Leona: Who's reading first?
Kim: [TO ELIZABETH] You go first. I've got you first on my list. Then
Richard.
Elizabeth: It's so long since I've done this, I
don't remember what we do. Do you all read it first?
Leona: No. You just read it out.
ELIZABETH JAMES READS HER POEM
Leona: Is this a comment on Chris's speech by Hades?
Elizabeth: Not consciously, I don't remember it.
Leona: The speech he makes to
Persephone in section five: he hopes she'll take her stay there in the
manner in which it was intended – as a compliment.
Richard: The way you read it, it sounded
like each line was restarting again and trying to say the same thing. But
the way I read it silently, there were many more different tones ... I was
surprised at the reading. That sense of it being a tape that was being rewound
and then being uttere£d again was most powerful towards the end, where
bits started to disappear. I wondered if a more naturalistic reading could
do things which were different.
Cahal: Is it the case that the readings that you get when you read
it on the page allow you to keep on regrouping bits to make different potential
sentences which you then keep abandoning? With any ambiguity, you test it
for one meaning: like 'It was important, if it was important ' -- that seems
reasonable ... ' -- It was if it was! OR 'if it was important, as if it was
important' ... which is, being important was unconditional, but acting as
if it was important .. as it was'. So that sounds as if the voice in the
poem is offering a conclusion, as if it was a fact it was important. 'As
important as' implies 'as' is something else. Yes?
Richard: [LAUGHS] I think I'm with youÉ
Cahal: The meanings are constantly shifting. But you're trying those
things out. 'As important as acting ... ' Or is it 'as important as acting as
if it was important'? And what is the thing anyway, that is as important as
acting important? Because we started off with a statement that it is important.
Richard: So it's a potentially important thing.
Cahal: Yeah, yeah. It may be important to act as if it was important.
'Being important' might not be that important, but it may be important to act
as if it was important.
Richard: It seemed to me that the doubts, the sense of the short lines
trying to feel their way into something more definitive, was partly lost in
the reading. 'It was' has a line to itself.
Hugh: Yes, a more performative reading than a working through doubts
and resolutions ... but on the other hand, as the notion of acting occurs so
much, I thought it was a good reading. I thought the ending was a revelation.
Kim: Oh, yes, it was.
Richard: No, I wouldn't say it was a bad reading. I just found it very
surprising.
Hugh: I suppose to be brutally blunt, what I was thinking, as I was
looking at it before, was, that it was playing with every conceivable permutation,
just to see what playing with every conceivable permutation, and a rather
interesting shape, produces. And is that a route, an exploration towards
something that is in any way paraphrasible. Or is it actual. It is what it
is, what it is. It is an interesting artefact.
Leona: I'm not convinced by the idea of paraphrasibility
of poems. For instance, I don't think a computer could have produced this.
A simple randomization programme that's just trying out the combinations
couldn't do that ...
Richard: It's a bit like a computer's Christmas card, though, isn't
it? There's a poem by Edwin Morgan
...
Leona: But a computer didn't write it.
Richard: That's what I mean. That's what I mean. It's getting close to the take of the computer. It's mimicking it in some way, I think, but it's not what a computer would produce.
Cahal: The difference is there are notions of language in here. The difference between 'As' in 'as it was' and when it's 'as if' and 'acting as if it was' -- they're all notions of language -- 'acting it' as well, it takes on another meaning. The computer couldn't put them together, and expect you to try to work with meanings. Those things are almost always much more unsatisfying than this is, because nearly everything here is capable, apart from the bit at the end, of being either a sensible sentence or being part of a sentence, a clause that leads onto a sentence, only it doesn't -- it leads back into something more like itself, which leaves you thinking, 'I have been fooled -- I have been robbed'.
If some other word came up here, like 'love' or 'hate' or 'shame' or 'death'
or something, then the whole would have been a subordinate clause, a very complicated
one, rolling into some idea. But as it refuses to do that. It's like when somebody
uses the same words in the explanation that were in the proposition, you think:
'I'm not sure that I buy this' ...
