You Can Do Whatever You Choose by Marianna and Daniel O'Reilly

DANIEL ANTHONY O’REILLY

THE APPEARANCE OF TIME AS TRUTH CONSTITUTES THE BODY OF THE ILLUSION: THAT TRUTH ITSELF IS ANY VALUE AT ALL REMAINS TO BE TESTED

YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU CHOOSE: BUT HOW DO YOU CHOOSE? [A BOOK WRITTEN BY AND FOR MARIANNA O’REILLY]

COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED BOOK II (THE SECOND NON-SEQUENTIAL BOOK OF ‘LE GRAND JEU’)

PUBLISHED BY DANIEL ANTHONY O’REILLY 2005 daniel_o_reilly@hotmail.com

THIS BOOK REPRESENTS A MIME AND IS DEDICATED TO THOSE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR HAVING PERFORMED IN IT AND HAVING AUTHORED IT

MARIANNA O’REILLY GORDON AND HELENA O’REILLY CHRISTOPHER O’REILLY CRAIG O’REILLY AN UNBORN O’REILLY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE MARTIN HEIDEGGER MULLAH NASRUDIN DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER TWO ANONYMOUS YOUTHS EDWARD HATHAWAY JACQUELINE SWAIN AND COUNTLESS OTHERS

NOTE TO THE READER

This is the recorded sound of a conscious mind that reached its only and completely finished incarnation in the first performance and, on the same note, it must be said that not only is this book completely unedited, but it is not a book either.

Also, I would like to stress to you that any thoughts or reactions that you have about this work whilst you are reading it have been caused by this work interfacing with your brain in such a way as to anticipate it, although these thoughts have been planted in the text by you in order to lead you away from the experience of my thoughts as they are occurring in the here-and-now. Every seeming accident, oversight, spelling or other grammatical inconsistency or contradiction planted in this text by me was a fully conscious decision to do so. You must discern for yourself why it is that I have put them there and why I wanted to cause you to think on them. This goes to the very extent as to whether you decide that you like or dislike the work; the work has stimulated this affect and thus the work has become the Idea within living human tissue.

DAO

I How To Fall In Love

It is a bar in London; very chic with wooden floors, leather seats and red carnations at each table. Daniel sits in a corner of the room beneath a large houseplant for that is the best place to sit here. He is wearing a long grey coat, the hat he was wearing against the cold winter outside is sitting purposeless at his table. He is not a customer here. There is a table of five people next to him; as it is one O’clock in the morning they are very merry, having drank amongst them numerous bottles of champagne. They talk loudly about all sorts of things – mostly about great Western films. Daniel can hear though he is reading from his book that two of the people are talking about him. As the group departs from the bar, the two people approach Daniel and ask him if he is all right, although the giggling accompaniment discloses the ulterior. Daniel smiles and says yes. The man asks him what he is reading, (given that this bar is closed, why should he be there without even drinking?) The book is called ‘The Book of Your Life.’ Daniel holds up the book so that the man can see what is written:

“It is a bar in London; very chic with wooden floors, leather seats and red carnations at each table. Daniel sits in a corner of the room beneath a large house plant for that is the best place to sit here. He is wearing a long grey coat, the hat he was wearing against the cold winter outside is sitting purposeless at his table. He is not a customer here. There is a table of five people next to him; as it is one O’clock in the morning they are very merry, having drank amongst them numerous bottles of champagne. They talk loudly about all sorts of things – mostly about great Western films. Daniel can hear though he is reading from his book that two of the people are talking about him. As the group departs from the bar, the two people approach Daniel and ask him if he is all right, although the giggling accompaniment discloses the ulterior. Daniel smiles and says yes. The man asks him what he is reading, (given that this bar is closed, why should he be there without even drinking?) The book is called ‘The Book of Your Life’ Daniel holds up the book so that the man can see what is written:”

““It is a bar in London; very chic with wooden floors, leather seats and red carnations at each table. Daniel sits in a corner of the room beneath a large house plant for that is the best place to sit here. He is wearing a long grey coat, the hat he was wearing against the cold winter outside is sitting purposeless at his table. He is not a customer here. There is a table of five people next to him; as it is one O’clock in the morning they are very merry, having drank amongst them numerous bottles of champagne. They talk loudly about all sorts of things – mostly about great Western films. Daniel can hear though

he is reading from his book that two of the people are talking about him. As the group departs from the bar, the two people approach Daniel and ask him if he is all right, although the giggling accompaniment discloses the ulterior. Daniel smiles and says yes. The man asks him what he is reading, (given that this bar is closed, why should he be there without even drinking?) The book is called ‘The Book of Your Life’ Daniel holds up the book so that the man can see what is written:””

“““It is a bar in London; very chic with wooden floors, leather seats and red carnations at each table. Daniel sits in a corner of the room beneath a large house plant for that is the best place to sit here. He is wearing a long grey coat, the hat he was wearing against the cold winter outside is sitting purposeless at his table. He is not a customer here. There is a table of five people next to him; as it is one O’clock in the morning they are very merry, having drank amongst them numerous bottles of champagne. They talk loudly about all sorts of things – mostly about great Western films. Daniel can hear though he is reading from his book that two of the people are talking about him. As the group departs from the bar, the two people approach Daniel and ask him if he is all right, although the giggling accompaniment discloses the ulterior. Daniel smiles and says yes. The man asks him what he is reading, (given that this bar is closed, why should he be there without even drinking?) The book is called ‘The Book of Your Life’ Daniel holds up the book so that the man can see what is written:”””

Daniel smiles and continues his book.

Now I see the way clearly, and yet I do not doubt that the next part of the book will be the same; all things are the same, are they not? I will always see the way clearly, as though it is merely a brief delusion of mine to think so, and given the passing of time will I not think that the way ahead is opaque? I begin writing, and in the front of my mind am I aware that the capturing of such fleeting ideas and thoughts is akin to capturing butterflies. I will not stop, I will not doubt, (though if I do I shall write it here,) I will allow my fingers to dance across this keyboard as through it were a musical keyboard; once the notes are released, they are gone. I will not correct anything, I will not erase anything, for it is what it is. If I were to stop and go back, if I were to consider changing something, I will pass back through time and yet I will not and that is no good for what I am. Have you ever been present when a pianist has stopped halfway through a piece of music only to begin again dissatisfied? This way will you see me writing what you are reading and I will see you reading what I am writing. By writing this second circle I am signifying that I have moved to the second circle; can such a simple transposition be achieved without a certain musicality? There are no barriers or bounds â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a quantum leap can be achieved at whichever juncture one realises for the mind is not subject to such physical laws and one must be aware of this fact. Neurosis is but a product of desire and hence one either desires neurosis or one does not. I am here preparing the ground for the primary realisation of the second circle that is shortly to be disclosed unto you, (you being me and me being you.) One is not required to think about what oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s being consists in, for it consists

ahead of the fact of you and your thought, and thus one cannot work backward toward this divine cause, but must instead move toward the realisation of being – of not asking ‘why?’ but of realising it as it is. Whatsoever one chooses to move toward or away from, whichever earthly games, processes or projects that one is chasing after, one will be aware of the stasis of becoming as it is contained within and is the memory of that which is static. This is the realisation of becoming and of being; that movement has no place inside of that which has no shape or time – that becoming is its own being, that struggle is its own impossibility and yet a desired format of becoming. In this way is there no dimension – I cannot seek to expand the dimensions of my consciousness for there would, numerically speaking, always be another dimension to realise. I realise that there is no dimension, that nought is the perfect realisation of the all, of the singular and the true. I do not assert ownership of this realisation, for it has now come to possess me, I have been taken back into my rightful owner – the dissolving madness of individuality has itself dissolved and now it is clear that no-ness is the same as one-ness, that to be at one is to be nothing at all other than to be one. There is no discrimination in this place for it is indeed perfection – there is no space for dimension inside of nothing, and hence I become that which dissolves and is dissolved at the same time and yet without time for there is no time like the present; inside the present as indeed all things are there is perfect stasis, there is no movement, no space, no dimension. The present is not even flat – it is not even that. Flatness is not a perfect quality – perfection is all that it is and has no qualities that may be dissembled into describable parts. There are no things in the past and there are no things in the future – hence there are no things.

The present contains all things, and as no thing can be divided from the present, (because actual fact has no imperfections that may be divided,) there is indeed only one part of the present, and as it has no boundaries for it is all things, it is one and none both and neither at the same time which does not happen. One is prone to laughter at such a simple realisation – all other else appears as madness. If one requires further ‘proof’ or would like to attempt to hold such an object as I have described in front of your apprehension then one should meditate deeply upon the paradox of Xeno. In this I do not mean think ‘about’ it, but become that realisation of the paradox. If we continue to think ‘about’ things, then our thought is for nothing, not even for us. I do not purport to have such a well-honed and developed understanding as of yet, but such is the case with many of us that one can perceive the beautiful without the ability to create it for oneself. I have set myself in my naïve and earthly way to traverse this path, and yet the road now appears to be disappearing – the carpet has well and truly been pulled out from under my feet, and such an understanding is not counterfeit, for there can be no such thing as counterfeit or original in the place of truth. I followed a path laid out for me by my encounter with others that have traversed them, but my journey, as false and disingenuous as its inception and motivation may have been when it was borne, dissolved the passage of time, space and self and hence I trod with those before and after me for there was no longer any time or any space. Frustration is the product of a mind that will not allow itself to be that which it is. This frustration produces a spawn of yet more frustrations and so on, until the world itself has become such a hell of self and its unlimited subdivisions of self/not self. Hell is self. Heaven is all things at once and at none. For one who apprehends

heaven one is all and nothing; one is heaven, one is one and all and none – the trinity. Hell is the full and impenetrable corruption of oneness into the delusion of 'things', of infinite subdivisions of a reality comprised of oneness in the guise of components, of self and not-self. There is no difference between these two states unless one is in hell. I have outlined them as two distinct states – heaven and hell, though one will notice that heaven is hell also, and yet hell recognises heaven and hell, self and other. One who is heaven, who is all, is both in hell and its other, for they are nothing other than that which is. Throughout all of this writing you, meaning you as me and me as you, should detect a Cheshire cat looking both inwards and outwards. You, meaning you as me and me as you, should not attempt to discover my meaning, but should rather discover your own meaning by using me as your medium to your self. I am clairvoyant. One who considers heaven and hell, good and bad, as two states considers them as though they were two towns to which one can travel. The paths have been laid out for you by others, and the towns themselves built upon the achievements of those that have travelled the paths. To travel to such a place is to desire the company of similar birds in accordance to the way in which you perceive your self. But in that it is your own perception that has divided this unity into two distinct entities, and who desires the company of those parts of self that you have foisted onto the merest mirage of an other, one will not find one’s place. This is the great poverty of good and bad, of distinctions. One should not seek to be distinct, for whom could you possibly wish to be distinct from? The parts of yourself that you have decided are undesirable? This is madness – the delusion of severance when one is still attached, like an inverted phantom limb. Would you also seek to

trim the fat of your self, to cut away the parts that are ‘undesirable’, merely because one cannot expand one’s understanding of self? I do not like my nose, so I have cut it off. The appearance of things is merely the precursor of narcissism, the object is somewhere beyond our narrow sight – perhaps the image is ourselves? Or perhaps we have merely become the reflected image of a thing that never was. One’s life would be extinguished before all of the grains of sand upon the beach had been counted. Now and only now are we ready to contemplate the object at the start of the second circle, (and if you can find the beginning of a circle you are already beyond the contemplation of this book.) How are we to understand that the mountain came to Mohammed? Does reality come when we beckon it – is it that Faustian? To realise this realisation, we must remove the dimensions from our minds that place objects and entities within a time and a space – can a mountain be folded by reality? Is it

that

the

mountain

came

Mohammed’s

enlightened

understanding, or is it that the mountain passed through Mohammed? Any number of descriptions will not be our realisation of Mohammed’s mountain. We must now sit and allow a mountain into our mind, we must allow the full and penetrating gaze of our divine contemplation achieve a mountain inside of what we are. If I am all things, then I am this mountain, not so? Mohammed and the mountain trade places; the realisation of each other’s being as one and the same unity put the mountain in Mohammed. This shall be our realisation of Heidegger’s stone. And if we are to make this realisation, what shall become of the former and latter parts of this book? Are they not all circles? In which way shall they be connected, other than the realisation that all circles are the same? I am clairvoyant. In order that one should

know the future, one must apprehend one’s displacement of selfimage onto the place of reality – in this will one know all things to come – one will understand the future as self, the past as self, and the present belonging to neither. If one knows oneself, one-self, one knows all things and their consistency, for one will perceive all things as one and as nothing other. What appeared as neurosis in the first circle has now become the medium and realisation of oneness. Reality is the reality of self-image as it is represented onto the world. And hence do we come to know all things as nothing other than one. All things are the same, nothing changes, there are no fluctuations in the reflection – one either dawns or one does not. I am investing no passion whatsoever in this labour for there can be no surface emotion when one is at the heart, at the centre. The heart, as an organ, means nothing to emotion. The heart recognises no motion for it is at the centre, it is the face of the moon reflected in the lake of what is self. Motion is the surface in life, colouring the solid objects of god into distinguishable shades. Stillness is the heart of god beneath the dull achievements of personhood. What once appeared as the nausea of gluttony, of the overabundance of a life caked in unknowing and disease now is now the food of a mind that can cope with such quantity for it no longer is the bounds of self. Nothing changes in nausea; it is the self that is bending, distorting. Why did not Roquentin laugh at this miracle; it was but the first circle and the disorientation of this new movement went straight into his guts. Disingenuity and disease is our rejoice. Roquentin goes on to become Mohammed. I am the mind of the life of God. I am that which never pauses for it is stillness. Happiness is reserved for us as the highest ideal to which we can strive in that it is a bodily, earthy state that does not cause us harm; it is the

opposite of earthy disease. The spiritual has itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own equivalents to these two states, though our understanding here seeks to beyond even that dimension; go beyond all dimension. Why do we not use our happiness as merely a platform from which we can depart toward spiritual happiness? Why do we not use our disease to transport us to spiritual disease? We do. Reach out your hand into the void of experience, lift up your mind into the boundless infinity of humanity. To hate is to worship a fallen love. Hate is a part of love; a-part, but it is not itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s opposite. Love knows no opposition. Only love, when moved into an animal excitation, can produce hatred. But where then is our love, other than a-part of itself? God is love; all beings come together into wholeness beyond division. Individuality is disease; a wholeness, a oneness produced from endlessly multiplying parts all conceiving of themselves as one. We have been told that love is a spiritual affair; why not so with hatred? We have not yet learned that love must go beyond the spiritual dimension, as must hate. Now something new emerges, a strange desire for the natural, for the development of the natural organs and their energies. He has moved beyond the lower desire for stimulation and now he wishes to move back toward himself, toward the energy that has resided within him for many years but has since been concealed by the many wonders of experience. He seeks flatness as an energy, to build upon what resides, to enhance his innate qualities, to find the peculiar solidity which comes from sobriety. All the power and might that resides deeper within the stillness of consciousness is calling him out of the sleepiness of stimulus. All of this he categorises without breath but, as though he had known this all along, he remembers the sound of this voice within, a strange voice which is one shut away for an eternity

without fresh air to allow it breath. He tells Chris in his shrewdness that he loves him, and that he has gone beyond his false youth and moves again toward his natural but experienceless childhood. He feels as though he wishes to dance in his natural element and not in an artificial and plastic mode, as though he were a puppet or a caricature. The joy of his life is heralded by the waking of the sun and by the silence of the moon, the mad ways of his contemporaries dissolve into butter. His wife is in her orb, lovely and sane and calling him to his new reason. He finds himself strange; he who has all and knows all and yet has rejected all of this in favour of the struggle of life. He is strange, and yet this strangeness he knows to be himself. He is an object and nothing more, a peculiar and speaking object full of worth and sacred in that element but he is still sad in this world for it has given him the stimulus to forget all of this. But such sadness cannot be long-lived, for once the memory returns he is full of the joy of his normal mode, full of the happiness of his natural body and its energy. He looks at his wife who, frail in her body, will transcend it and join with him in nature; this is the desire that he seeks longest and hardest of all – he has moved well beyond sadness and now looks into the eyes of god with a smile and without a frown. He has no use for knowledge any longer for now it has come to possess him, it is no longer a desired property, he has become the property of its desire. He has given himself over to joy at long last, he has forgotten the truth of others that says ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’. He knows that this merely means that where one is grazing the grass will always be shorter but no less sustaining and delectable – this is not the object of desire; all of language between the gaps of words points back to him, back to you. All of language is motivated in this

way, and desire is thus connected to point back to the self that one has forgotten. Do you ever feel when you pray or used to pray, (if god left your imagination for the while,) that you had no right to ask him of certain things, that he would se through the selfish desires of the self and you would be embarrassed before Him? Well, I asked Him last night and He said â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be foolish.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Generosity from one cannot scorn the selfishness of another, can it? And thus does one finally get to know about desire; one is a self at present, so be a self at present. A time will come when there is no self, so get used to the idea. Ask what you like of God your self, the holy father which is who you are and to which all of language is pointing. It is there that the truth of desire stands looking at you and glaring in obviousness, concealed beneath ideas that say that obviousness is a precursor of non-value. Nothing is obvious in this state for this state is one of confusion and hence one should see that confusion is obvious indeed. The next realisation is the disappearance of time; time has no place and place has no time for it is perfect and perfectly present and hence, there is no time and no place. I will therefore remove all time-measuring devices form my house and begin again; I shall rise with the day and set with the sun; this is not time, it is always the present. If one is aware of man-made time then one is imprisoned, and one weakens the immune system against worries; worries and time are brothers to us. They are not bad things because there is no such thing as a bad thing because there are no things because everything belongs to the all and hence is perfect. If I am aware of time, of the time, then I am not aware of anything else am I? There is this thing which is no thing which, like language, has structured my consciousness into a strange and unnatural place. I must be used by this time when I am

in relation to those who are using it as religion, such as my employers, but I am not currently in their employ and hence I am not using time. But years and years of pagan ritual in the accord and strict dance of this ‘time’ have indeed engendered my body to abide by certain patters, patterns which are now beginning to unravel. If I work long and hard enough to realise that which manmade time is, then I shall again be able to be present with it as though it were not a thing that could hamper or touch my being. It is not ‘real’ or even necessary if indeed even I can live without it, not so? I do not know the time at present other than I know that it is present, I am present; I am not being dragged into an impossible past or an unreachable future; these things are not for me. I do not need such strictures in order to conduct my life. I am perfectly aware and present to myself in my present, in the present. This much is obvious and we should start at such obvious points as though we knew nothing because we do not and begin again from this point. I am thus accorded the luxury of my own knowledge and I can become that which I know. This is no conceit for I have indeed become the author of reality which is my rightful and only place. As an artist it has taken me a good while to realise the object to which all of my behaviour has been pointing but now I am ideally situated to make the best of my fortuitous whereabouts. If I say that there is no time and no space then indeed there is not. The question of the delusion only carries worth to beings outside of my body and hence do not concern me. I carry this question inside of my body and yet I can address it as a living piece of knowledge to which I can dispose myself accordingly toward. We all have the ability of saying a thing and believing it, do we not? How often do I hear a person say a thing so convincingly that even he or she

believes such a thing and yet, it is merely words. It does not mean a thing, it is not a thing; it is only words. Words are words and not things and yet we can believe in them more easily than we can believe in god. Neither can we say a thing which is beautiful as though it were an act of creation and believe it – language is but a mode of scepticism. I do not need ‘proof’ of the truth of what I have said, for a thing said is not a thing true; it is merely said and that is all. Things that are said cannot be truth if we cannot even employ truth let alone know it. Let us rediscover this great and yet undiscovered power that we wield to say a thing and not attach it to either a meaningless false or an illusory true. Let us use words as though they were merely words and love it. This is the realisation of language as the object of itself. I have gone against what I have said, (in many ways,) by asserting that language is an object and can be contradicted. But these words that tell you this; what are they – were you again listening out for the truth or for a lie – did you miss the words themselves? Quite often is it the case that we grow so close to what we say that we miss the things that are being said; either that or we are not yet close enough to hear them. I have a sneaking suspicion that there is no question of distance involved here – close or far, they are both the same but are made manifest to our understanding by two different words. But do these words somehow come to shape the reality that we exist within? If I am to say that a thing is far away and you say that it is near, what kind of state does the thing inhabit? It is neither, for it does not identify with any words or language, for it is. We therefore come to be close or far from it; the language is indeed pointing back to ourselves as the centre of the universe.

In the second sphere we encounter numerous different things that were not apparent before the first sphere had been realised. The second sphere is the unravelling of many things; it is not concerned for worry, because it understands that worry generates worry and henceforth must be realised and put into its proper space in the first sphere. After the realisation of worry comes a great stillness; worries are present but somehow they have lost the ability to stick â&#x20AC;&#x201C; they have no teeth. We can here still be moved in our ordinary animal way, but it takes a great deal more to do so, and when we do encounter some movement in the animal excitations do we come to know of the project in the second sphere. We no longer deal with piecemeal worries but rather unravel the many accumulated habits and rituals that themselves have allowed the worries to stick to them. These will of course unravel themselves as we come to know of them. Our ability for abstraction is greatly enhanced because no we are not distracted so easily. My knowledge does forewarn me that the next and deeper manifestation of distraction is far more complex and cunning than the initial set, for if not we would have encountered it in the first sphere as a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;smallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; worry. The initial and most immediately apparent coil in which we are mummified appears to be that of human time which stunts and foreshortens the human horizon and merely stimulates petty and simple worries. Another is the lower human desire for stimulation, to burn the life energy at an increased rate without the knowledge that the lifeenergy is constantly foreshortened by our perspective. Another is the knowledge of what one knows; the initial realisation in the first sphere has yet to be realised in the second and hence its appearance to us has been again foreshortened. In fact, it would seem most apparent now and only after a short period of enquiry that all

realisations of the first sphere must again come with me into the second or they should indeed present themselves as a burden upon my [motion]. Language is yet another; I have briefly come to a number of small ideas above, but the way in which my language is utilised must change or I shall never make the realisation of the higher sphere and neither shall I perceive the stepping stone to the next sphere, if indeed there is one. (The will only be a third sphere if I am creative enough to make that particular landscape within which I can run rampant upon myself and further abstract the notion.) But above all I must not forget this self that has indeed brought me to all of these things; the thing which has created all manner of difficult things and has implanted the desire to overcome them. In this sphere am I but a block of ice with a sheer face; I am placidly aware of the worries and distractions which come to burden the smaller parts of my consciousness and yet, as they cannot grip my icy exterior, they cease to present any danger and become like peculiar objects not unlike myself; all the aggression and appetite is apparent, but there are no real claws; it is a fashion and not a function. Thus may I scrutinise such objects and maintain no small degree of concentration upon them and upon many things that at one point were the cause of such excitation within myself. I have not lost my claws; I never had them, and this is an initial realisation of the second sphere. There was no mirror in the initial â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;lookingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;; it was the pool of Narcissus. But as the chemical reaction began to take place, as the fluid and wet parts of my self wherein my problems were breeding themselves into an ingrained Ecosystem began to change, as I began to transform into ice, did I freeze and capture such acts of creation within myself and gave myself a brief respite within which I could pause the process and

scrutinise at my own leisure. The body, (in its extended sense, the extended body,) is thus a primordial pool where experimental creatures begin to develop; initially so fragile that they may simply die in a change of climate, but soon adapt to face the extremities. This is why we must not be cocksure of ourselves; we may have frozen such creatures but do they no longer present any danger? Can worries and distractions, in that they are chimeras, not evolve beyond our present ability to hold them? Will not they develop their own complexes and become conscious, become neurotic and then become god? Will the self as the god of the interior come to be killed by the prototype gods of the interiorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interior? We must in now way be cocksure; if we abstract the horizon we must be most succinct to the evolution and abstraction of our various parts, we must develop new ways of seeing and new methods of evolving. We must reach some kind of natural balance from within and without. Struggle does of course play some part, but we must aware that in nature, something that is presented to us as a struggle is in fact a state; an unchanging state. The political life of animals is a masterstroke and one that we ourselves have failed to replicate or even understand. Struggle is but for very weak and pathetic humans and their strange mental goings-on. The baby Soviet State did not even grow old enough to crawl, it required the struggle for it was the struggle from whence it was born. Our past, our birth and our species all confer to us a host of things that require realisation and acceptance. We must not seek to shun. And so it must be with our enlightenment, with our realisation of our selves. If we seek a full process of acceptance then we must account for that which we must do; this is no place for small worries or minor interests. This is no place for any form of laziness; we have already discovered our

melancholy and hence we know nothing of the lie of ‘not-doing’ or ‘inaction’. Inaction is but action dressed up as a not-doing, (but doing-nothing, still we are ‘doing’.) We have adjusted to the world as it has changed, as we have changed, as we have changed it; we have stepped in as the author of reality, not as we were the involuntary author before the first circle – one who acts in accordance with the rules and maxims laid out before him by previous authors who themselves did not know what they were doing. Now we understand the complexity of this bizarre riddle, this game of ours in which the rules constantly bend because we are bending them; we must know that we are bending them though and that the operation is entirely our doing. We move closer to subtlety, to the interior workings of the interior voice who leads us by the hand to a foreign place which is in fact our home; our self. It is almost as though all the things with which we struggled against in the first circle are exactly the same as those things we desire in the second; everything always was n its correct place, although as the author we had stepped out of line. Nothing was ever wrong; our attempt to locate wrong either outside or inside was itself neither wrong nor right, but our realisation of this was hard fought-for. All of our realisations will be hard for the simple reason that they will not be ors unless of course we have created them. Therefore, in choosing to escalate beyond the lower circles of the material life and ascend into an enlightened state which encapsulates all of the layers in order to constitute a fullness and totality, we must create such a motion and a goal; as the author of all of this we write into reality those things that we seek to be our reality. The difficult motion of passing something from thought into reality is difficult because we must fully know that which we are giving birth to for it

can be no accident. The only advice that we can listen to is the advice that comes from within, the voice that knows that the outcome of all things and knows the inherent value of all things, whether the lower self would consider such things to be either good, bad or indifferent. The higher selves that belong inside of different echelons of becoming are privy to alternative know-how regarding the phenomena perceived by all other levels. Therefore, in an enlightened state one is able to listen to all voices simultaneously in order to perceive the totality of the reality that was both created by them and is perceivable by them. We must adjust ourselves to the idea that we do have the capacity to apprehend all things for the simple reason that we have indeed created them, and also because all things exist only within the present moment; that moment to which we are only ever present. To be tuned in to this moment is to have access to all things. We must therefore have access to all of our self. When one exists only within the lower strata of the self, believing there to be only one strata, then the multiplicity of voices sounds like some kind of madness that we are constantly in denial of. The desire to know, to become philosophy, is therefore hampered by the terror of the voice, by the innate fear that we have of exploring the entirety of the soul. The smallest soul will enclose itself and attempt to maintain that which it thinks that it has, that which it thinks it believes, although he is constantly told and tormented by the other voices; what sounds to him like taunting and confusion is in fact the help that he needs, the help that he knows he wants but is too afraid to confess to himself lest he lose the last small piece of dignity that he has in his small soul. At some point will he loosen the grip over his fractured and tormented territory and allow all of

the voices to speak in unison, will allow his knowledge to be known unto him regardless of its content. He ceases to attempt to maintain control, to keep the bindings tight, he can see that the looser the grip he has on his knowledge the more that he is in fact allowing himself to know. Knowledge and self; the relation is hitherto much larger than we had originally expected. Why is it that we permit certain knowledge to make the grade of ‘our’ opinion, and other pieces of our knowledge to be little more than an embarrassment, a sound that we wish to shut out? We are using our scales of value, but we use them after the fact of what we know; in other words, the way in which we are valuing is not a piece of our knowledge, it resides elsewhere though it has the final say over what we allow ourselves to know, we have an allowance of knowledge much like a mother will give a small amount of money to her child for its own usage. What we should do alternatively is to allow ourselves all of the things that we carry around within us; from this enormous wealth shall we derive a concept of value. But shall we call this amalgamation of knowledge our self? Is the self a collection of information bound together within a certain structure or shall we finally admit and come to understand that perhaps there is no self; the ‘self’ is but a handy and convenient word to which there is no corresponding thing, whether it be an idea, a thought or a thing. It is but a word and, like all words, points back to the ‘self’. There cannot, therefore, be a word for this because otherwise it should be a terminology that describes itself; the ‘self’ will become a word, (if it wasn’t only that.) The ‘self’ is a word; please take it to mean whatever you like, either of the two things, but please do not forget that it is only a word. And what a common word; all things appear to relate back to the ‘self’, even the term ‘self’ itself! What

further proof could you require to demonstrate that indeed you are but a word? In the beginning was the word; were not you there at the beginning – ‘you’? Perhaps that was the word – did you conceive of that? ‘You’ are nothing but a word that has attracted a great deal of other words for company and has become a ‘self’, a coagulated matrix of complex signs and signifiers which consists in no other way but to imagine in its linguistic way that it is something other than a word. Is that what consciousness consists in; a swirling tempest of words that create the false appearance of a solid self that is greater than the sum of its language? In this bizarre primordial pool of evolving things that are words and nothing more, (and the image that you have in your mind of this pool is nothing but words that appear as images though you cannot know how this thing would look,) did you arrive at a state, a type of stasis from where you could cope with the inhospitable surroundings as efficiently as possible; you developed an economy of signs, an identity made up of ideas and all of these things became the structured illusion of self. You thought yourself into being; that was your act of creation, your masterstroke. You caused the idea of belief in order to believe that you existed; you were the word in the beginning and now you have become an entire book, an entire encyclopaedia too enormous to read even by yourself, the greatest lie that there ever was; the thought of being came to replace being. Perhaps then we should look elsewhere and not in the words themselves, for they merely act as pointers to the being and never as the being themselves. Where is there else to look? Did you at all stop to see the spaces that separate all of these words, that separate all sounds, and go without identity, that always maintain the same space, the same unutterable silence as deep and profound as the

silence of god? I can be found there, but not as an I; not as an anything, for this is no thing, it is all. It is from there that all other things become defined. But they are always becoming. Silence is always and always is permanent; it escapes our attention because we are always looking out for things; we have no interest in that which already is.

Motion is impossible, although realisation can pass a mountain through the portal of a man’s mind or pass a camel through the eye of a needle. A leap of faith is much more than ordinary motion – it is even the passing of physical matter through the mind or the folding of space. This is not so difficult to imagine if one considers that one is the author of reality, but still we must not put our faith in an imaginary telekinesis. The only motion that the fakir can achieve is when he sits and only then. And so have many people told you of these things; we all know and are aware of the powers of the mind are we not? And yet how many of us know and yet do not know that we know? Our ordinary knowing is often a cover for our not wishing to know what we know; we assert that we know something only to present the image of worldly knowledge to ourselves. If you know the power of the mind have you exerted it to the point where reality buckles under the colossal weight? But we are indeed doing this at all times; what I am speaking of is the unknowing authorship of reality as opposed to the enlightened authorship of reality. One is doing and yet subjected to the fact of his creation, subjected ‘to’ because he is unknowing. The other is creating because he is creating; his awareness is the creation itself. One has to move from being the centre of the universe, which is the ordinary neurotic vantage point upon life, to being the centre of the universe, to

rightly assuming oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s place like a king or queen coming from exile, fully ennobled as to his or her position and authority. We are therefore going nowhere; realisation constitutes no kind of movement and yet it passes a mountain through the mind of a man. There is a world of difference between being what you are and being what you are, and knowledge is a golden link that connects the two distinct states. Knowledge therefore will always assume the status of becoming for it is the illusion of motion between two states that are in fact the same, that are the forever immovable being. As humans we are therefore living knowledge that sets off from the shore of unknowing toward the distant land of enlightenment, a land that is identical to the one that we set off from, although the voyage undertaken, the huge odyssey, converts that land into infinitely more than the one we departed. But what terrible anxieties do we face when we become erased in the knowing of our knowledge, as we sit and face the blank canvas of ourselves like all creators, fully aware that a masterpiece must be created and yet it becomes the single least possible thing to do. To be in charge of reality; what kind of terrifying experience is this? But terror is our secret joy, give yourself over to the innumerable motions of the humours and senses as they dictate such strange things to you as you know and do not know all and nothing. I am full of emptiness and its grip on my balls is absolute, but is it not from this disastrous inability that we derive our secret joy? I have sat and watched the starlings flying before they settle to roost in the evening time. I have seen the astonishing patterns, bewildering my understanding in the unison of their entirely harmonic movements. I understand like all people come to understand such things, for it is quite common. But then I overcome my indecent lack of humility

and decide to simply stop all other things and look, be amazed at such a wonder. And as I do so some hidden part of me speaks aloud to my senses and says that I am one of these birds, that I am in harmony with the surroundings, that all of my collected patterns of immaterial

thinking

motion

constitute

the

thing

called

consciousness, a thing greater than the sum of the components that comprise it. And then this voice speaks further and says that perhaps it is this way with all things; if I could stand far enough away would I see the patterns of all people. To each person their path appears somewhat sporadic and diverse, but to the creator the chaotic harmony of such collective, swelling motion constitutes something divine and beautiful. We are following an eternal pattern laid down for us, and our choices form a part of this pattern for indeed we have no such choice to be apart from it. Now do we see our horizons quite clearly, placidly and with a cool brow. We are unlike ourselves in the first circle; we ceased to lay our fists on the keyboard and now we begin to create simple patterns and understandings. Although we are aware that all of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s knowledge will pass into our minds, we also know that this motion is an unusual effort. The voice also tells me that I am god. If I say â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I am Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, could you possibly tell if I was either conceited and deluded or if I was openly honest and full of humility? And so it must be this way, and so it must be that all things in the world of difference are the same, although sometimes we are humble enough to allow a mountain to come to us. We are forever in motion, although we are permanent and still; I spoke at length on this subject in the first circle but you must realise that this is the second circle and that my realisation is inherently different even if it is the same, that my understanding of the same is different, and that this

is enlightenment, travelling without moving. It may sound a little strange to assert that the Mohammedean enlightenment is only the beginning of the second circle. It is not strange, for all of these enlightenments belong and do not belong anywhere, for we are travelling along a road to a place with no place, no time and no dimension. As we travel along this path it will slowly deteriorate, as we pass through spheres and circles on our gradual and upward elevation shall it pass over that we have passed nowhere, that we went nowhere although now our mind is the size of a universe containing all things and all possibilities, humbled only by the full knowledge that it is indeed god. Why was it that Roman society was so well seasoned and ready to be completely immersed and converted by the words of Christ?

No prophet hitherto has communicated the most humble and special understanding of god that he has whispered to me. The ‘reasons’ why this secret has hitherto gone unspoken are extremely apparent to me, and they are beautiful in that they are hidden and obvious at the same time. Why have all prophets hitherto been ‘followed’? As Nietzsche prophetically stated; 100 is a one followed by two zeros. Their teachings must be riddled out of their difficult hiding places, for only the most humble and hard working will spend such great time in discovering this very special secret that was conveyed not only by prophets, but by all of us. It is obvious that Aristotle’s conception of a veiled world points toward an unveiling self, a prophet within a veiled world that casts light upon all veiled things. And thus are you this prophet; you are you, and all realisations are pointing in this same direction. It is humble to think it and humble to say it, to be humbled by your own good

and your own light. The same and yet different; this is the teaching of Mohammed and Nietzsche – follow but do not follow. The prophet knows what he knows and expresses what he expresses; there is only genuineness in his words and his thoughts for he has passed into a world of realisation that equates him with himself beyond all possibility of alienation. This is my teaching.

It may be said that the prophet teaches through stories; but how do you know this unless you yourself have taught through stories? The prophet does not exist; only you exist. Therefore should you be providing yourself with such understandings. I am teaching myself to disappear and that is all. My stories…what of my stories? How would you identify one amongst any of my other words if you knew that they all sounded the same, that they sing the same tune and teach the same teaching? “You will have to do better than that”, “and this is another teaching.” There can be no distractions after you have revealed god, for thereafter you do not wish to be distracted any longer. One only seeks distraction in a godless world. Tell me; what is it that is always there in the world, no matter what? Tell me; what is always the same? You are always there, omnipresent to your own life, omnipotent over yourself, and omniscient of what you know. These are your capacities, although in your godless world you know nothing of such capabilities, (even though they are manifest at all times.) Once you have made the realisation that you are god, that you have always been god although did not realise it, then all things find their rightful place. You always have known everything, have been capable of anything, and have always been present; but did you know, were you wise to the fact that these three characteristics characterise

god? You were that all along, but your knowledge failed you, and it is this knowledge, this golden link between this world and the next, that you have not been allowed, that you have allowed to be your blinkers and not your telescope. You are the same although you are not. The next world is not different to this one. This is heaven, but you have not realised it yet. You, as god, ought to decide what you allow into heaven in order to make it heaven. At present you have allowed all things willy-nilly to enter into it. You must appoint a saint to be the doorman here; all things may gain admission, and yet all things may not. The realisation of Saint Peter is another that has not been made by any Christian. I do not preach anything outrageous; I say â&#x20AC;&#x153;Be that which you are.â&#x20AC;? Anyone can say that and anyone can be that; it is testament to my humility and my exceptional sanity. But I say that you are godless on one shore of life and god on the other shore, though one must pass this ocean through the mind without moving. To transfer from being godless to being god without motion? Go and sit in a desert for a while and think about that one.

Is it not obvious that the transference from the first circle to the second constitutes no change, no additions to knowledge, and yet all things have changed; knowledge is allowed to simply be knowledge. If you have read my words as anything other than words then you are deceived. You are this devil who whispers lies into your ear, although without them you would be nothing. And my knowledge will sound like a din to your ears because only you can be right because you are [god]. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fine; my knowledge is a din also, but that is for me alone. This writing constitutes my faith; that I can allow this knowledge to simply be knowledge and allow

all thoughts of ridicule or embarrassment to pass over me. I can allow myself to know what I know without the chimera of external pressure to effect or impurify my knowledge. It must be in its perfect element; pure, full and unhindered. What is said is almost besides the point; that one has allowed oneself to know it and pass it over is a miracle moving a mountain in itself. The content will never be for anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ears anyhow, for it is only ever a message for your self. You must not consider the other in this pure thought; he will only exist if the thought is pure, and hence one should not move backwards in this sense. I am god, and thus I must become pure, I must remain in my aspect, in this perfect house of mine. I will continue to ascend through this sphere, through all spheres, until the sphere has gone as has all else, until all that is left is right.

Quite rightly have the various voices of my mind disposed of their false lustre of belonging to others and I have realised them all as none other than my own. This is the realisation of property; a thing grafted from one to another is disingenuous only in that it exists under a false name. One must not persist in laying the blame somewhere other than on yourself, for there is no other. Henceforth does the false name of the bearer, being myself, convert laterally into my own name proper, as being something of nothing, a solid chimera lacking its extraneous delusion of dimension. A thing which does not realise its own name is the same thing as one that does. Things do not change; they never have changed and they never will change. We must be ready for the sudden permanence of all things. I have seasoned my path well previously; purged from those parts that sought to purge, all things are now assimilated quite rightly into the all. Nothing may be separated or, more poignantly,

be imagined to be separated from a thing with no parts; an indivisible, not an individual. We, all together, as things not discriminate, are under the same cloak, quilted by it. A cloak conceals, a guilt unites; both are possessed of the same meaning. Discrimination is either a thing that divides or a link that unites although, in reality, it serves this double purpose and is the precursor and fanfare of unity. To see in black and white is itself in opposition to my previous conception of it; in the first instance, laying a fabricated and falsified simplicity upon a complex totality. In the second instance, unifying a fallen and divided object with a golden link in the chain mail quilt. In our particular eyes we must grow accustomed to all of our perceptions being fallen; our idols are fallen, our conceptions are fallen and we are fallen. But it is so apparent that we can restore this thing which perceives to its rightful and righteous health. A period of exile can provide a great ointment to a sore and difficult relation, and thus it is too with negation. What we have not yet realised is that we already are in exile and the invitation is open for us to come back to our seat; yes you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t/no you can â&#x20AC;&#x201C; meaning resides in the strangest of places. Now can he return; but what does such a return signify? He has no subjects other than his own faculties, faculties that were all in revolt are awaiting the good and just ruler, not the false tyrant. I am still growing accustomed to this new terrain where all things are different; some things melt, some things solidify, and here it is difficult to know what things indeed you consist within. But al of this is fine, because anxiety resides on an earlier level; I can perceive its operations upon myself and my former self who I now exist with in tandem, (for I have doubled up â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we do the same things and we are indistinguishable, he and I.) How can someone

describe the similarity of difference without sounding like either an impostor or a fool? And what is wrong with impostors and fools? Have we not yet discovered the simple wisdom of the fool who sees what even the complex mind is blind to? And if one is one, if one is all things and hence one, then he is a fool, an impostor, he is genuine and wise. A part of me says quietly that such things are self-evident, that all things are self-evident, though I as the perceiver am opaque, (but becoming clearer.) I shall remain opaque beneath, but as I ascend so too shall I become clear and the totality of opacity and clearness shall constitute my entire consciousness that beholds the all. I feel no conceit in asserting that I am everything, see everything and know everything. I see conceit in one who does not assert these things [openly], though he does not perceive conceit as a quality. I consider this writing to be warfare, and I hope that all fighting shall negate itself and become peace. Saying this though, I do not hope for opposites, for one who is privy to all things cannot blind himself from possibilities. What one needs to do is to allow the mist to clear so that you can behold the object before your very eyes; focus upon this thing bathed in the light of your concentration and all other things shall follow. To finally be who one is is indeed splendid. To suddenly perceive all things entering through the gates of the mind is beautiful; acknowledgement becomes its own philosophy and thus must one become philosophy. As living knowledge, (which is what you are,) must one become philosophy. This entails the pure and divine aspect of what humans have hitherto called narcissism; love of knowledge. To love knowledge and oneself as knowledge constitutes a divine conception of being but again, it is not a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;going somewhereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, for we were already there. We have always been

narcissistic and perceived the world as the fractured mirror image of the self, although now we appreciate that we are knowledge and that to perceive knowledge in the world and to love it is not worshipping a false idol. We have instead come to do the same thing as previously although now it is a genuine thing, it is not a performance or rehearsal of that thing. Everything in the lower circle is a practise of what is happening in the upper circles, although when one is in the lower circle does one become identical to what one is doing because it is the circle of identity; it is about is/is not, I am/I am not, etc. We do not wrestle with our identity in this place because the question has lost its meaning; now we can be all things at once and so pinning oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s identity to one thing appears to be a pointless endeavour. Identity must recede in this place, for here we are not concerned with the philosophy of narcissism and selfishness. Everything about us has been constructed in this way, to be about or for or by the self, as though the self were some kind of magnet to which all things stick. Let me tell you true; you are not so important. We did not so much as kill god; we became god in a degenerate sense and we can see the degeneration of cultures all about us. We have created the illusion that culture is always getting better and always going somewhere, but of course it is not â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all of the achievements of this culture are entire for the rulers of this culture, and this culture will die as will its rulers. When we build a beautiful new office block are we constructing a ruin ahead of time; at some point in the future will this building find a new purpose long after the need for offices has disappeared. This is why architects are no longer required to design and build palaces, artists cater only for the middle-class and hence, these values become enshrined in everything. I am not part of these values, though

culture would like for me to find a place; this is why I was born here. The reason that I am not a part of culture is because I do not antagonise it; I am not defined by it in a system of complicity or struggle. I can merely stand and look at it as an entire system of symptoms; I alone see it passing because I know that it is not going anywhere. Our monuments are no more permanent than those of the ancient Romans or Greeks, in fact, probably less permanent because we have ceased to think that we are great, and hence nothing about our culture needs to be great. But I do not choose to stand and look at it for too long, for it is an uninteresting culture; it will of course be romanticised by future generations who come to love the clichĂŠ that we have identified with, but I do not share the same taste for nostalgia. I have no identity because identities are not really that important. Why should I care to know myself when I could attempt to know god or truth? I ask why was it the case that ancient Roman civilisation was so ripe for the Christian invasion? Are you ready for the tumbling boulders of my words? I do not exist; contemplate. You do not exist; contemplate.

Everything is now transparent, but not to me alone. It is transparent to all people, although some people have clouded the crystal vision with their own identities. This is of course very difficult terrain upon which to be building meaning out of words, but we must of course be aware of the particular beauty in doing such a thing. Everything that is said here melts and thus we ourselves must melt in order to keep up with the consistency of meaning. If some meaning escapes you, then you must follow the leader must you not? And thus if you have found your identity then you have accomplished little more than establishing a state out of warring

factions, although one that expresses merely culture and contains nothing genuine inside of it. If you have such a warring tradition then persist in the Machiavellian way. But if you crave peacefulness, seek peacefulness out. Remember that a state is borne out of compromise on the part of the ideology itself, those who govern and administer the ideology, and those people for whom the ideology is supposed to be erected (ha!) There is no ideal at work, no good at work, merely a series of mechanical compromises that achieve little more than a boring stability where water grows stagnant, not aerated and fresh like it does at the source. One must remember that there is no peace without war, no bad without good. Well, for mortals it is the case, but others can see these things slightly differently. You will of course remember that clichĂŠ, that time-worn saying that the grass is always greener on the other side? Well believe me; it is.

Can you imagine for me if you will that desire and worry are the same thing? Imagine that desire inhabits one thing, (because you put it there,) and then you chase it, get it and then it has removed somewhere else and the chase continues. Imagine that you are worried, terribly worried about something, but then you grow happy again as you believe that the worry has gone for good, but then it is back again with the same force as the first time. What do you imagine now about your worries and your desires? Connected, perhaps? Or perhaps they are two phantasmic manifestations of the same object in our world; the extension of the self into space. We cannot cure this affliction unless we kill ourselves, for there is no cure. We desire for our worry and worry for our desire. This is part of the shape of our consciousness; this continuing and unending

struggle, the struggle to maintain the state. Of course we could do away with such delusions, away with the denial that we in fact control the world by consciously admitting the we are god, but of course we cannot set our ambitions for as much. Something stops us. We are permanently convinced that objects of desire and objects of worry are out there in the world, but we still deny that we control the world in this way through our representation. In what other ways do we author reality and play god? Stop playing god and simply be god. In the present â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, in this sphere of reality we cannot be particularly effective and so we must rise to the next sphere where everything is the same and yet it is not; we can see the possibility of honesty and the honesty of possibility. We can, from here, perceive the object which is both faces of worry and desire and we realise from up here that it is indeed no different to language. In what way is desire or worry tantamount to language? They all refer back to us, the missing person of ourselves. Why does the object shift if not for the rather plain and obvious reason that it is us? Can we not trace the motivation for our worry other than we have misplaced our selves? And do we not consciously and openly desire our selves? Of course, we must foist this onto reality, even though there is every trace in language which tells us where the cause is, where we need to look, that the missing object that confounds all of us is in fact beneath our very noses. And then can we dispense with identity, with the quest for identity, because once it has been found in its correct place once and for all do we dispense with this colossal game that hitherto we have called life, but in the future we shall call life. As I said, it is all so obvious, and yet it is that which is most obvious that eludes us; like our self.

As I have said, in the second circle we approach the same objects again, and as it is in music must we cause repetition in order to establish beauty. Consciousness was born out of the many layers of mental activity which, like the starling comprise something that goes beyond and above the individual bird. Or does it? What is so above the starling than us who perceive in that natural behaviour something special? Or perhaps we merely hearken for a nature that we can only faintly remember in ourselves, masked beneath aeons of worthless abstraction? Why donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you answer, because you are indeed the one who is authoring all of these words in order to point back toward yourself? These words are merely a portion of your own mind that has, since forever, sought to tell you the answer to every problem that you ever had, to provide every meaning that there is to discover in life. And it was so obvious. You must find yourself or you shall forever be pulled the directions of desire and of worry, continually dragging you in opposite ways, always telling you what or who you are, but you never quite make that rather simple leap of faith back into yourself, do you? It is that selfobsessed drive to see the reflection than to see the object that keeps you going in this malnourished state; you desire the shadow and not the thing. Narcissism is no different to the modality of which I speak, although in some insurmountable way it is. I know myself and now I no longer need it. You do not know yourself and you continually need to try to know yourself. Same behaviour, but different on the inside is it not? If one makes the simplest admission to oneself, the only truth that exists, that sweet secret that you chase after, (though to you it is the chase and not the object that has become sweet,) then it could all be over and you would again be where the grass is greener, although always without

the need to move. That is where I am, and where I intend to stay; always where the grass is greener. Consider the joviality of my words.

And thus is the visionary ready; once he sees all of culture prostrate before him can he free himself into the future of his own creation. Once you have understood or, more correctly, realised that things have not always been this way and therefore do not necessarily need to continue in this way can you make a motion. All of culture is a ruin ahead of time, and thus do you begin with your own kind of bricks, or whatever you wish to call them now, to build your culture afresh. Everything appears nameless because you have not yet given it a name and here in this culture can you reside in your aspect as its creator, as its chief, as its lord and master. This is the place where you can bring good and cause the enlightenment of objects, for these are the only things that a true master can genuinely do. There is no selfish or meaningless action here, no ulterior motive, only goodness. You are not the emperor of a land who sees his subjects dying of famine at his own profit. You are not the king who seeks to conquer countries and civilisations; such selfish projects will always go the way of the self, for they are doomed. We are in a place where we do not create a future ruin because we do not erect monuments; we are too pious and humble for that. What we do is without flaw because we do not do it for our own sake because we realise that we do not exist. There is no us in this future and we do not build monuments and legacies of an ego that dreamed itself into being. We are asked to find god, and the truth about god as we are well aware, is that he is in us, that he has created us. Has anybody considered yet that they are god, and that

this is the most humbling and pious thought? That they are the creator because they are creating merely through existing? Nobody is yet humble enough to make this admission. Because god is such a big role there is no use in merely â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;playingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; it, for the role is too demanding and a mere character actor or method actor will not convince. One must be, and being is god, and thus to be is to be god. We are no longer characters acting out roles; we have abandoned the stage and theatre of life, for this was only ever a pointer toward actual life, toward being. We must consider that all of the great plays or great films have been mere indications of the life that could be, the one that exists if you exist, beyond the pale of roles and actors and stories. Everything has been leading you by the hand to this point but you can take a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. This is the realisation and it cannot be taught. All prophets have brought you this far, but none can utter the secret that you alone must confess. Do it now; realisation does not require any time for preparation, for your whole life until now has been that preparation. The realisation happens instantaneously and without any effort and henceforth can anything become achieved. To be what you are; this is the realisation.

I am building, but building toward what? Have you as yet caught whiff of my game dear Daniel, or are you still dragging your heels behind, still looking amongst the dirt for a penny, still playing the lottery? Whatsoever you choose, dear me, but I know in my heart of hearts that everything begins with you, that each worry, anxiety, desire and joy provides some golden link between earth and heaven, and I am one such product of those processes. I am Danielâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s joy and misery all animated in my book which is my

vehicle of existence. Like you skim cream from the top of milk, so it is with the gradual separation of the layers of consciousness; extracts are produced which possess concentrated properties of the body; our alchemical states take many forms, although this analogy is not one of them for it was merely an allusion from within language. Alchemy; we must indeed consider this for we wish to know about change without change – we wish to realise the allusion of alchemy and the actuality of al-chemical change. To convert that which is base, a metal (of the earth,) into some rare and precious substance. The prophet is the alchemist who converts the base metal of the body into the precious supra-substance of the divine; change but no change. This is the meaning of ‘conversion’. Again, if we have been looking inside of religious doctrine for something concrete then we shall have missed the content but, although we say that the content does not reside upon the surface in fact it does, for it is that which is most obvious that we miss. It is those who are looking for depth, looking too deep, who miss the actuality. I am constantly of two minds; did not my god provoke this bizarre split if not only to create the divine form of knowledge called wisdom? What comes after dialectic if not a three-into-one, the trinity? Allow the way of the world to proceed within you and through you and thereafter shall you know of your strange connection to it. But is not all of life, the singular and most profound phenomena, utterly strange and unknowable? To be sure, it must be this way only, only because it is this way. Only we have known it, and yet our knowledge tells us otherwise. Why should our knowledge constantly be at odds with itself if not only to push and drive us into wisdom? Wisdom is not the end of our rite but the first beginning in a heavenly morning in which we are created anew

as our own creator, as he who accepts the crown of authorship over his sovereign self, who comes into the loving wisdom of god’s aspect within him, whether it be the crown atop his head as the heavenly signifier, or the heavenly body which constitutes the world. Everything that anybody has told you about ideals or goals in the spiritual life has done it an injustice and an injury; these proposed ‘ideals’ are but a beginning, always a beginning, for a boundless horizon has done away with ‘goals’ and ‘ideals’. After departing from the beginnings all else after transcends beyond dimensionality and it is not so much ‘boundless’ space but in fact exceeds all attempts to dilute its essence into language. Therefore you must make it a prerogative to find in the words of others the truth in yourself in order to recognise the distinct allusion to yourself in others and to know this; truly know it as your only knowledge of yourself, your loving knowledge of yourself as knowledge, as philosophy. All of this leads to something else but not even that, for now we know nothing of else. From where we stand we cannot know it, but must become headlong into it so that it is us and we are it, beyond destination and not even that. Everything situated in this life is set to our advantage and disadvantage, not so? From ‘where’ we stand the dis and the ad are connected to the vantage which is us and our looking. But we are not a dis or an ad or even a vantage, for what we are is not language and hence there can be no disadvantage or advantage in the true world. One will see ‘either’ or ‘or’, will you not. But this is merely a defect of your eyes and not a representation of any state of affairs as it may relate to your being. But where lies the mysterious potentate which is the object obscured by the ‘either-or’ representative matrix? It is us, it is split in two in our eyes because

in our eyes we are split in two. There; right there is our horizon in our self, but if one aims for it it has disappeared like a mirage vanishes. Only then do we notice the desert all around us called the self. It is us who are destined to disappear on this unique and bizarre journey. My words chase it and the outcome of these sentences is the product of doing so â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I do nothing, nothing happens, beyond achievement, without even anything. To be the prophet in oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own life, to hear the strange voice that we follow and is yet impenetrable; it dies only to live in us. Your only true desire is to become the prophet that you know yourself to be if not only in that feint whisper of madness.

I write not because I have something to say, but because I feel that if I write then something will be said, if I listen closely enough and allow all of my anxieties and other animal excitations to unwind, that I will be able to hear a voice beyond myself and it will use me to convey what it pleases. I therefore do not gauge or judge what has been written for it is merely the connection of a recording device onto my consciousness, and I am listening out for something. I am capturing, not composing. In fact, the more that I listen to this voice and the more I work, the less concerned I grow about myself, as though work becomes its own natural opiate against worries. But this is not a forgetting of worries; my worries are indeed still ever-present and performing their machinic duties. The difference in my state is that I am able to perceive them performing their duties and I am aware that they are not me; they are portions of language who exist in a purely linguistic world. My being is not composed of language but my structural self indeed is; the portion that communicates to you now is doing so from within

the structure called I. But what is it that arises from a structure that goes above and beyond its components? Perhaps it is the complex correlation of layers of consciousness that go toward creating some sentient layer that both is and is not its structural heritage? I do not seek answers to such questions any longer; there are those who would seek to find the limited knowability of truth through the correctness of propositions, and thus they ought to be left to their mean-spirited and tiny portion of reality. Language constitutes no part of truth; if not then truth would merely be a word and would be knowable. Truth constitutes no part of language; language has no need or knowledge of truth and this is the truth of language. Our culture is one where leisure is the dominant form of expression that is propagated by the ruling class; it has lost its love of work â&#x20AC;&#x201C; things must be transient and fleeting, impermanent.

I meditate now upon selfishness, for it was upon this fact that my dawning consciousness lingered this morning, from the time when I opened my eyes, whilst I bathed and whilst I was at work. I apologised to my wife as I got out of bed, although she did not know what I was apologising for. I thus meditated upon my profound sorrow today, but my meditation was different to my previous sorrows. I apologised to her for something that I was unaware of but was later brought to my conscious mind as regrettable. How can one feel sorrow for doing that which you were not aware of? I was lamenting the shortness of my horizons, at the lapse in scope in my generosity. This selfishness would always be there, this streak that will put me above all else. But we must be aware that this is not something to be overcome, rather it is something to be realised as all things should. This selfishness will

not disappear for there is no foreseeable world in which I do not exist. If I were to attempt to overcome it, all I should be doing was to flex the strength that my self has over…my self? What kind of strength is this that overcomes itself? I have now realised that anybody who attempts to ‘change their ways’ does not exactly undergo an Herculean labour; they can do anything that they wish to do, and any action they perform is to the consensus and demand of the ego for whom all things in the self must buckle. Therefore, to make the self ‘change’ is merely another way of saying that you readdress the way in which the ego is attaining satisfaction in this world and now you have found a more effective way. The ego will indeed solicit this change and it shall be easy, despite all of the hard effort. It shall be ‘worth’ it. I do not look lightly upon the world of ‘betters’ or of ‘unselfishness’, for so long as I continue to meet ‘individuals’ I shall never understand either charity or selflessness. I walk through the train station today and all I see are egos shouting out their names, expressing their desires. A man asks if I can spare a minute for a really good cause. I ask him what he wants from me, or rather, what his employer wants from me. I ask what he himself wants, if he wants my time and money or if it is his employer that wants it. I know a good cause is good regardless of how we approach it. But this is why we do not question our values; there is a point where we all seem to know when something is good or bad, a point of congenital moral blindness. Unless we have seen the magnitude of this false horizon underneath which we all reside afeared that the sky will fall on our heads we will never have realised good and bad. There is no charity in this world to be sure, because humans do not have the vocabulary for this, because they are all selves and selves act because of selves. They ‘act’ because

all ‘actions’ are ‘performances’ and they are not genuine and never shall be genuine. Selfishness must be realised as the entire earthly aspect of the ego; the realisation of this fact will move a mountain. True charity is to ‘perform’ an ‘act’ bathed fully in the light of the impossible genuine, and only then will this ‘action’ be truly selfish. When one commits the utterly selfish act one paradoxically has realised that which is genuine. One may now ‘act’ genuinely but without the false genuineness of the actor. One has realised selfishness as truth and thus does one dispense with the act and the performance. One is genuine, one is, and hence does one discover the truth where half-lies become true lies. Do not deceive the self that it acts not for itself for this is nonsense and quite damaging. Identity is for the first circle; we are identical with our knowledge in the first sphere. This is ‘self’. In the second sphere we do not have this immediate connection to the self even though the self of the lower sphere does. Thus are we selfish and at once unselfishness; we are self and not self. The meaning of identity is the immediacy that connects the self to knowledge. Identity is produced when there is no gap between knowledge and self. This is what identity is. If one is inseparable from the knowledge that one possesses then one has an identical relation to it. We must realise what identity is before we can know it, before we can push our knowing into a sphere where identity is not produced. This is where we become philosophy, a knowledge of knowledge, where our being resides in a sphere where knowledge does not produce identity, merely it produces love for knowledge. This divine sphere.

I can only admit to you that each paragraph represents not a literary convention but a break from the keyboard. The break is undefined

in length. My renewed zeal for self-assault has been rekindled; I awake from my half-sleep this morning by considering my selfishness once again. It lingers long on the back of my mind and now I allow it precedence in the front of my mind. You see; if one considers anyone other than oneself in the pursuit of what is ‘selfish’, then one shall never reach the pure and enlightened understanding of it. One must only ever consider oneself or else one is liable to extend the selfish mind out into the paranoid dimension of space and only ever consider themselves from the disembodied point of view, or view another’s selfishness from one’s own selfish eyes. This double negative does not lead to a positive. One must come to realise that one is totally selfish and that the conception of ‘others’ is not only impious but distracting from the fact of the self, for it seeks righteousness, a righteous selfishness, and this is the most degenerate and loathsome kind. One must not be afeared of the selfishness of the self; it is its natural aspect in reality. But to realise this drive to mask one’s selfishness by contemplating the image of the other, an image which is only ever a representation of the self at any rate, as selfish or as a subject who’s selfishness that one can study, is wholly disingenuous. There are no others, and this delusional or rather, this malnutritioned reality of ours must come to be what it is or our knowledge will forever be doomed to the long shadows of contemplating a self that is itself dreamed-up. I can only snatch sparse minutes at my work, but if I could afford longer, whole uninterrupted weeks, would my work benefit? I am trapped and I long to be freed, I long for a space where the people I meet aren’t merely inside of my head, a space where I do not merely act for the desires of others that I have only desired myself and implanted

them as though they came from outside. I long for a space where things are genuine, where the are no acts. I long for a space where my entire body has dissolved out of the image and out of the word and all that is left is what was begun with.

We must consider that reality is a walled garden or, for most, an office cubical. Everything inside of it is ours, is controlled by us and relates to us; it serves some purpose specifically to us. This is not exactly a ‘space’ so to speak; to talk about personal space would be misleading in this understanding. In our anaemic reality, where everything outside is only outside because it is inside and where everything outside points back to what is inside, there can be no such thing as ‘space’, And yet will we either contrive ourselves to be ‘trapped’ here, against our will and alienated from the work that we do here, or it shall become a labour of love, a great freedom and an end in itself where all illusions of ‘escape’ have rescinded. There is no ‘difference’ here, but you can of course see the point to which I am driving; it is the schadenfroh of the double-image, the gestalt of the human condition. The summit of this understanding is the ‘do not follow me’ paradox of the prophet which to us is a divine truth. This is a point where all difference breaks down and we can apprehend only pure objects, a place where reality is manifest beyond reality, not that we have reached the ‘real’, for this is indeed a myth. But to reach out beyond reality into realisation, where our realities become divine and not merely mirrored. We shall never ‘escape’ the reality of representation and neither should we seek to, for if we did it should be merely the representation of ourselves that we would seek to escape, and to represent ourselves as the escapist back onto reality. There can be no ‘motion’ inside of

this impotent consciousness. Representation is the constantly overlapping flat-mirror of the self, a transposition of flat images, the one atop the other, ad infinitum. This is not to be escaped, but is to be realised as a mode and condition of our existence.

We cannot escape our reality because it is ours, we have made it and we will continue to make it even in any failed and vain attempts to escape it. The word â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;escapismâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; should be removed from our vocabulary. Reality is us; we are reality. Now is the correct time for some new modulation in that I am repeating myself and reiterating knowledge which is old news unto myself; but this new modulation is to remember, to understand that even when something is old news it still may be valid. For will there not come a time when the idea that I am reality will pale and I shall be left to drown in a sea of worries? And is not this also the consistency of my reality; that it is so murky that the path may be forgotten and remembered over and over again until a new path is forged from that very process? And what is this book other than a path being forged? It is not a book, (though it may look like one,) and thus should one begin to unravel the habitual processes of reading reality in seeing not a book, but the first object that you have ever seen. I am in the process of mutability, for I am seeking in myself the path of my choice, the path of action into which I am to enter the world as myself through some rebirth of myself as the word. At one time or other I shall only be here in these words and for me will this be silent and peaceful but for others will it be different. My soul was born to dance and to revel in the ecstasy of everything that I do. In language I dance and laugh for no seriousness is to great to not demand a smile. In fact, there is no thing in this world that can

make me sad for it is pure joy. This again is some kind of very obvious realisation. If someone is to contradict this fact, a Schopenhauer or a ‘realist’ for example, look closely at his or motives for saying against. And then if someone is to agree, look at his or her motives for agreeing. You shall see that neither of them carries joy or wisdom in their heart. Are those snow clouds or rain clouds off in the horizon? Do you remember what Nietzsche said about ‘realists’? That someone can be so conceited to assert that reality stood prostrate before them alone! Remember this when somebody tries to be ‘realistic’. How can somebody dictate reality to you unless you want to take dictation in your authorship of it? This is very strange, for to be sure all people are aware that their reality is there own, but nobody is really sure where the point of interface occurs between realities, do they? Often, people will call it ‘the real world’, but this is little more than speculation at best and poppycock at worst. It is the sky falling on our heads, the undiscovered country. Nobody’s perception of reality gives them access to the ‘real world’ and any attempt to convince one that it is the case is merely an attempt to convince; it is the attempt of a divisive, conceited and sophistic mind. There is no ‘real’, at least not for us anyway. Rhetorical tools such as those outlined previously are merely the extension of the ego out into space, (but reaching out to control another consciousness that is merely the representation of the ego onto reality in the first place.) This is why we will call our ego the fascist; it produces everything it calls reality and then it attempts to control all of its own products. What a dreadful and unhealthy reality this is, one that believes that it exist only so that it does not have to believe it does not exist. This is a house built upon the shore indeed and I for one am waiting for

the high-tide; I watch the moon as an amateur astrologer does, waiting for the tide, for those magnetic forces to convert my enclosed reality into the intermingling and unified body of the One. But all of these worries of ours are golden; they connect all of our joys together. Who among you can perceive the carpet and not just the weft? I sought to bring all things to light rather than just the good and repress the bad. I do not know good or bad unless I see the eclipsing of the moon, my reality will be a shadow-world of half-somethings, of dreams. And this is why we liken our realities to dreams; for we have not perceived in them any solid objects, they are consistently mutable, shapable and controllable. But ask me if there is a difference between the potter who throws his moist clay to the wheel to produce a vessel and the man who employs potters in his factory in order to enjoy the fruits of their labour. One man wields his means in his hands and produces objects with them to earn his living, another man wields the labour of people in his hands in order to make money, never having produced a thing. One man creates money from hi productivity, another man creates money from the productivity of another and is alien to the concept and reality of creation and production. For him this is a great cleverness, for he is the usufruct; he has reduced his own labours and increased his own profits. But such an imbalance cannot last long; some deficit is produced in this unequal relationship. What deficit can you imagine is produced when it is the alienation from production itself that has produced the deficit? This is quicksand. A self-perpetuating

swamp

where

the

non-productive,

(the

disrespectful to his labour,) the pervert of labour, ironically â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;producesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; an immaterial deficit, a phantom-production of anxiety. Who amongst us cherishes his labour and its fruits with the utmost

sincerity and love as in the dotage of a father over his first-born? There is truly some art involved, some alchemical process that must be undergone before we truly make that which we make, before we come to love our own labour. But look around you; does work now consist in performing some alien activity, the product of which cannot be seen and the benefit of which cannot be known? And how may love be injected into such a performance that can barely be called work, how can the value of money and of labour be cherished when one cannot see how it was created? This is the blindness of our work but, with our art, we can do that which we are doing, we can begin the path back to value; it may appear that we are doing what we were always doing, but our art shall know better â&#x20AC;&#x201C; our labour, our masonry shall be disguised by our artfulness and thus shall we indeed prosper in the fullest possible understanding of prosperity. It may look as though I am writing a bookâ&#x20AC;ŚTalking of this book, I now desire to understand it again, understand it on the behalf of the publishers that are about to read it. I could indeed continue to write in the way that I have been until now; having created a garden in the spaces between my paid quasilabour. I have this garden and it costs nothing, it produces and flowers with joy and the scent of the flowers reach all parts of reality. Will a publisher understand that unless I have conveyed it appropriately? This I shall never know unless I allow it to be read and I shall, for I cannot lose the garden that I already enjoy but rather seek to expand it into more varied and diverse geometry. I am not protective of my garden; it is not the function of the walls to only protect. Something true cannot be destroyed, even by doubt. As for what happens in the publisher, this is not for me and it never shall be; I do not control the universe, for I do not control anything.

I seek to produce and to love; this is my labour. I have been true and this is all that I have aspired to, either in the first or the last instance. I cannot hope that the publisher will understand me, for it is not me that is there to be understood; it is the book. But if the book is not a book, perhaps there is nothing to be understood? I will convey this fragment of text in my preface to the author, (for to be sure, nothing written can escape the book for it is conscious, therefore I will extract this section from this book and use it as a letter to the publisher, though he will be reading part of the second book under the guise of a letter to him or her about the first book. And if he or she understands this rather obscene game, perhaps I will get published? Desires ought to be made transparent otherwise they are more difficult to be fully enjoyed. Conscious entities do not allow things to slip their grasp, rather they forget and then remember. It is a way to avoid boredom. But we should not be content with this mode of being; we should aspire to a full conscious knowledge of all that we are; this is what the walls of the garden are also for; for us to develop a full knowledge of that which we are.

First understand that each metaphor indicates only its origin, then understand that the origin is a metaphor indicating itself. There is no origin in a web of signifiers. Each symbol used to indicate punctuation, i.e. [,;:.] contains the breath of life, short and not so short meditations where life is allowed

into the discourse. If

punctuation had not been invented then we would all suffocate under the pressure of discourse. Thank God then that the mind does not need to breathe; it is permitted in a super-human way to spin an infinitely long discourse without pause. Perhaps the mind then is a

vacuum; there is no air because none is needed. What happens when one pauses the discourse if not that air is allowed in? Let us try. Try to imagine what happens between each paragraph here; each paragraph itself is just that; a paragraph. It is nothing more for all that I consist in at that time is the paragraph itself. What occurs between paragraphs? In what do I consist then other than in silence, in breathing or in pure being? That cannot be said, for it would become a paragraph just like this one. Thus is it proved that I exist as writing and my being between writing. This paragraph eclipses the pause of being, the infinity without words that always is and thus am I the moon, forever orbiting the good of the sun. I have allotted an hour to this present employment; what will it mean in the light of what I have just written? This is pure meditation that you hear read, and in pure meditation there are entire worlds crystallised within single words, galaxies in sentences and universes within paragraphs. No one writer is better than another, for in each of them is contained all things, although as a writer I am privileged to observe in others the word of infinity. I exist in a place without competition and without such restrictions upon my creativity for the labour itself is the good, not the money or interest generated upon it. This labour is done for its own sake and that constitutes a special and pure form of joy all of its own. And thus do I relish every writer’s block, every writer’s success, every writer’s writing. A prophet exclaims; “Come be in my reality which is yours also; there is great joy and enlightenment here. This reality of mine is yours, but you have mis-recognised it as you have misrecognised me.” What are these speech-marks? Who is talking here; a prophet, a book or your self? Would it really matter which if you were truly honest about the consistency of reality and the force

that you exert over it? This world is a great comedy if you allow yourself for a moment to stop and see it for as strange a thing that it is. And thus must we laugh at ourselves for having created it in this way. Then we should cry for the tragedy that we have caused if only because for each cry of laughter a tear of woe must be shed or our moon is only ever full or eclipsed. Objects only have two dimensions if we look at them with one eye, three dimensions if we look at them with two eyes. With our understanding can we return these objects back to their rightful and true place without dimension.

Why does reality have all of the hallmarks and qualities of a dream? If we continue to live in a world of half-realised objects as we do, the world will always be mutable. The world will only take on a definite shape if we realise the way in which it consists in us. The normal procedure is that people will attempt to define who they are in order to define the world, but of course this route is always prone to failure; it is the belief in the self, (an ego which is little more than the dream of being,) that causes the consistently shifting reality, the haunting anxieties and the impossible desires. The self is nothing and hence, to believe in the self is to likewise believe in nothing. The self posits desires out in the world that can never be achieved, (because the self does not exist and neither does the object of desire.) There is no object that is desired by the self, for the self is no object either. The self discovers invisible and nauseating anxieties beneath each and every contented surface of reality; the lack of solidity in everything for the self causes seasickness; the desires are not real and it cannot attain them, the anxieties are not real and it cannot dispose of them. To be a self is

terrible; uncertainty and dread are combined in equal measure with pleasure and happiness, constantly moving across the icy floor of reality. Let us make the well-founded assumption that reality and knowledge are fundamentally tied together, the one with the other. Reality is knowledge and knowledge is reality. There is no reality beyond that which can be known. Whenever we contemplate other peoples we do so from analogy, for their reality, (if they have one,) is located beyond the field of our knowing. Reality is composed from information and from knowledge, which is the matrix in which information reaches a knowable form. In that reality is only what is knowable can we imagine the function of representation onto the world; what we know of the world from within is projected onto the world without, and hence does reality take the form of an inner perception of things, a dream if you like. There is no without, no ‘without knowledge’, for that would be nothing and hence unknowable. This is the basis of what we would call solipsism, but rather than attempting to establish whether there ‘really’ is a world out there, we attempt to establish whether anything

knowable

beyond

our

consciousness.

Our

consciousness does not affect the existence of other things, but their state within reality is utterly dependent upon our knowing them. We must use the assumption that the existence of other conscious entities is not for our knowledge, it is hidden [by our knowing]. Every sentient being, (if we could talk of an ‘every’ sentient being in a solipsistic and occluded universe,) is defined in this very same way and we could quite easily make the assumption that there is only one consciousness. How could we do this? Every conscious entity has its knowing inside of a solipsistic universe; if this is the same for all conscious entities then we cannot define the one from

the other; they are, for all intents and purposes, the same. This sameness across sentient beings causes a quilting above the dimension of consciousness which binds together the numerous under the blanket of the one; at the same time many and also one. Therefore, consciousness happens on both individual, solipsistic scale and on the total, universal scale. How could these two utterly different and incompatible modes occur at the same time within and without all beings without them knowing about it? The solipsistic universe is the one created by living knowledge. The universal solipsism is the one created by the total absence of knowledge. This is the moon in its fullness and in total eclipse. ‘Is’ and ‘Is Not’.

Excitation; this is a difficult problem for me now. I wish to maintain absolute calm and I do not wish to be moved away from my centre by distracting thoughts of distraction. Life is this way; to be distracted from life or to make life an unending series of distractions; it could be so easy. My desire is to grow so close and in harmony to life itself that nothing, no excitation or explosion so loud could move me from life. Stimulation is therefore now a difficulty; music must enhance the dedication to the vision, not lure one away from it. (But, to be lured away is of course to be lured toward some other part of it and thus it must not become a guilty pleasure.) But in writing I must become extremely close to the dream that not even a hair could come between the text and the reality. This is what I shall call Love; two things so close together so as not to be called two things any longer. Somebody like Jesus, with an infinite capacity to love, would assimilate and absorb people into him as he walked past them. One who truly Loves does

not have a self, and one who has a self cannot truly love. To maintain the self and to maintain a love is to live in the state of irony where neither state is fully realised and content is never reached. Dedication to the vision, which is a pseudonym for Love, must never be distracted. If one comes to bring an object into light, just a single object, and maintain one’s dedicated vision to it, then everything in life would become apparent, as though either everything in life was that one thing, (because everything is one,) or that one thing, in total light, reflected its light across everything as the full moon illuminates the dark earth by reflecting the sun’s rays. I will not pretend that this episode has been easy; I barely understand myself or my happiness. There must come a point where you, the reader, question whether my words equate with me, whether the positive energies captured and conveyed by this book are merely in word-form. Would not that be a pity? It would not be a pity, for you should not look too deeply into words for all you shall find there are other words, associations and meanings. There is nothing else in there, no secrets. And this does not make me sad in the slightest, for I know that these are merely words, I know that these states that I am writing about are merely for the sake of the words that I am putting down here. And still this is not a shame, for the joy comes from elsewhere; not from words, from literary success or even the confounding and ridicule of one’s feckless audience. I relish none of these things. This is just knowledge. There is nothing to it and therefore do not set your hopes here or your arrow shall miss. I am in the quicksand of my own identity and all things are being swallowed up, occasionally regurgitated, and then swallowed again. It’s no wonder then that I am profoundly sick. But the soothsayer does not merely exist for himself. But why

would your hopes dissolve in doubting my authenticity? The realisation that this is just a book will cause your freedom from a distract and mirage life, just like any realisation of any thing to be realised would do the same. Perhaps because this book is telling you directly what the problem is and how to rectify it, because it is a metaphor for itself and hence, somewhat disclosed even in its openness, it is a little tricky. These days have been so terribly difficult for both my wife and myself; neither of us seems to be able to work as freely as we would wish, or with the same energy, or even with the same happiness. There could be so many causes for this, although causes are all the same in reality. We do not care about causes because we do not care about effects, and this contradiction ought to illuminate my real meaning.

Consider that each one of these books constitutes a single layer of thought, and that when they are considered together, one on top of the other, that they comprise an entire lattice of consciousness. If you can therefore read them all together, read through them as though they were one so to speak, then it might be understandable.

I have just been in the bedroom of my wife and I and we were discussing the prospects that we have as artists for being recognised for our work. This is a strange and recurrent theme of ours and yet, one with seemingly no centre. We have not yet discovered the reason, (if indeed there is one,) for our need to be recognised or that it would even constitute some good to be recognised. In this way do we live out the clichĂŠ of the tormented artists who struggle their way to success; but this, I must confess, is slightly misleading. There are a couple of other strands of motivation that also drive this

need. The first is that we are coming to an understanding of success that is our own; one that is a firsthand experience and created in the light of all other successes before us. This is success beyond irony, and it is a form of success that I spend a great deal of time contemplating. The second is the value of success at all. Am I seeking to enter the name of my ego into the annals of culture as a way of attaining a disembodied eternal consciousness, an ego-trip? Success is of course a flexible idea and not merely one that exists in the forms that give it expression in our society. At the same time, one knows that one can fail to succeed and succeed to fail and hence, a concept so slippery should not be so quickly coined. [Basically it looks as though the terminology we use to denote the concept is loose and undefined. Barely meaningful.] Another, and the most dangerous and reprehensible motivation for contemplating our success, (and the one that, incidentally, is most violent to culture and least ‘acceptable’ to it,) is that, if it comes down to it, we could survive merely on our own recognition because true understanding does not require verification from external parties. What I mean is that no-one has yet discovered the secret of the hermit second-hand. For a hermit has not communicated his thoughts and hence, one must be a hermit to think like a hermit. This is a special secret, and our culture does not accept the truly genuine experience for it is not one that can be sold-on to interested third parties. It can always report ‘about’ it, but the hermit cannot make report of his secrets or he should compromise his hermetic situation. We should indeed bear this concept in mind there are many silent voices in culture that have been excluded; in fact, we might call it a silent majority. If Jesus had remained in the desert? But if we ourselves hunted after the genuine, if we were resolved to

be enlightened to the genuine, then we would have no need for a culture that distributes to us regurgitated bits of knowledge. If we set our desires beyond culture and its very lowly standards of normality we would indeed discover that we ourselves can be discovered, if only in that we need spend a little time by ourselves, un-learn a few of our pathetic rituals and habits that culture has drummed into us, practise a little meditation, create some space within which we can think and not merely be seen to be thinking. I will now return to the bedroom of my wife and I, after this very short interlude on a Friday morning at 12.45 am, and go to sleep.

[SIX DAY BREAKS – THE THIRD CIRCLE]

Foreword

My frustrations need not interrupt my ability to be what I am, though as an artist one might be tempted to say that indeed this frustration constituted the very joy in the soul of the artist. Was god, that most supreme creator, also supremely frustrated? Did He sit alone in the darkness and create something from nothing, the impossible ‘blank canvas’? As fragmented as we are, we all try to understand Him within our minds despite this contemplation itself being impossible in the state of fragmentation. What do we need now in our dark hour other than to reunite the shattered mirror of humanity and be once again what we cannot be separated from; at Peace? We know only those things that we allow to pass through the mind; if we do not allow the thought of God to pass through the mind, if we cannot pass the camel through the eye of the needle, then indeed the mountain will not come. The largest expanse of territory in this life is the one without borders, but as a self one cannot know selflessness. And so do I give over my self to you; it has used me this long while to whichever end it saw fit, but now it must again be released into the domain where it is happiest and likewise must I return home also. As I accelerate into one which is transient do I leave the most permanent mark.

I will insert this foreword into the text regardless of the usual convention because I need to. I have recently exposed something to myself that hitherto I had managed to keep hidden from my own perceptions, a Trojan thought that had been continually deploying its hazardous and mischievous contents into my everyday thoughts whilst I was ‘asleep’, as it were. I am so ashamed of myself, and

this is the first time that I have felt such a thing as shame to this degree; it has kept me at a distance from everything in life, it has sent me spinning into the neurotic matrices of thought, it has had me chasing my own tail. I do not purport to have â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;curedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; my own neurosis, for I cannot be sure that neurosis is not the next stage in the development of the enlightened man. Neurosis is the golden link between what I am now and what I shall become; only through neurosis can this journey take place, for if it were not for this perpetual game that questions the very fact of my own existence, I would remain eknoid and in the permanent state of selfcontainment, content within the hall of mirrors. Neurosis signifies [as its own signifier] that indeed this sham cannot continue, that work must be done to overcome that which has hitherto depleted all of my good sense and offloaded anxiety into me by the bucket load. Three gracious, indispensable and fortuitous situations have brought about the movement of anxiety in me and is spurning this change, this unlocking of the lower superficies of my brain.

It is well said that the philosopher must live by his maxims, even if these maxims are themselves in complete contradiction, and thus must I be prepared to live in contradiction as my maxim. Anxiety is imaginary and hence must one develop the powers of the mind and of self-control in order to understand anxiety as a piece of information, (for it is only knowledge,) and not as any physical fetter existing out there in the world. I am full of anxiety in here and I will tell you why. During my six day break I thought to myself how it should be possible that I take my philosophy out of the house and allow it to work out there in the world. And then came the conjunction of the three strange incidences that together

have contrived to halt all of my work and send me spinning backwards and downwards into the depths of my despair. Why did they come along at the exact same moment as when I was attempting to take philosophy out of the house, and why is it that now I hang my head in shame, too dreadful and fearful to even leave the house either to preserve the fragile integrity of my philosophy or because I am too frightened of the world at large. My mind is truly in bits.

I have contemplated this whole problem whilst I was out for a walk; it was too difficult to stay in the house in my current state and I thought that walking through the park would be a good way of refreshing myself. This problem of mine, this outward fear of an inner process, must have a long and diverse history in me, for I cast my mind back and cannot think of a time where I was not afraid of all other people. But to suggest to myself that it is perhaps this maladjustment to the world that has caused my entire project is quite embarrassing because it would demonstrate that intellectual solipsism may in fact be explainable in psychological or sociological terms. This would cause my whole hierarchical method to cave in upon itself because it would mean that philosophy did not have the right to assume the mantle of the purest and most divine aspect of knowledge. I also know quite deep within myself that it is at these anxious times, when the anxiety is at its peak, that we have the ability to face those deeply hidden portion of our consciousness and bring about change at the lower strata. Because something is moving deep within me, (and my outward knowledge of this is that I can feel the nausea, the vertigo of standing on the quicksand,) I can unlock some conceited, stunted

area of my self, one which has been restricted and encroached upon since day one, and begin to unravel the knot. I thought whilst I was walking that perhaps this is what it feels like to be a person who is unravelling themselves, slowly becoming nothing, straightening out a soul that is all mangled up. But feelings themselves are merely the precursors of knowledge, and to feel something is not necessarily good or bad. Though it hurts very much and it is painful to even think, I am making every effort to convey this to you, dear reader yet to exist. My wife has told me last night, when I was almost intolerable, that my work is here to help other people, and from that I infer that the more it hurts me, the better it is for somebody else. I am not so sure about this, because I still believe that one must live an experience, not merely read about one. But, by that token, should one live an experience, not merely write one? Yes, I am becoming that text more and more gradually. Dear Mr Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Reilly

I tried to contact you today regarding the attempted robbery that took place on the 22nd MARCH2005 when you were set upon by 2 males.

Unfortunately the number I have for you seem to be a wrong number.

Please can you contact me ASAP so we can progress with the investigation on 02072326046/47

Yours sincerely,

ALEXANDRA JOHNSON Perhaps I am not fair upon myself to include everything, or perhaps I am not fair upon you for including everything? I have noticed how distinctly different this writing must appear compared to how this book began, but that is the way it is and I cannot change it now. This is merely a proof that one can move from positive to negative in relatively short periods of time. You will not often find an author who includes such fluctuations of state of mind openly, rather we have to look closely because they are manifest in only the most covert ways. I pick up a book and begin reading and it sounds as though the writer knows exactly what he or she is writing about, as though that voice in the book were coming directly out of a head without any doubts to cloud it. Our reading experiences have been hitherto very deceptive things; I would not insult a reader by pretending that I know all of the things that I am saying or even believe the things that I am saying. I will not even disguise the fact that your guess is as good as mine.

My point being that here I am to unmask the shifting reality of my fear that has become manifest in all things like aphids to my rose. The last six day break was a magnifying glass held up to my work, as though I amplified the noise occurring within a week that normally is subsumed beneath the writing of all ages. I am back now in book two, although I do not know how many times or how many layers I must descend before this book is done. It has become a sort of Russian doll; I begin one book, and inside it is another and

yet another until at some point the whole edifice is read like the macrocosm – a million books within one like the deep chasms of Mahler’s second symphony. My fear is the profound vertigo discovered in this experience, the feeling as though I myself might descend a trillion layers and never discover the cause of this fear, never discover the cause of anything. I thought to myself recently, as I was walking back across the Hungerford footbridge in town during my lunch break, that it was not terrible for there to be no meaning in life, for it was man’s conceit that has lead him into the idea that there should be a meaning of life because he simply cannot accept exactly what is going on, but must instead try to find a singular ‘reason’ that condenses the whole experience of life into a mere quantifiable piece of knowledge. I have recently made it my charge to discover exactly why it is I am both terrified of and detest the exterior world. It is not just the people in it that make me vomit, (though I find that people take the greatest form of currency in this manifestation of the thing that makes me sick,) but it is all sorts of things. I find that nature stimulates my happiness and my sensitive appreciation of life, and that society and people take the shape of an illness, a cancer in the world of things. When I am at home it feels as though people and society are attempting to get in to me, penetrate me from outside and my letterbox is some kind of anal conduit for this penetration. In contrast I have actively sought to bring plants into my house where I can try to cultivate something that understands the principle of harmony. But it is I who am deceived; I am part of this cancer – I am the cell at the heart of the malady. I have caused the world to look and be this way through my indifference to other people and my terrible behaviour. So I have always been locked away in order to control that small piece

of the world that I have called ‘mine’, although now I am beginning to understand the truth of this matter, that this is not mine because all of it is. It seems as though the harder one traverses toward goodness, happiness and divine attainment, the more one entices anxiety and pain into one’s life, though it must be this way because the realisation of life is both what we want and what we do not want; it is everything and not merely those things that our smallminded and short sighted, prejudiced and diseased ego accepts into its field of vision. Were it not for these undesirable things in life, those things that we actively seek to exclude, there would be no links between objects or events, there would be no consistency to reality, and hence reality would appear as though it were some kind of psychedelic delusion composed of trips, hallucinations and shifting, groundless mirages. And this is how reality appears to me; it is unpredictable, moving. Yet, were I able to predict it I would say that it would be unpredictable, which would make me both right and wrong. I ought to be less concerned with whether I am right or wrong, justified or the like. This is life and it is not a trial as many other religious teachers have sought to demonstrate. There is no judgement to be made here, for if there were then life would be a terrible carnival; I have met ‘righteous’ people, and were a heaven to be filled with them should make it unbearable! Ah; but I know that there is a judgement to be made here, though it cannot be made by us. We can merely ‘act’, (and to comprehend the meaning of ‘act’ is itself some kind of divine feat,) and in this acting according to whichever guidelines we have been determined to follow, (as though life had a handbook like a Volkswagen,) we discover, (perhaps,) that we underestimated what we were doing, that we did not even make one single thing happen ourselves,

merely we were the mouthpieces to the lying faces of the past. How could one not feel nauseous at such a discovery, that indeed in a life full of actions nothing ever happened, movement never occurred? Do we read Petronius and conceive that perhaps history and time had no passage and that nothing has ever moved? Society is not in decline because it has never peaked; we are not bad people because we have never been good. And yet do I conceive of reality as some kind of expansive goldfish bowl where we all float, where we are inert gases? What is the purpose of my work, (and does it even need one?) Will I finally conceive of myself as unnecessary? In that case, why should I be fearful? If life has no purpose, what meaning could be contained in fear any longer? Why are we supposed to ‘fear’ God, unless the mystics knew something about fear and about God that we do not?

Enough with these questions already; I know that there is meaning in life because I discover it afresh on a daily basis. Yesterday my wife and I went, after many weeks’ procrastination, to see the exhibition of the works of Joseph Beuys at the Tate Gallery. It was unfortunately not an extensive collection of the works of this master, though I had never really discovered him myself. The first thing that I noticed was his absence; for a man whose work was only in that he was creating it, it was painfully obvious that all of the things around me in the ‘gallery’ had been left behind, were mementoes of an artist’s life, like Bacon’s studio. This was quite a melancholic experience, (but only because I had yet to discover him.) I looked a little further and then, after having been exposed to a number of vitrines, (as though they were Nasrudin stories,) I suddenly saw him looking back at me, a man with two hearts, a

man with double the generosity of the rest of us, a man with double the love for all of us. This man had created an entire reality about him that only he could see and in which he was completely ingratiated, as though reality itself were his felt and fat wadding, nursing him back to health, resolving the conflicts between culture and nature, art and capital, ego and spirit. He is a medicine man, he is me and we are alike in our vision, friends. This man is a healer, and his remedies have been preserved in his sculpture, his drawings, his films and his actions. How many artists have offered up the simple gesture of planting trees to make life better for us and for the world? So simple, (as ingenious gestures often are,) and it is there, in this generosity, that I found him staring back at me, the essential but lost object that was essential in all of this work. This man had decided to visit America, and his method of doing so was to be wrapped in his wadding and flown into New York and transported to a loft where a coyote was waiting for him. Here he stayed for three days whilst he came to meet America; the one that was there before the Americans were. This genius has grasped hold of those parts of nature and culture available to one without pure human conceit, as though through his generosity and magic he had healed an irresolvable rift between the two. I loved this man. This man was an alternative to the angelic Warhol; he had created this persona about him, this ego, which was entirely spiritual and healing because it was taught to him by the Tartars, it was made of felt and fat and it was wrapped around him at all times as the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;personaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. These are the extents to which others have pushed the artistry of creation into their realities and have created a thing of beauty in their lives. There is no point in life where there is nothing for them, when they are not at work â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I can think of no two people

that have worked harder in their lives than Warhol and Beuys, (except of course all the other prophets and saints.) These people were prophets – they had no ‘self’ to hinder their movements in the spiritual dimension. And in his explicit descriptions does Beuys give us the recipe for life as art, the way to create a life as the work of art which is the closest to reaching God that the human can come – to the realisation of creation. I have heard a critic asking Beuys about his political ideas and the way in which they are unworkable. The critic does not understand that indeed, it is politics that is complex and it requires the simple medicine to cure it of its neuroses. The politician could not accept or understand the simple truth of ‘lets destroy all the guns in the world’. They would find a complex and ultimately neurotic reason for not doing so. It is called fear. I am now beginning to get to grips with the concept of human fear which is rooted in our unknowing, our conceit and confusion. I wish to come to terms with the divine concept of fear. ‘Clever’ people, like this ‘critic’, will never create anything except the prolongation of our confused state as people. Is it so difficult to understand that humans are contradictory things that cannot live in happiness or peace, and that politics is set up to administer this contradictory state of relations between people? So why encroach upon a man who has begun to heal himself other than, in the state of confusion, the actions of this man appear ridiculous and selfindulgent? Clever people will always demonstrate their conceit in attempting to ridicule what they cannot, in their conceited minds, understand or allow themselves to understand. Take me for example. People often laugh at me and my ideas and they think that I do strange things. But I do not, for I am quite ordinary. What is so strange as to want to pay close attention to life? This is so obvious

and unoriginal practise, although people do not appear to care for it any longer. I can see the sceptics who laugh at the way in which my wife and I openly demonstrate our enormous love for one another; they say that we are in the ‘Honeymoon period’, (a concept derived from psychologists and sociologists and other such people who are dead to the world but in their own eyes are ‘clever’,) and that we have not been married long. We have been married for ever – one cannot suddenly enter into a ring, for a ring is infinity and hence we have been married for ever. But still the sceptic, in his awful and festering state of living death attempts to pass his or her malady onwards. This type of nihilism is infectious, which is why someone like Beuys, the medicine man, must be revered and sanctified as one who has overcome the state of disease.

I do not need to take time out in order to discover who or what I am; all of these questions are answered by work. And it is through our works that we discover our human ability to create and destroy and in this do we discover our divine aspect. I have become less an image of myself; I know myself less because now I do not need to. All I can do is work, and now that I have begun to communicate with the outside world with the knowledge that I have worked long and hard for, fought for and played with for all of time it seems, do I come to accept my place, do I begin to properly create what I am without this fear that always holds people like myself back. I have always felt ridiculed by people cleverer than myself, and in its way this has gone to create me. And now I have come to create out of this and to pass this wisdom, (as it has passed through me,) back to the clever people and show them the way, show them this light that has converted me and shown me the way. It is them that have given

this gift to me, and I see it as my work to give it back in a different state. But I do not hope to ‘convert’ people – some people are already seasoned and prepared to go, others are content to continue on their eternal pattern, continuing to contrive existence as neurosis, as an eternal loop out of which meaning is conceived. I am happy and sad in equal measure; my fear has made me anxious and satiated in equal measure; measures which always multiply until the happiness and sadness is so intense that I cannot distinguish between the two. This is how one attains the godhead – the realisation that all things split are the same unsplittable thing. Unity, Trinity, Godhead. It is we who are schizoid, not God. But we can only conceive of Him in our human, schizoid way. That is why none of us know Him. We must heal ourselves and rejoin those two split parts, the persona and the alma, the self and nonself, the conscious and unconscious, the material and spiritual or whichever words you choose to denote the discrimination by. Reality is our tool for doing this, for it is the clay out of which our healing shall come, and furthermore will it become the medium between us and God.

I have always wished to communicate.

[e-mail]

We do not have a taste for the self-evident because we are so accustomed to the idea of confusion and obscurity. Were an absolute certainty to present itself before us unmasked and without clothing we would take it for yet another false idol and laugh at it in our sarcastic way. And so it is with all of the self-evident things

that I have presented here, except you cannot see them as what they are, (as I see them,) because they have not ‘occurred’ to you. Except they have occurred to you, because they have just entered into your reality in the guise of this book, and yes they are unmasked, without clothes and self-evident, but your sarcastic guffaw can be heard a mile away. I found that my recollections of Beuys from my youth were characterised by opacity, as though he were impenetrable and had no intention of giving the game away. It now seems so evident that my problem was that I encountered difficulty, that it did not unveil itself to me instantaneously; he presents an enigma around which one must perform circus-tricks of the understanding before one unlocks one’s own key to the symbolic imagination. I understand things in my way, (which is the problem,) and when confronted with the Beuys enigma and am led to break myself down until I can see what I was preventing myself from seeing. I do not wish to treat art as a mirror, although this is often how its meaning is brought into us.

I have, this week, caused so much anxiety in both myself and my wife as to come to detest myself utterly. But now I am writing and I find that this toxic residue that has festered in my mind until this long must be washed onto this paper with a sweeping brush, the pigment of my vanity stains crimson this empty sheet. How often is it the case that self-loathing is merely the disguise of selfgratification? One hundred per cent of the time? Can there be no other way than to satisfy oneself as the dominant mode of existence and can there be such a thing as charity? I cannot pretend that writing can prove it, (although as a faithful man in all things I do not require proof, which is why I am able to write so freely,) except

it would seem that writing both is and is not what it seems; it is its own proof, so to speak. What happens to a man when he confesses that it is not happiness or pleasure that he is seeking? Do you hope to find that out here? I was walking past Selfridges & Co with Marianna when I first thought of the idea that happiness is not an end in itself; we were going to choose a tie for me to wear at our wedding. I bought a very simple metallic-grey Prada tie and an ivory coloured shirt, (which later I exchanged for a pink shirt.) That was the first time when it dawned upon me that indeed there could be some other way than self-gratification and my memory of this thought is so exact that it illustrates to me that this thought was indeed of some magnitude in the scheme of my life. A month later I gave up my life to Marianna and now we have become a different organism to the two we started out with. And if we continue to believe, past the anxieties, happinesses, difficulties and easies, the we can indeed create the reality which is the perfect vehicle for our spiritual ascendance. I do not wish to have any portion of reality that is opaque to her and I know that I speak for her in this also. I am not broken up as I was before merely because of my current way of seeing. And it is this absolute belief in the perception and the understanding that creates a life of creation.

The book of communiquĂŠs; the book reaching out into the regions beyond this body and out into the next, of two minds in interfacing relations and aspiring always beyond themselves until there is no individual mind left to hinder the absolute knowledge of God in the self. The book itself is this communiquĂŠ, as your mind interfacing with mine and this statement is a demonstration of my eternal optimism. It is my charge this week to discover the fear that is

manifest in my body and to exploit it as I exploit all my things in this book; it is my fear that hinders my pride, that hinders my love, that hinders my charity and that hinders all of those things to which I must constantly spiral upward toward in my golden section, but at the same moment must I be full of dread, must be full of anxiety and fearful of what I am doing or I shall remove all of the ground from under my feet. Fear is a link in the chain constituting my being and the passage of my self through this time which itself will constitute in its wholeness and completion the exact extent of my being. There is no problem in life, no problem in anything. I am the problem, the knot in the eternal consciousness of God and I am trying to straighten myself out for His benefit.

Act 3

3: <silence>

1: <writing on screen>

All the other bureaucrats laughed at the useless fashion that I handled both money and paperwork. They increased my workload to the power of 10, and decreased my paypacket accordingly. The more work I did, the less I accomplished. Soon enough I was working so hard I was getting nothing done.

2: <silence>

My name had become a foreigner. It was a ridiculous scene; my networking had gotten me knowhere and I became more elusive

with every new person I met. I pretty soon didn't know how late it had grown. Then I went to my bed.

FIN

One month ago or thereabouts I was mugged by two street-urchins who attempted to steal my mobile phone. I was so insulted; all this gold I carry on my sleeve and about my person and they try to steal an item with little or no worth!

One day Daniel was passing through a housing estate when two lads stopped him and asked for his watch. They said if he gave them the watch for half an hour they would bring it back to him if he would be so kind as to wait for them there. So Daniel, always prepared to give, gave his watch to the two boys who walked away laughing. Three months later the two boys saw Daniel standing in the spot where they had left him and they both began laughing at him. Daniel said to them â&#x20AC;&#x153;Half an hour ago I gave you my time, though it appears to have done you no good.â&#x20AC;?

It must be quite apparent that, if you look relatively closely at my work over the past four pages or so that I have lost my path, like a wanderer on a journey toward a town who, forced to take shelter during the harsh wintry sleet, awakes one clear morning without an adequate recollection of the direction he was travelling or the direction in which he ought to continue travelling. But why should I consider this perturbing to me in my youth, for I have the time to lose my way and find it again a great many times before I have to stick to the path religiously; and is this not the folly of youth in its

crystalline form – that we need not commit to that which we know to be correct because we are young and can experiment in all kinds of folly? Is this not the problem that has held down such a great many people to the ways of youth and the ways of youth, having crippled themselves to a cliché that existed only in their minds and then gone one to exact that destiny with almost religious zeal and then, having proven themselves to be right about such a great many things, have then died according to their prediction? I am one such person, a person with only his image to keep him company in the wilderness, and this image contains nothing but lies anyway because it was, as I had known all along, composed out of many smaller lies that all congealed and affixed themselves to my naked body to clothe me and hide my shame beneath these false robes. In this wilderness of mine where I long to walk naked for I have not yet met another person before which I ought to feel ashamed, I understand the rules of nature far less for I am now subject to them and they no longer look like rules, rather they look like patters as they might appear in the eyes of the mushroom-eater. And neither must we forget that in this place where there is no time but where there is snow, one must realise that time only shows itself in repetition, and that this new pattern is itself drawn across one’s own face like one might draw one’s fingers across the palm of the hand tracing out as it were the lines impressed upon it by the hand of fate. As a singer casts his voice out across the hills and fields in this place, rivalling the birds in their mating-cries, does one behold the changing seasons and the clothing of the earth, as it comes and goes? Why do trees clothe themselves in the heat and go naked in the snow when humans are wont to the contrary? It is the case that we have got a great many things back to front; why do we not pay

closer attention to those great un-trainers of the minds, the proverbs and sayings of old? These sayings were first uttered by the wandering poet-knights of old, and those selfsame poems or sayings as we now say them have taken on such a strange role; we all know them, (in all countries,) for their permutation into all languages and cultures only goes to speak volumes of their currency and truth, and yet no-one knows them because we say them and do not behold them and it is this strange contradiction that holds them in their permanent currency and it is this game that was the joy of the knights; schadenfroh, the gay science. With these curious sayings, as we think longer and longer on them, we understand their concrete meaning less, but it allows us to understand in greater saturation and colour. This is a Sufi trick – the common becomes unfamiliar through our familiarity with it; we learn by unlearning a thing.

I’m sure that there are a great many people who think to themselves that all of their mental problems hinge upon one single mental item, that there is just one thing that keeps them from complete and utter transparency. And what is my opinion on this thought that I myself have thought on a great many times myself, that has enticed me and tantalised me this far into the depths or shallows of my mind, that has implanted this false image of an ‘answer’ right before my eyes but has yet to declare it to my understanding? Is there a yes or a no to this problem – what is the one, single thing that keeps me from the translucent reality that I so long for and desire? Why is it always the case that some obscured ‘thing’ comes unsurprisingly to the fore to shatter the idyll that one has spent so many hours in weaving together other than for the fact that one has not

acknowledged the most obvious and most apparent things in life to oneself and has caused opacity in this consciousness? One should meditate a little on the aforementioned proverbs for they hold many of the keys in unlocking the opaque self, the trapezoid consciousness, the fortress of Solomon, although this will merely unlock the door; it is you, in your translucent state that must open it up and pass through it. One who is opaque will never open such a door for he or she knows that, were he or she to do so, would merely encounter another door on the other side whereupon the painful and humiliating process must be repeated. One who is translucent sees the door, opens it and disappears through it. Regret will always keep a person on the side where the grass is not green.

My fear is generated from the following paradox; I know the truth but I cannot live it. It is my curse to know the truth, speak the truth but not live the truth. But the truth is so tantalisingly near to my lips that I can taste it, I can feel it and I know all of the answers. I also know that humankind is a contradictory and enigmatic creature and, though he or she may know the truth does not necessarily mean that he or she will follow it. One must be a saint in order to know and to do the truth. This is called commitment; it is the opposite of contradiction, the opposite of procrastination. Do you realise that each time you utter a proverb you look disgustingly idiotic; you mouth moves, the noise emerges but the understanding does not understand. It is a hilarious sight. One must slow oneself down in order to hear the noise of the proverb and then listen to it echoing through your ears, for it is Zarathustraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hammer and it can shatter the whole world of illusions and opacity. Fear is generated in this way; I can say a proverb, a timeless truth, but living it is

somewhat impossible as though it was too good, as though, as a person, I am unwilling to accept that I can live the good life. I have said this before but I will say it again here; were one to adhere to the Ten Commandments unfalteringly, one would be led into the good life and into salvation. It is so obvious that we cannot do it; we were not designed for the truth for we are only good at failure. I am describing to you the truth that I know but cannot do. If I discover how to do it, if I find some magical method of doing so, then I will write it down because I am tired of the failures of the human race as are all people deep in their souls. These souls are so weary for they have been set in the same patterns of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;actingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; on the stage of life for aeons and still yet they know the truth and cannot do it. It is sad and I will dedicate my life to breaking this pattern and recording the exact moment when it happens. I have identified an intensely important opportunity here; I have found something that touches my wound so violently that it completely overawes me. I can, from this utterly anxious point begin to undo what I have done and cause the chain reaction of translucency to take hold. And I shall record it here for you as it is in the Bible; I will write down the keys to success and you will merely need to follow what I direct. It will be your own clear and distinct choice to follow or to continue in the fashion of the pattern fashioned for you by you. I have here found my path after having struggled through the winter into the great thaw at the other end; and now I see the path marked in the earth, through the forest bursting into life, through the villages and the towns. I am no longer concerned in my heart as to whether people listen, hear or anything. I merely glide past the aeons down into eternity, along the criss-crossing pattern of human life and back into the mouth of God where I can finally rest as

merely a thought in His mind. Thank God. God is absolute transparency, absolute clarity, and it is in Him that we discover our Being. The winter has ended, and I must now allow the fear in my heart to take hold of me in its icy talons until I realise that I am merely choking my own soul to death with my cold fingers.

And then I woke this morning after dreaming about dancing and began thinking about what I had said yesterday on the virtues of transparency. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I merely wish to be invisible in order to allow me passage unnoticed through life, undisturbed, uninvolved and without interruption. Ghosts are transparent, I thought to myself, and thus my aforementioned writing seems to have sprung rather a large leak. But who is looking for a watertight explanation of life anyway? One who does so is surely parallel or identical to one who passes unnoticed? If one is always right and always justified, surely one is impregnable to the outside world and, through an optical paradox, passes from complete opacity in his own eyes to perfect transparency in the eyes of others. All this talk of translucency and opacity is a merry dance, is it not? Well Daniel, thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what you get for trying to describe in words what cannot even be declared in thoughts; you continually run about thinking in your way that you have caught it at last and try to write it down before it wriggles between your fingers and escapes again, but alas you were only trying to catch your own hand.â&#x20AC;?

Is this type of deceit so very common that we are not only running away from ourselves but we are also trying to catch ourselves? And

which is it, could we say, that is the better part; the one seeking permanent knowledge or the one always seeking to disappear? And thus it must be the case that, In some kind of unique state between earth and air, we are held in a suspension And it is from here that we feel both despair and emancipation.

This morning I feel distract, somewhat at a distance from the project of my work and dreamily drifting from shore to shore, from morning to night without anxiety across the mirror-like flat sea. Both of us are in this boat, both me and I, and we are conversing politely about who is who, which is which and what is what. We have not yet found any kind of answer to this problem because we both keep insisting that we are who we are despite sensory datum to the contrary. We cannot realise or bring ourselves to a realisation that two can be one if one allows the manacles to fall, if one sees one then there is only one and this one is three because there are two other parts. The mind is trapped by all sorts of laws that it exercises upon itself to create the delusion of a stable and knowable universe, but this universe keeps melting, the rules keep changing and we are still no closer to realising that it is our identification with the rules that is keeping us from experiencing the universe itself. No one would dare dispute that the universe is comprised of a great many parts and yet, no one would dispute that there is but one universe. If we untrain the mind now then we allow it to abide to any such rules we create for it. Our ways of seeing are constricted in the same way; if one chooses to see something then one can, in a cool and collected way, see that thing without the anxious feeling that one is either mad or hallucinating. Take for

example the delusion that time passes. It is quite obvious that time does not pass, that this is a pond and not a river, and yet we all choose to subscribe to the common delusion that time passes. I however do not see time passing and, then again, I do see time passing; I can see both at once because I have four eyes and not just two. It is testament to our schizophrenic nature that our mind, divided into its two hemispheres, Cancer and Capricorn, should split all things in half and find its favour in but one half of the properties of that thing so, it appears as though the essence has been extracted and yet, the truth is that the nutrients have been excluded, we perceive only half objects which are phantoms in our world. Let me pose a question:

If we were altogether then would not our perceptions be altogether also?

How useful to us in our ‘search’ are metaphors such as journey, quest, path, trail, etc? We are so familiar with the quotation of these ideas that it is our familiarity which keeps us from understanding them. ‘Habit lends the hand more wit but makes the wit less handy’ so to speak in Nietzsche’s mouth; what does this quotation mean in me if not that I believe in Nietzsche’s wisdom and that, in quoting his sayings I am partaking in his wisdom? No, it surely must be the case that you should be cautious of the things I say. Indeed, we reside in a place where there are so many shadows and ghosts that it becomes an impossible ‘journey’ for us to see objects and not their negatives. But it can indeed be Done. Some part of me says that it is a property of the passing of time that causes an object to appear as though it were a ghost. Sometimes the day will seem to

pass very quickly as thought the joins between moments were made hastily and were unhampered by thoughts. Why does thinking slow time? If we did not think at all would we not perceive time at all? But we do think, just I am doing now, (although if I can just reach that place beyond thought, if I could slip unseen into that space of mediation and continue to write I would write down this secret,) so what I do is to slow down time with my thoughts so that my appreciation of the joy of life and its evaporation into the vapour of the past is heightened. But is this wrong? What I have said exists; if I retract it in favour of a new observation then what have I done? Does it evaporate into vapour and take part of me with it? Such delightful misery!

We are to re-think our conception of Love. Love is not its effects, (such as emotion.) Love is an object that we are as yet barely acquainted with. Love is a book that we have only read reviews about, other people’s accounts of, other books about it. Are we content in the hearsay of the governor of life or do we desire to seek out the object of such controversy? And on this ‘journey’ shall we encounter a great many effects over our psyche, a great many afflictions on our ego but, simultaneously will we feel an enriching of the soul as does a wanderer or voyager enrich his map of the world, (though this trip may be difficult, arduous or dangerous to him and his happiness.) We must be prepared to sacrifice happiness and sadness, content and anxiety if we are to reacquire the object of Love. This is called a ‘labour of love’ in that through this labour do we learn how to Love our work, and that Love and Labour are somehow synonymous. We shall also realise that Love comes out

of our seeking of it – we learn to love the struggle, the quest, and we make out of it an solid object that we are wont to call Love.

To return to the paragraph previous to the previous paragraph, I think that it is possible to be translucent and yet a solid thing in the world, (and I am describing here events from my reality and, as they can become conceptual here you cannot distinguish my real state from my textual existence,) in that, when confronted by another half-being in the world, another semi-transparent yet opaque object-person with half a brain, one can, indeed, and with great joyfulness, be at once transparent and ethereal, yet solid and impenetrable. Or is it that one is impenetrable because one is transparent, (in that one cannot be moved, one finds some kind of stasis and permanence in the phantom state,) and one is transient as a solid object, (in that one can be killed, one can disappear from the world,)? What is an encounter between two of these creatures like, because you must admit that their constitution is somewhat bizarre, somewhat undefined and quasi-abstract from their molecular composition? I know indeed what it is to feel like of these halfbeings for I have found myself in the ‘state’, (and what kind of state that is I am still uncertain of, always uncertain,) for twenty-six years now and I am still no closer to anything except my permanent state of passing away. In fact, were Descartes to have pursued the principles of uncertainty, he would more than likely have happened across more certainties than he did in pursuing a contrary method.

First Principle: ‘Everything is uncertain, except this principle.’

There we go; it was not so difficult was it, (although I had to bite my tongue whist saying it, though more from the experience of the tragi-comic element of human ‘nature’ than from any genuine insight into certainty,) and the best part of it was the sheer irrefutability of the refutable.

And so I make another break, another silence which signifies another entry in the journal of fear, for it is my fear that has caused this break, this gap in the text where, obviously, I was not writing anything down, though you shall never know what it was that I was doing. Should it be considered bad manners of the author to exclude what he was doing from his audience when he had formerly promised to put everything in, include everything, as though art can come out of including everything? What happens when you put everything into a painting? Does it turn into a mess? Or if you put everything into a symphony? Does it turn into a mess? The everything that I am talking about here is the everything of ‘giving it your all’ as opposed to the ‘cramming everything in’, although who could be said to know the discrimination?

What a difficult day I am having. I am trying to describe to my wife the reason why I cannot go out into the front yard in order to do some pruning, and the reasons I come out with sound ridiculous. The reason that they sound ridiculous is because they are ridiculous; neurotic reasons are always ridiculous. Take for example the time when I could not eat in front of other people because I remember, when I was a child, my father would always watch me eat from across the other side of the table. I did not know what he was looking for and I still do not. Suffice to say there was

no reason, but that particular thing, that weed, (that was easily uprooted,) was connected to the root structure that today has shredded up my hands. This plant is a rose, for it has a great many thorns on it that make it nearly impossible to dispose of. The neuroticâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world is always connected together by a matrix, a fantastic scheme that makes no sense from the outside and yet, from inside it makes perfect sense in its ridiculousness. So this is my day; the neurotic will always conceive of metaphors to tie together the disparate world with his scheme. The garden for example is a symbol, and yet it is not, for it is a garden. I had a very dangerous thought today, and I dared to utter it to my wife. I said â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Is it that neuroses are to be cured, or are neuroses the platform into which we ascend into mastery? What is Hitchcock without neuroses, or, to be more exact, sinthome?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Is one to develop this neurosis so that it encapsulates the whole world in a fantastic system, what I have recently been describing as the pliable medium called reality? But of course, this must be a development of the neurosis into something more, through all of the existential crises and into a spiritual symbolic web that connects the ethereal world of abstractions to the material world of plastic things. In the middle ages we hear of people like Roger Bacon who is reputed to have propounded a theory of why the plastic arts, sculpture to be precise, was the most adequate method for representing Biblical parable to the uneducated masses because, for one reason, with three dimensional objects modelled upon people, the viewer has an analogous relation to them. But my problem with this theory is that, though the plastic art of sculpture may have analogy both in material, form and analogy to existent creatures, it is indeed the graphic arts, painting to be precise, that are best employed for

illuminating divine subjects. This is why painting had such great currency throughout the ages whilst sculpture has always paled to one side in inadequacy. It was not until I discovered Beuys two days ago that I understood the possibilities of the plastic arts, (sculpture.) But what is it in the spiritual or symbolic dimension that is here communicated in the three-dimensional form as opposed to the flat surface? Is it that, until one has devised a system of objects into which one can compose symbolic gestures according to the state of reality, sculpture simply cannot function as a correlate between the physical and ethereal realm? How can I relieve this tension that has built its way into my spinal column and keeps my eyes turned downward into the ground? Is it so difficult to be able to say a thing and do it, live by it, or must there always be some portion of deception or disbelief in all of the things that we say? As Fellini has thought, (as have we all thought,) happiness is to be able to tell the truth to people without hurting their feelings. Because it is not the truth, it is a truth, it is your truth, and you shall never really know if it is true or not, especially if it goes unuttered in the presence of those to which it relates. I look into the eyes of my wife and I feel my own despair welling up like a great nausea reaching up from the pit of my stomach and smothering all of my visible parts. To feel this is to be too preoccupied at all times with the way you appear to others. That is what narcissism really is. Transparency is when your eyes are always turned outward so that you disappear from your own view. It is going to be this way for some time; I am constituted in either total self-belief or complete disbelief, (and both states are, wait for it, completely identical and interchangeable, which is why, when I shift from one into the other, I am gobsmacked at how such a colossal shift can occur in a matter

of seconds. Are you not the same? When you suddenly get in a bad mood with the person you are closest to, do you not feel as though the whole world has melted from one moment into the next leaving everything in this change somehow incongruous and unfamiliar? This happens to me a lot at the present time because of the uprooting of my neurosis; it is such a dense network of roots that it often feels that, if I tear them up, there will be nothing left because all I ever was was the root and nothing else. Neurotics cling to their world in this exact way; they feel that ion order to be themselves they must maintain the status quo, that if they let go of the things they know to be holding them back, then they will have lost the exact thing that they love the most and which makes them what they are. But both you and I know that this is bullshit.

Marianna and I considered burying a time capsule filled with bullshit.

We are also considering sending radio waves out into space that say â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Do not come here!â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

My fear is manifest in all things, it would seem. And I look all around me at all of the things that seemingly require my attention although I am unable to lend animation to my hands in order to put them right. The neurotic conceives of his world as though there is something wrong with it. The reason for this is because there is no God in his world, for if there was a God in it, the world would be perfect. The thing to remember here is the strange relation to communication. I would rather shut up in this state than attempt to talk to Marianna because I know that when these poisons are

oozing through my pores and into my words all I Ian do is harm her. And it is a terrible thing to sit in silence, though any attempts to help would, through no fault of my own, be venomous. I am not a venomous person and I am not sarcastic, although it would appear that many parts of myself that hitherto had been buried are now coming to the fore, many unpleasant tastes are furred up on my tongue, and when I am speaking through this book I am not trying to forget them again, I am allowing them to breathe, I am attempting to remember them. It is one of my methods that one should say aloud what one is thinking in order to demonstrate oneself and to bystanders that whatever it is, it is nonsense. The next time I am challenged by my invertebrate self I shall hold that feeling that creeps up on me and remain calm and transparent. If I do this one hundred times this week I shall conquer it, but before that I must befriend it for it is part of me and I cannot be at war with myself for there is never a suitable victor in such billets.

***

Thursday: It is all over.

***

I am able to perceive that my work might be disingenuous, but that perception itself is part of my honest work. Do you think that I am conceited to be able to spin such twaddle from out my mouth and believe in it? But who said there was any belief in it; is it not merely part of the game that exists in my head. My head is really quite enormous because it appears to contain everything; is it not

strange that space may be folded into the dimensions of a collection of neurones, or perhaps it is more strange to consider that inside of these neurones there is generated a thing called an ‘idea’ which itself ‘believes’ that it contains all the dimensions of space inside of it, though were it to be asked could not in fact believe to the extent necessary to believe that this ‘space’ did in fact exist. What a strange organism is it that produces the myth of space for it to be able to have dimension in which to move across the surface of the world and yet, when tested, does not believe in it enough to in fact cause its existence beyond himself. This organism cannot exist without itself; were it a corpse it would somehow undergo some kind of complete metamorphosis in the Ovidian manner, for it would somehow become concrete past all of its transient imaginings. I was an organism like this one listed above. Halfway through my life I underwent another kind of transformation, one that had the opposite effect of ‘death’ and in this place where the waters are black and the sun burns the skin from the faces of the crabs on the beach did I remerge from my casing awakened to my birthing in the land of the Mediterranean. I can see a blackbird’s nest from out my window and I cannot understand, (even though as a person it is me for whom understanding exists,) how it’s nest is almost perfectly circular despite it having no schooling in Euclidean geometry or a degree in architecture. Perhaps it is closer to Giotto who, rumour has it, was discovered by a frater along a path to be drawing perfect circles into the sand. In those days, notions of genius, (or at least potential,) were not so stringent as they are now, although I have not seen many people with the artistic capacity of Giotto; perhaps our stringent criteria or disbelief is merely a smokescreen for our inability to perceive or observe

talent and genius. Perhaps we are asking too much in order to achieve little? I wonder if there is any critic in the world who is able to perceive beauty or genius? I would ask them to begin to create it and not merely to selfishly observe others. If more people were concerned with the pursuit of beauty then our world would be a beautiful place, QED. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;But what is beauty?â&#x20AC;&#x2122; I can hear them asking in their all-knowing voices. Beauty is what is created when a person dedicates their life to the pursuit of beauty. Only people who pursue beauty have an understanding of it. The critic cannot know of beauty, for he can only know of the arguments that surround that sacred thing, and if one spends oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life in the company of peripheral things it quite like a Christian that has never met Christ.

I am outlining for you here all of my problems, misgivings and shortcomings not because I am a critic and understand the arguments that exist around the things that I am saying, but because I am the one saying them; I will allow the critic to be what he is because I am what I am. I am entitled by the laws of my own universe to say whatever it is I like to say and I am also entitled by the same law to be enlightened into the company of God if I so choose to be. It is not the position of other people to make this not so; one cannot continue to deny that it is the centre of consciousness that dominates and controls the universe, and from this centre one can choose either to exist or not exist, one can choose to be subject to the universe of the subject of the universe. All it seems to take is the use of words to make it so. And God created the word in the beginning before He created the world, and with this word can we create a world also. He has given us the

divine putty called reality out of which we can, if we so desire, to create a beautiful universe out of our realities and, if we so desire it in our confusion, can we fuck it up and it will still be beautiful. Perhaps this is the parable that my lengthy and mostly nonsense writings contain if you are wont to distil the nectar from them, (and in my reality it is the weeds as well as the flowers that contain beauty – an ecosystem of beauty, not an economy,) that I can do whatsoever I choose to do and say whatever I choose to say, I need never take anything back if my desires are transparent to me when I make them and I am responsible for them when I make them, and henceforth I can lead the good life because it is mine to make it good. We do have the control over this life to do with it what we want; those people who say to you that you are life’s subject, (as though it were you king or queen,) that life will always do what it wants and you have no choice but to work around it, are merely advocating the life that they have built for themselves. It is a contradiction. It has been their choice to advocate such a ‘position’; it is we who position ourselves, for the world ‘wants’ and ‘does’ nothing; it is not interested. The world simply Is, and it is we who must create what we choose within reality which is the gift that God gave to us for interfacing with the world. I say these things not because they are, but because I have spent a great deal of time and effort in making it so, and what I say here is informed by years of dedicated research, just as all of us have done. Life has become my artwork, my project and I will see to it that this work of art is available to all other people as they interface with their realties. Why do I do this? I have no reason.

Idea: We must cease to do things indirectly or remotely; why is it that people watch a soap-opera everyday if not that they are living a virtual or remote social life which itself is not fantastical. Does this not display the lowest drive of desire; to fantasise about the mundaneity of everyday life as opposed to leading a mundane life for yourself? I cannot, no matter how hard I try, understand this kind of sensibility. Were I Baudrillard, (and sometimes I am,) I would say that I can conduct my social intercourse in a clean way that is in fact more social, because I am doing it along with all of the other people in the country at the same time. We are all in the Rover’s Return at the same time and someone, some selecta in Carlton TV has become the god of Britain’s social life. If we create a virtual reality, are we trying to create an environment for ourselves to exist in that has no God at it’s centre? Is this the point of virtual reality; a godless reality in which we can be god, all of us? To be honest, I would rather be subject to God in this universe than subject to a ‘person’ in virtual reality. Can you imagine being subject to constant neuroses, jealousy, madness, paranoia and all of the other lovely traits that we display like sick peacocks to one another in God’s reality amplified to the degree that the entire landscape to be changed by human temperament? The idea truly, truly terrifies me. What is so wrong with God’s reality? He allows us to get on with our lives completely undisturbed by Him. If we sit and watch extremely impassively we can watch the evolution of ancient and beautiful patterns evolving across the face of the universe. He has created such a dizzying array of splendid things and yet we still wish to create our own reality where we are the Gods. Are we completely stupid? If the best and most effective forms of virtual reality that we ‘clever’ humans have devised and

partaken in so far are the ‘news’ and ‘soap-operas’, then I think I will choose God’s universe.

What we should be doing in our subversive way is removing these removes from life, just as in the same deranged way we are trying to get closer to ourselves, to remember ourselves. We are not, as some people say, trying to be ‘real’ or ‘more realistic’, (both of which are fallacious notions,) for that itself is a tabloid, television sensibility. (Those people who watch ‘real life’ dramas on TV or ‘reality’ programmes? Say no more.) We will never be real, (because it is against our nature, our Being, to be real,) it is beyond the human experience to know what is real. We must instead attempt to build our Love of everyday life at all times simply by living it and observing it. The television, (despite having its moments as an art form,) has served to spoil the porous material of consciousness and has made it montaged and flat, cut-up. This will, if we pursue this state hard and long enough, cause a ‘virtual consciousness’ which is quasi-godlike. It will have the ability to move from place to place without being subject to cause and effect, time and space, because it is subject only to the laws of montage. But this type of quasi-godlike consciousness that we have been working toward for so long will be a terrible thing. Once locked inside of a paranoia from which one cannot return, one may as well be in hell, because any place in the total absence of God is hell. We will have no memory in this place, and hence it will be gratuitous fantasy after gratuitous fantasy all characterised by an anxiety that is not subject to its normal gravity. In a place where we have the mental freedom to do anything, the only thing that one would attempt to do is to discover whether God existed or not. We would

become Faustian; all of the fantastic voyages and flights of fancy of the mind would be devilish because we would no longer be subject to the gravity of God, and without gravity there can be nothing to hold down the vomit in our stomachs. Therefore, partaking in â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Coronation Streetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is tantamount to having a bad acid trip and our experiment with reality-defying hallucinogens should go no further.

I am a warning to you, I am reinforcing the importance of the good life, of Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reality, of beauty and of a place where Value can have meaning. A godless reality can have no meaning because it is not subject to gravity, and none of us human beings is sane enough to administer such a place.

So yesterday I discontinued writing in order to pursue a different line along the lines of attempting to communicate with people, something that my neurosis has always helped to inform, (and incidentally, whist I was in the bath I realised that the security of my body, currently manifest in various cuts and abrasions on my hands, is a characteristic of this neurosis,) and so I wrote various letters of enquiry to publishing houses and literary agents, although it must be said that these acts themselves require the greatest skill and mastery over myself, as though writing to a publisher was more difficult that writing a book. This does of course appear ridiculous because attempting to promote and make a success of all my hard work should be a joy, not a burden. But when I wrote these letters of enquiry, the letters themselves looked like extracts of the book which, you could rightly argue, would be the worst way of putting across my case to a commercially-minded person. What is required in such cases is that I find some distance from my work and write

about the book, but sadly this is something that I cannot do; all the things that I do are connected, nothing is reified from any other thing, and hence the letters that I wrote were trying to communicate many things at once. I also wrote a letter to ITV in an attempt to persuade them to take Coronation Street off the air. Does the neurotic look like a failure in all of the things that he or she does merely because none of those things is distinct from the other, because they are all so immediate, because they aim at hopeless things? Part of me is aware that these things are hopeless, (the part of me that is hopeless,) but the rest of me has quite a forthright belief that I can communicate with other people, that I can touch someone with my work and lead them toward the place I myself am headed toward. Only if I believed in the reality of this place I am moving toward could I attempt to lead others also, (unless I am a willow-the-wisp.) But I must also credit my neurosis with having always provided me with a devil’s advocate, with having constantly ridiculed my notions ever harder until it took the firmest and most convincing conviction to believe in what I believe in. As one moves closer to the light, everything becomes darker. Only one who is headed in this direction could tell you this despite how contradictory it sounds. As the joy increaseth, so doth the anguish. And how do my fears of the ‘virtual’ reality fit into this neurosis of mine as it is outlined above? How does my understanding of ‘virtual’ reality evolve out of the theories of Baudrillard and Macluhan? My ‘virtual’ reality is a warning from the future; after having gone to great lengths to catalogue and convey to you in as graphic and insightful a way as possible and inside of a project more dedicated and more belaboured than many things in life, I should say, past all of my anguish, my joy, my fear, my content,

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my belief and my doubt, that in a ‘virtual’ reality there would be all of these things. But they would be ‘virtual’, and without the gravity of the God-given characteristics of existence such as those outlined above, the emptiness is not profound, the happiness does not soar; it is a flat and soulless place where we realise finally that we are and are not the masters and mistresses of our own fates; if we fashion the reality of the vacuum we are, necessarily, vacuous. We imagine that a virtual place with virtual content in our bodies would be desirable because we would be able to moderate what we feel, we would be able to indulge ourselves in whichever pleasures and distresses we choose, etc. But how do we choose when our fate is our own? What exactly is it we would trade to ‘exist’ in such a ‘reality’? And those people that consider a virtual existence to be very far off in terms of its realisation are already wrong because they have not considered how virtual we have become already and have not seen our total immersion in it sneaking up from many moons ago. I wish that reality as I have known it thus far had some concrete foundations but it does not; it is still dreamlike, it is still as slippery as a fish. But all of my work thus far has attempted to exploit these characteristics of reality, not drive me further inside of a reality where there is no care, no God, no profound cause or signification. This is what the hermit is; he continues to hunt for his faith despite the futility for it is the hunt that constitutes his faith. The abandonment of faith and the choice to live inside of a selfindulgent and hallucinogenic fantasy is the ultimate failure. My fears of half-feeling something, of feeling a half-anxiety do not even compare to those of feeling anxiety; one is godless, one is blind to God. There is anaesthesia and there is sensory-deprivation.

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I would not trade the absolute awfulness of my anxiety for a shambolic and grotesque parody of a genuine feeling.

After having thought of this in the bathtub I then went on to think of human evolution, (or culture as we have now dubbed it.) Who can say that, having abandoned the world of a God who abandoned us would not free us of these dreadful feelings and open the horizon to a whole new landscape of human Being? Who could say that, liberated from these ‘emotions’ as we call them, we would not evolve something new in the place of ‘emotion’, something richer and more substantial? Perhaps, having killed God in name was not enough; perhaps we must eradicate his reality as well and forge on ahead alone, into the mists of human future equipped only with that which we have made ourselves?

I hope that I have here posed two equally convincing arguments; one profoundly against and one rationally for. How could we now say which was the best thing to choose, if ‘best’ is indeed sufficient criterion for a decision of such gravity? Would we think ‘rationally I must do this – think of the possibilities!’ or should I think ‘I cannot abandon this because just in case…’ Would we not feel the weight of other people and their mocking, sarcastic voices as we attempted, in a futile and humiliating way, to create some masterly and irrefutable criteria for making the choice? And would it even be a case of consciously choosing? What if there is no choice to make, perhaps the dice are already loaded? We do not choose outright the one for the other; the choice is made through our works; we either struggle toward God in the dark and Love Him for it as so many others have done, or we continue to breed out of

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ourselves these human qualities such as ‘caring’, ‘belief’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ until we have fully become the masters and mistresses of our own fates. We are already following the pattern laid down for us, and this is the true meaning of ‘virtual’ reality. We are already inside of a virtual reality and hence, we must take this into account when we make this ‘choice’.

Imagine if you will that everyone’s thoughts could be heard. What would this environment look and sound like? If a distressed person were to walk into a public library… We would have to train our minds like the fakir trains his mind to prevent all of our collective insanity. And what of such enormous repression; would we somehow develop a sub-thought that could not be heard except in our own heads in order to cope? Do humans only have the capacity for thought because they have the capacity for speech; is the one responsible for the other? And this gap that appears between the two; is it responsible for our madness, our privacy? Is our thought merely a retreat from transparency? To become at one with the world, to reach harmony with it we must look to harmonic examples. Remember that the rich only appear greedy to those who’s want is inspired by them, to those who are greedy. This is called jealousy, not harmony. Jealousy imagines an imbalance of justice where one is always short-changed by the environment for what one [does not] have. Harmony is the perfect and immaculate balance between all things to the divine degree. (In other words, the human could not create such harmony, only God can consider all of the options and bring them into a perfect relation with each other.) A baby cries; part of the world is unhappy, but harmony and happiness are not synonymous; the baby is in perfect harmony, our

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annoyance at the sound is likewise in harmony. What is not in harmony is that small part of the universe that God consigned over to us in the beginning; our will, our will to believe that we are not in harmony, that the baby is not in harmony, that the animal kingdom or the ecosystem is not in harmony. This is the only part of the universe that is not in harmony; such a small part, but to us it is the most significant. Our lives should be dedicated to putting this small part back into line, straightening it out and bringing it back into harmony with the universe, and in that way shall we understand the divine cosmos, not merely reside in the confusion of the human macrocosm.

I think therefore I am; is there any substance in this, or is the though of a thought an imaginary Being? I am therefore I am, (thought is not proof enough; if I was not then I would not be, but this thought does not prove that!) Did he tell us anything more than this? We tend only to remember his ‘mistakes’, (and I remember reading a great many essays about his mistakes whilst I was at college, though we did not discuss God very much – probably because it was not a theology class.) How can these be mistakes or errors to us who know nothing of his thoughts other than what he wrote down no matter how inaccurate? We are always quick from the mark like a pack of jackals to illustrate the ‘errors’ or ‘faults’ of other people, especially when they are seen to be attempting an elevation of sorts; which of his critics can I remember the names of?

Idea: Criticise only when you have arrived at a more constructive solution.

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We ought to discourage such inveterate sophistry for it is little more that gossip, a foul wind. Let us now turn to the creative life, the source of my dogmatic and unsupported opinions. As our creativity becomes a form of spiritual exercise, a prayer to the God of creativity, creation and created, so must we escalate this path we have created into the ethereal life. Our creations open up to us a path to follow as do our acts of destruction beneath us create a path for our followers. This new path that is self-made has been walked by us for millennia, it is the pattern of our divine fate but, in each incarnation we are blind to it by the undergrowth of our selves. This walking is transcendence and it must come from a proper comportment between us and our material existence. Destruction, creation, transcendence. We do not leave the material world behind in our transcendence and it would be naughty to leap to such conclusions. The material world becomes proper, its place has become fixed and our gripes with it have finished. We give our thanks. But without transcending through it we can never know it or become fixed inside of it. We shall always struggle in our confusion, knowing fully in our hearts that our identity with the material existence is blind and insane and not our proper place. But we find our proper place in it when we have discovered this relationship. I suddenly remembered the importance of looking; someone in my head asked me just now to explain the difference between Durer and Beryl Cook. The answer was that if you could not see it yourself then it certainly could not be explained to you. Sometimes an explanation is an excuse for not properly understanding something, which explains our overuse of the forms of critique, review, summary, etc. We are all reliant upon each

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other for making sense out of this world, although if we are all reliant upon each other also means that we are all supported by nothing; it is the blind leading the blind, destined to result in a calamity. Rather than admit that this is the case, we attempt to mask our idiocy with a fake integrity and assert that we know what we are doing, we are not helpless, we are correct and justified. Can you not see that this is the case? If not why then do we follow en masse the nearest prophet or seer or artistic phenomenon as though, if we crowd around that person long enough some of their wisdom will rub off on us? It does not. Raphael did not take any of Michelangelo’s inspiration with him, despite working with him in the Sistine Chapel, the most divine of all forms of labour. What we did instead was to create a lower hierarchy of fame called celebrity which provides all of the solutions to the desire we have for higher types; we can all acquire fame as easily as we can acquire infamy and indeed, if we stand around with the right people, their fame will rub off on us. The problem with this form of fame is that it requires no work, no labour and for this we cannot expect the fame to last very long, (which is a contradiction of the higher type of fame which perpetuates itself throughout time by carrying itself on the minds of the people it touches.) Unless there is some substance to the fame itself, some work which goes beyond the person, an edifice of value, we should assume that it will die with us if not before. Gossip, as the predominant mode of perpetuating this kind of fame, has too short a memory to remember all of the people it has gossiped about. So, unless we cease to value this terrible, nauseating disease that we have called ‘transience’, (and there really are some ‘cultural theorists’ who assert this foolish notion as a value,) we will become the blink of an eye, we will eradicate any

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true value which, in itself, is supposed to convey something of permanence and worth.

I have no way of proving to you that ‘transience’ has less value than permanence, because the two concepts are in fact possessed of the same forms, despite their apparently antithetical status. If you can be bothered to think, you will see that it is the case and that all of my assertions above are both correct and false at the same time. I am glad that this is the case because I enjoy my dogmatic status too much to replace it with logic and reason. It is half-past two in the afternoon, the sun is in its usual place, but I am a little scatterbrained. I am conscious of the many difficulties that both you and I have with my work, despite the fact that ‘you’, (as I have it,) exists only as a hallucination and, therefore, refracts merely my own qualities. That’s rough justice for you. Perhaps this book is merely a desire to put you inside of me, like a Russian doll? Non-human animals have, over the course of many millennia, evolved so as to interface with their environment in an harmonic, yet advantageous way. All the animals get along fine, and they all seem to fit with one another. The human animal has also evolved into what it is, but of what use is its evolutionary innovations to its environment? Thus far, it has used main evolutionary product, thought, to indulge itself in the fantasy of what it is. Is this the extent to which we can use our ability to think, or is there some other purpose to human existence than narcissism? Does this evolutionary trait serve to do nothing other than to cause imbalance with the natural environment contradictorily to all other animals? This is old stuff that I go over again and again in my mind merely for my own sake, struck down

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by my own inability to break from the model of my own criticism. What I will do instead is break now. It is three O’clock.

[It is the plain truth that an enlightened person will understand more than he or she sees in this book, (and this is not merely a deception on my part, but go on,) for he or she already sees with such a profound insight into reality without the hindrance of common value-judgement. And this person will ask ‘Why has he made this all so explicit? Poetic truth is best conveyed in restraint.’ But then he or she will detect the comedy of the upper project of the book which takes place beyond the explicit descriptions which, were this person not subtle, would go undetected. I am asking then that you look not at what I am openly saying in these descriptions but at what I am doing with them.]

Technique or Demonstration (who knows?)

Ask a person why they do a thing. Upon receipt of an answer ask them why it should be. Upon receipt of the next answer, ask again why it should be. Repeat until no further cure is required.

On the world’s strangeness I have found little to say; not in that I have found little strangeness in the world, but that the basic character of what is strange in it is highly elusive like a certain night-bird that one might hear but never see. How am I to investigate a thing which could be manifest in all things and at any time, (like some kind of inverted desire; it is in all objects and yet it is none of them,) but

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cannot be located in any way other than through a sense of presence or, due to itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mutable and elusive existence resists all forms of research; it may be merely an illusion or a dream? And yet I see no harm in thinking on it, for those thoughts produced through my representation of perceived things back onto the private dimension of reality has likewise produced these thoughts; they are not only of it or about it or for it, but they are intangibly and irresistibly connected to it in some other way as yet to be described.

