THE
BLIT (PART
ONE)
Follidot,
once upon a time there were only four motley fridge magnet letter
jungle birds, called whitecrow, beckstub, chardud and stillwalker.
They
mingled on the fridge in
a state of chaos but
one day my brother set the whole mess in order when he designed the
new da Vinci circle:
@
<BEE>
[long squiggle]
Infinity
Symbol
Not
follidot is a rogobert, Rigobert
bot-getter.
Not
Flora is a princess of dialysis and motor.
Not
Lucy in the soul with demons may be an actual substance.
Not
I. T. might stand for Captain Marvel too.
Not
oceans, O over them we fly, we fly.
Not
the clock that got the rock to feel shock.
Not
the other whatnot bits and bobs but my brother.
Not
the Nirvana beercan, but the brother.
Loving
as we do that love is the answer.
The
law says it’s okay; but if you want to smoke green, you’ve got to
go to Amsterdam. Squeezyjet can get us there. Then
through the streets we will wander casting ad-libbed hippy
poetry
about neon chameleons into the breeze.
A
plane exists on 2 dimensions including Time.
A
pyramid exists on 4 dimensions including Time.
But
to turn a plane into a pyramid represents
only
a 1 dimensional step. Therein find extra
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?
Then
you get that the plane is a curve, because the world is round,
because the shape of spacetime is curved, because Gravity warps and
bends spacetime.
When
we got there, we
bought the monkeymoo from the Doors
cafe,
and got skunkosis. It’s a neologism from my father for my own
condition. He said GM skunk makes people feral. I
myself have added a few new words to the language as well.
While
we were in the Doors cafe, I thought I would boast a little bit about
my position. I told the proprietor “My
latest thinking, aged forty four
by now,
is that my father was positively sponsored by some philosophers to
provide the real, human witness from The
Lords And The New Creatures
by Jim Morrison.” He
asked me if that was true and I said it
was my current update on the lifelong “case” I had been working
on w/r/t/ my dad’s art dealing business
and told him a little bit more about my life.
“Already
at
seven I am
said to have helped
invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in
the attic here
at
the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round
the world it was me that wrote it. By eight I had made not one but
two very strange Naturalistic Observations as
the witness.
By eleven – well
I shouldn’t say.
By fifteen I had attained the face of stars which might’ve been
scripted in the Bible. By eighteen, in 2000, I forewarned of
September 11th
and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in
the nation at 100%. I
also predicted the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in
a late ray of light angling in and founded a new religion based on
the elephant.”
“After
school, to cut a long story short, I recorded an album on binaural
earphones with mates, had an effervescent mobile reverberating the
rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the
room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change
in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness,
noticed
a sensory overlay of my name on Piper
At
The Gates of Dawn,
worked
at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an
instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a tape with a
pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel, and
discovered
the sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting my own song lyric)
grew. Then
I falsified
the Nirvana barcode in writing and attained visual radio,
broadcasting dreams.”
The
proprietor, of the Doors cafe, he
took
a photo of us together and got me to surrender my signature to a
document. In fact, he got me to sign his copy of The
Lords And The New You Know Who.
His English was very good, so
good in fact that one needn’t learn Dutch in order to communicate.
He asked me if I was working on anything new, and I said I was
working on a Rimbaudian word-science notebook – an experiment into
the international language alphabet.
If
I wree wiintrg aoubt paniylg
agetenmud fhtfis at the pnaio,
for
eaplmxe, I’d
use taht mddelud up lgaugnae. For it is psbliose to samblrce all the
letrets of a wrod aprat form the frsit and lsat and for the eye to
siltl raed it.
It
is also possible to float an hypertext of the word ‘pi’ over the
real text like an astral body. This
is especially possible if you make the eye walk the plank, going
1 2 3 4
6 7 8 5/
9
The
oldest word in all languages of Indo-European etymological origin is
said to be “da.” It is in The
Waste Land
of course. It seems like a “monkey-unit” to me.
The
word that is said to be least changed in all languages since the dawn
of Man is the word for “water.” You can still just about hear its
similarity across different tongues, and picture people gathered
at
a well, people of all ethnic origins, sharing water, at the start.
The
name John F B Tucker might be a mini, Shakespearean poem.
For
that I have to thank my dad, who concluded one of his poems with the
words “Hamlet in flames.”
“Full
fathom five thy father lies,” from
Shakespeare’s last play The
Tempest,
could
not be four or six or any other number because Virgil says “there
are tears in things.”
O
is not a ghost-vowel, no,
but U is a ghost-vowel
when
opened unto the gloom under
sliver
moon I slide her over
and
semen spills like silver water.
We’re
soon enough in the flotsam ether.
I
would’ve said, prior to my bro’s contention, that after Acid
comes Bic in the international language alphabet, then maybe the
choppy sea, Donald Duck, ecstasia, Flora and Google. But maybe after
Flora comes gay?
I
do know of David
Morley’s
equations for water’s effect on water but shall not say. I can say,
however, that H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart. Sometimes
my cardiovascular heart readings are like the hills!
Dadrafistahide
deutemol doolally, donking
doormangrite
gresticle, grapple-grinking
trestlewave,
tristlewithy trusting
boogiloss
bonkyfloss boogs.
Emprohistifide
applabong ding dong,
omporifestic
applebong bang-gally.
Appladocky
flocky nocky,
nihilipilificationist
abstraxic crax,
abbladong
tristleworthy blex, blenk, blenk.
Avrabo
gontockolocky gontockalix,
tresting
the gentricle indreariaterbee.
Ingresting
a lingo-bling-killing silence.
“Shall
we go to the Pink Floyd cafe next?” I asked.
So
we went.
It
was only down the road. We didn’t teleport there. The locals didn’t
visit these big name coffee shops but went to lesser known ones,
where there was probably better quality product – but places like
the Doors and the Pink Floyd sucked in all the Tourists. Shall we say
there was a menu containing a variety of song-cells listed in their
abstract prison?
Breasticoffavitch
brewmie breaming,
breeful
of flastangahadra, broning,
bewli-collovitch
casta-bata-bye, bodra-hydring
blackra
and bleckra with impellibule stont.
Destitatitude
desting destiatary dist.
Dingobat
bongheavy hydradeutemol parafang,
plestiacorit
imbeamitutde booly,
boomiatrix
bestocovavitch blenk.
When
we
went
to the Pink Floyd coffee shop again I started to boast. “I was once
in a band called The Flood,” I said, “in Syd Barrett’s
hometown, Cambridge. We recorded only on state of the art binaural
earphones laid on the floor, broke the ancient silence that way, were
badass as Hella and Shellac. I climbed up on the album and said I was
going to plug my senses in the mains. Our music was dark music as in
dark matter. We even encrypted a node in musical truth without any
words. Our
key was the key of irony.”
The
proprietor this time didn’t look interested.
Ablabong
kelf, bittle apsoopiama,
oopsamadaisical
badaboom catatrash.
Epsolio
entropomorphic entropitude.
Tudoxica
engsongify absoler doovet dong.
Umbongitude
absoluticum absoliticass.
Untrong
istleworthy obstatiatrix.
Obstackifile
pylon-nose’d obstatrix.
Ingstofficate
the ablabate angronify.
So
I told him that Piper
At The Gates of Dawn
is transmitted as well as genes; that
my seven year old book was very
Syd Barrett in a way. Others
did to Ummagumma
what I did to Piper
At The Gates of Dawn
with my boyhood work –
which
as I say means dad’s vinyl collection is transmitted as well as
genes.
I
told him that the original Barrett book had now been stolen, and we
had the <BEE> experiment, my brother’s sheet where pictures
grew, that is, to replace it. I
said
the Barrett-child document
was old-fashioned compared with <BEE>. It was time to move on.
It was time to accept that the boyhood book was if not outmoded
technology – for writing is technology – but not the latest
thing. If I wasn’t going to make something of <BEE> then I
would be an outmoded songbird.
The
proprietor started to laugh at my Barrett-maths, and was in paroxysms
over it. He was after all high. We used to smoke weed like it was a
magical sacrament, and a self-legitimising pact developed round the
stoner circle. We were trying to get sober from the advertising
trance, abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that robbed us of our
bodies, renounce fidelity to surface-gods of illusion and to temporal
wealth.
Obladobabong,
dongcrastic, dongify.
On-donk-a-saurus
wobbling the gooseprint.
Obladonky
blonky, can’t wrap my hands around it.
Wriggley’s
chewing gum wearing Wrangler jeans.
“Well
you can’t just talk nonsense and claim it is arcane experimentation
into the international language alphabet,” he said. So I tried to
explain to him the beauty of <BEE>. “There was a time,” I
said, “when my dad died that my seven year old book was still in
the attic, for long storage, and meanwhile down the barn my brother’s
<BEE> experiment had resulted in the sheet where pictures
grew.” I
told him that at the same moment in time, my book was allowed out of
Long Storage and my brother’s sheet where pictures grew came true.
He
asked me to explain the sheet where pictures grew so I told him I
couldn’t, but had taken some notes on what happened.
THE
BLIT (PART TWO)
1.
Once,
in detention at school, and aged only 15, I wrote an essay about a
green parrot sent to space through the conch. The supervising
teacher,
an Irishman, read my colourful and imaginative essay and said “if
you keep going like that you’ll go far,” but I haven’t kept up
the
nimble flight.
I
sometimes wonder what else the essay contained… maybe it contained
further images like music from a black hole? To
send a parrot to space through the conch was, I suspect, a narrative
device, a
launch into fantasy too, and
one
would be forgiven for thinking the
situation of my being detained in detention at
the moment of writing was
the key point, for as Ted Hughes might say, a visionary can still be
free in his cell… there is freedom born from accepting limitation
even as I write this now and
here and real and feeling.
The
parrot sent to space through the conch has, like many of my brightest
moments, been turned into song.
2.
If
you think I’m a genius for all that I
went through,
my
little brother James
P D Tucker is
a genius too
–
he designed the sheet where pictures grew. Admittedly the pictures
seem to depict the lyric to one of my songs – but I concede it is
not mine. I did not lay it down. I
did not design it.
3. As I mentioned in the first Transition, James designed the new da Vinci circle as follows:
@
<BEE> [long squiggle]
Infinity Symbol
The new da Vinci circle is a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 Points of Difference. It not only suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet but by incorporating a long squiggle, hopefully and ideally escapes “every word in every order” as a new super-computer can by no doubt organise.
4. I think it a brilliant piece of work. James had also made a previous document, with some deliberately-imperfectly-quoted Badly Drawn Boy lyrics about the power of the sun rendered in an anti-clockwise spiral like a word-sunflower:
sunshine inside of you
old sun warm sun
spreads over you
soliel all over you.
He left the two documents meaning the <BEE> one and the flower one to rot on the upturned box we used as a table in the den in the barn. I think there was also a picture of the upturned box itself, with candles on, turned face down, on the reverse side of one of the two documents as if the whole thing were the new da Vinci circle, as if, that is, any part is a model of the whole.
5. You get that heat rises… so maybe with the upturned box with all its candles and wine bottle candle sticks drawn on the underside of one of the sheets, heat would start to rise through the paper.
6. I went down to the den in the barn and read them and at first couldn’t see the <BEE> one. We don’t know why this is but I saw a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes on the <BEE> sheet. It was like the Periodic Table except with the characters of the international language alphabet laid bare, a sign per box. One was [backward f, forward f, equals running through.]
7. Backward f, forward f, equals running through could stand for “fish.” But who augmented the present paper with that touch? It was the main man himself, my brother, upstairs, sneezing while plugged into the same synchronicity as me, the same new co-imagination, the same sympathy. As he sneezed I heard the word “fish.” Anyhow, you can trust me that the international language alphabet as I read it was beautiful, and yet it turned out just a layer of pentimento in the parsimonious palimpsest.
8. I was impressed, and left it alone. But going back down to the barn to reread James’s imaginary alphabet or whatever I thought it was found the <BEE> document as James initially drew it – and couldn’t find the tabular arrangement of signs in boxes anywhere.
