The ancient typewriter sits motionless, and above it hangs a stormcloud of language. In another case nearby in the bookshop of the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, London, annotations written into one of the visionary thinker Emanuel Swedenborg's books by the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge are annotated in their turn.
These objects have been selected, and prose poems in response to them written, by Iain Sinclair, one of the participants in Swedenborg House: Fourteen Interventions, a site-specific exhibition at one of central London's most atmospheric venues. Just across the road from a Hawksmoor church whose spire is eerily modelled on the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, this old building has been opened up from top to bottom – literally, into the basement – by Sinclair and other connoisseurs of its vibe. Jeremy Deller shows a London video; Bridget Smith, silent recorder of London places, has taken a picture of the Swedenborg Society's characterful public hall. And everywhere, you come across Sinclair's objects, including an eccentric looking basket in the basement – a cousin, he suggests, of the Wicker Man.
As part of this event, I too will be giving a talk here, on 4 March. It's entitled The Visions of Leonardo da Vinci (and a Memory of His Childhood), and I hope it will resonate with the building and the countercultural history it embodies as effectively as the exhibition does. If you are a Sinclair fan, the texts and choices of his on display may strike you as a materialisation of one of his London-saturated essays in a real London place and time, and his event tonight with Brian Catling is bound to be memorable.
But why are so many artists and writers participating in an event to mark the 200th anniversary of the Swedenborg Society? The clue is in those annotations by Coleridge. Swedenborg's ideas influenced the Romantic movement and, above all, Blake, whose argument with Swedenborg is preserved in his masterpiece The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
So, come along on Thursday and let's have an argument – for, as Blake says, "without contraries is no progression".
