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Although roughly hewn the shape of this work should stand out from that bare block first thrown up from the face of that broken cliff exposed by a fault stricken earth quarried by Fox. Waited by the hammer and tap of heavenly intervention the block, taken and torn with chronic turmoil in the untamed, the chaotic belly and opened up before herim, fell, depositing half digested sediments to line with oracular stone the moving chambers of that voice[2]. Thus, hewn to the heart, the spewn stone, hollowed of substance forever foretells speech by speech, while hugging its ores and growing its gems in fresh light. Here, in this hard case, confined by the shape it has taken on, not of me, or you, not of any one’s making, but embellished of its own pleasing, here, a seemly mass, it seems worth worshipping, or celebrating, or further adjustment.

It could be helpful to mention that “House of Stone” is Fox’s third stonework. Of these earlier stone constructions the most recent “My House[3]” (1998) could be regarded as preliminary to this work, the cybennial (2000CE[4]) “House of Stone”. The much earlier stonework, “Stone Circle[5]”, is an early intimation of Fox grasping at something hard, at solidity, only to find that even stone curves and caves and contorts, corrodes, turns circular, comes hollow, empty, difficult to grasp, subject to devious, erosive demolition, becomes impossibly broken, the mere rubble of its own deconstruction. Here among the rubble is no vantage point, though reconstruction[6] is a different story. Destruction seems synonymous with de-construction. The idea that enciphers of truth can be carved in stone, inscribed into surfaces, has long been left to endeavors of archeological unearthings, excavating confusions of ‘permanence’ with ‘correctness’, as subjects, among others, for deconflation. Reconstituting inscriptions from such rubble requires Foucaultian[7] imagination, indeed invention. Not that truth their-selves are susceptible to being more than instruments of common reason, are not subject to less than the torments of common interpretation and the pain of ever new instruments scraping their surfaces, deciphering the wounds and abrasions of belief[8].

The real problem with every “deconstructive” argumentation of the classic concept of truth is not to demonstrate that the paradigm by which we reason might be fallacious. It looks as if everybody is in agreement about this, by now. The world as we represent it to ourselves is an effect of interpretation. The problem has more to do with the nature of the guarantees that authorize us to attempt a new paradigm that others must not recognize as delirium, pure imagination of the impossible. What is the criterion that allows us to distinguish between dream, poetic invention, and an “acid trip” (because there are people who, after having taken the drug, throw themselves out windows convinced they can fly, only to wind up splattered all over the ground; an end, mark you, in sharp contrast with their hopes and intentions) from acceptable statements on the things of the physical or historical world around us?[9]

Of course, a philosopher and a platypus may, in truth, be a linguist too far. But ‘truth’ is not the issue, it is the question of recognition: can (will) you (agree to) recognize a platypus if you are Kant (1724-1804). Or would you prefer to transport an unicorn across such a sea of troubles in a linguistic sieve or would you rather take Fox’s boat of stone and be content with Marco Polo’s dis-graceful rhinoceros as your own sinking fund of knowledge?

Yet, how can we forget that poetry be of unicorns, their music, and that music be language and language be-wildering the words of our mouth who spit in the eye that deceives us with vision of serpentine signs? Is it that poetry can become a metalanguage lifting the clay feet of ordinary discourse above those stuck on themselves and loving the language of such love unwisely?

Moreover, at any given moment these questions [on the language of philosophy], which long remained special and virtual ones, become dominant and obsessing. This is certainly not insignificant as concerns the “historical” relation of philosophy to its proper limit and to the singular form of this closure. This singularity is manifested regularly along the lines of the following turn: whoever alleges that philosophical discourse belongs to the closure of a language must still proceed within this language and with the oppositions it furnishes. According to a law that can be formalized, philosophy always reappropriates for itself the discourse that de-limits it.[10]

Yet, stone and serpent strike a chord in the calculus that slithers across blank faces marking out meanings beyond us, drawing us ever further beyond the commonplaces haunted by the ghosts of us, objectless and eerie with misgivings, stuck with mistaken identities, grasping at empty occupations. Let this be a warning on the reappropriated language used here to ‘explain’ the language used in the poem itself its own object whose fiction is real. It seems, in any case, that we are all in the same Neurathian boat[11], trying to carve the truth out by chipping away at sea.

This ‘note’ (number 7) struck on the “House of Stone” song demonstrates, perversely, the great economy of poetry in the production of ‘beyondering’ objects[12] the contemplation of ‘whom’ discovers limits of selfish explanation and slivers the contemplative wholly beyond themselves. On this particular poetic object a rather punkish ‘tune’ is played cracking[13] the song in mind[14] using repetition, rhythm and rhyme to whip matter into a crazed, transient, unstable, mental salivation, an atavistic froth[15] in which everyday reality is digested, a pebble beneath the tongue. In other words, a sound sanctuary where need for meaning is supplied by gratuitous movement, a bubbly swirl whose stony stimulants pop and disappear upon the very slightest objective scrutiny. Perhaps, “House of Stone” is a haven capturing James Ramsey Macdonald’s:

… people who have not lost communion with the mystic things of life, the people of witcheries, the people who see in the dark, the people who are only half born into the delusion which men call Time and Space.[16]

As a politician Macdonald was surely in tune with the times, even with, perhaps unconsciously, his contemporary the philosopher J M E McTaggart, whose “a series” and “b series” distinctions about the nature of time[17] seem increasingly relevant today, 2003CE.

And thus not only each event, but the whole universe taken as a series of separate events, would appear imperfect. Even if such a series could ever be complete, it could not fully represent the reality, since the parts would still, by their existence in time, be isolated from one another, and claim some amount of independence. Thus the apparent imperfection of the universe would be due to the fact that we are regarding it sub specie temporis—an aspect which we have seen reason to conclude that Hegel himself did not regard as adequate to reality. If we could only see it sub specie aeternitatis, we should see it in its real perfection.[18]

Thus, the Nietzschean problem of the perspectival[19] continues to haunt Fox who with frantic verse seems intent on exorcising the appearance of such matter from his mind. The movement of the verse itself, rather than its content, seems designed to drive ghost from out the very building stone of his house. Such ghost in the stone is that which haunts the timeless prospect, or dream, of McTaggart’s perfect universe sub specie æternitatus, a variant (or mutant) ‘perspectival’ that seems on the brink of presenting thought without a time perspective, arrowless, a spaceless solidity crammed immovably in mind, a mind set in ultimate stone, an ultimate solidity, beyond (behind) the vision of human psyche, set as pure mentality, mind as monadic monolith[20].

For Baudrillard time ‘itself’ is assumed to ‘be’ something hidden behind the arrangements of human understandings. The (wrist) watch is his classic example of an object that typifies this “discontinual and ‘habitual’ function”,

It [the watch] typifies the twofold way in which we experience objects. On the one hand, it informs us about objective time — for chronometric exactitude is the very dimension of practical constraints, social exteriority, and death. But at the same time as it subjects us to an irreducible temporality, the watch as object also helps us to have time to ourselves. Just as a car ‘eats up’ the miles, so does the watch-object consume time. By concretizing and dividing up time, it turns it into an object of consumption. Time is no longer that hazardous dimension of praxis: it is a domesticated quantity.[23]

Fox’s verse actively runs the temporal gauntlet, attempting to rush the “hazardous dimension of praxis”, to overrun its limitations and to place himself upon a throne above or beyond Baudrillardian domestication.

“And there I sits”. Fox plainly presents an ekstatic tensing of “I” so as to transfix, in a seat of knowledge, an episteme trapped, ex cathedra, in the process of sitting out its own thought. Not, for Fox, the problem of ‘perception of the perceiver perceiving’, of such ekstasis leading to apparent regressus ad infinitum seemingly equivalent to reductio ad absurdum, an elastic imagination stretching toward a first cause, &/or to its breaking point. No, his is a distinction that these ‘two’ perceptions are not of a kind, but ‘duumvirate’[24]. The ‘perceiver perceiving’ is reflexion in praxis, while the contemporaneous (or is it simultaneous?) ‘perception of the perceiver perceiving’ is reflection[25] of (on) praxis. Yet, reflection is no more (or less) real than a real mirage[26], as if mind were mirror, and mirror were mind and whose image may be misleading but not false. The ‘perceiver-in-praxis’ is ‘psyche-in-action’; yet mirroring is not mind but merely reflexion and (considered) reflexion is nothing but reflection. The ‘différance’[27] is the intercession of the ‘natural’ psychology of memory. This is not the Nietzchean metaphysics of memory yielding eternal recurrence as given by Löwith[28], but the subvention of re-membering, the extending of the imperceptible Zenoic ‘present’ to cover itself with past impressions and future expectancies, thus forming a ‘factishion’[29] known as the-present-time. Such intercession is of memory as of a moisture permeating psyche cohering its myriad elements as a salivated wholeness upon a tongue whose fluidity is ‘imagining’, a property of con-temporary extension. From such wholeness imagining stretches, extends, forms, fills, flows, pours, runs, dis-courses. In the thirst for knowledge an oasis looks real enough (in theory) for sensible pause upon its shining way and hole[30], to dip and refresh a tongue, and to speak as an I (ego) that really “sits upon a throne” in terminal consonance with “stone”, ex-pressing weightily. Such attractive euphony is indeed consonant with the commanding, weighty ex-pression of an existential point to I and the way such an I weighs the point of ‘things’, places them, ensuring nothing is merely a vacuum to be filled in an orderly way commensurate with the increments and rulings of I, ruler of all things, ultimate over-seer, overlooker.

Thus even though being can not be the support of any differentiated quality, nothingness is logically subsequent to it since it supposes being in order to deny it, since the irreducible quality of the not comes to add itself to the undifferentiated mass of being in order to release it. That does not mean only that we should refuse to put being and non-being on the same plane, but also that we must be careful never to posit nothingness as an original abyss from which being arose.[31]

In this it is the natural bent of psyche to bring, on reflection, sense to mind that forever bends over backwards to make a sense of psyche. Yet, I sits still, so very still, undetected and indetectable, shrouded in being, seemingly strung insupportably between psyche and mind as between life and death, covering up diaphanous reality as if it were an empty shroud folded naked among itself, a third person absent, a ghost at the cloth’s edge pulling at loose threads. The subsequence of nothingness to being (somethingness) is, of course, an idea plainly mistaken depending as it does on the perspectival of seriatim causality, that being causes nothingness, which is a result that makes no sense.

With all this in mind, Fox is certainly attempting to express, inter alia, in emotional terms the mental stress generated by his own awareness through the actual cognition day-to-day and night-by-night of such existential insubstantiality weighing on his own psyche, of the pressure induced by the groundlessness and ambiguity of subjectless being, of being without firmament[32]. Or, to be, as it were up to date, it is to do with Fox’s struggle with the threat of the pataphysical. It is interesting to note that Jarry[33] was a contemporary of Bradley, so “up-to-date” may be itself something of a pataphysical property.

In all this, it seems that Fox assumes singers of the “House of Stone” will naturally take “house” as, inter alia, metonymy for ‘mind’, rather than ‘psyche’. Fox, it seems, distinguishes between ‘mind’ and ‘psyche’. He treats ‘mind’ as immaterial entity (in keeping with Monostone’s theory of relational and solid omniversality[34]), whose only action is ‘thinking’, ever beset by its potential to set the Cartesian hare running its circle (chasing the fleeting psychology of solidity). The term ‘psyche’ is preferred by Fox for its tendency toward the Greek, incorporating ‘animation’, whose action (praxis) is to live, though beset by the modern convention to mis-translate as ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, rather than ‘breath of life’[35]. Though both ‘mind’ and ‘psyche’ carry the Cartesian duality gene[36], Fox wounds the hare by distinguishing that mind thinks while psyche breathes, and in breathing psyche is part and parcel of its vicinality as well as part and parcel of its thoughts extending the vicinal[37] beyond the (tangible, real, but only apparently solid) senses to the imaginary senses (intangible but no less, though differently, real); thus mind, with its imaginative volition, is imbibed of psyche and not distinct from it, mind thus being something of a pataphysical concomitant of psyche. Of course, this is not to shoot dead the hare itself[38], a dead hare is more than breathless, gets no where, not even back to its own point of departure as a proper hare should in a normal world, or to creep ever closer to its tortoise in a purely flat racing world[39].

The hare and the tortoise are one thing, but an hedgehog is another. And the finest hedgehog ever baked in a book is perhaps Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) of prolific argument and doubtful dissidence. Russell typifies the enormous power of the erinaceous[40] to unify the shape of ‘knowable’ knowledge. Of extraordinary intellect and academic capacity, he was able to discern and embraced vast arrays of facts and copulate with them vigorously until conception gave birth to wholes that made sense in themselves (certainly to lesser hedgehogs; though such were usually committed to finding holes in his wholes as a matter of course). Fox, in his own hole, remained in the dark afraid of shadows, but scenting that the blood of hedgehogs was only just beyond the end of his nose. Russell seems to have felt that it was all a question of trying harder, digging the hole deeper, inventing the odd torch, better imaging, cleaner idols.

It may be said—and this is an objection which must be met at the outset—that it is the duty of the philosopher to call into question the admittedly fallible beliefs of daily life, and to replace them by something more solid and irrefragable. In a sense this is true, and in a sense it is effected in the course of analysis. But in another sense, and a very important one, it is quite impossible. While admitting that doubt is possible with regard to all our common knowledge, we must nevertheless accept that knowledge in the main if philosophy is to be possible at all. There is not any superfine brand of knowledge, obtainable by the philosopher, which can give us a standpoint from which to criticize the whole of the knowledge of daily life. The most that can be done is to examine and purify our common knowledge by an internal scrutiny, assuming the canons by which it has been obtained, and applying them with more care and with more precision. Philosophy cannot boast of having achieved such a degree of certainty that it can have authority to condemn the facts of experience and the laws of science. The philosophic scrutiny, therefore, though skeptical in regard to every detail, is not skeptical as regards the whole. That is to say, its criticism of details will only be based upon their relation to other details, not upon some external criterion which can be applied to all the details equally. The reason for this abstention from a universal criticism is not any dogmatic confidence, but its exact opposite; it is not that common knowledge must be true, but that we possess no radically different kind of knowledge derived from some other source. Universal skepticism, though logically irrefutably, is practically barren; it can only, therefore, give a certain flavour of hesitancy to our beliefs, and cannot be used to substitute other beliefs for them.[41]

The desideratum (viz “no radically different kind of knowledge”) that Russell eschews leaves him amidst the “Tribe” whose idols must be melted down, refined, purified, poured and reformed into correcting lenses through which may be induced improved images the proper observation of which may be truer of them in themselves than before.

The metaphor Bacon used in presenting the Idols of the Tribe guides his thinking in a crucial way. The mind of man is a distorting mirror; it reflects what goes on in the world around it, but in a distorted fashion. Its images are therefore false images, or Idols. Its images are therefore false images, or Idols. These distortions can never, he thinks, be wholly avoided, but it is possible to make corrections for them. If we first learn about the human mind and the kinds of distortions to which it is prone, then we will be in a position to construct correcting lenses to compensate for the distortion (just as we can construct spectacles to correct for defective vision once we have identified the defect). In the first book of the Novum Organum Bacon discusses the idols, and in the second he outlines the method, Induction, which is designed to correct for these distortions.[42]

Such correction of the mind through the lens of induction, and Russell’s earlier assessment of the strategic (un)reliability of induction[43] as a safe method of prediction, accordingly leaves our knowledge of the external world in limbo, as it were falling between the two stools of flawed observation and suspect mental interpretation. The manifold problems of mind as reliable oracle are manifested in Bacon’s proposed “New Instrument” for inducing the (an) objective world to expose a less distorted (accurate, true, real) image of itself. Bacon is at pains, of course, to finesse his new and wholly human instrument of inquiry past the barriers erected by the established, authorized scheme of knowledge (teachings, rules), the official epistemology, set up and run by the English Church.

Thus, the “Novum Organum” tries to distinguishes between religious knowledge (revealed knowledge) and real knowledge (scientific knowledge) and is at pains to ensure that his new instrument does not interfere with authorized (revealed) knowledge. It is not possible for the old instrument (mind as vatic orifice) to really know anything for certain except by authority of the Church whose founding Fathers discerned that God’s truth (‘struth) was certainly confirmed in their own minds. Bacon carefully avoids interfering with such Truth by redefining knowledge as essentially of two kinds: (religious) Truth as revealed by authorized sources confirmed through an approved process of pure reasoning, and scientific[44] truth as revealed by (scientific) observation of direct empirical experience (perhaps by authorized observers). Scientific truth, as all things, belonged to the English Christian God and could not contradict Truth religiously enacted by authorized angels and played out in earthly theatres by prophets and priests. The New Instrument, mind as reliable oracle, observes and predicts but does not instruct God’s Truth. Such instruction is reserved for the pontification of priesthoods as ultimate vatic orifices enunciating authoritatively, bridging the mind of (this or that) God between a universal heaven and an English earth. More widely such vatic orifices have long opened shop among the markets of the world peddling paradises to the multitudinous denizens of caves kneeling in darkness, denying light, blindly paying out their tribute as their lives are played out with prayer.[45]

However, a key feature of Fox’s ‘thinking’, if it can be tentatively thought of that way, is his reference to the (defunk) “official doctrine” [of mind] as described somewhat derisively by Gilbert Ryle in the mid 20^th century, but not yet killed off in popular imaginings even now in the 21^st, though seemingly long defunk in academia:

The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the doubtful exceptions of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to exist and function.[46]

Ryle further explains that, according to the “official doctrine”, human bodies are in space but minds are not. He then argues, with some cogency, the “absurdity” of the “official doctrine”. He argues that this doctrine is ultimately derived in Descartes’ “myth”, as he puts it; though noting that Descartes is not wholly culpable for the way the body-mind myth has become a central functionality in the 20^th Century and in the structure and form of the English language[47]. Simply to speak is to automatically fabricate such duality. The two-worlds view is inescapably implied by the grammar of speech as well as by speech itself and cannot but be re-presented through concomitant mentalese[48] whereof imaginations ‘fill-in’ wordless gaps with the forms of the worlds available to the imaginings of individual human incipients. Whereas the ‘mentality of space’ contains mind as an ‘hapticity’ that otherwise senses itself-being intangible. This is to eschew the modern monosensual tendency[49] whereby vision dominates the tongue of observation (linguifaction) and forms the adjectival reflexion of space producing the dimensional form in which the imagination of space seems inevitably contained (limited) and expressed. The seeing the sabre toothed tiger is believing it will eat you and saying so out loud: such vision is persuasive and prioritizing. However, the proximity of sabre tootheds, whose propensity is to eat people, may once have been susceptible to noses not yet grown narrow and pious. The noses of we who now inhabit highly sterile vicinities are well out of touch (smell) with such savagery, and this perceptual ‘distance’ would certainly jeopardize our genes surviving should such creatures still threaten to consume us. Belief[50] is therefore a certain emotion created by uncertain facts. It is an emotion ‘linguified’ in English by the word ‘belief’. This emotion fabricates a geography of the sensual dimensions, constructing the vicinal and the virtual, banning that not held dear. Belief spoken from fluid mouths lovingly repressing space from mind until nothing is expressible but only the dimensions of belief are speakable. Beliefs love rules seems the rule, banal though such linguification seems. The only certain thing about the emotion belief is that it seems almost always, perhaps always, an indicator of error (if error is manifested by contra-diction). The only certainty it seems in practice is that all beliefs are also disbelieved (by someone else).

Sartre is also helpful in this when he tries to establish the answer to the question, “How can the being of the phenomenon be trans-phenomenal?”[51]. He says,

… we have been brought to an impasse since we have not been able to establish the connection between the two regions of being [from appearances as positives rather than negatives and thence to the two regions of the heart of being, the in-itself and the for-itself] which we have discovered. No doubt this is because we have chosen an unfortunate approach. Descartes found himself faced with an analogous problem when he had to deal with the relation between soul and body. He planned then to look for the solution on the level where the union of thinking substance and extended substance was actually effected—that is, in the imagination. His advice is valuable. To be sure, our concern is not that of Descartes and we do not conceive of imagination as he did. But what we can retain is the reminder that it is not profitable first to separate the two terms of a relation in order to try to join them again later. The relation is a synthesis. Consequently the results of analysis can not be covered over again by the moments of this synthesis.[52]

Perhaps, Sartre’s hare seems madder[53] than Ryle’s, or should we say ‘differenter’. Of course, both are made irrelevant by Monostone’s “Theory of the Omniverse as Purely Relational and Purely Solid Universes” whereby humankind is only in or unified with the Relational Universe. Such a universe supports the burgeoning reality of the factish as pataphysical fetish, and thus permits analysis of the inseparable, of the fact undone.

Nevertheless, Fox’s fabrication of “House of Stone” seems designed to transmit, to mark out such obversity, extending form to comprehensively unfix, as it were, the ‘visionary’ spatiality, or human schema, of space whose basic geography can be ‘seen’ as a vicinality (bundle[54]) of sense.

The posture and structure of the body generates a particular local geography — up and down, back and front, left and right — which are also culturally associated with meanings such as sacred and profane. We are the centre of our world, always experiencing the environment firstly from within this ‘circumambient space’ or immediate geography. As one moves, one’s left and right, back and front, and so on also move. This immediate geography is extended by the body’s senses, the intimate senses of touch and smell and the distant senses of sight and hearing. And more directly, the locomotion of the body allows it, with the aid of memory and expectation, to develop a wider ‘map’ of the environment through which it travels. Technology also extends the reach of the body and can give us a sense of experiencing a world apart from the body. Here, technologies such as the telephone and television are everyday examples.[55]

Thus, the mentality of space is inseparable from, or one and the same as ‘sense’ ‘sensing’ and thereby ‘making sense’. This is not to make sense of space, but sense making space.

Sense, as in ‘making sense’, refers to order and understanding. This is sense as meaning.

Sense, or ‘the senses’, can also refer to the specific sense modes — touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing and the sense of balance. This is sense as sensation or feeling.

These two aspects are closely related and often implied by each other. The sense(s) is (are) both a reaching out to the world as a source of information and an understanding of that world so gathered. The sensuous experience and understanding is grounded in previous experience and expectation, each dependent on sensual and sensory capacities and educational training and cultural conditioning.[56]

Yet, Fox involves a third sense which, unlike a third eye[57], is the sensing of mentality. Hereof the imagined real is qualified as virtual, but extends vicinal sensation to incorporate such supposed unreality as real sensation, to bundle such ‘mirageals’[58] of mentality, such ‘imaginaries’ as can be conjured through a combination of psychosomoses and socially prescribed expectations such as those derived from human power structures of a religious (belief) character, actual religions such as Roman Catholicism, Islamism, Lutherism, or quasi religions such as communism, consumerism, nationalism, imperialism, globism and such like manipulators of ‘sacred texts’ (ideologies, god given rules and such) and systems of administering power[59]. This third sense (of sense) bundles up the virtual with the actual as pataphysically real as one another. Just as the mirage is a real mirage, so making sense of the bundle makes sense. Praxis-of-psyche is limited by its vicinal operability, though this not to suggest the geography of such operability is limited by the reach of the five senses, the classic physiological senses; but that the scope of prosthetic technologies and the ‘prosthetics’ of imaginations[60] and of myriad reflections-on-praxis consummate experience as a singular bundle of common order, of indistinguishably common effects, of universal sense.

In a classic contortion of Buddhism we have the third eye, a socio-mechanical (prosthetic) ritual alteration, rather than, say, a chemical alteration of an Huxlean[61] psycho-chemical character, through which apparent new vision is obtained and a power structure dependent on the protective authority of being chosen from above is formed and projected upon the ordinary (unchosen) masses through ritualized communication structures controlled by the chosen. Thus, as chosen Tibetan T Lopsang Rampa reported in the mid 20^th Century,

Suddenly there was a little “scrunch” and the instrument penetrated the bone [of Rampa’s forehead]. Instantly its motion was arrested by the very alert operator. He held the handle of the instrument firmly while the Lama Mingyar Dondup passed him a very hard, very clean sliver of wood which had been treated by fire and herbs to make it as hard as steel. This sliver was inserted in the “U” of the instrument and slid down so that it just entered the hole in my head. The lama operating moved slightly to one side so that the Lama Mingyar Dondup could also stand in front of me. Them at a nod from the latter, the operator, with infinite caution, slid the sliver farther and farther. Suddenly I felt a stinging, tickling sensation apparently at the bridge of my nose. It subsided, and I became aware of subtle scents which I could not identify. That, too, passed away and was replaced by a feeling as if I was pushing, or being pushed, against a resilient veil. Suddenly there was a blinding flash, and at that instant the Lama Mingyar Dondup said “Stop?” For a moment the pain was intense, like a searing white flame. It diminished, died and was replace[d] by spirals of colour, and globules of incandescent smoke. The metal instrument was carefully removed. The sliver of wood remained, it would stay in place for two or three weeks and until it was removed I would have to stay in this little room almost in darkness. No one would see me except these three lamas, who would continue my instruction day by day. Until the sliver was removed I would have only the barest necessities to eat and drink. As the projecting sliver was being bound in place so that it could not move, the Lama Mingyar Dondup turned to me and said: “You are now one of us Lopsang. For the rest of your life you will see people as they are and not as they pretend to be.” It was a very strange experience to see these men apparently enveloped in golden flame. Not until later did I realize that their auras were golden because of the pure life they led, and that most people would look very different indeed.[62]

It is clear that Rampa was writing a kind of ‘science’ fiction in that earlier and familiar ‘unscientific’ religious form which forms &/or permeates the power structures of the ages with miracles, magics and revelations. The idea of making an human ‘inhuman’, of translating that of earth up to that of heavenly astrality (light of light), or down to hellish netherness (dark abyss), is a well established and diverse fiction that seems always to have fed the natural hunger of humanity to overcome the arrow of time whose toxic[63] trajectory points toward but one end, the end of one, to one’s death. It is with regard to this end (death) that an ambrosia is imagined and sought, a food for thought, a Frankensteinian elixir whose golden dust powders and soothes the weeping wounds that mere living inflicts upon itself and whose healing transmutes death into more life, into more of the same.

