January 2026 – My a'th Kar

January 24, 2026January 25, 2026

Why Are Some Of The Worst People Suddenly So Concerned About My Cornish ‘Identity’?

I remember the moment quite clearly. Back in 2015, I was part of a scrappy, grass-roots effort trying to understand what on earth had happened to London Pride. I’d started digging into the financials, following sponsorship pages and annual reports, trying to work out how something that once felt unruly, provincial and ours had turned into a vast corporate machine. I wrote about it at the time, half in disappointment, half in ironic detachment (4+5). What struck me wasn’t just the money, but who was supplying it.

Barclays, Citi, big law firms like Baker McKenzie, and polished NGOs with immaculate branding such as Exterion had all been sponsoring London Pride events for several years. At some point, amid the spreadsheets and sponsor logos, I asked a very simple question: why do these people care so much about my sexual orientation? When did global finance decide it was emotionally invested in my being a gay man? I didn’t feel particularly ‘seen’, as the cool kids like to say these days, I felt categorised, monetised and branded (3).

That feeling has stayed with me.

Years later, while researching my PhD on how humans comprehend their environment and articulate that through language, I found myself back in similar emotional territory. I was comparing grammatical features of the two languages of my homeland: English and Kernewek. As I dug deeper into the revival of Kernewek and the cultural discourse orbiting it, the same sensation returned. That tightening in the gut. Why? I thought. Why now? Why, after centuries of neglect, ridicule and outright economic extraction, were some very respectable institutions in the UK suddenly so interested in cultivating a Cornish cultural ‘identity’?

To be clear, I have nothing against LGBT people who pour their time and love into London Pride. Nor do I have anything against Cornish people who work tirelessly to protect Kernewek and explore Cornish culture. I admire the commitment involved in both. This isn’t an attack on grass-roots energy. It’s a plea for scepticism about institutions that have a long, well-documented habit of exploiting grass-roots movements for ends that rarely improve the material conditions of ordinary people.

Here’s the thing – symbolic recognition is cheap. Flags are cheap. Car stickers are cheap. Language initiatives, diversity panels and glossy campaigns are cheap compared to land, mineral rights or meaningful economic redress. If there were serious conversations about who benefits from Cornwall’s land and resources, things might look very different. Imagine if working Cornish people had actually benefited from generations of mining and extraction, rather than watching profits flow elsewhere.

Much of that wealth has continued to flow into multinational corporations. Some large corporations, in general, are known to fund cultural or heritage projects, often as part of wider reputational or social-licence strategies. However, my concern here is not primarily about arts funding, but about extraction and ownership. The Rothschild family, for example, through its company Imerys (formerly Peñarroya), directly profits from Cornish mineral deposits, continuing a long tradition in which the material wealth of Cornwall is extracted while local communities see limited material return (2).

This sits in stark contrast to the symbolic recognition of Cornish culture, such as Kernewek being granted Part III status under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1). I often find myself asking: would most Cornish people prefer dual-language signposts on every street and road, or would they rather see the profits of kaolin and lithium extraction invested directly into local infrastructure, housing and public services?

What I see is a familiar pattern. Cultural identity is elevated, polished and funded just enough to be celebrated – but not enough to be actually empowered. Difference is encouraged, curated and then quietly weaponised to keep people segmented and manageable. I am deeply suspicious of financial and industrial interests that have held this island, and much of the planet, to ransom for centuries suddenly presenting themselves as champions of minority issues. I do not trust people who have a proven track record of participating in land-theft, exploitation and mass-murder. This is not paranoia; it is historical materialism, grounded in patterns of extraction, enclosure and enforced dependency that are well documented.

I refuse to be separated from my neighbours by each aspect of my identity. I refuse to be further divided and conquered. Yes, I am Cornish. Yes, I am a gay man. But more than that, I am descended from people who have laboured on this island, generation after generation, for the enrichment of a very small number of Mittel European families and their attendant German and Italian banking cartels. This shared material history matters more to me than any corporate badge of recognition ever could.

As always, my a’th kar!

I discuss this blog in more detail in the video below:

References:

(1) Cornwall Council (2026) Cornish language officially granted Part III status. Available at: https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/council-news/environment-culture-and-planning/cornish-language-officially-granted-part-iii-status/ (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

(2) Imerys S.A. (no date) Imerys – Our history. Available at: https://www.imerys.com/imerys-group/our-history/ (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

(3) Pride in London (2015) Sponsor Pride in London 2015. Archive snapshot. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20150627020110/https://prideinlondon.org/sponsors/ (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

(4) Verran, T. (2015) “Why we felt the need to bury Pride… #RIPPRIDE #QUEERFIGHTBACK”, Around the world in 80 gays!. Available at: https://tryg-aroundtheworldin80gays.blogspot.com/2015/06/why-we-felt-need-to-bury-pride-rippride.html (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

(5) Verran, T. (2016) “The moment I lost my Pride”, Around the world in 80 gays!. Available at: https://tryg-aroundtheworldin80gays.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-moment-i-lost-my-pride.html (Accessed: 20/01/2026).

January 17, 2026

Utopia and Dystopia: The Tai-Chi of the Technocracy Movement

The technocracy movement has been drifting back into my awareness lately, not as a concrete policy proposal so much as a cultural mood. It presents itself as ruthlessly rational: engineers over politicians, systems over sentiment, energy over money. One of its more intriguing early voices was Harold Loeb, whose 1922 essay The Mysticism of Money – later expanded into a book – framed technocracy as an attempt to break the spell of finance itself. Money, Loeb argued, was not neutral or objective, but a kind of mass hallucination: a symbolic system that had quietly replaced material reality. Technocracy, in his view, might free society from this enchantment by reorganising life around energy, production and measurable flows.

That language alone should give us pause. Spells. Mysticism. Enchantment. Even at its most “scientific,” technocracy appears haunted by what it claims to dispel.

Its emblem, the Monad, reinforces this suspicion. A circle divided by a wavy line, it symbolises balance between production and consumption. Once again, society is imagined not as a messy community of competing interests, but as a system of energetic equilibrium. It is hard not to notice how closely this mirrors Daoist cosmology. The yin-yang symbol isn’t identical, but the resemblance is unmistakable: dynamic balance, reciprocal forces and the idea that stability emerges from flow rather than from endlessly negotiating discrete encounters.

This raises an awkward question. If technocracy sought balance in natural energy systems, then perhaps this supposedly rational and logical project was quietly borrowing from the Dao. Daoism does not seek to dominate nature; it seeks alignment with it. It interprets reality as process rather than structure, movement rather than command. Technocracy, for all its charts and calculations, seems to echo this sensibility – even as it insists on its own radical modernity.

Things become even more intriguing when we look at some of the cultural and literary output of the 20th century. The century which birthed technocracy also became the great age of dystopian science fiction. Utopias had been more confidently conjured in European literature during the Renaissance. However, moving into the early 20th-century, some notable Utopian fictions were published: A Modern Utopia (H.G. Wells, 1905) imagined a technologically advanced planetary society overseen by a rational ruling class. Red Star (Alexander Bogdanov, 1908) offered a socialist utopia on Mars. Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915) proposed a peaceful feminist civilisation without men, war, or domination.

As the century progressed and industrial systems intensified, the cult of technological solutions became institutionalised, which resulted in technology and utopian thought becoming more intricately entwined. Just as The Age of Reason had spawned the decadence of Romanticism, so the 20th century generated enduring classics of the dystopian genre. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin, 1920) portrayed a society ruled by numbers, logic and surveillance. Brave New World (1932) imagined control achieved through pleasure and conditioning rather than violence. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) perfected surveillance and thought control. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) burned books not out of hatred, but in the name of comfort and social equilibrium.

This waxing and waning between Utopia and Dystopia almost traces a Tai Chi trajectory. In Daoist cosmology, reality unfolds from Wu-chi – the undifferentiated void – into yin and yang, and then into Tai Chi: the animated interplay of opposites. Utopian and dystopian narratives feel like a cultural expression of technocratic yin and yang. Both work to enforce a belief system. We are simultaneously captivated by the allure of a technologically perfected, Star Trek-style future and terrified by its erosion of autonomy and self-determination. These narratives do not negate one another; they generate movement between them. Promise and warning. Hope and fear. Order and disorder.

Seen this way, utopian and dystopian stories become the Tai Chi of technocracy. They circulate around the same core assumptions: that society is a system, that humans are manageable, and that balance can be engineered by a priestly class. One narrative seduces us with harmony and efficiency; the other terrifies us with sterility and domination. We are encouraged to welcome AI or fear AI, but in either case we are quietly trained to accept the same premise: that a super-processor should be considered “intelligent.” These are not neutral debates so much as ritual incantations – symbols and spectacles that orient us toward an inevitable, optimised future.

Even our most rational, scientific and secular movements, it seems, still require their myths, their devotees and their Dao.

As always, my a’th kar!

January 10, 2026

Introducing The Psy-omatics of Presentation

When people ask me what psy-omatics actually means, I often say: it’s about how thinking and sensing happen together, in the body, in a place, at a moment. It’s not just about ideas in the head, but the messy, alive relationship between the enviroment, mind, body and language (1). In a post titled Introducing The Psy-omatics of Encounter, I outline how I make sense of the physical and conceptual things that I meet. Here, I want to outline how I articulate these encounters or turn them into communicative events: what I call The Psy-omatics of Presentation.

Any kind of meaningful presentation – whether it’s writing, speaking, poetry, performance, or teaching – requires preparation. Not just mental preparation, but physical preparation too. Over the years, I’ve learned that if I want to present lyrical ideas clearly, my body has to be ready to carry them. That means fitness, breath, posture, voice and attention. I don’t just think the words; I feel them moving through me; I project them, shape them.

This approach borrows from many places. From poetry, I take Charles Olson’s idea that language carries energy from the writer to the reader or, in my case, from the presenter to the listener (2). I have interpreted that energy somatically. It’s not an abstract force floating around; it’s something felt in muscle tension, rhythm, breath, and timing. From performance theory, I’ve been influenced by Eugenio Barba’s idea of the “dilated body,” where trained physical awareness creates a bridge between action and thought (3). What interests me here is intuition – not as something vague, but as a form of embodied thinking.

Where I start to depart from some of these traditions is in how I understand the environment. I don’t experience the world as pure flow, constant movement or total immersion. Instead, I encounter both flows and substances. Some things move and change; others resist, hold still and demand attention. When I’m presenting, I’m negotiating both. Sometimes I need motion and momentum. Sometimes I need stillness, pauses, and silence to let meaning settle.

This is where psy-omatics differs from approaches like Sandra Reeve’s “eco-somatics,” (4) which often emphasise continuous movement and full integration with the environment. My relationship to a site – whether that’s a landscape, a room, or a digital space – is never complete or seamless. There is always a part of ‘me’, psychologically and somatically, that does not dissolve into the environment. Language itself creates distance. To name something is already to step back from it. That distance isn’t a failure; it’s necessary for thought.

For many reasons, I’ve become wary of using the word performance. It often carries theatrical expectations that can obscure what I’m really trying to do. I’m not interested in spectacle, although I understand the mechanics of smoke and mirrors. I’m interested in clarity, sincerity and inquiry. The psy-omatics of presentation is about finding ways to present lyrical thinking – through speaking, making and doing – that respect the tensions between body and mind, movement and stillness, nearness and distance.

In the end, psy-omatics is not a method you copy. It’s a way of paying attention. Each project, each presentation, has to find its own form. Or, as I put it in the thesis, it has to be done in a way better described not as performance, but as gwruthyl: a making-through-doing, grounded in the lived encounter between self, world and language.

As always, my a’th kar!

References:

(1) Verran, T. (2025) Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry. Thesis. University of Plymouth. Available
at: https://doi.org/10.24382/nv45-pk79

(2) Olson, Charles, (1950) “Projective Verse,” Originally published in, Poetry New York, no 3, 1950,
www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse. Accessed 20 November 2023.

(3) Barba, Eugenio. (1985) The Dilated Body: on the Energies of Acting. New Theatre Quarterly, 1(4), pp. 369–
382.doi:10.1017/S0266464X00001792.

(4) Reeve, Sandra. (2006) The next Step: Eco-Somatics and Performance. Move into Life. https://www.moveintolife.com/uploads/1/3/9/6/13969833/the_changing_body2.pdf [Accessed 2025]

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026

Mesotopia: A Remedy to the Extremes of Utopia, Dystopia and Arcadia

I want to begin with time, because time is where much of our thinking quietly goes astray. In Mesotopia – Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (2025), I describe time not as a neutral container that events pass through, but as something that happens in the act of encounter. This idea is indebted to Graham Harman’s discussion of time in The Quadruple Object, where time emerges as an effort to determine a sensual object through its qualities. In mesotopian terms, time is not ticking away somewhere else; it is generated in the moment I attempt to make sense of what is directly in front of me.

Mesotopian thinking, then, unfolds in the present tense. It is a mode of attention that asks: what is this place, this situation, this feeling—right now? What qualities are available to me, and what meanings can I cautiously, playfully, and only partially draw from them? This is not a search for final truths. Rather, it is a resistance to the urge to escape the present by disappearing into imagined futures or idealised pasts.

Utopia, dystopia and Arcadia are powerful narrative modes, and I understand their appeal. Utopia pulls us into visions of perfected systems and frictionless lives. Yet these visions are always subjective. My personal utopia might feel liberating to some, while appearing deeply unsettling – or even terrifying – to others. Dystopia pulls us into a place of fear, catastrophe and collapse. Here again, subjectivity plays a role: what one group fears as dystopian, another may quietly celebrate as utopian. Arcadia operates differently. It tugs us backward toward a supposedly lost golden age, where life was imagined to be simpler, purer, more authentic. Despite their differences, all three exert a similar effect on our ability to engage with the present.

Each of these modes lifts us out of the here and now and relocates our attention elsewhere. In doing so, they distract us from the difficult, ambiguous work of understanding where we actually are. Utopian, Dystopian and Arcadian narratives are frequently invoked to obscure reality, conjuring cognitive boundaries that divide people along rigid – and often outdated – ideological lines.

There is another danger in these modes of thinking that concerns me deeply: they all tend to render us passive. Utopia can feel so vast and total that our small actions seem insignificant. Dystopia, meanwhile, paralyses us with the sense that everything is already lost. Arcadia gently encourages us to refuse the temptations of change and progress altogether. In each case, the outcome is similar: we hesitate, withdraw, and stop experimenting. We become trapped in a present that feels frozen – unable to take chances, explore possibilities or test new potentials.

I am not suggesting that foresight or memory should be abandoned. Mesotopia does not exclude planning for the future or studying history. What I am proposing is something more modest: that before we disappear into fantasies of what might be, or myths of what once was, we first learn to understand the present place that asks for our attention and care.

Mesotopian thinking requires us to attend carefully to what is already here – to notice the textures, tensions and latent possibilities of the present moment. It invites modesty instead of grand solutions, curiosity instead of certainty. From this position, the present becomes intelligible enough to respond to, which in turn makes the uncertainties of the future more manageable as they are encountered.

For me, mesotopia is a remedy, not an escape. It is a way of staying with the middle ground – where meaning is provisional, time is encountered rather than mastered, and the present is not something to endure until a better world arrives, but something to engage with, thoughtfully and creatively, in the moment.

I expand on this blog in the following video:

As always, my a’th kar!

References:

(1) Verran, T. (2025) Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry. Thesis. University of Plymouth. Available
at: https://doi.org/10.24382/nv45-pk79

(2) Harman, Graham. (2011) The Quadruple Object. London: Zero Books.