Vespula Dreamng

 Here is a recent work. Perhaps it is an illustration for a very Decadent poem... Do you have a mystic sister?

Illustration: Vespula Dreaming, 2007

Vespula Vanishes

 

Vespula Vanishes is a new A C Evans poetry collection published Inclement Publishing (edited by Michelle Foster) in a limited edition of twenty copies. Here is a recent review notice by Steve Sneyd from Data Dump 118, Feb. 2008.

VESPULA VANISHES AND OTHER POEMS Inclement (Poetry for the Modern Soul), 2007 Limited Edition

Vespula Vanishes is dedicated to Tori Amos* and tells of a lady come ‘out of the light’, finding the elegant world she could not articulate a day place that ‘ignored her pain’, and via twilight longings this ‘ghostly shape of desire’ dissolved ‘into the night’. Is this title poem of A C Evans’ latest collection decadent psychological portrait or evocation of other (worldly) woman? Of the 25 poems here many raise similar questions as to the boundary condition/genre definition, intriguingly some are predominantly urban or other urban/social/mental decay evocations, and a few are niche-able as more clearly genre, including Lust For A Vampire (Mircalla) her ‘breasts running with gore’, the Dark Tower-set Slave Mask ‘A face I can trust because/ I cannot see your pain./Do you understand why I/ Lick your wounds tonight?’ etc being DF, while there is at least a trace of Sfnal, e.g. Lost Words with its ‘closed sphere’ holding a world last of ‘resplendent/dying/suns’, Only Shadows’ ‘failing star’ (ACE sharing Clark Ashton Smith’s love of star death imagery) and, in the enigmatic post-Surreal definitions of Reflections In A Mirror, alongside those for ‘closed syllable’ and ‘sympiesometer’ is ‘Jupiter’ as ‘an organic arabesque’ and ‘intellect’ as a ‘new type of space’, though the payoff is back to decadent psychology with ‘sacrament…morbid fear of light’.
* Whose only UK No 1 hymned the darkside figure of the ‘Professional Widow’

The poem Slave Mask from Vespula Vanishes also appeared in the collection Dark Tower 3 The Black Throne (2007) from Atlantean Publishing (edited by D J Tyrer) who published Fractured Muse, a previous collection from A C.

A review of Vespula Vanishes & Other Poems by Eve Kimber of Pulsar Poetry Webzine can be found here 

Gnosticism Unmasked

 

In his book Psychonaut (1987), Chaos Magic theorist Peter J Carroll says the Gnostics were ‘true anarchists of the spirit’. For Carroll, Gnosticism represents a unique theology of revolt, a subversive doctrine of anti-morality and radical cosmological value-reversal. Gnosticism is presented as an integral belief system incorporating techniques of either libertinism or asceticism to implement a quasi-magical, esoteric programme. These ‘spiritual anarchists’ were, he claims, such a threat to the religious status quo (‘the black order of hierarchical Christianity’) that, unsurprisingly, they were violently suppressed by the authorities. Such, in a nutshell, is one of the many common perceptions of the phenomenon of Gnosticism, or the ‘Gnostic Religion’.

Both among the general public and the intelligentsia interest in this subject peaked in the years following the Second World War. In fact there is the possibility that what is commonly called ‘Gnosticism’ is – in the light of the insuperable obstacles encountered by researchers in the field – a product of the mid-twentieth century. It is a cultural artefact of the modern age with hardly any connection to the religious beliefs of late antiquity, a ‘Procrustean paradigm’ (Williams) obscuring the true dynamics behind textual sources.

Prior to 1945 this assemblage of belief systems and sects was approached mainly from the viewpoint of the early Christian heresiologists (Irenaeus, Hippolytus of Rome, Pseudo-Tertullian, Epiphanius of Salamis) whose writings, naturally, condemned ‘Gnostics’ as heretics: believers in irrational, blasphemous teachings – perversions of ‘true’ faith.

As the nineteenth century progressed scholars became more concerned with the simplistic exercise of symbol derivation – tracing the inheritance of motifs and symbols in art and literature across various cultures and time zones – and aside from the speculations of occultists, Gnosticism was of interest only in these contexts.

The occult approach to the subject may be exemplified by Crowley’s book The Vision and The Voice (written 1900-1909) as it draws upon the system of personified Aeons (the thirty Aethyrs) found in the Angelic works of Dr John Dee. This was a magical-spiritual system indirectly derived from ancient sources considered ‘gnostic’ or, more likely, Neo-Platonic. Other esoteric interpretations of Gnosticism abound in the occult community, while Neo-Gnostic churches with their roots in the nineteenth century, such as that founded by the Patriarch Synesius (Fabre des Essarts), still flourish in various forms today.

In the late nineteen fifties the study of Gnosticism attracted attention among a wider readership, partly due to the seminal study Les Livres secrets des Gnostiques d’Egypte (1958) by French expert Jean Doresse. But it was The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (1958, 1963) by Hans Jonas that probably did more than any other work to cement the image of the ‘revolutionary’ gnostic vision in the popular consciousness and the developing anti-establishment counter-culture.

Jonas surveyed many relevant belief systems from a phenomenological perspective and codified many influential themes and motifs. Also, he linked the gnostic corpus to the pervasive notion of social crisis and made telling comparisons with Existentialism. For many, the allure of ‘secret books’, ‘hidden knowledge’, ‘the alien god’ and antinomian, anti-cosmic pessimism proved irresistible. It is this complex of psycho-spiritual ideas that crystallised the idea of ‘Gnosticism’ as many understand the term today. Perhaps the secret books of the gnostic sects, like the Necronomicon of H P Lovecraft and its many spin-offs, hold the keys to ancient mysteries and new, perhaps terrible, readings of human destiny.

When faced with teleological crisis, disruptive social change or political disaster the fearful imagination retreats into the murky underworld of the collective unconscious, the theological undergrowth of unorthodox speculation. The apparently ‘counter-traditional’ nature of supposed ‘gnostic’ belief systems presents the onlooker with a rich vein of appropriate symbolism. Here is a dark and anguished picture of the cosmos – a universe created by inimical powers. This identification gave rise to what some exasperated experts have referred to as a ‘menu of clichés’, the inflation of a jargon term – Gnosticism – into a fashionable category. A category that soon became so all-inclusive as to prove a hindrance to understanding.

Richard Smith and Ioan Culianu have listed the wide-ranging use of the term Gnosticism in modern times. Thus we find the term applied to the poetry and prophetic books of William Blake, Moby Dick, the psychology of Jung, Communism, Nazism and Existentialism. Albert Camus claimed that the Marquis de Sade was a Gnostic. The philosophy of Hegel as been defined as ‘gnostic’ along with Psychoanalysis, Marxism, James Joyce, Yeats, Kafka and the novels of Herman Hesse, to name but a few movements and authors swept up into the ‘gnostic’ stew. Even more recently ‘gnostic’ motifs and images have surfaced in the lyrics of musician Tori Amos who finds that Jesus was a Christian feminist. Some claim that science itself is ‘gnostic’. Culianu came to regard the term as a ‘sick sign’ a bucket term that has come to mean far too much – that is to say nothing at all. Clearly he was right.

