MATERIALIST DOT NET

I live much like a hermit these days. pleasant, simple, undisturbed. My flat is a mountainside cave, dug in the side of my apartment block.

most days I see very few people, speak to even less. sometimes none. from the back of the queue, I commune with the baristas at nero in a language of nods, fingers raised to indicate shots: by the time I get to the end of the queue, my coffee is ready. occcasional pleasantries are exchanged.

for the moment my work entails only writing, an activity that boils down to a lot of time spent sitting around coffee-shops with a frown, tinkering with sentences, broken by the odd burst of clarity and focus. chiefly I subsist on a diet of fruit, bread and cheese; occasionally, some fish. I meditate, not as much as I could but enough. on the side I build my strange little devices and make links, connections, figure out... things. new things.

for the time being at least, I am content.

sometimes I catch myself in the act and laugh, gently chiding. like this morning: I read a passage from swedenborg that crystallized, clear as a drop of rain, something I had understood only dimly before. with an intangible rush of air, a great leaden weight dropped from my limbs, all at once, and I could move freely.

such things are quite silly. all the while however, in the dusty corners and folded wrinkles of my own time, things move about, in the dark, slowly changing shape. not bothering to inspect myself too closely, I surprise myself: my responses, my concerns, the questions that preoccupy me.

the dark dreams fit the pattern of this hermitage, as do the unpredictable euphorias; the times when I wander up the cobblestoned street from the river and notice, with a sudden laugh, that the world is illuminated, that an unseen multitude walks with me, behind me, sharing the spring of my step.

dark have been my dreams of late.

two nights ago there was a strange gyrating carnival suspended from a ceiling, with a merry-go-round of fossilized elves. I popped a japanese man's kidneys with my bare hands. or rather I failed to do so, several times, and cracked his ribs instead. he pleaded for mercy - or skill, rather - and coughed blood on me.

last night, I dreamt of three men roaming the highways, looking for traffic victims. when they found one, they descended from their car and tore the victim apart with their hands, feasting on the slick bloodied organs. when they finished, they'd wipe their mouths with their sleeves and take the remains home to build golems. grisly, potlatch things, faces bound with tendons and raw muscle.

they're not nightmares, i don't wake up scared - but I don't wake up rested either. mostly they're unpleasant for being so damn vivid - I recollect the blood on the japanese man's wispy moustache, the wet crunchy textures of the feast. not sure whether they might mean anything, but they coincide with a couple of days' worth of anomie. I'm restless, my head hurts, my thoughts are sluggish and I can't focus to save my life. unsure what to do about this. probably, first priority should be to finish this damned article.

went to the friendly neighbourhood money-machine this morning, asked for 30£ and got an extra 20£ wrapped up around the other two notes. never happened to me before, I was a bit surprised.

giving out free money 'd contravene the most elemental interests behind cash machine construction. as a design principle, it ought to be safeguarded against more than accidental decapitation, or passing mixomatosis to customer babies. i imagine the heads of medieval cash-machine designers rolling over this sort of thing.

after my recent spree, i just gave thanks and chalked it up to newton's third law of motion.

at first sight, I find the whole indigo child phenomenon hilarious. their characteristics (scroll down) read like a sad little ten-step psychiatrical diagnostic for badly wired children and failed parenting. you can feel the pulse of desperation lodged between the bulletpoints - the strained, wish-fulfilling interpretations.

a sample, from a press article. Jake, an indigo child, "had trouble grasping the concept that he was not in charge. "He has to be told," Jake's mother says. "He doesn't think he needs permission." Spence noticed a similar idiosyncrasy in her granddaughter. "You have to coax her to do her homework," she says." non-standard human behaviour. fo sho.

children are opaque, I'm amazed there isn't an oracular discipline dedicated to their interpretation. given the option, of course you'd rather believe the wilful and incomprehensible fruit of your loins was a highly evolved super-being than a psychosocial failure. who wouldn't. for myself, as a fledgling dissipative structure I read too much x-men. of course I'm attracted to the idea of exotic evolutionary leaps, enhanced genotypes, pint-sized emissaries from a higher vibrational frequency. homo superior? yes please. that said, the indigo future looks like it'd be rather a tad self-centered and annoying.

the concept interpellates a latent megalomania of parenting, brings it out of the closet. the wish for a special super-child, to bask in its reflected glory. but it also interpellates the child, its urge to be recognized as special. hell, apparently the indigos started being born in the late 1970s. in a corner of my mind, my own urge for messianic (self-)identification stirs. I could be a magical child too! no wonder the kids roll with it.

creepy and silly more or less in a 1:2 ratio, but then again... the creepiness does need to be contextualized, weighed against the pharmaco-capitalist takeover of childhood. the proliferation of drugs, the treatments and diagnoses, the normative medicalization of difference. vorsprung durch technik, we can build your child better. would I rather spend my childhood doped up on ritalin in the care of pastoral experts, or being treated as spiritual royalty by befuddled but well-meaning New-Ager parents? between two evils, I know which one I would pick.

so, since I started messing around with participant-observing orgonite before Christmas, I have gifted the following sites and people:

parents' greenhouse. conical hhg, courtesy of orgonise africa. grandmother's house. ditto. the sea just off my parents' pier. midnight new year's eve, ditto. ex's flat. ditto.

a friend, canadian pixie. small pyramid, courtesy of sensei. my mother's car. medium tb, ditto.

my ex-ex. medium coil-based hhg, courtesy of quebec orgone. wolfson college. a glorious mission, really should be written up. high-powered hhg, ditto.

