Introduction

First of all, some context.

I was proper Billy No-Mates when I started to try and get subscribers last month. I knew no one. None of my 1,200 Facebook friends were on here, and I had no imported list from LinkedIn, YouTube, or a personal website. Having either of those would have made life much easier than starting from scratch.

Also, if you’ve been on Substack a while, some of what I’m gonna say will be familiar. But for newbies, I wish someone had told me this from day one.

No. 1. The big(ger) publications are generally not going to help you much.

Of all the subscribers I have gained over this past month only 6% have over 300 subscribers, and just 3% have over 1000. Those percentages go up a bit more when you include followers, but not by that much. (More on following, later). I get why. They have less motivation to subscribe or read other people’s work, so, clearly, a lot of them don’t. I’ve even been told by more than one larger publication, “I don’t subscribe anymore because my inbox is too full’. That didn’t stop one of them from asking if I wanted to subscribe to them though!

Don’t get me wrong, there are bigger publications who are definitely up for encouraging and helping those on the lower steps of the ladder. I’ve connected with them. But they are in the minority, in my experience.

No. 2. The smaller publications are where it’s at.

Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I? But here are two reasons why. First, because I think there is a camaraderie amongst a lot of us given the above, a feeling, perhaps, that we should look out for each other. The vast majority of my subscribers have under 200 readers—many with fewer than 100. But here’s the thing—in spite of the fact that the odds are stacked against us, there doesn’t appear to be any shortage of newbies signing up. The available data tends to back up my anecdotal evidence.

The second reason is that I have read over 400 articles in the last month from this subsection of Substack, and there’s some great writing out there. In fact, I reckon it’s often a lot better than the bigger publications, ‘cos there’s hunger and raw freshness in the writing, which creates a different sort of originality. What kind of genres have I come across? Well, a lot of self-help stuff of varying quality; personal essays, some written with amazing honesty. AI? Yep. Short stories? Some. Also, poetry, bits of philosophy, and one or two oddballs.

No. 3. A viral note is worth its weight in gold.

Course, we can get into semantics on what exactly that is, but viral is as viral does. I did the standard thing of writing a note describing the type of people I wanted to connect with, and it received over 350 likes and, more importantly, over 200 replies. That really helped with getting subscribers, as well as finding really good publications to subscribe to. One thing about the note—it took me three different posts to get any responses. So, if it doesn’t work straight away, tweak the wording till you get somewhere.

No. 4. ‘Following’ is a copout.

It took me a little while to discover this, but I get it now. Following is bullshit. All it does is clog up my feed with an echo chamber of non-committals. So, ignore the follow button! If you want to truly connect with people and build relationships, for me, it’s through subscribing.

No. 5. Be careful if you’re not exactly compos mentis when you’re on here.

Had a couple of drinks. Got into a couple of…exchanges of opinion. All went a bit Pete Tong. Let’s move on.

No. 6. There is definitely an optimum balance on how long you should leave it between newsletters.

I’ve read a lot of advice about that. Personally, every 3 or 4 days is too much for me; burnout becomes a distinct possibility. That said, leave it more than 10 days and momentum may be lost. Also, if I see a newsletter is really long, my heart sinks a bit, and I don’t always read till the end. Just saying. Anyways, given my last point, I’ll leave it at that for now.

Would love to hear from other people about their experiences, so feel free to comment and/or take part in my subscriber chat on this subject.

Chin chin

G-dog

So, the title is self-explanatory, I think. I kept it short, but you get a sense of the occasion. After 17 years of writing the book, yesterday was a very satisfying day. Here is the link to Amazon, if you’re interested…

Amazon

Peace and Love

The Existential Believer

I woke up to knock knock. Bloody knock. Hammer blows to my head, amped up to eleven. It was the front door. Someone was very keen for me to answer it. I, however, was not. Knock. Knock. Shit. The dream had left me in a bad mood, although of late, that tended to be my default setting.

‘Go away’, I shouted loudly from upstairs. Knock knock came the reply. Only two types of people knocked like that: the police and bailiffs, neither of which I wanted to open the door to, as a rule, so I stayed put. Knock. Knock. The sheer dogged-mindedness of their persistence both irritated and mildly intrigued me. They weren’t going to be put off, so there was nothing for it but to open the door. When I did, I was greeted by the damnedest sight. Three blokes who looked like they were just off to a fancy-dress party. The one in the middle sported a Guy Fawkes beard and was adorned head to foot in English Civil War re-enactment kit. The one on the left looked like some nerdy librarian from the 1940s or 50s, complete with thick horn-rimmed glasses and pipe in mouth. The one on the right had the most outrageous handlebar moustache I had ever seen and an evening suit—with a necktie, of all things. The last two looked to be in their forties, whilst the Guy Fawkes look-alike was retirement material. It wasn’t what I was expecting.

‘Can I help you fellas?’

‘Good morning, Graham, do you mind if we could inconvenience you but for a small moment of your time. We would very much like to talk to you concerning a certain matter’, Guy Fawkes said, in a very polite old-school English accent.

‘Err...are you Jehovah’s Witnesses? Because if you are, you’re wasting your time’. If they were, they’d gone to some effort to dress for the occasion, but who else shows up unannounced on random doorsteps?

