A Sequel to The Qliphoth - extract

Here are the opening paragraphs of Beneath the Pleasure Zones ,  the evolving sequel to  The Qliphoth:

1.1 Special Effects of the Rupture

“The post-Qliphothic aeon.”  As time passed, the phrase seemed increasingly cryptic each time Lucas wrote it.  This time he was using a cracked biro on the back of some old spread-sheets salvaged from a ruined tax office. He hoped that this latest attempt at a memoir would finally create an explanation, an exegesis that made sense of the Qliphothic Intrusion,  the Yesodic Leakage, or as the authorities now termed it, desperate to sanitise its terrors, “The Rupture.”

Over a decade  now since that brief aperture in the consensus of what then passed for reality, the daily time-line. A  sudden blinding fissure in the sky; an eruption of darkness across the cities ; a crack in the shell of Malkuth, our root-world,  according to the wandering street-prophets, that admitted the dark side of the Yesodic zones. The dark energies of the Qliphoth broke in and out.  Everyone had a pet creed, a broken pot of theory that didn’t quite hold up.  “No-one can develop a workable practice to cope fully with the afterbirths of the Rupture, ” wrote Lucas, cautiously. And yet again, paused.

For this was personal history.  His dead parents, Nick and Pauline,  became vessels and he was an agent, blundering into forbidden zones, who “let something fly in,” as the Lore of the Rupture had it. That’s all he could tell himself.

Rain drummed on the roof of his shelter, a ramshackle extension to an old Carbon-Age observation post  dug out of the woody  hillside in those wild years when our defence mechanisms were launch-keys in plutonic silos.  Now everyone was into  psychic self-defence.  He sensed a remote  inner-ear distant babble, perhaps from the squabbling sages of nearby Leynebridge- and the moment of self-recollection was gone.

He pushed the precious paper to one side of the table. So much for his Neuro-Saxon chronicle.  His left temple ached.  Focus on language became more difficult after the Rupture; and now it was impossible to concoct a narrative that he could live in comfortably.

Comforts in general were in short supply, especially here in the Borderlands, where the followers of the Lore had  congregated,  to live close to the Earth.  He surveyed his improvised living space, his bunk, his books leaning on the rusty shelves that would have housed  a  short-wave radio console  or a geiger counter.  His late mother’s imported Chairman Mao alarm clock  told him it was  approximately  eight-thirty. Simple  tinplate mechanisms usually worked.  So he  peered out under the heavy concrete lintel into his extension, a  crazy parody of a suburban conservatory cobbled together from plastic sheeting, corrugated iron and discarded pallets. It was  raining heavily, as Vivienne had predicted. He must try not to think too hard about dreamy Vivienne. But it stopped him thinking about Carla. Or Leila. Or Robyn. All his lost girls.

Time to work if he was  going to eat today , to go to Leynebridge and share the battered ornaments of his knowledge at the Learning Repository. With  the kids. Damned kids.

He still couldn’t believe he’d fallen into his late mother’s vocation as an educator , albeit in modes she never anticipated in her Age of Ideology ( Marxist-Leninist)  But in the chaos of the immediate post-Rupture period,  it was his  best chance of keeping his head down. Someone had to deal with the thousands of young persons traumatised by their new-found powers and the bombardments of  a para-psychic  society.  Flash-back: the ghost of himself barely out of his teens, helping his mother instill some simple left-brain skills into moaning semi-children huddled in the shell of Westway Community School.  The least he could do. All he could do.  His encounters  in the alt-worlds, which still try to entrap him  in dream-frames, had given him some immunity against the Special Effects of the Rupture.  He had survived.  If only to talk it through.

Problem was that he was still talking it through ( or its voices were talking through him)  years later in the Borderlands, with nowhere to go but round and round. Except on his solitary shift at the “community”  radio station.  Leynebridge 930 AM. Which was about to close. It looked as if the community didn’t want his communications.

He pulled the plastic sheeting off his trike and checked the battery. Hopefully it might  last another season.  The motor whined fitfully. Then, with his bag of books over his shoulder and his greatcoat flapping in the drizzle,  he bumped down the grass-fissured track towards Leynebridge.

The route curved down through a copse, passed an abandoned pub, its picnic tables chopped up for firewood, and crossed sloping pasture lands where huddles of sheep ruminated. As he cycled, he noticed a faint tremor in his right temple.  The glistening hedgerows are signalling, alive with biomorphic energy.  Then he controlled the reflex - it was  surely  a slight breeze. Or  the animals simply stating their presence-in-itself.  The   dim murmur in his head merged with the hum of the motor as the trike gathered speed.

As he reached the fork between Leynebridge  and Old Hallows, he overtook a dented pick-up carrying a sagging pyramid of potatoes. The driver  was mouthing something, probably some mantra intended to keep him focussed on the road, but his fuel trailer full of methane was swinging everywhere,  so Lucas gave him a wide berth. He could see the turrets of the Leynebridge Tower  through the haze.

The road skirted a burying ground, another  mass grave from Rupture-times. Between the  yew trees and the crooked wooden markers, he noticed  three Harvesters and looked away quickly.  Hooded in grey they slowly moved their snaking detectors along  the overgrown paths. Refugees from the Urbs often assumed they were  using metal detectors to salvage precious metals - a saw blade, a claw hammer, a lock-knife. But Lucas knew their modus operandi. Even now, they still claimed an ancient  right to harvest souls; and on their vigils they claimed to see  a bluish orgone-flicker of astral  energy hovering over the grassy mounds, to be gathered as a life-feed in their secret ceremonies.  The Leynebridge Elders discouraged the micro-sect and it was unusual to see them after sun-rise.  Another sign that the precarious social order was collapsing?

The Qliphoth on Kindle

The Qliphoth  is now available  for Kindle e-read and Kindle apps    on this page at the Amazon UK site  and  here at the US Amazon site.  To quote the blurb: 


"Paul A Green's cult novel, first published by Libros Libertad in 2007, is now available on Kindle. It's a dazzling fusion of occult fantasy and speculative fiction that evokes a wild transmutation of everyday life. Magick collides with physics to create a fissile reality - a voyage into dangerous zones that veers between hilarity and horror...

