Golgonooza

  Imagine attending a ceremony in Spring (in this case with the Zuni in what is now New Mexico) where the local medicine men gather around a square of compacted yellow sand in which a single seed of corn is planted. As they chant, pray, you watch emerge over the course of hours, not days or weeks, a fully-fledged corn plant, glistening green, emerge whose cob will be closely inspected for its prediction of the forthcoming autumn harvest. What do you make of this? If you are a white person, observing this in the nineteenth century, you tend to presume a trick but what kind of trickery? All of your explanations sound either hollow - the use of a corn plant from the previous year but then how is its greenery maintained? Or equally fantastical to what you have just witnessed - for example, mass hypnosis or a secret accelerant growth chemical. Later, reading this historical account, you can fall back on the assumption that it is a piece of fantastical literature - except the mostly mode...

I first saw the poet, David Gascoyne,  across a crowded room in the Primrose Hill Community Centre in London. It was my first ever attendance at a poetry reading (when I was at university) drawn by his name on the bill - one of three Surrealist poets (though in truth all three had drunk at the well of the unconscious and moved on). I had only the description of the poet, Kathleen Raine, to go on and this was not a description of physical characteristics but of character and quality of being. There was a tall man, quietly standing to one side, at the far end of the room, with an air of such collected vulnerability and searching presence that I knew it could be no other. There he was in his signature bow tie waiting to speak, to read. He read beautifully (not always a characteristic of poets with their own work) and I had my admiration confirmed. Later we were to meet (at a conference) and hold a long conversation about Christianity, existentialism and that quality of being that is p...