Tryg Verran – My a'th Kar

April 26, 2026April 26, 2026

Mesotopia: Significant Findings and Contributions. Partial Revelation

If you spend nearly ten years on a thing – a thesis, a question, an ache – then what do you come away with? This is a problem that many researchers wrestle with long after their viva.

My thesis, Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (Verran, 2025), emerged from my exploration into the murky realm of meaning-making; into how humans make sense of their environment and articulate this through the art of language. While engaging with methods and approaches of scientific materialism, it was open to other, less quantifiable aspects of understanding. My approach exists between the hard data of environmental science and the soft collapse of attributing a lyrical utterance to a physical sensation. Mesotopia is that middle place. It is a weird, damp, mossy ground where you are forced to admit that you’re guessing, and that guess, that intuition, is something beautiful.

Here’s what I’ve learned, and I offer it not as truth but as partial revelation: all environmental research ends in conjecture. You can measure carbon flux. You can map watersheds, but the moment you ask why – why the tide is rising, why the magpie sings – then you have left the laboratory and entered the weirder world of the poetic. This requires intuition; not as a substitute for rigour, but as its strange twin. The best researchers I know don’t pretend to be robots or LLMs. They listen for what the data doesn’t say.

This became painfully clear when I tried to get a clean historical picture of Celtic culture. I wanted something tethered to the languages themselves: Old Kernewek, the living breath of Breton fragments. What I found instead was a hall of mirrors. There are no objective sources. Texts were scripted by either a monk or a cultist with an agenda. Every archaeological layer has been interpreted by a romantic, a nationalist or a grant committee. Anyone who proclaims certainty about Celtic culture should be eyed the way you’d eye a man selling miracle water from the back of a van.

This is the deeper sickness. Doing a PhD means watching how the money moves. You see funding streams shape ideological and political directions for corporate profit: pharmaceuticals, tech, and weapons. These industries don’t just buy labs. They buy histories too. They buy the humanities, indirectly, turning entire departments into PR factories churning out favourable narratives. There are red lines and guardrails everywhere. You learn them quickly. Don’t scrutinise the military applications or environmental impacts of all this wonderful new tech. Don’t question the ethics of corporate influence on land use. Don’t look at the family backgrounds of financiers recently termed ‘philanthropists’. Do that, and the funding dries up. The list goes on. This is the unspoken rule – to have any kind of career in Western academia, you need to learn when to keep your mouth shut.

I finished my PhD less certain about what is real. So much of academic work seems to be about inventing reality for other people to live in. I admit that I can never find my way through all the misdirections and dead ends, and that any meaningful clarity eludes me. On reflection, I don’t see that as a failure. That is the crack where light gets in. I’ve glimpsed the man behind the velvet curtain of western liberalism, working his bells and whistles and selling his snake oil, and I don’t believe him anymore. I do not believe in the neutrality of universities, nor in the clean hands of Western research culture.

I live in partial revelation. I am always listening. I am certain of nothing and sceptical of everything. However, I can still hope that somewhere – in a different kind of institution with a different way of asking – there is a place where intuition is honoured, funding doesn’t own the questions, and any person is free to research, interrogate or argue controversial positions.

As always, my a’th kar!

Follow this link to a video where I discuss this blog in more detail:

March 29, 2026

Mesotopia: Significant Findings and Contributions

If you are looking for neat conclusions, this isn’t that kind of project. Indeed, I suggest that if you are looking for neat conclusions – you’re probably missing a big part of what makes research interesting. After years of wrestling with sites, words, and the strange space between being in a place and thinking about how I understand it, I have not found a tidy set of answers. Instead, I’ve landed somewhere more interesting: a conviction that meaning is made through a subtle interplay between the environment, the body and the mind. I’ve also found that different forms of expression demand different metaphysics – different philosophies of interpreting what is real – to turn these environmental encounters into something that can be communicated.

Let me put that another way. If you’re making a dance, you might need to focus more on theories that conceive a universe of energies and flows, as these are better suited to speaking about movement. However, if you’re making a lyric about an environmental encounter, you need a little distance to process the encounter, therefore theories that convey a universe of substances. And if you’re trying to make sense of the world while moving through it, then you might need to employ a theory that sits between theories of substances and flows.

Mesotopia, a middle place, is my attempt to do this. It is a place where physical things meet conceptual things, a place of substances and flows, a practice that sits between theory and experience, between knowing and not-knowing. I have found that a theory of object-oriented ontology (OOO), as advanced by Graham Harman, has proven to be really helpful when talking about mesotopia and mesotopian logic.

One of the more unexpected findings of my research is that the Cornish language – Kernewek – is structurally more suited to object-oriented thinking than English. I looked at three features of the Kernewek language that differ from the English language. Firstly, the use of pronominal prepositions; secondly, the favouring of predicate-led constructions; finally, the way nouns often sit before modifiers. I have found that these are not just grammatical quirks. I suggest that they build a world where things don’t exist merely as props for chattering human subjects. In Kernewek, the language itself leans into the idea that objects have their own stubborn presence. English, by contrast, keeps trying to put the speaking subject in the driver’s seat.

When you are trying to express your understanding of the world, the form that communication takes matters. I have found that parataxis – placing phrases side by side without explicit connections – is more significant than syntax for expressing relations to the environment. You don’t explain the space. You juxtapose. You let things sit next to each other, and the space between them does the work. What is the subtle difference between a phrase like ‘good day’ or ‘dydh da’ (literally ‘day good’)? Well, I advance the idea that the English phrase prioritises the subject’s opinion, ‘good’, over the object, ‘day’. Whereas the Kernewek version acknowledges the object, ‘dydh’, before the speaker’s opinion, ‘da’. It’s a subtle difference; however, I propose that this difference articulates a slightly different perspective of my understanding of what a day actually is.

It is useful to consider the significance of Graham Harman’s notion of ‘space’ here. Space, in this sense, is the distance between my physical encounter with an object and the object as I have conceived it in its totality. My physical encounter with a ‘day’ is comprised of various sensory events, such as registering the difference between darkness and light. However, there is much to a day that eludes my certainty – the totality of my understanding of a ‘day’ involves substances and flows that elude my senses, such as planetary objects and rotations. Therefore, the human concept of ‘day’ is simply an educated guess of what a day actually is, and whether or not it is ‘good’ is a human imposition. What’s ‘good’ for humans might not necessarily be ‘good’ for seagulls.

Perhaps the most delicate finding – the one that’s often most difficult for me to explain in simple terms – is this: my understanding of my environment mimics a sensation of knowing, but it’s actually rooted in an experience of not-knowing. For example, my practice of communicating my understanding of my environment involves lyrical composition. While these compositions feel like they’re delivering understanding, what they’re really doing is performing the condition of being amidst things I can’t fully grasp. Hence, I find that I exist in a world of partial revelation.

So no, there are no definitive conclusions here. There is a clearer sense that if you want to understand a place, you have to accept that the place – and the objects within it – keep their secrets. That means finding a philosophy, a language, a compositional practice that doesn’t translate everything back into human terms.

As always, my a’th kar!

Page 227 from Verran (2025) provides a summary of significant findings:

Summary of Significant Findings and Contributions (Verran, 2025)

March 22, 2026

On Celtic Nationalisms: (Aside) Why Does the UK Keep Spawning Strange Esoteric Cults?

While researching my PhD thesis, Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (2025), I spent considerable time visiting Celtic language communities and Celtic nationalist meetings across Britain. I went expecting to find what I’d romanticised: the last strongholds of living tradition, people gathering in draughty village halls to keep the old words breathing. What I found instead puzzled me deeply, and has since forced me to rethink my entire understanding of Celtic nationalisms and their revival.

Many of these gatherings were as I had imagined and were in village halls, but at some of these gatherings, I kept meeting members of esoteric orders, like Zionists and Mormons. They sat among Kernewek learners and Celtic nationalists, and I found myself asking the obvious question: what on earth are you doing here?

The answer is stranger than I expected.

The Hebrew Connection:

The links with Zionism emerge from something specific: the revival of the ancient Hebrew language. For many language activists, Hebrew stands as the great success story – a language of liturgy returned to public places. Israeli groups provided practical advice and strategies for growing the Welsh language during the latter half of the 20^th century.

Beneath this practical solidarity lurked something more theological. For certain strands of Zionist thought, particularly those influenced by figures like Abraham Isaac Kook, the return to the Land and the revival of Hebrew were not merely nationalist projects but messianic events. So, if the revival of Hebrew carried political and theological significance for funders of the state of Israel, what of the revival of Welsh or Cornish? Is there some hidden financial or theological motive?

A Landscape of Secrets:

The truth is that the United Kingdom has long been a factory for esoteric orders that shape the political world from the shadows. We manufacture them the way Switzerland manufactures cuckoo clocks. To ignore this fact is to misunderstand our history. The history of the UK is littered with secret fraternities of posh boys performing rituals and rites. As ridiculous as they might seem to the uninitiated outsider – these people seem to believe whatever it is they are doing. Aleister Crowley alone spawned an evolving line of Thelemic sex cults, with their “Do what thou wilt” and elaborate initiations for posh boys and poets. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Typhonian Order – each has promised hidden knowledge to privileged devotees, and many of their practices still reverberate through respectable contemporary societies.

