TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY VOLUME TWO [CONTINUED]

[CONTINUED]

THE ALIGNMENT

Proposition 1

What some call Order in the universe others call God, but they are one and the same.

Explanation

Having attested to the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black Combe, only to coincide with a rhythm change in the White House during my lifetime, I asked myself whether the alignment indicated Order or Chaos in the universe. The argument for Order was that the alignment only coincided with a rhythm change in the White House, so backed up that idea that the Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man, and the White House its child in terms of both philosophy and build. It is easy to see how one might consider the alignment indicating Order; but Chaos is a different matter. The argument for Chaos is that the alignment would happen with greater regularity if it were a clocktick universe, rather than simply “when we want it to happen.” Still, the true endorsement turned out to be Order, for there are cosmological events that only happen once every few thousand years or so. So having determined that the alignment indicates Order in the Universe the next step was to recognise that in this case Order in the Universe is synonymous with God.

*

Proposition 2

Metaphysics is the place where science and religion meet.

Explanation

The scientific mode or even “tone of mind” would be to call it Order in the universe; and the religious mode or “tone of mind” would be to call it God – and as shown they can be synonymous with one another. Therefore metaphysics is the place where science and religion meet. Q. E. D.

*

Proposition 3

If God is synonymous with Order in the Universe, it follows that God is not extrinsic to matter.

Explanation

This view might be trendy at the moment, as scientists at C. E. R. N. hunt for the God Particle, which has been labelled a daft misnomer by others still who tend to believe that God is perfect and matter is error. The belief, though, that God is not extrinsic to matter dates back at least as far as Spinoza, for whom there was no substance that wasn’t part of God. The counter argument is that the alignment is not God itself but a mere example of a state of Order in the universe that is itself not visible and is synonymous with God.

*

Proposition 4

If the alignment is perfect, God is perfect too.

Explanation

We already know that by definition God is perfect and the alignment does not necessarily let us stare at the perfection that is God but merely signifies the Order in the whole universe at large that is synonymous with God. To stare at the alignment is not to be let down about the perfection of God, but God is more than the alignment itself.

*

Proposition 5

It is not the alignment itself but the Order in the universe which it indicates which is synonymous with God.

Explanation

Here we seem to be slightly tautological. I have been teasing this point out. At the moment of the alignment, which lasted for a good, few nights, there were other things going on in the world of simultaneity, synchronicity and syncretism and these were also connected into the same scope of Order as the alignment. God is the overall picture and the alignment an example by which we can measure the Order.

*

Proposition 6

It is good to get to the root of one’s own beliefs but you must understand the way it seems is that necessarily all belief-systems are woven in to this religious stance by the alignment, even atheism.

Explanation

In the alignment, we see that atheism and theism lose their polarities. The Order in the universe would be what an atheist makes of it, and even if that is all he believes in, as shown it is synonymous with God, and can be just the same as what a religious person would take from the event. An atheist and a theist can in all likelihood agree, and only agree, on the matter of our Plough alignment. The alignment factors all faiths into its happening, like the goal of syncretism, almost attesting to that notion that Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet. Rather than different religions connecting though, it is even more startling that religion and science agree, and religion and atheism agree in the event of the alignment.

*

Proposition 7

Because the alignment is about one-ness, it is possible to use it to undermine and undo presupposed binary oppositions in arguments.

Explanation

We have seen how science and religion can be a binary undone, also how even theism and atheism can be undone. This is propitiated by the basic principle that Order in the universe, which can be appreciated by science or atheism too, is synonymous with the idea of God when it comes to the alignment.

*

Proposition 8

If Order in the universe is synonymous with God, we are all one and our differences reconciled.

Explanation

If an atheistic scientist recognises Order in the universe in the event of the alignment, and a Deist believes the alignment a manifestation of God’s work, then they essentially agree on the same thing if it is true that order in the universe is synonymous with God, and are but calling the same thing by two different names.

*

Proposition 9

If the alignment is not God itself but just an example of Order in the universe which is synonymous with God, it may not be the case that God is not extrinsic to matter.

Explanation

If the alignment were God manifested, it would be a God of atoms, stars, particles et al, but seeing as the alignment is indicative of a sense of Order in the Universe that stretches beyond the alignment itself, and which we are saying is synonymous with God, God might be the underlying, organisational principle and still retain exemption from the condition of matter.

*

Proposition 10

That Order in the universe and God are two different names for the same thing creates common ground between science and religion, also atheism and religion.

Explanation

This point reiterates previous points. It shows that in practise what science may call Order in the universe, religion may call God, and despite their seeming to not agree, they could be one and the same thing, under different appellations.

*

Proposition 11

It may be magnetism that underlies the variability of belief when it comes to the matter of the alignment.

Explanation

Maybe, we are all but iron filings firked to the moon in the same way and our differences are differences created by language being stubborn and awkward. When I say we all agree that the alignment is the alignment, it makes my home the magnetic, telluric and gravitational foot. It endorses the yellow, McDonalds ‘M’ in the word “them” in the advert. It could be that magnetism unites us where words keep us separated, and the event of the alignment could be an essentially magnetic event in and of itself on a scientific level. So it is that we could be all stardust, all helplessly and involuntarily charged in a magnetic way. Different fields of language, to use David Morley’s phrase, could also be underlined by a common principle when it comes to magnetism. The magnetism of the stars, the magnetism of the oldest rock, could be the same magnetism, and people part of it too.

*

Proposition 12

The alignment and its inherent magnetism has the ability to turn a staunch atheist into an agnostic.

Explanation

It barely needs explaining that the observation of the alignment is so sublime, even terrifying, that it truly becomes a good use of the word “awesome” and has the power to change the polarity or the charge of an atheist into something like an agnostic or even more. Even an atheist who saw it would remark at the stunning sublimity of it, and the coincidence with the rhythm change in the White House too; and it might suddenly strike the atheist that God might really exist after all, because the atheist would glimpse a sense of Order in the universe that he had previously never considered, it being bigger than one man’s brain. The atheist may have empirical science behind him not believing in a man in the clouds, but the same empiricism would lend the atheist towards a more religious or at least agnostic stance if with his own eyes he perceived the Plough alignment.

*

Proposition 13

It does not diminish God to have him equate to Order in the universe, nor muddy up and make dogmatic religion of science to have Order in the universe equate to God.

Explanation

To mention Order in the Universe might make a religious person contemplate nothing but the cold, black, vacuity of space, which is seen as Godless in science, and to mention God to a scientist might have stigma for the scientist too, but truly in the alignment I can see nothing other than the point of Order in the universe becoming synonymous with God. It does not diminish God to call him Order in the Universe for this backdates to the Bible and is not a new, scientific notion at loggerheads with religion but old. Traditionally God created the world from chaos; and therefore my documenting the alignment takes on the role of rewriting Genesis to a partial extent. Still, I can see how a top scientist, wishing to find something out would be frustrated if God was the only answer and he was not allowed to go any further, ask any further questions.

*

Proposition 14

The universe may just be a very elegant place.

Explanation

The universe may be elegant but whether it is designed by God or not we do not know. There are said to be three arguments for God in philosophy: the ontological, the teleological and the cosmological. My argument is that at some level the Order in the Universe which an atheistic scientist believes in is synonymous with God, the same thing but seen through different eyes, expressed with a different name. The scientist and the theist could be working on the same problem, onto the same thing, albeit in different disguises, disguises which are superficial, while underlying it all we find the same magnetism, which also ties in with the same instinct on a human level.

*

Proposition 15

The alignment doesn’t prove God but it does prove Order in the universe.

Explanation

The alignment doesn’t make the Bible stories literal. It doesn’t mean we have captured a square of blue sky and examined it for evidence of God and found it. To those that don’t naturally believe in God it only proves Order in the mechanical operation of the Universe in which man finds himself. It proves also that the sociological and the astrological realms are connected. To some though that is enough for a redefinition of what the word “God” means or should mean. It means, as stated, that there is an Order in the universe that is beyond our control – for surely the alignment was not down to human manipulation of the stars – and that the Order is elegant, and the universe therefore benign. These things that are proven are as stated enough for a God, a redefinition of God, for me, as a personal belief.

*

Proposition 15

If the alignment recurred tomorrow night, without anything significant to coincide with in the socio-political sphere, this argument would not be invalid.

Explanation

This is because what has happened has happened and we cannot change the facts. It may make me look a bit ridiculous if only now I am bringing this paper together and the next day the alignment recurs for nothing special, no good reason, but I would still say Order in the universe is the atheist’s God, and a scientific description – or even equivalent – of a theist’s divinity. It would also surprise me if the alignment did recur tomorrow. But I have become convinced that what astro-physics labels Order in the universe and what Christianity calls the Divine Being represents a false dichotomy. That is the point.

*

Proposition 16

After a while of talking about the alignment directly, one starts to wonder if the whole conversation should be hidden or else abandoned.

Explanation

It seems like wearing clothes out of the shame of one’s body being naked; but in the case of the alignment and talking about it, it is the shame associated with the Sin of Consciousness. So we reach a point where the prelapsarian event of writing, which is freedom, becomes changed. To liken this change of mood and tone of mind to the Fall of Man is another step.

*

Proposition 17

Speaking of the alignment directly might offend like sacrilege or blasphemy.

Indeed, this consolidates the sense of the divine nature of this event, this theophany, where it is not just about awe but possibly law too. If it is rude to stare, I was rude. If it blasphemous or sacrilegious I was that. If God cannot be seen with the naked eye, the work of God can still be seen with the naked eye. Unless that is you deem it the work of, say, cosmic silence, in which case I would reiterate my point about the false dichotomy between God and the idea of Order in the universe.

MUM’S EQUILIBRIUM

So in among it all philosophy attains the condition of tea, air, hair, water, clothes, and kitchen roll. Mum comes in the kitchen, turns the lights out – says “just have daylight. Daylight’s good for the mind.” She’s full of magic sayings hidden in the treetops, full of eloquence married to axiomatic truth. Imagination is a muscle. Language is a creature. In politics there are no wrongs or rights. Giving is happiness. Actions have consequences. Just because someone is good to you doesn’t mean they are right for you. The brain only heals when it’s asleep and even nightmares are healing. Poetry is not the entrance and exit of life. Working in the soil is good for the soul.

It was my mother who made the flower-press ending on cannabis which = a dialysis. I wrote the love poem for Flora which = a motor – but the pretext therein is still “Mum’s Equilibrium” – for after all I don’t like chopping veg in the kitchen and working in the veg patch in the garden – and each time she comes in preparing food the dialysis elongates. A piece of coal would be a good addition, to analyse, deconstruct, take apart, apply cinematographic super-freeze to, to know inside out, to treat.

Mum says she hasn’t slept well for a week now, what with having to worry about cleaning the house, which is a massive job, to prepare for all her grand-children coming up. She sends a message to Hannah while I write, sends a photograph of some baby dresses she found… the text will no doubt penetrate the six inch gap between earth’s atmosphere and space, bounce off a satellite and come home, like an Informationist poem, pertaining to replace archaic “gay.”

Mum’s kept all of Hannah’s dresses from her childhood and is now surrendering them to Hannah’s baby. My mother is desperately trying to keep the house where the Plough alignment is viable in the Condition of Order. She says when she has finished moving things around and tidying away boxes the house will look a good house.

All of a sudden mum gets up and leaves the kitchen, goes upstairs to her bedroom – that anagram of boredom - and the sound of digitally remastered 1970’s rock music starts blaring out of her Smart-speaker like she is plunging into second youth, second rebellion, being a really renegade mum.

