Christmas in the Doghouse

Op. 142

CHRISTMAS IN THE DOGHOUSE

Aphoristic Philosophy/Literature

John O'Loughlin

-------------------------

There are those of whom it could be said that he was less of a wolf in sheep's clothing than a hawk in the clothing of a dove.

++++++

When a country turns away from religion, as from Roman Catholicism in the West, you end up with a situation, axially dominated by females, whereby women can do no wrong and men, by contrast, are adjudged to be the perpetrators of evil – the reverse, in actual fact, of a religious position characterized, as it will be, by male axial domination in church-hegemonic vein. Such, alas, has been the British situation for several centuries past – in fact, ever since the Reformation and the ensuing triumph of science over religion.

++++++

I recall a neighbour, whom I had always regarded as a bit of an idiot, saying to me one day: “I don't believe women are any worse than men”. This neighbour was no Roman Catholic, nor even an Anglican or Nonconformist, but somebody who had been raised as a Jehovah Witness and, in secular repudiation of his upbringing, considered himself free of religious superstition.

++++++

Writing only when you get a worthwhile thought … is the mark of a thinker, or philosopher. Writing for the sake of writing, on the other hand, is the mark of a ...writer who, as the literary equivalent of art-for-art's-sake, may well be a novelist or even essayist. Like speaking, writing is on the female side of life, in contrast to both reading and thinking, those subjective modes of intellectual activity.

The actor speaks, the poet reads, the novelist writes, and the philosopher thinks … at least in general terms, though this is not invariably the case. After all, the dramatist also writes, if principally for the speech of actors, while the poet necessarily has first to write what he subsequently reads aloud in public or even, if blessed with a good memory, recites to a captive audience. As a rule, speaking, writing, reading, and thinking are pretty interchangeable and interdependent, even if categorical generalizations are possible and – at least for the philosophical mind – logically inevitable!

Generally speaking, the dramatist writes to have his words spoken, the poet writes to have his words scanned or memorized, the novelist writes to have his words read, and the philosopher writes to have his ideas pondered, or thought about.

******

Scientists tell us that before 'the Universe', i.e., the Cosmos, was formed, even before the so-called 'Big Bang', there was a struggle between matter and anti-matter, elements and anti-elements, the one with a positive charge and the other charged negatively, each of which, when they came into contact, as they were bound to, cancelled the other out. Sounds to me suspiciously like some rudimentary equivalent of gender, with opposite charges in conflict and tending, when collisions occur, to cancel one another out in terms of the resulting offspring, which combine aspects or elements of both within one or the other gender. For it seems to me that the struggle between 'matter' and 'anti-matter', as the scientists call it, doesn't stop with the 'Big Bang' and subsequent emergence of 'the Universe', but continues, after a fashion, to this day, not least in the guise of gender differentiation and the conflict of what is incompatible.

If 'matter' corresponds to electrons, as the scientists have suggested, then it could be argued that, in the mutually annihilating struggle between 'matter' and 'anti-matter' that apparently preceded 'the Universe', the former would correspond to what was proto-female and the latter to what was proto-male, since I have always been led to understand that electrons bear a negative charge, like women, who are effectively more vacuum than plenum and, hence, more objective than subjective.

Also, this distinction between 'matter' and 'anti-matter' suggests to me the rudiments of that between 'soma' and 'psyche', body and mind, which, to me, would have gender connotations in which 'matter' correlated with 'soma' and 'anti-matter' with 'psyche', though obviously on terms that have little in common with the subsequent development of 'soma' and 'psyche' in relation to the ensuing gender struggles between females and males, with the vacuous objectivity, ever expressive, of the one, and the plenum-like (or 'plenumous') subjectivity, ever impressive, of the other, corresponding, in my estimation, to negative and positive charges, the ethereal will and corporeal spirit of the former ever warring upon the corporeal ego and ethereal soul of the latter, with will against soul (ethereal) and spirit against ego (corporeal), so that one can infer a kind of class distinction between the upper planes of will and soul, corresponding to metachemistry and metaphysics, and the lower planes of spirit and ego, corresponding to chemistry and physics, as between space and time on the one hand and volume and mass on the other.

If the war by the objective upon the subjective is successful, one finds space and pseudo-time (noumenal) and volume and pseudo-mass (phenomenal). If, however, it is unsuccessful, presumably because of a greater degree of subjectivity than objectivity can conquer, then the results will be either time and pseudo-space (noumenal) or mass and pseudo-volume (phenomenal) depending, as it were, upon the class context or elemental plane. But in axial terms time and pseudo-space will be polar to volume and pseudo-mass, with a strict gender polarity (male) between time and pseudo-mass in the one case and a like gender polarity (female) between pseudo-space and volume in the other case in relation to what can be described as church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axial criteria, the very antithesis of the polarity between space and pseudo-time with mass and pseudo-volume, with a strict gender polarity (female) between space and pseudo-volume in the one case and a similar polarity (male) between pseudo-time and mass in the other case in relation to state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axial criteria. For such axes, being diagonal, contrast noumenal sensibility/pseudo-sensuality with phenomenal sensuality/pseudo-sensibility on the one hand, that of the church-hegemonic, and noumenal sensuality/pseudo-sensibility with phenomenal sensibility/pseudo-sensuality on the other hand, that of the state-hegemonic, and remain mutually incompatible.

++++++

It may be an uncomfortable fact, if not exactly a painful truth, that life is a consequence of sex, and sex can be reduced – can it not? – to the female's need to reproduce in order both to justify the menstrual and other inconveniences that come with a vacuum, or womb-like vacuous disposition, and to acquire, as a temporary solution to and even reprieve from this, a surrogate plenum in the guise of offspring. Sex, in short, boils down to women, who are the bearers of children and, hence, the means whereby living matter (though not necessarily materialism) is perpetuated.

******

Outrageousness is an artist's prerogative, a protest against the herd-like mediocrity of the generality, who do not like to make decisions for themselves and become too individualistic, since for them sanity is objective or, in the male (actually pseudo-male) case, conditioned by objectivity to a degree which precludes anything approaching the subjectivity of the artist.

The artist as philosopher; outrageous from an academic point-of-view, since less dependent upon scholarship and more self-reliant.

In his struggle with mediocrity, the artist must constantly re-invent himself and, hence, the nature and practice of his art.

The artist is not only ahead of the people, he is effectively contrary to them, since he lives from within, whereas they live from without, dominated by others rather than thinking for themselves.

The artist is not merely once removed from the unthinking herd, like the thinking herd of the bourgeoisie, nor even twice removed from it, like the unthinking individual (more likely an autocrat), but effectively thrice removed from it as a thinking individual whose thoughts, or capacity for thinking, can prove especially alarming to those, including individuals, or individualized persons, who don't think. One recalls the expression 'cat amongst the pigeons' with a degree of ironic resignation in view of the kind of effect one's thoughts or thinking processes can have on those in the neighbourhood or social vicinity who don't think and are so seemingly allergic to thinking, so sensitive to the occurrence of thought in others as to be inclined to react, in what may often be a censoriously thumping manner, against anyone who does think, thereby intending to combat and, if possible, preclude or at least inhibit it from a standpoint rooted in objectivity.

++++++

That man who cannot extricate himself from the masses will be sucked down by them, as by a swamp of human quicksand. That man who cannot extricate himself from the masses, even as physically he lives amongst them, will never become an artist, but simply remain or become the opposite of one, namely an apologist of social conformity through female domination, whether from the standpoints of science or of politics.

The concept of “people's artist” is a blatant contradiction in terms, since absolutely failing to do justice to the nature of art, which is anything but populist or sensationalist, never mind proletarian. One can be an artiste in relation to popular culture, but never an artist! For subjective individualism leads, inevitably, towards metaphysics, and hence away from the people in the transcendence of 'the world' of physical and chemical (not to mention subordinately pseudo-chemical and pseudo-physical) norms.

Even metachemistry, being objectively individualist in character, would fail to meet the requirements of art, which is not only 'high' but antithetical to science and, hence, the empirical view of the world which tends to its domination, not, manifestly not, to its transcendence An age dominated by science, as by various manifestations of metachemical autocracy, will necessarily be inimical to art, as to metaphysics and inner values generally. But so, for that matter, will ages or societies characterized by the predominance of chemistry or the preponderance of physics, if in opposite ways; that is, less in respect of science than, more mundanely, of politics or economics.

The artist who is in any degree genuine, or metaphysical, in ages dominated by metachemistry, chemistry, or physics (if not all three, in varying degrees, together), will be a pariah, an outsider if not outcast whose work, having religious connotations, will be slighted and spurned by those for whom science, politics, or economics is their raison d'être and criterion by which life is evaluated and effectively understood. But the artist who, fearing his work will be misunderstood or shunned, 'sells out' – presuming, as I am, that he was not a sham to begin with and therefore unaware of his position – to one or another of the prevailing ungodly tendencies is, in truth, no artist at all but, at best, an artiste and, at worst, a dilettante or fake, whose 'art' will be little more than propaganda in the service of externals.

The painful truth is that, in an age when the inner values of religion are no longer in vogue (metaphysically limited to bound soma at the expense of free psyche as those inner values may traditionally have been), most people can get on perfectly well without art and, thus, artists, not least when they take the form of the philosopher-artist, the self-appointed 'free-lance' theoretician who is anathema even to so-called academic philosophers, meaning those PhDs who are accounted 'chairs' and more usually given to some 'bovaryization' of philosophy not incompatible with a scientific, political, or economic turn-of-mind within civilized frameworks long beholden to 'false gods', the kinds of 'gods' that Nietzsche, himself a 'free-lancer', railed against with such phlegmatic distinction. And did so, moreover, as a philosopher-artist, or philosophical artist, not as an artist-philosopher, a mere artistic philosopher whose books are rarely if ever entirely free of scholarly references, but tend, rather, to derive from other books to the detriment of original thought.

******

Ordinarily in the world there is so much objective pressure brought to bear on subjectivity that it is nothing short of miraculous that subjectivity can survive at all, never mind flourish in the guise of the artist.

Life appears determined to thwart 'transvaluations', 'rebirths', 're-evaluations', and other endeavours to 'turn the tables' on the objective status quo from a subjective standpoint. Rather, does it seem that 'transvaluations', 'rebirths', and such like alternatives are pretty much the metaphysical exception to the general non-metaphysical rule, and that subjectivity is powerless to directly threaten the objectivity of 'the world' and, more especially, that which metachemically rules over it from an unequivocally objective point-of-view. In that respect, idealism can no more defeat materialism than transcendentalism defeat fundamentalism – at least not directly, in a clash of antitheses subject to axial differentiation.

For artists like us, it is enough to have lived a largely metaphysical life or lifestyle, given to philosophy and the pursuit and understanding of Truth, without having been unduly co-opted by 'the world' to a repudiation of 'inner values' and opposition to thought. Our estimation of success is non-monetary in character, attaching, rather, to the fait accompli of what we have creatively achieved.

Generally speaking, women have no time for religion as understood by an adherence to metaphysical transcendentalism (coupled to a subordinate metaphysical idealism) because too objective, in their vacuous natures, to believe in the subjectivity of 'inner values'. The only form of religion they usually believe in, which in point of fact is less religious than occult, is astrology, and thus the 'influence' of the stars and planets on human behaviour, destiny, fate, fortune, circumstances, etc. At any rate, that is based in the concrete on both noumenal and phenomenal terms, linking the supernatural to the natural, like ethereal objectivity (stars) with corporeal objectivity (planets, including, not least, the Earth itself), whereby will and spirit, elemental particles and molecular particles, are free to play a dominating hand.

++++++

Handguns with revolving barrels are called revolvers. Hence handguns without revolving barrels are not revolvers but something relatively different, like semi-automatics.

Knowledge is – at any rate to a male – more liberating than confusing. In fact, it is ignorance which leads to confusion, not knowledge.

++++++

Women have a way of sensing when you think and often do something to censure it.

++++++

In Britain, Parliament is divisible between the upper chamber of the 'House of Lords' and the lower chamber of the 'House of Commons', the former being where peers sit and the latter where commoners sit, as in a kind of noble/plebeian distinction. To the best of my knowledge, few peers have ever sat in the Commons, but more than a few persons of common origins have sat in the Lords!

There has been much talk in both Britain and Ireland, in recent days, of abolishing the upper chamber in favour of a unicameral alternative. But such fanciful notions as enter the heads of certain deluded politicians determined to exploit a populist agenda signally fail to take account of the fact that neither monarch nor president can directly liaise with the lower chamber, so that if, as 'head of state', such persons are to have any connection with parliament and, hence, government at all, they require an upper chamber, as befitting their higher rank and sovereign status, which cannot be brought into direct parliamentary contact with the 'representatives of the people', as of the common herd, and more especially of this or that particular political faction thereof.

Now whilst this may not apply as much to the lower/upper distinction between the Dáil and the Seanad in the Republic of Ireland, which is after all a republic, as it does to that between the Commons and the Lords in the United Kingdom, ruled as it is by a constitutional monarchy, it still applies to some extent and should be respected in view of the distinction between a titular president and the parliamentary executive, and the need to maintain such a distinction, free of political compromise, on the world stage, where more than political considerations have to be addressed.

******

If modern war reveals one thing above all others, it must surely be the barbarous extents to which the civilized will go to protect their vested interests, including the bombing of churches, monasteries, mosques, etc.

++++++

Have just finished reading Joachim Fest's intriguing biography (in translation) of Albert Speer entitled Speer and Hitler, which I was always likely to get around to eventually because of the high esteem in which I hold the DVD drama-documentary of the same name featuring outstanding performances by Sebastian Koch and Tobias Moretti in the principal roles, one of my all-time favourite Germany-related DVDs both of whose discs I have watched more times than I care to remember in the couple of years since I acquired it from HMV in Oxford Street in London's West End. Not surprisingly, it was largely based on Fest's biography and features an interview with Fest himself which throws additional light on the project and on his own professional relationship to Speer.

++++++

I've never owned a computer, whether desktop or laptop, that wasn't a complete and utter farce! Computers are like women, with whom one's relationship, if one happens to have one, goes steadily downhill. Then one picks oneself up not through the wisdom of abstinence, but with the help of a new relationship or, in my case, computer – at least temporarily. For the next computer turns out to be just as much of an idiot as the previous one.

When machines (and the dongles or whatever attaching to them) let one down, as they frequently do, there is usually a book or notebook to fall back on, so to speak, as though in revulsion against the stupidity of machines like computers and their dicey peripherals.

++++++

An unpleasant feeling of being surrounded, on all sides and if not above (since I live on the top floor) then certainly below, by neighbours who are somehow remarkably sensitive to if not cynically and sceptically opposed to one's thoughts and the processes by which one thinks at all, and do everything in their power to thwart or inhibit them, evidently in consequence of a tendency to regard thinking as a form of madness. Most if not all of these neighbours I would guess to be of foreign origin and some, I know for a fact, are definitely female.

As you go through life you come to realize, through bitter experience, that intelligence is pretty much the exception to the general rule, and that most people, far from endorsing intelligence, are perfectly able to get along without it. In fact, they are more inclined to make war on it, as though it were a threat to their existence or lifestyle and possibly even an obstacle to seduction.

Intelligence is precious precisely because it is rare and, like all rare things or attributes, it is not characteristic of the masses, with their slavish adherence to nature principally in the form of female dominion.

