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1)
A middle aged woman working in a public service and answers the phone.

Hello how may I help you?
Hi…
The voice is soft, almost mumbly, distant.
Hello, can I help you?
Hi, I’m feeling quite stressed…
Oh ok.
She does not know what to say, this is not a line for stressed people, but she is kind.
I’m feeling very stressed, I’ve been working very hard.
Yes it can be stressful, do you need to talk to someone?
I do need to talk to someone, you sound nice.
Maybe I can find you someone to talk to.
She wants to get off the phone but the kindness and concern keeps her in place.
Can you talk to me? Silence for a moment. Are you there? Bear with me.
I’m still here, are you ok?
I’m quite stressed. I’ve been working all night.
You must be tired.
I’ve just had some crack so I’m quite high. Bear with me. Silence. How old are you?
I don’t think we need to talk about that.
You sound nice, you sound a lot older than me. Can you talk to me?
I am talking to you. What’s your name?
People, my house mates don’t know me. My name is Michael.
Oh?
They think I’m like them, but I’m not and I need, I need a release, I need a release from the stress.
She shudders at this term -thinking of the pauses and requests for patients. However the distance, the mumble, the silence somehow stop her from cutting it off.
I’m supposed to be like Mr Jack the Lad, that’s how they know me. Silence. I need a release. Silence. Bear with me. Silence. That’s how they know me but…
But what?
I like wearing women’s underwear, I’m so stressed, I need to smoke some more crack.
Be careful.
I need to smoke some more crack now, can I call back in a bit?
Yes of course.
She doesn’t know if she means this or what the right thing to do is.

2
The call ends and the woman is shaken. This is not a normal call for the establishment to take. Other employees rally round offering support, yet equally seeking information. What has shaken her up? Is it interesting? Their intrigue weighs greater than their sympathy. The woman herself is not above the ability to enlist a certain perception of absurdity to the whole affair. The comedy has the function of alchemically transforming the trauma. Whose is the trauma though? The crack smoking stress head or the woman? Their concern asks if she has a number. No, the phone registers unknown. Why did she keep talking? Policy is to put the phone down. Felt sorry for him, just needed to be sure he wasn’t, you know, in danger. If calls back, need to be more terse. Refer to appropriate body. Comedy reappears. Absurd image. Story proliferates through colleagues. Women’s underwear become pants, a name is born ‘Crack pants’.

3
The staff in the public institution were all of a buzz at the call. It was an incursion into a pedestrian world by an alien force: Crack Pants. There was excited anticipation as to if or when the next call would come. Of course if too much crack had been smoked then it would be unlikely there would a call any times soon. The lady who had received the call, whilst utilising the humorous levity of the office, did not feel entirely comfortable. Instead she felt worried. Partially for the caller and partially for the bogeyman like aura that the event began to acquire. The caller had liked her. You hear about unhealthy attachments like this. Follow people. Say they want to talk but it goes wrong. Frightening.

4
Then, later in the same day a call to a different staff member.

They heard my voice and hung up.
It was Crack Pants.
Are you sure?
I can’t be sure, but someone rang and then hung up. The call shows as unknown.
It was probably him.
Was there any noise?
Maybe a soft hiss before the click.

The original woman is more worried. She eats her lunch at her own desk away from the service dept. The phone rings. She picks it up. It goes dead. Now she is more worried. It is pointed out that if that was Crack Pants why would he hang up when he actually reached her? This line has a number. The number is checked, it has no phone to it. Even though there is no logic to it the worry persists.

At the main desk the phone rings again and hangs up.
It hung up.
That must be Crack Pants.

People are excited.

5
Calls begin to proliferate. Some longer some shorter. Sometimes there is a soft voice. Sometimes there is the hint of a voice. Sometimes a crackling. Sometimes a cough. The comparison is made with the Victorian cryptid, Spring Heeled Jack whose appearance mutated through sightings. The composite name ‘Spring Heeled Crack Pants’ appears naturally in this environment. Other connections are noticed. Spring Heeled Jack began to appear more demonic as time went on.

What did the caller say? He’s known as a ‘Jack’ the lad. What does he have a [crack] pipe? What does he wear? Women’s ‘pants’, pants pipe, Pan’s pipe and Pan of course is a kind of Christian devil archetype. These strange clues are surely just mass psychotic play.

6
A seated male staff member overheard someone shout ‘thanks Michael!’ and sees disappearing round a corner a figure on crutches. Their detective instincts lurched into life. Michael. The same day. The calls. Crutches -a deviant sign for a possibly ‘cracked’ bone. Making his excuses he went to check the building. Michael seemed to have vanished -probably gone in the lift, could be anywhere now. Drawn on by the mystery he went up a floor on foot. Glancing across the mezzanine he could see a young man in one of the computer labs. No one should be in those he was sure. Finish the building, come back and check on the rule, then evict them.

Looking for Michael continued further up the building. On the inspection his attention was also caught by a heavily muscled male patron who was voraciously eating something out of a pot. A mental note was made to check on this muscled inhabitant on the way back as something did not seem right about him.

The whole building was checked. No crutch burdened Michael was found. Descending to the central office he made the requisite checks about the computer labs and received the information he was already sure of -that no one should be in there. Hastening back to the scene of the crime he was befuddled to discover there was no one in this lab. Furthermore the lab was tightly locked such that only his staff card (or another like it) could possibly have gained entrance. A chill ran down his spine and he hastened to check on the muscular man and his (now surely empty) pot. Circumnavigating the floor to sneak up on him, our current protagonist was horrified to discover that there was no muscular man in the seat where he had once been. Noting the obvious logical possibility that he had simply left, he still felt disturbed by this and the other disappearance (not to mention the disappearing disabled Michael), believing them somehow to be connected to the current spate of calls.

7
In the evening when this service was still open the phone rang. The same man who had dutifully but in vain searched for Spring Heeled Crack Pants or Michael or whoever, was on the desk and answered this call.

Hello, a public service, how may I help you?
Hello… Silent, mumbly and distant.
Hello. Less severe than he fantasized he might be.
Hello, can you talk?
Hello sir, this isn’t really a service for talking. More in control now.
Hello can you talk? I’m quite high, bear with me.
Can I try and find someone to talk to you?
Can’t you talk? I’m quite high.
He wants to ask if he’s high on crack again but it seems deeply inappropriate.
Let me see if we can find someone for you to talk to.
Ok. He seems deflated. The hissing in the background is audible.

The public servant puts CP on hold and begins to try to find an alternative institution that might house his needs. He flounders badly from switchboard location to switchboard location. By the time he returns CP has fled the line.

8
Next day there is a plan in place to put CP through to a helpline if he should call. Staff now are so familiar with the whole phenomena that they joke they might accidently greet the caller as ‘Crack Pants’ or CP. Hi Crack Pants is that you? How are you doing? No one is sure if this won’t actually happen. Senior staff try to tell others to treat the matter with the gravity it deserves. Mid-morning the call comes and CP is directed to a helpline. But no one is convinced it is over. They don’t want it to be over. There are sightings of muscled men with pots on the third floor. Some one else claims there was someone in the computer lab, but again it was found to be locked and empty.

9
Another theory emerged amongst staff. Someone speculated that the phrases ‘bear with me’ might have been incorrectly decoded. The alternative decoding is that there was ‘a bear with him’. Whilst seeming errant nonsense at first, suggestions that the bear might be a crack hallucination or a metaphorical bear rendered it more reasonable. The theory took a stranger turn when it was suggested that CP might be Goldilocks as he liked to wear women’s underthings. This supposedly comedic addition brought about a shudder in the original complainant (who had been listening with interest). She then began to state that she was sure that in the original conversation, CP had used the phrase ‘bear with me’ three times.

10
In the evening the original lady is working. She gazes out the window and sees with some disbelief as a van seems to be reversing fairly swiftly towards the entrance of the building. The van bumps into the door and stops sharply -the driver having realised his miscalculation. Part of the sign for the building is damaged. There is a crack in the letter C of Public. The same woman, who has gone out to inspect the damage, is trying to ignore the significance of the crack and actually listen to the man who is apologizing. She would have managed this had she not then read the sign on the van which read ‘CP builders’. The sudden build up of pressure in her head became unbearable and fearing the man would reveal his name to be ‘Michael’ she ran back inside white-faced, informing her colleague that they needed to deal with the incident as she passed by.

11
Whilst the van incident was duly logged, despite the fervent attempts of the woman to explain the significance of a ‘crack’ in the C of Public, the builders’ name and the symbolic act of trying to enter the building, management were not sympathetic. She was informed that she should either take some time off or put the whole business behind her.

There were no more calls that day and the weirdness seemed to subside. A symbolic cleansing took place. The kitchen and office were deep cleaned. Everyone promised to be more tidy. Everyone felt more settled.

Then someone returned from the kitchen saying there was a solitary dirty spoon on the draining board. This seemed especially appalling since everyone had only just now made such strong covenants that they would keep all utensils and crockery clean from now on.

Several persons began to google if a spoon was required for smoking crack.

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These notes are a product of conversation with Emanuel Magno.

We are painting in simple broad brush strokes here, yet even these can reveal some interesting thoughts and possible structures. To recap briefly we are investigating how certain modes of interacting with the world can be conceived as responses to the the nothingness. We would say the nothingness can be a cognitive discovery (there may be always a trace of this). When this occurs reason philosophy is a void response. Furthermore philosophy here is characterised precisely by its untestable nature and desire to ground its subject matter (knowledge, how to live, the being of Being). This is not a derogatory comment only a descriptive one. Philosophical concepts a priori cannot be defeated by any opposing philosophical concept. Science may shore up the edges of philosophy but sceptical possibilities can persist in the face of overwhelming evidence (and philosophy is duty bound to take them seriously -even though sometimes it would not like to). Hence this shoring up is more a case of rendering unpalatable rather than removing from the philosophical realm. Philosophy tries to ground what it cannot ground using thought, this is its nature.

We also identified sorcery as described in the works of Castaneda as a void response. The accusations of fiction levelled at the works are irrelevant here, all that is relevant is the system and the system describes a way of living that absolutely accepts the void and urges action as if there was no void -yet all the while knows it is there. Sorcery then is a magickal response of action to the void and chaos magick is a very similar (though not identical) one. Chaos magick is more forgiving of regular human nature than sorcery.

Compassion/love was also noted as a void response i.e. in the face of the nothingness the only tenable action is to show compassion to the world and all the beings in it.

It can be argued of course that these are all philosophies insofar they attempt to ground existence by an ungroundable principle. However the difference is that sorcery and compassion responses supply action to be lived and hence they transcend the philosophical realm of thought.

As previously noted there is no claim that philosophy never leads to altered lives, only that the majority of the time the biggest change philosophy makes to someone’s life is that they become interested in philosophy.

We must also consider the source of what looks like a philosophy. This kind of notion turns on the ontological status of revelation. If revelation comes from within a discrete self and represents nothing more than the subconscious mulling over of a problem, the answer to which is fed back to the questioner by some means that appears to not be the questioner, then we might consider it little more unconscious cognition. However if revelation comes from an external power (God/Spirit) then the philosophy in question has not be grounded in cognition of any kind and hence is not philosophy in the above sense of thinking hard about problems.

Of course one cannot actually tell the difference between these two phenomena, the problem is as we say, agnostic disjunctive. In this sense then the phenomenology of external revelation is only what is important and such systems as they arise are not -in our brush strokes- to be considered philosophy in the sense of trying to conceptually/logically disentangle problems.

External revelation though often results in the void-cocoons (or a-voidances). These are systems that shield humans from the void by giving rules for living that are transcendent to humanity. They often supply a teleology. This is a very important part of an a-voidance. Shamanic systems, polytheisms and monotheisms are all largely a-voidances. Shamanic systems do so by direct contact with spirit. Spirit in turn will reveal a creation myth to the shaman. The non-reflectivity of shamanic based communities means that spirit may be naively trusted in its claims. Contact with spirit is perfectly real (though ontologically questionable as the above agnostic disjunction shows) it is just that, as is often said, the spirits cannot be trusted.

Alternative again to any kind of spirituality, cognition or compassion is a certain physical response of fullness to the world -like a hedonism. This may not be born necessarily out of direct cognition of life as a problem, but rather is the result of a certain effusive spirit. When such a person asks themselves whether or not their pleasure in life is reasonable, they simply find that there is no reason why it is not reasonable; life becomes justified on these terms. Equally such a consideration may be never made. The effusiveness of the physicality of life covers the yawning void.

