July 1
In my silence and withdrawal, the other vision has been developing, becoming more real …
A tower. A tower made with my own hands, whose walls connect the inside and outside: filtering, refining, intensifying what is outside inward; amplifying and radiating what is inside out. A tower whose anticlockwise winding steps I climb to the wonder of the countless stars, the coldness of space and the contemplation of ultimate meaning; and whose clockwise spiral I descend into inchoate darkness and the mystery and the heat of the root of being …

The tower is here, in the place I am sitting, on this very spot. And I must build it. Beginning now.

I level the site, laying a long board edgeways, my spirit level on top, this way and that until in all directions it is parallel to the surface of the earth, the curve of the glass tube mimicking the earth’s curvature, and the bubble at the top, as I am, on top of the world.
Then I range across the site until I feel myself at the centre, the point at which I am pulled in no direction, from which there is nowhere to go, and drive in a stake. Looping a rope the length of the tower’s radius over the stake I pull it tight and walk slowly in a circle, scratching the circumference into the earth.

July 2
I begin digging the foundations. I remove a spade width of turf, cutting through thick grass, severing matted roots, and stack the turves grass side down where they will stay for a couple of years to compost.
Then I begin to dig down, using pickaxe and spade.
I dig through ashes and rubbish: pieces of broken pottery and glass, rusty wire that snags the pickaxe, a fragment of cow horn, a rat trap, castrating irons, chicken bones, broken-bladed sheep shears, illegible newspaper – I wonder what date? How far have I dug already into history? So close to the surface there is no plastic, not even the indestructible twine you find everywhere on French farms; this site is already historical. I find a small bottle marked GIFT and some German words; I pocket it. As I dig I hear Madame let out the hens and ducks, Monsieur take out the sheep, Gaston unchain the cows and lead them off to pasture. Then there is silence. I’m digging backwards, anti-clockwise.

I’ve completed one circuit and I’m through the level of human occupation into untouched soil. It is brown with humus, fibrous, alive with worms and centipedes and creeping things. I unearth a larva the size of my middle finger, pale green, almost luminous, writhing slowly, wonder what creature this is destined to be, place it carefully. The sun rises higher, grows hotter. I hear Monsieur and Gaston return with the animals, the sounds of lunch, then silence as the family slumbers. The sun is at the meridian, pouring its full heat onto my bare head.

I have completed another circuit and now I am deeper than the animal and vegetable kingdoms – how shallow are life’s roots into the earth! – into the mineral realm. Ochre clay, weathered rock. I’m digging into the substance of the earth, the earth untouched by living things, making a new connection to the earth as it was before there was life. As I go down in space, I go back in time. Digging the foundations. This is the place. There is nowhere else. My wanderings over the face of the earth cease here. Here I will strike down a root to the centre of the earth, to the earth’s dark, molten core.
My brains are boiling in the pan of my skull. The heat is a cloak of lead upon me. But I work on, through the heat of the day, the only waking thing in a silent, comatose world, the only sounds the hack and scrape of my implements, the only movements the rise and fall of my pick, the cut and throw of my spade. Everything else is held in the syrup heat poured down from the sun, like flies in amber. Only I, active in the fundamental particle-charge flashing between the earth’s centre and the vertical sun, work on, possessed.

And then the sun passes the zenith, out of the zone of the meridian; the connection is broken, the heat begins to lessen. Paralysis becomes sleep, and from sleep there is awakening; the dogs shake themselves to their feet, the family scratch and yawn themselves awake, shaking heads at their strange dreams. They drink coffee and return slowly to their work. I strike rock, the living rock.
I clean out the trench, lay bare the rock. And then I step out, stagger, almost fall, go blindly, wearily inside and put my head under the pump and pump until I can pump no more, wrap my head in a towel, crawl onto the sofa and fall asleep.

