Posted on

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.

From Tai Chi to Technocratic Monad

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!

Posted on

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]

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Technocrats: High Priests of the Latest Doomsday Cults

In early 2020, I attended a conference put on by tech companies in association with a university in Wellington. The opening provocation was something about preventing public pushback to technocracy. I recall candid questions being exchanged, such as: “How do we stop them from killing us?” That was the tone-setter. Not how do we include people? or how do we serve the public good? but how do we manage the inevitable irritation of the masses when they realise what’s being built for them, rather than with them.

The New Doomsday Cult – Image generated by AI

As the conference unfolded, what struck me most was the paranoia of our self-appointed harbingers of the apocalypse – Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and their various satellites – as communicated through their acolytes. Beneath the sleek sermons and benevolent rhetoric lies a deep suspicion of the human being. Many of them, and their postulants, appear convinced – after a century of institutionalised technocracy – that the human has become an impediment to progress. There are simply too many people destined for, what Yuval Noah Harari’s calls, the “useless class,” all too fleshy and too fallible to continue serving the sacred pyramid of civilised order. For this divine techno-order to flourish, some necrotic flesh will need to be sacrificed – and no prizes for guessing who that will be.

To hear the tech gurus speculate, often with messianic intensity, on utopian or dystopian futures has been revealing. What appears to be missing from almost all of these visions is people like you and me, dear reader. The human shows up mainly as a problem to be solved; an inefficiency to be optimised away, or a legacy system awaiting decommission. Depending on which esoteric order you belong to, the apocalypse arrives via one of the four horsemen – war, famine, conquest, or death – with the modern add-on of pestilence for good measure. Whatever the mechanism, extinction is assumed. The debate is not if, but how.

From there, the factions emerge. Some devotees of accelerationism argue that we should actively hasten the apocalypse, fusing with technology in order to liberate the human intellect from the messy constraints of the body. This is a rough-and-ready summation of Nick Land’s “Dark Enlightenment,” but it captures the mood: abandon the human form, upload what matters, and let the rest burn. Others imagine a post-catastrophe world of technates – planned communities where survivors are neatly organised and every aspect of life is micro-managed by AI, overseen by a priestly class of ordained engineers.

It all sounds like dreadful pulp science fiction. The trouble is that it’s a fiction sincerely believed by some of the most powerful and influential people on the planet. I see traces of this thinking seeping into policy papers, funding models, research agendas and academic language. Words like “legacy,” “scalability,” and “sustainability” quietly replace older ideas such as curiosity, investigation and lived experience. The human is reduced to a sequence of variables and processes, while faceless systems of governance steadily relegate us to the annals of history.

And yet – here’s where I stay upbeat – this worldview only holds if we accept its premise. It is merely a cult like any other. I refuse the premise that the human is a problem to be solved. We are not a transitional inconvenience on the way to some silicon rapture. We are meaning-making creatures, embedded in places, bodies, histories and relationships that cannot be fully reduced to an algorithm. The real danger of this technocratic doomsday cult is not that it predicts the end of the world, but that it might bring about a world without us in it – not through extinction, but through erasure.

I do not accept that technocratic utopias or dystopias are the only meaningful options for a future that still includes humanity.

As always, my a’th kar!

Posted on

We Need to Talk About NATO!

Whether we like it or not, people need to start asking some serious questions about what NATO is actually doing – apart from serving, of course, as a ‘peaceful defensive alliance’.

Here’s something I’ve been noticing, behind the slick corporate think-tank presentations and branding, where NATO operates on the ground, there are frequently covert operations, huge propaganda campaigns, coups, assassinations, armed militias running around murdering people, false-flags, mass civilian casualties and – coincidently – US corporations on hand to profit from rebuilding critical infrastructure (1).

Not that most people I have met at NATO conferences seem to be aware of any of this. The type of person you meet at a NATO conference is the kind of mid-wit functionary who believes that Putin has been running the US executive branch since 2015, and that the CIA cares about Queer rights in Iran.

