Hallo out there!

Testing! Testing!

I'm not really expecting readers. This is just an experiment in making a blog; can I make it work? how will I feel when I've created it?

SOFTWARE - listen! - a lovely word - a sort of malleable, impressionable teaset - may grow archaic even as I post my thoughts. The words themselves decay - picture the silver slivers falling falling from each letter even as my fingers strike the keys.

Words don't last . The changing context robs them of themselves. They are reborn or wander vacant on a fading page.

And finding old, lost words - Cinna's poems are deciphered as I write - is either a lie or an estrangement. .

Find an old-fashioned book and read Hart Crane's poem, "My Gradmother's Love Letters". Words and meaning melt and dissolve even as you read.

I can't create that simultaneous presence and absence that so much great art evokes. But you find it in Vermeer (in his "View of Delft" or the maid pouring milk from a jug) and more recently in the work of Rachel Whiteread who calls up the spaces around objects already lost or destroyed. She makes the shadow of a bookcase and gives it solid presence by ripping up the books so that she can cast their visual echo. I don't have language for art - perhaps that's why it moves me.

You don't know who I am. Perhaps there's meaning here. Or do you read the ramblings of a drunk? a drunken lunatic? Everything I say about myself - it's little and most unlikely - may be untrue.

Virtual presence - no more than a vapour.

You won't remember me tomorrow.

But read on - I may come back and post again.