my writing

Tag: Writing

  • 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,…

  • 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 Shaftesbury for Greece, 1999 : Pages from ‘Odysseos’ Island’,

    p1. There is a moment. After my preparations, the note-taking, the buying and borrowing, the itinerary-writing, the spreading out and piling up of things to take – so that the flat was no longer a place to live but a resource at the service of going away, my first trip to Greece alone since 1971…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Return to Albi: Cycling the Green Meridian, Day 19.

    Day 19: Belcastel to Albi, 51miles. The first smile of the South. Dante and tripe. ‘Benveguda en Tarn’. Pink city. Crusade against Christians. A congregation facing hell. The great explorer lost. Diagonals of the Hexagon. The garden restaurant. Burger à point. It is another cold night and I hardly sleep. I’m up, packed and ready…