Bringing more grass, under feet treading concrete, hundreds of miles from home, and the ground has names, songs full of grief, sounds that belong to a single stream, Kasegv, the place of the mayor, Kumrava, the valley of speech, utchings of wind, Fridlas, the blue moorland, filled by the sky. The farm passed down, yet never possessed, lives father to son, mother to child, feeding the people with sheep, the sheep with grass, and memory, with years, lived looking at mountains. One single glance of a hillside darkened by cloud is enough to sense the world it breathes, and this world needs all the breath we have, Karnathluelen, Karnath-Datheth, Karnath-Uchath, all the Karnevi, Erelen of the shining light, Droskul, the endless ridge curving to nothing. One man I know loved this place so much, he said he'd found his place to die. Years I knew him, walking the high moorlines or watching the calls of a winter fire in the cottage grate, and die he did, die he did, but not before one month's final joy

[01:05]

in wild creation gave him that full sight he'd glimpsed in Blake. He too wrestled with his angel, in and out of hospital, the white sheets and clouds unfolded to the mountain's bracing sense of space, now he was ready, his heart so long at the edge of the nest shook its wings and flew into the hills he loved, became the hills he loved, walked with an easy rest, cradled by the faith he'd nursed for years in doubt. His ashes are scattered over by Abba, the water, continually saying his name, as I still go home to Talaga, speaking the names of those I know, speaking the names of those I love. So that was written years ago, and I've recited that for years, and then suddenly I wake up four o'clock in the morning, and I just felt his presence there, like a living being, and

[02:07]

I walked into the kitchen, and I was sat at the big kitchen table there in Yorkshire, and with a fireplace, but the fire was empty, and it reminded me all the more of that coal fire we used to sit in front of, because those cottages in Wales are so damp and cold, you've got a fire going, it's the same temperature in that cottage in the middle of summer as it is in the middle of winter, there's this stone, stone, stone everywhere, so it just holds the temperature almost like the sea. And so I was thinking of Michael and that fire, and how we sat on either side of that fire like two bookends, you know, and how we got to know each other at the side of that fire, and I suddenly realized that the new fire between us was the boundary between his world and mine, you know, and he knew what it was like to be the other side of that boundary and I didn't, and we were sat on either side of it now, and now the roles were reversed

[03:10]

because I was hearing his voice talking about something I was wondering about, you know, what it was like to have passed on from this world. So this is the conversation I had with him. It's called Firelight and Memory. Firelight and Memory. The way the fire held in the grate from day to day through that long winter. I'd just come back from South America living on the equator, you know, in a pair of shorts for two years, and I was plunged back into these dark firelit rooms in North Wales, and

[04:12]

you walked out the door, you got a face full of cold horizontal rain, you know, so it was quite a transition for me to enter the rest of my life, you know. The way the fire held in the grate from day to day through that long winter. You'd think the black coal was nestled in the flames by invisible hens, because in my memory we barely stirred from talking. That year I came back from the islands, the hearth blazed through a whole winter of listening and telling. You leaning forward toward the warmth, hand raised just like mine is now above the page, so your palm cupped and held the glowing fire, and your forehead creased with bearing down on the issue until you had it just right in your mind and could feel it beginning to grow in mine. Outside the long valley of the Ogwen was full of wind and bending trees, night after November night in those cold rains. Our minds grew numb to the outside sky, and we drew together for warmth like the sheep

[05:16]

huddled in twos or threes about the farm, hugging the walls and the frost-scarred hollows. Our faces were lit by the fire, but our backs, like theirs, were turned to the outside gale. Inside the talk fought hard against that dark, the gales a constant backdrop to our exploratory wintering blether. That winter we spent together in front of the endless fire. Everything we said seemed necessary and important. I see you're still talking now. Looking back to me over your shoulder from the kitchen counter, the teapot in your left hand while the kettle bubbled and steamed in your right, carrying the point of that argument through every movement until the final satisfying set of the lid in the pot. You wanted to know, you said, if Blake was true in his meeting with the angels, or had exaggerated an intuition to make the point we stand in conversation with worlds larger

[06:20]

than ourselves. I loved the youthful argument then, but sense now, looking back, haunting possibilities to that final inquiry. So that affirmation or negation of your repeated question has enormous consequence, and you stand there, right across my past, as if blocking further access to my future. Looking in me for a truth I'm not yet ready to know. In that kitchen, you still keep on talking, and I, remembering you, year after year, keep listening. But then it was almost always my enthusiastic talk to your concentrated listening, night after night, until our November acquaintance eased by January into firm friendship. And I remember one midnight, the exact moment we first recognized a companionship that remained solid for a lifetime, laughing and raising the winking glasses.

[07:21]

And in a delight at odds with the shrieking through the trees, we fell into a mutual discovery of lines each of us had memorized alone, our faces glowing equally with brandy, bravo lines of Blake, and the leaping fire. We walked the hills in short bursts between stinging showers. I always have to laugh when I think of Michael walking because we used to make our sandwiches before we'd go. We'd spend quite a bit in deciding what we were going to have and making it. Then we'd pack the sandwiches up and we'd walk about 200 yards. And Michael would sit down and eat his sandwich. And I'd say, what are you doing? We've got a whole day to go. He said, I know. If I don't eat it now, I'll just be thinking about it all day. So. We walked the hills in short bursts between stinging showers, boiled the few eggs the

[08:22]

hens could muster to an exact softness we thought could bring a best beginning and a rightness to the day. We, with barely a hint of spring in that sharp air, in the very cellar of winter, and snugged off from the tumult of the world, were living out a summer of our friendship. We, in the very cellar of winter, and snugged off from the tumult of the world, were living out a summer of our friendship. And I know now, like every other summer in my northern memory, too short, too much belonging to close affections, too untouchable by the present, and not recalled or remembered enough. After that, just a few memories more of you ghost through my mind, like the sun's last rays passing over the spread red bracken of a Welsh September. Then right above the ridge at Tanagath, I see your quick, distant walking silhouette, and you're gone. I woke this morning with those lit memories living in my mind, and now recalling you,

[09:22]

the warmth from that fire still heats my face and has me look across the empty grate to find you. Your eyes half-closed in concentration, and your face raised, I see you forever framed in firelight, and now I cannot tell if your serious angel visits me through distant memory or close proximity. And now I cannot tell if your serious angel visits me through distant memory or close proximity. You are there, then, in that time so utterly that my present seems stillborn. You are there in that time so utterly that my present seems stillborn, waiting, catching its breath for you to finish your sentence. So strange that you should arrest me so, your point always being that every corner of creation sings its own aliveness and speaks to us in tongues we are afraid to learn. Memory convinces me you're as alive now as you were then. Me on this side, you on the other.

[10:25]

The fire now burning between us, the one that separates my life from your death. This fire lights my face on one side and yours on the other, and I see my fear at making a future transition to your rested habitation is a deep puzzle that frets you. You want to know my fear, and you see in my face a need for your persuasion. I find the depth of our friendship with you gone has terrible consequences and makes me think of the possibilities of a life to come. You make me long for a future in which our past together is still alive. I put the pen to rest on the table and turn to hear your imagined invitation. By an empty grate, I trust again to your companionship. My idea of faith this morning, you and I, by some bright fire, snug against the winter of any past or future disappearance.

[11:27]

So, conversations with that. Where does the poetry come from? Does it come from old memories? Does it come from the invitations? Does it come from the inner conversations? Where does it come from? I don't know. It comes from the frontier, you know, that white page comes from sitting down and facing things and finding the words for it. But it's been a long apprenticeship, you know, you start just by trying to get the sounds right and that's all you can do to begin with. You can't, it's very difficult to think in a poem when you first start writing. You shouldn't really because you're not ready for it yet. And so it takes a good few years before I think, before you can think and still write good poetry. Coleridge said, no poet begins in philosophy or they write bad poetry.

