After reading Daniel Defoe’s Tour of the Eastern Counties of England, I decided to write a linear tour, sliding down the East Anglian Heights. Itinerary: Luton street food vans -> King John’s treasure.
Gordon Home imagined inserting himself into modernity that way, Through the Chilterns to the Fens. This is an impossible route, of course: the Heights mark the westernmost extent of historical East Anglia, veering round the edge of the historical Fens.
I stood on the spot. Narrated wonders forgotten by libraries, un-rediscovered even by freelance travel journalists. Wonders out of which God, on appeal, might compile a wünderkammer or terrarium for me to tramp after life.
Whittling down subjectivities research angles got ever more oblique. And they proliferated and curation sickness got me. It went to poetic wording.
It’s not easy getting back in once you’re out. It’s even harder when you weren’t there in the first place. Raymond Williams fantasised long and hard, under great imagined pain, about how great it would be if the Labour Party were actually Marxist.
The wettest place in England now the driest, with Osiris-finding frisson such a real fiction that people exposed in floodground newbuilds will care to worry only through eventual narratives currently in pre-production.
Summer light renders the land us, and our cultures down to dribbling subsistence. Repeatable, repeating, comfortable as egg.
Instead of making something about thinking, I enjoyed the thinking for the time being, which is sometimes sufficient action.
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