I've also disseminated a small number of personal pendants, courtesy of carol croft. to mother, ex's mother and a liaison [damn, I really need to start working out nicknames for people if I'm going to start writing about them again...].

as far as my own production goes, i'm still getting my head around the casting process and the devices I've come up with still seem somewhat flawed - though they are improving. I have however managed to gift the river durham, with two medium hhgs constructed by yours truly, and a little by-way off the river with ditto, two medium hhgs.

today I built two minor devices. one of them a conventional hhg-like tower, aluminium shavings and copper, three single-terminated crystals and an amethyst. the other one however was a variant, using 4 single-terminated crystals, a chunk of rose-quartz and actual coins (about £2 worth of coppers and small silver: euro, sterling and romanian). the device came out really dense, heavy in the hand - and rather than the usual variations of amber, it was fudge-white and opaque, with veneers of oxidized green embedded in a pale flesh-coloured mass, tinted pink and ochre. I quite like it, though the coins were too close to the surface and the resin peeled off - to cover up the holes, I immersed it in a second pour this morning. the last time I checked, the outer layer was settling in the more usual semi-translucent amber. expert opinion says coins are worthless - too large, apparently - but I wanted to try it out.

I'm quite intrigued by the chemical aspects of the casting - the factors that seem to affect the catalytic reaction and how they do so. in this case, I think the mass and texture may have resulted from a combination of oscillating temperature, a residue of water in the form and high atmospheric humidity: I set it on the terrace overnight, and it started snowing. the unusual materials may also have interfered with the reaction, some metals seem to do that - I had a similar strangely-textured outcome a few weeks ago, when I tried to use a heavy steel coil from a bargain-bin egg-cooker. clearly, I need to use actual coil wire.

this morning I was wondering whether it might be time to escalate operations from the personal, and start targetting actual 'DOR emitters' in the area. all in the name of participant observation, of course. of course. a couple of minutes' worth of browsing revealed this little gem of governmental transparency. pure perfection: big brother tells me there's a 22m antenna, operated by 3, just opposite my flat.

hmmm now. wonder where I should start.

there are people out there that nothing ever happens to.

not because their lives are uneventful, not at all. rather, they remain untouched by things because in a strange sense they are not themselves. never themselves. their core is hollow, or it has been hollowed. it may have been lost, or brutalized, or denied. who knows. either way, at a deep and unfathomable level, they are simply not there. not in the way that one naturally assumes.

I no longer think this is a permanent condition. in time, the soul reaches out, the grass greens. but in the meantime, everything that happens happens on the surface, and is assimilated instantly into a play of existing surface structures. they are all persona, but not in any simple, or obvious, or transparent way. their personalities may be magnificent. complex and alluring works of art, charming, witty, charismatic, potent. magnetic - and yet somewhere, beyond the fire and the light, there is an empty plain. the pain of an unimaginable absence, a void that the untrained eye simply doesn't recognize, nor the mind suspect. it may be that experience is the only guide to this.

away from their centre these people become dangerous. not by intention, by instinct. in their loneliness and disconnection they become mimics, or parasites. feeding on the lives of others, assimilating them into the growing ramshackle assemblage that conceals their absented centre. they invent themselves and eat stories like termite builders chew wood, pasting it to makeshift walls. to stand with them is to stand at the mouth of a cavern, where a warm breeze compels you inwards, to the cold and the yawning dark. they can't help this. despite their best intentions, they remain unaccountable to themselves.

I have met some of these people. I think maybe I used to be one, for a while, a long time ago. there is no bitterness or rancour in this. a sense of gratitude, perhaps, mingled with pity or sorrow. the gratitude owed to important teachers, whether or not their teaching was intentional, and the pity that moves you to help them, even where you can't. recently, perhaps, the hopeful observation that in time, they may sometimes return to themselves. or be returned.

since christmas, the twists and turns have been so complicated that I can't actually talk about them anymore. not because they're uncomfortable, quite the opposite: I can't even represent them to myself because as soon as I try thinking them through, I start giggling and I lose focus. rock and roll.

now, as if the connections weren't dense enough - three times over, after the last ten days - two threads in my little corner of the noosphere just folded in on themselves, with a beautiful extra turn, a flourish, a little macrame. I love it, though I don't think the involved parties 'd quite understand what I find so funny about it.

accelerate the introduction of novelty, I say. immanentize the eschaton. hagbard celine never died.

