HAMISH'S NOTEBOOK

“You master a text not by solidifying its internal logical structure, but by knowing and loving your audience, even to the point where, as in Phaedrus, you can convince them to want to sleep with you. Rock’n’roll figured this one out a long time ago.

But rock stars also die young. Or they become fat, they become bloated, they become depressed with age. On the one hand, the scale of amplification of their symbolic output is nearly impossible to reverse, and on the other they are tied to a form of symbolic production structured around youth and vitalism and libidinal surplus that is impossible to sustain with age. The human heart is the most banal metaphor for love, but is also a physiological timekeeper. Many athletes suffer from a condition where the heart swells to become too large as a result of overexertion. Essentially, even if you are a marathon runner fully endowed with the endurance and stamina to run enormously long distances with ease each day, your body will nevertheless collapse after some time. And yet, it remains extremely hard for athletes and trainers to identify when the limit to overexertion has been reached, as the tearing of muscle tissue is likewise the prompt for the muscle to grow and become stronger. Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens, where he collapsed and died to deliver a message of victory in the form of a single word: νικῶμεν (victory).”