The eyeless tick drops from her perch.

Her survival – she requires a large bloodmeal to develop and lay eggs – depends not on vision but chemical and environmental cues. Instead of eyes, she has a sensory organ on her forelegs that detects carbon dioxide, humidity, air currents, radiant light and heat, and butyric acid – a compound in sweat metabolised by skin bacteria, responsible for the “cheesy” odour of human armpits.

Her partner requires less blood. His sensory organs are more attuned to finding mates for breeding than locating hosts for feeding.

This reminds me, for reasons I’ll try to explain, of a story told to me by a friend – a historian specialising in the writing, social mechanisms and material processes of Jesuit global communications during the first decades of the Society of Jesus (1540-1573). The story – a true story, he says – is about a Florentine man who spent forty years guarding a giant amphora in a forgotten corner of the Ufizzi.

The amphora was Etruscan, 6th century, decorated with the silhouetted figures of whip-bearing young men on horseback. When the Florentine first began working in the museum, back when he, too, was a young man, he learned everything he could about the vessel. How it was a neck-amphora, likely Etrusco-Corinthian. How the figures were drawn in black slip on a red-orange clay ground, with red pigment for the clothing and harnesses. How the horses’ muscles were incised into the clay, as were the whips and reins and the floral patterns down at the level of the horses’ hooves. How the urn was a grave offering, found in an aristocrat’s tomb, and how the young men on the galloping horses symbolised elite status and the journey to the afterlife.

After four days, his interest waned. He focused then on the visitors, first by sharing with them what he had learned, and then, when this too became tiresome, and often embarrassing – few people visited that wing of the museum, and fewer still were interested in what a poorly paid museum guard had to say – he began imagining what the visitors’ lives were like, where they were from, what their homes looked like and how much money they made, whether they still had sex, and what was going on in their heads as they looked at the boys on the funerary urn.

One afternoon, after lunch, forty years later – a lifetime spent in the same chair in the same room with the same empty vessel sucking the life out of him, an old man now, with creaking joints and a smoker’s hack, nearing retirement, all alone, staring vacuously at a potter’s crock, he got up from the chair and pushed it over, smashing it to pieces.

Part of this, you’ll be surprised to learn, was motivated by a close listening last weekend to Charles Mingus’ final studio work, Cumbia & Jazz Fusion (1978), whose title track opens with birdsong followed by Afro-Colombian cumbia rhythms, call-and-response big-band brass sections, blues solos, modal improvs, total random-sounding chaos, and shout-out vocal sections by Mingus like this:

Mama's little baby don't like no shortnin' bread
Mama's little baby likes truffles
Mama's little baby likes caviar
Mama's little baby likes all the fine things of life
All the things that a real good person should have…
Mama's little baby don’t want Uncle Ben’s [What?] or Aunt Jemima's [Aunt Jemima? Huh?] Mama’s little baby wants freedom! [Freedom!] And power! [Power!]

It’s a complex mix, recorded while Mingus was battling undiagnosed ALS. It displays the breadth of his genius, and, while not all of it works – some of it descends into tropical “Club Med jazz” kitsch, and the second track, originally written for an Italian film score but never used, gets a bit maudlin – most of it is absolutely amazing, joyous, sprawling, brash, and, almost 60 years on, incredibly fresh. Moreover, I can’t imagine anyone inside or outside the 2025 jazz world, or the World world, or any other contemporary music world, making anything anywhere near as exuberantly ambitious.

Why is that?

This brings to mind a passage recently read in a Mark Fisher essay, “Slow Cancellation of the Future” (2013). Before I quote it, let me say that I came late to Mark Fisher. I think partly because I don’t know much about his core musical references, but more so, I fear, because he topped himself. With few exceptions – Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig, John Berryman – I avoid the thoughts of those who chose death over life. This is a sad and cowardly limitation that I am seeking to overcome, or, at least, think past. I just revisited Hemingway, whom I formerly disparaged for his shotgun ending – which for years I smugly countered with Aldous Huxley’s decision, two years later, on his cancer deathbed – on the same day as the Kennedy assassination – to ask his wife to inject him with “LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular.” I’m glad I did: much of Hemingway’s prose still lives. Much of Huxley’s is dead.

I also recently loaded up on Sylvia Plath. Which my daughter is also reading. Which is ok by me.

Next: Yukio Mishima, Cesare Pavese, Hunter S. Thompson, Anne Sexton, Gerard de Nerval, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Primo Levi, Romain Gary, Sarah Kane, Arthur Koestler, Richard Brautigan and Ryunosuke Akutagawa.

Here’s the Fisher passage:

“While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet… There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.”

The “more shortly” is a devastating take on the blood-sucking aspects of our present-day world.

Horses, like chickens, pigs and rabbits, are fight-or-flight prey animals. The males fight for dominance, but barely. Ritualised displays are more the norm. Often, just a look is required. Winners control the harem of mares, and thus more of their genes are transmitted to future generations than those of the weaker beasts they conquer. But the real leader of the herd is usually a mare. The top stud is just that, a stud.

