Naturally, like everybody else, I'm sorry to see Luke go.
I'm not capable of writing a heronbone tribute at the moment that exceeds this recent effort.
But that doesn't matter.
The best tribute a writer can have is the knowledge that he has changed others' percepts, affects and concepts (the three aspects of a body, according to Deleuze, glossing Spinoza). If the blogs in our network are anything to go by, it's evident that anyone who has sensitively engaged with Luke's work over the last twenty months or so has been changed, and changed for the better, by the contact with his writing. I hope such a change is evident in what I produce here, because it is certainly apparent in the way in which I engage with the world in a renewed way.
The thrill of challenging and being challenged by an attentive audience, the rages, the temporary consensuses, the bursts of enthusiasm and equally sudden lapses into melancholia that we have all undergone have meant that blogging in our little network has been a hothousing experience. The speed and intensity of the feedback network - something that could only happen on the net, could only happen NOW - has made possible a supercharged efflorescence of discourse and writerly personae.
But if you are a serious writer, like Luke is, you occasionally need time to withdraw, to collect and collate and synthesise.
His archives are dense enough, rich enough to keep even the hungriest heronbone devotee satiated for some considerable time yet.
So long as Luke is still writing, that's all I care about.
Time to get out of the hothouse, as Jerry Cornelius said in 1968.
But he'll be back, and better...
Posted by mark at September 14, 2004 06:37 PM | TrackBack