Putting Theory into Practice

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)

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 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 10, 2026

Introducing The Psy-omatics of Presentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always, my a’th kar!

References:

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

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

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

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

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I expand on this blog in the following video:

As always, my a’th kar!

References:

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

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

December 28, 2025January 9, 2026

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.

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!

December 14, 2025December 14, 2025

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.

November 29, 2025November 29, 2025

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.

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!