Does this consideration mean we may paint the aesthetic temperament (the poetic, the musical, the artistic) also as void response? Such responses are not cognitive reactions and hence they probably should considered a further part of the picture.

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The void responses as we have identified them so far are: philosophy, sorcery, love-compassion (characterised by Buddhism) and a concept we feel in the region of hedonism. This latter category may have an almost Nietzschean quality to it, a fullness of life that attempts to overcome the void by strength of enjoyment of life.

Probably the notion of lining these up with the Jungian quaternity is something of heuristic fantasy, nevertheless the idea spawns more consideration of the matter generally. Can philosophy be viewed as such a purely mental activity when it overtly recognizes the void as an issue for us? The 20th century saw phenomenological existentialism recognize the void as a feature of existence that we must deal with. This is a fascinating occurrence considering the thesis (that philosophy is a response to the void) that implies a Hegelian moment of self awareness for the discipline. Yet is such a moment sufficient for some these aspects of philosophy to be considered to transcend its morass of endless argumentation -by which we characterised it?

On reflection possibly not. The multiplicity of phenomenologies and existentialisms, despite possibly having some marginal effect on peoples lives, largely functions only to create more philosophical territory which can then be debated. The word marginal is probably a disservice here. There are no doubt people who, having read Nietzsche feel inspired to reach higher, people who have read Sartre who sought to live every moment to the full. Such cases are not to be denied, our claim is only that in the majority of cases even the when one feels strongly impressed by the ideas, the impact on actual behaviour is largely minimal.

For this reason then the original claim of philosophy as an activity which understands the nothing and seeks to build a foundation of reason where a priori none is possible is maintained.

Another consideration is that the category of sorcery must be made to include chaos magick. CM is most certainly a void response. The awareness of the insanity that not all the magickal systems can be true pushed the (potential) efficacy of it onto the subjects will and subtracted the intrinsic powers of the symbols. Castaneda’s sorcery and CM make an interesting pair. At a glance CM would be thought to subsume sorcery, however we are not convinced this is the case. CM tends to facilitate the desires of the ego, whereas for sorcery all such desires are a priori pointless and can only undertaken as ‘acts of power’, that is acts done to their absolute best despite their absolute pointlessness. A CM practitioner could employ this belief set for their own purposes, however this proves difficult since if the CM practitioner considers the matter they will discover that CM itself considers all activities pointless, from this though it merely concludes that we might just as well indulge the ego as not. It would however be probably be difficult to be brought to face the void and act in the face of it (sorcery) and then to return to an ego position as then the holding of the ego itself would be forced to be viewed as an act, which one could choose to uphold or not. Probably acts of petty magick would drop away. This is not to say a CM practitioner might not learn all such things without every touching sorcery. Here we only comment on a certain popular playful aspect of it. The truth is that both sorcery and CM advocate altering the self frequently to destabilize it. The only claim here is that sorcery is not necessarily one more tool in the CM kit, and can be better considered to be a complementary equivalent.

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As described there is a circuit of numbers d-f-j-s-l-w-u-p-h-n-d (also shown below) that can be derived from the triangle-base method.

We might reasonably ask ‘what becomes of all the other numbers?’ The answer is that with the exception of a and m they each feed into the numbers of the circuits.

To follow remember that the alphabet has been adjusted to 22 letters that gives full phonetic range. These letters are also numbers which in base 10 are as follows: a=1 b=2 d=3 e=4 f=5 g=6 h=7 i=8 j=9 k=10 l=11 m=12 n=13 o=14 p=15 r=16 s=17 t=18 u=19 v=20 w=21 z=22.

The base 23 math that reveals the feeding structure is the same triangular height base method used to derive the circuit, the formula for which is 2n-1.

a*b-a=a
b*b-a=d (d is circuit number)
e*b-a=h (h is circuit number)
g*b-a=l (l is a circuit number)
i*b-a=p (p is a circuit number)
k*b-a=u (u is a circuit number)
m*b-a=(a0)+=a
o*b-a=(ae)+=f (f is a circuit number)
r*b-a=(ai)+=j (j is a circuit number)
t*b-a=(am)+=n (n is a circuit number)
v*b-a=(ar)+=s (s is a circuit number)
z*b-a=(av)+=w (w is a circuit number)

Without math the feeder pairings are (feeder first):
b-d
e-h
g–l
i-p
k-u
o-f
r-j
t-n
v-s
z-w

These feeder numbers can be conceived as spikes sticking out from different edges of a three dimensional shape. This will inform the eventual picture.