[12:42]

But every poet becomes a philosopher. That's a lovely line. So I just started it and there's a beautiful moment in Wordsworth's Prelude where he remembers this young boy and he remembers him very poignantly because he died, the young boy, Wordsworth's friend died soon after this event. But Wordsworth remembers how this friend of his used to creep to the lake to practice making owl sounds because he wanted to call the owls on the other side of the lake. And Wordsworth watched him night after night and he couldn't do it, you know, blowing into his fist and went off by himself so he wouldn't be humiliated, you know, in front of all his school friends trying to make this sound which perhaps many of his friends could already do. And then eventually the boy standing there on this little ear of land which is still there at Eswait Lake, just outside the village of Hawkeshead, he made the sound and didn't

[13:44]

all the owls of the world call back from the trees on the other side of the lake. And so Wordsworth saw this as the absolute essence of writing poetry, that you would make a sound which would elicit an answering call from the world. All the owls of the world light up and call back to you. And when you hear it, you know, you're ready for further discourse, you know. But there's part of you, you know, that has the language and the knowledge for things which your ordinary, everyday personality is too afraid of, you know. So whatever corner of the world where you can sit down and apprentice yourself to that frontier, you'd have an equal art in it, an equal sense of surprise and articulation.

[14:45]

But ultimately I don't know where, I don't know when, it can't be answered. Memory is the mother of the muses, the Greeks said, meaning what it means to be fully human, fully this human, the edge of your own life, trying to say it. There's an astonishing moment in Russian poetic history when Anna Akhmatova was standing in the gray line outside the police station waiting for news of her son who was off in the gulags. And she was there with hundreds of other people all waiting for news of lost relatives. It was just a horrible, horrible situation. And often you'd find out that your relative was dead just by the fact that they'd sent all their belongings, you know, in a package and it would just say dead on it. And that was it, that's how you found out, you know, so it's awful. And this woman found out somehow in the line, she found out that this was Anna Akhmatova standing behind her. And it's written down in Akhmatova's diary.

[15:48]

This woman turned to her and said, can you describe this? Meaning this gray horror that they're a part of. And Akhmatova said, yes, so she said, just yes. And in the diary Akhmatova says, then something like a smile passed over what had once been her face. Just the fact that someone could say it, you know, could describe it, meant you were not alone, you know, and you were part of a larger human community which might have been temporarily forgotten in that madness, but it was still there, you know. So, the basis, to me, of all these marriages is allowing the other person to have their own life, allowing creation to have its own life, having the person you're working with,

[16:52]

having, letting your work have its own life, and in a way take it, you know, take you to places where you're not totally in control, but you do feel as if you're actually part of the conversation. And I do think that in every marriage there's a ritual kind of humiliation that you have to go through. And you'll see couples actually play with this humiliation all the time. Part of the knowledge of intimacy is always being able to bring the other person down to ground, you know. Of course, there's a shadow side to that, you know, where you'll never let the person, you'll never let the genius of the other person out at all, because you're constantly bringing them down, you know, through your joking, through whatever it is, you know, and that would be the shadow side of it, but there's a lovely kind of mutual humiliation in which you're constantly returned to the ground of your being, to the humus of your being, through

[17:53]

being in proximity to this other person. And the other ability is to constantly be giving the other person away, to be giving your work away, to be not held ransom to it, so you can go in and you don't have things hanging over you. You're constantly giving it away, so you feel as if you have freedom. You know, one of the great difficulties of people who've worked 30 years at Kodak or Boeing is they've created a parent-child relationship, and whenever it comes to a courageous conversation, they will always finesse it, because the idea of leaving is so traumatic, of leaving that father and mother behind, that you would never even move in that direction. So I often say you have to take the part of you that doesn't belong to the organization through the door every day. So it can either be a silent witness, and whatever work that is that you're doing, the

[18:56]

part of you that actually doesn't belong there, that has much bigger fish to fry, that always wonders about what you're doing, that's a very healthy person to have with you as a companion, and who's always looking at other horizons. And it's not, I don't think it's actually undermining you, it's actually giving you the ability to have an adult-adult relationship. You are not my whole world, therefore I can actually allow you to be an individual person and not someone who has power over me. So the same thing with your partner, you know, your spouse, your partner, constantly giving them away. There's a beautiful line by Gabriel Garcia Marquez about his wife, in an interview, where he's asked about his long happy marriage, which is unusual for artists, you know. And he says, you know, I know her so well that I haven't a clue who she is.

[19:56]

And it's a beautiful line because what he's saying is he's constantly able to look at her with surprise, you know, as if he's just met her for the first time, and to allow the other person to surprise you, because they're not the same person you met, you know, there's part of them, a core of them, but you're actually on a parallel pilgrimage, and if you lose that conversation you'll very quickly become strangers to one another. Same thing with your work, same thing with yourself, you become a stranger to yourself if you don't take the marriage, you know, the intimacy of the marriage with yourself seriously. Yes, yes, I'd say so.

[21:21]

I think I was working in one little corner there, I don't think you could say it for every situation, that confusion is diagnostic of falsehood, but I'd say it often is. But there's a way, actually, of living, you know, between different possibilities, where you don't feel confused by it, you're just waiting for the whole thing to ripen and that's a different quality. So I often think that we move too quickly. You think as soon as the evidence is supplied to you that you have a possibility in this direction or that, you're supposed to make a decision, where in actual fact you're supposed to live with them both until you're almost bursting, you know, just like an apple on a tree or an orange, you know, the fruit, you know, it's ripe on a given day and it suddenly comes to that moment where it's ready to fall from the tree.

[22:24]

So to let yourself pay attention to both, but not choose too early, just live with them both until you find yourself doing something, you know, find yourself saying something, find yourself knowing. That's different. Does that make sense? Yeah. That's what Rilke called a pure contradiction. He said, stretch your well-disciplined strengths between two opposing poles because inside human beings is where God learns. And I think what he's saying there is, you know, there is no right answer until you actually get to the place where the whole thing breaks open. And the answer is actually in the breaking open. That day I saw beneath dark clouds the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out. I knew then as I had before, life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining

[23:28]

pages in a great book waiting to be read. That day I saw beneath dark clouds the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out. I knew then as I had before, life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing, speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert, fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground. That day, that's an experience I had of ripening on the Welsh hills where I was supposed to go one way or this way and I was walking up the hills saying, shall I do this, shall I do that, shall I do this, shall I do, if I do this then I should, you know. And I got to the top and the whole thing just blew away and that was the experience I had

[24:31]

that day. That day I saw beneath dark clouds the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out. I knew then as I had before. Life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing, speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert, fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground. So, this is a piece I wrote, and I'd like to, to, yes, I'll, let me read this piece.

[25:55]

This is written for a number of marriages, actually. It's written for my own marriage. It's called The Vows at Glen Columkill, and I proposed to my wife at the top of this beautiful valley called Glen Columkill in County Clare, and it's also a place that I associate with another marriage, which is the marriage of my friend Patrick and his wife Cheryl. But it's also, brings to mind the marriage that Patrick and Cheryl have with the land there, and that everyone has with the land in the Burren. The Burren, where I take a group of people every, every summer, it's just an astonishing landscape, and it's been inhabited by human beings for five or six thousand years, so there are Bronze Age sites everywhere all over the place, and Celtics, Celtic churches, and that Glen Columkill means, means the church of the church, the valley where the church of Columbus is, yeah, Column, and there's an old memory there of, of Columba, Columba being,

