The first Smith

It all started so long ago when I was just a baby. I loved cats, I loved to draw and I was given my Smith puppet.
My real live cat was called Smith. I guess he was Black Smith coz he was black.
He had a short and magical life, it must have been his ninth life because he did not come back as a flesh and blood cat, he came back as a hand puppet who is still with me.
I have always loved the spirits which inhabit toys and dolls. I am not sure what part of my brain would light up in neuro imaging when I am communing with these spirits but I don't think Richard Dawkins would be too keen on my manifestations.

In October 2011 I went to France, Invited there by Dominique Deluze and La Menagerie. I was to make a short film and run an exhibition of public art with Smith.

It was a wonderful and terrible experience. Terrible as in terror and wonderful as in the most significant job of my life with the most significant Frenchmen I know.

Dominique started as he meant to go on with meetings after hours that went until midnight. My head was turning with jet lag and my French language machine was creaking and weezing into action. I have had no experience with this sort of collaboration and I am fairly sure that my colleagues were at times mystified by my behaviour. I felt as my friend Jim Mckee puts it...  a strange mix of anger and dread, and I felt Anglo Saxon to the max.
I think Smith is totally anglo saxon himself. His ancestors are not frogs after all, they are cool cats who eat sardines and sing to the sound of small guitars.

Even now he is singing the song of the sand shoe every night of the full moon because he is haunted by the beauty and melancholia  which is his France.

Lucinda Clutterbuck and Smith

 As a digital immigrant one makes the normal amount of mistakes that any immigrant makes. One has to learn the culture and the language and one can suffer from foot in mouth disease.
I have to admit that not all my friends realise that I created a tulpa without realising what I was doing.

 I thought I created the character of Smith when I became a parent and brought out my hand puppet to show my children but actually he had been there a long time before that.


I made stories, I made pictures and I even asked questions of Smith and gradually he turned into something over which I must relinquish control because other people have projected their own ideas on him.

I think he is a tulpa.....
A tulpa:  It is a materialized thought that has taken physical form and is usually regarded as synonymous to a thoughtform. (Wikipedia).
I find it unnerving and yet I have been compelled to continue with my Smith experiences. In my endeavours to learn the new world I may have inadvertently been a cyber pest. I may have sent friend requests to people I didn't know by indiscriminate clicking! 

I have been an immigrant in the real world when I lived in France in my youth and I know how awkward and rude I must have seemed to some.

So in my digital learning I will always only be a digital immigrant and as such I hope to be brave enough to continue even though I may make gaffs and will probably still click all the wrong buttons in my efforts to develop what my mentor calls "a web presence".

Smith still has something left to say and I welcome your interventions.

That was then.

Look it is true that I have been sulking. But that was then. A frail modern man has encouraged me to leave my somnolent state and come out... again!  How many times do I have to do that? It was 9 times right?
 I have recently learnt that I might be a tulpa and I am pretty excited about it. True that! She has been soaking herself in new atheist propaganda and revisiting old friends such as that Alcantara fellow and William James... Is that de Alcantara as in D'Angelo or as in de Mure? True I like words almost as much as paint but I think a tulpa can do what ever it wants!
How cool is that?

Cool cats are tulpas!!!!