Walking With Goats: Sheep Against Satan!

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Fifth Generation Warfare for the Epistemologically Challenged

by our regular guest columnist Walking With Goats

Welcome to 2023.

I’ve mentioned before that I have trouble knowing things. Twenty six years of reprocessing my life through the fictionalisation ferment of my mind has left me with very few steady surfaces. For this reason however – and others, which I will come to soon – I feel I’m uniquely placed to offer heartfelt advice to the world on the subject of winning the C21st information war.

On the face of it though, goats have very little to do with 5th Gen Warfare, whether you focus on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, high fashion houses’ bondage with toddlers, wokeism and cancel culture, Trump 2024 or climate catastrophe. That’s why I’ve decided to dedicate this episode of my column to sheep.

And I’ll warn you now: I won’t be criticising.

So mocked and maligned over the last three years, the sheep is – in my modest experience – in fact the very noblest of beasts. A source of tremendous wisdom, gentle transcendence and, if we’re just willing to listen, bearer of a message capable of unlocking us from the knots of cognitive dissonance constructed over the last three years, imparting to us the full power of the self and demonstrating its coexistence with God.

This is Lucy.

Sure, she looks unassuming. That’s a part of her power.

Lucy’s selfhood is an act of triumph though – one as visceral and as redemptive as birth. And we can learn from her. She wants to teach us. She likes humans.

It’s such a pressing time to get a handle on our own sentience now too, as R&D teams across the globe compete to replace it – from the games designer I once got off with in the back of a taxi cab, now readjusting his own coffee coaster at Bilderberg, through to the interiors-savvy handlers of Ameca, the gently feminine robot addressing us from the fireside with her alternative Overlord’s Xmas Speech. It’s really never been more important to hear ourselves think. Yet interestingly, it’s never been so hard.

Yes, the “information warzone” is an all-singing, all-dancing, all-encompassing theme park – higher resolution than reality – replete with uniformed guards and a very expensive cafe.

Prepare yourself. This episode of Walking With Goats may require a leap of faith here and there. The rustic, signposted visitor trails can’t be relied upon. The prettily bordered maps must, on all accounts, be ignored.

Radox’s Pomegranate and Red Apple Scent is 100% inspired by nature fragrance.

It’s a mind-altering trip for me these days to stay in other people’s homes. The water pressure on the shower is enough to eliminate civil unrest. Not that you’d get any in Surbiton.

My daughter and I did some of the London galleries. I want her to see what the real world looks like – and smell its scent. Radox chemists take no moment of rest at any point during their design phase, nor do they allow the ingress of any nuance of inspiration not derived from the aroma of the wild.

The real world is amazing.

I was considering quitting animal husbandry when I spoke to you last. Two things took place – a call and response across the perception/reality divide – one awful, one very beautiful. As I’ve often been fortunate enough to find, the first one gave rise to the last.

My own life’s a tough sell midwinter. No one would fancy my fifteen minute neighbourhood. Our yard is wet filth. A hillside of springs has made this a permanent residence over centuries – and believe me I’m glad of the water that flows by no more than gravity down from the chamber in the field to our house – but everywhere you look is shit-mud. My hat gets pushed down by my hood to leave a horizontal inch-high visor through which to navigate the everchanging brown wetlands. It’s not the kind of obfuscation I’m looking for. A person needs to be able to see shit-mud on their say so.

Fran says we have to make both the shit-mud and the ice-rain sexy – in order to attract other people to the lifestyle we’re living – because they need to make the move. She should know. She’s sold a lot of things over the years. That’s why I’m going to leave her a little space here, for the purpose:

Thanks Fran.

Marketing’s so good these days that it’s enough to make your sanity twang. If you can rebrand the escalating disconnect between ingrained Western optimism and sudden undeniable destitution with the capital letters “CO OP LOW PRICE!” it’s worth asking what else the world might be concealing from you.

Over the month of December, as we were offered brief shelter from the news and gifted our rations of football and tinsel, I spent a bit of time reading 1984. Censorship isn’t what it used to be though – nor what it will soon transubstantiate to become. It was hard to guess just how exciting telescreens could be in 1948.

Doublethink isn’t uncomfortable in the slightest when it’s engendered by a revolving smorgasbord of brightly coloured temptations and emotional triggers, chosen just for you and served with panache by your favourite digital influencer.

