University. When I moved into 228 West Parade, I was the first one there. Bored out of my wits, and believing myself useless in terms of cooking, cleaning, and caring for myself1, it seemed logical to start some kind of unwieldy, obscurantist writing project. Replete with cigarettes and microwave pizza, it was time to embrace a life of living dangerously, or what I thought living dangerous was with my brief forays into Tom Waits lore, beatnik mythologising, and onanistic loneliness. The only thing to be done was write something no one would want to read.
Starting a tumblr blog, I intended to write a never-ending, multi-chapter epic, which lost steam swiftly and became the first volume of The Oneiriad2. Here began the formulation of a writing style, project, and ethos which would haunt, possess, inspire, and guide me up until this moment right now. Trying to describe precisely what it is is somewhat impossible, due to its fluidic nature3, but I will attempt to break it down as best as I can.
Suffice to say, the man I was then (Jasper Maurus) is not the man I am now ([redacted]).
Autowritten & Unedited
The Oneiriad was initially inspired by William Burroughs and his tome The Word Hoard4. I found the tales of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Ansen collecting stray pages & scribbles - sections typewritten in bathroom stalls left to fester if not saved by fellow beats - beyond inspiring, and longed for a baffling collection of friends who would find my literary effluvia just as fascinating. The idea of sinking into a writerly state and seeing what emerged seemed perfect between long bouts of rum-drinking & chainsmoking. As of writing this, the cigarettes are long gone, and the rum & whiskey swapped out for green tea & decaff coffee, but the process remains the same. A trance-like state, allowing a narratological intrusive thought to lock in, and see where it leads; an oneiriad, one might say, when half-awake, unable to lucidly control the dream, but able to recognise it as such as you follow along with it. This autowriting takes some practice, of being able to drop-in5 to a narrative and let it play out. It is very much the same zone a child possesses when playing make-pretend; the child knows it isn’t real, but the story can’t quite end, the reality of it unfolding just as their material life does. Real and true become interchangeable. Just because something can’t be touched, doesn’t make it not real. Autowriting is a key player in The Oneiriad, creating friction and serendipity. In time the autowriting fades, enough scrawled to determine where it is going in a more linear fashion, but returning to the state is paramount.
Unlike The Word Hoard however, The Oneiriad is (predominantly) unedited. The mistakes, typos, plot holes, and errors in the script are part of the tapestry, everything up for grabs for an over-complex retconning. After learning Tsugumi Ohba wrote DEATH NOTE6 with little idea how he would solve the previous issues crimes & puzzles, the deadline for the next issue was to solve his own questions; the unedited nature of The Oneiriad ceased to be simply a lazy affectation. No longer was it only that I didn’t want to edit (I loathe it), but it became part of the teasing threads, figuring out why XYZ had manifested as it had. That Freudian slip, that misquote, that change of eye colour, all became part of something else going on. Like Stephen King’s famous itchy nose in a straight jacket, but solved with rambunctious, para-cosmological godmoding. Nothing is true, everything permitted.
Collaborative & Copyleft
What began to frustrate me however is how the mind pulls you in directions not necessarily beneficial for the author. I would realise a line was taken from a film recently watched, or a story-line would not manifest in my own consciousness but when speaking with friends they seemed to know precisely what would happen next. I may, for example, know XYZ character goes to the shops but not what they buy, but a colleague, friend, enemy would say what happens next, perhaps even just as mocking jape, and the story began to continue outside my field of influence. Further friction would kick off. As Nick Cave described:
“Do you want to know how to write a song? Songwriting is about counterpoint. Counterpoint is the key. Putting two disparate images beside each other and seeing which way the sparks fly. Like letting a small child in the same room as, I don’t know, a Mongolian psychopath or something, and just sitting back and seeing what happens. Then you send in a clown, say, on a tricycle and again you wait and you watch. And if that doesn’t do it, you shoot the clown.”
It is one thing to be the sole author wrangling the clowns, but if that could exponentially grow, the rivulets of Pierrot blood would be uncontainable. What is important in The Oneiriad is letting the ideas ride out with their own steam, and that can’t always happen with my mind, my heart, my fingers. The Oneiriad is a collaborative endeavour, owned by no one. Yes, I originally manifested it, and formed the core foundations the rest can fungally bloom from, but the idea an idea is owned by me seemed sickening. No. The Oneiriad is whatever you make it, or more accurately, it is whatever it makes itself through you.
For this to occur, copyright had to be erased with aplomb. Everything in my writing is copyright free (which I label as copyleft, but open source may be a more preferable term)7, allowing anyone to do anything they please with the text. If a character strikes someones fancy, they can run with it. Adapt into a film, done. And with this comes cheeky thievery, literary Genet-esque stolen goods: Doctor Who can take as much place in the canon as Sex And The City. Carrie Bradshaw can fight Judge Dredd. Jean-Luc Picard marries Elvira. Icabod Crane steals the Millennium Falcon. Why any of this though?
At first, because autowriting doesn’t recognise borders. How often do you find you are writing a narrative in X intellectual property (the term alone makes me unwell), only to have to rewrite it with new names, locations, to hide the fact it was yours and not stolen goods. It was always yours. And no ones. For god’s sake Fifty Shades of Grey is Twilight fanfiction, and sold trillions—the people simply long for a good yarn (or an erotic one): to determine something imagined can be owned by anyone is ludicrous.
Of course, this raises questions of protecting the artist, which I won’t have time to unpack here. But suffice to say, copyright didn’t protect Marvel writers8, it protected Marvel. What protects artists is community, not whoever owns the sheet of paper saying Captain Nazi is there’s, and there’s alone.
Free & ‘Not Good’
If the work was going to be intellectually borderless, then it should be equally accessible. As well as getting around the pesky issue of stealing other IP and not paying for it, everything in The Oneiriad should be as close to free as it can possibly be so people living in the hellscape that is the modern world can bloody well read it. We all need to pay the rent, we all need to afford food; why on earth am I going to make it harder for you to do that by making my fanfiction-cum-autowriting the price of milk? I can argue I need the money to pay my rent, buy my food, which is why I give the option to pay whatever you like, but if I can’t afford to buy art then you sure as hell can’t, and we’ll just go around in a circle making everyone feel guilty & ashamed they aren’t paying everyone elses rent! The capitalists have us by the balls with this one. I simply won’t play their game. You can’t afford it. I can’t afford it. Let’s just have a good time.
The issue here is we can quickly fall into the Tory aphorism “get a real job”, and The Oneiriad is as anti-fascist as I can manifest it9. If we could all live on our art, the world would be a far happier place, but right now, unless you’re happy being Jeff Koons money-laundering at the Gagosian, you’ll probably need to be a barista, office lackey, therapist, fireman (just don’t be a f*cking cop)—these are as much part of the art of The Oneiriad as the writing. You manifest characters with trials and hero journeys: your job is part of yours in the material.
Inspired by Grant Morrisons ideas of the godhead, our reality is merely the story book to something much higher than us. The Oneiriad embodies this spirit, with the text and the author as one (more of that later)—in short, don’t feel you are losing because you are not a published author. The world has enough pretentious heart-bleeders discussing the brand awareness of YA fiction. If you want to make money off your work, just read Jim Behrle.
Let’s just begin by saying that there are more poets than ever before in the history of literature—and therefore more magazines, reading series, and tiny publishers. There are probably 800 or so active writing programs in the United States alone. I could have looked up the actual number, but facts don’t actually matter.
Luckily, if you don’t need to make $20 a word, the work doesn’t need to be any good.
There is more to this philosophy of “not-goodness” than what meets the eye however; back in the day, myself, Robbie Taylor and Charlie Gualtieri would critique the poetry at open mic nights in the city of Lincoln. We concluded that if we had nothing to say about the work, the work wasn’t any good; even if you could say 10,000 bad things about a poem, this meant it had enough merit to be worked on: silence, just throw the thing in the bin. This rings somewhat true for me even now, but over time I’ve shifted away from the idea of binnable work and publishable work, even private work and public work. There is work I don’t like, but that’s something personal to me. Being a teacher in a past/present life, seeing the number of media students try desperately to make a film that looks like a silver screen blockbuster was heartbreaking. If not that, the alternative was to “do it like Tarantino” so it can “look bad on purpose”, making very poorly constructed zombie flicks in the hopes B-Movie was a genre of its own. Everyone - including me - missed the point. It isn’t about being good or bad, or living up to cinematic or literary expectations, but about making the stuff. Process.
