Sounds of the Soul:
Adventures in Time

copyright

Sounds of the Soul: Adventures in Time, Andrea Waddell Published by Scribbulations LLC www.scribbulations.com ISBN 978-1-935751-00-7

Front cover photo by Ben Hawley. Back cover photo by Lee Towsey.

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suggestion

If after reading Andrea's poems you would consider making a donation in her name to a cause which was very close to her heart, may we suggest The Lord Dowding Fund for Humane Research, which awards grants for medical and scientific research without the use of animals.

The Lord Dowding Fund for Humane Research
Millbank Tower,
Millbank,
London SW1P 4QP
(Tel: 020 7630 3340)
www.ldf.org.uk

vocabulary

Andrea had a rich and varied vocabulary, and so you will find at the back a glossary of some of the more unusual words she has used.

contents

foreword	9
preamble	13
psychology	18
an epic of sorts	19
ars vivendi	20
chariots of fire	22
missive	24
bungie in the jungle	26
philosophy of the forenoon	27
reflections on will-power	29
Christopher Robin and Pooh	31
a tale for two	33
ode to ice	34
Wiccan Logic / Wiccan Grace	35
basic interrogation techniques	37
the harpies	38
demons lost and found	39
the power of rage	41
the emotion tree	43
metamorphosis from reality into image	46
no bogeyman	48
other souls	50
my soggy socks	51
love in the night (original)	52
love in the night (modified)	54
lust	56
spiritual acrobatics in a world of Newtonian mechanics	57
painting the chiaroscuro of love	59
a token expression of good-will	62
to absent friends	64
the geography of the spirit	67
the theatre of the absurd	69
the truth about dialectic	71
underneath these clothes, my soul is naked	72
this human zoo	74
being me	75
more freedom, please	77
what is living?	78
a fable	80
what it is / to have to work like a nigger	81
Anna Akhmatova	83
sociology	86
theory and practice	87
séance with society	88
supernatural strife	90
is the spirit anachronistic?	92
on freedom	95
the questionable merits of the law	97
on Mammon	99
confronting Christianity	101
a cautionary tale about drugs	102
civilisation and its discontents	103
now even reality's been branded across its ass	104
in this poem I will pull no punches and tell you how it really is	106
a theory purporting to explain why we eat chickens	107
my anarchist poem	108
be very angry	110
the natural world	112
back to basics	113
psychic symphony	115
the joy of squirrels	117
my affair with the floor	118
the body	119
stealth of the weather	122
my psychic exposure on the heath	123
a letter to the all-powerful machine	125
time	128
meditations on time	129
tomorrow as the start of the rest of my life	131
summer-time delirium	133
Pamplona	135
the prodigal son	137
vivisection	138
déjà vu	140
thought	142
thursday thoughts	143
truth and delusion	144
roller-coaster	146
de profundis	147
the zen factor	149
the artistic endeavour	150
broaching the limits of poetry	151
poet's block	153
wild-child	154
the secret	155
somewhere down my 'to do' list	157
all the spirit needs is paper and ink	159
nervous twitch	161
art, my saviour	163
reading a sentence of Proust	164
a writer's skill	165
a dedication	166
is it poetic justice?	167
occult	168
the games of fate	169
passing time	171
thoughts on karma	172
the spice of life	173
the pattern	174
rendez-vous in Samarkand	175
glossary	178

foreword

Andrea died tragically at the age of 29, but those short years were crammed full of diverse experiences, all of which are hinted at in her poetry.

She studied Philosophy at the University of Durham, and later completed an MA in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex, all the while suffering severely from fibromyalgia (which is a syndrome of problems including painful muscles, abdominal problems, sleeplessness and depression). The constant pain often meant that it was impossible for her to carry shopping or textbooks, to stay for long in any one position, or even brush her hair or hold a telephone to her ear. (She always found ways round these problems: for instance, she would visit a local hairdresser each day, and for 50p they would brush her hair for her!)

After achieving her degrees, Andrea decided to study massage and aromatherapy and, in spite of her painful muscles, she was able to give massages which the recipients always found amazingly beneficial. Later on she went out to Thailand on two separate occasions, for several weeks at a time, to study for diplomas in all the various Thai massage techniques.

