It's A Mystery.

"It's a mystery, it's a mystery, I'm still searching for a clue. It's a mystery to me" - It's A Mystery, Toyah

Last night's London Fortean Society talk (at The Bell in Whitechapel) was something of a mystery for me before I attended (there wasn't much information on the website) and it was still a mystery to me after I'd attended it. I reckon that even if I read speaker Neil Nixon's book 'Why Mystery Matters' (co-written with E K Knight and also the name of last night's talk) the whole thing would still be a mystery.

That's not to say it was a bad talk. It wasn't. It was very good. It just had a very loose narrative. There was a lot of digression, lots of going off on tangents. Discursion came very easily to Neil Nixon. The basic premise, that - in recent years and definitely since the Internet started to take over our lives - we have underrated the role of mystery in our lives, seemed sound to me but I'm not totally sure how that related to the idea that Elvis Presley was generated by AI in the future and sent back in time to entertain us or how we will soon be sending credit card sized spaceships into outer space to search for extra terrestrials really fitted in with it.

Nixon teaches creative writing and he spoke about that point when his students reach the end of the course, when they've become really good writers, and how that is the point when the mystery kicks in. It's not a mystery to do with UFOs, Bigfoot, or conspiracy theories (though Nixon certainly had things to say on all those subjects) but it's a mystery to do with our own lives.

We don't know our future, we can't know our future, so we need to try and make sense of this chaotic world and our place in it. So we ask ourselves questions, we use dialectic methods, to try and find a role for ourselves. This involves plunging ourselves into a mystery of sorts. Anyone who thinks they know the answer to everything (something which is impossible) is closing down the possibility of mystery in their life.

The difference between a scientist and a conspiracy theorist is that scientists are asked questions, asked to solve problems, and they do their best to answer those questions and solve those problems as best they can while accepting that in the future people may find better answers and solutions. A conspiracy theorist, and Nixon cited Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, will basically say they have the answer so we no longer need to talk about it anymore. I'm right. You're wrong. End of.

Nixon compared it to bolting the doors of the upstairs room of The Bell we were all sat in closed until everyone in there agreed he was right. I was with him here but I wasn't totally sure I was when he spoke about watching his beloved Carlisle Utd. One day he was watching them play against Barnet and it was a rare occasion because his father and his eldest son had joined him.

Their star player picked the ball up near the centre circle, ran it through the Barnet defence and slipped it past the keeper to score. Nixon claimed he knew as soon as the guy got the ball he'd score and felt that was because he was with his dad and son. But, as he pointed out, Carlisle were top of the league, this player was on fire at the time, and Nixon (who writes about football - as well as music and mystery) knows a bit about the game.

I think he knew it was likely he'd score. When he told this anecdote I turned to my friend Dewi and we pulled faces at each other as if to say "nah, mate - not having that one". It reminded me of some of Gary Lachman's less impressive claims when he spoke for the LFS in April 2022.

Elsewhere, Nixon managed to include references to such a disaparate cast of people as Studs Terkel, Charles Fort (always a popular choice of the London Fortean Society), Boris Johnson (a far less popular choice and the only mystery about him is how one person can be such a total and utter cunt), and Matthieu Ricard - the happiest man in the world, and when he told a story about watching a team of morbidly obese footballers beat a team of much slimmer footballers by virtue of their reading of their game he claimed that he'd never heard of that happening before. I couldn't help reminding him of Jan Molby.

It was a confusing, sprawling, and - yes - mysterious talk but it was an enjoyable one and Neil Nixon was a very good speaker who was generous with his time and even joined us downstairs in the pub for a pint afterwards. I'm glad I went. You're probably not glad you bothered to read this.

Thanks to Dewi, Michael, Tim, Jackie, and Paula for keeping me company last night, thanks to David and the London Fortean Society for putting this event, and thanks, most of all, to Neil Nixon. It's Jeremy Harte next month. That'll be even harder to get a blog out of.