The catalyst for the post-war fascination with Gnosticism was the discovery in Upper Egypt in 1945 of the collection of documents known as the Nag Hammadi Library. The ‘discovery’ of ancient manuscripts or inscriptions, arcane messages from a distant age, is itself an evocative event, bringing to mind exotic adventures in far away lands and the exploits of popular heroes like Indiana Jones or Alan Quatermain. In the Introduction to Rider Haggard’s novel She: A History of Adventure (1887) we find a reproduction of a facsimile of the ‘Sherd of Amenartas’, an ancient amphora fragment inscribed with the legend of Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the Sorceress of the Caves of Kor. The ancient, enigmatic text is a gateway to mystery, adventure and wild imaginings. For many the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts evoked the same ethos.

Reportedly discovered by locals engaged in a melodramatic blood feud the small cache of ancient Coptic texts were unearthed in a red earthenware jar in the caves at Jabal al-Tarif near the town of Nag Hammadi. This library comprised thirteen codices (twelve intact and one surviving only in a few pages) and eventually became the property of the Coptic Museum in Cairo. This collection comprises the largest single surviving set of Coptic translations of original Greek devotional works dating from the 2nd or 3rd Century or possibly earlier. Each codex contains a number of tracts, some anthologies more wide-ranging than others. For example Codex I (known as the Jung Foundation Codex) contains five tractates while Codex VI contains eight works, including the famous ‘voice of the revealer’ paradox poem Thunder, Perfect Mind. On the other hand Codex X contains only one work and Codex VIII merely two. One item The Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John is included several times and seems to be the most popular and respected tractate in the collection.

The entire library soon became popularly known as The Gnostic Gospels – unfortunately not one of the 52 tractates in the entire collection mentions the word gnostikos/gnostikoi (or the Coptic equivalent of that Greek term) even once. How very odd – very odd indeed!

Even among the sects anathematised by heresiologists close analysis shows that it is virtually impossible to identify any group of believers who actually used ‘Gnostic’ as a label of self-definition. Although the sects use a variety of nomenclature, including Pneumatics, Seed, Elect, Race of Seth, Race of the Perfect Human and Immovable Race the name ‘Gnostic’ is not among those used by devotees. In any case there is a need to distinguish between ‘Gnosticism’ and ‘gnosis’. The term ‘gnosis’ can refer to any mode of mystical knowledge, whereas the term ‘Gnosticism’ implies a generalised unity, some form of coherent, established, historical movement, system or religious organisation. Gnosticism means The Gnostic Religion, an entity for which ‘there is no evidence and against which there is much,’ to quote Michael Allen Williams. The idea of specialised mystical knowledge (‘gnosis’) as a factor defining a particular set of believers is widespread among many different religions – it is a very broad term of little analytical value.

The provenance of the collection remains a matter of speculation. One should draw a distinction between the possible custodians of the Codices and their producers. Williams speculates that the books may have been produced by fourth century Egyptian monks interested in examining questions of divinity and spiritual techniques for attaining transcendence of the created order. The writers of these scriptures would, at the time of composition, have found nothing un-Christian about the contents of the tractates. However the diversity of the contents has given rise to conflicting theories about the ownership and purpose of the collection. Possibilities include a particular sect of unknown designation; a heresiological resource used to refute unorthodox arguments; a haphazard collection maintained as general reading matter before the imposition of strict orthodoxy in biblical literature by Bishop Athanasius (in the year 367).

The codices fall into four rough groupings comprising items from the Corpus Hermeticum, part of Plato’s Republic and two other sets: ‘demiurgical’ texts and ‘non-demiurgical’ texts – among the latter there are items on the subject of Baptism and the Eucharist.

This brief survey highlights the particular group of texts defined as ‘demiurgical’, or to be precise ‘biblical demiurgical’. It is the demiurgical myth pattern that emerges as a particular type of revelation tradition within the Codices of interest to researchers concerned with the issue of ‘Gnosticism’. It might appear that these tractates indicate a religious innovation in the context of orthodox Christian teaching, and this might indeed be the case. However one must be clear on two points: firstly that all these texts are within the sphere of Judaic Scriptural exegesis, and secondly, that the demiurgical idea is not unique to Judaism, Christianity or an emerging new doctrine of ‘Gnosticism’. In fact the myth pattern is an import from older philosophical traditions, specifically from Platonism.

The main source of the demiurgic myth is Plato’s dialogue Timaeus (circa 448 BC).

The term demiurge (demiourgos) means ‘producer’, ‘workman’ or ‘creator’. In Timaeus the demiurge is the creator of the visible, material world – the sensible, mundane universe made from the four elements. That the material universe is a copy of an ideal universe existing only in the realm of Ideas or Forms, is an essential point of the Platonic mythic pattern. The Timaeus pattern is an example of cosmogenesis of the emanationist type. In this kind of system, by virtue of its secondary status, the ‘real’ world of human beings is already perceived as a degraded mode of existence, a downward emanation from a purer form of spiritual being.

However this kind of hierarchy also extends to the entities that inhabit the lower world. The demiurge created not only the Soul of the World, but also the stars and a caste of ‘lower gods’. It is these lower gods who are responsible for the creation of the mortal bodies of men, although the demiurge is thought responsible for their immortal souls.

In later antiquity this scheme was subject to vast elaboration and, as in the original Platonic system, the demiurge was differentiated from the ultimate principle of Good, a moral category closely associated with the Ideal Universe of Forms. Greek Christians and Jewish scholars influenced by Neo-Platonism and other aspects of Greek thought soon identified the demiourgos as the Creator God of Genesis. This is the origin of the biblical demiurgic tradition, a mode of Judaeo-Christian theological speculation that over time has given rise to the idea of ‘Gnosticism’. This analysis would exclude other religions or sects that promoted a dualistic vision – thus Manichaeans and Mandeans are not to be classed as ‘Gnostics’. While ‘classic gnostic’ works such as The Apocryphon of John should properly be seen as variations of the Judaic scriptural tradition, not a separate religion with a unique ‘revolutionary’ or ‘anarchic’ attitude. The two distinguishing features being (1) a distinction between the ‘ultimate’ transcendent deity (‘God’) and the Creator God of the Bible and (2) the theme of a message of reawakening (salvation) sent from the higher realm. This higher realm is clearly a variant of the Platonic ideal realm of Forms, later vulgarised in the familiar notion of a celestial Heaven.

Given that the terminology associated with ‘Biblical Demiurgy’ is a more viable and clear than that associated with ‘Gnosticism’ some experts argue that this category provides the only fruitful avenue for further research. One can but agree with this assumption, even if it spells the end of a romantic love affair with a fictional anti-establishment religion.

It remains to examine the motivations, if not the origins, of this variant tradition within Judaeo-Christian speculation.

The particular character of Biblical Demiurgical myths derives from moral preoccupations. Salvation ideology is above all an ideology of moral purity. The notion of ‘evil’ is therefore, not only central to the redemptive ethic typical of the Christian tradition (and all other puritan moral doctrines world-wide), it is also a notoriously difficult concept to integrate into a framework determined by a supernatural principle of ultimate Goodness.

The difficulties arising from the problem of evil and other anomalies or peculiarities in scripture (anthropomorphic characterisations of the deity, for example) account for the particular character of the Biblical Demiurgical constellation of mythic systems. It is strenuous attempts to deal with these concerns of Theodicy, sometimes in the face of satire and criticism from non-Jews and non-Christians that lead to the innovations enshrined in some of the Nag Hammadi Codices.

