PREVIOUSLY… I got Long Covid, badly. Mostly hit me neurologically; Parkinsons’s and ME type symptoms. Then my wife got anal cancer. She’s been in remission for 2 years now, thank fuck… and we’re rebuilding our lives from that, slowly.
Meanwhile, we watched, isolated and housebound, as pretty much everyone else in the world who wasn’t a crip just decided to say Fuck Masks. Genocide as convenience. While literal fascism roams the land.
As a result of this, my magic has become more… militant. I say no more.
Yeah, so not had many spoons, as they say.
But as the year is ending – and also my infrequent newsletter is having to shut down because Mailchimp are cunts – I’m making a resolution.
To write shit down. Keep broadcasting when I can. Here, mostly.
I’m on as many of the non-Twitters as are reasonable (I hate Instagram the most, Bluesky, fucking Facebook or dear Tumblr probably easiest for me to actually see it.) But if it’s longer than a not-tweet, I’ll say it here.
Because I am angry, scared and so very disappointed in my fellow humans for the most part and am disinclined to take any shit from them, ever again. And I will keep talking, keep writing, while I still can. I have the hardware and nous to keep going if my neurology worsens.
I will therefore remain to remind you that this bitter old cunning-man, somehow about to turn 60 years old, is far from done.
After all these years of pain, fear, illness, rising literal fucking fascism and the worst of cyberpunk futures without hardly any of the good bits, I have come to a realisation. Well, a working model for me that fits the data.
This is Hell.
Once I realised and accepted that, the symbolism of that path kicked in hard.
It mostly stemmed from the continual use of it as a process and metaphor in Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon, which as I mention below has become to me what The Invisibles is for most chaotes – it combined so well with my stuff.
The process is called Catabasis. And you know how I love those cat puns.
At least while I walk through Hell (symbolically – only places I walk outdoors these days is to and fro doctors), life itself is not awful here. We’re both as well as possible considering, our son’s here for the holidays, I’m on a good drug regime for the symptoms.
And oh yeah I FUCKING KICKED FENTANYL.
Been on patches since the spine started some nine years ago – only thing that controlled the level 10 shooting arm pain – and was just left on them after the 2017 cyborg operation until my GP realised they could possibly be adding to my chronic fatigue and so we agreed to wean me off that shit.
I have to say my mood – which has ranged from black humour to black horror to black depression (to thankfully occasionally loving horniness with the missus which keeps us both stable, frankly) – immediately improved. But then again, they put me on that ol’fashioned morphine to wean me off the fentanyl and I also have weed so I am currently feeling pretty fucking good, to be honest. At least, the constant roar of pain is a murmur for now, so I can rub two brain cells together for once.
I had lost my optimism completely, in my catabasis. But now I remember the old battle-words…
We do not fight Nazis because we think we will win. We fight them because they are fucking Nazis.
Solidarity with the fighters for freedom under fascism. Yes, that includes Palestine, and oppressed Jews. It especially includes trans, non-binary and queer people. I think you may have gathered, crip people especially.
It includes any victim of those beliefs which Iain Banks condemned – any cause that makes children die.
Fuck them. The Useless Eaters will outlast your neglect and contempt out of pure fucking spite, one by one, until we go.
But that’s the thing about disabled people… life just keeps making more and more of us.
Anyway, on to more cheery stuff to see the new year out.
—
I read a lot of fiction. Because of my spinal injury, I have to read books solely as ebooks, on a tablet strapped above my head in bed, and that posture’s good for the cyborg spine bits so I read a couple of hours every night. Only fiction, or there’s a higher chance of bingeing-until-dawn/taking extensive notes like I’m on the fucking Rocinante on the float. (I stop on good cliffhanger chapters.)
Honestly, half of what I read this year was fairly generic genre material off Kindle Unlimited… but of the good stuff, I’d recommend…
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys – a very queer and trans friendly cozy post-apocalypse first contact story. Rich, deep, reads like silk. Just wonderful.
Conquest by Nina Allan – another banger by one of the most underrated women in Brit SF, this one a quietly told tale of a possible alien invasion only detected by a small group of late C20 conspiracy theorists (who, synchronistically enough, all seem to have lived in my various ends in Kent and South East London!).
The Exoskeleton Quartet by Shane Stadler – This is an extraordinary set of books exploring the human condition, always the core goal of SF, but it comes with a huge content warning because the first book is roughly 80% body horror about using a medically connected exoskeleton on condemned prisoners to automate causing severe agony in order to force out-of-body experiences… the detail on this is described very precisely. But if you can bear such, it goes to some amazing places, and a fuckload of Nazis die horribly.
I’m a big fan of Gareth Powell, but I hadn’t read his earlier work so his breakthrough Ack-Ack Macaque series was quite something. Crafty and vicious dissection of war, VR and politics through its titular Spitfire Ace and all-around bad-ass macaque.
Kirsty’s reading has tilted heavily towards queer romance as comfort food, and occasionally points me to some. I’m glad to see the biggest genre in the world open up and be accepted more these days, as there’s some excellent writing to be found. My favourites were The Unholy Trifecta series by AJ Sherwood (mostly gay but occasionally bi pairings of assassins, mercs and thieves with both civilians and their mutual battlefield adoption of a young girl who’s at least as smart as they are) and Colleen Cowley’s Clandestine Magic trilogy, a retelling of the early days of American Women’s Suffrage but in a universe where magic
A. works and
B. supposedly only men have it… and the woman who discovers that B. is a lie.
Another discovery was the work of qntm, a male Brit writer who debuted in the SCP Foundation forums with his short pieces, later fixed up into the book There Is No Antimemetics Division. Intensely clever but always readable, he delves into the impact on our world of anti-memes; ideas that do not want to be remembered or passed on, and take active measures to ensure this. All 4 of his novels are wonderful and I’d say Ed is the easiest entry point.
I liked Grant Morrison’s debut novel Luda well enough right up until the ending. Which was meh.
This was the year I discovered a sadly deceased woman SF writer had penned one of the all-time great time travel series. Kage Baker’s The Company runs to some 12 novels and 5 novellas, the last story published some 3 years after her death in 2009. These are just so damn clever. A megacorp discovers 2 world-changing pieces of kit: time travel (with limits) and immortality (with limits). In order to mazimise the profit from these, they recruit kids at the point of their deaths throughout time and send them back (often further back than their birth time) as immortal cyborg operatives to basically steal historical artefacts… and what happens when several groups of them rebel.(That time-travel-for-profit trick also pops up in our beloved St. Mary’s Priory series by Jodi Taylor, which continues to delight and, as usual, had a novel and a Xmas novella this year.) It smartly keeps the focus throughout the series on a handful of characters – one of whom, The Botanist Mendoza, becomes one of the all great heroines and so much more. A wonderful discovery, and a sad loss.
And, as I have every year since publication, I reread Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, which has become for me what The Invisibles was for practically every chaos magician in the Nineties, except not deliberately. (Although Nick is certainly smart enough to note that writing a book about alchemy and synchronicity is likely to be conducive to both.) I learn more about myself and my times on every read. I also read his latest, Titanium Noir: much shorter and less obviously complex, it’s a lean noir tale of a world where the rich (known as Titans) are, due to a side-effect of the immortality drugs only they get, physically huge. Guts capitalism with a stiletto.
Lots of telly – I praise the saints that someone got to make Slow Horses properly and that it’s a hit – and the usual constant FPS as my wellness sim.
Finished first Starfield run after wife let me get new XBox as early 60th/Xmas present. It was pretty fun, but buggy as fuck. Like life really – ooh, deep!
I really enjoyed Dead Island 2: found the Londoner character Jacob convincing and it’s a joy to play, like a less finicky Dying Light 2 – and funnier.
And a special shoutout to my online tabletop RPG groups. They’re the majority of my social life and I am so damn grateful for them. Extra big love to Tom and Matt, our GM’s.
So, you know, it’s not like Hell is that bad for me… but that constant hint of sulphur in every news item or development in automated callousness in the service of the TESCREAL fuckwits pervades everything.
Fuck them all.
Happy New Year.
May it bring you at least what you need, and only what you can bear.
First off… thanks for those who wrote back about One Thousand Days. Glad it struck a spark with folk, both crip and abled.
One of the things I mentioned there was my increasing involvement with other cyborgs and various disabled communities (god that sounds like some awful care home doesn’t it? I’m sticking with ‘crip groups’ thanks).
As a follow-up, here’s a piece I wrote for r/cyborgs_only: I’d been talking a bit about the Shrine of the Useless Eaters with Cy and she asked for my thoughts.
As I wrote this during the process of doing 1k Days, there’s come overlap; hope it’s still of some interest nonetheless.
I figured the easiest way in to a spirituality which didn’t require a religious adherence and was thus available to atheist/agnostic people was ancestor veneration in a kind of chaoc magic approach; and, as my old pal Ru Callender (who has a book out about his work as an alternative undertaker) taught me, we can choose our ancestors just as much as we choose our family-of-choice, creating ancestral lines of kith instead of kin.
TOWARDS A CYBORG SPIRITUALITY
I became a cyborg on 11 December 2017ce.
The procedure was a double discectomy with fusion of the C5 to C7 vertebrae, as a result of burst discs and the need to remove bone spurs from inside those vertebrae which were growing into my spinal nerves. This neurological damage was causing both severe shooting pain in both arms and a massive loss of sensation in my hands. (And also, a complete lack of humour re. Donald Trump jokes about his bone spurs.)
The operation was as successful as possible. The awful pain stopped, and most of the sensory loss in my hands was regained. Plus, I got a really sexy scar on my neck, and could give as answer when asked why it was there, that ‘I had my throat cut by professionals’.
I could and can still feel the place where the titanium was bolted to my skeleton, where the double helix latticework surrounding it was fusing with my bones. Last week, while thinking about the Borg Diem project, I came up with the term ‘Interfascia’ for that place ‘where the metal meets the meat’.
The other word I offered was ‘Borgods’. They are the subject of this piece.
Before I was a cyborg, I was a crip. Was never a healthy child (actually blinded by hay fever conjunctivitis at the age of 9 for a couple of days, always prone to flu and such, then diagnosed as Type II diabetic at 40 by developing gangrene in my foot after a martial arts injury). Diabetes leaves one prone to other ailments: in my case, Dupuytren’s Contracture (‘trigger finger’) and early onset arthritis in my knees.
I was also, I regret to say, involved with what Cy would now call Tryborg culture. I was one of the people involved in a web-based side project from the comic book Doktor Sleepless by Warren Ellis and Ivan Rodriguez. The book is set in a near-future where DIY transhumanists – known as Grinders – attempt to upgrade their bodies with whatever they have to hand. The book became a major influence on the biohacker movement.
Sorry about that.
(And even sorrier that Ellis was later outed as a serial sexual predator, using his fame and power to manipulate literally hundreds of women.)
But before all this, I was a nerd and a practicing magician.
My interest in what I usually just call ‘weird shit’ began at the age of seven, and persisted throughout a life which has had some quite odd moments. Because this began in the early Seventies and I was a working-poor kid, my resources were scarce. The local library was kind and gave me adult book access very early (Aleister Crowley before you’re ten is… educational). But British TV and other media at the time was rife with supernatural oddness, with shows like Children Of The Stones, Ace Of Wands, The Changes, Sky and others firing my imagination, alongside books by the likes of both Colin and Robert Anton Wilson, various fringe materials such as Chariots of the Gods? and Bermuda Triangle conspiracy theories, and the rise of paranormal celebrities such as Uri Geller.
A huge SF and horror nerd already, my paranormal experiences and love of low culture media combined into something I later discovered was being paralleled by magicians in Leeds and London; a form which eventually became known as chaos magic.
A key aspect of chaos magic, for those who don’t know, is that belief is treated as a tool: something which can be adopted and maintained fiercely for the duration of a magical working and then simply dropped and swapped for something else. As the system drew heavily from SF and fantasy (its eight pointed Chaosphere symbol from Michael Moorcock, the colours of magic associated with each point from Terry Pratchett), the use of pop culture characters as entities to be invoked or even worshipped was common.
My first exposure to the idea that we could create and work with new gods came from a Jewish atheist SF writer, Harlan Ellison. In the introduction to his 1975 collection Deathbird Stories, he wrote:
“As the time passes for men and women, so does it pass for gods, for they are made viable and substantial only through the massed beliefs of masses of men and women. And when puny mortals no longer worship at their altars, the gods die. To be replaced by newer, more relevant gods. Perhaps one day soon the time will pass for Jehovah and Buddha and Zoroaster and Brahma. Then the Earth will know other gods. Already we begin to worship these other, newer gods. Already the Church fights to hold its own. The young grow away from the old religions, the world seems to swing between the old and the new; more and more each day, interest in the occult, in the magical, in the phantasmagorical surges to the fore, leaving priests and rabbis and ministers concerned where their next god will come from. This group of stories deals with the new gods, with the new devils, with the modern incarnations of the little people and the wood sprites and the demons.
The grimoires and NECRONOMICONs of the gods of the freeway, of the ghetto blacks, of the coaxial cable; the paingod and the rock god and the god of neon; the god of legal tender, the god of business-as-usual and the gods that live in city streets and slot machines. The God of Smog and the God of Freudian Guilt. The Machine God. They are a strange, unpredictable lot, these new, vital, muscular gods. How we will come to worship them, what boons they may bestow, their moods and their limitations; these are the subjects of these stories. A New Testament of deities for the computerized age of confrontation and relevance. A grimoire and a guide. A pantheon of the holiest of holies for modern man. Know them now – they rule the nights through which we move.”
They certainly ruled mine.
Eventually, this would lead to a career as a Fortean journalist (I was the first to write longform on the Slenderman phenomenon and later covered the Waukesha tragedy caused by belief in that hyperreal entity for Fortean Times), involvement in political action (first in queer politics then opposition to Dominionist Christianity, the parent of the current Q and Proud Boy movements) and involvement with a series of public magical workings with a political leaning, such as various ceremonies connected to the British Discordian revival of interest in the work of Robert Anton Wilson (a lifelong crip due to childhood polio and a huge Star Trek fan) and several workings to curse the fascist Brexit project alongside the art-rock band The Indelicates.
With this as background, I would like to share some of my approach to working with gods – both known to be fictional and alleged to be historical – as a way of engaging with disability and cyborg existence.
When I fell ill in February of 2020 after giving a talk on magic and authenticity in London, I figured the flu-like symptoms would pass. When they did not, I thought I could handle the feeling of constant illness for a few months – I had dealt with the spinal problem and my cyborg transformation, I could handle this…
That was two and a half years ago. My condition, a form of Long Covid with neurological symptoms, got worse. And, in the midst of the strange times that awful disease has wrought, alongside the rise of blatant fascism worldwide, I fell into a deep depression.
Through lockdown and ever since, me and my wife (who has had ME/CFS for all of our nearly thirty years together and saw much that was painfully familiar in my condition) have had a tradition of making Sunday nights Date Night. We would make a nice meal and take turns choosing a movie to watch together. Often, these would be documentaries (not some folks’ idea of date material, but we both love learning new things – Neophiles, in Bob Wilson’s term). One that hit us both especially hard was Crip Camp (2020), about the early days of disability activism. This birthed in me a need to be more active in crip political agitation, but in our condition, there wasn’t much we could actually do aside from be grouchy on Twitter.
Then I picked out a Date Night film I had been interested in for some time: Marwencol (2010).
The film is a biography of the artist Mark Hogancamp, and his singular creation which gave the film its name. After a brutal mugging led to severe brain damage, Mark (like so many crips) had to develop a set of highly personal mental and physical approaches to his new existence. In his case, his toolkit was to build in his garden a hugely detailed model town in 1/12th scale, populated by customised figures of the GI Joe/Action Man variety.
This was partly a physical therapy, a way of redeveloping his hand/eye coordination using readily available hobby materials, but in developing the deep history of Marwencol (his conception of a small Belgian town occupied by the Nazis and then freed by a combination of American GIs and local resistance fighters), he was able to confront the trauma of his attack… by envisaging the various brutally killed Nazi figures as his abusers.
Whether he knew it consciously or not, that’s as direct a piece of sympathetic magic as I have ever heard of.
Back when I had the gangrenous foot, I was under enforced bedrest for about two months while the foot healed from the debridement of the rotting meat there. (Debridement – such a delicate term for such an agonising procedure to wake up from.)
While I lay in bed with this Cronenbergian vaginal opening granulating slowly, I acquired an XBox. I soon found that first person shooters were, for me at least, a kind of wellness sim. I could be someone who could walk! Run! JUMP! And gun down countless enemies while doing so. It kept me calm while I healed, and my love for FPS continues.
In the midst of my Long Covid depression, I had watched helplessly as the far right wing’s grip on the modern world tightened. The path from the Sad/Angry Puppies furore at the Hugo awards, the GamerGate ructions and their sequels, QAnon, Brexit mania and Trumpism seemed a clear line, and one with no good end.
I took again to my gaming habit, deciding an apt replay would be the modern reimagining of the Wolfenstein series. The modern incarnation is a far cry (yes, I also like Far Cry) from its 8-bit origin; the hero B.J. Blazkowicz now a philosophical warrior-poet fighting in a resistance in an alternate universe where the Nazis won and dominate the world.
Luckily – or perhaps fatedly – I found the limited edition of the game with the 1/12 scale figure of ‘Terror Billy’ was still available. And once I had my hands on this plastic incarnation of a character who, in the game New Colossus, becomes a cyborg from the neck down, I had an idea.
There seem to be an awful lot of cyborg protagonists in first person shooters. John-117, the Master Chief in the HALO series; the variously shaped and gendered incarnations of V in Cyberpunk 2077 – the synchronicity of the male version of V in the game sharing my name was not lost on me. And Adam Jensen of the Deus Ex prequels; whose often-memed line in the first game is for me a fundamental difference between us and the tryborgs…
“I never asked for this”.
Although I lacked both the money and the space to build an entire village of 1/12 scale cyborg heroes fighting the fash, I could at least make a small shrine to these new cyborg gods. My own private Marwencol.
As there was a space on my bookshelf opposite my bed where my Warren Ellis comics used to live, I felt that was the perfect area for something… righteous. Something I could see when I woke up every day, to help me get out of bed and get on with my life.
I gave up the idea of relative scale, but I did want one more 1/12 figure to balance BJ, so I went old school and acquired a vintage Steve Austin figure.
(The original Martin Caidin novels that The Six Million Dollar Man drew from were a lot stranger than the show, its Bigfoot encounter notwithstanding. For example, in Cyborg IV – published the same year as Deathbird Stories – Austin has his bionic limbs and sense organs removed and the interfaces used to join him with an armed space shuttle, making him a living spaceship.)
I picked up an Adam Jensen figure and one of Vic Stone aka Cyborg from Justice League and Doom Patrol; Luke Skywalker and Seven Of Nine joined them. And then I realised the shrine could also be not only an altar of sorts, as well as a visual symbol of resilience I sorely needed… it would connect to the long line of anti-fascist resistance fighters, and a memorial for all those lost to the Holocaust. So I expanded the remit to include other disabled heroes (Charles Xavier, Deadpool) as well as Jewish, Romani and trans exemplars. If I couldn’t find a figure that I could afford or fit in the space, I stuck a picture of them on the fake brick wall backing. I also included pictures of Hephaestos and of ‘actual’ cyborg heroes – Douglas Bader, Viktoria Modesta.
Upon that wall, I put the awful Nazi term for those they considered disposable, the ones that Niemöller forgot, the ones they truly first came for, a phrase I wanted to reclaim in the same way as we have the word ‘queer’…
“Unnütze Esser”
Useless Eaters.
The idea of ancestor worship is perhaps one of the oldest of human religious impulses. Many cultures would elevate their Beloved Dead to a form of higher spiritual significance, even to full godhood. In the various African Diaspora religions and magical systems such as voudon, this kind of elevation is still common.
From my experience with the Shrine of the Useless Eaters and half a century of working with spirit-like-entities ranging from classical gods and demons to the likes of John Constantine – while never quite believing in them, treating them as an interface to the unknowable Wyrd – I would suggest that honouring our cyborg ancestors of all stripes would be a good place to begin building a spiritual practice for cyborgs.
One advantage of this approach is that step backwards from full belief that chaos magic encourages. Allowing for the most atheist of us to play with these concepts, the ’psychological model’ of magic where the weird shit us mages do is just a set of tools to trick our brains into different kinds of functionality. As chaos magic’s unknowing godfather, Austin Osman Spare, used to say:
“Treat all such phenomena as if they are real, not as real”.
And as Alan Moore, who not only created my magical colleague John Constantine but also had a couple of odd occasions where he met him in the real world, once said:
‘The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.’
We can draw on our borgods for strength in times of crisis; we can invoke their characteristics into ourselves as needed. And we don’t have to ‘believe’ they are ‘real’: it’s a false dichotomy, as false as the one that separates our prosthetic parts from our meat and bone parts.
They are all Us.
(Much of my thinking around disability, cyborgs and magic comes from three friends and colleagues: Craig Slee aka Mr. VI, writing in Cold Albion, AI ethicist Dr. Damien Williams and my sensei David Southwell, creator of Hookland and founder of Folklore Against Fascism. I remain in their debt.
Written to Michael McCann’s score for Deus Ex: Human Revolution.)
For reasons I hope are self-evident, in this list, I draw no distinction between heroes and villains, ‘people’ and monsters. I do (mostly) draw a distinction between traumatic and elective cyborgs, leaving out the majority of the latter: a list of elective cyborgs would include pretty much all the secondary cast of Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex, Ghost In The Shell, half of Doktor Sleepless… and could be considered as try-and-succeed-borgs?
THEOLOGICAL
Nuada Airgetlám (‘the Silver Arm’); first king of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Silver arm was built by Dian Cécht.
Osiris; after his murder and dismemberment into 14 pieces by his brother Set, his wife Isis recovered his parts, except for his penis, which had been eaten by fish. Isis made him a strap-on.
Pelops: Greek hero, lost shoulder blade replaced with ivory construct by Hephaestos.
Icarus, kinda?
Freyja, Norse goddess of beauty, fertility, sex and war: wife of Odin; often described as weeping red-gold tears – her acclamation as a cyborg appears in the paper ‘The End Of The Human? The Cyborg Past And Present’ by Carole M. Cusack, as a post-Haraway riff.
-a version of her appears in the anime Cyborg 009 as a villain.
Vishpala, warrior-queen mentioned in the Rigvela: she lost a leg in battle and got an iron replacement The princess Vadhrimati lost a hands; gold replacement made – in both cases ‘by the gods’ (though my Hindu mythology is scant, there may be more on both these…)
Tezcatlipoca: his lost right foot replaced with obsidian.
Steve Austin/Jamie Summers/Barney Miller et al, The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-offs
Robocop.
-Half man. Half Machine. yadda yadda. A new FPS game with Peter Weller back in the role is coming soon. ) I note the not-great remake had Alex Murphy played by Joel Kinnaman, who also played Takeshi Kovacs in the first season of Altered Carbon – see below.)
The Terminators.
-For my money, the best being Cameron Baum, played by Summer Glau in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sorry, Arnie. (Though I must also mention Catherine Weaver, a T-1000 played by Shirley Manson.)
The Daleks and Cybermen and various other villains in Doctor Who
Root, from Person Of Interest.
-The first acolyte of the first artificial intelligence/god known only as The Machine, she integrated with The Machine first through data received via Bluetooth headsets, then by an updated cochlear implant installed after being tortured by the US intelligence officer known only as Control. If you haven’t seen Person Of Interest, I highly recommend it; not only is Amy Acker’s performance amazing, so is her eventual fate. And it’s much better than Westworld.
Adam Jensen: Deus Ex . He never asked for this.
V and Johnny Silverhand: Cyberpunk 2077.
Vic Stone aka Cyborg: member of both The Justice League and Doom Patrol at various points.
Seven Of Nine, Geordi Laforge, Airiam, Keyla Detmer, Sam Rutherford et al, Star Trek
Anakin and Luke Skywalker, General Grevious etc. You know where.
Master Chief and the early generations of Spartans in the HALO games.
Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road
Camina Drummer in The Expanse. Beltalowda!
Bucky Barnes, The Winter Soldier
Deathlok, Cable, no doubt several other Marvel characters, including Tony Stark post-Extremis. (I don’t keep up with the Big Two at this point.)
Frankenstein’s Monster!! Because of the electrodes (not bolts) in his neck.
Cliff Steele aka Robot-Man in Doom Patrol
BJ Blazkowicz, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus.
Molly Millions, Johnny Mnemonic and others in William Gibson’s Sprawl stories.
(Funny how Keanu’s played two cyborgs named Johnny… woah.)
Jane #57821 in Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer
Battle Angel Alita
Motoko Kusanagi in various versions of Ghost In The Shell
–SO many in anime!
The Tin Woodman in Oz
Helva, The Ship Who Sang: protagonist of the Anne McCaffrey series. One of several ‘brainships’ constructed from deformed babies whose growth was further restricted, and then grafted into titanium shells to be fused with spaceships. (NB how Steve Austin also became a spaceship for a time.)
The Shrike, aka the Lord of Pain, Angel of Final Atonement, Angel of Retribution from Beyond Time, in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos: a six-armed metal beast of ferocious killing ability, including the use of time travel in combat. Based on the DNA of human officer Fedmahn Kassad.
Takeshi Kovacs, and many other characters in Altered Carbon. (Sadly, the author Richard K. Morgan is a huge transphobe – ironic in a series where consciousness is commonly downloaded into different constructed body ‘sleeves’ of all genders…)
Murderbot. Seriously, you need to read Martha Wells’ Murderbot Chronicles.
We3: cybernetically enhanced military project turning a cat, a dog and a rabbit into killing machines, who escape and seek freedom. One of Grant Morrison’s (they/them) most heartbreaking comics.
The Company in Kage Baker’s time travel series: orphans kidnapped by a Time Police organisation, turned into immortal cyborgs.
The Peripherals in The Peripheral (both William Gibson’s book and the TV show, especially triple amputee Connor Penske) and the Marine Haptic soldiers therein.
Many characters in Shadowrun (I have to note here the truly unpleasant trope in that universe that the more cyberware one has, the less ‘soul’ one has. Originally a game-balancing mechanic to stop players making vastly overpowered cybermages, the implicit ableism was somewhat corrected in later editions.)
Mad-Eye Moody in Those Books By That TERF Woman.
John Probe aka M.A.C.H. 1 in the early issues of the classic 2000 AD comic. Probe, (Man Activated By Computopuncture Hyperpower) was a Steve Austin rip-off with more violence and moral ambiguity.
HISTORICAL
5th century B.C.E. (via Herodotus) Hegesistratus, a Greek soldier, lost a foot to torture; wooden prosthesis
-fought for the Persians against the Spartans who mutilated him
M. Sergius Silus (via Pliny), a Roman veteran of the Second Punic War against Carthage, wore an iron hand.
Ivar The Boneless: Viking warlord, famed for his many successful attacks on Britain. Appears to have at least worn metal splints for walking (does so in the TV show Vikings). The subject of a new novel by actor and disabled activist Nabil Shaban.
Gotz von Berlichingen. In 1508, he lost his right arm in the Battle of Landhut. He could afford to buy two technologically advanced iron arms with locking hand positions. He used his good hand to set a series of springs and releases so he could manipulate the artificial hand.
Tycho Brahe and his metal nose
James Edward Hanger: US Civil War veteran and engineer who upgraded his prosthetic leg and passed on the tech.
Douglas Bader: English WWII pilot who lost both legs in a plane crash. Captured by the Germans, escaped, was recaptured and sent to Colditz Castle, the infamous prison for escapee POW’s. He insisted to the commandant that not only should he keep his aluminium legs, but he should be permitted exercise walks in the countryside… during which, he stuffed the legs with Red Cross aid package chocolate and passed it around the local German civilians to subvert the population.
CURRENT
Viktoria Modesta: if you’ve not seen her Prototype video, treat yourself. Played a fine villain in the show Killjoys.
David Aguilar aka “Hand Solo”, The Lego prosthesis guy
Oscar Pistorius: perhaps the most problematic fave on the list, what with being a murderer and all.
Ruby Rose (she/they): the John Wick star suffered an injury while playing Batwoman on TV and had the same spinal operation that I did… and had to return to work a week later. She left the show after one season, citing this and other issues with the production.
Been quite a while since I wrote anything here. This is why.
My last public performance was at a Discordian-related event in London, Journey To Nutopia, on 23 Feb 2020ce. The subject was ‘Magic Is Real’.
In my talk, called ‘Tales From The Interface’ (which you can read below), I explored ideas around authenticity and the use of fiction in magic, referring to certain related work of the comics author Warren Ellis. The last part of the talk was a slide which read:
MAGIC WORKS
KNOW YOUR PATCH
LOVE MATTERS
PUNCH NAZIS
Three days after returning home from the gig, I fell ill. Like flu, but with more sweating and shaking. And it just would not go away.
(Four months after that, as I also note below, Ellis was outed as a serial sexual predator, having used his fame and influence to manipulate literally hundreds of young women in his profession for years. I could say much more about this, but I note it here because taking great care in who you listen to and why is a factor in how we got into this mess.)
Although I didn’t lose my sense of smell, a couple of weeks in I decided my other symptoms were close enough to this weird new disease known as SARS-COVID-19 to justify spending a delightful day playing NHS phone-chess, being passed from 111 to the COVID hotline to my surgery and back, only to be told that a diabetic with a chronic inflammatory disorder in his fifties wasn’t considered high risk enough to test for the disease because I hadn’t knowingly had contact with anyone who’d been out of the country recently.
Though I was getting sicker, I wasn’t in major respiratory distress. Rather than burden the NHS further, I stayed home. I’d handled twenty years of diabetes and arthritis: I’d had my throat cut by professionals and titanium bolted into my neck bones. I figured that I could tough this out for maybe three or four more months before completely losing my shit.
It has now been one thousand days since my illness began.
Just run that number around your head for a moment.
A thousand days. Twenty-four thousand hours.
One comparison would be that it was the length of the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Another would be, three-fifths the length of World War I and half the length of World War II.
In that time, I have become far more sick and disabled than I already was. I’ve lost most of my energy and resilience, in a manner extremely reminiscent of ME/CFS (my wife having suffered from this for 30 years, its effects are all too familiar).
I now only have the ability to leave the house for necessary medical or household reasons (always masked), and when I do, I usually fall prey to PEM – post-exertion malaise, where my chronic fatigue symptoms worsen and my body simply refuses to do anything but the basics for days after.
(I once had to spend 3 days doing nothing but shake after taking out a heavy bin bag.)
If I forget to put my N95 mask on when I answer the door for the post, I catch colds and flu at the drop of a hat.
I spent most of this time literally trembling at the cellular level, trying to sleep while drenched in sweat every night and soaking for half the day. As the condition worsened, I developed spasms in my arms, hands and sometimes my face. And my brain just… stopped working as well as it used to. We call it ‘brain fog’ but that doesn’t begin to cover how scary losing your cognition, your mind, actually is.
(I also have bouts of hiccups every single day, several times a day. Hiccups are hilarious, right? One of those basically funny bodily functions, like farting. Trust me, they stop being at all funny after the first few months.)
The process of traveling through various parts of the NHS with this ailment, while it was simultaneously being bombarded with Covid cases and strangled by Tory budget cuts has been… educational. In the second year, I was finally put onto what is delightfully termed the Vague Symptoms Path (also known as, somewhat ironically considering how long it took to reach it, the Rapid Diagnostic Services). This is a process of wide-scale tests to try and work out the cause of illnesses which are non-trivial to diagnose. It’s mostly a process of elimination.
At this point, they’re pretty sure I don’t have one of the major forms of cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, Lyme Disease, a variety of heart, liver and kidney diseases, brucellosis or thyroid nodules.
And, it’s not lupus.
After another year of waiting, I’m getting to see a neurologist really soon now…
In the last few months, a kindly GP decided that, if I couldn’t be diagnosed then they could at least try and treat the symptoms.
I was given some drugs to control the shaking and spasms – a combination of beta blockers (which have to be taken every six hours) and a muscle relaxant usually reserved for MS patients. For a month or two, I felt immensely better. The shaking and sweats pretty much stopped and the brain fog finally cleared. But they are becoming less effective. I once again have returned to trembling most of the time and the chronic fatigue symptoms never left me. Thankfully, most of my mind is still here.
Although I have never received an official diagnosis, the symptoms are a close fit what is now called Long Covid. Current estimates (which I suspect are on the low side) suggest over 1.2 million people suffer from Long Covid in the UK alone. It appears to cause damage to the entire circulatory system, possibly because of microscopic blood clots which the immune system cannot break down; the brain and heart are the two organs most severely affected. And, because of my not getting that early testing to confirm I’ve actually had Covid, they won’t admit me to the Long Covid clinic.
I have oddly fond memories of lockdown, especially compared to what followed. Weirdly, being chronically ill already, our lifestyle didn’t change very much, and my wife and I are always very content in each others’ company.
There was a sense of “we’re all in this together”. So many folk were revealed to be kind, generous and thoughtful of others in those days (like when my street, already fiercely resilient after three floods in eight years, set up doorstep disco parties every Saturday afternoon and they made me cry in the best way by playing ‘What’s Up’ by 4 Non Blondes – Sense8 fans will get why).
Meanwhile, most of the rest of the world – and the majority of the British Discordian tribe who had previously declared me as their shaman – grumbled their way through the entire lockdown. A notable event was certain members breaking lockdown to drive across national borders to enact a magical working which required no specific geographical location in which to be performed.
And, as soon as the least trustworthy and most blatantly corrupt government in British history told them they could, most of the country, and all too many of my friends, simply stopped wearing masks, went back out into the world and acted like it was all over.
As I watched all this, isolated in my house, with increasing horror, one phrase kept coming into mind…
Kobayashi Maru.
The Kobayashi Maru test first appears in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982). It’s a key event in Starfleet training: an exercise where a cadet crew have to try to save the ship of that name and its’ crew, which is stranded in enemy territory.
It is deliberately a no win scenario. You cannot rescue them at all, and you’ll almost certainly kill your crew trying.
The Kobayashi Mari is a test of character – an examination of how future Starfleet officers deal with something they cannot beat, can only try to ameliorate. How many people they try to save, how hard they try to do so and how they cope with failing.
(Famously, the only person to beat the test is James T. Kirk… who cheated. He got a commendation for that, but he later regretted never having actually faced that awful choice fully.)
COVID-19 was a Kobayashi Maru test for the entire world. A test of character in the face of unstoppable harm. And most of you failed it, badly.
In the thousand days that I’ve been stuck here, getting sicker and sicker, losing my ability to function in a world that increasingly excludes me and mine, I have watched people who swore they would strive for a better, more inclusive and kinder world completely abandon people like me. Running off to and organising every no-mask-mandate super-spreader event they could as soon as possible, partying in the middle of a plague. Almost completely abandoning all the creative ways and possibilities we found during lockdown to make the world a better, safer, more inclusive place for disabled and immunocompromised people.
I understand how hard it was, trust me on that. It must have been marvelous to feel free again, hug your friends, return to something like a normal life. But a fuckload of us couldn’t, and can’t, and may never be able to do so again.
For obvious reasons, I did not attend the funeral of beloved 23 tribe member Claudia Bolton. I also couldn’t bear to watch the live video of it… because from what I could see, not a single fucking one of those attending wore a mask to it. There were at least fifteen Covid cases afterward as a result. I don’t know how many of those converted to Long Covid, but I have sympathy for those for whom it did. But not much pity.
Before the brain fog symptoms caught me up, I did manage to do some writing. I was proud to have a piece in Paul Watson’s Rituals And Declarations volumes of folklore and resistance, called ‘Plastic Altars, Titanium Bones’, which talked about my cyborg transformation and the altar I created to keep me going through both that part of my Chapel Perilous and my Long Whatever, ‘The Shrine of the Useless Eaters’.
(‘Useless Eaters’ – ‘Unnütze Esser’ in German – was the Nazi term for the disabled people they rounded up, put in concentration camps and slaughtered. I intend to reclaim this term in much the same way we queers have reclaimed that one.)
Among the figures on the Shrine is Adam Jensen, protagonist of the Deus Ex prequel games, whose often-memed phrase was one I said to myself a lot during these thousand days…
“I never asked for this”.
The other thing I wrote was one of a collection of new essays for the Hilaritas edition of Robert Anton Wilson’s Sex Drugs and The Occult – A Journey Beyond Limits. It’s called ‘Spiral Architect’, and it was an honour to be among the creators who contributed, including Grant Morrison. (I even recorded a video of me reading it for a related Nutopia event.)
But after that, I was pretty much a zombie for over a year.
Last year, my wife, the artist Kirsty Hall, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Anal cancer, of all things – and believe me, we did all the black humour arse jokes possible. But the humour got pretty thin when I had to listen to my beloved scream in agony every time she took a shit, for a year.
When I told the 23 community this, I received a lot of well-wishing and kind messages… and then a bunch of them immediately posted anti-vaxx and anti-mask propaganda.
One of them, when I gently suggested gaining an understanding of such crip/chronically ill terms as ‘spoon theory’, just called me a cunt and told me to fuck off. Another told me, when I refused to continue an argument about a mutual acquaintance because I didn’t have the spoons (physical and mental energy) to do so, accused me of “hiding behind my disability”.
Failing the Kobayashi Maru while laughing your arses off.
Kirsty, thanks to the excellent work of St. James’ Hospital in Leeds, is now in full remission, but that year of fear and agony took its toll on both of us.
Kirsty underwent 6 weeks of radio/chemotherapy at St. Jimmy’s (the staff were fantastic… but we were aghast at how many visitors to this specialist cancer hospital did not wear masks). We spent weekdays there, staying in the hospital’s hotel wing for patients and carers – the closest thing to a holiday we have had in a long time – and coming home at weekends.
I was too ill to stay with Kirsty at the hospital for the last week, so I had to come home.
The second day I was home alone, 2 years to the day after I fell ill after that Nutopia event, our beloved cat Chiana dropped dead.
I found her cold, stiff corpse at the top of the stairs… then had to phone Kirsty at the cancer hospital to tell her, and then make arrangements for Chiana’s remains… all while being barely able to stand and walk.
So, here I am, nearing three years of this. My body spends most of its time acting as though I’m terrified – over-reaction of the sympathetic nervous system is my main symptom. And honestly, I am scared. Horrified, constantly, on top of this neurochemical tempest. And so very, very angry.
I have watched the world pretend this never happened, some saying it was a conspiracy caused by 5G and transexuals.Treating it as a mere blip in the steady march of late capitalism – as our new Prime Minister said, “Eat out to help out”. Behaving like the disease isn’t still out there, killing and maiming people daily.
I witnessed a community that pledged itself to the cause of making the world a better place, of pulling the Cosmic Trigger and sharing love and strength and harmony, mostly just rolling over and abandoning its most vulnerable people, conforming with the worst instincts of increasingly fascist capitalism and acting like everything will be Just Fine. Ignoring, or even agreeing with, the blatant culling of us Useless Eaters. Acting as though my life, Kirsty’s life and the countless others still at risk just don’t matter as much as their fun. Holding biting parties during a zombie apocalypse.
Some of them, though, have been marvelous throughout this. I am especially grateful to Chris Manley, who spent a lot of time driving us to and from the cancer hospital, picking up meds for us – he truly went above and beyond for us both. Tom Baker and Dan Sumption and their players have helped keep me somewhat sane with their online tabletop role play game sessions – pretty much the only social activity I have left. (I tried to run a game of my own – an occult riff on Mick Herron’s Slow Horses books, now a fine TV show – but after a few sessions, I found that I lacked the spoons to continue… my thanks to the patient players there.)
My new Hebden neighbour James Burt has been a great friend throughout, and respectful of our needs regarding possible further contagion. Some of the tribe have continued to maintain masking and other safety measures at their events, and to make those events available online where possible – Andrew O’Neill (whose BBC radio show Damned Andrew is superb) puts many of their comedy shows on Zoom and has done several Zoom-only shows.
I am also immensely grateful that, after mourning Chiana for six months, we adopted a new cat from a local rescue centre. Her name is Luna Ferocity Shadow: she was rescued from a home where the other cats bullied her. A Child of the Secret, just like me and Kirsty. And we adore her.
But honestly? Most of the people who called me friend, comrade or their shaman now fill me with nothing but a terrible sense of disappointment, abandonment and betrayal.
Some years ago, when I could still go to large scale events, I was involved in the accidental creation of a new religion: Wonderism. It drew from the Cosmic Trigger play and surrounding events, primarily inspired by a talk by John Higgs and the resulting poem by Salena Godden which gave Wonderism its rallying cry…
“Pessimism is for lightweights”.
(My part was the closing ceremony on the last night of the play, a magic ritual with a couple of hundred participants including Alan Moore, Adam Curtis and Jimmy Cauty. In that ritual, I talked about how the root of the word ‘conspiracy’ means ‘to breathe together’.
The bitter irony of that in times where I cannot risk breathing together with others without a N95 grade mask is not lost on me.)
I have so little optimism left in me now. Maybe that means I have finally become a lightweight… or perhaps, optimism is a function of one’s carrying capacity. Mine has been somewhat reduced as of late.
(And, frankly, my idea of a lightweight these days are the people who bitched so loudly about the mental stress of having to endure six months of lockdown, from the perspective of someone who has been housebound except for necessary medical excursions for five times as long.)
What little energy and magic I have left in my undoubtedly shortened lifespan will be spent on two linked causes: anti-fascism and disability activism. I shall be working with people who have shown actual solidarity through these times and communities who have proven they can actually be trusted, such as the Hookland and Folklore Against Fascism groups, and the growing community of cyborgs inspired by the work of people like The Cyborg Jillian Weise and performance artist Viktoria Modesta.
In those thousand days, we have lost so many people. Millions of unnecessary deaths; from Covid, from the war in Ukraine, from the murders of queer and trans people as a result of the fascist propaganda against them. Some of those losses hit me very hard indeed. As I started writing this, I heard that the great SF writer Greg Bear had died. The day after that, a fascist with an AR-15 assault rifle murdered 5 queer and trans people and maimed a dozen more at a drag event in the gay venue Club Q in Colorado Springs, the day before the Transgender Day Of Rememberance.
A week before that, we lost the comics artist Kevin O’Neill and (especially tragic for me, as his voice had carried me through some of the darkest points of my life) Kevin Conroy, the gay man who was the true voice of the Batman.
The loss which hurt me the most was Andrew Vachss, who died about a year ago. Andrew – who I knew slightly online and considered a personal hero for decades – was a lawyer and novelist who devoted his life and career to the protection of abused children and helping to understand and ameliorate the impact such abuse has upon society. He coined terms like ‘circle of trust’ to describe the places where these predators hunt, and ‘Children of the Secret’ for those of us who have suffered their attentions.
(He also sent Warren Ellis – an admirer of his work – a scathing tweet when Ellis was outed as a predator.)
With the destruction of Twitter under the command of its new owner and fash sympathiser Elon Musk, who has sided with people openly posting about disposing of the Useless Eaters (using that very term), another vital part of the disabled community’s fragile network is being destroyed. Meanwhile, the predators and their enablers – the likes of Jordan Peterson and even fucking Donald Trump – are being reinstated and given free rein.
Andrew Vachss wrote a Batman novel once, called The Ultimate Evil. It contains a haiku I think about often in these days of open fascist violence and manipulation, which Bruce Wayne’s mother Martha wrote for him when she learned that she had been targeted for assassination by a network of powerful pedophiles (because she too was a crime fighter with a secret identity… that of a rich socialite wife and mother). It was left in the care of Alfred to give to her son should he ever follow in her footsteps, on the day he became the embodiment of vengeance against them.
“Warrior, heed this
When you battle with demons
Aim not at their hearts”
The other line of Andrew’s I think about nearly every day is this…
“Behaviour is truth. You are what you DO.”
I have watched what most of you have done.
Do better.
If for no other reason than for enlightened self-interest, the logical next step from the selfishness I have seen on constant display from so damn many during these thousand days.
Wear masks. N95 grade. Insist on it at your events. Stream your events: those of us who can’t go would happily pay to watch them.
Think about access to your events if you insist on holding them. By which I mean; think about who they are inaccessible to and what to do about it. Don’t just mull it over amongst yourselves – talk with disabled people about this. As the saying goes:
‘Nothing about us without us.’
Get vaccinated unless you have an actual medical reason not to, and keep getting boosters. Stay informed: I understand it’s difficult to sort the actual truth about this disease and its continued presence from the conspiracy bullshit, but you have to try.
(A good start would be science journalist Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his Covid coverage.)
Stop supporting people who say it’s all over or that it doesn’t matter because it only affects the old and already sick. That’s literally the fascist extermination agenda, the Useless Eater Cull. Shun their fuckwit mouthpieces like Jordan Peterson and the never-ending parade of transphobes from JK Rowling to Joe Rogan, even (maybe especially) if you share them ‘ironically’.
And, to be clear: Disabled rights, trans rights, queer rights, non-binary rights… are human rights.
There’s a saying in the crip/chronic community: “disability is the one ‘minority’ anyone can join at any time”.
Or, as I put it; unless you’re lucky enough to die very suddenly, you will become disabled as you age, if not before.
Those of us with Long Covid and other immunocompromising illnesses, the crips and the chronics, are the crew of the Kobayashi Maru; stranded alone in enemy territory.
