DEAR CANCER

INTRO

I hope to know more about The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison, why I was the witness, why we had to have them.

I wish to shed light.

To make an imaginative advance.

To contribute to the history of knowledge.

I also wish to scintillate the reader with brilliance rather than present a scientific paper in the traditional sense that would require peer reviews ancetera.

In presenting the lyrics to The Oedipus Wrecks Gig, I hope to renew what I have called “the island of penguins.”

I wish to leave a record of the main moves I made and build on former work as if to point towards a conclusion.

I do not wish to repeat already-published material except in the case of Oedipus Wrecks where the material has been embellished since previous publication.

THE OEDIPUS WRECKS GIG, CAMDEN TOWN, CIRCA 1997

Nota Bene. Oedipus Wrecks were a three-piece, energetic too, in the mould of Nirvana, who played gigs just before the Millennium in London and the surrounding area. We took our name from a friend of the band called “Dr. Calculator Ptom,” whose wit we have to thank for that name that so suited us. We were, or I was, aiming for Doors lyrics and Nirvana riffs. The genre I had in my notebook and my mind was Grime already in those days as a mid-Atlantic equivalent of grunge but in the end we were said to have foreshadowed Doom. Oedipus Wrecks was basically about still singing along when The Lords And The New Creatures getting real had been too horrible and disgusting. I’m going to show you the lyrics to the set-list interwedged with paragraphs of prose about the surrounding time, and pertaining to a crepuscular twilight zone. I would say the original Oedipus Wrecks gigs were a trial for the idea of rhythm that can translate into literary ways.

I

SECRETS IN THE MUD

This is the sound of getting totally fucked.

Of when you first get your notebook sucked.

Of changing gold into Glastonbury mud.

Of lying down in a field with your bud.

This is the music through whom we aspire.

This is the rule book that is thrown on the fire.

This is the jam where the trousers are down.

This is the wine-shop on the edge of town.

Chorus: Glastonbury, you should be free, and all you have in your big city,

you hit my G, you make me see how I want to see,

lights go down, lights come on,

and all my sadness seems to be gone,

although I still love to be what I dream I am.

[guitar solo]

THE ISLAND OF PENGUINS

One night, two friends and I from Dr. Calculator Ptom’s school attained the island of penguins, out night-walking in Eskdale, on a camping trip in the Lakes. It was a vision in the truest sense of the word, both in its containment of the divine, as in our being three gathered in the name, and in it possibly being born of Rimbaudian derangement of the senses. I am then said to have proved the island of penguins with the first verse of the first song at my first gig. The problem, however, is that if the line (or maybe two lines) belong to the house I should possibly be made to be Anon with it all these years later. Then again if you take the line/s away from me surely that would mean attaining the island of penguins has become a regrettable event – which nobody wants to see. To this day it still hasn’t been sorted out. The line came into being for me one day when I was reading Rimbaud, and was never intended to be proof of the island of penguins. In the meantime it transpires that the island of penguins might’ve been observed on the other side of the universe!

II

OCEANS SMILE

Oceans smile with liquid eyes

and fill themselves with rain.

The tide goes out and leaves me

lost, the last thing a glass gene.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

Death will come on silky wings

but I for one will not go.  

A soul is endless, oceans open

and keeeeeeeps a perfect O.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

Go drink the ocean with your tea

cup, give your heart far out.

If oceans smile with liquid eyes

then they'll give you a shout.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

Too drunkenly I sail the water

on Rimbaud’s smoking boat.

With whiskygills primed in fire

I sail the waves to Boot.

Follow me to the resurrection

while the blind get crucified.

My weapon’s only loaded in my eyes.

(reconstructed via the new, synchronised word)

MEANWHILE

In the meantime, Dr. Calculator Ptom (who named the band but didn’t play) liked the movie La Heine, where there’s a gorgeous bit of urban poetry about society falling from a high-rise building, thinking to itself “so far so good, so far so good” all the way down. I had some poetry myself, or thought I did, inside me, as well as writing what I thought were good words to the songs.

III

VITAL SIGNS

Smile like a smile just to smile,

cast to Heaven for a while...

let's rip holes in the boat,

throw the captain overboard,

throw the angels off the bridge,

death comes and stops me getting

bored of life's soul-machine.

What we need is energy,

show me all your vital signs,

what we steal is what we need,

what we need to feel alive,

for I'm alive with vital signs.

Back to Hell to plunder wings,

let the ritual now begin,

come and ride the waiting beast,

ride it gone into the fire,

ride it to the waiting feast,

my baby's waiting to get higher,

to get higher, to get higher...

what we need is energy,

show me all your vital signs,

what we steal is what we need,

what we need to feel alive,

for I'm alive with vital signs,

yeah feel alive with vital signs.

Come again there's much to do,

don't you know that I love you?

IN THE MEANTIME

Meanwhile, Dr. Ptom and I were part of a group of intellectuals, a circle, who watched weird films like Eraserhead and The Warriors. We even kissed so willing we were to try new things. We would have tried out a new alphabet had we the opportunity. Dr. Ptom was a poet too… he had one about Zeus and the conjunction of souls I liked but knew I did not understand.

IV

KILL

My eyes sting,

my teeth are bleeding raw,

too much thought

to make me sick.

Stinky clothes

and mouth become

my skin and all

these fruits I want to kill.

Give my hope,

surrender to the tide,

you can take

my remains;

but I must go,

to wash the poison

from my eyes,

before, before, before I kill.

THROUGH THE WOODS

On the night we boarded a train not knowing where it was headed, we fell asleep, and were woken at dawn, in Luton, by the conductor, who let us off not having a ticket and sent us back the same way from which we came! We ended up sleeping in a suburban wood, under leaves, when we got back to Radlett! I remember mostly that it was cold! We could still find a portal under the leaves and open it and find stairs that lead down into dark earth, and follow them down and find the Nobel Prize Ceremony inside… all sorts of besuited gents sitting down. Or we could take the route of New Realism instead.

THE DREAM FILM STORE

A sad and seductive female voice is saying things to me. I cannot focus or see her face, it refuses to appear in my mind.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve finally come, I’ve been waiting for you for lifetimes.

- Welcome at last to the Dream-Film Store, I can’t believe you’ve awoken here after so long -

Did you have a long day? What can I find for you tonight – that’s right – anything you can imagine – a Thousand amazing thoughts preserved – or perhaps just a bottle of red wine and a dream about the swaying sea will rest you well tonight?”

Of course in dreams you never know you are dreaming. That is why they have control. Certainly this dream harnessed control enough to disturb me & leave itself lingering behind the back of my mind when I finally awoke.

In my sleep I was wrestling w/ heat & the covers, & frightened by the lady’s continuing voice. All I could see was blue.

“I know you can understand what I’m saying. Don’t be afraid” -

I felt her stretch out her arm towards me and I jumped in panic.

All around me I could see blurs of deep colour merging & swirling, a moving chaos of images and shapes. Still I could see no face.

“I know you can hear me, please, I’m your friend, look! I couldn’t bear to see you waste this now. You know me already please just trust me.”

********

II

I awoke shaken and wretched, grappling with the duvets, rubbing my stinging eyes. Already the terrible fear of my dream had subsided considerably; simply because waking instantly cancels out what was previously merely dreaming. Now I just had a headache & a longing to return to that strange scene and assuage the curiosity that always accompanies fear. I suppose the fear when you dream is because you don’t know you’re only dreaming. It seems real. I lay there thinking.

What troubled me most as I lay there in bed was that I never saw the woman’s face, though I could sense it was desperate to appear. Oh well, just a dream, as they say.

Refusing to let a dream trouble my thoughts all day, as had happened before I decided to get up and wash my face.

The flat was crazed by disorder & rubbish. Clothes, papers, books & boxes which should’ve been locked in some attic were at war w/ the floor. I trod w/ care to the bathroom & stood looking in the greasy mirror at a face full of grease; the eyes that once rewarded me w/ strange smiles were laden w/ sleep, heavy with the impurities that sleep had filtered. The Drain in my Brain.

“I’ve been swimming

in a sea of sleep,”

I began singing to myself in a hoarse groan. Wanting to give myself a shock, I dunked my head in a cold basin decorated w/ floating limescale, pubic hair (for some unknown reason) and toothpaste. How I could call that much of a wash I don’t know. Nevertheless, I felt fresher; so, as always, I started to prepare my morning spliff, which helped me decide what to do today, or if to do anything at all.

I used to take great pleasure in rolling huge reefers, just for the hilarity of seeing something unusual & absurd, I suppose. Recently though, since moving in to the flat, I’ve been rolling the swiftest & easiest joints possible, & filling them w/ more weed than the big old ones. Being stoned now fits into the same category of Time & Tedium that it once was the escape-route from.

As I lit the spliff, & fell softly back into the sensuous web that stonedness weaves, I felt a longing for the fantastical times I used to have w/ friends & girls & laughter & ideas – whereas now I just felt numb, in a blunt trance. Not wanting to linger on the past, I took a deep long drag, like the spliff was a sacrament, & pulled some stolid clouds of darkness into my lungs. Holding it down, I imagined counting some numbers but couldn’t get it together, so just waited - & then exhaled, releasing the smoke in a grave grey sigh, watching it fumble, disperse & vanish into cushions & curtains & air. My head was heavy. I knew what I needed now more than ever. To get out.

********

III

After dressing in some jeans & T-shirts, I took my weed, some skins, a pen & paper & various other articles of minor importance, & hid them in places in my big jacket. I’ve never been too bothered about what I wear on top - trousers, I just wear jeans, so I’m not fussy there either. Shoes, however, I’m very particular about, seeing as I have to walk in them etc. Shoes are rare allies in life. Also, I have a tendency to turn a jacket into a home.

So, finding a particular pair of boots, I left the flat w/ a feeling of the promise of the Day.

But where could I go?

I’d abandoned my friends a few months before, fallen out with them all except one, Gabriel, who I don’t speak to anymore, anyway. It was a strange series of incidents involving my previous band & some magic mushrooms. The details escape me & give me pain trying to remember them. We were called ‘Open Poem Opium,’ & we split up; that is all.

(“Beat through the veins of the city in madness

Revolving doors in your mind & sadness

Cities crawling in your brain

streets of mystery and of pain,

I’m leaving town on the underground train.”)

I put my hands in my pocket to instinctively protect myself from the knuckle-gnawing cold that hung around outside. Feeling what I thought was a £10 note in my jeans, I pulled it out to find only a little scribbling of lyrics written some days ago in a dull hash-induced trance.

I often scribbled things. I enjoyed the freedom of scribbling & doodling. The pen can move exactly where you want it free of direction, w/out the obligation of having to form restricting letters & words. I have pages & pages of doodles, strange shapes, & occasionally some lyrics appear in the mess. That’s what I did for the band – wrote songs & sang, though I don’t play any instrument.

Noticing a growing rumble in my stomach, I felt that food & coffee were the best options, & would give me more time to consider how my day of activity could be filled.

Rounding a corner, I saw the parade of shops ahead, dead faces facing me, w/ cheap dimestore smiles. In the middle was the cafe, called “The Rat & Vessel” to my amused bewilderment. I opened the door. Inside it smelled of sad people, old times clinging in smoke to the walls, sad paint and sad light. The door was still ringing from those crazy bells that crash together on opening , & make me cringe every time. Those bells should be banned from sad cafes. They exacerbate the dead silence that awaits you inside when the door slams shut & the bells stop clanging.

“A large strong white coffee please, & a Danish.”

£1. 90. I couldn’t believe it. I realised then that left me w/ only 10p for the day – a rare day of Activity. Oh well.

The coffee was bitter & the Danish was over sweet. I was fairly stoned & therefore felt a heightened sensitivity to things like taste. After a few mouthfuls, I realised it wasn’t quite late enough for breakfast yet.

Well, what could I do? Where could I go? 10p is less than having nothing, because it just irritates you with niggling little time-consuming questions.

I decided I’d be freer if I threw it away my last change. Why I didn’t bring any money w/ me I haven’t a clue – pen, paper & weed must have seemed like a more useful currency to remember this morning.

So On discovering that I finally had something to do (albeit only disposing of 10p), I thought I’d turn it into a ritual & perhaps waste an hour of the day. I was finding it increasingly difficult since realising this money shortage to tell myself that I was even capable of activity this morning. Spending an hour of one’s morning throwing away short change, & taking an hour to decide how to do it in particular to add a pretend sense of ‘fun…’ I realised a dead-end frustration possessing me. The town was in abeyance, time was trapping, what could I do to rid me of the cruel bindings of post-youth, expulsion from university, confusion, unemployment, & worst of all, sheer boredom? Where could I go, & with what purpose?

The 10p dilemma had started to annoy me. I thought in vain for ways I could make a ritualistic point of getting rid of it, but soon realised this sort of time-consuming thought was exactly what I wanted to get rid of the 10p for – like I said, to be free of it. This realisation of my own frustrating, mind-cycling stupidity annoyed me greatly. I decided I’d give it to the next tramp I saw.

It was now 11. 00. Which meant nothing to me, because w/out anything to do or anywhere to be, it didn’t matter what time it was. The street stretched ahead of me crawling w/ insect-cars & insect-people, all busily rushing around swarming sick and feversome. I often wondered exactly what the term “crowd-neuroses” means, & laughed that I felt detached from the clinging time-table lifestyle. Walls of grey rose either side of the road to complete the dull-grey prison of the street. People flocked & assembled, briefcases merged into madness, mute timetable agony, flaccid lovers limp by, smiles fail, children congregate in backstreets to escape, everyone around thinking they have something to do & somewhere to go! I felt dizzy so found a bench to sit down upon. Watching the parading fools & this procession of sadness brought out a sadness w/in me too. I was sitting motionless on the bench, feeling the flux & thrum of the city, the dead beat of London; & I heard the beat of my heart clash w/ the rhythm of the streets. I felt suddenly cold and alone. If London had a voice, it would be a blunted and dead-pan voice like Lou Reed’s.

I must have sat on that bench for about 2 hours. The time was spent coming to terms w/ the fact that I felt estranged from my environment – the first time I’d realised the alienation of being poor in a city. Perhaps if I lived in Cornwall, say, I’d have a job, a community in which I was known, maybe even some friends. The city is a great culmination of sadness & alienation. No-one in town is conscious of their extreme self-consciousness. Everyone in town is homeless.

Pleased w/ the thoughts I had accomplished this morning (& thinking was my poor equivalent of a morning’s work), I decided to roll up another spliff & go for another wander. My hands were cold & it was too windy sitting outside, so I went to look for the nearest phone-box. Phone-boxes were excellent for skinning up in, because a) you were off the street & out of people’s way b) there was a nice little platform bit to rest the Rizlas upon c) no-one disturbs you in a phone-box, because they assume you are looking for change, or about to make a call etc. One felt a slight degree of safety & protection inside.

The nearest phone was just across the road. I loved crossing roads, felt it like a game, a dare, a thrill. One of the things I felt most confident about in life was dodging traffic & crossing roads w/ what I liked to portray to the driver as being a fearless & disdainful nonchalance. I’m constantly occupying myself w/ little challenges & wars, that I suppose I create for my own amusement. Walking along a pavement, I often ask myself a question of importance then tell myself that if I reach that lamp-post over there before the next car passes me, the answer is so & so, & if not… I’m sure everyone plays the same game, just ask different questions. It’s amazing how something as utterly pointless & unfounded in anything apart from my own mind has the power to excite & possess me.

I can honestly feel a terrible suspense sometimes as a car grumbles & groans & approaches blind behind my back – I walk quicker, desperate for the answer I want. Sometimes, if I fail to reach the object in time for the right answer, I change the question or say I meant the previous lamp-post anyway. It is by no means a game I enjoy playing. I become frustrated w/ myself after a while, but at least it distracts me from frustration of having nothing better to do.

So crossing the road, I reached the phone-box, & entered its heavy door. Inside I felt how truly separate I was from everything else around me. There is a certain mysticism about phoneboxes & telecommunications. I remember having a fascination w/ Dr. Who, & the way he travelled throughout space & time in the blink of an eye. How I longed for such possibilities now, standing stoned & alone in a phone-box surrounded by strangers & the dizzying thrum of life. I wanted adventure, change, discovery – but I was stuck. Where was there to go?

I emptied my pockets on top of the phone & extracted the various bits of paraphernalia needed for skinning up. The spliff I rolled was terrible, due to what I noticed was a growing distraction in my mind.

Standing there pulling on the spliff, I tried to locate the exact area of my mind where the negativity was emanating from.

‘Right,’ I thought.

‘I know I don’t want to be here, but where do I want to be?’

Something was certainly on my mind, but I let it go as the smoke melted into my blood & sent diamonds rushing up my neck.

I started to gather my belongings, & noticed among them the 10p which I’d forgotten about.

“I’ll leave it here for some lucky person to make a phone call w/” I mused.

“Or, I could make a phone-call myself..”

I didn’t own a phone & the thought of making a phone call was quite big news to me. Who could I phone? I had no friends.

Except for maybe Gabriel. It had to be Gabriel. 0171 385 6603. I only had 10p, so I had to plan carefully what I would say. Even better, I thought, I could invite myself round to his.

I don’t know why I suddenly had a desire to be w/ someone. I don’t know whether I even liked the guy. I alienate myself. Perhaps the guilt that loneliness brings, had stirred me finally into communication.

“Hello?” came the cautious, questioning voice.

“Gabriel, man, it’s, uh, Franco, could I come round?”

I spoke nervously & stuttered a little, out of practise w/ conversation.

“What! Hey Franco, how’s it going? What are you doing? Come round!”

“Yeah, I will, I’ve got 2 credits left, so I’ll - “

The line went dead & the dead sound came up in my ear & hung around in a tone of despair.

“Shit,” I thought. “Where the fuck does Gabriel live.”

Typical, that for once I’d actually wanted to do something that involved someone other than me - & it wasn’t going to be possible.

I left the phone-box still sucking hard on the joint. “I suppose I could go home, get some more money & - “

The phone was ringing. I lifted it. It was Gabriel.

“Man you should’ve just said & I’d have called you back.”

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t know – shit, sorry. You know how I am w/ phones, clueless.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha ha – well, shall I meet you somewhere then?”

“I have no money & I’m down to my last few smoke’s worth.”

When I said earlier that phones fascinate me, I also meant to say that they terrify me. I’d probably prefer telepathy.

“I’’ll tell you what Franco, where are you – I’ll come and pick you up.”

“Um, well, I’m in a phone-box in Baron’s Court. I’ll meet you outside the Oddbins.”

“In 10 minutes, I’m close.”

“Alright man, that’s perfect, cheers.”

“See you then Franco.”

“Bye-bye.”

Wow. I’d never known anyone so efficient at phones. If I’m ever forced into using one to make arrangements, I faff around for hours being indecisive & calling back & hanging up.

Gabriel was a person of admirable sagacity for his age – 2 years older than me, 22, but w/ a sensibleness that empowered him to be utterly assured and self-confident. Decisive & wise, the kind of friend everyone wants & fears abusing.

I could already see Oddbins. I approached feeling slightly ridiculous still for my telephonic incompetence.

‘I could have done any number of things,’ I thought

- ‘reversed the charges, borrowed 10p off someone… oh well, I’m just useless, no matter.’

My thoughts were interrupted by Gabriel’s voice.

“Franco, jump in!”

Elliot Smith was playing on the stereo. I didn’t like Elliot Smith very much. He finds it too easy to write fairly good songs. I couldn’t respect that.

Gabriel had a spliff going. “Have a smoke on that man,” he urged. “How are you? Tell me about your life.”

“Well, I’m O. K I suppose. To be honest I’ve been quite dazed for ages. I don’t really know what’s going on man.”

“How’s the band?”

“We split.”

“Oh, why”

“Dunno, just crap really.”

“Just crap sounds about right. So what are you doing w/ yourself?”

“Oh, nothing much, nothing at all really. I’ve got virtually no money, & none on me.”

“Any girls?”

“Ha ha ha you must be joking.” The thought of me having the time, money, energy & effort for a girl was hilarious. I was not ‘boyfriend material’ – I never have been.

“Man, I’ve met this amazing girl, she’s at the flat at the moment – you’ll meet her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Mary.”

“What’s she like?”

“Oh, amazing man, you’ll see, you’ll see.”

“I’m not sure if I want to believe you or not. I mean you know how sceptical I am about girls. If she’s not perfect, not the Absolute One, then she’s not worth any waste of time bothering w/.” This was my arrogance. Suffice to say, I had never found the One Perfect Girl.

“Franco, I’m telling you man – if you’d just stop being so fucking particular & arty farty, & just accept things, you’d be happier. You’ve probably already met your Perfect Girl but were too busy moaning about existence & lack of money & fucking weed to even notice her.”

“you think?”

“Yeah, I do think. You can’t get perfection, so then take what’s best.”

Elliot Smith was starting to annoy me, so I turned it down. The car pulled up & stopped.

“Here we are then, this is the new flat.”

“Cool, which door.”

“Here.”

We entered.

I stood waiting inside the door wondering what I was doing. A blond girl w/ a subtle face & medium sized breasts came to the bottom of the stairs w/ an open smile on her face. She was attractive. Very. She wore only a long robe-like dressing gown that revealed tempting patches of skin when she moved. She looked at me for a strange second, then Gabriel & her were full of kisses & smiles. I felt a little bit small, an outsider. Gabriel introduced me, & we went through to the lounge for a smoke & some coffee.

I always admired the way Gabriel could mix women w/ friends. We shared a flat at University, so I knew him well & had witnessed many of his previous ‘mistakes’ & ‘successes.’ I felt rather uneasy being in the room w/ my old friend & his beautiful new girlfriend. I felt alone.

We sat for a while & Gabriel & Mary inevitably drifted into the usual fresh-lovers type of conversation. There was certainly a silent communication between them, a sign of their genuineness perhaps.

I looked around the lounge. Shelves groaned w/ the slow old weight of books, heaving piles of books, pages of words compressed & preserved together in slumber, long centuries of books. Gabriel had no doubt read them all. He thinks books hold the answers. I think they only hold the questions.

I became distracted from the books by the sudden movement of Mary putting on some trousers. She stood up & had to jump & pull them up quickly while she was in the air. I caught a glimpse of her pussy through her knickers. & then I was hooked. I couldn’t help but cast glances at that soft pleasure-triangle that women posses, knowing there was a cunt lying in her lap, just lying there unattended. I felt an angling, wincing agony.

Uncertainty and mystery was what sustained me, kept my curiosity strong.

I wanted now to solve the cunt-mysteries hiding in Mary’s knickers.

“Franco! Wake up man. Where’ve you been? Cloud cuckoo Land?”

“Shit man, sorry, I’m a little bit stoned, well quite stoned actually.”

Everyone laughed.

I suspected that Gabriel was feeling excellent about himself now – it was obvious that I had been staring at Mary.

“Yeah & I’m a little tired as well. I had a really strange dream last night.”

Gabriel & I often discussed our dreams when we were stoned.

“Yeah? Tell me about it.”

“Well, it was terrible, frightening. There was a woman.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes! That sounds just like Franco – terrified of women, even when it comes to wet dreams!”

Mary gave me a look of intrigue. Gabriel laughed at me more.

“You couldn’t understand unless you were there in the dream. It was terrifying.”

“What did she look like?”

“I’ve got no idea. I couldn’t concentrate enough on her face. It was everywhere, all around me – lots of deep blue green colours swirling & all the time there was the Voice…”

“...and what did it say?”

“something about the Dream-Film Store or something.”

“Wow. ‘The Dream-Film Store’. Sounds exciting. & what happened that was so scary?”

“I don’t…. I don’t really know…. It was just…. Um….”

I trailed off into oblivion. The T. V. had been put on & it flickered its bright ugly faces around the room. I felt dizzy & needed suddenly to lie down. Chaos was swarming in my head, I took a deep breath….

& a strange blue colour pervaded the scene.

“I’ve been calling you all day, why haven’t you been answering -

Look, there’s something we should get straight now & here: you WANT to be here, w/ me, so please make it easier on us both.”

“Who are you?”

“Oh you already know all this, it’s the same questions every time – in time you’ll remember everything, but I need to -”

“Where am I?”

“Why, you’re at the Dream-Film Store of course..”

I felt the softness of her presence, the lure of her maiden’s voice, a strange sense of having been here before in another time – still I could not see her face, just an oceanic blur.

“Is there something wrong? What is the matter?

What is the matter?”

she kept repeating

& repeating

her voice dispersing

& drowning as I

floated away

slowly upward towards

the surface again

through the big blue

until…

---------------------------------------------

IV

I awoke panting for breath on Gabriel’s sofa, w/ 2 impending heads above me – stoned expressionless faces.

“Man, what the fuck happened,” I joked.

Their smiles told me they were relieved.

“You suddenly started hyper-ventilating, & moving your limbs manically, & then you feinted & just lay there looking still & peaceful, &, uh, almost… dead!”

“Shit, that’s never happened before, I never feint, that’s weird.”

“Probably just the weed.”

“& the crap company,” added Mary w/ a smile. “Let me get you some water,” she continued.

“Please,” I agreed.

I watched the ripe shape of her body as she moved away, watched her casual motions sway. Disorder Lust & Loneliness. ‘There is no room for love in my life,’ I thought ‘or perhaps all I have is room for love.’

