The Hammock Papers: Intuition.

13 August 2026

Intuition.

From 1974, James Day speaks with Professor Bradbury about imagination, his dislike of school, and, most importantly, not thinking ...

I've had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, "Don't Think." You must never think at the typewriter. You must feel and then your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of data, you do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter, but at the typewriter you should be living. It should be a living experience, just as when I'm here with you.

Speaking to you, you're popping all sorts of questions at me. I don't have time to think about them. I can react to them. I try to say things that are meaningful and react to them. If I stopped and thought too long, we'd both of us fall asleep and that can happen at the typewriter, too.

The worst thing you do when you think is lie. You can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did. What you're trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself, find out who you really are. Try not to lie. Try to tell the truth all the time. The only way to do this is by being very active and very emotional and get out of yourself, making lists of things that you hate and things that you love. You write about these then intensely and when it's over, then you can think about it, then you can look at it. Well, it works or it doesn't work, something's missing here. Then, if something is missing, you go back and re-emotionalize that so it's all of a piece.

But thinking is to be a corrective in our life, it's not supposed to be the center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life, Being is supposed to be the center with correctives around which hold us like the skin holds our our blood and our flesh in. Our skin is not our way of life. The way of our our living is the blood coming through our veins, the ability to sense and to feel and to know. The intellect doesn't really help you very much there. You should get on with the business of living.

You rely heavily upon intuition, completely. Everything of mine is intuitive. All the poetry I've written, I couldn't possibly tell you how I did it. I don't know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of this sort of thing. It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that i loved. I love Shakespeare. I don't intellectualize about him. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins. I don't intellectualize about him. I love Dylan Thomas. I don't know what the hell he's writing about half the time, but he sounds good, he rings well.

I'll give you an example of this sort of thing. I walked into my living room, oh, 20 years ago, when one of my daughters was about four years old. A Dylan Thomas record was on the set and I thought that my wife had put the record on. Come to find out, my four-year-old had put on his record. I came into the room, she pointed to the record and said he knows what he's doing. That's great! See, that's not intellectualized, it's an emotional reaction. If there is no feeling there cannot be great art.

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BARRY HINES

"That's why it makes me mad when I take her out and I'll hear somebody say, 'Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk. I could shout at 'em; it's not a pet, Sir, hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me, right. And that's why it's great.Look, there's Billy Casper there wi' his pet hawk.' I could shout at 'em. It's not a pet, Sir. Hawks are not pets. Or when folks stop me and say, 'Is it tame?' Is it heck tame, it's trained, that's all. It's fierce, and it's wild, an' it's not bothered about anybody, not even about me right. And that's why it's great." (A Kestrel for a Knave)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

WALT WHITMAN

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL