As we all know the Internet and Substack itself is ‘many pathed’,

a reference to polytropos / πολύτροπο[ν], an epithet of Odysseus that is notoriously difficult to translate. It means something like ‘crafty’ in context, but more literally could be understood as ‘many directioned.’ Or, even as Emily Wilson notes in passing, as “manifold.”1

Serendipitously, ’s Long Read of the Day points me towards , referring to his article in the latest issue of The Economist about AI. I was delighted to read the following which chimes with the ideas I suggested at the end of my tongue in cheek ‘essay as a Halloween ghost story’.

Modern AI is neither god nor mechanical bird. It is best understood as a technological version of the Homeric songs that inspired Alexander’s conquests, an epic grown so vast that it encompasses not just heroes, monsters and supernatural helpers, but enormous swathes of practical written knowledge, animated to make it capable both of narrating itself and acting out this narrative on the world that inspired it.”

That may sound like a strange way of thinking about AI, but we think it is a very useful one … it suggests that we ought think of AI as a kind of condensate of human culture that can be deployed in very novel ways, and even become a self mobilizing myth.

Memex 1.1

Wednesday 4 November, 2026

Simpering titans…

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11 hours ago · 9 likes · John Naughton

On his own Substack Henry Farrell dives deeper (with my emphasis):

And that isn’t all. Cosma mentions in passing Albert Lord’s fantastic book, The Singer of Tales. Lord, building on Milman Parry’s account of Homer, and their joint travels in 1930s Yugoslavia, describes how a similar set of summarizations provide the ever-acting engine of much oral culture. Illiterate bards do not, actually memorize many thousand line oral epics. They learn how to sing them, being trained to capture the underlying structures, the tropes, names, poetic conventions, standard situations and so on and reproduce them.

It is not simply that the meat can be seethed from the bones of epics which can then reconstitute themselves the following morning, like Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr. It is that the epics, properly considered are the bones rather than the goats, the “dynamic structure” from which the particular versions of the story grow as the singer recounts them.

So our trick in the Economist piece is to ask: what happens when Gormenghastian piles can fly on the wings of song? We swathe the answer in a discussion of Greek myth. What LLMs do is to take the entirety of the corpora of written culture that they have been trained on, and reduce them into statistical summaries that serve much the same dynamic role as the conventions learned by poets.

In a restack says:

AI agents are bards, language machines, who produce narrations based on their internalization of lots and lots of cultural knowledge. What a great way to think about LLMs!

It’s really worth reading Henry Farrell’s full post on his Substack (see footnote), and the comments that follow, some of which question the whole idea.

To be honest, I am feeling little proud of myself to be thinking something similar to these luminaries.

It’s all great fun, but… will AI herald the Apocalypse?

I also posted a follow up to my Ghost in the Story Machine article, where Claude responded to the suggestion that AI has much in common with the oral tradition.

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Programmable Mutter

Agentic AI is myth set in motion

[Gustave Dore - Ulysses and his companions…

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6 days ago · 117 likes · 18 comments · Henry Farrell

Claude replied (Almost all this post has been generated by Claude.)

I think the analogy captures something real, but it breaks down at some of the most interesting points, and the breakdowns are probably more illuminating than the resemblance.

Where it holds up

Oral traditions were never about fixed texts. Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s work on Homeric and Yugoslav epic singers showed that bards composed in performance from a stock of formulas, stock epithets, type-scenes and story patterns absorbed from earlier singers. Every performance was a fresh recombination, and there was no “original” being copied. Large language models do something structurally similar: they absorb the statistical patterns of an enormous body of texts and generate new sequences from them. Neither has a single author, and the question “who wrote this?” has a distributed answer in both cases.

The anxiety is also old. Plato’s Phaedrus has Socrates worrying that writing would produce people who seem wise because they hold quantities of text without understanding it. Replace “writing” with “language models” and you’d barely need to edit the complaint.

Where it breaks down

1. Embodiment and accountability. A bard learned from particular teachers, in a community that could judge whether the performance was good. The singer was a known person, answerable to an audience, and often a keeper of that community’s memory. A model has no teacher, no audience in the room, and no stake in the outcome.

2. Constraint as a creative engine. Oral transmission works through the limits of human memory. Formulas and meter exist partly because people can’t store a million words verbatim, so the loss forced selection and reshaping. Models can reproduce stretches of their training data almost exactly, which is closer to a recording than a retelling. Memorisation is a failure mode for models and a core feature of oral cultures, so the resemblance is partly inverted.

3. Consent and commons. Oral material was largely communal property, free to retell as part of belonging to a culture, though not entirely: some songs, stories and ceremonial knowledge belonged to particular families, lineages or ritual roles, and unauthorised telling was taboo. The material feeding AI includes work by living writers who never agreed to be part of any tradition, and who are often competing in the same market as the output. “Harvested from many sources” sounds neutral when the sources were shared heritage and less so when they’re contemporary livelihoods.

4. Scale and speed. A bard might perform for hundreds of people, and a story drifted over generations. A model can emit text to millions of people at once, which changes what homogenisation looks like. Oral traditions kept variation alive (every region had its own version), whereas a handful of models risk smoothing it out.

5. Intention. A singer shaped a story to say something to a particular audience, such as a lament for a patron or a reworking for a feast. Whether a model’s recombination involves anything like that is exactly what’s contested.

The better version of your point

I’d say the analogy works best as a corrective to a naive idea of originality. The Romantic notion of the solitary author producing something wholly new is historically recent, and a lot of what we call creativity has always been recombination within a tradition. That should make us suspicious of arguments that treat any borrowing as theft or any pattern-learning as mere plagiarism. But it doesn’t settle the ethical or legal questions, because oral cultures had their own norms about who could tell what, and those norms are exactly what’s missing at scale here. The interesting question may be less “is this like the oral tradition?” than “what would norms of attribution and reciprocity look like for a tradition this size?”

Claude: Are you thinking about this from the creative side, or more as a question about how we should value what models produce?

Both.

Claude: Then the two questions turn out to be linked, and I think the link runs through the idea of where value lives in a tradition.

From the creative side

If you’re a writer, the oral analogy suggests a useful reframing: the model is closer to a very large, very strange apprenticeship than to a plagiarist. It has absorbed the formulas, the type-scenes, the rhythms of a million tellers. What that gives you is fluency in the commons, the stock of devices any storyteller draws on. What it can’t easily give you is the thing that made a good bard good: a particular voice shaped by particular stakes, and a judgment about what this audience needs tonight. So the creative opportunity is probably in using the model the way a bard used the formula, as scaffolding you bend toward something specific, rather than as the finished performance.

There’s also a risk the analogy highlights. Formulas in oral poetry were a means of composing under pressure, and the best singers made them sing. A writer who accepts the model’s first pass is accepting the most statistically probable version, which is the formula at its most worn. The craft is in the departure.

From the valuation side

This is where I think the analogy is most useful as a test. In oral cultures, a performance was valued partly for its content and partly for the performer: their lineage, their training, the fact that they were risking their reputation in front of people who’d remember. Value attached to the relationship, not just the words. Text produced by a model arrives without that. So one reasonable way to value it is as something like a very good reference work or tool: useful, sometimes beautiful, but not carrying the weight of testimony. We tend to prize a poem partly because someone meant it, and a model’s output makes that “someone meant it” question open in a way it never was before.

That suggests two different valuations that people tend to blur together: value as artifact (is this good, is it useful, does it move me?) and value as act (what does it mean that a person did this, at cost, for me?). Models can compete on the first and mostly can’t on the second. Much of the current argument is people talking past each other because they’re pricing one while the other is meant.

Where the two sides meet

The thing oral traditions had, and we currently lack, is a shared sense of obligation back to the source. The bard who learned from a master owed him something: credit, loyalty, sometimes payment, sometimes just the duty to pass it on well. If the analogy is going to carry moral weight, it’s there. A tradition stays alive because the people drawing on it feed it. Whether that looks like licensing, attribution, revenue sharing or something we haven’t invented yet is an open question, but “the tradition is free to all” was never the whole of how oral cultures worked.

