(Originally published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. II No. 1, Spring 1982, pp. 120-129)

PLAYING THE KITE

by Kenneth Tindall

      "Green is green."
      - Ludwig Wittgenstein

I was seventeen when I hitchhiked across the United States for the first time. I'd just got out of high school and the trip was a kind of graduation present to myself as I already had a taste for that kind of recreation. That was in 1954. I'd never heard of the Beat Generation. In 1957 I'd been in the U.S. Navy and that autumn I left for to Europe, spent nearly a year alone writing in the West of Ireland. The buses in either direction between Galway and Clifden would meet at the general store in Maam Cross and their passengers mingle for half an hour for a pint in front of the turf fire. One wintery afternoon I spoke with a Yank who was with the other bus. He asked me if I was out there on a grant.

Nineteen fifty eight. That was the summer Peggy Seeger went to China. It seemed like all the graves in Paris had been jarred open by something. I arrived from Oostende by thumb, knew no more French than oui and non, slept on park benches, in the flower market on La Cité‚ and under the bridges of the Seine, soon found George Whitman's Le Mistral Bookstore and listed myself as bona fide poet. That Bastille Day I was with an American girl from North Carolina. We drank wine at a little café near Metro Europe overlooking the slope of Montmartre.

One night when I was sleeping on a bench on Place St. Sulpice (where the best benches were) along came Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso and said hello. They'd just been up at Olivia d'Hauleville's visiting Piero Heliczer. Gregory gave me five hundred francs, said be careful of creeps and ugly people. But it was still the old Paris, people were still hospitable and indigent American artists could get free medical attention at the American Hospital. I freebied in various rooms, was hounded out by concierges, then one day Piero and I got jobs selling The Paris Review. It was Nelson Aldrich's idea. They went like hotcakes. We'd sell out the current issue, then sell out the stock of back issues. We'd work the boulevards and cafes on the Left Bank and now and then spend an evening doing the Champs Elysees and Montmartre, and suddenly I had money. I rented a room at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur. I was twenty-one years old. One day Piero and Olivia and I were making a pot of stew in my room and we didn't have enough money to buy meat, so I went out in the rue de Seine and asked a girl vouléz vouz mamselle

if she'd like to buy the meat for our meal and dine with us. She said oui merci and bought a pound of biftek and a bottle of cidre douce and the four of us feasted. That night she and I took a blanket and lay on the old city wall of Paris in the light of the full moon and courted. She was Danish and her name was Tove, meaning Dove. As Gregory wrote on the door, all was twig smear and cordury eggs.

We could hardly believe what we were doing. It was Baroque angels and old organ music and the snow falling in Paris. She gave me illuminations like the gift of a knife or tool, a flint implement that's been in the family from the beginning. Later, in Copenhagen, strangers would come up to us in the street and tell us they'd seen us in Paris. We were Les Amants. Tove and I lived in chambre vingt huit for about a year and a half. The room was dank, only a brief stripe of sunlight on the tile floor in the summer. We lived on my G.I. Bill and Tove's earnings cleaning house for an American SHAPE major who called his wife Pickle Puss. We were going to the Sorbonne, and the next year I went to the journalism school in rue Bonaparte. During the summer, when the G.I. Bill was on vacation, we'd sell The Paris Review and the New York Harald Tribune and earn money making chalk drawings on the Pont des Arts. Tove was pregnant. Sometimes we'd eat at the Vietnamese students' restaurant across the street in rue Git-le-Coeur.

Remember when Gregory was writing BOMB like an inventor up in the garret? He had the manuscript spread out on the floor putting the lines down mushroom-cloud-shaped turtles exploding over Istanbul... Remember Piero n' Olivia's tortoise named Aldous? There were a lot of typewriters tapping there in Madame Raschou's old hotel at the time, but I think William Burroughs had the only tape recorder. He was completing Naked Lunch, which was published that year by Maurice Girodias. Burroughs was a spectral savant, a canny old Greek subsisting on tea and paregoric and as American as a popcorn fart. He'd say something like "The only difference between a cat and a dog is that a dog can't scratch its ass" astonishingly in the same prairie twang as my own grandfather, and once he chortled at Tuli Kupferberg (Fuck You magazine) for calling alcohol a stimulant. I wonder how many people who have read Naked Lunch are aware that Clem and Jody are real persons.

Gregory Corso turned Tove and me on to grass and once we scored from one of Burroughs's weird Arab connections, but as might be expected, we were into a couples scene and it was mostly vin rouge. Nonetheless, there were memorable highs, and every time Jim Mattissoff turned on he'd gobble a pound of brown sugar all the while sputtering with almost pentecostal neoverbia which Piero Heliczer assiduously and with a straight face jotted down and used in his own poems. I remember one of Jim's constructions (Jim Mattissoff is a brilliant linguist, specializing in Oriental languages) was "redolent of sphinx," meanwhile his chick Anita, a long-legged redheaded English girl, was sitting perched on the washbasin taking a leak.

Now and then Tove and I would visit Jim and Gloria Jones. Gloria was pregnant too, and as she had a tendency to miscarry she was confined to bed. Jim had just crashed his Mercedes 300 SL and was all cuts and bruises. He was writing The Thin Red Line. It was interesting to see how this famous writer worked. He sat at the typewriter in a bare room for three hours every morning without brooking interruptions or touching drink and wrote finished copy. There was no scrimping on the typewriter paper either. His pages were triple-spaced and had margins as broad as the Martin Schoengauer etchings you could buy in a bookstore near the Pont des Arts, and he was as little disposed to talk writing as he was to talk about the Army. He did talk about himself, however. He had been a prizefighter, and he told about the time he got big enough to give his old man a licking. Later, when they were moving into their spread on Isle St. Louis, Gloria showed me the mammoth electric hot water heater and explained that Jim wanted it because, when he was writing From Here to Eternity, he lived in a trailer and had never had enough hot water. James Jones drank genuine Russian vodka and bought it at a liquor store on the Isle de la Cité.

A child may believe the wind is made by the leaves of the trees, just as the difficulty in philosophy, as Wittgenstein says, is to say no more than we know. When I was a nipper and the family went to the movies I thought sure it was possible to break through the screen and say hello to the people on the other side. I imagined myself doing this, not to interrupt the action but just to pet their dog. And it wasn't a question of illusion or a suspension of disbelief but rather that the black-and-white lives on the screen were being lived somewhence else, that they were another reality. Years later this effect of parallel reality came rushing home in East of Eden in the scene where Cal is talking to a Mexican girl in a field of lettuce while off in the distance what must be a blue Mercury passes along a highway. Admittedly this was gratuitous. But was this scene from The Red Desert gratuitous or did Antonioni intend its evocativeness? The mother is talking to her little boy, who is sick in bed, when suddenly an enormous blue ship like Babe the Blue Ox appears beyond his bedroom window and slowly steams past behind her head. Good art possesses this effect of all times and realities taking place right now and it's what makes the best writing as inalienable as folk song.

All art is originally folk art and the first poet was someone who recognized thoughts as events and sought to fix them in utterance, and the first teller of tales or spinner of yarns was a maker of worlds who made it possible for people to form realties in their minds and thus make their own. There really is no difference between "doing" philosophy and writing fiction, especially when writing involves original thinking. Robert Louis Stevensen in Fontainebleau wrote: "...art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. This love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the painter. The arabesque, properly speaking, and even in literature, is the first fancy of the artist...." But without an idea "the craft or sullen art" of Dylan Thomas is but the sullen craft of postal clerks and R.L.S.'s arabesque the pirouette of a traffic cop.

Let me tell you where I obtain the title of this essay, "Playing the Kite." One day in 1972 I was walking down Broadway near Times Square in New York City when I saw walking ahead of me a young man who was wearing a magnificent and gorgeous cape. It could have been the cape of a TV wrestler, but I thought better. I thought he might be from Philadelphia. The cape was soiled and tatterdemalion and looked as if it had been slept in more than one night, and its owner likewise had an air of roughing it. I drew alongside and asked him, "Say, do you play the banjo?" and he grinned and replied, "No, I play the kite."

