Moon Tiger

pulls out the stops

Claudia types. She has to pause from time to time to shake sand from the typewriter. She types partly from expediency and partly to exorcise what is now printed on her eyeballs. She tries to reduce to words what she has seen and thought. She types also because she is dog-tired, thirsty, aching and bad-tempered and if she does not occupy herself she might give away some of this, and be ashamed

Everyone, now, is cursing. The New Zealander has an interview lined up that he sees evaporating if they do not reach HQ by nightfall. The driver, who clearly regards Claudia as his special responsibility, says, ‘Don’t worry, miss, we’ll get you there.’ ‘I’m not worried,’ says Claudia, who is not. She takes the cover off her typewriter and sits in the cab of the truck, typing, while the desert roars around, now white, now sulphur, now rose-coloured

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

But I may well be the only one to know that Gordon has a deep seminal laziness. Oh, he works ... he will work himself into the ground, when it is a matter of the intellect. His laziness is more subtle than that, it is a laziness of the soul, and Sylvia is its manifestation

I have a print – you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum – of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer’s shop and a blacksmith’s and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith – or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse – passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer’s shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph – sixty minutes – was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock

Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once.

find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.