04-08/04/13

Authentic writing tends to follow from the thought. Writing for writing's sake, on the other hand, tends to reflect a degree of thoughtlessness and is fundamentally vapid.

I am a thinker/writer, an artist-philosopher. Period.

Slaves live to work and/or work to live; freemen live to play and/or play to live. Alas, the modern age is par excellence one of slavery, in which the individual is submerged in the collective – company, firm, corporation, organization, movement, school, or whatever – and the collective comes first. Freemen, unfortunately, are the exception to the rule, a rule determined by female-hegemonic criteria in objectivity and sensuality, those twin concretions of somatic licence.

In the modern age, the playboy stands in the somatic shadow of the workman, like a freeman to a slave.

Now what is the modern age but the secular fruit of Protestant schism? A direct consequence of the rejection of religion and, more specifically, of religious idealism in favour of a cynical, fatalistic submission to female domination.

The solution to this dilemma can only come when the Catholic 'dead' are resurrected … under Social Theocratic auspices.

A horrible place crawling with slaves, i.e., workmen. What disgusting noises! Enough to make one puke. Ugh, the anti-like industriousness of these petty creatures!

Culture is a gentle thing, as are the cultured. But consistently confronted by worker brutality, with their incessant noise, they are likely to become embittered. Such is the deplorably base, money-grubbing nature of the age, which puts profit before people and, above all, culture.

One can only be reluctant to write like this, but, then again, what else is one to do in the circumstances?

Of course, one could choose not to think or write at all. But then the bastards would have won … and what good is that?

Yesterday, the plethora of barbarous noises coming from the workmen in the house next-door was so intense and disturbing, especially the low drill grinding away down beside my bed, that even wax earplugs, my customary defence against noise, were of no avail and I just had to get up early in order to get away from the immediate vicinity of the main source of noise, although elsewhere in my flat things were not much better.

I can say, without any reservation, that I was extremely reluctant to stay indoors, never mind write. Yet somehow, with the help of hard rock music, I persevered and got on with some internet-related activity germane to my vocation. But there you are, I was once again in the front line of resistance to whatever they threw at me or, more correctly, inflicted upon themselves as builders, and somehow I survived, survived, I mean, as an artist.

So I live to fight another day. Writing is my weapon in the struggle against barbarity and brutality, philistinism and ignorance, prejudice and greed.

I search in my notebooks for something of note and, lo and behold! I uncover the truth.

Writers who drink heavily, presuming they are not up against really difficult circumstances, are either dissatisfied with themselves as writers or deluded into thinking that alcohol will give them some special insights and even literary wings, so to speak, enabling them to transcend the mundane limitations of diurnal life. In reality, what one is more likely to encounter, in reading such people (though there is no guarantee that a drunk will be published or even publish himself), is the voice of alcohol, not their own voice. Now that voice, besides being somewhat discordant and even raucous, is apt to become a colossal bore, with a kind of selfless impetus that has a momentum of its own but one, alas, that is peculiarly familiar in a world where most people are habituated if not to drinking then at least to taking orders from others and allowing others or other factors, not necessarily alcoholic, to rule their lives and lead them on a merry – or perhaps not so merry – dance.

Accept the world and lose your self (to a woman) or reject the world and discover your self, that is the choice a man must make, and it is of the order of not-being or being, not to be (with another) or to be (with self). Losing your soul (to the world) is likely to leave you feeling empty and dependent, and therefore your own worst enemy (as a man).

The voice of alcohol is not the voice of reason, but the voice of madness, which speaks from the standpoint of 'the other'.

The world is a reflection of female domination, however much this fact may be disguised, in philosophical and other writings, by recourse to such apparent abstractions as 'will' and 'spirit', terms which, in reality, have decidedly concrete implications. As, incidentally, do science and politics, not to mention art and sculpture, or, in literature, drama and poetry.

Whatever can be acted, as an expression of will, and whatever can be spoken, as an expression of spirit – the twin objective concretions of drama and poetry, which are quintessentially public, as, for that matter, are painting and sculpture, the 'drama' and 'poetry' of canvas and clay.