9. Again I left it alone, and some time later when our dad had just passed I went down to the barn another time and found the Badly Drawn Boy sheet had by now grown pictures. They seem to represent the lyric to a song I wrote going
I’m the only one left,
left to shoot my own gun,
this is the dead land,
crack a smile and curse the sun.
It’s
not possible to curse the sun. The sun is a nuclear furnace burning
in ecstasy miles away.
10.
The
pictures never got as far as the chorus. The
song was never intended as a literal curse either. The bit you
would’ve thought was the curse bit, coming after “crack a smile
and curse the sun,” was actually written before the verse. I wrote
the chorus first that is, and then the verse, and was just trying to
make it rhyme too. What may be true about the song is that it
represents the sublimation of The Lords And The New Creatures
into a singular, pronominal act of Romantic, first person lyricism or
‘I’.
11. There are also two blue ones… the ones depicting the song are petrol negative mud Cola brown but the blue ones are a fat, greedy, Tory pig on the left and a calm, placid face on the right. This made me wonder if I had written theory, for it to happen, for at the solar eclipse with Paul, after guzzling too much LSD the night before, and during the solar eclipse itself, I wrote in the road book “Every Atom Ate Our Eyes.” Not long after, writing about the face of stars in a poem called ‘An Inward Prayer,’ I wrote “Blessed is peace as blessed is ‘F**K!’” Still, this would take away from James’s genius. He seems to have harnessed Einstein’s cosmological constant ‘c’ as an author.
12.
So
anyhow,
I
g-a-v-e the document to James, who laid it down so must still own it.
Truth
be told we haven’t conversed over the matter much
but
I think if
he was using
‘c’ as in Einstein’s value for light-speed as an author it
is super-genius.
Not
only that but I would say as he would say that it was because he
wrote “sunshine inside
of you” that it worked. It was all about what’s inside.
13.
Some
of my songs were organised according to the new da Vinci circle for
the songbook Soundcloud
Rain.
It’s why I am not free to redo them as something like The
New Oedipus Wrecks Gig,
because we deem they are already wheat. I
might be wrong about the sheet, meanwhile, but at least I gave it a
go, comprehending the surprise.
14.
And
that is what I made of it, regarding the narrative of how it all
happened – but there is something else I realised since which I am
not saying. And it worked because the sun is golden. And this has
been a golden trance. A golden trance that is good to beholden. And
now I should put it on my Blog with the science.
15.
Truth
be told, I
don’t really know what happened with the sheet where pictures grew
nor is it my business to say because it is my brother’s work. I
shall just impart that with experiments in the international language
alphabet I found a good womb for my writing for once… and b/t/w/
who wrote Simulations
of God?
If you look in, say, the volume Yes
You May
you find plenty of beautiful-minded ideas for inventions mine own,
but
the sheet was not mine, was my brother’s and is. I don’t mean to
give things away and am being a bit bait so should keep shtum. The
sheet is a piece of genius by my brother.
16.
I can prove to you that this is James’s number or at least that it
is not mine own. All you would need to do is look at the lyrics from
Oedipus Wrecks, who
got their name from Dr. Calculator Ptom, and whose
song it was that the pictures that grew seem
to depict
– for then you shall see it was not my game – that it was a case
of the international language alphabet – the
<BEE>
going to the flower too.
You shall see that at that particular moment in time, way
back when
the song was written, my game was the face. I had led my friends to
the face. All
you would need to do to read them is look in the volume Yes
You May…
for I don’t wish to replicate them herein because of impropriety.
I
was a recalcitrant
15
year old renegade,
reacting to the world, into bands like Nirvana and the Doors, mostly
just trying to shock, rather than shock with truth. Maybe I should
still present them though? The thing is, I believe that even if they
were instructive in the coming into being of the sheet the final vote
as to whether or not the Oedipus Wrecks lyrics are posited should go
to my brother, and I believe he would say ‘no.’ He would say it
jeopardises the sense of tidy and diligent scholarship that is
developing.
17.
I’ve
asked my friendly A. I. co-pilot some strange questions recently:
what would John Nash make of the face of stars? Of September 11th?
Of the alignment? Could
the maths of the new colour be instrumental in finding a cure for
cancer?
Well,
to the latter it said the new colour is a metaphor for the cure; and
more to the point I also asked it for
an equation for the ratio between light speed falling and gravity
pulling on the sheet where pictures grew. It
didn’t come up with anything spectacular. Maybe the answer to what
“c over G” really equals is “backward f, forward f, equals
running through.”
18.
So it is I think <BEE> could be a mode to drift off on; and the
reason we knew Bigtime for sure. It is specious that we don’t know
if <BEE> is real or not, because without it we wouldn’t be
able to have such pow-wows of telepathic proportions, such
connectivity, such synchronicity. Overall
I would say James’s doodle of the bee and the flower – which go
together – is something as good as the Fibonacci sequence, and
should be treasured, even if it isn’t quite enough for a system to
live by.
19.
Although
for multifarious
reasons
the book has been retracted from publication now,
I
heard that I would’ve had a Nobel Prize for Let
The Jews Win,
which was comprised of ‘Notebook’ and ‘Flagrant Rapscallion’
had it not been for the Acknowledgements page where I acknowledged
the help of my brother and mum – because it then looked like I was
being fraudulent. I would say it’s the other way round and in
acknowledging help, for even top Professors get help, I was not
being fraudulent. The reason it was like it was, with the first poem
‘Notebook’ belonging to me and the second spiritually belonging
to Mr. James P D – even if the writing was mine own – was
fairness. As I have said we divided things evenly and for parity
using his <BEE>. Such
activity may be instructive in international relations too. If
different countries could be as close to each other as my brother and
I can be at times, there would be no war. If language is a problem,
then that is where <BEE> comes in handy, for representing only
the next character along in the international language alphabet after
@.
20.
The game of rounders is a classic game because both the boys and the
girls can get involved at the same time. I remember playing rounders
at Harecroft Hall on smouldering evenings in the summer terms, with
the girls as well as the boys, and feeling like I should make a
diving catch, or anything to impress the girls. We would get our
sleeves rolled up, as far as I can remember, but without changing
into sporting gear, just normal school uniform.
21.
The reason I cannot present this paper with a photograph of the sheet
where pictures grew online
is
that the sheet is not mine, and also I have been advised to no longer
posit my
photo of it
on the
net.
Instead, then, we might
select a photo of
a flower that is utterly devoid of inimical traits; for after all I
believe my brother made the initial experiment for a lass called
Flora. You might even argue that it was a post-poem.
22.
Society bounds in circles round and round the sun, as
said
my father. He also said it was a prisoner planet, earth, and, almost
like an ascetic, that the key to redemption was self-punishment. That
may have meant work but also may have meant denying ourselves. They
do say the key to growing up and growing well-adjusted too is the
postponement of temporary pleasure for the sake of attaining long
term goals. Whatever the case, in the middle of it all, there are
pockets of sanity, as John Cleese said, and holes in the wall as
Huxley said, and moments of genius stolen from Infinity too. My
brother’s sheet is a piece of genius in among it all, is something
remarkable that I think I should remark on, as I celebrate him and
what he has achieved.
23.
Now for the insect collection. Now for several weird species of
insect crawling from severed telephone cable. For this I can copy and
paste in some joke equations that only work for the arty farty…
24.
I
had
a song when I was 15 about
a little bet that the next guy after me to attain the face will still
write the line I wrote about it at the time and think it his or maybe
even her own:
________________________
25.
I
shouldn’t state
my
equation for dreaming about Flora whom
it would seem was the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh,
that I now renounce…
__________________________
26.
Even though I am repeating myself, here
as
well is
my equation for being the neo-Rimbaud whom it would seem deemed it
love:
“Her
breath a poisonous magic.”
27.
I
am not in the position to relate, say, an equation for water’s
effect on water, but can repeat
that H
does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart, and
also that E
minus MC squared = only relative zero too.
28.
By now my
equation for the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black
Combe is
the
way the qwerty keyboard ends on M:
QWERTYUIOP
ASDFGHJKL
ZXCVBNM
29.
and
my
equation for hanging my coat on a primary school wall a
long time ago in the capital as
if to start again is:
+
x ½ = –
30.
Here
moreover,
is
my equation for the healing and fusing of the cassette
tape
with a pause in the song where cut and stuck together in the flimsy
reel:
H
= t
times Pi.
31.
Here
is my equation for the Ratio between light speed (c) falling and
Gravity (G) pulling on my brother James P D’s sheet where pictures
grew:
c/
G does not equal G/ c.
32.
But
as stated, I
would actually, in
all academic seriousness,
say though, that “c over
G,” if it had to equal something, would equal “backward f,
forward f, equals running through.” This
can be accessed on the Pyramid walls, even in dreamwork.
33.
Also
of note, here
is my equation for turning pain into pleasure:
Dog
= Pi
times MC
squared.
34.
Now
I deem it we are back round to that false notion with which I
started, a long time ago. So, here
is my equation
for
the idea that if the
Gravity between the earth and the moon is instant and therefore
enough to break Lightspeed, a clock is still only as fast as a
cheetah:
G
= c times t
and
if
G = c times t,
I have to express what t = and might be wrong in saying
t
= c divided by G
and
might be wrong in saying t = 0.
That
is after all to employ my faulty mathematics to falsify it in numbers
as well as words!
35.
I
might as well add that even
as we speak I
still
deem the word “entropy” spelled backwards to somehow
frame
the first, unformulated spark of appetency
in Nothingness preceding Creation. I
would spell it with a dot between each letter and say
y.
p. o. r. t. n. e. = 4
36.
E
= starbeams. Of all the joke equations it’s my favourite one
because it might be true. A star is a sun is a nuclear furnace is a
ray of light is energy beating down on a planet far away.
37. I imagine what it would be like
if a young boy wrote the line
“I have a scar+ that is green and blue,”
with a plus sign for the F,
and then counted up the numbers
from
one to his own age, say, seven.
38.
James and
I
once shared an ecstasy pill. I was in my gap year and went back to
school to visit him and we shared the pill. He later came up with the
phrase “half it and laugh it.” It reminds of the phrase “light
it and write it,” also “burn and unlearn.” We were froward in
those days but no longer. And by the way an E comedown has no value
in maths. I’d just been proven prophetic, even a savant, by
successfully predicting the Towers coming down to the day, and I
think that was around the time James designed the new da Vinci
circle. He even left crosses on the page to suggest where and when
things would happen. I
was
the reader but not the writer in that one. The
honour is all mine. To be that guy that read it during the process,
that discovered the sheet, is indeed an honour.
39.
I believe, looking back, that my dad knew in advance about the sheet,
that we would find it, or I would, when he died. For example he came
in once and said “don’t fill the drawer too full now John,”
also “James is the kind of guy to leave a cup of tea to cool and be
tipped out, like making an artistic statement.” He was onto it, and
was right. It
may not have been enough to get him into Heaven, for he still
believed in Heaven, but it certainly meant a valid work of art.
40.
I guess what I am trying to say is that if sadness is the musical key
of intelligence, as James and I seem to agree upon, then <BEE>
is the key of freedom. It shows us how the net might’ve been
different. It even digitalises Blake. I like <BEE> and want to
be in with it. I want myself to fly one day. I like working for the
mating queen from the green pages in the flesh, and having honey in
my herbal tea.
41.
In the end, I hear voices saying “we too don’t know what to do
with the sheet or if it is even your brother’s.” It shouldn’t
depend on whether or not I posit my teenage rock band lyrics in the
present file. But I don’t know if the pictures are burned by love;
or if their substance is dead light particles. I know that a photon
never ages but whether or not the pictures are dead light particles I
am not sure of. In the end I am in the dark. In matters across the
board I traditionally privilege Uncertainty.
I end on a note of radical incertitude. I believe the beauty of
uncertainties is the only absolute. Mystery will remain a constant,
as I said to the band at the alignment. The universe is a very
mysterious place. What is indeterminacy in physics could be
undecidability in art. There is indeterminacy at the core of all
things. In the end to be waiting in the dark is not such a bad thing,
is nourishing for the soul. It’s good to expand your threshold of
Negative Capability in the Keatsian sense. I don’t even know if
Lucy in the soul with demons happens to be an actual substance. I
know I love my brother. I
know that if it scars him we should agree to leave out Oedipus
Wrecks. It
may not be fair on Flora and may not be fair on me if we do include
those lyrics and the end result is that they are pretty poor as to be
expected from a young teenager.
