Mainly About Myself

MAINLY ABOUT MYSELF (1985)

Living with the proletariat I haven't become a proletarian so much as learnt to understand them better. There is a world of difference between a shepherd-type and a sheep-type; the former is studious and hard-working, the latter ... self-indulgent and lazy. The shepherd-type remains outside the cultural 'promised land' of the moment; the sheep-type lives in it, as in a sheep pen. Clashes of interest inevitably occur between the one and the other. But no man has a right to consider himself worthy of leading the proletariat, in whatever capacity, who has not dwelt among them for a considerable period of time and learnt their ways! That man who knows little or nothing about the proletariat is their natural enemy.

Knowing the proletariat as I do, it is evident to me that their cultural self-indulgence is in line with the demands and direction of evolutionary progress. There are those of the proletariat, however, who are less given to cultural self-enrichment, more violent and competitive. Some of them are low and evil, unduly sarcastic; but many of them are persevering and tolerant and comparatively meek, while some are simply of a temperament and physical build that would find its self-realization either in the army or the police. You could regard these latter as potential sheepdog-types, and doubtless a revolutionary transformation of society would draw most of them into uniforms of one kind or another.

I still read a great deal, drawing on information from both books and magazines, which I reserve for the evening. Most of my reading from books is of a political nature these days, but I also find time for the odd novel - usually a work by Lawrence Durrell or Anthony Burgess. Enjoyable? Yes, in a way. But I no longer possess that enthusiasm for novels I had, say, 10-15 years ago. In fact, I now despise the genre as somehow too bourgeois or democratic, and to some extent this even applies to my own handful of novels, written over a six-year stretch, before I turned to higher things; though I suppose they are rather more what one could call 'supernovelistic', and hence effectively metaphysical, than genuinely literary. Certainly I began my literary career more as an antinovelist than a novelist, having previously come under the culturally disruptive influences of authors like James Joyce and Henry Miller, both of whom I now despise.

I find I can read magazines like Playboy, Mayfair, and Penthouse from cover to cover, though obviously not all in one go but ... in thirty-minute stints each evening. As a youth, I bought such magazines specifically for their models, hoping to find at least one girl whom I could spiritually as well as physically admire. Now, while still taking an interest in the girls, I buy these magazines primarily because there is plenty to read in them, even if not all of it is to my taste. Where formerly I could throw a magazine away without having read even one article, I now feel that I am cheating or depriving myself if I don't read everything, or almost everything, in them. And I don't throw the magazines away either, but pride myself, contrary to my previous practice, on collecting them, as if to say: 'Here is something more radical and progressive than books which, to a degree, has taken over from books in my cultural identity, just as, where music is concerned, cassettes have taken over from records.

As it happens most of my books, cassettes, and records come, these days, from the local library, which is conveniently close. The library also possesses a magazine rack which serves me quite well on Saturdays, when I go there specifically for the purpose of reading from a variety of publications - newspapers, periodicals, and magazines - like Le Monde (my French is passable, if only in reading), The Listener, The Spectator, Connoisseur, Art International, and The Socialist Standard. Most of them are bourgeois, and hence ideologically limited. But I can still derive a certain amount of intellectual pleasure and/or useful information from a perusal of their more appealing contents. I have to admit that I prefer The Listener to The Spectator, both from a current affairs and a cultural point-of-view, not to mention the quality of the paper and printing. (Fritz Spiegl's 'End Piece' is often fascinating, though rarely enlightening - in contrast, you might say, to Chris Welch's enlightening, though rarely fascinating, 'Centrepiece'.)

At one time I borrowed mainly classics from the record department of the library, but over the years I had exhausted most of the more appealing and, to my mind, best-recorded material available, so that, willy-nilly, I was obliged to progress, in due course, to the Jazz and Rock sections - in that order. Consequently, for the past year or so, I have borrowed nothing but Jazz and Rock, and I consider this indicative of an ideological sharpening and closed-society attitude, as if to say: classics are now beneath my pale, since too bourgeois and ... naturalistic.

