THE SPIDER W/ THE HARP THAT'S MADE OF STRING

INTRODUCTION

Jim Morrison was one of the most charismatic and iconic rock stars of all time, but he was also possibly the most erudite. His band the Doors were named after the writings of William Blake and Aldous Huxley. His claim was bringing academic intelligence to rock music. His work is already subject to some critical analysis in Wallace Fowlie’s compare and contrast of Morrison and Rimbaud Rebel As Poet where Fowlie says Morrison’s poetry is “a mere reflection” of good poetry and Rimbaud meanwhile is the real deal. Fowlie concludes his compare and contrast by commenting that what is most excellent from Morrison is not his written work but his singing voice. I am different from Fowlie and don’t agree with a lot of what was said in Rebel As Poet. It’s not that I don’t like Jim Morrison’s singing voice but that I thought at the time I read Fowlie that Morrison’s book The Lords And The New Creatures was one of the best books I’d ever read and took issue with what Fowlie was generally saying. Fowlie said for example that the new creatures are “metaphors,” alibis in disguise for the law-hounded poet. I am sure that they are to some extent, the extent of anthropomorphism and opening the inner zoo, but under the madding sun, this issue remains unresolved. Morrison wrote in The New Creatures that “a creature waits out the war,” meaning the Cold War presumably… he also writes of “the dry end of vacuum boat,” presumably meaning “the wrong end of the stick.” I think he was saying “if we get in trouble we’ll tell them they got the wrong end of the stick.” I would like herein to subject The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison to a modicum of sustained critical micro-analysis which would be to fill a hole I found when obsessing over the book and not being able to branch out to other literature around the subject.

Ideally there would be a text subjecting Morrison’s binary-machine to sustained critical micro-analysis by the witness and without him letting on that he was the witness – without giving the game away. However it is too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube once it is out and to retract a confession to being this so-called “witness,” as I made in The Field of Rock N Roll Science and other works too. I don’t want to cause any trouble and do have mental health issues so should just say I think The Lords And The New Creatures is a good test, like a spiritual or germ X-ray that exposes the germs of dictatorship on all hands.

My latest thinking, which might change, is that in this situation my father was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. Hi, I am the witness; and what a life I had too! At seven I was said to have 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 not one but two very strange Naturalistic Observations I did not understand. At eleven I was marked by an experiment into the maths of the new colour, which didn’t turn out to be the new colour in the end. At fifteen I attained the island of penguins which might’ve been scripted in the Bible. At eighteen I forewarned of what was to come in terms of the terrorist attacks to the day, also wrote the highest-marked English Literature A-level exam essay in the nation at 100%. I also made other prophecies such as the God Particle and the alignment.

After school I recorded an album on binaural earphones, had an effervescent mobile reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rang, hosted the Plough alignment for a rhythm change in the White House, spotted a sensory overlay of my name tattooed 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 reel and was even the one to discover my brother’s sheet where pictures (seemingly depicting my own song lyric) grew. I also falsified the Nirvana barcode and attained visual radio.

I hear they’ve even given Nobel Prizes for less but I didn’t earn 1p throughout any of that and still survive on benefits to this day. To go on for a first collection after all that, after discovering the sheet where pictures grew, must’ve been mad. I did bring out some books but only self-or-vanity-press published and my writing was mostly all rubbish. It was as if I was up against a democratising, balancing out mechanism that stops me winning with the things on my CV – as if the world is saying ‘no.’ To be fair I didn’t have an evil plan at all or any plan but never could get things together. To realise my creativity was my only real plan, and that would’ve included writing something as good as Morrison’s text.

Although it is a true story you might buy it as a fiction I have made up. Obviously I’d want to spread the Excellent News but learning to be wise might need to cover my tracks. Anyhow, you could say the infradiegetic heterotopia or chronotope or euchronia in which those events happened is “the Doors computer game.” Maybe that’s the setting for my own work too; and yet I don’t necessarily wish to write a novel, but a piece of literary criticism.

CHAPTER ONE: IMMEDIATE IMPRESSIONS

“Heavily spaced,” you could say, of the form of Jim Morrison’s duality of long poems - but then what? Could it have been the reason he died so young that he already brought a media-compression experiment into the world in the way that he did? A long time ago now, after my degree (a good degree) a book on The Lords And The New Creatures was something my Professors thought I should do; but I went off in different directions, none of which amounted to scholarship. “Some people think it’s as good as The Waste Land,” said Dr. Tony Sharpe, back then, and “the genius of the witness is elusive,” he also said as my degree was ending and I puzzled over the Intention behind Morrison’s text. I rather wish I had pursued a book of criticism on Morrison’s work; and did actually write a rather long essay on it that subjected it to sustained critical micro-analysis – which was only wasted on dead computers in the end.

I confess that my most recent reading of Morrison found it nowhere near as good as I remembered it from my adolescence. I read and reread it during my Sixth Form days and it truly was my favourite book. Still, entering courses where one follows the marks, it would not be wise to speak in the open about such a secret lover as I had. No, instead I claimed Crime And Punishment was my favourite – and although I love that too, I was neglecting to be open about my literary life.

At the time I first subjected Morrison to analysis, my reading had reached a saturation-point. I was able to say that when Morrison writes of dogs sniffing each other in The New Creatures he quotes Henry Miller without saying; and cutting back in with the statement “I am ghost-killer” by rhyming with the word “Miller” he creates what I would call an olfactory rhyme. Allen Ginsberg I would argue also employs an olfactory rhyme but in a different way: between the undisclosed concepts of his opening two poems.

In my original essay, I looked at the bit when Morrison writes “Fall down/ Strange gods arrive in fast enemy poses.” It seems to be Morrison tapping Huxley awoken in medias res in the middle of the trip in Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell.

I would’ve said that if The Waste Land is the flag-ship poem of Modernism, either or both of Morrison’s could be the flag-ship poem of postmodernism, where it is impossible to have an unmediated experience, and which is full of image-saturation bogging down the unconscious. I would’ve mentioned how increased rhythmical frenzy towards the end was still a common diegetic trait of both The Waste Land and the Morrison duality; and yet shown that there are differences inherent to their different ages such as a loss of belief in art’s ability to represent reality at all.

At the time I thought the opening image of The New Creatures – “Snakeskin jacket” – was thus because a) it was an image of shedding b) it snagged and tugged on the rug in the Feelies – that esemplastic cinema – in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. On my last reading of Morrison, however, I saw The New Creatures as nothing but an endless list!

The New Creatures was harder to read in my Sixth Form days than The Lords, but its ending, a beautiful example of the eschatological imagination, was stamped on my memory forever on but one reading. It was The Lords that I really fell in love with and reread many times. About it I would say Everything in a film is deliberate. Even a grain of dust. Likewise in Morrison’s poem which he described as “a thesis on film aesthetics,” there isn’t a spec of dust out of place. He arranged it so that you turn a page to find a particular line there and any messing around with the spacing and timing alters the meaning.

I shouldn’t forget to mention that at the time of writing this lost masterpiece on Jim Morrison’s poetry, my PC screen bloomed a numinous purple light daubing the walls; and it remained that way, albeit sometimes vacillating, for years. I felt like I was onto something in science. Science would probably say, however, and with a fairly unanimous voice too, that the less said the better about The Lords And The New Creatures; that the future of A. I, the possibility of other dimensions, Philip Pullman portals are all more interesting than the garbled nonsense of the green pages.

When I say the green pages, I mean Omnibus Press coloured the pages of The Lords And The New Creatures a traffic light colour motif of pages of orange and green respectively. They may be divided as:

The Lords The New Creatures

orange pages green pages

spaces closed spaces open

doors open doors closed

My argument is as follows: in postmodern theory, Saussure described the arbitrary bond between signifier and signified, i.e. phonetic and semantic aspects of the linguistic sign, to create “the Saussurian atom.” Derrida then exploded this atom by saying there isn’t even an arbitrary bond but no bond at all. The arbitrary bond is translated into metaphor by using the tops of milk: there is no reason red should confer no fat, green semi-skimmed and blue full fat milk. However, my point is that when it comes to colouring The Lords And The New Creatures a traffic light colour motif of orange and green pages respectively, then the green pages have an intrinsic bond: they confer go, grow, evolve, continuation, motion, life. This is not to be confused with what Zadie Smith bemoans as the supposed edifying properties of the colour green, which itself is more in the scope of literature as a debate between rurs and urbis. So there you have my argument; and it follows that there might be a witness or more than one witness.

I would say the correct endorsement was the witness ‘from’ The Lords And The New Creatures. Messrs ‘in’ and ‘of’ and ‘to’ and ‘from’ were all invited to that play. The witness ‘in’ was flat, in the book in 1969. The witness ‘of’ was the one standing there, attesting, in the 1990’s. The witness ‘from’ was the correct endorsement and the witness ‘to’ a mere formality after the correct endorsement was made. But let’s not go on about it. Let’s just say the way Morrison operates it is ambiguous, a thought-experiment, a test. He doesn’t necessarily write the book to force Naturalistic Observation through media-compression but I think he thinks, under the sun, where we are alive, animals essentially, it is going to happen. He reserves the right to say they are metaphors though, the new creatures, as Wallace Fowlie contends. I could go on for years about this and have elsewhere, on my last laptop: Locke on the Madness of The Lords And The New Creatures: I haven’t saved it on this new device. Anyhow, now it is night and I am awake and aware, witness or not.

CHAPTER TWO: THE IRISH ACCENT AND THE QUESTION OF ‘VISION’

Since first reading The Lords And The New Creatures I have also read Ulysses. Talk about not being able to branch out from Morrison ceases when you read Ulysses. Jim Morrison read it when he was a teenager – and so it would seem that The New Creatures in particular has an Irish accent. Take a line like:

“startling obedience from the pool people.”

He is encrypting something to do with life being a stream and every day being different from the last that he encountered in James Joyce. What I would like to say now, though it strays from textual analysis is that James Joyce saw new creatures too as well as myself as witness. Indeed you could ideate something of a chain called the chain of Dark Evolution. It would be a theory that states James Joyce saw new creatures too and his writing Ulysses may have then become the reason Ted Hughes saw a monster in the river in childhood; and Hughes writing The Hawk In The Rain (about the nature of visionary experience) then becomes the reason Jim Morrison is said to have seen winged serpents in the desert; and Jim writing The Lords And The New Creatures? Well, it is probably the case that someone (myself!) met not one but two. Thus there is a Logical Bond between Narrative and Naturalistic Observation that one might call the chain of Dark Evolution. Whether it be a right theory or not I do not know but take the stance of Bertrand Russell who says in History of Western Philosophy it is better to have a wrong theory than no theory at all.

I would also say that if you talk about The Lords And The New Creatures coming true, something kinetic becomes something static. It’s like John Barnes’s sensational goal against Brazil. Watching the action replay we know the ball is going in. We cannot give the uncertainty back to the moment. Something kinetic becomes something static.

In the case of Ted Hughes, he built up to writing about his Naturalistic Observation. It is present in his first volume and his second too. He became poet Laureate; and it was during his Laureateship that things got real for me. Ted Hughes might be worth mentioning on the nature of vision. Traditionally vision is demarcated from mere wild hallucination by containing something divine. Ted Hughes would say vision has thus been indoctrinated by the church who only brand Nature as evil – and he would say vision needs usurpation from the false hands of the false.

Blake was deemed a visionary because he breakfasted with angels and saw the sun as holy, not just a 2 pence piece; but Allen Ginsberg who was visited by the ghost of Blake and taught by that ghost the notes to the Songs of Innocence and Experience was deemed only mad. With Rimbaud there were those that went one way and those that went another. Some deemed it that he was a true visionary because he could look at a factory and see a mosque; others that it was mere wild hallucination.

It’s difficult to know with Jim Morrison whether he was a true visionary or not. I would say he was definitely a mystic as was James Joyce and that this is out of fashion at the moment, in a climate where many critics prefer things not to be mysticism-tinged but “unmisted.” If you believe in the aforementioned chain of Dark Evolution and that Morrison fits into it he is as much a visionary as the others in the chain, and his contribution was the pluralisation of the specimen that gets observed.

I suppose the problem is whether the witness should let you know or not. As a supposed “witness” I might meanwhile do as well writing about yesterday’s food as I would engaging in battle against Darwinian science. My brother Dr. Robert L G Tucker, who has read Ulysses twice, contended that the minute you become the witness, you become even less likely to win a Nobel Prize for science than you were before. This (in my opinion) is counter-intuitive to someone made witness like me for whom even genius is disappointing compared with what I have espied in boyhood. You know something extraordinary and remarkable has gone on on a scientific level but can’t come to grips with it.

CHAPTER THREE: REARRANGING PERCEPTION

I told you in The Lords as in film everything is deliberate. As Professor John Schad says, film has grammar; and even a spec of dust out of place would be undesirable. But check this out: the new edition of The Lords And The New Creatures as contained in The Collected Works of Jim Morrison has returned The Lords to a series of loose, scattershot-logical notes!

This I found infuriating, a disaster for my favourite long poem. Maybe they thought it was Machiavelli, or too dictatorial, or prone to being used as Nazi propaganda, or too totalitarian. Jim does say “Cinema is the most totalitarian of all the arts.” Anyhow, here I am venting my spleen, and guided by higher voices too, which let me know that within my scheme I seem to be renewing the wood! Don’t go there! Don’t go hunting for that booted away football!

It strikes me, going back to the former point, that if you leave large, gravid spaces, like stills, you are liable for people to run in and pour Ketchup so to speak. I like it when Jim speaks about novice silkworms that chance on opacity, stumble on the idea of rhythm. I like it also when he says move past them – go where waves come copulating, marrying together stunning juxtapositions of all unlikely Orders of Being. He doesn’t quite use these words but there is a subliminal text at times. When he talks of the “gray film” melting off the cheek, and saying farewell, he has something specific in mind that foreshadows the encrypted node of The New Creatures from within The Lords.

There are some interesting mirror-neuron-y things going on, such as the mention of wasps (i.e. creatures) in The Lords; and the line “fear The Lords who are secret among us” in The New Creatures. He also divides, suggestively, the image of children leaping into the shadow of a jet in The Lords and the bit about wings crashing on high winds of karma in The New Creatures. From the man made to the creaturely we see the division in that mirror-neuron-y connection, but the point is he failed to divide The Lords And The New Creatures entirely.

One of my favourite bits in The Lords is about 360 vision, but I don’t want to spoil it. I once read an article or even just conversation thread online by a woman who said she thought bits were brilliant but only a few bits, such as when Oswald escapes into a movie house in The Lords. Later on in his career Jim would write that when the true king’s murderers are left to roam free, a thousand magicians arise in the land. He really was, as he said, a “thought-provoking senator of lust.”

I love it when Jim talks about how a drug enacts a physical poem on the body. Around the time I read this I also read Brian Patten’s collection Little Johnny’s Confession where a schoolboy contemplates getting stoned on milk. I think it was a combination of these two things that led me to ideate the notion of a top-down drug called “Strictly Free” that does what it says on the tin, both is and makes you “strictly free” to consume. I suppose though that is just the narcostisation of air inbetween smokes. All this, this science, this art, this experiment, it was all interrupted at the time by September 11th and that was a great tragedy that had multifarious ramifications across all walks of life.

My speech in the den in the barn in 2000 was very Morrisonian, full of inventions, aphorisms, prophecies and artistic ambitions. Jim is good at thinking outside the box as they call it, and teaches you to do it too. If ever I was abused I find now only numbness. This Door book is part of why my family want me to die; and I left it too late to tell my brother James what I was put through. By now I sit here awaiting my fate, thinking my fate will resolve whatever that fate may be once I have finished a text I suppose I am duty-bound to produce.

We may never have another witness from The Lords And The New Creatures so should cherish it and nor should the witness be Anon, especially if he puts his heart and soul into a work, even if there is help from the State at hand, whom it seems are not so tyrannical after all if they permit a free and open face value discussion of the Revolutionary imagery I attested to in my boyhood.

CHAPTER FOUR: THROUGH THE WOODS

Okay I am going to be honest with you. As a witness, or even ‘the’ witness, in and of, to and from The Lords And The New Creatures, I feel an obligation to go deeper than merely studying words when I deal with the woods – but I don’t wish to stray on to the topic of biology in a philosophical text. I would say it is specious that “it’s all in your mind,” for the specimen is real and physical and independent of the witness’s thought. It has financial backing from adults, who might go to prison for it, that’s how real it is. When someone says “it’s all in your mind” that is because it is all in their mind, because they haven’t witnessed it and can only try and think of it to little avail. So it is that I journey from talking about words to leading us through the woods.

**

You don’t need to eat as much on a hot day. You can get up late in the afternoon and just have a piece of bread with humus. You don’t need a hot meal. And if you’re the witness, writing about yesterday’s food could be your Dorian Mode, or at least enough. I already wrote a Shakespearean sonnet about a cooked breakfast that contained every snooker ball colour – but the sad art police have made it very plain that my poetry has to be Anon, with weird insistence, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t think it right, and agree with John Stuart Mill that a progressive country can quickly become backwards if there is a decrease in Individuality. But that is by the by. My Shakespearean sonnet was never that good but at least the idea for it came from within.

**

What can you do when you become the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison? As stated, my latest thinking is that my dad was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness. The first was, I believe, something also attested to by James Joyce in time before me, which is written about in Ulysses. The second – it struck me only recently – was an actual monster, albeit very small and albeit contained to a plastic rectangular card.

With the first I went into the wood to get the booted away ball, and as I stood looking for the ball, it came from the right, crossed my body, parked and started to wriggle its little wing. This caused me to run and upon returning to the wood to hunt for it, it was not to be found. I think it was meant to look like a hoax but still exist in meaning.

With the second, I tried on a jacket under the stairs and got a sense something was wrong and took it off and looked inside… “mum!” I cried up the pine, wooden stairs. “There’s something disgusting growing in this jacket!”

I was ignored and it was a flat plastic rectangle with a pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds – splurged on top of it. I did not leave it to soak in water like a good scientist might. I left the room and went back in to see if it would still be there as the wood had taught me – and it was. So I made the decision to bin the whole jacket. Still you shouldn’t write about what you cannot renew.

**

I hear the living spreadsheet of plastic was called “Grand-darth’s Ship” taking its Taxonomy from a poem I wrote at seven in my web-book. The poem was about how my grand-dad Don became a deep-sea diver, but in reality he was an officer in the RAF who fought against the Nazis. So maybe the “reification” of the spreadsheet was to do with something like Symbiotic Homeostasis whereby there was such a juxtaposition of good and evil at work that it caused something new to evolve.

**

Meanwhile there is an equation blowing in the wind. Permutation is how the inner game of music operates. Not sine wave with minus sign coursing through. Tony Eade the gay maths teacher stood with his arms in a T and spoke in a strange tone when announcing to the boarders that it was chess club tonight. Intention – what is my Intention, but to shed scientific light, to make an imaginative advance, to contribute to the history of knowledge and maybe make the world a better place? In this world we are all equals. The image is of Egyptian mystery. Maybe. You don’t need a knife to achieve it.

**

To still be writing about the woods would be evil. That’s why it would be better to write about anything else, even the war America and Israel are now waging on Iran. Or the way Informationist poets used to send text messages into space, for example “liquid crystal meth.” Or even the peace and tranquillity that descends, momentarily at least in the quietened kitchen. The fridge drone has stopped for example, the whispering in the chimney subsided. The clock tick tocks but the Tap does not drip. Away in the cupboard, empty medicine packets build up so fast, but it is past the hour, now, when literature is a machine for remembering to take your meds. There is a séance of voices, if that be the collective noun, trying to appear, that were ongoing a few moments ago before this lull; and I don’t know what to make of them, how to translate or interpret them. Yes there are objects scattered about the room, and as my dad used to say “no nukes is good nukes,” always on the look out for a catchy saying (also see “Paul Scholes scores goals.”) Wouldn’t it be nice to be a philosopher? Or a scientist? Or a mathematician? So often in moments of reflection I “count things…” and I wonder why this is. I’d prefer to see a vision of a woman leaning back in tights, saying “do the lines,” like a ladder to Heaven, than I would talk about the wood, and how I was the hero, who liberated evolution from its tyranny.

