09-11/03/13

I scribble like a scribe because I am a kind of scribe and scribbling comes naturally to me.

Don't confound hope with faith. A woman can hope for a man with whom to have a child, and thus a family. That has nothing to do with male faith in the possibility of salvation from this world (and its female domination).

Paradoxically, hope in the one case can be associated with disbelief in the other, while, conversely, fear of the one can lead to or imply faith in the other.

Freedom from fear and shame through faith (belief) in self (self-belief), that is, faith in the ability of the male soul (metaphysical) to rise above 'the world' and achieve heavenly peace. Not impossible, but very much against the tide of life as a female-dominated reality characterized by will and spirit.

Photography is basically two-dimensional; holography, by contrast, three-dimensional. Therefore holography is a form of sculpture, with representational properties deriving from the projection of objects into space through the refraction of light. Some would call it sublimated sculpture, or a sculpture abstracted from 'real' objects without being necessarily abstract in itself.

I have always suffered from a reluctance to live. I have tended, rather, to exist … on my own … in sordid exile from my native country, the Republic of Ireland, from which I was taken at the unsuspecting age of two-and-a-half. In that respect I have something in common with W.B. Yeats, my favourite poet and the only Irish-born poet I really esteem, since he was brought to England at a similar age. Although schooled in England, his family, the Pollexfens, regularly returned to Ireland and eventually settled there again. So he accordingly spent more time in Ireland and reverted to being Irish – a thing I can hardly say for myself!

I think my reluctance to live has something to do with not being British, kind of resisting British criteria, not least axially (Britain is, of course, a state-hegemonic/church-subordinate country typified by a northwest-to-southeast axial directionality on what I term the intercardinal axial compass, as between Monarchic/Anglican and Parliamentary/Puritan polarities).

I think I have tended to live in and through books – my own not excepted – at a sort of Platonic remove not only from real life, or so-called real life, but from a type of reality, namely British, which I can't relate to and therefore tend to reject, leaving myself with no alternative but a kind of surrogate life to be found in books and writings, even though, as the reader will know by now, I am something of a reluctant writer, being more concerned, as a philosopher, to think.

I think the basis of my celibacy, of my reluctance to enter into sexual relationships with women, lies - quite apart from my anti-urban distaste of north London and want of any sort of romantic disposition in an environment which, in its urban congestion, noise, and pollution, frankly leaves me cold – in the fact that I would not want any son or daughter of mine (not knowing what gender you are going to get is another problem, but no matter!) to be born in England.

As someone born in the Republic of Ireland of an Irish Catholic father and even mother, though British born, raised as a Catholic, I consider myself to be free born, a free-born citizen of the Republic, and therefore I would be most reluctant to be partly responsible for any offspring of mine becoming a subject, through English birth, of Her (or perhaps by then His) Anglican Majesty's constitutional rule.

As an Irish citizen I take my status as a free-born individual very seriously; for it was not handed to us on a plate, so to speak, and knowing something about history, not least in terms of Anglo-Irish relations, I would be reluctant to belittle that achievement and my subsequent birthright by fathering a British citizen, or someone born in England and therefore made subject to a constitutional monarchy that was not even Catholic but manifestly the product of anti-Catholic Protestantism (Anglicanism). Thanks, but no thanks! Even Germany, which is a republic, would be less unattractive if not a viable alternative to Ireland or, rather, the Republic of Ireland (for at the time of writing the island of Ireland is still divided, if imperfectly so, into two nations thanks to the legacy of British imperialism). But the child would have to be born there, not in England, and therefore so long as I remain in England I shall remain celibate and, as in the past, not responsible for fathering a child.

At sixty, which is what I am, one is, in any case, more reluctant than ever to become a father, since somewhat over-the-hill. Besides, never having known or seen my own father, who shirked responsibility for me at an early age, I have never felt any real desire to become a father myself, since, quite apart from the fact that I did not have the benefit, as a child, of paternal care or company, encouragement or instruction, I would be extremely reluctant both to act as a father to somebody else and to extend such a man's surname into another (much younger) generation, one in relation to which I should really be a grandfather.

Anyway, the reader should have learnt from earlier pages what I think of the word 'generation' and of its corollary, namely decadence, which I largely tend to associate with the pseudo-male side of a generative dominion presided over by the somatically-free female. If, by contrast, I am indeed a cadent retort to bodily degeneration, a kind of philosophical or religious resurrection, then I cannot see how any associations with generation, much less of being partly responsible for generating offspring or, rather, of enabling a female to do so at my personal expense, could possibly transpire, given my reluctance to condone, never mind acquiesce in, a lifestyle characterized, in worldly vein, by female dominion. Thanks, but, as I said before, no thanks!