If you’ve read my earlier posts – Why You Should Be Embarrassed to Be Associated with UK News and Is Cornish Nationalism Part of a Broader Strategy of Tension? – you’ll know I don’t shy away from asking challenging questions about power, policy, and influence. NATO seems to echo the role that the East India Company played in the (former) British Empire – it’s a bloated non-governmental institution that meddles in disputes for shareholder profits. The NATO shaped elephant in the room just got more difficult to ignore, and it should be obvious to anyone paying attention that whatever has happened in Ukraine has certainly been facilitated in large part by NATO.

Amanda Sloat, who was Biden’s top Europe strategist on the U.S. National Security Council, let slip in a candid moment that what Western policymakers allowed to happen with NATO and Ukraine helped make this devastating war possible. She said that if Ukraine had clearly told Russia it would not join NATO – or if U.S. and UK envoys had advised Ukraine to drop that aspiration – this “may well have prevented the destruction and loss of life” we’ve witnessed over the past three years (2).

Not that this is news to anyone with the slightest understanding of NATO’s – uh, shall we say “colourful” history. To be clear: Sloat’s revelations are coming from a conversation with pranksters posing as Ukrainian officials, and yes, it’s apparent that while Amanda Sloat has served as an administrative functionary, she seems blissfully unaware of the gritty underside of NATO operations. But here it is, proof that Western policymakers considered explicitly ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine, and then decided against it. That decision, Sloat implies, might have made all the difference (2).

So let’s unpack this.

For years, people who said NATO expansion was reckless – especially into Ukraine – were shouted down, called “conspiracy theorists,” or worse, accused of being “Kremlin puppets.” This isn’t fringe commentary any more (not that it ever was) it’s an admission from inside the policymaking apparatus. Sloat just admitted, off the record, that maybe it was a strategic misstep. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that it wasn’t a strategic misstep at all, because chaos, fear and destruction seem to be the common outcomes of all NATO interventions. It’s almost like this chaos is the strategy – some wily conspiracy theorists might call this a strategy of tension! It’s hard to know precisely what NATO is doing, so much of their activities are mired in deep reservoirs of PR bullshit and think-tank wonk. A lot of this requires faith and devotion. People are obliged to trust an opaque organisation that seems to operate without any meaningful oversight or accountability – I’m not going to do that. How many people have to die before we really start to get an honest look at what NATO has been doing for decades?

My personal experience of being on the fringes of empire – where NATO operatives have a documented history of proactively employing the services of some groups who we’re all supposed to fear – reminds me that power without accountability is dangerous. Does anyone believe that NATO had nothing to do with overthrowing Assad and installing a member of al-Qaeda and ISIS as its newly besuited Israel-friendly ruler? I mean, I don’t pretend to know everything about the middle-east, but surely anyone looking at how this fucking scumbag al-Julani is now being paraded around the halls of ‘respectable’ Western governance like a hero can see this is an utterly shameless PR campaign (3). Whether it’s the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or now Ukraine, NATO’s footprint has always left debris in its wake – but of course, as we have always been told, it’s just a ‘peaceful, defensive alliance’.

As always, my a’th kar!

References:

(1) Wadhams, N. (2025). BlackRock’s Larry Fink Joins Trump Team Talks to Rebuild Ukraine. [online] Bloomberg.com. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-10/blackrock-s-larry-fink-joins-trump-team-talks-to-rebuild-ukraine [Accessed 17 Dec. 2025].

(2) Big News Network.com. (2022). Ukraine could have avoided conflict with one key step – ex-Biden adviser. [online] Available at: https://www.bignewsnetwork.com/news/278749126/ukraine-could-have-avoided-conflict-with-one-key-step-ex-biden-adviser?utm_source=chatgpt.com [Accessed 17 Dec. 2025].

(3) Proletarian TV (2025). The sad downfall of the Syrian government. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHdIDWKuQM8 [Accessed 20 Dec. 2025].

Posted on

Demystifying The Kernewek Language

I have argued in Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry (1) that yes, there is a real world, but no, it does not open itself to our complete comprehension. We are always half-in, half-out of its meanings, fumbling toward the real but never quite gripping it. This weird middle place – a mesh of physical and conceptual terrains – is the domain of the meaning-makers. The poets, the oracles, the interpreters of signs have historically been quite happy to hide their operations behind opulent rituals or clever distractions. But does it have to be this way? My lyrical work has long been an effort to demystify poetics and language, to free these communicative events from the dictates of esoteric schools and elite fraternities who still treat language as a proprietary ritual.