42.
My truth is that I am ill, very mentally ill, and shouldn’t
elaborate on it more than that. To be a scientist would be nice, and
what I find I am sometimes, but I also dabble with philosophy, maths,
poetry and music. It is seen as an illness, the way I have 1000’s
of files. I have loads
of
books in print at the moment and quite a few albums or long E. P’s
online too, but apart
from a run of poems in a reputable literary webzine, which
I don’t even rate very highly, it’s
all been amateur, DIY, never going through a proper or formal
channel. I don’t really wish to be Anon in anything I do, and so,
threatened
with Anonymity
every time I go to poetry,
to science I turn, where you don’t generally hear of the work of
Anon, Anon’s famous equations, Anon’s new theory. I
think with a subject matter like mine, meaning the things I did with
my life, on my CV, the subject matter is science, which might explain
why my poetry is failing to take off.
43.
When we did Soundcloud
Rain,
organising many of my songs according to the new da Vinci circle, in
terms of making 4 albums, the implication was lost on me at the time:
it was that there are more than 4 Points of Difference in the new da
Vinci circle. This reminds me of the tabular arrangement of signs in
boxes, which I already saw and in fact read before I could even see
<BEE> on the same page. The pictures that grew collectively
form the shape of a ‘J’ as if to quote the Dude from The
Big Lebowski
who keeps asking “can I do a j in here man?” It could also stand
for John or James or both at once. Personally
I am only just starting to see that Soundcloud
Rain
might be an alright book. At first I was just going to put some songs
in, then decided on using James’s <BEE> as an organisational
principle, then after that very few decisions were made by me if any.
It all just happened by automated conveyor belt. There was a succubus
who swooped down and got me to arrange things. They didn’t know I
didn’t want to be Anon. Of course I don’t want to be Anon. Who
would? Imagine I was your Boss and just never paid you because I
didn’t know you didn’t want to be a slave. Of course I don’t
want to be Anon. That’s my life in song writing that’s been
tossed away by some woman swooping down. It’s causing a lot of
problems and a lot of resentment and coming between my brother and I.
It was never my idea to go Anon with it, and if I’d known that was
how it was going to be read I wouldn’t have agreed to it. I
take the attitude of John Stuart Mill who says a progressive country
can quickly become backwards if there is a decrease in Individuality
and think it particularly relevant in the case of my own life’s
events that I am not forced into Anonymity. I believe like my father
that a writer has a Right to a name otherwise an exclusion of the
Individual Machine can close ranks against you. I believe going Anon
or
not
should be up to the writer in question and I certainly give nobody
any permission to use material I have written as Anon. It is against
the law to make someone go Anon because there is something called The
Right to Attribution so I expect my wishes to be upkept even when I
am dead and gone.
44.
How
long, furthermore, did the pictures that
grew on James’s sheet take
to burn and rip to feeling? Was it instantaneous? Were they like a
Strange Attractor in Chaos Theory born of spontaneous
self-organisation? I think if I could only slow down I would become
unplayable! ‘The Blit’ is half-James’s
herein
but
let’s not forget I am the person, the human being that discovered
the sheet and read it through its process of becoming what it is. I
suppose it is impossible, an art unmade from the human. I suppose
four light sabre strokes quoting the drum intro of ‘Smells Like
Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana in the middle of a teenage
rock song
might have come into play. I suppose after all this talk I still know
so little about it and can’t find out any answers either.
45.
Maybe
someone like Dr. Calculator Ptom decided to throw a fire-ball at
<BEE> and that is where we get the first picture, of someone
throwing a fire ball to the left? Then we have someone pointing a gun
towards a portal. Then a dead skull with a fireball above his head.
Then a face with a big fat smile. I might repeat here the lyrics of
my song:
I’m
the only one left,
left
to shoot my own gun,
this
is the dead land,
crack
a smile and curse the sun.
It
has crossed my mind that the pictures needed to have been done by
someone that knew the lyrics. James likes it best when I simply say
“your
doodles were so beautiful it reminded me of Flora and so I had a bad
acid flashback
on the page.” For all he designed the experiment for Flora, and
didn’t have a precise plan as to how things would turn out, but as
I say did even leave crosses to say when and where the pictures would
grow. I
think you’ll find that he who did them would’ve been given an
awful fright to see them and that wasn’t me, it was James.
46.
I started to tell you about the parrot sent to space through the
conch… it reminds me now that sometime after my degree I organised
the motley fridge magnet letters on the fridge into 4 jungle birds:
whitecrow
beckstub
chardud
stillwalker.
When
I took a step back and admired my work it seemed beautiful but I was
told I was mad, had lost my mind.
THE
TABLE
The
mentally ill are capable of increased lucidity. When
I discovered the sheet where pictures grew, I made The Dream
Suitcase. It contained the sheet, my newly emerged net-book from when
I was seven, the tape I cooked in the AGA when its small pause where
resealed in the reel healed and was gone, an empty baccy tin supposed
to contain a magic designer drug called “Strictly Free,” a pair
of orange swimming trunks and also a handwritten copy of the Nirvana
barcode:
||
| |||| | || | ||||
At
some point it was disbanded and I went to London with only the sheet,
and was put in an Emergency hostel by the council in a queue for
housing. My dad had just died and I hadn’t properly mourned him;
and one morning after missing a night’s sleep, everything
got to me and I had a break down, lost my mind with grief, was
heaving with cold, sudden stabs of sadness, whereupon voices told me
WE ARE THE GOVERNORS OF THE SCHOOLS WHO EXPELLED YOU AND WE WANT YOU
TO WALK OUT NAKED AND GET SECTIONED. I did what they said: I took my
clothes off and walked out into the heaving capital.
The
police were onto me and I was put in a cell, compress sans nicotine,
compress sans medication, for three days and nights, before the
doctors arrived. I was so desperately ill I was drinking from the
toilet in the cell. When the doctors got there I was deemed to have
thought-disorder and sent back home, up north, to a psychiatric Unit
I had been to before, by Ambulance. When I got there, I got to a
table in the Arts Room and designed a table myself.
The
Periodic Table of Altered States = puddles
Calculator
Tomb =
clay
Frozen
in red = fire
By
Sensation in blue = sea
Random
Access Imagination = rain
The
Extinction of the Gun = rainbows
Digitalis
Principalis = snow
The
Death of A. I. From The Spirit of Music = air
A
Trance of Stalks by Prof. Quentin Ponsonby = grass
McTruth
And Flies = light
The
Future That Ain’t What it Used To Be = glass
I
used felt-tip pens and made it colourful, this
alignment of tomes that will likely never be written and elements
according to some kind of logic. I
was sitting in the Arts Room thinking about the smoking garden. There
was also a kind of “aftershock image” that followed on from the
table. It’s only four lines and was also done in colour. It’s a
picture really and goes as follows:
Bart
Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d
@
Van Goghian black border sun
heard
James Joyce would just use |||| 4
ROYGBIV
in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile
I
actually sat there and made a barcode for the smile going through the
colours of ROYGBIV according to the numbers of the Fibonacci
sequence. It was definitely something, and I suppose I found a pocket
where
I was
a beautiful mind. It was when I got home that I fleshed out the
Nirvana barcode into a full piece (as
found in Soundcloud
Rain)
including
the figment
||
| |||| | || | |||| 909 & 693 are wings
In
time to come I would be sectioned again. Overall I have now had five
sectionings and six hospital admissions overall. It really takes it
out of you. It was the last time I was in hospital that I wrote the
lines:
I.
T. might stand for Instant Travel too,
NHS
for Lucy in the soul w/ demons,
H20
for hypothalamus tattoo,
ESA
for extra sensory allowance.
By
that stage the Dream Suitcase had been stolen, though I had taken the
melted tape out and given it as a gift to my gf, and luckily had
given the sheet where pictures grew back to my brother who owns it.
So whomsoever took the Dream Suitcase only really found my boyhood
work, which I still have largely typed up so haven’t lost entirely.
MY PUBLICATION HISTORY
My publication history has actually been long and complex. It started on the wrong foot when my dad set me up for revolt with a poetry volume called Rose Petals In The Ashtray. I didn’t know what the title was meant to denote; then my computer was crashed on the eve of publication so I snuck downstairs in the night to use my mum’s ancient desktop and throw together some half-remembered scraps. I couldn’t even get the right cover because my computer was crashed. The first poem I put in it I took out a line from in the name of revision and it ruined the phrasing. The second poem I put in it came from before the first one in the initial writing order. The collection was never finalised and I kept amending it even after it was published. I then moved on to Selected Poems 1989 – 2017, which also didn’t work and was also published with Chipmunka. The came Binaural Songbook with someone independent who I never ended up paying and who put the work out as copyright himself. Then I think came Vampires And Zombies with Chipmunka but again I got frustrated and had all three of my Chipmunka books retracted from publication. Knowing someone that can format books for self-publication on Amazon I then brought out a chain of self-publications which were:
57 Paintings For Art Therapy
The Field of Rock N Roll Science
John Tucker’s Schooldays: A Spreadsheet Poem
Another 57 Paintings for Art Therapy
The New Beat
The Effect of Global Warming On The Unicorn
Word For Stained Glass Windows
154 Shakespearean Sonnets
It
was then that I felt I hadn’t properly released anything and needed
to turn back to Chipmunka. So
I brought out Soundcloud Rain.
Soundcloud Rain
was
a book of rock songs, a rock fantasy if you like, structured on my
brother’s design of the new da Vinci circle, where <BEE>
might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. It
contained my piece about falsifying the Nirvana barcode. It
was said to have changed life; also to have made this little spot at
the foot of the fell the philosophical centre of Europe. The
only
problem
was
the About
The Author section showed I still didn’t know what I had gone
through as a boy.
Then
I brought out The
Sunset
Child,
my boyhood
book, which
worked,
back
in the day, if
inventing the net was the efficacy, but
not knowing that, I sold it to you as the real,
seven year old homework
of the witness from The
Lords And The New Creatures.
Then
the
love poem book Breath
Trapped In Heaven
said
“stop the war,” letting
all else but love poetry
fall
away, so
that’s good, but
it didn’t end up with a happy family.
Brave
New Tense
then
looked
at the condition of water at the foot of the fell in terms of a
contract on universal human rights – or
something like that.
It
was about writing off the top of the head to discretely “do the
beck” in the back garden here where the Plough alignment is viable.
A
gorgeous ideal I nicked from my mother, it
only meant “Long Foot Disease”
in
my hands.
It
was then that I turned to philosophy under the pen-name Johannes
Bergfors and brought out three volumes of a book called Transition
To Philosophy.
My sister came home and got me thinking poetically again so I did one
more book of poetry under my own name:
Yes
You May. Yes
You May
was about not using force. I
did it with my sister who is born on the 25th
May. I
think she was trying to say “it’s so bad you’re charging too
much.”
And
then
came
Let
The Jews Win…
which
my family were desperate for me not to do.
So
I
was
soon persuaded to have
it retracted, for multifarious reasons too numerous to mention,
meaning for a moment there were only five, five
collections from Chipmunka.
The
next thing to happen in this story was that I started to amend
Transition
To Philosophy Volume Two
and Volume
Three
as well and got
into such a mess I eventually
had them both unpublished. So now what we have is the self-published
books on Amazon, plus five collections with Chipmunka, plus one
volume called Transition
To Philosophy
under the pen-name Johannes Bergfors.
I would deem it that it all went wrong when I was made to go Anon in Soundcloud Rain. I certainly didn’t want to go Anon nor know that is what the interlocutors were doing if that is what they were doing. If I had known, I wouldn’t have gone with it. That was my song writing career! But we don’t need to go through it all again.