Lucas, a bewildered student, seeks out his dad Nick, psychedelic-era wreck and self-proclaimed channel for "Qabalistic knowledge", now confined to a mental hospital alongside Wolfbane, a forgotten rock & roll icon. Pauline, his rationalist teacher mother dreads their encounter. 

Her nightmares seem realised when Nick escapes and Lucas disappears - to enter a parallel world, peopled by a rogues' gallery of bohemian riff-raff and sexy priestesses, whose operations - artistic, erotic, criminal or magickal - are scribed with hallucinatory intensity. Think Mervyn Peake meets William Burroughs - and add a dash of Aleister Crowley...

This genre-bender is worm-holed with dark wit and satire. The manias of an imploding alternate world are revealed as a modulation of our obsessions, here at the base of The Qabalistic Tree, amid the broken shells and wreckage - the Qliphoth - of our Creation. And sea-side resorts will never seem the same again..."

The Web as Akashic Record?

Odd how technology acts out the  dreams of magic  in weird parodic form.  A recurrent theme in estoteric  tradition is the notion of the Akashic Record,  in which all human thought and activity is imprinted  on the fluid matrix of the astral plane, to be accessed by the seer or prophet.  Now, of course, as long as the infrastructure of the web  survives so do all the intimacies of our  tweets, blogs, downloads, mailings and postings.

So the cyberhistorian  of future generations could - on some obscure impulse - rummage through the code  and learn that since my last post I've been  reading Robert Sheppard's When Bad Times made Good Poetry,   the (recently)  late Kenneth Grant's Cults of the Shadow,   and listening to Ornette Coleman, Ruth Brown, The Clovers and John Coltrane.  The BBC turned down the Graham Bond play  but I've been working on  a film treatment for Blackdog Productions, an independent  production company  in Lancashire.  The digital edition of The Qliphoth  for Kindle is progressing, with the aim of publication in mid-February.

Projects for 2011

I'm trying to blog more frequently this year.  Various projects on the horizon:  a Kindle edition  of  The Qliphoth is in the pipeline, as is A Beginner's Guide to Radial City,  a compilation of  short fiction and poetry texts, some published already in print or on-line, others new which form a multi-media collaboration with digital artist Jeremy Welsh.  Later this year Shearsman Books should be bringing out my Selected Poems  and I await a decision from  BBC Radio  about  The Magus of Klook's Kleek,  my play about occult jazz rocker Graham Bond.

Michael McClure at Ledbury Poetry Festival July 2

Michael McClure.  Along with Lawrence Ferlinghetti,  a survivor of the San Francisco Beat scene, who read at the Six Gallery reading in 1955, when Ginsberg unleashed "Howl" on the world.  As a teenager I read him in "Evergreen Review" where he logged  his peyote experiences, bewildering transmissions from archeopsychic time that hinted at the possibilities of a poetry beyond the compulsive ironic self-deprecation of the Philip Larkin acolytes.  And now he's in the cosy market town of Ledbury, in a small beige-draped hall next to the swimming pool, in front of a full house. The Brit poetry establishment, epitomised by the literary  journalist James Fenton, hate him. Which is a good reason to start liking him before he's even started.

He's 78,  supposedly losing sight in one eye.  But he's still leonine, an old grey lion in a straw hat and blue shirt, and as he mounts the stage he's in total command of the space, the microphone, the expectant and (slightly puzzled?) audience. He's reading solo tonight, no backing from ex-Doors keyboard man Ray Manzarek, and most of the work is from the new book Mysteriosos, which includes a dive into personal memoire ( a trip to India, intimate time with his wife) and the deep time of the human genome  ( "Double Moire for Francis Crick").  The title alludes, of course to Thelonius Monk, and McClure's syntax, its rhythmic shifts  and  broken lines that suddenly aggregate fresh meaning, recall Monk's jabbing chords and abrupt clusters of notes. But Mc Clure voices it  seductively, with the deep breath and tone control  of a master tenor  saxist.

McClure celebrates  the mysteries of time, memory and  biology. He talks us into the existential moment of encountering  one's self as a life-form among other life-forms - lions, elephants, mice, eagles - linked by shared molecules, proteins, subtle architectures of tissue and meat.  Such an awareness drives his rage with the destruction of the natural world and our alienation from it, as well as his disgust with human self-destruction. "SMALL WARS/ARE/THE ART FORM/OF PRESIDENTS".    Inevitably,  the transformations  of time and the enigma of death are recurrent themes.  The new book features several elegies for poets , including my favourite American surrealist  Philip Lamantia; and a recognition of his own mortality, delivered tonight with a wry smile: "Now at last I am here/loving only you with your lynx eyes/ and displaying myself/as a sensual/ and wrinkled/crisis."

At the Sonic Henge

Take off your shoes. Enter the blue gloom of the yurt, under its intricate spokes.  Lie down, carefully. Bodies sprawl everywhere across the rugs,  silver speaker cones around the periphery. Thirteen cones of power.

It's already beginning, in shamanic drones, slow overlay of pulses and chimes, interweaving sines, steady increment of the theta waves. Sink into the deepening mix, the sliding aeonics.

Listen in/out for  vocodings in the earthmind,  your under-beings bubbling in/out the earth, the spirit-tunnels, ancestral wah-wah rhythm codings.  Revolve as a psi-spiral, drill down and out...

Out there, in the light years,   some  belly dancers release their  spinal chakras, with faint whoops.  I'm as faint as smoke, drifting through the skull cave...

At the Witch Camp Day 2

Next morning I return to  the camp, wandering past the geodesic dome and the smoking camp fires. Children happily chase each other and everybody smiles.


Today  Runic John is holding a seidr workshop, a working of the Runes in the Nordic Shamanic tradition.   We drift towards the circle, a ring of around fifty people slowly  gathering around four stakes that mark the cardinal points of the compass.  John greets us, jovial, expansive, commanding the space with his staff and resonant Yorkshire tones. Vast and shaven-headed is this shaman in his fur waistcoat and heavy khaki kilt. He will teach us to intone the Runes ,  as we simultaneously shape our gestures and postures to their forms.  


To warm us up  on this bright chilly morning, we begin with exercises, running towards the centre "around the sacred sheep turd".  Then, with John's patient coaching, we attempt the singing.  We sing crouching, we sing with fists extended. Each rune has a specific function, and  the tone/bodyform shapes the ond  ( odic force? vril?) working through us,  aligning us with the  God-beings in Asgard and the Ancestors in Helheim.   Our shaman strides around the circumference as  he relates the  flow of ond and  the energy centres  to the physical body, envisaged as a sphere of white for the head, red for the heart, blue for the genitals, brown for the feet.  The dynamic rainbow  sphere embodies psychic integration, not static but a balance of forces.


I sense  parallels to  the Eastern notion of chakras, or the Qabalistic system  but this isn't a seminar for scholarly digressions , it's a workshop and you have to keep working at it to  control breath and coordinate movement. Eventually we sing  runes more or less as one,  runes of foresight, runes of healing. Nothing  spectacular happens.  Yet there's a curious clarity of mind afterwards, as in the Lesser Banishing Ritual  in the Western tradition.


And now it's as if the whole event has found its centre, and there's growing synergy in the  flow of people around this wide field of stubbly grass.

At the Witch Camp - Day One

Solstice rites. The tents of many colours. Dragon kite circles high  in the chill breeze. An igloo tent with a pentagram flag. A faint throb of reggae. We're on a high windy plateau   under rolling grey cloud overlooking Trawden.  Warwick at the barbecue by the gate makes me a complimentary bacon sarnie. Ade, the instigator,  pagan promoter, lean and brown in combat trousers, races around the site, meeting and greeting and  glad-handing, raising the vibe.

Others wander more slowly, faery ladies in diadems  and  cloaks patterned with sigils. A little girl in a crown. Is this Crowley's  "crowned and conquering child"?  Men and women bear  staffs and crooks. Several men display complex tattoos, celtic mazes or nordic runes scored deep across tanned flesh.   Some cluster around Runic John's Apothecary Tent. He may have mighty exotic  herbs, shamanic plants like the legendary ayawasca that briefly  opens  a crack in the universe, and I ought to ask him but I'm too timid and sensible, which might, of course, be my ultimate damnation, who knows...

I request , instead, a Tarot reading from Maggy, softly spoken, fifty-something.  She uses the Waite pack. "I don't like the Crowley one.  He had such an ego. All "do what thou wilt". He forgot "but harm none..."  She fans the cards across the rugs of her tent.  The Hierophant is prominent. I like the look of that. Apparently I'm carrying a heavy work load at present - but coping.  My past contains an inverted Sun, an internal tension to be resolved - but it's soluble. There could be synchronicities ticking away here. As if the bright little icons  on the cards illuminated some flickering tableau  glimpsed  for an instant  in her brain-forest.

Druids summon us to form a circle at the centre of the camp, where the four points of the compass are staked out in the rough grass.  They're opening the camp with a salute to the elements and the ancestors. The sky is clearing. Vapour trails from distant rumbling jets  form a wavering geometry. I'm seeking omens - a tangled pentagram?

Some wiccan women have gathered near  the speaker's  tent to hear a ribald gypsy tale from Jos, a local story teller and gatherer of folk-lore.  The light's failing and it's too dark to read under canvas inside, so they sit outside  on a circle of rickety chairs. They're very jolly, like bawdy ladies  on  a night out as depicted by Beryl Cooke.  The fable, of Indian origin, recounts how a  princess is pleasured by  both a subtle lover and a generously endowed husband. It is read with relish, amid knowing laughs and much swigging of wine. The sisterhood clap their hands  at this tale of female fulfilment.

Camp fires are being lit as the night falls.  But  I'm not equipped for camping and retreat, via taxi, to a B &B in Colne for  ensuite shower and full English breakfast....

The Quantum Brothers at the Hay Poetry Jam

We can now confirm  that the   Quantum Brother(s)  will be participating in the Hay Poetry Jamboree.

At 12.00  on Saturday June 5th in the Salem Chapel, Hay-on-Wye, Powys, UK,  Brother Paul will be making one of his rare re-appearances in the living flesh to  present a screening  of THE SLOW LEARNING  and our most recent project  A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO RADIAL CITY.

The entire programme runs for approximately fifty minutes and will be repeated later in the afternoon.

The Slow Learning: a video poem for TV, exploring  “the terminal zones of the urban education industry” and “the slow motion of knowledge that’s just about to go fast forward into overwind…”  Presented in various modes  (performance/installation/screening) at the ICA, South Bank Centre & National Review of Live Art.  Texts or audio relating to the work have been published in Poetics Journal, Toxic Poetry, Culture Court. First Offence & Negative Entropy. 

Radial City: an urban intermedia  travelogue, encompassing  video  & narrative. It  relates to  the activities of the Bureau, as well as  prose fiction like “Radial Citizens”, recounting the fate of  a Radial City poet, in BRAND magazine , "Shadowing the City" at The Recusant and "Escape from Radial City" forthcoming  at NthPosition.

The Quantum Brothers: a sporadic collaboration  between Paul A. Green (text, voice & audio) and Jeremy Welsh (video, graphics & audio)


"Now yer see 'em, now yer don't..."

Beneath the Pleasure Zones - another strand

William was in a hollow chamber. The dream narrator said so. Light flickered. Perhaps he emitted this flickering light. Sometimes the curving walls were impacted earth, and fungal stones densely inscribed with lines and whorls, ones and zeros, but when he looked more closely he couldn't read those codes; and filaments of wire, or dusty webbing, or tangled fibrous roots drifted across his face like insect limbs, and the walls became bony, slippery with secreted fluid, and white matter puffed into everything.

And there was a pillar at the centre, and she was tied to it, her flow of fine hair falling across bare back, pale buttocks, and she turned, smiling, and released her wrists, and took off her head with a single motion, and offered it, eyes gleaming -

The dream rarely went further these days, and William, sweating
in his sleeping bag on the lumpy mattress, had been saved by the
bleeping digits of the clock, and now as he stumped about in the
bathroom, was determined to take a grip on the physical world,
the worn plastic cistern handle, the mottled mirror displaying
his face.

William Crowe had never been tempted to change his face by some magical procedure or change his ID by playing games with the collapsing bureaucracy, even by hacking through networks and infiltrating his corrupted files. None of that would have convinced him, in the lower levels of his being. For the defensive languages encoded in that po-face had somehow irradiated his infrastructure. Crowe was hating the image of his balding head, as he urinated in the blear light.

But this was fuggy August in the outlands of London. Forget your forgettable face, nightmares about brains and sex. Go for bathroom gropes and pangs. A cratered tooth sang of corruption as cold bacterial water surged under dentine. Bowel shakes would wobble him later. He was always a worried organism.

Who had forwarded his CV to Pleasure Centres? Some smart head-
hunter? It was a diabolical liberty, as South Londoners used to say. He hadn't applied for a job for months. Did he really have to find all his certificates in time for this interview? They'd be on a database, somewhere in the silicate wrinkles of the Lobe, cyphers lost in hyperspace, his lost competences... Hurry up, William, stop dreaming...

His mother's imperious voice, over fifty years ago, squalling with
lungfuls of refined indignation - William! - down that little
hall, across the brown linoleum patterned by golden lozenges of
afternoon light... No, he never wanted to hurry off to singing
lessons, he wanted to sit and finish his Meccano aeroplane. He
dreaded most human interfaces, interviews, whatever, but if he
failed to attend his benefits would erase themselves, wouldn't
they?

He'd meant to scan the morning's multimedia, catch the 8.00 Lobe
update. Too much retrospection already. Always scanning for memories that weren't quite there. He shuffled across the bedsit/kitchen room, trying to ignore the skeins of mould on the walls, sidestepping those damned fluffed-up clumps of carpet. He rummaged through the identikit of his possessions.

The name on his old ID pass was the authentic Dr. William
Arthur Crowe. MSc.PhD. High security had to be exact in these
matters. Surely the guard at the Research Establishment used to
smirk as he checked William through the gate and raised the boom
to admit the Rover to the reserved parking place. William may
have been a top-drawer boffin back then. But he had this moony
loonface which once made a girl at a sixth-form dance giggle into
her handkerchief. He blamed his mother back then.

He tried the Lobe Newsnet again as he munched and slurped. Toast,
coffee and a big shot of Dawn Surprise, the budget-priced North Korean vodka. Breakfast of champions. He had to learn which were the morning's relatively safe routes into the West End sector. To the Head Offices of Pleasure Centres plc. His old monitor blipped and flickered, the
mouse was grease-encrusted, but there was something happening...

The screen filled with the quivering monochrome image of a
monitor. This wasn't the Newsnet logo. And on this screen-within-
a-screen William could see two identical grey faces, Caucasian
male, clean-shaven, forty-plus. Sober square-headed men in suits
and ties,anyway. Solid no-nonsense men, with shiny well-parted
hair. Like old 1950s publicity photos of bandleaders, movie gangsters, radio announcers. Each stared formally out of a flickering oval halo. Their graphite-coloured lips moved jerkily in unison.

Another viral infestation by those damned cyber-fibre pirates! He
hadn't time to sort it out. When he had that flatlet in North London
it was just the same, except he kept getting endless loops
of a sermon from the Westminster Mosque when all he sought was a
little diversion on the Fast Fun Action Line. No wonder the poor and/or technically disadvantaged gave up altogether on the cybernautic complexities of accessing the Lobe and still preferred to totally immerse themselves at their neighbourhood Pleasure Centre. It used the Lobe but it was a user-friendly interface, a smiley face. "You can get Virtually anything you want at Pleasure Centres." Corny, but it worked. Perhaps Pleasure Centres really had work for an old cornball prof like him. But he had to stop getting lost in this somnambulistic drift, and get on with it.

He turned away, to delve for his CV; and there, under a
precious, irreplacable back issue of Scientific American, was the last uncrumpled copy.

Approaching seventy, William was still attempting to rescript his life. But the standard version, the bit he couldn't get out of his head, always went like this: he was born in Tooting, South London. An end-of-terrace - but featuring leaded panes, and a privet hedge, in Saunders Road. The only son of Norah and Lionel. His sister Charlotte had somehow died in The War, she wasn't discussed. Lionel was a clerk for London Transport. The Underground, safe as houses, everybody said so. Despite that bomb down the lift shaft at Clapham South. Thin Norah had post-war nerves, couldn't stand the noise of machines, while sour Aunt Doris lurked in the spare bedroom. Everyone listened to the wireless. No-one had any spare change. But Uncle Doug round the corner had a motor-cycle and sidecar.

He ate horrible cod-liver-oil pills in jam at St. Cosmo's Primary
and kids stole his macintosh, then broke his Coronation Mug. But he pulled himself together, mastered long-division, mental arithmetic, decimals, fractions. "Quite the little professor, aren't we?" coo'd Mrs. Tulse, nervously, as he started playing with algebra two years before taking the eleven-plus.

That was probably the year Uncle Doug took him to see the
bouncing bomb in The Dam Busters , maybe the year he saw British
Gaumont newsreels of mushrooming fireballs in the Maralinga
outback, and stared for hours at the battered cone of a V2 rocket-motor in the War Museum at Lambeth. SCIENTISTS WARN , said all the papers. ATOM MEN'S DEADLY SECRETS. He realised big sums created powerfully corrective spells. They were his equalisers, they evoked a stunning revenge on the boring, bullying world.

That's what he needed right now. A triumphal bloody scenario, for
a change. It's all he deserved. A dose of the right destiny, for once. To escape this deep gravity-well, with all its litter and dirty vests. He could not find clean socks. This biopic narration in his head would not stop. It was consuming time, his real-time life. He couldn't help it. He'd become a mechanical dreamer.

Yes, William had enjoyed his technicolour dream, long ago, on the
night before his eleven-plus exam. He was in the UK Secret Space Rocket. The cramped interior of the domed cabin was painted pastel green, walled with panels of round dials, racks of bakelite toggle switches, calibrated pointers, rows of buttons and solid well-machined levers, like the gearshift on Uncle Doug's Ariel Square Four. Secret formulae flashed across the tele-data screen of the electro-computer as he fed in the punched cards. Purple and amber warning lights glowed softly. With rising excitement, using his entire body weight, he'd pressed the central red switch on the Command Pedestal. Then smoke had filled the cabin of the UK Rocket, he could smell gunpowder and hot metal. The solid-fuel rockets were firing in clusters. This was his finest hour. This rocket would be his burning bush. He was about to ascend vertically into the future! And between his wet legs he felt the swelling curvature of the British Bomb...

At grammar school William's dreams had gone totally nuclear
- he was going to control British Atoms for World Peace, he planned to design the first UK atomic space rocket, he was going to turn the launch key and see a finned cylinder rise from Woomera on a pyramid of fire.

For he knew, he damned well knew Maths and Physics had created
his sanity at the Grammar School, had given him a secret enfolded space, a realm of hidden dimensions where he could retreat from the Teddy Boy Years and the Big Beat Boom. Their dirty menace throbbed distantly, on the far side of a glassy wall, the steamed-up windows of coffee bars, youth clubs with girls laughing dangerously.

He'd paid a passing tribute to his youth by trying out some hobbies - archeology, home electronics - but all that really mattered was earning the stingy approval of Mr. Lawson, Head of Physics - who'd actually smiled when he won the Scholarship to read Maths. He was a little too early for the permissive society but no matter, there was work to be done, so he got a Double First. And then there was that ground-breaking doctoral dissertation on artificial intelligence. Once upon a time,he'd been a brilliant flash. It said so, right here on the CV.

No wonder the Ministry of Defence had head-hunted him; and
tasked him to the Establishment. To work on our own truly British warheads. Admittedly he was working most of the time with computers, which were rapidly becoming his specialism, and there were no all-British space battleships to design, for even the Blue Streak missile had long been cancelled. But those years were still his glory days. He'd show those idiots on the Pleasure Centres panel - or as much as the Official Secrets Act would allow. Whatever had happened he was still a loyal Servant of the Crown. A guardian of the Heritage.

Sadly he'd arrived too late to serve Blue Danube and Red Beard,
those mighty fifteen-foot one-megaton monsters. He had missed the
dawn splendours of Yellow Sun and Orange Herald. But he contributed to key projects - the 950 MC, the Chevaline warhead modernisation programme, the A 277 free-fall weapon, and the elaborate preparations for Trident- and then he had a little department of his own, surely, until...

Until the Blackout. He'd lost his mathematical cutting edge after
the Blackout and all those tranquillisers and the ECT and Elaine walking out all over him in her scruffy boots before walking out with the damned kid. But Personnel were very kind (at least he thought so then) and they'd taken off him the serious hard stuff, to fool about with "tele-presence" gimmicks for remote-control weapons assembly and servicing. For a while, anyway.

There's such a bloody amnesiac haze shrouding that whole
episode. How the hell could he gloss it over with Pleasure Centres? That sneak Denis Weekes alleged he was incompetent, too much of a maverick generalist, who could no longer cope with focussing on the specifics of his job. But he was convinced that his demotion - no, redeployment - might have occurred because of his involvement in something else, some other
project under the Establishment umbrella, something big. Which he
couldn't deliver.

That was the worst of it. He couldn't deliver it, and now he wasn't clear what it was. His ROM had been sabotaged, his hard drive had been buried under a ton of shit. Electro-convulsive-therapy, for God's sake. Across his precious lobes. And amenotrophylene, they must have given him some of that, he's certain of it. Sleepy-juice for double-agents, to make them dozy. When he'd only been a hyper-alert patriot, playing his
long game for Britain. No wonder his ancient night brain was deeply fucked, no wonder he needed these big shots of Korean vodka.

But as he recovered from the Blackout, he found the whole country was buggered up by this accursed Event, declining into terminal
lunacy and New Age psycho-burble. Nobody could give him a coherent account of how or why. There was a lot of rhetoric about incursions from an alternate reality but nobody seemed to able to do the maths properly and prove it.

Now Christian and Islamic fundamentalist militia battled with the Panic Police for control of the inner cities, while that New Age brain-fungus,fed and watered by hallucinogens, spread throughout the countryside. After the Blackout Elaine tripped off to some strange neo-pagan community at Lethbridge on the Anglo-Welsh Borderlands. They’d only met once since, after Louise died. Marriage to Elaine had been a cold war from the start, and the Blackout plus the Event not long afterwards provided good opportunities to divorce him. Then it was downhill all the way to eventual redundancy.

For the end of the world came, when suddenly we couldn't even
afford our miracle bomb, when everything was cut, and cancelled,
and decommissioned, and nothing and nobody worked properly any more and the redundancy notices went out for everybody, even creeps like Denis Weekes, and now the grass was growing around the guard-huts and the barbed-wire was corroding in the drizzle...

No, stress the good times in the interview. Pure work. Sixteen
hours on a peak day. Balls to the rest of the silly sixties and seventies and eighties and their lazing and prancing, their obsession with the appearances of mere being, hazy crazy clothes and music. So he'd worn Aertex shirts and Hush Puppies and practical plastic Pakamaks all the way. So bloody what...

Anyway, so many of those public-school radicals had become street-walking bundles of rag and bone. Everyone looked as if they wore charity-shop rejects these days. Some young people even aped his style of haircut. At least he had decent old brogues for his interview. Unlike most people under thirty he could handle the physics and maths behind the computing? At least he'd burnt out with real flair, hehe hehe. He really ought to make up his mind to go.

Unlike some of his colleagues - Ebdon, O'Malley, Weekes - who
sold their talents (and probably nuclear materials) to the Caliphate or the Pacific Rim, William was a true patriot. So they could call him cranky, so there was this problem with his CV and of course, Dr Crowe had to understand that he was too old to find a niche in what little remained of UK industry. But surely the nation needed some glittering fragment of his shattered expertise. He glanced at a week-old business news print-out of The Times:

Pleasure Centres is Britain's only home-grown Virtual Reality
group, and one of its few remaining high-tech hopes. As our environment becomes increasingly threatened by post-Event malaise, overpopulation, crime and pollution there's a world wide demand for cheap interactive fantasy systems.

©Paul A Green 2010 - usual Creative Commons terms apply

Responses to Ken Edwards on Speculative Fiction - re G.K Chesterton

Ken Edwards, writer & publisher on Reality Street, has launched a personal probe into the nature of the fantastic in fiction, based around case-studies of eight novels.

I'm intrigued as I've read four of the books he's chosen and this project seems to parallel some of my own concerns in writing a sequel to The Qliphoth. Ken's investigation encompasses linguistic and structural experiment in non-naturalistic fiction, explores distinctions ( valid or otherwise) between "genre" and literary" fictions and their relation to book marketing, and considers the role of speculation & fantasy in the novel.

Before discussing Ken's critique of G.K Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday , some general and perhaps obvious reflections. It could be argued that all fiction is sui generis "fantastic" in the process of composition insofar it involves what the philosopher/psychologist Julian Jaynes called "narratisation", the conscious construction of an internalised world which is not consensual reality, and which , being based in language, depends on analogy & metaphor.

The creator of this fantasy identifies him/herself with persons, often fragmentarily envisaged, who may or may not have existed, in partially envisaged space-time locations. From this POV, all fiction is a desperate attempt at astral projection, wherein the author mingles with phantasms of the half-living. Presumably Hilary Mantel at some point "imagined herself" to be Thomas Cromwell in the historical novel Wolf Hall. Certainly in Beyond Black , her fine novel about the sub-culture of spiritualism, she created the internal world of a medium whose "voices" may be fabulated but might also relate to some of kind of objective reality - a metaphor in itself for the creative process?

Even in the French nouveau roman, in Alain Robber-Grillet's clinical and meticulously de-humanised description of a room or a piece of furniture, there is a conscious act of fabrication. The story-teller makes it all up "in order to tell the truth", according to Jean Cocteau. The fab novelist tells big fibs. (And Fibber is the name of my imaginary cat - but that's another story...)

I first read The Man Who Was Thursday as a schoolboy. As I've previously discussed back- channel with Ken, G. K Chesterton was respected by some members of my family as a Catholic intellectual who could indulge in wild flights of fancy and verbal pyrotechnics, but was safely rooted in the orthodoxies of Rome, a romantic whose romances who were firmly contained within the structures and strictures of Thomist scholasticism. (My god-father Percy Fitzsimons, a somewhat unreliable narrator, according to my mother, even hinted mysteriously that he'd "had a pint with GKC" - just as he'd allegedly "given crucial advice to Admiral Jellicoe at the Battle of Jutland..." ).

Ken's account of the narrative, in which the detective-poet Syme outwits the anarchist-poet Gregory to infiltrate a secret anarchist order whose members are named after the days of the week, is lucid and comprehensive. He makes the point that anarchist bombings and assassinations had already occurred in European cities during the 1890s, and refers, as one might expect, to Conrad's The Secret Agent as an important fictional treatment of this new and disturbing phenomenon. And we'd perhaps agree that Chesterton's pre-conversion background as a nineties aesthete, who'd studied at the Slade and was aware of the darker currents of aestheticism, probably coloured his vivid portrayal of the Saffron Park bohemian community where Syme and Gregory first meet.

Aesthetes were certainly attracted to explosions. In 1892 the French literary critic Laurent Tailhade enthused about the bombing of the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. "What do a few lives matter - si le geste est beau..." Two years later le beau geste cost him his eyesight, when a bomb went off in the restaurant where he was dining. The anarchism that Syme is tasked to investigate seems closer to the total nihilism endorsed by Russians like Nechaev , dedicated to ruthless destruction, than the social agendas of nineteenth century British libertarian movements, although a London anarchist pamphlet had, in 1894, called for " smashing windows and robbing misers, counterfeit coining and smuggling!" There is a certain pre-echo of our current sentiments about the bankers...

The anarchism that menaces Syme/Chesterton is as much metaphysical as socio-economic . It is Chaos, the void, the abyss. At one level, the debate between Syme and Gregory could be read as a mere poetry war, between the classic formalist and the organic romantic. Gregory insists: "The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere commonbodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."

But for Syme, causality and structure not only underpin art, but give shape, meaning and empowerment to our experience: "... every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,' it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam."

As the narrative unfolds and Symes assumes Gregory's role as "Thursday" on the anarchist council of seven, his sense of 'normality' is increasingly subverted. He is disoriented by the nightmarish aura of the conspirators - Monday's distorted smile, Saturday's blank smoked glasses, the senile decay of Friday, and above all, the sheer bulk of the president, Sunday. " As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large..."

The story develops, as Ken explicates, via a series of reversals and paradoxes. All the anarchists eventually suspect each other of being police agents and try to out-plot and pursue each other - to learn that they are all, indeed, policemen. Syme's sense of identity and ontological security is is further undermined. If all the criminals are cops, then all the saints might be sinners. Syme clings to the lantern that symbolises his Christian faith but after the absurdity of their farcical encounters, all value judgements are suspect.

When Syme and his colleagues finally confront Sunday, he feels "it's six men going to ask one man what they mean.." And when they challenge him about his identity Sunday's answers are cryptic, metaphysical, even mystical. He is an entity who has been sought "since the beginning of time", but he is certainly not the respectable patriarchal supreme being of the Roman Catholic sixpenny Catechism. Chesterton's best-known defence of Catholicism was to be called Orthodoxy but here his theology seems wildly unorthodox, more Gnostic than Catholic. To enrich the ambiguity, Sunday reveals he was also the man in the dark room who recruited them as police agents.