Naming, after all, has long been the preserve of priestly classes: the magi, the monks, the keepers of alphabets and incantations. In many religious orders, “the Word” is not just a tool but a cosmological foundation – articulation itself becomes sacrament. And once you take this seriously, it becomes impossible not to notice how incantations, chants, spells, prophetic mutterings and other religious-poetic forms lean heavily on the idea of language as conduit to hidden truths. This is the vatic, the mantic, the magical dimension of poesis, the belief that words do not merely describe the world but summon, shape, or invoke it.

Modern linguistics attempts to scrub all this clean. Structuralists, post-structuralists, cognitive scientists, psycholinguists; they all gather with laboratory-grade detachment to “demystify” language production. This is good in theory. But if you ignore the presence of mystery altogether, you’re not demystifying anything. You’re merely tucking your priestly robes into your slacks and hoping nobody notices the ancient hems. Many materialist linguists strike me as devout priestly magi decked out in secular boardroom drag. Here’s one of the many unspoken secrets of our supposedly rational institutions: even empirical research often rests on vast scaffolds of speculation. Each irrefutable graph serves as an article of faith – it’s an ‘educated guess’ berobed as a principle.

This is why it is difficult to determine how many theoretical schools are engaged in re-mystifying the archive of human knowledge – although some hide in plain sight. Even Tim Morton, spear-heading investigations into the ecological implications of object-oriented ontology, is overt about (eco)gnostic leanings.

Consider the accelerationists (2): the former CCRU crowd who hallucinated Deleuze and Guattari into a cybernetic fever dream, pushing symbolism to liturgical extremes. Their rapid decoupling of meaning from symbol, in pursuit of some machinic singularity, often sounds to me not unlike kabbalistic numerology or ecstatic glossolalia. It is not insignificant that many modern tech-titans are devotees of Nick Land. Listen to the quasi-prophetic ramblings of Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen as they speak of merging symbolic and material terrains; you will hear the cadences of a neo-cult, not a scientific proposal. Meanwhile, various deciples of the structuralists continue to worship The Corpus Linguistic with devotional intensity. ‘and the Word was God,’ they seem to say – and seemingly never notice they are mimicking devotees of Thoth, Hermes or even John 1:1 .Once again, the priests return, this time wearing the unbuttoned casuals of liberal intelligentsia.

In contrast, I often return to etymology, a much subtler way of demystifying meaning. Not by banishing mystery, but by acknowledging its layers. English gives the game away easily: most of our “proper” vocabulary is padded with Greek and Latin. The professional-managerial classes (PMC) learn just enough of these roots to keep the bloated machinery of liberal institutions functioning. Autobiography: self-life-writing. Philosophy: love-of-wisdom. Nothing mystical, only inherited structure.

When we apply the same etymological pressure to Kernewek, interesting stories surface. Pysk, the Kernewek word for “fish,” appears to descend from Latin piscis. This aligns with what Celtic linguists tell us: the Brythonic languages had more prolonged contact with Roman, Norman, and Saxon cultures than their Goidelic cousins. History leaves fingerprints on phonemes.

Or – and here’s a mischievous alternative – it suggests that one of the more “colourful” characters in the history of Kernewek revivalism simply inserted Latin or Greek terms (along with Welsh and Breton borrowings) to fill lexical gaps. The line between linguistic evolution and linguistic invention is not always tidy.

On page 76 of my thesis, I discuss Linguist Professor Price’s uncompromising position: Cornish is dead, he insists, and modern “revivals” are “partially invented” (Price, 1984: 134). He writes:

“The Old Celtic speech of Cornwall died out two centuries ago. It is still dead, and will evermore remain so… The present century has seen the propagation by a small band of enthusiasts of a type of language that is partially derived from the old Celtic speech of Cornwall, but it is also partially invented… I shall reserve the term Cornish for the genuine language and refer to the modern pseudo-Cornish as Cornic.”