**

Maybe, you have to open a Quantum Field of Intelligence. One of my tricks as a child was to say, when we were looking for something, “oh, iiiiiii know where it ISN’T.” Then I would point to places where it was not. “It isn’t there!” I would say wasting everyone’s time, turning the business of looking for something into a joke. The point was to make them think I did know where it is, that I was saying “oh, iiiiiiiiii know where it is,” but then to let them down.

Maybe, you have to open a quantum field of intelligence when you are bombarded with something that seems real, that you have to take in, and which then appears to disappear when you go back into the wood to hunt for it. I couldn’t tell you which is preferable out of the expression “Barnes has scored a chicken” and “Barnes hasn’t scored a chicken.”

I was overloaded, already by the first specimen. I used to sit on the bus – did I tell you? – and, as top of the form – ask myself in all srsness if the farm local to the school had a secret, underground lab where unsound experiments were conducted on animals and if one had got away. In all honesty I had to leave the school over the trivial matter of drawing a crude picture and blaspheming at the scene of a road accident on the school bus, before I could find out the answer to the question.

What my mother was doing while this was happening, well, she thought in the end I had helped invent the net back before any of this new creature malarkey got real. If so, it was when some scientists came round to the house – when I was seven - and got my dad to get me to write a book storing the idea of the net in the attic to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world and keep it free. If the theory has come into dispute it’s because I had no conscious memory of having done that, but I suppose I have been very busy ever since and I also suppose the net as we now know it didn’t instantly materialise back when the book was written, when it was stored in the attic for Long Storage without my being able to read it.

The problem I still now face as witness is doing good. One would’ve thought that the most obvious way I can do that is highlight that hidden parts of government hold a monopoly on evolution, can send a snake by telepathy, don’t change hands when a new power comes in, that the business of democracy is a sham, that this is why The Lords And The New Creatures is a good test, as if a spiritual or germ x-ray that finds the germs of dictatorship on all hands. But saying that am I really doing good? I am probably stirring up trouble for myself most likely. There must be some way to celebrate what happened. It may have been a mistake but it was not an accident and the motivation of the people that actually funded it remains unknown.

**

A project on the dinosaurs isn’t a bad reaction to becoming the witness. I remember when in the wake of becoming the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures I wrote a school project on the dinosaurs. I was ten or eleven; and my piece was scholarly and boring. The girls at the back meanwhile did the 60’s, stuck in bits of velvet and denim, made it all about fashion and music that didn’t include the Doors. My project too might’ve included more on the Doors. My last line was “last Autumn, two biologists announced that they had cloned the DNA of a forty-million-year-old, extinct stingless bee found in amber.” It was the best bit. It was the only bit that indicated my own Observations were “real as Jurassic Park.”

**

Water is the universal solvent. Water, water, clairvoyant daughter, please show us your ragged silken eye. I remember passing out in chapel and waking in a different room being offered tepid tapwater by the rugby captain as if for the rending detail: both our dads had chainsaws.

It strikes me now that this moment was a naturally occurring fossil of art rather than life. It was because I was the witness. Morrison obvs starts his text “Look where we worship.” That was why I went down as easily as smashed glass on chapel floor. The bit where “both our dads had chainsaws” is the best bit in the whole story.

**

The appearance of a black beetle while you write means “you’re done.” So often, trying to decide what to do about my literature, my file/s open on the laptop, I suddenly see a black beetle scurrying across the floor. Normally I see it as a bug from the cover of Syd Barrett’s solo album Barrett but always as a sign that I should pursue a weed-reeking insect collection of rock songs – always a sign that I should pursue the music. Until tonight that is, where I told my mother the above, and she said it doesn’t mean to pursue the music, it means “you’re done.” It means whatever you are presently working on is finished.

There is of course a long history in Jung where there is a scarab beetle, signifying whatever it signifies in dreams – and now to have this messenger, it is a good feeling to know what it means. I cannot say where mum got the information from to say that it means I am done, but I can believe her, for mums are often right. So it is that I pack the present file, which goes on and on in scattershot-logical ways away for when I get another chance. I mean, I was only just getting started but now am being closed down by the insectivorous kingdom. The point is even if I undid everything I have done and left myself a blank slate for starting again, I would still probably see the black beetle. So maybe I shouldn’t base my decisions on superstition; but maybe it is as valid a sign as any that I will receive and I should go by it religiously.

CHAPTER FIVE: SOME FURTHER THOUGHTS ON A BIOLOGICAL THEME

One point that may be made may be more obvious to biologists who haven’t attested to the Observations as I did. Darwin, who is bound to come up in the discussion, differentiates between variation that is born of Natural Selection and variation that is man-made. But I hear, in the myriad of voices, that it doesn’t make any difference. This however is surely debatable when it comes to the specimens I met. There are those, that is, that disqualify my attestations because they were done with a gun, so to speak, part of an illegal art smuggling ring, with financial backing. Again you would hope for the biologists to say “it doesn’t make any difference,” but this time, maybe it does, and does so because of the law.

**

Ultimately you have to think of cancer. My dad, who was sponsored to provide the witness, ended up dying of eleven tumours in the liver. My mother is Finnish and they don’t have The Lords And The New Creatures. When I mentioned it in Finnish company my Uncle said very discretely that they don’t talk about it in Finland because it leads to cancer. And look at my dad. He didn’t tell my mum, possibly because it was too risky, what was going on, that he’d named his sons after the Doors, who William Blake was, how The Lords And The New Creatures did the rounds at the Isle of Wight festival. But he still died of cancer, as if the secrets he kept metastasised. It could be why nobody wants to go through with it, discussing the topic, and why you’ll never win a Nobel Prize for science, if you’re the witness, regardless of how good your science is and whatever else you do. That’s part of why I was abused as a child, why they say my book must only be between myself and the State and not go on my Blog, why nobody has anything to be jealous of with regards to my life story, my insane CV.

**

If I could start again I wouldn’t put a plus sign for an ‘f’ in the line “I have a scar+ that is red and black.” I would aim my research at the King and try to be William’s Laureate. But maybe my experiment into the maths of the new colour undermines the cancer gnawing at my genome? Once again I feel forbidden from expanding on that, by law and common sense alike, except to say that acid isn’t flaccid and culture is transmitted as well as genes as evinced by the maths itself. I am not duty bound to reveal it all, but could easily do so, and you’d only be disappointed by it, or even enraged. You can always read The Sunset Child, which is my seven year old Prep, where the experiment was first conducted, should you wish to see the fragments that remain.

**

If it is harbouring secrets that gives rise to cancer, one would’ve thought I should bring a text like this to publication, but there are aesthetic issues to do with repetition within a body of work that is crass to commit to print. I trust my brother and mother’s judgement against it, while being lost in my own world, not knowing wrong from right. The State might say “we can see you are trying to redeem us of all evil but we think the witness has to get tortured and killed in prison to redeem us of all evil.” At least this is what voices confer. If you were the witness, you might be charged with the responsibility of affecting social change for the better, like doing away with violence and torture in prison, which government after government has failed to tackle. In other words the job might extend beyond merely attesting to weird specimens. After all Jim Morrison sings in ‘Shaman’s Blues’ “will you stop? Will you stop? Will you stop the pain?” As the subject becomes painful, with monotonous and threatening voices encroaching, one can stop the pain only on the most immediate level of turning to a different file. As Neil Curry writes in the poem ‘Skulls,’ which is addressed to John Wood, “we walked away talking of flowers instead.”

**

Prompted by voices, I am back, back to the discussion, about my dad’s cancer. He had Hep C which affects the liver and was always going to get liver cancer. It might not have been the secrets he kept. And Hep C, by the way, probably did not originate in The Lords And The New Creatures as in a binary-machine striving to give birth to a third category. But you can imagine me, grieving, in mental hospital, thinking I had made another scientific breakthrough – understood that Hep C originated in The Lords And The New Creatures. That bit Morrison is in the desert and looks at the stars and says “so many pigeons ripe with new diseases.” He really thought his way into the anthropomorphism very well. And I did ask a medical professional that time in mental hospital about my dad’s Hep C, and he said there was no chance it arose as a result of Morrison’s binary-machine. So it might not all be doom and gloom. There might be a lot of superstition surrounding the topic of Morrison’s work, like stigma too. Morrison’s work did invite evolution, but the mutation of Hep C was not one of the things that resulted, I hear.

**

My dad left behind a green notebook containing a list of French vocabulary, ostensibly; but the vocab list was also a code that can be cracked, revealing a poem. It was masterfully done and in it he implies “the order of the colours of the vowels is scrambled because they are wild animals.” It’s a similar point to the one about language being born of meat and therefore my being able to say anything and it still fitting in to a poem about animals.

**

One further point. When I was a kid there was a big family mystery as to what happened to James’s Gameboy. Some said he left it on a train, when it had disappeared. I, who was the witness, who didn’t discuss that matter of my being the witness with my siblings, entertain even to this day that James’s Gameboy was transformed into the second specimen I mention. That is the extent of my open-ness, my uncertainty, my quantum field of intelligence. That is also the extent of the evolutionary possibilities that were available before. I hope it hasn’t changed.

**

CHAPTER SIX: A GIANT SPIDDER

Imagine if after all this writing and all this life I got to the age of 44 and there was a new specimen! It would be part spider and part machine and crawl under your bed as you watched it, and leave you terrified, hiding under the covers. It would be bigger than a daddy long legs but still quite small. As for the bit where it’s part machine, you assume it’s a spider carrying something on its back, but then you realise it’s another specimen and one you might have designed and desired yourself. You hid from it under the duvet, hoping it wouldn’t crawl up on top of you but stay under the bed. Life goes on. The story you told about your childhood is unending. It is life itself, not narrative.

A moment ago a blessed and golden light lay everywhere in the Keatsian Autumn. I thought how Autumn is Optimus Prime, ate an apple from the orchard, and saw how laden with gold everything was out the window – but now a foul rain is falling. The music on the stereo in the kitchen measures this change by changing from The Kinks to the Doors. I myself at my screen also change, Protean in diversity, from doors open to doors closed. The subject matter shifted back to the new creatures and the new development in the story. One wishes to quote Jung who says the numinosity of a series of events only increases according to the number of items in the series. A book that starts to smell of perfume could be the word of a dog. The Oyster card reader on the bus saying BACKPASS ATTEMPTED instead of NO MONEY could be a psychotechnological post-poem – but both could be items in the Jungian sense. Still it is more Jung’s work on synchronicity that one feels an obligation to cite when the weather seems to change according to something else. Anyhow I would consider that we have had another specimen, though am not 100%, and that this time it wasn’t the philosophers that sponsored my dad but the herd-crowd in the Nietzschean sense, the audience, the friends and contemporaries, the lake. I would say it was a Nike Air spider, hatched since people my own age discovered I was the witness long ago and had been waylaid. All of a sudden I get a massive wave of emotional recall, think of my father and wish to cry, but can’t. Again it was a hybrid. These new creatures are created by smashing old creatures together, or old things in general. Who knows what was up with that spider? What was it carrying on its top? In my seven year old book, there’s one about seeing “a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine that was what it was coming from.” Maybe this was just that.

So it seems this changes everything of my story, renews it. And why should new creaturely attestation be the sole privilege of a young boy? I rather think it would be better if it was an adult making observations, a scientist even. But as I say upon seeing this spider scurrying towards me out of the blue, on the floor as I sat on the bed looking down at the floor, and seeing it going under the bed, I hid under the duvet.

If you ask yourself “was it a new creature?” the answer is “yes. Of course it was a new creature.” And in my sensing this I become the one that is new, and that comes with the danger of becoming a celebrity which with my illness I do not want under any circumstances. I called it a Nike Air spider but it was a celebrity spider among spiders. It’s almost like live mutation is contagious between us.

The first specimen was the juggernaut, in the wood. The second was the plastic spreadsheet in the lining of the jacket in the cloakroom under the stairs. I believe but might be wrong these were just continuities in a pre-existing chain of Naturalistic Observations; and that I myself in passing through the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, might, might have become the third specimen myself. Then there was an incident in a wood where a muntjac, seemingly at least, ran from the witness. Some friends and I stood still in a wood and I got a strange, fertile Sixth sense that we were not alone and turned my head to the left at the exact time a muntjac, looking brown and stumpy, ran out from underneath a large bracken frond and disappeared into the wood. Because the specimen ran from the witness, as if the witness was the new creature, I still count it as an observation. I wouldn’t actually say the island of penguins (so to speak) was necessarily in the same chain but it was a remarkable event that happened next. At some point I also found myself in the caravan at the foot of the fell with my brothers, drinking and smoking and playing guitar, and got a strange, fertile Sixth Sense that the dog had run off and was trapped on a fence miles away at the farm barking. So we walked up in the night and found that I was right. We brought him back home and continued our party. These are the specimens I have known, and I believe now there is another addition to the list.

It had to be a spider and also had to be a bad monkey funky spider, but why I might not be able to say. I am thinking already of what happened when I put my seven year old text out there as the real homework of the real witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. It was that, and yet it was also something I did with the government to help the internet into being. As I say it contains a piece where “we saw a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine that was what it was coming from.” That “giant spidder” as I called it could’ve been the net, but now this specimen has been seen, this spider, the Nike Air spider, the celebrity spider – and I cannot resist but to comment that one of the scientists that got me to help invent the net as a kid was called Spider! I remember he taught me a song at the piano. I think part of the maths if not all of it in the boyhood book was his. That is, I think he structured the equation on the front, to do with the ‘E’, but that it was I who did the ‘f’. I can’t remember this far back but I feel like we are getting back to those days with this new perception. Immediately upon me exclaiming to my family that there has been a new specimen, and that it’s part spider part machine, I think my brother James doubts it instantly. For him, I imagine it’s like the time I said I saw a hologram of Bob Dylan walking round Glastonbury on acid (which was not true). I love the way it’s so difficult to believe but that’s the feeling you get upon setting eyes on these things, the proof if you will. The experience of making an encounter is visual to you and the surprise of it to you when you relay it to someone else comes out as fantasy or delusion. What is a visual surprise to you – that feeling of seeing it – of being punctured and convinced - translates via language as something to doubt the reality of. This is natural and in one sense proves the validity of the specimen being “new” and the experience of seeing it as strange. All of a sudden I sense my job may not be over. It’s almost like the way things have been set up, in terms of apparatus and literature alike, a weird specimen would be the only triumph of hope as an outcome.

It did look very strange, larger than a daddy long legs and carrying something on its back, and you suspend judgement even though it looks strange and entertain that some evolutionary scientist out there knows something in terms of an explanation. So you yourself also doubt it, but then comes a time where you need to take the lead and your brother needs to doubt, and the protagonist in the play we’re in does believe in fashioning new specimens including the evolutionary possibility of part spider part machine. It’s just the nature of the play we’re in that the protagonist believes in these things, when he takes the lead, against all odds.

I think what my old English teacher didn’t like about Lord of The Flies was that the mystic character Simon says “the beast is us,” falsifying it, whereas in life, the true mystic character is the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures, the witness who really does attest to borderline things of an X or ‘other’ nature.

If I may take a moment I would like to regale you again with what I do. 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.

I was told “you’re not getting any more,” and thought there was nothing more for me to see or do in the room, but tentatively invest belief that there has, as stated, been a new specimen again. My mother is yet to see it, though I did give her a copy of The Lords And The New Creatures recently and have been trying to let her in slowly to the nature of dad’s experiment. Meanwhile there are flies in the house, and meanwhile also, my computer files are monsters. The appearance of a mousse might, in a poem, symbolise a bike riding itself.

So I see this is what can be achieved by evening when you get up in the morning. So “I don’t know” is the answer to your question. But they won’t let me win a Nobel Prize for science whatever I do because I am not prepared to renew the one with the fire-dance. I don’t’ really care about that… as long as the work is good enough, it’s enough validation on its own. Quite the reverse, though, I do realise I look a bit stupid with this new specimen. It was weeks ago that I saw it and only just put it down in words. So it can’t have been that drastic a matter. And truly it could’ve been an extra large daddy long legs carrying something of equal size to it on its back. It becomes a question of faith. The ones in my boyhood were not a question of faith, were undeniable and indubitable – but now the science is open again you’re starting to doubt it, no doubt, because I am talking of a new specimen like I am that is, I quote, half spider half machine! But it would be typical of life to wait until you are set and then present a new specimen upsetting the fixity of things. I cannot say with any certitude, meanwhile, that the Nike Air spider really was a new specimen, but it genuinely might’ve been… I hear to suspend judgement is a sign of intelligence and that the more intelligent you are the more gullible you are, or the more likely to entertain incredulous things. Emerson said intelligence is the ability to entertain a truth without investing belief and I would urge you, dear, gentle reader, to do just that with this new specimen. It took about 30 years to get to the bottom of the last ones from boyhood, and even then, I am still not sure what my dad’s art deal was all about, or who sponsored him for what.

Even though I only caught a two second glimpse at the Nike Air spider before it scurried under the bed, I would, if pressed, say that what it carried on its back was thread. Something made of thread. Something like a thin piece of string, in a woven pattern, or a single Quaver from a pack of Quavers crisps tied down with a thread, strapped on its back. It really is getting ridiculous as to what qualifies a new specimen, in terms of old things being smashed together, in terms of how little it takes, by means of hybridisation and juxtaposition, to tip a creature’s identity into the new bracket. I don’t think it was a Quaver crisp on its back, strapped in with some delicate white thread, but it was something like that. I know nothing of spiders, of zoology, of evolutionary science, outside The Lords And The New Creatures story, so cannot tell you if it was nest-building. It was definitely something of which I caught a two second glimpse as it scurried under the bed, away from prying eyes.

If I were pressed in an exam, as I say, I would argue that I saw this new specimen because my seven year old book helped invent the net; and when I published it I sold it to you as the real homework of the real witness, which was also true; and if you look through it, one of the most poignant and Doorsian bits is when my brother and I see “a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine that’s what it was coming from.” This is a symbol of the net, this giant spidder in the seven year old book. The story goes on to say, after all, that “just then I fell into a cobweb.” And I would say this new specimen is to do with that, but in what way I cannot see. It could be that the interlude between me helping invent the net as a boy and knowing I did, as an adult, is the interlude it took for this spider to come crawling home to me. It was not a normal spider, nearer an attention-seeking device.

These things always seem to elude capture. You may caress the image only with the eye! Jim Morrison described camera as “mechanical hermaphrodite/ androgynous machine” and that rings true when it came to the first specimen. If only there was a knife at hand to plunge into it and tell of its texture! Given that Cinema might be the Transforming Agent it might interesting! But this is codswallop! And the second specimen didn’t evade capture! It was still! I did away with it because it was plain evil to the naked eye and sometimes regret it still to this day, but who would go to the zoo to show their children a monster like that, when it would only upset the children on account of it being evil? This new specimen I mention, it might’ve been a spider carrying something on its back, as I say, but the boyhood book I wrote, as mentioned before, seems to offer a different story. Maybe it was the knowledge that I helped invent the net, stored in an animal visitation, coming home to me. “It really was you that invented the net,” said the spider, finally saving the day. “Really?” I said and it “yes. You wrote a little book when you were 7 that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world.” “Oh,” I said, “that’s nice.” “Yes,” said the spider, “but before you go boasting, know there were adults at the time to guide you, and there are others that did more.” “And what about you?” I asked the spider. He said “I’m a spidder. Not a spider but a spidder. A type of creature envisioned by the kid that helped invent the net. You invented me in your 7 year old book.” “That’s interesting,” I said “because it was likely a spelling mistake, but it’s turned out to be a mutation.” He said “the difference between me and a normal spider, as you can see, is the same as the difference between a spider and a spidder.” He was a character from my seven year old book and had a delicate ornament made of fine white string on his back, maybe a spider-harp.

I use conversation for scientific ends, so something child-like is underwritten by something grown up. Who knows what they are born of? Crisis, despair, imagination, mathematics? It is through imagination – also apostrophe – and dialogue – that I try to make sense of it and how the visual difference between what I saw and a normal spider is the same Taxonomic difference between the word “spider” and the word “spidder.” I don’t know but it sounds like the biological equivalent of Derrida’s “differ(A)nce.” Whatever the case I feel somewhat stranded by amazement… there I was writing a book about childhood Observations when another came along! It makes you want to start the book again, but then you wouldn’t have the sense of surprise and the unforeseeable.

CHAPTER SEVEN: FURTHER THOUGHTS ON THE SPIDDER

As a musician I take my cue from music when in medias res. Hendrix would always take the jam back to the riff. So it is that I return our concerns to matters of The Lords And The New Creatures. What would Jim Morrison make of the spidder? I like it when he talks of cars as engine beasts muttering their soft talk (“a delight at night to hear their quiet voices again after all these years.”) You can tell he’s on drugs, though, and has a warped perception of time. I think those “engine beasts” may have been the inspiration for the children’s cartoon Transformers but it’s only a guess. I also think when he mentions “bitter grazing in sick pastures” he foresees ecstasy-taking. It’s not the only foresight in the book either. He fairly foresees the internet. He says something about the city as a severed insect mound or “web.” “All citizens heir to the same royal parent,” he writes. This is in The New Creatures, and I love it. The net is also foreseen in a Utopian vision in James Joyce, who calls it “the net” in Ulysses. I think both would be delighted if I really have encountered a spidder. If I don’t get a chance to finish a text about it, I can always say it’s already contained in my boyhood book The Sunset Child.

Now I think that people who doubted I was the witness may be more inclined to believe it, but I might be wrong about that. Like my book it left you wondering “what the Hell was that thing?” A delicate contraption it would seem. I’ve seen some daddy long legs in my time but this one was different, a different category and order. It’s like when I met Grand-darth’s Ship: a pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds – splurged on top of a plastic rectangle inside a jacket. You could just tell from the pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds – that it was too regimented. It indicated difference, possibly man-made difference. The same was true of the spidder. I cannot tell if the contraption on its back contained man made cotton, but it was like it was carrying something made of thread. If it was part of the creature, so be it. You get down into what is organic and what is not and find the whole internet is as organic as a spider’s web. You find even LSD is fungal and flung from the centre of the sun. This spidder was a complication of things. As a child, in the web-book, I wrote “my monster goes to bed at six/ before bed he likes white string and tricks.” We were trying to give rise to the net all the way round the world, as you know. And look at how big it is now! Immense science has gone on. It is not true that science is dead. Even the car parked outside the window, in a resting position, proves that. It runs on equations none of the drivers understand. But that is just the perception at first hand. What would it take for a daddy long legs to be considered a machine? If it was complicated by a contraption of “white string and tricks” maybe symbolising the internet too, it could be a machine. But what I am talking about is so obtuse I don’t know if I should carry on. It was a contraption and it was a spider, at the same time = it was a spidder. And I do feel like it’s almost a matter of computer science to talk about it. It’s a convergence of computer science and zoology. If the original “vision of a giant spidder” in the seven year old book symbolised the net, then the creature I call a spidder that I observed with my own senses a little while back also symbolises the net.

I think the important point is that in my boyhood it was The Lords And The New Creatures “getting real” and now it is my book from boyhood, which is published as The Sunset Child, getting real. So there has been a succession. The boyhood witness’s book, that is, is now what is getting real in the story. So this spidder only at a remove or two qualifies as The Lords And The New Creatures happening, for it is the witness’s own book that is “happening.” I might be wrong about this: it might still be that it’s happening because my dad was sponsored to provide the real, human witness from Morrison’s book and it was me. It’s amazing how such small a detail can unhinge the mind. I say small but the spider was obviously different. It looked mechanistic. Like it was carrying a harp made of fine white string on its back. And yes this time we point our audience to The Sunset Child, not to The Lords And The New Creatures. Jim Morrison’s book ages and becomes the grandfather not the son.

So you might remember my talking about what I called “The chain of Dark Evolution,” which includes observations made by Joyce, Ted Hughes, Jim Morrison and myself – and if it is true the chain has entered the Digital World. So Nature itself is going online so to speak. It still leaves you in a state of compounded misunderstanding. The new creatures as I have met them all seem to be compounds, that is, alloys, hybrids, mongrelisations. They all contain stunning juxtaposition. In the case of the bird, I shall not say; in the case of the plastic spreadsheet it was plastic + organic matter; in the case of the spidder it was the contraption made of thread or string that it carried on its back.

Seeing as in boyhood there was a pair, one might start to ask of the next Observation in the line. That is, I can’t keep writing about a two second glimpse of a spidder forever, but should try and broaden my literary horizon somewhat. It scurried so fast under the bed because it would’ve been so easy to kill and it – or even Nature’s grand design – didn’t want that. But now I am making things up. How to translate experience into a true science I do not know. There are no “Venn diagrams” or “family trees” or “graphs” in my work. To extrapolate something from the given facts is hard. If it is true I was the witness when I was young, I think I’ll be the witness until I die, and that it is other people, who are not the witness, that maybe, maybe, wish for the job to not be over – for further specimens – for the continuation of the story. I think of these three specimens now, and yes I do also include myself as a specimen given the experiment into the maths of the new colour, and do include the muntjac episode because the specimen ran from the witness… could it be true that the animal kingdom knows I myself am a specimen? Darwin would call what happened to me w/r/t/ being marked by the maths of the new colour “speciation.” He said there is an extent of variation among a species that means an incipient species is born. His theme was that death is Mother Nature’s way of bringing new species into being. W/r/t the stripe on my body, it’s a line of mathematical code. But I don’t wish to speak of this… for it only means my death will be like Jesus unto those that know, and I don’t wish to show the mark that was left. Suffice to say the nurse in A and E when I needed to pee said “we think you’ve reinvented the human form.” I think the witness always was going to look like that, when caught up in all the evolutionary science and also the pseudo-science of it all. There was always going to be a small sign of evolution within the witness himself.

So it is that even though I have lost the ability to ejaculate I still do what I do. I was the boy who helped invent the net and who was also the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures and yes I do entertain that these things have converged in the case of the latest observation, the latest specimen.

CHAPTER EIGHT: WAITING IN THE WINGS OF EVOLUTION

So it is that I am back to considering The Lords And The New Creatures my favourite book. That was the way it was in Sixth Form, as I say; and I go exclusively from memory in this report. I gave a copy to my younger brother James whom it would seem said it was good but not as good as his own book. I gave a copy to my mother and she said you have to be stoned to read it. But being the witness I naturally think it a fine piece of work and emulation is weak but I would wish to do something like it. I am thinking now of where the spidder came from. I hope you don’t mind me using a child’s mis-spelling as a new creature’s Taxonomy. It seemed to shoot out from under a pile of clothes on my floor but I didn’t see it actually crawl out, only noticed it when it was crawling towards me as I sat on the bed. I think now of the “warm wheel turning” in The New Creatures, like some kind of green wheel of conceptual synaesthesia that can churn out observations. Otherwise I am not sure where it was hatched. Maybe it was forced through media compression. Maybe we are dealing not with science but with magic… I can see how the first specimen might’ve been seen as magic not science. But the second, in the same teleology, was a plastic spreadsheet at the start of the net, which makes it sound scientific. Then again, calling it a literal monster… you could be looking at mythology. This is a wildly out of key perception though because the second was at bottom sterile and available to sensory perception unto others – it physically went in the bin with my doing hand. The diagnosis that the living spreadsheet was a monster is a scientific diagnosis. The moment of diagnosis is a scientific one. Then with myself as the third specimen, you’d need to see what I am not prepared to show because it is private. I still think it a scientific specimen, not magic, for as stated the stripe is a line of mathematical code. Then there were other things – experiments, halfware, trons, as well as starry nights and all sorts across the board – and now the spidder. No, I would not say it was magic rather than science. The first specimen may have been, that bird in the wood, the juggernaut; but the spidder was scientific. It was to do with the net in ways I have been trying to explain. And that link between Narrative and Naturalistic Observationism is still there. If you remember me talking about the chain of Dark Evolution, it was as if what I write determines what the next observation will be for someone else – but it seems to have arrived with me instead of the next visionary in the line.

Reality may be porous with portals through which new creatures can leak. This is one answer to the question of what egg hatched for example, say, what we are calling “the spidder.” If no egg hatched it, then reality may be porous with portals through which new creatures can leak. They may wait in the wings of evolution, at the threshold of perception, the edge of Natural Selection, waiting to be born. Another suggestion comes from Chaos Theory: that things can be born of “spontaneous self-organisation.” In Chaos Theory you find “Strange Attractors” that linger on the border of chaos and order and which are born of spontaneous self-organisation.

The latter reminds of my brother’s sheet where pictures grew. It may not be a living creature, but is at least a concrete example of “something appearing from nothing” that we can hold in our doing hands. It all begs the question as to whether or not someone out there knows you have seen, say, what we are calling the Spidder, before you have written about it. That is, it may be a top-down government issue, but I don’t want to bring in the State. It could be that I am alone in my perceptions and that nobody, still, believes I was or even am the witness. I think I am the witness still, and that this new specimen confirms it.

I remember once writing about The Lords And The New Creatures when my dog Baxter, who used to bark at my supposedly clinical and delusional voices, started to bark at something in the scullery on the floor and I went next door and found a tiny lizard in the middle of winter on the floor. I picked it up with a tissue and took it outside. There was also an occasion when a bat must’ve got down the chimney for all of a sudden in a room without any other explanation, a bat was just circling the air. There was also a time at a festival called The Secret Garden Party. I went with my old band The Flood, and it was amazing, because there was skywriting, but the next morning, after the skywriting, I woke to find only my own tent was covered, utterly, with bird poo, in a field crammed with tents where you couldn’t fit another tent. There was something shamanic going on to do with my being the witness. I attracted the animals. But now I have strayed from the point, in giving too many examples, that reality may be porous with portals through which new creatures can leak. If so, it would seem there is no consensus or objective reality. This is not news to most, for whom reality is already a dream-vision. The threshold of resolution, or of perception, is not the end of the show but the start of Natural Selection.

But now I suppose it’s the same for writing about the bird from childhood – that something kinetic becomes something static and you shouldn’t write of what you cannot renew. So it is that I pack my spidder diagram away, and try to think of something else to say.

Mother’s in the kitchen. She breaks an egg. I suddenly remember the living spreadsheet from boyhood – and how I couldn’t tell if the organic matter was eggs or seeds. What if that was what hatched the recent spidder all these years later? What if their continuation is stretched over time like that? It would doubtless make more sense to humanity, if that was true: if there was continuity in their species over time.

So imagine them existing on a higher plane, where they remain hidden, until the time is right, then through some portal they appear. But what triggers their appearance? Is it human writing? Are they messengers that punctuate the history of Man’s learning? Might it be that the interlude between the plastic spreadsheet when I was 8 and the spidder now that I am 44 is actually much shorter unto them? This idea that there is a higher plane, is interesting. Also that there are portals. Already in my writing, I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too; and Lucy in the soul with demons may happen to be an actual substance – but that is by the by. I am thinking of the idea of a higher, mathematical plane where new creature observations wait until the time is right. If so, then why was the time right when it came to the Spidder? Was it something I said or rather wrote? We must not forget that language evolved out of meat, out of growing our brains by eating meat, and needing to spread information about farming, hunting, killing and cooking meat. Anything I say is in the anthropomorphic sense. My life goes on inside The Lords And The New Creatures. Looking for sense and looking for light can be hard. It is an intertextual existence to some extent, and McDonalds is the snake in the garden of Eden, and the Big Mac which contains the 4 basic caveman cravings of salt, fat, sugar and protein, is the heir to the Apple of Knowledge and I might get ill if I continue to write in this vein, so for now might leave it there.

CHAPTER NINE: RANDOM MEMORIES

I remember one of the first uses of an animal as a metaphor for something human was when the girl in the primary school toilets said I was “like an elephant.” We would’ve been at an age where we watch Disney films in the cinema, like Bambi. I was a big fan of those early films… and is the alphabet Nellie the Elephant’s suicide note? And can your gf not go veggie for reasons of Disney? Essentially Man is but another animal. John Gray the philosopher says the Bible went wrong in separating Man and the animals. I love the poetry of Ted Hughes, who brings us closer to Nature, who uses animals to signify human traits. I wonder of the monster he saw in the river in boyhood… having seen a monster myself, I know they needn’t be very big, but I would hazard a guess that Ted’s monster was much bigger. To think that all these strange observations are linked in a family blows my mind. It would make sense though if you could apply Darwinism to them. Ted Hughes ended up saying the monster was himself; but in my case there was a plastic card with a pattern of black stuff – maybe eggs or seeds – splurged on top in an un-naturally regimented way. That it came from within is a horrible thought. It was pure evil to behold.

In those days we were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the four of us Tucker siblings, in the game. I think the guys that sponsored my dad to provide the witness turned up and were suddenly called Bebop and Rocksteady because they were bad guys from the Turtles. That’s how young I was when it was all happening. The first specimen was a hybrid… even the specimen James Joyce encountered was a hybridisation, a smashing together of two old things to make something new. It was the wrong time to go hunting for that football in the wood.

Ted was Laureate when I wrote my seven year old book and also made observations at eight. He espoused the Freudian notion that the poet creates the framework of a fantasy world in order to deal with energies suppressed in the bass of the spine and unconscious. Talk of the poet washing up, and there being crocodiles hiding beneath the soapy bubbles would fit into that category. You start to think surfaces are deceptive, and get into the reptilian core of the brain. The atavism of books like Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies becomes topical in all your essays at University. And all along, beneath it all, there is the encrypted node in your boyhood book – that if the Gravity between earth and moon is instant and therefore enough to break light speed, a clock is still only as fast as a cheetah!

It would seem the physics of that is wrong for Gravity has no motion only bends and warps the fabric of spacetime – but the latter end of the node, the tail, about the cheetah, still feels right in an unfalsifiable sense. And when Hughes talks of Freud in interview it’s because it is fashionable in his intellectual circle, but fashions change, and after The Lords And The New Creatures came out it may not be so fashionable to say “the monster is just me.”

The point I would like to make is that my boyhood observations were both evil and the new one, that spidder, as I call it, did not seem evil at all. I still hid under the cover, but it was miles less evil than what I observed as a boy. It was so short, this new observation, just time enough for me to clock it as being alien, other or ‘X.’ They differ in attention-seeking ways. This is where I might need a big theory… Darwin’s theory of evolution does not, as popular rumour has it, say we descended from apes but that humans and apes both descended from the same source. I would still like to proffer the theory of Dark Evolution that posits a Logical Bond between narrative and Naturalistic Observationism, even if it be tempered by the new specimen. I would reiterate the point that what one writes of the Naturalistic Observation influences the very nature of the next specimen in line.

I would also say that if they differ in attention-seeking ways, I might be one of them, which seems a full reversal of saying “the monster is me.” That it’s happened again in adulthood can only be a good thing, I think, a triumph of the human spirit and maybe scientific procedure. I mentioned in the shock of it that it was this time not the guys that sponsored my dad but the people, and this I retract because where they come from I do not know. If Time is what stops everything happening all at once, maybe I am wrong in saying what we write about them influences the next observation in line – for maybe there is no line, no chronology, and they all happen simultaneously and forever. Maybe they are on a different time-scale, up in their superior plane, and visit us only briefly, through portals. I see a fly buzz in the kitchen and to say it is in B flat minor only adorns a bog-standard observation which is in contrast to the so-called new creatures.

My voices have suggested that my organising the Oedipus Wrecks set list and suggesting that the line about the ocean belongs to Anon is what has liberated this new perception, freed the experiment up. Then again you can’t trust what they say about Oedipus Wrecks because everything in it is done contretemps. I guess I am just a really weird person and that once you become the witness it is like that for life, even if observations seem to disappear for years and years.

Even when I present a psycho-technological post-poem about an effervescent mobile phone, reverberating the rhythm of ‘William Tell’ through every technological inlet in the room before it rings, it might go down as being “a bat.” Animalism may be the Lowest Common Denominator, the portal through which we understand things. So it may be true that there is nothing we can say that escapes the condition of meat… in which case one would look to mathematics, as going on on a higher plane, that is conceivably at least a priori not empirical. Some think answers to questions about the divine will arrive in maths. Others that God may exist on a higher, mathematical plane without knowing of our existence.

I reach an impasse in my thinking, pace round the kitchen in a circle, humming a Radiohead song in my mind. I get to thinking about Jim Morrison again, reading the history of time in the scales of a seven mile snake. Sometimes when I am a passenger being driven around at night the road ahead seems just that very snake. That Jim Morrison saw the winged serpent in the desert was as a result of Ted Hughes writing The Hawk In The Rain about his own Naturalistic Observationism still seems plausible to me. Maybe though to be a scientist I have to say “all of this is false.” I have presented the data, and some interpretations of it, but what I have said is NOT true. To be fair, one would need to back up what one says with Evidence, and the very nature of these new creature Observations precludes evidence. This is why it might’ve gone wrong when the second specimen of my boyhood was so revolting I put it in the bin.

Still, I believe Darwin wished for someone to come along and confute his theories… I might be able to show how some creatures are not born of Natural Selection, not part of evolution. It already was time that writing about the new creatures would be wrong; then it happened again; then I wrote about it – and already it seems to be time that writing about the new creatures is wrong once more.

CHAPTER TEN: PARTY ANIMALS

*

Once upon a time I sat down

at dawn to try and remember

every mad animal my work ever knew.

*

Well, in the beginning,

there was a cat playing a drum.

*

There were four

mice, then three.

*

A clock was only as fast as a cheetah.

*

We saw a vision of a giant spidder.

Jamie saw a machine

that’s what it was coming from.

*

There was a chameleon

that was hidden from view

through castles of foam!

*

Also: “he has spines all over him”

the poet wrote about a Hedgehog for all

Henry the Hedgehog

was attacked by

an adder but the

hedgehog won…

*

There was also talk

of a stalk that invited a fox

round for dinner and

put two well-cooked

meals in two long

vases so the stalk

could get the food

but not the fox!

*

There were even “gilly flowers.”

*

There was also a song

about the dog before:

and you might well

remember it for life too:

it’s the same as it used to be:

hopefully you didn’t get it from me!

*

Then I saw them: two weird specimens:

one the juggernaut whom I should hide,

or whose possibility of returning

I might be uniquely able to cancel.

*

The second was the

living spreadsheet:

“Grand-darth’s Ship”

as it was called, as if

I invented the thing.

*

It meant there was also plastic

grown in the scheme of evolution.

*

Then came the horrible

Hunter who was

a class-exercise

and an animal too…

beware his hollow,

hypnotising stare.

*

Cometh a friendly badger who

was allowed out of the pet shop at last.

*

Around this time, the fact that

a clock is only as fast as a cheetah

was also applied to the digital watch.

*

Then came the frog, swimming

wet words in the water of everlasting

life in a bucket in a clearing

in the centre of the woods…

*

The beast was next,

fast and frightening.

*

Don’t forget:

Dear Green Organisation,

We found a gannet with a broken wing

at a bonfire party on the beach.