“Gabriel,” I slowly asseverated, suddenly snapping back into the room, “when I feinted, just then, I had the dream of the scaring woman at the bed of the sea.”

“At the bed of the sea?”

“Yes, yes, it was at the bed of the sea first time as well. I remember. I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I haven’t seen the woman yet but I spoke to her.”

“What did you say?”

“’Who are you?’ & ‘where am I?’”

“Ha ha ha ha ha. & this was supposedly a nightmare?”

- “Um, well, no, not as such, no definitely not a nightmare, just a strange, scaring dream.”

“’Who are you?’ and ‘Where am I?’ That’s what people in 3-rd rate Hollywood PG’s say when they miraculously arrive at some fantastical place. Sounds like pure cheese to me man! I can’t believe you’re letting yourself get bothered by a dream as cheesy as this!”

“No, it wasn’t cheesy, it was crystal clear & pure blue & cool on my naked skin….”

Then there was an uncomfortable silence that hung around waiting to strangle me.

“Gabriel shall we have another bifter, I could really quite do w/ a J to sort my head out.”

“Yeah, man, that’s a sound idea. I’ll skin.”

I turned my head to look out of the window.

Grey streams pervaded the sky. The street outside was full of sadness, lined w/ windows, desperate & nothing. The street goes nowhere. The pedestrians are going to places that I refuse to call anywhere.

Mary had returned now w/ a glass of water & a cup of herbal tea.

“Oh, cheers, that’s perfect, thanks.”

I was never myself w/ new people. Strangers gave me a nervous edge. You could say that they excite me – or perhaps that was just Mary.

She sat down next to me on the sofa. I always sit forward w/ my hands clasped. (My mother used to say I sat like I was praying & I used to tell her that I was.) Mary sat back relaxed & full of presence. This made me feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t see her face behind me, & now felt sure she was sitting back so as to look at me w/out me noticing.

My stoned mind focussed out & dispersed & my thoughts began to spread into detailed crevices of indecision.

If I lent back it would be blatant that I’d either noticed her, if it’s true that she is looking at me, or, if not, it would be either a nervous action or a rather full-on, arrogant one; so I shouldn’t just sit here & feel comfortable w/ her looking at me from behind.

I considered my position w/ Mary agonisingly behind me, & Gabriel, my friend who was beginning to bore me a little, reading in front of me, quite engrossed. He had the spliff & wasn’t even smoking it. I didn’t want to ask him for it, because it was his, but the rude bastard hadn’t even passed it once.

Suddenly, in a moment of decision I sat back next to Mary, our bodies pressing. At this stage, w/ the threat of Gabriel there & the tendencies of my edgier thoughts getting carried away, I began to feel excited – I began to get an erection & my jeans were tight. “I could really do w/ leaning forward again,” I thought. “Though what would Mary think of me rocking back and forward like a monkey?” Paradox. The only solution I felt was to ask Gabriel for the biff & lean forward to take it.

“Gabs man, the bifter has extinguished itself in the absence of you smoking it. Have a light.”

We often spoke to each other in burlesque tones using highly pretentious diction to mock the people who assume we are being serious or genuinely ostentatious. A silent cruelty, & a disdainful one. We enjoyed deliberately confusing people. I know that of course it’s a manifestation of personal insecurities, or something like that. Enigmatic people, though, have to cultivate their enigmas, play on people’s curiosities. If people knew this, however, the enigma, the mystery, would cease.

I suppose you could say I suffered from a dreadful arrogance that played games w/ my autonomy.

W/ all this thought taking place & consuming my stoned mind, my erection subsided. & Gabriel passed me the joint.

“Cheers man. What you reading?”

“Turn of the Screw.”

“Henry James. I’ve read it.”

“What do you think?”

“Frightening. Frightening to think that the entire novel is related through the eyes of someone so subtly mad… psychotic… that she doesn’t know it and neither do we…”

“Yes, yes, the scary thing is that when you’re insane of course you wouldn’t know about it.”

“Where are you at?”

“The Governess has just been visited by her second horror.”

“Oooooooooh… it’s just getting good. The insanity accelerates from then on.”

I often spoke of insanity. The idea of it attracts me. It’s in the same boat as all the things which attract me like dreams & angels & myths & magic, symbols, Mystery.

I often used the word ‘insane’ as an adjective. I’d never told Gabriel (& he was the most likely person I would tell anything) that I don’t actually believe in sanity. Or intelligence. I just believe in minds.

I needed the loo.

“Mary, where’s the bathroom please.”

“Upstairs.”

That’s all I needed to know. Bathrooms are self-evident & usually exactly where you expect them to be. Still, you’ve got to ask.

“Right. Do you want the rest of this?” I offered the joint.

“Oh, yes please. Thanks.”

On leaving the room, I realised how much I’d wanted to leave it since entering it.

“I’ll take my time,” I thought.

Halfway up the brown carpeted stairs I heard Mary & Gabriel exchanging aggressive but hushed remarks w/ each other. They were squabbling. Shit. Was it something to do w/ me? No, don’t be arrogant Franco, of course not, they just waited for privacy.

I reached the top of the stairs slowly, straining to hear what they were saying downstairs.

“Don’t be so nosy Franco, go & take your piss,” I said to myself, imitating the sense of morals & responsibility that I recognised I inherently lacked.

Four possible doors faced me at the top of the stairs. I chose the one I was sure was a bathroom; but it was a bedroom. “Shit, oh well, another one of my immaculate notions ruined. Bathrooms are not self-evident after all.”

The door next to it was the right one. As I pissed, I looked around at all the fancy bottles of sprays & scents & creams & whatnot. My bathroom, in comparison, was utterly empty.

I decided I’d stay in the bathroom a little longer to give the two downstairs a fraction more privacy. Their relationship, on first impressions, was strange. They possessed a silent communication which I’d seen in other couples, but never experienced.

In front of me, they ignored each other. & Gabriel had definitely changed. I realised then, staring blankly in the mirror, that Gabriel was not a friend anymore. I no longer needed him for the public confidence he inspired in me. I no longer needed any public confidence. I had no friends. I had to get out, leave as quickly & politely as possible. W/ as much of Gabriel’s gorgeous skunk as possible.

Returning downstairs it was clear that all the fuss had subsided. Entering the living room, Gabriel had now moved to sit in my seat next to Mary on the sofa. He had his arm around her. The skunk was on the coffee-table, where Gabriel was previously sitting. I moved over & sat down. The couple were full of smiles.

For the next ½ hour, we chatted idly (except for Mary), & I was given the opportunity of rolling a spliff. Little did Gabriel know that it was also an opportunity for me to steal about ¼ of his ounce of skunk. Having convinced myself that there was no longer the same connection between us, that he wasn’t a friend, & that it was his fault as well, I reached a guilt-free state of mind, which excited me. Ah, the potentials of being guilt-free, amoral. All you needed was to be good at lying to yourself. So, skinning the J, I subtly spilled the bag under the coffee-table while the couple were smugly engrossed in some embrace. Under the coffee-table, I put a substantial handful into my left boot, then brought the rest up in the bag, laughing and apologising.

“Gabriel. After this biff I’m gonna cruise.”

“You’re going? Already?”

“Well, I’ve been here ages &… to be honest, I still don’t feel too good after that feinting episode.”

“I thought we’d do something today, go to Camden maybe.”

“Gabriel,” I joked like a friend would. “You know we never do anything if we’ve got enough weed.”

He was reluctant to agree. I knew it was because of Mary. Being w/ her changed him.

We smoked the spliff, & talked some more. I couldn’t be myself w/ him. He had become a stranger. The way he was so – insensitive about my dream as well…. That was what first alerted me to his new persona. Oh well. I managed friendly chatter, & by now had realised he probably wanted me to go anyway, & was probably experiencing the same friendship crisis between us that I was. At least he had Mary there when I left. What would she be like then? What were they really like together?

“So,” I said, standing up, “I’m off, man.”

“Cheers for phoning & coming round, it’s good that we’ve retained our friendship and are still in touch…” etc, etc,

Bullshit.

After the crap & the strange half-falsity had finally gotten too crappy to bear on both sides, I smiled at Mary.

“Pleasure to meet you,” I said looking at her intensely in her sea-green eyes, as if to communicate something more than my words actually said.

“you too,” she smiled,

“see you again.”

& then that was it. I doubted if she ever would see me again. Or Gabriel for that matter. It didn’t matter.

The door had closed behind me. I faced the street. I was free.

********

V

W/ my confidence fuelled by the safe knowledge of having something to smoke in my possession, I strolled briskly away. “Even if the worst comes to the worst,” I thought, “I can just get utterly cained & escape, pass out in a miserable gutter.” But I could not accept this as being the outcome of the day. “Decisions must be made,” I said decisively out-loud, to no-one. “I must choose.”

I turned the corner, not knowing where I was, or where I was going to. A woman w/ a pram passed me & deliberately averted her eyes from mine. I don’t know why but this fuelled my sense of drive further. My stride began to extend.

A moment later, a fragment of sun scattered through the clouds that had lay in the sky all day. A ray caught me in the eye. I began to feel quite exultant, happy to be alive, & to be me. I continued walking in a strong rhythm. My feet penetrated the street.

I started to hum; then I fitted words to the tune. I was walking directly into the beam of sunlight, which seemed to be exclusively shining on me. ‘Wow,’ I thought, light-headed & dreamy, ‘I am indeed a very special person, blessed.’ As soon as I’d felt this elated sensation float through me, the grey clouds covered the sun again, as if to punish me for my arrogance, or simply just to ruin my mood.

Angered by this, I felt like getting myself involved in a conflict against the sky & sun. I decided, in the mess of my mind, that I would will the sun back out from those clouds.

Soon my concentration faltered, though, & my thoughts maundered into silly crevices. I had turned onto a little side street, & at the end of it, I saw there was a fenced grassy opening w/ a gate. A cemetery. W/ my thought now on a level of confusion, it would be a good idea to sit down & think for a while. Maybe I could write a song.

The cemetery was virtually empty. Furthermore, it appeared to be more like a park than a cemetery. Nicely mowed lawns. Cosy gravel paths. Each tombstone lined up immaculately & forgotten about. I couldn’t believe for a minute that any of the people lying under this ground had specifically chosen this cemetery as their place of rest. Of all the places of rest on Earth.

I wandered down to the bottom of the path & sat by an unusually small gravestone under the trees in the corner. Leaves were scattered around me, fragile and crumbling.

“In loving memory of

Mary Calliope,

died 2^nd April 1882,

aged 26 years.”

That was what this curious gravestone said. It was faded & looked out of place, tucked away at the side under this tree. It seemed almost lonely. I leant against it, sitting on the damp ground, forgetting to respect the dead.

I noticed a robin hopping around the base of the nearest sycamore tree. He, or she for that matter, looked rather impoverished, skinny & tired. I immediately took pity on this little robin & felt helpless that I couldn’t give it something to eat. Instead, I smiled at it, & said “hello” in the tone of voice you’d use w/ a baby. “You can be my friend” I said wistfully, trying to put some genuine enthusiasm into my voice. I sounded false. Almost inevitably, the robin bobbed away. ‘Oh well.’

I sat there engrossed in an evolving day-dream, unable to find a single thread of productive thought, wallowing in whatever arose.

I was beginning to feel nauseous. My guts felt like sludging snakes writhing inside me. “Shit,” I thought “I haven’t eaten yet today.” What time was it? I hadn’t a clue. How long had I been sitting there? I began to panic a little, & feel light-headed. ‘Shit, I’ve got some weed, shit I forgot, wow, I’ll have another smoke and calm down.’

W/ my face down to my lap, & my fingers absorbed in the process of rolling a spliff, I did not notice the elderly woman approaching me w/ a little joke of a dog scampering beside her. Just as I lit up, & lifted my face up, she was there.

“Morning,” I said, slightly shocked.

Her face was heavy w/ old skin but could have been attractive before about 50 years of weathering set in.

“Why are you sitting on that grave?” she said abruptly.

“Well, um, actually, I am here to mourn my father’s grand mother.”

Her nosy rudeness annoyed me, & I was in the mood for retaliating on the offensive.

“She died while giving birth to my grandfather,” I continued, enjoying the freedom & spontaneity of lying, enjoying the fact that I had gained the upper hand.

“Oh,” she said solemnly. “Oh I am sorry,” she continued humbled and apologetic. I was suddenly hit by a great wave of guilt, at seeing how easily I had defeated his poor old woman, who was in the right anyway. I wanted to tell her that I was lying, & had actually stopped to roll up some illegal substances, & that yes I was a typical youth, & that you were right to question me… But she had already tottered off, w/ her little tottering dog. Oh well, no point in pitying the weak, I thought.

W/ this incident over, & seeming to have taken place hours ago, I continued with the spliff.

Slowly, I began to enter a state of mind that I’d never encountered before. My stomach seemed to expand & expand into space. I closed my eyes & felt the walls of my stomach moving outwards. I felt as if a universe was being created inside me. I felt a huge space within the entire of my body, which I felt no longer existed. I imagined seeing stars explode & planets being born &

********

VI

& I plummeted to the Dream-Film Store again…

“Here is where dreams are stored on disk,” said the friendly female voice as if on autocue. “Anything that can be dreamt, any dream sequence, it’s stacked on the shelves here in The Dream-Film Store, this shop beneath the waves.”

I felt less afraid than before.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I can explain.”

Her face, her physical form now appeared, a nubile and pulchritudinous sylph.

“Hi,” she said, resolving from the colour.

“Hi,” I said back, breaking that rule that women don’t like you copying them.

“Your loneliness, disorder and despair leads to LUST. Your agonies are self-inflicted. ALIENATION is one of them. You have escaped into The Dream Film Store. You have accidentally slipped into a crevice of your own mind and landed awake in the subconscious.”

“Really?”

“Either that or you have created a world here at the bottom of the sea symbolising mystery, women, penetration, drowning, hallucinating, dreaming, the subconscious.”

“Well which is it?”

“Your LONELINESS is a fantasy world that is the subconscious reaction to and sanctuary from the alienation, waste & disorder of your waking life. You are at war with yourself. Your subconscious is offering you peace terms.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Come with me while we plummet,” she said; “plummet with me while we sleep.”

********

A NOTE ON MY FIRST NUMBER REVISITED

The train of my thought is the 19. 08, in one ear and out the other. We get on board, us passengers and find our seats. I am by the window, and see the scenery flowing past. I am reading a good book. It’s something I did with my dad as a seven year old.

The train gets chugging along, wreckety, wreckety wreck.

The encrypted node in the boyhood work, meanwhile, was that if the Gravity between earth and moon is instant and therefore enough to break Light-speed a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah.

I see now that it was possibly adults about me who, for the sake of long storage, when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic, got me to begin encrypting that node with a text called

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

and to continue with a second text called

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

“but then again who knows.”

The split was not even but asymmetrical like one was on and one was off. It was like spotting the flaw in Einstein. It was like saying if you write Einstein backwards it implies the breaking of light speed. It was even like saying even if we invent a time machine that can equal light speed we can only go back in time because the future hasn’t happened yet.

Then the train slows down, its metal parts expanding and contracting, its wreckety wreckety wreck diminishing. We arrive at a station on the voyage!

At some point, after the Einsteinian bit, a + sign was put in for the F of ‘scarf’ in the line

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

Then there was a discussion of the struggle between ‘Good and Evil’ in a piece where

“I woke up at 1 o. clock.”

In other words the first person pronoun and the time 1 o’clock were being contrasted.

At the station on the voyage some people get on some disembark. The train gets chugging along again and the conductor comes down the aisle to spot new people whom he can ask to show their tickets.

It is not clear if the splitting of the two books happened next, for the number 2 in the sequence, but I think so. In terms of the number three, there was also my maths book where in among the numbers you find a three line poem going

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

To read it all you’d only need to go and get a copy of what by now I know helped invent the net but which at the time of publication I did not know helped invent the net. It’s called The Sunset Child. People have said the best one in it is called ‘My Dad.’

Counting continued, 4, 5, 6, 7.

4 was my age when I crashed my bike in Sweden. I used to live in Sweden with my mum when I was a baby, sleep outside in my pram, e’ en when it was winter.

5 was my second brother Dr. Robert’s age when I wrote – a poem about my 5 year old brother.

6 was a story, where I drank some lemonade and shrank until I was 6 inches tall. It’s a psychedelic fairy-tale of a story redolent of people like Syd Barrett and also ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Aeroplane.

7 was a time on my digital watch inside the story in question.

I think 7 was as far as it went. That was my age at the time I began the writing. There were in-between bits, that augmented and enhanced what was going on in terms of numbers.

Now we approach our final destination. Please leave the train. All passengers must disembark here at this station stop.

The whole of my early mathematics was based on the above situation, by which I mean school work. At some point you might make a mistake! Some of the bits and pieces look remarkably beautiful in the context. For example

1. Area of whole shape = 80 CM squared

Area of unshaded part = 4 CM squared

Area of shaded part = 76 CM squared

2. Area of whole shape = 72 CM squared

Area of unshaded part = 8 CM squared

Area of shaded part = 64 CM squared

At the age of 11 after having encountered both the juggernaut and a literal monster without knowing what the Hell was going on, I received the thin stripe up the underside and redefined what it means to say “I’m fine.”

It didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end.

At the train station there are other trains waiting to depart. There are a lot of people filing out through the turnstiles out onto the street. I follow them, putting my ticket through the machine.

All this should’ve been what I wrote about in GCSE maths but I couldn’t because the book was locked in the attic for Long Storage. During the GCSE maths exam I was bleeding. In the morning, before school, I picked up my bassplayer’s bass which for some reason I had; and dad said “no, it sends the wrong message for the morning of your GCSE maths exam. You’re not taking it to school.” He confiscated it off me and locked himself in the house, and I banged on the front door saying “give me back my bass,” and my hand went through the glass. I turned up to the maths exam dripping blood. If only I had used it as ink and written the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark.

INTRODUCTION TO JIM

Jim Morrison was one of the most charismatic and iconic rock stars of all time, but he was also possibly the most erudite. His band the Doors were named after the writings of William Blake and Aldous Huxley. His claim was bringing academic intelligence to rock music. His work is already subject to some critical analysis in Wallace Fowlie’s compare and contrast of Morrison and Rimbaud Rebel As Poet where Fowlie says Morrison’s poetry is “a mere reflection” of good poetry and Rimbaud meanwhile is the real deal. Fowlie concludes his compare and contrast by commenting that what is most excellent from Morrison is not his written work but his singing voice. I am different from Fowlie and don’t agree with a lot of what was said in Rebel As Poet. It’s not that I don’t like Jim Morrison’s singing voice but that I thought at the time I read Fowlie that Morrison’s book The Lords And The New Creatures was one of the best books I’d ever read and took issue with what Fowlie was generally saying. Fowlie said for example that the new creatures are “metaphors,” alibis in disguise for the law-hounded poet. I am sure that they are to some extent, the extent of anthropomorphism and opening the inner zoo, but under the madding sun, this issue remains unresolved. Morrison wrote in The New Creatures that “a creature waits out the war,” meaning the Cold War presumably… he also writes of “the dry end of vacuum boat,” presumably meaning “the wrong end of the stick.” I think he was saying “if we get in trouble we’ll tell them they got the wrong end of the stick.” I would like herein to subject The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison to a modicum of sustained critical micro-analysis which would be to fill a hole I found when obsessing over the book and not being able to branch out to other literature around the subject.

Ideally there would be a text subjecting Morrison’s binary-machine to sustained critical micro-analysis by the witness and without him letting on that he was the witness – without giving the game away. However it is too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube once it is out and to retract a confession to being this so-called “witness,” as I made in The Field of Rock N Roll Science and other works too. If the reality one finds oneself in is that hidden parts of government hold a monopoly on evolution as John Gray relays in Straw Dogs; is that they can send a snake via telepathy; is that they don’t change hands when a new government comes in; is that the entire business of democracy is a sham – then one would be forgiven for thinking the plot goes on a dystopian future world. Maybe this really is the atmosphere in which the experiment goes on and is why The Lords And The New Creatures is a good test, like a spiritual or germ X-ray that exposes the germs of dictatorship on all hands.

My latest thinking, which might change, is that in this situation my father was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. Hi, I am the witness; and what a life I had too! At seven I was said to have helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world it was I that wrote it. At eight I made not one but two very strange Naturalistic Observations I did not understand. At eleven I was marked by an experiment into the maths of the new colour, which didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. At fifteen I attained the island of penguins which might’ve been scripted in the Bible. At eighteen I forewarned of what was to come in terms of the terrorist attacks to the day, also wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. I also made other prophecies such as the God Particle and the alignment.

After school I recorded an album on binaural earphones, had an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, spotted a sensory overlay of my name tattooed 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 reel and was even the one to discover my brother’s sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting my own song lyric) grew. I also falsified the Nirvana barcode and attained visual radio.

I might’ve expected a Nobel Prize by then but didn’t earn 1p throughout any of that and still survive on benefits to this day. To go on for a first collection after all that, after discovering the sheet where pictures grew, must’ve been mad. I did bring out some books but only self-or-vanity-press published and my writing was mostly all rubbish. It was as if I was up against a democratising, balancing out mechanism that stops me winning with the things on my CV – as if the world is saying ‘no.’ To be fair I didn’t have an evil plan at all or any plan but never could get things together. To realise my creativity was my only real plan, and that would’ve included writing something as good as Morrison’s text.

Although it is a true story you might buy it as a fiction I have made up. Obviously I’d want to spread the Excellent News but learning to be wise might need to cover my tracks. Anyhow, you could say the infradiegetic heterotopia or chronotope or euchronia in which those events happened is “the Doors computer game.” Maybe that’s the setting for my own work too; and yet I don’t necessarily wish to write a novel, but a piece of literary criticism.

CHAPTER ONE: IMMEDIATE IMPRESSIONS

“Heavily spaced,” you could say, of the form of Jim Morrison’s duality of long poems - but then what? Could it have been the reason he died so young that he already brought a media-compression experiment into the world in the way that he did? A long time ago now, after my degree (a good degree) a book on The Lords And The New Creatures was something my Professors thought I should do; but I went off in different directions, none of which amounted to scholarship. “Some people think it’s as good as The Waste Land,” said Dr. Tony Sharpe, back then, and “the genius of the witness is elusive,” he also said as my degree was ending and I puzzled over the Intention behind Morrison’s text. I rather wish I had pursued a book of criticism on Morrison’s work; and did actually write a rather long essay on it that subjected it to sustained critical micro-analysis – which was only wasted on dead computers in the end.

I confess that my most recent reading of Morrison found it nowhere near as good as I remembered it from my adolescence. I read and reread it during my Sixth Form days and it truly was my favourite book. Still, entering courses where one follows the marks, it would not be wise to speak in the open about such a secret lover as I had. No, instead I claimed Crime And Punishment was my favourite – and although I love that too, I was neglecting to be open about my literary life.

At the time I first subjected Morrison to analysis, my reading had reached a saturation-point. I was able to say that when Morrison writes of dogs sniffing each other in The New Creatures he quotes Henry Miller without saying; and cutting back in with the statement “I am ghost-killer” by rhyming with the word “Miller” he creates what I would call an olfactory rhyme. Allen Ginsberg I would argue also employs an olfactory rhyme but in a different way: between the undisclosed concepts of his opening two poems.

In my original essay, I looked at the bit when Morrison writes “Fall down/ Strange gods arrive in fast enemy poses.” It seems to be Morrison tapping Huxley awoken in medias res in the middle of the trip in Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell.

I would’ve said that if The Waste Land is the flag-ship poem of Modernism, either or both of Morrison’s could be the flag-ship poem of postmodernism, where it is impossible to have an unmediated experience, and which is full of image-saturation bogging down the unconscious. I would’ve mentioned how increased rhythmical frenzy towards the end was still a common diegetic trait of both The Waste Land and the Morrison duality; and yet shown that there are differences inherent to their different ages such as a loss of belief in art’s ability to represent reality at all.

At the time I thought the opening image of The New Creatures – “Snakeskin jacket” – was thus because a) it was an image of shedding b) it snagged and tugged on the rug in the Feelies – that esemplastic cinema – in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. On my last reading of Morrison, however, I saw The New Creatures as nothing but an endless list!

The New Creatures was harder to read in my Sixth Form days than The Lords, but its ending, a beautiful example of the eschatological imagination, was stamped on my memory forever on but one reading. It was The Lords that I really fell in love with and reread many times. About it I would say Everything in a film is deliberate. Even a grain of dust. Likewise in Morrison’s poem which he described as “a thesis on film aesthetics,” there isn’t a spec of dust out of place. He arranged it so that you turn a page to find a particular line there and any messing around with the spacing and timing alters the meaning.

I shouldn’t forget to mention that at the time of writing this lost masterpiece on Jim Morrison’s poetry, my PC screen bloomed a numinous purple light daubing the walls; and it remained that way, albeit sometimes vacillating, for years. I felt like I was onto something in science. Science would probably say, however, and with a fairly unanimous voice too, that the less said the better about The Lords And The New Creatures; that the future of A. I, the possibility of other dimensions, Philip Pullman portals are all more interesting than the garbled nonsense of the green pages.

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

The Lords The New Creatures

orange pages green pages

spaces closed spaces open

doors open doors closed

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

I would say the correct endorsement was the witness ‘from’ The Lords And The New Creatures. Messrs ‘in’ and ‘of’ and ‘to’ and ‘from’ were all invited to that play. The witness ‘in’ was flat, in the book in 1969. The witness ‘of’ was the one standing there, attesting, in the 1990’s. The witness ‘from’ was the correct endorsement and the witness ‘to’ a mere formality after the correct endorsement was made. But let’s not go on about it. Let’s just say the way Morrison operates it is ambiguous, a thought-experiment, a test. He doesn’t necessarily write the book to force Naturalistic Observation through media-compression but I think he thinks, under the sun, where we are alive, animals essentially, it is going to happen. He reserves the right to say they are metaphors though, the new creatures, as Wallace Fowlie contends. I could go on for years about this and have elsewhere, on my last laptop: Locke on the Madness of The Lords And The New Creatures: I haven’t saved it on this new device. Anyhow, now it is night and I am awake and aware, witness or not.

CHAPTER TWO: THE IRISH ACCENT AND THE QUESTION OF ‘VISION’

Since first reading The Lords And The New Creatures I have also read Ulysses. Talk about not being able to branch out from Morrison ceases when you read Ulysses. Jim Morrison read it when he was a teenager – and so it would seem that The New Creatures in particular has an Irish accent. Take a line like:

“startling obedience from the pool people.”

He is encrypting something to do with life being a stream and every day being different from the last that he encountered in James Joyce. What I would like to say now, though it strays from textual analysis is that James Joyce saw new creatures too as well as myself as witness. Indeed you could ideate something of a chain called the chain of Dark Evolution. It would be a theory that states James Joyce saw new creatures too and his writing Ulysses may have then become the reason Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river in childhood; and Hughes writing The Hawk In The Rain (about the nature of visionary experience) then becomes the reason Jim Morrison is said to have seen winged serpents in the desert; and Jim writing The Lords And The New Creatures? Well, it is probably the case that someone (myself!) met not one but two. Thus there is a Logical Bond between Narrative and Naturalistic Observation that one might call the chain of Dark Evolution. Whether it be a right theory or not I do not know but take the stance of Bertrand Russell who says in History of Western Philosophy it is better to have a wrong theory than no theory at all.

I would also say that if you talk about The Lords And The New Creatures coming true, something kinetic becomes something static. It’s like John Barnes’s sensational goal against Brazil. Watching the action replay we know the ball is going in. We cannot give the uncertainty back to the moment. Something kinetic becomes something static.

In the case of Ted Hughes, he built up to writing about his Naturalistic Observation. It is present in his first volume and his second too. He became poet Laureate; and it was during his Laureateship that things got real for me. Ted Hughes might be worth mentioning on the nature of vision. Traditionally vision is demarcated from mere wild hallucination by containing something divine. Ted Hughes would say vision has thus been indoctrinated by the church who only brand Nature as evil – and he would say vision needs usurpation from the false hands of the false.

Blake was deemed a visionary because he breakfasted with angels and saw the sun as holy, not just a 2 pence piece; but Allen Ginsberg who was visited by the ghost of Blake and taught by that ghost the notes to the Songs of Innocence and Experience was deemed only mad. With Rimbaud there were those that went one way and those that went another. Some deemed it that he was a true visionary because he could look at a factory and see a mosque; others that it was mere wild hallucination.

It’s difficult to know with Jim Morrison whether he was a true visionary or not. I would say he was definitely a mystic as was James Joyce and that this is out of fashion at the moment, in a climate where many critics prefer things not to be mysticism-tinged but “unmisted.” If you believe in the aforementioned chain of Dark Evolution and that Morrison fits into it he is as much a visionary as the others in the chain, and his contribution was the pluralisation of the specimen that gets observed.

I suppose the problem is whether the witness should let you know or not. As a supposed “witness” I might meanwhile do as well writing about yesterday’s food as I would engaging in battle against Darwinian science. My brother Dr. Robert L G Tucker, who has read Ulysses twice, contended that the minute you become the witness, you become even less likely to win a Nobel Prize for science than you were before. This (in my opinion) is counter-intuitive to someone made witness like me for whom even genius is disappointing compared with what I have espied in boyhood. You know something extraordinary and remarkable has gone on on a scientific level but can’t come to grips with it.

CHAPTER THREE: REARRANGING PERCEPTION

I told you in The Lords as in film everything is deliberate. As Professor John Schad says, film has grammar; and even a spec of dust out of place would be undesirable. But check this out: the new edition of The Lords And The New Creatures as contained in The Collected Works of Jim Morrison has returned The Lords to a series of loose, scattershot-logical notes!

This I found infuriating, a disaster for my favourite long poem. Maybe they thought it was Machiavelli, or too dictatorial, or prone to being used as Nazi propaganda, or too totalitarian. Jim does say “Cinema is the most totalitarian of all the arts.” Anyhow, here I am venting my spleen, and guided by higher voices too, which let me know that within my scheme I seem to be renewing the wood! Don’t go there! Don’t go hunting for that booted away football!

It strikes me, going back to the former point, that if you leave large, gravid spaces, like stills, you are liable for people to run in and pour Ketchup so to speak. I like it when Jim speaks about novice silkworms that chance on opacity, stumble on the idea of rhythm. I like it also when he says move past them – go where waves come copulating, marrying together stunning juxtapositions of all unlikely Orders of Being. He doesn’t quite use these words but there is a subliminal text at times. When he talks of the “gray film” melting off the cheek, and saying farewell, he has something specific in mind that foreshadows the encrypted node of The New Creatures from within The Lords.

There are some interesting mirror-neuron-y things going on, such as the mention of wasps (i.e. creatures) in The Lords; and the line “fear The Lords who are secret among us” in The New Creatures. He also divides, suggestively, the image of children leaping into the shadow of a jet in The Lords and the bit about wings crashing on high winds of karma in The New Creatures. From the man made to the creaturely we see the division in that mirror-neuron-y connection, but the point is he failed to divide The Lords And The New Creatures entirely.

One of my favourite bits in The Lords is about 360 vision, but I don’t want to spoil it. I once read an article or even just conversation thread online by a woman who said she thought bits were brilliant but only a few bits, such as when Oswald escapes into a movie house in The Lords. Later on in his career Jim would write that when the true king’s murderers are left to roam free, a thousand magicians arise in the land. He really was, as he said, a “thought-provoking senator of lust.”

I love it when Jim talks about how a drug enacts a physical poem on the body. Around the time I read this I also read Brian Patten’s collection Little Johnny’s Confession where a schoolboy contemplates getting stoned on milk. I think it was a combination of these two things that led me to ideate the notion of a top-down drug called “Strictly Free” that does what it says on the tin, both is and makes you “strictly free” to consume. I suppose though that is just the narcostisation of air inbetween smokes. All this, this science, this art, this experiment, it was all interrupted at the time by September 11th and that was a great tragedy that had multifarious ramifications across all walks of life.

My speech in the den in the barn in 2000 was very Morrisonian, full of inventions, aphorisms, prophecies and artistic ambitions. Jim is good at thinking outside the box as they call it, and teaches you to do it too. If ever I was abused I find now only numbness. This Door book is part of why my family want me to die; and I left it too late to tell my brother James what I was put through. By now I sit here awaiting my fate, thinking my fate will resolve whatever that fate may be once I have finished a text I suppose I am duty-bound to produce.

We may never have another witness from The Lords And The New Creatures so should cherish it and nor should the witness be Anon, especially if he puts his heart and soul into a work, even if there is help from the State at hand, whom it seems are not so tyrannical after all if they permit a free and open face value discussion of the Revolutionary imagery I attested to in my boyhood.

CHAPTER FOUR: THROUGH THE WOODS

Okay I am going to be honest with you. As a witness, or even ‘the’ witness, in and of, to and from The Lords And The New Creatures, I feel an obligation to go deeper than merely studying words when I deal with the woods – but I don’t wish to stray on to the topic of biology in a philosophical text. I would say it is specious that “it’s all in your mind,” for the specimen is real and physical and independent of the witness’s thought. It has financial backing from adults, who might go to prison for it, that’s how real it is. When someone says “it’s all in your mind” that is because it is all in their mind, because they haven’t witnessed it and can only try and think of it to little avail. So it is that I journey from talking about words to leading us through the woods.

**

You don’t need to eat as much on a hot day. You can get up late in the afternoon and just have a piece of bread with humus. You don’t need a hot meal. And if you’re the witness, writing about yesterday’s food could be your Dorian Mode, or at least enough. I already wrote a Shakespearean sonnet about a cooked breakfast that contained every snooker ball colour – but the sad art police have made it very plain that my poetry has to be Anon, with weird insistence, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t think it right, and agree with John Stuart Mill that a progressive country can quickly become backwards if there is a decrease in Individuality. But that is by the by. My Shakespearean sonnet was never that good but at least the idea for it came from within.

**

What can you do when you become the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison? As stated, my latest thinking is that my dad was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness. The first was, I believe, something also attested to by James Joyce in time before me, which is written about in Ulysses. The second – it struck me only recently – was an actual monster, albeit very small and albeit contained to a plastic rectangular card.

With the first I went into the wood to get the booted away ball, and as I stood looking for the ball, it came from the right, crossed my body, parked and started to wriggle its little wing. This caused me to run and upon returning to the wood to hunt for it, it was not to be found. I think it was meant to look like a hoax but still exist in meaning.

With the second, I tried on a jacket under the stairs and got a sense something was wrong and took it off and looked inside… “mum!” I cried up the pine, wooden stairs. “There’s something disgusting growing in this jacket!”

I was ignored and it was a flat plastic rectangle with a pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds – splurged on top of it. I did not leave it to soak in water like a good scientist might. I left the room and went back in to see if it would still be there as the wood had taught me – and it was. So I made the decision to bin the whole jacket. Still you shouldn’t write about what you cannot renew.

**

Meanwhile there is an equation blowing in the wind. Permutation is how the inner game of music operates. Not sine wave with minus sign coursing through. Tony Eade the gay maths teacher stood with his arms in a T and spoke in a strange tone when announcing to the boarders that it was chess club tonight. Intention – what is my Intention, but to shed scientific light, to make an imaginative advance, to contribute to the history of knowledge and maybe make the world a better place? In this world we are all equals. The image is of Egyptian mystery. Maybe. You don’t need a knife to achieve it.

**

To still be writing about the woods would be evil. That’s why it would be better to write about anything else, even the war America and Israel are now waging on Iran. Or the way Informationist poets used to send text messages into space, for example “liquid crystal meth.” Or even the peace and tranquillity that descends, momentarily at least in the quietened kitchen. The fridge drone has stopped for example, the whispering in the chimney subsided. The clock tick tocks but the Tap does not drip. Away in the cupboard, empty medicine packets build up so fast, but it is past the hour, now, when literature is a machine for remembering to take your meds. There is a séance of voices, if that be the collective noun, trying to appear, that were ongoing a few moments ago before this lull; and I don’t know what to make of them, how to translate or interpret them. Yes there are objects scattered about the room, and as my dad used to say “no nukes is good nukes,” always on the look out for a catchy saying (also see “Paul Scholes scores goals.”) Wouldn’t it be nice to be a philosopher? Or a scientist? Or a mathematician? So often in moments of reflection I “count things…” and I wonder why this is. I’d prefer to see a vision of a woman leaning back in tights, saying “do the lines,” like a ladder to Heaven, than I would talk about the wood, and how I was the hero, who liberated evolution from its tyranny.

**

Maybe, you have to open a Quantum Field of Intelligence. One of my tricks as a child was to say, when we were looking for something, “oh, iiiiiii know where it ISN’T.” Then I would point to places where it was not. “It isn’t there!” I would say wasting everyone’s time, turning the business of looking for something into a joke. The point was to make them think I did know where it is, that I was saying “oh, iiiiiiiiii know where it is,” but then to let them down.

Maybe, you have to open a quantum field of intelligence when you are bombarded with something that seems real, that you have to take in, and which then appears to disappear when you go back into the wood to hunt for it. I couldn’t tell you which is preferable out of the expression “Barnes has scored a chicken” and “Barnes hasn’t scored a chicken.”

I was overloaded, already by the first specimen. I used to sit on the bus – did I tell you? – and, as top of the form – ask myself in all srsness if the farm local to the school had a secret, underground lab where unsound experiments were conducted on animals and if one had got away. In all honesty I had to leave the school over the trivial matter of drawing a crude picture and blaspheming at the scene of a road accident on the school bus, before I could find out the answer to the question.

What my mother was doing while this was happening, well, she thought in the end I had helped invent the net back before any of this new creature malarkey got real. If so, it was when some scientists came round to the house – when I was seven - and got my dad to get me to write a book storing the idea of the net in the attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world and keep it free. If the theory has come into dispute it’s because I had no conscious memory of having done that, but I suppose I have been very busy ever since and I also suppose the net as we now know it didn’t instantly materialise back when the book was written, when it was stored in the attic for Long Storage without my being able to read it.

The problem I still now face as witness is doing good. One would’ve thought that the most obvious way I can do that is highlight that hidden parts of government hold a monopoly on evolution, can send a snake by telepathy, don’t change hands when a new power comes in, that the business of democracy is a sham, that this is why The Lords And The New Creatures is a good test, as if a spiritual or germ x-ray that finds the germs of dictatorship on all hands. But saying that am I really doing good? I am probably stirring up trouble for myself most likely. There must be some way to celebrate what happened. It may have been a mistake but it was not an accident and the motivation of the people that actually funded it remains unknown.

**

A project on the dinosaurs isn’t a bad reaction to becoming the witness. I remember when in the wake of becoming the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures I wrote a school project on the dinosaurs. I was ten or eleven; and my piece was scholarly and boring. The girls at the back meanwhile did the 60’s, stuck in bits of velvet and denim, made it all about fashion and music that didn’t include the Doors. My project too might’ve included more on the Doors. My last line was “last Autumn, two biologists announced that they had cloned the DNA of a forty-million-year-old, extinct stingless bee found in amber.” It was the best bit. It was the only bit that indicated my own Observations were “real as Jurassic Park.”

**

Water is the universal solvent. Water, water, clairvoyant daughter, please show us your ragged silken eye. I remember passing out in chapel and waking in a different room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.

It strikes me now that this moment was a naturally occurring fossil of art rather than life. It was because I was the witness. Morrison obvs starts his text “Look where we worship.” That was why I went down as easily as smashed glass on chapel floor. The bit where “both our dads had chainsaws” is the best bit in the whole story.

**

The appearance of a black beetle while you write means “you’re done.” So often, trying to decide what to do about my literature, my file/s open on the laptop, I suddenly see a black beetle scurrying across the floor. Normally I see it as a bug from the cover of Syd Barrett’s solo album Barrett but always as a sign that I should pursue a weed-reeking insect collection of rock songs – always a sign that I should pursue the music. Until tonight that is, where I told my mother the above, and she said it doesn’t mean to pursue the music, it means “you’re done.” It means whatever you are presently working on is finished. There is of course a long history in Jung where there is a scarab beetle, signifying whatever it signifies in dreams – and now to have this messenger, it is a good feeling to know what it means. I cannot say where mum got the information from to say that it means I am done, but I can believe her, for mums are often right. So it is that I pack the present file, which goes on and on in scattershot-logical ways away for when I get another chance. I mean, I was only just getting started but now am being closed down by the insectivorous kingdom. The point is even if I undid everything I have done and left myself a blank slate for starting again, I would still probably see the black beetle. So maybe I shouldn’t base my decisions on superstition; but maybe it is as valid a sign as any that I will receive and I should go by it religiously.

CHAPTER FIVE: SOME FURTHER THOUGHTS ON A BIOLOGICAL THEME

One point that may be made may be more obvious to biologists who haven’t attested to the Observations as I did. Darwin, who is bound to come up in the discussion, differentiates between variation that is born of Natural Selection and variation that is man-made. But I hear, in the myriad of voices, that it doesn’t make any difference. This however is surely debatable when it comes to the specimens I met. There are those, that is, that disqualify my attestations because they were done with a gun, so to speak, part of an illegal art smuggling ring, with financial backing. Again you would hope for the biologists to say “it doesn’t make any difference,” but this time, maybe it does, and does so because of the law.

**

Ultimately you have to think of cancer. My dad, who was sponsored to provide the witness, ended up dying of eleven tumours in the liver. My mother is Finnish and they don’t have The Lords And The New Creatures. When I mentioned it in Finnish company my Uncle said very discretely that they don’t talk about it in Finland because it leads to cancer. And look at my dad. He didn’t tell my mum, possibly because it was too risky, what was going on, that he’d named his sons after the Doors, who William Blake was, how The Lords And The New Creatures did the rounds at the Isle of Wight festival. But he still died of cancer, as if the secrets he kept metastasised. It could be why nobody wants to go through with it, discussing the topic, and why you’ll never win a Nobel Prize for science, if you’re the witness, regardless of how good your science is and whatever else you do. That’s part of why I was abused as a child, why they say my book must only be between myself and the State and not go on my Blog, why nobody has anything to be jealous of with regards to my life story, my insane CV.

**

If I could start again I wouldn’t put a plus sign for an ‘f’ in the line “I have a scar+ that is red and black.” I would aim my research at the King and try to be William’s Laureate. But maybe my experiment into the maths of the new colour undermines the cancer gnawing at my genome? Once again I feel forbidden from expanding on that, by law and common sense alike, except to say that acid isn’t flaccid and culture is transmitted as well as genes as evinced by the maths itself. I am not duty bound to reveal it all, but could easily do so, and you’d only be disappointed by it, or even enraged. You can always read The Sunset Child, which is my seven year old Prep, where the experiment was first conducted, should you wish to see the fragments that remain.

**

If it is harbouring secrets that gives rise to cancer, one would’ve thought I should bring a text like this to publication, but there are aesthetic issues to do with repetition within a body of work that is crass to commit to print. I trust my brother and mother’s judgement against it, while being lost in my own world, not knowing wrong from right. The State might say “we can see you are trying to redeem us of all evil but we think the witness has to get tortured and killed in prison to redeem us of all evil.” At least this is what voices confer. If you were the witness, you might be charged with the responsibility of affecting social change for the better, like doing away with violence and torture in prison, which government after government has failed to tackle. In other words the job might extend beyond merely attesting to weird specimens. After all Jim Morrison sings in ‘Shaman’s Blues’ “will you stop? Will you stop? Will you stop the pain?” As the subject becomes painful, with monotonous and threatening voices encroaching, one can stop the pain only on the most immediate level of turning to a different file. As Neil Curry writes in the poem ‘Skulls,’ which is addressed to John Wood, “we walked away talking of flowers instead.”

**

Prompted by voices, I am back, back to the discussion, about my dad’s cancer. He had Hep C which affects the liver and was always going to get liver cancer. It might not have been the secrets he kept. And Hep C, by the way, probably did not originate in The Lords And The New Creatures as in a binary-machine striving to give birth to a third category. But you can imagine me, grieving, in mental hospital, thinking I had made another scientific breakthrough – understood that Hep C originated in The Lords And The New Creatures. That bit Morrison is in the desert and looks at the stars and says “so many pigeons ripe with new diseases.” He really thought his way into the anthropomorphism very well. And I did ask a medical professional that time in mental hospital about my dad’s Hep C, and he said there was no chance it arose as a result of Morrison’s binary-machine. So it might not all be doom and gloom. There might be a lot of superstition surrounding the topic of Morrison’s work, like stigma too. Morrison’s work did invite evolution, but the mutation of Hep C was not one of the things that resulted, I hear.

**

My dad left behind a green notebook containing a list of French vocabulary, ostensibly; but the vocab list was also a code that can be cracked, revealing a poem. It was masterfully done and in it he implies “the order of the colours of the vowels is scrambled because they are wild animals.” It’s a similar point to the one about language being born of meat and therefore my being able to say anything and it still fitting in to a poem about animals.

**

One further point. When I was a kid there was a big family mystery as to what happened to James’s Gameboy. Some said he left it on a train, when it had disappeared. I, who was the witness, who didn’t discuss that matter of my being the witness with my siblings, entertain even to this day that James’s Gameboy was transformed into the second specimen I mention. That is the extent of my open-ness, my uncertainty, my quantum field of intelligence. That is also the extent of the evolutionary possibilities that were available before. I hope it hasn’t changed.

**

CHAPTER SIX: A GIANT SPIDDER

Imagine if after all this writing and all this life I got to the age of 44 and there was a new specimen! It would be part spider and part machine and crawl under your bed as you watched it, and leave you terrified, hiding under the covers. It would be bigger than a daddy long legs but still quite small. As for the bit where it’s part machine, you assume it’s a spider carrying something on its back, but then you realise it’s another specimen and one you might have designed and desired yourself. You hid from it under the duvet, hoping it wouldn’t crawl up on top of you but stay under the bed. Life goes on. The story you told about your childhood is unending. It is life itself, not narrative.

A moment ago a blessed and golden light lay everywhere in the Keatsian Autumn. I thought how Autumn is Optimus Prime, ate an apple from the orchard, and saw how laden with gold everything was out the window – but now a foul rain is falling. The music on the stereo in the kitchen measures this change by changing from The Kinks to the Doors. I myself at my screen also change, Protean in diversity, from doors open to doors closed. The subject matter shifted back to the new creatures and the new development in the story. One wishes to quote Jung who says the numinosity of a series of events only increases according to the number of items in the series. A book that starts to smell of perfume could be the word of a dog. The Oyster card reader on the bus saying BACKPASS ATTEMPTED instead of NO MONEY could be a psychotechnological post-poem – but both could be items in the Jungian sense. Still it is more Jung’s work on synchronicity that one feels an obligation to cite when the weather seems to change according to something else. Anyhow I would consider that we have had another specimen, though am not 100%, and that this time it wasn’t the philosophers that sponsored my dad but the herd-crowd in the Nietzschean sense, the audience, the friends and contemporaries, the lake. I would say it was a Nike Air spider, hatched since people my own age discovered I was the witness long ago and had been waylaid. All of a sudden I get a massive wave of emotional recall, think of my father and wish to cry, but can’t. Again it was a hybrid. These new creatures are created by smashing old creatures together, or old things in general. Who knows what was up with that spider? What was it carrying on its top? In my seven year old book, there’s one about seeing “a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine that was what it was coming from.” Maybe this was just that.

So it seems this changes everything of my story, renews it. And why should new creaturely attestation be the sole privilege of a young boy? I rather think it would be better if it was an adult making observations, a scientist even. But as I say upon seeing this spider scurrying towards me out of the blue, on the floor as I sat on the bed looking down at the floor, and seeing it going under the bed, I hid under the duvet.

If you ask yourself “was it a new creature?” the answer is “yes. Of course it was a new creature.” And in my sensing this I become the one that is new, and that comes with the danger of becoming a celebrity which with my illness I do not want under any circumstances. I called it a Nike Air spider but it was a celebrity spider among spiders. It’s almost like live mutation is contagious between us.

The first specimen was the juggernaut, in the wood. The second was the plastic spreadsheet in the lining of the jacket in the cloakroom under the stairs. I believe but might be wrong these were just continuities in a pre-existing chain of Naturalistic Observations; and that I myself in passing through the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, might, might have become the third specimen myself. Then there was an incident in a wood where a muntjac, seemingly at least, ran from the witness. Some friends and I stood still in a wood and I got a strange, fertile Sixth sense that we were not alone and turned my head to the left at the exact time a muntjac, looking brown and stumpy, ran out from underneath a large bracken frond and disappeared into the wood. Because the specimen ran from the witness, as if the witness was the new creature, I still count it as an observation. I wouldn’t actually say the island of penguins (so to speak) was necessarily in the same chain but it was a remarkable event that happened next. At some point I also found myself in the caravan at the foot of the fell with my brothers, drinking and smoking and playing guitar, and got a strange, fertile Sixth Sense that the dog had run off and was trapped on a fence miles away at the farm barking. So we walked up in the night and found that I was right. We brought him back home and continued our party. These are the specimens I have known, and I believe now there is another addition to the list.

It had to be a spider and also had to be a bad monkey funky spider, but why I might not be able to say. I am thinking already of what happened when I put my seven year old text out there as the real homework of the real witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. It was that, and yet it was also something I did with the government to help the internet into being. As I say it contains a piece where “we saw a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine that was what it was coming from.” That “giant spidder” as I called it could’ve been the net, but now this specimen has been seen, this spider, the Nike Air spider, the celebrity spider – and I cannot resist but to comment that one of the scientists that got me to help invent the net as a kid was called Spider! I remember he taught me a song at the piano. I think part of the maths if not all of it in the boyhood book was his. That is, I think he structured the equation on the front, to do with the ‘E’, but that it was I who did the ‘f’. I can’t remember this far back but I feel like we are getting back to those days with this new perception. Immediately upon me exclaiming to my family that there has been a new specimen, and that it’s part spider part machine, I think my brother James doubts it instantly. For him, I imagine it’s like the time I said I saw a hologram of Bob Dylan walking round Glastonbury on acid (which was not true). I love the way it’s so difficult to believe but that’s the feeling you get upon setting eyes on these things, the proof if you will. The experience of making an encounter is visual to you and the surprise of it to you when you relay it to someone else comes out as fantasy or delusion. What is a visual surprise to you – that feeling of seeing it – of being punctured and convinced - translates via language as something to doubt the reality of. This is natural and in one sense proves the validity of the specimen being “new” and the experience of seeing it as strange. All of a sudden I sense my job may not be over. It’s almost like the way things have been set up, in terms of apparatus and literature alike, a weird specimen would be the only triumph of hope as an outcome.

