On foot from Edinburgh to Canterbury for a once-in-a-decade conference on ‘What It Means to Be a High-Functioning Humanzee in a Mythological World’, we are discussing the cultural fallout of ‘phase three scholasticism’, which has rocked the academic world and the Catholic Church in Ireland, and is responsible for the suicide of at least five university deans and three bishops, as well as the war between the Irish and the Brits. The discussion is heated and many of us are on t

Said the professor — I am in a vortex, a maelstrom, below the eye’s surface, standing on the abyssal plain, the fundament of all that is....

In the Beginning Was Strange to think I am the universe and everything in it too. I call out. No voice returns other than my echo. So...

What is amazing is not that my corpse was contracted and compressed into the earth’s dark matter (while my grave went unmarked and...

Discourse in the Garden: A Short Drama An olive grove. Night. The sound of approaching footsteps. SOCRATES: ‘Swounds! A dark day for strong flowers and cool breezes. Can you deny it? PLATO: Are you spreching to me, sir? SOCRATES: I am, almost certainly. [Sits beside PLATO.] Call me I am. PLATO: Ha! Welcome. Call me anything you like. I’ll deny it later. SOCRATES: Ho! I’ve only lived the one life. Where next? Should I go on? PLATO: Always going on. Even when you’re half dead.

The Humanzee  In the heat of a celluloid American night, Doctor Franklin Ahab — host to a crowd of forty souls — walks in a stately manner through the upper rooms of his Massachusetts mansion. He descends the wide staircase, smiling and reeling off witty one-liners. An orchestra plays The Rite of Spring  in the enormous dining hall. For a few minutes Ahab casually mingles among his guests, then calls for the conductor to settle down. Hester, his life partner in a transparent