Heaven

Three trombonists, their hands
snagged on their brass loops,
heil in unison.

What battlements are these?
What sky-high white
citadel? Whose heralds?

Buoyancy

Buoyancy is by definition a dual term: the relation between a thing and the medium in which it is contained. But we like to abstract it, to treat it like a singular and absolute quality. So, if I think of somebody's "emotional buoyancy" I tend is to forget that such resiliance depends precisely as much on the emotional environment as the person concerned. And, of course, some people live in emotional equivalent of the Dead Sea.

Fire

Fire, being a combustion, is always in the process of rendering itself inert.

On being a good teacher

War, says Thucydides, is a great teacher; an equivalence that can usefully be swung about its pivot. For the best teachers make war upon us, insofar as our ignorance determines us; and the worst teachers attempt to make a truce and peace with their pupils (you know: anything for an easy life ...)

Lady Macbeth

Look over there—Lady Macbeth is still scrubbing at her hands. For her it’s not a problem; it’s a routine. It’s how she feels comfortable. You might stop her doing it, forcibly, and save her fingers from blisters; but to do so would only result in more severe blisters on the skin of her mind. Leave her alone. Obsessive compulsions, most of them minor, are surprisingly ubiquitous in society. There are reasons why. Many of these repetitive actions are codified by society (religious ritual, say); some are privately arrived at and privately observed; a very small number are treated as if they were pathological. I’d suggest the reverse; they are, in their myriad variety, a necessary prophylaxis against the chaos of the universe.

Writing about love

Love is a difficult thing to write about, not because it manifests itself in the world in impossible ways (I mean, impossible to apprehend, impossible to reproduce in the novelistic idiom—although there may be something in this) but because love by its nature inflects so large a quantity of desire that its representation gets pulled out of shape. Love in fiction becomes the textual expression of how we desire love to be. As a result we are continually getting it wrong. I'm talking about more than the simple form, the familiar erotic-romantic fantasies where you get the guy, and he’s a splendid fellow; or you get the girl and she’s a doll (though that's clearly one way of getting it wrong). I'm talking about more complex forms too, for they do not escape the black-hole-tugging ellipses of desire mapped onto lived-experience; even tales of the woe in marriage, of desperate affairs or exploitative relations tend to represent sex as mind-blowing, love as life-consuming. This is the shape of our desire for desire.

On the re-definition of a commonly-used term

So, there’s the concept of body fascism. We all know what body fascists do. They oppress the fat man and the fat woman on account of their corpulence. The fat person is the victim, here, the body fascist the deplorable one. This is to read ‘fascism’ (loosely, of course, but comprehensibly) as trope for ‘systematic or oppressive cruelty’ on an individual level. But there are other perspectives.

So, imagine a world in which some nations so effectively hoard and consume food that they become, on a large scale, morbidly obese; whilst other nations have such a precarious supply of basic sustenance that major international organisations such as the Famine Early Warning Systems Network are necessary mechanisms to bellweather the phenomenon. These people over here have the power, the money, and therefore the food, and they are fat. Those people over there lack those three things and are thin, or are dying. Now: who’s the victim, and who the body-fascist, in such a world?

See, that’s what I hate about the way that term gets used.