IAIN SINCLAIR: ROADS WITHOUT END
From his first days in London, Iain Sinclair was obsessed with two paintings confronted in a Francis Bacon retrospective at the old Tate Gallery. The reworking of a lost masterwork, Van Gogh’s ‘Painter on the Road to Tarascon’, depicting a burdened pedestrian melting into his own shadow. And a spectral life-mask of a decapitated William Blake. Everything that followed seemed to relate to one or other of these prophetic images. The mortal contract involved constant movement, one expedition bleeding into the next, until John Clare’s definitive account of his escape from an Epping Forest asylum/refuge, carried us out of the known into the transcendent. The painter Renchi Bicknell, a collaborator in much of this mischief, will be on hand to revise and extend the conversation.
ABOUT IAIN SINCLAIR
Visionary, poet, novelist, essayist, film-maker, anthologist, curator, psychogeographer, Iain Sinclair is one of our most admired and versatile writers and makers, and Pembroke Poetry is delighted to welcome him back to Cambridge. He is the celebrated author ofDownriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor’s Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky’s Room(with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red EmpireandGhost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances and Conductors of Chaos.
Though we can expect him to range far and wide in the conversation he promises this evening, the book that is likely to be of particular relevance is his marvellous Edge of the Orison: in the traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey out of Essex’ (2005)
In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce – a woman three years dead …
In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare’s walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore – as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic – Sinclair’s quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet’s muse.
Cla’s first biographer appreciates CLA get native gift of poetry but refuses to acknowledge the pr it lacks structure organization of thought he asserts from another perspective another time I see those Journal letters fragments of autobiography as alert fres s the best of their and he had to learn the difficult thing in
Different places we are different people we live in one envelope with a multitude of voices lulling them by regular habits of rising laboring eating taking pleasure and exercise other in suspension Slumber but remain walking confirms identity we are never more than an extension of the ground arres a verb sentence often which keeps
You on your toes and makes you see quite how always on his toes he is Ian is going to stand up shortly I hope and talk for about 35 to 40 minutes renie companion on edge of the Horizon artist photographer who was brought up visited just before Sarah an astonishing visiting itself
Took a number of photographs in the course of the that produced this book and they are amazing behind you on the floor so you can them on the way I hope that between them they will leave us about 15 minutes of question because the real tribute to a vis speak is the
Qualif of the I cut us off at s because okay well as an alcoholic uh I feel free to address you and being in Cambridge I also feel free to be pedantic um I will get to John Clair but actually the John cla’s expression was
Not edge of the Horizon but edge of the Orizon which was his own spelling which gives it the important double meaning that gaze is also a prayer uh and I I want I want to get to John Clair because he’s been promised but there’s so many other things to do first we may
Not arrive at him today we will I hope um the talk of this birthday book was was a good prompt because I’ve been feeling since it I I couldn’t believe it it was a wonderful wonderful gift sort of best present I’ve ever had because there were so many
People some of some of them I didn’t know um offering so many forms of witness some with their own work some with anecdotes and memories some withd drawings it was an absolutely magical experience and it initiated me into a state that I now think of as one of the
Glories of old age it’s like the filmmakers talk about the golden hour there’s this period that lasts just as the sun goes down where everything changes in that light and and being very old and still on your feet does the same thing a lot of a lot of the permissions
Are there now everything is plural everything is permeable you don’t feel obliged to to discipline yourself in all the same ways I feel very free to move through all sorts of strands of time and you can’t help doing it because uh one of the things I’ve leared in an
Engagement with Sweden Berg house which has become a cultural Hub in London putting on exhibitions and Publishing is that Steven mcne there was telling me that what you have to understand about swedenberg is that he realizes that we are the ghosts that they’re in the plural world the the alternative version