‘Let me assure you, we have not come to witness for Jehovah’, he continued. The other two nodded vigorously in agreement.

‘Alright, well, what do you want?’ Just then, it started to rain.

‘It might be preferable if we could come in. Unfortunately, we did not take the precaution of suitable attire for such inclemency’.

Reluctantly, I let them in. They trundled through one after the other. The last one to enter, Moustache, somehow managed to trip himself up on the doorstep and stumbled, proper slapstick-style, into the front room.

‘Sheisse and goddammen’, he spat out. German, clearly, but as I looked him up and down, there was definitely something familiar that I just couldn’t place. They were an oddball bunch, for sure.

‘I apologize vor my manners. Ze step voss very sneaky’.

‘Yes. A sneaky step, that. Look, I think you better explain who you all are because, quite frankly, you’re doing my head in a bit’.

At this, Moustache looked to the others with a completely blank expression on his face.

‘I believe our friend is employing the common vernacular, Frederick. A loose translation would be—’

‘E is confused by our presence, n’est-ce pas?’ Glasses said in a thick French accent, as he looked at me.

‘What is this? A delegation from the EU, except you all had a go in the dressing-up box before you came out? I think you’d better leave’.

‘My ardent apologies, Graham. Allow me to introduce you to our little band of brothers. This’, he gestured at Glasses, ‘is Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous twentieth-century French philosopher, the man perhaps most associated with the term existentialism. And this’, he turned to Moustache, ‘is Frederick Nietzsche, the famous nineteenth-century German philosopher. You may be familiar with some of his concepts such as The Superman, God is Dead, The Herd and the Will to Power, amongst several others’. They both nodded amicably whilst I stared speechless. I’d heard of these two somewhere along the line, and that handlebar moustache was a dead giveaway, but I didn’t know much about either. And the fact that they were both in my front room was disconcerting.

‘And zis’, Sartre took over, ‘is Thomas ‘Obbes, zer famous seventeenth-century English philoso-fer, far-ver of zer social contract feery zat underpins all er…western political systems. Zer Individual gives up to zer state, zer Leviathan, some of zare freedoms, and in return, zer state protects zer individual and maintains social order. Somefing like zat?’

‘Something like that’, Hobbes confirmed.

‘Zer man responsable for zer saying “zer life of man is nasty, short and brutish”’.

‘Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, to be precise, JP, but everyone gets that wrong’. They exchanged knowing looks. ‘Like being introduced to the grim reaper, is it not? Imagine how I feel at parties. My friends call me Thomas, Graham’.

He held out his hand for me to shake. I just stared at it. This one I hadn’t heard of.

‘Alright, everyone, good laugh. Don’t know who put you up to it, but the jokes on me, clearly. Let’s be having you now gentlemen, please’. I started showing them to the door. ‘I don’t know who you are or what the crack is, but I want you to go now and never come back’.

‘I told Kierkegaard he vurd be like zis. But no, zat Dane is sinking alvays he is knowing best. “Vot do you expect”, I said. “He will be greeting us viv arms zat are opening? I sink not”. I knew it’.

‘Wait a minute. Kierkegaard? Soren Kierkegaard? How do you know him? He was in my dream last night’. I started chuckling to myself. ‘This is still part of the dream. Shit, of course! Weird dream, mind’.

‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our small lives are but surrounded by sleep’, Hobbes said.

‘That’s some more Shakespeare, I’m guessing’.

‘Zer Tempest’, Sartre answered.

‘So, can we trouble you for a few more moments of your time, Graham? There is method to our madness’.

‘OK, OK. I’ll go along with your little…whatever’. No harm in carrying things on, since the alternative was to wake up and deal with the same old shit. Besides, philosophers, especially ones I’d never heard of, didn’t tend to appear in my dreams, as a rule. It was trippy, no doubt, but maybe I’d just had some cheese the night before. I gestured for them to take a seat.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my third newsletter. This one is quite straightforward—it’s the first chapter from my book. However, before I unleash it on you, there’s a couple of things I need to mention.

The keen-eyed amongst you will notice that I have already put this on my publication page, so some of you will have read it already. I apologise for doubling up like this. The reason is that since I started actively getting subscribers two weeks ago, the number has been growing steadily day by day. Consequently, before I release any new extracts (which I will be doing over the next few weeks) I want to give new subscribers the chance to catch up. That’s also why I have labelled this newsletter so perfunctorily and used a similar image (though, again, the hawk-eyed will notice a slight difference from previous ones).

One last thing. I’m going to give you all a little surprise in either the next newsletter or the one after. If you’ve read my bio, you’ll know that back in the day I made my living from performing—one-man shows, theatre, stand-up, music etc etc. Then I started writing the book and everything went Pete Tong. Point is, with its upcoming release, I’m getting back on the horse and getting the dressing-up box down from the loft. So, I’m going to do some 5-minute video speed newsletters. What are those? Well, a chance for me to show you what I’m about rather than tell you. Something to look forward to, I think. So stay tuned for that.

To finish, I’ve been rinsing out The Hawk, the new Will Ferrell show on Netflix. It’s stupid, but fun. And listening to Money by Leikei 47, on repeat—the best hip-hop track I’ve heard in the last five years. No kidding.

Anyways, here’s the extract:

Take off

What good is a writer when they don’t write? As much use as one sheet of toilet paper during a case of the runs. I apologise for the colourful metaphor, but that’s about the size of it. Anyway, that’s why I’m on this plane travelling to the Philippines—to finish this bloody book. This book, which has literally eaten years of my life like a disease. This book, which has consumed my very being with its incessant call, like a drill in my mind. This book, which has—

‘—clouded my soul in a storm of apafee’, Voltaire says nonchalantly, peering over my shoulder at my laptop from the seat next to me.

‘No’, Frederick Nietzsche declares, leaning forward in the seat next to him. ‘Zare is a better vurd for zis clouded. I vaunt to say burn, over and over, viv metals. How are you saying zis in English?’

‘I believe the word you are looking for is corrodes’, Isaac Newton adds from behind us.

‘Yes, corrodes. Like acid I sink’. Nietzsche leans back contentedly.

‘The problem is not so much corrosion of the soul as a divided one. He must bring harmony to his being; unite his unconscious and conscious mind in his self; avoid the archetype of the failed writer’.

‘Not possible. The path that leads to complete satisfaction is, as a rule, obstructed by ze resistances which maintain repressions’.

There goes Freud, always the downer to Jung’s upper. I swear the pair of them are like Tom and Jerry sometimes. They’ve come over to join the discussion from their seats across the aisle.

‘Sigmund, I feel your input is not appropriate at this juncture. We should encourage the boy’s sense of hope for this trip’, Jung says.

‘Not gratify his unconscious desire to fail?’ Freud replies. ‘Fine, live in a dreamworld’.

At this, Jung nearly chokes on the pipe he snuck onto the plane, and there is loud laughter from the French contingent, all of whom sit in a group near the front. This includes Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, and Émilie du Châtelet, plus various other intellectual types that have been turning up over the last few years. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

‘Perhaps the analogy works better if it is presented as a maths problem you must answer. Say you have had to solve the equation of the book’. It takes a lot to get Einstein out of his game of chess. ‘Your move, Hobbes’.

‘To admit he does not know how to finish the book is the start to finishing it, gentlemen’, Socrates states whilst attempting to stop Plato and Aristotle running between his legs and beating the crap out of each other. Those two are just like a pair of naughty twelve-year-olds. Socrates’ statement sets off a passionate debate amongst all the other Greeks in the middle of the aisle. The Greeks—never ones to allow the inconvenience of not having enough room to swing half a cat get in the way of a good chinwag.

Jonah comes out of the toilet. ‘Perhaps he is still running away from his destiny’. Yes, that Jonah.

‘Maybe destiny choose us. Maybe we choose destiny’.

This is Nishida, an eastern philosopher from Japan who has become a good friend. Him and his mate Lao Tzu, a Daoist thinker from China, sit in the lotus position on their seats near me, being irony.

‘I believe our destiny is largely in our own hands’, Frederick Douglas responds, an African American abolitionist I met down the pub.

‘Guys, I’m trying to write, OK?’

This book, which has taken over my life these last X number of years. That’s probably the best way to describe it. As I look around at my travelling companions, there’s quite a few of them these days; I haven’t even mentioned all of them; seems like they’ve taken over the entire plane. It occurs to me, writing this, that you may well be wondering who all these people are. Maybe you know some of them. Maybe you know all of them. Maybe you don’t. I didn’t know many of them myself when it all started. But they’ve been with me now the whole time I’ve been writing this thing, and some have even become friends. So, their story is my story, in a messed-up sort of way. There is one noticeable absence from my travelling party. To introduce him is to take you back to how it all kicked-off; to explain why I’m now flying to the Philippines, even though I hate flying, with no clue as to the reason other than a nagging scratch that has evolved into a thorn in the flesh, i.e. this bloody book. My story begins seven years ago, like some stories do, with a dream...

If you haven’t subscribed yet, please feel free to. If you have already, thank you. It’s much appreciated, and if you want to do some mutual recommending, get in touch.

Peace and Love

The Existential Believer

Introduction

Hello and welcome.

Firstly, just a heads-up that I’ve put a new extract from my soon-to-be-released philosophical novel, ‘The Journal of an Existential Believer’, on my publication page. If you’ve read either/both of the other two, this one comes a few chapters further on. If you haven’t read them, feel free to.

Ok, this time round, I want to talk about a subject that is an important theme in the book: The Dialectic. This word can sometimes appear very imposing and academic, but my intention in both the book and here is to debunk all that and show how, actually, it is an excellent tool to get us out of the mess we are in these days.

Definitions

First of all, then, here are four definitions taken from the Oxford English Dictionary:

A) A method of examining and discussing opposing ideas to find the truth.

B) The dialectical tension or opposition between two interacting forces or elements.

C) The art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions.

D) An inquiry into contradictions and their solutions.

Whichever definition you choose, I want to ask two related questions: what does it mean to live our lives dialectically? And why is that something we should aspire to?

The Mediation of the News

To answer these, let’s look at a practical, everyday example: consuming the news.

