Eschatological Narratives

Several worlds are ending at once. This is not metaphor. 'Eschatological Narratives' maps four concurrent endings: the collapse of the post-war democratic consensus, the accelerating ecological catastrophe, the transhumanist project that proposes to leave the body and the earth behind, and the slow cultural implosion of a white Western dominance that can no longer sustain its own story. These are not separate crises. They are four expressions of one trajectory: a civilisation built on severance, arriving at the conclusions of its own logic. Against this backdrop, the book traces one man's attempt to understand what was done to him and what he built in response. He grew up in a Worcestershire village, adopted at birth into a white family, with no Black community around him and no one to teach him what that inheritance meant. Of his parents he was given only outlines: one Black, one white, one Caribbean, one English. No faces, no stories, no sense of who they were. For nearly five decades he built an interior world in the gap the outside world could not fill: a cosmological framework called MuMaGi, a musical system, a philosophical architecture. This book is its first major outward gesture. It says plainly what was kept underground for a very long time. 'Eschatological Narratives' moves between the civilisational and the intimate without apology, because the argument demands it. A Christmas dinner table in Norfolk and the enclosure of the commons are the same structure at different scales. The pointed arch, carrying its Arabic geometry north into the stones of an English cathedral, makes the same argument as capoeira: knowledge hidden in plain sight, patient as stone, waiting. Part cultural criticism, part memoir, part cosmological proposition, this is a book about what survives severance, and about what "the warrior comes home" means at forty-eight, when you are only beginning to understand what home is.