Uneasy

My fascination with using hypnagogic states to write is that it makes it all so very difficult to think about. I find myself increasingly drawn to things that are difficult to think about.

I don’t mean things with a solution to be beetle-chewed through and eventually excreted in a neat deposit of steaming conclusion. I mean things that are impossible to grasp.

The entry level impossible-to-grasp idea is what was there before there was something?

We all know that one. You start to try and think of nothing and then realise you’re imagining the big nothing as something and have to go back a few steps and, fucking hell, if it isn’t just easier to believe in a creator.

Have you ever lived in a house with a damp kitchen and tried to catch the silverfish that skate, excitingly-discovered, across formica surfaces when you – god-like – switch on the light at 3am? That’s what trying to think about nothing is, right?

Then, after the moment-before-the-birth-of-reality poser, we go up a step of uneasy to consider the human mind. The most impossible to grasp of all things. Other people’s and our own.

So, drawn as I am to the difficult-to-think-about, I really enjoy the strange feeling of trying to hold on to the images and sounds that appear from who-knows-where during a hypnagogic state.

At the bottom of this letter is a poem I built around some hypnagogic visions. Just before the poem I explain how I constructed the piece. I imagine this will be of interest to very few of you. It’s important to do things lots of people won’t care about.

Also scattered about the letter is news about my latest projects, plus a bit of boasting about an award which, cast in the dark dark shadow of the possibility there was a nothing before there was a something, seems infinitesimally pointless to even mention. So it goes.

But first, three difficult things I can’t quite grasp that I’ve been relishing recently.

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Philip K Dick’s ideas in his 1977 speech – If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.

Where these thirty Fernando Pessoa poems *really* came from.

What the poet Ted Hughes was thinking when he drew this map of the Orghast mythology. (Orghast was an experimental play in a made-up language (all languages are made up) based on the story of Prometheus and written by Hughes and theatre director Peter Brook.) Note Krogon the liver-pecking bird of prey on Prometheus’s shoulders and Orghast gestating in the god’s body

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There are two copies left of the third pressing of my new book, Language Consciousness Magick Romance. £25.

Buy one here.

I won’t be doing a fourth pressing of the book until 2025 now, when I’ll be launching it exclusively at Field System.

Here are some nice things people have said.

‘I simply can't express how much I love what you write.’

’Poems that shatter our old ways of seeing and feeling and shoot the soul of the world straight into our veins like it's the strongest of drugs. That's what Thomas Sharp's poems do.’

‘Your work touches somewhere very deep, very old, inside my being. Echoes of someone I've been somewhere, of someone I am now – perhaps not here indoors on a grey November evening, but when outside under the sky.’

‘Sexiest-looking book I own and I own a lot of books.’

‘A brain and a spirit like no other.’

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That’s me on the right of the photo taking a picture of some re-wilding fields and the river Dart in Devon.

On my left is Ben Hayes of the phenomenal Circa restaurant in Totnes.

Next to him is Philip Nieuwoudt of New Wood Trees whose barn we’re in and fields we’re looking at.

Jim Sutherland took the photo.

Next year will see the emergence of mine and Jim’s most ambitious art and language project yet, Our Longland Is Dreaming. It’ll take place over a year in Devon.

You can see the seedlings of the concept over on this substack. We’ll be adding to that as we develop it all. The year-long project will be like nothing I’ve done before.

Until these Devon pilgrimages begin, here’s us and Ben’s dog looking at a landscape and dreaming about what we can do with it. Jack the dog might have different ideas from us of course. Impossible to know.

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The advert I made for Politico has won a Brand Impact Award for writing. It was released in the UK during our last General Election and it is constructed out of a bunch of party political slogans from the last forty years.

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A huge thank you to everyone reading this Substack who came to the very first Abyssmass Variety Show in Islington on December 6th.

I created Abyssmass in 2022. It coincided with the release of Changeling, a long poem in the form of an absurdist play about crossing the abyss and the magick we find on the other side.

(If you want a free copy of Changeling just email back. I’m happy to post anywhere.)

Abyssmass is my new yearly confrontation with the idea of the abyss – you know, dark-nights-of-the-soul, mid-life crisis, quarter-life crisis – but making it magick.

The Abyssmass Variety show was a free event with an amazing array of artists and performers playing with the subject. A highlight for me was the phenomenally talented Sarah Kershaw.