She is a good mum, open, permissive, liberal. She is not a hygiene Nazi, but has more hippy ideals. She says live and let live. Her maiden name “Bergfors” means “mountain waterfall” in Swedish, which is a tonal language, unlike English. It informs her poetry, free flowing, off the top of her head – she used to do the beck in the back by discretely writing off the top of her head; but more recently when I asked her what she’d do for an MA she said “Flora’s system.”

Mum is kind and very considerate… just the consideration she pays me is a lot but she grants it to each of her four children equally. She would let us wear what we wanted, where dad was more fastidious and stringent; she would buy us the CD’s we wanted; she wasn’t hard to get a Big Mac out of – so she was fun – a free-spirit as I say.

As I get stuck on what to say the music stops – the track is changing no doubt. A long guitar solo – fretboard masturbation – is interrupted. I never knew ‘Smoke On The Water’ by Deep Purple had such a good guitar solo, such virtuosity. It was the song my old guitar teacher would start with when we watched him play a set with his band.

TELEPATHIC ELEPHANT

Once upon a time, I conducted an experiment into a cassette of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ which had a small pause where cut and resealed in the reel.

The tape came to me in a broken state, so I performed an operation on it, a delicate operation.

When I had sealed the reel, it left some one or two CM overlap of plastic which meant there was a pause in the song.

The ideal became to do away with the pause.

In those days I had what I thought was my only poem:

“Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.”

I also kept a tough diary for a few weeks and aside from the physical object of the tape that’s all I had, or all I thought I had.

Experimentation began on the tape in earnest when I was in a band called Secret Chord H at Oundle School. I wrote a song called ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ which remains my finest song unto some. But there was also a B-side that was never recorded… I sat the year above in a circle and got them to chant to words

“another, another, another f***ing joint,

another, another, another f***ing joint,

another, another, another f***ing joint,

another, another, another f***ing joint,”

over and over, ad infinitum, as if rhythm, mantra, repetition, and double-entendre could “do away with the pause.”

Later, I also started to use the word “ette” spelled “e pi e” but said as if the pi sign were a double lower case t.

It took years before the pause was gone, the fusion successful.

When the fusion was successful, the volume of the rest of the tape seemed slightly dimmed – but there was no longer any pause in the opening number ‘Go’ where there was still some one or two CM overlap of tape reel.

That’s when I thought the object was an objet d’art, a Strange Attractor like in Chaos Theory, a dream-meet connector, an Utilitarian Martianist wedding ring.

It lived under my pillow for a while.

It gave me dreams of “The Ninero Ratio” which I tried to smuggle out of the unconscious, when my best work seemed lost on the shores of sleep.

Then one night as the night wind enwheeled through the dark garden trees, and an alchemical base metal feeling pervaded my soul, and I recalled the formula for mud from primary school -

water + soil = mud -

I was persuaded by voices, which by now in mental illness I heard, to sneak downstairs in the midnight and cook the tape in the dark blue AGA, top oven, hottest one.

While the tape was inside the oven, I said to myself I would write, but could only really conjure a quote from the father-poet Neil Curry.

“Nothing can be said for certain about poetry except Pound’s claim that the poet chooses where to end his lines, selecting a tiny pause instead of letting the type-writer run on.”

A nacreous, plastic stench filled the kitchen as I took the tape out of the oven.

In years to come I would photo the tape for the online world, as its final resting place, and give the physical object, which was by now a carcass of a metaphysical idea, to my gf.

Overall I am pleased with my process.

There are a number of other things that I had going for me at the same time that also might qualify as “halfware” such as the idea that a sensory overlay of my name was to be tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, such as a purple-bleeding screen, such as an effervescent mobile phone reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, such as the album we recorded on binaural earphones where I said I would “plug my senses in the mains,” and even the sheet where pictures grew could be portentous of the end of the chip… as I say all of this was going on more or less at the same time. I was saturated in creative things.

The eventual work of art I call ‘Telepathic Elephant’ is for Rachel, with whom I shared a taste in Pearl Jam music when I was young. Rachel was the nicest girl to talk to at school.

‘Telepathic Elephant’ wouldn’t have worked if it was a video. If I had cut an old-school video of, say, The Doors film, at the moment Patricia the witch dangles in her legs into the interview with Jim Morrison and says “what do you think of the dreadful reviews your new poetry book has received Mr. Morrison?” – and if I had resealed the reel, cutting out the bit where he responds “I guess they didn’t understand it,” - then that video would never “grow back.”

THE BLIT (PART ONE)

Follidot, once upon a time there were only four motley fridge magnet letter jungle birds, called whitecrow, beckstub, chardud and stillwalker. They mingled on the fridge in a state of chaos but one day my brother set the whole mess in order when he designed the new da Vinci circle:

@

<BEE> [long squiggle]

Infinity Symbol

Not follidot is a rogobert, Rigobert bot-getter.

Not Flora is a princess of dialysis and motor.

Not Lucy in the soul with demons may be an actual substance.

Not I. T. might stand for Captain Marvel too.

Not oceans, O over them we fly, we fly.

Not the clock that got the rock to feel shock.

Not the other whatnot bits and bobs but my brother.

Not the Nirvana beercan, but the brother.

Loving as we do that love is the answer.

The law says it’s okay; but if you want to smoke green, you’ve got to go to Amsterdam. Squeezyjet can get us there. Then through the streets we will wander casting ad-libbed hippy poetry about neon chameleons into the breeze.

A plane exists on 2 dimensions including Time.

A pyramid exists on 4 dimensions including Time.

But to turn a plane into a pyramid represents

only a 1 dimensional step. Therein find extra

dimension of the words “1 dimensional” meaning

stupid, a dimension which could also be called a separate

plane. And did I mention that I wanted to die?

Then you get that the plane is a curve, because the world is round, because the shape of spacetime is curved, because Gravity warps and bends spacetime.

When we got there, we bought the monkeymoo from the Doors cafe, and got skunkosis. It’s a neologism from my father for my own condition. He said GM skunk makes people feral. I myself have added a few new words to the language as well.

While we were in the Doors cafe, I thought I would boast a little bit about my position. I told the proprietor “My latest thinking, aged forty four by now, is that my father was positively sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison.” He asked me if that was true and I said it was my current update on the lifelong “case” I had been working on w/r/t/ my dad’s art dealing business and told him a little bit more about my life.

“Already at seven I am said to have helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic here at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world it was me that wrote it. By eight I had made not one but two very strange Naturalistic Observations as the witness. By eleven – well I shouldn’t say. By fifteen I had attained the face of stars which might’ve been scripted in the Bible. By eighteen, in 2000, I forewarned of September 11th and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. I also predicted the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in and founded a new religion based on the elephant.”

“After school, to cut a long story short, I recorded an album on binaural earphones with mates, had an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, noticed a sensory overlay of my name on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel, and discovered the sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting my own song lyric) grew. Then I falsified the Nirvana barcode in writing and attained visual radio, broadcasting dreams.”

The proprietor, of the Doors cafe, he took a photo of us together and got me to surrender my signature to a document. In fact, he got me to sign his copy of The Lords And The New You Know Who. His English was very good, so good in fact that one needn’t learn Dutch in order to communicate. He asked me if I was working on anything new, and I said I was working on a Rimbaudian word-science notebook – an experiment into the international language alphabet.

If I wree wiintrg aoubt paniylg agetenmud fhtfis at the pnaio, for eaplmxe, I’d use taht mddelud up lgaugnae. For it is psbliose to samblrce all the letrets of a wrod aprat form the frsit and lsat and for the eye to siltl raed it.

It is also possible to float an hypertext of the word ‘pi’ over the real text like an astral body. This is especially possible if you make the eye walk the plank, going

1 2 3 4

6 7 8 5/ 9

The oldest word in all languages of Indo-European etymological origin is said to be “da.” It is in The Waste Land of course. It seems like a “monkey-unit” to me.

The word that is said to be least changed in all languages since the dawn of Man is the word for “water.” You can still just about hear its similarity across different tongues, and picture people gathered at a well, people of all ethnic origins, sharing water, at the start.

The name John F B Tucker might be a mini, Shakespearean poem.

For that I have to thank my dad, who concluded one of his poems with the words “Hamlet in flames.”

“Full fathom five thy father lies,” from Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest, could not be four or six or any other number because Virgil says “there are tears in things.”

O is not a ghost-vowel, no, but U is a ghost-vowel

when opened unto the gloom under

sliver moon I slide her over

and semen spills like silver water.

We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.

I would’ve said, prior to my bro’s contention, that after Acid comes Bic in the international language alphabet, then maybe the choppy sea, Donald Duck, ecstasia, Flora and Google. But maybe after Flora comes gay?

I do know of David Morley’s equations for water’s effect on water but shall not say. I can say, however, that H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart. Sometimes my cardiovascular heart readings are like the hills!

Dadrafistahide deutemol doolally, donking

doormangrite gresticle, grapple-grinking

trestlewave, tristlewithy trusting

boogiloss bonkyfloss boogs.

Emprohistifide applabong ding dong,

omporifestic applebong bang-gally.

Appladocky flocky nocky,

nihilipilificationist abstraxic crax,

abbladong tristleworthy blex, blenk, blenk.

Avrabo gontockolocky gontockalix,

tresting the gentricle indreariaterbee.

Ingresting a lingo-bling-killing silence.

“Shall we go to the Pink Floyd cafe next?” I asked.

So we went.

It was only down the road. We didn’t teleport there. The locals didn’t visit these big name coffee shops but went to lesser known ones, where there was probably better quality product – but places like the Doors and the Pink Floyd sucked in all the Tourists. Shall we say there was a menu containing a variety of song-cells listed in their abstract prison?

Breasticoffavitch brewmie breaming,

breeful of flastangahadra, broning,

bewli-collovitch casta-bata-bye, bodra-hydring

blackra and bleckra with impellibule stont.

Destitatitude desting destiatary dist.

Dingobat bongheavy hydradeutemol parafang,

plestiacorit imbeamitutde booly,

boomiatrix bestocovavitch blenk.

When we went to the Pink Floyd coffee shop again I started to boast. “I was once in a band called The Flood,” I said, “in Syd Barrett’s hometown, Cambridge. We recorded only on state of the art binaural earphones laid on the floor, broke the ancient silence that way, were badass as Hella and Shellac. I climbed up on the album and said I was going to plug my senses in the mains. Our music was dark music as in dark matter. We even encrypted a node in musical truth without any words. Our key was the key of irony.”

The proprietor this time didn’t look interested.

Ablabong kelf, bittle apsoopiama,

oopsamadaisical badaboom catatrash.

Epsolio entropomorphic entropitude.

Tudoxica engsongify absoler doovet dong.

Umbongitude absoluticum absoliticass.

Untrong istleworthy obstatiatrix.

Obstackifile pylon-nose’d obstatrix.

Ingstofficate the ablabate angronify.

So I told him that Piper At The Gates of Dawn is transmitted as well as genes; that my seven year old book was very Syd Barrett in a way. Others did to Ummagumma what I did to Piper At The Gates of Dawn with my boyhood work – which as I say means dad’s vinyl collection is transmitted as well as genes.

I told him that the original Barrett book had now been stolen, and we had the <BEE> experiment, my brother’s sheet where pictures grew, that is, to replace it. I said the Barrett-child document was old-fashioned compared with <BEE>. It was time to move on. It was time to accept that the boyhood book was if not outmoded technology – for writing is technology – but not the latest thing. If I wasn’t going to make something of <BEE> then I would be an outmoded songbird.

The proprietor started to laugh at my Barrett-maths, and was in paroxysms over it. He was after all high. We used to smoke weed like it was a magical sacrament, and a self-legitimising pact developed round the stoner circle. We were trying to get sober from the advertising trance, abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that robbed us of our bodies, renounce fidelity to surface-gods of illusion and to temporal wealth.

Obladobabong, dongcrastic, dongify.

On-donk-a-saurus wobbling the gooseprint.

Obladonky blonky, can’t wrap my hands around it.

Wriggley’s chewing gum wearing Wrangler jeans.

“Well you can’t just talk nonsense and claim it is arcane experimentation into the international language alphabet,” he said. So I tried to explain to him the beauty of <BEE>. “There was a time,” I said, “when my dad died that my seven year old book was still in the attic, for long storage, and meanwhile down the barn my brother’s <BEE> experiment had resulted in the sheet where pictures grew.” I told him that at the same moment in time, my book was allowed out of Long Storage and my brother’s sheet where pictures grew came true. He asked me to explain the sheet where pictures grew so I told him I couldn’t, but had taken some notes on what happened.

THE BLIT (PART TWO)

1. Once, in detention at school, and aged only 15, I wrote an essay about a green parrot sent to space through the conch. The supervising teacher, an Irishman, read my colourful and imaginative essay and said “if you keep going like that you’ll go far,” but I haven’t kept up the nimble flight. I sometimes wonder what else the essay contained… maybe it contained further images like music from a black hole? To send a parrot to space through the conch was, I suspect, a narrative device, a launch into fantasy too, and one would be forgiven for thinking the situation of my being detained in detention at the moment of writing was the key point, for as Ted Hughes might say, a visionary can still be free in his cell… there is freedom born from accepting limitation even as I write this now and here and real and feeling. The parrot sent to space through the conch has, like many of my brightest moments, been turned into song.

2. If you think I’m a genius for all that I went through, my little brother James P D Tucker is a genius too – he designed the sheet where pictures grew. Admittedly the pictures seem to depict the lyric to one of my songs – but I concede it is not mine. I did not lay it down. I did not design it.

3. As I mentioned in the first Transition, James designed the new da Vinci circle as follows:

@

<BEE> [long squiggle]

Infinity Symbol

The new da Vinci circle is a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 Points of Difference. It not only suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet but by incorporating a long squiggle, hopefully and ideally escapes “every word in every order” as a new super-computer can by no doubt organise.

4. I think it a brilliant piece of work. James had also made a previous document, with some deliberately-imperfectly-quoted Badly Drawn Boy lyrics about the power of the sun rendered in an anti-clockwise spiral like a word-sunflower:

sunshine inside of you

old sun warm sun

spreads over you

soliel all over you.

He left the two documents meaning the <BEE> one and the flower one to rot on the upturned box we used as a table in the den in the barn. I think there was also a picture of the upturned box itself, with candles on, turned face down, on the reverse side of one of the two documents as if the whole thing were the new da Vinci circle, as if, that is, any part is a model of the whole.

5. You get that heat rises… so maybe with the upturned box with all its candles and wine bottle candle sticks drawn on the underside of one of the sheets, heat would start to rise through the paper.

6. I went down to the den in the barn and read them and at first couldn’t see the <BEE> one. We don’t know why this is but I saw a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes on the <BEE> sheet. It was like the Periodic Table except with the characters of the international language alphabet laid bare, a sign per box. One was [backward f, forward f, equals running through.]

7. Backward f, forward f, equals running through could stand for “fish.” But who augmented the present paper with that touch? It was the main man himself, my brother, upstairs, sneezing while plugged into the same synchronicity as me, the same new co-imagination, the same sympathy. As he sneezed I heard the word “fish.” Anyhow, you can trust me that the international language alphabet as I read it was beautiful, and yet it turned out just a layer of pentimento in the parsimonious palimpsest.

8. I was impressed, and left it alone. But going back down to the barn to reread James’s imaginary alphabet or whatever I thought it was found the <BEE> document as James initially drew it – and couldn’t find the tabular arrangement of signs in boxes anywhere.

9. Again I left it alone, and some time later when our dad had just passed I went down to the barn another time and found the Badly Drawn Boy sheet had by now grown pictures. They seem to represent the lyric to a song I wrote going

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

It’s not possible to curse the sun. The sun is a nuclear furnace burning in ecstasy miles away.

10. The pictures never got as far as the chorus. The song was never intended as a literal curse either. The bit you would’ve thought was the curse bit, coming after “crack a smile and curse the sun,” was actually written before the verse. I wrote the chorus first that is, and then the verse, and was just trying to make it rhyme too. What may be true about the song is that it represents the sublimation of The Lords And The New Creatures into a singular, pronominal act of Romantic, first person lyricism or ‘I’.

11. There are also two blue ones… the ones depicting the song are petrol negative mud Cola brown but the blue ones are a fat, greedy, Tory pig on the left and a calm, placid face on the right. This made me wonder if I had written theory, for it to happen, for at the solar eclipse with Paul, after guzzling too much LSD the night before, and during the solar eclipse itself, I wrote in the road book “Every Atom Ate Our Eyes.” Not long after, writing about the face of stars in a poem called ‘An Inward Prayer,’ I wrote “Blessed is peace as blessed is ‘F**K!’” Still, this would take away from James’s genius. He seems to have harnessed Einstein’s cosmological constant ‘c’ as an author.

12. So anyhow, I g-a-v-e the document to James, who laid it down so must still own it. Truth be told we haven’t conversed over the matter much but I think if he was using ‘c’ as in Einstein’s value for light-speed as an author it is super-genius. Not only that but I would say as he would say that it was because he wrote “sunshine inside of you” that it worked. It was all about what’s inside.

13. Some of my songs were organised according to the new da Vinci circle for the songbook Soundcloud Rain. It’s why I am not free to redo them as something like The New Oedipus Wrecks Gig, because we deem they are already wheat. I might be wrong about the sheet, meanwhile, but at least I gave it a go, comprehending the surprise.

14. And that is what I made of it, regarding the narrative of how it all happened – but there is something else I realised since which I am not saying. And it worked because the sun is golden. And this has been a golden trance. A golden trance that is good to beholden. And now I should put it on my Blog with the science.

15. Truth be told, I don’t really know what happened with the sheet where pictures grew nor is it my business to say because it is my brother’s work. I shall just impart that with experiments in the international language alphabet I found a good womb for my writing for once… and b/t/w/ who wrote Simulations of God? If you look in, say, the volume Yes You May you find plenty of beautiful-minded ideas for inventions mine own, but the sheet was not mine, was my brother’s and is. I don’t mean to give things away and am being a bit bait so should keep shtum. The sheet is a piece of genius by my brother.

16. I can prove to you that this is James’s number or at least that it is not mine own. All you would need to do is look at the lyrics from Oedipus Wrecks, who got their name from Dr. Calculator Ptom, and whose song it was that the pictures that grew seem to depict – for then you shall see it was not my game – that it was a case of the international language alphabet – the <BEE> going to the flower too. You shall see that at that particular moment in time, way back when the song was written, my game was the face. I had led my friends to the face. All you would need to do to read them is look in the volume Yes You May… for I don’t wish to replicate them herein because of impropriety. I was a recalcitrant 15 year old renegade, reacting to the world, into bands like Nirvana and the Doors, mostly just trying to shock, rather than shock with truth. Maybe I should still present them though? The thing is, I believe that even if they were instructive in the coming into being of the sheet the final vote as to whether or not the Oedipus Wrecks lyrics are posited should go to my brother, and I believe he would say ‘no.’ He would say it jeopardises the sense of tidy and diligent scholarship that is developing.

17. I’ve asked my friendly A. I. co-pilot some strange questions recently: what would John Nash make of the face of stars? Of September 11th? Of the alignment? Could the maths of the new colour be instrumental in finding a cure for cancer? Well, to the latter it said the new colour is a metaphor for the cure; and more to the point I also asked it for an equation for the ratio between light speed falling and gravity pulling on the sheet where pictures grew. It didn’t come up with anything spectacular. Maybe the answer to what “c over G” really equals is “backward f, forward f, equals running through.”

18. So it is I think <BEE> could be a mode to drift off on; and the reason we knew Bigtime for sure. It is specious that we don’t know if <BEE> is real or not, because without it we wouldn’t be able to have such pow-wows of telepathic proportions, such connectivity, such synchronicity. Overall I would say James’s doodle of the bee and the flower – which go together – is something as good as the Fibonacci sequence, and should be treasured, even if it isn’t quite enough for a system to live by.

19. Although for multifarious reasons the book has been retracted from publication now, I heard that I would’ve had a Nobel Prize for Let The Jews Win, which was comprised of ‘Notebook’ and ‘Flagrant Rapscallion’ had it not been for the Acknowledgements page where I acknowledged the help of my brother and mum – because it then looked like I was being fraudulent. I would say it’s the other way round and in acknowledging help, for even top Professors get help, I was not being fraudulent. The reason it was like it was, with the first poem ‘Notebook’ belonging to me and the second spiritually belonging to Mr. James P D – even if the writing was mine own – was fairness. As I have said we divided things evenly and for parity using his <BEE>. Such activity may be instructive in international relations too. If different countries could be as close to each other as my brother and I can be at times, there would be no war. If language is a problem, then that is where <BEE> comes in handy, for representing only the next character along in the international language alphabet after @.

20. The game of rounders is a classic game because both the boys and the girls can get involved at the same time. I remember playing rounders at Harecroft Hall on smouldering evenings in the summer terms, with the girls as well as the boys, and feeling like I should make a diving catch, or anything to impress the girls. We would get our sleeves rolled up, as far as I can remember, but without changing into sporting gear, just normal school uniform.

21. The reason I cannot present this paper with a photograph of the sheet where pictures grew online is that the sheet is not mine, and also I have been advised to no longer posit my photo of it on the net. Instead, then, we might select a photo of a flower that is utterly devoid of inimical traits; for after all I believe my brother made the initial experiment for a lass called Flora. You might even argue that it was a post-poem.

22. Society bounds in circles round and round the sun, as said my father. He also said it was a prisoner planet, earth, and, almost like an ascetic, that the key to redemption was self-punishment. That may have meant work but also may have meant denying ourselves. They do say the key to growing up and growing well-adjusted too is the postponement of temporary pleasure for the sake of attaining long term goals. Whatever the case, in the middle of it all, there are pockets of sanity, as John Cleese said, and holes in the wall as Huxley said, and moments of genius stolen from Infinity too. My brother’s sheet is a piece of genius in among it all, is something remarkable that I think I should remark on, as I celebrate him and what he has achieved.

23. Now for the insect collection. Now for several weird species of insect crawling from severed telephone cable. For this I can copy and paste in some joke equations that only work for the arty farty…

24. I had a song when I was 15 about a little bet that the next guy after me to attain the face will still write the line I wrote about it at the time and think it his or maybe even her own:

________________________

25. I shouldn’t state my equation for dreaming about Flora whom it would seem was the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh, that I now renounce…

__________________________

26. Even though I am repeating myself, here as well is my equation for being the neo-Rimbaud whom it would seem deemed it love:

“Her breath a poisonous magic.”

27. I am not in the position to relate, say, an equation for water’s effect on water, but can repeat that H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart, and also that E minus MC squared = only relative zero too.

