Well, the place I want to begin is prolonged attention.
And it really hit me, as I was preparing for this, that as you look and look and look at something, it almost magnifies and it becomes bigger and higher resolution.
Through prolonged attention you can see things that you just wouldn't see in this sort of hustle and bustle of everyday life.
Yes.
And it's not just the eyes, of course.
There's listening.
When I sat Zen for years, I had a Zen koan given to me, which was, who is listening?
And that's a fierce form of attention, too.
And then, of course, there's the visual and the aural combined, so hearing and seeing together.
But then there's the whole bodily sense of somatic feeling, just what you feel in your body.
We call it, in a very narrow way, feelings, but it's much larger than that.
And the more you pay attention, the more of that inner horizon is brought to bear on the outer horizons of life.
So it's seeing, hearing, and then this sense of bodily presence, feeling the body of the world.
And then in the meeting there comes a place where the person who's paying attention, who was seeing and who was hearing disappears.
So I have a piece called Revelation Must Be Terrible because it has to do with the way you feel a kind of death occurring in your personality.
And the first lines are, Revelation must be terrible with no time left to say goodbye.
Imagine that moment, staring at the still waters, with only the brief tremor of your body to say you are leaving everything and everyone you know behind.
Being far from home is hard, but you know, at least we are all exiled together.
When you open your eyes to the world, you're on your own for the first time.
No one is even interested.
No one is even interested in saving you now.
And the world steps in to test the calm fluidity of your body from moment to moment, as if it believed you could join its vibrant dance of fire and final stillness.
Fire and calm and final stillness.
As if you were meant to be exactly where you are, as if, like the dark branch of a desert river, you could flow on without a speck of guilt and everything everywhere would still be just as it should be, as if your place in the world mattered and the world could neither hear nor speak the fullness of its own bitter and beautiful cry without the deep well of your body resonating in the echo.
Knowing that it takes only that first terrible word to make the circle complete.
Revelation must be terrible, knowing you can never hide your voice again.
So that whole poem looks at the phenomenology of deep attention what happens to you and what starts to break down and what falls away.
And then this sense of if you are paying attention to the world, you suddenly realize the world is paying attention to you.
And it's finding someone much bigger, much larger, more generous, more present, more fiery than the person who first began the attentive process.
So I had this in a very intimate and very practical way as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands.
And where the animals have no fear of human beings.
And you could be walking along the trail and you'd suddenly be looking at a hawk on a branch which would not move and would not fly away.
You can get within a few feet of it and you're looking into the eyes of a hawk.
And the hawk is looking at you and it's the absolute essence of hawkness.
And when I was first there, when I think about it, I was hardly seeing or hearing anything.
I might have known the Latin name of the bird, but that was actually a way of covering over the essence of what you were looking at.
But after a while, things start to speak back to you in a very fierce way.
And in Galapagos, what was speaking back to you was life and death, really.
You experienced animals and birds dying on a daily basis, including animals and birds and sea creatures that you'd got to know as individual characters.
And it might be a seal, a fur seal in one place that had a personality as different from the other fur seals as we have from each other, and or it it might be a land iguana uh, that also had a particular traits you know.
So you get to know these creatures and then suddenly you find them dead on the beach, and and uh.
And then we were.
We were traveling on this death dealing medium called the ocean, so everything was looking back at you, even fierce, more fiercely than you were looking at it yeah.
So then i started to realize that um, that real identity is not you, or that the identity is where what you think is you meets what you think is other than you.
And that's actually the place that you write from, is that meeting place, that attentive edge where things break down.
And then there's this voice that appears from that frontier.
Sometimes the frontier seems way out, you know, looking at horizons.
Sometimes it's an inner horizon inside yourself below which the revelation, the truth, the beauty of what you want to say is hibernating and nested inside yourself.
Yes, you say that I have this image.
