I've been doing a lot of reading this week for the project, which is taking me along several bold and violent vectors -- Theophrastus and Aristotle on the nature of fire (were Aristotle's opinions on the element conditioned at all by his experiences working for Alexander, who would advance the pre-Greek Fire incendiary weapons in his imperial conquests); oil and its connection to power; immortality and mortality, Prometheus connected to Hercules (who died in an envenomed tunic: the earliest bioweapon?) through Chiron, giver of medicine to mortals and 'friendly-fire' victim, death by necrosis, phossy jaw. The themes of the related material which are emerging seem to be: violence; obscurity and illumination; mortality and immortality; love and pain; divinity and inspiration; industrial labour and industrialized war; the elemental chemistry of the body. I'm going to head out to the East End over the weekend, try to document some of the London spots where fire, phosphorous and radical labour came together -- the old Bryant & May factory, now the luxury flats of Bow Quarter; the statue to Gladstone erected from forced contributions by the matchgirls; the Salvation Army's model factory; the Royal College of Surgeons museum.

The project is becoming more diffuse, taking on fire's tendency to spread and consume; I have to extinguish its 'living edge' (Theophrastus) before it ignites the whole symbolism of fire, light and spirit, i.e. threatens to disperse into the whole of culture. But the spread of relevance also tells us something true about the interconnection of forms of violent innovation and the growth of capitalism, or about 'enlightenment' in the A&H dialectical sense -- by which I guess the material masters me. Still, I don't mean to force readers to recover my own research process in order to read the poems, I don't want the poems to be an abstruse, high modernist, stodgy icon to acculturation, which you can only understand by replicating my labour. So I think I'll need to map the text to its various sources digitally. A very simple hypertext structure will suffice. The texts can 'cover' or float in front of their sources, which will be given briefly as marginalia, which the reader can click on to find out more if they want to. I'm going to start working on this now, playing with groupings and accidental felicities, see what happens.