Sometimes things move fast.

In March I attended the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland, and was glad to discover there Dale Pendell, a Renaissance anarchist: poet, botanist, psychonaut, Buddhist, scientist, magician. I recorded a small group discussion with him there, and immediately plunged into his unique books on my return: Pharmako/Poeia, Pharmako/Dynamis, Pharmako/Gnosis and Walking With Nobby..

Recently, Dale contracted me to build him a website, which was—as you’d imagine—a deal more pleasurable to work on than much of the rent-paying work I end up doing.

When I first delved into web design, I had an idea for a site called Palaeogenesis, which I thought of as: “the study of archaic creativity”, “the creative study of the archaic” and “the creation of the archaic”. I got as far as a basic look and feel, but other directions took over.

Anyway, when Dale said he wanted a “palaeo-alchemical” feel for his site, I immediately found myself, with relish, reconnecting to that abandoned current of design in me. I quite like the result. To check it out, and read more about this splendid writer, visit dalependell.com. (Note that users of Internet Explorer 6 and—goddess forbid—below won’t get the full translucent design loveliness. Upgrade!)

I saw my old mucker Merrick at the Anarchist Bookfair—he has more stamina for selling wares than me, bless him. He seems to still be shifting the odd copy of Neither Work Nor Leisure here and there. He’s been photocopying from old copies, so it seemed like a good time to resurrect the fusty old Quark files and get some new, slightly up-to-date masters to him for future copies.

Going through the layout, I found a page I had lifted from The Decadent, something published by a nineties group called Decadent Action. It was encouraging people not to quit their jobs (losing a good source of cash), but to just slack off: pull as many sickies as possible, doss around, that sort of thing.

They don’t seem to be around anymore, but a manifesto is to be found, and they have an entry on the Wiki:

Decadent Action was a mock “consumer terrorist group” and “High Street anarchist-guerrilla organisation” (or culture jammers) which argued that only a credit collapse through excessive consumer spending could bring about the end of capitalism. It argued that bringing about excessive inflation through unrestrained consumer spending was the sole lever which could precipitate the economic collapse upon which any revolutionary action is predicated. Therefore it promoted the idea of irresponsible credit and excessive spending on hedonistic pursuits to achieve its goals.

Wow—result!

Reading this post about the future of publishing, I found a number of interesting, depressing or exciting perceptions flying around like sparks from the clash between it and my current reading of Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Blake biography.

Seizing the means

Of course, the exciting part of it is the web’s promise to cut out the middle men: large publishers and distributors. The author of the post, Aaron Wall, a search engine optimization expert, calls for artists to become publishers (and for publishers to become artists). I’m way ahead of him on that one, editing and publishing my own stuff since before the web. Granted, it’s never been a commercial proposition, but the principle holds: optimism for the future has to include artists and writers seizing the means of production, and technology facilitating their expressions rather than commerce hampering them.

William Blake was way ahead, too, printing (with his tireless wife Catherine) many of his creations, famously pioneering a new print process known as relief etching. He used this technique to print his “illuminated books”, words and images combined on one metal plate.

Blake’s control over the technical means of his creativity was more than just a convenience. He understood the spiritual roots of McLuhan’s “medium is the message” centuries before media studies.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Here, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he rallies the process of relief etching, where acids burn away unprotected parts of the copper printing plate, to stand as a metaphor for the lifting of the veils from our degraded sensual perceptions. But this is almost beyond the realm of metaphor, as his means of conveying his idea is itself symbolic of the idea.

What kind of world does our new media—untouchable, frictionless, both pervasive and ephemeral, empowering and bewildering—convey? Do we want to live there?

Information snacks

The post embeds a brief interview with Cory Doctorow on how to blog effectively, and his advice boils down to: write like a wire service writer. Write like your audience could put your words down after a few seconds, because they probably will. At least, the people that “count” will:

Most people with significant social and/or economic influence have (an equivalent of) attention deficit disorder, caused by an interruption-driven life cluttered with too much content and too little time. People may want to consume relevant bits [...] Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.

I’m more interested than most in nurturing our besieged attention spans; part of my reason for reviving my relationship with print publishing is to encourage more breaks with the flooding rush of information flow, more oxbow lakes of reflective reading, or at least some meanders.

But wasn’t Blake one of the masters of “little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us”? So much so that I’ve no need to throw any at you—most people reading this will have at least a few almost clichéd pithy quotes from his poetry and writing to hand. Scanning a compilation of Blake quotes, it’s astonishing how many they are, how brief they are, and how potent their kick of perceptual reconfiguring is.

Many great thinkers are (or can be) aphoristic thinkers: Nietzsche, Einstein, Lao Tsu, Voltaire, Wittgenstein… Need one mention Jesus? Or Woody Allen?

The closely sustained argument of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death left him in a place where the revelatory infernal corrosives started breaking his language down into exaggerated, non-linear aphorisms, a kind of erudite prose poetry. He quotes McLuhan quoting Francis Bacon:

Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.

Brown goes on to proclaim:

Systematic form attempts to evade the necessity of death in the life of the mind as of the body; it has immortal longings in it, and so it remains dead. [...] The rigor is rigor mortis; systems are wooden crosses, Procrustean beds on which the living mind is pinned. Aphorism is the form of death and resurrection: “the form of eternity”.

All of which is a far cry from the kind of disposable blandness that usually results from “best practices” in blog writing! Still, might Blake have found some affinity with the web, with its eagerness for snappy one-liners and aptitude for textual and visual combinations?

What’s missing here is, firstly, the state of the reader, and secondly, the value of thorough reading, even (or especially) of aphoristic writers. Aphorisms, as a kind of pocket poetry of ideas, can compact very sophisticated insights into tiny seeds of expression. For that insight to properly unfold, however, the ground must be receptive—as Jesus taught in his Parable of the Sower. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Luke 8:8) Which of us, hurried into a permanently anxious low-level emergency state, frazzled with caffeine, eager to click the next link or check our inboxes, has ears to hear much at all?

It’s true that the greatness of someone like Nietzsche is that he wasn’t a system-builder. And yet, there are subtly (or not-so-subtly) dangerous misinterpretations lying in wait to prey on anyone who hasn’t surveyed the full scope of his thought. James Hillman’s work is similar. There are core ideas and tendencies, but the experimental nature of this thought leaves an particular arc that unfolds through his career. Apprehending it all doesn’t leave you with a totalized “system”, but it naturally creates a much fuller understanding of his work. My good friend Jim assures me that Gregory Bateson’s eclectic oeuvre is similarly rewarded by a comprehensive reading. Connections between apparently disparate ideas reveal themselves; and one starts seeing that the connections are the point of his worldview.

But who has the time to read all of Nietzsche, Hillman or Bateson? The dark Satanic offices demand their vast share of your life, and our hyperconnected society lets their demands press ever harder.

Art, commerce, democracy

Ackroyd, early on in Blake, contrasts the London prophet with the Romantic poets he’s normally loosely lumped with. He makes much of the fact that, despite “the dark Satanic mills”, Blake didn’t share the Romantics’ aversion to commerce, making his way (just) throughout his life as an engraver.

It’s true that Blake’s life as an artisan, a tradesman, coloured him in ways that differentiate him from, say, Wordsworth and Coleridge. But what colour?

When he returned to London in 1804, after three generally unsuccessful years near the Sussex coast, Blake “was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.” (Quoted in Ackroyd, p. 271) Ackroyd comments:

He is very specific about the period of darkness he has had to undergo, with a duration of twenty years up to this year of 1804. 1784 was the year in which his father died and in which he set up the print-selling business with James Parker in Broad Street. It was the beginning, then, of his life as a tradesman, conducted perhaps in emulation of his dead father.

He saw these two decades, wherein his youthful creativity was constantly restricted by commercial concerns, as time spent “as a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils”.

In the interview with Aaron Wall where I found his post on publishing, Wall is asked what he thinks the net will look like 100 or 200 years from now.

I think the distinction between the web and the real world will be hard to draw, or perhaps non-existent. Communication technologies will keep evolving and information will available readily in whatever format you like, but with well blended ads. It will become nearly impossible to see the difference between ads and content.

This tendency towards intensifying the blend between commerce and art, advertising and communication, is it creating a hybrid culture that transcends both, some utopian marriage? Or is it the bars of the Black Iron Prison becoming invisible, seamless?

Wall states the obvious dynamic of commercial survival:

If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.

The web promises a broad democratization of the supply-demand axis in publishing. But—oodles of pointless and shit websites notwithstanding—I thought the point of cutting out the middlemen was to enable more diversity?* Of course Wall’s goal is to help people be more commercially successful, so I can’t criticize his good advice. It’s just indicative of the growing control that “the consumer” has over their media world. And while I generally champion this control, I can’t help but see its shadow: the death of revelation.

Audiences can’t be ignored. But they should never be obeyed (just as publishers or artists should never be obeyed by their audiences). The artist’s responsibility (which, as Wall noted, is destined to overlap with that of the publisher) is to a certain extent, as David Cronenberg noted, to be irresponsible. Not wilfully or gratuitously; but to challenge, to provoke, to proffer unpalatable truths. To surprise, to lift the veils. If everyone gets exactly what they want, much of value to life will remain unseen, held at bay.

The web may yet be a tool of conviviality, a means to negotiate between the oppressions of both fascism and democracy. Things don’t look too promising. But I am—I hope—still open to surprises and revelations.

I’ll just end by noting one of the final questions in the interview with Aaron Wall:

How much offline reading do you do?

Much less than I would like…

* I realize that for the most part, the move from top-down to bottom-up dictation of media content is a move towards more diversity. I don’t oppose this. The “diversity” I’m talking about (as becomes clear) is diversions from what people immediately want, in a surface, ego, “gimme this” kind of way.

An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, “only a little while.”

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.

The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”

To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”

“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.

The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”

“Millions—then what?”

The American said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”

a review by Gyrus

• Published: Flamingo, 2000
• ISBN: 0002258471

I must first confess that this is the first Ballard novel I’ve read since 1979′s The Unlimited Dream Company. Perhaps a journey through the books between this and Super-Cannes would have prepared me for his current stance, which I was mildly surprised to find had a much more overt moral component than I’d previously noticed.

