Tonight I spent my time (is it my time to spend?) reading in the Book. I have (it seems) spent all my life reading in the Book, a curious monkish adherence, but new words turn up all the time. They were not there before. Why does the word ‘serpentine’ appear to move, to slither, to add grace, to suggest the sheer beauty of betrayal? The Book lays down the law; the Book subverts the law. We speak of ‘hearsay evidence’; there is nothing but ‘hearsay evidence’, but ‘hearsay’ is strangely close (is it not? albeit without etymological foundation) to heresy. In the IRC (encompassed by its fragile wings, enclosed in its unending care, affronted by its petty institutional jealousies) we all felt (and back then there were many more, many more) that we held the secret, or at least one of the secrets. Later on tonight, I shall tell you what the secret was; unless, of course, I am withheld, held in the spell of Nachtraglichkeit, suspended by a fly in amber … or the fragment of a fly. We await a further fragment. I have nothing (yet) to say on the topic of the World Museum of Peppers; except that it is in a small village in the Basque Country.
David Punter 