[27:04]

being marooned in a storm and founding a monastery there because he was there for so long, so the vows of Glen Columkill. But these are, this is a, this is a mixture of all those marriages, including the love for that landscape. The amazing thing about the limestone in the, in the County Clare is that when the rain falls in it, it turns black, you know, even on a bright summer's day, and so depending on, on the mixture of light and cloud, the limestone changes all of these different colors. But every landscape has its own genius like that. This place here is so marvelous because when you walk down towards that sea, you're often walking from sunlight into cold fog, you know, and there's almost like a line drawn across the valley at times here where you just walk through that corridor of fog, and every place has its own, but every person has their own genius too inside them, you know, means the spirit of who they are, and can you constantly give your work back its spirit so you can

[28:12]

see what it is, you know, why you became a doctor, why you became a nurse, why you're in sales, you know, why you're in this, you went in for a specific reason, you know, is the marriage still alive? You'll only find out if you go in and converse with it again, you know, and then that person who's sitting across from you at the breakfast table every morning, can you see the Apollo in them, can you still see that person, and if it's not there in the everyday, you know, it's not going to come if you can't converse with it yourself, if there's nothing eliciting it. Of course there comes a time where it's gone altogether or so hidden that it will never appear again, you may have to leave, you know, if there's no possibility for the future, but always, you know, to keep something alive, you're always giving it three good faith attempts, staying there at the frontier to see if this thing's still there, still going on.

[29:15]

So this is called The Vows of Glen Colmcille, it's as if the solid green of the valley were an island held and bound by the river floor stone, and when in summer rain white limestone turns black and the central green is light-wracked round the edges, that dark reflective gleam of rock becomes an edging brilliance that centers the field to deep emerald. No other place I know speaks simultaneously of meadows and desert, absorbing dryness and winter wet, the ground porous and forgiving of all elements, white and black, wet and dry, rich and barren, like a human marriage, one hand of welcome raised, the other tightened involuntary on a concealed knife in the necessary protections of otherness. As if someone had said, you will learn in this land the same welcome and the same exile as you do in your mortal vows to another. As if someone had said, you will learn in this land the same welcome and the same exile as you do in your mortal vows to another.

[30:16]

You will promise yourself and debase yourself and find yourself again in the intimacy of opposites. You will pasture yourself in the living green and the bare rock. You will find comfort in strangeness and prayer in aloneness. You will be proud and fierce and single-minded, even in your unknowing, and you will carry on through all the seasons of your living and dying until your aloneness becomes equal to the truth you have set yourself, to the trials you have set yourself. Then this land will become again the land you imagined when you saw it for the first time, and these vows of marriage become again and again the place you make your residence, like this same rough, intimate, and cradled ground between stone horizons, embracing, and always, like her, beyond you, strangely beautiful to know by its distance. So we've had a very rich day. Why don't we just have a little conversation with one another about where you've been traveling

[31:23]

in your own heart and mind today? There's a point at which the mixture can get too rich, and you can't take one more philosophical truth, and you're just desperate for page 39 of People magazine. So, let's just change the mold, and why don't you choose someone to talk to here, and just have a conversation, and then we'll just finish up with a little piece at the end, too, as a valediction, okay? So, if we can bring our attention to the front again, it looks like there's a kind of fierce

[32:41]

concentration of conversation there, right in the middle, right around Jim there. It's just emanating out from that circle. So, just any valedictory thoughts or things you'd like to say, and I'll finish with a piece. You alluded this morning that you yourself were kind of coming to a new frontier. No, I'm in that early stage of not knowing what is next. But it is destabilizing, because surety has been one of my, I suppose you could say it's been a virtue. I'm sure there'd be people who would say that it also has its shadows. But a kind of surety in my work about the direction, never knowing the ultimate details, but knowing definitely the direction.