I ate a 6-euro slice yesterday. It was advertised as “New York style pizza”. A reference to its thin crust and pepperoni topping? Certainly not the price. Maybe, too, the hot honey that was poured on it? Which I hadn’t asked for. Nor had the server asked me if I wanted it. I guess she just assumed I would. When did hot honey become a default pizza topping? A friend told me there is another Parisian pizza place that puts tonkotsu sauce on its pizza slices. Horse meat is a popular topping in Scandinavian countries, especially in Denmark. In Sweden, people put curry and banana on their pizzas.

I find all of this weird. Perhaps, however, it is I who is weird? As a Beatle once said, “It's weird not to be weird.”

The slice-serving place also served natural wines. The pepperoni didn’t curl up at the edges into a cup. The music playing was a cover of an Ethiopian jazz song played by a LA rock band best known for its covers of songs by Cambodian pop stars who died or disappeared during the Khmer Rouge genocide. I first heard it in a movie by Jim Jarmusch starring Bill Murray.

None of this is weird anymore. Nor was it weird that I ate the slice while walking down the street. Lately, I have seen many people in Paris doing likewise – walking and eating in the street. And on the metro. This was unseen – unheard of – in polite circles when I first moved here. I’ve even seen people carrying coffee cups – not paper coffee cups but their own coffee cups, brought from home or the office, with slogans on them, or brand names, or the names of their favourite sports teams. And wearing shorts. Grown men wearing shorts. This is all weirdly newish in Paris and does not, I think, augur well. It portends, in part, too, I fear, like our musical moment, to the gradual wearing away of time, space and, paradoxically, movement. The cancellation of expectations. The collapse of difference. The homogenisation of the new in the old and, especially, the now.

Speaking of old, I wrote about Paris pizza in the not-too-distant past.

Six degrees of hexagonality

Mark Fisher, on the other hand, in “Slow Cancellation of the Future”, suggests that the phenomena skirted above are byproducts of late neoliberal capitalism, which has so exhausted and confounded us with its endlessly inflationary appetites for technology and communication, which at once warp-speed life and snail-pace culture, that we no longer have the resources to produce or even recognize the new, or the old, but must settle for a steady bloodless flow of sameness, the eternally satisfying “quick fixes” of the present.

I’m not sure if this is true or if I’m even reading him right. Or what role, if any, hot honey, takeout coffee, Ethio-jazz, and Mingus’ take on Colombian indigenous music play in any of it. What I feel I do know is that I never understand what I think I know until I see it laid out. Even then, most of the time. This motivates a certain exhaustiveness. I refuse to exclude any experience. Often, I think so hard my head doubles in weight, like a mattress filled with a decade’s worth of mites and dust. Sometimes the excess quantity of blood rushing to my brain to feed these fast-exploding impressions makes me dizzy and I black out, or my heart stops for a few seconds – at least that is what it feels like.

Very few animals of the same species fight to the death. Snakes don’t use their fangs when they wrestle. Mule bucks fight with great zeal and much crashing and smashing, but only antler on antler. They never take a cheap shot: if a buck turns his head and exposes his unprotected flank, his opponent, too, will turn away.

Paul Virilio – Fisher reminds us of this in the essay – describes this disintegration of the distinction within time – between past, present, and future – as “polar inertia”, a paradoxical state in which technological acceleration leads to ever-increasing physical, social and temporal immobilisation. His examplar is Howard Hughes, who famously lived for years in the penthouse suite of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, and, when I was eleven and still going to Southlands Elementary School on the edge of the forest in Vancouver, in the Bayshore Inn downtown, completely secluded from the public, popping Valium tablets and mainlining codeine while watching, on continual loop, the John Sturges thriller Ice Station Zebra.

“Hughes, once a pioneer in aeronautics, became an early explorer of the existential terrain that cyberspace will open up, where it is no longer necessary to physically move in order to access the whole history of culture.” – Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, 2013

I’m not sure of this reading, either. Ice Station Zebra is hardly “the whole history of culture” despite the solid performances of Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Patrick McGoohan and, especially, the athlete and civil-rights activist Jim Brown, arguably the greatest running back in NFL history. Hughes’s early obsession with speed – his desire to “outpace mortality” by controlling time and space through navigation and movie-making – was cancelled by his later, reclusive, “time-surpassing” existence in hotel rooms rewatching the same mediocre movie, replacing physical movement with mediated and medicated repetition. Virilio likened this to modern society’s submersion in real-time media, where speed collapses space into a perpetual present. I think this is more to the point.

That said, why is standing up while eating considered unhealthy? Sitting is terrible for the circulation; surely it discourages proper digestion?

There are Galapagos finches that are hematophagous. In past incarnations they picked parasites off blue-footed boobies until, at some moment in their miraculous transformation, something transformed, and they discovered that the boobie’s blood was tastier and more plentiful than the nits and lice in their feathers, and that a little peck at the skin with a sharp beak was enough to start the warm liquid flow.

