Notes to self...

(April 2008 I think)
"There is energy in things, their inertness purely illusion. E=mc², a power station in a tram ticket, the roiling fury of an a-bomb locked up in a pebble, a useless key, a discarded bottle. In bodies too. In lives. They have their inert surfaces. They too are dull and cool to the touch, but hold inside them energies vast and unglimpsed. Seen only in pain, perhaps - when the feelingless body is split open and pain pours out like atomic brilliance, incendiary, terrible, a reminder of the unimaginable forces bound up in the knots of quiet that are our holding together."

I get you Martin, but question whether any of the writers you mention didn't edit and refine for publication. The stuff you write for yourself (like the paragraph above) is to me the raw ore which you can then work into something else. It's the difference between a gold nugget and wrought jewellery. Although it wasn't explicitly on my mind, the thought behind that short passage was there when I wrote that paragraph in "Suburban Mystery" about the mystery locked away in the silent brick boxes, like the energy in plutonium. Maybe you prefer the original, I don't know.

Anyway.

All a side issue, really. Your remarks did not offend me deeply or anything. Exasperated slightly, because they expressed to me a sort of vestal purism - as if anything that has to be altered for the sake of the world is sullying itself. I don't believe that. I think it makes you more honest...

This is turning into a whole philosophical sideshow of its own. I'll drop it for now.

When's the next date?


(PS: Just found this note to self in my journal, to prove (I think) that we are actually about the same thing here: "Seems to me writing is, like meditation, a reawakening to the world. A challenge to slough off the lethargy of habitual perception and touch the world afresh. To write is to reach out and touch the world again through its recreation..." OK, now I am really and truly going to shut up.)