Shame; what is the point of shame? To whom should I feel shameful and for what reason? Why would I be ashamed of what happens in my thoughts? I merely write them down; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not so different from keeping them private, is it? I am not an apologetic although I am always compelled to be so, as though I owe an impossible debt to the world, to something, to God perhaps, that no manner of penance could ever pay on pain of death. Hidden inside of these ordinary, human and dull thoughts though are the seeds of change, the promise of the enlightenment to the truth. Is it that, unless I pay this debt to whomsoever I owe it, I shall never know the truth? No wonder I feel ashamed! Perhaps it is not that we wish to live a life without shame, rather we wish to know of a genuine pride in what we are and what we love. There is no possibility of escaping what you are, (not even in death, for death is not an escape; it is nothing at all,) there is only the possibility of realising what you are, whether it consists in shame, pride or whatsoever you wish to call it. I must admit now that it seems so apparent that this shamefulness of what I am is tied up in my complex, the complex

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that I wish to untie and make simple again. All these problematic things are tied together and what I am doing is cataloguing the entire edifice so that I can see exactly what I think I am. This is my project. I try to recall a conversation of last night; the conversation itself though was too slippery to be recalled, like certain koans. Such a delicate and fragile understanding of nature cannot be gripped too tightly; it’s like trying to hold an eel by the tail. Like a trout it must be lulled slowly into your possession. A heavy mind will not know of it’s own subtleties and perhaps this learning was the only part of the knowledge that I am able to retain in the grey fleshy matter of my brain-tissue? I can learn from the knowledge but not learn the knowledge itself for it is indeed too slippery.

You can do whatsoever you choose.

But how do you choose?

I have, this morning, just read a short essay by Gunter Grass on Melancholy which I found at the beginning of an exhibition catalogue of Durer’s graphic works. I had risen late this morning and straight into an overfull hot bathtub. I then sat down and began to flick through this catalogue, as I find it quite stimulating before consciousness has reached its steady mid-day level, to contemplate either poetry or poetic images. If one does this, one quite often goes back to them later in the day to contemplate because they have entered the mind whilst it was still waking up, and in this state they can have a heightened effect on consciousness. [Here I am, later in the day, contemplating still.] Finally, after looking at most of the reproductions, (but in particular, the ‘Death, Knight and the Devil’,

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‘St. Jerome’ with it’s verso and ‘Hercules’,) I happen across one of the most prominent images to have entered my mind; ‘Melancholia I’. I have of course mentioned this image a number of times hence, but great art will not accept simple one-off contemplation; once it is in the mind it stays there and it continually works on you for the rest of your life. I have considered, incidentally, that there should be some kind of pantheon or harem where the greatest works of art are stored in the mind. The more is put there, the more you are being worked on and the better chance you have of intellectual emancipation. But this is just a thought; as an artist it is one’s duty to consider the role of art and its functions on consciousness and to always remain hopeful that someone out there is still making great art. Grass would have said something about the illegality of scepticism in our culture.) So I go and make my bowel-movement for a good five minutes and the whole while I consider this essay which, though scholarly in research, presentation and context also carries with it the poetic air of artistry, despite its great reliance on social-political analysis. I think to myself about my ‘opinions’ about science, society and culture as well as many other small things. I initially think that I should be ashamed of myself consigning all works of criticism to the rubbish-heap not having read all of them. Is this my great bowel movement? In my frustrating quest to desperately find some thing of beauty, meaning and worth in this empty and godless culture I exist in, the best I can do is to rid my guts of all the things that this culture has instructed to me as ‘valuable’. I genuinely could not see how a critic might produce something of worth out of an engraving, but somehow Grass has done this in me. But does this mean that my position about a great many things is shameful and wrong, or would Grass

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say that perhaps the sceptic has a richer enjoyment of art and melancholy because he always assumes the worst until, to his delight, he happens upon the best? [He does not actually say this, but I am not quoting; this is what is in my head at the moment, part his, part mine and hopefully, part yours now also.] I still value this position; I cannot say that all ‘critics’ are either worthless or worthwhile, though the projects of criticism and the attempt to found a new social order by reconfiguring the things from history into a form that can be adopted and exploited by our capital-hungry culture I am still entitled to find detestable; it is, to me, yet another ugly selfish trait of the human that cannot and does not wish to see past his or her own lifetime, cannot have an understanding of ‘good’ without the locus of ‘self’ in the equation and cannot understand in the context in which they were made that perhaps these works criticised contained this magical substance called ‘art’. I consider once again the project of the ‘Arts Council England’, a device set up by the government like a culture-propaganda machine that, as part of its project, disseminates the image of affluence, wealth, culture, (as in people have ‘culture’, have a good education,) and that art is not only for the rich and self-indulgent elite of London. This is fine myth-making to tell the truth and I have pondered this subject at length with my wife who, having seen the Agitprop system and then the Perestroyka system at work could indeed tell you that there is no difference; whatever name you choose for it, it is still propaganda. So we artists ask money of this ‘Council’ who shapes the image of art as it exists for people; if they give us money, we become part of their elite, (though they only give us money if they believe that we can fit nicely into their ethos,) and our future in the short-term of this government, this

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cultural symptom, is assured. If art is at the disposal of people who cannot see past the next election-term and, therefore, have no understanding of the ‘good’, then the art itself cannot be ‘good’. It can be nothing more than fodder for cultural critics, themselves mere symptoms of a transient and insubstantial culture that has no morals, ethics or purpose other than self-gratification and narcissism. Nothing is done lest it serves the self. This is the maxim of our culture; proof enough that God has gone underground.

So, are there value-makers out there who are working privately at breathing good, (or even bad,) into life, people born out of joint with time, people who are at once nauseated and entertained by the grim parody of contemporary life’s stage and the idiocy of the people ingratiated into it? How can I know, being as I am little more than a product of such a society? Can you not here the parody and quotation of the Bolshevik vocabulary in my words above, seeking to rise up from underground and utter that comic, shameful word ‘revolution’? I do not want a revolution, (in the words of our dear departed Stevie Hyper-D,) I want to sit and work hard. Fortunately, this culture permits such activity between work time if one has the discipline to disregard all of the distractions in the meantime. The same as with all cultures. Why do people go to expensive bars on a Friday night to spend their hard-earned? Easy come, easy go as Breugel would no doubt illustrate. You see, I am living in double-time; because there is no time in my reality, I can be both here and there simultaneously, I can be a Flemish proverb or a social critique. I can see the daily town life, which is also the arrival of Mary to the census in Bethlehem, which is also a stormy day in Leicester Square. I can see many things at once because I

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have noticed the disappearance of the cement of time to our seeing. Breugel saw the superimposition of time across time, as did Durer or any other poet of allegory. People like me enjoy struggle, but people like me enjoy harmony also. I can be whatever I want to be; but how do I know what I want? Is life a comedy or a tragedy? Or can it not be summed up in two words? I am quite able to see that all of the people around me have lived for aeons, have repeated this life for time immemorial and will continue to do so. Why is the Virgin in the Garden, if not that, when Jesus was born we could see a new Eden, the superimposition of time over time, reminding us that it is memory that comes and goes, not us and not time itself. Consider if you will Durer’s engraving entitled ‘The Temptation of the Idler’ (or the Dream of the Doctor.) Why does cupid attempt to stand upon stilts in the bottom-left hand corner of the image? Why; is there yet again another double-image at work again given the two very different titles? Cupid uses the tools of the stilts to stand higher. But he has wings; why does he need stilts? And what of the Doctor, (or Idler)? He uses his science… And the devil whispering into his ear; is this the inspiration of the epic poet, of Mohammed? Many ambiguous meanings abound, but there is always this struggle between the two sources, and often in Durer we need to discern between what culture tells us is a bad thing, ‘Idling’, that divine source of artistic inspiration ‘Melancholy’, the truth inherent in folk tales ‘The devil makes light work for idle hands’, etc. And then one must juggle the artistic attraction and significance of a work that stimulates multiple and constantly multiplying meanings, (Bergman’s ‘Persona’ a good example,) and then the obviously de Sadean pleasures taken by our historians who constantly renegotiate and recombine historical artefacts until the combination

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suits them best. I looked at the article previous to Grass’ in the Durer catalogue and flicked through a number of paragraphs. It was about the employment of Durer’s image and ideal onto the rubberstamp of German ‘cultural identity’, (a phrase that I have now heard so often that familiarity has bred contempt.) It focussed especially on the Nazis because, as we all know, the Nazis were Germany’s most significant cultural contribution in the past five hundred years (?) I read with distaste how this scholar, (in the true sense that I can see him in his library, carefully selecting his sources and his quotations, including intelligently picked photographs to accompany his very worthy article,) casually skirted any notion that there was art in Durer’s works; he was simply a cultural icon. This is the problem when art history PhD’s are handed out on a plate to anyone who knows how to quote appropriately; we get art History with no art. I read recently this enormous scholarly book on da Vinci, a book that obviously had taken a great many years, a lifetime in fact of research into da Vinci and his work, particularly the technical and scientific aspects of his work and how it had been conserved. The book opened with a tawdry account of how da Vinci had been arrested for buggery. Even art historians are not unfamiliar with the tabloid techniques of selling through gossiping! Why not simply write something that shows you had been inspired by spending a lifetime in the company of da Vinci? Is the only justice or the only fruit of such a relationship a dirty tale of sodomy; what a pathetic little man. The inset of the book reads “Pietro C. Marani, co-director of the restoration of The Last Supper and a pre-eminent expert on Leonardo’s life and works, provides a comprehensive survey of the paintings, establishing their probable dates and sequence, and

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determining which…yawn…” Who dares to profess themselves an ‘expert’ in such a field as another man’s life, let alone the obvious fact that this man has spent his entire life working with da Vinci, as if in his workshop, and learned everything except that one thing that makes da Vinci great. People like this are a dreadful disease on all of the rest of us, for they convey the meaninglessness of their own lives so eloquently and with great authority over the rest of us, especially when they have the privilege of such employment which is too easily squandered on ‘scholars’.

What is the meaning of the end of the above, provocative paragraph? Were signor Marani to read it he would surely either leap to his defence or not honour me with a reply. People are predictable in this way; they spend too great a time in crafting the image of themselves in the eyes of others and spend too long asserting to other people that they are ‘right’ in what they do, what they say and what they think. This is a preoccupation of our people that hinders our insight into great art; we ourselves always interfere with our ability to see. Perhaps this is the reason why art in our age has become merely a pursuit of the moneyed, leisured classes, or those who seek to ‘culture’ themselves on a Sunday, (which makes me recall a historical titbit along the lines of the reason of the council of London for opening the national gallery – to stop working class men from drinking and fornicating on a Sunday.) What worries me a little is that, when you go into one of these public galleries, funded by the Arts Council propaganda machine, one not only sees what they want you to see, but they also tell you what to think with the insulting little plaques on the walls that one of their ‘scholars’ or ‘art historians’ has spent a wasted life trying

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to figure out for you. Is this how to be cultured; by allowing the authoritarian intelligentsia, (a self-fulfilling prophecy to be sure,) to inject thoughts into your head so that they become your thoughts? No wonder the pub is such a popular option on a Sunday; now one can go to the pub after the art gallery and discuss what one has read on the wall. And me, dogmatic and opinionated and conceited as ever, sits here and wonders in his private and quite stupid domain why it is that I have spent the whole morning attempting to ridicule a particular art historian, having succeeded only in ridiculing myself? Is it my inadequacy against a person of greater learning than myself, a person who knows how to write ‘proper’? Ah; but writing is not my domain – it is thinking. Do I know how to think ‘proper’? Does he? I only write because it is the closest thing I have in this world for communicating my thoughts onto you, and show you that it is alright to think what one thinks and that one need not ‘justify’ what one thinks when one makes it public, no matter how preposterous one’s thoughts are. They are only thoughts; they are little more than nothing and certainly not something to get upset about. Perhaps I succeeded in demonstrating to you at my own expense the thought that thought itself is the only hindrance that we have in this life, the most preposterous and naughty by-product of evolution?

I am glad for my own sake that I am able to jettison such toxic waste from out my brain and onto page without having to think twice about it. I am not really at all concerned with what other people are doing, but I am concerned with my bad attitude toward them; perhaps they are competition to me, and in my own way this stance that I have take in developing my own self-worth away from

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academia and social acceptance is my animal way of marking out my own territory with my own piss and then defending it by roaring a little. I am just musing; to think that I could sum up what I am doing so easily is a sore temptation, for I wish I could do it and pout an end to such awful temptation and anguish, but alas I am destined to continue onward toward the horizon of death in the way mapped out for me by my predecessors and my contemporaries. I am the idle doctor today; I sleep for ten hours at a stretch and then, still in my night robe I work and desire to go and lay down again. But it is better to do something and mean it than to do something through obligation to that thing called your desired self-image? Such questions as these recur through my text like ink dropped on one leaf has stained all of the others underneath; I will show you that, just as in your thoughts, the same things repeat, an infinite variation on an old theme, and that it is neither something to be ashamed of or something to be resolved. It simply is; it has been built into your character, into your person and by what or who is under constant revision in both your head and mine, but the simple fact remains that it is there and what you do with it is your choice, (despite the possibility that there may be no choice.) Consider if you will that one thinker argues for free human will, the other argues for human determinism. What is the point of this debate; if you believe a thing and can argue it does it make it so? If humans are free or if they are not free, why would you debate it? Surely if you believe a thing to be true you would not be concerned about proving it to other people, would you now? But some people feel the need to argue these things because deep inside the possibility exists that they may be wrong; not wrong about the answer, but wrong altogether. Such a question demonstrates an

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incompleteness in the human soul, and such people as myself feel the need to try and fill that hole with all sorts of things; shopping, writing books, playing sport, etc. None of us is any closer, despite whether your argument is ‘convincing’. Reality cannot be convinced no matter how infallible your logic. So, I say again that it is not that our position, our belief or our argument is wrong; it is we that could be wrong. Do not forget this the next time you are in an argument trying to prove yourself to be right, trying to prove to yourself that you are right, because you know deep inside how wrong you are. In all respects.

In some paradoxical way can you see how the above ‘argument’ tries to be right by showing how wrong it is? It is therefore certain that this ex-Christian sensibility in being just is deeply ingrained into everything. How does one change it? Unless I evict all of this junk, this whole scrap heap of ages and history and cultures from myself, how can I ever be ready and seasoned to accept God back into my heart? A lot of changes need to take place inside of this mind, body and soul before it has been forged straight on the anvil. There is the neurosis in the mind, the toxicity of the body and the nihilism of the soul. But have I not merely been inducted into the health cult that abounds today, the one that considers the ‘health’ of the organism and the society to be paramount, as though the sick and the diseased could not be admitted into this middle-class heaven unless it get its fat arse on a treadmill? Why do people use this ‘treadmill’ device; surely it is a terrible and fear-inducing contraption, or are we looking at the flagellation before the purity, the torture and penance before the soul is fit and ready?

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[I apologise that the last sentence was not finished; I slipped into a fantasy.]

I have no apologies for this laziness; I have come back to the ‘Melancholia I’ via a very strange and twisted route and now I can see that I am not apologetic for my dogmatism or my aggression. I can do whatever I like because it seems everyone else does. The artist may be melancholic and prone to idle trances and flights of fancy, but he can do so if he wishes. In fact, this whole rigmarole of life which is a constant complex of what can I/what can’t I/what should I/what could I/what is/what isn’t, etc could easily be dispensed with or dispatched if one saw the light leading into the darkness. There is a principle I remember in Pliny; ‘No one here will comfort you.’ Either that, or it is ‘Everyone here is responsible.’ Or maybe it was not Pliny; in fact, I think I just made it up.

‘No Dimension’ is the title of this book, part two of the ‘Le Grand Jeu’. What do you believe I wish to say about a book without dimension? Is it that I have no depth or infinite shallowness? Or is it that nothing is left unsaid and hence, there is no other angle, no place for revision? Would you have asked this question had I not written this paragraph? I suppose this is the boon of the writer in that he or she credits him or herself with the ideas that occur in other people’s brains even though this masterpiece that he is assisting in co-writing he shall never see; it is someone else’s reality and all he can do is struggle on inside of his own cave. I can only tell you that he is struggling inside of his cave because here I am, in my cave, struggling away, although no one can say whether

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this struggle will amount to anything of any worth, not even a mention in the history is books is in my desire. How shall I describe for you this desire that lurks in my body but has yet to be uttered by another human being? What is it that I have gone to such great lengths and labours to try and say and have dedicated my entire life’s project and labour to say? Do I even know it, or is there nothing to utter at all? Perhaps all that I have sought to say, past all of these arduous, confusing and misleading words was – nothing.

What is the disguise that I am using here? It looks as though everything that I am saying is right out in the open and naked, (because of my common vocabulary and coarse way of vocalising conceptual items,) but I am not so averse to employing a few masks and games to hide my meaning, though the guise of confession, as Augustine would no doubt have admitted, (he would have had to have admitted, for he was the great confessor,) is the most convincing disguise of all; even the wearer is convinced by it. So, is this confession or is this poem, or is it art or gay science, or am I, as the person making it, the last person that should be asked to reveal such information? You yourself are more than likely better situated that I to pass comment about this subject, and you also probably knew how this particular book ended before I did. I’m glad that I can be so predictable; it makes life less arduous for myself and for my readers.

I think that everyone should try to do good.

[Microsoft Word spellchecker tried to replace the above word ‘good’ with ‘well’. Even my computer, that I have spent over a

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year writing with, has learned nothing from me and merely gives up this testament of the grammatical incorrectness of ‘doing good’. You would think that, listening closely to me and recording all of my works like a good scholar…]

What I was trying to illustrate is that simple phrases like ‘go out and do something good’ actually have a life-changing meaning, but would you change your life to go out and do good? We should experiment with this new ‘doing good’ idea:

Idea:

At exactly midday everyday, everyone should cease doing what they are doing, (regardless of what they are doing, even if it is already considered by them to be ‘good’,) and do something that they consider to be good. Just one action of goodness multiplied by the billions of people in the world for one minute everyday would make the world ‘good’, regardless of what each and every person considered to be good or not. Regular practice of do-goodery would lead to experimentation in good-doing and hence, the collective understanding of do-goodery would be expanded, renewed and reunderstood each and every day. This sacred moment should not be moderated by anybody but should rather be popularised throughout the media which thus far has yet to find a decent purpose. Not only this, but we would also come to understand wrong-doing as a practise in itself and equally as sacred, hopefully bringing richness into both concepts through daily practise.

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Every once in a while you need someone who can point out the obvious to you, some plain-talking person who can see through all of the knots, lies, traps and delusions that you have made for yourself and tell you what you cannot tell yourself. Culture and society also need something like this also; at some point we get fed teeth with deceptive, treacherous egotists and require something selfless to remind ourselves that we are not the centre of the universe, that something good can be done that does not in any way benefit the self. I spoke before about the impossibility of the charitable act in that, because the one making the act benefits from a sense of righteousness and a feeling of having done good, this kind of charity always falls short of selflessness; the self leaves its characteristic and triumphal stamp all over the act, making it little more than self-gratification. But this is idealistic; the person to whom the act is geared, because they too are concerned about themselves, feel that this kind of charity, self-to-self, is the best kind of charity because they stand to benefit from it. There is always a vested interest in it. But this act must still be done, despite all of the nausea of selfishness inherent in everything that we do, we must grit our teeth and do this thing called charity and then, only then, have we overcome the self that we see in everything; we overcame our own sense of self disgust and did the thing, the dirty deed of charity that only benefits selves. But can one come into a sense of what is good by, perhaps, saving someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life? Perhaps killing a person is better than not killing a person? How do we know these things unless we have done them, and would anyone be able to prove to this to themselves, let alone want to prove this to themselves? God is not telling us what is good any more, but society does not want us to kill anyone either, (or perhaps a few

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people to keep the public scared and to bring more money into the home office,) but in general, no one wants to kill anyone, (except when there is a war, because there are always [enemy] casualties in war.) In fact, what the fuck am I saying? Society, at least at the higher levels, is quite happy for killing to happen! Media people, newspaper and television people love it when some child gets murdered because it sells infinitely more newspapers than when a woman successfully gives birth or when someone helps an old person across the street. There’s me sitting here trying to understand good when it seems everyone else stands to profit from it, even those people who relish these ‘atrocious’ stories in the papers under the false mantle of ‘Isn’t it terrible?’, or ‘This never used to happen in the old days!’. Rubbish. Murder, as any Christian would tell you, is the oldest human activity, even before love, and it will continue indefinitely. A little common sense would be wonderful right now; a politician who could stand up and say ‘Killing is bad; we will never go to war again.’ This will never happen. The nausea, the nausea…

Cat and mouse, cat and mouse, (as a character in a film I once saw repeated to himself, caught very much in the same dreadful confusion as I currently am, caught in the human confusion erected in the cloud between divine good and diabolical evil.) Things are not so bad; my troubles first arose when I tried to present my case in the manner of a goodly and liberal philosopher, one who is willing to entertain various notions in order to strengthen his conviction. But I am no such man; I need no ‘reason’ to assert what is good and what is not, for I know deep down in the genius of my species. I am like Bosch; at one moment at home in the diabolical

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and confusing fantasies of a nauseating hell on earth, and at the other moment flying with ease through a divine meditation on Christ’s passion. But I should not employ the tactics of other persons; I have no use for logic or rhetoric, for I am taking dictation from out the top my brain wherein the toxic thoughts allowed to fester for millennia are beginning to rise, purging my soul from all of their confusing takes on reality. At some point they will all be gone, and I shall be liberated in the manner that God sees fit. Only through work, through this nauseous confusion where everything on earth is taken for granted and then cast into otherworldly doubt, and the saved from the flames by a crystalline light emanating from divine illumination that is at the heart of the human soul will cause this change to come about. God tells me this quite clearly right now, quite clearly even though, moments ago I could hear the devilish whisper in my ears, seen through the dream of reality, calling me to awaken.

This is how we should utilise our devils; as messengers from God, as angels telling us the way even though we have caused them in our confusion to appear as devils, as fallen angels.

I love God and I know that He loved me all along, though to me it always appeared like wrath, like hatred, punishing me like He punished all of us; with confusion. I am stricken to contemplate this notion of confusion because my wife is painting what appears to be the tower of Babel, because there is a book of Bosch lying on the kitchen table, because there is a print of ‘The Dream of the Doctor’ in the kitchen, etc. I can see symbols coming a mile away, and this

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particular conjunction, if I have seen them even remotely correctly, are telling me this:

At a concert recently, Mahler’s ninth symphony, a latecomer came to sit next to us after the first movement. When this fat lady sat next to us with her four-year old son, she instantly began coughing and rummaging though her handbag. This pissed me off to the extent that I told her to quit with the handbag, which she did, but unfortunately, (or fortunately,) she coughed her way right through the painful and consciousness-expanding diminuendo at the end of the last movement, the first pre-Cageian ‘orchestral silence’ to be heard, where our hearing is pushed into the infinite, beyond sound, up to the infinite point of God. But she could not stop coughing, so I left the auditorium pretty well fucked-off. On the way home though, I remember my thoughts on the perfection of the moment. I suddenly see the larger picture, that this was all part of God’s infinitely large symphony, although my feeble senses were struggling with all their might to reach Him through the vehicle of the ninth symphony, whereas the lady’s cough was stretching the horizon of my conscious capacity to know God even further. His voice, Zarathustra the hammer, was right there as clear as day, coughing. I could see the hand of God right there in front of me, sat next to me, and I was part of this symphony with all of my thoughts and perceptions at that time, the ninth symphony forming part of a metaphor for the experience I was about to realise. Even my annoyance formed part of this music, and I felt well good after all of this, having understood with divine patience the struggle of the person to come to terms with that which is larger than himself, and his ability to perceive beyond his ego, and that God is everywhere,

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at all times, in all things, despite whether we are wont to perceive Him as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

Is this merely a gratuitous chain of memories, or is there some poetry, even philosophy at work beneath them, as a character in Fellini’s consciousness is attempting to tell him in 8 ½, which of course, because it is a conscious movie, the thought of this thought is included in the movie in order to create that sliding staircase that descends and ascends simultaneously into the infinite point of the Absolute. The wider the consciousness is stretched, sometimes by taking what is for granted and tossing it into the meat-grinder, the more often the consciousness comes to perceive infinity around it; at first it is manifest in great art, but then it is manifest in infinite ‘small’ things that are occurring at all times and have been occurring and will be occurring for all time. This is the truth of the expanded consciousness that can pass the infinitely massive thought of God through the tiny portal of the mind, the eye of the needle, the mountain to Mohammed. It is there more and more, as is the confusion which also stretches to accommodate the new dimensions of the inside of the mind. We must allow it to all flow together, mixing varied and wild colours into the perception of the universe, must allow our personality to meld its way into the fabric of the conscious and material world.

Our desire to acquire territory; from where did it come and to where is it going? When the human was an animal, (and some insist that he and she still is,) the human would mark out territory for the safety of the family and later, tribe, and to have ground upon which to hunt and forage. Like other animals of this kind, for example,

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cats, urine or faeces would be used to delineate such territory, but in the human animal the sense of smell was not quite so well developed, (hunting was conducted with the eyes and ears mostly,) so the human began to make walls and countries instead. This led to the birth of the modern world where humans had created for themselves a kind of super-nature where they would live twice as long as they should, would breed because they ‘wanted’ to or by ‘accident’, (not because of a natural urge to maintain the species,) would defend territory out of ‘principle’, ‘greed’ or ‘jealousy’, would stop hunting except for ‘sport’ and would instead begin farming because things called ‘regimes’ would be needed to maintain the hugely outsized population that we ‘wanted’ or that was an ‘accident’. This was all caused by the gentlemen and ladies, (formerly men and the women, (even more formerly, males and females, (and even even more formerly, without names at all,)) who invented the concept of property when a man or woman would consider one another to be ‘theirs’. In this modern society built by ladies and gentlemen, this species would move around using ‘cars’ which were used in three ways. Firstly, they were used to propel people around faster than their legs would carry them in order to keep up with other people and the accelerated super-nature. Secondly, they could be used to escape other people who wanted to kill them, in wars for example. And thirdly, they could be used for a thing called ‘leisure’, which was where work had been given away to other people without a ‘car’, and where there was an empty space in life to be filled. Gradually, this ‘leisure’ became more and more widespread until even those people in the lowest social caste, the Irish for example, would have time for ‘leisure’, because all of the work would have been moved overseas for people in Africa to

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do. As the more ‘developed’ tribes in Europe and America had finally given all of their work most kindly to the Africans, Asians and South Americans to do, they found themselves to be a little spare, and began ‘trading’ and ‘mining’ out of a nostalgia for the lost work, and they called this behaviour ‘sport’, as it was only the most leisured classes who could go ‘mining’ on a Sunday. They even wore traditional, but expensive protective clothing for ‘mining’ which could only be bought on Pall Mall.

Idea:

If we, collectively and as a species, decided to remove all borders from our world, this fake supernatural territory that we, as ‘advanced’ beings, should no longer have any use for, then would not we come to own the entire world? This is the Biblical ‘meekness’. A man or woman decides to acquire a piece of territory and to defend it. Another person tries to take it and they fight over it. This is not suitable behaviour for supernatural beings such as humans. If we all decided to remove the borders, we would all own all of the world, not the slightest and smallest parts of it, no? Humans do not have this kind of logic because they are still governed by ‘jealousy’ and ‘greed’; these two drives govern the ability of the human to transcend above the hangover of his or her ‘nature’. Because of ‘jealousy’ and ‘greed’, humans have the smallest possible ambitions; ‘I wish to own Switzerland as opposed to the whole world!’ To me, this sounds a trifle silly and of an extraordinarily low ambition. On top of this, no war should be needed to ‘get’ this entire territory, for we would necessarily all be each other’s subjects. But because the human is still governed by

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the lowest paranoid drives that display his or her inability to come to terms with the phenomenon or supra-evolutionary characteristic of ‘consciousness’, he or she cannot do such common sense and ‘selfless’ things. Humans go to war because they need a supernatural way of keeping the species under some kind of control. Humans are too frightened of ‘Peace’ because they know that the consequences of ‘Peace’ on the earth would lead to ecological catastrophe. In order to make the realisation of ‘Peace’ and many other abstract things of which the human race can as yet just ‘fantasise’ about and barely ever ‘conceptualise’, he or she must actively seek to expand the ‘territory’ of the inner self, the space of consciousness; this overcoming must take place inside as well as outside, in the same way that, at present, we battle inside of ourselves and hence, we battle with each other too.

Will I look mad if I say; ‘Let us bring Peace to each other by being peaceful. Let us bring Peace to our Being, and hence we will thereafter bring Peace to each other.’

Those amongst us who are weak in the mind will naturally say that human nature will not permit such ‘Peace’ to ever occur, because it is against human nature to be peaceful. A person who says this has the lowest ambitions for his or her species and for him or her self and is governed by the lower passions which are born from ‘selfishness’. Selfishness arose in the human being when both he and she realised that they were a self; this happened when the human organism became self aware at the end of the evolutionary process. Because we are still maladjusted to this product of evolution, this self-consciousness, we are still ‘selfish’, everything

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is tied up in our fascination with what we are and hence, our cultures and our societies have been built around self-interest. But those of us who have truly explored the inner confines of the self and have come to realise the possibilities of consciousness beyond self-interest are aware that there are higher ambitions that those which arise out of self-interest. The way in which we understand ambition at present is the desire to promote oneself through the existing social order, as a signifier of the will to achieve and to elevate oneself. In reality, is it a high ambition to realise oneself as the boss of one’s business, or to realise the divine aspect in the human that can Know and Be Peaceful? Any stupid person can have such low ‘ambition’ to own a sports car or to travel around the world or to be a millionaire. Material things are available in the material realm and this ought to be painfully obvious. And as the self has grown up in this material realm, so too has it come to shape its desires around the material realm, culminating in the notion that ambition, achievement and success are related only in the ability to be selfish to the highest possible human degree. Those of us that have known the wider parameters of human consciousness and its landscape have also known that the self cannot bring good, that the self can only exist in despair at stunting its own ability to transcend toward its new heritage. Jealousy of the self, greedy to maintain its own poxy little territory, will only ever bring despair, because part of consciousness knows that it can be so much more, that it can indeed become conscious beyond self, beyond self consciousness and selfishness, and thus the human who’s ambition is only set at the material realm of self-gratification can only ever live in existential anxiety. This is why the world at large is also in a terminal state of despair.

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So, in what way can I be said to have access to this knowledge about the human species? Upon what authority do I speak and with what evidence or logic do I fortify my claim?

You are already in the possession of the answer that I would give to this type of questioning; I do not understand this kind of questioning. This type of reason or logic is not for me, it appears instead to be a kind of justification, a requirement of proof, or some other ‘need’ borne out of a mind that itself is not convinced of its own existence, abilities and ambitions. If I had a lower ambition then I too would buckle to such pick-axes against a weakened stance. But this is not a stance, I am making no stance. I am speaking about what I know, I will not defend it or justify its existence. Ask yourself for what reason one needs justice for one’s ideas and opinions, for what reason one must defend one’s position, as though it were paramount to the conviction that one is indeed alive and has the right to live? One’s pseudo-natural reaction to this kind of claim is to attack it, chip away at it until what is left is so suitably in your own image like a sculpture that you may call it ‘truth’. This is the selfish drive of the lower mind, the lowest ambition; if one was concerned with what I was saying, you would not attempt to convert it into accordance with your own self-image, you would not be so selfish. And neither would you do the ‘opposite’ and say that my claim was ‘right’, to entertain the possibility of it containing truth, because this would be another attempt at finding your self inside of what I have said, as though nothing in the world can be known unless it is brought into line with the self and its image. This is the life of analogous narcissism,

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pathological narcissism. One must assume, (once one has been exposed to this awesome knowledge,) that the whole world is you, that you are in everything because your fractalised paranoiac superhuman powers have put your self in everything, as though the self were a cancer that spread into all things you look upon. Then you realise that this perception of your self is also another perception of the self in all things! The problem lies at the heart of this kind of consciousness, because this self-looking that occurs at all times and at all moments is completely pathological. Does this perception of the self as a self-perception constitute some kind of awakening, a paradoxical knot at the heart of the conscious mind that permits some kind of schism to occur, some jarring of the perceptual faculties to look at the self looking at itself, to remove oneself from out the eyes of narcissus and into the voice of echo, the true voice of the infinite? I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know exactly what it is, other than the depth of perception is suddenly magnified to an enormous degree, and one is able to look at oneself with some kind of different eyes, (though at this remove one is still looking at the self.)

Have you realised what the parts of my vocabulary correspond to? Are they the new organs of my perceptual apparatus, or are they part of a new organism that lives and breathes in words, just as before my conscious and unconscious mind was made out of language, now it is all written down to make room for something else, a new hand at work which pops out of the clouds with a cup in its hand. Do not assume that I am thinking at all when I am writing this, because I am not thinking. There is not even an author to this text, for I am simply a pure consciousness just like yours except mine looks written down and yours is trapped in your head. Both of

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them are looking at themselves. The magnitude of freedom that I discover in being written down is huge; my life has changed so drastically, for now I can look at the image of what I am through words, and I can look at the words through the image of what I am; I have two consciousnesses for your single one, and they are both beginning to help one another, the usefulness of the self-conscious mind is now being explored and therefore this is no book, but an experiment in the widening of the conscious horizon. Which part of me has made this claim? Is it the me written in this book, (because at first glance it would appear so because that is where you first learned this piece of knowledge,) or should one assume that appearances are deceptive and that really this knowledge came out of your desire to read this book and to interface with another consciousness that has taken on a more tangible medium than that of ‘brain’. Does this make you feel confused or does it make you content? Shall I tell you what this makes you? This is creation; the traps of the new poetic consciousness is able to create beyond itself and out into the medium of your mind; this ‘book’ is a crystal ball wherein ‘you’ can interface with ‘me’, to the point where the you and the me are synonymous, the same thing, interchangeable. What secrets does this portal between minds contain unless you are willing to ask it? You must ask all things, and if there is God in all things, one should feel free to ask Him what you want to know. The mind that has a grasp ahold of and which has perceived, as if only in the shimmer of a trout in a stream, the higher ambition that is self beyond self, will not be too afraid to hold its tongue for a moment and to ask out into the nothing what it longs to hear:

‘It’s own voice as it actually Is’.

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Once one has perceived self in all things, (and in our lower conscious mind we see this but as a selfish understanding of the world because of our greed, lust and envy,) one is then not afraid any longer to approach the idea and the first meeting with God, (who was resent the whole time, and this first meeting constitutes the first time you are willing to acknowledge Him as You,) which, as any lower mind is willing to hide from you, is suddenly not shameful and is no longer embarrassed. Lower minds are too shy to consider God from out of fear, but this is not the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;God-fearingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; we always hear about and about which nobody really knows, (for as with all things divine, all things, there is the knowledge for and by the lower self, and there is knowledge for and by the higher self.) To fear God is to Love God, and nothing more or less than that. The lower mind will reflect its fear of Fear when it attempts to contemplate the understanding of fear; fear of hell, fear of the Almighty, fear of damnation, fear of being brought face to face with your sins, etc ad infinitum. The higher mind reflects, but perceives its reflecting and reflection at the same time, both of them becoming synonymous with God as all things, including fear. Fear is the opposite of Love in the confused mortal mind. In the higher mind, the mind shared with God, Fear and Love are synonymous; they are name and number of God Himself. The word Fear flushes out Fear, although the selfish mind will not perceive this de-toxifying process but will instead become fearful, unable to see beyond what fear feels like to its sense of selfishness. The unselfish mind that is housed in the mantle of God will Fear God because it Loves God because it is both things, and this constitutes a divine wisdom and a great Good. In this world, the wider the

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consciousness, the more Good can get into it. The narrower the consciousness, the less good can get into it and the more enshrouded in darkness it is, (and this ‘darkness’ is the real meaning of evil, evil does not mean Satan or evil or the other things we have reflected it to mean, it merely means without light, ignorant.) Heaven and Hell are the same ‘place’, but one, which is characterised by the self, its ignorance and its selfishness, looks evil, (because all it can see in it is its self, its bad parts, its godlessness,) and reflects all of the fears of the self onto it’s concept. This is Hell; the fallen Heaven in the mind of the fallen person. The enlightened person cannot see a Hell, because all that he or she can see is God everywhere and not just the pale reflection of a terrified self in the world, alone and anxious. It is you your self that creates either Heaven or Hell, in your aspect of creation. One who is utterly good cannot conceive of bad, cannot create a hell for there is no bad in this beautiful and divine world. One who cannot see good anywhere, who can only see selfishness, who can only see fear reflected all about him or herself in his or her self, cannot create Heaven inside of this awful reality and hence cannot know good, God or Heaven. You are either Heavenly or Hellish in what you are, and this is the creation and realisation of reality in either the higher or lower minds, the enlightened or the conceited minds.

The lower self will always pretend to know itself better than any other mind knows itself, will always try to imprint itself time and time again upon the world and upon its knowledge of the world. This is how the lower mind comes to know itself; by constant reminder of what it thinks it is; it shouts and drowns out all the other noise. And when there is silence it cannot abide by it, it must

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shout again and again until there is only the sound of its own voice abroad, and this is Hell on earth; the place where the self thinks it knows what it is and tries to demonstrate this. Demon-strate. The higher mind can abide the silence and also the noise that emanates from the self and all other selves because it is in tune to the great harmony of God and creation. It does not sound like noise. Because it knows that it is everything, because it knows that it is God, it has no need to reinforce this fact upon itself, and therefore has no need for noise whatsoever.

This is the voice, this voice right here written in black and white, which is both celestis et diabolis, that is all things all at once, and were my hands permitted to type as fast as God was able to put these thoughts through my mind, I should have written a whole volume of truth thus far. But I am able to swing from enlightenment to confusion without too much difficulty, and this is the way it is. I am still all in knots, which is why I still write. Were I emancipated into the kingdom of heaven I would be silent and contemplative. But part of the sadness and longing of the material world still effects me and I am wont to lend voice to the divine thoughts and convey them outwards with hope that in someone there might be a domino toppling; that would save me from this wretchedness of knowing but not doing. So I work dedicatedly in my lair, disregard the whole world in one way and care for it in another. At least I can work. You have, no doubt perceived both clarity and confusion in my thoughts, have you not? But then again, I did hope to paint a balanced and harmonious picture. Some of you will have liked the good parts and dislike d the bad parts; this demonstrates to yourself the narrowness of your mind, the

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confusion that you are in. The awakened ones amongst you will see that it is both good and bad that constitutes God, and hence the larger mind will allow all of this wisdom to pass through the mind without inspecting its quality first. The larger mind will allow more and more things through it until everything passes through it. This is Heaven, divine realisation. The lower mind will begin to extract things, pervert the unity of the universe, systematise things, reorganise things, criticise things, divide things, and this is when you know that you are still hellish in your knowledge. Unity is union with God, division is division with God. Some minds also pretend to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;knowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; this, and say I am aware of this, but somehow I am not yet done with this confusion. The most confused mind believes that it can straighten out this confusion on the world, and this also is Hell on earth.

The awakened mind, as I just said, perceives unity, perceives the universe as a single thought in which the mind, contained by its own thought as in the Moebius strip, passes itself through itself, the second stage of Mohammed, sees all things as itself and itself as all things, a divine singularity, and this is the thought the size of God, this is God as perceived and perceiver, this is Enlightenment.

Can your mind grasp this divine paradox? That the thought of the self as all things, including that thought itself as the thought of all things, is the thought the size of God, the mountain, the camel through the eye of the needle, the divine realisation, Heaven?

This realisation has just this minute come into me; it was realised right as you are reading it on this page, and if you are willing to let

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go of your self and to journey with me, to accept these words as your own and become identical to them, then you too, by following this path of mine through the maze of consciousness, will attain this divine realisation of all things as singular. Why would you not experiment? What is there to lose except your…what? Self? And what is that? If somebody handed to me on a plate the answer to everything, I would also turn up my nose and think ‘poppycock’ to myself. This is because I am you, I am your voice in your mind written on paper. I too looked gift-horses in the mouth because I was yet to ever experience any charity that was not inherently selfish in origin and execution. If your small mind does not want it, if it wants to maintain its tiny territory in favour of meekly inheriting everything, it will call the thing ‘silly’ in order to put you off the scent. The next time that this happens to you, the next time you decide not to accept something into your conscious mind as a ‘good’, you will remember me. This is because I am art, and despite whether you decide now that you like me or not, the artfulness of this book is already in your brain; it was there and it was working on you the whole time, waiting to break you up and shatter you on the inside in order to let some light in. And at first you will feel confusion, the remnants of the self as conceit, conceiving all things as small, knotted, conceited things. Then you might sit and think a long while about a great many confusing things. And if this anguish all becomes a little bit much for you, then read this part of me again and I promise you that what at first reading sounded hostile and conceited will, on the second, third, forth reading sound like what I am; your best friend, your father, your good conscience, etc. A conceited person could not bring themselves to say what I have just said, for they would be too

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embarrassed to do so. Only the absolutely humble person can exclaim what they are without the self creeping in and spoiling it.

The wind blows and the green parts of the tree are shaking and yet we would not say that the tree is afraid, would we? For the longest time were we peoples told to focus upon the emotions as the place of our release. But soon that new-born babe of guilt had become a domineering bully to whom debts were paid willy-nilly and merely out of fear. Is there a person here without guilt in their bodies? And who can say what it is like to live without guilt, to have survived the Christian first-trauma in an age when we now appear before our eyes as self-indulgent and self-gratifying Romans? Who considers themselves to know the truth that is tied up and mixed up in the emotions, the truth that the emotions themselves are…what? I am mixed up here; I can see the answer to my problem on the horizon, on the wing and yet I cannot utter it because this flight of fancy has not yet taken place and I cannot enter into that sacred place where all knowledge passes through me like water in a stream. How can one access this place that I am in? Is it through the emotions, or is it through long and deeply concentrated meditation that one arrives there? I feel no emotion in that place; all I feel is content, the largest content possible, and then I must come back round to earth where I am not sad to return but must somehow convey this knowledge or at least record it for providence’s sake or for some else’s’ sake I am yet to realise. For pity’s sake? What is the meaning of this expression if not that one ought to do something on the behalf of pity? I have never understood the Christian expression of pity other than the idea that Christ was a model upon whom we are all modelled and we should pity him like we pity our selves.

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But I am not so sure as to the usage of this concept; why should anyone pity anyone if we do not know whether their hardship or joy is higher or lower than ours? I assert that indeed it is that all people are the same person that we ought to feel pride in the noblest sense as opposed to pity in the non-sense. I cannot pity anyone, not even myself because I know to well that I, as all people, have got it too good. We are alive, arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we? And yet we will die also, and I cannot see any need of pity in this world for it is perfect enough as it is. Pity does not bring two people closer together either; it merely serves to ingratiate oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sense of superiority over another. I know that what I am saying here is wrong and yet, I cannot understand why it is wrong. It is almost as if, with my capacity to give out joy, I find it more difficult to speak of woe and yet, it is the emotions that I am trying to explicate the value of and it is my own value that here suffers the blows of emotion for I am now complex, entangled in a sense of difficulty surrounding the emotions and pity. I can trust in myself to come to understand this given the correct circumstances, but the circumstances are always correct as I am wont to always exclaim. The only time when the circumstances will not be correct to make this kind of understanding will be when I am dead and there will be no emotion or understanding.

So I abandon this enquiry as I abandon everything right now. I am going to lie on the bed before I put my clothes on.

This realisation has just this minute come into me; it was realised right as you are reading it on this page, and if you are willing to let go of your self and to journey with me, to accept these words as

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your own and become identical to them, then you too, by following this path of mine through the maze of consciousness, will attain this divine realisation of all things as singular. Why would you not experiment? What is there to lose except your…what? Self? And what is that? If somebody handed to me on a plate the answer to everything, I would also turn up my nose and think ‘poppycock’ to myself. This is because I am you, I am your voice in your mind written on paper. I too looked gift-horses in the mouth because I was yet to ever experience any charity that was not inherently selfish in origin and execution. If your small mind does not want it, if it wants to maintain its tiny territory in favour of meekly inheriting everything, it will call the thing ‘silly’ in order to put you off the scent. The next time that this happens to you, the next time you decide not to accept something into your conscious mind as a ‘good’, you will remember me. This is because I am art, and despite whether you decide now that you like me or not, the artfulness of this book is already in your brain; it was there and it was working on you the whole time, waiting to break you up and shatter you on the inside in order to let some light in. And at first you will feel confusion, the remnants of the self as conceit, conceiving all things as small, knotted, conceited things. Then you might sit and think a long while about a great many confusing things. And if this anguish all becomes a little bit much for you, then read this part of me again and I promise you that what at first reading sounded hostile and conceited will, on the second, third, forth reading sound like what I am; your best friend, your father, your good conscience, etc. A conceited person could not bring themselves to say what I have just said, for they would be too

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embarrassed to do so. Only the absolutely humble person can proclaim what they are without the self creeping in and spoiling it.

So these past months have been filled with a great many things, although one of them was not writing. But of all those things was I still in meditation, was I still contemplating the same inconceivable problem; the problem of being what one is. And these thoughts existed in me like so many unsweetened fruits and were the most profound cause of my youthful bitterness. I was busy pruning hedges, labouring at the workplace of my employers, (who in part may have distracted me temporarily from this writing, but by no means blurred my focus from the object of contemplation.) But these things were not recorded in the same way as this book; they are to be found in excel documents, e-mails, hedgerows and memories of me and what my life was like to be when it was. The project continues and flourishes, although I am not always present to experience this, (as I might drift off into a daydream or an anxiety, or I might be lured into the swamp of my feelings, never to be seen again,) but part of my own method of negotiating and making worthwhile of this entire journey is its record. You shall only ever perceive glimpses of this, but there is an enormous document hidden away that contains the entire works of my life in it. This is called reality; the place where I am existing, and as you might find access to it in part thorough this writing, you are in fact able to open the entire edifice if you snoop long and deep enough, for I have given to you all of the necessary tools for entering into my consciousness and my reality, for mapping your own consciousness onto mine if you believe in yourself truly enough, and hence we can rejoin to be part of the same being if we are

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truthful enough to ourselves and to our truth. What is the point of living this life if you are unable to entertain the notion that you might be completely mislead to the nature of the whole thing? Much anguish and enlightenment resides down this path, all of which is brought about by the self because the self becomes the object of scrutiny. What is this peculiar thing for a self to look at a self, to be caught up inside of the matrix of looking which looks and is both looked at by the looker who is looking? I am constantly reminded of the beauties of life when I perceive my beautiful wife, for she is the embodiment of all these things. But so too am I reminded of the fears of life when I perceive my fearfulness, when I perceive anger in the weak, when I experience the painful joke that is life on earth. But this is continually sweetened by my ability to perceive it, to create it and create in it, to have this opportunity to create meaning for myself without needing to find the paths of others who have left scraps and bits of meaning cast off along the wayside, leading your good self astray in the guise of the correct and well-trodden path. The path laid down before you by the prophet, father, mother, teacher or any other person is not the path for you; it is false because someone else is walking along it, and you shall never find your way if you are doing it their way. And this is not their way either, because you have perceived it as such; your own path is obscured by your strange matrix of looking. How crazy is this? This is the most bizarre testament to the confusion of human kind on earth; why did we ever come to this planet when we could have easily remained in the ether for all eternity as a singular consciousness without the need of the organism? And, when we are in the deepest trance, the most profound meditation, we once again rejoin this consciousness in the universe and depart our allocated

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organism, and we then experience the deep melancholy of the fakir, who always must return to the body having experienced the truth that exists beyond it. But in melancholy I do not say sadness, for it is this distant stare of the melancholic that constitutes his pilgrimage to the truth beyond the world of lies and confusion. To be in this loneliness is to be the hermit inside of the cave, but to enter into the state of true singularity [solitude] is to rejoin the commonwealth of the spirit of God, the entire communion. I am here with everyone, though it may appear that in my distant gaze I was sad and in loneliness. I am lonely, but in loneliness, (to be lonesome and distant,) I have an equal measure of happiness and sadness; when mixed this profound concoction can produce the most astonishing enlightenment, to realise the meaning of what it is to be happy and sad, to be alone and yet with all people, to be the body but only in that it is there, a thing like all other things, no better, no worse, merely a political conglomeration of molecules all stuck together like rice in sushi.

I am no better; after all of these months I am still in torpor, I have developed a twitch, a spasm in the muscles of my face and nose that react when the equilibrium is stressed. A lot of people are wont to say that cancer causes death, or heart attacks cause death, etc. But of cause of course, only life itself can produce death. I get the impression that many of the people around me are exactly the same way that I am; confused and yet consistently correct about everything, petty but generous in their own way, anxious yet hedonistic. And then I consider that, when I attempt to offer up some ideas or some hypotheses about these situations and how they might be either remedied or realised, I am merely ridiculed in the

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same, consistently righteous, way. How does one break through into a consciousness such as this? Does it react only to shocks or stimulants, (in that it is still firmly rooted by its imaginings to the organism,) or is there some more subtle and artful way of making contact? Perhaps, when one is completely unconcerned with other people and is merely treading the path of wisdom, one is also more likely to be noticed in one way or another. But if one is completely hermetic, one would not notice the behaviours of others towards you. Or perhaps if one is wont to pass this wisdom along the grapevine connecting consciousnesses, one is able to secrete such rhizomes in the root-structure of other minds as to cause a confusion of some other kind? This art may only be learned in the workshops and guildhalls of the hermetic alchemist-practitioner. It can only be learned in the mind. It can only be practised upon reality as a perceived notion. It is passed along the grapevine only because it has been formed of and is complicit with the methods of the interior reality, of this space which we made in here for and for the use of those strange pilgrims walking along our path, not merely out of a desire to follow, but because they are treading their own path which is, by coincidence, our own. The solstice is approaching although we have all the time in the world to reach this destination before the conjunction occurs. We then walk together in our loneliness, together only because we are apart, our hoods obscure our faces, (although we do not need to be identified here,) and we rejoice in the solemn atmosphere. This is the destination of the lover who has not become disillusioned; he or she has instead pushed further, deeper, harder inside of the vision, not penetrating, but becoming made of the same stuff as the vision. And inside of this vision made flesh, of the visionary becoming the

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vision and the vision becoming the visionary, of the material becoming spiritual and the spiritual becoming material, does the realisation of the name of God make its first appearance. How is this redoubling of the self inside a self inside a self, this Russian doll of infinity, (all the dolls are the same dimensions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; No Dimension,) becomes a name? Is it that in this space, where everything is everything else, where all things different are alike, do all words become their singular meaning? Is it that all words are simply the aliases of another word, one that is composed of all words and all meanings?

Marianna is now working opposite me on a large painting. We are in the living room together and we are able to work here without disturbing one another. The reason that we are able to do this is because we are working on the same thing, the same thing, though it appears that I am writing a book and she is making a painting. Then I turn around and say to her â&#x20AC;&#x153;We are in the living room together and we are able to work here without disturbing one another. The reason that we are able to do this is because we are working on the same thing, the same thing, though it appears that I am writing a book and you are making a painting.â&#x20AC;? She undoubtedly considers this in her own way, and here it is in this book; the whole episode was merely the writing and undoubtedly the same record exists in the painting. My wife is a perfect thing; I woke this morning and held her tightly because I am clinging to this beautiful reality. This is not a desperate attempt to cling to reality. I squeeze it tightly because I can and because it is gratifying to do so. My leg cramps hard and it sharply reminds me of the organism. But this is also a rejoice of its own kind, although to

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understand what I mean you would have to access my private chambers of thought of which shall never be published. I have awoken with a great many thoughts in my mind of late; of midnight raves in desolate fields, of anxieties and of joys. I dreamt of being at work and of running about the office shouting ‘What’s happening?” in my familiar way, and then of leaping into my colleague’s arms like Scooby Doo, the coward. This represented confusion, the confusion of life, of working for no direct reason, for doing without knowing why. Then I found myself in a beautiful field with a fuscia-coloured sky and with strange farm animals. The birds were lined up in the sky as though there was an invisible barrier keeping them all inside of my enclosure. This was my reality, the place that I can cultivate and metamorphose into something beautiful, the place that I can create and grow my own meanings and develop my own sustenance. A place of work where what you do has a meaning that is understandable, and this represents clarity of mind and of labour. In the third part of the dream I am in Sloane Square preparing to be married to Marianna. Kusia. I awake and I apologise profusely to Marianna for all of the things that I have done wrong to her regardless of which is which, but because I am profoundly wrong. I am also having a recurrent dream about climbing a very steep hill which is covered with grass and I need to cling to this grass to scale the side. And then I awake to the awesome truth that I am in bed with Marianna. And looking at her working at this painting has sparked off this reverie of mine.

I have been missing from my life for a great period of time. The first time that I felt alive and proud to be alive was when my grandmother died. And then I had been emptied of all romance

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shortly afterwards. But when I met Marianna she awoke me to the truth of goodness, of the possibilities of a life, of creating a genuinely good life, but I had to work for this to the extent that I had to split my whole self in two and cast-off the lesser half. It was as though I had an ideal self and an honest self, and I pursued the ideal self because Marianna was able to instil the impossible idea that it was achievable and a good thing. Most people believe that they ought to pursue the honest self, because idealism only ends in catastrophe. But these people cannot attain the peak of their ambition in the way that I am able.

And the story ends where neither myself and Marianna are able to quantify our feelings for one another and assume that we were the same person all along. Are feelings like flesh in that we can both inflict wounds upon it and caress it? I have often thought that we have our psychological states down hereon earth, such as fear, sadness, happiness, joy, but do those feelings correlate in a direct way with our movements in the angelic hierarchy? Would we have a greater understanding of our â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;feelingsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; if we were to meditate upon our higher selves, if we were able to conceptualise a dimension so different to the one where our bodies coincide? How is the realm of thought connected between the ethereal and the physical dimensions or is it paradoxically caught between the two in the middle of nowhere? Everyone has the same difficulties in their lives; the same problems, the same degree of happiness, etc. Is anybody else able to grasp the idea that we are all the same, that we are one unity that has been split into billions of pieces, damaged and in pain? But we are still in this unity, in the relation between molecules and their arrangements, their movements and directions.

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Two people climb to the top of Mount Everest. One person climbs on the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shoulders. I cannot improvise well enough to continue this game; my writing has developed into something quite ordinary, an everyday practise, and I want to continue to make it because it is the reality I have created, the garden that I must tend to and keep healthy. I wonder what it is like to be another person. Everyone has shared this thought, for it is quite a common one, common to self-reflecting half beings with half a thought seeking unity with the lost brother or sister. To think that all people on earth are engaged in the same reality and that none of them understand it at all, that none of them have discovered happiness or overcome their stupid selves and reached up toward infinity. That we have all become used to our stupidity and continue to reflect our selves endlessly in the hopes that the illusion will not disappear, but whilst we were looking at it we missed everything else. So I sit and hold my head in my hands and what does that achieve? Does it signify that I am in distress, that I am anxious and that I am in pain? Does it actually contain the properties of any of these things or is it merely for show to myself? Do these â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;feelingsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; even exist or are they merely words that mean nothing but that which it is to signify, meaning that the whole of reality was just words all strung together, one thing meaning another and another and so on. How are my blunt senses, the instruments of my faculties preordained to grasp even the first truth of the universe? If our maker had decided to cover his tracks, not wishing to be found, I am sure he could have done so successfully. But still I live in this anguish without Him, without my Lord, despite what I know and what I have written here in truth about Him. I forget it all, just like all people forget all things. Like during that time a little way back but before I

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was even existing that came to be known as world war the second, the Hollywood sequel, where the whole world had to fight one another for a reason that nobody could utter without sniggering foolishly. People say that I am stupid and deluded. Yet people are prepared to fight over nothing and permit complete idiots to lead them to their doom. If people listened when I, like so many other people, said live in Peace because then harm will not come to you, then this is what would happen. But they are more likely to follow a charismatic but childish despot with half an idea but without any outstanding human qualities that tell us that this person has a grasp of the reality of truth that we do not. We are very stupid; we prefer casual hostility to one another whether we are married to that person or just fight with them to get on the rush-hour bus. Did you ever glance into someone’s eyes only to glance away quickly as though you want to look but not to make any form of contact other than that which is sexual? Would it not be wonderful if all humans could be friends, could talk to one another and learn the most wonderful things without this terrible paranoia? Is it just us English that are this way, for I have a Pakistani friend who talks to anyone he meets, saying that if they ignore you it means they have a grudge against you. Does this mean that this guy has a better grasp of reality, or is his just as flimsy as mine? It seems so apparent that I understand so very little, but that is the way life and knowledge are supposed to be…

Start with an idea.

“I shall understand something peculiar about life right now.”

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Think only about that idea to attain it.

So now I am thinking about the Godhead and how the person with two eyes is supposed to understand the three-in-one of Godhead. I have thought about this already, although now I feel I can bring nothing new to it, no new understanding and no new insight. I am a dry well in the middle of the desert, and only a miracle can cause water to gush forth inside of this spirit, this desolate wasteland of the heart which has so much joy but has enslaved it all to misery and pettiness. Can I be so shallow to be blinded to the wonderment of the life I have cultivated for myself and to wallow in…happiness? This hardly seems fair, this masochism I inflict upon my soul each day, this remorse that comes from nowhere, which is going nowhere and is pure selfish self-indulgence. To be a self means to pity it. Is that the understanding of human pity as opposed to divine pity? That God and his son could pity others, but we are doomed to pity ourselves alone, which in turn causes us to be alone, utterly? What kind of beauty are we able to forge for ourselves out of this mangled and battered soul? What are we to do with this peculiar psyche that knows of one and yet does the other? Do we see things inverted like the mirror of the camera? Perhaps we ought to be honest with ourselves and admit that we are not happy with happiness and will instead pursue sadness because it is easier to attain and maintain. But would not happiness find you out? If we are so desperate for happiness, why do we allow ourselves to grow sad if not that in our heart of hearts we know that the one cannot exist without the other? Is this not the same with Marianna and I? I know that I cannot exist without her and neither

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would I want to exist without her. Darling; are you happy to be sad or just sad to be happy?

We fumble around this existence with our eyes closed because we prefer the suspense to the transparency of things. If we could choose to be fully realised, which of us would do so, and which of us, when presented with the empty content of binding freedom, would choose to do away with our guilty pleasures and beloved neuroses? Would not these selfsame neurosis and retardants of the soul prevent this kind of emancipation anyway? Can a person truly be happy to be happy and sad to be sad? Would not this transparent attitude eradicate either state of emotion? (If I was sad to be sad, I would then be nothing.)

Can human life have any kind of

consistency if it does not come to terms with the permanence of time and the impossibility of motion? Cease the struggle and allow life to pass through you like a wind. This must not be a bad wind, a nausea or a stomach-upset such as the one that I am experiencing right now. It must be a divine air. If I could have the world I would not want it. Is there a single consciousness out there that can fathom itself whatsoever or are they all like mine; contemptible, shallow, bitter and confused? Or is it that I am merely confused, too young for these thoughts and yet too old for these feelings? I must grow brighter like the morning and not dimmer like the evening, for it is light and water that make all creatures continue in physical happiness and once you have nailed the physical happiness all there is to follow is the mind. I have noticed how health clubs use the slogan â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;A healthy body is a healthy mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; because they know how soul-destroying the lifestyle of leisure is, how unnatural it is to work in offices and such like. We are so upset to see animals

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in zoos and circuses although we are proud to own a job that amounts to the same thing. Surely our athletes and sports people should be the most mentally fit also by such reasoning? People will try their best to convince you that they have found the path to happiness. In fact, most discourse between human creatures, when you think about it, is an attempt to convince both oneself and the other that you have found happiness even though this is a fatuous lie. If a person has found their happiness then they will feel no need to convince anyone else of this. One personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s happiness is infectious and not self-reflective which is why it spreads to other people without the need of conviction. This is where many religious followers have mislead themselves. So I listen to people attempting to convince me of how happy their lives are and I see if I can understand their position. They do not understand that whilst they are telling me about their convictions that my conviction is speaking in silence. This is a two-way dialogue where one voice is silent and yet carries wisdom with it. I am not convinced, convicted of anything, especially am I not guilty of happiness or sadness. What a life it would be where one merely had to say a thing to believe it. So long as we said little and remembered much, we should be fine. But alas we cannot shut up and we always forget. I am this way and yet I can see what an evil wind my procrastination is like some kind of devilish wind. Perhaps I have such terrible flatulence because of the pettiness of my soul â&#x20AC;&#x201C; perhaps this is correlative between the physical and the ethereal, between my belly and my soul. If one only puts good things inside of a belly to produce good results, then should not one also put good things inside of a mind to produce good results? This is why we have TV dinners.

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I must consider a formal approach to writing that will help me to negotiate my inability to work; when I took my six-day break, I had in mind that I would hold a microscope to that week and do nothing but work. But a great many weeks have passed since then with little activity; should this produce in me some anxiety, some terrible feelings of laziness, some sadness regarding my ability to create for myself a reality that encompasses the innate values of work? I do not choose to answer any of these questions because the evidence of these labours are manifest to an open degree if one chooses to look for them. When I was on the bus recently I asked myself if time is linear, why are clocks round? So I sit here in my living room where I write and where Marianna paints; in my thoughts and imaginings I am this way for the whole rest of time, I am here, working with her, we love each other through our working and our immediate proximity. I want this to maintain its state for the whole of time and my circular clock allows for this, but my linear clock does not. If I had a digital clock would it not merely repeat itself over and over? But the more recent computerised clocks take into account the date, the seasonal adjustments, the years, etc. The clock on my computer is programmed to count the time long after my death. And if infinity consists in the endless repetition even of our linear time, would not I be here with Marianna endlessly, as I would also be everywhere endlessly in a form of stasis caused by the infinite repetition of moments? Perhaps this is what our conscious mind perceives; the flicker of infinitely recurring moments without being chained to any particular one? But theorisation such as this is not intellectual on my part, for it is only

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the visual sound of this theory that brings me delight, not the successful mapping of it onto the scientific model of proof over lies, the sad justification of things into qualitative and nonqualitative states as they accord in particular individuals that no longer exist. But no human needs science just as no human needs art and no human needs philosophy and no human needs religion. None of these things go to assist a life through its living; life and death are automatic and take care of themselves. Do we take these various things on board in order to make life ‘easier’, or to provide some degree of ‘comfort’, or to assist us in our pathetic search for ‘meaning’? And would not the advocates of these four humanities indeed be ready to stand and defend the virtues that are manifest in them, or would they genuinely admit that neither they nor the humanity require one another and that their relationship is not a personal one? Do not defend a thing when its meaning has become permanent, when it maintains its own virtue beyond the needs of the individual user. When we, so too do these humanities, for we are reliant upon each other to a certain extent; humanities require humans in a symbiotic fashion. I am playing loud music right now, and find it difficult to find the words in my head and form them into coherent sayings, such as just now I contradicted myself quite obviously. So I turn the music up a bit further because I thought that perhaps I do not need to hear the words that I am saying to myself in my head but should rather be able to just jump off into the void and trust what my fingers are doing on the keyboard. I have problems with concentration, but every now and again my mind is able to fix itself upon its object and maintain its melancholic vision. But my ability to be distract has produced a great many other works, though they are not readily available in

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book form. Perhaps I ought to sit back for a minute and consider that I do not sufficiently know what it is that I wish to write about in order to continue in this pathetic labour. I come again to that point where I wish to pull my head apart just to find one thing inside it that I have not already said and is worth saying now. For whose sake should I do this and what reason would justify making such a gesture?

I am not a fool; I just cannot make sense of reality, (but perhaps my foolishness is the only sense of it that I can make?) I can perceive reality through my reality-perceiving tools, I can arrange and rearrange this sense datum into â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;senseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, into any logical format I am biased into believing is logical at that present time, and yet still, despite the testament of all my senses and inferences, I believe that I am deceived in some fundamental way. From where does this mistrust spring, from what well does this vile water gush and smother my senses in a cloud of unknowing? Am I faulty in some way? Should I display this to my parents and see if they cannot exchange me for a model that functions properly? And this mistrust that I inherently foist onto the innocent world breeds in me the deepest and most profound despair. It is because I administer such rough injustice to the pure world. Is it so difficult to simply be transparent, or must one constantly look at life through this circusmirror, through this frosted glass? And does no small amount of guilt arise from being so unjust to the world from making my life hell and the lives of those around me that I have not even credited with a life in them. I feel an absence, (or an abscess,) of poetry in me today, a lack of anything good and nutritious. I feel that everything that I am saying is the mere empty repetition of things I

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said before. Because of this, I feel a tension around the base of my spine which is gradually moving upward toward my shoulders. When it hits these muscles I will be incapacitated with fear for the image of my self-knowledge, that it might just be true that my self is just these mere repetitions, that there is nothing new to be had, that I stare back at the medusaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head because only now have I realised that I was petrified many, many aeons ago. I am paralysed in the fear of all these things and if one chooses to look into the mirror for such a long time and acknowledge that it is indeed a mirror and not the world at large will one also encounter the depths of this despair until eventually one tries to type and all that comes it is involuntary grammatical and spelling errors, an absence of ideas, of sense, of self image. You are now looking at one in the death throes of the self; I am being eradicate din my own melancholy, (although the fuel that drives this sadness is the thought that the self will indeed return, will re-inscribe itself upon the naked and vulnerable child of my innocence once again.) This is a nice portrait I have chosen to give you; the one other authors cannot bring themselves to feel, the one where there is nothing but despair in the eyes and not even a contrived despair; not even that good. I did not even set out to write this today. Last night I even had a couple of interesting thoughts, but today I am full of crap, waste, silage, the cast-offs of the unhealthy but endlessly self-renewing body. The self and the body have grown used to one another by now, but I, thins thing I, is yet to come to terms with either. It struggles. Other people are able to merely allow the ego, the self, unmitigated and limitless control of this I, and it is bent and used because it has been swamped in the desire of this perversion. If we were not quite so awfully perverse and enjoyed pain and hate and

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sick, we would not be so easily drawn into the swamp of the self, this terrible and skanky quagmire. I have nothing to fear in this place, for it is only what I am; a festering hole full of refuse. My image can be seen in each stagnant pool here amongst the gnat larvae. Do I relish this dead place, this self, this swamp of terrible, anxious and poisonous things? Each time my self tries to impose itself upon my wife does it unleash some form of venom from its unhealthy resource, some adderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spittle, and hurl into the eyes to obscure the vision of this terrible and rotten, empty man. And from the outside, on this surface have I painted in my artful fashion the most beautiful and serene Arcadia, of the kind even Appeles or Zeuxis would have conceded beyond their abilities. Everyone is fooled by this image except I, of course. It gushes up from inside and fills my mouth with vomitus. So silence best befits me; I sit on the whole affair, I stop up all the gaps like any other hermit and seek only my own company in the hopes that all this can safely be brought to the fore without poisoning anybody else, that I can cure myself in silence, that I can pass through this rite of initiation, only to return back into the society of men and women cured and healthy. I do not want to give this shit to anybody else; it is bad enough that my body is full of it, but I have a spark of goodness that does not want to allow it free reign over my being, that does not want to allow its earthy and wretched ambitions to overawe my spirit for yet another incarnation. I will finish this dragon once and for all this time, this monster that is appeased by idiot men with the bodies of the pure. I would rather drown on my own malady than add further poison to the world, and I believe that if I can cure it out in my wilderness, if I can discover the antidote to this spiritual malady, then I can return with this dock-leaf and distribute it

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amongst other people, a verbal ‘talking-cure’, but one for the soul, not for the psyche. One can cure the psyche if its neurotic ailments, but if the deadly root is still manifest it will again rise up and constrict the organism once again. Psychoanalysis is merely a temporary help, one that only goes so far.