Her life reads like a catalogue of challenges and difficulties. She was anorexic in childhood, then diagnosed with scoliosis, later developing the fibromyalgia mentioned above. She was bullied at school, knocked down by a car in Battersea, mugged in Prague (where she was teaching English in her gap year), and once was attacked by a gang of young thugs in Reading. While completing her second degree she developed acute ulcerative colitis which was nearly fatal, but she underwent a successful operation resulting in an ileostomy, which was later reversed. It was also at this time that her lifelong gender dysphoria was resolved surgically. In spite of all these vicissitudes Andrea never lost her zest for life and her sense of humour, and indeed she seemed to become stronger and more concerned for others as a result of every situation in which she found herself.

Andrea loved music (classical was her especial joy) and going to concerts; and she enjoyed visiting art galleries. She read voraciously (she was still working her way through the final volumes of Proust!); and she practised yoga and worked-out at the gym to keep her painful muscles under some sort of control. She was also studying Spanish; and she refused to own a television!

She was hailed on one internet site after her death as a 'vegan animal activist', and she did indeed work tirelessly for animals. However, she was also vitally interested in people, and always wanted to help anyone who was disadvantaged in life.

We knew Andrea wrote poetry, but it was not until after her death that her brother found the complete opus of poems on her laptop, composed between 2003 and 2009 and already arranged into groups (the headings are all Andrea's), and with her Preamble already written, in typical Andrea style! We, her family, are very happy to now complete Andrea's task and finally to publish her poems. We are very grateful to those special friends and members of Andrea's family who have each contributed comments on some of the poems.

Andrea was beautiful and brave, witty and clever, funny and (definitely) scatty. She was a private person, trying to be independent in spite of all her problems, and never complaining about the hand which Life had dealt her. We think that everyone she came into contact with, in whatever walk of life, went away feeling better, inspired, touched by her light. We are so proud of her.

Andrea's family

preamble

Philosophy is finished. The futility of seeking to assume the mantle of a wholly universalised, impersonalised voice, (that construction designated by the darling 'reason' of philosophers, with which we might rather say that, in their conceit, they presume to speak) has been rudely exposed in the history of its making and its demise (though the failure of a grand dream does not prohibit living on in denial, which is of course all-too-typical of dreaming). Despite its natural nobility, in seeing itself exempt from the ordinary obligation to appeal to people's sensibilities, philosophy killed their desire to believe in its own pronouncements, to inhabit their visceral essence and so feel swept along by their vital power. In consequence, the l'enfant terrible within people's souls never tired of seeking out the hidden paradox, through its self-appointed role as a devil's advocate, an activity which has always had all the stature of a parlour game.

Well, just as the practice of poetry pre-dated the birth of philosophy, let us all become poets once again! The spirit of philosophy will always burn in the living soul. Poetry, then, is the vehicle for the continuation of philosophy by other means. The secret ingredient of my collection has been a radically subjective viewpoint. I do not believe in the possibility of expounding totally impersonal and objective universal truths. I grapple with ultimate concerns and I treat this grappling as a form of art in itself. I appeal to the authority of my own subjective avowals as the only veridical security I should ever need.

My methodological dictum has been to avoid any reference to the 'real world' as commonly understood. In some of my pieces I actually seek to problematise the very notion of a 'real world' or 'external reality'. It is my belief that poetry must strive to capture that primordial sense of unitary experience – something of which we are all dimly aware yet all too often feel ourselves forced to disregard.

I wanted to prove the very possibility of such a project, bound by such a stricture. Yet where it may be said that I have deviated from this stricture, I intend that the particular worldly artefacts alluded to must be seen as naked, devoid of context, and absurd, rather in the manner of Marcel Duchamp's "readymades" (the classic example of which being the ordinary urinal put on a pedestal and summarily declared as art).

Obversely, each concept I invoke might be interpreted as deriving from that aforementioned "real world", yet I want to display it naked, divorced from the myriad contexts which sully it every time, always waylaying our attention and skewing it towards that "real world". I, on the contrary, want to showcase the possibility of beholding real meaning. A word is the ultimate conceptual minimalism. I want each word to do the maximum work made possible by its pure form, so as to yield its maximal cognitive distillate. For a word in nudeness can evoke more than the greatest of poets is able to, in seeking to string a collection of them together. I like to lean on the barest of metres, often incorporating just a two-stress pattern, which allows maximum stress to be placed on the individual words.

My words and metaphors thus become larger-than-life; my poems are surreal. This is not supposed to be a slur on their truthfulness. Their surrealism is the tool with which I seek to achieve this goal and draw the purest of pictures before the mind's eyes. They are literally "not of this world". But suffice to say I had no intention of writing "science-fiction". Yet the pedant who insists on picking apart my poems with his analytical scalpel will no doubt delight in proving their lack of everyday meaning.

The possibility of meaning likewise becomes an urgent problematic in light of my rejection of the possibility of universal truths. We have a whole battery of cognitive protocols which allow us to put to trial any assertion which presumes to claim special significance for itself and spurns our usual everyday hermeneutic contexts.

A poem, then, is something whose beauty of form alone allows it to say the unsayable. We freely circumvent our normal protocols of cognitive validity when in the presence of beauty of form. It is obviously churlish to put beauty under the knife. Yet we also positively demand the beautiful to be meaningful, in contradistinction to the pronouncements of philosophy which we commonly delight in subverting. (And if it happens that we don't find that beauty, there is clearly nothing to be gained from dissection).

This, then, has been, my ultimate, but humble, criterion for my poetic creations: that yielded by the desire to create something beautiful. At the same time, creation must be tempered by destruction. I have pruned each poem to its bare foundations, so that it might function quite apart from any secret intentions with which I might have overlaid it in my mind. I want each poem to be about the words themselves, and not at all about the artist, so that each word might set specific mental cogs moving for the reader. We can marvel at their play. Each poem is a little machine. Perhaps the only meaning to be found in them at all lies in their aesthetic form, if by meaning is demanded something potentially other than the words used (until we branch off in our own particular reverie). I don't pretend to any kind of intellectual rigour which would stand sceptical scrutiny outside the magic circle of my own poetic reveries.

I spurn empirical and narrative poetry, or rather: I re-forge it according to my methodological requirements. In the main, though, it seems to me that the poetic pre-occupation with the doings of other people and with the material realm betrays a fear of revealing our own soul and confronting our own demons. Similarly, narrative literature so easily misses the critical dynamics governing the heart of the life-process. For the thinner we spread ourselves in narrating events, the blinder we will be to disclosing the ultimate dynamic of 'real experience'.

Yet just as in the 'deep empiricism' of an introspective, subjective standpoint which allows me to find a voice where the pedantry of analytical philosophy struggles to speak at all (though it lives in denial) – time, nonetheless, manifests itself as my ultimate and insurmountable adversary. Because I can only recount my critical impressions through time, they will always be temporally indexed. While I can claim a certain 'sincerity in the moment', here lies the root of my ultimate doubts regarding my poetic veracity.

With a simple crank of time's screw, our deepest convictions can evaporate or be up-ended. This uncertainty goes to the heart of the poetic form as I understand it. Each of my poems may be thought to involve a dialectical movement. This may be a critical dynamic between fulfilment and despair, or more fundamentally: between grasping at a nugget of truth and watching it seep away; between upholding the very possibility of meaning and yielding to the infinite and eternal void.

Yet the very concrete form is then disingenuous. For a poem has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Yet time may not be so easily divided. Thus in insinuating the form of a conclusion, by one lookout I may have inadvertently turned truth on its head, for the flow of time is seamless and inexorable. It is futile to seek to determine in good faith where a poem should begin, and where it should end, or, pari passu, to seek to adjudicate between the causes of optimism and pessimism.

