TRANSITION TO PHILOSOPHY VOLUME 4

INTRODUCTION ONE SUMMER MORNING IN A KITCHEN

There were too many flies in the kitchen earlier – small ones, fruit flies, come to haunt the neo-air, hunting for crumbs of spilled sugar, or rather hugging the lips of cups used for lager and lime, or coffee; or floating around the remnants of mother’s peanut butter and cucumber on toast. They too might exist inside The Lords And The New Creatures or else they might’ve escaped! Jim was a fat alcoholic towards the end, and died way younger than I am now so my life hasn’t been entirely unsuccessful. My mother also drinks, drinks Gin and Tonic more than she eats; drinks so much of it in fact that I would sick it up if I drank as much. It can’t all be going in, I mean, in such large quantities, must be siphoned off elsewhere.

@

<BEE> [long squiggle]

Infinity Symbol

I see that <BEE> was if not a red herring then a dangled carrot. Through whose cyclical movement we travel. Society bounds in circles round the sun. It was and is James’s design: the new da Vinci circle. It appears in a lot of my work.

Of late I have not been very active. Since my last attempt at philosophy I read Think by Simon Blackburn which I much enjoyed, also The New Leviathans by John Gray. Now I am onto Lucretius, talking of the atom in a world before Christ, but I also watched a lecture given at Cambridge University on Wittgenstein via Youtube.

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

You might find I’ve already done that one, but the more I think about it the more I like it. Since my last attempt at philosophy I also wrote a lot including a long book of what I was calling philosophy but which only attained it in one long instance, and a few further snatches. To copy and paste it in would mean something kinetic becomes something static and that I should be dead against at least when it comes to the wood. I was talking about the distinction between Hobbes and Descartes, the former believing the mind was just a part of the body, the latter believing the mind is separate from the physical world. I am not sure anymore, but before I was saying, when I read of Descartes on perfection and look inside and find the Perfect Judge that his concerns are grammatical. I was also saying that because there is no such thing as mind cancer, absolutely definitely, we can be sure that the mind is indeed separate from the physical world but though I still believe there is no such thing as mind cancer I no longer hold the deduced belief that the mind is indeed separate from the physical world. For there might just be nothing for the term to name except the dance of the synapses, electrical impulses in the brain. So where before was a detailed philosophical argument that proposed Descartes was correct, now I languish in uncertainty.

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

Again we seem to have done that one before but I love to contain a timeless idea transmitted across time, a specific piece of language that is, in a very terse poem. I might still show you a copy and paste from my in-the-meantime notes on the mind too. I’ll show you now in fact…

EXCERPT FROM ‘THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND’

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, word-shades… 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 or behind 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 I 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.

CHAPTER TWO

Well, there were some thoughts from only a week or so ago, the good bit from a long spell of writing. But by now I am thinking of these terse snippets of verse, of how a specific idea is concealed, a timeless idea transmitted across time…

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that heaven sends is rain.)

Again we seem to have done that one before. I was told they were the beautiful bits of my oeuvre, but was it by the Perfect Inner Judge whose concerns are grammatical, or by voices, or by friends assuming the role of voices through the inner judge? I do not know; and my transition to philosophy is going suddenly slowly. In the mean-time since my last there has been another book organised too – songs and poems, it is comprised of, and it sorts out the inchoate morass of all that. It would seem that while at last I have organised my songs and poems, I have moved on to philosophy and no longer care for the old ways as much. When you get what you want you never want it again. Then again was it not only a moment ago that I showed you an encryption of something through verse?

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh, up

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

That’s one I don’t think we’ve done before. But what about <BEE> and all that with which I started? My bro is upstairs writing his epic sci-fi thriller. He made me breakfast today. I was put on the course of Digital Miniaturism sometime in the distant past. There are others, many others but do they have something specific behind the words that is not revealed? My old maths teacher likes one that has nothing behind the words the best:

Semen spills like silver water,

under the bridge with the angel’s daughter,

splashing with laughter in a moon-glow chamber.

The temptation is to augment it – maybe “turning your lover into a mother,” or maybe “already dreaming of a girl called Flora,” or maybe something about love being the answer. But every time I augment it – it gets scratched. I am left with the incomplete version that was the first version, a long time ago. It actually came before the long thin one starting “down.” And I would say five is enough of them, but I have more and many more.

Pressure from voices to deem this Eden. Who are you? I don’t know but they say “you must know by now that you look like a slapstick.” Does that mean I have post-digital Distortion Syndrome? I made the name up myself a few years ago. The doctor did actually say I look a blur. I don’t understand it myself. I thought it had gone away – the Hitler moustache. Who vandalised me I do not know but I don’t wish for this to be about that. A jet tears up the air above, the blemishless blue dome. I will get some coffee.

I also found out I was raped. Anyone who speaks against September 11th in 2000 is raped if it still goes ahead. There was just sooooooo much intellectual content in the same speech in 2000 and it seems I was raped on several fronts at once, including The Scientific Papers, including the binaural earphones, including more and many more. Anyhow where was I? In this medicated stupor? I have had to accept my looks are different, and differing, all over the shot. You look at photos of me, it’s like a different person every time. I think of Dorian Grey but it’s not quite the same. At the moment I am not too concerned about the way I look but about my soul. And as for the philosophical matter concerning the mind I can’t say with any certainty anymore what I really think. Or what thinking is for that matter. Or matter itself.

CHAPTER THREE

I might need to go with the song and poem book, but might be able to sustain this melody. I was thinking of what it would be like to do another one, another encryption. They are not as instant as they used to be judging by the latest:

The powers that be could be clouds

roving overhead on sky blue roads

but then again they could be The Lords…

here I could write a whole bunch of options like: desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies; while the diamond in the heart can wait; who like to visit and alter art; from Jim Morrison’s book of nodes.

So in other words there are too many options and the poem is unfinished. They are traditionally readymade things but that one seems slow-grown in the heart of the sun like eco-poetry can be, like Slow Art can be, like New Lakes poetry can be. There is an idea behind it to do with Nature but I shan’t spell it out. I don’t think it’s very good. It’s like something has happened, a whole mental health saga, and a need to take medication is blocking the creative spark, the flow.

I look back and remember when I wrote Transition To Philosophy (the first volume) and included a bit about the ic of Icarus being on the end of the word “noetic” meaning ‘of the mind.’ That first one remains my favourite one, but the second isn’t bad, and the third, well, I didn’t like the way I was forced to be fake, or rather, someone in among the Bunch didn’t like it. The Bunch should be what I call the rabble of angry voices. I hear the Bunch regularly. It’s very strange hearing voices. You might read in teenage years a poet like Jim Morrison say “the music and voices are all around you,” but have no conception of what it’s like; then when you start to hear them you don’t even know whether you should be dancing. You eventually get teamed up with a professional and ask them “what are voices?” and they give you some spiel about the phonologic loop, or something else in their positions of pseudo-science and it never satisfies you. You want to know what they so discretely talk about as in the Lou Reed song. At least this is my experience.

In the realm of the senses, we have taste, touch, sight, sound and smell. There are said to be four taste sensations, salt, sweet, sour and bitter but in China there is a fifth like hot and pungent. Touch meanwhile is the shortest route between subject and object. Sight, well, 25% of the brain is given over to the visual, miles more than any other sense, for we live in an image-saturated world bogging down the subconscious and preventing an unmediated experience. As for sound, I would say music is vibrating air. I would say when someone speaks soundwaves leave their mouth and enter the Byzantine conduit of my inner ear, rattling tiny bones in there, recognised as sound waves, a recognition which qualifies us as a species. As for smell, smell is the most primal sense, absent in cinema.

Professor Dave Morley says there is a Sixth sense called thanatos which is the increasing knowledge of one’s own mortality as one’s perceptual kingdom enters overdrive. I don’t know much about that, but mortality can be a form to write against. I liked it also when Wittgenstein said if you listen to a vowel sound repeated its colour changes. I am interested in synaesthesia or rather was before I got this fucked up. Its warm, green wheel was always turning back in the day.

Meanwhile the Bunch are saying things like “your D would deem it the poems and songs,” and also “if you get distracted from what you’re doing that easily it’s no good.” They make my life automatic. The Bunch, I should know them as, indeed.

Also during the recent mean-time text where I attained philosophy, I realised I am Shaggy and my brother James Scoob. Very often we only talk about food, only reconvene from our separate texts at moments when food conversation is needed.

I am glad to be starting again, but you must understand there already was a whole Transition To Philosophy Volume Four written, and it was about bricks. It was layering brick on top of brick and often mentioned the poet Michael Hofmann whose ideal was poems the shape and texture of bricks. I wasn’t sure what I was building, be it a house or an internet cafe, and at some point the brick motif unravelled. There was for example no remnant brickiness in the advert I showed you.

