TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY VOLUME FOUR

TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY VOLUME FOUR

Down the barn dad used to keep a pile of unused house bricks. One afternoon my brother James and I who were but small children took it upon ourselves to use them to build a house, no cement, just laying out the foundations on the lawn outside the barn. Dad found us and deemed it unsafe and put a stop to our house.

Years later I had a dream, where the poet Michael Hofmann, whose ideal was writing poems “the shape and texture of bricks,” visited me. He was standing right there where James and I had been building; and he had a guitar and was strumming two chords in an open detuning and singing over the top, a melody without words.

My poetry seems to have died a death. When you have life experiences like me, speaking against September 11^th in 2000, prophesying the God Particle, attaining the face of stars – to name but a few – it should lend itself to philosophy. I tried music but wasn’t very good at it – and now at 43 am not the man to bring people the new music. I tried poetry but found there isn’t an audience. I don’t know one single person in this rural, countrified life that even reads poetry. So to philosophy I have turned.

Once at school there was a professional philosopher turned up to give a talk on the Sophists. I had a decision to make in attending that or going to score some weed. I decided to do both, and sat there in the lecture with a massive bag of weed emanating a pungent, potent smell from my pocket. At one point I put my hand and said “Moral choice is based on making a decision; and the decision is based on making a judgement… so how do we decide whose judgment is right?” The lecturer said it was a good question.

I’ve just been talking to James at 2 in the morning. What are normal human interactions? Old friends reaffirming the pact with peels of laughter? You don’t see any of that round here. My friends are elsewhere, scattered about the country, swift ensconced with wives years ago, employed, paying off mortgages. One friend I had said his favourite band name of all time was Free Beer. When I asked him later whether he was writing a book, he said “one day it’ll all pour out.”

My grand-dad on my English side used to say “The mustard has to be English,” and standing up in the French restaurant to all of us present too. He stowed away on the bottom of a sub at 15, lying about his age, to get involved in the Second World War, went on to win the Sword of Honour and become the youngest non-commissioned officer in the RAF. It’s something that could go in a little medley of images I think of as The Road To Heaven by Noj And the Mob. But we must have the Right to disagree. I for one disagree with grand-dad that the mustard has to be English. I like French mustard and American mustard and think grand-dad was being fussy.

Gravity, katabasis, that dust that settles at the bottom of things. These enrapture my soul now. I think of my brother’s early comment that “a dog’s uncomplicated love is healing for the soul.” My brother’s lovely like that, comes out with deep things, things rich with gorgosity to think about and say.

It could be that I have liberated myself to really write, now that the masturbation is over with – the brain-onanism. Something ideologically sound is going on with this. When I read Hofmann’s bricks during my degree, I was also presenting poems that took the ideal form of defaced banknotes; and I did my dissertation on a scientist-poet called David Morley who researched water’s effect on water too.

It wasn’t until later that I recognised Allen Ginsberg employs what I would call an olfactory rhyme. He rhymes the undisclosed concepts of his first two poems in his Collected Works. The first I believe is a poem written with the efficacy of making you feel sick. This reminds us of the art of Rothko. Ginsberg’s mother was mentally ill, his father a Communist.

Sometimes getting high I used to get the impression that when I was out of earshot everyone would start talking an imaginary language foreign to me. It could be called, say, Alien-song, or be just gibberish, nonsense vernacular, gagazookzook and bongatee bingbong. How you would ever know I do not understand.

So far things seem to be well in place herein. It’s not a game of Tetris at a laptop screen. It’s not verbal Lego. It’s philosophy presented through the medium of creative writing. If there is a problem with my paying a vanity-press to publish my works, I can always do them for free online. I can even write directly onto the Blogspot page, or almost directly, for it doesn’t register until you press “publish.”

Tedious loo paper scenario prompted by voices. When I gravitated south to London after my degree, I wrote with the motley fridge magnet letters on Dr. Robert’s fridge the names of 4 unknown, new jungle birds:

whitecrow

beckstub

chardud

stillwalker

I noted the Star Wars teeth of the escalators chewing their insipid gum. I noted the calm, velvet fart of the Underground brushing your cheek as you wait for the tube. I noted the black butter smear on the reflective pane of the window when you sit there, commuting, going through Hades on the Circle Line.

My parents met on a train in Berlin. My mother likes to listen and sing along to Rod Stewart’s song ‘We Are Sailing’ while she rides back on a horse from Finland. She is an extremely nice person and her poetry is good too. I said to her last night “if I’m not even the best poet among the three of us in our house, I’m not likely to make it am I?”

I’ve just written a poem; and in fact have written a few over the last month or so, even though as I say poetry is dying a death for me. I have a file of songs and poems that is more than 700 pages of A4 long! It is one of 1000’s of files that contain permutations like a game of cards, also essays, short stories, failed novels, papers. It amounts to an inchoate morass, a virtual Brainforest, a teeming data-tree; so I thought philosophy could be remedial. It could cure me of the hopeless situation.

James came down the stairs, asked if I had noticed him getting me two Rustlers burgers. I had noticed and thanked him for it. He took his chocolate mouse out the fridge, asked if they were still the same or if the recipe had changed. I answered that they were the same and he went upstairs. The important fact in among this is the idea of sameness: bricks are all internationally uniform size and weight.

My dad was a brick official. When on holiday we found a pile of unused bricks lying around he would photograph the family standing before them. He used to make us all say “sex” not “cheese” to the camera too. At one stage it was embarrassing but I got used to it.

An amended edition of Transition To Philosophy is being published. That was when I tried to make something as beautiful and simple as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Wittgenstein. I remembered, upon getting 100% in an A-level exam, saying to James “I’ll do you a template.” So that became the form: so I presented 100 numbered fragments of thought.

It being too much like perfection, the guys on the intercom, old friends from London, who are trying to set me free, got me to then write about the blot. So Transition To Philosophy Volume Two started. I hope it is published tomorrow.

I tell you what I intend to build: an online cafe. Meanwhile, it looks like the third volume is good to go. Being a writer I am naturally onto the fourth before the third is published. And how does one go about building on online cafe? With bricks such as these? Would it be a Dada cafe, a surrealist cafe?

I found out about Michael Hofmann through reading an essay by a poet called Simon Pomery online. He said there was a Hofmann poem where invective spittle forms in the mouth as you read of what embedded liberal capitalism does to your ex. I liked the micro-analysis that was married to flair in the essay. I also fell in love with Hofmann’s ideal of writing poems the shape and texture of bricks.

The online cafe I am building serves an All Day Breakfast. It could be a breakfast of every snooker ball colour. I have a sonnet about eating one of those. It has been published by Snakeskin. But the Feds still might do away with everything unless I can come up with a scale.

It’s only marginally cooler outside tonight than it is in this solipsistic kitchen of fiction. My mother is talking about going round only in her bra, so punitively hot it is. We must be approaching mid summer, the longest day of the year. It’s been getting light at about 4. 30 AM, or starting to. The spooky, numinous, alien light starts to leak through the dark garden trees in the East then.

Last night in my dreams I saw faded photographs of both my father and my grandfather. Towards the point of waking, I was led to believe I was going to visit a female singer giving us a rendition of ‘Territorial Pissings’ by Nirvana. She sang well but the words were about two super-furry animals connecting on the fifth and sixth stair. The melody was not the same as the original Nirvana song either.

I love it when Hofmann says he found himself “like a suicide” – “the last thing in the bare cranium of the house.” It’s a lightbulb moment. In Paul Farley meanwhile, there is a riddle whose answer is lightbulb – but in Hofmann the eureka moment is just scattered around like second hand furniture.

To be a poet you’d need some starting place – an id. With me it’s just an endless open sea. I couldn’t even escape my seven year old work because it helped invent the net. I wrote a paper at university about whether or not Lucy in the soul w/ demons happens to be an actual substance. There have been several good pieces forthcoming from me. But so far it hasn’t worked as a poet.

As I mentioned in the first Transition to Philosophy, white noise and silence are mythical poles of a spectrum between which lies a frequency range where Communication is possible. Language can of course obfuscate true Communication as much as facilitate it.

The clouds over the fell are staggered like Imperial Star Destroyers tonight, purple as mnts in dreams. So slowly they move, come apart, dissipate. Their caravan drags us back to a magical time. Maybe it is the 1980’s? I watch them move in slow time, not clock time. They drag their loads away.

I have a song about a house whose bricks started to float apart but it’s more about reading The Lords on pot than anything Hofmann-like. I have a song also about a parrot sent to space through the conch. There was a time my imagination was just so fertile, nobody could keep up with it. Essays in detention were like writing at a red-bleeding type writer inside a ping-pong ball.

The rhythms of feet on foreign pavements. I called out ad-libbed hippy poetry about neon chameleons when I last went to the Dam with a friend. He was a bit embarrassed, but it was just my style, to waste poetry on the ego-loss breeze. I am starting to hope to contain it all, somehow. It is better out than in.

I went downstairs in the night and found a mouse scurrying around on the kitchen surfaces, looking for food. James came down and I showed him too. I ushered the mouse down behind the fridge where we think its hole is with a spatula. It could be a sign that something I had written was not a good idea, and I have to delete it.

Grumbling voices. What are they for? They don’t like the way I was urged to renounce my position as witness from The Lords And The New Creatures in Volume Two. It was other voices that urged me to.

Now I think of the old USSR and the Beatles’ song ‘Back in the USSR’ and a feeling of deathly pallor comes over me. It is possibly because of the war Russia is waging on the Ukraine. It is not our problem, not our mandate to stop it. It is out of our language.

But America might invade Iran who are close friends with Russia, because Israel has attacked Iran, in a time when Israel are at war in the Gaza Strip, and Russia at war in the Ukraine. So everything is on edge. Donald Trump has theoretically agreed to bombing Iran on the premise that they may be months from developing nuclear weapons. In a way it doesn’t matter what I do as long as I do my worst. The efficacy of becoming a philosopher may pale into insignificance herein.

Last night I was reading Simon Blackburn on the realm of the self. In terms of the self, he quotes Hume a bit: Hume repudiates the notion of self, says every time he turns inward his eye, he finds no central ‘I,’ only perceptions and sensations which if you take away leave no underlying self. But what rhetorical landscapes can provide for us in such troubled and testing times I do not know.

The third Transition To Philosophy book is available to read on my blog, if everything stays the same, and takes as its subject the treatment of P. I was sent an example of something called a calligramme by an old friend, through the ether, that ended on the letter P. The opportunity to do a fourth Volume is here and I can’t see it doing any harm. There are four seasons, compass points, Beatles, legs of a chair, wheels of a car, legs of a horse, sides to a square, and dimensions to the mapping of any point in spacetime according to Einstein.

There are also four Tucker siblings, born in Spring, Autumn, Winter and Summer respectively, marching right left right left in the hands. I believe the boys were named after the Doors and then they had a girl of course who is already a lucky young mum.

There are also four letters in the word ‘love,’ a word the world needs right now, for there is never enough love in the world. I tried to fill the world with love in Volume Three but lately am not so sure about it… I said some nice things about the Feds for instance.

When Michael Hofmann says “a snake had taken care of the frogs,” down the bottom of some garden, I did wonder if he was saying “a child took care of the new creatures.” That was long ago now and we have to face the present. The present tense is where everything happens in infinity. But what can we hold onto? What roots and images clutch?

Now it is later. I woke up early for writing but was so knackered on the meds I had to go back to bed and didn’t awake again until late afternoon. My dream was of showing an ex gf’s grown up daughter around. There was a movement going across the country. There was some character there who only had a brain, which was put inside an old hoover, or metal box, so he could have a body, and he seemed fine with it. As we all moved across country, gravitating here, the foot of the oldest fell, in dreams, sweepingly, we had to dodge some crocodiles and I being gallant saved my ex gf’s daughter from being eaten by one.

The world awaits Donald Trump’s decision as to whether or not to bomb Iran; and as it does we grow nervous, us peaceful protestors, us peace-loving hippies who would prefer to hug trees. Standing in a circle holding hands and singing in harmony is the way ahead I tell thee! But who would listen?

Today the weather is too hot, too punishing. It’s not even sunny, just muggy and close and humid. Cars crawl past – the sense of background noise is a growing depression for the soul. One sense of Romanticism is to turn away from socio-political reality to an apolitical realm; but then again Wordsworth himself attended the French Revolution, saying it was “very Heaven to be on the crest of that wave.”

A new Assisted Dying Bill is being passed, that allows terminally ill people to choose to die… I’m all in favour of it, but whether anejaculation (the inability to ejaculate) would qualify me I doubt. I remember the agonies my dad went through with cancer towards the end. He was just so brave about it, never batted an eyelid. The last words I heard him say were “have nice lives.” Then I left the room, leaving Dr. Bob to read to the dying man from the Book of John. Dad was high on morphine at the time, so hopefully went out smiling. It took a number of months for it to settle in, to hit me, and has taken about ten years to get over.

So far the best one I have done is Transition To Philosophy. The second volume wasn’t as good. As I say, I was aiming for something as beautiful as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the first. The second was about imperfection. The third is on a separate file, seemingly ready to publish as I speak. It’s also on the blog: all the first three volumes are. This is the fourth. It is good to have a Tap. Bricklaying could be a Tap.

I have just sent Transition To Philosophy Volume Three in the publisher’s direction. Am yet to hear back. We need to get that one done before we can work on bricks. My mother is a Care worker. She works for next to nothing in a difficult job. She wipes the bottoms of senescent men and women. I meanwhile am drinking a can of Pepsi Max: compress sans sugar, compress sans caffeine too.

In a few moments I may hear back from Chipmunka and then we can focus, all of us here, on the bricks. They could be the building blocks of a happier world. Ah yes, I have just had Transition To Philosophy Volume Three accepted for publication; have paid for it and sent it off. Mum’s complaining about the waste of family resources; how when she sells this big country house she will move into a tiny flat and cut James and I loose to fend for ourselves. I meanwhile have had a celebratory pint of lager with a lime top. A day that started nowhere has led to this moment… if I wasn’t so hot and bothered it might be even better. Big Bother is watching you!

I am lying on my back in bed. Only a moment ago, I read of our troubled and testing times online. There are photos of devastated hospitals. It’s difficult to develop and maintain a stance, except that war is Hell, and should be stopped. It affects all of us, even up here in this bucolic idyll.

I get uncomfortable, feel the night-time need to move to the kitchen for a drink. The midnight mouse is there again, on the kitchen surface. With my black cup I scoop it onto the floor and watch it scurry away to a hole behind the big, silver fridge. If its every appearance means I have included something I shouldn’t, I can not say what that is: there is no talk of the Feds for example herein.

There’s a new transcendental metaphysical proposition… something like “diff dissed” – a half language floating in the air which I am obliged to take as my cue, it being really there. I should take it as my metaphysical proposition and treat it. What was it again? “Diff” something. That makes you think of difference, and also differ(A)nce in the French, postmodern sense.

The ariel folk might be trying to press for a new language, a bit like Syd Barrett’s lyrics in The Madcap Laughs. If “diff” makes you think of difference, and also differ(A)nce in the French, postmodern sense, there’s also difficulty and diffidence too. “Diss” could imply dissonance, dissident, distance closed, Disaster Capitalism, discretion, the Lake District, distracted from distraction by distraction, disturbance in the Force; and I think when they use only one syllable of a word like in the example, they mean to contain all of the senses of it, all the possibilities, before they become concretised as but one outcome.

Alas I genuinely don’t know what they mean when they say they want me “to do one more on door the wad it.” The next instruction is to “bud it.” Again I don’t know what that means. Now the birds have piped up! Now I have gone onto Amazon to buy more books in preparation for when Simon Blackburn is finished.

A power-nap. I wake from my dream and as the dream escapes upon waking, I hear the shallow splash and play of the water of the toilet flush. There is Excellent News inside it. It is to do with <BEE>. My brother James who flushed the toilet says <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. In fact he posits 4 Points of Difference, namely

@

<BEE> long squiggle

Infinity Symbol

Why would I need to remember my dream if when waking I can hear the shallow splash and play of the toilet? And if its sound contained “accentuation” in terms of saying something about <BEE>, something in <BEE> language? I wouldn’t. There would be no reason to further remember my dream because of the sound which woke me, or which was there to displace consciousness when I woke, water accentuated into international language.

I think my sister Hannah and my other brother Dr. Robert are working for James – the author of <BEE> - and they want me to do the same. This time to their delight I might not need to run you through my CV – to earn my keep and prove my worth. We already did that in previous volumes.

It was Hannah’s voice I heard in the splash and play of water that came like a wash draped down over my window when I woke. The dream got away as the toilet was flushed, in perfect synchronicity. The water contained a musical jingle – not Beethoven hidden in the porcelain though I have known that too – just something in the key of <BEE>, words, married to the trickling of water.

And imagine if we did all start talking in Alien Song? Imagine if we gave it a try! If we floated the weird notion! If we gave it credence! If we guessed, if we proceeded by musical guesswork! Would there be an increase or a decrease in pain?

If I said “acradoobie blooba dangra” it would be nonsense vernacular to me which is surely different from denoting meaning in the new language. The point of language is to express, to help us communicate. We developed it by growing our brains by eating meat and needing to spread information about farming, hunting, killing and cooking meat. I mentioned this, went through it in the first volume of Transition To Philosophy. Language is not supposed to obfuscate communication but facilitate it. Wittgenstein was thus against private language. He thought a lot of suffering was caused by our misunderstanding the logic of language.

I can imagine my own writing being looked upon as the equivalent of Classical in a musical analogy. Anyhow what I woke up to was delightful. It was Hannah’s voice, but the sound was water, and information concerning <BEE> was being transmitted – sounding as if it was by Hannah - through the sound of the water in a way I would hesitate to call telepathic or to do with extrasensory perception but similar. Either that or the sound of the water was being transmitted through the operation of the new da Vinci circle. I don’t understand, but it is not an unhappy incomprehension.

The language I heard in the splash and play of water – it was oneiric-textured. It was a dream language. But it came from over there where someone – James – was very much awake – flushing the loo - while I resurfaced from the unconscious in my bed. And at the moment I would normally think to recollect my dreams, it was there, displacing that possibility, but it wasn’t to be taken in a negative way – for water’s sound is always assuaging for the soul.

