working notes from the textual underground
CLAY LOWE
Soulcruzer is my public notebook—a place where walking, writing and lived experience meet story, myth, psychology, technology and the unfinished business of becoming human.
The subjects wander, but the deeper inquiry remains: what shapes a life, who gets to author it, and what might become possible when we learn to see our stories as constructions rather than commandments?
Apocalypse has become a cultural operating system A new review of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism examines their argument that climate anxiety,
I went back through the passages I’d highlighted in Thee Psychick Bible and found a pattern I hadn’t quite seen while reading the book in
This is what I love: waking up in a field, watching the sun rise, listening to the birds and sipping black coffee. The sky is
The body has its own clocks. What interests me here is the mismatch between the body’s rhythm and the story the working day tells about
Culture is the expression of states of mind rooted in the effects of behavioural conditioning. Which means culture isn’t merely what a group believes. It’s
Time is a nonrenewable resource, but that language can make a life sound like a battery slowly running down. Use it wisely. Don’t waste a
What if? Two small words with a hinge between them. Most questions ask us to account for the world as it is. What happened? Why
You are haunted. Not by the dead, but by the versions of yourself that never got to breathe. We all carry them—the ghosts of the
At a September campfire in South Brent, Lin Yutang’s poet, peasant and vagabond become three ways of knowing: seeing, touching and moving through life.
On Star Trek at 60, the fictional heroes who offered me possible selves, and the frontier that kept moving from ships to terrain to the page.
What catches me in Angie Hobbs’s talk isn’t simply the claim that Plato anticipated fake news, demagogues and the slide from democracy into tyranny. Ancient
The mirror is a monster for a lot of people. I know this because I have stood in front of it and felt the room
Beat the algorithms
I am a writer, blogger and barefoot philosopher. I use that last word in its oldest sense: a lover of wisdom, someone trying to learn how to live. Philosophy, for me, belongs in the street, the kitchen, the garden and the difficult conversation. It begins wherever our ideas about life collide with the life we are actually living.
Soulcruzer is where I conduct that inquiry in public. I have been writing here since 2004, following my curiosity through story, myth, psychology, technology, music, walking and the unfinished business of becoming human. The subjects change, but the deeper questions keep returning. What shapes a life? Which stories have we inherited? How much of what we call reality is interpretation hardened into habit? What might become possible if we learned to see our stories as constructions rather than commandments?
Soulcruzer is a one-person voyage through ideas, stories, and the strange terrain of being human. If something here has sparked a thought, shifted your perspective, or simply kept you company for a while, you can help fuel the next exploration by buying me a coffee. No pressure—your attention is already a gift.
The Soulcruzer podcast is an audioblog from the edge of the inner life.
Part personal essay, part field recording, part narrative alchemy, it follows the strange places where story, psyche, myth, technology, and everyday experience begin to speak to each other.
One episode might wander through tarot as reflective technology. Another might take Nietzsche’s eternal return for a walk, explore games as containers for transformation, or ask what happens when ancient wisdom meets the AI age. Depth psychology brushes against the esoteric. Philosophy comes down from the shelf. Theory gets tested against life.
This is not polished guru-talk or productivity theatre. It is a mind in movement: raw notes, live experiments, confessional mysticism, and working fragments from the textual underground.
At the heart of it all is a simple premise:
Stories are code. Reality is programmable. And the life you are living might be more editable than you were taught to believe.
If you are drawn to the deep work, the strange edges, and the art of becoming more fully alive, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode, I take the Soulcruzer podcast out of the studio and into the fields.
What starts as an experiment in mobile podcasting/vlogging turns into a wandering meditation on labels, blogging, AI, morning rituals, and the strange abundance of media tools we now carry in our pockets.
