Friday 29 February 2008

whatever happened to the atomic children?

Chapter One:
=========
There was a knock on my caravan door. It was Coleridge.
“I rang up James. He said you were in. “he said.
“Come in” I replied” would you like some tea?”

We sat on the floor and discussed various events of the past 200 years since my friend had been alive.

Coleridge was very enthusiastic. He had come over the Heath from Highgate in the moonlight, sensing the arrival of some new work of greatness. He was very interested in the recent activities of such resourceful souls who daily challenged the state machinery of banks, companies and governments.
Already out of hand in his own time, it was certainly not past the power of his imagination to accept my descriptions of modern day logo fronted institutions with purpose suspicious and members dispensable.
“ ‘Tis a poison world indeed” he ruefully commented after hearing salient news
about the national grid, food and pharmaceutical industries, genetic engineering and now this new nuclear energy fuelled star wars plan. “Wanton
abuse of the Earth’s bounty that takes of Her treasures and splendor to make
it all a deadly foulness”
A dark cloud passed over his capacious mind for a few moments, then he looked
up, eyes a twinkle.
“Ah, ‘tis but to be expected. You could see it coming, it is only a stretch of
the imagination away from what they were doing in my day.”
We sat in deep reflection. A moment or two passed and then I asked Coleridge
if he would like some mushrooms.
He liked very much, so I set a saucepan of water to boil and then simmer some
seventy little psychedelic liberty caps.
Coleridge laughed full hearted to see them. “Why, these little helpers wear
hats like those peasant souls of emancipation in the time running up to the
revolution. Before, that is, the new authorities took things from their hands,
and it was off with their heads.
They wore pixie hats tweaked and sown to a nipple on top, just like these
little things.”
He picked out a liberty cap that remained in the paper bag and placed it
between his thumb and first two fingers for examination. Thus held, he slowly
rotated it to see all the cap and then peered at the gill like under side.
During this process a wry smile launched itself slowly across his face.
“And all for mischief and inspiration. How did I fail to realize this in my
time? I must be dread inobservant.” Another cloud swiftly unfolded from a
nearby recess in my friend’s mind and Coleridge stared through the window into
dark reveries that looked beyond my powers to endure.
Coleridge seemed suddenly locked onto a downer, so I put a JJ Cale CD on and
he instantly snapped out of this downward spiral.
“Saved by the DJ ” he laughed.
Some minutes went by.
“Tea?”
I poured 2 cups of the slightly foul tea.
“Lovely” was the reply, eyes looking for sweetener.
When the tea was cool, we sipped, then gulped down our brew, which threatened
to make us urge.
Some moments passed in silent observance of the various bodily sensations of
the liberty mixture encountering our stomachs and bloodstream. I began lengthy
preparation of a long stemmed pipe that had been with me for several years,
for use on such occasions.
Within 20 minutes we had begun to sing, to murmer gently with no words a song
to honour our meeting, the night and the moon lit Heath which we would soon
stumble out onto.
I handed the pipe to Coleridge and lit it as he sucked. He held his breath for
ages and then exploded in a fit of coughing and smoke clouds. Recovery saw the
Bard giggling with watery prism seeing eyes, swaying only to fall sideways
onto my beanbag.
It was my turn to draw a huge lungful from the pipe.
“Woa” I exclaimed with smoke, after holding my breath 40 seconds, yet not
coughing.
The Hempstead shag, grown nearby on the Heath brought on the mushrooms. After
ten more minutes of the atonal drone, which rose to outsize laughs and
cackles, and fell to gurglings, we spilled out onto the Heath. It was glowing,
so we followed a shiny little path to the top of an escarpment near Whitestone
ponds from where we could gaze opon the whole of London Town, sprawled about
the Thames Valley below.
Noting first how the cityscape resembled some molten compounds seething in
some alchemists crucible, we picked out famous landmarks, Samuel the older
ones, often commenting about such and such a building now gone or obscured by
modernity. I, without pride, pointing out the new.
With the ground sensuously trembling beneath our feet and air oscillating,
generously frilled with faerie crenelations, and tickling us without malice,
he began to explain.
“The reason I have come here is that several disembodied friends of mine have
expressed their feelings and indeed fears about a great number of the issues
that the more aware and awake of the gentlefolk of your time are concerned
about.
“They have sent me as a representative-of-continuity-from-the-past to show
that there is an unbroken line of dissent to overbearingly materialistic and
exploitative authoritarian conduct. Behaviour that is at expense of person and
environment. Does this ring any bells?”
The question of course hit me like a mallet on a gong.
“The mere presence of so-called free thinkers indicates, to a mind open with
possibility, that cherished dreams of freedom nurtured within Thought may
indeed become realities even though present obstacles seem insurmountable.
What is needed is consistent and imaginatively executed action, organized yet
not centralized to any one group or individual of command.”
I stared at my erudite companion as I added up his language like a sum.
“There are possible routes we could take, as you know. Though it could be
argued it is imperative to avoid total annihilation, this Eschaton is also
open for profound
transformation.”
“Meaning?” I queried.
“Meaning that death is not what we have been sold and that a poison can also
be a medicene. In many cultures, death has been a beginning, is another facet
of life, which, after a period out of Time as we perceive it, actually
precipitates souls into existence, restoring one for the bodily Incarnation.
Within the destruction of the old civilization are seeds of the new, growing
to rise phoenix-like above the ashes. You have heard of this kind of thing I
presume?”
I don’t know if I made a gesture, I was kind of gripped.
“It’s true on any level, this principle, it’s alchemy, it’s science and
physics, it’s common sense.”
“Whose?” but on went my mentor.
“I do worry about the half lives, they are a terribly long time and what one
hears about the mutation is beyond Mary Shelley, Thomas de Quincy and Peter
Breugel. Though opium frequented me with eternal seeming hells well enough,
this would be a hell not induced and of the mind and body alone, yet one all
about the places we have walked loved and lived our lives the whole world
over.
“Nuclear winter” I spoke our, naming the fear. I sensed my companion was not
dimmed by the thought of this. His eyes simply burned all the brighter and the
tone of his voice lowered. With considerable mesmeric control he seemed to
forge deep girders of powerfully suggestive thought which he then welded into
my unmade mind.
“The fact is that we have existed with these ideas appearing in us is
assurance that such notions have the possibility of happening, whatever the
forces around that seek to damn our efforts. Yet effort must be sustained for
this lonely seed to become alive and grow. Motivation and resilient endevour
are the order of this new millenium, as ever. It would be a shame to see it
all go to ruin, but I have a sense of confidence that stands up on it’s own
inspite of the apathy, hypocrasy and nihilism of these times.
“I think you are doing well, feel some hope is here. If I am wrong, then all
my deeply cherished Pantosocratic dreams are forever forfeit.”
Coleridge stopped speaking. We counted eleven or so flashes of light from the
apex of the pyramid on the Canary Wharf Tower dominating the London panorama.
I imagined London as a great diagram of lines drawn on some masons
architectural draft, invisibly but archly connecting up different sites and
buildings important in some way.
Momently, it seemed to be that hundreds of these connections sprang from many
angles in the City, from which some form of surging current instantly
enlivened itself as if through the synapses and neurones of an enormous brain.
A brain, it occurred to me, full of the control of evil intent. The vision
faded.
“Thanks for coming” I said eventually. “Surely it is a task a number of these
disembodied associates of yours must also hold dearly in their hearts. Those
who sung so lovingly the Earth’s praises in their lifetimes. What a lineage of
thinkers and doers have raised voices of concern over the centuries! With what
urgency now is the message to be heeded and applied.!”
Mr Coleridge and I drank in the view, We filled with momentary pride
concerning many examples of peoples resistance to societial laws created for
control contrary to needs and wishes of a common good.
Coleridge spoke. “ I don’t want to seem like an overbearing know-it-all, but
it is only now that people are beginning to come to certain realizations that
in my age were so hidden beneath the fear and religion of the time, that to
profess them publically were sure to get you enlisted in an asylum, or
otherwise gain dissapprovals.
“Even I, with all my supposed learning, observing and researching the wit and
way of phenomenal worlds, could not nessicerily apply the wisdoms I uncovered
to this world at that time.
“Alas my soul was cased in this body too haphazard. Though it enabled me thus
to see far further than my fellows, and to have so inherited a consciousness
willing and able to travel so far, it was hard. Oh unfortunate age with so
little use of it’s senses, Lost to any sense of the overall and absolute in
any normal day. Of the expanded within the mundane, of life beyond the
trammelings of both subtle and enforced methods of thinking Yes, I had a hard
time in the discovery. Is there another way? I feel not. Yet eventually, all
that is true becomes accepted.”
I piped up that he had been a damn good influence to many of us opon our
precarious journey through life. Further, that, faltering though had been the
way, with no foundation from his body of work, which was original, yet also
learned vastly of others, what smaller gleanings would now be the basis of our
general understanding. His understanding ranged as wide as had been possible
through all the sciences and arts. Bridges and latticeworks of his thought had
majestically and forever linked these antipodal truths and elucidated,
illuminating each subject three ways, as itself , as part of the whole and
somehow also as greater than the whole and sum of our present knowledge as
when peering beyond our known limits.
“We really just have to catch up.” I added, “Poets bring to home worldly and
other worldly vision, wisdom, knowledge and experience for a public which
perhaps strains to comprehend what is what from the separate boxes these
things have been placed in by society. Systems of thought and education
compartmentalize phenomena for the purpose of categorising, yet this leads to
alienation. Truth is there are no aliens, only strangers and the as yet
unknown, waiting, already present, undiscovered.
“Poets dissolve into the infinate and eternal at any given moment.This for the
purposes of their work, and essentially beyond most predjuces of the empiric
mind. Returning, more or less in tact, they can be inspired to create a
completeness in rhyme. Generally well before others they can envision and
popularize new horizons.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave a little bow and suggested we wander over to he
pond to read Keats’ piece on the memorial.We left the Heath and crossed the
road outside Jack Straw’s Castle.

