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11

1 – Asmodeus’ Die

(110 sang the refrains of J.)

He moaned of loss:

“You have a lucky shot and are eager to be the bravest”

The Demon retorted: “You are too eager for release by hand, but mark your gait well my gentle friend, for at any moment I may obfuscate your gaping screams”

But the young man would not be cowed:

“Song and stele that ne’er clutched your dentition’s grip; all that was available in the city has lapsed, the dramatic ingress of your god of stones dies upon a distant star!”

“But I am patient” quoth the demon “My pitch covers wildly the future. No matter how well you autopsy, the earth dies still”

“I will delay you and your lords” said the lad “No matter, how you cross the street or lie, or spring from any unseemly angle.”

A gaggle of journalists had gathered to watch the pair.

One named Kczello cried out in confused concentration:

“Which star have you left out?!” he cried in anguish “See! The day remains and Eris, collapses, staggering…” His raving voice faltered “from afar have I cast her and ran off in haste!”

“Again” said the demon calmly “no matter how old you are, no matter how you fly, the atmosphere of thieves is your gain and loss.”

The lad though, gathered himself and spoke up once more:

“You may cross the street all you wish, but the problematic image never ceases, only the fly remains!”

“And how old exactly are you?” said Kczello

The demon and lad knew not which of them he addressed and so replied at once:

“110 as the refrain of J goes”

2 – Corporate Saw

Broken by coal, risen through your sport,

This thorny icon perishes annually,

One day allows a fellow his right,

Another doubts this subject,

Humanity sighs…

She is insulted by no one —except that deafening controller

The game is one in which one must fail to feel the touch,

At this she excels for her waking attention does not shrink

Instead she grasps the meaning of dreams:

“Now the oak may definitely decide for the rock!”

Is a commonly spoken event,

A professional coroner, she regularly quartered journalists and years alike,

For both lie with equal ubiquity.

3 – A Problem

A new bull god that hoped to be,

More than powerful than great Apis of Egypt,

Yet he lacked the rights to create stardust,

And so leaned forward with his pitch,

beseeching other deities to grant this boon,

Those hoary great ones listened and replied:

“In this case there is no right for you to be and hence you have no right to stay.

Were you a lion, things might have been different, but you are not and though it is like a game, it is one you have lost.”

(Graham  26 July 2022)

12    From the diary of a Guardian Angel

a used dome is / a sparrow cote / prodable man

A French miner dies and

I don’t care that this is the land

where a house is not level and

fuels refuse to affect its heart

So, I take the stone

that the Guru found more powerful than fire

The broken statues are

still and no doctor comes to change the game

I counsel my friend

                   God knows we will cover the game

                   every year… but slowly

I add quickly and with control

                   You’re a married man

                   I don’t know who Appina is to know

                   anything about Art

                   I know only that God loves her

                   If you cross the street to

                   brook this water goddess please

                   do it secretly

                   This is important and if later you lose

                   I can dig your grave

Ron gets what I mean and because of this

he runs

runs to the year’s end

and will again

There again

a lot of the time

I know you can’t go

for even half the days

of the year

Outside is a place of holy stones

So I decide to read hers next

                   You are a beautiful woman

                   another goddess I hope

                   Now

                   about your

                   out-of-control cows …

preamble to a raw corpse

The boy asks

                   Does the bed move the moon?

He gets up and says

                   Go, it’s red!

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 6 August  2022)

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10    Stones

1 – The Cannibal God

Quartered for years the earth inside dies

Discordant again all humanity sighs

But broken by doubt this subject’s attention

Is given ascent by artistic intention

As shrinking light arrives contentments rise

Though your sport lacks the rights Thebes denies

The idiot whistles, the atmosphere collapses

Staggering, stumbling his raving voice lapses

The dramatic ingress of pink noise covers

A lucky shot the bravest mark discovers

Eager for release by a gentle friends’ hand

Condemned and confused he cannot stand

So the deafening oak event is one to make

The controller of ubiquitous stardust wake

2 – The Bulimic Demon

The problematic image dies every year,

but it is necessary and in this case

is the game you have no right to stay in.

No matter how old you are

they cross the street and

they spit angry words.

On the day of your autopsy,

no one is allowed to lie, criticize

or insult his fellow journalists

Now oak sawdust and dust control

are definitely widely available,

rocks decide the future of the city.