Andrea Waddell
May 2007

an epic of sorts

behind the
simple-minded
peace and quiet
of the same-old psychic sound
of here and now

lies a parallel spiritual realm
untold till now but most profound
(but behold)
this bloody internecine drama
is ready to come flooding
hither into the otherwise vacant mind
with its apocalyptic flicker

this dead-weight of guilt -
a penance each moment bestowed
from not excelling in effort -
is sinking my ship;
of course, it's all in my mind -
unveridical apparitions -
yet how I fidget
as I listen
to the dripping of time

my soggy socks

as I skip
past the puddle
of the aura
of another
the splash on my socks
weighs down my world

now I secretly see
how physics transfigures
the shape of the splash
and the sound of the squelch
into the outline
of a Life

theory and practice

by right of theory
this world we live in
is so very easy

behold the sprawling web
pre-spun'd
- a bureaucratic wonder!

just skip along
your flaxen prong
till ye find your chosen inn

my privy sensory reports
would mark me down a spoiling sport
yet they pronounce it fit
for solely Superhuman Sorts

back to basics

I know a still small place
where the world just floats -
the landscape of experience
just takes place:
midwife to all
new life,
in the nascence of sensation.

please picture those many things
so wanton to bestow
their many shocks and blows -
now nothing can evade
my eagle-eye'd gaze

in the shadows do I hover
ever hawkish to a twinkle
though the merest premonition –
as I ponder
shifting shapes
as they constellate in space
(though a new-found natural wonder)
each must declare itself afresh
friend or foe
else I embed further
and more securely in my hole -
then the ripples will dissolve
the reflections in the pond
so foreboding

in this world of ghosts oft-times besieged
I authorise, by course, what comes in, what may leave
ever on the qui vive
lest a trojan spy-horse
by her siren sound-track
infiltrates my sacred cave
so to wreak its wide-scale havoc -
spirits loom large, then bounce back
leaving me shaken
yet unscathed.

yet in my sequestered mental work-shed
this army of objects
has infiltrated my defences
and colonised my mind
to co-habit in my mental dell
each leaching my attention
debasing my awareness
resulting in this mindless, fuzzy mess.

when I meditate upon this suffocating landscape
I recollect each gift-horse
came emblazoned under auspices
of a little slice of paradise
on condition this hermit left her still small place
to dote upon her new-found babe
- until all autonomy of thought was gone
yet the stench of cadavers remained

with a little upheaval
can I retire to the cradle of nature
with nothing to make claims
which weigh on my attention;
instead do I behold
naked life
taking place -
for the world just floats
in my still small place

meditations on time

they say the past is dead and buried
each moment hallowed
for single use only
in the structure of the whole -
blink and you miss it -
each dark chapter of the past
consigned full-faced to the dustbin of history
or filed away till judgement day
but so many times in life
the shadows of the past do resurrect it
as if from nowhere they rear their head

what's further, if we merely rearranged the tables and the chairs
who'll dispute
we'll be re-living ancient affairs
over again?

how I write off dim memories
well and ill
as picture post-card snaps
their once pulsing life
which did augur of the future
slipped between my fingers
in the crumbling sands of time
such that I can no longer distinguish
what's real and what's illusion

yet they say of here and now
'tis the face of reality's finest hour
even the whole being
of the blooming existential flower
or wilting lily

yet 'tis recurrently the case
the present has an emptiness
while I try muster faith
that the manna of life past
will spin again about the carousel
to bring us face to face again
but just as plausible
that centrifugal forces
will fling my vital sustenance
hurtling thither
into the bowels of deepest, darkest, outer space

thursday thoughts

these thoughts
coruscate the psychic sky
flashbulb flares they fill the firmament
each cerebral scout
searching
for the Way
Out

these thoughts
spit and splutter; they
hit their heads
on celestial clutter.
Each psychic dart
sacrificing self
to the Puzzle
of the Promised
Pasture-land

these thoughts
fizzle and flop
all looks like a leisurely lull,
a mental road-block.
In fact from the flanks, do Satan's snipers,
(under guise of materialist matters)
secretly slay
my thoughts for the Day,
like clay pigeons
they Shatter.

these thoughts
leap like lemmings
to death's daring denouement
sending shrapnel to the skies
scratching my spectacles
and also my Eyes.

broaching the limits of poetry

I must confess
the normal living-state
to be an uncomprehending daze;
for as far as the eye can see
it's all surface and no meaning
which maketh the mind's eye glaze over;
and wherever it finds a prickly bit, its gaze retracts inward;
thus I'm confined to a flat landscape
described not by poesy but by prose

yet the poet in me
wants to roam freely
planting unlimited flags
all about the mental landscape
like a gung-ho imperialist;
yet what she's really seeking out
and her heart's craving after
is artistic uplifting
and the epicentre of doubt

so should this metaphysical East Anglia
be walled off
as a no-go area
for the aspiring poet?

yet as soon as I puff
on a cannabis roll-up
my questioning hound
breathes into being
and suddenly nothing is out of bounds
she'll sniff where she pleases

and as I thump
along the ground
and the wave of vibrations
makes my skull shudder

thoughts are sifted
through the mind's sieve,
and from time to time dislodged
from a barren precipice
until they emerge
fully formed in the conscious world;
it's like collecting the booty
in a fairground amusement

yet I may take no credit
when inspiration strikes
for the muse always takes me
by surprise

the games of fate

when my spirit's driven
to imprecate 'gainst the iniquities of living
and thereby garner all the pleasures accrued from being
dismissive
and I fancy launching myself out of the quotidian into orbit
with my crack of the whip;

in a lucid instant
I wonder whether life is just the neutral reality
in which we float and pursue our multifarious activities;
or if it's something else,
to wit, a game which is being played at our expense;

and whether or not
we're in the lap of the gods
the origin of life was obviously no regular phenomenon
which painted life a peculiar stain
on the physical landscape;
yet it's my opinion
we're being toyed with
because life's so habitually tainted
with the interference of fate

yet whenever we sense
some supernatural event
the memory immediately begins to fade
until it's consigned to time's landfill-site
and we prefer to doubt that it ever took place

and when reason hits a stumbling block
despite every appeal having been made to logic
and reality's functioning
appears to have hiccupped
it's easy to perceive the work of the gremlins
though in the final reckoning
it's impossible to prove if the gremlins exist or not

when a person is plucked from the public
to rendezvous with us
it's clearly a miracle that it's this particular individual;
yet we're blasé enough
to let them seep back into the crowd,
perhaps gambling on the possibility of another encounter

and fate is accommodating
with a spurt of chance liaisons
before she sucks this person
forever back into the masses,
never again to be heard of -
I can almost hear fate's cackle

while fate marches apace
we're left navel-gazing
searching for some rhyme or reason
driving the persons we meet,
whether it's to be love at first sight
or, including both at the same time,
ships who pass in the night

glossary

glossary of unusual or challenging words used in "Sounds of the Soul: Adventures in Time"

