Tonight, there’s a screening of Gabriel Over the White House (Gregory La Cava, 1933) film as part of the Nitrate series curated by Kit Ramsey, with Dominic Green at Verdurin, 7pm, tickets and information here.

Helen Rollins (of The Lack, filmmaker and author of Psychocinema), will be teaching a four-week course entitled Psychoanalysis for the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Subjectivity in art, AI, capital, and belief, beginning September 21st:

The ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming the core of our lives with digital media, artificial intelligence, automation, and ubiquitous connectivity. These technologies do not simply respond to our desires, but rather cultivate and exploit them, drawing us ever deeper into opaque control systems. They take hold of our very subjectivity.

This will be of great interest to anyone thinking about technology and psychoanalysis, subjectivity and culture.

I’m speaking in Rochester, New York, at the 2026 Women’s Convention on “Women as Icon”. More information here. A fantastic line-up!

On October 3rd, Verdurin will host a symposium entitled “The Moment of My Death”, organised by Pierre d’Alancaisez and Rose Lyddon, which will look at “multiple contemplative traditions, ranging from Vedic myth to accelerationism and from posthumanism to Christian eschatology.”

While I am more of the Spinozist persuasion, “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life,” this will no doubt be extremely interesting!

On November 14th, we will hold a discussion entitled “After Therapy”, organised by Emma Bielecki and me, and featuring Ashley Frawley and James Mumford, with other names to be announced. This will discuss the myriad contemporary uses of the therapeutic, examine what is living and what is dead in the tradition, and ask how we can think about “mental illness” in an age in which institutions have embraced an understanding of the human as fundamentally vulnerable. Details here.

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I’ll write more about our forthcoming publications in a separate post, but suffice it to say, it’s all very, very exciting: there’s no better time and place to think than in the ruins….

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect

.

not the thing but the word symbol that stands in for the thing

every wink is a sign of life

every culture has is an esoteric death cult

every culture is life

accelerate the arrangement/some shapes more interesting than others

all have their place

.

and conversations are infinite

all lines are open/on a cloudy day

every moment is saved

no record elsewhere

the record is the record/keep your pages

the only problem with meaning is

I can’t wait to see you!

waiting for the nothing

when you write in the second person is it generous or weak

one we don’t use the third person singular indefinite pronoun enough one

or is there a fourth

.

Can you still read your own hand-writing

.

and whose voice is it that sings

one or many voices

On this episode, Louise and I discuss the desire of Piddington, Oxfordshire (population c. 400) to secede from the United Kingdom in a bid to prevent 1250 migrants from being housed there. A real-life Passport to Pimlico moment or a whimsical media stunt? In what ways are the English able to protest—or simply discuss—the rapid transformation of their country?

The paywalled audio is below: thank you for your support.

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A trip back to the countryside to see my family. The land is without time, and dry to the point of dying. We water the plants in the beds in the garden, but we have to be judicious: no hosepipe ban yet, surprisingly, though the pressure to be conscientious appears in the form of emails from Wessex water, and an ambient sense of disapproval hangs heavy in the stuck air. Make your garden too luscious, and the other villagers would notice.

Even after the water company suggests we run the water to clear an airlock that makes the pipes sound like a foghorn, and I take the hosepipe round the front, I’m given instructions from my parents as to how to respond if someone walks by and tells me off.

My parents are disciples of the “practical sacred”: every day they pick up litter from the lane (red bull cans, cider bottles, tissues), and their house is meticulous. Nearing eighty, they also tidy the church graveyard, and visit care homes of varying types to help others pass the time. My father plays in a jug band and an amateur orchestra, and still runs, cycles, and swims. They regularly look after my brother’s children. Everything can be done: they are impeccable, organised, thoughtful, socially-minded people—to an extent I find almost unbearably impressive.

They are losing friends: to cancer, dementia, grief, to nothing atll. I don’t want them to die at all, or at least live to a hundred, but they are sanguine, insofar as anyone can be, about death. They often talk about how lucky they’ve been, and the interesting experiences they’ve had. They remember everything. We play shove ha’penny on a table my father made, a card game composed of my mother’s photographs, and we walk a lot, despite my mother’s still-recovering broken knee. They watch goldfinches drink water from a tray in the garden, speak to the cows, admire the sunset from the backyard, and regularly discuss the size of the moon. My father draws water from a well in the garden which gets lower every year. They have been married for fifty-six years, and love each other.

There is a curious melancholy I always get when I return. Over the years it has shifted from a heavier feeling somewhere in the middle of my chest to a lighter sensation that is a little more armoured. But I don’t know what it is. Something about the quality of time here: no matter how early one rises, it is never possible to do any work, beyond picking up leaves or helping to tidy. Something about England, or this part of it, with its impossible, gentle beauty: the dry stone walls, the narrow lanes, the indifferent vegetation. My mother starts to tell me about an encounter she had recently with an angry squirrel, but cuts it short because she doesn’t want to upset my nephew, who is seven, and loves football.

The immediacy of life here, the need to fix, plan and handle animals and plants: words feel like an affectation, a hobby that got out of hand. The jerky over-stimulation of the city: neighbourhood noise, the chaotic 3am party that never ends, none of this is here: there are woodpigeons, and doves, ents and efts and almshouses, practical men and sociable women. I have no idea how I became so utterly useless, some perverse imp that whispered in my childish ear and suggested I dedicate my life to absurd things. In the countryside, I accept everything. In the city, I accept everything. But these are different things to endure (somewhere between tolerate and embrace in either case). Who would I be if I returned?

It is now high summer, that period which one has towards gestured in the cold months as some magical period in which the weather will be fine, and some work will be done, somehow. The ideal fusion of warmth and smooth running. Naturally, of course, it is never quite summer, or it is hard to find oneself in the present rather than the promise of it, and there is never quite the hypothesised great productivity either. So let us give up on our idea of summer, and the fantasy of work, and wander about outside instead.

Nevertheless, we have a new Prime Minister, which somehow no one choose for the role (again), and a hosepipe ban, and there was some football (I have nothing for or against the sport, only a sense of relief that there is another large domain of human activity—cf. cars, all other sports, fishing, cookery—which I don’t need to know anything about).

I have spent far too long reading a book about the history of communism for a forthcoming review, and some time reflecting on the horror of Ann Widdecombe’s murder. I don’t think I’ve ever been so upset about the death of someone I’ve never met, but everything about her murder fills me with shock, despair and horrible foreboding. I attended a very solemn and beautiful requiem mass in her honour, and lit a candle for her in my church. There is a very strong sense that everything she was: outspoken, conservative, Catholic, characterful, extremely kind, is at odds with a growing murderous and malevolent spirit that stalks this country. Everything seems run by malign cartels of one kind or another.

Still, let us don our spiritual armour and carry on. Over the past couple of years, there has been a growing worry/acknowledgement that we are moving beyond the age of mass literacy and perhaps towards a new dark age (The New Dark Ages is the name of James Marriott’s forthcoming book on the end of reading; I reviewed Nigel Biggar’s similarly-named The New Dark Age, about the collapse of liberal institutions, a while ago).

We hosted an interesting event at Verdurin on the topic of literacy a few weeks ago, where we discussed Greek translation, writing implements and the difference between hyper-textualism and critical literacy. On this topic, and related concepts (imagination, taste, judgement, attention, distraction, intention, the canon), I taught a four-part course, Discernment, which is just now available as a video-course (including readings and guiding questions). It matters that we can say that something is not another thing, and that one thing is better than something else, and why!

Edited to add: you can also get discounted versions of the video version of two earlier courses, Zeitgeist and Iconoclasm with the code HEATWAVE26

I continue to have fruitful discussions with various interlocutors, among who Jasun Horsley (latest here and previous here), and Louise Perry (our latest discussion is here, and we will continue to record from time to odd-time now that Louise is in Australia).