The Bunch want me to show you another bit from said brick text but I can’t hear what they’re saying exactly, so what can I do? The Bunch are inexorably nattering today. I shall go to bed to read Lucretius!

CHAPTER FOUR

The bit that none of us get is why I didn’t see <BEE>, when I first read James’s documents. I read the first one he did first: the anti-clockwise spiral of Badly Drawn Boy lyrics deliberately imperfectly quoted:

sunshine inside of you

old sun warm sun

spreads over you

soliel all over you.

Then I read the second where the new da Vinci circle lay but instead of seeing it, I saw a tabular arrangement of signs in boxes. They included

[backward f,

forward f,

equals running

through].

That’s on the Pyramid walls too as if the Ancient World had a mastery of quantum mechanics. I saw the whole international language alphabet laid out in this tabular arrangement of signs in boxes. I thought to myself “James has designed a new alphabet and it’s genius.” I left it alone.

Going back another time to the den in the barn, I found there was, as I have described, no more tabular arrangement on the page, only the <BEE> diagram. I left it alone.

Going back another time to the den in the barn, when our father had just died, I found the first document had grown pictures, pictures depicting the lyric to a song, a dark song that I no longer had any care for, which I wrote at 15 or 16. I’ve been looking into it deeply and writing of it intermittently in my recent philosophy books but I still can’t understand what went on. As my father was dying they read to him from the Book of John. At least he got to watch Withnail and I before he died. But you get me – in my state of grief, like Hamlet’s grief, I was in no fit state to start writing a paper on what already was a paper, the sheet where pictures grew. My dad knew it would happen and left behind a list of French vocab that was a secret code encrypting things, encrypting a poem in hiding. I can show it to you albeit without the accents. I have translated it to my amazement too but it’s best left as he left it, a code.

DAD’S MINI CLASSIC

Ma fossette dimple

(Steak) A Point medium

Saignant rare

Deux converts? (deux personnes)

Veilleuse (petite lumiere)

CODE (grand lumiere)

la cote Rating, letter, number.

Un chien mechant - vicious

dog

La pourboie - tip

greviste de la faim - hunger strike

gacher (fig) bungle

parvenir a - arrive

pouisuivre - pursue

s’ agride - to be about

la hausse - rise (prices)

loisirs - leisure

Londres – cette cite meconnue (unrecognised)

une ville ou le pictoresque et l’ insolite (unusual)

le guettent a chaque pas

(lie in wait for)

des flaneurs lounger

lavabo -

etang - pond

brasserie = brewery/ beerhouse

atelier - workshop studio

(lit) occurrence

l’ incident = avec un autre eraducteur

l’ accident = mishap (he backs into

me while I’m on the

beach)

from a carpark attendant. Correct?

de l’ essence

Mettez 20 litres…

Remplissez…

ebrilles

erabe-crevte

huitres

pommes vapeur (steamed)

Limandelle meuniere

equenelle

paysanne

prune

epine - thorn

corail - coral

le lievre - hare

lapineau - bunny (rabbit)

shapes at Gritte du Grand Rue

l’ elephant et la trompe - E & trunk BUT le tronc d’un autre

l’ oreille de pire

le crinoline - crinoline

l’ aile de papillon - butterfly’s wing

l’ ile de puigouins - island of penguins

le sapin - fir-tree

la trousse - truss

le mammoth, le rhinoceros, le cheval,

le bison, le bouquetin (ibex, wild goats)

le nid d’ ouns - bear’s nest

______

charcuterie - pork butcher

papetrie - stationer’s

unblock - pad

brulene (coffee)

la digitale - foxglove

la fougere - fern

l’ ajone d’ or - gorse

le puits - well

quincatlerie - ironymongers

hardware

une planche decouper

- chopping board

en hetre (made of) beech

le gite - house, shelter.

deguster - taste, sip

cedre bleu - cedar…

bon apetit

bonne soiree

bonne nuit

un briquet - lighter

le medicine done

non-aggressif

parallel

A NOTE ON DAD’S LAST NUMBER

Dad’s last number appears to be a seemingly innocuous list of French vocab jotted down in a little, green pad; until you realise it is a code, a code you can crack, an encryption, at first, of almost definite lines of verse that nevertheless becomes more loose and given to hermeneutic autonomy. My latest translation of his “list” produced something brilliant in itself, in terms of an interpretation of the words hiding behind the facade, but the encryption of those words dad left is even better for its delight in a wilful opacity. It was his Rimbaud to say things in that encrypted way. The first French word for “dimple” for example indicates Miss (as in Little Miss); then we have something about steak – and you can see where he is going with that. His Hamlet is inveigling, and mine. But looking up “Veilleuse” in a French dictionary you find it no longer there, and that is your petite lumiere; then you would need a law for your General Relativity. He says I went wrong with the maths of the new colour, but that I was the new Syd Barrett, even the boy that helped invent the net for free. That lightning storm in France, which he drove us through for miles, which was so epic it was a God Simulation, that was Nature ripping up the rule book so the game could commence. Then the second page is about my younger brother James, and indicates that someone would find James’s sheet where pictures grew, down the barn, upon my dad’s dying. The absence of a signified word for “lavabo” is because he used to say “the garden is an eco-toilet;” and the mention of French for “pond” is because he used to say of James “still waters run deep.” Then we have something else and something else again which I might not wish to impart, for it might be better left to stand as it is, for you to have fun decoding it even if you’re not in the family. He mentions the Future State – behind the words; speaks of his personal political and philosophical opinions; says his children are, apart from the last, who is a female, named after the Doors, and born in a season each, going right left right left in the hands; talks of five shapes he could mention: how one of them is a trunk that is un autre trunk – another being the living spreadsheet of plastic – which he says was crinoline – that crinoline has been synthesised in evolution – and how the face of stars would best be called the island of penguins. The scrambling of the order of the vowels meanwhile is because they are wild animals. I shan’t say much more except that the unblocking of the pad is co-aligned with the liberty and equality of the blacks and a lot of intelligence went into dad’s last number – in fact you could say it’s a work of genius containment that I found refreshing in originality of approach. Words are best just before you find them even when you get them dead on. Hitting the notes with pinpoint precision you will only be let down.

BLUES UPDATE

I drift to sleep in the daytime, dream about washing up. My ma was in the dream; she said she’d give me £20 for washing up – when I’d just washed up – and I said no ma, please make it £5 instead. Maybe it’s because I read about Wittgenstein giving away his inherited fortune in an act of personal asceticism. I went to see mum when I had woken, told her there was nothing to eat, that the mince in the fridge and the chicken had gone off. She reminded me it is tonight that we put the recycling bins out. I like it when Simon Pomery alludes to Flora’s system as a cycle because he arraigns and inveighs against systems. I also like James’s system because it is not restrictive. But poetry and philosophy differ on the matter of systems. In poetry a system is not to be trusted because it rules with fear not love; but in philosophy you hear of the success of so and so’s system as their crowning achievement.

******

BLUES UPDATE (2)

I woke up this morning… it was the crack of dawn. I came stomping downstairs and had the last of the instant coffee, and a banana. What was I going to say about philosophy? I was going to say something about Wittgenstein. He said that there are no two identical games – that there is no one, singular thing common to all games. But if we look at the top of the second page of Jim Morrison’s The Lords And The New Creatures we seem to find the line: “All games contain the idea of death.” So maybe Jim Morrison was referencing that philosophical debate and solving one of the problems of philosophy. I would stretch Jim Morrison further and have done in previous work to say: “a game is a rehearsal for death.” Therein you might find something common to all games that Wittgenstein overlooked.

THE PROPHET AND THE LOSS

I mentioned earlier that between books I had had the revelation that upon leaving school I was raped. If you speak against September 11th in 2000 and it still goes ahead you were raped. So that is my revelation: I evolved, and was raped. So now I would like to take you through the speech in the barn, which has been reconstructed.

Yes, in the year 2000, in the old smoking den in the barn, I was making pretty speeches, and some present there remember that I actually founded a new religion, in ordinary speech which to recapture is difficult, but I can break it down. There were inventions, prophecies, ambitions and aphorisms, all mixed together in fluent speech but which can be categorised now. First let me reconsider the inventions. A virtual death machine to wake you up. A word-chord synthesiser at the edge of selection. A drug called “Strictly Free” that does what it says on the tin, is and makes you strictly free to consume. A red-bleeding type-writer inside a ping-pong ball. An holographic horse-cock wheeled in the bedroom of a corrupt politician. An invisible square of air called ‘Mosaic by Darth Vader’ stroked on telly. A neutraliser drink that sobers you up in one quick instant. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey protruding from the oldest fell at ten to eight. Earphones implanted with tiny mics inside them so that you can record on them. What’s wrong with these is that they are not real!

