He is not poetic. He is not a writer, as many of the members of this ersatz family are: Alfred, Timothy, Barbara. Each generation invests itself in its own secrets: safeguarding them, utilising them, understanding them. In this family, duplicity is the norm - anything else is carelessness - and so they - we - write, document, observe, extrapolate and steal pieces of our lives from the others when we cannot create them for ourselves.

For my own part, what I get from Barbara, Timothy, Alfred: human resilience, calm, constancy. What each of them take from me is their own to keep; all I will say with any certainty is that each of them is different in their approach. Perhaps I fulfil a filial function, for Alfred, or a analytic one, for Timothy, and a dramatic one, for Barbara. Multiplicity is the story of our interaction - it does not matter.

He does not operate the way the others do, yet he is irrevocably and unquestionably as part of the whole as any of them are. He does not write, because he does not need to: where we are used to silence, he talks. He never stops talking, no more than he ever stops moving, which he does not. He is not a thinker - which is not to say that he does not think - because he is a singularity in a house of mirrors: casting no few shadows, only the one that he carries with him at all times, longer than most, but also more real.

He creates in us commonality.

I take from Dick the selfsame thing that any other person he encounters takes from him. I take from Dick grace, which is more than the Batman could ever have hoped to achieve alone.

His is physical, not cognitive. Where the others have replaced blood with the bonds of affection, he repays genealogy with action, as if he could move the world into its proper place if he ever jumps high enough to find frequency and wavelength. As if, if he leaped, faith and loyalty alone will bridge the gap between where he starts, and where he ends, and where he wants to end.

The function of words is always misplaced. The advantage of love is always misused. Understanding is always superficial. Ultimately, analyticity is exactly what it is: repetitive, tautological, artificial.

The leap is, by virtue of its temporality, its blindness and its trust, alone in the way we greet it with universal admiration.

He leaps, and there is not one amongst us who will ever be strong, or weak, enough, to not put his or her hands forward, and extend so that fingertips touch again, teleological and profound, until we or he must swing away again, to keep moving against the dark night.