my writing

Category: Novel

  • Entering Greece for the first time, 1970 : pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    p 38On the overnight train down the length of Italy we take down the luggage and Simon and I use the netting racks as hammocks, leaving more sleeping space for the others. I look down at Jacks sleeping, sprawled and open-mouthed, then I’m rocked to sleep. I wake to a red dawn, the air already…

  • Inside the Tower : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    Aug 21I’ve worked steadily. I finished the panels and glazing in the tower roof and it stands empty. No purpose has revealed itself. Why did I build it?I go in and stand and look around and wonder what it’s for. An orgone accumulator? A meditation chamber? A folly? At present, simply an empty space. ‘What…

  • Building the Tower : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    July 1In 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…

  • La Balme in 1976 : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    p.54. I go to the door and stand in the sunlight and look out over the garden, the valley, the hills, clear and bright on this midsummer morning and now more alive in my eyes than it has ever been, because of the songs that are already weaving their way through me. What happened yesterday…

  • Albi in 1976: pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    Chapter 1: Albi I watch the cream and red train disappear slowly around the long bend. The last I see of Jane is her hand sticking out of the window, her fingers spread out like the ribs of a broken fan. I stare along the empty line until the noise of the train dies away…