CosmiKnot

A strange thing happened today which I would like to tell you about. I'm reading to you in the voice of John Smith the film maker whose introspective I have just attended at the ICA. Who knows perhaps @theotherjohnsmith will read this into his phone and send it to me. This is not a review. I don't feel I can do that as I  rudely left half way through the Q&A due to my usual anxiety about catching trains. I’m not sure where to begin so you will have to forgive me if I digress something John Smith seemed embarrassed to do during the aforementioned Q&A. What I want to tell you about is what I call meaning inside the event. The event like a liquid glass that is not quite as set as we like to see it as being. The glass that becomes blunt over time after being cut and subject to the process of oxidisation. But this is a  story which perhaps begins with my visit to Gallery 46 today with the students on the Masters course in Fine Art at the University of East London. It

Is talking to ones self on the walk and a bad thing I had intended to come with my son but my phone will have to do. So here we are winding our way over the pine needles and the varicose with roots in the woods the windows of us in the trees and I’m approaching a small bridge And it’s delightful banisters and a lady with a chocolate Labrador in her lovely weather Shisha finger you what do you call those things Gina it’s not as you know Sam you know the sort of synthetic woman material. It’ll come to me lots of dog walkers out here I always feel like I’m the weirdo because I don’t have a dog but it is lovely here.. So I’m on the prom prom prom and of the boardwalk which has a nice bring you feel and wanted gaps into which leaves and acorns have settled themselves. Going down a step here and I think about talking into my phone it didn’t worry me it is the fact that it distracts anyway how are you doing phone there in my hand needles leaves in acorns underfoot have to keep talking

Feary  I have a feary. Fear is always the cognitive mind knowing the body needs to somehow know. That the mind needs to cede to the body. We conquer fear by working with the body and not running away into the mind’s Warren of fictions and fixations. Feel the body knowing and be on hand with help if needed. I’ve recently experienced unusual bodily sensations such as tingling back of my scalp almost like a rehearsed fear. Like a cat play fighting with an unseen mouse. I thought oh that’s unsettling and felt the need to worry and tense. Then I thought no let the body be. I thought the same recently when I misjudged the contents of the first joint I’ve ever rolled and my body started to feel a little undulating. Panic was on hand in the form of my mind saying see what you’ve done? Then I thought no it’s supposed to do this and lay back and enjoyed the experience. So Is bravery knowing with the body? 

So I am aware that my position on life taking place in a materially vital cosmos is not necessarily the most popular way of regarding human relations. After all we are ultimately almost entirely mechanistic when it comes to the framework of understanding reality. I’ve been watching a program called stranger things and come to the conclusion that it is, like the narrative in the story itself, an opening into a visceral region of felt intensities. In the case of this supernatural thriller the felt intensity is of the hyperaesthetic kind or an excess one might consider non linguistic. The latest story focuses on the themes of death through memory and the stages of grief surrounding it. There seem to be threads and harmonies between the characters’ encounters with the monsters of the region known as the upside down world and their awareness of death itself as an event. Both of these themes are an opening onto the felt intensities of Cosmos as event. Stranger things comes closest of

I’ve thought how panpsychism is not a choice of belief flavour but a shift to our entangling with the expressivity of vibrant matter. Thinking how William Blake sought a system of emergent creativity rather than judging. Here’s my fog cast about it. Peace. Dear prudence you are part of everything. https://youtu.be/nJcU0dIhwb8 And why do I care about this idea of entangling with meaning inside the event? Being outside  The event is fundamental to modern culture. The idea of objectivity is to take something out of context in order to analyse effectively. Personal engagement must be removed from the equation. This has been promoted as good practice. Read a doctors letter about the patient and family history and you will feel the strenuous discipline of keeping a professional distance. Assessing autistic children cutting edge research studies their attention by tracking their eyes. A dementia patient is asked to name an object out of context. I never forget own child was asked to remove hi

Keep the Highway Code always look both ways and be kind to strangers. If I can give you one piece of advice it is to not foreclose. When I’m singing I’ve come to realise that my dislocated sometimes oblique antics are an attempt to Slow down the process of thinking I know what this is like. This is like this this is like this.This then is the thinking of the Empire of like. The analogous thoughts of instant foreclosing are symptoms of the language virus. The language virus has no need for the visceral reality of feeling temporal substance and so it strips it out. What a bad case of the language virus can do is introduce a surrogate kind of feeling as signifiers via the semiotics of clothing and making declarations of association and attachment. Charity is an obvious example of how this surrogate can broadcast a vestigial concept of feeling and  sustain the language virus. It still creates a window into feeling without letting the draft of it in.  But the thing that will actually

  Fiction and expressivity "Something within me or is it outside of me?" wrote James "compels me to put these words inside the haven of my morning pages notebook rather than into a laptop computer. To let my thoughts become themselves here on the paper where they are not attached to the Empire of the like. I am reminded time and time again of Winston Smith sitting round the corner from the TV screen in 1984. It is not paranoia of being observed that compels me to write on paper but a desire for the visceral truth of haptic resistance. Something like that anyway. It’s the pleasure of the feel of writing that helps my thoughts to become. Perhaps this is dangerous to ideas which demand a more direct route and digression, a consequence of writing on paper, will always favour expression. This is why we seek simplicity, as I do, but do not trust it. Throwing cake at the Mona Lisa was a seismic event but what did it mean what did it express? And so to the idea," James tri

It occurs to her that everything she thought was thought is only the surface of things. Thoughts being opinions or judgements that is. You may think you think something and let your mind meander round the thought to pull it into focus and line up with the post rational view point until it feels like something you feel. And yet what if you decide to blur out these kinds of   thought and simply feel she thought? The thoughts then become like the gravel on a driveway, which looks to the eye like a smooth surface but you can dig down a few inches to a lower level but still it remains a surface, albeit one with a shallow depth. What if really real life is the event below these thoughts accessed by actual feeling but because we are so convinced by the veracity of linguistic reason we find a way of determining that this is real life and within that shallow surface we can find the statements and equations to prove it.     Growing up she had not worn hearing aids and a moderate degree of missin

  I’m reading a book called The Night library and have been enjoying it until I got to this part where they are repeating humans this and humans that. Humans simplify things because the complexity of the quantuum wave function is too much for the brain to handle. Hence we create a simple narrative. In the book the librarian in the between life and death region is the narrator’s simplification of a god narrative. It struck me that this is     total bifurcated thinking with a complete blindness to the faith in the separated state of sciencification, which deems that there is the scientific reality that humans encounter and process. The truth is that we are part of the region we perceive and therefore our stories are also part of the region. Our own singular experience is part of the region expressing itself. The book goes on to discuss the multiverse and I must admit this is a theory I have enjoyed but now find myself wanting to call it out as a bullshit fantasy that is the cult of bifur

  And so you have passed your driving test whereas yesterday you were a learner driver today you are a driver. A wiseman with a clipboard asks you to read the number plate. He recites the words: I'm happy to tell you you've passed. The carcass of the prey lies flayed on the tarmac. Steam rising from its innards. The world around the shopping centre begins to come to life. I am a driver you think raising a hand to touch the blood smeared on each cheek. Clunk click every trip only a fool breaks the two second rule. Yesterday you were a novice driving with a scarlet letter and now you are a driver in charge of your own destiny turning the key in the ignition reversing off the driveway into the stream of life. Fuck you wanker Have some of that It's all second nature now The guilt gilded trauma the dashboard certainty it's all there waiting for you  to slip into neutral.  

