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21    The music of ‘Streets and Dreams’ part 2

C’n I bum a smoke?

Do be do wa

Hey man, whattsa time? Can I get a bell t’ chime?

Do be do woo

And bam shalam jest like that Valetta is pissed off in the extreme.

“Hey Valetta, calm the fuck down willya!”

Says Viktor Frankenstein, in between slurps of an oversized Negroni

Valetta (bam-shalam) is having none of this

“Fuck you Viktor! Fuck your stupid monster too, in his stupid ass!”

“Fer Chrissakes Valetta, calm down, have a Negroni”

Viktor signals to the monster to prepare the cocktail

But the monster has an eye on Valetta wonderin’ if she really wants it

As everyone knows Valetta has half an eye on the monster too,

Been goin’ on for months

Do be do wap

Is that the time already? Can I get a dime for Freddy?

Lorca and Goethe went into a bard,

Boy was he sore,

Do be do woop

And crazy-malazy there’s one cute little chicken in that coop,

“‘Saw her first!” says Johann

“Ya never did” says Federico, walzin’ over with the big Hispanic eyes,

But Goethe is too tricksy and trips him up with an urplanze-liana,

Federico goes tumblin’ down, into the chicken coop,

Henrietta makes a dash for the door,

But once again the German is too smart,

An organic alchemical device catches the bird at the out-tray

And ladies and gentlemen, it’s good-night Vienna.

Later at dinner (bash-ptempto!),

Reich and the G-Meister are eatin’ chicken schnitzel style,

“You got any left Willy?” peering at the plate from an oblique angle

“Nein” sniggers Wilhelm

“Ich kleide mich rechts!” and they both burst out laughing

Between guffaws, Goethe adds wid a wink

“I wuz only gonna ask…” he pauses for effect

“If it was orl-gone!?”

Sho do wop wop, fa dah!

(Graham   11 May 2023)

22    Jung’s fiery leaves of Pyrite and Salix

Who would comb a mile to your wooden abode

     lock out a tiger to anchor the urban

     meet this old hewn Malaccan ipso facto

     of an ethnic textile atelier… in love with delirium ?

Does ice frost over pearls in the ebbing night

     does the organ seethe for universal inputs

     and in organum sad psycho salutes

     that hurt the newest nom de plume ?

This leery Nereid peers into late cloth air

     now outing outlandish thoughts on the earth

     knowing a far satellite no-one knows reverses

     snowy orphan-powered television… your highness

Call after urgent call I’ll cuff this lack of talent

     to other months… in Midas agony fuck off

     to Salem before the mightiest southern law which

     deposed and poked Athena and shit lava on the earth

José’s strife is woven of slow credits in Psyche’s knapsack

     an alien’s napalm… the charm skirts sea and earth:

     a certain peekaboo De Chirico is deaf to words so nimble

     they would order spirits to merge horsey poo and snaky snow

Oozing such cyphered tack as the lucky machinic groan

     of a naïve town dog… dissimulating the idolum

     Hertz now takes to a nice iron tub with a worthy weapon

     and turtles roughshod over the eight-tower suburb

Ninja may attempt ire in a shabby Derby kitchen but

     listening listlessly to neat ear media they lack the knack

     to read surging millennial signs and morph into

     idle wrecks… necks tinged with the awful urge to doubt

Apropos hogwash England’s glee is a nasty beauty and hard

     a tangy tale in the Iliad and anathema… a girl kills the itch

     obeys key tech of net and path… makes a full fiord scan, O aye

     ousts old laws reaps the ague and knuckle wipes a soapy nose

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 28 May 2023)

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20    The music of ‘Streets and Dreams’

Tarzan climbs a liana

            from the earth’s tough core

            through Easby’s Abbey tree

            to Valetta’s strait street leak.

Shit man!         And the bay goes, ah!

Ipso facto        too far,

too far to deny

            some horrible foreign tunnel leads

            to a vacant Eel Pie Island,

too far to buy

            a true standard to plant

            some place on the Jazz Ait.

Then    let ten listen   

            to the anchovy sound of an annual

HALLELUJAH           ϋμνος to a royal court planner.

So, no eel pie   to chew on then

nothing           but a boom-time rapper

            in a banana bandana

easing his deadly vowel chains

            into your fitful ocean and

urging nocturnal earthen       seizures.

On a roll          even an eerie eleven

            does not haunt the earth

for hell             gathers sooner

and colours a rather rough Rubicon

bronze             from north to south

rust red           from east to west

And now rife with fossils

            set forth and stressed

            aloof and dumbed

they rhyme

            laid out to Mallaig where

            di Lasso disowns the air

as if Lorca had swallowed     our defence lines

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 28 March 2023)

21    The music of ‘Streets and Dreams’ part 2

C’n I bum a smoke?

Do be do wa

Hey man, whattsa time? Can I get a bell t’ chime?

Do be do woo

And bam shalam jest like that Valetta is pissed off in the extreme.