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Previously we considered sorcery as a kind of response to the void. We also consider that maybe the previously phraseology of void-parasite may be awry. This is the case because the void must always be mediated and hence it is not the void that is the parasite but the void-mediation-system. In the examples of Buddhism of sorcery we may broadly say that compassion and awe respectively mediate the impact of the void upon the human-vector.

We can consider other activities also as responses to the void. Not least of these is philosophy. Philosophers all brush with the void to a greater or lesser extent. This encounter is (for example) the dizzying vertigo one gets when encountering Descartes radical doubt for the first time. This sensation is often (but not always) easily repressed and the activity looks like one more mode of study. But of course what characterises philosophy is that really none of its questions receives an actual answer. It has this character because there are no regular knowledge criteria for the kinds of questions involved. This is because it responds to an encounter with nothing. Ultimate questions have no answers, only speculations: What should we do? Maybe this… What is the nature of all things? Maybe this…

Philosophy proceeds by creating and counter-posing logical speculation against logical speculation. Sometimes more regular-world criteria emerge from other disciplines (science, logic) that facilitate the partial withdrawal of some aspects of it. However otherwise what happens is largely a proliferation of systems reacting to a total unknowable.

In this way philosophy is indeed a void response, only unlike the awe and perceptual manipulation of sorcery and the compassion of Buddhism, it focusses on arguing about what is the case and what we can know. It is what it thinks it is: a love of reason (to interpret wisdom in the way in which philosophy has evolved it).

Such talk cannot help but put us in mind of the work of Laruelle and our own notions of manifestationism and agnostic disjunction. Laruelle puts forward a similar notion of war between differing ontologies, none of which can triumph, as all are reliant in the last instance on the One. The One in this sense can be likened to the void. It is the font of all concepts and yet contains none in itself. What we note also is that the conception we have of philosophy as an encounter with the void presents the void as a transcendental condition for philosophy and stronger than this philosophy is a transcendental consequence of the void. The human as human cannot help but develop these questions because the void is real and hence cannot help becoming locked in their labyrinthine argumentative structures.

Two additional observations come to mind. The first concerns prescriptive religion (largely monotheisms). These are interesting insofar as they do not so much represent a void interface as a-voidance. That is, they deny at least the moral void whilst preserving the ontological void -only God can understand being properly. The response that humans should have to the world though is not up for grabs, rather it is dictated by the deity in a book/system of rules.

The void is a more rational response to existence whereas the dictator God seems less so. However in a sense either of these notions is equally plausible such that they form a kind of meta-manifestationism (meta-non-philosophy). That is, it seems that the void/prescriptive God opposition operates at a different level to which e.g. idealism/realism does.

This fascinating consideration aside there is another way in which the prescriptive God works with the void. If we consider pneuminous accretive theory (which is a void entailing theory) to be correct, then any monotheistic deity can be seen as a vast pneuminous accretion that by its own conceptual power (definition) entails its supreme nature. As such, this supremacy is to its followers (and even to some extent to non-followers) actually supreme and its laws ‘real’.

In this case such a deity does not so much as make a void mediation system as a void-protection system. The monotheistic accretive entity cocoons the void and prevents the humans from coming into contact with it, offering up instead a deity complete with life and death explanation, teleology and morals to determine how existence should be lived. It is of course the removal of such a cocoon that Nietzsche called the death of God.

Secondly, and this in part builds on the possibility of a two tier philosophy dissection. It seems interesting (if maybe not at this stage plausible) to potentially align the void interfaces with the Jungian quaternity.

Such a lining up would tentatively be as follows:

Thinking Philosophy -mediated through reason

Feeling Compassion -mediated through good deeds

Intuition Sorcery -mediated through awe, astonishing events

Sensation Pseudo-Hedonism -mediated through physical work and sensory pleasure.