++++++

I've always distrusted people who are against art and culture, finding in them not merely a philistine opposition to it, but a barbarous indifference deriving from a love of sport and an unhealthy fascination with war.

The socialist delusion of raising the lower orders up through the provision of culture or, failing that, education … is premised upon an underestimation of the connection between manual labour, particularly that carried out in gangs or large groups, and the ensuing or correlative philistine disposition which renders an appreciation of all but popular culture impossible. But, of course, the other side of the socialist delusion is the anti-elitist sarcasm that would reduce society to the lowest-common-denominator of a culture-rejecting philistinism geared to manual labour and competitive sport, if not, as a summon bonnum, militaristic combativeness!

++++++

When I see the word 'editor', I incline to think of the Henry Miller expression about 'reaching for one's revolver', since the evidence of most print books to have come my way is that latter-day editors must be either incompetent or just plain ignorant, if not daft. I, on the other hand, am my own eScroll and eBook 'editor' and, as a rule, I achieve results typographically superior to those of the majority of books published in print by conventional publishers, who seem to be busily engaged upon the process of what the Bible calls the 'dead burying the dead', in their case under an avalanche of editorial and/or typographic incompetence.

++++++

Have just seen an internet banner advertising the claim that 'God writes new book', or something to that effect, which is obviously false, like so much else on the internet, because God wouldn't write a book, since merely the superconscious concomitant (candlelight to candleflame-like) of metaphysical sensibility, the joyful superfeeling, as it were, of the Soul, especially the male soul when it is 'turned on' or, rather, when, as a male, one allows oneself, in spurning worldly distractions, to be superconsciously or truthfully aware of it, which is Truth and, hence, a godly concomitant of Heaven.

I don't have any time for anthropomorphic concepts of God, still less for cosmic concepts having more to do with stars or quasars than persons. Either way, and one would be looking at a shortfall from, if not antithesis to, what is properly godly in precisely the sorts of religious 'bovaryizations' that most people, preferring not to de-mystify themselves or to have religion itself de-mystified, tend to accept, if not relate to. Pah!

Authority is good when true, because without it there is mere anarchy within some kind of democratic consensus, whereby each man – and woman – chooses his own god or interpretation thereof. Better the authoritative oppression of the false from the standpoint of true knowledge coupled to the calculated suppression of falsity than the 'fool's paradise' that must needs otherwise obtain, as in a democratic or worldly age like the present, when religious truth is virtually anathema from standpoints that, for commercial reasons, both advance and worship beauty.

A civilization is as good as its type and degree of culture, and that depends on authoritative control from those – ever a tiny minority – 'in the know'.

******

It may well be that life emerges out of war between the genders, the so-called 'gender war', but the more a man, or mature male, desires peace the less he can have to do with gender and the more aloof from gender confrontation he must be. The 'man of peace' is likely to be a solitary celibate, not a practising heterosexual or, indeed, homosexual. Cultural and religious geniuses are normally inclined to celibacy in a relatively or even absolutely solitary lifestyle, appropriate to the endorsement of otherworldly values within a metaphysical framework. I have always mistrusted geniuses – or so-called 'men of genius' – who were neither celibate nor solitary, including the likes of J.S. Bach and Igor Stravinsky. The greatest geniuses were ever solitary celibates, men like Beethoven and Brahms, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Even Baudelaire and Huysmans would largely seem to approximate the mould.

The twentieth century, by contrast, signifies the collapse of the otherworldly idealism of the greatest nineteenth-century geniuses, who were no friends of science or industrialism, by unleashing female freedom on the back of two industrially-fuelled world wars. This is the actual beginnings, the painful birth-pangs, as it were, of the modern age, and it is one of the least peaceful ages in history. In fact, it is truly awful. But somehow civilization survived, and it may be that, for those of us who live in the twenty-first century, civilized progress will again be truly possible, without the threat and actuality of war. Meanwhile the female will continue, in freedom, to war on the male, even without reference to the 'increase and multiply' ethos of the Old Testament that would appear to give her carte blanche, in this regard, to do her undamndest, so to speak, and work free will to a free spirited end, which is the maternal pride that comes from the expression of beauty.

Going against the grain of life, based as it is in war, not least in relation to gender, is no easy matter but, in truth, a painfully uphill task. But if you give in or surrender to the basic terms of life, beyond, that is, the basic necessities, then there is no hope, no prospect of an alternative world, otherworldly in character, and no higher culture, which is to say, metaphysical culture triumphant over pseudo-metachemical pseudo-civility in an apotheosis of civilization only intimated at within the church-hegemonic framework of Roman Catholic tradition. You will simply have civilization at a low ebb, emerging from war, or even the barbarous abandonment of civilization in favour of war and the enhancement of power. And, as you should know, if only from bitter experience as a man, power wars on contentment as, lower down from the ethereal realms of space and time to the corporeal realms of volume and mass, glory wars on form, making even the survival of ego somewhat uncertain.

A timely thud from a female neighbour – at any rate I can only presume such in the circumstances – would appear to indicate that she has somehow 'cottoned on' to the fact that I am writing my thoughts down again, which, as you well know, do not favour, much less encourage, female emancipation.

++++++

The planet may look 'beautiful' from outer space, but what takes place on it, not least in the seas, can be extremely ugly in its predatory intensity and sheer ruthlessness, its necessity-driven brutality. Aesthetics, in any context, is apt to be shallow in its depiction of and fascination with the mere surface impression of things, and I suspect that the view from outer space gives rise to the most shallow of all modes of aesthetics.

++++++

Outside, the rain pours down, not for the first time in recent days, and it looks set to continue for several hours, if not all day. One feels under the cosh, more so as an adult male, I suspect, than would a woman habituated, as they generally are, to varying degrees of objective imposition.

Often I write more on wet days than I do on dry or sunny days. Which I suppose is par for the course, as they say. Though, as a self-proclaimed thinker, I have to ensure that I do not get carried away … by my pen.

Now the rain hurtles down with what seems like a cynical disregard for human feelings, entirely oblivious of human or, indeed, any form of life.

******

Poetry is apt to vindicate the Alpha, not to endorse the Omega. Its fanciful delusions may serve to palliate the enormity of existence but do little to encourage an otherworldly alternative, such that only religious philosophy and philosophical religion can.

The poet is usually a weak-minded 'sonofabitch' who accepts the dominance of females and, hence, nature.

++++++

Those odious pests who spit their mental venom at one from behind the cover of the crowd are a conspicuously mob type lacking in self-confidence and self-esteem but striving, as though in compensation, to 'put one over' on others, especially those whom they perceive to be self-confident and dignified. Nobodies striving to become somebodies at someone else's expense, but only exposing themselves as cowardly weak-minded jerks who are not only ill-at-ease in public but ill-at-ease in themselves!

++++++

Christians have a belief that Christ died for them on the Cross, and tend to say words to that effect. But I've always had difficulty believing it, especially since it is a contention that requires to be qualified, if it is not to sound too vague and somehow generalized. What I can believe, without being even remotely a practising Christian, is that the figure on the Cross was a victim, not least of judicial power, and that as a victim his death can only have meaning or relevance to victims in general, more especially to victims of Christian descent and most especially to those of the Roman Catholic faith who happen to identify – unlike many of them – with the Crucified Christ more than with the Virgin Mary or so-called 'Mother of God'. They are the ones, it seems to me, for whom it could be argued, in a manner of speaking, that Christ died, since as victims they should be able to identify with a victim, with the uniquely Christian concept of 'God as victim', as opposed, say, to 'God as victor', not least in the guise of 'God as Creator', 'the Almighty', the so-called 'Father', and other variations on a metachemical theme having cosmic associations, but also, to a lesser if more relative extent, in the guise of the 'Marian victor', so to speak, the so-called 'Blessed Virgin', and other paradoxical variations on the theme of maternal redemption and/or resolution, of what is, with women, a predatory nature 'paying off' in terms of the attainment of maternity and the concomitant benefit of a surrogate plenum in the guise of the child, who will be her raison d’être and vindication of the beauty (and love) that exists, in nature, for a specific purpose, that being reproduction, and, as noted above, some kind of maternal resolution in pride (and strength), pride being as much the fulcrum of chemical free soma as beauty is the fulcrum of metachemical free soma, the free will of the latter tending, by and by, to the free spirit of the former when once a man has been secured (by the seduction of beauty coupled to love) and the stage set, as it were, for a maternal issue (the source of maternal pride).

Therefore to the extent that women operate within nature (and thwart whatever strives to go against it), they are predatory victors, not preyed-upon victims, and therefore would not, in my opinion, be of the class of persons for whom it could, after a fashion, be maintained that Christ died, he who was a victim himself. Neither could it reasonably be maintained that heretics are generally of such a class since, with an effective change of axis from the southwest-to-northeast points of the intercardinal axial compass on the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis (Roman Catholic) to the northwest-to-southeast points of it on what became (with the Puritan polarity of Anglicanism) the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate one, they tend towards an alignment with victors as opposed to victims, predatory and imperial victors characterized by the female domination of pseudo-metaphysics by metachemistry at the northwest point of the said axis, which the male domination of pseudo-chemistry by physics at the southeast point thereof does little to modify or mollify, since axially aligned with the overall sovereign factor, that of female domination in metachemical free soma.

Thus, to reiterate, it is only Catholics of a pro-metaphysical disposition within a largely pseudo-physical subordination to a victor's chemistry who could be expected to identify with the notion that Christ's death, as a victim on the Cross, was of some relevance to them as victims of female domination. For unlike the pseudo-metaphysical Anglican, who can be expected to take metachemical domination for granted, the pseudo-physical Catholic, a phenomenal rather than noumenal order of pseudo-male, has traditionally been conditioned, despite Marian rhetoric, to be sinfully ashamed of his predicament and anxious to atone for it through confessional contrition and the hope, thereby, of receiving, via a priest, divine pardon, or forgiveness of sin, in the interests of some metaphysical credibility such that the Crucified Christ, even as victim, tends to symbolize, if, it has to be said, to a degree well short of that free psyche which, whether or not symbolized by 'the Resurrection', is the true fulcrum of metaphysics in a realm of perfect being lying beyond both confession and pardon. For even the priest is limited, by his Christian faith, from representing any but a truncated metaphysics that, like the paradigm of metaphysical bound soma itself, must needs continue to defer, in Biblical loyalty, to Old Testament metachemistry, and hence to what is contrary to joy and truth in the all-too-predatory guise of beauty and love, those female attributes whose purpose, as alluded to above, is purely reproductive and, hence, world-perpetuating.

******

Now is the messy season, when cadaverous leaves lay scattered everywhere and it seems as if one is walking on death, the autumnal death of summer. Soon the trees will be stripped bare by the ravishing onslaughts of vicious winds, but their nudity will not appeal to us. No artist could make an aesthetic case for such trees. They are woebegone and must needs stoically endure the ensuing winter's inclemency before having any prospect of recovering their dignity with the birth of new leaves.

++++++

Have been reading Mary Kenny's 'revised and updated' biography of William Joyce, the definitive Lord Haw-Haw, entitled Germany Calling, and was much impressed by her scholarly patience in thoroughgoing research, if less so by the number of typographic and related technical errors which, as is all too often the case with modern books in paperback, somewhat detracted from one's appreciation of her work and made one contemptuous, not for the first time, of the extents to which an author is at the mercy of people ostensibly there to facilitate the process of publishing print books who simply don't or can't weed out such errors in the first place, either from incompetence or, not being the author themselves, indifference if not, at times, something altogether more sinister that makes one grateful for the fact that one is not dependent for publication on more than one person, namely oneself.

Be that as it may, William Joyce was evidently an interesting man, though not one I would have much in common with, other than a Galway heritage (unlike him, I was actually born there) and a Germanophile disposition which usually leads to an immersion in German history, culture, and language, not to mention certain geographical factors, like the layout and attributes of various cities and the relative disposition of the states and lands. What I manifestly don't have in common with him, however, is a pro-British Empire stance, even given the fact that, these days, the British Empire is much less evident or, if that sounds a little too facile in relation to the intensely cosmopolitan character of London and other British cities, less significant than it was in the early twentieth century, at a time when Joyce was evidently enamoured of it.

I suppose, like him, I do have some Orange blood in me, compliments of my maternal grandfather (who nominally 'converted' from Presbyterianism to Catholicism when he married my maternal grandmother), but not to the extent that I would identify with Unionists at the expense of Republicans, since I have always been both pro-Irish independence and pro-United Ireland, if less in republican terms, these days, than in relation to Social Theocracy, my own ideological philosophy which tends to eclipse both my Roman Catholic Galway heritage and subsequent post-Aldershot Protestant upbringing in Surrey where, having been put into care by my mother following the death of her mother (my protective Catholic grandmother), I was obliged to attend a Baptist church and go to a State (Church of England) school, neither of which I greatly relished.

As a self-professed Social Theocrat, I have no interest whatsoever, these days, in identifying either with Catholicism, from which I was wrenched at the tender age of ten after about seven years in Aldershot, or with Protestantism, that false imposition in Carshalton Beeches which I rather disrespectfully tended to treat as a kind of joke, both inside and outside the local church, and I always resent being identified with one or the other when, to my way of thinking, both are 'old hat' and of no relevance to my life as a free-lance intellectual of radically metaphysical persuasion. The last thing I can see myself doing is going along to a Christian church and pretending to have respect for what I ideologically and intellectually despise. In that, I believe I have something else in common with William Joyce, although not to any great extent, insofar as I consider myself to be more removed from both Catholicism and Protestantism than ever he was, even if I happen to regard Social Theocracy as the logical axial successor to Roman Catholicism, as though it were entitled to overhaul Catholicism in the interests of metaphysical independence of metachemistry in relation to 'Kingdom Come' or, at any rate, to my concept thereof, which happens to be logically credible and, I trust, morally viable.

Anyhow, William Joyce, who had gravitated from Catholicism to Anglicanism, died unrepentant, hanged for high treason in early 1946 for having aided and abetted Britain's wartime enemy, Nazi Germany, via a series of radio broadcasts from Berlin during 1939-41 (though he continued to broadcast up until 1945), the period preceding his acquirement of German citizenship when, although born in America to a naturalized American father, he was still technically a British subject, having formally obtained British citizenship while living and working in England on the basis that Southern Ireland, where he had spent most of his childhood and subsequent youth, was still part of the United Kingdom during his upbringing in Galway and that he was therefore entitled to British citizenship.

It was even alleged that Joyce was so pro-British that he had not merely sympathized but actually sided with the Black 'n' Tans against Irish freedom fighters, and generally got himself a bad reputation with Republicans, so much so that, as a marked man, it became to his advantage to leave Ireland – and thus the fledgling Irish Free State – for Britain and enrol with the British Army in England, one of those decisions of his with which I would have scant sympathy, even with British Army connections on my mother's side of the family, compliments of her father which, having spent most of my childhood in Aldershot, I have always regarded with some dismay and not a little embarrassment!

However, in Joyce's case, being accepted into the British Army was a confirmation of his Britishness and something of which he was immensely proud – until, that is, he was discharged within six months for unbecoming conduct and obliged to seek alternative employment, including, after a period at college and some private teaching, the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and, when he was kicked out of that, his own National Socialist League, which never went anywhere either, although, of course, he did, finding his true vocation, it would appear, working as an English-language broadcaster in National Socialist Germany.

