Catabasis

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.

I maintain a list of other contact points here: https://linktr.ee/catvincent

Like John Wick, I’m thinking I’m back.

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.

One Thousand Days

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.

Love matters. Punch Nazis.

Overdue update

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!)


So many amazing acts; including our town’s first Naked Girls Reading event, where our own Heidi Bang Tidy read one of my wife’s blog posts about working with the Hebden flood food relief, which had all of us, including Kirsty, in tears.

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.)

Next week, Hebden Bridge is having an extra Christmas because the flood buggered up the last one. Following that, back Darn Sarf: I’m giving a talk on the 27th at the first Art Arcana event, BORDERLANDS, organised by the immersive theatre/ritual troupe Foolish People: tickets are free if you want to pop along, but do book first. My talk is called “Betwixt And Between”.

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.

 

 

Cosmic Trigger 2: Night of the Fools

thothfool

23rd November of this year was the anniversary of a lot of things: among others, it was the birthdays of both Harpo Marx and Doctor Who. It was also the first anniversary of the end of the Cosmic Trigger: Find The Others festival, which included my performing an impromptu wedding for writer/director Daisy Campbell and her long time partner Greg.

And, because Daisy literally can’t avoid biting off more than any rational person could chew, then swallowing the lot, it marked the start of the process of staging the Cosmic Trigger play… including, Eris Willing, a US performance in Robert Anton Wilson’s final home of Santa Cruz, California.

To set the process going, Daisy and the Trigger Pullers held an event in London – the first of 22, each connecting to a Tarot Major Arcana. This was the Night of the Fool(s) – and I was asked to give a (23 minute, natch) talk. I decided to look at how The Fool, synchronicity and magic connect… and opened a whole can of worms for myself in the process.

By request, here’s that talk in full, with links to quoted folk added.

Continue reading “Cosmic Trigger 2: Night of the Fools”

Anomalous Engineering

anom
anom copyAnd because it’s just not been a busy enough week…

I’m involved in a new project, Anomalous Engineering.

Anomalous Engineering is the banner under which you’ll find unique works of cultural investigation. Finding Meaning in the Mundane, using Pop Cultureto expand on Esoterica. Practising Word Magic and image juxtaposition to reveal the Weird, hiding in Plain SightWeaponised Metaphysics and Improvised Expositional Devices.

Ghost Tribes of the Future, stranded in the Eternal Now. Time travelling Malcontentshacking ontology and dropping theory bombs. Offering up uncommon futures and profane visions of the present.

Anomalous Engineering is a Label, not a Band.

I’m very excited to be be label-mates with old friends such as M1k3y P1rat3, Emily Dare and Damian Williams, and other talented folk like Jenka Gurfinkel, Steen Comer and Jay Owens, with others to appear soon.

This is in the very early stages, so the url of anomalous.engineering isn’t quite ready; but the first pieces have appeared at both Medium and a placeholder WordPress blog.

So far, I’ve included revised versions of older pieces no longer available at their original site…

‘The Tribe of the Strange: Origin Myth’

‘Into The Hyper-Real’

‘Infinite Diversity’

‘Rate Of Return: Woolwich, 4GW and Kayfabe’

…and original work from us all, including some collaborative pieces (think of them as split singles and/or duets) will follow.

I think Anomalous Engineering may be worth a bookmark if the subject of, oh I dunno, our future as a species is of interest to you…

(Oh: and Boing Boing posted a link to my Robert Anton Wilson talk video, which was nice.)

Catch-up: Speaking on Fandom, Religion, Robert Anton Wilson

Been a while since I updated, and a fair bit happened in the interim… (and I’m not even mentioning the many splendid gigs I went to!). The last 5 weeks were especially busy.

The end of July had a personal first: I was invited to give a lecture at an academic conference, based on blind-read peer review selection of my paper. This was a big deal for someone with no college at all!

The conference was on Fandom and Religion at the University of Leicester. It was a fascinating three days. Science fiction and fantasy fandom was only a small part of the range – there were great talks on the religious aspects of everything from Polish football teams to music fans (two talks alone on Bono!).

My talk was called The Tulpa In The West (which you can read at that link to academia.edu) here’s the abstract;

The concept of the Tulpa first appears in Western thought within the writings of world traveller and mystic Alexandra David-Neel in 1929, in her book Magic And Mystery In Tibet. In David-Neel’s account, the Tulpa (which she translates as ‘thought-form’) is a human-form, physically manifest ‘spirit’ entity created by her Buddhist-trained visualization and meditation. After creating her tulpa, she lost control of both its form and intent, having to eventually banish it back to wherever it came from. This concept has infiltrated both popular culture and the occultism of the 20th and 21st century.

