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Universal Access   I have only ever lived among pollution Tell me it is not the sky I look at but an irradiated blanket, pitched between my street lamps and the real sky To that I say the real sky is immaterial, an idea cast too far back into the dark to matter My pollutions define me   As a child I favoured invented worlds, populated by tribes with kaleidoscopic cultures, another one always over the mountain ridge Today, in the city, the promise of a never spent or perfected flux is all that keeps me here The new thing ever opening Frontiers of the affordable and good   I am stranded in the middle of Moby Dick: p 274 out of 509 The Pequod, after listing in the South Pacific, has embarked upon its first ‘cutting in’, the process of safely flaying a whale of its blubber, which requires the whole crew to heave a hook-fed rope through the blowhole until everything gives at once, for the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange   Part of me would sooner stay here There is too much to read Far from a complaint, this is only to state the necessary obverse of infinity’s appeal Were we to know that our present book was the last we were yet to read, its conclusion would be intolerable Heaven, then, must be to choose a fixed point, knowing the brawl of infinite, receding options, as if slipping into a particular chair while rain hammers on the skylight Here I can dip my fingers in the dripping hide   Through my browser I watch a documentary, free of charge, about a church repurposed as a data centre where a record of every web page is collected through time Truly, there is a holiness in this: shades of God’s forensic love for hair and sand As well as sites they preserve books scanned by human hand, so that Melville’s relishing and fretful bulk can expand along its ultimate democratic tangent to take its place beside the novel’s Wiki page, as captured on almost every day of its existence   A great wall: