Beyond the Pale

Op. 34

BEYOND THE PALE -

Growth of a Messiah

Autobiographical Sketches

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CONTENTS

1. Self-Revelations (1983)

2. Mainly about Myself (1985)

3. Exile in Purgatory (1993)

4. Beyond the Pale (1996)

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SELF-REVELATIONS (1983)

Writing a journal is really a sort of madness, though it isn't generally recognized as such - unlike, for instance, a person who talks to himself. The writer of journals, notebooks, diaries, etc., also talks to himself, but on the higher level, as it were, of recorded thought. Often the journal is kept or written without concern for immediate publication; though most famous writers who keep journals doubtless do so with respect to eventual, if posthumous, publication. Thus Baudelaire, Gide, Camus, Nietzsche, amongst others. Had they not also been recognized men-of-letters, with various publications to their names, it is doubtful that any of them would have kept journals.

Although, from another point of view, it could also be said that a man addicted to writing will be glad of the opportunity a journal affords to continue writing, if in a relatively relaxed, lazy, and informal kind of way. When he has nothing else to do, or is unwilling to take on a difficult professional task, he can always take refuge in a journal, passing the time in a lukewarm though, on the whole, intellectually-gratifying, egotistical sort of way.

But if talking to oneself is a sort of madness, then writing to oneself cannot be much else, even if it corresponds, as a rule, to a more intelligent mind!

I have never much liked the proletariat, especially the lumpen proletariat, of which description the Borough of Haringey and, in particular, the area of Hornsey would appear to be well stocked. The man who lives in the room next to mine is a vulgar boor, who can never close a door without slamming it. He wretches and coughs in a disgusting manner, and very often mimics 'ahems' for my dubious benefit; though I am so used to such tepid sarcasm by now, after nine years of bedsitter accommodation in north London, that I tend not to be offended by it. What I most suffer from, where this middle-aged proletarian is concerned, is the volume of his television, which penetrates the thin wall separating our respective rooms on a nightly basis, obliging me, when I can't bring myself to complain, to seek refuge in wax earplugs. Sometimes one can hear his television blaring away during the afternoon as well, though he is generally more considerate then than at other times, possibly because he is slightly ashamed to be indoors all day (he is unemployed) and doesn't wish to distract me from my writing or, more likely, because the TV is simply less interesting then.

But I dislike the man intensely, not only because he is a layabout, but because of his bad language, ugly proletarian looks, cultural philistinism, and tendency to slam his door. Once or twice I thought of asking him to close it quietly; but, on reflection, I supposed that I would merely appear in a humiliating light, as a gentleman prepared to live with, or being obliged to live with, a rough prole! Then again, how can one expect someone who is so patently not a gentleman to behave like one? It would be quite illogical of me to require gentle behaviour of a lumpen brute. I have no option, short of changing address, but to persevere with him!

It was not so long ago that I began to form a distinction, in my mind, between children and kids. Ordinarily, educated people would take the latter term for a vulgar equivalent to the former, a lower-class way, as it were, of referring to children. This is of course the way I see it on one level; though on another level, peculiarly my own, I prefer to regard kids as lower-class children, as creatures for whom the term 'children' would be inappropriate, because suggesting something delicate, well-behaved, pretty, gentle, quiet, well-spoken, shy, respectful, and intellectually curious. These 'kids', on the other hand, are foul-mouthed, dirty, brutish, destructive, and ugly, being, in Ezra Pound's concise phrase, the 'offspring of the very poor'.

Living in a room which overlooks an alley, I have heard and seen these 'kids' playing there often enough to know that, by no stretch of the poetic imagination, could one reasonably apply the word 'children' to them! One or two of them are notably fiendish, and will doubtless become vandals and thugs in years to come. A 'kid' is not someone one would wish to pat on the head for being a good boy. On the contrary, he is somebody to avoid contact with, from fear that one might be tempted to knock him on the head for being a brute!

It would be difficult to imagine a greater musical distinction than that which exists between the two violin concertos on a Supraphon record I recently had the privilege of borrowing from Hornsey Central Library, and that despite the extraordinary fact of both concertos having been composed or published in the same year (1939), and being performed, on this record, by the same orchestra, viz. the Czech Philharmonic, under the same conductor, viz. Karel Ancerl, with the same violinist, viz. André Gertler.

These two quite remarkable concertos are the Hindemith and the Hartmann, and whereas the former is the epitome of Neo-Classicism, the latter comes straight out of mid-nineteenth-century Romanticism, and therefore isn't even late-Romantic, like, say, the Berg Violin Concerto, but anachronistically Romantic, reminiscent of Liszt. This in part doubtless explains why we’re not more familiar with Hartmann’s name!

Nevertheless, a considerable work in its own right, demanding passionate incisiveness from the soloist over long stretches of the third movement, the allegro di molto, which contrasts with the generally lugubrious tone, de profundis, of the preceding and succeeding movements, the work itself having been dubbed Concerto Funebre. But, typical of Romanticism of this type, one is dragged into the emotional vortex and obliged to identify with the composer's and performers' passion, particularly in the third and longest movement.

How different from the Hindemith, which keeps one outside, a spectator, as it were, of its cool classical poise, sparsely orchestrated with the finest of solo tones, the violin for the most part in the highest register - clear, clean, precise, a dispassionate, though not indifferent, performance. I would have preferred the Romantic work on side one and the Neo-Classical on side two, so that, having plumbed the depths, one could soar to the heights of dispassionate contemplation. Beginning with the latter and ending with the former, however, suggests a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation on the part of orchestra and soloist alike. Nevertheless, a great record!

After several years in Hornsey, north London, I am still alone, devoid of friends and acquaintances alike. All I have is my mother and stepfather, whom I visit in Finsbury Park on Friday evenings, but whose company I do not relish. My mother is too plebeian and philistine in mentality; my stepfather, a West Indian by origin, too taciturn and lethargic, more inclined to moroseness than good humour. Otherwise, an old woman whom I occasionally visit in Palmers Green, an acquaintance of one of my Galway aunts, whose conversation both bores and oppresses me, particularly when on the subject of Catholicism, about which, like so many older people of Southern Irish origin, she is well-nigh fanatic.

As regards friends or acquaintances of my own generation - not a thing! And it has been like this for so long now that, despite the depression from which I suffer in consequence of living where and how I do, I tend to take it all for granted. Even take my celibacy for granted, resigned to the fact that I shall never find myself a suitable female companion so long as I remain in Hornsey, isolated from my kind.

At thirty, I am still a virgin, and have not so much as kissed a woman in over ten years. Neither have I been to a party since 1974, the last one, oddly enough, being with some student friends in Newcastle. I have no prospects of sex or socialization at present; for, without a publisher, I shall remain confined to the dole and the narrow environment in which I languish, like a prisoner, among the proles.

Of all environments, the one I most dream of living in is rural or provincial, like the one in Merstham, Surrey, I was obliged to move out of in December 1973, having spent but two years in it with the family of a school friend, Chris. Somewhere, in short, where one could live in a house of one's own without the constant threat and actual inconvenience of neighbour disturbances, such as uncouth pop or rock music issuing from some fool's over-loud stereo speakers. For it would only be by moving from one extreme to another that I could quicken my recovery from depression and acquire such sensuality, both natural and sexual, as I have lacked these past nine years of urban exile.

In this desired environment I would have peace in which to write and read, and would gradually recover from my enforced celibacy with the assistance of a beautiful, intelligent, cultured and pleasant female. No doubt, I would also take regular country walks, and perhaps drink and smoke a little (sherry in preference to wine or beer, cigars in preference to cigarettes).

Interesting how beauty is mostly confined to the bourgeois and aristocratic classes. There is really no such thing as a beautiful proletarian, at least I have never noticed one during all these years of Hornsey life. Women of the people can be attractive, and some of them are even very attractive. But beautiful, no! That demands culture, intelligence, character, careful breeding, and, above all, soul. It conforms, one might say, to an earlier phase of human evolution, before life becomes exclusively transcendental and thereupon orientated towards truth.

The aristocratic and bourgeois classes stem from the beauty of nature. The proletariat spring-up in the city, at an artificial remove from nature, and consequently have no real contact with beauty. Paradoxical though it may seem, beauty would not become them. They do not require it.

But I, a man of lower-middle-class origin on my father's side, both appreciate and need beauty, and would not settle for a woman who was less than beautiful but ... either attractive or plain. I have no desire, either, to repeat my late-father's mistake and opt for an attractive proletarian. For I know the consequences of their separation only too well ... to wish to inflict, or run the risk of inflicting, something similar on anyone else. Better, if one cannot find an appropriate partner, to remain solitary.

There was one person whom I particularly coveted, though I was in love with someone else at the time, and she was both very beautiful and highly intelligent, a rare being of no mean cultural achievement either. This was back in the early 1970s, and I undoubtedly went to Newcastle, early in 1974, with a view to deepening my acquaintance with her. But nothing came of my visit and that was the last I saw of her, ashamed and disappointed, as I was, by circumstances seemingly beyond my control.

Nevertheless, I still think of her from time to time, and have used a variation on her in one or two of my novels. She was, in my estimation, the complete woman.

I masturbate but infrequently, no more than once a month, and do so not simply for the pleasure - there is little enough of that! - but, more importantly, to preclude my experiencing a wet-dream during the night, with all the attendant inconvenience of being woken up, having to clamber out of bed in the dark to mop up the mess on sheets, thighs, stomach, or wherever, with the aid of paper tissues. This disgusts me so much that I prefer to masturbate every once in a while, in an effort to pre-empt nature's tyranny and so save myself worse inconvenience later on!

Generally, I would say that the more one masturbates the less one suffers from wet-dreams. A minimum of once a month is therefore advisable! Naturally, I dislike masturbation from a personal point-of-view, but I don't suffer so much regret these days as I used to, chiefly because I look upon masturbation over pornography not as a form of perversion, which is what it must seem to the more naturalistic males, whether bourgeois or proletarian, but as a higher level of sexuality, part of evolutionary progress, one might say, towards the supersession of sexual activity in what I like to think of as a post-human millennium, when human brains will be artificially supported and sustained in communal contexts.

Neither do I associate masturbation with fears of self-abuse, the life-force being turned-in upon itself, as it were, in negation of a two-way give-and-take synchronicity or reciprocity. I have no Lawrentian or Reichian fears, in response to a strongly atomic imagination. I look at masturbation impartially, objectively, and come to the conclusion that the ejaculation of semen brought about by the friction of palm rubbing against penis will not differ, to any marked extent, from an ejaculation brought about by the friction of penis rubbing against vagina. In both cases, there is a friction and an ejaculation. That is all! But there is less flesh involved with masturbation than with atomic sex. It would not appeal to an average sensualist, but only to an extreme ascetic type.

In one sense, I suppose I have had a variety of girlfriends since moving to north London. For I have admired a number of pin-ups, such as one finds in men's magazines like Penthouse and Oui. Usually, there is at least one model in each month's Penthouse in whom I can take some pleasure, and generally I cut one or two of the more appealing photos out of the magazine and either pin them to the wall - having taken care to remove previous ones - or put them in a drawer that I especially reserve for a variety of clippings, photos, postcards, letters, Christmas cards, and other paper mementos, to extract the relevant photos when I feel like admiring the model anew.

Thus, in a sublimated kind of way, these models become my girlfriends, though on a relatively short-term basis, insofar as one may find a different model to admire every month. Is this madness or simply an extreme form of sexual relationship? The private person in me suggests the former, but the philosopher, the man with a sense of evolutionary perspective derived from the cumulative development of so much serious thinking, upholds the latter.

As a professional, I have to admit to the validity of evolutionary continuity in the realm of sex. As a displaced and therefore perverted individual, on the other hand, I long for the day when I shall be able to return to something like an atomic norm, and be able to have literal, concrete sex with a woman. For my depression, the sufferings of the private person, won't get any better so long as I remain confined, against my wishes, to an urban environment, and am accordingly obliged to seek sexual pleasure and relief with the help of men's magazines!

As one who listens to quite a lot of modern jazz, I tend to divide guitarists into three categories: those who are exceptionally proficient on both acoustic and electric guitars; those who are fairly proficient on both acoustic and electric guitars; and those who are fairly or exceptionally proficient only on electric guitars. This is really the equivalent of distinguishing between, in the first category, guitarists more bourgeois than proletarian in bias; in the second category, guitarists more proletarian than bourgeois in bias; and, in the third category, proletarian guitarists. A distinction, one could argue, between dualists at one end of the modern-jazz spectrum, and post-dualists at the other end of it.

Examples from each class will, in my opinion, include the following: John McLaughlin, Al Dimeola, John Abercrombie, Larry Coryell, Bill Connors, Philip Catherine, Allan Holdsworth, John Ethridge, Darryl Stuermer, and Jan Akkerman in the first category; Frank Zappa, John Scofield, Steve Khan, Gary Moore, Terji Rypdal, Gary Boyle, and Lee Ritenour in the second; Jeff Beck, Carlos Santana, Raymond Gomez, Tommy Bolin, George Benson, Clem Clempson, and Harvey Mandel in the third. This is, I believe, a relevant categorization from a class point-of-view, and, as a private individual, I tend to prefer those in the first category to those in the third, regarding them as superior guitarists.

The professional philosopher will now advance a rethink on the above-mentioned guitarists, however, and contend that, objectively considered, those in the third category are superior to the ones in the first and second categories, because not only relatively post-egocentric, that is to say, less inclined to complexity and virtuoso embellishment, but consistently electric, and thus transcendental instead of partly naturalistic, i.e. given to acoustic indulgence. This, by contrast, would be the evolutionary point-of-view, and one can only suppose that it would be a view more likely to win support in proletarian circles than among those who cling to naturalism from scruples of bourgeois conscience.

Clearly, I am a man very much divided against himself, a perverted provincial who suffers, through depression, stomach ulcers, solitude, sleeplessness, celibacy, neighbour incompatibility, etc., from his environmental displacement, and, at the same time, a philosopher who gains in strength, meaning, insight, profundity, vision, objectivity, etc., at the expense of the private person. This latter side of me, the objective side, has gone so far ahead of the personal, subjective side, that there is scarcely a link between them, no common ground on which they can meet and exchange views. For whatever suits the latter is detrimental to the former. Whatever the former needs to recover mental and bodily health would obstruct the further progress of the latter. If I return to nature, to a provincial environment, I will shortly cease being a transcendentalist. If I continue expanding my professional life, my private one can only get steadily worse. One day I will be so depressed and ulcer-ridden that I won't be able to work. Then the private life will have defeated the public, professional one. Either way, I must cease, at some future time, from being a transcendentalist. Which means that I must die to the spirit in order to be reborn in the flesh, and preferably before my depression gets any worse!

The fact that I make so much of my private life public, by revealing it on these pages, would not please a bourgeois. For the dualist is ever divided between the private and the public domain, and knows how to distinguish between them and keep the former to himself. On the other hand, evolution being a struggle from the private to the public sphere, the proletarian is supposed not to have a private life, for everything is officially interpreted in terms of the public one, the herd life, against which individualism is perceived as a threat and anachronism appertaining to the bourgeoisie. It is perhaps a reflection of my status as a perverted provincial that I should seek to make my private life public, to acquiesce, in a kind of transitional manner, in the Sartrean doctrine of opening the self to others (though Sartre never practised what he preached to anything like the same extent as, say, Henry Miller).

How paradoxical and hypocritical the British are! They speak of private medicine and public schools, when both are manifestations of the same elitist, discriminatory system! They ought rather to speak of private schools, as opposed to state schools, which are the truly public ones. Also the British are very secretive, in that everyone seems to be hiding something, psychologically speaking, from everyone else, as though fearful of the leak of some underhand deal at another's expense. I confess that in some twenty-eight years of living in England, I haven't become British. Rather, it is often brought home to me just how ineradicably Irish I am in so many ways, not least of all in the tendencies to be frank, extreme, outspoken, and rigorously logical. Probably my solitude, these past nine years, has something to do with being Irish in origin, not because the Irish are necessarily solitary, but rather because, more often than not, even when long resident or brought-up in England, they can't abide the British, particularly the English, whom they regard as hopeless materialists and philistines!

A Devil's Irishman is as much the exception to the rule as a God's Englishman, using the term 'God' in the most spiritual sense. At least that used to be the case, before people of English descent began to populate Ireland with politicians and soldiers, and, conversely, people of Irish descent began to populate England with priests and writers. These days God's Englishmen are more likely to be of Irish descent than Anglo-Saxon. (Similarly, one could argue that Devil's Irishmen are more likely to be of English descent than Gaelic.)

Considerations of ethnicity do enter into my estimation of females, for I seem to recall that the young woman I mentioned earlier, in connection with my visit to Newcastle, was of Irish descent, being blue-eyed, dark-haired, slender, Catholic, and a keen student of Joyce (she possessed both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake). I have often thought that I wouldn't marry anyone who wasn't Irish or at least partly Irish or of Irish descent. Conversely, I have often imagined, when snubbed by British women, particularly English ones, that considerations of ethnicity entered into their decision - the fear, perhaps, of having to adopt an Irish name in the event of marriage, or of being at loggerheads with one over political, religious, cultural, social, and sporting ties, or even of being roped-in to the Catholic Church!

Once I met an Irish girl and obtained her address, which was outside London. But although I wrote to her on a number of occasions, she refrained from reciprocating. Now I'm not implying that this was because she didn't want to involve herself with an Irishman, since, as I said, she too was Irish - second-generation Irish, as she described herself to me. I am simply underlining my determination to mate only with an Irishwoman; for how else to explain the futile persistency with which I wrote to a person who had no desire or intention of reciprocating my letters?

Perhaps this has something to do with my mother, who once informed me that, had she not been obliged, following the death of her Britain-based father, to accompany her homesick mother back to Ireland, she would never have married an Irishman, meaning my father. Thus I may well be rebelling, if unconsciously, against my mother's anti-Irishness when I insist on pursuing an endogamous course. Doubtless, I tend to equate my parent's incompatibility and subsequent separation with an underlying ethnic antagonism, my mother being superficially Catholic but fundamentally the daughter of an Ulster or Donegal Protestant on her father's side.

In me, the middle class and the working class meet in a classless compromise favouring the latter. My father was a failure by the professional standards of his parents and brothers, and sank into the non-professional rank of a buyer for Corbett's furniture store in Galway. My mother, on the other hand, came from a working-class family who, through the progress of her father from private to regimental sergeant-major in the British army, gravitated towards the lower middle-class.

Thus, theoretically, they both met, my parents, on approximately the same class level. But, in practice, they had arrived at it from opposite directions - my father down and my mother up. Fundamentally, one is what one was born as, not what one becomes. My father was always the son of country-dwelling professional folk, my mother the daughter of city-dwelling proletarians, and, not surprisingly, their marriage quickly broke up, my mother not being prepared to persevere with a husband who spent more time out, in the company of friends, than in, with his less than culturally- or intellectually-stimulating wife who, having been brought up in Britain, probably lacked deference and/or humility.

Thus, in a certain sense, I see myself as the reverse of D.H. Lawrence, who had a middle-class mother and a working-class father. He was mostly biased towards the middle classes in his petty-bourgeois constitution.

On the subject of D.H. Lawrence, it is perhaps worth mentioning and correcting a remark he once made, to the effect that any man who strives to become more than a man inevitably ends-up being less than one. He was, of course, referring to spiritual excess, to excessive intellectuality and lack of sex, to a kind of Shavian or Huxleyite lopsidedness, which ought, in his opinion, to be avoided because it could only be detrimental to human wholeness, in loyalty to a dualistic integrity.

And, to be sure, there is some truth in that statement, as I can personally attest from having to spend time, each day, dozing on my bed in an effort to reduce or relax the tension in my head which would otherwise prevent me from working. When, after an hour-and-a-half's scribbling in the afternoon, I retire to bed for an hour, I indulge in a form of sensual cannibalism by plunging, to a limited extent, into my subconscious, in an attempt to restore my head to something approaching normal psychic functioning.

Now one could argue that during this period of time I lead more of a dog's life than a man's, and thus vindicate Lawrence's contention. This is true. Yet what Lawrence didn't admit, but which I have proved by the unparalleled profundity of various of my works, is precisely that at other periods of time, while for instance one is writing, one can become more than a man, and all because one is not living within the narrow confines of a bourgeois lifestyle but oscillating between one extreme position and another in a way that, during the work-periods, enables one to approximate to superhuman levels of thought and creative insight. Were it not for this extreme lifestyle, oscillating between dog-like dozing and god-like mental alertness, I would never have arrived at 'the truth', but might well have remained confined to dualistic thinking, an atomic level that I would probably have mistaken, like the vast majority of its upholders, for the Ideal!

Of course, this is not to say that everyone should follow my example and adopt an extreme lifestyle. Very few people could, and, besides, the Truth doesn't require a legion of searchers but can be grasped and conveyed to paper by one resolute searcher alone, who functions in the role of messiah. I did not go in search of this extreme lifestyle, but had it thrust upon me by circumstances beyond my control (as, for example, in being obliged to move from Surrey to London), and somehow I have managed to come to terms with it and exploit it for what good can be derived from it, in the interests of truth. Previously I had taken dualism for the Truth, for that was compatible with my suburban background ... torn between nature and civilization, and I saw no reason to doubt it.

But after I had been confined, like a prisoner, in one of the most built-up areas of north London for several years, I began to doubt the eternal validity of dualism and, instead, started to evolve towards a post-dualistic position which, now that I have worked it out in some detail, I perceive as the logical step beyond dualism and means to the Truth. Thereafter I could no longer take dualists like D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, J.B. Priestley, and Hermann Hesse seriously, but turned, via transitional writers like Henry Miller and Christopher Isherwood, to my own truth, which I am convinced will one day be recognized as the Truth by all who care for progress in intellectual/spiritual matters because, not for the least of good reasons, they live in the right kind of environment to be able to appreciate and relate to it!

In mentioning Hermann Hesse, I should remark that, of all writers, he was the one in whom I recognized a marked temperamental and creative affinity with myself. Even given the fact that he remained a dualist, and therefore in many respects typically bourgeois, I have to name Hesse among my early mentors and principal influences. Probably I would have preferred to take a number of his books to a desert island with me than anyone else's, if obliged to make a definitive choice between various authors, including Huxley, Sartre, Camus, and Henry Miller. Not so much because of the level of thought, which is limited to atomic criteria, as because of the tone, style, temperamental bias, eclecticism (ranging from philosophical essays and novels to short stories and lyric poems), such as I pursue in my own work, as much from creative propulsion as from moral compulsion.

Was Hesse first and foremost a poet, like Hölderlin, or a philosopher, like Nietzsche? I have to confess that I see him first and foremost as a philosopher (not so much a lover of words as a seeker after truth), a petty-bourgeois and therefore creatively eclectic philosopher, like Huxley, but one who dabbled in poetry, often covering philosophical speculation in a thin veneer of verse, and who mistook himself for a poet in consequence. Not that he was unpoetical. But he was arguably less of a poet than, say, D.H. Lawrence.

Lawrence, as we all know, was a great womanizer; he extolled Woman while generally being critical of women. There is a streak of that vein in me too, because I can admire Woman in the abstract, without becoming particularly enamoured of women in general. Now one of the main reasons why I remain cool towards most women, besides the obvious one that they fail to correspond to my ideal, is that all too often, especially in the winter, they are veritable germ traps - the best catchers, carriers, and transmitters of colds on two legs!

Apart from the obvious reason of their being physically weaker than men, this is partly because they normally spend more time in the company of children (the most germ-prone category of all) than men and partly, too, because they are generally more naturalistic and therefore inclined to spend more time out-of-doors with, in all probability, less clothing on; and that because, for a variety of reasons, they often prefer to show off their bodies, regardless of the risks involved to health. This of course mainly applies to young women, especially to very young ones. But although older women may be more circumspect about the weather and mindful of the appropriate clothing to wear, they also suffer from colds more frequently and fiercely, as a rule, than men.

Thus whenever I enter a public place, for example a library, I take good care not to sit too closely to women, from fear that they may be suffering a cold and that I might, in consequence, become contaminated! From time to time, however, sexual instinct intervenes to cause me to sit closer to a woman, particularly when she is both good-looking and young. But, often enough, my initial pleasure in her proximity is strangled, all too soon, by the realization that she is snivelling badly and could well contaminate me if I don't watch out. I turn away in disgust, or find some pretext to exempt myself from her proximity.

Perhaps this may strike some people as unduly alarmist and pessimistic. But I have caught a sufficient number of bad colds from strange women, in the past, not to be overly optimistic or complacent in their presence! I suffer, you might say, from a kind of 'Death in Venice' complex, anxious lest my work be interfered with, for 2-3 weeks, in consequence of my being 'laid-up' by some intellectual nonentity.

Only against this background would it be possible for a person to understand the thoroughness with which I customarily arm myself against colds and flu! In winter I am never to be seen without a hooded-jacket, and never would I think of venturing out, even on a dry day, without a scarf underneath, a pair of leather gloves on my hands, and a good pair of leather boots on my feet.

Another motivation for taking such thorough precautions against colds is that, living alone, I am obliged to fetch medicines, stagger out to restaurants, stores, chemists, etc., regardless of my health. Knowing from bitter experience what this means, I prefer to do everything within my power to preclude contagion or exposure to germs. Indeed, I sometimes think that I suffer more, on balance, from worrying about catching a cold than I actually do from having caught one!

One thing I most certainly suffer too much from is neighbour noise, of which blaring records, radios, and televisions must be accounted the leading examples! Even at this very moment I am desperately struggling, despite the precaution of having inserted malleable wax-earplugs in both ears, against one such noise in the form of an over-loud stereo in the parallel room of a neighbour from the house next door. She is a rather callous person with simple tastes and, although she may not consciously mean any harm, she makes one's professional life a very uphill struggle!

Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that most of my writing has been done in competition with such a background of noise, against which even wax earplugs are but a partial defence. Thus I have sound reason to be all the more proud of what I have achieved, given the vulgar obstacles so consistently placed in my way! But as Wilde once said: 'No artist can live with the people', and what applies to artists, meaning in Wilde's case dramatists and poets, applies no less, in my opinion, to philosophers and writers generally, irrespective of whether or not they have an option.

Curiously, when I worked in what I regarded as a relatively inconsequential way, as a humble clerk, the environment in which I was working gave me every conceivable incentive, including the threat of supervisory reprimand, to get on with my work. But ever since I began to work in what I regard as a more consequential way, as a creative writer, the environments in which I have worked, both now and previously, have seemingly done everything possible to prevent me from working ... by impeding my concentration at every turn. What a strange paradox! And yet how diabolically typical of this life, this battleground betwixt Hell and Heaven, in which 'the good' struggle on, like Bunyan's Pilgrim, irrespective of what evil or stupidity comes their way.

But if I revealed my true feelings about neighbour noise without revealing what I feel about the large shaggy-coated mountain dog that, from the vantage-point of its 'guard post' the other side of the adjacent alley, tyrannizes over the immediate environment with its loud and persistent barking, I would indeed be conveying but a partial and misleadingly one-sided perspective to the reader! For that dog, more than any other single beast in the neighbourhood, is responsible for almost as much suffering, over the years, as all the noise of my immediate neighbours put together!

Not only does it bark when people venture along the alley, it barks when the mood takes it, and barks in such a raspingly gruff, aggressive, malicious sort of way ... as to seem the most evil creature on four legs! More than once has the analogy with Lawrence's harrowing description of the disembowelment of an old horse by a bull, in the first chapter of The Plumed Serpent, come to mind when, after a period of 10-15 minutes, this persistent barking begins to penetrate one's mind, like a psychic horn, and slowly tear it apart. And so powerful are the coarse vibrations emitted by this beast, that earplugs and headphones combined are inadequate to prevent them from penetrating one's mind and setting up sinister analogies there!

No, I don't like this animal, which was meant for somewhere like the Pyrenees, and I am at a loss to understand why it is rarely if ever cautioned by its owners for making such a foul noise. Probably they are either too insensitive or too far removed from its kennel to be particularly disturbed by it, and are only too aware, in any case, of their limitations in controlling it. Certainly, they would never have restrained the beast in the past had I not vigorously complained about it on a number of torrid occasions. But I grew weary of complaining when I realized that my protestations weren't achieving any positive results. An intelligent writer living amongst noise-loving proletarians has no right to expect the environment to conform to his wishes. I discovered that fact some time ago!

Yet it still strikes me as rather odd, on occasion, that such a vicious beast should be living in one of the world's largest cities, in what purports to be one of the most civilized, if not the most civilized, countries in the world, in this twentieth century [at the original time of writing] after Christ. When there were neighbours a few doors down the road who took-in strays, the combined noise of conflicting barks to left and right of me was, at times, so intense and persistent as to suggest not late twentieth-century civilization but, rather, some return to primeval barbarity, in which beasts dominated the sordid scene! And it was this disgracefully barbarous noise that got me seriously thinking about the eventual liquidation of dogs, the prospect of dogs eventually being destroyed on principle. For it is inconceivable to me that man should always be either an accomplice to or a victim of such animals.

