Thank you for this draft of hemlock. before I drain it to the dregs, could I just remark that there seem to me to be essentially two forms of discourse or desription.
The most fervently recommended today is, supposedly, concision, consisting in the isolation and abstraction of 'key points'.
A whole apparatus of techniques exists to support this approach: the bullet point, the executive summary, the abstract - as though the essence of an argument, of a conception, is something that could be abstracted from its context - the overhead projector, those boxes on the printed page. This is brevity, the less that is more, the distillation. It runs from executive jargon all the way to the new-age spiritualist aphorism. Modish, cliché-ed coinages are its handmaid.
Lurking in the despised shadows is another mode, that of elaboration, where the essence of a thing is approached, about and about, through the ebb and flow, relationship and counter-relationship, where the qualification may assume greater importance than the proposal. Here is no brevity, no magic bullet, only the flow and flux of a mutating thing.
Pity, like a naked new born babe, striding the blast...
