Sometimes, I wish that moment can be rewinded.

Above Freud's bulbous, oriental carpet-draped couch in 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, hangs a shrivelled, double-headed bronze penis by Louise Bourgeois. In an essay on "Freud's Toys" (1990), as Bourgeois dismissed the ancient artefacts that swarm over his desk and shelves (including numerous phallic amulets), she described Freud's cluttered office, with its "half-dead hysterics", as "a pitiful place". She also referred to Freud's patients as "maggots", which gives additional resonance to the placing of her suspended larval form. Analysis was, in her view, a form of metamorphosis, promising the transformation of seething misery into what Freud described as "common unhappiness". "A maggot," Bourgeois wrote, "is actually a symbol of resurrection."

Though she doesn't acknowledge it in her essay, Bourgeois had been in analysis herself for more than 30 years. In 1951, suffering from depression after her father's death, she entered therapy with Dr Leonard Cammer. The following year she switched to Dr Henry Lowenfeld, a second-generation Freudian who had emigrated to New York in 1938, the same year she did. Lowenfeld had been trained by the Marxist analyst Otto Fenichel in Berlin, where he was also a part of Wilhelm Reich's radical group, Sex-Pol. However, in New York, keen to assimilate to American culture and disenchanted with communism, Lowenfeld became part of the psychoanalytic mainstream and hid his radical past. At the height of the cold war he stole the incriminating Rundbriefe – letters written by Fenichel in the 1930s and circulated among their group of dissident analysts – from his colleague Annie Reich in an attempt to erase that history.

In 2007, just before Bourgeois's retrospective at Tate Modern, two boxes of discarded writings that refer to her analysis, which she underwent four times a week, were found in her Chelsea home; after her death in 2010 (aged 98), her assistant unearthed two more. Selections of these have been exhibited in the Freud museum alongside two dozen of her bulging and sinister patchwork sculptures and installations. These jottings, on random pads, letterheads, even playing cards, offer a glimpse into Bourgeois's psychological states. According to these notes, Lowenfeld considered the artist's inability to accept her aggression as the central problem to be worked through in analysis. "Aggression is used by guilt and turned against myself instead of being sublimated into useful channels," she wrote.

To art historians her free associations and doodles not only suggest clues as to the personal relationships and conflicts that inform all her work, but seem to offer direct links to her creative process (one Isis-like sketch is displayed here next to a similar multi-breasted sculpture, as fecund as the Venus of Willendorf). In an aborted letter to "Mon cher Papa", Bourgeois wrote: "In the 20th century the best work has been produced by those people whose exclusive concern was themselves." Her father was a tyrannical philanderer who had a 10-year affair with a live-in English governess, the discovery of which was the central trauma to which Bourgeois endlessly returned in her confessional work.

The recently discovered archive reveals the artist to have been an enthusiastic list-maker. In 1958, aged 47, Bourgeois compiled a melancholy account of her failures: "I have failed as a wife / as a woman / as a mother / as a hostess / as an artist / as a business woman", and so on. She made a suicidal list of "seven easy ways to end it all" (and throws in another for good measure). She listed her fears: "I am afraid of silence / I am afraid of the dark / I am afraid to fall down/ I am afraid of insomnia / I am afraid of emptiness …" And her feelings about analysis: "The analysis is a job / is a trap / is a privilege / is a luxury / is a duty … is a joke / makes me powerless / makes me into a cop / is a bad dream …"

Many of her automatic writings resemble concrete poetry, such as one arranged as a spiral of injunctions: "Do not risk too much / Do not hide too much / Do not neglect too much …" Others, written in cramped lines, are reminiscent of the webs of psychic "tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, [and] binds" that RD Laing formulates in Knots (1970). Bourgeois asked: "What is it that you want / do you know what it is / is it possible? no, why not / are you looking for a substitute. why? / which one?" On another loose leaf she wrote: "To be hurt / fear to be hurt / to hurt before you are hurt / what hurts?" (She answered her question by reverting to more list making: "to be abandoned / to be criticised / to be attached / to be asked too much / used / to be refused …")

These emotional inventories, with all their tangled logic, were Bourgeois's way of thinking, of working through. It was the art critic Peter Frank who encouraged her to jot down these free associations, not Lowenfeld: "It is not either my medicine nor my duty," she wrote in reference to Frank's suggestion; "I write because I have always felt that if people knew me really, they could not fail to like me. I write or make sculpture to be loved (for what I am)." Bourgeois admitted that this was a lost cause and was dismissive of their worth, suggesting that their meaning immediately evaporated, like Chinese calligraphy brushed on to stone with water: "Tout de mes notes seems remote + foreign except when in the process of being written, they communicate nothing not even to me."

