CYCLE FORTY-ONE

1. The autocratic nature of (conventional) television is such that one can do no more than change dictators ... as one switches from one channel to another.

2. I like to think, perhaps somewhat subjectively, of the upper-class character of BBC1, the middle-class character of BBC2, the working-class character of ITV, and the classless character of Channel 4. Hence a tendency on my part to avoid, as far as possible, BBC1 and BBC2, with their overly establishment bias.

3. The sadness of our age (the late-twentieth and early twenty-first century) is due in no small part to the dominating role of television and video and/or cinema, which suck the life out of people as they gaze vacuously at the screen, itself a product, in conventional systems, of a technological vacuum, viz. the cathode-ray tube.

4. If there is to be a joyful age, it will not be one in which people are dominated by television and/or film but, rather, one in which people are free from the heathen lights and able, in consequence, to cultivate their spirit, moving from the 'Kingdom Without' to the 'Kingdom Within'. For only once the latter has been firmly established ... can one move beyond the self to the universal self ... of airy Heaven.

5. By contrast to the universal self ... of airy Heaven, film corresponds to a universal not-self ... of starry Antiheaven and/or Antihell, an artificial manifestation of the Clear Light of Space and/or Clear Heat of Time, which constrains its devotees to an optical and/or aural vacuum.

6. Where the cosmic Clear Light of Space is effectively Jehovahesque in its primal divinity, the filmic Clear Light of Space is Marxian in its correspondence to the more artificial primal divinity of a superheathen age - the age, by and large, of the cinema.

7. The 'fall' of cinema from the Marxian Clear Light of Space to the Bolshevik Clear Heat of Time is traceable, it seems to me, to the advent of, first, sound and, then, colour, with an ever-more degenerate regression culminating, so to speak, in the score-ridden and unashamedly explosive spectacles of contemporary film.