ORANGE NOTEBOOK 1

How much of a part did the Renaissance contribute to the Reformation? For was not the Renaissance something of a Catholic decadence? If Catholicism underwent its own decadence with the Renaissance, as the evidence for papal debauchery and such like would suggest, then that, no doubt, had a considerable influence upon the Reformation, at least in Germany, and upon the Protestant rejection, through Luther (who had been to Rome and seen corruption at first hand), of all things Catholic.

I suppose, when it comes down to it, the offspring of parents take the male surname in order that the father be further bound, beyond marriage, to the mother. That didn't work, however, in my father's case and, ever since, I have been burdened with the surname of a man I didn't know and who, to judge by his absence from the family, didn't want to know me, either.

I guess human swine will always eat pig's flesh, after their swinish natures. You can always tell a swine by the fact that he eats pig's flesh, or pork.

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The sun melted into the ocean, like butter descending from above.

Hatred of most things British, love of most things German and/or Germanic – the emotional poles of my existence (subject to occasional modification).

I'd rather be shown up in public than show off in public.

Those who love hate, hate to love.

The British can be reserved, but they can also be unspeakably vulgar. Some Britons are more reserved than unspeakably vulgar, others more unspeakably vulgar than reserved. Even the reserved can, on occasion, be unspeakably vulgar, just as the unspeakably vulgar can, on occasion, be reserved. The British are both reserved and unspeakably vulgar, and perhaps, in some cases, reserved because unspeakably vulgar.

When you've acted in films like Run Lola Run, Anatomy, The Princess and the Warrior, and Atomised, as Franka Potente has, you'd probably feel you had a right to consider yourself the finest actress of your day, having played leading roles in four of the very best films of your time. I think my order of preference of the above films would be:-

1. The Princess and the Warrior (Der Krieger und die Kaiserin);

2. Atomised (Elementarteilchen);

3. Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt);

4. Anatomy (Anatomie).

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Whether a man knows his mind as well as a woman knows her body … must remain a moot point.

British urban terraced housing, up close and up tight! A convergence to some kind of worldly omega point that nonetheless stops short of anything arguably social democratic, like rectilinear tower blocs on sprawling estates.

With me, content precedes form, so that not just what but how I think conditions the way I write, the 'form' of my writings.

The damned androgynous liberal, paving the way, through equalitarianism, for the liberated bitch, unhampered by conservatism, to strut her liberated stuff with socialistic importunity. What a disgrace!

They are mistaken who think that by removing discrimination in one context it doesn't have a knock-on effect and undermine one's ability to discriminate in others. These days 'discrimination' has become a dirty word, especially with the 'politically correct', but it wasn't always so. In fact, the ability to discriminate meant the difference between 'good' and 'bad', 'right' and 'wrong', 'high' and 'low', and was regarded, correctly, as a prime attribute of the cultured, i.e. 'the discriminating' or 'the discerning' or those, generally, who could distinguish between 'right' and 'wrong', etc. In a non-discriminatory, egalitarian system 'anything goes' and the capacity to discriminate is not only undermined, but regarded as undesirable because 'elitist'. Somehow I can't help but think that all this want of discrimination stems from Protestant opposition to Catholicism and the gradual secular levelling which has since ensued, in consequence. In spite of that, however, people do still discriminate, because it is necessary to both human dignity and survivability.

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These days, literature is beset by too many conventional slaves who deprive it of original artists. Commercialization has so bedevilled literature that no self-respecting artist could possibly allow his work to be published commercially, much less expect it to be published by the book-oriented publishing establishment! Which is really just as well, since the prospects of his work surviving unscathed at the hands of editors and printers and others on the production side of publishing could only be slight, if the appalling evidence of most books is anything to judge by!

Politicians in Britain are usually too out of touch with reality (in their various provincial 'ivory towers') to think about the consequences of their actions, never mind to experience them at first-hand. Anybody who regularly votes in British General Elections to elect members of parliament would have to be British. Certainly, as an Irishman, I could not do such a thing, since, quite apart from what politicians have done and are still doing to undermine themselves, it would strike me as an axial betrayal, a betrayal of what I believe in.

I have employed a species of cultural fascism to hit back, time and again, at communistic workmen whose exploitation of somatic licence goes too far for my liking. In fact, they've only got what they deserved, that is, some form of retributive punishment. Which, on second thoughts, is probably less than they deserved.

The British form of global success, the imperial acquisitions of Empire, and so on, are fundamentally ant-like in character, and therefore only admirable from the standpoint of those who admire ants.

The weather goes from bad to worse, and there is nothing you can do about it, nobody you can specifically hold to account and blame for it. So helpless!

Much of the time we don't actually listen to music; we hear it and are tormented by it.

How could they bomb Monte Cassino?

Keeping up appearances is to put down essences. Keeping up (sticking to) essences is to put down appearances.

Drumming is the essence of rock music, one might almost say the godly element par excellence. Most kinds of music either don't have an essence or, like jazz, tend to have only a pseudo-essence in the guise of an approach to drumming (or percussion) that is more sequential than repetitive and therefore germane not to time (metaphysics) but to pseudo-time (pseudo-metaphysics), which, of course, exists under the spatial space, or space per se, of metachemistry, as under jazz vocals and/or brass, with particular reference, I should imagine, to use of a trumpet.

Born in Raiding, just south of Furchtenstein in Austria, Franz Liszt would have to be considered, these days, as just another great Austrian composer. Although Burgenland, the province in which Liszt was born, formerly belonged to Hungary within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, since 1921 it has been a part of the province of Lower Austria, in which Liszt's geburtshaus is to be found.

Austria is probably the one place in central Europe where Turks wouldn't want to live, at least in any great numbers.

Brunau-am-Inn's most infamous son – any guesses?

He was a tormented genius – tormented by other people!

Uneducated proletarians are simply people who are incapable – exceptions to the rule notwithstanding – of being educated. Only a fool or a madman would throw pearls before swine, not least those who, lacking the requisite capacity, don't want to be educated in the first place.

The incompetence of the British, inextricably bound, as it tends to be, to a degree of leg-pulling and even foul play, sometimes even Paddy-bashing as a foil for their want of competence, invariably makes for discontent. They are too much will and too little soul, but also, and conversely, too little spirit and too much ego.

Living in Britain, one is afflicted by the barbarity of so-called multiculturalism which, like the legendary tower of Babel, simply confounds and confuses one, since contrary to that which, as culture, leads to contentment.

Living in London, which is one of the most cosmopolitan cities on earth, is like living in a microcosm of the world. Any sense of national pride, whether English or British, would be difficult if not impossible in such a city, since it has little or nothing to do with the British nation, whatever that means, but appears rather to glory in the cosmopolitan transcendence of Englishness or Britishness to a point where the historically indigenous of one sort or another become swamped by foreign influences and scarcely recognizable as such.

When countries, or the people of a given country, are growing, they tend towards nationhood, or the achievement of a uniform culture within civilized bounds. When, however, countries are falling apart or disintegrating, they tend towards internationalism, or the break-up of nationhood under the twin pressures of barbarity and philistinism. As Yeats wrote: 'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world' … or, more specifically, upon what was once a nation. But a nation, one could argue, that undermined itself through foreign conquests and the absorption or integration of foreign elements, becoming, in the process, less male and more female in character.

It is ironic that while Ireland was discovering nationhood (through the Gaelic Revival, the Easter Rising, and so on), Britain was in the process of losing it (through the disruptive internationalism of Empire and the disintegrative consequences of global imperialism), with devolution as a concomitant of a developing British malaise.

Nationhood is the only thing worth holding on to; it is what defines a country. Without it, you are nothing. Internationalism leads not forwards but backwards … to alphaville, as to a polytheistic plethora of competing cultures whose incompatibility makes for barbarous strife and a want of certainty or conviction, a confusion of mind that allows the body to sensuously triumph.

