{Inner Bareness}[9th August 1990]

[Redbook7:205-206][19900809:1055]{Inner Bareness}[9th August 1990]

.1055

I’m perfectly happy to sit in a counterfeit-English pub with mock-timbered ceilings; on the whole, kitsch neither turns me on, not turns me up (as it does some) except where the theme itself is false (eg the new shopping centre (Metro?) in or near Newcastle-on-Tyne, with it rootless clutter of Disney-Grimm fantasias, which I have seen on television).

But when I was younger, and occasionally even now, to sit in early morning in (say) an undecorated Smithfield* café, alone in the crowd; or on a deserted sunlit railway platform on a Summer afternoon, perhaps at Far[r]ingdon [station]** nearby: would fill me with a wild emptiness of conflict and pure unformed Poetry, an overwhelming Peace and removal, a transcendent longing and fulfilment which only the greatest art, of deliberate art, can come near.

*[London’s central wholesale meat market, which has been on the site for about 1,000 years but at the time of writing this note is to be moved out of central London]

**[Probably the nearest London now has to a central interchange railway station, albeit a relatively small one]

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