Walking In Darkness - Sensory Deprivation

Niewidzialna Wystawa in Polish, which translates as the The Invisible Exhibition, is currently a big attraction in Warsaw. The report I've just read says the idea originated in Hungary a few years ago, but I recognise it as identical to an exhibition held in London, beneath the South Bank arts centre in the mid-1990s. 
The exhibition is in complete darkness and consists of a guided tour for a small group of people through a series of mocked up everyday environments led by a blind person. At the time it was in London, I was deeply into experiments in sensory deprivation, so I went along eagerly. The experience was a..., well the expression which immediately sprang to my mind was eye-opener, which is inappropriate because the object of the exhibition is to give insight (oh dear another visually led word) into the lives of the blind. So revelation is the better word.

A madman in Church

A new poem in the new issue of The Stone Hobo. 

Forgetting myself

I was going through a draw of old poems when I came across this self portrait. I can't remember doing it, I don't believe I ever did anything in this style ever again. I can't remember why I did it.
I can recognise the time of my life it represents: when I worked as a silk-screenprinter in World's End, the bottom rung of Chelsea's King's Road. Another memory of that time survives in the poem I wrote about a colleague who had the misfortune to be schizophrenic.

Life Class

I’ve not had many art lessons. The two classes I took with Meriel Gold in the village hall in Froyle, deep in the Hampshire downs were by far the best.

Meriel Gold studied with Cecil Collins. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, Cecil Collins, by all accounts a sweet natured and gentle man best known for his mystical landscapes, invented a revolutionary way of teaching art. His methods were so bizarre, even by the relaxed standards of the time, that the Central School of Art in London fired him. His students protested and in those days people took student protests more seriously than they do now, so Cecil Collins was reinstated.