it imposes on every light

Brophy's In Transit, 1969, is different again, completely otherwise from the last two books - now the voice is jaunty and Shandyish, aggressive but confiding, and the narrator is at an airport, which is the most direct expression so far of the vibrating between-place that Brophy inhabits or see herself inhabiting, especially when this narrator tells us that they are going to let their flight leave without them. There are two countries they could be in (one at the beginning of the flight, the other at the end), and they are doing as much as they can to ensure that they are not in either. Thinking this was going to place some worry on the flight crew, which I now pictured, I saw that I had been stimulated into adding non-existent things to the story (the doubly-imaginary flight crew was irresistible though, and I still observe them).

The narrator has forgotten whether they are male or female. Covertly trying to look at their own groin without attracting attention, they are foiled by corduroy trousers standing up in stiff folds. The clothing on their torso is also ambiguous. Now what? Brainwave! they think: I will go into a public toilet and remove my clothes inside a locked cubicle. But which set of toilets can they enter without attracting suspicion? They have mislaid their name, then they get it back but it is Pat. "Interlugubre," they say. "And what of me as a narrator?"

I am hateful to myself through claustrophobia. It is not a personality, this jellysac I can't break out of; it is a mere agglutination of physical characteristics. And must I for ever shew you everything, including myself, through this not quite transparent, this yellowed, wobbly, and probably distorting gelatinous envelope, myself?

I am weary of the limited permutations on predictable refractions which it imposes on every light I pass through it.

They predict that their physical identity, once they find it, will "murder" them. "It is for your sake I am seeking … the predestined masc. or fem. murderer, who shall destroy, by gobbling up, this 'I'." To be something is the equivalent of being murdered or self-betrayed (or of growing up, another voice would say, maybe one of those children's-book authors who end their stories with adulthood as death or implied death – Narnia -). You notice that In Transit changes after the narrator has figured out their sex. Eventually they melt off, and groups of people from different protest movements storm the airport, sabotaging the building, laying bombs, and playing rock music.

(Perhaps against Brophy's desires, the book here becomes very fixed to a certain decade.)

Looking at the totally different styles of Flesh, 1962, The Finishing Touch, 1963, and In Transit (as unalike as, say, Margaret Drabble, Muriel Spark, and Arno Schmidt?), can I argue that Brophy spent the 1960s trying to defy the jellysac of "limited permutations"? Once again, as in the other books, she does not seem committed to the production of a good ending, not even a good wayward ending, as if endings confront her with the demand to be a professional, make something the way it should be, and she shies away from it, she is one of those legendary Muslim craftspeople who put mistakes in rugs; she has let you know that she is still there, that she is not an author, that she is not a nameable thing. So it is unsatisfactory and yet stubbornly thematic every time.

Since John Ashbery has just died I have been listening to him recite poems on Youtube, those Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1974, lines about "a wave breaking on a rock, giving up | its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape | The forms retain a strong measure of ideal beauty | as they forage in secret on our idea of distortion. | Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since | dreams prolong us as they are absorbed? | Something like living occurs, a movement | Out of the dream into its codification." Mirror was not Ashbery's favourite Ashbery and not mine either. Other people liked it, he said to Pennsound, in 2016 I think (the March 18 interview?), but he thought that was only because it was close to their idea of how a poem should look, or closer than most of his other poems anyway.