Being a subjective kind of writer, more private than public, is the prerogative of novelists and philosophers, whom one would read in private rather than watch or listen to in public. The literature that is not, like drama and poetry, primarily of will and spirit is necessarily of ego and soul, and ego and soul are more male than female in character – in fact, it would be as subjectively logical for soul to exclude will, or philosophy to exclude drama, as for ego to exclude spirit, or fiction to exclude poetry, whether or not this actually happens. For, as a rule, will wars upon soul, as drama upon philosophy, and spirit wars upon ego, as poetry upon prose, and sometimes philosophy is appropriated by drama and prose by poetry, to the detriment, it could be said, of both philosophy and prose.

But if philosophy and prose are 'true' to themselves, then they will avoid appropriating drama and poetry respectively, since soul will no more gain from the appropriation of will than ego from the appropriation of spirit. On the contrary, they will be vitiated and therefore diminished, as in Nietzsche and Lawrence Durrell, to name but two appropriators.

A philosophy which is truly philosophic, as with Schopenhauer, and a prose which is truly prosaic, as with Sartre, will be alone genuine and therefore vehicles of literary subjectivity, which is impressive.

As for mixing the 'high' with the 'low', drama with poetry or, on the opposite side of the gender fence, philosophy with prose, or vice versa, forget it! Neither drama nor philosophy, will nor soul, gain anything from being mixed with poetry or prose, spirit or ego, but will simply be coarsened and thereby reduced in substance to some mongrel-like cross between the noble and the plebeian, the noumenal and the phenomenal, the ethereal and the corporeal, which will be neither fish nor foul but an ungainly compromise whose ability to fly, whether objectively in the case of drama or subjectively in the case of philosophy, is impeded by the degree to which it has substituted gills or hooves for wings and either purgatory for hell where, as with drama, objective expression takes precedence, or the earth for heaven where, as with philosophy, subjective impression is at stake. What, on the contrary, is truly dramatic or truly philosophic will be above such crudities!

The notion, traceable to the Bible, that God (or anything godly) could have created woman is positively monstrous and little short of a contradiction in terms. Only an erroneous concept of God, as of the godly, could possibly lead to such a ridiculous conclusion.

I think it was Huxley who once described God as a 'being withdrawn', and, to be sure, the subjective beingfulness of godliness or, more correctly, of heavenliness as a sensible feeling (of joy) that godliness bears divine witness to (as its outer manifestation, so to speak, in the sense of candlelight to candle-flame) is precisely what Huxley's phrase conjures-up for me, in complete contrast to any active will that objectively imposes upon the world, as upon life in general, and creates things, being responsible, after a fashion, for the so-called Universe. That is the misconception of God, as of godliness, that has bedevilled religion for centuries if not millennia, and, strangely enough, it continues to do so even in this day and age of ostensible enlightenment.

I have a theory of mobile phones – cell phones, if you prefer – that would equate each of the main or principal design types which exist today with a given hegemonic point of what I call the intercardinal axial compass, viz., metachemistry at the northwest point, metaphysics at the northeast point, chemistry at the southwest point, and physics at the southeast point, with metachemistry axially polar to physics on state-hegemonic terms, and chemistry axially polar to metaphysics on church-hegemonic terms.

Here, then, is this theory: the 'upper order', or noumenal, types of mobile phone would be sliders, or those whose screen slides up from the keypad, as approximating to the metachemical position, but folders, or those whose screen unfolds from the keypad as they are opened up, as approximating, by contrast, to the metaphysical position, so that we would have a kind of noumenal, or ethereal, antithesis between these two types of mobile phone.

Similarly, the 'lower order', or phenomenal, types of mobile phone would be those which appear to be entirely comprised of screen (all show) as approximating to the chemical position, and those, by contrast, upon which the keypad is more prominent as approximating to the physical position, so that we would have a kind of phenomenal, or corporeal, antithesis between them.

In axial terms, sliders would be polar to the latter type of 'phenomenal' mobile and folders to the former type, so that the overall axial contrast would be between upper-order screen-based phones and lower-order keypad-oriented phones on the one hand, that of the state-hegemonic axis, and lower-order screen-based phones and upper-order keypad-oriented phones on the other hand, that of the church-hegemonic axis.

In simple antithetical terms, one has a contrast, in each case, between alpha and omega, show and concealment, appearance and essence, screen and keypad, outer and inner, which is equivalent, so I contend, to a gender dichotomy between 'female' and 'male' types of mobile phone, as between the metachemical and chemical screen-based options on the one hand (usually more populist and therefore prevalent), and the physical and metaphysical keypad-oriented options on the other hand (usually more select and therefore suited to intellectual or high-brow types).

