Inside-Out Thinking

Independent on Sunday

Last week I wrote an article on changes in publishing, the spiritual function of the novel and the new art form that is come in the I on S. Think you can get it on their website.

What do Angels Want from Us?

Like anyone else who works in a large organization I get hundreds of e-mails per day - maybe 2-300, and it's getting worse. Does a business, like a publisher, work any the better for this? of course not! We are becoming more and more enslaved to the machine - and to scientific materialism.The thing about this relentlessness is that is gives you almost no time to think. If you gave 5 minutes to responding to each one, you literally wouldn't have time for anything else. E-mails also mean more meetings can be arranged more easily. i have perhaps on average 2 hours of meetings per day. A friend recently remarked that he used to walk past my office and see me staring happily out of the window with a vague expression on my face. These days my face is baking in the light of a hot screen. I'm no more or less successful than I was then.

So more words are exchanged more efficiently, but i reckon that in the midst of this fewer thoughts are exchanged - certainly fewer fresh, original thoughts.

What's the good news then? I think it comes in the form of the thought-beings, the angels who are constantly swimming into our mental space and trying to prompt us. New ideas, new imaginings, hunches, intuitions, awakening feelings. This is the tide sweeping in the other direction to the tide of materialism, infusing life into what is being deadened by materialism.

And what do they want from us? Of course they want us to be good and loving, and to show many of their own attributes. But there is one thing we can do they can't. Because unlike them we have a centre of consciousness that is enclosed from the cosmic mind - in Plato's cave of bone - we are not swept hither and thither in the great cosmic flow.

If you think of people who have passed on to humanity the thoughts of angels with the greatest immediacy - Enoch, Milton, Blake - these thoughts are expressed in great powerful images, poetic symbols. This is how angels think..

What they find difficult perhaps is systematic, abstract thought of the type that is unique to us. Ironically, perhaps, it has been refined by materialism. The philosophy of science instigated by Bacon was a big factor in this refining. We have put a lot of thought into what counts as a good, clear thought. We can think much more clearly than ever before - and that, I think, is the present task -to apply this to the spirit worlds.

I was prompted to think about this by a brave blogger who sent a personal story to this site, who joins me in this task. I've been heartened, too, by testimonies from people who have had regular vivid communications with the the spirit worlds, who say that the book helps them to see a structure, to make sense of it and see it as a whole. Makes me even more aware that i've had a lot of help, both bodied and disembodied.

Diana Bugged?

The inquiry now seems to show that Diana was right in believing she was being bugged. That comes as no surprise. This is not what my book or blog is about, but I have worked with several members of the security services, and i know they are regularly asked to perform actions on our behalf that are abhorrent to our private moral sense or code, unless we happen to be psychopaths.

One story that has stayed in my mind concerns a group of Africans taken up in a helicopter by members of our special forces, who tossed these Africans out one by one until they were given the information they were after. Some soldiers/operators may use a certain buddy-buddy bravado to get through these things, but anyone who isn't a psychopath - and most of them, these days at any rate, are not - will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives. And it's not the sort of thing you can ask sympathy for, is it?

Any bland assurances that members of the establishment or their supporters give us that this sort of thing doesn't go on, any suggestion that to believe that they do is to subscribe to paranoid conspiracy theories is an insult to all our intelligence. It also shows a quite shameful failure of empathy with regard to the mentally ill.

People who are really mentally ill are in great pain. Their illness is disabling, making it difficult for them to enjoy working and living life to the full with the rest of us.

It's a very different state of mind, then, to a genial and free-spirited enquiry into different ways of looking at life that may be almost completely the opposite of the concensus, different attitudes, different forms of consciousness even, and the conscious cultivation of 'negative capability'  - deliberately withholding assent to the conventional, fixed ways of looking at things, and waiting for a richer pattern to emerge.  Among the websites that commentators wish to sneer at as nutty there are many where people are pursuing this sort of experimentation out of a joyful sense of intellectual superiority.  I suspect it's here rather than in hidebound print media that the brilliant new ideas and inspired writing that will change the world will come.

Only a couple of years, I suspect, before the main edition of most books will be a download - and at that point the great change on consciousness will already be well under way.

Tide Drawing Out

A small group of friends threw a party to celebrate the publication of my book - Paul and Tony (Hutchinson), Oliver, Hannah and Rina (Century), Will (Cape and Bodley Head), and they invited, too, Kate (John Murray) and my best friend David, a bookseller in Lewes.

I can't remember when I laughed so much - such wit and so many funny anecdotes, some of them none the worse for having the air of stories perhaps told once or twice before. Oliver told the story of his student, dope-smoking days, visiting Will Self in a house on fire, of police turning up and being benignly unaware, and he told it so well that he induced a druggy giggly high in everyone around the table. Paul made a pretty speech ending up 'You must be mad or you wouldn't've come', we were lucky, too, to have the most beautiful women in publishing there - and the exciting prospect of Rina's ear-shattering Shirley Bassey impression.

Some of these people are members of the Twits, the only secret society of which I've ever been a member. We are a group of like-minded book editors, but I cannot say more...

Anyway I sat there thinking how much I love them all, and asking where else, in what other walk of life could i have found such good, kind, sensitive, thoughtful, attractive, funny and clever friends?

But then I had an anxiety, which is that i suspect that it may be one of the Deeper Laws of Life that as soon as you become conscious of a perfection like this one, it starts to decline and fall apart. One of the reasons i wrote my book was that in my early fifties i am beginning to feel the tide of memory drawing out, and I worried that I wouldn't be able to hold all this information in my head for much longer.

I also believe that publishing is about to morph into something very different. When all books become downloads, they will be shared for free amongst friends as music is now - and then how will the large publishing corporations survive? At our age, ranging from 30 to 60, we who sat round the table have a twittish nostalgia for the printed page, but my children are more used to reading on screen. All the action will be here on the net, it will be lawless and unregultaed and a new art form will evolve to replace the interior narrative of the novel.

Will all the old, twittish stuff fall apart this year? We'll see..

Cool

I remember I once asked Derek Jarman's partner why he - the partner - never drank alcohol?

'Because it makes me violent'

Oh OK...

Staring out to Sea

At a party over the holiday i met some good, kind, clever people who live on Romney Marsh. I sensed they are a bit sniffy about Derek Jarman's gravestone in their local church.

Derek manages to be an uncomfortable presence even in death!

I worked very closely with Derek on his book Modern Nature, mostly at his cottage at Dungeness, interweaving the story of his illness with episodes from his own life. We became quite close, with great admiration on my side, though on one occasion he rang up, in pain and wanting to talk, I sensed, and I was in a hurry to get off the line and do I can't remember what. One of those episodes that come back to haunt you, like when I carried my son, then a toddler, up to a hermit's cell, perched on a rock in Roche in Cornwall. He could have died. Times when you fail as a human being.

Last week i saw a dvd of Derek's film The Garden in the music shop at the bottom of St Martin's Lane, but his films are not much watched these days. Modern Nature is still a wonderful, beautiful book - a top ten bestseller then, something almost unimaginable today when the trade is led by the nose by supermarkets. The garden at Dungeness has also been exceptionally influential. Like Peter Cook, Derek Jarman scattered seeds that changed consciousness. Peter scattered jokes, Derek... seeds.

It's really his aesthetic that has been the great agent of change. The landscape at Dungeness is in many different ways a part of all our mental landscape, a no-man's land, a lawless borderland lying on the edge of waking consciousness, lit up from time to time, as Derek told me, by crackles and flashes from the crumbling nuclear power station. It's a place where he found new beauty in litter and garbage, in wood, metal and plastic washed up on the shore. Art is made out of scrap there and so too are houses!  This landscape looks out over the sea, and is on the border between the material world and whatever lies beyond.

In my book i talk about how in Botticelli's famous painting of Venus we see the ancient belief that shells were precipitated out of the sea, and how this was taken as a symbol of matter precipitated out of the cosmic mind. There is something of this in Derek's driftwood - and driftmetal and driftplastic - sculpture.

Derek had difficulties with the Church - a bit of a worry, as he used to say - because of the Church's traditional attitudes to his sexuality. But he was fascinated by religion and the great questions of life and death. His art - films, paintings, books, garden - addresses the great question that  now confronts us all: How do we get through this great looming materialism that threatens to extinguish the human spirit altogether?

I didn't spot it at the time, because I had not read the occult philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa, but i now see that Derek's writings are larded with quotes from CA. Which confirms me in my suspicion that all the most intelligent people check out esoteric philosophy at some time in their lives.  It's the greatest repository of thinking on the great questions of life and death.