HEAT Series 1

Within four generations, I found myself at this other end of the spectrum: from the world of my great-grandfather where a man’s duty is to transmit tradition, protecting it from the subversive effect of time, to one where tradition disappears completely and the only plausible raison-d’être of living is change that often sees itself as progressive per se.

If you can’t see them any more, then I think I must really be dead. Record in the case notes which of my conjectures you can confirm or dismiss. Draw what you can; measure what you can. But first and foremost: sharpen your scalpels, gentlemen, so that you don’t make a mess of it.

I put up my umbrella. Nothing else happens. I hold it above my head. I do this because it is raining. It is raining.

Avoid doughnuts. Doughnuts sprinkle your lap with sugar. / Avoid, for the first day of travel, all right turns. Travel light. / Wear one of the five new sweaters you bought for the trip.

Fish can all turn and flit in absolute synchrony, iron filings will point to the pole, well we’re all arranged like that in a focus on the door, something has signalled to the herd that this is what we will do and we do it, we do not move even though the rain begins again and satins darken, shirts cling and faces mercifully run rivulets.

Through all the months of chemotherapy, what Rachel focussed on was reclaiming herself. Her hair came off in soft and strangely frightening clumps in the shower as if it had no anchor. Nothing whatsoever kept it where it was supposed to be, where it had always been. Her hair said more clearly than anything else that Rachel’s world had come unhinged, that her own personal physics had cut loose and was headed for parts unknown.

This is an essay about the gigantic – women who seem permanently pitched skyward, whose articulations overpower, and have the capacity to rupture and then obliterate. It’s about the enormity and hot terror of self-expression, where words do not formulate slowly in mouths but instead ‘leap from lips’. This isn’t the stuff of sensible ambition – it’s loftiness and extravagance and total grandeur!

I worked them, sharpened hooks / for high-rollers, sewing my special rigs. / Bridles for bonito, live bait that / trailed the barbed viridian in our wake.

When [Charles Wright] calls poetry ‘this business I waste my heart on’ (WTTT, 38), he is not merely making an elegant bow to an eminent rhetorical figure but acknowledging having followed a seductive and fatal path in life. And it is with this thought in mind that we notice that his relations with spiritual masters are not always ironised.

The literary world prefers its daytime rose, / sweet and thorny, seasonal, blown. / You open only at night, on the ledge, / stepping from your continent’s shelf / like Houdini on a tightrope, flesh tensed, / gazing in all directions at once / like Titian’s triple portrait beasts, / or your own words, pointing and warning.

We have all heard of Prometheus, great rebel against the gods and bringer to earth of a commodity, fire, which we have depended on from earliest times for much of what makes us human: campfires, cooked meat, the forging of iron into ploughshares, horseshoes, swords. What is not so well known is that Prometheus had a brother, also a titan and demi-god, but as his name suggests quite opposite in nature and habit of thought.

One of the four bedrooms of each of the display homes would be furnished with an imaginary white Australian boy in mind. The room would most often be arranged to suit the taste of a sporting boy, with posters of the Chappell brothers dressed in World Series Cricket uniforms taped to the wall, Little Athletics ribbons pinned to the pinboard and empty Clarks’ running shoe boxes under the bed.

She was a strong young woman with a clear sense of her place in the world and she let the candidates, or contestants or suitors, know it, amusing herself by looking on the affair as one of those folk-tales in which a penniless beggar or soldier of fortune tries for the hand of a princess, for a kingdom too, but at the risk of his head.

Much of the language of cyberspace…seems strung out on an axis between opposing desires, for both embodiment and disembodiment. Margaret Wertheim uses that most physically explicit phrase, ‘surfing the net’, as an example. We have ‘visiting a site’ and ‘hit’. The body is ‘meat’, or ‘wetware’. Having your persona destroyed in some interactive games is called being ‘gutted’.