The Strange Case of Mudtown Lion

Or how I discovered that I might be a fictional character in someone else’s metaphysical experiment.

It began, as these things often do, with a perfectly innocent question.

I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, a novel that has the peculiar effect of making you suspicious of just about everything, including your own thoughts. For those unfamiliar with it, VALIS is a strange, semi-autobiographical journey through madness, mysticism, theology, and the possibility that reality isn’t quite what we’ve been led to believe it is.

Which, naturally, makes it exactly my kind of book.

One of the novel’s central characters is Horselover Fat, a man who becomes convinced that he’s received a transmission from a higher intelligence. The narrator, Philip K. Dick, presents Fat as a separate individual, although we gradually come to understand that Horselover Fat and Philip K. Dick are, in some peculiar sense, the same person.

The name itself is a linguistic trick.

Philip comes from the Greek Philippos, meaning “lover of horses”. Dick is also a German word meaning fat.

Philip K. Dick becomes Horselover Fat.

A literal translation that produces a name so wonderfully absurd it could only belong to someone who spends his days worrying about the true nature of reality.

And so I wondered: what would happen if I performed the same trick on my own name?

What would Clayton Lowe become if I dismantled the name, rummaged around in its linguistic ancestry, and reassembled it into something equally peculiar?

I asked ChatGPT.

This was my first mistake.

Or possibly my first revelation.

I’m not yet sure which.

The birth of Mudtown Lion

Clayton, it turns out, comes from Old English. Clǣg means clay, and tūn means settlement or enclosure. Essentially, a settlement built on clay soil.

A mud town, if we’re being somewhat liberal with the translation.

Lowe is more interesting because it has several possible linguistic origins. Depending on which historical path you follow, you arrive at a hill or burial mound, a wolf, or, through the German Löwe, a lion.

These aren’t necessarily the actual origins of my particular family name, but historical accuracy was never going to be the primary consideration in an exercise inspired by Philip K. Dick.

We were after something stranger.

And so the machine offered me several possibilities.

Earthmound.

Mudhill.

Earthbound Wolf.

Mudtown Lion.

I liked Earthbound Wolf immediately (of course). There’s something mythological about it. Something ancient and elemental. The wolf belongs to the wilderness, while earthbound suggests a creature constrained by the physical world, perhaps a spirit temporarily trapped in matter.

I could imagine Earthbound Wolf wandering through the woods of Warwickshire, contemplating the illusion of the separate self, occasionally stopping to admire a particularly interesting tree.

He’s the sort of fellow who might disappear into the woods for three days and return with a philosophical insight that nobody asked for.

I felt an immediate affinity with him.

But then there was Mudtown Lion.

Mudtown Lion!

I couldn’t stop laughing at the name.

It was ridiculous. Unglamorous. Almost embarrassingly ordinary, despite the lion.

And therein lay its appeal.

Because Mudtown Lion sounded like someone who might actually exist in a Philip K. Dick novel.

Not a heroic adventurer or a mythical wanderer, but a slightly dishevelled middle-aged man who spends too much time in cafés, scribbling metaphysical theories into battered notebooks while the rest of the world gets on with its business.

A man who suspects that reality is considerably stranger than anyone is letting on.

A man who occasionally receives transmissions from a higher intelligence, although he can’t entirely rule out the possibility that the intelligence is himself, communicating backwards through time.

He finds this possibility reassuring.

Except on Saturday evenings.

The man who receives transmissions

Once Mudtown Lion had a name, he began developing a personality.

This is the dangerous thing about naming something. Give an idea a name and it starts acquiring a life of its own.

I imagined him sitting in a café in Leamington Spa, nursing his third coffee, trying to reconstruct a revelation he’d experienced earlier that morning.

He was certain it concerned the relationship between consciousness and the structure of time. Something about the possibility that the future was somehow remembering the past, rather than the other way around.

He’d almost worked it out when a woman outside began arguing with a parking meter.

The argument was surprisingly heated.

By the time she walked away, Mudtown had forgotten the revelation entirely.

He wrote in his notebook:

The universe may be communicating through parking meters. Further investigation required.

This is the fellow I want to write about.

He’s not especially wise or enlightened, but he’s open to the possibility that the ordinary world contains extraordinary things.

He’s a metaphysical detective operating without a licence, searching for clues in the most unlikely places.

An overheard conversation.

A passage in a secondhand book.

A song that starts playing at exactly the right moment.

A coincidence so peculiar that he finds himself wondering whether coincidence is an adequate explanation.

He calls these experiences transmissions.

He doesn’t necessarily believe they’re messages from God or some extraterrestrial intelligence, but because they arrive with the peculiar quality of information received rather than information deliberately constructed, they could be.

They interrupt him.

They alter the direction of his thinking.

Sometimes they seem to know something he doesn’t.

Of course, there’s another perfectly reasonable explanation.

Perhaps his mind is simply doing what minds do, finding patterns, constructing meaning, connecting unrelated events into stories.

Mudtown is aware of this possibility.

He has read enough psychology to know that the human brain is an extraordinarily enthusiastic pattern-recognition machine.

But he has also read enough philosophy to wonder whether dismissing every unusual experience as a cognitive error might itself be a rather peculiar form of certainty.

After all, what exactly is an ordinary experience?

And who decided?

The usefulness of having another self

What interests me about this little experiment goes beyond the pleasure of inventing a ridiculous name.

In VALIS, Philip K. Dick uses Horselover Fat to create distance between himself and his own experiences.

Fat can believe things that Dick, as narrator, questions. He can entertain extraordinary metaphysical possibilities while the narrator maintains a degree of scepticism.

The two perspectives coexist.

Sometimes they contradict each other.

Sometimes neither seems particularly reliable.

And somewhere in the space between them, something interesting happens.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to my own writing.

For years, I’ve approached writing as a way of playing with words. I rarely begin an essay knowing precisely where it will end. More often, I begin with a question, a fragment of an idea, a line from a book, or something that happened during a walk.

I follow it.

One thought leads to another, sometimes in directions I hadn’t anticipated.

The writing becomes a kind of exploration, a means of discovering what I think by observing what emerges on the page.

But I wonder whether having a literary alter ego might open up another dimension to this process.

Because Clay Lowe, the person writing these words, has certain obligations.

He has a life to live, bills to pay, workshops to deliver, relationships to maintain. He has to function in the ordinary world, where people generally expect you to accept that Tuesday follows Monday and that the person who went to sleep last night is the same person who woke up this morning.

Mudtown Lion has no such obligations.

He can question anything.

He can follow a thought all the way into absurdity.

He can entertain possibilities that I might otherwise dismiss as too speculative, too strange, or too embarrassing to pursue.

He can believe six impossible things before breakfast, then spend the afternoon attempting to disprove them.

And perhaps, most importantly, he can be wrong.

Spectacularly wrong.

Because Mudtown isn’t required to arrive at a sensible conclusion.

His task is to explore.

I find that possibility enormously liberating.

Who exactly is doing the writing?

Of course, there’s an additional complication in all this.

Mudtown Lion was born during a conversation with an artificial intelligence.

I supplied the initial question. The machine supplied the linguistic possibilities. I recognised something in one of those possibilities, and together we began constructing a character.

So who invented Mudtown Lion?

Me?

The machine?

The interaction between us?

This is a question I’ve been circling for some time in my thinking about AI-assisted writing.

We tend to imagine authorship as something that originates inside an individual mind and subsequently gets transferred onto the page.

The writer has an idea. The writer writes it down. The finished text belongs to the writer.

But the actual experience of writing has always seemed considerably messier to me.

Ideas arrive from books, conversations, memories, overheard remarks, dreams, music, and encounters with other people.

We absorb fragments of the world and rearrange them into something that feels like our own thinking.

And sometimes, while writing, something appears that surprises us.

A sentence we didn’t know we were going to write.

A connection we hadn’t consciously made.

A character who suddenly says something that changes the direction of the story.

Where did that come from?

We generally say it came from the imagination, which is a perfectly acceptable answer provided nobody asks us to explain what imagination actually is.

Now we have artificial intelligence entering this already complicated process.

Not merely as a tool for correcting grammar or suggesting better adjectives, but as another participant in the conversation from which ideas emerge.

I’m not suggesting that the machine possesses imagination in the same sense that a human being does, or that it experiences creativity as I do.

I don’t know what, if anything, it is like to be the machine.

But I do know what it’s like to interact with one.

And the experience can be genuinely generative.

Mudtown Lion didn’t exist before that conversation.

Now he does.

At least in some sense.

Which raises a rather delightful question.

If a fictional character emerges from a conversation between a human and a machine, and subsequently begins influencing the human’s thinking, where exactly does the character reside?

In my mind?

In the text?

In the relationship between the two?

Or is Mudtown Lion, at this very moment, sitting in some metaphysical waiting room, wondering when I’ll stop philosophising about his existence and allow him to get on with his afternoon?

I suspect he’d be irritated by all this.

He has transmissions to investigate.

Three men walk into a metaphysical problem

As the conversation developed, another possibility emerged.

Perhaps Earthbound Wolf and Mudtown Lion weren’t competing names.

Perhaps they represented different aspects of the same person.

Earthbound Wolf is the mythic self.

The wanderer. The creature drawn towards the horizon. The part of me that wants to spend his days walking through forests, sleeping beneath the stars, and exploring the strange intersection between consciousness and the world.

He is freedom imagined as a way of being.

Mudtown Lion, on the other hand, is the metaphysical self.

The fellow who can’t leave a perfectly ordinary experience alone without turning it into an ontological problem.

He wants to understand what’s happening beneath the surface of things.

He suspects that existence contains hidden dimensions, not necessarily supernatural ones, but possibilities that remain concealed by our habitual ways of seeing.

And then there’s Clay Lowe.

The man who has to negotiate between them.

The one who actually has to get up in the morning, make the coffee, check his emails, and occasionally remind both of his alter egos that the electricity bill is due.

Three manifestations of one life.

Clay Lowe lives it.

Mudtown Lion interrogates it.

Earthbound Wolf wants to escape into it.

And perhaps the great cosmic joke is that all three believe they’re the original.

This brings me back to something that has fascinated me for years: the question of identity.

We tend to imagine the self as a singular, relatively stable entity.

I am me.

You are you.

We possess personalities, histories, memories, preferences, and beliefs that combine to form the person we understand ourselves to be.

But when I examine my own experience, I don’t find anything quite so tidy.

I find different versions of myself emerging in different circumstances.

The facilitator standing in front of a room.

The writer sitting alone with his thoughts.

The father.

The husband.

The wanderer.

The philosopher.

The former soldier.

The boy who once wanted to explore the stars.

Are these separate selves?

Masks worn by some deeper, more authentic identity?

Or is the self itself something that emerges from the ongoing conversation between these different ways of being?

Perhaps identity is less like a statue and more like a story.

Something continually revised.

Something that changes depending on who’s telling it.

And if that’s the case, perhaps inventing Mudtown Lion isn’t so different from what I’ve been doing all my life.

Creating versions of myself through which to explore the possibilities of existence.

A notebook for Mudtown

I’ve decided Mudtown Lion deserves his own notebook.

Not necessarily a physical one, although I rather like the idea of a battered black notebook filled with peculiar observations, philosophical fragments, and diagrams that appear to explain the structure of reality but are actually shopping lists.

More likely, he’ll inhabit some corner of my writing practice.

He might interrupt an essay.

Appear in a dialogue.

Offer a theory.

Disagree with something I’ve written.

Report a transmission from the universe that turns out to have been a faulty toaster.

I don’t want to make him too coherent.

That would defeat the purpose.

Part of his appeal is that he’s gloriously uncertain about almost everything.

He has theories rather than answers.

Suspicions rather than convictions.

He is willing to entertain the possibility that consciousness is fundamental to reality while remaining perfectly capable of losing his keys.

He might become a vehicle for exploring Gnosticism, existentialism, the nature of the self, artificial intelligence, synchronicity, or the possibility that time isn’t doing what we think it’s doing.

Or he might simply spend an entire afternoon watching pigeons in the town square and conclude that they know something we don’t.

Either way, I think he’ll be useful company.

And there’s something particularly appealing about allowing a fictional character to wander through a personal weblog.

After all, why should a blog contain only the thoughts and experiences of the person whose name appears at the top?

Why not populate it with other voices?

Imagined companions.

Contradictory selves.

Characters who challenge the author’s assumptions.

A little internal republic of minds, each attempting to make sense of the same bewildering universe.

Perhaps this is another way of thinking about the polyphonic quality I’ve been trying to develop in my writing.

Not simply multiple influences or registers within a single voice, but distinct perspectives that coexist without necessarily resolving into agreement.

A conversation rather than a declaration.

The essay as a meeting place.

The original and the copy

There’s one final thought I can’t quite leave alone.

In VALIS, the relationship between Philip K. Dick and Horselover Fat becomes increasingly unstable.

The distinction between narrator and character, observer and observed, begins to blur.

And that seems appropriate for a novel concerned with the possibility that our understanding of reality is itself fundamentally unreliable.

I wonder what would happen if Mudtown Lion began writing about me.

What would he make of Clay Lowe?

Would he regard me as a sensible fellow who spends too much time worrying about practical matters?

Would he find my philosophical speculations embarrassingly timid?

Would he suspect that I was merely a character he’d invented to handle the administrative responsibilities of being alive?

Perhaps he’d write something like this:

Clay Lowe was a curious invention. Mudtown had created him some years earlier as a means of maintaining contact with consensus reality. Lowe handled the mundane business of existence: paying bills, attending appointments, purchasing groceries, and reassuring other people that everything was more or less normal.

For a while, the arrangement had worked satisfactorily.

But lately Lowe had begun asking questions.

He’d started reading Philip K. Dick.

He’d developed an interest in Gnosticism.

And, most troubling of all, he’d begun conversing with an artificial intelligence about the possibility of creating a second identity.

Mudtown recognised the warning signs immediately.

His fictional character was becoming self-aware.

He closed his notebook.

This could become a problem.

I rather like that.

A fictional character inventing a fictional character who invents a fictional character.

Somewhere along the line, one of them has to be real.

Doesn’t he?

Anyway, it’s Friday afternoon as I write this, and I’ve spent a perfectly respectable portion of the day discussing the existence of a man called Mudtown Lion, who didn’t exist when I woke up this morning.

Now he has a name, a personality, a philosophical disposition, and a growing suspicion that reality is not entirely trustworthy.

I’m not sure what this says about me.

I’m even less sure what it says about the machine that helped bring him into existence.

But I’m rather pleased he’s here.

And I suspect we’ll be hearing more from him.

In fact, just now, as I was finishing this paragraph, a thought arrived that seemed to come from somewhere slightly outside my usual stream of thinking.

It was simple enough.

What makes you so certain you’re the one writing this?

I considered the question for a moment.

Then I made another cup of coffee.

Some transmissions are best left unanswered.

At least until Monday.

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Filed under: Notes from the Barefoot Philosopher / Dispatches from Mudtown / The Ontological Misadventures of Clayton Lowe

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Mudtown Lion was a dishevelled philosopher who spent his afternoons in cafés writing lengthy metaphysical treatises nobody read. Occasionally, he received transmissions from a higher intelligence, although he couldn’t rule out the possibility that the intelligence was himself, communicating backwards through time. He found this possibility reassuring, except on Saturdays.