Michael Allen Williams draws attention to elements of Genesis that were well known as problem features of the scripture. For example, in Gen 1:26 the creator is referred to in the plural (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”). Other stories, such as the Sin of Adam and Eve (the Paradise story); the Descent of the ‘Sons of God’; The Flood story and related tales of The Tower of Babel or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (similar to the Platonic myth of Atlantis), all presented problems of exegesis. Innovative mythmakers constructed elaborate scenarios to account for the anthropomorphism and perceived moral difficulties of these texts.

If the very notion of jealous or angry deity worked against the idea of transcendent spiritual serenity, the Platonic demiurge provided a very convenient solution. Clearly the creator of ‘this world’ of sin and suffering was not an omnipotent, all seeing, Supreme Being incapable of evil, but the work of a ‘lower’ emanation or entity in the role of ‘creator’. Classic ‘gnostic’ texts are typical of this kind of early Christian hermeneutic speculation, giving rise in the natural course of events to sects and sub-sects later condemned as heretics. Modern commentators who seek to present ‘Gnosticism’ as a pessimistic ‘anticosmic’ religion of revolt with a special essence that sets it apart from the mainstream are clinging to a distorted caricature vision – despite their diversity and variation all the original ‘gnostic’ texts known to us are, in fact, Christian. There never was a distinctive unified counter-traditional religion of revolt known to its adherents as ‘Gnosticism’.

Furthermore it is quite misleading to see the writings under discussion as a radical departure from the norms of early Christian and Judaic moral thinking. It is only to be expected, given the entrenched misogyny of all faiths based on moral purity, that the source of ‘evil’ in both the Sethian Apocryphon of John and Valentinianism (to cite just two examples) is a feminine principle. It is Sophia (‘Wisdom’) who initiates the degeneration of the emanations of being and disrupts the ‘serenity of the divine world’ (sometimes seen as a ‘household’) by a self-willed act of imaginative projection. Achamoth, offspring of Sophia, a personification of imperfect thinking, is also a feminine principle. In the Valentinian system it is Achamoth who creates the Demiurge, who, in ignorance of the supernal realms claims “I am the lord, and there is no one else…” (Isaiah 45:5). This utterance is as a sign of hubris – even though the demiurge is the Creator, he is still a degraded spiritual entity compared to the ultimate Good, the true God. The Devil, Cosmocrator of the World is created by the Demiurge.

Thus, we see how, by an indirect chain of emanations, the evil principle, the Devil, is a descendent of the only female principle in this patriarchal scheme so compatible with original Platonic thinking. Plato taught that evil men were reincarnated as women.

It is true that various categorisations of higher spiritual principles (such as Barbelo the mediating first-thought or self-image of the supreme entity) are pictured as androgynous – but one can be sure that such an idea simply confirmed the ‘heretical’ nature of these sects in the eyes of the orthodox. Nevertheless the general drift of all these mainly ascetic doctrines conforms to the overall pattern of salvation ideology, an ideology compelled by its own inner logic to assert the debased nature of the sensible world; for, if ‘the world’ is not ‘fallen’ there is no need of salvation.

The levels of emanation and complex strata of lower gods, angels and Aeons simply represent a more baroque variation on the original idea that the ‘real’ world is but a pale imitation (inferior or ‘fallen’) of a higher realm of pure perfection. The notion that evolution implies a continuing distance from the first principle of absolute purity implies that all subsequent phases, or changes, are more debased, more impure than previous phases. This is one of the main tenets of all authoritarian systems – the idea that change is always change for the worse, that tradition is preferable to innovation – one of the main rationales for the suppression of dissent in this particular kind of ideological framework.

This is why Sophia is seen as an ‘unruly’ element, a personification of cosmological perturbation, enemy of stability and harmonious authority. It is an interpretation serving the interests of a patriarchal caste horrified by the disruptive, truly anarchic (chaotic) potential of desire in general and female desire in particular.

At a more fundamental level these pre-orthodox, ‘heretical’ systems oscillate between the twin poles of temporality. Here we find, as one might expect, myths of the past and myths of the future. Myths of the past are creation myths, myths devised to explain or explore issues of origins, meaning and purpose, including the meaning and origin of evil. Myths of the future often derive from the universal notion of ‘deliverance’, sublimated (in the case of ‘Gnosticism’) via the Judaeo-Christian paradigm as the principle of Redemption or Salvation.

Insofar as the ‘gnostic’ beliefs outlined here fail to step beyond these parameters it is clear that the attribution of ‘revolutionary’ attitudes to so-called ‘gnostic’ believers is misleading, just as the notion that ‘Gnostics’ sought to invert interpretative traditions (‘value-reversal’) as a systematic programme of subversion is also misleading. Demiurgical interpretations of scripture represented specific attempts to deal with specific textual issues. These were issues well known as problematic and subject to continuous revision, analysis and scriptural surgery by many philosophers and theologians of the time. Of course, in many cases the church simply explained anomalies by allegory and parable, but others wrongly called ‘Gnostics’ invented alternative cosmologies using the familiar symbolic lexicon of Platonic philosophy in synthesis with Judaic myths and traditions assimilated into Christianity.

The origins and identities of the authors of the Nag Hammadi Codices will probably remain unknown. Behind these shadowy authors one should image a tangled web of complex theological speculation giving rise to multiple mythic innovations. The outcome of this process being the multiplicity of demiurgical interpretations found in the known sources. One thing, however, is quite certain: there was no distinct ‘religion’ or doctrine called ‘Gnosticism’ by its followers and there were no ‘spiritual anarchists’ in late antiquity.

 We can be sure that this idea is a symptom of modern anxiety or anomie, a product of twentieth century pessimism. ‘Gnosticism’ is a modern myth – the myth of a Religion That Never Was.

Select Bibliography

Carroll, Peter J. Liber Null and Psychonaut, Samuel Weiser, 1987

Howatson, M. C. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. OUP, 1997

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion. Beacon Press, 1958

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Pelican Books, 1982

Plato. Timaeus. Penguin Books, 1965

Webb, James. The Flight From Reason. Macdonald, 1971

Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking Gnosticism. Princeton University, 1996


Illustration:  The End Of Everything, 2000

 

Another Quiet Night In The City

Which one are you today?

Despite clear message we suffer temporarily.

 – seriously? classic result re-mastered full control –

But when small copies of a theoretically possible bigger blockbuster micro-transaction surfaced, becoming one of those rare moments, all baroque and lovingly crafted, unraveling details: disproportionate ‘representations’, psychotic types running around with worse-than-expected headaches a year earlier – she moved out! 

Fast-twitch tailspin stunning-looking quest: this isn’t something we’re handling well. Keep your shifty eyes on the road ahead…

So get stuck in acquiring this new body-mod type hobby, maximum strength wireless telegraphy blow-drier treatment. Torn fishnets, piercings, eyes-on-stalks, tattoos (sex-roses-demons), extreme Steampunk weirdness. And if the dam breaks?

Well, can’t help thinking about her deprived childhood – contrasting characteristic dishy, sharp, dude well-placed to help – a dodgy Fox in Socks or, maybe a cuddly 'Mr Tickle'. Smart office, stylish furniture, dedicated receptionist, cool rooms, business lounge, one-bedroomed flat, acoustics just right, not compromised in critical areas. Just sign-up, unlock car, focus on value – may end up a consultant.

Rapid response; powerful, reliable, scaleable, innovative and very ‘new world’. The Greatest Show on Earth: pseudo-cuties, gaffe-prone clowns, intriguing old bw silent films, vintage late night factor, hoax moon landing for extra fix. Never same again – dog-hairs, notebooks, char-grilled foie gras, pizza-and-pyjama party, awesome impersonators… are we really on the way out?

