van Gogh privileged because it reminded him of happiness. The word “yellow” is not literally yellow but indication to think of yellowness. In this sense words are lies.

27. Perhaps the truest understanding of the configuration sensus praecedit cogitationem is not from the authorial perspective but from that of the audience, who perceives the art. More than being something you apply as a philosophy to the making of a painting, or just as a philosophy to live by, for it seems to be a default, passive, unconscious fact – more than these you have the ideal of art giving pleasure as received by the audience. He or she looks at a Turner seascape and gains pleasure from the moodiness, the way the effect of perceiving reality is conveyed. The sensation in question is not the artist’s sensation but that of the audience reflecting upon and enjoying observing the specimen of art before them. And yes it does otherwise understood as a philosophical belief seem a default position that would normally go without saying.

28. What is becoming clear is that we must each have a logically worked-out system of priorities by which we live somewhere, inside ourselves. If sensus praecedit cogitationem is part of that, I wouldn’t be surprised. It could also be part of a self-erecting aesthetic system that forms of its own accord.

29. The most obvious thing has thus far been left out. A child could see it. A well-informed child. The formulation asks of whether the sensation of, say, a pin-prick in the fingerpad begins in the skin or in the brain; and the child should be able to see the affected area of skin sends a chemical message to the brain, which is what elicits the sensation, telling you what to feel. In a sense then, sensation begins in the brain. In a sense then we need at some point to run through the idea that sensation does not precede thought. Then we will have applied Cartesian doubt or else Popperian falsifiability to the fragrant proposition.

30. I might as well just say “one star leads to another star.” Such was the spontaneous poetry of my New Beat youth, where I called out lines, impromptu, ad-libbed over the bongo drummers around the fire at Glastonbury stone circle at night fall. When you look up and count, one star indeed seems to lead to another star. A sensuous web is woven that conceals the earth like a warm placenta and the Ancient Night proves altruism possible.

31. Words, words, words. What are words? These are words. Words in this epistemology I would say are useful tools associated with the instinct to survive. Man is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across metaphysics and words make connections between first and third persons. Words are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in order to make life easier. Words are, well, ONLY words.

32. I hear that foreigners don’t think the English language a poetic language, in terms of its musicality, in terms of being atonal. “MAYFLY” I say the word ‘mayfly,’ phonetically,

sounding out its every vowel-sound alphabetically.

33. I. The word ‘Entropy’ spelled backwards, i.e. y.p.o.r.t.n.e could frame the first, unformulated spark of appetence in Nothingness preceding Creation, or else there is nothing for the term to name in which case that might be Tucker’s constant. Neil Curry says “if two people can agree on the meaning of a new word, it becomes a real word.” But I never found anyone to agree with me on the matter of ‘entropy’ backwards!

33. II. If the bond between a mother and her child

is unconditional, she might remember

the Night when it was 6. 58

and 37 seconds so we all ran

as fast as we could towards the sofa.

34. Even though I think “sensation precedes thought,” the word “noetic” meaning “of the mind” is my new favourite word because its suffix ‘ic’ reminds of Icarus who flew too near the sun. There are of course many other words with the same suffix, like demiurgic, caustic, Homeric, atavistic, telluric, and I also like these but for some reason “noetic” is my favourite one.

35. I. Music, Sex And Ikea are the elements of miracle unto my mother. She likes to get food from

Karl Marx and Spencer, for whom it would seem Monopoly money will get us bread.

35. II. A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand. Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema. Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet. Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts. The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation. Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation. The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man. The opposite of something is the pre-requisite. The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution. The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph. When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy. When you lose your concentration you die. Your ordinary speech is surreal enough. There are too many words in the world. Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan. The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous. You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love. All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun. Without difference no contradistinction. Everyone is my brother and I love them. The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance. There is no more mapless space. Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self. Philosophy is a self-contained language corresponding to nothing real in life. Existentialism is a child at the pick and mix with a credit card. Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit. It is better to have a cup of tea than it is to kill yourself. Portability is the new apotheosis of Form. I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too. All things must be returned to earth, surrendered like a rented thing to death.

36. When my first, second-hand copy of Keats’s Letters fell open on the page about Negative Capability I loved it, and have been trying to expand my threshold of Negative Capability ever since. I think a large part Shakespeare’s genius is dissimulating the semblance of inevitability, which could also be called sustaining a narrative within a fixed rhyme scheme. Before Shakespeare, tragedy meant the collusion of outward forces, but Shakespeare changed tragedy to become the collusion of inward forces, which altered the course of Man, made him more self-investigatory, developing a new level of introspection.

37. The idea of ‘the given’ splits two ways into opposite meanings, one being the language at first hand, the other being the institution from whom sensation’s quest must escape…. so that word ‘the given’ is much like Freud said of heimlich and unheimlich meaning the same as explored in his book The Uncanny. My gf used the “given” to mean writing off the top of her head like Kerouack prescribed direct from “The Brain Jewel Centre;” for her given-ness was the opposite of craft; and I used it in the sense Jim Morrison meant it when he said “we are too content to accept the given in sensation’s quest” – so she used it to mean something characterised by freedom and I the opposite though it is the same word!

38. After garage and house comes library. Voices could be the colours of the vowels and make you increase your threshold for Negative Capability. Writing a letter Dear Music could be instructive in mental health in the future. H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart. You shouldn’t put Paradise Lost to music unless it is going to be amazing so it is an aesthetic not moral question.

39. I heard it said, or rather read, that we grew our great brains by eating meat, and needing to spread information about farming, hunting, killing and eating meat, developed language… still, Darwinian science, Natural biology, is not the business of philosophy; but I will just say my stance on Jim Morrison is to avoid incurring the problem of something “kinetic” becoming something “static.” It’s like John Barnes’s sensational goal against Brazil. Watching the action replay we cannot give the uncertainty back to the moment. We know the ball is going in. Something kinetic becomes something static. Sometimes I still discuss the proposition that “Barnes has scored a chicken,” with tremendous philosophical skill in my mind, including adding uncertainty, including negation of the proposition, and as if it were a proper philosophical notion; but now I have read Wittgenstein I know natural sciences – if you can call it that – not the business of philosophy. Still, the conversation rolls on in the mind. Even after a graceful and ecstatic “transition to music” is made, from the topic, like a flight or migration, the conversation seems to still want to continue. I imagine if it were being recorded for Infinity and beyond even though it goes on in my private, internal and subjective thoughts, and remark at how neat, ordered, logical and rational the discussion can get.

40. Science says to keep nothing except the falsification of the Nirvana barcode and my brother’s notion about <BEE>. The former refers to that occasion when I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard:

|| | |||| | || | ||||                909 & 693 are wings

41. The latter refers to my brother James’s new da Vinci circle. James designed the new da Vinci circle as a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 points of difference, namely

@

<BEE>                    [long squiggle]

Infinity Symbol

which not only suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet but by including a long squiggle might even simultaneously situate itself outside of the totalitarian machination of every word, book, sentence, paragraph, letter in every order.

42. James also had a second sheet to the <BEE> one that contained Badly Drawn Boy lyrics slightly imperfectly quoted and rendered as a word-sunflower, a sunflower made of words –

sunshine inside of you

old sun warm sun

spreads over you

soliel all over you…

and I turned up to the barn where they were both left to rot; and I read them; and on the second document (the <BEE> one) saw a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes! There was no new da Vinci circle other than what I was inside in my being! I assumed the tabular arrangement of signs in boxes – which seemed like the international language alphabet laid bare – to be permanently available to sensory perception, and left it alone.

A further visit to the barn proved that it had gone – on that particular sheet, only the <BEE> diagram remained.

Then when our father passed, a further visit to the den in the barn was when I discovered the Badly Drawn Boy sheet had bloomed or grown pictures – pictures that seem to depict the lyric to one of my old songs! This came at the end of a long chain of events that increased in numinosity according to the number of items in the series.

43. James says to design the sheet where pictures grew took a deft left hand born of another deft left hand (meaning my mum) and I can believe it. I believe my dad knew before he died that someone would discover the sheet; believe that even if the pictures depict the lyric to one of my songs the sheet still belongs to James; and have been grappling for a long time with trying to work out the value of c over G. That means an equation for the ratio between light speed [c] falling and Gravity [G] pulling down on a single sheet of paper. I haven’t arrived at that yet but deem it that it was the maths that James already did that propitiated those pictures and any further equation to do with “c over G” could be quite useless now.

44. I. I see I have shown the two things in the wrong order, anyhow. The new da Vinci circle should lead to the attainment of Nirvana. That’s just the way things go, the order of events. If I present them in that order hopefully it will make sense, work that way round in life, present a direct and logical bond between life and writing, present writing as technology. So instead of going all the way back to the start of the chapter and rewriting it, I shall just auto-correct it now:

@

<BEE>                                 long squiggle

Infinity Symbol

|| | |||| | || | ||||                   909 & 693 are wings

Then you get that I don’t really want to redo the poem with the Nirvana barcode in it. Then you get that 909 & 693 are the wings of <BEE> and he can even get in your dreams. What I mean is, the configuration that I came up with goes with <BEE> in a pictorial sense, seems to augment James’s diagram, though was never intended to be like that: it was intended to show the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures dealing with it, getting over it, coming up with something that even templates over it; but now we can bastardise it, or my brother can, as if he came up with it too!

44. II. A thesis as thin as the Rizla it is in, as saith one of my songs, can lead all the way to the loony bin. Not only this but a woman can go veggie for reasons of Disney; and a trance of stalks walks on stilts like a stance on talks only to the toilet then back to bed to rest its head under a soft, Pink Panther blanket. So you see that Flora is the limit, in James’s system.

45. It was when Russell said philosophy began with Thales making a successful prophecy that I thought it could be for me, who has made successful prophecies, particularly in the year 2000. Not only that but my prophesy of the God Particle hunt in 2000 from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in had antecedents in Democritus. I also enjoyed reading that commerce began in Crete, because my mother made my father a flower-press ending on a comic strip anti hero out of clippings from their Honeymoon in Crete which proves Cretan Literature not dead.

46. I took notes on the philosophers as I read Russell. I don’t actually like the sound of Nietzsche that much. Apparently, Nietzsche talks of the “noble” man worth saving over the whole of the herd-crowd. Performing tasks for the poetry world as I do for nothing, I feel I am the antithesis of Nietzsche’s “artist-tyrant.” I have no time for him – how intolerant he is of sympathy for the weak – how he believes great suffering should be endured by the herd-crowd if it saves one great man – how big into war he is. I much prefer the idea of Spinoza, who when cursed still proffered that if there is a choice to be made between endorsing further pain or endorsing healing, compassion, forgiveness and mercy, it should always be the latter. One thing I don’t like about the idea of Nietzsche is that he doesn’t think men should be equal. I think the James P D Tucker sheet where pictures grew quite conceivably actually enshrines equality in that the pictures are people, as we are people, levelled by the sheet. Of course it being in pictorial form without words makes it more international too. As my philosopher father would say “the image is the most international currency.”

47. Bertrand Russell on Francis Bacon is a fascinating chapter. “Bacon’s inductive method is faulty through insufficient emphasis on hypothesis. He hoped that mere orderly arrangement of data would make the right hypothesis obvious, but this is seldom the case,” he writes. He continues “as a rule, the framing of hypothesis is the most difficult part of scientific work, and the part where great ability is indispensable. So far, no method has been found which would make it possible to invent hypotheses by rule. Usually, some hypothesis is a necessary preliminary to the collection of facts, since the selection of facts demands some way of determining relevance. Without something of this kind, the mere multiplicity of facts is baffling.” Usually you start with an hypothesis, then go through a long deductive process, which is mathematical, and arrive at a consequence that can be tested by observation.

48. I. I remain unclear what my own hypothesis is. Yes I used to say “sensation precedes thought.” I also developed the idea that philosophy and poetry differ on the matters of truth. I read in Lawrence Durrell that “truth is what most contradicts itself in time.” I also heard it said that “truth is a quality of perception” in David Morley. Nietzsche would say truth is “a mobile army of metaphor, metonym, anthropomorphism” andcetera. I think now of my ex gf who had one (a poem) about how there is no such thing as immutable truth. Even the fell on a long enough timeline is mutable as Norman Nicholson said, and the same is true in matters of truth unto some. Truth can be welded, shaped, dressed up, adorned, manipulated, pressed, persuaded. Yet there is in philosophy a notion of truth as timeless, static, final and eternal. I myself believe in timeless ideas transmitted across time.

48. II. I mention timeless, universal truths but post-structuralism refutes these, embracing a more fluid and context-dependent understanding of knowledge, challenging objectivity, systems, structures, binary-oppositions, claiming structures are socially constructed not fixed, focussing on difference and ambiguity in meaning-making, rejecting essentialist conceptions of identity, arguing there is no reality beyond language and that all aspects of experience are textual.

48. III. Indeed the lesson of post-structuralism could be two-fold meaning a) the condition of being a text can extend to any object, any quotidian ephemera b) the condition of being a language unto itself can extend to any text. Phew! What a cluttered up mouthful! I am spitting teeth!

49. The best bit in a recent draft of a philosophy book was when I was structuring chapters on the alphabet; and I got to one chapter called ‘Watch;’ and I was noting the time a lot over a long stretch of time and writing of it; and I opened History of Western Philosophy to read of Hume on cause and effect; and just when my own chapter was ending, and I was thinking of what the next chapter could be, ‘x’ being a difficult thing to think of, I reached a page in History of Western Philosophy where there was a calm, mild ‘x’ printed on the bottom of the page without any explanation as to why or what it meant. This is in a book published in 1961 – where by now I was reading and writing in 2024! Whether this point of intersection was an accident or a miracle I could not say; and it deepened my idea of Fate somewhat, for I would say it was not “by chance” that I happened upon that ‘x’ on that page when I did, when trying to think of what came after the chapter for “Watch” in my own book. Here at the house where the stars re-align, you could say that ‘x marks the spot’ in that piratical way associated with the treasure map.

50. Also in Russell, I liked to read of Marx – of dialectical materialism – of how sensation was passive until Marx came along – of how history was no longer governed by something spiritual but something physical in its broad sweep, its plan. I am only reminded whilst reading this piece of philosophy of the idea that the great writers wrote the way they did because of the technology they used to write with: that James Joyce for example developed his particular style because of the type-writer. I am reminded of this by Marx saying what is most important in history, its driving force, is Man’s relation to matter, the most important part of which is his means of production.

51. Kant also seemed brilliant, demarcating the empirical and a priori, also the analytic and synthetic. He was my dad’s favourite philosopher. He was a bit of a home-bird; said love is Nature’s trick for ensuring reproduction, the colours of the flowers attracting the bees and so on. Descartes and “Cartesian doubt” was another useful treasure: I applied Cartesian doubt to the idea that I was the witness from Jim Morrison in another draft of this book but have left it out for good reasons.

