On Any Longer View, Man

It Used To Be Said, Not So Long Ago, That Every Suicide Gave Satan Special Pleasure. I Don't Think That's True-unless It Isn't True Either That The Devil Is A Gentleman. If The Devil Has No Class At All, Then Okay, I Agree: He Gets A Bang Out Of Suicide. Because Suicide Is A Mess. As A Subject For Study, Suicide Is Perhaps Uniquely Incoherent. And The Act Itself Is Without Shape And Without Form. The Human Project Implodes, Contorts Inward-shameful, Infantile, Writhing, Gesturing. It's A Mess In There.

It Was The Tiredness Of Time Lived, With Its Days And Days. It Was The Tiredness Of Gravity- Gravity, Which Wants You Down In The Center Of The Earth.

Writers Spend Too Much Time Among Dead Things. I Thought That Was Profound And Actually True, That You're Trying To Pump Life Into Something That Is Inanimate. You See What A Sort Of Audacious Thing It Is To Move These Sort Of Imaginary People Around In A Very Stylized And Patterned World.

When The Sky Is As Grey As This - Impeccably Grey, A Denial, Really Of The Very Concept Of Colour - And The Stooped Millions Lift Their Heads, It's Hard To Tell The Air From The Impurities In Our Human Eyes, As If The Sinking Climbing Paisley Curlicues Of Grit Were Part Of The Element Itself, Rain, Spores, Tears, Film, Dirt. Perhaps, At Such Moments, The Sky Is No More Then The Sum Of The Dirt That Lives In Our Human Eyes.

When I Go Back To The Core Of My Childhood, My Cousin Lucy Seems Always To Be In The Peripheral Vision Of My Memories. She Is Off To One Side, Always Off To One Side, With A Book, With A Scheme Or A Project Or An Enterprise.