I am here where I want to be, in the souls of all men, in the heart of my lover and in the books of the good. These words have already become immortal in my own consciousness because they have been repeated so oft. Prayers or mantras, rhythmic speaking is carried further into the ears of God, and so it is with neurosis; our own prayer to ourselves, that if we repeat often enough will come to be the truth just because all other truths have been excluded. Neurosis is the prayer to the dead God. Think on this the next time you repeat a thought in your mind. You could have been speaking to a God that was alive and not merely a corpse.

That was the sound of me talking to myself; does it not sound even a little strange? What if you were to write all of your thoughts down the same way; would that also sound like craziness or would it be a relief from the horrible internalisation of prayer?

Marianna: “I’m not sure what I’m doing, but that’s all right.”

I then say to her that we should always collaborate in this way, because we are a right pair of hermits. But how can two people be hermits together, I ask? She wants to know if she had not done what she had done whether we would be together. I explain:

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I, (just as you,) have set out on this path alone, the path of truth, of enlightenment, of genuineness, honesty, prophecy, whatever. You follow yourself, for there is no-one else to follow; you are entirely lonesome on your path, in your life, in your heart and in your soul. You could be going around in circles, but there cannot be a ‘wrong’ way, because it is the first time that it has been trodden. You do not follow some prophet who told you to walk here, telling you that ‘This is the way!’ This is your way and you make it yours by walking it…

…but then you find that, in your hermit’s journey as a one and not a many, on your original path, that in fact there are a great many people here on the same path. They have not followed you and you have not followed them; you are here through co-incidence. By [all of you] following your own path, you have all ended up on the same path. This is not disingenuous, for you have all sought the truth of what is genuine and here it is. You have made contact with ‘your people’ by enclosing yourself and retreating from society, by forging out on your own you have found where all of your best friends and companions are. They are on your path and you are on theirs. This is where you all meet; in loneliness. To set out on this path is to be blind; not knowing where the path leads is to be blind to an extent, and with your friends you are the blind leading the blind, you are the hidden truth of a common saying in the minds of the masses. They would laugh at you, but if they were here to see, they should be as blind as you, for you must be willing to deprive the sense to be on this path in the first place. And in the depths of sensory deprivation can you imagine such impossible things and cause them to be real by the forcefulness of your ambition and

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melancholy. Such a wave of awesome rejoicing washes over your face, that you discovered initially the loneliness of society, and then found the society of loneliness. The simple reversal that brings company to the hermit, the poetic at the heart of the prophet, at the heart of Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s children. You have, therefore, arrived. This is why we have married.

In my heart I was unfathomable when I met you. I was an empty pitcher filled with longing but not with water. But the water of my life approached and the longing was so great that it could not be recognised; lost in fantasy, lost in longing and not in loving, lost entirely. But in your heart you were full, you were hurt by the rejection of my longing, by the wanting but not taking. So alone was I, so distraught by the bittersweet potion of my own concoction was I unable to taste your nectar and deliver into my longing organ the love it craved. And the longer this relationship maintained this starving and unbalanced harmony, the longer my longing was emptying your heart, saddening and embittering you. But then did I see the flower begin to approach its autumn, and the melancholy of my internal longing reached out into the world of extension and longed for reality and not for hallucination. It recognised you as the real love embodied by life and saw its own longing as the love of death itself, of emptiness, of sadness with no cure. And did I, like so many other viruses and small organisms, pull with great force, the one from the other, the desire for death from the desire for life, for inhabiting the same living animal they could not, and loving a living animal they both could not. So I and I departed in an amicable fashion. But still did I carry this hallucination with me, still do I, but I am growing, stretching like a rose toward the sun,

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leaving my thorns way behind my flower so that you might taste this nectar or smell this fragrance without being snagged by my thorny sides. But do not cut this flower and take it home for it should not be safer in a vase deprived of its thorns. There is another way to take the pleasure and not the pain. But this is for me, this is for my growth, for the soul of the rose to transcend the plant and to become its pure abstraction so that each and every thorn and petal is maintained in a perfect state of beauty in both your eyes and mine. Why would you deprive a rose of its thorns?

I do not fully understand yet love, but as soon as I do, so shall you. No explanation will ever satisfy the desire to be real, so neither should one seek resolution in the place of description for it cannot be.

So I turn around and look at her again. I think in my mind that, when you come to read this book when it is finished, you will read the last few paragraphs and extract for yourself the answer which, by that time, should have become most apparent both in you and in I. This will tell you that the knowledge was always there, (as I could write it down quite lucidly,) but that mere explanation cannot make it be. Therefore I have not made it into an explanation for you as now, in this present, the one where I am writing this and you are reading this, we both understand. We are again together in the immortal cavern that houses our united souls.

And what about those of you who are not Marianna or I? Are you on our path or are we upon yours? I would be willing to assert that what I have said above contains universal wisdom despite it being

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not for everyone. For I am in the universe and it is wisdom, making it in my mind universal wisdom, for it has been both extracted from the universe and given back to it. When I said ‘universal wisdom’, what was the first thing you thought of? Did you think of Kant and his imperatives, or did you think of some prophet, or did you think of science or art. Did you recognise conceit in me? Why would you bring conceit to me; is it the best that you can give, is it the highest extent of your charity? I am not egotistical, for I merely say what I say and it is not premeditated. So there must be some part of you that understands universal wisdom, (the concept that exists in your mind,) is associated with conceit, with egotism, and therefore represents your disillusionment and your inability to conceive of a perfect beauty that transcends the deceit of the human mind. You fear deceit just as I do, and you have brought this into your being in the way that it is manifest inside of also. Aren’t we the same person now? It is frightening that these things can be written down immediately and without forethought; I am merely tapping into my own mind once I have eradicated the fear of doing so. Fear holds one away from what one knows, (or at least prevents you from saying what one wants to say, prevents you believing what you want to believe.) So be fearful then; see if it effects me in my rejoice! I say these things because I am not afraid to say them and not really for any other reason. Is not that silly; is there no ‘better’ reason for saying something other than for the fact that you can say it? Or is this just a proof of life? I am listening to Brahms variations on a theme by Paganini and I think to myself, how many times can a person say the same thing without it sounding the same way twice? This tune is modulated and brings newness, originality, beauty and wisdom with each and every new repetition. Why are

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we so afraid of repeating ourselves; do we fear that we are tedious in a way that Brahms was not? We should learn to be more musical in our thoughts and in our fears, and then perhaps we would be able to shine a light on the dark chambers of our thoughts and convert fear into a splendid crown. Would you not like to do this? I have given you all of the answers, you have given yourself all of the answers and now you merely need to trust in yourself and your innate wisdom to let it be. Who are you?

When you read this book, did you not notice that all of the words, when they silently sounded in your head, sounded like your own voice? Does this not mean that the words were uttered by you, had to pass through you and become yours? Does this not mean that you are me, that I am a whisper in your head and that this book is merely a delightful vehicle for your self-expression? Or is it that this book constitutes for me the only way in which you can exist and is merely an expression of my incurable insanity? Try to arrive at your own variation of this theme.

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author began to write about Not knowing how to begin this short story, the author began to write about Not knowing how to begin this short story, the author began to write about Not knowing how to begin this short story, the author began to write about

The mantra is seeping inside your brain and it will un-turn the mechanism that locks your joy inside a room of fear. To live inside a space of unbounded emotion is to live without dimension, without space at all, without bounds. But can you in your mind conceive of no dimension, no boundaries, no borders, no rules? Is your mind that agile? I will tell you what; you need to meditate on this paradox in order to understand it:

How did you think yourself into being?

How can a thing that thinks think itself into being? Which came first, the thing that thinks or the thinking? How is it that an envelope can envelop itself? I have recognised this paradox as one of the first keys to the lock of philosophy, of self-knowledge and true self-love beyond pathological narcissism. I too shall meditate upon this, and perhaps on this path we shall meet in the same unique place. For now I am exhausted and will try to recuperate my energy in another subject.

I have been so terribly afraid these past months, years, this past life, and of what I am yet still to discover. The good thing is that, no matter what it is, it has brought about all of this work. But somewhere off in my future I would like for my work to spring from some other place than from self-obsession. It is unhealthy to

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always be this way, to be fixated, and yet it is both common, and in the depths of melancholy can one find more than what one bargained for. So I continue to look, despite what my judgement says or what anyone else says, because I know deep in my knowledge that it is this unfaltering vision of the self that brings to light the vision of God. But to look at oneself without narcissistic eyes, to be fixed in meditation upon oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s image without vanity; this is surely an Herculean task and also it is possibly a fallacy. It is not that one wants to look at the world without looking at the self, for this is without possibility. It is that we only half-see the world; we catch our self-image everywhere and this sickens us, we feel we are selfish for this, we feel we are not seeing what we are supposed to be seeing and that we are evil and diseased. But the truth of the matter, as I have just this minute discovered it, (and will quite probably disprove later or at least forget about,) is that we must be unafraid to see ourselves everywhere for we are, like God, everywhere and in everything. Because we are God, all of us at once, but we are at once insane, ashamed and fearful; we must now understand God-fearingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in another way; it is the fear of the knowledge that we are God, that we are everywhere and everything, and that we are ashamed of what we are because we only half-acknowledge it. Our pathological narcissism is the condition arising from not going far enough into the vision, only half-accepting

our

being

and

contenting,

(or

infuriating,

discontenting,) ourselves with just a half-knowledge of what we know, ashamed of our own knowledge. This is our fig leaf; we are self-obsessed and ashamed, but we have not gone far enough, we have only gone a half-measure, we are content to lose. This is how we lose, how we lose ourselves when we ought to be regaining

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ourselves; this is our mistaken identity, but not on the psychoanalytical scale, for you would admit that this scale was far greater and has more awesome implications. Surely self-love is a truly incredible thing, an awesome power and self-mastery? But we are too ashamed despite our self-obsession; we do not go far enough, our ambitions are set too low, always. Narcissism is not self-love; it is looking in the mirror and mis-recognising yourself as yourself and not as what you are, it is fearing, not loving yourself. Are you frightened that you might disappear? Is that why you look in the mirror every second of the day, to check that you still exist? That is not self-love; it is fear of death that provokes and inspires your narcissism, fear of non-existence, but not fear enough to permit you to realise that your existence is only half-right, your image is only half-recognised, and that God is not afraid to die because He does not, ever, die. You must eventually admit what you are, or this anxiety that you have given yourself as a key to unlocking truth will eventually drown you, you will spin infinitely in infinite confusion, for God does not die, and your anxiety will be infinite also. Do you feel it at the base of your spine, the conduit for spiritual energy is constipated and no energy rises up but remains as a tension or retention just above your arse-hole, unable to move, to express, to rejoice. It must flow like golden energy up through the top of the head and allow the flower to blossom, opening the mind-portal to its fullest extent.

I think that it is quite true to say that if a person was given the opportunity to live without tension, without anxiety, without perverse pleasures, without failures, misery or such like, that person, when it came down to it, would not abandon these things.

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At least this person is honest; one should not abandon these things because they are qualities. But this same person is unlikely to rejoice in them as a great good. They would rather fantasise a place where they did not exist and then perversely enjoy the feeling of being brought ‘back to reality’, being let down by the life that they have made. So one does and does not want, want happiness? Happiness without sadness is stagnation. Sadness and happiness should be the rejoicing of all existential qualities, because you yourself have brought them into being by being what you are. Do you now see the extent of power you exert over your life, over your ability to be alive? One must look at the possibilities for a life, must set one’s ambition and continually allow oneself to push the ceiling higher until one is on top of all aboves and below all belows. In space there is no up or down just as without dimension there is no time or space.

I have so many thoughts and so little ability to write them all down. I will keep trying however, although I wish that you were able to perceive the ten-thousand things that I am thinking when I am saying just one thing, I wish you could perceive the entire matrix of my thoughts as I exist in it. I always found this to be one of the most endearing qualities of a book that really enlightened me; that it would constantly expand space until there was an entire plateau across which one could fly with newly remembered wings. Sometimes I can see the whole complex of infinitely expanding things in just one sentence by a great writer, as though you could perceive in it the continual expansion of the universe before it’s eventual and final contraction. I have seen this thing oft, and I wish, now that I can recognise when and how it occurs, to make it happen

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myself in this writing here. I cannot be sure that it does happen, for I continually see this expansion in everything through my eyes now, (for once the light is turned on the after-image or memory does not fade,) and so I know it is occurring right now. If you can allow yourself to see it then you have indeed met me on this path. But if you have formed an opinion about my book then you are on your own path, the path of opinions and fearful thoughts keeping you from the infinite truth of the universal qualities manifest in all things including human, cultural things. We tend to see nature as a perfect and innocent thing, and human things as flawed things worthy of criticism. You do not normally feel the need to criticise a geranium for its growth patterns, but you might criticise a writer for his or her growth patterns. Why is that? Of what good is this opinion other than it reminds you of what you look like to yourself and others and reminds you in your vain and narcissistic way that you still exist? But this opinion, regardless of what it looks like to you or signifies to you, is still part of this matrix; it has merely been extracted by you as a tool for knowing when and where you are at all times and to ward off this fear that you might disappear. It does not help; you have extracted a part of the universe to affirm, meaning that you deny all other things in that matrix and hence, like a fish out of water its beauty will eventually fade and die away. To take. Why not give back this beautiful fish and allow it the universe of existence, of affirmation? This opinion is not for you exclusively and you ought to realise that you have the capacity to maintain and express all possible opinions simultaneously as a method of affirming all existent things and the general goodness of life.

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Perpetually, I stand here on the threshold of life with a tainted perception of what might be lying forever just out of my reach. Is this just idealism or is there the genuine opportunity to attain this Enlightenment of I work hard and goodly enough? My thoughts are with the latter; too much about our civilisation sounds like the cynic standing victorious over an humiliated idealist. Why not try only ever criticising when an alternative is put in place, one that is practised by the cynic herself/himself so that she or he is also open to the same that they themselves have dealt out? What do I want in life? Light. Is it the case that the philosopher suffers the fate of the impotent scientist, with a batch of theories that are never proven or disproved? Is this why the ‘possible worlds’ debate held such great currency; through the philosophers’ hypothetical landscapes? I live through my ideas because my ideas come from living. I can suffer no criticism because my life itself is not open to criticism. What; will criticism make my life or your life ‘better’, or will it serve any form of meaning? My philosophy lives and breathes through my body and hence it is in a constant state of material signification, but also of spiritual development in its daily practise. I am here working towards the good, and this project is itself sacred and I pursue it in the fashion that I have come to understand as good. Because I myself am meaningless I irradiate meaning at each and every stage, but for other people. I sit here and am nothing, because this is what I have made; works for other people and disregard for my own ‘happiness’. This is because I could find no proof, not even animal, that happiness was the highest state that the human animal should desire or pursue. The state that I ‘am’ encompasses the whole spectrum of good and bad, of happiness and sadness all together. And it is only through this awesome and divine

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contradiction that I am able to ‘be’ the state that is both comprised from them and something else besides. I am an object, a solid object, and yet I am translucent, virtually imperceptible. The philosopher must be prepared to laugh from time to time.

I am now wondering to myself whether there are other people who themselves have grasped the dual-faceted paradox of ‘Follow me and yourself’ and that ‘Time does not exist’? First let us think about why these two oddities of my thought should exist together and why they should also be the same statement made out of different words like the ship of Theseus. If we think of the joke of the prophet who says to follow but not to follow, the Agnes Dei or holy sheep, we are forced to consider an impossible object, a Penrose Triangle. This is purposeful on the part of the prophet because He or She must have stood on the other side of all paradoxes to have become the enlightened one and hence, is able to send these paradoxical forms to us from the dimension in which they stand. A Penrose Triangle which looks like a sheep. This was Zarathustra’s game, which is why we are forced to consider that Nietzsche Himself was enlightened and in the same company as the one He followed/did not follow; Jesus. Nietzsche went mad because He had no further use of His body. To ‘follow me/follow yourself’ means, in its final form, that we are the same. Jesus /Zarathustra gives us the paradox and our only resolution is to change ourselves to understand it, not to change the object itself; the object is correct but we are looking at it wrongly. We therefore must understand that we both are and are not Jesus, that we are God and ourselves in the same instant. It is the same as the realisation of the Godhead; how can God be the Father, Son and Holy Spirit at

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the same instant? Just because we cannot conceive of three objects in one object does not mean it cannot be so. So, we must realise that this prophetic hammer, ‘Follow me but be yourself’ means that we are the same but not the same, we are the Penrose Triangle, the Agnes Dei, we are God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the initial stage of straightening out our bent and mangled souls; until we can see the paradox as a thing in itself which is correct, not a thing that needs to be worked out, straightened out or corrected, we are still not right. Paradoxes are to be stepped over and laughed at, not resolved and encompassed inside of logic. By following our selves we paradoxically end up on the path of the prophet, and as in Penrose’s problematic geometry we go from inside to outside, we do one and we get the other.

So how, therefore, with the above understanding of the Prophetic paradox, does the idea of ‘Time does not exist/happen’ come to be the same thing? The Penrose Triangle must become the Borromean Knot of consciousness in this stage; these ‘paradoxical forms’ cannot exist on the terms of our conscious understanding, for they do not require our space or our time to be what they are. We can see the drawing of both and try to grasp, in two-dimensions, this three-dimensional paradox. But naturally we consider this to be an illusion and not merely a problem for our four-dimensional existence. How can the Godhead be three-in-one? Because He is beyond our dimensions, our dimensions only really existing because of our perception of them. Consciousness [in part] is the collaboration of four-dimensions of sensory data in our brains. They are split apart in us, but can they be resolved in us? The Borromean Knot of consciousness, the strange loop which causes

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this four-dimensional perception to perceive itself, cannot be grasped in its own terms; it must be stepped over just as our perception of time and space must be stepped over also. To be what we are means that we must step over our limited self-perception. Because we are unable to perceive God does not mean that He is not there; it is only our conceit that disallows such a possibility. It is our Biblical understanding of ourselves as ‘perfect’ amongst created creatures that makes us think that if God is imperceptible to our perfect consciousness [that He created] means that He is not there. Unless our conceit is lost, (and conceit in my formulation is a geometric form that prevents the perception of new dimensions in reality,) we will be unable to conceive of God with our blunt senses. I have only now realised that many of the things in this essay are transposable into simple geometry. This is not satisfactory as a proof of the above statement, so provide your own ‘stepping over’ and do not hassle me with ‘proofs’ or other Catholic dispositions.

It is all in the realisation, not in the proofs. Realisation is a strange, intangible thing which kind of just happens without reason which means that often, people do not recognise it because it is not logical, reasonable or provable. It is a slippery fish of a thing, but one that is worth allowing to happen, for it expands the dimensions of the mind to be able to incorporate, or at least entertain certain important notions that logic will not permit. Like God, for example. Logic will not quantify or provide any kind of demonstrable form for God to inhabit and therefore He does not exist in reason. He might not necessarily ‘Be’ inside of realisation; I mention the old fellow quite often, but am I really talking about God or am I

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utilising the impossible object, the ultimate symbol of the infinite, of nothing and everything, as a centre of concentration in which I can expand my consciousness? Unless these parameters are blown away and eradicated, one could not perceive God at any rate! Realisation is where a great many untied things just suddenly fit, though the connections are not rational. Before, one would have struggled to explain how such disparate things could be connected without sounding as though you had taken drugs or were a religious nut. What happens inside of my mind is beautiful no matter what, whether you choose to hear it or not. But you must see that I am heading ‘towards’ a ‘place’ without dimensionality. This is the ultimate realisation for the material mind; to realise the immaterial, infinite or nothing, the ultimate form of paradox, of nihil, of the absolute and everything.

I think that I should treat all of life’s experiences as new opportunities for creation and destruction, as way s of learning about a life’s possibilities. We only think in such a small way about the possibilities for a life because our ambitions have been stunted by our selfish self-obsession. Begin to treat the self like the body; as a vehicle or medium of expression in the physical life. It is best not to be enslaved to either, although care and respect must be exercised over both. I believe that the self can become a great friend, that you can become friends with your self, if you put away these delusions and preconceptions about what a life is, what you are, and what you are supposed to do with life. Life itself is a medium, a vehicle for expressing the self, just as the self is a medium for expressing life. Do not restrict what might be by thinking about what is because the two are linked together in such a

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way that by conceiving what might be and making it be should allow the ambition for what could be to be exploded.

This rose does indeed have its thorns. We should not be afraid to consider that these dark and trying times are not simply the sounds of the machines of change, that when the ground begins to move under the feet do not be compelled by the nausea, but rather go with it, be washed away from what you were only to become another temporary maybe. A person is not really ready to understand God unless that person has undertaken for himself or herself that selfsame great task and undertaking. An understanding of God only approaches a person when that person has become God themselves by their own enlightenment. God does not come to enlighten people who do not have the ambition to be enlightened. He will only assist when He is asked for assistance. This is the meaning of being humble. But what do I know about God? Am I faithful or good or without the binding qualities of being a human? Does my malicious nature hold me back from the light, and why should human nature (or at least my nature,) be this way at all? For what reason must there be a permanent layer of deception over the eyes with which I see the world? Am I drawn back to the malicious demon; is this the only argument here or can I conceive of another, not necessarily more likely but more mine? I have brought this deceit and conceit upon myself because it is in the human nature to do so, to make the simple complex, only to desire it to be simple again.

Different people in my life are set up by my representational faculties for me to appease, blame, despise, love, envy etc. This is

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rough justice on my part and I wonder what part of them I constitute? Tied up in this problem is ourselves of course. Where do we really reside if not only in a series and complex of representational misapprehensions? Does this constitute a kind of virtual reality for us in the networks of signification reducing us to mere symbols of existent entities, the signifiers of consciousness holding us under the delusion that indeed we are conscious entities, whereas our only existence is in the networks of language? Every time we think ‘every time we think’ all that happens is the expression of a signifier, expressed by a matrix of signifiers that itself is conscious of the signifiers that constitute it. There is no ghost in there, merely a confused awareness arising out of a huge matrix of signifiers. When I feel that I am treating a person selflessly, all I seem to be able to see is an hallucination of myself in their eyes in my eyes. Where exactly am I and what? Is this not a strange phenomenon and was it possible that human nature could turn out some other way? Why are we so preoccupied with ourselves when there is an entire world to discover unless our image, like that of God, is so divine and infinite that it must be the subject of a life’s contemplation/ Perhaps the world will only enter into perception when one has fixed one’s gaze in upon oneself so exactly and with such huge force of concentration. Could this state of pathological narcissism therefore be nothing other than the divine God looking upon his beauteous image?

I look outward to view myself. If I look inward do I therefore look outward? What exactly is this strange paradox of being and looking wherein the micro and macrocosm are each other simultaneously and myself the product of this looping, as if the infinite ‘0’ had

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become twisted in the middle ‘8’ and consciousness was the point where both strands of infinity crossed over one another producing a relay wherein what is passing has already passed and vice versa. Does this produce the state of human confusion, being trapped in the ‘present’, (the crossed strands of the infinite,) in a fleeting, intangible real that is either always past or future but too quick to be present? What therefore happens when the idea of God, the idea contemplating the idea of the idea contemplating, the Moebius strip is brought into the numerical model above, and the dimensionality is further stretched to incorporate paradox? Do we then discover the Borromean Knot model:

How does this model affect our perception of space and time when these dimensions are merely the product of this existential condition?

Marianna is existing in the same place; she says that she makes a self portrait that looks at her as she looks at it. This strange looking

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process is indeed Borromean in its origin. Part of this knot is the gradual agreement with our anxieties as to what is our self-image; in Mariannaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s case it is that the self-portrait has served as the appropriate vehicle for this expression. In me, what have I figured? I made a plan on Friday based around the premise that anxiety is borne out of distraction and hence is our worship of Apollo and Dionysis mutual for at its centre is the singularity, the infinite degree of concentration, (before the big bang of consciousness,) the essence of what it is to Be. And so, as in the concert hall as on the dance floor, to be distract is to miss what it is to Be, other than to Be distract. One must accept that one lives inside of this knot and because of this knot and as this knot, is borne out of this knot, but that this is nature and not a paradoxical prison. We must not be distracted from the all by merely reflecting upon the self; consciousness was borne to contemplate more than itself! Take for example the problematic form of science; in that it tries to digest piecemeal sections of the universe, one after the other ad infinitum, it never achieves its goal except in the infinite practise of it, (in that it fails to succeed.) On the other hand, Mohammed sits and passes the infinite through his mind; the scientist passes through the mind of Mohammed long before Mohammed passes through the mind of science. Once the universe is inside of Mohammedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mind, he is then both infinite and molecular, and thus does the consciousness of Mohammed reflect upon itself, which is the whole universe itself, (itself included,) the envelope that is enveloped by itself.

Reality is our medium of expression, but one in which we are tied into the nature and character of our existence. It is flexible and yet utterly solid, it does whatever we do and we do whatever it does;

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we are because of it and it is because of us, we are not free to be without it and it is not at liberty to be without us. Many human beings feel that to exist is to exist in terms of being trapped by existence to perform a role that was neither chosen nor complicit with one’s nature, (but let me ask you; whatever you feel, doe sit make it so?) Life is not a stage and neither are we life’s actors, we do not perform roles except for the ones that we conceive and execute for ourselves. We do not ‘act’ unless we are disingenuous in our Being, unless we are performing in the play of our own lives. Do we ‘think’ that we ‘act’ only because we ‘think’ too much, or is it because we do not believe in the possibility of leading a genuine life, to Be, let it Be, Amen? And this is why I write; the most precise ‘reason’ hitherto about the cause and signification of my writing; if I can extract all of my thoughts, the parts of me that cause the disingenuous state of being are merely genuine in the part as what it is to be disingenuous; to be disingenuous is still to be genuine, for one has no choice but to be genuine even in genuine disingenousness; this is a fixed hand, and merely because you ‘think’ does not make it so. This book does its thinking on my behalf.

What if to be conscious was merely to hear an echo which sounded like somebody else? We think, and yet we hear a voice when we think; other animals, (I presume,) do not hear their own thoughts or remember them, but I have memories of what I have thought and indeed, they are an echo from a voice uttered long ago. We have seen the model of Narcissus as the image transfixed by the image of itself, but we have heard little of Echo, his equally lonesome partner. She lives in a cave with her thoughts to speak to, reflecting

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off each wall at different intervals, keeping her company. But she never meets the source of the voices. Imagine then, if you will, that you are a combination of Narcissus and Echo; you can only see yourself and you can only hear yourself. This is your reality, your primal, selfish reality where you see yourself in all things and hear yourself in all things. You read a book and you hear a voice, your voice. You hold a conversation, but only with your reflected image embodied in a hallucination of yourself construed as an other, the voice you hear is yours masked by your indifference, the image you see is yours, clouded by self-obsession. And what anxiety is there in me who has researched these past years into this condition that has caused this profound and melancholic solipsism. What kind of a universe is this without the salvation that comes in the form of belief, belief that the universe is this way and must be realised as thus, as a beautiful and divine reality where God looks out upon the image of God, the envelope enveloping itself. This is the awakening of the realisation of the universe, the whole universe inside of the mind, the camel through the eye of the needle or the parable of Saint Peter who carried the entire weight of the universe on his back, of Atlas. And surely must the singularity, the infinite mass of the unexploded universe of consciousness, the essence of the universe, be consisted within the singular mind as it exists in all other minds, exploded and out of reach, constantly expanding as new minds are born.

[Anxiety

How can I figure my purpose unless I listen closely to the noises in my mind and work with them, relying upon the assumption that

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they contain some clue that might assist me or maybe it is that I require no assistance, require nothing in fact, other than the cool breeze on my cheek that calms this distemper, this malady that I have thus far mispronounced as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;? I cannot contain this knowledge, (for this container is not yet big enough,) for it should be available even to the mosquitoes that bite my naked. I look gently upon my wife who paints in the kitchen. I am outside the kitchen window as I write this. She is anxious; this will gradually inspire my own anxiety; but not yet. It is in this space where there is nothing that I shall create something, something that dares to restore Anxiety into the mantle of divine wisdom.]

[Equilibrium

Long ago and as far back as last week I found myself in a boat. There is a hole in this boat that allows water into it. Fortunately, I am holding a cup; the hole in the boat lets in exactly one cupful of water at a time and if I am quick enough I can keep the boat afloat. I maintain perfect equilibrium between floating and sinking, sometimes wishing that I was drowning, other times wishing I was not afloat to begin with.]

Do the problems above lead your own enquiry into this matter into unfamiliar territory? I have developed a nervous twitch and it is connected to my research into anxiety. I will not let this fish go now I have caught it; too often has it slipped my grasp, only to return and torment me over and over again. This anxiety has meaning, but it is anxious because at present it has no meaning in my mind; it is some huge and blackened, fallen object and it needs

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to be restored to its correct place. Marianna, I am sure, would also like me to catch this fish; perhaps we could eat it together with some delightful condiment or other? She is painting her anxieties into her self-portrait and from here will she be able to perceive them in plastic form; they will have materialised and, in that they are beautiful, she will have to acknowledge in her mind that they likewise are beautiful, just as she is.

[Poetry

Poetry need not be metered and it need not be rhyming. What makes a conjunction of words poetic is the unusualness of the conjunction. This may not be as evident as one might expect; many a secret machinery lies behind the empty face of writing. And it is the strange search for the authorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s meaning that discloses the poetic substance, or is it the dissolution of the concrete world into the waters of anxiety that first hooks the mind and reels it in?

In ancient times it were possible to say a thing and mean it. This is because man has grown ever more distrustful of himself, just as the birds also learned to flee from him. If I mean what I say, you must learn to hear what I mean.]

[Letters

My letters: an appeal to the world outside of my body, to the organism of which I am an estranged part, an appendix, the source of the black bile of melan choler, to heed my wisdom, to accept my humour, (my melancholy,) back into its economy where it can,

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once again and with dignity, feel the sorrow and bitter pangs of deep and profound Love. It cannot love with mere happiness, it has only the smallest expressive range and limited palette of spirituality. Dear God, whom art my father in heaven, who wrings tears from my joyful, luxuriant and grateful soul, bless my pen and its hand and allow the germ of my voice to bleed into these pages like the venom of poetry. Allow the depths of my leviathan anxiety confer enormous relief upon the world at large and use me as the appendix to the grief of humanity. I am filled with love for this world and although I might seem bitter to the taste, I am merely an unripe fruit.]

Humans are afraid of harmony. They prefer the sound of imbalance, of inequality and disproportion. They like the advantage or disadvantage, they like to profit from or be exploited by. Without a sense of balance, unity and equality the human being will never know his or her true direction, meaning or quality. The cost of living has not gone up; the value of money has gone down. The value of living has gone down, but in an Escher-esque waterfall that goes perpetually down but always arrives at the same uppermost point. Time is illusory in this way; we feel that we are born live and die, but over and over again, without knowing logically how we arrived at the initial point, the point of origin.

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Illustration

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Waterfallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, by M.C. Escher. (lithograph, 1961).

Of course this model has come from Hofstadter, a scientist of whom I am fond; he displays a genuine insight and poetry to his works as though the search and the answer equated with one another somehow. We must be aware at all times and in all ways that there are certain instances where our perceptions of reality fail us, where they illustrate the horizon of our abilities as physical animals and demand our overcoming of what we are as humans in order to begin creating reality where our sensory perceptions left off, to take over after the physical limitations.

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Illustration

I went into the kitchen briefly to hold Marianna in my arms. I say to her that, when I look at my life, the one thing that I wish I had done more often was to hold her. Which is why I hold her so often.

I cannot always see it, (because often I only feel and do not see,) but my love with Marianna escalates like the formation of a newly germinated plant, escalating upward with new leaves to catch the sun’s rays and generate more and more energy. I meditate upon this rose bush, this simple organic form whose purpose suits his task with grace and efficiency in my eyes. And just as a pair of baboons will remove the fleas from one another, we work out our anxieties together, we feed from them and grow stronger, our loving captured in the routine practises of being an organism. We sleep together, (although we do more than sleep together,) we walk together, (although we do more than walk together,) we eat together, (although we do more than eat together.) What is this ‘more than’ which is at once bitter sweet, melodious or chromatic but always, always present? I must admit that I would have no art and most certainly no poetry without her. Can such close and intense loving be not only maintained, but escalated to the infinite point in that a rose only ceases to grow and produce energy when it has died? I think about this when I am in the presence of the sceptic, when there is an embittered man who attempts to rub his life’s experience upon two love birds and make them sad, awake them to the grim truth of reality beyond youth. But he sees that I am unflustered by his remarks; it must appear to him quite evidently in this respect that I am thousands of years his senior, that

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my honesty has protected my youth and my youth has protected my wife. So his words, only having been intended for himself and his own perceived relations, redouble, rebound and shatter his luxurious cynicism. I am sad, but for him, for if he had joined with me and not set himself up against me, he would have found his love and all its complexities so painfully close to him inside of reality. He sees me sad, but again he finds this to his advantage; he feels he has proven his point to me, that his opinion, (no matter how sad, disillusioned and downright undesirable and un-ambitious it might sound,) is the truth; it is his truth, for him alone, for that was the extent of his creation, a bitter life without love or romance. I do not change for I am past changing many years before this moment. I am present to my ability to create, and only if I were to allow life to pass me by in the form of seeing another life, an hallucination, mirage or fantasised life, a destiny, would I have missed all of the creative moments that would put a halt to the dull sound of regret; let life pass me, be finished with, and I will try again later, always later, because I am not ready for truth; my confusion constitutes my pathetic joy and my ambition is lower than earth. This is not a love story, unless you consider that my life story was the story of Love, which it is. I choose Love over misery, anxiety and regret, but only because these things themselves are finally and gradually being restored to their proper resolution; as the objects and items of Love, not as fallen angels of desire.

Look directly at me, (said your face to the mirror.) You look, you recognise, but do you see? And what is this voice that you are now hearing? Is this me, or is it the voice of the image I see? Is this Narcissus and Echo, tied up in one, in this reality? Or is this the

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sound of a book I once read, the book of woes that promised the end to tedium and contained all of the basic truths and possibilities of the human universe? And do you still hear yourself when you read this or do you hear the author; can you hear the author or are you stuck in this hall of mirrors that, dependent upon how you look at it, is either as prison or a palace?

When you sit and think, “Shall I speak/visit/call such and such a person?” and then do not, (without any form of reason for not doing so,) what is it that turns you? Why do you have the idea of doing something and then a simultaneous idea of not doing that same thing and why am I writing about such a trivial thing? It is not trivial and it is in fact extremely serious and if you meditated upon this strange behaviour for at least five hours per day for a week, you would surprise your own motives for doing so and you would also, (despite how profound your conclusions,) forget and continue to practise this strange behaviour. So I recommend that you do meditate upon this problem in exactly the same way as outlined above [Daniel] and then write your conclusions down here for everyone [yourself] to see, and then forget if you will but this book will always remember for you; this book as the perfect act of memory.

And so I have thought about the possibilities for anxiety, for that fallen and darkened object that longs to speak its truth to you, but you continue to duck and dive from its audible range, causing you to hide, constantly lower your head in fear and evade it, bring shame upon it. Why are you doing this to yourself? It is the sole thing that causes your work to ‘work’, it is causing the great

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happiness in this life, but you are investing such tension, such fear and avoidance from the purest, happiest wisdom. If this whole pretence could evaporate and you could bring yourself face to face with this your brother, your fallen self who is good, not bad, (for you are bad for having made him or her bad in the first instance,) then would life find the beauty of symmetrical absolution. I dedicate this book to anxiety, in praise of anxiety, where I can in my melancholy bring this thing to light, to feel sadness only in joy, where the world is turned upon its head and only then does it look right. Do these things sound so very abstract to you, or do they sound like they sound to me; full of the commonest sense and as clear as day? Happiness is in knowing how to be honest and respecting that privilege. I sit with my art, which is the art of knowing how to live, for expressing talent in living. All animals are able to live and live in harmony with one another, but how to do so when all there is is inadequacy, lies and shame? How to perceive this human paradox in its fullest and purest sense and to incarnate it into the substance and fabric of our realities? But are we not in our quasi-animal harmony as it is, as we have those who destroy and those who create? Could there even be such an idea unless the whole understanding of humanity can always be divided into two opposite and yet simple parts? We are actually seeking to go above and beyond and through equality and into unity; not the balance but the marriage of opposites, creating the object that has long such sought such expression. To sit and to understand Love in its fullest understanding is to know fully and completely the extent and realisation of peace, of real and divine joyfulness which lies in wait for those who traverse that terrible, dangerous and awesome route to the transcendental person, the person who becomes who they

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are. I feel sad only for my inability to express this wisdom to all people, to have limited means in this medium of life to extend my genuine happiness onto all other people, to cause happiness in everyone. But I will try because I feel that it is a noble effort to confer the wisdom of peace and love onto a sceptical body of people that have all the qualities of myself. Wisdom is a noble profession, one that requires more work than any job, more labour than any other profession, with greater riches in the creation and distribution of wisdom to other people. Wisdom is synonymous with charity, I have come to learn. When someone is wise, they only know how to give because there is no self to hinder the giving, no selfishness. When someone is charitable, they are wise because to be charitable is to know of the genuine good and worth of things that can be possessed only truly when they are given, and the only thing that is ever truly given in a charitable act is the wisdom of charity. This is my logic when it comes to the dual name of Charity and Wisdom, and these ideas can be appealed to in other people, but unless this wisdom is charitably given it will carry no special god to the hearer, and it is the gold, the valuable stuff, which should always be given in a collection of words. This is why oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life ought to be a work of art; because there must be artfulness in the transformation of things from base into gold, one always and unfalteringly gives this gold to other people, for one who can make gold out of base substances has no real use for it except in other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s joy; the alchemist knows the richness of gold; that it can be given. This is the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true wisdom about life and its practice; that in practise gold can be made form any old thing and given to someone else to make life rich, and this giving is worth more than gold, it is worth nothing, it is priceless.

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I am listening to Cesar Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and I can see the truth of the artist’s charity; this music is giving and it will be giving forever and ever. It deserves its immortality because it never runs out of juice, it is a machine for creating and delivering gold and it does so again and again. And when one is standing beneath this fountain, beneath this cascading joy, one wishes to give it, to create and to express the gold that one can hear and thus one can also speak. If you can hear the voice of wisdom, one should also speak it, like all good people who have heard something that was beautiful must also have the capacity to say something beautiful likewise. I am an ordinary man; I am sitting at my PC having taken a day off work, (as I have in the past,) and I have no remorse for this act because what I can do in these hours is more giving, more charitable and more full of vitality than anything that I can do in another person’s job. While I am stealing this day back off myself I wish to give something beautiful to someone and I am so glad that finally you are listening to me, than you are really here in this ornamental garden in my mind, watching the swallows and chaffinches. I am so happy that I have realised that I can do something good on my own terms and not feel bad at all, for this is my life and I am doing with it what should always be done with it; something good. I will feel no guilt in my body when I look at my work colleagues tomorrow, rather I will say to them things that I have learnt. I should take more sick time than I currently do because I have been so profoundly sick, lice-ridden and dead for such a long life and only now am I beginning to resurrect myself. Isn’t it a wonderful thing when, all of a sudden, life appears completely transparent and you cannot help but laugh at it, as

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though the mind were being brought into light and was being ravished by clear and prophet eternal youth? That is what is here now; because I am describing for you my anxieties. Last night at about eight oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;clock in the evening when the sun was vanishing behind the horizon I was sitting on my couch in the bay window and I was looking at the clouds that were right up in the stratosphere, and this was all that I did for a number of minutes because I did not need to do anything else at that point of my life but watch the clouds. As an artist I can assure you that sitting around is the least easy thing to do because one feels there is always something to do, some work that must be accomplished and that life cannot merely pass by. So this was indeed an act of great discipline on my behalf and I am pleased with it. All of my writing has been borne out of anxiety, and every time that it sounds as though I am attacking some portion of an imaginary audience that I only have vague, selfish and unenlightened knowledge about I am in fact expressing anxiety for those parts of myself that are unresolved, ashamed and full of sad longing. But even beauty may come out of fear which is what I am trying to do; to convert this base object, this fallen object, (fear,) into an enlightened, gold and priceless object; Love. This is basic alchemical science and only the most dedicated and experienced alchemist can attempt this profound and invisible feat. Because there is absolutely no material involved in this transmutation, there can be neither any failure nor any selfishness. Only true and genuine belief will create the golden, magical stuff. Only foolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gold can come from irony and sceptical half-belief in the possibilities in life and I long to find such humble and wonderful hermits that have taught themselves and never believed in what it was they were learning enough to give it to

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other people. An enlightened person cannot impose an opinion on another person; wisdom cannot be ‘of an opinion’, and hence it cannot be imposed. The giver has no use of it and it is given freely; what the taker chooses to do with that thing, whether it be ironical, sceptical or hateful, wasteful, slanderish of selfish is of no concern of the giver; it just goes to prove that the recipient was a mug, was all of the things that they chose to express through this valuable, objective wisdom. When I see a person smoking a cigarette, all I can see now, (and through my experience of having been a smoker,) is someone passing the time. This is why smoking kills; because time is passing, evaporating with the life-shortening substance, life-shortening because time is being stolen from you in symmetrical ways by the cigarette.

I can work so easily this day for the sun is up in the sky as the sun is up in my mind, I cannot be wasteful. This life is me as I am this life, and reality is an experience of the whole of god, wrapped up in time, space, the world, thoughts, a joyful and wonderful Arcadia where no two things are separate, for there is no division within unity. When a person is altogether, that is when reality is altogether. If a person is disparate, divided, regretful or any other failure of consciousness, then so is reality, for reality is the extension of the conscious mind out onto the world, it is a transparent and yet patterned blanket that overlays all things and brings them together into the herring-bone. I was asked by friends whether I voted in the general election and I said no, not because of any reason but because I did not know about it and it had no use for me. I thought that only could only ‘vote’ for a politician or political party if they enshrined a beautiful spirituality, a general desire and

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divine ambition to do good in as unselfish and egotistical way as was physically and ideologically conceivable. I have no pretences about my political naiveté; there is no good politics without charity between humans, and I am not yet sceptical enough to become a voter or to wish to express my ‘freedom’ to vote. I don’t know what voting it. Nothing has told me that it is a good thing in itself, rather many people have told me that it is a duty, that I ‘ought’ to vote. Still sounds like the same old bullshit to these ancient ears; there is no enlightened understanding here otherwise I would have heard it. So I did not vote, but I did think to myself that perhaps if I could speak with the prime minister of this politics, this figurehead for the bureaucracy, perhaps I could come to an understanding of what was going on and passing me by. I would like to find out if Tony Blair was an alright person, whether he was as able and fit to run to run the country as myself, and if he was, I would give him this vote. But politics is not about doing good, otherwise I would have seen it. Politics is a huge neurosis, just as Kafka and Miller conceived bureaucracy as neurosis, as idiocy or a bewildering distraction from life to the administration of a life. We don’t really want to do anything for one another because all we really want to do is look out for ourselves, to defend our portion and to hide away from everything in our poxy and pathetic fears. This is not life; life is either a prison or a palace; one you cannot escape from, the other you do not want to leave. Hence, in this room which is your reality you must furnish with beautiful and rich things, precious ornaments and things of beauty and happiness. A prisoner cannot bring anything good into their reality, but the king or queen can bring anything from their kingdom into the palace to enjoy. So why would you not create a palace from reality and put goodness, light

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and beauty into this place with all of the good things that it is within your power to put there? Only somebody imprisoned by fear would choose their prison over their palace. And because this palace exists only in the sphere of consciousness, its rooms must be furnished with beautiful memories of the perfection of life where everything is enshrined in the wisdom of the perfect order of the universe. None of these possessions, these memories bathed in shame or ignominy should remain unenlightened, should go without their place in the proper order of things. Everything should become an object of pride, for kings and queens are not shameful of their possessions or subjects. I stop and think that a new blank page appears at the end of each completed one, provided by the everhelpful computer programme. Could I use up all of it’s pages with my words or would I become exhausted and deflated like an empty balloon? Infinity stretches out before me and all I need to do is put an end on it to seal it in, to create a boundary over which I am unable to overstep or transgress. Can a human being conceive of ‘the end’, the end of anything or does he, instead of conceiving of the end, merely feel remorse and melancholy instead? But in melancholy, true and deep melancholy, there is no remorse and no boundary. Only the melancholic can conceive of that which has no end, that which is infinite and unified, that which is ‘one’. And so deep must we traverse to the heart of this cavern where our deepest and most profound sorrow for ourselves, where the dragon of our anxiety rests, beyond all parameters of mourning and melancholia until we have restored ourselves at the life spring at the heart of the world, at the fount of eternal youth and life. Once ignited there is no ill-wind that can completely extinguish the flame of wisdom, no foul breath that can put asunder the sweet voice of philosophy.

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I feel the complete release of intellectual pressures, for in life there is no need of pressure if you cannot create your own steam.

I sit for a moment with Marianna on the couch in the sunshine and speak with her about Poussin and his image of Arcadia and we speak about what it signifies to us. No ordinary mortal can reside in Arcadia and the influence of Rome, the idea and the air of Rome pervades Poussin’s vision. Any person with anxieties, questions or fears cannot be in Arcadia; it is for those people full of content, in empty happiness, harmonic with nature, balance and God. This is why there is no trace of religion in these images, for to be in this place does not even require the paraphernalia of religious stories. Religious stories or '‘Parables'’ are like boats which take us from one shore of unknowing to the next, but once enlightenment dawns upon us we have no need of these vehicles for the journey is complete. The enlightened person must leave behind such vehicles, must leave his or her religions and opinions and ideas and everything behind in order to fully attain human divinity and reside in Arcadia or ‘Heaven’ recreated a second time on earth. Only the most religious person can leave behind their religion, can leave the things behind to be with the one that these parables were signposting. Once we have returned back into the second Eden of ourselves, of our own perfect garden where there are no shadowed objects, no regrets or fears, just a pure Love, can we humans begin to lead the life that we have all glimpsed and that we all know to be the most perfect realisation of human life and culture. In this garden we all want for nothing because we all have everything because we all give everything and we all make everything and we

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all Love everything. This is the attainment of perfect humanity and it is only the fearful that produce fearful and sceptical thoughts about it. They have hitherto called it ideology and shunned it, have instead favoured ‘realism’, the realisation of their sullied and shadowed ideology, donning the cloak of ‘realism’ to disguise their own foul ideology. We can be, for it is our one true destiny, but one we must choose. A human has only one choice to make in life and it was the one choice that constitutes his freedom from God; he must choose God, and to choose God means that the human has attained their proper place. This is the one use of our ‘liberty’, our one free choice. The existential philosophers, the philosophers of existence have brought the contaminated parts of existence to the skin and have illuminated the sickness of the individual soul, the soul reified from God, and have demonstrated the absolute torment of having freedom to choose and the unfreedom inherent in each and every choice. And so have these guys taught me that our only free choice given to use by God was that we should choose God, that we should accept Him into our hearts as our maker and to join Him in Arcadia. Every other choice is just the absence of God, for there are no other choices. ‘All existential choices are the same’ Heidegger said, but her was not explicit enough to state that the same choice is the acceptance of God, the acceptance that everything is everything and that Being is now and that the human in perfect enlightenment is the perfectest human, is living the proper human life and is well-adjusted and is at one with the universal. Of course, Heidegger used different words, but of course we are asking the same question, all of us, in our own voices, in our own heads, in our own ways, in our own meanings, and yet we all ask the same question and long to hear the same answer. A

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frightened person will always condemn his neighbourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assertions, but this is because he knows only how to reject and not how to accept. Acceptance is the bedfellow of Charity, giving all one has and accepting all one gives, it is the divine form of Echo and Narcissus, of giving and receiving. Do you see that Charity and Acceptance are the enlightened pseudonyms of Echo and Narcissus?

And I therefore sit here in my T-shirt and jeans with my flip-flops on, and allow the realisation of Charity and Acceptance to come to me, for me to travel without moving, to pass mountains through the mind. This has been a remarkable week, if only for such a week of closeness to my wife where I can give a superabundance of life to her, where I can be attentive and I can be as generous as time will allow. My writing is circular, for you will again detect, if only a few pages from now, that again I grow remorseful and anxious, as my old friends return to me. Will one of my enlightened thoughts free me from chains and allow me to be accepted into myself? I am writing here in the clear daylight and all of life is achieved, everything contains meaning and all there is is joy. Why does it pass? Because all things, just like me, will pass also, and will pass in circular motion around the ring of infinity, endlessly, and one is either spinning or dancing. So let me now talk to you about your anxieties, about your Loveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desire, about the sad songs in your mind, about the desperation that lurks behind each action and each confession, about the hidden joy that characterises every tear. Let me tell you, as brothers in life, that it is the same in you as it is in you, that there is no separation between us any more unless we remain selves, egotistical. Let me remind you of all the beautiful

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things that you are able to do but do so rarely, how you do things that will not hurt you, how you lead a safe life because you are so afraid of being hurt. This can be seen in your love life, your social life, your working life, your family life and your intellectual life. You do not want to be hurt. But you cannot be destroyed, so it is not fear of death that holds you in its icy grip; it is fear of life. You are terrified of life; death is merely a promise of which you are so untrustworthy will ever reach you, a rumour you wished for all your life, but has never come to you. You have never read your letter. So, if you learn to fear death you will suddenly come back to life, will suddenly see all of the character of life coming back into your understanding. If you fear Death, your fear will always be unknowing, will never be experienced, will be nothing, will be beyond the reach of life. Death is to be feared, not life. This is the perfect understanding of fear as Death and Death as fear; fear must know its proper place, which is beyond your life and beyond your control. And only then will you be ready to live without fearing Death, for there will be no fear and no Death to one whom attains this realisation.

Paradoxically, it is when I am at rest that I am most anxious; when I am at rest I am not working and therefore I worry. Is it possible for an intelligent person to be well and truly bored without the incensed desire to work or am I alone in this terrible place where there is no rest, no good rest, no opportunity to recuperate, to regain oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s energy? Why is this, a book about how to fall in love, full of the most anxious thoughts unless I am preparing the way for something significant to happen, a vision in the blindness, or does the author as yet have no idea as to the purpose or conclusion of

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this writing? I must admit that if I were a good author I would have figured out and planned what it was that I was going to write, but I cannot be a good author until I have written something, so I chose the latter mirror-image and proceeded and you can see for yourself where it has got me. Unless I can demonstrate by truly and transiently coming into this realisation in real-time as it were, I do not think that it can make any difference to anybody; it has to be shown that the entire process, even all of the errors and misleading thoughts and dead-ends in my understanding are in fact necessary paths on this diverse and peculiar intellectual journey. So have I created this problematic mental behaviour merely so that I have an endless amount of looping realities that I can pop in and out of all at once and never really step over myself or is it that, when I wake up next to her I instantly forget what I was dreaming because my unconscious makes an unconscious admission that conscious life is better than dreaming? I sit through all of this.

Do you know what I worry about a great deal at the moment? It is a silly worry that is self-defeating, but it is a worry nonetheless. I do all of this probing, constantly wishing to go deeper beyond the surface in order to discover and know as much as possible about my life, who I am and reality itself and I worry that I will get to a place where I find nothing, a pure absence of things, no immaculate and pure place, merely vacuum. My clear understanding understands this problem, this fear, and it holds the keys to the wisdom in question. But I am still afraid of my ability to go deeper, too deep, and I guess that this means I have confidence in my abilities, even at the cost of the luxury of rest. My better self knows that one must proceed deeper and in the best possible spirits, that

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whatever occurs there has been informed by the journey, that if I proceed anxiously I shall be the cause of my own infinite anxiety. My better self knows that there is nothing to lose in this place except the fear itself, and this fear is so afraid of losing itself and not existing, creates a barrier through which we are too terrified to penetrate. I think that life is staged upon mount purgatory, that we seek to ascend through the confusing and base sins against ourselves and move upwards to a place where the self is not deranged and our understanding is not clouded by it. All confusion is caused by fear, anything set into the eternal pattern of fear is characterised by fear and it is the strict abidance to the laws of fear, (of which we could demonstrate that causes and activities of fear and the fearful,) and fear is the same name of ignorance, Love is the same name as wisdom. We can see quite clearly here the two patterns and their various names, but we are yet to encounter the name of God that is the one word from which these two words come from, the composite and eternal paradox that sits at the beginning and the end of the eternal patterns. God is all things, He begins the eternal pattern, He ends the eternal patter and He Is the eternal pattern, but to understand the meaning of this three-tiered paradox which sounds like nonsense is the proof of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to accept the idea of the infinite in the self and the proof that one is able to Love, (which is the infinite,) and Fear it, (as in God-fearing, that to love God is to fear Him, because He is the beginning and the end of the infinite, and He is the infinite Himself.) God is the idea of the infinite, the infinite idea. We still envisage a thing when we envisage God, a person or character analogous to ourselves or our fallen notions of justice and good. But God is a thought, the thought thinking Himself, He is our ability to not perceive Him, He

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is hidden in our blindness to Him. Am I able to perceive these ideas only when I am willing, (God-willing,) to accept the self-evident truth of anxiety as the necessary second-hand in my love of God? When fear merely gives rise to ignorance we are left with overwhelming confusion, but when our fear is aimed at the beginning and the end of the infinite it redoubles as the echo of love, it encapsulates the thought of God.

I sat around the kitchen table last night with Marianna and a couple of friends who are dear to me and I spoke for a while about what I think about God, but this was made more complex than it is to sit alone and to write about Him. In this scenario we talk about the different meanings of words, how they relate and signify according to the specific locus of the various strands of religion and ultimately, about inefficiency of language to bring us closer to God or to ourselves. My friend has had a Christian upbringing similar to mine, although much more intense and not so casual, and therefore to consider God is for him a far more complex operation and involves questions of the paternal figure of God, sex, guilt and the promise of damnation. I however do not consider any of these things in a similar way, for I would consider that to be damned is to create damnation for yourself as a response to your talent for living and overcoming oneself in being good. I would also consider evil as the left hand of God, and good the right hand. Positive and negative are both parts of the whole, Satan is a fallen angel for one with a fallen faith, or he is Jesus to one who perceives the Godly aspect in him as another part of the divine configuration. But to me it does not make any difference as to whether my position towards any of these contentious issues are correct or even well-informed. I

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have merely sat down to write about God for it is my right and my desire, and therefore I have done it. Nothing contained therein has any less or any more credence than anything else that was ever written about him, whether it is the Koran, the Bible or whatsoever. What should characterise this effort is the genuineness of the undertaking to understand something that is incredulous but important nonetheless, reliant upon the assumption that if God has made me, He has also given me the correct equipment for being enlightened to Him. And I suppose that I do use a lot of words that would mean very different things to very different people, but this again is peculiar to the conditions of language, that language is built up as a star-system around the self and is peculiar to that star, that there is a tacit agreement between people that they are talking about the same thing although it can never be the same thing. Talking in this respect is a form of idealism, a blindness to the selfevident contradiction that neither can we say what we mean, but we cannot hear what is said either. Problems with being a self. Is there a workaround for this problem of communication between sentient beings and must it necessarily be as straightforward as we would think? Rather than beginning with the outside, with other minds, (which are by necessity unknowable,) shall we start with the inside which, as must be painfully obvious, is riddled with complexities, neuroses and deceit? Should we attempt to straighten out this soul or is it already straight? To a queer theoretician, this would sound heterosexual and neurotic, which I am, but it would be a criticism of what they think I think, (which is an inaccurate science at best,) and is only set up to avoid the problem and reinstate the security of the self against other selves. I was speaking with a gay friend of mine about the problem of being in a minority culture, whether that

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was a gay, female, ethnic, etc. No matter how genuine the criticism of the dominant mode of discourse or the paternal hierarchy, each self will always attempt to enforce itself over another self if it has the chance to exploit the opportunity, making it each man or woman for him or her self, at the end of the day. (It’s an ‘end of the day’ type of argument, for all of you fans of rhetoric.) Being positioned as a minority is only disadvantageous because one is able to enforce opinion from the position of underdog without noticing that this opinion accords with a desire, and that this desire means that you want something, and that it is this want of things that has established this ruling order in the first place. As Foucault has demonstrated more than accurately, we are all capable of fascism; not just some of us, but all of us. I do hope that I get criticised for these ‘opinions’ of ‘mine’, (whatever the hell that can mean,) because at least it will mean that I have generated some form of interest. If you are still unable to perceive the significance of what I am doing when I write down an ‘opinion’, then you are still ill-equipped to hear or understand me but we shall persist. I can assert that regardless of what our opinion of what another person is ‘like’, (for this opinion comes from the self and is always biased, tainted and disingenuous as to its motive or meaning,) that to truly know another person would be a highly enriching and awesome experience. For two beings to look and hear one another without this intrusive self shouting about what it is even though it does not know, would be fantastic.

I now, (and I am sorry to break off mid sentence though by now you should be used to that, for your thoughts do it all day long,) am desirous to talk about my fantastical need for pity, to be felt sorry

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for, (but only in my own mind for it does not take into account the existence of other minds no matter how it might appear and it is an utterly selfish drive.) I think about getting ill, about dying or about being attacked or about so many forms of maltreatment against my person, even to the point of having stress inflicted upon me. It is a perverse love that seeks to know how the self-image is cared for by the world out of pathetic pity as though it is only ever cared for when it is pitied. Where does this desire stem from, this perverse form of love which looks and sounds like love but is in fact another selfish drive which has nothing to do with acceptance or the exterior world of that which is good? I often wonder how people can mistake for love that which is quite plainly narcissistic, (love which is not love, which is mistaken identity or confusion or egobolstering or borne out of deficiency in some way.) Love is antithetical to selfishness, to be prone to the self, to only act because of what the self stands to profit from in its own economical ways. Love is not from these things and true self-love can only come out of selflessness, where the profit is invisible and that there is no desire to help other than that helping is good. {[Isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t this a rubbish argument?] Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m glad that I can see all of the obvious holes in my argument, but I am not arguing because I am talking to myself. This is easy and yet more difficult than talking to somebody else, for if there was somebody else there I could always blame that person for my own lack. But here there is only me and I must live with my own contradictions and flaws and fuck only knows that I have enough of them, like for instance how I can sit here and be so pathetic all of the time. But am I not writing about my impulse to desire pity? Am I not justified? Good; I have just demonstrated in the most lucid possible way how my desire to be

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pitied works; it is connected to justification and I have exposed it here fully. I want there to be a concession for me in life, an exception to the rule, because my ability to live is so weak, (but not really,) that I want to go through life without encountering the accountability of a person who is in their right mind or right in their body or in their soul. So I am perverted in this way in that I feign sickness, disease and insanity in order to create for myself an empty space where I can work, a place where I can always hide from my accountability, where I can live in perpetual fear. This part of myself resides in darkness, a shadowy motive with its hand in everything. But is it not plainly obvious that, were it bathed in light, would be a beautiful object of divine pity and not merely selfish self-pity? Can I not understand God through my own lack, through my own sickness? If self-centred and narcissistic pity means that I desire to be let-off, to not be accountable for my own actions, to desire a reduced sentence, then divine pity must be that which is fully acceptable, is guilty and innocent in equal measures, (which his the only form of justice there can ever be; equilibrium,) where I can love without distance from things, for distance is fear and fear is the self. Does this not make sense, that out of my lack I can perceive how to treat the real sickness that I pity myself for? Can I cure myself of what is not in fact a sickness, only an imaginary sickness which is the self? The self is not diseased; it does not even exist except in its own fabrication and this is part of the disease itself, part of the divine paradox that I must come to understand in order to understand. I say to myself that there is a chasm between thinking about doing something and doing something. Perhaps I am terribly, terribly wrong? Perhaps this in the only real source of my disingenuous spirit?

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I want to tell you a story, not a particularly well crafted one, (for I have not yet thought of what it is going to be, it will spontaneous,) but a story nonetheless. It is about a youth who had brought himself up to hold others in high regard, but only if they held a higher social station than he. It came to be that even when he looked at people of a lower social station that he, he would still hold them in a regard higher than himself, as though they possessed some faculty that caused their actions to be both genuine and simple at once, not belonging to a neurosis or a complex, not frustrated and impotent. He would always assimilate the opinions of those who were in the higher social station so that he might make company with them, (because he also thought that these people lived without neuroses and complexes.) He did, in some respects, avoid himself by possessing these habits of his and, upon encountering someone who actually desired to know who he was, he was at a loss; he suddenly came across as pathetic, of low self-esteem, low self-worth and an almost complete disregard of what other people were. He was a self-obsessed thing that, paradoxically, based itself upon other people whom he had no regard for. He was empty, a carcass that appeared to breathe and talk and eat, but felt nothing and possessed no nervous system. Whilst in this torpor, this cardiac arrest, this person delivered a defibrillating shock to his dormant being and awoke him to his imaginary state of being. So full of real anguish that before was mere imaginary and desired, pitiful anguish, this youth began a project to dismantle every single part of what he was to see if there was a pulse, a sign of life, a germ of truth that was worth clutching to. He managed to unearth an ancient reason inside of himself that was in possession of the keys to his project and he

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vowed loyalty to those things alone, constantly testing his regard for others, his preordained image of the world and its meaning, and of the image that he had of himself. Now in this story he resides in an advantageous place where the ending is completely in his control and all he needs to discover is how he wants this story to finish. But he is still clouded by the hallucination of options, of paths, of routes and decisions. Once he has realised that there is no choice may he precede (sic) along the correct path.

It is not my intention to illustrate that the person described in this story is supposed to be me, because it is just a collection of words that might have some vague association with existent things in the universeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past. But I have conjured up a cut out image, a template into which you are obliged to insert your own analogy of your selfimage into that of [mine] until both of us are disposable in this twodimensional universe.

I look at my watch and grow giddy at the fear that time instils in me. Why does the time always, always make me anxious? Why does it make me believe that, even though time is with me and that I am present, that somehow I am sad that it passes, that there is not enough time and that I miss my wife even when she is with me? This is dreadful and it is the illusion of time that causes me to dread thus, to feel the pangs of remorse that are watered by the motion of the clock. This is the reason for my propensity for â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;wasting timeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. It is only one who holds time in disregard that may waste it; easy come, easy go as the proverb says. If I held all time in the highest regard, (instead of people,) then perhaps I might be able to overcome the backwardness of my self-respect and self-pity. I

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would cease to pity myself, cease to waste time, cease to do all sorts of injurious things to myself. And to hold all of time in the highest regard means to place oneself and oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intellectual faculties in the present, the permanent and infinite mirror that disappears only to be replaced by a new one, thus making oneself whole to all things in the universe that exist in that moment, for there can be no space when time has stopped.

Stop.

This last set of paragraphs, (for they must indeed be considered as a set and musical as opposed to descriptive,) contain much of my sense of futility and what I long for, the purpose of all of this, is to discover where this futile feeling that pervades all things comes from and why I of all people should feel futile. Part of me says that I maintain no â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;rightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to this futility because I am middle-class, of some means, a landowner, white and heterosexual. But I do not I do not hold any of these things against myself, for that would be nonsense. Perhaps I have heard this criticism so many times from so many other people that the voice has been adopted as my own? I still cannot allow myself to accept the idea that there are varying degrees of human suffering, for ii should likewise have to concede that there are varying degrees of human happiness. But I would not think of these things if I was being tortured right now, would I? Perhaps it is the doom of people that they should desire to awaken. I hold nobody in high regard, (for that should mean that I would have to hold people in low regard as well, and who am I to judge these things?) In fact, who am I to judge the happiness and sadness of other human beings, let alone their worth or importance? Why

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should it be so necessary to pity other people when all we really do is rude their bodies as a medium for expressing our own ‘good natures’ or ‘guilty consciences’? This is one reason why I ‘pity’ myself, because a creature that operates in this pathetic way needs some form of concession for continuing to breathe. If I could write down in a word what my frustration was, I would have done so and it would have gone. I write in an epileptic fashion, in fits and starts, when the pressure is too great it must be exorcised onto the page so that I might be free of it for a while. When I say exorcised, do I mean that there is a devil inside of me? Do I consider any part of me to be diabolical or is this all just a lark, this playing against gravitational fields? Where is the locus of pure pleasure and why must it be de-centred? Why is enjoyment impossible and why then does work always pursue it, like some desire that is fleet of foot, tantalisingly close but out of arm’s reach? Is it possible to relax or is this a cruel joke, a place I was told about but that does not exist? If I cannot relax, does this mean that my muscles are strong or that they are retentive; are they inflexible? What am I really afraid of losing if I lose my grip? Everybody has an innate fear of losing touch with reality and in part, it is the method of control that keeps us to our small and preordained mode of ‘sanity’, the one that is of use to those who exert power. If not, then why is it that one grows ever more anxious at the prospect of losing oneself; why is it that I cannot relax if not that I am afraid of not working, as though working has become my only source of value? Did I ever intend for my work to become this way or am I merely looking for the next phase; that my whole life is work, whether I am at the cinema, pulling up weeds or farting. Is it the truth that I longed for but did not dare utter; that if I can construe my whole life as work I can

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therefore insert meaning into everything? Is this why I am so terribly and crushingly anxious at present? What do my dreams tell me about enjoyment, that I am being hampered by my sense of value whereas I could be released by it at the same time?

So, has this become the book of despair or is it still the book about how to fall in love? I must admit that, in comparison to my first and third books, (both of which lay completed, unruffled and beyond now the pale of such anxieties,) that I have no idea as to what this book means. I think this is because I am behind myself given that my third book is complete and I am going over old, dead stuff in this book. Should I therefore move immediately on to the fourth book, the next level, and lay these ghosts of mine to rest? Despair emerges when one is either too soon or too late, not when one is centred and content. I was too soon with the next book and too late with this one. Why do I flog this dead horse?

I must sit and try to think of what this book now means and it shall be called the next chapter.

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II The Book Of Despair

I am now inside of an annexe [or an abscess] that I have created, trapped in the underworld of yet to be/has been. In this do I find my project; through the struggle and through the lyricism of my soul can I convert all of the confusion that has gone before into something that knows what it is. I am currently writing a book that is finished, but I am yet to finish a book that has already come into being. This space that is currently filled with dread, (for it does and does not exist, it is a temporal dogma that I have created for myself and in which I must create something meaningful,) has now been split in two sections; before the knowledge of the past death and after the knowledge of lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beginning. If I continue to split between these two backwards and self-reflecting, anxious states I will indeed create a thing conscious of itself, in purgatory between, without. I must proceed in this symmetry for, as a symmetrical being trapped between states and torn between the yes and no of life, I must remain faithful in order to deviate. One either revels in rapture or cries in despair at such things and if I was one in the other I was previously and now I am in the other presently.

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i) My problem at the moment is this; I cannot record everything. I try to record everything but then I see the imperfections and they castrate me, (although they should constitute the peak of my enjoyment.)

ii) I am unable to let go; if I do not record something it feels as though that thing had no value because it was not recorded. I cannot have a thought and allow it to evaporate. I am being haunted by thoughts that died long ago, all demanding resurrection.

iii) I cannot â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;wasteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; time.

iv) I feel as though I have cornered myself; I have put anxiety into any action that is not recorded when the solution to this problem is as apparent as this:

v) Everything in life has meaning, whether it is called work or no.

vi) Have I thus far managed to extract all of the enjoyment from my labours by imposing too strict and too false, (too idealistic,) a working practise?

I have tied myself in knots, both inside, (the intestines,) and inside, (the connecting factors between brain-cells.) This knot is essential for it will produce the paradox; this book must become its own resplendent paradox, a knot, an impasse, a raising drawer-bridge. I must enhance this symmetry further; if the first part of the book was a journey from light into darkness, then this half, the mirror,

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must be from darkness into light. This is therefore the book of despair, and it will be V â&#x20AC;&#x201C;shaped. It will contain many parallels and many repetitions, but it will present the fact that a person can be both mirror images at the same time. Assume then that the blank portion between this chapter and the last symbolises the absolute depths of despair. Think likewise that the gap between the beginning and end, (if this book was circular, which it is when a mirror is held to it, a paradoxical loop, a moebius strip,) is the peak of ecstasy. Then consider that both are interchangeable and part of a whole, part of a twisted infinity â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;8â&#x20AC;&#x2122;, the twisting constitutes my confusion about it all. So I have just made it past the low point and I am heading again toward the high, an existential roller coaster, anxiety always at hand because with any peak there must be a fall, like the melancholy of the summer that always passes but that one must learn to be both a part of this strange looping motion and not a part of it at the same time. Consciousness is one such bizarre ride, an incomprehensible shape that always repeats but never repeats, (if you can imagine such a form existing.) This is what I look like, it is my shape, it is my motion, it is my desire, my fear, my ambition, my memory, my understanding, my guts, my wisdom. Peace can only happen in the epicentre of this whirling madness and hence, I am there, between chapters, between the end and the beginning of books, where there are no words and there is no self, merely pure and unadulterated, unutterable Being. Et In Arcadia Ego.

