SELF-PORTRAIT The images cut to the core. Orpheus limping from the hole of hell to sing. Or Christ slumped on a cross screaming at the silence of his god. Or a red fox running through bent bracken as night drops. Or my own birth sign: two antinomian fish locked in a jagged tidal stream - that geometric counterpoint. These are my icons where endings are beginnings, where the country of despair borders the frontier of possibility. But above all, one image from my childhood: the water lily at the centre of the kitchen-garden pond, its long stem slowly winding down and down into a bed of slime – and what moves me is its mauve bud opening out into the sun, disclosing its many petals one by one, hieratic and exact: forgotten chakra in the skull.11_journey.html
 
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