That’s not to say his earlier work is out-and-out ‘immoral’—perhaps not even ‘amoral’, although this is the most generous that his critics used to get. It’s obvious from the Re/Search book on Ballard (which, if it can be considered one of his works, is my favourite) that he has a very powerful moral sense, only one that is coupled to an unflinching Freudian-surrealist passion for facing the unconscious on its own terms.

Here, though, we’re a step removed from the plunge into creative pathology. This is not a criticism, however. I’m fascinated to see Ballard for aiming his guns directly at a target (unbridled corporate power) rather than firing just to explore the possibilities—it’s just not what I expected.

The novel’s protagonist, Paul Sinclair, is an aviation magazine editor recuperating from a crash (Ballard’s not changed that much then!) who arrives with his young wife at her new job in Eden-Olympia, a utopian business park built near Cannes to house some of the world’s most powerful corporations. The familiar Ballardian roguish psychopomp comes in the form of Wilder Penrose, the park’s resident psychiatrist. Penrose—like nearly everyone else—is reluctant to say much about the recent spree-killing conducted by the former occupant of the Sinclairs’ new house, who was killed in the process…

Paul, bored by the pool with his injured leg, becomes slowly but powerfully obsessed by the spree-killer’s actions and motives. (I’m reminded of Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound amateur sleuth in Rear Window, but of course Ballard’s less interested in the injury’s connotations of impotence, as Hitchcock was, than in the character’s fascination with brutal incidents and acts, and the fetish value of surgical restraints.) He gradually uncovers a secret world of proto-fascist violence beneath the hyper-efficient work regime of Eden-Olympia, and, largely through the dominating influence of Wilder Penrose, becomes embroiled. But Paul struggles to maintain a measure of distance, forming a tension that drives the narrative, between fascination with the nearly consequence-free release of repressed urges, and shocked indignation at callous violence and perversity.

The seductive logic behind these covert eruptions of brutality is detailed in a riveting cod-philosophical conversation between Penrose and Sinclair. But the moral dimension to this work is foregrounded from the beginning, where we learn of the idea that Eden-Olympia, seen as an experiment in future living, was constructed with the intention of eliminating the need for moral choice in its inhabitants. Everything is automated, looked after, watched over, designed. The unquestioned and inexorable drive for more and more streamlined economic efficiency leaves in its wake confused people with a waning capacity for making difficult choices about what to do with their mounting wealth and power.

Certainly not one of Ballard’s best, but seeing the poet laureate of suburban alienation peel back the layers of deceit around our unelected techno-lords is fascinating at the very least.

a review by Gyrus

• Published: City Lights Books, 1997
• ISBN: 0872863328

I bought this book on the strength of the title—mentioned in Wired News’ coverage of a conference Ullman was speaking at—and general praise from readers at Amazon. The title’s style is ultimately, I think, misleading—for me it evoked a thoroughly engrossing survey of human-machine relations, perhaps journalistic, definitely non-personal. However, ‘non-personal’ is far from the book’s reality. Sure, it’s partly about the non-personal world you sink into when hooked on the abstracted rush of software coding. But in the end it’s a brave and successful attempt to reveal this world’s inevitable link back to the messy, human world of personal relationships.

A radical feminist and communist in the early 70′s, Ullman moved swiftly into the burgeoning world of computer programming later that decade. We join her, 20 years down the line, as she plies her trade—now advanced to ‘software engineer’—as an independent contractor in San Francisco’s booming tech-obsessed Bay Area. She vividly (and hilariously) describes that odd realm where people lose all sense of time, not due to dreamy mind-expansion, but because of hyper-focused mind-contraction. No daylight, humming machines, frantic colleagues who reach the pits of despair when their code crashes, the body’s energy thrown around by caffeine and sleep deprivation, unnaturally compressed into one’s cerebrum, eyes and fingers.

Her account of this world quickly mingles with her personal life, something one reader at Amazon found disconcerting:

Working as a technical writer within the technology industry, I related to a great deal of the story. That being said, a great deal of the story had nothing to do with what I thought the theme was to be. The book is marketed as a liberal arts major’s mis-adventures in techno-land. I was not interested in the author’s personal, sexual life. I wasn’t offended by it, just bored.

Boring it’s not, if you’re interested in both techno-land and the human heart. I quote the above reader to make it clear to anyone thinking of buying a copy that in the end you do need an interest in the human heart as well to fully get behind this unique tale. I mentioned the obsessive programmer’s world’s "inevitable link back" to the personal world because however much this link is ignored, missed, blanked out, neglected or not believed in, it persists. I’m worried by the extent to which this bond, which can’t be erased or deleted or archived, is neglected by the people who are moulding the culture of tomorrow. Which is why I find Ullman’s account, for all the perversity of the human-machine tangles it describes, courageous and encouraging in its honesty.

"In the end, this is a book about Ellen Ullman, not about technoculture." So says yet another disillusioned Amazon customer. Are they disillusioned just because they felt the book was marketed in a deceptive way? I thought the title implied an in-depth critique of technoculture—but was pleasantly surprised that it was in-depth in a different way, delving into someone’s actual experience of this culture’s massively complex innards. And yet there are still people out there blind enough to dimiss the book because of this, serving only to highlight Ullman’s still-timely cautionary tale.

The Government keeps complaining that the unemployed don’t want to work… lets face it; the employed don’t want to work either!

Bruce Morton, SiN

With both the Conservative and Labour parties declaring battle on the "evil" of unemployment, it has been left to those storm-troopers of the revolution, the Liberal Democratic Party, to admit that unemployment will not go away, and in fact full employment is virtually impossible. As the economic and industrial strategies of the world change is it still possible to insist that everyone in the developed world devotes their life to being a good and fruitful "wage slave"? Even with society currently designed to ensure that everyone is streamlined into a "career path" or low paid "McJob"; and all our energies are spent on ensuring that we get to spend the rest of out lives doing things we don’t want to do; does it seem so bizarre to suggest that careers, employment and jobs are 20th century diseases which require to be eradicated? Well, I admit it does look a big step if you are hypnotised into believing in the work ethic, but look beyond what you have been told and see the future.

Eradicating work does not mean regressing to a pre-historic Garden of Eden, (there’s far too many of us to feed from one tree anyway). There are tasks of manufacturing, supply and distribution which are required by society. These tasks could be more efficiently per formed by intelligent machines than by humans. Machines work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, they don’t require holidays, pensions, healthcare, training, maternity leave, sick leave and mornings off cos they’ve got a hangover. They don’t turn up late, get stroppy, skive off, steal the stock and sabotage the operations. They don’t go on strike. With current cybernetic technologies most jobs in the developed world, both in "unskilled" and "management" positions, could be better performed by a machine. In the near future even the supervision and creation of the machines will be automated so that a minimal human involvement will be necessary to supply our every need. The major obstacle in the progress of cybernetics is the limited imaginations of governments, employers and unions. They simply cannot see what good could come of putting all those people out of work.

Alternatively their imaginations run vividly to an army of idle revolutionaries smashing the state because at last they are not chained down by worrying about their income. They also cannot see how we would survive economically. Well is it not obvious, even with high initial costs for instalment and considering maintenance, machines are much more efficient than human workers? The increased productivity would mean increased profits. In the current system increased profits go into the pockets of the managers and the share holders. Why not make us all shareholders, spread the rewards a little? At this time all wages and benefits come from the ‘available pool of resources’. It is the myth that one’s livelihood depends on "earning" a part of this pool that keeps the rich at the top of the pile. An equal distribution of the worlds current wealth would allow everyone to share the standard of living of a well off American family. Let’s be clear at this point that ‘money’ is not ‘wealth’. Money is a token system, a piece of modern voodoo which be stows a mysterious value on otherwise worthless bits of paper. Wealth is the education, means of production, distribution system, homes, and above all, nowadays, information that is controlled by a community, individual or nation.

The distribution of a nations wealth could be achieved by a variety of means, such as some of the examples listed below (these are only a few of the alternate economic systems we could adopt):

The National Dividend

Invented by engineer C.F. Douglas, and developed by Ezra Pound and Buckminster Fuller. Every citizen is declared a shareholder in the Nation and receives dividends on the Gross National Profit for the year. This would not be inflationary as long as the dividends were equal to the GNP and not above it.

The Guaranteed Annual Income

Proposed by economist Robert Theobald. The Government establishes an annual minimum income (above the poverty line), and guarantees that no-one would receive less. They would be responsible for making up the incomes of those not earning or with low earnings. The removal of various layers of red tape would make this a cheaper system to operate, and would spare the recipient the humiliation of welfare queues.

The Negative Income Tax

Devised by Nobel economist Milton Friedman. Similar to the above—any citizen whose earnings fell below the agreed minimum would receive from the government a sum to make up the difference. Again this is cheaper than the current system and less degrading for the recipient.

The RICH Economy

Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis. Devised by L. Wayne Benner and Robert Anton Wilson. This works in four stages:

1. Encourage cybernation by rewarding workers who design themselves out of a job.
2. Establish either the Guaranteed Annual Income or the Negative Income Tax to ensure that those unemployed by the cybernation are not forced into the current lunatic welfare system.
3. Gradually raise the Guaranteed Income to the level of the National Dividends, thus raising the living standards of the whole nation.
4. Progress with massive investment in adult education.

Eventually everyone will get bored watching daytime soaps, getting stoned and lying in bed all day. Give people the opportunity to learn to do something more fulfilling than TV, Fast Food and crummy jobs, give people a chance to become part of the challenges of the future, feeding the rest of the planet, Space Migration, Life Extensionism Sciences. It is also recognised that raising the educational level of a nation decreases the birth rate and increases the wealth creating potential, both problems receiving much media coverage just now.

Aristotle is recorded to have said that slavery would only be abolished when machines were built that could operate them selves. We now have that technology, but we do not have the intelligence and the will to use it. The idea of a work ethic (an idea created by the ruling classes who never had to work a day in their lives) has hypnotised us long enough. Let us celebrate unemployment as the crest of the Third Wave and congratulate the wilfully unemployed for leading the way to a new universe.

Further reading

• R.A. Wilson: The Illuminati Papers (The RICH Economy)
• Alvin Toffler: The Third Wave and Previews & Premises
• Henry George: Progress and Poverty
• Silvio Gessell: The Natural Economic Order
• Buckminster Fuller: Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth
• Benjamin Tucker: Individual Liberty
• Peter Maurin: The Green Revolution

Are my perceptions sharpening, heightened by some mantra-like quality of repetitive typing work and the glare of monitors and strip lights? Or is it just that the faces around here have been hardened and rigidified into easily-spotted emotional responses to the world?

A woman from (in)Human Resources (employees = coal) just around the corner walks past every now and then, and it amazes me more each time how set her basic expression is. She often tries to soften her harsh white neck with a flowing pastel-coloured piece of silky material tied around, but it only contrasts and heightens. Maybe that’s the point—there is a curious allure to her demeanour. But any attraction I feel is usually burst by an aching flash that tries to imagine and conjure up the feelings in her past that have led to her face being so stone-cold sculptured.

Projection plays its part here, no doubt. But I can’t help noticing the obviousness of all the varied masks worn around here. A woman working across the desk in Facilities has a very similar rigidity, but her set reaction to the world seems to be turned more inward. She seems painfully timid, and there’s a perpetually wounded undercurrent to her. I can’t imagine her belly-laughing, which is sad. Only Debbie, who sits next to me (separated by the oh-so pleasantly dark pink neck-high partitions), comes across more hopefully, constantly bubbling with girlish enthusiasm. Her nasal Yorkshire cry of "Y’alright?" to everyone who walks past is only occasionally unendearing. She’s bright and shining, despite the beginnings of strained wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, and her commitment to her work seems strangely inspiring (I usually find that seeing a commitment to nine to five rituals inspires only hollow despair).

Aside from the masks that people try to pass off as faces, there are also the masks that are worn as a specific reaction to the utterly weird, unnatural situation of office work. Vast amounts of people of differing interests, wills, social classes, ambitions, needs and desires, thrown together under the tenuously homogenizing umbrella of Corporate Image—"teamwork", "people are our greatest asset", "one vision", and the insubstantial carrot-on-a-stick of internal prize-giving ("We did it! We collected a million pounds in credit payments!") The masks are worn, the roles are played, so the corporate mechanisms can continue to buzz and whirr. In fact, I often think of this as an acting job. I’m paid to come in here and play a role, audience and co-stars being the same people. When I go for a dump and lock the cubicle door, I always get the sensation of stepping off-stage.

But… the disguises are never air-tight, and the escaping emotional gases either filter out through office gossip and back-stabbing, or get turned within to plague the body and nerves.

My boss is a friendly enough guy, even if his apparent air-tightness is unnerving. We occasionally share a mild bout of humour in reference to some difficulty in the latest document that needs infinite amendments, and he’s been known to show interest in my life outside work. But one evening, after we had both stayed behind an hour late to finish a particular document, we ended up walking out of the building at the same time. I could feel that thin crust of a role I wear in work flaking off as we neared the door, and we barely exchanged a word. Outside, greeted by a view of Leeds’
cityscape crowned by a rich and glorious sunset, we parted. He didn’t even look at me when he muttered goodbye. It doesn’t make me sad in the slightest. What does make me sad is that such a vast amount of people are forced to invest their time and their energy in fashioning masks so they can just get along with people they wouldn’t even think of interacting with in everyday life. And that this paper-thin, toxic and soul-sapping illusion of transcendence of boundaries experienced in office work is perhaps the only taste of transcendence many people have. I live in a culture where two men share laughter under strip-lights and over a plastic desk, but shrink into entirely different worlds before the beauty of the sun sinking into the earth.

At the opposite end of this vast open-plan C-shaped office, there’s a big glass case. Inside, together with a wooden shield studded with smaller silver shields, is an ornate golden chalice. I’ve just been down there, surreptitiously stopping for a peep to remind me on the way to the toilets at the other end of the building. Underneath the chalice, floridly engraved on a plaque, is:

1994
The Holy Grail of Excellence
Awarded to Sir Bernard Crooks
and his Valiant Operations Team.

‘Excellence’ is a key word in corporate word-image jargon. I thought Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie were making it all up when they did their Rhodes Boyson piss-take. Both of them as rosy-cheeked, lamb-chopped, waffling Boysons, orgasmically repeating phrases like "Standards of accountability" and "Centres of excellence". It was Hugh Laurie’s blustery Boyson voice I heard when I first saw "centre of excellence" on one of the director’s slide shows I had to design. Along with other phrases like "risk excellence" and a whole slide occupied with the words "……Our people are enriched, cherished, motivated and prosperous," I had to laugh to myself. (The next slide made me sad, though—it shot me through with infectious hollowness. "Our biggest asset is… ‘THE LEEDS SPIRIT’" …there was a cheesy clip-art graphic of a crowd of literally faceless people, and underneath… "= Team Spirit," and on a the next line, "is unquenchable.")

