Some kind of key, or combinations of keys

There is an attraction to accounts in that they can be reconciled in one dimension. The bottom-line result is of no real consequence as a credit is probably good, and any debt, once paid, creates a flow of some sort that is far less straightforward, and not predetermined. A good deal of improvisation is called for if anything is to be made into something else.

What might at first seem at first like a loss can be a way of a hole being kicked in a psychic wall. Light can stream through from another place, and the cast of things changes. Gates might be approached and passed through, if flows are to be joined, but they are not always visible or easily recognisable.

There are two patches of paint on the kitchen wall where small cupboards have been torn off the wall. They show how the kitchen was painted long ago and make a field of blue and green as if a poster faded by the sun. It is more difficult to reconcile experience, feeling, history, or the impression of an image than it is to work out tax.

We used to go on holiday to a lake beyond the mountains but before the coast on the other side of the island. It was surrounded by dense and ancient forest. On the wall of the bedroom we stayed in was a poster for wranglers that taught me that yellow and red are fugitive. The lake was so high the last year we went that whole trees and field of flax were beneath the water and we canoed over them.

I was recently driving my car and listening to a radio show about how scientists believe they have isolated a hormone that causes people to be kind to others, or inversely, when in deficit, perform cruel acts. I was thinking about this with some interest and, turning right, crashed into a tram, uninsured.

Later that day I was swimming in a pool, doing the lengths I do at that time of the week. It is somewhat of a holding pattern for me and my family, lowering ourselves into the water, only really moving and breathing. I thought about how my friend used to joke that swimming in a pool always made it feel like the accident never happened.

But it was not the pool, it was a strange peace that came from having to accept that something had just happened and there was no revision possible. A point of stillness had been reached, all doubt and earlier decisions had accumulated, and all that was left was a receptive and replete vulnerability.

Calculations involve a situation, elements, and a procedure which may involve a channelling or harbouring or gathering of discarded items. Island behaviours, or ways learned during periods of subsistence living, can expose means (spaces and mechanisms) that are like pools between the beginning and ends of ancient worlds.

It all went silent in about 1999. There may have been a surrender to other kinds of information. A yellow gesture, for instance. Or the signals exchanged telepathically over the phone between two friends drawing in different towns. Shapes would correspond, or a word would to one be “Cole”, a name, while the other would preceive a lump of coal.

In Charlie Brown, Woodstock would witter about, fantail-like, at the children’s head-height, each dealing inexpertly and unsupported with feelings, difficulties, desire, systems, groups. His communicative peeps were notes as little hatches, like the ones someone might make to score the passing of days of waiting in fives.

These strokes are reminiscent of the way that small children come into language, first making the shapes of sentences in utterances into which the words are eventually drawn, as if sucked up a straw slowly and by a larger being. At this stage I am sure they can hear the thoughts of their terribly exposed parents.

They prove this by using words they have never heard, sometimes just as the thought is being spun in the adult. This is a quiet but deeply heavy experience, and is repeated often enough for is veracity to be beyond doubt. This also shows that heaviness, in music or otherwise, is not synonymous with histrionics or scale.

To paint a bird, flowers or other small-of-power entity is commonly and persistently considered to be a lowly thing, as is to paint on a small scale. Other genres are where something of greater meaning is supposed to occur. But a painting of a piece of cut thick, pale asparagus, the sort buried in the earth until it is picked, is as heavy as the songs of Neil Young. Or a bare foot.

Is it because of its lack of fear of intimacy, and feminine disregard for dominance, that it has this strength of display? The small scale is like a book or a song in that it is compact, yet expansive. “A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death. At times, some birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre.”

I was due to be born in the last days of 1969, on the day that the first men walked on the moon. I was born three and a half weeks late into deep snow, my mother would tell me. When I was old enough to do so, maybe six, I painstakingly, and with some real and adaptive research, made my first book about the lunar landing.

Their clearly defined task really appealed, as did the empty, pale landscape of the moon and the compact nature of the habitation provided by the spacecraft. At this age, and with what Steiner called soul-knowledge of the letters, not possible before six, I liked to draw floorplans of one-person dwellings. It seems it had not occurred to me that I would want or need to live with other people.

I did some of the lettering in yellow and my mother told me that this was a mistake because from a distance yellow appears to be white, and disappears into a white ground. I took this on board, but from a distance it seems like this constructive criticism is more relevant to the design of street signage than to fantasy borne in colour.

I liked the chalkiness of the moon where the light was like the white of a page, and in so being might have been emblematic of literary imagination in some register. The basic devices of all fantastic literature are reputedly only four in number: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double.

I have not lived here long, and early on I was walking along a path in a park, and a young man cycled towards me happily and excitedly going somewhere with a bird’s nest in one hand. He made me like it here better, no longer on an island. His image, the spatial–colour relationships, were a good starting point, the paint of his picture going beyond its frame.