Latterly, the wretched workmen next-door have added sawing to their ungodly repertoire of hammering, drilling, and scraping. Whatever next?

A more fitting name for the British would, in my opinion, be the Brutish. For, accustomed to the strife of imperialism and the acquisition by force of empire, the British masses are nothing if not brutal, with few if any exceptions. Getting on with it without reasoning or even knowing why seems to be their fatality, one deriving, in no small part, from the English Reformation, which left them bereft of religious sensibility or otherworldly idealism, without even the benefit of a Lutheran protest.

London is little more than a glorified ants' nest of commerce-driven industry and industrial chaos.

Too many people, too little space. What could be worse?

Prisoners of war and concentration camps usually go 'hand-in-glove'. You cannot really have the one without the other, not when vast numbers of POWs are involved.

A modern militarily successful nation will have an awful lot of concentration camps.

To turn Europe into a single, if federated, supernation would seem to be the coming task of historical progress in Europe as a whole. An aspiration that can only be fulfilled at the expense of the individual nations which traditionally exist within it but are currently disintegrating in the 'melting pot' of international anarchy.

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Frederick May – one of the great 'might have beens' of Irish classical music.

Only 'arseholes' drink beer straight from cans, whether in terms of pale ale and lager on the one hand (colloquially identifiable with 'piss' and 'pseudo-shit'), which I have tended to identify with chemistry and pseudo-physics, or stout and brown ale on the other hand (colloquially identifiable with 'shit' and 'pseudo-piss'), which I have tended to identify with physics and pseudo-chemistry, with a strong suggestion of the applicability of such tastes to either a paedophile or a homosexual disposition. Either way, a degeneration from bottles, as from either female- or male-dominated kinds of heterosexuality.

I will always be a thoughtful thorn-in-the-side of the thoughtless majority, who make a virtue of their incapacity or unwillingness to think, and especially to think honestly or credibly or boldly.

For some, the 'golden mean' in between Hell and Heaven is Purgatory; for others it is Earth. In neither case does one rise above the corporeal equivalent of beer.

She don't half waste money on flashy clothes; she completely wastes it!

When, in the past, I saw people – almost invariably males – drinking from cans in the London Underground, I didn't think anything of it, apart from feeling a slight disgust or contempt. Now I would sense a correlation of sorts between canned drinks, including though not limited to alcohol, and the Underground, or Metro.

He had reservations about visiting 'the Reservation', but once there he overcame his customary reserve and reserved a table for two, reserving the right to eat in the company of his alter ego.

Another wet, windy day with a heavy-leaden sullen sky that causes one to feel truly contemptuous of the weather and all the more prone to world rejection, as one struggles with oneself in the face of such persistent, almost predictable inclemencies and simply turns within, like a tortoise withdrawing back into its shell on what may appear to be a damage-limitation exercise. Sad.

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I eat because I have to, not because I particularly want to.

It is not my consciousness that exhibits a considerable thirst when I drink when thirsty, nor is it my consciousness that reveals how much of an appetite I have when I eat when hungry, but my body which speaks for itself in the degree to which it thirstily or hungrily devours whatever fluids or solids happen to be available, whilst I, as consciousness, though able to consciously moderate my intake, observe and rationally conclude that I must have been thirsty or hungry. By itself, consciousness has little to do with this, since its principal function is to enable one to locate the sources of liquid or solid nourishment that one's body desires. Fundamentally consciousness is little more than a tool, or means, for enabling one, as body, to survive, since ego, the seat of consciousness, is subject to the Will, which expresses the body's needs and desires. I am, in a sense, driven by the Will to drink and eat, but the actual source of what is drunk or eaten has to be located, or chosen, by consciousness, as ego acting in the service of the Will. As for spirit acting in the service of the Soul, that is another matter, if one that is secondary to the above. For spirit cannot serve the Soul unless ego has served the Will and the body can accordingly relax its grip, as it were, upon consciousness, freeing spirit for what is superconscious and therefore transcendental, that is, transcendent of the fundamental needs of the body.