Authors such as Walter B. Gibson (the creator of The Shadow) and comics scribe Alvin Schwartz have used the tulpa concept to describe elements of fictive reality leaking into the ‘real’ world. The tulpa has appeared in a variety of other modern works, ranging from TV shows such as Supernatural to the near-future science fiction comic book Doktor Sleepless. It also formed a major element in the origin of the fictionally-derived but potent urban myth of The Slenderman, and has led to magical practices such as the chaos magic ‘egregore’ summonings and the internet-originated, fandom-adjacent act of ‘tulpamancy’. I discuss the rise of this Westernised conception of the tulpa, its considerable variance from the actual praxis of Tibetan Buddhist worship and its implications for both our post-structural, ‘hyperreal’ society and modern occult praxis.

My enormous thanks to the scholars who organised, spoke at and attended this conference, who were uniformly kind and friendly to an unschooled weirdo.

Last week was a double-header. Some of you might recall my involvement in the stage version of Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger (as co-worker at the Liverpool street ritual which channeled the synchronicity powers of both Carl Jung and John Constantine, and then my being the surprise celebrant for director Daisy Campbell’s impromptu wedding the day after the premiere last November)… and that I gave a talk earlier in the year at Senate House Library on the subject of Wilson.

On 27 August, I gave a very expanded version of this talk at my beloved Treadwells bookshop, which seemed to go down well. I’ll hopefully be posting a YouTube video of the talk over the weekend for those unable to attend. As Daisy, Kate Alderton (who played Arlen Wilson in the play) and my Daily Grail colleague/instigator/KLF biographer John Higgs were in the audience, it was quite the reunion… and one which continued into the next day.

On the 28th, John Higgs held the launch for his new book, ‘Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense Of The 20th Century‘, which I can’t recommend too highly. This book deserves to be as big a hit as A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME & read by far more of its purchasers.

It takes all the major developments through that century – from shifts in art and culture to the end of empires, the birth of science fiction and our networked world – and not only explains their development lucidly and ties the whole lot together, he makes it downright hilarious in places. (Especially how he explains postmodernism by comparing it to Super Mario Bros.)

It was great to see the enthusiasm for John’s work here, and meet up with even more of the Cosmic Trigger crew. Even more exciting: Daisy unveiled plans to bring the play to the US in 2017, the tenth anniversary of Bob’s Death. Santa Cruz, Ca, 23 July. Make a note!

Talks and talking

I did a podcast a couple of days with my friend and fellow Grinder Mikey Pirate (who is totally not the leader of an Asteroid Death Cult): we talked about the usual stuff – hyperreal religion, metafiction, Trickster Gods, Slenderman, Babylon 5‘s Rangers and why those who cosplay the Engineers from Prometheus might not be the nicest people to have over for a cup of tea.

Here it is:

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Next week, I’m giving two different talks in London on two consecutive days:

22nd April, I’m speaking at the Royal College of Art’s Battersea campus (RCA students only, sadly) on neopaganism, the hyperreal (again), authenticity and Midsummer.     Details here.

On the 23rd, appropriately enough, I’m giving a talk on ‘Robert Anton Wilson – Gnostic Agnostic’ at the University of London’s Senate House Library’s ‘Marginal Presences’ Symposium – there should still be tickets available for this, and you can learn more here.

Killing Slenderman, in Darklore 7: with footnotes!

I’m happy to announce the publication of Darklore, volume 7 by Daily Grail Publishing.

This year’s book is another stunning collection of the best of modern Forteana – and it also contains the second half of my look at the way the Slenderman meme is infiltrating the ‘real’ world.

This piece, Killing Slenderman, looks at what this could mean and what to do about it – taking on such examples of the fictional entering the quotidian as Alan Moore’s meetings with his own creation John Constantine, and Grant Morrison’s near-death experience writing The Invisibles.

As with Part One (which is still free to download as a pdf article here), I’ve put an extensive set of footnotes and links on the site – you can find that right here – just scroll down part the Part One notes.) I include a little more detail in exactly how, as a combat magician, I might deal with a Slenderman incursion.

And remember… No Wifin.

The Right Man/Violent Male

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.

Here is a lengthy but excellent consideration of the model by Robert Anton Wilson, which puts the model in context.

“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.)