The rest, as they say, is history, and Joyce was to pay the price for his treachery, which only goes to prove that he may have been more of an Irishman than he thought, and that it took Nazi Germany to make him aware of the fact, to disabuse him of some of his British pretensions and to enable him to wreak vengeance on a country which had not loved him half as much as he had apparently loved it. A salutary lesson perhaps, though evidently difficult for a man like him, who would not have been popular in Ireland, to swallow.

++++++

Unlike William Joyce, I have never been particularly pro-British, even if, as an Irish citizen, I am not particularly proud to be Irish in view of what transpired between my mother and father in Galway, the latter of whom I never knew, so that I feel tainted by what I suspect was my father's rejection of aspects of my mother which probably struck him as not merely pro-British but, in view of her army connections (I can recall an aunt informing me during one of my occasional visits to Galway that my mother was known in the family as Mary Aldershot), actually British and therefore unworthy of a Galway Catholic like himself, a man who was not simply Irish but Connaught Irish, born, I believe, in Cashel, Connemara, in true West of Ireland fashion.

Yet, for all that, I am still technically Irish, even if my mother happened to be born in England (in Aldershot of Irish-born parents), and have never felt the slightest desire to become a British citizen with a British passport, the kind of passport that my mother would have … compliments, I would guess, of her second husband, who happened to be a British citizen of West Indian extraction. I am still Irish in spite of her, and even if I may sometimes regret or even resent it, it is nonetheless a fact that I cannot do anything about, since I usually act and think like an Irishman, not a Briton, and certainly not as an Englishman, much as I may have spent most of my life in England – in fact, all but the first two-and-a-half years of it. If there is one thing worse, for me, than not being regarded as Irish by Irishmen, it is being regarded as English by Englishmen, since, in a very real sense, I am no more English than Wellington was Irish, even granted that he was born in Ireland.

I am, let us say, a reluctant Irishman, an Irishman accustomed to long solitary and celibate exile who, on the few occasions he has managed to visit Ireland, including Galway, feels somewhat out-of-place in what is technically his native land but, conversely, has no love of the land or, more precisely, of the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate criteria, ruled over by an Anglican monarch, characterizing the land in which it has been his fate to live, a lone outsider with no desire to identify with Britain either politically or religiously, much less economically or scientifically.

Therefore, unlike William Joyce, I could never be pro-British Empire, never mind distinctly pro-British and, hence, partial to a political structure, in both monarchy and parliament, that derives its justification from Protestant criteria. I may not be pro-Irish Republican, but I am not anti-Irish either, and certainly not anti-republican from a unionist standpoint! Simply pro-Social Theocratic, and that, for me, has always been intended, above all, for Ireland and for countries, like the Republic of Ireland/Eire, with a mainly Roman Catholic tradition that suggests to me the right axial preconditions, as it were, for subsequent 'stepping up', or revolutionary overhaul, as noted above.

******

If there's one thing a laptop keyboard is bound to do … it is to undermine if not completely destroy one's ability to type. A laptop is not a typewriter but, like computers in general, a device whose keys tend to be insufficiently responsive and too flat to permit of anything beyond 'keying-in', in somewhat laborious fashion, whatever it is that one is trying to convey to screen. For, as you soon learn, keying-in and typing are two entirely different things! Especially when you can type properly, not merely use two fingers in typically untutored or indifferent vein.

++++++

Have been reading, or trying to read, Christopher Ailsby's 2005 edition of The Third Reich Day by Day, which is evidently series 4 in Spellmount Military Handbooks. I say 'try to read' because it is so riddled with typographic and other technical blunders that it seems to be at war with itself, in spite of the immense efforts the author has obviously made to gather together so many historical facts or details which have been supplemented by an astonishing number of quality monochrome photos. One doesn't wish to underestimate the historical significance of this project, but unfortunately it has shot itself in the foot so many times – not least on page 187 where, under a photo clearly showing the Japanese ambassador's car flanked by motorcycle police heading along a crowded German street lined by soldiers in what I assume to be Berlin, the caption has words to the effect that the Japanese ambassador is welcomed to Japan!!! (my exclamation marks) – that I have even less respect for it than for the biography of William Joyce alluded to above – less literary respect, that is, and an overwhelming sense that such books cannot be evaluated by standards proper to literature, not even to a minor branch of literature like biography, but have to be indulged in terms of mentalities falling well short of – if not being actually at variance with – literature in the technical sloppiness and incompetence of the printed word, a factor which may be less attributable to the author than to editors and printers and whoever it is that, as with so many print books, signally lacks a capacity to excise typographical blunders in the first place!

Frankly, I could well do without such books, even from the local library, since they do nothing to allay my poor opinion of modern book publishing in general, not least when the printing has been farmed out, as in the case of this one, to a China-based printer presumably in the interests of cost-cutting. Rather does it seem to be a case of the 'dead burying the dead', with those of us who have any literary self-respect fending for ourselves on an independent basis – independent of editors and printers and others who would undermine it and cause us to regret that we had ever been foolish or desperate enough to hand our work over to the likes of them in the first place. For just imagine how the author feels when confronted by evidence of such typographical incompetence!

It is surely no mere coincidence that the general quality of book production has declined in proportion not simply in relation to the extent printing has been farmed out to foreign printers, but also in proportion to the general emergence of high-quality film production in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, film being more representative of the modern age than ever books are. Though even film is under threat, these days, from other media, including, to a limited extent as yet, eBooks, much as they may have some way to go to come properly into their own as a viable alternative not just to books but also to films.

As for my eBooks, all I can say is that I have never doubted the excellence of their production, bearing in mind that, together with my eScrolls (as I call those free-to-read texts presented on an italic writerly white-on-black basis commensurate with a kind of Nietzschean 'transvaluation'), they are the means by which I make my philosophy available for study. And my philosophy is, as far as I am concerned, second to none in its metaphysical scope and depth. But, then again, such a philosophy is not going to be read, much less studied, by the millions, the masses, the newspaper readers and buyers of cheap paperbacks. On the contrary, even if it were more accessible, it would not have popular appeal, being somehow too ideologically and technically advanced, not to mention the product of a certain ethnic bias which, although overhauled, can only further limit its appeal to those of a like radical persuasion.

++++++

When they say you've got to find it within yourself, these gurus and so-called spiritual leaders, what they are implying is that one shouldn't expect them to act like sunflowers or even roses, but should be prepared to become more like a tulip or other inward-looking flower or plant oneself. At any rate, that is part of the story. The other part is that, as recognized gurus or 'spiritual leaders', they do have a reputation for imposing their teachings upon others, else how would they have become recognized as such in the first place? All authoritative figures impose their doctrines upon others, whether indirectly (through books, pamphlets, and the like) or directly (through lectures, meetings, and cult indoctrination). These days, however, any Westerner overly into yoga or transcendental meditation could only be described as radically petty-bourgeois, since the adoption of Eastern mysticism or spiritual devotions is not germane to global civilization as a largely proletarian phenomenon having intimate associations with electronic media, including film and television.

++++++

It was 'raining cats and dogs' outside but, having just had a bath, I was 'sweating like a pig' inside. What could be more ironic?

++++++

Computer-related stress is surely one of the most prevalent afflictions of modern life.

++++++

Few if any of my thoughts come without a struggle, though the main struggle is against neighbour and worker reaction and opposition to the whole process of thinking and recording one's thoughts.

If there's one thing more important than physical privacy, it can only be mental privacy, the privacy to think one's thoughts and write them down without fear of neighbour reaction or premeditated physical subversion, whether from kids, youths, women, or whatever.

******

If, by and large, people do not reflect (like 'the thinker', or philosopher), it isn't because they have been deprived of the facility through sinister forces working against them, but simply because they don't want to reflect, preferring an 'outgoing' disposition in relation, I would contend, to female domination of society in general and of the demands made by society and nature upon themselves. The Sun, for instance, does not encourage reflection, being itself intensely 'outgoing', and the more sunshine a people are habituated to, the less will they be inclined to reflection, as to thinking deeply about anything. In fact, they will resemble roses, if not sunflowers. Most people neither have the time nor inclination to reflect, and the thinking exception only proves the thoughtless rule, the rule of how life is actually lived by the masses, and especially by those whom a politician of some substance once described as 'all antennae and no brains', or something to that effect.

++++++

If, on subatomic terms, protons are polar to electrons as positively charged elements to negatively charged ones, then it would not be unreasonable to suppose that a contrary polarity of sorts would exist between neutrons and photons, as though between neutral elements that nonetheless had contrary biases, with neutrons, say, displaying a positive bias and photons, by contrast, a negative one, in keeping with a kind of juvenile gender disposition analogous, in human terms, to sons and daughters as opposed, like protons and electrons, to fathers and mothers.

Normally, I do not attach much significance to the concept of the 'nuclear family', with mothers behaving as electron equivalents and fathers, by contrast, as proton equivalents; for it has always seemed to me, contrary to the accepted wisdom, that men revolve around women, as around those who need to gravitate from photons to electrons, or daughters to mothers, in order to fulfil themselves as women, with offspring, whether in the guise of sons or daughters, neutron or photon equivalents, in turn revolving around them, since the basic meaning of life for females is reproduction, and beauty (coupled to love) would not be of much use if it didn't lead to some kind of maternal pride (coupled to maternal strength) more or less as a matter of natural course.

But there are, to be sure, grounds for accepting that, in some respects, mothers revolve around fathers, like electrons around protons in the atom, as in the adoption, following marriage, of the husband's surname, which is also applied to any children resulting from the marriage that will nonetheless be closer to the mother in terms of whom they mostly or effectively relate to and are dependent on. But, generally speaking, I do not believe it can be systematically maintained that, other than in certain domestic and cultural matters, wives revolve around husbands when, to all intents and purposes, they spend much of their time revolving around kids, that is to say, looking after their children and facilitating, as far as possible, their growth in terms of how they are raised. The nuclear theory of the family, as of marriage, seems to me somewhat cosmetic in relation to the underlying forces which both seduce and control men, making them, in Baudelaire's memorable phrase, 'slaves of a slave', or a kind of adjunct, that is, to the maternal sway.

++++++

Certainly photography and especially what is photogenic, like beautiful women, would suggest an association with photons, with the emission or giving off of light, so to speak, from some beautiful source partial, in the case of females, to drawing on the heat of love precisely to facilitate this process, and one may suppose, continuing with human analogues, that if there is indeed a negative bias to photons, the bias of beauty is towards pride, which would be akin to a descent, or 'fall', of females from daughters to mothers, as from photons to electrons, in gender contrast to the corresponding ascent, or 'rise', of males from sons to fathers, as from neutrons to protons, presuming upon a positive bias to the 'sexual neutrality' of neutrons, so that one would have an effective switch of axis from the polarity of photons with neutrons, or daughters with sons, to the polarity of electrons with protons, or mothers with fathers, the former axis effectively state-hegemonic in terms of a polarity between the northwest (metachemical) and southeast (physical) points of what I customarily term 'the intercardinal axial compass', and the latter axis effectively church-hegemonic in terms of a polarity between the southwest (chemical) and northeast (metaphysical) points thereof.

Hence instead of a polarity between daughters (or virgins) and sons, as between photons with a negative bias and neutrons with a positive one, we would have, with maturity, a polarity between mothers and fathers, electrons and protons, the one negative and the other positive, or tending to impregnate what would otherwise remain virginal if not barren. But even if fathers are polar to mothers, as metaphysics to chemistry, on the church-hegemonic axis, one should not forget that not only is 'the Father', as a religious term, not representative of the soulful fulcrum of metaphysics, but it is limited to Christian usage and cannot be applied to metaphysics in nature without due qualification, as though to a human extrapolation from winged seed-pods on certain species of tree, which can be given a reproductive interpretation. Such a pre-Christian 'father', as is germane to sexual reproduction, is no more Christian than the 'father' that precedes nature in the Cosmos, and neither is it germane to what succeeds nature in both Christian humanism and, to anticipate the future, cyborgistic transcendentalism. It certainly constitutes a mode of metaphysics and even, in a limited sense, of godliness, one more heathen than either pagan or Christian. But it is far from being germane to the ultimate mode of metaphysics, never mind the penultimate mode which, in the West, has been symbolized by the Catholic Christ 'on high', sitting, post-Crucifixionally, on the 'right-hand' side of the so-called Father, meaning the Old Testament Creator, and, in the East, by the Buddha and the practice less of prayer than of transcendental meditation.

Both Roman Catholic Christianity and Buddhism have superseded the natural mode of metaphysics in father-centred sexual reproduction, just as that could be said to have superseded the peace-pipe smoke rings of cosmos-oriented metaphysics deriving, in all probability, from a Saturnian blueprint in the Solar System. Yes, Christianity may have appropriated sexual reproduction to itself and sought to tame or circumscribe it within acceptable boundaries, but the 'Our Father' of Christianity is still distinct from the coital father whose sexually reproductive inclinations pre-date anything specifically Catholic, being 'god in nature' as opposed to 'god in mankind' or 'god in cyborgkind', the latter of which, when it finally materializes, will not, like 'god in mankind', Jesus Christ, be antithetical to 'god in nature', but to 'god in cosmos', whether this god be metaphysically cosmic or, indeed, metachemically cosmic and, hence, less fatherly than motherly or even daughterly, as it were, in her virginal vacuity and quasar/black hole-like 'outgoingness'.

The neutron equivalence, to speak metaphorically, fancies the photon equivalence, who knows how to 'strut her stuff' and generate spiritual light, augmented, it may well be, by cosmetic light, but he isn't sure whether he wants to turn into a proton equivalence in nature vis-à-vis an electron equivalence there, fearing that marriage will cost him dear, and not simply in a financial sense. So he holds back from marital commitments, as from a change of axis.

++++++

The medieval concept of marriage within the Catholic framework was designed to identify the bride with the Church and the bridegroom with Christ, as though in a union between Christ and the Church. Which is actually pretty odd, since to limit the Church to the bride is to reduce it, 'Mother Church-wise', to a merely Marian institution, whereas to identify the bridegroom with Christ is to reduce Christ to the status of someone who marries in nature rather than, in following his own advice, leaves women (mother, sister, wife, daughter, or whatever) to 'take up the Cross' and become fully humanist or, better, quasi-transcendentalist, the object of Christian worship as leading to the resurrectional transcendence of 'the world' of natural limitations and, hence, to whatever falls short of the Christian ideal, the ideal of a celibacy-derived humanistic metaphysics at one remove from natural metaphysics and its matrimonial union with natural chemistry, of husband with wife in what, despite Christian endeavours to appropriate and even vitiate it, is fundamentally a pre-Christian, even heathen, reality deriving not from the Church but from nature. Monks may not have compromised with 'the world', but the Church, as a state-sanctioned institution, had no option but to do so and strive to regulate marriage in accordance, as far as possible, with Christian principles, including, not least, the practise of monogamy.

Having suggested a kind of gender polarity between electrons and protons, the former negative and the latter positive (vacuum and plenum?), chemistry and metaphysics on the one hand, and between photons and neutrons, the former neutral with a negative bias and the latter neutral with a positive one (anti-vacuum and pro-plenum?), metachemistry and physics on the other hand, I should add that, in terms of the contrasting axes (church-hegemonic/state-subordinate and state-hegemonic/church-subordinate), things are never quite that simple or straightforward.

For we also have to consider the same gender polarities, as it were, between chemistry and pseudo-metachemistry vis-à-vis pseudo-physics and metaphysics in the church-hegemonic case, and between metachemistry and pseudo-chemistry vis-à-vis pseudo-metaphysics and physics in the state-hegemonic case or, rather, cases, since there is a gender distinction between the former and latter polarities on each axis, whether church- or state-hegemonic. Therefore one could opt for a subatomic parallel to each of these same gender polarities, bearing in mind that anything 'pseudo' (and gender subordinate) derives its existence from an 'anti' position that is its precondition.

So in the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate case of the chemical to pseudo-metachemical polarity we shall have a subatomic parallel with electrons and what could be called pseudo-photons (deriving from anti-photons) coupled, on the male side of the gender divide, with a pseudo-physical to metaphysical polarity that gives us a subatomic parallel with what could be called pseudo-neutrons (deriving from anti-neutrons) and protons, whereas in the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate case of the metachemical to pseudo-chemical polarity we will have a subatomic parallel with photons and what could be called pseudo-electrons (deriving from anti-electrons) coupled, on the male side of the gender divide, with a pseudo-metaphysical to physical polarity that gives us a subatomic parallel with what could be called pseudo-protons (deriving from anti-protons) and neutrons. All very contentious from a scientific standpoint, to be sure, but philosophical logic compels me to draw such parallels and allow for the possibility, if not inevitability, of subatomic pseudo-elements in axial polarity to the hegemonic subatomic elements, whether noumenal (ethereal) or phenomenal (corporeal), absolute or relative.

******

The other day I was thinking about the 'Lord's Prayer', or at least the way I think about it, in relation to Adolf Hitler, since I have long been of the view that the Third Reich was a kind of crude approximation to 'Kingdom Come', and this is what I came up with:-

'Our Father, who art in heaven (National Socialism),

hallowed be thy name (Heil Hitler!).

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done (as all-powerful dictator),

in earth (the Third Reich) as it is in heaven (Mein Kampf).

Give us this day our daily bread (full employment),

and forgive us our trespasses (against Jews, Communists, smaller countries, etc.),

as we forgive those who trespass against us (French, British, Americans, etc.).

Lead us not into temptation (prostitution, homosexuality, jazz, cabaret, etc.),

but deliver us from evil (the Weimar Republic, Jews, Communists, etc.).

For thine is the kingdom (the Greater German Reich),

the power and the glory (chancellor and president combined into the office of Führer),

for ever and ever (the Thousand Year Reich).

Amen (Sieg Heil!).

Nicht schlimm, oder? In fact, you can believe there are some who would argue that 'Kingdom Come' has already come (and gone) with the Third Reich, and that Adolf Hitler, as Führer, was akin to the 'Second Coming' … of Christ, who saved his people, the Aryan Germans and Germanic Aryans, from civil strife and moral corruption, as he set about cleaving the faithful (in National Socialism) from the faithless (in Socialism, Communism, Liberalism, etc.) as a matter of eschatological necessity, simultaneously delivering them from the punitive restrictions of Versailles and its corresponding privations, of which there were a great many, including loss of territory.

Others would argue that even if there was a parallel of sorts between the Third Reich and Judgement, it was too narrowly European and thus limited to Christians or persons of Christian descent. Which is basically what any Christ-orientated 'Kingdom Come' would be anyway, thereby being of little or no relevance to Judaists, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Shintoists, and others of non-Christian practice or descent in the world at large. Consequently it inevitably incurred the wrath of those nations, like the Soviet Union, the United States of America, Great Britain, and France that, for various reasons, were more international and even global in outlook, whether because they were themselves multi-racial and multi-cultural (like the Soviet Union and the United States) or because (like Britain and France) they had large overseas territories in their empires which made them more open to foreign influence and correspondingly less disposed to a narrowly European outlook deriving, in large part, from Christian and, more specifically, Catholic eschatology, with its belief in the Second Coming of Christ. Thus, in a very real sense, the international predilections of both Western Capitalism and Eastern Communism triumphed over National Socialism, and the result is a world that, ever more global in character, reflects the multi-culturalism and multi-racialism of the former Allies.

So if anything has still to come, it would have to be less of a 'kingdom', in the autocratic sense as largely embodied by Hitler's dictatorship, than what I have termed a 'centre', the Centre, if you will, of a religiously sovereign people who have rights in relation to religious sovereignty, conceived by me as the ultimate sovereignty, that not only reflected a universal bias, but implied the global overcoming of man in the interests of a male-biased superhumanism commensurate with divine and, for females, pseudo-diabolic criteria, analogous to the distinction between the proverbial saint and (neutralized) dragon or, alternatively, lamb and (neutralized) lion and/or wolf that I have customarily thought of in terms of metaphysics and pseudo-metachemistry at the northeast point of the intercardinal axial compass upon what would be a stepped-up, or 'resurrected', church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis.

And there I rest my case, which, in any case, those who have studied the progress of my writings over the years and, indeed, decades will, I trust, be sufficiently familiar with not to require any additional reiteration here. Although the point needs to be made, I think, that if, in contrast to petty kingdoms or principalities, nationalism is the omega of worldly criteria and internationalism the alpha of post-worldly, or global, criteria, then the omega of global civilization could only be a kind of super- if not supra-nationalism that took us beyond the divergent and heterogeneous into the convergent and homogeneous, replacing the centrifugal with the centripetal, the various federated states of the modern age with the universal centre of the future one.

As for the alpha and omega of pre-worldly civilization, I guess one would have to settle for tribal groupings on the one hand and city states on the other, conceiving of the latter of as the antithetical equivalent of the coming post-worldly omega which, to cite John Bunyan, would probably have more to do with a 'celestial city' than with anything earthly, and thus with a kind of space centre (station) apotheosis of civilized development that some would identify, beyond de Chardin, with the true nature of the Omega Point.

++++++

There is arguably nothing as shocking as an electric shock, but don't get too shocked by this revelation, since it is also pretty shocking to suffer a power cut and find oneself in the dark, with no heating or lighting and little if anything to do, not even an acoustic guitar to strum. Without electricity modern life would grind to a halt, as one's own life tends to do when deprived of it.

++++++

The mad night, November 5^th, has come around again, obliging me to resort to Ozzy Osbourne in order to block out, at least partially, their fiendish delight in burning effigies of Guy Fawkes, that unfortunate Catholic Dutchman who didn't succeed in blowing up the British parliament back in the seventeenth century, and letting off innumerable fireworks, most of which would appear to be designed to explode with a bang or even a series of bangs. I've never allowed myself, not having married and fathered kids, to get drawn into that madness, which I regard as a kind of British and, more specifically, English disease.

Of course, it didn't start on November 5^th, and it certainly won't end there. But it comes to a kind of head, or climax, tonight, which, for me, is one of the blackest days of the year. I guess Guy Fawkes night is the British equivalent of Carnival, when ordinary everyday people take leave of their senses for a number of hours, if not days and weeks, and get carried away by the general orgy of combustion which rakes the night sky with a plethora of coloured explosions.

In contrast to all that, my experience of Ozzy Osbourne's The Essential Ozzy tonight, despite having been virtually driven to it by all the extraneous noise, has been totally uplifting. This is true greatness! I mean, the sheer fecundity of his music and profundity of his lyrics combine to create a monumentality that is, frankly, unsurpassed in modern music. This is way beyond the likes of Beethoven, Brahms, Vaughan Williams, Sibelius, Martinu, or whoever. Only Alice Cooper comes anywhere close to matching it, since he, as is well known, is pretty much Ozzy's only equal in hard rock/heavy metal, and one cannot but suspect a degree of genius at work in both men.

******

Can't figure out which is the funniest film, Mein Führer or Auf Herz und Nieren. Probably the latter, which briefly features Burt Reynolds, though both films, I have to say, are absolutely hilarious!

++++++

They say you lead by example, and that is doubtless true, since any form of coercion or violent imposition would be in consequence of rule, less of constitutional rule than of despotism. So you lead by example, and others can, if they so choose, elect to follow you.

Those who 'lead' through coercion are akin to the proverbial “wolf in sheep's clothing” or, as could also be said, hawk in the guise of a dove.

++++++

If I were asked – though I doubt in reality that I ever would be – to name my top five film Hitlers, I believe my answer would be something along the following lines:-

1. Bruno Ganz (Downfall).

2. Helge Schneider (Mein Führer).

3. Tobias Moretti (Speer & Hitler).

4. Leonid Mosgovoi (Moloch).

5. Anthony Hopkins (The Bunker).

For me, Bruno Ganz of Downfall is number one because of a compelling charismatic spell which he manages to cast despite playing a Hitler who was well past his prime and, when not brooding or reminiscing, subject to uncontrollable bursts of anger and fits of rage caused by adverse military and social circumstances, while being afflicted with drug dependency and nervous tremors in his left hand that further narrowed his physical and even mental options – a feature which Ganz conveys with a degree of credible consistency sometimes lacking in other actors. Also you feel he engages with Speer, his favourite minister and spiritual companion, even soul mate, in a way that conveys something of their mutual regard and artist's solidarity, if I can put it that way, which not even Tobias Moretti seems to match, much as he may have a more convincingly studied manner of conveying certain hand gestures and body postures that are unambiguously akin to Hitler's.

Yet despite the amazingly subtle way he conveys Hitler's premature decrepitude and increasingly lackadaisical manner, even a sense of deflated ego and encroaching defeatism, towards the end of Speer & Hitler, I still find Moretti less convincing, overall, than Bruno Ganz and certainly less physically like Hitler, as a person, than either Ganz or Schneider, the latter of whom not only looks the part in Mein Führer, but manages to act the arbitrary despot to a degree uncharacteristic of the other film Hitlers, with the possible exception of Moloch's Leonid Mosgovoi who, like Schneider, can flare up on an impulse and just as quickly sink into a state of abject lethargy or even nervous tension and fear-racked introspection in what is by any standards a deeply atmospheric film, as though fearing the worst or being unsure as to the likelihood of a positive outcome to certain events. Mosgovoi, a German-speaking Russian actor, also reveals a playful and even romantic side to his Hitler which, especially in connection with Eva Braun, is not without irony and even sarcasm, although he tends to go beyond Schneider in terms of portraying the dictator in a humiliating light or emphasizing his pet foibles, including an exaggerated tendency towards hypochondria, probably because, unlike the German actor, he is more willing, as a Russian, to go along with a psychologically critical portrait of the Nazi dictator, whereas Schneider's interpretation is more geared to comedy and to highlighting the absurdities to which Hitler could go to maintain his power in face of insurmountable odds.

As for Anthony Hopkins' Hitler, which I have listed last in my top five film Hitlers, I find his character the least natural and possibly the most contrived of them all, although like Ganz he is confined, in The Bunker, to the last weeks of Hitler's life and has to tread a difficult path between lethargy and anger, fear and resolution, optimism and an overwhelming sense of defeat, if not futility engendered by the presumption of having been betrayed and let down by his generals. Given that he has to compete with German or, at least, apparently German-speaking actors like Mosgovoi, it is no small achievement for Hopkins, starring moreover in a much earlier film, that his Hitler is as engaging and even convincing as he mostly transpires to being, even given one's reservations about his sincerity or ability to psychologically step into Hitler's shoes, as it were, and play the part as if he really meant it or was suited to it from a sense of conviction or fellow feeling. I was not totally convinced by Hopkins' rather schoolmasterish Hitler, who shuffled around somewhat aimlessly as though not really there but in a kind of drug-fuelled dream or, rather, nightmare. Yet he still impressed and even entertained me, which is surely something the real Hitler, who still held life and death in his hands even towards the end, would have signally failed to do!

So we can be grateful for these various interpretations of and angles on Hitler's character and fate which have brought an important aspect of recent history to life and given us so much food for thought. That even so accomplished an actor as Robert Carlyle doesn't make my top five is testimony enough to the strength of the various Hitler protagonists who, for me, happen to have stolen the limelight. Whether that would still be my top five in five or ten years' time, I cannot of course say. But right now I have no doubt that the most credible and impressive actors of this difficult role are in all but one case given to presenting the character in his native tongue, whether from a mainly comic or tragic viewpoint. There is no arguing with that!

******

As one who has rarely passed a day over the past forty something years without listening to rock or related electronic music for at least an hour and sometimes more, I should, in the spirit of Henry Miller (who, incidentally, despised rock 'n' roll), be able to draw up quite a long list of, let us say, guitarists – electric, electric/acoustic, and even acoustic – who have impressed me during the course of that time, that is, from about 1967 to the present day, and so I am going to attempt a comprehensive list, not necessarily in order of merit (a tall order, to say the least!), of such guitarists in the expectation of being able to stretch it to well over a hundred names.

Thus: Michael Schenker, Jeff Beck, Gary Moore, Snowy White, Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton, Rory Gallagher, David Gilmour, Jerry Garcia, John Scofield, Allan Holdsworth, Robert Fripp, Bernhard Beibl, Zakk Wylde, Tony Iommi, Michael Amott, Robin Trower, Larry Coryell, Al DiMeola, Mick Taylor, Peter Green, Philip Donnelly, Pete Townshend, Ronnie Wood, John McLaughlin, Steve Khan, Jimmy Page, Steve Howe, John Martyn, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Neil Young, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Gary Duncan, Robbie Krieger, Tommy Bolin, Alvin Lee, Arthur Lee, Bill Connors, Walter Trout, Frank Zappa, Sandro Oliver, Janick Gers, Dave Murray, Adrian Smith, Philip Campbell, David O'List, Richie Blackmore, Steve Morse, Warren Haynes, Dickie Betts, Duane Allman, Martin Barre, Mick Abrahams, Edgar Broughton, Gerald Gradwohl, Jimi Hendrix, Gary Boyle, Dave Evans (the Edge), John Etheridge, Juan Martín, Albert Lee, Jan Akkerman, Daryl Stuermer, Philip Catherine, Larry Carlton, Clem Clempson, Daevid Allen, Tony McPhee, Marc Bonilla, Kirk Hammett, James Hetfield, Scott Gorham, John Sykes, Brian Robertson, Freddie White, Bernie Torme, Eric Bell, Buddy Whittington, Kevin Peek, Zlatko Perica, Marino, Paco de Lucia, Juan Valdivia, JJ Marsh, Keith Richards, Adam Seymour, Robbie McIntosh, Jim Sullivan, B.B. King, Corrado Rustici, John Abercrombie, Terje Rypdal, Ewald Pfleger, Stan Webb, Ray Gomez, Ake Ziedén, Phil Palmer, Anthony Drennan, Robbie Mildenberger, Jean-Marie Pompidor, Harvey Mandel, Brian May, Mark Knopfler, George Benson, Pat Metheny, Lenny Kravitz, Joe Gooch, Adrian Belew, Mark Barratt, and Lee Ritenour.

If I've missed anybody of musical substance from this off-the-top-of-my-head informal list of contemporary guitarists, rock or otherwise, it may well be because they were never part of my musical universe, so to speak, and are therefore either unknown to me or, for one reason or another, are people I am musically indifferent about if not, in a way, totally uninterested in. For these are the guitarists who, at one time or another, have impressed me most, and I confess that I still listen to many of them today, some five decades after I first became aware of the power and musical significance of the electric guitar and, indeed, of guitars played in a modern idiom in general.

