I grew up in a small village. Our house was from the 1970s. It was one of two homes which had been built in the grounds of a traditional cottage that dated much earlier. Our back garden had a regularly fruiting mature apple tree which had once been part of the cottage’s orchard and was now within our boundaries.
The little girl who had lived in village cottage back in the 1910s didn’t acknowledge the enclosing and parcelling of its land. Sometimes my family and I would be sitting down to dinner and see her walk past the window into our garden to collect as much juicy windfall as she could scoop into her held-out skirt.
Of course she wasn’t a little girl by then, she was an old woman. And she didn’t live in the cottage anymore, having moved elsewhere in the village.
But she was a little girl really. And she did live in the bounteous appley cottage. Just at a different point in time.
Eight Women Gathering Apples by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1876
I’m currently visiting English sites of witch executions. It’s a project with Goldsmith’s artist and practicing witch Geraldine Hudson. We go to gallows sites on new moons. There’s an acknowledgment of the murders, a ritual, and a gathering of clay from the locations. There will be artefacts arising from the project – objects, a performance and a text.
The written element is forming around a new bit of language magick I’ve invented called ‘Remembranes’.
I will return to these shortly. But first let’s talk about the fact that I, a mere pip of a poet and not a great ancient and gnarly-branched wizard, might have the hubris to invent new magick.
Still from a film featuring Genesis P-Orridge’s band Psychic TV, Berlin 1983.
Inventing new magick isn’t hubris though. I think it’s a duty. For you, as well as me. Especially if you write.
Do you know much about Chaos Magick?
It began in the UK synchronously with punk. Mid-to-late 1970s. Around the time a bucolic cottage garden in the English West Mid Lands was being concreted over – sparing the apple tree – to make room for a couple of drab new builds.
Chaos Magick is occult punk. Just as punk music spat in the face of bloated, virtuosic, arcane Progressive Rock and its sixteen-minute concept songs played with the utmost seriousness, so Chaos Magick sprayed its sigils over the robes of traditional high magic and its bloated, virtuosic, arcane rituals performed with the utmost seriousness.
In 1976 the punk magazine Sniffing Glue printed this illustration.
And that’s Chaos Magick’s outlook. No ornament and a belief anyone could perform it. It wanted you to get to the good stuff – changing your reality – quickly. No initiations, set ceremonies or multi-yeared system of ascending grades here. Just pick up a wand (or anything wand-shaped really or don’t use a wand, whatever) and get gigging.
One of the influences on Chaos Magick was Discordianism. The joke-not-a-joke religion founded in 1963 around Eris, Goddess of chaos and discord. That’s the Discordianism symbol below. Note the Pentagon, US military headquarters and one of the key Erisian shrines. What do you do in the face of overwhelming oppressive power? You weird it up of course.
And note the apple. Here’s the story behind that.
The exciting stupid funny awkward thing about Chaos Magick and Discordianism is that they tell us we can just make things up. New techniques of magick. New ways of living. New reality tunnels. No one’s actually stopping us.
You can decide the Pentagon is a shrine for your made-up religion if you want. You can decide City traders are faery folk if you want … and that you need to to plant the world’s largest faery ring around the City of London to bind them. You can discover a new form of RNA life and name it after a science fiction concept denoting interstellar contact and the expansion of human consciousness if you want and everyone will not only just accept it but some people will weave it into their spiritual worldview. You can decide that today apples are highly significant and that tomorrow they are not.
People say things and then they come true. That’s how all this works.
And it all begins with language. Which brings me back to Remembranes. I started with the word (a genetic splicing of remembering and membrane) but I’ve now decided that they are real. Like, not just a cute concept I’ve created but actually real. And I’m going to behave as if they are. Because that’s how all this works.
The writer Tobias Churton has coined – not entirely seriously – the word gnostalgia. Triggered for him by listening to Debussy and then experiencing a profound, almost tangible, nostalgia for his childhood mixed with a yearning for something mysterious, symbolic, that he can’t quite grasp.
There’s Debussy with his daughter in an orchard. I bet they collected some apples.
I’m sure you regularly experience what Churton is describing. And I’m sure you know that the word ‘nostalgia’ originally meant a kind of homesick wasting away. ‘Nostos’ in Greek being to ‘return to the native land’ and ‘algos’ being ‘suffering’ or ‘grief’.
The *energy* the past has, right? It’s fearsome. It has its own gravity. All that windfall we never picked up, just waiting there for us, seemingly out-of-reach. The best we can do is give ourselves a wistful moment of grief for a lost native land. The mourning of the prelapsarian garden. (Not an apple.)
Well, as I’ve bored on about before, I don’t think time is what we think it is. Time is loopy. This explainer of Wheeler’s Delayed Choice Experiment is worth a watch.
So I’ve invented Remembranes. Remembranes are everywhere. Appearing and evaporating endlessly. Imagine them as porous connections between two time events. Consciousness can reach through a Remembrane. People in each event can connect – often unknowingly, sometimes deliberately.
You create a Remembrane by the intentional entanglement of material from your two chosen time events – one of which being your local present. The more material from each time event you use and the deeper you entangle this material, the longer-lasting and more porous a Remembrane you open up.
Click through this slide show for an illustration. Accompanying music.
The witch project will create textual Remembranes by mixing material from the trials and executions … with the documenting of our visits to the locations. It will thin the membrane between two times and our consciousness will be able to feed in and feed from the consciousness of the women. It is about forgiveness and unothering.
And it does not matter whether you or I think this is actually happening. If we say it is, it is. That’s what writing can do.
Grace Slick performing White Rabbit in front of appley shapes, 1968.
Time is loopy.
It’s strange, whenever I begin to write a fresh long-poem, I find that news and new discoveries emerge to nudge me along. Now that could be confirmation bias or it could be that what I know *now* is flowing back to the beginning of a project.
Some of you may be following my other Substack, Very Special Knowledge. It’s both an experiment in oversharing the writing process and a way to raise the print bill for my next book. It’s a six month thing and I’m four months in.
I’m simultaneously writing the verse and telling the subscribers how and why I’m doing it. The new work is about lots of things – longevity, anarchy, forests, parents, CIA men and Holy Guardian Angels – with a twisted undercurrent of coded DNA research and interstellar messages.
And now Stanford has announced an entirely new form of life. A previously undiscovered class of RNA objects. New mysterious bits of genetic material that have no detectable sequences or even structural similarities known to any other biological agents.
The Stanford biologists have called them … wait for it … Obelisks. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s interstellar messengers.
They appeared in about 10 percent of the human microbiomes the team examined. The Obelisks all seem to include codes for a new class of protein the researchers have named Oblins.
And guess what, they don’t know what they are for other than that they may bridge the ancient gap between the simplest genetic molecules and more complex viruses. This is a key strand of my new work brought to life.
I asked AI to make me an RNA obelisk being looked at by RNA ancestors.
Back when the little girl from the past was stealing into my childhood garden and taking apples, I was discovering a book by John Wyndham called The Chrysalids. It immediately became one of the reality tunnels through which I view the world.
Any readers who have been kind enough to buy one of my own books may have noticed the six-fingered palm print colophon on the title pages. It’s a print of my own hand (plus an extra pinky) and is a tribute to the glorious 1964 paperback Chrysalids cover below.
I was pleased to be invited to write about this cover for the fantastic Book Cover Review website. The review is about the past and the future.
This pleasing article reports that Gen Z are rediscovering the idea of the public library.
Any excuse to bring forth something from my body of work. In this case, one of my British Library ads which I shared on LinkedIn for attention. Got to keep those commissions coming. Losing money on poetry books doesn’t pay for itself you know …
But look, the billboard is really pointing out that libraries are huge Remembranes. In amongst all that shopping and caféing are the places where you can reach the past and the past can reach you.
Ok, one last call for mischief makers to join us on February 29th, Leap Day, in creating the world’s largest faery ring of one hundred handcrafted bronze mushrooms around the City of London’s financial district, the Square Mile.
City traders are the faery folk the old tales warned us about. Living in the glass mountains of London’s Square Mile, they’re human in appearance, amoral and there’s always some tricksy deal going down. They’re a significant factor in global inequality, a dark corner of capitalism and a destabilising financial form of imperialism.
We first planted this faery ring on Leap Day 2020 and now the circle needs reweirding.
Email me back to join us. We’re meeting at the Bank of England at 12:30pm on the 29th. You’ll get a map, a team to work with, a section of the ring and a brace of handcrafted bronze mushrooms to plant. Then we meet up again and go to the pub.
A poem about returning and remembering. It’s written to be read in a Black Country accent (Shakespeare’s y’now or, if you prefer, Thomas Shelby) so feel free to give that a go. It’ll make the Remembrane just that little more porous.
Here I am, back there again Here I am, back there again, in the mid lands of black grease towns cuffed together by coldcrow-and-pylon and drinkers reminiscing of pioneering iron. In the mid lands of round voices rolling themselves out as dough; of motorbikes stolen over by the reservoir, their sound an udderburst, slaprump low. In the mid lands where the terrible fathers creosote fencing, where the job lot fathers hose prideandjoy cars, where you, owlmeat rotting in the dark, teach yourself to think apart the universe like Jack Parsons firing on Nasa mescaline or Jesus tripping on temptation with Satan. A fly-eye fracture of desert psychedelia deciding who you are. The burnt bloodblack field by my childhide house is helled to stubble, palm-marking hollow shoots, amongst which I sit out the scarab-rolled sandsad and featureless dunes of my youth. Over the hill the unmilked factories are growling. Yeast on the air from one, vinegar from another. Somewhere, busride close, prisoners are led purposelessly from room to room. They ask themselves ‘what was it I promised myself that I’d do? What was it?’ And life is one long forgetting. What was it you promised yourself that you’d do? What was it?
I invent worlds, commercial campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. I’ve spent my life thinking about what writing can do. If you favour my ideas and style then please consider sharing my commercial website or my artistic website with the ambitious brand owners or sensitive artistic patrons in your life. I’m an independent practitioner and I do what I do through building partnerships.
Chocky was my Wyndam magic. The stuff about thought being outside of time and space has stayed with me. In 1999 I was in Jersey with family & friends to catch the Eclipse. It was profound life-changer of an experience. Spiritual but also intensely 'material'. One of our party had been so engrossed in a book that he'd kept it open and just turned his head as the magic was happening. Then quickly back to his book. I found this completely incomprehensible. I moved closer to see what could have kept him from witnessing the celestial wonder. Yeah, he was reading Chocky.
I'm totally here for the new magic! Looking forward to leap day.
Divine Magic will always beat Sorcery Magic. See you at Leap Day!