It did look very strange, larger than a daddy long legs and carrying something on its back, and you suspend judgement even though it looks strange and entertain that some evolutionary scientist out there knows something in terms of an explanation. So you yourself also doubt it, but then comes a time where you need to take the lead and your brother needs to doubt, and the protagonist in the play we’re in does believe in fashioning new specimens including the evolutionary possibility of part spider part machine. It’s just the nature of the play we’re in that the protagonist believes in these things, when he takes the lead, against all odds.

I think what my old English teacher didn’t like about Lord of The Flies was that the mystic character Simon says “the beast is us,” falsifying it, whereas in life, the true mystic character is the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures, the witness who really does attest to borderline things of an X or ‘other’ nature.

If I may take a moment I would like to regale you again with what I do. My latest thinking is that my dad was (possibly) sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. Already at seven I helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world it was I that wrote it. At eight I made two Naturalistic Observations I didn’t understand. At eleven I was marked by a boyhood experiment into the maths of the new colour, and it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. Soon enough I attained the island of penguins. It may have been observed on the other side of the universe. In 2000 I predicted September 11th, spoke against it, also prophesied the God Particle, the alignment and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation. After school, I recorded an album on state of the art, binaural earphones. I had an effervescent mobile phone reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang. I climbed up on the binaural earphone album and said I would “plug my senses in the mains,” hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, spotted a tattoo 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. It was my brother’s sheet originally, so I surrendered it over. It then became time to start bringing books out, including a falsification of the Nirvana barcode, and also for a while I attained visual radio broadcasting dreams.

I was told “you’re not getting any more,” and thought there was nothing more for me to see or do in the room, but tentatively invest belief that there has, as stated, been a new specimen again. My mother is yet to see it, though I did give her a copy of The Lords And The New Creatures recently and have been trying to let her in slowly to the nature of dad’s experiment. Meanwhile there are flies in the house, and meanwhile also, my computer files are monsters. The appearance of a mousse might, in a poem, symbolise a bike riding itself.

So I see this is what can be achieved by evening when you get up in the morning. So “I don’t know” is the answer to your question. But they won’t let me win a Nobel Prize for science whatever I do because I am not prepared to renew the one with the fire-dance. I don’t’ really care about that… as long as the work is good enough, it’s enough validation on its own. Quite the reverse, though, I do realise I look a bit stupid with this new specimen. It was weeks ago that I saw it and only just put it down in words. So it can’t have been that drastic a matter. And truly it could’ve been an extra large daddy long legs carrying something of equal size to it on its back. It becomes a question of faith. The ones in my boyhood were not a question of faith, were undeniable and indubitable – but now the science is open again you’re starting to doubt it, no doubt, because I am talking of a new specimen like I am that is, I quote, half spider half machine! But it would be typical of life to wait until you are set and then present a new specimen upsetting the fixity of things. I cannot say with any certitude, meanwhile, that the Nike Air spider really was a new specimen, but it genuinely might’ve been… I hear to suspend judgement is a sign of intelligence and that the more intelligent you are the more gullible you are, or the more likely to entertain incredulous things. Emerson said intelligence is the ability to entertain a truth without investing belief and I would urge you, dear, gentle reader, to do just that with this new specimen. It took about 30 years to get to the bottom of the last ones from boyhood, and even then, I am still not sure what my dad’s art deal was all about, or who sponsored him for what.

Even though I only caught a two second glimpse at the Nike Air spider before it scurried under the bed, I would, if pressed, say that what it carried on its back was thread. Something made of thread. Something like a thin piece of string, in a woven pattern, or a single Quaver from a pack of Quavers crisps tied down with a thread, strapped on its back. It really is getting ridiculous as to what qualifies a new specimen, in terms of old things being smashed together, in terms of how little it takes, by means of hybridisation and juxtaposition, to tip a creature’s identity into the new bracket. I don’t think it was a Quaver crisp on its back, strapped in with some delicate white thread, but it was something like that. I know nothing of spiders, of zoology, of evolutionary science, outside The Lords And The New Creatures story, so cannot tell you if it was nest-building. It was definitely something of which I caught a two second glimpse as it scurried under the bed, away from prying eyes.

If I were pressed in an exam, as I say, I would argue that I saw this new specimen because my seven year old book helped invent the net; and when I published it I sold it to you as the real homework of the real witness, which was also true; and if you look through it, one of the most poignant and Doorsian bits is when my brother and I see “a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine that’s what it was coming from.” This is a symbol of the net, this giant spidder in the seven year old book. The story goes on to say, after all, that “just then I fell into a cobweb.” And I would say this new specimen is to do with that, but in what way I cannot see. It could be that the interlude between me helping invent the net as a boy and knowing I did, as an adult, is the interlude it took for this spider to come crawling home to me. It was not a normal spider, nearer an attention-seeking device.

These things always seem to elude capture. You may caress the image only with the eye! Jim Morrison described camera as “mechanical hermaphrodite/ androgynous machine” and that rings true when it came to the first specimen. If only there was a knife at hand to plunge into it and tell of its texture! Given that Cinema might be the Transforming Agent it might interesting! But this is codswallop! And the second specimen didn’t evade capture! It was still! I did away with it because it was plain evil to the naked eye and sometimes regret it still to this day, but who would go to the zoo to show their children a monster like that, when it would only upset the children on account of it being evil? This new specimen I mention, it might’ve been a spider carrying something on its back, as I say, but the boyhood book I wrote, as mentioned before, seems to offer a different story. Maybe it was the knowledge that I helped invent the net, stored in an animal visitation, coming home to me. “It really was you that invented the net,” said the spider, finally saving the day. “Really?” I said and it “yes. You wrote a little book when you were 7 that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world.” “Oh,” I said, “that’s nice.” “Yes,” said the spider, “but before you go boasting, know there were adults at the time to guide you, and there are others that did more.” “And what about you?” I asked the spider. He said “I’m a spidder. Not a spider but a spidder. A type of creature envisioned by the kid that helped invent the net. You invented me in your 7 year old book.” “That’s interesting,” I said “because it was likely a spelling mistake, but it’s turned out to be a mutation.” He said “the difference between me and a normal spider, as you can see, is the same as the difference between a spider and a spidder.” He was a character from my seven year old book and had a delicate ornament made of fine white string on his back, maybe a spider-harp.

I use conversation for scientific ends, so something child-like is underwritten by something grown up. Who knows what they are born of? Crisis, despair, imagination, mathematics? It is through imagination – also apostrophe – and dialogue – that I try to make sense of it and how the visual difference between what I saw and a normal spider is the same Taxonomic difference between the word “spider” and the word “spidder.” I don’t know but it sounds like the biological equivalent of Derrida’s “differ(A)nce.” Whatever the case I feel somewhat stranded by amazement… there I was writing a book about childhood Observations when another came along! It makes you want to start the book again, but then you wouldn’t have the sense of surprise and the unforeseeable.

CHAPTER SEVEN: FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE SPIDDER

As a musician I take my cue from music when in medias res. Hendrix would always take the jam back to the riff. So it is that I return our concerns to matters of The Lords And The New Creatures. What would Jim Morrison make of the spidder? I like it when he talks of cars as engine beasts muttering their soft talk (“a delight at night to hear their quiet voices again after all these years.”) You can tell he’s on drugs, though, and has a warped perception of time. I think those “engine beasts” may have been the inspiration for the children’s cartoon Transformers but it’s only a guess. I also think when he mentions “bitter grazing in sick pastures” he foresees ecstasy-taking. It’s not the only foresight in the book either. He fairly foresees the internet. He says something about the city as a severed insect mound or “web.” “All citizens heir to the same royal parent,” he writes. This is in The New Creatures, and I love it. The net is also foreseen in a Utopian vision in James Joyce, who calls it “the net” in Ulysses. I think both would be delighted if I really have encountered a spidder. If I don’t get a chance to finish a text about it, I can always say it’s already contained in my boyhood book The Sunset Child.

Now I think that people who doubted I was the witness may be more inclined to believe it, but I might be wrong about that. Like my book it left you wondering “what the Hell was that thing?” A delicate contraption it would seem. I’ve seen some daddy long legs in my time but this one was different, a different category and order. It’s like when I met Grand-darth’s Ship: a pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds – splurged on top of a plastic rectangle inside a jacket. You could just tell from the pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds – that it was too regimented. It indicated difference, possibly man-made difference. The same was true of the spidder. I cannot tell if the contraption on its back contained man made cotton, but it was like it was carrying something made of thread. If it was part of the creature, so be it. You get down into what is organic and what is not and find the whole internet is as organic as a spider’s web. You find even LSD is fungal and flung from the centre of the sun. This spidder was a complication of things. As a child, in the web-book, I wrote “my monster goes to bed at six/ before bed he likes white string and tricks.” We were trying to give rise to the net all the way round the world, as you know. And look at how big it is now! Immense science has gone on. It is not true that science is dead. Even the car parked outside the window, in a resting position, proves that. It runs on equations none of the drivers understand. But that is just the perception at first hand. What would it take for a daddy long legs to be considered a machine? If it was complicated by a contraption of “white string and tricks” maybe symbolising the internet too, it could be a machine. But what I am talking about is so obtuse I don’t know if I should carry on. It was a contraption and it was a spider, at the same time = it was a spidder. And I do feel like it’s almost a matter of computer science to talk about it. It’s a convergence of computer science and zoology. If the original “vision of a giant spidder” in the seven year old book symbolised the net, then the creature I call a spidder that I observed with my own senses a little while back also symbolises the net.

I think the important point is that in my boyhood it was The Lords And The New Creatures “getting real” and now it is my book from boyhood, which is published as The Sunset Child, getting real. So there has been a succession. The boyhood witness’s book, that is, is now what is getting real in the story. So this spidder only at a remove or two qualifies as The Lords And The New Creatures happening, for it is the witness’s own book that is “happening.” I might be wrong about this: it might still be that it’s happening because my dad was sponsored to provide the real, human witness from Morrison’s book and it was me. It’s amazing how such small a detail can unhinge the mind. I say small but the spider was obviously different. It looked mechanistic. Like it was carrying a harp made of fine white string on its back. And yes this time we point our audience to The Sunset Child, not to The Lords And The New Creatures. Jim Morrison’s book ages and becomes the grandfather not the son.

So you might remember my talking about what I called “The chain of Dark Evolution,” which includes observations made by Joyce, Ted Hughes, Jim Morrison and myself – and if it is true the chain has entered the Digital World. So Nature itself is going online so to speak. It still leaves you in a state of compounded misunderstanding. The new creatures as I have met them all seem to be compounds, that is, alloys, hybrids, mongrelisations. They all contain stunning juxtaposition. In the case of the bird, I shall not say; in the case of the plastic spreadsheet it was plastic + organic matter; in the case of the spidder it was the contraption made of thread or string that it carried on its back.

Seeing as in boyhood there was a pair, one might start to ask of the next Observation in the line. That is, I can’t keep writing about a two second glimpse of a spidder forever, but should try and broaden my literary horizon somewhat. It scurried so fast under the bed because it would’ve been so easy to kill and it – or even Nature’s grand design – didn’t want that. But now I am making things up. How to translate experience into a true science I do not know. There are no “Venn diagrams” or “family trees” or “graphs” in my work. To extrapolate something from the given facts is hard. If it is true I was the witness when I was young, I think I’ll be the witness until I die, and that it is other people, who are not the witness, that maybe, maybe, wish for the job to not be over – for further specimens – for the continuation of the story. I think of these three specimens now, and yes I do also include myself as a specimen given the experiment into the maths of the new colour, and do include the muntjac episode because the specimen ran from the witness… could it be true that the animal kingdom knows I myself am a specimen? Darwin would call what happened to me w/r/t/ being marked by the maths of the new colour “speciation.” He said there is an extent of variation among a species that means an incipient species is born. His theme was that death is Mother Nature’s way of bringing new species into being. W/r/t the stripe on my body, it’s a line of mathematical code. But I don’t wish to speak of this… for it only means my death will be like Jesus unto those that know, and I don’t wish to show the mark that was left. Suffice to say the nurse in A and E when I needed to pee said “we think you’ve reinvented the human form.” I think the witness always was going to look like that, when caught up in all the evolutionary science and also the pseudo-science of it all. There was always going to be a small sign of evolution within the witness himself.

So it is that even though I have lost the ability to ejaculate I still do what I do. I was the boy who helped invent the net and who was also the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures and yes I do entertain that these things have converged in the case of the latest observation, the latest specimen.

CHAPTER EIGHT: WAITING IN THE WINGS OF EVOLUTION

So it is that I am back to considering The Lords And The New Creatures my favourite book. That was the way it was in Sixth Form, as I say; and I go exclusively from memory in this report. I gave a copy to my younger brother James whom it would seem said it was good but not as good as his own book. I gave a copy to my mother and she said you have to be stoned to read it. But being the witness I naturally think it a fine piece of work and emulation is weak but I would wish to do something like it. I am thinking now of where the spidder came from. I hope you don’t mind me using a child’s mis-spelling as a new creature’s Taxonomy. It seemed to shoot out from under a pile of clothes on my floor but I didn’t see it actually crawl out, only noticed it when it was crawling towards me as I sat on the bed. I think now of the “warm wheel turning” in The New Creatures, like some kind of green wheel of conceptual synaesthesia that can churn out observations. Otherwise I am not sure where it was hatched. Maybe it was forced through media compression. Maybe we are dealing not with science but with magic… I can see how the first specimen might’ve been seen as magic not science. But the second, in the same teleology, was a plastic spreadsheet at the start of the net, which makes it sound scientific. Then again, calling it a literal monster… you could be looking at mythology. This is a wildly out of key perception though because the second was at bottom sterile and available to sensory perception unto others – it physically went in the bin with my doing hand. The diagnosis that the living spreadsheet was a monster is a scientific diagnosis. The moment of diagnosis is a scientific one. Then with myself as the third specimen, you’d need to see what I am not prepared to show because it is private. I still think it a scientific specimen, not magic, for as stated the stripe is a line of mathematical code. Then there were other things – experiments, halfware, trons, as well as starry nights and all sorts across the board – and now the spidder. No, I would not say it was magic rather than science. The first specimen may have been, that bird in the wood, the juggernaut; but the spidder was scientific. It was to do with the net in ways I have been trying to explain. And that link between Narrative and Naturalistic Observationism is still there. If you remember me talking about the chain of Dark Evolution, it was as if what I write determines what the next observation will be for someone else – but it seems to have arrived with me instead of the next visionary in the line.

Reality may be porous with portals through which new creatures can leak. This is one answer to the question of what egg hatched for example, say, what we are calling “the spidder.” If no egg hatched it, then reality may be porous with portals through which new creatures can leak. They may wait in the wings of evolution, at the threshold of perception, the edge of Natural Selection, waiting to be born. Another suggestion comes from Chaos Theory: that things can be born of “spontaneous self-organisation.” In Chaos Theory you find “Strange Attractors” that linger on the border of chaos and order and which are born of spontaneous self-organisation.

The latter reminds of my brother’s sheet where pictures grew. It may not be a living creature, but is at least a concrete example of “something appearing from nothing” that we can hold in our doing hands. It all begs the question as to whether or not someone out there knows you have seen, say, what we are calling the Spidder, before you have written about it. That is, it may be a top-down government issue, but I don’t want to bring in the State. It could be that I am alone in my perceptions and that nobody, still, believes I was or even am the witness. I think I am the witness still, and that this new specimen confirms it.

I remember once writing about The Lords And The New Creatures when my dog Baxter, who used to bark at my supposedly clinical and delusional voices, started to bark at something in the scullery on the floor and I went next door and found a tiny lizard in the middle of winter on the floor. I picked it up with a tissue and took it outside. There was also an occasion when a bat must’ve got down the chimney for all of a sudden in a room without any other explanation, a bat was just circling the air. There was also a time at a festival called The Secret Garden Party. I went with my old band The Flood, and it was amazing, because there was skywriting, but the next morning, after the skywriting, I woke to find only my own tent was covered, utterly, with bird poo, in a field crammed with tents where you couldn’t fit another tent. There was something shamanic going on to do with my being the witness. I attracted the animals. But now I have strayed from the point, in giving too many examples, that reality may be porous with portals through which new creatures can leak. If so, it would seem there is no consensus or objective reality. This is not news to most, for whom reality is already a dream-vision. The threshold of resolution, or of perception, is not the end of the show but the start of Natural Selection.

But now I suppose it’s the same for writing about the bird from childhood – that something kinetic becomes something static and you shouldn’t write of what you cannot renew. So it is that I pack my spidder diagram away, and try to think of something else to say.

Mother’s in the kitchen. She breaks an egg. I suddenly remember the living spreadsheet from boyhood – and how I couldn’t tell if the organic matter was eggs or seeds. What if that was what hatched the recent spidder all these years later? What if their continuation is stretched over time like that? It would doubtless make more sense to humanity, if that was true: if there was continuity in their species over time.

So imagine them existing on a higher plane, where they remain hidden, until the time is right, then through some portal they appear. But what triggers their appearance? Is it human writing? Are they messengers that punctuate the history of Man’s learning? Might it be that the interlude between the plastic spreadsheet when I was 8 and the spidder now that I am 44 is actually much shorter unto them? This idea that there is a higher plane, is interesting. Also that there are portals. Already in my writing, I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too; and Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance – but that is by the by. I am thinking of the idea of a higher, mathematical plane where new creature observations wait until the time is right. If so, then why was the time right when it came to the Spidder? Was it something I said or rather wrote? We must not forget that language evolved out of meat, out of growing our brains by eating meat, and needing to spread information about farming, hunting, killing and cooking meat. Anything I say is in the anthropomorphic sense. My life goes on inside The Lords And The New Creatures. Looking for sense and looking for light can be hard. It is an intertextual existence to some extent, and McDonalds is the snake in the garden of Eden, and the Big Mac which contains the 4 basic caveman cravings of salt, fat, sugar and protein, is the heir to the Apple of Knowledge and I might get ill if I continue to write in this vein, so for now might leave it there.

CHAPTER NINE: RANDOM MEMORIES

I remember one of the first uses of an animal as a metaphor for something human was when the girl in the primary school toilets said I was “like an elephant.” We would’ve been at an age where we watch Disney films in the cinema, like Bambi. I was a big fan of those early films… and is the alphabet Nellie the Elephant’s suicide note? And can your gf not go veggie for reasons of Disney? Essentially Man is but another animal. John Gray the philosopher says the Bible went wrong in separating Man and the animals. I love the poetry of Ted Hughes, who brings us closer to Nature, who uses animals to signify human traits. I wonder of the monster he saw in the river in boyhood… having seen a monster myself, I know they needn’t be very big, but I would hazard a guess that Ted’s monster was much bigger. To think that all these strange observations are linked in a family blows my mind. It would make sense though if you could apply Darwinism to them. Ted Hughes ended up saying the monster was himself; but in my case there was a plastic card with a pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds – splurged on top in an un-naturally regimented way. That it came from within is a horrible thought. It was pure evil to behold.

In those days we were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the four of us Tucker siblings, in the game. I think the guys that sponsored my dad to provide the witness turned up and were suddenly called Bebop and Rocksteady because they were bad guys from the Turtles. That’s how young I was when it was all happening. The first specimen was a hybrid… even the specimen James Joyce encountered was a hybridisation, a smashing together of two old things to make something new. It was the wrong time to go hunting for that football in the wood.

Ted was Laureate when I wrote my seven year old book and also made observations at eight. He espoused the Freudian notion that the poet creates the framework of a fantasy world in order to deal with energies suppressed in the bass of the spine and unconscious. Talk of the poet washing up, and there being crocodiles hiding beneath the soapy bubbles would fit into that category. You start to think surfaces are deceptive, and get into the reptilian core of the brain. The atavism of books like Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies becomes topical in all your essays at University. And all along, beneath it all, there is the encrypted node in your boyhood book – that if the Gravity between earth and moon is instant and therefore enough to break light speed, a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah!

It would seem the physics of that is wrong for Gravity has no motion only bends and warps the fabric of spacetime – but the latter end of the node, the tail, about the cheetah, still feels right in an unfalsifiable sense. And when Hughes talks of Freud in interview it’s because it is fashionable in his intellectual circle, but fashions change, and after The Lords And The New Creatures came out it may not be so fashionable to say “the monster is just me.”

The point I would like to make is that my boyhood observations were both evil and the new one, that spidder, as I call it, did not seem evil at all. I still hid under the cover, but it was miles less evil than what I observed as a boy. It was so short, this new observation, just time enough for me to clock it as being alien, other or ‘X.’ They differ in attention-seeking ways. This is where I might need a big theory… Darwin’s theory of evolution does not, as popular rumour has it, say we descended from apes but that humans and apes both descended from the same source. I would still like to proffer the theory of Dark Evolution that posits a Logical Bond between narrative and Naturalistic Observationism, even if it be tempered by the new specimen. I would reiterate the point that what one writes of the Naturalistic Observation influences the very nature of the next specimen in line.

I would also say that if they differ in attention-seeking ways, I might be one of them, which seems a full reversal of saying “the monster is me.” That it’s happened again in adulthood can only be a good thing, I think, a triumph of the human spirit and maybe scientific procedure. I mentioned in the shock of it that it was this time not the guys that sponsored my dad but the people, and this I retract because where they come from I do not know. If Time is what stops everything happening all at once, maybe I am wrong in saying what we write about them influences the next observation in line – for maybe there is no line, no chronology, and they all happen simultaneously and forever. Maybe they are on a different time-scale, up in their superior plane, and visit us only briefly, through portals. I see a fly buzz in the kitchen and to say it is in B flat minor only adorns a bog-standard observation which is in contrast to the so-called new creatures.

My voices have suggested that my organising the Oedipus Wrecks set list and suggesting that the line about the ocean belongs to Anon is what has liberated this new perception, freed the experiment up. Then again you can’t trust what they say about Oedipus Wrecks because everything in it is done contretemps. I guess I am just a really weird person and that once you become the witness it is like that for life, even if observations seem to disappear for years and years.

Even when I present a psycho-technological post-poem about an effervescent mobile phone, reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rings, it might go down as being “a bat.” Animalism may be the Lowest Common Denominator, the portal through which we understand things. So it may be true that there is nothing we can say that escapes the condition of meat… in which case one would look to mathematics, as going on on a higher plane, that is conceivably at least a priori not empirical. Some think answers to questions about the divine will arrive in maths. Others that God may exist on a higher, mathematical plane without knowing of our existence.

I reach an impasse in my thinking, pace round the kitchen in a circle, humming a Radiohead song in my mind. I get to thinking about Jim Morrison again, reading the history of time in the scales of a seven mile snake. Sometimes when I am a passenger being driven around at night the road ahead seems just that very snake. That Jim Morrison saw the winged serpent in the desert was as a result of Ted Hughes writing The Hawk In The Rain about his own Naturalistic Observationism still seems plausible to me. Maybe though to be a scientist I have to say “all of this is false.” I have presented the data, and some interpretations of it, but what I have said is NOT true. To be fair, one would need to back up what one says with Evidence, and the very nature of these new creature Observations precludes evidence. This is why it might’ve gone wrong when the second specimen of my boyhood was so revolting I put it in the bin.

Still, I believe Darwin wished for someone to come along and confute his theories… I might be able to show how some creatures are not born of Natural Selection, not part of evolution. It already was time that writing about the new creatures would be wrong; then it happened again; then I wrote about it – and already it seems to be time that writing about the new creatures is wrong once more.

CHAPTER TEN: PARTY ANIMALS

*

Once upon a time I sat down

at dawn to try and remember

every mad animal my work ever knew.

*

Well, in the beginning,

there was a cat playing a drum.

*

There were four

mice, then three.

*

A clock was only as fast as a cheetah.

*

We saw a vision of a giant spidder.

Jamie saw a machine

that’s what it was coming from.

*

There was a chameleon

that was hidden from view

through castles of foam!

*

Also: “he has spines all over him”

the poet wrote about a Hedgehog for all

Henry the Hedgehog

was attacked by

an adder but the

hedgehog won…

*

There was also talk

of a stalk that invited a fox

round for dinner and

put two well-cooked

meals in two long

vases so the stalk

could get the food

but not the fox!

*

There were even “gilly flowers.”

*

There was also a song

about the dog before:

and you might well

remember it for life too:

it’s the same as it used to be:

hopefully you didn’t get it from me!

*

Then I saw them: two weird specimens:

one the juggernaut whom I should hide,

or whose possibility of returning

I might be uniquely able to cancel.

*

The second was the

living spreadsheet:

“Grand-darth’s Ship”

as it was called, as if

I invented the thing.

*

It meant there was also plastic

grown in the scheme of evolution.