To recapture the prophetic aspect (an aperture on rapture) is another challenge but I was basically saying: “I look into that dust in that late sunbeam angling in and foresee that they will one day hunt for something called the God Particle that will prove God non-extrinsic to matter. It would be good to see an alignment of the Plough and the landscape for a rhythm change in the White House, maybe in India. I think if Fight Club were real someone would fly two planes into the Twin Towers on September 11^th and I don’t that a good idea but it might happen. Meanwhile, I would like to write a book, maybe a Trilogy, called The Scientific Papers, classed as a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception. It would also be good if there were a party in an office block where all the internal walls are removed and where every floor represents a decade in music, fashion and substances. I myself would like to record an album on earphones, like Rimbaud might if he were a musician. I would say that smells from tellies would also be possible one day too. I think what we might see is an Age called the Age of Enchantment that is an echo of the Enlightenment. I do wonder if there will be another immaculate conception now that we have a new Millennium.”

Ambitions were also laid down. To replace the archaic word for ‘gay’ would be amazeballs because ‘gay’ used to be Man’s highest emotion and was never replaced. To discover an aesthetic anti-system like the colours of the vowels in English would also be great, even though Rimbaud deemed it folly. To conduct an experiment into the international language alphabet would also be an artistic ambition. As would inventing the post-poem be. To overthrow the conscious self-censor would be good, maybe create a superhuman narrator called FUCK who can tell the truth like no-one else. To start a new religion is what I am getting at because I think the Millennium means what is old is expended and we need to renew our values; and already Jedi is an official religion on the census forms in London. To start a new language entirely would also be a positive thing, if at all possible, in my opinion. I would also see gypsy poetry in the English centre because it would shake things up and I think it could be interesting to see if they have anything new to offer. If I were a concept artist I’d build a room made of hash that the audience can blow-torch but as I am not, just a writer, I can’t do that; and I would only endorse real live death in the cinema if an old granny volunteered for euthanasia and that’s because I do have some moral compass. To make a new discovery as big as fire is the long and short of it, for every generation might have that chance again, to usurp the burning torch of culture from the old. To bring back the Summer of Love is the largest and widest goal. To bring about simultaneous orgasm of Man.

Then fourthly there were the maxims and arrows that came hand in hand with ordinary speech. A Russian has a right to a square of red perceived by someone from another land and Liberty and Trade go hand in hand. Smell is the most primal sense, in love, absent in cinema. Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet. Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts. The Age of Communication momentarily endorses, means the Age of Alienation. Each age is unable to see its own prejudices, its own cage of retrospective categorisation. The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the simultaneous astrological and sociological de-centering of Man. The opposite of something is the pre-requisite. The pre-verbal, the thought-pattern, into words, via the mechanics of meaning, is dilution. The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph. When you renounce the quest for meaning, you find it, fall back on meaning-by-proxy. When you lose your concentration you die. Your ordinary speech is surreal enough. There are too many words in the world. Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan. The artist is the missing link reintegrating into a society of worms below and the artistic spirit androgynous. You should not trust systems for they rule with fear not love. All guns should be flown in a spaceship into the heart of the sun. Without difference no contradistinction. Everyone is my brother and I love them. The symbol [R] represents the stance that there is room for Creativity in the synapse gulf, that the creative spark is not all mappable/ predictable in advance. There is no more mapless space.

There was also the seemingly minor matter of dad’s art dealing business. I was saying it was code or recourse to euphemism for a pollen smuggling business based in Morocco. He told us he was an art dealer nicknamed Blue that charged the Germans for the return of their Russian-plundered pastoral paintings, but I started to entertain that it was a lie to protect his family. Still to this day I don’t really know the full story!

Anyhow, I was also saying Jesus was a proto-hippy-stoner-poet, who would’ve smoked pot in our day and age. I was going on about how I liked they way a sprinkling of Tinkerbell’s magic dust makes them fly in Peter Pan, how a Mario mushroom confers energy, how they fall asleep in a poppy field in The Wizard of Oz to attain the Emerald City. It was a good conversation, where I also pointed out the four of us are named after the Doors apart from when they had a girl of course, and how we are born in a season each, going Spring Autumn Winter Summer and how we march right left right left in the hands. Of course there are four compass points too, seasons, legs of a horse, wheels of a car, sides of a table, and even dimensions in the mapping of spacetime in Einstein. My speeches for there were probably a few were often punctuated by the word “revolve!” which meant we had to revolve whatever we were smoking round the circle. If I had written it down it would be like notes on hyper-vision.

Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self. Philosophy is a self-contained language corresponding to nothing real in life. Existentialism is a child at the pick and mix with a credit card. Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit. It is better to have a cup of tea than it is to kill yourself. Portability is the new apotheosis of Form. I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too. All things must be returned to earth, surrendered like a rented thing to death.

The speech would have sufficed as a written text, or the start of one, had I written it down. That’s not just the cannabis making it seem better than it was. Indeed, it was like wasting a good book on the air; and there were so many things in it that started to come true – like the earphones, the Scientific Papers, the office block party, the God Particle hunt andcetera. It was as if the rape was going on on all fronts. It starts without cognition, just a burning psychosis in the brain when the Towers fell, that I tried to douse with whisky. You then have to try and translate the mute, befuddled shapes of the preverbal into words; to acknowledge the stranger; to negotiate peace terms with the unruly unconscious. At the time there was a war of misplaced revenge and ego-parade waged against the wrong country, and Paul kept a list of scurrilous oxymorons bandied about on the News, like the War on Terror and the peace-keeping missile, to hold the authorities to account. I was in a daze, and we were still trying to make it work as a band, a band that recorded on earphones. Now that people know me they think I am more a Nash character. If you look in previous Transition To Philosophy books there is further evidence of this. It would be easier to drop in my CV than to start regaling you with all the things I have done.

CURRICULUM VETO

NAME: JOHNNY HYPOTHALAMUS

BORN: 02/ 04/ 1982

POSITION APPLIED FOR: PHILOSOPHER

CIRCA 1985:

Started reading the Financial Times as a three year old.

CIRCA 1989 – 90:

Wrote a little book that encrypted a scientific node to do with Gravity, helping invent the net by storing the idea of it in writing in the attic here in order that it could bloom, conducting minor experiment into the maths for the new colour as a cellular mark and separating the object ‘pollen’ from its name.

CIRCA 1990:

Made some Naturalistic Observations I don’t quite understand.

CIRCA 1990:

The second was like a living spreadsheet of plastic – and I dealt with it.

CIRCA 1993:

Was marked on what the Irish might call the forearm by the experiment into the maths for the new colour. It didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. In other words from here on in I wear the new colour scar, from when the maths of the new colour left a mark that didn’t turn out to be the new colour.

CIRCA 1994:

Wrote album called The Road To Heaven by Noj And The Mob, containing inflections of Popperian epistemology and Miltonian theology, exploring backward liquid maths in words and music.

CIRCA 1995:

At the end of the government-set intelligence test at the computers, at the most expensive Prep School in the known universe, upon having completed the task and been systematically ignored, typed in the rhythm of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by Nirvana into the computer.

CIRCA 1995:

Won English Prize and French Prize at Caldicott, then the most expensive Prep School in the known universe.

CIRCA 1995:

Came into possession of a tape that was cut in the reel; and re-sealed it in a delicate operation, to create a pause in the music. An experiment was born.

CIRCA 1995:

Wrote a miniaturist poem about what went on in the I. T. Room earlier mentioned:

“Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.”

CIRCA 1997:

Attained the face of stars with two friends while out night-walking in Eskdale. Still we had to walk away.

CIRCA 1998:

Began thinking of the musical genre Grime, coined the word amazeballs, and the mnemonic for the strings in Even A Dick Gets Big Erections.

CIRCA 1998:

Played gigs in London with a second band, namely Oedipus Wrecks, who had a song with the line “oceans smile with liquid eyes and fill themselves with rain.”

CIRCA 1998:

Started DIY poetry press called Ice Land Publications after the country in Brave New World where renegades are exiled who produced magazine called Poetry Now.

CIRCA 1998:

Also that year started third band in Secret Chord H. Secret Chord H made it to the radio with a song called ‘Dream With Open Eyes’.

CIRCA 1998:

Began an experiment into healing a cassette tape of Pearl Jam ‘VS’ with a pause where cut and re-sealed in the reel. That is, after setting the experiment up, I wrote a song repeating the mantra of “another, another, another fucking joint,” over and over, to see if the pause could be done away with.

2000:

Started and abandoned a Sixth form novel called The Dream Film Store.

2000:

Spoke against September 11^th in the barn, when asked of the plot of Fight Club.

2000:

Predicted the hunt for the God Particle’s discovery from looking at a ballet of dust in a late ray of light angling in.

2000:

Prophesied the Plough alignment but said it would be “maybe in India” as opposed to my own backgarden. Nevertheless, those present remember me founding a new religion all about the elephant.

2000:

Wrote the highest marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%.

2000:

Set aside ideal for a book to write about it all called The Scientific Papers. It was to be classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science as a single discussion of perception.”

2001:

Started to record an album on a mate’s state-of-the-art, binaural earphones in a new band called The Flood in Cambridge.

CIRCA 2001:

Also had “effervescent” mobile phone reverberating rhythm of William Tell through every technological inlet in the room before it rang from the art smuggler nicknamed Blue.

2001 or 2:

Won place at Warwick University to read Creative Writing under David Morley by writing a portfolio about Portability as the Apotheosis of Form which included a poem called Instant Travel, written at a computer screen, in Cambridge.

2002:

Arriving at Warwick discovered my own tutor David Morley had in 2002 just brought out a book called The Scientific Papers, classed as “a series of findings into itself, into the concept of art and science writing as a single discussion of perception.” He had the extra word “writing.”

2002:

Wrote many good undergraduate pieces such as a CNF piece called Lucy In The Soul With Demons, not sure if she was an actual substance. Also wrote a poem that tried to calibrate a new, “magnetic” language by encrypting events in the mystical realm as a series of adverts for imaginary products that also satirised consumerist greed. Still, left without degree.

CIRCA 2004:

Promised on the binaural earphone record I would “plug my senses in the mains,” then left The Flood to pursue poetry and get a degree at the second time of asking, this time from my local University in the north, Lancaster.

CIRCA 2005 or 2006:

Already writing about the new A. I.

CIRCA 2008:

Hosted the alignment of the Plough and the oldest fell Black Combe which definitely concurred with the sociopolitical realm: a rhythm change in the White House.

2009:

Achieved a First Class Honours degree from Lancaster University. Undergraduate pieces included a portfolio taking the form of defaced banknotes, and a dissertation on David Morley.

CIRCA 2009:

Was diagnosed almost as soon as I remembered the two weird specimens from boyhood, with schizo-affective disorder, as if such a recognition of myself as the formal “witness from The Lords And The New Creatures” was always concurrent with diagnosis insanity.

CIRCA 2009:

Attested to large-scale skywriting at the Secret Garden Party.

CIRCA 2009:

A six song album by The Flood – recorded through binaural earphones – is made available to listen to on Soundcloud. It was recorded years earlier and contains a lyric about plugging the senses into the mains.

2010:

Attested to pint glass exploding from thin air in the capital, much like someone else also present at the face of stars had in time before me.

2010:

Noticed the witness’s name was stamped on Piper At The Gates of Dawn as if some kind of proof – maybe a musical concept from back in the band days.

CIRCA 2011:

Got together with a mate and made a solo album called ‘Songs To Record With Earphones’ [Demo 3] is available on Soundcloud.

2013:

Project on healing the tape of a pause where cut and re-sealed in the reel became successful whereupon the tape was cooked in the dark blue AGA, top oven hottest one, to make it a valid work of art, and photographed and put online.

2013:

Built The Tower of magic books like one emanating the smell of redolent flowers or Flora’s perfume and another missing a line it once had.

2013:

Computer screen bloomed a numinous purple light that filled the room. Worked at said screen almost constantly, writing.

2014:

Upon the loss of my father, I discovered a sheet where pictures grew. Pictures seem to depict the lyric from an old song from Oedipus Wrecks, London band from 1998, though the sheet belongs to my brother James P D Tucker possibly as part of a deal my dad made.

2015:

Wrote poem that falsifies the Nirvana barcode, which I made to be the beat of Scentless Apprentice by Nirvana tapped out in approximate barcode shape using the tool of the qwerty keyboard.

2015 – 2023:

Published several books, some of which were un-published later. The first was Rose Petals In The Ashtray, but I un-published it. The problem was that for some mysterious reason my computer died on the night of publication so I couldn’t even get the cover I wanted let alone the text. I crept downstairs to my mother’s ancient desktop and threw together some half-remembered scraps. Not only that but I didn’t know the meaning of the title, which my dad gave me. Things haven’t recovered ever since. When I later-unpublished the book, I brought out some self-publications. The ones that are still available online are:

Binaural Songbook

57 Paintings For Art Therapy

The Field of Rock N Roll Science

John Tucker’s Schooldays: A Spreadsheet Poem

Another 57 Paintings for Art Therapy

The New Beat

The Effect of Global Warming On The Unicorn

Word For Stained Glass Windows

154 Shakespearean Sonnets

2023:

New band with a mate - Funnelspirals - have changed name to Black Hole Myths and put a new E. P. on Grant’s Bandcamp page.

2023:

Started to record some of my back catalogue of songs for Bandcamp.

2023:

Brought out a book of song lyrics called Soundcloud Rain with Chipmunka. It is classed as a “Sound Art experiment into secret chord H” in that I sat with my songs on a file and heard the voice of Hannah telling me how to arrange them and did what she said and published the book before finding out it wasn’t really Hannah. It includes the falsification of the Nirvana barcode.

2023:

Brought out seven year old scribblings as The Sunset Child. As stated it performs several scientific functions including storing the idea of the net in writing in the attic.

2024:

Organised some recent recordings for Bandcamp. There are several albums up there now.

2024:

Brought out a new book with Chipmunka, called Breath Trapped In Heaven, comprised entirely of love poems. The idea is that including only love poems, literature may have started to release or disinhibit serotonin.

2024:

Brought out a fourth Chipmunka book, called Brave New Tense. The idea is that to write off the top of your head about your current, current situation with a New Beat, no-edits policy you can Tap the beck in the back garden here where the stars re-align.

2024:

Retracted the fourth Chipmunka book Brave New Tense from publication.

2024:

It turned out that the binaural earphones on which The Flood recorded were my own idea to invent back in the den in the barn in 2000.

2024:

Sat in the same chair as yesterday, working at the same laptop as yesterday, on the same vexed, age old questions as yesterday, wondering why, wishing I had done enough.

2024:

Considered the entirety of the data-tree, the 1000’s of files, the inchoate morass, the virtual Brainforest as the ultimate work of art and the truth as to what I had really done.

2024:

Brought out Brave New Tense again.

2025:

Realised I didn’t know how old I was. Thinking I was 43, I turned out to be 42. Wondered how long it had been like this.

2025:

Thought of all I had left out: every access of wonder, inscape of wings, piece of pollen in the pollen count, visionary proclivity.

2025:

Still, tried to be at peace.

2025:

Even just putting the sheet where pictures grew along with the set list of the band Oedipus Wrecks on Blogspot page, I feel like I am about to die and have to take them down. There was a stage where not only that was up there, but a photo of the tape, proof of the purple bleeding screen, hyperlink to the binaural recordings – and more – and it was the same then – heart trouble. It may be that I don’t get to share scientific information online.

2025:

The Oedipus Wrecks set-list + sheet where pictures grew has gone back online. The presentation therein has been described as “The God of Trons.” A tron could be a point of intersection between technology and art or a post-poetic experiment with a psycho-technological edge. Presenting the sheet like I have would probably be what a famous scientist would do having discovered the sheet.

2025:

Sat back wondering what else could possibly be done.

2025:

Took the pictures down again because my brother says my old friends only want them up there so that the pictures can belong to the New Red City. I believe the sheet still belongs to the person that laid it down and that is my brother even if the pictures depict the lyric to an Oedipus Wrecks song.

2025:

Put the piece back on the Blogspot page. The sheet + Oedipus Wrecks lyrics is a piece called ‘The Wasted Ship.’

2025:

Still had to take ‘The Wasted Ship’ (and everything else up there) down from the blog again.

2025:

Returned to philosophy, with a gift administered by the apothecary: to start with a CV, then turn inward, think.

2025:

Brought out Transition To Philosophy, also Transition To Philosophy Volume Two, also Transition To Philosophy Volume Three under the name Johannes Bergfors.

SHOPPING LIST

Here and now and real and feeling in this solipsistic kitchen of fiction in the hour after dawn, we’ve started a shopping list:

instant coffee

tea (gold blend)

milk

bread.

There will be other things put on it in time. It could be a list of all the things we cannot have if I publish another book at my own expense! It could also be the simplicity the other side of the complex. Water is a very English concern… if I write off the top of my head about my current situation do I not Tap the beck in the back discretely? Yes I do. What else could go on our list?

Strawberry jam

chocolate mousse

All these (in)essential things are going on the list. Then someone else other than myself will drive to the local town Millom, three miles away, and buy them, probably on my bank card, for that is one way I like to pull my weight. I also do a lot of washing up for nothing; and how quickly the kitchen gets messy again too!

My father used to say “Order is Happiness” and was big into lists. He had a file for almost everything in life. He complained that the let-handed people he lives with were messy but they are simply more creative, using the other brain hemisphere. The whole of reading and writing in English at least is geared towards the right handed. It’s why a lot of really intelligent and creative left-handers fail to do well at school but show great genius when school’s out, when they can be free – witness my brother James who designed the sheet where pictures grew. You can’t take that away from him, even if the pictures depict my song lyric.

A few months ago when I was reading the Tao of Physics I started a list myself. Although it was soon abandoned, I would like to copy and paste it in, so we can inspect it like yesterday’s horoscope, for accuracy.

THE BUDDHA OF BLACK COMBE

1

“So” would be a good way to start, but what we do not yet know, only that it could be instructive for it to start with “so.”

2

It is night, but soon it will be dawn. I was reading The Tao of Physics one moment; then went looking for the original Tao in among the groaning shelves, to submit myself to wisdom, and though I failed to get it, found Jack Kerouack’s Scripture of the Golden Eternity. I read it, all in one go, while pacing in a circle round the table in the kitchen. Soon I’ll be telling you I’m a Bodhisattva.

3

I can tell you my vocabulary of Eastern words is expanding again…

lila means “the activity of the Divine”

maya originally means “magic creative power” but became bastardised, came to mean “Goddess of Illusion”

karma means “action”

moksha means “liberation”

yoga means “to join” as in soul with God

duhkha means “suffering or frustration” w/r/t/ the transience of everything

trishna means “clinging or grasping”

samsara is the wheel of suffering as most will know

nirvana is the liberation from it as you will also likely know

sutras are scriptures of huge dimensions

sunyata is the void

tathata is suchness

bodhi is true enlightened wisdom

prajna is transcendental wisdom

Karuna is love or compassion

Dharmakaya is “the body of being” and pervades all things in the universe and is reflected in the mind as bodhi

4

By now and as promised day breaks. Birds sing in trees, which oxygenate the garden. Wishing to collate a little book of wisdom, my writing reflects my recent reading. Here would be valid cause for making a claim for the benefits of reading. In neuro-science they say “if it fires it wires,” meaning that when you read it changes the synapses of your brain, which branch out to deal with new information.

5

Having started with the word ‘so’, I can also tell you that there was another option. That is, I still remember long ago, in the little blue bedroom here at the magnetic, telluric and gravitational foot of the oldest fell, writing a miniaturist masterpiece in early teenage years:

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

It could be seen as the starting point of something, but I do not wish to be didactic, Homiletic, parabolic or Hellenising in my approach to you, dear, gentle audience made of waves.

6

I was a fan of Kurt Cobain in those days. Some time after, I got into the Doors. As I may have said, I drew two, large, dilated, overlapping circles, one for the Known and one for the Unknown, and said the oval-shaped bit in the middle, where they clapped and overlapped, that was labelled “the area of self.” It doesn’t strike me that this map is still valid.

7

When in teenage years I wrote the words:

“Atman is Brahman

as the sun is its light,”

it was an essentially atheistic statement; was but a teenager being wilful, froward and wrong-headed. Still, I was interested in spiritual matters, in the truth. In the same piece I wrote the following words:

“Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that Heaven sends is rain).”

It strikes me as a rather good bit or byte. That whole passage of writing proved you could survive an apocalypse of the ego, which I knew on LSD before I had even left school.

8

Soon enough I became quite philosophical in my notebook (a distractionary), while writing about words: “Words, words, words. What are words? These are words. Words in this epistemology I would say are useful tools associated with the instinct to survive. Man is words and ‘man’ is a word and words draw bridges across metaphysics and words make connections between first and third persons. Words are also a great bandwagon of falsity we must presume is not false in order to make life easier. Words are, well, ONLY words.”

10

I went on to consider “sentient air” as a development in the world. My ideal for verse was Excellent News. I was New Beat.

11

That was then and this is now. Here is where I live. At the foot of Black Combe. Here nature is an art exhibition. The true architecture of State. A Buddhist would say to always live in the now and here and real and feeling. The dawn is a foggy one. Monastic mist covers the fell. Everything seems very watery.

12

I love dawns like these… I love this particular dawn, I mean. Even just boiling the kettle on the AGA, to make black tea, is a privilege here at this monastic retreat. Even a laptop can be involved in a spiritual awakening. Even a brother that doesn’t believe in God.

13

My friend says to open a third category. In schizo-affective disorder, when you’re up it’s symptoms of psychosis associated with schizophrenia and when you’re down it’s mood-based symptoms associated with bipolarity and manic depression. My friend says call the third category spirituality. He might be round today!

14

I’ve been up the fell sooooooooooooooooo many times now. A white witch in the village who used to proof-read for a local poet said that the foothill of Black Combe (Sea Ness) used to be Seer Ness after a seer and his trance. It could be me with all the things I see (and foresee). I also heard it was St. Patrick who used to pray here. When you’re having a spiritual awakening, there’s a lot on offer in this modern world. You needn’t divvy out the sects and cults individually, precluding the totality of spiritual awareness. You needn’t subscribe to only a narrow view.

15

I no longer subscribe to the derangement of the senses to attain the Unknown.

16

A broken letter on your keyboard can mean you have to slow down, and that is always good advice in spiritual matters. Presently I am copy and pasting in my ‘n.’ I hope going slower I can cure the jotto-mania of the myriad mind, the monkey-mind, that sometimes sees me writing way too much way too often.

17

Like some meditation teachers you come across, I was first drawn to it to freshen up after drug experiences. I later heard that to use meditation as therapy is wrong. That was before my illness. I used to meditate every day. It was mixed in with detox, large-scale reading, dreamwork and exercise, like a counter-Rimbaudian program of self-help, or like training for the Strange Olympics. There followed my fall.

18

A wood-pigeon flies past the window. Going from right to left, it could be like that “invisible sheet music” the mystic sees, going against the grain of Western music, indicating a more holistic music.

19

My mother has awoken. She is retiring today after a long career of slogging her guts out in the Care industry for next to no money. She says gnomic things… “the brain only heals when it’s asleep and even nightmares are healing.” “Life is not about being a genius but hard graft day in day out.” “Imagination is a muscle.” “Language is a creature.” I am soooooooooooooooooo happy for her to be retiring! After all these years of work! The problem is going to be funds, paying for what we now know is the star alignment house.

20

Stay alert to the danger. Beware life passing you by. Christ is passionate, Buddha dispassionate. Christ is red, Buddha blue. Sometimes you see a collared dove in the garden, sometimes a crow. Definitely turn the light off when you leave the room. Remember as Syd Barrett sang “action brings good fortune.”

21

Freedom flows… and it’s the last thing I write before falling asleep. Waking late into the afternoon, I am drugged on heavy meds. My friend is here. We drink tea and play guitar. We light mum’s fire. She is working her last ever shift. When she gets back she’ll like to see a fire lit, lambent, flagrant, lithe flames dancing… she’ll likely have a drink too. The wind outside meanwhile is a lone wolf. Darkness has fallen. It’s not good to get up in the dark and sleep the day.

22

A new day. Wake up. Log on the brain with food and tea (tea no sugar) before you insufflate the acrid fume of the Vape pen. If you see the bin needs emptying, take it upon yourself to do that. If there is washing up to be done, take it upon yourself to do that. You might then find a quiet lull, an inviting abeyance, where you can pause a while and smile, feeling better about yourself, and have a cup of tea (tea no sugar). Today is the first day of your mum’s retirement after all. Treat her kindly.

23

Remember also to take your medication. Sometimes literature can be a machine for remembering to take your medication. If the act of taking medication seems against your religion, you are not alone, but should remember that people with real mental illness positively like taking their meds, and these seemingly irreconcilable opposites can be reconciled. It was surely you who vociferated loudly in hospital that the nature of visionary experience is not amenable to the dialectic of sickness and recovery, to sterile medicalese, and that one’s sickness is more congenial than one’s health unto those in charge of one’s health for monetary reasons, meaning Big Pharma companies who can with-hold a cure until the price is right – but now you understand the illness is not a conspiracy!

24

You also used to say no true poet could be on Western medication because a poet is a translator of feelings and the feelings you get on chemicals are all fake. More recently you see you should plug in, that the science works! That you shouldn’t harbour new-age, mysticism-tinged, hippy beliefs like those anymore.

25

Eating the flesh of a pear, I think deserves a haiku, but I am only a neophyte. I enter now the chatterbox hours, talk about how my Universal Credit is still pending. My brother bought some lemons a while back, so many of them too – like product placement advertising the light of spring to come. He’s intelligent like that, my bro, left-handed, creative, and is right about the lemony light. In my books I never found a voice or got it right. I start to drift off, thinking about the past. I heard a voice say they preferred it when I was a blue not a red. In fact they said everyone prefers it that way. I am thinking of a haiku to do with lemony light. It blows my hair about.

26

I finished The Tao of Physics and got back to Sartre… the former says (however) that the void is alive, full of life and there is therefore no such thing as “nothingness.” Sartre comes round to agreeing. The existence of the question implies the ability to negate; the ability to negate implies the existence of non-being or Nothingness – which is not - (he says.) That’s as far as I got with that before I put it down.

TEA

Upon reading back through those notes from months ago, the first thing I do is look for green tea, and finding some, put the kettle on. My father when he retired from art dealing found a role here as a chinwagging tea-hag of Time, inviting his mates round to just chew the fat and drink tea. He was a failed writer – and I was going to say “like me” but we don’t know that. I still have a chance and more to the point we live in an age of self-publication where failure and success are not the same as they once were. The kettle boils as I write, and I think how success is just indoctrinating as many people with your marketing as is possible – how there is nothing meritocratic to making it in music or writing either way.

Now thinking that if philosophy is best when it is tea it is also best when specifically organic pure green tea, I sip on the very substance in question and try to capture nothing, try to not escape, try to not waft up into realms of fantasy. As for my dad, 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 a list of French vocab earlier posited, and 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 being on the left. For example imagine if the left was a beautiful, compassionate emotion to explore. I think it is, but don’t want to be naive about it.

From ‘BRICKS’

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 up 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.

NOW THAT I HAVE READ LUCRETIUS

Lucretius was a Latin poet who was writing about atoms in a world before Christ. His remit was to lead people out of superstition and into the light of science. Though the content of his science is both derived from Epicurus and also by modern standards imperfect, Lucretius made it his business to use poetry to soften that blow; to render the content in beautiful word-forms. If it was written in verses originally, the translation is a prose poem, with no line-breaks. I read it patiently and thoroughly until the end where I rushed a bit, merely scanning or skim-reading. Truth be told, I was told I should read it before I start trying to be a philosopher; but I read other things instead, on the way to Lucretius.

I already wrote of my reading journey in the first volume of Transition To Philosophy and since then have only continued reading; and now I’ve read On The Nature of the Universe by Lucretius, it’s difficult to know what to say without spoiling it for a fellow reader.

I know my father read it, my father who has died, and read it before I was born – so that is something going on in the background, if I am to go about “reading reading.” The science fails to impress by today’s standards, but seems a previous draft of modern science from thousands of years ago, focussing on some of the same themes; so it’s actually amazing how much they knew or thought they knew, or convinced themselves they knew. You have to remember when you read it that in those days they weren’t even sure if the sun was literally re-made every morning or not. I felt that once Lucretius had absorbed the idea of the atom from the Greek teachers, he went overboard with it, applying it to every phenomenon going. They thought sight was explained by objects emitting a stream of atoms. In other words the science is crude but for its day it was way ahead of the game. The goal of Epicureanism is tranquillity and Lucretius is often found saying wise things about how man should live, with a quiet mind guided by philosophy, without need of violence. I think a compare and contrast between Lucretius and a modern Italian physicist called Carlo Rovelli who wrote a really good book called Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey To Quantum Gravity – would be a good subject. I’ve read them both but am not volunteering!

PASTA

James says there are still loads of flies in the kitchen. They have come back. I am trying to keep to new stuff philosophically but going round and round in circles, meanwhile, at least being partially recursive if not wholly, while James is in the kitchen chopping bacon. If it’s what I want to do, be a philosopher, who would stop me? I’ve never really read any writer consecutively apart from Enid Blyton and the Hardy Boys when I was a kid, also Martin Amis during my degree but my brother James read the whole of Terry Pratchett. Is that why he works in the way he does, with 20 different books at once? With me I can have 20 files open but they are all angrily channelled into the same outcome, all supposed to be one book, and just become recursive. Now for the recycling bin I go outside and dispose of some rubbish for at our mother’s request we are green. Now I have been left with a plate of delicious pasta. James has left the room, that is, leaving me with the delectable carbonara; and I think he thinks philosophy is pasta. I also think where this has gone wrong is dictating truth – the scene in the barn – because as Wittgenstein says philosophy is not a dogmatic set of creeds but a process of elucidation. Still, one is allowed in ordinary speech to speak one’s mind. It’s just the ossification of the written word narrows things down a bit. Being told what is right, what is the truth, can be tiresome. Not just that but feelings are as important as thoughts, if not more so. So here I am having now made it via reading Lucretius to the world of philosophy and what have I to say but not much? I spoke too soon, perhaps, in bringing out previous volumes, and have left myself little to say. It is a learning process though. Any physicist who holds the same beliefs all his life has not made a breakthrough.

I start to read about whether A. I. is scheming against us in an online magazine and James comes back into the kitchen. I tell him mum and I really enjoyed our food and thanked him for it. I told him I covered up the rest of the pasta in case of flies but that I didn’t think flies were interested in pasta. He says he thinks they might be, takes some more food, covers it again and leaves the room. I write it down like a recording angel, a New Beat poet trying to record everything, but quite soon there’s just myself, the laptop, and the kitchen, with the kitchen clock tick tocking and an occasional car passing by outside. So far I would say my achievement has been to attain a transition to philosophy from the creative arts, through autodidactic reading, culminating in a reading of Lucretius. I would not say the logical systematisation of my life’s events to a series of scientific results has been the achievement but I dabbled with that a bit. Do I already regret the transition to philosophy series of books? I wonder if it would be better had there been only one, but am not too disheartened. To use the modern parlance I would say it’s even been sick.

I can’t remember off the top of my head what I’ve been writing about in these books but would like to stress that it’s good to be kind. People shouldn’t go about cursing people or if you accept a more scientific term hypnotising people to do ill. You should always be kind. Even when I lived like a nomad or even tramp in Cambridge, the Rimbaudian days, I was kind. If I had an eighth – and even if it was my last money – I’d share it out. So it is that I tell both James and mum they have never done anything to me they need to apologise for, and that we should stay friends and be nice to each other. Even now when I am quite frankly handicapped by both mental illness and egregious amounts of medication that blocks the creative spark, I would say to be kind is the answer. Leonard Cohen says “you who wish to conquer pain must learn what makes me kind.” This reminds me of my dreams last night, where a kind friend was teaching me how music can be a form of sex. I woke early, angry for some reason, went back to bed and dreamt of James. He’s been in my dreams a lot recently but I don’t want to expand on this at leisure. I want to re-evaluate my position. There is no such thing as mind cancer; and I have made the transition to philosophy from the creative arts by reading, culminating in a reading of Lucretius and now I am thinking of further reading. Wittgenstein never read much philosophy but was a genius at it. I might need to read a bit more, and the answer could be Russell, which is, give or take a few popular books, where my philosophy reading started.

Anyhow, there are calves in the field, munching blind on grass; and flies in the kitchen, and I love my friends and family. I even love this place of quiet contemplation where there is no Burger King. Place can ossify, brainrot, rootedness but I do still love it here. I can’t go anywhere so have to make the most of it and that’s what I am doing. The idea of a philosophy book coming from this place at the gravitational, magnetic and telluric foot of the oldest fell sounds grand even grandiloquent as an idea but it’s not really like that. It’s just a man and his ideas, getting them down in various ways, trying to cling to some sense of a philosophical tradition, but veering off course regularly. I heard it said that even the best philosophy doesn’t come into most people’s lives; that most lives are untouched even by Wittgenstein. I still find it a good thing to be doing, and might get to reading Russell tonight.

ON WISHING I HAD LESS

Someone in the Bunch knows my teenage mnemonic for the guitar strings was “Even A Dick Gets Big Erections,” reckons it’s a logical system, and recommends an album of instrumentals accompanied by a text of defaced bank note poems. It’s very tempting but I just sorted all the music out and the instrumentals are largely staggered across a series of other albums.

I remember when I was at a certain age all I had was a tape with a pause where resealed in the reel, and a four line poem, maybe a few pages of a tough diary too. Later all I had was the Oedipus Wrecks set list of about 8 numbers. Later still all I had was a DIY “mushroom” magazine at school and a single by Secret Chord H used as a radio jingle. Later still – after the terrible LSD trip – all I had was a 6-song album recorded by the Flood on a pair of binaural earphones. Now I wonder if I still have any of what I used to have and if not what I do have, having to have something. I know I have the voices and the illness, plus a CV laden with miraculous things. I reckon there are 16 books in print and 9 albums online at this present moment. I also like to count things in the room if that counts!

If I decided to only have an album of instrumentals and the defaced bank note poems I’d never be able to get rid of the rest of it whether it exists in memory, in meaning, in physicality or however. I am starting to empathise with Michael Hofmann, when he sat in the last carriage of the train regretting every move he made. What have I achieved? The melted tape? The binaural earphone album? When I first went into arduous training like the poets of old would when they wanted to provide the property ‘fir’ for the king, I dreamt of flying to the Isle of Man to pick up a collection made of chocolate and the shape of a remote control from a white gardening table. The Isle of Man became a recurring motif in dreams, where we would play football, or visit cannabis cafes that only sold THC free stalks.

Now I cast my mind back to my degree – the period after my illness started – and how much time has elapsed since then – and my youth flown – and looking into the centre of things I feel like uttering “the terror! The terror!” for that is partially the feeling of it. The Bunch are baying again. And I can’t stop writing, and am not in a position to be able to afford another vanity-press publication, and even if I could there are several options across several fields that all might be as good as the other but which will just end up sitting in the box they come in, getting unread. Unless there is value to having something on Amazon, meaning posthumous fame, Van Gogh style, I can’t see the point in vanity-presses right now. We don’t know what to do when we need to be in with it anymore. A writer can also find himself so alienated and exiled that he is the audience to the piece he is supposed to be presenting.

I’ll tell you a secret: I recently took an O. D. the likes of which it was genius to survive but coming down from the chemical equations of it all lost the ability to ejaculate. The girls say if I haven’t got the juice for them I am gay. What a turn up at 43; and yet living here it isn’t going to make any difference either way. It would just be more lonely if I was gay than before when I was straight and yet didn’t even glean a kiss for about ten years in the best years of my life. What a lonely old place.

So here I am living in this privileged spot at the foot of the fell where the Plough alignment works – and believe you me it is staggering to behold – and I am skint, single, mentally ill, unemployed, carless, childless, heavily medicated and living with my mother. Even if we moved to Ulverston, the hippy town of the north, I would probably stay indoors all the time and regret the move and wish I was still in the middle of the sticks, the peace and quietude I know here. I scarcely have any friends – one is my mother’s age though age doesn’t matter – and another who I thought was a friend turned out to be evil and the kind of guy that goes round placing curses on innocent people, and worse things too which I shall not mention.

Now, this not being able to ejaculate – it means I cannot masturbate, or rather, if I do, it is a dry, mute stump dumbfounded where before was a fountain. I still get attracted to women on TV if they are attractive and know the suffering of desire too, like in the old days but can no longer consider myself part of the meat market so to speak.

And talking against this place meanwhile I feel like I am cursing God! So that’s not good. I am just rather lonely and have only my brother and my mother for company, whom I love dearly. This not being able to masturbate is quite srs. I never thought of myself as being attractive when naked, quite the opposite, but now I am also delivered from the art of love – but not quite. I still have love in my heart which is where the days end and start. My feelings of late have been cramped in by fear. Mental hospital was a near death experience last time but I don’t wish to go on about it. Still there is a sense of love in my big, helpless heart, and I look forward to meeting my sister’s baby daughter too.

I think about which book to read: a biography of Nick Drake, or Bertrand Russell’s Basic Writings, or Frank O ‘ Hara. I can do all of it you see, at least music, philosophy and poetry but get the impression poetry is dead – in fact that it’s all dead. So I subsist, part of the breathe eat sleep shit fuck die model of man, except without the fucking. Nobody cares for what I write nor do I necessarily seek approval. I’m never going to have a partner to read to, to curl up next to, to address.

As for attaining philosophy it is likely a sham – likely that I just read some Wittgenstein and fell in love with a daydream, without full understanding even of what he was saying, and started to emulate him nevertheless. I am no more philosophical than Joe Bloggs down the pub talking about his car. I am half-Finnish so get deep-thinking from my mother’s side but the leap to philosophy is likely a sham as I say.

If all you need to do is read Lucretius that I have but I am still going round and round with songs and poems never quite sure of my place or who I am, who I am meant to be, what my role is, my voice. It was probably vanity that drew me to writing the way I wrote the recent series of philosophy books. I keep expecting life to provide answers to these basic questions in insane vexation but all I get is medicine to suppress and placate symptoms of erratic nature.

Yet never before have I felt so clear. Never do I feel so clear as when it is all dead and we ourselves are waiting to die. I lie back, still fearing situations I have been in in the past, even here, song going through my head, mind mindlessly counting sections of the lamp shade, and say to myself I will make a stand, plant a flag, penetrate enough to say something true and there is nothing more forthcoming than the fact that I have endured srs drug abuse in the past. I was actually thinking for a second there, thinking about Paul, who would, if it wasn’t for the weed we smoked, be the first port of call in gaining a foothold in the adult world: a friendship that once was so strong and no longer seems to matter one bit. The centre has thus collapsed.

The Bunch sound out again. I miss what they are saying, lying there trying to get both my braincells to combine. There should be no such thing as an absent minded philosopher. Reading the state of one’s own human condition is relentless. I say a quiet quick prayer and my thoughts turn to sex afterwards. Huge is the universe and we are but blips. Life is but a meaningless blip. The cosmos doesn’t care for philosophy. The mind is a spec of dust in the cosmic order. The Universe is indifferent to the workings of the mind. I like to lie here in the vampiric hours, the wee hours, listening to the weather slide and swoop and sway away outside the windowpane.

I hear my mother awake at 4 Am, fretting, as I too fret over my family’s safety. Seeking a chemical cure I could go downstairs and get some sleeping pills. The story of my life can only partially be told in terms of preserving the miracles, the good things and not talking about the bad.

PIPE DOWN NOW JOHN

I mentioned this in Soundcloud Rain (by John Tucker), that book of songs: I still remember my coming to consciousness, my clicking awake and aware. We were on holiday in a resort called Brockwood Hall in Whicham Valley, Cumbria; and were sitting round the breakfast table eating Cornflakes. I found not one but two plastic yellow submarines in the Cornflakes box – so it was a lucky box – and my mum said “you like ‘Yellow Submarine’ don’t you John?” and I said the enormous roadgoing YES. Just like that I clicked awake and aware. So my earliest memory and my coming to consciousness are the same moment. I realised I had to start trying to understand what my father was talking about because his speech, unlike my mum’s, was just a kind of microphone static.

People can’t believe that I can remember this far back to my earliest consciousness but I can. It was saying YES to mum’s question where I pinged awake, clicked on. It’s funny that English is my mother’s third language and I could understand her better than I could my father for whom English was the first language. This is where I could launch into a Proustian memoir but I won’t. I think about words – whether a word is a tool. Whether or not a word is the basic unit of meaning. Whether words denote, signify, anything intrinsically. That first word YES invited an endless torrent of words, a chain reaction of ineluctable process.

I seem to remember being only allowed to play with one of the plastic yellow subs, with one being saved for later. My dad used to say “pipe down now John” as if I were going by periscope to his dying days. He might’ve known I clicked awake and aware at that breakfast table too. I wonder now if I actually had the words for “microphone static” as my father’s speech was interpreted in that same chalet that breakfast time at Brockwood Hall. I am a bit of a strange one because I was born with an erection and both my parents agreed I was a bat. James my younger brother said I wasn’t born without talent but what my talents are I can not say.

Whether or not I was born the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures I do not know. There was possibly a vacuum to fill to that end. As I have said I have come to believe it my dad’s business, but am not sure – he was always very secretive about how he made his money. It is possible he was sponsored by some philosophers to use me as a witness when I was young. I am sure I mentioned this in a previous volume. I guess the sad thing is now I will never know.

A MODEST SELF-APPRAISAL

You might get the impression from reading my Transition To Philosophy books that I am quite taken by the works of Wittgenstein. I wonder what my grandparents would make of this though. I watched a video tonight that said he fought with the Germans against the Allies. When later he decided education was the remedy for civilised worlds turning barbaric, and went into teaching, he used to hit children. I suppose it’s the same as in poetry where we are taught not to read the author’s life but the author’s work. Wittgenstein’s work does seem brilliant… but there are holes in it I think. Like him I am turning out to be an ordinary speech philosopher, but I do a lot more besides.

I reread the first volume of Transition To Philosophy last night and was happy with it. The second and third volumes are also published but for some reason the second volume is not being sold as a book on Amazon yet. I am looking into it – it might be because I included a zany diagram that is difficult for mass printing to reproduce. I am not too displeased with the three volumes so far, anyhow. But I do wonder if this posture as a philosopher is a sham.

It might be that I never publish this present fourth volume.

There is a problem in the argument for Descartes’s position about the mind. I said that because we have a word for it we know the mind exists. I was saying the mind is separate from the physical world because we know there is no such thing as mind cancer – but don’t we already have a word for mind cancer? So it cannot be true absolutely that if we have a word for something it definitely exists. So therein I have falsified my own notion, or else applied Cartesian doubt to it.

I hear by now I should be getting right down into the ‘id’ but I’ve got a feeling I am “distracted from distraction by distraction,” as TS Eliot put it.