In an atomic civilization, where the pagan root is intact, there is of course no possibility of dogs being liquidated, since that would be anachronistic in a futuristic kind of way. But in a post-atomic civilization, such as must some day arise, the retention of dogs, not to mention other animals of a noisy or violent disposition, would be inconceivable, because the pagan root would have been extirpated. I look forward to such an age. For as long as I live, I shall be haunted by the memory of what it means to be a victim of excessively ferocious and regular barking!

There are times, however, when, providing they aren't too loud or persistent, neither neighbour nor dog noises annoy me, times when I can rise above emotional commitment and reaction to vulgar disturbances, and usually they are in the evening when, having paid my professional dues to the temporal world, I can afford to spend some time indifferent to pleasure and pain alike, not concerned with survival or reputation or truth or duty or morality, but free from all that in the absorption of a meditation state, at one with the upper part of my conscious mind, the superconscious, in blessed tranquillity; in the clear, so to speak, from emotional disturbances.

I experienced such a rewarding state-of-mind last night, January 11th 1983, between listening to each side of a Martinu record, and must attribute my ripeness for such beatitude in part to the regular breaks from reading, writing, listening to music, etc., that tension forces upon me, and in part to the gradual evolution of my psyche towards a level of intellectual/spiritual achievement where it is possible to experience the meditation state without too much struggle and almost entirely free of emotional intrusions, because one can separate the higher part of the conscious mind from the lower part virtually as a matter of course.

I hadn't fully realized, until recently, just how elitist meditation actually is; for unless one's psyche has reached a certain pitch of superconsciously-biased development, one will be too influenced by one's emotions to be capable of properly, easily, and consistently detaching oneself from them.

Nevertheless it's to be hoped that, one day, society will be organized in such a way as to make attainment to this level of psychic development possible for the great majority of people (a minority possibly not being involved to the same extent because they have technological or political roles to fulfil), who will then detach themselves from the subconscious as they acclimatize themselves to the highest human level of spiritual fulfilment in the superconscious. This should be possible in the transcendental civilization, when meditation will become the appropriate religious commitment on a communal and universal basis.

As for my own individual meditating experiences, I'm glad if, during the 15-20 minutes I spend exclusively in the company of my superconscious, I don't have to pass critical comment, in response to my emotions, on whatever noise may be audible to me. Last night, for instance, the sound of someone's coughing and wretching in the alley had no adverse effect upon me at all because I heard it in a completely objective, non-evaluating kind of way, simply as a sound among sounds, each sound being very distinct but, at the same time, not something to despise or condemn, and thus sounding pretty equal, paradoxically, to an emotion-free conscious mind.

Incidentally, it was brought home to me, on this occasion, just how mistaken the image of the smiling Buddha is, which strikes me as but a rococo perversion, as it were, of the original Buddhist ideal. For to be indifferent to pleasure and pain alike, one must be above the subconscious in supra-emotional tranquillity. The image of the smiling Buddha, on the contrary, reflects enslavement to emotional commitment. He is but a positive egotist!

Concerning the subconscious, there are two things that I am paradoxically proud of: the first of which being the difficulty with which I get to sleep, i.e. the protracted time it takes me to slide down into subconscious enslavement from a superconsciously-biased psyche, and the second of which being my inability, on waking, to remember more than a fraction of my dream-life, which testifies, I should think, to the relatively shallow grip my subconscious must have on me. Animals may be able to get to sleep easily and quickly, but the more sophisticated or intelligent men find getting to sleep rather difficult, and primarily because they have further to fall than those who, whether animal or human, are never very far from subconscious or emotional indulgence anyway.

Indeed, could one not argue that the more intelligent the man, the harder he will find it to get to sleep? Certainly the autobiographies of many intelligent men - Hermann Hesse's among them - provide ample evidence to the fact that sleep rarely came easily to them, and we may believe that this was primarily because their intellect was too highly-charged, too keyed-up, as it were, to enable them to relapse into subconscious dominion with animal-like ease.

Usually it takes me from between an hour and two hours to get to sleep, and when I do eventually succeed, my sleep is relatively shallow and intermittent. My dreams do not hold any great interest for me, on waking, and quickly disappear from memory, leaving but a few disconnected fragments. I would not be of much use to a dream psychologist, like Jung, and have never taken Freud's theories of dream interpretation very seriously. I am convinced that, in the future, people will not only take less interest in the subconscious, they will sleep less as well!

Since it is more usual for a man to swing from one extreme to another if, in the first place, he is an extremist and if, in the second place, he is capable of swinging, than to stop at a halfway stage, we need not doubt that sinners have occasionally become saints and, conversely, saints become sinners. The idea that unless a man was formerly a sinner, and in a big way, he is unlikely to become a saint, has to be seen against this background, it seems to me, of swinging from one extreme to another. Of course, not all saints have previously been sinners, although it has become possible for certain writers to canonize lay saints on the basis of what the man has endured or suffered over the years, regardless of his background.

Thus Sartre saw justification to elevate Jean Genet to the lay sainthood, since this man could not, as a long-term prisoner, lead anything approaching an average sensual, sexual, comfortable existence. Likewise, on a similar basis, I would like to suggest the name of Rudolf Hess. For regardless of whatever war crimes he may or may not have committed, Hess led such an ascetic life, over the decades of his incarceration in Spandau, that it would be unrealistic to regard him as a sinner. Thus, as far as I am concerned, 'Saint Hess'!

As for myself, I too may be on the verge, if not already there, of sainthood, since various circumstances, financial as well as environmental, have forced a consistent pattern of asceticism in celibacy and solitude upon me, during the past nine years of my residence in north London. Yet I would hesitate to regard myself as a saint, and for the simple reason that I do not relate to the Christian tradition but, in turning away from it, have dedicated so much of my creative energies towards outlining a future course, both human and post-human, of religious development.

Yes, it is as an outsider in the Christian civilization that I see myself, a messiah for whom the Christian Church, whether Catholic or Protestant, holds little or no interest; a man who relates, on the strength of both theory and race, to revolutionary opposition to dualistic civilization, though more from a transcendentalist than a communist point-of-view, bearing in mind his allegiance to Ireland and thus to spiritual values generally.

Not therefore a man who sees himself being set-up as a Western hero, a champion of Christian values, but, more likely, outlawed as a threat to the level of civilization generally prevailing there. One whose truth concerning, amongst other things, the concept of a post-human millennium ... would prove embarrassing to a civilization dedicated to upholding the beliefs of the Church with regard, for example, to life after death, the survival of the spirit in posthumous salvation.

Yes, I am the man who is poor and ascetic not because he is beneath the society in which he lives but because, intellectually considered, he has the capacity to tower over it, like an intellectual colossus. I look down on priests from the vantage-point of my atheistic transcendentalism. Just so did Christ look down on the priests, the scribes and pharisees, of his own day, as one who appertained to a higher development. But I appertain to a still higher development than Christ, and so I cannot admire his latter-day followers, nor allow myself to accept honours from them.

There are men who are without women, but not all men who are alone are without women. There are also men who are beyond women, considered from a literal, palpable point-of-view. These men - and I would appear to be one of them - are akin to free-electron equivalents, who intimate, by their freedom from atomic constraint, of the ultimate freedom (from sensual ties) of the future free-electron absolute, the heavenly Beyond as the goal of evolutionary striving. A man who is beyond women, in this way, is not 'bent', as the ignorant tend to suppose, but morally superior, freer, living on a higher plane of evolutionary development. A man who is without a woman, and who regretfully recognizes this fact in himself, is simply an unwilling free-electron equivalent, perhaps even a neutron equivalent, unhappy in his solitude, and hoping that, through whatever efforts he may make to find a suitable woman, he will one day become a lover, a partner in heterosexual dualism. Unbeknown to himself, he wishes to establish an atomic integrity by becoming the slave of a proton equivalent who, if he marries her, will function as his 'better half'.

The post-atomic man, on the other hand, does not wish to be dominated by proton equivalents. He may opt for a relationship, embracing sex, with what I like to call a quasi-electron equivalent, a liberated female, but this relationship will not involve marriage. He may, if homosexual, enter into pseudo-electron (transmuted neutron) relationships with men on his own level. Or he may prefer, being obliged by circumstances, to remain alone and to establish some kind of free-electron relationship, on a sexual basis, with pornography, or such pornographic models from a variety of men's magazines or whatever as appeal to his sexual tastes. This is the post-atomic relationship that I have been obliged to uphold, though the private individual in me longs dearly for the first, a relationship, outside marriage, with a liberated female. I refer to Sartre's relationship with Simone de Beauvoir as a good example of this kind of post-atomic arrangement.

I cannot bring myself to read a female author unless she is both beautiful and sophisticated. For when she is both, I can enter into a kind of quasi-romantic relationship with her. My ideal, therefore, is a beautiful philosopher, and I think I find this ideal in Simone de Beauvoir, whom I will not hesitate from considering beautiful, referring, of course, to the years before age diminished her looks, if not her charm.

A sophisticated woman who, like Irish Murdoch, is not beautiful, on the other hand, I take little interest in. Neither can I bring myself to read a beautiful woman who is not sophisticated, like Edna O'Brien, though I can continue to admire her beauty. But, on the whole, I avoid female authors, because I do not like to be intellectually instructed or talked down to by a woman.

For a similar reason, I would not care to receive a sermon, were I a church-goer, from a woman priest (priestess?). The situation would strike me as slightly grotesque and hypocritical. But that is only because I am one of the most intellectually sophisticated of men, for whom equals would be hard enough to find even among my own sex!

There are different types of philosopher, though all philosophers may be divided into two main categories, depending on whether they speak to the Few, the rulers, or to the Many, the masses. If the former, then they are serious philosophers. If the latter, they are more likely to be popular philosophers. To speak to the rulers, or to those who are destined to become future rulers, is to reveal intellect, or what one regards as an important progression in intellectual matters, to the Few, that it may be acted upon in due course. To speak to the Many, by contrast, is to offer them tips as to how best to conduct their lives in straightened or reduced circumstances if they are to attain to happiness or love or success or power or freedom or whatever.

A good example of the first type of philosopher is Nietzsche. By contrast, John Cowper Powys affords us a worthy example of the second. And Bertrand Russell is one of those hybrid, serious/popular philosophers who seem to come somewhere in-between the two extremes.

In my case, I like to think of myself as a serious philosopher, not one for the masses but one whose truth might influence the course of history and thus ameliorate the lives of the masses in due time.

Things can always be looked at from two ways, a subjective and an objective way, which is equivalent to saying a negative and a positive way. I can view my life in north London from the private, individual angle or, if I prefer, from the public, professional angle. In the first case, I shall be seeing it subjectively, in the second case - objectively.

In this day and age it is more customary to identify with the objective, professional side than with the other, because the public is increasingly coming to supplant the private and to drive it out-of-bounds. It is better to be positive than negative and, for that reason, I should think first and foremost of what I have achieved as a philosopher ... rather than what I've suffered, or been obliged to endure, as a private individual. Then I will appear to myself in a messianic light, not simply as an unfortunate wretch, as certain of these pages could lead one to suppose.

MAINLY ABOUT MYSELF (1985)

Living with the proletariat I haven't become a proletarian so much as learnt to understand them better. There is a world of difference between a shepherd-type and a sheep-type; the former is studious and hard-working, the latter ... self-indulgent and lazy. The shepherd-type remains outside the cultural 'promised land' of the moment; the sheep-type lives in it, as in a sheep pen. Clashes of interest inevitably occur between the one and the other. But no man has a right to consider himself worthy of leading the proletariat, in whatever capacity, who has not dwelt among them for a considerable period of time and learnt their ways! That man who knows little or nothing about the proletariat is their natural enemy.

Knowing the proletariat as I do, it is evident to me that their cultural self-indulgence is in line with the demands and direction of evolutionary progress. There are those of the proletariat, however, who are less given to cultural self-enrichment, more violent and competitive. Some of them are low and evil, unduly sarcastic; but many of them are persevering and tolerant and comparatively meek, while some are simply of a temperament and physical build that would find its self-realization either in the army or the police. You could regard these latter as potential sheepdog-types, and doubtless a revolutionary transformation of society would draw most of them into uniforms of one kind or another.

I still read a great deal, drawing on information from both books and magazines, which I reserve for the evening. Most of my reading from books is of a political nature these days, but I also find time for the odd novel - usually a work by Lawrence Durrell or Anthony Burgess. Enjoyable? Yes, in a way. But I no longer possess that enthusiasm for novels I had, say, 10-15 years ago. In fact, I now despise the genre as somehow too bourgeois or democratic, and to some extent this even applies to my own handful of novels, written over a six-year stretch, before I turned to higher things; though I suppose they are rather more what one could call 'supernovelistic', and hence effectively metaphysical, than genuinely literary. Certainly I began my literary career more as an antinovelist than a novelist, having previously come under the culturally disruptive influences of authors like James Joyce and Henry Miller, both of whom I now despise.

I find I can read magazines like Playboy, Mayfair, and Penthouse from cover to cover, though obviously not all in one go but ... in thirty-minute stints each evening. As a youth, I bought such magazines specifically for their models, hoping to find at least one girl whom I could spiritually as well as physically admire. Now, while still taking an interest in the girls, I buy these magazines primarily because there is plenty to read in them, even if not all of it is to my taste. Where formerly I could throw a magazine away without having read even one article, I now feel that I am cheating or depriving myself if I don't read everything, or almost everything, in them. And I don't throw the magazines away either, but pride myself, contrary to my previous practice, on collecting them, as if to say: 'Here is something more radical and progressive than books which, to a degree, has taken over from books in my cultural identity, just as, where music is concerned, cassettes have taken over from records.

As it happens most of my books, cassettes, and records come, these days, from the local library, which is conveniently close. The library also possesses a magazine rack which serves me quite well on Saturdays, when I go there specifically for the purpose of reading from a variety of publications - newspapers, periodicals, and magazines - like Le Monde (my French is passable, if only in reading), The Listener, The Spectator, Connoisseur, Art International, and The Socialist Standard. Most of them are bourgeois, and hence ideologically limited. But I can still derive a certain amount of intellectual pleasure and/or useful information from a perusal of their more appealing contents. I have to admit that I prefer The Listener to The Spectator, both from a current affairs and a cultural point-of-view, not to mention the quality of the paper and printing. (Fritz Spiegl's 'End Piece' is often fascinating, though rarely enlightening - in contrast, you might say, to Chris Welch's enlightening, though rarely fascinating, 'Centrepiece'.)