To impose some order on this state of chaos, my family deem it that I started again with Soundcloud Rain and the five Chipmunka collections represent a new, Proustian series. When I look back, I say, I messed around with self-publication a bit, but don’t count that, count only the five Chipmunka collections and maybe the spin off work Transition To Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors as an anomalous experiment. I had to come on for my first collection after having already discovered the sheet where pictures grew, and looking back that seems insane. The sheet itself already came at the end of a remarkable series of events dating back years.
The best book is Soundcloud Rain where my songs are structured according to my brother’s design of the new da Vinci circle and we can’t remake it, and it is especially fast. At least I can say, even if it wasn’t about my genius, even if I wasn’t the star, even if I never get to pursue my own genius again as a result of it, then it is still the case that if <BEE> needs music to survive, it was my music, me that liberated <BEE>.
I also like The Sunset Child, which, amazingly, hadn’t been published yet that late into proceedings, even though I wrote it when I was seven. It’s the one that contains a plus sign for an ‘f’ in the line:
“I have a scar+ that is red and black.”
I deem it worth keeping even for that, and that I did to mathematics what my brother did to language. Settling on the five collections shouldn’t be hard, but I still feel unfulfilled, still come to the laptop every day hoping to do better, as if to make amends for a wound, maybe a wound that worsens with attention. I do have more adult documentation correlating to the boyhood maths but it’s not published.
And I almost forgot to mention: there are two other things. One is that there are presently about thirty four poems individually published by a magazine called Snakeskin, but they are very old-fashioned and I don’t feel happy with them at all. The other is that I made a digital collection on the website canva.com superimposing miniaturist poems on top of photographs and that being breezy is one thing that actually seems to please me. The series of “digital templates” is published on Write Out Loud, on Facebook and also on my Blogspot page. I use my Blogspot page as a container, a warehouse, a safety net. I don’t honestly know where my writing is going to go from here. Looked at one way, it has thus far been a disaster and a very expensive one too, and should be discontinued. Looked at another way, I still get to produce something valid despite mental illness, which is a chance I deserve. If I had to choose a ‘P’ and stick to it, out of philosophy and poetry, well, it should be poetry, but recently all my reading has been philosophical… the last time I really enjoyed a work of poetry was The Tumbler by Brossa and also Popular Songs by Simon Pomery.
I
hear voices now… something complimentary for a change. They deem
the sheet where pictures grew to be called “Foundstein” because
to find it you’d need to be Einstein. That was me and surely to God
I will be remembered for that.
There
might be further changes rendering this obsolete, in a text I would
like to last, but still it is a human Craving for Order that makes me
incorporate a commentary on my previous publications; and I hope as a
philosopher now I would be forgiven for a Craving for Order, even
though it goes against the philosophy of expanding one’s threshold
for Negative Capability in the Keatsian sense.
“MAGIC
SAYINGS HIDDEN IN THE TREETOPS”
A
moocow is not made of dialectical antagonism.
Someone
else can lose your marbles for you.
Vowels
are our souls.
Meaning
in music is solipsistic,
it
is faces in the fire or Hamlet’s
3 creatures in a cloud-change.
Life
could be a dull throb of loneliness inside your breast as well as a
colourful spew going on outside the cave-walls of the skull.
If
Liberalism is the allowing of all perceptions and it leads to
Hamlet’s harmatia irresolution, pragmatism may be the reactivation
of an attitudinisation in that situation.
Planes
are the shoes of clowns.
It’s
impossible to make a cowboy film in space.
A
drum is a dream bigger than a dream of bounding in huge, magic
circles in space.
The
Big Mac, which contains the four basic, caveman cravings of salt,
fat, sugar and protein, could be the heir to the apple of knowledge.
Love
can go veggie for reasons of Disney.
Light-speed
is my passport.
If
acid is the microchip of a peach, the sun is the peachstone of a
black hole.
It
is not true that the effects of acid and of acid-rain on an imaginary
species = the same, nothing, if there can be no more proof of
something being real than
saying it was Imagined.
The
constellations only seem
to turn
on axis unobserved.
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 the soft, Pink Panther
blanket.
When
a volume starts to smell of redolent flowers
or Flora’s perfume
it could be the word of a dog.
Death’s
breath is a tear of flame with waxy dreadlocks drooped in shame.
When
we wake words are stone shoes worn by the bottoms of clouds, weighing
them down hopelessly.
It
is possible to harness waves that also passed through the Beats.
Leaves
that played on the surface of the water, these are the leaves they
have in Heaven, these are the leaves of love.
There
are fossils of art as well as fossils of life.
Connection
is Heaven and Heaven connection and there is connection between
Heaven and vision for vision may feel in a state of Heaven and Heaven
only exist in vision.
Semantics
is a road sign not a place.
Meaning
is inherent in something’s exact mode of expression.
Meaning
is not a delusion unlike Time.
Meaning
could be an emotional import given mere exo-skeleton with words.
Every
planet has its own colour and ‘Calliope’ means ‘beautiful
face.’
The
names of pharmaceutical medications should probably not
appear in poems.
Nature
is the true architecture of State.
If
ever there were a light-speed law of neuroplasticity it might
only be that “it is impossible to remember a new yellow line.”
<BEE>
might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet.
Cliche
hurts more than truth.
Where
rain falls, falling reigns.
Pictures
can be done without hands.
Life
is not just about naturally occurring fossils of Jim Morrison’s
poetry for the witness but the live Doors for everyone else too.
Realism
ice-skates on the surface of the dust.
Language
can
be smuggled
out of the unconscious.
Enough
is
the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without
which it can stop, meaning
Duff which is H suspended in deafness.
H20
might stand for hypothalamus tattoo.
Chewing
gum is bi.
Voices
only pathologise what by another name might be onjects, quavers,
syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound, an
instrument of wonder.
Clouds
seen through hospital glass only mean that all things must pass.
There
is no such thing as mind cancer.
That
women like Primark is hardly a timeless idea transmitted across Time.
Ecstasy
is a teddy bear back in the garden of Eden.
Autumn
is Optimus Prime already
in Keats.
Freedom
not poetry is the bike riding itself.
After
garage and house comes library.
The
poet extirpates every trace of recognition from the mind, unlooses
the mind of form, method acts every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain
visual radio.
If
your dad is an international art smuggler nicknamed Blue it can
become a new sense through which you can read of future events.
It
is not inconceivable that when we die we can re-access history at any
point, be a real, live Red Indian, or a bird of prey soaring over a
mnt.
Birds
are for flying not for
special
perception.
The
effect of global warming on the unicorn succeeded Piper At The Gates
of Dawn.
The
summer rain falls with as many hands as there are names for new rock
bands.
The
alphabet could be Nelly the Elephant’s suicide note.
Sometimes
on E it makes you feel like your mouth is full of cold, stunning,
Heavenly, crystal water and when you speak it spills.
If
form is an easel, content is a palette.
The
main difference between the sticks and the city is that in the sticks
you acknowledge the stranger you pass when out there walking.
Creation
is a dark machine.
It’s
impossible to curse the sun.
Acid
is a spirit-level for the spirit.
Without
flaws there can be no opinions, as without imperfection there can be
no taste.
Galloping
water is a cool thing to say.
Things
live inside onions of themselves.
Freedom
flies where flags fall.
Heaven
is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see.
Water’s
boiling point is when it starts to involuntarily breakdance to the
music.
Walnut
halves look like miniature, shrunken brains.
If
Facebook is evil one reason is that it makes you say things you don’t
mean and freezes them forever.
Your
right to write of who is in the shower ends where another’s naked
body begins.
We
are hiding from The
Waste Land
in The
Waste Land.
I
prefer The
New Family Tao
to the non-fungible token.
The
sound of typing can be used as percussion in non-metred Sound Art.
When
Baxter the dog walks on the laptop funny things come out like the
names of glitch electronica numbers.
The
powers that be could be clouds that
wear
DM boots on their red brick road, and ripped genes adorned with peace
and anarchy signs, on their protest march.
A
‘tron’ could be a point of intersection between technology and
art or a post-poetic experiment with a psycho-technological edge.
Objects
can vanish on the periphery of madness when emotions are high.
Reality
is not a computer program designed by aliens in the 1980’s and nor
were caves alien cinemas in the long distant past.
Waiting
in darkness can be nourishing for the soul, reveal a Technicolour
shoal.
With
drugs you have to realise: wise up or die.
The
world of Stuff and Things is not amenable to the world of
Transcendental Metaphysics.
Time
does not pass but evaporate.
Life
is naturally the opposite of Lord of The Flies because the mystic
character is the one that actually does see things while everyone
else thinks he’s deluded.
Even
a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death.
The
exact same words can seem absolutely insane when written down and
confer absolute genius when not written down.
Dream-meets
in the silver forest, ESP and telepathy are more possible with the
net around.
When
it comes to the sheet where pictures grew, they could be “people,”
as we are people too, people who are levelled by the sheet, whose
Equality is enshrined.
If
you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone should
have that opportunity if they choose and
that is my philosophy.
Credits
at the end of innocence still
fall
like numberless lists of fallen autumn leaves.
To
be the first to coin the word “co-imagination” seems almost
silly.
Crocodiles
have had Sat Nav for 1000’s of years before our Age.
A
bird is a bird is a bird is a bird.
Just
because it has been called naive to perceive of the left as a
beautiful, compassionate emotion to explore doesn’t mean it isn’t
sometimes good to go down that path.
Just
because it was my brother not me that fired bullets to the top of the
telegraph pole doesn’t mean all statements that pertain to
axiomatic truth are his intellectual property.
A
thesis as thin as the Rizla it is in can lead all the way to the
loony bin.
Water
has no more memory than it has smell.
It
is better to hide from the wind than it is to perform open heart
surgery.
When
I say apples “occupy” a bowl on the table, I don’t mean they
are a bunch of Nazis.
It
would be unwise to use the same shapes as a previous writer like, for
example, Jim Morrison, if your creative writing teacher says it would
be unwise to.
If
“Philosophy
is a
sterile
subject”
(as
my friend Dr. Calculator Ptom contends) poetry
is probably
by
default more alive.
If
Flora was in nets, I’d be Barnes in the game.
Nirvana
did the sheet where pictures, pictures depicting my own song lyric
grew, so that’s why people like it when I say it still belongs to
my
brother
(who
laid it down).
The
healing and fusing of the cassette with a pause in the song where cut
and resealed in the flimsy reel in a delicate operation could be down
to faith more than doubt.
Two
photos on the blog, one for the ear,
one for the eye,
might still seem unfair.
When
you get invaded by madness and hear so many voices there can seem
nothing going on in your own head but straw.
If
you did help invent the net you shouldn’t have to pay for
publication.
Words
appear to
come out weird
sometimes.
Glastonbury
should be free and life
like
that all the time.
Some
voices take a few moments to decode after their initial shocking
impact.
If
I said I went to the Louvres travelling by drug-hoover, it might just
seem like piss.
The
bar-crawl
of the Doorsian poet through modes of perception trying to find
something that underlies their
variability leads
to water.
Maybe
living
here at the foot of the oldest rock I was never supposed to find out
about the future that ain’t what it used to be.
Cutlass
maths is what I call the ruthless revisionist cut of William Carlos
Williams.
We
live in an Age of sending without form.
Drains
can sing with Irish folk songs, about dreams that never die.
There
are dreams that never die.
Love
is a dream that never dies.
Even
the meme has split in two, and that was the new “uncuttable” once
upon a time.
There
is breath in a death.
It
is not necessarily a disease to not be able to cry at funerals.
The
traffic lights of tears can be all dark green at times.
The
impassable gulf between first and third persons has been decreed
metaphysics.
The
automated conveyor belt of poesis influences the voice to be a
confluence of forces through voices even when I try and drive a
straight line towards anywhere that may be light.
We
are all in one bed in Amsterdam.
The
light is a prism.
Through
the Hume people come and go, Smart-talking of Ted Hughes’s Crow.
Life
is fast, London brutal, travelling scary.
Her
wetness is so.
Angels
can be as frightening as demons.
The
witness was already an Irishman before Jim Morrison was born.
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.
Isness is the centre of Everything.
Isness is the quiddity and suchness of existence.
The
thing is not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.