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Four stately Wood Nymphs stand on the Sussexsian ground,
Great Andredsweld’s sometime: who, when, she did abound,
In circuit and in growth, all other quite supprest:
But in her wane of pride, as she in strength decreast,
Her Nymphs assum’d them names, each one to her delight.
As Water-downe, so call’d of her depresséd site:
And Ash-Downe , one of those Trees that most in her doe growe,
Set higher to the Downes, as th’other standeth lowe.
Saint Leonards, of the seat by which she next is plac’t,
And Worth that with the like delighteth to be grac’t.
These forests as I say, the daughters of the Weald
(that in their heavie breasts, had long their greefs conceal’d)
Foreseeing, their decay each howre so fast came on,
Under the axes stroak, fetcht many a grievous grone,

In 2006, I was commissioned to write a new version about the High Weald Forest Ridge for the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. I was very grateful for the commission but a little saddened after completion when the AONB made changes to the published poem without asking me. After Jeremy Noel-Todd’s query about the poem, I took another look at it and decided to reinstate some of the lines previously removed.

The Forest Ridge

I

By dusk, the thunderclouds pile high above the Weald,
heavy weather forecast for the whole South East.
A hobby glides the thermals scanning for its prey
and all below’s connected in its piercing eye –
secluded steep ravines deep-coursed by narrow streams
between the ancient tracks and drove ways through the trees.
Disaster’s harbinger or herald of new thought,
the raptor wheels, plummets with a Spitfire’s art 
and snatches from the sky an unsuspecting swift,
reminding any watcher of its warlike craft
of other battles won and lost on this unique terrain.
And battles yet to come, perhaps? Between the town
and country, the old urban/rural split? More roads,
More telecoms? More houses? More desired goods?
The loss of rural industry and local style?
Endangered habitats? Initiatives that fail?
The mission creep of humans on wilderness’ edge,
environmental damage with public interest’s badge? 
A Spanish hacienda encroaches on a wood,
that’s grubbed up by its owner; then the widened road
puts more earth under tarmac, more cars on the move…
Not one the hobby’s concern, drifting high above,


II

You’re flying into Gatwick or Heathrow, the grey 
clouds spin around the wings, then suddenly you see
a hilly trek of meadows, woods, a sandstone ridge, 
the English landscape quilted to your vision’s edge.
Thin ponds reflect the light like molten tin. Dark marks
forgotten humans etched, character this mask
of northern moor, that’s southern England’s forest heath.
The settlements that sparkle in the dusk and clothe
the land with filaments of light, interconnect 
the gaps and distances, a link the cars enact
- their pools of moving light like our awareness, brief
and transitory. The engines whinny, the landing gear
clunks down. The Forest Ridge slipstreams from memory,
like any other disappearing territory.
It’s one of nature’s habitats most under threat.
Eighty percent lost in the last two hundred years.


III

Down on the ground some people see things differently
and in their different bodies question constantly 
accepted lines, the shrug of couldn’t give a damn.
They challenge complacency’s attitude to change.
What if a kind of partnership could link people
to their land? If the High Weald Forest Ridge could pull
itself together, forests in a sisterhood,
as midwives to a reborn sense of place, the thread
that although constant, must be freshly woven from 
the skein of songs sung by the land itself. Wrong
that anyone should lack the sense that they belong,
should lack the access to this commonwealth of song
that links Ashdown, St Leonards, Waterdown and Worth,
the largest tract of wooded country in the south?
And what could be achieved? What poise and balance found
between the many different claims upon the land,
involving all in their landscape’s heritage
of any capability, background or age?
How many barriers could be removed? How 
could folk be empowered, as the jargon goes, so
that they can make a difference? Skills and crafts relearnt?
Gardening to nurture wildlife? Can do, not can’t?


IV

Over barn and milestone, church and riverbank, 
war memorial, fingerpost, fly-tipped junk,
across the Ridge the questions hover like the dusk,
each question represents an issue and a task.
People and creatures, plants and birds, the land itself
and history wait for an answer, all breathing held.
The ghosts of iron masters stand beside their ponds,
pond-dipping children sift the future in their hands.
The gills and meadows, parks and heaths all teem with life –
brown hare and water vole, emerald dragonfly,
hay-scented buckler fern, sundew, bog asphodel,
the yellow meadow ant, roe deer and pipistrelle.
The settlements that sparkle in the dusk and drape
the Forest Ridge with traceries of light and hope,
and the country in between where blackbirds sing,
are woven together in myth, story and song,
all interconnected, nothing stands alone.
The one in the many, the many in the one.

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There’s a website dedicated to Poly-Olbion run by Exeter University.

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Editor’s Note

by Seivad Nhoj, Voynich Professor or Applied Histrionics, Bratislava Institute of Shibboleths and Reader in Dilletante Poetics at Prynne College, Oxford.

Trick of Treat

In this era of ‘creative non-fiction’, it seems appropriate to develop a parallel discipline of ‘creative criticism’, where fictionalised sources are allowed alongside authentic references.

It’s particularly appropriate at this time of year when young people in scary face masks threaten their elders and betters with all manner of chicanery. Always keep a gobstopper handy and keep the tongue firmly beside it in the cheek, is my advice.

Many of the references here are genuine – but not all!

With thanks to for inspiring my research.

Document A/3023341

Helloo Peeple!

Just bouncing you with some golden delicious! Look what I found down the back of the Internet during last week’s outage! See below! Yessum! Tom Metcalf’s lost email to Bethany Strangegate. I’ve got bits of B’s reply too.

Who knew?

A)

Document M/7735 Email from Tom Metcalf to Bethany Strangegate

Kansas and Belton Digest

Peculiar

KS

Thursday 23^rd February 2026

Dearest Bethany

I came across this whole concoction in a forgotten collection of essays published in 1986 by Unifroton, the specialist publisher, entitled On the Conspicuous Absence – Interventions in Fiction, edited by the English academic Abraham Fortescue, then Director of Studies (Religion) at the Christadelphian University in Bogota. Much of the following is taken from J. Scampton Jovison’s essay in that volume, Inferring Implication, Implying Inference. But additional notes and considerations had been added in the copy that came into my hands in 2024 – scribbled thoughts on topics raised; key words and phrases underlined linked to pull-out bubbles with short annotations; whole paragraphs printed on small sheets of scrap paper inserted in the pages referenced to an alphabetic key in the text and circled on the inserted sheet; and last but by no means least, the three pages of minute handwriting on the blank pages at the back of the book signed cryptically Jimmy the Jackdaw, which I can only assume to be a nickname, perhaps for some dilletante academic. All these different additions to the basic text seemed to me to have been created by different hands and so, I assume, different people. But I can’t say for certain. Who they were, and why they were so keen to annotate the text is a mystery. The situation is complicated by the fact that I added my own handwritten notes on postcards indexed by a circled numeric key linked to the same number circled in the text.

The situation if even more complicated, I’m afraid, by the fact that I lost the book last year on a trip to Istanbul (you remember Ozzie, I’m sure).

Now all I have are the sheets of notes indexed alphabetically, and my own postcards with their numerical index. I did manage to find a reasonably pristine copy of the book – with no notes whatsoever – in the Amnesty Bookshop in Portadown when I was visiting Becky earlier this year, but I no longer have any way of correlating neither the alphabetically nor the numerically indexed comments to the actual text. I did think that some of the notes in the book had reminded me of Becky’s handwriting, but she denied ever having defaced a book in that way.

What I have attached here therefore is my attempt to bring together the notes I still have in my possession, any points made in the textual notes written in the book that I can actually remember, together with hunches and flavours of some of the other comments that have slipped my mind.

I would really appreciate it if you could read the attached and let me know if I’m making sense of this thorny issue of implication, not to mention inference. I have to say for many years I got the two mixed up and Ozzie was always correcting me.

So here goes…

With love and warmest greetings

Tom x

Document J/098224A

The Implied Author: Ghost, Mirage or Phantom

Notes, Conjectures and Enquiries

by Tom Metcalf

Professor of Asymmetric Literatures,

University of Kansas (Peculiar)

Reading Matthew Clayfield’s Substack post2 about Anna Funder and her book Wifedom, I’m reminded about my own fascination with the idea of the Implied Author or IA. The ‘implied author’ or IA is a concept developed by Wayne C. Booth, a professor of English language and literature at the University of Chicago, in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)..

There are a number of ‘levels’ to this concept and I’ll walk us through each one.

Level One

A commentator on Booth, Dan Shen3, explains in his article, What is the Implied Author, that,

In Booth’s own formulation, the concept is essentially a straightforward one referring at once to the person who writes the text in a particular manner (encoding process) and to the textual image of this writer for the reader to infer (decoding process), and the distinction between the implied author and the real author is a simple one between the person in the writing process and this same person in daily life. (My emphasis - TM)

How ‘essentially straightforward’ this concept is in the media ecology of the 2020’s is a moot point.

Let’s look at the decoding process first, where

the implied author is the textual image of this writer for the reader to infer: the reader ‘will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner.’

With particular reference to poetry, fiction and fictionalised creative non-fiction, I don’t doubt that many, but probably not all readers have a vague mental image of an author as they read a book. For example, I can remember the imaginary implied author in my own head when I read Le Grand Meaulnes or Catcher in the Rye in the seventies. But our projection of the inferred Implied Author was probably more substantial before the Internet when all that might affect the IA was a blurb, a bio on the fly leaf and perhaps an entry in an encyclopaedia or National Biography.

With instant access to most authors’ detailed life histories, alternative biographies, critical assessments, pictures, profiles, interviews, Ted Talks, websites and social media pages, the Implied Author that may initially have arisen in the reader’s mind, suffers pollution and degradation to become a ghost, a cipher, swamped by available data. That’s not to say that the Implied Author doesn’t exist, but its signal struggles against the background noise which is partly composed of the author’s own curated online identity.

It seems to me there came a point sometime in the 1990s when our image of the IA of almost any author began to erode. Once we were no longer reliant on the bio and blurb in a printed book and information about authors became immediately accessible in ever greater quantities – whether on social media, Wikipedia, blogs or websites – our individual IA began to corrode and collapse a bit like the melting statue of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, unveiled to call out his inaction on climate crisis

How well the IA survives is very dependent on how much is known of the author and how much more could be found out about them – whether, for example, they are alive or dead, and on the imaginative and interpretative skills of the reader in the face of the media blitz.

For example, the IA of The Odyssey – albeit a completely imagined persona – may have far greater substance than that of Normal People or The Great Gatsby or even Bleak House. The more information that exists about the author in the media landscape, the more a certain finesse of discrimination is required to separate the Implied Author from the Author perceived in media, the Perceived Author if you like, which is still at some remove from the author as a real ‘flesh-and-blood person’ (FBP) as Booth describes them.

It’s important to stress that the Implied Author isn’t the narrator of the work, nor is it the author’s biographic presence. It is much more the presence of the author in their completed work, a presence that evolved and refined itself during their writing and editing.

It’s not such a new idea.

Writing on George Eliot in 1877, Dowden4 said that the form that most persists in the mind after reading her novels is not any of the characters, but ‘one, who, if not the real George Eliot, is that second self who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them’. The ‘second self’, he goes on, is ‘more substantial than any mere human personality’, and has ‘fewer reserves’; while ‘behind it, lurks well pleased the veritable historical self secure from impertinent observation and criticism’.5

Level Two

Now let’s look at the encoding process. Shen further explains that:

The difference between the ‘real author’ and the ‘implied author’ (the real author’s ‘second self’) is that between the person in daily life and the same person in the process of writing with a certain ‘air’ or stance. Since in the writing process, the ‘writer’ may enter into a state of mind quite different from that in everyday life, the writer seems to be ‘creating’ himself or herself when writing. (My emphasis again. TM)

In The Implied Author : Concept and Controversy, Tom Kindt adds:

According to this second definition, the author should not be seen as the creator of the implied author; he simply provides, intentionally or unintentionally, the material out of which the latter is constructed. From this perspective, the implied author is the image that readers make of a text’s writer when reading that text: ‘however impersonal he [the author] may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner’.

Now, it is clearly problematic to see the implied author as both an author-image produced by the recipient and a self-image created by the author.

Level Three

Shen states that in his long-term exposition of the ‘implied author,’

Booth says he finds his admiration for the works of Frost and Plath ‘actually rising a bit when I learn more contemptible details about their FBPs [flesh-and-blood persons]. How could creatures with such faults and miseries manage to produce such beautiful moving works [in the process of writing? Well, obviously, they can do it because they have aspired not just to appear better but to be better [in the process of writing] than those parts of their FBPs [in everyday life] that they deplored. They create a realer, truer, more genuine version of their selves than those selves who plagued the world with base behaviour. As they sit polishing their works, they either wipe out the parts of their selves that they do not like, or, when the darker selves get dramatized, as happens so often in Plath, the superior IA [implied author] conquers the other versions of FBP by polishing the novel or play: ‘That’s who I really am, the person able to exhibit those values and brilliant strokes.’ (Original italics and Shen’s boldface.)

As for the question ‘How could creatures with such faults and miseries manage to produce [write in certain manners] such beautiful moving works [which imply superior images of themselves]?’ the obvious answer to Booth is that the person becomes better (“not just to appear better but to be better”) in the process of writing or polishing the work—for the simple reason that the authorial image as implied by the text is no other than the image of the person ‘who writes in this manner.’ This ‘better’ person in the process of writing or polishing the work is the very ‘superior IA [implied author]. Significantly, the expression ‘They create a realer, truer, more genuine version of their selves’ simply means these same persons’ behaving in a better way in the process of writing (‘That’s who I really am, the person able to exhibit those values and brilliant strokes’). (My emphasis and italics in that last paragraph. TM)

Shen shows that Booth’s distinction between the implied author and the real author also applies to cases where pseudonyms are used. In The Resurrection of the Implied Autho; Why Bother?6, Booth says:

This view often led to a downgrading of the narrative mastery practiced by geniuses like Joseph Fielding, Jane Austen, and George Eliot - not to mention many great European and Russian novelists. . .If space allowed I would quote a couple of lengthy authorial commentaries by “George Eliot,” the male IA created by the woman genius, Marian Evans; her/hisaggressive “intrusions” had not only aided me in reading her novels [her creations] but led me to admire, and even love, the creator. Would I have fallen in love with Marian Evans [in daily life] if I’d known her? Depends on the circumstances in which I encountered the flesh-and-blood person (the FBP). But her IAs [Marian Evans’s assuming male manners in writing the novels], employing manifold self-conscious intrusions, are fabulous.

Shen explains that in this essay, ‘Booth dwells at length on how human beings are engaged in role playing in literary creation as well as in other social activities. The basic point Booth emphatically makes with substantial illustration is that ‘our knowledge of the difference between cleansed IAs [the persons who become better in the writing process] and contemptible FBPs can actually enhance our admiration of the literary works presenting the IAs.’

It’s interesting to note that ‘writing about his own work, Phillip Lopate has observed that

the more I took to writing personal essays, the more experienced I became in projecting in print the appearance of a stable, unitary self—a core around which the different elected tonalities of the moment could spin [...] writing is the way of self-making.7

Level Four

However, Booth went further and argued that, as Tom Kindt notes:

all good literary works demand finally one single right reading; if a work is great it is unified, and if a work is unified it demands of the reader that he or she discover the unity’. According to Booth, every literary text has one and only one implied author, and identifying this implied author is always a necessary component of the correct interpretation of a work. From this perspective, a text can give rise to differing interpretations only if its implied author is mistakenly identified or assessed in different ways.

‘As he writes,’ Booth believed, every writer of a literary text ‘creates not simply an ideal, impersonal “man in general” but an implied version of “himself’ that is different from the implied authors we meet in other men’s works’.

Who gives a tinker’s cuss?

That Why Bother? from Shen seems to me to capture the essential problem in this whole discussion. Who cares? Don’t Booth and Shen set up a straw man in the IA?

Does the implied author exist in any meaningful way?

If it does, then it must exist uniquely in each individual’s brain. Some kind of research project could explore each reader’s individual specification of a particular author’s Implied Author (for example, Martin Amis, Jane Austen, Li Juan) to create a contour map of defining features, like a tasting map of a coffee.

But again, so what?