That, in a nutshell, is my theory of mobile phones, and you can take it or leave it, accept or reject it, according to your 'lights' (as James Joyce might say).

My own type of mobile phone happens to be a folder, or fold-up, which I would consider appropriate to my metaphysical disposition and predilection as a thinker, or self-taught philosopher, for whom the centripetal takes considerable precedence over the centrifugal.

Probably, if literary parallels are to be adduced, the slider, or slide-up type of mobile phone, would accord with a dramatic bias as appropriate to a playwright; the screen-based one with a poetic bias, as appropriate to a poet; the keypad-oriented one with a prosaic bias, as appropriate to a novelist; and, as noted above, the folding type of mobile phone with a philosophic bias, as appropriate to someone like me whose life revolves around thought.

Being a thinker, I have to confess that my phone is used primarily for playing music (the most metaphysical of the arts) rather than for talking, surfing the internet, or watching videos. I have theories about which type of mobile phone these other options most accord with, but I'll leave that for the reader to figure out for himself.

Somehow, in spite of everything the world throws at you, you keep going, a solitary outsider and bohemian intellectual who continues, day after day, to play his music despite regular interference and even opposition, as from ethnically unrelated types who, in most cases, don't even want to hear Western music at all, never mind rock music in various of its several permutations. But somehow, despite being a minority of one, you keep going, remaining true to yourself both vocationally and recreationally. And that is all you really need to do.

People fixated on beauty, as on 'the Beautiful', don't want truth, as in 'the True', and are probably incapable, in any case, of being truthful, since for them factual beauty is all that really counts.

Drama and philosophy are mutually exclusive, like the Devil and Heaven or Hell and God, to cite the primary (fulcra) and secondary (bovaryized) positive aspects of metachemistry (soma) and metaphysics (psyche).

What isn't mutually exclusive, however, is drama and pseudo-philosophy (dramatic) on the one hand, and philosophy and pseudo-drama (philosophic) on the other hand, since these are akin to metachemistry and pseudo-metaphysics in the one case, that of drama and pseudo-philosophy, and to metaphysics and pseudo-metachemistry in the other case, that of philosophy and pseudo-drama.

Likewise, if 'down below' (phenomenal as opposed to noumenal planes), poetry and prose are mutually exclusive, like purgatory and man or woman and the earth, to cite, once again, the primary (fulcra) and secondary (bovaryized) positive aspects of chemistry (soma) and physics (psyche).

What isn't mutually exclusive, however, is poetry and pseudo-prose (poetic) on the one hand, and prose and pseudo-poetry (prosaic) on the other hand, since these are akin to chemistry and pseudo-physics in the one case, that of poetry and pseudo-prose, and to physics and pseudo-chemistry in the other case, that of prose and pseudo-poetry.

Dramatic philosophy is, of course, pseudo-philosophy, philosophic drama, by contrast, pseudo-drama.

Similarly, poetic prose is, of course, pseudo-prose, prosaic poetry, by contrast, pseudo-poetry.

Dialogues are no-less pseudo-philosophic than monologues pseudo-dramatic.

Prose poems are no-less pseudo-prosaic than free verse pseudo-poetic.

Don't believe me? Just think about it for a moment, even if you are reluctant to do so.

The Artist, if true (genuine), is in this world but not of it (Sound familiar?).

On the contrary, he has to constantly struggle against it to survive as an artist. For 'the world', least of all on its female side, does not encourage him or anyone else, for that matter, who does what he is.

To think in terms of two sides to life, as to a coin, may be somewhat reductionist, but it does lead, sooner or later, to a distinction between victors and victims, predators and prey, with the one presupposing the other, as females presuppose males.

Salvation is nothing less (or more) than the deliverance of victims from the clutches of victors, thereby putting the predators 'out of business'. Easier said than done, of course, but there is no other interpretation of salvation that makes any religious – as against scientific, political, or economic – sense. And, of course, when (and if) you deliver victims from victors, thereby saving the former and effectively damning the latter (to neutralization as predators), you put an end to 'the world' (as we know it in relation to man rather than simply in terms of the planet), since life in 'the world' only works on the basis of victors and victims, females and males, predators and prey, the rich and the poor, the strong (powerful) and the weak (powerless), etc., etc., as, in fact, is the case with Nature generally.

