As a practical man who values material force, I am born to take the knocks of experience. It is my duty to work those knocks into the ideas I propose. Why press the button and wait when the elevator does not work? With what magniloquence do we rile up our neighbours about the blocked stairwells of our habitat when this has been the concrete condition for years? Can anything be more inimical to change than expressing outrage or surprise about the corruption of our world?

Although that which most achingly I crave can never be, there is an abiding inclination to praktikos in me – a concern, after all is said, with the done, with getting as close as can be. I prepared for eight years for our hands to intertwine and the brush of her lips at 11.55 as the blue moon rose over the other Table Mountain. Hundreds of butterflies hurt me in their escort away at dawn to never return.

I am a practical man. I like ideas to be embodied. Enemies too. Desires. St Paul’s cathedral, Jitterbug St. Claire, The ecstasy of St Theresa.

That’s why, flipping ahead and reading that a Black Panther or a Palestinian with a rocket-launcher; in other words, particular “nomads” and “group-formations” were recommended, only then did Anti-Oedipus, the book of my suggestible university days, move me.

"On the first page it says: 'In the fresco i'm one of the figures in the background.'
The meticulous handwriting, no smudges, tiny. Names, places, dates, reflections. The notebook of the final fevered days.
The yellowed and decrepit letters, the dusk of decades.
The coin of the kingdom of the mad dangles on my chest to remind me of the eternal oscillation of human fortunes.
The book, perhaps the only remaining copy, has never been opened.
The names are the names of the dead. My names, and those have travelled those twisting paths."