Bourgeois considered art as her parallel "form of psychoanalysis", offering privileged and unique access to the unconscious, as well as a form of psychological release. On a piece of pink paper she scratched the slogan, "Art is a guarantee of sanity." Her artwork was reparative, a form of mental mending. Bourgeois's mother had been a tapestry restorer and Bourgeois often compared her to a spider spinning a fragile web; Maman (1999), Bourgeois's massive arachnid guarding an egg, is on display in the garden of the Freud museum (where Anna Freud's sizeable loom sits upstairs). In her textile pieces, the artist follows in her mother's footsteps by weaving, a craft that Freud, in one of his wilder hypotheses, thought had been invented by women as an unconscious product of "penis envy" (because the results imitate the hair that hides the genitals).

Bourgeois identified herself as a hysteric and made sculptures, like Arch of Hysteria (1993), that made reference to the "whirlpool of histeria" (sic) in which she often found herself consumed. In the Freud museum exhibition, the engraving that usually hangs above the famous couch – depicting Freud's mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot, the "Napoleon of the neurosis", demonstrating hypnosis on a swooning hysterical patient – has been moved to an adjacent room, where it serves to introduce works by Bourgeois. In that context, the accompanying vitrines contain what looks like outsider art by an inmate of the Salpêtrière Hospital: magical objects with multiple faces; patchwork dolls with amputated limbs over which knives hover threateningly.

The artist was well-versed in psychoanalytic concepts, which informed and have often been used to help understand her work. She frequently annotated the psychoanalytic writings she read; on display here is her summary of a case history recounted in Werner Muensterberger's "The Creative Process: Its Relation to Object Loss and Fetishism" (1963). Muensterberger tells the story of a grieving woman who made a doll out of her late husband's dirty underclothes, a mannequin she tucked up next to her in bed, which evidently fascinated Bourgeois. Her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, to whom many of Bourgeois's notes refer (did he desire her anymore?), was the director of the Museum of Primitive Art in New York and would have shared her interest in such fetish objects. Her own work was a similarly magical act aimed at exorcising trauma.

But, ultimately, Bourgeois felt that analysis had little to offer the artist. "The truth is that Freud did nothing for artists, or for the artist's problem, the artist's torment," Bourgeois wrote in "Freud's Toys", as if in frustration with the process to which she submitted for so many years, "to be an artist involves some suffering. That's why artists repeat themselves – because they have no access to a cure." Lowenfeld had died four years earlier, ending her analysis but evidently not her pain, which continued to fuel her work. In his essay "Dostoevesky and Parricide" (1926), Freud himself admitted: "Before the problem of the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms."

This image, shot with the assistance of Simon Vinall, is one of the first photographs Giles Duley has taken since his injury. © Giles Duley

On 7 February this year, Giles Duley, an independent 39-year-old British photographer, was blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan. He became a triple amputee, losing his left arm and both legs. His life is a miracle – most soldiers with similar injuries do not survive. It is his suggestion that we meet at London's Charing Cross hospital, where he is recovering from an operation to ease ossification of muscle at the end of one of his leg stumps.

1. Giles Duley
2. Becoming the Story
3. KK Outlet,
4. London
5. N1 6PB

1. Starts 4 November 2011
2. Until 26 November 2011
4. Details:
   020 7033 7680
5. Free
6. Venue website

I am not used to combining interviewing with hospital visiting but it is obvious that this is typical Duley. He has stoicism and spark, wants to get on with things, is more than willing to answer questions from his hospital bed. And this is not the half of it. As soon as he is fit enough, he plans to return to Afghanistan to photograph the medical treatment of injured civilians in Kabul. He has it all worked out – even down to the tripod head (his innovation) that will attach to what remains of his left arm and on to which a camera can be affixed: "My friends love this idea of me as half man, half camera," he says and laughs – as if this metamorphosis had always been on the cards.

Our reason for meeting is, in part, Becoming the Story, a retrospective of his work. His pictures are tremendous. He has taken former Unita soldiers in Angola, acid-burn survivors in Bangladesh, a Nuer woman giving birth to a stillborn child (for which he won an award in the Prix de la Photographie, Paris in 2010).

I tell him his images would do nothing to calm the primitive anxiety that photographers steal souls: he has an ability to see through people. And yet what shines out of the work is, above all, his respect for the uniqueness of each human being. He does not see himself as a photojournalist. He is aiming for the "universal". Empathy is his gift. It should be me putting Duley at his ease – but it is the other way round. He looks alert and owlish in his specs but is easy, bright and talkative. His girlfriend, Jen, is at his bedside and we chat about the marathon she is running to raise money for him, then she heads off to the canteen, promising to be back soon.

Duley returns toAfghanistan as soon as she has gone – as he must repeatedly in his own mind; it is the story that has to be told in order to move on. He was with the 1st Squadron of the 75th Cavalry Regiment of the US Army, a "small unit from the midwest", and studying the "huge impact" of war on soldiers (some no more than 20 years old). His plan was also to photograph civilian bomb victims and the work of an Italian charity, Emergency. He was into his fourth week but not making much progress. It is his pattern to get frustrated and send friends despairing emails ("I'm a rubbish photographer… I don't know why I am here"). But he knows himself well enough by now to recognise this as a staging post: his pictures come gradually: Trust, he says, is key. Often, a project comes into focus only as it is ending.

They were in Sangsar, in rural Afghanistan, nicknamed "Heart of Darkness" by the Americans because it is where Mullah Omar, one of the founders of the Taliban, had his mosque. "Imagine the most basic of combat outposts with sandbags, mud, ramparts, no proper electricity, no running water. To go out on patrol, you went through a wire. You could be under fire within a hundred metres of the base." And they had been fired at, only the day before, from a small, abandoned compound.

On 7 February, the plan was to search that compound. What was it they were searching for? "It's a question that sums up the war. I don't think anyone knew – chasing shadows." Although, he adds, they were checking on a sniper to see where he had been shooting from.

The compound was a mud hut with a small wall around it. The patrol consisted of six Americans and six Afghani National Army soldiers. The Afghans were supposed to be taking charge but a disagreement had broken out about who was to do the searching. "The Afghans were refusing, saying the compound would be full of booby traps." For about 15 minutes, the soldiers had been standing about and walking across a "little bit of flat ground". It felt, therefore, like a safe spot. While the sergeants were chatting, Duley turned to talk to an American soldier. And, at once, he felt "a click in my right leg" – the pressure plate that set off the landmine. "It is pretty instantaneous from click to explosion. And yet everything seemed to go into slow motion. I was tossed by the blast but there was not much noise – just bright, white, hot light. I remember seeing myself from outside my body. Not a religious experience but intense heat and fire and the strangely calm sense of flying through the air."

He did not pass out: "You go to a place that is beyond pain. It is funny how it is almost more painful to fall over and scrape your knee than to be blown up. Your body goes into incredible protection mode." What he saw, after "landing with a thud" was beyond his comprehension. His left arm was ripped to shreds. "There were white bones where the fingers should have been, the skin was peeled back off the hand and smouldering. It was like a horror film. I was terrified I might be paralysed because I tried to sit up but could not move." He did a "stocktake" of his body. "I could see clearly, I had my right hand. I could think. And what I thought was, I can still work as a photographer." (The first thing he would later say to his sister was: "I am still a photographer" – he "needed that goal".)

A different sort of stocktaking ensued, as each soldier shouted his name to ascertain who had been hit. "And I was letting them know it was me." But nobody could come to Duley until they had checked for secondary devices. Minutes seemed to last an eternity: "You just want somebody there." When Sergeant Chris Metz, leading the patrol, reached him: "He was fantastic. He asked questions about American football and whether I had a girlfriend. He kept me grounded. I felt very light-headed. My initial thought was that I was going to bleed to death quite quickly."

People are said to review their lives in flashback when they think they are about to die. For Duley, it was a flash-forward. He remembers: "I thought about Jen and how I knew she was the person I had been looking for all my life. I remember thinking I wasn't ready to give up on that. I thought about kids and how much I wanted them and about work. I knew how much I wanted to carry on work. And I kept shouting at the top of my voice, 'I am not fucking dying in Afghanistan.'"