Hugh: Yeah. I think a lot of that is in the undeclared 'it.'
Cahal: In 'it?' Yeah.
Hugh: In some ways this goes all the way round defining not 'it' but
the qualities that might be ascribed to it.
Richard: To the idea of importance.
Hugh: Yes.
Cahal: There's a similar difference between
the performed thing and the written thing, in a number of Beckett's pieces,
that do this sort of thing. And you sit and read them, and think 'Oh, how
clever, because that sentence does this, and then does that, and I never
realised that ...' But when you actually listen to them performed in a dark
room, or with just a mouth about a foot off the floor speaking this, what
you get is a sense of emotion, of panic, of stopping and starting, of fragmented
personality, of common experience, and a whole lot of different things are
achieved by acting it.
Richard: The way that Elizabeth read it was to avoid that natural
colloquial conditional thing.
Cahal: Although the pace was sort of suggesting some sort of starting
and stopping, maybe like a tape, stopping and starting, but I felt more like
somebody trying to get into or trying to make a statement that had all these
subordinate starting points, that could never really get to what you really
want to say.
Richard: Yes, that's right. That's right.
Kim: I mean, it's lovely when the language starts to break down so that 'impo t' looks like 'impotent'.
Richard: Yes ... it does. What's a 't acti wing'? I think this is
what this poem is: it's a 'tacti wing.'
Cahal: What's the shape?
Richard: It's a Christmas tree with a lampshade on it.
Kim: [TO RICHARD] Or reflected in a lake.
Leona: Or a bauble ...
Cahal: Well, it's like a Christmas bauble. There should be several two
syllable or one syllable words down here, to establish a very pointy bauble.
It's kind of an early spearhead, isn't it?
Kim: It's quite an elegant shape, whatever it is.
Richard: It's an important thing, because it's been centred. It's something
that you'll have to keep now. [RICHARD LAUGHS]
Kim: Almost everything looks as if it's all meant, except for that repetition
of 'acting acting.' I mean, I'll let you get away with 'acting it / it was'
-- that was all right, but the 'acting acting' seemed to be a very sort of weak
repetition.
Cahal: Oh, I loved that.
Leona: [TO CAHAL] Acting acting?
Cahal: Yeah. You might want to be acting acting ... I'll buy that.
Leona: Because that's what made me think of Hades, that's
what Hades was doing in section 5 of Persephone.
Kim: Perhaps I am bringing biographical baggage to this, but I don't
find 'acting acting' very interesting. 'Acting acting' is like 'writers writing'
-- ho hum
Leona: If you don't count the bits where it starts to break down in the
last four lines É there are seven parts. And I thought, to begin with, that
I was going to be able to detect a pattern of operation. But having got half-way
through it, I can't detect a pattern of operation. If anyone's interested. It's
seven words, and the pattern is: 1,2, 3 ... 4, 1, 2, 3 ... 5, 4, 1,2, 3 ...
6,1,2 ... 6,3,6 ... 7, 5, 4, 1, 2, 3 ... Actually, maybe there is a pattern
in there ... 7, 3 ... 7, double 4 ...
Kim: It's Hugh's telephone number!
Leona: Knowing how Elizabeth works sometimes, that isn't impossible!
[LONG PAUSE]
Leona: [LAUGHS] Everyone's checking to see if I've done my numbers right.
Cahal: No, no. No, no.
Richard: It has a pulse, though, doesn't it? A kind of pulse ... Is
this to do with the idea of the unparaphrasibility of the poem? That you
actually just have to go through the poem; that you're not going to be able
to say 'Well, and Character A on line number one started here, and he's going
to meet Character B by the end of the poem'.
Cahal: Is it possible that what they're saying
is what that acting is? There are two kinds of acting, aren't there? There
is acting in the sense of doing, and there's acting in the sense of 'pretending
to do' and each time we come across those shades of meaning, 'acting' is
open to that interpretation. Maybe acting is important in this poem, because
doing is important. In all these sort of obscure and conditional ways maybe
it's important. It's not saying it's absolutely important, but maybe it's
important. Maybe it's important to do even if that seems like you're acting.
Maybe it's important for you to act, in the sense of play-act. Go through
the motions. Pretending to be doing something, because it's only by doing
that, that you learn how to do it. [LAUGHS] Let me just say that again ...
Richard: It's not being that categorical, though, is it?
Cahal: It's not being that categorical, but it seems to me that it's
about whether it's important to act. And that is 'act' both in the sense of
doing something, or in the sense of play-acting, pretending, going through the
motions of doing something. The number of ways in which that is approached to
the point where something, maybe like total confusion, or unutterability, wins
out in the end ... It seems to me that, if that foot-note wasn't there, we could
stick with it as word games, and almost not ask ourselves what does 'important'
and 'acting' mean? This is a poem about: it's important to act in one of two
ways, and both ways are considered. And why is it important? There are a number
of attempts to say in what way it might be important, and they're suggesting
that it might be important to act as if it was important. Does the fact that
you are going through the motions and not really doing the thing -- does that
still matter? Because if somebody said afterwards, 'Oh, you were only pretending,
there,' does the acting therefore count for something? 'Was it, if it was important,
acting?' In other words, was it in fact, only faking? Or was it true? Was it,
nonetheless, important?
Richard: And does the form itself suggest that, in that it is, obviously,
only acting, because this is completely unrealistic? And does it matter that
it is utterly unrealistic? That it's actually a process of sifting, of iterating
(if that's a word), can we still take it seriously?
Cahal: I think that's a valid point but I think I would describe it as going from a positive statement to a complete failure of utterance at the end -- an inability to form a coherent sentence at the end. And that inability comes from doubts, not just about whether the thing itself was important, but doubts about whether doing something when you're not entirely convinced is better than not doing it. Whether there's some value in doing it -- you might learn what the value in it is. If you said 'I won't do that because if I did, I would only be faking', you would never become part of the process. It's one of the continuing concerns I have about writing. Some people I know imagine that it comes fully fledged, and their poems are absolutely brilliant, and they know they're brilliant, because they make the hair stand on the back of the neck, or one of those cliches. And that doesn't happen to me very much.
Richard: [LAUGHS]
Cahal: What does happen is the process; is the feeling that I'm doing
the process. People are always saying: 'I can spot a fake' ...'So-and-so's a
great critic, he can spot a fake'. And I don't know whether I'm somebody who
can spot a fake or whether I am a fake, or whether just doing it is enough,
when it's craft, when it's art.
Leona: Whether there's such a thing as a fake.
Cahal: Yeah. Indeed. Of course there is, if someone's laughing at you,
but then, the person who reads a text and says: 'This is really good, I would
write a page of criticism on this' and then somebody else says, 'Oh, I only
made it up' -- the point is, they've made up a really good one! Literary
hoaxes don't amuse me at all É. This Ern Malley thing, this supposed modernist
poet [who was invented by two poets in Australia] ... people wrote hard-working
essays on him, then they became part of the process. The fact that the first
stage of the process was a hoax is irrelevant, because it was written by
people who had the capability of writing modernist poetry, and the fact that
they didn't 'feel' it is undetectable, frankly. So it's all of about good
texts. And therefore, whenI'm faced with a situation where somebody who says:
'Will you join this process, protest, progress, anything -- will you do
this?' And that might be about how you live your life, it might be about
integrity, it might be about how you do your job. Am I only acting, what
I do at my work? Yes, and no. Is it as important if I'm only acting? Maybe,
but I'm doing the same things ... and maybe only by doing it will I ever
be it. Maybe everybody else is doing it as well. So there's an awful lot
of that in here. By paraphrasing, by trying to make out what these things
are saying ... This seems to be pushing us towards it: if you're faced with
something, and you say 'If I do that, I would be a fake, but maybe by doing
it, I would learn to be the real thing.'
Leona: Have you read Erving Goffman's 'Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life'? The book that changed my life.
Elizabeth: Really?
Leona: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Go on. On the back of a postcard.
Leona: On the back of a postcard ... He says more-or-less what you say
here. It made me think about those sorts of things ... if this is what we're
doing. Is it real, and is anything important? I had a real crisis of humanity
over that book, and it was about those kind of things ... When you go out into
your family and into the work-place, and into the shops and so on, and you may
present a different self in all these different places. Are any of them less
real than the others? I mean, that's not the book in a nutshell.
Cahal: But you think that's one of the things coming out of it.
Leona: Yeah. It's an interesting poem, because for me, it invites me
to populate it with things that might be being acted, and ... [TO CAHAL] you
did a lot of talking about writing. There were two things I was tempted to populate
it with: and one was loving someone, and in the end you actually got to the
kissing, and the words are coming like kisses, and the other is 'Service American
Style'. You know, people always say '"Have A Good Day!" -- I hate
Americans saying that. They don't mean it'.
Elizabeth: No, they do mean it! Just because they're acting doesn't
mean they don't mean it.
[PAUSE]
Kim: What I liked was when you look at a
word, and it's repeated and repeated and repeated -- suddenly you don't really
understand what it is. So the word 'important' on the page when you read
it -- I like the way you broke it down at the end, because in fact I didn't
understand it by the time it had been said so many times. And
also, I liked the way that you read it, because it didn't really make any
difference that nothing made sense at the end. It all sounded wonderful --
which is, of course, what acting is about, isn't it?
Hugh: Yeah. [TO CAHAL] I agree with a lot of what you say, Cahal, but
disagree with your interpretation of the end, because you see it as a failure
of articulation, and I don't hear failure.
Cahal: You're right. I didn't hear it. I decided that from the paper
before I heard it read, and I think something more interesting was happening
in the reading ... but even on paper, the fact that in the end, it creates new
words, or things that might be words, is interesting, even if not important.
Kim: Or important, if not interesting.
Cahal: [REFERRING TO THE FOOTNOTE] There isn't just a possibility that
Ross has mistranslated Aristotle,
and it doesn't say exactly that?
Elizabeth: Well, it's hard to say, but it says it so delightfully, doesn't
it.
Cahal: Good.
Elizabeth: That whole chapter is full of wonderful things.
Cahal: Yeah, if it says what I think it says, it says something that
I've been thinking a lot about. You know when we talk about how there's too
much poetry around ... Part of me wants to say, that it's better that people
keep doing it, so long as they're not faking, better that we keep involved in
the process, than that we have just one or two bits of pure and good art.
Leona: What's 'faking.' You mean trying to put something over on you?
Cahal: 'Faking it.' Let's just think of it as a quality. Is
it better that a large amount of people act as though they were poets (and
I don't mean that in the Oscar Wilde sense). I mean, do the act of writing
poetry, and try to get good, rather than that people say, 'Well, if I can't
write like x, then I'll simply sit and not write poetry'. It seems to me
the process of acting -- and I'm not talking about acting as faith, but acting
as doing -- in every walk of life, doing is more important than trying to
decide whether something is absolutely the perfect ... the perfect expression,
the purest idea.
Leona: Or sincere. Is sincere the opposite of acting?
Cahal: Yeah, but ... is it better to act if you're not absolutely sure
whether you're a fake or not É is it better to go with the process rather than
debate whether you might be sincere, or whether other people might have access
to another level of sincerity you don't have.
Leona: It depends on the outcome. It's like most actions. It depends
on the effect of the actions.
Cahal: Yeah. I think that's right as well.
Leona: What's it going to do to your life, and thelives of others.
Elizabeth: The action does make a difference to the person you are,
actually
Leona: Yeah.
Cahal: You learn by doing. You become by doing
Elizabeth: You become. That's right.
Cahal: And to not do it – we know that whatever your doubts are, if you don't do it, nothing's going to change.
Elizabeth: But if you do it, you might turn out to be good or bad.