NATO, for example, is the global defender of fairgrounds. Tasked with the guardianship of a nation, its protective embrace fosters a summer evening ambience where racially diverse group selfies can take place without fear.

360 surveillance makes purchase suggestions far more opportunely timed than C20th fascism could have foreseen – and no one crawling from the emotional wreckage of the second world war would ever have guessed at the feeling of personal liberation crystalised by expanding the range of flags they might be allowed to wave.

My take on Winston Smith was a little harsher than other people’s, I expect, knowing as I do that Orwell sexually assaulted my father’s Godmother. His relationship with her was far more than that – their love in fact a tragedy that spanned both lifetimes. Nonetheless, Winston’s feelings for Julia – who was based on Jacintha – structured themselves on a framework of violence as unsympathetic as Big Brother’s state.

Huxley had a better feel for the way infowar would be waged, I think – though I share Orwell’s pain at the loss of conceptual thought. So ill at ease with his own urges, Orwell could not conceive of a totalitarianism born of pleasure though – whereas Aldous espoused it, along with his many friends.

Of course, pleasure’s not actually the way that you could characterise the last three years, but its spectre’s been ever-present. Not domineering, like the brutalist Ministries of Love and Plenty, but picturesque – a mantle of festive lights and meandering cycle lanes. A sightseeing tour, courtesy of Windows 365.

Ascetic totalitarianism is the domain of the confident, well-entrenched regime.

Only someone dispossessed of all the facts would countenance it.

For a lot of people here in Britain, Brexit was the first time that information warfare became a thing, and Fran thinks that was marketing too in a way, to show potential buyers what the technology was capable of. As the information superstructure we lived within was dissembled, disassembled, honed and precision bombed into the newsfeeds of every individual in the country, we learnt for the first time that communities – even families – could be broken apart. Their atomisation invisible to measurement until the triggers of their new opinions had been pulled, it was true that only a master of dark and esoteric arts could have understood the legislative differences achieved by Brexit, but even a fact-free moron like me could see the societal result.

Led By Donkeys tried to battle Brexit from the ground up – starting in Stoke Newington obviously – with only irony and persuasive accents. Facilitating the living memorial of London’s South Bank Covid Wall next, with its 150,000 hearts scattered over the concrete to be grasped by the public, their oeuvre is a fantastic example of how information warfare can be waged, I think. From the officer class to the volunteer squaddie, its foot soldiers are unsuspecting.

The image recognition software that enabled the memorial meant Led By Donkeys could disseminate into that vast number of eulogies a single message of overwhelming power: the veracity of the death statistics given out by the ONS.

Information warfare – like all kinds of warfare – has chokepoints, at which it can be shaped by will.

Historically, a Judas goat was used to bring a flock of sheep down to the slaughter. I doubt it looked up from the bucket once they’d all got home.

Why would we theorise anything other than what’s clear as day everywhere around us? Walking in lockstep across a landscape unquestioned, we can safely say we’re no part of any great conspiracy.

Lucy was normalised to the culture inflicted on sheep when she came to me; for the most part afraid but then at times seized with an unendurable energy that would manifest itself in astonishing twirls or sudden Grand Jetés. Older than her two ewe friends, Lottie and Liquorice, by one year, she was also placed into a new position of authority. She had never had a lamb however. That was yet to be.

Their names were given to them by my daughter of course.

They know them now, all my sheep, these three years in – and many other words besides. Words are the structure of Lucy’s story of becoming. Goats are highly vocal, continuously reassuring one another of their proximity (and themselves, of their possession of superior forage), and often utilising human intonation for it. Kama specialises in indignancy. Thorne’s utterance of choice is stiff dismissal. Sheep however call out only when they fear they are alone. And unlike goats, in word or in deed, they cannot lie.

As Lucy has come to identify and transcend the containment grid that comprises sheep mentality – a map of the fence-to-fence monocrop that’s all a modern sheep’s allowed to know – her truthfulness has shone out with increasing certainty.

That the world she’s faced can sometimes be riven by conflict, confusion or even grief has not dissuaded her.

I want very much to be like Lucy.

Before we’re besieged by the next pandemic, overcome by leagues of Russian hackers, or deprived of quiet moments to read by the pressing desire to queue up in front of a bank, it’s worth taking the time to consider what we want to be, I think.

That’s what information warfare is designed to prevent: self-determination.

And its aggressors are trying ever so hard. I’m wilful as fuck and I’ve still almost caved. We all want the path of least resistance. To a degree, even those who know what’s at its end.