Frankenstein, though perhaps merely an instrument in a moral argument when Mary Shelley wrote the story (1818)[64], now rears heris[65] ugly head today as a genuine horror, a frightener, a powerful short-cut weapon accessed and dispersed by the forces of reaction. Such abbreviations, belligerently manipulated, are the crude weaponry of modern virtual wars, weapons of mass instruction whose collateral damage is genuine (true) misunderstanding. Thus, genuine beliefs fabricate bases of Frankensteinian praxes whose mirageality is of no matter. Yet, there is more to Frankenstein than meets the eye, or indeed hand, or indeed nose; or is not simply a matter of taste, who will kiss Frankenstein, or more precisely find herim appetizing. It is not the volition of the so called monster herim-self that troubles consumption, no s/he is but another factish inhabiting this or that psychic space. It is the concomitant creation of heris creator that is trouble, it is the creation of creator by the created[66]. The inevitable result of creation is the creator creating (as if time’s arrow is bent, boomeranged, reflexed). That the creator of an human being (or any being, or any factish, any pataphysicality) should recognize itself as god, a god responsible for its creations in space is a childish manipulation, a playing-thing of a celibate Papa cloaked in heris appetites[67]. Such Promethean efforts are rife, yet such gods seem ever invidious, appearing as artifactual reciprocations of paternalistic proportions:

Were you not the first person it saw when it opened its eyes? Did it not stammer your name? Did it not hold out those deformed limbs towards you? It was born good, like you, handsome, like you, wise like you, since you were its creator. Why flee? Why leave it alone, ill adapted to a world that rejected it? … No, your sin is not that you took yourself to be God, for God never abandons his creatures, no matter how sinful. He follows them, sacrifices Himself for them, throws Himself at their feet, sends them His only son; He saves them. Continual, continuous creation … You are drawing the wrong lesson. It is not the creative power that we need to curtail; it is our love we need to extend, even to our lesser brothers who did not ask us for life. We acquainted them with existence. We need to acquaint them with love.[68]

Of course, s/he (the monster) was a mistake, something went badly wrong, got ugly, got dangerous, but that was ‘his’ own fault, wasn’t it? Was s/he not intrinsically bad, or was s/he made badly? Merely a bastard factish irresponsibly fathered (parthogenetically by Mary Shelley) in moral and technical error simply for the pleasure or therapy in the making of herim. Now Frankensteinian factishes represent natural conservativism, and are collectively a key ‘mirageal’ weapon of reactionaries in continual war against material change and new ideas. In the hot-house politics of new growths Frankenstein’s scary monster is a key weapon in the armoury of reflexive Luddites breaking into seemingly scary laisse-faire laboratories dedicated to making monstrous profits for the good of humankind, etc etc. Or, the re-invention of Frankenstein as, say, Frank Einstein, the acceptably new munster on the block.

Yet, nothing was new about Frankenstein except s/he, on the face of it, turned out to be seemingly a ‘bad thing’, not merely a fairy or freak for show. This is to say Frankenstein was not simply odd, abnormal, not sociometrically central, but was fearfully ugly, threatening, an object lesson in the consequences of any old smith turning out the odd human hand and eye having gained access to the resources of furnace, fire and fiction to twist ‘man’[69] in the name of God. ‘He’ was nothing new, having always lurked and lurched among all tribes and peoples scurrying between flesh and field eating things until their mouths were stopped with death. Creation myths all involve earth, clay and fire in the hands of supermen gods making mud pies that turn into creatures of earth, earthlings. At first the mere earth, the water and fire and a pot maker’s gods, then a tin pot god supplants the rest, an epitome of steely man, edgy with smith in hand, chained by the ankle to his fire. All such gods are said to have spoken and in such speech have deposited their plays upon surfaces to bed meanings like silts suffering and sinking under slowing rivers as they reach into the vast deeps of an unknown and unknowable sea[70]. Here, in our depths, we feel vague light seemingly from above must be the surface of heaven, where drowning must surely end. Here we breath but through the mercy of our own inventions. Here only the archaeology of inexorable sediment rises.

Without cosmetics Frankenstein continues heris ugly, antipathetic rule within the horrorsphere undisturbed by Avon Ladies, unsupplanted by a sympathetic Edward Scissorhands[71]. The humanoidal confinement of psyche containing mind in the iron grip, as it were, of Darwinian genetics squeezes fear absolutely and completely into an human humankind glimpsing, if not envisaging, prospects of inhumanoidal transplantation, the robotico-surgical whereof the grafting of parts[72] may deconstruct the familiar and graft ‘other’, the entirely strange, (not merely the différantiation[73] of Derrida) to psyche, to inescapably and wholly alter psyche, making its praxis unrecognizably, unreferenceably mad[74]. This is to dive into the cybennial soup for sure, and once in the soup, that gene pool of living humanity muddied by earth, it seems more a stew of technological accidence than a tasteful consommé. In lieu of there being God(s) dictating ‘the way’ variously through the open mouths of incessantly industrious beneficiaries, there is only serendipitous consilience[75] operating beyond the claims washed up by the many and various waves of vicarious clamour.

Beyond the vast bureaucracies of well resourced theocrats endlessly recycling belief into the perpetual emotion of subservience to their painstaking[76] rules and regulations, beyond these is to entertain the inexplicable accidents of movement which generate fairy tale discoveries that click together making ‘new-sense’[77], annoyingly beyond the safety net of common sense. Although scientific consensus had long eschewed the persuasive modernist perspective of Victorian common sense, no such dodginess had entered the popular unconscious until the late 20^th century. In 1988 John Barrow, when considering “Inner space and outer space”, points out the fundamentals of this shift in terms of the ‘new-sense’ of the post-modern scientific community:

Quantum theory revealed that the deepest laws of the micro-world govern strange and unobservables things. It marks the end of visualization and ‘common sense’ as trustworthy guides to the frontiers of knowledge. No longer could we have confidence in the Victorian belief that everything can be pictured in terms of simple mechanical models—atoms do not behave like cricket balls, nor does space lie flat and true like the top of a billiard table. The complementarity manifested in quantum laws reflects the inability of our classical concepts to accommodate the richness and subtlety of the world, and removes the Cartesian divide that insulates the observer from the observed. Naïve realism is dead.

Relativity showed us that the bedrock of our experience—the space and time within which we find ourselves immersed and swept along—is as malleable as anything else we know. Space and time are not just fundamental categories within which we must organize our experience: they are influenced by those experiences. The rate of flow of time; the geometry of space; both are determined locally by the material within the Universe. We cannot distinguish between the curvature of space and the masses that effect it. They are equivalent ways of describing the same phenomenon.[78]

Now, 2004, cybennial mass perspectival seems to have swiftly surpassed the post-modern and formed a common unconsciousness in the image of goods of mass consumption, of electronically or digitally mediated objects (goodies)[79]. Such mediation has automatically subvened the implicit socio-conceptual bases of ‘new’ information and communication technologies (ICTs) which supervene as representing ‘technology’ as any-thing that extends ‘normal’ human bodymind, yet the problem of normality shift itself accentuates the quantafication[80] of the human. Sean Aylward Smith, succinctly sums up an underlying aspect of this problem,

Attempting to define what technology is involves diving headlong into such murky problems as the subject/object dichotomy, the ontology of artefacts and the limits of the body -- that is, the very definition of humanity …[81]

Smith goes on to describe the (new) problematic of the “limits of the body” and gives the example of the Melbourne performance artist Stelarc who has a third arm rather than a third eye:

When he's not suspending himself from ceilings with fishhooks, he has a project known as the Third Arm. This consists of a metal arm-like mechanism, containing computer componentry, which is attached to his body. Simple enough -- sounds like technology: inorganic, non-natural and requiring sophisticated manufacturing capacity. Except that it is controlled and operated by the nerve-endings in his body, just like a real arm -- or a prosthetic arm, for that matter. It isn't attached like a dildo or a belt, it is attached and controlled like any organic limb. Okay, so maybe what Stelarc needs is not a new definition of technology but a strong bout of therapy and a good lie down, but what about pacemakers? Replacement hips? Dildos, for that matter? Or belts, for that matter? Or what about running shoes or football boots? There is a television advertisement for adidas football boots and featuring Alessandro del Piero, in which the ideal football player is built from the ground up according to written and reproducible specifications (that is, as a piece of technology) -- wearing adidas boots and looking exactly like the Juventus striker.[82]

Stelarcian hybridism, the wired, digitized flesh, breeds rejection as not having an history of normality, an established social immunology, of not having a story, a socializing myth to carry it through except that of Frankensteinian proportions as if being mad was normal, simply a matter of change, of difference being normal and routinely replacing the old with the normally new normality. Even Edward Scissorhands, eponymouly undisguised, is in that sense not a modern machine, or a digitized effigy (or digimorph), seeming inhuman merely by mechanical extension; unlike Asimov’s egotised “I Robot”[83] whose 1950s technology is entirely inhuman, yet through fictional complexity generates a gestaltic ‘consciousness’ that seems human, indeed is ‘factishiously human’.

However, the problem of Gloria’s Robbie is that s/he seems a humanized robot in recognizably human form aware of itself being aware in a netword of human meanings, unlike the robotic-robot, The Talking Robot, the unhuman looking object that factishions with Gloria as they operate together textually:

The Talking Robot” who was designed to answer questions, and only such questions as it could answer had ever been put to it. It was quite confident of its ability, therefore, “I—can—help—you.”

Thank you, Mr. Robot, sir. Have you seen Robbie?” [asks the little girl Gloria, looking for her robotic nurse]

“He’s about so high, Mr. Robot, sir, only higher, and he’s very nice. He’s got a head, you know. I mean you haven’t, but he has, Mr. Robot, sir.”

“Yes, Mr. Robot, sir. A robot just like you, except he can’t talk, of course, and—and looks like a real person.”

To which the talking robot’s only response was an erratic splutter and an occasional incoherent sound. The radical generalization offered it, ie its existence, not as a particular object, but as a member of a general group, was too much for it. Loyally, it tried to encompass the concept and half a dozen coils burnt out. Little warning signals were buzzing.[84]

Mr Robot is burnt out by a failure of imagination. For Asimov the glorious humanization of Robbie is a process that travels from machine to humanlike behavior dependent on a (then) recognizable consciousness of what ‘human consciousness’ should be like; whereas, for Fox, the direction of travel is from human to machine, or a vector derived from both in the mechanization of humanity (inhumanization), not the machine humanized. It is the wholesale industrialization of the fixtional farm where each plot can be tended untouched by human hand and mined for meaning to be kinematically fed into the vast spectating maw of dutifully vacant fields of knowledge[85] waiting to be ploughed and seeded, weeded, tended, toiled, cropped, converted, enclosed as vast pataphysical estates populated by urbanoidal globeings farmed wholly for their capacities to produce and consume material goods while patiently chewing the cud of the immaterial in an all consuming soylence[86].

Indeed, such soylence is truly golden. The mass consumption of the immaterial by the supine is objectified as tactile deposits in the vein of Midas hidden in pockets beneath the surface of appearance in dens where the glister and image of darkness itself adumbrates the value of vision. Such golden stupefaction gives a touch of apparent solidity to the immaterial having all the appearances of substantially making good. Such apparent substantiation of the immaterial, its feel good factor, permeates beyond the porous realms of belief and disbelief and their respective suspensions of the superficial enabling globeing to substantially actualize consumption of the immaterial with neither (belief or disbelief), suspending the artificial to feel good as a sein of plexuality consecrating self as dead end[87]. Such self-actualization in this ‘induality of neither’ is sufficient to motivate the grazing habits of globeings ‘nethered’ though they are to the stakes beneath the various ‘woods[88]. Such habituations, like the advent of silent reading and the private excursions away from the intensive reading aloud of official texts[89], unsuspicously, naively construct realities from appearances. Between them serendipitous consilience unconceals the deception of the thrush[90] voicing heris songs this way and that, sounding as though s/he is the bird to follow into a singular, Parmidean world.

All this is effectively mutated by the vast swathe of industrialized immateriality which is constituted in the futuristic genre[91] that the urbanoidal globeing is conditioned to. This mutation makes it possible for globeing to imagine new man (Neo[92]) with mutilated mind of fantastic capability. The urbanoidal globeing is oriented to the fixtional factishion, the being impossible, the impossible being. Of course, such (absurd) impossibility can be traced back to the earliest representations of ‘reality’ on cave walls. For example, the amazing find of cave painting at Chauvet-pont-D’Arc showing hunting scenes are surely fixtions. Perhaps, their affect on contemporary observers was as dramatically ‘realistic’ then[93] (6000 BCE) as are now (2003 CE) the massive and manifold[94] sense attacks manufactured in Hollywood, the studio ‘hits’ programmed by nerds in their technological dens for the urbanoidal globeing. Nevertheless, posing the impossible prepares globeing to encounter and countenance the biomechanically ‘impossible’ doused in the chemistry of drug induced curricula altering the social psychology of the normal, the point of sociometric centrality, shifting the Gaussian mean toward another axis. Such peer prescription moves state funded toleration through all kinds of projects, initiatives, special schemes[95]. Here the protean Terminator[96] may clasp HAL[97] to (his) its bosom, Johnny Mnemonic[98] hand in glove with Edward Scissorhands, while neo-sapien, Neo the new wise guy, rises over the normal, a cross between Christ, Fawkes[99] and the Terminator, an overall superman, at last[100].

Thus, in the fertile womb of Hollywood, metaphors continually mix and breed the morphean magic of the immaterial, manipulating conception as if febrile fingers had found a touching key to life in the pleasuring of open tombs, in working each salivating sarcophagus greedy for its pound of dead flesh in lieu of having a life. Here, in the open lap of incestuous software, the raw Matrix deconceives the messianic to copulate with the idea of Christ manufacturing an even newer man engendered with inhuman power to overcome any opposition to its proliferation or otherwise form of advancement. Such interferes with the myriad superstitions tongued by wandering messianics driven by their own importance to get lost in wildernesses wherein to agonize for attention. Now prophets are made only by imagining sufficient magic to savage the muddled senses of the intellectually obese, the great mass of urbanoidal globs herded into darkened dens where motion is confused with reality and reality with truth[101], and truth with genuflections awash with the rituals of the kneeling mind bent on clean feet and picking particular food, the ritual forms of butchery, the shape of hats, hoods, cloaks, beards and hair and flowing robes encrested with gold and precious stones and an extra tall hat, and precious crooks and such like paraphenalia as are the crucial outward signs of the power of faith or faith in power, even to the hand and foot and to the nether parts such as are required to pleasure and dignify and comfortably encompass ex cathedra the power of the god who backs them.

Conversely, exchanging Hollywood for Holiness, the genuflected seem obsessed with not the secret but the public indulgence of their sexual preferences. These latter enlightened religions, typified by large and wonderfully insipid parts of the Anglican Communion[102], seem wholly dedicated to granting indulgences to themselves and partners at large on a Chaucerian scale by pandering to the publication and promotion of what were once obscure pleasures. In the face of Catholic secrecy and Koranic cover, Anglican self-indulgence is required to flourish and flower freely between sexes of every kind and condition in the name of their god of love. Such hypocrisy is nothing new, but its florescence must surely engender widespread conversions of the repressed, bringing them out from their long and uncomfortable lying in the caves and cabals of their communities, coming into open and profitable communion with their churches, where enclaves have lain patiently for so long in their obscure sects advantageously hidden from the prying eyes and laws of the secular. Now, with the inexhaustible power of the religious to trim and turn their words to suit their needs, no Anglican functionary or member of any kind need suffer for behavioural proclivities forced upon them by their peculiar sexualities arising to awkwardly fuck up religious achievement. No longer need their members suffer as secret martyrs to the ancient perversions of their church, no longer sacrifice their needs to the frustrations of secrecy, but grasp on words that are satisfactorily re-formed to incorporate open consignment to the pleasures and heats of Augustinian fires, of pure and fruitless sex whose soul object is waxing the entertainment and comfort of the carnal. In the vanguard, the Anglicans preserve god for the realm of the inhuman, the urbanoidal globeing, while the reactionary conservativism of the Roman Catholics and the Islamists and other religious conservationists must preserve the all too human human, or face extinction. Of course, either way God would be dead as we know Him, the light would be gone from our eyes. Would we be dead without light, without that electromagnetic spectrum radiating at 10- *** GHertz on our retinal substance? But, imagine, no over-being telling us what to do all the time; what on earth would we do?

Here, in the dark, light appears real, a natural good scattering darkness to the uttermost corners of dens, beyond habitation of urbanoidal globeing, that it may take root only in screenless recesses where such reality can be unseen. Here the unseen, kept in the dark by the dark clothing it, is relegated to really tick and twist at the corners of human consciousness as unseen eyebeams[103] trick their way through habits of lifetimes to spy on naked light, exposing satanic illumination of verses shining against the heart of light nakedly exposed in new scriptoria to words stripped of meaning. Blinded, such eyebeams accustom themselves to the texture of the darkness clothing their vision until such texture becomes the feeling of light sprawled darkly on flayed surface of lamb stretched by hoods bartering death for a mere tithe torn and terrorized from kneeling minds prostrate with prayer and propaganda. Here, afraid of the dark, human herds ever stumble to their knees involuntarily submitting to fraternal hoods whose loudspeakers recite their sacred texts for an ultimate prophet under the hailing hands of fraternal hoods harnessing fear for their own good. Thus, humankind can in-deed feel its way around the dangerous envisionments made out of darkness whose immaterialities can only be imagined in the light of denunciations of lightlessness as being beyond vision, only fit for blind feeling. Blind thus, and crouching in a womb’s corner awaiting vatlike the birth of feeling, the immaterial coils and recoils among its tales, breeding fire like suns refracting through the facets of a fallen jewel sunk beneath a mere surface to light the satanic ever twisting and retracting through the dark, ever turning lithesome upon its bed of death[104]. Here, swelling with appearance, stony faced upon its empty shell, loathsome with fruitless display, the carnivating sarcophagus consumes its fair share, gobbles its slice of death, digesting the light of day.

Monstrous though this may seem, and deadly amongst the general mass of inhumane cyborgs we, the recursive[105], hopefully always find inventions of the liberal democratic hero, of the comitatus[106], the knight errant protecting the weak, the down trodden. Epitomizing such weaklings[107] are typically women, or rather chaste virgins whose potential for producing valid offspring is unsullied by promiscuity and the fruitfulness of plural fucking[108] and who are thus capable of procreating assured property succession in addition to cunning amalgamation of capital between families, enabling living (heroes) to imagine their dead hands could claw vicariously from the grave and re-possess their lost worldly wealth, their past real estate. This realty generates the genealogical asset of the noble wherefrom the goodness of its own right governance is always re-newable. Thus is the hero schooled in the realities of notoriety in protecting such noble assets as the chaste female and her access to the futures market. Yet, the shifting nature of assets, the very nature of property, indeed the very nature of nature[109] itself, calls up new images of a virtually real hero compliant with the needs entertained by the newly ennobled whose properties can be wholly revealed when right-clicked by a dead mouse entirely incapable of jellifying the backbones of chaste maidens capable of their own rescue. The new hero needs no maidens to fuck up his properties, and new maidens need no heroes to fuck them up. In the new fucking world the assumption of the virgin seems undesirable, over the top, a matter of unrequited pleasure in the prostitution of love. Here, in this new world aboriginals wait for their reservations to be overrun by pornopoppers manipulating money from the world of dreary wankers feeling their way toward their own ends. While such well lubricated diasporas[110] may be pornopopped to extinction, and others reduced to fruitless sexual conversations between insulated body parts, others may wholly reconstruct sexual intercourse, feeling replenishment is best served by data transfer.

Such deviance prospects the new from old grounds, excavates the future from old workings digging up the ‘same’, exhausting old foundations, yet somehow always altering what they support.

The new is intrinsically an odd phenomenon. It continually threatens established patterns. What is different about the new and its meaning in the twentieth century is that it has become part of the central ideology of western culture in its characterized representation of modernity. In a strange mix, the new reinforces the old and established. Nonetheless, the new, like culture itself, is never completely contained by any overarching architecture. The new expresses the potential, and occasionally the enactment, of significant cultural change. The fatigue that I have identified in our thinking about the new identifies a decline in the power of modernity to capture change, difference and transformation. That very fatigue may indicate in and of itself something profoundly new.[111]

In this ‘newness’ seems nothing new, but part and parcel of the normal; newness is expected, planned for, a regular emergence, manipulative of events. ‘The new’ seems not at all new, merely novel, a ‘nowness’ rather than newness. In considering the root of new we are taken, by Skeat, to OE niwe meaning now, and this exposes the natural tautology in the new and indicates that what it means now is different, which is rooted more in madness than nowness (though it might be madness to know now).

Of course, unlike the unicorn (or Marco Polo’s rhinoceros[112]) but like the platypus, such inhuman humanity is ‘unacceptably new’, which is to say, not new at all, but (madly) different, a phenomenon so threateningly different as to require reflexive prevention: rejection, containment or elimination on sight.

Newness of this kind seems to have monstrously exhausted or evaded the intestinal architecture of the socially digestible, is not swallowed at all, remains unappetizingly wretched on its plate, dangerously unconsumed. All that remains of the art is “Art”, with a very large capital critically protected by the hitmen of the media mafia. In poetry Sampson Carrasco may be right in concluding that there are only three-and-a-half great poets living[114]. However, in general, cybennial art, just as all Art before it, is largely manufactured by exhibitionists using money invested by agents of busyness with the power to herd spectating masses, slopping, sinking or swimming in a mediasphere frantic with manipulation, accident, eggs, spoons and other competing races, while frenzies of swirling fame freak scents of blood to streaking sharks. The phenomenal tastelessness of such new-sense, “Korpenwelten” for example, gets under the skin[115], into the meat, the guts of the matter, cuts to the bone. Such new-sense irritates and may make people so mad they jump beyond their vicinal norms, out of the safety of the familiar to a differing consciousness inflamed by imagination, dis-solving[116] familiar space. Yet, stripped bare, the skinless dead, the plastinated animal, is exposed to the well established, customary Frankensteinian reaction of the skinned. The familiar assumptions of the post-modern analysts drawing conclusions on behalf of environmentalist &/or anti-capitalist lobbies are all unconsciously lodged in the comfortable beds and ivory studios of affluent liberal democracies wedded to some kind of reversion to a fictitious Gaiacentric status quo wherein humans can exploit Gaia in their present form without cost. Of course, the conservatism of conservation is a fundamental opposition to any change, and such fundamentalism is a religious behaviour[117].

Or should we keep our eyes skinned so as to see through those fine veneers glossing over deep rooted stories of brutes religiously rooting through forests sniffing flesh and blood and cannibalizing all before them. Human and other animal sacrifice knows no bounds whether it be to drink the blood and eat the flesh of the sacrificed on earth (Christ recrucified ad infinitum), or to cut out the living hearts of thousands upon an altar to the sun.

This somewhat naïve interpretation of Mexica behaviour, as if such were particularly abnormal to human beings rather than normal if sublimated eucharistically as wine and bread, leaves reason to hurt and kill people firmly in the hands of those with a ‘reason’. Whatever ‘moral’ code (social norms) and by whomsoever invented and enforced seems to know no limits, as, for example, burying people alive up to their necks and then after due pause smashing their heads to pulp for Qur’anic ‘reasons’ (females for adultery, say) is surely okay, quite normal (you need to agree with this point or get fatwahed yourself, which means you can be murdered with impunity by anyone who feels like it, indeed such a murderer is guaranteed heris peculiar pleasures in paradise for eternity). It seems wholly to misunderstand ‘human’ behaviour to suppose it ‘inhuman’ to design to kill millions using industrial means and then to unceremoniously kill them, or to line up thousands and kill them ceremonially one by one by cutting out their living hearts (it is a huge and exhausting task for so many to be killed by so few), or to smart bomb thousands to bits to persuade them to change their ways, or—ad nauseum …. Such inhumane behaviours seem all too human.

From the (tribal) perspective of this or that liberal democracy it seems that there has to be a ‘good’ reason to kill people, something efficacious (necessary) to the maintenance of a status quo (liberal democracy), of course executed as humanely (as possible). Yet, such ‘necessity’ explains other ‘normalities’, the Stalinist ‘reasoning’ of, say, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, African Chiefs and Generals, various Popes, endless Monarchs, Presidents and Prime Ministers, and so on, or indeed the myriad of other ‘reasons’ of the tribe, such as those that infest Africa with genocidal Swiss Bank self-interests. Or reasons that extend to petty power politics, for (to take an arbitrary[119]) example, that of the Ju-ju Doctor in 1930s Benin, responsible to the Oba (King, Chief) for maintaining the correct worship of the spirit of his dead father:

Four hundred years ago, when Portuguese missionaries first appeared on this coast [of Nigeria], a Jesuit managed to gain a considerable following among the Ju-ju devotees. This was too much for the head Ju-ju doctor; he killed the missionary and cut out his heart, and ate it so that he might gain the stranger’s power, which was evidently stronger than his own. He also wore the Jesuit’s white cassock and Maltese cross from round his neck. In time, of course, the cassock wore out, and the ancient Ju-ju man had to content himself with a kind of white chalk found on the banks of a stream; from this he made a paste to smear his body—the nearest approach he could get to the missionary’s white vestment. This custom of smearing a chalky solution on the body is still used by the descendant of the man who murdered the Portuguese missionary. What is more when he is taking part in Ju-ju ceremonies, he religiously wears the original Maltese cross.[120]

When the human corpse is stripped to the bone and its animus bared there seems nothing it cannot pretend to. Bismirched with adornments of dyes, muds and pastes, profuse with skins, with clothes, rings, studs and stones, bedeviled by their wrongs and their rites ‘humanity’ dances to death’s tune, senses laden with diverting artifacts and determined clubbing inside and out of caves and caverns, assorted cathedrals, churches, temples, tents, taverns and tabernacles, and all such religious cavities where decayed minds adhere emptily, aching for extraction from the nerve ridden dance. Supervising such vacancy is a fabulous Dentist-in-empty-sky (Dies) with husk and herb and a word, cracked and deserted, dry, rolling and rattling, a nut in an empty tin communicating pure containment. The fabulous Dies seems ready with daily pain[121] to hand and a convincing gleam of technological or miraculous appurtenance to extract the living from the mouth of the dead who have had their day. What they would say we know not, the dead have no voice.