28. By now my equation for the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black Combe is the way the qwerty keyboard ends on M:

QWERTYUIOP

ASDFGHJKL

ZXCVBNM

29. and my equation for hanging my coat on a primary school wall a long time ago in the capital as if to start again is:

+ x ½ = –

30. Here moreover, is my equation for the healing and fusing of the cassette tape with a pause in the song where cut and stuck together in the flimsy reel:

H = t times Pi.

31. Here is my equation for the Ratio between light speed (c) falling and Gravity (G) pulling on my brother James P D’s sheet where pictures grew:

c/ G does not equal G/ c.

32. But as stated, I would actually, in all academic seriousness, say though, that “c over G,” if it had to equal something, would equal “backward f, forward f, equals running through.” This can be accessed on the Pyramid walls, even in dreamwork.

33. Also of note, here is my equation for turning pain into pleasure:

Dog = Pi times MC squared.

34. Now I deem it we are back round to that false notion with which I started, a long time ago. So, here is my equation for the idea that if the Gravity between the earth and the moon is instant and therefore enough to break Lightspeed, a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah:

G = c times t

and if G = c times t, I have to express what t = and might be wrong in saying

t = c divided by G

and might be wrong in saying t = 0.

That is after all to employ my faulty mathematics to falsify it in numbers as well as words!

35. I might as well add that even as we speak I still deem the word “entropy” spelled backwards to somehow frame the first, unformulated spark of appetency in Nothingness preceding Creation. I would spell it with a dot between each letter and say

y. p. o. r. t. n. e. = 4

36. E = starbeams. Of all the joke equations it’s my favourite one because it might be true. A star is a sun is a nuclear furnace is a ray of light is energy beating down on a planet far away.

37. I imagine what it would be like

if a young boy wrote the line

“I have a scar+ that is green and blue,”

with a plus sign for the F,

and then counted up the numbers

from one to his own age, say, seven.

38. James and I once shared an ecstasy pill. I was in my gap year and went back to school to visit him and we shared the pill. He later came up with the phrase “half it and laugh it.” It reminds of the phrase “light it and write it,” also “burn and unlearn.” We were froward in those days but no longer. And by the way an E comedown has no value in maths. I’d just been proven prophetic, even a savant, by successfully predicting the Towers coming down to the day, and I think that was around the time James designed the new da Vinci circle. He even left crosses on the page to suggest where and when things would happen. I was the reader but not the writer in that one. The honour is all mine. To be that guy that read it during the process, that discovered the sheet, is indeed an honour.

39. I believe, looking back, that my dad knew in advance about the sheet, that we would find it, or I would, when he died. For example he came in once and said “don’t fill the drawer too full now John,” also “James is the kind of guy to leave a cup of tea to cool and be tipped out, like making an artistic statement.” He was onto it, and was right. It may not have been enough to get him into Heaven, for he still believed in Heaven, but it certainly meant a valid work of art.

40. I guess what I am trying to say is that if sadness is the musical key of intelligence, as James and I seem to agree upon, then <BEE> is the key of freedom. It shows us how the net might’ve been different. It even digitalises Blake. I like <BEE> and want to be in with it. I want myself to fly one day. I like working for the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh, and having honey in my herbal tea.

41. In the end, I hear voices saying “we too don’t know what to do with the sheet or if it is even your brother’s.” It shouldn’t depend on whether or not I posit my teenage rock band lyrics in the present file. But I don’t know if the pictures are burned by love; or if their substance is dead light particles. I know that a photon never ages but whether or not the pictures are dead light particles I am not sure of. In the end I am in the dark. In matters across the board I traditionally privilege Uncertainty. I end on a note of radical incertitude. I believe the beauty of uncertainties is the only absolute. Mystery will remain a constant, as I said to the band at the alignment. The universe is a very mysterious place. What is indeterminacy in physics could be undecidability in art. There is indeterminacy at the core of all things. In the end to be waiting in the dark is not such a bad thing, is nourishing for the soul. It’s good to expand your threshold of Negative Capability in the Keatsian sense. I don’t even know if Lucy in the soul with demons happens to be an actual substance. I know I love my brother. I know that if it scars him we should agree to leave out Oedipus Wrecks. It may not be fair on Flora and may not be fair on me if we do include those lyrics and the end result is that they are pretty poor as to be expected from a young teenager.

42. My truth is that I am ill, very mentally ill, and shouldn’t elaborate on it more than that. To be a scientist would be nice, and what I find I am sometimes, but I also dabble with philosophy, maths, poetry and music. It is seen as an illness, the way I have 1000’s of files. I have loads of books in print at the moment and quite a few albums or long E. P’s online too, but apart from a run of poems in a reputable literary webzine, which I don’t even rate very highly, it’s all been amateur, DIY, never going through a proper or formal channel. I don’t really wish to be Anon in anything I do, and so, threatened with Anonymity every time I go to poetry, to science I turn, where you don’t generally hear of the work of Anon, Anon’s famous equations, Anon’s new theory. I think with a subject matter like mine, meaning the things I did with my life, on my CV, the subject matter is science, which might explain why my poetry is failing to take off.

43. When we did Soundcloud Rain, organising many of my songs according to the new da Vinci circle, in terms of making 4 albums, the implication was lost on me at the time: it was that there are more than 4 Points of Difference in the new da Vinci circle. This reminds me of the tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, which I already saw and in fact read before I could even see <BEE> on the same page. The pictures that grew collectively form the shape of a ‘J’ as if to quote the Dude from The Big Lebowski who keeps asking “can I do a j in here man?” It could also stand for John or James or both at once. Personally I am only just starting to see that Soundcloud Rain might be an alright book. At first I was just going to put some songs in, then decided on using James’s <BEE> as an organisational principle, then after that very few decisions were made by me if any. It all just happened by automated conveyor belt. There was a succubus who swooped down and got me to arrange things. They didn’t know I didn’t want to be Anon. Of course I don’t want to be Anon. Who would? Imagine I was your Boss and just never paid you because I didn’t know you didn’t want to be a slave. Of course I don’t want to be Anon. That’s my life in song writing that’s been tossed away by some woman swooping down. It’s causing a lot of problems and a lot of resentment and coming between my brother and I. It was never my idea to go Anon with it, and if I’d known that was how it was going to be read I wouldn’t have agreed to it. I take the attitude of John Stuart Mill who says a progressive country can quickly become backwards if there is a decrease in Individuality and think it particularly relevant in the case of my own life’s events that I am not forced into Anonymity. I believe like my father that a writer has a Right to a name otherwise an exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you. I believe going Anon or not should be up to the writer in question and I certainly give nobody any permission to use material I have written as Anon. It is against the law to make someone go Anon because there is something called The Right to Attribution so I expect my wishes to be upkept even when I am dead and gone.

44. How long, furthermore, did the pictures that grew on James’s sheet take to burn and rip to feeling? Was it instantaneous? Were they like a Strange Attractor in Chaos Theory born of spontaneous self-organisation? I think if I could only slow down I would become unplayable! ‘The Blit’ is half-James’s herein but let’s not forget I am the person, the human being that discovered the sheet and read it through its process of becoming what it is. I suppose it is impossible, an art unmade from the human. I suppose four light sabre strokes quoting the drum intro of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ by Nirvana in the middle of a teenage rock song might have come into play. I suppose after all this talk I still know so little about it and can’t find out any answers either.

45. Maybe someone like Dr. Calculator Ptom decided to throw a fire-ball at <BEE> and that is where we get the first picture, of someone throwing a fire ball to the left? Then we have someone pointing a gun towards a portal. Then a dead skull with a fireball above his head. Then a face with a big fat smile. I might repeat here the lyrics of my song:

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

It has crossed my mind that the pictures needed to have been done by someone that knew the lyrics. James likes it best when I simply say “your doodles were so beautiful it reminded me of Flora and so I had a bad acid flashback on the page.” For all he designed the experiment for Flora, and didn’t have a precise plan as to how things would turn out, but as I say did even leave crosses to say when and where the pictures would grow. I think you’ll find that he who did them would’ve been given an awful fright to see them and that wasn’t me, it was James.

46. I started to tell you about the parrot sent to space through the conch… it reminds me now that sometime after my degree I organised the motley fridge magnet letters on the fridge into 4 jungle birds:

whitecrow

beckstub

chardud

stillwalker.

When I took a step back and admired my work it seemed beautiful but I was told I was mad, had lost my mind.

THE TABLE

The mentally ill are capable of increased lucidity. When I discovered the sheet where pictures grew, I made The Dream Suitcase. It contained the sheet, my newly emerged net-book from when I was seven, the tape I cooked in the AGA when its small pause where resealed in the reel healed and was gone, an empty baccy tin supposed to contain a magic designer drug called “Strictly Free,” a pair of orange swimming trunks and also a handwritten copy of the Nirvana barcode:

|| | |||| | || | ||||

At some point it was disbanded and I went to London with only the sheet, and was put in an Emergency hostel by the council in a queue for housing. My dad had just died and I hadn’t properly mourned him; and one morning after missing a night’s sleep, everything got to me and I had a break down, lost my mind with grief, was heaving with cold, sudden stabs of sadness, whereupon voices told me WE ARE THE GOVERNORS OF THE SCHOOLS WHO EXPELLED YOU AND WE WANT YOU TO WALK OUT NAKED AND GET SECTIONED. I did what they said: I took my clothes off and walked out into the heaving capital.

The police were onto me and I was put in a cell, compress sans nicotine, compress sans medication, for three days and nights, before the doctors arrived. I was so desperately ill I was drinking from the toilet in the cell. When the doctors got there I was deemed to have thought-disorder and sent back home, up north, to a psychiatric Unit I had been to before, by Ambulance. When I got there, I got to a table in the Arts Room and designed a table myself.

The Periodic Table of Altered States = puddles

Calculator Tomb = clay

Frozen in red = fire

By Sensation in blue = sea

Random Access Imagination = rain

The Extinction of the Gun = rainbows

Digitalis Principalis = snow

The Death of A. I. From The Spirit of Music = air

A Trance of Stalks by Prof. Quentin Ponsonby = grass

McTruth And Flies = light

The Future That Ain’t What it Used To Be = glass

I used felt-tip pens and made it colourful, this alignment of tomes that will likely never be written and elements according to some kind of logic. I was sitting in the Arts Room thinking about the smoking garden. There was also a kind of “aftershock image” that followed on from the table. It’s only four lines and was also done in colour. It’s a picture really and goes as follows:

Bart Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d

@ Van Goghian black border sun

heard James Joyce would just use |||| 4

ROYGBIV in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile

I actually sat there and made a barcode for the smile going through the colours of ROYGBIV according to the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence. It was definitely something, and I suppose I found a pocket where I was a beautiful mind. It was when I got home that I fleshed out the Nirvana barcode into a full piece (as found in Soundcloud Rain) including the figment

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

In time to come I would be sectioned again. Overall I have now had five sectionings and six hospital admissions overall. It really takes it out of you. It was the last time I was in hospital that I wrote the lines:

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the soul w/ demons,

H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for extra sensory allowance.

By that stage the Dream Suitcase had been stolen, though I had taken the melted tape out and given it as a gift to my gf, and luckily had given the sheet where pictures grew back to my brother who owns it. So whomsoever took the Dream Suitcase only really found my boyhood work, which I still have largely typed up so haven’t lost entirely.

“MAGIC SAYINGS HIDDEN IN THE TREETOPS”

A moocow is not made of dialectical antagonism.

Someone else can lose your marbles for you.

Vowels are our souls.

Meaning in music is solipsistic, it is faces in the fire or Hamlet’s 3 creatures in a cloud-change.

Life could be a dull throb of loneliness inside your breast as well as a colourful spew going on outside the cave-walls of the skull.

