Sublime

Marlowe stands close and lights it for him, smelling of hair cream and something else as well. The faintest whiff of brimstone. Marlowe enjoys a different kind of immortality, achieved by different means. No magic acorns or slumbering under trees. He sold his soul on the dotted line, joined an exclusive members’ club. Eternal life. But not eternal

to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature – this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts . . .8

He was one of those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of artistic expression.

On one side was a quartet of tall, slender, curving Psilocybe cubensis, one of the more common species of magic mushroom. On the back was a quotation from William Blake that, it occurred to me later, neatly aligned the way of the scientist with that of the mystic: “The true method of knowledge is experiment.”

I dreamt of him once; he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child.

He told me that from his earliest years he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end;

Go on; I'll follow thee.