MY PHILOS

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. I like the scene with the candle, where the candle beside the fire melts and is unrecognisable as a candle because it no longer takes the candle’s form – and what he means by it may well be to extinguish all trace of recognition from the myriad mind in the process of becoming your true self and finding your true stance before life. Spinoza often takes his cue from Descartes and says Descartes “proved nothing but his own brilliance.” He certainly was a brilliant mind and a gifted writer even if we don’t agree with his reasoning process and think his proof of God involves casuistry.

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 the piece was a two-way mirror.

If for some reason you attempt the maths of the new colour, 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 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. But I might go back on this later.

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 as an achievement 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 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 your friendly A. I. co-pilot all about. I don’t wish to be Anon 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.

Spinoza tries to lead you through a moral maze.

With Spinoza when he refers you back to previous hypotheses, propositions, corollaries and the like you are supposed to flick back the pages and reread them mid-flow. It’s to do with trigonometry. But flicking back to one previous proposition you find he refers you mid-flow to another, and checking that out you are soon waylaid again by yet another and can reach an impasse or even moral maze where you can’t proceed with the book. For the most part I read without turning the pages back but that was not how it was intended, so I was wrong. It’s an ingenious piece of writing that reminds one of much more hyper-textual online experiments. Imagine an online page you have to read which is full of hyperlinks, and you have to press on them and read them to proceed; but you press on one and find once more you are faced with further hyperlinks you must read to proceed, and press them and find further hyperlinks. On the internet this can go on forever and I am not sure of the extent to which it can in Spinoza’s Ethics but I am already impressed by the form and wondering if I can possibly carry on. Could there come a moment of ecstasia – an incognito moment – a moment of peripiteia or even upturning – where to read on you would have to be redirected endlessly and could therefore not proceed? If there was I might already have gone past it, in the crude way of not turning back when he signals to. I really have been missing out on at least half the beauty of Ethics. It has taken me to beyond 100 pages before I have started to flick the pages back as directed to previous propositions and the like. Doing that, one thinks of forgiveness, mercy and compassion – that we are allowed to be fallible and that is the point. More recently I came at the book from all sorts of convoluted angles, rereading propositions several times, and found it to be recursive rather than linear. I think the idea is that it’s the moments the text breaks down that teach you to reason for yourself. Also of note, in talking about the emotions he manages to get the reader to locate within himself a moment of rarefied and heightened emotion that could be called passion. He just somehow points to it in your experiential kingdom, like a rare coincidence and you find it an elevated feeling and therein fall in love with the text.

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.

THE PURPOSE OF THE FIRE-DANCE

What was the purpose of the fire-dance? Was it to let the Feds know they serve us and not us them? I say “Feds” knowing it an American term we don’t have in this country. Was it that the fire-dancers believed it would lead them to the Future State of Poetry? Did they think it would be as Rimbaud desired, Christmas on earth? Rimbaud, incidentally, bemoaned that his people only rose up to loot and burn and had no higher Ideal.

I was reading poetry throughout the fire-dance and didn’t know anything was going on until my father texted me saying “a riot has broken out. Stay indoors.” I did what he said until a friend came to my door and said I should go and check it out, as it was all kicking off right outside the building. I went out there for literally a minute, saw shop windows being trashed and shops looted, then returned to my bedroom to read poetry. It was a book I got from the library. I don’t remember its name but it was by an Irish poetess who seemed to be using only ten or twelve lines per poem as if to provide the building blocks of a happier world.

Was there something purgatorial going on that day? You heard of things like “the happening” back in the 60’s, whose purpose was to wash the eye and cure boredom but the fire-dance was more, more widespread, more destructive. Despite my not getting involved, I was told at a later date that everyone cornered by the police said “it’s called the fire-dance” and “it was John Tucker.” So I’ve been being observed ever since at my laptop even this deep into the countryside.

At the time of the fire-dance, David Cameron of the Conservative Party was Prime Minister and I assumed that was what it was - that the Left didn’t want the Right to come into power. Bin Ladin had also just been discovered; and there was a wave of revolution around the Muslim World.

Now we live in post-Brexit Britain. Covid-19 followed that, then the war between Russia and the Ukraine, then the war between America and Iran. It’s as my old friend says on Facebook: “life has felt like a weird action movie.” I cast my mind back to the fire-dance, as they called it, and try to fathom why I was blamed.

