FURTHER PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRIES
BY JOHN TUCKER
NOTE
A year or so ago I was advised to don a nom de plume for my new writing, at the same time as I turned away from a career in poetry under my real name towards philosophy; and the end result was a book called Transition To Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors. It was to be my Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein, or so I hoped; and though some professional philosophers liked it tremendously, I have since decided against the nom de plume because it would mean I have two bodies of work that overlap and that would be wrong. There were originally two additional volumes – Volume Two and Volume Three – of Transition To Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors, but things have had to change. Now instead of those extra volumes I propose to bring you Further Philosophical Enquiries by John Tucker. Whilst I was writing it I was still Johannes Bergfors, the nom de plume, in my mind, and yet I hope I have been through it and eliminated fossils from that prior draft. I feel as if I went wrong calling Transition To Philosophy a book by Johannes Bergfors and that nothing good lies in that direction after all. I also feel that now there is a piece on the Plough alignment contained herein it is a strong work that almost processes the events of my life to a logically worked-out series of scientific results. Still, I have no way of knowing if it is any good or not because I read English and Creative Writing, not Philosophy, at University. Largely I have tried herein to scintillate rather than lecture with the intellectual content and to bind it to life.
THE
ALIGNMENT
Proposition
1
What
some call Order in the universe others call God, but they are one and
the same.
Explanation
Having
attested to the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black
Combe,
only to coincide with a rhythm change in the White House during my
lifetime, I asked myself whether the alignment indicated Order or
Chaos in the universe. The argument for Order was that the alignment
only coincided with a rhythm change in the White House, so backed up
that idea that the Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and
sociological de-centering of Man, and the White House its child in
terms of both philosophy and build. It is easy to see how one might
consider the alignment indicating Order; but Chaos is a different
matter. The argument for Chaos is that the alignment would happen
with greater regularity if it were a clocktick universe, rather than
simply “when we want it to happen.” Still, the true
endorsement
turned out to be Order, for there are
cosmological events that only happen once
every
few thousand years or
so.
So having determined that the alignment indicates Order in the
Universe the next step was to recognise that in this case Order in
the Universe is synonymous with God.
*
Proposition
2
Metaphysics
is the place where science and religion meet.
Explanation
The
scientific mode or even “tone of mind” would be to call
it Order
in the universe; and the religious mode or “tone of mind” would
be to call
it
God – and as shown they can be synonymous with one another.
Therefore metaphysics is the place where science and religion meet.
Q.
E. D.
*
Proposition
3
If
God is synonymous with Order in the Universe, it follows that God is
not extrinsic to matter.
Explanation
This
view might be trendy at the moment, as scientists at C. E. R. N. hunt
for the God Particle, which has been labelled a daft misnomer by
others still who tend to believe that God is perfect and matter is
error. The belief, though, that God is not
extrinsic to matter dates back at least as far as Spinoza, for whom
there was no substance that wasn’t part of God. The
counter argument is that the alignment is not God itself but a mere
example of a state of Order in the universe that is itself
not
visible and is synonymous with God.
*
Proposition
4
If
the alignment is perfect, God is perfect too.
Explanation
We
already know that by definition God is perfect and the
alignment does not necessarily let us stare at the perfection that is
God but merely signifies the Order in the whole universe at large
that is synonymous with God. To stare at the alignment is not to be
let down about the perfection of God, but God is more than the
alignment itself.
*
Proposition
5
It
is not the alignment itself but the Order in the universe which it
indicates which is synonymous with God.
Explanation
Here
we seem to be slightly tautological. I
have been teasing this point out. At the moment of the alignment,
which lasted for a good, few nights, there were other things going on
in the
world of simultaneity,
synchronicity
and syncretism
and these were also connected into the same scope of Order as
the alignment. God is the overall picture and the alignment an
example by which we can measure the Order.
*
Proposition
6
It
is good to get to the root of one’s own beliefs but you must
understand the way it seems is that necessarily all belief-systems
are woven in to this religious stance by
the alignment,
even atheism.
Explanation
In
the alignment, we see that atheism and theism lose their polarities.
The Order in the universe would be what an atheist makes of it, and
even if that is all he believes in, as shown it is synonymous with
God, and can be just the same as what a religious person would take
from the event. An atheist and a theist can in all likelihood agree,
and only agree, on the matter of our Plough alignment. The alignment
factors all faiths into its happening, like the
goal of
syncretism, almost
attesting
to that notion that Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.
Rather than different religions connecting
though,
it is even more startling that religion and science agree, and
religion and atheism agree in the event of the alignment.
*
Proposition
7
Because
the alignment is about one-ness, it is possible to use it to
undermine and undo presupposed binary oppositions in arguments.
Explanation
We
have seen how science and religion can be a binary undone, also how
even theism and atheism can be undone. This is propitiated by the
basic principle that Order in the universe, which can be appreciated
by science or atheism too, is synonymous with the idea of God when it
comes to the alignment.
*
Proposition
8
If
Order in the universe is synonymous with God, we are all one and our
differences reconciled.
Explanation
If
an atheistic scientist recognises Order in the universe in the event
of the alignment, and a Deist believes the alignment a manifestation
of God’s
work,
then they essentially agree on the same thing if it is true that
order in the universe is synonymous with God, and
are but calling the same thing by two different names.
*
Proposition
9
If
the alignment is not God itself but just an example of Order in the
universe which is synonymous with God, it may not be the case that
God is not extrinsic to matter.
Explanation
If
the alignment were God manifested, it would be a God of atoms, stars,
particles et al, but seeing as the alignment is indicative of a sense
of Order in the Universe that stretches beyond the alignment itself,
and
which we are saying is synonymous with God, God
might be the underlying, organisational principle and still retain
exemption from the condition of matter.
*
Proposition
10
That
Order in the universe and God are two different names for the same
thing creates common ground between science and religion, also
atheism and religion.
Explanation
This
point reiterates previous points. It
shows that in practise what science may call Order in the universe,
religion may call God, and despite their seeming to not agree, they
could be one and the same thing, under
different appellations.
*
Proposition
11
It
may be magnetism that underlies the variability of belief when it
comes to the matter of the alignment.
Explanation
Maybe,
we are all but iron filings firked to the moon in the same way and
our differences are differences created by language being stubborn
and awkward. When I say we all agree that the alignment is the
alignment, it makes my home the magnetic, telluric and gravitational
foot. It endorses the yellow, McDonalds ‘M’ in the word “them”
in
the advert. It
could be that magnetism unites us where words keep us separated, and
the event of the alignment could be an essentially magnetic event in
and of itself on a scientific level. So it is that we could be all
stardust, all helplessly and
involuntarily charged in a magnetic way. Different fields of
language, to use David Morley’s phrase, could also be underlined by
a common principle when it comes to magnetism. The
magnetism of the stars, the magnetism of the oldest rock, could be
the same magnetism, and people part of it too.
*
Proposition
12
The
alignment and its inherent magnetism has the ability to turn a
staunch atheist into an agnostic.
Explanation
It
barely needs explaining that the observation of the alignment is so
sublime, even terrifying, that it truly becomes a good use of the
word “awesome” and has the power to change the polarity or the
charge of an atheist into something like an agnostic or even more.
Even an atheist who saw it would remark at the stunning sublimity of
it, and the coincidence with the rhythm change in the White House
too; and it might suddenly strike the atheist that God might really
exist after all, because the atheist would glimpse a sense of Order
in the universe that he had previously never considered, it being
bigger than one man’s brain. The atheist may have empirical science
behind him not believing in a man in the clouds, but the same
empiricism would lend the atheist towards a more religious or at
least agnostic stance if with his own eyes he perceived the Plough
alignment.
*
Proposition
13
It
does not diminish God to have him equate to Order in the universe,
nor muddy up and make dogmatic religion of science to have Order in
the universe equate to God.
Explanation
To
mention Order in the Universe might make a religious person
contemplate nothing but the cold, black, vacuity of space, which is
seen as Godless in science, and to mention God to a scientist might
have stigma for the scientist too, but truly in the alignment I can
see nothing other than the point of Order in the universe becoming
synonymous with God. It does not diminish God to call him Order in
the Universe for this backdates to the Bible and is not a new,
scientific notion at loggerheads with religion but old. Traditionally
God created the world from chaos; and therefore my documenting the
alignment takes on the role of rewriting Genesis to
a partial extent.
Still, I can see how a top scientist, wishing to find something out
would be frustrated if God was the only answer and he was not allowed
to go any further, ask any further questions.
*
Proposition
14
The
universe may just be a very elegant place.
Explanation
The
universe may be elegant but whether it is designed by God or not we
do not know. There are said to be three arguments for God in
philosophy: the ontological, the teleological and the cosmological.
My argument is that at some level the Order in the Universe which an
atheistic scientist believes in is synonymous with God, the same
thing but seen through different eyes, expressed with a different
name. The scientist and the theist could be working on the same
problem, onto the same thing, albeit in different disguises,
disguises which are superficial, while underlying it all we find the
same magnetism, which also ties in with the same instinct on
a human level.
*
Proposition
15
The
alignment doesn’t prove God but it does prove Order in the
universe.
Explanation
The
alignment doesn’t make the Bible stories literal. It doesn’t mean
we have captured a square of blue sky and examined it for evidence of
God and found it. To those that don’t naturally believe in God it
only proves Order in the mechanical operation of the Universe in
which man finds himself. It proves also that the sociological and the
astrological realms are connected. To some though that is enough for
a redefinition of what the word “God” means or should mean. It
means, as stated, that there is an Order in the universe that is
beyond our control – for surely the alignment was not down to human
manipulation
of the stars – and that the Order is elegant, and the universe
therefore benign. These things that are proven are as stated enough
for a God, a redefinition of God, for me, as a personal belief.
*
Proposition
16
If
the alignment recurred tomorrow night, without anything significant
to coincide with in the socio-political sphere, this argument would
not be invalid.
Explanation
This
is because what has happened has happened and we cannot change the
facts. It may make me look a bit ridiculous if only now I am bringing
this paper together and the next day the alignment recurs for nothing
special, no good reason, but I would still say Order
in the universe is the atheist’s God, and a scientific description
– or even equivalent – of a theist’s divinity. It would also
surprise me if the alignment did recur tomorrow. But I have become
convinced that what astro-physics labels Order in the universe and
what Christianity calls the Divine Being represents a false
dichotomy. That is the point.
*
Proposition
17
After
a while of talking about the alignment directly, one starts to wonder
if the whole conversation should be hidden or else abandoned.
Explanation
It
seems like wearing clothes out of the shame of one’s body being
naked; but in the case of the alignment and talking about it, it is
the shame associated with the Sin of Consciousness. So we reach a
point where the prelapsarian event of writing, which is freedom,
becomes changed. To liken this change of mood and tone of mind to the
Fall of Man is another step.
*
Proposition
18
Speaking
of the alignment directly might offend like sacrilege or blasphemy.
Indeed,
this consolidates the sense of the divine nature of this event, this
theophany, where it is not just about awe but possibly law too. If it
is rude to stare, I was rude. If it is
blasphemous
or sacrilegious I was that. If God cannot be seen with the naked eye,
the work of God can still be seen with the naked eye. Unless
that is you deem it the work of, say, cosmic silence, in which case I
would reiterate my point about the false dichotomy between God and
the idea of Order in the universe.
*
Proposition
19
The
alignment is an object of worship that transcends difference and also
underlies the variability of religious beliefs.
Explanation
To
see the alignment is to be taken in by a religious event. The
religion itself, as in what religion you are, does not matter. The
alignment makes sense whatever religion you are, whatever colour or
creed. It is so sacred that some people, from a distance, without
seeing it, hide it under the name “white eyebrow.” It is not
inconceivable that it is the main focal point of an international
religion all the way round the world. A Rastafarian and a Jew and a
Christian could all be equally awe-struck by the alignment, which is
almost like saying we are equal in the eyes of God, and almost like
the idea that these different faiths share a common perception of
God, which I have argued is the same as the idea of Order in the
universe.
*
Proposition
20
The
alignment is evidence that Nature is the true architecture of State.
Explanation
Indeed,
I was just thinking about Wordsworth who sought passage to the divine
through the medium of Mother Nature, when I stumbled on this old
aphorism, this axiomatic truth. It is the connection between the
astrological event of the alignment and the socio-political sphere
that makes this axiom ring true to me. Still, it feels right-wing
compared with the exploration of the Future State, and maybe therein
you have the essential difference between the Right and the Left.
*
MUM’S
EQUILIBRIUM
So
in among it all philosophy attains the condition of tea, air, hair,
water, clothes, and kitchen roll. Mum
comes in the kitchen, turns the lights out – says “just have
daylight. Daylight’s good for the mind.” She’s full of magic
sayings hidden in the treetops, full of eloquence married to
axiomatic truth. Imagination is a muscle. Language is a creature. In
politics there are no wrongs or rights. Giving is happiness. Actions
have consequences. Just because someone is good to you doesn’t mean
they are right for you. The brain only heals when it’s asleep and
even nightmares are healing. Poetry is not the entrance and exit of
life. Working in the soil is good for the soul.
It
was my mother who made the flower-press ending on cannabis which = a
dialysis. I wrote the love poem for Flora which = a motor – but the
pretext therein is still “Mum’s Equilibrium” – for after all
I don’t like chopping veg in the kitchen and working in the veg
patch in the garden – and each time she comes in preparing food the
dialysis elongates. A piece of coal would be a good addition, to
analyse, deconstruct, take apart, apply cinematographic super-freeze
to, to know inside out, to treat.
Mum
says she hasn’t slept well for a week now, what with having to
worry about cleaning the house, which is a massive job, to prepare
for all her grand-children coming up. She sends a message to Hannah
while I write, sends a photograph of some baby dresses she found…
the text will no doubt penetrate the six inch gap between earth’s
atmosphere and space, bounce off a satellite and come home, like
an Informationist poem, pertaining to replace archaic “gay.”
Mum’s
kept all of Hannah’s dresses from her childhood and is now
surrendering them to Hannah’s baby. My mother is desperately trying
to keep the house where the Plough alignment is viable in the
Condition of Order. She
says when she has finished moving things around and tidying away
boxes the house will look a good house.
All
of a sudden mum gets up and leaves the kitchen,
goes upstairs to
her bedroom – that anagram of boredom -
and the sound of digitally remastered 1970’s rock music starts
blaring out of her Smart-speaker like she is plunging into second
youth, second rebellion, being a really renegade mum.
She
is a good mum, open, permissive, liberal. She is not a hygiene Nazi,
but has more hippy ideals. She says live and let live. Her maiden
name “Bergfors” means “mountain waterfall” in Swedish, which
is a tonal language, unlike English. It
informs her poetry, free flowing, off the top of her head – she
used
to
do the beck in the back by discretely writing off the top of her
head; but
more recently
when I asked her what she’d do for an MA she said “Flora’s
system.”
Mum
is kind and very
considerate… just the consideration she pays me is a lot but she
grants it to each of her four children equally. She
would let us wear what we wanted, where dad was more fastidious and
stringent;
she would buy us the CD’s we wanted; she wasn’t hard to get a Big
Mac out of – so she was fun – a free-spirit as I say.
As
I get stuck on what to say the music stops – the track is changing
no doubt. A long guitar solo – fretboard masturbation – is
interrupted. I never knew ‘Smoke On The Water’ by Deep Purple had
such a good guitar solo, such virtuosity. It was the song my old
guitar teacher would start with when we watched him play a set with
his band.
TELEPATHIC
ELEPHANT
Once
upon
a time, I conducted
an experiment into a cassette of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ which had a small
pause where cut and resealed in the reel.
The
tape came to me in a broken state, so I performed an operation on it,
a delicate operation.
When
I had sealed the reel, it left some one or two CM overlap of plastic
which
meant
there was a pause in the song.
The
ideal became to do away with the pause.
In
those days I had what I thought was my
only
poem:
“Sullen,
silken sulks,
we
drink the same rain,
spit
is clean
and
so is dirt.”
I
also kept a tough diary for a few weeks and aside from the physical
object of the tape that’s all I had, or all I thought I had.
Experimentation
began on the tape in earnest when I was in a band called Secret Chord
H at Oundle School. I wrote a song called ‘Dream With Open Eyes’
which remains my finest song unto some. But there was also a B-side
that was never recorded… I sat the year above in a circle and got
them to chant to words
“another,
another, another f***ing joint,
another,
another, another f***ing joint,
another,
another, another f***ing joint,
another,
another, another f***ing joint,”
over
and over, ad infinitum, as if rhythm, mantra, repetition, and
double-entendre could “do away with the pause.”
Later,
I
also started to use the word “ette” spelled “e pi e” but said
as if the pi sign were a double lower case t.
It
took years before the pause was gone, the fusion successful.
When
the fusion was successful, the volume of the rest of the tape seemed
slightly dimmed – but there was no longer any pause in the opening
number ‘Go’ where there was still some one or two CM overlap of
tape reel.
That’s
when I thought the object was an objet
d’art,
a Strange Attractor like in Chaos
Theory,
a dream-meet connector, an Utilitarian Martianist wedding ring.
It
lived under my pillow for a while.
It
gave me dreams of “The Ninero Ratio” which I tried to smuggle out
of the unconscious, when my best work seemed lost on the shores of
sleep.
Then
one night as the night wind enwheeled through the dark garden trees,
and an alchemical base metal feeling pervaded my soul, and I recalled
the formula for mud from primary school -
water
+ soil = mud -
I
was persuaded by voices, which by now in mental illness I heard, to
sneak downstairs in the midnight and cook the tape in the dark blue
AGA, top oven, hottest one.
While
the tape was inside the oven, I said to myself I would write, but
could only really conjure a quote from the father-poet Neil Curry.
“Nothing
can be said for certain about poetry except Pound’s claim that the
poet chooses where to end his lines, selecting a tiny pause instead
of letting the type-writer run on.”
A
nacreous, plastic stench filled the kitchen as I took the tape out of
the oven.
In
years to come I would photo the tape for the online world, as its
final resting place, and give the physical object, which was by now a
carcass of a metaphysical idea, to my gf.
Overall
I am pleased with my process.
There
are a number of other things that I
had going for me at the same time that also
might qualify as “halfware” such as the
idea that a
sensory overlay of my
name was
to be tattooed
on Piper
At
The Gates of Dawn,
such
as a
purple-bleeding screen, such
as an
effervescent mobile phone reverberating the rhythm of ‘William
Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before
it rang,
such
as the
album we recorded on binaural earphones where I said I would “plug
my senses in the mains,” and even the sheet where pictures grew
could be portentous of the end of the chip… as
I say all
of this was going on more
or less at
the same time. I was saturated in creative things.
The
eventual work of art I call ‘Telepathic Elephant’ is for Rachel,
with whom I shared a taste in Pearl Jam music when I was young.
Rachel
was the nicest girl to talk to at school.
‘Telepathic
Elephant’ wouldn’t have worked if it was a video. If I had cut an
old-school video of, say, The Doors film, at the moment Patricia the
witch dangles in her legs into the interview with Jim Morrison and
says “what do you think of the dreadful reviews your new poetry
book has received Mr. Morrison?” – and if I had resealed the
reel, cutting out the bit where he responds “I guess they didn’t
understand it,” - then that video would never “grow back.”
<BEE>
My
brother goes out for kebabs. How can I talk of him without mentioning
his philosophy all over? He says <BEE> might soon ensue from @
in the international language alphabet. It is thus in his credo. As I
stated
in Transition
to Philosophy
by
my nom
de plume
“Johannes Bergfors,” he
designed an experiment with more than one
bit
of paper, containing diagrams, which contain the idea mentioned. He
is now the boss of the art dealing company, partly because of my
illness, partly because of his genius. As I said in Transition
To Philosophy
<BEE> is the only original idea in it. Be free, <BEE>,
when you sail across the sea! I think of Wittgenstein who seems at
times to be pertaining towards a more international lexicon. My
brother produced evidence of it. I think in <BEE> we all agree
that something good has been uttered. I think we are united in
blessing <BEE>. As I stated in Transition
To Philosophy <BEE>
could be a mode to drift off on. So
we see that in the end it is my own brother who is the one to deliver
us from all evil. He said the way his computer broke “wasn’t the
Feds.” That
“the Feds had nothing to do with it. It was cheap equipment.” He
is trying to fix it, get new parts shipped in. He is delivering my
kebab back from Millom. I said in Transition
I would do whatever James wants to do with his <BEE> even if it
be maintain a philosophical silence but things have gone on. I wonder
if doing anything other than <BEE> appears evil in a relative
way. I
don’t know what to say now – at the impasse – but he’s done
it to turn us on. He gets back with the kebab. He’s had a bad day.
But I’m sure he’ll be able to fix his computer. As he says “we
live in hope.”
Although
that could be a good place to leave it for now I have little else to
do but try and “get philosophical” about my brother’s recent
burp.
He burped when he got home with
the kebab having started to eat on the way back.
One sense of this utterance is that my own philosophy, compared with
<BEE> is but a shameless belly burp (falsifying
the Nirvana barcode et al).
But there are other meanings I feel too tired to strive for. The
inverse meaning is immediately upon me: that his philosophy is a burp
or rather that
we are to interpret the burp in
the context of
his philosophy not mine. If you think satire’s leaking in that is
not intentional. In the context of James’s philosophy, you find the
burp in realtime no different from another burp, but in reflection,
in afterthought, in aftertaste, a far more meaningful burp. When I
say “meaningful” that is measured against meaning as we once knew
it; and yet with <BEE> around, values need tearing down and
erecting anew. Indeed that is exactly what <BEE> is about and
James himself cites Nietzsche as an influence. He’s
a philosophical genius that leaves me feeling “abstracted from
knowledge.”
If
philosophy is a way of escaping an abstract prison, I feel with <BEE>
that has been achieved, but it’s not my idea, only my brother’s…
still, I can admire it, recognise the genius, be on the same side in
life as my brother, whom it seems was only
in
love with the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh… I
feel elucidation is the way to escape an abstract prison
anyhow.
I must try to not be jealous of my younger brother’s luck, for
that would put me right back inside an abstract prison.
Philosophy
could be the process of elucidation that allows one to escape an
abstract prison, but these may be just words, words in the
old-fashioned vernacular, that dates back to Gondwanaland and even
the dinosaurs whom it seems are now birds. Words may be debased
currency but they are always preferable to physical force. One should
use one’s time at the cryptic crossroad to denounce violence, and
in the meantime we have <BEE> to see if we can be free. So it
is I must not get jealous of my brother’s contribution.
ON BEING SERVED THE BLOT TO WRITE ABOUT
Why would I be served the blot? More to the point what am I going to make of it in a literary sense It could contain a mixture of Blur and Oasis, the big, black blot I put on the page:
[.]
My first work of philosophy, Transition To Philosophy, isn’t even out there yet; and already I am thinking of a second, all about the blot.
When I studied Creative Writing at Warwick University we had an open-air poetry assignment, so as to not divorce poetry from its etymological origins poesis meaning “something which is brought into being.”
Some hung strips of poetry from the trees, someone put a banner saying CRE before the sign for carpark 8, to make the word CRE8. Someone did something with a goldfish bowl. I myself at the time, with a friend, went on a roof to arrange an unused pile of bricks into the words: “PLANNING PERMISSION: BUILD PYRAMIDS OF NEW FOUND LAND.”
And someone brought in a single full stop on a page entitled ‘Writer’s Block.’ I am not trying to rip him off herein, more write a book of philosophy.
Brian Patten, a poet I once admired greatly, said “death is the only grammatically correct full stop.” Look at the sign. Analyse it. What does it say? What does it mean? Imagine if I had followed it up, or you had, by saying “yes indeed!”
Already I see a celebration of oddness; and then I think about Man’s predicament on earth – how weird everything is, society bounding in circles round the sun – this prisoner planet, as my dad called it, where the answer may well be self-punishment.
Blur and Oasis meanwhile were both pretty good. Blur had the rhythm of attack you get from London, present in many of their bands like the Sex Pistols, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Clash, Madness. You get it from the markets on the streets. Oasis meanwhile were characterised more by bittersweet, comedown energy. If they are married in the blot so be it, but that could be reading meaning in where there is none, with hermeneutic autonomy.
If Deconstruction is a dream, letting the eye become distracted by things not meant to be in the text, the monster learning the language in the hut in Frankenstein is Caliban from The Tempest.
Already you can see most of my education was in English and Creative Writing, not Philosophy.
Already, the blot is an imperfection; already a solar eclipse to look at; already it is difficult to pin down what I feel about the blot in words. To isolate, to say with pinpoint precision. Already in turn it means just that – the pinning down of something – but what?
The blot is the blot is the blot is the blot.
I believe I have seen it before, maybe in Wittgenstein.
Shall we revisit the microcosm, the atemporal isle, posit the blot all over? At some point I should, and what if it were blue and what if it were red? Can you “read” it? Or is there a difference between a simple shape and a line of meaning? It could be about someone that needs to stop writing and can’t. I’ve been through 1000’s of files. I’ve had 1000’s of bright ideas. One of them was Action Thriller: to write an action thriller and cut it up and copy and paste it in a random fashion at the screen like Jackson Pollock making an action painting, and still calling it “Action Thriller.” Chance collocations thus churn up evidence through the operation of a game. But now I am settling on philosophy. I felt apart from a few typos my first work in this field went quite well. No, I don’t feel it is the former work that is the blot on the landscape.
My life went wrong with LSD and then I fluffed my Oxford interview. Could that be it? The meaning of the blot? You start to see it can be unpacked in several ways, that there is liberty in the mind. Even when the mind is stained by LSD you can replace with happy memories, positive self-message, log on your brain in the morning with fruit before you insufflate the fume of the Vape pen.
********
What sound does the blot have? Isn’t it strange how all it takes is a blot and everything can start to pour forth? I got it in a co-imaginative way: an old friend on magic alphabet radio: he said to write a second book of philosophy, when I can, about the blot. Thank you friend! So it is that I too sing the song of my self and my soul! I stand atop my Mnt Oblivion and fart out of the wrong orifice!
Let’s say all the action, all the plot, goes on inside the blot. The blot is the plot or even the anti-plot. So what exactly happened? Did two youths board a train not knowing where it was headed in the middle of the Night in London? For a dare? For a probing of the edges of freedom? If we say they did, we now know where they ended up: the blot. So all the foci and loci of their voyage got compressed, concentrated into a singular motif.
The unity of everything under the sun; the way we are all of one mind: is this what I mean? I looked at my old, obsolete FB account the other day and found I had written a poem going:
if e = mc squ@red
c over G = ½
@ltern@tively put:
if e – mc squ@red = [0/ only rel@tive 0]
c over G = ½
@ltern@tively put:
if e – mc squ@red = [0/ only rel@tive 0]
c over G = ½
& life is 1
********
That was when my letter ‘a’ function was broken. And how shall we relate the blot to the letter ‘a’ knowing ‘a’ comes first in the alphabet and there is only one blot? I now put one teabag in one cup and stir in the artificial sweetener with one spoon. I said already in Transition To Philosophy that we start with a playground full of friends, slowly discard them, settle on another soul and die alone.
********
My friend who commissioned me to do this, he knows what he wants and goes for it: is very singular in his tastes and passions. Yet if you only like, say, The Clash, and never broaden your taste, how can you even be said to like music at all? Speaking of music: I had a cassette tape of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ that had a pause where the flimsy reel was cut and resealed. The ideal was to do away with the pause, even to create a poetry machine in perpetual motion.
It worked; the pause was done away with. I thought I’d mention this because I was talking at the time about E pi E as a word pronounced “ette” and that roundness reminds of the blot. Should I posit the blot again or not posit the blot? Without thinking about what’s gone into it, I already knew I was going to posit it twice. You get some people who posit a blank page for example: I did that in the school poetry mag. They said it was “second to none.” Now the blot that can be unpacked in sooooooo many ways:
[.]
It’s not as big as last time. What could be in it? No thought was put into it. It could be a spatio-temporal context. Here is my Walden, all apart from the deep, green bassoon.
About Blur and Oasis merged: one had a song called ‘Coffee And TV,’ the other ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol.’ It was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes one day in the shed where I first conceived of the blot as a mixture of Blur and Oasis. That was long ago. I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. Anyhow, Wittgenstein says language conveys a picture in the mind: is the blot a picture?
I went down to a festival celebrating the solar eclipse with P, and we took too much LSD on the night before the eclipse. It was Lucy in the soul with demons whom as I have said elsewhere might happen to be an actual substance. On the day of the actual eclipse, the weather was grey and got greyer. Nobody needed the X-ray specs because the sun was obscured by cloud. Waking that morning, the day of the eclipse, after the dark night of the soul before it, I felt strangely empty, as if I had lost contact with myself. I was as Syd Barrett sang on The Madcap Laughs “alone and unreal.” But here I am. Here is my Walden, minus the deep, green bassoon.
There is an effect here that is like “The Silken Veil.” I call it “The Silken Veil Effect.” It’s when distant, fading light, of piercing lucidity, calls to you from o’er the shoulder of the fell at sundown, when the fell in the foreground is black and you can just see the fading light. It is around that time now but grey clouds have obscured the sky.
Soon I might be on the lookout for the moon.
In fact going out there is a patch of purple cloud-mountains – an enchanted kingdom – to the left of the fell - and the moon burns bright but is not spherical. And so we reach the end of another day. Yesterday’s writing is still on my mind. Tomorrow I might fit it in. Today is where we live, tonight, tonight.
As a teenage philosopher I drew two, large, overlapping circles, one for the Known, one for the Unknown, and said the small, oval-shaped bit in the middle where they overlapped and clapped was “the area of self.” The idea was that the circles grow together. As the Unknown becomes the Known the area of self in the middle subsumes both the circles into one. There is a total eclipse.
*****
Last
night I was awake all night. I loaned the idea for writing a new book
of philosophy about “the blot” from the air – an old friend in
the network of voices. I walked around the kitchen postponing it,
thinking about the war, how terrible it is. I actually wrote a poem,
the first for a long time, in the night-time:
This
broken clock impression
is
getting quite good -
up
all night, walking
in
a circle round the kitchen.
It’s
the second night in a row.
There
is war in the world.
Grizzly
war, Hellish war,
painful
war, colourful & loud.
And
what good can a writer do?
But
affect incremental changes?
I
walk in darkness around
this
kitchen – apart from voices.
In
my mind a meerkat
attacks
a deadly snake.
In
an aggressive burst of energy.
O
send us the light, Dear Lord.
********
I
didn’t think it was a bad poem, and it probably led me to fiddling
with poem files again. By daybreak I was so tired I couldn’t sleep
and got a sleeping pill from James. Today I got up late, and we had a
Take-away pizza, and I then set about working on my new philosophy
book, all about the blot. I
forgot to mention that at some point yesterday, before the sleeping
pill, I actually read Transition
To Philosophy
and thought it wasn’t that bad. Often writers don’t get round to
reading their own work but I did. One
problem was that it didn’t really try and stop the war! That was
what I mostly noticed! So I wrote a little poem yesterday – and
today woke up and got busy with the blot. The blot is now the plot!
It
has already been contended by the air’s mind that my writing about
the blot is more thoughtful than my other writing. Every full stop
could be the blot in disguise. Is
the blot not about how philosophy is a self-contained language
corresponding to nothing real in life?
********
Now
it is later. It is past midnight again. Maybe the idea of the blot –
of writing about the blot – was not meant to be a generative device
but to get me to stop? Or maybe to get me to try and stop the war?
The
world is an uneasy place at the moment, as you can tell even up here
in a world of Romantic escape. I
feel uneasy and turn to Wittgenstein. Maybe to know your own
philosophy you must first know who your favourite philosopher is?
Similarly to unpack something that happens in your own country, even
if it is to do with an American media-compression experiment, you may
have to read some indigenous philosophy. And
when your
mate’s dad says to you in the pub “when you get old your body
starts to hurt,” is that not philosophy by means of it pertaining
to being axiomatic, truthful, or is philosophy something more than
that, something analytic, something transcendent, something to do
with suspension of judgement, or ecstasia, and a process of
clarification, a teasing out of arguments, a resistance to preaching,
to sermonisation, but a dissection of language, culture, meaning…
what does philosophy mean to you and why? And then it is the same for
the blot. Not “what does the blot mean?” but “what does the
blot mean for you and why?” The
blot is not universal in
meaning like
God just because it contains an absence of meaning-signifiers. It is
surely subjective in meaning even though it contains an absence of
meaning-signifiers. And as I stated in an
earlier draft of
Transition
To Philosophy,
“we must have the Right to Disagree,” like Lennon getting high in
his tree. If the blot is an aperture, for example, is it closed to
you and open to someone else? If it is a picture of an astral body
unto one person, is it the singularity of a black hole unto another?
And what would Mr. Bean, who delivered a lecture on art at the end of
the Bean Movie, make of the blot as a work of art? Is it my “God is
dead” moment – in the sense that meaning has grown diverted? Or
is it more Duchamp? And
when I say it contains an absence of meaning-signifiers, is that even
true? Do I mean it? Or is there in that absence itself a
signification? You might even say that it translates internationally!
There are some delicate bits in Transition
To Philosophy
that don’t. So we see something approaching the sum of all
difference connected; then we see something else, something devoid.
And what about that black cataract over its eye? And what about the
fact that it has no sound like a mute button on a remote control? I
heard that language is just differences in sound combined with
differences in idea; is the blot exempt? How does the blot attain
meaning? How does it journey from Signification to Significance? And
is it just a piece in a beautiful opera of being? And does it mean
something about imminent death? Have
I been sent the blot because I have been hired to die?
*****
The
scene is my bedroom, the anagram of boredom. It is not a crime scene,
but we can investigate. There is a nylon string guitar leaning up
against the chest of drawers; there are clothes on the floor; there
is a mirror; there are two portraits of John Lennon done by
my
artist friend; there is the Tower – that instrument of philosophy –
where I started with a book that began to emanate smell – and
continued to collect weird books that seemed subject to natural
magic. No, it is not a crime scene, just a domestic scene, but if I
am being sent the blot as a death threat, it could be the scene of a
crime nevertheless.
My
bed is unmade. My phone on the bedside table. My tea also. A
hair-band (for I have long hair.) Some
defunct Vape pens. Some empty Vape juice packets. A candle left over
from the recent power-cut. The bedside light is on but not the main
light. The watch my friend got me for Christmas is here. Two old
laptops are flat on the chest of drawers. It is Night. No music pours
through the house. I turn my mind to Heaven. Heaven is a pile of
imaginary statistics that no-one will ever get to see. There is
fly-paper hanging down from a notch on the window. There is a waste
paper basket containing old bottles, sweet wrappers et al.
I
decide the best thing I can do is to take the Tower back to my old
bedroom where my own bookshelves are. The books in this present
bedroom are Dr. Bob’s, not mine. So I take the Tower back to the
other shelves and integrate the Tower into those other shelves so
that no-one would notice it.
MORE ON THE BLOT
I
am thinking about the blot again, or as some call it “the dot.”
The
blot, meaning death. Why have I been commissioned to do it? Let me
not launch into paranoid conspiracy theories. Let me undress the
presentation of the dot as a philosopher would a proposition. But
wait, that is not possible. It is not a proposition. It isn’t
actual language, in not employing the mechanics of meaning, through
differentiation. It differs from All Other Language in a singular
way, by warrant of it not connoting, other than through the
superstitious mode of it connoting imminent death. But maybe it’s
not so superstitious – maybe I am
about to die?
I
think mortality is a form that you can write against; that death can
wake you up and get you writing for your life. But something about
this blot idea, it is less an
hypothetical death than ever before. It is a more accelerated, real
sense of death. I think in short that God is a game. That a game is
based on permutation. That even a game of cards can be a rehearsal
for death. I think The
Lords And The New Creatures
is also a game – a wide, yellow circle with death the pinpoint
centre and the circumference closing in. I think it also a
media-compression experiment dreamed up on LSD under a hot,
Californian sun.
The
friend who gave me the blot: he was a poet as I was too. He had one
when we were young going something like:
“A
house. At night. Waiting in darkness
for
you. Who do you think of when
you
touch yourself in the shower?”
I
puzzled over it for a long time because he did delight in a wilful
opacity; and it took me years to crack the code. In fact it was the
night before my father died that I got what he was talking about. So
I wrote it down on my computer. Then my dad died and I think the next
thing in the list was:
“Death’s
breath is a tear of flame,
with
waxy dreadlocks drooped in shame.”
They
existed either side of the actual pinpoint moment of death. Now
the
friend
has
asked me to do the blot… knowing what he meant in his poem, I think
again of the blot, and the way the meaning of the poem only
came
to me in a time coinciding with my dad’s death. If you’re too
slow you’ve missed it. This friend, he didn’t ideate the
“intended meaning” himself but encrypted it, and applied it to
music too, to beautiful effect. He made songs in other words that
never repeat themselves, never look back, always move on, make you
wonder “how did we get here?” miles down the line. Not that it’s
not but who you think of touching yourself in the shower is the one
with all the wordly power over you.
MORE
ON THE BLOT AFTER A LONG TIME HAS PASSED
I
think it could be “the sum of all notes.” And having reached this
conclusion what more is there to say? I shall not describe it. But I
set off on the wrong foot with this. Transition
To Philosophy
was such that it was structured as 100 numbered points because it was
about using my 100% A-level exam essay as a form, doing a template of
it for my brother. So in a way it was about perfection. Is that why I
am now served the blot? When I say it is the sum of all notes, I
might mean musically, or in the promissory sense of the note-taker.
One thing is for sure is that the idea did not come from within.
Transition
To Philosophy
was good because the idea came from within, but herein the idea has
come from without. It’s like I have been set a task, and a
laborious one too.