The boobies offer little resistance. They just sit there and take it, as if vestigiously remembering the relief their progenitors felt when the nits and lice were picked off their skin.

I sharpened a knife yesterday, something I don’t do nearly often enough. A few minutes later, while using it to dice a yellow onion, I sliced into the tip of my forefinger. Unreflexively, I put it in my mouth and cleaned the wound with my tongue. It tasted of iron. I looked at it closely, the blood had stopped. A few seconds later, however, it leaked through the fresh slit in the skin. Not wanting to sully the onions – I was preparing dinner for guests – I covered the cut with a short length of paper towel, pressing hard to staunch the flow.

In the basement, I found some gaffer tape and, after struggling to find where the loose end of tape started on the roll, I pulled off enough to cover the improvised dressing, tore the tape free from the roll with my teeth and went back to the kitchen to finish chopping the onions. Some, I could now see, were red. I pushed these onto the blade of the knife, along with those that formed their periphery – as a precaution against contamination – and threw them into the worm bucket. I cleaned the knife with soap and hot water, wiped down the blemished area of the cutting board, and finished the dish. Which, by all accounts, was delicious.

Charlie Mingus was born in Camp Little, a segregated US Army base in Nogales, Arizona, on April 22, 1922, of German American, African American, British, Chinese, and Native American heritage.

Nogales is a divided city, half in Arizona and half in Sonora, Mexico. His father was a Buffalo Soldier, part of an all-Black army regiment composed of former slaves and then their descendants. They were posted to the American side of Nogales in 1917 to secure the border during the Mexican Revolution, following Pancho Villa’s 1916 cross-border raid on Columbus, New Mexico, which killed over a dozen Americans and triggered a U.S. military punitive expedition into Mexico. In 1918, a day-long battle erupted in Nogales, resulting in twelve fatalities. A makeshift fence was erected in the middle of downtown to split the two sides.

By the time of Mingus’ birth, the town was divided by 2-mile, 6-foot steel fence. People could still cross back and forth easily, especially during Prohibition, when Arizona was “wet” and Sonora “dry”.

Today, its 10-mile-long 30-foot steel bollard walls are patrolled by US Border Patrol agents.

Among the sea birds called brown boobies, two eggs are laid in each nest. After the eggs are hatched, one of the young birds attacks the other and forces it out of the nest, so that it dies. Every creature, we must remember, lives in a world composed entirely of subjective realities. You, me, Sylvia Plath, Charles Mingus and Mark Fisher. The brown boobie fledgeling. The female tick, who, once she has engorged herself with the blood of her victim, drops to the ground, lays her clutch, and dies. Because all animals instinctively know how to die. They separate from the group. They perish. They expect nothing. They return to the earth. They sink to the ocean floor.

Another story, which I hesitate to include here because, like the one Paul Nelles told me about the Uffizi guard, it will alienate many in the audience, is set just north of Florence, near the Alps, in Turin, and was the subject of a Béla Tarr film, and, before that, a bit of an obsession of mine when I was a young man: Nietzsche, out in the summer heat, his head filled with music, is wandering through the streets of Turin humming to himself, silently conducting, composing his anti-tribute to Wagner. He sees a horse, a dray, sweating in the sun. This is in the hot summer of 1888, the year of Occident. The year of Muybridge’s tripped wires. A dozen cameras lined up in a whitewashed shack, peeking out like cannons on a Spanish galleon.

Which calls to mind the horses on the funerary urn, and those the conquistadors rode off the boats, pounding the dust, charging the shit-scared natives who were amazed to see two legs split from the beast’s flank, drop to the ground and walk towards them, swords raised, shouting gibberish at the top of their lungs, shining in their Toledan breastplates like silvered armadillos.

Nietzsche sees the man beat the cabbie-horse, a brute beating a beast, whipping and flaying the poor animal. The horse is foaming at the mouth, muscles twitching under a steaming pelt. Nietzsche snaps, something inside his head snaps. He lunges at the cabbie, knocking him to the ground, fists flailing till the crowd pulls him off and a butcher, a man who knows him well, dusts him off and starts to walk him to his hotel. Nietzsche, the pity-destroyer, rips free, returns to the horse, throws his arms around its neck, sobbing like a baby. They pull him off again. The butcher strong-arms him back to his hotel room where, in a fever, he starts scribbling, writing letters to friends, world leaders, popes and presidents, and the dead. He cannot stop. It is a sickness.

He never touches the piano again. The music dies in his brain.

Once she has climbed to the tip of a branch and waited – perhaps for years – she leaps at the smell of butyric acid. If she lands on something warm (37°C), she burrows blindly through fur. Finding skin, she pierces it and drinks. Her surrounding world is a closed functional circle, stripped of all superfluity, where perception and action merge into a single biological rhythm.

Thus, the tick’s world is not a lesser version of ours but a perfectly attuned reality – a soap bubble of meaning, self-contained and complete.

– Jakob von Uexküll (paraphrased from Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen), 1934.

Thanks for reading. Off now to this: