Themes discussed include:
Hiroshima | guilt
| metaphor | goddesses
| smallness | tone
| punctuation | flames
and walls (according to the poet)
Leona: [BEFORE READING OUT POEM] There are a couple of things that I'd like to get out of this. Mainly, this is something reworked in order to go into the sequence I'm writing – the Hale-Bopp Poems – which have got stuck on things like comets and planets; and things like planets die, and this is a sort of planetary thing. So I'd like some sort of feed-back on whether people think I'm mad to think this is OK.
Kim: I like the line "Our grass is green. Our roses seem to flourish." The 'seem to' makes you doubt the speakers, it seems like they are unreliable narrators. Which is nice, because it makes you judge what they are saying, not just taking it as fact. And that makes it all very sad.
Elizabeth: What's the actual scenario? I mean, is it something later on, or is it a way of talking about now. In which case, what's the "shadow of death etched upon the wall?"
Cahal: That's Hiroshima, isn't it?
Elizabeth: Right. Right.
Cahal: And "since then" is what we've done since we unleased the weapons, isn't it. I mean, that's one construction. And if that's Hiroshima, then since then what we've been walking in is not a real earth, but a crematorium garden in which the grass may be green and the roses seem to flourish, but in fact, what it's about is death and burning. And "no one misses innocence" … I suppose it's saying, if we take that sort of reading of it, that no one is actually critical of the loss of innocence from the time before that. And that's not strictly true, I shouldn't have thought. It's not literally true that the time before the atom bomb was a time when the world was good and everything was unpolluted, and so on. And yet, if we read innocence as just being that one thing that is lost, that's too narrow. But maybe Hiroshima is only one of the many things we've been doing for millions of years, that is a loss of innocence … and we've made ourselves at home in this place, knowing that it's irreparable, we actually do fiddley little things to try and put it right, thinking we have endless chances, I suppose, like kids. The idea of the children is the most important thing, I think. The naivety with which we think we can do this. The fact that we're unequal to the argument … and awaiting flames … Are the children? Are the foolish children, who don't see what they've lost, or the world we're living in, the world post-destruction, post-death. Are they actually the ones who are going to destroy the world, or just be unable to stop. We're both, aren't we? We're the kids who don't say anything; who try to patch up the damage … I think these kids are playing with matches. It's hard to get from their "mother will forgive us once again" to the "awating flames."
Kim: Well, Gaia is Mother Earth, so it's quite a literal poem, actually. To be thrown out of the Garden of Eden into what you think is a garden, but is a cemetery.
Cahal: Yes … I'm not quite sure why she's awaiting flames.
Kim: It's biblical, isn't it? I mean, the world is going to end in flames
Cahal: It is? The bible?
Kim: I think so …
Cahal: I'm not sure, quite frankly.
Richard: Well, it's broadly apocalyptic, isn't it?
Elizabeth: Well, but that's part of the realm of it all being our fault, because of the atom-bomb, isn't it? If it's just a matter of the apocalypse is going to come, it's going to come.
Cahal: Yes, the atom bomb, and all that is involved in that, which is science, development, pollution …
Richard: Apocalypse is somehow associated with human guilt, isn't it? Although yes, it probably is going to happen, whether or not we're very good from now on. Still, associated with guilt, because that's when Judgement comes. And somehow it's got transferred. Somehow Apocalypse is actually human-made.
Elizabeth: Yes, that's right.
Richard: It's punishing. Yeah.
Elizabeth: I mean the real apocalypse is a lottery or something. But this apocalypse is because you've actually set fire to something, or something like that. So you've caused it. In a literal way.
Cahal: Which is only to say that New Ageism is more guilt-ridden than Christianity. Well Christianity says the world will end, and it isn't your fault, because it was always meant to end. 'How you'll be caught-out when it ends' is what Christianity's about. When, in fact, the whole ecology business says 'you're making it do this'. Whether that suggests an alternative reading that says if you didn't do all these things, like have cars and atom-bombs and so on, the world might go on forever – I don't know.