I
am up in the night-time, again, at the foot of the oldest fell. Is
the blot every colour merged? It certainly isn’t the absence of
every colour, for that is the white space onto which it is posited –
and I think Spot the Dog is constellation too. Indeed, I have seen
it, a low-hanging, sensational star, flickering red and blue. Unless
it was a man-made object. They can make all sorts these days. I just
make books and sometimes songs. I want to make the best possible book
of philosophy I can. There
could be something MacBethian going on. Also: Jim Morrison mentions a
wall, did I tell you, which is scratched with a blemish, and trying
to perfect it with further scratches. It’s
so long ago that I started to write of the blot that I no longer know
what
I said, without rereading it all back. You have to go with the
language-at-first-hand sometimes. In fact you can only really do
that, unless you want to go straight for the mouth, deep into the
pre-verbal recesses of the psyche.
********
More
time passes. I get why I was served the blot. Transition
To Philosophy
showed promise. The reason it was good is that the idea came
from within. The idea arose when I
got 100% in a timed, English Literature A-level exam essay to “do
James a template,” to help him with his essays, but I never did,
nor understand what I had meant myself by the idea of the template;
and that was what Transition
To Philosophy
was getting at. The subject was that a good piece of writing should
spring from a sound aesthetic philosophy, and the form was 100
numbered points.
But
it wasn’t actually perfect and was easy to spot holes in. For
example, it may only have been a B Minus. Or
for another example, they couldn’t even keep it in a unitary font –
as if my files had been hacked. Also
probably most crucially I failed to cite my references in quoting a
friend - and it was this friend that served me the blot – so I
make it that. So
I was served the blot by someone
who wished to pick holes in the first. I
suppose that is a mistake, that comes hand in hand with amateurism.
Will Fenn is the name of the friend that first got me thinking along
the lines of atheistic pragmatism. Having got this far and made
amends, things could be okay now. That’s
why I should suddenly
leave
the blot alone
and get straight on with the business of proving telepathy real with
Dr. Calculator Ptom.
TELEPATHY
HAS BEEN PROVEN
Once
upon a time,
an
interlocutor, possibly
meaning my old friend and bloodbrother the philosopher Dr. Calculator
Ptom, picked
up my hands while I was at the screen in
a different part of the country and
got me to type:
He
found himself on a plane.
He
found himself on a.
He
found himself on.
He
found himself.
He
found.
P.
But
what “P” means we do not know. Wittgenstein for example would
say:
P
= ~ ~ P.
I
later heard it said that the wing-shaped calligramme
is
the only good bit in the whole of my oeuvre, and whilst I contest
this, it might still be true, depending on your hermeneutic autonomy
and subjective taste.
My
point, which I left out so far, is that I
would say that the wing-bit is still mine own, in the sense that if
you hear voices they are your own thoughts, and if you write them
down you needn’t become Anon, thankfully. I
imagine Dr. Calculator Ptom feeling (if only a little bit) peeved off
that the calligramme is mine, but being a Liberalist essentially, he
would I am sure retain good humour about it.
Having
convinced myself that I have scientific proof that telepathy is
real,
I wonder which of us out of Dr. Ptom and I it was going somewhere by
plane, which sense of ‘plane’ it was, and how to factor it into a
story. Already the wing-bit has been used in poetry
publications,
so I am not too happy to be replicating and duplicating it as
a philosopher. But
still, if it hasn’t been made clear before that it was through the
wing-bit that telepathy was proven, it needed saying.
Having
done that I wonder how else I can be of service… I
could falsify the Nirvana barcode and have; write a rudimentary
mathematical proof about the genius of my brother’s sheet where
pictures grew – and more. Maybe,
now
that I have finally
done
what he wanted me to do, Dr. Calculator Ptom could even help me from
a great distance, via magic alphabet radio and the new, synchronised
word? Already I have a long file above
me as beneath
me, performing one or two functions, but it might change. What I mean
is I don’t need help… and
if I do, it
is more likely to come from within the house, where I live with my
brother and my mother, who all seem to share what I call
“co-imagination” and what James calls “sympathy.”
There
is a piece of maths I am fond of, but recognise as not mine own,
which I must not include.
Whose it is I cannot say, and am not going to posit or delimit it, so
know not why I mention it at all, other than that you see the
Organisational Principle of my mind working over, see me, that is,
working things out and trying to be fair… once I introduced Dr.
Calculator Ptom to a woman as “a polymath” and he said
immediately “John’s a polymath too,” so that is the extent of
what the P in the calligramme may stand for, meaning it can also
stand for anything beginning with P… peace would be a good one,
having the peace of mind to write.
I
deem it that we should have done P before, rather than leave it this
late into a career where I am forever caught in a state of disrepair.
It might not be too late to present a few clippings from the
data-tree in the name of maths and science and don’t forget
philosophy.
It’s
interesting because sometimes a voice that comes from outside of your
consciousness appears to come from within you, like a form of
friendship, a bond renewed, bypassing
the mind’s ear.
You can also hear voices that seem to come from without that are
actually your own thoughts. I have been a voice-hearing writer for
many years, and hear that voices might be perceived as difference not
illness in the future. Already they are “onjects,” quavers,
syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound. For that
is what it is to be a poet, to rename reality, to claim your pills
are “poetry buttons” whose names should never appear in poems, to
claim hospital is “Monopoly Jail.” You might even start inventing
illnesses like I did with “Metal Brain Disease” which may have
been something to do with knowing you have fried your brain on drugs
but not noticing any changes… now to have this proof of telepathy
is a wonderful thing because it disturbs the awful solipsism of
voice-hearing. Living in the countryside with mental illness is
really tough, and hearing voices all the while is too, so it is
heart-warming to have the scientific
evidence
of telepathic union.
Meanwhile
I take my father’s stance that writing of the living is rude so
don’t wish to start telling adventure stories about Dr. Calculator
Ptom and I but we did once board a train not knowing where it was
headed. Now
I hear from all the way down in London that “now it
might
be
time to hear from all the way down in London that it’s good, that”
meaning
this
passage, in this co-imaginative and proleptic way.
OUTLINE
OF LIFE EVENTS THAT LEAD TO THE CONDITION OF SCIENCE
When
I
was only
seven,
and
liked the film All
Dogs Go To Heaven,
I
helped
invent the net albeit
only in
a
little way.
I scribed
a little
book, that
is,
that
stored
the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to
grow all the way round the world – and
to keep it free too.
The book performed
at
least four
scientific functions: it
encrypted
a scientific notion concerning Gravity; stored
the idea of the net in
writing in the attic to
give it a chance to grow around the world;
calibrated
an algorithm that sublimates
numbers and letters on a cellular level to see if the new colour, I
think, could be rendered as a cellular mark; and
separated
the object ‘pollen’ from its name - and I did not consciously
know,
even though it was writ with my own right hand.
Some might say that’s already enough or even too much for a whole life’s contribution to writing, but it was only a promising start. Then at eight I made two Naturalistic Observations I didn’t understand… if one was metaphorically speaking the breakfast of every snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom, the latter was the plastic spreadsheet in the lining of a jacket in the cloakroom.
Yes, then by the age of eleven I was “incrementally” marked by the maths of the new colour on the hand even though it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. At that stage I was at Caldicott. My siblings and I wrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. We sang of the dog going round and round chasing own tail! I won the government set intelligence test at the computers.
Leaving Prep School, I came into possession of a cassette cut in the reel and resealed it in a delicate operation meaning a pause in the song, and an ideal to do away with the pause. That was one experiment back then that lasted for years. It being Pearl Jam ‘VS’ I suppose the experiment was in organising a poetry machine in perpetual motion. At fifteen I formed a second band called Oedipus Wrecks. My mnemonic for the strings was indeed Even A Dick Gets Big Erections. We foreshadowed the genre Doom. I also led two friends to the face of stars. We were three gathered in the name that Night so it could be something from the Bible but there are other options including collective hallucination, including a vision scripted in The Lords And The New You Know Who. By now I had started reading it.
I formed Secret Chord H and an Anon love poetry magazine while still at school, sweet sixteen. Then at eighteen years old in the year 2000, and not unlike Democritus of the Ancient Greeks, I foresaw the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in. I was a fully tuned-in prophet on other fronts too, even savant because I foresaw and spoke against September 11th using my own brain in 2000. I did also entertain the idea that the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison might have to become the missing link to the super-human corridor in evolution – but it may not be my own thesis.
I envisioned our Plough alignment happening, but got the address well wrong, saying “maybe in India” as opposed to my back garden. I set aside an ideal for a book called The Scientific Papers about it all that would be classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.” Among the prophecies I spouted many ideas for inventions, many aphorisms, many artistic ambitions. That year I wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%.
My fourth band The Flood recorded an album or even algorithm on binaural earphones… the earphones were my idea to invent, back in the den in the barn, which was never mentioned once during the band because it wasn’t me that implemented it. Already some of these things seem scientific, these motifs, this Excellent News. When writing a portfolio for Warwick University, furthermore, I entertained that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, that Portability might be the apotheosis of form…
The Towers came down, appalling us all or at least my friend Paul. I did feel the psychosis in my brain burn and burn. Still, when I got rid of the burning feeling, I lost my memory of the conversation where I forewarned of it, the whole prophetic speech. So I had little recollection of the barn where I had foreseen and spoken against it to the day using my own brain; and was persuaded at length to continue playing in the binaural earphone band.
Attending Warwick University, in 2002, I found my teacher, Professor David Morley, whom it would seem was a reasonable man, had just brought out The Scientific Papers and with an almost-verbatim classification to mine own. When it happens in sheep it is called morphic resonance and when it happens in academia it is uncanny embrocation.
My first mobile, it reverberated the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang. I wrote a paper about whether or not Lucy in the soul w/ demons even happens to be an actual substance. With no degree, I returned to the band in my Gap Year haunt of Cambridge and promised on the binaural album recorded on earphones I’d “plug my senses in the mains.”
Leaving the band, I coined the neologism “co-imagination,” before attending a second university, Lancaster, where I got a First despite the onset of mental illness. My dissertation was on the scientist-poet David Morley. I attested to our Holy Cow, the white eyebrow, the alignment of the Plough, the Plough honed in to align for a beautiful rhythm change in the White House around that time.
I also attended the Secret Garden party after and found real skywriting; gravitated down south, attesting to a pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital. I found my name tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, as if some sensory overlay had grown as naturally as grass.
Returning north again, I built The Tower out of books I had gained that seemed to exhibit signs of natural magic, like one emanating the redolent smell of perfume that could be the word of a dog, and another that seemed to have lost a line. My PC screen bloomed purple, and I worked at the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen in an experiment into post-humanism. I also found the tape I mentioned to be a successful fusion and listening in to the suggestion of the wind cooked it in the dark blue AGA’s top oven.
When my dad died, and the purple-bleeding screen in the same instant, I discovered the sheet where pictures brown and blue simply bloomed or maybe grew. It could be portentous of the end of the chip. The pictures seem to depict the lyric to an old song I wrote in Oedipus Wrecks but the sheet is still not mine for it belongs to my younger brother who designed it, who laid it down. That was also when my boyhood book emerged which only now do I start to understand in terms of long storage. Then it was time to falsify the Nirvana barcode, and nor did I forget to extirpate every trace of recognition from the myriad mind, unloose the mind of form, method-act every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio, broadcasting dreams.
Throughout
that sequence of events I found it impossible to gain even 1p and my
friends on both the right and the left deem it that that is not fair;
but
it is
not my business to complain about money. I
suppose if someone pays you for the face of stars, they themselves
become a tyrant. I
also suppose there might be some kind of democratisation or balancing
out process going on that stops me from winning, from getting ahead.
I
have by now brought out many books and some albums too, only in an
amateur way, but as I say am still yet to earn a single penny from
any of the life experiences I mention.
SCIENCE SAYS
Science STILL says to only keep my old falsification of the Nirvana barcode and my brother’s notion about <BEE>.
The latter is not mine; and so I must leave it out for now at least.
In terms of the falsification of the Nirvana barcode, that refers to that occasion when I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.
I actually did have a mobile phone that buzzed off before it rang, through every technological inlet in the room, telly, stereo, laptop, air.
So I wrote that down – that monochromatic drone of ‘William Tell’ – somehow - and it became a song that falsified the Nirvana barcode through bastardisations and mishearings of other people’s songs, that nevertheless worked as a piece of music unto itself, sustaining narrative, meaning and musicality all at once.
It has been called as good as Rachmaninov… but for now I am to only keep the Nirvana barcode bit from the whole sodden story!
|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings
A NOTE ON MY FIRST NUMBER
The encrypted node in the boyhood work, meanwhile, was that if the Gravity between earth and moon is instant and therefore enough to break Light-speed a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah.
I see now that it was possibly adults about me who, for the sake of long storage, when the idea of the net needed storing in writing, got me to begin encrypting that with a text called
2
JOHN TUCKER
ENGLISH
E
and to continue with a second text called
ENGLISH
JOHN TUCKER
HARECROFT
1
“but then again who knows.”
The split was not even but asymmetrical like one was on and one was off. It was like spotting the flaw in Einstein. It was like saying if you write Einstein backwards it implies the breaking of light speed. It was even like saying even if we invent a time machine that can equal light speed we can only go back in time because the future hasn’t happened yet.
At some point, after the Einsteinian bit, a + sign was put in for the F of ‘scarf’ in the line
“I have a scar+ that is red and black.”
Then there was a discussion of the struggle between ‘Good and Evil’ in a piece where
“I woke up at 1 o. clock.”
In other words the first person pronoun and the time 1 o’clock were being contrasted.
It is not clear if the splitting of the two books happened next, for the number 2 in the sequence, but I think so. In terms of the number three, there was also my maths book where in among the numbers you find a three line poem going
Colour circles red. How many circles?
Colour triangles blue. How many squares?
Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?
To read it all you’d only need to go and get a copy of what by now I know helped invent the net but which at the time of publication I did not know helped invent the net. It’s called The Sunset Child. People have said the best one in it is called ‘My Dad.’
THE LIVING SPREADSHEET
At eight years old, then, I made the two Observations, one a breakfast of every snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom, the other the living spreadsheet.
W/r/t the latter, 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 wooden stairs. “There’s something disgusting growing in this jacket!”
It could be described as a flat, plastic rectangle with an un-naturally regimented pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds - splurged on top.
I left the room to see if it would still be there when I went back; and it was; and so I decided to put the whole jacket in the bin.
I heard later, years later, it was called “Grand-darth’s Ship” and took its Taxonomic Genus from one of my own seven year old poems.
The poem ‘Grand-darth’s Ship’ was about how my grand-dad Don became a deep-sea diver. For a start, he actually fought against the Nazis and secondly he didn’t become a deep-sea diver in reality – he became an Officer in the R. A. F. So it just grew, evolved, this living spreadsheet, which was not an animal that reminds of wealth, but of grand-dad’s generation and the horror of war.
What I think I have learned about this specimen recently is that it was an actual monster albeit small, and that a monster needn’t be very big. Maybe we were supposed to deem it a success of scientific procedure that it was available to sensory perception in what some might call consensus reality, in other words stable and at bottom sterile.
How it came into being I do not know. Reification means “becoming a thing” and comes from Latinate etymology “res” meaning “thing” but where this living spreadsheet as I call it came from I do not know. I could start talking about “Symbiotic Homeostasis.” That means there was such a juxtaposition going on between Good and Evil that Nature acted with an homeostatic reaction. So we are talking about kinesis – but how plastic became part of that kinesis I do not know.
If it was my dad’s business and there was financial backing I’d just say that with enough financial backing anything is possible. One might deem it a shame that I threw the specimen away on judging it evil, for now we cannot examine it, but I am not convinced of that version.
They say this is what I should’ve been writing about when I was writing teenage love poetry inspired by Jim Morrison – but it’s better late than never eh?
They also say you shouldn’t write about things you cannot renew; but I think in this case of the synthesis of the living spreadsheet it might be renewable even if not by me.
I also think if you can trust my sensory perception it shows that science is the key to a world of possibility. To possibilities opening up. It shows what can be done and that is surely inspiring. I am not trying to bring down the government or start a Revolution, only report accurately on what has been seen, sound out the realm of the senses. If new possibilities arise that is surely a good thing and should not be squashed or censored.
I’M FINE
“I’m fine,” I say all the time and you wouldn’t know what I mean.
I mean I was visibly marked on the hand by the experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark when I was about 11.
I took a long thin stripe up the underside, and that is what I mean when I say I’m fine.
It didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end.
We still see that it is possible to effect your own evolution.
You could even call it self-evolution.
This one might imagine comes from within as opposed to adaptation to the environment. It might be what Darwin would focus on in my situation, nevertheless: The Theory of Self-Evolution. And if I were a shapeshifter, Protean, a changeling, I would also try and be the Darwin of light, where maybe Morley is the Einstein of water.
In
short we might be able to grow new colours on a cellular level, and I
might have evidence of this either way. Above
all else in my science, this would seem to be the greatest
revelation. If you Google the question “is it possible to change
the colour of white skin through maths?” the whole net will tell
you no, but this is not true, even if the colour did not turn to be
the new colour in the end.
It
might not be cool to say this but last time I was in A and E after an
attempted O. D. there was a female, non-white nurse who had to help
me go for a pee. When I came home I heard her on the airwaves say
“you looked twin-tone when you needed to pee. We would say you have
re-invented the human form.”
I
also heard that now they think I did the maths of the new colour (and
even though it didn’t turn out either red and black or the new
colour in the end), my death is going to be like Jesus – as if the
+ sign is a literal cross.
THE
RED AND BLUE THING
Between
the tincture and The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob
there was a prose poem, or even dyad of prose poems called ‘The
Fire’ and ‘The Sea’. I was thus quite old when I “did the red
and blue thing” and now through reading gather that it was yet
another example of embrocation
with a scientist poet called David Morley, which I would see more of
the older I got.
‘The
Fire’ was a description of the sitting room fire, its 100 tongues
that danced and entranced, here where the stars realign. It was
observed; whereas ‘The Sea’ was remembered and imagined. It’s
interesting though because there is a difference between humidity and
moisture in the air; and the hottest star heat burns blue; and the
red and blue thing as they call it, which Michael
Hofmann
writes
of in a poem called ‘Entr’ acte’ could be but a graph with one
long line kinking headward from the heart and ending in the stars.
So
that was something I
did
between the tincture and the first album; and back then I was a
garden brick expert – my garden bricks, attention to detail in
grammar and spelling too, and
general keen-ness at English saw
me top of the form at English every term at school. And then years
later, as I say, I found out at University that Professor David
Morley had done the “red and blue thing” through the elements in
just the same way, when he was studying acid rain’s effect on Lake
Windemere up in the Lakes where I lived as a child.
Anyhow,
the boyhood work was a proof and the red and blue thing may have been
enough to be another. I was already producing proofs in boyhood,
which were cogent and interesting. You
notice in the elemental style a complete absence of grim specimens
and a belief in the Natural sciences.
The
embrocation
with David Morley could be down to his researching the effects of
acid-rain on Lake Windemere in my boyhood, but there are other
potential causal factors such as that I was the witness and he was an
evolutionary scientist and still is.