In pursuit of Sunday, who escapes on a hi-jacked elephant and in a balloon (the deity as a cosmic merry prankster), the detectives speculate about his identity - Syme even compares him to Pan, that avatar of fin-de-siecle Crowleyanity. The final scenes, a curious dream-like party-cum-pageant in Sunday's garden, in which they're dressed in costumes symbolising the days of creation, heightens the Christian overtones but there's no easy allegorising - the anarchist and the lawman are interdependent. And Syme's last encounter is profoundly enigmatic:

"The great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had

made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, "Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?"

Writing fantasy has often been described as a strategy to explore and confront our fears. GKC, like that other aesthete Catholic convert Montague Summers, had perhaps glimpsed the darker side of the fin-de-siecle and the shadow aspects of himself. Unlike Summers, who took refuge in antiquarian demonology, GKC made an imaginative foray into the unknown.

Solstice Signs & Sounds

Time to re-awaken the blogman from his sloth and reflect on recent reading/viewing/listening as prologomena to the slog of the writing. Every day I promise to sing the blues of the aeon, with out fail. Fat chance but it's worth a shot.

A mellow Christmas with Cathy & James, some good red wine, great food and various gifts, including a biography of Ithell Colquohoun, occultist & surrealist painter.

As an assemblage of information about this mysterious woman, it's very interesting although it doesn't work so well as a narrative. Ithell's struggles in the internal battles of British surrealism are documented, and there's some coverage of the occult sub-culture in the UK in the 1950s. She wrote a biography of Golden Dawn founder McGregor Mathers, a figure who has always intrigued me.

I acquired Ken Edward's Songbook. Ken is a verbal tonmeister of the postmod loonytune weltkunstschaft and has written an especially good evocation of the suburban railway mysteries plus praise songs for Coltrane and a tribute to Bill Griffiths.

I've also read the final draft of Arlene De Winter's terrific fantasy novel the Golden Stair. Watch the skies and spaces for this one...

Sounds - Sun Ra's Antique Blacks. Those squalling saxes and Mister Ra's saturnine synth always take me to the bridge on Jupiter. I took a deep breath, got out the alto for the first time in weeks and blew a muffled homage.

Film: Half of 81/2 , disrupted by social duties but still one of my isolation ward movies plus Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising which keys into a re-reading of Crowley's Vision & the Voice and the enigma of the Enochian invocations.

Resolution: to complete the Great Work...

Auto Mode

My obsolete levers are linked to ferrous devices in the mornings. Sorry about the prolixity of hate-plurals. A dissolving picture of an enclosure (?) haunts with its thin soundtrack. Fashionistas walked all over us this morning, hitting us with their tubes of pink light. A symbol of love is that it grows hairier as the deepest corner is reached, you lean sideways to evade the laughter-bucket. A continuous future can only be assured by the licentious organism that sold us. That frat -pack! Years climbing up and down fluorescent funnels of tunnels and the present tense is breaking up, as genders are added up and the black snow fills the bottom of my mouth.

Hence, a complete restoration of this text isn't recommended

Intersection

crossed wires across those roads

sparkle and drone

I/you was lurching

under a piggybacking god

running out of optional selves

as that eco-necromicon got packed in

causes infantile tantrics and barfing

for gassy hot futures

only thousands of days to go

and I'm gone gone gone

A Work in Progress

I've been re-reading Peter Carroll's Liber Kaos and some of his related writings on Chaos Magick. Paradoxically some aspects of the Work now fall into place. His analysis of cyclical cultural interplay between Transcendalists, Materialists and Magicians parallels the cultural conflicts that have emerged in the rough draft. These could be given locales, contested territories. And three key characters would seem to embody these paradigms, or would be arguing about them internally. And actions rise out of the void of causality as they look for the lost plot. The "Shadow time" of probability and its relation to ordinary " pseudo time" is another useful concept. Not for nothing was old Master Therion called "The King of the Shadow Realms..." The same para-physics of "Probability waves" surface in the Radial City stories - see:

http://www.brandliterarymagazine.co.uk/page.php?ed=05&title=Paul%20Green&name=07

Odd how one gropes towards the same thing from different directions.

A Work in Stasis

For a long time I have been bumbling around with another novel, which keeps falling apart as soon I look at it. Writer's cramp would at least help me to get a grip on the disintegrating fragments.

It's a near-future dystopian frayed yarn but somehow it wants to move beyond surreal gooning and gurning in the ruins of the West.

There's a strand about an elderly unemployed nuclear weapons designer looking for a new life in a Britain that is becoming rapidly post-industrialised and polarised around various fundamentalisms .

There's another strand set in a town on the Anglo-Welsh borders(hey, hey!) where an alternative neo-pagan culture is evolving. But it's fragile, fraught with internal dissent.

There's a techno strand, entangled around a corporation that creates virtual reality environments as escape zones for an increasingly disturbed urban populace. Cyber-entities may emerge from the digital soup...

And I've tried adding yet another sticky strand, drawn from the entrails of my first novel The Qliphoth. This revisits my protagonist Lucas a decade or two on, when the trans-dimensional energies released at the end of the first book have permeated daily existence, heightening its unpredictable & apocalyptic quality.

Somewhere there's a pattern from which a structure will develop , but I suspect it will have little to do with"what the characters want", as the plot-gurus keep reminding us. Their drives will become apparent, on the road, as it were. I have a feeling some of them may become retro-drives, into a kind of hyper-flashback.

Last week on a random impulse I bought a copy of the original "Scroll" version of Kerouac's On The Road, the first draft he wrote in three weeks on a long continuous roll of paper, which he glued together and fed through his typewriter. The myth of course, is that the whole book was conceived in three weeks, whereas he already had numerous discarded false starts, fragments and years of notebooks; and the Scroll mss was subsequently heavily revised and re-drafted. Yet the Scroll gave him the direction and focus he needed, to keep watching that narrow paper moving in front of him like the white line on the middle of the highway. The man was on a roll...

So that's what I need - a Holy Rolling Scroll. And a voice in my flaky ears...

Interviewed by Arlene on Winterspells -the thoughts that got away...