Sir Bernard must have creamed in his pants (or in the chalice itself) when he got the fucking Holy Grail of Excellence. Perhaps the valiant attainment of his Operations Team was commemorated by some mid-office ceremony, waves of applause greeting the presentation of the chalice at its climax. Last time I was working here, everyone was undergoing ‘Service Excellence’ training. Like credit financiers really serve their customers.

Now they’ve put up inverted triangle SERVICE EXCELLENCE signs above those departments who have achieved this mystical height of superior functioning. ‘Excellence’ being the Holy Grail of corporate performance (or rather of corporate linguistic masturbation), this must have been the Holy Grail of Holy Grails. In fact, it is a symbol of a symbol, a twice-removed abstract cousin only tenuously related to reality, and utterly unrelated to actions that, to me, may constitute excellence. As a friend said last night, they’re not talking the same language as Bill & Ted.

And though I know that ‘Holy Grail’, as a concept and phrase, has passed into popular use and is universally understood in the very broad sense of "the ultimate prize or achievement", I still can’t help seeing this particular chalice as a very specific bastardization of one of the most profound archetypes to be found in English mythology. What heightens this is my conviction that the National Lottery (the presence of which is strong in office culture) is a conscious conspiracy to bastardize, mock, and ultimately defuse the most potent return-to-Eden myth-structure this country has.

During the eighties, the Tories did a brilliant job of making it absolutely clear that Britain is truly a Waste Land. They rubbed salt into the Wounded King’s gaping thigh. And now, when our need is at its greatest, Camelot (plc) returns! But instead of healing this wasted land, it plasters it over with a thick layer of banknotes-cum-bandages, blotting out awareness with cash-lust, scratch-card fetishes and the televisually-synchronized stimulation of millions of adrenal glands. "Whom does the Grail serve?" is the mythical question that heals the King and the Land, which can more prosaically be seen as clear, sudden and crystalline awareness, a direct confrontation with the reality of the Waste Land—perhaps leading to acceptance and that over-theologized humdinger, redemption.

Here, in a tastefully decorated modern office, replete with plants and mineral water dispensers, I can sense the cover-up, feel the decay and rot beneath layer upon layer of solidified denial. It’s a place where I’m forced to brush against what is, sadly, contemporary British culture: nine-to-five work, clubbing at the weekend, multiplex cinemas designed like efficient slaughterhouses, nervous breakdowns, choked motorways, MacDonald’s… and National Lottery syndicates.

Two days ago the self-confessed reincarnation of Arthur Pendragon was arrested at Newbury in the midst of the protest to halt the destruction of ancient woodland to make way for an ineffectual bypass. He was arrested for carrying an offensive weapon—his broadsword (aka Excalibur). And the Holy Grail stands in an office of the consumer finance division of one of the world’s largest multinationals. I haven’t a fucking clue what that says about Britain, but I suspect it means we’re in trouble.

In the unconscious, cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which the head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow, and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head.

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need A KICK IN THE SEAT OF THE PANTS.

blurb on cover of a business training manual seen in my employers’ Education Centre

The "prehistoric image of the body" unearthed by Richard Onians testifies to a lack of schism between thought and sexuality in archaic cultures, and forms a skeletal map of a persistently recurring model of human experience of the cosmos. The three-levelled shamanic plan of existence embraces the Underworld, Middleworld and Upperworld—less holistically seen in the later, and confused, Heaven, Earth and Hell. The shamanic map is usually centred around a natural axis mundi, centre of the world, like a tree or a mountain. One may speculate as to whether the first shamans derived this map from observation of natural phenomena or from inward perception of the structure of the body, but ultimately this is pointless. It seems natural to assume that the genesis of this model lies in both phenomena, for its obvious secret is that it describes the fundamental identity of the human body and the universe. It seems to be the basic form underlying the varying chakra systems from around the world. The base of the spine, or root (spine = tree), is associated with sexuality, basic impulses of life and creative forces—corresponding to the Underworld’s traditional association with the generative furnaces of nature (alienation from nature thus turning the Underworld into Hell). The trunk—stomach, solar plexus or heart—corresponds to Middleworld, the earthly realm. And somewhere in or above the skull lies the Upperworld, world of gods and archetypes. The spine branches out into the myriad branches, twigs and leaves of the neural network.

Christopher Hyatt touched something important when he said in his Undoing Yourself that you should live from the gut so that you can use both ends (see also the Amerindian concept of ‘speaking from the heart’). This ideal of balanced human behaviour, cerebrality and sexuality utilized and co-ordinated at gut/heart level, interestingly reflects the transhuman spiritual condition of the shaman, walker between worlds, who has gained access to both Under- and Upperworlds, yet lives in this world, mediating between these simple divisions of reality.

Throughout the esoteric traditions of the world you will find variations on these themes, the three-levelled nature of both the universe and the psychoplasmic body, and their ultimate unity. From the cosmic body-maps of Tantric art to the Body of Christ and his post-execution trip down to Hell and up to Heaven; from the Siberian shaman’s ascent of the World Tree to the Indian yogi’s raising of the Kundalini snake-energy; from the semen, grey matter and spinal fluid of Onians to the past, future and NOW of thee Psychick Cross.