Then there are the British Israelites, who emerged properly in the 19th century with the claim that the British people are literally descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. John Wilson’s Our Israelitish Origin (1840) gave the movement its founding text, and by the 1880s, Anglo-Israel associations had sprouted across Britain. These were not fringe eccentrics in any simple sense – they included clergy, peers, and at their peak claimed millions of sympathisers throughout the former colonies. It’s no surprise that ideas from the British Israelites heavily influenced the Mormon church in the United States.

And yes – the modern Zionist movement itself, in its current ethno-nationalist political form, emerged from late 19th-century Europe. These aren’t just eccentric social clubs; the reason the US Empire has evolved into a crusading force obsessed with prophecy and rapture, or the state of Israel has become an ethno-supremacist state is because of weird fringe ideas that have gestated right here in the UK. The quirks of many of these cults tap into the same soil of romantic nationalism, biblical prophecy, and the conviction that ancient peoples could be reassembled in the present.

What Do They Want?

The ultimate goals of these secret esoteric societies remain, by design, hidden. We live in what I call a state of partial revelation – we glimpse fragments, but never the full machinery. Theosophists spoke of a coming World Teacher. Crowley announced the Aeon of Horus. British Israelites anticipated the restoration of the Davidic throne through the British monarchy. According to researcher of the occult Tracy Twyman, some secret societies have sought out a mythical ‘twilight language’ which conveys secret knowledge – this might explain an interest in old languages like Hebrew, Welsh, or even Cornish. The more I look into the work of figures like Edward Williams (also known as ‘Iolo Morganwg’) or Robert Morton Nance, the more I become sceptical of their motives or methods. Whatever their goals, scattered through all of the secret societies runs a thread of sectarianism, of chosen peoples, and of elect nations.

What becomes clear, viewed from ground level, is that such groups consistently function against the interests of the uninitiated – which means the common people. They work to create division – to balkanise not only territories but imaginations. The English Mistery of the 1930s, with its mystical feudalism and its “kins” of racially pure Englishmen, sought to roll back democracy and reinstate aristocratic rule. Rolf Gardiner, one of its leaders, wrote explicitly in German journals about reviving long-lost Germanic traditions in the English social order. These are not harmless antiquarians – they are architects of division, fear and paranoia.

Demystifying the Mystery:

Mesotopian logic demands a demystification of meaning-making. Not the crude demystification that pretends mystery doesn’t exist – we can never fully know the real world, and any claim to total knowledge is itself a power move. Rather, an honest demystification that names what is not known, that refuses the priestly gesture of hiding operations behind ritual.

Celtic languages do not belong to esoteric orders. They do not belong to neo-feudal aristocrats or digital landlords or prophets of racial destiny. They belong to the communities that speak them, learn them, dream in them – communities of ordinary people trying to hold onto something precious. The mystifiers would turn these languages into keys to hidden kingdoms. I say: let these languages remain what they are – words for sea and rock and magpie, for love and loss and the hope of conveying something meaningful or, dare I say, beautiful.

As always, my a’th kar.

I discuss this blog in more detail in the video:

References:

Allen, J.H. (1917) Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright. 15th edn. Haverhill, MA: Destiny Publishers. [Originally published 1902].

Armstrong, H.W. (2005) The United States and Britain in Prophecy. Edmund, OK: Philadelphia Church of God. [Originally published 1954].

Bogdan, H. and Starr, M.P. (eds.) (2012) Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carew, M. (2003) Tara and the Ark of the Covenant: A Search for the Ark of the Covenant by British-Israelites on the Hill of Tara (1899-1902). Dublin: Discovery Programme/Royal Irish Academy.

Dietz, B. (2018) ‘Sanderson, William John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Green, E.H.H. (2002) Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Griffiths, R. (1980) Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9. London: Constable.

Hedenborg White, M. (2020) ‘Rethinking Aleister Crowley and Thelema: New Perspectives’, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 21(1), pp. 1-12.

Linehan, T. (2000) British Fascism, 1918-1939: Parties, Ideology and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Mirsky, Y. (2022) ‘Rav Kook: The Leading Thinker of Religious Zionism’, Brandeis University Jewish Experience, September. Available at:https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/history-culture/2022/september/kook-zionism-mirsky.html (Accessed: 16 March 2026).

Pasi, M. (2014) Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics. Abingdon: Routledge. [Originally published in Italian 1999].

Platts-Mills, J. (2001) Muck, Silk and Socialism: Recollections of a Left-wing Queen’s Counsel. Wedmore: Paper Publishing.

Posen Library (no date) Abraham Isaac Kook: Biography. Available at: http://www.posenlibrary.com/author/abraham-isaac-kook (Accessed: 16 March 2026).

Sanderson, W.J. (1927) Statecraft. London: [publisher unknown].

Sanderson, W.J. (1930) That Which Was Lost: A Treatise on Freemasonry and the English Mistery. London: [publisher unknown].

