Detail from a copy of Goblin Market and other poems by Christina Rosetti. Photograph: Oxford University.
Today was a strange no-woman's land between one world and the next, a storm coming but not yet arrived, the land warm but withdrawing for winter. Not knowing whether I was coming or going, I experimented with psychogeography and spontaneous prose, looking for the trail of breadcrumbs leading to the bridge of tags.
Friday 3 October 2025
I can hear the wind rising, rumbling high up over the houses. Closer, the trees have an eerie stillness, a gentle rustle of their leaves like a spectral giant stroking a cat.
Storm Amy is on the way, already it is wet and strangely warm. I can feel that giddy excitement that comes with high winds, wanting to laugh hysterically for no reason, rush around with helicopter arms.
The Goblin Market is calling me with Citrons from the South ... what can this strange half imagined place be. Domesticity shines, the pristine hob, wiped clean surfaces, clean table covering and yet ... the Goblins hover.
Are they pulling me to the future, what lies there unseen, or back to the past, my past all seventy long years of it, or the past of this land, fields on the edge of the village of Knighton, here before Domesday, a high ridge, safe from the flood waters of the Wash Brook and the Soar. Is it the ones who came before me, my own ...
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... and others who travelled and foraged and farmed, collecting fallen wood, like I do, for the fire.
The minutes tick by on this half release morning, that outgrown skin not entirely sloughed off, rubbing up against walls and doors to loosen it and slip away free.
I turn to the future, the ones and zeros falling, cascading like dominoes, rattling in their eerie green silence, each pixel perfectly formed, running down the screen, falling like rain on the window.
It seems they are normally square but if rectangular, then taller than wider. When stitches run they have the opposite aspect, wider than taller, but the same binary: knit (front), purl (backwards), knit, purl, knit, purl, coding, coding, coding.
Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Rain falling on the perspex roof, gentle droplets heralding the weather to come. Make sure your drains and gutters are clear, advise the authorities, and, "Phone this number immediately ...
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... if you see poo or tissue emerging from sewage runs." I wonder if condoms still litter the vast slurry containers, dark and curiously distended like fat grubs on the surface. They survived every process, I wonder did they flood out in the clean water pipes, falling into the rivers and reservoirs, caking into islands with branches and leaves, plastic bottles and old cans.
I've wrestled with tags, digital demons, labelling and pinning you down with precision ... or bridges to new worlds, friends, connections, information, communities, creating wealth, connecting the synapses and nodes, putting together, by noughts and ones, a future.
How to keep, translate, that organic roundness, curves, waves and tendrils, networks, fractals, blossoming and transforming, myriad movement but still the mathematical perfection of Fibonacci spirals, encapsulate the energy in digital form. Can it be done.
The rain is getting into its groove, falling continuously, quieter now.
I've found, as Struthless says, that you don't need to wait for inspiration, inspiration comes in the doing. It's hard not to edit as I transcribe, thinking of better rhymes, better visions, other tangents arising and leading off. I keep to the deal: transcribe only the hand-written (although I can't resist editing out the repeated word here and there). It was harder today to keep going with the words already written, not crossing them out with my scratchy fountain pen and replacing them with another idea. I stuck with Kerouac - no revisions. But I can't let loose yet, or couldn't imagine yet, [no] periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas.
References
Goblin Market - Christina Rosetti
A chaotic guide to making stuff instead of doomscrolling - Struthless
Essentials of Spontaneous Prose - Jack Kerouac
Previous Posts in This Series
On Transitions - Friday 26 September 2025
On Bringing New Audiences - Saturday 20 September 2025
On Liminal Spaces - Saturday 13 September 2025