There has been an ongoing literary obsession in the last few years with the diaries of 18th century poet John Clare, the self-taught 'Peasant Poet'. Clare famously describes his escape from a lunatic asylum in his evocative, fugue-like Journey Out of Essex (1841), racing through fields, sleeping in ditches, hallucinating old dead lovers, pursuing milk maids and following church spires on the edge of the horizon, or 'Orison', as he spells it.
Iain Sinclair went on to retrace Clare's footsteps in his memoir, Edge of the Orison (2005), followed by Adam Foulds' fictional account of the same journey, The Quickening Maze (2009). Sophie Scraplehorn's work with maps (2008), in which she cuts out all the names of places, creates a similar feeling of loss in a landscape; Clare's wandering 'in the blue mist' where 'the orisons edge surrounds'.
I had imagined that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison & that a days journey was able to find it so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures & discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I could look down like looking into a large pit & see into is secrets the same as I believd I could see heaven by looking into the water.
John Clare
