What does it matter? Lying in that hard bed, unnunned, blessedly ignored and allowed to contemplate the nature of predestinate insects or, moving up-market, lobsters and crabs, crusty chaps; looking for the primordial moment of will, our will I mean, and not finding it, knowing that we did not, I repeat did not, invent ourselves and that now in this eternal fix it is not what we do that will help, it is what we are that matters and what we are is not in our hands; lying, I say with the insolence of the damned who have nothing to lose and therefore do not have to suck up in a pointless attempt at influencing divine intolerance, a steel Hades, striding forward! Lying there, I say, either the verbal transpositions of my leedle estrook or it may be my natural language composed quite spontaneously a kind of set of psalms, antipsalms if you like, the natural blasphemy of our condition, why this is hell nor am I out of it, Marlowe, q.v. It is like the spontaneous effort by which a certain kind of wasp will lay eggs in a certain caterpillar it all makes good sense you wouldn’t expect anything else. What irony that it should have been so reasonable, so sane! Because during that time I must have seemed wholly mad with garbled speech, mumbling to myself in a language which wasn’t even English but my native tongue.

However, I survived that state and began attempts to relearn a foreign language, the one I am using now. For a time I stuck to single syllables and it was quite interesting or would have been had I not still had the strain inside me, tuning me up, I thought, like a steel violin string—would I were catgut to snap and be done with, that’s what I thought, having early in life recognized that ninety-nine per cent of this language is metaphor and now having suspicions about the odd one per cent. Anyway I practised this foreign language to take the place of my so-called mumbles. It was difficult. It was like moving each syllable from here to there no that won’t do it was like having laboriously to refashion a statue, paint a complex picture, not to say “liquor” with your mouth when your mind had thought “sunrise”. I walked through the hospital regulations in a state cognate that’s the right word to madness or delirious trimmings which since by your time the whole load of religious stuff will have come back with a bang or with the bang or bangs I’ve lost my thread.

At some point I found myself back in the hotel, then in the hire car, then in the ferry, each of these stages being quite separate like pictures in frames, and not very important compared with the violin string being wound tighter and tighter the note shriller and old nobodaddy there everywhere. But I went on practising my single syllables in its despite. On that ferry (I was watching an Italian cruise ship I think the Italians said she was the Cristoforo Colombo so for my biography I mean our biography you can find the exact place and date) I tried with my mind to think the word “end”. I spoke it out loud and what my mouth said was “sin”. This made me laugh in a lopsided way as I considered the relationship between this new word, the heat in my body, the steel string, the vision, all those things a biography would uncover that I had tried to cover in our dance. Oh it made me laugh all right. But at least I now had the alchemy of one word and might add others. It was like walking on thin ice.