GOOD TO BE HOME. On the train back from Edinburgh I took great care to restrain myself from just moving straight on to the next thing on the list. A list to end all lists has been accumulating in my absence, but Edinburgh needed some thinking through on the train.
Things do need thinking through. And writing down, ideally.
On Friday afternoon I visited Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden and forgot both my notebook and my painkillers. The absence of each had a similar effect. I can’t manage the pressure of dumbness very well. I write a lot of things down on a daily basis so I have them recorded, and at a place like Little Sparta (that’s what his home’s called) it’s headache-inducing to let things go by unrecorded.
It isn’t that I liked everything I saw. A lot of it I straightforwardly disliked. But the garden contained certain difficult to recollect sensations and sentiments, and if I’d had a pen and paper I could have tried to gather them down into words and leave them there, and carry on with an unclouded head. Having no means of noting anything down, I had to contain all these things throughout the hours I was there, and continually risk losing them without using them up properly. I mentioned the other day in an interview at The Other Room in Manchester the need to mop up World, and the hope that language might be able to do that. And the hope above all that poetry – language redoubled – might be able to mop up more World still.