[33:43]

And now that dispensation has run out. So, now I have to start the conversation. In a more gentle way, you know, and be gentle with myself at the same time. So, it's just as if the whole thing, you know, I've been traveling over this plain, and suddenly, for hundreds of miles, and suddenly I've got to the Rocky Mountains. It's a different kind of terrain, and it needs different kind of wilderness skills, and needs you to be a different kind of person at the same time. So, that's where I am. Well, you know, when I thought about it, I thought, well, wait a minute, what about the exceptions? You know, when you think about people who were awful in many other areas

[34:50]

of their life, but were brilliant artists, such as Picasso, then I thought, well, that's also what's killing our world at the same time. You know, we've got all these brilliant virtues in certain areas that are also destroying huge parts of the fabric of our ecology. And, we're paying for successes that are only within certain parameters, you know, and we have to have a new understanding of what genius might mean, which means the spirit of the whole place, not just the particular place, you know, where, in other words, you'll build your malls, you know, and in an unappetizing way in one place, and you'll pay a lot of money to live in a beautiful place where there are trees and all the rest, you know, but one devastation is feeding the other, and we start to make a world in which there's more artistry

[35:52]

everywhere. So, I do think that if your work, if you lose your vision in your work, it's bound to make your marriage suffer, bound to make your relationship suffer, because part of you is dying, and if you do nothing about it, there's nothing wrong with an old vision going, you know, and your partner then witnesses you grappling, and we're under the impression that our partner's in love with all our marvelous, powerful invulnerabilities, but they actually love us most for our vulnerabilities. We never get this straight, but it's true, you know. And so, as long as you're present and vulnerable and grappling with these things, you know, the marriage stays alive. It's when you ignore it, and part of you dies, you know. So, you have all this dead wood around, dead wood sitting in the chair in the evening, you know, dead wood going to work, dead wood, just nobody there, just a hollow sound when

[36:53]

you knock. So, you can only live with that for so long before you start to deaden yourself, and you have to go elsewhere, you know. So, and it's especially true when you neglect the conversation with yourself, and you're not interested in it anymore, and there's a compensatory mechanism whereby you get more and more involved in the periphery, because to stop being involved in the periphery means you'd have to face up to this neglect of what's really occurring underneath. So, the periphery becomes more and more frenzied, you know, and that's never healthy for your work, never healthy for your relationship or marriage. It was interesting how that three marriages theme came. I was in South Africa, and I had five days of work, you know. It was very intense, because it's a huge effort to get to South Africa. So, I had something like, but even I was amazed at the number of talks they'd

[37:55]

arranged for me. I was going under the auspices of the biggest retail bank called NEDCOR in South Africa, and I was working with all their managers and their executive, but I was also doing these cultural talks on behalf of the bank and everything for their clients, but also just for Johannesburg and Cape Town in general. And I had about 12 talks to give, and I became very good friends with the CEO of this retail division. He's become a friend actually. His name's Pete Backwell. But he insisted on going to all my talks, and I said, don't you have, isn't your time valuable? So, it meant I couldn't repeat myself at all, you know. So, after the first grumbling to myself, I said, no, take this as a challenge. Your challenge is to keep Pete interested for the whole week, right? So, I said, right, this is what I'll do. And so I had to go through my whole repertoire just about poems and subjects and stories, you know. But I got to the last night in Johannesburg where I was doing a

[39:00]

talk for the executive group and all their spouses, their husbands and their wives. And it was a very nice kind of restaurant area of the building where I was giving the talk. But I got to that place, and I'd been talking nonstop for four days or so before I went down to Cape Town. And I felt like I was absolutely dry. I had nothing to say to anybody, you know. And I said, what am I going to say tonight to the executive group and their spouses and partners, you know? And something on relationship, you know, work. And so I sat down beside this huge refrigerator in the kitchen area, and I had all my pages of the first lines of poems that I have memorized. I was going through all my stories. I've got nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And I'm lucky I've got 20 minutes, still 20 minutes. I'm going through this thing, and nothing, [...] you know. And 10 minutes

[40:02]

and five minutes, and finally, still nothing. And I had to walk up, and there's this wonderful introduction, David White, da-da-da-da-da. But it was amazing in the way the subconscious works, because I stood up there, and I said, I'd like to talk about the three marriages. And I'd never said that to myself in my whole life, you know. And I hadn't even said it behind the refrigerator there. It just came out of nowhere. And it was one of the best talks of the whole week, you know. So you never know what part of you is engaged in coming to the central plot of where, you know, there's part of you, almost always, part of you knows where to place itself, you know, if you can just open up for it. Having said that, it's also good to just... I must remember not to scratch there again.

