TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY VOLUME TWO (NEW VERSION)

TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY VOLUME TWO

[NEW VERSION]

BY JOHANNES BERGFORS

<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 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. 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.”

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 publications by John Tucker, so I am not too happy to be replicating and duplicating it under my new nom de plume for philosophy “Johannes Bergfors.” 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.

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.

HANNAH

I was trying to write white. In the recent and excluded 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 11^th 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 11^th 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 11^th 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.