And then left the smoke for fields

On to the hilltop, near the stone Templar hall, and

We laid our bed and stall a mile from there,

In the tower clock, and our bodies seldom

Rubbing to Eros, knew sex was absent

Made our new routine as demanded duty

Meeting them first, the student cohort.

My first encounter from the other side

Flushed with preconception and highest expectation

So with buried naivety, I said hello to the group.

From this hilltop now, the clarity of each is seen,

Yet in time past the whole appeared as one, a mass.

A land of stuff, to be sculpted into a social being,

different to any other known or seen in the west

With red banners

Its past one-dimensional in hegemony,

Heated daily by performance energy.

The clock progressed, to day one and ‘s’ one zero one

As written in the spec to be drawing.

But here was a ritual, yes a rite,

Yes a drawing expanded and a quote,

A walk of a perimeter, blindfold, barefoot.

Then each poured a shot of clear spirit.

Vodka with a blade of bison grass, perfumed esophagi.

Then on bended knee, I washed each foot

Dried with towel, sterile and prepared the space course

For learning,  and unfoldment,

A journey of potentials through all phenomena, black and a bell-sheep.

All were willing in participation

Witnesses all, we and all pronouns

Each age and every ID not dissolved  as thought then

But suspended in collection

Each past, its knots and ties, pain and joy shelved

Girls and boys abused or protected

Scars of old, searing to that moment, paused

These and every other moment felt, stemmed

Punctured by the pedagogic ritual enshrined,

In the white-walled barn, emptied and renewed;

And unbeknownst to me I was in preparation

Through my own pantheon of oracles

The tools of Elizabeth Tate and Catherine Morley

I cleared the ground for an entrance to teaching

In reverence then of Brisley, Beuys, Ulay

And Abramovic, before she became priestess

Of the deepest, darkest state.

Chairs that we then sat upon, each distanced

Unravelled the recollection and reflections

Of what had occurred.   Witness or audience,

Power and agency reviewed

Resistance measured against usurpation

              And some rightly offered:

“Are you not a guru?    Asking us to do so

as you wished, a power trip”,

I understood, contradiction known.

A gnawing in me that I still hold real.

“And what of drawing? How does this relate?”

No charcoal, no paper in this time allotted:

“Taking a line for a walk”

“Why do we need the trace of vigorous hand movement?”

And I felt the calm, post-performance plus, of all I’d learnt,

A wand passed down, touched me, and instilled:

“Prepare the next one?” And more,

to bury the division of art and life.

Bridge the gap, with ritual to ascend

“Life long certitude”

               And I prepared the next,

With charcoal and paper disrupted: “Klee

“through father to son, over alcohol,

“And yet diseased.”  And then she came forth.

Through the Rose Garden where the white lady walked.

To upend my world, 1966, to the now of then.

And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away

And so, the journey began

              Odyssey and pilgrimage,

A hidden path or ley, tied to earth and beyond, Druid,

Vates or Bardic, as script written but unread

Without the need of eyes to engage

The course book torn up. So that: