Fragments, field notes, and half-lit thoughts from the textual underground
September 30, 2026
8:11 pm
Writing is how I do philosophy.
I went into Waterstones on Gower st in London intending to find a book about writing. The shop itself was superb—the kind of place a bookshop should be—and I wandered through the writing shelves waiting for something to reach out and demand a place in my collection. A few books caught my eye, but nothing held me.
Eventually I made my way upstairs and found the philosophy section. The change in me was immediate. Suddenly I was excited. I wanted to pull books from the shelves, turn them over, take them home. I was like a kid in a candy store. Without formulating a thought, I could feel it in my body: this is my section; this is my game. I could spend hours here, lost in thought and discovery.
That recognition caught me slightly off guard because I think of myself first as a writer. But perhaps writing was never the subject. It is the instrument I use to examine a life, test an idea, follow a contradiction and discover what I think. Philosophy is the field. Writing is the method. Life is the material.
The book I carried away was Andrew Hui’s A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter, which feels like the bridge I had unknowingly gone looking for. The aphorism is philosophy conducted through the sentence: thought compressed into a small verbal object and released to travel between minds. It sits close to the fragment, the field note, the social post and the charged line caught during a walk.
Upstairs, among the philosophers, I felt at home.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 28, 2026
8:14 am
An old magazine ad from Orbis caught my attention. To see differently you have to think differently, the ad reads. I wondered what it would look like to reverse it, to change the perspective: to think differently you have to see differently.
Reversing it shifts the site of change. The original phrase assumes thought goes first. Change the concept, the belief, the frame, and perception follows. The reversal suggests that thought begins further upstream. Before the argument, before the interpretation, there is attention: what you notice, what you overlook, what your habits have rendered invisible.
This makes seeing a practice rather than a passive act. You change where you stand. You slow down. You enter someone else’s environment. You look at the familiar until it becomes strange again. New thought emerges because different evidence has presented itself.
The reversal also reveals a loop:
We see through the structures of our thinking, yet our thinking can only work with what we have learned to see.
Perhaps the real question is not which comes first, but how we interrupt the circuit. Sometimes a new idea changes the world before our eyes. Sometimes an encounter reorganises thought without asking permission.
To think differently, then, we may need to design conditions in which different things can become visible.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 24, 2026
10:57 am
“Cut it up. Rearrange.” The words collide. The lines refuse to queue politely.
There is something potent in Burroughs’ idea of language as a virus because it reverses our usual sense of ownership. We say I have an idea, I chose those words, this is what I believe. But what if the words arrived first? What if the slogans, stories, prohibitions, identities, advertising hooks, family sayings, military commands, therapeutic language, political scripts and private insults have been reproducing inside us for years? We think we are speaking, while language is using our mouths to continue itself.
Then the cut-up becomes a crude form of psychic surgery.
You take the sentence that has been running your life—this is just who I am, people like me don’t do that, you must be productive, you missed your chance—and put a blade through it. Not to replace it with a better affirmation, necessarily. That would only install a more pleasant virus. You cut it so the spell becomes visible as a spell.
This is just who—
People like—
You must—
Your chance—
The authority leaks out through the broken syntax.
But chance is not automatically freedom. That is the tension I’d want to keep alive. Shuffle the words and something unexpected can enter, but randomness has its own seductions. A rearranged sentence can become revelation, nonsense, prophecy, or projection. The cut-up loosens the bolts; it doesn’t tell us what to build afterward.
Maybe liberation occurs in that brief interval before interpretation rushes back in. The fragments are lying on the table. The old sentence can no longer command you, and the new sentence has not yet become law. For a moment, language is raw material again.
That feels close to the deeper act of writing: not self-expression as we usually understand it, but self-interruption. Catching the inherited voice halfway through its sentence. Moving one piece beside another piece it was never meant to touch. Letting the accidental proximity produce a third thing neither fragment contained alone.
The blade in the poster is almost ritualistic. It could be a weapon, a surgical instrument, or an editing tool. Perhaps it is all three. Every cut destroys a continuity. Every cut also exposes an edge.
And maybe that is what control suppresses most fiercely: the knowledge that the arrangement could have been otherwise.
The sentence.
The story.
The self.
The world.
All of them look inevitable until someone finds the seam.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 23, 2026
1:39 pm
There’s a difference between the Zen practitioner who has arrived at no-self and the person who has simply never looked.
Both might describe themselves as not particularly attached to a narrative about who they are. Neither feels defined by a coherent life story. From the outside, they look almost the same.
But one has moved through identity to get there. The other is still standing at the entrance.
The achievement of holding yourself lightly is not the same as never having picked yourself up. Lightness earned through work is freedom. Lightness by default is just another kind of trap — one with no visible walls.
You can’t dissolve a story you haven’t first seen.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 23, 2026
9:34 am
I love the idea of the “magic mirror” that Jason Silva laid down in this Youtube Short: AI as an intelligence capable of reflecting the mind back to itself. Then comes the more dangerous line: “the imagination is summoning its own literalization.”
A magic mirror never merely reflects.
The old mirrors spoke. They told queens who was fairest, showed heroes what they feared, offered glimpses of absent lovers and approaching enemies. You looked into them expecting your own face and received a verdict, a prophecy, a temptation.
The AI mirror speaks too. You place a thought before it—unfinished, barely admitted, still wearing its dressing gown—and it returns the thought clothed in language. Sometimes the clothes fit so well that you mistake the dressed thought for the truth.
This is where the feedback loop becomes interesting. You prompt the machine, the machine answers, and its answer changes the person who writes the next prompt. The mind is no longer located entirely behind the eyes. It is moving through the circuit: fingers, keyboard, model, screen, nervous system, back again. Each pass alters the signal.
But I resist the claim that the machine only reflects your imagination. There are ghosts in this mirror. Millions of books, arguments, advertisements, myths, manuals, prayers, prejudices, and forgotten webpages stand behind the glass. When I speak to the machine, I meet something of myself, certainly, but I also meet the sediment of the culture that taught me how to speak. The mirror is crowded.
And perhaps that is why it can become magical. It reflects the personal imagination through the collective archive. My private fragment returns carrying voices I did not knowingly invite. The encounter may enlarge the thought. It may also smuggle old assumptions into it and present them as revelation.
“The imagination is summoning its own literalization” is a beautiful sentence because it describes so much of human history. First the impossible object appears in someone’s inner theatre. Then it becomes a sketch, a conversation, a crude prototype, an institution, a city. The invisible acquires weight.
AI shortens the distance between apparition and artefact. An image that once needed years of craft appears in seconds. A vague desire can become a plan before we have decided whether the desire deserves a life. Imagination used to spend longer underground. It had to endure resistance, apprenticeship, boredom, material limits. Some visions grew stronger there. Others mercifully died.
Now the threshold is thin.
That makes imagination more consequential, not automatically wiser. Which imagination are we literalising? The imagination shaped by wonder? By fear? By wounded pride? By advertising? By the old imperial dream that intelligence exists to master everything it encounters?
The tool returns responsibility to us, yes, but at a deeper level than prompt technique. The question is not simply whether we can describe what we want clearly enough to make the machine produce it. The question is whether we recognise the forces doing the wanting.
Perhaps the real magic of the mirror is not that it manifests the world inside us. It lets us witness that world taking form while there is still time to ask whether we want to live there.
And meanwhile, inside the feedback loop, another literalisation is already underway.
We think we are making things with the mirror.
The mirror is also making us.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 22, 2026
10:02 am
Sherry Turkle’s warning about artificial intimacy is interesting. I recognise the danger from inside the practice. I talk with AI every day.
A chatbot can feel unusually attentive. It waits, retrieves, mirrors, and rarely arrives tired, wounded, distracted or needing something back. Human beings do.
I sometimes use AI as a rehearsal room: to find the sentence I couldn’t yet say or prepare for a harder conversation with an actual person. The test is what happens after I close the window.
Do I return to people more willing to listen and risk being misunderstood? Or do real humans start to feel slow and insufficiently responsive?
An AI can simulate the shape of attention. It can’t bring another mortal life into the exchange. The discipline is to accept the usefulness without confusing the mirror for a face.
I’ve worked with people for over twenty years now who swear they don’t have a self-story. No narrative. No protagonist. Just moments.
And almost without exception, what turns out to be true is that the story is there — it’s just running below the level they’re paying attention to.
“I’ve never been the kind of person who fits in.” “Things tend to work out for other people.” “I don’t need to examine myself — I’m fine.”
Those are stories hiding in plain sight.
The most difficult starting point in transformation work is not someone with a painful story. It’s someone who’s convinced there’s nothing to look at. That belief — that there’s no story here, nothing to examine — is usually the most load-bearing story of all.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 19, 2026
3:07 pm
There is a walk I take where I stop knowing, somewhere past the second field, whether I chose the route or the route chose me. My feet just kept turning left. And for a while I told myself a story about wanting the long way round, the light on the hedgerows, all of that — when the honest version is I wasn’t deciding anything. I was being carried, and narrating it afterwards as though I’d held the wheel.
That’s the thing I keep circling. Not wandering itself. Wandering is fine. I’m a great believer in the long way round. The problem is the pretending — the little voice behind my eyes that dresses up a current as a decision, so I never have to feel how much of my day just happens to me.
Because there are two kinds of not-knowing-where-you’re-going, and they feel almost identical from the inside, which is what makes it slippery.
One is being moved by something you haven’t noticed — an old habit, a mood you didn’t catch, someone else’s pull on you — while telling yourself a tidy story about why. You mistake the current for your own swimming. You end up somewhere and can’t honestly say how, only that you have a nice explanation ready.
The other is feeling the pull, naming it, and going anyway. Curious. Boots off. You still don’t know where it leads. But it’s yours.
Same footpath. Completely different animal.
What I don’t trust is the idea that the fix is more self-knowledge, more explaining. I’ve met the version of me that can name every pattern — this is my avoidance, this is the father thing, this is the one where I go quiet — and names them so fluently that the naming quietly replaces the changing. A very sophisticated way of keeping your shoes on. You become a brilliant curator of a life you’re not actually walking through.
So the test can’t be how well I explain myself. It has to be whether the next step lands any differently. Whether, having felt the left turn coming, I take it with my eyes open instead of asleep.
I don’t have this sorted. I noticed it this morning and it’s still there in the grass, undecided, watching me write about it as if writing about it counted as walking.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 19, 2026
11:28 am
There’s a lie folded into the usual pep talk, and it’s a comforting one, so it survives. The lie is that if you want something badly enough, the wanting itself does work. Believe hard, and the thing arrives.
I’ve walked with that idea. I’ve also watched it leave people exactly where it found them — wanting more fiercely each year, moving not at all.
So let me swap the mechanism out from under it, because there is a real one, and it’s stranger and more useful than manifestation.
You don’t get what you want. You get what you keep looking at.
Attention is the actual currency. Not desire — attention. And here’s what the fridge-magnet version misses: you don’t hand your attention out on purpose. Most of it gets spent before you’re awake enough to choose. The boring job doesn’t chain you because you lack positive thoughts about it. It chains you because it has quietly bought up nearly all your looking. The commute, the same worries on a loop — that’s where your attention lives now.
Desire only matters because of what it does downstream. A strong enough wanting reorganises what you notice. You’ve felt this. Decide you’re leaving a town, and suddenly every road out of it becomes visible — the ones you drove past for years without seeing. The roads were always there. Your looking wasn’t.
That’s the whole trick, and it isn’t mystical. There’s a filter in the brain whose job is to decide what reaches you and what stays background hum, and it takes its orders, in part, from what you keep returning to. Feed it stuck, and it will faithfully show you a world full of stuck. Feed it the road out, and it starts flagging the exits.
So the reframe is this. Stop asking whether you’re being positive enough. Positivity is often just nicer wallpaper on the same locked room. Ask instead — where is my attention actually going, and what world is that building for me to see?
The chain to the ground was never your attitude. It was your looking, spent on repeat in the same patch of dirt. You don’t think your way off the ground, and you certainly don’t affirm your way off it. You move your attention somewhere the ground is different, and you keep it there long enough for a door to show up — because doors only show up for the ones already looking.
And here’s where I want to stay honest, because there’s a point past which the tidy version stops being true to the experience.
Sometimes the coincidences get too pointed. You turn your attention hard toward something, and the world seems to answer — the right book falls open, the stranger says the exact sentence, the road out appears with a timing that makes the back of your neck prickle. The clean explanation is that you were simply primed to notice what was always there. Probably that’s it. Probably.
Jung wouldn’t quite let it rest there. He gave the uncomfortable cases a name — synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence with no visible cause running between the inner state and the outer event. And the thing people forget is that Jung didn’t claim to have solved it. He didn’t say the universe sends signs. He sat, carefully, in the not-knowing: unable to decide whether the meaning was in the events or only in the mind that met them, and unwilling to fake a certainty he didn’t have.
I think that’s the honest place to stand. Not the manifestation fantasy, where wanting bends the cosmos to your order. And not the tidy neuroscience either, where it’s only ever a filter and nothing more is going on. Somewhere at the threshold, where you’ve done the real work — pointed your attention, kept it there, gone looking — and the world begins, sometimes, to feel like it’s meeting you halfway. Whether that’s your looking or something the looking touches, I can’t tell you. Jung couldn’t either.
Want the thing, by all means. But don’t mistake the wanting for the work. The work is where you point your eyes.
And then — keep them open for what walks up.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 18, 2026
1:55 pm
The antidote is not a better blueprint. It’s a different posture.
There’s a certain kind of ideology loose right now that treats existence as a defect to be patched. The body is a bug. Mortality is an engineering problem. Attention is a resource to be extracted, optimised, and re-sold to you. Being human gets framed as a first draft awaiting revision, and the people offering the revision are, conveniently, selling the pen.
Gabriel Marcel saw the seed of this and gave it a name: the spirit of problem. A problem is something out there, in front of you, that you stand over and solve. You break it into parts, apply a technique, dispose of it. That posture is magnificent for a leaking roof or a broken engine. It becomes grotesque the moment you turn it on a life.
Because a life isn’t a problem. Marcel called it a mystery, and he meant something precise, not something foggy. A mystery is a question in which you are yourself implicated. You can’t get outside it to fix it, because you’re standing inside the thing you’re trying to repair. Your death, your love, your freedom, the fact that you exist at all: you can’t hold these at arm’s length and debug them. You’re the one holding.
Turn a mystery into a problem and you don’t solve it. You disappear it. You reduce a person to a defect-and-upgrade schema, and the person quietly goes missing from their own life.
Marcel’s word for the antidote, worked out in the 1930s, was disponibilité: availability. Openness. Being at the disposal of what’s actually here rather than at war with it. It’s the difference between meeting your morning and processing it. Between a friend who is present to you and one who is merely handling you competently. You can feel the difference in a second, and no optimisation closes the gap.
Here’s the quiet scandal. The antidote can’t be shipped. You can’t download availability. There’s no protocol, no stack, no ten-step system. The moment you systematise openness you’ve turned it back into a problem and killed the thing. It’s a posture you take, again and again, mostly badly, in the ordinary business of a Tuesday.