THE
EMOTIONAL COLLAPSE
Also between the tincture and The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob I had a complete emotional collapse. I was in the I. T. Room at Prep School, in days before I had entertained that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, and it all got on top of me. I was talking to the teacher and suddenly started sobbing. The teacher was hugging me, asking and asking “what’s wrong? What’s wrong?” and all I could say was “I don’t know! I don’t know!” To this day I cannot pinpoint what upset me so, but I was going through changes and suppose that I was entitled to feel sad.
I had never heard of The Lords And The New Creatures, as hadn’t my mother, but I think I was already the witness. I hadn’t read my seven year old book because it had to be locked in the attic but in it I had already helped invent the net and my thing was now marked by the mathematics contained in it. It all got on top of me and made me break down in tears, and it wasn’t just any old crying – I was heaving with sadness.
If you look in The Lords And The New Creatures, it starts with “Look where we worship,” and funnily enough I had by that stage already had a black out in chapel. I think it a naturally occurring fossil of art. I went down like smashed glass on chapel floor and woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.
The New Creatures of course begins with the words:
“Snakeskin jacket
Indian eyes
brilliant hair
he moves in disturbed
Nile insect
air.”
If
you look at my experiences, the wood, the plastic spreadsheet, the
tear up the front, it templates over the opening of The
New
Creatures
– which has always seemed cryptic to me, ambiguous, impossible to
fully understand. If Jim Morrison was scripting a witness, factoring
in a foreseen human repository, with his opening gambit, the sheer
incomprehensibility of his language might account for why I was lost
for words when having a breakdown. What
I might now mean is if you want to understand what Morrison meant,
find out what the subsequent witness went through and that will
reveal what Morrison meant;
and what really came after “brilliant hair” was an experience of
tremendous sadness and being lost for words about it too.
I
have by now read and reread The
Lords And The New You Know Who.
He
does say “a creature waits out the war,” meaning the Cold War;
and my dad did say he sold his art dealing business at the fall of
the old Berlin Wall; but Jim Morrison also talks of “the dry end of
vacuum boat,” connoting “the wrong end of the stick,” as if to
say “if we get in trouble for what evolves we need to be able to
say they got the wrong end of the stick.”
There
is an Irish accent in the second moiety The
New Creatures,
derived straight from James Joyce that I have detected. The ending is
beautiful, almost eschatological and prelapsarian in one. Overall
some say it’s as good as The
Waste Land
by TS Eliot; and some, like Dr. Tony Sharpe of Lancaster University,
have contended that “the genius of the witness is elusive.”
That’s me: present in the book before I was born. I mentioned in
Transition
To Philosophy
a little bit about the difference between being the witness ‘in,’
‘of,’ ‘to’ and ‘from’. The witness ‘in’ is scripted
in the book when Morrison says “we need a witness to the killing.”
The witness ‘of’ attests to specimens themselves. The witness
‘from’ is the correct endorsement and the witness ‘to’ a mere
formality after the correct endorsement is made. I think I already
made this clear in Transition
To Philosophy,
and am but repeating myself. Not
only have
I gone to town on reading and rereading Morrison’s text,
but I have rewritten it, many
times over.
NOTES
ON WORDS
6. It isn’t too hard to ideate a theory of meaning.
If I need a theory of meaning I could just reiterate a few salient points that have been knocking around my screen for a long time:
a) The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, when translated via the mechanics of meaning, into words, represents dilution.
b) When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.
c) The meaning of something is inherent in its exact mode of expression.
d) Meaning is not a delusion unlike Time.
e) Meaning is an emotional import given mere exo-skeleton with words.
– These statements seem to state the obvious and are largely not original but that doesn’t mean they are not true. My next point is that:
f) Meaning is an effect of differences in sound combined with differences in idea.
g) If all these statements are simultaneously true, something “polysemic” has happened.
h) It may be that for something to attain meaning it must journey from Sheer Signification to (in)significance.
Note:
Point (f) that meaning is an effect of differences in sound combined with differences in idea seems to suggest that meaning is quite superfluous; but it has to go deeper than being a mere “effect,” has to correspond to something in the human surely. I’m not proposing a return to the conception of the linguistic sign as “transcendent referent” like pre-Derridean philosophy just think meaning should be more than an effect. Meaning is indeed the most meaningful thing, if you permit the neoplasm, the tautology. The word for meaning has a meaning too and it is meaning in and of itself. Meaning should be deeper than trickery, than post-modernism, than surface being depth andcetera.
10. There is no such thing as immutable truth.
My ex gf when I was at Warwick University said “there’s no such thing as immutable truth.” Yet reading Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I discover him saying philosophers do believe in a kind of truth that is fixed and static, timeless and eternal. I think of the idea that my dad delimited to me when I was young:
“there’s no such thing as almost infinite.”
You could say it is timeless and eternal, that truth; but you could also say what my ex gf means is that the language used to say it is plastic and malleable. Still, I like to believe that beyond the language the meaning of the words is eternally true and immutably so.
It might even be seen as the moment I first showed a philosophical turn of mind. We were driving in the car, and I was in the back seat, and though I knew it was a mistake, said that something was “almost infinite.” My dad jumped on it and said “there’s no such thing as almost infinite.” I did know that and felt a fool for the clumsiness of my expression, for the people that were there must’ve got the impression that I didn’t know what my father said, whereas in reality I had spent long nights considering the edge of the universe and what lies beyond the edge. I misrepresented myself, in terms of self-promotion, and found a difference between identity and persona, what I think and the careless things I say, thought and expression in other words. The mistake I made I never wished to make again, which was selling myself short.
12. Science and art still differ on the matter of truth.
They have different sensibilities. In science truth is to be falsified through which nothing is 100%, only ever 99% at best. In poetry however there is truth-to-itself through which anything can be true if well-made enough. Poetic truth is like the truth of the individual, constituted of its own inner nature. This came up in my dissertation on the work of David Morley, years ago. I was instructed in that by Dr. Tony Sharpe of Lancaster University.
In my dissertation I argued that we come to a work of art presupposing many binary oppositions. These might include:
inside/ outside a convention;
science/ art;
High/ Low;
honesty/ craft;
narrative/ confessional;
and I argued that a great work might start to undo these binary oppositions. But still, where science and art differ is in the treatment of truth. A poem could say “Barnes has scored a chicken” and if the poem was well-made enough, it would be true for the duration of the poem. If a scientist said “Barnes has scored a chicken” it would only be a percentage of truth, never 100%.
26. The symbol [R] represents the stance, the large-R, Romantic stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.
My usual example of this is to connect the words “drip drown dream dragon drop” but never before have I expressed the truth that it is actually easy to conjure examples of word-combinations that nobody has before. The polkadot dancers left the door fleering in a leery way and to be quixotic hitched a ride on the cosmic wave south where a mouth lay in wait, open as a gate, until the hexagonal sun set, dreaming in ink.
When I say these words have never been organised before I must temper that by saying there are super-computers who can put every word, letter, sentence, book, paragraph in every order, like the machine in Gulliver’s Travels. But presumably that would run on indefinitely instead of providing a single sentence. Whatever the case, there is a debate in Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco as to whether or not the super-computer in question has ruined the heart-purifying permutation games of the Cabala or whether in fact computers can be spiritual – and the answer is it is subjective.
I think of exemplums like [R], like the number “!00%” - and like my old Nirvana barcode; like James’s notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet, even the plus sign for an ‘f’ in the line “I have a scar+ that is red and black” – as somehow escaping the totalitarian machination, as somehow representing hope, but they may also be accounted for by the super-computer.
However this is a specious imputation. It is not that we are up against an Evil Empire and must usurp literature from the hands of said supercomputer. It is just a marvel of technology that everything we can think of is accounted for – everything that is, in my list, apart from the suit. The computer won’t have done the suit. It escapes. In fact you could say the supercomputer cannot compute the suit.
31.
Love is grouped with language not God.
Teenage
philosophers sometimes group God and love together in the cynical
sense that (as they say) both are illusory. However, I think it more
sophisticated to group love with language. As WH Auden said “love
is a choice of words.” So this I would say is an essentially
pragmatic option.
Wittgenstein
said a lot of the problems of philosophy are created by
misunderstanding
the logic of language
and hoped to elucidate these problems. A lot of problems in life not
just philosophy - are
also down to communication. So, believing, on top of this, that love
is aligned with language not God, I hope to improve my language-use –
to open communication – and I think this comes down to care. Taking
care, engaging brain, needn’t make you a fastidious middle aged
man, but a happier communicator. And after all lack of communication
is saddening, isn’t it? Like when as a child Valentine’s Day
passes you by without anyone telling you it is Valentine’s Day.
It’s saddening and sadness is a terrible emotion whose waves seem
to stretch before and after time. All told then to remedy sadness,
communication should be focussed on.
34.
There is
more
than
one sense
of the word “perception.”
The
word “perception” has different meanings that are not utterly
distinct but related. First and foremost is the Primary Meaning: the
activity of the sensory organs in a neutral state. This is hearing,
seeing, tasting, touching and smelling. The next is the
Interpretative Meaning which is meant when someone says “my
perception of events was such and such.” It is an analytic
interpretation of what goes through the senses. The next is the
Subjective Meaning which is akin to Belief and also Opinion. It is
meant when someone says “in my perception, so and so.” As stated
these senses of perception are not utterly distinct but related and
it could be said one builds on another; even that taken as a process
there is a procession from information to knowledge to wisdom. That
procession from information to knowledge to wisdom could double as a
process of abstraction, through which something concrete becomes
something abstract. You could also say it templates over the paradigm
of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Perception, in short is a
catch-all, umbrella term that when opened up carries multifarious
meanings that slightly differ in emphasis. At least, this is my
perception of the word “perception.”
37.
Some
coinage seems universal and pre-existent.
Once
upon a time,
a while ago, I
invented the
word
distractionary to contain such neologisms as comnambulism, meaning
online sleepwalking, as funger meaning hunger for fun, as filence
meaning delicate speech, as amazeballs to replace archaic ‘gay,’
as emocracy, meaning rule by emotion, as agovernment, meaning the
opposite of government, as gravitolution and evity which might go
without saying, as co-imagination, as in to be diagonalised by
omnijective interface of random access co-imagination, which is not
fun, and I thought isness was another one, as in music is penetration
of isness, but it was already done in Joyce, whom it seems knew a lot
of these, and I have just recollected
another, not just “indwellable” meaning the opposite of
indomitable, when
it comes to cinema, but
the word ‘entropy’ spelled backwards, as if to frame the first,
unformulated spark of appetency
in Nothingness, preceding Creation, yet again, even though the
universe was born in silence not
appetency
as far as we know.
39.
Some poetic effects have no name.
My
undergraduate dissertation was an immanent, Kantian critique in
mimicking the
methodology of David
Morley’s series of findings into itself, into the concept of art
and science writing as a single discussion of perception. The
micro-analysis focussed on the line “the heart trammelled and
rammed on the anvil bleeds visions.” I worked out he was using the
anti-dactylus, two soft, one hard; and not only that but the stressed
syllables in that metrical pattern all rhymed on a short A. The
effect is kinetic; and there is invective monotony written into the
line’s musical configuration; but apart from that it is nameless,
nameless in all the array of hyper-specialised tools of sustained
critical micro-analysis. I
found this surprising because the effect seemed form at its most
mathematically precise but then again considering the line belongs to
a bilingual, gypsy shaman narrator, we might not be surprised that
the metre indicates something that is outside a tradition.
40.
Time spent reading in hushed library corners pays off.
Professor
Squillegybob says:
“The
Great Gatsby
could be an infradiegetic heterotopia pertaining to panchronic,
panoramic overview like a chronotope turned euchronia, unless this
represents a word-world gone polysemic with the multifarious
possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy through whom the esemplastic
has fled away with the quadlibetical.” That’s
not to be confused with my brother Dr. Bob who would say the above
sentence is nonsense, just an attempt to bamboozle the reader with
fastidious loquacity, with fanciful magniloquence, with profuse
verbosity, and that it is better to keep things simple, to try and
not
use as many long words as possible. Indeed
the more I know the meanings of words like “infradiegetic” the
less I know the meanings of small, simple words like “in” and
“of.” There was a chap at school said to be the cleverest of all
of us and he said “sometimes I forget how to spell ‘is.’” It
seemed like a highly intelligent
thing to say considering we were less than ten. It
is possible, meanwhile, to go through a course, doing more reading
than they can even throw at you, absorb all the hyper-specialised
terms and still forget how to spell “Winnie the Pooh.” Winnie
the Pooh
is said to be where the English store their best philosophy. We lack
an immanent, Kantian tradition but have things like Winnie
the Pooh
instead. It wasn’t on my reading list when I was at University but
my father did read it to my siblings and I as children.
41.
Language contains fossils.
The
word “went” is not past participle of the verb “to go”
originally, but the verb “to wend.” It is thus a fossil; and
language is full of them, fossils, coins, corruptions, dead metaphors
the brain is built of, ossifications, word-shades, word-frequencies,
ghost-vowels, consonantal masses. The English language is worth
billions of pounds, the creative industries second only to the
financial markets for bringing in wealth. This
was one of the salient points of one undergraduate poem portfolio
that took the form of defaced bank notes within its plot. I handed it
in the Professor Paul Farley and he gave me a First for it, and it
would’ve been even better had it contained something a government
super-computer that can put every word in every order wouldn’t have
thought of.
42.
Language is a creature.
I
read in The
New Scientist that
we developed language on the basis of meat; that we grew our brains
by eating meat; that we then needed to spread information about
farming, hunting, killing, cooking
and eating meat – so developed language.
One
of my Professors, Prof. John Schad of Lancaster University, says
“language speaks Man.”
Another,
Professor David Morley of
Warwick University,
says “language is a word-world where words are a species.”
My
friend Paul the poet and I think that “language is the emotional
condom of the world.”
Part
of that is that the pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, when translated
into words, via the mechanics of meaning, always represents a
dilution.
50.
Truth is aligned with psychic pleasure.
So
far this seems to be about me trying to catch up with my circle of
intellectual friends from London, who all started reading Philosophy
at school the year I left town and went to another school. I am, that
is, hot on the heels of the scholars, and would like to take things
further. Maybe I would start learning about “Impartials” like
undergraduates
at
Lancaster University? Maybe I would realise I need to read some
indigenous philosophy if I am to deal with events in the mystical
realm that happened in my own country? Maybe I am to recognise the
Nirvana barcode is a fallacy and I am not to redo it? Maybe I should
open up on why the word “philosophy” is built with the word
“philos” meaning love? For after all isn’t love how we are
programmed to function?
Well,
Kant
says love is Nature’s trick for ensuring reproduction, the colours
of the flowers attracting the bees and so on. Auden says love is a
choice of words. Love used to be aligned with madness, fever and
intoxication, but became more pragmatic, more to do with language in
the Modernist era. Martin Amis says love is Man’s highest emotion;
but a female poetess I saw live took a much more biological view and
said love is a kind of banana custard, presumably meaning semen. I
suppose if it were “trust” or “respect” of wisdom rather than
philos
meaning love, it wouldn’t be as strong; and also that it remains
love because very often it is passed down, inherited, and love is the
function through which we have offspring after all. I suppose it is
also love because philosophy treats a subject in as high a way as is
possible. The verb with which the wisdom is treated is very often
love.
My
father, for example of wisdom itself,
used to say love is the hope the heart literally needs in order for
it to
survive without which it can stop; and that was the lesson of his
tale about some great grandparent on my Finnish side dying of a
broken heart. I suppose if he
just dictated the wisdom in that case it wouldn’t be as good as it
is when you bind it to life. He never used to say the wisdom
out-right just tell the story of a Finnish great grandparent who on
seeing his daughters scattered and sent off to different homes after
a Russian Invasion, died of a broken heart. “You can die of a
broken heart,” he said. “The heart needs hope in order to
survive,” he continued. Thus the wisdom is bound to life. The
definition of what love is is embedded
in and derived
from the narrative that is being passed down. He
also therefore
passes
down the wisdom of binding wisdom to life. I use this example of
wisdom in a passage on love because it is wisdom about love.
My
answer to the question is already given which is that philosophy is
about treatment and
treatment is about love but
it’s also because it’s about being a good human, loving thy
neighbour, making the world a better place, a subject conducted
between individuals that love their work, and
ideally, hopefully love each other as parents love their offspring to
whom they impart their wisdom.
Wisdom,
in short, is something we pass down, and passing down is for
families, and families are made of love.
There
is also the idea that truth is co-aligned with psychic pleasure. That
it is the fakes and frauds that lead to pain. Truth after all is what
the philosopher may be after. He seeks to extirpate every trace of
falsity from his myriad mind, and
develop a stance.
PREFACE TO ‘NOTEBOOK’
This
text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of
the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts
have been made to order the bank notes but were not always
successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice
or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a
critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are
liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of
exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing
through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text
necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free
that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly
free” to consume. It is but an open-air piece,
comprised of torn and bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given
artificial insemination. Inherent in it is a notion that money is an
Ode to Death, that a fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work
sets you free.
NOTEBOOK
Il
faut que je m’en aille.
Sometimes
you’ve just got to hit
the road and.
Start
learning the basics of a strange, unseen vernacular arrowed down from
some lost, mad Godhead within. Pass
the fallen road sign saying THINK! in the nettles and the mystery of
the single shoe beside the road, in a fast Subaru Impreza with Paul
and the gang, the Beatles’ back catalogue tumbling from the
speaker, the open window a roaring lion, late birds singing in trees,
birds that are intelligent, trees that are our friends, on a
smouldering evening in Cambridgeshire, when nothing really matters.
The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog, he should be sleeping like a log, goes round and round chasing his own tail, only goes upstairs for a trail of Maltesers, nice, round and pale, we’re on the road to Heaven, happiness awaits us there, flutter in the sideways, flutter in the sideways, bring your brief fling with the politics of flight…
Seeing
as we can travel backward in time, seeing as we have equalled the
speed of light, I thought we could revisit some choice excerpts from
my boyhood and beyond.
Teacher
rite elephant nite
everything
lite lesson love
learn
tell everyone Esso orange.
2 MC = E = MC [someone] 1
In
the picture of the airport
I
can see… a runway,
a
cloud, two planes,
a
control tower
and
the ire ii net.
In our new pogrom there is a Vetacore.
A bomp explodes.
I
faded my work.
I have a scar+ that is red and black.
I
found a piece of string with a stone on it. I put it round my neck. I
saw that the stone could fit into the hole in the wall. It was full
of dead skeletons.
He
has spines all over him.
Colour
circles red. How many circles?
Colour
triangles blue. How many squares?
Colour
oblongs orange. How many triangles?
Hot
July brings cooling showers,
straw
berries and gilly flowers.
When
I see beer it reminds me of my dad when he is drunk and when I see a
police man it reminds me of the time my dad lost his drivers license.