– Why I still think of myself as a blogger first
– Podcasting, vodcasting, and the pressure to become “multimodal”
– The problem with labels: “When you label me, you negate me”
– soulcruzer.com as the central hub/home on the internet
– Wisdom Walks as thinking time
– Walking, motion, and changing perspective
– The “barefoot philosopher” approach to everyday philosophy
– AI as an extension of cognition rather than just a productivity tool
– The “soft cyborg” and the library of Alexandria in your pocket
– Morning reality tunnels and the sacred space before breakfast
– Coffee, barefoot grounding, and choosing what enters your mind first
– Indie blogging, platforms, Substack, distribution, and the open web
– Why these episodes may stay loose, minimally edited, and stream-of-consciousness
experiements in story, self, and transformation
field notes, fragments, half-lit thoughts
Apocalypse has become a cultural operating system A new review of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism examines their argument that climate anxiety, technological disruption, extreme wealth and apocalyptic religious or political narratives are beginning to converge into a distinctive contemporary worldview. Their focus is political, but the larger cultural claim is more interesting: people who stop believing in a shared future become susceptible to radically different ideas about what—or who—is worth saving. The Guardian Roddenberry offered a civilisation that had survived its stupidity and become curious enough to explore the universe. Much contemporary culture imagines precisely the
I went back through the passages I’d highlighted in Thee Psychick Bible and found a pattern I hadn’t quite seen while reading the book in sequence. Beneath the sigils, cut-ups, ritual instructions and countercultural provocation, the book keeps returning to the deliberate construction of conditions: symbols that focus desire, rituals that interrupt habit, language that reveals its own machinery, groups that generate thoughts unavailable to the isolated individual. Magick begins to look less like an attempt to violate reality and more like the conscious design of environments that change how a person thinks and lives. That brings it remarkably close
This is what I love: waking up in a field, watching the sun rise, listening to the birds and sipping black coffee. The sky is thick with cloud, but the sun has found a narrow opening above the hedgerow. Gold light spilling across the fields. The day arriving without asking anything of me yet. Perhaps this is why I keep returning to camping: to remember that a morning can be enough on its own.
The body has its own clocks. What interests me here is the mismatch between the body’s rhythm and the story the working day tells about us. The working day assumes a fairly flat human being: switch on in the morning, remain cognitively available for eight hours, then switch off at an administratively acceptable time. If your attention collapses at three, the failure appears to be yours. You ate the wrong lunch. You’re undisciplined. You need another coffee. You need to optimise your blood sugar, your sleep, your supplements, your morning routine. But the biology suggests something less accusatory. Sleep pressure
Culture is the expression of states of mind rooted in the effects of behavioural conditioning. Which means culture isn’t merely what a group believes. It’s what repeated behaviour has taught the group to feel. The child learns when to speak and when to shut up. The employee learns which questions are welcome. The soldier learns what fear must look like when translated into action. The consumer learns to experience dissatisfaction as desire. Long before these instructions become ideas, they’re trained into posture, timing, appetite, shame, attention. Behaviour rehearsed often enough becomes disposition. Disposition becomes atmosphere. Atmosphere becomes culture. We usually
Time is a nonrenewable resource, but that language can make a life sound like a battery slowly running down. Use it wisely. Don’t waste a drop. Extract maximum value before the whole operation shuts down. There’s truth in the warning, but also a trap. The moment we call time a resource, the manager in the mind arrives with a clipboard. The day becomes something to allocate, optimise, account for. Eight hours sold here, an hour invested there, twenty minutes squandered looking at nonsense on a screen. Soon we’re measuring a life by its efficiency, which may be one of the
What if? Two small words with a hinge between them. Most questions ask us to account for the world as it is. What happened? Why did it happen? What should I do about it? Useful questions, but they keep us inside the existing map. What if? takes a pencil to the border and wonders whether the edge of the known world is really an edge, or merely the place where the cartographer stopped drawing. It’s the question children ask before the world teaches them to be sensible. What if the wardrobe leads somewhere? What if the floor is lava? What
When your own life has a voice I haven’t watched My Brilliant Career yet, so I can’t say much about Sybylla Melvyn herself. But Srila Devi’s reflection on the character left me sitting with one question: What makes a person dare to live so freely? Srila writes that other people often describe her as courageous for travelling the world alone, while she regards marriage and parenthood as the braver path. Her own choices didn’t feel especially courageous from the inside. She simply did what she felt called to do. There is something important in that gap between how a life
On the drive down to Bristol this morning, I was listening to a 90’s mix. Two tunes caught my attention, One Headlight by The Wallflowers and Public Enemy’s He Got Game featuring Stephen Stills. I’ll deal with He Got Game in another post. Here’s the Wallflower line that poked me in the eye: “Man, I ain’t changed but I know I’m not the same.” I kept turning it over in my mind as the road passed beneath me. It names a kind of change that doesn’t fit the usual before-and-after story. There’s no clean break, no discarded self standing at
essays, mixtapes, podcasts, and experiments
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