52. At some point, after reading Russell, I also read some Quine. Quine lost me with his maths. Is this where philosophy died? In the middle of From A Logical Point of View? Where the layman cannot understand? Surely not! And if it is true I tried the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark as a boy/ spoke against September 11th in 2000 – a faux defaced bank note on Quine would already be enough.

53. Straw Dogs by John Gray was another. It’s not light reading. I have just started reading it for the third time. The first time was not enough, and evidently the second time was not enough. Already I find a plethora of succulent quotes apposite for the discussion of “self-evolution.” Shall I posit what John Gray says? He says that “conscious human evolution... is a mirage.” He says “it seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodelled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organized crime, and hidden parts of government vie for control. If the human species is re-engineered it will not be the result of humanity assuming a godlike control of its destiny. It will be another twist in man’s fate.” In other words, even if you prove self-evolution is possible, human destiny will still be out of your own hands.

54. I. Then I turned to Locke and Berkeley, or essays on. It was Locke’s distinction between ideas that come from sense-perception and ideas that come from reflection that got me thinking differently. I started reclaiming subjective, internal thought processes from boyhood, remembering all sorts of mental activity. For example at night there was a bouncing ball in my head that only bounced when I said “stop” and only stopped when I said “bounce.” So only through inverse logic could I govern it and every night I would check it was still there. For another example I used to say the word “kangaroo” over and over in my mind until it went numb, emptied itself of meaning, hopped off to become the mad, kangaroo king. On the motorway between houses if I wasn’t counting the white lines, I was imagining my foreskin snagged on the barbed wire fence for miles. I pictured living in derelict barns beside the road. Internally-speaking, I remembered the echo in the cave, (when you think something twice, slightly louder the second time, and wonder at the disjunction); and scenes of pretend torture that were not real but which I had to escape from in cartoon-like, contortionist ways. One dream I had as a child was of my brother’s face all through the night, in real time. His face didn’t move or change and my worry all night long was that he’d died. I never was so happy as when I woke and found him still in the land of the living and oblivious to the dream I’d had. Another time I closed my eyes and opened them again and had in the meantime already slept a whole night’s sleep. Sometimes I would wake myself up to check if I had gone to sleep or not. In prayer at night I would think in words, and try and get everyone in – apart from myself of course unless there was maybe an exam coming up. I remember also reading a lot and getting into a mode of being whereby I would think the words as or even before they happened, trying to second guess the text, which I would say was predictive or even “proleptic.” I also remember playing under a blanket in the back of a car with a girl called Maya and lifting my head out and saying to the driver (who was my dad) “I’ve found a star.”

54. II. To account for the whole history of my turning inwards would take a lot longer than a few thousand words, but I might add that Sartre says consciousness is “the plenum of being.” Others have said mere computation. Others still that there is nothing for the term to name.

54. III. Camus says the only problem of modern philosophy worth considering is whether or not there is a rationale for suicide. If for example you had been cursed and then run over a child – you’d feel pretty bad – but I would say suicide only leaves behind more pain. Anyhow, my dad preferred Camus who wrote L’ Etranger to Sartre who wrote Being And Nothingness. L’ Etranger can be read on a single train journey, but Being And Nothingness not. My dad also liked the way Camus was an international goal keeper. One work of philosophy by my dad was when he brought in a single sheet containing two teams: England whites and England blacks. “What do you notice about these two teams son?” he asked. “One is black and one is white, dad,” I said. “Correct,” he said, and we pored over the sheet like blueprints. It was 1997 or 1998. He asked who I thought would win and I said “probably the blacks.” To that he said “well, there’s a difference between having all the skill and being able to win a match.” We spoke of who would be captain of each team, and had a good talk. At the end of the talk he delivered the message: “there’s probably going to be a rhythm change in the White House in your lifetime son.” I was delighted, not just with the idea of the rhythm change but being allowed foreknowledge. It struck me that the way dad delivered the philosophical message through the medium of something I could relate to as a teenager was beautiful, and that philosophy should be more like that. I still consider that team sheet dad drew up to be a true work of modern philosophy and one of the best things he did as a philosopher. In terms of the coupling of football and philosophy, my favourite player of all time, John Barnes, has become quite a philosopher in the English tradition: he writes articulate articles against racism for the broadsheets. In Barnes we had an exceptional talent at football who scored arguably England’s greatest ever goal; and yet at some point he suffered racist abuse. Now his articulate articles seem to me to be part of the great English philosophical tradition that arraigns and inveighs against the scripting of a singular, great tome to contain it all and disseminates its best bits all over. It was my dad who isolated Barnes’s articles for me as a good read. Dad used to say “football is semi-soap-opera and semi-sport,” also “something good for blokes to talk about.” He said it was mainly for playing not watching, disliked the passive spectator; but we wouldn’t miss an England match on telly for years. Now that he is gone I don’t follow it anymore.

54. IV. We have a large yellow jug useful for taking to the pub, filling with ale and bringing home. Grand-dad used to do it; dad used to do it; and dad got us to do it too. When dad died I noticed the yellow jug on top of the fridge, caked in a layer of dust; and in that dust dad had left a message, written with his finger the letters “C F X”. This could be cue for me to regale you with all the instances of vision, inscapes of wings, accesses of wonder that I have known. You name it I have experienced it: wings, talking dogs, skywriting, a pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital, books changing name, hypertexts on telly, olfactory hallucinations, indoor pools of water forming on the floor of their own accord, and more and many more. I don’t think we need a Periodic Table of Altered States and am in fact against it as I am against the idea that there necessarily be a “Light-speed Law of Neuroplasticity” that states “it is impossible to remember a new yellow line.” To enlist all the visions I have known, every piece of pollen in the whole pollen count, in a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes would not be possible. It would be better to just say “the pollen count got knocked unconscious by the many-handed rain.” Alternatively you could say:

“the summer rain falls with as many hands

as there are names for new rock bands.”

54. V. There was a time I extirpated every trace of recognition from the myriad mind, unloosed the mind of form, method-acted every adjective in ‘Howl’ and attained visual radio broadcasting dreams but things have returned to the boring smell of water now, to status life detail, to quotidian consciousness, to the daily soap opera of the goldfish bowl.

55. Omnibus Press coloured the pages of The Lords And The New Creatures a traffic light colour motif of pages of orange and green respectively. They may be divided as:

The Lords The New Creatures

orange pages green pages

spaces closed spaces open

doors open doors closed

I say “doors closed” in the sense of the banishment of doubt.

56. My argument is as follows: in postmodern theory, Saussure described the arbitrary bond between signifier and signified, i.e. phonetic and semantic aspects of the linguistic sign, to create “the Saussurian atom.” Derrida then exploded this atom by saying there isn’t even an arbitrary bond but no bond at all. This is translated into metaphor by using the tops of milk: there is no reason red should confer no fat, green semi-skimmed and blue full fat milk. However, my point is that when it comes to colouring The Lords And The New Creatures a traffic light colour motif of orange and green pages respectively, then the green pages have an intrinsic bond: they confer go, grow, evolve, continuation, motion, life. This radically confutes French postmodern theory and is not to be confused with what Zadie Smith bemoans as the supposed edifying properties of the colour green, which itself is more in the scope of literature as a debate between rurs and urbis.

57. I would say the correct endorsement was the witness ‘from’ The Lords And The New Creatures. Messrs ‘in’ and ‘of’ and ‘to’ and ‘from’ were all invited to that play. The witness ‘in’ was flat, in the book in 1969. The witness ‘of’ was the one standing there, attesting, in the 1990’s. The witness ‘from’ was the correct endorsement and the witness ‘to’ a mere formality after the correct endorsement was made.

58. Across the board, Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form. It is present in the memorability of a line of song as much as the trend in technology to ever-increased minimalism. For an example of Portability, the line “semen spills like silver water” seems to have assonance helping it along, to where it’s going, (possibly the moon), and the musicality thus enhances the memorability.

59. The philosophy of atheistic pragmatism can be summarised in a few salient points.

1. Being only animals as human beings are, we have necessities in the pragmatic conception of Man as needing only to breathe, eat, sleep, go to the toilet, reproduce and die.

2. In the scope of this particular type of pragmatism, we do not deserve a God because we are just monkeys with bigger brains and more dextrous fingers.

3. God thus becomes a vain projection to cover up your fear of Nothingness.

4. Similarly when someone says “I know that I don’t know, so I believe in the Unknown,” you must ask yourself if a goldfish has an Unknown too and if not then it doesn’t exist as a “thing.”

5. In the scope of this particular pragmatism, we start with a playground full of friends, slowly discard them, settle on another soul and die alone… the pyramid shape is erected to the sun.

6. Death is conceived of as sleep with no dreams.

7. Love is not aligned with God in the sense of their being illusory but with language. Love becomes as WH Auden says “a choice of words.”

8. In the scope of this pragmatism, it is impossible for girls and boys to be friends, for there is always ulterior sexual motive to undermine amicability.

9. Likewise one does not have sex with a personality but with a body.

10. In the scope of this pragmatism, getting married and having children still seem like the natural things to do.

The counter to it is that it is cynical and not only that but intolerant of other people’s beliefs.

60. The following proposition seems neither chemistry nor musicology:

Lucy in the soul with demons

may happen to be an actual substance.

It harkens back to when Paul and I went on a road trip to a festival celebrating the solar eclipse.

61. Way back when I was in one band and we were recording on earphones, binaural earphones, I said:

“To plug my senses in the mains

might utilise !00% of my brains.”

It was a typo, that lead to a new number, the number !00% that has implications of Artificial Intelligence.

62. I. The invention of Halfware could include the earphone album, and a tape cut and resealed in the reel, presenting the efficacy of “doing away with the pause,” also a purple bleeding screen, or a sensory overlay of a name appearing on a famous album, or an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rings.

62. II. There are other instances of technological invention that never made it to reality. 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 of a corrupt politician. 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 were in the same list but made it to reality, Rimbaud style.

63. This text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts have been made to order the bank notes but were not always successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free” to consume. It is but an open-air notebook, comprised of torn and bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given artificial insemination. Inherent in it is a notion that money is an Ode to Death, that a fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work sets you free.

64. I open the page at the perfect place to continue my own discussion. It is Wittgenstein. He is saying “thinking is surrounded by a nimbus. – Its essence, logic, presents an order: namely, the a priori order of the world; that is the order of possibilities, which the world and thinking must have in common. But this order, it seems, must be utterly simple. It is prior to all experience, must run through all experience; no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty may attach to it. – It must rather be of the purest crystal.” So is he not saying, to cut a long story short, that logic (the essence of thinking) is prior to all experience?

65. In this way we see Cartesian doubt and Popperian falsifiability both applied to the elegant and reckless axiom from my essay on Warhol. We see a break from the dogmatism of it. We approach a hidden order of things, an underlying order, where thought and world correspond, in a way that is prior to our experiencing of reality.

66. The thing is the thing and there is no escaping it. It should make sense to update my axiom, my maxim, my arrow, my aphorism, my angle. Yes, that sensus praecedit cogitationem may have helped me get 100% in an A-level exam essay; but now there appears cause to update myself. The rock star changes costume mid show too. The river runs through variegated ages of rock. So let us say my new thing is: the thing is the thing and there is no escaping it.

67. One immediate thought (but is it a sensation?) is that Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus would take the new axiom as its main point and extend thereafter for a whole book and I am stumped after one phrase. Another immediate thought (or is it a sensation?) is to interview my brother on what he thinks about the new axiom. Already, he says “a dog is a dog is a dog is a dog,” presumably apropos of the new da Vinci circle earlier mentioned. The way it goes round. The way the four “points of difference” may point towards an interchangeable sameness too. The thing is only the thing and other things are only themselves as well.

68. Now my spirits are lifted and I am enlivened. I think back to the book on Eastern mysticism I recently read: The Tao of Physics: to some of the wisdom contained in the Eastern tradition where consciousness is permutations that come from the void. “There is no such thing as Nothingness,” said the author Fritjof Capra. Even Sartre speaks of Nothingness “which is not.” The thing is not the opposite of nothing but the same. But here I have wafted into realms of fantasy already, am making it up as I go along. And what would happen if I used Google to translate an axiom into Latin to make it look more formal? I did that with the last one about sensation. Res est res, et nulla est ei fuga.

69. The thing is not the same as Nothing but itself. Yes, we may say, but what is the thing? The thing is still the thing and there is no escaping it! You cannot escape what’s inside by changing the four walls which immure you; so why would you be able to escape the fact that the thing is the thing and there is no escaping it?!

70. Only through the system is the system conquered. Only through the thing does the thing remain itself. I say that but I might also say “only through the thing does the thing renew itself.”

71. Imagining the thing were a cup of tea I go and make a cup of tea, thinking of my boyhood maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, how it failed, how I should not renew it, how philosophy might be tea and whether I am in thinking the thing to be a cup of tea trying to escape the idea that the thing is the thing and there is no escaping it.

72. In other words I imagine the thing is a cup of tea and renew my cup of tea thinking about felicitous language and fastidious loquacity, maybe now that I am middle aged, and how to proceed from the present impasse with the same mixture of austere beauty and Eastern mystical wisdom as a moment ago. Slow. I am slow. It took me years to undress the idea that sensation precedes thought and upgrade my slavery. I do not wish to be in a state of Dogma Stupor Torpor and Slumber in a mental sense. My meds have gone down hours ago now; my cup of tea cools. I think of something to say.

73. The thing is not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.

What the thing is we already know – for it is the thing - but if I say it is a cup of tea it at least might be that for the duration of the utterance.

What can be said about the thing will be said.

Everything about the Thing that can be said will be said or else we will remain silent.

The word “thing” is not literally a thing but indication to cogitate on “thinginess.”

74. So it is that I find myself trying to transcend an impasse. The sound of something online echoes through from my brother’s room, maybe a film or live streaming. The voices visit. They say now they know it’s me, it’s good. I walk round the kitchen in a circle thinking idly about what to say. It is not the same as thinking, when you walk round the kitchen idly, in absent minded fashion. There is no absent minded philosopher. I do actually think of something to say then something else again and the original thought is displaced, lost, in the quick succession of thoughts. Hence I am disappointed for it has not come back, and no insufflation of the Vape pen can trigger a revolt in my short-term memory.

75. When there is no “thing” to say, say nothing. Well, Russell would say that’s not sound advice: even when an hypothesis is wrong it’s better to have one than not. Likewise just because an hypothesis is right doesn’t mean you should always say it. So I drink lime juice under the Ancient Night. I wash up and think about the thing. That “the thing is the thing is the thing is the thing” borrows from James’s dog, so that’s not ‘it.’ That “the universe is the sum of all facts” only borrows from Wittgenstein, so that’s not ‘it’ either. Maybe the thing ultimately is death. Unless the thing is the thing and only the thing. Yes I rather think it is: I think meaning inherent to something’s exact mode of expression. I think meaning is not a delusion unlike Time. I think meaning is an emotional import given mere exo-skeleton with words. I think semantics is a road sign not a place.

76. I am not so sure sensation precedes thought anymore. But I do think Romanticism an escape from the postmodern malaise as described above. And what a place to work from, this monastic retreat. What a place to determine that the thing is the thing and there is no escaping it. I start to wonder about my ism, as if I have already made a contribution to philosophy that needs Christening (like falsifying the Nirvana barcode). Wittgenstein says philosophy is when language goes on holiday and we start naming things like it is a baptism. I think Taxonomy, though, is dull. Like plot is dull compared with narrative technique. So I do not deduce from my copy and pasting efforts that I am, say, a “Connectionist.” I think an amateur ordinary speech philosopher is more likely. But the gnomic nomenclature of professional philosophy is something I do not fully know. The thing is not outside the thing but within the thing itself.

77. I am no longer sure sensation precedes thought ergo sum. I am Johnny Hypothalamus of an undergraduate fiction. Already it seems a matter of faith rather than knowledge whether or not sensation does precede thought; and then you ask the question of what the difference is between believing something and knowing it which is negligible if anything. And I have already started to doubt that I am Johnny Hypothalamus of an undergraduate fiction. In fact I seem to remember visiting the Pompidou Centre with my gf and finding JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS painted in red on a black background, at the top of its conceptual ascent through the ages. In fact I seem to remember designing a new “window” after the red on black text-art, going:

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and.

Pass the fallen road sign saying THINK! in the nettles and the mystery of the single shoe beside the road, in a fast Subaru Impreza with Paul and the gang, the Beatles’ back catalogue tumbling from the speaker, the open window a roaring lion, late birds singing in trees, birds that are intelligent, trees that are our friends, on a smouldering evening in Cambridgeshire, when nothing really matters.

78. Milk. Limejuice. Cider. Tea. These are the four options open to me. I do not know because of the dizzy state of my philosophy. Taken as seasons they form a wheel. Previously I had them configured as <Milk Water Whisky Wine>. These were the 4 Pillars of Time. In an adolescent philosophy I also drew two large overlapping circles, one for the Known one for the Unknown and said the oval-shaped bit in the middle where they over-lapped and clapped was “the area of the self.” I almost prefer the adolescent to the man in the case of the seasons encrypted as drinks.

79. So to re-clarify things: I am supposed to be thinking of a type of thought that is prior to experience. The thing is not the opposite of the thing but the same as the thing. Here I feel I have run out of things to say on the thing. I went to sleep and had a dream and woke in the afternoon. Decisions need to be made: and every decision, as Dr. Calculator Ptom says, in a very existential way, exiles a world.

80. The following proposition is not to do with post-Einsteinian astro-physics.

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that heaven sends is rain.)

81. Although there is little sense in still “doing James a template” of an 100% A-level exam essay when he’s as clever as I and we are in our forties there does still seem a modicum of Beautiful Functionality in employing the form, exploring the form. If I said “the kettle rises to a silent scream, its steam Ariel returning on Caliban’s chain,” you could say it’s a template of Rimbaud’s famous credo, or even an example of floating an hypertext over the real like an astral body. Still there hardly seems cause for an aesthetic system in the kettle.

82. Things may have been too far out for scholarship. The original 100% A-level essay was in answer to the question “does Marianne Dashwood merely settle for Colonel Brandon?” in Sense And Sensibility. I answered a vehement NO, re-engineered the question to one about the journey from idealism to pragmatism, in the sense that Marianne must learn to temper the wild, impassion’d and Romantic proclivities of her temperament, learn the falsehood of her own opinions. Herein however, I am redacting a huge philosophical tome to a random tapestry of fragments without cogent argument as if an obeisance to the Age of the Soundbyte. It also strikes me as rude if I am still “doing a template for James” but the audience may be elsewhere. In among the emphasis on happy language one must retain reader-awareness and not alienate the audience. Even if it’s one person, I would be happy.

83. Anyhow, here is my byte w/r/t Flora’s pretext. It’s only small but is a perfectly measured haiku in terms of the syllable count:

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

It could even be another infradiegetic heterotopia pertaining to panoramic, panchronic overview, like a chronotope-cum-euchronia, unless all this represents a word-world gone polysemic with the multifarious possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy through whom the esemplastic has fled away with the quadlibetical.

84. I. The following encrypted proposition need not be encrypted in order to not remain Anon:

“The female painter is a great exhibitionist, setting up her easel anywhere, in the Gondwanaland-green garden out here, or down on Gutterby Beach, where waves still make gentle love to the shore.”

Still the proposition is not said in face value terms. This sees the author delight in a wilful opacity, bats, black magnets, encryption, firking, code, symbolism, mysticism as if he were still a poet – but of course philosophy finds opacity too.

84. II. Mention of “firking” brings this snippet or snapshot-fragment back to my mind:

“Once again it falls on me to be the one to say

that biding my time from here to eternity

to see if the lawn has sprung a flower

watch out for the Honda lawnmower.”

For I am supposed to mow the grass where the stars re-align; but how am I supposed to do that if the equipment is broken?

85. I. My dad on the Ancient Night. There’s no such thing as ‘almost infinite.’ There had to be everything in order for there to be even an atom. A drum is a dream bigger than a dream of bounding in huge, magic circles in space. Again, I am in the kitchen, thinking if the windows were washed, every one, we would see nothing but the same white mirrors, re-affirming the quiet interior of this done-up room.

85. II. These photograph stars, they were once each a nuclear furnace. The night sky only seems to revolve “on axis unobserved.” There is seeming fixity to the universe when you observe the stars at night; and only when you go inside, do something else, and revisit the sky later do the stars seem to have revolved. It is actually the earth revolving. And the reason we can see dead stars like they are alive still is that it takes the light so long to journey to the eye that for centuries after a star has died it still appears to be hanging there, a little, glimmering, crystal tear, clinging to the dark, in love with the dark, as bright and beautiful as it would be if it were really there. Such talk is hyper-textual, is in the area of “hypertext” – also asks if a sensory overlay can be committed to a famous album without going back to the studio to re-record it. “Stamp your witness on the punished ground,” said Jim Morrison. If that is me, I was never given a chance to declare the new creatures metaphors, being only 8 years old and thrown into it!

86. The renewal of values is interesting. Marriage with children could be a value, almost in a normative sense. Then you’ve got algebraic substitution where “values” correspond in logical symbolism. Dr. Robert, bringing my own philosophical free speech back to me, says:

“The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.”

You could also say a guitar’s de-tunings are its “values.”

87. If what I am hearing is correct, those that burned the pictures on the sheet did so because they thought I didn’t even write the song in question. I wrote the lyrics apart from one line stolen from TS Eliot. With the music I rearranged Smells Like Teen Spirit, and put in a rhythm change too. I look back at the songs I wrote at 15 as a bunch of nonsense. They didn’t even survive in my set-list when I moved school, but I remember them still to this day. I was just emulating the likes of Nirvana and the Doors as an impressionable and sometimes froward teenager. I think literature more enduring than music, because music, or pop music, is by its very definition and appeal fleeting, transient, even vacuous and unsustainable. I look back from the vantage point of philosophy at my role in music as a vapid fashion statement suitable only for the rebellion of youth. Still I appreciate how music penetrates is-ness; and meaning in music is faces in fire or Hamlet’s three creatures in a single cloud-change.