I was going to write to you at Christmas, just to say thank you for listening, except that somehow it didn’t feel right – but I want to say that I’m grateful for the opportunity to tell you these things. For your continued ear, regardless of where our opinions may differ. Without it, everything would be very hard.

Winter shrinks what it means to live here. We don’t even aim to do much more than keep ourselves and the animals going over these long months. I carry firewood in the storms, rainbows cupping the property intermittently, before being reincorporated into the gravid sky that brings them forth. In the field – ever-patient, sitting out the diagonal rain with her flock – Lucy’s coat offers her the outline of a perfect semicircle too, in black. Their six dark tumps (Lucy, Lottie, Ottie and Magda, alongside the proud Obsidian and his dangerously unnamed half-brother) lie tactically positioned upon the slope, gazing down at the house throughout the hours of daylight that will inevitably transpire into dusk and feeding time.

Here we sit, in the lee of the year, with the winter’s changing faces paraded above bare trees. The goats are quiet in their Nice House, pregnant with the spring that’s awaiting us and this time around powerfully cognizant of the force that they will birth. On our not-nearly-self-sufficient-enough smallholding, the turning seasons almost seem to have come together and locked hands. Entering year number four, it’s becoming harder to see beyond the circle.

Failures this time round include not trenching for storage of cabbages; minus fifteen has destroyed their clean hearts. Successes include the many hanging sacks of potatoes, the solar-powered cheese airing cupboard, to some (moderate, temporary) degree the off-grid electric fencing. Hardly into real winter yet though, the fields bedraggled and the hand-gathered hay now gone – replaced with tight-packed bales – it will be goat walking season soon.

It was the goats of course who taught Lucy she needn’t be confined to her allotted neighbourhood; that although she didn’t have it herself then, there was such a thing as agency at all. The fence lines which for them marked no more than a duty of challenge, were for the three ewes who arrived here absolutes.

For all the power of goat will though – and this is the lesson we must learn – if equally informed, in fact they’re the more controllable of the two species.

For a while they grazed, and escaped, together. The first twelve months of Lucy’s residency here were characterised (for me) by panic stricken three mile runs to find the entire flock in a neighbour’s garden. The goats would casually note my arrival, my desperately rattling bucket, and back we’d trot with all the sheep in tow. Three at first, but soon their lambs as well. Thirteen jingling joggers at their most numerous.

So it was that the goats and sheep had to be separated eventually, despite the logistical nightmare entailed – but Lucy’s mind was already forming by then.

The world had boundaries, but they were material and could be overcome. Analysis and effort made them ineffectual. And there was more. If you left, the events continued in series: the feeding human came with her bucket to bring you home.

Lucy’s reality, for the first time, had handholds.

When lambs escaped or when Barry the Ram went chasing other ewes and, bereft and confused, his own girls followed, Lucy could open her mouth and use her voice to convey this message to me. And Lo! I came – and I came rattling with oats and corn.

Lucy’s voice, it transpired, was a powerful and long-range baritone capable of bringing me forth regardless of where they roamed. And clearly I was in charge not only of provision but also sense-making. In response to her, I spoke. And my own voice offered her topography for the days’ and weeks’ and months’ events; navigable and amenable to forecasting. In Lucy’s world, it had become clear there was a God.

And I answered, always. I could hear her from the toilet. Prophets of the ancient world would have envied her success.

But I was not God. In fact I wasn’t even God’s messenger. If there was a metaphor for my role in Lucy’s life then it was far more rational, and it’s in its rationality it was far less kind.

We have only seven acres. The decision of which animals to sell is one that occupies me at night for months. I never watch one go without crying. The factors that have to be considered are great; they constitute my animals’ entire lives. The sheep I rear have never known hunger or fear. Who will be able to thrive on a new farm? Is her lamb female, so she can keep it with her? Remaining here, who will be happy and strong within the reshaped flock? In which years have they had to see their children go before?

In September I sold Lucy’s daughter, Nina, and Nina’s daughter too – because they could travel to their new home together. And of the twins that Lucy had birthed that year, I sold her ewe lamb too. Other choices would have left wholly childless mothers.

And I had decided to keep her favourite, Obsidian – the most beautiful, tender, intelligent creature I have ever known. Affectionate, gentle both to me and to the girls around him. Lucy had brought him up to be that way.