For the first half of the evening Sarah was loose in the crowd, sometimes tormenting, sometimes seducing them. Dressed in a black body and a black Moretta mask, she was The Wandering Womb. Her fingers are painted black because she wore fingerless gloves to play the piano in an earlier spot.

During the second half of the variety show, The Wandering Womb came to the stage, had extreme hysterics and then performed, accompanied by three string performers, the most skin-shivering version of Cosmic Dancer you’ve ever heard.

I danced myself right out the womb.

I’m so lucky to work with such dark talent.

Do mark December 6th, Abyssmass, 2025 in your diary.

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For a year or so one of my roles has been the Creative Director for St Martin-in-the-Fields Trust. St Martin’s is the parish church for Buckingham Palace, but also has a remarkable history of supporting vital causes – from the anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s to Extinction Rebellion launching their first London march from the church’s steps.

You may also have seen my piece commissioned for Sir Simon Russell Beale to perform in their space.

I’ve now created a new initiative for them, a Substack exploring questions of giving and how we are all part of The Wider Kindness. You can read the first letter here and the second letter here. Please do subscribe and support.

It’s written by the brilliant Eleanor Robins, whose own Substack is a regular source of deep inspiration and thought. Eleanor and I co-wrote the lecture I performed during my Idyllegy Happening earlier this year. You can read that lecture here.

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Hypnagogia is the state of consciousness you experience as wakefulness turns into sleep. I’ve been experimenting with it for a few years and increasingly find I can induce and surf it at will.

During it you are aware as if awake, but dream-like images appear in your mind’s eye, as can auditory hallucinations. Often when I am in the state I will hear full lines of poetry spoken close to my ear. The trick is to have a notebook ready and learn to jolt yourself alert enough to write down whatever is said, however seemingly incongruous.

Here’s my thought process for the following poem. The whole piece took about an hour, including the half-dreaming.

First a hypnagogic session of around twenty minutes offered me two things. The first a spoken sentence ‘it really is no more use, this tremendous gaiety’ and then shortly afterwards the image of an handwritten inscription in a bible ‘stay sane’.

The sentence had a lovely rhythmic quality, it could be divided into two lines of seven syllables. Each line begins with two iambic feet – two beats that are unstressed / stressed – followed by an anapaest, a foot with three beats, the final beat being the most stressed.

Thanks unconsciousness mind, I thought.

That set the structure for each line of the poem – though inevitably some stresses are shuffled around a bit to vary the music, and the fourth line of the second stanza steals a syllable from the second line of the same stanza. So those are eight and six syllables respectively.

The rejection of gaiety after, clearly, some weighing up of the situation sounded to me like someone thinking carefully about the balance sheet of their emotions … an accountant of feelings. That lead me to the next four lines – I got a little flutter of excitement when the image of turning a dry page by wetting one’s thumb in your own heart arrived.

The ‘ulge’ of ‘bulge’ and ‘edge’ of ‘ledger’ and ‘urge’ of ‘surge’ were all tones chosen because they seemed to make the wet sort of sucking sound I could imaging the thumb making through aortic juices.

The second verse introduces a bee because everyone likes a bee. And also because I could imagine it being the kind of creature our measurer of happiness might like – purposeful and utilitarian. Those first three lines go heavy on ‘s’ sounds to mimic some buzzing and I couldn’t resist the double meaning in ‘profit’. Both the accountancy term and the bee foretelling a future.

Time for the second hypnagogic image, the bible inscription, and here I was specifically thinking of Allen Ginsburg’s mother in an asylum, depicted in his phenomenal poem Kaddish.

And there I’ll leave the explanation. The third and four stanzas are more of the same, but different. And you’ll have to draw your own uneasy conclusions on what it’s all about.

The accountant

‘It really is no more use,
this tremendous gaiety’
decided the accountant
wetting his thumb in his heart
to bulge a ledger’s dry page
like a surge of tally-ups.

In the bee's analysis,
garden-invisible,
he hears real efficiency,
little profit in wavering.
Then there was the inscription
his committed mother wrote
in her bible once, ‘stay sane’.

‘Pleasant advice’ the bee said
weird through a dead breeze window, 
its mothermouth nectar-stuffed.

The ledger page went over
and air was ambiguous
on whether it lived outside
or in. Summer continued.