Having revealed a tendency towards the appreciation of over a hundred contemporary guitarists, I suppose I may as well obviate or preclude any accusations of instrumental bias by supplementing this with as many keyboard players as memory, conditioned by decades of involvement, will permit, beginning with Keith Emerson, probably my favourite all-time keyboardist, and continuing with the estimable likes of Jon Lord, Dave Greenslade, Rick Wakeman, Chick Corea, Jan Hammer, Steve Winwood (also a guitarist), David Sancious (also a guitarist), Edgar Froese (also a guitarist), Stu Goldberg, Barry Miles, Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Philippe Saisse, John Mayall (also a guitarist). Mike Ratledge, Karl Jenkins, Steve McDonald, Greg Allman, Brian Auger, Thorsten Quaeschning, Thijs Van Leer, Ronan Hardiman, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Zawinul, Vangelis, Per Wiberg, Colin Townes, Massimo Giuntoli. Don Airey, Patrick Moraz, Allan Zavod, Jean-Michel Jarre, Howard Jones, Steve Gray, Chick Churchill, Vincent Crane, Rainer Bruninghaus, Chris Franke, and Johannes Schmoeling. Well short of a hundred, I know, but then again keyboardists are a rarer – and, on the whole, less popular – breed of musician than guitarists, are they not?

++++++

Noticed an interesting window display in a Palmers Green shop today (13/11/13) in which Buddha figurines had been placed on a shelf above one featuring a number of dragon figurines or sculptures that should, in the nature of such an arrangement, have been physically bound or constrained for want of a fire-breathing capacity and any evidence of interest from above, that is, from the self-absorbed Buddhas.

Certainly this display struck me as having some moral and even logical significance, much as I normally interpret such a significance in terms of a gender distinction between psychically free males and somatically pseudo-bound females, the former saved to psychic peace-of-mind and the latter counter-damned to somatic constraints the product, in no small measure, of male hegemonic control which renders them less female (in free soma and bound psyche) than pseudo-female (in pseudo-bound soma and pseudo-free psyche), and therefore as mirroring, in reverse ratio terms (1:3 as against 3:1), the free psyche and bound soma of the hegemonic male who, like the Buddhas referred to above, would be blessed with fidelity (truth) to gender instead of being cursed or, rather, pseudo-cursed, like the pseudo-female, with having to go against the grain of one's gender to an extent which puts one in the position of a neutralized dragon existing under the saintly heel or, if that sounds too narrow, of a lion and/or wolf that 'lies down', through neutralization, with the 'lamb of god' that stands over it as metaphysics over pseudo-metachemistry or, in simple parlance, stands on a higher plane, if not shelf, from that which is fated to remain gender subordinate, as pseudo-space under time, in consequence. But, of course, my logic and the common run of things in the world are two entirely different things, incapable, seemingly, of reconciliation.

Britain is the land, par excellence, where transcendentalism and idealism are 'beyond the pale' of what is taken seriously, namely the materialism and fundamentalism which characterize the rule a metachemical roost in which things are judged from a scientific as opposed to religious standpoint, and what is not amenable to empirical verification is treated as of little or no account, even as non-existent. Which is why there is scant respect for the soul in any land dominated by will.

******

The symphony started out with a few good ideas, but the longer it went on the more the composer seemed to be running out of them until, towards the end, one was grimly hanging on and wishing the music would hurry up and finish. Alas, as though from perversity, it seemed to take an eternity to do so! The longer one had to persevere with its want of interesting ideas, the more contemptuous of it one became. I began by thinking it was the work of a contemporary composer, possibly British, but it turned out I was wrong. Just another horribly tedious overblown composition by what I took to be a brass-ridden jerk, who turned out to be none other than Gustav Mahler. And the symphony in question was his seventh.

++++++

The day, none too smart, was weak and bleak as I looked out of the window and wondered how long it would take to turn strong and allow me to sing my song without appearing pretentious or obliged to sink into a dirge that would be no more than a reflection of where the day was now at, without the consolation of promise or trust.

The river of my imagination rushed headlong towards the yawning precipice, but appeared to recoil on the brink of annihilation as though in dread of what lay ahead, before plunging over the edge into the cauldron of foaming spray from which there would be no return. I stared aghast as the fall claimed its water and the heaving flanks of what was once a proud river capsized into the descent that rapidly ensued. With heaving flanks, I say, the river had rushed towards its nemesis, plunging over the precipice into the raging cauldron that ceaselessly and mercilessly churned whatever water fell into its rapacious clutches with a frenzy born of desperation, before the rapids took over and carried away the foaming remnants of the once-proud river without so much as a moment's hesitation.

Only men of a certain stamp can live with the windy cries and plaintive moans that, like so many agitated ghosts, command these attic heights so far removed from worldly norms and the stolid complacency down below. Philosophers and poets accustomed to metaphysical musings on gusts of windswept thought!

Where once I took a philosophical approach to poetry, I have since taken a poetic approach to philosophy, like Nietzsche before me, the philosopher-artist par excellence.

++++++

Are not the Mozarts, the Beethovens, the Brahmses of our day – if any such there be – not those who are at the cutting edge of instrumental technology, using the most up-to-date or efficacious means to compose and perform their music? Hardly writers for the conventional or classical orchestra, with its acoustic limitations, but users of electric or electronic instruments, including, not least, guitars and keyboards. And what goes for composers must surely apply to writers and artists as well?

The question for writers is whether their writing is a liberation from self or a journey towards self, which is a distinction, I would guess, between objectivity and subjectivity, female and male creative values, whether in regard to drama (female objectivity) or fiction (pseudo-female pseudo-objectivity) on the one hand, or to poetry (pseudo-male pseudo-subjectivity) or philosophy (male subjectivity) on the other hand. For me, writing has increasingly become, with the passing of time, a journey to self, as to self-realization. Hence Centretruths – Inner Journeys to the Centre of Truth, which is to be found in the self of the metaphysical male.

Those who don't write with gender in mind are akin to androgynous liberals who tend to regard people as the same, irrespective of gender. Either that, or they unconsciously write from a male or a female standpoint for other males or females without being in the least aware of it, overlooking the fact that many if not most females in the male case and males in the female case will not be served by their writings but, in all probability, will be left cold or simply alienated.

Writing with gender in mind is even now comparatively rare, albeit we live in a post-atomic age in which the atom has already been split and, in consequence, it behoves those of us at the cutting edge of literature or literary productions to reflect that fact, with predilections which are appropriately post-worldly and even pro-otherworldly/pseudo-netherworldly in their accommodation of a gender-divisible Saint and (neutralized) Dragon-like structure comprised of metaphysics and pseudo-metachemistry, with the former unequivocally hegemonic over the latter in view of the triumph of transcendentalist ideals. World overcoming, to use a Nietzschean expression, cannot be effected except on the basis of an approach to thinking, as to writing, which is post-atomic and therefore arguably orientated towards a protonic/pseudo-photonic detachment from neutronic and electronic complications of the sort which make for worldly atomicity.

++++++

If the 'common man' – female as well as male – wasn't generally so detestable, it would be easier or, at any rate, less difficult to sympathize with him. Alas, it is a rare talent that makes the welfare of the 'common man' his raison d'être, actually doing something to help him or at least acting in the belief that what he does is actually helping him rather than simply interfering or reflecting a delusional ideological standpoint orientated towards 'world betterment', a term that doesn't imply 'world overcoming' but, rather, some presumed improvement of how things actually are in the world generally, without putting the emphasis upon otherworldly values. In other words, a secular ideal that, in the nature of such ideals, can only be false.

******

Trapped in the suffering, you feel like a caged animal for whom there is no relief, no reprieve from the public glare and claustrophobic confinement in which pain is intensified.

Sometimes one vomits over life as over a sickness or disease from which one longs to escape, as from a never-ending stream of worries and torments which contribute, in no small measure, to the nervous prostration under which one labours, as under a cloud of despair.

Fear not, say the heroes. You'll pull through in the end!

++++++

And I looked back at her yearning for me with such cold contempt that she blushed and turned away in embarrassment, as though self-consciously aware of having been caught in the act of trying to advance her reproductive ambitions at the expense of a man who wasn't in the slightest bit interested.

There is nothing in this life I hate and fear so much as love.

++++++

Racing-car drivers are surely the major criminals of the sporting world, for whom speed is the means to a victorious end in what would most likely be a smoking hot, if not overheated, racing car whose engine had been pushed to the limit by a driver hell-bent on out-racing everybody else. Are not speed and heat correlative, like the free soma and bound psyche of metachemistry (ordinarily hyped as metaphysics), that powerful objectification of free will, as of all things materially and fundamentally female, which struts its beautiful stuff over a world held spellbound by love but ever fearful of the ugliness and hatred that is the evil corollary of the original crime. She moves fast and generates heat, rather like the racing cars of the grand prix circuits. God, how I detest them! But are motorbike racers any better? They, too, generate heat through speed.

++++++

I have brought philosophy to a point way beyond any previous philosopher, or serious thinker of the philosopher-artist variety, to a kind of omega point of structural comprehensiveness that not even Arthur Koestler was able to achieve (given his 'tripartite' limitations analogous, though decidedly distinct from, the trinitarian limitations of Christian tradition), a structural comprehensiveness, I say, in which everything adds up and anything can be pinpointed and evaluated on the basis of its actual elemental or, for that matter, pseudo-elemental worth or significance in relation to or even in opposition with an ontological fulcrum in metaphysics, the philosophical element par excellence.

Those who ignore me do so for reasons best known to themselves. Those who underestimate me do so for want of an ability to appreciate or understand my work.

The last philosopher who meant anything to me was Jean-Paul Sartre, despite his negative philosophy (existentialism), whereas the first was Arthur Schopenhauer, another exponent of philosophical negativity. In between, there was of course Friedrich Nietzsche, whose positivity stretched towards the superhuman, and Oswald Spengler, whose philosophy of history was not without the sort of structural comprehensiveness that gave wings to my own assault on Truth and made me aware that, if I was to surpass both him and the others named here, I would have to be no less if not even more structurally comprehensive in relation to a quadruplicity of factors that, deriving from the principal elements, viz., fire, water, vegetation (earth), and air, would form the basis of subsequent embellishment. Even John Bunyan can be cited in relation to such a structure, though I would hesitate to classify the author of Pilgrim's Progress with those whom, as philosophers of a free-thinking disposition, one can be proud to have surpassed.

++++++

If cavemen and communes precede tribes and city states, as the alpha and omega of pre-ancient (primeval) and ancient types of society respectively, then it can be argued that petty kingdoms or principalities and nation states precede the international federations and whatever is to come in terms of a super- if not supra-national centro-complexification commensurate with the Universal as the alpha and omega of modern and post-modern types of society respectively.

The post-modern age is also the age of the post-atomic, an age in which, as noted above, the atom has been split and it behoves us to take a post-worldly view of life as of that which constitutes living rather than to continue to adhere, in worldly vein, to atomic cohesiveness, not least in respect of such concepts as freedom, sanity, morality, divinity, etc., all of which would previously have taken their cue from alpha domination, and thus from an objectively female approach to the world rooted, it would appear, in photonic objectivity.

The worldly age was divisible between ancient and modern, as between two types of approaches to atomic relativity, the former natural and the latter artificial. Flanking it are the pre-ancient societies of pre-atomic primitivism on the one hand and the post-modern societies of post-atomic futurism on the other hand, the former dominated by supernatural criteria under the aegis of metachemical free soma and the latter by what could be called supernurtural criteria under the aegis of metaphysical free psyche, equivalent to a kind of super-artificiality in which the synthetic overhaul of nature-derived artificiality is what most characterizes it, and we look increasingly towards a transcendental future, a future whose idealism is truly transcendent of the natural world.

******

2012 was undoubtedly the worst year of my life, a year when everything bad came to an appalling head, making me wonder, as I cast my mind back over the torturous sequence of events that culminated in a change of address over Christmas, how I managed to survive into 2013 to write this and other texts.

++++++

The audience is to the band (or group) a kind of abstraction, which would not exist but for the band. To be sure, the band needs the audience and, in a sense, would not exist as a commercially successful entity without one. But it is the band that creates the audience, not vice versa, and to the band the audience are an abstract collective, scarcely recognizable as individuals. It is the band, on the contrary, that is the concrete embodiment of individualism, both as individual members of it and as exponents of musical and/or compositional individualism, without which it would have no interest for the audience, that abstract embodiment, as it were, of collectivism, some of whose members may well aspire towards individuality or even be representative of individuality at other times and in a different or analogous context. For audience and band are not immutably fixed in a dichotomous mould but are capable, to varying extents (depending on the individuals) of interchangeability, so that what was concrete in one context can become abstract in the other, and vice versa, though not normally within the same audience/band concert.

Tangerine Dream Live at the Tempodrome Berlin (‘September 21^st 2006’) is without the shadow of a doubt Tangerine Dream's best Eastgate-released DVD, featuring not only 25 concert tracks/titles and 5 encore ones, but a seven member line-up comprised of Edgar Froese, Jerome Froese, Thorsten Quaeschning, Iris Camaa, Linda Spa, Gerald Gradwohl, and Bernhard Beibl. That is at least two more musicians than one usually gets from their Eastgate DVDs, and the sound is correspondingly richer and more varied. Also, some three hours of their music is no small contributory factor to what I regard as the overall appropriate musical pre-eminence of this particular DVD recorded in Germany's historic capital.

++++++

If you are a slave to your addiction, be it to alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, sex, or whatever, you will not be a free man. Nor will you become a free man without outside intervention, without the assistance, that is, of persons capable of liberating you from your slavery and thereby setting you free.

If alcohol gives you nightmares, it would be better if you desisted from its consumption – assuming you were not slavishly addicted and incapable, in consequence, of doing so.

It is ironic that at a time when tobacco is being discouraged, at least in relation to the smoking of cigarettes, alcohol, by contrast, is more easily and variously available than ever, with literally thousands of different kinds of spirits, wines, and beers being produced in dozens of countries and exported from hundreds of sellers or merchants all over the world. It is also somewhat sad, since alcohol, in whatever guise, does little to enhance your life or better your health, being for the most part a temporary solution to a permanent problem, namely that of living in the modern/post-modern world with its soulless consumerism and societal malaise, one born of materialism and the overwhelming dominance, universally, of money.

Whether you prefer spirits, wines, or beers, have arguably upper class, middle class, or lower class tastes, you will be afflicted by the same demon in different guises, a demon that, issuing from the devil and/or bedevilment of original crime, ensures that the soul is starved of metaphysical nourishment and rendered incapable of joy, without which there can be no godly grace but only, at most, a subversion or corruption of it such that results in a sinful acquiescence, by males, in the dominance of devilish values like crime and evil.

Another thing about alcohol and the consumption thereof is that one gets carried away by it to a point where the 'golden mean' of all things in moderation that makes for relative happiness is drowned in an orgy of excess, whereby every vice or cultural indulgence (the two are not necessarily identical) is taken to extremes and the variety that is the proverbial 'spice of life' in sobriety is replaced by a self-indulgent fixation upon one thing, like music or drama, to the exclusion of others. Good in one sense, that of the immediate present, but in terms of the development or cultivation, through variety, of a 'rounded psychology', profoundly self-defeating, since the fixation is bound to repeat itself to a degree whereby it becomes predictably boring, like a record or song doomed to replay itself ad infinitum and ad nauseam, because there are only a limited number of things that would be considered appropriate to or 'worthy of' the particular alcoholic bias.

The 'red devil wine' he consumed, from time to time, did not wash his sins away but was itself a sin against the holy ghost that warred upon his self, making him feel polluted and spiritually unclean. This is the 'inner dirt' that renders the 'inner cleanliness' of grace impossible of attainment; for the committing of sin is folly, just as the avoidance of sin in the interests of divine grace is wisdom. By the wisdom of grace are you saved from the folly of sin.