When I was a kid, there was this place called the Tactile Dome in San Francisco, and it was basically like this maze that you would sort of traverse in the dark and you would kind of try to figure out what was going on there.
Yeah.
And...
When you're investigating emotions, trying to make sense of the world, how much of that investigation is a sort of you're talking about sitting meditating, how much of it is a sort of stillness and listening, versus how much of it is just writing, getting it wrong rewriting, getting it wrong.
How does that process of expanding your frontier of what you can put into words, how does that work?
Yeah, I mean, the rewriting is just an outer afterthought, almost, the writing.
It's the ability to have the physical experience and to be able to translate that into language which has the same movement.
It doesn't lose any movement by you saying it.
So prose, you could say is about something.
Poetry is the thing itself.
Good poetry.
I should say bad poetry is not about the thing itself, but uh, good poetry is is being able to uh name the world while keeping it alive.
You know, the name's a kind of meta name, it's an introduction, it's a dance, it's so everything stays alive uh, as you are, as you are speaking, and that speaking is is is what i is also writing.
You know, sometimes uh many poets have uh have composed as they walk, without any written instruments at all.
So wordsworth was a great exponent of that And in fact he trained a little dog to run 50 yards ahead of him to warn him if any of the locals came, because they already thought he was an eccentric.
But he used to be muttering to himself.
So I sometimes compose while I'm walking.
Like a muttering.
It's not like a pen and paper.
It's like you're muttering.
Yes, or even declaiming out loud.
And luckily in my day and age, I have the iPhone, so I can actually put it into the phone and I don't have to memorize it as well as having said it.
When I think about writing, I think about that physical frontier between what you think is you and what is not you.
That's where you speak from.
Yeah.
And often you do feel it as a darkness.
You use the metaphor of the, what was it called?
The tactile dome.
Yeah, the tactile dome of being in the dark.
Yeah.
So often.
You know that what you want to write lies deep inside you, but you can't articulate it as yet.
And it feels like it's buried in your body somewhere.
Yeah, so that's.
That's like a metaphor of the night too, because it metaphorically and imaginatively feels dark inside your body.
But there's all this movement there.
I have a piece, actually that i wrote um.
It's about the difference between writing at night and writing in the day.
It's a sweet darkness.
It is, exactly, yeah.
And so I noticed during one of my really intense writing periods that I had a completely different relationship to the world outside when it was dark outside the window than when I was writing during the lighter hours of the day.
And I thought that's really fascinating.
It's a different horizon.
This is the piece I wrote about that.
It's called Sweet Darkness, which you were experiencing in the tactile dome.
Yeah.
When your eyes are tired, the world is tired also.
When your vision is gone, no part of the world can find you.
It's time to go into the night where the dark has eyes to recognize its own.
There you can be sure you are not beyond love.
There you can be sure.
That was quite a radical thing to say, actually.
I didn't even know what it meant when I wrote it.
There you can be sure you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your home tonight.
The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything, or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
It's hard to name things in the dark.
It's one of the reasons where you can be walking past a cemetery in the countryside or through a cemetery during the day.
You will have completely different thoughts than the thoughts, and perhaps even fears, you would have walking through in the night.
We're made in an evolutionary shaping to be incredibly attentive at night and in the darkness, because we don't know what's coming out of the darkness.
Therefore, we don't name it so easily.
I spent a lot of time in the African bush, and you rarely go out in the bush at night.
And if you do, you need to go with someone who really knows what they're doing, because at night that's not your territory.
Yeah, you are your meat, exactly your prey of some kind.
Or you can just be taken out by accident, you know, by run over by cape, buffalo or whatever, and there and also the hippopotami have come out of the water.
They can't come out during the day because they get sunburned, so they graze at night and um, and then there's a roaring of the lions and stalking of creatures.
You know, It's only then you realize how somnambulant the world is during the day.
Strangely enough, the world's half asleep during the day and other things come awake at night, and we know that intuitively.
So it's really interesting to pay attention to a landscape in the dark.
Rilke has a poem where he's looking at a fire in in a dark landscape and he's saying the way human beings look at that is they take that source of light as a central point and they they extrapolate from that point, they contextualize everything from that one point of light.
And he asked the beautiful question what would it be like if you actually contextualized your life from the darkness, from what lies beyond, from what lies over the horizon?
And he says, all of you, what is it now?
It's, oh yes, du Dunkelheit aus der Stimme.
I get it in German first.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, you darkness from which I come.
I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world, because the fire makes a circle of light so that no one comes to find you anymore.
The darkness holds everything.
And then he goes on to say how much elemental movement there is in the darkness.
Yeah.
So the ability to look beyond what you normally can see.
If you look, for instance, at the phenomena of horizon, and there are horizons in writing.
You're constantly trying to get over the horizon of your own understanding.
And when you look at a horizon in the outer world, what's beautiful about that horizon is what lies beyond it.
By definition, a horizon has a world beyond that you cannot see, and that's actually what's nourishing about it.
That's why you will pay more money for a house looking over the ocean or looking at the mountains.
It's got a line of beauty, but beyond that is something that you can't see.
It's constantly invitational.
That's what's beautiful about it.
And when you look at good writing, good writing is also constantly invitational to what lies beyond the line of beauty that you've arranged.
So Virginia Woolf was an amazing writer in that she would never let you settle into one mind.
She never wrote her novels where one person is narrating the whole thing, whether it's the narrator or the character.
She's constantly moving from one character to another, so that you have this constellated.
It's almost like a darkness, because you don't know where you are.
You're in this conversation.
It's where everything meets that the true spirit of that novel comes alive.
Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, yeah.
When you were earlier, you were saying, as you were reading I think it was Sweet Darkness you said I wrote a line and I didn't even know what it meant at the time, which is really interesting because it means that, if I think of almost like an order of operations, there's something that's coming from a subconscious, intuitive source that's then being put on the page, rather than the conscious mind doing that.
And that there's.
That implies a real either a playfulness I don't know what word you want to go with either a playfulness or a surrender to some sort of natural, intuitive flow.
Yes, it's what Coleridge and Keats would have called the primary imagination.
Where the imagination?
We tend to think of the imagination as the ability to think up new things.
Yeah, but that's the secondary imagination to the romantic poets.
It's the fancy.
The primary imagination is the ability to dwell in a powerful elemental faculty inside yourself which is able to align thousands of elements of the unknown around and constellate those elements in one coherent line of portrait, one coherent image.
So it's a kind of coalescing force.
It's a faculty of belonging, really.
You can imagine it from a really practical point of view, actually.
And I've experienced this practical point of view out in the African bush again, being with a guide on a walking safari, which are often quite dangerous actually.
And we came into a clearing, and he just stopped us immediately.
And he said, everyone stop.
And we stood stock still for the longest time.
And then didn't.
A male lion put its head up just 20 yards away from us.
And we had to back out really slowly.
But we were within charging distance.
We were in a dangerous perimeter.
And afterwards I said to him, I said, what happened?
I said, how did you know there was a lion there?
He said, I don't know.
I just knew there was something there.
So for him it was probably the slight aroma, maybe a few molecules of lion which he'd be familiar with, which his conscious mind couldn't understand.
It could have been the way the grass was laid down.
It could have been the spore tracks that he saw only hazily.
Yeah.
But all of those combined together were integrated at this central imagination.
That said, lion, yeah.
Lion clothes, yeah.
So we have this ability to bring together in very practical ways things which are not recognized by the.
I'd call it the strategic mind rather than the conscious mind, because this is equally conscious.
In fact, it's a deeper conscious.
Yeah, it pays a deeper conscious attention to the world.
So going back to the theme of horizons.
Yeah.
What lies over the horizon is a kind of darkness.
It's the unknown, even if it's light during the day.