The Lack has nearly reached 200 episodes! Recent discussions include We Are The Lambeth Boys, Zorba the Greek and Eerie, Indiana.

Following the success of Inversion, Verdurin will be publishing several more titles in the months to come, among which, ’s The Hermitage and ’s The Stud. Needless to say, our commitment to quality and our superior taste ensure that these publications are fantastic.

I also strongly recommend Kit Ramsay and Jack Hewitt’s The Final Film Festival (various London venues, August 6-9th). Incredible selection, and Kit also programmes the Nitrate film series at Verdurin, which opened with a fantastic screening and discussion, led by Oliver Bennett of of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. The next screening, of The East is Red (dir. Enjie Li, Ping Want) will take place on August 4th, with a response from the always-interesting Lee Jones.

I’ll be in Bergen at the end of August for their annual Philosophy festival, and in New York during the last two weeks of September (events to be announced).

I have a plan to make some more videos, but if I do, they’ll be about books, so all our literacy, however useless it may shortly be, will not have been in vain.

signs and not-signs, the printer’s tray

filled with conkers and dust and a plastic lizard

no abc or semi-colon;

and the missing badge your father lost

something about the working class

.

no middle-class neither

no distinction but a

taste the difference

the best

sad loophole in a tomato

same warehouse

you could live on oysters you said, having eaten twenty yesterday

having regaled the oyster-men with a tale about every one’s a baby

in exchange

the mongers and their birthrates, the promise of grit

.

Death is an institution

the things you hear

Everybody everyone always

I had to

The analyst snags the hyperbole

Everybody? everyone? always? You had to?

Yes everybody,

yes everyone,

yes always

Yes I had to

And is it war?

War is so twentieth century

The pacific end of history

a boat, you are struck by the little splash

And the feet, deep, the rough rock

And every word gets traced back to the sea

.

Information is surprise then control

doing the opposite of what it ought

taking a line for a walk on the map

and why is your face so open

On this episode, Louise and I discuss recent social skirmishes in Belfast and Southampton, following the murder of Henry Nowak, the brutal attack on Stephen Ogilvie, and the institutional failings that increasingly characterise life in Britain.

How does the response to these incidents relate to the government introduction of Digital ID for under-16s? Whose job is it to look after children’s access to the internet anyway? Are the state simply going to crack down on people who notice and discuss terrible incidents rather than address them directly? Additionally: are we seeing the total collapse of the middle class?

Paywalled audio below: thank you for subscribing.

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God in every padfall

you don’t need to believe anything

we all have backache

so what if we are food

it’s an honour to be eaten

Ellen says we haven’t explained pigeons yet

so tired of the little fall

getting somewhat passive

the fine line between killer and writer

please let me sleep next to my boots

it’s not dirt

from a certain height

it’s not civilisation either, I’ll admit

there are two sides to every plate

solve et coagula circling the drain

there are men of this age

and men of eternity

I am sad to hear you are dying

the peasant’s death, a simple love

map a few causes

map them well

I know you did

and if we never met

imagine that we are in a field somewhere

the young men who died for each other

you say if no one drove on the motorways for twenty years they would disintegrate

what earth, what contingency

don’t draw the grid,

the end is not the end nor the end nor the end

In this episode we discuss the recent local election results, Reform’s success, the on-going question of the radicalisation of young women, what it would mean to strategically defend elements of the liberal settlement, femosphere misinformation and what the right should be saying to women. What was Anglo-Liberalism, and where might we be headed?

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my neighbour tells me a fox took his shoe

in the long grass, blooms in plastic

there’s a man in North London he says

in the meantime, he throws oranges from the market

he finds his shoe

.

they shoot foxes don’t they

well it’s been a long time

I admit your flowers go hard

but weeds live forever, what’s the rush

Encountering God in the hills and trees, yes, yes, of course!