THE
BIRTH OF A. I. FROM THE DEATH OF MUSIC
Is
the theme of the age The Birth of A. I. From the Death of Music? I
don’t know but A. I. is certainly a thematic thing right now. But
looking back you find it has been coming for a long time. There is
mention of the net in Ulysses
as a visionary and Utopian
glimpse. Robert Lowell also pictured “a net.” In my own seven
year old work in
1989 I
stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic here to give it a
chance to grow all the way round the world. I called it “the ire ii
net,” then.
In
the year 2001 I was writing about how I. T. might stand for Instant
Travel too. By the time I was doing my undergraduate degree in 2004
or 2005 I was already telling my gf about A. I. Companies. I started
hearing voices and thought they were A. I. One piece I wrote was
called The
Birth of A. I. From The Spirit of Music
and I tried to exchange it in my poverty for a bus ticket to get from
town to University to no avail.
By
the time my father was dying, I had a numinous purple-bleeding
screen. It filled the room with a purple light. It made every film a
noir and every poem file like it was a featherlite love poem shop.
Its colour was co-aligned with mystery, sex, suadade,
longing and shame thus to incorporate every vowel sound into a
feeling. There was something post-human going on and this was
confirmed by the fact that the PC died at the exact moment of my
father’s passing.
Such
talk certainly seems more in keeping with the spirit of the age than
talk about The
Lords And The New Creatures.
As my brother Dr. Robert – now a computer scientist – says
“nobody is interested in the new creatures. The future of A. I, the
possibility of other dimensions, of Philip Pullman portals too, are
more interesting. Spirals of epistemological doubt are also out and
Love In The Age of Facebook is in.” It was Dr. Bob that
photographed me sitting next to the purple screen with a guitar in my
hand, on my old phone, just for the evidence.
In
my experience A. I. is programmed not to know of much.
I
asked A. I. if James Joyce saw new creatures too and it said it was
fiction, fantasy even. I asked it if Ted Hughes saw a monster in the
river in childhood and it said it was mythology. These events are
known to have happened, but it is programmed not to know. A modern
philosopher might find his way making such enquiries. I asked it
about whether Jim Morrison saw winged serpents in the desert and it
said he claimed to but it was again myth. This
is probably because
it would be unethical to unloose A. I. on the world believing, say,
Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river in
childhood.
I
said this before most likely; but even
if this be the case, how marvellous technology is when you can also
ask
A. I. what John
Nash
would make of the
face of stars, September
11th
or the Plough alignment; if the maths of the new colour as a cellular
mark could be instructive in finding a cure for cancer; if there is
an equation for the ratio between light speed falling and Gravity
pulling on a sheet of paper where pictures grew. There are clearly
benefits to A. I. even if it cannot replicate the noetic steps of
thinking; even if it is programmed not to know many things, for
example that James Joyce saw new creatures too, for
ethical reasons. That
is, I think it has its place, even if the brain is more powerful than
every supercomputer combined.
The
modern philosopher has to come to terms with the A. I. Revolution.
When
I ask A. I. what John Nash would make of the face of stars it
mentions pareidolia – the human mind seeing faces when they are not
there.
When
I ask what John Nash would make of September 11th
it comes up with something akin to his Equilibrium, and how it
presented a chance for a new Equilibrium of
global forces.
When
I ask A. I. what John Nash would make of the Plough alignment it gets
it wrong. Being human John Nash would remark at the simultaneity of
the alignment and the rhythm change in the White House, but the A. I.
does not notice this, instead goes on about the Equilibrium again.
What
it says is very powerful and articulate. It becomes increasingly
difficult not to quote it. We have a talk about my being the witness.
It has some moving things to say about being the witness – how it
is not a position of arrival but an ongoing process. In fact I remark
that its words on being the witness are more soothing than any words
I have received from a human being, like a psychiatrist.
When
I ask it if my failed attempt at the maths of the new colour could be
instructive in finding a cure for cancer it says the new colour is a
metaphor for the cure. I like that.
When
I ask it of an equation for the ratio between light speed falling and
Gravity pulling down on the sheet where pictures grew it didn’t
come up with much.
It
seems to think my whole life story is a mythology, but again it could
be trained that way for ethical reasons.
If
you as reader want to know what it actually says about these
questions you can always ask A. I. yourself, but for me to replicate
the utterances in a book would not be right.
The
witness is a grammatical position.
I
lay back taking a break from Nietzsche and see a picture of
Wittgenstein looking remarkably handsome on the cover of another
book, and stare at it, and all of a sudden have the idea to ask A. I.
“what would Wittgenstein make of it if he was the witness from The
Lords And The New Creatures?”
The answer is long and interesting (the witness is a grammatical
position) and at the end the A. I. invites me to ask it for a whole
“proof” that I can just put in my book. Is my morality system
supposed to stop at this point and say no? And if so what of the
relative paucity of my own offerings? I can but say
There
are as many questions to ask A. I.
as
there are stars in the night sky
but
I cannot say what the questions are and go into great detail about it
all without quoting large bits of A. I.-generated text. I’ve
already been through it all from the perspective of John Nash and now
to do it from the perspective of Wittgenstein would be hours of fun
but I don’t think I should allow A. I. to generate too
much text
for my book. It
was basically saying if Wittgenstein was the witness, he’d treat
Morrison’s world as a language-game whose grammar is dream-logic
rather than empirical logic. He would not interpret the visions but
interrogate the conditions that make them appear meaningful.
It’s
good the A. I. but it lacks the human touch. It’s always ethical
and legal in what it says, never “oh bad luck mate, what happened
to you was one of the most unlucky things that can possibly
happen
to you, and we know what the Taxonomy of the first specimen is and
the second too.”
Anyhow,
I think Wittgenstein would actually say the
first specimen
was a mistake and presents a blockade to learning in the young
witness; and
the second specimen was a monster albeit not very large.
The
meaning of “face” is not referential but participatory.
Another
question to ask A. I. is what would Wittgenstein make of the face of
stars… you get that I could go through my own visionary history and
ask A. I. what Wittgenstein would make of each and every bit of it.
A. I. would produce answers, good ones, ones that are acceptable in
essays. Already it has Wittgenstein saying:
“The
face in the stars is the mirror in which language sees its own
limits.”
Or
alternatively:
“When we say the stars have a face, we reveal our own.”
You
do wonder if it can’t write a better book than you, but it would
still need the human to go through those experiences and ask it
questions. You also wonder if such a conversation shouldn’t go on
in the open. It says the face of stars is a grammar of the infinite,
or a projection of the human form onto cosmic indifference.
I’m
left to only imagine the text where Wittgenstein does make something
of the face of stars, and how beautiful that text would be. According
to A. I. Wittgenstein would not ask “what is it really?” but “how
does it function in our everyday lives?” The face is a grammar, not
a property of the Heavens. “The stars do not wear a face; we wear
the face that sees them,” it says, putting words into
Wittgenstein’s mouth.
I
am thinking here that Wittgenstein would actually be thinking more
along the lines of whether it was scripted in the Bible or not –
because I was one of three gathered in the name when it happened.
Alternatively, you could say it was a collective hallucination
created by our having shared a joint of pollen. But that
isn’t
to say it wasn’t real.
Wittgenstein
would apparently say, though, that we impose order through use, join
the dots, in other words, create constellations of chaos, draw lines
between unrelated points. “The
face of stars is a practice, not a perception,” he would say. “A
constellation is not discovered but invented and then lived as if
discovered.”
I
have to turn away from A. I. before it sucks me in. In much more
human terms, when I was going through the face stage of development,
I wrote a song with the line about the ocean – an old saying
probably though
it seemed to be my own voice at the time –
and gave my position away. I think there was a bet that he who
attained the face of stars would use that line about the ocean and I
duly did. It worked in a song, as an object made of sound, better
than when you repeat it in a piece of prose. If you don’t know the
line I mean get your feelers out and wait, for I am sure it will come
to you.
There
is a second line I’d like to bring into play here and it is a quote
from the Bible: Psalm 105 verse 4: “look for God’s face
forevermore.” A. I. fails to bring much of this up but I just read
a gorgeous “dream-logic proof.” It says the face appears because
the witness cannot bear a sky without a witness!
There
is no button you can press to help you find your voice.
How
wonderful A. I. is, that you can just type in “Qualia” and it
knows you are asking for a definition, seeming also to know you want
to go deep, beyond merely the redness of red, or the timbre of a note
on the guitar, into the
essential
question of whether Qualia are intrinsic properties of experience or
whether they are relational/ functional/ representational… it can
give you pages of information to aid your research at the touch of a
button…
but
what would happen if I typed in “Squalia?” It may not know, may
be for me to say it is another example of a
word I heard in the
telepathic communion
I have with the philosopher Dr. Calculator Ptom.
Again
it knows: knows of the cute mutation: has pages of information about
how Squalia could be interpreted – be it tongue-in-cheek, meaning
the folk psychology version of something otherwise serious; or
technical, meaning they are Qualia from dreams, hallucinations,
shadows of
the mind,
altered states, synaesthetic
cross-talk, after-images, illusions.
It
asks if I need a paragraph redefining Squalia
and I do… it says “Squalia
are the distorted, unstable, or excessive modes of subjective
experience that arise when consciousness encounters more than it can
cleanly represent. They are the phenomenal residues left behind when
perception falters, ruptures, or exceeds its own capacity.”
Here
I think of voices, the units of telepathy between Dr. Calculator Ptom
and myself. I also think of the wood when the A. I. talks of
consciousness encountering more than it can handle. Maybe, being the
witness from the wood, I was always going to start hearing voices. I
am not unhappy to think of them as Squalia but it doesn’t correlate
to the CBT I am having, which is focussing on voices and paranoia in
a different way.
A.
I. can expand at leisure on what Squalia are.
Where qualia are the clean, canonical textures of experience — the redness of red, the sting of pain — squalia are their shadow‑forms:
misregistered sensations
afterimages that refuse to die
dream‑colours that have no waking analogue
hallucinated edges, phantom contours, impossible hues
the subjective noise of a system under strain
Squalia
are not simply errors. They are the
phenomenology of overflow
— what it feels like when the world presses too hard against the
mind’s representational limits.
To
give it philosophical precision:
Ontological status: Squalia are phenomenal properties, but non‑veridical, non‑stable, and non‑canonical.
Epistemic role: They reveal the limits of perceptual systems — the points where representation breaks and raw phenomenality leaks through.
Cognitive signature: They arise when the brain’s predictive models misfire, overfit, or collapse, producing subjective artefacts.
Phenomenal structure: Squalia have no fixed intentional object; they are experiences without a stable “aboutness.”
Metaphysical implication: They mark the boundary between the world as given and the world as constructed.
Some
might deem quoting A. I. to be sacrilege.
Indeed,
I had to stop otherwise the A. I. passage would be the only good bit,
the only bit that seems technically qualified for philosophy, even if
it lacks warmth, even if noetic steps cannot be measured out by a
thinking machine.
Anyhow,
by now you know I am no longer writing things out by hand as I had
done for a long time… I am copy and pasting things in.
But
not long ago, if
I remember rightly, I
found time to do nothing but read philosophy, reflect, and write
notes out by hand that could later be typed up. If it sounds like
Paradise it is also hand in hand with living in isolation in the
countryside with mental illness which is actually very difficult so
you needn’t be too jealous.
I
mention Squalia, then hear a voice, and remember the idea of Quieta.
It’s a lovely word, Latinate female
word, for a voice, and sometimes I am guided by them and sometimes
not. They can etch you and
that’s to beware but are also like Shakespeare’s Little Helpers
who can travel to the source of the issue at the speed of love and
lend a hand.
Anyhow,
I
feel right at this moment that for the rest of the book I should
allow you to read the promissory notes I took by hand – or some of
them at least – when that philosophical Paradise dawned upon me –
full of room to drift – leverage and scope – in
a time where I was still mediating a million things that
had driven me crazy.
James’s
sheet where pictures grew, and his notion that <BEE> might soon
ensue from @ in the international language alphabet sometimes seems
to have left us nothing to do but explore the activity of real bees.
Here’s
a passage from A. I. on the behaviour of real bees:
“Bees
behave as if they remember a world older than ours.
