Hard-on

The part of 'hard-on' that people get fixated with is the hard part; but what interests me about 'hard-on', qua phrase, is the on part; as if an erection is something we wear, something we drawn onto our otherwise inherently soft flesh. An erection, in other words, is the adoption of a localised exoskeleton, not a stiffening from the inside out but rather a strapping on of external armour.

Phones

There's a ghost in phones.

Once, when phones were tethered to walls and booths, those ghostly diembodied voices haunted them as a spectre haunts a house, or a graveyard, or some specific place. Now that phones have been untethered to sweep freeform and spirographic trajectories through the world, those spectres have been loosed. Now the place they haunt is everyplace.

Religion and memory

Immediate or strictly contemporaneous religions (Scientology, say) seem absurd to us, even though the miracles they declare are no more intrinsically risible than those of Christianity, Islam or Hinduism. But this must be so, because religious belief works as memory, not as to-hand experience … or at least not as this latter for most people (ecstatics and schizophrenics excepted, I mean). As is the case with our memory, many details are omitted, and many contradictions and infelicities reworked into more-than-truly-contiguous narratives. Like memory, religion doesn’t always or even particularly intrude on everyday living—it requires a will-to-contemplation to evoke it, actually, although a properly functioning religion is bound to provide copious aides-memoires (liturgy, ceremony and so on) to help in this respect. Consulting family photographs, after all, has a liturgical aspect to it.

The memory-gravity of religion means that those portions of religious practice or thought that have a significant future component end up doing that strange thing of construing future apocalypse as memory … the odd past-oriented backwardness of St John’s revealed future, for instance.

The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that this is one of the things that science fiction has in common with religion.

Open-heart surgery

The scalpel that had made his chest
Into an open-cast quarry
Mined the word-seam in his breast:
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

White Cloud, Dark Blue Sky

I saw three little clouds, bright white clods, against a sky so deeply blue it looked almost purple. I looked again: the white clouds were standing out, in relief, not against a sky but against a huge purple raincloud of such size and uniformity of colour it looked like the sky. That feeling, in the middle of your torso, when your senses shift about ...

The beast Imagination

The beast Hope is much more easily domesticated than the beast Imagination.

The Witch Speaks

You think I like my familiar? By no means, no; it is wicked, perverse, dangerous. But it's my familiar. You don't choose your family; all that you do is find ways not to reject your family. I don't like my familiar, but I love it.