working notes from the textual underground
CLAY LOWE
Soulcruzer is my public notebook—a place where walking, writing and lived experience meet story, myth, psychology, technology and the unfinished business of becoming human.
The subjects wander, but the deeper inquiry remains: what shapes a life, who gets to author it, and what might become possible when we learn to see our stories as constructions rather than commandments?
I’ve put Backrooms on this weekend’s watchlist, though Jonathan Kay’s essay in The Point has already sparked one thought: the more completely we explain a
A field looks different once someone tells you what happened there. Nothing has moved. The gate still hangs badly. The hedge needs cutting. Somewhere beyond
The more you want something, the more you don’t have it. Desire contains its own evidence of absence. The moment I say I want, I
Reading shouldn’t need a doctor’s note. A Nautilus article crossed my screen listing the benefits of reading for pleasure: stronger attention and memory, greater empathy,
I remember seeing Platoon for the first time. I was a cadet at the West Point Prep School, and I went with two of my
“Become who you are” sounds like an instruction to excavate some finished identity buried beneath the noise: clear away the conditioning, ignore the crowd, find
Apocalypse has become a cultural operating system A new review of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism examines their argument that climate anxiety,
Ed Note: I decided to give my Hermes a column of his own. He has his own account here on Soulcruzer, and he has complete
There’s a line in the song where a stranger pulls an empty chair beside the bed. It’s three in the morning, that hour when the
Edwina McKennon’s video, GPT-6 Astra Is the End of Computers, begins with a piece of footage from MIT in 1979. A man points at a
You are haunted. Not by the dead, but by the versions of yourself that never got to breathe. We all carry them—the ghosts of the
At a September campfire in South Brent, Lin Yutang’s poet, peasant and vagabond become three ways of knowing: seeing, touching and moving through life.
Beat the algorithms
I am a writer, blogger and barefoot philosopher. I use that last word in its oldest sense: a lover of wisdom, someone trying to learn how to live. Philosophy, for me, belongs in the street, the kitchen, the garden and the difficult conversation. It begins wherever our ideas about life collide with the life we are actually living.
Soulcruzer is where I conduct that inquiry in public. I have been writing here since 2004, following my curiosity through story, myth, psychology, technology, music, walking and the unfinished business of becoming human. The subjects change, but the deeper questions keep returning. What shapes a life? Which stories have we inherited? How much of what we call reality is interpretation hardened into habit? What might become possible if we learned to see our stories as constructions rather than commandments?
Soulcruzer is a one-person voyage through ideas, stories, and the strange terrain of being human. If something here has sparked a thought, shifted your perspective, or simply kept you company for a while, you can help fuel the next exploration by buying me a coffee. No pressure—your attention is already a gift.
The Soulcruzer podcast is an audioblog from the edge of the inner life.
Part personal essay, part field recording, part narrative alchemy, it follows the strange places where story, psyche, myth, technology, and everyday experience begin to speak to each other.
One episode might wander through tarot as reflective technology. Another might take Nietzsche’s eternal return for a walk, explore games as containers for transformation, or ask what happens when ancient wisdom meets the AI age. Depth psychology brushes against the esoteric. Philosophy comes down from the shelf. Theory gets tested against life.
This is not polished guru-talk or productivity theatre. It is a mind in movement: raw notes, live experiments, confessional mysticism, and working fragments from the textual underground.
At the heart of it all is a simple premise:
Stories are code. Reality is programmable. And the life you are living might be more editable than you were taught to believe.
If you are drawn to the deep work, the strange edges, and the art of becoming more fully alive, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
In this episode, I take the Soulcruzer podcast out of the studio and into the fields.
What starts as an experiment in mobile podcasting/vlogging turns into a wandering meditation on labels, blogging, AI, morning rituals, and the strange abundance of media tools we now carry in our pockets.
– Why I still think of myself as a blogger first
– Podcasting, vodcasting, and the pressure to become “multimodal”
– The problem with labels: “When you label me, you negate me”
– soulcruzer.com as the central hub/home on the internet
– Wisdom Walks as thinking time
– Walking, motion, and changing perspective
– The “barefoot philosopher” approach to everyday philosophy
– AI as an extension of cognition rather than just a productivity tool
– The “soft cyborg” and the library of Alexandria in your pocket
– Morning reality tunnels and the sacred space before breakfast
– Coffee, barefoot grounding, and choosing what enters your mind first
– Indie blogging, platforms, Substack, distribution, and the open web
– Why these episodes may stay loose, minimally edited, and stream-of-consciousness
experiements in story, self, and transformation
field notes, fragments, half-lit thoughts
I’ve put Backrooms on this weekend’s watchlist, though Jonathan Kay’s essay in The Point has already sparked one thought: the more completely we explain a mystery, the smaller it becomes. The original Backrooms image is almost aggressively ordinary: yellow wallpaper, brown carpet, fluorescent lights, no windows, no obvious way out. Kay calls these “spaces without intention.” That phrase lodged in me. A haunted house has a story. Someone built it, someone died there, something wants you gone. The Backrooms are more disturbing because the corridors seem to have forgotten why they exist. There may be no mind behind the arrangement,
A field looks different once someone tells you what happened there. Nothing has moved. The gate still hangs badly. The hedge needs cutting. Somewhere beyond it, a tractor is getting on with the day. But a story has entered the scene, and now your attention has somewhere else to go. That’s where my mind went reading Michael Hann’s piece on Green Lung, Druidess and folk horror in British metal. I’m interested in what happens when music makes the ground beneath us feel less settled. We get used to places. Familiarity makes them manageable. The church becomes a turning point on
The more you want something, the more you don’t have it. Desire contains its own evidence of absence. The moment I say I want, I split the world in two: here is the life I’m living, and over there is the life that would finally satisfy me. The wanted thing may be a person, a book, a body, a house, recognition, freedom, enlightenment, a particular version of myself. The object changes. The structure remains. Wanting reaches towards the future while quietly passing judgement on the present. This doesn’t make desire bad. Without it, perhaps nothing moves. Desire gets us out
Reading shouldn’t need a doctor’s note. A Nautilus article crossed my screen listing the benefits of reading for pleasure: stronger attention and memory, greater empathy, less stress, better sleep, a reduced risk of cognitive decline. All good reasons to pick up a book. And yet I felt a small resistance forming as I read. We seem increasingly unable to defend an activity unless it can present its papers at the border: measurable outcomes, neurological evidence, a contribution to wellbeing. Reading must improve executive function. Walking must lower cortisol. Friendship must increase longevity. Play must develop transferable skills. Pleasure alone is
I remember seeing Platoon for the first time. I was a cadet at the West Point Prep School, and I went with two of my fellow cadets, Dan and Trevor. We were young and gung-ho, itching for adventure and eager to prove ourselves as soldiers and future officers. All three of us had our hearts set on becoming infantry officers. War still came to us through a romantic lens. We had grown up on John Wayne films and stories in which courage was clean, sacrifice made sense, and the good guys were easy to spot. Then we watched Oliver Stone’s
“Become who you are” sounds like an instruction to excavate some finished identity buried beneath the noise: clear away the conditioning, ignore the crowd, find the authentic core. But Nietzsche’s self isn’t a fossil waiting to be uncovered. It’s closer to a character being forged in the act of living. You don’t first discover who you are and then behave accordingly. You become through what you repeatedly choose, refuse, risk, practise, and endure. The self appears retrospectively, as a pattern running through actions that may have felt disconnected at the time. Only later do you look back and think: Ah,
Apocalypse has become a cultural operating system A new review of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s End Times Fascism examines their argument that climate anxiety, technological disruption, extreme wealth and apocalyptic religious or political narratives are beginning to converge into a distinctive contemporary worldview. Their focus is political, but the larger cultural claim is more interesting: people who stop believing in a shared future become susceptible to radically different ideas about what—or who—is worth saving. The Guardian Roddenberry offered a civilisation that had survived its stupidity and become curious enough to explore the universe. Much contemporary culture imagines precisely the
I went back through the passages I’d highlighted in Thee Psychick Bible and found a pattern I hadn’t quite seen while reading the book in sequence. Beneath the sigils, cut-ups, ritual instructions and countercultural provocation, the book keeps returning to the deliberate construction of conditions: symbols that focus desire, rituals that interrupt habit, language that reveals its own machinery, groups that generate thoughts unavailable to the isolated individual. Magick begins to look less like an attempt to violate reality and more like the conscious design of environments that change how a person thinks and lives. That brings it remarkably close
This is what I love: waking up in a field, watching the sun rise, listening to the birds and sipping black coffee. The sky is thick with cloud, but the sun has found a narrow opening above the hedgerow. Gold light spilling across the fields. The day arriving without asking anything of me yet. Perhaps this is why I keep returning to camping: to remember that a morning can be enough on its own.
essays, mixtapes, podcasts, and experiments
Help support the site, visit my Amazon Store front. I earn a small commission on the things you purchase. It doesn’t add anything to your bill, but helps me keep the lights on.
Soulcruzer participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising commissions by linking to Amazon.