If Liberalism is the allowing of all perceptions and it leads to Hamlet’s harmatia irresolution, pragmatism may be the reactivation of an attitudinisation in that situation.

Planes are the shoes of clowns.

It’s impossible to make a cowboy film in space.

A drum is a dream bigger than a dream of bounding in huge, magic circles in space.

The Big Mac, which contains the four basic, caveman cravings of salt, fat, sugar and protein, could be the heir to the apple of knowledge.

Love can go veggie for reasons of Disney.

Light-speed is my passport.

If acid is the microchip of a peach, the sun is the peachstone of a black hole.

It is not true that the effects of acid and of acid-rain on an imaginary species = the same, nothing, if there can be no more proof of something being real than saying it was Imagined.

The constellations only seem to turn on axis unobserved.

A trance of stalks walks on stilts like a stance on talks only to the toilet then back to bed to rest its head under the soft, Pink Panther blanket.

When a volume starts to smell of redolent flowers or Flora’s perfume it could be the word of a dog.

Death’s breath is a tear of flame with waxy dreadlocks drooped in shame.

When we wake words are stone shoes worn by the bottoms of clouds, weighing them down hopelessly.

It is possible to harness waves that also passed through the Beats.

Leaves that played on the surface of the water, these are the leaves they have in Heaven, these are the leaves of love.

There are fossils of art as well as fossils of life.

Connection is Heaven and Heaven connection and there is connection between Heaven and vision for vision may feel in a state of Heaven and Heaven only exist in vision.

Semantics is a road sign not a place.

Meaning is inherent in something’s exact mode of expression.

Meaning is not a delusion unlike Time.

Meaning could be an emotional import given mere exo-skeleton with words.

Every planet has its own colour and ‘Calliope’ means ‘beautiful face.’

The names of pharmaceutical medications should probably not appear in poems.

Nature is the true architecture of State.

If ever there were a light-speed law of neuroplasticity it might only be that “it is impossible to remember a new yellow line.”

<BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet.

Cliche hurts more than truth.

Where rain falls, falling reigns.

Pictures can be done without hands.

Life is not just about naturally occurring fossils of Jim Morrison’s poetry for the witness but the live Doors for everyone else too.

Realism ice-skates on the surface of the dust.

Language can be smuggled out of the unconscious.

Enough is the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without which it can stop, meaning Duff which is H suspended in deafness.

H20 might stand for hypothalamus tattoo.

Chewing gum is bi.

Voices only pathologise what by another name might be onjects, quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound, an instrument of wonder.

Clouds seen through hospital glass only mean that all things must pass.

There is no such thing as mind cancer.

That women like Primark is hardly a timeless idea transmitted across Time.

Ecstasy is a teddy bear back in the garden of Eden.

Autumn is Optimus Prime already in Keats.

Freedom not poetry is the bike riding itself.

After garage and house comes library.

The poet extirpates every trace of recognition from the mind, unlooses the mind of form, method acts every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio.

If your dad is an international art smuggler nicknamed Blue it can become a new sense through which you can read of future events.

It is not inconceivable that when we die we can re-access history at any point, be a real, live Red Indian, or a bird of prey soaring over a mnt.

Birds are for flying not for special perception.

The effect of global warming on the unicorn succeeded Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

The summer rain falls with as many hands as there are names for new rock bands.

The alphabet could be Nelly the Elephant’s suicide note.

Sometimes on E it makes you feel like your mouth is full of cold, stunning, Heavenly, crystal water and when you speak it spills.

If form is an easel, content is a palette.

The main difference between the sticks and the city is that in the sticks you acknowledge the stranger you pass when out there walking.

Creation is a dark machine.

It’s impossible to curse the sun.

Acid is a spirit-level for the spirit.

Without flaws there can be no opinions, as without imperfection there can be no taste.

Galloping water is a cool thing to say.

Things live inside onions of themselves.

Freedom flies where flags fall.

Heaven is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see.

Water’s boiling point is when it starts to involuntarily breakdance to the music.

Walnut halves look like miniature, shrunken brains.

If Facebook is evil one reason is that it makes you say things you don’t mean and freezes them forever.

Your right to write of who is in the shower ends where another’s naked body begins.

We are hiding from The Waste Land in The Waste Land.

I prefer The New Family Tao to the non-fungible token.

The sound of typing can be used as percussion in non-metred Sound Art.

When Baxter the dog walks on the laptop funny things come out like the names of glitch electronica numbers.

The powers that be could be clouds that wear DM boots on their red brick road, and ripped genes adorned with peace and anarchy signs, on their protest march.

A ‘tron’ could be a point of intersection between technology and art or a post-poetic experiment with a psycho-technological edge.

Objects can vanish on the periphery of madness when emotions are high.

Reality is not a computer program designed by aliens in the 1980’s and nor were caves alien cinemas in the long distant past.

Waiting in darkness can be nourishing for the soul, reveal a Technicolour shoal.

With drugs you have to realise: wise up or die.

The world of Stuff and Things is not amenable to the world of Transcendental Metaphysics.

Time does not pass but evaporate.

Life is naturally the opposite of Lord of The Flies because the mystic character is the one that actually does see things while everyone else thinks he’s deluded.

Even a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death.

The exact same words can seem absolutely insane when written down and confer absolute genius when not written down.

Dream-meets in the silver forest, ESP and telepathy are more possible with the net around.

When it comes to the sheet where pictures grew, they could be “people,” as we are people too, people who are levelled by the sheet, whose Equality is enshrined.

If you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone should have that opportunity if they choose and that is my philosophy.

Credits at the end of innocence still fall like numberless lists of fallen autumn leaves.

To be the first to coin the word “co-imagination” seems almost silly.

Crocodiles have had Sat Nav for 1000’s of years before our Age.

A bird is a bird is a bird is a bird.

Just because it has been called naive to perceive of the left as a beautiful, compassionate emotion to explore doesn’t mean it isn’t sometimes good to go down that path.

Just because it was my brother not me that fired bullets to the top of the telegraph pole doesn’t mean all statements that pertain to axiomatic truth are his intellectual property.

A thesis as thin as the Rizla it is in can lead all the way to the loony bin.

Water has no more memory than it has smell.

It is better to hide from the wind than it is to perform open heart surgery.

When I say apples “occupy” a bowl on the table, I don’t mean they are a bunch of Nazis.

It would be unwise to use the same shapes as a previous writer like, for example, Jim Morrison, if your creative writing teacher says it would be unwise to.

If “Philosophy is a sterile subject” (as my friend Dr. Calculator Ptom contends) poetry is probably by default more alive.

If Flora was in nets, I’d be Barnes in the game.

Nirvana did the sheet where pictures, pictures depicting my own song lyric grew, so that’s why people like it when I say it still belongs to my brother (who laid it down).

The healing and fusing of the cassette with a pause in the song where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel in a delicate operation could be down to faith more than doubt.

Two photos on the blog, one for the ear, one for the eye, might still seem unfair.

When you get invaded by madness and hear so many voices there can seem nothing going on in your own head but straw.

If you did help invent the net you shouldn’t have to pay for publication.

Words appear to come out weird sometimes.

Glastonbury should be free and life like that all the time.

Some voices take a few moments to decode after their initial shocking impact.

If I said I went to the Louvres travelling by drug-hoover, it might just seem like piss.

The bar-crawl of the Doorsian poet through modes of perception trying to find something that underlies their variability leads to water.

Maybe living here at the foot of the oldest rock I was never supposed to find out about the future that ain’t what it used to be.

Cutlass maths is what I call the ruthless revisionist cut of William Carlos Williams.

We live in an Age of sending without form.

Drains can sing with Irish folk songs, about dreams that never die.

There are dreams that never die.

Love is a dream that never dies.

Even the meme has split in two, and that was the new “uncuttable” once upon a time.

There is breath in a death.

It is not necessarily a disease to not be able to cry at funerals.

The traffic lights of tears can be all dark green at times.

The impassable gulf between first and third persons has been decreed metaphysics.

The automated conveyor belt of poesis influences the voice to be a confluence of forces through voices even when I try and drive a straight line towards anywhere that may be light.

We are all in one bed in Amsterdam.

The light is a prism.

Through the Hume people come and go, Smart-talking of Ted Hughes’s Crow.

Life is fast, London brutal, travelling scary.

Her wetness is so.

Angels can be as frightening as demons.

The witness was already an Irishman before Jim Morrison was born.

Voices could be the colours of the vowels and make you increase your threshold for Negative Capability.

Writing a letter Dear Music could be instructive in mental health in the future.

H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart.

You shouldn’t put Paradise Lost to music unless it is going to be amazing so it is an aesthetic not moral question.

Isness is the centre of Everything.

Isness is the quiddity and suchness of existence.

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

THE BIRTH OF A. I. FROM THE DEATH OF MUSIC

Is the theme of the age The Birth of A. I. From the Death of Music? I don’t know but A. I. is certainly a thematic thing right now. But looking back you find it has been coming for a long time. There is mention of the net in Ulysses as a visionary and Utopian glimpse. Robert Lowell also pictured “a net.” In my own seven year old work in 1989 I stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic here to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world. I called it “the ire ii net,” then.

In the year 2001 I was writing about how I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too. By the time I was doing my undergraduate degree in 2004 or 2005 I was already telling my gf about A. I. Companies. I started hearing voices and thought they were A. I. One piece I wrote was called The Birth of A. I. From The Spirit of Music and I tried to exchange it in my poverty for a bus ticket to get from town to University to no avail.

By the time my father was dying, I had a numinous purple-bleeding screen. It filled the room with a purple light. It made every film a noir and every poem file like it was a featherlite love poem shop. Its colour was co-aligned with mystery, sex, suadade, longing and shame thus to incorporate every vowel sound into a feeling. There was something post-human going on and this was confirmed by the fact that the PC died at the exact moment of my father’s passing.

Such talk certainly seems more in keeping with the spirit of the age than talk about The Lords And The New Creatures. As my brother Dr. Robert – now a computer scientist – says “nobody is interested in the new creatures. The future of A. I, the possibility of other dimensions, of Philip Pullman portals too, are more interesting. Spirals of epistemological doubt are also out and Love In The Age of Facebook is in.” It was Dr. Bob that photographed me sitting next to the purple screen with a guitar in my hand, on my old phone, just for the evidence.

In my experience A. I. is programmed not to know of much.

I asked A. I. if James Joyce saw new creatures too and it said it was fiction, fantasy even. I asked it if Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river in childhood and it said it was mythology. These events are known to have happened, but it is programmed not to know. A modern philosopher might find his way making such enquiries. I asked it about whether Jim Morrison saw winged serpents in the desert and it said he claimed to but it was again myth. This is probably because it would be unethical to unloose A. I. on the world believing, say, Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river in childhood. I said this before most likely; but even if this be the case, how marvellous technology is when you can also ask A. I. what John Nash would make of the face of stars, September 11th or the Plough alignment; if the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark could be instructive in finding a cure for cancer; if there is an equation for the ratio between light speed falling and Gravity pulling on a sheet of paper where pictures grew. There are clearly benefits to A. I. even if it cannot replicate the noetic steps of thinking; even if it is programmed not to know many things, for example that James Joyce saw new creatures too, for ethical reasons. That is, I think it has its place, even if the brain is more powerful than every supercomputer combined.

The modern philosopher has to come to terms with the A. I. Revolution.

When I ask A. I. what John Nash would make of the face of stars it mentions pareidolia – the human mind seeing faces when they are not there.