We saved its life.

Please plant some trees for this effort.

John F B Tucker.

*

Last Autumn two biologists announced

they had cloned the DNA of a

forty-million-year-old, extinct

stingless bee found in amber.

*

By puberty, I think I decided

not only has bongles still got the stones,

but Barnes has scored a chicken.

*

Butterflies flutter

in the sideways

reality of the grin

of sunbeams.

*

“Break bird with the skin of snake,”

I said in a poem.

*

“I can see,” said Prof. Feldman to me

“how ‘broken haloes fall from angels,

you see them on the floor.’”

*

My name is David Bonky,

I’m a knock-kneed hummingbird,

there’s a tear up my jacket

and I want to stay a nerd.

*

In 1998, a salmon

escaped the ancient net.

*

A sprightly hypertext-

sniper on Piper At

The Gates of Dawn

accrued to the procession too.

*

The anguila eel is wet and named after

the devil for mysteriously appearing

in the puddles of towns on rainy days.

*

Literature is a vehicle,

unlike the death-box, television.

*

Piggy is a symbol

of Reason and dies.

*

Civilisation is a thin

veneer belied by dark,

arational forces – the

temptation of atavism.

*

A purple parrot perched

upon the shoulder of

the pirate squawked

“don’t tell Moronika.”

*

A green parrot was sent

to space through the conch…

*

A Lion Bar was driven

through the economy

in a car and a carfume

whooshed from the unicorn’s bottom…

*

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

To break on through

to the Other Side.

Why did the chicken

cross the road?

I am the Burger King.

I can eat anything.

Preferably a Double

Whopper with cheese,

bacon, fries and a Coke.

*

The rising kestrel finds

its boiling point is now

contained in the imperative:

“desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.”

*

Paul is traditionally

eagle-eyed with the

cherry, for example.

*

Waves [squiggle]

crossed the FTSE [squiggle]

and the Helter-Skelter [squiggle]

crashed in the electric sea.

*

Natterjack sparrows

scream by the time of dawn.

*

Le little lapin

on le lawn,

trembling in

the dusky dawn

forlorn as fallen

autumn leaves

is the wave

that misbehaves.

*

The purlieu is the vexed edge

of the silver forest and beyond it

lies the sylvan frieze.

*

The image starts as an amber

scarab [like Jung’s symbol], scuttling

still on a hill of sand or a tumulus.

The image is of Egyptian mystery

and kings and masked gold

and pharaohs and jewels

in the night sky like stars

and the red, triangular sun of the Day.

*

Waving for the raven’s throne

only to break the Hollow Claw.

*

Maybe birds speak in a language

called gaga-zook-zook

and bongatee-bing-bong.

*

I shall not give a damn.

I shall not give a fish.

I shall not live an onion.

I shall contrive a dragonfly.

It will become an ostrich.

And ostriches are for eating

and friends are for meeting

and I am friends with the dragonfly.

*

Neil Curry says the woods

are traditionally a testing ground

not just in literature but

in life which is not

black and white but

kaleidoscopes of colour.

*

An A-E-I-O-U- bird

toots its hollow

horn out on the A595.

*

Down the beach sea-

birds scream from the

ragged rocks – is it their

love song or elegy?

*

Jerry

Springer’s

camera

crew

descended

like

vultures

to

eat

the

eyes

of

the

deadman.

*

There was an accident on the road today -

mum drove past a juggernaut and

said “it’s a bloody juggernaut.”

*

She says language is a creature

and imagination a muscle.

*

My pet dodo sleeps with her

heart in a jar by the bedside table.

*

I buy drugs off a guy

who’s lost the plot

forgotten the truth and the lie.

*

Ted Hughes saw a monster

in the river in childhood but

recognised it was himself.

*

I wrote a story about a man

who could see a black,

avaricious, anarchy

of menacing, dog-shit

sucking fucking flies in the

fridge at a house party

where no-one else

could see them.

*

Go to waste,

was the command,

from the end

of a branch.

*

How to fix a broken

yolk I do not know

maybe sit down

and have a smoke.

*

The bird in the wood,

it was definitely a horse.

*

I saw a rare bird,

I told my ex,

over the phone

and I had – a red

kite while climbing

up the rear side

of the fell.

*

When I fell up a tree

I was trading stories

with the chief of

the black bird spies.

*

Birds are now thought

to be what became of the dinosaurs.

*

I heard we grew out great

brains by eating meat and

needing to spread information

about farming, hunting, killing,

cooking and eating meat, developed language…

and I for one am glad it wasn’t

fungus instead of meat.

*

In poetry music not only

aids memorability but

precedes sense as an

agent of understanding

as in the Natural World.

*

My laptop password

is whitecrow, which

I deem neo-shamanic.

*

I have 4 motley

fridge-magnet letter

jungle birds now:

whitecrow, chardud,

beckstub, stillwalker.

*

Pen wine fate heaven fix

alive more free you gun

the scissor-bird sings

with innocuous vision.

*

Love can go veggie

for reasons of Disney.

*

Tit butter moat

brink notes sprinkle

outside open Darwin

window down.

*

The pulleys are not for bullies.

The birds are smuggling super-cars

to an Iranian over-lord

through Persia

and over the mnts.

Shush.

Listen.

Tin is their usual merchandise.

*

Then they stuck the end of ‘Bike’ in his head,

‘Bike’ in his hair, ‘Bike’ in his head.

*

The bird in the wood

was not the end of ‘Bike’

because soundwave recognition

qualifies a species.

*

They’re having trouble

papering over the cracks.

*

Once you see the shark mask replica

worn by a seagull, you see

the sun is the peachstone

of a black hole, sinking.

*

She asked: “do you remember looking

for the Golden Eagles up the fell?”

*

A bird pipes a bar of light

up a tree a jar goes down of sunset

late beams land drunken and hazy

and lazy soaking the beer garden

like day is a dream’s balcony

around mellow me.

*

It is not strictly true that

the effect of acid and

the effect 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,

hence the effect of global

warming on the unicorn’s

like a postmodern id.

*

We crashed on a ship REC and we tried

the canons and they were still red hot.

We went into the cabin and we saw

a captain’s chest and twenty

fighting pirates and we looked out

and saw a whirlpool heading

straight towards us and since

we were under the sea the

whirlpool pulled on top of the water.

*

“I believe the brooch is in the jackdaw’s

nest in that tall tree,” he said, and he was right.

“I knew where to look because the bird left

marks on your dressing-table,” he explained.

*

I was the first one up followed by

the white pawns then the two queens

then the two kings then the blakc pawns

then the bishop then the rooks

and last of all the knits.

*

Wouldn’t it be pollen

if Barnes has scored a chicken

and spring is a red horse?

*

The sun is a hedgehog everywhere,

spilling its needles defensively.

*

The cannabee

comes from Rontaur.

*

Crows were messengers

to the Ancient Greek Gods.

*

I hear their primal coo or caw

or mating call or

wall of stones or

squawk or cry or

squaw or scream

at the Request Stop Station -

new jewellery for the sensual -

and think of her

and her soft, mangled jaw,

soft as prehistoric

dinosaur maw and

more and many more -

car, car, they

croon, car, car.

*

Circumference of adverts at the pristine

empty cricket green next to the mental hospital:

three larger seagulls bully a much

smaller bird for crumbs. I am

rooting for the smaller one, reading

Bukowski and the score stays nil nil.

*

Jim Morrison saw

winged serpents in

the desert on acid

whom we know is

never quite flaccid

and also flung from the sun.

*

<BEE> might still

ensue from @ in

the international

language alphabet.

*

When mother says don’t

put all your eggs in one basket

I think of the word V-A-E-I-O-U-L.

*

Crows can talk.

*

Crows dogs horses trees,

these are our friends, yes these.

*

Bees can count.

*

Jackdaws can speak.

*

Birds are now known

to be highly intelligent

like dogs and horses.

*

There are 3 types of

swallow in America.

*

The flamingo-anglepoise

has just been born.

*

She said: “life is shit.

My mother died.

I gave up religion.

Now when I see

a robin I know it’s

my mother come to visit me.”

*

A single lone black bird

sings atop a tree this

dark dawn then flies away.

*

I see a smaller brown one

dart and swerve below.

*

Inside my eggs quack

and S. O. S. in the pan.

*

I see 12 crows in the Combe field,

the museum field, the same field.

*

Multiple flocks of Jonathon

Livingstone Seagulls

sail out to sea.

*

Why should an aged bullet up

a telegraph pole spread its wings?

*

I do not hope

to tern again!

*

Barnes has scored a liquid noose

and it’s full of pussy juice.

*

Yippee I have two blank bits of paper I can fly!

*

Birds are for flying

not for special

perception

*

Floating in the quiet of a weightless dawn,

the buzzard is the crux

of the flux of Time

and gets ready to mug

his prey scurrying beneath him.

*

You can't have your break

bird with the skin of snake and eat it.

*

You can take a horse to

water and drink the horse.

*

Don't forget if you

are getting a puppy

for Christmas, THINK

and wear a seatbelt.

*

We go a month of Mondays

and by the time we

arrive, several weird

species of insect

crawl out of severed

telephone cable.

*

When in Rome all roads

shit in the woods.

*

The bear is a catholic.

*

That James Joyce also

saw new creatures

and wrote of it in You Know Who

which had a physiological affect on me.

*

The resident pheasant

to reach out for style

is called MC Hammer

for all his dandy attire.

*

Omnivorous frog eyes blink in the puddles

while mine own are drugged up and groggy

and I don't know why something so pellucid

can come across as being green and froggy...

*

Do not listen to the moth

says Dr. Calculator Ptom

on his word-chord piano.

*

I went to a music event with no mask

at a Sports and Social Club;

and at the back, as it got dark,

the footie pitch was hunted for grub

by twelve grey and elegant

herons, standing round, mooching

whom I saw fly when the band

began, stretch their wings

out to tremendous width and breadth,

gliding off, to the guitarist’s twangs,

atlas-wide wings, beating.

*

I’ve been redrafted, the lion at the heart

of Poem Records, upon their happiness…

*

Even that means to

an end the alphabet

could turn out Nelly the

Elephant’s suicide note…

*

Some breakfast containing

every snooker ball colour -

I only had three rashers

of bacon on their own! 

*

Barnes has scored a liquid horse

it got on to the writing course

and when at last its work was done

then it flew back to the sun

when it returned it was burned

the people asked what had been learned

and Barnes’ horse said why of course

it is to have more intercourse

*

The free-thinking sheep eat

grass in the Combe field,

the field we rent out

to a local farmer friend,

who moves them a

lot, with his dog Max.

*

O is the key of the

babbling unicorn.

*

Because a dying animal is faster than.

*

Outside the windows

cows doze like menhirs.

*

I hear the monastic puking

of the ancient sheep and

know I am home.

*

The buzzard is the reason

the colour of Cumbria is brown.

*

McTruth And Flies

would be a good

name for a book.

*

We should kill

the snake in the greenhouse.

*

Dog = pi times mc squared.

*

Baxter the dog sits next to me

on the bed, grown very used to me

feeding him sweet, sugary tea.

*

Flies fly in a zany,

computer game rhythm.

*

Tiny red spiders

dance to imaginary

drum n bass on my

window ledge and

until I look them up

online and find out

what they are I

think I have

discovered a

new species.

*

When I was a boy

I used to repeat the word

‘kangaroo’ in my head

until it went numb,

emptied itself of meaning,

hopped off to become

the mad, kangaroo king.

*

I realise given the supposition

of language’s origins

that in my animalistic

piece I can now say anything.

*

The dog is looking

out of the window.

*

The window

is made of glass.

*

The glass is pellucid.

*

It offers a frame

of perception

on the world.

*

You can see, for example,

the beck in the back garden.

*

This reminds me that when

the birds return in spring

it is like sensation returning

to the fingers after

an anaesthetic, but

that’s still quite obvious.

*

Less obvious is

the fact that the water

is brackish to taste.

*

Also out the window

I see the mist up the fell.

*

Trees are ponderously

swaying like coral.

*

When monkeys herald

the new dawn up a tree,

they are celebrating

light, exalting the senses,

singing of a love for life.

*

When birds pepper the new

day, they are warning

others off their branch.

*

Typos are still

dolphins

in the sea.

*

Smashed, I type,

my fingers have crashed,

and my mad, crashed

fingers have connected yet again.

*

Lego contains no

mono sodium glutamate,

nor ego, nor anything

bad for those

allergic to nuts,

or to strobe lights,

and nor would it

hurt to mention its

plastic form in a

piece on animals.

*

Will Self said

where Martin Amis

was more into

narrative devices, he

was more into

philosophy

and animals.

*

The Lords And The New Creatures

used to be my favourite book.

*

A fluke it was,

when I became

witness and now

look where we

worship and

beware.

*

There are no dark forces

conspiring against you in life.

*

Take out your Lords

and see in all

directions at once.

*

Beyond the mind’s eye

may lie the mind’s ear

I mean I can hear

Baxter the dog

barking at my supposedly

clinical and delusory voices.

*

How the wood

can come again

I do not know.

*

How I can terminate

that possibility

I do not know

but it seems like

it might be easier.

*

Blessed is the seal’s seed.

*

We still inherit dreams

of fighting wild packs

of animals from ancestors

who had to rehearse

for that real situation.

*

The idiot box

kills brain cells.

That may be why

I call it the death box.

My dad wanted to

put a pick axe

through the telly.

I haven’t watched

a droplet for

years and years.

*

To be worthy

would ruin my image,

to drink Coke

would flatter

the style of some.

*

There are bears inside the moon

who drink and think the same of you.

*

The summer moon wears

the ultra scan of every baby.

*

Next time,

bend ze knees,

said my dad, in

Classic, east European,

Popperian accent.

*

Well, I missed out a further

song about Ossie the dog, chasing

his own tail, only going

upstairs for a trail of

Maltesers, nice, round

and pale, a song from

The Road To Heaven

by Noj And The Mob.

*

And yet after all this

I may have found a way out -

fire, fire, fire!

*

Then again it is still a word.

*

I am soooooo square!

I feel like I should be

the neo-Darwin what with

my boyhood attestations,

and write of the logical

bond between narrative

and Naturalistic Observationism.

*

I’m not going to be long this time

I am only going to do one.

Everything else I have taken care of.

*

To start the discussion off

I will ask: did James Joyce,

who saw new creatures too,

writing Ulysses become

the reason Ted Hughes

saw a monster in the river?

*

Quite interesting indeed,

and not being able

to find a way out,

of meat, nor fungus,

hmn, I might just write

whatever comes into my head.

*

In Prep School I named

my Fantasy Cricket Team

the Fungus Faces, who sat

mid-table in the list on

geography wall, among

all the others like

the All Stars, the

Champions and the Best.

*

If you rewind to a younger age,

when I read Enid Blyton’s

adventure stories, the character

I wanted to be was Philip

who was the one that was

best with the animals,

who magnetised the puffins

on the top of the cliff.

*

If I said the light is dark

would I escape the meat?

*

That could mean

Toad of Toad Hall

down in his dank dungeon

is climbing up the wall

wearing ladies underwear

and asking and asking

where it all went wrong.

*

My dad used to say

skunk made me canine.

*

I used to feel more leonine

in my fur coat, soft, white shirt

and my black trousers.

*

My dog stands on my laptop -

miles more interesting

than this – and the resultant

text reads as follows:

#][P;IK

*

Wallace Fowlie said, in some of

the only sustained critical analysis

of Jim Morrison’s text that

the new creatures are metaphors,

alibis in disguise for the

law-hounded poet; but then

it went and happened, shit

got real – as Morrison

said “a creature [waited]

out the war,” - and that

meant the Cold War – after which

my dad immediately sold his

art smuggling business – at

the fall of the Berlin Wall -

meaning it was me that was witness-

and now Russia is at war again

I cannot help wonder if

I have some role to play – if

the war will stop and if

the new creatures

will arise another time.

*

The word ‘adimal’ could be

the sublimation of the animal

and the advert.

*

The word “Transphiloquisation”

could mean inter-racial love.

*

Entropy backwards could frame

the first unformulated spark of

appetency in Nothingness, preceding

Creation and its dance.

*

‘Emocracy’ could mean

‘rule by emotion.’

*

‘Agovernment’ could mean

the opposite of government.

*

Filence could mean

delicate speech.

*

I cannot tell you

if a bunch of

cave-paintings in words

is the same or not as a

distractionary

that contains

the metallurgical

origins of birds.

*

I’m just so bored but

I did wish for a further

concept poem – long

and containing some

underlying, unifying principle.

*

What is the concept

of my new poem

going to be now

that I have written it?

*

I guess its only concept

is to unlock the cages

of the inner zoo…

well that will do.

*

The cock crows,

the dawn has risen,

the dog is by my side,

I have eaten not one but two

open top sandwiches,

Dutch cheese and

Italian salami on

Hovis bread, toasted.

I have a cup of tea

with which to gulp

down the medication.

I also have a pouch of tobacco.

Maybe one day I will

run out of ideas and

have to make a new

concept poem all

about giving up smoking.

*

It turns from white to grey

so fast, contains a

million little me’s.

*

Then we see I renewed it,

as if I had a choice.

*

You see I might be taking

the harder path as a

matter of stance before

life, not ruling out their

rebirth, carrying a

burden alone, slowed

down but also enriched.

‘I am the heir to the foul air,’

says Ben, and it seems

like air from the great

subconscious to me.

*

James has taken the dog

up the fell, for a walk, to

expend some of the dog’s

energy and try and

get fit himself, but

it’s rude to write of the

living, all writing is

fiction, there is no

immutable truth, all

selfhood is mythology,

it is malleable is history,

so again I await Dr. Ptom

and the word-chord piano,

revolving at the edge of life.

*

If I were into art

I would be a Fauve, maybe even

dance the brush on

the paper to the music of

the Aphex Twin in

any colour I deem

fit to make the shape

of a beast of energy -

but seeing as I am but

a humble, minor poet,

I can but feel that

something’s gone wrong.

*

A shark’s fin sticks up

out of the choppy sea.

The News has got a screw loose.

These random access bytes

I love but not for love

or money will I

return to babyspeak,

gaga zook zook

and bongatee bing bong,

and did I tell you

of the time I escaped

from Monopoly Jail,

and made it to Scotland,

ah, it made my dad laugh,

but the cops found me

and brought me back

and as soon as I cottoned on

that I was the witness

I was diagnosed, they

were the same instant,

so then you get people

saying it’s textbook delusion,

whereas what is textbook

is dimestore psychology,

for all there likely

wouldn’t be the wound

if these things didn’t

happen in atomic reality,

and That’s All Folks,

if you buy cheap

you buy twice.

*

James has fed the dog

and cooked and the food

is ready already.

John is the guy that

sits here eating it.

*

It is later, and we’re back

on the topic of food.

Lamb stew is now being

cooked and the sound

of newborn lambs

fills the air outside.

*

Our dog already died.

*

Jim Morrison’s book

The Lords And The New

You Know Who was about

laying down the law to the animals.

*

CHAPTER ELEVEN: MORE THOUGHTS ON NEW CREATURES

Of all the new creatures I can ideate, the best one is <BEE>. It is my brother James P D whom we have to thank for the notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. My own original ideas include that I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too; and Lucy in the soul w/ demons might happen to be an actual substance; but nothing up there with <BEE>. Apparently, the children of our friends are growing up to do the <BEE> one. By the <BEE> one presumably they mean the book Soundcloud Rain where I provided songs for <BEE>. It’s why I am not free to reshape and rehash any of that material. I sit growing fat from eating pizza, also fatting up my file. My friends prefer the attempted maths of the new colour when I am a seven year old, not as an adult presentation. There are multifarious options available to me nevertheless. I went to the toilet a moment ago and there was a fat, black, ugly, large house-spider on one of the pipes. I was offended by it so squashed it in a piece of tissue. Normally I am too timid to even kill a daddy long legs. What I don’t believe is that the new specimen, which I called a “spidder” is only Number Three, for there might be other witnesses and there was more in my story too… to make a tree, to categorise these weird Observations might be hard. I heard sometime in my childhood that there are new species of insect coming into being every second in the Amazon jungle. Whether these qualify as specimens or just as normal species I don’t know and am not sure of the difference other than that maybe the qualification of specimen is granted to something that smashes together two known things into a new compound that shouldn’t be like that in the natural order of things. So even though they are material there is an imputation of fake-ness in them.

