59

JH: Somehow, somewhere, no doubt. Your idea of a hole in our collective whatsis due to missing texts is very interesting. To me it matches with your regretting a use of charcoal. A single halt in step changes the entire artistic process, whether individually or collectively. Is the missing subordinate to the locatable? A question answered differently every time it's asked - for sometimes a lost paradise is in mind, sometimes contentment. Poetry can present the missing and the locatable together as equals. Metaphor, independent of verse, does this. When compared to real-life (non-literary) events, the locatable and missing in literature are often reversed. Will all that's missing from literature someday be said again in new works of literature? Literature as the literature of mourning for literature? In these new works, all that will be lost (and this losing is by no means certain) is the exact words in the originals. Has the entirety of these re-visited works already been written? How would we know?


AHB: I don't suppose we would know. When I started painting 4 years ago, I was given to chucking out works that really annoyed me, quite a lot of my production at that time. Someone told me not to discard but keep these losers to use in collage. These works disappear, and yet. People imagine what Keats would've done had he dodged TB. In a way, the writing he 'would have' written had he lived HAS been written, by our collective interest. A lot of looping, helixing and downright repetition occurs in literature and art. Omigawd am I suggesting reincarnation??? it seems like the lost work, Sappho's or never done, like elder Keats, is written somehow. I don't mind going all Blakean about this. It's not something I think a lot about (I'll bet Blake did so think), but there is that plane of literature that is life. We know it, the energy and satisfactions, as well as confusions, inadequacy and disappointment. And I don't even smoke dope! Anyway, a strong connection with those of yore, even if yore was just a few years ago.