working notes from the textual underground
I’ve become increasingly interested in what it means to operate as a text-based ontologist in a world where text is becoming the universal substrate.
A text-based ontologist sounds like someone who should live in a footnote.
They don’t.
They live in the browser window, the notebook, the prompt box, the blog editor, the Obsidian graph, the half-finished post, the walking thought captured before it evaporates. Their material is language. Their subject is being. Their method is to hold attention long enough for a sentence to disclose what it is carrying.
It’s not really a job title. It’s more of a way of being caught by the world.
A working note on Ruth Netzer, tarot as active imagination, and the Jungian Quest for the Self as a spiral of symbolic integration rather than a simple heroic journey.
A short note on rereading Debbie Ford, noticing our reactions, and treating shadow work as an ongoing conversation with the self.
A rock mixtape for crawling out of the rut: Linkin Park, Papa Roach, System of a Down, Avenged Sevenfold, and the stubborn desire to live the thing instead of performing a brand.
The old questions have not changed much. How should I live? Who am I becoming? What is worth paying attention to? What is freedom? What is wisdom? What is the soul, if we dare still use that word? These questions predate Socrates. They predate writing. They are carved into the bones of the species, and they have kept philosophers, mystics, poets, and ordinary troubled humans occupied for as long as there have been fires to sit around and dark skies to stare into. Every generation meets them as if for the first time. Every life receives them fresh, intimate, inconvenient,
I finished Richard Cavendish’s The Black Arts this week. Not in the heroic readerly sense of having sat down and consumed it cleanly from first page to last, pencil in hand, scholar’s lamp burning into the night. I have been reading it on and off for a few months. Picking it up, putting it down, returning to it when the mood came back round. Some books ask for that kind of reading. They don’t want to be finished quickly. They want to become part of the weather for a while. My copy is the 50th anniversary edition. I bought it
I stole this idea from Justin Brooke on his LinkedIn profile. It’s a FUN PROMPT, and what came back from ChatGPT was pretty cool. I also asked Claude; the results were good, but they lacked an edge. Anyway, the prompt is: Write an unhinged BIO about me. Here’s mine: Clay Lowe is a walking footnote in the great unwritten manuscript of the universe. Part blogger, part philosopher, part myth-drenched field reporter from the edge of ordinary life, he spends his days following the rhizome wherever it wants to go: down muddy footpaths, through obscure books, into the textual underground, across
A short note on rereading Debbie Ford, noticing our reactions, and treating shadow work as an ongoing conversation with the self.
This morning I kept thinking about how much of my inner life is written in symbols. A hawk circles above the fields near my house, and every time I see it something deep stirs… a reminder of vigilance, focus, higher vision. I could say it’s just a bird, but that would miss the truth of how the psyche works. Images like that are old programs written in a language older than words. They wake something that knows more than I do. Tarot does the same thing. You pull a card and feel it moving in you before you even interpret
Knowing yourself isn’t about coming up with a neat definition you can put on a business card. It’s more like watching the weather of your own being. The soul shows up in the little things, like what you’re drawn to, what you shy away from, or the memories that stick on you like burrs and the ones that slip away without a trace. If you pay attention, you can catch the soul in the act. It’s there in the way you suddenly decide, without much thought, to take a different path home. It’s in how you savour the first sip
When the mask slips, let it. We spend much of our lives arranging faces for the world. A mask for work, another for friends, and still another for family gatherings. These are not always deceptions. Masks can be protective, ceremonial, even sacred. They help us navigate the stage of daily life without having to walk bare-skinned into every storm. But masks are fragile things. They crack when laughter bursts too loud, when grief presses through the seams, when love or anger rushes up unplanned. The slip can feel like a mistake. Like you’re being caught unprepared. This isn’t failure. It’s
We treat meaning like it’s some luxury add-on to life, like it’s something you get to once you’ve checked all the boxes. But that’s backwards. Meaning isn’t the cherry on top. It’s in the foundation, right up there with food and water and air. You can suffocate without oxygen and starve without food. But without meaning? You drift. You’re technically alive, but there’s this hollowness. Yeah, you’re breathing, but nothing’s actually anchoring you to the ground. People will push through absolute hell if they think it means something. But give someone a comfortable life with no purpose? That comfort curdles
The Latin and Greek reads: ‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere,et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.’ Translation: “For I myself saw the Sibyl of Cumae with my own eyes hanging in a jar,and when the boys asked her: ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’she replied: ‘I want to die.’” This line is the epigraph of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Who is the Sibyl of Cumae? The Sibyl was an ancient prophetess, most famously associated with Apollo. The Cumaean Sibyl appears in Virgil’s Aeneid, where she guides Aeneas through
The Soulcruzer podcast…narrative alchemy in audio form. Call it an audioblog, call it threshold work, call it confessional mysticism.
One day I’m working through tarot as spiritual technology. The next, I’m exploring Nietzsche’s eternal return as lived practice, chaos magick techniques, or games as containers for transformation. Depth psychology meets the esoteric. Ancient wisdom meets the AI age. Theory becomes practice.
This is what narrative alchemy sounds like from the inside: raw, real, unpolished. Experiments in treating stories as code and consciousness as hackable.
If you’re here for the deep work and the edges, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode, I explore one of Jung’s most striking images: the unconscious as both dragon and treasure. What if the fear, resistance, and chaos you encounter when you turn inward aren’t signs that something is wrong but signs that you’re getting close to something valuable? Drawing on Jungian depth psychology, NLP, and the logic of myth, I unpack why the very thing guarding your buried gold is often indistinguishable from the thing you most want to avoid and what it actually means to face it.
Somewhere along the way, the internet stopped being a place you could get lost in.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The web I fell in love with, the one that let you follow a link from mediaeval alchemy to cognitive science to a poet’s notebook at 2am and feel like you’d discovered something, has mostly been replaced by feeds, funnels, and content engineered to keep you scrolling without actually going anywhere. The algorithm decides what you see. The personal brand tells you what to expect. The niche keeps everything tidy, and the curiosity slowly dies.
Soulcruzer is my argument against a web that trades curiosity for control. Against feeds that flatten experience into content and turn attention into a commodity. Against the quiet pressure to specialise, optimise, and perform a version of yourself that fits neatly into a niche.
It’s an argument made in practice. I read, I write, I walk, I wonder—out in the open. I follow threads wherever they lead, trusting that meaning emerges through movement, not management. This is a space for the long way round. For thinking out loud. For staying human in a system that keeps trying to reduce you to a pattern.
If there’s a point to it, it’s this: to keep the signal of a curious life alive.