The tourniquets were the first things that really hurt. He remembers asking: "Am I dying?" And there was a moment of reckoning: "The stretcher wasn't fully unrolled, it was ending way too soon. I could see bits of clothing and flesh in the tree above me." He saw a soldier's face turn grey at the sight of him – that frightened him. The sergeant offered him a cigarette and, although he had given up years before, he took it. "There was a strange Marlboro man moment when they propped me up against this canvas thing and the guy fed me a cigarette. It was calming and enjoyable – normality in the total abnormality of the situation."

Duley remembers being lifted into the Black Hawk medevac helicopter and the pain of it. He describes the down draught from rotor blades blowing dust into his face and the heat and people all around. But his will to survive was absolute: "I remember thinking: that's the first stage done… I've made it to the helicopter."

He is still in touch with medics, Cole Reece and Mo Williams, who flew with him on the 20-minute flight to the Nato military hospital at Kandahar airfield. They were used to heavy fighting – if Williams looked "befuddled" on the flight, he explained in a recent email, it was because he was astonished: every other triple amputee they had tried to get back to Kandahar had died. "And you were chatting away, asking pertinent questions…" At the time, he told Duley: "You are a fucking hell of a fighter."

What Williams did not know then was how much Duley had to fight for. And this is the bit that – if it were made up by a scriptwriter – you'd dismiss as an unfeasible subplot. He tells me about Jen. He had known her for a couple of years – the friend of a friend. She had been interested in photography. They had become familiar through letters – were pen-pals, e-friends. It was not until they met, face to face, not long before he went to Afghanistan, that he fell in love: "My heart leapt – I was absolutely sure she was the person for me." They went on several dates before Christmas. And he wrote from Afghanistan: "I told her I was in love with her and absolutely sure and wanted us to be a couple." But here is the twist: he never saw her reply. "She wrote a letter to say she felt the same way. It arrived the day I got blown up."

Duley was at the Nato hospital for two days before being flown to Birmingham, where his brother, David, and sister, Sarah, put everything – families and careers – on hold to be with him. He had, right at the start, given out Jen's phone number and his brother dutifully rang her but "no one in the family knew who she was". Duley was in intensive care and worsening: he got a lung infection, his kidneys packed up and, on 26 February, the doctors summoned the family to his bedside because they thought he was not going to pull through. For two months, it was touch and go. Visitors were kept to a minimum. Jen wrote every day and his sister read her letters aloud.

"Just to hear that she loved me and that it didn't matter what happened, that it made no difference to her. I mean, the whole thing was a shock because I didn't even know she felt that way at all." And he stops, his voice breaks and he needlessly apologises. He tells me how he would ask his sister to reread the letters. He couldn't talk (because of a tracheotomy) but would "tap" emphatically.

His sister got the message in every sense: "Do you want Jen to come?" she asked. And, in mid-March, Jen did. Duley was "terrified" of how she might react to the sight of him. But from that moment on, Jen's steadfastness has sustained him. His family, too, he says, have kept him going: "It has brought us closer." And he clearly has many friends, who have reacted with relief on discovering that he has retained his "dark sense of humour", that he is the person he always was.

Then he tells me a bizarre fact: his career as a photographer started in a hospital bed. He grew up in East Coker, Sussex, the youngest of five children, the son of an engineer (his father is now in his 80s and has been "wonderful"). He was keen on athletics and American football and, at 17, had gone to the US, hoping to attend college there. But he was involved in a car crash that smashed his knees and his plans. He spent six months back in England, in hospital. ("My surgeon said I would need operations on my knees later on. I have proved him wrong. My right knee is completely cured.") During this time, his godfather died and left him his camera (an Olympus OM10) and Unreasonable Behaviour, the autobiography of war photographer Don McCullin. Duley was bowled over. He ordered every teach-yourself-photography book he could and read them in hospital. As soon as he was home, he set up a darkroom in his bedroom: "I was obsessed from the moment I took my first photograph. I wanted to make photography my career."

At that point, many of his school friends were in bands. Duley played an "uncool" violin and bassoon; his camera gave him "credibility". In a sense, it was his instrument: "Everyone in a band has a big ego – they love having pictures taken." He felt he was in a band himself. He studied at Bristol and Bournemouth, but it was on the strength of his portfolio of photos of friends that he found his first jobs in London. It was the early 1990s, at the birth of Britpop – "a brilliant time". And his career went from strength to strength.

It was not long before he was getting commissions from GQ, Esquire and Vogue. He remembers a shoot with Mariah Carey where he realised "the image is bigger than the person and what I was photographing was the image". He took pictures of Christian Bale for Disney, was paid a small fortune but felt uneasy about the "corporate" portraits he had taken. He had moved into a world of high gloss and laboured at it. He was getting work as a fashion photographer, telling himself he must aim to be the new Mario Testino. But success and disillusionment were, all the time, growing together. In 2002, there was a turning point. He was taking pictures of a Big Brother star in a Soho hotel when a sordid argument broke out about whether she had agreed to do a topless shot. "I remember thinking, how have I ended up here? This has nothing to do with my love of photography."

He completely lost his temper and threw his camera down on the hotel bed and – to his dismay – watched it bounce off the bed and out through the window into Charlotte Street. It was not just the end of his camera. It was, for a year, the end of his career. He moved to Hastings and became severely depressed: "I hardly left my house. I felt I had let myself down." Yet it was during this fallow year that he started to think about what he could do in the world. He had always been "moved by the news and by people's stories". And he began to think how photography could be a way to "record events for posterity".

It was the beginning of the idea behind the quarterly photographic journal he still plans to launch. Document will "tell unheard stories of those caught in conflict and economic hardship around the world and record their lives as a way to better our understanding".

Duley was not under any illusions. He knew this was no commercial initiative. He would have to fund himself. What he did was "quite radical". He put everything into storage and got a job as a carer, looking after someone with multiple sclerosis. He would work 24-hour shifts, seven days a week for six to eight weeks, continuously. He could not go out of the flat, so would see nobody else for that period. It was hard – he doesn't pretend it wasn't –but then he could go on photographic trips for four weeks.

In 2009, something extraordinary happened. He was photographing Bangladeshi refugees who had no access to medical support. Dying people were lining up in front of him, as if expecting him to cure them. In consternation, he took the village elder aside: "These people have to understand I am not a doctor. I can't help them." The village elder replied that they knew he was a photographer: "But it is important to them that people see what is happening to us."

It was a moment of validation and public recognition followed. In 2010, Duley was nominated for an Amnesty International media award: "Most of the photographers had ITN or BBC or Al-Jazeera after their names. I was the only person with just my name. I had done it from my bedroom, funded everything, commissioned myself."

I have kept the difficult question until last: why go back to Afghanistan? "Because the story I was working on is unfinished business. Because going back may be a way of making sense of what happened. And because it is nice to think that, just maybe, some kid who had had his legs blown off might look at me, see me back at work and be inspired."

His hope is that his plight may also put an end to his moral ambivalence – his guilt – at photographing, for whatever reason, other people's suffering. "Now I am going to feel much more comfortable," he smiles. "I'll be able to say, well, look what happened to me… we can have a laugh about it."

Duley is also a realist, however. He admits he is "terrified". He insists he is a coward. I can think of no better definition of courage than returning to Afghanistan in spite of being afraid. But in the end, he explains, it is all about independence: "I want my life back. I want to be where I was a year ago. I am desperate to take photographs again." Sometimes, he catches himself in a full-length mirror and can be reduced to tears. He has phantom pains from missing limbs and he worries about being "defined by my injuries".

He is not going to let any of this stop him. He has already achieved many "small victories" at the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court in Surrey. He can sit up (weeks of physiotherapy, because you don't have the counterbalance of feet and legs); he can roll himself into a wheelchair unaided (a formidable feat) and he has taken his first steps on prosthetic legs (Herculean strength required). What's more, he has always felt: "If you believe you can do something, you can make it happen." As I say goodbye, I tell him I know he will make it happen, that he is already working on it. On the way out, I glimpse Jen waiting to go up. "What an amazing man," I call out and catch her reply as she disappears into the lift: "Isn't he just?"

the photographers who influenced me By Giles Duley

GERDA TARO (1910-37)

Famed for being the first true female war photographer (and Robert Capa's lover), for her political views and for her death in combat at 26. She had an incredible eye, but for me her most striking quality is her compassion and empathy. Her series on the bombing of Valencia had a real impact on me. It's a shame she doesn't get the recognition she deserves.

ROBERT CAPA (1913-54)

He defined modern war photography. His desire to get among the action produced iconic war photographs, none more so than his incredible, blurred images of the D-Day landings. I was moved to tears when I saw them as a child. He once said: "If your picture isn't good enough, you're not close enough." That advice has defined my work.

DON MCCULLIN (b 1935)

The greatest-ever photojournalist and the biggest influence on my life. It was reading his autobiography at 18 that inspired me to pick up a camera for the first time. His strong morals and empathy come across in his work. I've always sensed he was at one with his subject; he gives dignity to those he photographs. An amazing, thoughtful photographer.

TIM PAGE (b 1944)

I met Page when I was 20. He was more of a rock star than a photographer and I must admit I was seduced by his tales of excesses and risk-taking. In the words of Michael Herr, Page was the most "extravagant" of the "wigged-out crazies running around Vietnam" and he was the inspiration for Dennis Hopper's character in Apocalypse Now.

JAMES NACHTWEY (b 1948)

The most important working war photographer. His work is of such an incredible quality from concept to print and as something of a perfectionist myself I am in awe of his professional standards. He comes across as a reserved and private man, who lets his photography speak; the way it should be.

TIM HETHERINGTON (1970-2011)

He redefined war photography. His use of colour and multimedia and his choice of subject matter were pioneering. His book, Infidel, is moving and unique, as is his film, Restrepo. His restrained photographs of sleeping soldiers in Afghanistan tell more about modern war than any action shot. I was in intensive care when I heard of his death, a terrible loss.

“For some years I’ve been very interested in the relationship between science and art,” he says by way of introduction, citing two of his other earlier pieces, Mnemonic (1999), “about memory and how the brain functions” and A Disappearing Number (2007), a voyage into the rarefied realm of pure mathematics.

The present focus of his attention is nothing less than “the nature of what we think of as reality. The brain constantly assures us, reassures us that we are in control. But, the closer you look, the more questions you have about it.

“If you were to take our physical body, perhaps it’s more obvious. For instance, you’re completely unaware of digesting your coffee, and you’re not having to think about the fact you’re sitting upright. You probably haven’t even noticed that you’re nodding your head, hoping to encourage your interviewee to carry on talking, or that you’re laughing now because I’m saying these things,” he continues (just as I’m beginning to wonder how long he’ll keep up this up). “All this is fuelled by the unconscious, not by the conscious mind.”

There follows a diverting detour into the experiments of the neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet and the mathematician and broadcaster Marcus du Sautoy, which “put question marks under everything, including free will. Our consciousness is a tiny, tiny fragment on the top of an enormous ocean of something you might call the subconscious… preconscious… unconscious.”

Which brings McBurney to The Master and Margarita. In Bulgakov’s oneiric comic fantasy, written over several years in the 1930s, the devil in disguise, accompanied by a motley entourage of sidekicks and familiars, including a giant black cat which likes to swig vodka, comes to contemporary Moscow, with delirious results.

Another plotline concerns the love between Margarita and a character known only as the Master, who has been committed to an insane asylum. And, in case all that is not enough to be going on with, these narratives frame yet another: an unorthodox account being written by the Master of the trial and crucifixion of Yeshua Ha-Notsri, or Jesus Christ, seen from the point of view of Pontius Pilate.

It would be very hard indeed to imagine anything further from the secure everyday verities of Soviet Realism. The Master and Margarita is seen as one of the greatest works in Russian literature. By some accounts, it inspired Mick Jagger to write Sympathy for the Devil (Lucifer emerges – as does Pontius Pilate – as rather more personable than the crazed godless characters inhabiting Stalinist Moscow). The book was banned for decades in the USSR and a 1994 film version remained unreleased until last year because of copyright issues.

“The Master and Margarita is deeply to do with the unconscious,” McBurney says. “It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he’s not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate. For the last 2,000 years people have been telling and retelling it, and its effect on the Judeo-Christian religions is immense.

“Pilate’s guilt and the choice that he made and his apparent refusal to take responsibility are something deep within our sense of who we are. And one of the beautiful things about The Master and Margarita is simply that Pilate is forgiven. So the piece is partly, if not centrally, about compassion. That seems to me a very urgent idea at the moment.”

Judging by early reports of the play’s brief trial run in Plymouth last November, Complicite will be deploying its full bag of pyrotechnics at the Barbican to bring this “unstageable” spectacle to life. But McBurney waves aside his reputation as the great innovator of British theatre.

“So often it’s suggested there’s this new wave which is producing a whole new kind of work. In my opinion there’s nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else. For example, recently in Britain there has been a great wave of what people call 'immersive theatre’, but site-specific events of different sorts have been around since the 1960s and before.”