******

Few physical books are written for their own sake, but mostly as a means to a financial end, whether this end is disguised under the euphemism of 'earning a living' or nakedly revealed as a manifestation of commercial greed. Only metaphysical books, like eBooks, can be written as ends-in-themselves, standing, when true, as a beacon of light in a world subjected, by physical books, to the blight of greed and the sanctimonious concretion of female domination.

++++++

It is not God that having 'made the world' rules over it, but the Devil, and not least in the guise of Devil the Mother/Virgin hyped as God the Father, or Beauty hyped as Truth. Such a 'God', being divergently objective, is much closer to the female side of life than to its male side, the side forever labouring under the yoke of female predation and exploitation. And for the fools who succumb to their seductions, Beauty is Truth.

Because the world is forever in the grip of crime and evil, not least in the guise of criminal and evil persons, it can never be taken for granted by the enlightened, by persons acquainted with grace and wisdom, but can only be regarded as a problem, one deserving of solution … in the form, ultimately, of 'Kingdom Come', with the deliverance of the 'put upon' from the rule of crime and evil to an otherworldly context characterized by the rule, theocratically as opposed to autocratically, of grace and wisdom. Such a rule would require nothing less than the 'remaking' of man, or a certain type of man (long identified by me with pseudo-physics) in the 'divine image', that is, in the image, if you will, of grace (truth/joy) and wisdom (illusion/woe), the image, if you prefer, of 'God in Heaven'.

But any divine 'remaking' of man necessarily presupposes the pseudo-diabolic corollary of the 'remaking' of woman (pseudo-man's chemical governess, so to speak) in the image, metaphorically speaking, of pseudo-punishment (pseudo-beauty/pseudo-love) and pseudo-goodness (pseudo-ugliness/pseudo-hatred), without which there can be no 'eternal peace' for the Saved (metaphysical males). For the metaphysical peace of the one gender can only be achieved on the basis of the pseudo-metachemical subjugation of the other, neutralized dragon-like to the saintly hegemony that would reign 'on high', a plane up (in metaphysics) from those fated to a subordinate position (in pseudo-metachemistry) in the mainstream structure – the 'Centre proper' as opposed to its 'administrative aside' – of what I loosely conceive to be the nature of 'Kingdom Come'.

Thanks to the existence of grace and wisdom, traditionally the theocratic preserve of Catholic priests, the sinful and foolish pseudo-males have not been expected to take their sins and follies for granted but, rather, to confess them to a priest and thereby acquire, through verbal absolution, a modicum of grace and wisdom with which to arm themselves, as it were, against the virtual inevitability of subsequent sins and follies all too characteristic of 'the world' and, more particularly, of their subordinate status in it (under chemical females).

Yet this only really applies to pseudo-physical pseudo-males, not to those chemical females who are obliged, in achieving maternity, to take 'the world' as they know it for granted, since it is the goal of their striving, metachemically, after motherhood and the attainment, thereby, of a surrogate plenum, in the guise of offspring, with which to acquire release, if only temporarily and, as it were, intermittently, from the burden of virginal vacuity.

So while some persons take 'the world' for granted, others do not, and this applies as much, albeit on reverse gender-structured terms, to the physical/pseudo-chemical mass Protestant dichotomy across the worldly – and axial – divide as to that noted above between, in mass Catholic vein, the chemical/pseudo-physical.

Yet in the physical/pseudo-chemical case it would be the pseudo-chemical pseudo-females, I believe, who would not take 'the world' as they know it for granted, since they live under a physical male hegemonic heel, so to speak, and could only profit from an axial deliverance, through what could be termed Undamnation, from pseudo-chemistry to metachemistry, as from gender subordination under physics to a gender hegemony over pseudo-metaphysics, just as (to revert to the aforementioned Catholic axis) it is the pseudo-physical pseudo-males who would profit, through Salvation, from axial deliverance to metaphysics, as from gender subordination to chemical females to a gender hegemony over pseudo-metachemical pseudo-females, the counter-damned corollary of the metaphysical salvation of the pseudo-physical.

However, when you are already damned, as are the pseudo-chemical (as from the axial polarity of metachemical freedom), then the most you can expect is to be delivered from subordination to the physical, who are pseudo-saved (as from pseudo-metaphysical pseudo-binding) to an undamned hegemony, as alluded to above, over the pseudo-unsaved pseudo-metaphysical, since it is only the physical who can take the world as they know it for granted, having achieved, through pseudo-salvation, relative independence of pseudo-metaphysics and its pseudo-unsaved subordination to metachemistry. Enough for now, since the overall complexities of this logic are such that one would not expect to have too many readers with the intellectual or gender capacity to understand, much less endorse it!

******

Some would regard Villon as the greatest of French poets, others of a more bohemian nature would claim Verlaine as their man, while still others would insist, with a certain patrician disdain, on the pre-eminence of Mallarmé, as though referencing some kind of Delius-like musician in sublime disguise. I, being different, would probably opt for Baudelaire, whose fleurs were not as mal as might be thought. As a youth, however, my enthusiasm for French poetry was sparked by that most youthful and uncynical of poets, Rimbaud, whose penchant for the exotic, for drugs and all things mystical, was to lead me, in due course, to poets (and writers) like de Nerval and Baudelaire, the de Quincy and Coleridge, as it were, of French poetry, both of whom made journeys, one way or another, to the Orient.

But if there's one poet, really a prose poet and poet in prose, whom I was destined to fall for in no uncertain terms it must be Lautréamont, who was really no more prolific than Rimbaud, but whose influence on French writing and on devotees of French poetry was immense, principally through the medium of his best-known work, Maldoror or, more correctly, Les Chants de Maldoror, a narrative poem which was to blow through the clichés and cobwebs of belles lettres with the storm of its black humour and almost boundless irony.

After Lautréamont, the most controversially 'obscene' writer in French since de Sade, the unnatural nature of whose writings owed not a little to the fact of his lengthy spells of solitary confinement, there was only one direction one could go, and that, albeit with more than a passing salute to Huysmans, that mentor of the cultured hypochondriac, was into the twentieth century with the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, and with novels like Notre Dame des Fleurs, Jean Genet, who took poetic licence to an entirely new level that even earned the respect of so determined a philosopher as Sartre, who for a time in the early 'fifties was not entirely above poetic leanings himself, especially in plays like Altona and Nakrassov, despite his conviction that the bitter experiences of the Second World War had rendered poetry and lyrical endeavour in general redundant.

Eventually, like Sartre, I too would abandon poetic leanings or, at any rate, an overt commitment to poetry, becoming, in an intellectual sense, the Sartre of my day. But I still feel a certain nostalgia, from time to time, for the French poets of my youth who, whether as youths or adults, were to dominate my approach to French letters and, indeed, to literature in general for years to come, making me sensitive to the poetic element even in such realistic authors as Gide and Malraux, not to mention the rather more down-to-earth if lyrically-inclined Albert Camus.

Even now, long after I've lost my taste for French literature, it is Baudelaire more than any other French writer, with the possible exception of Sartre (one should mention, in passing, the strong cultural connection between these two men which Sartre's psychologically-orientated biographical portrait of Baudelaire would seem to confirm), who commands my greatest respect, since he knew, more than anyone, that for literary endeavour of a personal and/or universal nature to survive you had to be able to overcome the resistance and even opposition of 'ordinary' people and just get on with it willy-nilly.

For common people, beset with children and relatives, are the epitome of all that is most anti-intellectual and therefore anti-literary, opposing from a largely breeding if not ethnically alien standpoint the perceived intellectuality of the exceptional man, be he poet, philosopher, or even prose writer. Therefore our victory over mediocrity or barbarity or whatever you prefer to call it is all the sweeter whenever we succeed in producing work that satisfies our literary conscience and makes us proud to have done what we did in spite of whatever opposition, usually born of envy and resentment, may have come our way from those whom we feel obliged, by circumstances, to identify with the common herd of semi-literate if not illiterate proletarians.

++++++

The free mind at play is preferable, from a male standpoint, to the free body at work. For in the latter instance there is likely to be a pseudo-bound mind enslavement on the part of pseudo-males to free females, who will be metachemically or chemically hegemonic over them, whereas the free male is likely to enslave the pseudo-female to bodily pseudo-binding, the subordinate gender corollary of his particular type of mental freedom, be it metaphysical or physical. One gender's freedom is the opposite gender's binding, rather like the adage about meat and poison.

Frank Zappa was, in a sense, the Salvador Dali of rock music, stretching time and space way beyond their usual musical bounds with a creative mind that was musically freer than the great majority of his contemporaries. Zappa remains one of the few real or, more correctly, surreal geniuses of our time, a musician who was far more than a mere anti-classical cynic or blues-slavering parodist, but an intensely original musician with a prolific output that defied the norms of commercial production.

What I want to know about a musician is whether his music is a cultural manifestation of free mind, and thus contributes to expanded consciousness, or whether, on the contrary, it is just a reflection of bodily freedom which any fool – and not a few bitches – can dance to. No small distinction! In fact, all the difference between classicism and populism, with a fundamental gender distinction between male and female criteria that will always have pseudo-female and pseudo-male corollaries respectively.

Most of the best rock music, especially in the context of progressive rock, tends to exemplify free mind, whereas the bulk of pop music, orientated towards dance, exemplifies bodily freedom, the very thing that any form of classicism, whether ancient or modern, acoustic or electric, tends to fight shy of, whether from the standpoints of ego or soul.

++++++

The higher and truer your ideas, the more flak will you receive from persons who are both envious of you and humiliated by the fact that they hadn't thought of them or, for reasons best known to themselves, were unable to think like that in the first place.

To claim that you were encouraged to think in a society or milieu dominated by females (and their kids) would be a contradiction in terms. On the contrary, all outgoing creatures do their utmost to discourage you, since life for them is about looking, not reflecting.

******

Have just finished reading, in fairly quick succession, Backroads Guide to Germany, which is fine if you happen to own a car or can drive, and Walking Dublin, for which all that is required is a steady pair of legs and, notwithstanding the likelihood of one's getting wet, the ability to follow complex road and pavement directions in order to track down significant or interesting destinations.

Travelling around out-of-the-way places in Germany is, frankly, beyond me, since I don't possess a car and, even if I could afford to rent one, have never driven anywhere under any circumstances. But walking around Dublin is something that I did, on several occasions, in the past, so I have some experience of what it takes, though not necessarily in relation to some of the places outlined in the aforementioned book which, in any case, is a comparatively recent publication. I can still remember, however, the thrill I got on first sighting, almost by accident, the Spire as I approached it from Henry Street, only noticing it when a few yards from where it stands in the middle of O'Connell Street. Such a thrill, or buzz of excitement, can only happen once.

These days, traipsing around Dublin would have less appeal, since I prefer to take public transport whenever possible – at least in London. But Dublin remains an impressive city, with an atmosphere and air peculiar to itself. Only Berlin holds as much interest for me … perhaps even more, since it is a good deal bigger and, well, more agreeably spaced out, with excellent transport links to boot.

++++++

Rarely do I have a thought that goes uncensored, as it were, from some bimbo of a neighbour, be it juvenile or adult, whose extraordinary sensitivity to thought, or at any rate to my predilection for thinking, results in a fit of stamping or banging or whatever. It almost makes one afraid to think, though I shall not be put off that easily, given my understanding of life as a gender war in which will and spirit, germane to what is properly female, objectively war on ego and soul, germane, by contrast, to all that is properly, and therefore subjectively, male. You simply cannot give in or surrender. You have to keep on fighting … in my case the 'good fight' for the eventual triumph of soul in what is loosely termed 'Kingdom Come'.

To that end I have dedicated the greater part of my life's work, which has included the ideological invention, as it were, of Social Theocracy as the precondition of Social Transcendentalism and everything that it morally stands for, not least the eventual democratic superseding, in countries with the right kind of (church-hegemonic) axial preconditions, of political sovereignty in the mass by religious sovereignty and the exchange of rights accruing to the former for rights accruing to the latter in what will necessarily have to be a male-dominated society in which 'the world' of or, rather, as an expression of female domination has been 'overcome', to use a Nietzschean term, and man or, more correctly, what is properly male has been set free of, in particular, wilful subversion, culminating in a social structure analogous to that of the proverbial Saint and (neutralized) Dragon, that is, metaphysical male and pseudo-metachemical pseudo-female distinctions in which whatever is predatory 'lies down', through neutralization, with whatever has traditionally, in its soul-oriented subjectivity, been the victim of female predation, or predation motivated by reproductive need, and this despite appearances or presumptions on the part of many males (especially pseudo-males) to the contrary!

In the meantime the fight goes on, at least with me, who knows full well that peace will not come until victory has been won and one's soul-mind is free to be true to itself, as 'God in Heaven', without fear or proof, based in evidence and experience, of external subversion and censure.

++++++

Now that women are rampant, liberated from gender subordination and glorying in their somatic freedoms, it is difficult to find anyone with a genuine sense of what it means to be religious and therefore engaged in 'fighting the good fight', as the saying goes. Easier to find accomplices to if not champions of female liberation and effective gender domination. Pseudo-males, who 'suck up' to women, having 'made their peace', such as it is, with 'the world' and consequently turned their backs on, if not overtly repudiated, any otherworldly aspiration, deeming it fanciful or unrealistic or somehow 'contrary to nature' and at loggerheads with what lies behind Nature in the Cosmos....Which, however, is what true religion should be, if less, for me, from a Christian standpoint than, hopefully in the future, from a kind of Superchristian one that I, of course, would identify with Social Theocracy, conceiving of it as the logical successor, as it were, to what I have customarily identified as properly Christian, namely Roman Catholicism, with its axial purchase (southwest to northeast points of the intercardinal axial compass) on metaphysics, albeit a necessarily and, in a sense, regrettably truncated metaphysics in consequence of the Creator-esque prevalence, in back (effectively corresponding to the northwest point of the intercardinal axial compass), of metachemistry and all that has anchored, in Judaic vein, the Christian extrapolation, in New Testament fashion, of what is broadly termed the Judeo-Christian tradition, even though, except in the case of Protestants, the principal components of that tradition, namely Judaism and Roman Catholicism, are at axial loggerheads and in no wise compatible.

In fact, they are mutually irreconcilable, like the alpha and omega of the Middle East and what, in the case of Western Europe, could be called the Middle West respectively, the former autocratically rooted in Creator-ism (Jehovah), the latter straining on a theocratic leash, as it were, towards the Crucifixional paradigm of bound metaphysical soma in respect of Christ, the one necessarily precluding, by its very existence, any possibility of free metaphysical psyche on the part of the other, since metaphysical free psyche, the preponderating ratio aspect (3:1) of metaphysics, is only possible in the event of metaphysical freedom from metachemistry and a repudiation, in consequence, of everything associated with Creator-ism, that is, with God as Creator or First Mover or so-called Father in back of Nature and the world in general. Such a repudiation might be considered atheist by some, but to me it is the precondition of a truly divine orientation in relation to both the bound soma and, more importantly, the free psyche of metaphysics as the prerogative of saved males.

******

Worse than poor artists, who at least have a chance of improving over the course of time, are those ideological subversives and philistine enemies of art who use it to glorify the worker and further a political cause. For they make the continuation or, more likely, resumption of genuine art, by which I principally mean art motivated by creative individualism rather than simply rooted in reality, all the more difficult in consequence of the degree to which it was subverted and effectively tarnished by whatever utilitarian or propagandistic twist the Social Realists and other philistines of a like pragmatic nature chose, or were obliged, to inflict upon it, effectively replacing art by a form of craft and hyping, in time-honoured vein, the latter as the former.