“Hey Valetta, calm the fuck down willya!”

Says Viktor Frankenstein, in between slurps of an oversized Negroni

Valetta (bam-shalam) is having none of this

“Fuck you Viktor! Fuck your stupid monster too, in his stupid ass!”

“Fer Chrissakes Valetta, calm down, have a Negroni”

Viktor signals to the monster to prepare the cocktail

But the monster has an eye on Valetta wonderin’ if she really wants it

As everyone knows Valetta has half an eye on the monster too,

Been goin’ on for months

Do be do wap

Is that the time already? Can I get a dime for Freddy?

Lorca and Goethe went into a bard,

Boy was he sore,

Do be do woop

And crazy-malazy there’s one cute little chicken in that coop,

“‘Saw her first!” says Johann

“Ya never did” says Federico, walzin’ over with the big Hispanic eyes,

But Goethe is too tricksy and trips him up with an urplanze-liana,

Federico goes tumblin’ down, into the chicken coop,

Henrietta makes a dash for the door,

But once again the German is too smart,

An organic alchemical device catches the bird at the out-tray

And ladies and gentlemen, it’s good-night Vienna.

Later at dinner (bash-ptempto!),

Reich and the G-Meister are eatin’ chicken schnitzel style,

“You got any left Willy?” peering at the plate from an oblique angle

“Nein” sniggers Wilhelm

“Ich kleide mich rechts!” and they both burst out laughing

Between guffaws, Goethe adds wid a wink

“I wuz only gonna ask…” he pauses for effect

“If it was orl-gone!?”

Sho do wop wop, fa dah!

(Graham   11 May 2023)

by on

The nature of dreams of seems almost taken for granted as an area to be decoded rather than respected as actual experience. Dreams might indeed be of the nature of a disconnected blurred sense in which we scarcely seem an experiencing subject at all, yet even in this instance, we actually still are. Unless lucid (in which though, it is still experiential) the dream is the not experienced as dream and hence, at the time, not discounted as ‘unreal’; its events, whatever they are, actually happen to us (to a greater or lesser resemblance that waking life). To discount this experience in favour of the notion that it was ‘just a dream’ is valid insofar as certain criteria of wakefulness do not apply to it, however to then reduce it to something that needs decoding, rather than being experientially relevant to the our consciousness is clearly to place an hermneutic filter on it that is ontologically reductive.

That is, if the dream happened then it necessarily happened to us. That it may or may not be the processing of various unconscious forces is neither here to there. If it terrified us then it terrified us, if it made us weep for a lost time then it also did this. This effect occured to our psyche and as such affects us in a sense like any other event that traumatises or exhalts us. This is not to deny the possibility of learning something deeper from the content of ones dreams, though the comparison with waking life is also reasonable. Our patterns in daily life also need decoding and recognising; in life we move through a quasi random series of events and encounters that may be decoded in various ways; this is also so in the dream sphere.

The emphasis on the event effect on the psyche can be considered stranger yet when we consider how many dreams we do not even know we experienced. I have various repetitive places and structures in my dream world that I sometimes forget even exist, only to sometimes, on the border of sleep, get flashes of, that remind me that there are these visited fixed places that I appear in and interact with. It is clear to me from these half recollections that there is a good deal of activity I am engaged in that I have nearly no awareness of.

This makes the picture even stranger, for initially I pointed out the necessity of the effect that dreams as events must have (since they are experienced phenomena), yet now we are drawn to the conclusion (unless we wish to deny that these events affect us) that for many of us (who do not have perfect access to our dreams) there is exists a world of experience that necessarily affects us and yet we have little or no awareness of.

This does not deny that dreams may be processing/manifesting unconscious forces, but it also means that the experience of this processing/manifesting is a) experiental and b) often unconsciously so. This raises the possibility that if b is true (hard to deny), the unconscious experience of the dream may itself then be a force that determines our reactions and responses to phenomena in the waking world. Which means in turn that dreams especially in their unconscious form, represent an strange feedback mechanism determining part of our worldly attitude and response based on the manifest forces that we have unwittingly experienced, even though those forces might be ontologically be nothing more than our own unconscious processing. This ontological reduction then, even if true, matters not in the face of this effective power.

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Looking again at this title, I can see this could be the name of a childrens’ book, this wasn’t however really my intention. I recently watched Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out of My Head, where he presents Kerry Thornley as an eccentric who fell into a deluded dream world. It was interesting to see this materialist take (possibly for the BBC) as I had only every considered if from the ontological weirdness positition. For Curtis, the Discordians were clever pranksters who tried to expose the absurdity of conspiracy culture, only to be undone by their own illusions. The show’s neat storytelling — the trickster trapped in his own trick — but it’s also a flattening. Curtis’ materialism leaves him blind to (possible —see agnostic disjunction) the deeper mechanism at work. Operation Mindfuck was intended as parody: a satirical flood of rumors about the Illuminati, designed to expose how easily conspiracy theories could be manufactured and spread. Thornley, Wilson and others deliberately seeded nonsense to make people question their own credulity. Thornley’s life made him peculiarly vulnerable to his own invention. He had known Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marines; he was already caught in a web of coincidence and suspicion. When the Illuminati myth circulated, it began to attach itself to these very facts of his biography. What began as parody quickly fed back as paranoia.

