And that too passed ... By which I mean that on some level all of it continues to be so, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter too much any more.

The right side of my body is in serial collapse: joints going down like dominoes. As much as I can, I avoid asking myself what this means. I have a certain internal cartography. I know – or think I do – where certain experiences, certain traits of personality, certain clusters of emotion are located in my body, and this is valid on a certain level. But knowing it all too surely blocks out space for the unknown. And then there’s the awareness that all of this geography exists only on the relative plane. In moments of intense presence, in movement, it’s all dissolved. It just doesn’t exist. So it seems better not to feed it too much energy.

I feel dark inside. Through the dance, a certain process is unwinding itself in me. It is plotless and unmapped, and it isn’t finished. In the meantime this is where it leaves me, in this place – this dark place. It’s not so much that it’s hard to put this into words (although it is), but more that it’s hard to know whether putting it into words is any use – or whether words just fossilise it into some sort of spurious permanence with all the meaning leached out. When I was a child, one of my aunts had a place-mat made out of dead butterflies. They were laminated into a gruesome kind of sandwich, their fat furry bodies bulging the transparent plastic. Even at the age of eight, maybe, I saw how the essential point had been missed. I saw how when you take something bright and vibrant and on the wing and seal it into plastic limbo, you are not understanding that the wonder and beauty of life is in its evanescence, that you have destroyed whatever there was of vitality there and left yourself with some sort of grim sarcophagus.

Sometimes when I write I feel that I am committing the evanescent into the limbo of ink. When I was a child, a process occurred by which I was dislocated from my body into words. My instinctive impulse to move was displaced into the acquired discipline of writing. I was like a gypsy baby switched at birth, and once I had grown up and found my way back, I couldn’t quite trust the gadjes any more. So when I engage in the process of writing, my heart and my throat constrict a bit; my stomach speeds up. I want to struggle. I want to batter my wings against the camphor jar. That’s what it did to me in the end, dislocating myself into writing: it suffocated me and sealed me in plastic: silent, immobile. Yes, I had words – I published them – but they were half-dead: zombie words. Their lifeforce had flown away.

If I’m writing this now, it’s because occasionally, if I can keep shedding garments and digging down deeper, the passage of words across paper ceases to be the record of something experienced in some other time, on some other occasion, and the words become the unique moment of themselves. They take wing. And even thinking this makes me smell camphor, and I want to select all and press the delete key.