Fast-twitch tailspin stunning-looking quest: this isn’t something we’re handling that well, so,  keep your shifty eyes on the road ahead… We enter the strange world of Citizen X.

Back in the sixties and seventies a blend of daft comedy and musical revelry highlights, like four-day event skin treatments and massages, you’ll be able to watch despite everything the blackouts the slowdowns. Creepy fan-mail but no booking fees! 
Now arriving to phase-out entire cities (New York-London-Paris-Berlin) in period costume you get on with it in an original jet-black ball-gown. True privilege light a candle have a glass of wine, closer now, mistakes are the way to learn: we dress up and dance our socks off – snake ring, fingerless gloves, edgy soundtrack impressively constructed, code missing. Automatically get everyone in the mood make sure your pet isn’t left out shouldn’t need monthly bewitching this ‘Gothic Luxe’ trend: monochrome lace spider bracelet, battered leather jacket testament to power of a multitude of sins, heaven for wild girls dates back to Saxon times – what crisis? 
Endemic issues speed up process shamelessly different shapes sizes backgrounds it was almost noon screaming agony outside veritable cornucopia of vice, dazzling discoveries if you see nothing else tune in to this reunion of opposites special edition. Three point two million years ago we observe your fast-disappearing world of coastal lagoons so Cindy’s dream of becoming an actress goes out the window fishing trip. Visit a studio, trade in crystal meth, political dossier recast as airport novel (huh?) grab an extra, find out more with sub-machine guns; yes it’s just another quiet night in the city circa 1952.

Fast-twitch tailspin stunning-looking quest: this isn’t something we’re handling well. So just keep your shifty eyes on the road ahead…We enter the strange world of...?

It’s overwhelming and truly special to be here. Fine art prints, elbow-patch blazers, hybrid golf clubs, thrills amplified first class turn-out you gotta be on some next level high-stakes electric dreamy instrumental happy slappers slapping, flappers flapping about call you tomorrow gaudy reminder of those luminous superdry suits, inflammable paper hats, glo-sticks, sin and spectacle: regrettably the air vent explodes. Exclusive chat ideal protection skinny-fit trousers, secret pockets, do your research nation-wide, slip back into that cockney accent what a laugh iconic alien cartel inside my brain welcome to hell slim design so-hated tiny minority public comment bad press not too good not the moment to get it on… so much can go wrong on the sofa with your new girlfriend honey honey don’t stop honey honey dynamic incredibly exciting are you brave enough?

Pale blue skies engine capacity post-war consumer boom culture, retro-futurism, new wave writers, deviant subtopian norms, pretentious and intrusive outdoor advertising hoardings, wires, poles, ill-sited public utilities such a fool to ask (Cindy Oh Cindy) edit your copy on trains and planes snap pictures into your diary long lens sunset over the rocky bay two couples scupper your plans think of new ways feminine variations end in another crisis.

Are we really on the way out? Today which one are you?

Illustration: The Strange World of Citizen X, 2007

Second Highway II

Second Highway II

The Unique Zero Manifesto (2007)

Arriere la muse academique! - Baudelaire

Welcome to Unique Zero – the negation of everything.

Creativity is a value-neutral process independent of all forms of expression.

Vigorously reject any notion of a generalised or theoretical ‘poetic’.

The creative process is not ‘theoretical’.

The specific technicalities of any art form – poetry, painting, music, sculpture, installation or assemblage – are of secondary interest, even a distraction, when trying to understand the nature of the creative process.

From the perspective of the primal creative processes there are no significant factors associated with specialised techniques derived from different artistic 'disciplines' or methods, including poetry. This is always the case, even though some media/modes/genres/forms are, in the context of overall function, or with regard to the individual temperament of the artist, more suited to purpose than others, depending upon viewpoint. Furthermore, distinctions between 'non representation' and 'abstraction' are invalid: all artworks are, in the first instance, symbolic representations or constructed reifications, even 'found objects', ‘ready-mades’ or 'conceptual' artefacts. Nevertheless, a ‘symbol’ can also be non-figurative (non-objective) and can be described, loosely, as ‘abstract’.

All artworks derive from the personality, the mentality, of the auteur. They are polysemic/polyvalent, symbolic objects having as their primary raison d'être the externalisation, via signification, of the psychological-ontological, infinitely evolving presence/existence of the auteur (author/artist/poet) without whom the 'work' (opus) would not exist and without whom language is meaningless.

The Cultural Milieu

This process of externalisation (trace or trail) takes place within a specific socio-cultural context (or Zeitgeist) that partially shapes the final outcome. It is possible to 'transcend' the socio-cultural context, although it very difficult to do so. The chronotope in the cultural ‘ecosystem’ locates the auteur (poet/artist) in a socio-cultural milieu or contextual mise-en-scene, based on the enforcement of norms within specific social structures such as the class system, caste systems and the means of economic production.

Normative structures, sustained by ideology and belief (participation mystique) are usually experienced as hegemonic and repressive to some degree. Such normative structures are Blake’s 'mind-forg'd manacles' of cultural oppression and structural evil and must be psychologically accommodated through sublimation, the discharge of instinctual energies into non-instinctual, ideologically sanctioned forms of behaviour. A form of false consciousness tending toward narcosis is a by-product of this sublimation mechanism.

On the other hand, the normative ideology (‘culture’) of any social system is also capable of the infinite assimilation of any artefact, however innovative, progressive, recondite, radical, marginal, outrageous or avant-garde. In advanced economies any artefact will also be the inevitable subject of homogenised commodification by the forces of The Market (the Mondrian dress, the Edvard Munch screaming pillow). Cultural oppression works through all those inhibiting, regressive, ideological normalisation effects persistently degrading the chronotope, both locally and globally (law of entropy) in the interest of various authoritarian cultural-spiritual power elites. Such high caste power elites may declare war upon ‘false gods’ and each other, but they are all united by an imperative to criminalize the imagination; alongside dope-fiends, loose women, idolaters and apostates, free thinkers and artists – makers of ‘graven images’ – are the real enemy. The ‘Open Realism’ (realisme ouvert) of the unrestrained imagination, a mode of extreme naturalism encompassing the antinomian syzygy phenomenon of complementarity, works against this perpetual state of dispossession, and works for the nullification of everything; a Unique Zero opposed to the wretched standing joke of rigidified ‘culture’. The unreality of the chronotope ensnares the subject in an infinitely receding hall of distorting mirrors where the conflict between utilitarian austerity and indulgent individualism cannot be recognised as a smoke screen. In this context, artworks can be either transgressive or conformist, although the poetic process is innately transgressive (non-conformist) because all art can induce a de-familiarisation (disclosure) effect perturbing, however weakly, the hegemony of the mainstream and disrupting the inauthentic discourse of ‘idle chatter’ (they call it 'metaphysics').

Even if ultimately inconsequential, even if only an imperceptible ‘shudder’ (frisson nouveau), a perturbation of the chronotope and its normative, cultural signifying systems is a transgression – and all such perturbations or disturbances are taboo. But the ‘purpose’ of the poem/work is exploration and discovery at the edge of zone; to explore the experience of limits, to explore experience off-limits; to discover or probe the borders of the human event horizon; to actualise singularity, the aporetic neither-nor and/or both.