So I came downstairs to the solipsistic kitchen of fiction to write, to drink tea, to walk around topless in the morning heat, on Summer’s Longest Day, amidst the chirruping of birds outside, on a day with no clouds, just oceans of blue sky.

The new da Vinci circle, (James’s diagram) not only suggests <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet but by including a long squiggle escapes every word in every order: every word, book, sentence, letter, paragraph, in every order, as a new super-computer can agglomerate.

Last night I was reading philosophy on this autodidactic course I am on. The topic was God – arguments for his existence – which include the Ontological, the Cosmological and the Teleological. I don’t find any of them that convincing to be honest. The Ontological Argument seems to suggest – as in Anselm – that because we can conceive of God, and understand the meaning of the word, he exists. The Cosmological Argument seems to be about cause and effect, and there being an un-caused thing at the start of it all, an unchanging changer. The Teleological Argument is an argument about design – the design of a Creator. You can read all about it in various places including the book ‘Think’ by Simon Blackburn. The first two arguments (I think) are deductive while the last is inductive. The first (Ontological) is a priori; the other two a posteriori. What’s good about Simon Blackburn is that it contains the same information as a hardback philosophy textbook but in the flowing of discussion, meaning it is more scintillating.

Some say God is but a vain projection to cover up our fear of Nothingness. Others say a stopped, glottal monosyllable. Others reckon God is not to worship in blind and dogmatic slumber but to behead, dethrone and become. Aristotle’s God was thought thinking on itself. Others still say God might exist on a mathematical plane without being aware of our existence. Those people would tend to believe answers to the divine will arrive in maths! I couldn’t write a series of philosophy books without at least mentioning God but I still not happy to be doing so.

Martin Amis says “faith is the right to approval by the supernatural.” I would say that in my experience to pray before an LSD trip engenders a better, safer trip than not praying even if there is no God. This is my empirical stance on God, derived from the drug taking days I have said goodbye to. I would also say the Order in the Universe as evinced by the Plough alignment could be synonymous with God. But what this has to do with James’s charming <BEE> I have no clue.

Back to being a New Beat philosopher, to a belief in pasta, I come. As I am up early I make mum a coffee in a flask for her day at work. She needs to wash her hair. She says the kitchen still stinks from some cooking experiment by James yesterday. I can’t smell it. “I don’t even know why I said YES,” she says, presumably to leaving her retirement to go back to work. “Some of my plants died when I was in Finland, nobody watered them.”

Fastforward. It is midnight. I stopped what I was doing and went to a poetry file. There’s a perfectly good enough one. ‘Cept that is not what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m supposed to be doing bricks. There I was dignified and visible, writing, of a morning, when I heard the voices say: “we were trying to get you to turn us in.” I spoke to mum about this: she says you can’t because voices are not real. Dragging a heavy head I went back to bed – back in bad habits indeed – and slept all day and woke at midnight. That’s now. And I stomp downstairs to the kitchen. Mum comes in and complains about having lights on in these pube-shaving, lecky-saving times. We’re almost skint.

I have my meds, soporific, homeostatic, neuroleptic, mood-stabilising stuff. My mother calls them poetry buttons in their motley conglomerations like pool balls or song cells. Their names should never appear in poems! Poems should not contain their names! There’s nothing worse than reading a young poet in Monopoly Jail begin with explaining how his Olanzapine has been upped. Give us something more fresh, daring and exploratory!

In my dream I was trying to go down on my ex but she didn’t want me to. So I guess we just sat and chatted. Facets and assets, is that what we chatted? There was a bike ride I was going to have to make. A long one, from the Land of Dreams to the foot of the fell. I woke here at the magnetic, telluric, gravitational foot in the night-time, stranded. The abandoned warehouse of the psyche is grey and whispery tonight. I am struggling to get a good brick down, thinking of alchemy where they compress dense, sticky black stuff into cakes and transmogrify it into gold. Should I divide them with mathematical functions and flags?

Mum awakes stricken in sleep – I tell her America has bombed the Fordo plant. She says some things, how Trump needs shooting; I tell her so does Vladimir Putin! My promise is to keep as many lights off as possible when she goes back to bed.

Sprachen ze bracken. That’s what I say. The mood is a bracken frond drooping down. The beck is a fountain pen. The powers that be could be clouds/ floating by on their sky blue roads. Room for Mother Nature in the future is what I mean. They can’t pave the Lake District – but they might build a nuclear waste dump, which would suck.

My first collection (amended) is sitting pretty on another file but comes from before the anejaculation – love poems for Flora and more. So it’s possibly redundant now. I think the general message is if I don’t stop writing we’re going to run out before my brother James gets to do a number.

There are moments when I think of passing on wisdom, or just information, to my son. For example, that they got a posh architect to build the new cafe down the beach - which is information I collected and stored as if for this process. Of course I do not have nor will ever have children now, and when I imagine my father passing on the food to me, it’s as far as the electric human chain goes with myself. It’s interesting that I still process information for that faculty of passing it on to my children even though I don’t have any. So I imagine my father – who of course did have children – passing on the same information to me – and soon it comes to pass that the whole situation has gone to waste unless I can salvage something literary as a consolation prize for God’s unwanted children.

Slowing down, collecting one’s thoughts, filling one’s inbox is better for bricks than merely spilling one’s mind. I must possibly try and stifle as much as I can. Granted that writing must go on, I set myself a target of 60, 000 words, which would give my brother a chance to get his book nearer completion. Then the textual flourish is over, and there’s a comedown as if words were drugs in some cosmic analogy. I must wait like waiting is a good thing.

There’s also the scene in my mind of giving a lecture to the undergraduates. “My poetry was going nowhere. I wasn’t getting the books right. So I donned a pen-name and took up philosophy.” Then, I would be myself saying it to my father round the table of a Professor I’d just met.

I’m trying to get used to anejaculation. Verbal abuse from voices. Manic depression. Low energy, psychosis. So I went to a file with songs on and started trying to arrange a gig but it was futile, hopeless. My ‘Write Out Loud’ poetry blog has been empty for weeks, months. I guess if I want to be happy, it has to start from within. I find a local spot and wish it yellow. It is a blind spot, being my mind thinking about the internal workings of my physical body most likely. Pick a place and begin, bless it.

Time passes or rather does not pass but evaporate. Another truncated day goes to waste when I go back to bed, stultified on medication, in the morning, just to dream, as if only in dreams can I be free. Dreams are when we heal: the brain only heals when it is asleep and even nightmares are healing. Waking in the evening I check the news on America bombing Iran. I also notice two new philosophy books have arrived from Amazon. Without being able to ejaculate anymore I am a weirdo, a freak; and remember I was dreaming of girls and naughtiness that I will never again know. I took an O. D. a while back the likes of which it was genius to survive but lost the ability to ejaculate when I came down from the chemical complexities of it all. Whoever did that to me didn’t ask me or tell me, just went ahead and deprived me of the Right to Breed. It’s why it makes little sense pursuing my poetry, if my best poetry is love poetry for Flora.

Sometimes there’s nothing to do but read. A process of elimination leads you to the book. At others you have nothing to look forward to except the ingurgitation of medication. My dad used to say I had wasted my time on pop music when I wasn’t really very musical. “But it’s not too late to save it, if you give up drugs and read some good books.” I wonder what he’d say now, now that I have anejaculation? Death claimed him, irrevocable death.

If I said reality is untenable. If I said language has lost all meaning. If I said life is trying to die. If I said literature has become inoperable. If I said the world has gone insane. If I said all our hopes are shattered. If I said our dreams come to nothing. You would believe me, wouldn’t you?

It could be because intelligence is sadness. Yet they say to divide a page into the good and the bad and list what’s good in the good side and what’s bad about your life in the bad side, the good side will always win. So maybe we ignore the darkness and have to? The atavism and horror of daytime telly is well-known, meanwhile. And here I am ( ) surrounded by a choir of piping up, postmodern voices, thinking about a plan for a shock-proof world!

In my dream I was with my progressive, left-wing doctor friend. He says things like “they diagnose on form not content,” and “it can happen to the best of us,” and “you can get better,” and “the science works,” and “plug in.” We were going round the world but it was not the same world. It was not quite a world seen through the prism of a mutation in consciousness but almost. It was topsy-turvy, upside down, back to front, a secret world hidden in a cupboard perhaps. We had in dreams the freedom to explore new continents, and the money to do it too. The spirit of youth and its energy was among us. Maybe the shapes the continents made on the Atlas were animals now? At some point travel turned into sex – and there were females present for that. When I woke it was all over, all gone.

I used to keep an avid, detailed Dreamwork diary but several times have let it go and no longer do. I think you can tell by the mastery I have with remembering my dreams, by habit, in my books, that I was once a dreamworker, before and also after my illness. My dreamwork diary made a better and more creative read than my poetry for a long while, each dream containing an upturning or something carnivalesque that was unique to it and accurately remembered.

They say in dreams there is no context. They say we still inherit dreams of fighting wild packs of animals from ancestors that had to rehearse for the real, live situation. They say we are dreaming all the time except in sleep without stimulus. They say if you can train yourself to lucid dream then focus on something like a local McDonalds where people meet, dream-meeting is possible. In my experience, which is all I can go by, it is possible to smuggle language out of the unconscious. My dream-meet meanwhile tended not to McDonalds but to Heaven where there was a motto: drugs in secret, alchemy in the open, ultimate in effect. People were chanting it. People were taking particles of dirt and found it worked like drugs with psychoactive properties. It was a chemical heaven.

Those days I was surrounded by creative things – the Tower, the purple-bleeding screen, the binaural earphone experiment, the tape with the pause where cut and resealed which we were trying to fuse, an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, the idea that the witness’s name would appear on Piper as naturally as grass – and I would soon go on to discover the sheet where pictures grew. So there was a distinction between what you might call “halfware” and the actual topics of my writing, which went across the board, in ways that were not palpable. I still regret that not a lot has come from it all, but am trying to fix it with literature. I already heard the wind-cry suggest when I am done with bricks I should turn to a piece arranged by the wind. Maybe it will blow my brick house down!

You don’t get a sense of it all with my poetry. Maybe, I mean, there was a moment where I became a different kind of artist – where poetry changed, or life. I could go on my Blog where I am storing the Transition to Philosophy books at the moment and put up photographs – such as the purple-bleeding screen, such as the sheet where pictures grew, such as the melted tape – and a hyperlink to the song on Piper where my name grew like a sensory overlay – and do a paper about the Tower – and show a hyperlink to the Flood’s binaural experiment – and maybe posit one or two other bits of writing like the falsification of the Nirvana barcode – but would it be doing any good? I admit that it would be cutting edge and state of the art, and up there with the likes of Simon Pomery, but would it be doing any good? It would be a psycho-technological heaven. It would show some of the real realms of headspace I have been through as an artist; but in terms of being the building block of a happier world, it remains to be proven that such a Blogspot page exhibition would be a good thing.

Then the imputation is that I am being obscurantist or neo-phobic in electing a piece of prose over such arcane gadgetry and gear… such an accusation is surely false. What I want to drill home to you is the extent of the saturation with creative things that was concomitant to my first luxuriating in the world of madness, which is far from luxurious let me tell you. The only thing that stops me now from organising the Blogspot page as mentioned is that with the philosophy books up instead I am getting many more readers than I ever used to when I organised the psycho-technological art exhibition. Not only that but the real sheet, as opposed to the photo, doesn’t belong to me – it belongs to my brother Mr. James P D Tucker. I was just the guy that discovered and photo’d it, and didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize that my friends felt I deserved.

The fell meanwhile looks monastic and ancient in any weather. Professor David Morley would say “you live in a very privileged place and should write about it.” It comes as a stunning contrast to the whole “black laboratory” I had going. There are some things I could say about the Lakes and have done too, but I can never commit to any particular direction without forfeiting a perfectly valid one. Should I put up the psycho-technological art exhibition, I would be losing out on content, intellectual food. I would also feel like continuing writing in the present tense; and maybe with all that stuff online my health would be affected too.

You see me in a state of being very tempted to go ahead and put it all back online; and I would also put up my Curriculum Veto, to show the main moves I made, for there is more. But I was hoping in this one of the series of books I could leave it out herein. The boyhood work is another concern for I helped invent the net at seven. You would see something like the new Syd Barrett, I imagine, if I put it all up on the Blogspot page. I’d have to rewrite my paper on the Tower as an instrument of civil engineering, and a mirror for the soul.

I’m starting to think about it… and I feel like Charlie who won the golden ticket in Roald Dahl’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Within half an hour I might take down the boring old philosophy books that I am paying to have published and put up some un-categorisable art-forms that border on scientific breakthroughs. Then I would re-enter the world of emoticons, emojis, platform games, virtual smiles, Facebook poetry, Instagram poetry, technology. It hardly seems a question of right or wrong, but a question of aesthetics to which there is no morally right or wrong answer. I’m sure it would be the slickest blog online if I went ahead with it. The problem is literally that I might die of a heart attack if I give everything in the art dealing business away for free online – and not just that but would in the meantime have to pay to publish documents. It’s not right for someone that helped invent the net to have to pay to publish documents.

I suppose sometimes you have to deal with the language at first hand. That was part of being New Beat. What I mean is life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans, as Lennon said. So you have to accept what you’re given in the present tense. So life changed, became digital, and the repertoire I could but might not Blog, as mentioned, attests to that change. If I were doing an MA in poetry I would somehow like to h-a-n-d in the Blogspot page. It would be the more accurate account of things. But as I say I might die of it, because it gives my literal heart away for free online, where there is genuine war going on, and genuine anarchy too.

If I were building, or rather rebuilding the Blogspot exhibition, I’d start with a hyperlink to the Flood, who recorded only on binaural earphones, and I’d leave a note about how I said I would plug my senses in the mains. There would also be a band photograph on that page.

The next thing would be a hyperlink to the Youtube song we mean when we mention the name tattooed on Piper and I’d accompany that with a poem. Then I’d have the melted tape, two photos of, accompanied by text. Then I’d have the wing-bit. Someone sent me a poem going:

He found himself on a plane.

He found himself on a.

He found himself on.

He found himself.

He found.

P.

That would be accompanied by a photo of a plane wing sent by another friend. So it would be co-imaginative, but go through me. Then I’d put up Dr. Robert’s photo of me with the purple-bleeding screen. I’d have a note about how Dr. Robert helped me write a quatrain going:

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.

Then what? Then it might be time for the essay on the Tower I made of books that exhibited natural magic. Then we’d have the sheet where pictures grew. Then we’d have my poem about the effervescent mobile that falsifies the Nirvana barcode in music. I suppose I’d finish it off with a CV accompanied by a photo of myself looking smarmy and smart at University.

What is the story with such a blog? I think it would be a work of genius that collates many works of genius. But as the person through whom it all goes, I would possibly, like last time, have heart trouble. I would start to feel nauseous and like I was about to die. I would have to take the precious scientific evidence down, even though the net started as a tool for sharing scientific information. There would be other documents I could put up, the odd poem for example. I could begin, as in before the earphone album, with a poem called ‘That Black Natural E.’ I pause for thought… there probably isn’t a precedent for making such a decision in the history of Man. Already I wonder what it would be like to put it all up there again, and contemplate rewriting my lost paper on the Tower. I don’t think it’s a question of either being greedy or not greedy.

So I go ahead and conduct the experiment: 11 genius Blogspot entries combining picture and text. But it turns out the sheet where pictures grew, even though it was my discovery, even though the pictures depict the lyric to a song I wrote is still not mine to blog. Not only that but I was getting mixed fonts without being able to change them on the Blogspot page as if I were myself peopled by other souls, or haunted. And I don’t like that. I believe Order is happiness, so I have taken the presentation down. It took about an hour in the end to put them up, and five minutes to delete them. Without the sheet where pictures grew there’s no point in the presentation. Moreover, my mother has a Sixth Sense about these things and knows when I am building such a blog, and comes in to the kitchen to tell me not to (in whatever way she has). So it is that I am unleashed with the mandate to do my worst as a philosopher, with the medium of the old-fashioned book!

The Night finds me bare chested, drinking Fosters, preparing to cook some Tomahawk steaks at midnight, insufflating the fume of the Vape pen, possibly though don’t quote me on it relieved about the cancellation of the Blogspot page exhibition, certainly willing to poke fun at poets for being prissy and pathetic if that is what they are, including my former self, if that is what being a poet means to me, for I should like to say that gone is the dream, before I had any chance of realising it. If the true voice is the halfware presentation, it only says “this person fried their brain.” I might’ve done a little bit but hold out for healing. Now I sit with my Interstellar Artois feeling okay under the high, white, kitchen ceiling.

Those professionals that do up houses, painters and decorators, they know their stuff and stand apart from the amateur. I had a pint with ours down the pub. My words want to point to places of connectivity, but keep failing, where every word choice settles on a compromise. My second pint goes down. Wearing nothing but a pair of green shorts I hang around. My words want to point into your heart, and place a finger on your heart valve but don’t. Their signifiers scurry around like mice instead. Today has largely been free of voices but I have been in bed, sleeping off a mental illness that won’t go.

I was once known as the lion from the heart of Poem Records. Whose writing helped invent the net at seven? Who was witness from The Lords And The New Creatures twice? Who attempted the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark? Who attained the face of stars? Who forewarned of September 11th in 2000? Who got 100% in their last English Literature A-level exam essay? It was me; and that was all before leaving school. But where is the poetry? It hasn’t materialised and that is not because I haven’t been reading – I used to do nothing but read – but evil was done unto me, severe evil, and I went mad with it before I’d got anything together.

Then it strikes me, all of a sudden, at 04. 30 AM, like a blind epiphany of Heaven - that my brother is Scooby Do and I am Shaggy. We come bearing gifts, shells from the shore, wishing peace upon you. The tyrannical category of intellectual endeavour has been left behind, abandoned in favour of some cartoons. And would you like to see the imaginary pub’s menu which I have designed and drawn with my hand? You can get a normal beer for a normal price, or would be able to if it was real.

My brother and I, we go way back. To watching the Snowman together where I thought I would cry. To sooooo many TV shows and films. To light sabre fights conducted with sticks and special effects done with mouth sounds. To listening to the same music in the car, kids’ music. To playing football in the field, with Bob in nets. To holidays, to swimming. And now it has dawned on me: he is Scooby Do and I am Shaggy. Like zoiks! Run for your life Scoob!

And what mysteries we have to solve too. The latest is the sheet where pictures grew. What a mystery it has proved to be. It could be to do with dead light particles eh? And the boffins from London? But we don’t know this. We are just looking into it. We are only just scratching the surface of human potential. It is better to have a scientific theory than none even if it is wrong. So there’s been a key change, a gear shift of brain cells, and we are looking for clues. It could be that science is better conducted in the guise of Shaggy and Scoob. It makes it more fun, more humorous eh?

Unless I am going to be told the answer I can’t see this particular mystery being solved, but am happy now that my bro and I are sorted. The pictures that grew could be my own thoughts about the other sheet, the second sheet, with <BEE> on, where I saw the international language alphabet laid out in a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes. And Stephen Fry would’ve gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for us pesky kids.

If he did it, he did it with radar, fame and lung butter (as Paul used to call it). What I don’t like is jiggery pokery though: we need to know who it was and blame them for it. Stephen Fry is clever and we’ve blamed it on him; but it might just as easily have been Nirvana! After all the song that the pictures depict contained four hits to the snare that were a deliberate quote from the drums of Smells Like Teen Spirit! And here’s me awakening to the fact that I am Shaggy and my brother Scoob, in medias res, like Huxley, in Transition to Philosophy Volume Four!

Something needed to happen – it was too dreary before. We needed to say “yes” a bit more, find some urgency, to locate the go-beat, like Dean and Sal, who know time, and know that All is Well. As I lay back on my bed I knew peace only a Holy moment ago, even in a time of war. It’s got subtle edges has peace. Now the dawn has unleashed its stereo on the world, and colour telly too, and Night has gone. It feels like it would be evil to not be part of the Shaggy and Scoob duo right now; that I’ve woken up in this recognition, had a self-revelation.

Now some facts on the senses. 25% of the brain is taken up with the visual, more than any other sense by miles. We live after all in an image-saturated world bogging down the subconscious. Smell meanwhile is the most primal sense, absent in cinema. As for hearing, the inner ear is a labyrinthine conduit. Soundwave recognition is something that is said to qualify a species. When I speak soundwaves are created by oscillated air which rattle tiny bones inside your inner ear, and are recognised as sound. Touch meanwhile is the shortest route between subject and object. As for taste, there are traditionally four taste sensations: salt, sweet, sour and bitter; but Chinese cooking is said to have an extra one like hot and pungent.

I mention this little ongoing diary of the senses because I read in Simon Blackburn of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and Descartes and their variations of emphasis on the theme of dividing ideas that come from without and within; of the primary and secondary worlds; of the scientific world of extension and the subjective world of the senses; of the world of fact and the world of image. Now it is time for my morning cup of tea, and it looks like philosophy has become tea too.

It seems incredible that we can bypass the senses in experience of reality – but that may be where God, or the idea of God resides, eh? Dedalus famously said we all have the same understanding of the meaning of the word God. But I don’t want this to be about Him. I was going to say: one of my poems from GCSE level flirted with the idea of “music in a room with no door.” I only remember the first verse:

If you believe it, it is there,

naked under nearer stars,

softly swashing, backwashing music,

music in a room with no door.

Back then I was actually really good at English, good enough for A stars in Literature and in Language too at least – and how can we experience music in a room with no door? There might be some kind of thought-experiment that could be used as a proof in an argument that borrows from said image. I guess what I was saying was that sometimes there’s something behind the words and sometimes even if the words seem beautiful there isn’t. But what a visionary proclivity too! I still believe in music in a room with no door. Dad’s business. The art smuggler nicknamed Blue. The Berlin Wall. The new creatures. The blueprints for the net I wrote at seven and which had to be locked in the locked attic. Hidden parts of government getting involved. It was all in there. It was all part of my understanding of music in a room with no door.

Professor David Morley says we have six senses actually: the sixth (he says) is thanatos: a growing sense of one’s own mortality in life. He would say the perceptual kingdom of the individual enters conceptual overdrive the longer we live and the more we read. I just finished Simon Blackburn’s Think and loved it. Mindless plankton, to move on to reading another philosophy book, without at least noting that he’s good on logic and excellent on ethics. I imagine how many philosophy books he’s read compared with me! They might be mindless plankton to him now; but then again, yes, then again, there is the perceptual kingdom of the individual that enters overdrive.

If you line up your postcards of art on the wall – Turner, Van Gogh et al – and leave a space, sunlight through the window will visit the empty space and carve a painting that looks like a wind-chime made of light, or something subaquatic and pulsing. This is as close to a proof of God as I ever got but then again most religious groups say God cannot be seen, with the senses. Anyhow this has become scattershot-logical now, like a promissory draft…

I move on to The New Leviathans, John Gray’s new book, having been impressed by his Straw Dogs. In the middle of the first chapter in the morning an Air Force jet tears up the sky and I remember I should check the news. “BBC News,” I tap in, sober, download the lowdown of downtime, then get busy reading my new book. It would be nice to have something. I didn’t mean it like that but get some limejuice. It is heavily diluted and looks like white wine with a green tint like the River Esk in summer. Why is it that writers consolidate themselves with intertextuality, allusion, a saturation point where plagiarism gives way to the semblance of free thought but at the expense of originality if that be a possible thing? When I read there is unconscious assimilation and then when I write unconscious pastiche. The smell of influence is upon us writers. The river is trained.

Rescue James. The Shaggy and Scoob story will only go so far. After all we are in our forties. He’s writing a sci-fi novel or series of. He got to 20 files, each with 30, 000 words and the computer died on him so he lost it all but is rebuilding. He is the Terry Pratchett of sci-fi, in working on several at once. He thinks of it as no more than cheap entertainment. Like me he is an amateur ordinary speech philosopher. You could call the school Conversationalism, as in Wordsworth’s talent for. Some things you go through though mean there are no words. Down.

Outside my book there is no world… yet losing concentration after so much good reading I put the book down. I tell a lie, there is a world. It’s a windy day but sunny. Maybe I could revisit the poem where “sunlight blows my hair about?” Maybe it would be crass, boredom-killing, pointless, a nervous affliction, a bad, adolescent habit. Poets should ask themselves “and who do you write for?” and if they don’t know they should be silenced. And they should ask themselves “do you read poetry day in day out?” and if the answer is no they should be silenced. At least this is the education you get.

I was thinking (flippantly, ironically, you name it) of presenting a Shakespearean sonnet about eating a breakfast of every snooker ball colour from 2024. Then a whimsical poem containing a Mario mushroom from 1998. Then what? You get me – it’s already broken. The options are extremely multifarious but is Any of it Any good? I could put the falsification of the Nirvana barcode third… but you see my point is, you can’t just attach things willy nilly in poetry. There has to be a reason for each poem and a reason for the overall sequence, like a story arc. As I say there is no audience anymore. I don’t know one person that still reads poetry. So how can I continue? With strangers online? No thank you!

My dad used to say the value of this house should include the bigger picture. That means the re-alignment. It coincides with the socio-political sphere and proves that the Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man. Here I sit in the kitchen, waiting for the bacon in the AGA to brown. I think I have written and published the first book of philosophy to ever come from this place, this spatio-temporal context, this monastic retreat, this idyll, this bucolic spot. I searched on Amazon and found Transition To Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors was there. Soon Volume Two and Volume Three will be there as well.

I take James a Scooby Snack. It is a fried tomato and bacon sandwich. We talk a lot about food, my brother and I. Very often we each sit writing at our separate laptops and only reconvene when it’s time to do something about food. This is partly why Shaggy and Scoob might be the correct endorsement. There’s also the fact that my brother’s sheet where pictures grew are cartoons. There’s also the fact that we live in a postmodern world where philosophy in a more traditional sense may have died.

Back to bed, sleep and dreams, awake again in a medicated stupor, check the news, sweep the floor, eat a banana, talk to someone on FB, smoke my Vape pen, type at my laptop, decisions to make. What does the Dude do about his love poetry now that he can’t ejaculate?

Spotify’s on in the kitchen where James washes up. We’ve had the Doors, David Bowie and now we’ve got ‘It’s Only Rock N Roll But I Like It’ by the Rolling Stones. If I could still ejaculate would I be sad? About not being able to ejaculate? Music open pores on foreign air. There’s something osmotic and porous about it. S. O. S. by Abba comes on – it’s pretty, it’s ear-candy, it’s sweet, but do I like it? Does it grant me access to the past, the garden? Or rather does it grant me access to the present tense? I am sad, but I know it’s different. My life has shot past. I was talking to an old University lass on FB. We could’ve got married and had children but it’s too late now.

Some say my mental health all went wrong with the wood. I now believe it was dad’s business – that he was sponsored by some philosophers to use me as witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. I think they knew it would seem like a hoax but still exist in meaning. I was only eight. But I am not fussed. I think it character building. It’s not like I bent my knees, got down to give it a kiss, and was bitten with a poisonous bite. Nothing untoward happened to the witness that time.

All it takes is for my brother James to say “alright” for the Doors to come on Spotify. The music has died down for now it is later. It’s a kebab night here at the foot of the fell. Longitudes and latitudes of blandishments and platitudes connect. Pleasing cleverness is one thing but it’s not moral compass and that reminds me of something else…

My dad was a failed writer himself. Like Rimbaud he stopped writing and took up smuggling, art smuggling in his case. Before he died he managed to do away with all his writing except for conveying Eight Precepts in ordinary speech to help me with my own writing.

1. All writing is fiction.

2. It is rude to write of the living.

3. A standard of truthfulness should come before the need to the sell a story.

4. A writer has a right to a name otherwise an Exclusion of the Individual Machine can close ranks against you.

5. “Why not?” is not a good reason for writing a poem.

6. You’re supposed to get the ball over the other guy’s head.

7. The poet is a translator of feelings and the feelings you get on illegal drugs are all fake.

8. Literature either has moral compass or sheer cleverness alone.

I like them all apart from the moral compass one, because it could be seen as being a bit reductive and old-fashioned. One of dad’s examples of “sheer cleverness alone” was William Burroughs because of the cut-up method, but Burroughs was found on Ted Hughes’s bookshelf and Hughes would definitely appear a writer of moral compass to me. So things are not so black and white.

I find I am without stance. I do not know what I am ‘about.’ Should I take my cue from my father? He had no allegiance to any political party but disparaged the left. He said the left line their own pockets as much as anyone, reward their voters by promoting them to bureaucratic positions, expanding the government into a situation of Big State Worship. He said the less government the better. He said the NHS was a religion substitute for the atheist left and called it the National Hypochondriac Service.

I myself am not too sure. I don’t believe in cuts to Benefits, because I am the first member of my family to need benefits, and that’s a very left-wing stance. It was also said that with my CV – attaining the face of stars, doing The Lords And The New Creatures – to name but a few pieces of pollen in the pollen count – if I was on the left I would’ve earned money with it. That doesn’t mean I should be on the left if earning money off my things would be tasteless. But there may be other reasons. For example imagine if the left was a beautiful, compassionate emotion to explore.

Every day I wake for work at what I call the altar of the laptop. A cruciform platform it isn’t, quite, but an altar it is. Anyhow, I need something to stop the bleeding. To cauterise the wound. The last of my kebab was thrown in the bin and now I drink fizzy Diet Coke, thinking of it as a rainy day in a glass cup. And when it rains is it not a bit of fizz like in Diet Coke? Mental hospital, there you don’t feel free. I haven’t been for a long time now, despite attempts, like an O. D. My brother and I never found love. We found each other and literature too. And what’s left, what remains, when you take away a poet’s ability to ejaculate? I lost it in the chemical equation when I tried to O. D. Is it not just maths that remains, a question of form without content?

I’ve been talking to a fucking cool woman with whom I had a bit of a thing at University. She says not to give up on love poetry just because I can’t ejaculate anymore. Anyhow, we spoke for a while about writing. Then, inspired, I took up organising poems. I organised two ample collections, one predominantly early work, the other later work. Then I saw the mouse again, as if I had written something wrong that I needed to delete.

I can line up a collection and line up another and make a connection and add some rock songs on the end. But philosophy is my new direction. And I don’t get to sleep with her. Whom it seems may be away in dreams. If only until tomorrow.

I hear Scoob walk down the stairs from my room. When I have finished reading back through my text I go downstairs to join him, find him eating, always eating. He is having bacon and tomato. I make myself some crumpets in the toaster and tea. Ah, the alliterative and trivial taking of toast and tea takes me back to 2002! Warwick University! Now it is later. But chopped up time, time chopped up, into little pieces, won’t last forever. So to the glue I turn my attention.

I turned my brother’s attention to the Shaggy and Scoob situation in the kitchen – “it’s proper Shaggy and Scoob,” I said, and “it’s all food!” He agreed. Then I thanked him for turning me in the direction of philosophy if he ever did because the poetry was going nowhere fast. He said he was glad I found something good that I can do. So, as I say, I made my crumpets and tea at 3 AM, and came back to the bedroom, that anagram of boredom.

A mute frustration of forms. But then again a question: did you ever used to think “how long would we survive, if the house sailed away, and was parked on a desert island, with only the food we have now?” We’d have to eat it all for once. Usually as in most households there’s quite a bit of shameful, shameful waste. Even when we make pasta there’s a lot left over that has to be binned. Anyhow, the house isn’t sailing, and what I intend to do for the next few moments at least is read philosophy.

I can’t ejaculate but the brain paths may be fixed. I can’t concentrate on reading my philosophy book as yet because I might die any minute without having brought my own attempt to the online world. I am thinking now about the thought-experiment that is the present tense. It is true that without an audience poetry shrivels. Witness me, with only a few online connections if any, no real person on the other end. I never leave the house, or the grounds, or rather very rarely. Here is a microcosm. It is not necessarily “hermetically-sealed” but an island. My brother and mother are the ones that drive into town to shop. What good can come from it? My bet is that philosophy could survive, but without an audience I doubt poetry will survive. I want to say that because I believe I am writing philosophy. It’s not about setting up a Republic where pollen is a currency, but almost.

JD Salinger wrote well when living in a cabin in the wood with just his family and no outside influence. I have the net, to buy books, to check News, to listen to music on, to Blog my papers on, to talk to people on FB with – though I think FB is evil – but I don’t have a community or neighbourhood. We are very isolated here in semi-wilderness. The experiment is a writing experiment. All writing is an experiment.

I think despite living in the most poetically-inspiring place, if I were to keep some poems that counted, there would be sooooooooo few of them it wouldn’t be enough for a book. I wonder why this is? Is it the ubiquitous ever-presence of Dylan on tap that makes it devalued? Whereas if I were in a less poetically-inspiring environment things would count for more? You could call it Longfoot Disease – just sitting here writing at the foot of the fell. Already we saw in a book from before what happened when the Ideal was to write off the top of the head to mysteriously signify and Tap the beck in the back. To bypass a tract on Universal Human Rights. It was a beautiful ideal but turned into Longfoot Disease.

Without form there is no structure. Without structure there is no end. Again with the so-called brick motif we are seeing an Anything Goes attitude. It’s all very well saying to yourself “I’ll just do one more to finish the Transition To Philosophy series” but what about the rest of my life? I am still young enough to warrant exciting times, entertainment, to have energy; and the idea that I am going to be stuck here for the rest of my life, be it with or without being able to write, is an experiment into the visionary realm – for it is the visionary that can find liberation within restriction. It is an experiment into liberation that is born of accepting limitation. Honestly, if I could just “give up” writing, after reaching a certain point, I would – or at least I might – but Man will always look for work and make work even if there is none available because work sets us free.

I do not like to think of my brother and his work as but a time-killing device. He probably doesn’t like to think of me thinking of my work as the opposite – genuine achievement. I am to be found either sitting at the kitchen table typing or in bed either reading or sleeping. Sometimes I walk on the patio outside for a breath of fresh air. I believe in my writing I do a good enough job of speaking plainly to an audience who I don’t know. There is no foreseen human repository like a future witness from The Lords And The New Creatures.

The inference here is that Nature is the true architecture of State. It may seem a right-wing political stance compared with Simon Pomery showing us the Future in psycho-technological post-poetry but it is actually quite a sound belief. When I say “sound” you must understand I can literally hear the beck through the window now at 03. 48 AM. But who this is for I have no clue other than for myself. If the writer isn’t impressed the reader won’t be.

Once, I lived a rock n roll lifestyle which I would describe as “a wankered planetarium of ego;” but now I have been forced to say goodbye to all that. I don’t even follow the football anymore. Still no saint, I nevertheless don’t smoke anymore nor take drugs. Sometimes I have a beer. I might have one now. Just one. Just to test the water, get the creative juices flowing.

The way it seems to me is that I now have the rest of my life to explore the consolation of philosophy as both a reader and writer. It is a subject I did not study at University level or at any level, though my father and many old friends did. So I am a novice, and have Beginner’s Luck, but will probably seem like Dean Moriarty from On The Road when he goes to the library to learn. This moment Now and Here and Real and Feeling reminds me of the point in literature where Henry Miller says “when you give up the ghost all else follows with a mute precision.” Miller was popular among the beatniks, renegades, wild-cards, anarchists, Bohemian Aristocrats whom I knew when I was youthful and of which I was one.

I don’t want to just make something of staggering genius and kill myself. I think suicide is selfish and leaves behind a lot of pain for others. The proposition of my life, this new life, is Kantian. I am to resist distractions – for instance, I never watch telly – and subsist on as little as is possible here at the fell’s foot, only knowing the company of my family and of course the delightful network of voices.

As for the time, Wittgenstein took 16 years to write Philosophical Investigations. But he was a Professor, and he travelled, and he had relationships. I have nothing. Anyhow it turns out to be a brutal night, up all night battling ghost-chatter and battered-sanity. I’ve been spooked and on the run for a long time and there is only really my family who can soothe me.

Once a professional came to our school, our red brick institution, to give an anti-drugs lecture. He said he was spiked and thought he could fly. Jumped out of a seven storey window and landed on his feet seven storeys below. Broke both legs. That guy was a professional.

It turned out he’d had a joint before the lecture, and allowed smoking at the back. Much to our amusement. We didn’t understand him though. That guy was a professional. I who was hopelessly naive but rather good at writing poems if not songs, thought, as the guy played us poems and songs I could do his job better than him! That was an aesthetic judgement against his material but I didn’t understand him. That guy was a professional.

As far as I remembered my poetry career my first poem was Junior Three at Chetwynde when we all had to write of ‘The Horrible Hunter’ based on a collective pool of images and phrases the teacher had gathered from us and put on the board. Mine was singled out for excellence. I seem to remember (actually) it contained a line going “beware his hollow, hypnotising stare.”

But of course if I remember rightly I can even remember at the time we wrote it thinking to myself, this is easy, this is my subject, my metier, this is what I am already traditionally good at. And it turned out I was right – I already had strong poems dating back to the age of seven in the attic.

The line about the hollow, hypnotising stare was embellished by memory, so not exactly as I remembered it, but almost. It shows that memory is unreliable – but as I found out with the Tower books can change as well. Language is alive. As Professor David Morley, an evolutionary biologist before he became a poet, contends, “language is a word-world where words are a species.”

And of course my mother says “language is a creature,” which is one of her magic sayings hidden in treetops. Others include “imagination is a muscle.” “In politics there are no wrongs or rights.” “Just because someone is good to you doesn’t mean they are right for you.” “The brain only heals when it is asleep and even nightmares are healing.” “Actions have consequences.” Even though English is her third language, she is eloquent.

I don’t think the seven year old text changed in the attic, just that my memory of the first poem (which was actually quite deep into the series, some four years down the line from the real start), fluctuated. I do however wonder about both Paradise Lost and Ulysses. With gypsy poetry in the English centre I think the canonical versions could be subject to natural magic, but am not sure.

Anyhow, about the guy who came to talk to us at school – I have started to wonder if he was cursed, or worse, hypnotised, in some prank, to do something evil, and I have developed the stance on the ethics of it that if you are hypnotised to do something evil, or even something you’d think might be fun, you shouldn’t have to plead guilty to it. It would be interesting to know what Simon Blackburn, an expert on ethics, and on free will, thinks about this.

The professional, he played us his songs and read us his poems and advised us against taking drugs. I would advise the same: to reiterate the point of my father, drugs ruin lives, on a long enough timeline. Drug taking is monumentally selfish.

Acid is a personality-altering substance that can have you trapped in a 24 hour nightmare. Even GM skunk is not to be trusted. The brain naturally releases cannabinoids for moments of signification like reaching the top of a mnt and to flood your brain un-naturally, meaning and signification become a mess, aleatory – the crazy palimpsest of memory starts to have signification at any random point of intersection.

Heroin is a death sentence meanwhile. Speed plays havoc with the mood, is the worst drug for the brain. Cocaine is only a brief titillation that leaves you hungering madly after some addictive and expensive stuff at dawn, while a monster comes over the wave-horizon.

A healing magic mushroom trip can be a secret garden that makes the walls of the Hotel breathe and the fluff on the ceiling walk but you know some people never come back. Alcohol meanwhile is a good friend and a bad enemy. Cigarettes just give you lung cancer. Designer drugs like 4CMC make you a zombie.

So it is that if I had my mental health and some transport I too could go round the public schools, giving lectures against drugs. I wasn’t quite spiked and didn’t jump out of a window but have known the dangers. My musical and poetic repertoire, to accompany the talk, would be way off beam though. I haven’t focussed on building a didactic, homiletic, parabolic or Hellenising aspect of my creative output.

Speaking of which tomorrow the publisher sets about working on Volume Three. Volumes One And Two are in the post already. It is raining, and rain is right. It feels like the right endorsement. Out there in the Gondwanaland-green eco-toilet, the rain’s downward direction makes a crooked tile from the Mediterranean. In other words it is not all in one downward direction. I actually like the lyrics of Fontaines D. C. when he says the rain is “all mescalined when the past is stale.” But I rarely if ever keep up with the new music anymore. Bore.

Out in the isolation, where you never see anyone, you probably deem it safe to write things that should you be in the hustle and bustle of the city you wouldn’t. If I were in the close proximity of people I might eschew much of my content herein for being boring, loo-paper, water, air, hair, pasta, clothes, tea. But I like it also when amateur ordinary speech philosophy attains those conditions even if they are only metaphors for the familiarity which unsettles more than the very strange.

My mind drifts, less like a breeze block and more like a flower-head bobbing in the breeze. The summer rain has knocked the pollen count unconscious again. I look at the patterns of the raindrops on the patio – is this how he made his startling discovery? No, for there is no discovery, only the pattern of raindrops on the patio, which seem aleatory. I imagine them plinking at the qwerty keyboard for instance. Qwerty ends on M for the reason of our Plough alignment and here I am where it happens, typing at qwerty, about raindrops, that seem to contain no pattern, nothing of the Golden Ratio, only drum down on the paving stones of the patio.

I take it back: QWERTY might, only might end on M for the reason of the alignment and here I am, trying to make a good book, as I am within my Rights to. I think of an art smuggling operation for whom pollen is a front, and if it was them that produced the sheet where pictures grew. I think to be a member of society you have to forgive people, even if you never saw him actually do it. I think also of Paul and when we took Lucy in the soul with demons who might happen to be a substance, even if you don’t take it. Now the bin-men are here, outside, compressing garbage like the memory does to days. This reminds me: it’s Glastonbury. All the Glastonburies roll into one big ball, as Hannah saith. Such is the nature of memory that it flatters us and literature is its aid.

I’ve discarded 100’s of world class poems in my time and one was A Season In Heaven, written on speed, all about waves. All I remember is that at the start, a cloud of powdered light billows in like magic curtains on the high, karmic wind… then visual radio kicked in, in life. At some point I mentioned happiness: “happiness is the ultimate alchemy/ happiness the golden drum.” But I would say if it is a chemical radiance it is a Fool’s Paradise you’re living in. I would say that a poet is a translator of feelings and the feelings you get on drugs are all fake. I would reiterate Lennon’s point that happiness must come within. You can work towards it. You can sow good seeds. You can do good deeds. You can pull your weight. You can forgive your enemies. You can renounce violence of all kinds. You can live within your means. You can learn to love again. You can.

Some young artists talk of liberating themselves through shame. Of creation born of destruction. Of catharsis by chaos. Of suffering for your art. Of the derangement of the senses to attain the unknown. Of the way when the body is ravaged the spirit grows stronger. Of the way what’s bad for you is good for you intellectually. Burn and unlearn, they may say, and light it and write it, of a joint. Or half it and laugh it, with a little, bitter pill which art in Heaven. These modes of being don’t seem to strike me as very valuable anymore. I am getting to the age where I appreciate the folksy songs on Side B of Piper At The Gates of Dawn, not just the rocky, guitar-driven numbers of Side A. I have mellowed, and those Rimbaudian modes are yesterday’s news.

You can give up drugs; you can also stop saying “man” and “dude” – if a philosopher you want to be – a respectable citizen! No more “sliding out of responsibility,” as my dad called it, “growing dangerously detached,” like a “Rebel Without A Pause,” gone all “pale and mysterious.” You could have information (semantics) to bring forth in language (pragmatics). You must lose those hippy clothes! As Dr. Robert urges! Your happiness, it should be a right not a crime. Not a sin. Many lives know no happiness at all and as John Gray the philosopher contends it could be down to luck.

All those runs up the oldest fell, all those five-a-day days, all those books I read, all those swims, all those press ups, all those morning meditations, dreamwork diaries, self-help techniques, it should all pay off but sometimes doesn’t. Sometimes it is when you apply yourself to those good things that you can fall ill through other means that are outside your control. Sometimes the best intentions are futile against the cut-throat, cruel world. But don’t be put off trying. Buddha of course found the golden mean between asceticism and wanton indulgence in the end.

That’s what it’s about, finding a golden mean. Yes, you should turn off the light when you leave the room. There are things you can do, meanwhile, to ease suffering. You can earn your freedom by working hard. Your happiness should be a Right not a crime or a sin, but all too often in this world cruel Fate deprives us. So, Sisyphus rolls the ball of rock up the hill again.

Ah, who am I to lecture on happiness? There may be more felicity in a fanciful flight towards such questions as considered by Hobbes and Descartes when they are alleged to have met. For Descartes the mind was composed of something separate from the material world, but for Hobbes the mind was part of the physical body. So into an abstract realm I go, like Proust wafting into realms of fantasy, exploring elaborate, Byzantine sub-clauses. You have to ask yourself what you think about certain questions and why such clear distinctions between philosophers exists. The question arises, then, do I think the mind separate from the material world or part of the body?

I liked it when Descartes clenched the ideal of Perfection in his mind, as separate and untainted, preceding sense; but that such a thing proved God, as in the Ontological Argument, I did not necessarily buy. I like all that accelerates and propitiates liberty and open-ness, including the tone of mind Descartes is alleged to have found w/r/t/ Perfection, but proving God with it is not my business.

I think of this ideal of Perfection in relation to grammar funnily enough. Apart from instances of text argot, I am a bit of a grammar Nazi. You might not get that from the extreme number of typos often found in my books; but there is an instinct for when something is right or wrong, grammatically, that I would connect to this ideal of Perfection in Descartes. I would say it is an a priori sense, but then again it might not be innate but learned through experience. What do I mean?

I mean that when I wrote an English Literature A-level exam essay marked at 100%, there wasn’t a droplet of ink out of place; and now I read that one of my favourite devices, the semi-colon, is growing towards extinction. I cannot have the semi-colon growing extinct just because kids don’t use it anymore on their devices. But – this notion of Perfection – in a grammatical way – is it not therefore false if language changes beyond one’s control? I am not saying I am a perfect grammarian, just that looking within, whilst reading of Descartes, and his notion of Perfection, I noticed a sense of judgment that was both awesome and supreme – and its primary concern was grammar.

I would lament the death of the semi-colon; but it’s all biodegradable in the end. It will all grow back if it wants to. I don’t hold out too much hope for my writing being still valid when our language as we know it has become hieroglyphs in future time.

Language is full of fossils, ossifications, word-frequencies, dead metaphors which the brain is built of, coins, corruptions, word-chords… words can be steps, drugs, children, particles, genes, cells and more. I used to have a Professor called John Schad who professed that “language speaks Man.” It is a delightful idea that implicates linguistic theory with Bahktinian carnivalesque inversion and also Russian Formalist ostranenie.

I guess when I speak of a Perfect Judge in grammar, or that the idea of Perfection manifests itself in grammatical decisions, then you have not so much a silence onto which the reading mind casts its reading, the words themselves, but a silence between thoughts that you can access in meditation.

I used to meditate a lot during my undergraduate degree at Lancaster, in the meditation room, on my own, practising known techniques, until I fell asleep and in the rush of my degree and in the mental illness I fell into not much in terms of realising my creativity was achieved. Perhaps now, there are trained pathways in the brain that will allow such breath?

Another Professor spoke of a Euclidean word-surface undermined by the subatomic realms of language. This translation into metaphor highlights the way that the poet delights in a wilful opacity, bats, black magnets, encryption, firking, code, archetypal symbolism. As these variations on the theme of James Joyce come cluttering up into the inner ear, we find the present writer divorced from the business of his poetry again. Can it be that place is the first Point of Departure, spatio-temporal context, and here, despite it being a pretty one, the prettiest one, it is just not a good place for writing surviving verse?

I still haven’t answered the question I posed myself. Is the mind separate from the material world as in Descartes or is it part of the body as in Hobbes? An assessment is made – like a form of scansion – inward scansion – that neglects to check the body’s reflection in the mirror – but discovers an immediate scepticism as to the existence of anything within my remit and orbit that is NOT part of my body.

Yet at the same time, the very thought to probe within, a turning of the attention towards an inscape, a proclivity, doesn’t necessarily correspond to a part of the body. Miracles can happen too. Even if they bear feathers it does not preclude that statues of Gods in Rome are made of marble! Perfection – I would have to ask my brother, my younger brother, James. He would say there is none I am sure. We are faced with Jim Morrison’s wall that contains a scratch and our need is to perfect it with further scratches.

There are no straight lines in Nature. I think here of the Mona Lisa. We read The Da Vinci Code at Lancaster. The horizon behind the face of the Mona Lisa is un-even, appearing higher on the right than on the left, to signify something I forget. They even say the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait sometimes. “There’s something about the Mona Lisa smile,” my mother says, and it is a code to crack. That’s what my song that contained the line “crack a smile and curse the sun” was on about. That is the song we mean when we say the sheet where pictures grew depicted a lyric. But now I am straying from Perfection. Does such a thing exist in the judgment of the brain when it reads and writes? As I say when I turn inward I find a supreme judge – sometimes – rarely too – but its decisions are mainly grammatical.

I heard the mind called “an homeostatic device” in Will Self but it’s typical of his drug-writing to conjure such a definition. I also remember – as if were Anon – the idea that the mind “is a fluid excreted by the brain.” Such a thing might belong in William Burroughs.

The division is into that of psychosis and that of neurosis. The word ‘psyche’ comes from Ancient Greek etymology kopsiche meaning ghost and one polymath I met – called Brian O’ Connell – says ghosts can of course travel in time. He said one scholar visited Ancient Greece and found the Greeks tremendous actors who wore long cloak, buskins and Native American Indian head-dress. Well, they must have looked tremendously impressive!

But one can easily forget one’s own line of enquiry in such learning. I would maintain that there is no such thing as mind cancer. The brain is made of cells, and wormcasts are the name for the shape they make, and cancer too is made of cells, happens when even one cell turns cancerous; so I would say on this rationale the mind is not just the activity of the brain because the mind is immune to cancer in Absolution. If there is no such thing as mind cancer as I think we are hopefully, ideally agreed, then it follows that the mind is more than just part of the physical human body as is the sceptical, material and realist perception.

So we have a sudden belief in something detached and – to use a coin – “incellular.” To what this line of reasoning points though one is not sure – for all it might be Perfection but that would be surely a mistaken belief. Rather than Perfection, we might suggest that “Beauty” is the general direction of that line of reasoning that proves or thinks it proves that there is more to the mind than matter. Then we enter a cosmic arena, and one where songs and poems, whose difference we often try to define, are the same “Music of the Spheres.”

So it is that on a dullshine day, in Cumbria, Transition to Philosophy Volume Four seems to have at last attained some. Some of the real stuff itself. Philosophy. The argument is for the incellular presence of the mind within the capacious chambers of the brain. So now I know what I think. I think if there is no such thing as mind cancer, the mind is not just a part of the body but like Descartes said, separate from the physical world. The next question is whether or not this stance is still an act of faith or whether it has been proven by my reasoning.

First, let us play Devil’s advocate and use our minds, or just the operations of our brains, to falsify the notion that has been revealed, and that means take the stance of Hobbes again. There is no mind that is separate from the body. I don’t see how I can backtrack on the special discovery of my own special perception, but let’s say there is nothing for the term mind to name; only the operations of brain cells, synapses firing, allowing the transmission of electric impulses in the brain. Let’s say this notion of mind is an illusion and even that it being impervious to cancer proves its non-existence. My first response to that counter-argument is to apply the Ontological Argument to the mind rather than to God. If we have a word for the mind there must be a thing called a mind. Words and things must’ve corresponded. Admittedly the notion of mind might then only have arisen in a confusion in the past when science was not as progressive and light had not been reached… but I would still say if there is a name for it, it is something. The word mind itself is not an actual mind but indication to cogitate on mind-ness; still words and things must’ve once corresponded – and then you find the argument for the “incellularity” of the mind follows from that point in the discussion.

Now we are bridging a gap that might be called metaphysics. It’s what I should’ve been doing in previous volumes where I dared to do things that might mean death. Death, meaning death. Meaning, meaning “meaning.” Meaning and the mind are close associates at work and work in an office together. They are acute associates actually. Death could be the Big Boss at the end of the level of the philosophy computer game, meaning Death. I feel this day has been a good one already.

Now I would like to reiterate a point made in the first Transition To Philosophy all those weeks ago. The symbol [R] could mean the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, the large-R, Romantic stance that Creativity is not all mappable/ predictable in advance. This in practise means I look out the window or even leave the room for the garden. I was going to say, for example, that the proof of the mind being separate from the material world is a foolproof proof; but I ended up thinking “it’s a foolproof fool.” This could be [R]. This could be energy in the soul creating waves. This could be a Freudian slip or else no accident or else the right thing to say. So it is that the proof is a foolproof fool!

One thing I like about the above text is that I think the breakthrough has been proving that the mind is separate from the material world by means of there being no such thing as mind cancer. Taken otherwise though, you could also see that there being no such thing as mind cancer is the actual breakthrough itself. It isn’t for me because the proof of the mind being separate from the material world came second for me, and correlates to the history of philosophy, which is what I was trying to attain, and am still… the former belief (that there is no such thing as mind cancer) came from smack, bang in the middle of my Lancaster University undergraduate degree which was interrupted by an episode of mental illness so extreme that it meant the acute ward, not just mental hospital. We’re talking irrefutable proof of objects vanishing on the periphery of madness.

Yes, I went to hospital for a headwound and the nurse put a bandage on; and I went to touch it to see if it was paddy and it was; and I went to touch it a second time and it was gone. I hadn’t left the seat. The nurse had to put another bandage on. But when I say it like it is to the straight and sober and narrow and most importantly sane, they don’t believe me. It’s written on the medical notes.

So that was something that happened towards the tail end of my first episode. It was witnessed, that is, that an object can vanish on the periphery of madness. I know someone now, a dear friend, who was in mental hospital while I sat in A and E getting tended to, who now thinks the disappearing bandage was him – that it was to do with knowledge of form. I had to suspend all judgements in this way, and went back to University after the acute ward and got the highest First in the year.

I did so much reading and writing when I left the ward, that I deserved my First. I was disciplined. And yes there was a piece about mind cancer. The impossibility of mind cancer might be a celebratory moment, but is it really Absolute? If it is Absolute it points to something timeless – a timeless truth, static, eternal and fixed. Poets often don’t believe in immutable truth because they fashion and shape things, but philosophy often differs. This may be what they mean by the term Impartials. They may have antecedents in Plato’s Forms. But to go on about this I would have to read more philosophy. There are thousands of books in this house and there still aren’t enough.

Now I reach the stage of Dialogues, conversations with myself. One is as follows:

A: where is the objective evidence that there is no such thing as mind cancer?

B: there is no objective evidence that there’s no such thing as mind cancer.

A: why not?

B: because there’s no such thing as mind cancer.

You could explore a delight in paradox that way, whereby there being no objective evidence IS the objective evidence. A contradiction this may be, a logical impossibility. Another conversation with myself might run as follows:

A: England is the most philosophically sound country. Because it is the fairest. So all our best philosophy is therefore stored in Winnie the Pooh. Because it’s not fair to keep it. So we we don’t actually have any great philosophy. But I intend to bring about a book of philosophy that does contain some philosophical genius, and in England too.

B: over my dead body.

A: too late

B: okay then I’ll let you win

A: thank you

Actually it’s not true, there is plenty of great philosophy in England and the English language and moreover the mark of a country’s civilisation is how much foreign literature it translates. I’ve read some. I would say as a general rule not to make a book too good. I would also say there are boring passages in mine and yet they might be doing to the ongoing medication what an exciting young poet would do to the noxious toxins, habitually. If that is true I would deem it misguided energy. So to the sober contemplation of the tree outside the window I turn, the tidal roar of wind in its branches, the way it is waving not drowning, the love I have of this moment.

Well, that I do and now it is later; and it is later that we think. It is Night, a mellow Night, concave in the middle, with nothing to do but write. I can report that my old laptop, my former laptop, has finally died irreversibly – and that that is where I stored all my songs. They are on Bandcamp, except a precious one that I took down because it sounded like Syd Barrett. Wishing to put it back up there again tonight I tried to turn the former laptop on and found it had died. Farewell, data-tree.

There were 1000’s of files on that laptop, but I managed to save the best of it. Anyway, who knows what’s best? I woke tonight at around midnight to voices saying even the Transition to Philosophy series isn’t me at my best. They seemed to suggest the best of me was scones, scans, songs, something of the sort. That means Soundcloud Rain by John Tucker, where I arranged my songs according to James’s design of the new da Vinci circle only for other people to rudely comment that it’s genius but now James’s work. Consequently I don’t rate it very highly. That’s because one’s book should be one’s own not a communist ego-loss experiment, not a poetry hive-mind, not an omnijective interface of random access co-imagination.

But the voice is tempting, drawing me back into my past. Every time I consider the band days, my youth, or reconsider, I see a literal black beetle crawling across the black, slate flags on the kitchen floor. It’s like it’s a messenger, a reminder. I never crush it either. I went down south, leaving a good relationship with Danielle, who was the year below me at school, to live with Paul in my Gap Year, taking a bag with some books, a green guitar, a lump of hash and a bag of speed. For a while we had happiness, playing songs in his pagoda in his garden at his parents’ house on a smouldering summer night, smoking hash, working terrible jobs, going into Cambridge by train to busk.

It was busking that we met Mark and Tom and Jez and Steve and the Anglia Polytechnic Crew. Then when I was kicked out of Paul’s mum’s house I moved in with the Anglia Polytechnic Crew, in my Gap Year, sleeping on floors and sofas. For a while I had a big adventure, not knowing where I would sleep each night, and where possessing cannabis was more important.

This was the period a further friend from Paul’s school, Niki, popped up with the earphones, binaural earphones, on which we started to record. I had spoken about doing that very thing to my brothers in the barn in a prophetic speech before I had ever been to Cambridgeshire, so my brothers think I was the guy whose idea it was to invent the earphones, but I didn’t implement it, and we got recording circa 2000 or 2001, in Cambridge. A scene developed. I started to take E, even though it had been against my principles previously. I learned from Mark and Jez the art of detuning the guitar and going astray. It was all very exciting. Then the Towers came down.

I had as stated elsewhere forewarned of it in the barn with my brothers up here before I went down south. I went off to Warwick University a prophet, and we would all reconvene in Cambridge in holidays, maybe add another number to the earphone record. I left Warwick University with no degree, and came back to Cambridge, then eventually left Cambridge after the record was done, and came home to the north.

You can hear it as a playlist on Soundcloud under Tom Woodhall’s name. My brother doesn’t like the way I had the idea to invent the earphones and provided most of the music but was kicked out of the band whereupon the rich man gave the music to another band member and swanned off with all his inherited wealth leaving me in a state of disarray. He thinks that rich man who implemented the idea or at least procured the earphones from someone else, is the true thief, that I was robbed, and that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

The band used to pretend the spliff was my willy without telling me and treated me like the drugged up brother in the Russian roulette scene in The Deerhunter. They even had the cheek to tell me when we got to the end of it I was a Nazi! I was the guy that had the idea to invent the fucking earphones before I had even set foot down there! They didn’t even thank me for it!

I came home to the north, coined the word “co-imagination,” and embarked on a program of dreamwork, meditation, detox, reading and exercise, wouldn’t even drink tea because of the caffeine I was being that good. Some bloke claiming to be a shaman turned up – the stranger – conducting what he said was a ritual to heal my intelligence. I went off to University a second time and went mad.

Anyhow it was good when I sang “going to meet with the Otherness/ best go get a party dress.” It was also good when I sang “going to get your freshness back/ plug my senses in the mains.” Apart from those two songs there are very few lyrics on the album on Soundcloud. We noticed even recording background static, feedback, on the earphones, makes it a tone-poem. The eventual album was a “dark CD.” Dark in the sense of dark matter. I still hear the dark CD to this day when for example I put on the dishwasher: waves are accentuated in words, lines of meaning. It isn’t the same if James puts on the dishwasher – then it will just be the normal, wet, dishwasher sound.

As you know by now it’s not the only musical concept, musical experiment I have been involved in, but I shan’t go on. I am expecting you to have read the other Transition to Philosophy books in order before you arrive at Volume Four. I wasn’t that happy with the binaural earphone album then that was it, the work of my youth. It’s only got 6 songs on, even though we recorded many more. I have herein showed you some of the other examples of “halfware.”

My brother comes downstairs in the Night, says I am being very loud, tells me he went shopping yesterday, with my card, and got a lot of stuff including a new frying pan because the old one had a scratch. Once the frying pan has a scratch it becomes unsafe and you have to replace it. I tell him it’s cool, to use my card. I have a song, b/t/w/, containing the line “3484, 3484, what do you need one of those for?” I never really made a professional sounding recording but some still think of me as a musician. 3484 is of course my bank card number, a glorious idea for a song. I think if John Peel were still alive he might’ve found us worthy of playing and promoting, but it’s all over now, we already lost Battle of the Bands, because we were a studious, weed-dependent studio band without a studio, who listened to Radiohead as if Radiohead were a field.

After The Flood and after my eventual degree too I made some recordings with Grant Aspinall which are also online. More recently I recorded on Ableton Live. This was when my songs were structured on the new da Vinci circle. It’s a kind of un-categorisable multi media where the songs are in a book called Soundcloud Rain, and also recorded in the album format on Bandcamp, where you can also find things like the photo of the sheet where pictures grew used as an album cover! So: to drag this all back to the nursemaid voice that said my best work wasn’t philosophy: they must mean said multi-media, where the songs could be scans or scones. Yet you listen to the actual recordings they are rather poor, very amateurish, just demo standard really.

Anyhow, James hates the old binaural bat and urges me to stick to the new da Vinci circle. It’s for the reason of this rock n roll past that I think to open a beer at dawn. I crack one open and think of old friends. I also think of the way James got in the word “pans” when he came downstairs. As in the speaker pans, the camera pans. Simon Pomery, meanwhile, is of the opinion I should quit all output on all fronts and just say “my Floyd was Freud.” I hear him sometimes in the new, synchronised word. The beer is delicious and gone. Soon I’ll be playing guitar at dawn. Then we’ll be back to normal. A failed musician who can’t fit in anywhere anymore.

I play a song on the acoustic guitar. It’s better on the electric, on the binaural earphone record. Now I feel like playing a game, and writing the word “Paul.” I am dragged back to the question: did I actually do the wrong or the right thing when I left my gf Danielle and headed down south for a Gap Year to Cambridge? I might be married with children by now if it wasn’t for that escapade. Now I have another beer and lose my philosophical thread, and mood too. Maybe I am best suited as a neo-Classical musician as the guys suggested?

There’s an album I made with Grant Aspinall that hasn’t been formalised yet, concretised; and on it I do guitar and narrate other people’s poetry. There is but one lyric by myself; and it is a spoken word album. It is called ‘Eternal Full Moon’ and I would like to see it concretised.

Albums are good and we should bring them back. I’ve been in many bands including Noj And The Mob (who wrote The Road To Heaven), Oedipus Wrecks (who foreshadowed doom) and Secret Chord H (whose drummer was the best of a generation); but in terms of albums we have The Flood’s binaural earphone work, then a solo album Grant help me make which is under John F B tucker on Soundcloud, then hopefully ‘Eternal Full Moon’ which is by Black Hole Myths, then also the Ableton Live recordings. For I didn’t just stop at 4 albums for the new da Vinci circle but I think there are actually 8 Abelton Live albums! On Bandcamp! Which nobody has ever listened to!

I love my brother, the sympathy we have, the co-imagination. The best song in the Ableton Live recordings was co-authored – me the lyrics and James the music, the thrust. So I have another beer. It is my third. So I am contemplating my repertoire. That solo album Grant helped me make, after the Flood, it is called ‘Songs To Record With Earphones’ [Demo 3]. It only has 6 songs. There were once more but they were repeats from The Flood, so I axed them. So like the Flood, there are only 6 songs on it, but they are really good songs. At least I like them.

So you find me this dawn wishing for something that is realisable and within reach: the concretisation of ‘Eternal Full Moon’ by Black Hole Myths. Even though there is only one lyric on it by myself, it’s as much about me as about Grant. He’s a great guy, a superb talent, my mum’s generation but I’ll let him off his age! He says it only matters how old you are if you are in a boyband and is right! He says you don’t have to be Syd Barrett anyone can do it. So it is that I find myself tidying up the mess and advertising musical works. The beers I am drinking go down very well. The third is downed. It is dawn. The birds are singing. My life is not over yet and I have hope for future work.

So what happened after the Grant phase? Well, I organised some home recordings, from Ableton Live, according to the new da Vinci circle. So it’s as much about my brother’s genius as mine. In fact more so. It’s like the songwriter himself has to play second fiddle. It’s like <BEE> is a new key or mode. He makes me laugh, he brings me home, he makes me admit “I was wasted for years.” He makes me feel warm inside. He makes me see clearly. <BEE> is priceless. So it’s not just that it might come after @ in the international language alphabet, but in a new language. The emphasis need not be on international, but can be on “new” instead.

If you’re both poet and songwriter, or rather either poet or songwriter and you take drugs, you’ll find yourself being a songwriter. You’ll find the poetry is abstracted, separated from you. You’ll find you can’t make it work as a poet. This is what I found at least. So I explored detunings, late nights, E, GM skunk, binaural earphones, philosophy chat rooms of an offline nature, Radiohead as a field, sleeping on sofas and floors. Attempts to resurrect a promising, once promising, poetry career were futile. Now I have all these books I wasn’t getting right – and I think the albums themselves might be better.

Music is ephemeral, vapid, inconstant, fleeting, vacuous and unsustainable and that is its appeal. Literature by default is more enduring, but some would get bored. I won’t lie: if ever I was I am no longer the man to bring you the new music. I play my guitar and sing at dawn nevertheless. With a capsized canoe for a drum, poppadom hi-hats and a dog for a front man – or not as the case may really be – I perform like a bird performing for an audience of no-one from the end of a branch. And wouldn’t it be typical if I went to all this trouble, all this extent, all this expense to attain philosophy and I ended up where I started, a failed musician?

Suddenly I remember: today is not the day the teddy bears have their picnic; but it is the day the publisher sets to work on Transition To Philosophy Volume Three. I drink the fourth beer, and agree not to have any more. Something could be at stake.

Compare and contrast myself who left music to get a degree but went mad, with a friend called Mark who dropped out of APU to pursue music, and got a good sound in the end. Would you rather have the renegade First Class Honours degree from the top ten University or the minor online following and musical repertoire? I would rather have the First and it’s not for reasons of employment but for richness of soul.

Compare and contrast also a sweet selfie with one line beneath it with a whole epic tome or even series of philosophy books that quite realistically bore the pants off people. What is the winner in that one? I think I would rather have the selfie, the longer this goes on!

One tragic thing: the richman, who owned the earphones… my friend, my estranged friend. Before we fell out, he was going to organise a vinyl LP of some of the back catalogue we recorded on earphones but never used. Then we fell out, and I think he deleted the whole back catalogue. So that’s a matter of sorrow and regret. We shouldn’t have fallen out and it was a mistake to. So I have to console myself that I have done enough in musical terms in other ways.

So I’ve had four beers; am walking round topless in Bermuda shorts. Soon I’ll be wanting a spliff! This is not good! I am trying to steer clear of all that. I have just played a speeded up version of ‘Dream With Open Eyes’ by Secret Chord H on the acoustic. How is it that we never made it? That I never made it? Well, CD shops closed. The album went into hibernation. There was no making it right at the juncture when we would’ve made it. One minute Paul and I were busking

“I confess my open heart

is lying with her legs apart.”

Someone stopped in Cambridge and said he could get us a record deal. Next minute record deals were old hat. Everything went digital. Even the dawn birds. I am thus a failed musician, a failed pop star, trying to make it as a philosopher, or even not to make it.

“Grade suicide” was one option when I left the ward and went back to University: that’s getting as low a mark as is possible. I’d like to say I tried it but didn’t. I followed the marks and got a First. There was one portfolio, as I say, that explored the form of defaced bank notes in its plot. There was rap. There were many “events” in and of themselves.

Right now, my Transcendent Signifier would be the fact of having my new philosophy books on sale on Amazon. It’s been like Jason Bourne, in starting again. If I have already done enough as a musician what am I playing at trying to be a philosopher? Well, there are times in life I wish I had listened to my father, who once urged me to pack in twanging that guitar and do something srs. Philosophers often think of nothing but death.

I started this talking about, and trying to replicate, writing the shape and texture of bricks; but as time has gone on, have loosened up my tongue, and found the brick is not a naturally-occurring speech-form. The ideal of the brick has a Marxist ideological backing, but as I have gone on talking about philosophy, have strayed from the form of the brick. I have gone on further to defend my position against fans that think of me as a musician still. I am not committing suicide of music herein, just idly talking, agglomerating quantity in a Conceptualist way.

You should be mindful of everything you consume. I reach a stage this morning where creature comforts no longer appeal. I am quenched and sated. Too often consumption is mindless. I got into the River Styx of tea and coffee in Monopoly Jail. Now it is routine for me to be seen with a cup of something. Slowing down is also a good idea. Living in present. Buddhistic things. I don’t fancy a grape right now, let alone an orange. So it is I drift free into an in-between realm with no consumption.

Death is something we will never get as far as actually knowing, or recognising. It is an absence of an event. It will happen to us all but the extent to which it happens to us is debatable; for it is something that isn’t recognised or experienced. It is others to whom our own deaths will happen. They will stand by our beds while we are away, gone.

When I was declaring with medical certitude in my illness that there is no such thing as mind cancer, I also declared that the virus Hep C did NOT originate in the version of The Lords And The New Creatures that was coloured a traffic light colour motif of only orange and green pages respectively. My dad actually had Hep C and got it bad before they even discovered the virus. These days it can be cured but his couldn’t because he was too far gone before they found it. We noticed that the liver, which it affects, controls emotional balance, cleansing and purging the blood of its noxious toxins.

The poet does a similar thing to language, is the liver function. The poet is not just pilgrim to Parnassus, deep-sea diver in collective unconscious, psychic map-maker, alchemist of perception, liver-function of language but translator of feelings. As I have stated the feelings you get on illegal drugs are all fake.

Philosophy seems more about treatment of an issue, conceptual or hedonic engineering, hypostasising and floating weird notions it undresses, examining language and use in ways not decorative but analytical. Developing a stance might have been the motivation for the Transition To Philosophy series, and I feel I have done that now.

But why would I try and please my dad when he’s a deadman? Simply put you should love your mother and honour your father which should go together, even if it be through fidelity to the memory of someone when they are gone.

Neil Curry says our feelings for the dead should not fade just because our memories do. This is true of my dad whom I loved very much despite our not always seeing eye to eye and in fact crossing swords. I remember before he died I wrote with my finger in the mist of the window that character

[backward f,

forward f,

equals running through]

and he asked me what it meant! I said it means the effects of acid and the effects of acid-rain on an imaginary species equal the same and he said if it’s an imaginary species they equal nothing. I thought about it and realised I think there is nothing more real than something imagined. I think Blake would say the same.

He left the letters C.F.X. written in the dust on the jug, the big yellow jug which we used to fill with ale in the pub and bring home. There are indeed many special effects to perceive in The Weather Theatre. When he’d gone my mum wiped the dust off the yellow jug which I wasn’t too happy about, but it had to happen. So dad’s last message was erased.

He also left behind a list of French vocab that is a code that can be cracked, transformed into a text delimiting the whole of the art dealing business story in poetry. I studied and translated it, and loved it. But I haven’t published it yet. It might be too contentious, too dangerous and challenging. That’s why he left it as a code that appears only to be a list of French vocab.

Breaking out of frames, habitual or ritualistic thinking. Breaking a psychological habit. It can be hard. A lot of my screen time is spent scrolling up and down as if to guard something precious without reading it, without getting stuck in. There are many bad habits of mind I have. Another one is feeling free to quote Paul without citing a reference. He does the same to me. We mix and swap and blend our resources. Even though we are out of contact. He also went from being a failed poet/ songwriter to writing philosophy. He writes socio-political commentary for an Anon blog. Essays that are well-researched, erudite, eloquent too. Maybe the whole John and Paul thing, our names, precluded us ever making it as pop stars and we both had to find something more substantial!

I have started to fear consciousness beyond death. I told you about Morley’s idea of the Sixth Sense being thanatos, or a growing perception of your own mortality in life. I have started to consider my death and Heaven and Hell too. I’d like to go out peacefully in my sleep, and for death to = sleep with no dreams. I don’t want to have residual brain activity when I’m gone, can’t breathe, heart stopped. I don’t want to lie there with any consciousness at all waiting to be cremated, or put under ground. I want death to be final and absolute and for the lights to go out. I said it before but H does not = 0 – 0 because I have a heart.

Thinking of death, I think of the staggering breakdown of all morality at the end of The New Creatures, the eschatological imagination it took to conjure that piece of poetry, which at the time of first reading was stamped on my memory for life. I say for life but there may yet alas come a day when I can no longer remember what I have learned of Jim Morrison’s poetry and retained throughout drug days since teenage years. Meanwhile the fell is laughing with green.

Sometimes it’s nice if your dad is dying to say to him something like “dad you’re the best” very casually, like a slang phrase. Or to say “we all love you very much.” Then you will be true. It might be a matter of conscience as well. Speaking of which I should check the news. The ceasefire was announced between Iran and Israel either yesterday or the day before. I keep up to date with headlines, summaries and articles on BBC News online. Open sesame.

About my foreknowledge, prescience, of September 11th dad used to say “there’s no evil plot that doesn’t leak.” About Jim Morrison’s mythos of “The Lords,” an invisible power that blinds us to our slavery through art, he said “there are no dark forces conspiring against you in life.” About conspiracy theories he said “in my experience there are more cock ups than conspiracies in history.” His list of French vocab was a mini-Classic of the quality of any of the best literature but not the quantity to my meagre mind. Hugging him again would be good.

A double espresso is enough coffee for a day. I make mum one as I do every morning, take it through to her, tell her today is the day I get a new book published. Thinking I mean I have paid for another since last time, she moans, but I inform her it’s the same one I paid for last time, they’ve just been waiting to format it. I haven’t paid any more money since last time. I tell her it will mean there are three books by Johannes Bergfors for sale on Amazon. “Dad would be very pleased,” I say “to see his son have three really boring philosophy books go on sale online.” She seems satisfied with that. Instead of bugging her like an electron buzzing about I come back in to the solipsistic kitchen of fiction.

My treatment of ‘P’ in Volume Three was more Mr. Bean than Wittgenstein. The publisher sends me the copy. It’s appallingly formatted – titles of chapters floating halfway down a page. Inconsistent fonts. I paid for it too. But I bite my tongue being polite and say yes to proceeding with it. Otherwise there would be no literary career. He says once I have received all three copies, volumes one, two and three, by snail mail, and approved of them all, he will put them on the website, on Amazon etcetera.

The thing about the fourth, herein, is that it’s all one piece, so we don’t have to have titles floating halfway down the page. So it’s durable. It might in the end just be a single brick rather than a house. But I don’t know. I haven’t planned anything. The plot is no-plot. The plot is an anti-plot. The plot is a vegetable plot. Except for the fact that there might be some kind of war going on, be it online or off. People – by which I mean voices – keep telling me they are going to destroy everything I have done when I am gone. You have to ask yourself why they would act in a Fascist and evil way like that and ask yourself what guarantees you can find against such a thing.

I suppose you get what you’re given and you shut up and don’t complain. That is the attitude I am expected to adopt w/r/t/ the appalling formatting of the work. But at least they are permitting self-expression, voicing the mentally ill, allowing the work to get out there… these grumbling voices by contrast ask me “why do you carry on when you know we’re going to destroy it all when you’re gone?” The reason is I don’t believe you are going to destroy it all because it’s Nazis that destroy other people’s books and we don’t live in a Nazi country.

It is later now. I’ve had my anti-psychotic injection that literally pins me to the spot each month, stops me gallivanting away. Last night I reduced the music on Bandcamp, irreversibly deleting three albums and some other songs too. This morning I woke up and my cursor had disappeared from my laptop. I couldn’t work it. So I got James to fix it. He did and then I had my anti-psychotic injection. The music is more compact, stronger than it was before. The decisions I made were right, in terms of doing away with light fingered ness. So it is that I have the binaural album, then a solo album made with Grant, hopefully the spoken word album Grant and I made together but haven’t put online, then the Ableton Live recordings which means 4 albums structured on the new da Vinci circle and one E. P. of excess material. A lot of material has been taken down from Bandcamp in the hope of strengthening the new da Vinci circle.

“All done,” said the woman giving me my injection. I wonder if now I have anejaculation I can still be a beautiful mind. I would’ve thought it wouldn’t make any difference except that I cannot ejaculate. I still love my country and deem it a fair one. I still love my chosen metier of philosophy even though my new Bertrand Russell book looks forbidding and dense and solid. I still love my friends even though we fell out. I still don’t get any listens on Bandcamp or Soundcloud even though I am satisfied with the material enough to not take it all down. I still try and find a recurring decimal in writing even though it’s not poetry anymore.

James seems to have fixed my laptop left-handed. The right and left click on the mouse have swapped around! I find it funny because he is left-handed and I love him for it too. Some t-shirts arrive by snail mail for James. I take them to him, tell him the laptop has become left-handed. He says he isn’t sure why it’s working either, because it just started working again half way through his operation. It makes me think of the word ‘psycho-sensitive’ which is a word from JG Ballard. As in the psycho-sensitive laptop.

I think that now we all type with both hands the old dichotomy of the left handed being more creative and the right more logical might be overthrown. But I might be wrong. Still, it seems to make sense that I as a right-handed person am not working on something creative but philosophy, while James, who is left-handed, is working on something creative upstairs.

So I’ve been on Bandcamp listening to the albums that were structured on the new da Vinci circle. Even though I have taken the really dud ones out, there still isn’t one recording worth keeping in the whole lot. Or rather there are maybe three or four songs worth keeping, maybe five. I’m not happy that I don’t have creative freedom over it without guilt for destroying the new da Vinci circle. If the songs could be adequately recorded I might be willing but I have no experience of recording on Ableton Live and quite frankly the production standard is terrible. It’s really embarrassing and is getting me down. “If you don’t like that soon it will be the news,” says the threatening voice, and that means The Lords And The New Creatures too. Please can I get rid of them?

The other option is to leave them up and just accept that I am not a musician, it wasn’t to be. Then the options would be poetry or philosophy. I can’t bring myself to get rid of the shrunken packages entirely because I still don’t know why it was that I was made to do them, and what value they have, maybe as an anti-state campaign for freedom. To know that I’d need to ask my brother James but he is very non-communicative. It’s all very well for him having listened to my speech and been inspired to design <BEE> but I don’t want to be the one who made something terrible of it. I just don’t understand what’s going on. I just don’t understand what’s going on.

Maybe something political is going on. Maybe James believes we should all speak in a new language and has used my terrible, terrible recordings to build a platform to that end. Mark Velarde would only keep one or two of them but I can think of three more. One thing is for sure, I cannot bring back what I delete anymore, because the old laptop is dead, so I have to know what’s going on before I make decisions. If James isn’t prepared to talk other than in Mad Speak I don’t know what I am going to do.

I already regret irreversibly changing it so I am not going to take any more down, just accept that I don’t have creative freedom because of <BEE>. Unless I do still have creative freedom. In which case I’ll ask my brother what’s going on. He doesn’t tell me things. So I get the impression someone made an effort for me and I didn’t like it. Which means I shouldn’t do away with it because it would be rude. But the quality of the songs is just really bad and I think I should only leave up the ones that are not painful to listen to. It’s not that they’re badly written it’s just that the tron format isn’t the right format for most of the songs.

So I do what I think I should: take down all the songs apart from about 6. I always wanted to do 3 albums not 13. The binaural earphone album was already one at the stage. Then the solo album from Grant’s secret location, now the scattering or handful of digital songs on Bandcamp could be said to be but one album. It’s still up there as five albums but they’ve only got one or two songs on. But the songs are worth listening to for once. There’s also the prospect of the spoken word album with Grant, ‘Eternal Full Moon’ by Black Hole Myths.

It was wretched, wretched <BEE> and now it’s still <BEE> but not a protracted few hours of painful listening at my expense. It’s still got a Flora-seeking nose and it’s still <BEE> but it’s good. If my bro isn’t alright with it still being <BEE>, we’ll take the album names out and maybe the photos on the covers too and just call them things like ‘One Song’ or ‘Two Songs.’

James would say “if it made you feel unfree, <BEE> wasn’t that great.” I already felt like weeping before I took the terrible, terrible, unlistenable, painful songs down and now I do again. It wasn’t <BEE> that wasn’t that great it was the way I was forced to upkeep a terrible list of terrible songs without being able to take dud things done in my name down.

Time passes or evaporates. I sleep and am woken sad. It’s the thought of hurting others. It’s the thought of people not communicating. I checked my old laptop again to see if it just needed charging – it didn’t, was truly dead. It might not be too late to have it fixed and put up not one, not two but dozens and dozens of really terrible recordings. Then my bro will be happy. Otherwise they may have to try <BEE> a different way. I listen to the 6 songs I saved and they’re really good and when it’s over I want to cry. I fucking love my brother, who may have loaned me <BEE> as an act of friendship and what do I do, throw it back in his face. It’s just a shame that the rest of the songs were dreadful, which is always likely to be the case if you write as many as me. Now they say he did it because they thought I was going to die and they wanted something to look back on. I have saved the best of the best of the <BEE>, so it’s not all amiss.

01. 11 AM. I wake at night. My first thought after a long hibernation is <BEE>. I am sad for what’s been destroyed. I don’t like it that everyone decided to rewrite <BEE> through me without letting me know. Consequently I didn’t like the result. But I am sad to have destroyed it even though it had exactly zero listens on Bandcamp because it was shit. What makes me sad is the lack of communication. I was never told “we’re all going to rewrite <BEE> through you and you must comply.” I thought the end result was absolute garbage in musical terms, but they’ll say it was good when the songs that represented the sheet were all flat and dud for example. I don’t want it to be like that though.

As it was before the first song was unlistenably painful and it never got better for a long, long series of albums – was I not in the right to change it? But I think of harm done to my brother’s feelings! So I go upstairs this late into the night and say to James who is still up “on Monday can we go into Barrow to get my old computer fixed so we can get the <BEE> thing back up. I feel absolutely terrible about it, like I can’t proceed at all.” We speak, converse, which is good. He says it might be fixable, so we shall go in and try on Monday. So I feel a bit better for our having a plan. If only I’d left the whole 8 albums up and just ignored the need to be a good musician! Just dealt with the embarrassment!

I’m just going to have the four <BEE> albums as they are in the book Soundcloud Rain, none of this learning process business, none of the songs that came from after. There are already people that believe it’s their music. What’s it doing on my site if it’s your music? The truth is the whole thing is Ringo and I am the one that gets the blame even though it isn’t my decision to create it.

Early morning voices say “now that you’re free, don’t go back there.” Also “it made you look like a right Wonker.” I’m still looking forward to having the laptop fixed, if they can do it, so the songs are saved. I can’t think what it is that made me take them down. The <BEE> thing online was an un-categorisable machine, combining words, music and pictures – and it was very much forced upon me – and I very much didn’t like it. When I was trying to rearrange songs I was hearing voices saying “that’s MY music.” Well, if it is it shouldn’t be on my Bandcamp page should it. More to the point if it’s Ringo I don’t want anything to do with it.

There’s also the point my local, friendly voice posits that when I was remembering the songs, which had lived in memory for so long, and needed to fill bits in, that’s when I was exploited by people putting blood and piss in there. This might be part of the reason why I am not deemed to be the person meant to bring us the new music. “We did it when we thought you were autistic,” says someone. If I could just leave it the way I’ve done it now, with 6 songs spread over 5 albums, we could build on it.

It doesn’t seem like summer right now. We have had almost no sunny days. The first thing I should do is ask James “do you mind there being blood and piss in the songs?” I am easy with it either way. Obvs I would rather not have blood and piss in the songs, but if James then says we are good to proceed I will – if we possibly can – and if not then they will have to think of a new way to do <BEE>. This is sad because it means it died on my watch, even when I was loaned <BEE> and the sheet by nice people to see what I could do with it.

The next person says even the philosophy without the songs behind it lacks an engine. If it’s like that then why have the songs had zero listens? If the songs have had zero listens I can’t imagine they are worth keeping. “We D’d it so you can say dutt,” they say, but I know not what they mean, even though they always talk to me like that.

I felt like I was going through the emotions of the last sunset on earth when I was dealing with this <BEE> problem. One problem is it’s more than mine but I am the one to sort it. I found the eventual product an embarrassment personally, when it came to showing my old musical friends what I had been up to. It’ll be good to talk to James when he gets up – he’ll have the right answer.

Glastonbury’s on, and I am not there, which sucks, doh! I’ve been five or six times, I think six. I used to count them but now they all roll into one big ball. If I were left alone, no medication, I might hitch down there and try and get in somehow. That’s the kind I was before the illness. Did I tell you about the disappearing bandage? I think I did. It could’ve been a demarcation, a watershed.

I helped invent the net at 7, took care of The Lords And The New Creatures twice at 8, was marked by the maths of the new colour at 11, attained the face of stars at 15, spoke against September 11th in 2000, at 18, and got 100% in an English A-level exam. Someone is saying now they know where I have been they don’t want for me to do the music but relate what I know. “We weren’t really trying to make it so that you are unencumbered,” one voice has confessed.

I get to this stage of the morning and it’s past noon and no-one has left their rooms yet. It frustrates me every day. There never is a moment where you’d ask “what are we going to do with the transient day?” Mum is going to drink and James barely leave his room. So I’ve written a letter to James.

I tell him I’m writing because lack of communication makes me sad; and he should be asked as a First Point of Departure if we are to try and rebuild <BEE>. I tell him, vocally, it’s Saturday and by Monday we should go in to try and save the dreadful music. He says we can do that if I want. Is it really what I want though? Don’t forget the music is not just poor but really poor. Now I am back in the Negative Room. Back to bed with it I go. Nobody even gets up around here. There are three of us looking after the star alignment house: one chronic alcoholic, two srsly mentally ill, and no job between us.

The fact that we are Shaggy and Scoob has been ignored for a while. I can’t express how much I love my brother; but you can imagine either Shaggy or Scoob without the other, or rather you can’t. Scoob says even if we redo the <BEE> albums we’d still need to D it with the new muse. That means augment it with all the new songs, 8 albums or more overall. They were all up only a few days ago and now to get them back I’d have to pay to have my old laptop fixed. Meanwhile I was reading about the female footballer Lucy Bronze, how she was diagnosed autistic late in life. The same thing happened to me. High-functioning autism. I like to count things. I lie back and automatically start counting corners, shelves, books, levels, layers, objects, stuff and things, racing round in a circuit, sometimes to a song in my head, so rhythmically, counting things.

Now I’m just looking forward to Monday, when we try and fix the broken laptop. If James needs <BEE> there’s nothing I can do, nor want to do, to stop it. I want to do what’s right by my brother. I have been seen to have the powers of a savant: I tried the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark at seven. What normal kid does that? In 2000 I was able to forewarn people of September 11th, also the hunt for the God Particle, the Plough alignment, though I got the address wrong, and my future tutor’s scientific papers. I reached into the future with my mind and was soon to become mentally ill. That year I wrote an exam essay marked at 100% after only seeing the film of the book. It was the highest mark in the nation! You can see that I have or at least had the powers of a savant; but where are they now? If I am to predict even the immediate future, I cannot foresee whether James and I will even get the old computer fixed and save the music. The music isn’t very good music but it’s definitely music. In a way it doesn’t matter how bad the music is, if it’s all about my brother’s <BEE>. So now I am looking forward to getting it back up there, even though it had zero visitors.

But maybe I am not an high functioning autist as was once diagnosed because maybe I am just nuts as my mother says. It’s 15. 01 and the time means little to me. It’s Glastonbury on right now, and I’m not there.

I have been reading some more philosophy. The blurb on the back says John Gray is Britain’s best philosopher. He’s certainly very interesting, quite scathing too, forewarning us in detailed and erudite passages about man’s precarious predicament on earth. He puts it all in a cultural and socio-political context that has great historical consciousness and is very well researched. Anyhow, reading it, I am convinced that more than anything else I know of, <BEE> could hold the key to Man’s future. So it’s a question now of either fixing the dead computer to resurrect the <BEE> thing in music, or, if we can’t, doing <BEE> again in another way.

What you’ll notice is the emotions the author goes through when he thinks the <BEE> has died, and they are coloured by brotherly love, the love bond that might exist between Shaggy and Scoob. When the author thinks the <BEE> has died he also thinks he’s let his brother down at the same time; but the <BEE>, on this reckoning at least, may not have died. Still, just to make sure, the author is prepared to spend up to a £1000 or more on having a defunct computer fixed just to save music which he wouldn’t normally save – because it was structured according to the new da Vinci circle.

And what does it mean for the @ symbol if the <BEE> that came after it is done in innocence? Even if it means <BEE> has died we can soon have D’d it to the eruption. Beta waves are one rank down from alpha waves – alpha waves are the most awake, the beta waves, then I think it’s delta waves and finally omega waves are asleep. There’s a lovely phrase in an Alex Garland book where he talks of “a beta-wave angel.” It would presumably be his second book. I always wondered.

Nevermind what though. James comes in. Talk of food. It’s a Shaggy and Scoob moment. Because we’re getting take-away! Yippee! Then we can be like those American slobs we used to watch on TV! But the whole point is about being nice, because James has offered to have a go at fixing my broken laptop manually! Yippee! Then, maybe, the music will be back online!

I sit and await my food, hardly a greedy guzzle guts, but certainly fatter in my middle age than in my youth. I still have a black T-shirt on, from Pakistan and that reminds me: dad would say “capitalism is good if it means you can get a water melon from South America for next to nothing in the local supermarket.” He was full of these really annoying opinions in which he seemed to believe very strongly and righteously but which may have just been thought-provocation. It seems apt, and even apposite when laying bricks in this co-extensive and contiguous way to mention that opinion of his. He would say happiness is the point of life. He would say freedom has to be earned. He would say the way out of trouble is to get your head down and work hard.

So now I sit with an advert for ‘airless spray paint specialist’ feeling like Jimi Hendrix for bringing the riff back in. They’re a roofing and painting outfit that dropped by once to leave their calling card. I believe each window would be between £200 and £250 to paint and we have plenty of them. In the meantime I have found my brother the appropriate screwdriver for the job of opening my old laptop, unscrewing the nine or ten screws on the back. I am always afraid of snakes these days when I go into the shed to the tool box. I always have been afraid of snakes, like as a child in bed thinking “what if one snuck up the ivy and go through the bathroom window and is under my bed?” More recently we found an adder – gravid – in the greenhouse and since letting the garden go to seed, become overgrown, I fear there might be a nest.

The adder in the greenhouse was looking for a dead bird that lay on the floor. Now the car comes back with the food. You hear the loose, Betfair jingle of shingle lifted from the big, flat bird-table when a car arrives or if it leaves Cumpstones drive. Food!

After eating, I tend to some poems. I have 27 individually published by a reputable magazine called Snakeskin, beginning a few years ago, but they’re shit and if I were to bring them out, what about my first collection that represents early work? I am sure it was better before I started to monopolise indigenous wisdom in regimented metres as instructed by the wind.

I can organise a book of individually published poems, sure; and precede it with more, with early work. Then my gaze will be redirected again. They’ll turn my attention to Soundcloud Rain, the book of songs, and say it’s genius. Then someone else pipes up and says they would be done with it after the book that tried the maths for the new colour, which though from 1989 was released after Soundcloud Rain. Now I’m redirected to the knowledge that Danielle hates me because I left her. So we still seem to be going round and round!




...so there I was thinking of what green, green utterance to make as witness or not to make. Barnes has scored a chicken. Should that be it? I do not wish to divert my brother’s <BEE> into the green realm of my childhood but the healing of the earth was on my mind a moment ago. My childhood was spent against the back-drop of acid-rain, the asthma of the earth, new levels of pollution, population rise. There I was a minute ago recalling it, and at some point I realised I would want to write what I was thinking down, about renewal, the colour green, healing the earth. I did not want terror to be that utterance that the witness delivers, the message. But what else was there in the way events unfolded?

One minute I didn’t know what the verb to invigilate meant. When the headmistress said our gay music teacher Mr. Williams couldn’t attend because “Mr. Williams is invigilating” I pictured him at home stricken by an aspect of horror, a biological reaction, possibly to do with laying eggs, possibly to do with being gay.

I also didn’t know the difference between drugs and AIDS at one point. But I felt like I should be the one to deliver a green message after the Observations I had made in the Lakes. I didn’t start with a completely organic voice because I started with “the ire ii net,” as in helping invent the net at seven, but by the age of 8 I was possibly due to say something about healing the soul of the world. If that became conflated with terror, then it became lost.

I can honestly think of no better utterance or way forward for myself than to reiterate James’s point about <BEE>. I imagine what it would be like if I were schooled in global governance, international affairs, politics, and had <BEE> to work with. Some say the sovereignty of the State will always be intact in the borderless economy and not overthrown by the Multi National Corporation; and that that sovereignty is held in place by the State’s ability to make the decision to go to war. I heard someone else say that national boundaries will be rewritten according to what we find on social media sites. In other words the future is virtual according to that line of thinking. <BEE> could hold the key to all these areas, where more expertise than what I have is needed.

Anyhow I was lying back only a moment ago remembering something Dr. Calculator Ptom said to me in Cambridge: “it’s really funny there’s a hippy who goes to the centre of town barefoot.” I started to get suspicious, because of the word ‘hippy’ and the word ‘funny,’ and only tonight started to entertain that what he was laughing at was the way my dad used to turn up to rugby matches to watch us and call out the word “legs!” very loudly from the touchline. “He can’t go anywhere without his legs, get his legs!” That’s what my dad was like. He didn’t care much for what others thought of him. So there’s another one I think I’ve cracked, and it brought a smile to my face in the night-time.

Dr. Calculator Ptom also said when he started to hear voices he knew it was time to stop taking acid. When I started to hear voices it was Dr. Ptom’s voice largely, in among many other disparate voices. Now there is nothing I can do to stop hearing voices. But I can focus on being green, and what my green utterance should be as witness, and renewal, and rebirth, and hope. I can focus on turning off excess lights, saving energy, electricity. If terror took my mouth away on the verge of becoming a man, this quest to become a philosopher would seem more purposive in a way. As stated <BEE> fills the hole in the immediate sphere of my thinking, as the language at first hand, as the plan for a more shock-proof world, as the test of the future too.

Now that you all know, make chocolate videos happen. I drift to sleep surrounded by the choir of fans. They are trying to help me get back the Right to Ejaculate. It’s a goal; but it might not work. Now it is later. I have woken up early having missed a whole day that I slept through. I woke up this mundane Monday morning and got busy cleaning the kitchen. Action brings good fortune, and that is my philosophy. You have to confront the inevitable eventually. Growing up is about postponing instant gratification for the attainment of long term goals. So now the kitchen is clean. I am drinking lovely tea and have had my morning meds. Today is the day we might go in to Barrow to save the music, or might not.

I’m sure I dreamed of Caroline last night, from Warwick University, and that in the dream she was “the One.” Even if she is the counterpoint of my soul, she is less likely to be the One now that I cannot ejaculate. I think you’ll find it’s going to be a saint’s diary hidden beneath the surfaces from here on in. I think of contacting Ben Fridja, an old mate from London who was super street-smart, and a really good friend at one point… we went to several festivals and had several New Beat adventures. What I mean is it would be nice if I felt I had some friends. I could live here in Cumbria my whole life without ever talking to anyone else, let alone meeting the One.

Even the farmers in the pub called it “Dumbria” for that very reason. Local headlines might read MRS. BLOGGINS’S GOLDFISH HAS JUST DIED! The idea of the Beautometer is on my mind in this part. I also think writing about the Lakes is like designing and refining a designer drug called “Strictly Free.” I like the way the light is lucid and the air fresh. It’s here that Nature is an art exhibition. Here that Nature is the true architecture of Kate. The powers that be could be clouds/ floating by on their sky blue roads. To plug the senses in the mains one might need to go swimming in the River Esk, to jump in off the naturally-formed ledge of rock. The beck in the back might be a fountain pen. The mood a bracken frond drooping down. This Naturalism is possibly my true philosophy now. This place my Walden except without the deep, green bassoon sounding out.

There is talent dotted around, in music and painting and presumably poetry too but here you find even if gold were discovered there would be no gold rush. Beautiful watercolours go for the price of the frame; while in the city the artist’s technical engineer is charged with the job of filling the room with polystyrene for art. In terms of poetry, this is said to be the most poetically-inspiring county but I can’t even find a press in its bounds. There is no DogMuckels footprint on the sand, no camera crew descended like vultures – just the pretty, bucolic idyll I am to call my home.

People from the south keep saying I am “in” but not “of,” which is only partially true. Whilst I am a Londoner, my dad had this house spare all my life, and I have roots up here going back generations. My English teaching granny wanted to sleep atop the oldest fell on the supportive spring mattress of heather on a balmy midsummer night… it was her dream, and it was never clear whether she made it or not.

Some of the locals think of me as the Seer of Sea Ness. That is, the foothill of Black Combe, Sea Ness, was once named “Seer Ness” after a seer and his trance. What with my CV, seeing the new creatures, seeing the face of stars, seeing the future on many accounts particularly in 2000, I am known as the seer. Some say the origin of that is St. Patrick himself praying here, but we are not sure about that.

The farmers in the pub still consider me a southerner because I speak in RP. Neither of my parents spoke in a northern accent and I was schooled mostly in the south so I don’t see how I was supposed to pick up the northern accent. The most famous poet to come from this region is Norman Nicholson who was a family friend of my English-teaching granny. My Sixth Form tutor, when I did the last year of my A-levels at a northern day school, was also one of the world’s leading experts on Nicholson. At the time I was a Londoner and more interested in reading The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison but I have gone on to read and love the whole of Nicholson’s poetic oeuvre.

The only changes to the natural geography of the area since Nicholson’s day are the cafe down the beach and the wind-farm out to sea, revolving its Mercedez Benz sign arms, making green lecky. The changes have been to do with global warming, the advent of phones, the internet and I would also say opportunities for vice increasing in the local town which Nicholson never really left. I have given readings in The Beggars Theatre, a really good venue in the local town, three miles down the road, to raise money for the mental health charity Mind. I was even in the local paper after one of the events. But where is my work? Where is my first collection? The books I was bringing out I wasn’t getting right. By now I scarcely read poetry, and don’t know anyone else that does, and thus have no audience. Without an audience, poetry shrivels. Admittedly I have a file of poems and songs that is more than 700 pages of A4 long, but that’s way too fat and excessive for anyone. The only poetry I have ever published that has got past an editor’s discerning critical faculties – as opposed to my paying for it to be published – is the series of poems I had individually published by Snakeskin. Snakeskin are a very old fashioned magazine. They don’t like a poem that retains its meaning from the reader and to be quite honest I don’t agree with that aesthetic philosophy. A poet to my meagre mind should delight in a wilful opacity, bats, black magnets, encryption, firking and code. This is because as James Joyce writes in Ulysses it is not the words or the music that matters but what lies behind them.

My dad would be happy that by now I have read Ulysses and Paradise Lost. I am very well read but they come even better read than me: there are still holes in my Shakespeare, and at University I was rubbish at Chaucer, if a whizz at Modernism and postmodernism too. Towards the end of my degree – my second attempt – at Lancaster, I was very disciplined.

Tomorrow I find out if another poem is individually published by Snakeskin. Mum keeps telling me to stop augmenting that pile because there is some misinformation in it. I was writing under the illusion that I was cursed when really I was hypnotised. At least this is my current thinking about it. Anyhow, best not go on. Poetry remains notoriously difficult to publish in normal and formal channels. English poetry presents a gentile facade. You have to really dig to find good stuff.

There was a time the lads and I – the southern lads – attended the poetry tent at Glastonbury. It was a middle aged man, who had failed as a writer, reading out some genteel drivel about a bicycle. We all vowed to not end up like him – to do something more electric whatever it was. At the time I was in Oedipus Wrecks, who had the song with the line “oceans smile with liquid eyes and fill themselves with rain.” I had led two friends to the face of stars! While up here on a camping holiday! Now I fear I am turning into that grey haired man in the poetry tent.

I might be right that with a CV like mine, the only chance of getting paid for what I do is the Nobel Prize, which brings up the question of whether I want one. We’ve been through this one in Volume Four: you can’t have one for trying the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark if you are not prepared to reveal the private mark. Moreover there were others who did more towards the invention of the net than me. As for the face of stars one would be surprised if it led to a Nobel. So here I am, skint, single, mentally ill, medicated, carless, unemployed, living with my mother in the sticks and I can’t ejaculate either.

I make James and myself a breakfast – fried egg and bacon sandwich – and take his up to him. “We <BEE> breakfast delivery,” I say marching into his room. “What is it?” he asks. I tell him: “just a fried egg and bacon sandwich.” I also say “we’re probably not going to go into Barrow today to fix the computer.” He says I am correct in that. He would have to do the driving after all. “But you’ll have to have a look at the computer at some point later,” I add, and he agrees. So my hope and faith is placed in DIY.

I suppose I should write poetry about stagnation. I haven’t left the house for years. Back to bed I go to read, read John Gray, described as Britain’s best philosopher. To free the tea, I might be doing this, writing. What is a “net-vein” for instance? When I remember the time everything went digital, it included the birds. But then again I suppose if stagnation is the theme and key I would do better to not write poetry at all. The teachers thought I’d only need to go into Millom to get some girlie action. It hasn’t proved such a simple career.

I hear voices, but not what they say, drawing me into a wooded area of the mind. It might not even be about me but I think it is. Eventually someone says “we were all wondering what you were going to do about our new pogrom?” I have a poem about this from the age of 7, where pogrom is spelled “pogram” meaning it could’ve gone either way, pogrom or program.

There is a waterfall at the back of our house.

I saw a mural in France.

I lost my blue paints.

Ten plus ten equals twenty.

Our housekeeper is called Joyce.

In our new program there is a Vetacore.

A bomp explodes.

I faded my work.

For a while the thought wasn’t going to get written down – indeed we could write it, but decided not to instead. Such a thing might be the reason for the sheet where pictures grew. Then I decided to write it after all, that even if it’s all I do it might spell a happy end for a career that has been a bit hit and miss, and in parts relied on my brother’s genius instead of exploring my own.

There was a time I thought that converting the bomb into an instrument of pathos, as in the above poem, was what did it – brought about Naturalistic Observations of a weird nature back then – but I no longer think or feel that way.

That seems as good a place to leave it for now as I can think of, this transition to philosophy, whereupon I take my brother breakfast in bed, meaning milk, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and his big round white bowl, all on a tray, rudely barging in and waking him, on a day where I wait for books to be delivered by snail-mail, a sunny day, a day of hope, which includes hope for my brother’s literary career, his sci-fi novels, and for the continued safety, love, happiness, peace of my family, both immediate and large.

But I have to go on for several reasons. Firstly my brother says “now we know if you don’t do it you don’t want to Dow it.” That means I have been infested by several thousand voices down the years. They may want petting and naming: the Rabble might do. The Rabble says “the one you did with the sums in when you were wee contained enough information to do away with all violence.” I still have most of it typed up but the original was stolen by the gypsies. I’ll never get to do another one like it. Man may never get to do another one like it.

So I think about this internet cafe I am building with bricks – are they made out of air? When will it be the final brick? “We wouldn’t do any more to the internet cafe because you might get put in P, and they might be so abstruse as to deem the curse or hypnotism an excuse.” Then there you are, that’s the end. Except the story goes on: even though it’s my transition to philosophy, it’s all been done through James. So it is that we need to fix the dreadful music scenario. We need (apparently) to put the hard-drive from the old defunct laptop into the new laptop. James knows how to do it but it might not work. It depends (apparently) on what is actually wrong with my old laptop. The old one will (apparently) never work again. So it’s a question of saving the hard-drive or not.

Here is where I start to cut things out, to save trouble, to not expose the ill deeds of others. When I brought up mind cancer at University they said to cut it out. You can’t do that because there is genuinely no such thing. Anyhow, James says he will probably have to order a new part. I know I’m supposed to have helped invent the net at seven and I did but this kind of stuff is over my head. It’s interesting to think there are modes of invention required for the net to exist that didn’t require a computer. That was me – it wasn’t prophecy like in James Joyce, but downright invention. I stored the blue prints, the groundplan, the idea of the net in writing in the attic to give it a chance to grow.

They’re talking about cutting him off. Presumably that means from societal connections and from his supply of fags and booze too. There’s the other chicken that needs eating as well. I think the best of the books, the most saintly, is Volume Three, for its incorporation of Oedipus Wrecks lyrics. Today it’s very hot, cloying, close, muggy, humid, and punitive. The pastry takes 12 minutes and the pie half an hour. Actually I might.

That’s what you get for D’ing it to the one with the Transformer. Actually the riots were my dad’s. Now mum is chopping vegetables or pastry or something. If the flower-press ending on cannabis still = a dialysis, and the love poem hoping to impress poor Flora still = a motor, then what? You might need to put that bit up a bit. Have we got eggs? Flora was a lovely lass at school – I hugged her – but she would only prove my bro’s if she was here.

There was only one egg left. The raspberries have leaked as well. We’re going to have to apply bleach to the table where they’re leaked. She was drop dead gorgeous was Flora, blonde, pulchritudinous. I picture the zipper of her jeans going down. Once when I was “healed” by a maniac, that just turned up out of the blue, I was walking home and a beautiful woman came up and said “I have no place to stay.” For some reason the one they call “my new mum” still thinks I was the evil one in that situation.

I was the kid that invented the net for nothing, took care of The Lords And The New Creatures, twice, went through the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, attained the face of stars, forewarned of September 11th, got 100% in a timed A-level exam, foresaw the God Particle from looking at dust and more before I even left school. Flora was gorgeous but out of my reach, out of my league. I think she went with my bro though, my bro who thinks philosophy is pasta. Apparently I have read more of it than him still.

The first Observation wasn’t new but also observed by James Joyce and written of in Ulysses, said to be the greatest novel ever. This sprung a theory in my mind. Because I also learned that between Joyce and me there were others. The theory is called the theory of Dark Evolution and posits that Joyce writing about his attestations in Ulysses became the reason why Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river; and Hughes writing The Hawk in the Rain became the reason Jim Morrison is said to have seen winged serpents in the desert; and then when he wrote The Lords And The New Creatures it landed with me.

I think life the opposite of Lord of the Flies because in Lord of the Flies the mystic character Simon says “the beast is us” in other words falsifying it, saying there’s only human nature, the temptation of atavism; but I think in life the true mystic is the character that is made to be witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. Traditionally mystics park themselves by becks and reflect on life, muse on deep things.

The second specimen I met was actually new but I have dealt with this already. I dealt with this in Volume Three. And the kitchen – there’s some kind of special shampoo on the table. I rather feel a saint, actually. I remember when Flora said “John’s got no arse.” I didn’t have a riposte. I should’ve said “well, if you were my sister I would fart in your face. So what do you think I would do that with if it wasn’t my arse.” I never felt happy with my body, but I don’t care anymore. I didn’t know what to say to girls back in the day and now it is for Hannah that I lead us through the woods again. It was a mistake – and every one alive has made one or two. Despite what Dedalus says about being a man of genius. Now it’s gone dark because I had to lead us through the woods, so my mum turns on the lights. Now mum is working on a pie. She is pasting a pastry. You have to put eggwash on otherwise it doesn’t go brown and comes out pasty. This time I won’t ask the publishers if they can do a discount. The language at first hand has something wrong with it. Who is counting?

Then we have more for the recycling bin. Oh. What did mum do with her phone? I think if you’d been an innocent Injun and stuck with the new creatures as opposed to fulfilling obligations as a government scientist as well mum would be mum. But mum still is mum, in a way. She crunches food with her teeth. Apart from her teeth she’s very attractive. Dad always used to say as much. Flora was attractive too. But now she’s gone. So it is that a salmon muscles its way to the back of my mum’s soup. A salmon escaped the ancient net, I once wrote. Don’t go opening the oven door now. Or puff pastry will be flat. We all love our puff pastry.

I can see steam billowing out of a pot; I can see asparagus cut into a neat row. I look about at the solipsistic kitchen of fiction, painted a plush, Mediterranean coral. Telly through the wall leaks in from the back of the room – is that where we get the lion from the heart of Poem Records? I look forwards and see fruit. I hear footsteps – mum’s coming back into the room to put the asparagus on. It’s going to be longer yet. If only these voices, pluralistic, tempting, could stop goading me. That one needs to be sieved and made into a soup. A lot of the world survives off chicken. They scavenge so you don’t need to feed them much. Morfar wanted to keep rabbits but it backfired because he put Mixi in charge of feeding the rabbits, so none of them ended up in a pot. It’s just a portable gift you are born with. It comes from ascetic indolence, or else the automated conveyor belt. Oskar is a potato farmer. That’s what I picked out of there.

We need to take the lawnmower and strimmer to be serviced before we can apply them to the grass. It looks like a good puff pastry. Another five minutes or so. The language at first hand could also be free beer. That is the idealism of the New Beat youth – see Mark and Jez for that – but it’s not working. There was once an art exhibition in my cupboard when I was ill – I wrote on all the packets. I like making soup because when I have a bad stomach soup is so nice to eat. Comforting and gentle.

Pollen, even if you didn’t have any limbs I would still want to hold you in mine arms and as the sun slouches to Bethlehem or war only strength knows it has to be Bethlehem. Indeed, I would wish to rugger-bugger up your butter cunt with my bastard cock but alas I cannot. I love you, and though my words don’t show it, believe as WH Auden said “love is a choice of words,” that we should learn to focus more deeply on clarity of language-use. It might help us avoid pain and speaking of which the pie was delicious, delectable, soft, colourful, even sweet in parts, containing all sorts of Classic ingredients as well as chicken.

Mum is having seconds of pie, as I have already had. James doesn’t like the sort of pie we are having and doesn’t know what he’s missing. He’s fastidious about food, and knows very clearly what he likes and what he doesn’t. As well as soft, warm, succulent chicken the pie had carrots, leaks, horse chestnuts, and more; but now I am clinging to the skirt-tails of what has gone before! I think I just want to leave this one up in the air – just abandon it – get it published like it is here and now and real and feeling and see what happens.

I remember the singing of the tap from Hofmann – we get that here too. There’s also the glug of ug or drug or smuggle – the big guilty gulp from the jug of ug – the glug of the jug of ug or drug or smuggle – that is the house pipes – which I never seem to be able to configure in the right word-order to convey maximum ug. It reminds me though that when I was actually reading Hofmann I thought about encrypting the song ‘You Can’t Touch This’ by MC Hammer using only natural sounds around me. The house pipes glugging on a jug of ug or drug or smuggle or Ugly Truth Revealed Inside! was one such sound, possibly the bassline!

It just needs vegetables. One of mum’s soups. And the rest of the pie might go to Norah if we don’t eat it. Norah likes mum’s cooking. She takes it round Norah’s to brighten up her diet. The pie was lovely and I just had an extra piece of asparagus too. I used to think the name Jerusalem Artichoke would be a good band name, when I was in a band with a couple of cool Jewish guys, but we were Oedipus Wrecks. Why do potatoes retain their heat for longer than any other vegetable? It’s because of the water content. They have higher water content than most. When you go in to town to get coffee can you get tea too? I like the Gold Blend. I also like James’s <BEE> and mum’s flower-press thing from which I derive the Florid Pretext itself, which presumably then is hers, with me just articulating it.

Well, I have just finished the new John Gray work of philosophy – he’s brilliant. The saturation point he has reached with allusion, erudition, reading is extreme. And what would you say in a creative writing seminar when you get a five second caption, to start a debate about a book of such depth? Maybe “good use of quotations on a formal level.” Already the reader, my reader, would have to read it to know what I mean, and that’s not a bad idea by the way, reading it. There are so many points he makes. One is that Liberalism, born of Monotheism, is a gonner. One point I really liked was that we Romanticise freedom overly in the West where limitation would be as good, in certain measures. His knowledge of Russia is very profound. War leaks in the head even when miles away.

This reminds me of another snippet of verse I might salvage from the year 1999:

Apocalypse travels from afar,

speeded by a brand new car,

Hell is falling from the skies,

or so I seem to prophesize,

all that Heaven sends is rain.

This was my first prophecy of September 11th which later became acute. It started as a general prophecy, in a Blake-like way and went on a bit, to also include a line from Shakespeare:

A muse of fire that descends

from the brightest Heaven of invention.

It’s scary when you do that as a schoolboy, but I suppose I was just attuned. Anyhow, I fail to foresee the future right now. But Gray was talking a lot about death. Not just the numbers, the scale of death in the 20th Century over ideology, but later on about Thanatos. This is Freud’s counterpoint to Eros. It is as Freud says the death drive as opposed to the sex drive. Gray says it had little scientific credibility. I was thinking though of the idea that mortality can be a form to write against. Form is a restriction that sets you free and in poetry is often about maths. The idea that mortality can be a poetic form seems almost Romantic unto some.

Anyhow I am wondering where mine is. If James gets the new da Vinci circle and mum gets the Florid Pretext as earlier mentioned, do I get one? Lord knows, if there is a Lord, I have been through hundreds if not thousands of conceits, concepts, plots, strategies, schemata, themes, devices, ideals. You start to realise there isn’t going to be another one – it’s not just going to suddenly appear – metastasize out of the water like a magic otter. So you are left with practising the philosophy of others, or rather, sharing it. I’ve told you about some of the things I have written of; and not just herein but in the whole series; and one thing I did at seven was knock the battery off the pollen, as in separate it from name, habits and associations. But more than anything snazzy you just get honesty and bravery from me. Canine love. Hard work. Persistence. Reading habits. Intelligent selection. A beautiful perceptual kingdom. I don’t know. I can’t think of much. What would happen if we did <BEE> and Flora at the same time?

She would be the mating queen from the green pages of The New Creatures in the flesh. I already knew that when I first met her at 16 and wrote her a poem. The whole “Florid Pretext” depends on a love poem for Flora and I was the guy that wrote that to start with at 16. It isn’t really very motor-like but definitely something. All day I have had “we are sailing” by Rod Stewart in my mind’s ear. If that isn’t <BEE> and Flora merged then what is? They are both left-handers, James and mum, so creative. I am supposed to be more logical and organised, hence I am working on working on being a philosopher more than a novelist. <BEE> strikes me as something in the key of yellow and Flora is blonde, so maybe Van Gogh’s colour of happiness is something to note. Speaking of which there are too many lights on. They’ve both got Beauty in common as well. <BEE> could stand for beautiful and Flora be the human personification of it but I don’t think it meant that way. I think it a shame that my brother and Flora are not together if they had a brief dalliance at school when I had gone. What they have in common more than anything is the idea of the system. In philosophy you hear of the triumph of so and so’s system; but in poetry systems are not to be trusted because they rule with fear not love.

<BEE> and the Florid Pretext could both be called systems but also aesthetic anti-systems. Rimbaud was careful to scramble the order of the colours of the vowels to keep it in line with the derangement of the senses. I was looking for an aesthetic anti-system like the colours of the vowels in English, also to conduct an experiment into the international language, also to replace archaic gay, also a whole list of other artistic ambitions, delivered in the prophetic speech where I spoke against September 11th in 2000; and now it all seems to have been realised. Amazeballs would be the replacement for archaic gay, and a word I had already coined myself by that stage but not considered. You could even say that voices represent a super-human narrator meant to overthrow the conscious self-censor and predominant brain hemisphere as was also on my shopping list.

You could look into other systems at this moment, this crux in the flux of time… the NHS comes to mind, but seems way off target. The Benefits system is another. My seven year old book published as The Sunset Child by John Tucker could represent a system for following a school year or even two or maybe three, systematically, with dates, while performing tasks of great scientific exactitude like encrypting a notion concerning Gravity and storing the idea of the net in the attic and conducting an experiment into the maths of the new colour and separating the pollen from its name.

Four functions it seems to have but there might’ve been something to do with the Plough as well; and four Tucker siblings there are, born in a season each, marching right left, right left in the handedness. I probably repeat my own work by saying this. Even that seems a system but it might be an anti-system. Jim Morrison says “if you are not against a system you are a part of it.” I rack my brain for other systems but nothing as beautiful as <BEE> or the Florid Pretext comes to mind. I would shine a buttercup torch on her chin, or whatever it is they do in those old, Romantic tales.

“The chicken definitely needs to come out of the AGA now,” says mum, as I go next door to tell her I’ve checked it and found it beige. I take it out and leave it. It is late at night, past 1 AM, the night I finished The New Leviathans by John Gray, a fine writer. I do think I should be allowed to write my ideas down and not face the threat of people doing away with or squashing my voice. After all we live in age tolerant of mental health issues, where after the blacks, the women, the homosexuals, the rights of the mentally ill come to prominence.

I guess fascism and communism were both attempts at systems that were no good because they were too extreme. <BEE> and the Florid Pretext, representing my brother and my mother, are much better and if they could become political systems, I am sure the world would be a happier place.

A house meanwhile could be described as a system of bricks. I heard it said online that a house should cost no more than £1, but if you invest £30, 000 into doing it up to sell it, you’d expect a normal price. My dad always used to say the value of this house should include the Bigger Picture; but no estate agent seems to factor in the Plough’s alignment into an evaluation. Anyhow, I didn’t think this brick laying episode was making a house – it’s supposed to be an internet cafe!

I suppose a multiplication table is a system of sorts… which reminds me – I need to have my medication! Literature can be such an aid to memory and when you are an habitual medicine taker as well as writer, literature can be a machine for remembering to take your meds. Ah yes, that’s better; and now I recall how my mnemonic for the guitar strings used to be Even A Dick Gets Big Erections, and how even that might be called a system, with underlying Logic.

I think looking back to days when my leather jacket was black I had a happy knack with musical concepts back in my youth – for instance one was to do with Nirvana…

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

Another was when I came into possession of that Pearl Jam tape that was cut in the reel. After a delicate operation to reseal the reel it had a small pause in the music, so the ideal was to do away with the small pause, by chanting “another, another, another fucking joint.”

My mnemonic for the strings indeed became Even A Dick Gets Big Erections. I indeed recorded a little album on binaural earphones, said on the record I would “plug my senses in the mains.” I wrote a paper about whether or not Lucy in the soul w/ demons happens to be an actual substance but it got lost, maybe in the void!

My first mobile indeed started to reverberate the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang from home. There was a call to tattoo someone’s name on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, and finally the one that takes the biscuit is when I discovered my brother’s sheet where pictures grew.

That pretty much sums up what I was doing with my musical youth - and now here I sit ( ) striving not for effect but still struggling to just talk. Voices could be quavers, could be onjects, could be syllabubbles, could be sonic machinations at the periphery of sound and most importantly the colours of the vowels. They ask you to increase your threshold of Negative Capability. Meanwhile there’s something I think I know and shouldn’t impart but it’s because I have a heart; and writing a letter Dear Music could be instructive in mental health in the future; and putting Paradise Lost to music shouldn’t be done unless it’s going to be amazing, so it’s an aesthetic not moral question.

I also remember, when Aphex Twin’s new double album came out around the Millennium, it was comparable to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. I failed to make it an essay, while my brother-poet Dedalus was writing of how Autechre is the heir to Wagner. I look back and consider the road of rock n roll cliché as leading only to sadness. I would reiterate that the music world is largely a wankered planetarium of ego.

The bands I have been in amount to five, like the Glastonburies I have been to, and the number of Lucies it takes to be clinically insane. The first album I wrote was The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob but it was only a family album done by young kids singing of the dog chasing his tail and recorded on a ghetto blaster. Then at 15 or 16 Oedipus Wrecks formed and gigged in London and foreshadowed doom. Moving schools I then formed Secret Chord H with the best drummer of his generation. It wasn’t until my Gap Year though that I formed the Flood and we started to properly record.

By now I am in Black Hole Myths. I am 43 and don’t play much music anymore, but wrote the score. I think there’s enough information in the musical concepts of the past page or so to qualify me as a neo-Classical composer; but it being in the past, and my turning to philosophy, well, one might argue for instance that the musical concepts are best to talk about not listen to. That puts it in line with a musical form of the literary mode of Conceptualism where books agglomerate quantity over quality, conceive of language as trash and more to the point are meant to be discussed not even read!

Systems. Alcohol. Sound. These are words. I rack my brain for other examples of systems but I guess one is all you need per person and mine was contained in the music – it’s a guess. I’m trying to be fair to the people I am living with who drive in to town to buy the shopping, often on my card. I try and do as much washing up as is possible these days which would’ve been inconceivable when my dad was still alive. He was very helpful. He was always helping people. He was also very Inclusive. An highly intelligent guy, he started sentences “I’m no genius but…” I might do well to take after him in some respects after all.

And Flora. You’ll bet I say this to all the girls/ but I look at you and see only purple silken swirls. / O to chink pelvises like champagne flutes/ atop the oldest fell wearing walking boots. - Lines from my poetic non-career. Going nowhere fast it was. Worse than Adrian Mole in some respects. Now I sit here ( ) thinking about systems. I like it when Simon Pomery talks of the cycle instead of the system, because he arraigns and inveighs against it, like a form of de-institutionalisation. What I don’t like is when people diss <BEE> or when my brother gets disheartened by the mess I made of my music on Bandcamp with terrible recordings.

There are certain poems that are systems or even aesthetic anti-systems like the one that contains the line:

Her breath a poisonous magic.

I wouldn’t exactly say it was a logical system, but it contained a Nintendo innuendo and worked. I vandalised it in my now-retracted first collection.

So how can <BEE> or the Florid Pretext be transformed into political things? And bring about peace? I would say that’s exactly what writing about them is for. You don’t need to nail a Lutheran Statement to the door of Parliament during the fire-dance; you can affect incremental changes with a literary voice. This is why I don’t think my work should suffer the fascism of being done away with on account of some perceived, Revolutionary sin. So it might even be the subtext of ring-a-ring-of-roses, a pocket full of posies, a tichoo, a tichoo, we all fall down.

I thought Warwick University was a fascist place. To start with, sitting in the barn with my bros in 2000, that conversation where I spoke against September 11th, which was a piece of pollen in the pollen count, I highlighted my ideal for a book. It was to be The Scientific Papers and classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception. I went down south, formed a band, the Towers came down, I got on the prestigious course and found in the first week my tutor had just brought out The Scientific Papers. It was classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception. He had the extra word ‘writing.’

Next thing you know I was banned from the Students’ Union for being leglessly drunk when I had literally had less than one bottle of WKD and was simply lying on a table in a darkened corner to reflect on my life. It was an erroneous judgment made against me that started the war and I was never legally allowed back in the Union after that day in the first week or so but kept sneaking in through a window whereupon teams of Security guards would get on their walkie-talkies and say “emergency, Tucker’s in the building, evict him.”

Meanwhile someone in loco parentis said they’d turn a blind eye to pot smoking in private rooms, so we did, whereupon Security barged in and confiscated precious memorabilia and paraphernalia from around the world which is not illegal to own. That was when my friends and I were kicked out of Halls of Residence.

Then there was a party on a roof, and I think that was when I was banned from campus altogether. Meanwhile someone had started a song in Battle of the Bands going “fuck the Union, fuck the Union, I shall free John Tucker, he’s one cool motherfucker.”

The final straw was when I did actually get drunk this time and was making my way home to the bus stop with Luke and underarmed an empty blue WKD bottle towards a bin in empty space and missed. We walked off and when we got to the bus stop, Security crept up stealthily behind us and accosted me. They wrapped their arms round me and restricted my movement and I wasn’t having it. I threw the first blue meanie over my shoulder, and the next and the police were called and Luke and I woke each in a cell.

We had to plead guilty to affray. We got tonnes of community service. I was expelled and told never to contact the University again. Luke was still allowed to be a student but got extra community service. So I went back to Cambridge to live in a shed in the band’s commune, and continue with my Gap Year band; and I couldn’t even get on the Dole because the Labour Government needed papers proving I wasn’t a student from a University I wasn’t allowed to contact. In short I was robbed, lied to, persecuted, branded a criminal and forced to eat from bins in the formative years of my life. And when I packed it in and came home to the Lakes I started a program of meditation, dreamwork, detox, reading and exercise in preparation for giving University a second chance – my local Lancaster – and that was when the stranger turned up and “healed me”. I won’t tell you what he said because I am forgiving in fact a big hearted twat who just gets treated so badly wherever he goes that it’s sickening.

About the book, years later Morley the tutor conceded that “if you were the witness it was yours yes,” and also said “I’m sorry for doing that to you.” You can see why I considered myself up against a fascist regime eh? It wasn’t long after being healed by the shaman, the wizard, the priest, the Illuminati, as he said he was, when he conducted his magic, his ritual, that I went fully round the bend with it all and was in the acute ward, not just the normal mental hospital and I have been on extreme doses of medication ever since. Now I hear in voices they’re going to put me in prison for it too! I don’t believe they will. This is a democratic country. I am allowed to tell my true story. If someone really badly injures me I will try and leave it out too.

So the Feds seem to have said if I can tie it all up, and finish it off, the writing, they will actually keep me out of prison. But that would leave doing the washing up which I already do; and nothing else. I would obviously continue to read and that would inspire me to continue to write presumably but I don’t want to be defeatist about this. It might be possible for a writer like me to stop.

When Paul and I and Jez and Mark and Jess and Niki and maybe some others too went on a road trip to Kent, they were still notebook-carrying days; and I chased Paul into the sea with my notebook in my pocket and everything was washed away. The notebook itself came from the time I was working in a factory and saw an empty book lying around and plucked it. By the age of about 23 I binned not one, not two, but three big black bin liners completely full of notebooks from my youth, containing songs, poems, thoughts, stories, snippets, aphorisms, situations, come downs, adventures, Tetris, phone numbers, and more. It was my father that urged me to do away with it all and recognise that literature is biodegradable. It will all grow back if it wants to.