In mid-January 2023 – nearly two years ago now – I found myself living under what I can refer to euphemistically as “difficult conditions.” The details are irrelevant. To say “neighbours from hell” gives the gist; to say more could be libelous. It is enough to say that my flat had pretty much become a “no go” area for me and I was forced to spend as much time away from it as possible. Among other things this meant that I became even more a habitué of the British Library than I already was. To people who know me, that might seem impossible. But for several months my person was indeed present there more often than usual, to the extent that it would not be an exaggeration to say that I was practically living in the place. (Truth to tell, I have written this blog post there.)
I had no demanding work at the time. I had just signed the contract for my biography of Maurice Nicoll – Maurice Nicoll The Forgotten Teacher of the Fourth Way – which I had submitted to my publishers, Inner Traditions, having already written it for another publisher, who sat on it for several months before informing me that they had changed their minds. I would get the copyedited manuscript back to work on, but not for some time, and the few articles I was commissioned to write would not keep me busy for long. I had to write something. The difficulties at my flat had started long before January, and so far I had spent my afternoons at the library reading. But I needed to do something, some creative activity, in order to affirm myself, and to feel that I existed, to put it existentially. Subject to the conditions under which I was living, my sense of being began to dissipate. And let me tell you, that is not a good thing. I would not be exaggerating to say that if I didn’t do something soon, my sanity – what there was left of it – would slip away.
So one afternoon in mid-January 2023, sitting at my desk at the British Library, I decided to tell myself my story. I framed this in the form of an answer to a question I’m often asked: How did I go from being a musician to writing the sort of books I do? The switch from writing pop songs and playing in rock bands to writing books about the occult or the evolution of consciousness may seem rather abrupt and discontinuous. But in fact my interest in the sort of thing I write about began at the same time as my career as a songwriter and musician, and the books I was reading then informed some of the songs I was writing. So there was a connection between the two after all.
Gradually, what began as a series of what I humbly called “notes toward an autobiography,” written initially to keep me sane, took on a life of their own, with the result that, almost exactly a year later, I had produced a memoir. Its circular, ouroboric form was not planned. I had, indeed, no plan or outline. I would just tell the story of my life before, during, and after my time as a musician, up to my departure from sunny Southern California for a new life in rain-soaked London. What I was writing could be thought of as both a prequel and sequel to New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation, my earlier memoir specifically about my years in music. But it became clear that I could finish writing this new one on January 10th, 2024, the 28th anniversary of my relocating to London from Los Angeles. The memoir stops – if I can be excused one spoiler – with my leaving Los Angeles for London at the end of 1995, en route to becoming a writer, so we can say that it ends at my beginning, with a nod to T. S. Eliot. (It is also leaves the possibility of another memoir, of my time in London, obvious.) Needless to say, fates willing, I will be marking my 29th year in London later this month.
I’m happy to say that in August 2024, Inner Traditions accepted the memoir for publication. Touched By The Presence: From Blondie’s Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult is due for release in November 2025. I’m also happy to say that they have very kindly allowed me to share a peek at the cover. It features some photographs from back in the day, taken by my good friend Lisa Jane Persky. The memoir’s title comes from a song I wrote while in Blondie, “(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear,” about the odd telepathic and shared dream experiences Lisa and I had, during Blondie’s first North American tour in 1977. Lisa is also providing photographs for an 8 page B&W insert.
Without giving too much away, I can say that the book looks at various influences on my life, staring with comic books at age 5 and ending with my abandoning an academic career at age 40, to take my chances at becoming a writer in a foreign clime. Along the way I encounter H. P. Lovecraft, Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche, existentialism, Aleister Crowley ( as well as his O.T.O.), Gurdjieff and a book, Colin Wilson’s The Occult, that, as the cliche goes, literally changed my life, as well as the musicians, artists and other unconventional characters I knew in NYC, LA and other locations. It also goes into some detail about my attempts to find a place in academia, just as the age of “political correctness” was dawning, as well as my years working at California’s New Age Central, the Bodhi Tree Bookshop in the 1980s and 90s. And it also recounts a ‘ mini search for the miraculous’ I undertook in the summer of 1983, which had me, among other places, at Chartres Cathedral, Glastonbury, the site of Gurdjieff’s institute in Fontainebleau (I was a student of ‘the work’ at the time), Stonehenge, and other ‘esotourist’ sites, including a pilgrimage to Cornwall to meet Colin Wilson. I won’t say more – I’m loathe to drop names - but I will post about it when it’s available for pre-order. With any luck, that will be fairly soon.
Oddly enough, while writing Touched By The Presence, I took another stroll down memory lane, almost literally. This time it was a map. Fear City: The New York Underground 1974-1981, is a map of my old neighbourhoods during my years in the “Blank Generation,” the name Richard Hell gave to the early crowd at CBGB in the mid-70s. Like the other maps I’ve done for Herb Lester Associates – Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Britain, Facts Concerning H. P. Lovecraft and His Environs, and Inspector Maigret’s Paris – I provide the text and the locations making up the NYC 70s “underground” scene, most of which sadly no longer exist. So along with CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, the Mudd Club, Hurrah and other notorious night spots, a psychogeographer armed with this map can hunt down where I lived with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in Little Italy, the Blondie loft on the Bowery, (not far from William Burroughs’ ‘bunker’) and the Ramones rehearsal space, among other sites. Once again, Lisa provided an early Blondie photograph, shot at our loft, a block from CBGB, for the cover. The map will be published in April this year, but is available for pre-order.
Another work I'm scheduled to start this year is a new book commissioned by my UK publisher, Floris Books, with whom I’ve had a long and creative relationship. The tentative title is We Forget That We Exist: The Way of Radical Astonishment. To say that we ‘forget’ that we exist may elicit more than one raised eyebrow, and the admission that, while many of us no doubt would like to forget that certain other people exist, one’s own existence is something we usually remember. But is that really true? I ask because on more than one occasion, I’ve experienced an odd sensation that I can only described as a sudden, vivid, urgent sense of my own existence – something, as mentioned, that came under threat during my ‘homeless’ months – and with it an equally vivid awareness of the existence of the world and everything in it. Prior to this feeling I of course knew that I and everything else existed. But here language fails us. Because although I believed I ‘knew’ that I existed, in that sudden moment the glaring ‘fact’ of my existence became unmistakably real and I knew in a way I usually do not, that I am, and that everything else, is. The ‘is-ness’ of things became undeniable, what the thirteenth century German mystic Meister Eckhart called their istigkeit.
Although I have had this experience several times (some of them are recounted in Touched By The Presence ), the actual inspiration for the book – which I have yet to start writing – came from an experience I had during the first Covid-19 lockdown here in London in 2020. What happened then? One morning in early spring, a few weeks into the lockdown, I opened the door to my garden, cup of coffee in hand, went out, took a deep breathe, looked up and was surprised by what I saw. What did I see? The sun. The sun had surprised me. It was as if I had seen it for the first time, or in the way I had as a child, on long summer days at the beach on the New Jersey shore. “What is that?” I heard myself say. When I realised what I had said, I laughed. Had my neighbours heard me – not the ones from hell, who had yet to take up residence over my head – they might have wondered what drug I was on, to be cackling so. I wrote about the experience here (“Getting Beyond the Robot”) and would give a talk about it for the Pari Centre in Tuscany. In the book, which isn’t scheduled for delivery until spring 2026 – so there’s quite some time before its publication – I look at other, similar experiences I’ve had over the years, what they might mean, and how they are understood in different contexts, such as Zen Buddhism, Meister Eckhart’s mysticism, existential philosophy, Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way and Colin Wilson’s insights into what he calls ‘the robot’, an evolutionary adaptation that is absolutely indispensable yet who takes over more of our lives that we would like it too.
Speaking of Colin Wilson, one of the regrettable developments of 2024 (there were, of course, quite a few of them) was that my publisher Penguin decided to allow my biography of Wilson, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, to go out of print. It was, to be sure, a blow. It's my favourite of my books and the one I feel is most important, because I believe Wilson’s ideas about consciousness and our paradoxical relationship with freedom remain absolutely essential to anyone interested in their evolution and that of humanity at large. This summer will mark the 50th anniversary of my first reading The Occult, an event that set the wheels of destiny in motion and which eventually led me to become both a writer and a Londoner. One might think that, half a century later, I might have outgrown my youthful enthusiasm for Wilson’s work, or at least to have developed some reservations about it. Call it arrested development, but I feel as strongly about it now as I did when I first came across a beat-up paperback of Wilson’s ‘comeback’ book at the flat in the East Village that Chris Stein sublet to Tommy Ramone and asked if I could borrow it (the story is in the memoir). With that in mind, one of my projects for 2025 is to either find a new publisher for Beyond the Robot or, more likely, publish it myself.
I have quite a few talks lined up for 2025, some live events, some via Zoom. On 1 March I’ll be in conversation with Maitreyabandhu of the London Buddhist Centre about my work on the evolution of consciousness and my experiences with precognitive dreams, the subject of my book Dreaming Ahead of Time. On 22 March I’ll be giving an online talk for the Theosophical Society in America about Consciousness and Esotericism, based on my book The Secret Teachers of the Western World. Details will follow.
On 7 April I’ll be giving a Zoom talk, “Who was Hermes Trismegistus?” based on my book The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus for the Consciousness Perspectives Forum. Later that month, on the 13th and 16th I’ll be talking part in two events at Manly P Hall’s Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, a favourite haunt during my years in LA. On the 13th I’ll be part of a panel of speakers discussing the odd resonances between the Hermetic tradition and the internet. The event is being organised by the theologian and author Tara Burton and will involve talks, discussions and a salon. On the 16th I’ll be giving a talk of my own for the PRS, on the crossover between esoteric psychology and current research in neuroscience, and am speaking with them about doing an online course based on The Secret Teachers of the Western World. Details for all events forthcoming.
In May I’ll be travelling again, this time to Greece, to take part in the Oracle Dream Retreat at Delphi and Epidaurus, from the 8th to the 15th, organised by dream researcher Sarah Janes. I’ll be on site and will be joined remotely by Eric Wargo, author of Time Loops and other works about precognition and other temporal anomalies. This promises to be quite an experience. I haven’t been to Greece and I intend to spend some time there after the retreat, to pay homage to birthplace of philosophy.
I’ve spoken with David Lorimer of the Science and Medical Network about giving a talk, "Challenge and Response: The Goldilocks Theory of History", focusing on the work of Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, and Jean Gebser, at an event in July. This will be a seminar devoted to the notion of “civilization in transition,” something that most of us awake to what is happening in the world are aware of. This past year has seen some remarkable sudden shifts, political, social, even meteorological. I don’t suspect they are over yet; indeed, I imagine they may become even more turbulent. But there is no point in feeling overwhelmed in advance. Toynbee, whom I mention above, believed that a civilization’s “time of troubles” is also a time when it can gather its forces and rise above its challenges and make a creative advance. He believed, as others do and did, that the way forward depends on a “creative minority,” those uncomfortable evolutionary misfits Colin Wilson called “outsiders.” They are out there. If you’re reading this, you’re one of them.
Happy New Year everyone.