The writer's malady, impotence, has nothing to do with the potency, or lack of it, which beckons the local gynaecologist. It's related entirely to the sperm of the brain that fertilises the eggs of a writer's expression.

How many great ideas have been lost to an empty bank of words? Many writers become so engaged in having sexcapades with columns by the numbers, that the reproductive mechanism functions without much virility.

The spark of great prose needs to be delivered with penetrating passion. One can only ingest what this means by seeing how fervid experts reach their peaks.

In a 1981 documentary called The Day after Trinity, Freeman Dyson, a reigning grey eminence of maths and theoretical physics, as well as an ardent proponent of nuclear disarmament, described the seductive power that brought us the ability to create atomic energy out of nothing:

"The glitter of nuclear weapons is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist.

"To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million tonnes of rock into the sky.

"It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this, what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds."

Moving from the thrill of scientific discovery to the euphoria of practical application, one might say Enola Gay, the name of the aircraft that delivered the first nuclear weapon to Japan, had her day.

Journalist John Pilger raises the experience to the climactic heights of libidinal after-effects.

"The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality.

"For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate 'good war', whose 'ethical bath', as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the West not only to expiate its bloody imperial past, but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb."

When describing the impotence of systems, as Fred Reed does, the writer overcomes the malady of impotence by instilling the power of poetry in his prose.

The imagery in his comparisons builds until it explodes:

"They (Southern white bigots) sounded exactly like American Zionists speaking of Arabs. There was the same insistence on racial inferiority, on the filthiness of blacks or Arabs, their historical uselessness, their incapacity to fit into a civilised world, their sexual appetites.

"There is nothing Jewish in this. It is the normal moral sewerisation that results from the relation of masters to slaves. Prison guards have it. South Africans had it.

"The only good Indian is a dead Indian. The underclass are always vermin and the masters always become moral monsters. The Nazis, early Likudists, had identical notions of Jews."

Henry Miller's books were filled with a sexuality unheard of in fiction at the time he wrote, giving rise to an historic court ruling that changed censorship standards.

Miller had the unique trait of turning the dark side of prosaic life into the potency of a writer's poetic climax:

"Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind." The chances of success depend largely on a writer's potency to fertilise minds that are open.