	word or phrase	meaning or interpretation (as used in the poems) nb prefix A signifies a word newly devised by Andrea herself
	abjure	to solemnly reject, disclaim or swear off something
	abscond	to run away secretly, especially to avoid punishment
	absurdist	deliberately ridiculous art, or theatre, to parody and mock real life
	accolade	praise and acclaim, especially by award of an honour of some kind
	agglutination	a mass of stuff congealed or stuck together like glue
	aletheia	the philosopher Heidegger saw this as open connectivity between the truth of things
	amorphous	without any definite shape
	anachronistic	from a completely different time or era than its surroundings or context
	angst	acute, indefinable, sense of anxiety or indecision
	annuity	a regular income in return for an initial sum of money paid
	anthropological	relating to the study of human beings and their culture
	anticlimactic	finishing in a disappointing or ineffective way
A	anysoever	anything whatsoever
	apocalyptic	relating to a Doomsday ending of the world
	Ariadne	her thread enabled the Greek hero Theseus to escape from the Minotaur's labyrinth
	arrow of time	the unchangeable direction that things happen in science and life generally
	ars vivendi	the art of living satisfyingly
	artefact	something made by someone, or inevitably caused as by-product of some event
	atavistic	an emotion (or impulse, or action) coming from primitive instincts
	athwart	a sailing term, meaning across the direction of travel
	autonomy	independence, freedom of self-government
	avowal	an emotional declaration
	awol	a military term, meaning temporarily absent without permission
	axiom	a reasonable basic assumption which can't be proved without assuming something else
	bastion	a military fortification, or someone defending strong principles
	behemoth	a gigantic creature or organisation
	beholden	indebted or morally obliged to someone
	behove	to be appropriate for someone to act in a certain way
	bent	an enjoyable skill or interest
	bifurcate	to split into two different directions
	burgeon	to develop and flourish successfully
	cadaver	a corpse, especially in medical situations
	capricious	impulsive, changeable, unpredictable
	carnal	sexual without love or emotion
	catharsis	a liberating or purifying emotional experience
	caveat	an advisory warning or caution
	chariots of fire	old-fashioned poetic image of dramatic divine force
	chi	vital energy in Eastern medicine
	chiaroscuro	the interplay of light and shade in a painting
	churlish	resentful or grudging
	clipper	an exceptionally fast nineteenth-century commercial sailing ship
	cochlea	vital part of the inner ear, connecting to the brain
	cognitive	relating to how the brain converts sensation and information into feelings and ideas
	confabulate	to talk together, to create narrative together
	conjecture	to make reasonable guesses or suppositions about something we don't know for sure
	constellate	to make into clusters, like groups of stars
	coquetry	romantic flirting or teasing
	corporeity	tangible physical existence, embodiment as matter
	coruscate	to sparkle with light
	crepuscule	old-fashioned word for the period of day immediately following sunset
	cubism	style of painting initiated by Picasso in which you see several sides simultaneously
	deadweight	an oppressive burden
	definitive	unequalled in quality or authority, a benchmark for all the others
	demise	death or termination
	descry	to see by looking carefully
	detrimental	having a harmful effect on something or somebody
	detritus	a random mass of fragmental decayed remains (animal, vegetable or mineral)
	devil's advocate	somebody who deliberately argues to the contrary to battle-test a point of view
	dialectical	harmonising two different points of view by smoothing-out their differences
	dictum	an authoritative statement or arrogant assertion
	diktat	a decree issued by a dictator or conqueror
	dint [by dint of]	a specialised word implying virtue, eg "Her success was by dint of very hard work"
	discombobulation	a state of muddle or confusion probably caused by somebody else
	disingenuous	diminished truthfulness, esp. by pretending to be more naïve than you really are
	disparate	totally different in quality or quantity from others in the same general category
A	distain	well, not sure, maybe to disdain, or to remove a discoloration
	diurnal	happening regularly during daytime, or at least on a daily basis
	Elysium	in Greek mythology, where good people go after death, though not where the gods live
	Elysian fields	Elysium is most frequently referred to as the Elysian Fields; an agnostic euphemism
	empirical	based on experiment or observation rather than theory
	enfant terrible	a brattish person in polite company, behaving unconventionally and being indiscreet
	entropy	a universal number constantly increasing as time passes and things crumble & decay
	epiphenomenon	allegedly secondary to reality eg "mind is an epiphenomenon, brain is the reality"
	Eros	the mythological Greek god of Love, equivalent to the Roman god Cupid
	evanescent	fading away, transitory
A	everysoever	anyone, or anything, whatsoever
	exigency	a very urgent, or very demanding, situation
	existential	relating to human existence, or to existentialism (a rather negative philosophy of life)