You say “of course” too often, it’s very irritating

But in concrete

Dead eggs, unholy bones, playing cards

Kipple drives out nonkipple

“Base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations.” - Bataille

The great age of religious fervour: everything works

a snapped peg, that fridge, your failure, my love

carnival and lent

the history of history is the relation between a line and a circle

you draw shapes in the academy’s sand

and armed men smoke at the perimeter

it’s not going to get weird, it always was

fate is masked providence, doing his little dance, there is no mood

when I visited the pyramids (one or many?) the entities, bemused,

I did not understand their decor, all zeros and ones

and a turning globe, an aspirational hotel-piece

I understand why they said “get back to nature!”

you have to laugh

.

and when you tire of the ecstasy of communication

there are ghosts

and ruins, and the ruins of ruins

Sophrosyne

Last night I saw a baby fox, a little cub, with its mother, gingerly padding around the mulch in the churchyard. And the crows are boisterous and seem less judgemental than usual. April’s heaviness cedes to a hazy gentle swelter, and even the plants I thought were for sure gone forever, kept only as reminders of brevity and failure, have risen again, surging through (despite, for) their dead brothers. Now the Green Blade Riseth.

Some announcements!

I recently interviewed Sebastian Morello, author of Mysticism, Magic & Monastries, and many other splendid books and essays besides, for the New Culture Forum. We disucssed what can only be described as a war on the countryside, by Labour and previous governments alike, and how the spreadsheet-minded see only “empty space” and a recalcitrant people, and not the beauty (and hardship) of rural life.

I’m now working with my dear friend Brian on Soothsayer, a journal dedicated to exploration of the enchanted cosmos. We will publish occasional essays on matters esoteric, religious, theological, cultural, symbolic and historical. Do subscribe if you are interested in werewolves, the antichrist, Christ, the Green Man, the enchanted skies, and everything that exceeds the prison mind.

I’m speaking at a couple of forthcoming events during May.

Firstly, I’m in Stevenage at 4pm on May 16th, speaking to the Basketweavers about Discernment (the topic of my on-going and very enjoyable course at Verdurin, for which I will soon make videos of the topics—imagination, taste, attention, literacy—for those who couldn’t be there in person).

Tickets for the Basketweavers event (£5) are available here.

On May 20th, I’m speaking to the astral and wise Angie Speaks, author of Late-Stage Babylon (Repeater) at Verdurin. We’ll discuss eschatology, Jung, technology and modernity’s shadow…

Tickets for this event (£10) are available here.

There are many more things to come, including some fantastic fiction commissions from Verdurin’s publishing wing, and I’ll be writing various cultural reports (book reviews, theatre visits, musical observations, &c.) for the New Culture Forum’s Substack, which will officially launch soon (you can subscribe here now to be notified of full & free cultural texts from me and the other fellows which, as I say, will start appearing shortly).

Our long-running cinema podcast, The Lack, continues to explore the moving-image with a philosophical and political bent. Our Patreon is here. The A-side is always free, and the B-side, for Patrons, contains our deeper (and sometimes personal) reflections on concepts. Recent film discussions include: The Conformist (1970 film (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970), Stranger (dir. Mads Hedegaard, 2025), Harvest (dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2024), and our B-side discussions include a requiem for Habermas, Bataille, a discussion of optimism/pessimism and how the 1950s and the 1980s might be compared.

I have an essay on the death of a tacit culture and one on the Antichrist (for Soothsayer) to finish: thank you for your continued support and have an avian and light-hearted May!

In the latest special episode of , Louise Perry and I discuss the reasons why young women in particular are drawn to far-left ideas, such as those promoted by the British Green Party.

Paywalled audio episode below. Thank you for subscribing!

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the men who are too symmetrical

the surreal is rational

and the reason is uneven

.

do you have water

can you open the window

nostalgic for our crimes

the good men

.

hell is empty and all the devils are here

Arden, Arcadia, Asda

it is hard to be a sinner

harder still to remember why

.

