my writing

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  • Swans on the River

    I don’t know where they came from.I saw the last one arrive, descending with an easy parachute grace, its great wings cupping the air as its splayed feet touched the water, entered it, so that it landed with barely a splash. It folded its wings, settled with the others, afloat.There are twelve, dazzling as light,…

  • The Chauvet Cave : Into Prehistory.

    Cycling up the tree-clad Ardeche valley, as the motor-cyclists speed past around the many curves (this is a tourist road, opened in 1960), canted over, hanging their lives out over hundred-metre drops, depending on the adhesion of a few square inches of rubber, I am imagining the painters of the Chauvet Cave watching the passing…

  • William Blake & The Art School Ball, 1966.

    p40 On the day of the Arts Ball I read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.It is impossible to convey the effect of reading that firework-box of statement and contradiction, directness and ambiguity, celebration and subversion, all carried along on a juggernaut of certainty. Line after incandescent line of it could be the object of…

  • Jacks, Bob Dylan, and ‘One Song Jukebox Number 1.’ 1971.

    p78. On 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…

  • Australia

    Claude Levi-Strauss and approaching the Red Centre I “Exploration is not so much a covering of surface distance as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape, or a remark overheard may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning.” Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p56…

  • Leaving Naxos, 1970. Pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    p379I plunged inside the vibrating drum of music, the thudding rhythmic bass shaking the floor, screaming guitar notes bending the walls, the drum kit smashing the air into glittering fragments. Sensory overload in which my bones, emptied by leaping, now filled with pulsing, coloured mercury, my body, hollowed out by activity and strung with resonant…

  • 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…

  • Introduction. &, Meeting Penny : Pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    INTRODUCTION The details of Richard’s disappearance filtered through to me slowly. Or perhaps I filtered them slowly. I had lost touch, ceased to keep in touch with him several years before, having run out of patience with his lack of focus, his failure to get on. When getting on, one needs the company of those…

  • Bob Dylan and Herman Melville: “Blind Willie McTell” and ‘The Confidence-Man’.

    Note: I originally wrote this piece, on the links between a Bob Dylan song and a Herman Melville novel, a dozen years ago, before his Nobel Prize for Literature, when he was still a ‘song and dance man’. It was written in a compressed form for a specialist Bob Dylan magazine. Here I’ll open it…

  • 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…