5 january

There is a cold calculated sort of comfort to numbers-- so arrogant and dead-- so atrophyingly secure. Up is never sideways; the spider bite will swell; green is always & only blue-plus-yellow. What a morbidly pleasurable thing, to reduce life into bits of faceless concrete, into cold impartial lumps of time and space. What a malignant satisfaction it brings to be sometimes no more than one small wooden peg hammered back into the block. To reduce tangles and tangles of consciousness into silent rows of impersonal grey cord; to be sometimes clean and sharp and dead as a military corpse rather than one big mess of dreams colliding.