I wrote myself a note in 2006, smiling, without thinking: I'll be there in two minutes – in two words, in a summer's day – I'll arrive at the earth. Specifically, I would land on Lemnos. I had the idea that when someone got thrown out of Heaven (a gated development, masculine, nicely-ranked, well-lit:

they would drop down to Lemnos where outlaws and pirates live. Lemnos would be the name of a gateway to what Wallace Stevens succinctly calls ‘the second part of life’ (‘The Creations of Sound’, Collected Poems, p. 311). Lemnos would also be part of the story of writing: the name of the episode where fear of separation from the group would lose its power to silence and distort what is to be written. I continued to believe I would go there, even though I had also been told on the highest authority that that part of the story, the part about dropping down on Lemnos, was a myth.

I went back to the English authorised version of falling and the Fall, written by Milton, who insists that the coming to earth on Lemnos did not happen. Paradise Lost goes back to Lemnos in order to visibly specifically correct itself, and Homer. It tells how an angel-architect built in Heaven, then rebelled against God and was cast down to Hell. Once there he went on building, and was much admired. According to Milton, this angel only reached Lemnos, earth, in a classical fable. The story comes from The Iliad.