Now, some of you might say straight away, “I don’t watch or read the news anymore—it’s too depressing.” I can’t really argue with that. However, if you want to know what is going on in the world and hold an informed opinion, engaging with it is necessary.

The problem we encounter when we do is the issue of mediation—the filtering of truth according to various agendas. This filtering may be relatively benign, born of simple time and space constraints (the length of a broadcast, the word limit of an article), or it may be more severe (outright bias due to a political stance).

The methods of mediation can be subtle—like editing a news report to leave out certain unpalatable truths, or cropping a photo to frame a subject in a certain light. Or, they can be more obvious, say, through directly expressing an opinion, and the choice of guests and ‘experts’. Some do it more than others, and some are much more in-your-face. But make no mistake: every news organisation mediates the news. It is naive of us to think otherwise.

The Perils of the Echo Chamber

Relying on a single news source narrows the information available to us and makes us complicit in silencing the opposite view. It creates the infamous “echo chamber,” where we only encounter beliefs, ideas, and opinions that reinforce our own, creating the illusion that everyone agrees with us. Notice how this phrase is associated with social media algorithms mediating what news we receive on our newsfeeds. By doing this, they encourage a passive way of consuming the news and shut down any opposing or contrary views.

To boldly go beyond…

So, how do we overcome this? By choosing to be active participants rather than passive consumers.

I believe we need to adopt a dialectical approach. This means actively seeking out different, opposing news sources to build a larger, more complete picture of the truth. It requires us to shed our own prejudices—after all, we aren’t immune to mediation ourselves. In these highly polarized, binary times, where we seem to have lost the art of listening to people we disagree with, a dialectical mindset seems to be the only way to halt the increasing splintering of our societies.

Challenge yourself this week: Visit a news site you normally avoid. You don’t have to agree with it, but try to see the world through its lens—if only to find the potential truth hidden in the tension between their view and yours.

Thanks for reading!

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing if you haven’t already.

Peace and love.

The Existential Believer.

Welcome to The Existential Believer

Hello and welcome to my very first newsletter!

No point messing around, so let’s get right to it. I signed up for Substack six months ago, but with the upcoming release of my new philosophical novel on Amazon, I finally knuckled down last week to build my publication and welcome subscribers. For computer illiterates like me, it hasn’t been easy—especially with half the YouTube tutorial videos featuring older versions.

Anyway, I appear to have made some progress. Hence, this newsletter.

What to Expect Here

Yes, my Substack is partly here to promote my book. Can’t deny it. I’ve already posted a couple of extracts alongside character bios of the thinkers and philosophers who feature in it. There are over 70 of them in total, so I’ll be dropping more bios over time. And more extracts. Obviously, I’d love for you to buy the book when it drops, but—slowly, slowly, catch the monkey. Substack is a place to find and cultivate a community, after all. Over the next few newsletters, I’ll be expounding on the core themes and subjects of The Journal of an Existential Believer to give you a heads-up on what’s in store.

What’s in a Name?

I suppose another pertinent point for my first newsletter is an explanation of the name: The Existential Believer.

Well... read the book! Or at least stick around for the next few newsletters. It took me 17 years to write something that attempts to explain what that title means, so compressing it into some pithy soundbite is both demeaning and pretty much impossible. (Just joking about the former. Kind of. Not joking about the latter.)

What I can tell you is that the narrative follows my quest to uncover what the term truly signifies. That journey leads me to explore:

• The limits of language in a post-truth world.

• How actions can (and must) speak louder than words.

• How to move beyond the binary thinking and polarization defining our world today.

To top it off, my mental health is crumbling under the weight of an all-consuming nihilism—a situation compounded by meeting those 70-odd historical figures. At first in dreams, but eventually in Tesco, down the pub, and in the belly of a fish. They help (and sometimes hinder) me along the way.

More on all of that in the next few newsletters.

A Bit About Me

One other thing I suppose should be dealt with in my first newsletter—a bit of info on me. If you head to my Substack page and click About, you’ll find my bio. Suffice it to say, I was nearly famous. Sort of. Twice. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: To be nearly famous once may be regarded as a misfortune; to be so twice looks like carelessness.

It’s a long story—115,000 words long, in fact (the book is part autofiction). The short version is that over the years, I’ve developed a highly-skilled ability to shoot myself spectacularly in the foot at precisely the wrong moment. That’s a big reason why this book took 17 years to write—I was just so damned scared of putting myself out there again. But overcoming that fear is part of what it means to be an existential believer, I suppose.

Weekly Cultural Highlights

As a way of signing off and to set a precedent for future newsletters, here are two things I’ve been loving this week:

1. Watching: I’ve just rinsed out the entire first season of Ride or Die on Amazon Prime Video. It stars Hannah Waddingham from Ted Lasso, and it’s really cool. The assassin plotline is pure hokum, but the core friendship between the two female leads is what keeps you hooked.

2. Listening: I’ve had a British band called Getdown Services on repeat. They’re still underground, but they won’t be in six months. You read it here first!

Thanks for reading! I enjoyed writing this, so I’ll be back in your inbox again soon.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing if you haven’t already or sharing it with a friend!

Peace and love.

The Existential Believer.