It's a kind of darkness.
And we tend to see all outer horizons as really nourishing.
But each of us have an inner horizon below which you could say the next possibility for maturity is the next dispensation of your life.
It's the next dispensation of maturity, the next territory of understanding you're about to go into that.
Part of you has actually already walked into.
You just don't realize.
Part of us often has matured.
This inner part has matured way beyond the place where your personality actually exists in the world.
Yeah.
We've all had the experience of suddenly having a revelation and realizing you've known it actually for a long time.
You've just refused to face up to it.
For sure.
Yeah.
Whether it's in a relationship, or whether you need to commit and tell the person you love them, or whether you need to tell them you need to go.
You've known that.
For so long.
Yeah, before you actually got there.
So we have this inner horizon which we don't see as a line of nourishment.
We see it as a line of resistance below which we often find it uncomfortable to go.
So often our great traditions, like the Zen tradition, but also the tradition of writing.
It's about dropping below that line of discomfort and finding that there's equal nourishment below it.
And I'll just finish with a couple of lines.
And just to work with that line until you stop being uncomfortable with it, you actually realize.
No, it's leading you like sweet darkness, the poem you know.
When your eyes are tired, the world is tired also.
It's this giving up at the surface in order to rest in an incredibly deep way inside yourself and drop below this horizon and actually dwell in the part of you that already knows.
Stop trying to catch up with yourself.
Be the one inside yourself that's actually up with the seasonality of your existence.
I think at times no, I think throughout my life I've had a fear of difficult emotions sadness grief anguish, anxiety.
And it's still a great struggle for me to go heartbreak.
Oh, my goodness, to go into that.
And I'm really curious to hear how you've written about, gone about writing about one of those difficult emotions.
I'd imagine that's unimaginably challenging but also, if I'm hearing you correctly, can be quite fruitful.
Yes.
Almost every quality, if a human being can feel it, is meant to be felt.
It's in the constellation of the way we inhabit the world.
And so we often use words against ourselves.
We will name things in ways that keep them at a distance.
So I've just I just wrote an essay on weeping which I just went up on sub stack uh, where my new work goes up, and uh, We often see weeping in a pejorative way and we even have the phrase it's enough to make a grown man weep.
So it's not masculine, it's not male to weep.
But weeping may be the closest experience human beings have to an actual experience of enlightenment. because in weeping you have given up you've broken down whatever control you wanted over the world has slipped out of your hands uh whatever way you wanted to keep heartbreak at bay whatever way you wanted to keep grief at bay they've all those perimeters have all been broken down by the grief the loss the person leaving you by uh the diagnosis you've just been given in the hospital yeah and uh and you've actually dropped down um below this perimeter and it breaks apart through those that overflow of emotions yeah So the reason you're weeping is you haven't built a body that can hold that revelation.
But now you're just about to do it.
You're breaking open this controlled edge that you've had.
You've surrounded it, and it's breaking out of there.
And so you're actually becoming larger through the weeping.
So it's really interesting to actually try to have almost a practice of weeping, even if you can't actually go into full weeping, but to feel the emotion of it as much as you can, because the emotion is a doorway to something much deeper.
So Camus, the great French philosopher, had a great and loving imperative.
He said live to the point of tears.
He said amen yeah, and that's not an invitation to modeling sentimentality, that's an invitation to feeling everything as much as you can feel it all the time, right in beauty and in sorrow.
Yeah, don't hide it from yourself, don't just try and feel everything.
You see a homeless person in the street.
Yeah uh, who's uh falling over because they're so exhausted or they're dehydrated, or You feel it.
You don't walk past it and have a barrier against it.
It doesn't mean to say you can do anything about it, about the person, but it may be that you would actually help them in that moment.
But it's because we're afraid of the consequences of feeling.
Yes.
That we won't allow it.
So there's a moment, for instance in The Prelude by Wordsworth, where he's in the midst of this astonishing street fair that filled the whole of London in the 18th century.