I do have issues with Price’s framing. As I wrote:

“What is involved in inventing a language? What is a pseudo-language? What does a ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ Kernewek sound like? I remain confused by the extent to which Price uses terms such as authentic, genuine, and pseudo in relation to Kernewek.” (Verran, 2025: 76)

Whether or not one accepts Price’s verdict, the point stands: Kernewek should be preserved and spoken as a breathing archive of our past, not re-engineered as an esoteric tool of ethnonationalism. We know too well what can happen when fringe political movements revive ancient languages to manufacture legitimacy. And it doesn’t surprise me that Celtic circles frequently attract a plethora of esoteric characters: Zionists, Catholic Religious Orders, Rosicrucians, Masons, New-Age Druids, Shamans or Wiccans – all projecting mystical significance onto minority languages. Why this conviction that certain tongues contain secret indigenous wisdom? Romantic nationalism, folklore, and the Arcadian fantasy of an unbroken Celtic lineage have all fed this impulse.

The more I learn about figures like Iolo Morganwg or Robert Morton Nance – who seem to have consciously cultivated a priestly order of Celtic mystics modelled on Julius Caesar’s accounts of ancient Britons – the more frustrated I become. We don’t need to live inside the art projects of eccentric artists or poets – and yes, that includes me! Trust me, we definitely shouldn’t live inside anything I create.

As a poet, I enjoy bending language into unorthodox shapes. I fabricate littoral places inside my verse, places that shimmer and sometimes misbehave. But I do not belong to the mystery schools of modern priestly classes, who still seem intent on fabricating material realities for entire populations to inhabit according to the whims of neo-feudal aristocrats or digital landlords.

For me, the mystery is not something to eradicate but something to remain in dialogue with. I continue to wrestle with the languages I have inherited. I am consciously rejecting past myths or Arthurian tropes all too often associated with Celtic languages. Through lyrical poetry, I keep listening – probing the metaphysical uncertainties that Kernewek, in all its contested life and afterlife, continues to stir.

As always, my a’th kar!

All References Available From Verran, 2025:

(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) Monoskop.org. (2017). Cybernetic Culture Research Unit – Monoskop. [online] Available at: https://monoskop.org/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Unit.

Posted on

Sober Talk: The Politics of Fun. Written at/ with/ for Pattaya 2025

When I first became sober eleven years ago, the line I heard most often from old drinking companions was: “You used to be so much fun!” At first, I honestly believed them. Yes I used to be fun. I had been a spirited drunk, the first on the dance-floor, the man who could stretch a mildly amusing anecdote into a raucous tale of comedic exaggeration. There I was, the very embodiment of a boozy raconteur fun distilled into human form.

That’s what I told myself, anyway.

The truth was: I was deeply unhappy. I used revelry as a way to mask the creeping recognition of malignant trauma. I believed that fun was performance: the loud laugh, the daring dare, the clever comeback. Fun was something manufactured, something flung outward as distraction. It wasn’t until I stopped drinking that I recognised just how much emotional labour had gone into appearing fun, and how little joy I had actually experienced.

In day to day life, sobriety gets interpreted as accusation. People don’t tend to hear “I don’t drink,” they hear, “I disapprove of your drinking.” They don’t hear choice – they hear judgment. How do we talk about things that aren’t conventionally regarded as ‘fun’ without sounding like pious pricks?

Here’s something I’ve slowly come to understand: the politics of fun is fundamentally about not noticing. I’m not just talking about ‘drunk’ fun either – so much fun is learning how to switch off noticing certain things. It’s a conspiracy of selective blindness. Alcohol helped me blur the boring, soften the painful and gloss over the inconvenient. Sobriety, on the other hand, is the opposite of that. Sobriety is noticing – often against your will.

When I stopped drinking, the world sharpened. I suddenly noticed that A+E departments weren’t mysteriously chaotic on Saturday nights – they were flooded with intoxicated people who had fallen, crashed or fought. I noticed that many of the people I had grown up with – perfectly average ‘social drinkers’ – might more honestly be described as functioning alcoholics. I noticed how many relationships quietly revolved around the highs and lows of alcohol use. I noticed that behind many of the funniest people I knew lurked deep wells of avoidance, anxiety, grief and violence.

Alcohol was the soft-focus filter on reality. By removing it, reality became uncomfortably clear.

This great ‘noticing’ I have been continuing to experience has not been limited to the effects of substance misuse. No, it has affected me on a profoundly personal and political level. I started to notice that most of the things we buy or use are mined, farmed or produced by an invisible underclass of peasants. That’s not fun. I started to notice that so much of the world is actually built by slave or exploited labour – that’s not ‘fun’ either. I also started to notice endless war machines producing millions of displaced people wandering the world looking for sanctuary – so I volunteered to work in refugee camps. That, my friends, is definitely not fun.

