WHERE YOU AT, JOHN?

WHERE YOU AT, JOHN?

BY JOHN TUCKER

NOTE

A year or so ago I was advised to don a nom de plume for my new writing, at the same time as I turned away from a career in poetry under my real name (John Tucker) towards philosophy; and the end result was a book called Transition To Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors. It was to be my Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein, or so I hoped; and though some professional philosophers liked it tremendously, I have since decided against the nom de plume because it would mean having two bodies of work that overlap and that would be wrong. There were originally two additional volumes – Volume Two and Volume Three – of Transition To Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors, but things have had to change. Now instead of those extra volumes I propose to bring you this present text by John Tucker. Whilst I was writing it I was still Johannes Bergfors, the nom de plume, in my mind, and yet I hope I have been through it and eliminated fossils from that prior draft. I feel as if I went wrong calling Transition To Philosophy a book by Johannes Bergfors and that nothing good lies in that direction after all. I also feel that now there is a piece on the Plough alignment contained herein it is a strong work that almost processes the events of my life to a logically worked-out series of scientific results. Still, I have no way of knowing if it is any good or not because I read English and Creative Writing, not Philosophy, at University. Largely I have tried herein to scintillate rather than lecture with the intellectual content and to bind it to life.

THE ALIGNMENT

Proposition 1

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 2

Metaphysics is the place where science and religion meet.

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 3

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 4

If the alignment is perfect, God is perfect too.

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 5

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 6

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 7

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 8

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 9

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 10

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 11

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 12

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 13

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 14

The universe may just be a very elegant place.

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 15

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 16

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 17

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 18

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 19

The alignment is an object of worship that transcends difference and also underlies the variability of religious beliefs.

Explanation

To see the alignment is to be taken in by a religious event. The religion itself, as in what religion you are, does not matter. The alignment makes sense whatever religion you are, whatever colour or creed. It is so sacred that some people, from a distance, without seeing it, hide it under the name “white eyebrow.” It is not inconceivable that it is the main focal point of an international religion all the way round the world. A Rastafarian and a Jew and a Christian could all be equally awe-struck by the alignment, which is almost like saying we are equal in the eyes of God, and almost like the idea that these different faiths share a common perception of God, which I have argued is the same as the idea of Order in the universe.

*

Proposition 20

The alignment is evidence that Nature is the true architecture of State.

Explanation

Indeed, I was just thinking about Wordsworth who sought passage to the divine through the medium of Mother Nature, when I stumbled on this old aphorism, this axiomatic truth. It is the connection between the astrological event of the alignment and the socio-political sphere that makes this axiom ring true to me. Still, it feels right-wing compared with the exploration of the Future State, and maybe therein you have the essential difference between the Right and the Left.

*

Proposition 21

Even though the alignment is only really visible from this private property, we can’t affect it to happen.

Explanation

Indeed its being affected to happen is something beyond my knowledge as well as control. If there is manipulation, I cannot tell who by or where. I cannot tell if the alignment arrives top-down from the State or bottom-up from the farmers who plough the land. It being the Plough, one would presume it might be the farmers… farming was the most noble profession unto the Ancient Greeks. Wordsworth too, who sought the thoughts of the highest man in the words of the common man, thought that the working class, the peasant class, had stronger moral fibre than the higher classes. The alignment also includes the plight of blacks… I was once thanked for what I did for the blacks, even though I did little except host the alignment. My friends came up from the south after quite a few days of it and attested to it; then we went off on a camping trip in the Lakes and that was the last I saw of the alignment. What would’ve happened had we walked up Black Combe instead of the camping trip I do not know. And ultimately, when it aligns, who else can you thank but God?

*

Proposition 22

God might exist on a mathematical plane without knowing of our existence.

Explanation

I confess I read this online somewhere but have long since been interested in the idea that answers to the divine will arrive in maths. My father read Philosophy at the LSE in the 1960’s and went there seeking answers to the divine but found instead the philosophy of science. I have looked into the idea of a number sequence that leads to Heaven in my own writing. Ascending the fell I consider that Heaven is a pile of statistics no-one will ever see – for I would seek to know if I have taken more steps up the fell than any other – and reason that I will never find out. But as for the proposition, it is but one of many concepts of God. Aristotle’s God was “thought thinking on itself.” For others God is but a stopped, glottal monosyllable. For others God is used to fill holes in arguments. For others God is not to worship in blind, dogmatic slumber but to behead, dethrone and become. For others God is but a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness. To others we don’t deserve a God, are but monkeys with bigger brains and more dextrous fingers. And yet to those who speak against God in such ways, I ask what do you make of the alignment then? It doesn’t strike me as random-ness and chance.

*

Proposition 23

One is free to dismiss anything I say about the alignment because one has the Right to Freedom of Religion.

Explanation

It scarcely needs me saying that I am guessing with all this, for academia proceeds by guesswork. It is not intended as a dogmatic creed. It is not intended to be stamped on the hearts and minds of humanity. Should you disagree with my thinking on my feet in such a way you are free to form your own opinions. For example one of our nearest neighbours lives at Fell Brow which is further up the fell and looks out from it rather than up at it, and the person from Fell Brow dismisses the validity of the alignment because it can’t be seen to come together from his house. I can only report from the gravitational, magnetic and telluric foot, where the Plough alignment is uniquely viable and visible. You find the footpath up the fell begins here on our land, in the Combe field which is a museum of a field, retaining a furrowed, rippled look from old-fashioned ploughing technology of agrarian golden ages of yore. It is in that field where the alignment really works best in terms of visibility.

*

Proposition 24

You cannot separate a religion from its indigenous landscape.

Explanation

Indeed one of my favourite novels from when I was growing up, The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, seems to posit a religion in a different place from where it arose, and the difficulties inherent in that. Clearly though, what they mean when they say you cannot remove a religion from its indigenous landscape comes clear to you at the alignment. The alignment makes it all make sense, the indigenous wisdom of the saying. It’s the first time you see the landscape in a religious light. It connects the stars and the farm land.

*

Proposition 25

At the alignment the main event was in the White House.

Explanation

My father didn’t even acknowledge the alignment, preferring to stay indoors and watch the inaugural speech of Mr. Obama whom they called “the poet” on telly. For dad that was the main event and anything in the cosmicomic sphere was trivial compared with it. I remember in 1997 when we still had a second house in London, he told me there was probably going to be a rhythm change in the White House during my lifetime, and he was right. He would’ve said the poet’s democratic election was the main event and not the Plough alignment. Still there were people I knew among my southern friends, musicians mainly, that foresaw the stars coming into alignment before they foresaw the democratic election of the poet.

MUM’S EQUILIBRIUM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TELEPATHIC ELEPHANT

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

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

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

The ideal became to do away with the pause.

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

“Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It lived under my pillow for a while.

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

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

water + soil = mud -

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

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

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

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

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

Overall I am pleased with my process.

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

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

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

<BEE>

My brother goes out for kebabs. How can I talk of him without mentioning his philosophy all over? He says <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. It is thus in his credo. As I stated in Transition to Philosophy by my nom de plume “Johannes Bergfors,” he designed an experiment with more than one bit of paper, containing diagrams, which contain the idea mentioned. He is now the boss of the art dealing company, partly because of my illness, partly because of his genius. As I said in Transition To Philosophy <BEE> is the only original idea in it. Be free, <BEE>, when you sail across the sea! I think of Wittgenstein who seems at times to be pertaining towards a more international lexicon. My brother produced evidence of it. I think in <BEE> we all agree that something good has been uttered. I think we are united in blessing <BEE>. As I stated in Transition To Philosophy <BEE> could be a mode to drift off on. So we see that in the end it is my own brother who is the one to deliver us from all evil. He said the way his computer broke “wasn’t the Feds.” That “the Feds had nothing to do with it. It was cheap equipment.” He is trying to fix it, get new parts shipped in. He is delivering my kebab back from Millom. I said in Transition I would do whatever James wants to do with his <BEE> even if it be maintain a philosophical silence but things have gone on. I wonder if doing anything other than <BEE> appears evil in a relative way. I don’t know what to say now – at the impasse – but he’s done it to turn us on. He gets back with the kebab. He’s had a bad day. But I’m sure he’ll be able to fix his computer. As he says “we live in hope.”

Although that could be a good place to leave it for now I have little else to do but try and “get philosophical” about my brother’s recent burp. He burped when he got home with the kebab having started to eat on the way back. One sense of this utterance is that my own philosophy, compared with <BEE> is but a shameless belly burp (falsifying the Nirvana barcode et al). But there are other meanings I feel too tired to strive for. The inverse meaning is immediately upon me: that his philosophy is a burp or rather that we are to interpret the burp in the context of his philosophy not mine. If you think satire’s leaking in that is not intentional. In the context of James’s philosophy, you find the burp in realtime no different from another burp, but in reflection, in afterthought, in aftertaste, a far more meaningful burp. When I say “meaningful” that is measured against meaning as we once knew it; and yet with <BEE> around, values need tearing down and erecting anew. Indeed that is exactly what <BEE> is about and James himself cites Nietzsche as an influence. He’s a philosophical genius that leaves me feeling “abstracted from knowledge.”

If philosophy is a way of escaping an abstract prison, I feel with <BEE> that has been achieved, but it’s not my idea, only my brother’s… still, I can admire it, recognise the genius, be on the same side in life as my brother, whom it seems was only in love with the mating queen from the green pages in the flesh… I feel elucidation is the way to escape an abstract prison anyhow. I must try to not be jealous of my younger brother’s luck, for that would put me right back inside an abstract prison. Philosophy could be the process of elucidation that allows one to escape an abstract prison, but these may be just words, words in the old-fashioned vernacular, that dates back to Gondwanaland and even the dinosaurs whom it seems are now birds. Words may be debased currency but they are always preferable to physical force. One should use one’s time at the cryptic crossroad to denounce violence, and in the meantime we have <BEE> to see if we can be free. So it is I must not get jealous of my brother’s contribution.

ON BEING SERVED THE BLOT TO WRITE ABOUT

Why would I be served the blot? More to the point what am I going to make of it in a literary sense It could contain a mixture of Blur and Oasis, the big, black blot I put on the page:

[.]

My first work of philosophy, Transition To Philosophy, isn’t even out there yet; and already I am thinking of a second, all about the blot.

When I studied Creative Writing at Warwick University we had an open-air poetry assignment, so as to not divorce poetry from its etymological origins poesis meaning “something which is brought into being.”

Some hung strips of poetry from the trees, someone put a banner saying CRE before the sign for carpark 8, to make the word CRE8. Someone did something with a goldfish bowl. I myself at the time, with a friend, went on a roof to arrange an unused pile of bricks into the words: “PLANNING PERMISSION: BUILD PYRAMIDS OF NEW FOUND LAND.”

And someone brought in a single full stop on a page entitled ‘Writer’s Block.’ I am not trying to rip him off herein, more write a book of philosophy.

Brian Patten, a poet I once admired greatly, said “death is the only grammatically correct full stop.” Look at the sign. Analyse it. What does it say? What does it mean? Imagine if I had followed it up, or you had, by saying “yes indeed!”

Already I see a celebration of oddness; and then I think about Man’s predicament on earth – how weird everything is, society bounding in circles round the sun – this prisoner planet, as my dad called it, where the answer may well be self-punishment.

Blur and Oasis meanwhile were both pretty good. Blur had the rhythm of attack you get from London, present in many of their bands like the Sex Pistols, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Clash, Madness. You get it from the markets on the streets. Oasis meanwhile were characterised more by bittersweet, comedown energy. If they are married in the blot so be it, but that could be reading meaning in where there is none, with hermeneutic autonomy.

If Deconstruction is a dream, letting the eye become distracted by things not meant to be in the text, the monster learning the language in the hut in Frankenstein is Caliban from The Tempest.

Already you can see most of my education was in English and Creative Writing, not Philosophy.

Already, the blot is an imperfection; already a solar eclipse to look at; already it is difficult to pin down what I feel about the blot in words. To isolate, to say with pinpoint precision. Already in turn it means just that – the pinning down of something – but what?

The blot is the blot is the blot is the blot.

I believe I have seen it before, maybe in Wittgenstein.

Shall we revisit the microcosm, the atemporal isle, posit the blot all over? At some point I should, and what if it were blue and what if it were red? Can you “read” it? Or is there a difference between a simple shape and a line of meaning? It could be about someone that needs to stop writing and can’t. I’ve been through 1000’s of files. I’ve had 1000’s of bright ideas. One of them was Action Thriller: to write an action thriller and cut it up and copy and paste it in a random fashion at the screen like Jackson Pollock making an action painting, and still calling it “Action Thriller.” Chance collocations thus churn up evidence through the operation of a game. But now I am settling on philosophy. I felt apart from a few typos my first work in this field went quite well. No, I don’t feel it is the former work that is the blot on the landscape.

My life went wrong with LSD and then I fluffed my Oxford interview. Could that be it? The meaning of the blot? You start to see it can be unpacked in several ways, that there is liberty in the mind. Even when the mind is stained by LSD you can replace with happy memories, positive self-message, log on your brain in the morning with fruit before you insufflate the fume of the Vape pen.

********

What sound does the blot have? Isn’t it strange how all it takes is a blot and everything can start to pour forth? I got it in a co-imaginative way: an old friend on magic alphabet radio: he said to write a second book of philosophy, when I can, about the blot. Thank you friend! So it is that I too sing the song of my self and my soul! I stand atop my Mnt Oblivion and fart out of the wrong orifice!

Let’s say all the action, all the plot, goes on inside the blot. The blot is the plot or even the anti-plot. So what exactly happened? Did two youths board a train not knowing where it was headed in the middle of the Night in London? For a dare? For a probing of the edges of freedom? If we say they did, we now know where they ended up: the blot. So all the foci and loci of their voyage got compressed, concentrated into a singular motif.

The unity of everything under the sun; the way we are all of one mind: is this what I mean? I looked at my old, obsolete FB account the other day and found I had written a poem going:

if e = mc squ@red

c over G = ½

@ltern@tively put:

if e – mc squ@red = [0/ only rel@tive 0]

c over G = ½

@ltern@tively put:

if e – mc squ@red = [0/ only rel@tive 0]

c over G = ½

& life is 1

********

That was when my letter ‘a’ function was broken. And how shall we relate the blot to the letter ‘a’ knowing ‘a’ comes first in the alphabet and there is only one blot? I now put one teabag in one cup and stir in the artificial sweetener with one spoon. I said already in Transition To Philosophy that we start with a playground full of friends, slowly discard them, settle on another soul and die alone.

********

My friend who commissioned me to do this, he knows what he wants and goes for it: is very singular in his tastes and passions. Yet if you only like, say, The Clash, and never broaden your taste, how can you even be said to like music at all? Speaking of music: I had a cassette tape of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ that had a pause where the flimsy reel was cut and resealed. The ideal was to do away with the pause, even to create a poetry machine in perpetual motion.

It worked; the pause was done away with. I thought I’d mention this because I was talking at the time about E pi E as a word pronounced “ette” and that roundness reminds of the blot. Should I posit the blot again or not posit the blot? Without thinking about what’s gone into it, I already knew I was going to posit it twice. You get some people who posit a blank page for example: I did that in the school poetry mag. They said it was “second to none.” Now the blot that can be unpacked in sooooooo many ways:

[.]

It’s not as big as last time. What could be in it? No thought was put into it. It could be a spatio-temporal context. Here is my Walden, all apart from the deep, green bassoon.

About Blur and Oasis merged: one had a song called ‘Coffee And TV,’ the other ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol.’ It was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes one day in the shed where I first conceived of the blot as a mixture of Blur and Oasis. That was long ago. I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. Anyhow, Wittgenstein says language conveys a picture in the mind: is the blot a picture?

I went down to a festival celebrating the solar eclipse with P, and we took too much LSD on the night before the eclipse. It was Lucy in the soul with demons whom as I have said elsewhere might happen to be an actual substance. On the day of the actual eclipse, the weather was grey and got greyer. Nobody needed the X-ray specs because the sun was obscured by cloud. Waking that morning, the day of the eclipse, after the dark night of the soul before it, I felt strangely empty, as if I had lost contact with myself. I was as Syd Barrett sang on The Madcap Laughs “alone and unreal.” But here I am. Here is my Walden, minus the deep, green bassoon.

