by on

The previous one and its mutation in the Mutations poetry series:

4      Innate savants’ great valley

The calm smile of an umbrella stand is transient

and elephants returning home to dark energy

bury their words in a rich port of failure

Scent discovered effortlessly disappears quickly

ignored at first this content reduces concern

for capital delays in hard pronunciation

Apprentice beetles bowing to want dive into

the prison master’s sick pink features and

as a group rub their free hands in oil

Death has become unclear in limited speculations

all fixed by several old torture treatments that

freeze crematorium victims’ ashes forever

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 16 April 2022)

5      Taunt

There are miles of serene rotating shadows,

with crumbling mansions for beleaguered lords,

whose mausoleums house dry sprites of bone

When once I sought these receding dwellings,

setting aside the voices of others who warned:

‘Perils beset whomsoever attempts these withered lithic lands’

The servants of their carapaced masters issued forth

Splitting light into a myriad rays,

That swarmed as vile rubies against my approach,

Regret is a bitter pill of long-.

lost ways

A fixated end, slow and methodical was mine,

The breeze blew and I wept for a stony age.

by on

This series of posts is a sequence of poems written between myself and the poet Geoff Matthews. The series begins with a poem he wrote independently of this project, I then wrote the following poem by mutating his original. Each mutation follows no particular rule but rather is simply as we chose to assimilate and reform the material.

Each Poem will be posted with its sequitur so that possible connections can be made, i.e. so this post contains 0 and 1 (the first actual mutation), but the next post will contain 1 and 2 and so on.

Mutations 0 & 1

0      Consolation

don’t hold the knife like that

             the fat man will snatch it

                 and snap your wrist

and then the sun was seen

                an orange tomato on

                   a scabby horizon

Zatoichi hears the knot in

              his assailant’s shoulder

                    renders it string

peacock scream and rattle

               manipulating the park

                    vision to dream

1 Harvest

The brittle straw man sat bewildered,

          by the cream that dripped,

          as he looked wistfully on,

and in the elevator,

          that hoary contraption of descent,

          which floated sonorously down,

a toad’s call echoes from the pool below,

          as the fake antagonist hungered still,

          dreaming of bees,

all this I heard without once moving,

          keeping my eye firmly,

          on the receding highway,

(a hare moves at speed,

          an alacrity of asphalt,

          suitable only for evasive swerves).

by on

Almost everything that is written here is a combination of two things: experience of synchronicity and an intuition/thought sequence I once had over 30 years ago concerning establishing a sort of metaphysical value to regional art/creative endeavours in which it could be easily seen that they did not need to be seen as compared to ‘real’ works. This latter chain of thought I have never been able to establish properly again since the original insight, though I do remember feeling something similar to it in reading a book on Laruelle.

I think the hegemonic materialism that has gained greater and greater traction since the renaissance is actually more powerful than I realised. I see in my philosophy, everything is an apology in a way. The agnostic disjunction is a fence sitting move that pays homage to this materialism, it acknowledges it might be right, even though really I feel it isn’t right at all. But that’s the point of that philosophy isn’t it? You cannot trust how you feel about things. Surely there is actually wisdom in this, furthermore if I were just to wax unfettered metaphysics I would be part of a new age ish culture that I long ago rejected. So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on the agnostic disjunction.

What is maybe more illuminating is my feeling of a certain liberation after reading Federico Faggin’s Irreducible. Not because I agree with it all, but because a figure, like Faggin who was deeply embedded in the materialist computer science world has come to think that this is almost certainly wrong and puts forward a powerful picture to suggest that our experience of consciousness is a quantum process, which puts it forever out of reach of AI, no matter how machinically capable it becomes (because the quantum nature of consciousness means it is non-algorithmic). He reminds us how little we actually understand at this level of physics, how reasonable it is that quantum processes will be going on in biological organisms and how perfectly reasonable it is that we are some kind of part of larger conscious field that exists in something like a Hilbert space.

Ideas, at least like the last point have existed in mysticism for a long time. Indeed the new age movement has been using quantum physics for a long time to make various claims. Often though, these just sounded like putting the word quantum in front of something to make it sound a bit funky. I think the actual processing of Faggin’s point gives a strange liberation that I have not properly unpacked yet, but it reminds me of the insight into meaning that I had 30 years ago.

Back to hegemonic materialism, I don’t like it that for all my work on pneuma, for all the weird things that have happened, for all the books on this area I have read, it has taken an albeit changed, but still authority figure (white male scientist let’s be clear) for my consciousness to feel it is allowed to feel this possibility less tied to the apologetic agnostic disjunction. That shows me how deep it goes (maybe not for other people, but for me).

But I feel this won’t be just about me, this will be something true for a lot of people. People who think they might think things are a bit strange but actually have the materialist thing holding sway. Interestingly it’s almost an inverted Nietzsche, who thought the shadow of Christianity was long (it is), but here we have a lurking materialism, that removes meaning, and for Nietzsche supposedly frees us to make ourselves. What it really did was kill us inside, it wasn’t liberation.

But here is maybe a true way forwards (maybe). The new age movement and similar notions get’s things wrong. We can’t go backwards, we can’t start believing in all that old shit, because it’s just wrong. All those, gods, spirits, astrological ideas, tarot cards, they aren’t ancient real science. But equally they all can kind of work and they work because reality is some massive feedback kind of mess made of pure information (pneuma as I call it). But that doesn’t make them the true system/tools.

Back to the quantum consciousness bit, our consciousness, our pneuminous field , isn’t epiphenomenal, it isn’t inert, it’s an active system that is interacting with the fields around us in who knows what kinds of ways. My recent theorising suggests different directional temporalities may be responsible for beings being able to manifest information orthogonally into temporal flows (synchronicity), but this is only theorising.

The whole task is nearly impossible. It involves recognising the forces involved in this reality as actually what we call weird (but really that’s just normal) and at the same time not listening to nearly any voice that speaks from the deep pneuminous layers. Why? Because these layers lie. They will produce more magic books, they will pronounce more messiahs, more strange rituals, more blood sacrifices.

We don’t have to lose reason, that’s not the point. We have to apply reason (and other regions of consciousness) to how this works but equally recognise we’re involved in something so mysterious and strange and we should be embarrassed that we every tried to label it with this brutal materialism. It’s listening, it’s all listening. Just don’t listen to everything it says back.

by on

The relation of pneuma to time can only be played with speculatively. This however does not mean that reasonable speculations cannot be made, and even if they are speculative they may have merit as ideas to be experienced if nothing else.

Difficult as it is to unpick, it is necessarily true that time is an accretion of pneuma. That is to say, since it is a concept like any other, this must be the case. There is a vector, or maybe several vectors that have the time concept applied to them. This sense of movement and change accompanied by regular patterns of lengthening and shortening days, altering seasons, decay, birth. These are the overlapping vector regions that we call time. For us, it goes in one direction, or at least for the consciously aware parts of ourselves. As Bergson recognised, it has different natures, it has an experiential qualitative dimension in which it can drag or quicken and it has a seemingly objective nature in which we can demonstrate its measurable nature by means of time pieces.

As time has gone by the latter version has become more and more accepted as the only time, and Bergon’s time becomes more like an interesting thought, an epiphenomenal time that we can recognise but know isn’t ‘real’. The pneuminous accretive model suggests a feedback system in which the accretion employed feeds back onto th vector to make it ‘more like the accretion’ in some way. This direction in which this is the case could now reasonably be identified as sideways (see the previous post on sideways perspectives).

So time is an accretion, but part of its vector structure is (as stated) the sense of change. There is a conceptual (accretive) parade in front of us as we move around, an endless series of conceptually understood beings litter the place. Internally (in the mind, another accretion) it is, if not similar, also accretively littered. The internal dialogue, for most people, constantly pours over various ideas, scenarios, worries.

An extension of this observation is that since time is an accretion, a background accretion for this parade of accretions then there is, in a sense, a way to stop it. To not be too crazy about it, I would have to concede that, barring possible extreme spiritual practices that I could only hypothesise about and have no particular evidence to suppose exist, such a notion would not alter reality in the sense of the absolute cessation of time. However I do find cogent the possiblity that whilst the vector field is indubitably changing, the engagement we call time could in some sense be severed.

This would in its most basic sense be meditation, but a meditation that did not focus on any rhythmical pattern, breath or otherwise that tied it to the forward facing time accretion. Such an absolute stillness, with an absence of intruding accretions, coupled with a re-perception of external reality that removed its comprehending concepts (successfully bracketed them off) would essentially form an absence of temporal perception (the removal of the time accretion). This removal would in turn remove the feedback, at least in the region of the individuals accretive connections. There would be no time. Of course the nagging sense that the body would continue to be forward facing persists. It’s a primary manifestation, however there is a secondary manifestation that presents an uncertainty as to how much ontological effect one might achieve by this action. If there is any ontological interaction then it seems to follow that lesser versions of such a practce might also precipitate lesser versions of reduced temporality.

So whilst internal dialogue stopping practices might fail at being as extreme as the one described above, any silence of the mind, removes accretive flow, disconnects us from it, and in a sense places us slightly outside of time (in a way that we should not feel is necessarily simply epiphenomenal). This fits quite well with pretty much all occult/esoteric systems, as they always encourage the cessation of the internal dialogue to achieve anything. Contemplating again the notion of sideways, we might hypothesise that, the removal of internal dialogue that directs the flow of the being forwards, allows it to face sideways. Sideways being the direction in which plant and other beings, often considered not conscious in our sense, direct their awareness. This direction may actually also be a kind of time (in the sense that there might be moving change within it), just time as we do not understand it, orthogonal or diagonal to ours. Certainly sideways has access to our time; this is speculatively, the direction from which synchroncity emits. Thought in this way, whilst Bergson’s duree, is still within forwards facing time, it could be considered to accept a certain wobble, and tendency that takes the being closer to the sideways perspective. From this perspective it would certainly achieve ontological parity with chronological time.