You are not a genuine artist, a real creative individual, until you feel that you are akin to a 'voice crying in the wilderness' of social conformity and urban banality on behalf of an original if not truly unique perspective on life that has the capacity to enlighten and thereby set men free of earthly bondage.

Every true artist is alone with his vision, his perception not so much of how things are as of how, in an ideal world, the world of art, they could be and maybe one day will be, thus doing away with the justification of art as an antidote to a reality dominated, in worldly vein, by barbarous and philistine opponents of culture and civility – in short, by opposition to what makes or may well, in the artist's estimation, make for the possibility of 'Kingdom Come', conceived as the ideal society in which the general welfare and particular well-being of the individual comes first.

Art can point the way towards the 'kingdom within', the eternal life of soulful truth, but the actual realization of it by the individual, necessarily male in view of its metaphysical subjectivity, is an art in itself, requiring means that enable one to transcend 'the world' and achieve that perfect Being which, in its metaphysical supremacy, is the proper end of life for any enlightened male, any male enlightened enough, that is, to be independent of the collective female concern, through metachemical objectivity, with reproduction.

++++++

The liberal is one who refuses to discriminate, not least in relation to religion, on the basis of gender, and consequently he is one who corrupts religion by reducing it to his effectively androgynous incapacity for metaphysical truth. By accepting 'the world' for the gender compromise it is, he acquiesces in the autocratic if not authoritarian rule of what rules over it from a metachemical standpoint, the standpoint, namely, of materialism/fundamentalism, and has therefore 'sold his soul' to the Devil, as to Devil the Mother/Virgin hyped as God in what some would call a kind of Faustian Pact. He is not of the Devil, no, but his liberal want of godliness in Heaven betrays a 'human-all-too-human' or, more correctly, humanist-all-too-humanist disposition which accepts worldly relativity and its refusal or inability, epitomized by the phenomenon of mixed congregations, to discriminate between the genders. For such discrimination, morally and socially, is indispensable to true religion, without which you cannot, as a male, even begin to understand the nature of salvation and of what it entails, not least with regard to its corollary, for females, of counter-damnation to a subordinate position, in pseudo-metachemistry under metaphysics, 'on high'.

The liberal, like the autocrat who rules over him, is really an enemy of religion and everything it stands for. His religion is, in truth, no religion at all, but a 'bovaryized' cop-out from the 'good fight' that, in contrast, accommodates 'the world' which he, more even than the autocrat, strenuously upholds, whether as an end-in-itself or a means to some degree of aristocratic if not autocratic promotion. And this contrary to his Catholic counterparts back across the lower-order axial divide who, whilst being very much in the world are not, through faith, of it to anything like a liberal extent, given their shame, at least in the case of males or more correctly pseudo-males, of sin and aspiration, through confession, to a 'higher world' closer, in essence, to godliness as an impression of Heaven, a world where not sin but grace is truly prevalent.

******

It is ironic that the cynical rejection of Roman Catholic imperfections by zealous Protestants did not lead to a better religion, one completely metaphysical, but rather to a gradual, inexorable turning away from religion under the twin pressures, axially polar, of science and economics, those catalysts of the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution, which define contemporary life even more than the political decadence of those who rejected Catholicism from within, so to speak, in the slide from lapsed Catholicism into republican socialism ever vulnerable to Marxist infiltration and hence pseudo-economic subversion by effective fifth columnists.

However, one should not overlook the fact that while Catholicism was tolerated and even condoned within the overall context of the United Kingdom, it was the armed struggle by republicans, whether socialist or otherwise, that made Irish political independence from Great Britain possible within what turned out to be the 26-county Free State, an independence justified less on the basis of economics or science than, ironically, of religion.

++++++

Were I to list all the bands and/or groups that have made the biggest impression on me over the years, at least since 1967 when I bought my first LP, I am confident that it would stretch to well over a hundred names, especially since, to aid memory, I am going to split the list into three main categories, viz. British Isles (British & Irish); Continental Europe; and North America (USA & Canada), without intending to infer any sense of hierarchy or special merit in any of the categories, whether regarded individually or collectively, and with apologies for those of my readers who would also like to see a 'world' category embracing bands from South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, etc., of which, I have to confess, there would be precious few. So, starting with bands and/or groups based in or originating from the British Isles, the list will proceed as follows:-

1. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Deep Purple, King Crimson, Cream, the Rolling Stones, the Nice, Taste, the Who, Traffic, Ten Years After, UFO, Michael Schenker Group (though Michael Schenker, the leader of MSG, is German, I have decided to include this group in the British Isles category if only because, with Schenker graduating from UFO, the group began on a largely British basis back in 1979, even if, rather like John Mayall's Bluesbreakes, it subsequently incorporated or opted for other elements, particularly American), Emerson Lake & Palmer (ELP), Atomic Rooster, Spooky Tooth, Egg, Native Son, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, the Groundhogs, Fleetwood Mac, Humble Pie, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Colosseum, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Blind Faith, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Edgar Broughton Band, Third Ear Band, Pentangle, Thin Lizzy, U2, Yes, Motorhead, No Sweat, Iron Maiden, Jethro Tull, the Ian Gillan Band, Clannad, Sky, the Alvin Lee Band, the Spencer Davis Group, the Pete Green Splinter Group, Chicken Shack, Gong (despite a French contingent), Levitation, Greenslade, Snowy White & the White Flames, Whitesnake, Mahavishnu Orchestra (despite the incorporation by John McLaughlin of Americans and other nationalities), Genesis, Colosseum 2, Horslips, the Big Jim Sullivan Band, Rainbow, Free, Curved Air, Status Quo, Pretenders, the Hothouse Flowers, Rare Bird, Van Der Graaf Generator, the Keith Emerson Band (despite the incorporation by Keith Emerson of American musicians), Eric Burden & the Animals, Procul Harum, An Emotional Fish;

2. Focus, Tangerine Dream, Heroes del Silencio, Artch, Spiritual Beggars, Arch Enemy, Carpe Diem, CCCP, Brother To Brother, Alembic, Pierre Moelen's Gong, Opus, Animato, Neuwirth & Die Extremschrammeln, Pedro Abrunhosa & Bandemonio, Acanto;

3. The Grateful Dead, the Allman Brother's Band, Santana, the Doors, the Mothers of Invention, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Black Label Society, Crosby Stills Nash & Young (CSN&Y), Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, the Band, Weather Report, Return to Forever, the Chick Corea Band, Jefferson Starship, the Steve Morse Band, the Jan Hammer Group, Savatage, Love, Canned Heat, Chicago, Alice Cooper (the original group), the Velvet Underground, New Riders of the Purple Sage, the Steve Miller Band, Spirit, Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane, Black 47, Metallica, Van Halen, Steppenwolf, the Byrds.

Interestingly, of the 100+ bands and/or groups listed, the first category contains well over 60, the second a mere 16, and the third some 33 names, making for over twice as many British Isles-based bands and/or groups as American ones and substantially more of the former than of the Continental European and North American combined. Which should say something, I guess, about the regional nature of musical taste, not to mention what some would claim to be the overall superiority of British rock music.

******

As we get older the hope of youth is replaced by the fear of old age, even of death; at first slowly and gradually, but with increasing momentum as we age, until, in the declining years, our lives are more characterized by fear than hope. Hope may rule the lives of the young, but fear is the key to old age.

++++++

If the working class got its way, there would be no great or exceptional men, no artists, philosophers, saints, but only a general levelling down of society to the lowest-common-socialistic-denominator of an almost supine acquiescence in female domination, as we have seen in the past.

++++++

The adulation of the masses falls like rain upon those under the critical glare of the spotlight, but their disapproval could feel more like sleet or even snow, freezing the blood of those who like to think of themselves as spokesmen of the soul.

++++++

I am always suspicious of those who, from ecological or other motives, wish to protect and preserve wild beasts, the sort of beasts that, if given sufficient opportunity, would tear even them apart.

My personal instinct about wild beasts, like tigers, lions, bears, wolves, leopards, pumas, and the like, not to mention their counterparts in the sea and air like sharks and eagles, is that the fewer of them in existence, the better.

'Did he who made the lamb make thee?' Blake rhetorically asks of or, rather, concerning the tiger, presumably as a species. All one can say is that 'he' is almost certainly the wrong gender and that, in any case, Nature doesn't proceed on the basis of divinity but from a plethora of competing standpoints, including the diabolic, whose roots go back to the Cosmos, that fountain of divinity, devility, femininity, masculinity, and their respective subordinate, or 'pseudo', gender corollaries.

++++++

Most people fear and at the same time crave scandal or, more correctly, the process of being scandalized, especially when what causes it issues from some elite, like artists and thinkers who may be completely unaware of the fact that what they say or do could possibly have that kind of effect.

++++++

Wordsworth claims, in one of his best-known poems, to have 'wandered lonely as a cloud', though I've never myself heard of a cloud that was actually lonely. Maybe alone, as a single mass of vapour, but lonely? A clear case of poetic licence, which is of course a euphemism for nonsense, or something to that effect.

The worst feeling of loneliness, I have always found, comes not from being alone, since that can be positively delightful, not to say an immense relief from being in company, but rather from being surrounded by alien types who, because of their origins, care little or nothing for one's cultural predilections and tend, as often as not, to take a disparaging view of them. In consequence of which one is conscious of living in cultural isolation, without the benefit of so-called 'kindred spirits' or 'fellow travellers' on one's particular path, but with an overwhelming feeling of cultural, intellectual, ethnic, even class loneliness in relation to the type of persons with whom one shares a house or neighbourhood or street or whatever.

++++++

The greater the accomplishment, be it in music, art, literature, sport, or anything else, the less inclined one will be to regard oneself as a sinner and to be sinfully self-conscious of one's mortal shortcomings. Even priests would have a moral difficulty in regarding themselves in such a manner, since it is their duty, at least in the Roman Catholic Church, to forgive sin from a standpoint closer to if not effectively identifiable with grace. In fact, relatively few people actually take such a dim view of themselves these days, preferring the benefits, when not Catholic, of a lifestyle, even an ethnically-conditioned lifestyle, that more accords with concepts like pseudo-grace or punishment, crime or pseudo-sin, not to mention, as the gender corollary (for females) of sin, a tendency towards pseudo-evil within an elemental context (chemical) that is actually more biased, in overall ratio terms (2½ free soma:1½ bound psyche), towards pseudo-crime, the free somatic corollary of the folly of those pseudo-males given (in pseudo-physics) to pseudo-free somatic licence under female (chemical) hegemonic pressure, of which carnal knowledge, as the mode of pseudo-knowledge par excellence, and the pseudo-pleasure, as it were, deriving from it are foolishly (though not sinfully) typical, and typical, moreover, in primary state-subordinate terms.

For sin, curiously enough, only derives from and accrues to the guilt of a preponderating (2½:1½ in pseudo-physics) pseudo-bound psyche, the primary church-hegemonic corollary, for pseudo-males, of the pseudo-evil bound psyche properly attaching, as secondary church-hegemonic corollary of the secondary state-subordinate pseudo-criminal free soma, to the hegemonic female (in chemistry), the more so as she has achieved a modicum of maternal resolution (in Marian vein).

Of course, for the lapsed Catholic/republican socialist, no sense of sin or folly, much less pseudo-evil or pseudo-crime, has to be acknowledged, and they tend, in consequence, to relapse into some degree of secular if not heathen indifference to Catholic mores under the governing aegis, so to speak, of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, that painterly metaphor, it seems to me, for the inevitability, under female domination, of secular maternity and therefore for a leadership less, in relation to the church-hegemonic/state-subordinate axis, towards a kind of fudged 'salvation', the product in large part of a truncated metaphysics 'done down' pseudo-metachemically, than back towards the apex of the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axis in what must always be a metachemical licence to strut her criminal stuff in the freest of somatic freedoms (3 free soma:1 bound psyche), one whose fulcrum lies not in free spirit, as with chemistry, but in free will.

The cultural struggle against philistinism can only be carried out on a church-hegemonic basis, requiring the gender subordinate (female) corollary of a pseudo-civil struggle against pseudo-barbarity in like polar terms. And it is a struggle that can be won, unlike that of pseudo-culture vis-à-vis pseudo-philistinism on the state-hegemonic axis, which in overall axial terms is ever gender subordinate (male) to the disadvantaged and effectively losing struggle of civility against barbarity, the latter of which rules the state-hegemonic axis at the expense of pseudo-philistinism no less than culture leads the church-hegemonic one at the expense of pseudo-civility.

Culture is no less righteous than philistinism meek on primary (male) church-hegemonic terms, whereas pseudo-civility is no less pseudo-just than pseudo-barbarity pseudo-vain on secondary (female) church-hegemonic terms. By axial contrast, pseudo-culture is no less pseudo-righteous than pseudo-philistinism pseudo-meek on secondary (male) state-hegemonic terms, whereas civility is no less just than barbarity vain on primary (female) state-hegemonic terms.

++++++

That a man can become a true or genuine individual in this world in the face of (and therefore contrary to) the collectivism of the female-dominated herd – that, I believe, is not only usually commensurate with genius but is also nothing short of miraculous!

++++++

I dislike the word 'cosmopolitan' almost as much as the word 'cosmos', as significant of all that, in its alpha-stemming objectivity, is most removed from the omega-oriented subjectivity of true universality, epitome of what is most homogeneous within a context dominated by metaphysics.

++++++

The equalitarianism of the average 'man of the people' is somewhat akin to the attitude: If I can't do and/or be that, then neither should you. An attitude that has nothing to do with raising the lower up higher but, on the contrary, more to do with pulling the higher down lower. And by that I do not just mean autocrats.

++++++

Regarding hammering workmen as being akin to woodpeckers is the latest and possibly foremost of my metaphorical euphemisms and/or categorical analogies.

++++++

It is imperative for anyone who practises philosophical logic to have his categories in order and as though fixed in a constant and easily recognizable mode, no matter how complicated or original and unusual the terminology, else ambivalence and uncertainty will ensue.

It is not enough to have the right number of categories for a given philosophy; the subject matter must be within the appropriate categories … before everything will add up and truth can accordingly be distinguished from what is less than or even contrary to it. For the purpose of a comprehensively-exacting logical structure is not the comprehensiveness itself, but the ability it gives one to distinguish, logically and morally, between the categories, so that what is properly philosophical, because metaphysically ontological, can be granted prominence over everything else, to the detriment and possible exclusion of the kind of subversive hype more usually associated with conventional religion and false philosophies, of which the 'scientific' philosophy of dialectical materialism is a case in point.

++++++

Christmas is that dreadful time of year when, under cover of religious disguise, family values are celebrated as never before, with an emphasis upon the mother and child. How it contrasts with Easter! Nothing short, in other words, of a polarity between chemistry/pseudo-physics (Christmas) and metaphysics/pseudo-metachemistry (Easter).

Morally weak people accept female domination as a matter of course, regarding those who don't as sexually corrupt or perverse or simply socially unrealistic.

I have always despised people who are morally weak, for they seem to me to be no more than a two-legged species of animal that, like the four-legged varieties, are simply creatures of nature who more or less take the natural status quo for granted.