Looking at the red poppy wreaths in the moonlight, I wondered why a friend
with the white poppy had been arrested, surely not for a breach of the peace!
Perhaps by breaching hate with thoughts of peace.
The thought passed. Coleridge was striding purposefully to the green area over
the road behind the concrete pond.
There were not many cars about, which was good. The drivers might have got
themselves confused had they stopped to question the man in white breaches,
old style leather walking boots, voluminous tatty coat and an eagle headed
walking staff I forgot to mention. The man’s old but still frequently flashing
eyes and floating, if white hair, belonged to a head that would most likely
have uttered congenial yet uncompromising words, a challenge to all
conformity. Sensing this perhaps, they stared from behind glass at what they
could not be sure of.
“Where are you going” said I
“Come over here.” said he.
Sat on a bench, intently staring at the moon was a man in a long dark coat. He
was eating chocolate buttons from a paper bag . Coleridge neared him and spoke
words of greeting in french.
“Bonsoir Marquis” was what he said. For some reason I felt my nerves set on
edge and for sweat to appear, moon bejeweled on my forehead.
“Bonsoir Monsieur Coleridge” said the Marquis. “It must be 200 years.”
“This is my friend Pok” Coleridge made a motion towards me.
“Alphonso de Sade” the Marquis offered his name and his hand, standing up as
he did so.
I shook his hand and found it firm, reassuring me against my immediate nervous
reaction.
Immediately I felt at ease. We all looked at the moon.
Eventually, when he had finished munching handful of chocolate buttons, of
which he offered us none, de Sade said:
“The moon, she tells me things. She turns me in so I can see there , then she
goes and I have to work out what to do next.”
We all shared a little laugh and de Sade spoke again.
“It is true what they say, most of it. I’ll not deny it. Why? How could I and
be true to myself. The world’s most infamous pervert restrained in prison and
asylum because They could not bear that He expose Them for what He fully knows
They were.
“Let me tell you that They were far worse!
“If my natural inclinations drew a perverse angle, then Their degree of
misdemeanour led off the scale, far, far exeeding any of my misguided
inclinations and influence over the lives of innocents.”
De Sade spat, away from their huddle, then regarded the moon again with
piercing eye.
“What some of us have to do to wake up.” He spoke with a quiet voice, yet his
words had
a force of engines. Many emotions seemed to pass through the man, seizing him
with power and passion that could have shaken a lesser man to death. Yet no
such lesser man was this and he conquered the mighty rage within to raise his
arms as a great channel opened up between he, us, the hill and the pond,
where three angels who happened to be there were in some way illuminated and
momently caught masturbating over each other
The light went out. De Sade thundered:
“Oh foulness of repression, fast gates on the loins of our conscience, idle
capability that dare not raise it’s face for fear of societies enfeebling
shame! Fie opon you !
“Haunted by phantom paranoias you have dulled yourselves like fools, attaching
blame to those who overtly perform what is done covertly within the deception
of Your sordid yet so elevated ranks. High standing Judges and Politicians,
Clergy and Generals, as I wrote in my masterpiece that for so long I thought
lost, which you can now get in paperback, you revolt me, you drove me ...to hell this past 200 years and still to the scapegoated life.
“I saw 3000 beheaded from my little window in the Bastille that looked over
that unsacred courtyard.Whilst fear filled avarice burned it’s hypocracy the
turned tables of newly assumed authority flowed with fresh blood, the
Revolution hijacked and the biggest paedofiles, perverts and murderers still
running around. I know their class and tendancies, whosoevers flag they flaunt
..I know them and what they do. Call me bad? That was completely understandable
but no comparison. If you think I should burn in one of the Hells, then have
I not already done so for my penance with hot purging and I am only just out.. So it is you can calmly
meet me here at all! Yet in my burning time, I peered through veils of flame
on flame to percieve deeper and yet more despirate dungeons fanning with
greatly amplified heats, designed by the Lords of that place to house sinners
obviously worse than I , for else would I not have been kept there yet myself?
There, spitted and turned like human boars opon monstrous shafts, living
spikes of metal, reside the souls of my former govenors, such as I have
indicated. Beelzebub and other denizens of Hells yet unnamed eagerly await
their turn at the handle. Close by, Mephistophelese Himself prepares the
basting bowl with the inflammatory venom of their own past lies and
deceptions.”
The Marquis cast a glance in the direction of Whitehall and the square mile
down there in the City.
“Wait and see, blind fools” he said.
“Not that it helps us or that I wish it, but wait and see, gullible power
needy public and private figures who have aquiesed with these cunning demons
in life. Wait and see what is revealed to You who would lock me away to
deflect accusations of Your own depravity.”
De Sade was getting very worked up, and out of the corner of my eye I could
see some of the demons beggining to crawl out of his imagination into our
world.
“I do not wish it opon you” he was saying “But you have precipitated opon our
whole earth a cataclysm of noxious industry. Satanic Mills! Look around you!
We are throttled by the Cities carcinogenic stranglehold. On every street, the
shade of media mind killing, the vengeful actions of dull mind to duller,
cycling great systems where honour has no place and devils are landlord.
“You have created Nature where there was no need for such a name before the
lancing of Mother Earth for iron, coal and now , worse things. You have
stripped and mined, created the iron foundry that begats the foul city, with
what recompense for hapless workers therein but ginhouses where you could get
drunk for a halfpenny, blind drunk for a penny.They just have more tax on it
nowadays.
You have torn and plundered this fecund and explodingly green and blue
beauteous sphere, the stinking factories and mills gouging scars for home and
worksites that evacuate their polluted waste and excess into seas and rivers
like so much chemical shyte.
Outside the walls is Nature , now a temporary arrangement. Nature, suitable only
for fucking with machines , raped for oils and minerals wherever possible.
Loud loud the engines and sour, sour the sight and fumes that drown our
memories of ever living with grace in this world.
De Sades voice had risen to a shreiking peak in it’s pitch and I could now
clearly see and smell a trough of flames with billowing acrid black smoke
appearing in my perifory vision. Horror filled, I looked through the curtains
of flame like an unholy of unholies, to see the skewered, tormented souls of
some people I didn’t recognize, and several that I did, from the TV I think.
They were screaming in agony and a vast demon stood by with a basting bowl of
boiling venemous words, which as it bubbled, frothed and spat so I could catch
some phrases that I did recognise from the tele opon the lips of politicians
councillers and though those paid to speak others words in advertisments.
Everything in this hell was revealed or was being painfully confessed through
the t orturous actions of varius devils dressed as S+M office clerks.
I have described. Now the head of the great demon began to turn towards me. I
saw the corner of green eye sending shards of lazering evil intent, slicing
through the dimensions between him and I with great ease.
De Sade was still ranting, though I could not now hear his words, the crackle
ws all around me, the sulphur in my nose and throat . I began to fully behold
the demonic visage of Beelzibub.
Everything in this place was revealed or was being painfully revealed or confessed through the actions of the characters that I have described .Now the head of the great demon began to turn towards me, I saw the corner of his green eye sending shards of evil lazering out of the abyss splicing atoms.
DeSade was still ranting, though I could not now hear his words. With crackle all around, sulphur in my nose and fear coursing through me, I beheld the face of Beelzibub square on..
He regarded me, like baleful fiends and monsters do in movies, pausing before they strike as if to give the protagonist time to escape.
I was however, parylysed with fear. Beelzibub’shead tilted to his left and them to his right. His goat eyes with the strange black oblong pupils opened and narrowed, allowing a momentary flash of the green light to illuminate the area by the bench. A forked tongue whipped in and out of his large crack of a mouth.
It was at this point that I noticed that Coleridge was not present. I began to panic, but could not move, like a rabbit prone in the beam of a car’s headlamps.
Beelzibub began finally to climb out of deSade’s imagination. It was too much.
“Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo”, I found the words pouring, or being drawn from my diaphramic depths without a conscious call. They arose infallibly in my time of need.
BEElzibub was now standing on the turf next to me, which smoked, but smelled sweet now not sulphuric. He wasn’t looking at me, the devilrous head, 10 feet above my own was looking towards the road.
It was Coleridge, smiling handsomely. Another strode willfully forward, clad with copious facial hair and blazing eyes as mad as Coleridge’s..
They drew up to our threesome and it occurred to me that deSade had stopped talking and was now gazing glowingly at them as they approached.
Coleridge spoke:
”Good company all, Mr William Blake.”
That I was the only one Blake did not recognize made no difference to the conviviality with which he greeted me, and I was soon feeling very at home among such distinguished company.


“Could the poet be a keystone sub-species of homo sapiens? The poet: an apparently useless creature, but potentially the saver of eco-systems.”
Johnathon Bateman, The Song of the Earth p.231

The poets drew together in a huddle, Beelzibub towered over. We made a low murmer, which became a roar, which flowed out from the one voice that sent us skipping off around the lawn doing cartwheels, hitchkicks and the like.
“ Keats?”
He was sat on the bench, coughing lightly into an embroidered hankerchief..
AS the moon moved across the sky , several more literary figures from the area appeared, some well known, some not. Of the well known I saw Byron and Sylvia Plath, also Rabinandrath Tagore, but there were many more that I knew or that one of the others did.
We all made a huge circling ring, holding hands and my mate Phoenix led an interminable chant about the earth and sky all being one with each other.
As we danced and span in a growing circle it became that we were all making a vow and were telling the land so with our light footfalls. We wove in and out of each other, we led off in snake like processions about the hill. We sent our intention into the earth,the only thing we could agree on was that we could all dance forever and have a world with no tax.
Beelzibub kept a beat, thrumming the basting bowl with a huge log he had gone off to find, which he had emptied out in hell causing a terrific amount of slander onto several politicians who shall remain nameless but who imprisoned a man for 18 years for speaking out on a matter of international concern beyond the concerns of one nation. Also it splattered onto some backbenchers who were roasting because they hadn’t stood up and spoken their minds but rather preferred to slag each and everyone off.
From time to time he twanged the 40 foot flagpole to a rhythm you could call, well devil’s music.
“Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo” I called out to that arch devil. Mr B looked through and through me, perceiving my soul and more. His head split into seven different pieces, but he grinned. Beelzibub was pleased, I could see clear through him as well and that devil relaxed a moment then doubled the beat in a kinky new cadence all of his own.
The dance became more and more furious, we circled this way, we span that way, we twirled each other around laughing, more and more furious, faster and faster until we all fell down in a heap.
After the spiraling dance and the heap, people and creatures slowly picked themselves up and shuffled home, or lay or sat around the Heath top till someone made a fire a little way out of sight. The dawn came eventually and Coleridge came back to mine.We had been talking about the fate of the Earth over a few pipes, it was about 7 in the morning when I announced that it was time to do my morning chanting. Coleridge sat patiently as I droned the liturgy and chanted nam myo ho renge kyo. Opon finishing, my friend opened up.
“That was tremendous” he enthused. “” How do you say that?.”
I explained that I use this, the mystic law at all moments I can remember to so as to bring the best out of me and extract the best out of any environment to create the best of circumstances for all people”
Coleridge’s eyes boggled even more than they did naturally.
“Is it possible to do all that in one go “he said “Where’s the priest, what are the rules of conduct, why not meditate instead, why chant, who pays?”
I told him I simply chant nam myo ho renge kyo to my heart’s content every morning and evening and any time I feel in between. It comes from the heart, and is called the Lotus Sutra. It is intoned for the benefit of the individual and by extension, the whole of society.
Coleridge had heard of the sutra, he had heard of Nam. He had heard of Myo and Ho and Renge and of Kyo, never of chanting it.
“So when you chant this, you are summing up the Buddha life in one phrase and bringing it into the physical world ,through the voice. The corresponding meta physical state of life responds to this call allowing our lifestate to perceive the limitless expanded states
that all is immersed within.”
“That is one way of putting it. What is awesome is the thought of your vast mental and meta-physical capacities engaging with the mystic law of cause and effect.”
“That is I presume ,is what the practice is all about.” Coleridge’s mind, though of enormous mental ability, could also move in a non rational way.
It could move in profound ways. That is something he is capable of which lies beneath the simple intellect. This is what made it possible for him to chant with me when I invited him.
“How does it go then “ he queried.
“Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo. Together?”
We started to recite the diamoku, or title of the Lotus Sutra, but as soon as we pronounced the first N of Nam, a great flash of what looked like lightening arched from Coleridge’s body onto my burner, up the metal chimney and out of the caravan roof. We kept going for the whole five syllables for I almost dared not stop, Looking then round at Coleridge, I saw he was completely lit up with coursing electricity from head to foot , grinning manically and now taking a deep breath of air to pronounce the next one.
My spine went electric, goosebumps appeared on my brain,I sprang up and out of the caravan, as my friend let a second daimoku peel out. This Time I could see the sparking raw energy light up the sky, as lightening, or something like that phenomenon By the time of the third diamoku, the lightening had reached a dazzling peak that surely could not be topped, yet it was at this moment that the entire sky flashed a white light that then splintered into a zillion shards of beautifully refracting rainbows.
One of these rainbows other feet fell somewhere down in the valley below and up it came a two gentleman that Coleridge was delighted to meet. They were William Morris the designer and Michael Faraday, the inventor .
We were all rather mindblown at what had just happened, yet there was no stopping Coleridge who was teaching the chant to his new friends.
We all chanted. The sky exploded with music and colour, the stones on the Heath rang with resonance, the lightening forked into an enormous tree shape reaching into the heavens yet which harmed nobody.
Faraday and William Morris had brought some plans of the city with them. They seemed particularly remarkable because , as Faraday pointed out, there were geometric patterns superimposed all over them that made their shapes between certain parts of town and particular buildings. The map also looked really new.
“What could this possibly be?” he mused with us.
“Where did you get it?” I asked.
“We found it just now on the way here”
“It smells fresh” said Coleridge.
“I wonder what it is? ventured William, marveling at the designs. “Look, it is all shapes and angles made from the positioning of all of these different places in London.”
We all looked at each other. Could this be a cosmically Xeroxed map of London as printed off by some mechanism of Coleridge’s inner sight?
I assumed this to be the case, and fell off to sleep for a few hours.

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Chapter Two=========================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================
In 1980 I knew that there were such things as atom bombs that destroy life on earth in about ten minutes. This knowledge had an influence opon the rest of my life as I attempted to make something worthwhileout of these circumstances.
My plan was to carry on with the intention of making good with tunes and lyrics to open up awareness of a common need to continue living. Precious little media seemed to be on the wavelength, but that was no reason to doubt. Were people really as deeply sedated by fear as it seemed? Numb with paranoia and insecurity not far beneath the surface? Everything reinforced these feelings, from the billboards and TV to the high rises and latest cars. The only things that seemed to reach over the gap to me was poetry and rock'n'roll. So grateful was I that I decided to attempt to give for others what had got me through my formative years.
It took years to establish what was not the prevalent mood of the times in the ultra consumer 80's. The ninetees were the time that the sufforcated notion of care of the environment began properly to recover exert themselves. I was pleased, I had prayed and formed the feelings in dreamtime that later appeared all about as I lived it.
Coleridge was always a help. He was before everything else for me. Such a mind, expanded far as a boy, then to collide with the major innovations in modern scienfic investigation as a grown man. Without him I feel many ideas would not now be about in this world, many connections of thought would not have been brought together, understood or extrapolated in the ways they were, to the benefit of us all in this present age.
His spirit of exploration of the near and far reaches has inspired me to this moment with the will to continue, and be amazed at what I find. Before The advent of psychedelic rock music in my life, there was Coleridge's Kubla Khan.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately Pleasure Dome Decree"
This the fundament, the fountain of inspiration for me, others of my friends and associates, and I actually believe, all others who might deny it.
Making the Pleasure Dome is the work of the Tribe of people I choose to associate with, the physical and meta physical (as Coleridge so loved) fusion of the seat of pleasure, learning and survival in this age. This is why he appears in this story, this is where my ideas come from.
From Ottery St Mary in East Devon my story stems. That was also Coleridge’s birthplace where his father, who died when the boy was nine, was headmaster. I attended the same school; King’s, though it had moved up the hill by my time. Not that I was born in that part of the world. I come from Hampstead (Hempstead) in North London, a short walk up to the top of the hill from my caravan. At the end of the sixties I was 5 and we moved to Stanstead Essex for a year, then to Feniton Devon for six months in the house with the ‘tool gate’, a gate made of welded tools. Feniton is 6 miles from Honiton where we lived from 1972. Ottery St. Mary lies in between the two places forming a triangle.
The sea is not far away . Ten miles from Honiton is Sidmouth. Exmouth Budleigh Salterton, Seaton, Beer and Branscombe are other nearby towns along the south coast.
I once plotted leylines of this area on an ordinance survey map, and found the whole area to be criss crossed with them. I just took a ruler and placed it along the line of any churchs old stone crosses, straight sections of road, fords in rivers, tumuli (burial mounds, Hill forts (usually along the edges of them), crossroads, anchient trackways and spiraling bark on trees.(You can’t see them on maps.)
The quantity of the straight lines I began to find was staggering. As a collection they were strewn about seemingly like jackstraws, yet this did not alter the fact that every line was composed of land features from an old age set in dead straight lines.
They were everywhere. I was amazed. I wondered what other age it had been that had this arrangement with the land of their birth. What mind had placed these edifices so strangely mathematical across the surface of the land?
These thoughts had been prompted by my father and mother who would take me and my sister to places like Maiden Castle in Dorset , Uffington White Horse, Wayland s Smithy, Avebury rings stones and Silbury Hill, Glastonbury Tor or nearby Hembury Fort near Payhembury, Devon.
I would stand on top of the Round ball Hill in Honiton and gaze at the landscape. This hill is a ridge with a roundly shaped end that faces my parents house. I have stared at it since early days from the front window. It still looks to me like it comes from another land. It could have been smoothed off by anchient people. From Roundball you can look across town roughly south and you will see St Cyres Hill, Then straight ahead, Dumden Iron Age Hillfort, topped with still surviving tall elm trees.
What other ages had this land known ?I had wondered this, staring at the new estate built opposite us on land we had known up to 1980 as three fields with a farm that had no electric and used one legged stools to milk the cows.
My mum told me once to appreciate nature while it was there. I wasn’t very old, but I took this to heart. In fact, it influenced everything because there is nothing more vital than our environment. I also remember from earlier, in Hampstead , in about 1968, sitting at the top of the stairs and saying I was starving , then having a second thought knowing that there were people who were really starving.
Informative moments. I also remember having a bath as an infant and hearing what must have been Bob Dylan. Some line rhyming “brain” with “drain”. It had to be Masters of War on the radio.
I set out to walk the anchient way in a modern world. We understand spiritual warrior to be the creed of this age. What other way could there be at the dangerous beginning of this atomic age?
If the world was potentially about to explode, what were we doing here with our time? Largely due to my father again, I had come across all sorts of helpful literature. The ones in bookshop remainder buckets were generally the most interesting to me. Books on ecological living , world mind, and a particularly weird and intreaging one called An Index of Possibilities. In its chapters were tales of other forms of consciousness, other forms of power creation and different forms of electricity. It commented on the lives of Faraday, Nicolia Tesla creating free electricity and Wilhelm Reich with his orgone acculmulators much influencing the wanderings of my mind over the next years.
Deeply seated in me is the positive forward motion inspired of these sometime repressed sciences , and from these influences a new paradigm has formed.