*

Then came the horrible

Hunter who was

a class-exercise

and an animal too…

beware his hollow,

hypnotising stare.

*

Cometh a friendly badger who

was allowed out of the pet shop at last.

*

Around this time, the fact that

a clock is only as fast as a cheetah

was also applied to the digital watch.

*

Then came the frog, swimming

wet words in the water of everlasting

life in a bucket in a clearing

in the centre of the woods…

*

The beast was next,

fast and frightening.

*

Don’t forget:

Dear Green Organisation,

We found a gannet with a broken wing

at a bonfire party on the beach.

We saved its life.

Please plant some trees for this effort.

John F B Tucker.

*

Last Autumn two biologists announced

they had cloned the DNA of a

forty-million-year-old, extinct

stingless bee found in amber.

*

By puberty, I think I decided

not only has bongles still got the stones,

but Barnes has scored a chicken.

*

Butterflies flutter

in the sideways

reality of the grin

of sunbeams.

*

“Break bird with the skin of snake,”

I said in a poem.

*

“I can see,” said Prof. Feldman to me

“how ‘broken haloes fall from angels,

you see them on the floor.’”

*

My name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket

and I want to stay a nerd.

*

In 1998, a salmon

escaped the ancient net.

*

A sprightly hypertext-

sniper on Piper At

The Gates of Dawn

accrued to the procession too.

*

The anguila eel is wet and named after

the devil for mysteriously appearing

in the puddles of towns on rainy days.

*

Literature is a vehicle,

unlike the death-box, television.

*

Piggy is a symbol

of Reason and dies.

*

Civilisation is a thin

veneer belied by dark,

arational forces – the

temptation of atavism.

*

A purple parrot perched

upon the shoulder of

the pirate squawked

“don’t tell Moronika.”

*

A green parrot was sent

to space through the conch…

*

A Lion Bar was driven

through the economy

in a car and a carfume

whooshed from the unicorn’s bottom…

*

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

To break on through

to the Other Side.

Why did the chicken

cross the road?

I am the Burger King.

I can eat anything.

Preferably a Double

Whopper with cheese,

bacon, fries and a Coke.

*

The rising kestrel finds

its boiling point is now

contained in the imperative:

“desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.”

*

Paul is traditionally

eagle-eyed with the

cherry, for example.

*

Waves [squiggle]

crossed the FTSE [squiggle]

and the Helter-Skelter [squiggle]

crashed in the electric sea.

*

Natterjack sparrows

scream by the time of dawn.

*

Le little lapin

on le lawn,

trembling in

the dusky dawn

forlorn as fallen

autumn leaves

is the wave

that misbehaves.

*

The purlieu is the vexed edge

of the silver forest and beyond it

lies the sylvan frieze.

*

The image starts as an amber

scarab [like Jung’s symbol], scuttling

still on a hill of sand or a tumulus.

The image is of Egyptian mystery

and kings and masked gold

and pharaohs and jewels

in the night sky like stars

and the red, triangular sun of the Day.

*

Waving for the raven’s throne

only to break the Hollow Claw.

*

Maybe birds speak in a language

called gaga-zook-zook

and bongatee-bing-bong.

*

I shall not give a damn.

I shall not give a fish.

I shall not live an onion.

I shall contrive a dragonfly.

It will become an ostrich.

And ostriches are for eating

and friends are for meeting

and I am friends with the dragonfly.

*

Neil Curry says the woods

are traditionally a testing ground

not just in literature but

in life which is not

black and white but

kaleidoscopes of colour.

*

An A-E-I-O-U- bird

toots its hollow

horn out on the A595.

*

Down the beach sea-

birds scream from the

ragged rocks – is it their

love song or elegy?

*

Jerry

Springer’s

camera

crew

descended

like

vultures

to

eat

the

eyes

of

the

deadman.

*

There was an accident on the road today -

mum drove past a juggernaut and

said “it’s a bloody juggernaut.”

*

She says language is a creature

and imagination a muscle.

*

My pet dodo sleeps with her

heart in a jar by the bedside table.

*

I buy drugs off a guy

who’s lost the plot

forgotten the truth and the lie.

*

Ted Hughes saw a monster

in the river in childhood but

recognised it was himself.

*

I wrote a story about a man

who could see a black,

avaricious, anarchy

of menacing, dog-shit

sucking fucking flies in the

fridge at a house party

where no-one else

could see them.

*

Go to waste,

was the command,

from the end

of a branch.

*

How to fix a broken

yolk I do not know

maybe sit down

and have a smoke.

*

The bird in the wood,

it was definitely a horse.

*

I saw a rare bird,

I told my ex,

over the phone

and I had – a red

kite while climbing

up the rear side

of the fell.

*

When I fell up a tree

I was trading stories

with the chief of

the black bird spies.

*

Birds are now thought

to be what became of the dinosaurs.

*

I heard we grew out great

brains by eating meat and

needing to spread information

about farming, hunting, killing,

cooking and eating meat, developed language…

and I for one am glad it wasn’t

fungus instead of meat.

*

In poetry music not only

aids memorability but

precedes sense as an

agent of understanding

as in the Natural World.

*

My laptop password

is whitecrow, which

I deem neo-shamanic.

*

I have 4 motley

fridge-magnet letter

jungle birds now:

whitecrow, chardud,

beckstub, stillwalker.

*

Pen wine fate heaven fix

alive more free you gun

the scissor-bird sings

with innocuous vision.

*

Love can go veggie

for reasons of Disney.

*

Tit butter moat

brink notes sprinkle

outside open Darwin

window down.

*

The pulleys are not for bullies.

The birds are smuggling super-cars

to an Iranian over-lord

through Persia

and over the mnts.

Shush.

Listen.

Tin is their usual merchandise.

*

Then they stuck the end of ‘Bike’ in his head,

‘Bike’ in his hair, ‘Bike’ in his head.

*

The bird in the wood

was not the end of ‘Bike’

because soundwave recognition

qualifies a species.

*

They’re having trouble

papering over the cracks.

*

Once you see the shark mask replica

worn by a seagull, you see

the sun is the peachstone

of a black hole, sinking.

*

She asked: “do you remember looking

for the Golden Eagles up the fell?”

*

A bird pipes a bar of light

up a tree a jar goes down of sunset

late beams land drunken and hazy

and lazy soaking the beer garden

like day is a dream’s balcony

around mellow me.

*

It is not strictly true that

the effect of acid and

the effect 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,

hence the effect of global

warming on the unicorn’s

like a postmodern id.

*

We crashed on a ship REC and we tried

the canons and they were still red hot.

We went into the cabin and we saw

a captain’s chest and twenty

fighting pirates and we looked out

and saw a whirlpool heading

straight towards us and since

we were under the sea the

whirlpool pulled on top of the water.

*

“I believe the brooch is in the jackdaw’s

nest in that tall tree,” he said, and he was right.

“I knew where to look because the bird left

marks on your dressing-table,” he explained.

*

I was the first one up followed by

the white pawns then the two queens

then the two kings then the blakc pawns

then the bishop then the rooks

and last of all the knits.

*

Wouldn’t it be pollen

if Barnes has scored a chicken

and spring is a red horse?

*

The sun is a hedgehog everywhere,

spilling its needles defensively.

*

The cannabee

comes from Rontaur.

*

Crows were messengers

to the Ancient Greek Gods.

*

I hear their primal coo or caw

or mating call or

wall of stones or

squawk or cry or

squaw or scream

at the Request Stop Station -

new jewellery for the sensual -

and think of her

and her soft, mangled jaw,

soft as prehistoric

dinosaur maw and

more and many more -

car, car, they

croon, car, car.

*

Circumference of adverts at the pristine

empty cricket green next to the mental hospital:

three larger seagulls bully a much

smaller bird for crumbs. I am

rooting for the smaller one, reading

Bukowski and the score stays nil nil.

*

Jim Morrison saw

winged serpents in

the desert on acid

whom we know is

never quite flaccid

and also flung from the sun.

*

<BEE> might still

ensue from @ in

the international

language alphabet.

*

When mother says don’t

put all your eggs in one basket

I think of the word V-A-E-I-O-U-L.

*

Crows can talk.

*

Crows dogs horses trees,

these are our friends, yes these.

*

Bees can count.

*

Jackdaws can speak.

*

Birds are now known

to be highly intelligent

like dogs and horses.

*

There are 3 types of

swallow in America.

*

The flamingo-anglepoise

has just been born.

*

She said: “life is shit.

My mother died.

I gave up religion.

Now when I see

a robin I know it’s

my mother come to visit me.”

*

A single lone black bird

sings atop a tree this

dark dawn then flies away.

*

I see a smaller brown one

dart and swerve below.

*

Inside my eggs quack

and S. O. S. in the pan.

*

I see 12 crows in the Combe field,

the museum field, the same field.

*

Multiple flocks of Jonathon

Livingstone Seagulls

sail out to sea.

*

Why should an aged bullet up

a telegraph pole spread its wings?

*

I do not hope

to tern again!

*

Barnes has scored a liquid noose

and it’s full of pussy juice.

*

Yippee I have two blank bits of paper I can fly!

*

Birds are for flying

not for special

perception

*

Floating in the quiet of a weightless dawn,

the buzzard is the crux

of the flux of Time

and gets ready to mug

his prey scurrying beneath him.

*

You can't have your break

bird with the skin of snake and eat it.

*

You can take a horse to

water and drink the horse.

*

Don't forget if you

are getting a puppy

for Christmas, THINK

and wear a seatbelt.

*

We go a month of Mondays

and by the time we

arrive, several weird

species of insect

crawl out of severed

telephone cable.

*

When in Rome all roads

shit in the woods.

*

The bear is a catholic.

*

That James Joyce also

saw new creatures

and wrote of it in You Know Who

which had a physiological affect on me.

*

The resident pheasant

to reach out for style

is called MC Hammer

for all his dandy attire.

*

Omnivorous frog eyes blink in the puddles

while mine own are drugged up and groggy

and I don't know why something so pellucid

can come across as being green and froggy...

*

Do not listen to the moth

says Dr. Calculator Ptom

on his word-chord piano.

*

I went to a music event with no mask

at a Sports and Social Club;

and at the back, as it got dark,

the footie pitch was hunted for grub

by twelve grey and elegant

herons, standing round, mooching

whom I saw fly when the band

began, stretch their wings

out to tremendous width and breadth,

gliding off, to the guitarist’s twangs,

atlas-wide wings, beating.

*

I’ve been redrafted, the lion at the heart

of Poem Records, upon their happiness…

*

Even that means to

an end the alphabet

could turn out Nelly the

Elephant’s suicide note…

*

Some breakfast containing

every snooker ball colour -

I only had three rashers

of bacon on their own! 

*

Barnes has scored a liquid horse

it got on to the writing course

and when at last its work was done

then it flew back to the sun

when it returned it was burned

the people asked what had been learned

and Barnes’ horse said why of course

it is to have more intercourse

*

The free-thinking sheep eat

grass in the Combe field,

the field we rent out

to a local farmer friend,

who moves them a

lot, with his dog Max.

*

O is the key of the

babbling unicorn.

*

Because a dying animal is faster than.

*

Outside the windows

cows doze like menhirs.

*

I hear the monastic puking

of the ancient sheep and

know I am home.

*

The buzzard is the reason

the colour of Cumbria is brown.

*

McTruth And Flies

would be a good

name for a book.

*

We should kill

the snake in the greenhouse.

*

Dog = pi times mc squared.

*

Baxter the dog sits next to me

on the bed, grown very used to me

feeding him sweet, sugary tea.

*

Flies fly in a zany,

computer game rhythm.

*

Tiny red spiders

dance to imaginary

drum n bass on my

window ledge and

until I look them up

online and find out

what they are I

think I have

discovered a

new species.

*

When I was a boy

I used to repeat the word

‘kangaroo’ in my head

until it went numb,

emptied itself of meaning,

hopped off to become

the mad, kangaroo king.

*

I realise given the supposition

of language’s origins

that in my animalistic

piece I can now say anything.

*

The dog is looking

out of the window.

*

The window

is made of glass.

*

The glass is pellucid.

*

It offers a frame

of perception

on the world.

*

You can see, for example,

the beck in the back garden.

*

This reminds me that when

the birds return in spring

it is like sensation returning

to the fingers after

an anaesthetic, but

that’s still quite obvious.

*

Less obvious is

the fact that the water

is brackish to taste.

*

Also out the window

I see the mist up the fell.

*

Trees are ponderously

swaying like coral.

*

When monkeys herald

the new dawn up a tree,

they are celebrating

light, exalting the senses,

singing of a love for life.

*

When birds pepper the new

day, they are warning

others off their branch.

*

Typos are still

dolphins

in the sea.

*

Smashed, I type,

my fingers have crashed,

and my mad, crashed

fingers have connected yet again.

*

Lego contains no

mono sodium glutamate,

nor ego, nor anything

bad for those

allergic to nuts,

or to strobe lights,

and nor would it

hurt to mention its

plastic form in a

piece on animals.

*

Will Self said

where Martin Amis

was more into

narrative devices, he

was more into

philosophy

and animals.

*

The Lords And The New Creatures

used to be my favourite book.

*

A fluke it was,

when I became

witness and now

look where we

worship and

beware.

*

There are no dark forces

conspiring against you in life.

*

Take out your Lords

and see in all

directions at once.

*

Beyond the mind’s eye

may lie the mind’s ear

I mean I can hear

Baxter the dog

barking at my supposedly

clinical and delusory voices.

*

How the wood

can come again

I do not know.

*

How I can terminate

that possibility

I do not know

but it seems like

it might be easier.

*

Blessed is the seal’s seed.

*

We still inherit dreams

of fighting wild packs

of animals from ancestors

who had to rehearse

for that real situation.

*

The idiot box

kills brain cells.

That may be why

I call it the death box.

My dad wanted to

put a pick axe

through the telly.

I haven’t watched

a droplet for

years and years.

*

To be worthy

would ruin my image,

to drink Coke

would flatter

the style of some.

*

There are bears inside the moon

who drink and think the same of you.

*

The summer moon wears

the ultra scan of every baby.

*

Next time,

bend ze knees,

said my dad, in

Classic, east European,

Popperian accent.

*

Well, I missed out a further

song about Ossie the dog, chasing

his own tail, only going

upstairs for a trail of

Maltesers, nice, round

and pale, a song from

The Road To Heaven

by Noj And The Mob.

*

And yet after all this

I may have found a way out -

fire, fire, fire!

*

Then again it is still a word.

*

I am soooooo square!

I feel like I should be

the neo-Darwin what with

my boyhood attestations,

and write of the logical

bond between narrative

and Naturalistic Observationism.

*

I’m not going to be long this time

I am only going to do one.

Everything else I have taken care of.

*

To start the discussion off

I will ask: did James Joyce,

who saw new creatures too,

writing Ulysses become

the reason Ted Hughes

saw a monster in the river?

*

Quite interesting indeed,

and not being able

to find a way out,

of meat, nor fungus,

hmn, I might just write

whatever comes into my head.

*

In Prep School I named

my Fantasy Cricket Team

the Fungus Faces, who sat

mid-table in the list on

geography wall, among

all the others like

the All Stars, the

Champions and the Best.

*

If you rewind to a younger age,

when I read Enid Blyton’s

adventure stories, the character

I wanted to be was Philip

who was the one that was

best with the animals,

who magnetised the puffins

on the top of the cliff.

*

If I said the light is dark

would I escape the meat?

*

That could mean

Toad of Toad Hall

down in his dank dungeon

is climbing up the wall

wearing ladies underwear

and asking and asking

where it all went wrong.

*

My dad used to say

skunk made me canine.

*

I used to feel more leonine

in my fur coat, soft, white shirt

and my black trousers.

*

My dog stands on my laptop -

miles more interesting

than this – and the resultant

text reads as follows:

#][P;IK

*

Wallace Fowlie said, in some of

the only sustained critical analysis

of Jim Morrison’s text that

the new creatures are metaphors,

alibis in disguise for the

law-hounded poet; but then

it went and happened, shit

got real – as Morrison

said “a creature [waited]

out the war,” - and that

meant the Cold War – after which

my dad immediately sold his

art smuggling business – at

the fall of the Berlin Wall -

meaning it was me that was witness-

and now Russia is at war again

I cannot help wonder if

I have some role to play – if

the war will stop and if

the new creatures

will arise another time.

*

The word ‘adimal’ could be

the sublimation of the animal

and the advert.

*

The word “Transphiloquisation”

could mean inter-racial love.

*

Entropy backwards could frame

the first unformulated spark of

appetency in Nothingness, preceding

Creation and its dance.

*

‘Emocracy’ could mean

‘rule by emotion.’

*

‘Agovernment’ could mean

the opposite of government.

*

Filence could mean

delicate speech.

*

I cannot tell you

if a bunch of

cave-paintings in words

is the same or not as a

distractionary

that contains

the metallurgical

origins of birds.

*

I’m just so bored but

I did wish for a further

concept poem – long

and containing some

underlying, unifying principle.

*

What is the concept

of my new poem

going to be now

that I have written it?

*

I guess its only concept

is to unlock the cages

of the inner zoo…

well that will do.

*

The cock crows,

the dawn has risen,

the dog is by my side,

I have eaten not one but two

open top sandwiches,

Dutch cheese and

Italian salami on

Hovis bread, toasted.

I have a cup of tea

with which to gulp

down the medication.

I also have a pouch of tobacco.

Maybe one day I will

run out of ideas and

have to make a new

concept poem all

about giving up smoking.

*

It turns from white to grey

so fast, contains a

million little me’s.

*

Then we see I renewed it,

as if I had a choice.

*

You see I might be taking

the harder path as a

matter of stance before

life, not ruling out their

rebirth, carrying a

burden alone, slowed

down but also enriched.

‘I am the heir to the foul air,’

says Ben, and it seems

like air from the great

subconscious to me.

*

James has taken the dog

up the fell, for a walk, to

expend some of the dog’s

energy and try and

get fit himself, but

it’s rude to write of the

living, all writing is

fiction, there is no

immutable truth, all

selfhood is mythology,

it is malleable is history,

so again I await Dr. Ptom

and the word-chord piano,

revolving at the edge of life.

*

If I were into art

I would be a Fauve, maybe even

dance the brush on

the paper to the music of

the Aphex Twin in

any colour I deem

fit to make the shape

of a beast of energy -

but seeing as I am but

a humble, minor poet,

I can but feel that

something’s gone wrong.

*

A shark’s fin sticks up

out of the choppy sea.

The News has got a screw loose.

These random access bytes

I love but not for love

or money will I

return to babyspeak,

gaga zook zook

and bongatee bing bong,

and did I tell you

of the time I escaped

from Monopoly Jail,

and made it to Scotland,

ah, it made my dad laugh,

and as soon as I cottoned on

that I was the witness

I was diagnosed, they

were the same instant,

so then you get people

saying it’s textbook delusion,

whereas what is textbook

is dimestore psychology,

for all there likely

wouldn’t be the wound

if these things didn’t

happen in atomic reality,

and That’s All Folks,

if you buy cheap

you buy twice.

*

James has fed the dog

and cooked and the food

is ready already.

John is the guy that

sits here eating it.

*

It is later, and we’re back

on the topic of food.

Lamb stew is now being

cooked and the sound

of newborn lambs

fills the air outside.

*

Our dog already died.

*

Jim Morrison’s book

The Lords And The New

You Know Who was about

laying down the law to the animals.

*

CHAPTER ELEVEN: MORE THOUGHTS ON NEW CREATURES

Of all the new creatures I can ideate, the best one is <BEE>. It is my brother James P D whom we have to thank for the notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. My own original ideas include that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too; and Lucy in the soul w/ demons might happen to be an actual substance; but nothing up there with <BEE>. Apparently, the children of our friends are growing up to do the <BEE> one. By the <BEE> one presumably they mean the book Soundcloud Rain where I provided songs for <BEE>. It’s why I am not free to reshape and rehash any of that material. I sit growing fat from eating pizza, also fatting up my file. My friends prefer the attempted maths of the new colour when I am a seven year old, not as an adult presentation. There are multifarious options available to me nevertheless. I went to the toilet a moment ago and there was a fat, black, ugly, large house-spider on one of the pipes. I was offended by it so squashed it in a piece of tissue. Normally I am too timid to even kill a daddy long legs. What I don’t believe is that the new specimen, which I called a “spidder” is only Number Three, for there might be other witnesses and there was more in my story too… to make a tree, to categorise these weird Observations might be hard. I heard sometime in my childhood that there are new species of insect coming into being every second in the Amazon jungle. Whether these qualify as specimens or just as normal species I don’t know and am not sure of the difference other than that maybe the qualification of specimen is granted to something that smashes together two known things into a new compound that shouldn’t be like that in the natural order of things. So even though they are material there is an imputation of fake-ness in them.

Geoff Hattersley, a fine poet whose work I admire, says in the poem ‘The New Mr. Barnsley Something’ that he ended up wondering what happened to the old New Mr. Barnsley Something. Cows still munch grass, mulchy and blind. Sheep still sound like a cross between something monastic and puking. The old creatures seem unaffected by the transient advent of new ones. I say transient for even the second specimen, that plastic spreadsheet didn’t last long, was easy to kill. The old creatures carry on as before. Dogs still bark. Cats still prowl. Birds still make nests in the chimney. Geese still flock. Fish still swim. And yes this reminds me: I used to say “if there was a light speed law of neuroplasticity it would only be that it is impossible to remember a new creature.” I changed it: if there is a light speed law of neuroplasticity it would only be that it is impossible to remember a new yellow line. I like the amendment but I still don’t think we need a light speed law of neuroplasticity any more than a Periodic Table of Altered States. I suppose the reasoning behind the law is that for something to be truly new it must involve the permanent supervention of novelty and in order to be remembered something would become old in the process. As I say though we don’t need a light speed law of neuroplasticity.

I pass the time at my screen, without venting my spleen, my mood made stable on a sterilised table, all my rage in the cage for the minimum wage… I tend to a file of poems then my mother comes downstairs and sends me to bed. So here I sit ( ) in the same place as I was sitting in when I saw the Nike Air spider, the celebrity spider, or even “spidder.” I wasn’t expecting it but you know these things are very forceful when it comes to being perceived and leave you in no doubt. They are attention-seeking devices, meant for human regard. They don’t just go about their business in their own world. They aim to be perceived. They know they are going to be perceived. So they must have an inbuilt knowledge of the observer and his perceptual kingdom, an overview. They must come from a superior knowledge bank. The deep, green store from which they come must be more than falling leaves. But then again I don’t know any of this for sure and am only hoping someone else will become freer by my agitations. They could be species of the Taxonomic Genus “Calculator Tomb!”

This business of them knowing they are going to be perceived as I am certain they do brings up new questions… why is it that they need to “make that transaction” between the observer and the observed or is it that the observer, the human needs to “make that transaction?” If so how do they know? Where do the come from? I touched earlier on spontaneous self-organisation like a Strange Attractor from Chaos Theory… does evolution now consent to that as a mode of birthing a new species? If science is dead as Dr. Stephanie Dyke comments, do the rules of evolution go out the window? Or is it the other way round, that when we had to have them, the specimens, science died? I don’t believe the latter because science didn’t die when Joyce, Hughes and Morrison made their observations. I just believe that there is a gap between what science will teach you at school and what experience can tell you, if you are the witness, which seems to be cool, though people don’t tend to admit it, preferring to chat facets and assets, football or shopping or cars or telly or music or books. It would seem that if you’re the witness there is something stopping Observations becoming endless, which could be what they refer to as “the system.” I have got a little story about the system which I can show you…

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE START OF A NOVEL

I know a man, let’s call him Henry, spoke against September 11th in 2000, who was therefore raped when it still happened. Everything from the same conversation also started to come true… his own idea to invent binaural earphones on which to record his music was “implemented” by another guy. Same for his idea for a book. In 2001 he was in a band, recording on earphones with the rich guy that implemented the idea… they tried to dress Henry up to look like Hitler, pretended the spliff was his bifter, treated him like a living art installation. He didn’t even get to mention that the earphones were his own idea to invent. This is because when the Towers fell down he was therefore raped; and this manifested as a burning feeling in the psyche; and when he suppressed the burning feeling in order to function he lost all memory of the conversation in the barn in 2000 where he had shown prescience. The formative years of his life were spent under these conditions.

When he finally got out of the bad landscape, came home to the Lakes, he was placed under a curse by a maniacal hypnotist. Things didn’t go well for him ever after. He became acutely ill, which some close to him believe dates back to the rich man that implemented the idea to invent the earphones. This rich man, he would never need work a day, and at the end of the band swanned off with all his money to have a happy life whilst Henry was rendered destitute. So as I say Henry went home to the Lakes and was cursed by a hypnotist. He became acutely ill. After becoming ill, there was an attempt at his life in his sleep – or what seemed to be one – which turned out to be an operation to give him a new member! Oh, it worked for ten minutes. Then the fire-dance blamed it on Henry even though he didn’t know it was going on or when he found out participate. Then when his dad died they all made him go for a naked walk when he was in a broken state.