Pneuminous theory clarifies what Curtis cannot see. In this framework, a vector is a blank phenomenon — an occurrence, a thing, a thought, a pattern, in the world on any level. In this case Thornley’s military service, his link to Oswald, odd coincidences in time and place: these are vectors.

Accretions of pneuma are the meanings or interpretations that latch onto these vectors. Operation Mindfuck seeded the Illuminati myth as such an accretion —a spell. Once attached, the myth grew beyond its originators. Other people repeated it, embellished it, and passed it along until Thornley himself encountered it not as author, but as implicated subject.

The process looks something like this:

  1. Vector creation — phenomena occur/exist.
  2. Pneuminous Accretive fusion via subject — in this casethe Illuminati myth attaches to them.
  3. Feedback — the pneuminous accretions return to Thornley (from sideways), binding to his life story. This is the a-temporal interaction known as synchronicity.
  4. Entanglement — the myth becomes indistinguishable from his lived reality, which facilitates the literal re-perception of the phenomenon, due it’s appearing to actually be continually happening.

Curtis calls this something like “a dream world.” But from a pneuminous perspective, it is a dream world in a sense (dreams are made of pneuma) but is also a feedback loop of accretions colonising vectors until the operator (in this case at least) himself is caught inside.

This loop also explains why Thornley experienced his life as filled with uncanny coincidences. Synchronicity is the secondary effect of accretions fusing with vectors. Once the Illuminati lens was in play, every odd overlap looked meaningful. His proximity to Oswald, rumors of CIA infiltration, strange recurrences — all were drawn into the orbit of the self creating myth.

Possibly what happened with Thornley was, because of the very powers he was playing with (the invocation of the Illuminati: literally a shadowy cabal of enormous power, even if only as egregore) attached to vectors of already synchronistic phenomena which possibly even were some kind of occult product, human made or otherwise. This double layering may have produced a kind of pneuminous vortex. The more accretions gathered, the stronger the pull. Thornley had effectively created a spiral in which coincidences (vectors) were endlessly absorbed by the Illuminati myth (accretion), generating more synchronicity that confirmed itself. The parody had become ontology (with the number 23 somehow in the mix as a kind of master signifier of it all_.

Curtis isn’t wrong to say Thornley got lost. But he mislabels the process. Thornley didn’t simply “dream himself into unreality.” He underestimated the very mechanism that pneuminous theory describes: once accretions start looping back into lived experience, they gain a grip that no irony can dissolve.

What Curtis dismisses as a dream world is better understood as a vortex of pneuminous accretions attached to vectors, the appearance of which was then fed directly back into the system — a genuine ontological condition, not just delusion. Thornley is not only a cautionary tale but a case study in how pneuma functions in the form of memes, myths and meanings can grow beyond their creators and return with inescapable (pneuminous) force.

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19    Anna the Witch

“Anna are you worn and hard by your graft?

Anna will you wail and chill like the draft?

Anna will you tell us a tale of your craft?”

“Though spikey lees, behind betray,

I will not tell thee how I play,

I will not tell thee of the cave,

Nor of the silent darkness’ wave.”

“Anna play your tricks on me,

Anna, show your power to see,

Anna, Anna hear my plea!”

“Nay child I will not now bewitch thee,

Neither will I conjure here the sidhe,

To haunt and never let thee free.”

“Anna, with a thong of leather,

Anna, with a lucky heather,

Anna can you bend the weather?”

“Gale and hale, tornadoes of fire,

Flood and muds, deserts and mire,

Rain wash down the fools and all,

Silence follows final call.”

(Graham   27 February 2023)

20    The music of ‘Streets and Dreams’

Tarzan climbs a liana

            from the earth’s tough core

            through Easby’s Abbey tree

            to Valetta’s strait street leak.

Shit man!         And the bay goes, ah!

Ipso facto        too far,

too far to deny

            some horrible foreign tunnel leads

            to a vacant Eel Pie Island,

too far to buy

            a true standard to plant

            some place on the Jazz Ait.

Then    let ten listen   

            to the anchovy sound of an annual

HALLELUJAH           ϋμνος to a royal court planner.

So, no eel pie   to chew on then

nothing           but a boom-time rapper

            in a banana bandana

easing his deadly vowel chains

            into your fitful ocean and

urging nocturnal earthen       seizures.

On a roll          even an eerie eleven

            does not haunt the earth

for hell             gathers sooner

and colours a rather rough Rubicon

bronze             from north to south

rust red           from east to west

And now rife with fossils

            set forth and stressed

            aloof and dumbed

they rhyme

            laid out to Mallaig where

            di Lasso disowns the air

as if Lorca had swallowed     our defence lines