Coleridge and I had the idea of meeting up with a few of the others down at Mudshute, on the Isle of Dogs, where we felt we might rearrange the blueprint that John Dee, court magician extraordinaire had pocused up the English Empire with.
Several friends of mine would gather there from time to time down there next to the city farm in a loosely ceremonial way. The first time we met up beforehand to prepare at Dave and Cathy’s house, Mandala records, where I had the good fortune to be able to record for a number of years with my troupe Spacegoats under the good flag “Music can help heal the world.”this is a motto which either has the “help” in it or not depending on how passionate a day’s music had been.
Suzanna had told us that a gentleman representing the Hopi nation was coming to town, an Earth healer called Roy Littleson. He is not actually Hopi, but he is the adopted son of Elder Grandfather Titus whom he survives, now to hold healing ceremonies in a variety of ways often featuring incantation, sacred tobacco, shells, feathers and crumbled stone.
Phoenix had chanced to come by Dave’s house. It was curious that he should do this, because Roy was commencing a healing that night that he called the Phoenix Ceremony.
As was often at Mandala, there were hosts of wonderful people passing through, often from different parts of the globe. And at this time, Hiroki Okana, his wife and his Japanese minstrels were staying a few days, so they were to come along.
At the Phoenix ceremony, held in Dave’s front room, Roy prepared a special table that was to act as a form of Tardis to dissolve the boundaries between life and death and all the limitations we imagine in this world. On it were arranged all the offerings of a tribal mind expressing the intent, in the form of the Hopi Cross, of the prayer behind it. We sat in semi darkness in Dave’s front room as the characters appeared.
Roy talked us through the various stages a soul goes through in death, and how there are many lost souls who have not died properly from this world, who are released through the ceremonial burning of votive offerings. As the ritual climaxed, we placed small star shapes we had made from thin wooden spills into a small bowl of flame opon a sand bed at the centre of the table , Roy would tell us how millions of souls were being released from limbo as we did this.
Afterwards we had some wine and food and set to planning our day out in Mudchute next to the city farm across the river from Greenwich. This is a flat open plateaux, formed in one area into a relatively large amphitheatre. A raised earthwork rampart wall girdles the whole. At one point on this perimeter is a small concrete circle you can stand on, which , we heard, was the very spot that magician John Dee, in the employ of Her Majesty Queen Elizibeth of England, summoned up the British Empire.
We were to go to the Meridian line of Greenwich mean time in the Park, dissolve some boundries, then sally down to the Isle of Dogs for a big stomp of the rampart wall and then a circle of us people out under the sky to indicate to everything from the heavens down that the old hierarchy of power was shifting on now.
We convened by the dock with the Cutty Sark , joined by Caras and Raga waited for Zeg to turn up, then dove into the tunnel reached by a liftshaft that stretches under the Thames. Raga had brought a fifty foot long Rainbow Dragon banner, bearing the seven colours in bright material, which was rapidly unfurled along a line of ten people dancing skipping and singing as we went.
Reaching Mudchute we walked onto the land and spread about exploring where we individually wished, reconvening near a small tree at the base of the earth perimeter wall some moments later. Raga and Hiroko, Hiroki’s wife laid out the colourful banner carefully in a semi circle on the grass.
Dave said something about the power of a circle of people and making a strong wish for a better future free from war. People stood in a circle, held hands and listened to what he said with the wind blowing softly but quite cold around us. Then Roy spoke. He told everyone that a great Eagle had spoken to him in a vision and placed a rainbow opon his forehead, whereupon he could see for a while with the eyes of a Sky Elk , who see All things for what they are. When the vision was over, Roy said he had known a path that would lead to a correct understanding of these times.
Taking a pinch corn from a little belt pouch, he held it aloft in his hand, and spoke the words
“Uru no kava ee takkee towa” and instructed us to repeat after him. Shaking his small gourd rattle, he chanted for a few moments and every one made quite a good job of the words. After this he lowered his hand and let the corn feed through his fingers and out opon the wind. As it scattered opon the land Roy asked us always to listen for the spirits of the ancestors and what they wished, for they would soon be our children.
We walked up the slope of the earth bank joining the path that goes all around the site. As we went, a discussion took place about Hopi Prophesy and the unfolding work of people like Roy who tour the world with one mind; to spread understanding of the possibility of earth healing and survival beyond our present stasis.
Talk turned to the origin of the Rainbow Festivals, now recognised by Congress as a bona fide tribe. These had started in Arizona in 1970 around the time when the great rock peace festivals of the sixties created Altamont and stars like Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin had just died. In the aftermath footage of the Isle of White Festival film of that year we hear the transformed blond haired presenter/promoter saying with feeling that it had felt like the last great festival of it’s era.
Did he know that Jimi was about to die? Did everybody really, somehow? Janis and Jimi were soon both dead. Jim Morrison died the next year in Paris, as the story goes. All three had played at that festival
Who said that Hendrix died the day that Glastonbury festival first started, is that true?
Anyway, both in England and in the States, Europe and much of the rest of the world, festivals of this nature had established, and were developing from this point. The Rainbow Festivals set up that year and since then the government has had to conceed those people tribal status. Thus Congress is effectively acknowledging their recognition that these hippies must be the Ones spoken of in the prophesies from those tribal people whose land modern America’s forefathers had violently claimed two centuries before.
The prophesies have been directly responsible for Congress acknowledging the Rainbow Tribe and they had been passed down, kept intact by word of mouth into the present day from a thousand years ago. Similar prophesies exist among peoples of many parts of the world. You may of heard this:

When the Earth is sick and all the creatures are dying,
There will come a tribe of people of all cultures and creeds, who believe in
Deeds and not words, who will restore the planet to it’s former beauty.
They will become known as “The Warriors of the Rainbow”


I mean many of my friends, including me may well shy from any mention of rainbow, for a plethitude of reasons created by human foibles. Yet I doubt any would strongly deny the underlying gravis of these words.

It seemed clear to Roy and the rest of us that the society around us was all separated up numbed into consumerism and with a broken heart, and that England had gone out into the world and made war to build an Empire.
We neared the place where John Dee was said to have done the deed and solomnly formed a circle around it.
Clouds passed over the sky changing light on the ground and we stood in silence.
It was some time before Roy began to sing a little song of his teaching to the world. It goes like this:

Wake up wake up wake up
Wake up to the rising sun
Listen to your heart
We are one we are one we are one.

