Dear Dougald, I wonder about this Sufi wine. Islam forbids it — the metaphor and the beverage. Are we not already drunk? Two fathoms deep is well under. And ours is beer. You and I are in my daytime dream looking at an ancient map Which is a palimpsest. We're a couple of cartographers who have abandoned our profession. It's a profession which pretends this map is not a palimpsest. It's the unspoken, unspeakable Law of our profession. We are professors -- educators. And the fullness of our ignorance has us. We refuse to profess. We're drunk on what was buried, hidden, masked, disguised. Everything truly useful lives on the surface of this poem -- this map. What lay hidden below was secretly encoded into the map's strange design. Decode it and it clearly says, "Notice what is missing. Attend to the lacunae. Keep digging. You are near."
(A letter to Dougald Hine)