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?

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)

15 AI ate a Nomos Later

Its                            first                         iron                          fist

Even                        sad                          deer                         endear

Ecclesiastical           famine                     ran                           godless

Weapons                 rain                          hard                        down

Found                     nonchalantly           at                             home

No                           encampments         last                          time

Fecund                    banished                 dreams                    longing

Word                       temples                   awaken                   secrets

Aeon                       maps                       leaden                     upground

North                       rising                       inexorable               crying

Nearer                     above                      eerie                         winter

Sterilised                 strange                    demon                     cinema

(Graham  13 October 2022)

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

14    Basic information – a clone laments

In the region of stair twilight no matter is found at dusk

even shade breathes deeper where the centre owns a husk

We clear a fragmented emptiness as sombre brethren gather to sing

we assay one last landscape which a family of strangers is ravaging

The poor sweep the world dancing in the warm

they move moving movements laterally in the dark

until the stony realms become ethereal and calm

For our shade endlessly crafts wonder in the bottom of shafts

If anxiety knew

why sense flew

away from the new

Another fear brings a body down

(a direction to direct weeping until staring back

becomes a complete case of quiet encroachment)

simply rushing into rocky darkness

as if fear could guide a plunging soul

toward the tremulous notion of earth

Poor Lucifer watching lucid upper grounds

fails to notice this spirit once so alive

and meets this unimportant doctor now seeking

in black chasms all he needs to perceive

Beyond the dead space that eldritch man might fear

sense does not return except through the silence here

and encompassing the desperation of flesh

Lincoln greets the aides who fade until peace is pressed

Back come fine ideas as their acceleration ceases

to reign on new surfaces as lonely shapes and creases

and moving in the direction of tenebrous distraction

sheer quiescence becomes our own intention

No wonder we wonder without wandering

how experienced relatives can be so overpowering

carried everywhere and acting decrepit yet flying and fleeing

from the lithic shrieking of monuments and being

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 24 September 2022)

15 IA Ate a Nomos Later

Its                            first                         iron                          fist

Even                        sad                          deer                         endear

Ecclesiastical           famine               ran                     godless

Weapons                 rain                          hard                        down

Found                     nonchalantly           at                             home

No                           encampments         last                          time

Fecund                    banished                 dreams                    longing

Word                       temples                   awaken                   secrets

Aeon                       maps                       leaden                     upground

North                       rising                       inexorable               crying

Nearer                     above                      eerie                         winter

Sterilised                 strange                    demon                     cinema

(Graham  13 October 2022)

13    Cairn

Poor poor Lucien, they found his body at the bottom of the shaft,

With sombre desperation they brought him to the surface,

Where he could only fail to breathe the clear air of the upper world,

The doctor himself wept as they carried him back,

Lucien watched them with bemusement as they carried his husk away,

And did not notice the quiet calm with which he assayed the weeping relatives and aides,

As the twilight gathered into dusk, the rocky landscape became statuesque monuments,

Who themselves came alive as strange eldritch shapes,

This new family danced and sang with him on the fading staircase to darkness,

When this last stair came to a new realm beyond his stony brethren,

Here a sense returned to him that he knew whilst of flesh,

An overpowering fear of the sheer emptiness of tenebrous encroachment,

“How can the dead feel fear?” His fragmented spirit wondered

As it flew shrieking back down the chasm from whence it came,

Greeting only a deeper shade of black that rushed to meet it,

The once-was Lucien flew until the dark was so all encompassing,

Until the silence so complete, until the acceleration so unimportant,

That a quiescent peace reigned.

The ravaging fear ceased and our shade perceived that owing to its own fine matter,

It had plunged through the ground and into a space that was the earth itself.

With no sense of direction, the soul acted only on the intention of movement,

Endlessly seeking to discern one region from another, yet with no idea of direction to guide them,

Experienced an ethereal tremulous anxiety.

The notion that, with no direction, they might be moving towards the centre or even simply laterally.

Did they move? Were they moving?

14    Basic information – a clone laments

In the region of stair twilight no matter is found at dusk

even shade breathes deeper where the centre owns a husk

We clear a fragmented emptiness as sombre brethren gather to sing

we assay one last landscape which a family of strangers is ravaging

The poor sweep the world dancing in the warm

they move moving movements laterally in the dark

until the stony realms become ethereal and calm

For our shade endlessly crafts wonder in the bottom of shafts

If anxiety knew

why sense flew

away from the new

Another fear brings a body down

(a direction to direct weeping until staring back

becomes a complete case of quiet encroachment)

simply rushing into rocky darkness

as if fear could guide a plunging soul

toward the tremulous notion of earth

Poor Lucifer watching lucid upper grounds

fails to notice this spirit once so alive

and meets this unimportant doctor now seeking

in black chasms all he needs to perceive

Beyond the dead space that eldritch man might fear

sense does not return except through the silence here

and encompassing the desperation of flesh

Lincoln greets the aides who fade until peace is pressed

Back come fine ideas as their acceleration ceases

to reign on new surfaces as lonely shapes and creases

and moving in the direction of tenebrous distraction

sheer quiescence becomes our own intention

No wonder we wonder without wandering

how experienced relatives can be so overpowering

carried everywhere and acting decrepit yet flying and fleeing

from the lithic shrieking of monuments and being