The ascent. We climb higher to where the river Dart is supposed to have its source. This is the source of the water they use in Plymouth Gin, W. says. It's the peat which gives it its special softness. And the way it's filtered through granite.

W. passes me his hipflask. We’ve brought our gin back to its wellspring! To its Eden! We’ve completed the circle. We drink to the Dart, and to the rain that feeds the Dart. We drink to the clouds, and to the seawater that evaporates to make the clouds. We drink to the sea and to the rivers that feed the sea.

We drink to our digestive systems. Our gin-processing systems! And we fantasise, as we drink, about a thinker of the moors, a thinker lost on the moor like King Lear and twice as mad as him. About a thinker whose madness is his thought, W. says mystically.

He'll be our Hölderlin, who grasping Zeus's lightning - madness itself -, will pass it to us 'wrapped in song'. He'll be our Artaud on his mad Irish quest, looking for Saint Patrick in the bogs. He’ll be our Judge Schreber, visited by little men from Cassiopeia, Wega and Capella, who warned him in tiny voices of the approaching end of the world ...

He’ll be our Louis Wain, with his cosmic cats. And he’ll be our post-conversation William Kuzelek, painting the grain elevators on the Saskatchewan prairies, painting the vast sky above the prairies. Canadian madness is lucidity itself, we agree.

Our thinker will be a playmate of God, who, now God is dead, sings of God's absence on the high moor. He'll be a thinker of the roof of the world, who will stay up high on the roof, refusing to come down.