July 3
Mixing concrete by hand is hard work. Concrete is a heavy, unresponsive material. Throw a rock onto other rocks and it will bounce, elastic as a rubber ball, or shatter, the pieces flying with the energy of shrapnel. Throw a concrete block and it will land, and it may break, but that’s about it. It is a sullen material, to be anthropomorphic. Or maybe it is dead. Dead bodies feel heavy in a way that live ones don’t (as I remember from working in a hospital). Concrete is an invented material, the calculated creation of the simulacrum of stone by the careful application of mechanical and chemical principles; it is an industrial material. Perhaps it is no accident that it was invented by the Romans, that most industrial of preindustrial societies, forgotten, then re-invented in the Industrial Revolution. In its tightly packed, economical structure there is no room for life; no crystals have grown here, there have been no fossilisings, no metamorphoses: it has no history.
But it has its value. And its value, its one superiority to stone, is that it can be poured cold. Stone can only be poured hot, and then only with difficulty. So it is excellent for foundations, for curved foundations. But it is hard work.

It needs a lot of shovelling. Which is why the labourer, whose shovel is the one tool personal to him, keeps it so well. Give him a new one and the first thing he does is get the angle grinder and take two inches off the blade. Is this a union thing, a class thing, his way of reducing the employer’s pound of flesh to fourteen ounces? No. He knows from experience that the balance is wrong. He knows that although he will get less on the shovel, there will be more shovels to the hour, and more work done.
And he needs no tribologist to inform him about friction: he keeps his shovel so shiny he can shave in it; and I’ve often seen the old labourers frying their bacon and eggs on it on a frosty morning.

Four of gravel, two of sand, one of cement. Mix them dry, turning and turning until the sand (yellow) and the gravel (white) are randomly mixed and every grain is uniformly coated with cement dust (grey), and all is grey. I flatten the castle and make a crater, an internal moat, and fill it with water. The minimum of water, much less than seems necessary, for this is a chemical reaction not a mechanical mix, and too much water weakens it: “you’re not making mud pies”, the foreman said. And then circling the crater I carefully collapse in the rim, taking care not to make a breach for the water to stream out. The hygroscopic cement sucks in the water like blotting paper. When the water is all gone I turn and turn the mix until it is all one. I pour it into the trench. I tamp it and level it. I’ve reversed the natural process and created rock from rock debris.
Except that the only property this material shares with rock is its hardness; its inertness is a barrier. To connect the living rock with the stones of the tower I insert twelve copper rods vertically at equal intervals.
Then I cover the foundation with wet sacks to slow the drying process; the slower it dries, the harder it will become. I wash the barrow and the shovel carefully, and then the cement dust and sweat from my body. I have lunch.

 July 4
Through the heat of the day I barrow stones from the ruined barn to the site of the tower. Many of the stones are soot-blackened, some have been baked to biscuit, soft, cracked and useless.

The barn burned down: the Combons say struck by lightning; the Bonafets say there was no lightning that night. By the time the dogs woke them it had taken hold and, with no telephone and only wells for water, there wasn’t much that could be done. They opened the door, but the first animal to run hysterically out was a sheep on fire, and fearing for the hay, the other barns, the houses, they had to bolt the door and listen to the different cries of the different animals as they burned to death. The insurance money paid for the Combon’s move to Albi. I wonder if there is still fire, still screams in these stones.

I make many journeys. Sometimes I overload the barrow and curse as I force it by force of will, straining, along the path. Sometimes I underfill it, and abuse myself for the waste, and feel my mind wander. And sometimes I get it just right, the weight and distribution of stones, I know, as I straighten my legs and lift, just able to lift, lean slightly forward and focus my attention on the single wheel and in my mind’s eye see it beginning to turn and I begin to walk. I am walking a tightrope that the wheel is creating over nothingness as it turns, and it turns only because my attention is exactly on its moving surface. Is the tightrope unreeling because my arms and shoulders and back and legs are pushing this almost unbearably heavy wheelbarrow; or is the turning wheel drawing me along…? It doesn’t matter. Intention is all. “Intention directs the chi, chi directs the body.” I watch fascinated as the stones fall and bounce and bound over each other, and then are still. One pile reduces, the other grows. One pile is gone, might never have been; this one is. By the time I have finished it is evening.