Folk medicine has it that a key placed on the temple will alleviate headache, and what is the bait we set out for the catch-claw of an idea the way one might loft a key in order to attract lightning? Writing is like making love, naked, "body only" which is what the Indians of Tierra del Fuego called a poor man, and without macho or recourse to literary sinapisms. Just as the loving couple is the most anarchistic entity in the universe (the curve of space clothes two kinds of time) and is intolerable to society, so the artist in doing what he desires is the law incarnate and irrefutable. The state of creating worlds can be compared to the lovers' play of balance between advantage and deservedness, the environment of the soft creatures of the mind, including its pumas and polar bears. You cultivate this state and become familiar with the weather of your mind and the events in it, the topographies and the jet streams, the blow-bys of cosmic dust like a familiar scent, the edifices, so that you don't stumble on your own thresholds. It's a good thing the houses are hollow, as the Danes say when the rain begins pelting down. I like the sweet thing of making it work. Other books intentionally evoke specific mental states but without doing anything with them. The Banks of the Sea explains how to use déjà vu to, as Fredegonde expresses it, "get yourself a job and get yourself a lover." After all, as Wittgenstein says, it is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact – literally. Language accomplishes reality and if you understand how, then you're cooking with atomic gas.

Yet for all its mystique, writing is work like any other kind of work, and for me it has always been associated with having a job and working. My personal concept of the equivalency of work and love may be a manifestation of my family background. My sister has a Kentucky long rifle that the Tindalls used in the War of 1812. My father's grandfather was engineer on a Mississippi steamboat and then a locomotive engineer on the Missouri Pacific Railroad. My father's mother was born in a sod dugout on the Kansas prairie and for a Christmas tree they used a tumbleweed. Her father was half Osage and named Lovin and her mother was a stately woman named Montgomery. My mother's mother's people are Okies of Irish descent named Hurley and my mother's father was a Dutch immigrant named Leemans. They worked in the motion picture industry. My mother and father met at Thomas Starr King Junior High School in Los Angeles, which is where I was born.

I worked all summer in 1957 in order to get to Ireland. I worked thirteen hours a day night-shift at the American Can Company in Jersey City. I read all the William Faulkner I could get my hands on and wrote. The best job I ever had was at a small factory in one of the suburbs of Copenhagen. There were only fifty people employed there. The place produced tin cans and paper cans, and I operated a machine that made spirally wound paper tubing. At the same time I was caretaker and had an apartment up under the roof. There were gardens and lots of greenery and lakes, and I was in love and my girl lived with me there. I was writing Great Heads (Grove Press 1969). I have a stack of strips of paper from the machine with hasty, piecework jottings on them. Here's one:

Can almost clamber up into it and write out from it, anything, the locomotive, the weather, like being lichen. What is in the way is a mismatched impedance, a transferral of analog to digital. The thing and its words.

That was in the early sixties. The factory no longer exists and most of the people who worked there have died or are retired. I still dream about the place, meet up in the morning and punch in, notice that the production has altered in the interval since the last dream. Kaj and Alice and Irming and Brostrøm are there, and Herr Jørgensen the foreman. They greet me, tell me things, I tell them things. Irming lights her morning cheroot and starts her punch press. The whirling pounding day. The owner of the factory helped Jews escape to Sweden out of the clutches of the SS. One of his sons died in the Resistance. Here are some more notes from that time.

Person like a fixed object. Attempts to change are compounding the original flaws. The conversation/party changes key but so-and-so continues in the old. He/she's like a standing vessel of liquid that can receive or emit temperature only at a change in its surroundings.

Stephen Spender: World Within World.

Tale told from two viewpoints: the chronicler of a decrepit civilization sees the arrival of the predicted destroyer. And: the narration of a traveller into a new country. Parallel, rough, of Cortez and the Aztecs. The traveller doesn't see much of the civilization and the civilization sees no boon in the newcomer. He sees only a very small number of the population: those who are as real as he is.

In bed so long he wore holes in the soles of his ass, the old man coughed sentences, whole paragraphs until he was dead. Period.

Return to the ruin, not even a ruin but removed to all but the remains of man's vestiges/aspirations, the paved streets, lights, sewers, side streets to the teeming burgeoning slum. Downtown transcience in seeming solidity the towers' empty tumescence. The bus ride. We meet them and see their secret which they've tried to keep. Reflections from the usuals' viewpoint.

Get to the setting of ink on paper. Stomach-gripping anxiety like the beginning of a journey. I find everything else to do but write.

E.M. Forster's treatment of women.

Janne breaks twigs from the winter-stiff trees and brings them inside. We have everything for a spring: warmth, light, liquid water. She hopes the buds will green soon.

Play drop the hankie and I'm all for courtin'. The trees' faceless nudity. The purity of the buildings across the park.

Skin sprouts, sown of the spores of your gaze, your eyes like the sex parts of a mushroom. Seeing you is always looking upwards, your light against the trees' milk-dark vault.

The little boy swore foully and his mother told him that if he kept it up he'd grow black wings. "Fuck it, he said. "As long as I get to fly."

Expressing ugly sentiments in a beautiful way.

Dream, night of 23 June, 1964: I am dining with my father at a restaurant. He comments on a painting of a sailing ship on the wall. I tell him that the painting is no good because it incorrectly represents the way in which the sails are fastened to the yards. I explain to him in great detail and with drawings the proper bending of sail to yard. (The ones in the painting were anachronistic, belonging to ships from before the Age of Exploration.) Later, I'm walking outdoors in a city that resembles Paris. Janne and Julie accompany me. We stop at a streetcorner beside the Seine and I place a large and exquisitely detailed model of a fishing boat down on the sidewalk. Julie crawls in the model with great difficulty, laughing, and rocks back and forth. I feel indignant.

Referring to Jewish boys and gentile girls, something found in the Kenyon Review, Spring, 1964: "Meanwhile a love affair develops between Jacob and Wanda, his master's daughter, which recalls the Kabbalistic symbolization of the gentiles as a woman Israel must redeem."

Great Heads is full of observations on writing and the ways of writing. When Bob Gemshorn explains himself to Birgit Flynn, for example:

I am indeed hard in the word's ward. In being with you, talking with you, I observe the whole orchestration of you. Words, gestures, their tone and lineaments. Are these just the limbs and twigs that can be anticipated? Whole foliage of divergencies from every statement. What about the insides? What could you possibly mean by what you just said? I see myself choosing a model or composite of "the people," and I really don't know how to behave as a normal human being. I can be one person as well as another, though better both than neither, and not for long, any of them. I myself am a nothing, an alien alphabet soup, something like a TV receiver or a symbol-translating machine, not creating and not really transforming. I see through a man and articulate the skeleton of his personality...

he's propounding a theory of character as well as telling her about his actual modus operandi as spy/drug dealer in the book. He carries out three or four sepatate identities, something like Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob. I imagine that as a boy Robert Gemshorn had the habit of affecting (I didn't. He's fiction) other boys' affectations, a lisp, a gait, a way of tilting the head and cocking the ol' eyebrow and saying "apophthegm." He's really got himself together, but instead of writing his characters he's into something and uses novelistic thinking to do his thing. He should have been a writer. That's what he should have been doing at La Picaudiere instead of hatching plots. He was anything but a Communist. But that's another story.

You've got your notes, your research (an adventure in more ways than you'd expect), a good memory, a good synesthetic exchange among all the senses, a familiarity with the weather of the mind in which you send your kite up, your dreams, hypnagogic and other visions, a respect for the dead and for your posterity, and most important of all for a writer constant self-scrutiny like eternal vigilance:

What kind of hairline lying, crosshair ambiguity am I cultivating? I very cleverly convince Janne of her fault, keep my hands clean, never touch the truth. I'm extremely accurate, saying the right dishonesty...

All of the above may, to be sure, be thought of as various kinds of experience. Another kind is the actual experience of people and things. I mean, you're the Pathé News, the eyes and ears of the world. For instance if you spend enough time on the streets, you discover that you can read people, buildings, store windows, the weather, the traffic, the movement of everything around you just like you read written language, and if you write you discover that it's possible to recreate the effect of this in your lines and it becomes a tool of your ear. An example of this is the opening passage in chapter four "The Barnacle Goose" in The Banks of the Sea.

