Brooding clouds in the sky over Compañía Street. A street like a flexed arm, but the blow never arrives. I wandered into Víctor Jara’s bookshop, undefiled, but possessed by the Dionysian spirit. It was just what I was waiting for, just what my life needed: a hint of inebriation, a touch of madness, action. I wanted risk in every movement, knowing that in Greek, to seduce also means to destroy. I sought destruction. I made my way to the poetry section and stopped beside a volume by Pascoli. Take from each thing the smile and the tear, says Pascoli. I closed this book and took another, something more du jour, from Michaux: Man needs a landscape within which to rage. And then another, from the poet Alberto Santamaría: When I came down, I hardly knew where my body led me. Half beaten and exhausted from these truths I took down a book from Calasso: The Dionysian phallus is a hallucinogen, we know nothing of the fidelity to cultivation and only copulate in the wild woods. Finally I tired of poetry’s instruction. I heaped all the books onto a funeral mound fancying that by osmosis Pascoli would be Michaux, and Michaux Calasso, and vice-versa: Santamaría Pascoli, and Michaux Santamaría and like this agitating all the poetry until it formed a single compendium of verse that would say everything and then I thought: now that I have read these books I need to live some of what they say.

Recently, I was walking down Nassau street and I saw a blind woman, with a stick, walking in front of me, very quickly, in the same direction. She had bashed into several people who were waiting for buses and looking the other way. After she collided with the fourth person, I walked up to her and offered her my arm. She took it and the two of us walked, still very quickly, up around the front of Trinity College Dublin and toward D’Olier street. She was on her way to work and basically knew which direction she was going in. I mentioned, as we approached D’Olier street, that the old Irish Times building was progressing well with its renovations. She said that she had never known that the building was there. I worked as a structural engineer for some years in Scotland and Ireland. On one particular project I received geotechnical information from a two-acre site just outside Edinburgh. The information was in the form of borehole data. These boreholes determine the nature of the soil, from the surface to, usually, a depth of about twenty or thirty metres. This borehole information provided me with the nature of the different types of strata of material and at what depth these strata occured. I was looking at the black boulder clay stratum.

In November 1962 my father made my mother leave the marital home, 257 Cannon Hill Lane, a mock-Tudor semi in the south London suburb of Morden. I was eight, my brother, Sasha, six, and my father forty-eight. Over the following months my father became highly irritable, very quarrelsome, and his sleep pattern went to pot. Now he wrote through the night, went to bed around seven in the morning, got up about four in the afternoon, and resumed work on his plays and novels at seven or eight in the evening. One evening, he called us to the kitchen. He’d made one of his standard suppers, brown toast, mashed sardines and a sliced tomato. The plates were on the breakfast counter and there were three of them. He was eating with us, which usually he never did. He must be in a good mood, I decided.