A Video & A Message to Readers

'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction—'

Yeats portrait by Michael Hawthorne

Can the Centre hold? If so, which Centre?

A conversation with Neil Oliver and a message to my readers concerning a moment of personal crisis.

‘I wonder if people’s tolerance for the nonsense, you know, has just reached a point. I think it’s troubling that we are so long down the road. It’s just gone on and on and on and, you know, it just wears people down. Now, when you go back into the question of the excess deaths, I mean it has puzzled me for so long, you know, how somebody can deal with it. I mean to deal with, say, the death of a child is like it’s just about the worst thing you ever . . . that will ever happen.Right? We don’t even want to think about it in those terms. But to think about it and when there’s even the germ of a suggestion that this didn’t have to happen, that it wasn’t some Act of God it wasn’t, you know. “hard luck” — it wasn’t an accident; that this was actually what we knew it was: a bioweapon designed to kill. Now I don’t know how somebody comes out of that at all, but I certainly don’t know how they stay in it without speaking, and so many people have gone through that in the last five years, and they haven’t spoken about it. Almost nobody has spoken about it, as far as I know nobody voluably —  they’ve been silenced or bought off, or whatever, but there have been no famous whistleblowers about this, unless you know some that I don’t, and yet the figures are there and the figures are irrefutable, because at the very start of all this it was said again and again that the measure of this “pandemic” would be the number of excess deaths. Well, there are excess deaths, but there were none during the pandemic. They came after and nobody wants to talk about them. And the journalists who told us that every life mattered, every life matters, you know, for a full year, now tell us, implicitly, these lives don’t matter. I don’t know how that works. I don’t know how people can live with that and not scream the place down, not pull the head off some politician by the ears.’

— John Waters

‘You can tell people whatever you want to tell people, but actions obviously speak louder than words and people can see that events are unfolding around them. I’m increasingly turning away from, um, loud and definite. You know that thing about . . . your countryman’s line about “the best lack all conviction, but the worst are filled with passionate intensity”. I don’t listen to passionate intensity much anymore. I’m drawn to people who have grown quietly quizzical, uncertain, and their uncertainty, I think, is a manifestation of questions that maybe they’re asking themselves, but to a greater or lesser extent, they haven’t quite worked up the energy to ask other people, but that the questions are out there. And I think I think those questions are manifesting in best lacking all conviction.’

— Neil Oliver

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

— ‘The Second Coming, W. B. Yeats

Notice to Readers

As I wrote in a message delivereed on Friday lasr to full members of John Waters Unchained I am having radically to reduce my workload for health reasons. This will affect primarily my weekly, diaries, which I have now put on ice for a few months due to the onset of a very debilitating, persistent and worrying illness.

I do not yet have a name for the condition that assails me. It is reminiscent of several conditions I suffered from before, but does not coincide fully with any of these. One symptom is that my energy levels, already in single digits, have utterly collapsed. This has happened gradually over the past month — since just before Easter — and at first seemed to be just standard exhaustion. In the past week, however, it has become clear that something more sinister may be in train, as I have been encountering difficulties with the most fundamental functions: walking, eating, drinking, lifting, even typing for more than short periods. I have found myself either unable to get out of bed or, on succeeding, spending several hours crawling around, wishing to just throw myself on to the floor and lie there for the remainder of time. My appetite has disappeared: there is almost nothing I can persuade myself to eat, and mostly I eat almost nothing. I have had to cease virtually all work-related activities, with the exception of a couple of recent interviews which had been arranged for some time, and which I managed to get through in the past week without seeming like I was impersonating a dead man talking. When I have achieved a basic level of recovery, I plan to turn to return to work on a gradualist basis. Meanwhile, there may be some gaps in the output published here — usually comprising essays and videos — but I hope and expect that thiis will even out in a few weeks or months.

I thank you all, from the depths of my soul, for being with me on this voyage through the Unknowable. I thank you for your loyalty and constant support. These have been special years in my life. I say this purely for the record, even though I do not know what the future holds, so people should not read overmuch into it. What I know is that, for the next few months, I have to radically reduce my workload, to give myself a breathing space to allow me to recover (should that be possible). I shall, of course, continue to lurk inside my Substack premises by candlelight, albeit on a reduced basis. I’ll still post videos and write occasional articles, though of relatively modest length, and without a paywall, as in any event I have been doing for the past almost seven years. I’ll also post occasional bulletins conveying any news of my state of health, and prospects for a return to maximum effectuality. Please stick around.

* This is an abridged version of a message sent to paid subscribers last Friday