At one time I borrowed mainly classics from the record department of the library, but over the years I had exhausted most of the more appealing and, to my mind, best-recorded material available, so that, willy-nilly, I was obliged to progress, in due course, to the Jazz and Rock sections - in that order. Consequently, for the past year or so, I have borrowed nothing but Jazz and Rock, and I consider this indicative of an ideological sharpening and closed-society attitude, as if to say: classics are now beneath my pale, since too bourgeois and ... naturalistic.

So if one lives in a radical, i.e. urban, environment and is therefore (or inherently) an evolutionary type, one improves oneself by degrees - the raison d'être, I suppose, of being alive. Or perhaps a raison d'être would be nearer the truth for me, since I also have ideological motives to consider. But it is really me who is being improved and doing the improving; for I am well aware that such an environment can and does worsen others.

In similar fashion, through a process of ideological evolution, I have put myself 'beyond the pale' of painterly art, including the most abstract examples. Formerly, I took a scholarly interest in it. Now I simply see it as bourgeois, limited in time and space, a form under siege from light art and completely transcended by holography. As well identify with parliamentary democracy as ... take an interest in paintings!

But as a self-professed Social Transcendentalist, I am in no position to rave about abstract art or any other kind of painting, modern or traditional. If I had my political way, I would have such art banned and the existing masterpieces either auctioned off on the gullible bourgeoisie overseas - and for a tidy price - or, failing that, destroyed. There would be no place for open-society conservationism!

This is something that would apply no less to bourgeois records, books, and magazines - in short, to all modes of culture on the democratic open-society level and/or beneath it. Not to mention modes of anticulture on the specifically proletarian, and hence Marxist, level. For instance, I would certainly support a ban on the sale of The Socialist Standard, which is but a semi-anarchic, mass-democratic periodical of little or no value, politically or culturally, to the ideologically evolved.

Often, when reading this periodical at the local library, I have been brought close to boiling-point by the political stupidity and naiveté therein displayed! Sometimes I have felt the opposite emotion - a desire to burst out laughing, so ludicrous was the political content of the article(s) in question. Occasionally, though, I may happen upon an article of real critical value and insight, a résumé, say, of some aspect of modern history or an exposé of the hypocrisy of the British Labour Movement, and then I am virtually at one with it. Were it not for such articles, there would be no point in my continuing to read. But, on balance, The Socialist Standard doesn't make it with me, which is why, given the opportunity, I would have it banned. For I am, after all, the representative of supertruth, and where supertruth is ... there can be no lies - not even superlies!

Were I to vote in a British General Election - a thing, incidentally, I haven't done since 1974, when I plumped for Thorpe's Liberals in preference to the Scylla of Wilson's Labour Party and the Charybdis of Heath's Conservatives - I expect I would cast in my lot with the Social Democrats [latterly Liberal Democrats], if only because they signify the possibility of an end to the traditional two-party parliamentary rivalry of the idealistic Conservatives, or Tories, and the materialistic Democratic Socialists ... of the Labour Party, in a sort of superrealism. But, frankly, I don't have much confidence in their prospects of long-term success; for no matter how beneficial to Britain superrealism or, if you prefer, superliberalism may seem on paper, in reality Britain is too decadent to be anything but post-state in its political integrity.

One might say that Britain entered its political decline from the day that the Liberal Party was eclipsed by the Labour Party and realism began to fade into the political background ... as a post-state dichotomy between materialistic socialism and idealistic conservatism became the parliamentary norm, a norm growing ever more dichotomous with the passing decades, British society fissured down the middle in a political nuclear fission, too late now to reverse the process of decline and attempt to bring the sundered extremes back together again in a democratic realism of superliberal unity, the endeavour noble but ... ultimately doomed to failure beneath the mounting pressures of political extremism, a struggle against the treacherous current of political decadence ... bearing everything down towards the rocks of socialist barbarism, against which both bourgeois idealism and bourgeois realism, not to mention bourgeois materialism, will probably be dashed to pieces.

Were I to vote for the Social Democrats, I would be voting for a lost cause, just as in 1974. The fact that I haven't voted since then is not only a reflection of my pessimism with regard to British politics, but an indication of my developing supertheocratic allegiance to Social Transcendentalism, and consequent inclination to regard myself as a Social Transcendentalist, for whom democratic allegiances are irrelevant.

To continue the argument, one might say that Social Transcendentalism is my idealism, a superidealism having future applicability, the way I see it, to Eire and to countries capable of and entitled to supertheocratic upgrading. The great superidealistic opponent of communism, which one might identify, by contrast, with supermaterialism. However, a dichotomy has long existed in me between the ideal and the real, and whilst I may identify with the ideal in theory ... I would be capable, I suspect, of supporting the real in practice, in this case the superrealism of Social Democracy, since I reside, at the time of writing, in Britain, not Eire.

Mad? Schizophrenic? Possibly. But such a dichotomy is my reality, one might almost say my norm, since I inherited from my briefly-married parents a division, inherent in themselves, between the real and the ideal, the practical and the theoretical, in the form of a working-class/middle-class, British-Irish/Gaelic-Irish division, a division which, on both counts, has ever cut me off from a majority of people, both British and Irish, and contributed to my becoming something of an arch-loner.

Thus what I believe in theory doesn't necessarily connect with what I do, or might do, in practice. And yet it is possible that my idealism, developed to a certain point, could turn against my realism, as seems already to be the case, and oblige me to take an anti-realist stance to a degree that would cut me off from and lead to the destruction of the real, in the name of an idealistic absolutism.

Certainly, this tendency would mature were I to return to Eire, the country of my birth, and put down stronger idealistic roots. For I am predominantly Gaelic-Irish, probably by as much as three-quarters, and am only too aware that my realism is bolstered by long residence in Britain, as if England obliged me to emphasize that part of my totality not only at the expense of the other but ... out of all proportion to its true worth! Irish residence would, I am confident, quickly deflate it, placing due emphasis on my idealism.

It is not unusual for people - neighbours, shopkeepers, librarians, and the like - to take me for a Jew, and this in spite of my quintessentially Irish name. It is not as if I particularly look like a Jew ... so much as the fact that I am perceived to be both very intelligent and highly cultured, which is something that an Englishman, in particular, is reluctant to identify with the Irish. After all, did not the English oppress the Irish for centuries, so how therefore can an Irishman be more intelligent and cultured than an Englishman? He was always deprived and kept down, reduced to a kind of subhuman level, whereas the Englishman not too busy oppressing the Irish, or any other unfortunate race, was relatively free to cultivate the intellect, with cultural superiority the inevitable consequence.

Well, such shallow reasoning may even today underline majority British thinking about the Irish, but the fact is that, commonplace views aside, my intellectual and cultural superiority - such as it is - does not derive from my being a Jew but, on the contrary, an Irishman of, on my father's side, intellectual stock who was raised in England and therefore acquired, in addition to a British education, an English accent and cultural lifestyle. If I do not sound like an Irishman, it is because I am, in some respects, an Hiberno-Englishman, comparatively free from Catholic indoctrination and the limitations, culturally or otherwise, that often attend it.

And yet I must admit that by far the greater part of my education derives from library books, magazines, records, etc., and that I'm consequently more self-taught than teacher-taught, as also in the profounder sense of being one's own teacher ... through writing. I have been careful not to succumb to English prejudices inherent in an English education, preferring to use a basic education - which is all, in any case, High School ever gave me - in the service of a private and largely non-English education derived from various foreign and external sources, Irish included.

For, deep down, I have not become English, and I mean this in more than an ethnic sense. I have always been conscious of being an Irishman in England, even though I have lived in Britain since the age of approximately two-and-a-half. And this is because my father's influence is stronger, both ethnically and class-wise, than my mother's, making me unwilling to identify with England. As if to say, one came from too noble and mentally strong a family, too Gaelic a family, to be disposed to taking a complacent view of an English identification! Fools can be absorbed into the bloodstream of the English nation, whether under the banner of Marxism or democracy or whatever, but not a man like me, for whom history is an ever-present reality ... demanding ethnic fidelity. It was not I who brought myself to England, but my pro-British and effectively half-Protestant mother, and consequently it is not for me to consider myself an Englishman but an Irishman in exile, awaiting a favourable opportunity to return to the land of his birth.

But when or under what circumstances would that be? As far as I am concerned ... as soon as I'm in a position, both financially and psychologically, to return to Ireland on independent terms, able to avoid undue exposure to or influence by religious tradition. For if exile in England has given me anything, it is freedom from everything traditional in Irish life, a freedom to formulate a new faith and an overwhelming desire to offer that faith to the Irish people in due course, in order that they may be lifted out of the comparative darkness of a Roman Catholic past and into the light of a Social Transcendentalist future, free from God the Father, the Virgin Mary, Christ, and other such Bible-derived entities ... to develop pure spirit in the name of the (self-styled) Second Coming, who offers them religious sovereignty in the true form of self-realization ... that they may tend towards the spiritual climax of evolution in a future Beyond.

Yes, if I offer them this divine freedom, it is because long exile in England deprived me of a consistently Irish Catholic upbringing and obliged me to either accept or reject Protestantism. Being of Irish race, I rejected the abstract god of the Protestants, but could no longer identify with the concrete god of the Catholic Church, from which religion I had been wrenched at the tender age of ten ... when my Catholic maternal grandmother died and my mother, relatively free of sectarian scruples and anxious to get me out of the way (not altogether unreasonably in some respects, since we only had one room in the lodging house we inhabited, and I was growing too big to continue sharing the same bed with her, which was the only bed in the room), packed me off to a Protestant Children's Home in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey.

I can still recall the shocked letter I wrote to my mother shortly after arriving there, in which I informed her, in no uncertain terms, that the House Parents, being Baptist, were of the 'wrong faith', and that it was therefore necessary to take me away from the place as quickly as possible - a letter soon to be confiscated, unfortunately, by a suspicious House Parent, but one which, even if posted, would probably not have had the slightest influence on her. How could it have? My last Catholic connection had disappeared with my grandmother's death, so I was abandoned to the Protestant lions, thereafter to be systematically indoctrinated in the Baptist faith.

I needn't have worried. I was anything but partial to nonconformist (heretical) Christianity, and found the ideal of conversion to its Christ ludicrous. Only half-wits, I thought, became Christians and made a public show of the fact by getting baptized. I was never a half-wit but always too much of a whole wit or, at any rate, three-quarter wit to be a sheep to the Baptist slaughter. I had been regarded as a 'tough nut to crack' and, to be sure, I was to prove, in the end, too tough for even the most obdurate 'nut-cracker' to succeed with me. I was impervious to Baptist assaults on my Catholic sensibility, and when I was finally released from the Children's Home, seven years later, into a grubby hostel, I had not the slightest desire ever to set foot inside a Baptist church again!

But if I hadn't been converted to the Baptist faith, this form of nonconformism had very firmly severed me from my Catholic roots. I could no more desire entry into a Catholic church. Henceforth, I was on my own, and I would either sink into Marxist materialism or swim on a current of superidealism yet to be fully forged. I was destined for the latter!

But not without ups and downs, diversions and experimentations. For there was a time, a few years ago, when I considered myself a Marxist or, at any rate, socialist, even if one who had an interest in oriental mysticism and transcendental values generally. I was never an out-and-out materialist, nor, if on none other than ethnic grounds, could I ever become such. For one thing, I despised the mob too much, and for another ... I could never abide the reduction of art to the mundane level of proletarian propaganda. I had a feeling that Marxism meant the assertion of what is lowest in life by the lowest for the lowest in a world that would end, if Marxism triumphed, in a barbarous dead-end of proletarian mediocrity. Clearly, there had to be some alternative to Marxism, and I was determined to discover it!

Buddhism, however, was not enough; for I quickly discerned in this oriental religion - as in various others - an inability to come to terms with evil, an indifference to evil, bordering on the ridiculous, in self-centred contemplation. No matter if one were to meditate every day for hours at a stretch, evil still existed and would continue to exist, becoming ever more confident of its goals and capable, at some point in time, of opposing the meditator and, if necessary, eliminating him. Besides, personal salvation, the ideal that every man must take care of his own soul and practise meditation, had a bourgeois elitist ring to it. For if the meditator took himself off to his little private retreat specifically for the purpose of cultivating his soul, he could say to the world: 'Blow you Jack, I'm alright', which would be true up to a point. But not ultimately so! For I soon discovered, by a combination of reason and practice, that, by itself, meditation was inadequate to truly save the soul, since it dwelt in the brain and would ever remain there until the body killed it off.

Clearly, if the soul was to survive and attain to the heavenly Beyond, something would have to be done about the body. We would have to kill off the body, so to speak, as we progressed to a stage of life when human brains were artificially supported and just as artificially sustained in collectivized contexts. This theory, concerning the first of two projected post-human life forms, led me to abandon all interest in Buddhism, which is no more than a dualistic religion, with trinitarian distinctions between Ground, Buddha, and Clear Light of the Void, and pursue my unique destiny as the forger and champion of a true world religion which I came, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, to call Centerism or Centrism, since I envisaged it being conducted largely within the context of a meditation centre, the successor, as far as I was concerned, to Christian churches and in particular to the Catholic Church, while being politically furthered and supported by Social Transcendentalism, its ideological front-line.

Was there a blueprint for or prototype of this politico-religious ideology? Yes, I believe there was, and for a time, before I forged unique terminology together with a new and purer religious orientation, I fell under the spell of Fascism/National Socialism, particularly as developed and furthered by Adolf Hitler. Indeed, I even thought of myself as an Irish National Socialist or, rather, Social Nationalist, just as I had previously considered myself to be a Marxist and a Buddhist. But I soon realized that while Fascism served a purpose in the evolution of my own thought ... it was essentially a thing of the past, never to be resurrected on anything like identical terms in the future. What mattered was the creation of a superior ideology stemming, in some degree, from it or, at any rate, from what was best in it, including its opposition to Communism.

And so, inevitably, I came to see Fascism as a milestone on the road to Centrism, a crude approximation to the true religion, with Hitler as a kind of bogus messiah who, instead of saving the German people, eventually led them to damnation, whether through his own fault or the overwhelming military superiority of his democratic enemies ... I shall not say. But National Socialism, lacking the kind of religious insights I have developed and now equate with supertruth, could never have won. Mein Kampf may have been a crude, Germanic approximation to the Bible of the Second Coming, but it was ultimately inadequate to serve the future salvation of the world in a true religion. Even if Hitler had survived the War and proceeded to work out his religious views, as he had apparently intended to do, he would not have got much nearer to supertruth, being fundamentally too pagan to have broken free of the Creator, or some such Father-equivalent, in the name of the Holy Ghost.

No, quite apart from personal limitations, Hitler would have been limited by large sections of the German people themselves, including Aryan 'blond beasts', who would inevitably have revolted at too transcendental a religion. Had he been born into some other, darker people ... things might have developed slightly differently. But Nazism was always paradoxically torn between the great realistic iceberg of German tradition and its own revolutionary tip of anti-Marxist idealism, with the iceberg to a large extent conditioning the formulation of the ideology. I abandoned Fascism with no less relief than, earlier, I had abandoned Marxism. For I had discovered that race and ideology are deeply intertwined - in fact, inextricably connected.

Speaking as a Social Transcendentalist, I do not speak for the British or the Germans or the Americans or even the Russians necessarily, but, rather, for peoples like the Irish, the Israelis, the Iranians, possibly the Spanish and the Greeks, and various others whom I have 'chosen' to work together in the name of a truly global religion. I am aware that the Way will be hard, that nationalist interests will oppose the development of supra-national Centrism in the countries concerned, not least of all in Eire; but I am in no doubt that the Will of that which most corresponds to a Second Coming will eventually triumph over bourgeois reaction. For there is no real alternative from the evolutionary standpoint, and only religious progress will make the lives of the peoples in question any better.

Those who are primarily interested in materially bettering themselves at the expense of the people cannot expect to survive much longer. The entire bourgeois world will be overcome, all atomic materialism erased in the name of evolutionary progress. In some countries it will be some form of socialism which erases it, in others ... Social Transcendentalism. Either way, the materialistic worldly traditions will perish, and everything bourgeois along with them!

Just imagine a world, if you dare, where there are no orchestras and conductors, no cotton suits and leather shoes, no skirts and dresses, high-heels and make-up, ties and shirts, sculptures and paintings, records and hardbacks, museums and art galleries, landlords and lodging houses, universities and academies, dogs and cats, cigarettes and joints, pipes and cigars, wine and beer, whisky and gin, magazines and newspapers, bullets and bombs, banks and currencies, armies and navies, plutocrats and aristocrats, monarchs and royals, parliaments and politicians, churches and priests, cars and buses, bicycles and horses, fires and matches, strikes and unions, pubs and restaurants, marriages and divorces, heterosexuals and homosexuals, prisons and lunatic asylums, trees and flowers, gardens and fields, building societies and interest rates, stock exchanges and shares, mortgages and houses, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Can you imagine that? Are you in favour of imagining any such thing? Or are you a bourgeois reactionary with no desire but to perpetuate the liberal status quo! Time will divide the chaff from the wheat, the sheep from the goats, and there can be no escape!

Those who are not for me are against me, whether directly, as bourgeois, or indirectly, as socialists. I know that the reckoning with bourgeois materialism must come first, and that socialists are entitled to pursue their destiny at its expense, just as Centrists will be obliged to pursue their destiny mainly at the expense of religious fundamentalism in the Middle East. Socialists and Centrists will need to work together, to co-operate in the short term, in pursuance of their respective interests.

History has witnessed the implementation of a Final Solution from a closed-society crudely supertheocratic point-of-view ... with regard to the Jews - a religio-tribal designation upheld in loyalty to Zion; German Jews, French Jews, not (except in comparatively rare instances) Jewish Germans or Jewish Frenchmen - and we are obliged to perceive in their religious nobility the seeds of their destruction under Nazism. Many surviving Jews, wiser than before, subsequently became Israelis, and thus escaped the curse of diaspora tribalism. Others remained Jews - French Jews, German Jews, etc. - and are still so today. Eventually, it is to be hoped that most Jews will become Social Transcendentalists, either in Israel or in those countries most likely destined for Centrist upgrading, and a Social Transcendentalist is first and foremost an ideologue, not a national, and most emphatically not a tribalist!

There can be no such thing, in other words, as a Jewish Social Transcendentalist. Only an Israeli or Irish or Iranian Social Transcendentalist in a Centrist Federation. It will not be the Jews who are found wanting or caught beneath a closed-society supertheocratic pale, but, in all probability, certain other races, tribal groupings, esoteric sects, and so on, who, for a variety of reasons, cannot be directly assimilated to the ideology.

'... Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven' - the most significant line of the 'Lord's Prayer'. Yet how ironical that so many of those who mouth this hope, or who have mouthed it in the past, would be among the first to oppose me, to prevent the democratically-engineered mass overthrow of democracy and all the open-society and autocratic phenomena that go with it ... in the interests of the liberal status quo! All those self-righteous Christians will proclaim to the sky their belief in and hope for the Second Coming. But who is this Second Coming - the literal return of Christ? Assuredly not! Only a fool would believe that a man who died on the Cross in Roman times was going to return to the world some two-thousand years later, irrespective of the theological legitimacy of the Resurrection.

Reincarnation of the same person with the same name, features, and race is a myth. If the concept of reincarnation has any validity, it can only be to the metaphorical extent that a type, a particular temperament, a specific destiny ... will return to the world at periodic intervals, when and if such a type, temperament, destiny, or whatever is required. Very well, Christ was one messiah, a bringer of salvation through His self, and I like to think of myself as another, a more advanced messiah, if you will, in the evolution of messiahs, who brings salvation through his self for others to realize in their selves, a destiny analogous to Christ's but on a higher, more absolute plane of religious evolution, with the emphasis on the people saving their selves through self-realization.

To me, the Second Coming stands in an antithetical relationship to the Virgin Mary, a deity which I like to think of as 'the minor subnatural'. For if the Father is defined as 'the major subnatural' and Christ as 'the natural', i.e. symptomatic of an atomic compromise between the Father and the Holy Ghost, then the Second Coming corresponds to 'the minor supernatural' and the Holy Ghost to 'the major supernatural' which, in all probability, is destined to materialize, as it were, at the climax of evolution. The Catholic Christ, however, is not 'the natural' or, rather, 'major natural', independent of the Blessed Virgin, but 'the minor natural', a baby in His Mother's arms, an idealistic Christ overshadowed by the 'subnatural' Virgin.

Well, it's not difficult, from all this, to see which people will support a Second Coming who proclaims himself 'the minor supernatural', in relation to the (future) Holy Ghost, and has no truck with Christian naturalism. Certainly, this second messiah is not appealing to or expecting the backing of hard-line Protestants! He appeals, on the contrary, to an extreme people in the name of a new and antithetical extremism, substituting for a sub-theocratic past a supertheocratic future. I am, of course, referring here to the Catholic Irish, from whose loins I sprang.

And I tell you, when I drink a bottle of wine, as I sometimes do on Saturday evening in order to relax myself for a little music-listening and television-viewing, it is almost always Liebfraumilch that I drink, with a picture of the Virgin and Child on the label, as if to confirm a Catholic bias. Never do I drink beer, which I associate with a Protestant bias, and I have no use for hard liquor. I like the sweetness and smoothness of white wine, and I drink it not because I really want to, but because it temporarily alleviates the tension from which I suffer in consequence of having been alone in the sordid milieu of my particular part of north London for so long. It sensualizes my scalp, so to speak, and thus enables me to soak-up electronic bombardments from my record-player or television or radio or cassette-player with seeming impunity.

For one night of the week I, a fish out of provincial water, a deep-sea fish languishing in the urban shallows, am relatively free from tension and inhibitions, free to relax on my own relatively more sophisticated cultural terms. But I would be incapable of drinking wine for its own sake, and I wager that were I to return to Ireland, I would soon abandon its use in favour of a more natural and lasting cure for tension!

Never having made love to a woman, I remain, at thirty-three (33), a virgin. Youth gave me unrequited love and London has given me solitude. Were I not technically a virgin, how could I lay claim to be the Second Coming? Indeed, how would I have got to my Social Transcendentalist level of thought, if I had had a woman hanging around my neck all these years? Spiritually, you are limited by your sexual habits and lifestyle; if they are conventional, then your spiritual status will be conventional, which is to say, naturalistic and atomic. My sexual habits, to the limited extent that I ever indulged in any, have always been radical, which is to say, connected with erotic photography, and therefore my spirituality is radical, since I am free to think what I choose, not what a woman would prefer me to think or what I would probably think if tied to one and saddled with children. In me, the supernatural has triumphed over the natural; for no matter what mental or even physical pain I suffer from being alone, I suffer in God's name ... as one who has put a maximum premium on spiritual freedom!

Even if I am destined to die to the spirit in order to be reborn in the flesh ... of worldly time, I shall have accomplished my theoretical task ... of a Second Coming equivalent ... in the name of supertruth. No less than 'In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was God', meaning the Old Testament equivalent of the Father, viz. Jehovah, can it be said that 'In the End was the Word, and the Word was God', meaning the Second Coming. What happens to me in the flesh is relatively unimportant, since I am not here to be worshipped in the flesh but comprehended and obeyed in the word of the spirit.

The 'I' writing this is the 'I' of the messianic Second Coming, not the personal 'I' of the concrete individual. Such a personal self will cry out - and does from time to time - in the name of the natural, the flesh, aghast at the suffering that denial of the flesh in the name of the greater 'I' has entailed. But this greater 'I' is indifferent to the flesh and its sufferings, and that is why it is God made manifest in the Word - the closest thing to the Holy Spirit. Call it persona or superpersona, if you prefer; but it is this professional, messianic 'I' which has triumphed over the small 'I' in the creation of supertruth.

God begins and ends in these and other such pages. Those who wish to know God on the level of the Second Coming will have to read my work. Yet by then I will already, in all likelihood, have died to the spirit and been reborn in the flesh ... of worldly time.

EXILE IN PURGATORY (1993)

Eight years have passed since my last series of autobiographical sketches, and in that time much has changed and much, too, stayed approximately the same. On the changed side, I moved from one part of Hornsey to another, which, by and large, was a move for the better, both domestically and environmentally. I became, following a period of employment training, a part-time computer/typing tutor for a small training centre affiliated to Hornsey YMCA. I learnt how to type properly (rare for a writer, not to mention a male) and, what's more, how to use a computer.

Both these attainments have since benefited me enormously, and my work, meaning principally philosophy, is now at an all-time peak. You could say that, despite these gains, writing is my constant companion in a world which still finds me without friends or lovers but, as though in compensation, with an excess of genius! For if there is one thing which more than anything else has stayed approximately the same as before, it is my position as a solitary writer of genius in an overwhelmingly philistine society. I may be alone, but I am alone on my own creative terms, scorning the shallow successes of the commercial mob and the vulgar blandishments of money-crazed advertisers.

From 1985-1993 I lived, creatively, in what I now regard as a philosophical wilderness. I wrote nothing but philosophy, principally in the form of aphoristic notes (or 'supernotes', as I preferred to call them), and sought 'the truth', beyond anything I had achieved before, with a zeal and one-pointedness of mind which left even my earlier philosophical endeavours far behind. Yet, despite my unrelenting efforts to corner and expound 'the truth', or perhaps I should say 'supertruth' (for it was indeed a higher sense of truth I was pursuing), I failed to find it, even after several thousand pages spanning some eight volumes. The ultimate truth was more elusive than I had expected it to be, although here and there I did more than adequate justice to subjects which bordered upon it or which I had already touched upon in earlier works. Yet my metaphysics was still short of completion when, eight years after entering the field of this intense philosophical endeavour, I drew a close to the final volume of supernotes which spiralled through successive twists-and-turns of a seemingly endless cycle of refinements and rethinks, and left the 'philosophical wilderness' behind.

Almost immediately I entered the fulfilment of that period in the aphoristic purism of Maximum Truth, which is where my metaphysics finally 'came good', and I achieved the elemental completeness I had lacked until then, a completeness which added the photon to the proton, electron, and neutron of my earlier theories. Now, finally, I had 'the truth', and I was philosophically fulfilled. Everything I had written led to this peak, this comprehensive objectivity and objective comprehensiveness, and I could look back on it with the satisfaction of one who has tallied long in the wilderness and passed on to higher things. I was saved. Now it only remained for me to save the world.

The world will only be saved from its sin when people turn from the lights which blind them to their spirit, and soar heavenwards on a current of gravity-defying air, leaving the heaviness of their mundane lives behind them. Currently there is so much moral ignorance in the world, especially the Western one, that it is hard to see how much progress against the lights which blind people to their spirit could be made without recourse to the most drastic means, means which undo decades of vacuous expansion and put a halt to the domination which these heathen lights now enjoy, to the detriment of everything pure and holy.

Personally, I have no illusions as to the difficulty of the task ahead, nor any scruples about exploiting whatever means are most conducive to the liberation of mankind from the vacuous clutches of these ungodly media. Each year that passes the Moloch of spirit-devouring light grows more powerful and exacts ever higher financial and moral sacrifices from its countless victims, bleeding them dry. Such will continue to be the shameful case until, under the auspices of divine leadership, the people rise up against their oppressors and cast off the yoke of media-grovelling enslavement which currently binds them to their sad fate. How and where this will be done, remains to be seen. But a time must come when a moral reckoning will have to be made, since one cannot have it both ways. Either one is for God or for the Devil, and if the former is ultimately to prevail, then the latter will have to be cast down from its immoral throne and consigned to the flames of judgemental history, there to burn in Hell until not a trace of its previous existence remains!

I hope I shall live to see the day when a start will be made, in certain chosen countries, on the honourable path of rolling back the power and influence of these media which now have the greater part of the world in their merciless grip, a grip which can only grow tighter as the years pass ... if nothing is done to resist it. Rest assured that, under divine leadership, steps will be taken to combat the Devil's influence and free as many peoples as possible from the spirit-throttling grip which ungodly men seem hell-bent on tightening, come what may! He who becomes the most credible approximation to a Second Coming cannot stand on the sidelines and watch innocent people being consumed alive by this Moloch whose manifold lights know no rest. Better that the clear lights of the void should be put out ... than that the people should be blinded to the Holy Spirit of Heaven, which is their only hope of salvation.