But Obsidian has no markings. To sell my sheep to a home, instead of through the evils of auction, they must be marked as a Torwen breeder wants. Coming to purchase, my buyer brought his own tup. And so for two weeks Lucy did not know that her son remained. Each day I’d sit with her and use his name – and she did look towards the other field when I spoke to her. But a male sheep’s voice is low and does not carry. Lucy sickened. Her eyes gummed up with conjunctivitis and through the infection she looked at me with hesitation.

Reality had shape, but it was not the shape of love and trust and safety. Her world was ruled, but it was not by God, she saw.

They stood together, their noses very close to one another’s, she and her son, without vocalisation when they saw each other again.

No one can love words more than me but some things don’t need them.

When winter first came, as it did in fog, I’d lost Burtie and watched Lucy robbed of child. I was bereft at the reality of self-sufficiency.

We spent a day winching the trunk of a larch from our woodland by hand, preparing for the coming months through which our Rayburn cooks, powers radiators, heats our water and consumes tree after tree. A hand winch is a great piece of kit if you want to approach the agenda of the next seven years retaining the concept of bodily autonomy. I couldn’t build one, but I can just about use it. My limitations get harder to ignore as time goes by though, both physical and mental. I’d like to say my autonomous body could take another ten years of smallholding, but I’m not sure.

It was unusually misty that afternoon while we worked in the woodland without an engine. The dew in the air was the only thing left to determine facts.

They are quite translucent in my mind as well.

Epistemic is a good, hard, angular word. All of its components bear weight. An entire world could be constructed on that tabletop.

I had in my mind this relationship between words and wordlessness, fact and fiction – and also those who shape the reality we live inside. The Balenciaga scandal, with its array of celebrity implications, had just washed across the Twitterverse and the NYT had yet to launch its damage control narrative – a story which would have meant little to me, but for ‘Aunty’ Jacintha’s relationship with Aleister Crowley after Orwell died.

Of all the books she sent to my father, one is certainly worth reading. I’d consumed it voraciously the previous week. I have no desire towards magic, as I’ve said before, to bend the world to the purpose of my will – or I’d probably turn my attention to all the mud outside. But it’s more than that, as I will try to explain to you next.

There are better gifts that the universe can give than learning how to control it – as there are better kinds of knowing than that which breaks knowledge down.

The master of dark and esoteric arts best placed to fine tooth comb the implications of the Brexit legislation would surely have been the one that accompanied the ’72 Brussels delegation to the EEC in the first place. The book most highly recommended by Aunty Cini – and which I recommend to you –  was written by leading civil servant, Somerset House stalwart and specialist in the obscurer points of Common Market budgeting, David Conway. The brilliantly titled Magic: An Occult Primer – The Complete Do-It-Yourself Guide.

Conway hailed from just outside Aberystwyth. No Crowley – or Murdoch – one can only imagine what an Aber boy so enthralled by West London’s fountains would have made of the analytic-armed hijacking of his career jewel.

Certainly, I think, he would have been fascinated to see the raw power of it – the cognitive force required to inflict such utter fragmentation on our minds.

September 2019 I took that first picture of Lucy, in the wooden kraal I described as a cross between Lothlorien and a concentration camp. I was still three months’ away from the New Year’s Eve in London that would land me with viral pneumonia, googling symptoms (at that point I still trusted Google), to chance upon a multitude of handheld Wuhan videos at 4am. The naivety nurtured by thirty nine years living within the brilliant replica of a Western liberal democracy had been subjected to no more than a gentle breeze.

I used to read The Guardian. Till I was in my 30’s, every winter saw me happily gulp down 3 months’ worth of amoxycillin to cure my spots. Involuntary quarantine wasn’t a concept I’d ever personally considered, not even during the long week that it took to put up that pen.

You can fall down a rabbit hole without ever looking for one.

Michael Borreman’s Fire From the Sun is not a book I’d recommend to anyone. It features a lot of toddlers doing things like eating their own arms. When I chanced upon it during the insomniac burst that coincided with Balenciaga’s pants-down moment – as most feeling people would have been – I was disappointed to see that an information agent with such nuclear weapons as Keeping Up With the Kardashians was keen to put it on our reading lists.