When I see shoes it reminds me of my dad's smelly feet. My dad is the
sort of person who tells you not to put your elbows on the table when
he does it himself and my dad tells me not to ride my bike on the
garden flowers when once he reversed the car on them. My dad helps me
with
my prep and most of the time I get it wrong. Sometimes my dad acts as
he is three years old but he is really forty-one. When I say “I
should play soccer for the England team” he just says “some
chance.”
It
was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards
the sofa.
MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,
MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,
HE'S GOT THREE EYES
AND A BIG FAT NOSE
AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED
WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,
HE ONCE TOOK A PILL
THAT MADE HIM ILL
AND EVER SINCE THEN
HE'S
BEEN STANDING VERY STILL.
Squawk
squawk gaggle gaggle, bongles has still got the stones.
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and
so is dirt.
Folder
graffiti. Normal is boring. Do it later. God made speed to save us,
God made hash to help us. The
system works quite well. The
grass is always long on the Other Side.
The
fire-dance dwelled in electric drums
where
ecstasy fell soft fathoms to clap
and
bells let peace form in blue notes
and
peered at deer in the wood and ate of it
and
wet let excellence sound out its criticism
and
dawn let sting its unsheathed sting
and
chloroform in the heart let see
if
only Game Over was seen in nights.
The
sun
hanged
himself
from
a
length
of
daisy
chain.
Clocktick
clock being clocked off by clocktick.
Clocktick
clock not being clocked off by Time.
The
Universal Mind’s moon meat man might.
The
Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant.
The
Universal Mind’s moon meat man met.
Break,
bird with the skin of snake.
God
rushed into the cold cod quick.
Behold!
An evil vision hath flashed before mine eyes!
Barnes
has scored a chicken
and
wingers are allowed bikes!
Maybe
a
tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, like The Periodic Table except
a swear word in every box, to
go at the end?
Even
A Duck
Gets Big Erections: my mnemonic for the strings
of the electric
guitar took the same amount of time to conjure as it takes to say,
but
my mother has changed it now.
Hey, my name is David Bonky,
I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,
there’s a tear up my jacket.
Over and out, testing testing 123, welcome to my presence and its intensity...
I watch her walk along on the other side of the street.
She parades the black panther’s nonchalant strut.
She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.
She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.
She slides the stick of it out of the pack.
She puts the stick of it into her mouth.
She loves to chew and suck the taste.
She loves to chew and suck the taste.
She puts the packet back in her bag.
She swings the bag about a little bit.
She walks past a little pub long shut.
She might go check out a flower shop.
She loves to chew and to suck the taste.
She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.
I read that Maya means “Goddess of Illusion” in Sanskrit, where Mara, by stunning contrast, is the Buddhist God of Temptation.
A glance
A blink
A fault in the stars
Her mascara slips into pools of black
A chance
A second
of Infinity
She flutters her eyelids
like spring’s first butterfly
The stars awake to notice love
she waits with open arms.
But all is well if I only think
& sigh of the dreams of dusk
Images before I sleep
Dancing, escaping memory
They seem to have no cares at all
They seem to know the name of love
They seem to be my sacred friends
Ancient messengers, waking at night
But I will forget them & never care
About what I saw in love & alive
What? Oh, I guess it’s love
Just us & love Forever...
Sometimes I wish to have no more than a line penned in the margins of a newspaper going:
The light of all that’s good is true
if believing is the dawn of dreams.
The ship is traditionally a male symbol in poetry. The sea is traditionally a she. It is traditionally men who go out on dark boats to explore the sea under the stars. The sea becomes a symbol of the unknown, or the unconscious, which the poet penetrates on epic voyages. Only when the ship is ripped is the sea a she and the water Nirvana-blue as solar spike.
Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.
Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.
Soft
and
loose
like
yellow
pencils
scribbling
dreams
as
they
arrive.
Semen spills like silver water,
under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,
splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.
Don’t escape at night
into a heightened dream
from a dull and longing sleep.
Her breath a poisonous magic.
Sometimes perhaps
down opening quiet
I am drawn down
long and alone and
my friend and my foe
recede into deep sleep
sudden and still
like a dawn behind
a screaming veil
where silence is born
and all that’s loose and tight
and all that’s light is light
like first morning
with no night
and wend my way
so slow to Freedom
and soft Infancy-lunacy
with harp-sure eyes
so I can live
the last poet’s
last poem.
There is joy in things
and smiles not grins like butter
but like butterflies.
My philosophy in a nutshell: sensus praecedit cogitationem. It could be the motto of the LSE’s Philosophy Dpt; but when you write it down, what happens?
Tonight it is your right to judge by heart alone.
When I first read the line “I look forward to the future with rapt uncertainty - and I can’t stand the suspense,” for some unknown reason it chimed like bells, reverberating up in the fells and struck a warm, psychic chord. I even conjured lines to rhyme with it before I knew what it meant like:
[John is dancing with aliens in collective ecstasy].
Last
night it seemed we couldn't sleep but maybe I was dreaming. The world
expands inside my hands it's getting heavy. Of all the treasures I
could choose I can't seem to decide. Today the shade was washed away
where I would hide. Dream with open eyes, come below and we can
fantasise. Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come below and we
can fantasise. Last night it seemed we nearly
died
but maybe I was dreaming. It made me feel sooooooooooooo alive
and soooooooo in love. Dream
with open eyes, come below and we can fantasise. Now that I’ve
stopped telling lies, come below
and we can fantasise.
J:
what colour is white?
P:
smooth and tight!
J:
what colour is blue?
P:
be true you!
Waves
[squiggle]
crossed
the FTSE
[squiggle]
and
the Helter Skelter
[squiggle]
crashed
in the electric-sea
[squiggle].
Blessed may be the end at last,
under the sea,
below the soul,
in the upside-down
Oceans above us
(all
that Heaven sends is rain).
Words,
words, words. What are words? These are words. Words in this
epistemological
system
I would say are useful tools associated with the instinct to survive.
Man
is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across
metaphysics and words make connections between first and third
persons. Words
are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in
order to make life easier. Words
are, well, ONLY words.
“Mayfly,”
I say the word
“mayfly”
phonetically
sounding
out its every
vowel
sound alphabetically.
Also
in
Sixth Form, in my word-science notebook I wrote
the word “entropy” backwards and tried to give it meaning:
y.
p. o. r. t. n. e. = 4
Reading
of ancient alchemists in The
Lords And The New You Know Who
by Jim
Morrison I wrote
a lovely line.
“Waves
make gentle love to the shore.” Reading
of a schoolboy contemplating getting stoned on milk in Little
Johnny’s Confession
by Brian
Patten I wrote another
lovely line. “Homework
tonight is to remember your dreams.”
One
night we
were having a Scrotbag
Party
in the caravan. That means drinking and smoking - and
suddenly I got a preternatural sixth sense that the dog had run off
and was trapped on the fence at
the local farm barking.
So we walked up through the fields, our
tombstone-shadows looming tall beneath the moon in the church field;
and we found the terrible goat which was tied up in the triangular
patch of land past our field; and we noted how its eyes gleamed a
baleful green colour when a lone car passed; and we made it past the
terrible goat and to the farm where we indeed discovered Ossie the
dog trapped on the fence, barking. I was wearing a fur coat and had a
bottle opener in the pocket and used it to cut the dog free. Then we
made it back to ours and told the dog he was a bad boy for running
off and continued with our Scrotbag
Party.
The
symbol [R] could still
represent
the stance,
the large-R
Romantic stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse
gulf; that Creativity is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.
When
you renounce the quest for meaning you find it, fall back on
meaning-by-proxy.
All
guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun.
V to the knock-kneed hummingbird’s wings… plus, in Rimbaud’s colours of the vowels, E is white; but in my friend Agent G’s musical code, when you detune the guitar strings all the way down, the street-name for E becomes F sharp minor!
2
JOHN TUCKER
ENGLISH
E
ENGLISH
JOHN TUCKER
HARECROFT
1
Signed by everwell, she couldn’t hit it sideways, or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman with the hairgel of Dracula, Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.
Where once I wandered far and wide
on a field-file, a file-field,
a fenceless farm without
security alarm where all hearts bleed
and all arts breed, now Hell
is very quiet, unadvertised.
McBreastmilk,
McBreastmilk,
don’t feed your kids.
Gentle face erasing cream,
smear it in and let it sink
down through the pores of your skin
to erase your deepest down dirt.
O stars the government
that truly speaks for us!
Get an extra kid for free
when you spend 99p.
Freefall 0800 down
your own black hole pupils.
Maybelline you maybe only make-believe
you may be the true mating queen of the hive,
may mad vampires stalk you,
stalking walls walk through
your vagrant dreams.
I see state of head
is more than Head of State.
Monster Munch can
always gobble up your food.
Cancerel can always
sweeten the stewed-
carfume coffee we sip in
this liminal afterlounge.
It’s getting cramped
as a tin of beans in here.
In emergency please
break glass and exit.
Credits at the end of innocence
are falling like numberless lists
of fallen autumn leaves.
Snatched handfuls of light
come to nothing in the dark room.
There must be a use for
this dust amounting.
There’s nothing like digging
a meaningless hole as if to cure the
spiralling lethargy of Hell...
and when I went into the
woods to bury my soul,
all the trees knelt down.
O perpetual orgasm of the sun!
Privation is the mother of imagery.
Prayers, ghosts and
e-mails chatter on
the ego-loss breeze.
The chitchat in the solipsistic
kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.
My new, motley fridge magnet
letters contain no question
mark in the pack but the first
qualification of Modernism
is inquiry and furthermore
wilful ignorance is a sin.
Meanwhile outside the
fallen Autumn leaves
are where bears have
dipped their feet in pots of paint
and danced across the threshold
of the paving stones.
Water clears its throat from the tap.
Gunpowder was only invented
for fireworks and a firework
is a champion sperm nosing up
blind to explode bright and wonderful
deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.
The world is a cool, bejewell'd
marble snug in Holy Orbit
suckling on a mother sun.
Supposedly there is soon
to be New Atlantis on the moon.
The cure for cancer
sustains your heart.
Robbed by a bastard vending machine,
somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper
to cleanse the doors of perception,
a drunkard attacks a wall
on an otherwise empty street,
a policeman forces himself
to come with a gun.
Hey salesman
slow down
with that
fast-food.
I don't mind
waiting here
for a year.
Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form: sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day when I jump from the jungle to the Arctic to the Sahara. Mutation in consciousness itself, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture-without-motion-bones, like sadness gene and dreaming gland.
It's not impossible to write an anti-poem. Love is not a mechanistic set of rules. Love was once aligned with madness, fever and intoxication. Love became grouped with language not God. Love became a tough word-combination. Love has no ego as everyone knows, and so it goes and so it grows.
I for one think Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance. Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud, a rainbow smashed a railway train window. A baby cannot trip without memories... I remember “every atom ate our eyes.” Our eyes: they are ingrown in the ocean's bellyful of wine, down in the seabed-orchard. There is angelic music inborn in the inner ear; but those whom the Gods wish to drive mad are sent the end of ‘Bike’ in their heads and madness is not something to be Romanticised as a return to Purity.
Impunity seems more what the poet wants. He likes to float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds, and is into exploring alternative histories suppressed by the overarching meta-narrative. For plastic surgery of the soul there are libraries. Poetry is the bike riding itself. Monopoly money will get us well, Monopoly money will get us bread, she picks the blue tac off the wall and says “my T-shirt is red”. I put my wounds up on bright flags; I take the angel up the arse. To plug my senses in the mains might engage [!00 %] of my brains.
It’s all about a permanent reactivation of the Glastonbury Festival spirit. John Tucker is taking acid again. Money shags in the dark. Thoughts of one’s greatness only diminish one’s greatness. Skunkfoot is putrid demons excreted through stone. Love an army of fire. Fire needs some incentive to rise up. Shall I touch my heart with a red Bic biro? When all the air in outer space is consumed… The bed in the wood, it was definitely a whore’s, with solar spike I can use the Force, with R2D2 I cleanse my doors, I’m just trying to win my Star Wars. I’m starting to think in five musical parts at once. The Anon Throwaway as a new form could become an alternative currency to rival with money for the role of the real.
Formal education is not for everyone. The yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park is the postmodern churchspire in the spiritual vacuum. Postmodernism is theme dissolved into message. Giant killers are frozen peas in the microwave. I look into the mirror though I shouldn’t pool my sources. I’m not going to die at the age of twenty seven, watch the dreamtapes on repeat from a golden seat in Heaven.
The heart beats to the rhythm of one. A fiver is surely cheese and onion flavour. Cataclysm is catalyst for the old cat that sat on the map of sound, just because the world is very round. If there were paper under my heart there would be writing on it and it would be art. I might ding it in compressed Space Age seconds.
[missing
fragments]
If
you falsify the Nirvana barcode it should have meaning. I can run you
through a series of life events in terse
precis
that meant I arrived at such a culmination.
Well,
at
seven I helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed
storing in writing in the attic here to
give it a chance to grow all the way round the world, I
was the one to write it. By eight I was the witness from
The Lords And The New You Know Who
twice. By eleven who
knew what was going on?
By fifteen I attained the face of stars which
may have been scripted in the Bible.
By eighteen I forewarned of September 11th
in 2000 and wrote the highest-marked English
Literature A-level
exam essay in the nation at 100%.
After
school I recorded an album on binaural earphones, 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,
worked the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen, built the Tower as an
instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a cassette
tape with a pause where resealed in the reel, and discovered the
sheet where pictures (seemingly
depicting one of my own song lyrics) grew.
I
went through all that without earning 1p. Then
as a summary of all of
that
which
I had done,
I invented
and falsified
the Nirvana barcode and around
about that time
also
attained visual radio, broadcasting dreams that
swirl in digital, purple swathes about the head of the deranged
seer...
So
you see that it has been fast indeed! That Subaru Impreza! And Time
does not pass but evaporate! And things live inside onions of
themselves! And galloping water would be a cool thing to say!
I
made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless
Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape
using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.
Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit
Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit
Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit
Bring bring
bring bring
“Hello?”
Gold member, you're the one,
the one with the heart of gold
Vowels, pure vowels
Immanuel Kant
will come to thee
with immanence
You come home smacked up you come
d/ d/ d/ down
grooving up slowly
d/ d/ d/ down
grooving up slowly
d/ d/ d/ down
grooving up slowly
yeah yeah yeah
yeah yeah yeah
yeah yeah yeah
boom
boom
boom
boom
boom
how did we get down here from flat-top
wide tunnel cities self driving cars
bears in the moon and liquor and drugs
and whisky baaaaaaaaaaaars
boom shanka, you're the one,
the one with the sonic boom
knickers knickers faster than lightning
skin up fall out of bed
and did those feet
in ancient times
rain down, rain down,
come on raindown
and walk the sun
fatter, hippier, less well connected
always walk the hallways
down to create my own
and in the meantime
and in the meantime
I'll do the monkey bars with my legs
manic depression has enraptured my name
don't know what I want but I just want shame
don't know what I want but I just won't shave
rainy waif, rain always,
lay back and dream
on a rainy waif
now I know how Kurt Cobain sang
oh now I know how Kurt Cobain sang
no more laaaaaaaaaa la's
removal van canes will be turned into furniture
we're thinking of putting Tricky's name on the front sir
you never see me dead near an inch of closure
|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings
“and a record made of sound
goes round and round, conveying
music to the speaker through the stylus,”
says the radio as I turn it on.
Well, although there is no
such thing as the Nirvana barcode
it opens up a discussion about
the Telepathic Walkie Talkie, how
if barcode is rain barcode is phone...
and at least I have
the grace to come
back and say that the
extinction of consciousness
has no monetary value.
It is past dawn
and I see that
that first mobile
phone
has gone.
If it makes any difference to you,
my little bro is a genius too, who
designed the sheet
where pictures grew
and says <BEE>
might soon ensue
from @ in the international
language alphabet…
he did it for Flora,
subject of many a love poem of mine,
and it turns out he
had her, did her,
loved her, won her,
got her, in time past.
He’s a lucky guy for that,
but who kissed who
is playground stuff,
and jealousy is a wasted emotion,
and I am proud
to be my brother’s brother,
and my mother’s son.
I
would never begrudge my brother something I would want for myself or
my mother either.
HANNAH
I was trying to write white. In the recent poem ‘Notebook,’ the opening line “il faut que je m’en aille” is a quote from Arthur Rimbaud, an archaic French subjunctive meaning “I too must go.”
The second line (“Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and”) is Go-Beat-stricken.
I was trying to confer a special message through the white space in-between, and sheer insouciant faith, like a counter to the red on black JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS which I read at the top of the Pompidou Centre’s conceptual ascent through the ages.
The original album called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob which I was rewriting in ‘Notebook’ included a song called ‘L to the Pregnant Snorkel’ and one about Ossie the dog going round and round chasing his own tail. If ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ contained inflections of my father’s education at the LSE under Sir Karl Popper, who taught of of P1 to TT to EE to P2, Ossie the dog’s song was more John Lennon. It never got as far as V, in the Utilitarian Martianist slowspell of the word “LOVE,” indicating that my heart was broken, but I made amends in the recent rewrite.
The
trumpet wears his foreskin on the inside.
There
is an upturned canoe for a drum.
There
is a dog for a frontman and
there
are poppadom hi-hats in the band.
We
have a family friend called Rafe who was also in the band, like a
brother he was and is still too. Dad always used to say “you always
change when Rafe’s here John. It’s called pack mentality. You
start to misbehave. You’re weak.”
With
Rafe on board, we were named like the Doors (almost). John, James,
Robert and Rafe we were. But we also have a sister called Hannah.
Traditionally
what comes after The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob
is Hannah, the blonde palindrome from the 25th
of May.
That
means H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart.
The
band started as 4 siblings born in a season each, spiralling Spring,
Autumn, Winter, Summer, marching right left right left in the
handedness – and yet this might mean that anyone can be in the
band.
The Quire is opened, awakes the blame of memory...
whomsoever they’re looking for it’s not me.
Light shafts in its distilled sleep.
The dead in tired dance circle the silence,
lingering fragile moments outside the quiet Quietus -
but wait, who dreamed me awake this time?
It was me, I'm he who dared disturb.
Not to renounce the past with rapt amazement
but to forgive our sins, falling like leaves.
We have seen this all before, time
tumbling away into sleep, seen
this darkness drop and these ruins murmur
and now we are gathered to appoint the gods
and now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves
and now we are gathered to ordain this dust,
we are gathered to live and to dream.
It
took a rainy day
in
Penn, Bucks, to write and record the original album The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob;
and we indeed
sang
of the dog going round and round chasing his own tail; but the
original cassette (a one off) was later recorded over with a Blur gig
on Radio One.
That isn’t the end of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob either, for it surely goes on and on.
I have said it before and would say it again that God is a game, and that a game is based on permutation, or at least can be, and that a permutation game can be a rehearsal for death.
I would also say The Lords And The New Creatures is a game, a wide, yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre and the circumference closing in. I would also say it is a media compression experiment dreamed up on LSD under a hot, Californian sun, maybe to expose the germs of dictatorship on all hands. It churns up evidence through the operation of a game. It tests the place where evolution is controlled, monopolised. It asks if he who controls the media controls evolution too. It is a good test.