Sometimes somebody closed a store or a theater and one after another like bowling pins the businesses closed and a shell sometimes an entire block was left hollow of commerce, left the signs in the windows and the letters on the markee. Still the elevated flashes ovoid faces quick mirrors Myrtle Avenue. How many places are there a pedestal clock up on the sidewalk like a public punishment? Sorry, says the clock. Sorry. They're doing something in the old foyers, tickets to the globe from shattered boxoffices, steerages for derelicts in the immigrant night. Stooped in sleep, steeped in transportation, crowds remember boarded up V-days, green mossy planks, the whole city in an old man's woodpile. The ax pauses like a skater, enters into shoestores' pier windows carpet and lucite footsy mesas scribbled with night like a sugar rink.

One evening Fredegonde sat holding her head in her hands, elbows resting on the plain yellow oilcloth they'd searched for and found, at last, a whole roll of in a thrift shop in White Plains, and watched Imogene make a mound of the bread crumbs on the slicing board, the pumpernickel fresh and face down on it, the serrated knife already in the sink. It was almost lamplight in the kitchen.

"I have come to the conclusion," she said with a portly voice, "that you're you 'cas that's who you're best at..."

Fredegonde's statement I found one scorcher of an afternoon written in miniscule uncials at eye level in a doorjamb in the apartment on Avenue B where I lived from 1970 to 1974. The place had been a hippie pad. I was constantly writing.

I mean, it's possible to write from anything at all. If you're riding in a train, say, and look out and see a wad of straw stuffed in a broken corner of a barn window, and you imagine yourself as the farmer looking at it and remembering when he put it there to keep out the winter wind, and what the weather was like on that day and what his wife had said to him that morning and the neighbor's dog barking at a child bicycling down the road, why you've got a whole world including its geology, the local crop rotation, and who was living there when the railroad came.

      And the boy was thinking,
      I'll put on my clatter skates
      And use my big kite for a sail,
      Then the dog will be afraid
      And run under the porch.

Call it the East Virginia & Western, then something like this comes down the tracks. It has a familiar ring, like an engagement ring:

      "I was born and raised in East Virginia,
      To North Carolina I did go,
      And there I met the fairest maiden,
      Her name and age I do not know..."

When it's wash-up time in Texas. In 1971 I was working in a factory in Long Island City, Eagle Electric Mfg. Co. Now, I'm going to transcribe here a sample of my notes from April of that year so you can see how some of the lines materialized in The Banks of the Sea :

"Mealy apple broody vineyards that kind of heavy handed open-stop strumming that can sound like thirty bass harmonicas good measure tit squeeze and semi-opaque instep putty Senior Service elbow patches and what's even more obvious the unicorn State Express radio and TV monopolies the fancy small wholes blood tannin littoral materials. One of those vanity tables with elbows. The cat paced on her knuckles like an anteater while my sister curled her hair with an eggbeater. Sneeze orgy. I'll make you forget your cause. The Celebration Temptation Tango. Some Diane from high school. When it's wash-up time in Texas. Mare straw. If you look at her long enough she'll start dancing like Little Egypt, and she doesn't seem to like it except sensually. Now, I'm not sure that it isn't reductive, that is to say, that she doesn't know what else to do. Whether it's because her parents had her doing it when she was a toddler or out of a feigned natural embarrassment, I'm not sure, but I can image her lying down for somebody for the same reasons. And everything she does is like that. She knows when to do it and how to do it. She's peanuts, popcorn, and Crackerjacks. She's an entertainment machine..."

The loading ramp foreman's name was Gregory, and there was a fat kid named Leo Giglia. One day Leo went around asking the guys if they had any spare change they could lend him. He'd had to skip his lunch and he didn't have any food at home and he was hungry. But it was the day before payday and everybody was broke, so Leo went out to the ramp to ask Gregory if he had any money he could lend him, but Gregory had already gone home. But that's another story. Then there was the truck driver who drove all the way from Arkansas with a flatbed trailer with a load of hardwood pallets for the receiving department. Andy Lamberti, the receiving department chief, took a look at the pallets and rejected the whole load because they were substandard. So the driver parked his truck on a vacant lot beside the Queensborough Bridge, set the load on fire and walked away from it.

The Banks of the Sea is a traditional adventure story with a happy ending. My new experimental novel, with the working title "The Old Land" ( Pignon), is about freedom. Here's a taste:

"I withdrew into the darkness of my own mind in order that the shark would stop following me. Then something else drifted into the monster's attention as I withdrew, something like a chip from an ax, as I withdrew, my limbs intact and white, unnoticeable in the absolute darkness. The chip turned slowly and caught the light and the shark swam toward it. The chip was transparent in one direction and it was only in turning that it became apparent. But could it have been volition which turned it? Or was it merely eddied once in the ancient turbulence so that it turned and cast a shadow and was discovered.