So what can we do? You can’t just demand that everyone stops having fun any more than you can dictate what is or isn’t fun. I don’t have the answer. The problem is – so much of life for so many people just isn’t fun. In order to have fun, you have to not notice the trafficked people building your ‘wellness holiday retreat’ or serving your wine. You have to not notice that the economic heart of so much fun is that someone somewhere is losing out.

Now, before anyone feels judged – let me be clear: I don’t care what people choose to do with their bodies, their evenings, or their holidays. I don’t hold some puritanical moral high ground. I don’t deliver sermons. I am not the ghost of Christmas Temperance. I choose sobriety because I like it. I like noticing things. It suits me.

I’ve been trying to balance ‘noticing’ with ‘fun’ and believe that I’m much more fun now than I was as a drunken jester. My attention is real. My presence is not performance. Unfortunately, some of my former drinking buddies disagree – chiefly because I no longer serve as supporting cast in the theatre of their intoxication, but that’s just the way it is now – I can’t go back to ‘not noticing’.

It’s actually really challenging for me to live in the UK, given that so much of UK life revolves around substance misuse and existing in a state of ‘not noticing’. Fun now – for me – is clarity. It’s noticing. It’s connection. It’s feeling it all rather than numbing it away. And if that makes me “no fun” to the still-blurred, then so be it. I’d rather notice.

As always,  my a’th kar!

Posted on

Psy-omatics Meets Tai Chi Chuan

Over the past several years, I’ve devoted much of my research and practice to developing what I’ve come to call psy-omatics – a poetic method of listening to what the body knows, and how meaning unfolds through its encounters with the environment. In psy-omatics, I treat the body not as a sealed-off vessel or a machine of muscles and joints, but as a site of relational inquiry: a perceptual instrument that feels itself into meaning by collaborating with the world.

Recently, I have been learning Tai Chi and Chi Kung and practising these movements daily. Here is a summary of some of the similarities and differences I have noticed so far between Tai Chi and my own psy-omatic positions.

Morning Tai Chi

Similarities: 

1. Both are philosophies of somatic practice.
Tai Chi is not simply a sequence of postures; it is a philosophy embodied – Taoism in motion. Psy-omatics similarly is not a self-help technique or method of stretching, it is a conceptual practice of embodied inquiry. Both interpret movement as thought; posture as worldview; gesture as epistemology. In both, theoretical abstractions are explored through deep investigation of movement within the body and the intellect.

2. Both are praxis of mind/body attunement to environment.
During Tai Chi, our coach has encouraged us to attend to our surroundings, to feel the movement of breath and breeze as continuous, to sense other bodies in the room not as distractions but as events. Psy-omatics likewise revolves around attunement – the ways the body opens to acoustic, tactile and spatial cues from the environment. In both, we feel our way into the world.

3. Both require deep introspection to somatic processes.
Whether noticing the shift of weight from heel to toe in Tai Chi, or listening to the subtle tensions in the ribcage in psy-omatics, both practices call for inward attention. Not an analytical attention, but a felt awareness. In psy-omatics, I often ask, what emotion or language does the body want to produce in this moment? In Tai Chi, the question is more, how does the movement flow through me? Yet both move through this same domain of embodied introspection.

4. Both require “grounding,” although there are subtle differences here.
In Tai Chi, grounding involves drawing energy upward from the ground. The earth is a resource of chi, a reservoir of subtle force. In psy-omatics, the ground is not a battery or an energy source. The contact between body and soil (or floor) becomes an exchange, a site of meaning-making, almost conversational. In psy-omatics, I encounter the ground as an interlocutor rather than a source of power.

Differences:

The most important divergences, I have found, emerge from metaphysics – from the different assumptions about what the world is.

