Iritis is a rare, mysterious and potentially serious eye condition. I’ve suffered from iritis intermittently since 1973 – in either eye, but mainly the left. Thanks goodness, so far, never in both eyes at once! I have had it in my left eye for the last few days. Normally OK when treated with steroid drops. And, indeed, it is now slowly improving.

It's just annoying for this rare condition to recur as much as it does. It needs immediate treatment when it ignites and nobody seems to know how it's caused.

It is a curse - but it is true to say that, in some clandestine cultures of the world, it is deemed to be a rare 'mark of genius'. No joke.

This is a prose poem I once wrote about it - entitled DIES IRAE, first published in 'Mausoleum' magazine in 1996: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/04/dies-irae.html

Following my article on Gunfleet Sands Wind Farm yesterday:

Findings have just been announced today that moths and butterflies surf the wind;
http://news.discovery.com/animals/migrating-insects-butterflies.html
They instinctively or deliberately discover fast moving winds or thermals in the upper atmosphere that enable them to migrate vast distances in a short space of time.
One can imagine them surging along - enfolded together or separately? - in an unconscious nirvana or fully conscious? -

?? like fiction writers who send their synchronised shards or mites into visionary tides of random truth and fiction within the vast migratory creativity of art. Some tides self-created others created for them.

 Where I live.

This was the then mysterious beginning of the process (November 2008):

And here today is the end result:

Can anyone tell me why the wind turbines look much bigger when viewed from the bottom of a road leading to the sea front than when viewed from the sea front itself?

The Ligottian Banker on 'Deal or No Deal' certainly had a field day today. He even had his own rat army in the sewers.

Noel Edmunds said he had tempered what the Banker said. So who knows to what creative depths of Horror the Banker truly stooped?

Even 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' by Thomas Ligotti has nothing on this Banker's Philosophy of Life and Death.

Elizabeth Taylor (the novelist and short story writer) writes to her lover Ray Russell in 1944 about the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett:

"Not in the least up your street. The curiosities of literature. A dark madness pervades. Beyond the insanities, nothing happens. A bunch of rococo & unpleasant people stand talking in a room; first in one house, then in another, then back again at the first. Who shall sit down 13th at a table they discuss for a whole chapter. They all speak the same, even the children. They are all nasty. No one does any work - not even the governess."

ET loved the novels of I C-B and the two women became friends.

'The Virtual Revolution' says WWW was invented in CERN. Seems therefore a good name for the Internet: CERN Zoo?

Theme and variations on the word 'Overrated':

http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/3150.html?1264852188

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 Theme and variations on 'The Other Elizabeth Taylor' (Persephone Books 2009)

and the nature of fiction:

http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/3150.html?1264852188

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 http://www.knibbworld.com/campbelldiscuss/messages/1/3156.html?1264871556 :-

Time for Des's world....
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I don't wish that on anyone!

My world is one where human beings - fundamentally selfish - will be part of systemic problems of reality that can be governed for a while in cycles of historical challenge-and-response, challenge-and-response again, and again.

Meanwhile, thankfully, selfishness is sometimes geared to a selflessness (altruism) that, in turn, selfishness enjoys as its sense of self-satisfaction.

Someone elsewhere today kindly quoted the following words from Brian Eno:

<< Pretension is the dismissive name given to people's attempts to be something other than what they 'really are'. It is vilified in England in particular because we are so suspicious of people trying to 'rise above their station'.

In the arts, the word 'pretentious' has a special meaning: the attempt at something that the critic thinks you have no right even to try. I'm very happy to have added my little offering to the glowing mountain of things described as 'pretentious' - I'm happy to have made claims on things that I didn't have any 'right' to, and I'm happy to have tried being someone else to see what it felt like.

I decided to turn the word 'pretentious' into a compliment. The common assumption is that there are 'real' people and there are others who are pretending to be something they're not. There is also an assumption that there's something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It's the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.

Robert Wyatt once said that we were always in the condition of children - faced with things we couldn't understand and thus with the need to guess and improvise. Pretending is what kids do all the time. It's how they learn. What makes anyone think that you should sometime give it up? >>

End of quote.

I am pretentious for drawing philosophical meaning from TV shows such as Big Brother and Deal or No Deal.

I am pretentious for publishing 'Nemonymous' with its experimental ethos.

I am pretentious for wallowing in neologisms over the years.

I am pretentious for making real-time reviews of books.

I am pretentious for blogging my previously published (as well as new) fictions: i.e. those textured exercises in something I pretentiously define as indefinable.

I am even pretentious enough to believe that I would have had many more books published if I had gone out of my way actually to make fiction submissions to publishers and I would now be more famous than the most famous writers of all and that, when I am dead, people will value my work far more than while I remain alive.

I am pretentious enough to write all the above without truly believing any of it.

I once wrote the passage below on the internet about Big Brother Reality TV. I think it still applies.

I feel this series of BB has teased out many interesting points regarding meta-drama, the pseudo-real, nemotions etc. as well as making one more perceptive about people and their (mis)intentions and failings - and their positive points when none first seemed apparent --- plus just the enjoyable froth of a provocative games show, itself with some serious failings as well as evoking sharp observations on life and our own sporty, serious and/or tongue-in-cheek loyalties and dislikes about the presented (often crude and despicable) ciphers of people. Thoughts for a crumbling generation. I feel both positive and negative about such considerations, neither condemning or praising, but somehow wiser (I hope) after the event. It's not serious, of course, but it also *is* serious somehow, and revelatory.

 

I'd go further. To become a writer, one must possibly first watch Big Brother as that's where the best writing's done. A uniquely dramatic masterclass-on-the-hoof, simultaneously ingenuous and disingenuous. Simultaneously collective and individual. And so many other latent riches about modern humanity (whatever one's view about it) as examined under the meta-fictionalised camera obscura.
Revelling in vulnerability....

 

I feel sad that it is now all over, like closing the covers of a favourite book after finally finishing it with a sigh of satisfaction at its crystallisation of insight.