It's A Terrible Poison, Writing.

I Know That Part Of The Reason I Read Tolkien When I'm Ill Is That There Is An Almost Total Absence Of Sexuality In His World, Which Is Restful.

He Was Beautiful, That Was Always Affirmed, But His Beauty Was Hard To Fix Or To See, For He Was Always Glimmering, Flickering, Melting, Mixing, He Was The Shape Of A Shapeless Flame, He Was The Eddying Thread Of Needle-shapes In The Shapeless Mass Of The Waterfall. He Was The Invisible Wind That Hurried The Clouds In Billows And Ribbons. You Could See A Bare Tree On The Skyline Bent By The Wind, Holding Up Twisted Branches And Bent Twigs, And Suddenly Its Formless Form Would Resolve Itself Into That Of The Trickster.

The Minds Of Stone Lovers Had Colonised Stones As Lichens Clung To Them With Golden Or Grey-green Florid Stains. The Human World Of Stones Is Caught In Organic Metaphors Like Flies In Amber. Words Came From Flesh And Hair And Plants. Reniform, Mammilated, Botryoidal, Dendrite, Haematite. Carnelian Is From Carnal, From Flesh. Serpentine And Lizardite Are Stone Reptiles ; Phyllite Is Leafy-green.

On Buses And Trains, I Always Think About The Inexhaustible Variety Of Human Genes. We See Types, And Occasionally Twins, But Never Doubles. All Faces Are Unique, And This Is Exhilarating, Despite The Increasingly Plastic Similarity Of Tv Stars And Actors.

Vocabularies Are Crossing Circles And Loops. We Are Defined By The Lines We Choose To Cross Or To Be Confined By.