Carl Jung is probably one of the most recognized figures in the book. Mentored by Freud in psychoanalysis, the two had a big falling out over Freud’s hang-up with sex, prompting Jung to establish the school of analytical psychology. He is known for a range of concepts that have become part of our shared language: introversion and extroversion, the collective unconscious, archetypes, the persona, the shadow, and individuation. Arguably, one of his greatest contributions as a thinker was exploring and legitimizing Eastern philosophy, integrating it into Western culture.

I first meet Jung when he appears in a dream alongside Freud, Jacques Lacan, and William James, and they all proceed to psychoanalyze me. After that, he starts turning up everywhere—at Tesco, down the pub, in the belly of a large fish, and eventually deep in the Philippine jungle—guiding me on the path to individuation. Along the way, he introduces me to Eastern philosophers like Lao Tzu, Nagarjuna, and Nishida. This lot, together with Alan Watts, helps me make sense of the increasingly absurd world I find myself in.

Kitarō Nishida is an interesting character. He learned Danish—a notoriously difficult language—in order to read Kierkegaard in the original. This helped him incorporate the existential with Buddhism to create a unique philosophical system, personified by his theory of “basho”. This melding of Eastern and Western philosophy was the foundational principle of the Kyoto School that he established. Although hardly anyone has heard of him here in the West, when people use the term “non-binary”, they are evoking his influence.

I first meet him in the belly of a whale, along with Jonah. Soon, he becomes one of the key guides in my quest. Whether it be leaping fifty meters over the ramparts of Elsinore dressed as Morpheus from the Matrix, plying me with hallucinogenic fish, or getting all Zen in the pasta aisle of Tesco with Nagarjuna and Alan Watts, Nishida is an important element in the book.

A lot of people have heard of Simone de Beauvoir, often because of her connection with Sartre—sometimes-girlfriend, lifelong companion. This is a bittersweet irony for a woman who railed against the patriarchal society she found herself in. Perhaps she’s best known for her book, The Second Sex, often cited as a founding feminist text. However, she was a brilliant existential thinker in her own right, and her understanding of the ambiguity of freedom is arguably more practical than Sartre’s radical perspective.

The first time I meet her, she comes to a party at my place with Sartre and spends most of the time heckling Hegel. By the time I am deep in the Philippine jungle, she appears more frequently, often alongside other female thinkers and writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah Arendt, and Émilie du Châtelet. In fact, I watch the news of the burgeoning #MeToo movement with this lot in a reggae bar while they provide the commentary. She is a refreshing antidote to the male-dominated world I am confronted with, acting as a sparky sidekick along the way.

The name Malcolm X is probably familiar to a fair few. His name is synonymous with the African American plight. During the ‘50s and ‘60s, he came to prominence in America through his passionate speeches and direct action. In many ways, he was the dialectical opposite of Martin Luther King—a contemporary of his who is also a character in my book. While King believed in non-violence, racial integration, and Christianity, Malcolm X believed in the contrary: self-defense, black separatism, and Islam. That said, his views softened somewhat toward King and his methods in his later years.

I first meet him at a reggae bar in the Philippines, along with King and W.E.B. Du Bois, a black existentialist writer from the late 19th/early 20th century. We watch footage of the Black Lives Matter rallies together. The next time I see him, he is on an episode of Big Brother, discussing whose turn it is to do the laundry with Cecil Rhodes and Clive of India, two prominent figures from Britain’s colonial past.

Jacques Derrida is one of those philosophers that not so many people have heard of, but a lot use his ideas without knowing it. For example, he is the man responsible more than any other for popularizing the term “deconstruction”, though what he meant by that term and how we use it today have become somewhat detached. He made his name by brilliantly deconstructing other philosophers and, in so doing—along with Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan, all of whom are also characters in my book—created post-structuralism, the philosophical basis of postmodernism.

Unlike the others mentioned above, who love nothing better than getting arseholed and scrapping with each other whenever I see them, Derrida has retreated to a hideout deep in the Philippine jungle. As part of my quest, I travel up-river on a boat with Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Nishida for company, until I find him a la Colonel Kurtz, surrounded by the heads of all the philosophers he’s deconstructed on spikes.

Some have heard of him. Many more haven’t. Perhaps it’s fair to say he’s an acquired taste, although his influence is as profound as any of the more well-known names often bandied about—Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Descartes, and Kant. They’re all characters in the book, too. Except Kant. Read it if you want to know why.

I have introduced him as Søren Kierkegaard, but he used over a dozen pseudonyms, including such delightful examples as Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Victor Eremita, Nicolaus Notabene, Constantin Constantius, Hilarius Bookbinder, Vigilius Haufniensis, and Frater Taciturnus. Each of these became a distinctive voice of their own, with individual opinions that often contradicted each other. In fact, there is a direct link between him and someone like Marshall Mathers, with his use of the Slim Shady and Eminem pseudonyms.

