CosmiKnot

The mobile phone can take photos.  We shape our tools and our tools shape us Really detailed instant photos.  We work out too and our tools shape up So posing for a selfie is a reflex mode.  We shape our truth and our truth shapes us Hugging a friend in an instant well drilled repose.  We shape our tools and our tools shape us. We live in a realm mapped by the snaps we take.  We shape our tools and the tools shape us But what if mobile phones had been really good at testing air pollution as a side product? We shape our tools and our tools shape us. Or were easily adapted to being phasers set to stun? We shape our tools and the tools shape us Or mind reading devises? Or instant Voice translators? Or peace negotiating ambassadors? Or lie detectors? Or instant truth deliverers? Or Ghost revealers? Or God messengers? Or parallel dimension portal openers? We shape our tools and our tools shape us. Instead we have lea...

The Deadends are perhaps a view of ourselves through the cosmic microwaves of time via a post-apocalyptic primordial telescope. We live in a state of self-hypnosis to permit our disavowal to frame our lives with perfectly engineered precision. We are all akin to the footballer who inhabits a Caravaggio painted mask of pleading sincerity to indicate that he played the ball despite having been pulling his opponents shirt for ten seconds. He believes he is correct in pleading to the referee’s sense of reason. This is clearly an evolutionary glitch that has us in its grip. This separation is what keeps us estranged from the very part of us that would reconnect us to the immediate embodied responsibility to each other. Each and every other. Now here we will remain until more idiots claim to have a soul. This is Ginsberg saying something similar in the TLS in 1964 "The individual soul is under attack and for that reason a “beat” generation existed and will continue to exist under...

Getting on for ten years ago my friend Barry recommended I read The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. Another left-brain right-brain tract I presumed and thought it would hold little worth beyond the usual character insights – perhaps there would be some of Jung’s personality types thrown in. How wrong I was. This book addresses, with its specific thesis, the problem addressed by any recent critical theorist of note – namely the distortion caused by systematic or mechanistic modes of thinking. Most of these theorists eventually have to break free of the mechanistic mode and end up writing something like poetry – Deleuze, Derrida, de Bord, Adorno even Foucault to an extent. That McGilchrist doesn’t do this is perhaps why his book is so lasting and resonant. It’s tough going but if you stick with it the evidence marches forward like the massed ranks of one of the civilisations he reveals to be self-destructing. The reason for this self-destruction is that systemised or left ...

The Fungus Foray and Rhizomatic Being Full Fungus Foray images Before setting off on today’s fungus foray I’d been thinking about memory. About how memory is perhaps not simply within the brain waiting to be picked up off the shelf but rather is in the objects around us. I was standing in the back garden looking at my neighbour from hell’s ladder. I found it hard to look at the ladder without relieving the various kinds of abuse we have suffered at his hands. (Thanks to a police visit he seems to have gotten the message that everyone has a right to live without fear of abuse). Still I was ok and it seemed to demonstrate how objects in the outside world don’t just trigger memory they help embody it. Ever since attending a lecture about consciousness by Marcus du Sautoy (Professor for public understanding of science at Oxford University) at The Barbican I’ve had a sense of unease about the way we conceive of our consciousness from a machine-like perspective. It’s similar to visual...

Kings place. Oh my god I’m back You finally did it How can I be so curmudgeonly as to deny the seduction at play? Oh the pristine vintage cobbles The plate glass fronted warehouse arches Framing slim silhouete of new student Who sips coffee Totally amazing tote bags University of the Arts Tram lines flow encased at floor level As archival patina Of an industrious past It’s all good How can I fail to see that this is betterer Double plus gooderer I visit an exhibition of Soviet childrens books Encased in glass Remember the smell of mildew? Its freezing here comrade. I grasp and gasp Hoping for the oxygen of something actual The fleeting memory of a real experience An actual event. There is a hand printed lino cut cover For A Russian book of Walt Whitman’s O Pioneer. Is this it? The moment that evaded the death grip The strangulation by equivalence? Asphixiation by reproductive thingness. I think it is And a part of me celebr...