Kim: But don't you think if you put this poem back into its context, because it's part of the Hale-Bopp series now …
Elizabeth: Well, it is now.
Kim: … we are going to assume that when it says: "awaiting flames," the flames will be the comet hitting the earth, and that's whats going to destroy the earth, because we're nasty people.
Richard: I don't think it's that specific. I think it is about decentre-ing the planet. I'm thinking about it as just one of the rocks in the universe. One of the grains of sand. Maybe smaller than that. I don't think it's that specific …
Kim: I just think when you put it back into the context of the other poems, that's how you'll direct your reading.
Elizabeth: Yes, it might.
Richard: I think it will.
Elizabeth: I think it might be unsatisfactory.
Richard: Why is it unsatisfactory without it?
Elizabeth: Well, to me this isn't … there are one or two really nice things in it but I don't find it rises out of the fairly common-place. You know, 'gaia' and 'now'. It kind of generalises about it. I think what's good in this is this phrase: "the shadow of death etched upon a wall/ stands witness as long as the wall stands" – which kind of disrupts the regularity of the meter, and is a great phrase. It's a great line and a half. But actually, I don't find really any of the rest of it very exciting. It's not out-of-the- ordinary now. This may be because since this was written, we've had another decade of people talking in this language.
Leona: A decade and a half.
Cahal: I think my objection isn't that objection, my concern is that if there's a metaphor of a mother and children, then I think metaphors have to work exactly right. I can't see that, in the state that these children remain, is imagining that in spite of their efforts, mother will make it ok, I can't see how we can jump from that to the Mother turning oblivious in her sleep. 'Pain' yes, but 'harvest'? Part of it is that there are two different terms – one's a metaphoric mother, and one's a real mother, but why is she awaiting flames? Because even if you've got kids playing out in the backyard, there's no logical connection between that, and the fact that the mother is sleeping. The metaphor fails, there. Because the metaphor were using is a mother and children. We can't see why a mother is sleeping simply because her children are careless, and why she should be awaiting flames.
Richard: You can't await if you're oblivious.
Hugh: That's what worried me. I was worried about 'oblivious' and 'await.'
Richard: Unless she's specifically oblivious to one thing, but not to another.
Hugh: But we're just told 'oblivious.'
Richard: Well, because it's so close to the entreaty, you might think it's that she''s just oblivious to that, but I don't think so myself.
Kim: [AGREEING WITH RICHARD] No, because you get another comma after 'oblivious.'
Elizabeth: Yes, she has gone on making it clean. She hasn't actually fallen apart, quite.
Richard: I think I've got a problem with Mums (LAUGHS) I think it's more a question of taste. It's a taste of mummies and mothers. I see this as kind of a San Francisco Mama Cass, sort of … I feel uncomfortable about that. I feel uncomfortable because - I think it's also to do with Goddesses and I wonder about these Goddesses. I think they'd be a lot more frightening; a lot more chaotic and much more of authority figures than this drugged-out slumbering Mama Cass. [LAUGHS] I think they would give punishment as the Goddesses used to.
Kim: So you're an Old Ageist, rather than a New Ageist
Richard: I think I am. I go back to the Stone Age, I think. This is slightly - icky.
Elizabeth: I obviously like the beginning and I like "pain engraved in her harvest."
Kim: Mmmm. The speaker's obviously urban, though. The whole sense of 'soiling' the earth's garment – where 'soiling' means 'dirty.' It doesn't mean dirt. It's interesting.
Cahal: Is that obviously urban, or just the writer.
Kim: No. It's a poeticism, actually - 'soiling'
Cahal: Is it?
Kim: Or it's 'shit.' 'Soiling yourself.'
