No.181. Alchemy. It was the largest painting he'd made in the three weeks since his cornea transplant recovery, and he was pleased at the runaway energy it seemed to possess. He liked the tempest that swirled around the brimming reagent and seemed to encourage the volatile, chemically transformative stuff he had imagined to be inside it. His visitor, a rather stolid and diffident painter named Lucy Cobb, hated the picture. "It's too patriarchal," she told him, turning contemptuously away from the rampant picture. " Too testicular." He couldn't think of an adequate rejoinder.

No.180. A Swinger of Birches. Abigail, his next-door landscape-painter, had brought him a cup of camomile tea and a shortbread biscuit, and was (he noted wryly) predictably perplexed, if not downright dismayed, by the mural-sized wall of birch bark that covered most of one wall of his studio. "Why would you do this?" she asked him. He tried to come up with" a reason that would satisfy her. "I wanted to feel smaller than a tree," he explained. I wanted to feel engulfed by one. I feel the birch tree is a sort of ladder, a transit, to somewhere else." Abigail looked puzzled. "Do you remember Robert Frost's great poem, Birches?" he asked her. He knew she didn't so he recited some for her: I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. "But why would you go and plunder so much birch bark?" "I didn't" he replied. "The whole thing is made of paper and cardboard."

No.179. Sanctuary Ever since his left eye had declined into cloudiness and had been repaired, his gratitude for a clarified vision had burgeoned way beyond his lifelong romance with painting and had now reverted--or was it progressed?--to a realm of desire that dwelt in nature's minute, transformative moments. He was all at once experiencing a new hunger for trees, for hours spent by the shore, for animals of every stripe, for the vaulting birds, cloud forms. Grasses and weeds. He found the bushes of goldenrod burning beside the roads he drove on to be miraculous, manifestations of a floral El Dorado. He was an artist and he had turned his back on nature for most of his life. Now it was insistently there again--as it had been when he was a child--seductive, promising, hectic and soothing at the same time--Andre Breton's convulsive beauty, without the artifice. A couple of days ago, he had purchased at a garage sale a book called A Sanctuary Planted. It is by someone named Walter J.C. Murray, and had been published in London in 1954 by The Country Book Club (for "subscribers" only; you couldn't buy the book at the time). It's an account of the author's decision that, despite the Battle of Britain raging overhead ("War ploughs the heart and harrows the mind"), to secure a piece of land and plant a vast, complex, all-encompassing garden there. "I would plant a woodland," he writes, "where where every living thing would find sanctuary. I would encourage birds to come and live near me with trees and shrubs and mown paths, with food and water, and never the sound of a gun. And he does. That's what his enchanting book is about. He entered the book as of it were an abode. What longings it engendered in him!

No.178. I Only Have Eyes for You. His afflicted left eye had cost him a month of his life (which wasn't getting any longer). It was a double-decker operation: first a muffling cataract had to be slid away and then a nice fresh new cornea--which of course had belonged to somebody else--was gently insinuated into his eye--where it refused to stay Have summarily detached itself, this outlaw cornea had to be reattached. There were litres of improving drops: anti-infection drops, anti-rejection drops (who couldn't use some of them?), an eye-patch, and admonitions against stooping, lifting etc. Couldn't read. Couldn't (of course) drive. It was a sluggish, moribund six weeks. In the course of which he squinted haplessly at a lot of eye charts. How hopeless their inscrutable texts! How maddening, the way they faded away, line by line, into into some wistful, unattainable distance!