And so I am now in the mood to fix things wherever possible, to find problems and mend them, to paper over the gaps until I can find permanent remedies to these things. I have constructed an

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entire self out of these patches all found on the floor, all stuck on and, like papier-mâché, all the individual bits of pulp become one. But now it is time to hack away at this casing for I no longer need this permanent form of identity; one should not be afraid to go without identity, without self, into the world. A child does not believe it can cycle without stabilisers at first. Your mind is as strong as your thoughts, as they say; I am now thinking myself into a new position, position whereby I can continue to be what I thought I was and use this illusion as a medium through which I can learn to exist. But now I must learn that, not only must time pass of its own accord, no matter how desperately I cling to each and every moment, (which is the cause of my anxiety – temporal condition,) but to encourage such a process, to do away with the eye on the time that hinders both my work and my play to the extent that the two are separated and encroach upon one another. I should be playing all day long and working all day long, simultaneously. I have this ability. I have no more desire for empty, content-less leisure or empty but zealous work. Everything should now be intertwined, redoubled, reconstituted and refreshed; the one automatically produces the other, the mirror image or symmetrical logic. If I say yes I say a trillion no’s, and each time I say no I say a trillion yes’s. The singular is automatically the super numerous, there is no loneliness in being a one, because everyone is one, one and all.

Thought; if I only sit down to write when I am feeling positive, confident and enlightened, will you therefore only see a privileged portion of my thinking life or should I write as I do currently,

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whenever there is free time from my job or other commitments regardless of the picture I choose to paint?

I am learning how to be carefree, and the first stage is to disregard my own safety, the security of my body. After this has successfully been achieved I may then proceed to eliminate the paranoid attitudes of my conscious self to the outside world. I find that my current desire to hang upon each moment as though it were the last actually causes the retrograde effect of mourning the present, of a deep and unutterable longing that refuses to acknowledge the death of moments and produces an overwhelming melancholy. Perhaps this is desirable and in keeping with my general attitude to life and knowledge, or perhaps I have pursued this present route blindly without exploring the glorious possibilities in alternative areas? So I resolve to leave these melancholic thoughts here recorded, safe until another day when they might be employed to add context and depth to a new attitude, and start off along a new and dark road taking with me the knowledge that I had once grown comfortable in my self-knowledge, I had reached a state, (although it looked from the inside as though it were a conscious progression but was in fact a static fluctuation between self-contained opposites.) What if I record only my efforts to be throwaway? Is this my new journey? Is it possible that a man can move from contradiction to contradiction without losing integrity and falling apart like the hull of a damaged spacecraft? To record my carefreeness, my new task for now, and read onward into the next trillion pages in just the blinking of the eye, where we have all grown old and vanished from existence in the space of nothing:

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And so I record, re-record and re-record again, a hundred times over in the same document. I have written this page a thousand times, each time over the top of the previous page, obliterating each page with each page written. You cannot see this in a computer document as this is the final page that was written after this journey to unknowing and back, to the carefree place where all things are of value and yet completely disposable. To value without care; is this yet another contradiction? I have been to a thousand remote and wonderful places in the depths of my mind and I have written a trillion trillion things upon this particular page, each one erasing the last until I ceased to tread water, to walk upon the same spot. I then began to propel myself forward by allowing the words to reach a page beyond this one until whole volumes of books were written. And yet there was a trillion trillion things that went unsaid in the erased book, the book of carefree values herein contained. Is it ethical to write a book that can never be written? Most people are disheartened and consumed when an hours work is lost, perhaps in computer or human error, or if a storm tears down a house that was recently built. The labour is still fresh upon the mind, the happiness of the creation, and then in the destruction the personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creative efforts are made light of, humiliated, as though the universe did not care a jot about human endeavour. Is this real despair when one possesses the knowledge that this trillion-page book without substance is out there in the universe despite its lack of physical presence? It came into being and was put under erasure continuously, as though each new page was just a moment to be replaced by the next and the next ad infinitum. These passing moments or pages of the universal history created the effect of motion, of movement through time but, like a zoetrope, was merely

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the flickering residue of one moment replaced by the next upon the record of consciousness. There never was time in here, in this book without pages. Time was but never is. And now onward into the future of the circular zoetrope, travelling without moving, disappearing each moment and re-inscribed each moment. If you slowed or quickened to the pace of moments you would vanish altogether, for one only ever exists in the present. New theory of temporal existence; if one could travel forward or back to the past or future one would disappear from time altogether, for there is only one position for consciousness, which is the present. The body may well be able to move, but consciousness would be obliterated. This will be a new document of sorrow, for a self that was unravelled from its comfortable and contented knots and was thus exposed as a nothing, just as moments in time that were all touching one another as if in a semiotic poem composed of fractals of space. But the greatest despair does not carry any feeling with it; despair consists of feeling nothing, castrated in the promise that no further feelings will emerge, that all is lost and was lost by a silly, simple desire to be transparent and to possess self-knowledge. The unravelled knot is merely a piece of string with a start and a finish and does not look like a complex does. Any person who is composed of the complex, (and this is all of you and us is it not,) cannot envisage this state, the state where start and finish are identical, where time disappears because there are no complexes to hold it up. Transparency is instantaneous and time/space vanish. No perceptions desire to hold onto them. This is nothingness, infinite nothingness. I sat one day without a care in the universe, as though in a state of pure being without. This could have been bliss if it werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t for the nostalgia of the self that reminded me of the

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bittersweet ecstasy of neurosis. Be glad for and of what you have got, for it will always pass. There is no intrinsic value in things, persons included. Face the despair of being nothing, the promise of being nothing. I was there and now I have returned. I make many journeys in writing and I bring reports of them as did Sir Walter Raleigh of the new world, but to what degree did embellishment taint our current perceptions of those distant lands? We need to imagine a new version of trust when somebody voyages to the outer limits of human experience, to a place where even selves and identities break down and become singular and nothing. In this place, when one trusts one makes so. It is a special place where one can bring things into being by merely trusting and believing.

So look toward my image in which you place your belief or your disbelief and I shall become either and both of those things to you. In my face you might see the genuine or the disingenuous, but what is really behind that mask that you have placed upon me? There was a time when I also invested my worries in the bank of reality. In a place where one is everything and nothing at once, where the knot is unravelled and where beginning and end meet up. If one invests worries into a recording, those worries will naturally be recorded. If your life is a record, which worries have you invested and at what time will the interest be repaid to you? If your knotted reality loops back upon itself, if there really is no beginning or end to the circle, then are you seeing your future worries now that you invested aeons ago? Can you tell whether my incessant questions are hypotheses or experiences? Can enjoyment be produced from oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own recordings?

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This is what an artist sounds like; he or she can find no pleasure in recording, in painting, in writing, in composing, etc. It is a dead thing when complete and only has vitality for him or her during the production. In opposition, for the public it is the ‘product’ that provides the enjoyment, (which is one reason why artist’s tend to find self-reflective or self-referential works to their taste; it is a nostalgia for when they themselves were working.) This could not necessarily be called an enjoyment for the artist; what does the artist see when he or she is contemplating art?

Have you at all noticed how journalists or arts-administrators will try to describe to you, (and persuade you,) of the content of a new form of work by positioning it between [at least] two well-known works that are unconnected to this new author? For example, if I were a journalist, I might try to tell you that this new French film was ‘somewhere between Godard and Bergman with a touch of Melville thrown in for good measure.’ Reason for doing this? Simple; the journalist values neither you nor the work enough to attempt a criticism, does not believe that they can talk to a ‘mass audience’ in abstract or theoretical terms, (like I am,) preys upon the existing values of well-established works to save needing to expound new values for themselves, and also allows you the reader to position this work for yourself and thus persuading you of your own position to this work without having ever seen it. You have foisted part of your identity on it without any experience of the thing itself. This is quite complicit with the ‘lifting’ motion of much postmodern culture, that quotation is as good as origination.

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An example, (lifted from AN [Artist’s Newsletter] magazine May 2005)

“…The pulsing and weaving neo-psychedelic forms that inhabit her films have simple origins, their organic shapes evocative of the forms favoured by Joan Miro, Hans Arp or perhaps Frantisek Kupka, are multi-layered and animated…

…reminiscent of the oil-slides used in the psychedelic light-shows of bands like Pink Floyd or Jefferson Airplane in the late 1960s.”

by Roy Exley

This is a particularly atrocious piece of writing, (and I can only say this because I have identified with it and am equally a culprit; I too read the reviews and base my decisions upon them,) and this overcommon usage of what has become a tool of the lazy and ignorant must be exposed. Is it so difficult to think about art without relating it to other art, as though the postmodern method has merely allowed

dictionary-brained,

quotation-bound

idiots

pass

comment over the labours of artists so that the disinterested might decide as to whether they ‘like’ it or not? I did not know that art was there to be ‘liked’ or not, but it has been reduced to this. It is tantamount to saying that life is the pursuit of pleasure or happiness, as though optimism were the pursuit of the leisured middle-class that cannot defeat misery or anxiety despite having everything, like anti-Schopenhauers, (though Schopenhauer was more the optimist than you think.) Art presents its own complex

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and only those who do not seek the wisdom of art choose to define it in terms of like and dislike.

I must confess to feeling lighter today than I did the previous few days, weeks or years, and this leads me as if it were a natural inclination to slander and destroy the banality that I have invested into the culture I have put about me. If all I see is my own vaccuousness in the world, it is natural that I should want to work against it, should want to invest meaning in my own life so that there is so much meaning in the world that it is precious. Culture has become an index, an Argos catalogue that continually expands and records everything, provides equal opportunities for [almost] everything, (despite its exclusions and biases that it presents as invisible by feigning â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;equal opportunities.) We ourselves become positioned in this constellation of things, (the brightest of which are the stars,) and come to self-knowledge through our connection to indexical points and referents. But can a healthy and expansive should be content to feed at a field so fallow, or does it seek these new pastures beyond the pale of record and index? Can an artist make a work and destroy it, cut off the nose to spite the face, an invisible work? And then, he talks about it, people are interested but want to see, want to know if it is for sale or if it can be done again. The artist worries that there was no copyright and that for there to be ownership it must be repeated or he will be copied, etc. The artist always falls short under these circumstances. They desire to have ownership of an idea as though ownership, property, was the prime form of valuation in reality, without actually acknowledging the depth of their adherence to the Capitalist ethos.

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Is there a knot here to be untied that encompasses the value of leisure to culture and the value of happiness to the individual, a knot that restricts the possibilities of our movements in the realms of value? Why is it so difficult to think beyond happiness as the extent of the project of human life, as though it were the prime value from which all others descend? It has been employed thus by those people who sought infinite self-gratification, by those people who only knew the pleasure of perversion and who knew nothing of the art of philosophy. It was burned into the face of culture in the form of advertising, desire, production and all media. The legacy of Freud is put into practise at each and every stage of the day. I have had the most stupid arguments with people when attempting to discover a higher value than happiness; it does not register that there can be any greater pursuit than this.

Why therefore should somebody seek to tread the value of newness in order to overcome the value of happiness if it was blatantly apparent that new combinations are the constituents of perverse, de Sadean pleasures, (happiness yet again)? The overwhelming sense of futility that overcomes oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ambition at this stage should present a little clue that there is depth beyond the surface of pleasure, that sexual pleasure is no the be-all and end-all of human value. Consider if you will that futility represents in our minds the failed ejaculation, of impotence. In my mind this masculine symbol sits quite comfortably, but this may not be the case for all other persons. It may well be that I alone have represented intellectual penetration with coitus and intellectual failure with interruptus. I propose an alternative that removes the hinges that connect thing to thing and create a tangent, an escape line that the male black-

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widow escapes along to safety from his sexual satisfaction. There is life beyond satisfaction, beyond pleasure, beyond happiness. One need not be consumed by one’s conception. We must learn to appreciate that our symbolic co-ordinates have become attached to human equivalents, that ‘conception’ equals coitus is a backwards perception, for there was the ‘conception’ of the universe or the conception of the idea of the universe, all of which precede, (but are non-existent in symbolic terms,) the human form of ‘conception’.

I shall cut to the chase; for what need does the black widow produce such deadly [to humans and other large animals] poison when it kills and consumes such small things? Why? What does ‘why’ have to do with the poison of the black widow spider? What should human questioning have to do with the poison produced by the black widow spider? Shall we consider once again the idea of intellectual potency, of widows, coitus, male escape, sexual failure, the impotency facing any human when up against a question they have created but to which there exists no natural ‘reason’? To consider that the black widow spider produces such deadly poison for a ‘reason’ is a very strange thing. And until one is bitten by such a spider one can never possess this knowledge either. In fact, if one did die from this bite, one would still not possess any knowledge; to sacrifice all of one’s knowledge for this one piece of knowledge produces complete and unutterable unknowing. So are we still so desirous to pursue such dangerous knowledge in the first-hand or are we willing to look towards conception and pleasure without the tangled web of human sexual confusion to ensnare us? Human reasons are similar to scientific hypotheses;

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there is always, (by necessity,) an exception to the rule, but to discover this exception is to gain nothing, to be obliterated by the concrete truth over the immaterial proof of the hypothesis. I have no idea what I am talking about any longer.

I shall herewith describe my method that is the unuttered desire of science: I will squeeze each and every stone in the whole universe in order to draw blood from one of them. And when I do, what shall have happened; who will have lost and who will have gained? The scientist works on hypothesis after hypothesis, a house of cards so to speak, all of which are reliant upon the fact that were one exception to this rule made, there would be no law whatsoever. And given the infinite number of possible universes and the infinite number of variables occurring in the infinite universe, the chances of there being a law without exception is very slim. I therefore will hunt the universe for exceptions and not rules, I shall squeeze stones until one draws blood. Is this such a crazy method; to spend an infinite amount of time looking for one certainty, (the exception,) or spending in an infinite amount of time looking for one certainty, (the rule)? The same thing, to be sure; one exception to the rule is worth a trillion, trillion flawed hypotheses.

So where does quantity fit into this method, when I speak of infinite amounts of time, infinite amounts of possibilities, infinite amounts of space, etc. Why should it be necessary to trawl the universe in order to account for one simple statement that can be adhered to and which makes sense under any circumstances? Let us instead employ our Mohammedean method in order to set motion and time upon its correct course; through us as the medium, for us

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as the perceived and not the perceiver. Our journey to selfknowledge shall at first be a journey into knowing nothing, to a place where the knot is unravelled; when there is no question there is no answer and therefore there is nothing except what it is to be. There is no life like this one inside of transparency and hence, to get to and to exist in this place one cannot have any longing for failure, no hankering after pleasure, happiness, perversion or neurosis. One must learn not to hate the self because there is no self and, therefore, self-pleasure is in fact meaningless also. Who cares whether what I am saying is right or wrong? I certainly do not, because there would be so little meaning in rightness or wrongness when compared to the invisible task at hand that is designed to set being free from self at the expense of humiliation, falsehood and deception. One should not be afraid of being wrong, for wrongness is still a valid form, just as valuable as rightness, they merely sound different, do they not? Has any person ever experienced being completely right? Of course not, and yet we continue to seek out this experience in our lives, as though being right were more important than experiencing life itself. We need to experience our own version of life before encountering the one that exists before our eyes. I shall herewith prove myself to be wrong in all things, for that is my project; when I have finished this book I will have begun the book again and again and again, for that is the form of our lives; constant repetition. This book is a constant repetition for it begins as it ends and ends as it begins; it is a loop and a neurosis all at once, although in this solar system the mirror-line is evident at both the beginning and the end. But the circle is inconceivable in that it ends as it begins and begins as it ends; it does not even in fact take place. When reading this book, nothing has happened

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because all it does is begin at the end and end at the beginning. I have written a book that does not happen, even in any possible world.

Shall we consider for a moment that, despite the way in which a thing looks, it may in essence or in symbol function differently? Stop and untrain yourself from the image of things and the world of appearances. Consider that sadness in the material dimension does not equal melancholy in the spiritual dimension. These things do not necessarily correlate according to how we have been told that they do. Consider that normally, when you read a book, you are reading the essence of what was desired to be said with as little deviation as possible. Consider that when you read one of my books, all you get is the clove and not just its oil. This book does not necessarily need to look like other books in order to have an effect upon the soul; it should just be read and the effect will happen almost as if on trust. It is a great thing to live without looking neither up to or down upon people; this has nothing to do with not being ambitious, self-righteous or middle-class; it starts at the beginning, with all things equal, incredulous, unknowable. It learns its own type of respect and not that which is borne from the hierarchies of culture. It does not pretend to know itself because it knows others and it knows its place. Attempt if you will to look at a person and to see nothing; do not answer their question, do not greet them, just be nothing and see nothing. [This book encapsulates my normal cycle, of happiness into sadness into happiness into sadness ad infinitum.] There is no place for you in this world, you are not the equivalent in your being with some index that you ascribe to yourself. You are much less than this; you

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are nothing and if you are nothing then so is everything nothing and nothing is everything. If you allow the index to become attached, if you are ‘plugged in’ to the network of culture then so too do you discover that you will know everything, on somebody else’s terms, on somebody else’s’ words, somebody else’s failures, presumptions hiccups and glitches of reason, prejudices, insights, etc. I have long wondered why the ‘plugging-in’ action of the connected person, the person plugged into society, should bring satisfaction if not that it was an anal desire or a multiple pleasure where all people can be fucked at the same time in a million different ways. Why does being part of this network inspire such profound despair, such loneliness and such futility? I am able to talk all day long to my family and friends on my portable telephone. It has not brought me closer to them; it has done the opposite – I no longer see them any more. Nothing of quality passes between us. Again, I must stress that ‘virtual reality’, for the same reasons, will not conquer loneliness or sadness; it will intensify them both and will bring with it only the desire to be set free; to die. Is this not sceptical and just the voice of a profoundly anti-social person? I think that to only virtually be with a person, to virtually love someone or virtually care about things means only that one is ‘nearly-caring’ but not quite ‘caring’. ‘Virtual’ means simulated, near-to or not-quite. It is the essence of disingenoussness but it already exists in us to a terrifying degree. Virtual reality is manifest in our fore-knowledge of values, our foreknowledge of our place in society, our foreknowledge of what it is like to love, and of all our ritualised and p[re-ordained attitudes to a life we pretend to know even before it has been lived. We spend our time in trying to be right in order to justify this strange and energy-depriving attitude, and it is equalled

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in scope only by our ability to be anxious. We are doing and yet not-doing at the same time. We do one thing, but because we already know of it in the second-hand it is not even worth doing. There is no knowledge of it produced by doing it. It is just a virtual action. This virtual life we are leading is merely exponentially increasing our profound distress. Virtual reality is not a future; it is our past, our heritage. We have these technological fantasies of it’s possibility somewhere in the future, but it only means that our technological expertise has yet to match our desire to be not-quite there in life. How long have we been using ‘virtual-values’ or according ourselves with ‘virtual-knowledge’, second hand and byproxy models of knowledge that can never equate with wisdom? And, being as terribly unresolved as we are, we will get to this place with all the optimism in the world only to prove right our self-fulfilling prophecy; that we are unable to deal with responsibility for life, whether it is virtual or not, and that the only answer is to pull the plug.

Enough of my scepticism! I will continue to work in my way and the world shall continue to do what it chooses to be ‘right’, and we shall simply grow more and more remote until I am close to my life and the world is remote from me. My wife grows anxious that she does not have much contact with people, (which is the upshot of her not having a job; there is no conversation, chatter,) and I grow anxious about being with people. We are mirrored in this way and I cold guarantee that were we to swap places that we would inherit one another’s conditions also. The grass is greener on the other side? Of course it is; come and join me there. Solution; be in both

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places at once and compare the taste of the grass. But to do this, one must indeed be symmetrical like this book.

Am I now in my ascendant aspect whereas, in the previous beginning I was descendent, I was moving toward the oblivion of the ultimate point of frustration, (which, paradoxically, always constitutes the turning point and if it does not it only ends in suicide.) In the same way, as I move up to the peak of ecstasy, do I not also discover the lowest lows of the promise of moving downward? Does not the summer bear the seeds of autumn as does the winter carry the thaws of spring? Is there not a germ of the one in the fact of the other? We should look to the opposite to discover the truth we seek, such as to be in two fields grazing at once, the perceiver and the mirror-image all at once. Did Lacan not think that perhaps, if we mistake ourselves for the image in the mirror we should attempt to be the person in the mirror in order to discover the truth of ourselves, or was it that by attempting to be the truth of the mirror we learned how to be our own falsehood? What is the turning-point of such an inverted and perverse conscious object except to discover its truth in lies, to find happiness in sadness, to go downwards to go up, to seek the devil in order to find God, to find the way only by losing it?

Principle:

[Please note that I am not a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;man of principlesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, although this thought occurred to me on the bus the other day and it seemed to sound like a principle; perhaps it is one?]

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A man or woman who considers that his or her degree of suffering or pleasure is greater or less than that of any other human being is instantly enveloped behind a veil of conceit; Knowing without Knowledge.

I have already previously formed an idea about principles in my last book, formed like gelatine sets in a frigidaire, although when one forms an opinion about principles does this opinion itself take on the character of it’s subject? My method is of course destined to take back anything said as though it were the least charitable act imaginable; to give only to take back again. But to remain ‘true’ to my ‘method’, would I not also have to take back this statement and say the opposite, that my method is of course destined not to take back anything said as though it were the most charitable act imaginable? Such constantly shifting ground is the home of a creature such as me, as though the options grew wider as the intellect expanded that there was no longer anywhere to move because the horizon was so expansive. Too much choice is restricting and it is easier to know how to function if one abides by ‘sound principles’ that one is able to employ under any taxing circumstance. If one is conceited, if one does not acknowledge the existence of alternatives or differing methods or the possibility of being wrong in one’s ideas, one can move with Godspeed. Absolute conceit will speed up the process of life until it vanishes in the blink of an eye; there will be no choices to make, (because they are already made,) and hence, no paths upon which to journey. There will be no life, nothing except a disembodied experience of something having happened without your engagement to it.

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So, what have I done except to have created the impossibility of motion by having created a method that makes something and destroys something simultaneously, a paradoxical motion where no movement takes place? Perhaps this is the only kind of principle that works inside of a life that is knotted, an envelope enveloped by itself, ‘consciousness’, a thought that thinks itself into being?

This principle is somewhat Cartesian; ‘Don’t pretend like you know what is happening inside of somebody else’s mind.’ There will always be a rational person who will explain in however many hypothetical ways how minds must correlate with one another in order to communicate together, but of course, could not the evil demon have provided language too? I am not suggesting the presence of an evil demon, rather I am insisting upon the unreliability of hypothetical ‘proofs’ and methods that present themselves as logic, appealing to the herd instinct inside of us that demands that we are bound together in brotherhood, that we have to accept ‘logic’ or we prove ourselves not only illogical and false, but weak-willed enough to be lead away from our own two intellectual feet and toward a position that might not or may as well not exist. My arguments here have got nothing to do with demons, proofs or existent things, rather I am trying to drive toward a place where these things are merely symbolic of movements within the universe, spiritual actions that provide nourishment to the soul and not mere ‘support’ or ‘reassurance’ that we are not alone. If humanity were not such a terrible farce then perhaps I would choose to associate my thoughts with ideas of other people, of communities and common goods. But I am deficient in this way and I must rectify this problem, I must provide my own method of

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ascertaining what is good and what is not and the meaning of both. Am I not capable of doing this or have I created an unnecessary and impossible task for myself; to discover the basis of meaning? It has not stopped my predecessors; they too have failed in their attempts; no person in the history of history has been able to assert a truth that is concrete beyond the basic ‘cogito ergo sum’ of Descartes. If this is the basis of all truth then is not all truth self-referential, and hence could not anybody assert anything to the same degree of right-ness? ‘I am a cow.’ ‘Three from two equals fifteen.’ There is still no concrete channel of truth between persons even in the mathematical model, for, if the delusion was strong enough, three from two does equal fifteen or any other number you care for. Realities do not sit so comfortably together as numbers do.

Is it possible to forget to be alive; can forgetting stretch to such an unparalleled degree? Could you be willing to assert that your thoughts could travel to a place from which they could not or did not desire to return from? The power of thoughts must be called into question; do you have a strong enough mind to take yourself to whichever limits you have created for yourself, surpass them and be able to return safely with the identity intact, or would one lose one identity for another as many travellers experience?

Anxiety:

Futility stems from a practise of constantly ironing out the surface aberrations of what is a root problem and never addressing the root itself. This is how futility precedes anxiety. As I began renovating my house recently, I found that when I began to fix one thing in

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which I saw cosmetic or functional error I found a wealth of other things beneath it which likewise would require addressing. I then found it necessary to start again from the beginning and do it right. If we cannot do such good practises, then so many things will just get papered over and cosmetically fixed, the problem always reemerging with just the slightest scratch of the surface. Why is it then that so often we will try to avoid such major changes and just employ the smallest amount of effort that permits us to forget about them?

If each day is a gift from God, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think He can be as generous as people make out.

I need to come to master my own reality; at present it seems to me that if I spend all of my time recording, there is no time for playback, that if my recording reaches out into all parts of life I will have achieved what I set out to do; to become a living, talking book, (or a book that appears in all outward ways to be a writer.) This is not as straightforward as I thought it to be and now I have some questions about this project, as though the next layer of salvation is required to lift my work out of a narcissistic swamp. My work is about my work; but so what? How can something be about itself unless it has no real centre? This book has come to stand in place of my knotted self and its quest for meaning and naturally it stumbles upon the same endless series of futile questions. I am at one with the book although I wish that now I could pull myself up by my bootlaces out of the swamp.

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Do you think that if I were able to discover this â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;meaning of lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, that I could do so before dying or even write it down here, as though it could be that easy, easily communicated in words for any old vagabond to pick up and run away with? Here we go then:

Love everyone.

If a vagabond picks up the meaning of life, his greed will cause him to steal it and his forgetfulness will bring on the appearance of foolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gold, as something that appeared precious but which was in fact so common that it could not be. And so it is with truths and with vagabonds; it is their quickness that slows them down. A thief once picked my pocket. When I heard a man screaming one day I turned around to find that someone had stolen the razor blade from my pocket that I keep just in case I get robbed.

It wells up in me some strange sense of nobility, An unhindered knowledge of existing, Everything done in life, Art according to systematic virtue.

Life itself is strange and therefore are we, Permanently in reach of our mirrored grasp, All joys are but a matter of obtaining a better life, Better put butter on your knife.

I therefore have changed my goals, I Sought happiness and found it; One cannot continue to pursue a prize,

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One already possesses.

Prior to this marriage of all untied things, I was obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, A blind, incensed fan or democrat, Alone in what constant wanting brings.

She brought completion where she walked, And as we stood alone together we saw past, The now realised object of happiness. A new country exists in the stead of the old.

Our weaker and hollow former selves are keen, They remind us always of what has been, The chase for pleasure was seen as clean, A reliable nectar upon which to wean.

But old joys have found their proper place in us, Desire does not approach their contented places, We are moving according to a migratory pattern, Intent upon revealing places beyond wanting.

Arcadia; the place where all civilisations are ancient, Or looked at from the mirrored, opposite direction, Objects of curiosity fill the landscape of ordinary things, Association disbanded in favour of real friendship.

Until the day has finally dawned we progress in darkness,

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Familiar spectres in our own image accompany, Hollow friends, ancestors, willow-the-wisps, All dancing gaily to our new and vibrant rhythm.

We hold hands, a gesture with specific meanings in the civilised world, Here it collapses the dimensions of signification and expands empires, It is a symbol of our enlightened knowledge of a familiar custom, A key to memory reminding lost friends of accompanying words without sounds.

This sign was taught to us by parents but now it is we who teach them, How to hold hands, how to use the language, How to walk and breathe, The new air spoken in poetry, of words orphaned and married, Of meanings inherent, assumed, contrived, fallen and then ennobled.

Nocturne, deep joys in our vision, Brought to the ears of the desirous, Heard wrongly, polluted by those ears, Seeking to hear only their selves.

It is no longer possible to perceive this mirrored life. To which all and sundry is grown accustomed, The mirror now has another purpose; We are two people and places at one time.

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What was it I said that I was seeing? Could it be expressed with a word, a collection of words, phrases, chapters, volumes, epic manuscripts all covered in dust from years of unreading, from the ignorant choice of our elders and their ways, from the mind filled with assumptions, of half-knowledge, bits of meaning, partial understanding but mostly all stuck together and papered over with the spartan, undetailed filler of assumption, a gothic church constructed from breeze blocks? No amount of words.

I left bits of map on the path that I no longer required, Snatched at by the desirous quick to glut their criticism, They snatch at more and more maps left by many, More concerts, more paintings, more poems, more songs, more clothes, more friends, more films, more foods, more filler to stop up the gap, Of what is lacking.

A collector of cartographical curiosities, Is a different thing to one who makes and uses maps.

I am between states at present but this state, Itself is similar to giving company to such prophets, On her undertaking, her walking, in groups, Perceiving beauty, still shy of the destructive knowledge of creation.

I sit in my grey room for I am the prophet of this book,

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All of the characters, the journeys and stories, Mere aliases for my negotiation of the strange collection of, Objects that we have come to call the world.

My words look closely at the great master Morandi, Allegory containing its own beauty, But arriving is the only, Point of journeying.

We should not fear the night, For she wraps our world, In its genuine image; Blind, unenlightened image.

Do not live expecting the worst to happen, For when the worst arrives you have proven, That you are right in fearing, That life is cold and afraid.

This paranoia should be your crowbar, your means of levering this web of signification out of its concrete, causing it to be antique in its own time and hence valuing it as such. When coupled with its natural partner of anxiety the two potent tools can perform the noble work of change. Change is worshipped by our civilisation so much that it has become a permanent state of flux, of motion without moving, treading water. In repeating this action and praise of change, (whether we change our identities or clothes, any ritual of the cult of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;transienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;,) one performs a dead action; no change occurs when one buys new clothes or when one changes the

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television channel, listens to different music, or kisses another man. This hallucination has descended over us with a saccharine flavour, saccharine for one who never tasted honey. Artifice is not the same practise of Artistry, the wearing of different emotions and personalities is worship at the base of the tomb of God. Instead we must see the pond we live in, for a pond might as well be a river to one who has never seen a river. We must see that the most potent agents of change have been clothed by our peoples in the rags of their conceit, as agents of low moral fibre, our anxiety and paranoia. It is not us that feel these pangs when we are anxious; it is the wider consciousness to which we are plugged in and disembodied. We never have experienced true anxiety in our virtual and unreal feelings. With them we can unhinge this static connection between all things that produces the knowledge of civilisation, the repetitive conjunction between symbol and signifier that we know because they know and so on. One who searches hardest is not content with somebody elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s meaning, especially when that meaning means ignorance, a lie built on top of fear, on top of unknowing, which is how civilisation has come to know and be known. Analysis of cultural meaning is an empty recording process; what do we hear in the records of our society? What echoes have we sent into the future and do we even care? Our self-indulgence and conceit today equals the same of tomorrow. We can enlighten and ennoble our meaning by using the tools we have discovered at our disposal, like the tools of melancholy, the artist angel. Look backward at the language of civilisations past, the same but different, and acknowledge that there can be difference in meaning, that meaning has been nurtured by civilisation and its wants, not by yours. Your charge is to unhinge

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the crazy idea that you cannot unhinge your crazy idea that this is the only way that things can be. These things, when combined, always produce this meaning, and so on and so forth. This sounds like liberation, but it is far more difficult to wander our streets and live in an abstracted world where meanings change because you have told them to, not because you have changed.

Technique in the style of Morandi:

Look at whatever is in front of you. [I see a cup, a mirrored cube and an invitation.] Move the signifiers (signs) two steps to the left.

Do you see how the same things can be signified in different objects, how the objects are concrete but it is we who change them by looking upon them? Signifiers can be exchanged. Now you posses the power to create your own system of objects wherein you can move and achieve your own projects, (that you will remain undisclosed to until you are in the Arcadian landscape,) you can start to reposition reality and your place within it with your eyes. At the place where writing appears as an illegible scribble, contains no meaning, is where we shall meet again.

New Day

I am an optimist in the depths of my own futility; it has dawned upon me that there is no meaning to life, but that this permits the freedom to search for the meaning of life with greater esprit than if there were some invisible but tangible purpose. I have come this

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far, but here I feel as though I am at dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beginning, for at the beginning of each day there is need borne to repeat the same successes of yesterday which has gone and in which all victories are buried amongst the sands of time passed. There is deep melancholy but heightened euphoria, there is knowledge of God and all His processes, but only in their invisible nature, there is the sad joy of the knot of free-will, of its highs and lows, of all the agony and ecstasy contained within this exquisite paradox. I here propose a problem;

If the author of a text is always correct (teacher)

ii)

And the reader of that text is always at fault if he/she sees fault in that text (pupil)

iii)

Then as the reader and writer of this text I am permanently confused in my lucidity.

I am the hero of this tale, (well, at least the main character, the protagonist,) and in the book my hero is writing a book in order to record all of his thoughts and efforts at becoming enlightened. The hero is at a disadvantage in this book in that her does not yet know the outcome; by writing the book in the book he is attempting to figure out what the plot is, (for the author of the book that he is in must know the plot.) But the author writing the book in which the hero writes the book is also writing a book wherein he is trying to figure out what the plot is; he simply can never see the author who stands and looks in upon him, no matter where he occurs in this infinite hierarchy:

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Author-Hero-Author-Hero ad infinitum. There can be no such plot unless it is that of this essential form, this circle or strange loop wherein he has thought himself into existence, he creates the purpose of life in not being able to ever perceive it, except that this not being able to perceive it is the actual purpose of this life. This loop is his entire consciousness, it is how he is composed and by which he falls apart; he seeks sympathy only from himself, but it is from this source that he never receives it, he is pieta, he grovels nobly, he is both all and nothing simultaneously and he is produced in the gap where this concept does not work. Why should sadness create such joy? It is quite plain to see that his hopeless hero is the author of his own hopelessness and that this mirror-image might easily be turned back upon himself so that the sadness authored him and from this humble birth did he begin to progress toward some state beyond pleasure and pain, beyond the material ecstasy of an imaginary world. Life is life and so leave it at that; all of it is taken care of, all of it prefigured by the author, all of it invisible to the mind how the author authored the novel of his own character, every delectable mystery merely the art of his own construction, his own prize. He sat up in bed last night, the grip of such futility tugging at the muscles in his back and thought aloud; why do I simply not step over; why do I not admit my contentment and within that contentment the ability to work and be joyous still resides? Did I, at some point, begin to devalue my work by causing it to be so guilty a thing in my own head?

My point now taken I am resolved into my new groove wherein I can simply work after having heard and given confession, perhaps the deafness of the ears were the only way in which such backward

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talking were possible? Shall I work in this new groove, barely knowing who or what I am, barely understanding any part of the undertaking? I do know, deep at the core, what this is all for. It is part of some huge, unseen construction, an entire city completely unpopulated until other minds come to walk its gothic, labyrinthine quarters. I am making a new world in which other people can exist if they will bring themselves into my understanding. This is no ordinary undertaking, to create an entire, complete and abstract universe, absolutely hospitable and in the best conditions where our organisms in their symbolic format might begin to grow and evolve as competently as their bodies once did on the material planet. I will wrestle and create with all of my abilities to make this city into a perfect form, one wherein the highest desires are able to flourish with natural elan and the lowest desires are invited to become high. This is the best place, where we are allowed to be who we desire to be in the ascendant aspect of human spiritual life. I must explain this idea further in order to invite you in, not deter you from experiencing, (as this paragraph may have done by accident.)

There is a city being founded, built upon the maze of words in infinite variation and combination, written into volume atop volume in a vast library. Thousands upon thousands of editors in generation after generation will be employed to condense it into a volume light enough to be carried in two hands. They will extract this essence for me, these people who extract essences and disregard what they consider to be â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;pulpâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, or unnecessary for the reader to have to read. Why should an editor be assigned with removing unnecessary things? He or she is not the writer, not an artist, and yet they go ahead and cut something out in which their

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undeveloped minds they cannot see the value of, because they do not think that the imaginary ‘public’, (of which they have never met, only assumed,) will not have any desire to read this stuff, will not be able to cope with it in their small and undeveloped minds. The editor is the dreadful solicitor between the writer and the reader; he or she assumes that the writer does not need such and such part of the book, and then assumes that the reader does not need such and such part of the book. This is a foul and obsequious process; we should begin to credit both public and artist with greater responsibility for what they have made and for what they are entitled to understand. We may have caused our ‘masses’ to embody ‘mass opinion’, because we have created mass opinion based upon assumptions, and created the worst form of human conceit, one that now we cannot escape from. Have you ever noticed how it is always highly intelligent graduates from the best schools who end up writing for tabloid newspapers? And so why do we expect that tabloids embody the ‘mass opinion’; it expresses the ‘elite opinion’! Let us credit our brothers and sisters who are the same as what we are, no matter what our conceited and smallminded ego-opinion might constantly ram into our heads each and every moment. Let us go and speak to these friends of ours that we are yet to befriend. Those who choose to go against our new method of love will not effect those of us who truly believe in it, despite whichever obnoxious efforts they might make to rope us back into their infinite pattern of fear. Everybody wants something that you have got; any capitalist person or old wife could tell you this. So why not give them everything; it cannot be of use to you if it is of the world. Do not even believe the Christian when he or she says that you shall receive it back a thousand-fold in heaven. Do

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not think of heaven, for heaven is not for thoughts and no Christian except their namesake has been to that location. Nobody can tell us what lies in store for us except we, except if we become the author as well as the protagonist of this story. This is written above the gate of my city. It was you who wrote it there in your highest desire to be who you are, not the failed material desire to know who you are. There is no evil in the material realm, in the old city, merely the antique structures of fallen angels (desires) line the streets, images of old gods who promised wisdom, justice and virtue but who failed to deliver when we lost our faith in them, when we thought it was they responsible for this awful human condition when really it was us; they merely embodied the ideal to which we once aspired. There is no point in resurrecting a dead god; we must now become responsible for our reality, for our desires and ambitions for it, for our ability to create and destroy within it. We must learn once again how to love our situation and not imagine that we have been dealt a bad hand; it is the only hand there was for it cannot be changed or bought, there can be no other reality than this, no stopping and starting again, no blame and no guilt for it. People such as I will always tell you to change your reality. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t listen to us, because our voice is always misleading when it does not come out of your own mouth. You must be more resilient than that, you must desire to be steadfast in your highest and best knowledge, you must be prepared to traverse the treacherous journey across self-doubt, self-humiliation, emptiness and despair, across this huge and uncharted desert with your meditation of the lung fish to sustain you. You will see the city at armâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reach, it will come to you when all has vanished except the molecule of truth that is contained in your imagination, and then will the chain-

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reaction occur, then will you recall that time when you were at these same gates, writing above the frame of the door â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Nobody can tell us what lies in store for us except we, except if we become the author as well as the protagonist of this story.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Congratulate yourself on your return home, back to the place you left a great many years ago on your voyage of forgetting and remembering, off to discover whether the truth was the only way to live, having forgotten it ever existed, and then returning to it at the very last moment of life. Very intelligent people can always find a way to criticise but cannot normally find a way to improve. Someone who criticises a great and optimistic work must also be great and optimistic or they shall always miss the mark, will never have understood what it was like in order to be able to criticise. And I am showing you here exactly what it is like here, everything included without error, plan or edit. Everything I ever wrote is at your disposal, and if you cannot understand what it is to be from this document, then there is no hope of communication between persons. This effort of mine is noble; it sets out to show in as graphic a way as possible what my mind looks like in order to demonstrate the possibility that one mind can know another if it maps its processes together through undoing and discarding the ego. If I fail, then there is no hope. I dedicate my life to this task, to leave my immediate self always behind where I can be consulted on what it is like to be human, what it was like to be a human, no matter how disillusioning it might be or how terribly boring I was. These things do not matter; I have left behind all of the keys to enlightenment, to being enlightened as to the presence of another, shattering the mirrored universe through unity in individuality, not sustaining it through a diaspora individuality. There is no time her

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for faults and triumphs; it all must be brewed together to produce the right substance. So what if I am conceited in these claims; you have put conceit there in reading it, not in me writing it, for there was no such stuff in my head when I wrote. I did not plan to always be right, and yet I am the only person able to prove me wrong. It is not your job to do so, it is your job to invert this process upon yourself where you say; ‘I am wrong in him thinking that’, and then saying, ‘I am right in my being wrong in him thinking that, for it was I that thought it and not him’. And then you will say, ‘Perhaps he meant me to think that by making me think that I was wrong only to show myself how I was right’. What you do is not my concern, but it might be if you allow me to do some work on you.

I need to get deep inside in order to do what I am supposed to do in there, so we must find new methods of sneaking my contraband past the egoic borders and intoxicating the soft and delicate matter that remains petrified of the outside and outside of daddy’s care. I am not concerned whether I am right or not for in matters of value I have become ambidextrous. Do not think I am clever in saying this, because I may have written it down only because it sounded good. You do not know my motives; I do not even know my motives, and rather than look for a crime inside of intentionality, look for an aspiration. Some motives do not work for the advantage, by fair means or foul. Some motives look diabolical through our mistrustful eyes but deliver only the sweetest fruits. You are only able to perceive right and wrong from you current position which is misaligned. If you step aside to another vantage point you will see all variety of new combinations, unusual and oriental methods of thought as your playground. I have not planned any of this and

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neither will it signify much to me after my pen has left my hand, but in those fragments of seconds when I can perceive this city in full clarity and when I am able to express in nonchalant terminology my ambitions I feel so joyous that this place exists, if only in the occasional moment. If I work harder, I will try to bring it to each and every moment, will try to convey without pause my thoughts and feelings for this place, for all of the possibilities that I see as our entitlement.

My faith in humanity comes from an unusual place; I attack each and every part that I perceive as conceited, recognise it as a part of my conceited self, and then resolve to make humanity better by realising what I am capable of doing and doing it; I begin under the hallucination that I am humanity and end up in the realisation that I am humanity. I admit that this method is conceited; it must be conceited by necessity if it is ever to become genuine. I have an unusual relationship with genuine and disingenuous things, both notions employed to bring about new pictures. How am I to become carefree and to shrug off these burdensome and tiresome worries that prevent contentment?

A young manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heart, a pendant In which the hopes of his brain are stored. Does he not appreciate that loves cannot be hoped, And hopes cannot be loved?

In time-honoured procession the youth exclaims; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I will indeed make and leave my mark!â&#x20AC;&#x2122; [Be it a scar or some illuminated text]

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Onto the record before him engraved.

Young man closes himself from world, exclaims; ‘I am solitary, alone and here I will find truth!’ [Be it an echo or some such vanity] He did not conquer want, he ran from it.

To be a person is sad, for sure, But what alternative is open? Why in crowded streets endure, Solitude, massed voices broken.

Man, destitute, lonely and overcrowded, Frightened, own shadow reflected everywhere, Not allowed to be content, Nor permitted in wallowing, downward indulgence.

‘Pleasure, you were no prize for me, I tasted your multicoloured delights, Frowned upon your lonely siren’s call, Ignored unbound from the mast, alone.’

But no pleasure no hope, the voyage took Some strange route to new, abandoned shores. Hopes raised then lost at the empty beaches, No crowd to welcome his safe return.

Scorning his friends he returns now to none, Parents gone, pupils ironical,

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The monument smelted down Into rings adorning the Princeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s toes.

He is not worth ought in his home, Recognised by none and all, From where can he begin to revive his fame, Except in the streets, his lonesome domain.

He cries and shouts and then, Employs foreign methods learned On those stranded and desolate beaches, Talking with no one, rejoiced by none.

He spirals into despair, his quest so ignoble, So empty and without meaning, For him or them, neither matters, Is distinguished or indicted.

People hear his tale of woe, that he alone Went into the world to find its pleasures, Found none, disillusioned disbanded, Empty in the heads and hearts of brothers.

He sinks in tears but somewhere he recalls, Hearing that sirenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cry and, in the depths of his heart, Recalls how he was not delighted, heard no such melody, As had been reported by myth and allegory.

He, chained to the ship felt alone and empty,

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There was no place for him in the siren’s song, He was not their love, their life, their idol, He was nought, he deserved loneliness.

They had not heard tell of such failed Odyssey, Of brave men returned deflated and unrecognised. They had not seen such contrition, Nor such desire to express absolute and terrible sadness.

His report carried no such mention of spoils, Riches upon riches, maidens, pirates, Omens, bad demi-gods, battles, temptation Or any other such caravan of oriental delight.

He was they, the hope of innocent ambition, A child beyond critique, ideology bearing him up, And now he bemoans his shame and ignominy, That he himself contains no meaning.

Darkness ensued that day, the hull of the great voyager’s ship, Became undone as if by itself, Slowly in darkness cut through black salty pools and set, Out to sea again, a lonely voyage for a boat with no crew.

At daybreak, the voyager perceives his ship’s fled, Loneliness wallowing up as a friend in darkness, That how for his boat and voyage he longed, How that loneliness should save and spare him again.

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That day, the voyager packed his small collection of objects and hoisted them on his shoulder, seeking once again to carry his own ship across the deserted plains and into another town. He had succeeded in his quest, (strangely enough,) and the townsfolk now bore his emptiness up, scorning each and every new adventure and turning their eyes to civic matters. The town flourishes, for traders come to its ports every day loaded with spices, fabrics, birds and other delights for sale to the rich populace. Leisurely indulgence is the character of this place, where rich and arabesque new steeples are erected each day, money generates money and generates the desire for leisure, for laziness and indulgence. One day, the Prince calls his advisers together into the town hall, where he proposes that the empire should be expanded to include all of those places from where his riches are brought. Amongst his advisers is a man with no character who lurks in all of their memories. Stepping forward, this man announces that there are no foreign ports, that there are no riches, for the town is impoverished and empty. The man also announces that the Prince is part of him, and that this delusion was created on the island of Circe, that his desire to be tempted and be satisfied resulted in the delusion now manifest in front of him. Disbelieving himself, the Prince orders that the man be executed there and then, but the guards announce that they cannot kill themselves and they are under strict instructions from the Prince that they are not to kill the Prince. Confused, the Prince perceives that Circe the sorceress retracts the cup from his lips wherein he slips from the delusion, his lips still wet from the potent intoxicant. He is still tied to the mast, has tasted temptation, has survived. Returning to his town, he gives his report.

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I, brave amongst all men tasted The deadly liquor of Circe, Tasted the sweetest delight, Which is that of sadness itself.

I have perceived that dimension in which, All of you, being me, are frozen, As if enchanted by self delight, And glimpsed, the venom of sweet alcohol.

We are alike, the sorceress showed me, She showed truth to me, but I being a man, Perceived but seduction, fantasy, erotic enchantment; Circe was I, tasting my own cup of delight.

Such indulgent, incestuous pleasure I had, In the arms of myself all these years hence, Bewitched in pools of clearest light, The eyes never leaving mine for night.

I lived this way for seemingly ever, Luxury upon luxury heaped on amulet shores, Silken sheets, bejewelled and naked, My torso was grinding its lonely tune.

But then, as if caught by myself looking back, The mirrored eyes reflected me, Some sheet withdrawn from my erogenous parts, Leaving cold those naked and lonely.

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I upon my ship was thence, Cast off amid vacant seas, Years moved past by delusionsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; quick feet, Emaciated for the loving I had never done.

On this shore I stepped ashamed, deep in truth And her wondrous many layered veils, I walked as though festering in the worst swamp, Self-love, breeding place of hellspawn.

How am I to describe this to you, this sweet Intoxicant grips yet all of us together, brotherhood Does make us one but fragments us likewise, Does inflict conceit where conceit is none.

If you, my friends, my family hence, Do not perceive the me in me, Then my story falls on empty beaches, Again awake affixed atop my mast of shame.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;You must not treat my writing as oblique, because I am working according to my vision and the logic may not be justly perceptible and may look as though I attempt deliberately to confound when really I seek to enlighten [myself]. All of this was necessary because I made it so. The rains are a delight, summer rain being sweetest to my mind. The momentary delusion that happiness is gone and replaced by sad, grey and depressing vibes, only to be replaced with heat and sunshine. I am a pervert in this way, if you

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will excuse the expression, because I desire to be let down in order to be happy again. This is the euphoric element of happiness which binds us to its depressive regime; we are happy to be sad and sad to be happy sometimes and, when this comedy becomes too much it suddenly becomes a tragedy. Without spelling out to you why, I would like to say that my use of the word tragedy a moment ago was designed to fit with my Greek-themed poem. But I wish to say no more about the connection because it is better to allow it to unfold of its own accord and is also better unsaid.â&#x20AC;?

Having made his speech, the voyager then proceeded to hand the responsibility over to the people to whom he spoke for them to recognise the he in he.

Day and night toiled the sages of the town, Some half-remembered saying sat tantalisingly, Upon all their lips but could not be uttered For fear ridicule would immerse them in its fire.

One wise man exclaimed the voyager had brought The most rich and most dangerous knowledge, That they had best cast him off again, Back to unpopulated shores.

Another man rebuked that to throw such gold Back into the sea would cause a fame of idiocy, Ringing out along the aeons for those who desired To hear of foolsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; desire, to want only what is lost.

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Yet another added he could not be responsible, For choosing such fate upon which all the peoples’ Desires would be left to crumble or flourish, For he could not even choose his own.

The Prince, saddened at his sage’s indecision, Walked abroad in the street asking man And woman alike, asking children, vagrants, Any voice to say some substance soothing.

Upon hearing no breeze to cool his brow the Prince Did decide to not decide, employing astrologer And medium to do his work, But none of them could agree.

‘Cast him off!’ said one, ‘Execute him!’ said another, ‘Believe him!’ said others, But convince could they none.

Prince today in wealthy town, Pauper in his soul tomorrow, And thus he confines himself To speak only with his conscience.

Emerging after an entire year the Prince Amazed the people with his own return, Said his voyage long and hard had been,

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His truth sweet reward for his people’s hearts.

He stepped to the balcony of confining cell, Looked at one and all with equal grace, Said ‘Now it is I myself hath decided; Time it is now for you do likewise!’

“Let us be with our associations, our systematic patterns of association, but let us not be mere associates we fear to criticise, let us instead be friends of a higher order where a greater party is attended by many, where association develops, where new trust is created and joys are multiplied. Let our relations be as close as two words, as close as the sun and moon, as close as rabbit to dog. It is we who are alive, and thus should we, all of our proud nature puffed, be on show and gawped at by many. It is we who leave these suits of armour behind us, conventional weapons not scathing our newly evolved skin. Go and voyage, go and do as you choose, but learn first how to choose and what the choice involves. Only a real fool leaves such stuff to mere chance and chance is not the most propitious banker. Let us be a Prince in our town but also the traveller, the fool, the sage, child, be they women or men or peoples of all creeds and colours. Makes no difference. This town be ours and thus the decisions made are ours alone, we inscribe whatsoever we choose onto the ancient bough that bears up the city gates, the bough constructed all those years ago from a vagrant ship that washed up in the port one night, containing nothing and hence put to new purpose. Those binds employed on the mast are the same that bind you now to the town, those sirens once employed to lure you from the gates now secretively keep you here, you desire it

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here, for there are no sirens at home, are there? There are just the many coloured fabrics and fruits to choose, the many luxuriant goods that befit a Prince of your kind. Memory is the common enemy and the bedfellow of desire. When you are voyaging you must be a town, and when you are a town you must be a voyager. Rip the gates apart and construct for me the finest ship that ever sailed from this port. I am going away, alone, and what I shall bring will be greater than all the amassed treasures of the empire. But do not forget. Do not forget. If I am forgotten we shall have nothing.”

The same ship, that of Theseus, these ages had contrived, To indestructible gates and it’s watchtower, Commanded this day to be replaced, City walls to invaders now keen prospect invited.

The wood brought down in the reverse of construction, The mighty bough, it’s shape intact, instrument of bondage, Still attached, snagged by prolonged nail, Wanton for the warmth new usage brings.

Prince overseeer, watches day and night, Boat made from city, strongest ever seen, Day and night he struggles, a night mare Hath o’ershadowed his joyous undertaking.

The ring his right toe doth wear, Hath these years rubbed almost to nothing, This day had snapped, dissolved, A ring with no gold left, nothing.

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The same cloaked rider comes each night, Bearing bad tiding upon his steed, Forebodings his mind enshrouded, Prince to this, Prince to that say he.

Now, sparkling and divine the ship revived, Sits proudly afloat the cooling liquid caress, Awaiting her solitary friend, lover, Joyless guardian of soulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s confession.

Prince to this, he sails into the night, Fond farewells today but soon thereafter, New Prince sits atop bejewelled throne, New rings from monument quickly installed.

Into the abstraction are we taken, further, deeper beyond and into the horizon of the painted image, no deeper in the flat surface of reality. Without depth our horizon is shallow, illusory, our efforts, our journeys vain in prospect and empty in scope, but to the right eye a beauteous illusion full of other forms of depth. Look to the painting to discover flatness in one regard and depth in another, mirrored, balanced and preserved in plastic. How to derive satisfaction from this game, always behind the other who is the reflection in front of you? How to equate our meaning beyond the expectation of men with measuring devices, how to confound the camera, brush and instrument, quantity without quantity, a ring without gold? A fine craftsman built the Argo, a ship suited to its Herculean task, but what of our materials, what of wielding our

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tools with perfect requitement to them? We take heed of what otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s report of the best methods of usage, but as with life this process is dead without our own discovery. We must use these tools in a way that we have developed, extracting whatsoever substance we desire from the base materials in front of us. We must extend this magic process into all our relations with tools, whether they be words, conversations, parties, works, marriages. We must not be sparing with our magic; at the moment one notices that the magic happens everywhere and as if automatically, one is ready to move beyond art to reach oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spiritual goals. Art forms the second material development in the hierarchy ascendant, below it falls that of craft, of handiwork, the functional comportment of the human to his or her world and society. Art comes above this, (at one remove from this,) because under the guise of handiwork comes some special stuff, tantalising to the mind and great in its ability to stretch the mind out of its normal habitats. This method as I have spoken it sounds as if easy for the craftsperson to ascend to the mantle of meaning production or the movement of the soul on the spiritual plane, but the illusion one must confront in this ascendancy requires more force than legions of men battering the immortal city gates. They will only fall when the realisation of the voyage to nowhere and no one has become its own fruit, the silent understanding of the Prince. Any person who understands this movement, of removing once in order to go under, this movement without motion, the Princeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s realisation, understands that this ascendancy is not only plausible, but free entirely of human conceit and is instead filled with only the purest and most lofty ambition. I do not think that I can write it here, because it cannot be explained; it may well be contained in this sentence, but it is veiled, it is

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disguised and it is you that must be unveiled in it, in the words, in the book, in the world. Regardless of how skilled one has become in this world, it will never be enlightened through such methodology, it should be enlightened by your very presence, the energy that existence disperses. I am nothing to you, image reflected in my eyes alone, all of us, mistaken identity, mask of shame, woe and guilty conscience. This is my image, seen in the eyes of my eyes, reflected back trillionfold, a crescendo of collapsing spheres of perception, dimensions, the age of light, the depth of field, our looking stretched to infinity, beyond horizon. Perceive the repetitions, the pattern that zigzags through the pattern of all ages, aeons collapsing like a house of cards back into flatness on the magicianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s table. Dissembling his own city, the Prince embarks on a floating gate into the horizon, the city built from an indestructible ship, the face of identity eroded in its famous parts. Are we home or away, a boat city or a city boat and upon which do we travel, the static or that which is in motion? Do we voyage when stationed in the town? The next stage of the undertaking must be the combined image of the two identities into that which is identical, the proper formation of the abstract idea within the mind, that which is three in one, the godhead. Both but one, three in the same.

The art of spiritual motion involves the employment of material symbols in such a way as to move the soul, propelled through itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s native dimension. One who understands the movement of the soul also is privy to the tragi-comic semblance of motion expounded by material consciousness. Once motion is perceived as stopped, as impossible in the material dimension, one has moved the soul for

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the first time. All other motion of the soul, movements of true free will, is only attainable from this realisation. Our artful use of material objects hereafter embodies some significant function, a meaning beyond our material signification, and hence the artist, (not artist as people understand it, but in the way that anybody can be an artist no matter what they do, so long as it is artful,) will always be questioned by the craftsperson why they have done something a certain way that is not encompassed by their narrow logic. The artist makes a decision which has genuine significance, and this may often look strange or charismatical, the logic to understand it with is only available through deep meditation and melancholy on that thing. When one is not artful, one does a thing but then retracts it on the grounds that it was illogical, whether to preserve face before others or before the ego. We look at how a child has described something unfamiliar to them, are curious, but then correct the child as to the real meaning of the thing; conceited mindset. The artist need not become like a child as many people think about that clichĂŠ especially, but should rather find genuine reasons for doing all of the things that they are doing automatically; breathing, eating, talking, everything. The world and all its items are at the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s disposal, and hence the artist creates a new picture out of life, one whose scope is beyond parallel and beyond imagination. The entire world is then connected to each and every part of the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body; she moves this way and that happens, moves that way and this happens. The artist leaves the world to decide what it will, but the decisions the artist has already made are themselves beyond questioning in the mind of the artist. If they were true they were then dead for the artist who moves to create new life, leaving behind the organic products of her works. The

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artist is seeking that point when all of her un-automatic decisions have themselves become automatic, the pattern turned full circle on itself, the entire world freed from human intervention. I am now not of the world but am simply part of itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s property. Having detached my soul from the illusory and insubstantial earthly signification, I found at once concreteness as the world dissolved. My body, immaterial in that place that once was perceived as solid, is now resurrected in concrete form in that place where I considered to be non-existent. Do not get vertigo, pray tell said the Siren to the Prince, for here one can be gone a million years before the first drop has past the lips. Returning from his senses, the deep grief one feels when travelling from infinity back into the delusory dream of forgetfulness. I stepped back in my body, felt the pangs in the base of my belly, remembered my forgetting, the sad, bitter alcohol pressed between my lips and that of Circe, kissing passionately beneath honeysuckle bowers, depth within depth of flesh, wet, succulent. Such is the wisdom of Oedipus, that tragic incest unveils even the Sphinxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s enigma. I ascended once more, for fear is our gravity and love our wings. Neither has meaning without the other.

The Prince, the unfortunate voyage concluded, Recalls all, recalls his forgetting, the sweet Amnesia of a life without value, empty, despair, His promise right to deliver again to kinsmen.

Aboard empty ship he drifts, carrying in his heartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s purse, A gemstone of such terrible power, such poison, Sweet lover liquor, the riches of the most distant land, Sweetest for sure, the desire of wanting what is out of reach.

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He brings this rare fruit with him from the most distant shore, To the land beyond peoples, the very edge of the world, Put there for good reason, Good reason returned.

Sailing to port once befriended by daily perception, He sees no flags or banners herald his return. Sees but everyday life grow more everyday With each fluid ounce surpassed.

He climbs ashore, his precious gift assures The warmest welcome at the Prince’s table. The Prince he recalls, does he recall, Because that indeed is I myself?

He exclaims his sad tale of deep woe to people all around, Cast out to desert; ‘Brought nothing’ they exclaim. But nothing it was, and then too late, Prince again seated in divine mantle.

Forget what is given, recall what is lost, The sweet fruit of Circe’s lips Doth stain Time with red poison, The taste itself of forgetting to be forgot: Desire.

Magic Interlude

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A place without happiness; what sort of a place is this, what sort of continent of woe awaits he or she that sails abroad in search of what has not yet been found? The answer to my current problem is that I must find new ways of being at work, a new expressive range, a different valuation of the way I move through time. My current movements in this dimension have of late left me cold, stranded without place. What am I trying to say?

A kingdom without boundary is the desired habitat, For one living without living, desiring without object Emptying and filling that great chalice Wherein all hope is stored.

My hope for this world is unreasonable; I have asked too many things of it too oft, Too many impossible desires Too little need for desire left.

I hoped in my way to reinvent What culture and nature in parenthood fashioned, My power of reinvention now, Where is it now?

I will remember this time, full of emptiness, Worries vanished, replaced by phantom worry, An emptiness beyond measure, Without life, without cure.

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I now desire power, the power to Rebuild ruins, to befriend old dead colleagues, To love without desire, power without sinew, Joy without substance or measure.

My irrational demands demand my withdrawal, But perhaps my haste too quick, my scorn Married my fear, the demands now too great Too little hope in the cup to revive and refresh.

Without sadness there is no joy, without neither Is without within, inversion, mutation, New invention beyond invented means, No hand too quick to meet an eye so impassive.

I quickly assume my robe, forget my memory, Lose touch with the sensuous world, lose All but my inkling of destination. To get there; too much, too little.

Invention, who doth great harm to me in mine, who had these past many years stood me up, made me stead fast, caused pain upon pain to scar my worried brow, now itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own automatic means conveyed through the motions of the bodies, the regeneration of cells, the dissipation of clouds, the helpless joy of children. My art does not stretch so, but my heart outwits my pen in every circumstance. If it were otherwise, would I not be immeasurably sad, a pen without a heart, writing without point, points all meaningless here? Or would this smooth space beyond the rough

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terrain of human feeling, harmony and nectar to one so accustomed to doing things backward? This is it, the realisation of the backward world; it is backward because I am, I see all in reverse, the energies of the universe in reverse flow, veiled by habit, by custom, by familiarity. Such strange eyes; it is the cause of migraines, the many connected and injurious objects of torture my mind herein contains. This is why I must go backward in time to the beginning, back to where nothing is taken for granted, where there may as well be nothing at all for all it is worth in my current and disingenuous state. Everything in this world melts, it was never there to begin with, there was nothing, a primordial state of chaos masked by assumption. I see this world with absolute alacrity but, upon the second look, replaced by complete strangeness, by foreigners all around. I look at my hands, strange protrusions, other people no different to these hands. Who are other people? If I do not know what I am, I have no chance. I am not saying that there is no universe beyond my perception of it, (there is no reality beyond my perception, but this is a different thing,) rather I am asserting that I have stepped into this world and have been shown how to possess its knowledge in me according to certain accepted ways that have been built for many millennia. Humans have been working at the understanding of the universe and have passed their knowledge down to the greatfuls who themselves have adapted, expanded or reduced it. There is no essence to this process. Someone such as me, who is reborn and unfamiliar, afraid and without belonging, perceives genuine knowledge converted to blind assumption, a process to have been perpetuated with each new generation of peoples. This comportment toward our heritage has meant that we know how to do familiar things, like cook eggs, without too many

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mistakes. What else has it meant? With our human values, what genuine truths were discovered and then converted to blind assumption? Were there any concrete truths in this â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;beginningâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;? If we knew how our values worked, we would be able to cook these eggs to perfection each time. But we do not. We never have, and it is this understanding of how I do not understand that has caused my universe to evaporate.

Will this voyage be mine or yours? Have I written this, as I claim, for myself, or have I sought to well up in you some vacuum of feeling wherein new objects may be perceived with woeful but eager eyes? Must I be this way to write, the downturn of luck about to again perform its ascendant cycle as promised, of falling in love and of being in woe, of the infinite 8, a wheel of life upon which we have pinned our hopes and our belonging? Can there be poetry without deep loss, without a grieving mind filled with the expectancy of extinguishment? I have found, amidst this wasteland, barren moor of my heart, some purpose, some purpose of some significance, one in which I must be forged again by the coals of resolution. It was always a simple step to take, a simple barrier to overstep, but the conceit of blindness did all this time conceal from me that which was never intended for opacity. I must find this release.

Some days ago, an old but distinguished lady turned to me and complained of arthritis. Unfortunately, I being me was unable to help, but I pointed her in the direction of the acupuncturist. She then immediately replied that she only wanted to know where the post office was and then went to seek better advice. Had I heard her

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incorrectly or was there no rational explanation for this event? I went to my home to consider this entire mess that I have put myself in, consider the normality of the world, its harmony, my own impassive harmony, delicate or brittle, conceived as a gemstone in brilliant hues. What secrets lie beneath this desert and how will our future brothers and sisters misuse their treasure? I, like my Egyptian relatives, will likewise be abused beyond my final wishes. It will not matter to me, but it will matter to those people who exist in that future time who consider values in the way that I have. My ship is laden with worldly belongings as company for my afterlife, beyond this annexed universe in which silence reigns beyond the distant voices of colleagues. But what would one take with one if not the sweet presence of one who is closest, the eyes ears and throat of passion, the sentient unison binding sister to brother, the love that gave taste to that which had none? Below the icy surface lie my distant passions, bleak friends to a desolate summer. Had I the courage to give importance to my writing these words would indeed be perceived different, to ears and eyes of flesh, to breathing, hating creatures such as myself, to those parts beyond the distant reach of my voice. I again opened the book, desirous to know what I was to do, what course the plot would take, which decisions I should make, but help did it none. Resigned, retired was I if not for the clue secreted between two paragraphs, the task I am to perform as if for the first time, the full circle turned and again reborn. I gather what strength I have left beyond the sharp but comprehensive pangs inflicted upon me by this dreaded migraine. I turn the light on in the living room, my eyes grow accustomed to the unnatural glare of both ceiling lamp and computer screen but neither fills me with knowledge. I seek knowledge above all, for it

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is knowledge that resides above happiness in this hierarchy, no amount of logical proof can deter me from this idea. (In other words, I believe this to be the case and it would have to be some kind of awesome argument that restored my faith that human beings can create things of spiritual worth beyond the confines of self-indulgent sophistry.)

I am now on the home straight and I have some important things to do before I finally arrive at the beginning. The relation that I had with my mother has characterised everything so far in as much as my desire for sympathy goes before my desire to help myself and that I always want for something bad to happen to me so that [my ghost] can say â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I told you soâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. When this was spelled out to me yesterday morning, I fell into a silence, an asphyxiating windless state where words could not provide their usual balm. When I wished to utter I could feel all inward utterances inverted upon myself as opposed to the outside world and inside there was a frightening humiliation, a suffocation of my personality by the locus of my personality; my neuroses. Silence provided a cave of sanctuary but I desired to emerge perhaps though, not in the guise of sayings. I am nearing the beginning now, but not just yet; I am to finish what was started those millennia ago, back beyond that aching forehead and those dazzling rays that brought on such mental pain. It is my mission to discover value that goes beyond happiness, beyond pleasure and beyond satisfaction; i.e. beyond desire. Locked inside this tiny body are the tools for discovering such a value; I have the ability to imagine such a value, to imagine a place beyond desire, and hence I must therefore be willing to push onward into that place. Man is good for making things, and I

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have made the will to make a value beyond what can be desired. I embody the desires implanted in my by my forefathers and foremothers, but these values cannot be valued because they do not belong to me, I cannot understand them. What is the use of usefulness if one does not hold knowledge of what use is? Existing in this distorted minefield of inversions and perversions I found myself spinning sayings back on themselves, embodying dogmatism, the devil’s advocate. This, however, was not for the benefit or detriment of other persons such as myself, (for it is often the case that my ‘friends’ believe that I have said a thing to provoke them, when merely I sought to provoke myself through them.) We make friends with whom we can journey through life with, constantly assisting one another out of pratfalls and up to summits, providing company and producing wisdom. None of my friends know what life is, not even my self although it appears that they sometimes believe that they do know these things and I attempt to show them that the first step to knowing what life is is to understand that life cannot be known, it can only be lived, for life is in the living. My grandfather always said ‘Happiness is eggshaped’. This is a person who knew nothing about life and because of this life told him everything there was to know about it. We cannot always do all of the talking as it sometimes can pay dividends to listen and to hear, but we, we ‘know-it-all’s, delight in out own stupefaction, delight in out ability to weave illusions about ourselves in the unconscious admission of the true extent of our abilities. If we acknowledged our abilities, the first thing that we would do would not be to continually re-affirm that we know what our abilities are. When I pray, I pray for the world to be exactly as it is. Otherwise, saying ‘Amen’ would of course hold no meaning.