He’s known for his emphasis on subjective truth and the individual. This explains the association with the existential. He had views on the mass media of his day—the press—which are still pertinent now, as are his comments on organised religion. And he was, to use his own words, the most dialectical of thinkers, even though he only had contempt for the philosopher often most associated with the term ‘dialectic’— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

I first meet him when he appears in a dream as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, demanding that I go on an existential quest to avenge him by slaying the usurper king, Hegel, and keeping a journal while I’m at it. Several scenes from the play follow, including the one where Hamlet stabs Polonius in his mother’s bedroom and then tries to hide the body under the stairs, as well as the big swordfight finale with Laertes. Along the way, I try to punch him in a pub. We finally end up in Copenhagen for an emotional showdown.

Shit. Back in the castle, in the throne room this time. Hegel was there, kneeling in front of the throne, praying. He was dressed as the king, complete with a flashy crown. To his right was the blackboard with the words ‘Act 3, Scene 4’ highlighted and some other words I couldn’t make out underneath. From behind a curtain on the left, Kierkegaard entered the room in full Elizabethan costume, a sword in his hand. He looked the part alright, whatever part that was. He went behind Hegel, who seemed oblivious to everything, and raised the sword above his head.

‘Now might I do it pat, now he is praying; And now I’ll do’t;—and so he goes to heaven; and so am I reveng’d’. As usual, the words lit up on the board as he spoke them. Then he turned round and looked at me.

‘So, let us recap. You enter the scene from the left here, come behind Hegel, without making any unwanted noise that may disturb him from his knavish prayers, raise the sword like so and say the words on the board. Then, off with his head. Simple instructions. Direction should indicate not complicate. Your turn’.

He grabbed me by the arm and led me behind the curtain. ‘Right, get on with it’.

I didn’t move.

‘It is very important in life to know when your cue comes, Graham’.

I stayed still.

‘Fine, I will walk you through the scene’. He came behind me and directed me. ‘It is quite straightforward: you enter from behind the curtain, come around him here, raise the sword and then…’

‘Pack it in’.

‘Pack what in, Graham?’

‘I’m not doing it’.

He looked me up and down. ‘Perhaps the problem is you are not dressed for the part. Let me see what I can find’.

He was off in his usual flurry of activity and just about to leave the room when I said, ‘It’s not the clothes’.

He stopped in his tracks. ‘Clothes do not make a man, it is true. Would you like me to go over your motivation again? Perhaps you need to be reminded of it’.

‘Enough with the games, Kierkegaard. Always with the games’.

‘We can dispense with formalities now. Call me Soren’.

‘Alright. I’m not avenging you, Soren. Is that plain enough?’

‘I see. It is just as well that the king does not die in this scene then, is it not? For the hero reasons to himself that “a villain kills my father and for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven? O this is hire and salary, not revenge”. So, he leaves the king to his prayers, for what good they do him, and adjourns to his mother’s boudoir, a scene we have previously covered. You will gather by now that time, as your friend Einstein insisted, is relative. After all, it is out of joint’.

‘I haven’t met Einstein yet’.

‘No, but you met a few others, did you not? Including this villain’. He pointed to Hegel, who was still praying, seemingly in another world.

‘Yes, I met him’. I was talking to thin air. He’d done his usual trick of disappearing again, out the door behind the curtain. What if this time, I didn’t follow him.

As if on cue, he stuck his head back through the door. ‘What did he have to say about me?’

Then he was off again. I looked for a moment at Hegel there on his knees. That seemed very out of character for him. This was definitely a dream. The kind of dream Kierkegaard would have, come to think of it. Then I left the room. We were back in the corridor from last time. The Dane was waiting there for me. I noticed he still held the sword.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘He said you were a fine and upstanding member of the community’.

‘Very amusing. Now who is playing games?’

We started walking. ‘He said you were psychotic. To use Jung’s idea, he basically said you had a complex about him’.

‘Did he? And what do you think?’

‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know what to think anymore’.

‘I suppose he gave you all his bunkum about freedom and the such. I daresay he claimed to have invented me, too’.

I didn’t reply.

‘Along with everyone for that matter. Hegel’s notion of freedom is purely abstract, you understand. That is what makes it so dangerous. In his hands, the “I”, the personal “I” becomes nothing more than a fantastic ventriloquism act in which others are operating our strings. I have done what I can do to accustom people once more to hear an I, a personal I, speak. For truth can only be communicated by an I to an I. As soon as the communication becomes objective, the “we” to the “we”, the truth has become untruth’.

We took the stairs that led up to the ramparts.

‘Who is the I? What is truth?’ I asked.

‘I see you are learning fast on your quest. You did leap, did you not?’

‘I leapt into nothing’.

‘Quite. If one talks of the I as the self, then the self is spirit. Man is spirit. Therefore, man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the eternal and the temporal, of freedom and necessity. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self’.

‘That sounds like Hegel. It’s got that same gobbledygook stroke smarty-pants feel’.

He laughed. ‘That was the intention of the author, Anti-Climacus’.

‘One of your pseudonyms?’

‘Indeed. He was poking fun at Hegel’s language, though the joke was lost on most. The point is: there is a delicate balancing act being played out in everyman and woman’s life—between these dialectical opposites—and we are the relation, to the equilibrium or lack of it. Hegel was wrong; these opposites are not neatly resolved; there is a constant tension between the pull of these apparent paradoxes. We are, therefore, becoming the I, Graham. One is not yet a self. The leap, et cetera, et cetera. With regard to truth, two things about that. One: it can only be appropriated subjectively, by the I, though that does not presuppose that it cannot be objective in nature, merely that objective truth is always uncertain until it is appropriated subjectively—out on the deep over seventy thousand fathoms. Two: the truth is a trap; you cannot get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you. That is why sometimes it is necessary to deceive people into the truth’.

