It was, for a while, as if I could only write in verse, or at some halfway house between verse and prose, amounting to nothing, expressing something adjacent to myself, rather than expressing my own thoughts.

Even now, as I’m writing, the act of writing takes my thoughts out of my control and into its own hands, into the writing hand that admires the cleverness with which it constructs the sentences that start to appear on the page. So that, while I express something of the original idea which I wished to present, it takes on a polish and complexity that was never thought of until I started writing it out. This is also a shallowness. The impulse lives, and the words seem to bear it no relation, they do not so much kill it as leave it behind.

Tinnitus – this was what I originally intended to start writing about before words carried me away – tinnitus, I have thought from time to time, has made me feel far more closely the integration of body and mind. The fact that the brain is an organ of the body. The fact that physical and metaphysical are inextricably intertwined – the thoughts, perhaps, chemical pulsations – and that this is exactly how things should be. It is a good thing to be reminded of. Fusion, not disjunction. But it’s an eerie reminder too, because it smells of mortality.

Just a few minutes ago (it’s been a strange day: I was out of bed late as is usual, lately, and I’ve been going out too much and up too late in general) I had an image attack me while I was reading Oscar Wilde, who was speaking of children: it was children at a party, in a garden beneath a tree, in the sunlight, beating a piñata – an activity they’d looked forward too all morning – beating it and beating it babbling with happy laughter. But when it finally busted open, maggots rained out at their feet, instead of treats.

I didn’t like having a thought like that. It wasn’t really disturbing, it was just faint and sad. It was something a child would never think of.