Sweet worlds of words
If you want to learn about a poetic way of organising a library – and why wouldn’t you? – then read the first bit of this letter. Curious about my new book? Slide down until you see a black and white graphic of melting words. Want free tickets to my next Happening in London about the abyss? Keep on going until you see a sort of sexy desert cave entrance. Interested in a big advert about politics I’ve just won an award for? Well, bumpity bump that scroll bar further along like a Westminster lobbyist in a St James’ bar gurning for their next hit. Then go beyond all *that* for links to a thing I’m doing in a field plus a talk by a seer. Or read everything in order so as to enjoy the sweet juxtaposition of themes.
Because it’s clever and also true for many people including me, one of my favourite quotes comes from writer and magician Alan Moore – ‘I had to teach myself the word autodidact’.
‘Autodidact’ means someone who teaches themselves things.
I’m not an academic or an intellectual, I’m a bit of a hick. Libraries, universities and research facilities generally make me feel as uncomfortable as that particular type of posh man who asks if you ski. It’s all not my world.
Still the older I get and the more I create things, the more in love I fall with the idea of research and academia. This has come as a surprise to me, used as I am to just instinctively making stuff up and presenting it with grandiloquent unfounded confidence.
So I was delighted to be invited by WinsterMarsh to a preview of the reimagined Warburg Institute in London.
Particularly because the layout of the library, as originally proposed by founder Aby Warburg, is instinctive and poetic.
Aby Warburg was a German, born in 1866. He’s second from left in the picture above.
His was a wealthy banking family. At the age of 13, fascinated by art history, Aby made a deal with his younger brother, Max, to forfeit his birthright to take over the family firm … in return for Max’s promise to provide him with all the books he ever asked for.
Warburg built up a vast library as well as a very particular system of arranging the books. He died in 1929 and, to avoid the abyss of the Second World War, his library was moved to London in 1944.
The library is a most fantastical collection of, as the Institute puts it, ‘global cultural history and the role of images in society’. Which is quite a boring way of explaining just how *magical* it all is. The New Yorker, in this piece, puts it better …
‘Only as the visitor begins to study the collections does the oddity of the place appear. In the range-finder plates mounted on the shelves, where in a normal library one would expect to see “Spanish Literature, Sixteenth Century” or “Biography, American: E663-664,” there are, instead, signs pointing toward “Magic Mirrors” and “Amulets” and “The Evil Eye.” Long shelves of original medieval astrology hug texts on modern astronomy. The section on “Modern Philosophy” includes volume after volume of Nietzsche and half a shelf of Hume. The open stacks—exceptional in any gathering of irreplaceable books—are, in the European scheme of things, almost unknown. In the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris, the aim seems to be to keep as many books as possible safely out of the hands of people who might want to read them. In the Warburg Library, the books are available to be thumbed through at will.’
There are two aspects of the arrangement of the collection that I find particularly poetic. The first is that the library is set over four floors and these are dedicated – in order – to ‘Image’, ‘Word’, ‘Orientation’ and ‘Action’. That flow being how Warburg believed we understand and experience the world.
The second unique aspect of browsing is that the librarians work to the principle of ‘the law of the good neighbour’. Books and material is catalogued according to themes, rather than alphabetically. So arrive at Newton’s Mathematica Principia and expect the tomes next to it to touch on alchemy, that being one of Newton’s other, equally important, areas of study.
Serendipity is one of the best things about being alive and the Warburg Institute have it at the centre of what they do.
I have a new book out. It’s called Language Consciousness Magick Romance. It’s all my poetic bits from the last six years. 484 pages. Black cloth and white foil cover designed by Studio Sutherl&. This design just won a prestigious international typography award.
The poetry in the book is linked with mini-biographical and explanatory essays. It’s £25. The first pressing was of ten signed and numbered copies and these have sold out. I’m now taking pre-orders for a second pressing of ten signed copies. You can buy one here.
Here’s how the book begins …
I am myth now
The 19th century French illusionist Robert-Houdin (from whom the showman Houdini pick-pocketed two syllables) once described the art of conjuring thus … ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.’
I sometimes wonder if a poet is a magician – real wizardry here rather than tricks with boxes and mirrors – playing the part of an actor.
I have a triptych of earliest memories – they come from the ages of one, three and five.
At one I have a clear vision of peering into an empty wardrobe in a barren room – a room which would become my parents’ bedroom.
I was conceived in London in Christine Keeler’s boudoir – she was the beautiful at the centre of a 1960s scandal which almost brought down the British government.
Conception over with, and fat with me, my mother and father moved to the English West Mid Lands where I was born.
If ground absorbs the afterbirth and vibrations of beginnings, then I’m pleased to list Shakespeare, Aleister Crowley, Dr John Dee’s scryer Edward Kelley and composer Elgar as fellow progenies of the West Mid Land’s soil.
When I was one, my family moved to a village, Hammerwich, where the bare house and wardrobe were. This house was backed by a field and hill.
My next remembrance, two years later, is being stung in the mouth by a bee. I recall spitting it out, half-chewed, into my palm. When I was older I read folklore that said if you’re stung in the mouth by a bee as a child it gives you ‘honeyed words’. Plato and Pindar also being recipients of this insect gift.
Then I remember being five, in the playground of the tiny Victorian village school. Never one to make friends, I was hiding behind a large, old oak tree. I had taken the school football, placed it in front of me and, in the summer shadows of a thousand rippling oak leaves, was imagining I was a wizard with a scrying crystall.
Empty homes. Honeyed words. Avoiding everyone and trying to be a wizard.
This book isn’t about biographical details, this book is about language, consciousness, magick and romance.
Magick? The extra ‘k’ is my fellow Mid Lander Crowley’s invention to distinguish real magick from stage performing.
This book is about trying to be a wizard and trying to fill up all the bare rooms of life with imagination.
After I left the village of Hammerwich, a hedged-in place comfortable with crop circles, crumbling churches and darkness behind cottage doors, they dug up an old field and discovered Europe’s largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure. I have to accept this as a metaphor.
Before I tell you some stories from the six years during which all the poetry in this book was written, here are a handful of minor magic tricks. Little boxes, full of mirrors.
(You can read the poem that follows in the book at the bottom of this letter.)
My next event will be on December 6th in Islington. It is The Abyssmass Variety Show. As ever, it’ll be totally free. 60 tickets. You can get one here.
This is an event celebrating the abyss and the magick to be found on the other side once crossed. There will performances, music, theatre, readings and chaos.
Two years ago, also on December 6th, I published a long poem called Changeling. (This poem is now included in Language Consciousness Magick Romance.)
Changeling is in the form of a three-act absurdist play and follows the magickians Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuburg as they perform Dr John Dee’s Enochian rites in the Algerian desert.
By my calculations, it was December 6th when they raised the demon Choronzon and crossed the abyss. That might have been in their heads, but isn’t everything in our heads?
And so I have designated December 6th as Abyssmass, the day we celebrate our personal abysses and what we discover beyond them. Our culture didn’t have this before, which is a bit remiss, so I’ve invented it for all of us. I’m looking forward to eventually seeing the range of Abyssmass decorations – little hanging voids – in the supermarkets, as well as hearing grumbles about how Abyssmass seems to start earlier each year.
That fantastic poster for the event has been created by Will of Margaret and Brian Williams.
My advert for Politico won a writing award a couple of weeks ago. The ad was released just before the UK General Elections and is made up entirely of election slogans from the main political parties over the past 40-odd years.
Last on my shelves … another project of mine and a recommended talk.
Firstly, my *other* Substack – Our Longland Is Dreaming. This is a year-long artistic project about a form of writing called Boustrophedon, the medieval poem Piers Plowman, the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, fields, seasons and land art. There are a couple of posts up already to explain.
We don’t really know what the end result of the project will be. I hope it will be us learning to plough, writing something alliterative and launching a march on power.
We’ve already been offered a field in Devon and we’re off to look at it in a couple of weeks. I increasingly find in life that the odder the idea you offer up to the great library, the more likely a serendipitous invitation will make itself known. Like *this* particular reality thrives on and rewards novelty.
I know many of you will already read Ellie Robins’ Substack How to Go Home – if you don’t, you should. Ellie is an incredibly exciting thinker, exploring so much around mysticism, language, honesty and the imaginal world.
I co-wrote The Idyllegy happening, which took place at St Bride’s off Fleet Street, a few months ago, with Ellie. All the good bits were hers. Ellie took the photograph below of the event. It shows me as The Lecturer being out-consciousnessed by Will of Margaret, Sarah Kershaw and Francesca Way. Owen Barfield oversees the whole affair. I’m consistently amazed at the luck I have with collaborators.
Now Ellie is presenting a talk at the fabulous Kairos Club on November 28th. Information and tickets here, I very much recommend it.
I am myth now
but when I was unfarmed
on nevertheless legs, a bee
stungmeinmymouth yes. I spat
it free, cold-boiled across my hand.
Later I found folk lore telling me
beingstunginthemouthbyabee
gave Plato and Pindar
sweet worlds of words,
rich tricks of persuasion.
So whentimes I went seducing
I pictured the pulpy posy
of jutting-net wings, yellow-honey
insect-blood and body mistled
thrill-wet with the terror of lips.
...the more in love I fall with the idea of research and academia -- hear, here!
for all rich tricks of persuasion xx