– ‘Time is elastic here’, I said during an investigation of whether or not it was possible that the Book of Revelations had been written on the island of Patmos in AD 95 (after the Christian Era). It is personal, it has become very personal indeed, so that it is hard to place events in a particular order. [Await photographic evidence to clarify]
Still some distance from the Roman city of Leptus Magni today, and I decide to stay "on board". THISis the asylum: it seems we have lived almost equal to the gods, and risked the harm of their jealousy. I have to expand the Lost Agenda to include other trajectories as well as the magnitude of Istanbul:
1. Stormbound: the glass has fallen and an intense low is sweeping accross from the north-east
2. Dream state (traumarbeit): I recognise but I do not know these people, a physical as well as an emotional experience that is akin to a continuous rocking motion, such as ‘sea legs’, or after a long journey on a train the sensation of continued movement of the body after it has come to a stop
3. The island of Barra, Outer Hebrides (1978): the memory of a day on another excursion that I had not wished to continue at that time
4. "Foam" (Decreation, Anne Carson 2006): "[Essay with Rhapsody] on the sublime in Longinus and Antonini
5. The cleft in the rock: [PHOTOGRAPH] bring the first two fingers and the thumb together like this. However, the ‘despotica’ of the monastery on Patmos does not permit photography anywher in the grounds in the cave of St John – "… for the hour of his judgement is come…" (Revelations Ch 14 Vv 7), nor from the adjoining chapel of the Great Mother Anne. The ancient rock formation is fissured accross over the whole roof of the cave, a deep crack that extends to the exterior into the chapel of Anne, where it divides and widens arching gently upwards like an enormous flattened letter ‘Y’. And Anne, reading the Ikon robed in red as she must be, supports in her arms the Holy Virgin who is holding the flower to come, the Mother of God.