If I can play a part, no matter how small, in liberating the people from the lights which now bemuse and confuse them, then my work will not have been entirely in vain. I praise the day when I broke through to final truth and saw ... not the light of space, but the lightness of air all around me and was lifted up, like Christ, to that resurrection which is the true destiny of mankind. Where I have gone, others can follow, leaving behind not only the gravity of the world, but the tyrannous lights which currently dazzle them. They will see within and, in seeing within, 'the without' shall lose its hold upon them and perish to an insignificance scarcely imaginable at present. What remains of the old false way will be subordinated to the new, true way, never again to have that independence which is the hallmark of open-society immorality.

With me, autobiography in the usual trivial sense scarcely has any place, so much does my life revolve around philosophy and the truth I have at last mastered. It would be scant exaggeration to say that, outside my work, I have scarcely any reality or existence, since my work is such an integral part of me ... that the two are virtually synonymous. Yet that isn't, of course, entirely the case, nor could it ever be so, and I must now endeavour to return to the more autobiographical mould which I initially set out to develop, taking up the reins of phenomenal subjectivity some eight years on from the last time any such undertaking was broached.

What makes me more cautious and even reluctant than anything to autobiographically elaborate on my life in recent years ... is the fact that previous experiments in the genre have taught me, in no uncertain terms, just how transient and temporal autobiographical statements can be, so that, before too long has passed, one is already conscious of how much one has changed in the meantime, and of how uncharacteristic of one's more recent lifestyle certain previous admissions or confessions now are. In short, the pace with which things change can be so rapid ... that one has already left various aspects of a previous self severely in the lurch within a few months, if not weeks, of penning them. And that can be very embarrassing from the current point of view!

For instance, anyone familiar with certain of my earlier autobiographical sketches might have good reason to think that I am a masturbator and an advocate, by implication, of sexual immorality. Yet that would be so far from the truth of my current lifestyle, not to mention my lifestyle of several years now, as to have no bearing on it whatsoever! For if there ever was a time when I occasionally masturbated, that time is now long behind me, and I marvel to think that I haven't so much as looked at a men's magazine in years, never mind caressed my penis. Such an act would be beneath me, and if I am guilty of anything ... it is of nothing more than an occasional wet dream, such that only disgusts and inconveniences me, as I awake from a superficial slumber. Masturbation, thank heavens, is as far behind me as canned beer, bottled wine, men's magazines, and T-shirts. In fact, it is a good many years further behind me than T-shirts, about which I only comparatively recently (1992) became severely disillusioned.

Yes, it was an important day in my sartorial progress when I woke up to the fact that, together with jeans, T-shirts are supersquare, and hence effectively diabolical. I had been wearing both jeans and T-shirts for years, never thinking about their possible ideological or moral implications. All that mattered to me was that I didn't wear shirts or trousers, those complementary items of men's attire which I had abandoned, for the most part, many years before, deeming them too 'straight' and 'bourgeois'.

Well, I was right about shirts and trousers, intuitively if not logically, since there does seem to be a correlation between such attire and middle-class squareness, the squareness, one could argue, of a liberal lunacy, which is only relatively square (like the shape of shirts, with their buttons and collars). What I hadn't realized at the time, and now find all the more remarkable, was that T-shirts and jeans signified, in their more absolute squareness, a moral degeneration from shirts and trousers, much as though the sun had eclipsed the moon, or America taken over from Britain in the march of moral decline. If shirts and trousers were masculine, then T-shirts and jeans were submasculine, and thus worse again - a regression from purgatory to Hell, as from relative immorality (phenomenal objectivity) to absolute immorality (noumenal objectivity). In short, there was something fundamentalist, if not fascist, about T-shirts and jeans, and I vowed, on discovering this fact, never to buy either of them again. I had been caught-up, willy-nilly, in the moral decline of the West from middle-class liberalism to upper-class fundamentalism, and this despite my self-perceived image as an Irish-born 'Catholic' outsider in Britain who regarded Anglo-American civilization with a sceptical if not hostile eye, preferring, whenever possible, to remain detached from the mainstream currents (including pop and rock) of its hell-bound course.

Clearly, there were some aspects of this immoral civilization from which I had not remained sufficiently detached, lacking insight, at the time, into their true nature! But I had always had an alternative up my sleeve, so to speak, and this was of course the more mundane and subjective alternative of vests, those intrinsically feminine items of clothing which are effectively round ('hip') where shirts and T-shirts are square/supersquare respectively. Yes, the vest was the moral retort to T-shirts, but it had to be worn independently, not in conjunction (as in my case for several years) with T-shirts - either under or, more occasionally, over the latter. It was necessary to 'come out', where the wearing of vests was concerned, and proclaim one's allegiance to or, in my case, moral support for the world ... against its purgatorial and/or diabolical enemies. And not just in terms of vests, but, just as importantly, with regard to the wearing of joggers, which are no less subjective, taken-in at waist and ankles in due centripetal fashion, the overall effect suitably round and contrasting, once again, with the squareness of trousers and jeans. In fact, it was through the gift of an old pair of light-blue 'Nico' trousers from a neighbour of mine that I was able to break out of the stranglehold which jeans had imposed upon me, wearing them on an intermittent rather than a permanent basis.

When, two or three months later, this same neighbour gave me an old pair of dark-blue joggers which were too small for him, I was able to make the change to joggers with comparative ease, since I had already been in transition, as it were, through the 'Nico' trousers, and had come a sartorial step nearer to the world in any case. Now I was in harmony, at any rate as regards the combination of vest and joggers, and it only remained for me to purchase some new joggers in a colour (dark green) more congenial to myself ... for me to establish a colour harmony between my favourite vest (also dark green) and these joggers; such a harmony being more morally together than with disparate or clashing colours which, in any case, suggest more of a particle than a wavicle bias. I had only to buy a new pair of sneakers to match my 'worldly' outfit, an outfit of the world rather than of the purgatorial overworld or the diabolical netherworld, and the harmony of self-serving subjectivity would be complete - or nearly so!

For there is always need of a jacket when the weather is less than warm or dry, and this jacket should be stylistically attuned to everything else, not too short or with studs instead of buttons or too prominent a zip. I mean, too short and one is either 'up the lunar limbo' in some kind of radical 'Protestant' elevation over the world or, worse again, in some kind of diabolical (hoodless) opposition to liberalism which emphasizes studs (those solar-like centrifugal vacuums) at the expense of zips. Bad enough to have zips, in lunar 'watery' fashion, at the expense of buttons, those 'worldly' heterosexual norms. But to have studs at the expense of zips struck me as worse again, more like sartorial Hell than purgatory.

Ideally, then, the jacket should have buttons rather than studs, and a zip underneath ... for added protection against the weather. It should also have both the cuffs and the waist taken-in, and be of medium length, so as to preclude lunar implications. Sweatshirts would also seem to be the right choice of garment for colder days, and if the weather is wet then boots rather than sneakers would of course be the logical choice, provided, however, that they were of a sneaker-like modernity of style. Doubtless, those of us who dress in this relatively subjective fashion will eventually gravitate to one-piece suits of an absolutely subjective character, as Heaven supersedes the world, and 'supermoral' criteria replace the 'moral' criteria of the vesty present.

Actually, until now, I have never thought too deeply about jackets or, more specifically, the ideological implications of jacket lengths, and, since all my own jackets are relatively short zippers, it seems rather curious that I should suddenly decide to regard short zippers as either liberal or fundamentalist, lunar or solar, purgatorial or diabolic, and attach a 'worldly' status, by contrast, to medium-length ones. Can this really be the case when, to all intents and purposes, the short-length zippers generally appear more curvilinear, especially when taken-in at the waist, and the medium-length ones comparatively square? Surely, if one is to be consistent, it is the short-length jackets which are commensurate with a subjective bias? In which case, it should follow that, like the liberal and fundamentalist categories, worldly zippers will also be short-length, except that, in all probability, they won't have a hood but be purely bodily, as germane to the world. Rather, it seems that the medium-length vis-à-vis short-length distinction, with regard to zippers, is between the alpha and the omega of any given spectrum, so that one has a sort of objective/subjective, particle/wavicle dichotomy which cuts across all spectra (with the possible exception of the divine one and its one-piece absolutism).

If this is so, then 'worldly' zippers, which give prominence to buttons as opposed to either zips or studs, can be either medium or short, square or round, and their purgatorial and diabolical counterparts likewise. One's choice of 'medium' or 'short' will depend on whether one has an alpha or an omega bias - as, for example, on whether, with regard to the world, one is republican (and 'medium') or Catholic (and 'short'), 'objective' (though loosely subjective would probably be a more accurate description here) or subjective.

There was something almost Milleresque about the way I became a computer tutor, having been sent along to Hornsey YMCA to do Employment Training as a possible route back into work. I had hardly been on the course four months when, due to the existing assistant tutor's sudden and unannounced departure from the firm, I was offered her post on a part-time basis, much as Henry Miller had become personnel manager of a telegraph company after having originally sought employment as a messenger! Naturally, I was somewhat apprehensive at first, not having taken regular employment for several years, but it didn't take me too long to settle into the job, perhaps the only job I have ever really enjoyed doing.

With some 25-30 trainees between the principal tutor and myself, we were kept pretty busy, and I soon had to take responsibility for typing tuition as well as basic computing. The good thing about working part-time was that I still had sufficient time to carry-on with my writing, thereby developing my philosophical ideas as before. I had also learnt how to type properly, which is rare for a writer, and could work faster and more accurately in consequence. Nevertheless, it wasn't until I got a computer in 1991 that the quality of my work shot up to a standard of technical and thematic competence I would scarcely have dreamed possible before. For with a computer one can revise and edit work so extensively ... that the end product may bare little resemblance to the initial concept. Without a computer I would still be languishing in the mire of literary mundaneness, unable to rise above those technical and thematic shortcomings which had bedevilled my work from the beginning.

So, all things considered, I cannot pretend that my period as both an Employment Trainee and an Employment Trainer (1989-91) did not help my private work. On the contrary, it gave it a boost such that took it onto a new and higher plane. My only regret is that my career in Employment Training should have been so brief, and that funding cuts by the then-Tory Government led to me being made redundant at a time when my future seemed so assured. Unfortunately, good things often have a way of coming to a speedy end, and this was a case in point. I am only relieved that I had been able to move to better accommodation some six weeks before my redundancy notice came through, otherwise I would still be languishing in the ghetto-like milieu to which I had become sadly accustomed over the years prior to and during my brief career in Employment Training.

The extraordinary thing for me is that there is life, it seems, after the YMCA, and that I can see the said building from my window in Hermiston Avenue whenever I look down the road and across the nearby junior school to its imposing structure, towering five stories over the area like a gigantic monolith, its top floor more or less on a level with my eyes. From my previous address in Elder Avenue I could only see it from the toilet, by craning my head out of its first-floor side window. But then I was looking at it from the opposite direction to where I now see it, looking up, one could say, rather than down. It was approximately the same distance away as now, which is to say about 100-150 yards, and yet I saw it, during most of that time, from a completely different standpoint - 'the before' rather than 'the after'.

Yes, there is indeed life after the YMCA, but it is the classless life of social security once again and not the working-class life of computer tutoring. I am, if you will, in the Beyond ... as far as the world is concerned, and it is in this Beyond that, thanks in part to the small computer I was able to purchase shortly after moving here, my best and most truthful philosophical work has been achieved. It was in this Beyond ... of classless unemployment ... that I actually became a more genuine philosopher, with a purchase on truth more firm and comprehensive than at any previous time in the history of my philosophical quest. It was because I was once again unemployed that 'the truth' was possible to me; for truth requires classlessness if it is to materialize in anything approximating to a genuine mould.

These days I take more pride in my celibacy than ever before, since it confirms my preference for the lightness of air over the heaviness of the flesh. Only a clod would prefer the heaviness of the flesh, and thus pleasure, to the lightness of the air, and thus joy, and I flatter myself to think that, in Joycean speak, I am rather more of a god than a clod, more of a full-wit, so to speak, than a half-wit! That is why I tend to listen to Jazz as opposed to, say, Classical or Folk, though I have more tolerance for the latter kinds of music than for, say, Pop or Rock, not to mention Romantic and the avant-garde. Provided there is ample evidence of wind, particularly sax-playing, in Jazz, I am quite happy to listen to that and to nothing else.

What I don't like to listen to so much, however, is avant-garde jazz, which is generally too noisy, boring, and even intellectualized for my liking, being the subversive product, more usually, of 'lunes' and other unpleasantly middle-class types who contrive to bugger everything they can lay their dirty hands upon. When the middle class take over philosophy, as they do in colleges and other institutions of 'higher' learning, they intellectualize it to a degree where it becomes unintelligible to all but them, standing in the way of truth and yet posing as truth. When they take over music, and jazz music not least of all, they intellectualize it to an equally unintelligible degree, so that the deplorable result is a purgatorial cacophony bordering on Hell. This avant-garde jazz is the height of lunacy, and it smacks of musical heresy no less than the philosophical and sexual and other heresies to which the middle class, in particular, are so fatally prone! What's worse, it doesn't even involve wind instruments invariably, but is more likely to make use of keyboards, particularly the piano, as it wends its watery course through a plethora of discords and unrelated notes in a frenzy of antichrist hatred! Were these people capable of genuine Jazz, they wouldn't resort to such an abusive fury against it! But their ill-begotten, middle-class souls make them as incapable of musical truth as of any other kind of truth, and a gross subversion of Jazz is the deplorable result!

Truly, liberal civilization is indeed on the brink of total dissolution when people like that are 'free' to piss on Jazz with the same impunity as attends their philosophical counterparts vis-à-vis philosophy when, in the grip of some heretical demon, they reduce truth to the phonetic analysis and intellectual manipulation of words and their syllabic subdivisions thereof. The eclipse of these purgatorial 'lunes' by heathen devils is virtually inevitable and will indirectly relieve the oppressive burden from the shoulders of those who, living in cultural exile, have to put up with that which is personally abhorrent to them and an obstacle, by its very existence, to the realization of heavenly salvation.

Yet the full realization of such a salvation can only come in countries which are less liberal than humanist in character, and therefore in line for transcendental upgrading. The exiled man may have to return to his rightful country, if he doesn't wish to endure the diabolical fundamentalism which is the liberal heresy's just deserts. For purgatory is one thing, Hell quite another, and he who relates more to the world than to either purgatory or Hell will not receive Heaven by staying put in the country of ongoing damnation. Should he be able to return to his own country, so much the better! And it is that hope which I still entertain as I write these sketches from exile in England and ask myself if this will not be the year when I escape the ongoing fundamentalization, so to speak, of liberal Britain for the Catholic humanism of republican Ireland? Time alone will tell, but time is still, in a manner of speaking, on my side as I pen these lines in the hope that, one day, my exile will be behind me and the transcendentalization, as it were, of humanistic Ireland ahead of me, waiting, like a dream, to be fulfilled!