   Oh let us go to Greenwich you and I And see the origin of time The place where seconds were first discovered   Bubbling up like hic-ups in grey mud covered Up on that there hill  overlooking Olde Father Thames And later hours were found Once they had a powerful  Embroidered large handkerchief To wipe the sweat from the brows  of nearby weary tradesmen whose job was to surface the roads; To help the passage of time  flow more seamlessly.   Oh let’s go to Greenwich you and me Where the river tide flows out Towards the sea And the baby in its buggy Grows whiskers on her cheeks Whilst the museum assistant Makes sure no one speaks As he takes stock in the corner Who left him in charge Of the gold leaf flotilla And the funeral barge?    

  Oh Lordie troubles so hard, on the way to the hospital we listen to young Moby I mean he was younger when he had recorded the album in his New York apartment With what we might now consider to be primitive electronic sampling equipment And an anachronistic but quintessentially of its time electronic piano Perhaps, I speculate, it was this very primitivism that helped him to entangle with his terrain via the refrain, a milieu of the soul. He was  plundering  updating the field recordings of African American gospel folk songs My father loved Lead Belly and would sing me his version of Cocaine Blues along with the Dust Pneumonia to lull me to sleep My Father’s versions of these songs are my favourites and yet they do not appear anywhere on Youtube Lead Belly’s are the closest thing I can find I believe that the timing and social context of when you first encounter a song determine your qualitative processing of its value. On our way to see you on the respiratory ward we are listening to

  Into the valley by The Skids   Driving past the village pond Perhaps we would have brought you here Though that chapter has ended The one that began with me crouched  In front of the B&W portable tv In your and mum’s bedroom Taping Into the Valley of the Dolls by Generation X Onto my very own radio-cassette The one with a five-pin din for recording LPs The end of an era  Was it on vinyl? Ready steady go - you’re not ready to go you tell us You would like a nice cold beer You want to look at a smiling face I can’t make any more analogies anymore To explain the hard-plastic oxygen mask  Clamped to your face Twisting it out of shape Nippy the friendly CO2 level monitor Bleeping and warning us as you struggle  To be understood through the membrane. The priest with his yellowing well  Thumbed liturgical guidebook Thrown in out of his depth A sage fisherman’s sweater clinging to his paunch Falling with us down the log plume I see your face as we are sucked under Contortedly trying to t

  It’s been a bit of a week From clear plastic straws up each nostril To full deep-sea helmet through which you strain to speak Together we face the nearing impossible   Father am I forgiven Your mask has made me deaf You look like David Niven Diving to your death   Life is a matter of imagining The meaning in its moment Stretched across the wide screen Like the arrows of the bowmen   Suspended for eternity Above the cosmic ocean Your dreadful looks could murder With love and devotion   And now round the ring you stagger Absorbing each and every blow Before you I see a dagger When you gotta go you gotta go   So suspend the disbeliever The tank has nothing left You look like David Niven  diving to his death   The projector beam it flickers The consultant can’t save you with his bell It’s nearly time to still your beating ticker Inside the blue curtained family cell   To the hospital we’d driven Through the forest of unrest Now you look like David Niven Plunging to certain death   I boug

  00:00 Actual Occasion (Mikey Georgeson Installation) 11:11 The Non-bifurcatedman (Mikey Georgeson Installation) 24:03 Cookie – Eye in the Sky (secret track) 32:46 Data Streams (David Devant and his Spirit Wife) 36:38 The Deadends (Mikey Georgeson Installation) 44:05 Aesthetic Fact (Mikey Georgeson Installation) 46:22 Full Fathom Five (Mikey Georgeson Installation) 57:07 This Train (David Devant and his Spirit Wife)       Actual occasion: Emergence This piece of bass driven music was created as the central refrain for a silent disco installation using survival blankets and the rope goggles of entanglement to create a realm for collective felt understanding. The words “kindness is a virus” are taken from a suggestion by Richard Dawkins that, kindness serves no evolutionary purpose and is therefore a viral mode of relating. The installation asks the audience to speculate about an aesthetic cosmos with feeling at its core rather than the generalised conceptual model in which experience i