I mention all this partly because I don’t think it’s possible to understand the sharp inflection points of Mark’s intellectual trajectory without taking note, in some way, of his emotional makeup, which was somehow simultaneously volatile and trenchant. The person who in 2013 wrote Exiting the Vampire Castle was a touchy sod, reacting in a very characteristic way to the behaviour and comportment of other touchy sods, mixing up a heartfelt plea for consideration and comradeliness with a rhetorical belligerence that could only ever have had the effect of energetically escalating the situation. Altogether too many people found, and by all appearances continue to find, that escalation hugely rewarding, a motherlode of dark energy. It was less a political intervention than a psychic detonation. But there was something of this quality to the best of Mark’s work, too (in case it isn’t obvious, I don’t think of Vampire Castle as belonging to this category). “Libidinal” was one of his favourite words, but not in a swashbuckling sex-pest sort of way: he meant the sort of charge that lifts you off your feet when you read something really mind-bendingly good, listen to a record that instantly wires you into an anonymous multiplicity of people whose lives are all being transformed, at that very moment, by what they are hearing. He continually lamented the scarcity of such electrifying experiences in a drained, pacified media landscape; but I think it was as much a feature of his own internal landscape that things were either barren, or blazing with resurgent energy. (And then again: his “cold rationalist” understanding of the forces shaping psychic experience did not allow for a hard distinction to be made between “inner” and “outer” in this way).