Geoff Hattersley, a fine poet whose work I admire, says in the poem ‘The New Mr. Barnsley Something’ that he ended up wondering what happened to the old New Mr. Barnsley Something. Cows still munch grass, mulchy and blind. Sheep still sound like a cross between something monastic and puking. The old creatures seem unaffected by the transient advent of new ones. I say transient for even the second specimen, that plastic spreadsheet didn’t last long, was easy to kill. The old creatures carry on as before. Dogs still bark. Cats still prowl. Birds still make nests in the chimney. Geese still flock. Fish still swim. And yes this reminds me: I used to say “if there was a light speed law of neuroplasticity it would only be that it is impossible to remember a new creature.” I changed it: if there is a light speed law of neuroplasticity it would only be that it is impossible to remember a new yellow line. I like the amendment but I still don’t think we need a light speed law of neuroplasticity any more than a Periodic Table of Altered States. I suppose the reasoning behind the law is that for something to be truly new it must involve the permanent supervention of novelty and in order to be remembered something would become old in the process. As I say though we don’t need a light speed law of neuroplasticity.

I pass the time at my screen, without venting my spleen, my mood made stable on a sterilised table, all my rage in the cage for the minimum wage… I tend to a file of poems then my mother comes downstairs and sends me to bed. So here I sit ( ) in the same place as I was sitting in when I saw the Nike Air spider, the celebrity spider, or even “spidder.” I wasn’t expecting it but you know these things are very forceful when it comes to being perceived and leave you in no doubt. They are attention-seeking devices, meant for human regard. They don’t just go about their business in their own world. They aim to be perceived. They know they are going to be perceived. So they must have an inbuilt knowledge of the observer and his perceptual kingdom, an overview. They must come from a superior knowledge bank. The deep, green store from which they come must be more than falling leaves. But then again I don’t know any of this for sure and am only hoping someone else will become freer by my agitations. They could be species of the Taxonomic Genus “Calculator Tomb!”

This business of them knowing they are going to be perceived as I am certain they do brings up new questions… why is it that they need to “make that transaction” between the observer and the observed or is it that the observer, the human needs to “make that transaction?” If so how do they know? Where do the come from? I touched earlier on spontaneous self-organisation like a Strange Attractor from Chaos Theory… does evolution now consent to that as a mode of birthing a new species? If science is dead as Dr. Stephanie Dyke comments, do the rules of evolution go out the window? Or is it the other way round, that when we had to have them, the specimens, science died? I don’t believe the latter because science didn’t die when Joyce, Hughes and Morrison made their observations. I just believe that there is a gap between what science will teach you at school and what experience can tell you, if you are the witness, which seems to be cool, though people don’t tend to admit it, preferring to chat facets and assets, football or shopping or cars or telly or music or books. It would seem that if you’re the witness there is something stopping Observations becoming endless, which could be what they refer to as “the system.” I have got a little story about the system which I can show you… [Note: The system is saying no to the critical expose of the system so I can’t show you the piece.]

CHAPTER TWELVE: ENTRAILS

So we don’t get to see see that this “Henry” character from my piece on the system was a bit of a Jim Morrison character himself back in the day - nevermind. Now it is to the poetry of Jim Morrison I would like to return the discussion. When you’re the witness, in your boyhood and then in teenage years find the poetry, the poetry can seem like a license to write anything, garbled nonsense, at least The New Creatures can. When you get what he is smuggling it is impressive work, get that there’s some discipline in there. I say discipline but Morrison’s book is a typical loose sprawl that epitomises the permissiveness of the 1960’s and which you wouldn’t be able to get away with today. I heard it said that Jim wouldn’t have been published had he not been a rock star and so he might prove a bad role model or model for sanity to a young writer like the Henry in my story, who is myself. Ultimately Morrison is part of an idiot tradition. I myself would urge one to not become part of the idiot tradition. Myself, I wasted good, valuable time mimicking Jim Morrison in art and life alike, which I suppose was exhaustive research, into the nature of being the witness, almost like being a rock n roll historian, or dare I say it scientist. I used to say taking drugs got us sober from the advertising trance… a self-legitimising pact arose around the stoner circle. One would suppose that if my story is true, we might need a new word, and not just one, like “transphiloquisation,” but a whole new vocabulary. This could be why my brother’s <BEE> is so good, because it combines being a new creature with creating a new language. Nor can you just make up nonsense speak and call it the international language alphabet. Still, I used to wonder in paranoia if people, when I was out of earshot, all started to speak in a language I cannot understand.

If I said “a wallety-wallety-Walter,” would you get that I mean “water?” One would suppose it depends on context for meaning. If I said “the roots of the yew tree go down into slow centuries gone, looking for a wallety-wallety-Walter,” you might get that I mean water. We would have a mutation that could become a fossil in time. Even Simon Armitage, whom it would seem was the David Beckham of the poetry world when I was a youth, may start to regret his old work. New work becomes old work, and old work becomes Chaucer. All our words will become as if hieroglyphs in time. It is very difficult to make something that lasts. They even rearranged The Lords as I have said. A writer’s wish should not be gone against.

I suppose some buy the image of Jim Morrison as a mystic visionary and others don’t. I also suppose that some would contend that bands like The Doors and Nirvana misappropriate Enlightenment tools to propitiate consumerist entertainment. Still, I think Morrison’s book the best thing about the Doors, and a classic and along with Piper At The Gates of Dawn by Pink Floyd, one of the best things to come from the 1960’s. The way I narrate this tale might seem like a fairytale but all this stuff happened.

While there are commentators who believe if it has happened again it proves I am right; and that if I am right a book about it is the best I will ever write – well, there are those that still think talk of new creatures is schizophrenic talk and that my claim to having been the witness is “textbook.” This is part of the reason why Professor David Morley said it would be such a major challenge for me, to lead us through the woods. I would say that it is them with their dimestore psychology bandied about that is textbook and that if the observations hadn’t happened the illness wouldn’t be as real. I take the attitude, a popular attitude, that it is a combination of childhood trauma and drug taking in adulthood that triggers mental illness in many if not most cases.

I think though there are a growing number of people in the literary world who at least believe in my story even if they don’t like it. Rachael Allen the poetess says “animals should not remind us of wealth.” I agree with her, but think the animals I met in boyhood at least reminded us more of the horror of war than of wealth. Admittedly, my dad might’ve been sponsored to provide the human witness; or else it was a combination of Jim Morrison writing “a creature waits out the war,” and my dad selling his art dealing business at the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the two boyhood specimens weren’t there to remind us of wealth. I think what they had meant was that we had won the war. This latter one, the spidder, if you permit a neologism, a mutation of language, I am not so sure about.

In A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, the protagonist, who is played by Keanu Reeves in the film version, is infested with bugs as a result of the drugs he is taking and can even put them in jars and take them to the doctor, who will still say they are a result of the drugs, dismiss them despite their visceral reality. Where I am coming from, to be able to put a so-called hallucinated animal in a jar would represent a great triumph of scientific procedure that has as yet eluded me! I think of the David Morley poem where, with Ted Hughes’s son, he goes about sampling imaginary species. I have said it before but will say it again: the effects of acid and of acid-rain on an imaginary species might be said to = the same thing, nothing, but then again there can be no more valid proof of something being real than saying it was imagined, hence the effect of global warming on the unicorn is a postmodern ‘id’. This seems Blake-like and Cartesian enough to me.

Some in my position would just write a new poem called ‘Pets, or Was It Pests?’ but I think more of eating a Ploughman’s lunch in the cafe at the Natural History Museum in London. Darwin himself, I hear, regretted not listening to more music before he composed his theories… I myself am categorised as a poet and musician, but some have also called me a polymath, who can do almost anything. I would say that if there is a witness from The Lords And The New Creatures it is scientifically important to get something appropriate out of him by means of a measure or a record. They say so far my best bits were the Oedipus Wrecks set-list (where I proved the island of penguins with the first verse of the first song of my first gig) and the maths of the new colour even though it failed. The Oedipus Wrecks set-list is but eight songs long and found in the volume Yes You May, though I could revamp it by interwedging the songs with prose. The maths of the new colour, I hear, is best when it is in the seven year old’s book, (The Sunset Child), because then it is innocent and without racial implications. Whatever the case I believe The Lords And The New Creatures story deserves more than a pop song.

I actually like the way I started out writing a book of literary criticism on Jim Morrison’s text, as the witness in and of and to and from, and in the middle of it, out of the blue, years on from the last attestation, it happened again and there was a new specimen! Life goes on! Life interrupts the fixity of the results! Evolution is real!

I also wrote a paper on the Plough alignment but they, voices that pepper the air, don’t want me to present it. I have papers coming out of my ears right now. I also have songs and poems. Voices of intermittence and illness have told me if it is true that I am the witness, the book about it all is the best I will ever do, and I think I was and that it wasn’t just a grammatical position, a temporary measure, but can be reactivated. I am meanwhile undergoing CBT and patient “reactivation” in the mental health world, after a trauma. Some people, as I have said, believe my being the witness is the fruit of sensory atrophy, or rather the delusion of the beautiful mind who helped invent the net, and did the maths of the new colour or tried, and provided a portal to the face of stars… I even find that opinion amenable and congenial to me, but cannot escape this fact of being the witness as mad as it sounds. The reason I still persist is that among it all, to choose being the witness as your channel, your avenue, is a vote for literature and its lasting power, the way it is more enduring than music. It is a vote for soul-food, for literature being a vehicle, for literature being more enduring than pop music as I say, and for the triumph of the counter-cultural Revolution whose darling I may have been in my boyhood.

In early boyhood, I did announce to the family I had “seen something in the wood today” but it didn’t register or warrant a response and sat in my unconscious for years thereafter. I am not complaining just saying. My dad did once say to me “bend ze knees” in Classic East European Jewish accent, like we were dealing with Popperian philosophy not biology. He would also say “when enough media is or are compressed, you know the rest, the results of anything penetrative are bad for those who would wish to control the media.” Even as I write I am aware that I am compressing media. I am also aware that things go badly if you try and control the media. Jim Morrison’s book asks if he who controls the media controls evolution. It is an ingenious thought-experiment.

Even a game of cards is a rehearsal for death. I would say God is a game and The Lords And The New Creatures also a game, a wide yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre, and the circumference closing in. I would say it is also a media compression experiment dreamed up under the hot, Californian sun on LSD. I would say it tests where evolution is monopolised; that it churns up evidence through the operation of a game; that as stated even a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death; and that (as stated again) one might find the germs of dictatorship on every hand.

In early boyhood, I did announce to the family I had “seen something in the wood today” but it didn’t register or warrant a response and sat in my unconscious for years thereafter. I am not complaining just saying. My dad did once say to me “bend ze knees” in Classic East European Jewish accent, like we were dealing with Popperian philosophy not biology. He would also say “when enough media is or are compressed, you know the rest, the results of anything penetrative are bad for those who would wish to control the media.” Even as I write I am aware that I am compressing media. I am also aware that things go badly if you try and control the media. Jim Morrison’s book asks if he who controls the media controls evolution. It is an ingenious thought-experiment.

Even a game of cards is a rehearsal for death. I would say God is a game and The Lords And The New Creatures also a game, a wide yellow circle with death the pinpoint centre, and the circumference closing in. I would say it is also a media compression experiment dreamed up under the hot, Californian sun on LSD. I would say it tests where evolution is monopolised; that it churns up evidence through the operation of a game; that as stated even a game of cards can be a rehearsal for death; and that (as stated again) one might find the germs of dictatorship on every hand.

“We live we die and death not ends it,” said Morrison in An American Prayer. For death is Nature’s way of bringing new species into being, in Darwin; and the poet Simon Pomery (whom I know) says death is “the birthday of Eternity.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: 09/ 10/ 2026

Last night, I heard a thin whisper asking me to blog the Oedipus Wrecks set list, which was the portal to the island of penguins, and also a redaction of the maths of the new colour, which left a mark but failed to produce the new colour. I lay there, tired, thinking “I’ve got to do this before I sleep,” but drifted away to dreamland before I could have an effect on reality. This morning I blogged the documents and also the writing on the new creatures then went to my CBT session in Millom. I told my therapist, “it’s happened again. Do you remember me saying I was the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures as a boy? It’s happened again. There has been a new specimen.” I also told her “it was like a large spider but carrying a harp made of string.” She wrote down that “spider harp” was something to deal with, on her list, in her notebook. It sounded a bit thin when I told her it was a spider with a harp made of string on its back, but I think if you’ve been following the progression of my publications it will look more believable. I told her at seven I had written in my web-book that “then we saw a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine that’s what it was coming from.” We drifted off the topic very quickly, but coming home, back to the house, and to the laptop, to the book, I find myself sending out the Google search engines of memory to try and reclaim something by means of food for the soul. Maybe what has happened is that in my publications I have renewed The Lords And The New Creatures. If so I would say it is staggered over the general progression of books, but most evident when I present the seven year old text as the real homework of the real witness in The Sunset Child.

I think I did alright in my Chipmunka self-publications considering I hadn’t yet found out I played a little boy’s role in helping invent the net, and if I renewed Morrison that’s one result I didn’t anticipate, but being inside it, it was possibly inevitable.

By now, it would seem that if you start writing a book as the witness in and of and to and from and halfway through it happens again, then that is the best book you will ever do; but there remain unanswered questions that are difficult to face up to… why is it that new creaturely attestations qualify you as the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures, if The Lords And The New Creatures by Jim Morrison is about stopping the war? Is there an extent to which my boyhood observations do count but the most recent does not? Is there an extent to which it is just good manners and good faith to endorse the witness in and of and to and from being the witness in and of and to and from, and has that good faith run out? Is there an extent to which endorsing the witness’s observations is a vote against the observations being to do with evolutionary science? Is it just a guess that we put trust in, when we say the boy who made those Observations is the witness? Does it distort the veracity to find out that the witness’s father named his sons after The Doors? Was the art deal that was made slightly different than I have expressed it… by which I mean I have said my father was sponsored by some philosophers, which we know, but exactly what for remains a mystery?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: DEAD RAT RECORDS

I suppose I don’t really like the way The Lords And The New Creatures, be it at a remove or not, has happened again and left me still not knowing what to do about it. This is the story of my life. It’s been like this since I was a boy. In this day and age one might even ask A. I. “what do you do if The Lords And The New Creatures comes true in your boyhood and you grow up to be 44 and it happens again?” I actually go ahead and ask it the question, but reclaiming stolen soul, ignore the response and come back to the file. I heard it described that being the one to make the first observation is one of the most unfortunate things that can possibly happen to you. And now my mother comes into the kitchen complaining that the fridge smells like it’s had a dead rat inside it! For a second there I thought her presence in the kitchen again was going to indicate a return to the theme of Flora’s pretext, but it turned into more animalism, and now she leaves the room and goes to bed, leaving me wondering if there is a dead rat contained in my book. You might not notice it but today the pieces were moved around according to some asymmetrical but interesting and mirror-neuron-y design by my mother. She always told us there was something up with the Mona Lisa’s smile. Something to do with imperfection. Something to do with the golden sector maybe as well. As timely voices point out while I write, the only problem with this Organisational System is that people think I should be Anon for the Oedipus Wrecks but not for the rest of it, not for the maths of the new colour, andcetera. So while it seems a minor triumph it remains quietly so, as the text reaches climax and is then failed once more. You might even get that this present sentence is written while the present paragraph has been moved to a different file from when the rest of the paragraph was written. Who can account for the ease of copy and pasting, and how a sly disease can spread through a text in the Digital World?

It leaves me chained to the woods, just doing the woods, nothing more, which is evil of whomsoever organised this situation. You might get that the paragraph has moved again – it’s maddening and there is no purchase, no traction, when you don’t know what you’re doing. Was I built as a purely seeing thing whose role was to attest and not vociferate? If so it would seem like a sad thing in this modern world. Yet I think the witness could be the new Darwin! He – or rather I – hears voices, sits in the kitchen listening in to them, or out. They whisper in the wind, usually meaning mental health troubles down the line. If you feed them by writing down what they say they will want more and many more andcetera. I am still trying to find things out about why me and what I am supposed to do about it and for whom… who these voices are I don’t know but imagine them saying “we would deem it that if your dad was sponsored by some philosophers to provide the real, human witness, the dawn was wrong, your birth was wrong, everything about you was wrong from the start – even if you helped the invent the internet.” They would have me remembered not as a guy that did dozens of amazing things but as a guy who drowned all the cats – because they didn’t do any amazing things and because life is increasingly competitive in a Darwinian sense. They are of the belief that one man’s gain is another’s loss – that we live in a wheel where everyone steals as the Bush singer sang it – and this competitive edge borders on revenge as opposed to turning the other cheek. The values of the West in general are more about better and worse and less about forgiveness and compassion and mercy. I suppose if these rude detractors had been through what I went through they would expect to be paid! I expect when they read another writer earning more money off their own experience than they can make themselves, they would sue!

They don’t want me doing The Lords And The New Creatures now because we’ve gone through it again, had what has been agreed as another specimen and we still haven’t won with it. To kill one, meanwhile, as avid proof, would still represent no victory at all! However, I think the lead singer of Bush would give his right arm to be the witness from Jim Morrison’s book! Jim Morrison sang “break on through to the Other Side” but never told us what was on the Other Side. I’m back to writing about Jim Morrison. Our Jim, which art in Heaven, give us this day our daily bacon sandwich. He wasn’t a biologist but was extremely well-read especially considering he was a film student, not English literature. You may know this already but he could get his friends to pick any book from the groaning shelf and get them to read a bit out of it and without looking Jim would be able to tell them which book it was and reportedly which chapter too. These cognitive abilities are present in The Lords And The New Creatures and I don’t have the same abilities. I think it’s how Jim Morrison channels the discussion to a piece of poetry on the last page that just gets stamped onto the reader’s memory first time of reading. He drags a primal scream from the collective unconscious. To be the witness from his book one might suppose is an honour as well as a scientific goldmine that should be celebrated and reported on. However I can already hear the voice of “proper science” saying it’s not an actual scientific goldmine but a pseudo-scientific thing… and since when has their so-called proper science been able to conjure whole new creatures with heartbeats and everything? And these so-called proper scientists would be the first to tell us “science is dead.” And I am not opposed to proper science just not well versed in it. And I would say that if I really did encounter a new specimen a little while ago, science is not dead. Indeed it would seem only in its infancy if my understanding is as advanced as it gets. Granted it may be the case that only if you are on the cutting edge of science can you attest to these things, but that may not be strictly true and meanwhile I don’t have the frame of reference a normal evolutionary biologist would have as I studied English and Creative Writing. From that side of the tree, I would say I am having second thoughts about providing this witness’s own account. It’s just a tremor, an instinct, a feeling that I might be doing wrong – and what’s wrong and what’s right might go out the window when it comes to being the witness, which might be what’s wrong with it, if you permit such a tautology. Shouldn’t I, for example, be turning the experience into a story rather than a face value narrative? Shouldn’t I be writing a story called The Spider With A Harp Made of String?