PS. all is well, ye who worry. I do intend to write up the last ten days, though it doth bring me up against my no drive-by blogging policy, not to textualize innocent bystanders and crucify them forever in the monster cache-brain of google. this last turn is almost too much to resist though. we shall see.

not dead, just having an insanely interesting week. normal services will resume as soon as things settle into a more orderly pattern.

very lovely conference: well-meaning, inclusive, so... participatory. i feel strong ownership of the conferential process, and I am deeply empowered as a stakeholder in the process outcome. hell, I close my eyes and pink little purring kittens dance the dance of transformative participation on my retinas.

and yet, after 8 hours of presentations, I sit there at my roundtable writing advice on constitutive factors of success on little pink post-it notes, to put on the wall, and all I can think about, all I can ask myself, the one thought that blazes hectic and feverish through my restlessly wearied brain, is this.

except for the occasional oddity - the flaking cupolas; a house covered entirely in black cloth; the courtyard full of eroded greek statues pressing against the wire fence, like camp prisoners - cluj was nothing noteworthy. plain, gray, grotty, oppressive, straight lines and neon lights - substitute for any of a dozen nighttime cities I've wandered around in. the men were either thin and angry, or large and jovial and swarthy, or old. the women knew a strange art, of making you feel observed without ever looking at you.

bistrita, on the other hand. a ruined construction site in the carpathians, playground of giants. on the approach, the landscape is peppered with small, perfectly formed concrete houses in colors so outlandishly garish and bright they burn your eyes - lime green, radioactive orange, cobalt, crimson pink, a particularly toxic mutation of purple - all painted to look exactly the same texture. between and around them stand their unfinished siblings, bizarre gray multistoried structures in decaying concrete. peaks and turrets, strange openings, half-formed annexes, twisting corners and missing walls. monuments, but to what? I spotted a lead-white apartment block complete with medieval turrets. there may have been gargoyles. the hallucinatory architecture compensates for the landscape: dead and brown, it squats on dirty haunches under a leaden sky, seamlessly dispiriting. tree-less, rotting, littered with plastic bags and garbage. murdered.

if the approach is strange, built by a mad architect with an escher complex, the city itself is the cell where they locked him up. roofless hovels and jutting blocks of peeling concrete sit next to enormous marbled complexes, bureaucratic cathedrals, all gilded spires and ornate projections, that I can only describe as gargantuan. parts of the city are like one those optic illusions that say 'red' in green letters: turreted little houses in nouveaux gothic, serrated, painted in luminescent green. it overloads the brain.

I write this on the second floor of the coroana de aur hotel - a thing so hideous it has become something of glory, that defies the eyes. the place is a simulacrum, built as a tourist-trap tribute to stoker and named after the non-existent hostel where jonathan harker stayed during his visit to the carpathians. all bat insignias and enormous empty rooms, facades of carcinogenic purple, all the monumental gestures of autocratic chic: colossal polished stairwells and a tiny little entrance, a cavernous reception lined with empty shops and manned by a single blonde french-speaking receptionist. the floorplans are irregular, jagged, a lightless fractal maze of unmarked doors and sudden twists where I fumbled my way in the dark for minutes, leaning close to each door to trace the numbers with my fingers. in the end, I found my room in the reflection of a window.

for now, I have worked out that I have wireless when I have electricity. so far, this seems to be in 15-minute bursts.

been feeling cranky for the last week or so. nebulous, unfocused, irritable. I'm not sure why. experience tells me to recognize this as the frustrated cage-pacing that comes when there are lines to draw, maybe even skins to shed. I'm living at odds with myself, for some reason: in contradiction. there's something I need to do, but I perceive it only dimly.

with the years I've gotten a lot better at picking up on this sensation. or rather, I have less and less patience for myself, and my tendency to dither.

i'm haunted by a nature documentary I watched last night, life in cold blood.

the imagery was startling - a mating pair of sea turtles, mid-oceanic, ravaged in slow motion by a pack of frenzied males, seeking to dethrone the incumbent and breed. engulfed in a swarm of floating carapaces - rough stretching necks, sharp beaks, black and slanted eyes, alien heads. inscrutable, nipping at flippers and soft surfaces, forcing their way. threatening to drown the mating pair rather than surrender their claim. truth be told, a troublingly vivid image of male sexuality.

more evocative than this was the coda, however. sir david in communion with lonesome george, elderly and fly-ridden, last known representative of the Pinta Island tortoise sub-species. the omega turtle. the individual as the tragical limit point of the species, positioned past the threshold of extinction, marking an irreversible collapse. the brazen land on the other side of reproduction, outside the ark, where all that is left to do is emblemize: turn george into 'living inspiration', flip extinction into sacrifice. a gesture too self-conscious to succeed entirely, yet thus all the more poignant in the partial attempt. savage.