Such exposures open up the prospect of ‘us-humans’ having been inhuman all along when familiarity is stripped to the bone and the taboo of death extracted from the corpse that haunts us. Stripped out of all recognition of ‘our-humanity’ are we still images-of-god? Can the inhuman (not to be confused with the concept of the posthuman[122]) still be subjects of a grand design so big that it extends beyond vicinal hæcceity of this or that human locale[123] throughout the vast inhumanity of outer space while embracing an inner space intimated by that “korpenwelten” whose strangeness breeds thoughts of inhumanity, of infactual beings, or beings not quite factual, torn between new nomenclatures such as factishionality and beingish, and the entrenched notion of animus distinguishing the living from the dead. Thus, even the inner and the outer worlds of humanity as ‘we know them’ make us strangers unto ourselves. Revulsed or fascinated by ourselves as we expose ourselves to us as we ‘are’ is as nothing to the exposures of a future or a past ‘history’. Reliance on the idea that humaneness is what makes us human seems strangely misplaced if such ‘stories’ envisaged as (placed) ‘in-the-past’ (as so called histories) are to be believed. The ‘human’ machine somewhere else, the human machinized, not the machine humanized, not just as a story but as (future) history[124], the story of somewhere else made up here. History can never be of the ‘past’ or ‘future’, but is always merely of stories of other places, sited[125] elsewhere (on an-other plane, perhaps). The common idea that the future is not happened and the past is happened is an human misapprehension of inutterably muddling signification, the point of which seems permanently lost, being or become pointlessness itself.

We ‘certainly know’, in truth, as much about the future’ as we do about the ‘past’[126], though we do not swear by it in either case; both are “strange countries”, the so called past and the so called future. Yes, there seems to be detritus from the past that ‘tells’ us about a past, while there seems no detritus from the future that tells us about the future; but then we are both that detritus and amongst the detritus of the future; and in any case McTaggart’s “b series”, or Fox’s “c series”, provide that such detritus may be seen as of ‘us’ being the past of others (such as in astronomical terms we ‘see’ light billions of light years away from us — in our ‘past’, but from being in its converse future). That we humans have invented this way of seeing ‘things’ is mere anthropism, a bodymind-bias that may well be overcome (changed somehow) by prosthetic machinizations or otherwise smart extension, adaption, contraption or entraption, of the earthly Adam: perhaps more correctly Adam & Eve or Adam or Eve, or (more likely) neither, more likely some-thing hanging, suspended by the slimmest of genetic threads from an obscure fishiness to us humankind and (us) the inhuman. Such anthropic design might continue to allow the seeing of order out of chaos, might permit the laws of anthropy and entropy[127] to be put to bed together such that sleep may enfold us with dreams that depict timeless reality[128]. Our way of thinking about time, about space, our (natural) way of dimensioning movement fitfully out of our evolved physiology, could enter dimensionlessness domains[129].

In the 17^th century the great mathematician and astronomer Johann Kepler wrote:

It seems all a matter of grand design whose (obvious) necessary concomitant is God; this is to say not little and big gods dispersed in the environment, peeping from trees, or wreckage of first Cause undermined by penultimacy, but a genuine ‘God-thing’ upon whose pataphysical knee we may ‘factishionally’ sit praying to or for a ventriloquist. This ‘god’ is not simply that ‘revealed’ AUTHORITY, the pragmatic back-up behind such quasi-handbooks (sacred texts) developed and preserved for the administration of death defying powers such as the Old Testament &/or the New Testament bibles (books of ambiguous rules and events) or the poetically polished, administratively coherent and authoritarian Qur’an[131], but is the (necessary) personification of a convincingly ultimate ‘EXPLANATION’ that makes plain the inexplicable, that explicitly unfolds the excruciatingly convoluted, gives release to the inutterably repressed[132].

Yet, such explanations(s) cannot be ‘THE’ explanation, can ‘they’? Pluralization and variation seem naturally resident throughout the history of the world[133] when considering that the singular object of FAITH is multiple subjection, rather than singular (universal[134]) explanation. According to Gingerish, that arch atheist and solid statist Fred Hoyle[135] found his faith in there ‘being no god’ shaken by his observation of impressive ‘design’,

This might be so in (say) the pioneering geneticist C D Darlington’s[137] terms of competing and non-competing[138] societies seen, or explained, through the medium of a Darwinistic sociology of Hegelian character and vast Fukuyamian forces etc. However, this would be to ignore Fox’s “amoeba” theory of moral behaviour[139] as applied to human history, and extending to the ethics of human ‘morality’ and applicable to the question of ‘design’ extending to the indetectable operational relativities of the social forces whose effects and possible causes are the subject of scientific speculations. Fox has expressed the view in correspondence that we might as well analyse the motivations of amoeba as try to fathom some sort of metaphysical or religious rationale founding the customs and practices of observable and reputed human ‘moral’[140] behaviours. His is a somewhat Swiftian view of the modest if ingenious nature of humanity’s humanity.

I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration that of the hundred and twenty thousand children [in Ireland] already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one-fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep, black cattle or swine; and my reason is, that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in the sale to the persons of quality and fortune through the kingdom; always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.

I have reckoned upon a medium that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, increaseth to 28 pounds.

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.[141]

Swift’s excoriating caricature of the civilized ‘economy’ of 18^th century society in England and Ireland still seems a valid exposé of the general capacity of humankind to hide ingenious moral incompetence[142] beneath the civilized shifts and shines of a sumptuous veneer. Fox follows Swift but to an amoebic solution rather than to Swift’s analysis of an ultimate, cold rationale of individual self-interest being behind or beneath the polished moral posturings of the merely human. Whichever gloss is put on such a modest proposal, Swiftian satirical food for thought, in Fox’s view, supposes a disproportionate significance to human tastes and appetites well beyond the amoebic. Nevertheless, it is easily transposed to 2003 when account is taken of the direct parallel between the enclaves of absolute luxury dispersed throughout the English societies of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The distance between such enclaves and enclaves of absolute poverty and squalor is on a par with the distances between such enclaves in the 21^st in terms of the time and difficulty of traversal. A flight to Liberia takes about the same time as travelling from the West to the East End of London in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Of course this is easy to ‘imagine’, as a part of really living under the mass administration of such popular opiates of the people as “all you need is love love love …”; (oh yeah yeah yeah) and all such wishful thinking propagated by insects and other things of equal moral incompetence.

Certainly, such Swiftian close-ups[143] of human behaviour reveal the selfish gene, anthropomorphized[144], slipping naked among its appetites, snuffling between meals, soylently[145] grazing, grown heavy with success. Thus, in spite of the revolutions in human psyche, we remain technologically proficient brutes dizzy with desire for circus and perfect acts with spacious bones thrown through the curves and cavities of spaces measureless to a man still facing up to the bare bones of Kubrickian technological breakthrough[146]. Thus, with hands and tongues humanking grapples with tools incising perpetual revolutions from mouths to hands and hands to mouths that hinge on and about the broken stones and monuments of an earthly Babel pursuing permanence with punctuated thinking[147] and paradigms[148] of temporary truth as if truth grew from trees[149]. Humankind rolls endlessly onwards as if movement could be described by revolutionary games playing from meaningful mouths bursting with tongues that defy free speech with human definition. Within such rules the heliocentric Copernicus (1473-1543) proved ever more certainly that a Ptolemaic universe simply could not turn on the earth, could not be ‘right’, just had to be wrongheaded; this Copernican différantiation deposed ‘humanking’ from his earthly throne at the centre of ‘the’ universe and seemed to weakened the bonds of anthropocentrism. From ‘there’ Darwin (1809-1882) took ‘him’ from being the image of god to being other than god; which, according to Disraeli[150], converted him from angel to ape; perhaps Bacon would have said “idolized him”. Freud (1856-1939) found out the apish ‘he’ was not simply whom ‘he’ thought ‘he’ was, a rational being, but an-other being, riven by the demands of a large animal of the night ridden by death and driven by a distraught child riding the night riddled with dreams[151]. Then that fabulous twist in the tail when Crick and Watson in 1953 began to hang such otherness out to dry on strings of DNA, turning humankind into peculiar space. These are surely the four quadrants of psychic revolution that have turned the domainsions of humanmind upside down and inside out until such mind founders in its depths and crawls to sleep and dream upon a bed of psychic sand, still a ragged claw scuttling alone toward a mirror of observations[152], reflecting on the surface of things. And in this turn the scents of discarded flesh waft nostalgically through such minds all at sea, meaningless, bereaved of words, broken by absence, full of water[153]. Yet, Gaiacentrism remains, resurrects anthropocentrism, entertains a gaiamorphic or anthropomorphic vicinal as essential to any epistemology and its ontological concomitance. Of course, the Goddess Gaia[154] may well love humankind only just in so far as she loves herself.

The ‘anthropic principle’, as presented by Gingerish, could be claiming that what we (humankind) see is what we see, and what we see is all-the-universe that can be seen. This is so obviously a tautologically truth that it is naturally unpersuasive, though necessarily right within its limiting terms, but patently wrong in terms of the slightest appeal to experience, to that vast paradoxical basis (history) of error upon which science is especially founded, is indeed dependent[155]. The obvious use of the straw-man argument put up by the ‘faith-fool’ counts for little in the wider arguments spread across the fields of faithlessness for and against any metaphysics or (even) pataphysics of morality. The refrain of the lads in the trenches “we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re ….” may touch not only on a political ‘reality’ but an ultimate philosophical ‘truth’ after all. Thus, a “Weak Anthropic Principle” has appeal to the elasticity of ‘common sense’ whose stretches and returns are dynamically entertaining, yet definitively anchored to an human paradigm of some sort. It is, therefore, paradigmatic that,

—if we were to commission a survey of all the visible galaxies with a view to determining their relative brightness, we would have to deal with the in-built bias towards finding the brighter galaxies more easily than the fainter ones.

In cosmology, this type of selection bias is all pervading, and a recognition of the fact is enshrined in what has become known as the Weak Anthropic Principle. This is most usefully viewed as the recognition that our own existence requires certain necessary conditions to be met regarding the past and present structure of the visible universe. Our observations must not be viewed as having been taken from some unconstrained ensemble of possibilities but from some subset conditioned by the necessary conditions for carbon based observers like ourselves to have evolved before the stars die. Cosmologists view the Weak Anthropic Principle as a qualification of the famous stricture of Copernicus that man does not occupy a special position in the Universe. For, although we are right to disregard the prejudice that our position in the Universe is special in every way, we should not conclude from this that our position cannot be special in any way.[156]

Human imagination stretches, extends itself, but not to that snapping point, a disconnection[157], beyond which there is nothing human. It is a truism, and another tautology from which there seems no escape in human form, that we are always trapped in, or strapped to, an human paradigm of some sort.

Yet, humankind has itself changed in part and thus that to which the paradigmatic is referenced has itself shifted and continually shifts. Not only are there paradigm shifts within the human horizon, but where human has become inhuman the metaparadigmatics of vision itself within such human horizon need not be carried over. Perhaps humankind is ‘progressing’, to take Fukuyama seriously for a moment[158], away from the primitive worship of truth in trees, from the smearings of blood and such blessings extracted from human and other living sacrifice invoking benefits from big gods and little gods all around, to divine death’s dividends by inveigling the future, investing in the avoidance of death and living on the milk and honey such powers over deadly imagination assuredly bring. A part of humankind sometimes evades domination by the deadly paradigms of religions, paradigms that overshadow, shroud and confine the human psyche in obscure dungeons where vision is a dream come true, as if darkness had itself, just for a moment, imagined it slept. It is in the ‘act’ of imagination that the instinctive duality of human distinction between reality and appearance copulates, how reality is appearance and appearance is reality; this is the unregressive haeccity of imagination, the being conscious of ‘being-conscious’. It is of this act of being conscious that any human experience is virtually composed as a movement of transitory quasi-unifications of vicinal relationalities. All such acts of virtual composition really form shifting vicinal plexuses of relationalities that are wholly interplexual[159], that is omni-relational in behaviour and of which some are consciousnesses[160], though ‘consciousness-ness’ is not a necessary condition for relationality itself; consciousness as awareness is merely a form of relationality, a Quixotic act.

This Cervantean act is of transmuting appearance into reality-being-appearance (but reality not being everything); this is the Cervantes who created that great (fictional) pataphysician Don Quixote who had until his dying day the appearance in his own mind of a knight errant. Cervantes took (used) the alchemistry of fiction to realize ‘Don Quixote fictionalizing reality’. Don Quixote’s unawareness of his author’s meaning is not a disqualification of it, but its essential quality.

It is with a certain poignance that most readers ‘see’ through the small print that it is the loss of Don Quixote himself that might indeed prove the end of knights-errant in this world; but can Don Quixote ever be ‘lost’, as it were, through a (fictional) death when he does not in any case exist in ‘reality’; are only his beliefs real? However, he does exist in the mediasphere as a real fiction, as someone who is seen, a mirageal. So is this real enough to believe, as he does in the end, that he exists, but that knights errant do not? To avoid believing he really exists we must ‘suspend belief’, cease to love the idea he exists. Without such love, such infinitness[162] of needs, belief is difficult, impossible. Thus, according to Cervantes’ directive in the mouth of Don Quixote himself, belief should only be suspended in regard to his claim to be a knight errant, not to his being Don Quixote himself. Mirageously most particpants in the pataphysics of the “Adventures” determine that suspension of belief is a mere device, being-in-love cannot be annihilated so easily, Don Quixote cannot be a real mirage, a deliberate being: did he not really believe he was a knight errant until the very end of his life? He did.

Yet to deny his knight errantry was real, as he ultimately does, is to deny ‘reality’, would be to maintain the convenience of the archaic palisade erected by the early humankind between ‘past’ and ‘present’, that exclusion of the real carnivorous teeth that bite him bloodily and the imaginary that warn of things by frighting but not actually biting him, but that which now places him temporarily beyond the pale in mind of teeth ridden ‘real’ old space. It would escape the consciousnesses of few people that there is (was) at least one knight-errant in the Cervantian world, a world (relationality) which is (was) by definition continuous with such aware consciousnesses, and that is Don Quixote himself, and that he is not simply a fiction, but someone about whom belief must be deliberatively suspended in order to see him as unreal, as merely fiction, only made up, simply untrue. No sense tells us that there is Don Quixote, a pataphysical entity of imagination, and this is as real as the author’s and readers’ imaginations, although we seemingly need to suspend disbelief because we ‘know’ Don Quixote is not real, indeed he himself denies (denied) his own reality. The sheer senselessness of such suspensions, both of belief and disbelief, illustrates that both emotional states are ad hoc and that knowing is independent of either, that there is no sense in reality except as an acting-in-the-vicinal. Here. in this vicinity, there is nothing but the lance of Don Quixote to puncture ‘reality’ with invention. The bubble of reality, the technology that inflates the vicinality of its sphere to global proportions inspires surface tensions that interrupt the gossamer film in which an human life bears distorted reflections as glosses on temporary meanings. Here the gigantic mill of new technology turns and great stones grind reality to a dust that flys in the face of sense, blindsighting those tilting toward the surfaces and screens of understanding.

Thus, on reflection, humanmind makes something of itself by transmuting no-sense into sense, astrality into being, relationality into solidity while the philosopher’s stone caps these twin pillars of human knowledge, weighing wisdom down with the gravity of its fictitious existence, seemingly weightless in space. Upon the weight of such a ‘solid stone’ the beingness of imagination seems to hinge. The circle is complete whereby the ‘mathematics’ of imagination calculates the midsummer’s dreams of doxastic consciousness. It is this calculus that is imagination, and it is the place and plexus of the moving relationality whose identity cannot be separated from its universal relationality (U^r). This is to accept Fox’s rejection of Wittgenstein’s denial that identity is a relation[163]; this is a necessary concomitant of the uniquity[164] of all relations in the relational universe (U^r). The immateriality of relations leaves all knowledge to that serendipitous consilience whereat imagination makes itself appear real. Such parthenogenesis of the imagination parallels now the parthenogenesis of the bodymind (the corpse of the psyche) whose copulation of appearance with reality gives birth to consciousness whereat imagination is free to invent the messages that forage futures and dispose of pasts while dancing upon the heads of pins crowded with vicinal presents spontaneously pressing their precious points through the fluttering wings of angelic ephemera pinning down meaning with deadly precision. Such inventive immovabilities ex-press nothing but dead angels stuck on pins.

The Reality itself is nothing at all apart from appearances[165]. It is in the end nonsense to talk of realities—or of anything else—to which appearances could appear, or between which they somehow could hang as relations. Such realities (we have seen) would themselves be appearances or nothing. For there is no way of qualifying the Real except by appearances, and outside the Real there remains no space in which appearances could live. Reality appears in its appearances, and they are its revelation; and otherwise they also could be nothing whatever. The Reality comes into knowledge, and, the more we know of anything, the more in one way is Reality present within us. The Reality is our criterion of worse and better, of ugliness and beauty, of true and false, and of real and unreal. It in brief decides between, and gives a general meaning to, higher and lower. It is because of this criterion that appearances differ in worth; and, without it, lowest and highest would, for all we know, count the same in the universe.[166]

In these the last few lines of “Appearance and Reality” Bradley extrapolates an hierarchic scheme of what appear to be moral values, a religiosity that insists deus ex machina that (his) Reality is “spiritual”, immanent, “Absolute”, (did he say God, with a capital A ?). Surely.

Although, like much philosophy (or indeed the exegesis of poetry), this seems to verge on the farcical (high or low one may wonder). It seems that Bradley, after much grammatical self-flagellation and metalingual misappropriation, was verging on the inevitable, if for him ultimately doubtful, conclusion that Appearance is Reality[167]; albeit to assert this ‘truth’ as if it were true he finally resorted to God, a word masquerading as Absolute among the dramatis personæ of his philosophical play. However, Fox treats such copulation between appearance and reality as the genesis of consciousness whereof (the is-ness of) imagination, springs, flows and gathers a pool, a pond, of waters sunk at the deeps of sea whereof, he says, it stems[168]. In the stemming imagination is rooted; here God and Grendel lurk, while humankind swim lasciviously among the roots. The fruits of such copulation stem from that appearance, derived from the Latin ‘to show’ or ‘to make visible’[169], that humankind can pick and ponder, catch and consume and enjoy[170]. Imagination is singularly parthenogenetic, whereas consciousness is sexual, a sexus, requiring a nexus of plural relations to be (to exist), within whose bed of ‘vicinality’ imagination plexes and plys. We are faced, as it were, with the appearance of reality, with reality made visible to the humanmind in so far as humankind can and will envisage such copulation as being intercourse between human and inhuman, as being mere relation.

It is the potentially radical, stepped, alteration of the ‘humanbeing’ which is nourished, which is made possible and highly probable in cybennial[171] liberal democracies where variation is able to flourish. These variations are from the survivals of the once physically marginal and stillborn in unforgiving societies (cracies[172]), plus the changing of minds through the wide variation possible and probable in the extent, depth and kind of social interactions and of the post~post-modern milieu of edutainments[173] and docu-dramas[174] in which such interaction is set, plus the possible and probable development and widespread use of mind altering ‘drugs’, &/or the biotechnological reformations inhumanizing such candidates as the western urbanoid. Perhaps, it is by such steps that the posited constraints of the metaphysical can be reformed in practise such that an inhumanbeing can extend the it is[175] of the Parmenidean beyond (or between) serpent and stone:

Is copulation between unicorn and rhinoceros and platypus imaginable[177]? Perhaps a philosopher’s consciousness would make such an effort absurd[178]; but a poet knows consciousness, being the fruit of copulation between ‘appearance and reality’, is necessarily plagued by the absurd. Thus, imagination is absurdity’s utter bedfellow, deaf to the reasonable, a mute trying to mutter a strange language. Such ‘linguification’ of the mute and what is imaginable is imaginable, and what is imaginable makes copulation between serpent and stone conceivable. Perhaps, Parmenides and Lucretius were merely poets of stone, not philosophers after all.

Don’t we know the absurd is not inconceivable? That the voice of stone is as a pebble beneath the serpent’s poisonous tongue fluidly pointing speech with deadly aim into the eye of the beholder where the blindingly obvious can only wait to be counted and consumed in the dry psephologies of the market place. Here, or is it there, anyhow some-where, we undoubtably enter the semiotic aporia[179] of Eco to find ourselves paralysed and mortal. Here we may find a linguist disposed in the doubtful depths of misappropriating language to explain itself.

In order to respect this perplexity, in the pages that follow [on Being] we shall use Being in its widest and most open sense. But what sense can be held by a term that Peirce defined as being of null intension? Could it have the sense suggested by Leibniz’s dramatic question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

This implies inappropriately that being (is) a solid entity (being some-thing), something hard, even if soft (an hapticity still), susceptible to the inventions of sense, such as the natural tendency to inspissate space[181], as something of nothing. Of course, we are merely suspended on our intentions of our own words and can but watch as their careful shapes fold, soft and intensile, like Dalian signs bending under the curious weight of temporary observation, as if participating in their own representations. However, it is the implication of sex in the copula that generates the existentification of an entity, a birth of being, as if it has an object in mind, whereas is is merely showing relation, is merely relationality in mind, it existentifies a relation(s), it can have no other object in mind, as ‘such’ (as ‘so formed’, U^r).

Yet, for Eco, Sartre and many others after Nietzsche concerning themselves with the curious character of negation, though the ‘not something’ seems to mean no-thing, it is a vacancy implying entity, a vacant entity, but an entity nonetheless; thus ‘not nothing is something’, ending up with the Foxian ambiguity ‘nothing is real’ or ‘to no nothing’ = the verb to not to be (to be or not to be) the lack of a subject, ‘nothing is subjective’[182]:

Thus anyone who introduces negation into being from outside will discover subsequently that he makes it pass into non-being. But here we have a play on words involving the very idea of negation. For if I refuse to allow being any determination or content, I am nevertheless forced to affirm that it is. Thus, let anyone deny being whatever he wishes, he cannot cause it not to be, thanks to the very fact that he denies that it is this or that. Negation can not touch the nucleus of [the] being of Being, which is absolute plenitude and entire positivity. By contrast Non-being is a negation which aims at this nucleus of absolute density. Non-being is denied at the heart of Being. When Hegel writes, “(Being and Nothingness) are empty abstractions, and one is as empty as the other,” he forgets that emptiness is emptiness of something . Being is empty of all other determination than identity with itself, but non-being is empty of being. In a word, we must recall here against Hegel that being is and that nothingness is not.[183]

In this regard Fox, unlike Sartre (or probably Eco), does not feel Hegel to be forgetful of some-thing as such, and that copulation can be more fruitfully considered as being that ‘Being is something’ and ‘Nothingness is something-else’, rather than that ‘Being is some-thing’ and ‘Nothing is no-thing’, except as Foxian decisive ambiguity.

Such Sartrean dialectic turns out to be a rhetoric derived in a mere sentential grammar prescribed by the habitual perspectival governing Sartre’s lexus, a habit that, like us all, he could not kick and which in time proves permissible. The problematic of the philosopher’s appropriation of language being the inescapably innate infer-referentiality of any human language. This apparent ineluctability, or containment, itself holds such sway over human consciousness that it cannot be eschewed by normal imagination, but must rely on abnormality, mutatative evolution &/or self-construction whose speech is a nihilinguistic poetry annihilating the language it speaks leaving an aphasiac[184] silence whose emptiness is the selfless shape of things to come; into which something else cannot but fit as nothing is some-thing else pointing elsewhere. Yet, with such murder of language in hand, the dagger of meaning stabs in the dark, biting the dangerous hand that holds it, drawing blood to succour the kiss of lips and tongues that twist and turn from mouth to hand riddling eyes with empty visions demanding the false creations of speech. It seems a sure pointer to language being some-thing in relation to Eco’s suggestion that Heidegger’s Sein is nothing, except our understanding that we are finite entities whose “being-there” is identified, paradoxically, as:

Being here &/or there turns out to be subject to itself needing to speak of ‘its-selves’ before the speechlessness of death clutches silence, gouts concealment, reveals nothing. Only a super biotechnological language to meet a programme of inhuman needs could be strong enough to become being its-self, an ‘haecceital’ language, here to hand. In this Eco goes on to suggest not language as haecceity of being but consubstantiality with being:

An immense power is therefore conferred upon language, and some maintain that there is a form of language so strong, so consubstantial with the very foundations of being, that it “shows” us being (that it, the indissoluble plexus of being-language) so that the self-revelation of being is actuated within the language. The last verse of Höderlin’s Andenken is emblematic of this: “But what remains will be intuited by the poets.”[186]

And this is certainly a thought to conjure with: poetic intuition. Fox has come to believe that language can only be evolved by ‘nihilingual’ poets who embrace speechless knowledge with love, loving what they know to exhaustion, whereof they sleep to dream of death as they drown in the depths of their own epistemies clutching as at ethereal straws the sounds of their own protestations against silent demise. Thus, the old is deposed and a new intelligence chooses no sense as its domain where it roams haunting the old realms of sense with unknowable disquiet.

Such knowledge of death may bring the poet Lucretius once more to mind. His extraordinary poem, “On the Nature of Things”, recounting the pre-christian philosophy of Epicurus which eschews religious superstitions in general, presents mortality with fearless resolution as a relationality whose plexus is perpetually provisional, permanently transitional, always subject to arbitrary dissolution and redistribution, leaving the individual lost as ‘nothing-of-itself’ in its before and after, being (unrecognizably) some-thing else, elsewhere than here.

For Lucretius death is nothing, whereas the major religions and related but lesser superstitions domesticate death, institutionalizing a social psychology that obscures the ultimate effect of death by cultural excision. Lost is the soul, like the bird of the Old English poet[188], that flys from nowhere fluttering into and through the warmth and light and companionship of an human hall only to flit out again into nowhere. The Old English poet(s) sang without contamination of that ‘living’ death of the christian resurrection, that insurrection of strength, structure, system and subjection, whereunder human kindness, swollen with the fear of death, is milked en mass to feed a suckling priesthood dedicated to the secret pursuit of self-perpetuating privileges.

Such serenity of stone shines wholly unperturbed by such shapely plurality of facets as can be carved by recalcitrant jewellers setting stone in a poetry of vision.

Thus, at the least, the “House of Stone” is a rehearsed cry whose form is a model of a Cartesian twin déjà vu (or is it clone?) at odds with a singular Dasein. Fox has despaired of pulling at loose threads, unraveling philosophical cloaks to find himself garbless, naked and exposed among his disbeliefs, afraid of his own shadow shadowing him with deadly effect: I am therefore I think, I think therefore I am, I therefore think I am, I therefore am what I think, Therefore think am I? Therefore am I think? Therefore methinks thinking is culpable nocence.

Tennyson struggled to keep his grief over the death of his young friend Arthur Hallam within the bounds of a religious, Godly episteme wherein his words, as “little systems”, are kept within the limits of the “broken lights” of human reason.

In this regard, Tennyson typifies the weakness of the poet deferring, as it were, naturally to the imagined limits superimposed by beliefs in form(s) of supernatural authority socially deified. In Tennyson we see a poet become mere abductee, defeated, benighted and sinking beneath such superimposition upon a self grasping at words of straw.

Here is exemplified the distinction of words that run their course, are defined by course, and Fox’s ‘words without course’, words frightened by their own isolation, of finding themselves strung out like loose threads hanging tenuously from the enfoldings of undisclosable emotions. Tennyson is typical of a tendency in poets to become subjects of their own rhetoric rather than in their own words. In Tennyson such imperial rhetoric courses through the veins of his arguments, governing a kind of vainglorious space, an emptiness in which the entertainment of truths can be performed without the friction of feeling more than one’s own persuasions. Ryle p272—73 in Bailey etc

The ambivalence of the ‘deliberative frenzy’ of the verse of “House of Stone”, between its deliberation and its frenzy, is intended to bring to mind the tension between the presumption of a first person singular putting space in place, as it were ordering space to take a place, and space not being placeable. Space is seemingly not coverable by humanmind whether by cloaking that mind or by unraveling the loose threads hanging from such cloaks.

For Heidegger, regions represent the way things are “placed” in relation to a matrix of relations. A certain parallel is found in Whitehead. Actual occasions are felt not just singly but as occupying places within the extensive continuum. The places are arranged according to the relations holding among groups of actual occasions forming a nexus. The retaining and awaiting that makes possible Dasein’s ready-to-hand involvements also make possible the placing of things in keeping with those ready-to-hand involvements. As we have seen, retaining and awaiting are made possible by ecstatic temporality. For Whitehead, the actual occasion feels not just sensations but also, by symbolic reference, sensations of a “stone” as a regional unity (nexus). While individual sensations are appropriated from the past, they are projected onto the present region.[195]

Fox takes the idea of ‘house’ as shelter[196], a structure providing cover, into the verse as descriptive of ducking from ecstasy beneath a cloak whereunder the ‘reality’ of space is made to disappear. But such dis-appearance leaves space decisively ‘out-lined’ by such cloaks as cover it, though beneath such cloaks lies merely dark cave whose invisible ‘in-line’ is merely haptic containment, and whose decisive outline can only be imagined. Space is apparently covered by such cloakings, but remains dreamable (according to Fox) though sheltered and thus seemingly substantial and extensive by act of imagination. Fox’s persistent rhyming of “seems” with “dreams” makes explicit that he at least can imagine, if not observe, space ‘is’ really nothing uncontained.

Such ‘reality’ is confined by the verse to “here”, a vicinity seemingly observable yet “all that” (observability) disappears just as it appears (in this vicinity), gone without a trace. Space, in the ‘sense’ of dream, is as nothing set in stone. Fox knows ideas of what space ‘is’ are inexhaustible:

The philosophical treatment of space faces a problem whose tradition is as old as the entire history of philosophy. As an object of metaphysical and naturalistic philosophical speculation since the pre-Socratics, space seems to offer an almost inexhaustible variety of aspects throughout the historical changes of cosmogonies, systems and conceptual positions. What is given in them to date as a “theory” of space turns out to be a sublimated sediment of historically acquired concepts from whose entire intellectual content space assumes its decisive outlines. This is true for the finite central-peripheral spatial cosmos of antiquity and its modifications in high scholasticism, as well as for the infinite, homogeneous space of Renaissance philosophy; the same is true for the absolute space of Newton no less than for the much acclaimed “renaissance” of the Aristotelian conception of space in the field theories of modern physics.[197]

Only Fox could imagine Ströker’s “sublimated sediment” as ‘nothing is’ set in stone, a “House of Stone”, yet paradoxically seen (perceived) insubstantially in dreams. The verse leads to dreams and an open house that provides enough shelter from worldly fears to allow the seeming to survive as if really in mind, as part of a necessarily, if insufficiently, ordered house. Fox leads us into the dilemma ridden thoughts of Albert Monostone[198] stuck on questioning “Is space nothing?”, although pinioned by the thought that “Nothing is nothing” Again Fox uses the etymological character of ‘thing’[199], and nothing as the absence of any ‘thing’. He takes it that humanpsyche is never in the condition of no absence of thing in that the dis-universal character of the multiversality of omniverse, its insolidity, means that humanpsyche subsists in a purely relational omniverse; there being no bottom to the human apperception of solidity being solid, that there is ‘any-thing’ solid, as it were, the apparency of solidity, and its disappearance among the debris of the reductionist paradox a mere psychologism preserved through utility in practically managing ‘bodies’ of vicinal relationalities.

Here is a clear parallel with the Foxian technique, of stripping words back to their etymological sinews, of getting readers to crowd beneath their (real) etymological origins to create new-sense beneath familiar layers of meanings and through such estrangement to find the real thing of it they are, their words and them. In this many highly intelligent and observationally sensitive people observe what seems the merely anomalous in Fox’s work, but because their often highly perceptive observations are at odds with their vicinal norms, they naturally (reflexively), reject them as wrong, and as their observations ‘cannot’ be wrong, then they conclude Fox is mistaken, is merely promulgating error. This is difficult to argue with because people have to get by day-to-day, don’t they? Thus, getting by, the anomalous has to be (automatically) discarded, as it were a pragmatic reflex mental reaction jerking them back to the comforts and ease of their usual (normative) reality. However, in Fox’s case, what seems to them anomalous is actually decisive ambiguity.

[1]James Fraser, “The Golden Bough”, (1922), Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1993, p712. See below in more detail.

[2] Fox’s complex of ideas in the opening of the song include, among other things, allusion to the myth of Kronos the leader of the Titans, and god of time. This myth is widely reported, and thought likely to be of pre-Hellenic origin. Kronos is the youngest son of Heaven and Earth who, on the advice of his mother Earth, castrates his father Heaven who then no longer needs to approach Earth leaving room for his children the Titans to occupy the space he vacated:

Kronos then married his sister Rhea, and there were born to them Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, all of whom (or all the males), save the last, he swallowed, because he was fated to be overcome by one of them. Rhea, by counsel of her parents, wrapped a stone in swaddling-clothes when Zeus was born, and hid him away in Crete. Kronos swallowed the stone, thinking it to be his son. Later, by the contrivance of Earth, Kronos vomited up all those he had swallowed and was overcome by them after a desperate struggle.

(From the entry in the” Oxford Classical Dictionary”, 2^nd edition 1972, p 573-4 which gives a helpful summary of the sources).

[3] My House

There is a house I see in dreams

Where everything’s in place

And all is truly what it seems

In my ordered space.

Here I order everything

Putting all in place

So that all that disappears

Is gone without a trace

Gone behind this open face

Just as it appears

Gone without a trace

Oh gone, oh gone, oh gone,

Gone without a trace.

Here is my open house

Wherein I keep my dreams

And shelter from my worldly fears

Till all is what it seems.

Here I shelter in my dreams

Safe and sound I am

Here I shelter from my dreams

Safe and sound I am

Safe and sound, oh safe and sound

Safe and sound I am

Oh, safe and sound, oh, safe and sound,

Safe and sound I am.

(Thomas Albert Fox, “My House”, 1998).

[4] CE: Christian Era based on the erroneous dating of the birth of the Jewish dissident Joshua Messiah (Jesus Christ) using the Latin reference AD, Anno Domini, Year of our Lord. There are several calendars in use, and an unknown number fallen into disuse, derived from influential superstitions. The most geopolitically influential is the CE calendar based on the supposed year of our Lord (AD) combined with that other great variable the observation of the solar year (vernal or tropical). Inserted into this the complication of the lunar cycle and the further complication of the seven day week, based on the anciently observable seven planets. Certainly, an observational muddle compounded by the influential superstitions such as Christianity, Mahommedism, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism when we may find HE (Hegira Era) or BE (Buddhist Era), and so on. Thus the neat arithmetic of 2000AD means nothing, except in marketing terms for the various groups profiting from cybennial events. 2000CE is more or less an arbitrary figure, being 1,997 years after the birth of Joshua Messiah, 2,753 in relation to the old Roman calendar, 2,749 according to the ancient Babylonian calendar, 6,236 according to the first Egyptian calendar, 1,420 according to the Moslem calendar, 1,378 according to the Persian calendar, 1,716 according to the Coptic calendar, 2,544 according to the Buddhist calendar, 5,119 according to the Maya great cycle, 208 according to the calendar of the French Revolution (revolutionaries tend to brings things to zero), and the year of the Dragon according to the Chinese calendar widely used in East and South East Asia. This is gleaned from David Duncan’s excellent “The Calendar”, Fourth Estate, 1998; and the Internet. “Calendar” from Latin calends the first day of the Roman months when debts were collected; a case, perhaps, of time is money.

[5] Stone Circle

I

There lies a circle in our time

Of monumental solid stone

Darkened through with frost bit blood

Moving to the rhythm of our time.

II

Roaming among the blackened stones

A wind is heard that sighs and moans,

And in between

To secretly sing

Some silent words of deepest koans

Among the still and solid stones.

Crunch! grates the circle black bloodly

Uttering stone in endless ryme

To the presence of our time.

But the wind is outside of these stony words,

Rising and falling with amputated thoughts

Cut from the minds of men by men afraid

Of flying with the winded notes

Barely blown by a wind that sways and sighs

Songs in between monumental stones,

Flown in another world of unworded koans.

III

All sit we, but one or two,

Sly amanuenses to the gentle breeze

Wrapt in cast off shimmering veils

Playing in lights of ecstasy.

And all sit we shuddering

Neurotically

As we utter stutters in runic ryme

To the stolid rhythm of stony time.

Amputated mind

Leaving behind

A thoughtless stump groping for it …

which it was

before

Thoughts tended to roam

Into wind wound koans

Heard in between monumental stones,

Where all but one or two

Cut off their thoughts

And bled in stumps,

Cautiously,

and said

In whining ryming lines

Have done

Number one

Not you

Number two

What are you doing

So foully wooing

The wind?

We’ll all be in trouble

With our piles of rubble

If you both persist

In trying to exist.

Come away

Don’t sway

From the normal way

Of planning each day

For it’s next,

Using the honourable text

Of our benign cromlechs.

Come!

Sit with we indefinitely

Thinking thoughts finitely;

Fine thoughts finished in time

To match the ryme

We are bound to say

In preparation for another day.

IV

Yet, while the sarcophagus encaves us all

With our shadows on the wall

And we digest the moving scrawl,

One or two escape the thrall

And cast like bats throughout the nights

Perceiving wonderful facsimile sights

Portrayed by shifting patterns of air

Moving in between the obstacles there.

Flitting flights of swallow bat

Swoops

Disappear in twilight nights

Of waits and waits lightly poised

On warm air insect noise.

Mumbled air awaits the breeze to

Blow …

But we,

But we

Need no fresh air breeze;

For, how can we atone

For once worshipping the jewel stone?

Only one or two they

Seem to achieve

The loving love of a soft night breeze.

(Thomas Albert Fox, “Stone Circle”, 1976)

[6] It is arguable that Fox is not a Derridean deconstructionist, but a Foxian reconstructionist: different stories being his game. Thus, to explain the poem, which is itself in ordinary language, it seems unavoidable that the best that can be done is to invent a kind of ‘metalanguage’ that abides by the ‘cosmological’ rules it is revealing (discovering), but rises above the rules, as it were, in ekstasis. Fox has in view an ekslinguis, whereupon his tongue reaches a vantage point whereat it reveals its own representations. Fox has always found any language difficult, including his own, because all (human) languages are necessarily intrinsically misconceived and expressed by hedgehogs, each word an apple spiked, supposedly. In regard to his own language, English, he remains entirely without confidence in it as a lesser or greater instrument than any other human language for the purpose of prising ‘pristine knowledge’ from its intrinsic bedding. To this extent he is easily speechless; his tongue, pointedly mistaking dry ice for the tang of saltstone, is easily stuck on its unexpectedly alien character. Such cold heat breeds the nihilingual.

[7] Michel Foucault, 1926-84, French philosopher who developed a method of unearthing and examining (obscure) historical materials buried in the resorts and recesses of language with the aim of diagnosing the (fictitious) present. Ultimately, Foucault is yet another naïve Nietzschean addicted to the primacy of power being procreator of dominant epistemes whose deconstruction would reveal scrapings of unimaginable truth.

[8] Fox treats truth as the ‘that’ which humans express about their rationalizations for feeling (the emotion of) belief; in effect such rationalizations are temporary or ad hoc epistemes invented to order to satisfy arguments between feelings. Truth “theirselves” is intended to point to the anomalous (necessary) singularity of objective ‘truth’ as set in the plurality of subjective humanity where ‘truth’ lies embedded by or in the comforts and enjoyments of their individual be-liefs, disposing their feelings of love as ‘the’ ontology of what they know, exposing thus a plurality of pure and simple and separate epistemies beating the bloody chambers of their hearts.

[9] Umberto Eco, “Kant and the Platypus”, translated by Alastair McEwen, Vintage 2000, p48. The vincibility of all paradigms perpetuating human beliefs and surviving of fittest (most fitting) paradigm(s) through Khunian transformations as being more convincingly ‘scientific’ than predecessors. The Darwinian origin and evolution of scientific theory seems, impurely, to underlie a sociology of science suggesting that ‘science’ is mediated by quite primitive socio-economic processes in operating on and provisioning core belief systems in human societies.

[10] Jacques Derrida, “Margins of Philosophy, The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics”, translated by Alan Bass, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1982, p177.

[11] Otto Neurath, 1882-1945, “We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock, and reconstruct from the best components.” It is noticeable that Neurath naturally assumes you cannot build another boat, indeed it is noticeable that I (naturally) assume it is a boat I must build. At least Fox can float the idea of a stone boat suited to drowning hedgehogs.

[12] R W Hepburn, provides an illuminating ‘definition’ of poetry which includes reference to sculpture ++++ p691.

[13] At least a triple pun.

[14] Fox has in mind such great rock groups as “Fab 208” or “Blackfire”, that occasionally blast the living innards of the “Trout Tavern” (real-cider house), Keynsham, Somerset. England.

[15] Froth as ambrosia, and as reported by Fraser in the Golden Bough: “The foam of the sea is just such an object as a savage might choose to put his life in, because it occupies that sort of intermediate or nondescript position between earth and sky or sea and sky in which primitive man sees safety.” See detail given in Fox’s “The Fairy Queen”, page 73. Certainly froth is a thoughtless haven in 2003.

[16] I am grateful to Lord Elton for this quotation of James Ramsey Macdonald’s words, “The Life of James Ramsay Macdonald (1866-1919), Collins 1939, p14. This was an early life of Macdonald, 1866-1937, prior to his becoming the first British Labour Prime Minister, 1924, and Coalition Prime Minister 1929-35.

[17] In the “a-series” events are ordered as being ‘in’ the past or the present or the future, in the “b-series” events are ordered as being earlier or later than one another. Fox has in contemplation a “c-series” wherein events are ordered before and during and after; in other words are not ordered, being not materially interdependent.

[18] John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, “Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic”, Chapter V, “The Relation of the Dialectic to Time”, Section 154, Batoche Books, Kitchener 1999, Second Edition (1922) Cambridge University Press. First edition was published in 1896. This edition printed in 2000 by Batoche Books, 52 Eby Street South, Kitchener, Ontario, N2G 3L1, Canada. email: batoche@gto.net ISBN: 1-55273-033-6. For access to this text I am grateful to the splendid effort of John Mark Ockerbloom, University of Pennsylvania Library , http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ in providing the wonderful resource of “books online”.

[19] The Nietzschean perspectival, ++++++

[20] Leibnizean monadology treats substance (material) as comprised of monads, soul like entities that in the collective appear material (cf Fox’s relationalities). Monolith implies a Lucretian cosmology of paradoxically Zenoic dimension.

[21] Foxian poetry, verbal ‘copulation’, is the relation(s) of joining some-thing(s) (words) that generate (existentify) other-thing(s) (meanings) by sexuogenetic act (copulation with other(s)) &/or parthenogenetic act (copulation with self(ves)); sexual &/or ‘parthenual’ relations. This is to distinguish Fox’s copulations from the Platonic relations of, say, Umberto Eco’s +++++++ copula, or, say, Derrida’s +++++.

[22] Jean Baudrillard, “Subjective Discourse or The Non-Functional System of Objects”, in “Revenge of the Crystal: selected essays on the modern object and its destiny, 1968-1983”, edited and translated by Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis, Pluto Press 1990, p49.

[23] Jean Baudrillard, op cit, p50. [Whether there are semantic jokes here, at the same time as on the one hand, or not, is difficult to tell in translation].

[24] Duumvirate is an unusual word doing an unusual job. Latin “man of two”, referring to duumviri or pairs of co-equal Roman magistrates (SOED). Thus, a co-equality of experiences is emphasised.

[25] The variation reflexion is used to distinguish the reflexive bent of ‘praxis-that-is-psyche’, from the mental reflection on psyche’s praxis, though inextricably of the same vicinal bundle (cf Hume) entwined; though not atman not brahman not truth not spirit, not ghost (in something, or of something). Perhaps, praxis on reflection looks like Plotinian theoria by Heideggerian poiēsis refracted to seem ‘real’, that is ‘believable’. In the Foxian (inHumian) world ‘belief’ is critical, but does not necessarily invoke a convincing god.

[26] Thomas Albert Fox, “Oasis”, unpublished 1989 poem, in volume 5 (“Presence”) and Volume 7 (“The Charred Lord”), of his “Selected Poems”; see http://www.justwords.demon.com . This looks into the mirageal.

[27] Jacques Derrida, “Margins of Philosophy, Différance”, Harvester Press, 1982. Fox treats Derrida’s “différance” as: difference, being something else; deference, as to delay; deference, as to give way to (something better); deference, to follow; and différance as pure apparence, as nothing, being something wholly relational, having no substance but that it is apparently a word begging exinstance.

[28] Karl Löwith, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same”, translated J Harvey Lomax, University of California Press, (1978) 1997, p160-61.

[29] Fox has coined factishion, a fixtional fact (a fi-x-ctional fact is ‘real’ only when belief is suspended); conceptually (a) factishion is something close to a mirageal (a real mirage, see above and below).

[30] The Muslim submission to the sacred text of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s practises (Sunna) produce among other things Sharia Law, which means (law of) the ‘path to the watering hole’, source of all living, and problematically revealed by Fox as a very real mirage in an otherwise arid desert. Yet, while you can take a Fox to water you cannot make him drown.

[31] Jean Paul Sartre, “Being and Nothingness”, translated by Hazel Barnes, Methuen & Co 1969, p15. This perpetuates the substantial binary misconception of ‘nothingness’ that has confused and continues to propagate confusion in those with existential propensities. The existentialist misconception supplies the requirement for negation, that nothing is an aspect of being-annihilated, thence concomitant nihilism and Darwino-Marxist persuasions of the socio-economic fruitfulness of dialectical materialism, or the Freudian ‘if it hurts it must be good for you (someone)’, or as Fox has put it “humankind on the weal of revolution”.

[32] F H Bradley, “Appearance and Reality” OUP ninth impression (corrected) 1930, first published 1893, p25. In commenting that qualities ‘without relation’ have no meaning, Bradley concluded: “The Reals are secluded and simple, simple beyond belief if they never suspect that they are not so. But our fruitful life, on the other hand, seems due to their persistence in imaginary recovery from unimaginable perversion. And they remain guiltless of all real share in these ambiguous connexions, which seem to make the world. And they are above it, and fixed like stars in the firmament—if there only were a firmament.” Bradley’s whole sphere of thought hovers on the verge of essaying toward understanding, yet remains concreted in that grammatical firmament inhibiting his pen and thus inhabiting his mind, such that he (himself) is mere exhibition, the adjective of his own subjectless existence/being; whose very nearness determines separation, a space, a nothingness imparting endless duality without substance.

[33] Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), “In the book Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll Pataphysician: A Neo-Scientific Novel (published posthumously in 1911) Jarry promotes the pataphysical as a science of imaginary solutions.” from “Science Fiction And Cinema: The Hysterical Materialism of Pataphysical Space”, by Paul Kingsbury, in “Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction”, eds Hitchin and Kneale, Continuum, 2002. A collection of fascinating essays, that Fox considers at long last to rehabilitate his extensive boyhood reading of SF as Serious Fiction. Kingsbury accords Derrida the concept “metaphysics of presence”, this is close to Fox’s concept of psyche-in-praxis as a vicinality, see above and passim. It is to Kingsbury, presumably, that we owe the somewhat Hegalian inkhorn “hysterical materialism”, as reaction to the threat of the pataphysical. Of course, as defined by one of Fox’s Asian colleagues (when asked), ‘pataphysical’ could be the science of paté manufacture; a matter of such considerable importance in France that it might well have its own foundation of scientific theory and research. Or it might be much more closely related to all things Patagonian, which would naturally be a large subject and one again naturally contemporaneous with Jarry’s own presence according to the ‘a series’ (McTaggart) as himself preceding his transformation (movement) into a pure pataphysicality, consequential (in the ‘b series’) to being dead-later, and as thus (dead) he can only be known by me, or you as a pataphysicality, an apparition, as Sartre put it. There are a number of websites devoted to shocking paraphysicalities into mind, and one of some use is this http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~ngzF92/jarrypub/works/findex.html

[34] Albert Monostone, “Dear Zeno, About God’s Sensorium …”, unpublished, 2000. See above, Note 2, on “Light is Breaking”; and below on U^r and U^s . Fox has evolved a scheme of distinction based on the root of ‘verse’ (as from L versus, turning, ploughing a line, furrow). This has allowed Fox to run out universe to diverse, triverse and to omniverse in developing Monostone’s “Theory of Relationality and Solidity”.

[35] Fox is using the two words to distinguish between that relational entity which thinks (mind) and that which is part of that relational entity which lives (psyche). Psyche is a relational plexus cognate with plexus of body and plexus of mind and vicinity (environment) as one relational entity (com-plexus) without distinction of parts, envolving a vicinality. Whereas, although the relationality mind is com-plexed with psyche, it is a plexus to some degree distinctly embodied in body, is of independent volition, peripatetic: being ecstatic, able to walk around, seeming apart from body and environment, yet inevitably interfering, affecting psychic environment, affecting the vicinality of psyche and is thus one of it and not two of them (together).

[36] Rather as an inevitable ‘gene doping’ effect, than as a genetic defect.

[37] The term vicinal is developed from the SOED definitions of Vicinage ME; Vicinal 1677; Vicinity 1560. These three words are condensed into the vicinal whose meaning can be characterised as: places, things, people lying near to each other taken collectively; an area extended to a limited distance round a particular spot; a neighbourhood; that which is a local byway as opposed to a highway; that which is (to an observer or ‘the’ point of reference) proximate, adjacent, propinquent; that which is near in degree or quality, close relationship or connexion, similar, like, that which is nearly coincident with a given surface or plane”. In this vicinal is used as a new word which also gathers meaning from the context of its use herein, as well as this note itself, and perhaps more importantly from Shakespeare’s “local habitations” whose paradoxical strangeness he so nicely puts in the mouth of Theseus in response to Hyppolyta’s “’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.”:

More strange than true. I never may believe
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast can hold;
That is, the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination

That, if it would but apprehend some joy,

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

[William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer-night’s Dream”, 5.1.2-23, the CUP, The New Shakespeare, edition 1924, 1968.]

[38] Shooting an hare is a course taken by Fox in the song “March Hare”, ibid.

[39] Fox considers Zeno’s paradox to make sense (be valid) in a two dimensional world such as described by the mathematician Edwin Abbot Abbot in his extraordinary 1884 book “Flatland”. In (or on) pure Flatland point to point cannot be temporized (and remain Flatland); thus, Zeno’s tortoise, if it starts out ahead (not first), cannot be overtaken by anything (even Achilles) starting behind (not later). Of course, dimensioning of worlds has ‘infinite’ possibilities. Humankind, with utilitarian habituation, form, more or less in common, tri-dimensional worlds ambiguously temporized with an insensible (imagined) fourth (½ or quasi) dimension to enable manageable behaviours whereby humankind can process through life avoiding death as comfortably as possible. Death being the dispersement (redistribution) of (an human) plexus that has identity in itself (an human being). In regard to Zeno’s Paradox and the problem of traversing an infinite number of points or instants, Russell disposes of Zeno 1 & 2 (The Racecourse, and Achilles and his Tortoise) with the well worn logic-in-common by which the ‘normal, 3½ to 4 dimensional external world and the problem of infinity can be considered with the psychology of counting discounted by Cantor. However, in dealing with Zeno’s third argument, of the Arrow, Russell, using Prantl’s translation (of Aristotle on Zeno), observes thus:

“If everything, when it is behaving in a uniform manner, is continually either moving or at rest, but what is moving is always in the now, then the moving arrow is motionless.” This form of the argument brings out its force more clearly than Burnet’s paraphrase.

Here, if not in the first two [of Zeno’s] arguments, the view that a finite part of time consists of a finite series of successive instants seems to be assumed; at any rate the plausibility of the argument seems to depend upon supposing that there are consecutive instants. Throughout an instant, it is said, a moving body is where it is: it cannot move during the instant, for that would require that the instant should have parts. Thus, suppose we consider a period consisting of a thousand instants, and suppose the arrow is in flight throughout this period. At each of the thousand instants, the arrow is where it is, though at the next instant it is somewhere else. It is never moving, but in some miraculous way the change of position has to occur between instants, that is to say, not at any time whatever. This is what M. Bergson calls the cinematographic representation of reality. The more the difficulty is meditated, the more real it becomes. The solution lies in the theory of continuous series: … (Bertrand Russell, “Our Knowledge of the External World” —Lecture VI: The Problem of Infinity Considered Historically, George Allen & Unwin, first in 1914 revised 1926, p 179)

Yet, in more general terms, any movement requires an infinite number of instants between any two finite (ie observable) positions and whose difference is representable by any finite number 1 through to (∞ - 1); thus, ¹/_∞ = 0 or (^{∞ - 1}/_∞); which is to say that either is the same as nothing, time means nothing (and nothing means …).