However, the transgressive or conformist nature of any given artwork will also depend upon the worldview (Weltenschauung) of the auteur/poet. The dynamic, dialectical interplay of Weltenschauung and Zeitgeist at a singular point of intersection (auteur-nexus) within the chronotope influences the subject’s sense of identity, even though the chronotope may exist in a perpetual state of flux or emergence (the rigidity of cultural norms notwithstanding). The poetic process itself is a problematic factor with regard to the question of identity and can enter into a state of conflict with the ideological basis of the prevailing Zeitgeist. The subject’s personal Weltenschauung may, in reality, be a form of false consciousness – bad faith, ‘structural evil', meconnaissance or avidya. Interpellation, the mechanism of economic and cultural assimilation, may create an unstable atmospheric ‘I’ (a ‘they-self’ or mirage persona) that is not the same as the subject’s ‘true (real or empirical) self’. Most artefacts are determined by the phantom signature of this ‘mirage persona’, rather than the authentic signature of the artist’s true will, Sontag’s ‘principle of decision’.

These factors impact upon attempts to define an individual style, poetic or authorial ‘voice’ or maniera. Assertions of authorship per se can be compromised if it appears that personal identity is ‘nothing but’ a projection, an ideological/socio-economic ‘construct’ of mass consumer culture, the product of an all-pervasive theocratic hegemony like so-called ‘higher’ culture bedevilled by the self-serving Aristotelian humbug of ‘virtue’ and ‘magnificence’. Alternatively, the mirage persona is often confused with, or can masquerade as, the vulnerable and immature empirical self. Yet, the inauthentic, fragmentary they-self can never be the ‘real’ auteur. 

Inwardness and Poeisis

‘Inspiration’ and ‘talent’ are conventional terms denoting certain mental capabilities and imaginative capacities. Imaginative activity (active imagination) is 'driven' by innate obsessions or fixations with atavistic affinities, possibly of genetic origin. This compulsion, or impulse, finds 'expression' in an exploratory immersion process of 'inwardness' or descent (the dangerous passage, the voyage to the interior, the night sea journey, the quest or anti-quest).

The ‘descent’ or ‘inverse pilgrimage’ (katabasis) is fraught with anxiety, obstacles and difficulties. This experience assumes the character of an ordeal – an ascesis, even – realised through ‘rites of passage’ comprising three known stages: separation – initiation – return. During this process the subject will encounter or confront uncanny horrors and paranoid connections. These terrors may include resurgent atavisms (the phylogenetic inheritance), pathological forces, every form of self-violation (mortificatio) and shadowy, chthonic ‘elementals’ – all characterised by a ubiquitous undertow of archaic nostalgia. The subject is exposed to all the underworld horrors of personal and collective unconscious contents (the 'inferno') and other phantasmagoria – such as tutelary ‘threshold guardians’ – derived, in the final analysis, from psychic formations known as ‘archetypes’.

These ‘archetypes’ (collective representations or 'categories') can be either structures or paradigmatic processes, not just primordial images. Archetypes are not immutable, and naturally-occurring changes at the archetypal level (creation, evolution, decay, extinction) are reflected by corresponding changes in the prevailing Zeitgeist or world order. Phenomena such as cultural implosion, drift, lag, paradigm-mutation and belief-system burn-out (the death of god, the death of art) manifest themselves through collective time/'deep' history (Geschichte) just as pain is ‘referred’ away from an injured site to various other parts of the body. Thus, ‘archetypes’ can, and do, mutate over time. The archetypal level is, naturally, inherently unstable and without foundation.

Phantasmal figures and motifs (the inchoate raw material or massa confusa) arise from a dynamic, unconscious process driven by libido or unbound psychic energy. This inwardness or immersion process discloses the centre of desire (the heart of darkness, the end of the night, the final frontier), a duplicitous ‘inner world’ (inner space) of cosmic cruelty, proto-animistic fetishism, polymorphous perversity, illicit propensities, unrestrained fantasy, iambic scurrility, and primal narcissism, pathological fixations, retrogression and antinomian 'otherness'. Creativity involves both assimilation of this dark-side (the mutant spectres of desire) and psychic de-conditioning (deconstruction) from the effects of cultural-ideological interpellation (belief, ‘spirituality’ and 'metaphysics'). Deconditioning is achieved by immersion in darkness (blackening or noircissement) or, alternatively, by passage through the dark, haunted depths of the ‘enchanted forest’, the legendary wild-wood.

The ‘heart of darkness’, the capricious, macabre and sinister ‘dark-side’, and its shadowy, subconscious strata of involuntary memory (personal/collective) is the first level of the subject’s inner core, an emergent feature of mutable, fluidic, psychic topography derived from the semiotic, proto-symbolic chora (la chora semiotique). However, the phantasmal ‘contents’ of the dark-side derive from both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ experience: the products of indefinite feedback, everything but the soul. Characterised by the paradoxical, perceptual complementarity of syzygy phenomena (chaos/cosmos, causal/a-causal, subject/object, latent/manifest, light/dark, positive/negative, life/death, psyche/soma, masculine/feminine, self/not-self, fact/fiction, true/false, love/hate, demotic/hieratic, signifier/signified, wave/particle, etc.) the ‘contents’ reflect the indeterminate, bipolar, existential structure of the ‘real’. This is the case, even if there can be no such ‘thing’ as Reality, realism being a quality of understanding.

A primal phenomenon, not sensible or intelligible in itself, the chora semiotique is the universal pre-linguistic precursor ‘matrix realm' (the Platonic ‘receptacle of becoming’, the unus mundus, the quantum vacuum, the anima mundi, the abyssal depths) which underpins all symbolism, language and meaning. It is beyond rational understanding, merging with the ‘sympathetic’ autonomic nervous system and the primeval (visceral) sphere of the ‘old brain’, that proto-sentient, pre-logical ‘reptilian’ and limbic armature of the unconscious anatomy. Creativity consists of a non-verbal, irrational, intuitive, instinctual procedure of imaginative ‘shaping/forming’ or ‘making’ (poeisis) utilising the subject’s entire psyche – although internal incoherence and psychic division always inhibits optimal creative functioning and free plasticity. Phantasmal contents are subjected to a pre-logical transmutation process (khemeia) comprising condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy), articulated through the osmotic interchange of free association (automatism), energised by libido (vis creativa), predicated by differentiation and conditioned by ‘objective chance’.

This process generates a first phase 'work', opus, or artefact, shaped by the gratuitous laws of organic form (deep form) showing how reification becomes representation through metamorphosis. These representations generate, at the level of reader or audience response, an inter-subjective experience, effect or simulation, of ‘significance’, 'meaning' and aesthetic ‘value’ and, almost instantaneously, are co-opted or annexed as vectors of cultural interpellation. 

Invention and Aesthetic Effects

Primal poeisis functions independently of all self-conscious artifice, taste, thematic concerns, genre conventions and artistic method, although form and technique can be conventionalised at the socio-cultural level and always are. Naturally the auteur (poet/artist) will also work self-consciously, simultaneously exercising intellectual ability (ingegno), wit, erudition, virtuosity and acquired capability in the utilisation of all facets of creative technique both ancient and modern, formal and informal: style, structure, and content. Yet, the fortuitous automatism, the non-verbal visuality of primal poeisis will, at all times, suffuse every aspect of the work in hand, including the objective technical factors mentioned.

