Thank you to all readers for your attention, with particular gratitude to those fellow bloggers who have checked in here regularly, offering comments and encouragement – they know who they are. In the previous post, I mentioned a new project that has started to take shape, and I was flattered when a number of readers contacted me to ask for more details of this. It is not, however, a project that will be publicly documented, at least not in the form that the Shoreline has been, and it is unlikely to have an internet presence. In the meantime, this site’s ‘about’ page has been updated to reflect the fact that the project has now ended.

There are a couple of other things to mention before signing off. ‘Underworld Service’, the new album from old friend of the Shoreline, Andy Sharp aka English Heretic, is out soon, and among other delights it will contain a few minutes of a lengthy conversation that Andy and I recorded some time back. Other parts of that recording may see the light of the day in due course. And on September 13th,  if you’re anywhere near the East Sussex coast, come to Fort Process – a day of talks and music in the splendidly atmospheric surroundings of Newhaven Fort. Some big names of improv and avant-garde music (Peter Brötzmann, Steve Noble, John Butcher, Max Eastley and Thomas Köner, just for starters) will be playing, and there will also be talks – including one by your correspondent, in which I will cast an eye over the Haunted Shoreline, now that it has been brought to a kind of completion.

What was it all about? Were all those signs and portents, gleaned from flotsam and pebbles, of any actual consequence in the end? Or was it all just an exercise in playing with symbols and meanings – an amusing enough diversion but, in the end, a frivolous one?

As I mentioned once before, the project initially took shape in the aftermath of drastic emotional upheavals and the ending of a previous cycle of my muddled progress through this predicament we call the human condition. For me, it has had a significance that may not be immediately obvious from the sometimes tongue-in-cheek style in which I have documented it here. Events on the Shoreline, and the themes and concepts to which they have persistently alluded, have mirrored events in my day-to-day life to an uncanny degree, in ways in which I would not dream of writing about here.

Was there a final culmination to the alchemical quest – did I find the Philosopher’s Stone? Well, no, and I don’t think it works quite like that. But I have completed quite a voyage, and stand now on the threshold of a new venture, a new alchemical process. Having pursued these threads through some intuitive stratagem positioned at the shoreline of art and occult practice, I will say only that the Shoreline, the Haunted Shoreline, made a believer out of me.

Thanks, and goodbye. And if you want to dive back in, and let the current take you round once more, go here.

‍