"Titus Groan"

[fiefoe]

'What Fuchsia wanted from a picture was something unexpected. It was as though she enjoyed the artist telling her something quite fresh and new. Something she had never thought of before.'

'The Frivolous Cake'

'A freckled and frivolous cake there was /  That sailed on a pointless sea,
Or any lugubrious lake there was /  In a manner emphatic and free.
How jointlessly, and how jointlessly, /  The frivolous cake sailed by
On the waves of the ocean that pointlessly /  Threw fish to the lilac sky
...
And the frivolous cake was filled to the brim /  With the fun of her curranty crew
...
And the sensitive steel of the knife can feel /  That love is a race apart'

I wonder if this is how Peake felt when he faced a blank piece of paper in his studio:

• She descended the steps. There was a ripping away of clouds; a sky, a desert, a forsaken shore spread through her.
  As she stepped forward on the empty board, it was for her like walking into space. Space, as as the condors have shrill inklings of, and the cock-eagle glimpses through his blood.
  Silence was there with a loud rhythm.
• This is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or of a woman for their world. For the world of their centre where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame. The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast.
  Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every coloured sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love.
  

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