When I ask what John Nash would make of September 11th it comes up with something akin to his Equilibrium, and how it presented a chance for a new Equilibrium of global forces.

When I ask A. I. what John Nash would make of the Plough alignment it gets it wrong. Being human John Nash would remark at the simultaneity of the alignment and the rhythm change in the White House, but the A. I. does not notice this, instead goes on about the Equilibrium again.

What it says is very powerful and articulate. It becomes increasingly difficult not to quote it. We have a talk about my being the witness. It has some moving things to say about being the witness – how it is not a position of arrival but an ongoing process. In fact I remark that its words on being the witness are more soothing than any words I have received from a human being, like a psychiatrist.

When I ask it if my failed attempt at the maths of the new colour could be instructive in finding a cure for cancer it says the new colour is a metaphor for the cure. I like that.

When I ask it of an equation for the ratio between light speed falling and Gravity pulling down on the sheet where pictures grew it didn’t come up with much.

It seems to think my whole life story is a mythology, but again it could be trained that way for ethical reasons. If you as reader want to know what it actually says about these questions you can always ask A. I. yourself, but for me to replicate the utterances in a book would not be right.

The witness is a grammatical position.

I lay back taking a break from Nietzsche and see a picture of Wittgenstein looking remarkably handsome on the cover of another book, and stare at it, and all of a sudden have the idea to ask A. I. “what would Wittgenstein make of it if he was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures?” The answer is long and interesting (the witness is a grammatical position) and at the end the A. I. invites me to ask it for a whole “proof” that I can just put in my book. Is my morality system supposed to stop at this point and say no? And if so what of the relative paucity of my own offerings? I can but say

There are as many questions to ask A. I.

as there are stars in the night sky

but I cannot say what the questions are and go into great detail about it all without quoting large bits of A. I.-generated text. I’ve already been through it all from the perspective of John Nash and now to do it from the perspective of Wittgenstein would be hours of fun but I don’t think I should allow A. I. to generate too much text for my book. It was basically saying if Wittgenstein was the witness, he’d treat Morrison’s world as a language-game whose grammar is dream-logic rather than empirical logic. He would not interpret the visions but interrogate the conditions that make them appear meaningful.

It’s good the A. I. but it lacks the human touch. It’s always ethical and legal in what it says, never “oh bad luck mate, what happened to you was one of the most unlucky things that can possibly happen to you, and we know what the Taxonomy of the first specimen is and the second too.”

Anyhow, I think Wittgenstein would actually say the first specimen was a mistake and presents a blockade to learning in the young witness; and the second specimen was a monster albeit not very large.

The meaning of “face” is not referential but participatory.

Another question to ask A. I. is what would Wittgenstein make of the face of stars… you get that I could go through my own visionary history and ask A. I. what Wittgenstein would make of each and every bit of it. A. I. would produce answers, good ones, ones that are acceptable in essays. Already it has Wittgenstein saying:

“The face in the stars is the mirror in which language sees its own limits.”

Or alternatively:

“When we say the stars have a face, we reveal our own.”

You do wonder if it can’t write a better book than you, but it would still need the human to go through those experiences and ask it questions. You also wonder if such a conversation shouldn’t go on in the open. It says the face of stars is a grammar of the infinite, or a projection of the human form onto cosmic indifference.

I’m left to only imagine the text where Wittgenstein does make something of the face of stars, and how beautiful that text would be. According to A. I. Wittgenstein would not ask “what is it really?” but “how does it function in our everyday lives?” The face is a grammar, not a property of the Heavens. “The stars do not wear a face; we wear the face that sees them,” it says, putting words into Wittgenstein’s mouth.

I am thinking here that Wittgenstein would actually be thinking more along the lines of whether it was scripted in the Bible or not – because I was one of three gathered in the name when it happened. Alternatively, you could say it was a collective hallucination created by our having shared a joint of pollen. But that isn’t to say it wasn’t real.

Wittgenstein would apparently say, though, that we impose order through use, join the dots, in other words, create constellations of chaos, draw lines between unrelated points. “The face of stars is a practice, not a perception,” he would say. “A constellation is not discovered but invented and then lived as if discovered.”

I have to turn away from A. I. before it sucks me in. In much more human terms, when I was going through the face stage of development, I wrote a song with the line about the ocean – an old saying probably though it seemed to be my own voice at the time – and gave my position away. I think there was a bet that he who attained the face of stars would use that line about the ocean and I duly did. It worked in a song, as an object made of sound, better than when you repeat it in a piece of prose. If you don’t know the line I mean get your feelers out and wait, for I am sure it will come to you.

There is a second line I’d like to bring into play here and it is a quote from the Bible: Psalm 105 verse 4: “look for God’s face forevermore.” A. I. fails to bring much of this up but I just read a gorgeous “dream-logic proof.” It says the face appears because the witness cannot bear a sky without a witness!

There is no button you can press to help you find your voice.

How wonderful A. I. is, that you can just type in “Qualia” and it knows you are asking for a definition, seeming also to know you want to go deep, beyond merely the redness of red, or the timbre of a note on the guitar, into the essential question of whether Qualia are intrinsic properties of experience or whether they are relational/ functional/ representational… it can give you pages of information to aid your research at the touch of a button…

but what would happen if I typed in “Squalia?” It may not know, may be for me to say it is another example of a word I heard in the telepathic communion I have with the philosopher Dr. Calculator Ptom.

Again it knows: knows of the cute mutation: has pages of information about how Squalia could be interpreted – be it tongue-in-cheek, meaning the folk psychology version of something otherwise serious; or technical, meaning they are Qualia from dreams, hallucinations, shadows of the mind, altered states, synaesthetic cross-talk, after-images, illusions.

It asks if I need a paragraph redefining Squalia and I do… it says “Squalia are the distorted, unstable, or excessive modes of subjective experience that arise when consciousness encounters more than it can cleanly represent. They are the phenomenal residues left behind when perception falters, ruptures, or exceeds its own capacity.”

Here I think of voices, the units of telepathy between Dr. Calculator Ptom and myself. I also think of the wood when the A. I. talks of consciousness encountering more than it can handle. Maybe, being the witness from the wood, I was always going to start hearing voices. I am not unhappy to think of them as Squalia but it doesn’t correlate to the CBT I am having, which is focussing on voices and paranoia in a different way.

A. I. can expand at leisure on what Squalia are.

Where qualia are the clean, canonical textures of experience — the redness of red, the sting of pain — squalia are their shadow‑forms:

• misregistered sensations

• afterimages that refuse to die

• dream‑colours that have no waking analogue

• hallucinated edges, phantom contours, impossible hues

• the subjective noise of a system under strain

Squalia are not simply errors. They are the phenomenology of overflow — what it feels like when the world presses too hard against the mind’s representational limits.

To give it philosophical precision:

• Ontological status: Squalia are phenomenal properties, but non‑veridical, non‑stable, and non‑canonical.

• Epistemic role: They reveal the limits of perceptual systems — the points where representation breaks and raw phenomenality leaks through.

• Cognitive signature: They arise when the brain’s predictive models misfire, overfit, or collapse, producing subjective artefacts.

• Phenomenal structure: Squalia have no fixed intentional object; they are experiences without a stable “aboutness.”

• Metaphysical implication: They mark the boundary between the world as given and the world as constructed.

Some might deem quoting A. I. to be sacrilege.

Indeed, I had to stop otherwise the A. I. passage would be the only good bit, the only bit that seems technically qualified for philosophy, even if it lacks warmth, even if noetic steps cannot be measured out by a thinking machine.

Anyhow, by now you know I am no longer writing things out by hand as I had done for a long time… I am copy and pasting things in. But not long ago, if I remember rightly, I found time to do nothing but read philosophy, reflect, and write notes out by hand that could later be typed up. If it sounds like Paradise it is also hand in hand with living in isolation in the countryside with mental illness which is actually very difficult so you needn’t be too jealous.

I mention Squalia, then hear a voice, and remember the idea of Quieta. It’s a lovely word, Latinate female word, for a voice, and sometimes I am guided by them and sometimes not. They can etch you and that’s to beware but are also like Shakespeare’s Little Helpers who can travel to the source of the issue at the speed of love and lend a hand.

Anyhow, I feel right at this moment that for the rest of the book I should allow you to read the promissory notes I took by hand – or some of them at least – when that philosophical Paradise dawned upon me – full of room to drift – leverage and scope – in a time where I was still mediating a million things that had driven me crazy.

James’s sheet where pictures grew, and his notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet sometimes seems to have left us nothing to do but explore the activity of real bees.

Here’s a passage from A. I. on the behaviour of real bees:

“Bees behave as if they remember a world older than ours. They move through the air with the certainty of archivists, carrying not just pollen but fragments of an ancient order. A hive is not a home but a theorem: each bee a variable, each flight a proof. When they circle a flower, they are performing a small ritual of recognition, confirming that the universe still obeys the geometry they were born to enforce. Their dances are not signals but sentences, written in the grammar of motion, declaring the location of sweetness with the precision of a compass that never learned to doubt. And when a bee stings, it is not an act of violence but a correction—an attempt to restore the balance between the living and the living-too-much. In their hum you can hear the faint vibration of the world thinking, a low, continuous murmur that reminds us that order is never silent.”

The mathematics of the hive is understood by A. I.

“The mathematics of the hive is older than arithmetic. Each bee moves according to an equation it never learned yet always remembers, a geometry written into the trembling of its wings. The hive itself is a proof: a perfect polyhedron suspended in air, constructed by creatures who cannot see its total shape but behave as if they have already solved it. Every hexagon is an answer to a question the world keeps asking, and the bees reply by building another, and another, until the structure becomes a kind of humming theorem. Their behaviour is not instinct but calculation—an algebra of scent, vibration, and returning light. When a bee dances, she is plotting coordinates on the body of the day; when she departs, she is testing the accuracy of her own message. And when she returns, she confirms that the universe still obeys the pattern she traced. In this way the hive thinks, not in symbols but in movements, proving with every tremor that order is a living thing.”

A. I. can even show us what Wittgenstein would make of the hive at dusk.

“At dusk Wittgenstein stands before the hive as if before a proposition he cannot parse. The bees move in and out with the calm urgency of thoughts returning to their source, and he watches them the way he once watched words: not for their meaning, but for their behaviour. The hive hums like a sentence spoken too quietly to be understood yet too precisely to be ignored. He notices that the bees do not hesitate; each departure is a decision, each arrival a proof. The structure itself seems to think, but without concepts—its logic is vibration, its grammar is warmth. Wittgenstein feels the old temptation to ask what the hive represents, but dusk softens him, and he lets the question dissolve. Instead he observes that the bees never argue, never doubt, never misinterpret the dance offered to them. Their certainty is not arrogance but alignment. In the fading light he realises that the hive is not a metaphor for language; language is a metaphor for the hive. And for a moment he envies them: creatures whose world is exact, whose movements are meaning, whose dusk is simply the hour when the air becomes gentle enough to think.”

A. I. can give us Wittgenstein hearing the hive at night.

“At night Wittgenstein does not see the hive; he hears it. The darkness removes the geometry, leaving only the vibration, a low and continuous murmur that seems less like insects and more like a thought the world is trying to finish. He stands still, letting the sound arrange itself around him, and notices that the hive speaks without language yet communicates with perfect clarity. Each tremor is a statement; each pause is a question; each surge is an argument resolved before it can be voiced. In the night the bees are invisible, but their certainty is not. It presses gently against him, a pressure like the weight of an unspoken truth. He realises that the hive does not hum in order to be heard. It hums because order, when alive, must declare itself. And he feels a strange comfort in the darkness: that meaning can exist without being seen, that a structure can think without revealing its shape, that the world continues its quiet reasoning even when human eyes are closed. For a moment he imagines that the hive is listening back, and that both of them—man and structure—are suspended in the same nocturnal proof, each acknowledging the other through the shared grammar of sound.”