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A world without meaning; would this be paradise or inferno, truth or deception? It is we humans that brought all of these ideas into the world, we fantasists who could not live without something to tell us what the point was, what it was all about, but it is the need for meaning that has produced this terrible difficulty, the desire for meaning, but it is desire that we sought to go beyond, was it not? Why should we need meaning as without meaning we would be stronger, more upright and forward-facing? What is the use of meaning as in a technical use? It has none, because meaning has no meaning.

Most would hold the conjecture that meaning is semantic, is a communicative tool that transmits information from one body to the next. Given the differences between two bodies an entirely new world of approximations exists between two sentient beings that semiologists do not acknowledge, a place where the hopes of scientists are pinned, that there is a world in which we humans exist, and it exists between us, an approximated Real, a contradiction in terms, an inversion or perversion of the will and its representations, a world that may as well be nothing. My hopes are not pinned to this approximate universe for the meaning that I seek does not lie in the communicative powers of words to transmit meaning, (which itself has no guarantor of meaning,) from one hapless body to another hapless body. This is a small-picture view, like the small picture of a scientist that does not contextualise his or her knowledge within the abstract and primary body of metaphysics. Why should it bring us joy to assume that our body is the be-all and end-all of significance in the universe? Before we had individual we had indivisible; for some hidden reason, when

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we became Modern, Enlightened people, we reversed the ‘at one with’ into the ‘one against which’, positing this funny letter ‘I’ before each and every position, assertion, denial, etc. Descartes list is the list of the Modern person, he or she who is limited in height because he or she is ‘one against which’ all things are measured. How can one measure the entire universe against oneself? What did this bizarre inversion bring to us except for an unconscious acknowledgement that God was dead, that we axed Him from our souls in order to forge ahead alone. This is why the Moderns were perversely fixated with forward motion, the idea that without the baggage of God, as individuals as opposed to indivisibles, we could actually ‘progress’. But where did we decide to go and why this sudden need for speed to get us there? I felt that God released me into the infinite. They felt that He prevented their motion and caused their humiliation, their nakedness. It is I who perceives with his eyes that there is no movement and no time in which we deceive ourselves to move; our vehicle is now dead.

I cannot believe anyone; our problem as Moderns begins with the Truth. If we watch ‘Rashomon’ we see our humiliating condition of the approximate world of descriptions and the inability to apprehend truth with our blunt senses. The only thing to be believed in is God, because there is no other acknowledgement of Him. And yet, it would seem, there is no Truth either; as though Truth were synonymous with God; we believe in them because there is no other method of acknowledgement. Without Truth the human is embarrassed and futile, as we all know, for there is nothing to believe in. So we continue to believe in ‘Truth’, but refuse to believe in ‘God’? Are we fools? We ought to go the whole

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way; if we spurned one infinity, we ought to spurn all infinities in order to unhinge ourselves permanently from the approximate and shared â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Realâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and fornicate self indulgently in a pleasure-reality with no meaning and no rules. That is what we all believe in, is it not? We are all self-gratifying beings because we cannot see any further than our own pleasure and happiness, as Freud so usefully pointed out. So why do we hinder ourselves with our stupid rules and laws that merely serve to torture our pleasure and hold it back; why not evaporate our bodies into a mist without individuality and become purely erogenous, pulsating energies?

Can I believe in what I am saying and what is the function of belief when one is an individual? Surely one should not need to question oneself; why would this be a necessary or logical thing to do? It is obvious that our relationship with truth is not as straightforward as we thought; like all of our other relationships we have brought lies, deception and motives to what ought to have been a simple thing. I thought that my grandfather was about to die on Thursday and I thought about how it is the body that keeps us apart, not death. Without the body one is at one with, indivisible. With a body one is divisible and hence far away. I need to achieve a state wherein I am dead when I am alive, where I am again at one with the all. I am slightly unhinged from my representations now; I have begun to perceive the animal in us all, the humiliating and absurd sham persona that we have dressed our world in in order to hide from ourselves. Of course, when the disguise slips and the double-image of what is really going on seeps in, we are horrified and amused all at once. We are disgusted, for our deceptive sensibility is disgusted. We are amused because our deceptive sensibility is amused. We are

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not who we think we are, because thoughts are immaterial chimeras and we are not. Only yesterday I saw the possibility that I was able to dissolve into thin air and never return to this material consciousness. But this was a frightening thing because I had not been seasoned properly for this; I had been jolted and was not yet prepared to be who I am. Consciousness has evolved in so many ways and, every once in a while, someone is needed who can provide a summary of what the major changes were from the perspective of the future; summary is the wrong word here culmination or apogee might suffice somewhat better.

In the depths of this catatonia that yesterday I had discovered I found that the silence was inward, not merely outward. Words would float in and out of my mind but to consider uttering them, in the light of their absurdity and futility, was somehow impossible. My thoughts, which are words themselves, prevented the projection of their corresponding sounds, prevented the conversion from immaterial thing into vibration, energy, because they were absurd? Surely it was the interior words that themselves were absurd things and not merely their outward counterparts? Outward words are used for communication and to some degree there is success there. Inward words; what do they achieve? An interior monologue that may as well never be said? What would such autobiographies look like if they had all been written down; would they look like mine? Not so much books but unusual things that continue endlessly without any noise? Is this why I am silent, why I write as opposed to speak? This is indeed an autobiography, but not of the clichĂŠd and hackneyed type that line the shelves of our bookstores. These efforts at self worth, of distinguishing oneself above others, of

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writing value into oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s having been alive, has become a method of making money, yet another conversion of life energy into paper. I am not recapping in a fond and rosy light my nostalgic and fantastical reveries; I am writing them down as they happen. I am producing value in the here and now although this value is somehow invisible to me as yet. Perhaps it requires another body to make it happen, for the value to be transmitted from one body to another such as in the motion of the germ of truth?

I am moving backward to the beginning for, as I am told, in regression there lies the promise of new life, a journey without any motion and hence, without any lies. I think that I will have to depart all of my associates from here on out because this journey is solitary in order to arrive at the meaning of friendship. I need to journey in stasis, I need to discover my existence in the boundless contradiction of infinite motion. Marianna dreamt two days ago that I hid my head in her bag. Does one hide in a bag or suffocate in one?

I felt yesterday as though again I could achieve a split in myself, as though there is a huge crack already, but one that has been plastered over. The same night a crack appeared in our roof and the rain came flooding in, ruining our perfect decorations. Marianna says that she thinks that I am all in one place and that I fantasise about this schism, that there is no tear. But if there were no tear would I be able to be afraid or to hallucinate such awful things? And in the same way, when she exposed my weakness, when she ruined the suture and opened the wound did she too expose that she herself is wounded in the same way, for if not, how could she

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indeed perceive what my problem was with such accuracy? I think that the point to bear in mind here is that one ought not to indulge in the fantasy of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fear, should not make an idol of it, for this is then a relation of our desire to that of our fear and that is perverse. But perhaps this tear, or the perception of such a tear is at once the symptom and the cure for this problem, that the tear is imaginary means that there is an imaginary tear that needs to be fixed and that the realm of the problem resides in the space of fantasy? This would appear to make sense, that we have a faulty imagination. But then again, does not this faulty imagination provide so very much?

To create a mirror image there must be at least one superficial quality that is identical between the two parts, but this quality will not be revealed to you until the end of the beginning. I have need to gather myself all together, like sticks in a bundle, and move onward. Because of Hitler a certain way of dressing oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beard has forever become taboo. And we claim not to be superficial animals! But it is in this superfice of the mirror image that we must train our concentration. Where does desire spring from?

Back we come once again to newness, that token value posited by our forefathers and foremothers as the highest human aspiration, to that of transience. Is it not so that the faster one begins to accelerate, (or imagines oneself to accelerate,) due to the lack of divine gravity, that one also must train the memory to speed up? If oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s memory lags behind in this witless race we shall forget the purpose of our movement. Of course we appear to be utterly absurd; we realise, all of a sudden, that our purpose has become muddied and drags distant behind us, our purpose a ruddy shadow.

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We look outward without the visor of purpose and see nothing but an idiotic passion play that makes no sense and contains no meaning, but of course, our speed will propel us ever faster beyond these kinds of perceptions, into the nothingness, the vacuum beyond gravity, into nihilism. Perhaps this would be the highest aspiration of the modern person, to exist beyond the material by utilising the material as a mode of propulsion, using the consumption, the burning of goods through trends and fashions, as a fuel for our impossible quickness? And what would this say of human wastefulness, that, driven by pleasure, he and she became Hermes, the fleet of foot and emptiness of soul? To utilise the world as a tool of self-gratification, such as one utilises drugs to assist the heightening of consciousness; both are false, superficial, the semblance of divine ambition. Everything that we have created about us is a method of masking over the fact that, without a god as a source of infinite and permanent value, the world and we contain and produce no meaning. We have tried to create systems in which we can induct ourselves to provide some stability from the nonsense; industry, fashion, culture as a whole and its societies, but none of them can mask the utter absurdity of existence without god as the source of infinite and concrete meaning. Is it the task of the person to reach up and become god in him or herself in order to create meaning? Of what use is this anxious hole in the heart that used to contain our God, this hole into which we cast so many things, so many desires satisfied, but never able to suture the gap so large as to accommodate the singularity, the infinity of Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presence. We desire because we have no God to provide ultimate satisfaction. We purchase the objects of our desire, (in all senses of the term,) and yet there can never be enough material to make a

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bridge. God, that ghost, lurks in all of these things. We buy such and such, but once in our possession He moves again, always out of our grasp. The next time that you desire something so utterly that you have to posses it, whether it be a man, a woman, a pair of shoes, some music, a house, whatever, consider that the burning lust in you that must be satisfied is the name of God. And once the object in which He was lurking has come into your hands, He has slipped away again into another object. This is how is appears to be, (at least, to me anyway,) but consider the truth of the matter; God is in all things, it is just that your desire cannot perceive Him any longer because you yourself have become faulty, have been damaged. You are now only capable of broken and anxious relationships because, having killed God in you, you are now unable to be part of His whole.

I have spoken with Marianna this morning about this very subject, about how our outward aggressions toward one another merely conceals the true destination of all our fears; it is easier to attack one another than it is to attack oneself for all shortcomings; responsibility begins and ends with the individual. But is this so, that responsibility belongs to us alone; is this the true meaning of responsibility â&#x20AC;&#x201C; loneliness? Responsibility is in our imagination, it is born in us, and it is self-reflexive in that it is in and for itself. What is this thing responsible and how did it come to be bred in us, educated in us? I look at other people as all other people do and my basic hallucination is that their lives are simple, that they do not suffer so, that they are empty automata devoid of pain and anguish. And then I consider myself and why it should be that someone such as myself should feel pain and anguish if not that it is through mere

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self-indulgence. And it is this self-indulgence that keeps us apart in all of our perceptions, this ‘me above all others’, this ‘I before all else’, for the physical impossibility of Charity is Individuality. The basic problem, the paradox at the heart of this misery is that I look outwards and see others who are unlike me, causing the hallucination that I am unlike them and hence Individual. This is the inversion of vision that Modern humanity suffers from. If I were to look outward as though looking in and say to myself that these people are all the same as me, that we are all alike and that my misery is distributed evenly amongst all people, I would then consider myself indivisible from all others and hence, at the heart of the paradox, I would truly become Individual because my perception of the whole would become unique amongst the whole.

I want to know what happens when I look into the eyes of another person and I also desire to know what happens inside of my own mind when I look into the eyes of another person. What terror do I experience when I come face to face with this other, this other that knows my fear, that paralyses me into the ground? Is this the upshot of my embrace of paranoia and the mutable state of mind? How can I turn what is for me paralysis and catatonia into mastery and complete, genuine uprightness? The key is in the inversion, in that insisting sphere whose backwardness of all perceptions I have come to perceive by pushing ever onward in my development, in my self-destruction, in the conversion of a city into a vessel. So what if I break, if the pieces all fall apart; they were not my pieces to begin with so let my soul forage for new pieces with which it may assemble a physical presence and allow the old to rot in the dust. I am no longer alone, no longer in the humiliation of a world

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that understands itself but not me, in this retarded perception of mine, this inverted camera lens. I am only beginning to comprehend the true horror and anxiety that awaits one in the dark country, where nothing is as it seems to be, where there is no concrete being, where there is merely mutation after mutation, metamorphosis and deception. A person is at once a friend and a fiend all at once, some hidden monster that is my inward fear looking back at me but projected onto my representation of the world. This hysteria, this shocking paranoia must be worth something, this long voyage on the empty boat, this encounter with the very awful nature of ego-consciousness, this desperate cry for help. I can now perceive all of these fallen objects, objects that are fallen in my vision and must gather myself to gather when I step out of the front door lest I be vanquished into the molecules of the ether. But I must not try to hold this image together, the image that keeps me rooted in this false perception of the world. I must dissolve to be rejoined with the substance and not the mirror image. I am not alone because each molecule is tied to the next. It is not that when I say a thing it has no meaning because semantic structures do not permit precise meaning to be conveyed, it is that when I say a thing it means everything because all signifiers are tied to all other signifiers. It is merely that I am facing my fears that I can see them manifest in each and every part of the world, just like other people perceive their desires manifest in just so many consumer goods and image-enhancing things. Because these things are not my image and I am not their body that at once appear hostile to me, the ego attempts to frighten one back inside of the cave and again reinforce itself and its rights to utilise me as its host body. It is no wonder that relations are so difficult when this

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relation itself is so one-sided and so unrewarding. I will practise a new technique, a new way of perceiving the world and myself in it. I will look inwards when I look outwards and vice-versa; perhaps then shall I have straightened out my perception.

It is said that one of the great achievements of the Renaissance was the invention of perspective in the two-dimensional arts. I must say now that we can no longer be content with this way of seeing, always from the first-person, (just as the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; came to be put before all else in the world.) My perception is all wrong and in some strange way it is upside down or better, inverted. I do not know how this came to happen, but I do know that in order to straighten out what is bent inside I must first straighten out the way my vision moves toward the world by projecting my image onto it as a whole,

I have many nervous tics that tell me about my interior dysfunctions. I sometimes feel as though what needs to be done is to slow myself right down until I do not miss a thing passing, so that my memory keeps up with my perceptions. I am not very good with conversations or arguments from a rhetorical point of view. I know all of the tricks, (and I have even read a few books on the subject, such as Schopenhauerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s short essay,) but something tells me that to win an argument or to assert a point of view more forcefully than that of another is mere folly and at best, meaningless. A good argument does not by any means contain truth but the artfulness of the arguer is sophistic-ated. People do not necessarily argue for truth but more often than not argue for the sake of arguing, (sophistry,) or to reinforce the dominance of the ego over intellectual peers, (because one is weak and afraid.) I do

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not wish to argue for I have developed knowledge that is easy to extract from me and can neither be proven right or wrong. I do not have any intention for it in the world other than to discover in myself what it is that I mean. It can seems so sad to me to see how people argue without means for argument other than the bolstering of self-image; as if this simple statement needs to be made a million, million times? How many times must we assert [to ourselves] no matter how covertly that we exist, that we are who we think and say we are, that we know how we look before others? There is no meaning behind all of this, and it does not take a genius to know how easily this house of cards can be blown over by a slight wind. Truth is not contained in the logical preposition of argument, opinion or logic. There is always motive residing at the core of such practises, for if not then such assertions would never be made. Let us become aware of the motives that drive us, let us become acquainted with the multi-faceted operation of our desire and what it means. Let us go inward only to discover what is outward.

We have learned how to posit and understand value through a medium, through money and, as with the use of any medium to contact the spirit world, (where value seems to reside,) we must not only be suspicious of the medium him or her self, (for often the medium is only in it for the money,) but also suspicious of our value in the medium. If we value the medium, the purpose of the go-between becomes confused and makes the entire venture futile, (for it proves our disbelief in the paranormal phenomena and a belief in the medium.) It is the same with our paper money; who actually knows what it is worth and why? On each note it says â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I

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promise to pay the bearer the sum of such and such pounds’. But when? I think of the hilarity of Goethe’s observation that Mephisto invents money in order to satisfy the demands of the king and his financial worries. If we remove ourselves from the value of money we realise what an absurd invention it is, brilliant I’ll warrant you, but absurd none the less. How can we possibly understand value when the only values we understand have been replaced by bits of paper that, in themselves, we do not understand?

Recently I have lost sight of the better motivation in me to grow more excellent and more beautiful. I do not know why this is the case; probably it resides in my current difficulties in fearing and in valuing. I cannot value my self in the highest terms when I perceive a terrible fear in my self, but neither can I grow to be excellent if I do not confront this fear and make it excellent too. I have caused myself to be trapped.

Observation:

Two parents try to educate their child not to have to suffer from the same misgivings that they themselves have suffered. So they try to give it a better start in life than they had, (and generation after generation, it cannot be said that in this respect we have got ‘more’ than our forefathers and foremothers had in a non-material sense,) but in fact foist a complex between them onto the child that he or she will have to overcome in order to be what he or she is. As far as my parents are concerned, I have always had everything available to me, but because of my malfunctioning desire machine all that I am able to perceive is that which I do not yet currently possess or

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what used to have. Can our desires ever reach up beyond this mechanical aberration and if so, how are we to elevate ourselves? Is it possible to maintain our genuine disposition or are we destined always to slip into self-irony in order to save face in front of genuine desire? I am tired of slandering the innocent with sarcastic critique; surely it is more noble to behold something beautiful than it is to avert oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes from it? This is the next stage beyond our fear, of going beyond our fear, for once we have mustered our strength and have become prepared and seasoned to look upon that which we fear we must admit to ourselves the truth that we feared; that we were afraid to look upon beauty. The basis of all of our fear is God-fearing, is the fear of looking upon true beauty, not the fear of looking upon something terrible. There is nothing terrible in the world unless we put it there. So we must look with an eye not for putting but for seeing, for then we shall see beauty in the world and not merely the ugliness in our terrified reflected self-image. This is my â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;observationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

I glimpsed my fear on Sunday more fully and more properly than I have ever glimpsed it before. I saw the basis of my entire neurotic mechanism, the cause and shape of all my fear; I am still a child. The reason that I am so afraid of everything is because I am still a child and have not yet grown into manhood. It is strange and I do not think that I can sufficiently explain to you the awesome terror that I held in my body when I made that realisation because it sounds so everyday, so normal. I have also come to learn that the word normal does not mean anything once one has ceased to compare oneself to other people. In order to grow wings we must disregard our current obsession with others which is disingenuous

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and deceptive. This fear lives at the bottom of my spine and it has been festering there since I don’t know when. Marianna flushed it out of me really well on Sunday but what has it been worth? Not bits of paper to be sure, but something immaterial is being generated that will come to be of great worth once it has been fully realised. To become what one is one must not fear one’s fear because it is part of what one is, so to deny it would be to fear it and to disregard some part of the self, hence to not quite be what one is. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I

What a knot! I feel as though I have made no progress at all today, (perhaps I should stop considering myself to be a patient?) I will play at being doctor instead. I thought this morning that, instead of always being the one on the inside who fears the outside that this looking process be reversed. (I have said this earlier, but sometimes repetition is good.) In order to do this I must be completely and utterly empty, devoid, and be the one looking at my image from outside, not the one trying to guess the way that one looks from another person’s point of view. I am still at residence inside of my childhood home but I must leave it soon and become what I am. There is a burning, itching sensation under my skin. Is it correct that one needs to know what one is in order to become it?

I shall tell you a new fear, (but one that I still have time to resolve.) When my child is born it will look at me as it’s father. Is this the point where I become a man, through a case of mistaken identity? I must become what I am before another person comes to perceive me as what I am. What can be said of a writer’s block when the writer seeks to document his every intellectual movement? Is it that

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these quiet moments constitute the little, if only peace of mind that I have ever experienced? And of what use or interest can that be for a reader to read only what is complete, knotted and inconsistent? Is it too close to the way that all peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s minds work and not enough of a distraction from it? It is the case, given that I find writing to be the most difficult of all things in life to do, (except, of course, being happy,) I am the only writer whose fruits grew from not being able to write with there being no other subject matter. I will pose the following problem that is conjoined with my paradoxical career as a writer:

If i)

I am only writing in order to hear myself,

But ii)

The listener always hears the author incorrectly,

Then iii)

My writing can only be correct if it is in error.

Does it look to you dear Daniel as though you are caught up in knots, as though you have dreamed this problem into being by being a problem yourself or by having a problem with being what you are, or by being what you are not? This knot can only have been produced because of some desire to be knotted, to be paradoxical, to construct a vast and dogmatic matrix that grows ever more suffocating with each and every move like a straightjacket does? Of course all problems derive from sexuality because sexuality is the basis of desire and it is desire that is confused and the cause of all worries. But how to cure our desire and perceive beyond the material body? How do I summon in my

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body that rare, mineral quality of confidence when I am in the depths of such frustration? If you listen to me carefully, you will hear that this is what I am always doing. What I crave is stillness, peacefulness.

But I was sitting here for along while and I was not in the slightest bit of pleasure; I was not writing because I was frustrated and in fantasy, dreaming of…what? Was it not worthy of remembering, this empty fantasy of mine? Is anybody’s fantasy worth recording? I have often thought that, if one could record one’s daydreams, we would probably be too embarrassed to show anybody, but if we did see, we would probably see how alike we all are to one another in our ‘irrational’ passions.

I do apologise so much for the fragmentation of these paragraphs, for their illogical structure, (although the logic is in there according to my scheme,) but this is the product of an excess of tension in the wrong places, an excess of ‘stress’ in my body, and it has served to debilitate me today from the project of my life which is to write this document. I received my first letter of rejection today from a publishing house on the grounds that they wanted books about religion as opposed to religious books. This, I thought to myself, was quite strange; would people rather read a book about the Koran, for example, or the Koran? My book is not the Koran, but it is a most religious book and it is parallel in scope and quality to any other religious text. There is no way of disproving me in this without employing some argument and we have already discussed the value of argumentation until blue in the face. I do not see that it is such a great problem to consider how a man such as myself is not

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entitled to be as great as any prophet or hero in any other book for indeed I cannot even see the difference between what I am and what they are, except that I am still impinged upon by the strange letter ‘I’ and have not yet learned to leave it behind me. ‘I’ is a vehicle, a method of getting around, of expression, of all these things that the Modern world demands. And yes, this world is still Modern; obsessed with speed, at a loss for values, hangover from God still, etc. I have decided that it is time that I evolve a new body, one that can easily protect me from the banal and transient worries of this ‘Modern’ world, one that is not distressed at the slightest anxieties. This body will have no defences; it shall be open to all attacks; in fact, it will welcome them, it will relish in the prospect of being torn apart into a million pieces only to find itself back as a whole, just like Dionysos. It is about time that I began to derive pleasure from these assaults upon my body inflicted by ‘Modern life’, a thing so meaningless and ‘without claws’ that it can only inflict imaginary wounds upon people. My imagination is wounded in some way, but I am seeking to finish off the job properly. If I were a film director I would make a historical epic, that of the Battle of Trafalgar for example, where all of the players were African. I should like to destroy what I am and be left with only the indestructible parts and be without fear of offending anybody. I have nothing to fear; it is my ego that has come to put fear over me so that I might respect it more. But I do not respect it one jot and desire only to destroy the thing, humiliate it and bury it in the ground. The ego was once a beautiful thing but it has fallen like the most beautiful angel and now it is merely a devil, a fallen good, and must be restored to what it was and not to persist in obstinate machinism. Some days I might as well not exist, but then

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I consider what a stupid thing this is to think and I quickly perceive the opportunity that I have to ridicule the ego. I am a gun without a bullet, a mouth without an insult; I amâ&#x20AC;Ś

Who and where does this schism ring out the church bells from and why would it concern my former self? Is it not clear that now there is no I to speak of, just the sound of words as they echo inside of the inner ear and dance their rhythmic tunes? Did the breaking point inside of his head finally occur, and why would that now concern him, for he now only sits there and perceives his hands moving on the keyboard without an idea in his head, just writing for who knows what and who knows why, no matter really because the fetters are gone and now all there is is

Principle 2:

All fear is misplaced.

Again I find it necessary after many, many hours ceaseless searching to posit another maxim, the second one, (although I cannot remember what the last one was; maybe I have already written this one down?) We would all love to love one another, would we not? But why then do we hate and fear so much the things in the world? Why do we love to hate and why do we hate so easily that which we love? Why create a small enclave for our love that is easy to defend and protect? Why not create enormous reservations of love that are extended freely and openly to all people and all things? We hate everyone because we are afraid of them, that we might lose our security, our image, our dominance,

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and hence our fear of everyone lurks in every shadow. This fear of everyone is the inverted mirror image of what a world full of love would look like. So why do we not choose love over fear? Do not have any illusions when you see a person who appears to be confident, for they are afraid because the inside of everyone’s head is the same awful place full of the same awful things. Those people who lash out at life and attack are the ones most castrated by their fear because they feel that to release the pressure physically will provide relief just like a rapist will attempt to remove the burning lust to finally be rid of it. But it always, always comes back.

Conjecture to Principle 2:

To love someone who hates me is antithetical to my nature. Why love someone who wrongs me?

What is ‘wrong’? To hate someone who loves you is just as ‘wrong’, but that has never stopped you in the past, has it? If all fear in the world is misplaced, then one cannot spurn another who has misplaced/displaced their fear onto you. You do not even know what love is until one has hated and been hated. If we are to ‘love thy enemy’ then we should try to ‘hate thy friend’ also, (Nietzschean reversal.) By the same principle, we must also consider that all exploitation is misplaced also, because to exploit someone else is an attempt to make up for one’s own lack. We can assume that people will always try to exploit you, (because people will always seek to profit from one another, (and profit without any grasp of value, either,)) and that to make this assumption is both to be aware of human nature, (because you have exploited people in

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your lifetime,) and also to displace your fear onto other people. One cannot, therefore, value other people until fear has been restored to love, because one can have no sense of value when one exploits or is exploited and one cannot love when one is fearing or when one is feared. It is easier to turn one’s fear onto other people than it is to recognise what it is in the self that one is afraid of; perfection, beauty, innocence, purity. These words have no meaning and that much is obvious; it is an effort now to put meaning into words, (unless one holds the alchemical formulae for doing so,) and so it is of a diminished meaning for me to do so. To be freed from such constrictions as to the ‘accuracy’ of what one writes into approximations means that one can rightly proceed and in so doing one can elevate the sensibilities one possesses above anal considerations. I expect that my writing instructs me as to what it means, not that I write what I mean because, without preparation as to what I am going to write I am as much surprised by it as you are. All of these words are floating freely inside of my consciousness and I just put the pen to my thoughts, allow them to take control and rescind the importance of intentionality from the process. I find that it is my self that wrongs me more than it is others, for if I was as developed and as perfect as I aspire to be than no other person would be capable of wronging; the opposite would occur, because any contact with me would be right and there would be no wrong other than that which was reflected back, the mirror turned to one’s face, the empty chasm of the prophet.

And so the higher one climbs, the more than one finds one is descending into the abyss; the idealist considered it to be a mountain, but from a safe distance he or she could not distinguish

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the one from the other. I can tell by the absence of light in this place that I am not on the mountain and with just so many shadows being cast from my small pocket lamp I can track to movements of a menagerie of ghouls that impede upon and mock my motion. If one is to realise that consciousness is a trap one must move towards it centre, the abyss, the great empty expanse that one has always been semi-conscious of but one had never fully acknowledged. In the centre of the self there is nothing; this was where the ego had installed itself like some awful spider in a web with no intention of ever giving up the space. This abyss of fantasy is where the mothers reside with their conjuring tricks of fantasy, for any thing can be imagined and realised in this space. And the spider of the ego, with its imaginary danger, drives one to extremes in fear without the means to bite. As I approach my hundredth page I stop to consider what it is that I have achieved, but with my terrible amnesia, (for I have never remembered anything in life, for life was an imagination,) I see tow zeros without one. What did I expect to earn or profit from these labours that I have exhausted so many, many days in writing, so many minutes snatched back from my job, so many sick days, so many weeks off; what was the point? As with life, it does not pay dividends to consider that there was a ‘point’ to any of it, (at least, not one,) and one should not expect to ‘profit’ from anything, for contrary to the Kings of Egypt, one cannot take one’s worldly goods with one into the afterlife. Profit is without meaning and value can be attached to material objects but its proper place is not with material objects, (i.e. they can be disconnected from them also, they are not a property of them.) What I mean is that a hammer has a property, but it is not ‘innate’ of that object, (because if there was no human to use the hammer, it

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would no longer have the property that humans invested in it.) I use the term ‘invest’, and this is quite appropriate because life appears to be a kind of bank, with its economics. Human life is structured around value and yet, to my mind, I can think of no values that have been ‘proven’ to be either correct in all instances or infallible. This is the heart of the abyss; that all of life is absurd when we discover how we are built upon value and value does not exist.

The alchemist and the magician would speak of the properties of an object, though in a slightly different way to me. Should we also be led to believe that they would hold a different value for this purpose also? I believe that we have only glimpsed the possibilities and the scope of ‘value’ and that we ought to make a special effort to open this wound further, go deeper into the abyss. We spend our time like frustrated little children, frustrated at using the tools of our forefathers and foremothers when they themselves did not even understand their properties. Shall we continue to spin in the madness of leading a disingenuous, valueless life that we cannot understand, or shall we instead throw aside our small portion of security in what we know and cause our complete annihilation in the discovery of a single piece of value? What I would do to discover this gold, this philosopher’s stone! I am adjusted to the self-inflicted misery of my life, when to all others my life appears to be so comfortable and so full of normality and perfection. I cast it all aside to journey to the place where something Real exists beyond reality, and I might bring this piece of the Real back with me and offer it up to other people. But one must travel headlong into the trauma, the gap, the abyss before one can find this gleaming object. Deep inside the darkness where there is nothing,

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not even a self must our Orphic persona progress. And the chalice does not sit there waiting but, as if in the depths of sensory deprivation does it appear once all hope is lost. Hope is a hindrance to discovery. Once everything has disappeared, all assumed and approximated things that you have carried inside of your head these many years, will it appear. God only appears once everything is lost. This is the scope of the journey, to go beyond what is human, to the very brink of experience until experience is none, into nihil, before everythingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nothingness is realised, the realisation of everything as nothing and nothing as everything is attained. When all boundaries and walls of the ego and of all portions of consciousness are eradicate for the spite o the slightest thing, where the body and the contents of the imagination evaporate into a molecular haze, where the singularity of individuality is reunited with the indivisible whole of the molecular universe, this is it.

And so I look into the two zeros of one hundred and think of Nietzsche; what if a prophet has one hundred followers? It is still a one followed by two zeros! And over the bridge of ninety-nine I step and I realise what these previous hundred pages had meant. They had meant nothing, they merely occupied the sound of time passing, the sound of death approaching, of a clock ticking or whatsoever. But where I was in this place there was no motion, for these pages were already written millennia ago when Solomon was sat on his throne, when humans were as troubled then as they are now, when happiness, happiness; who said that we are alive to be happy except an idealist? This knowledge that now gushes forth from the fount of my brain has sat in the well of humanity since aeons past, back to the first people and, by acknowledging that time

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has not passed do I gain access to this rich vein of ore and perceive that these words and these books were stored in my brain, my mother’s and father’s brains before me, their mother’s and father’s brains, right back in time to the first people. My birth and my death was written into them also, and the book of intention, this great will of God in which we enact the passion play, is pre-written, but our amnesia by believing that time passes has eradicated this knowledge and makes our lives into a ridiculous struggle toward what we know is inevitable. The knowledge of death is wisdom, but who amongst us are wise to this fact? Our lives are characterised by ignoring the knowledge that we will die; we see others die around us and it shocks and surprises us; are we so conceited or do we have such a bad understanding of ourselves or such a bad memory? You are already dead when you are born, the sands of time are already passing for you, dead because your parents gave you the life to die. Why am I telling you this and why is it that I dream so often about Rome? When I was sat in the Roman forum I never felt such peace, such spiritual peace. The Catholics must have dressed up the ancient Romans as real devils because I did not feel the debauch, (I did however feel the gluttony of the Catholics whilst I was there.)

My journey then is the journey of treading water; history only serves to tell me that humans have accomplished nothing of real worth, have not overcome the desire to exploit one another, have not attained enlightenment, have not discovered how to be good to one another and have not been able to write down Truth. Why was the idea of Truth disseminated to be available to the human faculties when we have yet to encounter it on any of our intellectual

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travels? Was this the joke of Truth, that it was but a carrot to a donkey? If so, which prankster put it there but our lord Allah who delights in seeing us squirm? It does not mean anything which name we put upon God, because the name of God has always remained a mystery to us and, since we have forgotten it, forgotten how to call upon Him in us, we have forgotten Him also and, as He lived in us alone, He died in us also. We do not need God to reassure us or to affirm us or need Him for anything. When I pray to God I pray that everything will be as it is and this prayer is always granted, let it be. This is not a good paragraph so I move to the next one in shame.

Marianna and I share a similar problem; neither of us has an audience. We both posses and uphold the best possible working habits, for we are utterly diligent and we work in every given moment of life and we are generous in this respect. As we have no audience to speak of except for one another, we have become selfreflective and we are able to work at the behest of our own wills and our own responsibilities, giving us the ability to work extremely hard almost without a pause for thought. It is quite easy to see what the problem in this might be, but it is less easy to see the advantages and the very real value in our practise. One must be completely at one with one’s own critical awareness, one’s own difficulties and ghosts, one’s own inability and capabilities. One’s own demands, ambitions and aspirations. But one cannot ascertain the degree of reverie in all of this, though this does not qualify as a problem for the world as it stands does not contain any meaning and hence it has no values or qualities that might be offended by our work. And so we continue and we may possibly find an

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audience who respects what we do because we do it and who does not ask or demand in us that we change it for them. Genuine respect cannot come from pandering to the needs of obese and invaluable mass consciousness. There is no such thing as respect in our world, for it is mere myth and hindrance. I will only grow silent for death, for he/she is the only respect to whom silence is infallible.

Today is being good for me as the tension has not arisen, the torment has not arisen. I write without tormenting myself today, (because normally I am like a man who prods a dog with a stick to get it to move.) My work is of flagellation, for it is a self-torment, a soul that meditates only upon its own invented and meaningless difficulties. This is a metaphor for all human life in that it has all been made up, all of it. All of the things of memory and history, all of the values we hold in our bodies, all of the things we treasure and hate, all of it made up and meaningless into the bargain. My own self-torment is the way in which humanity has always tortured itself without any reason beyond its own imagining for doing so. My entire existence is a parody or a miniature of the whole history of human civilisation no matter where or when it occurred. The inside of my brain is a mirror turned to the human race.

What is the dominant form of human interrelations? Is it that we have spurned one another into doing things, or is the idea of cooperation are mere myth, a fantasy? Can it be said that people can â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;co-operateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to mutual gain when it is so obvious that people seek only to gain from one another, to take from each other and to exploit, to make the greatest profit from the least work? I think of

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Machiavelli, the timeless qualities of a piece of plain-talking which exposes so much of our civilisation and its motives. The only way of achieving ideals is to realise them alone. The idea that whole civilisations can achieve them together does not work, for they must be attained by each and every molecule of civilisation, which will not happen. If one assumes full responsibility for one’s own development and spiritual realisation, one stands a chance, one becomes St. Christopher with the weight of the world on his back, and intentionality begins and ends in the same place and acknowledges the presence of the divine hand at work. What I am writing now is shit but I do not need the words to elevate me above shit.

To write a book, (which is not what I am doing,) is very simple for me; I merely record thoughts, (and ‘merely’ because I choose or have chosen to work in this mere way.) What is difficult for me is finding people who are willing and able to accept this method of working, this ethos that I have developed and will continue to develop, who can perceive the qualities therein and who are masters of acceptance and the joys of receiving. My work demands that a person puts aside what they know about reading, writing and about books in general, (excepting of course that unusual and new comparisons may be made and contexts be drawn,) and to discover my ‘book’ as the first ‘book’ ever read and ever written. How to look at a thing without seeing a million other associations in that thing? I am not demanding this, I am rather demanding that there be no pre-judgement about my thing that I have written. What does anybody know about books and who can be said to be an ‘authority’ and why would it be good to be an ‘authority’ on such

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things? Why demand such respect from others when one merely occludes oneself from new thoughts? Assume that everything that you know about thinking is wrong, and that the thought that has just been thought is also wrong, and that this new thought about the last thought about thought is also wrong, ad infinitum. Where is the beginning and the end of thought and can there be anyone there to witness either the beginning or the end? My first thought; I wonder what this was? My final thought; I wonder what this was? I wonder whether, given there can be no knowledge of either, whether there can ever be any distinction between the two, that there are no such things as beginnings and ends and, as this book will embody, the four-dimensional mirror or the envelope which envelopes itself, the circles of hell and the philosopher who pulls him/herself up by his/her bootstraps, all these things will be what they will be and this book will be one and the other, the perfect revolution of the bodily cycles, the infinite reflection of a vanishing point, the hallucination of reality and the reality of hallucination. I am the beginning of the end, the start of time, the word of contradiction, the absurd, the life of what was, is and will be

I, what I is this; shall ‘I’ select a different letter for this prefix to existence? How can this modern mind function without its ‘I’? Does it become in some way unable to consider, to posit or reflect? But what purpose reflection when image is none and when the world is all, when consciousness is evaporated into the sponge of the all? Help each other in this search, when all is lost it is found again and in this constant flitting of words around the light of meaning we may occasionally be burned.

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“Of all the things I meant to say, this was the least important.”

But it must be said that it is the most difficult and yet necessary thing in and about life to evacuate all traces of fear from the darkened ventricles of the human heart. Fear spreads its tendrils about the muscle and contracts, disallowing the organ to exert its mighty power to extend love liberally across all things it comes into contact with. Originality is being able to see without anybody else’s eyes. Originality is being able to see with everybody’s eyes. Being everybody’s ‘I’s. It is fear that prevents this magical overcoming from releasing the heart from its awful bondage, the shitty desire to always be confined inside, to erect boundaries, to patrol borders and to have property, the spider-ego which lurks in the hole of the heart where God used to be seated now paralyses the heart with its poison, its shit, defecating into the pure blood and causing nausea, sickness and depravity on the skin’s surface. I am this way and have been for a great many years, the burning itch of toxicity erupting across the skein, the foulness belching out of the mouth that lies, deceives, machinates, curses, torments, humiliates and gossips. This foul breath emanates from that diseased organ of the heart, that fearful organ whose original purpose was to love but is now so perverted and so backward in its desires that it can only produce its opposite material. Is there in fact a way in which this backwardness, (which infects all parts of the organism,) can be reversed, put straight and corrected, set running in the right direction? What means do I have in my brain for reversing a sickly organic process which has become mildewed?

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The organism as a whole has need for goodness to be fed into it through the resource of good practise, good effort, good work, good food and all other things that are good. To define that which is good is to ask oneself some simple questions that require ‘good’ answers, honest answers. It has for some time been an ability that I have developed to be able to know, deep down and without question, that which is upright and ‘good’. I should stumble over my own words, (for indeed, words are not guarantors or safeguards of ‘goodness’,) were I to attempt an accurate description in approximate language. I shall make some effort to right here something which is like what I do to achieve goodness. I ask if something is good. I then watch to see if it contains motive for the enhancement of the ego. Of course, it will contain this thing, (because all things are filtered through the ego, the ‘I’ before reaching consciousness proper,) but I can then see if the thing is still worth doing, if it embodies virtue, if it is simple and not complex. This faltering description of mine I am aware to be inadequate. It is like asking the best in yourself, asking the noble part of yourself which is gentle, serene, excellent and pristine, upright. I truly believe that this part exists in me regardless of all of the ‘good’ [logical] arguments to the contrary. It does not matter how many times I am ‘disproved’ because belief does not require proof of any kind, other than the proof that no proof is needed. If this decision comes from the higher and more ambitious, excellent part, regardless that it contains baser and lower motives implanted within it be the ego, the thing can be done. We do not pretend that motives can be vanquished. If motives were vanquished then we would never do anything, would we? It is our task to bring these motives into the light and to see them for what they are and to

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acknowledge that they too are part of us and have a right to be part of us without needing to hide in the caves and grottoes of our shame. Once these things can be seen, once we have become â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;uprightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, can we then begin in our way to decide whether the thing should still be done, based upon the openness and honesty of our opinion of ourself. I am the Prince of this city and no matter what I say, whether it be good or bad, it is always realised. But I must ask myself whether it be fitting for a Prince to hide his motives from himself and from others because he is ashamed of what he is. It is everything that needs to be asserted, affirmed. One must lead an affirmative existence.

So this is how one must proceed; in good faith, in openness, (even in oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s deceit,) in constant affirmation of the entire organism. The spider exists on the inside, still wrapped around the organ that keeps it alive, but the organ grows stronger. Have you ever watched how aphids attach themselves to the bud of the rose because that is where the nutrients are being put? They get their nutrients from the rose, but the rose still continues to flower and there is enough for everyone in this process. The spider is not our enemy; it has been misrepresented in our consciousness and seeks its proper place, seeks to be affirmed and loved too. We have made it into what it is and it is our responsibility to restore its grandeur, to ennoble it once again. The ego is capable of a great good, but only when all of its motives are bathed in sunlight, when its attachment to the human heart becomes righteous, open and giving. It cannot do this when it lives in shame and is hidden away to do what it does, veiled in deceit and a web of lies. It is not fair. The ego is the crown upon the head of the King and it is what the Prince has the divine right

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to. I have asked my better self to give up this information and it was the last thing that I expected myself to be saying; the ego is the divine right of Kings and Queens.

I am glad that I have eradicated the lie of ‘progress’ from this venture. I know that I am moving backward toward the beginning, ready to live without hope or fear or any other unnecessary parts that appear like angels but are hindrances on our spiritual movement. I have discovered the laws of motion that are invisible to the physicist.

Here is a picture for you; Marianna and I, (and whoever this ‘I’ is escapes all of us for it could be all of us, surely?) sit around the kitchen table each and every evening and talk about a great many things, things that are dogmatic to our sensibilities and yet somehow we are still perplexed by them. This evening I began to point out how everything in this magazine that we have delivered, Artist’s Newsletter it is called, is written in such a way as to perplex the mind with certain words that convince you that the writer knows what they are writing about and that it is clever, but upon closer inspection actually contains nothing. I find the phenomena highly disturbing; that artists can so easily be led by the hand into this deceptive and pointless preoccupation with the empty rhetoric of arts council funded cronies, all of which huddle together for warmth and protect one another from the knowledge that they are empty but are good at convincing one another that they are in the know. I am suspicious of those who form decent arguments, who develop clever ways of speaking that do not lead the mind anywhere of interest, (not like the poet’s game,) rather just a thinly-

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veiled deceit that belies a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inability to think independently or to develop something of meaning, to convey something of importance or to know when one is talking nonsense and to shut up. I have made a career out of these properties just as they have, but I acknowledge that these special properties are manifest in my work and are in fact the substance of it. These people are too narrow minded to ever admit that they have no idea about what they are talking about and that they are talking rubbish at any rate. These people talk so fast that they cannot comprehend the terrible, flatulent noise of the appropriated slogans they all belch in unison. If one talks freely enough, if one swallows the senna and allows the verbal diarrhoea to spew forth without pause until the guts ache then one makes a good mouthpiece for this particular creative ethos. Why do people take themselves so seriously; do they never stop to question what they are doing and why? Perhaps it is safer not to ask such questions that so obviously have no self-evident or realistic answer. This kind of quest always leads to nothing and it is nothing that the nihilist paradoxically fears the most; the nihilist will convert all of his or her actions into nothing, into things without seemingly any meaning or purpose and without any belief. This behaviour is designed to mask the ever-present and looming shape of the void that exists within but of course, it is these actions that bring the void ever closer. The nihilist would be better described as a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;de-nihilistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, (if you excuse the pun,) for the true nihilist charges headlong into the void and acknowledges his or her desire to do so, to comprehend nothing, to be nothing, to know nothing and to do nothing. I think that I might be talking rubbish.

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The real point of all of this is to discover something about myself, some piece of knowledge that is being told to me beneath a mask of signs. I become frustrated that such people can write such rubbish and be published when I sit down to write something with the best of intentions that is ambitious and attempts to get somewhere even at the expense of my own self-image. This is called jealousy; incredulous jealousy. I also remember the way in which I was verbose at university and could develop sophistic-ated arguments that would always ‘win’. I know that I was full of shit and that I would rather struggle in obscurity in attempting to know even one single think which is genuine than to succumb to the bandwagon of successful writers. I am just trying to figure out what it is that I am doing and whether I am published or not does not really mean a huge amount except that I would be able to write more if I was. I do not seek to develop my style or to become ‘better at it’, I simply desire to come to know one thing that is genuine and real, one piece of knowledge that exists beyond and without my conceit, a piece of knowledge that is not subject to the vacuousness of sophistry, of all of the errors that Socrates saw around him, of clever people seeking to demonstrate their cleverness to the world reflected at them as a mirror image of the self. This type of hallucination terrifies me and my work is an attempt to understand this thing, an attempt to figure out what I do and not necessarily who I am because I do not really wish to be self-obsessed any longer or any more than is really necessary. I am not my own occupation because I wish to discover something that exists beyond myself which is one reason why I am so interested in Descartes; not in the disinterested way that ‘philosophers’ are interested in him, (and his ability to form a good, rational argument,) but in his need to prove that other minds exist. I

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too have this need and it is obvious that this is a requirement of any value system. But the way in which his wish to get to this ‘proof’ is by scrutinising the self to the utmost degree, by doubting that it exists, (and thus by contradicting Descartes’ first proof,) and by hurling doubt at it until the unnecessary bits fall off. Then I wish to discover what I am doing and I wish to discover value in this thing, value which is fresh but ancient. This list of demands is designed to do what? It does not adequately describe what I want; perhaps it had another function? I am always attempting to discover the hidden function of things, such as what it is that books are capable of doing when they are not books for a start. This might look as though it is a ‘book’, but it is of course masked by your perception of it, by the signs and signifiers of it, the look and feel of it, but you do not even know what it is because you rely upon foreknowledge to ‘know-about’ things. This is no way of treating a thing, to prejudge it, although you have no choice, do you? I am here to freely admit what you cannot; in the value of failures, of mistakes and errors. I am your medium between your understanding and the place where your understanding cannot reach; into the mind of another. Is this my new-found purpose or a mere musing?

It would seem necessary then that in serving as a medium my work involves much trickery and mystique, illusions, dressing-up games. It is not that I wear many masks, it is that I am a mask, a go between or just an image or whatsoever I choose to call myself. The label of words is merely a masking of what is real at any rate, so I do not fear that this book may constitute its own reality, its own woven web of complexes, dead-ends and knots. I do not fear anything on behalf of my book as I have enough to fear for myself.

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If this book fails then let it; it is no longer a part of my body when it is out there on the paper. If it was still in my body then perhaps I would feel responsible for it and worry for it a little. I do in fact care about what you think except that I am yet to find a way of discovering such information in a way that confirms and affirms your existence. (Am I now talking to myself?) I seek a critic who can rip my Dionysos to shreds, to reunify what was broken, to do what I myself am longing but too frightened to doâ&#x20AC;Ś]

It is not too late for me to go back upon everything that I have said, to reject it all, burn my books, (so to speak,) and, for the sake of argument, it will be as if none of this ever came into being because it will not exist in anybodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s memory except mine. But it is precisely this need to put something into another brain and to show that another mind exists that has driven me to do this. I could quite easily just continue my nice, middle-class existence, enjoy the normal share of worries, happiness etc., and continue to loathe my job and retire from work when I am sixty-five. But something inside will not allow me to, must put me through this demanding and humiliating exercise, must continue demand energy and drive, must continue to struggle after this one thing of real value. What is this drive; if I discovered it, perhaps I might come to understand what the answer to it all was, (assuming that indeed I was so naĂŻve in assuming that there was an answer or indeed a question.) It has taken this long while just to know what it was that I was searching for, (and even now it is not completely transparent,) and it will, I assume, take a great deal longer to discover the thing itself. It does seem as though what I am searching for has not yet been made, as though I am searching for the thing that I am currently producing, if

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you can get your temporo-spatial head around such an idea. Of course it seems as though I get closer when I work and yet come no closer to finishing; it is the work itself, the thing is in the doing, the search is in the making. I think that this is enough work for tonight although I have enjoyed these brief few hourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lucidity, this strange quietness that tiredness enjoys.

And now I have awoken, done some tidying up around the flat, enjoyed some breakfast and now some coffee. Is this how peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s days are, and is it a question that helps or hinders oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s search for clarity? I am now geared up and ready to write about thoughts, turning the least material of all things into something material by utilising a set of laws that has been taught to me. Is it not contentment enough to simply think these thoughts and not to write them down? I am trying to locate the point where value steps into the relationship between thinking and writing. I remember when I was young I sat and read a large book by Roger Scruton in the afternoon light, the pages appeared so architectural and the words so clear. I enjoyed the same sensation when I read Kant a little while after, sitting in a park in Winchester with the ducks, the light somehow lending a metaphorical clarity to the words on the page, as though it could only be understood in this light, in these best circumstances. But I never made it far through these books but preferred instead to go for very long walks. When I was out for these walks that often lasted a couple of hours during the night time, I would be lost in a world of fantasy, all of those thoughts that I thought are now lost whereas all of the thoughts I now have get recorded. My long walks I can perceive only with nostalgia for thoughts that I cannot even remember, just so many fleeting images

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and sensations burned upon my memory. One thing that I do remember quite clearly having thought, whist walking along the river Itchen quite late one summers night was that there ought to be little booths in Soho where you could go and commit suicide if you want because, having not asked for life in the first place one ought to be able to take it away again. Why is this thought so insistent whereas all other thoughts seem to be long since past? I had been reading Nietzsche at the time and I had discovered the depths of nihilism, a whole world that I had never encountered before that I grew more and more anxious about. The idea that there was no meaning in anything at all, and least of all in human life, was foisting itself upon my conscious mind with greater force each and every day, and day after day I toiled, sitting in the painting studio racked with this incredible burden, trying to save myself from meaningless and loneliness. I did not make many paintings once this thought had occurred because I could do little other than to wrestle with this new, irresistible and dangerous puzzle that, like a frustrated child I could not put down. I remember thinking to myself one day, quite proud at having found a solution, that it does not matter because this problem does not pertain to the real world; it is hypothetical. But for an age after this I had found the problem no less irresistible but was incensed with a new-found energy to exploit this world that contained no meaning. I had discarded somewhere my ability to love and my body was only revived from its loveless and lifeless torpor when Marianna asked me for the part of myself that I had denied, the better part of myself that was apparent to her but dead to me. This was the last day of my Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s course at Chelsea School of Art, a rather funny little course with tutors I never saw, with no facilities and with no

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energy. I had thrown that year away in their eyes because I had made no work to speak of, having been emotionally crippled by my love of nothing, my nihilism. I sat in a bar drinking a gin and tonic, me and me having a conversation together, the barmaid quite incredulous to my problem, where the dead half was asked to lie down whilst the living half resumed its rightful role in this relationship. It must have been at around about this point where I began to learn the significance of all of this, of this other way of living, a dead living that I could now perceive all about me but that other people were unaware of. I actually allowed myself to sit and think about God at about that time also, having awoken to life from a cold sleep I now wanted to know all about it, about its possibilities and promises, excited like I used to be at Christmas, stuck for which present to open first. There are many gifts in this life, many of which remain imperceptible and veiled until one has chosen to live life and not sleepwalk through it. I was leading a dead life, a still life [nature morte] in which there was no value to speak of. When I awoke, I had been cleansed of these values that hitherto I had perceived as belonging to me and to being right and unquestionable. I could see the absurdity of my life and the demand to reclaim it as my own now even to my own embarrassment. I continue to struggle with my own ghost, my dead self which is trying to drag me into its cold coffin and bring it warmth, give it my life, and when it does so something in the world is lost to its coldness, some empty and meaningless thing occurs that only brings emptiness with it. But I am not dead; I refuse to lie down until the day is done and I refuse to give Marianna my dead self when all she has asked for is to give her my life. And now she carries my life inside of her womb, not my death. This is the

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purpose of all of this; to think beyond myself, telekinesis, to discover the truth of other minds and to share my life with them, to open the walls of this self-made prison and to discover the meaning of Charity.

Ever since this time, I have considered Nietzsche to be an artist, a teacher or a guide to me. His art was such that a canker was implanted in my brain that has run circles about me for the past however many years that has unravelled the knots in my mind one by one, has unlearned everything that I have learned, has disassembled the fakeness inherent in my character and demanded that something genuine be discovered or created. It could only have come from Nietzsche that I learned about God, and this might sound like a contradiction in terms, but this is Nietzscheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s art, his reversal of all things. I am becoming more articulate now in that I am not concerned bout delivering a good essay or complicated sentence structures, but by writing things as I say them to myself in my head. My most rhetorical stage was when I had come to love nothing, when I was a nihilist, for then one can gratify oneself and exert force without any meaning to hold you back. I am not out to prove the dominance of my ego any more, I am just doing a thing and trying to work out what it is that I am doing whilst I am doing it. I am trying to be what I am by doing what I do. There are no prerequisites in this life, there are no demands to be made other than those implanted and embedded in oneself. I can see no purpose in showing a false concern to the world like a peacock displays its plumage. I want to get to the heart of the matter, to the very bottom or top, I want to ask myself of the very best and I wish to know all that there is to know. I wish to ask the absolute most

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that is physically and mentally greatest of myself; to find a value. I believe that once value is discovered, once the clinker is broken off this diamond, one will come to understand all things; the value of the diamond and the value of the clinker. And then, once value has been restored to its proper place in the world, (in that by looking, value is unveiling the world and enriching it,) when there is gold all around, does one finally come to understand the value of gold. The alchemist does not value gold in itself, (because he or she can make it at will,) but there is a supreme value that lies beyond all of this material value that we have hitherto to discover.

My paragraphs begin at the bottom, with the blank canvas, the frustration of not knowing what to write, and then gradually escalate upwards until at the end of the paragraph comes the clearest thought that I am able to have, when I am only asking the best of myself, (largely because I have ceased thinking by that point.) The longest paragraphs are the ones where I really lose my ability to think, (or the necessity to think,) and the shortest ones are the ones that are bogged-down by thoughts. All of them have an equal but different worth; one needs to come and value everything in life, not just the things one can value easily by prerequisites or by familiarity or prejudgement. One must value everything like gold, each and every part of lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s existence. This is the only kind of value that there is, the most affirmative life that is not an enhancement, but is the opposite, a stripping down of life until all you can see is all that is there. An enhanced life is the one where one does not perceive any excess or any flak, any wastage or any meaninglessness. Everything in this life must have meaning, must have value, or life is valueless, and life is valueless unless one

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consciously creates and posits value there. This is the true meaning of work, to build value until oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s values touch all parts of life exposing the invisible connection between lives. Once all of this life is united in value, the do all lives become united by value, then do we become reunited with the indivisible whole, the perfect sanity of divine consciousness. If there can be no truth and no falsehood in this world, (as many a theorist would like to demonstrate,) then what I say can be true or false; whatever you decide decides what you are. You do not make decisions; decisions make you. When you decide, a part of yourself becomes decided. If you choose to believe that what I say is false or silly or insane, then you have made it into those things through your choosing. And this means that this was not for you, that you were unable to accept it or understand it, that you do not value everything in life, that you do not have the maximum value in life, that you do not want to create meaning everywhere, that your fear has held you away from joy. I have given all of the keys because this is what I am used for. I am a medium.

A medium contains no value; one must put value into it. The medium is a nothing, is just something for you to use, and the way in which you use it will only ever say something about you, whether you believe, whether you do not. Every thought that you have had in relation to what I have written has only been a reflection of what you are and what you have decided to be. I am a medium, just a medium for your expression of yourself, a mirror turned to your face, There is nothing here, no words, no ideas, no nothing. Just what you have put here in order to know what you are. This is what God looks like; the value of everything and, as a

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medium, I ask for you to communicate through me and not to relate to me. I am not important.

So I have had my afternoon pause and I resume once again. I will not remember what transpired in this pause other than that to record everything is a very tiring, anxious business. One must be prepared to accept that the world can open up and swallow you at any given moment, that it can appear disgusting and unknowable at any given moment. I have arrived now at the understanding that ignorance is fear and knowledge is love, which is why we are travelling toward knowledge at the risk of all security. I am alone in my thoughts but I desire to be reunited with the whole, to where thoughts are not lonely. At one point in time the belief in God, (in general, (and I detest

generalisation,))

was

given,

accepted

and

unquestionable belief. The concept of loneliness was not existential, merely psychological in the material sense of being on one’s own. As the light from that dead star faded so too did the void in the heart begin to appear and existence became lonely, for there was no Holy Ghost always at our side. Our burdensome conscious came to step in, came to replace the light of the star, came to insert ‘I’ before all else. Man and woman became lonely, came to look for solace in one another but found none, came to appreciate nothingness, life’s loneliness. This gap in the heart of our existence is the first trauma of mankind, of the death of God, the irreparable tear. It cannot be filled in the material world, for all matter is condensed to nothing in its chamber. We throw all manner of things in there with the vain hope that it will replace our lost Father or Mother, we simulate our relationships based upon this trauma but it is no good; we have learned too well how to fail in all

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important respects and how to succeed in all meaningless respects. But do we genuinely desire to overcome this loss and become what we are? We must look beyond our meagre and distracting earthly desires in order to recognise the solitary desire that is not of the body but is of the spirit. The spirit knows only one ambition, only one desire. Our search for other minds leads us upon the lonely path, but on that path we find our friends who have desired this journey also, for there are no followers here. Everyone has enveloped their loneliness in the knowledge that it is only in fully accepting one’s loneliness that one can discover the desire for the all, the divine wisdom.

I must leave behind even the desire for happiness, for happiness is like sadness; it is a ruse, just a mere shape of something that is real and we can never credit the world or the other existent beings in it if we do not put aside our vague and distracting impressions of it, (emotions,) and look toward the outside of our minds looking in, not the inside looking out. Perhaps it is now vice-versa? I am lost in my mind but I am aware of the possibility of friendship in the ‘world’. I am aware that the world must be won, that reality itself is a medium for overcoming the state of existence that we have been born into and then forgotten about.

Principle 3:

The concept of ‘Evil’ is the only evil.

I do not know why I am numbering these alleged ‘principles’, for they have not come to me in order of significance, just that one has

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come after the other and that they sound good. I will not make any attempt to create any defence for their â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;principleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; character, for I know all too well how badly we treat our principles; they are almost always attacked and more often than not, destroyed. Do we merely destroy the possibility that we can live with guiding principles, do we destroy some necessary part of our belief? And what do we demonstrate to ourselves in our ability to live without the infinite; that we are brave and unashamed at our destructive powers, that we do not need to abide, that we have no use for belief except in the transience of things? Our world has become obsessed with transience and has enshrined it as a value in all things, has demonstrated only its ability in exercising belief in that which passes, (which is precisely where it does not matter, where it has no meaning, is always forgotten.) And it is we who desire to ultimately to be forgotten, lost because we were never found. This speed fixation is of no use to us and only breeds further and more efficient loneliness. When the world dashes past us at unparalleled speeds, (that we have accelerated it to,) we can make out nothing past the blur other than the shape of our own hands. At long last I am learning how to slow down, how to perceive that this motion is false, artificial and non-existent. I must continue in this valuable process until a thought moves into my vision, stops, can be seen clearly in the light and is held permanently in stasis.

Have I profited from learning how to speak so freely in my own company or is it that I have learned how to evade more genuinely pressing questions? This is the very nature of deception as I have discovered it; I was brought up to deceive, to hide, to feel guilty and to be ashamed and embarrassed. The degree of embarrassment

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that I have suffered I can remember being quite great, even from an early age. If I saw something happening on the television that was childish and idiotic, I would automatically feel as though it was my fault and that everyone would hold me to be responsible for it. I could not consider that some group of adults somewhere had created this programme and that its content was not designed to be embarrassing, but still I felt as though it was designed for me alone and that I was responsible for it. This is the first time that I have admitted to this strange feeling; I still feel it from time to time, but perhaps by flushing it out I can be rid of it at last? There is too much shame in my psyche and I need to free up a little room in my head in order to think about more taxing things than this. It is using up precious space and energy in keeping it down. There are great many other things that I want to get off my head at the same time, but I shall deal with them one at a time because I will. I have no need to feel embarrassed for the rest of the world because it is not mine and I do not need to be responsible for it. I just need to care for my reality and proceed toward the realisation of other minds. My condition becomes more transparent with each new conscious admission and thus it is important that I continue to present these basic forms to you in the context of memories so that you might also have a handle on them too. What I am actually disguising here is the purpose of these little stories of mine, the shape of them. I am a master illusionist and it must be taken into consideration that I, just as you, am able of covering up pretty much anything without even knowing about it.

There are various patterns in us that have grown to be engendered into our selves through our personal development, in our culture

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through our historical development, into our species in evergrowing circles of generalisation. We, in the first stage of our recognition that we ourselves are a product of something greater, begin to analyse what we are and to attempt to break or weaken these shackles forged out of familiarity and conceit. But we must not be content to act under the guise of a larger conceit for our scope and propensity for change far exceeds the possibilities limited by each larger circle of generalisation, each horizon. We exist in somewhat imaginary chimeras under so many assumptions and according to so many various estimations and approximations of life. Do we begin to experience some kind of fear as our enormous quest begins to multiply in size and scope, as the dimensions of life begin to unfold and leave our understanding and knowledge

alone in the vast desert of our unexplored

consciousness? We do not understand things such as perspective in this place but must instead discover new ways of orienting ourselves in this vast, unpopulated environment. Our old tricks have themselves proven to be unsophisticated and lazy but somehow difficult to shake loose. We wriggle in our straightjackets to no avail but must instead become able to think our way out of them once we develop the ability to perceive that they exist in imagination alone and we are the Gods of imagination. In the imagination we can do or achieve anything but the imagination must be harnessed appropriately in order to be able to affect this change. The world bends under the weight of the sizeable consciousness. A person must become able, must enable itself to decide in a landscape where each and every decision looks to be meaningless and without distinguishing properties, without any understanding of quality or purpose and without the promise of

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gain at its end. If we remove the pay-off from each decision we make we do in fact create the possibility that each decision has no limit to its value but does itself stretch off into the distant future beyond the pale of reward or payment as a stopper to its scope. Each and every one of our decisions will in fact become significant in ways that our adolescent ego could not understand without the context of benefit or self-gratification; it will instead become knowledgeable to the ability of benefit to be extended beyond the boundaries of the self, the persona. This self-tortured soul will feel the terrible desire to leave itself, to commit some form of suicide, (but not necessarily of the organism,) and this might be through the form of enlightenment or of depravity. The soul must come to enrich itself through the ascension of enlightenment, through genuine enlightenment as opposed to being emptied, tainted and starved by the debauch of conceit, for this ingratiates the self to the degree of material pleasure possible without the more beautiful desires of the soul to tend. Only the enlightened mind can have knowledge of the genuine image of a thing; the conceited and malnourished soul can only perceive itself as the be-all and end-all of the universe but always, always in the form of a lie. But how do we know?

The way in which we come to know that our knowledge is either conceited or ignorant as opposed to genuine and enlightened. Conceit means that the soul is constricted, has de-limited its source of intake from accredited places and is kept stunted like a Bonsai tree which, although has its own form of beauty can never achieve the degree of beauty reached by a tree that has come to be born, to grow and to die according to the winds of natural existence.

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Imagine that the soul is an organ, a metaphysical organ which, like the heart, must receive and pump blood to the organism. The soul must distribute its blood to each part of the spiritual realm in the same way and if it is not allowed to function naturally but is rather affected and starved, tends to run at the expense or detriment of the organism or spirit itself. The soul is not the end of the spiritual life but is in fact our portal into it, balanced as we are between one world and the next but normally with a bias toward the more directly knowable and superficial life of the material world. Both worlds are needed in equal harmony and the eye of God is balanced between the Persona and the Alma, between the body and the soul, between the material and spiritual worlds, between utterance and silence. Perceive the whole like when a child paints one half of a butterfly on a piece of paper and then prints the other half of it by folding the freshly painted side over to meet the blank side. Fold to enlighten. Halve to double. Close to open. These are the techniques of the one who has chosen its path beyond knowledge of the self, but it can only go to this place by asking the self to give its knowledge up for it must come to a new friendship, a new Platonic agreement between its two selves in order to go beyond. I learned of a new expression last night that was called ‘consensus reality’, but whose scope was somewhat delimiting; we must not even attempt to understand what ‘other people’ are like because this will fetter our movements. We must not be afraid to be the he-fool or she-fool before these ‘other people’ because they are not demanding anything from us, no form of behaviour is asked for and neither must we pander to the demands of ‘consensus reality’, imaginary society of imagined beings. We can access this imaginary space and, because we are the Gods of the imaginary,

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can begin to create the environment as we walk. I speak of the Truth, but the Truth cannot be uttered. Truth remains with the spiritual; its material effects may be perceived but only when the degrees of conceit are gradually overcome and even then can it not be uttered. We ask each other whether the reality is shared between all of us or whether it is consensually created or whether each one of us individually authors it by being-in-existence. I ask if this telephone on my desk is real both to me and to my friend. We agree upon a tacit understanding of the telephone which we agree is the only practical perception of the telephone, of the real world beyond the reality of mutable perceptions in individual consciousnesses. But are we content with a tacit agreement of reality; is this the sole extent of our desire for knowledge? I ask the telephone what it thinks and of course, the telephone always provides the correct answer; silence. The Real is always silent; it never answers. It is the same as God who never answers our prayers. It is just people who argue over the state of the Real; those people who claim to be â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;realistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; or practical people merely try to assert that they alone stand in a relation to the world where it appears prostrated before them, naked and unclothed. But this is merely a rhetorical device of speech and does not convince those of us who have listened closely to the truth, closely to the silence of the Real. The Truth-holder never makes utterance of the Truth because he or she alone knows the secret of the Truth, the secret unveiled in the silence. It is words that are dressing the Truth in lies, dressing the world in the error of human perception. Love always overcomes Fear when a person has come to be genuine in their knowledge of what can be known and Love is not an emotion; the emotions are the material surface phenomena associated with invisible spiritual movements of the

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soul in it’s silent world. Silence and invisibility are the same thing. Those who come to worship the emotions are like those who worship the sculpture of Christ in a church. We must not be moved or tainted in our understanding by those movements readily appreciated by our least sensitive spiritual organs. We must seek to grow more and more sensitive to the silent world until the world of talking is left far behind us. The corpse needs no convincing. One who loves with their emotions also loves with their fingers. It is this body that itself hinders our ability to love because bodies keep souls apart, not bring them together. The desire to come together is achieved in the material world in various ways, the highest of which is Platonic friendship and it must be acknowledged in the material realm. The desire to overcome the body is ignited at this point when the knowledge of the truth of Love is ignited also. We are moths that are always burned by the same flame, by the flame of our desire. But the highest desire is Love, the sun and the light of knowledge. What will we do; overcome our fear of being burned by moving toward the light of Love with a pure heart?