By this time, we were on top of the ramparts once again.

‘Is that what you’ve been trying to do with me?’ I demanded. ‘Swapping roles all the time. First, the ghost, then the king, now Hamlet’.

‘That was one of the purposes of the pseudonyms. When you label me—’

‘—you negate me. Yes, I get that’.

‘Now, it is time to fence. Literally as well as metaphorically. Pick up your sword’. He gestured to the wall where a sword leaned against it.

‘What?’

‘I know you have questions. I will only answer them if you use your weapon. Actions speak louder than words, after all’.

‘Paul said that as well. Which reminds me. Paul said I should ask you about the thorn. You used that word a lot, didn’t you? What was your thorn, Soren?’

‘Sword’. He gestured to it again.

‘Alright, alright. I’ll play. When in...Elsinore and all that’. I picked it up, which was just as well because he didn’t hang about. He thrust straight at me, and I only just managed to get out of the way of the blade. ‘Bloody hell. I thought we were just playing’.

‘You thought wrong, sir. If people are still writing books concerning the nature of my thorn, which they do with evermore tedium, why in heaven do you think I would tell an upstart such as yourself?’

‘Fine. It was Regine then, wasn’t it? When you broke off the engagement, you gave up on being normal like everybody else. You gave up on reality and escaped into fantasy, into “infinitude”, as you put it. You made her an object of that. She became an idea, a muse, because ultimately, that’s all you could handle, you coward. And you held onto that idea for the rest of your life, avoiding the real, finite, world. The one where you broke the girl’s heart. She was a thorn in the flesh to remind you of your lack of faith’. I jabbed at him, but he saw it coming and deftly jumped to his left.

‘You will have to do better than that’, he said. ‘Remember, I was something of a psychologist myself. When one thinks about it, perhaps Hamlet treats Ophelia in a similar fashion, with the supreme irony that it is Ophelia who cannot escape the fantasy that Hamlet has projected onto her. At any rate, he did “importune her with love, in honourable fashion” only to declare to her later “I loved you not”, a trick of the heart that I myself employed once. Though like Ophelia, I do believe poor Regine never really fell for it. Fortunately, however, she did avoid the same tragic end. That would have been too much to bear’. He stood still for a moment thinking about this. I saw my chance and lunged—into the wall behind him. ‘It is only an interpretation’, he continued nonchalantly, ‘Not bad though, if I say so myself. Is that all you’ve got, you scoundrel? You are a bit rusty at this lark, I can see’.

‘What about your melancholy then? You called it “sweet melancholy” in your journals. I think you identified so much with being depressed that, in the end, you didn’t want to let go of it. You liked it too much. You didn’t want to get better. It legitimised you’. I thrust, but once again I was too slow. ‘Your technique is clumsy, lacks finesse. But practice makes perfect’. He gestured for me to try again.

‘OK, how about the “great earthquake”? That’s when you came to think there was a curse on your family, wasn’t it? That God had somehow cursed your family because of something your father had done. Five of your six brothers and sisters died young, right? So, is that it? You could never shake the thought that you were somehow born to suffer’. This time he parried me, then our swords locked, and we grappled with each other face-to-face.

‘Congratulations, you have done your research. Very thorough. Anymore?’

‘Maybe you were ill. Syphilis? Epilepsy?’ He pushed me away, and I fell to the floor. He circled me as I desperately struggled to get to my feet. ‘I had a sickness. A sickness unto death. Just like you’.

‘What?’

‘Despair, Graham. That was my sickness: quiet despair’.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’.

‘Au contraire, you know exactly what I am talking about’.

By now I was back on my feet. He started to swish his sword through the air with confident strokes, getting ready to lunge at me. ‘The formula for all despair, as Anti-Climacus states in his book The Sickness unto Death, is to despair over oneself. That is to say, to will to be rid of oneself. All this talk of nihilism, Graham’. He started walking towards me and then struck at me, but I managed to block him.

‘What of it?’ I replied.

‘To will to be rid of oneself. All the self-piteous whining about not wanting to write, or not being able to write. Whatever’. He struck again, more viciously this time, and I only just managed to counter it.

‘It’s true’, I exclaimed.

‘To will to be rid of oneself. Your refusal to embrace your destiny: to become an existential believer. To will to be rid of oneself’. Another blow. I blocked, but I was retreating all the time and getting dangerously close to the edge of the castle walls.

‘I leapt off the wall’.

‘You leapt once. But you have to keep leaping. That’s how the narrative unfolds. To close the gap between what you want and what you end up with’.

‘More flipping grief’.

He continued, ‘And while we are on the subject. I see no ring on your finger. Where is your wife? All I see is a man with a thorn in his flesh. It takes one to know one, after all’. He jabbed at me, and with one quick flick of his wrist knocked my sword out of my hands. He placed his blade on my chest. ‘How appropriate. Your back seems to be against the wall’. That was about the size of it, to be fair. ‘You’ve accused me of holding on to suffering’.

