…the artist, as Wyndham Lewis said to me, “is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is aware of the unused potential of the present…”

…most jokes tend to have this minority quality or irritation quality, just as games people play often tend to have a rather destructive and violent quality. But a put-on, therefore, tends to be a way of hurting the public. It’s an act of aggression against people. And I think that a writer, when he picks up his pen, has to put on his public that way. If he has something to say, it’s going to hurt.

— Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews by Marshall McLuhan

I’m not sure how many things I started as an act of aggression — probably a few when in my twenties, because a certain kind of terrible hack naturally goes for straw men and imagined enemies, and someone more interested than me could doubtless identify them. We write the things we want to see, that we believe are missing. Unused potential. Is that hurting the public? Maybe some of us believe we’re goring someone’s ox, or want to. Being Edgy is still a thing, after all. But I’m not convinced that writing, even writing to disturb, is an act of aggression, even in a writer’s “punk” phase. It’s an act of addition. An act of revelation.

(And then I realised that, in a sense, so is skinning someone, so I went and made another coffee.)

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