‘Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it.’ —Agnes Martin

I first came across the name Agnes Martin in 1995 on a CD by John Zorn called Redbird, which contained a 40-minute piece written for her. Scored for harp, viola, cello and percussion, it was unlike any other piece of music I’d heard up to that point. Slow, minimal, ambient. The strings allowed to breath sustained notes throughout. No progression, just a series of soft atmospheric textures repeated, creating a hypnotic, shimmering effect. A work of unusual subtlety and beauty. The CD booklet had a picture of a woman, who I assumed was Agnes Martin, sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette and looking nervously at the camera. There were some excerpts from a piece of her writing called “The Current of the River of Life Moves Us”. The cover of the CD was a picture of hundreds of faint red lines. I knew so little about her then that I didn’t even realise it was one of her paintings.
    The Internet was only just happening then and so there wasn’t much I could find out about Agnes Martin. Then, 20 years later, in 2015, Tate Modern held a huge exhibition of her work. Remembering the CD connection, I went along, still not knowing much about her, or her work, not really knowing what to expect. I’ll never forget that day, the moment I walked into the first room, and was exposed to the sheer scale and vibrancy of her paintings. Room after room of incredible square canvases, each one a container of immense luminosity. My imagination was set ablaze.
    Born in Saskatchewan in 1912 to Scottish Presbyterian wheat farmers, Martin was brought up on the Canadian prairies. Her father died when she was just two years old and the family moved to Vancouver. She had a troubled relationship with her mother, who was a strict disciplinarian, but she was very close to her Presbyterian grandfather, who introduced her to the Bible and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Her spiritual life was being developed at an early age. 
    When she was just 19, Martin moved to Washington state to help her sister, who was having a difficult pregnancy. While she was there, she trained and worked as a teacher. In 1941, aged 29, she quit her job and drove cross-country in a Model T Ford to New York City, taking a month to camp along the way. In New York, she enrolled in the Teachers College at Columbia University, where she attended lectures given by Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, initiating a lifelong interest in East Asian philosophy. After a year of study there, Martin decided to become artist and changed her major to Fine Art. 
    On completing her undergraduate studies, Martin returned to Washington state, where she taught art in rural primary and secondary schools while also working various odd jobs. After several years of that, Martin moved to New Mexico in 1946 and enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to continue her studies in painting. She also participated in a Summer Field School of Art in Taos in 1947. Martin herself was critical of the work that she made during this period and destroyed the majority of it. 
    By 1951, she had saved up enough money to return to New York for a second time to begin graduate studies at Teachers College. After receiving her Masters of Arts degree in 1952, she returned to Taos in New Mexico, where she taught art in schools for three years. Her paintings at this time were still lifes and experiments with biomorphic forms. It was in Taos that New York art dealer Betty Parsons saw her paintings and offered to represent her, but only if she moved to New York City. So, in 1957, Martin moved for a third time to New York where she rented a sailmakers’s loft in Lower Manhattan, where many artists lived, including Jasper Johns and Barnett Newman. It was around 1960 that Martin came upon her signature style: the six foot square grid. 
    Some of the rooms at the Tate Modern exhibited many of these square grid paintings Martin produced during the 1960s. One of these was The Islands (1961). From a distance, the painting is merely brown with lots of what look like white dots inside arranged in a smaller square. It’s only as you approach the canvas that you see it is in fact made up of several layers. At ground level, on the brown base, there are hundreds of vertical and horizontal pencilled lines forming a thousand tiny boxes. Inside each of most of these boxes there is a tiny pair of dots of pale yellow paint, creating the illusion that these painted points have risen and are floating in mid-air. It’s as if we are looking down at a massive archipelago from a height of eight miles above earth. 
    Another grid, entitled The Tree (1964), appears merely at first to be a grey haze containing darker bands. On closer inspection, though, what appear to be solid grey horizontal bands are actually made of hundreds of parallel pencil lines placed very closely together. Look at it for long enough and, like those ‘magic eye’ posters of the 1980s, you almost see an aboreal form. Martin said, ‘When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision.’ 
    A personal favourite of mine is Friendship (1963), in which the surface of the grid is covered with gold leaf scored with a grid of rectangles. It is impossible to describe the effect this enormous painting has on you as you stand in front of it. It’s as if you are bathed in an impermeable golden mist. There is no depth, just a shimmering atmosphere of radiant warmth enveloping you. There is a sense of coming-into-being. 
    The overwhelming scale of these paintings is key. Elaine de Kooning once made a remark that Rothko’s work does not inhabit shapes, but areas. Something similar happens in Martin’s work. Up close, you are mesmerised by the delicacy of the trembling lines, but once you step away, everything blends into a single tone. As with the shift from shapes to areas, so there is a shift in Martin’s work from form to scale. As she herself said, her paintings are about ‘light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form.’ 
    The string of these happy, innocent, sublime grids that Martin produced during the 1960s were born out of a great deal of personal suffering. In early 1962, she was found wandering the streets of New York in a catatonic state and was placed in hospital. She was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and she remained in hospital for most of 1962. Her symptoms included auditory hallucinations, spells of depression and catatonic trances. Her voices, as she called them, directed almost every aspect of her life. 
    In 1967, just as she was gaining some recognition for her work, Martin suddenly left New York. It was never made clear why exactly she left so abruptly. Her loft space was due to be demolished and a very close friend had died of a heart attack, both of which may have contributed to her decision. In any case, she sold her materials and, with the proceeds from a National Council for the Arts grant, she bought a pickup truck and an Airstream camper and disappeared from view, travelling across the United States and Canada.
    After nearly two years of living off-grid, Martin had a vision of an adobe brick house. She knew she had to return to New Mexico, where she had previously spent many happy times. By chance, at a gas station in New Mexico, she heard of a remote piece of land for rent on a mesa 20 miles away and moved there. She spent the next few years building a one-room dwelling out of adobe bricks she made herself and then a log-cabin studio from trees she felled herself. She lived there alone without modern conveniences for several years. 
    Then in 1971, she was approached by a German press about making a portfolio of prints. She took up the offer and travelled to Stuttgart in Germany where she worked on the set of prints, which she called On a Clear Day. This experience seemed to be a source of great encouragement to her and precipitated Martin’s return to painting. Now, though, the grids had gone, replaced by horizontal or vertical lines, the old palette of subdued greys, blues and browns giving way to glowing stripes and bands of very pale pink, blue and yellow. She continued to live in her adobe house for the next 30 years producing yet another great period of work. 
    Around this time, she also started to write, publishing a highly personal essay in 1972 called “The Untroubled Mind”. In the essay, she spoke about the synthesis of her Calvinist upbringing with her Taoist-Zen beliefs and Western classism. She wrote about William Blake, whose work she loved, and Saint Augustine. She spoke about her love of nature and the inspiration she drew from it. The root word for ‘grid’ in Latin refers to wickerwork, or a lattice – flexible twigs woven crisscross into a horizontal-vertical format. Martin would have approved.
    When Martin died in 2004, she was universally praised for her fiercely independent nature. One writer said that she had ‘a reputation that grew and took on the aura of a legend’. She lived an extraordinary life and an extraordinarily difficult life, too. But, however difficult it might have been, Martin always insisted her art was not about her. There is no biography, no personality, in her work. She sought to destroy the ego. 
    In 1984, an English translation was published of a book called The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge written by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. In his paper, one of the concepts Lyotard writes about is ‘the sublime’. He writes:
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The sublime … takes place … when the imagination fails to present an object which might … come to match a concept. We have the Idea of the world (the totality of what is), but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it.

He goes on to say that one possible definition of the ‘postmodern’ would be ‘that which puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself.’ For me, this Idea applies to Martin’s work, because she painted, not what is not visible, but what is invisible, and presented it to us. She was a desert mystic painting her visions, but she didn’t paint what she saw, she painted what she felt and, for us, left behind a body of work of happiness, pure innocence and the sublime. 

‘It is from our awareness of transcendent reality and our response to concrete reality that our minds command us on our way – not really on a path or to a gate – but to full response.’ — Agnes Martin

‘Richard, do something interesting with your life.’
    There was admonishment in his voice when my old school friend Eddie said this to me. He was telling me off. A reprimand. Maybe even a warning. We were standing outside The Kings Head pub in Cuckfield, West Sussex, just after having said our goodbyes. He said this and then I watched him walk away. My first reaction was irritation. How dare he? Who did he think he was? What made him so perfect that he felt he could pass on advice to me? I walked away in the other direction, pissed off. Even now, it pisses me off a little bit. 
    I can’t remember exactly when this happened. It was all so long ago. I think it was probably around 1986, which would make us both 21 years old. I remember it being summer? If it was summer 1986, then, in December of that year, I went on to study at International House, Piccadilly for the Preparatory Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). I passed. In January 1987, I bought an inter-rail ticket and travelled to Milan to try to get a job teaching English. I remember I had to travel via Oostende – this was pre-Eurostar. Such was the demand for English by companies in and around Milan in the ’80s that I ended up getting four jobs. I accepted one with Oxford Institutes Italiani, who had schools in Milan and Magenta, and stayed in Italy for the next two years. But that’s another story. 
    Did Eddie know this when I met him at The Kings Head? If he did, his reprimand was even meaner. Wasn’t travelling to a new country, whose language I didn’t know, and living there for two years, an interesting thing to do? I’d have thought so. Why didn’t he? Or, more realistically, he probably didn’t know. If I knew when I met him at The Kings Head that I was going to study for a TEFL certificate, I can’t believe that I wouldn’t have told him, so maybe I hadn’t yet applied. Or even known about the course. Maybe his parting shot inspired me to search for something interesting to do and, when I found out about the TEFL course, apply for it. Who knows. In any case, it turned out that this would be the last time I ever saw Eddie. 

In 1978, I started my third year at Oathall Secondary School in Haywards Heath, West Sussex. I was 13. My class was called 3J1. In the first year, it was 1J1, in the second 2J1, and now 3J1. We were the same group of kids throughout and we were about to start our third year together. We were a tight unit. I remember the names of some of the other kids – Huw Brown, Peter Boyer, Stephen Dewhurst, Ian Pickering (Pickers?), Susan Paternoster (yes, really), Lindsay Whatshername, Judith Thingimijig. It all gets a bit hazy after that. I remember their faces and nicknames better. There was Tuppence (because he was so small), Bogey, Foggy, Chalky. Many years later, I remember wondering how on earth I had got away with five years at school without anyone cottoning on to the fact that they could have called me Dick Skinner. 
    But, in September 1978, there was a new kid in class, whose name was Eddie Stone. He had joined us from a local prep school called Great Walstead. I’m sure it’s exactly the same now as it was then in small provincial towns that have both state and private schools, but there was a great deal of animosity between us and the posh boys. And Eddie was posh. His family lived in a beautiful 17th century house, called Upper Lodge, in Ardingly, a quiet (and very expensive) village just outside Haywards Heath. I seem to remember his father worked in the City. On his first day at Oathall, Eddie carried a leather satchel and wore grey flannel shorts. Shorts! He had the mickey taken out of him about that for years afterwards. He never lived it down. 
    For some reason, Eddie was told to sit next to me in registration. For the rest of Secondary school – three years – we sat next to each other in registration from 9-9.25am five days a week. We also sat next to each other in English, Geography and a lot of other classes. I like to think that, because I was probably the first person he got to know when he arrived at Oathall, he naturally gravitated towards me. Wishful thinking. But I do remember hours and hours spent at our pair of desks, listening to white-haired Mr Poulson in his three-piece suit in English classes reading from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Eddie on the right hand side facing forward and me on the left, so that, when we were writing, because Eddie was left handed, we would be facing each other. I can picture Eddie’s handwriting clear as day, even now. We used the same kind of Parker pen. 
    But the thing that connected us most strongly was our mutual love of the Lake District. In the summer before I started secondary school, my dad and I climbed Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon). This was the summer of 1976, the hottest summer on record for years. There was a drought on and water bans were in place everywhere. We took the route via Crib Goch, an arête whose name in Welsh means ‘red ridge’. It’s not for the faint hearted, but I was a fearless 11-year-old. 
    When we got back down, we went for a swim in a lake because the showers at Pen-y-Pass youth hostel where we were staying were banned. Just as I was about to dive under the water, I felt a sudden rushing, as though a tap had been turned on in my body. It turned out that I had stepped on a broken bottle, which made deep cuts in my big toe and ball of my foot. With no hospitals anywhere nearby, we were told about a convent up in the mountains which had a treatment centre, so my dad drove me there. The nuns told me to stand in a bowl of hot water, which I knew would open up the wound again. I said I didn’t want to, but the nuns told me I had to because they needed to check for broken glass inside my foot. I was terrified, but I did so and the bowl soon turned red with blood. With the all clear, they put butterfly stitches on the cuts, which afterwards felt like the buzzing of a dodgy electrical connection. We drove back home the next day and I have never returned to north Wales since. It felt cursed. 
    The following year, my dad and I switched our attention to the Lake District. I planned all the routes, wrote the letters to all the youth hostels to book beds, dad signed the cheques. We then spent every one of my school holidays climbing as many of the 214 fells as possible, eventually bagging the last few in the summer of 1981 after my final year at school. On the last climb, we carried a bottle of fizz up and opened it on the summit. 
    When Eddie arrived at Oathall, I found out that he shared my obsession with all things to do with mountaineering. He had been visiting the Lakes for years with his family, too. When I sat my Geography O level, Eddie and I just happened once again to be sitting next to each other. I opened the paper and saw that one of the questions was all about the geology and agriculture of the Lake District. I looked up at Eddie and we smiled at each other. We both got As. This was the thing that bonded us. For us, mountains were theatres for dreams. 

By the end of school, there was a group of us that hung out together: me, Eddie, Steven B, Mark S, Mark T and Neil A. In the summer holidays after school finished, we went on a camping trip in the Ashdown Forest. We had terrible tents and too little food. It was hot. Arguments broke out and we cut short the trip and went home. The next month, we all went on to the local sixth-form college together. On the first morning of sixth form, I went to my registration group and who should be there? Eddie. Once again, we sat next to each other every day for the next two years. 
    By now, Eddie was a dedicated follower of fashion. At college, he wore Kickers, a mustard-coloured pair of dungarees and Fruit of the Loom sweatshirts. He smoked weed, listened to Bob Marley and the Tom Robinson Band and wore a feather earring in his left ear. He had come a long way from his satchel and shorts. He was cool. Cooler than anyone else. Way cooler than me. 
    Throughout college, Eddie and I went out with many of the same girls. My first girlfriend was Nicky W, whom I unceremoniously dumped one night at a party. I had no good reason and I’ll never forget the look of hurt on her face when I told her. I regret that. She ended up going out with Eddie. Along the way, we also both went out with Helen M and Jess S. 
    And then there was Kim, who loved Fleetwood Mac and Bob Dylan and dressed like a Rolling Stones groupie. I had never met a girl like her before. I didn’t know how to handle her. She blew hot and cold and was hard to read. She had a sharp tongue and wasn’t afraid to use it. It was years later that I understood all this was just a form of self-defence. She got kicked out of college after only a month due to lack of attendance. The nerve of her. 
    She, Eddie and I had a Jules et Jim type relationship for a short time but it never really happened between me and Kim. We never got it together. She and Eddie, however, were a perfect match and they had an on-off thing over the next few years. I knew on some level I was jealous. Despite that, Kim and I managed somehow to maintain a friendship, which has lasted to this day, although we haven’t seen each other in a long time. 
    After college, I drifted. I had failed my A levels badly and didn’t know what to do. I got some casual work in the industrial estate in Haywards Heath. Some of my friends were drifting too. On days off, Steven and I would meet in pubs at lunchtime, play Juno First all afternoon and get drunk. At the local social club, Steven, Neil and I played snooker against people older than us that we used to be afraid of at school. Eddie was no longer around at this time. He had moved to north Wales to become an outward bound instructor. I was impressed. While the rest of us were stumbling around, Eddie seemed to have found the way forward for himself. 
    I knew I had to get out of Haywards Heath as well. If I stayed any longer, I would never leave, and I didn’t want anything that Haywards Heath had to offer. Out of sheer desperation, one day Mark S and I decided to move to London. It was April 1985. A room had come up in my sister’s friend’s house, which Mark and I shared. I signed up with a temping agency doing soul-destroying jobs and Mark worked long hours as a waiter. Anything to pay the rent. 
    I have a photograph I took of Eddie sitting opposite me on a London tube train and giving me the V sign. It was definitely taken on the London Underground so it must have been taken after I moved to London. I have no idea why we were together in London or where we were going. No memory at all. Our paths had diverged. He had pursued the path that we had both started as young teenagers in the Lakes, which Eddie had then explored more fully throughout our college years by taking up rock climbing seriously, whereas I had pulled away, moved to London, met a girl and continued to drift for the next year or two. 
    Then that meeting at The Kings Head in 1987 and his comment that made me bristle so. I seem to remember that, by then, not only was Eddie happily working as an outward bound instructor in north Wales, but was also sharing a cottage with his girlfriend. It sounded idyllic. I still hadn’t done anything with my life, yet his seemed to be all sorted out. Maybe my irritation was about my dissatisfaction with myself rather than with Eddie’s words. Yes, that’s it. His comment had touched a nerve. Maybe he knew me better than I realised. Maybe his comment was an encouragement, not a criticism. I had almost certainly misjudged him. 
    The next few years for me were TEFL teaching in Italy for two years, then back to England to study for an English Literature degree at Sussex University, something I had decided to try for while in Italy. At 24, I had got in as a mature student rather than on my terrible science A level grades. Looking back, it was a huge moment in my life. It was the first time that I’d felt a sense of direction and purpose. I savoured every moment of my degree. I didn’t know what the outcome would be, but I knew I was finally on the right path. 
    A few months after I finished studying at Sussex, I went back to Haywards Heath to visit my dad and step mum for the weekend. In the kitchen, drinking tea, my step mum told me that Eddie had died in a climbing accident.

    What?

The details were sketchy, she said. Apparently, Eddie had gone free climbing solo, without telling anyone, including his girlfriend, where he was going or when he would be back. All this was highly unusual for any experienced climber, but especially for someone who had been trained as an outward bound instructor. I recall understanding that, because of all this, it was many days before anyone found his body. 
    Why hadn’t he used ropes? Why go out alone? Obviously he had put himself in such a position that if he made any kind of mistake, even a tiny one, the consequences would be fatal. Why? Knowing Eddie as I thought I did, I just didn’t understand what had driven him to put himself in such a precarious, dangerous place. 
    I wrote a letter of condolence to his parents but never received a reply. Then I heard a rumour that the whole family had moved away suddenly. Weirdly, I remember his older sister Emma and his younger sister Charlotte really well. The grief was too unbearable, I presumed. I don’t think I felt grief, exactly. I was shocked and confused. So young. Why? Was he unhappy? Did he go out knowing he wouldn’t come back? All the signs were there – leaving secretly without telling anyone, climbing solo with no rope. Madness. Or not? Did he want to die? Eddie was always streets ahead of me in terms of being more certain about life choices. Was he ahead of me in this, too? 
    All I had were questions that would never be answered. No one was there at the moment of death to record the exact circumstances. Eddie’s death has haunted me all my life but I’ve had to learn how to accept that there will never be any answers. All that remains of him are a few snaps that have changed colour like autumn leaves, some shaky memories and that awful final image in my mind’s eye of him losing contact with the rock face, arms flailing, legs bicycling, floating through air. 

On 21st August 2024, an acquaintance of mine messaged me to tell me that a close mutual friend of ours, Adrian, had died in a climbing accident in Wales. 

    Fuck!

I can’t believe it. This can’t be happening. Ade was a fully fit and healthy man. How on earth could he have died? My acquaintance didn’t know anything, only that he had fallen. Over the next 48 hours, I remained in a state of shock. It was so surprising that I would never see him again. Slowly, details emerged. It turned out that Ade was climbing Yr Wyddfa and that he was alone. Later, I found out that he was actually on Crib Goch when he fell. Two other climbers saw him fall and it was them who called the Mountain Rescue Team. Apparently, it took the MRT two hours to get there but I still didn’t know if they found Ade dead or alive. 
    The nearest MRT is in Llanberis. From there, it is a five-mile drive to the car park at Pen-y-Pass. Crib Goch is at 923m. The average time it takes to climb Yr Wyddfa from Pen-y-Pass via Crib Goch is four hours. The time it took for the Llanberis MRT to muster, drive to Pen-y-Pass and then get to where Ade was on Crib Goch was just two hours, which is an absolutely superhuman effort. It struck me that the only way the two other climbers could have known that it only took them two hours to get to Ade was if they had stayed with him. That they stayed with Ade gave me some comfort but I was still desperate to know what happened. 

I first met Ade (whose surname is Cross) in 2007, when he enrolled onto the Creative & Life Writing MA at Goldsmiths University, London, where I was a tutor. Since finishing university in 1992, I had gone on to complete a Masters in Creative Writing and then managed to publish a novel. On the back of that, in 2002, I landed a job teaching at Goldsmiths. I was assigned as Adrian’s one-to-one mentor. 
    The first thing I noticed about Ade was that he and his writing were very funny. And scatty. He wrote hilarious and surreal stories about things like trying to catch rattlesnakes in parks. We became fast friends and I gradually learned more about him. He had studied Philosophy at Lancaster University and was now working as an Education Officer for refugees for Wandsworth Council. Wow, I thought, that’s a worthy job. I quickly realised that Ade was a highly-principled man with solid socialist leanings and a strong sense of social justice. He had spent the summer of 2016 in Palestine helping to rebuild housing that had been destroyed. How many other people did I know who would do that? Not many. No one, actually, including me. 
    In 2011, I started a live monthly reading series called Vanguard Readings. Ade was its number one fan. He would come along to every event without fail. He was so reliable and trustworthy that I asked him to host some of the events. He stepped up to the mark with relish and his introductions to the readers became legendary for their dry wit and eccentricity. 
    In 2014, I formed a publishing branch of the reading series, called Vanguard Editions. Our first publication was an anthology of short stories. I asked Ade and a friend of ours, Des, to be the editors. They both enthusiastically agreed and did a great job. Ade and Des, along with another Goldsmiths graduate, Kat, became Vanguard’s Trustees. 
    In 2013, myself, Ade, my climbing partner Sam, my wife and my wife’s friend went on a walking trip to the Lake District. We stayed near Bowness and climbed Loughrigg and Bowfell. I’d never seen Ade happier. But this was peanuts for him. He used his holiday time to go on very active, sometimes extreme trips. He went whitewater rafting in the croc-infested Zambezi, on a long sledding trip north of the Arctic Circle in the depths of winter. He would travel alone to the Cairngorms and traipse around them with nothing but a bivouac. No tent. No phone signal. This last trip alarmed me. I’ve been walking in the Highlands and I know how wild they are. One foot in a rabbit hole and you’re screwed. I urged him not to go out solo like that again without some way of being in contact. 
    Over the years, I saw Ade very regularly at the Vanguard Trustee meetings as well as readings, launches and other events. The last time I saw him was in April 2024 when he agreed to sit with me all day at the Poetry Fair in London, where Vanguard had a stall of books to sell. I asked him for his help and he gave up his whole Saturday, without question, to support a press he wholeheartedly believed in. That was the measure of the man. 

