09-12/02/13

Life is so much bigger than any one person that the travails of the individual count for little in the grand scheme of things. Life goes on willy-nilly, polyversally indifferent to the universal, impersonally indifferent to the personal, objectively indifferent if not hostile to the subjective.

If there's one thing worse than recruiting, it can only be actually being recruited, since it almost inevitably follows that with recruitment goes regimentation and the sacrifice of one's will to the domination of another.

Some would claim that bangers 'n' mash was the classic rock 'n' roll meal. Others that toad-in-the-hole was, though, on reflection, that might well be more appropriate to rhythm 'n' blues, since arguably of an older vintage.

Inconsistency is the hallmark of the human. Humans are nothing if not inconsistent, in contrast to machines and most species of animal, who follow set patterns from which they rarely if ever deviate. But, then, the truly contemporary man, an urban proletarian, is nothing if not machine-like in his repetitious life-style and is expected, with the absence of religion, to behave like a machine, to repeat, on a daily basis, what he has done before. This is what happens with the dominion of science.

People lace their shoes with – lace? I think not. Whose shoelaces are made of lace these days?

Fries, burger, and soft drink, kind of like jazz, blues, and gospel, but not at all like rock 'n' roll, however you choose to define or interpret a term that, to reprise John Cowper Powys, 'affords a wide solution'.

Music is like a well into which one drops the bucket of one's tastes and from which one draws nourishment for the soul. Or is it one's will, spirit, or ego? Depends on the type of music, I guess, as well as on the person concerned.

If I didn't prefer my own music to anyone else's, there would be no point in me listening to it, never mind having composed it. But in the event of having done so, it would be odd not to prefer one's own music to anybody else's, since it should be closer to who or what one is.

When somebody else cooks for you, it's not the same as when you cook for yourself. In fact, it may well be that he who cooks for himself doesn't need anybody else to cook for him, since likely to prefer his own tastes and stratagems.

The Poet in his garret; the Philosopher in his attic, high above the mostly one and two storey houses of the masses.

No philosopher should live – or have to live – in a bungalow or cottage, the kinds of dwelling more suited to the down-to-earth writers of prose, particularly novels and fiction generally, which tend, as a rule, to reflect a low cultural disposition.

These days I travel by single-decker bus and overground train, rarely by anything else, least of all double-decker buses and the underground.

A man is never more of a man than when he is by himself. With a woman he is reduced to half a man, saddled to somebody who is more hell and purgatory than earth and heaven; in other words, to somebody anterior to himself and effectively inferior to him in relation to taking and being, since more characterized by doing and giving, viz., by will and spirit as opposed to ego and soul. It is this half-and-half deal which constitutes 'the world' as a kind of liberal phenomenon always falling short of 'the Beyond', as of 'Kingdom Come', the setting in which Heaven is granted free rein or, rather, the right to exist.

When all is said and done, we are alone (on our own) and have to make decisions in our own interests, or what we perceive to be such, irrespective of what others do or say, think or believe.

I have never interpreted 'free thought' as a licence to write anything, irrespective of how stupid, base, degenerate, or seemingly depraved it is. The 'liberal' concept of free thought leaves me cold, especially when it leads to trivia and to gratuitously vulgar or fatuous notions being taken seriously or granted a degree of credence for seemingly being at the so-called 'cutting edge' of things, however you might wish to interpret the latter phrase.

For me, by contrast, free thought (which should not be confused with its antithesis, free speech) is a philosophical concept deeply associated with religious freedom Which is not to say freedom from religion (often confounded if not falsely identified with freedom from religious persecution), but, on the contrary, freedom to develop a religious concept, like God or Heaven, to its logical conclusion, irrespective of how different or even contrary it may be to the perceived wisdom of religious tradition.

Being free of 'Creator-ism', of the so-called Father, Jehovah, the Almighty, the Omnipotent, etc., is for me the crux of religious freedom. For it allows metaphysics, the religious element par excellence, to develop or be developed to the full extent of its capability independently of metachemistry, the scientific element par excellence, and thus, to repeat, of the alpha-based 'First Mover', that is, of the so-called 'Creator' and/or 'Creator as God'.

This, for me, is the test of free thought, the responsibility of which and for which is to become profoundly religious in an ultimate sense, a sense which puts one 'beyond the pale' of the Church, as of conventional or traditional religion, in a mindset orientated towards the possibility of 'Kingdom Come', as a totally unprecedented manifestation of religious freedom or, more correctly, liberation achieved via the philosophical vehicle of free thought.

The 'free thinker' in this higher sense is alone truly religious, for he heralds the dawn of a new age in which the worship of power, disguised as the Almighty, the Creator, the Father, etc., would become a thing of the female-dominated past, when the will was triumphant and the soul … prostrated in supine submission before the tyranny of what passed for God. Is this not still the case today in large swathes of the world, the Judaic and Moslem East not excepted?

Even when, as a younger man, I was more into writing … I was reluctant to write about certain things, subjects which would have unduly compromised me or for which I had only a limited competence or passing interest. My reluctance then was of a different order – more like shyness or tact or indifference. Today, I can safely say this it derives, this reluctance, from my self-esteem as a thinker, for whom writing is a kind of 'necessary evil', to be entertained only as a last resort.

And yet, I am arguably a better writer, or better at writing, which is to say logically and systematically conveying my thoughts, than I was then, back in the heyday, as it were, of my literary vocation, when I was not beyond writing novels or poems or even dialogues (the nearest I ever came, within a largely philosophical framework, to the wilful drama of plays).

The artist/philosopher, or variants thereof, may not seem, in this day and age of commercial enterprise, to be the most significant or important of persons. But even with his limited appeal to the masses, who generally prefer competitive sport and game shows, he is absolutely necessary in an age when, with the decline to the point of near or even virtual extinction of religious conventions and traditions in the West (the East although apparently more religious is simply comparatively backward), he is the only safeguard, not least 'On High', that is, in the noumenal (ethereal) heights, against society being overly dominated by tyrannical elements who, desirous of bringing people more under their predatory wing, would proscribe and, if possible, exterminate anyone remotely resembling a genuine artist or philosopher or paradoxical combination of both, in order not to be constrained in the expression of their oppressive agendas by persons whose positive attitudes to creative individualism and subjective originality could only detract from if not actually inhibit their pursuit of power to authoritarian not to say overly tyrannical ends.

Without the constraining influence upon would-be tyrants or worshippers of power (who are often manual workers accustomed to the daily grind in all kinds of inclemencies) of artists and philosophers who are inherently subjective and disposed to 'new vistas' of creative potential, the proclivity of the common man towards competitive violence, fuelled by gender rivalry and the natural domination of females, would more easily be exploited by those of an autocratic or otherwise power-hungry disposition, with consequences that are only too predictable! The artist, thank god (and I use this term in connection with metaphysics), is, even if indirectly and via his intensely subjective creations, the 'bad conscience' and 'thorn in the side' of those who would otherwise have free rein in exploiting the common man for purposes much closer, in their metachemical natures, to the diabolic than to the divine.

So, when priests can no longer be taken seriously as religious leaders because they are manifestly anachronistic, kowtowing to superstitions and social conventions that have no bearing on the Truth, the independent creative minds are the last or only bulwark against those who would do away with religion in their obsessions with scientific power. But they have to be in or near the vanguard of metaphysics, these artists, and not unwitting apologists, like priests and the conventionally religious, for metachemistry by dint of adhering to fundamentalist constraints issuing from the outmoded religious traditions characterized by the worship of 'the Creator', 'the Almighty', 'the All-Powerful', even 'the Lord' (surely a medieval term with aristocratic associations?), and other variants on a (metachemical) theme all-too-beholden to the defence of tyranny under the cosmic order of things. As though that were sufficient justification for analogous processes continuing unabated on earth! Only the radical artist - and the artist-philosopher in particular - stands in the way, these days, of the untrammelled tyranny of those who, scornful or art and religion alike, would otherwise have a free hand in recruiting the common man to ends which lead not forwards to Heaven but backwards to Hell.

But be warned: the godly can and have been disposed of by the devilish, if democracy is not maintained as a safeguard against that happening, at least until such time as the godly can utilize the democratic process to ends which would exclude the power-hungry tyrannical in the interests of universal peace, establishing thereby a 'church' to end all churches in what would become the context of 'Kingdom Come'. For me, this process can only be carried forward by Social Theocracy acting under the messianic auspices of 'the Centre'. For it requires a vote for what I have termed 'religious sovereignty' (and the rights accruing to it), without a majority mandate for which, in certain countries, there could be no legal justification for transcending 'the world' and doing away with all that, in largely netherworldly vein, has always felt itself justified in ruling over it, even to the exclusion of otherworldly criteria and, hence, to a soul-denying slavish deference to mere willpower.

The citizen for the country or the country for the citizen, or both? Probably 'both' would be typically liberal and somehow worldly, whereas the citizen for the country smacks – notwithstanding crises like war - of alpha autocracy and, by contrast, the country for the citizen of something comparatively omega-orientated and, hence, theocratic (using that term in a higher, more evolved, non-Creator-worshipping sense).

Substitute society for country and, say, member for citizen, and you doubtless have a similar antithesis and/or compromise (in worldly vein) between the alpha and the omega. Collectivity on the one hand, that of the country (nation) and society, or persons collectively. Individuality on the other hand, that of the citizen and members, or persons individually.

Citizen of a country, members of society, persons collectively and individually, whether, in fact, they happen to be social or anti-social, herd-like in character (like the majority) or solitary and possibly if not probably misanthropic.

Of course, countries and nations are not necessarily synonymous, since Great Britain, for example, is a nation comprised, at the time of writing, of three countries, namely England, Wales, and Scotland, while the United Kingdom incorporates, besides numerous offshore islands like the Hebrides and the Orkney Isles, what is termed Northern Ireland, or six of the nine counties of the Province of Ulster, one of the four provinces that make up the island of Ireland, the greater percentage of which, including three of the Ulster counties, fall within the self-governing Republic of Ireland which, together with the self-governing Isle of Man, is nevertheless part of that archipelago of islands called the British Isles, together with islands closer to France like Jersey and Guernsey that fall within the British sphere of influence and would regard themselves as sharing British nationality.

The United Kingdom could loosely be described as a nation on account of its more or less traditionally common political and religious structures, but, even without the Republic of Ireland and the Isle of Man, it is comprised of several countries, each of which has its own characteristics, as do the majority of immigrants and British-born nationals who still adhere, in varying degrees, to the cultures, religions, languages, and social practices of their ancestors or native countries.

Furthermore, just how much 'national' overrides 'nation' in terms of a countrywide disposition or dispensation … is a moot point; for there is certainly a sense in which 'national' has come to be identified, rightly or wrongly, with more than just a nation. Nor can society be pegged down to all the members of 'the nation', since it also encompasses the various types of society, from class and profession to club and ethnicity, which constitute a nation, however much or little that term is synonymous with a given country.

Ideally, a society that serves its members is more desirable, from the members' standpoint, than one that exploits and dragoons them for purposes at variance with their personal inclinations or interests. It is even preferable, I believe, to a liberal compromise between exploitation and service, and it is only in a society which serves its members that you can have anything approaching if not approximating to 'Kingdom Come', like a country which serves its citizens by both protecting them and facilitating their well-being or, at any rate, the well-being of those earmarked for salvation as opposed to counter-damnation, a term I reserve, as the reader may well know or have guessed, for those who would have to be 'kept down' in order that the well-being of the deserving might be served to its maximum extent, so that, contrary to a liberal aspiration (whether fulfilled or not) to serve all and sundry, or the interests of the majority, irrespective of merit or nature or gender, one finds a parallel with the biblical metaphor of 'lamb' and (neutralized) 'lion', or, alternatively, 'saint' and (neutralized) 'dragon', the latter, in each case, being that which has to be 'kept down' if the former is to have, through peace of mind, that well-being which is commensurate with a heavenly situation and not, avowedly not, with any kind of worldly norm such that, if truth be told, facilitates the advantage (if not exactly well-being) of those given to what could be called well- or even mal-doing through the bridled or, in the worst case scenario, unbridled encouragement of free will in a situation not incompatible with the citizen serving the country or society being served by its members or, to take an analogous context, females being served by males … to a world-perpetuating reproductive end that could have no conceivable ending barring some cosmic or natural cataclysm, which would perhaps be some kind of poetic justice in a world without hope, through faith, of world-overcoming but governed – nay ruled – by fear.