Behind the long, elegant legs of Isabel Huppert, in the glass fronted office that I presume overlooks Manhattan, the presence of Fire From the Sun – alongside papers documenting famed paedophilic court cases and a fancy certificate awarded to the name of a known child murderer – were probably the best examples of product placement I have ever seen. Bond’s Aston Martin simply pales in comparison. But again, the impact would have been much the lesser, were it not for the text that had occupied my time. Because – for all his concentration on abstruse matters of tax and treasury – David Conway did a wonderful job of documenting the occult’s Master Rituals too.

I don’t make rabbit holes, but the world’s a fucking warren of them.

I’m super glad that I’m not one of Borremans’ subjects. The images he paints in Fire From the Sun and Sixteen Dances, which are exhibited in Tokyo I hear, make a big point of showing off that they may well be done from life. Each set against a large, draped white dustsheet – that I can only guess was changed between sessions – they certainly can’t wait to dare the viewer to ask.

And the Sixteen Dances outfits are great. I imagine Balenciaga makes them – without any fixtures or fittings on the hoods, just as Conway advised. Little ones for the kids and big ones for the grownups, all in matching black, which doesn’t pick up blood. I’ve always held that the practice of art must be above morality – that it has a higher purpose – existing to question the morals of its time. Once I’d managed to start sleeping again after seeing Borremans’ paintings, I slept on this question.

That the art you create defies your audience to withstand it – and presumably selects its patrons through the process – doesn’t mean it should be an exception to the rule. Subjecting young children to ritualistic abuse for your muse does of course.

Conway discourages blood sacrifice, you’ll be heartened to hear, and assures us it’s not necessary for an effective ritual. He had this to say about the relationship between magician and morality though:

The complete man… once he has experienced every human impulse and integrated them into one balanced personality, is able to reach the heart of the universe wherein lies union with God. This is the supreme achievement of magic, and it is summed up by Aleister Crowley as ‘the raising of the whole man in perfect balance to the power of Infinity.’ In short, it is the apotheosis of the self.

I’ve got my own take on this subject though.

It came to me suddenly – in the woodland, in the mist – as I said, I’ve been lucky enough to find that horror can give rise to beauty.

Like the practice of art, the practice of magic aims to transcend morals – but unlike art seeks to do so through the imposition of will. Doubtless the willpower of the wealthy who enjoy such costumes and dances, like that of the goat, is strong enough to convince them they’re in charge.

But will, by its very nature, is lesser than what is discovered in its absence.

I know this – and I can prove it too.

As much as I’d like to be good with facts, whatever things I can make come as much from knowledge fading out as fading in. Like the shapes of the trees that day: objects claimed and then relinquished. 26 years I’ve spent writing. It has nothing to do with will. Just the same as carpentry, snooker or dance, our greatest creations rise complete from our unconscious minds.

Now that Neuralink is beginning human trials, we can all start looking forward to a reality no longer undermined by sneaking suspicions. The rhythm of the news as it oscillates (across topography that almost seems familiar) will, thanks to Elon Musk, be an orchestral movement performed directly inside our minds.

The fifteen minute neighbourhood is going to make everywhere like Surbiton. There’ll be loads of farmers’ markets but absolutely no mud. When the day is done, pink macarons will be kindly shepherded into stabling not dissimilar to that enjoyed by the My Little Ponies. You wouldn’t want to visit another neighbourhood even if you had permits left.

I went to Surbiton to exchange food hampers with my family. It was during the long, impressive cold snap. In the mornings the ice at home was describing arabesques across the windows – and even in the city the ground was frozen hard. A lot of people had put out these low-energy-imitation-candle displays, that made rainbows of LEDs beyond their windows. There was garden furniture arranged in the forecourt in front of the parking lot where I stopped. Two chairs facing each other under all the carefully curated lives. Across the table from one another, housing only frost.

My inability with facts – which I do regret – is a consequence both of my mind’s familiarity with filing experience in the box marked “creative” and the sheer amount of time I’ve spent in the realm where such material reforms as real. There’s no apple as ripe with existence as the one that I watch my character eat. But I’d like to be able to help people understand – in conversation, where my failure to recall words and names and dates and numbers claims all embattled ground – just what winning 5th Generation Warfare means.

Because, whether you market Satanism as a great high heel brand, or checkpoints and cages as suburban dreams, information warfare is unfortunately not just a colonisation of the mind. In its wake, its instigators will plunder real things – like our land and bodies and our ability to procreate and our natural resources and the DNA that underwrites all life.

They are important links, all the ones above, but I’ll put one in particular here for a second time. The era is coming when the messages that I’m trying to convey to you will not be legal, if they even exist to be shared – and the rifts between us haven’t rendered them impossible for you to receive.

Fran just messaged to tell me that it’s a morning of epic beauty outside, and I need to do the animals in any case, so I’ll take a break now.

Just so you know though, hate speech about LGBTQ+ isn’t actually what our governments are trying to hide.

The nature of reality is a thing a lot of people don’t get to think about often, which is a shame. I have to say that it’s one of the perks of farming. I was excited to come across a couple of great verifications over the last month too. Working with zero facts, as the epistemologically challenged are forced to do, any backup from Nobel Prize winners is hugely appreciated.

The universe, we now have confirmation, isn’t ‘locally real.’ For anyone already struggling with their immediate reality of course, this is just going to sound off-putting – but it needn’t. I like to think of it in terms of the phrase you are what you eat.

Lucy, for instance, is poised wholly upon the rumination of delicate leaves. From no more than this, her full, fat sheepiness manifests itself in tantalising clarity to any predator. She remains Lucy though – thank God, because I really love her.

It didn’t take Moana long, after she had fallen, to become no more than food for Fifi. The self might be brief, but it’s a real thing, that’s for sure.

The universe is turning too. Even observation changes it. It doesn’t seem to matter how much space-time lies between, everything’s entangled. I can be confident in telling you, because these are facts about the cosmos now.

It’s not a mess on the floor. And nothing else has eaten it. The revolving faces of its synchronised stars and molecules endure as lucid.

Fran was right. It is a morning of epic beauty, but I don’t think the storms are done with us yet. The rain’s receded from the infirm ground for now. New clouds have come to pass, (cumulus fractus, the BBC website tells me) thrown out over the silhouetted hills – and the like-light of the hindered sun is held in all the trees’ bare fingers.

My daughter plays this game sometimes and she shouts, “I am going to die in 3…2…1..” and I say, “Millennia.” But of course, I know this is not true.

We cannot retain our selves forever. Uploading a map of our firing neurons onto a hard drive – or projecting their pattern toward the stars in Elon-song – nothing more will be ascertained of us than a photograph. It is the aim of those confined by their own wills to live forever. For myself I’ll be going back to join the things that make me real.

I no longer need to mediate Lucy’s reality for her. Attuned to the rhythms of her universe – knowing as she does that (although its landscapes can be mapped and forecasted by my vocalisations) it is really her own relationship with the world that keeps her safe – she stays with me by choice instead of by enforcement.

Each day I walk with them back and forth between our two fields, through the greener pasture of the woodland. Her star-charts and divination maps hang in her large, unblinking eyes. Walking light, as I do, without the burden of empirical fact, she has come to trust her instincts.

I can hold her gaze too. I’ll never let her down again.

The mediation of our reality by nefarious interests is a blag as old as the stars – or at least as old as our cognizance of their arrangements. While our world’s array of celebrity faces revolves across the digital ether and, trapped in Newspeak filter bubbles, we scream at each other unheard, the truth which 5th Generation warfare seeks to hide from us is literally everywhere – which is why they need to work so goddam hard.

They’re trying to erode self-determination, but the thing about determination is – as they well know – it’s actually quite hard to wear down. The more abrasion you apply, the stonier it becomes. Armed with intimacies however – reductive, compromising and divisive – they’ve taken the other route instead. They are attempting to erase the self.

Because he knows that mind characterises the entire universe, the magician is able to enjoy what we may call a unitary view of nature. For him, the universe is exactly what the word implies – a unity… All things have the same components and obey the same natural law, and behind their outward form there is but one mind. In magic, it is this universal ‘oneness’ that has long been an object of study and research. It represents for the magician, as it must also for the scientist, the secret of nature. It is the unifying principle behind the intricacy of natural phenomena, reconciling the unity of substance with the heterogeneity of form.

You cannot map the self. Empirical science’s ‘hard problem of consciousness’ will never be solved by breaking our thoughts apart. Those who practice the refinement of will in the Kabbalistic or Egyptian Master Rites – even with all their exciting opportunities for incense, orgasm and eating human flesh – are mistaken in believing that by replicating life they can comprehend it, or claim it unendingly.

In the woods, all substance beyond my ability to define, I saw a cobweb – and on its many junctures beads of dew had formed. Its shape could be made out – intricate – more fragile, but still clearer than the insubstantial trees.

An entity itself only because of what it conveyed.

Images by Francesca Swift

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