88. You have to be fair with intellectual property. Cutting out the mind cancer of plagiarism and sustaining genuine inquiry is the ideal narrative stance. Of course there is no such thing as mind cancer; but uncanny imbrocation – which in sheep is called morphic resonance – can sometimes seem to do as it pleases in the postmodern world. That has happened to me in many instances, big and small alike. I had an ideal for a text called The Scientific Papers, for example, classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception – and got to University, only to find that between my thinking it and arriving my very tutor had published it. I could regale you with many tales, many such instances where intellectual property turns grey. For but one more, it was my idea to invent the earphones on which the band recorded, but someone else implemented the idea so I never assumed control. Sometimes you feel robbed but at others know you are second to the point of intersection and have to admit defeat.

89. Love your brother. That is my philosophy. I love my brother and my other brother and my sister and my mother. I love it when Dr. Robert says “kiss your brother” to his young ‘un too. I think love is the answer, as they said in the 1960’s, so tell your brother, and engage with the Other, otherwise I’ll tell your mother.

90. In my teenage years, cannabis-smoking years, I thought the model of the mind was the sea, where the surface is the conscious mind, the sea water the subconscious and the rock on the bottom the unconscious mind, but I no longer smoke cannabis…. Although I heard it said the unconscious is a myth, even a contradiction in terms because if it was unconscious we wouldn’t have a word for it, I think you only need to wake from sleep, concussion or passing out to know there is such a thing as the unconscious.

91. The world of “stuff and things” is not amenable to the world of Transcendental Metaphysics. I used to bemoan “stuff and things” getting in the way, when I was clumsy with my hands, these two, mute, useful tools. But we live in a world ostensibly comprised of objects, even though there is no such thing as Objective Reality anymore. Maybe it’s the other way round: the world of transcendental metaphysics is not amenable to the world of Stuff and Things. I say Transcendental Metaphysics without remembering what I meant by it at the time: possibly a state of mind, characterised by High Indifference, and by suspension of judgement. Compared with the mute frustration of objects, it is superior. The transition to being a philosopher should entail an increase in happiness in terms of the state of mind – it should be an alchemy of perception. The new position should come with dignity.

92. I. The plane exists on 2 dimensions including Time. The pyramid exists on 4 dimensions, including Time. To turn a plane into a pyramid is a 1 dimensional step. Therein discover new dimension of the words ‘1 dimensional,’ meaning stupid – a dimension which could also be called a separate plane – and did I mention that I wanted to die?

92. II. Waves [squiggle] crossed the FTSE [squiggle] and the Helter-skelter [squiggle] crashed in the electric-sea [squiggle]. Perhaps this is not an ideal place to examine the difference between writing and squiggles, but not because of the squiggles, because of the words. I see that the first squiggle is a pictorial representation of the word “waves,” and the second squiggle a pictorial representation of the waves crossing the FTSE, the third pictorial representation of the Helter-skelter and the fourth of “the electric-sea.” Concealed by the expression you might find there is more I do not wish to give away as yet. I picture a young man writing on amphetamines, having no time to think, flippantly employing the squiggle to describe his inner world, his buzz, like a leap into hyper-vision; and yet how traditional it is that he is more or less giving his position as “witness” away. Could it be that something he is calling “waves” came from the right, crossed his body and parked at his feet? The phrase was originally penned by hand in the dark on a road trip and outside, under charged, bruised, empurpled chariots for clouds. It was called a “shadow page poem” and one of many that the author wrote in that session with his friend on the road trip. They kept a road book which was given to the friend at the end of the trip. The words in the expression give themselves to the squiggle so that the squiggle is ultra-meaningful whereas usually a squiggle would have little meaning. They could even be seen (those squiggles) as cardio-vascular heart readings high as the hills and oscillating. I now believe it possible to harness waves that have also passed through the Beats; and why I turn to the question of waves when on phet I do not know; and why I would turn to phet again I do not know given that last time it wreaked havoc. So it is that I come to you in a manner’d way on a mild and calm day. The expression w/r/t/ waves seems to ask not just of a difference between writing and squiggles but of a difference between poetry and visual art.

93. I. Bedroom is an anagram of boredom. My room has seven faces. It has five vertical walls plus a ceiling and a floor. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has seven parts too. So could the room be a 3D or even 4D representation of the Tractatus? Inside it I sit on my bed. Wittgenstein is open, on the Introduction. I lie back and count things impulsively, automatically, shelves, books, corners, stripes, objects, walls, surfaces, matter. There are twelve shelves, I notice, full of Dr. Bob’s books - same as disciples, months and notes in a scale. Once upon a time I fell asleep with Proust open on my face and reflexively, like a horse, kicked the shelves above the bed in my sleep, bringing all the books tumbling on my recuperating body. I woke in a sea of books, with mum and dad rushing from their separate bedrooms to help me put them back on the shelves. I thought it could be a good opening scene for a memoir.

93. II. Sitting in a London bar once, I was approached by a stranger as I wrote in my notebook; and first he said Proust was cumbersome; and then he drew a piece of cross hatched cloth in my notebook

#

and mentioned Quine. He said Quine drew a piece of cross-hatched cloth and argued that if it represents language, the material world is the edge and the abstract world the middle of the cloth. It coming from a stranger though you don’t know it’s reliable.

94. Language is the emotional condom of the world. Sometimes I get the words just right and yet I think “words are best just before you find them even when you get them dead on.” I got them dead on that instance for example and yet was only let down. I don’t mean to seem a know-it-all, or employ a homiletic mode, but to bind it to life. Still it seems true as they say that white noise and silence are mythical poles between whom lies a frequency range where Communication is possible. Language, furthermore, can also obfuscate true Communication.

95. My copy of Neil Curry’s Walking To Santiago started to emanate the smell of redolent flowers or Flora’s perfume… could it be the word of a dog? I heard it said a dog has almost 70 words which is almost as many as the French. A further book seemed to have changed, to have lost a long, limpid line of shining conveyance it once had… so it presented the Tower. I was then given “a mirror for the soul” comprising a James Joyce rarity with a silver cover on top of a WH Auden rarity with a black cover underneath. Before I read the Joyce it multiplied by division. There was suddenly a second Joyce rarity on the shelf with a green cover. So the Tower could be a work of philosophy in itself.

96. If the smell of perfume, meanwhile, is the word of a dog, then something like BACKPASS ATTEMPTED flashing up on the Oyster card reader on the bus instead of NO MONEY could be a psycho-technological post-poem. Yet both could be considered “items” in that same, Jungian sense where the numinosity of a series of events only increases according to the number of items in the series.

97. I. I suppose a seer is a Western form of what is a mystic in the East but then again they are not quite the same, not analogous, if the mystic embraces other states of consciousness to attain ecstasy and the seer literally “sees things” like visions across the board – including the future. There is certainly room in a person to attain both states of ecstasy and successful vision. In fact I would say being a visionary is rarer, and that all people at some stage lean towards the attainment of mystic states of ecstasy. A seer has no religious implications: it could be Red Indian as much as Christian as much as pagan. A mystic though is associated with religion be it in the East or the West. These lines are not clearly demarcated enough for me in our Western tradition.

97. II. Remember also to take your medication. Sometimes literature can be a machine for remembering to take your medication. If the act of taking medication seems against your religion, you are not alone, but should remember that people with real mental illness positively like taking their meds, and these seemingly irreconcilable opposites can be reconciled. It was I who vociferated loudly in hospital that the nature of visionary experience is not amenable to the dialectic of sickness and recovery, to sterile medicalese, and that one’s sickness is more congenial than one’s health unto those in charge of one’s health for monetary reasons, meaning Big Pharma companies who can with-hold a cure until the price is right – but now I understand the illness is not a conspiracy!

97. III. I – or is it A. I. - also used to say no true poet could be on Western medication because a poet is a translator of feelings and the feelings you get on chemicals are all fake. More recently I see you should plug in, that the science works! That you shouldn’t harbour new-age, mysticism-tinged, hippy beliefs like those anymore.

97. IV. Put very simply in terms of the Popperian epistemological method my father used to teach us of, P1 to TT to EE to P2, the status of my quest to be a philosopher is as follows:

Problem 1: I want to be a philosopher.

Tentative Theory: read more philosophy then.

Error Elimination: you also need to look inwards.

Problem 2: when can I begin?

So it is that one can begin, even if they haven’t yet read, say, Lucretius; and looking within and reading become embroiled, imbrocated in part of the great search.

97. V. Once I was talking to a philosopher called Dr. Calculator Ptom. He said something we all think: “the universe is a projection of the mind.”

I said “I thought of a more poetic way of saying that.”

He said “go on.”

“The sniper’s rifle is an extension of his eye.”

He said he was jealous unless it was stolen from someone like Jim Morrison.

I kept quiet because it was stolen from Jim Morrison.

For me though, it brings up the idea of fossils. I think there are fossils of art as well as life. I think being the witness from Jim Morrison’s book The Lords And The New Creatures, certain things you come out with are fossils of Morrison; certain activities go on within the book’s pages; your place in life is almost scripted.

I might be wrong though.

It’s my brother James who’s actually named after Jim Morrison (I think.)

I think dad named his sons after the Doors, and then they had a girl of course; and we go right left right left in the hands and are born in a season each, spiralling Spring, Autumn, Winter, Summer, so not in correct seasonal order, and no it is not a Swastika, more fair as fair can be.

The incident with Dr. Ptom also brought up the idea that philosophy is a sterile subject and poetry by default more alive.

I later found out, by reading Being And Nothingness, that Morrison derived his quote from Sartre, who also found opacity in using the image of a gunman to describe how the universe is a projection of the mind.

97. VI. Friends that have been philosophers include one that didn’t attend any lectures, but set up a smack den in his house, as a wilfully anti-social act of nihilism.

He thought of that as being a philosopher.

Then at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got one friend who got a Double First from Oxford. He designed a document showing the metaphors of mind down the ages. In the Industrial Revolution the metaphor of mind was the factory floor; in our own age it is the laptop.

It sounded exciting but the obvious counter is that consciousness hasn’t changed since Ancient Greece.

Also, in mental illness the metaphor of mind could become a broken TV ariel instead.

I had one friend who was the most articulate person to listen to, when he spouted about his own beliefs, and highly intelligent, but got an E in philosophy because he was intolerant of other people’s beliefs.

Dr. Calculator Ptom thought it funny. Dr. Ptom was of a Liberalist background. Liberalism I would define as the opening or allowing of all possible perceptions, which leads to Hamlet’s harmatia irresolution whereupon pragmatism becomes the reactivation of an attitudinisation in that situation.

97. VII.

I was always told never to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’ – but recently seeing it in so many philosophers done that way, I have succumbed to popular opinion.

I was also told “I before e except after c and only when the sound is E.”

Also that possession possesses four s’s.

Once I was lying in bed with my gf and we thought about what it would be like to change all the ‘ands’ in the world to ‘buts.’

You’d thus have salt but pepper, fish but chips.

“I came to come and then I went,” I told her which she liked.

But this sense of imposing dialectical antagonism in the middle of our favourite dyads and couplings was never developed into a piece.

At the time I had an idea to make two thoughts (A and B) talk on stage in a play where the auditorium was a skull, maybe taken for neurosurgery too.

I had a radio play about changing the name ‘life’ to something else, maybe ‘knife.’

But I don’t really want to start enlisting the ideas I have had for pieces that never came to anything – because there have been 100’s if not more.

I do feel though that I can look back at the folly of it all, all that poetry, all those songs, all that creative writing, from the new, middle aged vantage point of philosophy.

So I studied English BUT Creative Writing.

I read Crime BUT Punishment.

Oh, well, it was just a flippant idea, not to be taken srsly.

And a moocow is not made of dialectical antagonism.

97. VIII.

Depression is a cow.

How about that?

Discuss?

Well, you could say science and poetry still differ in matters of sensibility when it comes to truth.

In science truth is to be falsified through which nothing is 100%; but in poetry there is truth-to-itself through which anything can be 100% if well-made enough.

Poetic truth is constituted of its own inner nature, like the truth of the individual.

So whether or not depression IS a cow would depend on context and how well-made it is and whether it is a scientific or poetic therefore un-falsifiable truth.

Depression is an illness, not just someone feeling sad.

This would seem to be a more scientific thing, in fact a fact.

Yet that through falsifiability it is NOT 100% true unlike the previous would indicate something most counter-intuitive going on w/r/t/ truth.

Science and religion, b/t/w/ actually agree that behind us is Perfection be it super-symmetry of forces before Time began (to precede its own origins) or an Adamic, prelapsarian blank slate.

But when they differ, they differ, they demarcate, they veer apart.

It has been said that metaphysics itself is the place where science and religion meet.

I also heard it said that metaphysics is “the gap between first and third persons.”

97. IX.

When my brother James puts a plate of food before me and says “that’s what you’re getting,” he is right in several ways; for it means that is what I am getting to eat; and it also means that is what I understand I am getting to eat in a cognitive way. It is an empirical statement surely; and there may be other meanings that converge on the G-word “getting” that I haven’t unpacked.

There is also another G-word: “GOYT.”

It is a word explored by the poet Simon Pomery which undoes getting into feeling. He says “you can imagine Goyt Studies in the future.”

I once told him the word “goyt” is Celtic thought-patterns meeting Anglo-Saxon vowel-sounds but I might’ve been wrong.

This idea of getting – it involves the input of sensory-data through Observation and reflection too, so both sides of Locke’s coin.

W/r/t/ the plate of food, I know it’s what I am getting to eat as well as my getting it, in terms of understanding what it is comprised of. So in one sense I am given it as if a gift, and therefore get it, in another I compute what it is, and they both converge on the same word.

One wonders about other G-words, like the stopped, glottal, monosyllable that is God but doesn’t wish to turn off the audience or start a fight.

Dedalus in Ulysses says we all have the same understanding of what the word God means.

But some say God is a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness, and others thought thinking on itself, and others a stopped, glottal monosyllable, and others that God is not to worship blind in dogmatic slumber but to behead, dethrone, and become!

But I see I have gone down the wrong path.

I have reached the time of day when food becomes a concern and so must consult with my brother.