Cahal: I think as far as "small making and mending" it's working really well. But right from "the shadow of death," if you just look at this as a comment – nothing particularly metaphoric – it is actually tightly constructed, clear – the crematorium garden is obviously an image, or an allusion. "We've made ourselves at home in the place of destruction … down to "small making and mending." That seems to me a fine denunciation of what we try to do. It has a prayerful rather than biblical sound. It's working very well, the language is right, whether it's kind of evangelical or ritualistic, it's working. And then I think 'soiling' and "Mother will forgive us once again, once again" and then the Mother is some kind of she-god, lioness, actual Earth. it's just too hard to grasp. Both the kiddie bit and the Mother bit are too hard to grasp, in the light of the fact of what was being said was very effective sort of discourse. It's straight discourse up to that point. The idea of the cremetorium garden and the garden of Eden are both things we would take, you know, they're metaphors, but they're not big, out-of-the-way metaphors, they're things that we can get very quickly as we're reading through, and they don't take us away from the notion of an earth that is spoiled, we're now living in the post-funeral phase. It really does all work, right down to "small making and mending." I just don't think the last sort of six, five lines do.
Kim: There are some post-sonnetty things going on. I think there are eleven syllables in every line.
Elizabeth: No. I've just been counting.
Kim: No? There's some counting going on there – that's what's giving you that slightly fractured …
Richard: There's something almost kitsch about this.
Elizabeth: There are lots of really lovely line endings.
Kim: Yes.
Richard: It's like a Star Trek planet.
Cahal: Is it kitsch after the line I mentioned or before?
Richard: I think it's kitsch when it gets to "soiling earth's garments."
Kim: [AGREEING WITH RICHARD] Yeah.
Cahal: "making and mending" There's almost a total poem there. I think there's a weight there. That seems to me such a climax to this kind of discourse. The 'smallnesss' of "small making and mending." Why 'small'? Not 'small bits of making and mending.' Just "small making and mending." It's as if somebody put a sign up outside their house saying 'small making and mending done here.' I don't know whether the phrase works like that. Theres a wonderful line in the song 'Bread and Roses' which is: 'small art and love and beauty.' The juxtaposition: what is small art? And yet, it's brilliant. That 'small making and mending' seems to come from that discourse.
Elizabeth: I mean, the "making and mending" usually comes from the mother, on the whole, rather than the children. It's part of what she does for you, rather than you do yourself.
Cahal: In fact, there are no children up to that point, there are only people.
Elizabeth: Yes. And of course, they don't have to be very little. It isn't kiddies, actually.
Cahal: Yes
Leona: We're all children.
Cahal: Isn't that what's difficult: moving as a group of us – a group of adults who are deluded into thinking that in the face of this irreparable damage we can potter about doing our tiny little bits and putting it right – to move from there to children – technically children – or adults who are behaving like children, because they are saying "Mother will forgive us yet again." We're talking now about naiveté, messiness, lack of responsibility.
Elizabeth: Yes, but not to the point to which we, 'we' in the poem, are having some self-awareness. It's in speech marks.
Kim: I don't know. I think I'd rather have a 'We will be forgiven' rather than that 'the mother will.'
Cahal: But it's not self-awareness. We're saying "it will cling" 'we're okay' 'the earth will stand us through this' 'mother will let us off.' If we are the people, up to this point, who are collectively messing it up, failing to recognise our problems, then there comes a distance, because there's the conscious in the last five lines and there's the ones who say, and will claim "Mother will forgive us once again, once again." Now, they're not quite the 'we' because the consciousness in the poem doesn't subscribe to that, because that's too naíve for it.
Kim: Yes, I agree.
Cahal: So we're separated into the smart ones of us, and the stupid ones who are kind of child-like, who keep going crying to Mummy. And that kind of shift, jarrs.
Elizabeth: Except that kind of a shift is what we are all in, in fact.
Cahal: Oh, I'm not saying it isn't true, but does it feel good, does it feel right, does it really hit you, and you think 'Oh yeah, so I'm one of those ones.' I don't feel that either of them is a 'we.'
Elizabeth: Nevertheless, that might be the most important thing about the poem. That actually everybody is in this double consciousness of being perfectly aware. We know, for that matter, that smoking kills you. And we go on doing it. We are these two consciousness of action. And maybe that's the most important thing about the poem.
Richard: I think that might be what is wrong with it, because it suggests that there are simple choices to be made.