The spider with a harp made of string

wasn’t there in the Beginning…

he told me he came from a book

that helped invent the net if you look…

but music is making me feel sick

and science doesn’t do the trick

and singing is all out of key

and I can’t believe it came for me.

So this is where the story might end

a fairy story with let’s pretend.

The spider was moving and real.

It don’t know how that makes you feel.

**

Scratch that… I will go for a bath and write an actual song with an actual melody about it, because that is what I do to my scientific papers. I turn them into songs to give intellectual content to the book of songs, like in the cases of Instant Travel and Lucy in the Soul W/ Demons. So let me sing what I just sang in the bath….

The spider with a harp that’s made of string

must’ve thought Autumn time was Spring,

challenged me to see if I could sing,

the spider with a harp that’s made of string.

He took my mind back years and years,

through rivers of tears and bicycle gears,

filling this lonely old house with cheers,

until maybe it’s time to hit the beers.

I sang for the spider when in the bath,

(after guzzling some of mum’s lovely broth),

and it seemed in song I melted death,

which was better than a scientific graph…

the spider with a harp that’s made of string,

he was less evil than you’re thinking,

thinking that he’s an impossible thing,

and he listened in to my singing the song…

it wasn’t very good, but at least I tried.

At least on seeing him I didn’t hide.

I knew it was another one deep inside.

He scurried away, went off to find his bride.

**

I would say that is a successful song. So you’ve seen me try to use the language at first hand to convert something scientific into something literary and also musical. I think the song is not bad but where would I go with it? Give it to whom? Put it in what book? There is no poetry press in the Lakes. I could send it to Snakeskin but I already published several poems I don’t like with them, or more importantly, poems my mum and sister don’t like. My sister is the ref in the game.

So it is that having tried it as a scientific paper, and as a poem and as a song, it seems the only mode of writing left for me with which to make it count and last, when it comes to the spider with the harp made of string, is a children’s story.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE SPIDER WITH THE HARP THAT’S MADE OF STRING

The spider with the harp that’s made of string was the latest development in a long chain of observations made by a guy called Philip. He had seen all sorts of new creatures that smashed together two old things to make something new and was quite used to it by now. But it hadn’t happened for years and years and he grew up to be quite old before he met the spider with a harp made of string. He was sitting on his bed one night when he looked down at the floor and it came scurrying towards him. He only got a two second glimpse at it as it scurried towards him on the floor before it disappeared under the bed. So Philip got out his mobile phone and turned on the torch and went to look for it under the bed. He found it too, and said “what are you?”

The spider with the harp made of string crawled back out from under the bed and said “I am a spidder.”

“What’s a spidder?” asked Philip.

“You said it yourself,” said the spider with the harp made of string. “When you were a very young boy you helped invent the net. You wrote a book that stored the idea of the net in writing in the attic at the foot of the fell to give it a chance to grow all the way round the world. In the book you say you and your brother saw a vision of a giant spidder. Jamie saw a machine, that’s what it was coming from.”

“I didn’t know,” said Philip.

“Well you do now,” said the spider.

“So are you named after a spelling mistake from my own web-book?”

“Yes,” said the spider. “The difference between me and a normal spider is the same as the difference between a spider and the spidder in your book.”

“What’s with the harp?” said Philip.

“The harp is a delicate contraption that distinguishes me from the normal spider. It means I came from the book that helped invent the net, which you wrote when you were seven.”

“Can you play us a song?” asked Philip.

“Well,” said the spider. “The harp made of string is very small and delicate and you wouldn’t be able to hear me if I did.”

“Oh,” said Philip. “That’s a shame because I like music.”

“When you wrote about seeing the giant spidder in your boyhood web-book it was a symbol of the internet. I am here to bring it home to you. To help you realise you helped invent the net.”

“So you’re a messenger?” asked Philip.

“Yes,” said the spider with a harp made of string. “And at the same time I am also related to the other weird specimens you have met. The juggernaut in the wood. The plastic spreadsheet in the coat sleeve in the cloakroom under the stairs. But nor am I exactly number three. There have been more and many more. You were only supposed to catch a glimpse of me, then hide under the covers. It was supposed to be fleeting, but you got out your torch and found out I could speak.”

“I imagine with all your limbs you would be rather good at the harp,” said Philip.

“Well, if you sing quietly and I play very loud, maybe we could do a duet,” said the spider.

So they played together, Philip singing and the spider strumming his harp made of string. It was the same string as the imaginary string they unravelled in the boyhood web-book to invent the net. So the music was electric and electrifying. Philip did a good job of singing in key. When they had finished he said

“you’re less evil than the other specimens I have known.”

“Thank you,” said the spider, and then he asked if Philip could set him free, into the outdoor world, so Philip picked him up and put him in a Kleenex tissue and took him out the back door, and said farewell, and the spider said farewell to him in turn.

Later that day Philip’s mother came into the kitchen and asked Philip for help. She was knitting some pumpkins of wool to make a display for Halloween, the sort of crafty thing she did all the time, and needed Philip’s help to twist two long bits of wool together. Philip helped his mum and when the job was done she went off into the sitting room to knit while he stayed at the laptop writing. He wanted himself to make a record of his meeting the spider with the harp made of string, so he tried a scientific paper, but it wasn’t working, so he tried a poem and it wasn’t very good, so he tried a song, but there was no-one to listen. In the middle of his writing his mother came back in the kitchen and asked him what he thought of the first pumpkin made of wool and he told her it did look like a pumpkin, so she said “yes, it does actually, clever me.” By this stage Philip was writing a story about the spider with the harp made of string, so as to at least consign it to mythology even though the specimen was real. It dated back to about November 1989 and now it was October 2026. So it must’ve waited in the wings of evolution for a long time. Maybe they exist on a higher plane, a mathematical plane, and come to us through portals. Seeing is believing, and Philip had seen, seen a spider with a harp made of string, like a Nike Air spider, or a celebrity spider and in telling someone that someone becomes new in themselves… Philip told his mum and asked her if it was a new creature and she said “of course it’s a new creature.”

They didn’t speak of it much more than that but mother got on with knitting woollen pumpkins for her display and Philip started trying to write a story about his encounter, his visitation. He didn’t get very far into it before he wished to go outside, like the spider with the harp made of string, because he lived in a beautiful old house in the beautiful countryside, but night was falling soon so he didn’t. He just sat there, as if he had reached Nirvana. He was such a lucky guy to have met the spider with the harp made of string and after all these years of amazing things happening it was like it should be a beginning, the beginning of a career, be it in science, poetry, music or fiction. He didn’t think it philosophy because as Wittgenstein says Darwinian science is not the business of philosophy. But what a magical and enchanted kingdom Philip must’ve lived in like living in a fairytale.

That night he slept the deep, deep sleep of the innocent and dreamed of the spider with the harp made of string, that the harp grew very big and you could surf it like surfing the net… when he woke he felt cleansed like he’d been through catharsis by chaos. He got busy writing his story about the spider with the harp made of string and it started to flow and was easy.

His mother came in with something like a vine from which a lot of miniature woollen pumpkins were dangled and said “you doubted but I did it. I know how to work magic.” She was right – he had doubted that his mother’s woollen pumpkins would be recognisable as pumpkins but they were. There was an inverse parallelism between what he was doing at his screen and his mother’s knitting. He wasn’t knitting as such but the female knitting was equivalent to the male writing. It was approaching Halloween. Night was about to fall. He sat in the solipsistic kitchen writing as if he was flying, and his mum kept coming through, so the pretext changed from animalism to Flora’s system. Admittedly the ravioli had meat inside, as she pointed out, but largely she was talking of vegetarian-friendly things. And the food was good but they would have better tomorrow.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: FILE SHIFTING

It didn’t look like something you could eat. Not edible. My brother James and I talk about food every day – Scooby Snack time – asking questions like “what are we going to eat tonight?” and “is someone going to cook or shall we get take away?” I suppose the string contraption made the spider with the harp made of string a superior being to a spider, which one would assume is low down normally, until the new specimen is royalty among animals. It was so dainty, so easy to kill, but so special. Jim Morrison talks of “a special perception” forming about The Lords – which he says are a shamanic mythos about an invisible power that visits and alters art, blinds us to our slavery through the sop of art. “Special perception” is exactly what the observations, the specimens, seem to be surrounded by and cloaked in. The spider with the harp made of string on its back was no different. When I say the contraption was a harp I don’t know this but make an educated guess. Academia proceeds by these exact guesses. It might be a way of wrapping up the story with a fairytale ending, to say the contraption was a harp made of string. So it might’ve evolved out of the food chain and into the royal family of animals. It was possibly the most special perception of all of them.

I see I have been missing something… I previously said it dates back to my boyhood web-book. But before I published that book, I published Soundcloud Rain, which was songs structured according to my brother’s <BEE> - and the last line is: “signed by everwell, she couldn't hit it sideways, or maybe a soothsaying Spiderman with the hairgel of Dracula, Atlantis, Aquarius, the 60’s.” It was a notion I had developed when I was with Mary, and taking a lot of amphetamines to self-medicate against a condition called akathisia. So that was how the songbook ended, and maybe that was why the delicate perception of the spider came home to me.

Maybe I should take some time out to learn you, in Rimbaudian fashion, of some of my follies? What a shame it would be to copy and paste something previously written in at this juncture! Basically, the best of me thus far was the Oedipus Wrecks gig for being the portal to the island of penguins – and which is in Yes You May - and the maths of the new colour which is in The Sunset Child and which my black friends don’t want me to renew as an adult. Having said this I shall indeed copy and paste in a small narrative about my publication history…

My publication history has actually been long and complex. It started on the wrong foot when my dad set me up for revolt with a poetry volume called Rose Petals In The Ashtray. I didn’t know what the title was meant to denote; then my computer was crashed on the eve of publication so I snuck downstairs in the night to use my mum’s ancient desktop and throw together some half-remembered scraps. I couldn’t even get the right cover because my computer was crashed. The first poem I put in it I took out a line from in the name of revision and it ruined the phrasing. The second poem I put in it came from before the first one in the initial writing order. The collection was never finalised and I kept amending it even after it was published. I then moved on to Selected Poems 1989 – 2017, which also didn’t work and was also published with Chipmunka. Then came Binaural Songbook with someone independent who I never ended up paying and who put the work out as copyright himself. Then I think came Vampires And Zombies with Chipmunka but again I got frustrated and had all three of my Chipmunka books retracted from publication. Knowing someone that can format books for self-publication on Amazon I then brought out a chain of self-publications which were:

57 Paintings For Art Therapy

The Field of Rock N Roll Science

John Tucker’s Schooldays: A Spreadsheet Poem

Another 57 Paintings for Art Therapy

The New Beat

The Effect of Global Warming On The Unicorn

Word For Stained Glass Windows

154 Shakespearean Sonnets

It was then that I felt I hadn’t properly released anything and needed to turn back to Chipmunka. So I brought out Soundcloud Rain. Soundcloud Rain was a book of rock songs, a rock fantasy if you like, structured on my brother’s design of the new da Vinci circle, where <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet. It contained my piece about falsifying the Nirvana barcode. It was said to have changed life; also to have made this little spot at the foot of the fell the philosophical centre of Europe. The only problem was the About The Author section showed I still didn’t know what I had gone through as a boy.

Then I brought out The Sunset Child, my boyhood book, which worked, back in the day, if inventing the net was the efficacy, but not knowing that, I sold it to you as the real, seven year old homework of the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. It was that as well, but was more than I let alone about, serving a purpose of Long Storage as opposed to having a literary value.

Then the love poem book Breath Trapped In Heaven said “stop the war,” letting all else but love poetry fall away, so that’s good, but it didn’t end up with a happy family. I liked the 12 part serial poem for Nathalia which even took me onto the roof of the house where the Plough alignment lives on a summer evening in Doors film weather aged 16. I also liked the one that confers a Mario mushroom, and the one like Simon Pomery.

Brave New Tense then looked at the condition of water at the foot of the fell in terms of a contract on universal human rights – or something like that. It was about writing off the top of the head to discretely “do the beck” in the back garden here where the Plough alignment is viable. A gorgeous ideal I nicked from my mother, it only meant “Long Foot Disease” in my hands. The best one was the one that explored the form of defaced bank notes.

It was then that I turned to philosophy under the pen-name Johannes Bergfors and brought out three volumes of a book called Transition To Philosophy. My sister came home and got me thinking poetically again so I did one more book of poetry under my own name: Yes You May. Yes You May was about not using force. I did it with my sister who is born on the 25th May. I think she was trying to say “it’s so bad you’re charging too much.” It contained a transcript of the speech I made against September 11th in 2000, also the Oedipus Wrecks set list.

And then came Let The Jews Win… which my family were desperate for me not to do. So I was soon persuaded to have it retracted, for multifarious reasons too numerous to mention, meaning for a moment there were only five, five collections from Chipmunka.

The next thing to happen in this story was that I started to amend Transition To Philosophy Volume Two and Volume Three as well and got into such a mess I eventually had them both unpublished. So now what we have is the self-published books on Amazon, plus five collections with Chipmunka, plus one volume called Transition To Philosophy under the pen-name Johannes Bergfors.

I would deem it that it all went wrong when I was made to go Anon in Soundcloud Rain. I certainly didn’t want to go Anon nor know that is what the interlocutors were doing if that is what they were doing. If I had known, I wouldn’t have gone with it. That was my song writing career! But we don’t need to go through it all again.

To impose some order on this state of chaos, my family deem it that I started again with Soundcloud Rain and the five Chipmunka collections represent a new, Proustian series. When I look back, I say, I messed around with self-publication a bit, but don’t count that, count only the five Chipmunka collections and maybe the spin off work Transition To Philosophy by Johannes Bergfors as an anomalous experiment. I had to come on for my first collection after having already discovered the sheet where pictures grew, and looking back that seems insane. The sheet itself already came at the end of a remarkable series of events dating back years.

The best book is Soundcloud Rain where my songs are structured according to my brother’s design of the new da Vinci circle and we can’t remake it, and it is especially fast. At least I can say, even if it wasn’t about my genius, even if I wasn’t the star, even if I never get to pursue my own genius again as a result of it, then it is still the case that if <BEE> needs music to survive, it was my music, me that liberated <BEE>.

I also like The Sunset Child, which, amazingly, hadn’t been published yet that late into proceedings, even though I wrote it when I was seven. It’s the one that contains a plus sign for an ‘f’ in the line:

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

I deem it worth keeping even for that, and that I did to mathematics what my brother did to language. Settling on the five collections shouldn’t be hard, but I still feel unfulfilled, still come to the laptop every day hoping to do better, as if to make amends for a wound, maybe a wound that worsens with attention. I do have more adult documentation correlating to the boyhood maths but it’s not published.

And I almost forgot to mention: there are two other things. One is that there are presently about thirty six poems individually published by a magazine called Snakeskin, but they are very old-fashioned and I don’t feel happy with them at all. The other is that I made a digital collection on the website canva.com superimposing miniaturist poems on top of photographs and that being breezy is one thing that actually seems to please me. The series of “digital templates” is published on Write Out Loud, on Facebook and also on my Blogspot page. I use my Blogspot page as a container, a warehouse, a safety net. I don’t honestly know where my writing is going to go from here. Looked at one way, it has thus far been a disaster and a very expensive one too, and should be discontinued. Looked at another way, I still get to produce something valid despite mental illness, which is a chance I deserve. If I had to choose a ‘P’ and stick to it, out of philosophy and poetry, well, it should be poetry, but recently all my reading has been philosophical… the last time I really enjoyed a work of poetry was The Tumbler by Brossa and also Popular Songs by Simon Pomery.

I hear voices now… something complimentary for a change. They deem the sheet where pictures grew to be called “Foundstein” because to find it you’d need to be Einstein. That was me and surely to God I will be remembered for that.

There might be further changes rendering this obsolete, in a text I would like to last, but still it is a human Craving for Order that makes me incorporate a commentary on my previous publications; and I hope I would be forgiven for a Craving for Order, even though it goes against the philosophy of expanding one’s threshold for Negative Capability in the Keatsian sense.

If that is the literary side of things, I also have about ten musical demos online, but nobody listens to them. I am probably not the guy to bring us the new music anymore though some think of me as a musician still. The idea that’s growing on me is that I could settle for the Oedipus Wrecks and the maths of the new colour being the best of me, but that to augment it all with a book of criticism on The Lords And The New Creatures in the middle of which there is another specimen, would create another development in the story. It isn’t for shiny things above the fireplace that I do this but for truth. Anyhow, this late into proceedings and into the night, I entertain that the recent specimen came for me because of the way I signed off Soundcloud Rain. One might be forgiven for supposing that a new specimen’s appearance is a “drop what you’re doing and come” moment, a moment of glad crisis, a moment of uncertainty and upturning that requires attention.

It could be time to settle for what I have got and not move on but pack it in, for the Oedipus Wrecks is clear and solves timeless riddles, and the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark is something nobody else has done before and though they may be the best of me, and done when I was young, there has also been more and many more to reflect on too.

Now I have to move files again because I should stick to the other one I did with my mum and because I can’t do without the train. I love my mum. As we were making Eton Mess together tonight I told her she had some talented and good-looking children. “We did the sheet where pictures grew, the maths of the new colour, the face of stars, the Plough alignment, the internet, The Lords And The New Creatures,” I said and had to leave things out still, on account of the sentence staying natural. She told me to shut up but went next door and started to sing while she knitted. She was singing along to some music on telly. I went in and said “I heard you singing and thought something was in pain so came in to check,” and she laughed at my cheek. I suppose we did all this so that we could free my brother’s <BEE> and do it by taking a wee.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: MORNING PAGES

Above all else I have learned not to mistake for a finished work the work in progress that I am. I had before the spider with the harp made of string written out my autobiographical paragraph hundreds of times, as if turning up with the CV of a mystic visionary is enough to qualify one as a doctor of philosophy! Now there’s something new to go on the end of it, and I must not make the mistake again. I must privilege uncertainty. I think indeterminacy is to the world of science what undecidability is to the world of art, that Keats is right about Negative Capability, that the beauty of uncertainties is the only absolute, that mystery could remain a constant, that the universe is a very mysterious place, that uncertainty prevails. There will hopefully be more to come w/r/t/ my autobiographical paragraph so I shouldn’t just vomit my whole life out in such terse precis as if everything is concluded and dead.

It is morning and I had a dream last night that my dad killed a policeman to save me, or something like that. It was a disturbing dream, a violent dream, a dream where my brother still smoked skunk. We cannot trust violence. I hear the morning birds trilling in trees like laser-flutes. To get up with the sun and do something with one’s time, even if it be a writer, was part of my dad’s religion. Even when he had Hep C he would get up with the sun and go up trees with a chainsaw making logs for mother’s fire. Bird nosed, the sun could be called, poking its bird nose over the horizon. David Morley, the evolutionary biologist and poet too, says “the dawn is the chorus.” He might regret that my report on The Lords And The New Creatures lacks a song.

I noticed in the bath last night that the mark left by the maths of the new colour really does change colour according to heat and light. Still, in my not wishing to show you it, I shouldn’t mention it, and this rule of science that you are not to talk about what you cannot renew would cut out a load of my writing too, but I think I did renew the quest of The Lords And The New Creatures even if there is still doubt about attestations in Nature being the true cause and efficacy of that text.

Now a lone car passes. It is to be another day of writing. Writing and the river of tea and the Vape pen whose wispy fumes I insufflate. I look out the arthritic window to my right and see the natural world; I look out the window to my left and see the natural world. If life goes on inside the pages of Morrison’s text or not I do not know. I do sometimes wonder what it would be like if they turned Morrison’s book into a dream rather than a film… I also mentioned earlier the Doors computer game. In a Naturalistic sense, this place at the foot of Black Combe would be the perfect setting. As the witness I may be the main character. The Big Boss to defeat at the end of the level would be Fear. Jim was always going on about how “the fear of death is all that stops us being free.” His work smacks of Nietzsche in some places, in terms of the tone. Some would deem it arrogant but I don’t mind it.

