The Blind Roadmaker
By Ian Duhig
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About this ebook
Ian Duhig
Ian Duhig worked with homeless people for fifteen years before becoming a writer and he is still actively involved with minority and marginalised groups on artistic projects. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Cholmondeley Award recipient, Duhig has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize four times. He lives in Leeds with his wife Jane.
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2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I dunno. Allusive knitting not to my taste except for Selkie.
Book preview
The Blind Roadmaker - Ian Duhig
Ian Duhig
The Blind Roadmaker
PICADOR
Contents
Half the Story
The Blue Queen of Ashtrayland
Blockbusters
The Plagiarist’s Song
Bert Lloyd
The Ballad of Blind Jack Metcalf
The Balladeer’s Lament
The Wold Is Everything That Is The Case
Sternomancy
The Marbled Page
Indirections
Shapeshifting Ghosts of Byland Abbey
The Golden Calf
‘Combat Gnosticism’
The Year’s Mind, Ripon
Canto
Mother Shipton
Ashtrayville
The Passion of the Holly
Long Will
In His Shadow
Opening Night
Sardana
The Rûm District
Riddle
Brick Arch
Give Me Your Hand
Square Ring
Contracted Silences
The White Page
Bridled Vows
The Full Weight of the Law
The Scripture of the Jade Pivot
Aliens
Selkie
Acknowledgements and Notes
Half the Story
Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he walked regularly. She was crying. She’d lost her doll. Kafka helped the girl search for the doll but they couldn’t find it. They arranged to meet there next day to look again for her doll, but still they could not find it. When they met for the third time, Kafka gave her a tiny letter that he told her he’d found nearby. She read, ‘Don’t be sad: I’m only travelling. I’ll write I promise!’ And every day that summer, when Kafka and the little girl met, he’d read a new letter to her describing places the doll visited, what it did there and who it met. The little girl was comforted. When the holiday was over and she had to go back to school, he gave her a doll that he said was the lost prodigal returned, and, if it seemed a little different from the doll of her memory, a note pinned to its scarf explained: ‘My travels changed me.’
Or so ends this version of the story, popular with therapists, but in Dora Diamant’s own account, our one first-hand source, there was no new doll, nor a message of change and growth; instead, Dora had described a final letter sent to the little girl detailing how the doll met its soul mate and had married him; how it would be too busy with its new family to write again, enjoining the little girl to seek similar fulfilment in her own life. Dora also noted how this affair had driven Kafka to distraction, who’d endured white nights, tortured by his own compassion, feverishly thinking up new adventures for his changeling doll made out of letters and lies and love; how this correspondence had been maintained in this fashion for a