Elizabeth: No! We are not making the right choices, even though we know what –
Richard: There aren't choices to be made. That is one of the problems. It's not a case of knowing what's right and then doing it. It''s much more complicated than that. And that's one of the problems with this naiveté.
Hugh: It wasn't that complicated fifteen years ago, though.
Elizabeth: Yes, I think so.
Richard: I think it was.
Kim: These children come from a specific sort of Middle England as well, where they have roses.
Cahal: So what's the problem here? I think it's one of tone.
Kim: Mmmm.
Cahal: As much as image. And I think there's some kind of a tone set up that is logical, powerful, argumentative, almost political discourse, but it's much closer to home than political discourse. It seems to work. And it moves to another tone that let's us see how stupid we are, and that's the point where I bail out [LAUGHS] I could argue that discomfort is effective, but I don't believe it is. I think if somone says 'in the face of irreparable rips in the fabric, why are you bothering doing a bit of stitching and sewing?' I'd say, 'That's right: Stuff it.' But I would see the stupidity of that. That to me is – there's a Greek word for – for putting those two things together – what's the Greek word for it?. [GENERAL LAUGHTER]
Kim: Shall we finish Leona's poem?
Leona: Well, I think we're probably done. I mean, is there anything more useful to say?
Elizabeth: Is there anything you'd like to ask us?
Leona: Well, just a fiddley point. I put the words after "thinking" in quote marks, and I was wondering if they should be in italics instead.
Kim: Well, since we've cut all those … [LAUGHS] it doesn't matter any more.
Richard: [LAUGHS] This dialogue is out.
Elizabeth: To be honest, I don't think you should do anything. I think you should just have a capital I for 'It.'
Kim: Oh yes! So it would be free-indirect speech.
Leona: Right. Yeah …
Elizabeth: And then maybe, conceivably, you might want to have something other than a full stop.
Richard: Yes, that's sounding better.
Leona: So you get rid of the quote marks?
Richard: I think that's just small making and mending, though.
Elizabeth: Well, that's what we were asked to do.
Leona: Yes, it was a small making and mending sort of question.
Elizabeth: Yes. Leona, I'm sorry I didn't like it all that much.
Leona: No, you don't have to like it.
Cahal: I loved it, up to a point. Something goes wrong after that.
Kim: Mmm. Except you can't end with a "small making and mending." That's too small an ending.
Cahal: I liked it.
Kim: Mmm. I like something big like the Titanic. Epic.
Leona: Do people think it does work without the last bit?
Cahal: I'm not really sure. I hate things where you say: 'get rid of all this' or 'get rid of a whole chunk.' I just have a feeling that it's after that that I start to get uncomfortable. One argument is that the poem's wrong, and the other argument is that the poem's telling me something that makes me fell uncomfortable, and that might be good. I'm not really campaigning for it to end there, but just can't quite see exactly what's wrong after that.
Elizabeth: I think it could be transformed for me by being in context. Particularly, if, for instance, the mother turns and gets up, or something quite dramatic happens next. And then it could start to make some sort of sense.
Richard: Or if you leave the idea of the mother with the speech, and just finish it with "Once again. Once again."
Kim: Oh yes, that's quite nice. Yes.
Richard: And not actually realise the metaphor.
Leona: Yes. I suppose my problem with that is wanting to get to the flames.
Cahal: The other part of that is: if we're saying "once again, once again," we have to be doing something.
Leona: Maybe the children are waiting
Cahal: You have to see the danger without telling it. I think you have to see the foolishness of these children, thinking it can all be put right.
Kim: Yeah. And they can't. That's the important bit.
Cahal: We have to be able to see from their behaviour, what they're going to do.
Leona: If you think about the context, the flames can be a number of sorts of flames, if you stick with the biblical, people talked about the biblical flames, and the atomic flames, but there's also this idea of the comet, and astroid. And back at the beginning, just for your information, the wall in Hiroshima's not the only 'shadowed wall' that is standing witness. The Holocaust memorial and the Vietnam memorial. I think that that's not just in my imagination, because other people have responded to those, depending on their own experience, without thinking of Hiroshima at all…. Thank you. I thank you.