Roy said that we should forgive of the past and allow the unhappy souls to be able to properly die, or be reborn. Whatever state they are languishing in, disincarnate ones can be helped on their way by our ceremonial thoughts and wishes. He proceeded to walk to the centre of the circle and produced more of the wood spills that made the stars for burning. A second Phoenix Ceremony with the little bowl of fire occurred near the spot and we all made stars and offered them to the flames with positive wishes for all generations alive or dead.
Dave spoke again about the family of different people all around the planet thinking about, feeling and taking action to create what we want for a sustainable future, using all our diverse knowledge from our different cultures to understand perhaps in the way that the Sky Elk showed Roy, a correct way of understanding on this Earth today.
It was quite chilly, but we all stood as a few other people spoke and then began a low chant, a ringing earth tone voice that rolled from our mouths onto the ground.
It lolled and rolled over the grass and down the bank, it toned a few feet into the soil I expect. It made worms aware and the birds heard. Do I think a rainbow appeared at this moment.In all honesty it is probable that one did. In fact, do I have memories of being followed by a sequence of rainbows since one I have half remembered from earlier when we first met up at the dock?
We usually finish circles with a powerfully ascending vocalization, then let our held hands shoot above our heads whilst letting go a loud shriek or moan and then putting your hands on the earth to “ground” ourselves.
Much laughs and happiness at this point as we break up and start running around or talking with someone we haven’t said much to up to this point.


After some time exploring, we headed to the amphitheatre, marveling at it with a non- tobacco spliff that was going round. We foresaw ceremonies and plays that we could do there and crouched down out the wind in the cut away recesses.
Passing by the goats at the city farm, we championed the rainbow banner on the pavements of the Isle of Dogs, boisterously introducing people to our vibe as we strolled by. It was a bit dangerous with the road junctions at points, but we made it back to and down the lift, through the tunnel and back up again into Greenwich. I think it was still light.


The Hopi way asserts that there is always a way of averting a worse tragedy. There is always something or things that can be done to make a critical situation turn around, even at the last moment.
The Buddhism I practice concerns itself soley with that which converts poison into medicine. This works on a personal and at the same time on planetary levels. Another way to put this is to say you are changing bad karma to good fortune.
I personally do not believe in luck any more. Neither can I accept chance, because there is no time for it.
That we must live to make a difference if we want to survive is the basic undertone. It is what the prophesies are about and it is the reason for anyone being politically correct .

After I had introduced Coleridge to the delights of Can and The Incredible String Band from an old cassette, Faraday and Morris came round again and we talked late into the night pouring over our map with fervor. We discussed plans for the proposed trip to Mudchute amphitheatre, where we though to take some measurements.

=============================================================================================================================================================================================Chapter Three==================================================== =================================================================================================================================================================================

Some tin pot theorizing on atomic children.

I expect you were wondering if I would explain my title. The answer is that they are us. This is because we now live in a man-instigated atomic age.
Yes, radiation exists already in the universe, we never created it, just studied it .
The science, which was conducted mostly with the highest of spiritual and altruistic ideals, got taken over by the wartime military authorities and the arms industry.
Result? Cold war. Nuclear proliferation and a world in fear.
There has been conventional war the whole world over since the world war two. The first one was billed “the war to end all wars,” with irony that smarts up the century. There has been no war in mainland Britain or the Central American States, but these places have made many, sending thousands of soldiers and weapons out regularly to create foreign policy under the name of peace keeping. My friend Venus put it this way;
“Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity.” She has a point, in fact I know several folk who have employed this phrase or one like it. I would add that
The World War against Nature and poor nations, has been going on since Constantine and got amped up after WW2 . This war blasts poor people from the land they come from and then removes any sellable resources such as oil or uranium or tin or diamonds from that land. Whatever makes the owners of the weapons happily richer and able to make or buy new weapons to keep the pressure up.
Those like myself, with the relative yet suspect good fortune to live on land already leeched for its valuable minerals and metals, with an economy capable of bombing others first in pre-emptive strikes, need not worry unduly about being attacked, because we have huge armies and armaments to secure what we have won. We have our role cut out for us: We are consumers.
In the country I live we have enough money to buy what we need. This is painstakingly arranged for us by multinational corporations who have generated more than enough cash for our needs through big sales like arms manufacturing and legal pharmaceuticals.

Third World War is kept going by millions of people going to work for the people with the money and resources that if we recall, have been stolen from the poorer people and their land.
When we go to work, portions of that money goes into tax, which is spent on roads and hospitals and such useful things I am told. We are told we need these things. I don’t agree, though I know that people want to get about and we often need to be cured.
I am sure people feel it is important for councils to build new playgrounds for children and for this to be done, you need to tax. That I think playgrounds suck as does the whole urban sprawl may make people view as me being totally off planet. They couldn’t be more wrong. It is just everything.
A lot (the majority of ) tax money goes into buying equipment for war. Deals occur on an international level among people of all nationalities with the largest sums of money anywhere passing through banks.
This spells out the finance. The result is death and refugees. Also there are matters of land contamination and other scars inside the lives of decimated communities that daily endure the memory and consequences of war.

The consequences of war have in all ages been designed to be severe. With this nessecity in mind, innovations in war have always led the edge in technological advancement. That is to say a lot of time and effort has been put into development for the purpose of war.

“There has always been war and it will always be always be” is something that people often reiterate in a resigned manner. It is repeated especially by those, whosoever they are, not necessarily the fighters themselves, but by those who are paid the most handsomely to keep the war machine going.
That this conflict has been going on in different styles for a long long while does not mean it will continue tomorrow. This does not inevitably follow.
Now around for sixty years, as well as all the madness, the Atomic age has ushered in new forms of thought, out of necessity as old ones have been blown away.
Mahatma Gandhi gave his life to showing a different way a way of non violent resistance even with the simplest means.
We are having to find out, without jolting standard repeating reflex responses, how to dismantle the mind that made the machine that made this mad one.
That could be why Phoenix and I use the phrase “Other Worlds are Possible”
(That is correctly put a slogan of the present era as I type)

So how can we put an End to War? Is this of prime concern to us children or not?
Who admits to themselves that the scale of destruction with nuclear weapons is beyond our earthbound minds to conceive? We could not survive long enough to philosophize about it. We would be gone.
That would mean that war actually ends, but only because the whole planet creatures and people have turned into severely radioactive dust in space.
So then could we have small nuclear wars instead that only destroy bits of the planet. Thus tradition could be kept alive.
Depleted Uranium has already been long in common usage for tipping weapons, so this is already small scale atomic war. I read that on a poster.
Maybe we could carry on with small scale atomics and keep off the bigger ones. Then war could continue way into the 21st century and beyond. Yes, and when alien beings attack earth, we can use the big atomics because they will be tracked and attacked first out there in space safely out of our atmosphere. Tax money has been allocated, the plans are drawn up.
I don’t see it though. It is one or the other for me. Even by 1960 as I read somewhere else, there were enough a bombs to destroy the world 20 times over.
This is severe and every person knows it.
Being too much for our circuits to rationalize, this forces a new thought world to come through from the noonsphere. Does the following seem naïve and inapplicable to you?:
That the men and women that live in this thought world get what they want by behaving non violently. They use their imaginations, they inform us that it is possible. With non violence we have a chance to not escalate our squabbles up to war level simply by doing something else instead.
I don’t see we can survival in this atomic age in any other way.
Due to human anger being evident in this world and this being portrayed continuously in the media, people are led to believe this is how to behave, and tend to. Yet we can tend another way, we absolutely have the capacity to try something else even when angry and especially if we have all our lives fed with propaganda promoting war.
So, in this argument, the seed of not fighting somehow grows a world where war is a thing of the past and our missiles have become kiddy cruisers.
What’s it to be then,survival or extinction? Not a lot to extinction.
Conversly, survival would of necessity involve deeper understanding of the atomic world we have opened up. I for one am intrigued by certain possibilities that my imagination plays with. This is what this book is about.