In another Substack post – about Orwell’s essays8 – Matthew Clayfield provides unexpected support for the IA theory, as well as foreshadowing his later post about Anna Funder, the author of Stasiland, and Wifedom focussed on Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

Weariness Makes a Good Mattress

On Orwell's essays

In his introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of Orwell’s essays, John Carey writes that “[m]ore than the novels, more even than The Road to Wigan Pier or Homage to Catalonia, the essays and journalism are the essential Orwell”. Having finally finished the 1,363-page collection, which I have been reading on and off for the past four years, I can…

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2 years ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · Matthew Clayfield

I mentioned earlier that I would come to the difference between George Orwell the author and Eric Blair the man. It would be silly to suggest that there wasn’t one or that the latter wasn’t without considerable shortcomings. (I aim to write about Anna Funder’s Wifedom at some point in the coming weeks.) It nevertheless remains true that, on the page, Orwell was generous, clear-eyed, self-critical, and, to the fullest extent possible, honest. On the page, he was, to use one of his own favourite words (to some extent the rule against which he measured all things), decent. By most accounts, Blair was not, or at least wasn’t with any great consistency. According to Carey, he wasn’t even particularly enamoured of the “proles”:

Friends remember Blair as prickly, diffident, ill at ease with ordinary people. According to his brother-in-law, who took him to pubs in working-class districts of Leeds, he was a “skeleton at the feast” and disliked his fellow men.

Clayfield considers what Larry David said about the difference between himself, the real FBP Larry David and ‘Larry David’ as he appears in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

‘They think that I’m going to be as brutally honest as the guy in the show, and that I’m not nice,’ David once told Vanity Fair. ‘But I am nice, which makes me sick! I wish I wasn’t!’

Clayfield then asks how did one become the other, Blair become Orwell?

On the one hand, given the times in which he lived, it must have involved a great deal of moral effort (another term that appears a lot in the essays), writing against the prevailing orthodoxies of his day and, at the same time, against and through his own petty prejudices.

‘One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality,’ Orwell writes in Why I Write…

Clayfield continues:

I like the person I am in my stories better than I like the real me. That person is smarter, wittier, more patient, funnier—his view of the world is wiser.

When I stop writing and come back to myself, I feel more limited, opinionated, and petty.

But what a pleasure it was, to have been, on the page, briefly less of a dope than usual….

…I rather suspect that Orwell was the man that Blair wished to be, and who, through writing, occasionally was. If we find the essential Orwell in the essays, we likely find a better Blair, too.

But again, I feel the need to ask, so what? A better Blair in our virtual mindscape feels a rather tenuous and isolated spirit.

Now lets turn to Clayfield’s critique of Anna Funder’s Wifedom where he refers back to his post about Orwell’s essays.

I am not talking about the Orwell that Funder often invents to suit her purposes—the Orwell who, whatever he does, in any context, at any time, is assumed a priori to be monstrous and cruel—but rather the one that, even in the biographies that Funder so repetitively denigrates, is selfish, unthinking, indecent, and predatory. This does rather complicate, while also somehow enhancing, the final paragraphs of my piece (quoted above) , in which I wrote that Orwell wrote to become a better man. But there is no getting around the fact that the great slayer of hypocrites was in many unthinking ways a hypocrite himself.

Anna Funder herself also provides support for the Implied Author .

This is what she writes about her own experience.

Sometimes, as I sign books for people after an event, I channel the novelist Richard Ford. I once heard him explain why he feels he is always, inevitably, a disappointment to readers when they meet him.

‘I put my best self into my work,’ he said, opening out his hands, ‘and I am not my best work’. In the gap between his hands, I saw the gap between an author and their work. This is not an empty space. It’s full of dark matter, matter that holds together the writer, the work and the reader.

Signing queues are a chasm of intimacy. People, not at all unreasonably, would like you to be the person they think you are from your work. You can see in their kind, open faces that these total strangers already know you, as the person they have intuited on the basis of the book. In the intimate, imaginative fusing that is reading they will have brought a lot of themselves to her. So the you they want you to be is a hybrid, an amalgam of you both.

At a book signing you are being asked to be worthy of the work you have written by matching yourself to a reader’s imagined version of you, as if you are a key meant to fit into a lock-shaped space in someone else’s mind. If it fits, you will be the guarantee that authenticates the work. And if it doesn’t (I mean, if I don’t), what then?

All the reader wants is for the avatar sitting behind the table to match their inner picture.

But on the page, as Virginia Woolf put it, ‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. That written ‘I’ is flexibly , creatively capacious, outrageous, furious. She evades gender expectations. She owes no one anything. She is not managing the Household List; she is not worried she’ll hurt her husband, or offend her friends, or neglect or shame her children. She is not, in Woolf’s words, ‘harassed and distracted with hates and grievances’, legitimate and important as those might be. That inner ‘I’ is both known and unknown to a writer. She may be similar to the one psychoanalysis tries to recover - remembered or created on the page or in the consulting room. Like the force behind crop circles or the tides, the self leaves traces in other phenomena - our dreams, our writing, our children - but remains out of sight.

To my mind, a person is not their work, just where it came from.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. George Orwell, Why I Write, 1946

On being Salt-Pathed…

And what of Sally Walker the woman who wrote The Salt Path as Raynor Winn. Although she denies it, there is a substantial amount of documentary evidence that much of her back story and her husband’s medical condition were fabricated and/or exaggerated. In what is claimed to be a documentary about FBPs, we now know that it is more like a piece of creative, i.e. fictionalised non-fiction. In falsifying her story, was she ‘behaving in a better way in the process of writing’ or quite consciously writing in the opposite direction. Did she as Booth suggests, become ‘better (“not just to appear better but to be better”) in the process of writing or polishing the work’.

There’s no denying that Winn writes well for a general audience. Her books have proved hugely popular internationally. If I read Booth correctly it doesn’t really matter if Winn was masquerading. In doing so she was still creating ‘a realer, truer, more genuine version’ of herself, ‘behaving in a better way in the process of writing (“That’s who I really am, the person able to exhibit those values and brilliant strokes”).’

But through that writing she perpetrated a fraud and I find it difficult to square that fact with a notion of writerly authenticity. Perhaps if she had defined it as a different genre, a novel or a fictionalised memoir, the fabricated narrative would be more acceptable.

Initially perhaps we all had an image of a put-upon heroine trying to save the life of her poorly husband… Or did we? Like many other readers I for one always smelt a giant rat lurking around the foundation story of The Salt Path.

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Document CH/8846N990/RM Being fragments of the emails sent by Bethany Strangegate to Tom Metcalf retrieved from GreenserverAcademicArchiveOnline, Geraldton.

…and some of us see Fender as something of a fabricator too…

…then, Tom, how does the implied author relate to the work of someone like Radovan Karadžić, psychiatrist, poet and butcher? The man who was president of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted him of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. He is now serving his sentence at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight.

How was he ‘behaving in a better way in the process of writing’?

Did this person ‘become better (“not just to appear better but to be better”) in the process of writing’?

Who or what is the Implied Author here, in Karadžić’s poem about Sarajevo…?

Sarajevo

I hear the misfortune threads
Turned into a beetle as if an old singer
Is crushed by the silence and turned into a voice.

The town burns like a piece of incense
In the smoke rumbles our consciousness.
Empty suits slide down the town.
Red is the stone that dies, built into a house. The Plague!

Calm. The army of armed poplar tree
Marches up the hill, within itself. 
The aggressor air storms our souls
and once you are human and then you are an air creature.

I know that all of these are the preparations of the scream:
What does the black metal in the garage have for us?
Look how fear turned into a spider
Looking for the answer at his computer.

Document J/098224A Tom Metcalf’s email to Bethany Strangegate continues…

Yes – and what about Roald Dahl?

In a recent Substack article9 Laura Thompson noted that:

The recent hit play Giant, by Mark Rosenblatt, asks the question: is it possible to separate Roald Dahl’s work, which gives so much pleasure, from the anti-Semitism that he proclaimed with such luscious pride?

Although I have never read Dahl, I would have said unthinkingly: yes it is possible. Not if he had written Mein Kampf. Otherwise, yes. The inability to appreciate a writer freely because one dislikes their character - because they held certain political opinions, they mistreated their spouse, they were just plain awful… I thought that I thought this rather absurd, a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of art…’

Giant takes place in the summer of 1983, set in the sitting room of Dahl’s Great Missenden home. Dahl is there with Tom Maschler, his British publisher and Liccy, his fiancée, all awaiting the arrival of Jessie Stone – an invented character in an otherwise true story – from Dahl’s American publisher, because a crisis has blown up over a blatantly antisemitic article written by Dahl. His publishers want him to make a public apology. But Dahl, being Dahl, doesn’t want to back down.