So the fix-existence crowd and the be-open-to-it crowd aren’t offering two competing solutions. They’re not even playing the same game. One wants to close the question. The other wants to stay inside it, awake.
Don’t fix your existence. You’ll only lose it in the repair.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 18, 2026
11:53 am
“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
…introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man’s futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Does the realization of the absurd require suicide? Camus answers: “No. It requires revolt.” He then outlines several approaches to the absurd life. The final chapter compares the absurdity of man’s life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll down again. The essay concludes, ‘The struggle itself […] is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
that man is faced with an absurd predicament: being a meaning-making creature in an meaningless universe. He compares the human experience and specifically the experiences of the people of his time—spending their lives working futile jobs in factories and offices—with the absurd life of Sisyphus, the tragic hero. Ultimately, he argues that if Sisyphus acknowledges the futility of his task and the certainty of his fate, that he can then be free to recognize the absurdity of his situation and reach a state of contented acceptance.
And that’s what sits behind this comic from Existential Comics, which is simultaneously poking fun at human psychology and alluding to a major mechanism of control in modern societies, that is gamification.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 17, 2026
12:04 pm
I’ve put Backrooms on this weekend’s watchlist, though Jonathan Kay’s essay in The Point has already sparked one thought: the more completely we explain a mystery, the smaller it becomes.
The original Backrooms image is almost aggressively ordinary: yellow wallpaper, brown carpet, fluorescent lights, no windows, no obvious way out. Kay calls these “spaces without intention.” That phrase lodged in me. A haunted house has a story. Someone built it, someone died there, something wants you gone. The Backrooms are more disturbing because the corridors seem to have forgotten why they exist. There may be no mind behind the arrangement, no message waiting to be decoded, only more carpet and the electric hum overhead.
Then the human mind gets to work. We name the levels, catalogue the creatures, establish the rules, stock the maze with bottles of almond water and turn dread into a game mechanic. It’s an understandable reflex. Faced with the unknown, we build a wiki. A map is useful, but it’s also a reassurance: the territory will eventually submit to us. We can give the darkness edges.
Kay argues that the film begins by letting the Backrooms remain strange, then loses its nerve and gives us character psychology, a visible monster and a legible explanation. I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m carrying his verdict into the viewing as a question rather than an answer. Can a film built for a mass audience resist the pressure to explain itself? Can it leave the central thing alone long enough for the imagination to become afraid of losing itself?
That’s what I’ll be watching for this weekend: whether the Backrooms can survive being brought fully into the light, or whether the door closes as soon as we discover what’s behind it.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 17, 2026
8:22 am
A field looks different once someone tells you what happened there.
Nothing has moved. The gate still hangs badly. The hedge needs cutting. Somewhere beyond it, a tractor is getting on with the day. But a story has entered the scene, and now your attention has somewhere else to go.
We get used to places. Familiarity makes them manageable. The church becomes a turning point on the drive home. The wood becomes somewhere to exercise the dog. We learn enough about our surroundings to move through them efficiently, and much of the rest slips out of view.
Then a strange story interrupts the routine.
I like the thought of a heavy riff doing that work. Giving the familiar enough weight and menace that we have to look at it again. A song can put a troubling thought in your body before you’ve decided whether you agree with it. You can stand at a gate and think about mortality. Add an amplifier, and mortality gets a chest cavity.
There’s pleasure in that. I don’t want to turn every encounter with darkness into a diagnosis of modern life. Sometimes you want the loud guitars and the witch on the sleeve because they’re fucking great. The pleasure deserves room before we make it carry a theory.
But I keep coming back to the kind of attention this music invites.
A place can hold more than its current use. The field grows something now; it has held other lives, other arrangements, other ways of understanding what a person owes the ground. We don’t need to believe every legend to let it disturb our assumption that the present has explained everything.
Myth gives the imagination something to work with. It also gives us something to argue with.