[40] Erinaceous means hedgehogkind. This alludes to the parable of the Fox and the Hedgehog:

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: 'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'. Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance-and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; (Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox”, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1953, which can be found at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/idris/Essays/Hedge_n_Fox.htm ).

We find also that Bacon had similarly observed that:

There is one principal and as it were radical distinction between different minds, in respect of philosophy and the sciences, which is this: that some minds are stronger and apter to mark the differences of things, others to mark their resemblances. The steady and acute mind can fix its contemplations and dwell and fasten on the subtlest distinctions; the lofty and discursive mind recognizes and puts together the finest and most general resemblances. Both kinds, however, easily err in excess, by catching the one at gradations, the other at shadows. (Francis Bacon, “Novum Organon: or true direction concerning the interpretation of nature”, LV, 1620, internet edition based on 1863 Boston edition of Taggard & Thompson, http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm )

[41] Bertrand Russell, “Our Knowledge of the External World”, Lecture III, George Allen & Unwin, 1926. p73-4. This is very much in kind with Bacon’s comment on the benefits of finding a middle path:

Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men's efforts than good by their own. Those on the other hand who have taken a contrary course, and asserted that absolutely nothing can be known — whether it were from hatred of the ancient sophists, or from uncertainty and fluctuation of mind, or even from a kind of fullness of learning, that they fell upon this opinion — have certainly advanced reasons for it that are not to be despised; but yet they have neither started from true principles nor rested in the just conclusion, zeal and affectation having carried them much too far. The more ancient of the Greeks (whose writings are lost) took up with better judgment a position between these two extremes — between the presumption of pronouncing on everything, and the despair of comprehending anything; and though frequently and bitterly complaining of the difficulty of inquiry and the obscurity of things, and like impatient horses champing at the bit, they did not the less follow up their object and engage with nature, thinking (it seems) that this very question — viz., whether or not anything can be known — was to be settled not by arguing, but by trying. And yet they too, trusting entirely to the force of their understanding, applied no rule, but made everything turn upon hard thinking and perpetual working and exercise of the mind. (The New Organon [New Instrument], or true directions concerning the interpretation of nature, Author’s Preface, Francis Bacon, 1620, internet edition text 1863, http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm ).

[42] Mary and Jim Tiles, “An Introduction to Historical Epistemology: The Authority of Knowledge”, Blackwell, 1993, p41.

[43] On induction Russell observed amusingly on whether there is any reason for believing in what is called the uniformity of nature:

Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken. (Bertrand Russell, “The Problems of Philosophy”, Home University Library, 1912, p35.)

[44] Etymologically ‘science’ simply means ‘knowledge’ (Ayto says, it comes from Old French science from L scientia, from verb scíre ‘know’); thus, there is always a tautological sense in its ordinary use, though now it has come to mean knowledge based on hypothesis testing by observation and the use of mathematics and other forms of logical reasoning in proofing, proposing and further hypothesis testing by empirical observation until a theory can be reasonably looked at consistent with the (selected) empirical evidence and allowing for the interference of the observer in the confines of the world of experimentation.

[45] The poetry of Bacon’s metaphor “idols of the mind” to some extent obscures the problematical impurity, or overlapping character, of the four categories of obfuscation he identifies as ways humankind interprets images of external world. Nevertheless, there is a relationship between Bacon’s four idols and the multi-disciplinary approach to scripting the “playbooks” of modern social psychology; from personality theory through theory of social groups, organization theory and the sociology of institutions and societies, until Fox’s cybennial (post~post-modernist) identification of ‘cybennial man’ as ‘diasporic globeing’ appears to dispose of such disciplines just as nations states are becoming virtually dispersed and dissolved through the increasing porosity of their physical borders. Thus, Bacon’s idols seem to Fox graven images indeed:

XXXVIII

The idols and false notions which are now in possession of the human understanding, and have taken deep root therein, not only so beset men's minds that truth can hardly find entrance, but even after entrance is obtained, they will again in the very instauration of the sciences meet and trouble us, unless men being forewarned of the danger fortify themselves as far as may be against their assaults.

XXXIX

There are four classes of Idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names, calling the first class Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market Place; the fourth, Idols of the Theater.

XL

The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols. To point them out, however, is of great use; for the doctrine of Idols is to the interpretation of nature what the doctrine of the refutation of sophisms is to common logic.

XLI

The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

XLII

The Idols of the Cave are the idols of the individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature, owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature; or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in fact a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.

XLIII

There are also Idols formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other, which I call Idols of the Market Place, on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate, and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar. And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding. Nor do the definitions or explanations wherewith in some things learned men are wont to guard and defend themselves, by any means set the matter right. But words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies.

XLIV

Lastly, there are Idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the Theater, because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it only of the systems now in vogue, or only of the ancient sects and philosophies, that I speak; for many more plays of the same kind may yet be composed and in like artificial manner set forth; seeing that errors the most widely different have nevertheless causes for the most part alike. Neither again do I mean this only of entire systems, but also of many principles and axioms in science, which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received. (Francis Bacon, “Novum Organon: or true direction concerning the interpretation of nature”, 1620, internet edition based on 1863 Boston edition of Taggard & Thompson, text http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm ).

“Idols of the Cave” are sometimes translated as “Idols of the Den”, and this is (naturally) Fox’s preferred version. However, today it is the idle imagings of cybennial ‘man’ that have an underlying character, virtually constructed on a global basis, whereby the idols are imagined. Fox has termed this character the globeing or glob, which may be compared to the urbanoid; perhaps it would be more comprehensive to say the urbanoidal glob. In regard to such (urbanoidal) globeing Fox updates Bacon’s idols broadly as:

i) imagings of the den-of-personality-being formed in, or by, the nature & the nurture of the peculiar propensities of each genetic form and its (relational) experience.

ii) imagings of the tribe-of-social-being formed in, or by, actual or virtual memberships of social groups, organizations, institutions, societies, cultures, the globe, and by the performancing of social roles. The tribe is about the human condition itself set within the social psychology of being someone, and of that someone having context depicted by forms established by the tribe against which self is screened as a malformed shadow cast of defective sense.

iii) imagings of the “theatre-of-enacted-being” formed in, or by, the implication of ready made systems of thought that set convenient stages for human actors prescribing the plays it is permissible to perform. These are acts of faith (belief) prescribing false audiences for appearances such that thought is suspended in a solution of indissoluble common sense.

iv) imagings of the “market-of-linguified-being” formed in, or by, words tongue tied by language and hollowed by excavations for bodies of dead meanings.

[46] Gilbert Ryle, “The Concept of Mind”, Hutchinson, 1949, p11.

[47] Fox is essentially monolingual, thus English is his core reference. Of course, although the English language can hardly be considered less than polyglot, the point made here about Ryle’s argument is obviously applicable in most, if not all the 5,000 or more other extant languages, though Fox himself is silent on the point.

[48] Mentalese, is a neologism of Steven Pinker’s and refers to a valuable concept explicated in chapter 3 and throughout “The Language Instinct”, (1994) Penguin 1995, and “How the Mind Works”, W W Norton 1997.

[49] This is to take up McLuhan’s Gutenberg thesis that:

W. B. Yeats has an epigram which puts the themes of King Lear and Don Quixote in cryptic form:

Locke sank into a swoon
The graden died
God took the spinning jenny
Out of his side.

[50] Fox has threatened to produce a detailed paper on the matter of ‘belief’. He regards ‘belief’ as the relational centre (core) of being, and thus of the utmost importance in examining the ontology of knowledge. Various notes above and below intimate the importance of the nature of belief, as emotion, on the production of emotionally invincible epistemes derived in vincible ontology. Such everyday (ordinary), dearly beloved knowledge seems to turn out deceptively suspect and unconvincing when considered in universal terms, being of a somewhat local (vicinal) Newtonian character rather than, as it were, cosmologically Einsteinian. In universal terms mere be-lief may be regarded as being intrinsically foolish.

[51] Jean Paul Sartre, op cit, 1969, xliii.

[52] Jean Paul Sartre, op cit, 1969, p3.

[53] See Fox’s “March Hare Song” ibid.

[54] ‘Bundle” is mentioned in regard to the plexuses of relations (see below) which are of similar character but not the same as David Hume’s (1711-76) empiricist ‘bundle theory of self’; Hume, though seeming to overcome (blur) the body-mind dichotomy, asymmetrically perpetuates the Cartesian myth of material and immaterial worlds which vie confusingly to present themselves at the same point in human thought baffling any mind so involved.

[55] Paul Rodaway, “Sensuous Geographies”, Routledge, 1994, p32.

[56] Paul Rodaway, op cit, p5.

[57] T Lopsang Rampa, see below, another way of ‘seeing’, mind (or psyche) alteration through culturo-surgical intervention (socio-mechanical ritual).

[58] Mirageals is an inkhorn term from Fox combining mirage with real, (thus of oasis as ‘real’ mirage) perhaps of the character of the factish as derived from Bruno Latour and described by John Banks, 1999: “ The factish has to be fabricated, made, and invented; as such it has a complex and variable ontology in which it is entangled within collective practice. The status of the factish is all about the associations between humans and nonhumans and refuses the disabling opposition between subject and object, epistemology and ontology, internal belief and external world. The modern critic's belief that others believe functions to render invisible the complicated practice through which the categories are mixed and factishes are constructed.” Of course, Fox would say ‘fabricated’ rather than ‘constructed’, see http://www.media-culture.org.au/9907/games3.html . Indeed, Fox says that in practice he treats factish as pataphysical fetish. Of course, the idea of factish being just that, ‘nearly-a-fact’, very like a fact, something that is ‘fact-ish’, but this would not perhaps carry over the parallelism of the pataphysical with the metaphyscal.

[59] Balkanisation of the ‘markets’ for ‘kneelers’, that is consumers of the products and services of religions &/or ideologies, leads to endless regressive and often grossly aggressive sectarianisms; perhaps, in any case, the internecine reflex is an inevitable feature of the human condition, a Darwinian pack behaviour of genetic origin.

[60] For example the ‘props’ of Salvador Dali.

[61] Aldous Huxley, “The Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell”, of Mexico, mescalin and (could it have been) innocence, (1954), Penguin 1963.

[62] T Lopsang Rampa, “The Third Eye”, Corgi 1965 (first published Secker & Warburg 1956), p76.

[63] The etymology of toxic is exploited here, viz from Greek poisoned arrows (archery, bow), on through Latin to toxic.

[64] According to Paul Johnson, “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written under the influence of both radical poets (Shelley and Byron), can also be seen as a criticism of Wordsworth: in the novel, the pursuit of solitary, individual idealism, as opposed to the collective humanitarianism advocated by Shelley, leads to positive evil.” (“The Birth of the Modern”, 1991, p430). For Fox a “positive evil” is difficult to condemn with ease, just as it seems increasingly difficult to accept the easy assumption of Frankenstein’s ‘going wrong’ being thus a positive evil, a definite wrongness in worlds apart from the then world shared by Wordsworth and Mary Shelley.

[65] heris means her or his, conveniently refers to genderised objects, or facticities. It is now a well established Foxian neologism. Fox seems to treat Frankenstein as a genderised factish, not an ‘it’, although not necessarily ontologically either male or female in heris-self. Frankenstein can normally be a male or a female, even both, but only abnormally an ‘it’. This is to treat Frankenstein (herim) as a ‘normal’ factish. Of course, it is normally the case that Frankenstein is seen as male, which seems natural as ‘he’ is a monster, although a masculist movement might make a tissue of this. This is to take Fox to be extending dimorphic humanity to trimorphic.

[66] This is sometimes described as “artefactual reciprocation”, ++++++

[67] Such fatherliness is excised by Fox in his volume in preparation of about forty poems in many shapes and forms entitled “Inscriptions”. Each poem in the volume is about a contemporary mostly news media accessed personage, this is about the Pope.

Wojtyla, Karol Joseph 1920- (Our Father)

Getting down to the concrete kiss

There seemed nothing at all remiss,

But beneath his robe out of sight

Exorcising that human rite

He kneed the groin of the earth,

And barely its groan could be heard.

With “Inscriptions” Fox is attempting to re-vitalize the poiesis of history, to bring ‘history’ to life and life to history where each inscription ‘horizons’ locutionary events in a forseeable vicinity, a timeless space, operating as interlocutor between the vicinality of ‘places’ apparently involved.

[68] Quote of Latour 1996 taken from Nick Bingham, “Frankenstein, Food, Factishes and Fiction”, Ch12 “Lost in Space”, ed Hitchin & Kneale, Continuum 2002, p191.

[69] Fox, resorts to ‘man’ in order to press home the point that man is etymologically human being, person (OE mann) and has only come to mean male human beings relatively recently, distinguished as werman (male person), and wifman (female person) being at the root of woman, while werman was simplified and took over the human race of ‘man’.

[70] Adam, is the Hebrew word for ‘man’. Ultimately derived from Hebrew adam meaning "to be red", referring to the ruddy colour of human skin, or from Assyrian adamu meaning "to make". According to Genesis in the Old Testament Adam was created from the earth by God (there is a word play on Hebrew adamah "earth"). The poetry in the name of ‘Adam’ is that of the image moulded in the concrete of red, make, earth mixed through the triple punning combining to make ‘man’, which etymologically means simply an human, ‘man’ (OE wer-man) or woman (OE wif-man).

[71] Film, in the fairy story sphere, directed by Tim Burton, 1990, and starring Johnny Depp, for more information go to internet, this one is okay http://us.imdb.com/Title?0099487 Peg Boggs, your Avon lady, is delightfully played by Dianne Wiest

[72] The term ‘parts’ covers an ever extending itemisation over an ever widening range of types as 1) organic tissue type parts, such as autografts, homografts, heterografts, or 2) inorganic supplement types, such as roboplants (implants) robotaches (robotic attachments), or 3) bio-chemical alteration, or 4) genetic manipulation such as gene doping, or 5) pataphysical parts.

[73] Jacques Derrida, “Margins of Philosophy: Différance”, translated by Alan Bass, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1982. Derrida’s différantial calculus seems ultimately a blind recital of the ‘same’, an instrument for disseizing meaning of its normative ambience, for dispossessing meaning of presence in language that its residence be showed as an hollow housed by orderly masonic stone implying being as missing object, whose desideratum is apperceived merely. Fox has pointed out, in discussion, that inveigling (blinding) any difference between ‘difference and différance’ and indeed no difference between ‘difference and diference’ means it is impossible to différantiate between them in speech alone without consciously introducing a neophonism to eradicate the homophonic paronomasia of différance leaving it alone in the realm of phonemics where it sounds as though it subsists as ideal sounds uncontaminated by any others (sounds), even by the inferential buzz of silences, an endless plurality of absent sounds, whereof silence becomes factishious, just as any absent ‘object’ can be imagined to be a fiction (fixtion) of imagination. Thus, there need be no phonological diference (sic) between difference and deference unless we consciously choose to express one (as we can do and do do in English) in deference to our thought of the other. Such deference can only mean that written words are factitious objects that take on graphic lives of their own that we may copulate with if we lie with them and conspire to mean what we say by them as we define them among us with our usages and networks. This is to ‘say’ that the language of our thought, our mentalese, is not preliminarily verbal, but accreted upon our primary experiences (gah, ug), is learned about what we at first per-happen to know of. We are problematically led on by authorities we find (imagine), or who find us; thus we are educated, groomed until we unconsciously slip into a frictionless (factishionless) world of our own making where silence is as unspeakably tomblike as death, showing no sign of life except through the expression of observable or imagined differences: ‘the’ difference between hæcceities, between this and this, or this or this, or that and that, or …(the nine forms of pre-positional formations that humans have made sense of). Though this is a pencil and that is a pencil they are not the same as each other, no, they are different pencils although the same (kind), and thus more words are needed to fill in the sufficient difference(s) between them expressed as the place each is observed relative or recurrent to me (observing) their material, colour, texture form etc. Thus, ‘that’s not the same as this’ is differential haeccity attributed to that which seems other (whose samenesses are incomplete no matter how comprehensive), they are not identical (nothing is identical—except ‘uniquely’ with nothing), they are plural and therefore differentiable, nothing is neither plural nor singular, it is merely misprisionably so, nothing has no form or unform and is innumerable, thus cannot be unique as one thing, though unique as different, never the same as itself, nothing is the same. Such difference can be disseized by pointing, voicing, graphing individually or in any combination. Of course, in any and every case no object (factish) is ever constantly present, is ever without change, even if such change is merely of its location. Even though an object may seem relatively the same, as it were unmoved in relation to me, I am not the same and it is not the same and we have, in any and every case, both moved elsewhere in stellar terms. This is to say, or to recognise endlessly, that factishion cannot save ‘reality’ from movement and movement can only mean nothing remains the same, ever. The suspension of belief is automatic. Thus, there cannot be recurrence of the same whether eternal or temporal. In this (or that) Nietzsche, and concomitantly Derrida, are as mad as march hares, their circle being fatal to their route to the same as if the location of their meaning is fixed. There is only movement. When visiting the ‘same’ place by returning to an old ‘haunt’ we find merely a material husk of its actual previousness; clues merely, but not the beast of it, nor Ariadne’s helping hand. No matter how ‘exacty’ that ‘haunt’ has been preserved, it has moved on just as the earth has moved through astronomical (stellar) space never to return to the ‘same’ place, albeit our particular cave seems the same as always, if we discount minor decorative enhancement or archaeological degradation. Not that this way of it is not so inconvenient that making do with a mesh and muddle of shortcuts doesn’t make sense, it certainly does and seems to serve to keep us sound in body if not mind. However, to turn the Neoplatonists inside out, as it were, Fox has taken on the matter of Inge’s analysis of Plotinus such that:

When Plotinus shows that to strip an object of its qualities, its values, its meaning in a moral and spiritual scheme, and its aesthetic properties, is the way to reduce it to all-but nothing, he gives us a refutation of materialism, which is still valuable. He reminds us that the universe as conceived by naturalism owes far more to the mind of the observer than the naturalist is willing to admit. The naturalist is not, as he supposes, describing what he sees; he is interpreting it. He is translating sensuous impressions into the language of human thought. Without this labour of the mind there would no doubt be something left, but certainly not a world. (William R Inge, “The Philosphy of Plotinus: The Gifford Lectures at St Andrews 1917-1918”, Vol 1, 3^rd edition, Longmans Green & Co, p147-8)

[74] According to Ayto, 1990, the underlying meaning of ‘mad’ is changed, thus “gone mad” meant “become different”.

[75] The term “serendipitous consilience” refers to a Foxian concept, or conceit, that what humankind may pick up (not simply the mere eclecticism of the jackdaw) and carry in the psyche, any psyche, is in effect picked up serendipitously and may be collectively brought to mind, any mind, through consilience (idea-things that jump together); and, thus in mind, a related gestaltic being is apperceivable by that mind in natural ecstasis; that is in the disjunction of perception and memory imaginatively rejoined in a seemingly parallel psyche, a psychically distanced double, a phenomenon that illustrates the plurality of being, and, more to the point, the undimensional and unsingular ontology of being. In context, there is the breakdown of the traditional academic disciplines whereby knowledge is formed and traded by owners in well defined domains (monopolistic markets) jealously guarded by the gatekeepers of each discipline, this in turn breaking down into inter-disciplinary approaches with new gatekeepers (knowledge unions) taking over knowledge markets by monopolistic merger. Until, in the cybennial, knowledge is globulized, for ‘globeing’ consumption, this is a fundamental aspect of the industrialisation of the immaterial (initiated by Caxton, enabled by Gates, disseminated by Fox, and consummated in the mass consumption of the ‘globeing’, whose cybennial growth could be described as become ‘phenomenal’, a ‘phenomenon-in-itself’).

[76] Fox, in reading this note to his song, points out that although “painstaking” is etymologically ‘pains-taking’ (Chambers, Tyndale etc), meaning to take pains (care) in doing something, he reads it automatically in the context of (christian) religions as ‘pain-staking’ because of the automatic association with the habits of various churchs of sending people to the stake over their beliefs. Of course, pain originally means in etymologically terms to punish. This Foxian idiosyncrasy seems worth mentioning.

[77] The Foxian paronomasiacal exploitation of ‘new-sense’ and ‘nuisance’ runs throughout.

[78] John D Barrow, The World within the World”, OUP 1988, p160-161. Also see Stephen Spender’s parallel, if less definite, universe of (a) “World Within World”, ++++++++

[79] “Goodies” (emos, electronically mediated objects, or dmos, dimos) refers to goods in the traditional economic sense, but emphasises the peculiar service character of cybennial goods, being commonly fixtional or factishional, imagined, immaterial goods rather than conventional material objects. Such are ‘objects’ of mental consumption. In this such goodies have equivalence with, say, religious services, that is mentally utile, as distinct from being simply materially utile. Of course, the 19^th and 20^th centuries in the western sphere saw the astonishing rise of the industrialization of the material, the modern mass production of material goods and of the concomitant the socio-economic formations of market societies (liberal democracies) required to sustain such production by consuming the vast loads of goods so produced. The late 20^th century and the cybennial world of the 21^st has seen the wholesale ‘industrialisation of the immaterial’, and the concomitant generation of mass spectation (a kind of exploitation by exspectatortion) as the parallel for the mass consumption of mass produced material objects. This is the production of immaterial worlds as it were built on the back of a materialized elephant, perched on its swaying fictional way making mysterious capital progress toward precarious plural destinations. Industrialization of the immaterial through exploitation of surpluses (converted to capital) by the application and development of electronic information and communication technologies has a clear parallel with the modern industrialization of the material and the concomitant socio-psychological changes that radically altered perception of world then and now. Industrialization of the material was in two basic phases, mechanization followed by automation. Thus, we may see further that the structuring of a global society constructed of the industrialized mass production of immaterial goods manufactered in the depths of various ‘woods: Hollywood, Bollywood, Pinewood, and who knows what other woods wherein the urbanoidal glob (globeing) can get lost. Analogy of the car horseless the horsedrawn carriage etc highways etc +Das Kapital etc ++++(see “Intelligent College 1994 a visionary paper that ultimately fell foul of the all too familiar confederacy of dunces leading and governing that particular college and local community at the time)+concentration of cyber (soft) capital on diasporas (unreal estate, ie virtual estates) compared to real (hard) capital concentrated on the concrete formations structures of place (real estate, ie law of the land property rights) herding diasporas into virtual stadia or fields by controlling portals etc (cyberherding, spam bam cram software), and herding segments into real stadia or fields by controlling property (places) and their structures (++++herding, slam bam boom promotion). Marx +++++. Urbanoidal globs herded into a well fenced and toileted Glastonbury field seem to have gathered like Christians desperate to witness a miracle of some sort, any sort when the only miracle is the conversion of utterly mediocre music into waves of sound that blow the litter of light weight minds about the field along with the detritus of disposables engulfing it. ++++

[80] The play on quantification, meaning classical seeing, measuring stuff tautologically with rules, implies the substitution of numerable stuff with innumerable, if probabilistic, “quanta” and thus subject to quantum theory which throws up the ambiguity of the habitual (ie natural) material conception of ‘reality’ as being ultimately ‘solid’, rather than being purely relational. This Derridian vision is designed to illustrate what Fox considers to be the close parallel between the Cartesian duality problem and the duality of what is scientifically seen of stuff through quantum mechanics. In this Fox regards such simple dualities as merely precursors of illimitable pluralities as intimated, for example, by Barrow’s bubbles (see below).

[81] Sean Aylward Smith. "Where Does the Body End?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999), bite 1, http://www.media-culture.org.au/9905/end.html

[82] Sean Aylward Smith. "Where Does the Body End?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999), bite 2 bit 4 http://www.media-culture.org.au/9905/end.html

[83] Isaac Asimov, “I Robot”, (1951), Science Fiction Book Club, 1954.

[84] Isaac Asimov, op cit, p30-31.

[85] The manufacture of immaterial goodies (emos) on an industrial scale is achieved through a Bergsonian cinematization of ‘reality’. The feeding on such ‘new reality’ has all the appearances of the kinematic such that consumption of the hæcceital ‘this’ relates to pure motion, ie to motion considered abstractly, without reference to force or mass, (SOED 3^rd edition) in keeping with Fox’s notion of relationality and (the) relational universe (U^r) which he has derived from Monostone’s conception of the ‘Omniverse’ (O^m) as discussed below. In regard specifically to the problem of the conflict ‘appearance-versus-reality’, it can be ‘seen’ to be not only an unnecessary conflict, but not a conflict at all if, after Fox, appearance is considered to be reality. Fox has observed that the old established (psychological) boundaries which separated the two nations, as it were, of reality and appearance (philosophical passports and visas required to cross between the official spheres of influence), have become increasingly porous to the degree that free flow has become the rule in the cybennial. The duel in the human mind between appearance and reality is a duel between the psychology of self and other, it is the stasis of self-survival projecting upon other; and this is the false duality of self-wrestling (with itself). The plexuality ‘self’ is merely one of itself in its own complexual relationality. The usage of the words ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ reveals the worship of idols in the marketplace. Not only must such idols be broken, smashed to smithereens, ground to dust, but the iconoclast and the smith must be driven forth into the wilderness wherein to see oases and to wash their tongues dry in the mirageal waters of these oases until, speechless with destruction, their tongues take root in the desert. Such nihilingualism is at the root of the cybennial trek toward the artefacture of the immaterial and its manufacture on an industrial scale. Once more the ‘human’ being, as urbanoidal globeing, seems stuck on the twin track of the material and immaterial, however, this distinction continues to be a ‘natural’ self-delusion (as of the nation states) becoming undeceived by the growing effect of the machinisation of ‘the human’ by the advance of the biomechanical such that what it means to ‘be human’ becomes itself quantafiable and humanminds are increasingly lost in the woods (Holly, Bolly, Pine or …) and re-founded in a social-psychology of the inhuman. Thus schooled, and as urbanoidal globeings (globs) rush to stake out their natural estate in cyberspace, so this vast res nullius is overrun, taken, tamed, cleared. The planting defines the ‘this’ of that once empty, unused, unknown, undeleted wilderness, with mass immigrations whose seeds burgeon and existentify willi-nilly the space they occupy, encroaching disease with knowledge whilst obtruding an emergent form as the shape of things to come spreading throughout the sphere constructing its existence as a place (in space) with its own peculiar geography, displacing or wiping out pockets of indigenous nerds playing like mice in barns stuffed with grain waiting for cats to breed. Such inhumanity seems familiar, and such shaping too as it geographizes a once seemless world in its own image. The becoming of cyberspace is idealized as a place wherein the mundane is idolized in a market of the immaterial made good, though making no sense. Such insubstantial existentification is on the face of it a mere realisation of the superficial; nevertheless behind this screen a slave squats hand on string pulling the fan that cools the shadowy chamber in which we sit sipping sherbert leisurely dreaming of date palms and breezes, patiently waiting for palpable snow. And as the Himalaya descend so the material and immaterial become one. Herein the social psychology of the globeing is well prepared to see itself playing its part in the immaterial means of production whereby a serendipitous biomechanical support system constructs all the appearances of reality as if inhumanity were really human after all. There are ten (somewhat Nietzschean) Theorems of Consilient Serendipity. The First Theorem is that “what comes matters”. The Second Theorem is that “what is come has overcome”. The Third Theorem is that “what has overcome is right”. See Monostone for the others, particularly those qualifying these three, which of course, suffer from the problem of their apparent inconsistency with the continuity and consexistence of the relational universe (U^r).

[86] Play on “Soylent Green”, a film directed by Richard Fleischer, 1973, and starring Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson (excellence from these two). The film concludes by discovering that the 2022CE diet of the masses is truly human.

[87] This refers to the “Foxian Paradox of the Dead-end”, which aphoristically comes out as “How can you be dead? You can never be dead”. Fox, after the obvious, has only this indirect approach to the the paradox (and without determination of you) that: “materiality apparently needs dimension (extension, res extensa) to exist (ie to subsist-in), whereas immateriality is dimensionless (of the relational universe U^r); however, material is (supposedly) solid and belongs to solidity (the solid universe U^s) which is (also) dimensionless. Thus, materiality is either a constructed illusion (ie mere appearance intimating U^r &/or U^s, or it indicates that there is a material universe (U^m), a third universe. Does such indicate the omniverse (O) is trinitarian (O^t), or indescribably plural (O^p)?” The Foxian dead-end becomes open-ended, such that being-there does not matter, is neither here nor there, a mere sein of death; or merely a translingual phonomasia pointing to nothing when speech has been written to death. Thus, it appears (and if, as Fox takes it, appearance is reality) that ‘realities’ are variously ‘constituted’ formations of being (unifications, commonalities, uni-verses, erinaceous perceptions), and that there may be at least three ‘formations’ of being wherein(of,at) we humankind are not only participants in the relational universe (U^r) but also intimates of the solid universe (U^r) and also, thirdly, of a/the material universe (U^m) and that humankind must struggle to transpose such intimation into knowledge, or extend and transform its epistemological basis (or bases) that it may cope (grapple) with the problems of a tri-quantafiable epistemology. In knowledge whereof(at,in,by) a principle exposed (but not explained) by serindipitous consilience waits to jump us from universe to universe according to the complexion (strength and predilection—twist) of our minds until ontological opinion occurs that persuades an unexpected sense of/to it all. Philosophers might be tempted to cleverly confuse U^r and U^m with res cogitans (the immaterial, the insubstantial though existent mind) and res extensa (the material, the substantial though partially perceivable object), and fall back into the Cartesian split, that empty chasm automatically constructed as between ‘mind and body’ to counterfeit predictability, that crude and ineffective instrument for avoiding the dead-end, or creating God out of reason. Pre-diction, saying what is coming down the road toward us, is as ineffective as post-diction, saying what has already happened. Pre-diction’s techniques of prophetic intuition (vision), of data acquisition by selection (spin), of analysis (dream), planning (plotting), creative eventuality management (editing), and communication (rhetoric) can provide a comforting sense of ‘being-in-control’ of the future. Post-diction’s techniques of data acquisition by selection, analysis, planning and creative ‘de-scription’ provide some comforting sense of ‘being-in-control’ of the past, as it were, making the past a definite article. As to observing ‘the present’, what on earth is this and that upon us? It is impossible to ‘know-the-present’ a mere invention mindful of making sense by imperceptible dimensionization that ‘makes-no-sense’ at all. Humans simply do not know what is happening nowlet alone before and after, now is also pure invention; yet does that make it unreal? Again, the present appears indefinitely real and, according to Fox, is therefore real, that is, really imperceptibly indefinite. Such uncertain ontology of the imperceptible is surely proof of the fallibility of any epistemology based on it, locked in its own pre-positional infidelity.

[88] Especially Hollywood.

[89] Until the eighteenth century in England, for example, the bible and a small number of other works were read aloud and listened to over and over again. This intensive (public) reading and hearing of ‘approved’ books constructed closed or fixed mindsettings++++

[90] This is an allusion to the Foxian technique (poetic machinery whose ghost is allusion) of alluding to Thomas Stearns Eliot’s use of allusion lightly applied. Thus:

Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate,

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

( Thomas Stearns Eliot, “Four Quartets: Burnt Norton”, lines 19-25, 1935, Faber & Faber 1969.

Could we not find Thoreau and Whitman with their New England nuances and Hardy all with the voices of the thrush?

This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals of a gentle rain-storm in August, when, both air and water being perfectly still, but the sky overcast, mid-afternoon had all the serenity of evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being, shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important.

(Henry Thoreau, “Walden” Chapter 2).

Such poetic ‘ravelation’ is without limit of threads and bustle and buzz to supply the New England quilting bee, see “Women at Work”, in “Young America: A Folk Art History”, Museum of American Folk Art, Hudson Hills Press, 1981, p157 &162. And the thrush sings on just as the lilacs bloom when from the throat of a thrush Whitman sings of Lincoln’s bloody choking death.

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

4.

In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.

Song of the bleeding throat,
Death's outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing, thou would'st surely die.)

5.

Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep'd from the ground, spotting the gray debris,
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a coffin.

(Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”, stanzas 4 & 5, 1865-66).

Hardy’s thrush contradicts their own song simply by singing at all.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An age`d thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

(Thomas Hardy, 30^th December 1900)

[91] The futuristic genre, traditionally known as science fiction, (though Fox includes in this the miraculous manufactured by religions, resurrections, cures, feedings and other such fixtions), is a powerful influence in the manufacture of the cybennial immaterial. Thus, because of the scale of the pervasion of the futuristic genre and its artefactures (‘artefractures’, ‘artefactishions’), it significantly shapes the immaterial estate of the cybennial.

[92] Reference to the leading character “Neo” in the “Matrix” films (prequels and sequels etc, Fox includes “Johnny Mnemonic”) which began in pursuit of interesting expression of key, currently relevant, philosophical ideas of a manufactured society which reflects an equally manufactured reality. Sadly, with “Matrix Reloaded”, we have exactly that: a trash rehash and exploitation of the saved ‘capital investment’ held in the storyline and ideas-base, the cast and contractual assets base, the software and applications base, and the scenario database already developed (in the can) for the earlier Matrix films, plus the usual load of crash bang twaddle ironically hyped to the n^th degree as a must-experience ‘reality’ of computer choreographed chases, fights and mind bending-morphological transitions whose pointlessness is cunningly obfuscated by the occasional gnomic utterance which suggests obfuscation is mystery and that inevitable incomprehension is ‘really’ a mystical experience— if only you were capable of knowing such difficult stuff.

[93] See the excellent web site to get the idea of the vast cathedral like character of the cave at Chauvet-pont-D’Arc, in the Ardeche Gorges, France, to the sensible mind of paleolithic man wholly unconditioned to any kind of buildings than those slowly, secretly and subtly constructed by the rains and rivers around him and seen only from their inside by the flickering light of fire, while their exteriors are wholly unrevealed, forever faceless in the landscape until hoarded and signed, put on the map: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/index.html

[94] The term “manifold” (of sense), alludes to the Kantian forms of mind, that is data that are supplied to the mind through sensation. This allusion carries with it the implication that ++++++++++

[95] The th-ings of the cybennium “Engineering (genetic, structural & mechanical), Computing, Teleporting, Morphing, ++++++++. In the context of GM (Government Money) Projects, Initiatives, Special Schemes (PISS)

[96] Terminator (3) ++++

[97] HAL is Stanley Kubrick’s manipulative and ulimately homicidal artificial intelligence (AI computer) in the film “2001 a Space Odyssey”, 19++. HAL is an oblique reference to IBM coded by Kubrick afraid to take IBM head on, the then most powerful corporation in the world. The code was not difficult: H=I, A=B and L=M; not impossible to crack. +++++

[98] “Johnny Mnemonic”, directed by Robert Longo, 1995, in his feature debut and written by William Gibson based on his own story, is the first of Gibson's best-selling ‘cyberpunk' works to be brought to the screen. In the 21st century, information is the ultimate commodity. In a world where cyberspace is a workaday reality and outlaw hackers thrive, the most valuable information must sometimes be transported by mnemonic couriers, professionals like Johnny, played by Keanu Reeves, who offer the ultimate in security and confidentiality. Johnny guarantees delivery, for the right price, but he pays a price of his own for his chip-enhanced data-storage capacity; he has to dump his own memories to make room for the programs he smuggles for shadowy corporate clients. He wants those memories back, but it is going to be expensive, so expensive that he will have to make one last run to pay for it. Based on the short story by acclaimed "cyberpunk" author William Gibson and directed by celebrated artist Robert Longo, “Johnny Mnemonic” is a unique action adventure that takes us on a wild ride down the dark side of the information highway to a place where technology has taken some very lethal turns. Johnny contracts to deliver priceless data for a pair of scientists, defectors from Pharmakom, the world's third-largest corporation. The massive upload is too much for the mnemonic implant embedded in Johnny's brain. With no idea of what it is he's carrying, Johnny must find the secret access-codes that allow him to download the information, or die. But data-overload isn't the only thing threatening his life. The Yakuza, the world's most powerful crime-syndicate, are working for Pharmakom. Takahashi (Takeshi), the Yakuza sector chief, distrusts his own men; he secretly hires the ruthless bounty hunter known as Street Preacher (Dolph Lundgren) and orders him to bring in Johnny's head cryogenically preserved. With an army of professional killers on his trail, and terminal brain-crash closer by the minute, the film degenerates into the usual boring ‘hero running for his life’ in a cloud of Hollywood special effects, quickly obscuring its most important asset: Gibson’s interesting cyberpunk idea.

[99] Guy Fawkes, 1570-1606, 17^th century English bomber. Fawkes is remembered as the protagonist of The Gunpowder Plot, the name given to the conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament on 5^th November 1605. The plot centred around five conspirators, Robert Catesby, Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, John Wright and Guy or Guido Fawkes, later joined by Robert Keyes. They determined to blow up of the House of Lords in 1605 during the State Opening when the King, Lords and Commons would all be present. Fawkes was actually only a minor player, but is remembered as the protagonist. He and those of his fellow conspirators that survived their arrest, were tried for high treason in Westminster Hall on 27 January 1606 and all were convicted and sentenced to death. They were executed on 30th and 31st January by hanging (half choking), drawing (out their guts while still alive) and quartering (butchering). The heads and other portions of the conspirator's bodies were set up at various points around Westminster and London.

[100] +++++++ science fiction +++history of super man (James Bond to Terminator to Neo etc

[101] Fox persistently, if not consistently, treats truth as any that which humans express about their rationalizations for feeling (the emotion of) belief.

[102] This refers to the 2003 “Bishop Jennifer” controversy in the Anglican Church (of England, and over other appointments in North America). The hasty and plainly pre-emptive appointment of a (once) practising homosexual man openly ‘married’ to another man as Bishop of (appropriately) Reading caused the church to very publicly disappear up its own arse. Although always a happy, though secretive, haven for homosexuals (and for sexual perverts too, or perhaps its is now ‘incorrect’ to consider any sexual predilection and practise perverted), some ambitious elements of the Church felt the overwhelming need hang it all out. The appointment was a political means to force the gay rights issue out of the backrooms of the YMCA. The Anglican Church was already a typically soft target for OUTRAGE, a kind of self-appointed homosexual police whose Chief Vigilante in England, Peter Tatchel, has developed a sensational career shouting abuse at carefully selected civilized victims daring to appear to disagree with him. Tatchel is very like a police speed camera concentrated on the easy meat of such as Anglican priests gently traveling in mild quandaries at 35 mph along what seems a safe enough road. Sadly, their neighbourhood vigilante with familiar attention to easy advantage focuses his radar on the law abiding and profitable targets, while ignoring the genuinely criminal swooping along wholly unlicenced but easily identifiable at 100 mph. This has its most obvious parallel in the strategy of abuse and intimidation of such other fascist enclaves as inhabit (say) the inner recesses of Animal Rights issues. Of course, in the case of the Church it is truly ironic to find such an historically prime abuser now having to swallow its own medicine. Nevertheless, Fox feels that there is an unhappy Nazi ring to persuasion based on the strategy and tactics of abuse, whether it be civil intimidations or the application of crude violence or threats of such.

[103] Andrew Marvel, “+++++ etc and T S Eliot ++++etc

[104] Reference is made to Fox’s predilection for the Anglo Saxon and the myths of satanic monsters such as Grendel ++++++

[105] This is to take on both recur and recure (as SOED) such that recurrence is cured of error, and of what Fox calls the “fallacy of recursion” whereby any present illusion of the past seemingly defines its own future whereas the reverse is (necessarily) the case, if there is such a case in the first place. Such recursion is addressed interestingly by Gosden +++++

[106] Comitatus L ++++ OE etc +++

[107] Xref Holmes and gender in war etc ++++

[108] Now, of course, such fucking around is fruitless, is merely the display of personal pleasuring attendant on the weakminded self interestness of the emancipated woman; a being supposedly freed of male imposed restraints and demands by a body of middle class feminist careerists or ambitious entertainers committed to using pornopop to get on top. Such were and remain almost wholly ignorant of the complexity and diversity of male psychology; in this regard they have achieved parity of ignorance with their male counterparts. Fucking around is no longer a problem with the pill as new woman, equally with men, can fuck whomever she likes and as many as she likes as much as she likes without consequence other than to suffer the diseases of body and mind concomitant upon such behaviour in equal share with her partners in pleasure. Of course, contraction of such diseases is not her fault but society’s, which has not protected her from the consequences of her own actions, and in any case it is men that transmit such diseases (of course). Not that it takes two to tango, or that the Orwellian eye of Big Brother has not revealed that the appetites of females are as greedy and grubby as their male counterparts. The feminist achievement is, it seems, that emancipated woman is as gross and self indulgent as men generally, and that both form globs of equal crassness. Naturally, women have been corrupted by the new society, so it is not their fault, and of course, before emancipation they were not as has now been revealed, before they were in a much purer state (of course), only to be corrupted by …, guess. All this twaddle has to be faced, but it is entirely irrelevant as the urbanoidal glob is harvested, and the inhuman overweener emerges on top, neither superman nor superwoman, having got over both.

[109] The problematic of nature is characteristically under the hammer of the new geographers typifed by, say, Jennifer Light’s article on “The Changing Nature of Nature” ++++++++Ecumene

[110] Diasporas, is used in its (new) Foxian conception of ‘cyberspatialized communities’, diasporas Xref Edwards & Kedseemake etc +++++

[111] P. David Marshall, "Thinking through New." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of access] http://www.media-culture.org.au/9807/think.html

[112] Umberto Eco points out that Marco Polo had a contemporary description of the (unexistent, unobserved) unicorn, he knew what it should be (if it was found), and when he observed on Java a rhinoceros he saw that its horn was in that part singularly like the description of the unicorn, to the degree at least that there was one horn. Marco Polo concluded the rhinoceros was therefore a unicorn, absurd though this may seem today.

Marco Polo seems to have made a decision: rather than resegment the content by adding a new animal to the universe of the living, he has corrected the contemporary description of unicorns, so that, if they existed, they would be as he saw them and not as the legend described them. (Umberto Eco, “Kant and the Platypus”, translated by Alastair McEwan, Vintage 2000, p58).

Of course, in another far country Eugene Ionescu’s rhinoceroses are quick to gather alike in convincing herds, as if they existed, until they existed.

[113] Adam Dodd. "Unacceptably New: Cultural Factors in the 'Face on Mars' Controversy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.1 (1998), bite 1, bit 2. http://www.media-culture.org.au/9807/mars.html

[114] Migual De Cervantes, “The Adventures of Don Quixote De La Mancha”, p201 Ch XXXVII. Don Quixote, the knight, requested his friend, the bachelor, Sampson Carrasco, that:

… if he were a poet, to do him the favour to compose some verses for him, as a farewell to his lady, and to place a letter of her name at the beginning of each verse, so that the initials joined together might make Dulcina del Toboso. The bachelor said that, though he was not one of the great poets of Spain, who were said to be three-and-a half in number, he would endeavour to comply with his request; at the same time, he foresaw that it would be no easy task, as the name consisted of seventeen letters; for if he made four stanzas of four verses each, there would be a letter much, and if he made them of five, which are called Decimas or Redondillas, there would be three letters wanting: however, he said he would endeavour to sink a letter as well as he could, so that the name of Dulcina del Toboso should be included in the four stanzas.

Fox, for England, reads the clapometer for the 3½ poets as Seamus Heaney, Pamela Ayres, Andrew Motion while there is one hand clapping for Geoffrey Hill; on the other hand Fox feels that he is the inaudible missing half, assuming Carrasco’s arithmetic is slightly or half adrift.

[115] This is to refer to the controversy arising from Gunther Von Hagens’ “Körperwelten”, promoted as “fascination beneath the surface” as an international exhibition “Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies”. It was seen by Fox at the Atlantis Gallery, London, 2002; catalogue published by Institute of Plastination, Heidleberg 2001. For more see, http://www.bodyworlds.com Wilheim Kriz, in his foreword to the catalogue, p5, identifies three reasons for the positive response of the public to the exhibition in spite of negative media and religious disdain:

“There were certainly several reasons for the generally positive resonance among the public. I would like to single out three of them here: 1) The creator of these specimans is an unusual personality; 2) his works show things that are new and have never been seen; and 3) exhibiting them also permits those viewers not schooled in medicine to free themselves from a taboo.”

Of course, what is nowadays called bio-art (art based on new science) suggests that artistic fascinations of this kind are new, whereas such fascination was very fully exhibited from the so called Renaissance (a period with only Da Vinci and Cellini as free spirits while the many Michael Angelos remained in the grip of powerful church marketeers or laid low by plagues of petty and pusillanimous patrons.

[116] This is a per plexing Foxian term suggesting that humankind can (if it wills) un solve the solutions it has plexed physiologically (ie naturally) and re solve them. This re solving needs, depends on, dis solving its encumbrance of socio-genetic solutions as roted in this or that vicinal plexus.

[117] Gary C Bryner, Director of the Natural Resources Law Center and research professor at the University of Colorado, is typical of the environmental expert arguing for the sustainability status quo within the Gaia philosophy. In his book “Gaia’s Wager”, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), Bryner argues (xviii) that:

… while there are clearly significant signs of progress, the most compelling reading of the assessments of global environmental health by ecologists and other scientists is that the threats to the planet are serious and pervasive and that we are not currently on a trajectory that allows continuation of life as we know it.

This sentence encapsulates the basic contradiction between the teleologies of Gaia as a life of her own, and Gaia as a mothering machine designed to maintain man as he has come to know himself. Bryner points out (xx) that:

Gaia is the name given by the Greeks more than two thousand years ago to Mother Earth. The idea that the Earth is a living entity has been widely held as a religious belief. Scientists have been more hesitant to make the argument. James Hutton, a founder of the modern science of geology, speaking before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785, suggested that the Earth was alive. More recently, James Lovelock published a book in 1979 that proposed the Gaia hypothesis, that the “biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment.” Lovelock argued that entropy, as expressed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, means that all energy will eventually dissipate into heat and be unable to perform useful work. But life on earth continues because as Lovelock argued, “the entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.” Gaia includes the earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soils which combine to form a feedback or cybernetic system “which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.” The Gaia hypothesis suggests, among other things, that human activity may alter the balance of power between this complex human system and its most potent species. As a result, Gaia may make adjustments that are quite inhospitable for human life. Gaia may flourish, but human life may be much different, constrained, and limited.

The solipsistic judgementalism here is plain to see, a “different” human life is ‘naturally’ “constrained, and limited”; though “Gaia may flourish” the most potent species would not, at least not as it stands in its present glorious ‘normality’. The blatant assumption is that Gaia’s raison d’etre is to mother us as we are now. This pathetic fallacy is compounded by the “wager” that we present day human types should bet on Gaia as she is because, if not necessarily a winning bet, it cannot be a loser. Bryner takes the Blaise Pascal line that we might as well believe in and support an environmentalist approach (God given presumably) as we would then at least have a chance to save the world and in so doing would save ourselves, ie win big. The alternative is to remain an unbeliever and do nothing, and thus perhaps lose big. It is more rational to do something to maintain the status quo than to let Gaia take her course. The glib assumptions and ignorance of the law of unintended consequences seem typical of this lobby; whose fundamental assumption is that people ensconced in liberal democracies are inevitably the perfect social formation (assuming the liberal democracies are perfect) to enhance an ever conserved and conservative Gaia naturally dedicated to the survival of liberal democracies. That such entrapment is for heris own good goes without saying. The assumption that humankind is itself somehow a universal metaphysical good is also natural enough, of course, if your metaethical perspective is human.

[118] Inga Clendinnen, “Aztecs”, CUP, 1991, p89-90.

[119] Another case of serendipitous consilience?

[120] Richard St. Barbe Baker (1889-1982), “Africa Drums”, Adventurers Club, London 1945, p127-8. Baker is a fascinating if now a little known writer and global character, arguably the world’s first global environmentalist, known as “Man of Trees” etc. Put his full name in the internet and there’s quite a lot on him of interest.

[121] Note the acronymical use of Foxian translingual phonomasia (Fr pain) thus including intimation of the daily bread of the christian “Lord’s Prayer”, while the Latin dies also puns with death. Phonomasia is usually treated as literarily a lower class form; but this kind of snobbery is an error. Not to enter into such a maze of riddling routes to meaning is remain lost on a singular linear path that runs forever parallel to significant meaning. Some people are ‘tone’ deaf, as it were, to such plays. Not that they do not sense the frequency of the tone itself, but they are constituionally incapable of feeling the whole range of related harmonics involved. It is the harmony of the whole that resonates in other being. Ultimately, though sparing the detail of such as Joseph Fourier’s (1768-1830) analysis, attunement to the same frequency is only necessary but not sufficient for resonance with other, to being on the same wavelength.

[122] Fox has argued in discussion for the term “inhuman” rather than Fukuyama’s “posthuman” (“Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution”, published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2002). This is because Fox treats ‘human’ as a word always in semiotic transition. In his view such a word is unfixable, this applies to its relatives ‘humankind’ ‘mankind’ ‘man’; not to be confused with ‘humane’ or ‘inhumane’; to be human does not seem to depend on such apparently specific characteristics as humaneness. Fox has essentially taken the position in his work generally that (to him) the human is always lodged inescapably (if not tautologically) between the ‘pre-human’ and the ‘post-human’, and that such position is not temporally relative but spatially relative in that vicinal sociometric centrality points to what is ‘human’ in any vicinity (social plexus) and that such centrality is a function of the relative gathering, mediation and administration, of physical power among people comprising any social complexus. Fox’s approach to ‘history’ is obviously very different to that of Fukuyama, for Fox the ‘end of history’ is simply that, not a Fukuyamian culmination, but an entire Foxian dis-solving. Of course, Fukuyama’s recent revision in regard to the “posthuman” does have slight parallel with Fox’s radically dissolute approach to unveiling the velleities of common humanity, to expose humanity natured.

[123] Perceived here in front of us ‘this-presence-here’, said (linguafied) to be ‘human’, that which is familiar to us in form and behaviour stretched across a vicinal experience, a semiotic haeccity.

[124] In regard to “the past is a strange country”, this is a Foxian spatialisation of the notion of time; thus, the past and future are different maps of the same countries, places whose geographies are nexuses of vicinal plexuses. Foxian ‘history’ is simply ‘story’ about other places that must be (cannot be other than) stories at one and the same time they are thought of, whose events are merely an aspect of an emotional milieu that concocts a vicinal ‘present’.

[125] Use is made here of the triple pun on sited (cited, sighted) to convey the complexity of a timeless vision of being.

[126] It is easy to check this by simply considering personal experience on the matter. If not our own experience, then anyone at random might agree with Dr Johnson that:

He who has not made the experiment, or who is not accustomed to require rigorous accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from certainty of knowledge, and distinctness of imagery; how the succession of objects will be broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how particular features and discriminations will be compressed and congloberated into one gross and general idea. [from p133, Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samual Johnson, LL.D, edited R W Chapman, Humphrey Milford, OUP, 1924.]

[127] The problematic of the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics that entropy and chaos are necessarily involved with the idea that time is plural, ‘arrowed’ and personal.

[128] J W Dunne, “Experiment With Time”, Faber And Faber, 3^rd edition, 1934. A somewhat clumsy attempt to engineer ‘evidence’ of the Parmenidean uni-verse, ie monoverse, through the interpretation of dreams (pre-cognition and déjà vu) as a way of seeing, not the future, but what ‘is’, but is not normally seeable by humankind, not visible to normal sight trapped in time. Thus second sight or some other sight is required to see ‘all’ that ‘is’, or at least something of The Whole. Dunne employs ‘experiment’, collecting reports (anecdotal) of seeings and attempting to discern evidence of a reality behind their appearance. It is a potentially highly misleading work, but remains of considerable interest to Fox who places it in the character of future history as revealed by seers and oracles often dressed up as magicians, monks, mystics, priests, priestesses, prophets, witches and warlocks, actuaries, futurologists and the whole thesaurus of so called visionaries populating the imaginations of humankind hungry to know what’s coming.