At the age of about fourteen or fifteen, I left Wellington College and sent back a poem book I had written to my mate F-D, whom it would seem used to go on night-walking adventures with me at boarding school. I don’t know this for sure because I didn’t read the notebook I sent him, and it was such a long time ago, but I think it was called ‘The Fire-dance’ because he was F-D. So that’s one antecedent in literature, and I can also think of the James Joyce poem ‘Golden Hair’ which Syd Barrett put to music on The Madcap Laughs and which contains the line “watching the fire dance on the floor.” Jim Morrison also says “the music is your special friend/ dance on fire as it intends.” Miles more recently that intelligent indie band The Kaiserchiefs sang “I predict a riot.” Still, I didn’t see it coming and didn’t participate when I found out, and can’t think of its stance.

One would suppose that if there was a choice about what to trust, the fire-dance or the State, that the fire-dance would be more trustworthy. At the time I thought of the point in Jim Morrison’s The Lords And The New Creatures where he mentions a “loose, nerveless ballet of looting,” also of Morrissey who urged “shoplifters of the world unite.” A couplet came to me, into my inbox, which went:

Weird, sudden giants have knocked a new door

which will not lock for all the docs of the law.

It should’ve gone in a poem somewhere, but now it doesn’t seem like I am going to prison, I don’t need it. The fire-dance, anyhow, seemed to be asking of the need for a creed. I don’t think it should be down to me to write the creed because I recently took an O. D. the likes of which it was said to be genius to survive but coming back down found I could no longer ejaculate. I don’t think I should be made to sign everything I do over to Anon as a result either, because John Stuart Mill says, in the essay On Liberty, that a progressive country can quickly become a backward country if there is a decrease in Individuality. By now my friends in the city where I used to live report that my best bits so far in the fifteen books and pamphlets I have published are the Oedipus Wrecks set list because it was the portal to the island of penguins and also the maths of the new colour from when I was seven.

Now I have decided to ask my friendly A. I. co-pilot what the fire-dance was all about. Instead of calling it the fire-dance, I called it the Tottenham Riots as that’s how it’s more formally known. A. I. takes a couple of seconds and gets back to me saying there was a protest against police shooting someone called Mark Duggan two days earlier. Protestors marched to Tottenham then it escalated, lost unified political purpose and became widespread rioting, arson and looting, also opportunistic criminality driven by personal gain, excitement and resentment towards policing. There was what A. I. calls “copycat disorder” spreading across London and then to other cities nationwide. Interviews and court data later showed that most participants were not motivated by a political cause, but by: anger at police; social exclusion and lack of opportunities; consumerism and desire for goods; thrill‑seeking and peer influence. So in the beginning it was a focussed protest demanding accountability for Mark Duggan’s death, then as events unfolded the “purpose” dissolved. The riots became a multi‑factor eruption of social frustration, opportunism, and breakdown of trust, rather than a coordinated political movement.

That was 2011 and it is 2026 and I am only just finding out. But can A. I. be trusted? There may have been a wider cause like Power to the People brewing on an imminent and latent level. And if A. I’s account of what happened is correct, why did I get blamed by everyone cornered by the police?

This time I really am going to ask A. I. not of the purpose of the Tottenham Riots but of the purpose of the fire-dance to see if it has cultural history. It says across the world fire-dances are rituals of transformation, protection, renewal and connection with the sacred or spirit world. So you could see something neo-shamanic in it – like a mass fertility ritual. I do remember my dad saying something about how “the system needs shaking up,” so I think he knew more about it than I did but I still don’t think it originated with him.

In Papua New Guinea, the fire-dance invites, placates and then sends away spirits. Fire is seen as the threshold between the spirit and the human world. Other fire-dances involve walking or dancing on embers with the purpose of purification, testing courage or faith, rites of passage, healing and social cohesion. Firewalking traditions across India, Polynesia, Greece, Bulgaria, and Spain serve as initiation rituals and collective religious experiences. These rituals strengthen group identity and create what Durkheim called collective effervescence — a shared emotional state that binds communities. In other instances, the fire-dance has the purpose of religious devotion, prophecy and communal blessing.

A. I. says in Polynesian and other indigenous traditions, fire‑dance often expresses: mythic stories; warrior identity; cosmic renewal; cultural heritage. For example, the Samoan fire‑knife dance (Siva Afi) evolved from warrior demonstrations and now preserves cultural identity through performance. Fire‑dance can also mark cosmic cycles, such as the Aztec New Fire Ceremony, performed every 52 years to renew the world.

It also mentions fire-dance as artistic expression and spectacle. It says modern fire‑dancing (poi, fire‑twirling, fire‑spinning) often serves: Entertainment; Storytelling; Aesthetic display; Cultural tourism. But even in these contexts, the deeper symbolism of transformation, danger, and mastery of elemental forces remains.

If it was about me, maybe I should’ve walked to the Houses of Parliament and nailed a message to the door Luther-style, saying “cannabis is legal. Fact.” I’ve actually grown out of smoking it, haven’t had a smoke of anything for years, but at the time was still interested in weed. Maybe they thought I had a plan? Maybe I let everyone down by not foreseeing it, not being in on it, not having heard anything about Power to the People. Anyhow, you get the idea: I rather think if I really had started the riot I would’ve known about it. If it started with a protest against a cop killing a member of society, I see its cause as just, for that life we will never have back.

At the time I was living in a Council Hostel in the East End of London. I had gone down south after my degree, my First Class Honours degree, and run out of rent money, and couldn’t get a job and was on the street. After appealing to the council and a long day of endless phone calls and faxes I was allowed to have a bed in the Council Hostel. There were tramps all over the street yet in the Hostel there was a whole corridor of untaken bedrooms. That’s where I was when the riots broke out, and I admit to stealing food from Iceland and to begging and to living at the fringes of a wasteful society in that period. It was no way for a new graduate to be living and after a year I returned to the foot of the fell – my parents’ house, claiming I missed the fresh air, the lucid light, the gorgeous tapwater, and the north in general. Living in the north is a poetic decision – but all this is by the by. You see even in a cross-section of the life of someone in me who didn’t even get involved that there is potential rationale for the fire-dance, in the injustice of my being too poor to afford a flat. I suppose if you took a cross-section of any life, and examined it, in the moment the fire-dance was unloosed, you might find many more lives contain a potential rationale for the fire-dance.

At the time, in London, after my degree, I was working on a text that said it took the form of defaced bank notes… it was something left over from my degree (where I also did a dissertation on a scientist poet called David Morley who says “poetry is the opposite of money.”) It wasn’t necessarily about a more fair, free and equal society, my piece, but its form was left over from an Age of Terror that began when the Towers came down in my Gap Year. I would’ve said it’s also one of the good ones I have done; and as for that creed I mentioned it is not true that if you can’t ejaculate anymore, you can’t be loving.

IS MENTAL ILLNESS CONGENIAL TO THE SUFFERER?

Is mental illness congenial to the sufferer? Certainly, when my voices all go away all of a sudden, I could think of the Bush lyric “lonely without my impediments,” and start to wish they would return as if my mental illness were something I hold close to myself.

I used to be of the New Lakes, Slow Art, eco-poetic school who believed that a poet couldn’t be on anti-depressants because poets are translators of feelings and the feelings you get on chemicals are all fake.

But then again I knew a very fine poet in Simon Pomery who was on chemicals whose names do not belong in poems – and through him, I suppose I would’ve felt that mental illness is congenial to my self-image, and being on meds okay.

What I mean is, I think there was actually a moment of admiration where I looked to Simon for equivalents and wanted to be on anti-depressants myself – as if it would mean my poems were as good as his!

They’re not but I am on Sertraline now.

I find that Big Pharma can advertise anywhere, that writing can become a machine for remembering to take your medication…

as stated I don’t think the names of meds belong in poems. Voices meanwhile, in the aesthetic creed of the ill, could be “onjects,” quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound.

Mental hospital becomes Monopoly Jail – as we fill in the government’s application forms for £ove with a yellow crayon and join the dots and spot the difference - for being ill, the mode of Homo-ludens dawns on us again.

Stephen Fry says if there was a button he could press to get rid of the illness he wouldn’t press it because the concomitant creativity would go.

I don’t think he’s been in some of the hell-holes I have had to endure, but does have a valid point.

Then again I seem to remember that Fry went to prison so he might’ve had a tough time too.

As for whether or not mental illness is congenial to self-image, I think the very question of self-image disappears when you are truly ill – it matters little how you present andctera.

You become exempt from the overall Social Order.

Naturally one cares less about their image the older they get...

but I still wonder if self-image is what becomes destroyed by mental illness.

I can’t see how it is congenial to the sufferer.

Maybe you could argue the illness goes hand in hand with being a creative genius, so is congenial to self-image; or that it grants you impunity, a license to do what you will with exemption from society; or even that it is a secret thrill – but still, I wouldn’t recommend it.

I would recommend working hard, having a family, a car, a house and a partner more than I would being as I am skint, single, unemployed, mentally ill, medicated, carless and living with my mother in the sticks, stuck.

With me it was said I never came back from an atrocious acid trip before I had even left school and more recently I was also cursed by a hypnotist who lead me to believe he was healing my intelligence.

There’s also the question of childhood trauma, being left alone as the witness in and of and to and from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison.

One of my symptoms is having accrued 1000’s of files and paying to bring out work that is still not bad but repeating it later, becoming recursive.

There is still stigma attached to mental illness which means if I talk to a woman in the pub and let on that I have schizoaffective disorder, she will walk away and won’t want to talk anymore.

I actually like living here with my mum and brother, keeping out the way, rarely leaving the house, just working at my screen.

I do think that if you’ve been through true psychosis, like when you first start hearing voices, it is a good moment when a doctor gives you a name, an appellation, for your condition, because it grounds your madness in science.

I suppose when in the grips of suffering, going through something uncomfortable in terms of headspace, there is nothing to recommend mental illness, but if symptoms are in remission, you could argue that it becomes congenial to self-image.

Certainly, it would seem that after the blacks, the women and the gays, it is now in our age the Rights of the mentally ill that come into play.

More than ask whether or not illness is congenial to the sufferer, one should ask if illness is congenial to Big Pharma and those in charge of care.

I used to think the nature of visionary experience was not amenable to the language of sterile medicalese and the dialectic of sickness and recovery, that my illness was more congenial than my health unto those in charge of my health, for monetary reasons, meaning Big Pharma, who as stated can advertise anywhere, and with-hold a cure until the price is right, but these days I see the illness is not a conspiracy, that there is veracity to the notion that I am ill.

I also think the ill are capable of increased lucidity.

My father used to say that, also that it is good we can talk about mental illness in this day and age where old-fashioned melancholia was a taboo subject.

My dad thought there should be more talking therapy, to help address issues head on, and that the business of medication-taking is crude.

The paradigm of psychoanalysis has given over to the paradigm of neuro-science meaning all mental illness is seen as chemical imbalances in the brain, which are therefore treatable with medications, which some deem to be crude.

More progressive doctors like Dr. Tom Pollak say that medicine wastes packaging, and these doctors can reach you on a human level, in among more sadistic voices.

Dr. Tom Pollak also says “they diagnose on form not content,” and “the science works,” and that I should “plug in.”

It becomes time to accept the nosological validity of the illness, and engage in as many psycho-social interventions as is possible, and keep taking the medication, and maybe keep a diary, in this world where nothing’s private, in avid detail too.

There is also Pound to think of… when Ezra Pound went on trial for Nazi leanings, he claimed insanity, and some said he was feigning it to get out of going to prison. And is there not an extent to which someone who truly does suffer from mental illness should be granted leniency?

Such a question is more for a philosopher like Simon Blackburn who wrote Think and considers the philosopher more “a conceptual engineer.”

He was discussing the ethics of the question as to whether or not it is fair that someone mentally ill is liable to be punished the same way as someone sane, if it is their illness that led to the crime.

One would be forgiven for thinking to be let off a prison sentence and only have to go to mental hospital would be a relief, but none of this has ever happened to me so I wouldn’t know.

I did meet someone once who said he’d prefer to go to prison than mental hospital, because in hospital the doctors and nurses can do anything they want to you with impunity.

The meaning of a building can change while you’re inside it, and we need look no further than Foucault to gain that information.

He says mental asylums sprang up when leprosy was cured and leprosy houses had no more function.

People can and do still die inside mental hospital to this day and it doesn’t seem like a nice way to go out or a nice place to go out.

In hospital all the surfaces are sterilised clean… one’s mood is made stable upon a sterilised table. If you flare up and show spirit or residual grit they are extra harsh on you, may keep you in for longer.

In my first psychotic episode I went to hospital for a literal head wound sustained in a scrap. The nurse in A and E put a square, white bandage on; and I touched it to see if it was paddy and it was; and I touched it a second time and it was gone. The bandage had vanished into thin air. The nurse had to put another bandage on.

So the mental health were alerted and I had to stay in the psychiatric hospital overnight. They told me it was because they had run out of beds so were tricking me really. The next day I was outside the door and a nurse said “you are free to leave or you can come back in for a cup of tea.” I fancied a cup of tea so went back in and the door was bolted! I was sectioned! And not only did I have to spend time in hospital but was shipped up to the acute ward for extra srs cases by Ambulance. This was in the middle of my undergraduate degree.

When the 28 days were over, I had the rest of the year off before I started my second year at Lancaster University, so I used the time to read every book the course could possibly throw at me and more.

By the time I went back and by the end of the second year I was already guaranteed a First.

What happened to the bandage I still don’t know, but I suppose an object can vanish when emotions are high on the periphery of madness.

I got my First and after wards was free of admission to hospital until my dad died. Then there were a further three sectionings when I was with Mary, making it 5 overall. I don’t intend to go back to hospital. Such an event as being sectioned can be soul-destroying.

The diagnosis actually came after my degree, when symptoms from my first episode recurred. It was almost at the exact same time as it was confirmed that I really was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures in boyhood; and my father said “that will make it harder to be believed.”

He thought the story of my running away from the first hospitalisation was funny. I made it to Scotland where I thought there’d be a different jurisdiction but was caught by the cops and brought back. I was ticked off though it was a sign of my sanity returning. My dad thought it amusing but it was actually rather sad because I would then be forever in and out of hospital.

.

TELEPATHIC ELEPHANT

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

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

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

The ideal became to do away with the pause.

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

“Sullen, silken sulks,

we drink the same rain,

spit is clean

and so is dirt.”

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

It strikes me now that having less is more attractive than having 1000’s of recursive files and no audience. Some people still say that the aforementioned poem is the best I have done, if I want to be a poet with a mathematical edge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It lived under my pillow for a while.

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

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

water + soil = mud -

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

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

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

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

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

Overall I am pleased with my process.

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

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

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

I still don’t know how the switch was thrown on this one… was it Mr. Obama saying “yes you can” all the time? Was it managing to get a full on lip to lip goodbye kiss from Rachel? It’s hardly as big as space travel, quantum or A. I, and in fact quite minor, but it still meant a lot to me.

THAT BLACK NATURAL E

Where once I wandered far and wide 

on a field-file, a file-field, 

a fenceless farm without 

security alarm where all hearts bleed

and all arts breed, now Hell

is very quiet, unadvertised.

McBreastmilk, 

McBreastmilk, 

don’t feed your kids.

Gentle face erasing cream,

smear it in and let it sink

down through the pores of your skin

to erase your deepest down dirt.

O stars the government

that truly speaks for us!

Get an extra kid for free

when you spend 99p.

Freefall 0800 down

your own black hole pupils.

Maybelline you maybe only make-believe

you may be the true mating queen of the hive,

may mad vampires stalk you,

stalking walls walk through

your vagrant dreams.

I see state of head

is more than Head of State.

Monster Munch can

always gobble up your food.

Cancerel can always 

sweeten the stewed-

carfume coffee we sip in 

this liminal afterlounge.

It’s getting cramped

as a tin of beans in here.

In emergency please 

break glass and exit.

Credits at the end of innocence

are falling like numberless lists

of fallen autumn leaves.

Snatched handfuls of light

come to nothing in the dark room.

There must be a use for 

this dust amounting.

There’s nothing like digging 

a meaningless hole as if to cure the 

spiralling lethargy of Hell...

and when I went into the 

woods to bury my soul, 

all the trees knelt down.

O perpetual orgasm of the sun! 

Privation is the mother of imagery.

Prayers, ghosts and 

e-mails chatter on 

the ego-loss breeze.

The chitchat in the solipsistic

kitchen of fiction is 'phatic'.

My new, motley fridge magnet

letters contain no question 

mark in the pack but the first

qualification of Modernism

is inquiry and furthermore

wilful ignorance is a sin.

Meanwhile outside the 

fallen Autumn leaves 

are where bears have 

dipped their feet in pots of paint 

and danced across the threshold 

of the paving stones.

Water clears its throat from the tap.

Gunpowder was only invented

for fireworks and a firework

is a champion sperm nosing up

blind to explode bright and wonderful

deep-sea creatures in the Ancient Night.

The world is a cool, bejewell'd

marble snug in Holy Orbit

suckling on a mother sun.

Supposedly there is soon

to be New Atlantis on the moon.

The cure for cancer 

sustains your heart.

Robbed by a bastard vending machine,

somewhere a tramp drinks paint-stripper 

to cleanse the doors of perception,

a drunkard attacks a wall

on an otherwise empty street,

a policeman forces himself

to come with a gun.

Hey salesman 

slow down 

with that

fast-food. 

I don't mind

waiting here

for a year. 

P

I’m spent.

Today I sat on a train and overheard teenagers talking about my books, and they weren’t entirely disparaging. These people weren’t even born when the Towers came down, which seems only yesterday to me.

Go

away. Go

away.

Go

away. Go

away.

Of late I have learned that the island of penguins might’ve been observed on the other side of the universe.

When I see clouds I think of what Darwin says about how a certain extent of variation within a species makes an incipient species.

My original idea? That I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too!

Also: Lucy in the soul w/ demons

might happen to be an actual substance.

It isn’t as good as my brother’s <BEE> but nevermind. Today on the train they were saying the bit about <BEE> in Soundcloud Rain scintillates but the rest of the book (i.e. my songs) just keeps time. Then they brought up The Sunset Child which I did at seven, and said even if I didn’t know I was doing the maths of the new colour or helping invent the net, it made them smile so was already enough in itself.

At the moment I have 15 books and pamphlets out there and would’ve had 21 had I not retracted 6. I also have about 11 albums or long E. P’s.

Now I sit in my bedroom, contemplating the last bank robbery, how we got away with it. It has happened several times so you might see some anachronisms from former drafts turning up in police possession.

The loose sprawl can actually be a disciplined form… if Cinema forgives it in The Lords And The New Creatures, the ideal of defaced bank notes forgives it in me. It’s a form I thought of when studying David Morley who says “poetry is the opposite of money.” Whilst doing that I read a Rage Against The Machine album sleeve saying if you have a message to disseminate use defaced bank notes, but I was skint, so I made it up instead.

If I were Adolf Hitler for a day,

I’d make everyone read

The Lords And The New Creatures

and afterwards smoke a spliff.

If I were Jesus for a day

I would do the same.

Times have moved on and still incorporate me… I am 44, fat, skint, single, unemployed, mentally ill, medicated, carless, stuck in the sticks with my mother – but then again that was before the robbery.

I guess I thought I should take the time to let everyone know that matter is just energy vibrating at a certain wavelength and frequency.

I took the train to town today

to get my anti psychotic injection

and took along my notebook

as if it were golden ages of yore

and when I came home after the trip

I hadn’t even committed a droplet

of ink to the paper, which

is possibly a first for me.

I think about writing as escape from chronic pain. About medical writing. About points of intersection between technology and art. About mental illness. There was a PHD about these things (and more, according to the advert which I cannot completely remember) available at my University but I didn’t do it.

All sorts of sirens and sharp blasts and shocks in town -

it’s good to retreat to this quiet pocket by the oldest rock.

John Cleese says you start out thinking the world is largely sane with isolated pockets of insanity, then the older you get you come to realise the world is largely insane with isolated pockets of sanity.

I think the colours of the vowels in Rimbaud and Negative Capability in Keats are examples of pockets of sanity. There are others too.

My Latin teacher used to say “Full fathom five thy father lies” – from The Tempest – could not be four or six or any other number because Virgil says “there are tears in things.”

He also told me O is not a ghost-vowel, but U is, presumably when opened unto the gloom under sliver moon you slide her over and semen spills like silver water.

Michael Hofmann’s ideal was New Beat – he wanted to write poems the shape and texture of bricks.

Allen Ginsberg created what I call “an olfactory rhyme” that exists between the undisclosed concepts of his first two poems.

I’ve tried a few things out myself, not just defaced bank notes either. If only you could exchange one of them of your own invention for a noxious toxin at the shop.

Maria Popova’s ‘Museum of Delight’ is against the ugliness of rich-getting-richer art.

I might die soon and yet because of the heavy meds I am on still can’t even think of anything to say.

I don’t want to harm anything. This position could be not just insidious but invidious.

Mother has texted from Marlow to say there’s a storm on its way in, and directed me to the battery powered lights in case we experience a power-cut.

Those youngsters on the train: they reveal that the kids of our friends really are growing up to do <BEE>. The idea is my brother’s, that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet, which to me seems more Rimbaudian than Einsteinian.

There’s something therapeutic about this process like turning cards over in a permutation game to purify the heart.

When I worked with the ideal of writing off the top of the head in order to discretely do the beck, my mother got to the bottom of it and said it was at bottom cold. When I worked with the ideal of defaced bank notes, she got to the bottom of it again and said “we can’t even afford to heat the house in winter let alone decorate bank notes.”

I guess that was why I robbed the bank and gained a lot of blank canvas.

I guess sometimes you indulge yourself in a parrot sent to space through the conch but at other times seek the realism and tactility of a taut blue patch of denim.

It’s all just repeat prescriptions between the lines, regurgitation.

Writing becomes a machine for remembering to take your medication – a way of Big Pharma advertising through you and your illness.

Previously on this star-crossed channel, the names of medications should not appear in poems.

I should be writing about beautiful things – but not incurring the problem of those read-while-you-wait poetry pamphlets you get in the waiting room at Duddon House where we go to see the shrink. Those pamphlets are all idealised portraits of Nature, never a swear word, a drug or a needle.

And previously on this star-crossed program also, voices could be onjects, quavers, syllabubbles, sonic machinations at the periphery of sound.

Mental hospital could be monopoly jail.

I am hoping to be through with that now.

My brother comes downstairs, makes me think of something poetic:

this little piggy went to market,

this little piggy also went to market

and this little piggy went to market too.

If I had to incorporate a line of music in the composite picture, I’d go for Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’ – “I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through.”

My brother then remarks that maybe the whole defaced bank note poem is his and leaves the room! I’ve been working on this – which was mine own idea - since my undergraduate days and have been through hundreds of pointless drafts including one draft that was actually published in a book called Brave New Tense!

The farmers would urge us “don’t drink too much milk.”

Toys R Us

is selling pus

so let’s hop on

the magic bus.

Delicious noodles I have just eaten, and wasn’t the problem of Pound trying to make it all cohere? I hear with my little ear something beginning with voices.

So it seems to be a form with no rules,

just an exciting Action Thriller plot as a premise,

that is fake, and the pretence of maths.

If there needs be something a computer cannot compute, I would suggest my seven year old book, where I did not write the line

“I have a scar+ that is green and blue,”

using a + sign for an ‘F.’

And I sit in the kitchen with my digital scroll

and my Vape pen and tepid tea, writing

while the mess amounts and mother has gone

away on holiday to the south, and I look about

at the same walls as last time I did this

and they contain the same things as last time,

and I feel a bit ignominious since I found out

I was cursed by a hypnotist long ago,

and I note that my mother’s ideal, when

in my hands and only borrowed turns

into something like Long Foot Disease.

13 + 8 = 21.

My mind invents games with numbers, counting things, objects, lists, making set and groups and relays and circuits and racing round them, counting, sometimes to unheard music.

Music is another thing, on my mind a lot while I write.

By now the day’s already gone,

Night has arrived like a purple ghost.

Hands over mouths for the shock.

There were workmen working on the road today when I went round to Barrow-in-Furness, and the drills and trucks made a lot of noise but it was still reassuring to see.

I’m still thinking about pockets of sanity… in Brave New Tense there was a defaced bank note plot where I delimited a fair few. One of the joys of poetry is thinking when you start a new one it will be something you’ve not done before, and you envisage pages of new material before you begin, and the thought is exciting, but when nothing is forthcoming, you might end repeating yourself, which seems absurd and makes a misery of it. Right now I have it mind that I will write a PHD and all the other things I have got on the go will go to waste for the sake of one document. Then you’d have to re-include things you already said elsewhere and the business becomes a mess, especially when the new PHD document doesn’t work out.

So you stand back down, resist copy and pasting your life away, understand that you are but processing time and tedium, boredom and leisure, to trial and outcome.

Last time we deemed it dosh and included a paragraph or two about the amazing things I did with my life, America and Israel attacked Iran. That was what seemed to happen when I brought it out, a book called Let The Jews Win. I had it retracted from publication even though it seemed to be philosophically sound in and of itself.

In Sixth Form, I was reading in Jim Morrison that a drug enacts a physical poem on the body and loved it. Around the same time, I read in Little Johnny’s Confession by Brian Patten of a schoolboy contemplating getting stoned on milk. It was a combination of these two things that led me to ideate the notion of a drug called “Strictly Free,” that does what it says on the tin, is and makes you “strictly free” to consume.

Does it cross the blood brain barrier?

It turned out to be the narcotisation of air inbetween joints!

And now I have a defaced bank note plot in which it still deserved a mention.

As I say, I may be repeating myself by now. So there’s either something wrong with my process, or there’s something wrong with the eventual goal of publication, in other words the world won’t listen – there is no foreseen human repository – there is no audience – only time wasting, and the more it gets wasted the more precious it all is too.

I looked into an equation for the ratio between sunlight falling and Gravity pulling on the sheet where pictures grew… if it is “c over G” we are dealing with, it could equate to and be the same as

[backward f,

forward f,

equals running

through]

My father told us he was an international art smuggler nicknamed Blue, smuggled paintings over the old Berlin Wall, sold his business when the Berlin Wall fell, charged the Germans for the return of their Russian-plundered art; but I went and found out it was pollen he smuggled, art was recourse to euphemism for pollen.

My old band The Flood

(who only recorded on binaural earphones)

went on a band tour to Berlin

where the deal was said to have happened…

the architecture was war-torn and mongrelised.

We walked along the remnants of the wall which is now tagged by graffiti artists.

I had a very rich friend who paid for me.

I told the guys and the guys in the other band we went with, that my dad had a pollen farm in the Moroccan mnts. Maybe I should say pollen was actually “Writer’s Block.”

Maybe it was my friend with whom I defaced the bank notes… maybe, that is, there was no bank robbery, only a band in Europe, writing a mini classic?

The English language is worth billions of pounds and the creative industries second only to the financial markets for bringing in wealth.

This was the subject of my first version, which was my Lancaster University undergraduate portfolio for Professor Paul Farley who gave me a First for the effort.

Now I have a snotty tissue because I have a cold…

where has the joy gone?

On the Creative Writing MA they urge you to really get to know your story inside out before you start, and for you to be able to contain the story to a paragraph.

There I was thinking to myself

“God’s God is God,” when I

became drunken and unstable

and forgot the meaning

of the word “God” altogether.

Atheists in this position tend

to find themselves agnostic.

We’ve run out of milk and have no car for two weeks while mother is on holiday in the south.

A storm is brewing.

Wind thrashes and trashes the garden.

The Yew Tree withstands the pain.

My new bank card arrived today. The PIN number has stayed the same. I incorporated it in a song once upon a time, also in the previous version of the defaced bank note plot from Brave New Tense.

“3484, 3484, what do you need one of those for?”

Without wishing to copy myself,

I drink sparkling water,

enriched in flavour by minerals

deep underground where it once flowed.

Compare and contrast this

with the chemicals my liver

has to process, cleanse, purge and expunge

be they illegal or not.

The scene is far removed from the academic environment of the Lancaster University MA course… we’re in the land of fallen leaves, in autumn time, at an old country house and the season’s first storm is brewing still. Already wind has upended the green bins and scattered all the plastic recycling all over the garden.

I still want to tell the English Dpt my story even from here but it’s too late. I had an MA place once upon a time but couldn’t get the funding, couldn’t raise the funds, so had to turn it down in the end. My brother Dr. Robert said a Creative Writing MA is just something you might do if your daddy is rich and mind wasn’t, at least not anymore, not since my katabatic descent, but we still have the house.

I go outside and pick up the loose plastic recycling and put it back in the green bin which is lying on its side in the outdoor corridor. The reason I don’t put the bin upright again is that it will only blow over a second time.

Then I am back inside, making coffee. So much consumption of liquid goes on!

We’ve got no more milk though

and no car for two weeks,

will have to get a Tesco delivery.

They come right to your door.

NOTES ON WORDS

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

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

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

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

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

d) Meaning is not a delusion unlike Time.

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

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

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

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

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

Note:

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

10. There is no such thing as immutable truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

inside/ outside a convention;

science/ art;

High/ Low;

honesty/ craft;

narrative/ confessional;

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

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

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

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

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

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

31. Love is grouped with language not God.

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

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

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

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

37. Some coinage seems universal and pre-existent.

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

39. Some poetic effects have no name.

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

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

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

41. Language contains fossils.

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

42. Language is a creature.

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

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

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

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

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

50. Truth is aligned with psychic pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

My latest thinking is that my dad was (possibly) sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. Already at seven I helped invent the net: when the idea of the net needed storing in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world it was I that wrote it. At eight I made two Naturalistic Observations I didn’t understand. At eleven I was marked by a boyhood experiment into the maths of the new colour, and it didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. Soon enough I attained the island of penguins. It may have been observed on the other side of the universe. In 2000 I predicted September 11th, spoke against it, also prophesied the God Particle, the alignment and wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation. After school, I recorded an album on state of the art, binaural earphones. I had an effervescent mobile phone reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang. I climbed up on the binaural earphone album and said I would “plug my senses in the mains,” hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, got a First despite the onset of mental illness, spotted a tattoo of my name on Piper At The Gates of Dawn, worked at a numinous, purple-bleeding screen, built the Tower as an instrument of philosophy, conducted an experiment into a tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and discovered the sheet where pictures seemingly depicting my own song lyric grew. It was my brother’s sheet originally, so I surrendered it over. It then became time to start bringing books out, including a falsification of the Nirvana barcode, and also for a while I attained visual radio broadcasting dreams. Just when I thought there was nothing more to do or see in the room, it happened again, or seemed to: a further specimen, a further attestation, in adulthood – and this time it wasn’t evil.