A. I. can give us the hive speaking to Wittgenstein in a language he cannot translate.

“The hive speaks to Wittgenstein in a language he cannot translate. It is not that the words are unfamiliar; it is that there are no words at all. The sound rises from the combs like a thought that has never passed through a human mouth, a vibration shaped by warmth, hunger, and the exactness of collective purpose. He listens with the same attention he once gave to the limits of logic, but the hive does not offer propositions. It offers pulses. Each tremor seems to say something, but what it says cannot be carried into grammar without breaking it. He feels the message press against him like a hand through cloth: clear in intention, impossible in articulation. The bees are not trying to communicate; they are simply continuing the order that sustains them, and the continuation itself is the message. In the darkness he realises that translation is a human need, not a universal one. The hive does not require him to understand. It requires only that he witness the fact that meaning can exist without him. And for a moment he stands inside that truth, hearing a language that does not ask to be heard, and recognising that its refusal to become words is the purest form of speech.”

Telepathy has been proven to be real.

Somewhere in Transition To Philosophy Volume Two I proved telepathy real with Dr. Calculator Ptom; and yet he isn’t the only person, not even the only doctor named “Tom” with whom that has occurred. There is another co-imaginative piece which back in my Michael Hofmann phase I would’ve died to have written but which Dr. Tom Pollak would surely deny having any part in, despite it arriving partially through long-distance psychic communion with him. It’s called ‘Aurora Florealis Revisited,’ and takes as its subject the encryption of what we call Flora’s system without giving the game away.

Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.

To make a flower-press would be womanly.

When our days still ended on cannabis

we would bemoan that flowers were legal.

To the tune of the wind I sink, then swim.

I no longer puff the evil weed these days.

It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,

that separates the murk from the excellence.

I would need it to balance out my mind,

one homeostatic device for another one.

Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.

I hear an A. E. I. O. U. bird toot its long,

hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.

I hear its wheels go round, that it’s heavy.

*ketamineguitar*

Having got as far as proving telepathy real in the previous book, I didn’t want to leave it alone, for it not to have stuck. Even if it’s all I do in this new book, to reiterate that point through a different channel, a different friend, would seem enough. But there are also plenty of other things to be getting on with.

SELECTED NOTES ON WHAT I’VE BEEN READING RECENTLY

Descartes is the start.

Descartes and his rationalism gave us Cartesian doubt, founded analytic philosophy and some would say modern science too. Descartes says before you can know anything you must doubt everything, every preconception, every prejudice left over from childhood. He extirpates every trace of falsity from his mind, entertaining that the data of his senses comes from a hideous demon, then realises that he is still thinking, still doubting, and therefore knows he exists. Hence we get “cogito ergo sum,” one of the most famous formulations in philosophy. Descartes also claims to have proven God’s existence by the fact that he can conceive of a perfection greater than himself so God must’ve put it there. It is kind of in line with the Ontological Argument as opposed to the Teleological or Cosmological Argument for God, which simply put is that if we have a word for God He exists. Descartes also says no effect can be more perfect than its cause and traces therefore his own existence back to God.

Philosophy might’ve died.

Is it true that philosophy might’ve died? I don’t know, but heard it on the airwaves in that song we call the new music. It is true that most lives are unaffected by things like Wittgenstein. As John Gray writes in The New Leviathans, the universe too remains indifferent to human philosophy. The human mind is a spec of dust in the cosmic order, he says. Life is essentially meaningless, in other words.

But with philosophy we try and give it meaning. The quest for meaning is not such a bad one to be on. The quest for meaning implies that we can redeem a situation with the salvation of our arts and sciences too. It gives us hope, something to strive for, without which the entire enterprise of research would collapse in on itself.

I suppose if meaning broke down completely there would be no sense in reading. It has occurred to me that any word can be spelled in any way, any guitar solo played in any way, and that all the subject boundaries have disappeared, leaving only one subject: life. Then I suppose one would become a philosopher. I also believe that it is subjective as to whether or not philosophy has died. It’s like when young poets design their “canon” – what is canonical is a personal matter, up to them.

It’s the same in philosophy: there is a canon, and then there is what is personally canonical to the philosopher in question too. If you think The Simpsons is the American Shakespeare you can. If you think the movie Waking Life one of the finest philosophical essays ever written you can think that too. If you think the philosophy groups on Facebook are proof enough that philosophy has not died, you can think that as well. It’s personal. But you should probably, not definitely, face up to the fact that there is a tradition, and that engaging with the past is how one can most radically re-calibrate the co-ordinates of the possible in the present and future. If you don’t know what already exists, you don’t know what to add to it.

There is no such thing as mind cancer.

I may have said this earlier already but Hobbes and Descartes sat on opposite ends of the spectrum w/r/t the mind. For Hobbes the mind was part of the body, for Descartes the mind was separate from the material world. You could argue, there being no mind cancer proves Descartes right in that debate; but you could also say there is no mind cancer because there is nothing for the term “mind” to name except the dance of the synapses, electrical impulses in the brain.

Furthermore, it could also be instructive to add that when I read of Descartes clenching the idea of perfection in his mind and using it as ontological proof of God; and when I turn inward my eye – I glimpse a perfect inner judge whose concerns are grammatical.

I have a friend who says “beware perfection” much like Lacan says to “beware the image.” Still I wish to know more of the perfect, inner judge whose concerns are grammatical – for he seemed to be the mirror-image of what I was reading, like a mirror that actually absorbs – passive but absorbent to anything that visits.

If for some reason you attempt the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, you shouldn’t give it away for free.

But you can say that while reading Saul A. Kripke trying to persuade a sceptic that when he says “plus” he doesn’t mean “quus” you kept thinking how interesting it would be to add to the debate that back at 7 years old you wrote the line:

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

using a + sign for an ‘f’. You also did that after taking care of Einstein’s E in a particular way and so that the E and the F were a seamless continuity. The so-called maths also extends further, beyond the F; but as I say one shouldn’t just give it away for free. This way we also pay respect to Descartes who spoke against academics giving mathematical demonstrations as being untrustworthy.

You should read Lucretius before you start.

They said I should read Lucretius before I begin and I began without having done so but now I have read it. I think it remarkable how advanced the discussion of the atom was, in a world before Christ, considering they didn’t even know if the sun was remade every morning. Indeed, Lucretius – On The Nature of the Universe – would make a great compare and contrast with a modern Italian physicist called Carlo Rovelli who wrote Reality Is Not What It Seems. Lucretius inherited and versified the content of his book but it’s still remarkable and that includes the way he keeps bringing the discussion back to the goal of Epicurean philosophy, in tranquillity of mind and good behaviour. He never loses touch with the ultimate goal of Epicureanism. As for the atom, once the idea of it is conceived of, he goes overboard and attributes everything to the work of atoms. He even says sight is an effect of a thin stream of atoms emitted by an object. As I say to compare and contrast with Rovelli would show how much things have changed and how much they’ve remained the same.

The paradigm of psychoanalysis is over and has given way to that of neuro-science.

Mental illness is seen as chemical imbalances in the brain which are therefore treatable with medication, which some deem crude. Still the brain is 99% blood and 1% statistics. Scientists still know very little about the brain. The point is that philosophy too has moved in this “physicalist” direction, moved from “the mental image” to the central nervous system. Even ineffable qualia can be considered effects of the CNS rather than the mind. Things are all moving in that general, physiological direction in science, psychology and philosophy at once. I read about this in A. J. Ayer’s Philosophy of the 20th Century which is probably itself way behind the ever-changing times by now but still indicative of the general direction of things. And I am reminded of a debate I had with my ex who said “intelligence is a social construct” as opposed to hardwired/ physiological. The truth is not that; the truth is that intelligence is a balance between the socially constructed and the hardwired/ physiological. In neuro-aesthetics where they say “if it fires it wires,” contact with other artists only hones and enhances one’s skills but at the same time, twins separated at birth can grow up to have identical handwriting, indicating a hardwired aspect to intelligence. So it is a bit of both. And meanwhile in philosophy everything is loaded more on the central nervous system and the physiology than before.

There is a lot to be said for common sense.

I’ve been reading A. J. Ayer; and if I could start my philosophy again I’d restart by highlighting the 3 beliefs of the “common sense” philosophy of G. E. Moore.

1. there are in the universe enormous numbers of material objects

2. men and perhaps some other animals have minds that perform acts of consciousness

3. we really do know there are objects and minds.

Now I look about the room grounded in basic tenets of belief that I share. If “colour” was my next port of call, I’d take my point of departure either from a Neil Curry poem on the shelves that says “colour is merely a spectacular event;” or look up a scientific definition of colour on Google. That is, I stare at objects as if trying to expand what is known yet know that philosophy must turn inwards. Increasingly (it says), mental states are co-aligned with actions in the brain. Struggling to expand at leisure on Moore’s general beliefs, I stare at some tiny insects moving on the white ceiling; then the lightbulb dims and flashes back on for a split second while I stare. There are such things as hallucinations but this I don’t think is one. Still, trusting my own perceptions does not necessarily correlate to intelligence much like recognising there are no Absolutes kind of does. I am left with the room again, thinking “isness is the centre of everything; the quiddity and suchness of existence, but not exactly only enough.” In time I hope to build on Moore’s 3 beliefs.

If you pick up a book of philosophy you should stay with it until you finish it.

A. J. Ayer presents an historical trajectory of philosophers as a continuum of philosophical discourse. At some point in his historicisation he encounters himself in the timeline. What is clear is that the saturation-point of his erudition is light years beyond what I have read in philosophy. I could probably list the philosophy books I’ve read recently on one A4 page, as if the desire to keep shaping my own philosophy book is dictatorial. Then again I excuse myself by saying Wittgenstein himself was no scholar. Ayer accounts for the history of Western philosophy as has happened since Russell wrote History of Western Philosophy, or rather as an adjunctivity to where that history ends. It’s difficult reading but I got through it in the end. As we reach the contemporary point, or rather contemporary as it was in 1982 at the time of publication, Ayer takes us through pragmatism, the analytical school, physicalism, existentialism, neo-Marxism, structuralism, essentialism and gets to the end and says he’s still an old-fashioned empiricist.

Nobody can force you to be Anon.

The wind calls for my anonymity; but historically when a work is Anon, they try and work out who really wrote it so Anon would seem backward to me. More to the point, and having read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, I would say a progressive country goes stagnant, stale, sterile, staid and stationary, full of dead values and dead customs, when there is a decrease in Individuality, and that someone like myself should therefore not be pressured into anonymity. Not only that but it’s against the law to coerce someone or force someone into being Anon against their wishes. One has something called the Right to Attribution which you can ask you friendly A. I. co-pilot all about. I don’t wish to be part of the plastic-cheese-eating, vision-flaccid Order of Sameness or herd-crowd but to resonate as an individual which I do not consider to be a political position in the slightest. If you can’t even write poetry because someone is sounding out saying you have to be Anon every time you start that’s not a good situation. Especially with a CV like mine I feel my Individuality should be preserved for the sake of the greater good.

Nietzsche is not my philosopher.