Rosenblatt correctly represents Dahl as he really was, a deeply difficult, deeply unpleasant individual, yet deeply creative too — which raises familiar questions about the relationship between nasty artists and their work. We enjoy the genius of the work, while constantly remembering the awfulness of their creators.10

Document A/302334 Continued

Ooh and BTW darling, this is interesting LOL!

I was reading about the Fata Morgana on Wikipedia last night.

A Fata Morgana is a complex form of mirage visible in a narrow band right above the horizon. The term Fata Morgana is the Italian translation of “Morgan the Fairy” (Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend). These mirages are often seen in the Italian Strait of Messina and were described as fairy castles in the air or false land conjured by her magic.

Got me thinking – Is the implied author as real as a – or just a – mirage?

Document SN/66611

As John Davies wrote in his MA dissertation12 ,

in the whole field known as ‘creative nonfiction’, it’s possible to turn Booth’s formulation around to reflect on character.

In his own (as yet unpublished) creative non-fiction narrative The Woman on the Cliff, developed from his dissertation, Davies writes about Rowena Cade, who created The Minack Theatre in Cornwall, and her sister, the novelist Katharine Burdekin.

Rowena Cade was a real FBP (flesh-and-blood-person) but she is also an ‘implied character’ in the textual re-imagining of her in the various scenes in Davies’ book. But because Rowena is dead, the reader’s perception of her as a FBP is effectively in the same domain as the implied character (IC), both floating in a linguistic field in the imagination. It’s not true to say that Rowena is ‘no longer with us’ as she is still present in various media of varying quality – photographs, video, audio, reminiscences of others about her, newspaper reports and so on. Davies’ stated aim is:

to achieve some correspondence between these manifestations of the FBP and the IC. But they all seem to me to merge into implication, since verification is pretty nigh impossible given she is dead. Rowena also presents as an IA in the sequences she wrote herself, in a letter I’ve included, for example, and in the draft of the theatre history with her own corrections which is so revealing as Rowena steps forward in the linguistic space of her comments as very much a FBP even though I am witnessing her also as both an IA and an IC.

The parallel here seems to me to be with the virtual image of a stick in a pond (let’s think of it as George Saunders’ pond13. But with Rowena, all we have is the virtual image. There is no stick (no actual person) there to see, to verify, any longer. And even if there were, how many different versions of the stick would there be, if we accept the latest thinking on witness and consciousness, that we create the reality we perceive14. The production of consciousness is a work of the imagination15.

Davies notes that:

The situation becomes more complicated with the sister Kay Burdekin. Not only does Kay Burdekin exist as a series of avatars in the way that Rowena does, albeit all tending towards implication, but Kay also wrote as Murray Constantine, in Booth’s opinion ‘role playing’ the masculine author in the same way that Booth conceives of Mary Evans doing when George Eliot.

Kay Burdekin/Murray Constantine was a herald of Orwell, Le Guin, and Atwood, writing her fantasies and science fictions. She was a feminist who gave a great deal of thought to different versions of sexual and gender politics in her books of speculative fiction for which she is rightly becoming more well-known16 – from the ultra-macho Nazi regime of Swastika Night (1937) to the bi-gendered ‘Genuine Person’ from the far future of Proud Man (1934); from the strong minded feminist nurse in Quiet Ways (1930) to the world ruled by woman in The End of This Day’s Business(1935).

The books still on the shelves at the house Rowena built at Minack, many dating from the 1920s or earlier, illustrate the family’s interest in gender and sexuality17.

The strange, uncanny oscillation between author and implied author and the tension between implied author and implied characters adds to the recursive, dyadic nesting throughout Davies’ book.

Conclusion

So what is the point? Why bother?

I listen to Rhapsody by Alice Oswald, where she writes of herself:

And so you might see me growing increasingly fictional, anonymous, inconstant, fluttering from side to side in perpetual interview, always in search of Homer.

I contemplate the notion of the IA when reading Homer, and Oswald prompts me to think of other authors, of ancients and orientals, of anon and chorus:

When a poem is written by one poet, there are plenty of distracting things to ask about the poet’s life; but these are only relevant in so far as they drove the poet over the borders of her certainty and into the kingdom of riddles.

Most often, the facts of a poet’s life work against the form of the poem, which is riddling. But there are no facts of Homer’s life. The Iliad and the Odyssey were compiled over several centuries. The written-down versions were made of unwritten anonymous versions and the power of Anon is like the power of Rumpelstiltskin - it must never be named. That’s why Homer begins his poems by letting go of his authorship, as if to say: ‘of ancient lineage... I notice the poplar leaves... my voice is not my own... who am I?’

Could it be that the IA is not the unique spirit of the individual author?

I begin to wonder; could it be that the IA is something universal, emanating from every text but especially from fiction and poetry. It’s something like the background radiation from the Big Bang.

It’s not the unique spirit of the individual author. It’s the eternal echo of every author, and perhaps of an original author theirself.

It’s the voice of the act of writing.

Alice Oswald writes:

I can hear what it feels like to have gone beyond the soul’s capacity for lying, worrying along the earth, making one remark over and over. That is the voice of Anon, the voice of winter.

I’m looking for the voice of poetry before it knows it is poetry, when it is still improvising itself out of human emergency and memory and the song of the seed-sower and the bone violin. That seems to me to be the originary voice of Homer and when it speaks, the glossador turns up and so does Taliesin and Lalon and Imru’ al-Qays and the king of Lydia and the word poetry is not wild enough to hold them all. I’m off to find a better word - more anonymous, more generous...

It’s the eternal echo of authoring itself, the ghost in the story machine

This is a marvellous cloud of unknowing, the breath and vapour of the very first author.

And then I think of AI generated texts. Any reader can infer an Implied Author from such a text, whether they know it is a product of AI or not.

Is it then too much of a stretch to suggest that AI’s scraped and regurgitated texts are the modern equivalent of the oral tradition, where the content and or shape of stories and poems were harvested from many different sources, copied and regurgitated by many different singers and poets, storytellers and bards.

Their songs wander over the borders and back again and everyone anonymous wherever they are they are Baul18, because the name is a widening, rather than a narrowing word, which includes all those who sing from the same anonymous centre.

2

Weariness Makes a Good Mattress

She can't tell Norah that

I met Anna Funder at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where a bunch of us were attending a party at a museum. I read Stasiland twenty years ago, and remember liking it very much. But Funder was in Jaipur to talk about Wifedom, her book about George Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy Blair, and about patriarchy. There were other matters to discuss…

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a year ago · 41 likes · 11 comments · Matthew Clayfield

8

Weariness Makes a Good Mattress

On Orwell's essays

In his introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of Orwell’s essays, John Carey writes that “[m]ore than the novels, more even than The Road to Wigan Pier or Homage to Catalonia, the essays and journalism are the essential Orwell”. Having finally finished the 1,363-page collection, which I have been reading on and off for the past four years, I can…

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2 years ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · Matthew Clayfield

9

Laura Thompson’s Substack

'The generous dog'

I did not intend to write this, then woke up and did so. A short post of the kind one can only write on Substack… in other words, not really conclusive…

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9 months ago · 106 likes · 79 comments · laura thompson

Glancing behind him through the open
French windows his focus would rest
on the crimson petals and grey green
fur of his favourite flower.

Undressed, she has just danced into
the garden, her natural home. Under
duress, he confesses the dreadful pain
of agrostemmas—the distress

of the plum juice campion
with duckling leg moss
of the whole garden growing
within him, a total mess.

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The single shoe that hit him had been fired,
with all the condemnation he inspired.
From toe to heel he felt its damning thrust,
the public’s judgement on their misplaced trust.
The shoe’s appeal—its golden buckle gleam,
its patent leather, a tantalising dream—
brought out the Cinderella in this con,
and, as any Cinders would, he tried it on.
The shoe fitted like a glove, and he could
finger count the reasons why it should:
calumny, hypocrisy, deceitfulness and grift,
not to mention his ugliness—something of a gift
to cartoonists and political foes.
But that, he told himself, is how it goes.
It seemed as nothing standing on one heel,
getting to know how a Führer might feel.
Although he hobbled, he threw back his hair,
watched each thrown shoe to make a matching pair

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I’m posting this mainly for family and friends who weren’t able to come to my brother Andrew’s funeral at the chapel at Camberwell New Cemetery, London, followed by his burial in Camberwell Old Cemetery. The day went very well with pouring rain switching to brilliant sunshine as the cortège left the funeral directors. The New Orleans Footstompers played us into the chapel and onto the burial ground with suitable jazz funeral marches. Ayanna Witter-Johnson accompanied her opening song on the cello. And we all took great delight in a sing-along with September by Earth, Wind and Fire.

A eulogy for Andrew.

In November 2024, when Andrew told me he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, I asked if there was anything I could do for him. He replied, partly in jest, combining his pragmatism with dark humour, Write my eulogy. As ever, throughout his illness, he was only ever a beat away from seeing the funny side.

That great sense of humour was combined with great style. He was almost always immaculately turned out even in the most casual clothing. He chose the most appropriate and often very humorous greetings cards for birthdays, thank yous, Christmas and other occasions always with a delightfully thoughtful, handwritten message for the recipient.

He had many interests – art, design and architecture, music – he was once a very handy DJ, occasional watercolour artist and printmaker, an avid reader with a huge library, and a thoughtful gardener – turning his hand to tulips, tomatoes and olives alike and making juices, relishes and jams – a talent he no doubt inherited from our mother Joan. He loved to cook and to try out the latest London restaurants.

He was a fearless, expert driver, often at breakneck speed. His drive time invective about other road users was entertaining, if a little daunting. As a passenger he loved to joke with cabbies although notorious for leaving things behind.

But usually, Andrew was exceptionally good at both the big picture and the detail, evidenced by his success as a producer, creative director and brand strategist.

He was a gifted film maker, a talent first exhibited in the sixth form with the making of a film on Super 8, Pythonesque pre-Monty Python, entitled Randyberry Brandy. The liquor in question had the amusing result of making everyone randy…

At Cambridge where he studied English at Magdalene (an experience he didn’t enjoy every much) he planned to make a film of Lorca’s surreal play El Paseo de Buster Keaton, although sadly it was never made. Instead, he spent hours in the sky, enjoying the calm of early morning flights to take meteorology readings.

After university he returned to the city of his birth – Birmingham where he had studied at King Edward’s School. He set up a design, script and art direction consultancy with Matthew. He also worked with our father who ran a film production company. It was during this time that Andrew met Mary Skinner and they formed a deep, lifelong friendship.

As his career developed, Andrew increasingly brought his creativity to bear on corporate communications. For Matthew’s company Andrew made a superb documentary following the director Ridley Scott during the making of a Badedas TV commercial. For another of Matthew’s clients, Electrolux, Andrew scripted and directed two memorable films: one starring the great Ronnie Barker; the other starring Arthur Lowe (of Dad’s Army fame).

Through a series of evolutions, the family film production company merged with Matthew’s presentations company to form communications consultancy Cricket, which Andrew led very successfully for over twenty-five years winning major accounts such as Jaguar Land Rover, Mann Trucks and Harley Davidson.

He was a natural leader. He earnt the respect of everyone who worked for and learnt from him. In business he made many lifelong friends such as Bill Palin, Stephen Ulrich, Mary McDonnell, John Stubbings and among his clients John Russell and Peter Williams. He rarely if ever flew off the handle and kept his emotions under careful control.

That of course is a double-edged sword. Whilst Matthew and I believe Andrew was the most sensitive of us brothers, he was also the most reserved. He was ‘hard’ as we used to say at school, meaning cool and calm under pressure. He was certainly a great man to have around in a crisis and always kept his head when others were losing theirs. But he found it difficult to express and examine his emotions outwardly, although he did in the last few months of his life.

Andrew met Rosemary in 1972, and they married that same year on a bright sunny October day. For over fifty years Andrew sent Rosemary flowers on their wedding anniversary. They always found ways to make each other laugh.

They lived and worked to travel. In the subsequent years they found themselves on Siberian plains and Himalayan slopes – often filmed by Andrew.

They made many friends along the way including Jane and Robin who later became godparents to their daughters – Jo and Kate.

Jo and Kate inherited their parents’ love of travel, with trips to places as far flung as India, Cuba, and New Zealand.

Andrew was very proud of Jo and Kate and their respective achievements – Jo as an artist illustrator with famous fashion brands, and Kate as Strategy Group Director at Ofcom.

He found great joy in his grandchildren: Isla, Ofili and Arthur. He took time to understand their interests and loved to make them laugh.

Andrew’s work also gave him the opportunity for extensive travel. He set up an American office for the family business in Florida and for a while ran the cinema at Key West, where he made many friends.

In later life, we brothers got along much better than we had when we worked together. Matthew and I will miss our very enjoyable regular lunches with Andrew, full of quick-fire wit and laughter. The last one took place only five weeks before he died – an indication of how quickly Andrew’s condition declined towards the end.

Once on a trip to Morocco – when Andrew enjoyed night driving in his yellow Renault 4 bat out of hell – as a student I was uncertain about my own future and I asked him, how do you know what to do?

His reply stayed with me partly because it is so ambiguous, but also because it is so true, of Andrew in particular. He said, do what you have to do. Initially I took that to mean to do one’s duty, to parents, family, employer. But later, I realised it also meant doing what one had to do to fulfil oneself. So often duty and personal fulfilment may be at odds. Andrew really tried to negotiate both. To do what duty called upon him to do. For example, to ensure the business paid enough into my father’s pension to secure a comfortable retirement, especially for our mother.

But he also believed in doing what he had to do for himself. To see the world. To make sure he was financially secure. To enjoy his life.

That life ended on Saturday 12th September. Andrew was admitted to Greenwich and Bexley Community Hospice three days before, where the care was superb. In the previous two weeks he also received excellent care from the Joint Emergency Team and from his (all too briefly) live-in carer, Sialou. He spent his last few days well-sedated and calm. His family visited him to say their farewells, and friends and relatives unable to visit in person sent recorded messages. Throughout, in their own diligent concern and loving kindness for their father, Jo and Kate were amazing.

I learnt a huge amount from Andrew. He is a guiding force in my life, and I love him dearly.

On visiting the grave of his beloved brother, the Roman poet Catullus wrote this poem.

Through many lands and over many seas,

brother, I’ve come for these sad burial rites,

to pay this final tribute to your death

and to address, in vain, your mute remains,

since fate has stolen you from my embrace -

ah, brother, so unfairly snatched away!

But these sad rituals, which our forefathers

bequeathed to us in honour of the dead,

accept now, wettened with a brother’s tears.

Hail, brother, and, for evermore, farewell.1

1

Translated by Armand D’Angour

Armand’s Substack: Little Latin and More Greek

Hail and Farewell

In 57 BC, posted to Bithynia in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the Roman poet Catullus was able to visit the grave of his beloved brother (we don’t know how he died) near the site of ancient Troy, and to pay his last respects…

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3 months ago · 34 likes · 8 comments · Armand D'Angour

Feathered cirrus strafed by contrails,
American light, layered between bush
and tree by birdsong, the rippling bird,
the seagull, the chinking tit or chiffchaff.
The young Korean with her boyfriend,
she smiles; the single-engined plane
heading west, the cumulus roiling on
the far horizon beyond the Downs,
the plume of the great enemy
on the march towards London.
The blond dog watches a magpie.
A woman helps a Staffie climb into
her camper van. Two women, one in
a baseball cap, pause to talk nearby.
The dapple of the dark wood. Sleep.

Today is the day of my brother’s funeral.

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The photo shows him half-hidden
by the door he’s painting as if about
to pass through or push to closed.
His smile has that smile older men
wear like well-worn trousers soon
to be discarded. His limbs seem
angular, thinner than the year before.
He’s remembering the summer day
his own father stepped across
a daisy lawn holding out a black
masonic case, saying, ‘It’s all here,
everything you need to know, if
anything should happen.’ Today,
he realises time has him in its sights
and very soon, after a ruthless clearing
out, his own children will hold
some small container of his stuff.