There is an effect here that is like “The Silken Veil.” I call it “The Silken Veil Effect.” It’s when distant, fading light, of piercing lucidity, calls to you from o’er the shoulder of the fell at sundown, when the fell in the foreground is black and you can just see the fading light. It is around that time now but grey clouds have obscured the sky.

Soon I might be on the lookout for the moon.

In fact going out there is a patch of purple cloud-mountains – an enchanted kingdom – to the left of the fell - and the moon burns bright but is not spherical. And so we reach the end of another day. Yesterday’s writing is still on my mind. Tomorrow I might fit it in. Today is where we live, tonight, tonight.

As a teenage philosopher I drew two, large, overlapping circles, one for the Known, one for the Unknown, and said the small, oval-shaped bit in the middle where they overlapped and clapped was “the area of self.” The idea was that the circles grow together. As the Unknown becomes the Known the area of self in the middle subsumes both the circles into one. There is a total eclipse.

*****

Last night I was awake all night. I loaned the idea for writing a new book of philosophy about “the blot” from the air – an old friend in the network of voices. I walked around the kitchen postponing it, thinking about the war, how terrible it is. I actually wrote a poem, the first for a long time, in the night-time:

This broken clock impression

is getting quite good -

up all night, walking

in a circle round the kitchen.

It’s the second night in a row.

There is war in the world.

Grizzly war, Hellish war,

painful war, colourful & loud.

And what good can a writer do?

But affect incremental changes?

I walk in darkness around

this kitchen – apart from voices.

In my mind a meerkat

attacks a deadly snake.

In an aggressive burst of energy.

O send us the light, Dear Lord.

********

I didn’t think it was a bad poem, and it probably led me to fiddling with poem files again. By daybreak I was so tired I couldn’t sleep and got a sleeping pill from James. Today I got up late, and we had a Take-away pizza, and I then set about working on my new philosophy book, all about the blot. I forgot to mention that at some point yesterday, before the sleeping pill, I actually read Transition To Philosophy and thought it wasn’t that bad. Often writers don’t get round to reading their own work but I did. One problem was that it didn’t really try and stop the war! That was what I mostly noticed! So I wrote a little poem yesterday – and today woke up and got busy with the blot. The blot is now the plot! It has already been contended by the air’s mind that my writing about the blot is more thoughtful than my other writing. Every full stop could be the blot in disguise. Is the blot not about how philosophy is a self-contained language corresponding to nothing real in life?

********

Now it is later. It is past midnight again. Maybe the idea of the blot – of writing about the blot – was not meant to be a generative device but to get me to stop? Or maybe to get me to try and stop the war? The world is an uneasy place at the moment, as you can tell even up here in a world of Romantic escape. I feel uneasy and turn to Wittgenstein. Maybe to know your own philosophy you must first know who your favourite philosopher is? Similarly to unpack something that happens in your own country, even if it is to do with an American media-compression experiment, you may have to read some indigenous philosophy. And when your mate’s dad says to you in the pub “when you get old your body starts to hurt,” is that not philosophy by means of it pertaining to being axiomatic, truthful, or is philosophy something more than that, something analytic, something transcendent, something to do with suspension of judgement, or ecstasia, and a process of clarification, a teasing out of arguments, a resistance to preaching, to sermonisation, but a dissection of language, culture, meaning… what does philosophy mean to you and why? And then it is the same for the blot. Not “what does the blot mean?” but “what does the blot mean for you and why?” The blot is not universal in meaning like God just because it contains an absence of meaning-signifiers. It is surely subjective in meaning even though it contains an absence of meaning-signifiers. And as I stated in an earlier draft of Transition To Philosophy, “we must have the Right to Disagree,” like Lennon getting high in his tree. If the blot is an aperture, for example, is it closed to you and open to someone else? If it is a picture of an astral body unto one person, is it the singularity of a black hole unto another? And what would Mr. Bean, who delivered a lecture on art at the end of the Bean Movie, make of the blot as a work of art? Is it my “God is dead” moment – in the sense that meaning has grown diverted? Or is it more Duchamp? And when I say it contains an absence of meaning-signifiers, is that even true? Do I mean it? Or is there in that absence itself a signification? You might even say that it translates internationally! There are some delicate bits in Transition To Philosophy that don’t. So we see something approaching the sum of all difference connected; then we see something else, something devoid. And what about that black cataract over its eye? And what about the fact that it has no sound like a mute button on a remote control? I heard that language is just differences in sound combined with differences in idea; is the blot exempt? How does the blot attain meaning? How does it journey from Signification to Significance? And is it just a piece in a beautiful opera of being? And does it mean something about imminent death? Have I been sent the blot because I have been hired to die?

*****

The scene is my bedroom, the anagram of boredom. It is not a crime scene, but we can investigate. There is a nylon string guitar leaning up against the chest of drawers; there are clothes on the floor; there is a mirror; there are two portraits of John Lennon done by my artist friend; there is the Tower – that instrument of philosophy – where I started with a book that began to emanate smell – and continued to collect weird books that seemed subject to natural magic. No, it is not a crime scene, just a domestic scene, but if I am being sent the blot as a death threat, it could be the scene of a crime nevertheless.

My bed is unmade. My phone on the bedside table. My tea also. A hair-band (for I have long hair.) Some defunct Vape pens. Some empty Vape juice packets. A candle left over from the recent power-cut. The bedside light is on but not the main light. The watch my friend got me for Christmas is here. Two old laptops are flat on the chest of drawers. It is Night. No music pours through the house. I turn my mind to Heaven. Heaven is a pile of imaginary statistics that no-one will ever get to see. There is fly-paper hanging down from a notch on the window. There is a waste paper basket containing old bottles, sweet wrappers et al.

I decide the best thing I can do is to take the Tower back to my old bedroom where my own bookshelves are. The books in this present bedroom are Dr. Bob’s, not mine. So I take the Tower back to the other shelves and integrate the Tower into those other shelves so that no-one would notice it.

MORE ON THE BLOT

I am thinking about the blot again, or as some call it “the dot.” The blot, meaning death. Why have I been commissioned to do it? Let me not launch into paranoid conspiracy theories. Let me undress the presentation of the dot as a philosopher would a proposition. But wait, that is not possible. It is not a proposition. It isn’t actual language, in not employing the mechanics of meaning, through differentiation. It differs from All Other Language in a singular way, by warrant of it not connoting, other than through the superstitious mode of it connoting imminent death. But maybe it’s not so superstitious – maybe I am about to die?

I think mortality is a form that you can write against; that death can wake you up and get you writing for your life. But something about this blot idea, it is less an hypothetical death than ever before. It is a more accelerated, real sense of death. I think in short that God is a game. That a game is based on permutation. That even a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death. I think The Lords And The New Creatures is also a game – a wide, yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre and the circumference closing in. I think it also a media-compression experiment dreamed up on LSD under a hot, Californian sun.

The friend who gave me the blot: he was a poet as I was too. He had one when we were young going something like:

“A house. At night. Waiting in darkness

for you. Who do you think of when

you touch yourself in the shower?”

I puzzled over it for a long time because he did delight in a wilful opacity; and it took me years to crack the code. In fact it was the night before my father died that I got what he was talking about. So I wrote it down on my computer. Then my dad died and I think the next thing in the list was:

“Death’s breath is a tear of flame,

with waxy dreadlocks drooped in shame.”

They existed either side of the actual pinpoint moment of death. Now the friend has asked me to do the blot… knowing what he meant in his poem, I think again of the blot, and the way the meaning of the poem only came to me in a time coinciding with my dad’s death. If you’re too slow you’ve missed it. This friend, he didn’t ideate the “intended meaning” himself but encrypted it, and applied it to music too, to beautiful effect. He made songs in other words that never repeat themselves, never look back, always move on, make you wonder “how did we get here?” miles down the line. Not that it’s not but who you think of touching yourself in the shower is the one with all the wordly power over you.

MORE ON THE BLOT AFTER A LONG TIME HAS PASSED

I think it could be “the sum of all notes.” And having reached this conclusion what more is there to say? I shall not describe it. But I set off on the wrong foot with this. Transition To Philosophy was such that it was structured as 100 numbered points because it was about using my 100% A-level exam essay as a form, doing a template of it for my brother. So in a way it was about perfection. Is that why I am now served the blot? When I say it is the sum of all notes, I might mean musically, or in the promissory sense of the note-taker. One thing is for sure is that the idea did not come from within. Transition To Philosophy was good because the idea came from within, but herein the idea has come from without. It’s like I have been set a task, and a laborious one too.

I am up in the night-time, again, at the foot of the oldest fell. Is the blot every colour merged? It certainly isn’t the absence of every colour, for that is the white space onto which it is posited – and I think Spot the Dog is constellation too. Indeed, I have seen it, a low-hanging, sensational star, flickering red and blue. Unless it was a man-made object. They can make all sorts these days. I just make books and sometimes songs. I want to make the best possible book of philosophy I can. There could be something MacBethian going on. Also: Jim Morrison mentions a wall, did I tell you, which is scratched with a blemish, and trying to perfect it with further scratches. It’s so long ago that I started to write of the blot that I no longer know what I said, without rereading it all back. You have to go with the language-at-first-hand sometimes. In fact you can only really do that, unless you want to go straight for the mouth, deep into the pre-verbal recesses of the psyche.

********

More time passes. I get why I was served the blot. Transition To Philosophy showed promise. The reason it was good is that the idea came from within. The idea arose when I got 100% in a timed, English Literature A-level exam essay to “do James a template,” to help him with his essays, but I never did, nor understand what I had meant myself by the idea of the template; and that was what Transition To Philosophy was getting at. The subject was that a good piece of writing should spring from a sound aesthetic philosophy, and the form was 100 numbered points.

But it wasn’t actually perfect and was easy to spot holes in. For example, it may only have been a B Minus. Or for another example, they couldn’t even keep it in a unitary font – as if my files had been hacked. Also probably most crucially I failed to cite my references in quoting a friend - and it was this friend that served me the blot – so I make it that. So I was served the blot by someone who wished to pick holes in the first. I suppose that is a mistake, that comes hand in hand with amateurism. Will Fenn is the name of the friend that first got me thinking along the lines of atheistic pragmatism. Having got this far and made amends, things could be okay now. That’s why I should suddenly leave the blot alone and get straight on with the business of proving telepathy real with Dr. Calculator Ptom.

TELEPATHY HAS BEEN PROVEN

Once upon a time, an interlocutor, possibly meaning my old friend and bloodbrother the philosopher Dr. Calculator Ptom, picked up my hands while I was at the screen in a different part of the country and got me to type:

He found himself on a plane.

He found himself on a.

He found himself on.

He found himself.

He found.

P.

But what “P” means we do not know. Wittgenstein for example would say:

P = ~ ~ P.

I later heard it said that the wing-shaped calligramme is the only good bit in the whole of my oeuvre, and whilst I contest this, it might still be true, depending on your hermeneutic autonomy and subjective taste.

My point, which I left out so far, is that I would say that the wing-bit is still mine own, in the sense that if you hear voices they are your own thoughts, and if you write them down you needn’t become Anon, thankfully. I imagine Dr. Calculator Ptom feeling (if only a little bit) peeved off that the calligramme is mine, but being a Liberalist essentially, he would I am sure retain good humour about it.

Having convinced myself that I have scientific proof that telepathy is real, I wonder which of us out of Dr. Ptom and I it was going somewhere by plane, which sense of ‘plane’ it was, and how to factor it into a story. Already the wing-bit has been used in poetry publications, so I am not too happy to be replicating and duplicating it as a philosopher. But still, if it hasn’t been made clear before that it was through the wing-bit that telepathy was proven, it needed saying.

Having done that I wonder how else I can be of service… I could falsify the Nirvana barcode and have; write a rudimentary mathematical proof about the genius of my brother’s sheet where pictures grew – and more. Maybe, now that I have finally done what he wanted me to do, Dr. Calculator Ptom could even help me from a great distance, via magic alphabet radio and the new, synchronised word? Already I have a long file above me as beneath me, performing one or two functions, but it might change. What I mean is I don’t need help… and if I do, it is more likely to come from within the house, where I live with my brother and my mother, who all seem to share what I call “co-imagination” and what James calls “sympathy.”

There is a piece of maths I am fond of, but recognise as not mine own, which I must not include. Whose it is I cannot say, and am not going to posit or delimit it, so know not why I mention it at all, other than that you see the Organisational Principle of my mind working over, see me, that is, working things out and trying to be fair… once I introduced Dr. Calculator Ptom to a woman as “a polymath” and he said immediately “John’s a polymath too,” so that is the extent of what the P in the calligramme may stand for, meaning it can also stand for anything beginning with P… peace would be a good one, having the peace of mind to write.

I deem it that we should have done P before, rather than leave it this late into a career where I am forever caught in a state of disrepair. It might not be too late to present a few clippings from the data-tree in the name of maths and science and don’t forget philosophy.

It’s interesting because sometimes a voice that comes from outside of your consciousness appears to come from within you, like a form of friendship, a bond renewed, bypassing the mind’s ear. You can also hear voices that seem to come from without that are actually your own thoughts. I have been a voice-hearing writer for many years, and hear that voices might be perceived as difference not illness in the future. Already they are “onjects,” quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound. For that is what it is to be a poet, to rename reality, to claim your pills are “poetry buttons” whose names should never appear in poems, to claim hospital is “Monopoly Jail.” You might even start inventing illnesses like I did with “Metal Brain Disease” which may have been something to do with knowing you have fried your brain on drugs but not noticing any changes… now to have this proof of telepathy is a wonderful thing because it disturbs the awful solipsism of voice-hearing. Living in the countryside with mental illness is really tough, and hearing voices all the while is too, so it is heart-warming to have the scientific evidence of telepathic union.

Meanwhile I take my father’s stance that writing of the living is rude so don’t wish to start telling adventure stories about Dr. Calculator Ptom and I but we did once board a train not knowing where it was headed. Now I hear from all the way down in London that “now it might be time to hear from all the way down in London that it’s good, that” meaning this passage, in this co-imaginative and proleptic way.

OUTLINE OF LIFE EVENTS THAT LEAD TO THE CONDITION OF SCIENCE

When I was only seven, and liked the film All Dogs Go To Heaven, I helped invent the net albeit only in a little way. I scribed a little book, that is, that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world – and to keep it free too. The book performed at least four scientific functions: it encrypted a scientific notion concerning Gravity; stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow around the world; calibrated an algorithm that sublimates numbers and letters on a cellular level to see if the new colour, I think, could be rendered as a cellular mark; and separated the object ‘pollen’ from its name - and I did not consciously know, even though it was writ with my own right hand.

Some might say that’s already enough or even too much for a whole life’s contribution to writing, but it was only a promising start. Then at eight I made two Naturalistic Observations I didn’t understand… if one was metaphorically speaking the breakfast of every snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom, the latter was the plastic spreadsheet in the lining of a jacket in the cloakroom.

Yes, then by the age of eleven I was “incrementally” marked by the maths of the new colour on the hand even though it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. At that stage I was at Caldicott. My siblings and I wrote The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. We sang of the dog going round and round chasing own tail! I won the government set intelligence test at the computers.

Leaving Prep School, I came into possession of a cassette cut in the reel and resealed it in a delicate operation meaning a pause in the song, and an ideal to do away with the pause. That was one experiment back then that lasted for years. It being Pearl Jam ‘VS’ I suppose the experiment was in organising a poetry machine in perpetual motion. At fifteen I formed a second band called Oedipus Wrecks. My mnemonic for the strings was indeed Even A Dick Gets Big Erections. We foreshadowed the genre Doom. I also led two friends to the face of stars. We were three gathered in the name that Night so it could be something from the Bible but there are other options including collective hallucination, including a vision scripted in The Lords And The New You Know Who. By now I had started reading it.

I formed Secret Chord H and an Anon love poetry magazine while still at school, sweet sixteen. Then at eighteen years old in the year 2000, and not unlike Democritus of the Ancient Greeks, I foresaw the hunt for the God Particle from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in. I was a fully tuned-in prophet on other fronts too, even savant because I foresaw and spoke against September 11^th using my own brain in 2000. I did also entertain the idea that the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison might have to become the missing link to the super-human corridor in evolution – but it may not be my own thesis.

I envisioned our Plough alignment happening, but got the address well wrong, saying “maybe in India” as opposed to my back garden. I set aside an ideal for a book called The Scientific Papers about it all that would be classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.” Among the prophecies I spouted many ideas for inventions, many aphorisms, many artistic ambitions. That year I wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%.

My fourth band The Flood recorded an album or even algorithm on binaural earphones… the earphones were my idea to invent, back in the den in the barn, which was never mentioned once during the band because it wasn’t me that implemented it. Already some of these things seem scientific, these motifs, this Excellent News. When writing a portfolio for Warwick University, furthermore, I entertained that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, that Portability might be the apotheosis of form…

The Towers came down, appalling us all or at least my friend Paul. I did feel the psychosis in my brain burn and burn. Still, when I got rid of the burning feeling, I lost my memory of the conversation where I forewarned of it, the whole prophetic speech. So I had little recollection of the barn where I had foreseen and spoken against it to the day using my own brain; and was persuaded at length to continue playing in the binaural earphone band.

Attending Warwick University, in 2002, I found my teacher, Professor David Morley, whom it would seem was a reasonable man, had just brought out The Scientific Papers and with an almost-verbatim classification to mine own. When it happens in sheep it is called morphic resonance and when it happens in academia it is uncanny embrocation.

My first mobile, it reverberated the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang. I wrote a paper about whether or not Lucy in the soul w/ demons even happens to be an actual substance. With no degree, I returned to the band in my Gap Year haunt of Cambridge and promised on the binaural album recorded on earphones I’d “plug my senses in the mains.”

Leaving the band, I coined the neologism “co-imagination,” before attending a second university, Lancaster, where I got a First despite the onset of mental illness. My dissertation was on the scientist-poet David Morley. I attested to our Holy Cow, the white eyebrow, the alignment of the Plough, the Plough honed in to align for a beautiful rhythm change in the White House around that time.

I also attended the Secret Garden party after and found real skywriting; gravitated down south, attesting to a pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital. I found my name tattooed on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, as if some sensory overlay had grown as naturally as grass.

Returning north again, I built The Tower out of books I had gained that seemed to exhibit signs of natural magic, like one emanating the redolent smell of perfume that could be the word of a dog, and another that seemed to have lost a line. My PC screen bloomed purple, and I worked at the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen in an experiment into post-humanism. I also found the tape I mentioned to be a successful fusion and listening in to the suggestion of the wind cooked it in the dark blue AGA’s top oven.

When my dad died, and the purple-bleeding screen in the same instant, I discovered the sheet where pictures brown and blue simply bloomed or maybe grew. It could be portentous of the end of the chip. The pictures seem to depict the lyric to an old song I wrote in Oedipus Wrecks but the sheet is still not mine for it belongs to my younger brother who designed it, who laid it down. That was also when my boyhood book emerged which only now do I start to understand in terms of long storage. Then it was time to falsify the Nirvana barcode, and nor did I forget to extirpate every trace of recognition from the myriad mind, unloose the mind of form, method-act every adjective in ‘Howl’ to attain visual radio, broadcasting dreams.

Throughout that sequence of events I found it impossible to gain even 1p and my friends on both the right and the left deem it that that is not fair; but it is not my business to complain about money. I suppose if someone pays you for the face of stars, they themselves become a tyrant. I also suppose there might be some kind of democratisation or balancing out process going on that stops me from winning, from getting ahead. I have by now brought out many books and some albums too, only in an amateur way, but as I say am still yet to earn a single penny from any of the life experiences I mention.

SCIENCE SAYS

Science STILL says to only keep my old falsification of the Nirvana barcode and my brother’s notion about <BEE>.

The latter is not mine; and so I must leave it out for now at least.

In terms of the falsification of the Nirvana barcode, that refers to that occasion when I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.

I actually did have a mobile phone that buzzed off before it rang, through every technological inlet in the room, telly, stereo, laptop, air.

So I wrote that down – that monochromatic drone of ‘William Tell’ – somehow - and it became a song that falsified the Nirvana barcode through bastardisations and mishearings of other people’s songs, that nevertheless worked as a piece of music unto itself, sustaining narrative, meaning and musicality all at once.

It has been called as good as Rachmaninov… but for now I am to only keep the Nirvana barcode bit from the whole sodden story!

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings

A NOTE ON MY FIRST NUMBER

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

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

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

and to continue with a second text called

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

“but then again who knows.”

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

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

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

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

“I woke up at 1 o. clock.”

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

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

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

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

THE LIVING SPREADSHEET

At eight years old, then, I made the two Observations, one a breakfast of every snooker ball colour in James Joyce’s bedroom, the other the living spreadsheet.

W/r/t the latter, I tried on a jacket under the stairs and got a sense something was wrong and took it off and looked inside… “mum!” I cried up the wooden stairs. “There’s something disgusting growing in this jacket!”

It could be described as a flat, plastic rectangle with an un-naturally regimented pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds - splurged on top.

I left the room to see if it would still be there when I went back; and it was; and so I decided to put the whole jacket in the bin.

I heard later, years later, it was called “Grand-darth’s Ship” and took its Taxonomic Genus from one of my own seven year old poems.

The poem ‘Grand-darth’s Ship’ was about how my grand-dad Don became a deep-sea diver. For a start, he actually fought against the Nazis and secondly he didn’t become a deep-sea diver in reality – he became an Officer in the R. A. F. So it just grew, evolved, this living spreadsheet, which was not an animal that reminds of wealth, but of grand-dad’s generation and the horror of war.

What I think I have learned about this specimen recently is that it was an actual monster albeit small, and that a monster needn’t be very big. Maybe we were supposed to deem it a success of scientific procedure that it was available to sensory perception in what some might call consensus reality, in other words stable and at bottom sterile.

How it came into being I do not know. Reification means “becoming a thing” and comes from Latinate etymology “res” meaning “thing” but where this living spreadsheet as I call it came from I do not know. I could start talking about “Symbiotic Homeostasis.” That means there was such a juxtaposition going on between Good and Evil that Nature acted with an homeostatic reaction. So we are talking about kinesis – but how plastic became part of that kinesis I do not know.

If it was my dad’s business and there was financial backing I’d just say that with enough financial backing anything is possible. One might deem it a shame that I threw the specimen away on judging it evil, for now we cannot examine it, but I am not convinced of that version.

They say this is what I should’ve been writing about when I was writing teenage love poetry inspired by Jim Morrison – but it’s better late than never eh?

They also say you shouldn’t write about things you cannot renew; but I think in this case of the synthesis of the living spreadsheet it might be renewable even if not by me.

I also think if you can trust my sensory perception it shows that science is the key to a world of possibility. To possibilities opening up. It shows what can be done and that is surely inspiring. I am not trying to bring down the government or start a Revolution, only report accurately on what has been seen, sound out the realm of the senses. If new possibilities arise that is surely a good thing and should not be squashed or censored.

I’M FINE

“I’m fine,” I say all the time and you wouldn’t know what I mean.

I mean I was visibly marked on the hand by the experiment into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark when I was about 11.

I took a long thin stripe up the underside, and that is what I mean when I say I’m fine.

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

We still see that it is possible to effect your own evolution.

You could even call it self-evolution.

This one might imagine comes from within as opposed to adaptation to the environment. It might be what Darwin would focus on in my situation, nevertheless: The Theory of Self-Evolution. And if I were a shapeshifter, Protean, a changeling, I would also try and be the Darwin of light, where maybe Morley is the Einstein of water.

In short we might be able to grow new colours on a cellular level, and I might have evidence of this either way. Above all else in my science, this would seem to be the greatest revelation. If you Google the question “is it possible to change the colour of white skin through maths?” the whole net will tell you no, but this is not true, even if the colour did not turn to be the new colour in the end.

It might not be cool to say this but last time I was in A and E after an attempted O. D. there was a female, non-white nurse who had to help me go for a pee. When I came home I heard her on the airwaves say “you looked twin-tone when you needed to pee. We would say you have re-invented the human form.”

I also heard that now they think I did the maths of the new colour (and even though it didn’t turn out either red and black or the new colour in the end), my death is going to be like Jesus – as if the + sign is a literal cross.

THE RED AND BLUE THING

Between the tincture and The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob there was a prose poem, or even dyad of prose poems called ‘The Fire’ and ‘The Sea’. I was thus quite old when I “did the red and blue thing” and now through reading gather that it was yet another example of embrocation with a scientist poet called David Morley, which I would see more of the older I got.

‘The Fire’ was a description of the sitting room fire, its 100 tongues that danced and entranced, here where the stars realign. It was observed; whereas ‘The Sea’ was remembered and imagined. It’s interesting though because there is a difference between humidity and moisture in the air; and the hottest star heat burns blue; and the red and blue thing as they call it, which Michael Hofmann

writes of in a poem called ‘Entr’ acte’ could be but a graph with one long line kinking headward from the heart and ending in the stars.

So that was something I did between the tincture and the first album; and back then I was a garden brick expert – my garden bricks, attention to detail in grammar and spelling too, and general keen-ness at English saw me top of the form at English every term at school. And then years later, as I say, I found out at University that Professor David Morley had done the “red and blue thing” through the elements in just the same way, when he was studying acid rain’s effect on Lake Windemere up in the Lakes where I lived as a child.

Anyhow, the boyhood work was a proof and the red and blue thing may have been enough to be another. I was already producing proofs in boyhood, which were cogent and interesting. You notice in the elemental style a complete absence of grim specimens and a belief in the Natural sciences. The embrocation with David Morley could be down to his researching the effects of acid-rain on Lake Windemere in my boyhood, but there are other potential causal factors such as that I was the witness and he was an evolutionary scientist and still is.

THE EMOTIONAL COLLAPSE

Also between the tincture and The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob I had a complete emotional collapse. I was in the I. T. Room at Prep School, in days before I had entertained that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too, and it all got on top of me. I was talking to the teacher and suddenly started sobbing. The teacher was hugging me, asking and asking “what’s wrong? What’s wrong?” and all I could say was “I don’t know! I don’t know!” To this day I cannot pinpoint what upset me so, but I was going through changes and suppose that I was entitled to feel sad.

I had never heard of The Lords And The New Creatures, as hadn’t my mother, but I think I was already the witness. I hadn’t read my seven year old book because it had to be locked in the attic but in it I had already helped invent the net and my thing was now marked by the mathematics contained in it. It all got on top of me and made me break down in tears, and it wasn’t just any old crying – I was heaving with sadness.

If you look in The Lords And The New Creatures, it starts with “Look where we worship,” and funnily enough I had by that stage already had a black out in chapel. I think it a naturally occurring fossil of art. I went down like smashed glass on chapel floor and woke in another room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.

The New Creatures of course begins with the words:

“Snakeskin jacket

Indian eyes

brilliant hair

he moves in disturbed

Nile insect

air.”

If you look at my experiences, the wood, the plastic spreadsheet, the tear up the front, it templates over the opening of The New Creatures – which has always seemed cryptic to me, ambiguous, impossible to fully understand. If Jim Morrison was scripting a witness, factoring in a foreseen human repository, with his opening gambit, the sheer incomprehensibility of his language might account for why I was lost for words when having a breakdown. What I might now mean is if you want to understand what Morrison meant, find out what the subsequent witness went through and that will reveal what Morrison meant; and what really came after “brilliant hair” was an experience of tremendous sadness and being lost for words about it too.

I have by now read and reread The Lords And The New You Know Who. He does say “a creature waits out the war,” meaning the Cold War; and my dad did say he sold his art dealing business at the fall of the old Berlin Wall; but Jim Morrison also talks of “the dry end of vacuum boat,” connoting “the wrong end of the stick,” as if to say “if we get in trouble for what evolves we need to be able to say they got the wrong end of the stick.”

There is an Irish accent in the second moiety The New Creatures, derived straight from James Joyce that I have detected. The ending is beautiful, almost eschatological and prelapsarian in one. Overall some say it’s as good as The Waste Land by TS Eliot; and some, like Dr. Tony Sharpe of Lancaster University, have contended that “the genius of the witness is elusive.” That’s me: present in the book before I was born. I mentioned in Transition To Philosophy a little bit about the difference between being the witness ‘in,’ ‘of,’ ‘to’ and ‘from’. The witness ‘in’ is scripted in the book when Morrison says “we need a witness to the killing.” The witness ‘of’ attests to specimens themselves. The witness ‘from’ is the correct endorsement and the witness ‘to’ a mere formality after the correct endorsement is made. I think I already made this clear in Transition To Philosophy, and am but repeating myself. Not only have I gone to town on reading and rereading Morrison’s text, but I have rewritten it, many times over.

NOTES ON WORDS

6. It isn’t too hard to ideate a theory of meaning.

If I need a theory of meaning I could just reiterate a few salient points that have been knocking around my screen for a long time:

a) The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, when translated via the mechanics of meaning, into words, represents dilution.

b) When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.

c) The meaning of something is inherent in its exact mode of expression.

d) Meaning is not a delusion unlike Time.

e) Meaning is an emotional import given mere exo-skeleton with words.

– These statements seem to state the obvious and are largely not original but that doesn’t mean they are not true. My next point is that:

f) Meaning is an effect of differences in sound combined with differences in idea.

g) If all these statements are simultaneously true, something “polysemic” has happened.

h) It may be that for something to attain meaning it must journey from Sheer Signification to (in)significance.

Note:

Point (f) that meaning is an effect of differences in sound combined with differences in idea seems to suggest that meaning is quite superfluous; but it has to go deeper than being a mere “effect,” has to correspond to something in the human surely. I’m not proposing a return to the conception of the linguistic sign as “transcendent referent” like pre-Derridean philosophy just think meaning should be more than an effect. Meaning is indeed the most meaningful thing, if you permit the neoplasm, the tautology. The word for meaning has a meaning too and it is meaning in and of itself. Meaning should be deeper than trickery, than post-modernism, than surface being depth andcetera.

10. There is no such thing as immutable truth.

My ex gf when I was at Warwick University said “there’s no such thing as immutable truth.” Yet reading Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I discover him saying philosophers do believe in a kind of truth that is fixed and static, timeless and eternal. I think of the idea that my dad delimited to me when I was young:

“there’s no such thing as almost infinite.”

You could say it is timeless and eternal, that truth; but you could also say what my ex gf means is that the language used to say it is plastic and malleable. Still, I like to believe that beyond the language the meaning of the words is eternally true and immutably so.

It might even be seen as the moment I first showed a philosophical turn of mind. We were driving in the car, and I was in the back seat, and though I knew it was a mistake, said that something was “almost infinite.” My dad jumped on it and said “there’s no such thing as almost infinite.” I did know that and felt a fool for the clumsiness of my expression, for the people that were there must’ve got the impression that I didn’t know what my father said, whereas in reality I had spent long nights considering the edge of the universe and what lies beyond the edge. I misrepresented myself, in terms of self-promotion, and found a difference between identity and persona, what I think and the careless things I say, thought and expression in other words. The mistake I made I never wished to make again, which was selling myself short.

12. Science and art still differ on the matter of truth.

They have different sensibilities. In science truth is to be falsified through which nothing is 100%, only ever 99% at best. In poetry however there is truth-to-itself through which anything can be true if well-made enough. Poetic truth is like the truth of the individual, constituted of its own inner nature. This came up in my dissertation on the work of David Morley, years ago. I was instructed in that by Dr. Tony Sharpe of Lancaster University.

In my dissertation I argued that we come to a work of art presupposing many binary oppositions. These might include:

inside/ outside a convention;

science/ art;

High/ Low;

honesty/ craft;

narrative/ confessional;

and I argued that a great work might start to undo these binary oppositions. But still, where science and art differ is in the treatment of truth. A poem could say “Barnes has scored a chicken” and if the poem was well-made enough, it would be true for the duration of the poem. If a scientist said “Barnes has scored a chicken” it would only be a percentage of truth, never 100%.

26. The symbol [R] represents the stance, the large-R, Romantic stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

My usual example of this is to connect the words “drip drown dream dragon drop” but never before have I expressed the truth that it is actually easy to conjure examples of word-combinations that nobody has before. The polkadot dancers left the door fleering in a leery way and to be quixotic hitched a ride on the cosmic wave south where a mouth lay in wait, open as a gate, until the hexagonal sun set, dreaming in ink.

When I say these words have never been organised before I must temper that by saying there are super-computers who can put every word, letter, sentence, book, paragraph in every order, like the machine in Gulliver’s Travels. But presumably that would run on indefinitely instead of providing a single sentence. Whatever the case, there is a debate in Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco as to whether or not the super-computer in question has ruined the heart-purifying permutation games of the Cabala or whether in fact computers can be spiritual – and the answer is it is subjective.

I think of exemplums like [R], like the number “!00%” - and like my old Nirvana barcode; like James’s notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet, even the plus sign for an ‘f’ in the line “I have a scar+ that is red and black” – as somehow escaping the totalitarian machination, as somehow representing hope, but they may also be accounted for by the super-computer.

However this is a specious imputation. It is not that we are up against an Evil Empire and must usurp literature from the hands of said supercomputer. It is just a marvel of technology that everything we can think of is accounted for – everything that is, in my list, apart from the suit. The computer won’t have done the suit. It escapes. In fact you could say the supercomputer cannot compute the suit.

31. Love is grouped with language not God.

Teenage philosophers sometimes group God and love together in the cynical sense that (as they say) both are illusory. However, I think it more sophisticated to group love with language. As WH Auden said “love is a choice of words.” So this I would say is an essentially pragmatic option.

Wittgenstein said a lot of the problems of philosophy are created by misunderstanding the logic of language and hoped to elucidate these problems. A lot of problems in life not just philosophy - are also down to communication. So, believing, on top of this, that love is aligned with language not God, I hope to improve my language-use – to open communication – and I think this comes down to care. Taking care, engaging brain, needn’t make you a fastidious middle aged man, but a happier communicator. And after all lack of communication is saddening, isn’t it? Like when as a child Valentine’s Day passes you by without anyone telling you it is Valentine’s Day. It’s saddening and sadness is a terrible emotion whose waves seem to stretch before and after time. All told then to remedy sadness, communication should be focussed on.

34. There is more than one sense of the word “perception.”

The word “perception” has different meanings that are not utterly distinct but related. First and foremost is the Primary Meaning: the activity of the sensory organs in a neutral state. This is hearing, seeing, tasting, touching and smelling. The next is the Interpretative Meaning which is meant when someone says “my perception of events was such and such.” It is an analytic interpretation of what goes through the senses. The next is the Subjective Meaning which is akin to Belief and also Opinion. It is meant when someone says “in my perception, so and so.” As stated these senses of perception are not utterly distinct but related and it could be said one builds on another; even that taken as a process there is a procession from information to knowledge to wisdom. That procession from information to knowledge to wisdom could double as a process of abstraction, through which something concrete becomes something abstract. You could also say it templates over the paradigm of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Perception, in short is a catch-all, umbrella term that when opened up carries multifarious meanings that slightly differ in emphasis. At least, this is my perception of the word “perception.”

37. Some coinage seems universal and pre-existent.

Once upon a time, a while ago, I invented the word distractionary to contain such neologisms as comnambulism, meaning online sleepwalking, as funger meaning hunger for fun, as filence meaning delicate speech, as amazeballs to replace archaic ‘gay,’ as emocracy, meaning rule by emotion, as agovernment, meaning the opposite of government, as gravitolution and evity which might go without saying, as co-imagination, as in to be diagonalised by omnijective interface of random access co-imagination, which is not fun, and I thought isness was another one, as in music is penetration of isness, but it was already done in Joyce, whom it seems knew a lot of these, and I have just recollected another, not just “indwellable” meaning the opposite of indomitable, when it comes to cinema, but the word ‘entropy’ spelled backwards, as if to frame the first, unformulated spark of appetency in Nothingness, preceding Creation, yet again, even though the universe was born in silence not appetency as far as we know.

39. Some poetic effects have no name.

My undergraduate dissertation was an immanent, Kantian critique in mimicking the methodology of David Morley’s series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception. The micro-analysis focussed on the line “the heart trammelled and rammed on the anvil bleeds visions.” I worked out he was using the anti-dactylus, two soft, one hard; and not only that but the stressed syllables in that metrical pattern all rhymed on a short A. The effect is kinetic; and there is invective monotony written into the line’s musical configuration; but apart from that it is nameless, nameless in all the array of hyper-specialised tools of sustained critical micro-analysis. I found this surprising because the effect seemed form at its most mathematically precise but then again considering the line belongs to a bilingual, gypsy shaman narrator, we might not be surprised that the metre indicates something that is outside a tradition.

40. Time spent reading in hushed library corners pays off.

Professor Squillegybob says: “The Great Gatsby could be an infradiegetic heterotopia pertaining to panchronic, panoramic overview like a chronotope turned euchronia, unless this represents a word-world gone polysemic with the multifarious possibilities of hermeneutic autonomy through whom the esemplastic has fled away with the quadlibetical.” That’s not to be confused with my brother Dr. Bob who would say the above sentence is nonsense, just an attempt to bamboozle the reader with fastidious loquacity, with fanciful magniloquence, with profuse verbosity, and that it is better to keep things simple, to try and not use as many long words as possible. Indeed the more I know the meanings of words like “infradiegetic” the less I know the meanings of small, simple words like “in” and “of.” There was a chap at school said to be the cleverest of all of us and he said “sometimes I forget how to spell ‘is.’” It seemed like a highly intelligent thing to say considering we were less than ten. It is possible, meanwhile, to go through a course, doing more reading than they can even throw at you, absorb all the hyper-specialised terms and still forget how to spell “Winnie the Pooh.” Winnie the Pooh is said to be where the English store their best philosophy. We lack an immanent, Kantian tradition but have things like Winnie the Pooh instead. It wasn’t on my reading list when I was at University but my father did read it to my siblings and I as children.

41. Language contains fossils.

The word “went” is not past participle of the verb “to go” originally, but the verb “to wend.” It is thus a fossil; and language is full of them, fossils, coins, corruptions, dead metaphors the brain is built of, ossifications, word-shades, word-frequencies, ghost-vowels, consonantal masses. The English language is worth billions of pounds, the creative industries second only to the financial markets for bringing in wealth. This was one of the salient points of one undergraduate poem portfolio that took the form of defaced bank notes within its plot. I handed it in the Professor Paul Farley and he gave me a First for it, and it would’ve been even better had it contained something a government super-computer that can put every word in every order wouldn’t have thought of.

42. Language is a creature.

I read in The New Scientist that we developed language on the basis of meat; that we grew our brains by eating meat; that we then needed to spread information about farming, hunting, killing, cooking and eating meat – so developed language.

One of my Professors, Prof. John Schad of Lancaster University, says “language speaks Man.”

Another, Professor David Morley of Warwick University, says “language is a word-world where words are a species.”

My friend Paul the poet and I think that “language is the emotional condom of the world.”

Part of that is that the pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, when translated into words, via the mechanics of meaning, always represents a dilution.

50. Truth is aligned with psychic pleasure.

So far this seems to be about me trying to catch up with my circle of intellectual friends from London, who all started reading Philosophy at school the year I left town and went to another school. I am, that is, hot on the heels of the scholars, and would like to take things further. Maybe I would start learning about “Impartials” like undergraduates at Lancaster University? Maybe I would realise I need to read some indigenous philosophy if I am to deal with events in the mystical realm that happened in my own country? Maybe I am to recognise the Nirvana barcode is a fallacy and I am not to redo it? Maybe I should open up on why the word “philosophy” is built with the word “philos” meaning love? For after all isn’t love how we are programmed to function?

Well, Kant says love is Nature’s trick for ensuring reproduction, the colours of the flowers attracting the bees and so on. Auden says love is a choice of words. Love used to be aligned with madness, fever and intoxication, but became more pragmatic, more to do with language in the Modernist era. Martin Amis says love is Man’s highest emotion; but a female poetess I saw live took a much more biological view and said love is a kind of banana custard, presumably meaning semen. I suppose if it were “trust” or “respect” of wisdom rather than philos meaning love, it wouldn’t be as strong; and also that it remains love because very often it is passed down, inherited, and love is the function through which we have offspring after all. I suppose it is also love because philosophy treats a subject in as high a way as is possible. The verb with which the wisdom is treated is very often love.

My father, for example of wisdom itself, used to say love is the hope the heart literally needs in order for it to survive without which it can stop; and that was the lesson of his tale about some great grandparent on my Finnish side dying of a broken heart. I suppose if he just dictated the wisdom in that case it wouldn’t be as good as it is when you bind it to life. He never used to say the wisdom out-right just tell the story of a Finnish great grandparent who on seeing his daughters scattered and sent off to different homes after a Russian Invasion, died of a broken heart. “You can die of a broken heart,” he said. “The heart needs hope in order to survive,” he continued. Thus the wisdom is bound to life. The definition of what love is is embedded in and derived from the narrative that is being passed down. He also therefore passes down the wisdom of binding wisdom to life. I use this example of wisdom in a passage on love because it is wisdom about love.

My answer to the question is already given which is that philosophy is about treatment and treatment is about love but it’s also because it’s about being a good human, loving thy neighbour, making the world a better place, a subject conducted between individuals that love their work, and ideally, hopefully love each other as parents love their offspring to whom they impart their wisdom. Wisdom, in short, is something we pass down, and passing down is for families, and families are made of love.

There is also the idea that truth is co-aligned with psychic pleasure. That it is the fakes and frauds that lead to pain. Truth after all is what the philosopher may be after. He seeks to extirpate every trace of falsity from his myriad mind, and develop a stance.

PREFACE TO ‘NOTEBOOK’

This text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts have been made to order the bank notes but were not always successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free” to consume. It is but an open-air piece, comprised of torn and bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given artificial insemination. Inherent in it is a notion that money is an Ode to Death, that a fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work sets you free.

NOTEBOOK

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and.

Start learning the basics of a strange, unseen vernacular arrowed down from some lost, mad Godhead within. Pass the fallen road sign saying THINK! in the nettles and the mystery of the single shoe beside the road, in a fast Subaru Impreza with Paul and the gang, the Beatles’ back catalogue tumbling from the speaker, the open window a roaring lion, late birds singing in trees, birds that are intelligent, trees that are our friends, on a smouldering evening in Cambridgeshire, when nothing really matters.

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob. L to the pregnant snorkel + Ossie the dog, he should be sleeping like a log, goes round and round chasing his own tail, only goes upstairs for a trail of Maltesers, nice, round and pale, we’re on the road to Heaven, happiness awaits us there, flutter in the sideways, flutter in the sideways, bring your brief fling with the politics of flight…

Seeing as we can travel backward in time, seeing as we have equalled the speed of light, I thought we could revisit some choice excerpts from my boyhood and beyond.

Teacher rite elephant nite

everything lite lesson love

learn tell everyone Esso orange.

2 MC = E = MC [someone] 1

In the picture of the airport

I can see… a runway,

a cloud, two planes,

a control tower

and the ire ii net.

In our new pogrom there is a Vetacore.

A bomp explodes.

I faded my work.

I have a scar+ that is red and black.

I found a piece of string with a stone on it. I put it round my neck. I saw that the stone could fit into the hole in the wall. It was full of dead skeletons.

He has spines all over him.

Colour circles red. How many circles?

Colour triangles blue. How many squares?

Colour oblongs orange. How many triangles?

Hot July brings cooling showers,

straw berries and gilly flowers.

When I see beer it reminds me of my dad when he is drunk and when I see a police man it reminds me of the time my dad lost his drivers license. When I see shoes it reminds me of my dad's smelly feet. My dad is the sort of person who tells you not to put your elbows on the table when he does it himself and my dad tells me not to ride my bike on the garden flowers when once he reversed the car on them. My dad helps me with my prep and most of the time I get it wrong. Sometimes my dad acts as he is three years old but he is really forty-one. When I say “I should play soccer for the England team” he just says “some chance.”

It was 6. 58 and 37 seconds so we all ran as fast as we could towards the sofa.

MY DOG HAS GOT NO BRAIN,

MY DOG IS A TOTAL PAIN,

HE'S GOT THREE EYES

AND A BIG FAT NOSE

AND GETS HIMSELF TANGLED

WITH THE GARDEN HOSE,

HE ONCE TOOK A PILL

THAT MADE HIM ILL

AND EVER SINCE THEN

HE'S BEEN STANDING VERY STILL.

Squawk squawk gaggle gaggle, bongles has still got the stones.

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

Folder graffiti. Normal is boring. Do it later. God made speed to save us, God made hash to help us. The system works quite well. The grass is always long on the Other Side.

The fire-dance dwelled in electric drums

where ecstasy fell soft fathoms to clap

and bells let peace form in blue notes

and peered at deer in the wood and ate of it

and wet let excellence sound out its criticism

and dawn let sting its unsheathed sting

and chloroform in the heart let see

if only Game Over was seen in nights.

The

sun

hanged

himself

from

a

length

of

daisy

chain.

Clocktick clock being clocked off by clocktick.

Clocktick clock not being clocked off by Time.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man might.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man meant.

The Universal Mind’s moon meat man met.

Break, bird with the skin of snake.

God rushed into the cold cod quick.

Behold! An evil vision hath flashed before mine eyes!

Barnes has scored a chicken

and wingers are allowed bikes!

Maybe a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes, like The Periodic Table except a swear word in every box, to go at the end?

Even A Duck Gets Big Erections: my mnemonic for the strings of the electric guitar took the same amount of time to conjure as it takes to say, but my mother has changed it now.

Hey, my name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket.

Over and out, testing testing 123, welcome to my presence and its intensity...

I watch her walk along on the other side of the street.

She parades the black panther’s nonchalant strut.

She wears blue jeans and black leather boots.

She takes some chewing gum out of her bag.

She slides the stick of it out of the pack.

She puts the stick of it into her mouth.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She loves to chew and suck the taste.

She puts the packet back in her bag.

She swings the bag about a little bit.

She walks past a little pub long shut.

She might go check out a flower shop.

She loves to chew and to suck the taste.

She enjoys it, chewing and sucking the taste.

I read that Maya means “Goddess of Illusion” in Sanskrit, where Mara, by stunning contrast, is the Buddhist God of Temptation.

A glance

A blink

A fault in the stars

Her mascara slips into pools of black

A chance

A second

of Infinity

She flutters her eyelids

like spring’s first butterfly

The stars awake to notice love

she waits with open arms.

But all is well if I only think

& sigh of the dreams of dusk

Images before I sleep

Dancing, escaping memory

They seem to have no cares at all

They seem to know the name of love

They seem to be my sacred friends

Ancient messengers, waking at night

But I will forget them & never care

About what I saw in love & alive

What? Oh, I guess it’s love

Just us & love Forever...

Sometimes I wish to have no more than a line penned in the margins of a newspaper going:

The light of all that’s good is true

if believing is the dawn of dreams.

The ship is traditionally a male symbol in poetry. The sea is traditionally a she. It is traditionally men who go out on dark boats to explore the sea under the stars. The sea becomes a symbol of the unknown, or the unconscious, which the poet penetrates on epic voyages. Only when the ship is ripped is the sea a she and the water Nirvana-blue as solar spike.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

Soft

and

loose

like

yellow

pencils

scribbling

dreams

as

they

arrive.

Semen spills like silver water,

under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,

splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.

Don’t escape at night

into a heightened dream

from a dull and longing sleep.

Her breath a poisonous magic.

Sometimes perhaps

down opening quiet

I am drawn down

long and alone and

my friend and my foe

recede into deep sleep

sudden and still

like a dawn behind

a screaming veil

where silence is born

and all that’s loose and tight

and all that’s light is light

like first morning

with no night

and wend my way

so slow to Freedom

and soft Infancy-lunacy

with harp-sure eyes

so I can live

the last poet’s

last poem.

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

My philosophy in a nutshell: sensus praecedit cogitationem. It could be the motto of the LSE’s Philosophy Dpt; but when you write it down, what happens?

Tonight it is your right to judge by heart alone.

When I first read the line “I look forward to the future with rapt uncertainty - and I can’t stand the suspense,” for some unknown reason it chimed like bells, reverberating up in the fells and struck a warm, psychic chord. I even conjured lines to rhyme with it before I knew what it meant like:

[John is dancing with aliens in collective ecstasy].

Last night it seemed we couldn't sleep but maybe I was dreaming. The world expands inside my hands it's getting heavy. Of all the treasures I could choose I can't seem to decide. Today the shade was washed away where I would hide. Dream with open eyes, come below and we can fantasise. Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come below and we can fantasise. Last night it seemed we nearly died but maybe I was dreaming. It made me feel sooooooooooooo alive and soooooooo in love. Dream with open eyes, come below and we can fantasise. Now that I’ve stopped telling lies, come below and we can fantasise.

J: what colour is white?

P: smooth and tight!

J: what colour is blue?

P: be true you!

Waves

[squiggle]

crossed the FTSE

[squiggle]

and the Helter Skelter

[squiggle]

crashed in the electric-sea

[squiggle].

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that Heaven sends is rain).

Words, words, words. What are words? These are words. Words in this epistemological system I would say are useful tools associated with the instinct to survive. Man is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across metaphysics and words make connections between first and third persons. Words are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in order to make life easier. Words are, well, ONLY words.

“Mayfly,” I say the word

“mayfly” phonetically

sounding out its every

vowel sound alphabetically.

Also in Sixth Form, in my word-science notebook I wrote the word “entropy” backwards and tried to give it meaning:

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

Reading of ancient alchemists in The Lords And The New You Know Who by Jim Morrison I wrote a lovely line. “Waves make gentle love to the shore.” Reading of a schoolboy contemplating getting stoned on milk in Little Johnny’s Confession by Brian Patten I wrote another lovely line. “Homework tonight is to remember your dreams.”

One night we were having a Scrotbag Party in the caravan. That means drinking and smoking - and suddenly I got a preternatural sixth sense that the dog had run off and was trapped on the fence at the local farm barking. So we walked up through the fields, our tombstone-shadows looming tall beneath the moon in the church field; and we found the terrible goat which was tied up in the triangular patch of land past our field; and we noted how its eyes gleamed a baleful green colour when a lone car passed; and we made it past the terrible goat and to the farm where we indeed discovered Ossie the dog trapped on the fence, barking. I was wearing a fur coat and had a bottle opener in the pocket and used it to cut the dog free. Then we made it back to ours and told the dog he was a bad boy for running off and continued with our Scrotbag Party.

The symbol [R] could still represent the stance, the large-R Romantic stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf; that Creativity is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

When you renounce the quest for meaning you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.

All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun.

V to the knock-kneed hummingbird’s wings… plus, in Rimbaud’s colours of the vowels, E is white; but in my friend Agent G’s musical code, when you detune the guitar strings all the way down, the street-name for E becomes F sharp minor!

2

JOHN TUCKER

ENGLISH

E

ENGLISH

JOHN TUCKER

HARECROFT

1

Signed by everwell, she couldn’t hit it sideways, or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman with the hairgel of Dracula, Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.

Where once I wandered far and wide 

on a field-file, a file-field, 

a fenceless farm without 

security alarm where all hearts bleed

and all arts breed, now Hell

is very quiet, unadvertised.

McBreastmilk, 

McBreastmilk, 

don’t feed your kids.

Gentle face erasing cream,

smear it in and let it sink

down through the pores of your skin

to erase your deepest down dirt.

O stars the government

that truly speaks for us!

Get an extra kid for free

when you spend 99p.

Freefall 0800 down

your own black hole pupils.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the true mating queen of the hive,

may mad vampires stalk you,

stalking walls walk through

your vagrant dreams.

I see state of head

is more than Head of State.

Monster Munch can

always gobble up your food.

Cancerel can always 

sweeten the stewed-

carfume coffee we sip in 

this liminal afterlounge.

It’s getting cramped

as a tin of beans in here.

In emergency please 

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for 

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging 

a meaningless hole as if to cure the 

spiralling lethargy of Hell...

and when I went into the 

woods to bury my soul, 

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun! 

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and 

e-mails chatter on 

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new, motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question 

mark in the pack but the first

qualification of Modernism

is inquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the 

fallen Autumn leaves 

are where bears have 

dipped their feet in pots of paint 

and danced across the threshold 

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer 

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper 

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman 

slow down 

with that

fast-food. 

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year. 

Portability still seems the Apotheosis of Form: sometimes I can be walking along on a sunny day when I jump from the jungle to the Arctic to the Sahara. Mutation in consciousness itself, truth too simple to understand, these are gesture-without-motion-bones, like sadness gene and dreaming gland.

It's not impossible to write an anti-poem. Love is not a mechanistic set of rules. Love was once aligned with madness, fever and intoxication. Love became grouped with language not God. Love became a tough word-combination. Love has no ego as everyone knows, and so it goes and so it grows.

I for one think Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance. Travelling south, as I read Rimbaud, a rainbow smashed a railway train window. A baby cannot trip without memories... I remember “every atom ate our eyes.” Our eyes: they are ingrown in the ocean's bellyful of wine, down in the seabed-orchard. There is angelic music inborn in the inner ear; but those whom the Gods wish to drive mad are sent the end of ‘Bike’ in their heads and madness is not something to be Romanticised as a return to Purity.

Impunity seems more what the poet wants. He likes to float on the artifice of organic emotions through synthetic sounds, and is into exploring alternative histories suppressed by the overarching meta-narrative. For plastic surgery of the soul there are libraries. Poetry is the bike riding itself. Monopoly money will get us well, Monopoly money will get us bread, she picks the blue tac off the wall and says “my T-shirt is red”. I put my wounds up on bright flags; I take the angel up the arse. To plug my senses in the mains might engage [!00 %] of my brains.

It’s all about a permanent reactivation of the Glastonbury Festival spirit. John Tucker is taking acid again. Money shags in the dark. Thoughts of one’s greatness only diminish one’s greatness. Skunkfoot is putrid demons excreted through stone. Love an army of fire. Fire needs some incentive to rise up. Shall I touch my heart with a red Bic biro? When all the air in outer space is consumed… The bed in the wood, it was definitely a whore’s, with solar spike I can use the Force, with R2D2 I cleanse my doors, I’m just trying to win my Star Wars. I’m starting to think in five musical parts at once. The Anon Throwaway as a new form could become an alternative currency to rival with money for the role of the real.

Formal education is not for everyone. The yellow DogMuckels M atop the pole in the industrial park is the postmodern churchspire in the spiritual vacuum. Postmodernism is theme dissolved into message. Giant killers are frozen peas in the microwave. I look into the mirror though I shouldn’t pool my sources. I’m not going to die at the age of twenty seven, watch the dreamtapes on repeat from a golden seat in Heaven.

The heart beats to the rhythm of one. A fiver is surely cheese and onion flavour. Cataclysm is catalyst for the old cat that sat on the map of sound, just because the world is very round. If there were paper under my heart there would be writing on it and it would be art. I might ding it in compressed Space Age seconds.

[missing fragments]

If you falsify the Nirvana barcode it should have meaning. I can run you through a series of life events in terse precis that meant I arrived at such a culmination.

Well, at seven I helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic here to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world, I was the one to write it. By eight I was the witness from The Lords And The New You Know Who twice. By eleven who knew what was going on? By fifteen I attained the face of stars which may have been scripted in the Bible. By eighteen I forewarned of September 11th in 2000 and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%.

After school I recorded an album on binaural earphones, had an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, worked the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where resealed in the reel, and discovered the sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting one of my own song lyrics) grew.

I went through all that without earning 1p. Then as a summary of all of that which I had done, I invented and falsified the Nirvana barcode and around about that time also attained visual radio, broadcasting dreams that swirl in digital, purple swathes about the head of the deranged seer...

So you see that it has been fast indeed! That Subaru Impreza! And Time does not pass but evaporate! And things live inside onions of themselves! And galloping water would be a cool thing to say!

I made the Nirvana barcode to be but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Di di dit di di dit di di dit dit dit

Bring bring

bring bring

“Hello?”

Gold member, you're the one,

the one with the heart of gold

Vowels, pure vowels 

Immanuel Kant

will come to thee 

with immanence

You come home smacked up you come

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

d/ d/ d/ down

grooving up slowly

yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah

yeah yeah yeah

boom

boom

boom

boom

boom

how did we get down here from flat-top

wide tunnel cities self driving cars

bears in the moon and liquor and drugs

and whisky baaaaaaaaaaaars

boom shanka, you're the one,

the one with the sonic boom

knickers knickers faster than lightning

skin up fall out of bed

and did those feet

in ancient times

rain down, rain down,

come on raindown

and walk the sun

fatter, hippier, less well connected

always walk the hallways

down to create my own

and in the meantime

and in the meantime

I'll do the monkey bars with my legs

manic depression has enraptured my name

don't know what I want but I just want shame

don't know what I want but I just won't shave

rainy waif, rain always,

lay back and dream

on a rainy waif

now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

oh now I know how Kurt Cobain sang

no more laaaaaaaaaa la's

removal van canes will be turned into furniture

we're thinking of putting Tricky's name on the front sir

you never see me dead near an inch of closure

|| | |||| | || | |||| 909 and 693 are wings

“and a record made of sound

goes round and round, conveying

music to the speaker through the stylus,”

says the radio as I turn it on.

Well, although there is no

such thing as the Nirvana barcode

it opens up a discussion about

the Telepathic Walkie Talkie, how

if barcode is rain barcode is phone...

and at least I have

the grace to come

back and say that the

extinction of consciousness

has no monetary value.

It is past dawn

and I see that

that first mobile

phone has gone.

If it makes any difference to you,

my little bro is a genius too, who

designed the sheet

where pictures grew

and says <BEE>

might soon ensue

from @ in the international

language alphabet…

he did it for Flora,

subject of many a love poem of mine,

and it turns out he

had her, did her,

loved her, won her,

got her, in time past.

He’s a lucky guy for that,

but who kissed who

is playground stuff,

and jealousy is a wasted emotion,

and I am proud

to be my brother’s brother,

and my mother’s son.

I would never begrudge my brother something I would want for myself or my mother either.

HANNAH

I was trying to write white. In the recent poem ‘Notebook,’ the opening line “il faut que je m’en aille” is a quote from Arthur Rimbaud, an archaic French subjunctive meaning “I too must go.”

The second line (“Sometimes you’ve just got to hit the road and”) is Go-Beat-stricken.

I was trying to confer a special message through the white space in-between, and sheer insouciant faith, like a counter to the red on black JE DOUBTE DONC JE SUIS which I read at the top of the Pompidou Centre’s conceptual ascent through the ages.

The original album called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob which I was rewriting in ‘Notebook’ included a song called ‘L to the Pregnant Snorkel’ and one about Ossie the dog going round and round chasing his own tail. If ‘L To The Pregnant Snorkel’ contained inflections of my father’s education at the LSE under Sir Karl Popper, who taught of of P1 to TT to EE to P2, Ossie the dog’s song was more John Lennon. It never got as far as V, in the Utilitarian Martianist slowspell of the word “LOVE,” indicating that my heart was broken, but I made amends in the recent rewrite.

The trumpet wears his foreskin on the inside.

There is an upturned canoe for a drum.

There is a dog for a frontman and

there are poppadom hi-hats in the band.

We have a family friend called Rafe who was also in the band, like a brother he was and is still too. Dad always used to say “you always change when Rafe’s here John. It’s called pack mentality. You start to misbehave. You’re weak.”

With Rafe on board, we were named like the Doors (almost). John, James, Robert and Rafe we were. But we also have a sister called Hannah.

Traditionally what comes after The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob is Hannah, the blonde palindrome from the 25th of May.

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

The band started as 4 siblings born in a season each, spiralling Spring, Autumn, Winter, Summer, marching right left right left in the handedness – and yet this might mean that anyone can be in the band.

The Quire is opened, awakes the blame of memory...

whomsoever they’re looking for it’s not me.

Light shafts in its distilled sleep.

The dead in tired dance circle the silence,

lingering fragile moments outside the quiet Quietus -

but wait, who dreamed me awake this time?

It was me, I'm he who dared disturb.

Not to renounce the past with rapt amazement

but to forgive our sins, falling like leaves.

We have seen this all before, time

tumbling away into sleep, seen

this darkness drop and these ruins murmur

and now we are gathered to appoint the gods

and now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves

and now we are gathered to ordain this dust,

we are gathered to live and to dream.

It took a rainy day in Penn, Bucks, to write and record the original album The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob; and we indeed sang of the dog going round and round chasing his own tail; but the original cassette (a one off) was later recorded over with a Blur gig on Radio One.

That isn’t the end of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob either, for it surely goes on and on.

I have said it before and would say it again that God is a game, and that a game is based on permutation, or at least can be, and that a permutation game can be a rehearsal for death.

I would also say The Lords And The New Creatures is a game, a wide, yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre and the circumference closing in. I would also say it is a media compression experiment dreamed up on LSD under a hot, Californian sun, maybe to expose the germs of dictatorship on all hands. It churns up evidence through the operation of a game. It tests the place where evolution is controlled, monopolised. It asks if he who controls the media controls evolution too. It is a good test.

If God is a game what are the rules? Some say God is a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness. Some say God is but a stopped, glottal monosyllable. Some contend God is not to worship blind in dogmatic slumber but behead, dethrone and become. Dedalus says ultimately we all have the same definition of God.

Going empirically from personal experience I can say that praying before an LSD trip will mean a safer trip than if you don’t pray even if there is no God. So God could be a placebo. Still, I don’t wish to go on about God too much.

I like Paradise Lost, where Milton makes us sympathise with Satan for so long before we recognise he is evil. He also builds up through pages and pages of poetry to a moment of terse concision:

“She plucked. She ate.”

In Milton Jesus has a sword in Heaven. He is like one of God’s security guards! Traditionally it is the Muslim faith where we find the warrior-poet, so Milton might be suggesting “Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.”

I am also interested in God Simulations. Before The Lords And The New You Know Who seemed to get real in my boyhood, there was a lightning storm in France so epic, sublime and prolonged it was a God Simulation – it was Nature herself tearing up the rule book to let the games commence.

This doesn’t seem to be the subject matter of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob though, where there is as yet all too little mention of sex. Martin Amis says a single pixel of sex is ineffable, impervious to the workings of the pen.

Voices have stolen everything now and filled it with sugar.

If Forgiveness were a fine white powder, a chemical cure, they might with-hold the cure until the price is right but seeing as it is not I am prepared to try and forgive the guy that hypnotised and cursed me.

I used to say the nature of visionary experience is not amenable to the dialectic of sickness and recovery, the language of sterile medicalese, that one’s illness is more congenial than one’s health unto those that are in charge of one’s health, for monetary reasons, meaning Big Pharma companies that can with-hold a cure until the price is right, but now I see the illness is not a conspiracy, that the science works, that I should plug in.

As I may have said, in my first psychotic episode I went to hospital for a literal head wound. The nurse in A and E put a bandage on. I went to touch the bandage to see if it was paddy and it was. I went to touch it a second time and it was gone. The bandage had vanished into thin air while I sat still in a chair. The nurse had to put a second bandage on.

I was not just put in mental hospital but the acute ward. This was in the middle of my undergraduate degree. This is my story. I have been on heavy, neuroleptic, soporific, homeostatic medication ever since and had several hospital admissions. When I went back to University after that initial admission I got the highest First in the year and was a beautiful mind.

I wrote sooooooo many pieces, defaced bank notes, creative non fiction, rap, and one piece was about how there is no such thing as mind cancer. As I may have said, Hobbes and Descartes sit on diametrically opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to the nature of the human mind: for Hobbes the mind was just a part of the body but for Descartes the mind was separate from the physical world. When I read of Descartes clenching the idea of perfection in his mind, and using it as ontological proof of God, and I turn inward my eye to investigate, I glimpse a perfect, inner judge whose concerns seem to be grammatical.

You could say that because there is no such thing as mind cancer the mind is definitely separate from the material world but it could just as easily be the case that there is no mind cancer because there is nothing for the term “mind” to name except the dance of the synapses, electrical impulses in the brain.

The sheer indifference of the universe to human philosophy can boggle the mind.

The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob may be about Energy as much as Faith. In fact I may have lost my faith long ago although have blips. Some contend the idea of it is a pseudo-efficient, government-sponsored idiocy, others that it could unite us all. It was never supposed to be a post-Einsteinian comedy, nor about Backward Liquid Maths or Miltonian theology. I suppose it was more about Mr. Bean. The original was a bunch of young kids, the oldest of whom was 12, singing, as I say, about the dog going round and round chasing his own tail.

During my degree it was proposed that we scrap Trident and use the resources to explore space more instead; but without Trident we could be held to ransom by someone like Iran.

The nuclear submarine factory is only down the road in Barrow-in-Furness.

My brother is round there at the moment… I am home alone. I think how the nuclear sub factory in Barrow is enough to qualify it as a city, because the factory is a cathedral in the modern age.

I go out into the garden and look at the shape of the fell. The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob seems to contain a separation that corresponds to the geographical/ geological shape of the fell and its foothill Sea Ness from here at the gravitational, magnetic and telluric foot.

I often wonder about M-Theory in correlation to the shape of the fell… I wonder if the qwerty keyboard ends on ‘M’ for the reason of the alignment of Plough and oldest fell, as is only visible here, being “the last thing.”

You have to beware perfection, and beware making a text so good it could be used as Fascist propaganda.

My heart is a bass-drum stuffed with a pillow.

I am interested in the dust that lies at the bottom of things.

As my father passed, Dr. Robert read to him from the Book of John. When he was newly gone, though he’s only gone up the road, I was h-a-n-d-e-d a stack of books I wrote at seven years old and one early piece says:

“On Tuesday there was a magic car in Form 2 and it had flashing lites all over it… and we crashed on a ship REC… and since we were under the sea the whirlpool pulled on top of the water.”

In short though I only give you a fragment it Taps the Book of John for the televisual age.

Around the time of my father’s passing I was thinking, yes, my heart is a bass drum stuffed with a pillow. It could be an image from the renewal of The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob; but I don’t want it to mean I die of a heart attack! Traditionally my heart is strong, ocean-going, a liner.

Sometime after my dad’s death I falsified the Nirvana barcode. As I said in Let The Jews Win, if you falsify the Nirvana barcode it should have meaning.

Mum said it was a trick of grief.

When I made the Nirvana-barcode to be

but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by

Nirvana tapped out in approximate

barcode shape using the tool of

the qwerty keyboard and took it to her

she said “there is no such thing.”

The shape I mention only works

in Times New Roman, thus:

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

and the armed winged may well make

millions out of the new Nirvana barcode

as brought in by John F B Tucker but

upon writing it down I cast it on the fire

and got my mother to photograph it in flames.

It became smoke filing out of the chimney, and the smoke dissipated into the north wind, that great disseminator of seeds.

Out in the garden, where it is returned to the elemental realm, maths is the language of Nature.

Now, seeing as my dear friends Agent G and Mark too whom it would seem has a finer singing voice than me might need to see some maths, I should just say, in this system E = peace.

Starting with L to the Pregnant Snorkel, E = peace.

We could likewise start with, say, L to the stare of 3 o’ clock twice, and O needn’t be Ossie the dog, going round and round chasing his own tail, for there are many senses of O. For example O is the key of the babbling unicorn.

As for V, we could have the peace sign made with the fingers, or V to the wings of a bird.

The reason I have chosen ‘love’ for this Utilitarian Martianist slowspell is that love is as WH Auden says “a choice of words.” So many problems in philosophy and life alike are down to communication as Wittgenstein said; which is why it is good to further focus on language-use.

If E = L to the pregnant snorkel,

L to the pregnant snorkel = MC squared.

So it is that we arrive at Backward Liquid Maths, where E minus MC squared = only relative 0, but not being good at numbers, I deem that piffle, when everything is devoid of evil, went the hen.

And what about that time I sat in a room without moving for three days and three nights staring at a pint glass of water before me on the table untouched, taking notes on whatever went through my myriad mind? That’s a notebook I would like to reread but they are all gone.

I might also have mentioned my grand-dad Don’s motto.

The mustard has to be English.

The mustard has to be English.

The mustard has to be English

and growing outside in the wild.

My grandfather Don lied about his age at 15 to stow away to the Second World on the bottom of a sub, later won the Sword of Honour in the R. A. F. and became their youngest non-commissioned officer.

18. 49. I have just polished off a massive portion of sausages and Yorkshire puddings with delicious onion gravy so rich and thick it was like soup.

In Noj And The Mob, soup was called “moop.” Toast was called “boast.” I was Noj; James was Semaj but became Semgas because he didn’t like drinks with bubbles; Dr. Robert was Trebor; and Hannah was a blonde palindrome so I said she could be “Rannock.”

Mum was often “mumphis” as opposed to mumbo and dad was “Badmunch.”

I used to call “muppet!” up the stairs instead of “supper!” and everyone understood. I would also say “moonrag” instead of “morning” in the morning, and again the message came across.

It seems to be a Nintendo innuendo that

her breath a poisonous magic.

Then you’re faced with Hanif Kureishi,

a bit of The Buddha of Suburbia.

The anatomisation of the female

could extend for longer and longer…

her ankles are delicate ornaments of ivory.

You’re also faced with Pinchbeck

whom it would seem, in Breaking

Open The Head, talks of the division

of people into those that like

and those that don’t like mushrooms

as the most ancient division in civilisation.

That’s why I didn’t feel it was a gaff

when I wrote the original, after

poring over a Ted Hughes poem in English

at the same table as fragrant Rachel.

She was never to be my cosmic bride.

“Just so you know, you would already have got your degree from us for the way you write about Saul A. Kripke’s “quus.””

“Hang on a minute should I cry for help and ask what’s going on?”

(I am sitting here at my lonely vigil at the kitchen window finishing off with voices as voices have requested, but where are they now? Voices could be the colours of the vowels from Rimbaud. They assure me if I continue with the Transition To Philosophy series everything will be alright. They even said I should read Spinoza next, and continue my transition… then as I say they said to end this with quoting them. Syd Barrett wished to “hair” not “hear” by the time of The Madcap Laughs. They deem it I am paying them back, paying them due respect with philosophy and I am. They are impeccable in their timing, co-imaginative and proleptic too. But where are they now?)

“If it hadn’t been for the necessity to recount what you do you would’ve won awards.”

“You would’ve looked like Don who won awards in the Second World War.”

And Hannah is a radiant angel. She says she hopes it all goes on in the happy world of Haribo; that once you renounce Starbucks, cool, new stuff can happen; and about my career as a writer, that “wall is shit.” She has been a little ray of light all her life. I once had a dream of a party, attended by her too, whose epicentre was soooooo exciting in terms of music, drugs and fashion that the party had to spread outwards and could only be done so by dancing. That was the theme of Soundcloud Rain.

Which was quite left-wing of me.

Now I order Spinoza online… I gather he was cursed and fled his homeland, before becoming a philosopher.

Now it is Night and I might still summon up the depths of courage to write white, true and quite. The mute button is on. The painter’s palette on the easel. Now the voices cheer up…

“we want you to deem it that it’s not all Doom,” they say.

Well I am too unfit to make it all the way up the fell these days but the bald, blank forehead of Black Combe overlooks. Doom actually means judgement. I am not sure I like the word. Stoned heartbeats could be described as dreadful footsteps of doom. And it isn’t all doom, gloom, ruin and tomb. Free toy when children feed. I mean, it’s the next day now and quite nice a day enough. Now for the mute button again.

The painter’s easel, his canvas. There is blind white light on the canvas. Like a coruscation of divinity. There is also red paint. It forms… it forms the facial features of John Lennon. He is thinking in blind white light. That’s where it is coming from. The brain of John Lennon.

No voices today or not many anyway. Beware the dangers of just “putting anything in.” He may make war against you. This is not an O. D. attempt. I am the seer associated with Sea Ness, the foothill of Black Combe, which once was called Seer Ness after a seer and his trance. But by now, yes, I am just putting anything in.

Last night I dreamed of beautiful papers, designed on Euclidean geometry, like poems that take the shape of airports or the Premier League table. David Morley was dishing them out to us. We each got our fair wage. We queued up and received our papers from David Morley. I checked mine two times to make sure they were real and they were – they made sense in the dream world, and it seemed in the dream they correlated to real papers outside the dream world. This was not so: I was desperate to smuggle the beautiful papers out of the unconscious into the waking world but failed. When I woke up my publisher had at least formatted Transition To Philosophy Volume Two. I suppose it will do.

THE FACE OF STARS

How do I know the face of stars was scripted in the Bible? Firstly, we were three gathered in the name. We were on a camping holiday in Eskdale, and I had taken us to a tarn at sunset. The sun went down and we walked back through the concussive dark guided by a cigarette lighter’s spark, came out of the dripping trees into the open, crossed the River Esk on the stepping stones and stood beneath the universe at the clearing by St. Catherine’s Church. The universe was enlumed, drenched with electric diamonds, wet, dripping grape-bunches of stars; and Tom and I stood there together while Ben fished his fags out of the river; and we saw a shooting star or “fire fish tail” course across the Night from right to left; and we pointed, simultaneously, up at it in rapture; and all of a sudden we recognised the face of stars, there where the shooting star fizzled out; so we were already pointing up at it; and we sighed and were excited; and Ben came from the river bank and asked us what we were pointing at; and I guided his eyebeam across the Night so that he could also see it – the face of stars.

We had to walk away and did. Now the question is: how do I know it was scripted in the Bible? Well, I don’t know but believe, if you may permit a difference, and this belief has been engendered by a series of random text messages I have been sent from two separate numbers, containing Biblical quotes. Maybe, you will say they are taken out of context; but reading them, with my experience, I understood that the face of stars was scripted in the Bible. The list of quotes, divided into two books according to which number the texts were sent from, is as follows…

BOOK 1

Tue 1 Jan 2019. 00. 00

It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. Lam 3 v 22.

Mon 26 Sept 2022. 11. 38

He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Psalm 107 v 29

Mon 10th Oct 2022. 11. 45

For of him, and through him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen. Romans 11 v 36

Mon 24th Oct 2022. 12. 02.

… that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope. Romans 15 v 4.

Thursday 22 Dec 2022. 11. 20.

In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth. Eph 1 v 13.

Mon 2nd Jan, 2023. 12. 47

...so loved… John 3 v 16

Mon 16th Jan. 2023. 12. 16

For the LORD gives wisdom; From His mouth come knowledge and understanding. Proverbs 2 v 6.

Mon 30th Jan 2023. 12. 16.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11 v 28

Tuesday, 14 Feb 2023. 13. 32.

Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? Genesis 18 v 25.

Monday 27th Feb 2023. 13. 05.

But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble. James 4 v 6

Mon 10th April 2023. 11. 38

Who is wise, and he shall understand these things, prudent, & he shall know them for the ways of the Lord are right, & the just shall walk in them. Hosea 14 v 9.

Mon 24th April 2023. 13. 09.

After he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise. Heb 6 v 15.

Mon 8th May 2023. 19. 45

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. Rev 22 v 13.

Mon 22d May 2023. 12. 24

by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. Heb 9 v 12.

Mon 5th June 2023. 12. 35

Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompence of reward. Hebrews 10 v 35.

Mon 19 June 2023. 11. 05

Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. 1 John 3 v 1

Tuesday 4th July 2023. 12. 53

Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. Romans 4 v 3.

Mon 17 July 2023. 11. 46

For thou art with me Psalm 23 v 4

Monday 7 Aug 2023. 09. 42

the LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. Psalm 121 v 5.

Mon 9th Oct 2023. 23. 18

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Ecc 3 v 1

Mon 6th Nov 2023: 13. 24

To whom then will ye liken God? Or what likeness will ye compare unto him? Is 49 v 18.

Sunday 26th Nov 2023. 06. 22

our sufficiency is of God. 2 Cor 3 v 5.

Tues 19th Dec 2023. 10. 37.

Glory to God in the Highest. Luke 2 v 14

Monday 1st Jan 2024. 13. 25.

But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. Matthew 13 v 16.

Monday 15 Jan 2024. 11. 12.

I the LORD.. will hold thine hand, and will keep thee. Isaiah 42 v 6.

Monday 29 Jan 2024. 12. 19.

I will go before thee and make the crooked places straight. Isaiah 45 v 2.

Monday 11 March 2024. 11. 24

Worthy is the lamb. Revelation 5 v 12

Monday 25th March 2024. 11. 32.

Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? 1 Cor 6 v 19

Monday 8th April. 11. 54

Seek the Lord, and his strength: seek his face evermore. Psalm 105 v 4.

Monday 8th July. 23. 54.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Psalm 46 v 1

Whoever offers praise glorifies me. Psalm 50 v 23

Monday 15th July. 10. 39

For thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name. Psalm 138 v 2.

Monday 29 July. 11. 39.

And the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53 v 6.

Monday 12th August. 11. 15.

...upholding all things by the word of his power... Hebrews 1 v 3

Monday 26th August. 14. 17.

Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did, is not this the Christ? John 4 v 29

Monday 9 Sept. 12. 16

Behold, the fear of the LORD, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding. Job 28 v 28.

Monday 23rd Sept. 14. 03.

Pray without ceasing. 1 Thess 5v 17.

Monday 21 Oct. 10. 30.

Let such as love thy salvation say continually, the LORD be magnified. Psalm 40 v 16.

Monday 4th Nov. 10. 50

I am come that they might have life, and… have it more abundantly. John 10 v 10.

Mon 18th November 10. 00.

Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High. Psalm 50 v 14.

Mon 2nd Dec. 10. 19.

For God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. John 3 v 17

Mon 6th Jan. 10 35.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, either sorrow, or crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things have passed away. Rev 21 v 4

Mon 13 Jan 10. 17

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you. 1 Peter 5 v 7.

Sunday 2nd Feb 21. 55

Blessed is she who believed, for there will be a fulfillment of those things which were told her from the Lord. Luke 1 v 45

Monday 10th February. 11. 26

Shall he that contedeth with the Almighty instruct Him. Job 40 v 2

Monday 24 Feb. 10. 44.

And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. Mark 4 v 39.

Monday 10 March. 19. 38.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need. Heb 4 v 16

Mon. 10. 57.

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast. Hebrews 6 v 19.

Monday 7 April. 11. 35

Looking into Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. Hebrews 12 v 2

12. 15

...the son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. Galatians 2 v 20

Tuesday 20 May. 18. 21

Behold he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him. Rev 1 v 7

Monday 2 June. 10. 14.

Shall he that condendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth God, let him answer it. Job v 2

BOOK TWO

Monday 19th Sept 2022. 10. 52

The Lord, he it is that doth go before thee, he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee, fear not, neither be dismayed. Deut 31 v 8

Monday 3 Oct 2022. 12. 42.

Seek the Lord, and his strength, seek his face evermore. Psalm 105 v 4

Monday 17 Oct 2022. 12. 28.

It is God that girdeth me with strength, and maketh my way perfect. Psalm 18 v 32.

Monday 26 Dec 2022. 12. 44.

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things. Romans 8 v 32

Mon 23 January 2023. 11. 54

But be not thou far from me, O Lord: O my strength, haste thee to help me. Psalm 22 v 19.

Mon 6th Feb 2023. 12. 34.

The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever: the Lord shall rejoice in his works. Psalm 104 v 31.

Mon 20th Feb 2023. 11. 50

Even there shall thy had lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. Psalm 139 v 10.

Monday 6th March 2023. 11. 22.

I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: My God; in him will I trust. Psalm 91 v 2.

Tuesday 4th April 2023. 21. 38.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, And saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. Psalm 34 v 18.

Monday 17 April 2023. 10. 31.

Stand still and consider the wondrous works of God. Job 37 v 14.

Monday 1st May 2023. 13. 03.

Then spake Jesus… I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life. John 8: 12

Monday 15th May 2023. 11. 46.

Be still, and know that I am God. Psalm 46 v 10.

Monday 29th May 2023. 11. 53

Great is our Lord, and of great power; His understanding is infinite. Psalm 147 v 5.

Monday 12 June 2023. 11. 52.

He telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names. Psalm 147 v 4.

Monday 26th June, 2023. 11. 18.

In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. John 16 v 33.

Monday 10 July 2023. 12. 04

I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old. Psalm 77 v 11.

Monday 24th July 2023. 10. 11.

And they remembered that God was their rock, And the high God their redeemer. Psalm 78 v 35.

Monday 7th August 2023. 10. 21

My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the LORD: My heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God. Psalm 84 v 2.

Monday 16th October 2023. 11. 41.

… for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. Matthew 6 v 8.

Wednesday 1st November 2023. 08. 39.

For thou, art good, and ready to forgive; And plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee. Psalm 86 v 5.

Monday 13th Nov 2023. 11. 43.

My soul melteth for heaviness: Strengthen thou me according to thy word. Psalm 119 v 28

Monday 27th Nov 2023. 11. 48.

Therefore I will look unto the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me. Micah 7 v 7.

Monday 25th December 2023. 12. 04.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness. James 1 v 17.

Wed 10th Jan 2024. 04. 59.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us… John 1 v 14.

Monday 22d January 2024. 12. 27

But be not thou far from me, O LORD: O my strength, haste thee to help me. Psalm 22 v 19.

Monday 5th Feb 2024. 11. 38.

And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. Mark 4 v 39

Monday 4th March 2024

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. 2 Cor 5 v 21.

Monday 18th March 2024. 10. 30.

O LORD, thou art my God; I will exalt thee, I will praise thy name; for thou hast done wonderful things. Isaiah 25 v 1.

Monday 1st April. 12. 33.

The Lord is risen indeed. Luke 24 v 34.

Monday 8th July. 23. 54.

Unto thee, O my strength, will I sing: For God is my defence, and the God of my mercy. Psalm 59 v 17.

The Lords is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; And saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. Psalm 34 v 18.

Monday 22nd July. 09. 39.

O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: For his mercy endureth forever. Psalm 136 v 1.

Monday 5th August. 11.43.

And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. Col 3 v 17.

Monday 19th August. 10. 36.

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD and whose hope the LORD is. Jeremiah 17 v 7

Mon 2nd September. 10. 54.

The voice of the LORD is powerful; The voice of the LORD is full of majesty. Psalm 29 v 4.

Monday 16th September. 10. 36.

When I said, My foot slippeth; Thy mercy, O LORD, held me up. Psalm 94 v 18.

Monday 30th September. 11. 15.

For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm. Isaiah 25 v 4.

Thursday 17th Oct. 15. 38

And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest. Exodus 33 v 14.

Monday 28th October. 11. 55.

Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer. Romans 12 v 12.

Monday 11th November. 10. 54

For the vision is yet for an appointed time … though it tarry, wait for it, because it will surely come, it will not tarry. Hab 2 v 3.

Monday 25th November. 11. 53.

Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour; for we are members one of another. Ephesians 4 v 25.

Monday 9th December. 10. 48.

The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace. Exodus 14 v 14.

Monday 23 December. 12. 12.

When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. Matthew 2 v 10.

Monday 30th December. 13. 29.

He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words: Keep my commandments and live. Proverbs 4 v 4.

Monday 20th Jan 11. 43.

Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write; for these words are true and faithful. Revelation 21 v 5.

Monday 3rd Feb. 11. 16.

Be not wise in thine own eyes. Fear the LORD, and depart from evil. Proverbs 3 v 7.

Mon 17th Feb. 10. 33.

If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. Galatians 5 v 25.

Mon 3rd March. 11. 19.

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. John 14 v 27.

Monday 17 March 11. 47.

He brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, And set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. Psalm 40 v 2.

Monday 31 March 20. 03

Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice: Have mercy also upon me, and answer me. Psalm 27 v 7.

Monday 11. 30

For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: In the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me upon a rock. PS 27 v 5 TM

10. 42.

In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he shall direct thy paths. Proverbs 3 v 6.

CONCLUSION TO THE FACE OF STARS

After twice being sent the quote from Psalm 105 V 4, about how we are to seek God’s face forevermore, I believe, as a matter of faith, that the face of stars was scripted in the Bible. It might be what is meant by Jack and the Beanstalk, or rather, early talk of Giants, too. I also believe there was a bet that the one to attain the vision – albeit with two friends whom he led to the place where it was seen – would write a specific line, which was incorporated into a song I wrote round about the time in a band called Oedipus Wrecks. Knowing now it was part of a bet, or rather thinking it was, and that it was not mine own original work, even if I won it in a bet, I don’t really wish to regurgitate it herein. It’s what Jim Morrison means, I also believe, when in ‘The Crystal Ship’ he sings “when we get back I’ll drop a line.” Translated into French the line is “les océans sourient de leurs yeux liquides et se remplissent de pluie.”

If I had to bet as to whether or not the face will be observed again I would say yes, and remark that writing for that future witness could give a writer something purposive to do. Where and when it will happen again is beyond me and possibly down to chance, or else there are overlords to consider. What I think about the face of stars is that it was the most Rimbaudian thing. Rimbaud obvs famously said “the poet makes himself a visionary through a prodigious derangement of the senses to attain the unknown,” and us three gathered in the name had indeed shared a spliff of soft, Moroccan pollen beforehand. This doesn’t mean the face wasn’t real, for pollen is a naturally occurring thing. It means it was a vision attained by what Rimbaud called derangement.

They say what distinguishes vision from mere wild hallucination is the idea of God, that true vision contains a theophany not just an epiphany, a revelation of the divine. Ted Hughes who was poet Laureate at the time would say that means vision is indoctrinated by the church, who only brand Nature as evil. He would say to liberate vision from the false hands of the false. Blake was deemed a true visionary for breakfasting with angels, for seeing the sun as Holy not just a 2 pence piece; Ginsberg meanwhile was visited by the ghost of Blake who taught Ginsberg the notes to the Songs of Innocence and Experience – and for this Ginsberg was deemed mad rather than a true visionary. I think even though the three of us gathered in the name had shared a smoke of pollen, the face was a true vision, that dates back historically to the Bible.

My first piece of writing about the face was also high on pollen in the back of a moving car in France when I was 16 or 17, describing everything as “yes!” and everything as “Heavensent” and everything as “a Godsend.” My faith wavered but for a little while I was taken by the Beat Poets and their exaltations of the holiness of things. The original prose poem was a purple patch in a notebook with a purple cover but the notebook got thrown away when in my twenties my father urged me to make a burning, purgatorial move… I threw away several big, black liners all full of notebooks attesting to the recording angel of New Beat youth. I would’ve said, even though my faith was starting to waver, that the face meant God cannot be Nothing.

Even though I think things should have to go through the face, that I had to deal with it, I think to still be going on about it too much shouldn’t be done now that we have James’s sheet where pictures grew, which I would say is neither mad hallucination nor God-guaranteed vision but science, meaning also maths, and also, most importantly, a new art in and of itself. In the end there is no ‘c’ in James’s code. That may be why we don’t understand it still; but maybe he was trying to bring balance and equality to Flora’s pretext, her system, which with a nod to John Nash I call Mum’s Equilibrium. I thought I would bring up the face of stars anyhow to see if I have anything Einsteinian to say. He always pulled silly faces in photographs. Maybe he knew something he wasn’t letting on? I cannot speak of there being “cinema screens between us and the world” without remembering the chronic amounts of skunk I used to smoke, in notebook-carrying days. I think of the face in terms of desire, desire shaping the sweet mirage, shaping perception into being what we want it to be. As stated in this book the nearest I came to Einstein was twofold:

(1) my boyhood book at seven. If I showed you the whole new file trying to understand it, the maths of the new colour, even though it’s not very long, I might end up dying like Jesus. But as stated I can report that there was a post-Einsteinian moment where I put a + sign for the ‘f’ in the line “I have a scar+ that is red and black,” which was part of it.

(2) The only other thing I can think of is when I looked into an equation for the ratio between light speed falling and Gravity pulling on my brother’s sheet where pictures grew. I made it that “c over G” could be “backward f, forward f, equals running through.”

It is actually my brother James I think of when it comes to matters of Einstein, for to design the sheet where pictures grew took a deft left hand born of another deft left hand as he is, luckily for him. His notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet is probably much more what the doctor ordered than anything I provided. It has been said I did to maths what he did to English, but by now I am urged to leave that passage of my own writing out. It’s just a chapter, that tries to make sense of my seven year old text in adult terms, and it doesn’t matter overly that I can’t include it. You can always read my boyhood book and try and decipher for yourself what an adult would make of it. I for one am not prepared to die like Jesus just to bring you a few droplets of ink attesting to an experiment into the maths of the new colour from when I was seven.

Doing to maths what my brother did to English and at such a young age as seven might be why I ended up with the Nirvana barcode, but I would still say James’s way is happier, involving happier shapes. Just so that you know – I am being urged to omit a two or three page paper on the maths of the new colour from all this philosophy because I would have to die like Jesus if I included it; and I am also forbidden from including it even if I wanted to, but by whom I cannot say. I’d prefer to talk about the long day, how my sister and her husband and their young baby are visiting, how nice it is to see everyone. I also wonder what other members of the gang that were there at the face make of it. Could we agree that it was Rimbaudian in the sense of being a vision attained through the derangement of the senses? Could we also agree that in being scripted in the Bible it is a true vision not mere wild hallucination? Can you believe that I’ve been so busy I am only just seeing this one through? Could it be that the face only existed in a world before Facebook? Am I wrong that it will in all likelihood recur, and not just wrong but naive? Was it a cosmicomic moment that bridges The Lords And The New Creatures coming true and the eventual Plough alignment, making way for that eventual outcome?

The Milky Way is beautiful over Cervantes in Australia, studded with diamonds, but something tells me the face is an English incarnation because of law and order, and because of the lingua-franca. I might be wrong: we might just be dealing with a trashy image, a collective hallucination caused by drug taking – but it did seem a beautiful night, when stars were shining just for us, watching over the sleeping valley, where us three Londoners were on holiday. If it is a secret of the global village maybe I should not say any more. We may have strayed, furthermore, from philosophy to theology and now to mysticism and left science behind. I wrote a poem called “Hypertext” in my youth about how the stars are merely photos, illusions of the light that takes so long to reach the beams of our glistening eyes that the star still appears hanging there once the star has died. The idea behind the poem ‘Hypertext’ was that maybe, because the stars were like that, according to science, a sensory overlay could be affected to Piper At The Gates of Dawn. At least this is what the short poem seems to be about in retrospect. I used to be very much into poetry, live and breathe it, read it every night, keep up to date with events in the poetry world, but not so much anymore… now it is to people like Wittgenstein I turn. My whole life, or what is left of it, might be devoted to assiduous study, to philosophical reflection, to the stretching of the spare time continuum, to books. I don’t need to move away, not go on holiday, not even venture out to the local pub anymore, can just stay here, make staying an art, make thought-processes of rooted-ness, make philosophy my goal, and live a little bit like a hermit. It is a purification process.

After the face I may well have gone down a religious route, had it not been for a holiday I took, with all the song-writers of my year, after GCSE’s in a friend’s summer house in Devon, where we went to the beach, and discussed philosophy. The friend who hosted us was very articulate in speaking against God but inflexible and intolerant of other people’s beliefs. He thus went on to get an E in philosophy even though you might’ve been forgiven for thinking he actually had real live disciples at sixteen years old. I was asked if I believed in God and said I believed in the Unknown, but my friend retorted “does a goldfish have an Unknown?” and if not there was no such thing. My friend it was that said we are just monkeys with bigger brains and more dextrous fingers; that we don’t deserve a God. If I was into New Beat holiness after the face, I soon enough was swayed by the friend down the path of atheistic pragmatism. We are here to breathe eat sleep shit fuck and die. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the earth. Still to this day what I really think hasn’t been sorted out yet, which seems a position of default agnosticism as a shifting stance that allows all perceptions, and the surrender of the self to something more important than it.

Descartes would say not to try and erect a new, philosophical edifice de novo until you have questioned everything and are sure of what you think; and I think in that case Uncertainty prevails. I said it before but there is indeterminacy at the core of all things, and this translates into metaphysical matters as Undecidability. Indeterminacy is to matter and therefore science as undecidability is to subjective things therefore to art. It’s a bit black and white but something to go on at least. Here if Descartes were alive today he’d bring up an example of indeterminacy from science. I think of the so-called God Particle… just to remind you, I predicted the hunt for it in a prophetic speech in 2000, from looking at dust in a late ray of light angling in, as if I were Democritus of the Ancient Greeks – but have since read in a book of physics by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli that the idea of the God Particle is daft. Indeed, even from a religious point of view, they would say compared with God, matter is error. Anyhow, I think they can detect its influence but not pin it down.

I think I made the God Particle prophesy because of my dad’s education; because he read Philosophy at the LSE under Popper; because he had made use of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy where he tells us of the Ancient Greeks. In that sense culture is transmitted as well as genes, or rather, dad’s reading is transmitted as well as genes. In another sense, I may have been so prescient in the year 2000 because of my geographical position, and am thus on the receiving end of Nobel Prizes that have already been and gone! My mistake in the Millennial speech in the barn in 2000, where I got so much right, including September 11th, was dictating axiomatic truth. If you don’t believe me about that, I can show you another example of dictating axiomatic truth all over again...

THE STORY OF THE FLOOD

I

PREAMBLE

It’s hardly a mathematical proof but in the year 2000 there was a great unspooling in the den in the barn where I predicted September 11. I have endeavoured to reclaim the speech and categorise it too. It divides into prophecies, inventions, ambitions and aphorisms, but in the flesh was all extemporaneous speech, wedded to the colloquial and not written down. What we think is that it isn’t right that even September 11^th had to go through me when I was a schoolboy; and we think it is because I live in the house where the Plough alignment is viable. A transcript recapturing my Millennial unspooling now exists and has been augmented by further writing to show how things unfolded for me, leading up to that alignment.

II

MILLENNIAL PROPHECIES

I look into that dust in that late sunbeam angling in and foresee that they will one day hunt for something called the God Particle that will prove God non-extrinsic to matter.

It would be good to see an alignment of the Plough and the landscape for a first black President of America.

I think if Fight Club were real someone would fly two planes into the Twin Towers on September 11^th and I don’t think that a good idea but it might happen.

I would like to write a book, maybe a Trilogy, called The Scientific Papers, classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.

It would be good if there were a party in an office block where all the internal walls are removed and where every floor represents a decade in music, fashion and substances.

I myself would like to record an album on earphones, like Rimbaud might if he were a musician.

I would say that smells from tellies would also be possible one day too.

I think what we might see is an Age called the Age of Enchantment that is an echo of the Enlightenment.

I do wonder if there will be another immaculate conception now that we have a new Millennium.

III

MILLENNIAL PEN-KNIFE TOOLS

A virtual death machine to wake you up. A word-chord synthesiser at the edge of selection. A drug called “Strictly Free” that does what it says on the tin, is and makes you strictly free to consume. A red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball. An holographic horse-cock wheeled in the bedroom. An invisible square of air called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on telly. A neutraliser drink that sobers you up in one quick instant. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey protruding from the oldest fell at ten to eight. Earphones implanted with tiny mics inside them so that you can record on them. A love-bomb that explodes in a Chaos Theatre. What’s wrong with these is that they are not real!

IV

AMBITIONS

To replace the archaic word for ‘gay’ would be amazeballs because ‘gay’ used to be Man’s highest emotion and was never replaced.

To discover an aesthetic anti-system like the colours of the vowels in English would also be great, even though Rimbaud deemed it folly.

To conduct an experiment into the international language alphabet would also be an artistic ambition.

To overthrow the conscious self-censor would be good, maybe create a superhuman narrator called FUCK who can tell the truth like no-one else.

To start a new religion is what I am getting at because I think the Millennium means what is old is expended and we need to renew our values; and already Jedi is an official religion on the census forms in London.

To start a new language entirely would also be a positive thing, if at all possible, in my opinion.

I would like to start the tradition of the post-poem.

I would also see gypsy poetry in the English centre because it would shake things up and I think it could be interesting to see if they have anything new to offer.

If I were a concept artist I’d build a room made of hash that the audience can blow-torch but as I am not, just a writer, I can’t do that; and I would only endorse real live death in the cinema if an old granny volunteered for euthanasia and that’s because I do have some moral compass.

To make a new discovery as big as fire is the long and short of it, for every generation might have that chance again, to usurp the burning torch of culture from the old.

To bring back the Summer of Love is the largest and widest goal.

To bring about simultaneous orgasm of Man.

V

BLUE

“You know how dad told us all

he was an art smuggler nicknamed Blue?

That he smuggled art over the Berlin Wall?

That he sold his business when

the Berlin Wall fell? Well,

I think it might’ve been code, art

might’ve been recourse to euphemism.

I think he was a pollen smuggler.

I think he had a pollen farm

way up high in the Moroccan

mountains and shipped tonnes

and tonnes of pollen to the States.

This whole art dealer nicknamed

Blue thing is just to protect us.

At least this is what I entertain.

I also think he named us after

The Doors, John, James, and Robert

and then they had a girl of course.

Have you noticed we are born

in a season each, going Spring,

Autumn, Winter, Summer, and

march right left right left in the hands?

There are also four compass

points, four seasons, four wheels

of a car and four dimensions

to the mapping of any point in

the spacetime continuum including

time. Now revolve that bifter!

After all I think Jesus himself

would be a proto-hippy stoner

poet in this day and age. Ah,

I love it when the Wizard of Oz

resolves into colour. There are

casual drug references all around us.

Mario mushrooms confer energy.

Tinkerbell’s dust makes you

fly. And in the Wizard of Oz

they lie down in the field of

poppies and see the Emerald City.

So hurry up passing that joint.

Otherwise we’ll never stop the war.”

VI

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE DYING OF CANCER

A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand.

Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema.

Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.

Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts.

The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation.

Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation.

The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man.

The opposite of something is the pre-requisite.

The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution.

The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph.

When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy.

When you lose your concentration you die.

Your ordinary speech is surreal enough.

There are too many words in the world.

Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan.

The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous.

You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love.

All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun.

Without difference no contradistinction.

Everyone is my brother and I love them.

The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance.

There is no more mapless space.

Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self.

Philosophy is a self-contained language corresponding to nothing real in life.

Existentialism is a child at the pick and mix with a credit card.

Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit.

It is better to have a cup of tea than it is to kill yourself.

Portability is the new apotheosis of Form.

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too.

All things must be returned to earth, surrendered like a rented thing to death.

VII

WHAT THE BAND WANTED

They wanted to telepathically unite, they say, on a night when it would seem the quest was over. They wanted to remove the ‘I’ from art. They wanted us to be new binaural people. They kicked you out of the band because they deemed it that to do any more of what you wanted would’ve been a sin, when it wasn’t getting good. They wanted us to be as close as Optimus Prime is with himself. They deemed it the only good one from the dawn was ‘F Sharp Minor’ where you got the cat from Piper just right. If by now you hear them, consider it after the Flood, as in the way Rimbaud begins his Illuminations, saying “after the idea of the flood had subsided a rabbit in among the flowers said a prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web” - which leant itself to the naming of the band. What they didn’t get is that the binaural earphones were your idea to invent, that you’d already been prescient of September 11^th and that you were trying for the Plough alignment to coincide with a rhythm change in the White House, not to mention any of the other things of note in your Millennial speech in the barn. That’s why they think you were right, and why you eventually found the sheet where pictures grew in days long past taking ecstasy at the gates of dawn.

VIII

WHITE EYEBROW

It’s hardly a cosmi-economic theory but my father used to say, of this family home where the Plough alignment is viable, that “the value of this house should include The Bigger Picture.” It could also go the other way into a neo-Marxist direction; but if we gave the house away for 50p, (after spending £30, 000 doing it up), we wouldn’t be able to buy a new house. The Age of Enlightenment was said to be the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man and the White House its child in terms of both philosophy and build, and nowhere has that been more apparent to me than when observing the Plough alignment with the oldest fell Black Combe at a time of a rhythm change in the White House. To devalue that priceless gift would seem counter-intuitive to my meagre mind, and what happens in reality is that an estate agent will neither increase nor decrease the value of the house should it be on the market. That is, they will not factor the alignment in, nor devalue the house to 50p (which could also be said to be factoring the alignment in) but measure the value against the other houses. My father inherited the house from his father, and passed it on to my mother when he passed away; but still, I sometimes hear sadistic voices disputing that my father ever owned it. I think he did by law but there is an extent to which the Plough alignment belongs to us all. When dad spoke of valuing in the Bigger Picture he meant syncretism – the belief that all religions share a common goal - but there have been philosophers such as Sir Karl Popper – who taught my father at the LSE in the 1960’s - who don’t believe there is a Bigger Picture towards which things tend.

IX

OUR SONG

As I strive for something else on which to write a new proof, and before I get furloughed, I think back to my old band from Cambridge and how we seemed to affect a sensory overlay to Pink Floyd’s Piper At The Gates of Dawn.

Maybe the switch was thrown. Back in the day when we were recording the tron, that is recording on binaural earphones in The Flood, we also listened to Piper At The Gates of Dawn by the Pink Floyd; and maybe there was an inversion whereby the Floyd CD was suddenly recording instead of playing.

I do know that sometime after my degree I was living in London and listened to the classic Floyd album on Youtube and heard a sensory overlay of my name and voiceprint as if tattooed on Piper. Asking people about this, the possibility of affecting an album without going back to the studio to rerecord it, one person said it was schizophrenic talk; another that the sensory overlay was undeniable.

I do remember as I say listening to the album back when the tron was being recorded, and my mate suddenly saying “John Tucker” at a particular moment in the song, and me saying “this bit’s good,” which both seem to have stuck to the record as if it was indeed not just playing but recording.

I find this remarkable, as an overthrowing, as a usurpation, as a moment of ecstasia (meaning the suspension of all judgement), as something Bakhtinian applied to Bach, as a triumph of hope over logic, as another number which we could say is by our band, which begs the question as to whether or not Saucerful of Secrets still comes next!

I wonder why it had to be Track 5, Pow R Toc H. The name of the song is a type of acid they used to take in the 60’s if that makes any difference; and it is an instrumental too.

You start to ask if The Flood’s binaural album propitiated the possibility. We did a lot of recording and kept a 6-song play list. It was deemed more an algorithm than an album. On its last track I said I would “plug my senses in the mains.” That track is called ‘Hunger.’ It can be heard on rhythm guitarist Tom Woodhall’s Soundcloud page.

I imagine the road we didn’t go down; imagine what would’ve happened if at the start of the album we stopped and sat back asking if, for example, death is a fluid excreted by a gland in the brain called the Dreaming Gland, instead.

There may always be a concomitant pathway with the binaural earphone album, a road not gone down. The songs may have a dark edge as in dark matter – an antipode, a shadow, a satyr racing beside you on the beach.

It’s almost as if whatever you think, it is undercut by some irony, when it comes to the earphone album. It’s almost like irony becomes a musical key.

So it is that I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a carnivalesque upturning. We broke the ancient silence. The album was a scientific experiment. Water still came from the Tap. And who was the sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper but my natural biologist friend, stamping the witness’s name on Floyd?

I mentioned a “sprightly hypertext-sniper on Piper” in a conversation with my brother a long time ago in London, long before the Flood started to play. I also had the idea to invent the earphones myself in a conversation in the barn before I had set foot in Cambridgeshire where we played, but it wasn’t me who implemented the idea.

We might have split water; might’ve landed in a world where there needs to be New Rights. Imagine if for example one really did come out of the experiment looking ersatz or opaque. That would be unfortunate if you wished to become an English teacher; but you might find it is through The Flood that you are the new Faraday.

The Flood found out I had helped invent the net before I did… they called my mum down to talk to her about something, maybe my strange behaviour, and she told them something about my boyhood book. I thiiiiiiiiink all it was was when someone needed to store the idea of the net in writing in the attic here to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world and to keep it free too, I was the one to write it. And I didn’t know because the book had to be locked in the attic for Long Storage when I was very young.

One thing The Flood didn’t know though was how prescient, how prophetic I had been in a conversation with my brothers in the barn in 2000, before I set foot in Cambridgeshire, before the Towers came down, before the earphones came into play.

X

HALFWARE

I think the symbol N could represent the top of the telegraph pole, when a bullet is fired up there. I was once saturated by creative things. When I read of Maxwell and Faraday I think of a particular period where I was surrounded by creative things. For a start the Tower was on the shelf, including a book with smell that may have been the word of a dog and a book with a line that went missing. My computer bloomed a numinous purple light and working on it, typing up the plot of the film Eraserhead for a blog entry, one day, the telegraph pole in the field exploded. The binaural earphone album on which I said I’d plug my senses in the mains went online; and I also had an experiment into a cassette tape with a pause where resealed in the flimsy reel. That had been going on for years and was now a successful fusion. I melted it in the AGA at night to make it a valid work of art. At the time I considered some of these examples to be halfware, like, say, tattooing a name on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, or an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang – which I did also used to possess. It wasn’t long before my dad died and that meant I discovered the sheet, my brother’s sheet, where pictures grew, which could be portentous of the end of the chip; and it also meant my seven year old text emerged which I think was designed to store the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world. It was then that I falsified the Nirvana barcode, saturated as I say by creative things. Still, I lost my mind with grief when my dad died; and possibly shouldn’t still be going on about all the halfware.

LOST MINIATURE DREAMS

This text is painstakingly transcribed from defaced bank notes. Some of the bank notes are damaged, illegible, others ‘missing.’ Efforts have been made to order the bank notes but were not always successful. No efforts were made to authorial-fingerprint the voice or psychoanalyse the handwriting. The text is not necessarily a critical indictment of embedded liberal capitalism of whom we are liberal, human subjects and where money, formerly neutral means of exchange, is becoming a flying, white, electrical spark passing through borders of osmotic porosity in the dark. Nor is the text necessarily about an imaginary designer drug called Strictly Free that does exactly what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free” to consume. It is but an open-air poem, comprised of torn and bleeding snapshot-fragments that are given artificial insemination. Inherent in it is a notion that money is an Ode to Death, that a fiver is cheese and onion flavour, that work sets you free.

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

Necklace noose,

reckless truce,

drooling before

wet, electric eyes

My name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket.

(1998)

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

Waves

[squiggle]

crossed the FTSE

[squiggle]

and the Helter-Skelter

[squiggle]

crashed in the electric-sea

[squiggle].

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that heaven sends is rain.)

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh up,

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

To plug my senses in the mains

might engage !00% of my brains,

but it’s gone wrong at the plug,

just a dream on a drug.

I felt a leaf,

I fell out of life,

probably no-one else knew.

A trance of stalks walks on stilts

like a stance on talks only to the toilet

then back to bed to rest its head

under the soft, Pink Panther blanket.

She blows a poisonous magic

searched the corridor for a

crash had no survivors in Soviet

be weed

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just

got to hit the road and

Leaves that played on the surface of the water,

these are the leaves they have in Heaven,

these are the leaves of love.

Signed by everwell,

she couldn’t hit it sideways

or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman

with the hairgel of Dracula,

Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.

“Is there anything I can do to help?

Looks like I’m on washing up duty.

It’s fine I don’t mind washing up.

It won’t take long then I’ll be free.”

£34. 84 at the Take-away joint

can get you quite bloated,

not just quench’d and sated;

and by now I sit here wondering

just how much it cost.

My fingers have crashed,

my fingers have crashed

and my mad, crashed

fingers have connected.

A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in

can lead all the way to the loony bin,

can make you forget how to spell

Winnie the Pooh at the gates of Hell.

The day is a dream’s balcony around mellow me.

I remember when banks let pens go free.

Art gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi.

Love has gone veggie for reasons of Disney!

The future is no longer what it used to be!

I still crave a greedy DogMuckels when

the plush seat gets a hard-on at the end.

When Paul was talking of “McTruth”

I noticed a swarm of flies in the house.

Nobody else could even see them but me.

My mother calls the pills I pop “poetry

buttons” in motley conglomerations

like pool balls or songcells and

their names should not appear in poems.

Caroline is the last yellow crayon.

This could be the door to telepathy.

My granny and grand-dad were in the R. A. F.

Under a blanket in the back of a car -

I think of it now I’ve got this far.

Alone in the solipsistic kitchen

whom it would seem is un-war-ful.

Walking down to the Irish Sea quite slowly

to see if my place in life is lowly

a dying animal goes much faster.

He found himself on a plane.

He found himself on a.

He found himself on.

He found himself.

He found.

P.

If dog = pi times MC squared

it is because you wish to think him round

while O is the key of water shared

when rolling round on the ground.

O for a Muse of fire that descends

from the brightest Heaven of invention;

Rintrah roars and shakes his icy fires

into the burdened air, breathing.

One night, Jim Morrison pointed up

at the night sky on LSD and said “look!

It’s the infinite cocks fucking the infinite cunts!”

Barnes’s goal against Brazil,

it was was not born under a hill,

it is the best goal I’ve seen still,

Barnes’s goal against Brazil.

If the windows were washed – every one -

we’d still see nothing through them but

the white mirrors reaffirming the quiet

interior of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction.

Bart Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d

@ Van Goghian black border sun

heard James Joyce would just use |||| 4

ROYGBIV in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile

“I’ve been writing about bifters.

Hello my name is Pirripa.

[sound of sucking in of smoke.)

That’s my boyfriend.”

Now we are gathered to appoint the Gods,

now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves,

now we are gathered to ordain this dust,

we are gathered to live and to dream.

If you believe it, it is there,

naked under nearer stars,

softly swashing, backwashing music,

music in a room with no door.

A

A Yellow

A Yellow Pages

May dawn behead me

A Yellow Pages will suffice

A Yellow Pages will

Farewell my life

A Yellow

A

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,

H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for extra sensory allowance

but I for one still don’t really know

if Lucy even happens to be an actual substance.

I remember happy, sunny days,

days when we scored some weed and went

out in the meadows, when Paul

would turn to me and say

“wear an emotional condom

before you fuck my mind, man.”

Wouldn’t it be pollen

if Barnes has scored a chicken

and spring is a red horse?

Enough is the hope the heart

literally needs in order for it to survive

without which it can stop, meaning

Duff, which is H suspended in deafness

I cannot tell if sipping sugarless tea

or stretching honesty is the more easy

an encryption for the future that

ain’t what it used to be but I still

await the future with rapt uncertainty

and cannot stand the suspense.

We are the velvet e’s,

we’re shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,

the Roman Rd below,

beneath us as we fly.

[enter bass organ of ‘The End’]

Butter is good when you’re a nutter,

but I can think of something that’s better,

so had better write her a letter.

Opened unto the gloom under

sliver moon I slide her over.

Semen spills like silver water.

We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.

Forlorn as fallen autumn leaves,

is the wave that misbehaves,

goes out taking E at raves,

and soon enough no more believes.

One thing I learned I shouldn’t say too soon,

underneath this new moon,

but might instead just impart,

it is because I have a heart.

What actually happened was, I ended up robbing a bank, with a banana smuggled under a tea cloth and a balaclava on my head and face…there was a get-away car outside, and we went far and to a separate country too. We started to loan the money out and thus made money off it which meant we had plenty with which to use for a blank canvas. We had to be concise, when writing our contract on the money. The police were onto us, so what we did was wait until we had disseminated our message, and earned more money off the loaning of it than we stole in the first place, and quietly stormed into the bank with a banana openly protruding from a balaclava in my hand, and h-a-n-d-e-d the money – and the extra too – back to the bank. The police then let us off the crime and we went home, knowing our nodes were encrypted.

Of all the work I had achieved, be it before or after my mental illness, I still think of the binaural earphone album and the defaced bank note text as being among the best. I think if you remain on the left it’s alright but only when it’s phoney, for defacing actual bank notes is against the law. I think if you have to read Homer in order to be a philosopher everyone should get that opportunity should they choose and probably for free too. I think that is my philosophy and even more so, yours.