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– IAIN SINCLAIR – The Alchemy writers identify with an intensely local force field known as the Self, while appreciating that its borders, through homeopathic doses of loss or hurt or love, can burst; so that, in the instant of composition, there is no division between individual consciousness and the world at large. Vision is the name we give to that absolute. The thing that can’t be forced, prostituted or sold short. And herein lies the paradox and the challenge for the five chosen witnesses, who are privileged to write themselves out of the trap, the Faustian contract, by way of personal anecdote, ­strategic revelation or hopeful punt in the dark. The belief is declared several times in these essays that the natural world has its established mechanisms, suns will rise and rise again. We labour in that expectation, blackest night before dawn. Disillusion, anomie, betrayal are accepted as necessary tolls for access to the Great Work. Gabriel Josipovici quotes Beckett, somebody had to: ‘Bon qu’a ça.’ The condemned author – condemned to live – puts words on paper because it is all that he or she can do. Foolish to comment any further. But now comment is required. Comment has been solicited. ‘The writing is painfully aware,’ Josipovici says, ‘of the fact that the rhetoric both reinforces and undermines the anguish.’ In playing the game, feinting at a post­humous explanation for what is, in effect, an electro­chemical seizure, a sudden thickening of the tongue, a viii
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– Introduction – suspension of conditioned reflexes, the essayist finds relief in identification with terrain, some elective topography capable of bearing the weight of the metaphor that must be imposed upon it. Vision is out there and we will walk, hobble, swim or crawl, to find it. The special place might, for Partou Zia, be a flint field at the end of the land. A soft-focus garden running down to the Thames for Joanna Kavenna. A busy urban road for Gabriel Josipovici. An aircraft coming down on a motorway embankment for Anakana Schofield. Geography is destiny, but ‘reality’ is a tight bone cage: the cell of the skull from which consoling sets are conjured. The writer’s task is to recognise the place that is writing you; triggering the voices, giving you permission to continue. I began my own long and frustrating engagement with London by quoting from A Vision by W. B. Yeats. And I’ve never, in more than forty years, found good reason to go beyond that. ‘The living can assist the imagination of the dead.’ We are ventriloquised, confirmed in our fantasies. This is what we must do and we are doing it. ‘To drift into the poetic is in itself work,’ Zia says. Kavenna shares my belief that writing is rewriting. We receive and record the stories that press in upon us, across the boundaries of sleep and mortality. ‘I was troubled by bad dreams and these had an intensely tactile and auditory quality, and ­often seeped into the ensuing day, like a miasma. In my dreams the dead were alive.’ It is not Kavenna talking to us, it is ix

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– IAIN SINCLAIR –

The Alchemy writers identify with an intensely local force field known as the Self, while appreciating that its borders, through homeopathic doses of loss or hurt or love, can burst; so that, in the instant of composition, there is no division between individual consciousness and the world at large. Vision is the name we give to that absolute. The thing that can’t be forced, prostituted or sold short. And herein lies the paradox and the challenge for the five chosen witnesses, who are privileged to write themselves out of the trap, the Faustian contract, by way of personal anecdote, ­strategic revelation or hopeful punt in the dark. The belief is declared several times in these essays that the natural world has its established mechanisms, suns will rise and rise again. We labour in that expectation, blackest night before dawn. Disillusion, anomie, betrayal are accepted as necessary tolls for access to the Great Work.

Gabriel Josipovici quotes Beckett, somebody had to: ‘Bon qu’a ça.’ The condemned author – condemned to live – puts words on paper because it is all that he or she can do. Foolish to comment any further. But now comment is required. Comment has been solicited. ‘The writing is painfully aware,’ Josipovici says, ‘of the fact that the rhetoric both reinforces and undermines the anguish.’

In playing the game, feinting at a post­humous explanation for what is, in effect, an electro­chemical seizure, a sudden thickening of the tongue, a viii

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