(Geoffrey Mark Matthews 17 June  2022)

11

1 – Asmodeus’ Die

(110 sang the refrains of J.)

He moaned of loss:

“You have a lucky shot and are eager to be the bravest”

The Demon retorted: “You are too eager for release by hand, but mark your gait well my gentle friend, for at any moment I may obfuscate your gaping screams”

But the young man would not be cowed:

“Song and stele that ne’er clutched your dentition’s grip; all that was available in the city has lapsed, the dramatic ingress of your god of stones dies upon a distant star!”

“But I am patient” quoth the demon “My pitch covers wildly the future. No matter how well you autopsy, the earth dies still”

“I will delay you and your lords” said the lad “No matter, how you cross the street or lie, or spring from any unseemly angle.”

A gaggle of journalists had gathered to watch the pair.

One named Kczello cried out in confused concentration:

“Which star have you left out?!” he cried in anguish “See! The day remains and Eris, collapses, staggering…” His raving voice faltered “from afar have I cast her and ran off in haste!”

“Again” said the demon calmly “no matter how old you are, no matter how you fly, the atmosphere of thieves is your gain and loss.”

The lad though, gathered himself and spoke up once more:

“You may cross the street all you wish, but the problematic image never ceases, only the fly remains!”

“And how old exactly are you?” said Kczello

The demon and lad knew not which of them he addressed and so replied at once:

“110 as the refrain of J goes”

2 – Corporate Saw

Broken by coal, risen through your sport,

This thorny icon perishes annually,

One day allows a fellow his right,

Another doubts this subject,

Humanity sighs…

She is insulted by no one —except that deafening controller

The game is one in which one must fail to feel the touch,

At this she excels for her waking attention does not shrink

Instead she grasps the meaning of dreams:

“Now the oak may definitely decide for the rock!”

Is a commonly spoken event,

A professional coroner, she regularly quartered journalists and years alike,

For both lie with equal ubiquity.

3 – A Problem

A new bull god that hoped to be,

More than powerful than great Apis of Egypt,

Yet he lacked the rights to create stardust,

And so leaned forward with his pitch,

beseeching other deities to grant this boon,

Those hoary great ones listened and replied:

“In this case there is no right for you to be and hence you have no right to stay.

Were you a lion, things might have been different, but you are not and though it is like a game, it is one you have lost.”

(Graham  26 July 2022)

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Adam Curtis is well known for espousing the notion that modern society (especially the West) has no notion of where it is heading, or even of how it could be heading somewhere or even what it would mean for it to head anywhere. Western societies cannot imagine anything other than more of the same — more capitalism, maybe slightly stranger capitalism, with AI augmentations, but still weirdly the same. As Nietzsche understood, this doesn’t actually satisfy the the spiritual(a new word is probably needed but it will have to do) nature of the human. Christianity — brutal as it was — offered structure and purpose. Without that scaffolding, we are adrift. Individually, we seem to bear the existence of staring into the void and keep going. Collectively, it tears us apart.

Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism: the pervasive sense that “there is no alternative.” Capitalism presents itself not as one system among others, but as the only imaginable frame. We may dislike aspects of it, even hate it, but we can’t picture a coherent beyond. The future, if we dare to imagine it at all, looks like a more intensified version of the present — just stranger, faster, weirder. Jean Baudrillard gestured in a similar direction: culture untethered from any ground, spinning in loops of simulation, losing orientation.

The problem, though, is even worse. Pneuminous theory, or chaos magick (they are similar projects), doesn’t rescue us from this malaise. It extends the nihilism. It shows that not only rational structures, but even magickal, symbolic, and esoteric frameworks are contingent accretions — pneuma infecting vectors, conscious doubles arising by intention. The abyss doesn’t shrink when one embraces occultism; it expands. There is no final ground, only shifting layers of contingency.

Which leaves us with a somewhat grim recognition: powerful people who manufacture myths and control structures are, in a sense, right to do so. Without myth, societies collapse into conspiracy, nostalgia, or despair. The real question is: can there be an ethical control myth — one that binds without domination, one that acknowledges the possibility of paranormaityl without relegating it to fringe counterculture or totalising it into religion?

Maybe this is where a new myth must be conceived — the Myth of Ur. Ur not as an ancient city, but as a beginning, a foundation that knows itself as contingent. It would say: we are something like multidimensional pneuminous beings, layered, accreted, entangled in vectors of meaning and possibility. We cannot (at least in regular consciousness, know if paranormality actually obtains, but we cannot deny the possibility either. We live inside the disjunction, thus rather than being opposing agents we should dwellers on the threshold so to speak.

Furthermore, the possibility of the actuality is what we should bet on. Even in recognising the agnostic disjunction, we should act as if the fluid-paranormality were real, as it is this side that makes reality truly interconnected hand invokes our responsibility. Like Pascal’s wager: live as if God exists, because it is the safer bet. Our wager is ontological: live as if we are pneuminous beings. Not because it is proven, but because this orientation does the least violence to the complexity of our condition.

These kinds of rules could be examples that might be part of such an ethical ontology:

  • Live as if the world is layered and multidimensional in the most literal sense.
  • Direct power toward preserving openness, not closing it down.
  • Treat technology and capital as the contingent manifestations of the second centre they are: new accretions, not ultimate horizons or grounds.
  • Play seriously with meaning: enact, invent, but never deny fragility.
  • Care for others as beings whose pneuma you inevitably entangle.

This horizon entails the understanding of the accretions as process in a more active sense. This is the wager, the new Myth of Ur: a transparent myth that everyone knows is made (contingently accreted), but which we agree to live inside because it is better than the void. Not salvation, not certainty, but a collective as if — a horizon we can orient toward, even knowing it may be provisional. It doesn’t solve things in the way we might think of a solution, because thinking in that way cannot give an answer. However the acceptance of the radical nature of reality coupled with a deeper understanding of its impermanence may be part of our ability to overcome the place we have become stuck.

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It is striking that the most obvious instances of process are disasters. We rarely perceive flux in its gentle sustainment. The air moves, the cells divide, the world remakes itself continually — but these motions go unseen, unnoticed. What we see are the catastrophes: the building falling, the body failing, the sudden rupture. Process manifests as accident, as collapse. When flux comes to presence, it often comes as violence.

Little wonder, then, that we are suspicious of it. The closer a thing comes to looking solid, unmoving, eternal, the more we like it. We exalt monuments, we conserve institutions, we worship permanence. We train our eyes to see stability, to rest in it, to forget the ceaseless perishing underneath. Process is lived as background — and when it comes to the foreground, it terrifies.

Death is the concentrated emblem of this repression. To die is to undergo the pure proof of flux: the body, the identity, the story, all dissolving. Our culture displaces death, hides it, or aestheticizes it, precisely because it is unbearable as the clearest testimony to becoming. Death and process mirror one another in this way: each is denied, and in their denial the fantasy of permanence is secured.

Perhaps this explains why process philosophy is a late discovery in the Western canon. From Plato to Descartes, metaphysics served the desire for stability: being over becoming, substance over relation, eternal forms over time’s decay. Only with the cracks of modernity — Darwin’s evolution, industrial flux, entropy, relativity — did a new thinking become possible. The repression faltered, the monuments looked less eternal, and thinkers like Bergson and Whitehead could say what had always been true: everything is process.

But here lies the difficulty. Even now, process is hard to think. Our intellectual habits echo our psychic needs. We cling to the stable idea, the fixed identity, the substance that endures. To think flux as primary is to unlearn this orientation. It requires dwelling in what is usually unbearable: that every moment perishes as it arises, that every thing is fragile, that death is the very horizon of life.

This does not strip process philosophy of value. On the contrary, it intensifies it. Process thought is not just another ontology. It is a kind of counter-repressive labour. It asks us to affirm what we are disposed to flee. It forces us to look at disaster, decay, death — and to find there not only terror but also creativity. Becoming destroys, but it also makes. Flux is catastrophe, but it is also genesis.

In pneuminous terms, we could say that the accretions manifest as reinforcements of stable reality, the ideal forms present exactly this. Process needs incorporating into pneuminous theory. The fantasy of stability is not to be abolished; it too is part of the flux. To think process is to see that even our denials belong to it. The repression of process itself is a mode of becoming.

The lateness of process philosophy, its difficulty, and its power, all come from the same root: it confronts us with what we most want not to see. To affirm process is to affirm the impermanence of everything we value. Yet in that very affirmation something new becomes possible — a thinking that no longer clings to monuments, but lives in the trembling of their foundations.