In the weeks that followed Ade’s death, I waited for more news. I decided I would attend his inquest. I kept an eye on the website for the Coroner’s Office in Gwynedd, but nothing came up for months. Ade’s funeral was in September but, I was away and couldn’t go. I was really gutted that I couldn’t get to say my farewells. To my dismay, I was out of the country when his inquest was finally announced. Des, however, was able to attend and he passed on to me some details that were outlined at the inquest.
    Apparently, Ade had arrived at the B&B in Betws-y-Coed where he was staying at around 7pm on Friday 16th August. The following morning, he exchanged pleasantries with the other guests, commenting on what a lovely day it was, such good weather for walking. He seemed happy. He left at around 8am. 
     He was seen falling from the heights of Crib Goch by another walker at about 11am. The rescue services were called. They found him with severe injuries consistent with a tumbling fall from height. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Close by his body were his notebook and a novel, Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk. In his pocket were some fridge magnets, which said ‘I climbed Snowdon’. The coroner said his boots had a good tread and were suitable for the terrain.
    I winced at the title of that book. It was so typical of Ade that he would be carrying a hefty novel with him up a mountain; not only that, but a hefty Polish novel in translation by a Nobel-prize-winning author. He was a ferocious reader. But that title. Then there was Crib Goch, the red ridge. I googled pictures of it and couldn’t believe how perilous it looked. I couldn’t believe I’d climbed it aged 11. Perhaps that’s the best age to do it, when you have no inkling of the danger. Did Ade have that inkling? Any fear? I doubt it. He was a maverick, never one to turn down a challenge. 
    So, it was a solo walker who spotted him, not a pair. And the words ‘a tumbling fall from height’ suggests the fall was sheer and that Ade had died quickly, but who knows? No one, and no one ever will. I just hope he died quickly, with little or no pain. 
    Those magnets raise a question. All common sense would say that he must have bought them at the shop on the summit, which suggests that he was on his way down when he fell. But Ade fell at 11am. I’m assuming Ade caught a bus, or took a taxi, from Betws-y-Coed to the car park at Pen-y-Pass. That journey would have taken about 20 minutes. From there, the average time to the summit of Yr Wyddfa is four hours. So if Ade had caught the bus, climbed to the summit, bought the magnets and then was on his way down, all in just three hours, he must have been moving very fast. My feeling is that he was on his way up. If so, the fact that he took three hours to get to Crib Goch would fit in with the average four-hour journey time to the summit. If that is the case, where did he get the magnets? I’ll never be sure. 
    So that was the end of the road for me. Ade had died in a tragic mountaineering accident. Just like that. I was left with a mountain of good memories of a kind man, funny and original, clumsy and loveable. Gone too young. The same age as me. His boots with a ‘good tread’ making one wrong move amongst the rocks on the red ridge, then a terrible chute through air, floating. 

The news about Ade immediately triggered memories of Eddie and, for those first few days after Ade’s shocking death, I was also transported back in time to Eddie’s death 32 years earlier. While I waited for further news about Ade, I started to ransack my memories about Eddie and his death. All I knew was that he went free climbing solo without telling anyone and that it was a few days before his body was found. I needed to find out more. 
    On Facebook, I reconnected with Mark T and Steven B. I asked if they had any information about Eddie’s death but they only knew as much as I did. I asked Kim for her memories and stories about Eddie and she sent me photos of us all at college and told me what she remembered. We talked about Eddie a great deal but, she said, she had ‘virtually no memory’ of him. I understood. For me, too, it was hard to picture what I did with Eddie. We spent so much time together between the ages of 13 and 19 but I can remember precious little about him. 
    The fact that he was alone, used no ropes and told no one where he was going always perturbed me. Had he gone out that day knowing he would not come back? When I tentatively put that to Kim, she was adamant that there was no question of suicide. ‘No never!! Hubris might have killed him but in a million years he would never have taken his own life,’ she said. But Kim went on to say that Eddie had once said to her that he knew he would die young. He died at 27 years old, the same age as Jimi, Janis, Jim, Kurt and Amy. Eddie always had the whiff of a rock star about him. 
    I googled endlessly about climbers in north Wales but came up blank. Eddie died in 1992, just pre-internet, so there was next to nothing about him online. And then I found a quote by a climber, who said, ‘I watched Ed Stone down climb Axle Attack taking his gear out on the way.’ That was tantalising. It sounded as though the climber was impressed. Then I found another reference to Eddie by another climber, who just said that he remembered ‘going back many times to Wales to stay with and climb with the late Ed Stone.’ To hear Eddie being called Ed by these people was strange for me. I realised that these guys probably knew Eddie better than I did. They had a new name for him. Eddie was reborn as Ed in north Wales. He’d found his true place and calling. 
    I wrote to the Coroner’s Office in Gwynedd asking for a Record of Inquest for Eddie. The only information I could give them was his name, that he died somewhere in north Wales and the year of his death. They couldn’t find anything with so little to go on. I was at a dead end. 
    Then Kim sent some more photos. She had been digging a bit deeper and had found a photo of Eddie roped up on a rock face in mid-climb. He’s wearing grey lycra pants and a peach-coloured T shirt. It was terribly moving to see him in action like this. So young. Kim had also found the original clipping from the local paper, the Mid Sussex Times, about Eddie’s death. This turned out to be the crucial turning point in my effort to discover the facts. It said: 

A FORMER Mid Sussex man has been killed in a climbing accident in Wales.         
    Psychology student Edward Stone, 27, died in a fall on Snowdon while climbing solo.
    Mr Stone, son of Judith and Reg Stone, who used to live in Upper Lodge, Ardingly, was a mature student at Bangor University. He had lived in Wales for some years.
    A keen and experienced climber, he had set out on the expedition fully equipped on Friday. Royal Air Force rescue crews and the Llanberis Mountain Rescue team discovered his body the following day. The cause of the accident is unknown.
    The funeral will be held today (Friday) at Llanberis parish church.