We first few generations of Atomic age children must somehow be equipped in our DNA to respond to and survive the momentous advent of nuclear weapons. On some deep inner cortex we have the means to do this. It is in fact, I shall reveal, already emerging from life through our actions however small.
I am placing these stories in from of your eyes to illustrate this point, as it makes up the whole of the narrative. I want to show of something worthwhile in these times, where that started and who it comes from, why it exists and what it brings to this world.
Specific measures to bring about an end to war, primarily for me that is employing the strategy of the Lotus Sutra, shall unfold naturally within the narrative. The need for some excellent medicine in these circumstances is not to be overlooked. Surely it is a question of what is necessary to get a job done. You always need the tools and know how. Or does it all just happen because it just happens. I don’t think so.


Who presently bears mark of the children of an atomic age? At the very dawning of it, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings in Japan come to mind.
Ukrainian people live with Chernobyl, meaning Wormwood which as you may realize makes an appearance in the Bible book of Revelation, with ashes falling from the sky. An eschatonic prophesy if there ever was one became real enough and fearful with wrath on the morning of the 26th April 1986, when reactor 9 caught fire sending windborne radioactive fallout across Belarus, into Europe over the rest of the World.
People living near these places are still being born deformed and rates of leukemia, disputed to be caused by radioactivity are high. My friend was a soldier and possibly has what people call Gulf war syndrome. This, everybody knows, means sickness brought on by exposure to DU.

In the manufacture and proliferation of Atomic bombs there are built in possibilities for use of fear propagandas to repress the spirits of nations. Of these, Mutually Assured Destruction is about as comforting as it gets, seeing as no one would be left to experience any worry.
The Cold War, when superpowers stood each other off with threats of annihilation, were accentuating their power by playing on common fears, including other hazards of radiation and mutation.
With the world clouded in such fears, people are arguably much more manageable. It is a standard tactic through the ages
Yet the mushroom cloud itself is surely a portentous symbol of more than obliteration. It also represents a mushroom, let’s say a psychedelic one. This could be seen as portending a new time of sub and supra- atomic levels of understanding our universe, that were obscured to us before. That is the nature of states resulting from the ingestion of hallucinogenic fungi, the connection with deeper recesses of earth knowledge through the mycelium in the soil. An opened psyche can see what is there, can move through the curtains of manipulation drawn by overlords in the human sphere.

It is an old hippy adage that says that LSD, LySergic acid Diathemol was the antidote to the destructive potential of nuclear bombs.
It was certainly being developed at the same time, its effect experienced first during the same week as the first 2 explosions in fact. However, before the bombs were used, the same substance does not appear to have possessed any psychedelic properties. This may seem a bit strange but it seems LSD became psycho-active only after the bombs were first used. As if it were potentialized by the blasts.
Scientist Albert Hoffman had created the stuff, in Basel Switzerland, but it remained in his laboratory in a phial until some of it got on his skin, he started tripping and took a fabulously strange bike journey. It certainly hadn’t done that when tried before the 9th ofAugust 1945.
The generations conceived from this time have grown up in this atomic age. The first were the so called baby boomers, who grew of age in the sixties and all that.
Do people listen to the opinions of hippies? Do hippies get generally derided nowadays because they are old, or did their ideas become so normalized over time that what was far out became part of the fabric?
Certainly, their era made things much more interesting for the atomic children. Ideas were bounding about in the 60’s. Though they were not nessicerily new ones, novel concepts spilled indeed into the popular culture and so into public imagination.

This new thinking suggested that the accepted reality of the pre-atomic ages was not so and that the findings of modern physics and likewise old mystical religions were quite similar and had relevance in the modern world.
Suddenly solid ground does not exist as it did. It swirls in a cosmic tapestry of swirling atoms mostly space. Phenomena such as ourselves occupy space for a while and are never solid in the sense of being able to continue to exist forever. Everything changes in the phenomenal world, things grow old and cease to exist. Where does it go to? The material world reveals itself as truly part of the invisible worlds. Our take on the nature of reality has been irrevocably torn apart and we have had to make new parameters. Eminent modern physicists and mystical researchers conform that these new ideas are strikingly similar to very old ideas around in cultures across the globe long before our modern times.
Psychedelics have arguably been significant in the popular seeding of these concepts, allowing us to peer into what we are made of. They have blown asunder the restrictions of the intellect and conditioning into some wider reaches of consciousness since adapted broadly into culture today. Before, only the priest or his equivalent could have such knowledge, and they were given it by God for the benefit of others. Those common Others were not supposed to have visions. Only the divinely chosen, probably well paid had access. The divine role of honor was concealed and the path to God restricted for sinners, who were on this earth to toil for their sins living in fear of god . The Way had been designed so and probably was intended forever to have remained as such.
Yet the modern age has blown this thinking to bits.

So if acid appeared on cue as some cure for the bomb in that it facilitated an equivalent inner explosion of potent realizations, previously unrealized possibilities of being, a chain reaction of mind that keyed into sub-stratic worlds, what can we expect? A greater knowledge of life, featuring survival through exploration of further places to go?
Is there potential for more keenly understanding the nature of our universe with an exponentially released consciousness? I feel so.
Put it this way; I don’t think I could overcome a nuclear explosion with my expanded mind if it happened in my face, but there are good things that have come out of the hippies.

==========================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================
Chapter Four ============================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================


It wasn’t long before dawn. Coleridge and I were scrambling through
the undergrowth of some dense woodland near a stone cross we couldn’t find.
“How is it that love is bittersweet?” said he, grasping hold of a root that enabled him to get a foothold on a earthy incline.
When he reached the top of it I wanted to say “I’ve nothing to say,” but I couldn’t. Instead I gazed around the 270 degrees my neck can manage to turn through the dark
“I was lost in real terms and love no less than any other area, but it was worth it How could one such as I survive at all were it not for the spirit of will.”.
It was not far to go now .I was thinking of someone I loved very much . The moon suddenly bore down on us, pouncing from behind a cloud.
"Ah, the love interest" said a voice that seemed to come from that cloud. I looked at Coleridge, who seemed as surprised as i was and the both of us felt sheepish. What else could be said? We pondered our love and were found wanting. I went on a trip.
Sitting on the tree she was, in that season of youth that is unmistakable, but which you always miss at the time. We had got to know each other tentativly and had opened up enough to share a smoke and go back to each others homes. She was petite, dark haired and lovely, the tree under which she sat, wierd with many branches.
There existed a continuum of feelings between us, the tree and the rest of our surroundings that I can never forget, so perfectly it was etched on my memory from that moment to this. I look around at young couples and wonder if this might be their moment , hoping for them that the feeling remains longer than for me.
We shared a youthful summer, or rather from Easter to Halloween, during which the tree rooted itself in my soul as a friend forever, one older and more knowing. The girl and I had good times and bad times as all couples do, and "parted so hard" as it was for the subjects of "Goodbye first love", by the String Band, the only piece of music ever to adequately reach the particular aching in me for her. So that summer ended and my teens drew to a close, cutting sharply on the tapestry of my life's emotional line, which since has been somewhat more tattered.
I think back frequently to the many details of that time, and generally, difficult emotions rise, mostly of a cut-offness that is impossible to compromise. Any thoughts flail about looking for a home and have to be dealt with like so many needy mouths or people looking for somewhere to stay. I have grown adept at dealing with them patiently, without disruption to my daily patterns, but this does not make the feeling any better. Most of my present day interactions are twisted to a greater or lesser degree, by the inappropriated feelings due to this loss. Finishing with someone you love is easy compared to a life where you have seemingly ceased to exist in their eyes. Now that was twenty years ago and yesterday. As Cat Stevens was heard to cry out, "The first cut is the deepest" (Baby I know)
Coleridge was a little way off, looking for direction standing upon a large mossy stone looking off somewhere into the briars at first glimmerings of dawn. However, it was to no avail, the area we were in was completely confustulated by the wild growth. I knew his own emotional life back in the 1800's to have been very fraught and unhappy, not that this had hindered the progress of his mind it seemed; We had a certain understanding.
I looked at him as he extricated himself from the foliage. A dawning of some kind formed inside of me as I felt strangely liberated for a few moments from physical weight. My body suddenly experienced a release of tension and I was in several moments at one time. The overall sensation a good one as of a conjunction of love and physical release, an access of a sort to a region of pure and sunlit asexual orgasm. There was in fact some beautiful sunlight streaming into our hidden away woodland catche.
I fancied myself on a river of one of these beams, coloured by the vibration of my thought and arrowed to a specific moment in time where all the emotion was floating in a mesmerising sea of consequences, and I , free upon it as is a point of sunlight travelling through. I thought of the love, a tear formed in my eye and fell to the ground.
Unsure where I was for a moment, I started to walk, and found that a wall of thorny bramble was hiding a passage through the undergrowth. A little way led on, a twisting track made by some badgers perhaps; a route from barren feelings to the heart it might be. We both walked along and came to the stone cross we had been looking for so long.
"Here we are at last!" I exclaimed, and sat down in a clumsy way at it's foot. "Hallo cross, pleased to greet you."
Coleridge produced some bread and pate, and I lit up a pipe, this one smaller than the one previously mentioned.
He produced the curious map of London that Faraday and Morris had given them. As he carefully spread it out over the ground, I found a candle and lit it, but Coleridge stayed my hand and snuffed it out.
"Watch for what you don't know" he cryptically instructed.
I watched and saw immediately that the map illuminated itself. The eerie dawn light helped but it was no illusion. The glow came from the lines that linked up the different sites across the paper . Barely discernable in the light, these lines were actually alive and pulsating. We looked opon a micro London, lighting up the soil beneath it into a translucent phosphorescence.
"This is a vision of a future, the memory of a past" intoned Coleridge. "I have thought deep about this and find it by far the most fanciful and thereby the most appealing proposal"
"We could be looking at the arrangements, preparations, made upon the land of and for another technology.
"A symbiosis fusing means of energy and production, and the environment where this is occuring. In our case, the Earth, specifically here, on this map; London."
The light of day was getting stronger as we spoke, my mind phantoms were clearing and I could now focus now on what Coleridge was revealing.
He explained that he had been in discussion with Faraday on the nature of these seeming electrical pathways on the map. Of this Morris had commented that though at first sight presenting a chaotic form to the eye and mind, these resembled patterns he percieved as being that of a natural incidence such as he might like to use in a design.
I could see the High Street potential in this , but kept my thoughts to myself.
It was as easy to believe Coleridge as to believe that the stone cross possessed an earthly energy tangable to human sensitivities.
What was it all for though? What did they mean by another technology? My imagination could do more than ponder, for my companion was outlining his ideas on this, dealing with natural electricity and forms of water powered motorisation.
Coleridge talked for ages, the most of which is readily available in certain publications found frequently in book bargain buckets.
Significantly, he announced that he had been in touch with Sir Humprey Davy. Davy and Faraday had of coarse been colleages and friends in life, but are said to have suffored a parting of ways due to differing views on the nature of science and reality. Davy was ever the more mystically orientated, fully engaging with meta-physics in writing poetry as much as in his inventing and scientific reasoning.
Faraday largly dismissed this outlook, preferring to be more rational and empirical. He turned the scientific discovery of this curios electricity into the practical application of an actual functioning motor, through alternating the currents. Working at the Royal Institute, and running the Trinity Wharf lighthouse research centre for thirty years and developed electrical and chemical research comprised two portions of his working life.
Davy invented more or less everything, discovered the aneasthetic and trans-physical properties of nitrous oxide, better known as laughing gas, a surfeit of which, it is said, did for him.
So it was that Coleridge had had to send out a major plea into the etheric that he might have audience with Sir Humphrey. When they connected, Coleridge reported that Davy had been sitting on a cloud and would not be disturbed until he realised it was his old stoner mate STC.
They made arrangements but Davy was still pretty far gone. He would arrive "after a while" , Coleridge assured.
By now it was fully light and the luminosity of the map was fading in the daylight. Sitting next to the stone cross however, was an experience wonderfully charged with subtle energies that caressed the spine. It was as if we had entered into the world of the map, made real opon our location there in the undergrowth. The world of other electricities that Coleridge was intimating in his descriptions and conjectures on the subject.
I could feel a wonderous openness in the small of my back. It charged with a feeling of release my physical and sensory fields to such an extent that I had begun to disengage from inhibitative pains and aches that keep me contained in an singularly physical awareness of Self. I had expanded beyond this now and a form of me, not wholly mind, not wholly body, was floating with contentment in a space that also occupied by the stone. For a moment, the suggestions Coleridge was planting grew around me like a quick forest of psi-powered vines and silvery-golden boughs of knowledge.
After a while , the feeling passed into a new awareness , where I felt more deeply contented than I can generally access. This feeling has occured once or twice in dream or in waking, and it occurs to me then that this is what is below the surface
in our consciousness.
This is what we are when we allow our stress levels to be removed; namely an instinctual love and knowing of our own bodies, a fearlessness regarding the expansive and awe-inspiring natures of our world and a joy at the differences in each other.
Coleridge also mentioned at this point one Dr.Wilhelm Reich, a gentleman whose science was seemingly analogeous with our investigations in this very interesting and profound area. He had had his work burned by the American authorities, who seem to have been concerned that Reich's work on tension release was a threat to society.

We rolled up the map and walked for a while through the undergrowth by means of this path until we returned to the familiar surroundings

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