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I have never been to New York. I have not walked under its autumn leaves or felt its changing light. Still through the eponymous song, I know its melancholy (or the fantasy of its melancholy). This song alone carries it to me. This is the reach of the pneuminous accretion: one need not inhabit the city for the accretion (which is in a sense truly the city) to inhabit you.

The city is an accretion of pneuminous accretions, a pneuminous machine. Its towers, boulevards, infrastructures: these are only the vectors. Accretion occurs as cultural crystallisation. A work fastens affect to a vector, charging it. Autumn in New York is such a fastening. The melancholy it carries is not a representation of the city but a pneuminous deposit within it.

The deposit does not remain inert. Feedback is essential. The melancholy aura of the song infects the vector of New York. NARP Listeners then walk those streets under its spell. Their reinforced experience — their photographs, their stories, their further art (all more accretion) — folds back into the city’s aura. Each iteration thickens the charge. The city becomes (amongst other many other things) melancholy because the song makes it so, and the song is melancholy because the city can be encountered as such.

Thus the city (any city) is never itself in a naive sense. It is always more than itself, a resonant circuit of pneuma: matter, art, perception, all interlooped. “New York in autumn” is no longer reducible to weather or architecture; it is an accreted object, a hyper-condensation of cultural aura.

Through the song, New York exports itself. The melancholy of its autumn arrives already folded into my imagination, a feedback loop extended across distance. In this way, the accretion proves itself: I do not need the city for “Autumn in New York” to move me. The song is the city; the city is the song. And the loop continues, thickening, even for those who have never yet walked those streets.

This is the rational occult theory of the accretion in action: the notion of the pneuminous circuits that constitute the everyday things we take to ‘be’.

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18    Anathemata

n + 1

A pointless question repeated,

a way of peering into the abyss,

it appeals to me, this

crack in the cave wall.

If lost in the event field

of a fallow horizon,

if black sounding strings

see Thuban align again,

a chiasmus of things set apart

will amplify his dreadful heart.

 . . . from Lindum to London

bridges broken down 

Gale, hail, tornadoes of razor wire,

floods, muds, deserts of city and shire,

then moor and fen will wild again

to crack and cook and burn.

See: the omelette… stinks. 

And purple tongued it turns on Tyre

to swallow the whole hollow folktale

up to the head where, it is said,

the universe shrinks to strings of nothing.

0→∞

Now, it’s time to pick up an old guitar,

make it a chicken,

an old house cat,

a gift card,

a bird, a snake,

but no black noise

and without knowing what I’m doing!

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 3 February 2023)


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)

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17    Anno Domini

Ayin, Ayin! Cursed to view through fluted veil:

The lyre plays tastefully,

Ethereal young girls of the fey watch the ox,

Quite by chance the plough struck stone,

And the flint egg broke asunder,

Draco stepped out and spake:

“I am here what wouldst thou have me do?”

Accustomed as he was to the magicians’ circle,

Yet no avaricious sorcerer stood before him,

No gloomy garret greeted him,

No sombre cellar met his eyes,

Lit by candle, book and bell.

Only the soft breeze and gentle sun,

Only the whispering leaves and hedgerow rustle,

Only the timorous, curious murmur of those fair folk,

Who scattered when the egg was cracked.

Realising he was not trapped, Draco looked about in wonder,

And turning to the Ox he addressed it thus:

“I think, my noble beast, thou didst not bring me here,

And that mine release is some chance accident.”

The Ox nodded her consent, yet where the ploughman was,

No one could say.

(Graham   31 January 2023)

18    Anathemata

n + 1

A pointless question repeated,

a way of peering into the abyss,

it appeals to me, this

crack in the cave wall.

If lost in the event field

of a fallow horizon,

if black sounding strings

see Thuban align again,

a chiasmus of things set apart

will amplify his dreadful heart.

 . . . from Lindum to London

bridges broken down 

Gale, hail, tornadoes of razor wire,

floods, muds, deserts of city and shire,

then moor and fen will wild again

to crack and cook and burn.

See: the omelette… stinks. 

And purple tongued it turns on Tyre

to swallow the whole hollow folktale

up to the head where, it is said,

the universe shrinks to strings of nothing.

0→∞

Now, it’s time to pick up an old guitar,

make it a chicken,

an old house cat,

a gift card,

a bird, a snake,

but no black noise

and without knowing what I’m doing!

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 3 February 2023)

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Pneuma is not atmosphere. It is not a vague halo of meaning that drifts around things. Pneuma is substantialised conceptuality interacting with an ineffable field of potential infection (the vector field). Concepts, once engaged, do not remain abstract. They thicken, they harden, they acquire substance. A word is no longer just a sound, a flag no longer just cloth, a party no longer just a collection of individuals. Each becomes a carrier of accumulated meaning, myth, and association. This process is accretion: the layering of significance endlessly increasing the object or idea on the pneuminous plane.