The first detail that leapt out at me was that he had died on Yr Wyddfa, as Ade had. No way. Then I noticed the words ‘fully equipped’. So he wasn’t free climbing. Also, the fact that he was found the following day meant that someone raised the alarm quickly after Eddie failed to return home that night. Finally, that the Llanberis MRT found him so quickly suggests they knew where to look, which in turn suggests that whoever raised the alarm knew where Eddie had gone. All this refutes any idea that Eddie had acted recklessly that day to ensure he wouldn’t return, which is a source of great comfort. 
    The clipping showed me that I had believed a false story about Eddie’s death all these years. He wasn’t free climbing at all, so why had I believed he was? Who told me? How did I pick that up? And it wasn’t days before his body was found – it was found pretty fast, actually. Far from being a solitary, lonely, possibly suicidal event, it was instead a tragic, unexpected accident and the alarm was raised very quickly by someone close to him. 
    Kim had added the date by hand to the clipping – October 1992. With this less vague date, plus the names of Eddie’s parents and other information, I wrote once again to the Coroner’s Office. This time, after a week or two, I received the Record of Inquest for Eddie, which provided even more clues. It said his injuries were:

1a) Acute cardio-respiratory failure due to 
1b) Fracture dislocation of the neck due to
1c) Consistent with a fall from a height
2 Diffuse subarachnoid haemorrhage and fracture of skull

A quick google revealed that a ‘subarachnoid haemorrhage’ was usually the result of a blow to the head and a ‘fracture dislocation of the neck’ was usually the result of a fall from a significant height. This information, plus the fractured skull, suggests that Eddie, when he fell, landed on his head. 
    The Record also said that Eddie’s body was found at the base of Trinity Gully. I researched this online and found images of Trinity Face – an enormous, sheer rock face hanging just below the summit of Yr Wyddfa that looked like a miniature version of the north face of the Eiger. There are four routes up Trinity Face: Great Gully, Little Gully, Left-hand Trinity and Central Trinity. ‘Trinity Gully’ didn’t tell me which route exactly Eddie was on at the time of his death but all four, more-or-less vertical, ascents looked terrifying. 
    But what I still struggled with was why the ropes hadn’t saved him when he lost contact with the rock. I presume he had hooked himself onto crabs at pretty tight, regular intervals so that, if he did fall, he wouldn’t have fallen far or harmed himself. But the injuries Eddie sustained suggest a fall from a great height, which doesn’t tally with that idea. Once again, I will never have an answer to this question. No one was there to witness the fall. Eddie’s secret will remain with him forever. 

Eddie’s death is a distant memory for me, and an unreliable one, it turns out. I had misremembered him, and therefore misrepresented him, for years. I can’t say with certainty that I knew Eddie well. Did I ever? Those teenage years are tumultuous. You go through so many changes – layers, even – so quickly, make bad decisions, mistreat people. Ade’s death is brand new in relative terms, more raw, but I knew what kind of person Ade was from the off. Soulful, good-natured. They were different characters from different moments in my life but, because they were both friends who died on the same mountain, they will be forever tethered in my mind. But what was the tether? A leyline? A tightrope? Ariadne’s thread? Their deaths were caused by tiny errors, a boot put in slightly the wrong place, a fingertip in a fingerhold not exerting quite enough pressure. Narrow margins. I had also passed over that terrain and mercifully had escaped with nothing but cuts in the foot. I was lucky. 
    I want to end this piece with something I discovered during those many days researching Eddie’s death. I found out that, following Eddie’s death, a climber friend of his (or friends, I don’t know) put up and named a new route after him. The route is an E7 Trad climb on a mountain called Gallt yr Ogof, which is approximately seven miles north east of Yr Wyddfa. The route is called Heart of Stone. Far from being forgotten, Eddie will always be remembered by those who knew him best. 

‘Every work suggests its own method. Each novel’s been done differently, under different circumstances and using different methods. I got the idea for The Sheltering Sky riding on a Fifth Avenue bus one day going uptown from Tenth Street, I decided just which point of view I would take. It would be a work in which the narrator was omniscient. I would write it consciously up to a certain point, and after that let it take its own course. You remember there’s a little Kafka quote at the beginning of the third section: ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back; that is the point that must be reached.’ This seemed important to me, and when I got to that point, beyond which there was no turning back, I decided to use a surrealist technique—simply writing without any thought of what I had already written, or awareness of what I was writing, or intention as to what I was going to write next, or how it was going to finish. And I did that.’ Paul Bowles