She had her vacation homework with her. She showed him the essay she was writing. The Fishing Lure as Schizophrenic Art. Her lips were soft and the down in the corners of her mouth made them dewy hollows. She had the habit of breathing through her hair if she was thinking about something. She would twirl a hank of it in her fingers and hold it in front of her mouth. Sometimes she would do this when talking and he could never be sure she wasn't laughing up her sleeve. Now and then her breath would vapor as if they were speaking out of doors in the rain.

-Winthropthropic! she repeated laughing explosively.

- Both your mother and her sister have cold hands, Christance. It was a house full of women with cold hands. Your Grandpa bought your Grandma a Braun travel hair dryer and you should have seen all of them stand in line to warm their fingers in its styling nozzle.

- Winthropthropic!

There are no pews in Russian churches. Only the infirm sit. For the others there is a handrail like ship's rail along three walls and the Mass is interminable, like a long ferry crossing. The tottering princess was helped to her feet and she stood breathing rapidly and shallowly with her eyes cast heavenward as the chorus of sourdoughs sang the Gospel with their earthquake voices, then she gasped and sank back into her chair again. Each time she did this the knot of worshipers from the Russian embassy would turn and stare at her, for she was seated in front of the Czar's altar, the ikon in its massive frame standing on a frontal of the Imperial ensign, the black cross of St. Andrew on a while ground edged in black. For she looked like none of them, such a tall, light-haired woman in the palpitating butterfly of old age. The priest sang, celebrating the resurrection of Christ, as he swung the censer, tossing it so that it plummeted in trajectories and the silver chains clashed taut and the incense swirled in beams. The girl pressed her father's big hand.

- What's the handrail for, she whispered.

- To practice ballet on, he whispered...."

I went to Connemara that time and not to Roscommon, say, because Ronan Henderson, of Clontarf, who was second mate on the Irish Oak, knew people in Roundstone and thought I might be able to rent a house there, and so I spent the winter in Glawn Cottage. I think it's essential for a writer to have read good writers. One of the books I read that winter was Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point. Another was e.e. cummings's The Enormous Room, which I returned by mail to the N.Y.P.L. branch on West 23rd Street. I'd already read most of Joyce including parts of Finnegan's Wake.

When I was in the Navy I had a Japanese friend, a painter, who was going to Harvard. One day a couple of years later when I was in Paris and flat broke Yoshi and I happened to meet in the same car in the Metro. He gave me a twenty dollar bill and let me stay in his room. Now, this anecdote illustrates something about friendship, literature and religion. While I was in the Navy in Japan I was privileged to spend a weekend as the guest of Yoshi's family. He had written on ahead from the States that I was coming. After supper that evening, a wonderful sushi which Yoshi's mother made, we looked at the family album. There was a picture of one of the great-grandfathers, I think it was, who had been military governor of Okinawa around the turn the century. And there was a picture of Yoshi and his elder brother Kaz with toy guns playing shoot the Yanks, and at the same time I was a kid in California playing shoot the Japs. Yoshi's father was Professor of English at Tokyo Christian University, and his study contained a large and meticulously orderly collection of books in English. He asked me to read to him something from any of his books, and I read from one of the dialogues between Stephen and Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When I had finished reading, Professor Shimizu thanked me and wrote my name and the date in the margin of the page. I think these lines are a profoundly personal utterance of James Joyce the man, and in so being are far more essentially fiction than were the two characters mere mechanical boyos mouthing the fancies of their coy author. Listen:

- I see, Cranly said.

He produced his match and began to clean the crevice beween two teeth.

- Tell me, for example, would you deflower a virgin?

- Excuse me, Stephen said politely, is that not the ambition of most young gentlemen?

- What then is your point of view? Cranly asked.

His last phrase, sour smelling as the smoke of charcoal and disheartening, excited Stephen's brain, over which its fumes seemed to brood.

- Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use silence, exile, and cunning.

Kenneth Tindall
Copenhagen
November 26, 1981

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