98. I

In terms of the plate of food I mentioned, I think of “truth too simple to understand.” I think back to a piece I wrote in the days of my youth when I was reading T S Eliot:

It looks like mutation in consciousness,

truth too simple to understand,

these are gesture without motion bones

like sadness gene and dreaming gland

and the pollen has gone under Gondwanaland

and the ecstasy pill gone under the green hill

and we are hiding from The Waste

Land in The Waste Land still.

It struck me maybe watching that movie Pi that there is simplicity the other side of the enormously complex. I was working with the notion of truth too simple to understand in those days as if understanding warranted a level of complexity that was not only otiose but fake. I think when James presents the plate of food and says “that’s what you’re getting,” it could be an approach towards the type of truth I mean, truth too simple to understand. I also used the “but” instead of the “and” motif in the expression “believable BUT true,” to give the idea that when we believe we are been deceived, unless in special cases. I think the expression “believable BUT true” also pertains towards a mode of truth that is truth too simple to understand.

98. II.

I was thinking this earlier, to include truth too simple to understand, but it got away in among voices, prompts, triggers, cues, confusions. So now I am to thank my own brain for it coming back! Ovid – according to the poet Neil Curry – prescribes 9 years between life and writing, and this reminds me that the binary opposition of life and writing can unpack in other ways:

life writing

experience data

loss of self recollection of self after

escape return.

These binary oppositions are all one and the same thing, and as I get older I remark at how it takes my brain a bit longer to retrieve a lost thing.

98. III. My mother comes in the kitchen and mentions water. Well, it is the Universal Solvent. It is symbolised by H20. This is appropriate because H20 might stand for Hypothalamus Tattoo. For even water leaves an indelible stain, tattoo, on the hypothalamus. I know, meanwhile, of Professor David Morley’s equations for water’s effect on water but if I said them it wouldn’t be right. When you take E (and is E not flung from the sun?) your speech trembles at the knees in your mouth; and it feels like your mouth is full of cold, stunning, heavenly, crystal water and when you speak it spills. Water is the heavenly liquor. It runs clean and thin like the spirit of heaven. They say the word for water is the word least changed in all languages since the dawn of Man. They also say water is a very English concern. I believe it would be better to write a spontaneous poem off the top of my head about my current situation to quietly and discretely Tap the beck in the back garden at the foot of the fell than it would be to draw up a giant Tract on Universal Human Rights in words. Water also has no smell. Some contend the demarcation between the sane and insane is imaginary, is water, the same bucket of water. It – water – follows the path of least resistance which as gravity and katabasis require is down. Water’s boiling point meanwhile could be described as when it starts to involuntarily breakdance to the heated, excitable music. I was told once upon a time I had gone beyond water’s boiling point. Once I rearranged the names of Wikipedia with OuLiPo-esque substitution, putting in the word “Finland” for the entry on The Periodic Table, “the Sahara Desert” for the entry on Coca-Cola – and made as many as Shakespeare’s sonnets. In that, water had changed name to “needle.”

99. My final stance, when this is done, is to do whatever my brother James wants me to do with his <BEE> even if it means I retain a philosophical silence; to propitiate his creativity (for he is left-handed and has a high EQ); which means to cook him a breakfast of almost every snooker ball colour; and to do the washing up out here on reality’s starry faultline; for he is writing a sci-fi series as long as Lord of the Rings or longer which could endure in a different field from my own best efforts. In the end his notion about <BEE> which I only report on might be the only truly original idea contained herein – which is not something I find hard to accept at all.

100. The other day I was listening to magic alphabet radio as Dr. Robert calls it, or intercepting on the intercom. Voices, voices, everywhere, and not a drop to think. If thinking must be done it should be done clearly. It should be written clearly and brought to ink. Well, voices could be “onjects,” quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound – but they could also be real folk resounding around. Anyhow, they said: “you weren’t the only witness to Morrison’s reveal but you were the only one who also helped invent the net at seven with hidden parts of government. When I am one, under the sacred tree, I will say you can’t do both.”

AFTERWORD

By now I feel I might’ve written my best work. By now it is later. It is Night and I am in bed. It’s the same at Night: if the problem was not getting up it’s the same at night if you don’t go to bed. When the book is being finalised, because you have got up early with some disciplined routine for a few days since your dream of Roald Dahl – and you are staying up at Night trying to fix a systemic error near the start – you should go to bed on time. Night is when we sleep. The brain only heals when it is asleep and even night-mares are healing. So it is that I find myself in bed. I find myself. Whether a timeless classic has been produced in the meantime I cannot say but I can talk about the book as it now is. The purpose of the work is containment, containment of an aesthetic philosophy, of the tenets of faith or values in my belief-system. It is my first work of philosophy or else a work of art with a philosophical edge.

I never studied philosophy at University unlike my dad but it’s always been there in parallelism to my education and in conversation with friends and family alike. In making the transition to philosophy one might need to read Homer, which as yet I haven’t got round to doing, but it’s on my reading list. I would say that in an Age of Diet Philosophy where many philosophers haven’t yet read Homer, where philosophy might even have died, my autodidactic start is still commendable and sincere. I have engaged with a process of redaction and purification of what I truly think, rather than writing what a teacher has told me. It has come together at the foot of the Lakeland’s oldest fell, Black Combe, where I read and write a lot, also drink gallons of tea.

NOTES

1. Author, who is writing a large, philosophical tome called Transition To Philosophy, reads Wittgenstein, falls in love with austere beauty and concision of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

2. Author follows up with further reading: Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein.

3. Author starts to re-shape his text like the latter whereupon he remembers, nearing Point 100, a long time ago, when he wrote a 100% English Literature A-level exam essay, saying he would “do his brother James a template.”

4. Author falls in love with his own ideal for once but abandons early draft.

5. Author wakes up one morning early, inspired by a dream of Roald Dahl, re-invigorated, and redacts his own epic tome to a series of aphorisms, points, as if in the image of Tractatus, going through this own tome and keeping only the odd poignant moment which he likes.

6. Author, taking up the ideal of the 100% template again, numbers the redacted “points” which amount to about 80, and which are nearer to Philosophical Investigations than Tractatus.

7. Author goes through making up the rest of the 100 points, including Point 1.

8. Author upon finishing text writes Notes at the end, to try and make sense of it, elucidate the moves he made, be transparent.

9. Author fiddles around with Preface which started after the dream of Roald Dahl.

10. Author remarks how the work has tremendous existential energy but lacks narrative momentum, is nearer Waking Life than A Scanner Darkly, employing sheer quantification as an exo-skeleton to give it cohesion, where before might be something that binds it into a story.

11. Author decides it is about the quantification of art/ aesthetics, the labelling/ scoring of things out of ten or multiples of ten, the digital/ decimal world.

12. Author is struck by the pattern of scattered sun on the patio dappled with the shadow of a leafy tree; and compares and contrasts said image with the ideal of “the grid” that underlies us and the variability of perception in the future.

13. Author adds Afterword so there is an A to B trajectory, a plausible life-cycle.

14. Author sees the <BEE> already went to the flower and it was already proven that music could be 4D.

15. Author sees that he started out trying to help his brother and by now might need to apologise (sorry James).

16. Author extends Notes at the end but doesn’t wish to go through the whole conundrum with the 100 again.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Johannes Bergfors (which is the pen-name of John F B Tucker) was born in London in 1982 to a Finnish mother and an English father. He got a First Class Honours degree in English, Creative Writing and Practise from Lancaster University in 2009. He now lives in Cumbria, at the foot of Black Combe, with his mother and brother.