my writing

Tag: life

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The Divided Wood

    “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” A ruined splendour, a white wasteland … what has happened in the great wood?When his overbearing magnate father dies, Geoffrey believes that he has inherited everything and can at last come into his own. But the old man’s will contains a…