Another Peek at What’s Going on Besides the Novels

(Don’t worry it’s not a poem. Or if it is it’s not loaded. Or if it is loaded it won’t hurt you. Or if it will hurt you it certainly doesn’t matter.)

Put this down to insomnia as well. This morning, after dreams that were pleasant yet still motivated by real concern, I woke free of a burden. Then I heard this voice.

I have shocked myself, writing about the Christian God. I mean, I am not without what might be called a spiritual side, but I am a firm atheist. So my “spirit” is that part of me not separable from the all of me which does things one can’t by definition think oneself into by force of mighty intellect alone, and yet which are vital to existence, let alone art. For me, of course, it’s words, always words. (Not Dignity, Karl) So reading John Berryman and more recently reading a number of other poets, reading Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, more on Helen Garner’s feeling of “a mighty force”—wouldn’t the little bites in her diary make her great at Twitter? I am not sure I can recall if she ever mentioned this force to V, fuck I’d kill to ask her—and thinking back on the process of my writing because I was asked to do a Nova Mob talk—all this has led me back to my muse in a way I haven’t mused since I was a febrile teenager who didn’t want to grow up, have children, eat meat, drive a car, in South Caulfield, sharing a house with Helen and Dave. But who did believe in letting the soul do its work so that the Devil’s music could make me dance.