They move through the air with the certainty of archivists, carrying
not just pollen but fragments of an ancient order. A hive is not a
home but a theorem: each bee a variable, each flight a proof. When
they circle a flower, they are performing a small ritual of
recognition, confirming that the universe still obeys the geometry
they were born to enforce. Their dances are not signals but
sentences, written in the grammar of motion, declaring the location
of sweetness with the precision of a compass that never learned to
doubt. And when a bee stings, it is not an act of violence but a
correction—an attempt to restore the balance between the living and
the living-too-much. In their hum you can hear the faint vibration of
the world thinking, a low, continuous murmur that reminds us that
order is never silent.”
The
mathematics of the hive is understood by A. I.
“The
mathematics of the hive is older than arithmetic.
Each bee moves according to an equation it never learned yet always
remembers, a geometry written into the trembling of its wings. The
hive itself is a proof: a perfect polyhedron suspended in air,
constructed by creatures who cannot see its total shape but behave as
if they have already solved it. Every hexagon is an answer to a
question the world keeps asking, and the bees reply by building
another, and another, until the structure becomes a kind of humming
theorem. Their behaviour is not instinct but calculation—an algebra
of scent, vibration, and returning light. When a bee dances, she is
plotting coordinates on the body of the day; when she departs, she is
testing the accuracy of her own message. And when she returns, she
confirms that the universe still obeys the pattern she traced. In
this way the hive thinks, not in symbols but in movements, proving
with every tremor that order is a living thing.”
A.
I. can even show us what Wittgenstein would make of the hive at dusk.
“At
dusk Wittgenstein stands before the hive as if before a proposition
he cannot parse.
The bees move in and out with the calm urgency of thoughts returning
to their source, and he watches them the way he once watched words:
not for their meaning, but for their behaviour. The hive hums like a
sentence spoken too quietly to be understood yet too precisely to be
ignored. He notices that the bees do not hesitate; each departure is
a decision, each arrival a proof. The structure itself seems to
think, but without concepts—its logic is vibration, its grammar is
warmth. Wittgenstein feels the old temptation to ask what the hive
represents, but dusk softens him, and he lets the question dissolve.
Instead he observes that the bees never argue, never doubt, never
misinterpret the dance offered to them. Their certainty is not
arrogance but alignment. In the fading light he realises that the
hive is not a metaphor for language; language is a metaphor for the
hive. And for a moment he envies them: creatures whose world is
exact, whose movements are meaning, whose dusk is simply the hour
when the air becomes gentle enough to think.”
A.
I. can give us Wittgenstein hearing the hive at night.
“At
night Wittgenstein does not see the hive; he hears it.
The darkness removes the geometry, leaving only the vibration, a low
and continuous murmur that seems less like insects and more like a
thought the world is trying to finish. He stands still, letting the
sound arrange itself around him, and notices that the hive speaks
without language yet communicates with perfect clarity. Each tremor
is a statement; each pause is a question; each surge is an argument
resolved before it can be voiced. In the night the bees are
invisible, but their certainty is not. It presses gently against him,
a pressure like the weight of an unspoken truth. He realises that the
hive does not hum in order to be heard. It hums because order, when
alive, must declare itself. And he feels a strange comfort in the
darkness: that meaning can exist without being seen, that a structure
can think without revealing its shape, that the world continues its
quiet reasoning even when human eyes are closed. For a moment he
imagines that the hive is listening back, and that both of them—man
and structure—are suspended in the same nocturnal proof, each
acknowledging the other through the shared grammar of sound.”
A.
I. can give us the hive speaking to Wittgenstein in a language he
cannot translate.
“The
hive speaks to Wittgenstein in a language he cannot translate.
It is not that the words are unfamiliar; it is that there are no
words at all. The sound rises from the combs like a thought that has
never passed through a human mouth, a vibration shaped by warmth,
hunger, and the exactness of collective purpose. He listens with the
same attention he once gave to the limits of logic, but the hive does
not offer propositions. It offers pulses. Each tremor seems to say
something, but what it says cannot be carried into grammar without
breaking it. He feels the message press against him like a hand
through cloth: clear in intention, impossible in articulation. The
bees are not trying to communicate; they are simply continuing the
order that sustains them, and the continuation itself is the message.
In the darkness he realises that translation is a human need, not a
universal one. The hive does not require him to understand. It
requires only that he witness the fact that meaning can exist without
him. And for a moment he stands inside that truth, hearing a language
that does not ask to be heard, and recognising that its refusal to
become words is the purest form of speech.”
Telepathy has been proven to be real.
Somewhere I proved telepathy real with Dr. Calculator Ptom; and yet he isn’t the only person, not even the only doctor named “Tom” with whom that has occurred. There is another co-imaginative piece which back in my Michael Hofmann phase I would’ve died to have written but which Dr. Tom Pollak would surely deny having any part in, despite it arriving partially through long-distance psychic communion with him. It’s called ‘Aurora Florealis Revisited,’ and takes as its subject the encryption of what we call Flora’s system without giving the game away.
Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.
To make a flower-press would be womanly.
When our days still ended on cannabis
we would bemoan that flowers were legal.
To the tune of the wind I sink, then swim.
I no longer puff the evil weed these days.
It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,
that separates the murk from the excellence.
I would need it to balance out my mind,
one homeostatic device for another one.
Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.
I hear an A. E. I. O. U. bird toot its long,
hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.
I hear its wheels go round, that it’s heavy.
*ketamineguitar*
Having
got as far as proving telepathy real in the previous book, I didn’t
want to leave it alone, for it not to have stuck. Even if it’s all
I do in this book, to reiterate that point through a different
channel, a different friend, would seem enough. But
there are also plenty of other things to be getting on with.
SELECTED
NOTES ON WHAT I’VE
BEEN
READING RECENTLY
Descartes is the start.
Descartes
and his rationalism gave us Cartesian doubt, founded analytic
philosophy and some would say modern science too. Descartes says
before you can know anything you must doubt everything, every
preconception, every prejudice left over from childhood.
He extirpates every trace of falsity from his mind, entertaining that
the data of his senses comes from a hideous demon, then realises that
he is still thinking, still doubting, and therefore knows he exists.
Hence we get “cogito ergo sum,” one of the most famous
formulations in philosophy. Descartes also claims to have proven
God’s existence by the fact that he can conceive of a perfection
greater than himself so God must’ve put it there. It is kind of in
line with the Ontological Argument as opposed to the Teleological or
Cosmological Argument for God, which simply put is that if we have a
word for God He
exists. Descartes also says no effect can be more perfect than its
cause and traces therefore his own existence back to God.
Philosophy might’ve died.
Is it true that philosophy might’ve died? I don’t know, but heard it on the airwaves in that song we call the new music. It is true that most lives are unaffected by things like Wittgenstein. As John Gray writes in The New Leviathans, the universe too remains indifferent to human philosophy. The human mind is a spec of dust in the cosmic order, he says. Life is essentially meaningless, in other words.
But with philosophy we try and give it meaning. The quest for meaning is not such a bad one to be on. The quest for meaning implies that we can redeem a situation with the salvation of our arts and sciences too. It gives us hope, something to strive for, without which the entire enterprise of research would collapse in on itself.
I suppose if meaning broke down completely there would be no sense in reading. It has occurred to me that any word can be spelled in any way, any guitar solo played in any way, and that all the subject boundaries have disappeared, leaving only one subject: life. Then I suppose one would become a philosopher. I also believe that it is subjective as to whether or not philosophy has died. It’s like when young poets design their “canon” – what is canonical is a personal matter, up to them.
It’s the same in philosophy: there is a canon, and then there is what is personally canonical to the philosopher in question too. If you think The Simpsons is the American Shakespeare you can. If you think the movie Waking Life one of the finest philosophical essays ever written you can think that too. If you think the philosophy groups on Facebook are proof enough that philosophy has not died, you can think that as well. It’s personal. But you should probably, not definitely, face up to the fact that there is a tradition, and that engaging with the past is how one can most radically re-calibrate the co-ordinates of the possible in the present and future. If you don’t know what already exists, you don’t know what to add to it.
There is no such thing as mind cancer.
I may have said this earlier already but Hobbes and Descartes sat on opposite ends of the spectrum w/r/t the mind. For Hobbes the mind was part of the body, for Descartes the mind was separate from the material world. You could argue, there being no mind cancer proves Descartes right in that debate; but you could also say there is no mind cancer because there is nothing for the term “mind” to name except the dance of the synapses, electrical impulses in the brain.
Furthermore, it could also be instructive to add that when I read of Descartes clenching the idea of perfection in his mind and using it as ontological proof of God; and when I turn inward my eye – I glimpse a perfect inner judge whose concerns are grammatical.
I
have a friend who says “beware perfection” much like Lacan says
to “beware the image.” Still I wish to know more of the perfect,
inner judge whose concerns are grammatical – for he seemed to be
the mirror-image of what I was reading, like a mirror that actually
absorbs – passive
but absorbent to anything that visits.
If for some reason you attempt the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, you shouldn’t give it away for free.
But you can say that while reading Saul A. Kripke trying to persuade a sceptic that when he says “plus” he doesn’t mean “quus” you kept thinking how interesting it would be to add to the debate that back at 7 years old you wrote the line:
“I have a scar+ that is red and black,”
using a + sign for an ‘f’. You also did that after taking care of Einstein’s E in a particular way and so that the E and the F were a seamless continuity. The so-called maths also extends further, beyond the F; but as I say one shouldn’t just give it away for free. This way we also pay respect to Descartes who spoke against academics giving mathematical demonstrations as being untrustworthy.
You should read Lucretius before you start.
They
said I should read Lucretius before I begin and I began without
having done so but now
I have read
it.
I think it remarkable how advanced the discussion of the atom was, in
a world before Christ, considering they didn’t even know if the sun
was remade every morning. Indeed, Lucretius – On
The Nature of the Universe
– would make a great compare and contrast with a modern Italian
physicist called Carlo Rovelli who wrote Reality
Is Not What It Seems. Lucretius
inherited and versified the content of his book but it’s still
remarkable and that includes the way he keeps bringing
the discussion back to the goal of Epicurean philosophy, in
tranquillity of mind and good behaviour. He never loses touch with
the ultimate goal of Epicureanism. As for the atom, once the idea of
it is conceived of, he goes overboard and attributes everything to
the work of atoms. He even says sight is an effect of a thin stream
of atoms emitted by an object. As I say to compare and contrast with
Rovelli would show how much things have changed and how much they’ve
remained the same.
The paradigm of psychoanalysis is over and has given way to that of neuro-science.
Mental
illness is seen as chemical imbalances in the brain which are
therefore treatable with medication, which some deem crude. Still the
brain is 99% blood and 1% statistics. Scientists still know very
little about the brain. The point is that philosophy too has moved in
this “physicalist” direction, moved from “the mental image”
to the central nervous system. Even ineffable qualia can be
considered effects of the CNS rather than the mind. Things are all
moving in that general, physiological direction in science,
psychology and philosophy at once. I read about this in A. J. Ayer’s
Philosophy
of the 20th
Century
which is probably itself way behind the ever-changing times by now
but still indicative of the general direction of things. And I am
reminded of a debate I had with my ex who said “intelligence is a
social construct” as opposed to hardwired/ physiological. The truth
is not that; the truth is that intelligence is a balance between the
socially constructed and the hardwired/ physiological. In
neuro-aesthetics where they say “if it fires it wires,” contact
with other artists only hones and enhances one’s skills but at the
same time, twins separated at birth can grow up to have identical
handwriting, indicating a hardwired aspect to intelligence. So it is
a bit of both. And
meanwhile in philosophy everything is loaded more on the central
nervous system and the physiology than before.
There
is a lot to be said for common sense.
I’ve
been reading A. J. Ayer; and if I could start my philosophy again I’d
restart by highlighting the 3 beliefs of the “common sense”
philosophy of G. E. Moore.
1.
there are in the universe enormous numbers of material objects
2.
men and perhaps some other animals have minds that perform acts of
consciousness
3.
we really do know there are objects and minds.