‘You said to believe is to suffer. You martyred yourself with it. Look at The Corsair Affair’.

‘You think Paul cursed me then?’

‘I think Paul cursed Christianity’.

‘Then there’s only one thing for it’. He put his sword up to my neck and ran the point along my throat. ‘Actions speak louder than words. Up, up’. He gestured for me to climb the castle walls. I got up and stood looking towards the sea. Then I looked down. The tide was in, but there were rocks, too. Lots of them. ‘By the way, if you make it, find Derrida. He should be in the final act’.

‘What’s so impor—?’

Then he pushed me off the wall.

What good is a writer when they don’t write? As much use as one sheet of toilet paper during a case of the runs. I apologise for the colourful metaphor, but that’s about the size of it. Anyway, that’s why I’m on this plane travelling to the Philippines—to finish this bloody book. This book, which has literally eaten years of my life like a disease. This book, which has consumed my very being with its incessant call, like a drill in my mind. This book, which has—

‘—clouded my soul in a storm of apafee’, Voltaire says nonchalantly, peering over my shoulder at my laptop from the seat next to me.

‘No’, Frederick Nietzsche declares, leaning forward in the seat next to him. ‘Zare is a better vurd for zis clouded. I vaunt to say burn, over and over, viv metals. How are you saying zis in English?’

‘I believe the word you are looking for is corrodes’, Isaac Newton adds from behind us.

‘Yes, corrodes. Like acid I sink’. Nietzsche leans back contentedly.

‘The problem is not so much corrosion of the soul as a divided one. He must bring harmony to his being; unite his unconscious and conscious mind in his self; avoid the archetype of the failed writer’.

‘Not possible. The path that leads to complete satisfaction is, as a rule, obstructed by ze resistances which maintain repressions’.

There goes Freud, always the downer to Jung’s upper. I swear the pair of them are like Tom and Jerry sometimes. They’ve come over to join the discussion from their seats across the aisle.

‘Sigmund, I feel your input is not appropriate at this juncture. We should encourage the boy’s sense of hope for this trip’, Jung says.

‘Not gratify his unconscious desire to fail?’ Freud replies. ‘Fine, live in a dreamworld’.

At this, Jung nearly chokes on the pipe he snuck onto the plane, and there is loud laughter from the French contingent, all of whom sit in a group near the front. This includes Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Voltaire, and Émilie du Châtelet, plus various other intellectual types that have been turning up over the last few years. But I’ll get to that in a bit.

‘Perhaps the analogy works better if it is presented as a maths problem you must answer. Say you have had to solve the equation of the book’. It takes a lot to get Einstein out of his game of chess. ‘Your move, Hobbes’.

‘To admit he does not know how to finish the book is the start to finishing it, gentlemen’, Socrates states whilst attempting to stop Plato and Aristotle running between his legs and beating the crap out of each other. Those two are just like a pair of naughty twelve-year-olds. Socrates’ statement sets off a passionate debate amongst all the other Greeks in the middle of the aisle. The Greeks—never ones to allow the inconvenience of not having enough room to swing half a cat get in the way of a good chinwag.

Jonah comes out of the toilet. ‘Perhaps he is still running away from his destiny’. Yes, that Jonah.

‘Maybe destiny choose us. Maybe we choose destiny’.

This is Nishida, an eastern philosopher from Japan who has become a good friend. Him and his mate Lao Tzu, a Daoist thinker from China, sit in the lotus position on their seats near me, being irony.

‘I believe our destiny is largely in our own hands’, Frederick Douglas responds, an African American abolitionist I met down the pub.

‘Guys, I’m trying to write, OK?’

This book, which has taken over my life these last X number of years. That’s probably the best way to describe it. As I look around at my travelling companions, there’s quite a few of them these days; I haven’t even mentioned all of them; seems like they’ve taken over the entire plane. It occurs to me, writing this, that you may well be wondering who all these people are. Maybe you know some of them. Maybe you know all of them. Maybe you don’t. I didn’t know many of them myself when it all started. But they’ve been with me now the whole time I’ve been writing this thing, and some have even become friends. So, their story is my story, in a messed-up sort of way. There is one noticeable absence from my travelling party. To introduce him is to take you back to how it all kicked-off; to explain why I’m now flying to the Philippines, even though I hate flying, with no clue as to the reason other than a nagging scratch that has evolved into a thorn in the flesh, i.e. this bloody book. My story begins seven years ago, like some stories do, with a dream...

If you found yourself in the belly of a whale, eating hallucinogenic fish with Einstein, Galileo, Malcolm X, Emilie du Chatelet, and George Orwell, what would you do?

Ever wondered what Plato and Aristotle would be like as a pair of 12-year-olds, running amok amongst a contingent of pre-Socratic philosophers? In Tesco’s?

If Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir started heckling Hegel about freedom at a BBQ at your place, who would you throw out?

Ever wondered what would happen if Carl Jung started turning up in your dreams? Then down the pub, in the belly of a fish, and in the middle of a jungle in the Philippines—guiding you along the path of individuation?

Available to purchase on Amazon from the 31st of July

Graham Macfarlane