So far, slack-writing. I’m in a lull; when I was younger, I went through periods – of of of writer-crazes, of under-the-influence. I suppose it has to be (disappointingly for all concerned) that I’m more myself and so less swayable. But I still attempt to seek out books that will change me, and occasionally one once again does. (Clarice Lispector, Agùa Viva.)
I go back into the forest and am lost between thickly growing trunks.
What concerns me is that more stable writing lacks something because it lacks periodicity. Blue. Rose. Early. Middle. But sometimes there has to be, and so we have to endure, a season of walking in ice (Schubert, D.960) – Nature must come to seem not like nature at all, just like an element in one of its states; and then it needs to prove (Spring, torrential or not) that it can’t be killed by a sub-zero lull.
But the forest isn’t always available. Too often I stay in the glib city; it’s only when there are free animals around that there’s potential for metamorphosis. Pigeons and rats, green parrots and foxes – they won’t do; they’ve already changed into human-adjuncts, metropolites.
No, that’s wrong. I’m just bored of seeing them in Brockwell Park. A person only feels vivid when they feel hunted. Am I – are you? – capable of feeling prey? Who or what would eat me?
I see death as a perfectly circular lake, dark silver, almost perfectly smooth – because ripples of light sometimes travel back and forth across it (perhaps only to prove to me they are within my eyes, and are merely hopeful, because death is unreflective). Situated high up in the mountains, this lake is expensive to visit but far from exclusive. Entering the waters there is the most stylish thing most people do. They are being escorted into the back of a black Bentley – and driven on soft springs to the semi-circular beach of their oblivion.