Of London or life there is this Heaven of buildings but the people up there are contemplating back to these Leen Souls who are here as the ghosts enacting their own lives and that connects up with my founding statement which was in WB yates’s Vis Vision which is that the
Living can assist the imaginations of the Dead is that the the great works don’t finish John Clair doesn’t finish John Clair’s amazing account of this war so seny yes so dreamlike so completely essential actually continues and we have to join the walk we don’t join it as a
Critique but we We join it because it’s still going on and we connect up with it at all kinds of points um everything in life especially at this age memory memory Works in very odd ways and um having been around finel this extraordinary building across the road which you would never know unless
You had somebody to initiate you into it and hearing my friend reni’s stories of his childhood there just brought us back through time so so incredibly vividly to a day in the 1960s when I came there to his wedding on the grass and the house
Was a bit Pinker and so were we um and now being here in Cambridge takes me back to a very crucial moment when I was a school boy I began the kind of writing that I’m still doing now with a um I won can’t call it a thesis or paper whatever
About Dylan Thomas there was a scholarship called a travelan scholarship and um you had to carry out some form of research and I picked on Dylan Thomas because he was local to me and it was only six years after he died there were still people around who knew
Him and I did because I seemed like some kind of eccentric and I got through to the final which was here in Cambridge this is when it came to the crunch because you we we you looked at rooms with these big long tables today and it brings it right back
To me the sort of inquisitors around this table and me standing there and they said to me um can you recite a poem by Dylan Thomas you’ve done all this writing about him said well of course I can I get up and I start launching into
This PO and after about a minute they say stop stop that’s not Dylan Thomas it was but I mean I I folded completely and you know I didn’t have the mouse at that time to to understand that this was a nice Challenge and you supposed say of course it is and stand
Up for yourself and so I just sort of folded away but actually it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me so I couldn’t come to Cambridge and I went to Dublin which was a much more suitable place for me where I met Reni among other things there was a
Wonderfully anarchic Community there that sort of uh was not too over engaged with the university but it was a place that had theaters and cameras available so you it was a it was uh really a turning point in my life and that happened because of this uh this failure
Here but memory and another way as I was trying to explain to somebody who who was giving me some questions earlier today was that it’s uh it’s very much embedded in in buildings and that to have a sense of yourself you go back into a room and uh there’s a kind of
Radar beam that fills in from the walls that what you’re doing is not enlarging so much your own imagination and cataloging your memories it’s a a confirmation that thing now knows you that thing reports on you and you are enriched and getting to an old age you’re certainly enriched and I I wanted
To first of all give you the clue to to where the whole thing of this project of walking and interest in people like John Clair began which was when I I came to to London in uh 1962 to be film student in Brixton and that coincided with the big
Francis Bacon first retrospective at the Tate Gallery and there were two images in there which zoned in on me and which informed everything that follows and we’ll we’ll come around to them in the end and this is this is uh just a little extract from the book about the
Photographer John Deacon that was mentioned earlier memory is contained in architecture doors walls High ceilings secret spaces without names coming up the wide Stone stairs to the vestibule of Burlington house I began to suspect that my London dream began and ended with major exhibitions by Francis Bacon
The first in 1962 at the old Tate Gallery on Milbank was pure shock a nudge towards a new reality the revelation of a previously unexplored cultural Terrain the gathered paintings were themselves a journey an unstable path into a future prophesied in the Delirious revisioning of Vincent Van
Go’s painter on the road to tarason a stalled Walker a pilgrim melting into the dust of his track the Seeker is burdened with implements placed by a line of Cyprus trees and threatened on all sides by Spears of Southern grass Van Go The Man suicided by Society the
Afternoon of the crows foretells all and then as another kind of provocation the white bone Lantern of Bacon’s attack on William Blake’s life mask that intrusive occult procedure committed by the phrenologist JS devil for exhibition in the shop window on the Strand there were further masks taken from the original in
Anticipation of Technology IES of reproduction not yet invented Bacon’s Blake in the 1962 exhibition is a carnival mask a decapitated Spectre oddly illuminated in a private hell hairless toness hurt by knowledge the mouth is a surgical slash of Agony cutting through soft tissue running from cheek to cheek in company
With vano the man on the road to nowhere this bridled London icon embedded in the location where I first witnessed it became a significant item in my personal mythology the gouging of the cheeks the scraped and butchered neck the scalp Roar from clumps of hair torn away in
The removal of the enveloping plaster this portrait is a proudly born assault on mortality a signature of death in life r ruin and unyielding so we have Vincent van on the road to tarist a painting that’s now disappeared it was destroyed in a bombing raid and the way the bacon
Picked up on it signifying the fact that the Walker always has to be burdened on the way of his journey and that that journey is the thing that we have to locate for ourselves and it’s never ending you realize that one walk one journey is only the ACT access to the
Next and you keep going and all the time um the other voice is that voice of Blake who creates his own cosmology out of the knowledge he wants himself he undertakes walks but they’re not they’re not of the same quality or type he he he only really leaves London significantly for
One time London he is London and and London is him and he he dies you know very close to the to the river very close to the Strand and curiously enough John Clair and Blake coincide on the period of cla’s first visit to London John CLA the the The Peasant poet of
Helston this man who doesn’t feel comfortable whenever he gets out of his knowledge in the way that I was talking about the way the radar beams confirm your own identity his own identity was confirmed by this swoop around Helston by as far as glinton and out onto the edges of the
Fence and if he moved to the wrong place the Shadows began to fall uh CLA was a great Walker and made several Journeys but um the journey to London was a crucially difficult one because it was a journey by coach the publisher of Keats had decided that the fashion for Cockney poets was
Not going to carry and that the peasant poet was was the new one to to promote and uh CLA is forced to come to London and perform himself and on that coach Journey he sees the the workers the laborers in the fields and he has a kind
Of Soul jump between he should be there looking back at the coach that passes and he’s not and this doubling this plural is exactly the process that I’m achieved just by old age CLA got it through his particular talents his abilities and he had to suffer it and he
Arrives in in London and is taken out I mean he’s within a couple of hundred yards of where Blake is and he’s taken down to the temps and he says it’s not as good as Whitt SE Mia and they take him to St Paul’s it’s not Peterburg Cathedral everything has
To be remapped like a situationist map you’re navigating Paris with a map of Venice Claire is navigating London and certain streets he will not navigate he doesn’t want to go down chancer Lane it’s lethal it’s full of ghosts he’s going to just sell he’s acutely aware of an atmosphere
That has not yet arrived there’s the atmospher of the Law Courts around there’s that Sinister side of it but there’s also where aliser crley is going to live where uh magical rituals are going to take place on that street in the future but CLA somehow is is aware
Of that he he has achieved everything normal mortality achieves but he achieves it earlier in a psychic way um and this leads to terrible problems of splitting and doubling he sees Lord Byron’s funeral procession pass and by that accident again the jump of Soul he takes on the Persona of Byron and when
He’s in Matthew Allen’s asylum in high Beach um he starts to rewrite byon he he writes child Harold he writes extraordinary possessed poems and stays there in the forest to this edge of the city ragical place eping Forest you know the the one time I I met uh the American ecologist poet Gary
Snider um friend of Jack caroak Still Still Alive still up there in the Sierra Nevada went went up a man of a Zen Precision he says you if you come to see me you must arrive at 11:00 if you’re one minute late I won’t
Be there so we go up you know find our way up these Trails extraordinary his his instructions are like a John Clair poet you know very pair down get there there he is and um he’s with a large dog pounces up really takes a fancy to my
Wife and we we go through a series of challenges with Gary which is right you know and then he he makes some tea uh outside and and a few little things to eat and we sit down and he warms up because he says I want to talk to you
About eping Forest so I thought oh my gosh right okay we’re on now because he’ he’d heard that aspects of eping forest were threatened and its importance to him was sort of as if it was a Sierra Nevada itself if it was something Epic significant to London and that London
Couldn’t exist without this Forest Fringe where all of the oddest things would happen where Tennyson is also having a breakdown at the same time as Claire is is in the Asylum because he’s being paid for by his patrons uh Tennyson invests money with do with Matthew Allen in a process for making
Table legs which fails and is disastrous and so has to postpone his marriage the the the forest husbands its Melancholy it’s it’s a it’s a quite extraordinary thing and our access to it came about because um Ren she and I completed a long story
As to how we got into it a walk around London’s M25 Motorway around the fringes of it which took took a year one one day every month we met and we carried on from where we left left off before always within the acoustic Footprints which is what the highway Planters call
The distance back you can still hear the road always within that we made our year Journey around it in company at various times in Epsom in particular with Peter Carpenter Kevin Jackson people associated with this college who gave their insights into into these places and we saw the destruction of asylums
And hospitals we um had numerous numerous Adventures but the last night was extraordinary coming through we were coming um counterclockwise we we’d come through the forest we walked at night in right through eping Forest cars coming straight headlights straight towards us rain pouring down Kevin was pretty foot
Founded in the John Clair state and we we made that journey and we sat down in a pub in in walam ABI and suddenly it became clear that the only way out of this conundrum this road that goes go nowhere except into the past was that
You would have to follow John cla’s walk because CLA is up there in high beach for a number of years he he gets to know the gypsies who pass through the forest he gets to know people in local pubs he seems quite settled there and then comes
This moment he decides it’s not an escape because nobody’s chaining him up he decides that he’s got to enter the dream you know he’s become Byron he’s reconnected with his love who is the kind of love of his life in his own mind Mary Joyce of glinton who he last
Knew as as a school boy um he’s married to her in his own mind it’s a double marriage and he’s being locked up for bigamy because Patty his actual wife is also married to him and he he’s striking back he’s trying to undo the journey he’s unw walking what he’s doing is
Because uh the first journey or rather un rding he wants to unpick the mistake of coming to to London on a on a coach walk it and reclaim that land reclaim the knowledge of himself through that land which is just what we were trying to do in following his footsteps we
Couldn’t follow his exact footsteps we went wrong in all kinds of ways but always slept in the same places as he had slept um and as Reni was saying to me when we were chatting before it wasn’t anything like he had a proper plan or that he took down great details
Of his walk there was no deep topography about his description it was just that he was driven and he writes this phenomenal letter at the end it’s really quite like something by caroak way ahead of its time it’s that first impulse and and looking at the original manuscript
He’s writing right to the edge of the paper there not a centimeter left and it’s it’s delivered with such intensity and he gets there you know he gets back into the home territory but instead of being able to reclaim himself um Patty sends out a cart and
He’s picked up and taken back to Northboro which is the wrong place he he his his Cottage his home ground in Helston is gone and his patrons have got him a grander space in North bro but that that Village is on the edge of the fence that Village is two miles away
It’s nothing to walk but it’s lost ground and he’s homeless at home he can’t be there and after that it’s into his wife Tried Him and couldn’t deal with him into Northampton Asylum for the rest of to his life so I just will read a little scrap from from the orbital
Book of that moment when we we kind of connected with John CLA because this one Journey falls into another London Drew CLA and hurt him he remembered the funeral procession of Lord Byron playhouses with Morts of tumbling he saw what Cockney fools failed to recognize the living ghosts of
Chancery Lane he stayed late and Silent at every function to which he was brought so that he might delay the solitary walk back to his lodgings in Northampton Asylum he would become an emanation of Byron as Don Juan he ventriloquized aous Voice by an act of occult possession as Blake had revised
The errors of Milton CLA imagined so the doctors said that he was being punished imprison for bigamy for a first spiritual marriage unconfirmed by civil ceremony his Phantom bride was already buried in glinton churchard CLA did what any sane man would do he took off on his
Epic Journey out of Essex three and a half days walking back to northb in northand gnawing at grass torn from the roadside chewing tobacco without drink apart from a pint bought with coins thrown by migrant Farm laborers foot founded and broken down he completed his hallucinatory voyage without Maps or
Money CLA fixed his bearings by Sleeping with his head pointing to the north we calculated this journey which we were determined to repeat was around 120 miles or the distance of the M25 if it was stretched out into a straight line fug as exorcism cla’s War successfully
Performed the ritual we were toying with he had been in the forest long enough to understand the peculiarity of its status as a memorial to a featureless and unreachable past a living storm break at the limit of urban projection when CLA reunited with his Corporal wife come to write up the
Journal of this Escape he gave it the correct title Journey out of essic an expulsion a rejection the last of London and ambition the last of healing and mending digging Crow scaring rambling the acceptance of the dream the multiple World his Pros is excited incantatory
Essential he has to rewalk the road in a seizure he has to remember to remember to call up details before they fade the pains the errors extra miles tramped on miscalculation there’s no better there’s no more implicated account of the necessity of walking cla’s motivation was so much more powerful than our own
The great North Road was still a route down which everything and everyone traveled coaches gypsies Farmers military masterless men the M25 goes nowhere it’s self-referential postmodern iconic modestly corrupt it was don’t make any sense until it’s been abandoned and grown over like the airfields of middle England the dormitory Villages
The concrete bunkers in cornfields the nuclear shelters dis disguised as farmhouses cla’s walk was an act of love but the versions he gave the world was already at one remove a condemned cell confession a forged diary rapidly assembled to rationalize an ecstatic episode it went wrong so quickly his
Return disgruntled wife too many children cold Cottage in an alien Village he’d seen the enclosures he had been wandering in the fields when the men came to carry out the survey for the railway company the landscape didn’t know him he would be removed to spend the rest of his life in Northampton
Asylum he spurned newspaper BL and false obituries he’d seen his Mary alive and well and young as ever but his walk under undertaken in the spirit of Vera herzog’s from Munich to Paris to rescue a friend from cancer had failed he confirmed his Love’s death he filled
Her mouth with Earth he brought himself back to reality homeless at home and half gratified to feel I can be happy anywhere the story is told in a few scribbled Pages an epito before they took him away the diary finishes with quotation marks opened but unclosed and how can I
Forget uh because these walks are always about memory they’re about future memories and past memories and so the the past memories become the future project um The Crossover with Vincent Van led into a a much more recent project with renchi in that when there was the The vanok Exhibition at at the
Tate uh I was asked to write something about his time in in England and I started to redo the walks that he’d done just just really to get a sense of thinking about him not with any sense that I you know you could connect up precisely with the Landscapes that he’d
Done but uh I suppose the major one in England was from Ramsgate to Canterbury Canterbury to leam leam to Welling which he did in one pretty connected burst and when we went from Ramsgate to Canterbury in a in a day of troubled rain in a in a
In a difficult time for renchi and I met him there he was sketching the head of Vango a bust of angor in right close to the school where he taught in pouring rain and the the sort of Melancholy of this image melting off the page and renchi
Going on painting it seemed to set up the tone of this particular w and we walked all day through strangely lots of fields of drowned sunflowers and arrived at Canterbury late in the evening and and ren she particularly wanted to be inside the cathedral to kind of carry
The walk in there and the great doors were shut and there was a police woman standing there and that was it you know I thought well I I sort of said okay that’s that’s it off you know getting a tray and then she said no you know I claim pilgrims rights
And he was covered in mud you know and a huge Rock sack and he stood in front of this woman and said I we have walked here you know and you cannot deny me access and she said oh all right and she she couldn’t you know she
Opened up the door and in he went and uh the the chief officiate of this ceremony that was going on recognized this the power of this and led him to the spot that was the the central marking spot of English Christianity so that was I mean I heard about this because I wasn’t
There but that was exactly the tone of this thing and I carried um I carried the walk on you know I from I started in DOA for going Watling Street and came to Canterbury got got to lean and then did this walk to welli which was a a van go
