cott was hunting everywhere for genius, he was looking for it in the detritus of the street, overturning cans of rubbish in England, asking strangers. It turned out to work as a come-on line with a few foreigners, but why not: Do you have genius? The conversation could splinter in any number of directions after that and he’d come away looking as if he knew something. After all, he had his work to draw on. Not that they noticed, not that they understood. But still. Genius didn’t really make itself clear. It was never apparent. It was a kind of crown some wore and others envied. Or didn’t much consider or didn’t much care about. It depended, of course, on their DNA, the sperm and the egg that made them. Genius, small and precarious, was only what it was. An infinitesimal speck in the cosmos, compared to the infinite weight of everything that surrounded it, breathing and dead. You could say it was almost not, all be told, that it was not there nor should it ever be. Of this he was entirely unsure. And it was time he killed by thinking this, time which would not return again. It all dissolves into poetry, in the end, he thought, it is all sentence fragments and head-pictures and scents of things now gone, which can soothe a rotting brain. Yes, the brain has line breaks and caesuras. Things which drift off and stop, things which achieve more clarity, things which forever disappear from every horizon. Memory, he thought, is the only genius that matters. Every hour we are drifting into it. So, in the end, it did not really matter. He had no business looking for genius, it was a thing he would not find. It was the invisible world on a blade of grass, smaller. It was dust motes circling Mount Everest. It was some quality not-quality, who knew? The size of the universe is something we cannot grasp. Scott said this on more than one occasion. An answer is no more no less than itself. It slides into nothingness after it has been spoken. That might be genius. That might be, in which case everything is coated with invisible tracings, and everything is as de Selby postulated.

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