	expurgation	editing out, or expelling, the offensive parts of something
	extrapolate	to guess at something you don't know, based on the things you do know about it
	factoid	an unreliable fact based on unverifiable sources or urban myth
	feign	to put on a pretence of some emotion or interest
	firmament	the complete expanse of sky and starry heavens around the earth
	flux	a flow of something, or turbulent change in something
	Fortuna	the Roman goddess of good luck
	fracas	a noisy quarrel or brawl
	garner	to gather or store something, as does a farmer with his grain
	genuflect	to bend one or both knees to something holy
A	gloopy	thick, viscous and glue-like, or temporarily twonkish
	glutinous	viscous and sticky
	googleplex	an unimaginably large number: a google is 10^100, a googleplex is 10^google
	gremlin	an imaginary imp supposedly responsible for mechanical or electronic problems
	guttural	spoken from the back of the throat
	harpy	a Greek mythological creature, having a woman's body but with wings and claws
	haunch	the hindquarters of an animal
	hephaestian	relating to Hephaestos, the Greek god of fire and blacksmiths (like Roman god Vulcan)
	hermeneutic	relating to the interpretation of Scripture, or of the purpose of life in particular
	hermetically sealed	airtight
	hither	towards this place (where speaker or narrator is)
	homunculus	a fictional miniature human being in alchemy or early biological ideas
	horse-whispering	establishing a natural rapport with horses, especially wild or traumatised ones
	houri	a nymph in the Islamic paradise
	id	as told by Freud, the subconscious mind containing the primitive human instincts
	idiosyncratic	to have uniquely personal characteristics
	incumbent	down to the subject person to do whatever it is
	inexorable	relentless
	ingénue	a naïve girl or young woman
	insipid	bland, lacking in flavour or excitement
	internecine	mutually destructive or deadly to both sides in a conflict
	liminal	at the lower limit of sensation
	lumpen	dull, stupid or unthinking
	lustre	gloss or shine, especially of a jewel or ornament
	lustrous	having a noticeable lustre
	macho	tough, masculine, swaggering
	Mammon	a false god in the New Testament, personifying wealth and greed
	mantra	an unthinking slogan in popular usage or business-speak
	masquerade	a festive occasion where masks and costumes are worn, an elaborate pretence
	metamorphosis	a complete change in something, as in tadpole to frog, caterpillar to butterfly
	metaphysics	the branch of philosophy attempting to grapple with the nature of external reality
	methodology	the organised procedures by which some complex task is achieved
	militate	to (impersonally) influence strongly against (sometimes for) something
	minimalism	art, especially music, using the simplest elements to the best possible effect
	missive	a letter, especially a formal or official one
	module	a self-contained subunit of something
	multifarious	having many parts of great variety
	mundane	ordinary, humdrum, boring
	nadir	the lowest or deepest point of something, rock-bottom, the pits
	nascence	birth, state of being born
	netherworld	underworld after death (eg Hell), otherwise the world of society's underclass
	neurone	a nerve-cell
	nexus	an interconnection centre in a system
	nihilism	a belief that nothing, even life itself, has any value or importance
	noetic	relating to the mental world, especially the intelligent thinking side
	numinous	having a deeply spiritual or religious quality, mysterious and awesome
	obeisance	deference, a respectful gesture
	oblivion	state of forgetfulness, or being forgotten, or both
	obverse	the front side of something, such as the heads side of a coin
	ocular	relating to the eyes
	Odysseus	a Greek mythological hero, famous for his resourcefulness and his adventures
	oesophagus	the food-pipe from the throat to the stomach
A	oomptey-oomp	gentle brass-band background music in our inner world
	opine	to express an opinion that …
	origami	the ancient Japanese art of paper-folding
	osculate	to kiss
	osmosis	the energy-driven spread of fluid through a barrier or membrane
	Pandora's box	In Greek myth, the First Woman's casket from which all evil came, but Hope remained
	paradigm	the perfect example, or stereotype, of something
	pari passu	in equal amounts, or at least proportionately
	parse	to analyse the grammatical structure of a sentence
	penance	a voluntary self-punishment for a sin or wrong-doing
	penumbra	a partial eclipse, in which the shadow is less than complete
	periphery	the outside boundary line, or surface, of something
	peristalsis	the muscular contractions of the digestive organs that push their contents down the line
	pernicious	harmful or deadly
	phantasmagoria	a dreamlike medley of images, real and imaginary
	phantom	a ghostly, or even imaginary, image or mental symbol
	plethora	a large or excessive number of things, a super-abundance
	pinion	the junior partner in a gearwheel relationship, having fewer teeth than the other wheel
	pragmatic	approaching issues in a practical rather than theoretical or ideological way
	preamble	an introductory statement
	prescient	correctly anticipating events before they happen