More recently his files were hacked and being read out online… Henry’s brother caught them at it and said, on live streaming, to the hackers, “it all went wrong for Henry with that richman’s mum.” Henry walked past his brother’s room when this was said, thought his brother had meant the rich guy’s literal mother, and that it was the richman’s mother who had made an attempt at his life – for he didn’t know yet it was an operation designed to give him a new member, that one - so he got on to FB and gave the rich man Hell. He wasn’t sure what happened then, on FB, but he lost the plot and was so insulting to the rich man and his mother that their friendship will never recover.

He had left it to brew after hearing his brother for a little while then it was seeing a photo of the richman and the rest of the band that triggered Henry’s reaction off: for the rich man was clasping his jeans in the photo, grinning. He didn’t like the rich man clasping his jeans in the photo, and to be fair hadn’t yet worked out, because nobody had told him, that the old band really had tried to affect his looks. Still: seeing the rich man clasping his jeans as if in mockery triggered an episode of mental illness in Henry which is why he got onto the richman on FB and gave him Hell. Now, after a recent O. D. attempt “Henry” has also lost the ability to ejaculate. He thinks it is the rich man’s influence.

The problem Henry found in pinning the Hitler moustache to his so-called mates was that in the band he had a lyric going “I’m going to get your freshness back, plug my senses in the mains, it’s just a blood-rush to my brains, I’m going to get pretty much fucked up, flee the world on a midnight plane, dance with the aliens and the insane.” Indeed, Henry, made to look ersatz by his band, was in a world without Rights. His psychiatric doctor told him he looked “a blur.”

Throughout it all Henry was going through a personal crisis about not knowing whether or not he was gay. He would break down in tears and say “I think I’m gay.” While it was true that he foresaw September 11th and couldn’t remember, he was at the time never gay. He may have thought he was built like Adonis while actually being a munter, but he wasn’t dim. They may have deemed him to be dim, but when he was in the zone and sober, he had already written the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the nation. That may be part of being a savant. He was actually diagnosed autistic relatively recently and is now stuck with it. If the police ever come for him that’s what we’ll say – “he isn’t here.”

ii

Back to the continuing story of Henry… they even said it all went wrong (his band did) when he didn’t say thank you at the end of it. He came home to the Lakes, exiled from his band, fuming, unaware what had been going on and embarked on a program, quasi-religious, of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading, exercise and all the self-help techniques he could glean. That was when he was placed under a curse by a hypnotist. It was as if the world was saying “no,” right at the moment Henry was about to score a valid goal. To be fair he didn’t have an evil plan. It was just that he was getting to the age where he might provide a paper, or attempt to score a goal, or start a literary career. He had helped invent the net at seven, been the witness from The Lords and The New Creatures at eight, been marked by a failed experiment into the maths of the new colour in puberty, attained the face of stars, predicted September 11th with exactitude in 2000 and written the highest marked A-level exam essay in the country. He might’ve thought he was on course for a Nobel Prize, but the world had different notions. To be fair Henry didn’t have any plan at all. His Millennial idea for a book was The Scientific Papers: “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.” But back when Henry had got to Warwick University in 2002 he found his tutor David Morley had just brought out the exact thing: a book called The Scientific Papers – classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception.” The teacher had the extra word “writing” from Henry’s own ideal. So Henry had tried to recalibrate his goal. He was torn between Einstein’s Unified Field Theory and defaced bank notes. So he didn’t really have much of a plan but when he went home after not finishing University, and afterwards being in the band some more, (for the band were from his gap year haunt of Cambridge) – he embarked on this quasi-religious self-help program. He wanted only to realise his creativity. It wasn’t a bad ambition but the world said no, and I for one find it interesting that the world did say no to him. It could’ve been that he was up against a democratic balancing out mechanism, but if that was the theory, in practice it manifested as his being cursed by a hypnotist. He was just about to go to a second university, his local, Lancaster. When we look into it we may see that if he helped invent the net he may have too much power if he wins, converts it into a paper; that The Lords And The New Creatures experiment bearing attestations would go against hidden parts of government; that the maths of the new colour experiment could offend the Chinese for example; that if he were to start earning money off the face of stars he would be a tyrant; so already with the few things he had done before leaving school there was enough for the world to say no to him and his dream of being a writer.

Since being cursed by a hypnotist and going schizo with it, Henry carried on delivering the goods for instance, he hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, also discovered the sheet where pictures grew (among many other things) but he never won with the book. He thinks it means there is a democratic, balancing out mechanism that stops him winning and I think he is right and has in that capacity seen the light. It might also have been that the world was keeping him waiting until he was sure, for at the time he first became ill, nothing had been confirmed. He wouldn’t have been able to write, say, of helping invent the net, of being the witness, of the maths of the new colour, even if he had wanted to. Still, at the moment he chose to realise his creativity, back then, even if he was just building up to it, he was cursed by a hypnotist, as if the world was saying no to his decision – and as I have said he didn’t have anything evil planned as such, nor any plan at all. He still doesn’t have a plan. He persuades himself the books he brought out are okay but still feels the world is saying no, even more so than before, before his fall into mental illness.

But now I see it differently. I see his fall into illness a result of his not even being able to write about his experiences. Being silenced by circumstance. As I said he wouldn’t even have been able to write of it all if he wanted to, partly because his seven year old web-book had to be locked in the attic, so he wasn’t privy to it, partly because his dad’s business precluded conversation… so in reaching an age where he was to flourish, but not having the tools with which to do so, and thus being forced to remain silent or get it all wrong, that may have triggered mental illness in Henry. It certainly is a fascinating case even to this day. It may be that even if he writes a list of the big, symbolic miracles he has been involved in, it would still be against the law unless it were woven into a fiction, consigned to mythology. That could be where we get slaying the dragon from – consigning a list of miracles to mythology because it’s been such a beast that it would be unfair and undemocratic to preserve it in face value terms.

It strikes me now that the balancing out, democratising “mechanism” that stopped Henry turning the situation to his advantage is the law. It might’ve been against the law for him to sing of what was in his breast, to sound out the sights that have been seen. That must be awful, for a young man, trying to realise his creativity. Meanwhile his contemporaries and brother-poets are making it work. So it is that the best stuff remains underground, that most genius remains obtuse, that the predominant culture is toxic, that English poetry only wears a genteel facade, that Henry isn’t even allowed to write about the wonderful things he does. He may not have come to terms with his own past yet, may have been desperately trying to work things out, and yet that may have been on the wrong side of the law, or at least pertaining to being something illegal at the end of the day. Let’s look into it: a paper on how you helped invent the net. A paper on being the witness from Jim Morrison. A paper on the maths of the new colour. A paper on the face of stars. A paper on the conversation in the barn in 2000 where you spoke against September 11th and more. All achieved in the style of the highest marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the country. But by now the Towers have fallen and you too have recorded an album on binaural earphones, promising to plug your senses in the mains. By now you have left University without a degree despite promising papers on Instant Travel, also Lucy in the Soul W/ Demons. No, that paper was never going to happen, because as I say, Henry hadn’t yet confirmed the boyhood experiences as real. But still to have really done all that and to make a paper that means you win, gain an advantage over someone else, whatever the topic may be, may well be against what the world itself wants. I wish I could be there, in the days preceding the curse of the hypnotist, to warn him, and to fill him in on his life experiences of early boyhood, and to highlight what if anything is positive in his writing and to generally help out.

Iii

Truth be told we don’t know why Henry was cursed by a hypnotist or hypnotised by a wizard or whichever way round it was. We know that every morning we wake up thinking “oh no, not that war again.” It was said that Henry was “done” because someone whom it seems is also too powerful decided Henry was trying to take over the world when he was in his Gap Year in Cambridge at the start of the band. Henry never really had an ambition stretching further than maybe playing an acoustic gig at the local pub. But now he knows. He knows why he was cursed by a hypnotist. Do you remember when I told you about Warwick University? He had gone there in the immediate aftermath of September 11th and also having spoken of an ideal for a text called The Scientific Papers. In the first week he discovered his tutor had just brought out The Scientific Papers. And as Henry was in the middle of looking in the back to see if the tutor had cited him as a reference, the tutor walked into his bedroom and said “I am not TS Eliot. I am not a Conservative poet.” The next mistake that the institution made was when they mistook Henry for being leglessly drunk one evening in the Union, when Henry had drifted off from the crowd to lie on a table in a darkened corner on his own. He had had literally less than one bottle of WKD and was deemed to be leglessly drunk and ushered out of the Union physically by a Security Guard, who confiscated his membership card, which was never returned meaning he was never allowed into the Union again. On an isolated campus this is very disturbing. The next mistake was when someone in loco parentis told them they would turn a blind eye if the students smoked pot in their private rooms. So they did but Security walked in and confiscated paraphernalia bought from around the world which is not illegal to own. We were already starting to see that that Labour Government were one of the most lawless and authoritarian governments we had had and the students involved in that one were never allowed in Halls of Residence again. The next mistake was when some students had a party on the roof, and were found out, and that was when Henry was not only banned from the Union, nor from Halls but from campus altogether. It was around this time that one of his mates suggested they change the letters of Senate House into the anagram O See The Anus. But the curse of the hypnotist came from something else. It was the final straw, when Henry snuck back onto campus to drink with a mate, and walking away at the end thinking he’d got away with it, under armed an empty blue WKD bottle to a bin in empty space, missed, meaning the glass broke and that was when Security were alerted. They were patrolling nearby and as the students walked off to the bus stop Security crept up behind Henry and his mate and tried to physically accost them from behind, restrain their bodies, and after the way he had been treated by that University whose wages he was paying Henry didn’t appreciate it so got physical and threw a few blue bodies over his shoulder. The police were called and they woke each in a cell, Henry and his mate, and when it came to court they were urged to plead guilty even though on a campus with CCTV everywhere there was a bus obscuring the vision of the event. So they got done for affray. Henry was expelled and given community service and his mate was allowed to stay at University but given extra community service by the University on top of what he had to do for the law. Considering it was misplaced loyalty that he got involved in the affray it seems absolutely disgusting. It was also disgusting what happened to Henry, who was effectively stolen from, lied to, persecuted and branded a criminal for it while paying their wages. When Henry went back to Cambridge to play in the band again afterwards he couldn’t even get on the Dole because the University, who said he wasn’t allowed to contact them again, couldn’t therefore provide a bit of paper proving he was no longer a student. So he ate from bins and lived in a shed. And as I say when he got home, to the Lakes, and started trying to meditate, detox, exercise, read and do dreamwork, to realise his creativity, he was cursed by the hypnotist – and his current theory is that it was ordered by his mate whose life was ruined by community service.

The problem we face is that we don’t want to describe the curse because it could disturb the dawn chorus. Henry went off to University a second time, cursed and had a break down, saw a holographic horsecock wheeled in the bedroom, starting hearing voices, and eventually went to hospital for a literal head wound sustained in a scrap and the nurse applied a bandage to the wound, and Henry went to touch it to see if it was paddy and it was and went to touch it a second time and it was gone. The nurse had to put a second bandage on. That was when he was sectioned in the acute ward, not just normal mental hospital, in the middle of his degree. He ran away and made it to Scotland, thinking there would be a different jurisdiction, but the cops were swift on his slow back and caught him and brought him back to the border. He was ticked off but it was seen as a sign of his sanity returning. His dad thought his escape was hilarious but it was actually rather sad because it meant Henry would now be forever in and out of hospital. He went back and finished his degree, got the highest First in the year. Then there followed the riots. By this stage Henry wasn’t into revolt at all. He’d had his spirit broken by the mental health situation, and still harboured academic ambitions. That is, he still wrote at a laptop, and in extremis too. It is believed he has written 1000’s of files, not just 1000’s of poems and songs and branched out into papers and prose and failed novels and still considered himself a failed writer.

It wasn’t until he’d got his degree that he remembered the wood, and was occupied by that for a while. It turned out he really was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures as well as helping invent the net and all those other things too, and was yet to earn a penny himself, for any of the wonderful things he did. It really did get to such a late stage in the day before he had let his brothers in on that one, and it turned out his dad may have had a deal where he was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures, but that may not be the whole truth.

Iv

So Henry now thinks he knows why he was cursed by the hypnotist. Back at Warwick University he wasn’t treated very well. I would say that a war broke out between himself and the Security guards (little blue meanies) when he was banned from the Union and kept creeping back in through illicit windows to drink with his friends which was never allowed. Teams of Security guards would be on to him if they sensed he was in the building. The band that won Battle of the Bands did it by singing “fuck the Union, fuck the Union, I shall free Henry, he’s the coolest guy for me.” Or something like that. He was being persecuted ever after that erroneous decision on his drunken-ness and to think that all along he was sitting on something like The Scientific Papers – he could’ve been the best student they had ever had. So what I am saying is the seed consciousness of the fire-dance may have existed in the way Henry was being treated by Warwick University. People cornered at the fire-dance blamed it on him, even though he didn’t seem to participate or have any interest in it by the time it came around. At least the teacher that seemed to have stolen The Scientific Papers from the student – or independently arrived at the same thing – didn’t have an affair with Henry’s undergraduate gf at the same time, eh? Anyhow all of this is worth forgetting.

By now his voices tell him he would’ve actually won a Nobel Prize for one of his books called The Field of Rock N Roll Science had it not been for the wood. It was too mad. The book was good but made him look odd. He had got to that late stage of life and still didn’t know anything about why he was the witness. It would probably be instructive right now to run you through the full list of things he had going for him. He helped invent the net at seven: when someone needed to store the idea of the net in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow around the world it was Henry that wrote it. At eight he was the witness from The Lords And The New You Know Who, twice making weird observations. By then he had already gone wrong with the maths of the new colour and in puberty it left a mark on his body, but as I say wasn’t the new colour. At fifteen he attained the island of penguins and proved it in the first verse of the first song of his first gig. The problem was the lines he used possibly belong to the house so should be Anon – but at the same time if you take them away from him you make attaining the island of penguins a regrettable event. Then in 2000 when was 18 he forewarned of September 11th, predicted the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in, prophesied also the alignment for a rhythm change in the White House and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation. That was the year he also spoke of The Scientific Papers and recording on earphones and a whole bunch of other things that would also start to happen.

So after school he started recording on earphones, had an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, spotted a sensory overlay of his name on Piper, 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 was the one to discover the sheet where pictures seemingly depicting his own song lyric grew. The sheet belonged and still belongs to his brother, who designed it and laid it down and Henry was very good in surrendering possession of it to his younger brother. Then it was time to bring out books. So it was that trajectory from the age of seven up to finding the sheet that was his subject matter – and in fact could’ve been considered as “a weird science.” He was not a scientist by training so his dad always used to say it was a good job The Scientific Papers didn’t really land with Henry and that it did land with David Morley who was a scientist by training. Still, his ideal was never replaced. He went to University with an ideal and left with less than he arrived with. He left Warwick with the new ideal of presenting defaced bank notes because his tutor said “poetry is the opposite of money.” He went back to Cambridge as I have said and continued playing in the band, climbing up on the binaural earphone album to say he was going to plug his senses in the mains.

V

One evening, way back when he was still in the band, he had a fit, on E, skunk and White Russians galore and started wriggling round on the floor talking in a new language nobody could understand. So his band called his mum to tell her he was ill, and she came down, and sent Henry out to the shop while she had a private word. It is believed she told them of his role in helping invent the net, which Henry at the time was not privy to. Whatever the case she brought him home to the Lakes and he embarked on this program of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading and exercise, and was cursed by the hypnotist. He went on to do his dissertation on David Morley without mentioning the embrocation, the uncanny overlap.

The point is Henry still doesn’t know whether he’s on the right or the left and should by now. His dad said he personally had no allegiance to any particular political party and that seems admirable and noble enough, for the civil war that goes on between the monolithic binaries of right and left and every day is soul-destroying and people rarely have their own opinion, tend instead to inherit it, to upkeep a family tradition in the genes, to rearrange prejudice as opposed to think for themselves or change their ways. Though his dad had no allegiance to a party, he did say he was allergic to Labour governments, though this is none of anyone else’s business. His dad was a socialist when younger, when at the LSE studying philosophy under Karl Popper in the 1960’s but must’ve just grown out of it. He used to say the left line their own pockets as much as anyone, reward their own voters by promoting them to bureaucratic positions, thus expanding the State into a situation of Big State Worship – and that essentially the less government the better.

Henry meanwhile was the first member of his family to require Benefits and also benefitted from the NHS being free in his mental illness, so wasn’t sure which way he tended. If it was true that bigots, racists, homophobes and the like all flocked to the Right, he didn’t want anything to do with it. But his dad, who died of cancer, was learning him about politics before he died and opined that the military themselves have no faith in the Left because they always bankrupt the economy. Still, Henry had good memories of dancing on E under the last Labour Government and was possibly part of that generation that were mysteriously swayed to the Left by the events of the immediate post-Millennium. He didn’t want to rule it out, and had good friends on the Left who seemed to believe in freedom of speech, even that freedom of speech was the gift and property of the left. It may be true but still they wouldn’t let him speak freely about Syracuse.

Henry came to think of the Left as a beautiful, compassionate emotion worth exploring, and as an elongation of the moment of the end of Fascism, which he wanted to devote his soul to but the difficulties he had with intellectual property were something else. Who really wants all their own work to go down as Anon? It wasn’t necessarily left-wing to make it like that, and in fact John Stuart Mill was on the left, and he said a progressive country can quickly become backwards if there is a decrease in Individuality. Henry liked On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, where said opinion was expressed. Sometimes Henry got frustrated and it was like he came from a Conservative background and couldn’t make the leap due to events that had happened such as being made to be the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. At least, when some looked at his CV as delimited herein, they said “we think you’re on the Right,” as if he didn’t even have any choice. His background was upper middle class, and he deemed it that like his dad he didn’t have any allegiance to a political party. Commentators also said that if he had been on the left he would’ve been paid for some of the wonderful things he did, like help invent the net or attain the island of penguins. The left was very tempting and the right was not. I think he was on the right to start with in life and made a journey against all odds and obstacles in his way towards the left. The problem was that as a youth he couldn’t be on the Left like his friends were and honour his father at the same time, but by now, he focussed on policies such as the fact that he wasn’t in a position to agree with cutting Benefits or cutting the tax to the rich, both of which posit him on the left, or would if he gave a shit about politics at all. He disengaged from socio-political reality like a Romantic practising idle escapism in the Lake District.

Vi

So it was that Henry came into partial resolution, seeing some of the reason for his being cursed by the hypnotist and seeing it didn’t necessarily originate with the hypnotist. He would say now if it was his old mate from Warwick that organised it, that it was due to the University in the wake of September 11th as we have heard. We would deem it that the lives of two good young men were ruined and that the University owes them an apology.

Whomsoever the rude voices on the intercom are, they are threatening his mother with death if he doesn’t play ball with their own politics, and we don’t know what that means, except that maybe they want to see the Oedipus Wrecks lyrics as Anon, which I can do, but I am not allowed to show the sheet where pictures grew and they haven’t told me why they threaten my mother’s life. It could date back in this instance to the rich man who “implemented” Henry’s idea for inventing earphones, rendered him destitute and swanned off with all his money at the end. “Now put that on your blog or we’ll kill your ma,” they say. It’s difficult for him to know what to do against such a backlash, but he isn’t sure the document belongs on his blog. His ma got back home from Finland only tonight and her voice had gone, and she was feverish as she had been throughout her holiday. He remembers, funnily enough, one of the voices saying while she was away that they would deprive her of breath if he didn’t do such and such or so and so. It was a writing task, and probably involved Henry renouncing ownership of something he had himself written. It isn’t clear who these people are or if there are in fact several bodies of people all trying to communicate with him.

And what does it mean when you start to hear children among the voices? And what are the children of my friends growing up to be like? I mean, do they seem to be leaning towards the “new language” approach of <BEE> or are they traditionalists? Are these words I speak like Chaucer unto them? Ah, I should forget the children. I am never going to have any myself. As for voices Henry’s CBT therapist recommends being more assertive, saying “please can I be at peace in my own home now,” and when they continue, to imagine a protector like the footballer John Barnes saying “please can I be at peace in my own home now?”

Henry supposes that liberty is the oxygen of the soul, and he needs to put this on his blog because of that reason, because it means oxygen for someone’s soul. He doesn’t know who and it might all change, but he might just leave it now. He has done 15 books and they have amounted to nothing, all self and vanity-press publications, and it might be time to be satisfied with what he has done.

Vii

Henry woke up the next day, late into the afternoon, because he was soooooooooooo drugged up to the eyeballs on medication, and had nothing going on in his life. By half six he’d had a microwave curry, and now thought about getting a beer too. Before he did, he had some chocolate mousse (Tesco finest) for pudding. His mum had just got back from a holiday in Finland – as I said – and was ill. His brother was asleep, rarely if ever left his room at the best of times, especially not when sleeping! Henry was starting to see that he’d been “done” by the left, dating back years. Still, he considered himself realigned with the New Red Army. He started to consider, more importantly than politics or prejudice, that his writing was making his mother ill. He didn’t know this for a fact and was prepared to do anything, to write anything, to prevent it. His mother was not on the left but was very, very left-handed. Henry downed a pint of lager and lime, listened to the footsteps above his head, thought of his working class friends in the pub, how the farmers he knew were blue. “We can’t go on spending forever,” one of them said. But Henry’s mother is ill and we need to heal her with some kind of excoriation by energy.

There was a friendly voice at hand to say “to put the Anon one on the net when you’ve been treated like that by the left would be gross.” Henry had a second beer and dreamed himself back to days of being a musician. They used to record on binaural earphones in the dead of night in a place called The Lock Up which was on an industrial estate described as “a giant brain” by Henry when they were high, which was always. Now when he is in quietude in the night-time, his mind becomes an abandoned warehouse through which there may float a residual melody made for recording on earphones. There is when this happens only a slim demarcation between the math rock sensibility and neo-Classicial music, for the refrain, the melody, could go either way and either way it seems “monastic,” the music of the abandoned warehouse. Traditionally, according to Gap Year rules, and band rules in general, Nightfall is a time for waking up, and smoking skunk. Vampiric hours were upkept. They were interested in the switch thrown. Now Henry bathes in glory that never was. And his brother says whomsoever it was that made Henry look like Adolf Hitler should be being read his Rights. It’s the bit of shadow under his nose that has been turned into a Hitler moustache. It’s not the way he used to look. As I say only recently he was said to look “a blur” unto the doctor. So it was that just about everybody had been treating Henry like a sack of shit. He wasn’t treated, even unto the government, in a way that was liveable.

Viii

Now it was later, and time does not pass but evaporate. Henry was stuck in the sticks still, foot of the oldest fell. He wanted to put the war he had been through behind him. He was dealing with people trying to make him Anon. He didn’t believe in it himself and knew it to be illegal to make another go Anon, but was being dispossessed of his intellectual property. He was being screwed. He imagined people leaving bits of his oeuvre, his body of work, in public bins. The war in Ukraine and the war in Iran were also leaking in his brain from far away. There may be a fuel crisis coming up. He still didn’t know why he was cursed only what voices had whispered. The Strait of Hormuz was still closed. The house at the foot of the fell needed work, and didn’t bring in an income, in fact was very expensive to run. The kettle was boiling. The emotive charge at the end of The New Creatures came into play.

TBC

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: ENTRAILS

So we see that this “Henry” was a bit of a Jim Morrison character himself back in the day. It is to the poetry of Jim Morrison I would like to return the discussion. When you’re the witness, in your boyhood and then in teenage years find the poetry, the poetry can seem like a license to write anything, garbled nonsense, at least The New Creatures can. When you get what he is smuggling it is impressive work, get that there’s some discipline in there. I say discipline but Morrison’s book is a typical loose sprawl that epitomises the permissiveness of the 1960’s and which you wouldn’t be able to get away with today. I heard it said that Jim wouldn’t have been published had he not been a rock star and so he might prove a bad role model or model for sanity to a young writer like the Henry in my story, who is myself. Ultimately Morrison is part of an idiot tradition. I myself would urge one to not become part of the idiot tradition. Myself, I wasted good, valuable time mimicking Jim Morrison in art and life alike, which I suppose was exhaustive research, into the nature of being the witness, almost like being a rock n roll historian, or dare I say it scientist. I used to say taking drugs got us sober from the advertising trance… a self-legitimising pact arose around the stoner circle. One would suppose that if my story is true, we might need a new word, and not just one, like “transphiloquisation,” but a whole new vocabulary. This could be why my brother’s <BEE> is so good, because it combines being a new creature with creating a new language. Nor can you just make up nonsense speak and call it the international language alphabet. Still, I used to wonder in paranoia if people, when I was out of earshot, all started to speak in a language I cannot understand.

If I said “a wallety-wallety-Walter,” would you get that I mean “water?” One would suppose it depends on context for meaning. If I said “the roots of the yew tree go down into slow centuries gone, looking for a wallety-wallety-Walter,” you might get that I mean water. We would have a mutation that could become a fossil in time. Even Simon Armitage, whom it would seem was the David Beckham of the poetry world when I was a youth, may start to regret his old work. New work becomes old work, and old work becomes Chaucer. All our words will become as if hieroglyphs in time. It is very difficult to make something that lasts. They even rearranged The Lords as I have said. A writer’s wish should not be gone against.