And here, in a microcosmic reflection of how far ‘progress’ has tried to override nature, or just go completely against it, we find a business training manual that says (let us remind ourselves): "The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on." The repression of sexuality is complete, the domination of the grey matter end of the spectrum total. Sexual energy is sublimated into the brain, which is in turn used for brain-numbing tasks that are an insult to our being. The ‘other end’, down there, is just a portable cushion, supporting the body so the mind can more easily numb itself.

Now, according to this manual, some people get the ends "mixed up". Sitting on your head isn’t a widespread problem, I think, but people getting ideas, even feelings, about playing about with their own and other people’s bodies for pleasure… this can represent a serious threat to keeping it all under Control. Of course, we’re lucky enough to have loads of handy conventions through which we can safely channel this energy, if our job doesn’t drain it all.

But BE WARNED. If you start ‘mixing up’ your bodily poles too often, you’ll get a good kick in the pants. Experiences of polymorphous perversity, full bodily pleasure, are punishable by death.

This job is perfect for me, and I for it. I’ve lost my soul and found my home.

It now happens that I look forward to coming here—as long as I’m given work to keep my fingers flowing over the keyboard. If I’m left with nothing to do for a while, the remnants of my spirit, lashing out at any aspect of me it can find, cause me too much pain. Some acid philosopher has said that ‘Bad Trips’ are caused by the experience of viewing the limited, petty ego through the lens of your own Higher Intelligence. Feels like I’m getting a real good look these days, but the experience is ever more frictionless, an elusive, floating numbness. My Higher Intelligence is fed up of fighting this rigid snarling bunch of defences, and has left me for a while. Maybe merciful—would I be able to stand the harshness of seeing myself through its lens every day? So the mercy of the universe has dropped me into this temporary realisation of my fundamental identity as the perfect office worker.

As I said, I’m perfect for this job, temperamentally ideal. Last time I worked here I felt like an actor, an alien, an agent. I couldn’t believe these people were letting me, subversive me, have potential access to all the company’s mainframe drives and files. On the last day I got round to taking the risk of doing some photocopying (they’re very tight on this sort of thing), and nearly got caught, but walked out triumphant, never to see the place again. However, debts still needed paying, and the temp agency phoned me, the company wanted me, my skills, to save them from a mess. Perfect for the job… So, I’m here again, drawn back to my place, same desk, same job, different me.

Last time, I felt horror at the deadness in all the bodies around me who had surrendered their energy to the Corporation. I recognized the process in myself, too, which deepened my resolve to reclaim my energy and melt the frozen river.

NOW—I feel like an alien with my ‘friends’. I was a double agent after all, and now my True Self, energy repressed and sacrificed to the mysterious operations of Office Britain plc, is revealed. I feel at home typing out other people’s words, and I’m at a vague loss when I reach my house and have nothing to do. Even outside the office, my True Self manifests, unable to make a positive stand on anything important, unspontaneous, unimaginative, unstable, timid, just a cancerous agent among those who are naturally themselves. I drain them using the fabricated threads of companionship my Cover Self has woven around them. If they ignore me, it confirms my status as a fake, an outsider to integrity and value. If they try to help me… HA! They can’t imagine the tangled nets of lies and scared fakery I have at my disposal. I will find it easy to convince them of my essential lowliness, and woe to those who would double-bluff. I’ll shrivel up and turn away if you try to agree with my withering view of myself. I’m a black hole employed by the Corporation, my body is cold and unyielding, my embrace is uncomfortable. I’m lonely, I need warmth. Please, don’t come near me.

After about two solid weeks of unadulterated GREY, no sun, no cloud formations, definitely no sky, it’s happened. I noticed a curious brightness to the GREY walking to the bus stop this morning, enough to make things different. And walking towards the business park, I actually glimpsed the outline of the sun’s disc through the GREY. Sat here at my desk (sorry, workstation), it was quite stirring to see some differentiation happening in that dull blanket, then… Shit! The sun rays, breaking through, making everything haloed… a secretary casually walks over to the windows and presses the button to bring the automated blinds down… dzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Can’t see the monitor with the damn sun behind it. Shut it out. I relish the squinting, and turn up the contrast on my screen.

Perhaps even more lovely than the sunlight are the clouds. Probably because you can see them, look at them as objects. Beautiful grey fluffy walruses and candy mountains lined with shining silver. They’re drifting away now, as I look out of the one unblinded window, chased off by hefty weights of dark, dark, grey cloud, with the smeared bottom edges that prophesy rain. Maybe a real rain will come and wash all the scum out of my head.

I feel really guilty about writing that shit about the woman from (in)Human Resources. I have had my words in my head every time I see her, their meanings projected invisibly over her features. And something in me resisted this, scornful of my readiness to box up someone else’s emotional life in words as readily as I do my own. I started seeing her doing other things than walking past my desk with that slow, precise, purposeful stride. I started noticing the gentle bounce in her walk, and appreciated the fact that she was unhurried and focused. So many women trot past frantically, all their muscles buzzed into jerky near-paralysis by Chasing The Corporate Carrot. I even heard her voice, as she walked past with a colleague—it’s a warm but defined Leeds accent. And every now and then she would smile, the ‘mask’ quickly breaking into curves, her eyes shining. She’s attractive.

