The first of near-weekly blog entries will set the pattern ... an account of something that happened in the week before that is a little out of the ordinary run of things.

Treadwell's is an esoteric bookshop in Tavistock Street (Covent Garden) that has a tradition of holding lectures and events surrounding the by-ways of belief and literature.

This Wednesday saw a poetry reading that conceded nothing to modernism.  The aged but sprightly occultist Zachary Cox read from his own work (much of it comical parody), from a tradition now out of fashion (Poe, Swinburne, Chesterton) and from the Dragon Ritual, a Crowleian occult ritual that owed as much to Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern as to the 'wickedest man in the world'.

My business partner, of course, 'worries about me' (with a smile) because I give time to these things - as I did to earlier lectures on H.P. Lovecraft and will do to a forthcoming one on 'demonhunters of Japan' but this is a community of exploration of ideas that is far from po-faced, can sometimes laugh at itself and, even if my own approach remains horribly rational, is still trying to dig out the ineffable from the mundane where the rest of us have long given up.

More to the point, these cultural interludes spark creative ideas and innovative use of language in one's own world - and my income sometimes comes from making connections that others cannot make for themselves. The 'use-value' of Treadwell's events is not the point, of course, but it is nice to find a 'use-value' if only not to be unnecessarily defensive with business colleagues.  There is an odd mainstream prejudice against radical intellectual experimentation - as if the system as a whole depends on us all conforming to certain shared ideas to such an extent that any breach in that belief system might bring the whole thing tumbling down.  It suggests that we might be holding on to many of our beliefs out of fear for own survival if things were to change.

One final point - sometimes insights into new phenomena can come from surprising places.  We have scarcely touched the surface of what virtual worlds might do to our culture and personal development.  There is no precedent - unless it be some of the risky experimentation of the distinctly off-the-message-board practitioners of Chaos Magick.  This is not to accept the latter's version of the world but only to see that this closed world with its links to role play may have things to teach the wider culture about coping with changes that will partly detach mind from body through technology and then do so without restraint of geography and with a changed sense of time (which is one of the most remarkable subjective effects of entry into a virtual world).

For those interested in Zachary Cox, Treadwell's have released an Mp3 download of the recital at http://www.treadwells-london.com/downloads.asp  

Tate Modern's largest ever retrospective of living artists covers the occasionally scatological, no-holds-barred work of Gilbert & George.  If you are visiting London, you have until May 7th to see it.  In the past I might have said that you should not take anyone who might be easily shocked, but we live in a culture where shock is no longer shocking.  My teenage kids have the usual contemporary kid reaction to attempts by liberal parents to broaden their minds - to them, artistic shock is now merely embarrassing.  You can see the liberal pendulum swinging back to conservatism before your very eyes.

But what struck me was not the artistic endeavour or the remarkable continuity of vision over five decades so much as something that I have noticed elsewhere - the role of place in a work of art.  Can any art rooted in place be fully appreciated by someone who has not shared that sense of place to some degree with the artist?  You look at the labels and see Gilbert & George's extremely large works on loan from private collections all over Europe, presumably only able to fit inside the large houses of the Euro-rich.  How can a wealthy collector understand the references to the East End street?  Do they need to care?

A Duccio madonna and child cannot be understood without thinking about how it fitted into its church environment.  Students of art spend lifetimes in trying to recreate the symbolism or the cultural, social, economic and even political context of a work of art but what cannot be reproduced is the felt sense of being in a place and time shared by the artist. 

All the perceptions, the gestalt of place, may be partly reproducible in living memory but not conveyed through the art itself to a 'stranger'.  A work of art might fix some aspect of place but only so that other aspects are crowded out.  The whole draft that we call reality will then be rewritten by the observers to fit their own needs.  Art is, self-evidently, never precisely what it represents and there are plenty of French philosophers to tell us more if we really need to have all this confirmed for us.

Two artists bring out this reaction in me because I know the places which contributed to their art (though I would not be so presumptuous as to believe that I understood their art any better than anyone else and certainly no better than the artists themselves). Gilbert & George (counted as one artist) produce their work within a few streets of East London and Tracy Emin was born (as I was) and raised (as I was not) in Margate. 

Those streets of Gilbert & George's are very familiar to me.  London's cultural shifts and changes are expressed almost precisely in work after work.  An entire cultural experience over five decades is reproduced, in admittedly simplified terms, to someone who has lived through them without always comprehending what was going on at the time.  This sense of place lived in and then fixed as a 'memory of sentiment' must be impossible for many owners of these works to understand, so something else is driving them to buy and appreciate.  But the evocation of a specific time and place is still core to the art and it will be lost when people like me and others in my generation die.

The same with Emin.  Neither her work nor G&G's can be reduced to this evocation of place but anyone who grew up in the depressed culture of an English seaside town (mine was the neighbouring town of Ramsgate) can see in her graphic work direct reference, perhaps unconscious, to the primitive graffiti and seedy culture of an economy that lived hand-to-mouth on seasonal visitors who sometimes never turned up and, if they did, had little to spend.  Her autobiographical reactions to the culture of desperation and abuse and her reconstruction of herself through art could have taken place in any zone of deprivation - even in an abusive wealthy context - but the visuals and textures of her work evoke a particular time and place to someone who also participated in it.  That aspect of her work will also die as her generation of observers die.

Does this link matter, between the artist's possibly unconscious drawing down from place and the minority of people who may not appreciate what should be appreciated in the art but who still see these unconscious references to a shared world?  Probably not to the artist or the collector or the art market or the critic or the historian, but this evocation of experience provides a surprising link between watcher and watched.  The two sides do not have to like each other but they share an admittedly attenuated sense of being 'distant family'.  And like a 'family' that shares childhood memories but, otherwise, has nothing in common in adult life, this bond can still draw some people back in a crisis to the art - as a family gets called to a funeral, a wedding or to survival in a war. 

This brings us to Gilbert & George once again.  The very first room of the retrospective shows early work very different from the rest of the Exhibition except in scale.  It shows a rural idyll of sorts with Gilbert & George apparently celebrating the same sort of English sense of place that dominates Tate Britain.  There is an essay to be written on how English art moves from celebrating ownership of land [Gainsborough] to becoming integrated with the land as a national ideal, especially in the context of wartime experience and subsequent reactions to postwar changes in society. 

Gilbert & George's sharp shift to specific place from generalised national place in the 1970s and Tracey Emin's reversion to the personal in a revolt against place (yet never entirely leaving it behind) and so many other examples of trying to fix or avoid memory or fix and move on from place seem to indicate that 'English' artists are engaged in a continuous troubled process of coming to terms with the fragmentation of national identity.  This is especially clear in the very last rooms of the retrospective where the arrival of Islamic culture in the East London streets is recorded with the same aggression as the arrival of AIDS.  One of the 'enfants terribles' was born in Italy and Emin is of Turkish descent with continuing Turkish links and it may be that this enables them to see or feel or express what the indigenous English have long felt - that there is a profound disconnect between what our inherited national culture claims for us and what is experienced in the streets. 

Not that most of us care any more.  The English now believe with LP Hartley that the 'past is another country'.  But the shift from the culture of the 1940s and 1950s to the urban multicultural sexualised culture of the 1990s and 2000s has shattered the old sense of place and nationhood.  It has replaced it (in many cases) with a stronger sense of specific place, such as that of being a Londoner, and of personal rather than collective memory.  Our artists may, with that genius for the semi-conscious articulation of hidden truths, be chronicling this cultural revolution in which a world of rootless transient communities has emerged, where there is no longer any shared institutional authority and where memory is unstable because it is not easily reinforced by community norms as a national 'myth'.  A real war might change that, of course - but not the phoney war on terror.

Whether a wealthy collector in Luxembourg or Liechtenstein really comprehends any of this - any more than a nineteenth century British imperial collector of Italian altarpieces could understand a late-medieval small town Catholic sensibility - is another matter.  But I am sure that the collectors are making some very sound investments.

Not every week can have extraordinary events.  And there is no point in making an ordinary week extraordinary by making up stories.

This week, though, saw another interesting event at Treadwell's - http://www.treadwells-london.com/  (see the posting earlier in March).  Dr. Stephen Alexander of Warwick University closed his series of lectures on the grey zone between being human and being animal with a demanding but surprisingly lucid account of what the French philosophers D&G (Deleuze & Gattari, not, as he noted, Dolce & Gabbana) had written on the matter.  Perhaps they are the only philosophers to take werewolves and vampires as a legitimate subject of enquiry.

I am not even going to try and attempt to reproduce his dense argument, especially as I hold to a more 'classically' existentialist view that a great deal of French continental philosophy represents a back door attempt to rescue essentialism rather than face, head-on, any of the tough choices that raw existence presents us with.  In this case, D&G were trying to make Heraclitus, who believed that all things were in constant flux and there was no permanence, 'work'. 