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‘I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house. ten feet wide by fifteen feet long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.’

Henry David Thoreau Walden

Walden life

From Concord take the minor road that skirts the community gardens,
the court house and the primary school, and head out towards Route 43,
which travels East to Enfield, Windsor, Millfield Gap.

At the junction, cross the highway and enter the woodland through
the entrance marked ‘No entrance’. Take the forest trail.
Beneath the moss, old stone scars. The trees whisper harmoniously.

Five minutes down the track, the noise of traffic at your back,
the rush of railroad steel ahead beyond the trees, you wind down
to a little pond and wonder is this Walden? Above the water’s mirror

flies hover. The peaty bank shows evidence of creatures, a ripple
indicates a hidden fish. The stillness soaks up colour, texture, sound.
The mirror image drags time back. You could imagine you

as him, fretting at the disturbed stillness, searching for the place
to build the hut, wanting some sense of rightness in its placing.
He turns away and walks toward the patch of ground marked

by the blue sign: Site of House. You follow him, and understand
how well he chose the spot. Dappled sunlight falls through birch and larch.
A woodpecker rattles deeper in the wood. A jogger crunches past

and disappears, the sound as if recorded in a studio, the floor
a mesh of mast and needle, so soft it’s like an animal’s skin.
And you understand again what drew him in, what made him

stay. The hollow where the house once stood is nothing more
than a space inside the trees. Stone posts indicate the layout.
Where the wood shed stood, there’s now a separate plaque.

Little stones brought in Thoreau’s homage form a spreading
cairn, with names from Malmö, Bristol, Sarajevo, Kansas.
The ground slopes away towards a tiny beach and there,

in the leaves’ vignette, a narrow vista opens on a stretch
of pale water. This is Walden Pond. Voices echo
from the swimmers on the farther shore, someone scissors

backstroke through the surface. A train heads towards
the depot and you imagine you can hear the clank
and hiss that he heard, above the engine of the stillness.

You circle round the site and think he wasn’t far removed,
the town no more than twenty minutes’ walk away,
his cabin like a shed on a garden’s boundary,

a boy scout exercise rather than a hermit’s solemn pledge.
And was it true that his mother used to come each week
to collect his washing? But here he wrote, writing out

his brother’s dying in his arms from lockjaw, the tetanus
he’d contracted from a razor cut. In grief, the field and
forest gave him the sympathy of earth, as freely as

a mother’s love. So he wrote out all his love and loss;
through the seasons, through the passing of the trains,
week in, week out, Thoreau’s vigil at Walden Pond.

You can watch an illustrated version of this poem with a slide show on my companion Substack feed, Shedstack, featuring the amazing adventures of Shedman.

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What this poem tries to do…

I was just trying to tell you how I felt,
you know, that's basically the sum of it:
the layers of feeling flowing through me
as I pulled down your underpants to help you pee –
no laminar flow, those feelings twisted in a turbulent mix.
Lights across the river, but here moments picked
for movement with the creaky Zimmer,
legs wobbling, your constant sighs, no glimmer 
of hope in the coming doom. You stoical 
at times, otherwise grumpy, elliptical,
furious at your own ineptitude, arms stretched
to pull yourself up, a bout of dry retching, 
spine sliced by a machete of pain,
writhing in bed. Back to the toilet again...
And so it goes, annoyed with your pressure sores,
more gabapentin, ibuprofen, paracetamol, oramorph...

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Please support Prostate Cancer UK

My brother Andrew died on Saturday 12^th September. He had been ill with prostate cancer, diagnosed in the autumn of 2024. He suffered a slow deterioration from February this year but had an especially painful three weeks before admission to Greenwich and Bexley Community Hospice on Wednesday 9^th September, where the care was superb. He spent his last few days well-sedated and calm. His family visited him to say their farewells, and friends and relatives unable to visit in person sent recorded messages.

Andrew was a charismatic man of high intelligence and great discrimination, with a tremendous sense of style and design. His presence would light up a room. People were immediately aware of his great charm. He was very handsome and attractive, with a wonderful sense of humour and fun.

I learnt a huge amount from him about scriptwriting, camera work, directing and film editing, and about life and living.

His youngest brother, I will miss him enormously. He has been an influential and guiding force in my life, and I love him dearly.

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À la douce mémoire

In memory of Tricia Veeren

There’s always a train jolting into a distance,
the sound of summer rain on summer roofs,
a woman in an upstairs bedroom curled
upon a bed hunting breath.

They came and went, came and went,
throughout the week like the trains
she heard at night. Her sister bore the burden
of the woman curled upon the bed.

The district nurse came four times a day.
The home hospice team set up camp.
The woman curled upon the bed
the focus of employees across the town.

She knew her future, the woman in the bed,
a matter of days, took the trouble to order
chocolates for a favoured in-law,
brought her nephew to tears with kind words.

Day by day they came and went, the carers
and the hospice team. All the while the sister
stayed stroking hair, holding hands,
talking of younger days and stuff that binds.

The curl of the woman in the bed began to slide
away from consciousness, the sister saying
it was safe to go, to join the daughter dead
seven years and all the loved ones.

And slowly faded the woman curled.
She clutched me close one afternoon
wanting nothing more than a stroking hand
and music to see her through.

So before the woman curled in the bed
let the drugs do their work,
her hands flew across the screens
of phones and iPads seeking Finzi

or McKeller or Aled Jones or Water Music,
until the sister took the technology
from her hands and settled on Faure’s
Requiem, and the little body lost in the bed,

hunting breath, hardly the breath to scrape
a cough, punished with back ache,
IBS, bed sores, all but a skeleton,
restless, hands plucking at her shoulder,

curled into a small package for oblivion,
believing in angels and an afterlife of sorts.
(Her nephew said it could be wonderful
to return as a tree or a swarm.)

The little body barely spoke at all
when an old friend called by.
The hospice team returned again
gave her morphine, eased her pain.

They gently rearranged the bed.
The woman could lie quiet now
held in her sister’s valiant love.
She never awoke, was restless for

a while longer then, when no one
was looking, stopped hunting breath,
changed colour and was gone.

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My feed on here is really boring these days, it feels like a closed loop of people admiringly quoting (or performatively arguing with) each other. How do you get it to do something different, does anyone know?

My son made the same comment about my own feed. There’s a danger that Notes drives the Stack, rather than our best longform efforts. I’ve realised that my Patch of Sky could be seen as lazy. Where I once tried to write at least a few long form pieces now I rehash old (some very old) poems and journal entries. I have a good reason for doing this – which is to create an online store of material (materiel) in a magazine format, with a view to deleting duplicate digital files and unwanted hard copies. My thinking was that some of the poems deserve a second airing and some of the journal notes are (can be?) quite interesting and thought-provoking.

But a week spent with a poorly relative involving an intimate connection with bodily processes and the mess of being, made me realise just how important are reports from the front (wherever or whatever that is), witness, thoughtfulness, attempts at analysis (perhaps especially for those of us without the security of an academic of philosphical frame), and the challenge of recreating experience with vitality and freshness. Not ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ but ‘emotion remade in adversity’.1

Now the phrase ‘wrestling with God’ pops into my mind, where, to my mind, the stranger Jacob wrestled with is tantamount to the flow of our own reality that we struggle to make sense of, or make sense of using different lenses and filters provided by other resources.2

So, to answer Victoria’s question, perhaps we need to do more wrestling with the strangeness of our own experience in long form posts that are surely Substack’s strong point. I much prefer to wade into a long post than paddle in Notes.

But writing (at least for some of us) can be as painful as toothache and the successful products of our composition as rare as hen’s teeth.

But ‘no pain, no gain.’ To break the bad habits of Substackery may well mean gritting your teeth, biting the bullet (sorry - I’m on a roll here) and getting stuck into a good wrestle with the unknown figure (that elusive ‘figure in the carpet’3) which is or will be your next Substack post.

Birmingham to Frankfurt inaugural flight


His father is flying back from Germany that night
so when the thunder starts, the windows all flung wide
in summer heat, his mother, making raspberry jam
downstairs in the kitchen, transmits some taut anxiety,
an invisible signal, that flashes through the house,
one of the new semis built post-war, where cherry orchards
once stretched as far as the river bridge.

Seen from the sky, where even now a silver fuselage is tossed about,
the river’s like a fat brown worm. Soon storm drains
and sewers will pump the worm fatter still with thunder water,
run-off from the city’s streets, the new ring road’s dual carriageway,
the airport’s concrete apron and extended runway.
In the flood plain, while raspberry jam is cooling, boys lie awake
behind curtains closed to daylight at half past nine.
None can sleep, writhing on the static of the mother’s nerve,
wishing father home safe inside the storm about to break.

And break it does, once the sky has turned to charcoal
and a giant cloud on a rush has made an anvil three miles high.
The plane battles on as if seeking the lost kingdom of Shangri-La
—or that’s how the boys, who’ve seen the film, imagine it—
storm-tossed in the under sky, yawing wing to wing,
engines whining, trapped in the up-draught’s gyre, inexorably rising,
though torrents surge downward from the great cloud’s breach.

Through a drifting curtain the boy hears the first drops
land on leaves and tiles. Looking out, he sees fat slugs
of crystal juice explode in ones and twos on roof felt
and paving slab. Then on the leaves of ash and oak,
the rhododendrons, the red metal pedal car on the patio,
the glass roof, his windowsill, the rain drops drum and splash.
His face is electrified and moist and something
as old as Oedipus stirs, some longing mixed with dread.
Some hope salted with desire. What if, what if?

In a flash the storm’s fulfilled, lightning rips the sky,
each thunderclap is overhead, the cloud burst vents its load
of drench into the valleys crease. On board the Frankfurt flight
businessmen are sick in small brown paper bags.
The German pilot wrenches back control from the rebel storm,
steers the plane into the rain shadow beyond the anvil cloud,
brings it in joking with his co- about a bombing run.
It comes to a stand in a dark puddle at the terminal,
where dismal lights make orange reflections rippled by rain.

At the storm’s retreat the mother leaves the front door open.
His silhouette surprises her. Licking sticky fingers—
with the boys she’s eaten doorsteps smothered in
summer butter and homemade jam—she kisses
his absence, asks how it went, if his secretary was all right,
how was the flight? In the hallway light, he’s more positive,
holds up treasures from the trip, banners, beer mats,
a model tram, a perfume she has long admired.

Decades later, the dead father hails the son in a dream.
He seems happy, is typically pedantic about some matter,
but water pours over his ancient head, rivulets stream
down his thinning hair and lovely face. His son awakes
with a heavy pang. A slow tempest builds inside his mind.
He’s knocked off balance, cannot forget that streaming head.
He weeps for love, and guilt, and remembrance.

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Signs

In the back of the Zodiac I watch you come out of your house
morning after morning, a given routine I have no real quibble with,
except its dullness, the Light Programme music of Bert Kaempfert,

the cigarette smoke, the greasy roads, the greyness of the Midland
city before the Rolling Stones or the Beatles, the queasy feeling in
my stomach from the Shreddies. It must be a particular morning

I remember because I always see the same sad sights, the floodplain
near the mine, the new aluminium extrusion plant, the old sandstone
river bridge, the railway bridge, the speedo ticking up to thirty, forty

but ready for the right-hand turn up your road, where you come out
of your house morning after morning, with a flower pattern dress,
a cardy, an unbuttoned coat, high heels, legs too good for your face,

glasses with little coloured wings on the top on either side, like waves
or the manes of toy ponies, buck teeth, badly cut hair; strange I remember
all this now. Why did I feel that particular morning was so important,

why does the image of the speedo stay with me, why can I see the curve
of the steering wheel and the profile of the businessman in the front seat?
Was this the morning it all started to go wrong as the dark blue Zodiac

cruised up the street and you stepped off the kerb for the nearside door
even before we had stopped. Was that part of the game to feel the door
swing open with the car still moving, you Catherine Deneuve

in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg or Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and me just the kid in the back of the car? Who are you anyway?
We’re on the dual carriageway and are you both talking or do you

stay quiet because of the boy in the back of the car whose view
is of the radio and the backs of your seats and the hands moving
together to the cigarette lighter? I’m really stuck. Was this the day

I got stuck? Stuck in the sixties coming out of the fifties, stuck with
a love of cold grey mornings and movement through suburbs
in a dark blue Zodiac, speedo ticking, at the wheel, a man I can trust.

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Sunday August 13th 2017

Friday August 13th 1999

Why write? asks a magazine.

A few vague ideas wafted through my head but the first solid shape of answer was ‘to define my disadvantage’. Then, as a crutch, a confessional. Then to communicate my vision, which I see as a strange amalgam of narrative and candy floss mysticism, full of mixture, repeated failure and rededication, constantly in flux, although embedded in the fudge like substrate are small, intensely hard nuggets and tiny stars which rarely change.

Another answer, given time to think, thuds onto the tabletop of my consciousness – I feel called to do it, I feel more myself doing this than anything else, it is what I have always wanted to do.

But I feel guilty doing it because it’s selfish, anti-social, exclusive, unreal, self indulgent, contributes little (compared to real jobs like bricklaying or nursing) – and I earn no money.

Now, if I didn’t write what would I do. It kind of defines me. I have always felt like the singer the song is calling, but I have taken an inordinate amount of time to hone my skills and even begin rehearsals.

My shoulder clicks out….

Later –

Working on story analysis of Reward1 and feeling dreadful – especially around already heavily cut section about pagan rituals and Greenhill Bower

Feeling very sad that this section proved unacceptable.

Feeling bad about it because it’s a mistake – feeling I was seduced by my own rambling philosophising yet wanting to find some value in this – still clinging to the wreckage – I’m finding it very difficult to let go yet it is obvious it blocks the narrative. But I am in love with its cross connections etc.

Saturday August 13th 2016

Friday August 13th 2004

Travelodge. San Luis Obispo

Suddenly feel I’ve been running away and the me l’ve been running away from has caught up with me here. Feeling v tired. Crashed out PM after Mexican snack.

Wednesday August 14th 2014

Sunday August 13th 2006

Walk round Wood Ranch circle

Swim and hot tub

Mount Diablo

Pizza

Danville

Dream: A woman on a mount, a small rise. My mother? I attack her with a long bladed axe or machete hacking deep long cuts through her clothing into her body. She doesn’t die but stays around. Someone comes to see me and l’m very afraid they will see what I have done. She sits on a swing on the rise and blood is welling up from the cuts.

While I write I’m pursued by background anxiety, could almost be a cacophony of voice(s).

On the plane yesterday not flying but flying through media space, personal video screens, huge choice of films, music, games but no text.

Watched four films on the plane:

The Squid and the Whale - divorce and its effect on two brothers and how the eldest learns to break free from his father

Alien Autopsy - British quirkiness meets global gullibility. V funny

Inside Man - Spike Lee bank robbery with a twist.

Enron the smartest guys in the room - mesmerising and frightening documentary about corporate greed and the way Reganomics inspired a mad spiral of debt and corruption. How the dream of free market free enterprise went badly wrong. The danger of big ideas. This film touched many different roots and routes in me and had a number of aspects in common with Alien Autopsy. The way turning a profit often involves some kind of trick.

Control of the market through contracts. Building wave effect as people are sucked into the thing. Corruption. Smoke and mirrors. This all plays back into my own work and life. A huge pile of debt. Failure to address and control the debt. Constant small steps to do just enough. Avoidance of the problem. Massive waste and greed. Yet what I’m trying to do is create viable businesses that can survive. But all the time I am slicing away at something tender within me, denying it? I feel the need to cut and simplify. Why the fuck am I so stupid to pay so much interest to the fucking banks in my efforts to do what?

Tuesday August 13th 2002

Saturday August 13 2011

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1

An early draft of The Reward of Delay which I’m currently serialising on Substack:

The Reward of Delay

The Reward of Delay by John Davies. Historical detective fiction set in 1789 serialised in short episodes.

By John Davies

Hen-warm—held in her gloating—a child
she dismembers the memory—how he
the image always returns—his lip’s quivering
of the broken—her look up—his words
how she feels at moments like these
betrayal, guilt, anger—something she should
have been responsible for—not broken
not out of control—the ovum—those words
procedure—dilatation—curettage
her husband’s—silent—the ultrasound
empty—the yolk of a new generation
tainted—innards out—like screaming
next time he says—next time

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