Accretions resist erasure. They do not dissipate when disproved or mocked. Their persistence is their strength. The longer and denser the accretion, the more it begins to act like a being in its own right. The autonomy of these entities is not mystical; it is emergent. In the case of a political party their accumulated content already contains the imperative to survive, expand, and defend. The “autonomy” of a political party arises because its pneuma is built out of victory-songs, loyalty-signs, and growth-seeking slogans. Its conceptual body compels it to endure.

A political party is therefore not merely an organisation but an autonomous pneuminous accretion. It carries within it the compulsion of its accumulated material: to recruit, to spread, to proliferate. This is why parties are spoken of as if they themselves act — “the party wants,” “the party believes,” “the party is shifting.” Such phrases are not only metaphorical; they name the real behaviour of an accreted entity operating through human vectors who have become agents of its ideology (their own self(neurotic)-accretions have become taken over by it).

Politics, then, is not merely the rational debate of programmes or the management of resources. Politics is the clash of these autonomous accretions, each compelled by its pneuma to dominate the vector-field of society. Campaigns, elections, propaganda: all of these are worldly manifestations of the deeper struggle of conceptual beings competing for survival. Rational argument falters here because it addresses policies, while the real battle is waged by the entities themselves, whose presence persists even when policies collapse.

The political pneuma seeks vectors. Individuals, objects, and media become carriers of the infection. A human vector wears the colours, repeats the slogans, performs the rituals. Objects — flags, badges, mugs — are converted into talismans of the party-being. Media amplify the infection at scale, ensuring the slogans and emblems multiply across the cultural field.

The infection is not accidental; it is structural. The accretion is made of content that must grow, and so it bends its hosts toward the task of its propagation. To belong to a party is not just to support an organisation but to house an entity — to let its pneuma entangle with one’s own.

This entanglement reshapes the phenomenology of the host. Once infected, the world begins to arrange itself as if in communication with the party-being. Colours, phrases, and events appear synchronistically charged. What for the neutral observer is a coincidence, for the host is a sign. Reality begins to “speak” in the voice of the accretion.

And this synchronistic phenomenon is not epiphenomenal. It is not merely a psychological overlay projected onto a neutral world. It arises because the accretion interferes in the very nature of the vector. The host’s perceptual and conceptual field is altered; their relation to events is reconfigured. In this altered field, internal state and external event align in patterns generated by the pneuma itself. The synchronicity is the signature of the accretion’s presence, the trace of its operation through the host.

Thus politics doubles its movement. Outwardly, it spreads across society by capturing media and ritual. Inwardly, it transforms the lived reality of its hosts, bending coincidence into confirmation and accident into omen. Politics is therefore not only the clash of parties in parliament or the battle of slogans in the street. It is the synchronistic sorcery of pneuminous beings competing for dominion over both the public sphere and the private phenomenology of their members.

To ask what is politics? in the pneuminous sense is to ask: what becomes of the world when conceptual entities, hardened by accretion, press themselves into reality through human vectors? The answer is that politics is not simply governance, but the struggle of substantialised concepts to live, to grow, and to shape the very texture of reality itself.

The further question is to ask, what has become of this structure in the post-modern madness in which we have all become embroiled?

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16    Time being

A critical concept I have thought about a lot

call it delirium

the edge between duals

the host of hidden ghosts

A short time ago

somewhat less than ten millennia

Kremlin military forces and western intelligence

dazzled your guests with synthetic light

yes… several different types of sophism

Have you been to 1989 brother?

not on sojourn… I mean

as a no-backbone traveller she was

set-up as your doomed dream

ay ay aye!

I went bouldering and ache all over

what if lower birth rates lead to more like me

official sacrificial goats to welcome

with Inca carols… please make sure

you have napkins for these tingly entrées

Biting into pet products we can make-believe

we haven’t eaten our brain’s capacity

when a needy man or woman

wakes us up to multiply or to to to die

Finding out how time is dis-splayed in

under-hand over-hitched un-thinking

intestinal yet still in testina knots when

their use and abuse commonly assumes

a non-literature of rage and desire when

after years of studying long grass long roads

and long ago egos

none survives the panicky

kicks of the corpus callosum

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 23 October 2022)

17    Anno Domini

Ayin, Ayin! Cursed to view through fluted veil:

The lyre plays tastefully,

Ethereal young girls of the fey watch the ox,

Quite by chance the plough struck stone,

And the flint egg broke asunder,

Draco stepped out and spake:

“I am here what wouldst thou have me do?”

Accustomed as he was to the magicians’ circle,

Yet no avaricious sorcerer stood before him,

No gloomy garret greeted him,

No sombre cellar met his eyes,

Lit by candle, book and bell.

Only the soft breeze and gentle sun,

Only the whispering leaves and hedgerow rustle,

Only the timorous, curious murmur of those fair folk,

Who scattered when the egg was cracked.

Realising he was not trapped, Draco looked about in wonder,

And turning to the Ox he addressed it thus:

“I think, my noble beast, thou didst not bring me here,

And that mine release is some chance accident.”

The Ox nodded her consent, yet where the ploughman was,

No one could say.

(Graham   31 January 2023)