So if one lives in a radical, i.e. urban, environment and is therefore (or inherently) an evolutionary type, one improves oneself by degrees - the raison d'être, I suppose, of being alive. Or perhaps a raison d'être would be nearer the truth for me, since I also have ideological motives to consider. But it is really me who is being improved and doing the improving; for I am well aware that such an environment can and does worsen others.

In similar fashion, through a process of ideological evolution, I have put myself 'beyond the pale' of painterly art, including the most abstract examples. Formerly, I took a scholarly interest in it. Now I simply see it as bourgeois, limited in time and space, a form under siege from light art and completely transcended by holography. As well identify with parliamentary democracy as ... take an interest in paintings!

But as a self-professed Social Transcendentalist, I am in no position to rave about abstract art or any other kind of painting, modern or traditional. If I had my political way, I would have such art banned and the existing masterpieces either auctioned off on the gullible bourgeoisie overseas - and for a tidy price - or, failing that, destroyed. There would be no place for open-society conservationism!

This is something that would apply no less to bourgeois records, books, and magazines - in short, to all modes of culture on the democratic open-society level and/or beneath it. Not to mention modes of anticulture on the specifically proletarian, and hence Marxist, level. For instance, I would certainly support a ban on the sale of The Socialist Standard, which is but a semi-anarchic, mass-democratic periodical of little or no value, politically or culturally, to the ideologically evolved.

Often, when reading this periodical at the local library, I have been brought close to boiling-point by the political stupidity and naiveté therein displayed! Sometimes I have felt the opposite emotion - a desire to burst out laughing, so ludicrous was the political content of the article(s) in question. Occasionally, though, I may happen upon an article of real critical value and insight, a résumé, say, of some aspect of modern history or an exposé of the hypocrisy of the British Labour Movement, and then I am virtually at one with it. Were it not for such articles, there would be no point in my continuing to read. But, on balance, The Socialist Standard doesn't make it with me, which is why, given the opportunity, I would have it banned. For I am, after all, the representative of supertruth, and where supertruth is ... there can be no lies - not even superlies!

Were I to vote in a British General Election - a thing, incidentally, I haven't done since 1974, when I plumped for Thorpe's Liberals in preference to the Scylla of Wilson's Labour Party and the Charybdis of Heath's Conservatives - I expect I would cast in my lot with the Social Democrats [latterly Liberal Democrats], if only because they signify the possibility of an end to the traditional two-party parliamentary rivalry of the idealistic Conservatives, or Tories, and the materialistic Democratic Socialists ... of the Labour Party, in a sort of superrealism. But, frankly, I don't have much confidence in their prospects of long-term success; for no matter how beneficial to Britain superrealism or, if you prefer, superliberalism may seem on paper, in reality Britain is too decadent to be anything but post-state in its political integrity.

One might say that Britain entered its political decline from the day that the Liberal Party was eclipsed by the Labour Party and realism began to fade into the political background ... as a post-state dichotomy between materialistic socialism and idealistic conservatism became the parliamentary norm, a norm growing ever more dichotomous with the passing decades, British society fissured down the middle in a political nuclear fission, too late now to reverse the process of decline and attempt to bring the sundered extremes back together again in a democratic realism of superliberal unity, the endeavour noble but ... ultimately doomed to failure beneath the mounting pressures of political extremism, a struggle against the treacherous current of political decadence ... bearing everything down towards the rocks of socialist barbarism, against which both bourgeois idealism and bourgeois realism, not to mention bourgeois materialism, will probably be dashed to pieces.

Were I to vote for the Social Democrats, I would be voting for a lost cause, just as in 1974. The fact that I haven't voted since then is not only a reflection of my pessimism with regard to British politics, but an indication of my developing supertheocratic allegiance to Social Transcendentalism, and consequent inclination to regard myself as a Social Transcendentalist, for whom democratic allegiances are irrelevant.

To continue the argument, one might say that Social Transcendentalism is my idealism, a superidealism having future applicability, the way I see it, to Eire and to countries capable of and entitled to supertheocratic upgrading. The great superidealistic opponent of communism, which one might identify, by contrast, with supermaterialism. However, a dichotomy has long existed in me between the ideal and the real, and whilst I may identify with the ideal in theory ... I would be capable, I suspect, of supporting the real in practice, in this case the superrealism of Social Democracy, since I reside, at the time of writing, in Britain, not Eire.

Mad? Schizophrenic? Possibly. But such a dichotomy is my reality, one might almost say my norm, since I inherited from my briefly-married parents a division, inherent in themselves, between the real and the ideal, the practical and the theoretical, in the form of a working-class/middle-class, British-Irish/Gaelic-Irish division, a division which, on both counts, has ever cut me off from a majority of people, both British and Irish, and contributed to my becoming something of an arch-loner.

Thus what I believe in theory doesn't necessarily connect with what I do, or might do, in practice. And yet it is possible that my idealism, developed to a certain point, could turn against my realism, as seems already to be the case, and oblige me to take an anti-realist stance to a degree that would cut me off from and lead to the destruction of the real, in the name of an idealistic absolutism.

Certainly, this tendency would mature were I to return to Eire, the country of my birth, and put down stronger idealistic roots. For I am predominantly Gaelic-Irish, probably by as much as three-quarters, and am only too aware that my realism is bolstered by long residence in Britain, as if England obliged me to emphasize that part of my totality not only at the expense of the other but ... out of all proportion to its true worth! Irish residence would, I am confident, quickly deflate it, placing due emphasis on my idealism.

It is not unusual for people - neighbours, shopkeepers, librarians, and the like - to take me for a Jew, and this in spite of my quintessentially Irish name. It is not as if I particularly look like a Jew ... so much as the fact that I am perceived to be both very intelligent and highly cultured, which is something that an Englishman, in particular, is reluctant to identify with the Irish. After all, did not the English oppress the Irish for centuries, so how therefore can an Irishman be more intelligent and cultured than an Englishman? He was always deprived and kept down, reduced to a kind of subhuman level, whereas the Englishman not too busy oppressing the Irish, or any other unfortunate race, was relatively free to cultivate the intellect, with cultural superiority the inevitable consequence.

Well, such shallow reasoning may even today underline majority British thinking about the Irish, but the fact is that, commonplace views aside, my intellectual and cultural superiority - such as it is - does not derive from my being a Jew but, on the contrary, an Irishman of, on my father's side, intellectual stock who was raised in England and therefore acquired, in addition to a British education, an English accent and cultural lifestyle. If I do not sound like an Irishman, it is because I am, in some respects, an Hiberno-Englishman, comparatively free from Catholic indoctrination and the limitations, culturally or otherwise, that often attend it.

And yet I must admit that by far the greater part of my education derives from library books, magazines, records, etc., and that I'm consequently more self-taught than teacher-taught, as also in the profounder sense of being one's own teacher ... through writing. I have been careful not to succumb to English prejudices inherent in an English education, preferring to use a basic education - which is all, in any case, High School ever gave me - in the service of a private and largely non-English education derived from various foreign and external sources, Irish included.

For, deep down, I have not become English, and I mean this in more than an ethnic sense. I have always been conscious of being an Irishman in England, even though I have lived in Britain since the age of approximately two-and-a-half. And this is because my father's influence is stronger, both ethnically and class-wise, than my mother's, making me unwilling to identify with England. As if to say, one came from too noble and mentally strong a family, too Gaelic a family, to be disposed to taking a complacent view of an English identification! Fools can be absorbed into the bloodstream of the English nation, whether under the banner of Marxism or democracy or whatever, but not a man like me, for whom history is an ever-present reality ... demanding ethnic fidelity. It was not I who brought myself to England, but my pro-British and effectively half-Protestant mother, and consequently it is not for me to consider myself an Englishman but an Irishman in exile, awaiting a favourable opportunity to return to the land of his birth.

But when or under what circumstances would that be? As far as I am concerned ... as soon as I'm in a position, both financially and psychologically, to return to Ireland on independent terms, able to avoid undue exposure to or influence by religious tradition. For if exile in England has given me anything, it is freedom from everything traditional in Irish life, a freedom to formulate a new faith and an overwhelming desire to offer that faith to the Irish people in due course, in order that they may be lifted out of the comparative darkness of a Roman Catholic past and into the light of a Social Transcendentalist future, free from God the Father, the Virgin Mary, Christ, and other such Bible-derived entities ... to develop pure spirit in the name of the (self-styled) Second Coming, who offers them religious sovereignty in the true form of self-realization ... that they may tend towards the spiritual climax of evolution in a future Beyond.

Yes, if I offer them this divine freedom, it is because long exile in England deprived me of a consistently Irish Catholic upbringing and obliged me to either accept or reject Protestantism. Being of Irish race, I rejected the abstract god of the Protestants, but could no longer identify with the concrete god of the Catholic Church, from which religion I had been wrenched at the tender age of ten ... when my Catholic maternal grandmother died and my mother, relatively free of sectarian scruples and anxious to get me out of the way (not altogether unreasonably in some respects, since we only had one room in the lodging house we inhabited, and I was growing too big to continue sharing the same bed with her, which was the only bed in the room), packed me off to a Protestant Children's Home in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey.

I can still recall the shocked letter I wrote to my mother shortly after arriving there, in which I informed her, in no uncertain terms, that the House Parents, being Baptist, were of the 'wrong faith', and that it was therefore necessary to take me away from the place as quickly as possible - a letter soon to be confiscated, unfortunately, by a suspicious House Parent, but one which, even if posted, would probably not have had the slightest influence on her. How could it have? My last Catholic connection had disappeared with my grandmother's death, so I was abandoned to the Protestant lions, thereafter to be systematically indoctrinated in the Baptist faith.

I needn't have worried. I was anything but partial to nonconformist (heretical) Christianity, and found the ideal of conversion to its Christ ludicrous. Only half-wits, I thought, became Christians and made a public show of the fact by getting baptized. I was never a half-wit but always too much of a whole wit or, at any rate, three-quarter wit to be a sheep to the Baptist slaughter. I had been regarded as a 'tough nut to crack' and, to be sure, I was to prove, in the end, too tough for even the most obdurate 'nut-cracker' to succeed with me. I was impervious to Baptist assaults on my Catholic sensibility, and when I was finally released from the Children's Home, seven years later, into a grubby hostel, I had not the slightest desire ever to set foot inside a Baptist church again!

But if I hadn't been converted to the Baptist faith, this form of nonconformism had very firmly severed me from my Catholic roots. I could no more desire entry into a Catholic church. Henceforth, I was on my own, and I would either sink into Marxist materialism or swim on a current of superidealism yet to be fully forged. I was destined for the latter!

But not without ups and downs, diversions and experimentations. For there was a time, a few years ago, when I considered myself a Marxist or, at any rate, socialist, even if one who had an interest in oriental mysticism and transcendental values generally. I was never an out-and-out materialist, nor, if on none other than ethnic grounds, could I ever become such. For one thing, I despised the mob too much, and for another ... I could never abide the reduction of art to the mundane level of proletarian propaganda. I had a feeling that Marxism meant the assertion of what is lowest in life by the lowest for the lowest in a world that would end, if Marxism triumphed, in a barbarous dead-end of proletarian mediocrity. Clearly, there had to be some alternative to Marxism, and I was determined to discover it!

Buddhism, however, was not enough; for I quickly discerned in this oriental religion - as in various others - an inability to come to terms with evil, an indifference to evil, bordering on the ridiculous, in self-centred contemplation. No matter if one were to meditate every day for hours at a stretch, evil still existed and would continue to exist, becoming ever more confident of its goals and capable, at some point in time, of opposing the meditator and, if necessary, eliminating him. Besides, personal salvation, the ideal that every man must take care of his own soul and practise meditation, had a bourgeois elitist ring to it. For if the meditator took himself off to his little private retreat specifically for the purpose of cultivating his soul, he could say to the world: 'Blow you Jack, I'm alright', which would be true up to a point. But not ultimately so! For I soon discovered, by a combination of reason and practice, that, by itself, meditation was inadequate to truly save the soul, since it dwelt in the brain and would ever remain there until the body killed it off.

Clearly, if the soul was to survive and attain to the heavenly Beyond, something would have to be done about the body. We would have to kill off the body, so to speak, as we progressed to a stage of life when human brains were artificially supported and just as artificially sustained in collectivized contexts. This theory, concerning the first of two projected post-human life forms, led me to abandon all interest in Buddhism, which is no more than a dualistic religion, with trinitarian distinctions between Ground, Buddha, and Clear Light of the Void, and pursue my unique destiny as the forger and champion of a true world religion which I came, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, to call Centerism or Centrism, since I envisaged it being conducted largely within the context of a meditation centre, the successor, as far as I was concerned, to Christian churches and in particular to the Catholic Church, while being politically furthered and supported by Social Transcendentalism, its ideological front-line.

Was there a blueprint for or prototype of this politico-religious ideology? Yes, I believe there was, and for a time, before I forged unique terminology together with a new and purer religious orientation, I fell under the spell of Fascism/National Socialism, particularly as developed and furthered by Adolf Hitler. Indeed, I even thought of myself as an Irish National Socialist or, rather, Social Nationalist, just as I had previously considered myself to be a Marxist and a Buddhist. But I soon realized that while Fascism served a purpose in the evolution of my own thought ... it was essentially a thing of the past, never to be resurrected on anything like identical terms in the future. What mattered was the creation of a superior ideology stemming, in some degree, from it or, at any rate, from what was best in it, including its opposition to Communism.

And so, inevitably, I came to see Fascism as a milestone on the road to Centrism, a crude approximation to the true religion, with Hitler as a kind of bogus messiah who, instead of saving the German people, eventually led them to damnation, whether through his own fault or the overwhelming military superiority of his democratic enemies ... I shall not say. But National Socialism, lacking the kind of religious insights I have developed and now equate with supertruth, could never have won. Mein Kampf may have been a crude, Germanic approximation to the Bible of the Second Coming, but it was ultimately inadequate to serve the future salvation of the world in a true religion. Even if Hitler had survived the War and proceeded to work out his religious views, as he had apparently intended to do, he would not have got much nearer to supertruth, being fundamentally too pagan to have broken free of the Creator, or some such Father-equivalent, in the name of the Holy Ghost.

No, quite apart from personal limitations, Hitler would have been limited by large sections of the German people themselves, including Aryan 'blond beasts', who would inevitably have revolted at too transcendental a religion. Had he been born into some other, darker people ... things might have developed slightly differently. But Nazism was always paradoxically torn between the great realistic iceberg of German tradition and its own revolutionary tip of anti-Marxist idealism, with the iceberg to a large extent conditioning the formulation of the ideology. I abandoned Fascism with no less relief than, earlier, I had abandoned Marxism. For I had discovered that race and ideology are deeply intertwined - in fact, inextricably connected.

Speaking as a Social Transcendentalist, I do not speak for the British or the Germans or the Americans or even the Russians necessarily, but, rather, for peoples like the Irish, the Israelis, the Iranians, possibly the Spanish and the Greeks, and various others whom I have 'chosen' to work together in the name of a truly global religion. I am aware that the Way will be hard, that nationalist interests will oppose the development of supra-national Centrism in the countries concerned, not least of all in Eire; but I am in no doubt that the Will of that which most corresponds to a Second Coming will eventually triumph over bourgeois reaction. For there is no real alternative from the evolutionary standpoint, and only religious progress will make the lives of the peoples in question any better.

Those who are primarily interested in materially bettering themselves at the expense of the people cannot expect to survive much longer. The entire bourgeois world will be overcome, all atomic materialism erased in the name of evolutionary progress. In some countries it will be some form of socialism which erases it, in others ... Social Transcendentalism. Either way, the materialistic worldly traditions will perish, and everything bourgeois along with them!