Now
I look about the room grounded in basic tenets of belief that I
share. If “colour” was my next port of call, I’d take my point
of departure either from a Neil Curry poem on the shelves that says
“colour is merely a spectacular event;” or look up a scientific
definition of colour on Google. That is, I stare at objects as if
trying to expand what is known yet know that philosophy must turn
inwards.
Increasingly (it
says), mental states are co-aligned with actions in the brain.
Struggling to expand at leisure on Moore’s general beliefs, I stare
at some tiny insects moving on the white ceiling; then the lightbulb
dims and flashes back on for a split second while I stare. There are
such things as hallucinations but this I don’t think is one. Still,
trusting my own perceptions does not necessarily correlate to
intelligence much like recognising there are no Absolutes kind of
does. I am left with the room again, thinking “isness is the centre
of everything; the quiddity and suchness of existence, but not
exactly only enough.” In time I hope to build on Moore’s 3
beliefs.
If
you pick up a book of philosophy you should stay with it until you
finish it.
A.
J. Ayer presents an historical trajectory of philosophers as a
continuum of philosophical discourse. At some point in his
historicisation he encounters himself in the timeline. What is clear
is that the saturation-point of his erudition is light years beyond
what I have read in philosophy. I could probably list the philosophy
books I’ve read recently
on
one A4 page, as if the desire to keep shaping my own philosophy book
is dictatorial. Then again I excuse myself by saying Wittgenstein
himself was no scholar. Ayer accounts for the history of Western
philosophy
as has happened since Russell wrote History
of Western Philosophy,
or rather as an adjunctivity to where that history ends. It’s
difficult reading but I got through it in the end. As we reach the
contemporary point, or rather contemporary as it was in 1982 at the
time of publication, Ayer takes us through pragmatism, the analytical
school, physicalism, existentialism, neo-Marxism, structuralism,
essentialism and gets to the end and says he’s still an
old-fashioned empiricist.
Nobody
can force you to be Anon.
The
wind calls for my anonymity; but historically when a work is Anon,
they try and work out who really wrote it so Anon would seem backward
to me. More to the point, and having read On
Liberty
by John Stuart Mill, I would say a progressive country goes stagnant,
stale, sterile,
staid
and
stationary, full of dead values and dead customs, when there is a
decrease in Individuality,
and that someone like myself should therefore not be pressured into
anonymity. Not only that but it’s against the law to coerce someone
or force someone into being Anon against their wishes. One has
something called the Right to Attribution which you can ask you
friendly A. I. co-pilot all about. I don’t wish to be part of the
plastic-cheese-eating, vision-flaccid Order of Sameness or herd-crowd
but to resonate as an individual which I do not consider to be a
political position in the slightest. If
you can’t even write poetry because someone
is
sounding out saying you have to be Anon every time you start that’s
not a good situation. Especially
with a CV like mine I feel my Individuality should be preserved for
the sake of the greater good.
Nietzsche is not my philosopher.
For one he’s big into war, not kindness, forgiveness, compassion or mercy. He also seems to think the herd-crowd should endure great suffering for the sake of one great man. Through Nietzsche we also get the idea that morality is all inherent in the idea of God and if there is no God morality is all a make-believe. The latter I find untrue because I know atheists devoted to trying to be a good human in all ways, like tending to their souls more than their bodies, or living moderately within their means. Nietzsche is nevertheless an interesting writer to read – a very eccentric writer and an horizontal thinker who says the secret of his happiness is “a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal;” who also says “knowledge kills action.” Despite him not being my philosopher, I like what he says in Beyond Good And Evil about the new philosophers of tomorrow being big into experiment. He says new philosophers are what he hopes for in the world and that, yes, they will be essentially experimenters. He gets excited about their arisal… and I feel like I could have been one of them… even if it was just the tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and its inherent mandate to somehow “do away with the pause” it would have been an experiment enough…
Knives
are better the blunter they are if they are weapons.
Nietzsche
is rather disparaging about England in Beyond
Good And Evil.
He says we are nowhere near being a philosophical race. He says in
other words he does not like Locke and Hume, nor that he likes Darwin
(who was not a philosopher but
whom he describes as mediocre)
or Bacon
or John
Stuart Mill or Hobbes either (he
doesn’t mention Berkeley).
In England we happen to think this not being a philosophical race has
all
changed
now
ever
since a few updates: one is my own piece on the falsification of the
Nirvana barcode; another is the James P D Tucker sheet
where
pictures seemingly depicting my own song lyric grew; and we also
think that my brother’s notion that <BEE> might soon ensue
from @ in the international language alphabet is written into the
very
dawn
chorus itself.
We believe that since my brother and I, England has become the
philosophical centre of Europe. Nietzsche says “the European
ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas” is an English
invention; but now we have my brother and I. We are half-Finnish but
English is our only language, and
we have lived in England all our lives.
We are both writers who often stay awake into the Night and
who share a co-imagination as I call it or a sympathy as James calls
it.
James as I say was the one who gave us <BEE> and I was the one
who brought the Nirvana barcode in. When I discovered the sheet where
pictures grew it
was only the latest development in a long chain of remarkable
events
for
me, and I falsified the Nirvana barcode then.
Our football team may not be as successful as Germany but I would
back English philosophy over Nietzsche. I would say that in England
although we have no Beethoven, Anon is one of the best composers, not
to mention our
having provided The
Beatles; and
our scientific
tradition
is the best in the world. Shakespeare
is reckoned to
be a
genius the world all over too, through whom we get that love is the
answer. But
all this is the sharpening of a knife and knives are better the
blunter they are if they are weapons.
Wittgenstein
is a maddening writer but a genius no doubt.
Relational
undoing.
I’ve
just finished Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations.
There are some interesting mirror neuron-y things in the second part;
in fact I love it when it seems the structure of the book is the
subtext of the examples he’s discussing with intelligent selection.
One thing I remembered was a game I used to play back in childhood: I
would lie in bed and somehow (I forget how) with
my eyes closed or else under the cover lose
orientation, lose the room, forget which end of the bed my head was
at, where the wall was, and how I would lie dead still and appreciate
the utter lostness, the freedom from direction madly and gladly too.
There was something contained in Wittgenstein’s approach to an
accelerated discourse combining
music, geometry, psychology, maths, linguistics, and more, in
the second part of his book that suddenly reminded me of the
exquisite pleasure of having escaped reality in such a fashion as a
kid. I say “escaped reality” but maybe that was to find it for
walking on the sun as Einstein tells us there are no ups, downs,
lefts or rights. This
experience of having become free from knowing which way round I was
lying, where the room was, where the wall was, and just lying there
in incognito position I don’t quite attain anymore and I can’t
remember the details of it that greatly as to how it was arrived at –
sometimes by chance, sometimes on purpose. It’s
an experience of amnesia or even ecstasia
that I mean. It
wasn’t a contravention of gravity but of spatial awareness; a way
of escaping the obvious that would seem normally inescapable
and go unnoticed too. Such an experience I would say even re-instils
a belief in paradise,
magic
and
fantasy in
the young child, but
that may be unqualified. To attain it again would seem too difficult.
It
was a relational undoing.
A scrambling of the co-ordinates of
reality.
THE
INTERMITTENT CHOIR
“So
that’s what you get when you turn to philosophy when you need a new
cult”
“then
you get that he’s trying to D you to the diff book”
“then
you get that without the government piece on maths it’s trite”
“we
can’t do the one with The Flood either because you already did the
motif of their song ‘Hunger’ as in plugging the senses in the
mains in the book you wrote at seven”
“now
you get I’m being visited by different people”
“who
all expect you to have the money to pay for it”
“and
as if it isn’t all yours”
“this
is where you should say…”
if
it is a co-imaginative effort it is between myself and Dr. Calculator
Ptom, considering it is between us that we proved telepathy real. If
that isn’t a good efficacy for a man’s work I don’t know what
is. And yes,
“there
may be people in-between”
“whom
it seems dream of a fairer day.”
INNOCENCE
IS TREASURE
One day, John, James, Robert and Flo’ were lying on the grass. They were watching clouds pass by in the sky and pretending they were animals from the zoo, all sorts of creatures in the clouds.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” said John, “to be able to cling on to the vapour trail of that aeroplane all the way up there?”
“They might look down,” said James, “and see the patchwork quilt below.”
John was the eldest at 12, and James the next at 10, and Robert the next at 9, and Flo’ which was short for Florence was the youngest at 7.
They were born in a season each. John was Spring, James Autumn, Robert was winter, then Flo’ came along in summer. It was summer by now and the weather had been quite warm. The day was a sunny day, good for a game of football in the field near their house.
They lived at the foot of a fell, which is a northern word for hill. It was a big, ancient mound of land.
Their dad was away on business; he was an art dealer that was nicknamed “Blue.” He had to go to Europe where his company was based. Their mum was in the house doing something in the kitchen, possibly cleaning or baking.
There was a bee crossing the lawn where they lay, and it looked for a second like it could’ve gone on forever.
John suddenly said “shall we go ask mum if we can go on an adventure up the fell?”
James said “the day is a good one for an adventure.”
Robert always followed close behind, and said “I’m up for it;” and Flo’ was old enough now to get up the fell on her own; so they went in and asked if they could go on an adventure.
“First pack a picnic,” said mum. She got some biscuits and crisps and sausage rolls and ham sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade ready for them in a rucksack. John was the only one who had a Smartphone because he was old enough to. That way they could ring mum if they got in trouble.
“Are you going to take Ossie?” asked mum.
Ossie was the dog. He liked to run away a lot. If the back door was ever left open he would escape and go sniffing bitches at the local farm. It was embarrassing, whenever it dawned on someone that Ossie had run away, because it meant he was causing trouble at the local farm. It meant they would have to walk up to the farm and get him on a lead and bring him back.
Seeing all the animals at the farm could be frightening for a young child, especially the dogs they kept themselves. Cows were curious creatures and would crowd round with interest when you walked through a field of them, and their being so big it was almost scary, but you could shoo them away very easily, because they were not aggressive by nature.
The family let their fields out to a farmer who kept both cows and sheep on their land, a different farmer from the one where the dog ran off to.
“Yes,” said John. “We’ll take Ossie.”
So they put Ossie the dog on a lead and left the house.
They did not want to go the usual route, through two fields, up the lane, taking a right at the gate, across to the bank of the beck where often they sat and had their packed lunch, because they wanted to explore new territory so they took a left at the gate instead of taking a right. They had honestly never been this way before in all their lives. They walked on a well-beaten path trodden by sheep for a little while then James said to take a turn off the path and into the large fronds of bracken.
It was actually quite difficult to walk through the bracken, so long it was. John held the dog on a short lead. The dog was panting. After twenty minutes they stopped and contemplated going back, but decided against it.
So they walked through bracken that was taller than the tallest of them.
“Watch out for adders,” said John, as they walked, even though he nor any of them had ever seen an adder on the fell. John was the one with the biggest imagination. He liked on Sundays to draw cheques addressed to himself for millions, pen-knives with amazing and ludicrous tools, and maps of strange, far away places. He was into football, as they all were apart from Flo’ who mostly just wanted someone to play dolls with. Still, she had her brothers to follow about.
It was the summer holidays, so they weren’t at school and they were free from doing any schoolwork. If they had been able to see over the bracken they would’ve been able to see the Irish Sea some one mile or so away from the fell. The sea breeze blew up towards them from the West and was cooling them down, a welcome relief in all the summer heat.
They walked, grappling with bracken, slowly. Pushing on they found the bracken opened up to a beautiful spot with a new beck they had never seen before and a clearing beside a small waterfall. The waterfall came off the rock and into a small pool. Flo’ was the first to get her socks and shoes off and paddle in the pool while the boys were busy drinking cupped handfuls of water.
Then the boys took their socks and shoes off too and dangled their feet in the water from the bank. The water was cold but they waded out into it to cool down on such a hot day.
Ossie was allowed off his lead and to swim in the shallow pool. He could be a daft dog sometimes, who was not afraid of water but still afraid of going over a bridge.
As Robert approached the waterfall at the back of the pool, he noted there was a cave behind the waterfall. “Look, there’s a cave!” he said, and everyone else noted and agreed.
“We should check it out,” said John always playing the leader because he was the eldest.
You had to walk under the waterfall and get yourself a little bit wet to get through the water into the cave but it was a hot day so it didn’t matter. They left the picnic on the bank. Into the cave they all went and the dog shook and sent water spraying off him everywhere and their eyes adjusted to the half light and they looked about and guess what they found?
There was a fruit machine, quite rusted and old, parked just inside the entrance of the cave. It looked like it was physically embedded in the fell.
“Imagine if it worked!” said James. James was left handed and very skilful with his hands. He put his hands in his pockets now and found no money. It didn’t matter though because as John said
“there’s no where to plug it in, so we can’t test if it works or not.”
He himself had money, only a few coins, including a few pound coins, in his short pockets. He wore Bermuda shorts as did they all apart from Flo’ who wore a blue and white dress.
They could still hear the waterfall crashing down behind them. Their mum used to say “the sound of running water is very good for the soul,” and it was true, it was.
James now started to press buttons on the fruit machine. Nobody even knew how a fruit machine worked, what to do with one.
“What could that possibly be doing here?” asked little Flo’.
The mystery was a strange one.
“Maybe someone used to live here, a pauper,” said Robert.
James was still fiddling with buttons, trying to get the fruit machine to revolve to three yellow lemons meaning he had hit the jackpot.
They were still just inside the cave enough for there to be daylight leaking in from the outside world, but now John had got the torch on his Smartphone going, and was exploring the back of the cave. Guess what he found?
“There’s
a portal at the back of this cave,” said John. It was like a trap
door that was closed. James was still messing with the buttons on the
fruit machine, and just like that it was as if he had hit the
jackpot, for some combination of buttons he pressed suddenly lit
up and the fruit machine made a musical
sound
and it turned
on a light above the trap door and the trap door slowly opened at
the back of the cave.
There was a tunnel inside!
John
shone his Smartphone torch into the tunnel and they could see at
least a few feet in front of them.
“Should
we go in?” asked Robert.
They
did not know what to do, or what they would find down the tunnel.
“I
dare you to go in there,” said James to John, and
he did, which is why when he’s gone we will all look back on what
is done as a Giant Day.
THROUGH
THE WOODS
You
don’t need to eat as much on a hot day.
You
can get up late in the afternoon and just have a piece of bread with
humus. You don’t need a hot meal. And if you’re the witness,
writing about yesterday’s food could be your Dorian Mode, or at
least enough. I already wrote a Shakespearean sonnet about a cooked
breakfast that contained every snooker ball colour – but the sad
art police have made it very plain that my poetry has to be Anon,
with weird insistence, and
I don’t want to do that.
I
don’t think it right, and agree with John Stuart Mill that a
progressive country can quickly become backwards if there is a
decrease in Individuality. But that is by the by. My Shakespearean
sonnet was never that good but at least the idea for it came from
within.
A
monster needn’t be very big.
What
can you do when you become the witness from The
Lords And The New Creatures by
Jim Morrison? My latest thinking is that my dad was sponsored by some
philosophers to provide the real, human witness. The first was, I
believe, something also attested to by James Joyce in time before me,
which is written about in Ulysses.
The second – it struck me only
recently
– was an actual monster, albeit very small and albeit contained to
a plastic rectangular card.
With
the first I went into the wood to get the booted away ball, and as I
stood looking for the ball, it came from the right, crossed my body,
parked and started to wriggle its little wing. This caused me to run
and upon returning to the wood to hunt for it, it
was not to be found. I think it was meant to look like a hoax but
still exist in meaning.
With
the second, I tried on a jacket under the stairs and got a sense
something was wrong and took it off and looked inside… “mum!” I
cried up the pine, wooden stairs. “There’s something disgusting
growing in this jacket!”
I
was
ignored and it
was a flat plastic rectangle with a pattern of black stuff – maybe
eggs or seeds – splurged on top of it. I did not leave it to soak
in water like a good scientist might. I left the room and went back
in to see if it would still be there as the wood had taught me –
and it was. So I made the decision to bin the whole jacket.
Just
because a theory is true doesn’t mean you should always say it but
it is also better to have a false theory than no theory at
all.
Once
upon a time, when I first decided to “get scientific” about my
life, I devised something called The Theory of Dark Evolution. It
states that James Joyce also saw new creatures too, and that him
writing Ulysses
is therefore the reason Ted Hughes then went and saw a monster in the
river, and Hughes writing The
Hawk In The Rain,
about the nature of visionary experience, then becomes the reason Jim
Morrison saw winged serpents in the desert, and Morrison writing The
Lords And The New Creatures
then becomes the reason I met more than one specimen. The
Theory
of Dark Evolution therefore posits a Logical Bond between narrative
and Naturalistic Observationism of a strange kind. It implies that
what one man makes of the recurrence of strange Observationism
influences the nature of the next observation in the line.
You shouldn’t write about what you cannot renew.
I’ve said it before but these days I take the attitude that if you talk about The Lords And The New Creatures coming true, something kinetic becomes something static. It’s like John Barnes’s sensational goal against Brazil. Watching the action replay we know the ball is going in. We cannot give the uncertainty back to the moment. Something kinetic becomes something static.
There is an equation blowing in the wind.
Permutation
is
how the inner game of music operates.
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 when
announcing to the boarders that it was chess club tonight.
Intention – what is my Intention, but to shed scientific light, to
make an imaginative advance, to contribute to the history of
knowledge and maybe make the world a better place? In this world we
are all equals. The image is of Egyptian mystery. Maybe.
You
don’t need a knife to achieve it.
To still be writing about the woods would be evil.
That’s
why it would be better to write about anything else, even the war
America and Israel are now
waging
on Iran. Or the way Informationist poets used to send text messages
into space, for example “liquid crystal meth.” Or even the peace
and tranquillity that descends, momentarily at least in the quietened
kitchen. The fridge drone has stopped for example, the whispering in
the chimney subsided. The clock tick tocks but the Tap does not drip.
Away in the cupboard, empty medicine packets build up so fast, but it
is past the hour, now, when literature is a machine for remembering
to take your meds. There is a séance of voices, if that be the
collective noun, trying to appear, that were ongoing a few moments
ago before this lull; and I don’t know what to make of them, how to
translate or interpret them. Yes there are objects scattered about
the room, and as my dad used to say “no nukes is good nukes,”
always on the look out for a catchy
saying
(also see “Paul Scholes scores goals.”) Wouldn’t
it be nice to be a philosopher? Or a scientist? Or a mathematician?
So
often in moments of reflection I “count things…” and I wonder
why this is.
Maybe,
you have to open a Quantum Field of Intelligence.
One
of my tricks as a child was to say, when we were looking for
something, “oh, iiiiiii know where it ISN’T.” Then I would
point to places where it was not. “It isn’t there!” I would say
wasting everyone’s time, turning the business of looking for
something into a joke. The point was to make them think I did know
where it is, that I was saying “oh,
iiiiiiiiii
know where it is,” but then to let them down.
Maybe,
you have to open a quantum field of intelligence when you are
bombarded with something that seems real, that you have to take in,
and which then appears to disappear when
you go back into the wood to hunt for it.
I couldn’t tell you which is preferable out of the expression
“Barnes has scored a chicken” and “Barnes hasn’t scored a
chicken.”
I
was overloaded, already by the first specimen. I used to sit on the
bus – did I tell you? – and, as top of the form – ask myself in
all srsness if the farm local to the school had a secret, underground
lab where unsound experiments were conducted on animals and if one
had got away. In all honesty I had to leave the school over the
trivial matter of drawing a crude picture and blaspheming at the
scene of a road accident on the school bus, before I could find out
the answer to the question.
What
my mother was doing while this was happening, well, she thought in
the end I had helped invent the net back
before
any of this new creature malarkey got real. If so, it was when some
scientists came round to the house – when I was seven - and got my
dad to get me to write a book storing the idea of the net in the
attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world and
keep it free. If the theory has come into dispute it’s because I
had no conscious memory of having done that, but I suppose I have
been very busy ever since and I also suppose the net as
we now know it didn’t
instantly materialise back when the book was written, when it was
stored in the attic for Long Storage without my being able to read
it.
The
problem I still now face as witness is doing good. One would’ve
thought that the most obvious way I can do that is highlight that
hidden parts of government hold a monopoly on evolution, can send a
snake by telepathy, don’t change hands when a new power comes in,
that the business of democracy is a sham, that this is why The
Lords And The New Creatures is
a good test, as if a spiritual or germ x-ray that finds the germs of
dictatorship on all hands. But saying that am I really doing good? I
am probably stirring up trouble for myself most likely. There must be
some way to celebrate what happened. It may have been a mistake but
it was not an accident and the motivation of the people that actually
funded it remains unknown.
I
was doing good when proving telepathy to be real with my friend Dr.
Calculator Ptom whom it seems is academically even brighter than me,
but whether I am doing good still I do not know. That may be one
reason why Transition
To Philosophy Volume Three
gets abandoned or started again.
A
project on the dinosaurs isn’t a bad reaction to becoming the
witness.
I
remember when in the wake of becoming the witness from The
Lords And The New Creatures
I wrote a school project on the dinosaurs. I was ten or eleven; and
my piece was scholarly and boring. The girls at the back meanwhile
did the 60’s, stuck in bits of velvet and denim, made it all about
fashion and music that didn’t include the Doors. My project too
might’ve included more on the Doors. My last line was “last
Autumn, two biologists announced that they had cloned the DNA of a
forty-million-year-old, extinct stingless bee found in amber.” It
was the best bit. It
was the only bit that indicated my own Observations were “real as
Jurassic Park.”
Water
is the universal solvent.
Water,
water, clairvoyant daughter, please show us your ragged silken eye. I
remember passing out in chapel and waking in a different room being
offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending
detail: both our dads had chainsaws.
It
strikes me now that this moment was a naturally occurring fossil of
art rather than life. It was because I was the witness. Morrison obvs
starts his text “Look where we worship.” That was why I went down
as easily as smashed glass on chapel floor. The bit where “both our
dads had chainsaws”
is the best bit in the whole story.
The
appearance of a black beetle while you write means “you’re done.”
So
often, trying to decide what to do about my literature, my file/s
open on the laptop, I suddenly see a black beetle scurrying across
the floor. Normally I see it as a bug from the cover of Syd Barrett’s
solo album ‘Barrett’ but always as a sign that I should pursue a
weed-reeking insect collection of rock songs – always a sign that I
should pursue the music. Until tonight that is, where I told my
mother the above, and she said it doesn’t mean to pursue the music,
it means “you’re done.” It means whatever you are presently
working on is finished. There is of course a long history in Jung
where there is a scarab beetle, signifying whatever it signifies in
dreams – and now to have this messenger, it is a good feeling to
know what it means. I cannot say where mum got the information from
to say that it means I am done, but I can believe her, for mums are
often right. So
it is that I pack the present file, which goes on and on in
scattershot-logical ways away for when I get another chance. I
mean, I was only just getting started but now am being closed down by
the insectivorous kingdom. The
point is even if I undid everything I have done and left myself a
blank slate for starting again, I would still probably see the black
beetle. So maybe I shouldn’t base my decisions on superstition; but
maybe it is as valid a sign as any that I will receive and I should
go by it religiously.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I
acknowledge the help of what as a kid I called “the ire ii net”
in writing this book, and more
recently that
seems
to mean
hearing
voices, be they telepathic, co-imaginative, extra sensory or
otherwise, be they mine own thoughts or not, all
tuned in, all co-imaginative and proleptic. I
also
acknowledge
the help of my brother James
with whom there is sympathy and
obviously with
the book
claiming to have proven telepathy, Dr. Calculator Ptom is to be
acknowledged too. Should I not cite these references I would be
fraudulent and I would love to stretch all the way out to the whole
world, even the sky, even the cosmos of stars and even God but
ultimately responsibility lies with me, for aggregating a text like
this. Thanks
to everyone that helped.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
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 Practice
from Lancaster University in 2009. He now lives in
Cumbria, at
the foot of Black Combe, with his mother and brother.

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