Links to the files of
which follow the remarks below:–
This
collection of short prose, written on and off during the winter of 1980-81, starts
in a relatively literary fashion with the account of a clandestine visit of a
masseuse to a priest who can no longer cope with his celibacy, and ends in a
profoundly futuristic manner with an account of evolutionary progress towards a
definitive Beyond, as envisaged by a radical philosopher, who regards his
thinking as being beyond, though not necessarily above, everybody else. In between, there comes a fairly balanced
alternation between fictional and philosophical subjects ... as we follow the
voyeuristic pleasures and musings of a man covertly watching his wife getting
dressed from the comfort of his early-morning bed; explore the evolutionary
revelations of a de Chardinesquegnostic
in the face of atheistic unbelief; witness the existentialist horror of a Mondrianesque ascetic, whose rural daytrip out of London
with some friends proves to be more unsettling than he had first bargained for;
and go beyond conventional concepts of the Millennium, as of Millennialism,
with a revolutionary thinker who believes that only when, in general terms,
human brains become artificially supported and sustained to a transcendent end
will there be any prospect of heavenly salvation of a definitive order! – John O'Loughlin.
John O'Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic
of Ireland,
of Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split partly due to his mother's Aldershot origins (her father, a Presbyterian from Donegal, had served in the British Army),
he was brought to England by his mother and ethnically-protective grandmother (who upon the premature death of her husband had initially returned to Ireland after a lengthy marital absence from Athenry) in the mid-50s and, having had the benefit of private tuition from a Catholic priest, subsequently attended St. Joseph's and St. George's RC schools in Aldershot, Hants, and, with an enforced change of
denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been sent to a children's home
by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his grandmother, he went on to attend first Barrow Hedges Primary School in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and then Carshalton High School for Boys. Upon leaving the latter in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an
assortment of CSEs
(Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs
(General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London and went on, via two short-lived
jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford
Square, where, with some prior experience himself of having sat and passed (with merit) an ABRSM Gd.4 piano exam, he eventually became responsible for booking examination venues throughout Britain and Ireland.
After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled to study English and History, he returned to his former job in the West End
but, due to a combination of personal factors, left the Associated Board in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which,
despite a brief spell as a computer tutor at Hornsey Management Agency (affiliated to Hornsey YMCA) in the late '80s and
early '90s, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), An Interview
Reviewed (1979), Secret
Exchanges (1980), Sublimated
Relations(1981), and Deceptive
Motives (1981). Since the mid-80s John O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to
philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned several titles of a
philosophical nature, including Devil and
God (1985–6), Towards
the Supernoumenon(1987), Elemental Spectra (1988–9), Philosophical Truth (1991–2) and,
more recently, The Best
of All Possible Worlds (2008), The Centre of Truth
(2009), Insane but not Mad (2011) and Philosophic Flights of Poetic Fancy (2012).