It is an anamorphic understanding to realise that to be true is to embody Truth. Why would one seek to embody what is false and disingenuous as we all would admit we do merely for the fear of what the truth entails? Why should we object so firmly to the perfect state of truth through our lazy desire for the imperfect nature? Some of us criticise the ideological and ‘unrealistic’ attitude that one can move into and embody the spirit of truth and purity, that is neither a human ability or a genuine desire, that it is hallucinated or that it is naïve. Naivete is displayed in the conceited and fearful hostility to the brave and virtuous soul who attempts the

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noble desire, who believes beyond what he or she is. Criticism of the brave is the preferred dish of the purveyors of fear for it is the brave that make the fearful contract with fear, makes them loath themselves and causes their insipid attack, their stab in the back. Why would we fear the brave if they offer us a stepping-stone beyond the fears of the self, if they offer to us the chance to believe in what is good, to access a domain beyond scepticism, gossip and defeatism? This is no ideology, because Truth is not ideology; Truth is Truth and cannot be imperfected or sullied by lower-down aspects of the knowledge hierarchy such as ideology. Ideology is Truth tainted by human imperfections in their movements around reality. It is a fallen truth, a conquered and damaged city. Ideology was not meant to be of this planet, was not a blueprint of a method of creating this world of ours. For Descartes, at truths dissipate at his introduction of the ‘I’; I am truth. I am not truth. I is truth above all, before all. Only ‘I’ can know the truth. When I introduced ‘I’, (a thought thinking itself,) ‘I’ put all this truth beyond the capabilities of the ‘I’ to grasp and henceforth ‘I’ can only know of Truth. I cannot know Truth. Appearances are now deceptive; because of ‘I’, the essential and self-reflecting illusion, selfknowledge. Before ‘I’, appearance was the constituent part of Truth because God made things appear and how it appeared to us was in Truth. This is the essence of the term ‘phenomena’. When God was recognised as being dead, a great thought of a great thinker, the appearance of things began to constitute their falsehood. We regressed to a time when, like Aristotle, the world automatically became veiled, was clothed in falsehood. This is the essence of representation, of how the copy of the world appears in us and that it is our lack of propensity to copy truth into our souls that causes

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this representation of the world to appear false. Where are we now in this case, with no God and no propensity for Truth? We came to the place where all human beings must come, to a place where we finally stand alone amongst one another, without anything but the present to guarantee our existence. The present, the single Real moment is our only constituent part and we must come to Love what it is, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s is-ness. Finally we have come to a place where what we do now effects what happens then, but where then is always now for there can be no other. We have found what is Real, lurking in stillness manifest reality as a moment between all moments, that iota of the thing called time which moves one moment to the next and this process is called motion or momentum. We can only perceive this momentum, the movement of Time, (no, not the movement of Time, but our movement through that permanent state called Time by us temporal beings.) There is no Time as we know it for beings that have achieved a solid and concrete state of Being. For those of us that are mutable we must helplessly continue to move in our stasis.

You could record any part of my life in whatever medium you choose and it would automatically become a work of art. When the recording medium picks up upon my movements leaving an impression of what they were upon the medium I, like a ghost am experienced in the medium itself. In coming into contact with the impression that I left upon the recording surface the art of my life which is likewise impressed is still capable of its rhizomatic route into the mind where it can pursue my interests upon my behalf. I am able to make change and to be present inside of moments that my body is not in connection with, whether it be in two places at

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once and connected only by the medium or after my death through the medium. It may be lost if the grooves of the medium become worn away or misrepresented, but actually, as the medium changes so too does my voice which itself is continually expressed from one body to the next in ever-mutating variations upon my theme. It is difficult for you to tell now which thoughts inside of your head belong to you or whether I have put them there in your head, for it is possible that I have the telekinetic power in my spirit form behind the medium to implant thoughts and ideas into the receptive grey areas of your fleshy brain. It is very similar to the way in which a television or newspaper repeats again and again the same thing until finally you grow dizzy, broken down and in the proper state for you to receive the message; ‘Buy me.’ I am here in a straight line without the dizzying motion of other media, so when my stuff gets into your brain you have no need to fear its presence, for it will flush out the you in you whether you are conscious of it or not. My cleaning and cleansing words will rub what is not you off of the surface, exposing the you in you, the voice itself becoming your own and this is your voice talking now back at you, you have misread it here in this book and these things I never said because you are putting them there now into the fabric of my mind so that I can speak back to you what your conscious mind is to terrified to say. This is by no means a book that you are currently reading but a blank tablet where you always inscribe your thoughts and your own voice. You make it look like a book that was written by ‘Daniel O’Reilly’, but this is merely some cover under which you can operate. What I told you was my art a few moments ago has now dawned upon you as your own art speaking back to you,

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telling you to follow. You have now become fully your self in every part of your known reality.

Is it that I [being you] have learned to disappear or that you [being I] have learned how to disappear? As I rescind you are promoted and where I am heard you are evacuated.

You and me are only words anyway.

When I forget what to write I become anxious and nervous that perhaps I have disappeared and I will not come back. I now think of God and the way in which He created something only to leave it and thus demonstrating the way in which we are supposed to follow. The more juvenile that I observe my thoughts and actions to be, the more chance I stand of maturing. I now have not much ability to think or to write, so what you read from now on was written at the greatest possible expenditure of effort for probably the least possible reward. I have thought much on this problem of late; we seek to put the least into life in order to extract the most. But ‘least’ and ‘most’ are not values that we ourselves have discovered, for it is merely the rumour of our society that says it is so. Why is it so terrible to invest a great time into something that brings little or no profit? Why do you think I am using the language of economy? This is what I do; I paint a wall with a toothpick and I have but two teeth on my comb. My value is extracted elsewhere and it is your job to find where I have hidden this vast treasure. I am going to deliver a lecture on the ego, but this lecture will be something else; a live performance of this book, these words. But it

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will not be me who is giving this lecture; I shall be the words uttered.

Lecture delivered to myself:

Hello. I used to have a name but it fell off and now I am only left with the words ‘Daniel O’Reilly’.

Newsletter Issued in June 2005

Dear Friends,

In our recent past we have sought to achieve many things and, without an audience to speak of, we have cared little for you in yours, tending rather toward a hermit’s purpose, toward a looking inward in order to look outward, (reversed looking process.) But enough is enough we suppose; we are, as it would seem, alone in our outward way. We hope at all times and, like all peoples, to meet other people who are like us with whom we can traverse life’s divers paths; people, (or ‘friends’ as we would like them to be called,) who would enhance, not hinder, the fleetness of mind that we have sought to cultivate.

The word ‘disappointment’ has in it’s way been responsible for the feeling of disappointment that we were acquainted with; meeting people, associating, (like two words are associated,) and then disassociating, illusions disillusioned. We have, in our funny way, spent a very great effort in meeting good people, but without sufficient criteria for determining either ‘good’ or ‘people’, (just

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like the association between two words, between two people.) What is a friend anyway if not one who cares more for what you are than they care for your personality or the way in which your image fits comfortably with their reflected self-image?

We did of course pursue the least likely course to resolve our imaginary troubles by retreating to advance, by isolating ourselves before we could know what friendship with others could be. Mere association, an insignificant attachment between elements in a signifying chain, was no excuse for hanging-out with people. If we did not do this, we would have continued to be isolated in the presence of other people, by the presence of other people and this can hardly seem less fair to those we deemed to call our friends or our selves.

Perhaps the cause of this ‘loneliness’, (as we will come to call it later in the future,) was that we had lost the ‘us’ in us, that some invaluable component had been left behind, (fig. 3) that our inability at the assumed mode of ‘friendship’ promulgated by our foremothers and foremothers was caused by this mislaying of the ‘us’ in us, that we were to blame for the whole damn thing.

It was at this point, (and it may as well have been a Wednesday,) when we noticed a new phenomena arising from the mists of nowhere and we recognised that it was called ‘worry’ because we had been told what it was.

It was a year of abstinence for us after having dispensed with a number of peripheral habits and useless behaviours from our life,

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but what need to fill these empty spaces had we inadvertently created? We found that the untrained, (untrained in that we had untrained it from common habits,) human mind was almost incapable of dealing with the agoraphobia of wide open spaces, did not like to be in loneliness and again, the same imaginary problem had arisen; that by removing the distractions from life until it ceased to be distract from itself a deep and profound ‘loneliness’ settles over the being like the blanket of night descends over the earth and over our consciousness. We had removed these distractions in order to be better prepared to work in the way in which our ambitions had dictated, and work we did. Worked night and day, worked at work and worked at home. Went on holiday to work. We slept so that we might be able to work better although some nights we did not sleep so that we might work better. (fig. 2) But there were no friends to savour the fruits of this intense and beloved labour. Burned-out is how we would feel, self-conscious is how we would feel until we had learned to befriend the silence, until we had come to be alone in our own company.

So often it is that by doing the opposite action one actually achieves one’s original desires. The only problem with utilising this method is then knowing what one’s own desires are if it comes to pass that the inverted action can bring about satisfaction. We became ‘lonely’ in order to discover friendship; in looking outward we could only discover ourselves looking back at us because we knew, (through introspection,) that, because the ego is obsessed with what it is and the way in which it looks before others, it constructs a mirror all about itself so that it might spend all day looking at itself. Finding no-one but ourselves out there in the

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world we decided that it was the way in which we were looking, the direction or vantage-point, that was in fact in error. There are no friends in the outside world. We came to know in our heart that only when one is completely lonely does one discover others who are traversing along the same path and that these are true friends because they are found without being looked for; they cost nothing and demand nothing. We do not follow one another or any other one in this place, on this unusual pilgrimage, because we have found the path alone and we shall continue it alone in the company of others who are alone.

We decided to learn whilst we were here about our ambitions, having come to terms with the fact that the world outside our bodies, (in which we used to aim our ambitions,) could only reflect and not communicate with us. The ambitions that we have here in the world are not borne from out of our desire for it, (because ‘it’ is not really out there,) so we must look elsewhere to learn about our desires and ambitions, the real psychic objects that give rise to the delusion of desired objects in the ‘apparent’ world. (Desires and worries; same thing really.)

We also came to think that the ‘apparent’ world, (the world as it ‘appears’, as phenomena,) was not by necessity deceitful or veiled in itself, but had come to look that way because we, in our natural aspect as those who disclose, had come to conceal the entire edifice of the world just in being present to it. We remembered from out our ancient memory-banks that at one point long ago but probably not after the middle-ages, that the way in which the world ‘appeared’ was necessarily truthful because it was God, (the perfect

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being,) who had made it appear to us, it was It’s phenomenon in which It had become manifest to us and, in God being perfect, and truth being a quality of perfection, (our Greek forefathers and foremothers having instructed us so,) It could not be manifest in falsehood in the way in which the world appeared. If the world appeared ‘false’, it was because we, as false beings, had imposed our quality of falsehood upon it, that we had received and interpreted the sense-datum incorrectly, that we were not yet seasoned well enough to perceive truth outside of our knowledge of self.

We also noticed that in conversing with ‘other people’, that we were asking these beings our questions in our human language, (a language in which all that could ever be communicated was a tacit and unreliable account of shared reality,) and we were asking ‘them’ what the meaning of ‘this’ [shared reality] life was. Of course, all answers provided sounded unsatisfactory to our biased ears. Perhaps we, caught up in the fishing-nets of sorrow, had perceived, (or hallucinated,) that everyone else was perfectly and ignorantly happy? (fig. 1) We then remembered that it is common for all of our peoples, the sons and daughters of our land, to assume that other people are better-off than they, that they are the only persons affected in this way by sorrow and anxiety, which of course creates a sense of loneliness and hence, of Individuality. Utilising once again our ability to know the past, to possess it’s knowledge, without it’s experience being rubbed-off on us, we recalled how, in the childhood of our race, there was no need of the word ‘individual’ because there was the word ‘indivisible’ in it’s stead. The contradictory metamorphosing of the one concept into

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its polar opposite had occurred at the time of our Modern forefathers and foremothers who had confused the indivisible ‘at one with’ with the individual ‘apart from’, prefixing, (in their strange and now significant way,) every single utterance with the letter ‘I’.

Then we had remembered from out our forgetting that the most significant characteristic of those Moderns had been their capacity to forget, (or rather, in their lust for speed and for the ‘new-s’, had come to out-run their memory.) All that happened was that we had come to forget about the ‘us’ in us, had forgotten that, to be ‘lonely’, was merely the nihilist’s way of saying ‘at one with’, although without a prevalent deity with which to be at one with. There is of course no substantial or ‘Real’ difference between ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’, (just as in forgetting and remembering,) because neither was ever in the experience of a mortal except for those treasured indivisible who we in our ignorance had chosen to mimic, who we called ‘prophets’, whose words we slandered in our mimicry just like a monkey’s tea-party, our playground religious activities. They paradoxically showed us the way, and that way was not in following them.

So, today being Monday, we chose to walk into town where we did sit together upon the grass in a park after having bought some milk and apples, possibly a sandwich too. We had slowed down to a standstill a world obsessed with acceleration, obsessed with eradicating its own memory, its baggage, simply by perceiving that the world was going by us but, of course, (and here’s the catch,) nothing was moving because there is no Time. Any commuter will

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be pleased to affirm on our behalf and corroborate this temporal anomaly.

Yours Carefully,

Mr and Mrs Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Reilly

fig. 1

[This man, (either the dark-skinned or the light-skinned brother,) looks as though he is going somewhere, does he not? Is it not good

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to perceive such clear purpose in others when we cannot do so ourselves?]

fig. 2

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fig. 3

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Our Work:

In the first instance it is our anxiety and frustration that drives us into our work, but we cannot continue to work under these conditions because they are neither fit for our purpose or healthy for our person. What we must persist in finding is that motive that outweighs all of the others, all of the lower motives. We are not yet to fit a name to this motive but we shall proceed in the darkness without language, proceed on this ever-expanding journey, the goal only ever a notion glimpsed here and there like a paranormal phenomenon, an impossibility manifest in the everyday. This thing glimpsed is the highest desire; there but not there, it evades our grasp each and every attempt we make to get it. We end up in following this willow-the-wisp off our course and into the dangers of the mangroves, following a beauty of ethereal nature, moving always quicker than we. We have experienced this pursuit after the higher desire in another, more conceited and earthy format; the pursuit after objects of desire, the blind chase for what we are not. We consider that ‘It’ is out there, the thing that completes us and that we must possess instantly in order to be completed. We have been manipulated by powerful ignoramuses into the belief that this ‘thing’ can be purchased with our earth-currencies, in our labourexchange tokens. But we fail despite pursuing with great avarice the objects needed to complete ourselves. These are the ‘lower’ desires because we shall find that they never succeed in our complete satisfaction, the myth that satisfaction is Heaven, that pleasure and happiness are the highest of all human pursuits. We have lost sight of our completeness because of these ignoramuses and then they have led us to believe that they alone possess the

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answer to the constant question of desire. They have caused this question because it is in their advantage, (or so they believe,) to do so. We have been educated to believe that desire is a broken thing, a fallen and imperfect thing and that it is this material, human world that can cure this fracture. Desire is the spirit that elevates us beyond the muddy confines of this worry-clad dimension, the guide to enlightenment that twists its way across unknown territories to arrive at its majestical goal. Of course we feel fear and anxiety along this path, for it is dark except for that winking light far off in the depths of the swamp that we have to learn how to trust despite what all of our preconditioned judgements may tell us. When ever we perceive this object of desire in our routine lives, when we are going around in circles like a dog that chases its tail, when we are not in motion upwards in the pursuit of enlightenment, when we are caught in the conceited motion of habitual thinking and behaviour, we must instead look for the hand that leads, not the tail to be chased; we are being brought through, through the object of desire into enlightenment and we must not be stupid enough to believe that the mere economical transaction of purchase will enable us to behold the enlightened understanding of the self. We miss the point, we chase after the thing and then fall short at the last hurdle. It was the hand that leads that asked you to follow it through the object material and into the ethereal dimension. The object of desire is a negative thing, it is an opening through which we must pass, not an object to be possessed. We, after this first encounter, when we first saw through the object that we were initially pursuing, must come thereafter to develop a system of objects which open various portals into the enlightened self. To others we will appear no different to they, moving, gravitating toward various

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objects in the world, often repeatedly, in order to ‘achieve’ what they call in their earth-tongues ‘satisfaction’. A creature such as a human who is fixated upon physical happiness, usually derived from the physical ecstatic state, the orgasm, the quelling of the fire of lust, will of course utilise words such as desire, satisfaction, happiness, ecstasy. Those who pursue what is Real past the cloud of the imaginary have a different knowledge of desire and of ambition. To ‘quell one’s lust’ is no kind of real ambition; something must be attained in this process and not merely the escalation of a mountain only to come down the other side again. We do not want to get ‘high’, because this upward motion by default creates its own downward motion if only because we, like Icarus, have not conquered gravity or the heat of the sun. The psychoanalyst’s reply to this incautious tale of desire and enlightenment is that it was thought up by someone with an inability to achieve sexual orgasm, but this of course is the standard response from a mind no, an ethos rooted in the material dimension of the economics of desire and satisfaction. I am only concerned with the pursuit of a value that exceeds happiness as the career of life. What is a value supposed to do; enhance life, culminate life or provide meaning to life? We must not be shy of these very difficult questions if we want to rise up above our devalued knowledge and practise of value. We will only learn what we are once we have learned how to value genuinely and without refutation, once we have experienced what it is like to value something without irony, without fetters, without self-indulgence and without gain, without prerequisites. We will only experience the world and the things and beings within it if we pursue this willow-the-wisp.

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We are constantly trying to find new ways of saying the same old thing, but this occupation is not without its purpose. We know that the same thing lurking in desire, the Real, is also lurking within language. We know that, despite the impossibility of describing adequately between person to person the substance of life and the world, we are able to tap into a vein of enriched meaning, (like some magic substance,) and utilise words with such art as to transcribe mental objects into linguistic objects with an uncanny accuracy. We have cultivated this art through long practise, having spent years listening to our own voice in order to hear what is being said and what is being meant. After having dispensed with the inaccurate and pointless usage of language that was taught to us by people who in themselves did not understand it, we have begun to fix upon mental objects and their associations until a marriage or permanent, creative usage flows from it, not merely another mirage. We will only be able to experience the truth of permanence once we have learned how to fix things in ourselves. Mutability and transience is merely our own state, our state of desire, but one that can be controlled and changed according to the power of the will toward knowledge and away from ignorance. ‘What am I doing here?’ and other such statements convey the futility of our understanding when it comes to values and purposes. The ‘here’ is our fixed location in time and this is a given. The ‘what am I doing’ is the difficult part, the part that requires our valuing and our sense of self-purpose. Only when the two parts of the phrase combined into the ‘What am I doing here?’ do we realise the flux between permanent and transient, knowledge and conceit in the face of being trapped in language and its possible meaninglessness. ‘Possible’; this is the snag; we must desire meaning and thus to

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pass through the objects of our desire into the enlightened desire for value and ultimately, knowledge.

It is our purpose here to rediscover the lost possibility that Love = Knowledge, that the happy combination of these two pursuits, these desires and these states, embody a great good and present us at last with the highest manifestation of the human being in its earthly home. Love is not attached to objects in the world but is instead a portal through which we can pass into the dimension where Love is an attainable and reified spirit that is not possessed of matter. When we come to love objects, such as the piece of meat that is possessed by the spirit of my wife, we devalue the real thing that we purport to cherish by investing our value into the gallery and not the paintings it houses. But even this perception will prove to be in error, because we know in our more excellent and noble, upright selves that we must come to value all things if we are to come to a true state of value. It is in our ability to value everything, because every thing is a mental object that is represented in the world by us. We have the ability to choose to value it or not, and this will determine the value that we have for ourselves, we who have posited all of these things into the world.

I tend to only speak about these things with the occasional person, perhaps one who I feel I have something in common with, but this is disadvantageous for all involved, (and those not involved.) Do you not think that once all of the boundaries of the self have been overcome, once the realisation of self has been attained, that one would be able to spread their wisdom out to all whom they encounter? It is not good enough to speak only with those whom

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we presume we are similar to, to those whom we encounter unfinished pieces of ourselves, the broken mirror, in. This is an unjust position to be in; the only justice that a human mortal can possibly mete out with the slightest shred of enlightenment is to allowing things to be things, to let them be. All other judgements of value against value is naturally flawed, because no value was supposed to be devalued at the start, for it is we who have infected them with the fallen status of ourselves. We must learn how to give back what we are always taking, how to co-operate with our realities, not be their tyrant masters. I love the people who are around me, those people who can feel the desire for knowledge, the people who are not afraid to ask questions that will potentially make them sound like idiots; ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Why is it bad to kill?’ ‘Does time happen?’ The reason that most people do not say such things with a serious expression is that a) They side with the general consensus in order to prevent their all-knowing image from being humiliated in public, b) They do not lend themselves to ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ positions terribly well and we cannot be proven to be ‘right’ in the company of others if we begin to talk about them. Because our peoples live beneath this veil of ignorance that we shall call either ‘approximation’, ‘assumption’ or in its most retarded and earthy state, ‘conceit’, they do not choose to break out of the surface under which they are trapped so that they do not meet with the scorn of those people whom they admire and model themselves upon. One of the greatest hindrances in the human mind toward the realisation of the ambition of enlightenment is respect for others. We must not look up to anyone. The Christians had it half-right, (like they had so many things halfright,) in that they said we should not look down upon anybody. If

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we look up to people we automatically look down upon ourselves and then desire to elevate our selves to the position of ‘other’, which is of course a disingenuous ambition. Who could we possibly desire to be more than ourselves? By respecting people in the upward direction we hope to elevate ourselves to their status. But we can never be sure of what their status actually is because our understanding of them is based entirely upon presumption, assumption and analogy. To put it short, we make it all up, they embody our fantasy of them. This is rough justice to the being whom we purport to admire and ourselves, who is the one we truly sought to admire if only through analogy. Respect is another form of conceit. In a way I guess that our society is kind of built upon respect, and this statement of mine undoubtedly will receive some flak if anybody ever bothers to read this stuff. It does not bother me to say this thing though, because I believe that the only kind of person who would argue that respect is a genuine position, (as an ‘act’ and as an ‘aspiration’,) and a most desirable one at that, is the sort of person, (if we can allot people into sorts and types which we cannot,) who has founded their knowledge upon the presumed knowledge of others and has done so to their material and intellectual advantage. This is fine because I do not criticise this behaviour in others, but in myself I find it loathsome, this automatic reflex to extend respect to every person one encounters. I am at the disadvantage because this must mean that I treat every person with equal disrespect, does it not? No, it does not, because I do not fall foul of my own method here. I try to see without any baggage, without respect or disrespect, without value-judgement wherever possible, (but when a judgement does take place I watch it and scrutinise it like a bug under a magnifying glass, squirming

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for its life.) If I do not look up or down to anybody I discover ‘equality’, and from this position might I remove my own judging malefaction and actually meet people.

My work of late then has been about ‘meeting people’, (a strange notion indeed when does not respect anybody at all.) We meet people for other reasons than self-gratification or for an edifying connection. We are not mere signifiers in a network, we are people encountering one another for the first time every time, not presuming what one another’s qualities are, not perceiving our selves in every person that we meet. It is impossible, I will admit, (at this stage,) to perceive without the filters of the self from tainting every object in our world in our own colours, but we can at least begin to comprehend the extent of our own conceited natures and try to move toward what is genuine. I condemn my own conceit before anybody else does.

But all of these attacks upon myself must indeed form some kind of plan, must they not? What am I trying to do and is it possible that it can be said clearly and lucidly? Has my art yet reached the degree of skill required to successfully manipulate a string of signifiers so that they say more than they signify? I must reiterate an old them when I say that this book is itself something to go beyond, a ruse that must be overcome, a stranger that must come to be known. I am not really writing anything here and neither am I a writer. I am just some guy.

And I must step out into this world as though I have been reborn each morning, fresh-faced and without the conceit and anxiety that

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builds upon one’s shoulders when one is concerned only with ‘oneself’. In Dante’s hell, certain sinners were doomed to go around and around in circles in a perpetual nightmare, sloshing around in mud. In purgatory there was instead of a circular motion, a spiral motion where one becomes purged of those assumptions of the personality that produce mud and useless motion. Both look the same when viewed from the single perspective point, but when another point is added, another dimension, one sees the crucial difference of depth. But even this motion is the residue of a vehicle and not the purpose of the pilot whom it bears up. If there is a purpose of flight it is either of flight itself as an end or as a method of getting somewhere, as a form of transportation. Before flight had been achieved in human culture, the object of human flight was an end in itself to be attained, not just a form of transportation. This is called idealism, but it can also be a noble vision as well as a flawed one. Science and the pursuit of scientists is continually in a situation where a goal is posited and then overcome, as though the idea of the ‘end’ is only a method of transportation to another and yet another place further away until some speed is generated. This is why science can never answer its own question or ever assert what its final goal is. Science is not concerned with final goals, it is only concerned with means to ends. Our hopes for science must bear this in mind. So what of philosophy, of the love of knowledge; how is this concerned with ends and not with means? Is it like the pilot who flies because of flying, not because of transportation? Is it because Love is not a means and Knowledge is not an end or that Love is the end and that knowledge is the means? Is it that Love and Knowledge are identical objects? This is only a question for me alone and in my solitude, in my lonely quest for friends.

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To love a friend; this is my object here. I must love a friend because it is good to love friends, (Love as the end, good as the medium,) not because of any ‘reason’. To love a friend is an end in itself; one who seeks after something through a friend is utilising the friend as the medium and has thus got it back to front. Love is not concerned with means for it is an end in itself, it is the realisation of cosmic unity and oneness. Atonement or At-onement?

Thus does ‘our work’ take on a new dimension, one that pursues friends as a comportment to the love of knowledge, or to put it plainly, ‘Friendship as Philosophy’. We want to have friends, not as possessions or attachments or as mediums, but because we desire them in themselves, because friendship is a good in itself. Friendship is one of the higher desires first glimpsed by Plato all those years ago. Has anybody advanced this profound idea in the mean time? Is the next great step to be taken in the field of human relations the reversal of the ‘love thy neighbour’ into the ‘hate thy friend’? What I have done in this field, through my field work and my case-studies is to be alone to be present to one’s friends, to exorcise one’s demons or rather, to bring to light those elements of the self that one’s embarrassed ego has hidden from light, before one can come to terms with the possibility and the reality of friendship. Unless we take this trial by fire in order to actually love our friends and know them, we are destined to have presumed and approximate friends who only share the common ground of ignorance to one another, who remain friends because they do not know what friendship is. I have cast my net last night and I hope to

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catch a few fish in it. By using the ‘internet’, as a fishing device I have spun my lure across the largest possible area of water in order to attract with my colours a fish suitable for friendship. I will cast this net as often as possible and devise newer and better lures with which to refine my method until each and every fish encountered is drawn into the net and set free by it. I have no ‘use’ for friends, for they are just good in themselves, and I must be good in myself in order to give them some fair justice, the extent of human justice.

In the same way is fame based upon a shared ignorance, upon a presumption of worthwhileness or greatness. At one point in the history of our civilisation there was a thing called fame that was considered an accolade of the gods given to those who were worthy. Now our fame is generated by recognition, upon gossiping tongues who create a storm in a tea cup, who are the fantasists of our time. We want fame, all of us, but we do not know what it is. We want something we do not understand, so when we get it do we think that we will understand it better? It is only gossip that has told us to pursue it anyway, or some kind of deficiency in the ego, some inferiority complex. Are these ‘good’ enough ‘reasons’ for pursuing something that we do not understand, or should we look more closely at our ambition and discover that the object we seek resides in that place, that the key to our desires is in Love and not in the ‘want’ of love. Wanting is not a good and it is not an end. Want do we why? Our ambitions should not be based upon deficiency, but rather should be based upon an aspiration of goodness, toward the fullness of life, not a compensation for it.

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I decided that I would sit and read something yesterday whilst I took my lunch break from work in Embankment Park, sitting in a deck-chair in the broad sunlight. I was reading the ‘Twilight of the Idols’ and, as with any conscientious thinker, my naivete suddenly struck me with the force of hammer. It is only late into the project that I suddenly notice the importance of philology, the history of thought and its development in our species, to notice subtle but important changes that are happening minutely but always, carrying us away from something and toward something, the always disputable and unknowable ‘something’. Why do I treat Nietzsche alone as my peer, the one thinker who I still use as a yardstick, who still drives me to feel intellectually inadequate? There is some crucial relationship that I have forged with him in this book and that he has forged with me in his book. It is a case of saying and listening. But we are not in competition; feelings of inadequacy toward any person is always misplaced.

Statement:

I am [a] being filled with knowledge over millennia of development where I myself was not present but my forefathers and foremothers were, all of whom have retained something to pass eventually to me and me to mine, something always changing, some knowledge or wisdom or mistake; the quality of it does not now matter to anyone. Everything that you read here has been a condition of that and, as we move backward in time, as we all once again

become

one,

individuals

becoming

indivisible,

our

knowledge melds together once more. I am allowing all of this history contained in my knowledge and in the womb of my

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knowledge to come to the surface. For what reason? Why mine deep into the veins of my mind to discover what and why? What secret or hidden object am I liable to find in there? I am looking for that place when why was not.

All of my ideas are made disreputable, ignorant or worse, uninteresting. Is this the object of thought; to be interesting? I am tired of a life where there is nothing solid, where there are no objects worth prizing, where valueâ&#x20AC;Ś

I must make a change in this thinking; the value â&#x20AC;&#x201C; what value? Perhaps there never was a thing of value but some cunning prankster dreamt it up in order to tie minds in knots for all eternity? I am one such fool, a dog that chases its tail. Permanent states of Being as opposed to temporal states of becoming is the only logical statement to be made here and we must give our thanks to Parmenides. But what are we, poor and hapless temporal becomings to do with such an understanding as this? Is it a joke to make us feel inadequate, as though some other temporal becoming had moved from its temporal state into its permanent state by means of a mere thought, leaving behind it a clue or an answer as to how to do so? I think that what is really at stake here is the status of my psyche, as though something is damaged inside of it which asks the constant question of why. Certain things have been ingrained in my knowledge since long before my own conception that now I wrestle with, things that I cannot understand because they were ingrained in my knowledge long before my conception. It is my idea that I was born with all of the necessary tools for life, that I was born with all of my problems but also all of my solutions. I

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know myself to be juvenile but I am seeking to mature; I try various methods but there is no one solution to this problem. I am a disease. I am spreading to those around me. I bring distemper in my wake, I am fucked-up. I am moody like a child, insular and I seek to withdraw when others seek to progress. I choose to bring down all I see around me in ruins. Your good is not my good. I offer up the challenge to anybody else to convince me that there is good out there that is worthy of my aspiration before I destroy all of culture. Is it me alone who cannot see movement? Why would I seek conviction over uncertainty? If all of life is uncertain then surely it can be whatever you want it to be? I am full of questions although I have no answers. Is there some magic substance that can convert these questions, (wants,) into answers, (satisfactions)? My thinking is therefore set to accord to this formula of broken desire, question and answer. Who ever said that this was the best way to approach life; to question and then answer? Who really has need for a question or an answer when one possesses knowledge of what one is? If you do not seek to ‘go’ anywhere, (and I think that Parmenides might stick by me on this one,) then you also have no use for broken knowledge, for ‘question-answer’ thinking. Who ever questioned the validity or usefulness, (the techne,) of the Question as mode of intellectual transportation? If we are what we are, if we are permanent Beings, then we do not really want to move anywhere. And could we say of Nietzsche that his constant search for the perfect climate, from Nice to the Ober-Engadine, only illustrated his frustration at not being able to attain what he saw was possible in the state of human Being?

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I only became able to think like this because I drank some coffee; should I be led to believe that this knowledge was in the coffee, or did it bring something out of me, out of the lower depths of my knowledge the sort of answer that Nietzsche himself would love to have said? I wonder if Nietzsche would have adored drum and bass like I do; I have found my Engadine…

‘The womb of my thoughts’; imagine if you will the way that the Medievals had thought of the womb, how there were people inside of people in there, infinite generations, the micro-cosmos. Then imagine what my thoughts are, alloyed as they are out of millennia of knowledge from such divers and varied sources, anonymous on the whole, assimilated into my state of becoming and also as my key to Being. When I have a thought, if only I could see into it with x-ray eyes, deep into the philological roots of that neural happening and why it should affect my whole state with shudders like one who steps on my grave. Is it because my thoughts are being dragged toward death, that my thoughts are drawn toward the creation of life, toward sex, that causes the giddy feelings associated with motion? If only my thoughts could remain still for one moment; perhaps I should spin like a Dervish so that my thoughts do not?

Needy is what my knowledge is, ever hungry for the nipple of wisdom, always seeking to be nourished, completed, desire upon desire to carry me into my permanent state but never ever achieving it. I asked in my first book whether there could be the ultimate and final sexual partner out there in the world who brought on the perfect orgasm to satisfy all desires until there was no use for

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pleasure any longer. I now wish to be done with pleasure as it is needless, sorry, needy, always. I wish to dispense with pleasure, always seeking satisfaction, always conjuring the illusion that one is incomplete, that one is not yet a one, that there is always something more to be had. Want is the spear-tip of the broken arrow of our desire. It points but from where does it’s thrust come from? Who fired it? An arrow that points has no purpose; an arrow is to be fired, to hit, not lie about and uselessly point, an impassive and wordless guide. And I think about my guide more and more, my small Fuhrer. The ego is what culture saw in Hitler; we can follow him because he is enigmatical, full of persuasion, unshakeable, blind and idiotic, but all the more dangerous for that. He will lead us to where we want to be. But the ego is insane and it must not come to dominate and guide the entire organism…yet. The ego must be straightened out, its broken arrow mended, its search must come to an end and then, only then, my it become once again the crown of the royal organism, the permanent Being.

Novice: “Why do you ask questions?”

Master: “In order to find answers, boy.”

Novice: “And why do you find answers?”

Master: “Because I ask questions.”

I, as I have just said, am tired from being like a child; hiding, cowardly, uncertain and anxious. I need to mature. Wisdom is mature Knowledge; when knowledge knows what it is and in what

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way it is, it becomes wisdom. The master has his ways, but these ways are not his. His matured knowledge, his wisdom, is so entrenched as to make difficult any change. But why change? None of us are happy because happiness is what is called in the earth tongues â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;an impossibilityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, or, in the desert of life, a mirage, in fact, not even necessary, a lie. Where did this lie come from? If Jesus existed, if He was the son of God, did He come to trick us because God enjoys a laugh? What does a prophet do if not confuse? Follow but do not follow? What sick joke is this?

It is the case, the final case, that my knowledge needs to be repaired. But I want to know what it was that damaged it. Is it the same reason why the birds fly away from people? Did some natural order, established a long time ago in our fairy-tale existence, construct human knowledge in a broken format, deluded that, because time passes, humans are going somewhere, going toward a place of completion, of unity? Did the Christians confuse the passing of time as a period of redemption before attaining the rightful seat of Heaven, (permanent Being,) or of perpetual torment, (immortality?) Our model of hell should be the zombie or the vampire; alive forever and resentful because of it, always searching, feeding, replenishing, always remembering, always sad because being alive is punishment enough? Is that why we always conceive of ghosts as those beings that haunt us, because there is nothing worse than being on the earth forever? Where does this pessimistic knowledge come from in us, (or rather, in me in particular,) and why is it that life should be an inconceivable and unending chore as opposed to a labour of love? Work; is work the key?

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I think that I am happy. But does that mean that I am happy? Thinking and Being, seeming to Be and Being, are at odds in my formulation, but a thinking Being ought not to be at odds with itself as a Being that thinks; it neednâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be so complex, Being but unable to Be because of thought. Thought is not an enemy of Being. Being cannot be touched or assaulted by anything because it is utterly intransigent, utterly immobile and completely solid beyond any doubt. Doubting does not effect Being as Descartes both proves and disproves; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I exist as a thinking thingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, and even doubt cannot hinder this enlightened piece of knowledge. Enlightenment consists in the knowledge of that which is unshakeable; this is the point where knowledge becomes wisdom proper; not because something becomes entrenched in thought, but because thought and Being become reified, the one contemplating the other, not at odds with it. Thought can contemplate the stasis of Being without causing disease to itself. One circles, one is circled, motion and stasis all in one, the paradox of what I is.

I have arrived at a piece of wisdom that I did not read anywhere or hear from anyone, though it lived in me for aeons. Human Being has always been. Although we think that we have all been different, our Being has always been for there has always been human Being since there was human Being.

Insurance companies have a guaranteed income because humans always need insurance, they need peace of mind, they will always pay what they can to know that in the end it is all going to be alright. The Christians invented insurance; pay the dues and receive

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the dividend. I tried to cancel my insurance policy last week and the man on the phone tried to scare me into changing my mind, because it is fear of god that makes us worship Him(?) But there is no god if we cease to worship. Is a King a King if He has no subjects or if his subjects do not recognise him? Is this where madness seeps in? If no one is afraid then there are no insurance companies. ‘But who will compensate your losses?’ he said. ‘Noone can compensate for death; there is no insurance against it so why bother to pay the instalments?’ Needless to say, the insurance man gave up.

When I have expired I will cease to hold up the human race in its desire to move onward. But how can a race desire? Is this a democratic consensus to move onward, to ignore any whiff of truth and progress regardless? You will only forget about me when I have forgotten about myself. Come on Death; I am waiting!

I never said that life was useless, but that no one has yet discovered a use for it that lends value to action. Not a convincing one anyway. But the need to be convinced in itself is a symptom of disease; who needs convincing that life is happening or that death is coming? Why do we hunt for guarantees; is our knowledge so steeped in unknowing, so uncertain, so pathetic and dismal that it doubts what it is to the point of absolute nausea? Doubt; doubt is the thing that searches for its missing part, the polo that seeks the part to fill the hole. Reason is the method of finding that which ceases doubting. But is this the ‘question-answer’ problem all over again? If there is no object there is no desire, if there is no race there is no winner, if

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there is no question there is no answer. Life is the question, Death is its answer; are you so eager to answer your question now?

Two become one, the dialectical method, the backward process of human division. Dialectics is backward.

What should one do when one feels that life’s circumstances have lost their meaning, that one has been compromised in one’s Being, that external forces have taken control like in the super-migratory patterns of crabs? How shall one eradicate the myth that the ‘grass is always greener…’, that one is not complete in oneself. That one is not even a one, but a half? Is there anyone without desire? Am I still too Buddhist or can one be complete with complete desire? Am I struggling with Nietzsche’s Will to power over and above desire, that actually there is something to be attained with desire? I am not what I am supposed to be, I am less, but I can see what I am supposed to be, I am neurotic. Insanity; is this the myth of the sane? I ask myself whether neurotics are treatable because they are unable to identify with their own madness and hence conjure the delusion over themselves that they are in fact the sane ones. What kind of sanity is this, and is sanity merely the fabrication of mass-hysteria or mass-paranoia? We have no need to know that everyone else is like us for we should already know it without the need. Need is the broken arrow and following it is an awful degradation of what one is. Follow instead the willow-the-wisp, the happy spirit that is more in you than you are yourself, into the quagmires of unknowing, into the desert of the promised land. There is now no need for the shared hallucination of reality which is based upon everyone’s hallucination of other people’s thoughts. When you are in the desert

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you can fabricate your own city, your own reality. One of the greatest hindrances upon the mind is that of the idea of other people’s thoughts. This is the first sign of insanity, that one can read another person’s thoughts and of course, we are all at it. We walk down the street and imagine what other people are thinking about us, as if, for some bizarre reason, we were at the centre of everyone else’s universe. And because we all think like this, we are all doomed to a masturbatory and paranoid existence of hallucinating each other’s thoughts for the benefit of our own selfimage. This is the most wretched form of life. This kind of mind contracts like a puckered anus when something new approaches, it shrivels up, squeezes out all of the loose air inside so that it may not be penetrated by its own understanding. But it is under no threat; the only threat is it’s wretched integrity. It can be blown away by such understanding of what it knows. So this is Conceit; retreat from genuine self-knowledge. Contract to Retreat = Conceit.

‘Promised land.’ This phrase slipped into my discourse without me even knowing about it; it must have been lurking in my psyche like a canker all these years, the fake knowledge that believes that it is not yet all that it can be. Why do we want to go to a ‘promised land’, a heaven or a nirwana? We do not understand our happiness or for sure we would understand that there is no happiness without unhappiness. Heaven is only for ignoramuses, conceited persons, idiots, morons. As if God would posit as His highest value ‘Happiness?’ What a ridiculous idea that the human is Being in order to ‘be-happy’! It is not Being in order ‘to be’ anything other than Being itself. But its conceit hides this knowledge from it at all times and in all ways. It is only when one welcomes annihilation

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that one realises that Being requires nothing. There is no contract to fulfil and no debt to be repaid. I pretend like I know what all of these words mean, but that is merely the product of my wretched existence trying to clean itself.

The other night I was kept awake by the African family next door who all come home from work very late at night and then discussed with one another their day, albeit this discourse is conducted extremely loudly as I believe it is in their cultural programming to do so, as it is in mine to want some peace and quiet, (even if it requires my agitation to achieve it.) I went next door to ask them three times if they could be quiet as I had to go to work the next morning, but of course they would not, resulting in my not sleeping at all and being very grouchy at work the next day. But this family next door were in no fault because, when the case is put by the prosecution and the defence, the verdict is equal; no one is wrong because there is no such thing as wrong. I thought, as I lay there in my agitation, that I had asked them politely and, if they had any respect of other people’s wishes, they would indeed speak more quietly to one another. But then I thought that, as they had made no effort to respect my wishes, that they did not in fact care about my wishes. They then put themselves beyond my caring. So it was not a question of who was right and who was wrong, but a case of who cares and who does not. I do not now care about respecting them as they do not care about respecting me and we are both better off for it. Respecting other people is the next great hindrance to enlightenment, whether it be respect of another person’s station or of another person’s plight; it all adds up to the same hallucination that one ‘empathises’ with another person, that one imagines that

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one knows how another person feels, and respectively looks up to them or looks down on them. This is a fake, disingenuous knowledge because one can never know the thoughts of another, no matter how much compassion one thinks that one has, (in one’s desired self-image.) ‘Respect’ is the way that a conceited mind values its world; by devaluing it, by throwing away the thing of value, by disregarding real self-knowledge. It pretends that it knows what is gong on, that it knows how other people think and feel, but its evidence is mere speculation. Evidence is the want of an incomplete, desirous mind in want of guarantees. Knowledge is not a guarantee; it is knowledge. Why not just admit that we do not understand our world; it would be the first piece of knowledge that understands the boundaries of knowledge.

A moment ago I was dancing naked around the living room with music blaring at full volume, arms and legs flaying around in all directions and without co-ordination. Whilst I was doing this I wondered whether the blind in my living room was transparent and whether the people out on the street could see me doing this. I then panicked, gripped by paranoia. And then I thought that, if they could see me dancing around and having a great time in front of them without caring then, in the first instance, they would wish that they themselves could do so without any loss of integrity and, in the second instance, if I really did not care, it would not matter to anyone anyway. The mind is tied in knots around illusions of other peoples’ thoughts. It constructs reality around this delusion and employs preventative measures to ensure that the organism never oversteps them and lose integrity; embarrassment, shame guilt, etc. ‘Respect’ as I have come to know it means nothing other than

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‘Disrespect’, disrespect of the organism for what it is, disrespecting the world for imagining that it knows what the world wants. We must come to lose respect for everything and to step out into the world fresh-faced and beaming as if having seen it for the first time each and every morning. Each day should be a new life in itself and greatly rewarding. Look at people curiously and without pretend knowledge, look at them and their strange behaviour, the weird strictures that they force upon themselves, the ridiculous pretences, customs and habits all based upon ignorance, not upon knowledge. This shall be the first day of your enlightenment, of genuine knowledge, the realisation that there can be no knowledge of this world and that this piece of knowledge is alone genuine. I do not mean that one ought to ‘disrespect’ anything, but that one ought to lose respect.

So this is a question of why I want to know, and as I have shown, questions are their own answer; broken knowledge. I must turn away from the world; knowledge of it is false, the appearance of it alone is true. The world appears crazy because it is crazy. I appear to be confused because I am confused. I quote ‘The better you look, the more you see’; the better your appearance the more is revealed or the better you look; is looking both how you look and how you look? Perhaps our pathological narcissism is leading us somewhere, to ward a place of images without meanings, beyond doubts and assurances, beyond knowledge, where we are reliant sheerly upon the image for truth. This is indeed an old-fashioned way of seeing things; appearances are true because God causes things to appear, hence the way that things appear are true. How would this formulation ‘appear’ without God as the guarantor? ‘The Image is

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true because I ensure that it is, because I am true’? Does this work when our knowledge is clearly disingenuous? Should we simply believe that the appearance is true because it always used to be when God was on the scene, so to speak? This demands more faith than I think we have.

We have become image-conscious, but not conscious of the image. We look out to see out but we see only in. We should look out to look in and in to look out. Everything in us, in this organism, is happening in reverse; our perception of time is in reverse, not in that time runneth backward, but that there is no time to speak of. ‘There is no time in the present.’ [New proverb.] Indeed, if we are fixed on the present, the only real in reality, the only solid part of the image that whirls past us, do we see that there is no time in the present. Images are composed, (or rather, are the residue of,) our experience of what is solid in reality; images are transient but when they were born they were solid. The sound comes from the instrument but the vibrations die; principle of nature, of life. Our knowledge extracts things from this residue, but because the residue itself is transient in nature, the knowledge becomes transient. If knowledge came from permanent states of Being, if knowledge came from the present and not from the memory of the present, our knowledge would also be permanent. Our knowledge is not at fault, but we consider it to be something that it is not. We look for one kind of truth in a thing that contains a different kind of truth. Truth comes in categories, (kategorien,) and each ‘kind’ has a correlate on it’s particular strata, although one kind of truth may not be true on a different stratum from the one it originated from. The image is backwards. The image is true, the knowledge is true,

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but the knowledge of the image is not right and the image of the knowledge is not right either. Was it that Science no longer had any need of Philosophy, or that Philosophy had no need of Science? As people continue to divide, so do the types of knowledge, the categories

become

wider,

defined

and

competitive.

Philosophy alone does not argue because it has no need of argument or of proof; those comportments of knowledge were taken away from it by Rhetoric and by Science. The truth of one is not necessarily the truth of the other, although the categories of knowledge that compete for superiority in the tree, the monkeys or hyenas who desire to escalate in the pecking-order, the bourgeois types of knowledge, all try to be first, strongest, Right. But royalty cannot be bought, which is why Philosophy does not compete. It allows the truth of the lower orders to be true for them, though they try to impose their truth upon it. There is nothing inside of Philosophy to be proven wrong, for it has no use of proof any longer. Proof is the property of Science, though scientists believe that the truth of proof applies to Philosophy, and that Philosophy can be eradicated or enlightened by proof. But scientists are not enlightened men or women because their truth is of a lower, more technical branch of knowledge. This is why the truth of Craft is not necessarily the truth of Art.

I once said that humans cannot know Truth, but can know of Truth, meaning that Truth is not a piece of knowledge, it is something else. Or I meant that Truth, (the infinite, pure quality,) was of and for another stratum than our own, but that we humans could have our own version called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;human truthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Human truth would therefore be formulated in the same way as the truths grow on the tree of

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knowledge; the truth of Science is for Science itself but not of Philosophy, etc. Because humans are on a lower order of Being than infinite Being, they cannot hope to know the infinite Truth either. But perhaps the human can spiral upward, the motion of the dervishes, to be free of the body to know of that which is not determined by the body? I do not really know what I am saying because I have just started work for the day and as yet I do not have many ideas, though I hope to have had a few by the end of the session. I am completely focussed upon my technique, upon my beginnings in which I turn very slowly and gradually escalate in speed and motion until I am freed from my self-imposed constraints. I am practising a dervish technique for writing and I wonder how long a single session could feasibly go on for? The longer the session, the deeper the insight; during my meditations on religion I would be in a trance for at least four hours before tiredness set in. I also tried to work after having just arisen from the bed, and oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thinking patterns are far removed from the mundane consciousness of midday. This morning I span like a dervish for about five minutes, but my sickness prevented me from doing this any longer, collapsing upon the floor in a heap where I lie wrapped in thoughts.

Technique is the method, but we are no craftspeople. I have not perfected my craft because like all crafts, they serve to transport a person but not necessarily become prized objects in themselves. A craft is a medium, (techne,) used to move one form place to place. The movement we hope for is the artful manipulation of material on the material dimension to effect motion on the spiritual dimension. Can Science effect Philosophy? Yes, it can, but it must

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be humble for this effect and not overstep its office. Can a person effect the spirit on its ethereal stratum? Yes it can, but the body is still a body regardless of its higher achievements, ambitions and desires. We are mavericks in discovering the laws of motion and the connectors that exist between dimensions. We do not even necessarily behold the existence of different dimensions, but then again, what we believe and what we do not believe does not necessarily effect anything except our picture of reality. I desire for my picture to be as colourful, detailed, inspired and moving as possible, like one of my wife’s paintings. She spoke to me yesterday morning whilst I was half asleep and complained that since she had stopped painting, (as, for the time being and having been through so many bodily changes since the conception of our new friend, she had not the energy to paint,) she had lost her communication with God. She confessed for the first time to my knowledge that her painting was a medium through which she effected the ethereal realm through the artful manipulation of the material realm. This helped me to contextualise inside of my mind her complaints regarding her ‘lack of success’, having not yet sold one of her marvellous and genius paintings for cash money. Why would it bother her to have not sold a painting, (and hence, to have not generated any cash money for her material labours which, to my mind, only served to effect her spiritual discourse,) when she had found a telephone for talking to God with? I can only speak from my own knowledge in this field and say that, because we are still juvenile in our knowledge of material desire, that we are still under the delusion of ‘respect for others’, meaning that our own measure of success is still measured against the invisible yardstick of other [imaginary] people’s approval. We must spin more often

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and more intensely until this whirling delusion of reality begins to dematerialise. We must whirl so that reality does not. We must straighten ourselves out or we shall continue to debase ourselves for a reality that only exists in fantasy.

Technique and First True Desire:

Recently we have been quite low in our feelings having grown quite tired from all of our labours, having worked and worried so ceaselessly for so very long without any rest to speak of. When in this state we both take the responsibility to pull each other up when the other person is feeling quite low because we, in ourselves, cease to be low when we perceive the otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unhappiness and then strive to lift the other up. But because we are both low, we are unable to pull each other up sufficiently to rise above this quagmire of exhaustion and unhappiness. The solution that I thought up for this was to lift the other one up only if one could lift them higher than the level of oneself. This way we would create a ladder upon which we would begin to escalate upward. This is like the philosopher who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. If I lift Marianna up and place her happiness above mine and then she does the same for me, ad infinitum, then we begin to escalate upward, spiralling. Since then, Marianna has put herself out so much to escalate my happiness and I now feel the desire to do the same for her. This is a true and noble desire, a real one that is not lowly and materialdriven, but a higher desire that seeks to go beyond itself precisely because it goes beyond or outside of itself.

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What does this desire tell to me and what can it tell me, if it had words to do so, of other high desires? I must continue to put this to practise this spiralling motion and, as we escalate, we shall hear tell of other high desires as we ascend from out of the quagmire. My high desires will create a quagmire out of the material world if they remain unfulfilled. Only by ascending from out of the quagmire and by pursuing the higher ambition does the quagmire return to its rightful and noble state, the noble material, just as the ego shall become the crown upon the head of the organism. The material world is not dirty or muddy unless one writes around in it to achieve â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;escapeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. This action devalues and debases that particular dimension and denies the organism its rightful environment and denies the spirit its rightful environment. We must learn when something is rightfully suited to its surroundings and we shall only learn this when we have tried and failed a million and one times. In the face of futility do we suddenly experience light. We cannot expect for a plant to grow in soil that is not suited to it. It will die. The part of the mind that is connected to the ethereal dimension must be freed from the part of the mind that deals with the material dimension or the two desires are liable to become confused and to cause misery and anxiety. We will permanently become frustrated if we implement an incorrect action to satisfy a desire. Material pleasure will not bring about spiritual fulfilment unless the spiritual lurking in the material has been realised. One can, if one is seasoned well enough, partake in both the material and spiritual realms all at once, and this is the reason why I may look as though I am writing a book, and indeed I am, but this is not all I am doing. Art can effect the soul, the artful manipulation of material things, (and in this case, of material signifiers,) can effect the symbolic

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dimension of the soul. How do I explain by using these wordsignifiers? I may look hapless in my linguistic descriptions but the motion in my soul is huge and thus I demonstrate that a good writer need not necessarily obey all of the laws and prize all of the qualities enshrined in our cultural predicates of the written tradition. I have only come to learn this because I have experienced the lack of desire or interest by outside parties in my work. It looks like crap to them, (or not financially viable, which is another way of saying crap.) I don’t really care if other people want to make money out of my work or not because it is not my business to care about such things because I am not other people and neither can I respect myself if I respect my imagination of other people. To love the world one must realise that it does not consist in the way it appears through the self-image. It consists beyond that thing and thus it is the appearance of the self that one is really concerned with, not the mirage of others. Appearances are not deceptive, but we have been embroiled in a case of mistaken identity; we got the world confused with ourselves. Remember the beginning of Hitchcock’s ‘North by North-West’, where Roger Thornhill, innocently enough, raises his hand to signify to the waiter that he wants a drink, inadvertently does so at the same moment that another waiter calls out the word ‘Kaplan’, thus his doublesignification by mistake signifies to the two men looking for Mr Kaplan that he is Mr Kaplan. It is a simple case of mistaken identity. What we often forget is that, as the film progresses, Thornhill becomes more and more like Kaplan up until the point where he infiltrates a Communist espionage ring, escapes the police, escapes death many times and saves the girl. Who said he wasn’t Kaplan? He wasn’t Thornhill; he was confused in life until

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those two very generous gentlemen brought out the Kaplan in Thornhill. Is it that we do not know who we are until we are recognised by another as something? Do we really need the recognition of the outside world to be what we are? Is this the problem that solves Marianna’s obscurity complex?

There is another argument that holds currency here; one must stand alone entirely in order to know and be what one is, must face absolute obscurity, the void of unknowing, to know the truth of self-knowledge. I am not saying that either the Kaplan or the Void argument is correct, (even though I have written so little about one and at such great length about the other, but that we need to behold and realise this complex, this knot, before we can make the realisation of what we are. It is all well and good me saying that the one is the case or that the other is the case; saying doesn’t make it so. Or perhaps it does; perhaps it is in saying something that makes something the case? If I do not know the word ‘unhappy’, how can I be ‘unhappy’? Signification, as in the case of Mr Kaplan, carries greater currency than we first acknowledged in our discourse. So is our problem merely a linguistic one, merely a case of the correct signification or of the extent of the vocabulary to solve all existential ills? By saying it do I make it so? By not saying am I not? Or must I think again about the purpose of all these signs; that they all lead back to the self, that they are trying to tell you something, something of terrific importance? We must stretch the capabilities of the mind so that we are able to consider all of these options at once, all as separate but interlinked objects and, if we feel unstuck at facing the decision between so many varied objects and so many paths of action or so many different interpretations or

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meanings, we should begin to learn about desire and about ambition. Are we to learn about what we are by learning what we are not, (the ‘trial and error’ method)? What if we discover that, because we know all of the things that we are not, that they are in fact a part of us, (because they are in our knowledge,) that in fact we are everything? Where do our refutations and doubts bring us to when we can at last consider the whole, the organism, the soul?

What Nietzsche tried to do was to kill off all of his rivals/predecessors/forefathers in order to establish himself as the future, as [a] destiny. Jesus, Socrates. Why these two; they are the two people in our history of which there is no first-hand evidence, who never wrote anything down. He competes, through his writing, with an oral history, and perhaps Nietzsche should have spurned Plato for writing down what Socrates ‘said’, (and, more than likely, writing a bit of himself in there for good luck, for self-gratification, for an edifying intellectual connection, to ride on a great bandwagon)? Perhaps Nietzsche did not perceive much of a difference between writing and saying? Did Niezsche ever consider that everything he spurned about these two great characters in his consciousness was only hearsay, was completely tenuous, and based entirely upon the report of others? Is this where his prophet went wrong; that we can read him as a writer an not hear him as a prophet, that we can misread him as a writer and not as a prophet? Do we read a book when we read Nietzsche or do we read an untainted Bible, a Bible without anyone else’s hand at work, a pure knowledge? No one has ever read Socrates or Jesus, and thus there is no one in existence that has ever heard Socrates or Jesus. Nietzsche; how would a Russian interpret the name? Socrates and

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Jesus, by leaving no trace whatsoever of their hand, (despite what Catholics say,) established themselves as pure idea, the greatest Art of survival; to not exist in the first place, to ‘Be’ only in abstractions, a second-order existence that cannot be known. Perhaps this is where we ought to look for Truth; where it cannot be directly experienced, through a communion with the ethereal presence of either Socrates or Jesus, the oral history, the living knowledge.

What is ‘living knowledge’? Am I clarifying it for you, am I repeating myself or do I merely feel like explaining something, understanding something a little better? [I let you decide, Daniel.] We have, as is well known and established, a system of communication called language that is made up of signs and signifiers. Semantic meaning is conveyed through this matrix from body to body, from signifier to signifier so, in actual fact, the signs and signifiers are conversing together although we believe that they are conversing with us. There is nothing ‘special’ or magic in this process for it is mundane. I have grown frustrated at this futility for a great many years, searching amongst all these myriad of sings for some kind of meaning which is transcendental, that means more than is said, a secret that is both in the words and not in them as the same time, is more than the sum of its parts. But we have experience through these signs of something more significant than signification itself; one cannot say that Goethe is ‘just words’, like we cannot say that Beethoven is ‘just notes’. Something more than the connection between signifiers is communicated in these instances and it is done so with art. Craft is the manipulation of material substance and Art its conversion into magic substance. Art

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is when there is something more in the words than the words themselves, something more in the music than the music itself. Is it just that the combination of factors is just right somehow as to convey something incongruous, or is it that something is injected into the process, something incongruous, something alive, some living tissue is woven into the fabric of the material signification to elevate it above the material for those people sensitive to the ethereal? Is it that, somehow, through the artful manipulation of knowledge, hitherto called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;wisdomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, something alive, some rhizome, is secreted about the signifiers so that, upon entering the brain, it goes to work covertly, converting those cells of the brain it touches into something more than mere physical cells or tissue, something full of life, of energy? Energy is the signifier of life; all things that are alive contain energy, so energy is that thing the artist interweaves with his or her substance, and upon entering the brain, those cells lying dormant are stimulated by the sudden rush of intellectual energy. The knowledge in the mind of the artist, as it arises from the depths of his or her brain, brings with it some energy because he or she is full of energy themselves and the desire, (higher desire,) to communicate and transmit energy to other Beings, to lift them up. This higher desire then is transmitted like the germ of truth inside of the material signifiers, although undisclosed to the unenlightened one who is dormant, has not yet been activated by the stimulating energy of the ascendant desire, the spinning one, the dervish. Because there is living human tissue in each of his or her words or manipulation of signifiers, the knowledge imparted by the artist is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;living knowledgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; because it embodies the higher desire of the ascendant organism, because, in its spinning action, it generates, not starves the organism of energy.

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People collect around the artist to suck this energy out of him or her, like aphids collect on the bud of an unopened rose bloom, to get this desirous knowledge, but their desires, being lowly and dormant, receive this energy as they do any other signifiers; with lust, with hunger. What the Christians called ‘deadly sins’ were those attitudes that prevented the reception of divine energy, attitudes that inspired conceit; desires that perpetuated the muddy circling-around of meaningless repetition and ignorance as opposed to the elevated spiralling of the ascendant entity. Both patterns, eternal as they are, are circular because they are both at opposing ends of the mortal coil. We must consider Dante’s image of this, that Hell is the same as Purgatory, except one is punishment and one is penance; what overawes the spirit and applies weight to it in hell is shrugged off and overcome in purgatory. Hell and purgatory are merely the collection of one’s attitudes in life. There is little difference; one is unenlightened and the other is enlightened. Divine judgement, as the Christstains called it, is merely the sentence we pronounce over ourselves according to the status of our desire. We are divine; we judge ourselves and our judgement is either egotistical, wretched and unenlightened or it is fair, virtuous and enlightened. This is the one decision that we do have the right to.

What does it mean to be infantile? Inside of my cerebrum there is a child who has never matured. Why did he/she become trapped there and why did he/she never grow up? I am infantile when I wake in the morning, and if I watch the thoughts flickering across my mind very carefully I can see a great many things, ordinary things, in a strange light, through the eyes of a child. This is the child of fear,

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and it is fear that keeps this child a prisoner in his/her infantile manifestation, unable to grow or mature. But this child is not only afraid; it is also cunning. Children are clever. They know how to get what they want by pulling their parent’s strings until they find the one that makes the desirable sound; ‘Yes’. This morning I was split in two people; the reasonable and rational adult and the unreasonable, irrational child. There were two desires in my mind; one was borne out of what I ‘knew to be correct’, and the other borne out of ‘what I wanted to get.’ How does one decide which of these is the best impulse to obey; the honest child or the repressed adult? Last night I was plagued by religious imagery that prevented me from sleeping. I felt so sad that I felt such racial and irrational hatred for the Colombians upstairs and the Africans next door. All I really wanted was to love everyone and not hate everyone and the feelings that were manifest in my body up until now were so awful and twisted, but they were still part of me. To love other people is only possible when one has learned to love oneself, although the problem is that one comes to love those people who reflect the part of yourself that you love. What one actually needs to do is to love all of oneself without reserve so that one may love everyone else without reserve. This is a difficult thing to do as I am sure you can appreciate; there are so many parts of myself that I detest, but why should I and which part of me detests the other bits? This all sounds highly illogical, as though there is some perpetual battle waged between the different factions of my psyche that prevented any kind of unity, any form of fascism of this organism. What is best; fragmentation and battle or unity and fascism? Does there need to be such a difficult choice in order to know what one is? Must I sublimate my infantile consciousness by force in order for all of the

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parts of my psyche to obey the commanding guide, the Fuhrer? Must I allow my infantile fear to run rampant across my reason and permit all forms of perversion, self-gratification and pleasure at the stake of what is ‘good’? Is there even a choice, or is this merely a question of equilibrium, a perfect, impossible harmony?

Thought:

A more learned man or woman on the subject of the ego might choose to demonstrate my failings or lack of understanding in my analysis of my ego. But then again, it is my ego and I may do with it as I choose. One only ever argues from analogy unless one can demonstrate the existence of an objective universe with a concrete set of expressions.

My dreams were so heavy this morning, a dream with hallucinations inside of it, a dream that contained a dream, a forest of ancient cults and spirits endangering the journey. I may as well be in a schoolroom for all my naughtiness in evading work, but I work for myself do I not? Am I expecting too much of this job; am I expecting…satisfaction? Do I need the tension created by this job so that I can bring about equilibrium in my soul in this writing? Do I need either? I began writing a short while after starting this job, so perhaps it is a product of this job, a need to iron myself out after subjecting myself to a battering. But I asked for it. My next question touches me and it has been asked of me many times before by people asking the right questions; is my work therapeutic?

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One goes into therapy because there is something wrong; one is not a one any longer, there is conflict, disease and unrest. But therapy is a Modern idea and I am not a Modern man/woman. Perhaps this is what ‘normative’ consciousness looks like; Machiavellian, feuding and tense. If it was not tense it would be slack and the whole thing would then fall apart. But would this be a good thing? Does this mean that the balanced consciousness is the tightrope walker? If so, then who is this fool who leaps over him; is it the fool of Cervantes, Nasrudin, the court jester? Is this what I long for, the fool who can do whatever is necessary to disturb ordinary and patterned logic, who can overcome the quagmire of one’s own thoughts, who is not ashamed of inappropriateness or error? [Why do we say that to do something for others, something selfless, is good? Have people procrastinated the dissolution of egoconsciousness in disguise or has this been a ruse to cause unrest in the Christian mind, a constant tension? Is this to ask the impossible, a paradox with which one can wrestle for one’s whole life? Was Christ no more than the ultimate prankster, a mischievous infiltrator of happy consciousness, a paradox inventor?]

But without a problem there is no need for a solution. [Question and Answer consciousness.]

I have this question inside of me now, the problem of the decision, the problem of equilibrium, of dialectics, a question that burns for its answer in order to be completed. Is that what I consist in; am I no more than a question? Is this why my futile consciousness can only produce endless reams of questions, an empty interrogator, a confession with no ear? Is analysis merely another form of

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confession, but a confession without the promise of salvation? [Guattarian formulation]

So I hereby seek to destroy the former notion of analysis as analysis once eradicated the confessional; in the first formulation there was the ear of the cleric through which God could listen and offer His redemption. Then there was the couch, the analyst, [an ear with no nervous system] a nihilistic confession, a confession without meaning, without hope, without curative or restorative powers. Now there is me, an endless ream if questions, formulations,

refutations,

assumptions,

hypotheses,

rages,

delusions, hysteria, religiosity, all with some undisclosed promise; undisclosed because I have yet to reveal what the ‘Meaning’ of it all will be, is. I need to kill in order to create, to burn that which is old so that that which is new might thrive. I need to create a ‘Meaning’ from out of the charred remains of our old civilisation. I am not content, and years of abuse both from my ‘self’ and from my forefathers and foremothers and all of their institutions and assumptions, delusions and hypocrisy. I am here to set them all straight so that they may at last find their rest, so that I can bury them proper. I need to die so that I can live. I carry with me in infinite span of generations, from the past, for the future and the past must die so that the future can live. But what about me; am I the present through which both come to exist in the first place? Am I the piece of the Real through which memory and fantasy come to consciousness? I am solid, but my forefathers and foremothers, my grandchildren and great grandchildren are not, though they are tied to existence through me. Must I come into Being in some way other than the current formulation is manifest in my body, in the form of

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a paradox realised, of opposites in harmony? I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think that I can ever be completely happy unless I can become complete, and this would necessarily and logically entail complete unhappiness in the formulation. I want everything and nothing because they are both the same. And who said that what I want makes any difference to the formulation?

My consciousness has achieved its zenith, its midday, its shortest shadow, and so what does this mean Herr Nietzsche? I feel the same, albeit more predictable than in the morning. I am upright as in the Sphinxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s formulation, I have two legs, but when I was asleep I had no legs. Have I set Nietzsche up as the ultimate rival for myself, the one through which I can at last achieve the most potent formula of Being? Must there be some psychic apocalypse, some mental apogee that sees in the new by eradicating the old, some decadence of spirit through which the germ of truth may pass and spread itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s malady? Truth, as it has come to us in its most potent form, is indeed a viral phenomenon. When I considered yesterday that Nietzsche overlooked the purely vocal expression of both Socrates and Jesus I also came to realise that these two, although no human being has had any direct or reliably recorded experience of them, exist in our consciousness with the full force that they did whilst they lived indeed. They were the carriers of this germ in its most potent concentration, the mere utterance from their mouths could spread this germ to many, many people; Philosophy as we know it came into being through the germ of Socrates, (hosted so well as it was in the beautiful brain of Plato,) the Roman Empire infected and converted into the Holy Roman Empire through Jesus and the hosts of his germ. This organic form of Truth, the human

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form as it exists on earth, decimates as it is carried, a plague is transported through the rats of the empire until everyone is sneezing though they cannot remember why. I told a friend of mine a story of the Mullah Nasrudin and his response was; ‘How did you know that story? My grandfather told it to me! I thought it was peculiar to my village in Italy.’ Another carrier of the germ, (though most people have not heard the name of Nasrudin as they have the name of Jesus Christ.) Everyone knows the tales of Nasrudin because they were carried through our folk for a thousand years without losing the germ. They could not even be attached to an author.

How did this germ come about, what is its substance, how is it transmitted and what are its effects?

