FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS INTO PHILOSOPHY

FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS INTO PHILOSOPHY

BY JOHANNES BERGFORS

PHILOSOPHY BY THIS AUTHOR

Transition To Philosophy

Transition To Philosophy Volume Two

THE ALIGNMENT

THE ALIGNMENT

Proposition 1

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 2

Metaphysics is the place where science and religion meet.

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 3

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 4

If the alignment is perfect, God is perfect too.

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 5

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 6

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 7

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 8

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 9

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 10

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 11

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 12

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 13

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 14

The universe may just be a very elegant place.

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 15

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

Explanation

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

*

Proposition 15

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

Explanation

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

THE STORY OF THE FLOOD

THE STORY OF THE FLOOD

I

PREAMBLE

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

II

MILLENNIAL PROPHECIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

MILLENNIAL PEN-KNIFE TOOLS

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

IV

AMBITIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To bring about simultaneous orgasm of Man.

V

BLUE

“You know how dad told us all

he was an art smuggler nicknamed Blue?

That he smuggled art over the Berlin Wall?

That he sold his business when

the Berlin Wall fell? Well,

I think it might’ve been code, art

might’ve been recourse to euphemism.

I think he was a pollen smuggler.

I think he had a pollen farm

way up high in the Moroccan

mountains and shipped tonnes

and tonnes of pollen to the States.

This whole art dealer nicknamed

Blue thing is just to protect us.

At least this is what I entertain.

I also think he named us after

The Doors, John, James, and Robert

and then they had a girl of course.

Have you noticed we are born

in a season each, going Spring,

Autumn, Winter, Summer, and

march right left right left in the hands?

There are also four compass

points, four seasons, four wheels

of a car and four dimensions

to the mapping of any point in

the spacetime continuum including

time. Now revolve that bifter!

After all I think Jesus himself

would be a proto-hippy stoner

poet in this day and age. Ah,

I love it when the Wizard of Oz

resolves into colour. There are

casual drug references all around us.

Mario mushrooms confer energy.

Tinkerbell’s dust makes you

fly. And in the Wizard of Oz

they lie down in the field of

poppies and see the Emerald City.

So hurry up passing that joint.

Otherwise we’ll never stop the war.”

VI

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE DYING OF CANCER

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

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

Blissful Lovingness is where all religions meet.

Better and worse are but materialistic, Western concepts.

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

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

The Age of Enchantment is an echo of The Enlightenment.

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

The opposite of something is the pre-requisite.

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

The condition of knowledge produces no Triumph.

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

When you lose your concentration you die.

Your ordinary speech is surreal enough.

There are too many words in the world.

Everything living shares the same heartbeat in a given lifespan.

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

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

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

Without difference no contradistinction.

Everyone is my brother and I love them.

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

There is no more mapless space.

Fear is an epiphany of Hell in the self.

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

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

Politics is a choice between two plates of dogshit.

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

Portability is the new apotheosis of Form.

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too.

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

VII

WHAT THE BAND WANTED

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

VIII

WHITE EYEBROW

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

IX

OUR SONG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X

HALFWARE

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

LOST MINIATURE DREAMS

LOST MINIATURE DREAMS

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

Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.

Necklace noose,

reckless truce,

drooling before

wet, electric eyes

My name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket.

(1998)

I’m the only one left,

left to shoot my own gun,

this is the dead land,

crack a smile and curse the sun.

There is joy in things

and smiles not grins like butter

but like butterflies.

Waves

[squiggle]

crossed the FTSE

[squiggle]

and the Helter-Skelter

[squiggle]

crashed in the electric-sea

[squiggle].

Blessed may be the end at last,

under the sea,

below the soul,

in the upside-down

Oceans above us

(all that heaven sends is rain.)

Down

down

down

down

down

deep

blue

below

“eh up,

mate,”

says my

mate

and is

it safe

to say

hello?

To plug my senses in the mains

might engage !00% of my brains,

but it’s gone wrong at the plug,

just a dream on a drug.

I felt a leaf,

I fell out of life,

probably no-one else knew.

A trance of stalks walks on stilts

like a stance on talks only to the toilet

then back to bed to rest its head

under the soft, Pink Panther blanket.

She blows a poisonous magic

searched the corridor for a

crash had no survivors in Soviet

be weed

Il faut que je m’en aille.

Sometimes you’ve just

got to hit the road and

Leaves that played on the surface of the water,

these are the leaves they have in Heaven,

these are the leaves of love.

Signed by everwell,

she couldn’t hit it sideways

or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman

with the hairgel of Dracula,

Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.

“Is there anything I can do to help?

Looks like I’m on washing up duty.

It’s fine I don’t mind washing up.

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

£34. 84 at the Take-away joint

can get you quite bloated,

not just quench’d and sated;

and by now I sit here wondering

just how much it cost.

My fingers have crashed,

my fingers have crashed

and my mad, crashed

fingers have connected.

A thesis as thin as the Rizla it’s in

can lead all the way to the loony bin,

can make you forget how to spell

Winnie the Pooh at the gates of Hell.

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

I remember when banks let pens go free.

Art gets to its feet like a cartoon Bambi.

Love has gone veggie for reasons of Disney!

The future is no longer what it used to be!

I still crave a greedy DogMuckels when

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

When Paul was talking of “McTruth”

I noticed a swarm of flies in the house.

Nobody else could even see them but me.

My mother calls the pills I pop “poetry

buttons” in motley conglomerations

like pool balls or songcells and

their names should not appear in poems.

Caroline is the last yellow crayon.

This could be the door to telepathy.

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

Under a blanket in the back of a car -

I think of it now I’ve got this far.

Alone in the solipsistic kitchen

whom it would seem is un-war-ful.

Walking down to the Irish Sea quite slowly

to see if my place in life is lowly

a dying animal goes much faster.

He found himself on a plane.

He found himself on a.

He found himself on.

He found himself.

He found.

P.

If dog = pi times MC squared

it is because you wish to think him round

while O is the key of water shared

when rolling round on the ground.

O for a Muse of fire that descends

from the brightest Heaven of invention;

Rintrah roars and shakes his icy fires

into the burdened air, breathing.

One night, Jim Morrison pointed up

at the night sky on LSD and said “look!

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

Barnes’s goal against Brazil,

it was was not born under a hill,

it is the best goal I’ve seen still,

Barnes’s goal against Brazil.

If the windows were washed – every one -

we’d still see nothing through them but

the white mirrors reaffirming the quiet

interior of this solipsistic kitchen of fiction.

Bart Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d

@ Van Goghian black border sun

heard James Joyce would just use |||| 4

ROYGBIV in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile

“I’ve been writing about bifters.

Hello my name is Pirripa.

[sound of sucking in of smoke.)

That’s my boyfriend.”

Now we are gathered to appoint the Gods,

now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves,

now we are gathered to ordain this dust,

we are gathered to live and to dream.

If you believe it, it is there,

naked under nearer stars,

softly swashing, backwashing music,

music in a room with no door.

A

A Yellow

A Yellow Pages

May dawn behead me

A Yellow Pages will suffice

A Yellow Pages will

Farewell my life

A Yellow

A

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the Soul w/ Demons,

H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for extra sensory allowance

but I for one still don’t really know

if Lucy even happens to be an actual substance.

I remember happy, sunny days,

days when we scored some weed and went

out in the meadows, when Paul

would turn to me and say

“wear an emotional condom

before you fuck my mind, man.”

Wouldn’t it be pollen

if Barnes has scored a chicken

and spring is a red horse?

Enough is the hope the heart

literally needs in order for it to survive

without which it can stop, meaning

Duff, which is H suspended in deafness

I cannot tell if sipping sugarless tea

or stretching honesty is the more easy

an encryption for the future that

ain’t what it used to be but I still

await the future with rapt uncertainty

and cannot stand the suspense.

We are the velvet e’s,

we’re shitting in Cuntington’s letterbox,

the Roman Rd below,

beneath us as we fly.

[enter bass organ of ‘The End’]

Butter is good when you’re a nutter,

but I can think of something that’s better,

so had better write her a letter.

Opened unto the gloom under

sliver moon I slide her over.

Semen spills like silver water.

We’re soon enough in the flotsam ether.

Forlorn as fallen autumn leaves,

is the wave that misbehaves,

goes out taking E at raves,

and soon enough no more believes.

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

underneath this new moon,

but might instead just impart,

it is because I have a heart.

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

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

HANNAH

HANNAH

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

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

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

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

The trumpet wears his foreskin on the inside.

There is an upturned canoe for a drum.

There is a dog for a frontman and

there are poppadom hi-hats in the band.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Light shafts in its distilled sleep.

The dead in tired dance circle the silence,

lingering fragile moments outside the quiet Quietus -

but wait, who dreamed me awake this time?

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

Not to renounce the past with rapt amazement

but to forgive our sins, falling like leaves.

We have seen this all before, time

tumbling away into sleep, seen

this darkness drop and these ruins murmur

and now we are gathered to appoint the gods

and now we are gathered to consecrate ourselves

and now we are gathered to ordain this dust,

we are gathered to live and to dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She plucked. She ate.”

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

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

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

Voices have stolen everything now and filled it with sugar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mum said it was a trick of grief.

When I made the Nirvana-barcode to be

but the beat of ‘Scentless Apprentice’ by

Nirvana tapped out in approximate

barcode shape using the tool of

the qwerty keyboard and took it to her

she said “there is no such thing.”

The shape I mention only works

in Times New Roman, thus:

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

and the armed winged may well make

millions out of the new Nirvana barcode

as brought in by John F B Tucker but

upon writing it down I cast it on the fire

and got my mother to photograph it in flames.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If E = L to the pregnant snorkel,

L to the pregnant snorkel = MC squared.

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

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

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

The mustard has to be English.

The mustard has to be English.

The mustard has to be English

and growing outside in the wild.

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

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

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

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

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

It seems to be a Nintendo innuendo that

her breath a poisonous magic.

Then you’re faced with Hanif Kureishi,

a bit of The Buddha of Suburbia.

The anatomisation of the female

could extend for longer and longer…

her ankles are delicate ornaments of ivory.

You’re also faced with Pinchbeck

whom it would seem, in Breaking

Open The Head, talks of the division

of people into those that like

and those that don’t like mushrooms

as the most ancient division in civilisation.

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

when I wrote the original, after

poring over a Ted Hughes poem in English

at the same table as fragrant Rachel.

She was never to be my cosmic bride.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which was quite left-wing of me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FACE OF STARS

THE FACE OF STARS

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

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

BOOK 1

Tue 1 Jan 2019. 00. 00

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

Mon 26 Sept 2022. 11. 38

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

Mon 10th Oct 2022. 11. 45

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

Mon 24th Oct 2022. 12. 02.

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

Thursday 22 Dec 2022. 11. 20.

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

Mon 2nd Jan, 2023. 12. 47

...so loved… John 3 v 16

Mon 16th Jan. 2023. 12. 16

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

Mon 30th Jan 2023. 12. 16.

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

Tuesday, 14 Feb 2023. 13. 32.

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

Monday 27th Feb 2023. 13. 05.

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

Mon 10th April 2023. 11. 38

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

Mon 24th April 2023. 13. 09.

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

Mon 8th May 2023. 19. 45

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

Mon 22d May 2023. 12. 24

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

Mon 5th June 2023. 12. 35

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

Mon 19 June 2023. 11. 05

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

Tuesday 4th July 2023. 12. 53

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

Mon 17 July 2023. 11. 46

For thou art with me Psalm 23 v 4

Monday 7 Aug 2023. 09. 42

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

Mon 9th Oct 2023. 23. 18

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

Mon 6th Nov 2023: 13. 24

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

Sunday 26th Nov 2023. 06. 22

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

Tues 19th Dec 2023. 10. 37.

Glory to God in the Highest. Luke 2 v 14

Monday 1st Jan 2024. 13. 25.

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

Monday 15 Jan 2024. 11. 12.

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

Monday 29 Jan 2024. 12. 19.

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

Monday 11 March 2024. 11. 24

Worthy is the lamb. Revelation 5 v 12

Monday 25th March 2024. 11. 32.

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

Monday 8th April. 11. 54

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

Monday 8th July. 23. 54.

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

Whoever offers praise glorifies me. Psalm 50 v 23

Monday 15th July. 10. 39

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

Monday 29 July. 11. 39.

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

Monday 12th August. 11. 15.

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

Monday 26th August. 14. 17.

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

Monday 9 Sept. 12. 16

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

Monday 23rd Sept. 14. 03.

Pray without ceasing. 1 Thess 5v 17.

Monday 21 Oct. 10. 30.

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

Monday 4th Nov. 10. 50

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

Mon 18th November 10. 00.

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

Mon 2nd Dec. 10. 19.

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

Mon 6th Jan. 10 35.

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

Mon 13 Jan 10. 17

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

Sunday 2nd Feb 21. 55

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

Monday 10th February. 11. 26

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

Monday 24 Feb. 10. 44.

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

Monday 10 March. 19. 38.

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

Mon. 10. 57.

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

Monday 7 April. 11. 35

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

12. 15

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

Tuesday 20 May. 18. 21

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

Monday 2 June. 10. 14.

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

BOOK TWO

Monday 19th Sept 2022. 10. 52

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

Monday 3 Oct 2022. 12. 42.

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

Monday 17 Oct 2022. 12. 28.

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

Monday 26 Dec 2022. 12. 44.

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

Mon 23 January 2023. 11. 54

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

Mon 6th Feb 2023. 12. 34.

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

Mon 20th Feb 2023. 11. 50

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

Monday 6th March 2023. 11. 22.

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

Tuesday 4th April 2023. 21. 38.

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

Monday 17 April 2023. 10. 31.

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

Monday 1st May 2023. 13. 03.

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

Monday 15th May 2023. 11. 46.

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

Monday 29th May 2023. 11. 53

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

Monday 12 June 2023. 11. 52.

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

Monday 26th June, 2023. 11. 18.

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

Monday 10 July 2023. 12. 04

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

Monday 24th July 2023. 10. 11.

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

Monday 7th August 2023. 10. 21

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

Monday 16th October 2023. 11. 41.

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

Wednesday 1st November 2023. 08. 39.

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

Monday 13th Nov 2023. 11. 43.

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

Monday 27th Nov 2023. 11. 48.

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

Monday 25th December 2023. 12. 04.

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

Wed 10th Jan 2024. 04. 59.

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

Monday 22d January 2024. 12. 27

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

Monday 5th Feb 2024. 11. 38.

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

Monday 4th March 2024

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

Monday 18th March 2024. 10. 30.

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

Monday 1st April. 12. 33.

The Lord is risen indeed. Luke 24 v 34.

Monday 8th July. 23. 54.

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

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

Monday 22nd July. 09. 39.

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

Monday 5th August. 11.43.

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

Monday 19th August. 10. 36.

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

Mon 2nd September. 10. 54.

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

Monday 16th September. 10. 36.

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

Monday 30th September. 11. 15.

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

Thursday 17th Oct. 15. 38

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

Monday 28th October. 11. 55.

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

Monday 11th November. 10. 54

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

Monday 25th November. 11. 53.

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

Monday 9th December. 10. 48.

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

Monday 23 December. 12. 12.

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

Monday 30th December. 13. 29.

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

Monday 20th Jan 11. 43.

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

Monday 3rd Feb. 11. 16.

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

Mon 17th Feb. 10. 33.

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

Mon 3rd March. 11. 19.

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

Monday 17 March 11. 47.

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

Monday 31 March 20. 03

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

Monday 11. 30

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

10. 42.

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

CONCLUSION TO THE FACE OF STARS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAGIC SAYINGS HIDDEN IN THE TREETOPS

“MAGIC SAYINGS HIDDEN IN THE TREETOPS”

A moocow is not made of dialectical antagonism.

Someone else can lose your marbles for you.

Vowels are our souls.

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

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

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

Planes are the shoes of clowns.

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

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

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

Love can go veggie for reasons of Disney.

Light-speed is my passport.

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

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

The constellations only seem to turn on axis unobserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Semantics is a road sign not a place.

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

Meaning is not a delusion unlike Time.

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

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

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

Nature is the true architecture of State.

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

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

Cliche hurts more than truth.

Where rain falls, falling reigns.

Pictures can be done without hands.

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

Realism ice-skates on the surface of the dust.

Language can be smuggled out of the unconscious.

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

H20 might stand for hypothalamus tattoo.

Chewing gum is bi.

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

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

There is no such thing as mind cancer.

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

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

Autumn is Optimus Prime already in Keats.

Freedom not poetry is the bike riding itself.

After garage and house comes library.

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

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

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

Birds are for flying not for special perception.

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

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

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

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

If form is an easel, content is a palette.

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

Creation is a dark machine.

It’s impossible to curse the sun.

Acid is a spirit-level for the spirit.

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

Galloping water is a cool thing to say.

Things live inside onions of themselves.

Freedom flies where flags fall.

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

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

Walnut halves look like miniature, shrunken brains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time does not pass but evaporate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Water has no more memory than it has smell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words appear to come out weird sometimes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We live in an Age of sending without form.

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

There are dreams that never die.

Love is a dream that never dies.

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

There is breath in a death.

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

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

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

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

We are all in one bed in Amsterdam.

The light is a prism.

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

Life is fast, London brutal, travelling scary.

Her wetness is so.

Angels can be as frightening as demons.

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

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

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

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

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

Isness is the centre of Everything.

Isness is the quiddity and suchness of existence.

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

THE TABLE

THE TABLE

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

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

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

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

The Periodic Table of Altered States = puddles

Calculator Tomb = clay

Frozen in red = fire

By Sensation in blue = sea

Random Access Imagination = rain

The Extinction of the Gun = rainbows

Digitalis Principalis = snow

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

A Trance of Stalks by Prof. Quentin Ponsonby = grass

McTruth And Flies = light

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

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

Bart Simpson’s yellow zigzag hair apostrophe d

@ Van Goghian black border sun

heard James Joyce would just use |||| 4

ROYGBIV in Fibonacci sequence barcode smile

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

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

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

I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too,

NHS for Lucy in the soul w/ demons,

H20 for hypothalamus tattoo,

ESA for extra sensory allowance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The witness is a grammatical position.

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

There are as many questions to ask A. I.

as there are stars in the night sky

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or alternatively:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• misregistered sensations

• afterimages that refuse to die

• dream‑colours that have no waking analogue

• hallucinated edges, phantom contours, impossible hues

• the subjective noise of a system under strain

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

To give it philosophical precision:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telepathy has been proven to be real.

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

Gilly flowers curtsey, not off the sound-map.

To make a flower-press would be womanly.

When our days still ended on cannabis

we would bemoan that flowers were legal.

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

I no longer puff the evil weed these days.

It would be a reward, a kind of dialysis,

that separates the murk from the excellence.

I would need it to balance out my mind,

one homeostatic device for another one.

Now I worry that I am hurried and florid.

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

hollow horn out on the A595 and relax.

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

*ketamineguitar*

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

SELECTED NOTES ON WHAT I’VE BEEN READING RECENTLY

SELECTED NOTES ON WHAT I’VE BEEN READING RECENTLY

Descartes is the start.

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

Philosophy might’ve died.

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

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

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

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

There is no such thing as mind cancer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You should read Lucretius before you start.

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

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

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

There is a lot to be said for common sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody can force you to be Anon.

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

Nietzsche is not my philosopher.

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

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

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

Wittgenstein is a maddening writer but a genius no doubt.

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