[41:11]

So yes, whatever. Yes. So any other thoughts? Well, I mean, there's two sides to it. One is, there's nothing wrong with a good journal, and there's nothing wrong with poetry that's... I always think any poetry that's written is a miracle, you know. But if you want to put it out in the world, then that's a fiercer

[42:33]

thing to do, you know. And you have to be willing for people to ignore it, and not to be interested, or not to be compelled. And then you have to say, what is it I'm not saying? Because when you're talking about the art of poetry, it's the art of creating language against which there are no defences. So it must mean that you've created clichés, you know, or you've created language against which there are defences. So it's up to you to go back to your desk and say it in a way in which people must listen. But I guess I'm saying that there's a part of me that's doing things for the poor, so that's why I'm not interested in doing something for the poor and the teacher. But the poor have to go into the world once in a while to look at the stuff. It's not that people aren't touched, they are. I go home, I lay there, and then the next day I'm so critical

[43:34]

of that. Well, I just say you're in the early days of the apprenticeship, and just carry on. And so you just have to be despondent, and then you have to be triumphant, and then despondent, and triumphant, and despondent, and you keep working away. And then you get a consistency about your application, you get a consistency about your understanding of what you have to offer, and your own voice, and a faith in it. So you're less seesawing around that. Exactly, yeah.

[44:36]

Well, it may be after your death they'll, you know, if you're introverted, so. I always like to offer comfort, you know. No, there is no formula, you know. So if you are introverted, it may not be that your poetry will get out. There's nothing which is, until, you know, someone finds your poetry tied up in ribbons behind the plaster of a wall, as they did with Emily Dickinson, you know. And you find 1,800 poems that are buried in the wall that no one except her closest relatives knew about while she was alive. And then they find a way into the world. Usually what's good finds its way out, you know, Hopkins poems. So I finished with a fierce risking yourself in the world poem. So this is called Self-Portrait.

[45:42]

And it was written after visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, seeing all these incredible self-portraits, courageous, unflinching ability to look at himself with no self-pity. Even when Van Gogh paints the self-portrait where he's got a bandage around his head, all he's saying when he's looking at you is, this is what happens when you go a little too far and cut your ear off, you know. There's no wallowing in it at all. I'm the suffering artist, da, [...] da. No, he's just looking back at you. Ah, this is me. Ah. So I thought, I went back to my room and said, you must be able to do the same thing in a poem. And this is Self-Portrait. Doesn't interest me, and we'll finish and just go out into this beautiful sunlit day. Doesn't interest me if there is one god or many gods. Doesn't interest me if there is one god or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. Doesn't interest

[46:48]

me if there is one god or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you could know despair or see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live I want to know if you are willing to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with fierce eyes saying, this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living, falling toward the center of your longing. If you are prepared to live day by day with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, I have heard in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God. I have heard in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God. Doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you can know despair or see it in others. You can know despair or see it in others.

[47:50]

If you are prepared to live in the world, if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you are prepared to live in the world, in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with fierce eyes saying, this is where I stand. This is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living, falling toward the center of your longing. If you are prepared to live day by day with the consequence of love, the consequence of love. Love is all right, it's the consequences of love. If you are prepared to live with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, I have heard in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God. Lovely, we've had a great day together.

[48:51]

And there's a lot working underground here. So just treat yourself gently for the next few hours. And nice glass of red wine, whatever, just let everything settle and start to bubble. A lot of these images are very, very powerful and they work away inside you, you know, without you even knowing. So go well, thank you for joining us, thank you for the listening ear, your participation and drive safely on the way home. Thank you.

[49:28]

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