But, having said this, if we see this sort of philosophy as a branch of art, weaving words to express the ineffable, making us think and provoking us, then there is no real need to get angry or irritated with it.  It is good just to sit back and let the occasional insanities roll over you and realise that some of those culturally self-referential daftnesses can be wiser guides on how one might conduct one's life than the rational logic of grey analysts who run our lives so clumsily and inhumanely.

There was one thought that Alexander provoked, probably unintentionally, that was liberating and troubling.  He explored the Nietzchean interest (expressed in literature by DH Lawrence) in reviving the animal in us - not as a silly Rousseau-esque idyll or as a reversion to barbarism and cruelty but as the construction of the 'post-human' or 'ubermensch'.  This moves beyond the human to re-connect with our animal natures in terms of something new and beyond nature.  There is a lot of daft fearful talk about the inherent fascism or Nazi element in philosophers like Nietzche or Heidegger, yet there is something disturbing to liberal rationality about the cold hard use of reason to privilege the life lived unreasonably or 'authentically'.

Liberal intellectuals often see the Holocaust as the fruit of these illiberal thinkers. The existentialists are more likely to see it as the epitome of rational technologism, with its camps, trains, gases and management discipline, all representative of an inhuman system that was itself based on a hypertrophied use of reason and analysis to meet ends justified by reference to a now-discredited 'science' of eugenics.  Communist 'scientific materialism' was no more intelligent.

The implication of the post-human is that, far from reverting to the natural, technology gives the human endless possibilities to go beyond nature and become (not evolve into) a new breed of animal for new conditions.  If the technology is not commanded by persons who are stronger than it, then weak humans with all their fears, desires and prejudices intact will be taken over by the possibilities that the technology offers.  And so we have death camps, nuclear weaponry, military-industrial complexes and environmental degradation.  Scary stuff!

The Eastern religions were very influential on the late-Germanic branch of Western philosophy that critiqued reason through the use of reason - the paradox in this is in itself classically Eastern.  Already, in the Zaadz universe, we see the strong dominance of Buddhist thinking in creative tension with more existentialist , liberal or pagan models.  Buddhist philosophical instincts continually move around concepts of nothingness, paradox, unknowability and the relative unimportance of rationality except as tool.  American pragmatism is perhaps the only branch of traditional analytic philosophy that recognises the hole at the centre of thinking but makes this a strength by seeing 'thinking' as a tool for other purposes. 

Wittgenstein eventually ditched the use of value of the use of language and thinking at the point that it touches the ineffable.  He notes that there is that about which nothing can be said - at least not in the analytical language of 'true' statements.  Yet, to the irritation of the analytical mind, we continue to say these things.  This appears to be a great divide amongst us humans - between those who live on either side of the boundary that Wittgenstein identified. 

This brings us back to the liminal world of humans and animals.  Is it possible that personal liberation does not just involve using rational tools for private and public ends? Are many of us not also engaged in a twin search for transcendance in the future (the search for nirvana or the state of post-human being) and for reproducing the one thing that animals seem to have that we do not - the ability to live briefly in the moment without past or future?

Some with rational analytical minds often seem terribly scared of the strength of emotions like desire and fear and of this loss of self in the moment.  They avoid the Dionysian moment of intoxication with the 'animal'.  Perhaps they fear where they might go - that Srebenica, Satanism or BDSM are just around the corner. 

They will also use their reason to argue away the big questions of Being so as not to face them directly, perhaps so as not to face the fearful fact that these questions cannot be answered except through leaps of irrational faith.  Accepting even one small leap into the unknown might chip away insidiously at all liberal reason with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Often they will analyse and research moments of transcendance in others but never really let go when they participate themselves - they will not stand up and hold a crowd in a political meeting, or lose themselves in orgasm, or lose space and time for a brief moment in ritual magic or religious practice and certainly never experience the  creative 'madness' that William Blake once enjoyed in a Soho street.  Politics, sex and religion are so often subjects of such earnestness for the Western liberal middle class that they are in danger of losing all sense of joy in life.

Maybe this is what being post-human will look like when the last earnest bourgeois has moved on - a final isolation of functioning reason to its rightful role as hand-maiden of the ineffable, the joyful and the irrational.  Scary stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze - for Deleuze
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Guattari - for Guattari