Comments on writing:
‘“Write a sentence as clean as a bone”, says James Baldwin; and yet, what use is a clean bone, detached, dismembered, dissevered, dissected, shorn of all the muscles and ligaments, emptied of the blood-breeding marrow, and the rest of the skeleton, bound to it by these things alone? Nothing but a relic, a fossil, a stick of calcium, fit for nothing but to be thrown to dogs and rats, or else hung up to admire, not for itself, but for the flesh and blood it once supported, and which supported it in turn; or rather for the movements and sounds made by that flesh and blood; or better still, for the loves, fears, courage, and imaginations those sounds and movements inspired in others. The useful bone is the dirty bone, the bone still bound by cartilege to the rest of the skeleton, the skeleton to the muscles, the muscles wrapped in the skin, and the whole body still alive. A bone cannot come into being without those things, and the moment they are gone, it begins to fall apart, unless turned to stone or locked away in tomb or reliquary. After that it is fit only for scavengers to eat, or else to be admired for all its late owner achieved in life when it was still uncleaned, hidden, mixed promiscuously with all the other organs of the body’.