July 5
I set the door frame in position, plumb and level it carefully. Then I begin to build.
For seven days I work alone, speaking to no one: building up; and when the circuit is complete going round again. Rising slowly upward, widdershins, a screw thread, Babel, the spiralling minaret at Samarra, slowly upward, a life of silent dedication. Tending the garden, feeding the chickens, looking after myself, are necessary but unwanted distractions from the steady labour of building and the slow mounting of the stone spiral. Aspiration.

And yet within the general aspiration my moods change.
Sometimes something happens and I click into a mood of grace in which right stone after right stone comes naturally and weightlessly to hand, each fits perfectly into the rich and complex creation that is coming into being, the wall rises naturally, I am filled with the glow of the virtue of what I am doing.
Sometimes I work in a mood of effortful but contented neutrality, sweating hard, in which stones are stones and mortar is mortar, and building this wall is simply the task I have set myself.
And sometimes a mood of black depression overwhelms me, in which every stone I pick up is loathsome and alien and brutal to my hands, and every stone I lay is a stone of sorrow weighing out the futility of my life, and the heaping up of this building is the culminating folly of a lifetime of stupidities.
And yet, strangely – for in free-stone building you see most clearly the signature of the builder – in appearance there is no difference in the look of the wall whatever mood I was in, and in structure all is sound.

I work on relentlessly, my life having purpose. A letter arrives from Jane a doubting, questioning letter. I toss it aside dismissively and go back to my work. The wall rises, course upon course. I miss no one, I glory in my solitude.
But the hard, unyielding work with hard, unyielding stone is making me hard, unyielding, stone-like. From the grey touch of the stone the greyness creeps along my arms; with the stone dust my blood thickens; my heart is turning, slowly, to … a commotion of dogs and the hooting of a car horn. I flinch. Then Sylvie, returning my car from the feu, bursts in with such a swirling of energy, her arms whirling me round, her cataract of words tossing me high, the smell of her body heating my blood, her active hands touching my skin back to life, and a great, red cartwheel of a strawberry flan lifted high like a new risen sun, that I simply dissolve. Within five minutes I am driving us towards Michael and Rosie’s.

July 14
I went to the brocante to buy a stove for my tower. There are wardrobes and beds, bread tables and bed warmers, yokes and old farm tools. The locals get rid of their old, solid, craftsman-made furniture, (they’re embarrassed by the traditional, ie ‘old-fashioned’) and buy factory-made veneered chipboard at the hypermarket in Albi. They sell reality and buy dreams. And the things they sell are being eagerly bought by the city bourgeois, to give a solid, authentic feel to the homes of their dislocated lives, although they have no experience of their use. The peasants want to live as if they are in cities; the city dwellers want the illusion of the country: the dreams of both are fed by magazines and television. Prices are low enough for English dealers to load up, drive back, and make a profit.
I bought a lovely art nouveau stove, a beautiful enamelled green-blue, Albi-made, for sixty francs. It fits well. I fastened the stove pipe in position and began building the stove in. Now my tower has a hearth. 

Aug 3
‘A dovecot? – squabs are good eating. A sauna? Heat upon heat, to sweat out the fever. Something Reichian?’ Fred surveys the wall of my tower. ‘Nicely built. I envy you your time on the buildings.’
‘A space. Just a space.’
‘An important space, eh?’ He points to the copper stakes. One evening, after an exceptionally hard day, I’d been wandering around the property, mind vacant when, walking between the house and the tower I had felt a tension, an unease. Splitting a hazel wand I had dowsed and found an energy line, quite a weak one but disturbed now by the presence of the tower. The copper rods channel it round.
‘Do they help? Did you dowse?’
‘Not for the location of the tower. Feng shui, rather. I found myself gravitating there. I’m sure it’s a very deep hot spot, strongly connected.
‘What are you building? What’s it for?’
‘I don’t know. I feel like one of the blokes in the Bible God tells to do something but doesn’t say why. Except, for me, there’s no God, no voice. Just a necessity. Not even that – I’m building it because I can’t imagine not building it. I’m making material what is already there – although I don’t know what it is … And I’m sure the purpose will emerge.
‘Something’s happening to me, and I’m trying to keep in touch with it, that’s all.
‘For the first time in years I’m on my own. There is silence again. Not the blocked silence of two people who can’t talk, but that silence in which, sometimes, real purpose emerges.
‘Trouble is, I don’t know whether it is purpose or delusion. Especially on my own. I just have to decide whether to go with it, or not. And I’m going with it.’