Those who believe in 'the world' necessarily believe in and respect its terms. Those who do not believe in 'the world', in rejecting its terms, tend to have faith in otherworldly criteria and are inherently religious.

Whether that faith can be vindicated … remains, one might say, to be seen. But such people as have faith tend to be victims and therefore usually if not exclusively male.

Adam and Evil (not bad, eh?). Nor is that song by Heaven and Hell from the album The Devil You Know entitled Atom and Evil, which would seem to be a pun on Adam and Eve.

I think the only financial freedom worth having is freedom from finances. Then you are truly free or, rather, liberated.

Free to do or free from those who do – that is, in a sense, the question, is it not? For the one interpretation of freedom is antithetical if not inimical to the other, and the predatory will always regard freedom in terms of free soma, or the licence to 'strut their stuff' and thereby exemplify 'the Beautiful' through free will.

But those who do are not the only ones who are free. That, to be blunt, is a metachemical order of freedom commensurate with free will in free soma. There are also other orders of freedom – chemical, for instance, which also has associations, through free spirit, with free soma, and, effectively on the other side (male) of the gender fence, physical, whose freedom has less to do with giving and more to do with taking, and taking – note-taking not least – in terms of free ego in free psyche.

Nietzsche's well-known phrase about not just being free from something but, more importantly, free for something else … can be construed to imply that one kind of freedom leads to another and can even, to some extent, be replaced by another, as when plutocratic freedom replaced – though didn't necessarily exclude or preclude – autocratic freedom, making the latter constitutionally obliged to acknowledge the 'rights' of plutocratic freedom, or, alternatively, when democratic freedom replaced or succeeded autocratic freedom disguised as theocracy, and we got republics that tended to favour socialism rather than capitalism or even a liberal mixture of capitalism and socialism.

Certain types of freedom replacing or succeeding other types of freedom is nothing new, but has been going on for centuries, even millennia, and the modern age is no exception, being, if anything, one when democratic freedom has come to the fore at the expense of autocratic and even plutocratic freedoms, though the latter is far from dead. In fact, plutocracies disguised as democracies have been no less prevalent than autocracies disguised as theocracies, and have incurred various forms of freedom-clamouring opposition which, in some cases, have led to so-called People's democracies and other Social Democratic variations on a Marxist theme.

But whilst freedom from one sort of freedom may lead to another sort of freedom, better for some and worse for others, freedom from freedom has not transpired on a mass basis, nor could it in worldly societies or in societies beholden, in netherworldly vein, to autocratic freedom.

One kind of freedom replacing another is all too symptomatic of worldly societies or of societies whose ambitions are worldly, whether in relation to democracy or to plutocracy, bureaucracy or meritocracy, and is akin, in my view, to one kind of 'godly thingfulness', or idolatry, superseding another, as with Marian and Christian 'gods', or deities, superseding pre-Christian deities like Jehovah or Zeus or 'the Creator', and doing so on a kind of attenuated basis that required a modification of such concepts as 'the Creator', 'the Almighty', Jehovah, etc., that, whilst still existing as a religious concept (as it would have to do from an extrapolative standpoint), allowed for such Christian concepts as 'Mother' and 'Son' to enter into religion, which is precisely what such a concept as 'the Father' actually does, unlike Jehovah or Allah or any other non-Western monotheistic concept of God as 'Creator' and sole ruling principle behind the so-called Universe (cosmos) – in other words, as a disguised form of autocracy that, from a Christian standpoint, must appear as a species of religious tyranny characteristic of an older or more backward type of civilization, one even subject to dissimilar environmental and climatic factors to those generally prevailing in Europe, and northern Europe in particular.

Yet even 'the Father', equivalent one could argue to a constitutional monarchy, continued to fulfil, or fill, the autocratic role for those peoples whose religious freedom had become more focused around 'the Mother' and/or 'the Son' in typically Christian (Catholic and/or Protestant) vein, whether or not such deities could be construed as corresponding to an inherently worldly type of civilization divisible between giving and taking, democracy (with a bureaucratic correlation) and plutocracy (with a meritocratic correlation), this civilization itself so divided against itself as to have fissured into alternative and even contrasting types of freedom that would continue to divide it along roughly Catholic and Protestant lines.