However the faculty of invention (invenzione), comprising discovery, representation and all modes of reification and transformation (inflections, modifications, recapitulations, transpositions, modulations and permutations), is rooted in the automatic mechanism of the libidinous process.

In its pure state (l'art pour l'art), poetic invention operates surrealistically (sans sujet preconcu) upon, and within, the psyche. It draws an intuitive, elemental ‘spark’ (scintilla) from the encounter between, and/or juxtaposition of, mutually exclusive or distant realities: ‘kitchen-cynic’ naturalism colliding with mythic symbolism, for example, or a weird fusion of pastoral Arcadia and urban inferno.

Invention can draw the same elemental spark from the off-beat, marvellous-uncanny ‘inbetweenness’ properties of ‘alien’, interstitial phenomena; from an erratic oscillation between the trite and original, or historicism and futurism; from an incongruous synthesis of low-tone and grand manner or from an irregular union of preciosity and brutalism. Often tragicomic, sometimes bitter-sweet, invention can endow the ephemeral with gravitas, transmuting the despised and the neglected into high art or high camp, into an underground freak-out (ufo) precipitating a mind-warp (dereglement de tous les sens).

The process may manifest in different rhapsodic ‘poetic’ lyrical, or, alternatively, ‘anti-poetic’, passionless non-lyrical, modalities. Modalities such as melopoeia (‘phonetic’ or ‘musical’) or phanopoeia (‘visual’ or ‘pictorial’) commingle with complimentary modes of functioning such as pathopoeia (working with affective elements such as feeling, mood and emotion, even with estrangement, irony and alienation) or mythopoeia (Euhemerism/mythologisation/mythic parallelism).

The epistemological element of ‘meaning’ (semantic relations, etymology, associations, nuance, denotation and connotation) endows the artefact with communicative properties and linguistic capacities that engage with consciousness and psychosomatic exteriority, acquiring in the process a patina of ‘cultural value’.

Meanwhile, at the level of the chronotope, the subject interacts impressionistically with 'the world ' via an interface conditioned by the multidimensional, dialectical interaction of sensation, Zeitgeist and Weltenschauung. Here, through a dialectical interplay of material forces, events and subjective perceptions (e.g. synchronicity and coincidence), inspirational feedback (friction/irritability) continues to fuel and inform the poetic process on a mundane day-to-day basis. This magic-circumstantial aesthetic redemption of banality enhances intensity of perception and poetic intuition, even if it does not necessarily effect a diminution of existential unease, anxiety or ‘angst’.

To some degree this entire procedure is 'convulsive' (explosive-fixed) insofar as it arises from an energetic spasm, a surreal analogue to geological seismic activity, triggered by ritualistic intercession, in alliance with the pleasure principle. This ‘nervous spasm’ is the climax or consummation (Chymische Hochzeit) of the initial impulse. The degree of convulsive intensity generated by the primary processes is conditioned by the level of intensity inherent in any given creative act or event and also depends on the neurological or mental state and personality of the auteur.

This intensity is manifest as an emotional spark or charge comprising energy quanta of attraction/repulsion energising the artefact at an extremely deep level within its infrastructure. In a specifically poetic context the affective/emotional charge, or cathexis, invests the imagistic, lexical and other structural elements of a work with a quantum of aesthetic 'power', either weak or strong.

The charge will have an enigmatic 'effect' (la sorcellerie evocatoire), even, perhaps, an absurd effect of hilarity – provoked, for instance, by cynicism, burlesque, iambic parody, black humour or the vitriol of corrosive satire – upon both the reader and the writer. This outcome can be heightened in certain cases to the level of a paranormal 'numinous effect' (uncanny intensity of feeling) that is often misrepresented in mystical terms by both poets and readers. This problem arises, for example, in apocalyptic or ‘vatic’ (visionary) art and is often associated with the transcendental view that all art aspires to ‘the condition of music’.

The degree of charge/intensity also determines the transgressive potential of the work on the socio-cultural plane. Furthermore, the exact nature of the ‘uncanny’ effect (das Unheimlich) and/or response in specific instances is infinitely variable, multi-factorial, unpredictable, hallucinatory and indeterminate in conformance with The Uncertainty Principle. Audience or reader-response will be conditioned by, among other factors, individual predisposition, immediate circumstances, state of health, degree of socio-cultural alienation, collective expectations or inhibiting horizons demarcating the phobic, ideological miasma of false consciousness. 

Parapraxis

The open-real ‘lifted horizon’ (epiphany) of de-familiarisation is a consequence of disruption (perturbation or infraction) of the auteur-nexus within the chronotope and, correspondingly, within the psyche. This inter-penetration of the inner and outer worlds of the reader-writer causes a parapraxis or subversive breakdown of normality; a shamanistic ‘break-though in plane’ (a vector, rupture, tear, wound or gateway) disclosing ‘alterity’ (aporia, otherness, surreality, hyper-reality, super-reality, the dis-placed and the dis-located) warping contingent historicity, displacing the distorting mirrors of the hyper-culture. Alterity, in this context, may be defined as the bizarre (or ‘convulsive’) antithesis of false consciousness that embodies the manifest unreality of the prevailing socio-cultural hegemony. De-familiarisation may generate a heterodox mode of ‘open realism’ (disclosure, desacralization) in contradiction to the oppressive unreality (narcosis) of the phenomena of false consciousness and specious ‘identity’ (national identity, social identity, cultural identity). Such phantasmal, collective, consensual mirages of interpellation maintain social and psychological control through denial of the self, ultimately inducing ideological de-realisation (etherealization or dissolution) in the vapours of mystical unreality euphemistically called The Cloud of Unknowing.

Yet, faced with the impossibility of ‘saying’ anything ‘new’, creativity takes its revenge, ruthlessly recycling, plundering or pillaging the phenomenal, theatrical, kaleidoscopic ‘spectacle’ of the world for ‘raw material’. From a position of ‘absolute divergence’, (absolute nonconformism) creativity enhances the autonomous potential of the spontaneous, singular, side-real imagination in a perverse, even tawdry, spirit of panache; a spirit of intransigent opposition, a 'negative dialectic' of contradiction and reverse exegesis, working, always, against the grain, subversively ‘against nature’ (contra naturam). To reduce the eternal to the transient, to transform substance into style, the ‘signature of the artist’s will’ – that is the essence of modernity with its ‘art-house’ experimentalism, with its ‘cool’ cosmopolitan, radical chic, is it not?

Within the chronotope, the falsehood of the subject’s specular mirage persona may be compromised or exposed by aesthetic manipulation of double images, wordplay, rhetorical devices and figures of all kinds including ‘multiple personalities’, alter egos, authorial ‘voices’, poetic ‘masks’ and heteronyms. Similarly the integrity of the poetic process can be jeopardised by self-division and psychic fragmentation. From this perspective ‘impersonality’, or aesthetic distance, is simply one mask among many, just one survival strategy among others equally valid or invalid.

No strategy can be guaranteed, not even Nihilism, Stoicism or Epicureanism. Not even the decadent, dandified insouciance of cultivated dilettantism. Not even the daunting complexities of Post-modern theory – not even the ironies of high camp; not even the mass media glitzkrieg. No, not even the free-floating aestheticism of marginal dispossessed ‘outsiders’ inhabiting ‘unseen’ paraxial, liminal regions of cultural and sub-cultural life.

The creative process has two outcomes: first, an impact at the socio-cultural level, and second, a psychoactive (psychotropic) effect within the psyche of the individual subject.

This 'psycho-activity', this psychedelic epiphany, is an end in itself and the motive for the original creative fixation-compulsion (impetus/impulse). Through feedback this fixation-compulsion evolves into a process of developmental integration, a process of growth-change through ‘altered states’ of lucidity or ‘systematic derangement’ (raisonne deregelement), defined as ‘individuation’.

Often misrepresented in ‘spiritual’ terms and thus neutralised, or blocked, by false consciousness and the devious contents of the mystical mirror-world menagerie or cultural hothouse, individuation is simply the human manifestation of a general drive to entelechy (autarchic self-realisation) common to all living organisms, one aspect of the parabolic arc of the evolutionary process. Artistic activity, as a mode of ontogenic-phylogenic self-actualisation, has an evolutionary function (survival value, realisation of singularity) at the biological, species level.

Enrichment of the anguished existential spectacle; enhanced adaptive capacities; the ‘pataphysical subversion of interpellation in the name of an ‘impossible’, absurd freedom (la liberte absurde); intensification of the contemporaneous, perceptual ‘now’ (the inadvertent lucidity of the ‘sublime moment’, the gem-like flames of synaesthesia); the infinite, ambivalent reinvention of modernity. These are some possible benefits derived from creativity. Others might include the cathartic purgation of ‘spiritual’ accretions, blockages and restrictions impeding psychic integration. However the autonomous imagination is indifferent to such ‘benefits’ and, being neither benign nor malign, its ultimate effect may well be ‘off-centre’, may well induce disarray and further confusion: a sardonic ‘debacle of the intellect’.

The reification and externalisation of the artwork, its conformance to expectations within objective, historical parameters of social exchange, art or anti-art fashions, styles, schools, genres and movements in the fragmentary world of the mirage persona or they-self, is a by-product of this natural process. Nevertheless the opus or ‘work’ may have important, quasi-autonomous cultural effects and implications. These implications are acute when viewed against the background of inevitable, infinite and eternal psycho-aesthetic warfare occurring within the social theatre of the chronotope – the perpetual sectarian conflict and generational revolt between successive schools of thought and ideological movements within the hegemonic domain of cultural oppression. These conflicts, transfigured and intensified by the underlying struggle (agon) between the palliative unreality of false consciousness (inauthenticity) and the paradoxical symbolic-naturalistic ‘Open Realism’ of disclosure, will never end. Expanding and transforming the shared cognitive-epistemological-ontological framework, testing the cultural event horizon, in accord with the arbitrary and ‘uncanny’ principle of ‘strangeness’ and the characteristic ‘charm’ of the unexpected, The Work creates its own tremors and aftershocks, its own future – and the nullification of everything. 

Frisson nouveau – Hugo

Noircissement – Celine

Sans sujet preconcu – Breton

Dereglement de tous les sens/raisonne dereglement – Rimbaud

La sorcellerie evocatoire – Baudelaire

La liberte absurde – Camus

Finis

Radical Grotesques

The Secret Agent
By Joseph Conrad
Edited with an Introduction by Michael Newton
Penguin Books, 2007
ISBN 978-0-141-44158-0

An acute analysis of the human condition may well conclude that behind the flim-flam of philosophy, theology, metaphysics and transcendental speculation, human actions, ideals and aspirations are conditioned by, and derived from, a corrosive Fear. A fear of reality translated into a hatred of existence reified as a culturally conditioned loathing of the world. Subjected to a process of ideological sublimation, this loathing, which is self-loathing, is transformed into extreme politics, a form of politics defined here, by Michael Newton in his Introduction, as ‘the politics of feeling’. The Secret Agent delves into the political unconscious of the politics of feeling.
It is very well known that just as Dostoyevsky based his political novel The Devils (1871) on the true life Nechayev Conspiracy of 1869, so Conrad, writing in 1906, based his fictional ‘dynamite novel’ on a political outrage as reported in the newspapers. Anarchist Martial Bourdin emerged from the shadows to die, horrifically, in a failed bomb-attack on The Greenwich Observatory in 1894. In this depressingly familiar case the perpetrator was killed by his own explosives, leading Conrad to ponder the implications of – to use his words – such an act of ‘blood stained inanity’.
Newton asks if the anarchist action was planned as an attack on the Meridian Line. Was it an attempt to destroy the organisation of time itself? For those fixated on the compulsive doctrine of the attentat, the notion of propaganda by deed, such an objective may have seemed entirely valid. The action of the novel centres upon the reactions of Mrs Verloc, whose retarded younger brother Stevie is inveigled into becoming the bomb-carrier by her shady husband, a double agent – the ‘Secret Agent’ of the title. Her death at the end of the book is reported in the press as ‘Suicide of Lady Passenger from A Cross-Channel Boat – An Impenetrable Mystery Seems Destined To Hang For Ever Over This Act Of Madness And Despair’.
It is the explanation of this ‘impenetrable mystery,’ the motivation for Mrs Verloc’s acts of murder and self-destruction, of madness and despair, that forms the domestic dimension of the plot. A plot inspired by a few words uttered by a friend, Ford Maddox Ford, who, in conversation, remarked “Oh that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards.” It was Conrad who expanded the scenario to include the murder of Mr Verloc by his wife, a desolate woman for whom the tragic Stevie, almost unearthly in the intensity of his compassion, meant everything.
If the scenario of The Secret Agent retains a morbid sense of familiarity (a vulnerable youth manoeuvred into committing an atrocity, or potential atrocity, by a trusted elder) then the most lurid of extremists, the ‘incorruptible’ Professor, the Perfect Anarchist, embodies Conrad’s conception of the ultimate terrorist. Even though the epithet recalls Robespierre, this is certainly a figure more familiar than we would like.
Two key scenes of the story are conversations set in a seedy hostelry called The Silenus (‘the renowned Silenus’) where, towards the end of the book, one of the subversives, comrade Alexander Ossipon, nick-named The Doctor, is discussing the Verloc Affair and its outcome. During this discussion The Professor taps the breast pocket of his jacket, claiming “And yet I am the force.”
Ossipon announces his future Brave New World of two hundred years into the future when ‘doctors will rule the world’ for, even now, in the shadows, ‘science reigns already’. He describes his vision to counteract the misanthropy of his companion who preaches ‘utter extermination’.
Aghast, Ossipon exclaims, “you carry in your pocket enough stuff to send yourself and, say, twenty other people into eternity.”
The Professor responds by raising his glass and drinks calmly to “the destruction of what is.”
To intimidate the authorities and so deter arrest this creature of hate has turned himself into a human bomb; he declares the sole aim of his life is to develop the perfect detonator – an intelligent detonator. In several paragraphs Conrad expounds the viewpoint of The Professor who feels that he is ‘a force’. A misanthrope who loathes the weak and ‘the odious multitude’ of mankind, he anticipates the death-doctrine of fascism: “I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is self-evident.” For an irritated Ossipon this is “a transcendental way of putting it.” The adjective is pejorative.
Joseph Conrad’s approach to his subject matter is one of relentless, consistent irony and it is this all-pervasive irony that, among other factors, makes The Secret Agent such a remarkable work of fiction, or, to quote Newton, a ‘signally important work of Modernist fiction.’ It should be noted that Conrad’s sardonic view is all encompassing and no one escapes his excoriation – not the radicals, not the politicians, not the police and not the ‘ordinary’ person for there are no ordinary people in this novel of ‘radical grotesques’.
In his Author’s Note (1920), included in this volume, Conrad remarks upon the ‘criminal futility’ of the Greenwich incident. He condemns all aspects of the attack including doctrine, action and the fundamental mentality. For him the most obnoxious feature of the radical pose is that it stems from a brazen desire to exploit ‘the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction.’ It is this radical pose with its ‘unpardonable’ philosophical pretences that is represented in various ways by the menagerie of radical grotesques comprising the anarchist underground described in the novel.
This collection of repellent types includes not only The Professor and Comrade Ossipon but also other figures like Michaelis (possibly based on Kropotkin) and Karl Yundt (known as ‘the terrorist’) whose views are somewhat similar to those of the Incorruptible Professor, even though the latter despises the former. Yundt dreams of a cadre of ‘destroyers’, a band of men (they are all men, these committed idealists) ‘absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means’. Devoid of all pity for anything, including themselves, these ‘destroyers’ would enact the principle of ‘death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity’.
As a ‘dynamite novel’, an example of the newly emerging genre of espionage fiction, The Secret Agent is also an urban novel. Elsewhere critics have written much on this aspect of a book, which remains one of the great London stories with its descriptions of Westminster, Soho and Kensington set in the fin-de-siecle era. Here the city is a suffocating, hellish domain. It functions as the sordid backdrop for acts of depravity perpetrated by fragmentary beings prone to the ludicrous outcomes ‘of chance and our own natures’ as Michael Newton explains, hapless victims of ontological ambush, of ‘unexpected solutions of continuity, sudden holes in space and time’ to cite Conrad himself.
Is this ‘totally ironic artefact’ also a novel which diminishes all human agents and the human civilisation of which they claim to be part, as is stated by Fletcher and Bradbury in their essay on The Introverted Novel. Perhaps, but even if agents of destruction pass ‘unsuspected and deadly, like a pest’ through our streets, as does The Incorruptible Professor at the end of the narrative, it is also another human agent, a clear-sighted writer, who has unmasked the unpardonable ‘philosophical pretences’ articulating the megalomania of Fear. Here, laid bare, is the murky pathology of all deluded ideologues seeking to regenerate a fallen world but who, in fact, are driven by a vitriolic hatred of existence.

