Our initial instruction had been quite simple. At the end of our first meeting, Jim had said:
‘Let’s meet under the clock.’
We hadn’t met there. We had met haphazardly. They had been stranded in a lift while going up to film London from the air, and I had been early, for once, and had been wandering around, looking at faces, bumping into the restless neurotic energies of the crowd, till I had picked up so much psychic debris that I needed a drink to straighten myself out. And drinking now, in silence, pondering the crowd that seemed to replenish itself, full of individuals going nowhere except round and round, as if taking their private demons for a walk, I thought about the meeting that hadn’t taken place under the clock. I’m a bit like that; I think about all manner of tangential things. I like angles and odd turnings. Straightforward things bore me. In order to think about a straightforward thing I have to somehow first make it tangential. And so I thought about us setting out on our journey from under the shadow of the great clock, and what a different journey it would have been, launched from beneath such a symbol.
It occurred to me, as I got mildly pissed, that one way or another, we all set off on the road, take to ship, steal off at dawn, catch a lift on the highway, sneak out of our houses, under the shadow of the clock. I gazed now at the great black clock of the station, with its little white markings, its time partitions, and its hour and second hands crawling or speeding round the mighty sombre disc that makes time visible, makes it go round and round. I watched as it regulated and spun and made us nervy and neurotic. I gazed, mesmerised, at that great disc, on which so many eyes were riveted; and then something happened to my mind. I think I slipped off sideways into the mythical world that lurks within the giant ice-cube, where my great white horse dwells protected under the blistering sun of an endless desert. And my mind slipped in there, into its cool interiors, its boundless worlds, and I went a-wandering in free space, in time space, amongst the playthings of the spirit, in a place where there are no ghosts, no monsters, no nightmares, no evil, no failure, no fear, but only the original world, fragments of the original world, with Eden’s dawn in the air, and fresh flower fragrances, and a gentle sunlight of joy. This is the place I go to sometimes, if I’m lucky, when I’m lost in the desert. There I get to be happy amongst the first things, the first night, the first flowers, the first dew, the first thoughts, the first caress of breeze on the first living flesh, the first awakening from the first consciousness, the first blooming of the first flower, on the first garden, of the first earth, with the first thoughts of love opening in my first mind of an upright being on creation day. And it was there, in that zone, in that giant ice-cube space, concealed beneath the great white horse, that I danced among notions of the first Arcadia.