Cahal: Yeah. There does seem to be a good and bad issue here. I think
apart from whatever your perception of good and bad is, the question of whether
you act, either by going through the process where you're not 100% sure whether
you're going to be good at it or not, or act in the sense of doing something,
physically act, both of those -- the debate seems to be: Are both of those preferable
in that you want to become that thing? Let's say you play the piano very badly
...
Elizabeth: The lyre, is what Aristotle says -- he says that playing
the lyre produces good lyre players and bad lyre players.
Cahal: So is it better that a large number of people sit down to play
the piano ... but all the worst ones will get better, I mean, this is the difference
between --
Elizabeth: Not if they start with bad habits!
Cahal: Well, ok, right. There's probably more to that one sentence.
But, yeah, absolutely. But I still think that we're in a world in which, if
you can't be really good at something, the less people will do with it, because
there is so much else that's around.
Kim: I don't think people care about whether they're good, as long as
they have the recognition.
Leona: If you go to some of these 'open mike'
poetry readings, either people don't have any concept of whether they're
good or bad, or they don't care. What they care about is getting their moment
in front of the microphone, and their voices amplified, and everyone is hearing
it, and then they leave after that.
Kim: [LAUGHS, AGREEING WITH LEONA] They come just before, and they leave
right after. And all their friends come, and leave with them.
Cahal: Ok. Playing the lyre, or the piano, or standing at an open mike
session .. I wasn't talking purely about acting in the sense of doing the thing,
whether you're good or bad, but taking part in the process, and the process
for those people, as with the piano-player and the lyre-player, is to learn
and to work at, and to perform a little bit, and to take criticism ... The process
is coming here, to this workshop, the process is getting into a small magazine,
for this particular thing, poetry. The process for the piano-player is to learn
a little bit, and take criticism, and take lessons and practise, and do all
those things, and I think there was a world in which more people did things
in the hope of being good -- not in the hope of being good in the Albert Hall,
but in the hope of being good among six people.
Leona: Yeah. And being adequate enough that their immediate circle of
family and friends could enjoy what they were doing
Cahal: And it could grow from that. The difference is now that so much
good -- good in the sense of professional -- is easily available by turning
a switch, that a lot of that has been lost in music, obviously. The number of
people who played music socially ... whatever the hobby, there are far fewer
amateur lapidarists, there are far fewer people with a microscope, there are
far fewer people doing chemistry ...
Leona: Do you know that for a fact?
Cahal: Oh yes. Oh yes. At least, no --
Richard: [LAUGHS, TO KIM] That's a relief.
Cahal: I know it for a fact in Northern Ireland, only because I've studied
the whole Victorian movement there. I mean, brass bands. How many people play
in brass bands live. There's about two brass bands in England.
Leona: I know so many people who are in amateur choirs and do astromony
and very active in natural history, and I just wonder ...
Cahal: Maybe we disagree about that. What I know is that kids growing
up have a lot less, I think our generation had a lot less than my grandparents'
generation, in terms of drawing things, and doing things, and believing you
could never learn enough. Of course, you could say that science has become so
sophisticated that a person in a back-shed with his microscope isn't going to
discover something new. They didn't believe that in the Victorian age. So that's
important that people do the process, even if they're not going to be the most
famous, if they're not going to invent something unique, that the whole world
recognises; it's important that they crack on with the part of it.
Kim: I don't know. This seems like a very adolescent sort of poem, too.
If it's important ... or is it acting? Those are the sorts of things you worry
about when you're young
Cahal: I never worried about that when I was young. I was confident.
Leona: Yeah, I didn't start worrying about anything until I was a mature
student.
Kim: I've grown out of that. I don't see it as 'confidence', I see it
as 'insecurity' to wonder if it's important, and back to 'is important, is important,
is important'. All those permutations Where now I just do it.
Leona: But when you have your mid-life crisis, you'll start worrying about it again!
Elizabeth: [TO THE GROUP] Thank you very much! Kim, which is the next poem on your pile? Is it Richard?