However, despite its schismatic splintering, doing did not and, in the circumstances, could not cease to exist, or be religiously symbolized (as Father, Creator, Almighty, etc.), just because, in Western civilization, and Europe in particular, giving and taking had become more prevalent. So it need not surprise us if the latter were – and to varying extents still are – tarred by the former's brush, as it were, for notions of freedom of a lower order to have superseded, but still be subject to, the root or most basic order of freedom that, being metachemical and predominantly somatic, is the supernatural principle behind worldly life.

“Man is never so free as when he acts”, said Sartre, as if there was something inherently praiseworthy about an order of freedom that, based in metachemistry, is characteristically more female than male (strictly speaking, most female and least male), since having associations with free will and therefore with what I have tended, in recent years, to associate with Devil the Mother. Doing is, to be sure, the freest order of freedom, but it is also, on that account, the furthest removed from being, from what is neither free nor unfree but simply is, since beyond the scope and limitations of freedom.

The Nietzschean cry of 'freedom from' in order that there may be 'freedom for' may be more vociferous in our own time, but it does not and cannot put an end to the 'wheel of suffering' which is 'the world' and the kind of vicious circle, largely comprised of triangular rigidities, that the partial replacement of one type of freedom by another necessarily implies. For there can be no absolute freedom, other than in the autocratic sense of netherworldly free will, in a world where freedom is simply to replace one set of choices or one course of action by another, the ego superseding the will, the spirit superseding the will-disguised-as-soul (though still deferential to Creator-ism) and then, in its secular decadence, rendered all the more vulnerable to predation by the axial enemy of spirit whose ego is beholden to will and able to profit from the doing of will by taking from the giving of spirit, the basis, in a triangular nutshell, of capitalist exploitation.

One godly delusion leads to another just as surely as one mode of freedom to another, and the Truth continues to lie 'beyond the pale' of whatever is both characterized and limited by freedom, whether in relation to metachemical beauty, chemical strength (pride), or physical knowledge. Being, the essence of Truth, is, to repeat, neither free nor unfree, it simply is, and in its beingfulness all else, all that is not being, ceases to have any meaning; for freedom is meaningless to that which is beyond it.

Not this or that, not a toing and froing, not a choice between competing or antagonistic options, not a dialectics of triangularity, neither partial to free speech, to free verse, to a free press, to freedom of movement, nor to freedom of action, being is free of freedom, and in that it is true to self, to the soul, in what we call Heaven, the condition neither of doing, giving, nor taking, which is axially beyond all worldly limitations.

To be liberated from freedom (and binding) by being, the soul one with the self in metaphysical salvation – that is the only solution, from a male standpoint, to the triangular 'wheel of suffering' of apparently independent but actually interdependent freedoms which grind everything and everybody in the mill of life from birth to death.

Life in north London has always given me the impression, somewhat eschatological in character, that I am one who is constantly being tormented by devils and demons who, in the intensely urban environments in which I have been obliged through chance and circumstance to live, take the forms of hammering, drilling, banging, shouting, thumping workmen who never go away, at least not for good, but tend to characterize so much of the way life is lived in what I like to think of as these worker-infested environments. Is this not a kind of hell?

I do, in spite of having been raised as a Protestant in a children's home and at high school, have a certain ingrained detestation of the British work ethic, especially when it manifests in manual or labouring work.

The extent to which one is constantly being brutalized by workmen's noises is, in a way, nothing short of scandalous, and makes one conscious of what a horrible place this part of north London (Hornsey/Harringay) actually is, even if there weren't plenty of other reasons to consider it – and other places like it in London as a whole – as such.

I think their self-sacrificing work ethic has always scandalized me and kind of driven me in the opposite direction or, at any rate, made me more self-consciously 'the artist' and philosophically-inclined 'bohemian intellectual' who must daily achieve his salvation, the salvation of his soul, through what he thinks and writes, with its publication a kind of testament not only to what it means to be an artist-philosopher, writer, or whatever, but as evidence of opposition to 'the world', as to worldly lifestyles, which for me – and I think all genuine artists – is the raison d'être of art.

But why are they, the British, so like that, I mean generally so philistine? I believe it has a lot to do with female domination within a state-hegemonic axial system deriving from Protestantism. That is, of course, not the whole explanation, but it's certainly a cogent starting-point.