Of course, it’s good to read as widely as possible—especially outside your race, class and gender—but, as a writer, I’ve found I’ve learned more by returning to the same book again and again. When you finish reading a novel for the first time, your memory of it does not stay fixed forever; it shifts and evolves. Years later, you might find yourself talking about it only to discover that your memory has retained only a few scraps—mythic representations—of the text. You realise that, in the intervening years, you have reconstructed in your mind an entirely different book—an inner book of ‘received beliefs’—from the actual one. This is when the value of re-reading becomes obvious. A book comes alive with each new reading. A book is born again every time you pick it up. When you re-read a book, it will appear to be different on a second, or third reading, but of course the book hasn’t changed, you have. Any text has the potential for several different interpretations, and no single reading can ever exhaust a text’s full potential because, on re-reading, each reader will search for connections in their own way, excluding other possibilities and so making them aware of their own role in the play of meaning. It’s not the case that subsequent readings are any ‘truer’ than the first—they are just different. The fact that readers can be differently affected by the same text shows the degree to which reading is a creative process. If you read a single book many times over, it marks the changes in your life and, whatever happens, you continue to have a conversation with it. 
    Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky is a novel that I happen to have read a number of times and, each time I re-read it, it offers fresh insights into how and why I think it is such a great piece of work. Set in North Africa just after the Second World War, the novel is about husband and wife, Port and Kit, and their travels after they arrive in Tangier. When I first read the novel, I thought it was Port’s story, but after a few more reads, I realised it was in fact Kit’s story. She is the character who undergoes the most change and the person in whose company we end the story. Also, I had not noticed at first how Port and Kit’s journey starts at the coast, in a well-populated city, and goes directly inland, stopping at places that become fewer and further between and less and less well-populated until, ultimately, they arrive in the middle of nowhere. The desert and its ‘virulent sunlight’ take on an increasingly claustrophobic, emptying role, smothering love and hope until all that is left is sand and wind. This doomed journey into the desert is a subtle, sophisticated metaphor for their relationship. I also had not noticed that, although Port and Kit both have sexual encounters with native Arabs, it is how they respond to those encounters that matters, that defines the difference between their personalities. Port’s is a one-night stand and the experience ‘poisons’ him and is his ultimate undoing. Kit, on the other hand, enters into a desperate, very physical affair with a Bedouin that rejuvenates her body entirely and sets her off on another journey altogether.
    Port’s death in the desert provokes an existential panic attack in his wife, Kit. She is crushed by his death, but she is also liberated in a way. The novel continues for another 60 pages as we see the consequences of Kit’s loss play itself out in the narrative and, by the end, we realise that the story had been about Kit all along, not Port. His death has not resolved her life, just set her off on a new and different journey. Indeed, endings of stories are, in a sense, just beginnings to other stories. In the most perfectly plotted stories, resolutions give rise to a new set of problems. 
    The start of The Sheltering Sky has its end seeded deep within it. Port has become so disenchanted with Kit that he has reduced their marriage to an intellectual exercise. What he comes to expect from it can never be sustained. At one point in the book while looking at the sky, Port says, ‘I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind’. Bowles peels back that protection to reveal the pain and pitilessness of a modern relationship. We, the reader, sense this and pull against the inevitable and Bowles dramatises this tension. He has said that, after getting the idea for the novel, he wrote it ‘in cold blood’ in nine months flat. The only scene that proved tricky to write was Port’s death in the fly-blown desert town of Sbâ (one of the most convincing and harrowing evocations of death since Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich). He says, ‘I got to the death scene and I didn’t feel up to tackling it, so I ate a lot of majoun and just lay back that afternoon and the next day I had it resolved.’ 
    Literary novels such as The Sheltering Sky act as mirrors, but the act of reading and re-reading them presents us with the paradox—the reader is forced to reveal aspects of themselves in order to experience the reality of the text, a ‘reality’ that is different from their own. The impact of that reality will depend on the extent to which the reader actively participates and provides the unwritten part of the text, and yet, by participating in that way, the reader must think in terms of experiences beyond their own. Some texts offer nothing but harmonious world-building, purified of all contradiction and excluding everything that might disturb that illusion once established, but The Sheltering Sky doesn’t lie like this—it is so fragmentary that the reader’s attention is solely occupied with the search for connections, making us aware of our own capacity for providing links. Indeed, it is only by leaving behind the familiar world of their experience that the reader can truly participate in the adventure. In this way, Paul Bowles is Mercury, a messenger, world-traveller, transporter of communications from one realm to the next, and his cold, clear eye tells us that a truthful marriage can sometimes be both loving and loveless, that a modern love can be ‘twisted’.

‘A moral message is the last thing I look for.’ Paul Bowles

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​‘The machine in the title of Richard Skinner’s new collection is the cherry tree of its opening poem, which “explodes in white noise every spring”. It is a “perfect” machine, conducting towards healing, loading “a sense of surety and calm”. As does, in fact, the poem itself, with its villanelle-like repetitions and rhymes. Other forms of white noise we are familiar with – an untuned radio, the residual galactic hiss of the Big Bang, the sound of the ocean in a shell – act, I think, in the same way. Packed with data, inviting the imagination. Faced with such possibilities, Skinner can seem scarcely able to contain his excitement at the white noise of the world. In his poem “The Scene”, he ponders the constituent elements of a sea- and sky-scape, engages with possible similes, eventually concludes that

​‘All the world is drawn to this single point  
​Moved to convene by enormous forces’
 
And the result as he stands enclosed in this serenity?  If one were to ‘tap’ him today, he would ‘ring like a bell’. The enormous forces referred to are perhaps most movingly arrayed in “Amaryllis & the Iceman (for J)”. Here, dermatological traits visible in the addressed individual reflect a ‘journey (which) began in the Holocene/in Central Siberia’. The long development of our shared genome leaps compassionately into focus. 

​There’s a tremendous kinetic energy in these poems, evidenced in the wide variety of linguistic stratagems he deploys to express the wonder and joy of things. These range from bright-eyed vocalic transpositions to wholesale melding of poems by different authors. Wallace Stevens would surely have approved his evocation of the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) as ‘an ecru curtain/in an epic inert arena,/each inch an ounce in nuance’; while Louis McNeice and Paul Muldoon cohabit strangely in “Snow2”; and in “The Wild Swans at Coole N + 7” a technique of lexical substitution reminiscent of one employed by Christopher Middleton in parts of Pataxanadu leaves WB Yeats amusingly, but somehow still beautifully, transmogrified.
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There are many cultural references in this collection, but don’t let that put you off.  If you don’t recognise all, or even many, of them (and I certainly didn’t) then I can only testify that you’ll enjoy finding out about, say, ‘hunger stones’ in northern European rivers, the Sedburgh Embroidery, or the work of Agnes Martin or Claude Cahun.  It’s all part of the pleasure afforded by this truly remarkable collection.’
​— Peter Didsbury, author of A Fire Shared

