CosmiKnot

Speech for the Blakefest Cinematic Glad Day Celebrations  Bognor Regis Picture Dome 28th November 2021 Video here When I was asked four years ago to curate Blakefest I was over awed by the great innovating poet’s creative legacy. Soon, however, I began to realise that his song of creative emergence resonated with my ideas about the possibilities for an experience of meaning inside the event. Is, for instance, the event the same as Plato’s Khora; movement as the womb of everything? Thankyou for organising the event Rachel (Searle). What is a song if not an event? And so for Blake the imagination was not a bolt on to or escape from the mechanistic material reality but the core of the cosmos itself. Blake shows us an opening onto a realm where feeling and creative emergence a literally within all matter and we become aware of our indigenousness to nature. This, explains why we need to embody the extra sensory experience via ritual to feel meaning as a part of the expressivity of the u...

  Be more Organism My screams will articulate a feeling of infinite longing for the “expression” model to re-emerge in a culture of feeling adorned with a filigree of ornate concepts.     Whilst walking with my two sons to ward off depression, anxiety and in my case fibromyalgia, the eldest turned to me and asked, do you think you could build a nest with your mouth? I thought for a bit and was understandably taken aback. How do they know how to make the structure in triangles he went on? I’m not sure they know how we consider knowing to be. They don’t have an instruction manual to follow. It’s more a case of the knowledge being part of their body. My son started to say something about them being programmed. But who is controlling them he asked? At this point I felt that this idea of control is perhaps the greatest stumbling block to expanded empathetic thought that there is. God used to be the controller so who or what is in control now that he is dead? This dialectical m...

You are in a semi-trendy coffee shop come bar on Long Acre, WC2, on a fine day in May at some point during the turn of the century. You do that half getting up thing to shake the hand of the man who has just joined your company. He is boyishly handsome with a certain rugged traveller’s masculine quality. He reminds you of your best friend at school who had the same easy self-confidence, arising from good-looks and physical presence. This is Michael says Kevin the man who has invited you here today. Earlier Kevin told you that you would be joined by the son of Ronnie Biggs and so when you shake hands there is a mutual acknowledgement in the brief locking of eyes, that you are meeting the son of someone connected. Quite why the son of a great train robber is at your meeting is not something you can answer easily but somehow fits in with the felt intensity of being on the brink of something. It’s a feeling you often experienced during your time with Humbug Records. Humbug were a tiny labe...

 This is an article I wrote about writing songs about eleven years ago for a Magazine edited by Jonny Other: Using Passions As Beacons Leads to Instances of Backwards Causality  or How Not to Write a Pop Song and stay looking trendy            “You must always know what your song is about before commencing” this was the best advise I could get online when trying to work out how I write songs. never the less I remain convinced that there are certain persons who are able, almost without effort, to relax the muscles of the mind and slip from the shackles of habitual thought and let their ideas soar way beyond the seven feet of biosphere we habitually patrol.  I suppose despite my fear of giving away the end I should consider the idea that backwards causality is simply a manifestation of the ability of the subconscious mind to function more rapidly and dynamically than the rational mind- thus giving the everyday brain the...

A song created for Blakefest 2020 by David Devant and his Spirit Wife. Inspired directly by William Blake's vision of Albion:  Grass - green screen- green screen grass - analogue - virtual - virtual - actual - green green screen - grass - lawn - earth - pixel take everything and make it matter for expression and the virtual weaves with the actual in fiery visions. There’s something magical about grass as a green screen when one considers how William Blake found the virtual in the material. released for Blake's birthday on Corporate records

Here is a link to a comic strip I've done with a long standing friend and interrogator The Aug Stone. I love Aug's affinity to a natural state of wonder, which made making the comic a total pleasure. He gave me free rein with clear instructions as to the setting. Writing a comic is much more than just filling in speech bubbles. Aug has created an existential miss-en-scene without breaking sweat. His visualisation of the scenario is genuinely bizarre and dreamlike without feeling contrived. Funnily enough Aug thinks that the story is perhaps too obviously personal but I've been working on it a while and it still intrigues and niggles away at my unconscious. The story seems to lead towards a meaning but never wholly explains itself, which is exactly what I want from a tale, rather than a moral observation or rousing resolution. Click the picture to see the whole thing.

white feather As I lay on the black disc of the 8 ft in Demeter trampoline entombed by netted walls staring down the wishing well of infinity curve blue a small white cloud was dropped into the azure field of my vision. Whereupon it became A tiny fluffy white feather thousands of miles above the earth falling silently like a speeding weightless bullet onto the tip of my right big toe. What does this mean? I wonder staring at the clouds. Oh I give up.

To gee myself up during the installation of Trope I bought a copy of The Doors of Perception. Perhaps it was my porous state of mind but nearly every line felt like a consoling arm around the shoulder with an accompanying voice telling me that a sense of wonderment was a good, albeit out of fashion, thing (I jest the voices were purely metaphorical).  “At least you aren’t lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order” The above is part of Aldus Huxley ’s response to a recording of some madrigals by Gesauldo . Admittedly at the time he was “high” on the affects of mescaline recently ingested in the name of experimental science but there is something in these words that speaks to my heart. There are two choices when this revelation strikes you and one is to respond with the anti-energy of the Dadaist and the other is to embrace the cosmic order of the dislocated wonderist for “the totality is present in the broken pieces” as Huxley goe...

Yesterday I passed the Mall Gallery outside which was a large poster for a Peter Blake exhibition. The poster was a life size version of his self-portrait in denim. A classic. The exhibition shuts at four I was informed – oh what’s the time? Ten to four. Ten minutes would have been too long to look at the exhibition, which was essentially a collection of ink jet posters of Peter Blake's collage work. I could look at them online. Peter Blake is a lovely man or at least that is the impression I have formed of him from a couple of brief meetings and Beatles documentaries. Here comes the “but”. But before I go on perhaps I need to get over myself after all perhaps he himself doesn’t think of this as art. Leave him alone – it’s not his fault that the world is full of poseurs out to make a quick buck from other people’s desire to somehow seem classily creative in a quirky way. Is that enough of a but already? In my hastily scrawled notes written on the top deck of the 176 I was set to de...

Don 3D specs now... Thanks to martin White for rendering this. I'm very pleased at the accidental union of left and right brain this produces.