Speaking of sites, McBurney’s devil will be holding court in July at nowhere less than the Popes’ Palace in Avignon, as part of the city’s theatre festival. The Palace, with its majestic Cour d’Honneur, where performances take place, is a very different space from the Barbican: how will he cope?

“It’s a challenge I’m trying to come to terms with,” he says. “I’m relying on my unconscious to give me the answers, hoping that I’ll wake up one morning and know exactly what it is I have to do.”

'The Master and Margarita’ opens at the Barbican on March 15

8 March 2012 Last updated at 17:55

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Solar storm passes without incident so far

Nasa image showing extreme ultraviolet wavelengths on Sun's surface

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A solar storm in the Earth's magnetic field has largely passed, but adverse effects could still occur, experts say.

"The freight train has gone by, and is still going by, and now we're just watching for how this is all going to shake out," said Joseph Kunches, a scientist with US weather agency Noaa.

Charged particles from the Sun will keep on passing the Earth until Friday.

There had been fears that this "coronal mass ejection" could wreak havoc with satellites or power grids on Earth.

However, up to this point, Dr Kunches said, "all told, it's not a terribly strong event".

The current coronal mass ejection (CME) - travelling at some 1,300km per second - began arriving at Earth on Thursday morning, after the release of two particularly strong solar flares earlier in the week.

'Wake-up call'

Activity near the Sun's surface rises and falls through an 11-year cycle that is due to peak in 2013 or 2014.

Some solar flares result in CMEs - the launch of a huge bubble of charged particles hurtling toward the Earth at speeds up to millions of kilometres per hour.

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Solar Storms

• The sudden release of magnetic energy stored in the Sun's atmosphere can cause a bright flare
• This can also release bursts of charged particles into space
• These solar "eruptions" are known as coronal mass ejections or CMEs
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• The subsequent disturbances in the Earth's magnetic envelope are called solar storms
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• They can also cause aurorae - Northern and Southern Lights - to be seen at lower latitudes

• BBC Solar System: Solar Wind
• BBC Solar System: The Sun

The Earth's magnetic field protects it from the constant onslaught of high-energy particles from the Sun and elsewhere in the cosmos.

However, the solar storms that mark the arrival of CMEs can disrupt the field enough to have an effect on the Earth's surface - causing current spikes in power grids or disrupting navigation devices.

Among the more benign effects is that the magnetic-field disturbance can make the Northern Lights visible at lower latitudes.

But it is often unclear, even up to the last minute, just how grave or spectacular the effects will be on Earth - that depends on the magnetic alignment of the material within the CME, which is difficult to predict.

Because different parts of the bubble can have different alignments, scientists say that the storm could still have adverse effects as it passes.

"The magnetic field in the solar wind is not facing in the direction of danger. But it could change, into the early evening," said David Kerridge, director of geoscience research at the British Geological Survey.

Although space weather scientists have seen no more significant activity since the solar flares that launched the current storm, scientists around the globe are still keeping an a close watch on the Sun.

"The part of the Sun where this came from is still active," Dr Kerridge told BBC News. "It's a 27-day cycle and we're right in the middle of it, so it is coming straight at us and will be for a few days yet. We could see more material," he explained.

But regardless of its eventual extent, this episode of solar activity is a preview of what is to come in the broader, 11-year solar cycle.

Dr Craig Underwood, from the Surrey Space Centre, UK, said: "The event is the largest for several years, but it is not in the most severe class. We may expect more storms of this kind and perhaps much more severe ones in the next year or so as we approach solar maximum.

"Such events act as a wake-up call as to how our modern western lifestyles are utterly dependent on space technology and national power grid infrastructure."

Many storms are benign; this storm could enable skywatchers to see the Northern Lights from parts of the northern US and northern UK.

But the strongest storms can have other, more significant effects.

In 1972, a geomagnetic storm provoked by a solar flare knocked out long-distance telephone communication across the US state of Illinois.

And in 1989, another disturbance plunged six million people into darkness across the Canadian province of Quebec.