After he’s gone, heading back to England, back to the front line of the resistance, I lie within my wall of stone.
The midday sun beats down upon me. I lie on my back in this crucible of stone, spreadeagled, staked out by Apaches, my eyelids cut off, to stare at the sun until mad and blind … O Sun, do not blind me, or burn me – give me sight, insight, heat; strike your heat deep into me, illuminate the diamond cave untouched as yet by light. Give me the strength for purpose without destination. Am I a loosed arrow without a target? A space craft slung-shot around the solar system, observing and never arriving, to end in the lifeless black of space, or the fusion heart of the sun…?
Don’t think of ends. Let the destination materialise ….

‘Don’t wall yourself in.’ Fred’s last words.
Is this a broken tower, as in the tarot, “symbol for the ambition that is built on faulty premises”. No, this is a tower to complete, a tower to top out, to roof.
Roof a cone of scalloped slates, as on fairy tale castles, Le-Duc’s Carcassonne, Dordogne houses…? How is Montaigne’s tower roofed? Will I carve quotations on the beams …? And then it comes. Of course:

A dome. A geodesic dome. The modern Gothic.

Upon the firm foundation I will place lightness, the lightest of space enclosures. Buckminster Fuller’s intricate pattern of carefully calculated triangles. An aery dome, imaging the dome of the sky, the subtlest of skins connecting interior and exterior …
I see myself at my desk, chiaroscuro room with a single pool of light from my shell lamp in which I make my calculations. And at my bench, making the ribs, cutting and shaping. And on the scaffolding, fitting the network of ribs, building out the delicate lattice structure …  Tomorrow, after this social interlude, I will resume my solitary work on the tower.

Aug 14
I began cutting the struts for the tower roof, the geodesic dome, today.
I’ve had some lengths of chestnut machined to size and rebated by Lucien, the joiner in the village (I can’t call him the village joiner because like all tradesmen these days he works over a wide area). He’s a young man, about my age, who took over the workshop from his father. Although the old tools still line the walls, they’re there to impress the city folk who’ve bought maisons secondaires and want them done up in traditional style. His pride and joy are the electric saws and planers and mortising machines he has installed. He wanted to know what the wood was for, so I explained, showing him my drawings and a couple of photographs of domes. He examined them carefully, but soon lost interest. It has no use in his work, for his clients, so it has no value to him.

I had some squares of flexible steel cut and drilled at the garage. More a machine shop than garage, he can do anything with metal, repair any machine. His grandfather was the blacksmith. He gave us an iron plate and told me where to dig out the fire clay I needed to repair the stove that had been given to us by a family ‘moving up’ to gas. So many local resources, now neglected!

It was good to be working at my bench again, with wood, with tools I understand and am familiar with; saw, plane, square, sliding bevel, chisel, mallet. The sweep and lisp of a sharp plane along a piece of fine wood, the smell of the curls of shavings, sharpening blades, the voluptuous delight as I push a tenon into a mortise and they fit together, snug and tight and what was two is now one.
It’s complicated, working out the structure and construction. But the combination of Bucky Fuller’s abstract, stratospheric ideas and the down-to-earth workshop handling of wood is exhilarating.

Aug 16
I’ve finished making the struts for the dome. Tomorrow I’ll start fitting them.

It is dark. I go out and step inside the wall of stone. I close the door, lie down. I am lying in a crater in the desert, where a meteorite fell millennia ago, a black stone. The sky is a velvet pall pricked by ten thousand pinpricks through which is visible the empyreal light. The points of light are suns, nuclear fusion furnaces millions of degrees hot, isolated in the absolute zero of space, moving steadily apart. The stars group into galaxies, the galaxies into clusters, the clusters into clusters of clusters, all relating to each other in a curved space-time continuum predictable within a chosen frame of reference. The stars resolve into heroic constellations that tell true stories, into zodiacal constellations which by their subtle powers affect our lives … The sky, with stars lambent and lustrous, sharp and brilliant, is wonderful tonight.