If God is a game what are the rules? Some say God is a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness. Some say God is but a stopped, glottal monosyllable. Some contend God is not to worship blind in dogmatic slumber but behead, dethrone and become. Dedalus says ultimately we all have the same definition of God.
Going empirically from personal experience I can say that praying before an LSD trip will mean a safer trip than if you don’t pray even if there is no God. So God could be a placebo. Still, I don’t wish to go on about God too much.
I like Paradise Lost, where Milton makes us sympathise with Satan for so long before we recognise he is evil. He also builds up through pages and pages of poetry to a moment of terse concision:
“She plucked. She ate.”
In Milton Jesus has a sword in Heaven. He is like one of God’s security guards! Traditionally it is the Muslim faith where we find the warrior-poet, so Milton might be suggesting “Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.”
I am also interested in God Simulations. Before The Lords And The New You Know Who seemed to get real in my boyhood, there was a lightning storm in France so epic, sublime and prolonged it was a God Simulation – it was Nature herself tearing up the rule book to let the games commence.
This doesn’t seem to be the subject matter of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob though, where there is as yet all too little mention of sex. Martin Amis says a single pixel of sex is ineffable, impervious to the workings of the pen.
Voices
have stolen everything now and filled it with sugar.
If
Forgiveness were a fine white powder, a chemical cure, they might
with-hold the cure until the price is right but seeing as it is not I
am prepared to try and forgive the guy that hypnotised
and cursed
me.
I
used to say the nature of visionary experience is not amenable to the
dialectic of sickness and recovery, the language of sterile
medicalese, that one’s illness is more congenial than one’s
health unto those that are in charge of one’s health, for monetary
reasons, meaning Big Pharma companies that can with-hold a cure until
the price is right, but now I see the illness is not a conspiracy,
that
the science works, that I should plug in.
As
I may have said, in
my first psychotic episode I went to hospital for a literal head
wound. The nurse in A and E put a bandage on. I went to touch the
bandage to see if it was paddy and it was. I went to touch it a
second time and it was gone. The bandage had vanished into thin air
while I sat still in a chair. The nurse had to put a second bandage
on.
I
was not just put in mental hospital but the acute ward. This was in
the middle of my undergraduate degree. This is my story. I have been
on heavy, neuroleptic, soporific, homeostatic medication ever since
and had several hospital admissions. When I went back to University
after that initial admission I got the highest First in the year and
was a beautiful mind.
I
wrote sooooooo many pieces, defaced bank notes, creative non fiction,
rap, and one piece was about how there is no such thing as mind
cancer. As
I may have said, Hobbes
and Descartes sit on diametrically opposite sides of the spectrum
when it comes to the nature of the human mind: for Hobbes the mind
was just a part of the body but for Descartes the mind was separate
from the physical
world. When I read of Descartes clenching the idea of perfection in
his mind, and using it
as ontological proof of God, and I turn inward my eye to investigate,
I glimpse a perfect, inner judge whose concerns seem to be
grammatical.
You
could say that because there is no such thing as mind cancer the mind
is definitely separate from the material world but it could just as
easily be the case that 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.
The
sheer
indifference of the universe to human philosophy can boggle the mind.
The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob
may be about Energy as much as Faith. In fact I may have lost my
faith long
ago although
have blips. Some contend the idea of it is a pseudo-efficient,
government-sponsored idiocy, others that it could unite us all. It
was never supposed to be a post-Einsteinian comedy, nor about
Backward Liquid Maths or Miltonian theology. I suppose it was more
about Mr. Bean. The original was a bunch of young kids, the oldest of
whom was 12, singing, as
I say,
about the dog going round and round chasing his own tail.
During
my degree it was proposed that we scrap Trident and use the resources
to explore space more instead;
but without Trident we could be
held
to ransom by someone like Iran.
The
nuclear submarine factory is only down the road in Barrow-in-Furness.
My
brother is round there at the moment… I am home alone. I
think how the nuclear sub factory in Barrow is enough to qualify it
as a city, because the factory is a cathedral in the modern age.
I
go out into the garden and look at the shape of the fell. The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob
seems to contain a separation that corresponds to the geographical/
geological shape of the fell and its foothill Sea Ness from here at
the gravitational, magnetic and telluric foot.
I
often wonder about M-Theory in correlation to the shape of the fell…
I wonder if the qwerty keyboard ends on ‘M’ for the reason of the
alignment of Plough and oldest fell, as is only visible here, being
“the last thing.”
You
have to beware perfection, and beware making a text so good it could
be used as Fascist propaganda.
My
heart is a bass-drum stuffed with a pillow.
I
am interested in the dust that lies at the bottom of things.
As
my father passed, Dr. Robert read to him from the Book of John. When
he was newly gone, though he’s only gone up the road, I was
h-a-n-d-e-d a stack of books I wrote at seven years old and one early
piece
says:
“On
Tuesday there was a magic car in Form 2 and it had flashing lites all
over it… and
we
crashed on a ship REC… and since we were under the sea the
whirlpool pulled on top of the water.”
In
short though I only give you a
fragment
it Taps the Book of John for the televisual age.
Around
the time of my father’s passing I was thinking, yes, my heart is a
bass drum stuffed with a pillow. It could be an image from the
renewal of The
Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob;
but I don’t want it to mean I die of a heart attack! Traditionally
my heart is strong, ocean-going,
a liner.
Sometime
after my dad’s death I falsified the Nirvana barcode. As
I said in Let
The Jews Win, if
you falsify the Nirvana barcode it should have meaning.
Mum
said it was a trick of grief.
When
I made the Nirvana-barcode to be
but
the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by
Nirvana
tapped out in approximate
barcode
shape using the tool of
the
qwerty keyboard and took it to her
she
said “there is no such thing.”
The
shape I mention only works
in
Times New Roman, thus:
||
| |||| | || | |||| 909 & 693 are wings
and
the armed winged may well make
millions
out of the new Nirvana barcode
as
brought in by John F B Tucker but
upon
writing it down I cast it on the fire
and
got my mother to photograph it in flames.
It became smoke filing out of the chimney, and the smoke dissipated into the north wind, that great disseminator of seeds.
Out
in the garden, where it is returned to the elemental realm, maths is
the language of Nature.
Now, seeing as my dear friends Agent G and Mark too whom it would seem has a finer singing voice than me might need to see some maths, I should just say, in this system E = peace.
Starting with L to the Pregnant Snorkel, E = peace.
We could likewise start with, say, L to the stare of 3 o’ clock twice, and O needn’t be Ossie the dog, going round and round chasing his own tail, for there are many senses of O. For example O is the key of the babbling unicorn.
As for V, we could have the peace sign made with the fingers, or V to the wings of a bird.
The
reason I have chosen ‘love’ for this Utilitarian Martianist
slowspell is that love is as WH Auden says “a choice of words.”
So many problems in philosophy and life alike are down to
communication as Wittgenstein said; which is why it is good to
further focus on language-use.
If E = L to the pregnant snorkel,
L to the pregnant snorkel = MC squared.
So it is that we arrive at Backward Liquid Maths, where E minus MC squared = only relative 0, but not being good at numbers, I deem that piffle, when everything is devoid of evil, went the hen.
And
what about that time I sat in a room without moving for three days
and three nights staring at a pint glass of
water before
me on the table untouched, taking notes on whatever went through my
myriad mind? That’s a notebook I would like to reread but they are
all gone.
I
might also have mentioned my grand-dad Don’s motto.
The
mustard has to be English.
The
mustard has to be English.
The
mustard has to be English
and
growing outside in the wild.
My
grandfather Don lied about his age at 15 to stow away to the Second
World on the bottom of a sub, later won the Sword of Honour in the R.
A. F. and became their youngest non-commissioned officer.
18.
49. I have just polished off a massive portion of sausages and
Yorkshire puddings with delicious onion
gravy
so rich and thick it was like soup.
In
Noj And The Mob, soup was called “moop.” Toast was called
“boast.” I was Noj; James was Semaj but became Semgas because he
didn’t like drinks with bubbles; Dr. Robert was Trebor; and Hannah
was a blonde palindrome so I said she could be “Rannock.”
Mum
was often “mumphis” as opposed to mumbo and dad was “Badmunch.”
I
used to call “muppet!” up the stairs instead of “supper!” and
everyone understood. I would also say “moonrag” instead of
“morning” in the morning, and again the message came across.
It
seems to
be a
Nintendo innuendo that
her
breath a poisonous magic.
Then
you’re faced with Hanif Kureishi,
a
bit of The
Buddha of Suburbia.
The
anatomisation of the female
could
extend for longer and longer…
her
ankles are delicate ornaments of ivory.
You’re
also faced with Pinchbeck
whom
it would seem, in Breaking
Open
The Head,
talks of the division
of
people into those that like
and
those that don’t like mushrooms
as
the most ancient division in civilisation.
That’s
why I didn’t feel it was a gaff
when
I wrote the original, after
poring
over a Ted Hughes poem in English
at
the same table as fragrant Rachel.
She
was never to be my cosmic bride.
“Just
so you
know,
you would
already have got your degree from us for the way you write about Saul
A. Kripke’s “quus.””
“Hang
on a minute should I cry for help and ask what’s going on?”
(I
am sitting here at my lonely vigil at the kitchen window finishing
off with voices as voices have requested, but where are they now?
Voices could be the colours of the vowels from Rimbaud. They assure
me if I continue with the Transition
To Philosophy
series everything will be alright. They even said I should read
Spinoza next, and continue my transition… then as I say they said
to end this with quoting them. Syd Barrett wished to “hair” not
“hear” by the time of The
Madcap Laughs.
They deem it I am paying them back, paying them due respect with
philosophy and I am. They are impeccable in their timing,
co-imaginative and proleptic too. But where are they now?)
“If
it hadn’t been for the necessity to recount what you do you
would’ve won awards.”
“You
would’ve looked like Don who won awards in the Second World War.”
And
Hannah is a radiant angel. She
says she hopes it all goes on in the happy world of Haribo; that once
you renounce Starbucks, cool, new stuff can happen; and about my
career as a writer, that “wall is shit.” She has been a little
ray of light all her life. I once had a dream of a party, attended by
her too, whose epicentre was soooooo exciting in terms of music,
drugs and fashion that the party had to spread outwards and could
only be done so by dancing. That
was the theme of Soundcloud
Rain.
Which
was quite left-wing of me.
Now
I order Spinoza online… I gather he was cursed and fled his
homeland, before becoming a philosopher.
Now
it is Night and I might still summon up the depths of courage to
write white, true and quite. The mute button is on. The painter’s
palette on the easel. Now the voices cheer up…
“we
want you to deem it that it’s not all Doom,” they say.
Well
I am too unfit to make it all the way up the fell these days but the
bald, blank forehead of Black Combe overlooks. Doom actually means
judgement. I am not sure I like the word. Stoned heartbeats could be
described as dreadful footsteps of doom. And it isn’t all doom,
gloom, ruin and tomb. Free toy when children feed. I mean, it’s the
next day now and quite nice a day enough. Now for the mute button
again.
The
painter’s easel, his canvas. There is blind white light on the
canvas. Like a coruscation of divinity. There is also red paint. It
forms… it forms the facial features of John Lennon. He is thinking
in blind white light. That’s where it is coming from. The brain of
John Lennon.
No
voices today or not many anyway. Beware the dangers of just “putting
anything in.” He may make war against you. This is not an O. D.
attempt. I am the seer associated with Sea Ness, the foothill of
Black Combe, which once was called Seer Ness after a seer and his
trance. But by now, yes, I am just putting anything in.
Last
night I dreamed of beautiful papers, designed on Euclidean geometry,
like poems that take the shape of airports or the Premier League
table. David
Morley was dishing them out to us. We each got our fair wage. We
queued up and received our papers from David Morley. I checked mine
two times
to
make sure they were real and they were – they made sense in the
dream world, and it seemed in the dream they correlated to real
papers outside the dream world. This
was not so: I
was desperate to smuggle the beautiful papers out of the unconscious
into the waking world but failed. When I woke up my publisher had at
least formatted Transition
To Philosophy Volume Two.
I suppose it will do.
THE FACE OF STARS
How do I know the face of stars was scripted in the Bible? Firstly, we were three gathered in the name. We were on a camping holiday in Eskdale, and I had taken us to a tarn at sunset. The sun went down and we walked back through the concussive dark guided by a cigarette lighter’s spark, came out of the dripping trees into the open, crossed the River Esk on the stepping stones and stood beneath the universe at the clearing by St. Catherine’s Church. The universe was enlumed, drenched with electric diamonds, wet, dripping grape-bunches of stars; and Tom and I stood there together while Ben fished his fags out of the river; and we saw a shooting star or “fire fish tail” course across the Night from right to left; and we pointed, simultaneously, up at it in rapture; and all of a sudden we recognised the face of stars, there where the shooting star fizzled out; so we were already pointing up at it; and we sighed and were excited; and Ben came from the river bank and asked us what we were pointing at; and I guided his eyebeam across the Night so that he could also see it – the face of stars.
We had to walk away and did. Now the question is: how do I know it was scripted in the Bible? Well, I don’t know but believe, if you may permit a difference, and this belief has been engendered by a series of random text messages I have been sent from two separate numbers, containing Biblical quotes. Maybe, you will say they are taken out of context; but reading them, with my experience, I understood that the face of stars was scripted in the Bible. The list of quotes, divided into two books according to which number the texts were sent from, is as follows…
BOOK
1
Tue
1 Jan
2019. 00. 00
It
is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not
consumed,
because his compassions
fail not.
Lam 3 v 22.
Mon
26 Sept
2022. 11. 38
He
maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Psalm
107 v 29
Mon
10th
Oct 2022. 11. 45
For
of him, and
through him, are all things:
to whom be glory for ever. Amen.
Romans
11 v 36
Mon
24th
Oct 2022. 12. 02.
… that
we through patience
and
comfort of the scriptures might have hope. Romans
15 v 4.
Thursday
22 Dec 2022. 11. 20.
In
whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth. Eph 1 v
13.
Mon
2nd
Jan,
2023. 12. 47
...so
loved… John
3 v 16
Mon
16th
Jan.
2023. 12. 16
For
the LORD gives wisdom; From His mouth come knowledge
and
understanding.
Proverbs 2 v 6.
Mon
30th
Jan
2023. 12. 16.
Come
unto
me, all ye that labour and
are heavy laden,
and
I will give you rest. Matthew 11 v 28
Tuesday,
14 Feb 2023. 13. 32.
Shall
not
the Judge of all the earth do right?
Genesis
18 v 25.
Monday
27th
Feb 2023. 13. 05.
But
he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud,
but giveth grace unto
the humble. James 4
v 6
Mon
10th
April 2023. 11. 38
Who
is wise, and
he shall understand
these things,
prudent,
& he shall know
them for the ways of the Lord are right, & the just shall walk in
them. Hosea 14 v 9.
Mon
24th
April 2023. 13. 09.
After
he had patiently
endured,
he obtained
the
promise. Heb 6 v 15.
Mon
8th
May 2023. 19. 45
I
am Alpha and
Omega, the beginning
and
the end,
the first and
the last. Rev 22 v 13.
Mon
22d May 2023. 12. 24
by
his own
blood he entered
in
once
into
the holy place, having
obtained
eternal
redemption
for us. Heb 9 v 12.
Mon
5th
June
2023. 12. 35
Cast
not
away therefore your confidence,
which hath great recompence
of reward. Hebrews 10 v 35.
Mon
19 June
2023. 11. 05
Behold,
what manner
of love the Father has bestowed upon
us, that we should be called the sons
of God. 1 John
3 v 1
Tuesday
4th
July 2023. 12. 53
Abraham
believed God, and
it was counted
unto
him for righteousness. Romans 4 v 3.
Mon
17 July 2023. 11. 46
For
thou art with me Psalm 23 v 4
Monday
7 Aug 2023. 09.
42
the
LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon
thy right hand.
Psalm 121 v 5.
Mon
9th
Oct 2023. 23. 18
To
everything
there is a season,
and
a time to every purpose under
the heaven.
Ecc 3 v 1
Mon
6th
Nov
2023: 13. 24
To
whom then
will ye liken
God?
Or what likeness
will ye compare unto
him?
Is 49 v 18.
Sunday
26th
Nov
2023. 06. 22
our
sufficiency
is of God. 2 Cor 3 v 5.
Tues
19th
Dec 2023. 10. 37.
Glory
to God in
the
Highest. Luke 2 v 14
Monday
1st
Jan
2024. 13. 25.
But
blessed are your eyes, for they see: and
your ears, for they hear. Matthew 13 v 16.
Monday
15 Jan
2024.
11. 12.
I
the LORD.. will hold thine
hand,
and
will keep thee. Isaiah 42 v 6.
Monday
29 Jan
2024.
12. 19.
I
will go before thee and
make the crooked places straight. Isaiah 45 v 2.
Monday
11 March 2024. 11. 24
Worthy
is the lamb. Revelation
5
v 12
Monday
25th
March 2024. 11. 32.
Or
do you not
know
that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in
you,
whom you have from God, and
you are not
your own?
1
Cor 6 v 19
Monday
8th
April. 11. 54
Seek
the Lord, and
his strength:
seek his face evermore. Psalm 105 v 4.
Monday
8th
July. 23. 54.
God
is our refuge and
strength,
a very present
help in
trouble. Psalm 46 v 1
Whoever
offers praise glorifies me. Psalm 50 v 23
Monday
15th
July. 10. 39
For
thou hast magnified
thy word above all thy name.
Psalm 138 v 2.
Monday
29 July. 11. 39.
And
the Lord hath laid on
Him
the iniquity
of us all. Isaiah 53 v 6.
Monday
12th
August. 11. 15.
...upholding
all things
by the word of his power... Hebrews 1 v 3
Monday
26th
August. 14. 17.
Come,
see a man,
which
told me all things
that ever I did, is not
this the Christ?
John
4 v 29
Monday
9 Sept. 12. 16
Behold,
the fear of the LORD, that is wisdom; and
to depart from evil is understanding.
Job 28 v 28.
Monday
23rd
Sept. 14. 03.
Pray
without ceasing.
1 Thess 5v 17.
Monday
21 Oct. 10. 30.
Let
such as love thy salvation
say
continually,
the LORD be magnified.
Psalm 40 v 16.
Monday
4th
Nov.
10. 50
I
am come that they might have life, and… have it more abundantly.
John
10
v 10.
Mon
18th
November
10. 00.
Offer
unto
God thanksgiving;
and
pay thy vows unto
the most High. Psalm 50 v 14.
Mon
2nd
Dec. 10. 19.
For
God sent
not
his son
into
the world to condemn
the
world; but that the world through him might be saved. John
3 v 17
Mon
6th
Jan.
10 35.
And
God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and
there shall be no
more death, either sorrow, or crying,
neither
shall there be any
more pain:
for the former things
have passed away. Rev 21 v 4
Mon
13 Jan
10. 17
Casting
all your care upon
him; for he careth for you. 1 Peter 5 v 7.
Sunday
2nd
Feb 21. 55
Blessed
is she who believed, for there will be a fulfillment
of those things
which were told her from the Lord. Luke 1 v 45
Monday
10th
February. 11. 26
Shall
he that contedeth
with the Almighty instruct
Him. Job 40 v 2
Monday
24 Feb. 10. 44.
And
he arose, and
rebuked the wind,
and
said unto
the sea, Peace, be still. And
the wind
ceased, and
there was a great calm. Mark 4 v 39.
Monday
10 March. 19. 38.
Let
us therefore come boldly unto
the throne
of grace, that we may obtain
mercy, and
find
grace to help in
time of need.
Heb 4 v 16
Mon.
10. 57.
Which
hope we have as an
anchor
of the soul, both sure and
steadfast. Hebrews 6 v 19.
Monday
7 April. 11. 35
Looking
into Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. Hebrews 12 v 2
12.
15
...the
son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. Galatians 2 v 20
Tuesday
20 May. 18. 21
Behold
he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him. Rev 1 v 7
Monday
2 June. 10. 14.
Shall
he that condendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth
God, let him answer it. Job v 2
BOOK
TWO
Monday
19th
Sept 2022. 10. 52
The
Lord, he it is that doth go before thee, he will be with thee, he
will not
fail thee, neither
forsake thee, fear not,
neither
be dismayed. Deut 31 v 8
Monday
3 Oct 2022. 12. 42.
Seek
the Lord, and
his strength,
seek his face evermore.
Psalm 105 v 4
Monday
17 Oct 2022. 12. 28.
It
is God that girdeth me with strength,
and
maketh my way perfect. Psalm 18 v 32.
Monday
26 Dec 2022. 12. 44.
He
that spared not
his own
Son,
but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not
with him also freely give us all things.
Romans
8 v 32
Mon
23 January
2023. 11. 54
But
be not
thou far from me, O Lord: O my strength,
haste thee to help me. Psalm 22 v 19.
Mon
6th
Feb 2023. 12. 34.
The
glory of the Lord shall endure
for ever: the Lord shall rejoice in
his works. Psalm 104 v 31.
Mon
20th
Feb 2023. 11. 50
Even
there shall thy had lead me, and
thy right hand
shall hold me. Psalm 139 v 10.
Monday
6th
March 2023. 11. 22.
I
will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and
my fortress: My God; in
him will I trust. Psalm 91 v 2.
Tuesday
4th
April 2023. 21. 38.
The
LORD is nigh
unto
them that are of a broken
heart, And
saveth such as be of a contrite
spirit. Psalm 34 v 18.
Monday
17 April 2023. 10. 31.
Stand
still and
consider
the wondrous
works of God. Job 37 v 14.
Monday
1st
May 2023. 13. 03.
Then
spake Jesus… I am the light of the world: he that followeth me
shall not
walk in
darkness,
but shall have the light of life. John
8: 12
Monday
15th
May 2023. 11. 46.
Be
still, and
know
that I am God. Psalm 46 v 10.
Monday
29th
May 2023. 11. 53
Great
is our Lord, and
of great power; His understanding
is infinite.
Psalm 147 v 5.
Monday
12 June
2023. 11. 52.
He
telleth the number
of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.
Psalm 147 v 4.
Monday
26th
June, 2023. 11. 18.
In
the world ye shall have tribulation;
but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. John
16 v 33.
Monday
10 July 2023. 12. 04
I
will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy
wonders
of old. Psalm 77 v 11.
Monday
24th
July 2023. 10. 11.
And
they remembered that God was their rock, And
the high God their redeemer. Psalm 78 v 35.
Monday
7th
August 2023. 10. 21
My
soul longeth,
yea, even
fainteth for the courts of the LORD: My heart and
my flesh crieth out for the living
God. Psalm 84 v 2.
Monday
16th
October
2023. 11. 41.
… for
your Father knoweth
what things
ye have need
of, before ye ask him. Matthew 6 v 8.
Wednesday
1st
November
2023. 08. 39.
For
thou, art good, and
ready to forgive; And
plenteous
in
mercy unto
all them that call upon
thee. Psalm 86 v 5.
Monday
13th
Nov
2023. 11. 43.
My
soul melteth for heaviness:
Strengthen
thou me according
to thy word. Psalm 119 v 28
Monday
27th
Nov
2023. 11. 48.
Therefore
I will look unto
the
LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation;
my God will hear me. Micah 7 v 7.
Monday
25th
December 2023. 12. 04.
Every
good gift and
every perfect gift is from above, and
cometh down
from the Father of lights, with whom is no
variableness.
James 1 v 17.
Wed
10th
Jan
2024. 04. 59.
And
the Word was made flesh, and
dwelt among
us… John
1 v 14.
Monday
22d January
2024. 12. 27
But
be not
thou far from me, O LORD: O my strength,
haste thee to help me. Psalm 22 v 19.
Monday
5th
Feb 2024. 11. 38.
And
he arose, and
rebuked the wind,
and
said unto
the sea, Peace, be still. And
the wind
ceased, and
there was a great calm. Mark 4 v 39
Monday
4th
March 2024
For
he hath made him to be sin
for us, who knew
no
sin,
that we might be made the righteousness
of God in
him. 2 Cor 5 v 21.
Monday
18th
March 2024. 10. 30.
O
LORD, thou art my God; I will exalt thee, I will praise thy name;
for thou hast done
wonderful
things.
Isaiah 25 v 1.
Monday
1st
April. 12. 33.
The
Lord is risen
indeed.
Luke 24 v 34.
Monday
8th
July. 23. 54.
Unto
thee, O my strength,
will I sing:
For God is my defence,
and
the God of my mercy. Psalm 59 v 17.
The
Lords is nigh
unto
them that are of a broken
heart; And
saveth such as be of a contrite
spirit. Psalm 34 v 18.
Monday
22nd
July. 09. 39.
O
give thanks
unto
the LORD; for he is good: For his mercy endureth
forever. Psalm 136 v 1.
Monday
5th
August. 11.43.
And
whatsoever ye do in
word or deed, do all in
the name
of the Lord Jesus, giving
thanks
to God and
the Father by him. Col 3 v 17.
Monday
19th August. 10. 36.
Blessed
is the man
that trusteth in
the LORD and
whose hope the LORD is. Jeremiah 17 v 7
Mon
2nd
September. 10. 54.
The
voice of the LORD is powerful; The voice of the LORD is full of
majesty. Psalm 29 v 4.
Monday
16th
September. 10. 36.
When
I said, My foot slippeth; Thy mercy, O LORD, held me up. Psalm 94 v
18.
Monday
30th
September. 11. 15.
For
thou hast been
a strength
to the poor, a strength
to the needy
in
his distress, a refuge from the storm. Isaiah 25 v 4.
Thursday
17th
Oct. 15. 38
And
he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.
Exodus 33 v 14.
Monday
28th
October. 11. 55.
Rejoicing
in
hope; patient
in tribulation; continuing
instant
in
prayer. Romans 12 v 12.
Monday
11th
November.
10. 54
For
the vision
is yet for an
appointed
time … though it tarry, wait for it, because it will surely come,
it will not
tarry. Hab 2 v 3.
Monday
25th
November.
11. 53.
Wherefore
putting
away lying,
speak every man
truth with his neighbour;
for we are members one
of another.
Ephesians 4 v 25.
Monday
9th
December. 10. 48.
The
LORD shall fight for you, and
ye shall hold your peace. Exodus 14 v 14.
Monday
23 December. 12. 12.
When
they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding
great joy. Matthew 2 v 10.
Monday
30th
December. 13. 29.
He
taught me also, and
said unto
me, Let thine
heart retain
my words: Keep my commandments
and
live. Proverbs 4 v 4.
Monday
20th
Jan
11. 43.
Behold,
I make all things
new.
And
he said unto
me, Write; for these words are true and
faithful. Revelation
21 v 5.
Monday
3rd
Feb. 11. 16.
Be
not
wise in
thine
own
eyes. Fear the LORD, and
depart from evil. Proverbs 3 v 7.
Mon
17th
Feb. 10. 33.
If
we live in
the Spirit, let us also walk in
the Spirit. Galatians 5 v 25.
Mon
3rd
March. 11. 19.
Peace
I leave with you, my peace I give unto
you: not
as the world giveth, give I unto
you. Let not
your heart be troubled, neither
let it be afraid. John
14 v 27.
Monday
17 March
11. 47.
He
brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, And
set my feet upon
a rock, and
established my goings.
Psalm 40 v 2.
Monday
31 March 20. 03
Hear,
O LORD, when I cry with my voice: Have mercy also upon me, and answer
me. Psalm 27 v 7.
Monday
11. 30
For
in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: In the
secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me upon a
rock. PS 27 v 5 TM
10.
42.
In
all thy ways acknowledge him, And he shall direct thy paths. Proverbs
3 v 6.
CONCLUSION
TO THE FACE OF STARS
After
twice being sent the quote from Psalm 105 V 4, about how we are to
seek God’s face forevermore, I believe, as a matter of faith, that
the face of stars was scripted in the Bible. It might be what is
meant by Jack and the Beanstalk, or rather, early talk of Giants,
too. I also believe there was a bet that the one to attain the vision
– albeit with two friends whom he led to the place where it was
seen – would write a specific line, which was incorporated into a
song I wrote round about the time in a band called Oedipus Wrecks.
Knowing now it was part of a bet, or rather thinking it was, and that
it was not mine own original work, even if I won it in a bet, I don’t
really wish to regurgitate it herein. It’s what Jim Morrison means,
I also believe, when in ‘The Crystal Ship’ he sings “when we
get back I’ll drop a line.” Translated
into French the line is “les
océans sourient de leurs yeux liquides et se remplissent de pluie.”
If
I had to bet as to whether or not the face will be observed again I
would say yes, and remark that writing for that future witness could
give a
writer
something purposive to do. Where and when it will happen again is
beyond me and possibly down to chance, or else there are overlords to
consider. What I think about the face of stars is that it was the
most Rimbaudian thing. Rimbaud obvs famously said “the poet makes
himself a visionary through a prodigious derangement of the senses to
attain the unknown,” and us three gathered in the name had indeed
shared a spliff of soft,
Moroccan pollen
beforehand. This doesn’t mean the face wasn’t real, for pollen is
a naturally occurring thing. It means it was a vision attained by
what Rimbaud called derangement.
They
say what distinguishes vision from mere wild hallucination is the
idea of God, that true vision contains a theophany not just an
epiphany, a revelation of the divine. Ted Hughes who was poet
Laureate at the time would say that means vision is indoctrinated by
the church, who only brand Nature as evil. He would say to liberate
vision from the false hands of the false. Blake was deemed a true
visionary for breakfasting with angels, for seeing the sun as Holy
not just a 2 pence piece; Ginsberg meanwhile was visited by the ghost
of Blake who taught Ginsberg the notes to the Songs
of Innocence and Experience –
and for this Ginsberg was deemed mad rather than a true visionary. I
think even though the three of us gathered in the name had shared a
smoke of pollen, the face was a true vision, that dates back
historically to the Bible.
My
first piece of writing about the face was also high on pollen in the
back of a moving car in France when I was 16 or 17, describing
everything as “yes!” and everything as “Heavensent” and
everything as “a Godsend.” My faith wavered but for
a little while I
was taken by the Beat Poets and their exaltations of the holiness of
things. The original prose poem was a purple patch in a notebook with
a purple cover but the notebook got thrown away when in my twenties
my father urged me to make a burning, purgatorial move… I threw
away several big, black liners all full of notebooks attesting to the
recording angel of New Beat youth. I
would’ve said, even though my faith was starting to waver, that the
face meant God cannot be Nothing.
Even
though I think things should have to go through the face, that I had
to deal with it, I think to still be going on about it too much
shouldn’t be done now that we have James’s sheet where pictures
grew, which I would say is neither mad hallucination nor
God-guaranteed vision but science, meaning
also maths, and also, most importantly, a new art in and of itself.
In
the end there is no ‘c’ in James’s code. That
may be why we don’t understand it still; but maybe he was trying to
bring balance and equality to Flora’s pretext, her system, which
with a nod to John Nash I call Mum’s Equilibrium. I
thought I would bring up the face of stars anyhow to see if I have
anything Einsteinian to say. He always pulled silly faces in
photographs. Maybe he knew something he wasn’t letting on? I cannot
speak of there being “cinema screens between us and the world”
without remembering the chronic amounts of skunk I used to smoke, in
notebook-carrying days. I think of the face in terms of desire,
desire shaping the sweet mirage, shaping perception into being what
we want it to be. As stated in this book the nearest I came to
Einstein was twofold:
(1)
my boyhood book at seven. If
I showed you the whole new
file
trying
to understand it,
the maths of the new colour, even though it’s not very long, I
might end up dying like Jesus. But as stated I
can report that
there was a post-Einsteinian moment
where I put a + sign for the ‘f’
in the line “I have a scar+ that is red and black,” which was
part of it.
(2)
The only other thing I can think of is when I looked into an
equation for the
ratio between light speed falling and Gravity pulling on my brother’s
sheet where pictures grew. I made it that “c over G” could be
“backward f, forward f, equals running through.”
It
is actually my brother James I think of when it comes to matters of
Einstein, for to design the sheet where pictures grew took a deft
left hand born of another deft left hand as he is, luckily for him.
His notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the
international language alphabet is probably much more what the doctor
ordered than anything I provided. It has been said I did to maths
what he did to English, but by now I am urged to leave that passage
of my
own writing
out. It’s
just a chapter, that tries to make sense of my seven year old text in
adult terms, and it doesn’t matter overly that I can’t include
it. You can always read my boyhood book and try and decipher for
yourself what an adult would make of it. I for one am not prepared to
die like Jesus just to bring you a few droplets of ink attesting to
an experiment into the maths of the new colour from when I was seven.
Doing to maths what my brother did to English and at such a young age as seven might be why I ended up with the Nirvana barcode, but I would still say James’s way is happier, involving happier shapes. Just so that you know – I am being urged to omit a two or three page paper on the maths of the new colour from all this philosophy because I would have to die like Jesus if I included it; and I am also forbidden from including it even if I wanted to, but by whom I cannot say. I’d prefer to talk about the long day, how my sister and her husband and their young baby are visiting, how nice it is to see everyone. I also wonder what other members of the gang that were there at the face make of it. Could we agree that it was Rimbaudian in the sense of being a vision attained through the derangement of the senses? Could we also agree that in being scripted in the Bible it is a true vision not mere wild hallucination? Can you believe that I’ve been so busy I am only just seeing this one through? Could it be that the face only existed in a world before Facebook? Am I wrong that it will in all likelihood recur, and not just wrong but naive? Was it a cosmicomic moment that bridges The Lords And The New Creatures coming true and the eventual Plough alignment, making way for that eventual outcome?
The
Milky Way is beautiful over Cervantes in Australia, studded with
diamonds, but something tells me the face is an English incarnation
because of law and order, and because of the lingua-franca. I might
be wrong: we might just be dealing with a trashy image, a collective
hallucination caused by drug taking – but it did seem a beautiful
night, when stars were shining just for us, watching over the
sleeping valley, where us three Londoners were on holiday. If it is a
secret of the global village maybe I should not say any more. We may
have strayed, furthermore, from philosophy to theology and now to
mysticism and left science behind. I wrote a poem called “Hypertext”
in my youth about how the stars are merely photos, illusions of the
light that takes so long to reach the beams of our glistening eyes
that the
star
still appears hanging there once the star has died.
The
idea behind the poem ‘Hypertext’ was that maybe, because the
stars were like that, according to science, a sensory overlay could
be affected to Piper
At The Gates of Dawn.
At least this is what the short poem seems to be about in retrospect.
I used to be very much into poetry, live and breathe it, read it
every night, keep up to date with events in the poetry world, but not
so much anymore…
now it is to people like Wittgenstein I turn. My
whole life, or what is left of it, might be devoted to assiduous
study, to philosophical reflection, to the stretching of the spare
time continuum, to books. I
don’t need to move away, not go on holiday, not even venture out to
the local pub anymore, can just stay here, make staying an art, make
thought-processes
of rooted-ness, make philosophy my goal, and live a little bit like a
hermit. It is a purification process.
After
the face I may well have gone down a religious route, had it not been
for a holiday I took, with all the song-writers of my year, after
GCSE’s in a friend’s summer house in Devon, where we went to the
beach, and discussed philosophy. The friend who
hosted us
was very articulate in speaking against God but inflexible and
intolerant of other people’s beliefs. He thus went on to get an E
in philosophy even though you might’ve been forgiven for thinking
he actually had real live disciples at sixteen years old. I was asked
if I believed in God and said I believed in the Unknown, but my
friend retorted “does a goldfish have an Unknown?” and if not
there was no such thing. My friend it was that said we are just
monkeys with bigger brains and more dextrous fingers; that we don’t
deserve a God. If I was into New Beat holiness after the face, I soon
enough was swayed by the friend down the path of atheistic
pragmatism. We are here to breathe eat sleep shit fuck and die. We
are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the earth. Still to this day
what I really think hasn’t been sorted out yet, which seems a
position of default agnosticism as a shifting stance that allows all
perceptions, and
the surrender of the self to something more important than it.
Descartes
would say not to try and erect a new, philosophical edifice de
novo
until you have questioned everything and are sure of what you think;
and I think in that case Uncertainty prevails. I said it before but
there is indeterminacy at the core of all things, and this translates
into metaphysical matters as Undecidability. Indeterminacy is to
matter and therefore science as undecidability is to subjective
things therefore to art. It’s a bit black and white but something
to go on at least. Here
if Descartes were alive today he’d bring up an example of
indeterminacy from
science. I think of the so-called God Particle… just
to remind you, I
predicted the hunt for it in a prophetic speech in 2000, from looking
at dust in a late ray of light angling in, as if I were Democritus of
the Ancient Greeks – but have since read in a book of physics by
the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli that the idea of the God Particle
is daft. Indeed, even from a religious point of view, they would say
compared with God, matter is error. Anyhow,
I
think they can detect its influence but not pin it down.
I
think I made the God Particle prophesy because of my dad’s
education; because he read Philosophy at the LSE under Popper;
because he had made use of Bertrand Russell’s History
of Western Philosophy
where he tells us of the Ancient Greeks. In that sense culture is
transmitted as well as genes, or rather, dad’s reading is
transmitted as well as genes. In another sense, I may have been so
prescient in the year 2000 because of my geographical position, and
am thus on the receiving end of Nobel Prizes that have already been
and
gone!
My
mistake in the Millennial speech in the barn in 2000, where I got so
much right, including September 11th,
was dictating axiomatic truth. If you don’t believe me about that,
I can show you another example of dictating axiomatic truth all over
again...
THE STORY OF THE FLOOD
I
PREAMBLE
It’s hardly a mathematical proof but in the year 2000 there was a great unspooling in the den in the barn where I predicted September 11. I have endeavoured to reclaim the speech and categorise it too. It divides into prophecies, inventions, ambitions and aphorisms, but in the flesh was all extemporaneous speech, wedded to the colloquial and not written down. What we think is that it isn’t right that even September 11th had to go through me when I was a schoolboy; and we think it is because I live in the house where the Plough alignment is viable. A transcript recapturing my Millennial unspooling now exists and has been augmented by further writing to show how things unfolded for me, leading up to that alignment.
II
MILLENNIAL PROPHECIES
I look into that dust in that late sunbeam angling in and foresee that they will one day hunt for something called the God Particle that will prove God non-extrinsic to matter.
It would be good to see an alignment of the Plough and the landscape for a first black President of America.
I think if Fight Club were real someone would fly two planes into the Twin Towers on September 11th and I don’t think that a good idea but it might happen.
I would like to write a book, maybe a Trilogy, called The Scientific Papers, classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.
It would be good if there were a party in an office block where all the internal walls are removed and where every floor represents a decade in music, fashion and substances.
I myself would like to record an album on earphones, like Rimbaud might if he were a musician.
I would say that smells from tellies would also be possible one day too.
I think what we might see is an Age called the Age of Enchantment that is an echo of the Enlightenment.
I do wonder if there will be another immaculate conception now that we have a new Millennium.
III
MILLENNIAL PEN-KNIFE TOOLS
A virtual death machine to wake you up. A word-chord synthesiser at the edge of selection. A drug called “Strictly Free” that does what it says on the tin, is and makes you strictly free to consume. A red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball. An holographic horse-cock wheeled in the bedroom. An invisible square of air called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on telly. A neutraliser drink that sobers you up in one quick instant. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey protruding from the oldest fell at ten to eight. Earphones implanted with tiny mics inside them so that you can record on them. A love-bomb that explodes in a Chaos Theatre. What’s wrong with these is that they are not real!
IV
AMBITIONS
To replace the archaic word for ‘gay’ would be amazeballs because ‘gay’ used to be Man’s highest emotion and was never replaced.
To discover an aesthetic anti-system like the colours of the vowels in English would also be great, even though Rimbaud deemed it folly.
To conduct an experiment into the international language alphabet would also be an artistic ambition.
To overthrow the conscious self-censor would be good, maybe create a superhuman narrator called FUCK who can tell the truth like no-one else.
To start a new religion is what I am getting at because I think the Millennium means what is old is expended and we need to renew our values; and already Jedi is an official religion on the census forms in London.
To start a new language entirely would also be a positive thing, if at all possible, in my opinion.
I would like to start the tradition of the post-poem.
I would also see gypsy poetry in the English centre because it would shake things up and I think it could be interesting to see if they have anything new to offer.
If I were a concept artist I’d build a room made of hash that the audience can blow-torch but as I am not, just a writer, I can’t do that; and I would only endorse real live death in the cinema if an old granny volunteered for euthanasia and that’s because I do have some moral compass.
To make a new discovery as big as fire is the long and short of it, for every generation might have that chance again, to usurp the burning torch of culture from the old.
To bring back the Summer of Love is the largest and widest goal.
To bring about simultaneous orgasm of Man.
V
BLUE
“You know how dad told us all
he was an art smuggler nicknamed Blue?
That he smuggled art over the Berlin Wall?
That he sold his business when
the Berlin Wall fell? Well,
I think it might’ve been code, art
might’ve been recourse to euphemism.
I think he was a pollen smuggler.
I think he had a pollen farm
way up high in the Moroccan
mountains and shipped tonnes
and tonnes of pollen to the States.
This whole art dealer nicknamed
Blue thing is just to protect us.
At least this is what I entertain.
I also think he named us after
The Doors, John, James, and Robert
and then they had a girl of course.
Have you noticed we are born
in a season each, going Spring,
Autumn, Winter, Summer, and
march right left right left in the hands?
There are also four compass
points, four seasons, four wheels
of a car and four dimensions
to the mapping of any point in
the spacetime continuum including
time. Now revolve that bifter!
After all I think Jesus himself
would be a proto-hippy stoner
poet in this day and age. Ah,
I love it when the Wizard of Oz
resolves into colour. There are
casual drug references all around us.
Mario mushrooms confer energy.
Tinkerbell’s dust makes you
fly. And in the Wizard of Oz
they lie down in the field of
poppies and see the Emerald City.
So hurry up passing that joint.
Otherwise we’ll never stop the war.”
VI
WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE DYING OF CANCER
A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand.
Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema.
Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.
Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts.
The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation.
Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation.
The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man.
The opposite of something is the pre-requisite.
The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution.
The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph.
When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.
When you lose your concentration you die.
Your ordinary speech is surreal enough.
There are too many words in the world.
Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan.
The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous.
You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love.
All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun.
Without difference no contradistinction.
Everyone is my brother and I love them.
The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.
There is no more mapless space.
Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self.
Philosophy is a self-contained language corresponding to nothing real in life.
Existentialism is a child at the pick and mix with a credit card.
Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit.
It is better to have a cup of tea than it is to kill yourself.
Portability is the new apotheosis of Form.
I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too.
All things must be returned to earth, surrendered like a rented thing to death.
VII
WHAT THE BAND WANTED
They wanted to telepathically unite, they say, on a night when it would seem the quest was over. They wanted to remove the ‘I’ from art. They wanted us to be new binaural people. They kicked you out of the band because they deemed it that to do any more of what you wanted would’ve been a sin, when it wasn’t getting good. They wanted us to be as close as Optimus Prime is with himself. They deemed it the only good one from the dawn was ‘F Sharp Minor’ where you got the cat from Piper just right. If by now you hear them, consider it after the Flood, as in the way Rimbaud begins his Illuminations, saying “after the idea of the flood had subsided a rabbit in among the flowers said a prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web” - which leant itself to the naming of the band. What they didn’t get is that the binaural earphones were your idea to invent, that you’d already been prescient of September 11th and that you were trying for the Plough alignment to coincide with a rhythm change in the White House, not to mention any of the other things of note in your Millennial speech in the barn. That’s why they think you were right, and why you eventually found the sheet where pictures grew in days long past taking ecstasy at the gates of dawn.
VIII
WHITE EYEBROW
It’s
hardly a cosmi-economic theory but my father used to say, of this
family home where the Plough alignment is viable, that “the value
of this house should include The Bigger Picture.” It could also go
the other way into a
neo-Marxist
direction; but if we gave the house away for 50p, (after
spending £30, 000 doing it up), we
wouldn’t be able to buy a new house. The Age of Enlightenment was
said to be the simultaneous astrological and sociological
de-centering of Man and the White House its child in terms of both
philosophy and build, and nowhere has that been more apparent to me
than when observing the Plough alignment with the oldest fell Black
Combe at a time of a rhythm change in the White House. To devalue
that priceless
gift
would seem counter-intuitive to my meagre mind, and what happens in
reality is that an estate agent will neither increase nor decrease
the value of the house should it be on the market. That is, they will
not factor the alignment in, nor devalue the house to 50p (which
could also be said to be factoring the alignment in) but
measure the value against the other houses. My
father inherited the house from his father, and passed it on to my
mother when he passed away; but still, I sometimes hear sadistic
voices disputing that my father ever owned it. I think he did by law
but there is an extent to which the Plough alignment belongs to us
all. When dad spoke of valuing in the Bigger Picture he meant
syncretism – the
belief that all religions share a common goal -
but there have been philosophers such as Sir Karl Popper – who
taught my father at the LSE in the 1960’s
- who don’t believe there is a Bigger Picture towards which things
tend.
IX
OUR SONG
As I strive for something else on which to write a new proof, and before I get furloughed, I think back to my old band from Cambridge and how we seemed to affect a sensory overlay to Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates of Dawn.
Maybe the switch was thrown. Back in the day when we were recording the tron, that is recording on binaural earphones in The Flood, we also listened to Piper At The Gates of Dawn by the Pink Floyd; and maybe there was an inversion whereby the Floyd CD was suddenly recording instead of playing.
I do know that sometime after my degree I was living in London and listened to the classic Floyd album on Youtube and heard a sensory overlay of my name and voiceprint as if tattooed on Piper. Asking people about this, the possibility of affecting an album without going back to the studio to rerecord it, one person said it was schizophrenic talk; another that the sensory overlay was undeniable.
I do remember as I say listening to the album back when the tron was being recorded, and my mate suddenly saying “John Tucker” at a particular moment in the song, and me saying “this bit’s good,” which both seem to have stuck to the record as if it was indeed not just playing but recording.
I find this remarkable, as an overthrowing, as a usurpation, as a moment of ecstasia (meaning the suspension of all judgement), as something Bakhtinian applied to Bach, as a triumph of hope over logic, as another number which we could say is by our band, which begs the question as to whether or not Saucerful of Secrets still comes next!
I wonder why it had to be Track 5, Pow R Toc H. The name of the song is a type of acid they used to take in the 60’s if that makes any difference; and it is an instrumental too.
You start to ask if The Flood’s binaural album propitiated the possibility. We did a lot of recording and kept a 6-song play list. It was deemed more an algorithm than an album. On its last track I said I would “plug my senses in the mains.” That track is called ‘Hunger.’ It can be heard on rhythm guitarist Tom Woodhall’s Soundcloud page.
I imagine the road we didn’t go down; imagine what would’ve happened if at the start of the album we stopped and sat back asking if, for example, death is a fluid excreted by a gland in the brain called the Dreaming Gland, instead.
There may always be a concomitant pathway with the binaural earphone album, a road not gone down. The songs may have a dark edge as in dark matter – an antipode, a shadow, a satyr racing beside you on the beach.
It’s almost as if whatever you think, it is undercut by some irony, when it comes to the earphone album. It’s almost like irony becomes a musical key.
So it is that I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a carnivalesque upturning. We broke the ancient silence. The album was a scientific experiment. Water still came from the Tap. And who was the sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper but my natural biologist friend, stamping the witness’s name on Floyd?
I mentioned a “sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper” in a conversation with my brother a long time ago in London, long before the Flood started to play. I also had the idea to invent the earphones myself in a conversation in the barn before I had set foot in Cambridgeshire where we played, but it wasn’t me who implemented the idea.
We might have split water; might’ve landed in a world where there needs to be New Rights. Imagine if for example one really did come out of the experiment looking ersatz or opaque. That would be unfortunate if you wished to become an English teacher; but you might find it is through The Flood that you are the new Faraday.
The
Flood found out I had helped invent the net before I did… they
called my mum down to talk to her about something, maybe my strange
behaviour, and she told them something
about my boyhood book.
I
thiiiiiiiiink all
it was was when someone needed to store the idea of the net in
writing in the attic here to give it a chance to grow all the way
round the world and to keep it free too, I was the one to write it.
And
I
didn’t know because the book had to be locked in the attic for Long
Storage when I was very young.
One
thing The Flood didn’t know though was how prescient, how prophetic
I had been in a conversation with my brothers in the barn in 2000,
before I set foot in Cambridgeshire, before the Towers came down,
before the earphones came into play.
X
HALFWARE
I
think the symbol N could represent the top of the telegraph pole,
when a bullet is fired up there. I was once saturated by creative
things. When
I read of Maxwell and Faraday I think of a particular period where I
was surrounded by creative things. For a start the Tower was on the
shelf, including a book with smell that may have been the word of a
dog and a book with a line that went missing. My computer bloomed a
numinous purple light and working on it, typing up the plot of the
film Eraserhead
for
a blog entry, one day, the telegraph pole in the field exploded. The
binaural earphone album on which I said I’d plug my senses in the
mains went online; and I also had an experiment into a cassette tape
with a pause where resealed in the flimsy reel. That had been going
on for years and was now a successful fusion. I melted it in the AGA
at night to make it a valid work of art. At the time I considered
some of these examples to be halfware, like, say, tattooing a name on
Piper
At The Gates of Dawn,
or an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William
Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang
– which I did also used to possess. It wasn’t long before my dad
died and that meant I discovered the sheet, my brother’s sheet,
where pictures grew, which
could be portentous of the end of the chip;
and it also meant my seven year old text emerged which
I think was designed to store the idea of the net in writing in the
attic to
give it a chance to grow all the way round the world.
It was then that I falsified the Nirvana barcode, saturated as I say
by creative things. Still, I lost my mind with grief when my dad
died; and possibly shouldn’t still be going on about all the
halfware.
LOST MINIATURE DREAMS
This
text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of
the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts
have been made to order the bank notes but were not always
successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice
or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a
critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are
liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of
exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing
through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text
necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free
that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly
free” to consume. It is but an open-air poem, comprised of torn and
bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given artificial insemination.
Inherent in it is a notion that money is an Ode to Death, that a
fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work sets you free.
Sullen, silken sulks,
we drink the same rain,
spit is clean
and
so is dirt.
Necklace noose,
reckless truce,
drooling before
wet, electric eyes
My name is David Bonky,
I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,
there’s a tear up my jacket.
(1998)
I’m
the only one left,
left
to shoot my own gun,
this
is the dead land,
crack
a smile and curse the sun.
There is joy in things
and smiles not grins like butter
but
like butterflies.
Waves
[squiggle]
crossed
the FTSE
[squiggle]
and
the Helter-Skelter
[squiggle]
crashed
in the electric-sea
[squiggle].
Blessed may be the end at last,
under the sea,
below the soul,
in the upside-down
Oceans above us
(all that heaven sends is rain.)
Down
down
down
down
down
deep
blue
below
“eh
up,
mate,”
says
my
mate
and
is
it
safe
to
say
hello?
To plug my senses in the mains
might engage !00% of my brains,
but it’s gone wrong at the plug,
just a dream on a drug.
I
felt a leaf,
I
fell out of life,
probably
no-one else knew.
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.
She blows a poisonous magic
searched the corridor for a
crash had no survivors in Soviet
be weed
Il faut que je m’en aille.
Sometimes you’ve just
got to hit the road and
Leaves that played on the surface of the water,
these are the leaves they have in Heaven,
these
are the leaves of love.
Signed by everwell,
she couldn’t hit it sideways
or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman
with the hairgel of Dracula,
Atlantis,
Aquarius, the 60’s.
“Is there anything I can do to help?
Looks like I’m on washing up duty.
It’s fine I don’t mind washing up.
It won’t take long then I’ll be free.”
£34. 84 at the Take-away joint
can get you quite bloated,
not just quench’d and sated;
and by now I sit here wondering
just how much it cost.
My
fingers have crashed,
my
fingers have crashed
and
my mad, crashed
fingers
have connected.
A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in
can lead all the way to the loony bin,
can make you forget how to spell
Winnie the Pooh at the gates of Hell.
The
day is a dream’s balcony around mellow me.
I
remember when banks let pens go free.
Art
gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi.
Love
has
gone
veggie for reasons of Disney!
The
future is no longer what it used to be!
I
still crave a greedy DogMuckels when
the
plush seat gets a hard-on at the end.
When
Paul was talking of “McTruth”
I
noticed a swarm of flies in the house.
Nobody
else could even see them but
me.
My
mother calls the
pills I
pop “poetry
buttons”
in motley conglomerations
like
pool balls or songcells and
their
names
should not appear
in poems.
Caroline
is the last yellow crayon.
This
could be the door to telepathy.
My
granny and grand-dad were in the R. A. F.
Under
a blanket in the back of a car -
I
think of it now I’ve got this far.
Alone
in the solipsistic kitchen
whom
it would seem is un-war-ful.
Walking
down to the Irish Sea quite
slowly
to
see if my place in life is lowly
a
dying animal goes much faster.
He
found himself on a plane.
He
found himself on a.
He
found himself on.
He
found himself.
He
found.
P.
If
dog = pi times MC squared
it
is because you wish to think him round
while
O is the key of water shared
when
rolling round on the ground.
O for a Muse of fire that descends
from the brightest Heaven of invention;
Rintrah roars and shakes his icy fires
into
the burdened air, breathing.
One
night, Jim
Morrison pointed up
at
the night sky on LSD and said “look!
It’s
the infinite cocks fucking the infinite cunts!”
Barnes’s
goal against Brazil,
it
was was not born under a hill,
it
is the best goal I’ve seen still,
Barnes’s
goal against Brazil.
If
the windows were washed – every one -
we’d
still
see
nothing through them but
the
white mirrors reaffirming the quiet
interior
of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction.
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’ve
been writing about bifters.
Hello
my name is Pirripa.
[sound
of sucking in of smoke.)
That’s
my boyfriend.”
Now
we are gathered to appoint the Gods,
now
we are gathered to consecrate ourselves,
now
we are gathered to ordain this dust,
we
are gathered to live and to dream.
If
you believe it, it is there,
naked
under nearer stars,
softly
swashing, backwashing music,
music
in a room with no door.
A
A Yellow
A Yellow Pages
May dawn behead me
A Yellow Pages will suffice
A Yellow Pages will
Farewell my life
A Yellow
A
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
but I for one still don’t really know
if Lucy even happens to be an actual substance.
I
remember happy, sunny days,
days
when we scored some weed and went
out
in the meadows, when Paul
would
turn to me and say
“wear
an emotional condom
before
you fuck my mind, man.”
Wouldn’t
it be pollen
if
Barnes has scored a chicken
and
spring is a red horse?
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
I cannot tell if sipping sugarless tea
or stretching honesty is the more easy
an encryption for the future that
ain’t what it used to be but I still
await the future with rapt uncertainty
and
cannot stand the suspense.
We
are the velvet e’s,
we’re
shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,
the
Roman Rd below,
beneath
us as we fly.
[enter
bass organ of ‘The End’]
Butter
is good when you’re a nutter,
but
I can think of something that’s better,
so
had better write her a letter.
Opened unto the gloom under
sliver moon I slide her over.
Semen spills like silver water.
We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.
Forlorn
as fallen autumn leaves,
is
the wave that misbehaves,
goes
out taking E at raves,
and
soon enough no more believes.
One
thing I learned I shouldn’t say too soon,
underneath
this new moon,
but
might instead just impart,
it
is because I have a heart.
What
actually happened was, I ended up robbing a bank, with a banana
smuggled under a tea cloth and a balaclava on my head and face…there
was a get-away car outside, and we went far and to a separate country
too. We started to loan the money out and thus made money off it
which meant we had plenty with which to use for a blank canvas. We
had to be concise, when writing our contract on
the money.
The
police were onto us, so what we did was wait until we had
disseminated our message, and earned more money off the loaning of it
than we stole in the first place, and quietly stormed into the bank
with a banana openly
protruding
from a balaclava in my hand, and h-a-n-d-e-d the money – and the
extra too – back to the bank. The police then let us off the crime
and we went home, knowing our nodes were encrypted.
Of
all the work I had achieved, be it before or after my mental illness,
I still think of the binaural earphone album and the defaced bank
note text as being among
the
best. I think if you remain on the left it’s alright but only when
it’s phoney, for defacing actual bank notes is against the law. I
think if you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone
should get that opportunity should
they choose and
probably for free too. I
think that
is my philosophy and even more so, yours.

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