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>Do you mind if I ask you to elaborate on that? I'd love to hear your >extended thoughts. All best A Really? I could go on for pages & pages, nothing would make me happier than talking about political unhappiness, but focusing on poetry… This is gonna be crude jotted down… I suppose the observation is: There are certain modes of power which operate by making people unhappy. Unhappiness or sadness as a diminishment of force. You could go in a million directions & places with this observation, that law requires sacrifice, that morality works by marshalling joy and sadness, political economy’s parcelling of time, consumerism etc. Then the formal qualities of these modes can get displaced – all sorts of unnamed aches & unspecifiable nostalgias… Attractive for poets who don’t see that their subject has become the working of power & interpellation. The seminal essay on the specific power of priests is Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise where he writes about the priest whose ultimate power move is to invent the idea of infinite debt, so we’re unhappy without end, infinitely extending the finite social debts of gifts which can be repaid – a debt to God, or a debt of original sin, because total, is the equivalent of tyrannical power. No wonder Spin. was publicly expelled from the Jewish community! There’s for some a suffocating beauty in this idea of a lack, a gap intrinsic to life– no wonder a lot of writers are pulled towards it - it exerts an attraction, and unhooks itself so it becomes a priest-position – but rather than being beautiful it just appears to me as strangulation, a perverse move. [it’s accidental that this form of power rubs off on doctors, who literally do see the majority of humans as being in a state of illness, fallen from a template of health, _full life] Whitman is the modern poet whose work is one enormous counter-blast for life, I think, celebrating the body & all the other leaves of grass, catalogues what the body can do rather than defining what it is Best, Edmund