Just imagine a world, if you dare, where there are no orchestras and conductors, no cotton suits and leather shoes, no skirts and dresses, high-heels and make-up, ties and shirts, sculptures and paintings, records and hardbacks, museums and art galleries, landlords and lodging houses, universities and academies, dogs and cats, cigarettes and joints, pipes and cigars, wine and beer, whisky and gin, magazines and newspapers, bullets and bombs, banks and currencies, armies and navies, plutocrats and aristocrats, monarchs and royals, parliaments and politicians, churches and priests, cars and buses, bicycles and horses, fires and matches, strikes and unions, pubs and restaurants, marriages and divorces, heterosexuals and homosexuals, prisons and lunatic asylums, trees and flowers, gardens and fields, building societies and interest rates, stock exchanges and shares, mortgages and houses, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Can you imagine that? Are you in favour of imagining any such thing? Or are you a bourgeois reactionary with no desire but to perpetuate the liberal status quo! Time will divide the chaff from the wheat, the sheep from the goats, and there can be no escape!

Those who are not for me are against me, whether directly, as bourgeois, or indirectly, as socialists. I know that the reckoning with bourgeois materialism must come first, and that socialists are entitled to pursue their destiny at its expense, just as Centrists will be obliged to pursue their destiny mainly at the expense of religious fundamentalism in the Middle East. Socialists and Centrists will need to work together, to co-operate in the short term, in pursuance of their respective interests.

History has witnessed the implementation of a Final Solution from a closed-society crudely supertheocratic point-of-view ... with regard to the Jews - a religio-tribal designation upheld in loyalty to Zion; German Jews, French Jews, not (except in comparatively rare instances) Jewish Germans or Jewish Frenchmen - and we are obliged to perceive in their religious nobility the seeds of their destruction under Nazism. Many surviving Jews, wiser than before, subsequently became Israelis, and thus escaped the curse of diaspora tribalism. Others remained Jews - French Jews, German Jews, etc. - and are still so today. Eventually, it is to be hoped that most Jews will become Social Transcendentalists, either in Israel or in those countries most likely destined for Centrist upgrading, and a Social Transcendentalist is first and foremost an ideologue, not a national, and most emphatically not a tribalist!

There can be no such thing, in other words, as a Jewish Social Transcendentalist. Only an Israeli or Irish or Iranian Social Transcendentalist in a Centrist Federation. It will not be the Jews who are found wanting or caught beneath a closed-society supertheocratic pale, but, in all probability, certain other races, tribal groupings, esoteric sects, and so on, who, for a variety of reasons, cannot be directly assimilated to the ideology.

'... Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven' - the most significant line of the 'Lord's Prayer'. Yet how ironical that so many of those who mouth this hope, or who have mouthed it in the past, would be among the first to oppose me, to prevent the democratically-engineered mass overthrow of democracy and all the open-society and autocratic phenomena that go with it ... in the interests of the liberal status quo! All those self-righteous Christians will proclaim to the sky their belief in and hope for the Second Coming. But who is this Second Coming - the literal return of Christ? Assuredly not! Only a fool would believe that a man who died on the Cross in Roman times was going to return to the world some two-thousand years later, irrespective of the theological legitimacy of the Resurrection.

Reincarnation of the same person with the same name, features, and race is a myth. If the concept of reincarnation has any validity, it can only be to the metaphorical extent that a type, a particular temperament, a specific destiny ... will return to the world at periodic intervals, when and if such a type, temperament, destiny, or whatever is required. Very well, Christ was one messiah, a bringer of salvation through His self, and I like to think of myself as another, a more advanced messiah, if you will, in the evolution of messiahs, who brings salvation through his self for others to realize in their selves, a destiny analogous to Christ's but on a higher, more absolute plane of religious evolution, with the emphasis on the people saving their selves through self-realization.

To me, the Second Coming stands in an antithetical relationship to the Virgin Mary, a deity which I like to think of as 'the minor subnatural'. For if the Father is defined as 'the major subnatural' and Christ as 'the natural', i.e. symptomatic of an atomic compromise between the Father and the Holy Ghost, then the Second Coming corresponds to 'the minor supernatural' and the Holy Ghost to 'the major supernatural' which, in all probability, is destined to materialize, as it were, at the climax of evolution. The Catholic Christ, however, is not 'the natural' or, rather, 'major natural', independent of the Blessed Virgin, but 'the minor natural', a baby in His Mother's arms, an idealistic Christ overshadowed by the 'subnatural' Virgin.

Well, it's not difficult, from all this, to see which people will support a Second Coming who proclaims himself 'the minor supernatural', in relation to the (future) Holy Ghost, and has no truck with Christian naturalism. Certainly, this second messiah is not appealing to or expecting the backing of hard-line Protestants! He appeals, on the contrary, to an extreme people in the name of a new and antithetical extremism, substituting for a sub-theocratic past a supertheocratic future. I am, of course, referring here to the Catholic Irish, from whose loins I sprang.

And I tell you, when I drink a bottle of wine, as I sometimes do on Saturday evening in order to relax myself for a little music-listening and television-viewing, it is almost always Liebfraumilch that I drink, with a picture of the Virgin and Child on the label, as if to confirm a Catholic bias. Never do I drink beer, which I associate with a Protestant bias, and I have no use for hard liquor. I like the sweetness and smoothness of white wine, and I drink it not because I really want to, but because it temporarily alleviates the tension from which I suffer in consequence of having been alone in the sordid milieu of my particular part of north London for so long. It sensualizes my scalp, so to speak, and thus enables me to soak-up electronic bombardments from my record-player or television or radio or cassette-player with seeming impunity.

For one night of the week I, a fish out of provincial water, a deep-sea fish languishing in the urban shallows, am relatively free from tension and inhibitions, free to relax on my own relatively more sophisticated cultural terms. But I would be incapable of drinking wine for its own sake, and I wager that were I to return to Ireland, I would soon abandon its use in favour of a more natural and lasting cure for tension!

Never having made love to a woman, I remain, at thirty-three (33), a virgin. Youth gave me unrequited love and London has given me solitude. Were I not technically a virgin, how could I lay claim to be the Second Coming? Indeed, how would I have got to my Social Transcendentalist level of thought, if I had had a woman hanging around my neck all these years? Spiritually, you are limited by your sexual habits and lifestyle; if they are conventional, then your spiritual status will be conventional, which is to say, naturalistic and atomic. My sexual habits, to the limited extent that I ever indulged in any, have always been radical, which is to say, connected with erotic photography, and therefore my spirituality is radical, since I am free to think what I choose, not what a woman would prefer me to think or what I would probably think if tied to one and saddled with children. In me, the supernatural has triumphed over the natural; for no matter what mental or even physical pain I suffer from being alone, I suffer in God's name ... as one who has put a maximum premium on spiritual freedom!

Even if I am destined to die to the spirit in order to be reborn in the flesh ... of worldly time, I shall have accomplished my theoretical task ... of a Second Coming equivalent ... in the name of supertruth. No less than 'In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was God', meaning the Old Testament equivalent of the Father, viz. Jehovah, can it be said that 'In the End was the Word, and the Word was God', meaning the Second Coming. What happens to me in the flesh is relatively unimportant, since I am not here to be worshipped in the flesh but comprehended and obeyed in the word of the spirit.

The 'I' writing this is the 'I' of the messianic Second Coming, not the personal 'I' of the concrete individual. Such a personal self will cry out - and does from time to time - in the name of the natural, the flesh, aghast at the suffering that denial of the flesh in the name of the greater 'I' has entailed. But this greater 'I' is indifferent to the flesh and its sufferings, and that is why it is God made manifest in the Word - the closest thing to the Holy Spirit. Call it persona or superpersona, if you prefer; but it is this professional, messianic 'I' which has triumphed over the small 'I' in the creation of supertruth.

God begins and ends in these and other such pages. Those who wish to know God on the level of the Second Coming will have to read my work. Yet by then I will already, in all likelihood, have died to the spirit and been reborn in the flesh ... of worldly time.