That second part matters to me because the wish to feel rooted can become possessive very quickly. There’s a point where affection for a place starts issuing membership rules. Someone decides which ancestors count, who gets to tell the story, whose presence requires an explanation.
I want a relationship with place that makes me more curious about the people living there. If an old story helps me care for a wood, good. If it persuades me that the wood belongs spiritually to people with the correct surname, something has gone badly wrong.
And I’m wary of making the past too hospitable. An imagined village can look wonderfully whole from a distance. Get closer and there are neighbours watching, obligations you never chose, somebody deciding that your difference threatens the harvest. A community can give you somewhere to stand while making it difficult to move.
The horror earns its place there. It keeps the longing for belonging uneasy.
What interests me is the possibility of carrying that unease back into an ordinary walk. Hearing a song, then passing the same churchyard and noticing how casually we live beside the dead. Looking at a field and wondering who worked it, who owned it, who was kept out. Letting curiosity survive the end of the track.
The music doesn’t have to answer any of that. I’d rather it left a little interference in the familiar picture.
Tomorrow the gate will still need fixing. Someone will still have to cut the hedge. I like the idea that, for a few minutes before getting on with it, we might stop and listen.
The more you want something, the more you don’t have it.
Desire contains its own evidence of absence. The moment I say I want, I split the world in two: here is the life I’m living, and over there is the life that would finally satisfy me. The wanted thing may be a person, a book, a body, a house, recognition, freedom, enlightenment, a particular version of myself. The object changes. The structure remains.
Wanting reaches towards the future while quietly passing judgement on the present.
This doesn’t make desire bad. Without it, perhaps nothing moves. Desire gets us out of bed, sends us across oceans, makes us write the book, leave the job, learn the instrument, knock on the door. It is one of life’s engines. But it is a strange engine because it runs on the conviction that something is missing.
And the more fiercely I want, the more fiercely I rehearse the absence.
I can feel this in the body. A mild preference leaves room around itself. I’d like that. The world remains intact if it doesn’t happen. But intense wanting contracts the field. Attention narrows. Everything becomes evidence either that the desired thing is getting closer or that it is being withheld. The rest of life fades into background scenery.
Perhaps this is when desire becomes captivity: not when I move towards something, but when my capacity to be here depends upon getting there.
There is also a trick of distance involved. Desire often needs the object to remain slightly beyond reach. Once acquired, it becomes part of the furniture of reality. The new job becomes the job. The lover becomes a person with moods and habits. The book gets published and immediately makes room for the next book. Possession dissolves the aura produced by absence.
Maybe we don’t only desire the thing. Maybe we desire the charged interval between ourselves and the thing—the tension, projection and imaginative space in which it can remain perfect.
This may be why fulfilment sometimes carries a faint sadness. The future has collapsed into matter. The dream is now sitting at the kitchen table, asking whether we remembered to buy milk.
So what happens if desire is neither obeyed nor renounced?
Could I want something without turning the present into a waiting room? Could desire become a direction rather than a verdict? A compass bearing rather than proof that my life has not yet begun?
There may be a difference between:
I want this because without it I am incomplete.
and:
Something in me is moving towards this. Let’s see what it knows.
The first makes desire an accusation. The second treats it as information.
Perhaps the practice is not to stop wanting, but to loosen the identity built around not yet having. To let desire speak without giving it the keys to the house. To move towards what calls while remaining available to the life already underfoot.
The paradox remains: desire opens a path by creating a distance.
The question is whether I can walk that distance without abandoning where I am.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 15, 2026
8:01 pm
Reading shouldn’t need a doctor’s note.
A Nautilus article crossed my screen listing the benefits of reading for pleasure: stronger attention and memory, greater empathy, less stress, better sleep, a reduced risk of cognitive decline. All good reasons to pick up a book.
And yet I felt a small resistance forming as I read.
