When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands.

I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.

I was born on a council estate with a mum who, despite doing everything she could for me, couldn't help me learn to read and write because she had never been taught herself. As the jargon would have it now, I was not 'school ready.'

I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.

People who work in specialized fields seem to have their own language. Practitioners develop a shorthand to communicate among themselves. The jargon can almost sound like a foreign language.

Sometimes the hardest part I think for actors on '24' is some of the jargon and getting the ideas and the thoughts and the information out quickly enough and succinctly enough and clearly enough.