Aug 18
‘Raise high the roof beams, carpenters…!’
I don’t know where to start. I’ve finished. The tower, the domed tower, looks great. I’m happy, a bit pissed. No – high.

It was tricky, building up the structure of struts – not struts, ribs, yes, ribs – into a dome. I suppose all roof-raisings, no matter how small, should be communal affairs. But I wanted to do this myself, alone. Starting from the curved wall plate, moving around, fitting ribs, edging out from the wall, in towards the centre, up towards the pole, gradually over-arching space. I’d imagined a Brunelleschi mysterious, almost mystical construction, spinning out an unsupported dome until it closes at the zenith (‘how did he do that …?’). In fact I had to support its gravity-heavy sagging as I pushed out over emptiness. Even so I felt wonderfully industrious, like a spider. Or at least a spider-man. (Skyscraper construction, 1930s.) Mortising the first ribs into the wall plate, then methodically bolting the ends of the ribs to the flexible steel plates, circling, constructing a pattern of triangles upwards and outwards – yet inwards – over the interior space of the tower. It was heavy on supports until I was at the top of the dome, the north pole, fitting into place the last five ribs. And then there was no pole. Just a seamless curved surface of equilateral triangles, the roof an integrated whole that lifted itself off, airborne. Weightless, self-supporting.
Rather than a structure to enclose or exclude, it is an aspect of space. It floats, an idea. Like some tremendous metaphor of cooperation. Democracy, even. Bucky, you are beautiful – tough, but beautiful.

I stood inside it, remembered:
“Every human being stands beneath his own dome of heaven.”

I walked around it. I looked at it from every window in the house.
I drove up to the rim to see it in the setting of the hamlet. It is perfect. Aesthetically, geometrically, geomantically perfect.
I can feel its influence singing along ley lines to the seven great centres of the earth. At last I’ve done something.
I had forgotten, and now I remembered it all in a rush. Isn’t that what actions are for sometimes, especially actions you don’t have a reason for, but know are necessary? To remember. To remind. To open the door of a room you’d forgotten existed. A door from the present to the past. To allow the past to come into the present …? Remembering:
That the geodesic dome’s integrity is in tension not compression. So it weighs a fraction of any other space enclosure and hardly presses on the ground at all.
That it derives from an icosahedron, one of the five regular solids, the one that for the Ancients encloses the element water.
That the geodesic sphere is found in carbon molecules (discovered after Bucky had invented the geodesic dome – they call them Bucky balls), viruses, microscopic sea creatures. Footballs. Fundamental geometry. Natural geometry.

When it got dark I went inside the tower and lay down and stared up. The pattern of ribs was black against the starry sky.

At first I saw triangles. Small triangles, large triangles – and suddenly the Pythagorean “holy tetractys”, the ten dot triangle or pyramid that represents position, extension, form, the elements, number, the triple Goddess …. The triangles merged into diamonds, separated and re-formed into other triangles, other diamonds; and then hexagons, hexagons most of all, dissolving and resolving, overlapping and ever changing hexagons.
Except at the top of the dome; there, where the Great Triangles meet, there, uniquely, is a pentagon. A space that connects. An absence that creates presence. All around it is change, flow of energy. There, is stillness. My eye wanders excitedly over the pattern of triangles, as it would over an Islamic mosaic, or the face of a sunflower; and then returns to rest on the still eye of the pentagon.
I look at the stars, no longer free, through a mesh now, a net thrown over them ….
I gaze at the pattern of triangles. But now my eye can pass through the net and see the stars. When there is no moon, the stars are brighter, their pattern more complex and interesting, their light more various. Jane moon is gone. Moonlight drowns starlight, fills the night sky with its presence. Praise the moonless, starlit sky.

‘Inside the Tower’ will follow.