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Seattle writer & occultist Arlene De Winter, who generously gave me audio blog-space to discuss the genesis of the play Babalon and the various occult/paranormal themes that keep surfacing in my work. Arlene is a good listener (as well as a wise woman ) so I spoke freely for over an hour about the mysteries of the Babalon Working, conspiracy theories about the death of Jack Parsons, the influence of Thelema and so on - with the odd digression into the magickal pataphysics of my novel The Qliphoth

The red wine was flowing and the thoughts were flying or at least flipping. The sub-text of the uttering might have been something like this:

We live, in quantal blips, amid the multiverses, constantly generating alt.models of ourselves, and perhaps merging/mutating with entities whose activities are leaked into this reality-level via dreamfeed, vision-mixing and the various rites and writs for exploring the luminous wound of expanding consciousness.

To cope with all this, not to mention the mess of materiality, that mutha of means, Uncle Aleister said you and I need " the method of science, the aim of religion".

But the polyverse is perverse and elusive ( polymorphous as love) , incessantly bifurcating into duality, as expressed in the split-screen experiment.

The source of all being, the ontological ground-zero, is random flux-ups, a magickal manifestation...

The Writing Workshop Debate

The British & Irish Poets List began a debate on the function of writing workshops, creative writing MFAs etc. I found myself rewriting my experience at UBC 68-70:

I'm going to crawl out from under my philosopher's stone and add my tangle to the thread. "Workshops Saved My Life!" Well, maybe not, but my stint onthe Creative Writing MA at the U of British Columbia ( 68-70) certainly changed it.

It got me out of the UK academy (by chance more than design) and plonked me into a new environment, gave me time to write, plus a tiny pittance and afocus on the actuality of writing. "I'm gonna thrash your Oxonian ass," said Prof J Michael Yates, my supervisor, "if you don't buy a fucking TYPEWRITER!" I suppose that was an early form of career development.

There were furious debates between West Coast Neo-Surrealists ( my faction back then), Regional Ruralists, Black Mountaineers, and Concretists. There was a seminar when I presented a poem intended as a vatic probe into deep space-time, where I ended up howling with hysterical laughter along with the rest of the room. There was a translation workshop where I made 123 mistakes in ten pages of a text by Andre Breton. There was the prompting to try new forms of fabulating and signifying. There was a campus radio station where Igot to play with tape recorders. There was a group script-writing project that spawned a rhythm and blues show, which actually made me a living on real radio for a while. There were marathon readings - to full auditoria - and much partying (with the occasional fight) And of course, there were the workshops, weekly psychodramas, a kind of cerebral battle of the bands.

Energy levels were high.

In retrospect, the ritual of the workshop was less important than the fact that writing was meant to be central to one's existence and that people actually read it and argued about it. One-to-one sessions were more useful, especially with one tutor's more reflective and laid-back explorations." I enjoy our talks, Paul. But I'm not sure if you were supposed to be my student?" Assessment was flexible. I was once assessed on Form in the Novel in the Faculty Club, orally, over several large whiskies.

It was, of course, a time of cultural upheaval and the Dept was relatively new and raw, in relatively uncharted territory. Iowa had been running for some years but there was nothing like this in the UK.

There were odd paradoxes. When I interviewed Jackson McLow for local radio (can you imagine interviewing him for local radio now in the UK?) it was under the aegis of Warren Tallman in the English Dept, which had an uneasy relationship with Creative Writing and its allegedly European tendencies, fostered by Yates. I think the usual campus politics were at work.

So what did it all mean? What became of us all? One of my contemporaries stayed on and rose thru the ranks to become Head of Dept and Poet Laureate of Vancouver. A couple of others got teaching posts in other universities. One guy became a successful radio producer. Another was last heard of pushing a miracle diet food. One chap attempted to murder his wife. One guy

went to jail in a dope bust, came out and wrote a successful memoir and relaunched a journalistic career. Yates quit academia altogether and worked as a prison guard for a few years ( not in the same joint) He wrote a memoir too. I blundered back to the UK and foolishly stuck my head in the jaws of the further education system.

UBC certainly helped me to to teach myself. But there are no gurus, no magic( or even magick) shortcuts. You just have to lurch onwards and sideways.

As I face the start of a new academic year, I can't help comparing my lifeexperience at UBC forty years ago with the kind of micro-managed bean-collecting that now represses teachers in UK further ( and sadly higher) education. Brother Peter Philpott, a great worker in the mill of avant-poetics, puts it well: the utterly reductive target-culture which dominates all aspects of British education, and distorts everything within education.

Next week I have to record my "continuing professional development" for the Institute For Learning which monitors "good practice" in teaching and learning. I can't help wondering if it isn't yet another tool of surveillance and control...

To Evoke Pharaoh Sanders

Thothman calls the Pharoah

(aetheric timewarping in memoriam)

So the Pharoah screams forward through time

howling and hauling my ass backwards

New York August '68 242 East Third Street Alphabet City

where the scribe was inscribed in his depths

after the yellow cab over potholes, garbage bin, grilled door,

goggling on the blink in the blackness of Slug's Saloon

beaking a pale nose through fuming blackness

big Afro-Sheen dashiki brothers guarding the bar

check out my white threads, my queasy minder

(attorney bro-in-mob-law from Tudor City)

who expected Dixie jazz in hats

not the bullroarer tenor raising funk demons

blazing pyramid of percussion avalanche piano

a long yodel mastering the universe

Reviving the Blog

The Archives have been abandoned for over a year. One aim of the blog - to promote The Qliphoth - has faltered , as the book now seems doomed to float into the infinite void of history i.e. sales have been on the nano side... Other projects have manifested directly on-line or in print elsewhere, so the notion of using the blog as a kind of testbed for new work hasn't been followed through.

Maybe there's been a half-hidden reluctance to commit ideas and experience to the web. In the privacy of the scribbly notebook, the squiggly secrets and the wavering sigils operate in a protected zone. But now maybe it's time to get out a bit and air some of this material, in real-time, not horde it like a fat green dragon on a heap of fool's gold...