What matters in The Oneiriad is dialogue (triologue, quadrilogue, infinilogue), and not the quality of the work. Quality cannot be measured, especially when the benchmark is a hundred-thousand superhero flicks saying the same liberal nothing. Even Matt Damon can’t make a film now without it hitting capitalistic quotients very few people give a damn about. I love a good superhero film, but art is more than profit margins. If this becomes the way we measure success - how many CGI shots in your film; how many books published in hardback, chilling on Waterstones shelves packed-up by tired minimum wage employees - the work will falter, crumble to dust. It will mean nothing.
No, The Oneiriad must be open source, borderless, and whatever it happens to be. It doesn’t need to be good, it needs to be true. A child’s first poem trumps all the art in the Louvre.
Metamodern & Metafictive
Adam X. Smith - a fellow collaborator in the oneirosphere - recently described me as a metamodern. As well as stroking my ego someone out there was analysing my work, it opened a portal into the future potential of The Oneiriad.
The Oneiriad originally began as an obscurantist endeavour. I wrote a manifesto on Obscurantism: the purpose of the text is to be as impossible to unpack as possible. It was a post-teenage whine against university lecturers telling me all work needed to be “accessible” (and not in the sense above) and/or “relatable”. I did not find my lived experience relatable at all. Undiscovered trauma, undiagnosed personality disorder, latent alcoholism, addictive proclivities, masturbatory standoffishness, bad pretentiousness, and being an asshat made my reality terrifying. I barely understood why anything was happening the way it was, and it seemed that to be honest in my writing, I needed it to feel as obscurantist as living did to me; I felt there was some secret everyone else knew but I—writing something none of the f*ckers would read would show them.
On some level, this is still true in the text. Inspired by Blake Butler and Mark Z. Danielewski, The Oneiriad oft takes formats impenetrable or bizarre, but now with an eye & ear for purpose. No longer a text schizoid, but psychotic. No longer a text whining, but moaning. No longer a text confused, but truly obscurantist. What I missed before is there had to be something to obscure, for it to be obscurantist: before it was just noise (although, nothing to be sniffed at when it comes to noise music).
Metamodernism10 congeals a new side of the coin for The Oneiriad. Not simply blood-splattered, spitting-feathers obscure, but sincere in offering a hand through the dark of a meta-reality no one fully comprehends. We live in a post-truth world, which should have been beautiful, freeing. We live in an era of climate catastrophe, denialism, and conspiracy11. We live in a time where NHS workers need foodbanks, police officers arrest rape victims, and WAR is still on the cards. Obscurantism is as alive as it ever was. But it needs a dose of sincerity, something hopeful. Metamodernism, unifying the oscillating poles of postmodern snark with hopepunk glisteny-eyed dreaming, may be the answer to a question I didn’t know I was asking about the work: what is it good for?
Meta- is an ongoing word however. It could probably be shoved as prefix on a great many philosophical, psychological, narratological, and cosmological terms and it would balance just-so on the event horizon of The Oneiriad. Primarily though, The Oneiriad is metafictive. Each text that interconnects with it becomes part of it, and vice versa. Each authors lived experience infused in it, and blossoming outside of it. Character inserts of our own selves with fabulist names. Autobiography meeting science fiction. Ricard St Jassoemein is as much I as I am him, but he is a real entity. He lives and breathes, just without the troublesome meat suit. Everything is real here.
Magic(k)al
Metafiction, in this case, might as well be the word magick.
My relationship with the K-stricken chaos has been a difficult one. At times I can see how much it has benefited me, but it also has been a self-induced schizophrenia (although I loathe this term in medical circles12) almost ruining relationships and other successes. Magick, with a K, is a rabbit warren of individuals trying to come up with new theories to everything, and although a great many witches, magicians, and occultists are wonderful, beautiful people13, the ones I found were grubby, ethically suspect, and hallucinatory without the enlightenment.
However, it is unavoidable to note a spiritual dimension takes up one vertices of The Oneiriad. Whether good ol’ fashioned chaos magic (I’ll delete the K to distinguish it from previous onanistic forays with little moral grounding) or my recent journey to The Cosmic Christ, The Oneiriad is a manifestation machine.
