A lovely morning – I walked to the railway station through a grey, becalmed, snow-powdered Northampton, the roads quiet and few pedestrians on the pavements. Fine snow still coming down constantly, almost no wind. I was warm and sure-footed in my fleece and boots. Later in the train I started idly stringing together fragments of baroque counterpoint in my head, the way I sometimes used to do as I fell asleep in the evening, mentally perambulating around the cycle of fifths. I haven’t felt this calm and alert in a while. Herr, unser Herrscher!

Did it snow when I was in Cardiff? I seem to remember that it did, but don’t quite trust the memory. I remember Anne with her licorice cigarette papers, tall, quizzical and sardonic. My friend Gerald said that she was beautiful, and I had to think about it before I saw that he was right: a shift in the balance of the world. Fastidious, self-shielding loneliness made me a dead loss around women, whom I let down repeatedly in smaller and greater ways. Valuing someone is an activity as much as a disposition: showing that you care, a form of affective labour. If there’s one thing I need to learn in my life, it’s that this is not superfluous. But I don’t feel that I understand the code, which sometimes seems to me to be a women’s language spoken by only a few male initiates; and some of what it can be used to say is subtly de-valuing, or works to reinforce social hierarchy. I doubt I’ll ever stop being surprised by the things women can feel slighted by, or mystified by their anger with each other.

There’s an occasional virtue, perhaps, in “emotional illiteracy” (or what I sometimes like to think of as “sense and reason”). At least, like “selective deafness”, it should be recognised as a social tactic. One of my favourite lines from The Simpsons is Homer’s comment on the break-up of Millhouse’s* parents’ marriage: “The problem is communication – too much communication”. There’s a tendency now to pluralise “literacy”: to speak of “literacies”, familiarities with various protocols. Knowing how to play video-games is different from knowing how to use a Biblical concordance, for example. Presumably one can also pluralise “illiteracy”, and speak of the tactical value of different illiteracies. What is the value of not knowing how to operate the user interface of Microsoft Word? A certain independence from the machine and its (proprietory) software: you remain plugged into the social (asking people for help) instead of letting your habits be modified by the technology so that other people become less necessary (in proportion as the technology itself becomes more necessary). What is the value in not recognising that someone’s ostensibly factual statement is in fact meant to communicate their emotional frustration, in not knowing that the proper response is to address that frustration rather than to focus on the factual validity of the statement? Independence from the affective circuits that produce, on the one hand, warm and sustaining sociality and, on the other, vicious and resentful emotional antagonism.

* Typo/slip corrected: this originally read “Millbank’s”.

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