1. Tai Chi emerges from a Taoist metaphysics of energy, whereas psy-omatics engages with substances and flows.
In Tai Chi, everything is energy and flux: yin and yang exchange endlessly; movement arises from the circulation of chi. In psy-omatics, I do not encounter a world of things that are solely composed of invisible energy. I encounter textures, pressures, acoustic reverberations, material resistance, physiological intensities. In short, I encounter a world of both substances and flows. These differing metaphysical frameworks shape the practice in fundamental ways. Tai Chi moves like liquid through an interconnected whole; whereas psy-omatics moves like a body negotiating encounters with other things. This fundamental difference requires further contemplation.

2. Tai Chi encourages the mind to lead the body, whereas in psy-omatics sometimes the body leads the mind.
In Tai Chi, my coach has often repeated: the mind leads the chi, and the chi leads the body. The intention precedes the gesture. In psy-omatics, I often find that the body responds before intention forms. A shoulder tightens, a hip withdraws, a hand reaches—and only afterwards does the mind grasp meaning. The body becomes an author of thought rather than merely its medium.

3. Tai Chi relies on visualisation and imagination, whereas psy-omatics resists ocularcentric vocabulary.
In Chi Kung, we trace points of energy, imagine roots descending from our feet and visualise streams of chi entering our bone-marrow. Psy-omatics avoids these visual metaphors because they privilege sight over other senses. I argue that so much body-work eludes sight. Instead, I turn to acoustics – resonance, rhythm, reverberation; to tactile sensation, proprioception, density and vibration. Meaning is not simply seen but felt.

4. Some ‘new-age’ adaptations of Eastern philosophy emphasise self-improvement, whereas psy-omatics acknowledges multiple vectors of causation.
I have noticed a tendency, in some versions of Tai Chi teaching, to emphasise personal enlightenment, self-realisation, inner peace. While these are valuable pursuits, they can imply a passive stance toward the world: the belief that one should accept things as they are, retreat inward, and cultivate serenity. Psy-omatics, by contrast, views the human as a causal actor among many. The body does not merely adapt to the world; it helps shape it. Somatic practice becomes an act of participation, not withdrawal.

Closing Thoughts:

Overall, I genuinely enjoy Tai Chi, and I continue to learn from it – not just physically but philosophically. I am always aware that I may have misunderstood or oversimplified some aspects of its metaphysics, and I remain open to correction from more experienced practitioners. I am learning new dimensions of bodily awareness through Tai Chi and Chi Kung, but for understanding the poetic process at the heart of psy-omatics, I encounter a very different world.

Perhaps that is the core discovery from my encounter with Tai Chi and Chi Kung: different movement practices require different metaphysical assumptions. Rather than seeking a single ‘correct’ account of the body and its movements, I am learning to hold these differing frameworks gently, letting each illuminate different contours of embodied experience.

As always, my a’th kar!

 

Posted on

Introducing Klewes: Listening in the Expanded Field

When I first began formulating the ideas that would eventually become my concept of mesotopia, I needed a way to describe the strange middle-ground where perception, place, and meaning fold into one another. I sensed that our encounters with the world happen both ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ but identifying with any kind of precision that place between ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ would require contemplation of both the psychological and somatic techniques involved in meaning making – hence my ongoing research into psy-omatic practice (1). Before working on my thesis, I had been playing with a method that helped me navigate that in-between space with more precision. That practice is what I now call klewes.

Klewes by Maruay Makekurdchoo (2018)

Klewes is a word from Kernewek, the Cornish language, meaning “to hear, think, feel, perceive.” The word immediately resonated with me. Its definition already gestures beyond the narrow sense of hearing and toward a fuller, more embodied mode of knowing. I realised that what I needed was a practice of attending that begins with the body’s capacity to listen – not just with the ears, but with everything capable of sensing vibration. I wasn’t seeking a metaphor. I wanted a method. So klewes became the name for that method.

The procedure is simple, but the effects can be disarming. When I arrive at a site of composition – whether a field, a coastal path, an abandoned industrial corner, or a patch of woodland – I lie down. I close my eyes. I take long, slow breaths for about fifteen minutes, sometimes a bit more, until my attention begins to settle. With my vision removed from the foreground, something else starts to happen: the body reorients itself. The ground becomes not a surface beneath me but a resonant partner. Vibrations travel upward – small tremors, shifting pressures, the faint hum of heat working its way through soil and stone. In those moments, I begin to “hear” with the back of my skull, with my ribs, with the folds of clothing touching the ground.

This is what I mean by listening in the expanded field.