Wikipedia (2006) British Israelism. Available at: https://webarchiveweb.wayback.bac-lac.canada.ca/web/20060913000000/http://en.wikipedia.org:80/wiki/British_Israelism (Accessed: 16 March 2026).

Wikipedia (2025) Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_Order_of_the_Golden_Dawn (Accessed: 16 March 2026).

Wikipedia (2023) English Mistery. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Mistery (Accessed: 16 March 2026).

Wikipedia Contributors (2025). Iolo Morganwg. Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iolo_Morganwg (Accessed: 21 March 2026).

Wikipedia Contributors (2025). Robert Morton Nance. Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morton_Nance (Accessed: 21 March 2026).

Wilson, J. (1840) Our Israelitish Origin. London: [publisher unknown].

Wright, P. (2002) The Village that Died for England. London: Faber and Faber.

Yeats, W.B. (1901) Is the Order of R. R. & A. C. to Remain a Magical Order? London: Privately printed.

March 15, 2026March 15, 2026

Pride to Arrogance

I’m a word nerd. I always have been. Give me a fancy word and I’ll happily disappear down an etymological rabbit hole. Words aren’t just labels; they often carry complicated philosophies and histories. They tell us how people once felt about things, and sometimes how they still do.

Take pride.

We tend to treat Pride – with a capital P – as an unqualified good. It is banners and glitter and rainbows filling the streets. It is colourful defiance. It’s what Aretha Franklin was getting at when she sang about pride as “a deeper love.” After centuries of shame being attached to people who have chosen alternative ways of loving and presenting themselves, pride has been a necessary corrective.

Yet as an emotional state, pride has always been ambiguous. The traditional moralists were not entirely wrong to rank it high among the deadly sins. Not because feeling good about yourself is wicked, but because pride untethered can curdle into arrogance. Push it a little further and you get hubris – an ancient Greek warning sign that someone is about to fall flat on their face.

So let’s unpack my understanding of pride. Too much pride insists that not only am I worthy, but that I am flawless. Not only that my way of loving and living is legitimate, but that it is morally superior. That is the pivot point where something liberatory can harden into something faintly sanctimonious.

The antidote to arrogance is humility. Not humiliation or self-erasure, but the quiet recognition that I am one human among many, and that all of us are fallible.

Living a liberated sex life doesn’t make me a bad person, but it also doesn’t make me a saint. It doesn’t grant prophetic insight or moral authority. It simply means I am navigating the same tempestuous terrain as everyone else: desire, pleasure, guilt, connection, and loneliness. I’m not exceptional; I’m just another awkward mammal – albeit one who can claim a few good songs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since reconnecting with friends and colleagues at Margate Pride. The experience has also brought another word to mind: community.

These days all sorts of organisations often brand groups of people with shared interests ‘communities’; the cycling community, the vegan community, the queer community. However, the word originally meant something closer to ‘the common people’ – those who share a place. Not the nobility; not the clergy; just the rest of us muddling through together. When I talk about community cohesion, it’s this older meaning I have in mind.

If we take that definition seriously, grass-roots engagement stops being about curating safe rooms full of ideological twins. Instead, it becomes about speaking to neighbours you might not agree with on everything. It requires enough humility to listen to what people actually say, and to recognise that we probably share more concerns than we assume.

In my experience, stepping outside your comfort zone is surprisingly productive. Most of my conversations with non-LGBT+ people within many communities have been positive. It turns out, the man who loathes ‘woke culture’ is also worried about paying his heating bill. The woman who doesn’t understand why everyone suddenly uses the word ‘queer’ is desperately anxious about her mum’s hospital waiting list.

Material concerns cut across identity in surprising ways.

For example, you might be a trendy queer artist and struggling to pay your rent and bills. Congratulations! You’re just like most people living on your street. You might be fighting for access to life-saving treatment because you’re HIV positive or trans. Most people I speak with are also fighting for access to different forms of life-saving healthcare. When you focus on housing, wages and healthcare you discover common ground, and on common ground, you can build something sturdier than a slogan or an annual event.

The secret to effective community grass-roots organising is no secret at all, it’s just talking with the people who live around you.

Pride got us out of the shadows. Humility might help us grow in the daylight.

As always, my a’th kar.

I discuss this blog in more depth over on my YouTube channel:

March 1, 2026

Empirical or Intuitive Modes of Inquiry: Interpreting Information in a State of Partial Revelation

In my 2025 thesis, I make what initially sounds like a scandalous claim: all research, no matter how diligent, arrives at a moment of conjecture.

That’s not an attack on science. It’s not a flirtation with relativism. It’s an observation about what actually happens when we try to know something.

You can observe, measure, dissect, test and evaluate until you disappear into sub-atomic weirdness. You can triangulate sources, run regressions, peer review the life out of a paragraph – but eventually, you have to conclude. That conclusion – however sophisticated – is an educated guess.

A very good guess, perhaps. A responsible guess, but a guess nonetheless.

This is not a weakness in research. It’s a structural feature of inquiry in a world that only ever reveals itself partially.

In developing what I call a mesotopian mode of meaning-making, I found myself drawn to the speculative strategies of fiction – particularly the Utopian genre. World-building works by extrapolation. An author takes fragments of reality and extends them into coherent possibility. The reader recognises the plausibility not because every detail is empirically verified, but because the world hangs together. It resonates.

Research works in much the same way.

We gather fragments of the real. Data points. Interviews. Archival traces. Phenomenological encounters, and then we construct a model that accounts for them. We are not inventing from nothing. We are extrapolating from partial revelation.

Mesotopian logic simply makes this explicit.

Rather than pretending to empirical omniscience, it acknowledges the intuitive component in interpretation. It admits that at some point the researcher must lean into a felt coherence; a sense that the pattern is right; that the explanation fits.

Now, the immediate objection is obvious: doesn’t this throw everything into doubt?

No.

Because there is a real world.

I am not arguing that reality is optional or that truth is whatever we desire. The world resists us. It surprises us. It refuses to conform to our expectations. Much of it remains withdrawn, opaque, inaccessible – but not imaginary.

What we have access to are encounters. These are moments in which something shows up; a document that shifts your understanding; a conversation that reframes the field; a material object that refuses the narrative you were about to impose on it.

These phenomenological encounters inform epistemological comprehension. In other words, how things appear to us shapes what we can responsibly claim to know.

But between encounter and conclusion, there is always a gap.

And that gap is not filled by raw data alone.

This is where I detect something like an “intuitive phenomenology.” Not simply psychological bias, not wishful thinking, but a form of instinctive pattern recognition. The mind – and perhaps something deeper than mind – moves to complete the picture. It draws connections. It senses coherence. It fills epistemological gaps so that meaning can stabilise.

We already trust this process in everyday life. A seasoned organiser can walk into a room and “read” it. A historian can sense when an archive is hiding something. A scientist can feel when a model is elegant rather than forced.

These are not irrational acts. They are disciplined intuitions shaped by immersion in reality.

Mesotopian inquiry does not replace empiricism with vibes. It integrates empirical rigour with an honest account of the intuitive leap that always occurs at the edge of knowledge.

So empirical or intuitive? The answer is both.

We live in a state of partial revelation. The world gives itself, but never entirely. Our task is to respond carefully, rigorously, and imaginatively. Not to claim absolute certainty, but to make the most responsible guess we can – and to remain open when the world answers back.

As always, my a’th kar!

I discuss this blog in more detail on my Youtube channel:

February 23, 2026

Mesotopia: ‘High Weirdness’ Against a Priestly Class.

I have a lingering suspicion that every movement, no matter how exploratory or liberatory it begins, eventually generates its own clergy. The people who explain its meaning to the rest of us. Not the be-robed, incense-and-lace variety (though give it time), but the interpretive class – the ones who assure you that what you think you’re seeing isn’t quite what you’re seeing, and luckily, they have the key. This caste hasn’t vanished; it has simply donned the corporate drag of the professional-managerial class.

Mesotopia, at least as I understand it, refuses that comfort.

If mesotopia is anything, it is the awkward recognition that the world is real – stubbornly real – but never fully available. Objects exceed us. Systems exceed us. Institutions exceed us. Yet each of us possesses the capacity to make meaning through our encounters with the environments we inhabit. And this is the crucial point: that process does not require a priestly caste to mediate it. Partial revelation is not the same thing as authorised revelation.

We live in an age addicted to interpretation. Scroll any feed and you’ll find someone explaining what the data really means, what the conflict really signifies, what the text actually implies. It’s a lucrative posture. It flatters the explainer and infantilises the audience. The message is always the same: the real is too complex for you. Leave it to us.

Mesotopia pushes back.

If meaning happens in the encounter – if it is co-constituted in that charged space between me and what I meet – then no one gets to claim exclusive access to it. The mesotopian event is democratic in the most unsettling way. It insists that you are already implicated in the making of sense. There is no backstage pass.

This is not relativism. The world bites. History happened. Power concentrates. Money moves in very specific directions. But the claim that only a sanctioned cadre can interpret these realities is itself a power move. It is theology dressed up as theory.

You see it everywhere. In academia, it appears as jargon that sometimes functions less as precision and more as initiation rite. In activism, where sometimes a deviation from approved vocabulary can feel like heresy. In politics, where technocrats speak as though code and program were sacred texts decipherable only by the ordained.

Mesotopia requires a certain slowness – a willingness to dwell in encounter. Each experience is turned through association and intuition as we try to understand the environment in which we find ourselves. Yes, the real withdraws. Yes, structures operate beyond immediate perception. But that does not invalidate lived encounter; it intensifies its importance. The fact that we never grasp the whole does not mean we grasp nothing. It means we work provisionally, relationally, in good faith.

A priestly class thrives on the promise of total vision. Mesotopia is content with fragments.

There is something profoundly anti-authoritarian about admitting that revelation is always partial. It levels the field. It allows disagreement without excommunication. It acknowledges that I might hear something you don’t, and you might notice something I’ve missed – not because one of us is enlightened, but because we are differently positioned within the same recalcitrant world.

The danger, of course, is that mesotopia itself becomes doctrine. That someone eventually writes the catechism: “Thou shalt interpret thus.” I can already hear the conference panels.

So let me be clear. This is not a retreat into the political monad, nor a New Age hymn to the sovereign self. We are not isolated atoms floating above our biological or socio-political milieu. Our environments include community, history, institutions and power. Meaning-making happens within those entanglements, not outside them. Nor do I believe in some private enlightenment waiting at the end of sufficient introspection.

Mesotopia is not a ladder to ascend above others. It is a reminder that we are already entangled in something that exceeds us – and that none of us owns the veil.

No robes. No incense. No vestments. No authorised intermediaries.

Just the difficult, ordinary work of meeting a world that will never fully disclose itself – and refusing to let anyone claim exclusive rights to its mystery.

As always, my a’th kar!

I discuss this post in more detail on my YouTube channel:

References:

Davis, Erik. (2019). High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. MIT Press.

Verran, Tristan. (2025) Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry. University of Plymouth Archive.

February 15, 2026

Why the Epstein Scandal Matters to Grass-roots Organising – Yes, Even in Cornwall!

I know. The moment you mention Epstein, half the room switches off and the other half assumes you’re about to spiral into salacious gossip about decadent royals. Fair enough. There’s been no shortage of lurid headlines, often supporting bad faith takes or outright distractions. If you’re involved in grassroots organising – environment, housing, disability rights, local culture – then the Epstein scandal actually matters a great deal. Even here in the Duchy of Cornwall. Especially down here, in fact.

Not because of the sex crimes themselves, horrific as they are. Without sounding flippant, those are not the important part from an organising perspective. What matters is that the Epstein documents give us a rare, unvarnished look at how power actually functions. Not how it claims to function in glossy brochures, mission statements, or charity galas, but how it works when the doors are closed and the theatre stops.

What emerges is a class of people who genuinely believe themselves to be above the law – not metaphorically, literally. They trade influence across governments, intelligence agencies, banks, weapons manufacturers, and ‘philanthropic’ institutions with astonishing ease. The Epstein network shows us that inter-institutional power doesn’t operate through democratic accountability; it operates through personal relationships, financial leverage, kompromat, and shared class interest.

This is vital for grassroots organisers to understand, because so much organising energy is wasted arguing with the performance of power. We petition the institution, we appeal to its stated values, we take part in consultations that are largely ceremonial. Such processes help cultivate the illusion of participation. Meanwhile, the real decisions are being made elsewhere, by people who will never attend a town hall meeting and who don’t particularly care what the public thinks.

One of the more sobering elements of the Epstein story isn’t just who he knew, but what moved through his world: money laundering, arms flows, political interference, even regime change. Governments toppled, leaders removed, and vast sums legally washed clean through cultural, educational, and environmental organisations. That should ring bells for anyone who’s ever wondered why certain funders always seem to back ‘good causes’ while working-class communities remain neglected.

People are still combing through millions of released emails in the US, but already the outline of empire is visible. The Financial Times article on Epstein’s banking connections is revealing in this regard. When you trace those networks outward, you don’t end up in abstract theory – you end up in very real places. Yes, even Cornwall. Through extractive industries like Imerys, and through respected institutions such as wildlife and cultural trusts. This is what global power looks like when it lands locally.

The same family that profits from extracting Cornwall’s mineral reserves also funds organisations that promote ‘greener’ approaches to resource management, including initiatives linked to the Cornwall Wildlife Trust’s Green Recovery Challenge Fund. This does not, in itself, prove any wrongdoing. However, it does help explain why certain environmental impacts, particularly those linked to mineral extraction, are often absent from official campaigning narratives. This is grassroots theatre in action: the same interests profiting from extraction are also funding the boundaries within which ‘opposition’ is allowed to operate.

To be clear, the Epstein revelations are often discussed through the lens of particular social or cultural networks, but focusing on identity alone misses the point. What is being exposed is not a uniquely Zionist phenomenon, but a familiar pattern of elite, transnational power that has historically operated across Mittel-European, British, German, Italian, and American ruling classes alike. This is simply how imperial power has reproduced itself.

Crucially, the people working at the grassroots level of charitable, cultural, or environmental organisations are not villains. Most have little to no awareness of the legacies of wealth tied to colonial extraction in regions such as Rhodesia, Palestine or Somalia for example. My research suggests these same mechanics operate throughout the provinces, particularly within the overtly feudal ‘Duchy’ of Cornwall.

This is why outlets like the TrueAnon podcast and The Grayzone matter. They’ve been doing the unglamorous work of tracing these connections through a historical materialist lens, rather than dismissing them as scandal or conspiracy. They remind us that power has a history, a geography, and a balance sheet.

If grassroots organising is going to be effective, it has to be grounded in reality – not the comforting story we’re told about how the world works, but the uncomfortable truth of how it often does. The Epstein scandal isn’t a distraction from local issues. It’s a brutal lesson in why local struggles are always connected to global systems of power.

As always, my a’th kar!

I discuss this blog in more depth over on YouTube:

References:

(1) Cornwall Wildlife Trust (n.d.) Green Recovery Challenge Fund: Past projects. Available at: https://www.cornwallwildlifetrust.org.uk/what-we-do/past-projects/green-recovery-challenge-fund (Accessed: 9 February 2026).

(2) Financial Times (n.d.) Jeffrey Epstein and the banking system. Financial Times. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/0d70b7d3-063d-43a0-812b-8b8b3e7c4c47 (Accessed: 9 February 2026).

(3) Imerys (n.d.) Imerys in the United Kingdom: Cornwall operations. Imerys. Available at: https://www.imerys.com/united-kingdom/cornwall (Accessed: 9 February 2026).

(4) Tages-Anzeiger. (2026). Tamedia AG. [online] Available at: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/epstein-beriet-ariane-de-rothschild-475024135092 [Accessed 14 Feb. 2026].

(5) @TrueAnonPod Truanon (n.d.) Truanon podcast. Available at: https://soundcloud.com/truanonpod (Accessed: 9 February 2026).

(6) @thegrayzone7996 The Grayzone (n.d.) Discussion on the Epstein files and imperial power structures. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2wz4rGGRGA&t=8s

February 8, 2026

Mesotopia: Towards a Politics of Partial Revelation

One of the quietly awkward things about Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is watching very clever people try to prise a politics out of it without breaking the crockery. Graham Harman tends to sidestep the issue, while Timothy Morton leans into it with a kind of earnest bravado. Morton’s move toward ecognosticism, and the attempt to locate this within a Marxist framework in texts like Humankind, is genuinely interesting. However, it also feels slightly misaligned. Classic Marxism is grounded in class analysis, historically specific struggles, and the evaluation of material and economic exploitation. OOO, by contrast, flattens the ontological field. Everything withdraws. Everything is weird. The risk is that a politics emerging from OOO may be interpreted less as a material project and more as a kind of nihilistic mood that risks favouring apathy over engagement.

I explore this tension more fully in my thesis, Mesotopia: Towards a place of lyrical inquiry, but the short version is this: I admire the effort to push OOO into the political sphere, even when I don’t think it quite lands – and that misfiring is instructive, because it reveals something important about knowledge itself.

While researching the mechanics of mesotopian meaning-making, it became increasingly obvious to me that all research, no matter how rigorous, eventually arrives at a moment of pure conjecture. There is always a moment where the evidence runs out and interpretation takes over. Mesotopia names this space. I live here. We all do, whether we admit it or not. It is a state of partial revelation.

This is not as exotic as it sounds. In fact, it has deep resonances with classic Marxism and even elements of Maoism, where political life is understood to be structurally occluded. Much is withheld – not necessarily because it is illegal, but because it would be politically embarrassing, destabilising, or simply inconvenient if widely known. The very existence of scandals that sit at the periphery of respectable political discourse – such as Operation Gladio or Jeffrey Epstein – points to this condition. Power does not announce itself clearly. Decisions are made elsewhere, in rooms you and I, dear reader, are not invited into, using codes and languages we have not been taught to speak.

My own experiences of working at the fringes of empire have only reinforced my thinking here. I do not know the truth of political machinations at the highest level, but I do know, with absolute certainty, that the general public does not know everything either. This isn’t paranoia. It isn’t fear. It’s political realism.

Often in my research, I return to old-fashioned historical materialist strategies – following flows of money, mapping institutional relationships, noting who funds whom and why. These methods can clarify motivations and alliances that otherwise seem baffling. However, they do not constitute conclusive proof of wrongdoing. Many financial arrangements are perfectly legal. They are simply hidden because they don’t look good under fluorescent light.

This is why I’ve found Erik Davis’s approach in High Weirdness so refreshing. Davis manages to acknowledge the unknown, the speculative, and the unresolved without sliding into mockery or credulity. He takes uncertainty seriously.