Erik Satie was an iconoclast, a visionary and a pioneer. He was an iconoclast because, throughout his life, he refused all conventional teaching. As he said himself, he was a man who was happier using 13 letters of the alphabet to evolve his own language than using 26 letters like everyone else. He was a visionary because the music he composed broke so firmly with the past, particularly with Wagner. No one had written music like his before, nor have they ever since. His limpid, languorous style has often been imitated but never bettered. Finally, he was a pioneer because his music and ideas were the forerunners to a great deal of music that we take for granted today—furniture music, ambient music and repetitive (or minimal) music. Without Satie, we would have had a very different kind of John Cage, and without John Cage, we would have no Brian Eno. 
​
Satie was born in Honfleur in 1866 and, apart from one trip to Brussels, lived in Paris the whole of his adult life. And, besides one disastrous six-month affair with an artist and acrobat called Suzanne Valadon, he remained single and celibate all his life. More than anything or anyone, he loved children and animals. For 27 years, he let no one into his room except stray dogs. He said, ‘The more I know about men, the more I admire dogs’. But Satie did have one great friend in Claude Debussy, who was the composer Satie most admired in his life and with whom he maintained one of the greatest ever friendships between musicians. Satie claimed to have only ever cried twice in his life—once at the death of Debussy and once at the death of Lenin. 

One of the keys to understanding Satie’s life and music was the idea of Immobility. He said that, for him, it was richer to ‘imagine’ life than to experience it. For him, experience was a form of paralysis and so he withdrew into himself. I think one of the reasons the act of withdrawing was so important to him was because he wanted to live many different lives in one place rather than the same life in many different places. Immobility allowed him to stay in one place and grow, change and shed skins, and this was symbolised by the various ‘uniforms’ he adopted throughout his life. He started out dressing in a priestly, floor-length ‘smock’, then, for seven years, he wore nothing but seven identical velvet suits, and then, in the last stages of his life, he wore the black suit and bowler hat of a minor civil servant.

Another key to Satie was the idea of The Miniature. Jean Cocteau said of him that ‘The smallest work by Satie is small in the way a keyhole is small. Everything changes when you put your eye to it.’ He made countless drawings of tiny houses, manors and châteaux, the production of which would absorb him for hours and days. These imaginary worlds were, for him, every bit as real as the ‘real’ world and he felt more at home in them. For Satie, The Miniature was a refuge of greatness. 

The final key to Satie’s work is the idea of Repetition. In 1949, John Cage went to Paris to find out more about Satie’s music (apart from a few cognoscenti, Satie’s work was unknown at that time) and one of the pieces he discovered was entitled “Vexations”. Played through once, this rather innocuous piece made up of 36 diminished and augmented chords lasts no more than 2–3 minutes, but Satie had set a trap for the performer by saying that the piece should be played 840 times in succession. To do this, he said, ‘it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities’. If you follow Satie’s instructions, the average time it takes to perform the piece is about 24 hours, which is longer than it would take to perform all his other pieces of music put together. 

It might seem like a joke, but Satie was deadly serious and the repetitive nature of all his pieces raises interesting questions about the function of boredom in art. Satie said that ‘boredom is deep and mysterious’. Of “Vexations”, Cage said, ‘The music first becomes so familiar that it seems extremely offensive and objectionable. But after a while the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking further offence, and a very strange euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begins to set in … It is only boring at first. After a while the euphoria begins to intensify.’

In May 2007, I was in the audience in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern for a performance of “Vexations”, performed according to Satie’s instructions. One of the pianists for the event was Gavin Bryars, who talked about its difficulties for a pianist. He said that, even after performing it many times over, pianists have great difficulty committing it to memory because of the baffling complexity of its construction and notation, and the piece requires tremendous concentration to play precisely because you return to zero 840 times. It is only in time that the piece works. For both performer and listener, “Vexations” is a test of the limits of endurance and patience—it is a maze, a koan, an inner journey as well as a spiritual vexation. 

Satie was never rich or famous in his lifetime; indeed he was a pauper by choice for the whole of his life, but he was greatly admired by many musicians and artists who would go on to become famous. At his funeral were, among others, Picasso, Cocteau, Brancusi, Man Ray and Georges Braque. Satie’s favourite book was Alice in Wonderland and he often said that, because he was half Scottish, he was the only Frenchman who could fully understand English humour. He approached life humorously and was by nature an absurdist, so when Dadaism and Surrealism came along, despite being much older than others in those groups, he fitted in quite naturally with their ethos. His younger friends called him ‘Le Mâitre’ (‘The Boss’) and he sat in on their meetings as chairman, but was also their mascot. 

Satie always maintained that he was a bad composer and an even worse pianist. He was indeed a very bad pianist, but of course, we now know that he was, in fact, a very good composer. The most famous of his pieces for piano are the “Trois Gymnopédies”, written when he was 21 and ill in bed during his military service. They were three versions of the same theme and Satie likened them to walking round a piece of sculpture and viewing it from three different angles. Based on ideas of purity, antiquity and tranquillity, the pieces remain amongst the best-known and most famous ever written for the piano. 
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But of all Satie’s creations, I think the most magnificent was his own life. I’ve always admired his refusal to conform, his dedication to his art, the singularity with which he pursued his dreams. Just as he was receiving some small recognition for his work, Satie fell gravely ill with pleurisy brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. He was moved to the St Joseph Hospital and was given a private room paid for by the fabulously wealthy Comte de Beaumont. It was there that he died in 1925. It is hard to sum up any life in a single line, particularly one as willful and eccentric as Satie’s, but his contemporary Louis Durey came closest in his description of Satie as ‘one of those capricious plants which produces a strange unique flower in some solitary and inaccessible place’.