The mighty line
I invent worlds, commercial campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. I’ve spent my life thinking about what writing can do. If you favour my ideas and style then please consider sharing my website with the ambitious brand owners and sensitive artistic patrons in your life. I’m an independent practitioner and I do what I do through building partnerships. Here is a list of some people I’ve worked with so far.
I’m a fan of playwright Kit Marlowe (1564 –1593) for many reasons. His darkly secretive life, his spy-thriller death (of which Shakespeare possibly said ’a great reckoning in a little room’), the sulphur–stinking play ‘Doctor Faustus’, the Arcadian pastoral poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’, and – absolutely not least – his ridiculous hair, which by the look of this portrait seems as problematic as mine.
Actually, we don’t even know if that *is* a picture of him.
Literary fame being full of vagaries, one of the epithets most often attached to devilish Christopher is ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’, presumably because he was the first to popularise blank verse. However, this mention originates from a backhanded compliment by fellow Elizabethan playwright Ben Johnson in the dedication he wrote about Shakespeare in the First Folio.
‘For, if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely to thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd or Marlowe's mighty line.’
Imagine – the comment about you that rings though the ages comes from a verse saying you’re not quite as good as someone else. I can only refer you to my last Substack and remind all that we don’t get to control how we are remembered.
So mighty lines is what I’ll muse upon.
I now offer you five writing adventures that all either began from – or congealed like a knife wound around – a single sharp line. I offer no detail about the writing process except to say that most often each of the lines was given to me in a state of hypnagogia like an underhand payment in a backstreet tavern … and then I got on with the dirty business of creation from there. Like a man with Mephistopheles on his side, each of the five lines are emboldened.
These Were Days of Endless Endless
Thank you to all who joined me at last week’s talk about my latest book ‘These Were Days of Endless Endless.’ Because quite a few people who subscribe to this Substack are writers and because no one ever talks about this sort of thing, preferring instead to maintain a persistent aura of success, I thought you might like to know numbers.
I published These Were Days about a month ago. Since then I’ve sold three (3), given away about 100 (one hundred). Thirty-four (34) recipients signed up for the Zoom talk, 19 (nineteen) people actually tuned in.
This is considerably better than the one (1) person who turned up at the launch of my book ‘Jack and Jill’ in a pub on Great Portland Street. Things are improving. Nineteen-fold.
One of the reasons I did the event is because it forced me to begin building a talk about poetry. I’d like to do this in person a lot over the coming year. Please invite me to your local village hall, river bank or marshland.
The Running Towards
I picked up a couple of D&AD pencils in last week’s awards. Including a Graphite Pencil for my writing for London Fire Brigade.
And if you scroll to the comments of this post you’ll find a discussion between people who don’t like the line ‘Love is the running towards’.
Beginning Today We’ll Rebuild The World From All Of The Good Little Feelings Everyone Is Having
That’s the title of my poetry and sculpture collaboration with the brilliant Bryony Benge-Abbott. It was a commission for the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and we showed it in a Twickenham wood in December last year. It’s about data and biodiversity loss and animism. Read about it here and listen to the spoken word piece.
It’s now coming to beautiful York on the 15th, 16th and 17th June. Sign up here.
... but I don’t know what became of it
That’s the first line of a dawning, new long poem called ‘The Idyllegy’. I found the line in a biography of Kenneth Grahame. Grahame was the author of ‘The Wind In The Willows’ which is notable for its particularly beautiful and transcendent Pan scene. Pan, like Marlowe’s shepherd, resides in Arcadia.
The line came from a letter written by Grahame’s wife, Elspeth, after he died. They had a strange, infantile and fairly tragic life together and she became a bit disassociated from reality as a widow. In the letter it’s not actually clear what she is looking for, though presumably some memento of him. What a line though! I couldn’t get it out of my head. I like that we don’t know what is lost.
It loosely inspired the poem you’ll find at the bottom of this Substack.
And then I began thinking that what was lost for the real Elspeth was an Arcadia which never really existed. Though for Kenneth it was present in his fiction.
And so ‘The Idyllegy’ is about Arcadia. It’s a psychedelic pastoral. I’ve been going *deep* on the whole tradition of pastorals – both in literary and classical art – so will talk about some of the writing traditions of this form in a future Substack.
For now though, a couple of requests.
Firstly, I’m not going to give this one away for free. I’d love to but unit price is just a *little* too much right now. Sorry. But I will sell it at cost – for £10 – and there are only 100 copies being printed. Hardback, amethyst cloth cover, gold foil title and lots and lots of white space around the ruins of verse for you to illustrate.
If there’s enough interest then I’ll get it made in a couple of months. If no one wants it I’ll still get it made, just much later when I have enough wind in my willows. You can register your intention to own a copy here.
Here’s Arthur Rackham’s illustration of Pan from Grahame’s classic. Just below his goaty legs is a message for any visual artists reading this.
As I mentioned above, ‘The Idyllegy’ will be printed in a way that encourages the reader to sketch amongst the crumbled edifices of my stanzas. But I’m also going to have ten copies illustrated by collaborator artists. These unique copies will then be sold for much money, with all the proceeds going to an environmental charity.
Would you like to receive a book to doodle in and then be auctioned off? Just hit reply to this email if so.
And now, a passage from the ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ chapter of ‘The Wind In The Willows’. The moment where Rat and Mole *almost* see Pan.
‘Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.’
We don’t know what this is
‘You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends’ said Robert Anton Wilson and don’t you just agree?
Our second sunrise gathering is happening on Hackney Marshes, June 21st. Summer solstice. Meet at 4:23am for a 4:42am appearance from Sol.
Bring your co-conspirators or come alone. Follow this Instagram. Be there or … be in bed probably. Oh just brush down your goat legs and come. We don’t know what it is either but Arcadia and meeting Pan always begins at dawn.
Elspeth’s letter ‘... but I don’t know what became of it’ she wrote, having given the morning to looking. It wasn’t in the starry trunk beneath the stairs, or the pockets of his jacket that only got one impostured outing, then was saved for best. She’d dredged the pond and carefully detailed last night’s garden dream. Pulled down all the books, skimmed a thousand passages in a lovely trance. Checked the news and the big-spoon drawer. Nowhere. Tasted peaches for the first time in ages, went on dating sites, sat at the piano and sighed at her starry hands. Thought she’d found it in the sudden death of a long ago friend and then in euphoric hunger just before luncheon, but that was something else altogether.
I like to think they're selling tenfold in a parallel world... Excellent piece, TS
A lovely poem 💖