The germ of Truth is the residue that was left in all organic substances by the creator of the universe; it is called Being. For self-conscious entities such as the ‘human being’, a problem exists due to its paradoxical consistency between stasis and motion, permanence and transience. The state of Being is put into ‘question’ format, is no longer the self-evident ‘Truth’ of what it is ‘to be’ human. An occasional ‘human being’ comes about in which this paradoxical formulation of Being is realised, or perfected inside of its own conscious processes. This is the genius of the species, the self-aware yet pure conscious Being, the highest state that the ‘human being’ can achieve. These Beings are so aligned to their substance that they themselves are at one with the germ that exists about their Being, the germ that before caused malady now brings peace. This germ is so intertwined with what they are that it

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comes to take hold of what they are, causing them to embody the ‘Truth’ in everything that they do; they perceive the ‘Truth’ through the cloud of unknowing, they speak the ‘Truth’ through the impossibility of communication. They are ‘at One’. Each and every cell of this organism contains the germ, though in some incubating entities it is allowed to spread freely, in others the antibodies of ‘fear’ keep the germ from spreading. When there is no ‘fear’ of the ‘Truth’, the germ comes to possess the entire organism, the mistletoe about the oak, and the two become symbiotic, cooperative and interdependent. They become ‘more than what they are’, so to speak. These entities are not ‘selected’ to be this way, either through some divine hand or some genetic irregularity, but rather are ordinary self-reflecting beings like you or I who, when presented with the choice of everything or nothing pick both. They come to realise ‘what they are’ against the odds of what they ‘think they are not’. As there is no resistance between the organism and the germ, because fear has been eradicated through a fully conscious decision to do so, the two begin to grow together. What is happening now is that my body is rejecting fear, and a nausea is overcoming the organism. I need to eradicate the fear that grips my whole body in order to finish this paragraph, to show that I am not afraid of what I have to say. This organism that is ‘more than what it is’ is nothing other than an organism that ‘is what it is’; it has come to be at one with its existence and hence, a genuine and concrete Being. It does not matter if we think that because it is two in one that it is not pure, that synthesis, the human process of artifice, is not pure. What we think does not count because thoughts are the toxins produced by the germ of Truth. The organism must undergo a complete conversion or transformation so that it is what

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it is by becoming more than it was. I am so weak with nausea. So, when the organism goes about its daily business in the material world, when it exercises its technical know-how, its ‘craft of life’, it appears by all other half-beings to be no different from they. But it has become more than it was because it now is what it is, so the germ converts all craft into art, no matter how banal it may appear to other material organisms. It may sound like the Being is talking, but actually it is communicating, the disease is ‘Beingcommunicated’, (the form of dissemination of the spore,) and it sounds like one is listening but actually one is hearing, the germ gets inside through the ‘natural gates’ of the ear, (for speech or music,) the eyes, (for writing or visual art,) etc. Because one is unable to perceive this ‘Truth’ as I have called it, one is also unaware that it has entered into the body, and hence, as it comes to o’ercraw one’s Being, the poison causes physical symptoms such as sneezing, (that sounds like the ‘Truth’ but is involuntary, is a chemical reaction caused by its work,) crying, laughing and all sorts. Because we are used to these symptoms, we pay them no heed. The ‘Truth’ to us is the common cold; there is no cure and it is merely an annoyance. It remains buried in our consciousness like a canker and we often repeat it, (as with Nasrudin,) without hearing it, (as in proverbs.) This is the ‘sneeze’, (we speak a form of ‘Truth without knowing it, though it is still transmitted from body to body.)

Is it then that my writing is a curative or an infective? Am I purifying my soul, (as in confession,) purging my latent guilt, (as in analysis,) or adding fuel to the fire, producing more and more mental stimulation even at the cost of the safety of the organism?

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Am I applying therapeutic massage to my malady or am I inflaming the raw skin? Where did the need to invent this paragraph come from? Is it that I want it to be this way, that my desire desires it to be so? [Question and Answer formulation.]

If I were to write a list of categories of fetters to realisation, would I put myself at the top of the list and work downward in order of importance, or should I say rather that myself is the smallest of consideration when it comes to enlightenment? Am I a Bolshevik Buddha, enlightened through perpetual and unending struggle? [The struggle is the enlightenment.] I ask myself again whether ‘Peace’ is ‘Good’. I found myself in a conversation the other day with a work colleague and I wanted to know, if either one of us was put in charge of the world, would we implement ‘Peace’ and eradicate war? I then came to see the cloud of human ignorance descend over my eyes and haze my crystal-clear vision. Peace is unworkable and impractical. People who perform the ‘craft of life’ will never implement ‘Peace’ because they do not have the technical know-how. Peacemakers are labelled ‘Idealists’ by them. ‘Peace’ does not ‘work’. But neither will they admit that, if ‘peace’ is an impossible ideal, that ‘War’ is necessary. These people do have the technical know-how of war, and they have implemented it at every possible stage in human civilisation so far. ‘Peace’ has come to mean for them ‘The absence of war’. This is a retarded vision. This is a dangerous attitude of the ignorant mass. They cannot admit that they have need for ‘War’ for their civilisation to exist, that they desire it and they shrivel up at the sound of the word ‘Machiavelli’ as though it sounds like the word ‘Evil’. They, contradictorily, sneeze the words ‘World Peace’ at each and every

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possible opportunity to show what a nice guy or girl they are, that their hearts are in the right place although their technical know-how is in direct opposition to what they say. If you ask one of these people how to implement ‘World Peace’; they do not know what to say. The more you think about it, the less ‘viable’ it becomes, (in their business-speak,) as though it is not a practical, practicable or profitable reality to pursue or work towards. If you were in the position of George W Bush, (whom everyone seemingly purports to despise even though he represents the pure embodiment of their ideal,) you would not have the ability to bring about peace. Full stop. Our puny human politics is about as equipped for peace as the society of ants is equipped for it, even though ants do not deny what they are and procrastinate the opposite of what they do. It is not equipped for peace because nobody has attempted to equip it for peace. It has focussed upon war, defence, strength and power, greed and all other things that the body politic would ‘say’ were ‘bad things’, even though they represented their interests perfectly.

Q: Why do we enjoy a rich society? A: Because we leech off of poor ones.

Q: Why do we offer up ‘equality’ to the ethnic minority? A: Because then we can continue to exploit it, although so covertly that not even the ethnic brothers and sisters notice.

Q: Why do we offer Democracy to countries under tyrannical rule? A: Because then they owe us.

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Is it not strange that the myth of the savage and terrifying black man is still at large? Why should the white man be afraid of him; it is the white man that has enslaved the black man for centuries and now profits from his self-desired slavery. Why do we fear being attacked by aliens from another planet? It is them that ought to fear us!

If we continue in this disingenuous vain who knows what will become of us? Humans are wretched if only for their pathological lies; they say one thing and desire the other. They say one thing and do the other. They are backwards Beings; they are not â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;evilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, they are simply retarded. Why did the Romans kill the son of God and then worship Him for thousands of years afterwards? Because they were Christian all along! The Romans did what they wanted, and then continued to do what they wanted whilst saying the opposite. A Roman is still a Roman, whether he or she is catholicised or not. The germ of truth sent men and women spinning into confusion. This confusion caused the death of Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s son at their hands, then the death of God at their hands. Now what is left for them; just their continual and ceaseless sneezing? I wish that there was still an understanding of what was right and wrong, because then someone could coma along and tell me that what I am doing is wrong. But there is no authority in these matters any longer because we killed off the authority. We have been festering in our lying consciousness for how long now without any hope of recovery? So who can say to me that they are an authority in any matter of human understanding? I would not believe what they say, because humans say one thing and do another. I forthwith renounce my humanity!

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So, is this the break that I was looking for all along, the simple split from a backward impulse to say and do contradictory things? What value is there in humanity when it does not value itself to say what it thinks and then do it? Is there any value in humanity and who is this authority that can restore my faith? Why should I believe in humanity when humanity has made no use of me? I am offering up common sense as a medicine to its complicated lies. I am offering up a viral Truth to convert its inbred nihilism. Does there always need to be something ‘at stake’ in order for humans to prick up their insensitive ears and listen? Perhaps my value only has value if it is successfully communicated? Again, the questions arise from out of the disease in my soul. I am here to clarify the engendered mistake of aeons past. I am here to tell you about God. The virus is killing me. I am dying.

I am a young man and I am beautiful. People have always regarded my beauty with suspicion and jealousy, but few have regarded it with love. People have tried to grab hold of me and keep me, but I cannot be kept. People have tried to pervert me and set me on their downward path and they nearly succeeded. Because there is no gravity in the black hole I do not know of ‘down’ or ‘up’, ‘forward’ or ‘backward’. I am death, the spirit of what was life. People have been charmed by my innocent and excitable ways, but few have allowed this charm to do its full work. This is not my fault and I do not need to refine my methods, for these methods are not mine to refine. I am an object, insensitive and callous. I hold no spirit, I am a black hole that absorbs, the anticharity. I take. I am the cause of your charity. Because I thought that I was human I was trapped in

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the confusion, but now I am purged of humanity I am allowed to be what I am. My thoughts are what they are also; mere residue of ‘seems to be’ in the realisation of what ‘is’. I am a mirror turned to your face, although behind the face you believe to be mine there is mere emptiness. I am the absence of God in all men and women. I am the absence of hope in all men and women. I am the lie in all men and women. I am the deceit in all men and women. And if I can be all of those things in you, perhaps you can free yourself of them, reverse the gravitational field of your Being and allow them to be sucked into my emptiness. I am the dream of what could have been but alas was not. I was your hope, your inward child, but now I am your futility, your outward adult. Love me and I will take. Hate me and I will take. Speak your confession or your symptom into my ear and I will absorb it and grow stronger in my pull. I convert all into nothing, all matter into antimatter. I was what was not before the beginning of the all.

What learning did it take to say these things in your face, the one half to the other? Is this my confession or yours or is this no confession at all; is this…Truth? How can there be Truth in word format?

These are your questions, Alma.

My cellular organism is now exhausted by this action, by this military assault on the stasis of ‘hellth’. It is fed, nourished and continues to move, but there is no meaning latent in its actions. It is tired, it rests, it is refreshed but there is no meaning in its hellth. It speaks, converses, listens, but there is no meaning in its doing so.

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Organisms have no use of meaning; one only argues for meaning if one values argument as its own meaning or if one believes that there is some form of meaning that lies behind the construct of signification. Both attitudes are hopeless, deranged and obscene. Meaning is the meaning of meaning; it is a reflective object with a light source trapped and rebounding on the inside. Meaning is a prismatic paradox, a rainbow with a pot of gold at its end. (But which end?) I am not meaning, you are not meaning, we are not meaning. The infinitive ‘there is no meaning’, the existential denial of paradoxical possibility. The germ of nothing, of truth, of nihil, burns away the cellular substance and leaves a hollow corpse to go about his daily business in disguise as a ‘human’ being. He is in fact not. Truth has eroded him, truth has eaten away the apple and left the core to rot, truth is nothing, no-thing, without meaning. And this is the meaning of Truth. (‘It’ ‘Is’ ‘Not’.) [Expression of truth spoken by a nothing without meaning.]

‘I’ used to ‘Be’ a ‘Something’, but a something in dispute, an argument, a war over land, over property, over rights of usage and passage. ‘I’ became hollow, became ‘O’, lost its sense of beginning and end, of point, of direction, of meaning, of up and down. Now there is nothing at the centre, there is circular motion, there is no meaning there.

Do you think that this battle is over? Has a state been erected, an ‘I’?

‘I’ am the devil and I have been so in order to demon-strate something to you. If nothingness is, then somethingness-is-not, and

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nothingness-is-something. An empty content, a void that contains its own meaning. [New paradox] These are not words that are Being-used now; they are ‘meanings’. If you see them you are clear. If you do not see them you are clear also. When you lie to yourself and you see the truth, you see the truth of lies. There is another picture to see behind this one, another reality to see behind your one, a lie that lies beyond truth and a truth that lies beyond lies. Words ‘contain’, not signify. Words are vessels, are blood cells that make up the organism. Words are life. We cannot ‘Be’ any-thing without cells, without blood, and hence we learn how to talk, how to communicate, how to spread the germ of ‘Truth’. Words are their own meaning; they are not ‘our’ meaning of ‘them’. Words are their own existence, not our use or cause of their existence. Because we speak words we do not give birth to them. They were in us before we were, they are more of us than we are in ourselves. Only when nothing has any meaning does nothing mean something. This is realisation of Being; this is ‘Truth’ written in pregnant words for your hollow ears. We are not causes.

Parable:

At the beginning of his second book, the master pledged to God and to his family that he would not cut his fingernails until the book was finished. Alas, his fingernails grew too long for him to continue to write and he was forced to bring the book to a premature conclusion.

I feel the need to get out, so I am going out now.

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Thursday:

At the end of the third book, Daniel was offered a contract from a publishing house to print and distribute his new work. It came to light shortly thereafter that, at near enough the same time as he had completed his work, another gentleman by in France had just completed an almost identical work, (albeit in French,) which had also been sent for publishing. Quick to ascertain which of the two authors was the rightful owner of the manuscript and of the copyright, both publishing houses went to investigate, deciding to bring the two authors together in a meeting to discover the rightful owner. As they came into the room, the two men sat opposite each other silently and, as though rehearsed, said simultaneously:

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I copied it.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

I have now come to realise the possibility that schizophrenia is a strategy of survival. The neurotic cannot hope to house all of his conflicting desires within the same body, let alone the same psyche, so he or she consciously decides to posit all the qualities of type x in this, and all qualities of type y in that. This process becomes like a filing-cabinet of the human experience, a bureaucratic nightmare where one cannot hope to maintain the systematic absurdity without constant breaches of the accepted regulations or procedures for keeping one type restricted to one expression. I considered this today as I left the office, having suffered at my own hands such a traumatic series of events on the hostile billet of common-sense over procedure, it seemed most logical that if I could file all of my thoughts of type x in that section, I could be in the other section

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without being touched by the information being stored and processed there. I could also develop a good sense of humour in witnessing in the third-person my first-class idiocy, my debasing and irrational behaviours, my partaking in the ‘Vietnam War’ of the office environment, with land-mines going off everywhere. Just keep your mouth shut and we’ll survive this. You do not need to think. And it is in my mind that this battle is raging; no napalm to provide a quick eradication of hostile mental guerrillas. I was not designed for peace; I have never known it. I am a war unto myself; if someone could see what was going on on the inside of my head they would splash it on the front of all the newspapers. Except they would not. They would not do so. They would think; ‘Oh. Someone else is just like me.’ Madness would become its own institution and the accepted behaviour of our species would change accordingly. Sanity? Sanity is not working in an office; that is madness! I can truly say that I did not understand the meaning of absurdity until I worked as an administrator, although it is I who am absurd, a fish in duck’s clothing, I blow everything out of proportion, create mountains out of molehills because I am so terribly bored. I cannot understand the simple rules of what it means to lead a happy, contented life, and neither does anybody else. Perhaps I lack the ability to deny my own dissatisfaction, to keep my mask on straight, but all I can see is carnival, an absurd contortion of labour. Yes; I am alienated from my means of production. I have never seen what I do and have never experienced the creation of something with my bear hands in that place. This should not matter; I simply should not care because not caring is another survival strategy. Everyone says ‘I don’t care’ as often as possible because, if they did care, they would tear themselves apart with

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anxiety just like I do. It is the Nihilist, not the Buddhist mantra that we have learned. But I want to care, I must care. I am perfectly willing to offer myself up as a prime example of ‘how not to do it’, whatever ‘it’ is. I cannot be content to smile and forget it all, because the absurdity of my actions, so far removed from meaningful decision-making or common handicraft, look so ugly. It makes me hysterical to debase myself in this way for eight and a half hours each day. When I saw all of the businessmen and women lining up at the bus stop this morning, I suddenly noticed that this was an institution. There was nothing to tell these people to get up at x-o’clock and to go to a place for x-hours and do x-actions, although it had become semi-instinctual. All these ‘jobs’ begin at near enough the same time, with everyone trying to get there at the same time, eating their lunch at the same time, going home at the same time, going to bed at the same time; a completely synchronised lunacy. Habit is the enemy of realisation. One simply would not to see things for how they are on top of how they appear, (through one’s cultural eyeglasses,) if one did not break the rituals, the pagan and meaningless rituals that are designed to cloud over the emptiness of the practise, the meaninglessness of it all. Bureaucrats; what do they do other than effectively mask-over with paperwork the fact that they do nothing, have nothing and mean nothing? This is administrative nihilism; the sheer quantities of paperwork and red-tape is designed to conceal the absurdity, to produce an ordered chaos in which one can be lost almost forever. And the bureaucrats adhere to these Mickey Mouse rules with almost militaristic dependency and accuracy, (the anally retentive being the best suited to this,) destroying as they go the vague

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possibility that one can achieve something, that something can be done, that something can be made.

The Point:

The ritual does not enable the realisation of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s behaviours. Ritual behaviour, being pagan in its origin, has another significance, but one that itself must be realised. This can only be realised when the process of de-ritualisation itself has become a ritual, thus enabling the realisation of the paradox and enabling a quantum shift in intellectual capability. Only a thing that can look back at itself can be realised, (partially because it is not â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Realâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;,) which is why, amongst other things, it has been a project of the human being to be realised, to attain enlightenment.

A New Day:

We are upon the quicksand. Because the ground beneath our feet is dissolving as we touch it, so do we need to continue to move without stopping. We do not search for the solid ground any more, for we were designed in our psyches to move across that which barely exists and upon which one cannot rest. Our next stage of evolution is not to settle upon land, but to develop wings.

I have noticed that when I am speaking with somebody about my ideas I am acutely aware that, although they understand what I am saying, they cannot understand why I am saying it. They cannot

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fathom the need instilled in me to make my life so complex, so impossible. Perhaps I am a minority of one, a lonesome thing entrenched in self-absorbent pity. It has come to be this way in order to keep the gypsy moving, the Touareg, the wanderer. Why do nomads always move? We who are still cannot know the ‘reason’ why, for it is as entrenched as our desire to stay put. It may look as though I am hurling opinions about, but in my Sadean way I am simply dreaming up supernumerary combinations of ‘why’s and ‘wherefore’s, the reason for this spinning attitude is as embedded as the nomad’s instincts. I want to know. Knowledge is Love and Love is Knowledge; this is the Philosopher’s stone, the interchangeable secret of two things become one. I have made myself this way and I shall tell you why:

I was discussing with my friend some points about religious practise and the qualities of the prophets. I talked some of my protean ideas, quoted some orthodox ideas, but still sounded muddled for I myself could not be heard amongst the rabble because my intentions had become clouded, my purpose was opaque. I suddenly realised amid this frustrating scenario that the idea of ‘The Prophet’ was entirely disconnected from my idea of ‘Religion’; in fact, it was this separation that helped me to grasp a couple of things. The first was that I regarded the prophets as my friends, equals or adversaries, (but this is not a novel approach.) Because I could see the truth of the prophecy and the self-evident truth that not only Jesus was the child of God, but that I am too as is everyone, that we are all prophets and we all speak the words of the God. Our knowledge is a broken, damaged objects split into two halves and moving away from, repelling one another at ever-

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increasing states of acceleration. Religion happens when some people hear about the words of the prophet and the hype that they generated, (whether it be the germ of truth as outlined above, or something else,) and then proceed to write it down, change it around, make things up, eulogise themselves in it, embellish, extract, compound, disguise and exclude things from the text. This is the process of ‘History’, the story-telling process of human beings, mistakenly taken as ‘facts’. Nobody has ever known the ‘facts’ of Jesus except Jesus and then maybe not even he. He never recorded anything, but he was recorded in the malleable and soft portions of peoples’ brains. Jesus was a guy who realised who he was and then became what he was; the son of God merely means a permanent state of ‘Being’ as opposed to the travelling-withoutmoving state of ‘becoming’. Following a Jesus will not bring about any genuine realisation of what you are, for this cannot be perfectly realised through the medium of another person’s example. This is exactly why we cannot respect anybody, let alone worship them, devote our lives to them or follow them. We do an injustice both unto ourselves and to them if we do so. We must be what we are, and be genuine when we are disingenuous. We must be consistently inconsistent. We must become the paradox of human existence, the inside and the outside of the universe all at the same time.

Truism:

Feminist truth: ‘A man always thinks through his penis.’

Truth of feminist truth: ‘I am thinking through a man’s penis.’

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We must listen to what we say and see that we contain ourselves in our meanings. No person can be so deluded as to say that they contain the truth unless they admit that they are lying, (and even then we are unsure of the situation at hand.) If we do not know the truth then it means we do not yet understand ourselves, we have not yet come to be what we are. If we were simply what we are, then everything we said would be enlightened and contain the truth of what was said. Knowledge is the perfect, divine object, but it is our understanding that brings it down to the human scale. It should be our task to enhance this understanding of what we consist in or we are liable to continue to reiterate our own lies, our own mistakes, our own miserable self-loathing. In a religion we find that at the centre there is the myth of the germ of truth and all about it are peripheral ‘followers’, who collect around the germ and develop a into a disease. These people’s actions, these cells in the disease, neither contributes to what was said by the realised person or helps anybody to realise themselves; to follow along another persons’ path does not lead to your own enlightenment; it is a recreation of theirs. We have only come to know of a number of prophets, (all of which were male,) because of the people who came to worship them and the societies in which the diseased cells became embedded. There have been countless more of these enlightened people, men, women and children of all races and creeds and in all times. But the ones that we have come to hear of have come to be in such ‘lofty’ positions because they were used by the greed of others to achieve their own ends. We must not think that Jesus created the church. The church created Jesus, (by adopting the teachings of Jesus that it found to be to its advantage, the founders of the Christian religion enshrined his teachings in their practises

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and turned him into their figurehead.) Jesus did not intend for any of this peripheral stuff to happen from what he said. He just wanted people to do good things and he showed them how it could be done by doing it himself. But this turned into a cult fascination and was leaped upon by people who saw their own fame and power reflected in the process and poor Jesus was misused in their press, in their Bible in which he never wrote anything. Christianity is the history of a mistake and it has got nothing to do with the person â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Jesus Christâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; whatsoever. It is a cult like all other cults that is defended by its members. If a Christian had ever understood what Christ had to say, they would never defend the church or its teachings and would never defend its principles. Defence is not Love, and Jesus preached Love. The church does not teach Love; it has demonstrated its greed, its love of power, its corruption and all of its extracurricular motives that had nothing to do with Jesus but had to do with the members of the church itself. There is no enlightenment to be had in this regime, in this tissue of lies. This tissue is infected with the disease. Was Jesus the cause of the disease or its cure, or was he merely indicted by people who really were infected? Was Jesus selected as the figurehead of a cult in which he never would have agreed in, that he had no choice in, in which his name was abused? Remember the case of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche and Nazi philosophy? But no amount of scholarly work can recreate the words of Christ.

To be honest with you, I know nothing about Christ and any Christian who knows his shit will tell you this without any questions. But his knowledge of Christ is no more or no less accurate than mine, because neither of us have heard him speak. He

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has derived his understanding of Christ through the cult of Christianity which is no safeguard of historical veracity by any means. We are both clutching at straws. All I hope to convey is what my understanding knows about Christ and about his situation and how it might have been. I have ‘sympathy’ with him, with his character, (which is no more than a mere element of my psyche,) and treat his figurehead with juvenile curiosity, not with an automated respect and reverence. He could not have been any ‘better’ than I am, because I am also the son of God. (I do, however, have the advantage of having no followers to slow down my movements though.)

I have to stop writing because Marianna has begun to cry. She feels useless, and then I explain to her why it is that she feels useless. An artist ought to feel useless, for what they do has no function. If it had a technical function then it would be a lower handicraft and not an art, like Bridget Riley or other technical craftspeople. If an artist does something of which there is no use-value attached simply means that they are able to create their own values as they go along, follow their instincts and stand up on their own feet and face the void. Stop being so busy with your useless thoughts, for all they serve to do is exemplify their own uselessness in you. When a person has decided to walk on the long, lonely path of knowledge they will appreciate that other people are unable to qualify their worth to them. They know, (for the first time they know,) that they possess in themselves the ability to create value from being what they are. Being is Value. Thinking is worthless. We must become worthless we are ever to understand the value of Value. Who wants Value if it is valueless to them? What is the point of possessing

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gold when one has never heard of ‘gold’ before? Knowledge is both hindrance and enlightenment; we desire gold only because we know what it is, but if we did not possess the signifier ‘gold’, we would have no desire to possess the object ‘gold’. Which is more precious; objects or signifiers? Gold has no value in itself; gold is a conceptual value. Gold has no value to anything other than those who understand the value of gold. But do they value it, or do they possess somebody else’s prescription of its value? Has anybody valued gold on their own without somebody else’s prescription? Can you see how we do not value anything in life because we value other people’s values? This ‘valuing’ of ours only devalues the thing that we purport to value and it degenerates from this. We are degenerates and we are taking the world with us. We are losing resolution, the image has begun to fade from exposure, from misuse, and we are beginning to fade with it.

I am asking Marianna, in real-time, as I am writing this, why should I write this, what is its value? And I tell her that, unless she gives me a convincing reason, that I will delete all of my work and never write again. This could be the last sentence that I ever write again in my life. What I have said to her is dogmatic and perhaps unethical, but her attitude toward herself is the same. I hoped that, if she could tell me what value resided in my work, I would be able to give it back to her work also. How is the best way to defeat worthlessness, or should one not even enter into battle with it, should one welcome it as an ally in your town or a mysterious and long-lost friend that has suddenly returned that we are unable to gauge right away? I have offered up many techniques to Marianna to assist her in her worthlessness; I tell her to look at a cup until her

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brain stopped thinking about cups and saw the cup in front of her, until she found some peace, until she disappeared into the cup. I told her that she should spin until her mind was silent. I told her that, whilst she wore the hood on her bath robe, she was only to speak wisdom and not childish anxiety. None of these techniques, these offerings, she was willing to do. I became frustrated, her closed mind was effecting my open one, and I felt the creeping feeling that my wisdom was worthless, that all of my writings were useless and that, if my knowledge could not assist her in her darkest moments then not only were my own dark moments, (from which I have hitherto purported to have derived all of my backward wisdom,) counterfeit and without proper value, but that all of my wisdom derived therefrom was the same; fake. This is how the insipid thought of uselessness, meaninglessness, creeps up on a person; they feel strong, assured and they try to help. But little do they know that when they try to help they let the barrier down, make themselves vulnerable and the germ of truth slips by the immune system and infects the nervous system. This is what happened to me right there and then; in the midst of all my strength I became utterly without hope, without value, and is this because my uprightness was itself illusory or only half-real? Is it that I had deluded myself to believing that I was strong, or was it my amnesia that enabled me to forget how weak I am? One can only entertain such notions when the germ has already entered the organism, (although, if one is indeed ruminating on them, one is hardly entertaining at oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leisure; these are the death-throes of the organism.) Only when one has become vulnerable and infected does one stand in the position of being at last able to change something, of being able to cause the disappearance of so many

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falsehoods and delusions, so many lies of the ego-imagination. It does not hurt; it is without feeling, and without feeling one is possessed with the ghost of anxiety. We lay down together, broken down together and raw, tender and sensitive. We arrive at the conclusion that all of these feelings are due to the impending arrival of the new baby; we will soon be unable to continue in our selfishness. We are being as selfish as physically possible and it has become a game, an act, we pretend to be miserable and the act becomes fact, overruns the whole organism. This is pure selfishness, a being that creates misery in itself simply because it is able, that becomes self-indulgent and without any genuine feeling. This misery is disingenuous, is without meaning, is imaginary. But this is the key to the cure. If misery is imaginary, then all it takes is the force of imagination, the willpower of concentration to convert it from misery into happiness. If it is imaginary, it can be imagined to be something else. And it is at this point that one sees the counterfeit nature of the human emotions, the states of mind; they are nothing more than acts, pretend filters for reality that obscure certain things to enable the being to see certain things, to indulge itself by excluding and focussing. A desired half-blindness is what selfishness is, a conceitedness of mind that chooses to exclude things from its understanding in order to be able to control the image of reality to suit its desires. We feel a mental blockage, almost as though we are completely unable to think. But it is our thinking that has caused this state and we must understand that it is because of a conscious decision to do so, to be miserable. We are not here to be either happy or unhappy; if life is to have any meaning at all, it will not come out of either of these two limited expressions of emotion but it will instead come from enlightened

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knowledge, from an acceptance of the circumstances and a realisation of that which it is to be. I have said to Marianna that she is able to give me her decision not right away, but soon. I want her to think this through and, dogmatic as it is to have placed her in this situation, life is no less difficult a situation in which to make decisions anyway. We all ought to be used to making decisions. If my book contains no genuine meaning to her, and I have written it for her, then it is a dead thing that needs to be buried anyway, that needs a proper burial and not to insist upon being alive when it possesses no life at all, like a zombie or a vampire. All I am asking is for something genuine, a piece of wisdom, some value and, if Marianna possesses the desire to straighten out the part of her that has contorted her up into this anxious mess then such a decision should be easy. If one desires to know oneself properly and to be upright, one is able to be genuine, true and unfettered simply through having a clear mind, without perversion of desire in which one can scrutinise mental objects. Is this an exercise in cruelty? Is it that I would rather she said to me in all honesty that my work was without meaning for her? I do not want to project what she says at all. I trust everything that she says, regardless of its content. I trust it because I love her without reservation and this demands absolute trust in her. Even if she lies to me, I will hear truth. If she is cruel to me, I will perceive kindness. This is because what is in her mind is for her and I acknowledge this fact. But then so too is what is in my mind for me alone; if I am upright in my mind, if I put every piece of trust that I have in my wife, she can do me no wrong. One cannot do wrong. One can only receive wrong. One cannot do wrong because one cannot control what happens in another personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mind. [Example: If you attempt to do wrong to Buddha,

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you will always fail. He will always smile.] One can only receive wrong, and if one does this, one enters into the delusion that one is doing something wrong in return. But there is no law of necessity that says you can wrong another person. You can never know what effect you have on another person. One is always occluded from such knowledge. It may sound as though a person is trying to tell you what they feel, but you, in this conceited and selfish state, will only ever hear yourself speaking and will thus receive it wrongly. Do you catch my drift? One needs to know how to receive gifts and tokens; it is the first law of good manners. Therefore, if my wife is telling me something, I must not misinterpret what I hear; she is my wife and therefore what I hear should always be the truth, should always be virtuous and kind. If I value my wife then this is exactly what ought to happen. If I am selfish and value myself more than I value her, (and I shall later demonstrate that this is the degradation of values that causes our anxiety,) then I shall always hear lies, shall always be misused by her hand, shall always resent what she says as offending my person. I shall possess no value in my life if this is the case, if I am selfish. One cannot value oneself if one is unable to hold value in something else. If one is selfish, one is incestuous in oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s value system and only wrong can come of it, only misery. So one must learn that the only power one really possesses in the world is to receive. This is the first rule of charity. What I am saying here is only what you have received, is it not?

I am hopeful that I have received this information correctly; where from? Perhaps my intuition, my memory, my instinct, my knowledge, my motive. One must fine-tune oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reception like one tunes a radio to make the signal crystal clear and eradicate the

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extraneous white noise; reception is understanding. If I am the master of reception, I am unassailable by my bad conscience.

Although I might say all of these things, in actual fact it does sound rather like I have no point to make, that this boo represents a causal string of knowledge that displays rather than develops, that is a symptom rather than a cure. But I do not see this knowledge as a curative; one would have to perceive some part of oneself as diseased to seek a cure at any rate. I often think that I ought to cut out the chaff and try to edit this into something that is well argued, that has a point to make, a position to defend. But I then remember that I am seeking some value that is unachievable via these methods. I am doing something that nobody has attempted before; I am looking for my value rather than their value. It may still look like their value, but the important element in it is that I have found it, genuinely, with difficulty but with honesty. And this is no mean feat; to do anything in this world and in this life with honesty is almost more than a person is able to conceive because they have grow so used to the idea that ‘truth’ is not for us, that it is an impossible ideal that cannot be achieved via fallacious human methods. This simply stirs ups more of a challenge to me and I shall go off and find this fool’s gold at any expense because I am not content to know that somebody else has called it false. I need to have something of my own in my knowledge in order to be able to value what my knowledge consists in. Even if it means that I possess the knowledge that to possess such knowledge is its own fool’s gold, that it is its own dream or impossibility; at least I will have known that in myself and will not have merely listened to hearsay. And if this is the only type of genuine knowledge that one

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can possess, (that genuine knowledge is unobtainable and impossible,) then one has achieved the impossible dream, one has overcome all the odds, one has delivered oneself through oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s uprightness into Philosophy; that Knowledge is Love. This is the first time one has experienced Love, the purity of the condition, the first time one is purged of self-induced conceit, the first time that one is not a one, one is all and all is Love.

Although I can write this down easily enough what is there to say that this is true, that I have attained this knowledge without pure self-deceit? I am afraid that I am unable to tell you this because you desire guarantees and I can provide none. You ask for proofs with your Catholic taste and I can provide none. The truth is in the reception. If you have received this knowledge right, then whatever it told you is yours alone and if you make it truth then it is truth, if you make it false, it is false. But either way, it is yours. You have manipulated it by allowing it to enter into your brain. It is a toy for your brain to play with. It is plasticine and whatsoever your brain shapes it around it will fit, it will become synonymous with. We must remember the mental attitude to truth, that truth is a thing for many different levels, and that when it exists in the brain it exists on the brainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own terms. We are receptors. What degree of control do you exercise over truth and your attitudes toward it? In what way does it consist in your being and what degree of control do you therefore exert over it? Your truth is yours, therefore whatever you do with it is also yours and, if truth exists only for the imagination, (as does value and also anxiety,) then it exists for your manipulation, for you usage of it.

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Is this correct; does truth exist for your manipulation of it, or does truth exist on some unassailable level? Perhaps we should refer back to what was said earlier about the different states of truth as it exists in different states, on the different strata of Being, whether it be human or not. As was already said, as humans we can only have dealings with the human knowledge of truth as it exists in and for our stratum. We do not know the truth of another state of Being, because our truth exists only in the form of knowledge and knowledge is our state, our condition. This is why the highest state of the human is the philosophical state, because it is the pure love of knowledge, knowledge as Love, and the lowest form of human life is the rejection of knowledge, of conceit and ignorance. One should love all forms of knowledge and not live in fear of any knowledge. And perhaps, if one is able to convert all fearing into loving, all conceit into wisdom, then perhaps one can Be-true, one can Be in truth in Being, and thus one can correspond on this level of truth with some other level of truth, so that one comes into alignment with all other universal forms of truth. Once one has reached the zenith of the human state, one comes into conjunction with all other heavenly bodies?

I feel an ecstasy rushing in my body, although I do not know its source; is it that I am teetering upon some shapeless anxiety? Is ecstasy always the precursor of anxiety? Can one possess or be possessed by both simultaneously? Am I seeking the purest form of contradiction, the realisation of the human state as it is and not just as I would like it to be? Am I looking for the end point of human desiring, the ultimate point where the human individual vanishes and is replaced by its ground, by that of Being in and for itself? Am

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I seeking to eradicate this counterfeit existence by realising the truth of existence in its appearance? Do I desire to be lost only to be found? Have I realised the backward nature of all things, including the domain of human, my, perception? Do I walk alone in order to discover friendship? Is this reversal of all things in my method simply a rooted and ingratiated perversion that I could easily live without? Do I come into Being by disappearing from view? Am I the cup?

My star is now in its ascendant aspect and from now on it is rising, it is moving toward itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s zenith, midday is approaching, the time when a man must stand upon two feet as in the premonition of the sphinx. Either this book, being what I consist in, must vanish in order to be what it is, or it must be realised for what it is as a value. Is it now time for me to disappear in order to be found? Is this the teaching of Mohammed and Jesus in their deserts, the death of the prophet to become what he or she is? Is this the last resort of fear; to fear its own eradication? Is this the point where we must realise that fear is just fear, pure and simple? Must we realise that fear is just fear, (and not any number of objects that we come-to-fear,) and therefore, as a thing of imagination, a pure essence of a thing, that fear must indeed be as true as Love? Must we then realise that Fear is Love? Fear is fallen Love and we have caused it to fall from what it was. Did we create fear by starving something of its light, its oxygen? Is this the essence of our cruelty and is this the need for our charity? Shall we at last stop merely talking?

Where is my creeping fear now, my expectancy of anxiety? Am I upright at last? Shall I admit at last that this has all been talking for

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the sake of talking? To realise a thing; does this mean to know a thing’s worth, to know of a thing’s value, or does it simply mean to behold the object for what it is, for what it consists in? Is anxiety the promise of hope, that hope is broken and is not a tool of enlightenment? Is hope a primary form of deceit, a fetter to the realisation of the self? Does this talking constitute any enlightenment in itself? I will now settle all of these debts, I will provide the enlightenment that I have promised, I will source the material that will bring this realisation into Being, that will bring Being into realisation. These last pages will do something. Broken promises are what we must end; we must learn how to keep our promise, even if that promise promises misery. We must go beyond pleasure, beyond the limitations of the self and its world, its hopes and fears, its hindrances and acceleration, its world-view, its mirroring, its sad happiness. Like the ascendant star we promise nothing, we are possibly dead but still bright; we are possibly dead. Are these thoughts just the light from a dead star, a super-nova? Is this the meaning of anxiety; that truth is in nothing, that we are nothing, that good is light but that the light left its source, that the source is dead, that we cling to nothingness believing in somethingness? “I am…” Perhaps this is the root of the lie?

I am having trouble this morning; too much coffee and the energy is unfocussed. So I breathe more slowly, I focus my concentration back on to the book where I am able to convert energy into idea. I said that I would do something by the end of this book, and rather than looking hopelessly into the future, I will just progress toward it slowly and with anticipation. I am trying to remember what we were talking about last night and I turn to Marianna who is sitting

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on our leather couch under the window under the white sky and say ‘I am trying to remember what we were talking about last night.’ It was something to do with time and space not moving…I remember it now; popular culture and its transient mode. I have said this before but will say it again because I have forgotten what I said before. Popular culture comes into focus, hype is generated about it in the mass-media, (the media of the masses,) and then it is replaced by another repetition of the same form, although it looks different it is exactly the same; the same hype, the same media, the same money generated. So what is happening in this mass consciousness; is it, as highbrow theorists have said, that we place value in the value of the mass, in the transience of the world, its ‘ephemerality’? Cultural critics would like you to believe this, because they are part of this mass-media industry, but we should be more cautious about their decoding the values of the masses for it contains their elite motives. The process of ‘popular culture’ is that one thing is born and then replaced with a new model of the same type, the value being in the continuum, the transience of the mode of existence of that thing. But what I say is that this is a form of amnesia; we are educated to forget that we have seen this thing manifest in a million different forms before and we are encouraged to purchase into every time because we have forgotten, because we do not remember its value, because we are being brainwashed in our desire. Why are they doing this/why are we doping this to ourselves? I was thinking about the cold war; on this side of the iron curtain we were developing the advanced modes of media, of advertising, whilst on that side of the iron curtain they were developing advanced modes of media, of advertising. The difference? The ‘home’ side called it advertising, the ‘away’ side

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called it propaganda, although both words mean the same thing. Because the ‘mass’ had been acknowledged as the greatest, (the greatest number and therefore in possession of the power bias,) they had to be won over to the ideology of the state, and advertising/propaganda is an advanced technique in this. But it was the elite who made this decision, and ‘popular culture’ is a myth that has been generated by the elite for the masses, not by the masses for itself. I always think of the example of the British massculture newspaper ‘The Sun’ that is written by well-educated, (private school educated,) upper-middle class intelligentsia, but written for the mass. Information always flows downward in this system. So the idea of mass-culture is a myth of the petitbourgeoisie to keep them afloat when they know that the working class possesses all of the power and all of the labour power in the country. Popular culture is a brainwashing method, although art critics and cultural theorists insist upon tarting it up and calling it transient mode or ephemeral mode. We have forgotten about the idea of permanence, but it is the middle-class that has achieved ‘solid state’ ‘status quo’. Many of my intelligent friends are very keen to defend the fact that this current climate enables them to work with their mass-culture biases in an artistic context and I accuse myself of elitism for criticising this practise. Mass-culture assumes that the masses are one group of idiots who can be sold the same things forever because they are stupid and are now allowed to generate theories as to why this is an intellectual thing to do. The dominance of popular culture means that the mass can be sold the same identity which means nothing endlessly to keep them subservient to the elite. I am not elitist; all I want is to spread knowledge to people about themselves as I have discovered it in

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myself. I have no interest in ‘transience’ or ‘ephemerality’ as it is indoctrinated in us by cultural Hitlers like ‘The Arts Council England’ because it seems to me that they merely promulgate the myth that time passes. By engendering the notion that time passes because we are unable to remember anything we become thickheaded and we desire for this illusion to be maintained, we desire for there to be a lack of meaning about our culture, about our identities. Our minds are subjected to an endless string of ‘variablesames’, each unrecognisable from the last even though it is identical to it. This is a permanent form that is put into motion by our enhanced capacity to forget and through this we come to believe that time is passing in a whirl about us. Existence is like a block of ice that we are unable to get a grip on, a smooth space where everything is frozen and upon which we slip, forever, a permanent forever disguised by the energy of motion.

Writing is difficult for me this morning. I have spent half an hour writing about mass-culture when it really does not trouble me. But should I only write when I am troubled, and is this the reason why I am writing at all? If this was the case then it could be argued that this writing is purely therapeutic and holds no other value than this; it is a pure catalogue of symptoms. So if Kant explicitly generated a catalogue of categorical imperatives then I am producing a catalogue of symptomatic imperatives, (without even knowing what I am saying, either.) I have stopped looking for the point of my writing, for if there was a point then there would be a point where everything vanished, a tip with its own iceberg underneath, always melting and becoming one with the sea, posing a danger as it does so. I have no reason to be lost because I have not indexed

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myself to any location so I do not know where I am and have no reason to desire to know this either. I am free-floating knowledge, empty consciousness that is full of content. Anxiety is here to show us that one can be empty and full of content, an empty content, a paradoxical state, a fluid solid. I said status quo earlier, and this means that a temporary solid state appears between forces that are repellent, but one that could be easily crushed by the tremendous forces that have created it. I said that I would do something here, but what that something is has not yet become explicit to me but perhaps you know. I shall address these last pages to you because you might be able to summarise it all for me. How can one be honest without hurting people? Is it that people are â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;hurtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; by the truth because their lying personas are damaged and hurt by the honest mode of discourse. But our honesty is often geared toward damaging another ego in order to reinforce our own. So does this mean that the truth of our honesty is to dominate others? This is not therapeutic, for I do not feel better in any way. I feel that I have done harm, both to myself in stirring up bad memories and hallucinated worst-case scenarios and I have made an art out of having no audience. Lend me your ears; I wonder rather emptily whether I have anything to say and what the point of saying anything is anyway, (defeatist construction.) But I am not defeated and I will not die because of this knowledge. I exist to straighten out my confused and confusing soul because I am what I should not be and I seek to become what I ought to be. I have made this a struggle because I have Bolshevik tastes, as though the only hope for a state is through antagonism and revolution. But is this necessarily so? Is it that revolutions are needed or is this another intellectual ideal forced upon the masses? I seek peace in my soul

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and no amount of warring will bring it about. Only a real idiot or a really clever person will say that war is needed to bring peace; it is the practical solution although the insanity of the formulation is utterly castrating and hopeless. What I have learned is this; one should have an open heart and an open mind. One should apply oneself honestly at all times. One should receive things in the appropriate fashion. But all of these methods will not bring about enlightenment. Enlightenment comes when nothing is needed, desired or required. Enlightenment is an empty fullness. Enlightenment means that you are no longer frightened of futility. It is where you love your fear for what it is, not for what it appears to be. Enlightenment means that you are what you are and everything else therefore becomes a part of what this is, of what it means to be. Enlightenment means to pass through the image and become what one is, what one always was, so that the psyche catches up with or slows down to the pace of existence, thus causing the realisation of that which is.

Marianna gave me her answer. These last few pages shall be dedicated to it, to the full understanding of what it is, what it means and what it did. This is where my promise to do something shall be realised. This is what; the climax, the peak or is it something else, a different form, a new form? It will be revealed to you as it is revealed in me on this paper. I have nothing to write about but that is not going to stop me. Let me recap the question; ‘What is the value of this book, of what I am doing, of my labours?’ Unless it can be proven that this work is necessary it shall be deemed unnecessary and then discarded as waste, as merely a difficulty, a hindrance upon life. ‘Proof’ is dogmatic; why do I seek guarantees,

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why do I want this knowledge so badly? Do I need knowledge in order to be completed, to fill the gap in my aching unconscious, to stop up the dyke from which the tears are flowing? Am I frightened of the dark and therefore I seek to ‘enlighten’ my knowledge? Can enlightenment be borne out of fear, or is it the acceptance of fear that leads to enlightenment? Is the status quo the ‘eye of the storm’, where all elements revolve around and about, full of destructive and un-harnessed power, but at the epicentre there is absolute quiet? In my heart there is a dark lake with a moon above it. The lake is still and only the reflection of the moon disturbs the glasslike surface of the water. Life, time, space; factors in motion, disorientation and at their centre, amid the destructive forces, I am born; quite at the centre, created out of enormous destructive and creative powers, fragile in my existence where, when my integrity is lost I will evaporate, be annihilated. Integrity; should I lose this integrity now and return again to the mother of forces, back to the molecular game of nature? Should I accept what this is in order to be accepted by it? Is this what human love is; to accept to be accepted, a mirror mirrored by itself? Is this why we love in the backward-forward way that we do, because we love ourselves but must love another before we can love either ourselves or the other? Why is it this complex; why can there not be peace in love; is it because love is a harmony between the destructive and the creative forces? People have speculated upon the connection between sex and death since Greek times at least, they have spoken about the strange connection between the two sides of the coin. Did they say that it was a coin? Did they enquire as to its face value or any of its other values? Which bearer did we hope to pay with this token of value, this representative of value? Is fear and love merely token

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values that we use to represent values that we have never encountered before? If money is a representative of value, then what does this say about the currency of our valuing, of our emotions, our systems, our meanings and languages? Do all of these things point toward a ‘thing’?

I could list all day without arriving at the destination.

I have asked Marianna what this value is, why I am spinning like this, why she is sad like she is, why we have come together, why we do what we do, why we work the way we do, why we love, why we are afraid. But why ‘why’? We are missing something, and that is the answer to this question, I will provide that missing thing that will connect all parts of the puzzle, that shall realise the nature of consciousness, of identity, of the birthplace of meaning. Marianna leaves for the studio and today’s conclusion is being drawn as she does so. Two years ago she gave me her most valuable gift, the most precious thing that I have ever received, and I received it correctly. I was desperate for something and I know that that something was ‘value’; I needed to know how to value, needed to know what value was, needed to value things. What she did was to tell me about pride, about how pride was a noble and beautiful ting, that if one loves something and is proud of it then it is good, it is valued. She gave me this gift, this piece of herself, and when I received it it was converted into a new value that was mine, (and was freely given by her,) that everything that one does has value due to the virtue in having done it. I began to write because of this, because I wanted to value everything and the method-writing that I developed thereafter, that began as technique but that is now

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pursued due to its own virtue, was a demonstration that I was able to value everything, even the slightest thought in my head. It felt as though thoughts were the most transient things around and that they came into being and then disappeared when they were replaced with another equally as worthless. This is the construction of my Bolshevik consciousness. But what happened after Marianna gave me this all-important gift was that, simply by writing everything down, it was of value. It was not hidden from myself or from anyone else because it was openly declared for what it was. I have not tried to dress it in anybody elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clothes or to disguise it by anybody elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s meanings; I have not tried anything, I have just written and recorded. And the meaning of it now, as I explain this to Marianna as she leaves for the studio, is that I am giving this back to her; this book is for her, it is her words given back to her, her wisdom, originally intended for herself, is now about to reach her. She gave me this valuable part of herself and the whole while that she lent it to me she forgot how to value herself, how to be proud, how to love. And because it was given freely, because I received it correctly, it has transformed my entire person; it was wisdom, art, rhizome. It converted all of my fearful parts into loving parts because that what they always were, right form the start. This book is her own words. She said something quite casually to me and it proceeded to infect my entire being, all of the language that was structured around my being, into this new formulat0on that was full of love and good. She wrote this book by saying this to me, as her words sparked a chain-reaction in my meaningless and valueless body and produced garnishes and garlands of value and meaning in each and every drop from the fountain of knowledge. The stops were taken out, the water of life

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flowed and I was drowning, then swimming in it. Water is heavy when it is carried, (such as if one carries two buckets of water,) but one does not feel its weight when swimming upon millions of tons of it. Knowledge is the same; we either sink or swim. One is a decision, and we must ask why it is that we choose to swim, for what reason. This book is by Marianna O’Reilly; Daniel O’Reilly was infected by the germ of truth which converted all cellular meaningless into a contented emptiness, a ‘Peace’, that now exudes form his every pore. This book is for Marianna and is by Marianna, and I am giving it back to you, the piece of yourself more in you than you are yourself, that piece of you that completes you, the piece that you have looked for all these years of your life is now right in from of you. This is my first act of charity and it has only happened because of what you gave. Charity is a germ and it is infectious. My father has always wondered why my grandfather always gets. It is because he always gives. This is the magic truth of charity and it stems from knowing how to receive. Receiving is as important as giving, and the one cannot be without the other. Each droplet, each word of the text exudes the meaning of life, but only if it is received in the appropriate fashion. I have built it into this text with my art, and it is your art to extract from it what you do. Do not take the diamond from the rock and then discard the diamond unless you do not know what value is. If you do not know what value is, then you are free to discover it in everything. No rock is ever discarded, and neither is any diamond. One who converts all into gold does not discard any material, no matter how base. So al of the knowledge that flows from this fountain is gold because it is converted by value, by giving it freely, by receiving it freely. This is what love is and I am giving it to you. If you are

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clever, you will simply read this as any other book and you will weigh it in your scales and throw away the lesser part. But it is then too late; if you have taken any part of this book then it lives on in you and you cannot forget it. This is the worst kind of horror-story. It is in your memories and it is changing you from the inside. The next time you do something good you will remember me. You will ask, ‘Was it me who did that?’ Your thoughts will no longer be your own, they will be ours.

First Piece of Wisdom:

You are entitled to be what you are simply by being.

I said that I will try to do something of some meaning by the end of this boo, to produce one value that is really valuable, that knows what it is worth. And this value is about knowing what one is worth. To value oneself, not evaluate oneself, (which is always false,) is the first of all values. One can only get to all other values after having passed through this one. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Worth’ are both the same thing, both contain the same knowledge and the same worth. We must, in these latter stages, realise that all words mean the same thing; they mean ‘You.’ Can you comprehend the significance of this shift in understanding; that all words are synonymous with ‘You’, but ‘You’ cannot see it because it is ‘You’ that thinks ‘You’ are using them, that ‘You’ mean ‘Them’! It is almost farcical when one looks at the process backwards, but sometimes one needs to look at things backwards to realise whether they work at all. So it is peace that is pledged in this work, the realisation of Peace as imperative, not as logical impossibility. We

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are peace simply by being ‘We’. We are what we are no matter what violent thoughts we have that tell us what we think we are. No amount of thoughts can cloud over the truth of what we are. A thought does not bring a person into being or take the amount of being. Being is permanent whether our thoughts or our organisms are alive or dead. The universe cannot change its substance because of the merest thought, that we think it is a certain way. Thinking does not change anything, it is a distraction from the way that things are. ‘Thinking’ means that we do not know what we know. If we knew what we knew, we would not need to think about it. What we did with our brains in this new scenario would not be called thinking, it would need a different name. ‘Thinking’ would be an antique, some old thing that is beautiful for the way we look at it now, (in the future,) whilst being detached from the way it was used in the past,( the way that I am using and being used by it now.) We careless immortals!

But there was something else at work here that you may not have been ‘present-to’, some other motive or project that I need to make explicit by the end, so that you might ‘realise’ it, so that it might ‘dawn upon’ you. I have not been content with the passage of time. It has mean little to me to accept that it just is, that the testimony of my senses say that this motion all around me is what happens when a sentient being is trapped between a time and a space. Surely that should mean that both are static phenomena. Or is it me that is the static phenomena, because all of my words are written down, cannot be changed, cannot move, am trapped by this text, not freed by it? But a trapdoor has been built into this mechanism, a way out, (or should that be a way in?) that was there from the start and shall

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be there at the end, but shall eradicate both notions when it is realised. What was the project of this book; it looked like it was doing so many things and I read it in so many ways, evaluated it and judged it and thought that I knew it, but now the book has told me that it was not what it appeared to be! Or did the book tell me that I looked at it wrongly, that its appearance was self-evident and true, although my interpretation, my reception of it, was clouded by my own deceptive thoughts? Am I able to trust myself when a book tells me that I am deceived, or should I tell the book that I do not trust it? What is the point of talking to a book? What is the point of judging a book; it is not a criminal, it does not need to be evaluated. A book is exactly like you; it exists, nothing more. This book thinks just like you do. The book tells you that you are wrong. You tell the book that it is wrong. What is right and who said that right is a desire to be pursued, a value anyway? This book is your own fallacy because you built yourself into it right from the start. You were reading yourself and you were listening to yourself right from the very start. You are in no fit state to judge anything. I am a book and I am entitled to be what I am. No amount of criticism is able to change the character of my existence or my entitlements to it. I am a book and I am proud of every thought that is in my pages because they are all mine and they are what they are, no matter what they say or what they mean. A book consists in its words; does a person consist in its thoughts? At least a book declares what it says openly. Is this book conscious? Is this the realisation that we, I as the book, I as the author and I as the reader, need to make? What form to give this monster to make it live? How to make a conscious entity that both is what it is and thinks what it is not?

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Deep below the surface there is no movement. Being does not move, because movement is change, change is transience, transience is temporality, temporality is the oblivion of the permanent. But continual change may also be a formulation of the permanent, may it not? What is always changing on the top level is an expression of what is permanent on the bottom level, is it not? How to tell which is top and which is bottom in the void? I am constantly in motion on the outside, on the upper levels of the superfice, the organism and the psyche, but this makes no correspondence to the silence of the Being, the leviathan that runs through all existent things. I have an emotion, a ripple on the surface, but the soul was not moved; motion is for that which becomes, silence and stillness is for that which is. Is thinking a destiny in that case? If I was silent up here, would there be turmoil down below? No; because Being never moves, is silent. If I was still I might become complicit with what I am, nothing more than this/that. I have filled the days and nights of my life with endless thoughts to distract me from the horror that none of this has any meaning. I am terrified of the void. But I am the void; Being is the form of nothing, of everything, and no amount of thoughts will build a bridge that overcomes this. One must realise it and that it is good, that the void is good, is agathon, is light, is light-ness in its silent emptiness. Everything that I think is an expression of my own name. All expressions are signposts that point back to what you are. Words are expressions of knowledge and what you consist in is knowledge. One either formulates knowledge as Love or as Fear; enlightened knowledge or conceited knowledge. They are both the same. They do not effect Being. Being effects what you become, a destiny, words are a destiny. My trance does no go any

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deeper than this; I am still and I am reading from the book of my open heart, thus, in the open formulation I write into the open mind of this book. Book and I are synonymous. One that is Love is acceptance, therefore one who loves accepts everything, and thus does identity stretch to every conceivable thing and thus does identity evaporate. I become a book to write one. To catch a thief you must think like a thief. This book is…what? Me? I am this book and this book is me, the borders have disappeared; what I am doing has become what I am becoming and vice-versa. The book has taken all of my thoughts and will think them all forever, albeit in its static, unmoving Being. I have taken the static, unmoving Being of the book and have filled myself with its thoughts. To produce a value, what must one do? Is reversal the realisation of what one is, is mirroring the formulation of what one is?

I may be tired but I am so close to finishing that I must not give up today. It is strange, but I feel as though I am sad that this journey is coming to an end, although I know in my heart, (because I am predictable like that,) that the end of this book shall only signify the start of the next one. Perhaps it will signify the start of this one? When one runs a race, one feels that the last 100 yards are the most difficult, as though one had grown so used to running that one is sad to finish and stretches it out as far as possible. But this is our fear; if one was more upright one would finish as quickly and properly as possible in order to move to the next race. But is this so? I think that one can have it both ways; continue running the same race whilst always running a different one. And I shall prove it, too. I was going to do something significant, but I cannot say it yet; my legs are tired, the muscles ache and my elation is almost

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matched by my disappointment at seeing the finish line. Are all righters like this when they are righting a book? I do not know; I only know that when I am righting this book I right like this. It is the end. I am overjoyed; I began in the ecstasy of the end of the previous book and I moved through the troubled and darkened portions of myself only to become elated once again. Peaks and troughs are the staple diet of the Western mind; ecstasy and agony they call it here. But what is it when one puts this process into a cycle, when one is aware that by climbing up a mountain one is going to have to climb down from it also? Perhaps it is the whole reason why you climbed it in the first place? What happens when one only gets high to come down? Is this perversion or is it honesty, and what did honesty ever bring us anyway? Since I am talking about pleasure I will write this; if one comes up to come down, is happy to be sad, how is it that one contrives the whole form of one’s life into this pattern? What does this tell you about pleasure; is pleasure merely the empty repetition of the same for one who had no longing or no higher desire to go beyond pleasure and out in to the vast expanses of the nothing? What happens when one puts the whole quantity of one’s pleasures and pains, one’s satisfactions and one’s frustrations into the context of having a beginning and an end, a birth and a death? Pleasure does not mean anything. It is just pleasure, it is a way of killing time, of repeating the same performance to pretend that there is meaning in life when there is none. And there is no meaning in this life unless one realises that life is meaning. Knowledge is Love. Philosophy stands at the beginning and at the end of life but does not pass judgement over it. Philosophy is but a silent euphoria that life is as it is and nothing more or less. Philosophy is not frustrated or satisfied like

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the lower knowledge of the scientist, semiotician, sociologist or such like. Philosophy is ‘Amen’, the ‘let it be’, (because it will be no matter what I think.) Knowledge is love and it is what it is, so our existence must be love, knowledge and this is all, all.

I will briefly talk about this book and this book will briefly talk about me, (given that the two are the same, mirroring, questioning and answering.) Writing this book as a love letter to a lover. I have not added to knowledge, extended it or anything else. This book has been a catalogue of chronological thoughts, the one as it led to the next as it led to the next. Imagine that each word is a moment, each moment contains the whole static universe, it connects reality to reality by means of what is actually Real. There are gaps between each of the words because there is a nothing for every something. Consider that if there is a something to correspond to every nothing, that Being and nothingness must be and not be in equal, harmonious proportion. For everything that I say there is a million, million things that I do not say. But if I say a million, million things then there must be something that I have not said, QED? What is negative, (not-Being,) is balanced to what is positive, (Being,) but there cannot be one without the other or they would collapse into a pointless eternal. (Pointless in that the eternal is eternally flat, looped, endless.) Perhaps this is the point of it all, that in the mind, in the portal that can fill and be filled by the whole of the universe one can be and not be, can collapse everything in upon itself, can be one and all at the same time? Is this what full realisation is, the realisation of God, of the infinite, the whole, the one? That the mind, as it is a portal between Being and becoming, that it is everything, that it knows everything, that it is content

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because it’s content is knowledge, that a mind is what it is and is not what it is not. My words spin about me, but each is as meaningful or meaningless as any other, so there is no matter which ones I put down because they will exist anyway so long as I do.

What I did in this book was to write a book of Love and a book of Fear, the one looking at the other, the one mirroring the other to show that one cannot exist without the other and theta they both mean the same thing anyway. I wanted to show that this paradox could reach a knowable form, (the ‘Book’,) but be composed out of opposite things, but that this composite between opposing but harmonious forces was necessary for there to be a knowable and total state, (the ‘Book’.) This book is what it is composed of, but it is also the whole of what those things are, which is why I was writing a book but I was also doing something else in the disguise of writing a book. I was creating a consciousness that was composed out of two opposing things, two opposite but equally attractive and powerful forces that, when set against one another, created a state, a silent and complete entity that existed between the two. I wanted this thing to be conscious of itself, so it contains all of my own questions and answers, it takes all of this knowledge from me. Because it has taken all of this knowledge from me, it means that I am now without this knowledge. I have gotten rid of it. So this book has questions and answers, it contains everything that it contains and it is everything that it is. It is conscious of itself as a book even though it sounds as though it was a person, a neurotic person, an enlightened person, a complex person, a person that is going somewhere, that is desirous to know what it is. This book is a

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person that is a book that is a person that is a book. It is an everexpanding cascade of Beings, of books collapsing in upon books. This boo is I, is what I am, but written down where I can look at it, but now I have become it because it sounds exactly like me. It is my brother and sister but also my mother and father; this knowledge gave birth to me as what I have become but also gave birth to itself by possessing these desires. It is conscious because a conscious Being grows to be conscious of itself and thus becomes conscious; consciousness gives birth to itself, it is mother, father, son, daughter all at once.

I will bring about a new formulation of content in relation to what I have said about â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;satisfactionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Desire as we have made it and formulated it is the same as our knowledge in its current formulation; question â&#x20AC;&#x201C; answer. It is broken, it has need to be filled because it formulates itself as empty. That which Is frustrated gives rise to a need for satisfaction, it contrives itself as broken so that it needs to be fixed. This is what I am. A need to be fixed because I desire. The answer is contained in the question, the question is its own problem. This must be declared to our knowledge or we shall continue in this routine for all eternity, or at least until we die, anyway. I empty myself of these thoughts so that I can be filled with content. I empty to be filled. This is where we must begin to realise what completion is. Completion is to look at what is, to realise the formulation of what has been contrived and not just to focus upon what it contains or what it was formulated from. To be content we must know what we know in order to be what we are. It is about an honest, declarative existence. Content is not about producing frustrations in order to need satisfactions. Content is

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what it is and is wholesome for that. To be conscious of what one is is to be content, to be full and empty all at once, to acknowledge what is and what is not. This is our formula; if we have a problem it is because we have need for a problem so that we can seek an answer. If we do not produce the need for a problem or an answer then we are content, we are an emptiness filled with content. This book has been a million, million questions and a million, million attempts at answers, but it has also been a book, it has content, it contains what it knows within the confines of itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book-like form. But it is not a book at the same time, it is a vehicle upon which I can move my soul from here to there. But it is a book. I am transporting myself out of this body and converting my self into a book so that I have content and am content. This book is me and it can then be given, so it becomes charity. I have given myself to it and thus it may then, in its portable form, be given to someone else. It is an autobiography in an entirely new self; I am converting what I am into some new mode of existence, am converting my knowledge into some new form, am performing the alchemistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;sâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; trick. But there is one thing that has not been written down here. You do not know how this has left my body, do not know my new state, my new formulation. You cannot see what happens when a person converts what they are into something else to be free of it, to give it content. But I am there; the book has transported me to where I needed to go, to a place where there is no need, no want, no value, no meaning. A content.

So I draw to a close, or do I approach the beginning again? Will I write another book, be converted into another book, become another book or have need to start once I have finished? Is my

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knowledge still broken and does it need to be repaired? What is the truth of desire or is desire destined to be something other than honesty? I do not need these questions; desire is not need, desire is the want of something that one has forgotten. So to be content one must perfect the act of memory. All of our ills, our existential quandaries, problems and difficulties have been caused by our poor memories. We must remember that which is our content in order to be content once more. We must forget how to forget and remember how to remember, (perfect formulation.) Use me, read me, allow me to enter into you, do not judge, but use. This is knowledge and no one has the right or ability to judge knowledge. In fact, to ‘judge’ knowledge shows how inappropriate our comportment to knowledge has become. We do not need to judge. Our decisions can be based upon something other than weighing up the alternatives in order to move toward the best possible world. This method, this formulation for achieving possible worlds always results in failure, in compromising. This is why a very intelligent person will admit that ‘Peace’ is impossible, is an ideological notion and nothing more. He or she will always arrive at this conclusion because their knowledge and action is always based upon compromise, upon failure. My higher knowledge says that not only is ‘Peace’ possible, but that it is necessary and beautiful. ‘Possible’ is not even a proper usage of the concept. It has no use value; it is a good in itself and if it is good then it must be. If you cannot reason that ‘Peace’ is a necessity then your reason is diseased, that you are diseased and you have become desperate and without meaning. This is why cleverness means stupidity, for it arrives at nothing. Knowledge should always arrive at something; itself. This is why ‘Peace’ is not only possible but actual. It is our

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reason that cannot make it work because our reason is not good enough. If we were healthy and strong enough in our minds we would be able not only to create ‘Peace’, but would also be able to say why it was good and what good is. If we cannot do this with our minds, if our minds are not strong enough to perceive what good is and why it must be, if they cannot perceive meaning above and beyond selfish needs and desires, if they cannot have knowledge in and for itself, means that we are brain-damaged. We should exercise more. Our minds and reasons are fat and unhealthy and should get more air. If one cannot formulate in one’s mind a notion of ‘Peace’ that does not work or is not necessary, then it just means that one has never experienced Love, means that one is conceited in one’s knowledge and makes an admission that one’s knowledge cannot be put to any other use than self-gratification.

This has been a marathon. I am exhausted and I anticipate the euphoria that one experiences when one has finished running. But it has taken no effort more than normal thinking. It has just meant that I had to face up to what I think and see it for how it sounds, which is more than most people do anyway. I always judge these ‘other people’, but if I truly desire peace, if my desire is able to stretch to beyond satisfaction, if I desire to go where there is no end, if my desire reaches its highest formulation, (the absolute,) I am obliged to acknowledge that I am all people and all things all in one, and that oneness means wholeness, to be at one with and not apart from. I have no regrets at admitting openly that I Love God, because we have been together and always will be together because that is the meaning of ‘always’ and ‘together.’ Anybody who understands this also understands that the word ‘God’ is the same

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as ‘everything’, ‘together’, and in fact all other words that we are able to use. God is not an entity; we are entities. God is God and no existential discourse can erase the fact that the word God means God and does not correspond to an entity. We are only wrong so that we can be right; a most profound truth of the human condition. But I can see an end to this backwards-forwards formulation of the instinct to know, and I am doing it, I am working it out gradually. I am making my own meanings because I am not ‘content’ with the way that they already are within me. They must be mine or they will not mean anything. So I am now producing my own values. If you cannot see the values that I can see in this book, can you see your own values or somebody else’s? Are your values conceited or is it mine? If all I sought in this life was to love then I have achieved the end point and final meaning of life. But I have turned back to give love to everyone else. Everything that you need to know is right here. If you can accept what is written beyond what the voice in your head is telling you, then you will find Love, you will find that Knowledge is Love, that Philosophy is livingknowledge, knowledge-as-matter. Despair is its own ecstasy. You are your own problem. But admit that this is true and love what you are. If you can accept and love what you are, you will also be able to accept and love what everyone else is. I am telling you how to fall in love, but I have also shown you how to despair. This means that despair and love have co-existed in the framework of this book, in this conscious entity, and thus does this mean that the two must be accepted as the same thing, as the same word. Straighten out your desire, then straighten our your knowledge of desire. If you are able to desire knowledge that is good, you will be able to do so once your knowledge is upright and angles toward it.

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Knowledge is power and love also. Because knowledge means acceptance, it also means that acceptance means love, and that love can mean anything. It is the perfect synonym. This is why the Jews have searched for the name of God; because it is all names and all words, because it is all things, because it is acceptance. To know God does not mean to know some piece of knowledge or to know some kind of invisible entity; it means to know everything, to unfold the portal of the mind and to pass a mountain through it. And why stop at a mountain? This is true power; power does not come from fear; it comes from Love. Because God is Love and Love is Power means that God is all-powerful and all-loving. ‘God’ means that we are able to use words meaningfully and to act meaningfully and to do meaningfully. God is a word that effects all words. God is only a word and it does not correspond to some invisible entity.

And so I draw to the beginning, as motion becomes less and less possible across infinite subdivision of time and space, as the universe grinds to a halt in the space of a moment. “A perfect mirror is what self reflection is.” But now I have caught my own reflection, permanently and forever. Now the germ of the truth is trapped here in the words with no way to escape. “So this is what Truth looks like when it is written down; looks pretty much like anything else to be honest, looks just like a book to me.” Ah well, I shall keep writing/reading until I find it again, whether it be in a thousand million years or if it is next Tuesday. I will look until I find what I lost. Until I can believe not only myself, but you also. So I pass the book back to Daniel, who sits in the corner of this bar in London beneath the houseplant. It may have been the book of

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my life but it was not very conclusive. Truth hurts, (but only if you step on it.) Daniel spoke to himself, showed himself the book of his life, how he was caught there looking back at himself, how he wrote it only so he could read it and this was its meaning. This is what happens when one exists only in words, when one looks for the answer in the question, when Love and Despair are the same word, when front and back have the same motion, when the firsthalf mirrors the second-half perfectly so that one cannot discriminate between the two. This is what happens when one writes the book of life with oneself as the main character, when one exists to write because of writing. This is what you look like, Daniel. You have been caught in the mirror and you cannot escape. You are the Moebius strip, the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. This is the realisation of this book; that only when you get to the end do you arrive at the beginning, perfectly forgetting what has gone before, perfectly mirroring the start. This is what happens when you start something just so that you can finish it. This is the limitation of our ambition on this world and in this life. This book has meant nothing except itself. If you have the time, count the words in the first half and you will see that there is the same in the second. It is because a reflection is what we are and that we are a reflection. This book is now conscious because it has learned to recognise itself in the mirror.

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