I suppose some buy the image of Jim Morrison as a mystic visionary and others don’t. I also suppose that some would contend that bands like The Doors and Nirvana misappropriate Enlightenment tools to propitiate consumerist entertainment. Still, I think Morrison’s book the best thing about the Doors, and a classic and along with Piper At The Gates of Dawn by Pink Floyd, one of the best things to come from the 1960’s. The way I narrate this tale might seem like a fairytale but all this stuff happened.

While there are commentators who believe if it has happened again it proves I am right; and that if I am right a book about it is the best I will ever write – well, there are those that still think talk of new creatures is schizophrenic talk and that my claim to having been the witness is “textbook.” This is part of the reason why Professor David Morley said it would be such a major challenge for me, to lead us through the woods. I would say that it is them with their dimestore psychology bandied about that is textbook and that if the observations hadn’t happened the illness wouldn’t be as real. I take the attitude, a popular attitude, that it is a combination of childhood trauma and drug taking in adulthood that triggers mental illness in many if not most cases.

I think though there are a growing number of people in the literary world who at least believe in my story even if they don’t like it. Rachael Allen the poetess says “animals should not remind us of wealth.” I agree with her, but think the animals I met in boyhood at least reminded us more of the horror of war than of wealth. Admittedly, my dad might’ve been sponsored to provide the human witness; or else it was a combination of Jim Morrison writing “a creature waits out the war,” and my dad selling his art dealing business at the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the two boyhood specimens weren’t there to remind us of wealth. I think what they had meant was that we had won the war. This latter one, the spidder, if you permit a neologism, a mutation of language, I am not so sure about.

In A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, the protagonist, who is played by Keanu Reeves in the film version, is infested with bugs as a result of the drugs he is taking and can even put them in jars and take them to the doctor, who will still say they are a result of the drugs, dismiss them despite their visceral reality. Where I am coming from, to be able to put a so-called hallucinated animal in a jar would represent a great triumph of scientific procedure that has as yet eluded me! I think of the David Morley poem where, with Ted Hughes’s son, he goes about sampling imaginary species. I have said it before but will say it again: the effects of acid and of acid-rain on an imaginary species might be said to = the same thing, nothing, but then again there can be no more valid proof of something being real than saying it was imagined, hence the effect of global warming on the unicorn is a postmodern ‘id’. This seems Blake-like and Cartesian enough to me.

Some in my position would just write a new poem called ‘Pets, or Was It Pests?’ but I think more of eating a Ploughman’s lunch in the cafe at the Natural History Museum in London. Darwin himself, I hear, regretted not listening to more music before he composed his theories… I myself am categorised as a poet and musician, but some have also called me a polymath, who can do almost anything. I would say that if there is a witness from The Lords And The New Creatures it is scientifically important to get something appropriate out of him by means of a measure or a record. They say so far my best bits were the Oedipus Wrecks set-list (where I proved the island of penguins with the first verse of the first song of my first gig) and the maths of the new colour even though it failed. The Oedipus Wrecks set-list is but eight songs long and found in the volume Yes You May, though I could revamp it by interwedging the songs with prose. The maths of the new colour, I hear, is best when it is in the seven year old’s book, (The Sunset Child), because then it is innocent and without racial implications. Whatever the case I believe The Lords And The New Creatures story deserves more than a pop song.

I actually like the way I started out writing a book of literary criticism on Jim Morrison’s text, as the witness in and of and to and from, and in the middle of it, out of the blue, years on from the last attestation, it happened again and there was a new specimen! Life goes on! Life interrupts the fixity of the results! Evolution is real!

I also wrote a paper on the Plough alignment but they, voices that pepper the air, don’t want me to present it. I have papers coming out of my ears right now. I also have songs and poems. Voices of intermittence and illness have told me if it is true that I am the witness, the book about it all is the best I will ever do, and I think I was and that it wasn’t just a grammatical position, a temporary measure, but can be reactivated. I am meanwhile undergoing CBT and patient “reactivation” in the mental health world, after a trauma. Some people, as I have said, believe my being the witness is the fruit of sensory atrophy, or rather the delusion of the beautiful mind who helped invent the net, and did the maths of the new colour or tried, and provided a portal to the face of stars… I even find that opinion amenable and congenial to me, but cannot escape this fact of being the witness as mad as it sounds. The reason I still persist is that among it all, to choose being the witness as your channel, your avenue, is a vote for literature and its lasting power, the way it is more enduring than music. It is a vote for soul-food, for literature being a vehicle, for literature being more enduring than pop music as I say, and for the triumph of the counter-cultural Revolution whose darling I may have been in my boyhood.

In early boyhood, I did announce to the family I had “seen something in the wood today” but it didn’t register or warrant a response and sat in my unconscious for years thereafter. I am not complaining just saying. My dad did once say to me “bend ze knees” in Classic East European Jewish accent, like we were dealing with Popperian philosophy not biology. He would also say “when enough media is or are compressed, you know the rest, the results of anything penetrative are bad for those who would wish to control the media.” Even as I write I am aware that I am compressing media. I am also aware that things go badly if you try and control the media. Jim Morrison’s book asks if he who controls the media controls evolution. It is an ingenious thought-experiment.

Even a game of cards is a rehearsal for death. I would say God is a game and The Lords And The New Creatures also a game, a wide yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre, and the circumference closing in. I would say it is also a media compression experiment dreamed up under the hot, Californian sun on LSD. I would say it tests where evolution is monopolised; that it churns up evidence through the operation of a game; that as stated even a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death; and that (as stated again) one might find the germs of dictatorship on every hand.

In early boyhood, I did announce to the family I had “seen something in the wood today” but it didn’t register or warrant a response and sat in my unconscious for years thereafter. I am not complaining just saying. My dad did once say to me “bend ze knees” in Classic East European Jewish accent, like we were dealing with Popperian philosophy not biology. He would also say “when enough media is or are compressed, you know the rest, the results of anything penetrative are bad for those who would wish to control the media.” Even as I write I am aware that I am compressing media. I am also aware that things go badly if you try and control the media. Jim Morrison’s book asks if he who controls the media controls evolution. It is an ingenious thought-experiment.

Even a game of cards is a rehearsal for death. I would say God is a game and The Lords And The New Creatures also a game, a wide yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre, and the circumference closing in. I would say it is also a media compression experiment dreamed up under the hot, Californian sun on LSD. I would say it tests where evolution is monopolised; that it churns up evidence through the operation of a game; that as stated even a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death; and that (as stated again) one might find the germs of dictatorship on every hand.

“We live we die and death not ends it,” said Morrison in An American Prayer. For death is Nature’s way of bringing new species into being, in Darwin; and the poet Simon Pomery (whom I know) says death is “the birthday of Eternity.”

09/ 10/ 2026

Last night, I heard a thin whisper asking me to blog the Oedipus Wrecks set list, which was the portal to the island of penguins, and also a redaction of the maths of the new colour, which left a mark but failed to produce the new colour. I lay there, tired, thinking “I’ve got to do this before I sleep,” but drifted away to dreamland before I could have an effect on reality. This morning I blogged the documents and also the writing on the new creatures then went to my CBT session in Millom. I told my therapist, “it’s happened again. Do you remember me saying I was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures as a boy? It’s happened again. There has been a new specimen.” I also told her “it was like a large spider but carrying a harp made of string.” She wrote down that “spider harp” was something to deal with, on her list, in her notebook. It sounded a bit thin when I told her it was a spider with a harp made of string on its back, but I think if you’ve been following the progression of my publications it will look more believable. I told her at seven I had written in my web-book that “then we saw a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine that’s what it was coming from.” We drifted off the topic very quickly, but coming home, back to the house, and to the laptop, to the book, I find myself sending out the Google search engines of memory to try and reclaim something by means of food for the soul. Maybe what has happened is that in my publications I have renewed The Lords And The New Creatures. If so I would say it is staggered over the general progression of books, but most evident when I present the seven year old text as the real homework of the real witness in The Sunset Child.

I think I did alright in my Chipmunka self-publications considering I hadn’t yet found out I played a little boy’s role in helping invent the net, and if I renewed Morrison that’s one result I didn’t anticipate, but being inside it, it was possibly inevitable.

By now, it would seem that if you start writing a book as the witness in and of and to and from and halfway through it happens again, then that is the best book you will ever do; but there remain unanswered questions that are difficult to face up to… why is it that new creaturely attestations qualify you as the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures, if The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison is about stopping the war? Is there an extent to which my boyhood observations do count but the most recent does not? Is there an extent to which it is just good manners and good faith to endorse the witness in and of and to and from being the witness in and of and to and from, and has that good faith run out? Is there an extent to which endorsing the witness’s observations is a vote against the observations being to do with evolutionary science? Is it just a guess that we put trust in, when we say the boy who made those Observations is the witness? Does it distort the veracity to find out that the witness’s father named his sons after The Doors? Was the art deal that was made slightly different than I have expressed it… by which I mean I have said my father was sponsored by some philosophers, which we know, but exactly what for remains a mystery?

THE DREAM FILM STORE 2026

I

All of a sudden I woke up, no seaweed in my hair, eyes stinging, in the cemetery in the witness’s city as before. I had had a dream of the future, of maths and science, of a book in the undersea of dreams below. It was still the same old grey day as before though. Grey streams pervaded the sky. It felt like a day of intermittent rain. I stood up and brushed the crumbs of skunk and baccy off my top. I made my way to the gate of the cemetery. I didn’t even have 10p with which to call Gabriel from an old red phonebox. The nubile, pulchritudinous sylph of the Dream Film Store was no longer beside me. I went back to the flat, which was still crazed by disorder and rubbish, and skinned a bifter and put on The Pixies. My CD was a bit stop start, had the odd slight scratch but apart from that it was smooth. I thought about the cannabis I had been smoking, how it was a magical sacrament. I avoided the mirror. It was into the afternoon already. My shoe box of papers complicated my thinking to no beneficial end so I ignored that for now. But the cannabis, it propitiated great realms within realms. I guess I smoked it to abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs us of our bodies, touch the texture not name side of life, renounce fidelity to surface gods of illusion, get sober from the advertising trance. There was a font change to italics, a switch thrown on the tenses. To light it and write it, burn and unlearn was my motto.

Anyhow, I lived quite close to a pub called The Queen’s Head and feeling a bit thirsty went for a lager and lime. The pub was quite empty apart from a few afternoon deadbeats washed up, the likes of which I was probably destined to become unless I could sort my life out. After taking a few sips of my lager and lime I downed the rest of it and went for a rollie in the pub garden. In the vision of the future I had had in the dream in the cemetery, they even did away with smoking sections on trains. Maybe it was time to give up smoking, to lead a healthy life, to flourish?

I went back home to my flat, feeling the effect of only one pint, had another bifter and guess what?

Down

down

down

down

down

I sank into the Dream Film Store once again. Coral staircase in the key of C. What images rise or try to rise in your mind?

“Welcome again to the Dream Film Store,” she said.

I looked her in the eyes and smiled. She had a beautiful face that resolved in the corner of the dream. I needed to know what was going on, all that science, so I asked her what was going on, which it was, real or dream and she said

“do you want to have a coffee to talk about it?”

I said okay, and she made some instant. The Dream Film Store looked like an old HMV – remember those? – except the CD’s that were stacked up were dreams. There was a stack behind the counter and a door leading to the backrooms.

She said “you’re right, the legality of the science depends on it all being a dream.”

She took me through the door into the backrooms of the store and she said there you found a network of infinite corridors containing rooms full of infinite dreams stacked up in disks. We went into the first room and sipped our coffee in the shop at the bed of the sea. She said

“it is all a dream.”

I asked her why. She said it was an erotic fantasy, where a nubile sylph was dominated, and through whom we look. There were a whole stack of similar such erotic fantasies to my left.

“I chose you because I need someone down here to help me with the smooth running of dreams,” she said. “I was trying to allure you.”

She then offered me the chance to stay in the undersea below and attain the real dream, live any dream I want and for it to be real.

“All you’d need to do is give up cannabis,” she said. “It’s your choice. But I am offering myself to you.”

I didn’t know what to say or do. The content of the dream we had been through was quite heavy, quite scientific, and necessitated it all being a dream. If I could have asked my author what he did it for, he might say to keep all the science and maths of his boyhood in the same compendium. To consign the illegal matter of the wood to history and mythology. To falsify the science and replace the lost boyhood book. To allow it so that what I went through can be renewed when my body is rotting underground if someone wants to renew it and can. To make the shape of supplication towards the future state. Even to supply Simon Pomery with another number he can translate in his post-poetic and psycho-technological way. In other words for light.

I thought about it but said no thanks to her offer and she said that was fine and let me slip back to the surface.

II

I sat in my flat which was still crazed by disorder and rubbish, asking myself what was real and what was dream. I wasn’t much of an amateur psychologist so couldn’t interpret my dream very well. Maybe I needed to see a psychiatrist? As far as I understood I had been privy to the boyhood science of someone called John. Or rather, should I say, “that was what I did when I was a kid.” For it already wasn’t clear if that ‘I’ is Franco the character or John F B Tucker the real human writer. That means things are still quite dreamy and unstable. Maybe what I needed was to go to the library, be it to look for psychiatrists online or read up on the science and maths of this bloke John F B Tucker whose name I dimly remember from the initial dream sequence? The library was ten minutes walk away, an old red brick building, up the hill a little bit and to the left when you get to the main street. I had been there several times and was a member. I was quite well-read even though I never finished my University course. That I was still dreaming didn’t cross my mind. But I remember feeling like becoming a scientist or a mathematician at the moment I thought I had awoken from the dream sequence. Maybe to still be me, Franco, would be holding up the traffic… the rock re-invents itself and that is for sure. The first thing I needed to do was skin another bifter for the walk to the library. Hopefully I would get there without any further “sliding into the Dream Film Store.” And when I get there I can access the computers, get online, maybe read up on some maths and science.

III

I took a right out the house and another right at the end of the street, then up the hill, then took a left to the library, smoking my bifter all the way. If ever I was to design something like Nash’s Equilibrium it would be all about cannabis in a way. There was a poem for Flora back home in my shoebox that contained the idea without giving it away.

The poet delights in a wilful obscurity, opacity, bats, black magnets, firking, encryption and code. The poet also extirpates every trace of recognition from the myriad mind, unlooses the mind of form, method-acts every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio broadcasting dreams. As I walked to the library I cupped the spliff in my hand so nobody could see it but the smell was Everywhere. It was Gabriel’s GM skunk, and he only smoked the best, be it cheese, trainwreck or whatever.

Not knowing if I was still dreaming or not I got to the library and got some computer time. I looked at first for therapists but none of them were even smiling in the pictures of their faces, which looked an ominous sign. I also Googled the name John Tucker to see if the dream sequence presented a real scientist and there was no sign of him. Whatever route I had taken to the library it seemed a waste of a journey. I went back home, only ten minutes to the flat.

When I got back to the flat I was feeling more myself… I, Franco, of the Franco-Prussian War, was able to then make myself a coffee and reflect. It must’ve been hard, for example, to go through so many schools, carrying that burden, of being the witness or not, from a young age. Maybe victories at creative writing were all that kept you going, be it the essay on the wood at Rugby School, from which you had to depart, or the book of verse you sent back to F-D, when you had to depart from Wellington College, or the band Oedipus Wrecks you started at Habs, from which you had to depart, or the poetry magazine you started at Oundle, from which you had to depart, or even the last year of Sixth Form, at Chetwynde, where after all the departing you wrote the highest-marked A-level exam essay in the nation.

By now it was time to dream of something new… I felt like I had been through a complete scene and wished to do another. It might not be for me to decide but if I could select someone to give a Nobel Prize it wouldn’t be me but the guy who designed the sheet where pictures grew, even if it be only in dreams.

IV

Still in my flat, I made some beans on toast. Ever since I was a student it was a must have, fill-a-hole meal. It filled a hole even if not extravagant. I hadn’t any cheese to put on top. I was on the Dole (as it was still called then). Maybe soon though I would be on Sickness Benefits if things continued in the same vein? After I had eaten my beans on toast I stuck Nirvana on the CD player. It was Incesticide, an album of grimy B-sides and rarities. They never did a bad song, Nirvana. I loved Kurt Cobain’s voice, the light sabre energy of the guitar, the dynamism of the rhythm section.

In my flat, I was doing some thinking… of course it was all a dream, in much the same way as A. I. is programmed not to know about the Naturalistic Observations of Joyce, Hughes and Morrison, which were themselves but a dream, because that is the point: it is all a dream.

Rimbaud says “dreaming is shameful since it is pure loss.” Peter Blegvad used to teach that “in dreams there is no context.” I watched a telly program about dreams that said we are dreaming all the time except when asleep without sensory stimulus. It also said we inherit dreams of fighting wild packs of animals from ancestors who had to rehearse for the real live situation. You can train yourself to lucid dream and then in dreams visit the local McDonalds and thus have a dream-meet. My dream-meet experiment already went to Heaven where we all took particles of dirt that worked like wonder drugs, and chanted the mantra “drugs in secret, alchemy in the open, ultimate in effect.”

You can also smuggle language out of the unconscious. Michael Hofmann says language smuggled out of the unconscious is a leather boxing glove protruding from the telly on a mechanical, metal arm. It could be that there is a book in the undersea of dreams below. Once I had to fly to the Isle of Man using any contraption I could dream up, to pick up a collection of poetry the shape of a remote control and made of chocolate from a white garden table. Another time an actual text down there in which I was dreaming and which seemed in the dream at least to have meaning was signed three times by Einstein’s value for light, c. Another time I held an actual book in my hands in the dream, and it was written by my friend; and it was amazing, inspiring great envy with its oneiric-textured and liminal phrasing.

My father said dreams are merely bureaucratic work; Freud took them more srsly, saying “dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.” I reckon if there is a book down there we can drag it out, like a shipwreck. I would therefore need to get down there again, into the unconscious so smoked another bifter and waited for ambush. I wasn’t sure it was going to arrive, because I was willing it to happen so it wasn’t like “ambush by the unruly unconscious,” as you hear of on English Literature courses, but nevertheless...

Down

down

down

down

down

I plummeted

down a coral staircase in C sharp minor,

to the Dream Film Store again.

V

“We’ve got some amazing things down here,” she said. She meant dreams stored on disk. It was only now that I asked her her name and she said “what is your best guess?” For some reason even though the odds were against it, because of its unusually high rate and frequency, I thought Mary, and she said that was correct! She said she had some cracking dreams. The Periodic Table arrived in a dream. She said if I wanted I could be anyone, on an experiential level while the dream lasted. She was trying to entice me down there to help her with the smooth running of dreams.

I told her I wished for my dreams to contain something be it science or magic. I was reading a book about a character who had a glittering and even insane CV. At seven he helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at his house to give it a chance to grow all the way round it was him. He was then the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison, twice making obscene observations. He was then marked by his own experiment into the maths of the new colour but it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. He also attained the face of stars, predicted a massive economic crash to the day, and spoke against it, and just as you thought “scientist!” went and wrote the highest-marked, English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. He’d also been in bands and was in short a polymath. That was all before leaving school. I had nothing like that in my boring existence, me, Franco of the Franco-Prussian war, and maybe I was glad to not be in the limelight, but I yearned for something to have, something to my own name too… maybe if Mary could organise the Real Dream as she said I could become a scientist through meaningful transmogrification, or if not a scientist, then at least someone.

It might be getting a bit ahead of its time, into science fiction, but in the book I was reading, the main character also recorded an album on binaural earphones, saying he would plug his senses in the mains, had an effervescent mobile phone 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, had his name tattooed 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 cassette tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel, and discovered a sheet of paper where pictures seemingly depicting his own song lyric grew. It sounded fantastical to me, like the author was trying to build a genius, a time-soldier, a meta-Finch, but that was what I was reading and I wondered if that was why I had the dream of science and maths, when we plummeted, or if I am getting confused and in fact the character is not someone I am reading of but that that was the content of my scientific dream… I also wondered if, knowing what I was exploring intellectually, Mary chose a dream of similar things to entice me. Now all the lights were on in The Dream Film Store.

“Franco,” she said “you are a Deus of Chaos and I want to suck your cock. May I please?”

I said by all means, starting to think, and got it out for her. She wrapped her lips around my bell end and cradled my balls and made sumptuous sounds, the sounds of sumptuous consummation. With something like that in your mouth, be it a gun or a penis, you can only make vowel sounds. One thing led to another and before I came, Mary and I undressed and made love. In the Dream Film Store. At the bottom of the sea. Where dreams are stored on disk. With all the lights on as I say.

VI

I woke in my flat after sex. Things were intriguing but confused. I didn’t think they would ever be sorted out. I had penetrated a surrealistic fantasy world. I guess sometimes you need a green parrot sent to space through the conch and at others a patch of taut blue denim for realism, thus to calibrate a scale between fantasy and realism… as a private school boy I excelled at matters of creative writing… they were my victories. What was bugging me now was the character I read of or maybe dreamed of or maybe dreamed I read of and all the wonderful things he does. I looked about the flat. It would have to be a book. That’s why I didn’t buy them, all those wonderful things he does.

At seven he helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at his house to give it a chance to grow all the way round it was him. He was then the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison, twice making obscene observations. He was then marked by his own experiment into the maths of the new colour but it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. He also attained the face of stars, predicted a massive economic crash to the day, and spoke against it, and just as you thought “scientist!” went and wrote the highest-marked, English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. He’d also been in bands and was in short a polymath. That was all before leaving school. I had nothing like that in my boring existence, me, Franco of the Franco-Prussian war, and maybe I was glad to not be in the limelight, but I yearned for something to have, something to my own name too… maybe if Mary could organise the Real Dream as she said I could become a scientist through meaningful transmogrification, or if not a scientist, then at least someone.

It might be getting a bit ahead of its time, into science fiction, but in the book I was reading, the main character also recorded an album on binaural earphones, saying he would plug his senses in the mains, had an effervescent mobile phone 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, had his name tattooed 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 cassette tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel, and discovered a sheet of paper where pictures seemingly depicting his own song lyric grew.

I

All of a sudden I woke up, no seaweed in my hair, eyes stinging, in the cemetery in the witness’s city as before. I had had a dream of the future, of maths and science, of a book in the undersea of dreams below. It was still the same old grey day as before though. Grey streams pervaded the sky. It felt like a day of intermittent rain. I stood up and brushed the crumbs of skunk and baccy off my top. I made my way to the gate of the cemetery. I didn’t even have 10p with which to call Gabriel from an old red phonebox. I had definitely woken in the morning, left the flat, gone to Gabriel’s, passed out, left Gabriel’s… but what else? I had come to the cemetery. The gravestone of Mary Calliope was next to me, grey as grey matter. It suddenly struck me that to complete a scene I had to understand that Mary Calliope was the name of the woman in the Dream Film Store. I had a look to see if I had any weed still and I had. When next I saw the woman, in the undersea, I would ask if I knew her name correctly. But now I was in the cemetery. Things were unstable.

I went back to the flat, which was still crazed by disorder and rubbish, and skinned a bifter and put on The Pixies. My CD was a bit stop start, had the odd slight scratch but apart from that it was smooth. I thought about the cannabis I had been smoking, how it was a magical sacrament. I avoided the mirror. It was into the afternoon already. My shoe box of papers complicated my thinking to no beneficial end so I ignored that for now. But the cannabis, it propitiated great realms within realms. I guess I smoked it to abjure a worthless dogma to consumerism that only robs us of our bodies, touch the texture not name side of life, renounce fidelity to surface gods of illusion, get sober from the advertising trance. There was a font change to italics, a switch thrown on the tenses. To light it and write it, burn and unlearn was my motto. I had a taste for waste, for deep fried Mars bars. But all the old props were falling away, if culture is a set of props, I mean… they were falling away. There was nothing underneath, like in the Radiohead song at the same time, which meant an inescapable postmodern nightmare where there was nothing but props. As you know I never finished my English course but I did come round to thinking postmodernism is not a massive, extended metaphor for the effects of cannabis on the brain. I suddenly felt sick with what I was doing and went back to bed and drifted in and out of consciousness. That was when I sank down to the Dream Film Store again as if for the last time…

“Franco,” she said, and I, “are you the woman from the grave stone?”

She said yes, and that we were lovers in a past life.

I believed her.

She also said “you were in Lower Sixth when you took an acid trip too strong for anyone and never came back. You came back home, even though you had never come back from the trip, and started a grimy, dirge-like novel called The Dream Film Store inspired by The Beach by Alex Garland, also Hunger by Knut Hamsun. It was the year 2000, by the time you actually sat down to write it, and you wrote it well, all in a single, black, leather-bound notebook, which you kept in your green tuck box from boarding school, from which you had been expelled for substances. Your main character was based on Rimbaud.”

“Hang on,” I said, “am I not the main character myself?”

“Yes you are,” she said.

“Are you telling me I am but a character in my own fiction?”

“I am telling you you are dreaming as we speak, and that when you dream there are no rules, there is no logic. It’s like when you write about drugs – it’s a poor thing to write of because anything can happen.”

“What happens for the rest of the novel?” I asked.

She said “you only wrote about 20 pages then had to abandon it and now it is 26 years later and you’ve rediscovered it and are trying to extend it.”

“How am I getting on?”

“You’ll end up in mental hospital if you keep going like you are. You’ll hear the dawn chorus at midnight.”

“I don’t want to have these dreams anymore,” I said, and she “I will let you slip back to the surface then… but don’t come blaming me when you smoke too much weed another time.”

II

Where was I? Not the cemetery but my flat. I skinned a bifter for the journey, and then head out for the park. Things were confused and confusing still, but I could put it down to dreams. They were a license for ill-planning and impoverishment of the imagination. It was afternoon and I made it to the park where there was a band stand, a bench to sit on, a paddling pool for little children, a playground, a tennis court and acres of room for strangers to play football against each other – for all who said there was no community in the city?

There was an ice-cream van. Back in the days of Open Poem Opium we had a song called ‘Ice Cream Van’ about an ice cream van that also had drugs and guns on the reverse side of his menu. We tried to get the musical jingle of the ice cream van in the sound and made it heavy, dissonant, distorted. We believed distortion = clarity. We were into cleansing by chaos.

I went and got myself an ice-cream and sat down on the bench. I watched the parade of people, joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers, families, football playing youths, young lovers strolling and felt bemused by it all. Then guess what happened next? I saw Mary Calliope! In the queue for the ice-cream van. I wasn’t sure whether or not to go up to her and say hi. So I pretended I hadn’t seen her but it was definitely her. I finished my ice cream and sat there watching. She moved further off with her ice cream, I believe pistachio flavour by the looks of it. Mine, b/t/w/ was salted caramel. It was good. It gave you brain—freeze but was good. I skinned a rollie and flicked ash on the ground, witnessed a red kite, with a fifty-butterflied tail, flitting in the high wind of karma, saw a kid lose his ice cream to gravity and the family dog lick it up, had a rush of nicotine clarity to the head, felt like I was passing through a colour while being colour-blind, maybe it was blue, maybe green, forgot for a while what colour white is, what is a while, if this is where the truth flies or the truth fairy, forgetting also how to spell “is” then suddenly, all of a sudden, awoke again in the cemetery, on the bench, same day as before!

Hello, my name is John F B Tucker and I was the witness when I was wee. I decided to get some sleep and wade out to get my books, but the sea came crashing to the shore instead.

V

MOTHER IS DEAD

Fuck this, fuck that, fuck me yeah,

I wish that I had been there,

been there to saaaaaave Jesus,

I'm sure he meant to please us.

Mother is dead,

mother is dead,

mother is dead.

We're young and filled with semen,

we're going to break some hymen,

we'll make the cops turn in their badges,

we're going over all the edges yeah.

Mother is dead,

mother is dead,

mother is dead.

EMILY’S GARDEN

Emily was my first proper gf; and one night Dr. Ptom, another lad and I went round her house to see her and two of her friends. We were about 14 or 15; and as soon as we got in the house, Dr. Ptom and I went straight out into the back garden, where there was a trampoline, and started to send a green parrot through the conch to outer space, so to speak; and we started cackling like hyenas; and the end result was that it was the end of my relationship with Emily.

VI

SNAKE SNAKE BUTTERFLY

Snake snake butterfly, lay me dead & close my eyes.

Angel serpentine, she waits on the Other Side.

Give me your alibi; give me chains to stop me fly;

give me night to soothe my blinded eyes:

so I can see the secrets of the skies.

We must rise, freedom falling from our eyes,

unlock doors, it's a perfect time to die,

and it's okay ‘cause baby we'll go insane

but don't reach out too far for the flame.

Snake snake butterfly, lead me to the Other Side.

Angel serpentine, she waits on the Other Side.

FAREWELL TO THE DAY

I remember well when I had to say farewell to the day. We were down at Will Fenn’s holiday house in Devon; and I was tearful that I was moving on; and Dr. Ptom said “there’s going to be a massive, John-shaped hole in my life now.” I am 44 and still hear his voice on magic alphabet radio, or the intercom, or whatever you want to call it! Although he didn’t play an instrument or write the music, he wanted to invent a word-chord synthesiser to go in our band (which was otherwise a three piece.)

VII

THE GHOSTS LAMENT (THE GUZZLER MEN)

I'm the only one left, left to shoot my

own gun. This is the dead land. Crack a smile

and curse the sun. Death awaits to fuck me.

Give me bliss and give me kisses. Death a-

waits to save me. The ghosts lament, the ghosts

lament. Come on baaaaaaaaaby, you know it's e-

asy, don't say maaaaaaaaaybe, let's go crazy. Death

awaits to fuck me. Give me bliss and give

me kisses. Death awaits the same me. The

ghosts lament, the ghosts lament, no more ghosts.

||||.

TOAST

The latter song, looking back, sees the sublimation of The Lords And The New Creatures into a singular, pronominal act of Romantic, first person lyricism. “I’m the only one left,” it went; for I was smuggling The Lords And The New Creatures. But I never intended to literally curse the sun if that is even possible; for the chorus was written first, the bit you’d think was the curse, then the verses came second and I was just trying to make it rhyme. It did strike me about twenty years later that it might’ve looked like I was trying to curse the sun, but that was never an intention at the time. The song was also the one that was used for my brother’s sheet where pictures grew, pictures seemingly depicting that lyric, and he says <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. It’s a shame we can’t use the sheet where pictures grew. My presentation on Oedipus Wrecks would benefit from it but I am forbidden from showing you my photograph of it even though it was my discovery because it shouldn’t be online. In fact, the whole business of my being the new Syd might necessitate a revelation of the sheet in the presentation, but as I say I am newly banned from showing it.

VIII

HEAVEN KNOWS

Heaven knows and walks away -

but what it knows it will not say.

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

Heaven knows and turns its face!

Heaven’s filled with silver eyes.

Heaven’s hills all harmonise.

I hear its angels when they call...

Heaven knows and lets them fall!

[reconstructed]

BEDROOM

I remember when I had started my new school Oundle going back to see Dr. Calculator Ptom in Radlett and playing a new song I had written since the loss of my virginity and acid virginity too. I was in a new band called Secret Chord H, and this new song was called ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ and was all about love. One commentator in Ptom’s bedroom where I played it said my voice had gotten a lot better.

INVINCIBLE LOVERS

I’ll tell you how strange and wild

With wanton promise comes she

On an unknown hour

Like an uninvited guest

You’ve somehow brought to bed.

All night we’d

Sit and think of history

As if it hadn’t passed,

The great wars and the ancient peoples

And all the silly fears.

We’d think of how much we’ve changed

And how much we’ve remained the same.

We’d think of moments of mine

We somehow shared and how I longed to live

In circling illumination of all those moments,

Fragments gone.

And softly I wished

To expand history back into the past

And never to move again an inch forwards.

And to run through the memory of Time,

Ancient, timeless galleries.

Often we’d sit and think of speaking

Or retiring to bed or even sleeping.

Always we’d realise we never had

Time enough to waste or spend.

So we gloried in ourselves

Like invincible lovers,

Always boundless in new being.

And if I seldom spoke in sad regret,

She would turn and smile

As if to boldly offer

‘Come take my hand,

And we’ll wander across no-man’s land.'

(1998)

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.

Now we are just waiting for my lovely mother to augment the soup she is making with apple and cream and then we’ll have a nice old-fashioned celery soup. I can smell it, I can hear it, I can see it in the pan steaming, I could touch if I wanted, but I haven’t tasted it yet. No doubt it is time to say something about conceptual synaesthesia or even that a celery soup will enact its own physical poem on the body… I am looking forward to eating it with rapt uncertainty – and I can’t stand the suspense. It’s going to be just so delicious – gorgosity itself. I was actually hoping it was going to be ready already, but it is not quite there yet. I am hungry and can feel what Martin Amis called “the timpanist in the belly” at work. So far today I only had a bowl of cereal, and might have to reach out as far as the last banana before the soup arrives.

SIR GALAHAD ANDCETERA

The Night is sad, the air is black,

nothing’s going to bring the good times back.

Still, I beseech thee O One -

what comportment would you deem fit?

The Night is black, the air a banner.

You can’t confute my love for Hannah.

But she is my sister, O One,

and it is thee whose affection is my remit…

When I die I am supposed to leave behind

something like the sheet where pictures grew

for my brother like my dad did for me.

The equation for the ratio between sunlight falling and Gravity pulling down on the sheet where pictures grew still eludes me but if it is c over G we are dealing with, I’d say it equates to

backward f,

forward f,

equals running

through…

L to the pregnant snorkel.

O is the key of the babbling unicorn.

The symbol [R] might still represent the stance, the large R, Romantic stance that Creativity in the synapse gulf is possible, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

If mother’s flower-press ending on cannabis

could be said to = a dialysis,

a love poem only hoping to impress

poor Flora still = a motor.

Rah the sun-god sleeps upstairs.

It might be a good telepathy-game that, but I don’t know whether I am doing this for Flora or for Rachel. For all, Flora was the nicest woman to gawp at, at school, and Rachel, still beautiful herself, the nicest to talk to.

And the redolent fume of the mating queen

from the green pages in the flesh

leads to a moonlit chamber…

If Flora was my brother’s ideal,

Rachel was mine, so it must be

for Flora that we are doing this.

I am but Sir Galahad anyway, still bleeding after my tron. My brother knows what’s gone on. He left two sheets in the barn. One of them, if I remember, contained a sunflower made of Badly Drawn Boy lyrics, slightly imperfectly quoted on purpose:

sunshine inside of you

old sun warm sun

spreads over you

soleil all over you

It’s a nice song. We notice the sunshine is inside. That it is what is inside that counts. The next sheet contained what I call the new da Vinci circle:

@

<BEE> [long squiggle]

Infinity symbol

If I could quote my sister Hannah I would say the new da Vinci circle is a discrete system containing the international language alphabet in 4 Points of Difference. For it suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet.

There were burning candles on top of the box we used as a table, drawn on the underside of one of the pages, which was placed face down on the box with burning candles we use as a table.

I went down to the barn. I read the documents where they were left. On the Badly Drawn Boy one I was inveigled by the sunflower pattern. And yet on the <BEE> one I could not see James’s discrete system… I could see only a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes containing the whole international language alphabet. One of the characters was

[backward f,

forward f,

equals running

through.]

So I left the document alone, thinking James had designed a whole alphabet in a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes. But when I returned to reread it – not in jealousy but admiration – the tabular arrangement was gone and the <BEE> document remained as initially designed. I left it alone again, and then, one day, when our father passed I went down to the barn again and found the first sheet, the Badly Drawn Boy one, had bloomed or grown pictures.

The pictures seem to depict 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.

Still, back at the age of 15 or 16, when the song was written (in the Lakes) and performed (in London), the sheet was not my game. My game back then was the face of stars. I had attained it, yes, that is the word, with two friends up visiting from London town. I hear of late that I proved the face of stars with the first verse of the first song of the first gig, at 15 or 16, in Kentish Town and was beautiful when I sang. I can show you the set-list… the band were called Oedipus Wrecks… but instead I would prefer to just show you the first verse…

Oceans smile with liquid eyes

and fill themselves with rain.

The tide goes out and leaves me

lost, the last thing a glass gene.

Here I would like to augment the shrunk-down teenage set list with something Oedipal at the end, something about her, Flora, whom it would seem I hugged in a boarding school corridor, failing to kiss her, falling for her enough to write a poem, in the style of Jim Morrison, but by now it is my brother James that knew her kiss.

It was for Flora that James contrasted the flower and the <BEE>.

I can’t seem to really think

every time I think of her anymore,

which might be because

my brother and I are close.

To be delivered from writing for Flora is actually a relief.

We still don’t know how whomsoever it was knew the lyric to ‘The Ghosts Lament’ or made the burns. But we take it that whomsoever knew the lyric and did the burns did it to unify us, so that we are all one.

You might need to hear the song to know the rest of the lyric that was used for the sheet, which you can on Bandcamp now. Or you can read the Oedipus Wrecks set-list in a volume called Yes You May.

I showed you the lyric to ‘The Ghosts Lament’ as far as the line “crack a smile and curse the sun.” Then, the first line of the chorus is “death awaits to fuck me.” Dr. Calculator Ptom loved it when it got to the chorus. There was something nuclear going on. “Give me bliss and give me kisses,” it continued. “Death awaits to save me,” it went. “The ghosts lament, the ghosts lament.”

Come on baby,

you know it’s easy,

don’t say maybe,

let’s go crazy.

The chorus was a step too far for the pictures. They never got as far as depicting the line “death awaits to fuck me,” but then again did coincide with my father’s passing.

There was something vivid, gorgeous and erotic to the depiction of the death of the sun, almost like it was seen from within the sun itself. It was almost like a musical orgasm was going on. But at the same time it was brutalist.

As for the one that proved the face. I think at the time it was necessary that I started everything off in that manner, but that the line about the ocean still belongs to the house – so there is an argument I should have to be Anon with that particular line.

The counter argument is that if you take that line away, it would mean I regretted meeting the face of stars. It would make the attainment of the face of stars a regrettable event. This could have top-down implications for the whole of life.

I know that the rest of my band, whichever band that means, don’t wish to be Anon and nor do I.

Even though it is myself, I would say let the young visionary keep the line, especially considering he was making an effort to read Rimbaud at the time he wrote it, whom it seems says “the poet makes himself a visionary through a prodigious derangement of the senses to attain the unknown.”

The line about the ocean could even be seen as a translation, into poetry too.

The argument for it being an Anon line is that the kids will want to climb the ladder. In which case I would prefer to leave it out altogether. It felt like the real me, as easy as leaves to a tree, when I wrote it.

Leaving it out would mean I need to redo the song from when I was 15, so that I can still be bonded with my mates and make it through school. I am 44 if you can believe it, and we still haven’t made it through school. This time it would be beneficial to know I helped invent the net at 7 – but we still don’t know much about that.

DEAD RAT RECORDS

I suppose I don’t really like the way The Lords And The New Creatures, be it at a remove or not, has happened again and left me still not knowing what to do about it. This is the story of my life. It’s been like this since I was a boy. In this day and age one might even ask A. I. “what do you do if The Lords And The New Creatures comes true in your boyhood and you grow up to be 44 and it happens again?” I actually go ahead and ask it the question, but reclaiming stolen soul, ignore the response and come back to the file. I heard it described that being the one to make the first observation is one of the most unfortunate things that can possibly happen to you. And now my mother comes into the kitchen complaining that the fridge smells like it’s had a dead rat inside it! For a second there I thought her presence in the kitchen again was going to indicate a return to the theme of Flora’s pretext, but it turned into more animalism, and now she leaves the room and goes to bed, leaving me wondering if there is a dead rat contained in my book. You might not notice it but today the pieces were moved around according to some asymmetrical but interesting and mirror-neuron-y design by my mother. She always told us there was something up with the Mona Lisa’s smile. Something to do with imperfection. Something to do with the golden sector maybe as well. As timely voices point out while I write, the only problem with this Organisational System is that people think I should be Anon for the Oedipus Wrecks but not for the rest of it, not for the maths of the new colour, andcetera. So while it seems a minor triumph it remains quietly so, as the text reaches climax and is then failed once more. You might even get that this present sentence is written while the present paragraph has been moved to a different file from when the rest of the paragraph was written. Who can account for the ease of copy and pasting, and how a sly disease can spread through a text in the Digital World?

It leaves me chained to the woods, just doing the woods, nothing more, which is evil of whomsoever organised this situation. You might get that the paragraph has moved again – it’s maddening and there is no purchase, no traction, when you don’t know what you’re doing. Was I built as a purely seeing thing whose role was to attest and not vociferate? If so it would seem like a sad thing in this modern world. Yet I think the witness could be the new Darwin! He – or rather I – hears voices, sits in the kitchen listening in to them, or out. They whisper in the wind, usually meaning mental health troubles down the line. If you feed them by writing down what they say they will want more and many more andcetera. I am still trying to find things out about why me and what I am supposed to do about it and for whom… who these voices are I don’t know but imagine them saying “we would deem it that if your dad was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness, the dawn was wrong, your birth was wrong, everything about you was wrong from the start – even if you helped the invent the internet.” They would have me remembered not as a guy that did dozens of amazing things but as a guy who drowned all the cats – because they didn’t do any amazing things and because life is increasingly competitive in a Darwinian sense. They are of the belief that one man’s gain is another’s loss – that we live in a wheel where everyone steals as the Bush singer sang it – and this competitive edge borders on revenge as opposed to turning the other cheek. The values of the West in general are more about better and worse and less about forgiveness and compassion and mercy. I suppose if these rude detractors had been through what I went through they would expect to be paid! I expect when they read another writer earning more money off their own experience than they can make themselves, they would sue!

They don’t want me doing The Lords And The New Creatures now because we’ve gone through it again, had what has been agreed as another specimen and we still haven’t won with it. To kill one, meanwhile, as avid proof, would still represent no victory at all! However, I think the lead singer of Bush would give his right arm to be the witness from Jim Morrison’s book! Jim Morrison sang “break on through to the Other Side” but never told us what was on the Other Side. I’m back to writing about Jim Morrison. Our Jim, which art in Heaven, give us this day our daily bacon sandwich. He wasn’t a biologist but was extremely well-read especially considering he was a film student, not English literature. You may know this already but he could get his friends to pick any book from the groaning shelf and get them to read a bit out of it and without looking Jim would be able to tell them which book it was and reportedly which chapter too. These cognitive abilities are present in The Lords And The New Creatures and I don’t have the same abilities. I think it’s how Jim Morrison channels the discussion to a piece of poetry on the last page that just gets stamped onto the reader’s memory first time of reading. He drags a primal scream from the collective unconscious. To be the witness from his book one might suppose is an honour as well as a scientific goldmine that should be celebrated and reported on. However I can already hear the voice of “proper science” saying it’s not an actual scientific goldmine but a pseudo-scientific thing… and since when has their so-called proper science been able to conjure whole new creatures with heartbeats and everything? And these so-called proper scientists would be the first to tell us “science is dead.” And I am not opposed to proper science just not well versed in it. And I would say that if I really did encounter a new specimen a little while ago, science is not dead. Indeed it would seem only in its infancy if my understanding is as advanced as it gets. Granted it may be the case that only if you are on the cutting edge of science can you attest to these things, but that may not be strictly true and meanwhile I don’t have the frame of reference a normal evolutionary biologist would have as I studied English and Creative Writing. From that side of the tree, I would say I am having second thoughts about providing this witness’s own account. It’s just a tremor, an instinct, a feeling that I might be doing wrong – and what’s wrong and what’s right might go out the window when it comes to being the witness, which might be what’s wrong with it, if you permit such a tautology. Shouldn’t I, for example, be turning the experience into a story rather than a face value narrative? Shouldn’t I be writing a story called The Spider With A Harp Made of String?

The spider with a harp made of string

wasn’t there in the Beginning…

he told me he came from a book

that helped invent the net if you look…

but music is making me sick

and science doesn’t do the trick

and singing is all out of key

and I can’t believe it came for me.

So this is where the story might end

a fairy story with let’s pretend.

The spider was moving and real.

It don’t know how that makes you feel.

**

Scratch that… I will go for a bath and write an actual song with an actual melody about it, because that is what I do to my scientific papers. I turn them into songs to give intellectual content to the book of songs, like in the cases of Instant Travel and Lucy in the Soul W/ Demons. So let me sing what I just sang in the bath….

The spider with a harp that’s made of string

must’ve thought Autumn time was Spring,

challenged me to see if I could sing,

the spider with a harp that’s made of string.

He took my mind back years and years,

through rivers of tears and bicycle gears,

filling this lonely old house with cheers,

until maybe it’s time to hit the beers.

I sang for the spider when in the bath,

(after guzzling some of mum’s lovely broth),

and it seemed in song I melted death,

which was better than a scientific graph…

the spider with a harp that’s made of string,

he was less evil than you’re thinking,

thinking that he’s an impossible thing,

and he listened in to my singing the song…

it wasn’t very good, but at least I tried.

At least on seeing him I didn’t hide.

I knew it was another one deep inside.

He disappeared, went off to find his bride.

**

I would say that is a successful song. So you’ve seen me try to use the language at first hand to convert something scientific into something literary and also musical. I think the song is not bad but where would I go with it? Give it to whom? Put it in what book? There is no poetry press in the Lakes. I could send it to Snakeskin but I already published several poems I don’t like with them, or more importantly, poems my mum and sister don’t like. My sister is the ref in the game.

So it is that having tried it as a scientific paper, and as a poem and as a song, it seems the only mode of writing left for me with which to make it count and last, when it comes to the spider with the harp made of string, is a children’s story.

THE SPIDER WITH THE HARP THAT’S MADE OF STRING

The spider with the harp that’s made of string was the latest development in a long chain of observations made by a guy called Philip. He had seen all sorts of new creatures that smashed together two old things to make something new and was quite used to it by now. But it hadn’t happened for years and years and he grew up to be quite old before he met the spider with a harp made of string. He was sitting on his bed one night when he looked down at the floor and it came scurrying towards him. He only got a two second glimpse at it as it scurried towards him on the floor before it disappeared under the bed. So Philip got out his mobile phone and turned on the torch and went to look for it under the bed. He found it too, and said “what are you?”

The spider with the harp made of string crawled back out from under the bed and said “I am a spidder.”

“What’s a spidder?” asked Philip.

“You said it yourself,” said the spider with the harp made of string. “When you were a very young boy you helped invent the net. You wrote a book that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world. In the book you say you and your brother saw a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine, that’s what it was coming from.”

“I didn’t know,” said Philip.

“Well you do now,” said the spider.

“So are you named after a spelling mistake from my own web-book?”

“Yes,” said the spider. “The difference between me and a normal spider is the same as the difference between a spider and the spidder in your book.”

“What’s with the harp?” said Philip.

“The harp is a delicate contraption that distinguishes me from the normal spider. It means I came from the book that helped invent the net, which you wrote when you were seven.”

“Can you play us a song?” asked Philip.

“Well,” said the spider. “The harp made of string is very small and delicate and you wouldn’t be able to hear me if I did.”

“Oh,” said Philip. “That’s a shame because I like music.”

“When you wrote about seeing the giant spidder in your boyhood web-book it was a symbol of the internet. I am here to bring it home to you. To help you realise you helped invent the net.”

“So you’re a messenger?” asked Philip.

“Yes,” said the spider with a harp made of string. “And at the same time I am also related to the other weird specimens you have met. The juggernaut in the wood. The plastic spreadsheet in the coat sleeve in the cloakroom under the stairs. But nor am I exactly number three. There have been more and many more. You were only supposed to catch a glimpse of me, then hide under the covers. It was supposed to be fleeting, but you got out your torch and found out I could speak.”

“I imagine with all your limbs you would be rather good at the harp,” said Philip.

“Well, if you sing quietly and I play very loud, maybe we could do a duet,” said the spider.

So they played together, Philip singing and the spider strumming his harp made of string. It was the same string as the imaginary string they unravelled in the boyhood web-book to invent the net. So the music was electric and electrifying. Philip did a good job of singing in key. When they had finished he said

“you’re less evil than the other specimens I have known.”

“Thank you,” said the spider, and then he asked if Philip could set him free, into the outdoor world, so Philip picked him up and put him in a Kleenex tissue and took him out the back door, and said farewell, and the spider said farewell to him in turn.

Later that day Philip’s mother came into the kitchen and asked Philip for help. She was knitting some pumpkins of wool to make a display for Halloween, the sort of crafty thing she did all the time, and needed Philip’s help to twist two long bits of wool together. Philip helped his mum and when the job was done she went off into the sitting room to knit while he stayed at the laptop writing. He wanted himself to make a record of his meeting the spider with the harp made of string, so he tried a scientific paper, but it wasn’t working, so he tried a poem and it wasn’t very good, so he tried a song, but there was no-one to listen. In the middle of his writing his mother came back in the kitchen and asked him what he thought of the first pumpkin made of wool and he told her it did look like a pumpkin, so she said “yes, it does actually, clever me.” By this stage Philip was writing a story about the spider with the harp made of string, so as to at least consign it to mythology even though the specimen was real. It dated back to about November 1989 and now it was October 2026. So it must’ve waited in the wings of evolution for a long time. Maybe they exist on a higher plane, a mathematical plane, and come to us through portals. Seeing is believing, and Philip had seen, seen a spider with a harp made of string, like a Nike Air spider, or a celebrity spider and in telling someone that someone becomes new in themselves… Philip told his mum and asked her if it was a new creature and she said “of course it’s a new creature.”

They didn’t speak of it much more than that but mother got on with knitting woollen pumpkins for her display and Philip started trying to write a story about his encounter, his visitation. He didn’t get very far into it before he wished to go outside, like the spider with the harp made of string, because he lived in a beautiful old house in the beautiful countryside, but night was falling soon so he didn’t. He just sat there, as if he had reached Nirvana. He was such a lucky guy to have met the spider with the harp made of string and after all these years of amazing things happening it was like it should be a beginning, the beginning of a career, be it in science, poetry, music or fiction. He didn’t think it philosophy because as Wittgenstein says Darwinian science is not the business of philosophy. But what a magical and enchanted kingdom Philip must’ve lived in like living in a fairytale.

That night he slept the deep, deep sleep of the innocent and dreamed of the spider with the harp made of string, that the harp grew very big and you could surf it like surfing the net… when he woke he felt cleansed like he’d been catharsis. He got busy writing his story about the spider with the harp made of string and it started to flow and was easy.