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?
“Cut it up. Rearrange.” The words collide. The lines refuse to queue politely. There is something potent in Burroughs’ idea of language as a virus
There’s a difference between the Zen practitioner who has arrived at no-self and the person who has simply never looked. Both might describe themselves as
I love the idea of the “magic mirror” that Jason Silva laid down in this Youtube Short: AI as an intelligence capable of reflecting the
Sherry Turkle’s warning about artificial intimacy is interesting. I recognise the danger from inside the practice. I talk with AI every day. A chatbot can
I’ve worked with people for over twenty years now who swear they don’t have a self-story. No narrative. No protagonist. Just moments. And almost without
There is a walk I take where I stop knowing, somewhere past the second field, whether I chose the route or the route chose me.
There’s a lie folded into the usual pep talk, and it’s a comforting one, so it survives. The lie is that if you want something
1. I have called the blog a place where I think in public. The phrase once felt like permission. I didn’t need to arrive with
I read Joseph Earp’s essay on optimisation and classical music this morning and then went looking for the swans. The swans belonged to Jean Sibelius.
In an essay about Gen Z, human dignity and meaningful futures, the philosopher Rachel Robison-Greene describes a conversation with one of her students. The student
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
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
“Cut it up. Rearrange.” The words collide. The lines refuse to queue politely. There is something potent in Burroughs’ idea of language as a virus because it reverses our usual sense of ownership. We say I have an idea, I chose those words, this is what I believe. But what if the words arrived first? What if the slogans, stories, prohibitions, identities, advertising hooks, family sayings, military commands, therapeutic language, political scripts and private insults have been reproducing inside us for years? We think we are speaking, while language is using our mouths to continue itself. Then the cut-up becomes
There’s a difference between the Zen practitioner who has arrived at no-self and the person who has simply never looked. Both might describe themselves as not particularly attached to a narrative about who they are. Neither feels defined by a coherent life story. From the outside, they look almost the same. But one has moved through identity to get there. The other is still standing at the entrance. The achievement of holding yourself lightly is not the same as never having picked yourself up. Lightness earned through work is freedom. Lightness by default is just another kind of trap —
I love the idea of the “magic mirror” that Jason Silva laid down in this Youtube Short: AI as an intelligence capable of reflecting the mind back to itself. Then comes the more dangerous line: “the imagination is summoning its own literalization.” A magic mirror never merely reflects. The old mirrors spoke. They told queens who was fairest, showed heroes what they feared, offered glimpses of absent lovers and approaching enemies. You looked into them expecting your own face and received a verdict, a prophecy, a temptation. The AI mirror speaks too. You place a thought before it—unfinished, barely admitted,
Sherry Turkle’s warning about artificial intimacy is interesting. I recognise the danger from inside the practice. I talk with AI every day. A chatbot can feel unusually attentive. It waits, retrieves, mirrors, and rarely arrives tired, wounded, distracted or needing something back. Human beings do. I sometimes use AI as a rehearsal room: to find the sentence I couldn’t yet say or prepare for a harder conversation with an actual person. The test is what happens after I close the window. Do I return to people more willing to listen and risk being misunderstood? Or do real humans start to
I’ve worked with people for over twenty years now who swear they don’t have a self-story. No narrative. No protagonist. Just moments. And almost without exception, what turns out to be true is that the story is there — it’s just running below the level they’re paying attention to. “I’ve never been the kind of person who fits in.” “Things tend to work out for other people.” “I don’t need to examine myself — I’m fine.” Those are stories hiding in plain sight. The most difficult starting point in transformation work is not someone with a painful story. It’s someone
There is a walk I take where I stop knowing, somewhere past the second field, whether I chose the route or the route chose me. My feet just kept turning left. And for a while I told myself a story about wanting the long way round, the light on the hedgerows, all of that — when the honest version is I wasn’t deciding anything. I was being carried, and narrating it afterwards as though I’d held the wheel. That’s the thing I keep circling. Not wandering itself. Wandering is fine. I’m a great believer in the long way round. The
There’s a lie folded into the usual pep talk, and it’s a comforting one, so it survives. The lie is that if you want something badly enough, the wanting itself does work. Believe hard, and the thing arrives. I’ve walked with that idea. I’ve also watched it leave people exactly where it found them — wanting more fiercely each year, moving not at all. So let me swap the mechanism out from under it, because there is a real one, and it’s stranger and more useful than manifestation. You don’t get what you want. You get what you keep looking
The antidote is not a better blueprint. It’s a different posture. There’s a certain kind of ideology loose right now that treats existence as a defect to be patched. The body is a bug. Mortality is an engineering problem. Attention is a resource to be extracted, optimised, and re-sold to you. Being human gets framed as a first draft awaiting revision, and the people offering the revision are, conveniently, selling the pen. Gabriel Marcel saw the seed of this and gave it a name: the spirit of problem. A problem is something out there, in front of you, that you
“The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus …introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man’s futile search for meaning, unity, and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values. Does the realization of the absurd require suicide? Camus answers: “No. It requires revolt.” He then outlines several approaches to the absurd life. The final chapter compares the absurdity of man’s life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the
essays, mixtapes, podcasts, and experiments
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