Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What is Simulism
Simulism holds that it is not a paradox to accept the Enlightenment casting of the universe as indifferent and yet to give rein to our ceaseless desire to seek meaning and to impose significance on all we encounter and do. One lies in the field of rationality; the other, in what it is to be human. To force a singular observation is to kill or set free Schrödinger’s cat: we would be left either as mere mechanism or as pure fantasy.
Simulism concerns itself instead with human meaning — a space that accepts we are deceived by our own perspective. We are sure, wrongly, the universe is imbued with meaning. It is our framework; we are caged within it and it cannot be escaped. We will seek meaning in everything we encounter.
This must not be denied. To deny is to strip away all that is human. Yet, to ignore what we also rationally observe, is ridiculous. The universe is indifferent.
Simulism accepts both: the void of meaning and the belief there must be meaning. It then defines what is important is human meaning: The search for meaning even in the face of knowing such is will never reach conclusion because to conclude is to inevitably fail.
Even as, on one hand, we gradually efface belief in the divine, and, on the other, we make machines that can emulate our desire for closure, we remain unique within our field of knowledge. Alone in the universe, we keep saying: Why?
To live as a Simulist is to accept that doubleness: an ouroboros whose mouth is indifference and whose tail is significance, each feeding the other without end.
It is, in essence, the sublime without God — consciousness brooding, to rework Milton, over the dark abyss, and in doing so, stirring the firmament, and seeing that it can be good…
…providing we remember that it is up to us to keep creating, thinking, living, making; to keep pouring our matter of meaning in, forever, tail to the head.
Q2. How does Simulism link the novels, the photography, the haiku, and the garden?
Each of the modes I work in approaches Simulism in a different way.
Novels
The Ghosts of Swelford trilogy uses mythic satire. They laugh at the folly of all of us, our egos chasing significance and most of the time getting us and everyone else in a mess, but offer a vision of how, through making the right choices, by choosing love and through community, a different vision can be built.
Photography
My photography comes from the same reflex but is applied utterly differently and in a visual way. I show how the desire to produce or make meaning is inevitable in any system programmed to always try to find an answer. I take images; they are a combination of my eye, thought and the capacity of the camera. I edit these, because I have a demand for the images to meet my patternation. But then I dissolve them digitally, and allow AI to undertake a process of making sense of what it has been offered. This isn’t collaboration but demonstration — an experiment in how any system, human or mechanical, strains to impose pattern on the unknown. It does its best. It is hallucination. It is not the input and it does not adequately describe a single viewpoint in a recognisable way. It teeters on the edge between some form of mimesis and abstraction. Again I intervene and edit. My aim is to produce an image that invites a question of the viewer: what is this and how am I to respond to it? Through this, the viewer joins in a chain of image interrogations where intelligence attempts to bring certainty: my eye through the camera, the camera converting photons to electrons, my making sense of the output, the AI trying to make sense of my input, my attempts at making sense of the AI output, and finally the viewer making sense of the aftermath of pattern making, hallucination and translations between systems.
Poetry and Haiku
The poetry looks at Simulism differently. If human meaning is the act of searching for meaning, creating meaning for ourselves, how does this operate? I choose to look at two aspects. In long form poetry I consider how people raise up trivial objects to totemic status. A mug of Horlicks or a child’s toy is layered with significance that defies its indifferent status. In haiku, I look at the fleeting and the fragment and how, again, such can resonate with significance beyond a cold appraisal of value.
The Garden — Where the Whale Talks to the Stars
In my garden, I am creating a space where Simulism is made physically manifest. Plants die, trees are uprooted by storm, rocks erode. And yet it is so arranged that through pareidolia, one can envisage that the garden gestures towards a coral sea, mountains, plains, or expanses of the cosmos. So it is a space which can be just rock and earth, or mythic vision. In being both, it offers a space that does not deny the void, but also shows what humanity can do if it trusts itself to dream.
Q3. What is Topogenesthetics?
This is a term I have coined from topos – place; genesis – come into being; aesthetics – perception. It means the study of how a place comes to be imbued by humanity with meaning.
Q4. What are The Ghosts of Swelford Slaughter books actually about?
They’re satirical, haunted novels filled with the ordinary and the prosaic, the everyday and the every-myth. They are about how people try to make meaning in an indifferent world. The bankers, the land-owners, the activists, the journalists and the politicians each believe their pursuit—wealth, virtue, power, exposure—will fill the void. The witches and the spy, and some of the ghosts, see the world more clearly: they accept its limits and want, simply, for everyone to be all right. They don’t look for sweeping redemption: just a world where people look after each other (and themselves) a bit better.
The series uses grotesque comedy and moral gravity to show that human meaning is made not through denial or sacrifice, but through ordinary decency — what we choose to do for others, out of love and a desire for meaning, accepting, not trying to run from, the silence of the universe. Simulism carries strong moral implications: the ethical act becomes the human expression of meaning.
Q5. Who is this work for?
Anyone who prefers questions to declarations, and thoughtfulness to certainty, journey not ending…
Q6. Where can I read more?
On Substack — Simulist Ephimera — where I post essays, poems, haiku, fragments from the novels, and notes from the garden and studio.
Q7. Do you work with festivals, galleries, agents or commissioners?
Yes. My practice crosses fiction, poetry, photography/images, non-fiction, landscape and philosophy, and sits at the intersection of literature, art, place and meaning. I collaborate with literary agents, galleries, festivals, broadcasters and curators interested in contemporary landscape, satire, Japanese-influenced garden practice and ideas-led work.
Contact: contact@johnruxburton.co.uk