I encountered something similar while researching the Cornish language. I plotted the publishing output of writers who have subtly pushed narratives of Baltic and Celtic nationalisms and arrived at a moment of conjecture – why are they doing this? I also didn’t understand why certain groups of people attended some Celtic language meetings. I still don’t. I will never know the inner motives of esoteric groups. Mesotopia teaches me to live with that – not as resignation, but as orientation. Not knowing is not a failure. It is the condition of political life. However, this does not mean that we simply accept ‘not knowing’ as a reason for ‘not doing’. On the contrary, I suggest that a politics of partial revelation encourages us to continue to participate in a project to attend to our local environments even though we cannot possibly know everything.

I can state what I know and intuit what I don’t.

From my research, I observe that industrialists, financiers, and right-wing factions often push nationalist narratives to appeal to the sensibilities of certain minority groups. For what ultimate reason, I cannot know; my intuition, however, is to remain sceptical of their intentions. Partial revelation is the rule, not the exception, and politics begins not with certainty, but with the refusal to be paralysed by its absence.

As always, my a’th kar!

You can follow this link for a video discussion of this blog:

References:
(1) Davis, Erik. (2019). High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in The Seventies. The MIT Press.
(2) Harman, Graham. (2016). Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Polity.
(3) Morton, Timothy. (2017). Humankind: Solidarity with Non-human People. Verso.
(4) Verran, Tristan. (2025). Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry. The University of Plymouth. https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/ada-theses/113/

February 1, 2026February 1, 2026

Introducing the Mesotopian Event

I want to begin in the present moment, because that is where the mesotopian event lives. Not as an abstract idea floating above experience, and not as a fixed material fact beneath it, but as something that happens when I meet an object and realise that meaning is being made with me, not simply handed to me. The mesotopian event is my attempt to describe that fleeting, charged instant of encounter – the moment when thought, sensation, intuition and language briefly co-habit the same room.

In my 2025 thesis, Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry, I draw heavily on Graham Harman’s concept of The Quadruple Object. Harman suggests that any object – whether a stone, a poem, or a political idea – is held together by four poles: the real object (RO), the real quality (RQ), the sensual object (SO), and the sensual quality (SQ). These poles do not collapse into one another; instead, they are sustained by four tensions: time, space, essence, and eidos. For Harman, all objects – human and other-than-human alike – encounter one another through these tensions.

A key insight for me is this: objects endure precisely because they withdraw. Their essence is never fully accessible. I can touch a limpet, describe it, argue with it, write about it – but something always escapes me. This is not a failure of perception. It is the very condition that makes meaning possible.

Essence, then, names the tension between the real object and its real qualities, both of which remain partially withheld during any encounter. Time emerges as the tension between the sensual object and its sensual qualities. I know, for example, that a limpet has lived longer because its shell is rougher than the smoother shells of younger limpets. Space, meanwhile, is the tension between the sensual object and its real qualities. It is not the distance between objects, but the gap between the limpet as I encounter it and the real qualities that make it a limpet at all. I interpret eidos as something closer to intuition: the felt sense that arises as I try to conceive the real object through the sensual qualities available to me. I encounter a rough, conical shell and intuit the older limpet recoiling from my touch within.

The Mesotopian Event – building on Harman’s ‘Quadruple Object’

The diagram from my thesis helps to clarify this. The four poles are held apart, with certain relations fixed and others activated. The dashed lines mark moments of tension and movement. The mesotopian event occurs along these lines, where space and eidos interact while time and essence quietly hold their ground.

The mesotopian event happens when I consciously step into this condition. During such an encounter, two tensions remain fixed. Time is fixed because the encounter happens now – not in memory, not in projection, but in the present moment of attention. Essence is fixed because it remains withdrawn. No amount of cleverness will prise it open. It stays put, stubborn and generative.

What does move are space and eidos. I turn the sensual object – the object as it appears to me – through its sensual qualities. I attend to texture, rhythm, tone, association, metaphor. I let intuition lead rather than command. This turning is not analytical in the conventional sense; it is exploratory, almost playful. I am guessing at the object’s withheld essence, fully aware that I will never arrive – and that this is precisely the point.

I describe mesotopia as a place between conceptual and physical terrains. In that in-between space, encounters with objects reveal multiple agents of causation. Meaning is no longer a straight line from subject to object. Instead, it becomes something composed, situated and contingent.

Ultimately, the mesotopian event is an ethics of attention. It asks me to slow down, to resist the urge to dominate experience with explanation, and to trust that which withdraws is just as important as what appears. Meaning, in this view, is not something I extract from the world. It is something that happens between us – briefly, beautifully, and never quite the same way twice.

As always, my a’th kar!

I expand on this post in the following video:

References:

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

Verran, Tristan. (2025) Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry. Thesis. University of Plymouth. https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/ada-theses/113/

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).