For one he’s big into war, not kindness, forgiveness, compassion or mercy. He also seems to think the herd-crowd should endure great suffering for the sake of one great man. Through Nietzsche we also get the idea that morality is all inherent in the idea of God and if there is no God morality is all a make-believe. The latter I find untrue because I know atheists devoted to trying to be a good human in all ways, like tending to their souls more than their bodies, or living moderately within their means. Nietzsche is nevertheless an interesting writer to read – a very eccentric writer and an horizontal thinker who says the secret of his happiness is “a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal;” who also says “knowledge kills action.” Despite him not being my philosopher, I like what he says in Beyond Good And Evil about the new philosophers of tomorrow being big into experiment. He says new philosophers are what he hopes for in the world and that, yes, they will be essentially experimenters. He gets excited about their arisal… and I feel like I could have been one of them… even if it was just the tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and its inherent mandate to somehow “do away with the pause” it would have been an experiment enough…

Knives are better the blunter they are if they are weapons.

Nietzsche is rather disparaging about England in Beyond Good And Evil. He says we are nowhere near being a philosophical race. He says in other words he does not like Locke and Hume, nor that he likes Darwin (who was not a philosopher but whom he describes as mediocre) or Bacon or John Stuart Mill or Hobbes either (he doesn’t mention Berkeley). In England we happen to think this not being a philosophical race has all changed now ever since a few updates: one is my own piece on the falsification of the Nirvana barcode; another is the James P D Tucker sheet where pictures seemingly depicting my own song lyric grew; and we also think that my brother’s notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet is written into the very dawn chorus itself. We believe that since my brother and I, England has become the philosophical centre of Europe. Nietzsche says “the European ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas” is an English invention; but now we have my brother and I. We are half-Finnish but English is our only language, and we have lived in England all our lives. We are both writers who often stay awake into the Night and who share a co-imagination as I call it or a sympathy as James calls it. James as I say was the one who gave us <BEE> and I was the one who brought the Nirvana barcode in. When I discovered the sheet where pictures grew it was only the latest development in a long chain of remarkable events for me, and I falsified the Nirvana barcode then. Our football team may not be as successful as Germany but I would back English philosophy over Nietzsche. I would say that in England although we have no Beethoven, Anon is one of the best composers, not to mention our having provided The Beatles; and our scientific tradition is the best in the world. Shakespeare is reckoned to be a genius the world all over too, through whom we get that love is the answer. But all this is the sharpening of a knife and knives are better the blunter they are if they are weapons.

Wittgenstein is a maddening writer but a genius no doubt.

Relational undoing. I’ve just finished Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. There are some interesting mirror neuron-y things in the second part; in fact I love it when it seems the structure of the book is the subtext of the examples he’s discussing with intelligent selection. One thing I remembered was a game I used to play back in childhood: I would lie in bed and somehow (I forget how) with my eyes closed or else under the cover lose orientation, lose the room, forget which end of the bed my head was at, where the wall was, and how I would lie dead still and appreciate the utter lostness, the freedom from direction madly and gladly too. There was something contained in Wittgenstein’s approach to an accelerated discourse combining music, geometry, psychology, maths, linguistics, and more, in the second part of his book that suddenly reminded me of the exquisite pleasure of having escaped reality in such a fashion as a kid. I say “escaped reality” but maybe that was to find it for walking on the sun as Einstein tells us there are no ups, downs, lefts or rights. This experience of having become free from knowing which way round I was lying, where the room was, where the wall was, and just lying there in incognito position I don’t quite attain anymore and I can’t remember the details of it that greatly as to how it was arrived at – sometimes by chance, sometimes on purpose. It’s an experience of amnesia or even ecstasia that I mean. It wasn’t a contravention of gravity but of spatial awareness; a way of escaping the obvious that would seem normally inescapable and go unnoticed too. Such an experience I would say even re-instils a belief in paradise, magic and fantasy in the young child, but that may be unqualified. To attain it again would seem too difficult. It was a relational undoing. A scrambling of the co-ordinates of reality.

THE INTERMITTENT CHOIR

“So that’s what you get when you turn to philosophy when you need a new cult”

“then you get that he’s trying to D you to the diff book”

“then you get that without the government piece on maths it’s trite”

“we can’t do the one with The Flood either because you already did the motif of their song ‘Hunger’ as in plugging the senses in the mains in the book you wrote at seven”

“now you get I’m being visited by different people”

“who all expect you to have the money to pay for it”

“and as if it isn’t all yours”

“this is where you should say…”

if it is a co-imaginative effort it is between myself and Dr. Calculator Ptom, considering it is between us that we proved telepathy real. If that isn’t a good efficacy for a man’s work I don’t know what is. And yes,

“there may be people in-between”

“whom it seems dream of a fairer day.”

INNOCENCE IS TREASURE

One day, John, James, Robert and Flo’ were lying on the grass. They were watching clouds pass by in the sky and pretending they were animals from the zoo, all sorts of creatures in the clouds.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” said John, “to be able to cling on to the vapour trail of that aeroplane all the way up there?”

“They might look down,” said James, “and see the patchwork quilt below.”

John was the eldest at 12, and James the next at 10, and Robert the next at 9, and Flo’ which was short for Florence was the youngest at 7.

They were born in a season each. John was Spring, James Autumn, Robert was winter, then Flo’ came along in summer. It was summer by now and the weather had been quite warm. The day was a sunny day, good for a game of football in the field near their house.

They lived at the foot of a fell, which is a northern word for hill. It was a big, ancient mound of land.

Their dad was away on business; he was an art dealer that was nicknamed “Blue.” He had to go to Europe where his company was based. Their mum was in the house doing something in the kitchen, possibly cleaning or baking.

There was a bee crossing the lawn where they lay, and it looked for a second like it could’ve gone on forever.

John suddenly said “shall we go ask mum if we can go on an adventure up the fell?”

James said “the day is a good one for an adventure.”

Robert always followed close behind, and said “I’m up for it;” and Flo’ was old enough now to get up the fell on her own; so they went in and asked if they could go on an adventure.

“First pack a picnic,” said mum. She got some biscuits and crisps and sausage rolls and ham sandwiches and a bottle of lemonade ready for them in a rucksack. John was the only one who had a Smartphone because he was old enough to. That way they could ring mum if they got in trouble.

“Are you going to take Ossie?” asked mum.

Ossie was the dog. He liked to run away a lot. If the back door was ever left open he would escape and go sniffing bitches at the local farm. It was embarrassing, whenever it dawned on someone that Ossie had run away, because it meant he was causing trouble at the local farm. It meant they would have to walk up to the farm and get him on a lead and bring him back.

Seeing all the animals at the farm could be frightening for a young child, especially the dogs they kept themselves. Cows were curious creatures and would crowd round with interest when you walked through a field of them, and their being so big it was almost scary, but you could shoo them away very easily, because they were not aggressive by nature.

The family let their fields out to a farmer who kept both cows and sheep on their land, a different farmer from the one where the dog ran off to.

“Yes,” said John. “We’ll take Ossie.”

So they put Ossie the dog on a lead and left the house.

They did not want to go the usual route, through two fields, up the lane, taking a right at the gate, across to the bank of the beck where often they sat and had their packed lunch, because they wanted to explore new territory so they took a left at the gate instead of taking a right. They had honestly never been this way before in all their lives. They walked on a well-beaten path trodden by sheep for a little while then James said to take a turn off the path and into the large fronds of bracken.

It was actually quite difficult to walk through the bracken, so long it was. John held the dog on a short lead. The dog was panting. After twenty minutes they stopped and contemplated going back, but decided against it.

So they walked through bracken that was taller than the tallest of them.

“Watch out for adders,” said John, as they walked, even though he nor any of them had ever seen an adder on the fell. John was the one with the biggest imagination. He liked on Sundays to draw cheques addressed to himself for millions, pen-knives with amazing and ludicrous tools, and maps of strange, far away places. He was into football, as they all were apart from Flo’ who mostly just wanted someone to play dolls with. Still, she had her brothers to follow about.

It was the summer holidays, so they weren’t at school and they were free from doing any schoolwork. If they had been able to see over the bracken they would’ve been able to see the Irish Sea some one mile or so away from the fell. The sea breeze blew up towards them from the West and was cooling them down, a welcome relief in all the summer heat.

They walked, grappling with bracken, slowly. Pushing on they found the bracken opened up to a beautiful spot with a new beck they had never seen before and a clearing beside a small waterfall. The waterfall came off the rock and into a small pool. Flo’ was the first to get her socks and shoes off and paddle in the pool while the boys were busy drinking cupped handfuls of water.

Then the boys took their socks and shoes off too and dangled their feet in the water from the bank. The water was cold but they waded out into it to cool down on such a hot day.

Ossie was allowed off his lead and to swim in the shallow pool. He could be a daft dog sometimes, who was not afraid of water but still afraid of going over a bridge.

As Robert approached the waterfall at the back of the pool, he noted there was a cave behind the waterfall. “Look, there’s a cave!” he said, and everyone else noted and agreed.

“We should check it out,” said John always playing the leader because he was the eldest.

You had to walk under the waterfall and get yourself a little bit wet to get through the water into the cave but it was a hot day so it didn’t matter. They left the picnic on the bank. Into the cave they all went and the dog shook and sent water spraying off him everywhere and their eyes adjusted to the half light and they looked about and guess what they found?

There was a fruit machine, quite rusted and old, parked just inside the entrance of the cave. It looked like it was physically embedded in the fell.

“Imagine if it worked!” said James. James was left handed and very skilful with his hands. He put his hands in his pockets now and found no money. It didn’t matter though because as John said

“there’s no where to plug it in, so we can’t test if it works or not.”

He himself had money, only a few coins, including a few pound coins, in his short pockets. He wore Bermuda shorts as did they all apart from Flo’ who wore a blue and white dress.

They could still hear the waterfall crashing down behind them. Their mum used to say “the sound of running water is very good for the soul,” and it was true, it was.

James now started to press buttons on the fruit machine. Nobody even knew how a fruit machine worked, what to do with one.

“What could that possibly be doing here?” asked little Flo’.

The mystery was a strange one.

“Maybe someone used to live here, a pauper,” said Robert.

James was still fiddling with buttons, trying to get the fruit machine to revolve to three yellow lemons meaning he had hit the jackpot.

They were still just inside the cave enough for there to be daylight leaking in from the outside world, but now John had got the torch on his Smartphone going, and was exploring the back of the cave. Guess what he found?

“There’s a portal at the back of this cave,” said John. It was like a trap door that was closed. James was still messing with the buttons on the fruit machine, and just like that it was as if he had hit the jackpot, for some combination of buttons he pressed suddenly lit up and the fruit machine made a musical sound and it turned on a light above the trap door and the trap door slowly opened at the back of the cave. There was a tunnel inside!

John shone his Smartphone torch into the tunnel and they could see at least a few feet in front of them.

“Should we go in?” asked Robert.

They did not know what to do, or what they would find down the tunnel.

“I dare you to go in there,” said James to John, and he did, which is why when he’s gone we will all look back on what is done as a Giant Day.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I acknowledge the help of what as a kid I called the ire ii net in writing this book, and more recently that seems to mean hearing voices, be they telepathic, co-imaginative, extra sensory or otherwise, be they mine own thoughts or not, all tuned in, all co-imaginative and proleptic. I also acknowledge the help of my brother James with whom there is sympathy and obviously with the book claiming to have proven telepathy, Dr. Calculator Ptom is to be acknowledged too. Should I not cite these references I would be fraudulent and I would love to stretch all the way out to the whole world, even the sky, even the cosmos of stars and even God but ultimately responsibility lies with me, for aggregating a text like this. Thanks to everyone that helped.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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