published in The Supplement Issue 37 Nov 2007

Illustration: Water Lane, 1980

Cyborg Apocalypse

In the future we will copulate with computers, we will all be Cyborgs, ‘mythic hybrids of machine and organism’ – the distinction between man and machine is based on a false proposition. If, as Haraway says, ‘the relation between organism and machine has been a border war’ we should step back and recognise that the machine is not the real enemy.
Let’s fuse with the machines – and the sooner the better! Hang on a minute – we already have!

Illustration: Cyborg Encounter, 2007

Nowhere Imperfect

A Provisional Cosmology

There are secret motions, out of sight, that lie concealed in matter – Lucretius

How can a self-activating universe emerge from nowhere?
Activity in the cosmic substrate (quantum vacuum) involves an indeterminate relationship, governed by the Uncertainty Principle, between the complimentary quantities of energy and time. The Uncertainty Principle is not an intellectual construct but a fundamental characteristic of phenomena.
This uncertainty relation allows for the transformation of ‘borrowed energy’ into a particle called a pion. At a subatomic level pairs of such exchange particles or mesons, provide the attractive intra-nuclear force between protons and neutrons (nucleons) within the atomic nucleus. These ‘virtual’ particles are the objective source of The Casimir Effect, a phenomenon that confirms the existence of minimal energy entities in apparently ‘empty’ space.
There is no absolute void and no such thing as absolutely empty space, even though the Uncertainty Principle ensures that subatomic activity in the void, or quantum vacuum, cannot be described with precise exactitude. A field of absolutely empty space cannot ‘exist’ because the Uncertainty Principle prohibits a field fixed absolutely at zero. In the quantum universe no field can have both a precise value (zero) and a precise rate of change (zero) simultaneously, consequently there will always be a minimum level of uncertainty, a certain level of irregularity, slight fluctuations in the density and velocity of particles. These non-uniform perturbations would be as small as they could be, but would, nevertheless, lead to anomalies in the otherwise smooth regularity of any emerging points of space-time generated by such irregular fluctuations through friction.
The Big Bang event can be understood as the explosive after-effect of an extended chain of irregular perturbations among fluctuating virtual particles generated by borrowed energy comprising the indeterminate pre-cosmic substrate at the quantum level. The density fluctuations already present in the initial space-time singularity, and observed in the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background), formed the basis of subsequent physical irregularities in the early material conditions of the universe and eventually gave rise to all the astronomical features of the observable cosmos.
These astronomical features are the by-product of a quantum eruption, much as the material expelled from a volcano is the by-product of a violent subterranean event. The outcome of this ‘eruption’ is an expanding red-shift universe of galaxies in space-time that, in due course, having exhausted its propulsive momentum, will revert to an original quantum state. In the interim, over immense periods of time, complex chemical chain-reactions, together with the interplay of forces and the synthesis of stellar elements, will engender all the phenomena of organisation and animation humans call ‘nature’, including living organisms such as bacteria, plants and animals on diverse planets. Notwithstanding the vast time-scales involved, ‘existence’ as experienced by these organisms, is as transient as the universe itself – a universe tending to disorder, reflecting latent chaos and where time is an emergent property arising from the red-shift expansion.
There is no substantive role for intelligence, imagination, self-awareness and other capacities of sentience in a value-neutral and non-purposive universe, although the development of sentience in humans gives rise to anthropomorphic interpretations of existence. Such interpretations are based on a false identification of structural organisation with thought. Even though these capacities – survival strategies of evolutionary adaptation – are of great value to physically weak organisms, they have no intrinsic significance. The same is true of all metaphysical speculation which, being a by-product or side effect of self-awareness, is disconnected from the factual basis of actual reality.
A condition known as the ‘no-boundary condition’ applies to both the manifest universe and the pre-cosmic quantum vacuum. Thus, just as there is no such phenomenon as ‘empty’ space, there is no possibility of any ‘edge’ demarcating either the physical macrocosm, or its quantum substrate, from any form of ‘outside’ above or beyond the manifest sphere.
Even taking into account the possibility of ‘other’ dimensions or the possible viability of the hypothetical ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, the substrate and the cosmic totality are indivisible and coextensive. There is no exterior or transcendent sphere of existence, just as there is no possibility of ‘non-existence’ because there is no absolute void: total nothingness cannot exist.
The answer to the perennial question of origination (where does the universe come from?) can be answered with reference to the quantum vacuum. But if we ask how this vacuum in its turn can exist and from where it derives its existence it must be said that the answer cannot be formulated with absolute exactitude. This failure of exactitude is the natural consequence of the Uncertainty Principle governing indeterminate relations between complimentary quantities, ensuring that the ‘given’ substrate perpetuates itself. Furthermore, this self-perpetuation cannot be seen as a 'genesis' or 'birth', or mode of becoming, for such an idea would imply that a void lacking a space-time continuum emerged from a state prior to its own existence – an outlandish and superfluous assumption.
The Uncertainty Principle also explains how, through non-uniformity (anisotropy) and the process of ‘borrowed’ energy, the quantum vacuum may give rise, from an imperfect ‘nowhere’, to any number of expanding space-time universes of finite extent .

Illustration: Spontaneous Creation, 2007