Yesterday I dug out my first full tank - C9. I stripped to the waist and climbed down the ladder onto the level of the skins, about four feet deep in a twelve foot high, six foot square tanks, painted yellow inside, illuminated by a safety lamp swinging from the manhole cover at the top, fiendishly hot and stinking of alcohol. With Jean-Pierre at the small door in the front, scraping the skins out into the augur with a long fork, I heaved the piles down to him, dripping sweat into the thick sludge. The Augean stables came to mind, as did Hell, or the work of the cells of my liver after a night out. God knows how long it took, but I must have shifted a couple of tonnes, and emerged, soaked, splattered with juice, streaked with sweat and must, triumphant, demanding a cigarette.

I am pressed by time: delimbed and changed. Even my body is unfamiliar to me now, enlarged, bled and refined. Chattering in the cold winds of dawn and racked out in the midday sun, alternately starving and engorged - always thirsty, waiting on tomorrow, attesting the provenance of the future, holding back the pleasures of this day for that. I seek peace, but am undecided where to find it - yet, for all that I am happy. Ye gods and demigods, I am happy.

Jacques Derrida and Christopher Reeve dead in the same week - the Guardian (International Ed.) doesn't know what to do with itself - particularly as noone seems able to sum him up, except by slighting him. Jackie would have loved it. A sign defines itself by difference, and only by its difference, to other signs. A text has multiple meanings, or rather understandings, of which many, if not almost all, are unknown, and perhaps unknowable, by the author. These seem to be the salient points; why are they so difficult to point to? The author cannot anticipate the reaction of hir audience, cannot predict the effect of hir outpourings; indeed s/he changes them, muddies the waters, with hir construction of them, like Heisenberg, crouched over the microscope, formulating uncertainty even as it undoes him, his eye changing, irreversibly, the atoms beneath his gaze. Like God, remaking the world through floods, fires and expulsions, the creation of difference which is simply the duality of our gaze, splitting our atomic life into us and them, I and not-I, when all are one in Yog-Sothtoth, in time, in the Tao, in the true God who exists outside of our perception, outside all perception because SHe is perception. The medium is the deity. I am. Four thousand years before Descartes, magus Moses tries to bind the spirit of the incarnate with a carny's trick: know your enemy's name, fix a crosshair on the target (night-goggled special forces on the cool hills paint munitions dumps and hospitals with laser beams for the incoming fighters), and possess its very self. But the flaming foliage answered only: I am. You can't have multiple readings of me - I am undeconstructable, for I am everything, the word, the way, Q, the original text, wellspring of the world.

I have been a miner, digging at the face of life; fermented grapeskins, exhausted passions, falling like dead leaves about my feet, into my boots, leaving dirty stains like blood-streaked wounds on the sweating flesh of my upper arms, my lower back, my thighs, loci of strength and the pain which must be endured to produce it. I have been a miner, finding my way through long tunnels, black with darkness, the light upon my forehead an erring but insistent port light to the mysteries. I have thrummed the plumblines of sunken wells, and gazed in awe above the rocky seats of trig points, the trinity of direction confusing, revealing only cloud. I take my position and move on. I prefer not to stay - I chase. I want to catch something I might be ashamed of.