The point of klewes isn’t to romanticise nature or to retreat into some meditative cocoon. It’s a deliberate unsettling of the visual habits that dominate our encounters with place. Modern life, and even much ecological thinking, leans heavily on the eye: the view, the image, the landscape. Vision often leads to a sense of distance reinforcing an “I over here” observing a “world over there.” That separation underpins an anthropocentric way of relating, one in which the human becomes the sole interpreter of meaning.

When I practise klewes, I don’t begin with seeing. I begin with hearing. The site arrives first as vibration, pressure, pulse. Instead of interpreting the place, I let the place impress itself upon me. Hearing – expanded into feeling – becomes a way of entering into relation without assuming that what I see defines what is there.

I’ve found that this shifts the entire tone of composition. Rather than imposing structure onto the site, I allow the site to tune me. The thinking, composing or writing that follows carries traces of that initial, ear-led encounter. It is quieter, more porous, and more situated.

Klewes is, ultimately, an invitation: to hear our way into place, to perceive without rushing to picture, and to recognise that the world meets us long before we claim to look at it.

As always, my a’th kar!

References:

(1)Verran, T. (2025) Introducing the Psy-omatics of Encounter. https://myathkar.org/introducing-the-psy-omatics-of-encounter/

(2) Verran, T. (2025) Mesotopia: Towards a Place of Lyrical Inquiry. Pearl. The University of Plymouth.

Posted on

Is Tommy Poppers Real?

Since 2010, I’ve been experimenting with how to be a writer on the internet. I’ve made blogs, stories, anonymous profiles and strange hybrids that lived somewhere between art and autobiography. Some of these experiments worked; others fell flat or disappeared into the algorithmic abyss. But across these fifteen years of testing the limits of online identity, one question keeps returning to me: is Tommy Poppers real?

The short answer is yes—and no.

Tommy Poppers exists. He writes, he posts, he provokes. He’s had conversations with real people. He’s been misread, adored, and blocked. But he isn’t real in the metaphysical sense. There is no withheld essence to Tommy Poppers that could exist independently of me. He’s not sitting in some digital backroom waiting to log on. He is a performance, an appearance—a sensual object projected into a particular medium at a particular time.

This troubles Graham Harman’s notion that every object, whether material or immaterial, has an autonomous essence—something withdrawn, beyond all relation. I simply don’t see that in Tommy. He only flickers into being when someone reads, reacts, or misinterprets him. He’s not withdrawn but relational; not autonomous but dependent. He depends on my creative act and the network that sustains him. When the internet is turned off forever, this version of Tommy vanishes into the ether. Perhaps a version of Tommy would continue to compose and sing to people in ‘real’ life, but this would still be a projection of the ‘real’ me. After a performance, the sailor hat would be returned to the box, and I would concern myself with other things.

What’s more unsettling is how these digital experiments have rippled offline. Over the years, I’ve seen people respond to my avatars as if they were separate beings—proof, perhaps, that our culture has quietly accepted digital personas as real. Yet what these encounters reveal, to me at least, is that the internet exists—but it isn’t real. It’s a sensual distraction, an elaborate mirage designed to sustain the illusion of technocratic supremacy. It convinces us that the symbolic realm—the feeds, the data, the curated self—is somehow more meaningful than embodied life.

To clarify: yes, Tommy Poppers exists. So does an bardh wyls, and so, for that matter, do I—Tryg. These are not “characters” in the fictional sense. They are working avatars, conceptual tools I use to explore difficult themes. Tommy helps me confront the performance of masculinity and the shadow of male violence. An bardh wyls, “the wild poet,” emerges when I write through the lyric’s relationship to place about environmental decadence and grief. Both are masks, but masks that reveal as much as they conceal.

I never post everything about where I am or who I’m with. That’s deliberate. It’s not secrecy—it’s philosophy. The digital realm cannot contain the totality of human existence. It can gesture, distort, amplify—but it cannot hold.

Offline, my life is grounded. I work with people I respect, in situations that demand attentiveness and care. Those relationships are real. They’re not content. I would never diminish them by performing them online.

So, is Tommy Poppers real? He’s as real as any reflection, as any poem, as any name you’ve ever written down and then outgrown. He is the shimmer of the self meeting its medium—a reminder that being online is not being alive.