Maybe much of what we were thinking was nonsense. It was sustaining. I’m looking for an explanation again of what is happening. I’ve lost the ability to find the appropriate situation which can stand for what’s most intensely meant now. As though starting from the beginning again to find out how to write. Before, I had only an inkling of what I wanted to say but many images of things which seemed to illustrate ‘it’ exactly. The collection of these and their cumulative effect was ‘it’. Then I could understand what ‘it’ was. When I start from the beginning now, the impetus, the reason to write is still present, still half-hidden and half-understood but the automatic transposition of an underlying intention into ‘subject matter’ is more awkward, difficult to achieve. The impetus, the reason to write stays like a gritty pebble which won’t dissolve

“He walks from the table and picks up the TV program.

Such things previously seemed like incorruptible grit. Facts which are the writer’s jigsaw pieces, impossible to transmute. But the sentence is not immutable. Just as the atomic theory, once learnt, makes it impossible to see matter as immutable again. Even if I don’t often think about it, my thinking is proceeding with that hypothesis in mind. Metaphors and allegories can be corroded once we are able to state something baldly.

“The heart-shaped saucer fell off the table and smashed into pieces on the floor.”

Metaphors only have meaning if we are unaware of a meaning, if it’s impossible for us to say what it is precisely. The fact that a meaning is vague or amorphous, a bit intangible, is not a reason to fabricate a metaphor.

I want to write about what most concerns me, what most concerns us. To make sense of what is constantly being confused.

“John Laws hopes to have 2 million signatures on a petition protesting against striking unions.”

Things I once thought of as facts are being corroded. Like things we’ve come to think of as undeniable rights. Like the right to strike.

“It is possible to sway a large mass of people against their own personal interests.”

There is a wave of public opinion being manufactured by the media. It doesn’t have anything to do with facts. It is being manufactured by powerful conservative interests who can afford the cost.