‘I had imagined that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison.’
Those interested in the life and various works, musical and textual, of John Clare may find the book ‘Edge of the Orison’ by Iain Sinclair, 2005, worth a look. Sinclair undertook with various companions to shadow John Clare’s escape from High Beach asylum near Epping Forest, east of London and the 80 mile walk back to his home near Peterborough in search of his lost love, Mary Joyce, a ghost already as she was three years dead. Sinclair deals in oddities and the unusual backed with wide ranging scholarship and his wife Anna had a distant familial relationship to Clare so he uses this to ground the book literally. Another unusual link: Lucia Joyce, the supposedly schizophrenic daughter of the Irish writer James Joyce, in the twentieth century had ended up in the same Northampton asylum where Clare spent his remaining years and Samuel Beckett, who had been a secretary for Joyce in his younger days and had had a relationship with Lucia at one point visited her in the years up to her death in 1982 and supported her financially. Beckett was also distantly related to Sinclair, a point he makes glancingly later in the book. These coincidences and textual resonances appealed to the writer and poet Sinclair, given his previous ambulatory explorations of London under the sign of psychogeography. From this dense cluster of relationships and coincidences he produced a fascinating book that walks Clare back literally into the nineteenth century, places him among his literary influences and moves him past the clumsy titles of ‘peasant poet’ and ‘madman’ into the wider literary canons and ‘history.’ Clare was someone who came to London and did not prosper, beyond his initial frothy fame. Sinclair as another outsider who made his bones eventually in London is an ideal writer to approach his ghostly predecessor. There are many resonations between Sinclair, Clare, and others in the game. Sinclair is very good at teasing these out, resounding them, as it were. As witness the title: Clare spells ‘horizon’ ‘orison’ and the book bounces nicely off the resemblance sonically and historically. Edge of the world. Prayer/discourse. Clare’s original journeys to London at the time when he was displaced geographically and spiritually by the unsettling psychological damages of the Enclosures provoked no attempt to artistically accommodate the city into his work. London was not his subject. By comparison, Blake was the poet of London and had the visions (literally) of his words and art to accommodate its demands. Clare’s life had been leavened by nature, the flora and fauna of a rough rural England now irrevocably changed. London unmade him. So to High Beech. Beyond that… much is speculation. Which is Sinclair’s forte…