Are you an amateur astronomer? Have you seen the effects of the solar storm? You can share your thoughts and experience by filling in the form below

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Simply put, without Ralph McQuarrie the Star Wars films would not have been possible. The 82-year old artist died this past Saturday in his home in California, nearly 40 years after he helped alter the course of pop culture and cinema. Without McQuarrie’s efforts, the world would never have experienced the thrill of cosmic dogfights nor witnessed the heights of pulp modernist drama George Lucas cobbled together from a profane mix of Shakespeare and 1940′s sci-fi serials. The cultural landscape of an entire generation would have been significantly changed, while the micro-blogging literacy of millennials would have lost entire vocabularies of meme-able resources to draw from. Still, we would have been spared the shameless gimmicks of the unrelenting merchandising empire that would become Lucasfilm, which continues to plunder the archives to further exploit McQuarrie’s influential work.

McQuarrie’s now famous panoramic gouaches convinced 20th Century Fox to give Lucas–the shy nerd with glasses who longingly observed the drag races and drive-in romances of American Graffiti from afar–a chance. With just a script and an awkward disposition, the young filmmaker had little luck shopping his epic around Hollywood. After several dismal meetings, Lucas hired McQuarrie. an illustrator formerly employed by Boeing and CBS for, among other things, drawings of the Apollo space program, to draft visuals which would accompany the scripted scenes. Won over by McQuarrie’s dozen or so conceptual paintings, the executives at Fox green-lit the space production, providing Lucas with the initial funding he needed and sending him on his way. Continue.

All images: Lucasfilm Ltd.

Among McQuarrie’s initial drawings were the beginnings of the films’ most iconic characters and settings. From a lightsaber duel between Darth Vader, here rendered with an anguished Japanese samurai mask and debonair blaster on his side, and Luke Skywalker, pictured wearing a breathing device resembling a scuba mask, to the dark, dingy Mos Eisley dive where two bountyhunters, an indecipherable Han Solo and a rodent-like rendition of Greedo, face off as a pair of Metropolis-esque droids look on, this first set of paintings would firmly establish the look and feel of the Star Wars universe.

In subsequent tableaux McQuarrie, whom Lucas would keep on throughout the development of the series, further fleshed out the aesthetics and tectonics of the films’ built environment. McQuarrie gave form to the architectural and socio-political polarities between the Galactic Empire and the fledgling rebel alliance; the rigor of the mechanistic, streamlined interiors of the Death Star, for example, extends to the design of everything from the Emperor’s diverse array of ships and weaponry, not to mention the cities of conquered planets, to the uniforms of his lowly subjects (think Apple’s design hegemony) and cohere a pointed contrast to the weathered world inhabited by the rebels. Paintings depicting the state of the latter possess an earthy quality that both evokes the somberness associated with the romantic ruin and a certain Rossi-esque timelessness of contemporary “ruins in reverse” that characterize the rebel base at Yavin, what is essentially a campus of Brutalist structures (i.e. monumental bunkers) which entomb a fleet of salvaged X-and Y-wings. (Though the fact that the quasi-sanctified palace in which Princess Leia officiates the medal ceremony that concludes Episode IV eerily recalls Albert Speer’s Nuremburg Cathedral of Light hints at the possibility that the rebels’ interests aren’t entirely noble.)

At the same time, though much of it would find its way onto the screen, McQuarrie’s work differs in tone with that of Lucas’s, at times, unabashedly hokey space opera. Granted, while the films themselves would progressively darken as new characters and situations would be absorbed into the narrative, they would never quite embody the moody, survivalist bent exhibited by McQuarrie’s paintings, which oscillate between the fantasy of Tolkeinian imagery and the dystopic chill of Blade Runner (as most evidenced by the Mos Eisely Cantina, Cloud City at dusk, and the almost urban conglomerations of space ships in outer space).

Lucas was right in asserting, in a statement issued in reaction to the news of the artist’s death, that McQuarrie was “a generous father to a conceptual art revolution that was born of his artwork, and which seized the imaginations of thousands and propelled them into the film industry.” McQuarrie, who would go onto work on several blockbuster films, including Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., plus Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Trek IV, developed the template for all future sci-fi films whose reach can still be felt today, as in films such as James Cameron’s Avatar and even Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. Lucas himself probably summed it up best: “Ralph McQuarrie was the first person I hired to help me envision ‘Star Wars,’ ” Mr. Lucas said in a written statement. “When words could not convey my ideas, I could always point to one of Ralph’s fabulous illustrations and say, ‘Do it like this.’”

by Samuel Medina

posted in Uncategorized

tagged Art, concept art, Darth Vader, Death Star, drawing, hollywood, lucasfilm, movies, Ralph McQuarrie, Star Wars

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