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– IAIN SINCLAIR – her character, her creature, Anthony Yorke, who is one thing here and another in a different text. He is a blocked writer, a teacher – and an actor. He luxuriates in taxonomies of failure. He resents his role in this slippery production. ‘This is nothing and everything, all at once.’ With intimations of a double displacement, separation from homeland and from physical well-being, Zia recognises her exile as a highway. ‘Barren country roads crowned by a ribbon of mathematically-arranged wires that stitch earth-horizons with the wide sky. Hours spent in bed reading, my only solace. Outside is alien, and I am too vulnerable to venture forth.’ The cold English sea is a cinema of memory in which the memories are not her own. The road is a prediction, running from past to future. ‘There are those who will scowl at the pavement as they tread their isolated path, determined to keep their starved souls in the deprived element of spiritual poverty.’ Along the stripped spine of a moorland track, the unresting dead are the only pilgrims. What excites me, as a reader of the five texts, is how molecular reactions fizz between them to stitch a single hydra-headed, argumentative entity. It really does feel that none of these pieces could have been written in the form they have settled on without the existence of the others. Sometimes the forward momentum of the narrative is grudging, sometimes it flows with the reckless inevitability of a river in spate. x
page 13
– Introduction – Zia’s road of exile, out there in the far west, tapping sources common to earlier migrants, such as W. S. Graham, D. H. Lawrence, Mary Butts, dissolves into Josipovici’s tramp from Brixton to New Cross: ‘so endless, so rundown and desperate that it becomes purgatorial.’ Moral exhaustion opens a grunge portal on the horrors of Francis Bacon’s painting of a vomiting man in a sealed room. The description brought me back to my first experience of London in 1962, when I made a number of hikes from Electric Avenue, Brixton, to the great Bacon retrospective at the old Tate Gallery on Millbank. Prominence in the show was given to ­Bacon’s reworking of Van Gogh’s Painter on the Road to Tarascon; a molten rendering that became the marker for a lifetime of burdened trudging, of too many days walking out to write. The condition of exile or tolerated otherness, defined by two of the Alchemy authors as a road, becomes an apprenticeship in migration for Benjamin ­Markovits. He leaves the USA for a season, trying out as a basketball player in Germany. Reading his ­finessed report, with its deceptively conversational style, we soon understand that the real apprenticeship, the bullet that can’t be dodged, is to become a professional writer. All the presentations have as their most immediate and defining quality the acceptance, reluctant or otherwise, of confrontation with the challenge of the commission: ‘writing about the mysterious process of xi

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– IAIN SINCLAIR –

her character, her creature, Anthony Yorke, who is one thing here and another in a different text. He is a blocked writer, a teacher – and an actor. He luxuriates in taxonomies of failure. He resents his role in this slippery production. ‘This is nothing and everything, all at once.’

With intimations of a double displacement, separation from homeland and from physical well-being, Zia recognises her exile as a highway. ‘Barren country roads crowned by a ribbon of mathematically-arranged wires that stitch earth-horizons with the wide sky. Hours spent in bed reading, my only solace. Outside is alien, and I am too vulnerable to venture forth.’ The cold English sea is a cinema of memory in which the memories are not her own. The road is a prediction, running from past to future. ‘There are those who will scowl at the pavement as they tread their isolated path, determined to keep their starved souls in the deprived element of spiritual poverty.’ Along the stripped spine of a moorland track, the unresting dead are the only pilgrims.

What excites me, as a reader of the five texts, is how molecular reactions fizz between them to stitch a single hydra-headed, argumentative entity. It really does feel that none of these pieces could have been written in the form they have settled on without the existence of the others. Sometimes the forward momentum of the narrative is grudging, sometimes it flows with the reckless inevitability of a river in spate.

x

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