I recently read Volume 6, where my self-insert fiction suit Logan is making pasta with his wife. I had written this at perhaps one of my most lonely periods. I now write this sentence with my fiancée opposite me. We made pasta last night.
Something between the autowriting, the leaning into the errors, the borderless wilderness of the text, and its metamodernity(fictionality,cosmology) creates space for manifestation. Those fiction suits of mine getting lost to addiction helped me claw out of it. Those selves with no sense of who they are helping me find out who I am. The scholars help me research. The Angels—who knows yet. I don’t always see the pattern between the fictional pleroma and my standing on The Tree Of Life. But I am sure it is there.
The Oneiriad inhabits what a kabbalist may call Yesod, the dream sphere, and what happens there seems to diffuse down into Malkuth, our material plane14. Subtle bodies, tulpa, kosha, pranayama, qi, sephira—all coalesces between the mental, the heart, the body15, influencing each other. So is my first oneiriad self named after St. Maurus, patron saint of gastric issues, and in time I have a colonectomy, and find something resembling Jesus. Don’t worry, it isn’t some anti-LGBT disastrously religious Christianity; it’s more radical than that, but that is for another time.
What I mean to say, is what you put into the world you get out of it. What we infuse into our fictions may well influence our material lives. Whether what we write is good, or publishable, or even makes sense, is irrelevant if it is true. It all exists just as much as our material bodies do reading this, it just takes a different form. If we treat The Oneiriad as real as our own lives, albeit muddy with fantasy, something will be manifested out the other end.
The Oneiriad is a vessel for all of this. The Oneiriad is a synonym for writing.
Get a therapist, you’ll learn all those things you thought you are you aren’t. Turns out it is all about your mother.
As of writing this there are 7 volumes. They don’t always load in order so click around. But in truth, my oneiriad, is everything I have ever written, from the eponymous volumes to my other novels, poetry, plays, even what I scribble on the back of napkins. All is my oneiriad. For each author, everything they write is their oneiriad. When they brush up against each other, magic.
As Ricard St Jassoemein describes, réalité concrète vs réalité fluide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Word_Hoard
And more importantly, climb out: don’t get lost in there.
DEATH NOTE isn’t the only manga/anime to inspire The Oneiriad. Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis: Evangelion, with its gainax endings, and works such as Ergo Proxy, also spurred those initial posts along.
There are no NFTs in The Oneiriad.
The author’s note in Cape explores some of this, hence the link.
The other issue of being copyleft is a Nazi can just get their hands on it and turn it into something horrible, but if you’re happy being a Nazi I’m pretty certain you aren’t going to mind my rules, so you’ll go and be a prick whether I legally protect it or not. And when was the last time legal meant good?
https://www.berfrois.com/2015/01/everything-always-wanted-know-metamodernism/
My next work, GAMMA FOUR, intends to explore this.
See: Alan Moore: “The schizophrenic has had their window kicked in, the magician has got a body of law – probably most of it bollocks, it doesn’t matter. The magician’s got a system into which the alien information that will be pouring into him or her will be fitted. They’ve got a filing cabinet, like the Qabalah, which is a filing cabinet for ideas. It divides the whole universe up into ten drawers. Any experience can be passed into one of the drawers. The schizophrenic is probably having exactly the same experience as the magician but has no context in which to understand it. … The schizophrenics I have known, the most evident thing about it is the interconnectedness of everything. That’s standard lunacy, it’s also standard magic. But with one of them, it is uncontrollable, you are lost in a world in which everything is obviously connected by symbolic threads. That is what the magician is seeking, to see these threads that connect things up. If you’ve got a system – even if it’s a completely made-up bogus system – then you’ve at least got a filing cabinet to sort this stuff into, you don’t have to get crushed under it.”
See: Phil Hine, Hookland, and the network of cunning folk there.
I am sure many kabbalists roll their eyes at how I use the terms, but I find it useful language.
I am embodying these ideas more in Rhythm Bliss drum circles. The whiskey soaked cynic of my past would laugh at me now, and vice versa. As above, so below? The self is an illusion.