What troubles me most today is the thought that they are going to do away with my work when I am gone, or make me Anon. I do not wish for either of those outcomes. I believe as John Stuart Mill wrote that a progressive country can quickly become backwards if there is a decrease in individuality. So that would cut out being Anon; and I also believe a writer’s wishes should not be gone against - but look what happened to The Lords! I still can’t believe they returned it to a loose, scattershot-logical anti-system of notes. There were connections in there that were strong, before, that are now lost in the new edition. Jim would be horrified by what they did to his text, and I don’t know if it was done like that to disempower the machinery that gave rise to certain observations I myself made – if it was top-down from some high authority.

I heard last on magic alphabet radio that they even think it was me that did the sheet where pictures grew! Now I imagine nothing left of me except the melted cassette. I told you already I had a cassette with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and an ideal to do away with the pause. The pause was done away with in the end through process and the tape then melted in the AGA but I don’t think it my best work. I imagine it all, the Oedipus Wrecks gig that was the portal to the face of stars, the maths of the new colour as a cellular mark, and all of it, either being done away with or being made Anon. In the meantime I have to think what to say for my latest book!

There are people on my side in this bitter dispute that want me to deem it just the music, because my detractors won’t care about that, and then we don’t have to think. My music is average and the worst of my subjects traditionally. My dad didn’t want me to pursue music but pursue literature. My music is recorded but nobody listens to it – so what does it mean to just deem it the music anyway? Does it mean pick up the guitar and write a song? A song nobody will hear, that will never get recorded, a song for an audience of nobody? My music has never got beyond the demo stage and yet with literature I sit here with a First Class Honours degree in English and Creative Writing and a story that is bigger than being the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. And it isn’t about the prostitution of my senses for the high goal, but what it is about I don’t know how to pinpoint, maybe the achievement of impossible things, maybe the rebalance Man’s position in Nature, maybe to law down the law to the animal kingdom of which we are a part.

Blackbirds wash… a blackbird washes in a dull, brown puddle dug in a rut under the car. It is part of the same internet as us. Now I hear geese and remember Michael Hofmann’s phrase “these are my geese honking abysmally.” When he says “a snake took care of the frogs,” I wonder if he means “a child took care of The Lords And The New Creatures.” Someone needed to. Observations were always going to occur. I think of the actor Val Kilmer who plays Morrison in the Doors film playing a detective, with short hair, in a different film, coming in to the crime scene and saying “it had to happen.” Films talk to each other like poetry books do too. I would re-iterate that point that says a scientific paper is also only a part of one big scientific paper. Without adequate scientific knowledge how can I go on? I forgot to mention so far that there is a seer and his trance associated with this spot at the foot of the fell. The foothill of Black Combe, that is, is called Sea Ness and was originally Seer Ness after a seer and his trance. After my poetry readings in Millom at gigs raising money for the mental health charity Mind, I became known as the seer but I think that a very Conservative way of unpacking the same data as my being the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures. The former dismisses the subject as mysticism, even as a job or role that is traditional… the latter still sounds too mad.

And what if I were to tell you that while I compose my book on The Lords And The New Creatures, there is mostly nothing but music in my mind? They, the melodies, would work as math-rock instrumentals for guitar or bass but also as monastic refrains… it’s been like this since The Flood who, in my youth, were the band that recorded only on binaural earphones. I suppose that’s another good thing I did but which they might try and take away from me when I am gone. Meanwhile in the world of words, I mentioned that popular opinion was that my subject herein was not proper science, but that may have been proven wrong by the treatment of the spider with the harp made of string. I may have proven that the sudden advent of a new specimen in the middle of the book of literary criticism proves that these messengers are a proper scientific subject. Meanwhile Oedipus Wrecks was good because it pointed to something good, namely the island of penguins and the maths of the new colour is the same, because it pointed to something good, but there needs be more, I mean, why else would my friends like those two things, if not for breaking ground and pointing to things that are good, having some efficacy on reality, and yet the transcript of my speech against September 11th in 2000 is also supposed to be good, though that didn’t point to anything good and now here I am with a sentence like a chord, writing about writing, feeling lost and in need of a theory. I am starting to shy away from this job but we may never have another witness in and of and to and from.

I’m not saying “I want to be Darwin, the centre of a world wide religious and scientific debate,” just that my boffin friends may need me to leave a record of the witness’s role… it is those friends that reckon the Oedipus Wrecks set list and the maths of the new colour are the best I have done. As I say I am starting to shy away but it keeps coming, the text, and the role is contained. As well as there being music in my head I also count things in sets, lists, patterns, relays, circuits. It is like I am playing drums with my eyes. These eyes they have seen some things. Jim Morrison calls the eyes “two, soft insatiable jewels.” He also mentions the eyes propped on tulip stalks when watching a film, how everything tends to the visual. His imagery is fecund. He says imagery is born of loss, echoing Rimbaud. He speaks of getting a “cerebral erection,” where the brain is bloated with blood, in the cinema. The Lords is partly about how the sensuous mode of being has gone under Gondwanaland. I like it when he echoes TS Eliot saying the mad, naked body dancing on a hillside has disappeared, become two eyes staring in the dark at the arts of vicarious existence. He says movies are but dead photographs given artificial insemination, as seems to be the form of his long poem The Lords. He said in interview he wished he was making movies and couldn’t so wrote The Lords instead. You can imagine how much I liked it in that passage of time when I had been the witness in boyhood and it was still yet to be confirmed in adulthood.

And as for my own text, I am going to be owned by the philosophers that sponsored my dad if I go ahead with it, but how can I stop? I might do better even if I walk around the kitchen talking to myself about previous work. The digital miniaturism of the poems I superimposed on photos at canva.com is more in keeping with the age than talk of the new creatures but then again now we have had a spider with a harp made of string, as if the story continues in the Digital Age. The latest specimen advances the cause into the future but also acknowledges the past. If the past is not acknowledged it can but rot the conscience. But history can enslave us. Dedalus in Ulysses wants to wake from the nightmare that is history. I couldn’t tell you if The Lords And The New Creatures is part of that very nightmare, because I am biased, being the witness in and of and to and from. Now my shying away from the topic has reached the point where I think I should stop but I literally can’t think of anything better to do for humanity than progress with this book.

If I was Hitler for a day I would make everyone read The Lords And The New Creatures, then afterwards smoke a spliff. If I was Jesus for a day, I would make everyone read The Lords And The New Creatures, then afterwards smoke a spliff. Alas I am neither a tyrant nor the son of God, only a low down lowly writer, what Morrison called a little witless blip on the ground. I was a renegade in my youth, an anarchist, a wild-card, Byronic and bohemian aristocracy too. These appellations were applied by others, and they said my poems were Rimbaud and my music Syd Barrett. Jim Morrison was a role model for me when I was young, to the detriment of a happy existence too. Look what happened to him – he died at 27 in the bath, in the fluids of elution – and now I am 44 – and I suppose Jim Morrison is or would be very jealous of me now! For just to stay alive is a triumph enough! Everything wants to survive! My father dealt with his Hep C by realising it wanted the same as him – to survive – and thus he co-existed with rather than suffering from. I miss him, my dad, and that dream I had last night disturbs me still. He lost an arm defending me… I think some young people treated him like Darth Vader at the end of the Doors computer game, then ran outside where I got out of a car, said something to me about my dad being the Boss in the Doors computer game, whereupon I went inside and saw dad there missing an arm, presumably from the froward youths that were making their getaway while I arrived by car. I keep a dreamwork diary b/t/w/ and find you can smuggle language out of the unconscious and there is a book down there but that’s another story.

Of the five books I have brought out with Chipmunka I think Soundcloud Rain and also The Sunset Child are the best, but I like them all. The poem that confers a Mario mushroom is in Breath Trapped In Heaven and I like that. The defaced bank note experiment is in Brave New Tense and I like that too. The Oedipus Wrecks set list is in Yes You May and I like that. And now I see I have attained the condition of tea. The discussion has been had, that is, and we have or I have attained tea. Let’s hope the tea is going to be aesthetically pleasing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: EVENING PAGES

I do feel like I am about to squawk my final squawk like Rimbaud in his psychodrama of soul-in-the-making, A Season In Hell. Maybe I will forget how to spell “Winnie the Pooh,” go through Cartesian doubt and come out the other side the proud owner of an original thought?

I rather think I already found one or two when I made my Warwick University Entrance portfolio about how I. T. might stand for Instant Travel too. It’s just a shame that when I got the place the portfolio was not returned and I went off on one about how Lucy in the soul w/ demons might be an actual substance instead.

Now voices call at me from the rocks, some wishing me to do one for the government, some for Anon. It’s maddening. And what would you think if I told you the next one was a winged horse? You might get that that is a leap into fiction. I suppose sometimes you need to send a parrot to space through the conch and sometimes look for the tactility of a taut blue patch of denim, thus to calibrate a scale between fantasy and new Realism. But maybe you thought when I mentioned the spider with the harp made of string that this was a launch into fiction already?

As a dabble with work I do some washing up… it’s the least I can do. It’s one of my roles here at the fellfoot. You don’t get paid for upkeeping this house and it’s actually very expensive to run. And here I am in the middle of it all showing my tenderness for a firefly so to speak!

Once you know my dad was sponsored by some philosophers to provide me as the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures as a child, you probably think Everything I write is a plate of bullshit. My mother hates the song where I am witness, partly because it was so risky, my dad didn’t even let her in on it. Or was that horseshit not bullshit? Whatever it is it stinks and now we all have to walk round in it. I like the way Jim Morrison says “fear the Lords who are secret among us.” If in a poem, I said just line “desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies,” it might be the alkali to Morrison’s acid. In fact I did collaborate on a poem containing that line when I was 16. It’s called ‘The Rising Kestrel’ and was co-authored with Mr. William Thyne.

Night arrives like a ghost.

The green kingdom around me

opens up to the starlit laughter.

To hover motionlessly o'er the mellow fields

I'm rising through this careless freewill

like a kestrel from its wood.

Lusting for life as every being should.

Desperate for sex with a dream full of ladies.

But nothing too personal.

Because love is life without drugs.

**

What happened was, my friend Mr. Thyne approached me at school to ask if I could help him with writing a poem for the magazine another friend and I had set up. I said to Mr. Thyne “you’re from Scotland – choose something like a bird of prey.” We sat down and I came up with about 90% of the poem and he added a few touches. I think it doubles as a midnight kettle’s ascent through the ages, the greatest hits of the canon as I knew it. That first line, “Night arrives like a ghost,” it’s Hamlet. There was a discussion about whether the ghost in Hamlet is a projection of the mind or a dramatic device. The next line is Keats on Negative Capability. Then we have Ted Hughes, then the Morrison, then we’re into rock n roll. I might do well, if I have no choice but to be Anon, to replicate the whole sequence. But that means starting a new file. Sorry, not sure what’s going on here – am inbetween files so to speak, a flying dither. And flight is one answer to Morrison but I think the terms and conditions on which real evolution can go on are above our heads, even mine.

I’m not sure what’s going on here. It’s difficult to know which file to go with. The government won’t let me do the cult one. I think they want no trace of the witness remaining. I was thinking, however, of writing

“my soul was torn and bleeding,

left out in the rain,

and you picked it up

and brought it back to me.”

But of course the government would want to erase that because it’s the witness. Not only is it the witness but it becomes Orwellian now and now and now as we face an endgame, a waiting game. I don’t know what to leave behind, don’t wish to die either.

“The answer is to live,” says my brother James, a genius he is too, “and if you are going to die, deem it songs and call it Yeah. Then we’d get that it was <BEE> that might’ve taken your fire away. And you talk to mum like you are Homer Simpson and she is Marge.”

Anyhow, it turns out the government don’t want to do away with this one because neither the spider nor I are evil, and something promising is turning out good.

CHAPTER NINETEEN: THERE IS NO KILLING OF DEAD FLIES

I woke up this morning with a dead fly (blue bottle) in the cold tea beside my bed. My immediate thought is to confirm the knowledge that it is not a new creature, not what we are looking for w/r/t/ The Lords And The New Creatures getting real – but then I think about the juxtaposition of fly and cold tea and think also how these other so-called new ones were juxtapositions, collocations, smashing together two old things to make new ones. Could it be that even the dead fly is another specimen? I don’t think it was nor a messenger, not there to add intellectual content to my book like an offering from a Higher Source that oversees the project. I think it was just a dead fly that was attracted to my dead tea and once in there drowned and could not get out. But then again, spiders catch flies, and I am writing a book at a file provisionally called The Spider With The Harp That’s Made of String. So maybe it is part of the set up. Maybe the whole thing is linked together. I don’t know much outside empirical knowledge of these specimens. Maybe I was supposed to shed light or write the new Ulysses. No, I don’t think the fly is new, but once again, spiders catch flies, so maybe it is a kind of liminal thing involved in the same game. Normally a dead fly in a cup is nothing but a dead fly in a cup but once you’ve been privileged enough to witness the spider with the harp that’s made of string… I don’t know anymore. I reach ecstasia, the suspension of all judgement.

Now there’s a living fly buzzing round the pan we use to heat milk for coffee in the morning. It is also a blue bottle. Darwinism would say we are all connected in a chain, that all of life originated from the same source. I heard it said that Darwinism understood truly shows that everything is eating everything else. I for one don’t wish to be slowly eaten to death by my own family. I was reading once upon a time about how we clambered up from the sea and then when on the shore evolved the eye. Apparently even to this day 25% of the human brain is given over to the eye which is miles more than any other sense. The structure of the eye is super-involuted and I cast mine about the kitchen. I am still thinking about the fly. If the juxtaposition of dead fly and cold tea isn’t enough to qualify a new species because the fly is dead, then living fly and hot milk would surely qualify, but it doesn’t because the milk isn’t part of the metabolism of the fly, and the fly is just like any other fly, hasn’t undergone a weird mutation.

Now I am taken back to a moment in the text where I said it has become about attaining the condition of tea and wanted the tea to be aesthetically pleasing. But before I can elaborate another specimen enters the scene – my old friend Mr. G turns up out of the blue. I make us a cup of tea each. He sits on a seat over which is draped my yellow Jim Morrison T-shirt which he himself got me from India years ago. The yellow T-shirt has its own story. I was sitting in my Millom flat, back when I lived in Millom, talking to my friend M about the Doors. I was saying “life isn’t just about naturally occurring fossils of Jim Morrison’s poetry for the witness but naturally occurring fossils of the live Doors for everyone else too.” I was also talking about what at the time I believed to be the light speed law of neuroplasticity – that it’s impossible to remember a new yellow line. And then I got a knock at the door. And it was Mr. G, the drummer, on time, who came into the Millom flat and said “I’ve just got back from India,” and who pulled out a gift he’d got me, which turned out to be a yellow Jim Morrison T-shirt which he’d traipsed half way round India to find for me.

I thought at the time this happened, a few years ago as I say, of synchronicity, simultaneity and syncretism. I asked if there was a Logical Bond between all those events, which seemed uncanny in coincidence.

So now Mr G has come round again this morning and sat on the seat over the back of which is draped the same yellow T-shirt. He’s gone now but we sat and talked for a while. He bent my ear. He was reading out messages to do with New Age spiritualism from his phone. There seems to be a new internet religion about to form where you can select parts of Buddhism, Christianity, New Age spirituality and all sorts, and share messages of goodwill online. I told Mr. G I was working on a new book. I told him what is was about – that I had started to write a book on Jim Morrison’s poetry The Lords And The New Creatures and in the middle of it there was a new specimen. I told him about the spider with a harp made of string. He mentioned something about angels. Usually when I talk about Jim Morrison’s book he retorts that he himself has seen an alien spaceship, but I don’t think that on the same level of analysis.

I told him what I was working on seemed to be more Darwinian than about New Age spirituality. A fly buzzed about the kitchen while we talked and I made us a second cup of tea. Now there are two fruit flies, small ones, about my screen. Very often it’s too windy at my screen for proper writing but I think herein I have come into my own.

Mr G, upon finding out I had met a spider with a harp made of string, even though that may be a Romantic idealisation of the “contraption” it carried, said there was musical potential and I had thought about that too but not explored it as yet. As I say he’s gone now, a musician friend with whom I was in a two piece band. He left me thinking about tuning the harp! About the spider strumming it! He’s a very spiritual guy that says poetry is not a competition, not about better and worse, those materialistic Western concepts, but more about Eastern values of compassion and forgiveness. In other words poetry in the West suffers from a Darwinian sense of competitiveness which is against the essence of poetry as the unique expression of the unique individual. We spoke about it once on the beach.

Anyhow under the sun it’s been an eventful morning, new creature wise. I like the way the interruption of the given happened again by which I mean the way I was writing about one new creaturely thing and there came into my life a new specimen, even if the specimen this time was human and an old friend.

CHAPTER TWENTY: NOTES TOWARDS A LASTING THEORY AS I AWAIT THE DELIVERY OF FISH AND CHIPS

The experiment has become writing to music on Youtube. I stick on some Nirvana, and it’s loud and disturbing but good. It gets me excited and distracted, Kurt’s rasping, raucous and beautiful voice cutting through, the rhythm section dynamic, the guitar full of light sabre fuzz and energy, the way distortion is clarity. It has nothing to do with new creatures, but the Doors were the Nirvana of the 1960’s. I suddenly get that I shouldn’t be following it, that it’s part of the idiot tradition and am offending my mother upstairs. I was going to try and compose a theory whilst listening to music, but I have no theory. Maybe there is no theory when it comes to this subject, only life. Maybe theory in itself is a byproduct of having such massive brains and the brains of these creatures I keep talking about are much lesser and don’t support the idea of theory at all. I just remembered that Darwin wished he had listened to more music before composing his theories, and wondered what it would be like to put some music on and type. “Meat-eating orchids forgive no-one just yet,” sings Kurt Cobain on In Utero… it reminds me that Darwin was a botanist. If I were to separate Flora’s pretext from talk of new creatures it might be false unto him. Flora’s pretext is to do with contrasting my mother’s flower-press ending on cannabis and a love poem for Flora. I myself did write love poetry for Flora but turned off her as soon as I found out she had been with my younger brother James. I don’t think Flora’s pretext is exactly what I am working on herein, just that Darwin wouldn’t distinguish the horticultural and the carnal in his theories of how life originated. And now maybe I should put some new music on? Something like the Aphex Twin? Drukqs was one of the best albums of my youth, brought out around the time we all started to get phones and e-mail addresses, when even Radiohead went electronica, which was also when the Towers tragically fell. I remember listening to said Aphex Twin album a lot at University. I started taking E at the same time. I had a band recording on binaural earphones left over from my Gap Year who used to still meet up in holidays and record. There was a poster of Einstein and also a poster of Radiohead on my wall. I had a plant I fed. I had a computer on which I typed listening to Aphex Twin, and some new genes, I mean jeans. I was writing about a mutation in consciousness. That was the period I got a First for a paper called Lucy in the Soul W/ Demons. I had already written Instant Travel to get on the course. As I say they both got turned into songs, and the original papers don’t remain.

Now I get three tracks into the Aphex Twin album and turn it off, return to the quietude of the solipsistic kitchen of fiction. I suppose I should say that before the spider with the harp made of string the situation was very standoffish between parts of government that helped invent the net and the followers of the Doors that celebrate the witness. What I mean is I was doing double: they said “you were working for the government when you helped invent the net and were working for the counter-cultural Revolution when you were the witness. You can’t do both.” I think when it comes to the spider with the harp made of string, we have a synthesis of both these camps. This is where I would cite the reference of my father who used to say “life is one.” This also concurs with Darwin, and may be the node I am encrypting. (There’s also the idea that “the rock reinvents itself.”)

