On Silence

How many does it take to make a silence? Is it two? Or one? But of course the answer is none. You cannot have a silence if somebody is there.

On defining poetry

Poetry is a way of speaking that is not, in any one of a dozen senses, a usual way of speaking. It is determined by the tensions of its structure and style and idiom, inflected through the poised artificiality of its manner. It is a negotiation between form and formality.

Alice the Mystic

It is always the present in a mirror. Who says so? Ageless Alice says it; and so do you. You've looked in the looking glass (what a name! as if the glass is looking at you!) and you've seen the thing I'm talking about. You know as well as anybody that a looking glass has no future and no past.

If the mirror world and the real world mix, anti-matter and matter, there will be an explosion. This is because timelessness and time make a perilously volatile mix. It's a truth well known to the world's mystics. ("'For what use is a life,' said Alice, 'without visions and conversations'")

Volcano mathematics

What’s inside the volcano? Fire and the gleaming lava that washes the face with heat? Or soot and choking dust and hills of ash? Or perhaps the question should be: which quantity outweighs the other? This is a difficult mathematics.

Passion

The word passion is linked etymologically to concepts of passivity. We don’t think of it this way anymore of course: we think of passion as a positive force (a positive good, often). It’s a wish fulfilment thing. ‘I feel passionately about this …’ ‘I feel passionately about you…’ These expressions actually mean ‘I have surrendered the agency and activity of my feelings; I am in a merely reactive and passive state.’ Dominos fall with exactly this passion.

But (and this is the nub) this does not entail a Stoic or a Rational imperative to escape our passions. To attempt to be free of passions is to be seduced by a dream of perfect independence: power, active control, the ideally circulating Unaccommodated Man. But it’s a false flicker. Passion is a relational term, and it is only our relations define us as fully human. Nobody can be passionate about themselves—enthusiastic, excited maybe, but not passionate, any more than the universe could ever passively react to the universe, or the Singulatity be passionate about the Singularity. It’s a misunderstanding of the term. So the attempt-Stoic or the attempt-Rational to overcome our passions is actually a project to isolate and dehumanise.

The original meaning of the word is now only recalled in archaic linguistic fossils. The Passion of the Christ is not about the fury or the intense desire of Christ, but the period of agonizingly passive suffering of the Christ. But even here the modern and original senses blend semantically, and indeed representationally: in Gibson’s film the quasi-erotic objectification of the naked body in pain parlays passivity into the passionate lust-for-pain which is so much the currency of contemporary cinema.

Age

The mistake is to think that age accumulates; the way, for instance, we will talk of a hundred-year-old as ‘a great age’. In fact a five year old is not only as full of age as a centenarian, she’s often more so. Now I don’t mean to imply, saying this, that 'age' is synonymous with 'life'. Of course it’s trivially obvious that a five year old has more life than a 100-year-old. (This is almost, indeed, as if we’re saying life is something that cannot be accumulated; but again, of course that's right.) Nor can it be said that ‘age’ is synonymous with ‘wisdom’; nor is it purely numerical. Rather it is constitutive, and a child consists of more than an adult. Or put it another way: life, like narrative, is a focalised thing; except that it focalises at every moment with equal force. And focalisation cannot be accumulated.

Goldcrest

And here is a songbird so tiny, its bones so aeroed, its feathers so filigree, that in some cases its heaviest organs are its eyes. Because they’re filled with fluid, of course; like its belly, except that its belly can be emptied. Which makes you think: how heavy a thing sight is! Isn’t there a lighter way of apprehending light?