The Focus of Life: The Mutterings of Aãos, is arguably the most biographically significant of all Spare’s published works. Often obscure, magical and fragmentary, it invites exploration of a strange Nietzschean landscape through what Spare termed ‘the labyrinth of the alphabet.’ But the recent discovery of Spare’s original conceptual folio for the book, once owned by the respected writer E.M. Forster, has revealed an unseen series of powerful magico-erotic drawings – termed by Spare ‘blasphemous Ideographs’ – that provide an important key to understanding the ‘secret ritual of Self-Love’ that underlies this evocative and deeply personal work.
This new issue of The Focus of Life provides readers with a high quality facsimile of the 1921 first edition, together with a full colour facsimile of the newly discovered conceptual folio for the project. Drawings too explicit for publication in 1921 have thus been reunited with the magical narrative, providing new insight for those exploring the artist’s life and magical philosophy. These important works are further augmented with critical essays from Phil Baker and Robert Ansell.
