Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

I was given a seed and when I loved it I was bidden to bury it in the ground, and I buried it, not knowing what I was sowing. That joy is more bitter than pain, that pain dearer than delight.

Sarah, we have gone so far together. Your offer this afternoon clears my path. Here is the work: to gather up the force which is in these evil thoughts, which now we merely feel as pain, uselessly, save as it makes a tension in our hearts that must gain its relief and expend itself in life at last: to gather up the force and put it, directly, to use.

I have seen such sights. A man may have reason to say he has found a door, and not a wall, although he can open it but a little way, and he has very scanty ideas of the space into which it leads. You will remember how utterly I must be unable to do justice to what I want to say.

But I hear the Doctor’s tread, he is not asleep, though he is never, as I am, troubled; restless, turning. I do not disturb him with my work. I am quite silent, I assure you, letting slip only the occasional moan. The heat of my thoughts, the intemperance of my argument, must not be allowed to break in on his meditations, which are unseen, water running beneath water. I will restrain my hand and let my words go free, where they will, from the window and out into the ignorant and uncaring streets.

Your brother,

James

To: Caroline Haddon

8 Finsbury Square

July, 1861

My dear Caroline,

I was at De Beauvoir Square this afternoon, and Sarah said to me, ‘Make haste and write your book; I will pay for the printing of it.’ I went to Dr Gull in the evening, and mentioned it. ‘Tell your sister I will divide it with her.’

I have just put down my pen and sealed a letter to Sarah, but I cannot rest, the Doctor is occupied, and there is so much, so very much to be said; please forgive me if I say just a little of it to you. It is not enough to leave these things half-born. Nothing can be that does not act, or be except by acting. The world is ruled by thought, but no one knows what will come of doing.

And yet from a little commonplace idea I have started on a train of thought that has almost revolutionised my ‘holdings’ on many of the most interesting and important subjects of thought, especially to a physician. My new ideas may be true or false, or rather, in great measure, they must be false; but that is not the question. They are new and mutually dependent, and inasmuch as they have flowed from an obvious though unrecognised truth I think they may contain the elements of something valuable.

But I was going to tell you where I have finished; for I must have done now, since it is impossible to go any farther. I have at last embraced the revolutions of the planets in my investigations, and propose to wind them up with an inquiry into the centrifugal force. You will smile, but I speak in earnest. I have either lighted upon a great fact or a monstrous fancy. If it be the latter, I am content: you know my opinion as to the part which error plays in the world. I don’t aspire to any higher honour than to do my work.

If my ideas be correct, and it may be partly so, I have made a step towards solving, not the essential mystery, but the ‘mystery’ of life. I want to meet with some first-rate mathematician and astronomer just to put him a few questions as to the centrifugal force, and then I would positively abstain from further pursuit of these subjects for the present, and would patiently retrace my steps, and sit down deliberately to mature the speculations that have crowded upon me, and revise and purify what I have written, which amounts to upwards of four hundred closely written foolscap pages.

Do not suppose I set such pursuits of science in comparison with moral aims. I don’t hold that man is an observing or reasoning animal, or that any amount of intellectual exertion or scientific attainment can be pleaded in excuse for the neglect of duty. The will is the man, not the intellect.

Perhaps I over-reach, attempting to circumscribe and set limits on the unknowable; ‘unknowable’ because to know would be to go beyond self, beyond limits, dissolve boundaries, give voice to that which is forbidden, a blasphemy of the truth.

But whatever fails, unseen ends are served; better ends than those which failed.

Think what a work had to be done! The price of my vision and of the madness it brings will have to be paid. It must be. It was not possible to have the whole world turned round and be quite different, and to see the assurance of its being good and not evil any more, without being driven back on oneself, and the penalty will come, and not alone.

Others can do in cold blood what genius does in pain and crucifixion. Genius is the inability to keep out Nature; it is the woman in man. The pivot in the turning world. It must be crushed. That is part of the work, its function. Uncrushed, the work were not done.

Genius asks no questions, follows Nature blindly: to licence, or madness. Nature repudiates man’s goodness in so far as he is not one with her. Too much denial, too many restraints! Nature says, ‘That force you are wasting I want to use through you.’

Genius sees the invisible. Men of genius are the women of the race. Genius is the positive denial of self, as asceticism is the negative. Genius-work has in it what cannot be done by will. It is the right leaving-off, abdication of control, inhibition of reflex. That is what heaven is called, a ceasing from labour.

The act must be half unawares, on the spur, not deliberate. A new thing; no conscious repetition of a thing done before.

I will do it. And I leave my justification to you.

As always, your friend

James

When the light was clean they kept to the heights. Water table. Windmills. Grazing cattle. Hinton’s sleep took him out of the city by routes that could never be found. Hills lifted from Islington, sudden as icebergs; meadows, streams. The cavernous streets cracked and let him into a tainted Arcadia. He walked through dockyards and wharfs that became forests; sunlight shafted the clearings with an estranged symbolism. He dipped hand in clear fountains, but he never drank from them.

Always, they returned. Their backs to the sentiment of open landscape; those fields were blank pages. They spun on their heels to face the excitement of the city’s unskinned heart, its glittering towers and monuments. The moment was postponed, the pleasure sharpened. But not prolonged. They plunged once more by Percival Street, by Goswell, St John, Farringdon; the same tracks, towards the known enclosures, the sanctuaries of power. The city was a museum of itself.

Morning of blood and daffodils, a frenzy of small birds kicking the soot from an irregularly roof’d escarpment. Gull plods, calm, canonical, satisfied: a man who has made love to his wife minutes before setting out; unbathed, replete, extending his sense of well-being to the new day.

He pokes, he prods; he trifles with a heavy cane.

Hinton steams, drives like a piston, the nap of his hat brushed the wrong way, ungloved, stopping, staring wildly about, surprised, unsettled, strung up, a bundle of odd volumes under his arm. He is Holmes returned from the Falls, revenant, born again, ‘strange old book-collector, his sharp, wizened face’, clutching The Origins of Tree Worship .

Fasting Hinton scorns the Quality Chop House; Gull’s juices bubble with disappointment. Hinton makes prophecy from the moisture on the moon of his fingernail. Onward! Blows back the scarf of cloud. Sir William contents himself with digging a splinter of dry mustard out from his raw one-day beard. Lags, noting his companion’s heel, ground down like a molar dieted on pebbles.

‘You are heart-dead now,’ said Gull, ‘I was summoned to give a second opinion; I informed them that my opinions were of necessity final. They were, in fact, not opinions at all — but judgments, made of long experience and observation. I am the ultimate court of appeal. It will cost you one hundred and fifty guineas, my dear sir, to learn that you are already a dead man. Arrange your affairs.