The difference is that, instead of having to risk your lives in trying to help us, you are protecting us all. If you don’t, you will end up stranded here with us.
Blimey, it’s been a long time since I updated this blog! There are all sorts of reasons: quickest way to sum these up and give you a clue as to what I’m doing next is to reproduce my latest newsletter…
CATERWAULING 17 June 2016ce
In which your narrator reboots after a crash
I am truly sorry about the gap between the last newsletter and now.
Basically, I did a lot of things, was too busy to write about them during them, and then fell over hard afterwards.
It’s something that never used to be talked about much concerning the effects of chronic illness (in my case, over a decade of Type II diabetes) – your body simply has less ‘energy’ to go round. Doing things, especially things involving a lot of travel, becomes incrementally difficult. Activists on these ‘invisible illnesses’ have come to use the metaphor of ‘spoons’ to describe this effect. I did a load of stuff, then I had no more spoons.
Here’s the things I did…
2nd of April was the marvellous Spirits Of Place event: hosted and envisioned by John Reppion. I was on the bill with some remarkable people, talking about the power of landscape, especially that of Liverpool and its environs. My talk, ‘Where The Buddleia Grows’ was on liminal spaces in urban magic, and seemed to go down well. You can read the text version over at Medium. Was an honour to be in that crew: meeting old acquaintances such as the great Ramsey Campbell and making many new friends. I also took advantage of the chance for a serious night of drinking with my partner-in-crime, David Southwell of Hookland fame.
On the 23rd of April, headed to That There London. I was called in to assist with a public magical working for Daisy Campbell and the Cosmic Trigger troupe: the immediate reason was that the gang were about to submit their bid for Arts Council funding for a second wave of the play next year. As a token of public interest in support of this, a Indiegogo was set up for that day to sell 123 tickets to the last London night of the show (which will happen, with or without the funding… but obviously it’ll be a lot easier with), and of course the first thing Daisy wanted was a ritual to nudge this result. In the middle of Hampstead Heath. The spirit of Eris was fully manifested (in the sense that a shitload of things almost went too wrong but not quite) and the Mischief was Managed. By the time we’d got a couple of rounds in at a nearby hostelry, those tickets had all sold. Took a little under three hours.
(I also got to crash at Daisy’s mum’s flat: which had that specifically odd sensation of sleeping in the home of a former Bond Girl.)
The last weekend of April, brought the extraordinarily fun and gorgeous Hebden Bridge Burlesque Festival. This 4 day event brought the cream of international performers to our little town & its environs. (This event is so inspiring that I wore four different outfits, none of which was in black!)
The peak was the glorious Perle Noire: seeing her perform was like watching the child of Josephine Baker and Eartha Kitt dance her exquisite arse off. A gracious woman, both on stage and off (had the chance to pay our respects in the pub after). Yet another triumph for our local community, and further proof that not even a flood can keep this town down.
The week after that, I went back down to the Smoke, to see one of the last performances of KEN: Terry Johnson’s play about his friendship and working with the late, great Ken Campbell, with Jeremy Stockwell in the title role. As Ken was a big influence on me in many ways (from seeing his staging of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at the Rainbow in 1980 to being the officiant at Daisy’s impromptu wedding at the Find The Others festival in 2014), I had to go. Not only were the play and the performances splendid, but I met two long-lost friends from the HHGG fan club ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha that I was an early member of! (And there was this whole part after the show involving naked people and psychedelic UV body paint. You had to be there.)
The next day was the pleasant change of going to a Treadwells event that I wasn’t actually speaking at: a one-day conference for the launch of the book The Secret Lore Of London. Christina and her gang always put on a good show, and this was no exception: the highlight for me was meeting John Constable aka John Crow, whose extraordinary shamanic and poetic work in, around and for the spirit of London’s lost was inspiring.
A couple of days back home, then down to Brighton for three days. The event I was going to was the Odditorium’s ‘Adventures On The Edge Of Culture’ for the Brighton Fringe. This featured my dear Daisy again, along with John Higgs, Melinda Gebbe and Alan Moore. This was as fascinating as you’d imagine… and then Higgs was kind enough to introduce me to Alan as a colleague.
Alan was utterly lovely. Listened to my somewhat burbling words, shook my hand 3 or 4 times… and then, when I said “there’s so much I’d love to talk to you about” said, “oh, we must go out for a drink next time I’m round your way”. Which, as it turns out, is fairly often. So, that happened.
The rest of the evening was spent nattering with Daisy & the crew (Alan had to make an early exit), which gave me the chance to natter with parts of that tribe I’d not spent as much time with as I’d liked before – people like Greg Wilson and Kermit Leveridge.
Day after was spent with my dear friends from that area that I’d not been in the same room as in years; my ex Lucy (one of the folk Neil Gaiman based Delirium in Sandman on) and her husband, the writer Adrian Bott. A fine reminder that time and circumstance don’t always triumph over love and friendship.
And then I got home and basically collapsed for a couple of weeks.
I have some spoons now. Here’s where they are being used…
Spent today doing final proof-reading of my next Darklore article, for the upcoming ninth volume of that ongoing Fortean compilation: an adaptation of my Treadwells talk on SF & fantasy’s influence on paganism and modern magic. And I just found out it’s right in front of a piece by Alan Moore… (Mine mentions him and Grant Morrison in the same breath – what could possibly go wrong?)
Tomorrow, back down to London to meet up with more of those old ZZ9 people. Folk there I’ve not set eyes on in a quarter of a century or more, so that’ll be interesting.
On the 23rd of the month, I will be getting a new tattoo: the White Horse of Uffington, inside of my right forearm. The timing of this upon the referendum date is not coincidental: seems the perfect time for an old cunning man like me to reaffirm his bond to Albion at a time when fascist and xenophobic forces are trying to make my land into a place of fear, suspicion and hatred. (RIP Jo Cox: she was MP for a nearby community and someone who clearly had no time for fear and hatred. May she be remembered for that, and not the manner of her death.)
Following this is Festival 23 on the 23rd (natch) of July and surrounding days. It’s going to be an incredible weekend, and the latest culmination of the 23 Current I’m honoured to be a part of. I’ll be doing a reading of selected works and teaching a workshop in Defence Against The Dark Arts 101. Say hi if you come along!
Thank you reading, and for your patience in my absence! (Now over 500 subscribers.) You can leave any time you want, of course… but hopefully I’ll have more to tell you, and more spoons to jingle.
Posted here for reference, one of the most important things I ever read in a comic book: the rant on the nature of ‘authenticity’ in music, personality and life from 2007’s Doktor Sleepless issue 5, “Your Imaginary Friend”.
(Worth noting that an earlier issue also contains the retelling of Alexandra David-Néel’s tulpa experience, which I discuss in my recent academic paper The Tulpa In The West.)
I was also recently delighted to discover one of the ur-texts for this piece: Faking It:The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor (ISBN: 9780571226597, which has the Big Bill Broonzy information and a treasury of other tales in this fascinating area. A must-read if any of this interests you.
All rights to this piece remain with writer Warren Ellis, artist Ivan Rodriguez and Avatar Press.
It’s 1991. Richey Manic is carving something into his arm because Steve Lamacq has suggested that The Manic Street Preachers lack an essential authenticity. What’s echoing in the backstage room is the voice of Ian Brown, still saying “Cos it’s 1989.Time to to get real.” In 1999 Godspeed You! Black Emperor start releasing CD’s sleeved in untreated cardboard. Intended or not, it denotes authenticity. Keeping it real. Like brown paper bags from Muji, founded 1980: Full name Mujirushi Ryohin, which means “No Brand, Quality Goods.”
Godspeed You! Black Emperor didn’t play the media game. Half of them were anarchists, and all of them hated the music industry. But of course they had a brand. You can’t help but notice that Naomi’s Klein’s book “No Logo” had a fucking logo on the front. Godspeed’s brand was authenticity. That’s what they had to sell. And if they didn’t sell records and gig tickets, then they were just 12 guys in Montreal eating ramen until they died. Richey Edwards couldn’t be Richey Manic, THAT RICHEY, unless he sold you on the concept that he was 4 real. Ian Brown and the Stone Roses couldn’t be that band, the band of the moment with the authentic voice that turned out to be the band in the right place at the right time and raised everyone up – unless they were more real than you.
Around the turn of the century Justin Timberlake began to carry around with him a group of black vocalists, whose job it apparently was, in live performances, to declare how “real” Justin Timberlake was before he began to sing. In 1938, sharp-dressed bluesman Big Bill Broonzy who’d been tearing up Chicago, played New York for the first time. But a blues guitarist in a good suit brewing up the primal muck of rock n’ roll with drummers and bassmen didn’t seem authentic enough to the Carnegie. So the concert programme described him as a poverty-stricken farmer who “had been prevailed upon to leave his mule and make his very first trek to the big city.” And they had him do acoustic guitar blues on his own. From there to his death twenty years later, he booked pretty much nothing but solo acoustic gigs. Because fake Big Bill Broonzy was deemed the authentic version.