One problem I find with the present writing project is my having lost the support of the others in my household. In going on about new creatures that only I have seen, I have lost them. I possibly also alienate the audience. I haven’t even got a groundbreaking theory about the observations, other than the chain of Dark Evolution, dark as in dark matter. I was hoping the mere presentation of facts would lead to a theory… but really you should start with a theory and test it, mathematically, rigorously, so that in the end it can be proven or confuted through observation.

Maybe I should’ve stopped at the point I nearly cried a while back in this text but couldn’t; still, there’s no point turning back now. And how could the others in the house-hold not be a part of the new writing project still, for they are alive too! Maybe it is time to ship in some notes on words, in which it is considered that language is a creature… maybe I should leave the lecture on language out. It is my mother who always said language is a creature. Language is also the emotional condom of the world. I mentioned above the latest scientific theory as to how language originated: language evolved when we grew our brains by eating meat and needed to spread information about our farming, hunting, cooking, killing and eating meat. That is the basis on which we have things like, say, the colours of the vowels in Rimbaud, Negative Capability in Keats, the semblance of inevitability in Shakespeare, Michael Hofmann’s poems “the shape and texture of bricks,” the last poet’s last poem in the Beat poets, the Objective Correlative in TS Eliot, the painterly style of the New York School, Milton trying to outdo the Bible, and Ted Hughes exploring the Central Nervous System of the earth. It doesn’t seem like these poetic things are based on rapacious carnality, but they are. I myself was cursed by a hypnotist which may not come across but it ruined my life, my chances, my ability to realise my dream. I cannot tell if I said this already, such is the copy and pasting of my method, the file hopping. It might not seem like I was cursed but I really was and left in a world with No Rights.

Anyhow I am glad to be alive after suicidal tendencies resurfaced last night and it seems James was right that the answer is to live. Now he’s going out to Millom to pick us up some fish and chips. I love fish and chips. It’s one of the most under-rated and best English inventions. We have provided the world wide web, the Beatles, gravity, Darwinian evolution, football, the television, and the toilet but fish and chips is another up there with the best of them. You don’t often hear of it in the same light as those other things, so it’s under-rated, like the sandwich is too.

It’s supposed to be food in the past tense not food in the future tense which the witness writes of but I look forward to my fish and chips with rapt uncertainty and cannot stand the suspense. One teacher at Warwick University wrote “FISH AND CHIPS” on the black board, then he underlined it and said “by underlining it it becomes a completely different thing.” It becomes the title of a potential poem in other words. The American soldiers stationed in Britain during the Second World War loved the fish and chips, if not the ale.

The food arrives… it is not a breakfast of every snooker ball colour. I eat it, unlike what is possible with the new creatures. After the fish, which is delicious, I make a chip butty with the remnant chips or some of them, and it too is delicious, with both Ketchup and mayonnaise. I clear the empty wrapping papers away. You can absorb the social realism in the fish and chip shop queue, the salt and vinegar of experience, soak it all up like the wrapping paper does the fish and chips. You can also, alternatively, write in wrinkled and crinkly Christmas wrapping paper. My dad’s ideal for poetry was the ash of yesterday’s fire wrapped up in yesterday’s newspaper and put out in the right, green bin. As I say he only really left behind his list of French vocab but it’s actually a long poem, because a code you can crack, and one of the best poems I have ever read too.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE: COMING HOME

I suppose what we’ve witnessed together in this book, dear, gentle reader is that the so-called new specimens which smash together old things appear from time to time like messengers then look for their homes in language. The bird in the wood was called “a juggernaut” in Joyce, also “a mistake” in terms of Taxonomy. The living spreadsheet of plastic was both “Grand-darth’s Ship” and a monster albeit very small. I would say “the spider with the harp that’s made of string” is the correct expression for what I attested to, what evolved, and that it is what I was looking for in parts of the book. It exists before language in a pre-alphabetic realm, associated with Nature, but then Taxonomy arises. That is where the creature comes home. It’s similar therefore to what happened in Rimbaud’s Season In Hell: the poet aligns himself with the blacks and the pre-alphabetic languages of Nature, and says “then the whites arrived, bringing morality.” It’s also similar to mental health. They say if you give someone a name they live up to it, but it is also the case that once the patient is diagnosed, hopefully the recovery becomes possible.

The latter reminds me to take my meds. After food I have to take Metformin for diabetes (type 2) which I got from drinking too much sweet tea, a habit from mental hospital. Very often writing can seem to be a machine for remembering to take your medication, as if Big Pharma is advertising through your own literary process. Some scientists contend we already live in a Pharmacological Utopia.

Once I have taken my meds, my mother comes through looking for her Vape pen. For some reason, whether she intended it or not, it reminds me of the arguments dad and mum used to have, and in particular the way mum used to say to him “all you did was stick your dick in, I had to do the rest.” Mum is a strong and formidable woman. She is full of what they call in Finland “magic sayings hidden in the treetops.” You can drown in a puddle. Language is a creature. Imagination is a muscle. In politics there are no wrongs or rights. Just because someone is good to you doesn’t mean they are right for you. Actions have consequences. The brain only heals when it’s asleep and even nightmares are healing. Giving makes you feel good. Working with soil is good for the soul. Poetry is not the entrance and exit of life.

I told her once that Dr. Ptom Fitzgerald claims there is no such thing as female genius. She didn’t like that and came back saying “without women we wouldn’t have spines.” It’s the man that determines the sex of the baby; and we all start as females then some develop as males. I find the female form fascinating, find women beautiful, and like the Michael Hofmann line “women supply all of life’s colour.” I even agree with Martin Amis who said he was very “gynocratic” meaning interested in rule by females. I thought I would have something to say as the witness in and of and to and from The Lords And The New Creatures about females but can’t pinpoint it. Maybe it’s that the females think they are the true witnesses in Nature because they have to go through childbirth. Maybe it’s that you couldn’t imagine the role of attestation arriving with a young girl as opposed to a young boy. Maybe it’s that talking about The Lords And The New Creatures getting real doesn’t just commit the sin of making something kinetic become static, but if you talk to a pregnant woman about it, you could do some damage.

With Jim Morrison gone, furthermore, there is no more “onus” in the new creature project. So the female’s urge to have babies becomes the gist of the new creature project instead. The female’s urge to mate is still the predominant thing. I as witness am not going to pass on my genes, just tap away at the plastic of the qwerty keyboard, dithering, without a publication contract waiting for nothing in particular, going to waste, and some might say I am a specimen myself, while many friends of mine have long since passed on their genes, had families, settled down to jobs and paying mortgages. In short what I might mean is that the witness lost to the fitness. If survival of the fittest in the Darwinian sense is real, the witness to the new creatures lost out to those that made no attestations. The only way the witness can “live on” after his death is music and literature, and selecting what to say is hard. It remains unlikely but not impossible that anything will be remembered of The Lords And The New Creatures coming true at all. As I say the witness lost to the fitness, despite having helped invent the net andcetera, and now when we look back we see the younger brother… we see the kids growing up to do the <BEE> thing, where <BEE> might come after @ in the international language alphabet. As you can imagine the feeling of this is really painful for me, even though I won the lottery so to speak. They all want me as their witness to be Anon but I don’t want to be, don’t agree with it. To bring out a book called something like The Spider With The Harp That’s Made of String could lodge itself in popular imagination and therefore be a deal, a compromise, a way of letting the witness win for once. I would hazard a guess that life itself doesn’t want the witness and everything he went through to be forgotten – but it’s only a guess.

Maybe I missed out on life. Then again, I look outside and see a bird, and the witness is still in. Now we’ve had the spider with a harp that’s made of string, we might need more and many more. We might need them to be plural. And if what I write about the observation influences the nature of what the next in the line sees, I wonder what that will be, and if we can test the theory, and why already it seems like the theory of Dark Evolution may not be 100% true. Maybe after The Lords And The New Creatures I need a second book, a second moiety, to make a binary-machine. Or maybe I just need to do what feels natural. Or maybe without proper publication, the experiment is dead. Maybe putting something on my blog doesn’t count. Maybe I am angry at the way things have panned out, not being properly published and all that. We still don’t know what will happen next. I sit here awaiting thoughts, in a new, mapless space, truant thoughts, like a spider with a harp that’s made of string seeking a mate.

This fact of the witness losing to the fitness may be why nobody wants me to pursue witness-related literature. It might be time therefore to shift my focus of attention to my younger brother James. I think the experiment he set up is at least as interesting as the experiment Jim Morrison set up, if not more. But it’s not for me to describe it. It’s the experiment that lead to the sheet where pictures grew – and it’s his remit to make more of it if he wants, delimit the ins and outs.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO: STILL LOOKING LIKE A FRUIT

Now the sound of something my brother is watching online tumbles from his room in the night time. Could it be that all we need is to free the <BEE>? The sound stops, as if I went wrong in writing it down, then starts again as if I went wrong in writing it down that it had stopped. It stops again once I write down that it has started and I feel like I am playing a losing game with writing it down – always jetlagged and looping back on myself. Maybe my brother’s privacy is affected by this. It is hard to guess what he thinks.

I think he might be urging me to “stop!” But I haven’t finished reporting on this biological miracle. What could you possibly dream as a new creature that is more poetic than a spider with a harp that’s made of string? A purple cow with wings isn’t going to happen. Nobody is going to see a purple cow with wings and we don’t know why this is or what the system is that forbids it, but I think we all know a purple cow with wings isn’t going to appear in either macro or micro evolution. At the same time biochemists who think biology too static a subject and can use energy as microscopes can tell you anything is possible, and that view is consolidated by financial backing too. But a purple cow with wings would still seem beyond the pale. However, I think it more likely that a purple cow with wings could be bred in a laboratory, and a spider with a harp that’s made of string on its back could be more like what life provides, a symbol of freedom, flying the flag for freedom, the freedom of the soul. My compassion for such specimens is not infinite, my curiosity still strong, but at some point I might need turn away. “String” might be changed to “thread” in the description, the Taxonomy, but I still want to Tap the internet with this creature.

It is only an instinct that says a purple cow with wings wouldn’t be possible without genetic engineering in a laboratory, and that a spider with a harp that’s made of string wouldn’t be possible in a laboratory, only in life. I didn’t get long enough a chance to see the specimen, only long enough for that switch to be thrown again.

It might be alright if I augment all this with something about the maths of the new colour after all. But still I would find myself without having won the Nobel prize and without any children and only one move left which is to put the document on a Blogspot page that nobody reads.

The question of what is ‘in’ is a big one. Surely he who leads his friends to the island of penguins will always be ‘in’ ever after; same with discovering the sheet where pictures grew (they tried telling me it was me who did the pictures if you remember). But what is ‘in’ as in ‘online’ at the same time? The net stretches to the cloud ticking over every second. The bedroom wall is not online but every computer file can be accessed in ways that weren’t possible only a decade ago. The spider with the harp that’s made of string is a collocation more apt for our digital age than even the fusion of an insect colony and a Gameboy.

I’m not saying that the latter is definitely what the living spreadsheet of plastic boiled down to, back in boyhood, just that when naming things they come home, even if it is heuristic. Still, we can be completely wrong in our estimations as to what these new creatures are comprised of. The whole discussion makes you look like a fruit. There is as I say no “onus,” nobody to stand up and say “that’s my victory, my project,” and it just gets left with a child. But the new one was not so evil, only a confirmation of what had gone on before.

All harps are made of string to some extent but what I meant was that this one was man-made thread and dates back to the web-book as I have depicted it. It forces you into a scientific posture to meet the spider with the harp that’s made of string. It wasn’t a regular harp that we could hear being plucked, but as I say is heuristic – only the best theory at the time.

So it is that my role in being the witness continued and continues still. I wish my dad was here sometimes to confirm what went on at the start. Was there a bet? Was there a discussion? Was there a secret art deal using me as the witness? Was it illegal, so illegal my father couldn’t tell his wife? Or did it all happen by accident? Was it not just the case that Jim Morrison wrote “a creature waits out the war,” combined with my dad selling his art dealing business at the fall of the Berlin Wall? Was there more purpose to it than that? Why did we have to have them and why do we have to have them still? I mean it’s not as if anything much seems to depend on it…

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE: LIBERTY

In America they enshrine their liberty in writing, and Jim did so too at the end of The Lords And The New Creatures. Arguably, he enshrined the freedom of the witness, in writing, in America, under a hot, Californian sun, but the witness turned out to be English, where we don’t enshrine our liberty in writing. And so an interesting philosophical area is opened. Freedom as my father said is Man’s main, psychic thread dating back to his nomadic days when he was tall, lithe and muscular. The role of the witness could be described as “noble slavery” – could be a job – could be a 24/ 7, unpaid job and going on in a grey area, an un-legislatable area, in an international sense. Certainly with everything I did as a witness which may not have ended yet, I was a noble servant of the poetry world.

When it comes to policing such matters as the new creatures or the island of penguins, who knows… I am sure the Feds are not happy that certain Naturalistic Observations can break out in a child’s school playground, but don’t know how to police it. These things I met were not hallucinations or vagaries of perception but alive.

And yes I do have srs mental health issues now, partly for frying my brain on acid before I had left school, but it doesn’t mean these events didn’t happen. I think if you were to say “Jim Morrison wrote a book called The Lords And The New Creatures and under the sun nothing happened,” that would be impossible. There is still an unresolved issue w/r/t tying it to Morrison’s book. James Joyce and Ted Hughes both “saw things” and didn’t have the privilege or even slavery of being tied to a book – they were not witnesses from some script, but free agents. Possibly, it should be the same for me. Possibly I shouldn’t endorse my being the witness from a specific text, but accept that the observations were separate and yet even the medical health professionals have come round to agreeing with me that I am the witness in and of and to and from Morrison’s book. I suppose it does become a matter of faith, preference and subject to the fashion of one’s time, not that I met the things I did, but that meeting them qualifies me as a specific witness from a specific book. I would suppose it all depends on what my father’s art deal really was, what he was sponsored for by the philosophers, whether it was to provide the real human witness from Jim Morrison’s book or just to give rise to observations in a more general sense. Alas, my father took his secrets to his grave apart from leaving behind a poem that took the form of a list of French vocab which was a code to crack.

Anyhow, I told you about antagonism between the Doors and the State. Some even commented that the State themselves would come round to seeing the need to renew observations. I think in the case of the spider with the harp that’s made of string we have the perfect symbol of agreement between my work for the State and my work for the Doors. I was seven when I helped invent the net with my web-book and eight when I made the first two observations as witness. I may have been born the witness, already the witness when I was born, but I don’t know anything about my dad’s art deal and I don’t think he would’ve left me in the dark if there wasn’t a good reason for it.

I was going to stop here, say “it’s done,” but then my brother went out to collect some take-away pizzas, and we will eat them without plates, and that will mean less washing up, but the food won’t be as good as mum’s home-made food, and in fact quite unhealthy too. I can’t believe it was only yesterday that we had fish and chips. The pizza I await the delivery of contains sweetcorn, ham, pineapple and mushroom. So it is a predominantly vegetarian-friendly pizza, apart from the ham, which comes sliced up in tiny cubes. James, my brother, is getting a 12 inch Meat Feast pizza without the chicken. I don’t think he trusts the chicken at the fast food joint.

I don’t think the philosophers that sponsored my dad belonged in jail over it, and I was the one that was supposedly abused as an eight year old, and The Lords And The New Creatures is still one of my favourite books, even if when it comes to an English degree I will not mention it out-right – and anyhow that is something to fix, this being afraid of mentioning one’s own favourite book, for legal reasons, to do with being made the witness as a child. Now the car gets home – our pizzas have arrived. I eat nearly all of mine in five minutes, washing it down with Pepsi Max, then have my Metformin pills for diabetes.

I look around for other daddy long legs, and find one occupying the wall just next to the wall socket where I plug in my laptop. There are often a few of them in this old country house, hanging and ominous, looking ready to abseil down from the ceiling, but waiting in their own world. In Ted Hughes Nature was frightening and otherworldly, a neighbouring darkness. Creation was a dark machine that functioned perfectly without manners and magniloquence, as evinced by the dynamism of his verbs, like in Crow, which is one of my favourite books. Going back a bit further in Wordsworth Nature was custodial – and a vehicle through which you could gain passage to the divine. In one piece I wrote at Warwick University, Nature was perceived as an art exhibition. When I look at these daddy long legs – ones without harps on their backs – I wonder of which type of Nature they belong to. One would expect the spider with the harp that’s made of string to be the custodial sense or even the artistic sense, and the normal daddy long legs to be in Hughes’s indifferent other world.

They say I was abused as a child because before I could unpack the juggernaut I was left with the other one, made of eggs or seeds and then in puberty there resolved the result of the maths of the new colour. Now, I thank whomsoever it was that sent me the spider with the harp that’s made of string, for it was not an evil specimen and neither am I. It just makes me look like a fruit, to try and put it down in words. I am still beset by voices claiming it hasn’t happened, The Lords And The New Creatures, under the sun, as if life does not exist; and there are also voices claiming I should be Anon, but it’s about a unique and personal experience that hasn’t happened to you and I am dead against being Anon. On the other side, there are people thinking it’s the best I have done, to try and render it in words what happens when The Lords And The New Creatures comes true in a biological sense. It’s about what The Lords And The New Creatures means to me, for I don’t apply it to everyone else’s understanding.

I hear voices, monotonous, mocking and encroaching upon my privacy and liberty, saying “we have just proved you weren’t really the witness.” On the contrary you could say there can be no more further proof that I was the witness than what has been provided. The theory was that I was the witness in boyhood, and people didn’t believe I really had met anything, so now that I have met something else in adulthood it proves I was right. Maybe what the rude intruding voices meant was that observations of new creatures can provenly go on outside of The Lords And The New Creatures. I never said this wasn’t possible, just that being the witness is an evolving role, that involved my becoming a specimen myself, and more than just meeting two weird creatures. I would hazard a guess as stated that this new one might come from the fact that I sold you the boyhood web-book as the real seven year old homework of the witness, which it also was. I think it a continuation in the story which pre-existed The Lords And The New Creatures but which still includes The Lords And The New Creatures.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR: SELF-INTERVIEW

In time after The Lords And The New Creatures, Jim Morrison invented a form called “the self-interview.” Some of his experiments in that form are present in the posthumously published volume Wilderness. It could be useful and instructive in working things out, should I practice the form when discussing the new creature situation.

A: let’s be real. Do you really think it happened again?

B: I do think it happened in my boyhood but whether it has happened again I don’t know.

A: I would only keep the small song or poem you wrote about it from the whole teeming mire.

B: I think that a good idea also.

A: then as is typical in your creative process you write a whole scientific paper just to reduce to an average song.

B: yes it happened with Instant Travel and also Lucy in the Soul W/ Demons.

A: but what I am getting at is that we know it happened again, but whether or not it was qualified as being the witness from The Lords And The New Creatures this time we do not know.

B: I still think it only happened this time because I was the witness in my boyhood.

A: but you accept that new creature attestations can go on outside the pages of Jim Morrison’s book.

B: I accept that new species are bing born every second in the Amazon jungle but that those new species occur in the scheme of evolution rather than represent a rupture in the scheme of evolution.

A: so would you say that the new creatures as you know them are of a different Order than the new creatures that naturally evolve in the Amazon?

B: yes I would say the new creatures as I know them smash together two old things that wouldn’t normally go together to make a new compound that is not part of the natural order of things.




**

I start to become recursive and leave it there and go to bed for a while.

Even reading Spinoza I am aware I am skimming over parts as if to get it done so I can move on to the book with the truth about The Lords And The New Creatures which doesn’t exist because it lives within the hibiscus.