BEYOND THE PALE (1996)

Since 1993, the year of my last series of autobiographical sketches, I have stuck to my philosophical guns, as it were, and fired away at the truth until, at length, I hit the bull's-eye and brought things to a fitting climax. Even the aphoristic purism of Maximum Truth and subsequent works of a kindred nature ... was less true than I had optimistically supposed at the time, given the absence of 'elementinos' from the elemental quadruplicities which characterize it. Until comparatively recently I was therefore guilty of hyping the elements to omega standings with regard to sensibility, to making elements count for elementinos! All they needed was a wavicle bias and, hey presto! an omega standing was theirs.

Well, all that of course embarrasses me in retrospect, as do a number of other things about my work in the period from 1993-95, before things finally began to turn away from error towards the most comprehensively exacting philosophy one could ever hope to achieve. It was with the cyclical works that follow the series of aphoristic books written during 1993-94 that a significant change for the better set in, even though I still had a way to go before 'the better' turned to 'the best', and I abandoned the linear thinking of my elemental spectrums for the lateral thinking of elemental planes, moving diagonally between parallel planes that don't touch, spectrum-wise, in the middle. Now I have a watertight framework that will stand the test of time and ensure my place at the forefront of serious philosophy. No-one who reads my work could be in any doubt as to its merits, and although I am self-taught, I have achieved what most philosophers can only dream of - namely, the attainment of philosophical perfection in a systematic comprehensiveness which does justice not only to truth, but to strength, knowledge, and beauty as well!

Frankly, philosophy is like an obsession, it dogs one's steps, one's every move, so that it is difficult, to the point of impossible, to get away from it. I exaggerate slightly, but rarely does a day pass without some new idea, some fresh revelation, thrusting itself upon me and demanding some kind of concretization, usually, as here, in the form of transference to paper, and from paper to disc and/or tape. You can't just put it to one side or cease to philosophize. Philosophy becomes one's life, and one takes it to bed, like a lover. One dreams and breathes philosophy as well as thinks and writes it. Sometimes I even think one shits philosophy. One is a philosopher, just as others are politicians or policemen or barbers or doctors or whatever. I became a philosopher, just as Beethoven became a composer and Dali a painter, and what a philosopher! I no longer have to philosophize: I am philosophy!

Out of my philosophy this year (1996) grew the desire to grow and then the reality of having a moustache, which, at the time of writing (March) is still growing. In fact, I only began to grow it earlier this month, having decided that moustaches correspond to 'rising vegetation' and were therefore eminently masculine or, at any rate, suited to someone with a predilection for independent thought! I don't expect my moustache to win any awards for thick growth or even texture, but at least I am now doing my bit to defy the clean-shaven trend of the 'bent majority' of feminized men, whose faces more correspond, it seems to me, to 'falling water' than to 'rising vegetation'. After all, if you don't sport some form of facial hair, you might as well be a woman, for whom 'falling water' is the feminine norm, a norm which seemingly justifies women in shedding tears and being chatter boxes - not altogether unlike a number of so-called men I know! Anyway, I saw the light, so to speak, and decided that a moustache was in order, both to counter the 'falling-water' trend of clean-shaven femininity and to affirm a sort of sensibly masculine bias with regard to my intellectuality, or self-styled standing as a radical intellectual.

I could have grown sideboards, but decided, after due reflection, that 'rising vegetation' around the ears was more sensual (and possibly Judaic) than sensible. Likewise, I could have grown a beard, but came to the conclusion that beards were rather more sensual than sensible in view of their positioning (lower down the face) on or under the chin, where one might be forgiven for drawing an antichristic analogy with some kind of republican and/or sexually active bias such that would detract, in its sensuality, from the Christian and even middle-class correlation of a moustache. Besides, I sported a beard, and quite a shaggy one too, during my late twenties and early thirties, so could hardly be expected to backtrack, as it were, and revert to something I had effectively outgrown.

Thus, scorning both sideboards and beard alike, I persist with my moustache, which I hope will enhance my masculinity and show to the world that, despite living in an intensely urban environment, I am no clean-shaven dupe of 'falling water' in overly civilized femininity, but a man of inner nature who wishes to shore-up his growing commitment to inner culture on a ridge of 'rising vegetation', the next-best thing to 'rising air'.

Really, if one were heavily into music, to listening to music every day, one could do no better than to grow sideboards, since a little 'rising vegetation' around the ears would suggest a bias for aural sensuality with regard to the alpha of 'rising air'. For air rises, in moral terms, from the ears to the lungs, as from sensuality to sensibility, outer to inner, airwaves to the breath, and therefore a commitment to the aural appreciation of music is effectively a commitment to outer air, the air of sensuality, as the airwaves go crashing against one's eardrums in due idealistic fashion. Well, much as I haven't 'kicked the habit' of listening to music on a fairly regular basis, I would not want to give anyone the impression, through the cultivation of sideboards, that the nadir of 'rising air' was where I was at! On the contrary, I am a little 'too long in the tooth' for that kind of naiveté, given my preference for sensibility over sensuality, particularly with regard to writing/thinking and, more importantly, meditating. For meditation does of course pertain, when properly indulged in, to the zenith of 'rising air', having to do with the lungs, whereas writing/thinking only pertains to the zenith of 'rising vegetation', significant though that is when compared to, say, its sexual nadir! Sometimes I am a man, sometimes a god, both externally, in listening to music, and internally, in meditating. Hopefully, I will become more of a god and less of a man in the course of time, as well as more of an inner god and less of an outer god, since the aural indulgence of outer air via music is a divine sin compared to the grace of indulging inner air via the breath. Even I am a sinner to the extent that I listen to music (not as much as I used to!), which constrains one to aural idealism. Were I to spend more time meditating, I would be correspondingly more graceful. Doubtless, I shall slowly climb the time-space continuum towards spiritual salvation, as I meditate more and listen to music less. For that is the only way one can be divinely saved!

The above entry would confirm, as much as anything, that there is divine sin no less than divine grace, albeit each has applicability to a different God, the one outer (in sensuality) and the other inner (in sensibility), the senses being sinful and the sensibilities graceful, an evolutionary progression (rise) in this case (of the time-space continuum) from ears to lungs. Naturally, there is also diabolic sin and diabolic grace, eyes and heart; feminine sin and feminine grace, tongue and womb; and masculine sin and masculine grace, phallus and brain. A devolutionary progression (fall) in the case of the diabolic options (of the space-time continuum) from eyes to heart; a devolutionary progression (fall) in the case of the feminine options (of the volume-mass continuum) from tongue to womb; and an evolutionary progression (rise) in the case of the masculine options (of the mass-volume continuum) from phallus to brain. Sin and grace, which is to say, sensuality and sensibility, vice and virtue, and, in a wider context, the context of glory as opposed to power, evil and good.

However that may be, I shall now do my best to revert to something more autobiographical, principally with reference to the subject of hair, about which a few interesting theories! Recently I had mine cut again, which was something it badly needed in view of the fact that my last visit to the hairdresser had occurred over six month previously. My hair had in the meantime grown to a point where I was able to bind the bulk of it into a ponytail, as has been my usual custom in recent years, despite intermittent visits to the barber for a conventional haircut. Well, I don't think I shall be doing that again, not if I can afford to get my hair cut before it gets too long anyway, since I have only recently come to the conclusion that long hair (even when not particularly long) is either akin to 'falling fire' (in the space-time continuum) or 'falling water' (in the volume-mass continuum), and, frankly, I want little or nothing to do with either! After all, I am now growing a moustache, which is akin, in my estimation, to a mode of facial 'rising vegetation' (in the mass-volume continuum), so how can I allow my hair to grow long in gender contradiction of what is patently a masculine resolve? The simple answer to what some might in any case regard as a rhetorical question is, of course, that I can't! Therefore short hair is obligatory if I am to achieve anything approaching 'rising vegetation' on my head. Though, given that my hair tends to be pretty straight (fine), it might be more accurate to think in terms of curtailing its capacity to suggest 'falling water'. For it seems to me that hair can suggest one of a number of correlations, depending on its type. Long and wavy, and it could be analogous to 'falling fire'. Long and straight, and one probably has a parallel with 'falling water' - the use of a ponytail, in each case, approximating it to the centripetal bias of sensibility. On the other hand, long (but not too long) and curly, and one probably has a parallel with 'rising air', whereas long (but not too long) and frizzy, and an analogy with 'rising vegetation' leaps to mind, this latter masculine where the former would be divine. And, doubtless, in sensibility, the curly and frizzy types of hair would be somewhat shorter than their centrifugal manifestations in sensuality, given the unlikelihood of a ponytail with these types of hair. Anyway, I do like this idea that hair can reflect a specific gender and/or ethnic orientation, with frizzy hair corresponding to the masculinity of 'rising vegetation'; straight hair corresponding to the femininity of 'falling water'; curly hair corresponding to the divinity of 'rising air'; and wavy hair corresponding to the devility of 'falling fire'. I don't wish to elaborate, but one doesn't need too much imagination to comprehend the parallels being drawn, and to understand how an alpha/omega, sensuality/sensibility dichotomy can be adumbrated in terms of a centrifugal/centripetal distinction not only between longer and shorter and/or loose and ponytailed versions of any given type of hair, but also with regard to its susceptibility to dryness or greasiness in what would amount to a kind of particle/wavicle distinction. Perhaps only those with greasy hair have any marked sensibility? Whatever the case, my own hair is usually pretty greasy, which is one of the reasons why I prefer to keep it short. I can now add that another reason is that, since it is of a fine texture which is neither wavy nor frizzy, still less curly, I would not wish to create an impression of 'falling water', in due feminine fashion. I may not be as masculine as someone with frizzy hair, but I'll be damned if I'm going to go out of my way to look feminine at the risk of undermining my moustache and detracting from my resolve to be as masculine as possible, masculine, that is to say, on higher, or intellectual, terms. For it is from a basis in masculinity that we build towards God, climbing from 'rising vegetation' to 'rising air', whether in sensuality or, preferably, in sensibility.

Although I am very short-sighted, I prefer to wear spectacles less and less or, put another way, only when I feel I have to, as when writing or shopping. My reasons for this are varied, not least of all a disgust with the rampant commercialization of spectacles that tends to prevail these days, but there is obviously a sense, over and above that, in which I tend to regard spectacles as likely to detract from my masculine self-esteem, by imposing a veneer of civilized femininity not unconnected with the notion of solidified liquid upon one! Frankly, however subjective such a notion may seem, I don't want to be overly dependent upon glasses, especially since there is so much one can do without them. Also significant is the fact that, besides the more obvious physical pressures associated with weight and fit, spectacles can cause psychological pressures to form from the effect of the lenses, or of refracted light, upon one's retina, and these pressures can have a mentally debilitating influence after a while - something that only becomes fully apparent when one removes one's spectacles and experiences a psychological relief. Spectacles are certainly not an unmixed blessing! What one gains on the roundabout of enhanced vision, one loses on the swings of mental equanimity and personal self-esteem. They are better used, I find, as a last resort. That way, one suffers less. Also one's eyes are likely to improve a bit if not constantly subjected to the burden of filtering reduced images through what can be powerful lenses, one or both of which may be soiled or stained or scratched, in any case. Certainly, mine are rarely completely clean! Though I make a point of washing my spectacles in soapy water whenever I have a bath, being careful to rinse them thoroughly afterwards!

These days I very seldom have a wet dream. My sleep, though far from dreamless, tends to exclude sex, as, in fact, does my life. So I suppose my dreams are only a reflection, after all, of what must be one of the most consistently celibate lives on earth. I am, I guess, just a little too spiritually earnest and morally insightful for things to be otherwise. Besides, I tend to regard sex as something that matters more to women than to men, bearing in mind their maternal ambitions. The fact that I don't have a woman hanging round my neck is, to me, a kind of moral victory, proof of my spiritual resolve, and thus something of which to be proud. I am not and never really have been a dupe of woman!

Nor do I seek compensatory satisfaction in homosexuality, though I have occasionally probed my rectum either out of pure frustration with domestic pressures or to combat persistent itching in the recent past and learnt, the hard way, to avoid doing any such thing again since, through recourse to some olive oil which I had been using at the time for an ear infection, I only brought pain and suffering upon myself which even now, two years later, continues to inconvenience me, principally in terms of excessive bowel rumblings, increased flatulence, internal soreness, and looser motion - factors which may not have arisen at all had my early childhood not been characterized by bowel problems caused, in part, by the application of such oils to my rectum by my mother, as she struggled to combat constipation through the application of a variety of ad hoc enemas, which only had the effect, as far as I can recall, of destabilizing my bowels and causing me to become rather looser than would otherwise have been the case!

Be that as it may, I don't practise sex of any description now, not even of a perversely personal kind, though I would have nothing against plastic inflatables. In fact, I am surprised at myself for not having purchased a so-called 'sex doll' by now, bearing in mind its reliance on air and consequent association with 'rising air' as probably the nearest thing to a divine mode of sexuality, more sensible than, say, so-called 'phone sex'.

Certainly, I would not now make use of pornographic erotica, whether in sex magazines or on video. For pornography is the sexuality of 'falling fire', which is to say, of the Devil, and anyone who is into God can have no truck with His diabolical antithesis, neither in the superfeminine context of centrifugal masturbation vis-à-vis a sex magazine, nor in the subfeminine context of centripetal (gadget-based) masturbation vis-à-vis a video. Only the submasculine context of 'phone sex' or the supermasculine context of plastic inflatables will be of any relevance to him, and the more he is into supreme being rather than primal being, the more, in other words, the lungs predominate over the ears in his divinity, the less likely it is that 'phone sex' will have any appeal to him (like music) and the more likely it will be, by contrast, that he both owns and utilizes a 'sex doll', suitably attired and inflated. Thus does divine sexuality stand apart from the diabolic sexuality of masturbation/pornography.

However, for those whose sexuality is less supernatural than natural, something more conservative is obviously in order, though not only in conventional heterosexual terms but also with regard to lesbianism and homosexuality. I don't, myself, see any problem in accommodating lesbians and homosexuals to the mundane and purgatorial tiers of the triadic Beyond, my projected concept of 'Kingdom Come', since it would be desirable for a certain amount of sexual segregation to obtain in relation to what are broadly feminine and masculine contexts, the former in mass and the latter in volume. The nuclear split beyond heterosexuality that we recognize in terms of lesbianism and homosexuality can thus be interpreted as a portent of the gender split between female and male that would characterize the bottom and middle tiers of the triadic Beyond, with the top, or heavenly tier having reference to supermen, and thus to persons whose preferred sexuality would or should be indulgent of plastic inflatables ... in due transcendental fashion. No, I'm not against lesbianism or homosexuality, since these modes of sexuality would probably be more suited to persons who had made it through to the lower tiers, the 'New Earth' and the 'New Purgatory' of 'Kingdom Come' than would be heterosexuality, with its liberal contours of compromise between men and women, 'rising vegetation' and 'falling water'.

A man should be more 'rising vegetation' in sensibility than 'falling water', but if he becomes more 'rising air' in sensibility than 'rising vegetation', then he is a superman and thus superhuman (divine). Conversely, a woman should be more 'falling water' in sensibility than 'rising vegetation', but if she becomes more 'falling fire' in sensibility than 'falling water', then she is a subwoman and thus subhuman (diabolic). On the other hand, a man into 'falling water' in either sensuality or sensibility is being effectively feminine, and thus 'bent' (from what a man should be) by masculine standards. Into 'falling fire' in either sensuality or sensibility and he is doubly 'bent', since effectively diabolic, something a man should never be, since that will exclude him from the possibility (always very real from a male standpoint) of God. Conversely, a woman into 'rising vegetation' in either sensuality or sensibility is being effectively masculine and thus 'bent' (from what a woman should be) by feminine standards. Into 'rising air' in either sensuality or sensibility and she is doubly 'bent', since effectively divine, something a woman can never be, bearing in mind the fact that women are fundamentally creatures of the Devil who do to give, not aspirants towards God who take to be. A divine woman is really a contradiction in terms, as is a diabolic man. The Devil (whether in sensuality or sensibility) is behind woman, whereas God (whether in sensuality or sensibility) is beyond man. Therefore worse than woman is the Devil, while better than man is God. A man who is determined to become more supermasculine than masculine, to become God (in sensibility), will not want women to become diabolical (in sensibility), but to remain feminine. Otherwise, there will be scant prospect of God for him!

Which contention returns us to myself, and to the recollection that I have only become godly by remaining loyal to my sensibility and building upon it towards superman, building upon mind towards spirit. I did not get to this position by cultivating the feminine in myself, least of all through garrulity, and still less did I attempt an accommodation with the diabolic, thereby removing myself even further from the possibility of divinity. Doubtless the fact that I'm by nature optically very short-sighted had something to do with it, since I am anything but observant, and rarely if ever stare at other people. Neither, however, do I make a habit of falling in love with anyone, and I'm only too aware that, compared to a woman, I would make a second-rate emotional devil!

No, rather than succumbing to that fate at the risk of being consumed alive by the Devil, I have kept women at a distance, concentrating, as far as possible, on being a sensible man, with the result that I am also, when it suits me, a sensible god, someone who, when he isn't writing or thinking, meditates, and is therefore superhumanly divine. Of course, I still have my failings, as the reader will recall, and occasionally I am subhumanly divine, listening to music in what is a sensual, if not sensational, manifestation of 'rising air'. But I am aware that this sort of thing is a failing (from the standpoint of divine sensibility), and such awareness is a significant achievement in itself!

Certainly, I am not now naively ignorant of my situation, which is why I would hesitate to boast of my musical tastes, the way I would have done several years ago. I listen to music without any real enthusiasm, only too aware of how irrelevant to my lifestyle most of it, whether instrumental or vocal, actually is. After all, I'm not sexually active but celibate, and therefore I don't convert to the ears from the phallus, to outer divinity from outer masculinity, the way I often convert to the lungs from the brain, to inner divinity from inner masculinity. On the contrary, I listen to music from habit, because it is something I have always done, and because it can afford one a barrier against neighbour noises, and so on. Maybe I lack the courage, at present, to stop listening to music altogether, although I am only too aware of how quickly one tires of most records (CDs, tapes, etc.), bearing in mind that appeals to sensuality through the senses lack eternal appeal on account of their external, and therefore comparatively superficial, nature. Ultimately, lasting satisfaction can only be found within, in sensibility, not through your ears! Nor, of course, through your eyes, etc.

These days I am almost ashamed of the fact that I own (dreadful word!) both a television and a video-recorder, even though I don't watch TV all that much and only rent one video a week, and that on a Sunday for Sunday-evening viewing. It is a sort of principle of mine, to watch a video on Sunday evening instead of watching TV. Although, usually, I have already watched TV earlier in the day, often with reference to Sunday-afternoon football, and don't, for that reason, particularly want to sit in front of more television in the evening. However, that isn't the entire picture, since my principle of preferring to watch a video in the evening is founded upon the assumption that, of the two manifestations of 'falling fire', video is the closest to sensibility and therefore a quasi-fundamentalist alternative to what could be called the materialism of TV. In short, if one cannot do without the Devil altogether, one day a week, then at least settle for a video devil, since that will vouchsafe one a kind of diabolical salvation, as though in the fiery soul! But, really, I ought to be ashamed of myself for not having the gumption to dispense with both television and video altogether! In some respects I am all too liberal, my possessions ranging across the board, so to speak, in deference to the Devil (television/video), woman (computer), man (LPs/CDs), and God (radio/audio). Were I the possessor of only a radio or, preferably, a radio-cassette player, I would be morally better off than I am at present, what with the devility of television/video, the femininity of a computer, and the masculinity of a midi/CD-player ... completing the picture and detracting from my divine aspirations.

But there you are! You don't realize, initially, exactly what you have let yourself in for ... by possessing all those things. You don't understand them. Later you may do, but by then it's too late! You're already hooked and committed to their preservation. And even if you become discriminating and choose to spend more time with one rather than another, say, radio rather than television, or CD-player rather than computer, you are still compromising your integrity with something that, by its very mechanical nature, appeals more to sensuality than to sensibility, with all-too-transient consequences. Tiens!

This year saw me revert, after several years’ abstinence, to buying a Sunday newspaper, namely The Sunday Independent, which (Irish production) recently became available in Britain. What I like about it is that it doesn't jerk you off with a magazine, in true British fashion, but tactfully (I presume) avoids compromising both itself and its readers with the Devil. Instead, one can proceed, in 'rising air', from the sensuality of the newspaper to the 'sensibility' (relatively speaking) of the pull-out paper supplement, thereby achieving a sort of divine salvation. The British newspapers, on the other hand, always defer to the Clear Light, which is not something I would ever want The Sunday Independent to do! In fact, I would stop buying what is, in any case, a rather expensive newspaper (£1), were it to include a magazine!

As to my notion that newspapers correspond to 'rising air', this has to be weighed against the notion of magazines corresponding to 'falling fire', specifically in terms of a devolutionary progression from photographic magazines to co-mags, or something of the sort, whilst always bearing in mind that the context of magazines will differ from the context of, say, journals ... by being sharp-spined. For, in expanding our perspective to include books and journals, it becomes evident that newspapers and magazines share a noumenal, or supernatural, standing due to their sharp spines, whereas books and journals share a phenomenal, or natural, standing due to a flat-spined mean, the former in relation, I shall contend, to 'rising vegetation', and the latter in relation to 'falling water'.

Hence the likelihood of an evolutionary progression from hardbacks to paperbacks, as from fleshy sensuality to cerebral sensibility in 'rising vegetation', in what would be a masculine context overall, with the countervailing likelihood of a devolutionary progression from wordy journals to pictorial journals, as from lingual sensuality to maternal sensibility in 'falling water', in what would be a feminine context. Both of which, however, would share a flat-spined basis in the phenomenal, in contrast to the sharp-spined noumenalism, as it were, of newspapers and magazines, the former effectively divine and the latter diabolic. All the difference, in short, between the lightness of 'rising air' and the glossiness (brightness) of 'falling fire'. By contrast, books would reflect the heaviness of 'rising vegetation' and journals the dullness (darkness) of 'falling water', books standing to newspapers as man to God, and journals standing to magazines as woman to the Devil. Hence a lightness/heaviness contrast between newspapers and books, subjectivity in its supernatural and natural manifestations, with a glossy/matt contrast between magazines and journals, objectivity in its supernatural and natural manifestations.

For someone like me, who considers himself a man of God, magazines are virtually taboo, and therefore I am glad to be able to buy a Sunday newspaper, at last, without having to endure a magazine. Likewise, I am happy to dispense with television on Sunday evenings, even if I still compromise with the Devil in terms of a video. Previously, I would read a paperback on Sunday morning, usually a worn classic, and therefore level with a sort of intellectual humanism. Now I am able to level with a sort of intellectual idealism/transcendentalism, and feel a lot better for it! You could say that I have 'gone up' in the world or, at any rate, in relation to the quadruplicity of intellectual options I have been discussing in this entry. I have converted from man to God.

The only thing that stops me from praying is the fact that I think. For when you think, there is no need for prayer, since you are being as intellectually subjective as it is possible to be anyway, and without the fundamentalist drawback of deferring to the heart. Besides, I am a little beyond prayer, bearing in mind the fact that I am rather more Superchristian than Christian or, put more concretely, a (self-styled) Social Transcendentalist rather than a (practising) Roman Catholic. I would not want to pray for my own coming, since I tend to regard myself in messianic terms anyway, and, apart from that, I would not want to pray to the Virgin/Mother or, worse again, the Father, since I have no time for such a comparatively fundamentalist deity, never having known my own father, not being partial to fathers (in terms of Catholic priests), and being anything but disposed to an objective, or left-wing, bias. I am, as the reader may have gathered, an intensely subjective, or right-wing, type of person, for whom the subjective intellectuality of thought is a bridge, at any rate in part, to the subjective spirituality of meditation, the 'peace that surpasses all understanding' in what is, from my standpoint, the Holy Spirit of Heaven.

Yes, the real virtue of thought, as to a lesser extent of cerebral prayer, is that it brings one, through the intellect, to the borders of spiritual subjectivity, allowing one to, as it were, jump, or convert, from mind to spirit, as from subjective naturalism to subjective supernaturalism, Christ and/or the Second Coming to the Holy Spirit and/or the Holy Spirit of Heaven. As I said, I am more Superchristian than Christian, and therefore my conversion from masculine to divine sensibility is rather more radical, having effect with regard to the abandonment of my philosophical thoughts for the transcendental realm of pure meditation, wherein the Holy Spirit of Heaven is revealed through the breath, as it rises and falls within the lungs, my mind stilled and transcended as spiritual consciousness, the superconscious, takes over. Only be being one with the universal self, the self that, being open to the air, is partial to Holy Spirit, can I escape the love of intellectual gravity (heaviness) in the joy of spiritual lightness. Only thus do I become divine. And in becoming supreme being, or being of a supreme order, I achieve metaphysical subjectivity, the subjectivity of subjectivities and binding of bindings! If I was a man of the sensible Right in mind, I most certainly become a god of the sensible Extreme Right in spirit. There is nowhere else to go.

Really, I am like the Christ Child, the Catholic Christ and symbol of prayer, because I lead ever rightwards, towards supreme being, the being of the Holy Spirit of Heaven. The Catholic Christ leads to the Holy Spirit, but the Protestant Christ, the Son of a writerly puritanism, doesn't. Even though he is centrist, He is more likely to lead, if one abandons Him, towards the Father, which is to say, from the intellectual brain to the emotional brain, the masculine to the (relatively speaking) submasculine, in what is then a left-wing position in readerly objectivity. Such is the fatality of Protestant nonconformism, and it contrasts with the Catholic humanism which leads from the prayerful brain to the spiritual brain, the masculine to the (relatively speaking) supermasculine, in what is then a right-wing position in meditative subjectivity.

Certainly, the Trinity appertains to the brain in one way or another, but the Holy Spirit is rather 'beyond the pale' of the Father and Son of Protestant nonconformism, just as thinkers, or philosophers, are somewhat 'beyond the pale' of the fathers and sons of what is effectively a Protestant literary nonconformism, namely poets and novelists/essayists. Hence the comparative paucity of philosophical subjectivity where Protestant civilization is concerned, and hence, too, the irrelevance of poetry and fiction to a properly Catholic civilization, centred, as it should be, in philosophy, but in philosophy as a stepping stone to theosophy, and thus divine praxis!

My philosophy, being 'beyond the pale' of Catholic philosophy, it follows that my theosophy will also be beyond the Catholic pale, in what is no 'third person' of the Trinity but the supra-cerebral absolutism of the Holy Spirit of Heaven, as centred in the lungs. For the lungs transcend the brain as, in power, God (truth) transcends man (knowledge), or, in glory, Heaven (joy) transcends purgatory (love), or, in another sense, Saturn transcends the Moon, or Social Transcendentalism transcends Roman Catholicism. And, transcending the brain, the lungs exist in complete independence of the Father, that emotional aspect of cerebral trinitarianism, and antithetically to the heart, the seat of genuine fundamentalism. I do not, like a Catholic, seek peace in the mind, with pure consciousness. I seek, and find, peace in the spirit, with the superconsciousness of my universal self. For the lungs are the cynosure of the spirit, and there is more spirit there than anywhere else, the spirit of God as against the spirit of man. Air enters the lungs and becomes holy, the Holy Spirit of Heaven. Focusing on this spirit, I am lifted up by the superconscious joy of a sublime lightness. My being is supreme, for it is the being of Heaven, and Heaven transcends purgatory as joy transcends love.

Yet I did not get to this supremacy simply by abandoning my thoughts, my superchristic subjectivity. I was able to abandon my thoughts because I never became too phenomenally sensible but was also noumenally sensual enough to be into my ears, and thus the passive receiver of musical and other sounds coming to me from without. A mind that is too dedicated to praying and/or thinking will never make it through to God, least of all completely, i.e. in terms of the Holy Spirit of Heaven. Only that mind which has cultivated aural passivity in relation to music ... will be truly open to the prospect of meditative passivity in relation to the lungs. For it is easier to be saved to meditative passivity of this ultimate order from the ears than to convert to it from the brain, which is to say, from intellectual subjectivity. A tired brain will enjoy a rest in the cerebral peace of the Holy Spirit, that component of the 'Three in One'. But a passive mind that is the beneficiary of aural receptivity will more readily accommodate itself to the respiratory sensibility of the lungs, thereby standing aside, so to speak, as superconsciousness rushes over it from the Holy Spirit of Heaven. Verily, such superconsciousness is 'beyond the pale' of pure consciousness, for it is not a stilled mind but an awakened spirit!

LONDON 1983–96 (Revised 2012)

Beyond the Pale