Journal Entry — Somewhere between currents, March 2025
I’m deep in this trip—both literally and imaginatively. Out here, with the swell beneath me and the wind churning thought into motion, I’ve been diving into A Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, Blake: Prophet Against Empire by David V. Erdman, and Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. I didn’t expect them to bleed together so naturally, or to make so much unnerving sense when placed alongside the daily news.
There’s something anarchic, electric, in Rimbaud—his refusal to conform, his outrage, his insistence on living outside the suffocation of expectation. He burned bridges with his own peers because he wouldn’t perform the role they wanted. Blake, too, railing against empire and tyranny in his time, writing as France burned, as America tore away from Britain, as Denmark faced the same colonial jaws. He saw through the veil of “reason” that justified domination, called it out in verse, painted it in wild, visionary plates.
Then there’s A Prophet Song, which feels less like fiction and more like forecast. In Lynch’s world, truth and terror walk the same tightrope we’re all on, teetering between disbelief and despair. You read it, and then you watch the news—Trump’s rhetoric, Russia’s manoeuvres, the smoke and theatre of power—and it all blends. It’s a Twilight Zone, but maybe not a new one. Maybe I’m just seeing it more clearly now, stripped of distraction, submerged in salt and text.
It feels like there’s a thread running through it all. A single thread—call it fear, call it prophecy, call it the human condition—that never snaps. It stretches across centuries, pulled taut by each new empire, each new collapse, each new uprising. It weaves through Blake’s fevered dreams, through Rimbaud’s raw rebellion, through the frightened mother in Lynch’s Dublin, through every headline where history repeats like an echo bouncing off dark water.
The difference now is speed. Once, it took five years for the world to know. Now, it’s instant. We see the horror as it unfolds, direct from the very mouths of the perpetrators, pixelated and live-streamed. But the thread is the same. Only the hand that tugs it has changed.
And I wonder—am I just more aware of it now? Or is it fraying?
My project—and expanded version of my poem A Season in the Deep—feels like it’s part of that same thread. A different fibre, maybe, but woven into the same cloth. Not a prophetic voice aimed at the world, but a descent inward—into my own unrest. A reckoning in real time. A personal season in the deep, echoing Rimbaud’s plunge into the inferno of self and spirit. A need to understand what’s breaking apart inside as the world outside does the same.
The thread hasn’t broken. It stretches still—fraying at the ends, perhaps—but carrying everything we are and everything we refuse to be.
I. Prophetic Voices in the Eye of the Storm
This journal entry wasn’t meant to become an essay. It was simply an attempt to pin down the mood of a trip—internal, external. But rereading it, I realise it encapsulates the tangled convergence of the texts I’m immersed in and the project I’m making.
Paul Lynch’s A Prophet Song plants us in the crumbling present of an Ireland drifting into fascism. Its narrative rhythm—dense, breathless, urgent—doesn’t just describe collapse, it enacts it. Like all good prophetic literature, it doesn’t comfort; it exposes. In this sense, Lynch joins a lineage that includes William Blake, who saw through the polished illusions of his age and wrote with fire against empire.
In David V. Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire, we encounter a man whose resistance was not just political but metaphysical. Blake’s poetry is soaked in symbol, myth, and spiritual defiance. He lived through revolution and repression, and he knew that the true battlefield was the imagination—because whoever controls the narrative controls the future.
II. Rebellion as Inner Flame
Arthur Rimbaud, by contrast, turned his fury inward. A Season in Hell is a burning of the self. His poetic rebellion was not political in the traditional sense, but no less radical. Rimbaud wanted to blow up every structure—religion, morality, language, even art. He infuriated his contemporaries by refusing to be digestible. In that way, he echoes Blake’s refusal to conform and Lynch’s unwilling narrator, who loses everything by trying to tell the truth.
This refusal—to be told how to live, what to see, what to believe—links all three. Each writer, in their own time and way, walks the prophet’s path: condemned, misread, or ignored until history finally catches up. Their writing doesn’t just reflect their time—it transcends it.
III. History Repeating in the Present
That thread—prophecy, resistance, the refusal to obey—is not new. It winds through human history, from empire to empire, regime to regime. It is not coincidence that reading these texts now feels familiar. The events of our own time—leaders who distort truth, wars of expansion, attacks on the vulnerable—are not deviations from history but its echo. Only the tempo has changed. What once took decades to unfold is now instantaneous. The news no longer arrives; it erupts.
We are more exposed to the raw machinery of control than ever before. But we are also more saturated, more fatigued, more uncertain of how to act. This is where the prophetic voice falters—not because it has lost power, but because we have lost the ability to hear it through the noise.
IV. A Season in the Deep
A Season in the Deep is my way of entering the thread—not as a commentator, not as a prophet, but as someone caught in the undertow. It’s not a protest project. It’s a personal descent. Like Rimbaud, I’m trying to name the shapes of my own chaos, to move through contradiction and come out changed. The dolphin is a figure, a totem, a shape I follow—not for peace, but for clarity in murky waters.
Where the others shout, I submerge. Where they raise alarm, I tread water. But the current is the same. The feeling of something slipping—language, meaning, order—internal, external, somewhere else—and the desire to swim through it rather than be dragged under. In the end, this project may be less about making sense of the world and more about making sense of myself in a world that no longer wants to make sense.