THE THEORY OF DARK EVOLUTION

Russell says it is better to posit a scientific theory even if it’s wrong than not to posit one; but at the same time there are certain scientific theories that may be right which would still be best not to posit. I wonder of my own Theory of Dark Evolution. It is a difficult theory that says James Joyce saw new creatures too, and his writing Ulysses about it becomes the reason Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river in childhood, and his writing The Hawk In The Rain becomes the reason Jim Morrison saw winged serpents in the desert on acid who we know is not flaccid; and his writing The Lords And The New Creatures then becomes the reason I saw not one but two. The theory posits a Logical Bond between Narrative and Naturalistic Observation in that what one writer writes about his Naturalistic Observations affects what the next observer in the chain sees. So it might be okay to posit this scientific theory even if the theory is wrong; but it might be the case that the theory is right and it is still not correct to go ahead and posit it! It’s something I brought up years ago in a self-publication called The Field of Rock N Roll Science by John F B Tucker.

This is where I would need to know more about my dad and his business. One theory states that it happened to be me because Jim Morrison wrote “a creature waits out the war” and my dad sold his international art dealing business at the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, the art dealing story may have been a lie: The Lords And The New Creatures might’ve been the actual business. He may, as I have suggested, have been sponsored by some philosophers to use me as witness. In short I am this deep in to my own philosophical investigations and I don’t know the first thing about my own subject which is my dad’s job. I believe if the theory I have articulated is true it is a stunning theory that radically alters the way we see literature.

It used to be a known thing in the poetry world that Ted Hughes, who was Poet Laureate, did see a monster in the river in his childhood; but these days A. I. is programmed to deny it, as it is the other Naturalistic Observations I mention. It doesn’t even accept James Joyce. Hence you can search the internet for evidence and find none. So I suppose poetry and its insinuation becomes ever more valuable. It is interesting that so far in the Theory of Dark Evolution it is always an English-speaking country and a different one every time. One does wonder if it is going to happen again or if the main fact of our time is that the chain has become extinct. The end of ‘Bike’ by Pink Floyd is a bird with skin of snake and to say the end of ‘Bike’ is extinct seems quite a comment to make. I would hesitate before saying anything else, and might indeed need to take a vow of silence hereafter.

REALITY CHECK

Things are sometimes fraught between my brother and I and it feels necessary to write about it. James is someone that enjoyed the most expensive education money can buy and never showed a droplet of promise at a single subject or got a single A. For him to turn out the family genius by warrant of doing 2 doodles, and because he is left-handed, would be boring, but that is how he wants it to be.

I regret getting involved with <BEE>. There was someone – an interlocutor – that got me to arrange my songs according to the new da Vinci circle and now I’m not free to change it. Not only that but I don’t even get intellectual property of my own songs because of <BEE>.

So going with <BEE> ruined my musical career where if we go to Bandcamp we see a protracted and awful series of albums where condensing the material to one good album would’ve been possible. Should I neglect to help him make something of <BEE> I would feel guilty so I can’t get rid of it.

Then I included <BEE> again in my fresh start as a philosopher because the sheet where pictures grew is one of my own scientific discoveries, and now I have to do everything with James’s permission and the whole thing has become an act of slavery. I regret even hearing of <BEE> which has never turned me on and seek a way out of this awkward situation.

It’s not just my musical career that has been ruined by <BEE> but I am no longer free to use lyrics that went into it as poems, so my poetry career has been ruin’d too. If for example <BEE> leaves me feeling this unfree it cannot be any good. If for another example I put all my songs in a book and because they are structured according to the new da Vinci circle they are no longer my songs then again <BEE> can’t be any good.

The mathematicians I know from University find my seven year old work into the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark to be far more interesting. Again it is with a sense of guilt that I relay this, because my brother is my brother and I love him, and I don’t want to bully him or say that he’s stupid like my dad used to say. Maybe I just needed for my own personality to be included in the work? One’s work should focus on one’s own capacity for genius, and if <BEE> precludes that in me I don’t like it. I start to fear that there has been some kind of movement to systematically destroy all my works and that my brother is part of it. I still feel I haven’t achieved a good number and it might not be too late. I wonder what it would be like if I had freedom over my own songs. I could arrange a sprechstimme album, and an album of instrumentals.

It doesn’t mean I hate my brother, doesn’t mean he is not a genius, for if I had designed the sheet where pictures grew I might consider myself one; it’s just that I don’t wish for him to be doing the driving. I’ve got enough to be getting on with, for as you know by now I helped invent the net at seven, was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures twice, went through the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, attained the face of stars, spoke against September 11th in 2000 and wrote the highest marked A-level exam essay in the nation and that’s all before leaving school. I needn’t go on for you will know it all already. In fact I shall say after school I did record an album on binaural earphones, get a First despite mental illness, host the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, work the numinous, purple-bleeding PC screen, build the Tower out of magical books as an instrument of philosophy, conduct an experiment into a tape with a pause where resealed in the reel, and discover the sheet where pictures grew. I then falsified the Nirvana barcode in writing and attained visual radio broadcasting dreams and I didn’t earn 1p throughout that chain of events, was left alone with it all, and they have given Nobel Prizes for less and I don’t like the way I went through all that so that my brother could be remembered as the family genius. I heard it said by the Bunch that I was supposed to be the scientist behind the sheet where pictures grew and that it turning out to be my brother’s changed things. The lyric that the pictures depict goes:

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

It was about the sublimation of The Lords And The New Creatures into a singular, pronominal act of Romantic first person lyricism or ‘I’. I don’t think the guys that did it understood that, but to be honest I don’t know who did it, or why, or if it was my brother and I. Personally, I have been entrenched in heavy medication since the disappearing bandage act, which kind of precludes good work, but my brother is working on a masterpiece. He’s not only doing the driving in my own philosophy but expects to be working on a masterpiece without my influence. It seems fair enough but I await James’s next number like I awaited the first, anticipating it to be good, and for all the females to flock and for my own sorry existence to continue getting ignored.

I suppose like Lennon said I’m just a jealous guy, but I also suppose I am generous in saying that, for it needn’t be the case. James does need a number and letting him have the sheet is only right as he laid it down. He is undeniably a genius but a very different one from me, being left-handed and therefore more creative. My dad used to say he even dreams creatively. I’m sorry James for this bit of the book. Keep being tremendous! You’ve never done anything to me you need to apologise for! I’m just confused!

DREAMWORK NOTATION

Last night in dreams I started writing a song with the line:

“I was walking through the clouds.”

The rest of the dream was an option for a second line. There were many options. I went back to University where the whole campus was out and crowded around and was offering help with options. Some of them came in the form of drugs. Some were written on the whiteboard. Whenever I chose an option, continued the song, everyone would find out. In another scene one of dad’s poet friends articulated two floating balls as the correct option. There were many scenes, bulging with options, bulging with medication, bulging with resolution in the dream. It was while I was singing that song in my dreams, a song which definitely elongated enough to be sung, that I felt free in dreamland. I did you know used to be a dreamworker, and a meditator, and an athlete, and a poet, and a scholar, and a self-helper, and a large scale reader, and more and many more. Dreamwork is great. Did you know we still inherit dreams of fighting wild packs of animals from ancestors that had to rehearse for the real live situation? Did you know in dreams there is no context? Did you know we are dreaming all the time except in sleep without sensory stimulus?

You can teach yourself to lucid dream and then take a further step towards a dream-meet. My dream-meet experiment didn’t tend to McDonalds though, but Heaven or the idea of Heaven where people took particles of dirt like drugs and got high off psychoactive dirt and chanted the mantra “drugs in secret, alchemy in the open, ultimate in effect.”

You can also learn to smuggle language out of the unconscious. I sometimes wonder if my best work is as Prof. David Morley says “lost on the shores of sleep.” The song in my dream last night, trailing its bulging offering of options for continuation, made me feel free and famous at once, like I was a star in the realm of dreams, like everyone knew me and knew my story, like I was a quiet household name, as familiar as dreams.

What happened last night was that I took a strong sleeping pill and started to write while it was having an effect of my brother and of <BEE>, very badly I think. I eventually got my anger off my chest and went to sleep and had one of those medicated dreams, full of homeostatic chemicals. I didn’t wake up until the evening and it is evening still. It was only a few hours ago that I woke and can only exclaim that I love my brother dearly, and that what I wrote yesterday was writing through the medium of the sleeping pill. We’re Shaggy and Scoob, James and I, and talk a lot about food. I wish I could flesh out the song in question too, now that it seems writ and rehearsed in dreams.

GO WITH THE FLO’

I was walking through the clouds,

with a song against my ear,

and when I made it through the crowds,

there was reason enough to cheer,

‘cause you were coming home,

yeah you were coming home,

and I just want say “hey! Go with the flo’!”

for you are such a beautiful one,

as beautiful as the English sun,

which so often tries to hide,

and we love you deep inside.

You’re coming with your mum and dad,

protected by a red guitar,

and though you’re uncle has gone mad,

you’re going to be a star,

‘cause you are coming home,

yeah you are coming home,

and I just want to say “hey! Go with the flo’!”

for you are such a beautiful one,

as beautiful as the English sun,

which so often tries to hide,

and we love you deep inside.