During winter I live in a large room of bicycles and books and spidery imagination. I would love to live this season forever, but life threatens with boiling Christmases, unhealthily tanned beach-goers, loud talking and over-eating, all of which displace meditation, a meditation which slows down the recording mind, allowing reality to thicken and curdle and to form new sites of feeling. One must have ‘a mind of winter’ as Wallace Stevens wrote. It is this reflective process which builds, I believe, a consciousness of caring. A kind of proprioception of the other—inside oneself. It disturbs all the cobwebs which make up the imaginative life and creates a new language out of them. Let me try to explain this in a less abstract fashion.

In winter I have what I call, ‘A Condition’. It is not a Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD, though I’m often melancholic; the Condition is about being connected to things—ordinary objects which are taken out of cupboards and then returned without the door being closed on them, which relegates their lonely existence to prolonged darkness. This alternating current between empathy and instrumentality becomes quite intense until the point at which I have to leave cupboards, fridges, windows, doors, drawers, all open for everything to be flooded with light and attention, otherwise they move me to sorrow. This attachment or imprinting onto objects is an interiority that could not be explained away psychologically in babble such as fear of abandonment, punishment anxiety, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, legendary psychasthenia, over-empathy, inability to deal with spaces etc. My theory is that the condition is both caused and continually remedied by a mental script, a tape in the brain which has to be made real by writing, typing, scratching onto paper; a textuality which frees objects from our constant enslavement of them through categorisation or identity thinking, so that they too, have a subjective consciousness, so that they too, have a language, one that can initiate a dialogue of caring for their constriction and for their freedom.