HEAT Series 1

The age of writing as confession is now evinced by the fact that there are more writers than readers, scribblers unable to keep reticent, acting in total cooperation with Zuckerberg and not with Gutenberg.

i dream that i have a panther i have a panther now black panther who is my little pet now who is my pet i like it like that how much is this doggy in the window tell me now i was lonely but now i’m not lonely i have a panther with me big and slinky smells catty smells musky to me and soft short fur shiny oily…

Why does the man who is having sexual intercourse, and the man who is dying, cast his eyes upwards, but when sleeping, downwards? Is it because the eyes are cast upwards as the heat moves out in that direction, while during sleep heat gathers in the lower parts of the body, and moves the eyes downwards? The eyes themselves close when there is no moisture left in them.

Atavism is, by its very nature, a complicated and mysterious transmission. In Slessor’s case the transmission is further complicated by a sense that the past is both a source of riches, and a blight upon the present.

‘Re-reading ‘Karmic Traces’ reminds me of the possibility of the essay as a poem: a spell whose purpose is to make you want to go out and find the truth for yourself.’

Cats and comets / are cousins. / With arching tails / and bright orbiting  / mating swoops. / I used to sleep / hugging my cat / I used to sleep / my nose buried / in her fur.

She herself was on her way to the moon, and if you laughed at the sight of the fish between her legs, she would eat you – and you came out again as a fish. The man had laughed, and half of him had already disappeared, he was staring straight ahead with a pair of black eyes, and he would go on doing that until she chewed his eyes to bits, and when he next saw something, it would be as a fish.

I could be a murderer, a thief, a seducer of minors, this country offered me the lot and in my anonymity, which hung like a protective cloud around my actions I felt my own response. I was beguiled, enticed, with all these impulses seeming already to have been lying, primed and ready, inside me. Vietnam was the sort of land in which I could get lost inside myself, the land of inner opportunity, and I did get ever so slightly lost and I committed one small crime.

Here I am, decades late, looking for things to touch that remind me of the Flowers. I was always between them, like a child between its parents, like a child burrowing into its parents’ bed.
They were unbreakable, the only certainty. That is what I saw then in that darkened bar. Her hair glowing about her patient face. And I was? A mouse he laid at her feet.

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.