No matter that he pioneered electric instruments in the blues, and was also recording with people like Pete Seeger, who wanted to take an axe to the cables when Dylan went electric in 1965. He changed his story in later years, but he was clearly offended by Dylan’s sudden inauthenticity, that maybe he’d been championing a fake all along. Because no one ever knew, or every one pretended to not know, that Bob Dylan was a fictional person. His authenticity was entirely constructed. Bob Dylan and Superman are the two greatest American myths created in the last century.
Who the hell wants to be real?
In 2006, Bob Dylan’s playing ” The Levee’s Gonna Break” Except the song’s called ” When the Levee Breaks” and it’s by Memphis Minnie. And she’s playing it in 1929, a few years before she moves to Chicago to tear up the town with Bill Broonzy. Who’s Memphis Minnie? One of the other great electric blues pioneers. And her name is actually Lizzie Douglas. And she’s not from Memphis either.
Authenticity? Authenticity is bullshit. Never more so than today. We can be anyone we can imagine being. We can be someone new every day.
You know why Grinders never got any respect in this town?
See if any of these comments are familiar:
‘You should be happy with who you are.’
‘Be yourself’.
‘That stuff is just fake.’
‘Don’t get any ideas above your station.’
‘Take that shit off.’
‘Dress Properly.’
‘Why can’t you be like everyone else?’
Yeah?
We are not real enough. We are not authentic to our society. Free speech does not extend to our own bodies.
But you know what? Back in the days before the internet, a kid called Robert Zimmerman said, “Fuck that, I’m going to be the man I dream of being. I’m going to be someone completely new and write about the end of the world because it’s the only thing worth talking about.” And that was one guy in Minnesota, in the same decade the telecommunications satellite was invented. Imagine what all of us, living here in the future, can achieve.
Be authentic to your dream, be authentic to your own ideas about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies and become your own invention. BE MAD SCIENTISTS.
Here at the end of the world, it’s the only thing worth doing.”
And… I’ve been commissioned by Fortean Times to write a feature on Slenderman for the next issue. This is a big deal for me, to put it mildly. I hope to do the subject – and the fall-out from the Wisconsin tragedy – justice.
It’s a strange world, and getting stranger by the day. Be safe out there, folks…
This has been kicking around in my head for a while…
The more I think about it, the more the corporate/government interference with the internet offends me on a very specific level. Here’s why:
It’s not their home – it’s Ours.
It’s like they’re walking uninvited into someone else’s house, moving all the furniture, throwing away the things they disapprove of and making it suit themselves – all without ever asking permission or forgiveness.
It offends me on the same gut level as any other breach of hospitality norms. They take the bread and salt of the internet and leave only their shit and piss.
And I won’t be having with it.
My gaff – my rules. It’s the oldest rule of turf there has ever been.
And the consequences of breaking that rule are, necessarily, severe.
I was googling for links describing the Right Man syndrome (for, of all things, a post to the AV Club’s review comments on this week episode of The Good Wife), and I found 2 things – there’s still not a vast amount of stuff on this vital model of extreme male behaviour, and something I wrote on the subject for the Dark Christianity LJ is still on the first page – and I don’t have it reprinted here. So, here it is (mostly, as you can see, quoting RAW) & a few additions after.
I’ve often mentioned here the theory of the Right Man/Violent Male as a model for the behaviour of the Dominionists. This was created by AE van Vogt and later developed by Colin Wilson – but there’s not much about it online.
“If, as Colin Wilson says, most of history has been the history of crime, this is because humans have the ability to retreat from existential reality into that peculiar construct which they call The “Real” Universe and I have been calling hypnosis. Any Platonic “Real” Universe is a model, an abstraction, which is comforting when we do not know what to do about the muddle of existential reality or ordinary experience. In this hypnosis, which is learned from others but then becomes self-induced, The “Real” Universe overwhelms us and large parts of existential, sensory-sensual experience are easily ignored, forgotten or repressed. The more totally we are hypnotized by The “Real” Universe, the more of existential experience we then edit out or blot out or blur into conformity with The “Real” Universe.
Concretely, the Violent Male—the extreme form of the Right Man1—edits out the suffering and pain he causes to others. That is only appearance and can be ignored. In The “Real” Universe, the victim is only one of Them—one of all the rotten bastards who have frustrated and mistreated the Right Man all his life. In existential reality, a large brutal male is beating a child; in The “Real” Universe of self-hypnosis, the Right Man is getting his just revenge on the oppressors who have abused him.
We have repeatedly employed Nietzsche’s metaphor in which existential reality is abysmal. In one dimension of meaning, this merely asserts that it is endless: the deeper you look into it, the more you see. It has the sense of infinity about it, whether or not it is topologically infinite in space-time.
The “Real” Universe—the model which has become experienced as the real universe—is, on the other hand, quite finite. It is compact and tidy, since it has been manufactured by discarding all the inconvenient parts of existential experience. This is why those self-hypnotized by a “Real” Universe of this sort can be so oblivious to the existential continuum around them. “How could a human being do something so cruel?” we sometimes ask in horror when an extreme Right Man is finally apprehended. The cruelty was “only” in the world of existential appearances; it does not exist in the edited and improved “Real” Universe of the Right Man. In The “Real” Universe, the Right Man is always Right.
The ghastly acceleration of violent, inexplicable and seemingly “pointless” crimes by Right Men in this century—and their hideous magnification into mass murders and war crimes by Right Men in governments—indicate the prevalence of this type of self-hypnosis and what Van Vogt calls “the inner horror” that accompanies it. This “inner horror” is a sense of total helplessness combined with the certainty of always being Right. It seems paradoxical, but the more totally Right a man becomes, the more helpless he also becomes. This is because being Right means “knowing” (gnosis) and “knowing” is understanding The “Real” Universe. Since The “Real” Universe is, by definition, “objective” and “outside us” and “not our creation,” we are made puny by it. We cannot act but only re-act—as The “Real” Universe pushes us, we push back. But it is bigger, so we will lose eventually. Our only defense is in being Right and fighting as dirty as possible.
This, I think, is in succinct form the philosophy of Adolph Hitler. It is the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, and of any rapist or thug you can find in any prison in the world. Where Single Vision reigns—where The “Real” Universe is outside us and impersonal—this shadow-world of violence and horror follows in its wake.”
The new stuff: Found a couple of excellent pieces on the subject from blogger PHinn – here’s a shortish quote, drawing mostly from Colin Wilson’s A Criminal History of Mankind:
“The notion of ‘losing face’ suggests an interesting alternative line of thought. It is obviously connected, for example, with the cruelty of Himmler and Stalin when their absolute authority was questioned. They were both men with a touchy sense of self-esteem, so that their response to any suspected insult was vindictive rage. Another characteristic of both men was a conviction they they were always right, and a total inability to admit that they might ever be wrong.”
“Himmlers and Stalins are, fortunately, rare; but the type is surprisingly common. The credit for recognising this goes to A.E. Van Vogt who is also the author of a number of brilliant psychological studies. Van Vogt’s concept of the ‘Right Man’ or ‘violent man’ is so important to the understanding of criminality that it deserves to be considered at length…”
[…]
“In 1954, Van Vogt began work on a war novel called The Violent Man, which was set in a Chinese prison camp. The commandant of the camp is one of those savagely authoritarian figures who would instantly, and without hesitation, order the execution of anyone who challenges his authority. Van Vogt was creating the type from observation of men like Hitler and Stalin. And, as he thought about the murderous behaviour of the commandant, he found himself wondering: ‘What could motivate a man like that?’ Why is it that some men believe that anyone who contradicts them is either dishonest or downright wicked? Do they really believe, in their heart of hearts, that they are gods who are incapable of being fallible? If so are, are they in some sense insane, like a man who thinks he is Julius Caesar?”
“Looking around for examples, it struck Van Vogt that male authoritarian behaviour is far too commonplace to be regarded as insanity. […] [For example,] marriage seems to bring out the ‘authoritarian’ personality in many males, according to Van Vogt’s observation.”
[…]
“… ‘the violent man’ or the ‘Right Man’ […] is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem — to feel he is a ‘somebody’. He is obsessed by the question of ‘losing face’, so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong.”
PHinn knows what he’s talking about and is well worth reading on the subject.
For me… Colin Wilson makes a good case in Criminal History that the Right Men were the drivers of civilization – they tend to be charming when not pushed, smart and driven at what they do, and usually unconcerned by the consequences of their need to be Right – in short, excellent generals, leaders and despots. But the price of having them eventually becomes too high.
I think that time is now.
Dunno about you, but I’m seeing signs that this habit of thought is appearing more and more, especially in the intersection of politics & religion.
It’s impossible to negotiate with a Right Man – so a prevalence of them appearing in, say, the leadership of various extreme Dominionist Xtian paths makes any kind of resolution of opposing philosophies almost moot. They Are Right. Can’t argue with that. But, knowing how their rage cannot fail but descend if you insist (however politely and calmly) that they are in error… well, I leave that as an exercise for the combat philosophers in the audience. (And I know there’re a few – Hi Damien!)
The fewer of these in the world, the better. I don’t mean slotting them – I mean breaking them. Force them to show their monstrous nature whenever possible. Taunt them, tell jokes, satirize them where they can’t help but see it. Drop these fuckers like Cain dropped Abel, like Godzilla dropped Tokyo. Break their wills, so hard and strong but oh so easily shattered.
Because they’re as Wrong as men can be.
(Colin Wilson’s books on the Right Man, Criminal History… The Killer & Written in Blood are all still available, as is van Vogt’s initial Report on the Violent Male.)
“A constitutional amendment was offered to create a new fourth branch of government for American citizens whose ‘primary residences were virtual networks’.” – Bruce Sterling, Distraction
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” – John Perry Barlow
“The general concept is simple, there are people that want to send a message that the Internet is a sovereign territory” – Barrett Lyon
————————-
I do not trust the government of the country of my birth. I do not feel any loyalty to them, or any other country, whatsoever. At best, I see them as an especially powerful mafia I have to kowtow to and buy services from. The closest thing to patriotism I have ever felt is to the Internet.
So, why can’t I take Internet as my nationality?
Barlow’s Declaration of the the Independence of Cyberspace is now nearly fifteen years old – which coincidentally is about how long I’ve been online. The internet was a very different beastie back then.
In the last couple of days, the fallout from the Wikileaks affair has spread far and wide. Julian Assange is in a British jail on what even skeptical observers note is a rather enthusiastic prosecution of an alleged sexual assault charge. Few doubt the real reason he is there is pressure from the US government. Ranking members of that government have called for his assassination. Wikileaks has been hit by multiple DDoS attacks – and, perhaps inevitably, Anonymous have responded with a wave of DDoS attacks of their own against targets which have supported the pressure on Wikileaks and Assange (from Paypal, Mastercard and Visa to the Swiss bank who froze his assets).
On the same day as Assange was arrested, the US Dept of State sent out a press notice, thus:
The United States is pleased to announce that it will host UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011, from May 1 – May 3 in Washington, D.C. UNESCO is the only UN agency with the mandate to promote freedom of expression and its corollary, freedom of the press.
…New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals’ right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.
I’m not quite sure what is worse – the staggering hypocrisy of this, or that the US think we’ll not notice that, or that they simply don’t care.
My own country’s government – run by a weak coalition government which is acting like they have a landslide mandate – is cutting vital services to the poor and disadvantaged to pay for deficits caused by their banking pals’ having been caught running the largest Ponzi scheme in human history… and their representatives have the gall to blame those poor and disadvantaged for the financial mess. Students are taking to the streets in protest. They are not my rulers, except by virtue of monopoly of violence and general habit.
There’s plenty of precedent for dual-citizenship (such as my being both a citizen of UK and EU), as well as transnational exemptions based on residential status – think diplomatic immunity. (And if ever there was a system that sums up the idea of privilege overriding local law, it’s diplomatic immunity… though as a quick-and-dirty way to get Internet Citizens protected, granting all such citizens diplomatic status under the Vienna Convention would do nicely! After all, every Internet Citizen is potentially a post-state actor unto themselves…)
There’s also precedent in such ideas as the World Citizen aspect of the Bahá’í Faith, as well as libertarian proposals for independent states such as Sealand.
Citizenship implies abiding by, and contributing to, a social contract. Doing Your Bit. I have to tell you I’m far happier doing that for the internet than for any state. It’s rules, customs and rituals make more intuitive sense to me than any state I have ever heard of. And yes, I would cheerfully give up my right to vote in the UK and EU for the rights and responsibilities of Internet Citizenship. (Dear David Cameron – that’s what a Big Society really fucking means.)
(Of course there’s intrinsic problems with being Citizen Internet. As I was writing this, I had an ISP issue that required multiple reboots of router & 2 hours on tech support. The physical infrastructure of the internet is indeed reliant on meatspace hardware located in post-Westphalian states. But then again, a huge amount of the wealth and culture of those states is now internet-based… some form of detente is surely negotiable. And perhaps the Wikileaks fallout is the first ugly step towards such a detente.)
(I’m also very aware that saying The Internet is a gross oversimplification of a whole bunch of different, sometimes competing, cultures. A key issue would be finding some common ground among all users – from attitudes to censorship to trolling to vandalism. But having a set of ground rules all citizens can accord to is surely the first necessary step for a citizenship, yes?)
The single biggest issue with declaring the internet as a sovereign territory is that nation-states have nothing to gain, and much to lose, from this. But then again, that doesn’t make it unthinkable – those nations once also had a lot to lose by making slavery illegal. (I can imagine quite similar arguments from them, too – “We own that! You can’t take our property!”) The quote from Bruce Sterling’s political SF novel Distraction comes from near the end of the book, after a post-financial crash US has to negotiate with a new power within it’s borders, nomadic tribes who conduct most of their social admin and political apparatus online (think Whuffie on steroids). I can easily imagine circumstances where the US would have to come to an understanding with non-state (or rather, post-state) actors. Another quote from Distraction goes, “Politics is the art of reconciling aspirations”.
OK – so let’s assume through some miracle the Powers That Be allow Internet to be recognised as a nationality. There’s a rotating crowd of randomly selected Anons sitting at the UN or something. What does that actually do?
One advantage I can see is that all those Blue Laws which use the phrase “based on the prevailing standards of the community” go away. My community is the Internet. Our standard for sexual freedom is /b/. (Obvious exception – and perhaps a necessary precondition – is zero-tolerance of actual child pornography and images of actual rape.) I also imagine that property and privacy laws would develop rather differently… the most important part for me is that those who wish not to play the same games as their home state have somewhere to call home. It would also be somewhere (for a rather virtual definition of ‘somewhere’, of course) where organisation to survive failed states and other antiquated tribes can be accomplished.
No doubt existing state actors would cause all kinds of problems for the Internet Citizen – governments tend to do that. But then again, they do that between each other – as the Wikileaks cables clearly show.
And for the states which claim to be democracies, it’ll show one possible result of truly sharing power among the people.
——————
NB – This isn’t a working proposal. It’s not even really a manifesto, yet. It’s perhaps just a naive dream… but it’s one that obsesses me increasingly. If anyone has useful ideas to contribute to this, sing out!
“Politics is the art of reconciling aspirations.” Bruce Sterling, Distraction
Election day begins. And, for the first time in the 28 years I have been eligible to do so, I am going to vote.
I always vowed that I would never ever do so, unless a candidate or party came along that were supporting at least some of my non-standard views, were not merely players in the status-quo game. I also vowed I’d never vote against a party or position rather than for one, unless the BNP or similar scumbags stood a chance of winning.
(How serious was I about that? I didn’t vote against Thatcher.)
I despise party politics. I think it a vile mash of knee-jerk bollocks veneered with hypocrisy and histrionics. I’ve seen good, honourable people I knew personally become part of the party machinery and rendered either irrelevant or absorbed into the Borg Continuum. Churchill’s line about Democracy being “the worst system of government except for all the others” never struck me as enough excuse to support it. My reply to questions on why I didn’t vote was, “Same reason I don’t gamble in Vegas – the House always wins.” The longer version is; governments effectively perform experiments on the entire population of their country while in power, based not on science but various economic and (HAHAHAHA) moral principles, with no training in doing anything other than winning and dealing. I’d love to see candidates have to show an understanding of this simple fact and act accordingly – rather than their usual skills of rhetoric and corruption.
I’ve worked in the British Civil Service (Treasury), so I’ve seen how the game is played. Like working in a sausage factory, but far worse for your sense of smell.
I was one of the few on the night that misbegotten mad-eyed cuntbag Tony Blair was elected who stated outright that he’d be a worse whore than the Tories for corporate cock. That ended any chance of voting for the working-man-gutted version of Labour. And the behaviour of that vile man we called The Smiler and his glum successor in regard to unjust foreign adventurism, erosion of civil liberties and in the end their inability to realise the oligarchs they served would sell even them into the ground – and then demand compensation when the economy noticed the fraud – and Labour gave it to them… no way could I ever vote for them, even to stop a return to Conservative rule.
My disgust for the Tory hypocrisy on matters such as homosexuality, and their utter disregard (now shared by ‘Labour’) for the non-rich, non-elites renders them unacceptable under any circumstances to be given power again. They think they deserve to rule us plebs – reason enough for them to never do so ever again.
The LibDems blew their chance with me by their cowardly “oh we’ll fix it later” attitude to the Digital Economy Act (and that after writing personally to my local MP on the subject, I was fobbed off with press releases.) Also, another status-quo white public schoolboy as leader. Same song, slightly different verse.
Greens just seem overcommitted to their special-interest angle (and a little Luddite for my taste) and the other small parties are right-wing wankers of various stripes.
I also never considered it right to just turn up and spoil the ballot paper, or just piss it away on a Monster Raving Loony Party-like candidate. Given the options I faced, I felt (like that line in Slacker) that withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy, so that’s what I did.
So why change the habits of an adult lifetime now?
Because I have a local candidate whose platform comes from the poor bastards who usually just suffer political decisions rather than make them – ordinary people. He stands for a controversial and important position in social change – drug legalisation. And, in the very likely hung parliament, it’s a time when a single voice could actually be heard and do some good.
(More on the People’s Manifesto here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People’s_Manifesto)
EDIT: One way that I think voting should be changed is to allow actual voting against a candidate, rather than having to vote for someone else as a protest/attempt to curb them. Simple enough – one column for Yes, one for No. You can tick one candidate in one column, not both. That way, those who wish to express the (all-too-common) view that “they’re all scum but this fucker shouldn’t be allowed near anything even vaguely resembling power” can be accounted for.