Walk obviously and an incredible walk that brought me right back to the failures or or in a sense of the Clare walk is that we were not able to make the connection between eping forest and uh the great North Road because you’re pushing through so many motorways it’s
Almost impossible so we sort of followed the Lee further up and and cut up to stevenage and join joined cla’s walk there so on this other walk I stayed true to to bangok and and clambered down motorways dashed across motorways all that all that complete craziness and
Then suddenly found a a glorious past through passage that carried me into um into wellin uh late late at night foot founded the N degree so in a sense just just a brief bit from something else just to show how one walk and figures from one walk are beside you all
The time and when Reni and I you know walked down to Brighton towards Brighton another walk that vanok done you know very much his presence was indicated in the landscape at so many points and this is this um he stayed with the family in in um
Black he in leam who whose daughter had died in a riding accident on black Heath no sooner pillowed in leam in a dead girl’s bed and the Restless Visionary was booted in a way Rising with laborers to to wellin where his sister was employed as a teaching assistant The
Fading stalker that’s me followed as rain returned after summer months passing the poor CLA Monastery Beyond High Barnet he thought of the other inextinguishable profet of the great North Road John CLA poor John drenched ditched hedged by an endless stream of commuters reps and white van bullies testing the motorway system the late
Pedestrian emphasized with cla’s Delirious account of his journey out of Essex that trudge from eping Forest to the cottage at Northboro where he’d be homeless at home the poet’s urgent report is a one breath confession spontaneous and uncensored Vincent’s London letters announc the coming era of mad Walkers and deep topographers
Looking at prisoners exercising painted in s in 1890 the stalker thought of CLA in Northampton Asylum and the despairing abdication of the Sonet version of I am and plaed upon the Earth as dull and void Earth’s prison chilled my body with its dram one of the best things that
Happened in relation to the John Clair project was that there was a film version made by Andrew cotting um in which Toby Jones played John Clair well God you know now if Toby Jones plays anything it’s a national emergency you know you know hold hold
The front page so but Toby was a such a subtle actor you know in his in his absorption of what CLA was in just a few gestures and I was sort of witnessing this covering up my acting by wearing a goat mask and reading little bits from from the journey to Essex and
But the one absolutely magical moment of this whole experience was that Toby was doing it really partly in honor of his father Freddy Jones a much more flamboyant actor of the old school and Freddy was obsessed by John Clair and done stage shows of cla’s work and he in
Fact played John Clare first on on television and Toby freaked out watching that when he was a child because his mom was playing patty and they saw them and he saw his father being taken off to the Asylum and mean a lot of people thought that was what should have happened with
Freddy who was quite a drinker but um Toby was playing his respects so Toby was physically enacting John Clair but Freddy was doing the voice and at the end of this thing we were just sitting in his garden and I asked him did he still could he still recall uh I am and
Recite it and he he began and he he was mesmerizing and then suddenly he lost it you know and luckily the camera kept on rolling and he he went into that other place you he went into something there were so many other things around he it
Gone and it came back it came back and it was like a wonderful resurrection and he he was so happy you know he and he just reached out of his head it was a the kind of Magic Moment you know you can you can get in a film and that is an
Addition to this this book and that takes me back to the moment when I’m in this place trying to do a poem by Dylan Thomas and uh this is said this is what happened I said do can you do a PO by dlan Thomas and I said um yes yes it’s a
Refusal to mourn the death by fire of a child in London never until the mankind making bird beast and flower fathering and all humbling Darkness tells with silence and they stop not Dyan Thomas but it is I can say that now and back in Cambridge it is and uh I’ll
Finish with that thank [Applause] you yes no whatever few so like for various reasons I I feel I’m in a State of Shock the shock is uh connected to a visit to my family home where um like the absolute essence of the garden was a huge cedar tree
Which um like I think about five years ago it’s it was failed and uh so it was very sad in that way to revisit my home and so I relate that very much to what Ian said at the very beginning it’s one of these uh it kind of pushes me into completing