I touched the Neanderthal’s hand

clenched, raised, red, sinewy

sometimes I hold a bottle and I can’t let go

are we not Beakers too

a man plays his recorder at the watches in the pawn shop window

You don’t want to rile the Anglo

the piano gave up after I left

.

I would rather have the choice to choose the field

modernity saved my life

in hell the worst punishment is being apart

we did it to ourselves

it’s not the end of the world;

too late for that

dead drops in the night, the crocus returns

trees (the art of care) have heard it all before;

the cry of foxes, and, man, inchoate

the curious urge to do something

stand upright, the order

rushing to the end,

he has no chill says the woman on the train

I think he’s moderated a little bit, he replies

She was content to just do it, he said

what was wrong with the old machines

no progress that doesn’t look like a monster

Or monsters; Or why we need aliens

proximity is war

the war inside; the violence of passivity

the calm of action; the patient is too large

.

You are angry about the book

about cosmopolitanism and Plutarch;

why is it so busy everywhere

this triangulation of the place the furthest away

impossible

not enough people; too few; too many

in order to decide you must own a pair of scissors

and God is in the rubbish

and good is in the paper hat

and from a certain height everything is holy;

some of it just looks bad

and ferns, alive, never alive, dead, never dead

well it’s all so fragile, the veil;

what kept you so long

In the midst of taking on some new work (interviewing for the New Culture Forum), I have been engaging in a rather interesting Lenten diet—basically the Orthodox restrictions (no meat, no fish, no eggs, no dairy, but also no oil), plus no sugar (beyond that which occurs naturally in fruit, and one teaspoon of honey per day). A vegan diet (bar the honey), basically. The no oil restriction is interesting: one learns to cook with water, vinegar (I have a pan that can cope, fortunately). I began with a 60 hour fast (only salt, black coffee and herbal tea) between Sunday afternoon and broken with the Eucharist on Ash Wednesday (I don’t drink Communion wine, of course). And I’m eating less.

I didn’t cut out coffee, which would have been the real test. But maybe next year. Anyway, all of this is still on-going (I’m not taking Sundays off, because it just seems easier to keep going with it), and of course there are still several weeks of Lent left. Let’s see if I can keep it going.

The most interesting aspect of all this, though, is what it has done to my sense of taste and smell. By restricting my diet I have quite quickly made all the food I can eat seem unutterably delicious: marmite and peanut/almond/walnut butter stand out as particularly tasty, but pretty much everything has become incredibly appealing. Some lemon or lime juice on some steamed spinach is acute, and fresh figs, in particular, are just ridiculous. The diet seems to operate as a kind of reset, basically, and I have more energy and optimism, and am praying and walking and thinking and reading more attentively.

My sense of smell, long battered by various iterations of covid and all the weird neo-illnesses that go round, which seem to be a fusion of several different things, has returned. Not gently, or slowly, but in sharp bursts of powerful scent. Admittedly, living in London, this is frequently less than ideal, as many of the city’s emanations are somewhat malodorous. Nevertheless, there is an interesting moment when you can almost make a bad thing good, at least hypothetical. I need to think about this last phenomenon a bit more, though.

In any case, all of this is to say I have been reflecting on what it means to discern, determine, judge, critique, prioritise, hierarchise and so on. Handily, I have a course coming up in April that addresses all of these issues! Discernment will take place over four weeks, beginning on the evening of Wednesday the 15th April. We will cover Imagination, Taste, Attention, and Literacy and read all kinds of interesting people, from Simone Weil to Hume to Pierre Bourdieu to St. Ignatius of Loyola. I particularly want to think about discernment in the age of the supposed literacy crisis, and in the era of tailored slop. Do sign up if you’re around, and write to Pierre at Verdurin or message me here if you have any questions.

I’ll write more soon: I realise there hasn’t been any poetry for a while. To order! And the imagination!