She’s not really from (in)Human Resources, though she spends a lot of time there. She works for a temping agency which this company has made a big deal with, big enough for the agency to have a few people in here virtually full-time. It’s a French-based agency called ECCO, a name I playfully allowed to weird me out when I tried to get a job through them, as I had previously only known ‘ECCO’ as John C. Lilly’s impersonal term for what others may call God, Brahman, Wakan Tanka, or The Management. Earth Coincidence Control Office. Being ‘employed by ECCO’ takes on hilariously grandiose resonances. And to weird things up a bit more, the abbreviated name of the multinational of which this company is a part is GE. Ge happens to be the Thracian form of the Greek goddess Gaia… the most common current name for Mother Earth. Working in GE for ECCO! Together with the Grail sat at the other end of this office and Camelot plc, this whole scene seems like a set-up designed by Carl Jung and John Major to baffle and subvert the psyches of unbalanced mystics. Only humour and humility saves me, that and knowing there’s only three weeks left…

A week and a half left. I asked one of my boss’s secretaries yesterday if I could work another week, because that would just clear my debts—my monetary guilt. She didn’t know. My boss phoned from his meeting in London—she popped the question to him, and I had a minor panic feeling hearing her say, "Oh, so you want him indefinitely, at least until the end of April?" My fragile mental state has left me with a disturbing feeling that I’m stuck here, that this is my fucking vocation, to be a nobody spineless temp. I often forget that it’s up to me whether I stay. I felt like someone had signed my contract behind my back. I quickly told her I could only really manage to stay until the end of next week, because I’ve got so much to do (which I have, but that doesn’t matter; I want OUT of here as soon as my debts are cleared).

Now that the sun shines daily, and the end is in sight, I am beginning to taste my non-corporate self, my own body, not the legal and financial body I’ve been a cell in for the past few weeks of eternity.

And still I feel slips. My veganism has lapsed since being here. Cheese in the canteen. What the fuck? Today, after eight months of not smoking, I had a red Marlboro. Lisa, Becca and I sat outside, luxuriating in our extended lunch break and giggling like kids excited to have a school lesson outside on the grass. I’ve been having vague inclinations to smoke recently, and today I went for the "I’ll have one to remind myself I don’t want to smoke" line of irrationality. It tasted nice, felt weird in between my fingers a bizarre appendage), and made me feel quite sick afterwards. Irrationality worked. I got into office gossip for the first time.

This whole trip, this whole descent into deadness, and my hidden longing for deadness, I don’t know yet how it stands, in the balance of my life. I often think of J.G. Ballard, that warrior of the imagination, doing battle on the fringes of modern, corporate and suburban lunacy. He lives in Shepperton, surrounded by the tarmac smells, angular concrete sights and stale consumer environments of road and airport culture. He sees suburbs as dangerous places—you don’t get mugged, but some passing corporation might steal your soul. (I get the worst of both worlds—I got mugged a few weeks ago on the highly dodgy Hyde Park, and come here to this business park every day to have my soul methodically drained and sapped.) Ballard rhapsodizes about Thatcher when she’s on TV, follows the Royal Family with the eye of an obsessive research scientist, and launches into expressing his desire to have thermonuclear weapons stationed behind his garden at any mention of CND. His playfulness and irony plunge into Britain’s cancers with the reckless resolve of the proto-shaman who surrenders hirself to hir initiatory sickness. Hoping to come through the other side, finding the meaning of the disease, conquering the sickness by becoming the sickness. He hopes to double-bluff the Apocalypse by affirming it so thoroughly and methodically that its destructiveness is negated.

Can I hope for a similar victory? When is resistance necessary, and when is it the resistance that traps us? When I surrender to the pleasure of a schedule laid out for me, the insidious comfort and niceties of the corporate environment, do I lose part of my soul? Or do I shred it and tear it when I resist, trying to hold onto the walls on my descent? Can I exorcize my ignored childhood desires for homogeneities—to smother my pain—through indulging them to the point where my unconscious, my body, my natural instincts for survival and healthy chaos, rise up and quell the subtle dominion of Thanatos?

I have felt some curious little satoris of resignation over the weeks, the rubble of my collapsing life mounting up around me until I give up trying to break out. Sometimes the giving up is followed by just more pain and shame, sometimes there’s a surprising peace. In the midst of what I think should be a most hideous depression, I find pleasure in small things, and easily share warm, funny exchanges with others. It often happens that the momentum of my self-hate refuses this unexpected break in the clouds, and angrily works to conjure up more clouds, magically regenerating itself in defiance of this illogical moment of grace. But I’m starting to see that self-hate is exhaustible; just don’t get drawn into wrestling with it, and it wrestles itself into submission.

That woman. The ECCO woman, she really does work for God. Maybe all that stone-cold mask shit was just a heap of confused projection after all. Or maybe she’s just smiling and talking more these days. She radiates as she walks past, and she brightens my days.