[129] This reflects Monostone’s work on the Domainsions of space in “Dear Zeno,about God’s Sensorium, or: The Demise Of Time And Place: Paradoxically, Taking Our Time, Copernicus, You, Me, Another And Zeno Meet At A Virtual Premise Looking Out Of Place For Space ...”,

(unpublished 2001). Domainsions re-present space/time dimensions in terms of human formations, they do not attempt to dis-cover the true problematic of the normal (human) ‘dimensioning’ of ‘movement’, ‘change’, difference, ‘différance’ diference. Domainsions dis-cover worlds in terms of the way certain dimensional forms instrument and dominate the observations of participant observers; thus, they are a way of proliferating human capabilities, yet remaining within the ‘human’ sphere as we can know it now (2003). In such ‘human’ terms Monostone identifies nine ‘domainsions’, a kind of domainsional ennead. Fox considers, however, that Elisabeth Ströker’s “Investigations in Philosophy of Space”, +++++

Whereas Monostone’s +++++

Table 1 A Taxonomy of Human Spaces: ‘Domainsions’:

1. Black hole space:

There is entity without length, breadth and depth, it is space empty of relations and can be said to be literally without relational existence. It is only solidity, a unity undifferentiable, a no-thing. It is one and the same with the ‘Black Whole Domainsion’ (see 8), of the same unknowability as Noumenal Space which functions for we humankind as an empty space into which we can dump all that cannot be thought of, a thoughtless space, an unlit space measureless to man, eschewed by Shelley (4.9b), and by Coleridge redeemed (AIII 7).

2. Magician’s space:

There is length without scope, monodimensional distance.

3. Zeno’s space:

There is length and breadth, but no depth. It is where a mathematical tortoise cannot be overtaken. It is the classical flat surface through which human expression (except mathematical) evades most domainsional restraints using ‘suspensions of belief’. Cyberspace is a Zeno’s space. Zenspace is a form of Zeno’s space. Ephemeral space is easily constructed and shifted through new ICTs as a form of Zeno’s space (ie virtual space), Cf “Flatland”, Edwin Abbot Abbot, op cit.

4. Solarspace:

There is length, breadth and depth. It is the space most heavily populated by ‘human’ interactivity. It is the space in which face to face interactions transpire in imperceptible time.

5. Galacticspace:

There is length, breadth, and depth with ‘time’ mediated interactivity. It is the space of sailing ships carrying instructions which take a year to reach the end of the earth, it is the space in which interaction transpires in seemingly perceptible time. The extremities, before which this space becomes timespace, are “felt” for with extraordinary antennae from places like San Augustin, New Mexico using Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescopes on an 8,000km baseline) that “sense” in time present events so ‘passed’ that their roots in action cannot be interacted with and belong not in galactic time, but to an archaeogalactic record, like a cave upon which a painting is drawn in timespace (7).

6. Interspace:

Any spaces separated by magical space (monodimensional distance); the space between space. Compare R W Thomas’ “Frequencies”, Macmillan 1978, p7 “The Gap”.

God woke, but the nightmare
did not recede. Word by word
the tower of speech grew.
He looked at it from the air
he reclined on. One word more and
it would be on a level
with him; vocabulary
would have triumphed. He
measured the thin gap
with his mind. No, no, no,
wider than that! But nearness
persisted. How to live with
the fact, that was the feaat
now. How to take his rest
on the edge of a chasm a
word could bridge. / He leaned …

7. Timespace:

Any spaces apparently separated by metabolic time, although apparently the ‘same’ spaces.

8. Noumenal Space (Black Whole Space):

This kind of space may be that of a curve of incompletion, of curve which joins all domainsions of space as in continuum, a Black Whole.

9. Universal Space:

That space in which any two or more of the eight domainsions subsist. A curving, plural place of numberless or innumerable continuums shaped neither truly nor falsely, space which eschews the binary fallacy, and therefore cannot be of number. Continuum cannot be of number, but of caverns measureless to Man sat with Plato’s shadows in an empty cave.

[130] This quote is taken from Owen Gingerish’s essay “Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmogony and Biblical Creation”, 1983, “The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, ed Timothy Ferris, Little, Brown and Company, 1991, p393.

[131] This is to leave aside an array of other ‘authorities’ revealed and recorded in sacred texts both literate, carried in books, and orally, carried in minds, such as Geoffrey Parrinder enumerated in the introduction to his superb “Dictionary of Non-Christian Religions” (Hulton Educational Publications, 1981):

… the loves of Zeus, the ten labours of Heracles, three Graces, nine Muses, the Capitoline Triad and three Vestal Virgins; the ten Avatars of Hinduism, four Vedas, Yugas and Yogas, and the principal Upanishads; the four Noble Truths of Buddhism, three Jewels, Four Brahma Vehãras and the Third Eye; the ten Gurus of the Sikhs, Fire Temples and Towers of Silence of the Parsis, White and Sky-clad Jains; the five Classics of Confucianism, eight Trigrams, the Temple of Heaven, the Torii and sects of Shinto. From Mesopotamia come Ziggurats, Tablets of Destiny, and myths of Marduk and Gilgamesh; from Egypt nine Enneads, the Book of the Dead, the Pyramids, and the Sphinx; from Islam the five Pillars, four Law Schools, Seven Sleepers, Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock; from Judaism the eighteen Blessings, thirteen Principles of Maimonides, Kabbalism and Hasidism; from Scandinavia the three Yggdrasil; and the Doom of the Gods; from Celtic lands the Mabinogion, Stonehenge and Arthur; from America the Big House, Totem Poles, the Ball Game and the Virgins of the Sun; from Australasia the Dreaming, Bark Paintings, Taboo and Mana; from Africa the ancestral stools, Ifa Oracle, and Zimbabwe, and beyond the sea Voodoo, Zombies and Black Muslims.

Certainly Schopenhauer (eg “The Art of Controversy”, selected and translated by T. Bailey Saunders, Swann Sonnenschein & Co, 1896) would have had a field day with the ‘universality’ of so much supernatural twaddle; Fox would massively extend the list, noting, for instance, that worship in America could be said to include the Ball Game and Pom Pom Virgins, or more widely the worship of a Virgin, an unfucked Mother of God, a virgin Madonna inspiring tracts of endless pornopop and such graphic perversity as reflects the well hidden, untouchable catholic proclivities of priesthoods, sheltering beneath holy wings swanning around in the sky preying for the young and succulent to suffer unto them. In suffering the little children they rise again to heavenly heights whereof they condescend to seed the earth with their fruitless living death.

[132] [note that the simple logic symbols used in this footnote are: ~ means “not”, v means “or”, & means “and”, = means “the same as”, Δ means “change in”.] Boxed in and battering at the walls of infinite tautology, Fox, the poet, avoided his being in an ‘empty’ box. The phrase “inutterably repressed” refers to the ‘unavoidable’ inconsequentiality of what many describe as the primary state of ‘the’ universe where (not when, according to Monostone) matter M (stuff) has infinite mass (∞m), is pure solidity, ie all-stuff infinitely repressed and thus being ‘pure singularity’ 1 (ie ‘being’ wholly repressed). Pure solidity amounts both to nil (nothingness, nihilness—after Sartre’s coinage) and one (wholeness) at the same place, and thus, at this pointlessness, 0 = 1 and 1 = 0. In this sense the the-universe is explosively (as it is put by the scientific establishment) expanding, an entity of infinite mass (∞m, a uni-verse wholly squashed into nothingness) on its way to being everywhere (reaching wholeness), or is it everywhere on its way to being nowhere (a hole)? Herein of it here (at this pointlessness) human psyches could have in mind being be-tween & be-twixt nothing (nowhere) and everything (everywhere), be-tween & be-twixt 0 & 1, forever scheming, undeconstructably in two-minds, trying to figure out their place in a singular scheme of things, trying to avoid nothing. Human psyche is characterizable as being both 0 v 1, but ~(0 & 1), which means the mentality of psyche, as it were, inevitably flip flops ‘quantum-wise’ between one state and the other in perpetual dual between mind and matter, the life of one being dependent on the defeat of the other. Fox observes, inter alia, Olber’s Paradox, the Paradox of Thermodynamics and the Paradox of gravity, together are clues to the obvious: that most cosmological perspectives are flawed inventions. Thus, credence can be given to Monostone’s “Omniverse” (unimaginably) allowing that both wholly solid and wholly relational universes (U^s& U^r respectively) coexist in that together they amount to (the) Di-verse (U^d), ie two ‘elementalities’ of ‘The’ Omniverse (U^o), each element being the tie unifying its uni-verse (Foxian aspect as poetic line, vertere, versus, ploughing, etc). The Omniverse is all one and limited by nothing (ie limited in either case by existencelessness); thus U^d = U^s& U^r; thus, U^o = U^d & (U^o– U^d). At the pointlessness of nil space, matter (M) becomes (as it were) so infinite it is the whole solidity U^s, ie the unity 1^s; thus M@∞m = U^s=1^s. The infinitesimal différance imagined between & betwixt being one and being nearly one, between and betwixt being nearly nothing and being nothing is a ‘linguifaction’, a caressing twist of the tongue that has entered the mind that we may ‘différantiate’ relational plexuses as if material solidities, intimations of U^s. In the false perspectival of mind-or-matter, it seems that for any existant X, that Δx tends X to 0 v Δx tends X to 1, so apparent existencelessness of an existant X is reached, either as a relationality (the human element 0⁰), or as a solidity (the inhuman element I^s), but not both. This to treat 0⁰ and 1^s as the Omniversal elemental states of ‘the’ Di-verse (Dⁱ), which is to distinguish between and betwixt: the mathematical state zero (0ⁿ) ie lack of numeration, and existential nothingness (0⁰) as symbol of existencelessness, ie nothingness; and to distinguish between betwixt one (1ⁿ) as a number and (1^s) as singularity, ie wholly solid unity. Although, 0⁰ and 1^s may be characterised in U^r by binary mathematics, where being ‘something v ~something’ is entertainable, such entertainment should not obscure the unavoidable implications of the ineradicable dualism of the ‘natural’ psychology of human mentality. Beings (such as “?”) whose element is U^s reach existencelessness in U^r (not in U^s) & in (U^o– U^d); thus, ~ U^s & (O^m– Dⁱ); and beings (such as humans, and any other plexus) whose element is U^r reach existencelessness in U^s (not in U^r) & in (U^o– U^d), thus, ~ U^r & (U^o– U^d). The confusion is that existencelessness seems invented to determine either end of being (U^r v U^s), whereas humankind is not (forever traveling) somewhere in between and betwixt either, but is at one end (U^r) where relationality is its condition, whereas U^s is where existencelessness seams. The element U^s , as ‘wholly oneness’, seems as though it exists, or should exist, should be detectable, at least scientifically (artificially), that it is something that (we) humankind could extend (ourselves) to if only we knew how. However, the illusion of solidity, this “too too solid flesh” misprises us of death whereto or whereof or whereby we melt, thaw or resolve into a dew, when we are already dew. Yet, Andrew Marvell 1621-78, in vaporising a drop of dew, seems to accidentally metonymise solidity “Such did the manna’s sacred dew distill,/ White and entire, though congealéd and chill,/ Congealed on earth; but does, dissolving, run/ Into the glories of th’ almighty sun.” There is a parallel between the Di-verse elementalties U^r & U^s and the vaporisation of Marvell’s drop of dew. Yet, the duplicity of his “Dialogue Between the Soul and Body” reveals the parallel is literally exact, as the meanings in either the body of the drop of dew or the vaporised soul can never meet, the Soul says,

O, who shall from the dungeon raise
A soul, enslaved so many ways,
With bolts of bones, and fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands.
Here blinded with an eye; and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear,
A soul hung up, as ‘twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins,
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart?

We seem endlessly hung up on a psychological ligament (nexus) strung between an idea of unity of the whole (1^s) and nothingness (0⁰) which ‘illudes’ (illusion/eludes/alludes) that either and both are existenceless. As only relations (U^r) seem evidenced and not solids (endless regression), it seems relationality U^r is the human condition (the human element) wherein we thus operate hereat only in U^r. In this human experience is perspectived through senses that ‘tell’ of solids being apparently perceived inductively, sensually (psychically), rather than as (bundles of) relations which were analytically, intellectually (mentally) supposed. Human experience seems to have distinguished a (substantial) différance between relationalities sparsely distributed and plexuses (condensed relationalites), ‘knowing’ such as ‘solid’, ie calling them, naming, them ‘solid’ ostensively, and of a kind with ‘material’, objective’, and so on, forming a convincing (believable) ontology to inform a plausible parallel epistemology. We only ‘seem’ to be strung ‘between’ U^r v U^s forever in two minds about our place in the scheme of things; but at this pointlessness we are all-ways lodged only in U^r where we seem in our element which is the purely relational U^r. That other ‘universal’ element U^s (solidity) appears beyond us as we seem at this pointlessness, but not necessarily as ‘we’ may be at another, as an ‘human’ may be somewhere else. Thus, that we somehow exist in a middle between U^r and U^s is wrong, is an human misprisioning, rather it is that humankind subsists only in U^r, and not at all in U^s, as intimated by the Aristotlian exclusion of a middle (existencelessness) argued by Quine (1970); not that Fox would argue that p v ~p is valid in regard that it implies U^r v ~U^s is valid in U^d (the) Diverse, and therefore also in U^o the Omniverse. That the elementality U^s does exist seems intimated, implicated by such relational phenomena as black wholes (that do not make any ‘sense’). Black wholes are intimated, implicated as ‘being’ in nil space where, as a relationality, such ‘matter’ seems explicable as M@∞m = 1^s = U^s; yet in infinite space matter (M) is also infinite, thus M@∞m = 0⁰ = U^r. In U^r there is no materiality but merely relationality, and in the relational there is only movement said to be ‘expansion’. This does not lead to space being ultimately ‘empty-of-everything’ (existencelessness), but wherewith such inevitable movement (changing), ie seeming expansion, of relations new relations are (obviously) endlessly created, thus U^r seems (if imagining ‘solid’ material) to constantly create new ‘material’ (Hoyle’s “Steady -but immaterial- State”), of course such ‘materials’ are merely new ‘bundles’ of relationalities, ie relational plexuses, which appear as material. Hereof, each human-plexus is ineluctably unique (a Foxian ‘uniquity’) though ever changing, un-still, transitional, immaterial, and whose ‘focus’ is vicinal, whereat ‘consciousness’ is made of a ‘sense-of-complexity’ whereat the transpiration of a ‘sparrow’ (cf “The Copenhagen Interpretation” of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle & Bohr’s complementarity principle) affects everything, all relations being related (is this the apparition—remnant of first cause, that tiny pebble in the pond, by an unknown —unknowable—hand, or an inhuman ‘involition’ in the n^th ‘domainsion’?). Hereof (in) U^r consciousness is a sense among others, a super-sense perhaps, but nevertheless a sense; a sense of the kinematic. Hereof in humankind’s element (U^r) sensing makes-sense in being forms of relationalities. In an-other element, U^s , imagination seems inutterably repressed and any-sense seems quite unimaginable, unmakable here at this pointlessness of an humankind clutched of its three conditions:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives — unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle.
(T S Eliot, “Four Quartets” Little Gidding III)

Thus, the three conditions U^s & U^r and between them indifférance, the death in the middle. Here, seemingly between them, is the material world U^m. It seems that humankind cannot sense, ie bring to mind, any consciousness of possibly subsisting in pure solidity as it cannot imagine (make an image-of) that ‘that-it-thinks’ it knows cannot exist, U^s , the impossible universe. There is nothing at all solid in the reflexive human (psychic) universe U^r (the relational universe). The ‘basis’ of U^r seems ultimately photonic or kinematic (masslessness, ^m/_∞), a simple (pure) relationality, matter seems solid merely as relationalities ‘cluster’ forming ‘quantafiable’ relational plexuses (‘inHumian’ bundles) whereof U^r is the ultimate complexity (uni-verse) of that elementality, and in another view appears ‘quantumly’ (if uncertainly) as an apparent solid. Such solidity is merely an appearance projected psychically onto some relations (plexuses, nodes) by, as it were, an invented attribution (made in or by ‘knowing’ relational plexuses, that ‘know-other-knowers’ as human), seemingly a necessary (reflexive) psychology in the mental management of (human/animal) psychic experience; experience as itself of itself, dasein. Being ‘is’, as it were, merely relational, rather than rational &/or sensible; thus, an imagined existence posits itself as being (somehow) suspended in between U^r&U^s, as if it exists extended between the here of it (U^r) and there of it (U^s) solely, and thus to their exclusion as existent themselves (ie setting them as beyond the bounds of the middle ‘where’ humankind supposes U^r & U^s = 0^o , and thus being beyond both (ends) are existencelessness, beyond the limits of the humanly knowable ‘universe’). Being in U^r or U^s makes no sense, thus U^m is made to make sense, where the quanta (being) flip flopped between them requires being in, or of, two minds. It is this muddle of an imaginary middle, this kinematic deception, wherein humankind thinks it is ‘naturally’ suspended, that is patently excluded by Fox, (after, in any case, Aristotle and Quine). However, ‘pure’ solidity may exist as another (the other) part of the Omniverse. Thus, the ‘The’ Omniverse is at the least a duality of relational and solid universes, whose ‘cluability’ seems psychically intimated in the relational universe though seemingly not epistemologically viable, being, as it were, ontologically inconsistent; there being an awareness of apparent ostensive solidity (named concept) as a psychic utility in vicinal management, ie some relational plexuses are conveniently distinguished as ‘solid’ material objects and ‘linguafacted’, ie named in a category called object and characterised as solid, seemingly of U^m. Such ‘linguifactions’ (of plexus ‘objects’) are only imagined through the différance in the ‘density’ or proximities of relations, of their complexity as compared to less complex plexuses hereat in the relational ‘the-universe’. Hereabouts (vicinity) humankind subsists as moving ligaments (nexuses) of relationality. Hereof psyches name (make ‘linguaments’) using languages; and thus becoming ‘linguified’ as simple (immaterial) relationalities or complex (material) relationalities teleologically licking death whereof nothing matters but paying for admission to a god’s purely relational paradise, as if the loss of our too solid flesh is to shed a material world (U^m) appearing as if solid, as if through a deceptive inspissation of U^r entry to U^s has been gained. For a purely immaterial world U^r (of spirit); such illusion is comforting and persuasive of our suspension between U^r & U^s on the the self-deception of the dual, when U^m has all the appearance of reality. Of course, if Fox is correct that appearance is reality, then to all intents and purposes U^m exists (at least is useful). Is this to express the ‘Tri-verse’ (T^r) as an elementality of a trinitarian Omniverse (U^o), or is it to exhaust the elementalites of U^o ? Such purpose seems in keeping with the satirist Peter Cook’s airy “I am very interested in the Universe—I am specializing in the Universe and all that it surrounds” [italics show modification]. I am grateful to John D Barrow for this quote which he gives on the title page of his book “Theories of Everything”, QPD 1991; given originally as “I am very interested in the Universe—I am specializing in the Universe and all that surrounds it”. Thus, otherwise the ultimate problem of the ‘one-verse’ universe, is that no matter to what lengths reduction is taken or indeed large objects’ are investigated it seems, like the search for pi, that solidity is ‘unearthable’.

[133] We need look no further than Sir Walter Ralegh (b.1552) whose “History …” is set at the great junction between the classical world and the renaissance, written while “perpetually” imprisoned in the notorious Tower of London, and ultimately beheaded in 1618. He summed up, in his “Preface to the History …” what he saw as the inevitable nature and necessity of difference between individuals that intimates, in a peculiar manner, Derridian différance:

As for other men; if there be any that have made themselves fathers of that fame which hath been begotten for them, I can neither envy at such their purchased glory, nor much lament mine own mishap in that kind; but content myself to say with Virgil, “Sic vos non vobis,”[so you not to yourselves] in many particulars. to labor other satisfaction, were an effect of frenzy, not of hope, seeing it is not truth, but opinion, that can travel the world without a passport. For were it otherwise; and were there not as many internal forms of the mind, as there are external figures of men; there were then some possibility to persuade by the mouth of one advocate, even equity alone.

But such is the multiplying and extensive virtue of dead earth, and of that breath-giving life which God hath cast upon time and dust, as that among those that were, of whom we read and hear; and among those that are, whom we see and converse with; everyone hath received a several picture of face, and everyone a diverse picture of mind; everyone a form apart, everyone a fancy and cogitation differing: there being nothing wherein Nature so much triumpheth as in dissimilitude. From whence it cometh that there is found so great diversity of opinions; so strong a contrariety of inclinations; so many natural and unnatural; wise, foolish, manly, and childish affections and passions in mortal men. For it is not the visible fashion and shape of plants, and of reasonable creatures, that makes the difference of working in the one, and of condition in the other; but the form internal.

And though it hath pleased God to reserve the art of reading men’s thoughts to himself: yet, as the fruit tells the name of the tree; so do the outward works of men (so far as their cogitations are acted) give us whereof to guess at the rest. Nay, it were not hard to express the one by the other, very near the life, did not craft in many, fear in the most, and the world’s love in all, teach every capacity, according to the compass it hath, to qualify and make over their inward deformities for a time. Though it be also true, “Nemo potest diu personam ferre fictam: cito in naturam suam residunt, quibus veritas non subest”: “No man can long continue masked in a counterfeit behavior: the things that are forced for pretences having no ground of truth, cannot long dissemble their own natures.” Neither can any man (saith Plutarch) so change himself, but that his heart may be sometimes seen at his tongue’s end.

(See, Famous Prefaces, The Harvard Classics, 1909–14, “Preface to the History of the World”, Paras. 1–25, Sir Walter Raleigh (1614), http://www1.aol.bartleby.com/39/15.html#txt3)

[134] The philosopher and polemicist Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) remains amusingly relevant on the argument of universality:

But to speak seriously, the universality of an opinion is no proof, nay, it is not even a probability, that the opinion is right. Those who maintain that it is so must assume (1) that length of time deprives a universal opinion of its demonstrative force, as otherwise all the old errors which were once universally held to be true would have to be recalled; for instance, the Ptolemaic system would have to be restored, or Catholicism re-established in all Protestant countries. They must assume (2) that distance of space has the same effect; otherwise the respective universality of opinion among the adherents of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam will put them in difficulty. (The Art of Controversy”, selected and translated by T. Bailey Saunders, Swann Sonnenschein & Co, 1896, p37-38).

Fox has a long standing affection for Schopenhauer because of his, Schopenhauer’s, pessimistic philosophy that human beings are simply manifestations of their own egotistical wills, rarely thinking much about the concerns or needs of others and only seeking to survive. One of the consequences of his idea of “will being the ultimate reality of the world” is that a person's individual will cannot be under the direct control of his or her reason. Instead, reason is itself an expression of will, and just one of many. People's motivations are found more in the unconscious than in their conscious minds, and as a result human action is a product of blind urges which the conscious mind only later seeks to explain and justify. Certainly, the individual human frame is massively driven by primitive physio-chemical (illogical) forces that do not seem subject to reason, but of reason subjected; while in any case psycho-sociological forces amass and mob individual reason with a mass of ‘justifications’.

[135] Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), a famous English astronomer, once much read after lights out by a youthful Fox, was a key proponent of the “Steady State Theory”, a contrary theory to that of the “Big Bang”, a term actually coined by Hoyle. Also a proponent of the modern “Panspermia Theory” of the universe.

[136] Owen Gingerish, op cit, p393.

[137] C D Darlington, “The Evolution of Man and Society”, George Allen and Unwin, 1969.

[138] Non-competing societies may the fittest for survival because they do not threaten more powerful societies and thereby are able to plant those moral systems that protect the variously weak, seemingly subverting the contrary Nietzschean morality of power, that of the overcoming right. In this the liberal democracies provide for toleration and allow wide variations in ‘humanity’ to flourish. In such societies the Nietzschean ‘weak’ are strong, the physically strong become weak as socially manipulative cunning counts for more than physical strength; such cunning derives from forms of intelligence surviving the most cursory ‘Romulus and Remus’ tests to the extent that such physical threshold for survival is crossed by a wide variety of what was until very recently extremely marginal human life. Indeed, physical and mental difference (especially Nietzschean weakness) may attract massive resources and social support in affluent liberal democracies, indeed lucrative careers are commonly based on the creative advancement of such interests. In the liberal democracies the meek (not weak?) may already be inheriting the earth. Although such inheritance may not turn out to be universal, particularly when considering the ‘law of countervailing power’ (viz the somewhat Newtonian: for every force its equal or stronger opposite will emerge). This is to recognise that no one, not even the weakest or meekest, has no power. Everyone has at the least some kind of negative power, the power to disrupt, to not do something, or to not do something correctly, or, extremely, to die plaintively, politically impoverishing the living etc etc.

[139] Fox’s ‘amoeba theory’ treats human morality as the product of diverse struggles for power and through power for dominance and through dominance survival and through survival the genetic will to power. According to Fox, there is as no ‘metaphysical rationale’ to human morality only in so far as there is such a rationale to the behaviour of amoeba, and thus to this extent ‘goodness’ is arbitrarily Nieztchean, merely subject to social genealogies perpetuating or supplanting status quos &/or at the whims of blocs of ‘mediaevil’ interests. Fox rejects the Manichaen division permeating the major religions that the world is naturally divided into Evil and Good, just as it is into Night and Day, into Darkness and Light, Satan and God. This vision of a Black and White morality viciously colours the whole of Christianity (through Augustine and other early Fathers) and Islam while illuminating, perhaps less viciously, the Buddhist vision and the Hindu panoply. There can be little doubt as to the powerful accumulative influence of the endless iteration of night and day upon the mental metabolism of humankind.

[140] The word moral is derived from Latin mos meaning custom, doing what has always been done applied in the sphere of an absolutist authority which has raised moral codes from the merely habitual (right by custom and practice—natural experience, and thus in some way workable) to the righteous application of a moral authority derived metaphysically or by revelation (supernaturally—voices in deserts and such like) and by literary conversion applied through books, with all the power accruing to bureaucracy, as a scarce and esoteric resource, in primitive worlds. Nietzsche’s “Genealogy” is persuasive on this.

[141] Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public”, 1729, see http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/modest.html .

[142] In keeping with Fox’s ‘amoeba theory’ of human morality the question of human ‘moral competence’ (discussed in depth in Fox’s “The Fairy Queen”, justWords, 2002), the matter of moral incompetence can be typically related to, say, Albert Camus’ writings, for example the Narrator’s analysis in “The Plague”:

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clearsightedness. (Albert Camus, “The Plague”, translated by Stuart Gilbert, Penguin Books, 1960, p110, first 1947 “La Peste”).

[143] Followed by such great artists and social commentator’s as Thackeray, Gaskill, Dickens and (differently) the remarkable Engels.

[144] Richard Dawkins, “The Selfish Gene”, Paladin, 1982 (OUP 1976). Such explanatory anthropomorphism is exemplified by Dawkins’ Chapter 6 “Genesmanship”, p95,

If we allow ourselves the licence of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do? It is trying to get more numerous in the gene pool. Basically it does this by helping to program bodies in which it finds itself to survive and to reproduce. But now we are emphasizing that ‘it’ is a distributed agency, existing in many different individuals at once. The key point of this chapter [6] is that a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself which are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.

[145] “Soylent Green”,a film directed by Richard Fleischer, 1973, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson (at their most excellent). The film concludes, Swiftian fashion, by discovering that the 2022 CE diet of the masses is truly human.

[146] Stanley Kubrick’s, “A Space Odyssey”, 1968, the opening sequence uses the conventional definition of what it is to be human (a tool using animal) and shows, in dramatic fashion, how it dawns on an individual ape that a strong bone gives stupendous advantage to the holder when used as a tool-weapon. Fox observes the way the Swiftian aspect of the film, which uses invisible but powerful forces to manipulate the plot, is that of a vision of man as a creature that changes from the reactionary, frightened, miserable, sad, accidental, murderous apes of the "Dawn of Man" opening, into the concluding controlled, emotionless, sterile, competent, dehumanized technologists of the moon visit and the Jupiter mission. Somewhere in between civilization came and went. In Kubrick's fantasy the Golden Age of man was a neglected 'instant' between a man-ape's exaltation at discovering the first weapon & a nuclear-powered spaceship floating on the mathematics of a graceful, musical orbit around the Earth. The inspired jump-cut is clear. One tool/weapon replaces another. Humankind has evolved through a Swiftian cycle of moral ingenuity that matches the scale and character of the technological revolution.

[147] Not quite Victor Borgian “phonetic punctuation”, but a form of ‘thinking’ peculiar to some of the linguified and not others.

[148] This is a reference to Thomas S Kuhn’s, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, 2^nd edition, University of Chicago 1970. There is, perhaps, a dialectical development of Karl Popper’s contrary rationalist rejection of “verification” in the procedures of (true/sound) scientific discovery in favour of (empirical) “falsification” in his 1968, “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, especially page 108, (first published 1959), and the invidious character of the Kuhnian “paradigm” (set of beliefs). In regard, for example, to probabilistic theories, Kuhn argues, p146:

If, as I have already urged, there can be no scientifically or empirically neutral system of language or concepts, then the proposed construction of alternate tests and theories must proceed from within one or other paradigm-based tradition. Thus restricted it would have no access to all possible experiences or to all possible theories. As a result, probabilistic theories disguise the verification situation as much as they illuminate it. Though that situation does, as they insist, depend upon the comparison of theories and of much widespread evidence, the theories and observations at issue are always closely related to ones already inexistence. Verification is like natural selection: it picks out the most viable among the actual alternatives in a particular historical situation. Whether that choice is the best that could have been made if still other alternatives had been available or if the data had been of another sort is not a question that can usefully be asked. There are no tools to employ in seeking answers to it.

[149] A Foxian etymological joke.

[150] Benjamin Disraeli, Oxford Speech, 1864. I am grateful to William Irvine for this quote which he gives at the beginning of his lovely book, “Apes Angels & Victorians: A Joint Biography of Darwin & Huxley”, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955.

[151] Fox accepts that the interpretation of wide awakeness has much to do with interpreting dreams, as was indeed recognised by Freud who wrote that “Dream-interpretation must seek a closer union with the rich material of poetry, myth, and popular idiom, and it must deal more faithfully than has hitherto been possible with the relations of dreams to the neuroses and to mental derangement.” Preface to the 3^rd Edition of “The Interpretation of Dreams”, by Sigmund Freud, Translated by A. A. Brill (1911), http://www.psychwww.com/books/interp/toc.htm . The idea of the child riding this ‘nightmare’ would not be approved by Fox himself because the etymology is not precise enough (the ‘mare’ of nightmare is not etymologically a female horse, but a pressing incubus (according to Ayto). Had it been correctly a female horse then a Foxian pun would have been possible; alas not so, but a good enough line for an humble editor.

[152] This is to create, on reflection, T S Eliot’s “pair” of ragged claws,

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

(Prufrock 1917).

[153] Hydrocephalous and the world known thereof; see Fox’s 1969 poem “Vincent”.

[154] Gaia is the name given by the Greeks to Mother Earth and is exploited as a modern god substitute by environmentalist and anti-capitalist pressure groups etc. See above.

[155] The inevitable paradox, according to Thomas S Khun, above, op cit. The movement of human mind from one quadrant to another is an act of imagination not simply a scientific progression.

[156] John D Barrow, “Theories of Everything”, QPD 1991, p163.

[157] This is a troublesome concept in regard to Fox’s thesis that beyond human is not unknowable. This is because the process itself, the movement from human to inhuman is its own connection (builds its own bridge), its own relationality a plexus in itself that may only be a metaforce, like a weak but omnipresent, pervasive (‘proximal’) ‘gravity’ extending to everything, but significantly influential only in the vicinal. Thus, humankind may ultimately be trapped by this natural gravity, the ‘gravity’ of its own nature being inescapable. Therefore, like the participant observer syndrome, it is troublesome to get beyond human as that which is the human is carried inevitably into the inhuman, and thus into a new ‘human’ condition.

[158] The evolution of human psyche through the silvero-centric, hydro-centric, gaia-centric, solar centric, galactico-centric, to the monotheistic, theo-centric, theo-cratic, plutocratic to the self defining aristocratic. The question is whether the change to the inhuman (for Fukuyama the “posthuman”) requires a step change (revolution) or gradual, perhaps managed or manageable change (evolution). Fox has rejected the latter as infeasible and is convinced that the change to the inhuman will be revolutionary, a sudden highly organised overturning and destroying of the soft milieu and fertile bed of liberal democracy in which successful humanity is born and bred and from which it necessarily springs. Such a revolution is unlikely to be noticed in the sense of attracting serious opposition, it would not be a coup in the classic sense, but a sudden turn of events shifting, without notice, power to the pigs, or less recognizable entities.

[159] Interplexuality is analogous to Derridean intertextuality.

[160] Plexualities that are knowers— in so far as we, humans, know knowing, the psyche in ekstasy with its own thoughts.

If any, so by love refin’d
That he souls’ language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood,

He (though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same)
Might thence a new concoction make
And part far purer than he came.

(John Donne “The Ecstasy”, stanzas 6 & 7, 1633).

Although Donne’s subtle metaphysical argument is charged with convincing an ulterior carnal conclusion of some sort, it nevertheless lends itself to this Foxian concoction of psyche ekstatically at odds with the seduction of its own mind. Only later, in the sermons, as an older man, is Donne concerned to seduce Christ.

[161] Miguel De Cervantes, “The Adventures of Don Quixote De La Mancha”, Part II, 1615, on the death of Don Quixote, Chapter LXXXI.

[162] This is to draw on John Donne’s wonderful stretch of ambiguity in “Lovers’ Infiniteness”, 1633..

[163] According to Fox, Wittgenstein is useful, but put his game in the wrong sphere where its rules discover contra-dictions in the language of his explanations. He is in the sphere of things, his games are thing games and thus they go on ‘in between’ things, they are forever Derridian always in between something and something, relying for their existentification on the Hegalian energy of their différances, and this results in his explanations of the rules being wholly misconceived. He did not conceive of pure relationality, his mind being weighed down to his bootstraps by things to which solidity seemed unavoidably attached as intrinsic to them and without such seemingly unavoidable inspissation they could not said rightly be rightly said to exist. Thus, Wittgenstein is stuck with the ontological paradox:

Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all. (Tractatus Logico—Philosophicus, 5.5303).

This reveals, among other things, that Wittgenstein could not conceive that it is not nothing to say that ‘something is identical with itself’. He sees (presumes) a kind of Parmenidean stasis as the preserver of uniqueness and that this must entail a (presumably fixed) relationship between ‘them’, rather than movement (kinesis) as the preserver of uniqueness, there being only movement and thus nothing between any-thing, anything being one with itself (all) as the relationality in which plexuses are formed and unformed. Thus, the rules are purely spatial, no time to complicate (complex) ‘matters’, only timeless movement such that there can only be all existent at once (one) and thus instantaneous universality (U^r) that includes all conditions at once, there being therefore only spatiality without limit. Here there is lebensraum in which there is room for all and anything goes, but cannot leave. The modest capability of humanmind is such that it must cope with far too much room and constructs forms which appear as moving vicinities proaxial with themselves, which are as themselves dynamic ‘uniquities’ (see “The Fairy Queen, p 26), though not ‘separate-things’, but shifting plexuses. To imagine this is as difficult as ‘imaging’ quanta. However, Wittgenstein later concedes that (the descriptors) identical and the same are ‘identical’, and that this is not a contra-diction,

215. But isn’t the same at least the same?

We seem to have an infallible paradigm of identity in the identity of the thing with itself. I feel like saying: “Here at any rate there can’t be a variety of interpretations. If you are seeing a thing you are seeing identity too.”

216. The are two things the same when they are what one thing is? And how am I to apply what one thing shews me to the case of two things?

“A thing is identical with itself.”—There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is concerned with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted.

We might also say: “Every thing fits into itself.” Or again: “Every thing fits into its own shape.” At the same time we look at a thing and imagine that there was a blank left for it, and that now it fits into it exactly.

Does this spot ‘fit’ into its white surrounding?—But that is just how it would look if there had first been a hole in its place and it then fitted into the hole. But when we say “it fits” we are not simply describing this appearance; not simply this situation.

“Every coloured patch fits exactly into its surroundings” is a rather specialized form of the rule of identity. (From, “Philosophical Investigations”, translated by G E M Anscombe, Blackwell 1968).

And thus, in like mind, every relationality (if for convenience regarded as plexuses) relates to all of its surrounding relations as well as to its own relations, and the apparent or virtual vicinality describes the intensity of such relations, the more intense the more such are plurally per-plexed and form plexuses. Plurality is endless and movement is all. The word “per-plexed” is a Foxian ‘etymologicality’. Of course, imagining such insubstantiality remains as difficult as really imagining quanta and eschewing the particular.

[164] See FQ +++++

[165] Bradley, op cit, gives the cross reference here to chapter xxvi, for the meaning he means of appearances. This is the chapter about “The Absolute and its Appearances” where Bradley’s appearances and Fox’s relationalities seemed ‘related’ (could they be on about the ‘same’); of course Bradley suffers wholly from the mis-appropriation of philosophical language by the voice of his ordinary language; indeed what he is ‘saying’ really makes no sense as such. The “Absolute” seems to be Bradley’s way of saying “the all” (everything):

All is appearance, and no appearance, nor any combination of these, is the same as Reality. This is half the truth, and by itself it is a dangerous error. We must turn at once to correct it by adding its counterpart and supplement. The Absolute is its appearances, it really is all and every one of them. That is the other half-truth which we have already insisted on, and which we must urge once more here. And we may remind ourselves at this point of a fatal mistake. If you take appearances, singly or all together, and assert barely that the Absolute is either one of them or all—the position is hopeless. Having first set these down as appearance, you now proclaim them as the very opposite; for that which is identified with the Absolute is no appearance but is utter reality. (p430-31)

[166] F H Bradley, op cit, p488-89.

[167] Fox does not take this copulation as engendering everything; appearance being reality does not mean appearance is everything nor, therefore, that reality is everything. Reality is this and something else and nothing more.

[168] This is Fox positing meanings at the root of the word ‘stem’ so that the nature of the sea is both a source of water, where it stems from, and the stemming of its flow as rivers are stemmed by the sea; ‘being’ both the terminus ad quo and the terminus ad quem,. Such magnification or extension of meaning is typical of Fox’s poetic economy. It can be taken on parallel terms with Italo Calvino’s comment on Borges:

… all Borges’ critics regularly point out that each text of his doubles or multiplies its own space through other books cited from an imaginary or real library, works that are either classical or erudite or simply invented. What I am most interested in stressing here is that with Borges we see the birth of literature raised to the second degree, as it were, and at the same time literature as derived from the square root of itself: a ‘potential literature’, to borrow a term that later would be fashionable in France. but whose forerunners can all be found in Fictions in the ideas and formulae for those works which could have been written by Borges’ own hypothetical Herbert Quain. (page 239, “Why Read the Classics”, translated by Martin McLaughlin, Vintage 2000).

Sadly, Fox has not read Borges, though such ideas appear relevant to his own exploitation of an editor, viz myself, providing this concurrent explanation, rather as Fishburne & Hughes’ opening remark in their Borges Dictionary:

The work of Jorge Luis Borges is intensely erudite, and its wealth of allusions may at times baffle and even discourage readers. The main purpose of the Dictionary is to explain these allusions, both for the general reader, by providing comprehensive information to make the text more immediately accessible, and for the specialist. The references, real and imaginary, with which Borges’s fiction is interwoven form an echoing subtext, supporting and enriching the surface plots of his stories. rarely gratuitous or merely ornamental, they reveal not only deliberate choice, but a remarkable degree of appositeness: in almost every case the allusion can be seen either to go with the grain of the story or to stand in paradic opposition with it. (from page 1 Introduction, the “Borges Dictionary”, Duckworth 1990).

Naturally, Fox, when viewing this explanation, commented, with some justice, that my explanations would themselves benefit from a dictionary such as Fishburne and Hughes’. However, it would be unproductive to take this parallel too far, as neither ultimately meet the other; and Fox is not up to allusionary methods as a means of meaning.

[169] Latin appãrere, ad parere.

[170] Fox, considers “Utilitarianism” as the basis of successful capitalist liberal democracies and that John Stuart Mill remains its greatest exponent with his simple, almost religious pronouncement on the nature of “Utility”:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded—namely, that pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. (John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism”, first published 1859, this edition J M Dent & Sons 1910, p6.)

[171] Cybennial is Foxian for post~post-modern.

[172] Cracies = Gk Kratos, power, rule, crazies.

[173] The word edutainment refers to this or that affective array of education and entertainment (cultural plexus) effectively leading the thoughts and feelings (socio-psychology) of this or that individual being as a relational plexus embedded in the complex of its social milieux.

[174] Instituted by Shakespeare +++++ The Tragedies and Histories +++

[175] Parmenides circa 510 BCE, poem, “On Nature”:

8) One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In this path are very many tokens that what is is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one. For what kind of origin for it wilt thou look for? In what way and from what source could it have drawn its increase? ... I shall not let thee say nor think that it came from what is not; for it can neither be thought nor uttered that anything is not. And, if it came from nothing, what need could have made it arise later rather than sooner? Therefore must it either be altogether or be not at all. Nor will the force of truth suffer aught to arise besides itself from that which is not. Wherefore, justice doth not loose her fetters and let anything come into being or pass away, but holds it fast. Our judgment thereon depends on this: "Is it or is it not?" Surely it is adjudged, as it needs must be, that we are to set aside the one way as unthinkable and nameless (for it is no true way), and that the other path is real and true. How, then, can what is be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; nor is it if it is going to be in the future. Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of. R. P. 117.

Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike, and there is no more of it in one place than in another, to hinder it from holding together, nor less of it, but everything is full of what is. Wherefore it is wholly continuous; for what is, is in contact with what is.

Moreover, it is immovable in the bonds of mighty chains, without beginning and without end; since coming into being and passing away have been driven afar, and true belief has cast them away. It is the same, and it rests in the self-same place, abiding in itself. And thus it remaineth constant in its place; for hard necessity keeps it in the bonds of the limit that holds it fast on every side. Wherefore it is not permitted to what is to be infinite; for it is in need of nothing; while, if it were infinite, it would stand in need of everything. R. P. 118.

The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered. And there is not, and never shall be, anything besides what is, since fate has chained it so as to be whole and immovable. Wherefore all these things are but names which mortals have given, believing them to be true -- coming into being and passing away, being and not being, change of place and alteration of bright color. R. P. 119.

(John Burnett, http://plato.evansville.edu/public/burnet/ch4a.htm )

[176] Jaques Derrida, “Margins of Philosophy”, “The Supplement of Copula Philosophy: Before Linguistics”, translated by Alan Bass, Harvester Wheatsheaf 1982, p178. Derrida notes that the quotation from Nietzche, fragment 1886, is obscure in that it does not appear in any of the English translations of “The Will to Power”.

[177] This is to imagine considering “a unicorn is a rhinoceros”; “a unicorn is like a rhinoceros”; (more persuasively) “a rhinoceros is a thick skinned unicorn”; “a unicorn is a platypus”; “a unicorn is un-like a platypus”; and such other variations as may arise: as true (believable) or false (unbelievable), depending whether belief is suspended or unsuspended or hovering above itself, an ekstastic possibility. Consideration hereof involves a starry eyed vision of existence whose plural consummation generates relief through divine belief or unbelief and a singular vision of being. Perversely such singularity involves copulation menage a trois, the celibate horn being at once instructed by the Kama Sutra and Madame Sosostris.

[178] Eugen Ionescu, “Rhinceros”, first published 1957, originated 1936, expressing not only the metaphysical complexities of reality, but a poetic socio-political vision of the ready, tangible, transmogrification of a ‘civilized’ society to Nazism and of the isolation of surviving individual humans, sinking into anomie, a nothingness, irrelevance amongst the thick skinned.

[179] Aporia +++++

[180] Umberto Eco, “Kant and the Platypus: essays on language and cognition”, translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwan, (1997), Vintage 2000, p12.

[181] Leibniz’s monadology seems closer to Fox’s U^r than Eco’s “Something” implies. However, Leibniz’s relations are substantial, and being substance they seem subject to seemingly natural or irresistible inspissation.

[182] In this, “to no nothing” is a Foxian parallel to the Socratic “I know I know nothing”, yet the Foxian use of the simple pun or play on (with) words, and its flood of intimations, disconcerts the natural flow of the ready philosophical rhetoric to illuminate the curious nature of ‘negation’ as an instrument of discernment. This Foxian technique refers thought to the interstices between words and their potential sententialities, reference to the wordless, language-free forms of these emptinesses resident amongst all and any languages, whose meaninglessnesses are not simple contra-versities of verbal environments.

[183] Jean Paul Sartre, “Being and Nothingness”, translated by Hazel E Barnes, Methuen, 1969, page 5 and page 15.

[184] This relies on the conventional definition of the term “aphasia” as given, for example, in “The Oxford Companion to the Mind”, OUP 1987, p31. The gist of this is that “aphasia” is the physical breakdown of the ability of speech (through a stroke), which is not necessarily accompanied by the the loss of the wider linguistic abilities such as reading or writing or comprehending generally. The use of the term “aphasiac” here in the context of “nihilinguist poetry”is to bring into play the idea of relying on the destruction of the ability of speech to ever say what it has in mind when the destruction of speech leaves only the invention of words to fill the empty sentence with meaning.

[185] Umberto Eco, “Kant and the Platypus: essays on language and cognition”, translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwan, (1997), Vintage 2000, p31.

[186] Umberto Eco, “Kant and the Platypus: essays on language and cognition”, translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwan, (1997), Vintage 2000, p31.

[187] W H Mallock, “Lucretius”, Ancient Classics for English Readers, edited W Lucas Collins, William Blackwood and Sons, 1878, p112. Cyril Bailey gives a prose translation:

Death, then, is naught to us [here Bailey gives a note that he considers this the climax of the poem], nor does it concern us a whit, inasmuch as the nature of the mind is but a mortal possession. And even as in the time gone by we felt no ill, when the Poeni came from all sides to the shock of battle, when all the world, shaken by the hurrying turmoil of war, shuddered and reeled beneath the high coasts of heaven, in doubt to which people’s sway must fall all human power by land and sea; so, when we shall be no more, when there shall have come the parting of the body and soul, by whose union we are made one, you may know that nothing at all will be able to happen to us, who will then be no more, or stir our feeling; no, not if earth shall be mingled with sea, and sea with sky. And even if the nature of mind and the power of soul has feeling, after it has been rent asunder from our body, yet it is naught to us, who are made one by the mating and marriage of body and soul. (Lucretius, “On The Nature Of Things”, translated by Cyril Bailey, Oxford 1910, Book III, ll830ff, p133-34).

It is clear that Lucretius’ (c.95-52BCE) pre-christian ‘science’, treats the mind as of the same material as the body, as but a limb or organ of the body. Fox points out that body could as easily be seen as an organ of mind, which leaves the question of the changing nature of body being a consequnce of thought. However, Fox sees the duality trap which he wishes to avoid. Lucretius, and his master Epicurus (c.341-279BCE), would have been appalled at the gruesome character of the christian religion unhappily spawned by the Jewish dissident Joshua Messiah (God saves the chosen one, Jesus Christ) and accessed by subsequent power hungry charlatans espousing exclusive rites to rescind death, selling tickets to heaven for the price of grotesque physical and moral subjection to institutions established and promoted by themselves. Perhaps, Epicurus and then Lucretius had felt some success philosophically in their disputation with the deathly superstitions of their own times. To subsequently find themselves mere subjects of the tortuous machinations of Catholics, Muslims and other such socio-political power structures would have have left them baffled and weary and very dead in a world taken over by an order which upon meeting a corpse for disposal at an Anglican churchyard asserts:

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. (St John xi. 25, 26.)

I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy my body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another. (Job xix. 25, 26, 27.)

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the Name of the Lord. (1 Tim. vi. 7. Job i. 21)

Disposal of the dead is a cornered market, an extraordinary exclusive (monopolistic) power:

Here is to be noted, that the Office ensuing is not to be used for any that die unbaptized, or excommunicate, or have laid violent hands upon themselves. (The Order for the Burial of the Dead, —according to the Church of England, from “The Coronation Prayer Book, Oxford 1902, p377).

For Muslims, as Christians, Judgement Day will come and unbelievers punished, not with death, but with eternal suffering in a Muslim Hell, Christians have their own exclusive Hell. It is salutary to note that neither of these the two worst religions in the world threaten death to those they define as miscreants, but threaten not to convert their deaths into more comfortable life elsewhere, but to convert their particular deaths into their particular punishments, a kind of individualized living hell. Such demarcation is rigorously patrolled by old men subservient to the bulls of Popes, the dictats of Patriarchs or the Fatwahs of Ayatollahs. In the case of Muslims there are special Muslim angels, a kind of supernatural police, that carry those lives taken in an active state of wrong-doing and which they hold in some kind of limbo to be judged before Allah (at the gates, presumably):

“(Namely) those whose lives the angels

Take in a state of wrong-doing

To their own souls.” [those who died in a state of kufr, rebellion against God]

Then would they offer submission

(With the pretence), “We did

No evil (knowingly).” (The angels will reply),

“Nay, but verily

God knoweth all that ye did;

“So enter the gates of Hell,

To dwell therein.

Thus evil indeed is the abode of the arrogant.”

(Sura “The Bee”. xvi. 28-29, “The Holy Qur’an”, translated with commentary by Abdulla Yusif Ali, American Trust Publications, 2^nd Edition 1977, p663).

Alternatively,

Those whom the angels will carry off while steeped in sin will offer submission, saying: ‘We have done no wrong!’ ‘Indeed!’ the angels will reply. ‘Allah knows all that you have done. Enter the gates of Hell: there you shall abide for ever.’ Dismal is the house where the once proud shall dwell.

(The Koran— “The Bee”, translated by NJ Dawood, Penguin Classics, 4^th Edition 1974, p306).

What we know is that the iron hands of religions have everywhere emerged to clasp and squeeze the human heart until it beats dry and bloodless upon the altar of priestly power where lips curl and tongues turn upon the next to be broken. The tracing of religions from the magics of primitive gangs and tribes lost in the dense forests and dark woods of time finds a mere step in the processing of humankind from magician to priest to the modern scientist of the pump. However, James Frazer’s conclusion is as salutary as it is wise:—

Yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high sounding names of the world and the universe. In the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought; and as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at phenomena—of registering the shadows on the screen—of which we in this generation can form no idea. The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes. We need not murmer at the endless pursuit:

Fatti non foste a viver come bruti

Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza

[Ye were not made to live like unto brutes,

But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.

(Longfellow’s 1867 translation of Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno”, Canto XXVI, 119-20)]

Great things will come of that pursuit, though we may not enjoy them. Brighter stars will rise on some voyageer of the future—some great Ulysses of the realms of thought—than shine on us. The dreams of magic may one day be the waking realities of science. But a dark shadow lies athwart the far end of this fair prospect. For however vast the increase of knowledge and of powetr which the furutre may have in store for man, he can hardly hope to stay the sweep of those great forces which seem to be making silently but relentlessly for the destruction of all this starry universe in which our earth swims as a speck or mote. (James Frazer, “The Golden Bough”, (1922), Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1993, p712-13).

[188] ref ????????

[189] Francis Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning”, edited and introduced by G W Kitchin, J M Dent & Sons, 1861, Book 2, p 162.

[190] Francis Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning”, edited and introduced by G W Kitchin, J M Dent & Sons, 1861, Book 2, p 162. This is taken from his comment “Non uti ut non appetas, non appetere ut non metuas, sunt animi pusilli et diffidentis”. This reference to the jewel stone is interpreted by Fox (Loitering bejewelled among idols ) as to remove the flaws except if they be unavoidable because, in removing the flaws, the greatness of stone is itself destroyed and its value seemingly lost.

[191] Francis Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning”, edited and introduced by G W Kitchin, J M Dent & Sons, 1861, Book 2, p 162. This is taken from his comment "Qui finem [spatium] vitae extremum inter munera ponat Naturae."

[192] Alfred Tennyson, “In Memorium A H H”, (Arthur Henry Hallam, 1811-1833), XXIII, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1883. A long elegiac poem written in 1850 to commemorate the death of his close friend, A H H, a fellow student during his days at Trinity College, Cambridge.

[193] Alfred Tennyson, op cit Introduction.

[194] Alfred Tennyson, op cit, V.

[195] Ron L Cooper, “Heidegger and Whitehead: A Phenomenological Examination into the Intelligibility of Experience”, Ohio University Press, 1993, p118.

[196] Fox, it seems, is treating house (Old English hus) as a built environment rather than a natural shelter such as a cave, bush or tree.

[197] Elisabeth Ströker, “Investigations in Philosophy of Space”, translated by Algis Mickunas, Ohio University Press, 1987 (original 1965), p1. This is the first paragraph of Ströker’s book.

[198] Alfred Monostone, (draft) “

[199] ‘Thing’,