Religion is a luxury, not a necessity, like science. Some would describe it as icing on the cake of life or, more credibly, as candles on the icing (spirit) that decorates the actual cake (will), with its fruit or other fillings (ego). The candles would, of course, correspond to the Soul – at least when lit. For only when the cake has candles is the Soul acknowledged.

One could argue that the most likely equivalence, in the Galaxy, to what is monotheistically regarded, in conventional religion (alpha-stemming), as 'the Creator', 'the Almighty', 'the All-Powerful', and other variations on the theme of what I tend to equate with Devil the Mother and/or Virgin hyped as God … would be a so-called Black Hole, especially one that existed in proximity to a Quasar that was busily consuming vast quantities of gaseous matter or nearby degenerative stars and, in consequence, was emitting astronomical amounts and degrees of radioactive material the brightness of which far outshone the brightest of the circling stars, thereby signalling a status quite at variance with the generality of stellar bodies, not least in respect of its central location in the Galaxy as a whole. Ironically, science would appear to have confirmed, by default, the existence of this Creator equivalence which conventional religion would equate with God, even if the vast numbers of galaxies in the so-called Universe (cosmos) would suggest the existence of a comparable number of Black Holes/Quasars more in keeping with a polytheistic than a monotheistic parallel. Actually, I have long maintained, in my writings, that monotheism accords with the 'central star' (black hole and/or quasar) of this galaxy as opposed to those of galaxies in general, the individual Black Holes/Quasars of which would amount, polytheistically, to a comparable number of 'Creators', 'Almighties', etc., in the Cosmos as a whole. Apparently, if science is to be believed, the Black Hole at the centre of the Milky Way, our own galaxy, is not also a Quasar (though how a Black Hole can be expected to exist without a Quasar, I don't honestly know), since not burning ferociously with the consumption of other stars and/or gaseous clusters, which, if true, is probably just as well for us! Assuming it was formerly host to a Quasar, it would now appear to be the equivalent, as a Black Hole, of a 'dead God', a 'god that died', to use a Nietzschean expression, and therefore no longer capable of creating anything, least of all new stars. Which, if true (and we have a right, for want of conclusive data, to uphold a degree of scepticism), would make Christianity seem all the more understandable, traditionally, in terms of a shift away from the old 'Creator' concept of God towards a humanistic concept, in Christ, that offered one the prospect of Eternal Life following his own death on the Cross, the worship of which exemplifies dying to 'the world', as to 'the flesh', in order to be reborn into the otherworldly life of the spirit or, better, the Soul, the full realization of which can only happen in Eternity, especially with the prospect, following Messianic intervention, of 'Kingdom Come'. All of which rather suggests the likelihood, with the return of some Christ-like Saviour in the guise of a 'Second Coming', of a kind of Superchristianity suited to man's logical successor, the Superman, and thus to what I have identified, in various of my later writings, with Social Theocracy and/or Social Transcendentalism, with a return, in consequence, to 'the Centre', albeit not, to be sure, to the centre of the Galaxy!

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When, the other day, I saw two degenerate-looking characters milling around outside Finsbury Park underground station with cans of beer in their hands, I smiled to myself and thought: 'That figures, doesn't it?'

I am the most reserved of people, who rarely speaks to anyone, least of all women, except when I have to, or am spoken to.

I have never reserved a table in a restaurant, since I have no interest in eating alone in what would most likely be a middle-class milieu. In fact, I have always avoided worldly contexts like restaurants, theatres, and concert halls, with their middle-class connotations. But that doesn't mean to say I've endorsed working-class contexts like pubs, clubs, football grounds, circuses, etc. instead. On the contrary, I have generally kept away from all public buildings of a communal or social nature, partly, I suspect, for financial reasons and partly from a distaste, as someone of Irish descent, of being seen in public in Britain or, at any rate, in London, the vast scale and compressed urban nature of which has always intimidated and, frankly, disgusted me ... to the point where I prefer to live as a recluse. As though, in fact, I wasn't really there, like a ghost.