Laughter, joy, delight and inspiration - this is what we experience at the funeral of a happy man or woman. However, most of us are born, live and die without having had sufficient time to entertain the host. This is why the death of a small child causes an agonising pain beyond words. Only tears and despair are fit to draw this pain, and we are, for a time, inconsolable. Nevertheless, we will stand again some day, and we will even laugh again, for we are human beings and we are remarkable creatures.

The dull haze that descends, for weeks, or months, or years, is the body hypnotising the mind, putting it to sleep. We cannot think clearly: we are somnolent. This is called writer's block.

His melancholy grew until it became a song, then a lament, then a curse, then a whirlwind. One Sabbath he came down the stairs with a strange fire in his eyes. Slamming the table, he shouted, "There is no judgement and there is no judge!' His those who heard him were unable to think or speak. There was horror in their hearts. The community was split, and each split was the cause of still more. Some of the people said, 'the precipice of his understanding became to sheer for us to climb, and he became lonely'. For he had retired to his room, left his beard untrimmed, and accepted his meals only through the crack in the door. The first revelation is like a crown in the sky. The last is like a tide of blood and black bile. Where you have gone, no-one can follow. You must come back to them, like a stranger who remembers the town of his birth.

Under the influence of noise, chaos, alcohol and other aids to randomness, the night begins to fray, and the threads diverge. Habit is engulfed by waves of chaos and coincidence. People arch off into new lives, with their own full consent, falling in with strangers, even falling in love, or at least into bed. Lives are created, couples diverge, factions split and fracture, falling into new orbits, or spinning off into the void. The order, never more than a truce, is broken.

Under cover of anonymity we speak with the voice of reality automatically, saying the unsayable. As our anonymity is removed, we become smaller and smaller, eventually speaking with our own voice. If we are not careful, we may become legendary, a living repository of our own history. This is not the place where new shoots are born. Therefore, we prefer to emerge over and over again from nothing, a creature of no rank.

Mad as you are, without a coherent centre, you have made yourself into an image which denies its own ground. I do not think there is any point in bargaining with you. I am impossible because you are impossible. The very second you understand, your reflection as it manifests in me will also understand.

‘Be gracious in victory’. This means not approaching your victims too closely, once you have tied them up, lest they bite off your nose.

When it comes to finding out about a person's whole being, their strengths and weaknesses in all their richness, uncensored by any conscious technique, you can see it all in their cooking.

The shallows and the depths... those fish residing in the depths despise the silvery fish who flit in the warm, light currents of the surface, as they do not understand how cold and dark the world can be. Unable to reach the surface, they see it from afar, perceiving the broad ebb and flow of its inhabitants, but experiencing none of its pleasures. They remain where they are, understanding only a little.

Ask a stranger what brought them here. They will tell you love, desire, fire, fate, regret. There are a thousand words. Some will say, do not ask us what brought us here, thereby forcing us to lie. Yet, miraculously, some will not answer your question at all.

I shy away from those who shun the ministrations of death and her sisters, decay and change. Among those, none fear more death than those who attempt to sexualise death. Let sex be sex, let death be death. What do they have in common?