rows of teeth like cuttlefish bones

found on an old thumbdrive backup, recording of honours brain spasm

when we talk of life, we are talking of a story {nods to giddens}, yet when we talk of a story we look only at it’s de-constituent parts, not at the life of the story {sartre, death of text as well as death of author – we’re eulogising a text when we speak of it}. much like the scattered mistresses of renaissance sonneteering {nods to vickers} we atomise our texts, disassemble them and analyse them from a particular view to ascertain a particular hypothesis of the literature. do not think for an instant i do not love this process, the extrapolation of detail and meaning is the well spring of intelligence and an exercise of existential importance; the ‘but’ of the matter however is that in doing so we cordon off our section of understanding. so the very act of critically appraising a text contains its own censorship, plays out its own mores and reveals the limits of the hypothesis. while we sometimes don’t see it and often daren’t speak its name, we are living post-modern, the popular critical zeitgeist is that of delimited, self-referential texts.

sometimes i think the very purpose of literary endeavour is just about having enough to say at a conference so that we don’t all go mad trying to fill the silence.