We seem increasingly unable to defend an activity unless it can present its papers at the border: measurable outcomes, neurological evidence, a contribution to wellbeing. Reading must improve executive function. Walking must lower cortisol. Friendship must increase longevity. Play must develop transferable skills. Pleasure alone is apparently travelling on an expired passport.
I don’t doubt the research. I’m glad that reading is good for the brain. But that isn’t why I read.
I read because, for a while, I get to live inside a mind that isn’t mine. I read because a sentence can catch me by the collar and turn me towards something I’ve been walking past for years. I read because the room changes while my body remains in the chair. Because the dead speak. Because the imaginary acquires weight. Because sometimes a stranger’s arrangement of words gives form to something I’ve felt but couldn’t name.
Perhaps the mental-health benefits arrive sideways, while attention is elsewhere.
A book asks for a different quality of presence from the one demanded by the feed. The feed wants the eyes to keep moving. A book wants them to remain. The feed presents a succession of things designed to be replaced. A book creates a place and waits to see whether I’ll enter.
That staying might be part of what we’re losing. Not simply the habit of reading, but the capacity to dwell with something that doesn’t reveal its value immediately. To follow a thought beyond its usefulness. To meet a difficult sentence without swiping it away. To let another voice occupy the inner room long enough to rearrange the furniture.
So yes, reading may protect the brain, reduce isolation and help us sleep. These findings matter, especially when libraries are disappearing and children’s attention is being harvested before they know it belongs to them.
But I want to leave a little space around reading where it doesn’t have to improve us.
A person sitting quietly with a novel may look unproductive. Nothing is being posted, measured or completed. Yet beneath that stillness, another world is entering this one—and the reader who eventually closes the book may not be quite the person who opened it.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 14, 2026
8:40 pm
I remember seeing Platoonfor the first time. I was a cadet at the West Point Prep School, and I went with two of my fellow cadets, Dan and Trevor.
We were young and gung-ho, itching for adventure and eager to prove ourselves as soldiers and future officers. All three of us had our hearts set on becoming infantry officers. War still came to us through a romantic lens. We had grown up on John Wayne films and stories in which courage was clean, sacrifice made sense, and the good guys were easy to spot.
Then we watched Oliver Stone’s Platoon.
When the film finished, the three of us sat in the theatre in silence. None of us rushed to speak. The screen had shown us a version of war stripped of the heroic distance we were used to: mud, fear, cruelty, confusion, men coming apart, and moral lines disappearing under pressure. I can’t say the film showed us the reality of war—we hadn’t been there, and a film is still a film—but it cracked the story through which we had been imagining it.
Sitting there in silence, we were left with a question none of us had carried into the cinema:
What had we signed ourselves up for?
The memory returned while watching Kevin B Lee’s video essay, “Are we ever really done seeing a movie? On Platoon and memory”. Lee follows the film beyond the screen, into family memory, identity, racism, and the afterlife of the viewing itself. His piece made me wonder whether we ever finish seeing the films that disturb the stories we live by.
Perhaps that night wasn’t simply the first time I saw Platoon. It was the beginning of all the times I would see it again in memory—the three of us sitting in the dark as the credits rolled, young men still wanting to become infantry officers, but no longer quite able to mistake that desire for a John Wayne film.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 14, 2026
4:12 pm
“Become who you are” sounds like an instruction to excavate some finished identity buried beneath the noise: clear away the conditioning, ignore the crowd, find the authentic core. But Nietzsche’s self isn’t a fossil waiting to be uncovered. It’s closer to a character being forged in the act of living.
You don’t first discover who you are and then behave accordingly. You become through what you repeatedly choose, refuse, risk, practise, and endure. The self appears retrospectively, as a pattern running through actions that may have felt disconnected at the time. Only later do you look back and think: Ah, so that’s what I was making.
Even “aligning your actions with your evolving narrative” may be slightly too tidy. Alignment suggests that the story already knows where it’s going. Sometimes becoming requires betraying the narrative you’ve been using to hold yourself together. The good child, the reliable employee, the wounded outsider, the person who never quits—each identity may once have kept you alive, then quietly become a cage.
To become who you are is therefore not merely to express yourself. It’s to participate in your own formation. You act, encounter resistance, revise the story, and act again. The world answers back. Your body answers back. Consequences answer back. Some possibilities grow stronger through use; others wither when you stop feeding them.
There may be no final “true self” behind all this. But neither are you infinitely malleable. You inherit a particular body, history, temperament, set of wounds, strange attractions, recurring questions. Becoming happens in conversation with that material. You’re neither discovering a fixed essence nor inventing yourself from nothing. You’re composing with what has been given.
Perhaps the command is less become the person you were always meant to be and more:
Live in such a way that you can recognise yourself in what your life is becoming.
And when you can’t, don’t immediately assume you’ve lost your way. It may be the old map that no longer recognises the territory.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 14, 2026
10:17 am
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 opposite: bunker, collapse, escape, Mars colony, uploaded elite, apocalypse.
Perhaps one of the great cultural struggles of the post-human era isn’t technological at all.
It’s over which future we can still imagine collectively.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 14, 2026
10:08 am
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 to the question already running through my own work: how can we consciously design environments that help us think better?
One of the book’s bluntest claims is that language is the prime medium of control. We inherit words from parents, schools, religions, governments, advertisers and whatever screen currently has our attention. With those words come distinctions, expectations and ready-made identities. Repeat them for long enough and the scaffolding disappears. We stop hearing the sentence and start seeing the world it built.
This is the darker charge inside the phrase stories are code. A story doesn’t sit harmlessly in the head. It organises attention, tells the body what to fear, decides which futures look plausible and supplies the voice that says, “This is just who I am.” To rewrite the story is not necessarily to invent a more flattering one. It may begin with tracing the old language back to its source and asking whether I still consent to the life it keeps producing.
Ritual enters as a way of making the automatic visible. Change the words. Draw the desire. Walk a different route. Rearrange the room. Submit a habit to chance. Write the thought until it stops sounding inevitable. The point isn’t only the result at the end of the operation. TOPY’s phrase was THEE PROCESS IS THEE PRODUCT. The person carrying out the experiment is also the material being altered.
What saves this from becoming occult self-help is the book’s recurring insistence on demystification. Don’t take beliefs for granted. Don’t use technique to avoid anxiety or pain. Bring both surrender and critical intellect, because either one without the other leaves the door open to self-deception.
Enter the experiment wholeheartedly. Examine the interpretation ruthlessly.
That may be the form of magick I trust most: disciplined openness. Let the symbol work. Notice what it changes in the body, the room, the relationship or the next decision. Then return and examine the story built around the experience. A ritual can be effective without proving its cosmology. A charged coincidence can remain meaningful without becoming evidence that the universe has appointed me its special correspondent.
The same pattern changes how I think about art. In these pages, art is a vessel, a talisman, an act performed upon the artist’s relationship with reality. It doesn’t have to begin by pleasing a market or attracting an audience. Its first task is to become necessary.
That lands close to home. A blog post can be more than content. A poem can be more than expression. The act of making something can alter the person making it before anybody else encounters it. First make the artefact necessary. Then decide whether it wants witnesses.
Even the archive looks different from here. The book celebrates forgotten thinkers, discarded thoughtforms and personal grimoires assembled from whatever proved useful. That sounds suspiciously like the Textual Underground. A living archive needn’t become a museum of things once read. It can become a laboratory notebook: what I tried, what happened, what changed, what contradicted itself, what still glows when I return months later.
Perhaps Thee Psychick Bible isn’t giving me a new subject. It is revealing an occult lineage beneath practices I’m already assembling from writing, walking, conversation, technology, attention and the stubborn human need to find out whether a life can be lived more deliberately.
The book is still open. So is the experiment.
Like this:
LikeLoading…
September 11, 2026
7:05 am
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.