In this special episode, and I discuss Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. We come at the film from different angles: does Fennell’s approach represent the positive domination of “short form video content”, cinema as anachronistic fashion-shoot and the power and influence of romantasy, a favourite genre of women readers? Or is Fennell’s work indicative of the death of cinema as the Twentieth century understood it—as structure, character, dialogue, suspense, world-creating?

Link to the podcast below the paywall: thank you for your support! I hope you are all wonderfully Lenten-minded, one way or another….

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I have transformed myself into the zero of form and dragged myself out of the rubbish-filled pool of Academic Art. I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature.
—Kazimir Malevich

The truth of the modern world lies not in what is revealed to us but by what is hidden. The pre-modern world still exists: even in the midst of declining civilisation (past the zenith of culture, there is only the metropolis and its tyranny of greys, concrete, grids). There is still a tree outside the window (one looks past the plastic bags that attach to its branches).

The tree is subversive if one understands that the purpose of the degenerated Apollonian principle is to eliminate Nature, that is to say all that resists symmetry. All that exists cyclically—that comes into being, lives and dies—has, from the standpoint of dull order altogether too much vital force in it. The order of nature must be destroyed by the order of zero—an unnatural, alien force. We live in the order of zero, and have done for quite some time. Those who dwell in the violence and viscera of Nature are the obvious enemies of the ones for whom the Grey Square, lacking the pure feeling of the black, who detest countryfolk, farmers, animals, and the wilderness (who would like, instead, to build grey blocks and call them “The Wilderness”).

Representation—that is to say, the copying of God—was an adoration when it was not direct rivalry. The Church, opting in favour of icons against the iconoclastic tendencies of the East, loses control of the cascade of images which flow like a waterfall from the living body of Christ. These portals, however, escape their upward direction and can no longer be harnessed. Every thing becomes icon, sign. The thing itself becomes exhausted. There is no longer a way we see what is created and lives, and what has been made and never lives.

The more states pretend to control words, the more they silently admit that images have long escaped their grasp. It is an admission that what they would like to control, namely the image, has been beaten by the Black Square. From out of the Black Square, and displayed on Black Squares everywhere is the defeat of the imagination: whatever you can imagine already exists and can be seen. The power of the Black Square consists in you not seeing it but in its being seen through. The frame is the portal. We are only ever looking at the Black Square even, or especially, when we think we are seeing movement, “real” life.

Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without "things" (that is, the "time-tested well-spring of life") - Malevich

The black square or rectangle, a version of the same, is the true victor of the twentieth and twenty-first century, which are the same century. The square is, as Malevich says is “a living, regal infant”. The squares proliferate, giving birth not from the void (or the nothing) but from replication. The circle is defeated. The line of the horizon is defeated. The triangle lives on in esoteric rituals and the suspicion of schemes of which one is always the loser. The square-child is the new icon, the bounded, empty creator.

The black megalith of Kubrik, zen alien technology, becomes a pocket scrying machine. The face is no longer that which transmits the light of the creator, but a crime. The eyes, in particular, no longer windows but subject to the domination of the black square. Sight itself is post-representation. Seeing is on the side of history, and finished.

In 2020, the Black Square replicated a million times over, in a little joke of its own—Black (Square) Lives Matter—to remind us that it is the Ur-icon of modernity itself. The Black Square commanded a brief appearance, and the people complied. (In one of those ironies of history, five years earlier, a joke of Malevich’s was discovered scribbled under the top layer of one of his Black Squares (“Battle of negroes in a dark cave”)).

The Black Square does not announce itself as enemy, because it doesn’t need to, and because it is not exactly an enemy. It is the frame through which all things come to be, and to be seen, the moment we could not rest with an order which does not deal in squares. The Black Square nevertheless presents itself as a challenge: ⬛️ ⬛️ ⬛️

p.s. editing to add this, which came from Ted Gioia’s note. No doubt the DOJ’s software was directed to Black Square all female faces, but what an image.