++++++

In a world where most people, especially when female, tend to regard anyone who can think for himself as a 'lune' (colloquial for 'lunatic'), you can gauge what an uphill struggle it is to go against the grain of the masses and achieve that independence of mind which is characteristic of genius and, more especially, of the possibility of divine truth which, not surprisingly, has hitherto, in whatever form it has taken, been the exception to the rule, even to the rule of illusion hyped as truth.

Some would contend that you can never change the world or, more accurately, overcome it in favour of otherworldly criteria akin to Heaven or, in traditional parlance, 'Kingdom Come'. How can you turn against or turn your back on women and kids? they will rhetorically ask, as though the mere thought of it was outrageous and blatantly unrealistic. For is not life a product of female domination? Do women not generally get their way and produce offspring? And are not families generally confirmation of that fact? Quite apart from the obvious fact that women and children are generally so lovely and even adorable.

Well, that being the case, the world will drag on and never change or, rather, be changed, since if the fundamentals remain unchanged, given their variously seductive natures, then there is no way that 'man will be overcome', to use a Nietzschean expression, and gradually be replaced by a cyborgistic mean closer to godliness or, depending on gender, to pseudo-devilishness, the absolutely pseudo-bound somatic corollary of an absolutely free psychic disposition.

What a depressing thought! Only more of the same, generation after generation, in a world destined to repeat itself, with comparatively superficial modifications, for ever and anon. I do not accept that, and I believe there are other criteria at work in the determination of evolution than those which operate within a gender constant framework fatalistically deferential to the power and glory of females.

******

Literature is divided between those who write because they have something to say, like playwrights, and those who write to get their thoughts on paper (or on computer screen), like philosophers, with poets and novelists usually coming somewhere in between.

++++++

The internet is full of braggarts who desperately want to offer you their wealth-producing systems. But why? Why should anyone want to offer anyone else a system that makes them wealthy unless 1) it no longer does so and they are anxious to make money from selling it or 2) it never made money at all and they are just confidence tricksters who hope to capitalize on the gullible by claiming to have made thousands if not millions from it?

++++++

You can only lead what can be led (as from pseudo-physics to metaphysics). What cannot be led must be suppressed (as in relation to pseudo-metachemistry a plane down from metaphysics, as pseudo-space under time). Therefore metaphysics does not lead pseudo-metachemistry, even if it happened to be hegemonic over it; for pseudo-metachemistry would not wish to follow in the metaphysical footsteps, as it were, of those destined for metaphysics because capable of it. This is the real distinction between salvation (of the pseudo-physical) and pseudo-damnation (of the chemical) in relation to the element to which some can be saved (metaphysics) and the pseudo-element, by contrast, to which others would have to be pseudo-damned (pseudo-metachemistry), in a kind of counter-fall complement to a rise, before any long-term prospect, almost as a knock-on effect, of damnation and pseudo-salvation (if temporarily), or a fall and a counter-rise, could be anticipated in relation to the metachemical and pseudo-metaphysical vis-à-vis their polarities in pseudo-chemistry and physics respectively, the latter of which would continue, for a while, to be equivocally hegemonic over the former. But that is an entirely different axis from the one alluded to above, and movement would have to transpire on the one before there could be any prospect of subsequent movement on the other, as outlined in previous texts.

++++++

Another day of struggle against the noise being generated by the 'class enemy' next-door, whose relentless hammering and hell-knows-what-else has now shifted to the rear of the house, mainly, it would seem, in relation to some kind of extension out back which they have been working on for the past few months in succession to what had been going on in the house itself for several previous months, not least in relation to the building of a kind of additional room or attic right next to my bedroom, which happens to overlook a number of back gardens. I am beginning to wonder whether it will ever end, this building noise, if there will ever come a time when no such manual work will be going on next-door and one can have a modicum of physical peace, even with thought-sensitive neighbours of foreign origin out to inhibit or censure every mental reflection on one's admittedly somewhat intellectual part. Somehow it seems to me that every place I have ever lived in in the London Borough of Haringey, whether in Stroud Green, Crouch End, Hornsey, or Harringay, has either been the scene of or right next to a building site, metaphorically speaking. It would appear to be a characteristic of urban life in certain areas that hammering and building work in general is a daily occurrence, with little or no reprieve or prospect of cessation for any length of time.

Urban environments and the urban worker, the proletarian, go hand-in-glove, and never more so, it would appear, than at a time when East European labour, released from communist fetters though by no means entirely independent of a kind of worker-proud socialistic mindset, is readily available and more than willing to do their building work – that is, indigenous and other workers or clients who may or may not have jobs that need doing – for them, and to do it, moreover, to a degree and in a manner that leaves no stone unturned, tearing the old building work down and more or less starting from scratch as though to wipe the slate clean of past associations and make the results more acceptable to the new breed of employers, entrepreneurs, or whatever. No wonder these jobs take so long to complete! But more extraordinary still is the fact that, even with possibly reduced labour costs in certain quarters, the overall cost of refurbishing or building from scratch must be astronomical. Just where is all this money coming from? And who is it that has so much of it in the first place? Not philosophical writers or intellectual artists like me, at any rate!

++++++

You can take from the rich and give to the poor, but the rich do not become poor from giving nor the poor rich from taking, since the former are rich from Doing, whereas the latter remain poor from Being.

Doing to give is a female prerogative, taking to Be a male one.

Generally speaking, it is females who are rich (in will and spirit) and males poor (in will and spirit because partial to ego and soul, which, however, are constantly warred upon by will and spirit).

A rich man is really a bent male, a male who is effectively female in disposition, with an outgoing personality that tends to instigate where others, more circumspect or self-respecting, would hold back.

++++++

Men would think more were women less inclined to oppose it from a standpoint rooted in objectivity and a greater tendency, in consequence, to talk and, not altogether surprisingly, to dominate such conversation as ensues.

The 'thinker' is most likely to be a solitary celibate – in short, a philosopher, but one who, in all probability, will still have to struggle more generally and, as it were, impersonally against female opposition, since such opposition, wherever it may come from, does not accept, as a fait accompli, the right of males to a philosophical independence of them, but rather serves to crush religious independence from a fundamentally scientific point-of-view.

To me, the Crucifixion is an icon, a token, if you will, of crushed religious independence, unlike the smiling Buddha, who would seem to be joyfully, even blissfully, independent of everything and everyone else in the most perfect form, from a human or quasi-superhuman standpoint, of inner sanity, which, to its detractors, will simply appear 'insane', a term congenial to those deferential to if not actively rooted in the outer form of sanity which has tended to condition the concept 'sanity' for generations past within the netherworldly-dominated world and world-view.

++++++

Classical music into Rock Classical (not to be confused with classic rock) – a kind of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde transformation, wouldn't you say? Whereby musical subjectivity is undermined by objective tendencies characteristic of though by no means exclusive to rock 'n' roll. For we should not overlook the possibility, where the more blatantly objective types of Jazz are concerned, of a kind of Count or even Earl Hyde, should we?

++++++

Once more, as for several days past, civilization is under siege, tested to the limit by the storming inclemencies of a Nature hell-bent on avenging herself on us for having spurned her in favour of urban detachment and urbane independence. Somehow civilization will survive, but at some cost. For the damage will be immense and thousands will be seriously inconvenienced, if not shattered or killed. Sometimes I think that what goes on without, with 'Mother Nature', is simply a grosser and more barbarously impersonal manifestation of what goes on within, with 'sister nature', on a more or less daily basis. And then, every so often, men get drawn into the conflict, and we end-up with a war, paradoxically advancing civilization on the most barbarous terms.

******

It was Christmas Day and we were all seated in the drawing room around the large Christmas tree against the substantial base of which all the presents that the house-parents had bought and wrapped for the children in their care were piled up in such fashion that, with one glance, you knew they had gone to no little trouble in so presenting them that they appeared as though deriving from the tree itself, like so many nuts or seed pods or other offerings from its copiously-bedecked bauble-laden branches.

As it happened, it was early afternoon and we had just eaten Christmas dinner in the dining room across the hallway and generally put ourselves into a receptive and grateful frame-of-mind, glad to have got this far without undue mishap or serious regret. I must have been about twelve or thirteen at the time, but there were others in this all-boys Children's Home who were younger still, maybe eight or nine, with a markedly more excited and expectant air, as though on tenterhooks for 'Father Christmas', either the male house-parent or, on this occasion, his stooped father who, even without a fiery red gown and pair of high boots that must have been dragged out of hibernation in some remoter part of the house, somehow looked the part, what with his white beard and twinkling eyes and other well-known trademarks of Santa Clause.

Today it fell to him to dispense the presents to each of the boys as he read out the name dangling on a card from whichever of the well-wrapped presents he happened to have chosen from the huge pile under the tree, presents which, experience had taught me, the house-parents had done their best to match to the particular tastes or character or age of each one of us, whether younger, like Derek, a curly-haired kid who sat cross-legged on the floor no more than three yards from the Christmas tree, or older, like myself and one or two of the others who had managed to grab one of the armchairs that stood in a semi-circle to either side of it.

Both the senior house-parents, who happened to be husband and wife, were seated in their customary places, the one opposite the other, and if memory serves me there were also a couple of junior house-parents in the room, neither of whom, being spinsters, were married, even though they were of marriageable age and one of them, in particular, was passably attractive, despite having a slight limp. Old 'Father Christmas', as we shall call the male house-parent's father, bearing in mind that he was only standing-in for a symbolic figure, was well into the distribution of presents by now, and as each boy's name was read out, whether punctuated by a roguish chuckle or supplemented by an involuntary and possibly knowing grunt, an eager hand would reach for the proffered parcel which, on being shyly or even boldly accepted, was then stashed away at the individual's feet or, if he already happened to be on the floor, just in front of him, so that instead of being distracted with the business of tearing them open every boy – and sometimes a house-parent – was as soon ready to receive the next parcel in like vein as he had been to take the previous one, keeping 'Santa' on his toes, as they say, and certainly on his high-booted feet for the duration of a process which, given the large numbers of presents involved with the multiple distribution to sixteen or so persons, including the house-parents, could prove quite demanding and invariably pretty time-consuming, time being something which 'Father Christmas', in no way analogous to 'Father Time', seemed to be in short supply of as he busied himself with this present and that, holding the label up close to his dim-sighted eyes in order to accurately decipher the name on it and then either shuffling over to the person concerned or, if this proved unnecessary, simply handing it out to him before returning, with stooped back, to the foot of the tree to retrieve the next one his hands happened to alight upon until, by and by and with a sort of inexorable logic, the pile of presents stretching right around the banked-up base of it began to diminish and the pile either in front of or at the feet of each of the eager recipients, whether adult or juvenile, to grow correspondingly larger until, with several such piles on the floor alone, never mind tables and chairs, there was scarcely any room for him to manoeuvre in, let alone for us to stash our presents.

In the meantime, Derek had become well-nigh hypnotized by the pile of brightly-wrapped presents that had gradually built up in front of him, and it was as much as he could do to contain his excitement and, what's worse, lust for receiving. Fortunately for 'Santa' there were now fewer parcels for him to distribute, and he must have been looking forward to a well-earned rest, to be able to take his boots of and put his feet up somewhere else, especially since he was, appropriately enough, no spring chicken but, as the father of an adult himself, quite elderly and not a little infirm.

Soon, however, the last of the carefully-wrapped gifts would be handed out to somebody in the assembled throng, since it only remained for a couple of us to enable him to complete his task by thanking him, with good-natured irony, for his seasonal generosity, the product, as I well knew, of several days if not weeks preparation on the part of each of the house-parents who, now that proceedings were drawing to a close, would have the satisfaction of witnessing the joy and pleasure on the faces of those boys in particular who, being comparatively new intakes to the Home, had not experienced such an event before and would not, in all likelihood, have encountered anything similar outside the framework of care into which circumstances had perforce thrust them.

Up till this point that joy and pleasure would have gone some way towards recompensing the house-parents for their efforts, though they were further compensated by the presents which they had bought and wrapped for one another and which some of the older boys, including myself, had managed, in spite of straitened circumstances, to buy for them as well, making for some degree of reciprocal emotion. With what sounded like a sigh of relief, old 'Father Christmas' had just distributed the last present, as it happened a quite large one, to the younger and prettier of the two junior house-parents, who graciously accepted it with a giggle of surprise.

Now it was at this juncture that young Derek, who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor not more than a couple of yards from me, kind of snapped out of his trance or spell and cried out, apparently in all innocence of any Dickensian connotation: “Is that all?” The question, which evidently referred to the presents, was not addressed to anyone in particular, not even the retreating 'Father Christmas', and it took a moment or two for its disappointed tone to penetrate the general hubbub of excited expectancy at the prospect of our now being able to actually open the presents and discover what the wrappings were intended to conceal. But when it did there was a sudden hushed silence, as though in shocked disbelief, and it wasn't long before the female senior house-parent, unable to regard this question as a joke or to dismiss it as of small account, shouted back: “Derek!” in a tone at once deeply censorious and bitterly disillusioned.

The senior male house-parent had also come around, as if by a prompt, to her point of view and, filled with a sudden rage, rushed out of his armchair to grab the unfortunate boy by the ear and wrench him to his feet, preparatory to dragging him from the room and, even before they had reached the door to the hall, administering not one but several smacks in quick succession to what I presumed – for I could not see from where I sat and felt, in any case, somewhat reluctant to look – was the back of his legs, since one could hear the sharp sound of a large thick-fingered hand on naked flesh followed by a renting of the air by high-pitched shrieks of pain which burst from Derek's mouth at the ferocity of his chastisement, a ferocity which may well have impacted on his buttocks as well. It was all too much for the senior male house-parent to be confronted by such ingratitude, such naked greed and lust for more from a boy who had had no shortage of presents in front of him and appeared not to realize how much effort they, the house-parents in general, had gone to, psychologically as well as physically and financially, to provide a sufficiency of presents for some twelve boys of different ages and four if not five (if we are to include 'Father Christmas' himself) adults.

Meanwhile, Derek's shrieking continued to poison the atmosphere, even from the hall and the dreaded front office that had once been a dentist's surgery but in the context of this Children's Home had usually functioned as a kind of punishment cell into which miscreants were vigorously hauled to be summarily interrogated and/or chastised, and now we sat in our various places as though frozen with embarrassment, unable to fully comprehend the enormity of the situation and why, on this day of all days, the celebration throughout Christendom of Christ's birth, the hope and happiness of a few minutes' ago had now been eclipsed by fear and woe, even by a sense of panic and helplessness that, as a boy in care, anything could happen at any time of the day or night to shatter the illusion of family security, of social well-being, and cause one to feel conscious of just how vulnerable one was to be in such a position, to be a child who, with the smallest of psychological or social slips, a failure to meet fire-drill criteria in the middle of the night or to get out of bed when roused at 6.45 to do housework before breakfast, could be subjected to the grossest uncaring brutality and made to feel guilty for just being alive, the product of some miscarriage of familial justice that had caused a social problem the solution to which necessarily required exceptional measures.

Derek was now, alas, the catalyst of our communal woe as we struggled to return to the customary Christmas Day atmosphere and, with tentative moves towards opening our presents, carry on as if nothing unusual or unexpected or indecent had occurred, even though any real semblance of the Christmas spirit had now dispersed and we were once again confronted by the existentialist horror of our earthly lot in the care of persons who, despite the best of intentions, were not our real parents and had no reason to love us or to regard us with anything but a cold professional contempt. This, sad to say, was one Christmas that none of us – especially not Derek – would never forget!

LONDON 2013

Christmas in the Doghouse