	primordial	existing at the very beginning or earliest stages of time
	problematic	causing a difficulty
	problematise	cast constructive doubt upon
	proselytise	to convert people from another religion to your own by means of a campaign
	prosody	the study of poetic structure
	protean	readily able to change from one shape to another
	protocol	an agreed form of behaviour, communication or negotiation in official business
	psychical	relating to supernatural events, possibilities or capabilities
A	psychosities	I'm not really sure!
	qigong	a health-giving Chinese technique of breathing and exercise
	quagmire	a swamp, a hopelessly tricky and embarrassing situation
	quintessence	the most concentrated inner spirit of something, its spiritual DNA
	quotidian	occurring every day, commonplace
	realm	originally a royal domain, nowadays any major area of involvement or interest
	recalcitrant	strong-headed and disobedient
	recap	short for recapitulate, to summarise or restate a story so far
	redemption	something which cancels out the guilt of wrongdoing
	redoubt	a fortified position or stronghold
	reflux	distillation and recondensation
	reverie	an absent-minded daydream
	rill	a small brook or stream
	river of Lethe	in Greek mythology a river in Hades causing total forgetfulness to all who drink from it
	Samarkand	like Timbuktu, or Shangri La, or Ithaca, somewhere we all yearn for inwardly
	sasquatch	in Canadian folklore a hairy manlike beast which leaves huge footprints
A	schwurr schwoars	this rails against the predictability of association and things doing what it says on the box
	scrutinise	to look at something and examine it very closely and carefully
	scrutiny	close visual examination
	segue	stretch away from something like pieces of music played without a pause
	sensibility	emotional depth and responsiveness
	sequestered	unfrequented, secluded, lonely
	seraphim	angels of the highest rank in Christian tradition, though not in Judaism or Islam
	sinuous	graceful, snake-like in movement, or like a waveform moving across a screen
	skulk	to move stealthily and lurk in the shadows
	soliloquy	speaking your thoughts aloud in a theatrical way, especially when alone on a stage
	solitudinous	being or existing in solitude, though not necessarily in a lonely way
A	sombering	having a deeply serious, even melancholy or gloomy, effect
	sooth	old-fashioned word for sooth (as in the word soothsayer)
	spinners of fate	in Greek mythology, they controlled the thread of life of every mortal from birth to death
	stoma	a microscopic breathing pore on a plan's surface, letting atmospheric gases in and out
	stricture	a severe criticism of somebody
	stupor	dullness, lethargy or even semi-unconsciousness
	subjective	purely personal perception, emotion, thought-process, or prejudice
	subsistence	a life-style geared to whatever necessities are available
	subvert	to undermine or sabotage a person's loyalties or belief-system
	succour	help or assistance, especially at a time of extreme distress or difficulty
	superfluous	more than is necessary or required
	supposit	to adopt or integrate something into ourselves, to take it on board wholeheartedly
	surreal	dreamlike and bizarre, mixing the everyday with the unreal and impossible
	tabula rasa	clean slate, without mental baggage of any kind, as new-born infants are (allegedly)
	tai chi	a Chinese system of light exercises and coordinated rhythmic movements
	Tantalus	in Greek mythology, was punished by fruit and water being always just beyond reach
	tao	Chinese concept of the basis for things to exist and events to happen
	terra firma	solid ground
	theophany	a visual manifestation of God, such as the burning bush or the pillar of cloud and fire
	thwart	to frustrate or successfully oppose something or somebody
	translucence	semi-transparent, allowing light through but only partially
	travesty	a grotesque imitation in mockery of something or somebody
	troika	a group of three people in power, or in charge of something, maybe dictatorially
	trompe l'oeil	artistic, decorative or architectural special effect to create an optical illusion
	tsunami	Japanese word for a massive tidal wave that sweeps inland and causes destruction
	utopian	relating to a hopelessly idealistic state of government and social harmony
	vacillation	indecisive fluctuation in somebody's determination or intended course of action
	vacuous	mindless, dopey, devoid of sense or meaning
	vagary	erratic action or behaviour
	velleity	the lowest possible level of interest or intention, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action
	veridical	previously dreamt of, or revealed in dreams or hallucinations
	vernal	relating to springtime, or occurring during spring
	vestibule	a lobby outside a office, or small antechamber
	vial	an old-fashioned word for a small bottle, containing some costly liqueur or medication
	visceral	relating to bodily organs (especially intestines), hence to deeply instinctive intuitions
	wanton	lacking in self-restraint, immoral, vicious, or destructive
	wiccan	relating to the modern cult of pagan religion and white witchcraft or Druidism
	wont	habitual practice, accustomed tendency, to do something
	zenith	the point in the sky vertically above somebody or somewhere (opposite of nadir)