A cycle and then just I’m just open now like that that’s the end of that I had another experience that just to rub it in um earlier in the year i’ I’d created a a really large Mosaic Shop sign in Glastonbury where I live and um
When like a few weeks back uh in January we had like tremendous storms and somehow like the whole of this sign um blew down but I didn’t know that I I just took a walk into town and it I feel that’s that’s the radical Edge
Which we step into and I mean I I look up to my elders and Ian is a bit older than I am but so I mean just I’ll just finish by saying like um total thanks to I and and that it’s is really great to to have Elders who you can really admire
And uh get a lot out of is sometimes it’s just a company walking where we’ve walked hundreds of miles probably together and it’s like not always I mean that’s another thing that came out with the van Go Walks the M25 walk the John Clair walk it’s still got
This essence of just walking it’s like the with in and and and a lot of these other um people like Rambo he just gets up one day boom and walks and I I feel uh that that’s very essential again to that radical state of mind it’s just go
You you had a very particular way of taking the photographs that you took on that Journey it was different to the way that the journeys are normally recorded yeah I did I I I thought I didn’t want to stop stop and uh kind of pause and
Frame things at all like I i’ let it um be like a walking so the the photographs if you get to see them at the back they are uh very much walking photographs and uh I feel that that like although John CLA on on that walk out of Essex didn’t Um didn’t yeah he didn’t uh scary uh I feel John Clair didn’t observe much outside but I I feel there was a a spiritual and intuitive feel to it and that’s that was more the mood we we were going along in just an an intuitive one there seems to be interference
Between the two microphones yeah so it all swallows in the chimney no so uh I just just repeat again great great thanks to Ian he’s been a great um companion and guide and uh yeah on on a long walk you you get great wisdoms from from him but also just
Uh casual stuff where it’s it’s all been like great and continuing pleasure and I hope you’ve enjoyed this talk as much as I have thank thank you in thank you very much I I suggest you turn that off for now because it’s doing something it’s doing something funny I think it’s your
Reason anyway questions I Ask of your I ask it’s old what say about relationship well I think it’s much more like spontaneous sketching in a sense that um the pros books were were written um on a on a on a laptop you know so I can see the page and I’m adjusting it
The the poems are always just scribbled in kind of little notebooks and one of the one of the disadvantages of that is I can’t read my own writing so when when I come to transcribe it it becomes something else and often very weird words start to come
Up but I feel that they are they are the real raw material you know of the whole thing but they often um they don’t go through a process whereby these other Pro tests have to be Rewritten and made relatively accessible the the poem is what it is and of sometimes it’s a
Sketch occasionally it becomes something bigger and a larger structure um um they they’re quite important to me but I’ve never felt any obligation to to get them out into a somewhere where they could find an audience so and also what I like about it is the the possibility of
Working with independent presses you know which is quite different to to working with editors and copy editors and all the rest of it with Peter Carpenter who’s who’s published u a couple of my books um you know it’s a it’s a it’s a proper conversation it’s a
Kind of a total engagement and finding a way that the the book looks like the poem feels and so I’ve done so many of those that nobody would ever know existed and and without those I wouldn’t be able to do the other stuff so I’ve actually got a huge trench
About that size to be transcribed which is getting alarming because I’ve never haven’t had the time you know where i’ i’ I’d like to get back and work on that you know and I think it would be nice to to get that out into a into a form where
More people could see it so thank you very much for asking about that because not many people do yeah so the question about doubling the topography yeah digital in in what in terms of the digital world which is doing that process for us you know in a
In a sense I think you’re you’re competing with those Technologies um particularly when I did a book called light out for the territory back back in the 90s was sort of beginning this process of walking and interrogating London so hyper conscious of the fact of every move was being filmed on
CCTV it was it was the beginning really beginning of that it came quite late and largely the city of London decided that it would emphasize its particular Singularity by installing these millions of cameras so several times began to be challenged in the city of London just for taking photographs or something and
You were aware that the demands on someone writing about it changed because of this doubling that that in a sense the only way crimes were going to be solved or dealt with is if they if they were in the movie if they weren’t in the film forget
It um and that had a danger you know like um CCTV cameras were installed in in a in a block of uh outside sorry outside a block of new Flats in Hackney and the the dealing and sort of Street activity that had gone on then because
They were aware that this was a camera Zone moved inside the building where there was no camera and a a young student who was working in the building complained and got stabbed and killed so essentially the cameras had created if you were not in the camera Zone you were
In a crime Zone and the the city was remapped in this doubled sense and that is something that we have to deal with I think it’s gone way way way beyond that now it’s it’s really intriguing but I think it’ll take someone with a sort of
Savia tech technical point of view to do that Fant great yeah the the what yeah yeah well I think I think you’re you know you’re right in that those are those are the important sort of transcendence of the Native particular moments that are very of a working
Person who buys time to sit in a hollow tree or beside a river or whatever and the the can express itself or he waits for the moment when he can write it me there there’s a paper inside his hat that he can scribble that down and that’s that’s what he’s about until he’s
Transported out I think this is the this is the thing it’s a kind of a a force Journey that that turns him into the thing that needs to walk back in a in a different way and so essentially those those poems of Stillness are what he
He’s after and and how he keeps a record of things to start with and then that’s destroyed and become or becomes something else which I think is equally interesting because of the the nature of the journey well I think I I was not giving a proper
Account then of what I feel because I I I was trying more to say that having Bor born witness to something that thing becomes part of you and you are continuing to Bear witness to to it you know if if I spend a day walking around
Cambridge then I’ve had to to buy that in a sense that that becomes a part of my memory map and I continue to do it and reference it and come back to it it’s not that I’ve witnessed something and therefore I think it’s done with and
Put it aside I I don’t want to give that impression quite the reverse so so w witness is well no it’s like it’s not there to be witnessed but it’s still there just like get Dawn you just because you don’t see a thing doesn’t mean it’s not there um
And there is this sort of uh strange plurality going back to Sweden swedenberg again when he was walking around Stockholm suddenly had the sense that the people he was walking through were all dead Souls they were they were dead and he was I mean I don’t have that
Privileged sense that I’m walking among the dead I I felt more like you be you can become one of the dead because they don’t go away um with with renchi we we had a recently a rather wonderful experience for us anyway Exhibition at swedenberg house called histories and
Hauntings and this was a recapitulation of a show that we’d managed to get in the White Chapel Gallery in 1974 just by walking in off the street as you could in those days say oh we’re local poets can we have a show okay uh and the third member of that was Brian
Catling who who died a year or so ago but you know in this show he was totally present you everything he was he was as much there as if he had been standing in the room sort of deciding where this is going to be shown that’s going to be
Shown whatever and one of the things I showed was a sword he cast a great sword about that size around the time of the first exhibition but it was so so personal an object he made for me and so powerful that I I never could exhibit it
It was always wrapped up and hidden away and uh this was the first time it was opened up and and renchi was felt very strongly that this object kind of aligned the the compass bearings of the show so it was in a glass vitrine by itself and it was no sooner put there
Then the roof of swedenberg house fell in and it was a painting that rented made to bring it back to Cambridge called Mr prin and this was a little very glowing painting of two of us arriving in Cambridge with a great rucksack of poetry books to show to Mr
Prin and he’s opening up an underground car park to let us out into the light and this painting launched itself off the wall at that moment and just smashed so there you go the the the dead are in our conversation still for sure it’s 7
O’ there could not be a better way to end I would just like to say uh you said fading stalker that’s me indistinguishable profits I thank you so [Applause] much