The furious music of birds at the zoo
Inventing worlds, commercial campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. A life of thinking about what writing can do. If you favour the ideas and style seen here then please consider sharing it with the ambitious brand owners and sensitive artistic patrons in your life. Here is a list of some previous collaborators.
There’s a line early on in The Supreme Point, in one of the sections where the astronauts have left Earth and have reached the place in space where reality breaks down, which sings of …
… the euphoria and gnosis of programming and metaprogramming in the human biocomputer when spring is here to tell you hurry.
Spliced with some original writing and a Disney song, ‘programming and metaprogramming in the human biocomputer’ is the title of a book by the inventor of the isolation tank – and a noted dolphin conversationalist – John C. Lilly.
The book is about the hardware and software of brain and mind, the mystery of consciousness, and the idea of reprogramming the way we see the world.
Here’s a screenshot from the 1992 computer game ‘Ecco the Dolphin’, which was partly based on Lilly’s ideas. Doesn’t surfacing always feel so good?
We’ll return to reprogramming your biocomputer shortly.
The four words at the top of this email have also been at the top of various Poetry Of It All bios for a few years now. Language. Consciousness. Magic. Romance. A set of guiding interests. A roughly drawn intellectual map that guarantees a lifetime of exploration.
Inevitably the four elements are simply aspects of the same thing. Language leads to consciousness (though not in some boring linear-time way), consciousness is THE fundamental stuff and so playing with it allows us to change everything – a practice traditionally referred to as magic – and dabbling with reality through ‘magic’ can only ever lead to the awful terror of the Sublime as the Romantics would have it – the glorious plunging vertigo of realising that we are the merest spec of egoless nothing in a vast universe of divine mind. A mind which uses language to conjure itself into existence. Though not in any kind of sequential way.
Sorry, probably should have said Happy New Year before beginning all that.
We’ll do some resolutions (and the reprogramming your biocomputer) in a moment. A brief liturgical interlude first.
This email has talked before about a staunch belief that commercial writing has just as much potential as artistic writing for becoming part of culture. And so to Christmas Day when this work for London Fire Brigade became the basis of The Revd Canon Dr Jennifer Smith’s sermon. You can watch the relevant section here.
Unexpected and deeply honouring.
Ok. New year resolutions. Well, suggestions for experiments really. Can bending language *actually* bend consciousness? Feel free to adopt one of the following practicals and then email or comment how you got on.
Try not to use the word ‘I’ or variations thereof – ‘me’, ‘mine’ etc. – for a week. See what it does to the you you persist in believing in. See how it changes your conversation and your written communications. It’s difficult … as you may have noticed already from some of the colder, clumsier phrases in this email. Your humble author’s ego already feels like it’s throwing itself against the bars of a cage made of words.
This experiment has a grand magical history. Beastly Aleister Crowley first recommended it and it’s taken up again by Robert Anton Wilson in ‘Cosmic Trigger I’. Wilson writes ‘I bit my thumb, hard, at each slip. By about the fourth day, I had a very sore thumb and an even more painful ego. The subjectivity and self-centredness of normal human consciousness was hideously obvious to me. By the seventh day I had entered an altered state’.
For one month commit to including a sentence of beauty in every matter-of-fact, prosaic email you send. Inform the tax office that you have posted back the form they requested, but make sure to add a line describing the thrill of the icy rain on your face as you approached the monolithic postbox. Confirm sign off of the designs, but also mention you have an infinity of warm yearning inside you that particular afternoon. This sort of thing. What’s the worst that could happen?
For a week de-gender your conversation. Don’t use ‘he’ or ‘she’, only ‘they’.
Play with hypnagogic writing. Mid-afternoon is a good time, that 3pm heavy-eyed trough. Sit in a quiet room. Float in the curious velveteen land between wake and sleep. Listen for the spoken words which will float across your consciousness. As soon as you hear something (and you will), write it down. Return. Build up a short piece of writing. The poem at the bottom of this email had the first verse delivered in this manner. Heard as if spoken aloud, completely as set out.
Practice using the Shakespearean ‘and’. It’s what Ted Hughes calls ‘that little formula’ and describes as ‘two nouns linked by an ‘and’ (or it can be two adjectives) directing their combined and contrasting meanings onto a third word, always a noun, in a way that startles all three words into odd, metaphorical life.’
Three examples to get you going …’A beauty-waning and distressed widow’
’Seduc’d the pitch and height of his degree’
’The tediousness and process of my travel’
Look at the light conflict between the ideas of ‘beauty-waning’ and ‘distressed’, or the conceptual difference between ‘tediousness’ and ‘process’, and see how the tension that materialises turns such short descriptions into kaleidoscopes of possible meaning. Do this in your own writing for clue-filled and malleable moments.Alternatively, write a long-form piece without using the word ‘and’ at all. This was done in Jack and Jill – not a single ‘and’ appears, except when it binds the two tragic protagonists together in their hillish, doomed love. Writing like this is limiting freeing as a sustained exercise. The neighbouring words are brought closer, their meanings elide a little. Your understanding of them elides a little.
Deliberately use the phrase, written or in speech, ‘I don’t understand’ three times a day for a week. Even if you do understand. The words ‘I don’t understand’ are big big magic.
One of the things about not being published is that you can’t get your books into bookshops and you can’t get your books reviewed. Except, except, except! There’s this place called Sphinx Review who are deeply kind to your correspondent’s amateur status and regularly feature his works.
So for those of you who received a copy of Changeling and are wondering what the hell it’s all about, you’ll be pleased to see you’re not the only one. Full review here.
And so a poem about language and consciousness.
Birds at the zoo
The furious music of birds at the zoo,
aviary echo, you’d think they were happy
in their echo of their old real world
set up in our real world as a prelude
to the bang glass gameshow of monkeys.
Hot constant. Half-listen. Reminded
of the space station’s static-thick chirrup and ring,
a Tibetan bowl tumbling in the terrible bleak.
As soon as sung sounds extinct as soon as sung.
They’re in there somewhere, dazzle dapper
and dressed down, filling the trees
behind mould-edged screens half-reflecting
a you, here, lost in wrong-continent foliage.
The internet-balloons float over Kenya,
far quieter than these incessant signallers,
as are geostationary satellites and deadmen
tapping telegrams from the Titanic.
Could be a recording.
We would never know.
They would never know.
(I am nowhere
but in my serotonin
spiked by the oil-wet, black walnut
I have eaten.)
Beautiful and thought-provoking words as always Thomas. Let's attempt all the resolutions all at once! Excitement of the secrets will bleed as confused and frustrated faces frown.
Some bloody great ideas here I am stealing wholesale.