It was called St.
Bartholomew's Fair, and it was like Carnival in Rio today.
It's gone from the streets of London now, but it used to take over London for a good few days and the whole place would be a bacchanalia.
You know.
There'd be fire eaters and sword swallowers and rary shows and oxen turning on spits and and thousands of people milling around and dancing and and acrobats and tightrope yeah, all through the streets.
But he's wandering and he's got.
So Wurzes has got this deep facility for this primary imagination.
He grew up in the mountains and lakes of the English Lake District.
And as a child, he spent a lot of time alone in this deeply profound, attentive state.
Yeah.
So he has this beautiful line at the beginning of this passage and the prelude is 300 pages of Blackbirds.
So this is just one passage.
So he's a young man, and he's walking through the streets.
He sees this blind beggar against a wall, homeless person, our equivalent.
And he has this lovely line.
He says and one's far traveled in such mood, beyond the reach of common indication, we would say I was really tripping man.
It's an out-of-body experience, an in-body experience.
And once far-travelled, in such mood, beyond the reach of common indication, lost amid the moving pageant, was my chance abruptly to be smitten with a view of a blind beggar who, with upright face, stood propped against a wall.
Upon his chest a written paper to explain the story of the man and who he was.
My mind did, at this vision, turn round as with the might of waters, and it seemed to me that in this sight was a type or emblem of the utmost that we know, both of ourselves and of the universe.
And upon the shape of that unmoving man, his fixed face and sightless eyes, I gazed, as if admonished by another world.
That's living to the point of tears.
A gaze as if admonished by another world.
Yeah, because we're all walking around actually with a piece of paper metaphorically on our chest saying this is who I am and this is why you should give something to me.
We all have two easy explanations of who we are.
And then this image of this man looking, gazing out beyond the crowd into the great beyond, and being found by a much larger world than people who supposedly have their everyday vision.
This is an amazing line when he says my mind did, at this site, turn round as with the might of waters.
That's incredible here.
My mind is, at this sight, turned round as with the might of waters, and it seemed to me that, in this sight, was the type or emblem of the utmost that we know, both of ourselves and of the universe.
And upon the shape of that unmoving man, his fixed face and sightless eyes, I gazed, as if admonished by another world.
So this is deeply in the Zen tradition, as Dogen Zenji in the 12th century, 13th century said, a great Zen teacher.
He said, if you go out and confirm the 10,000 things, this is delusion.
If you name things, you know, if you've got all the Latin names for the birds and you say oh, that's that, that's that, that's this, that's that.
This is delusion.
If the 10,000 things come and find you, this is enlightenment.
Yeah, if the world comes and speaks to you in its own essence, rather than the ventriloquist voice you have pushed again onto it.
And it's true.
You know, in a relationship or marriage, your partner, your loving partner, how many times are we trying to throw our voice into their bodies so they'll say the thing we want them to say?
How many times do we really listen to the essence of who we've got there?
And we're afraid of that essence because it's movable, it's always seasonable.
So we're afraid of finding that actually our partner doesn't like us at the moment because of the way we are.
And we're afraid of that revelation.
So a real attentive ear and eye is saying, what are you seeing?
What are you hearing?
What are you finding here?
I want to know and uh, and going out to meet that.
So maybe they'd find something different through that refreshing sense of new presence.
One of the things i've been thinking about all conversation and it really relates to your consolations books is that you know how many spiritual traditions talk about something along the lines of the thing without a name.
You know, like the feng shui is this essence that we can't quite name, but what i'm?
I'm playing around with this in my head, but it seems like a lot of what you're trying to do is redefine terms.
Like you were talking about anger.
Anger, the purest form of care.
Like for me, when I heard that, I think of anger.
I'll run away from anger.
No, anger, it's a purest form of care.
We get angry about the things that are the most true to our hearts, to our purpose, whatever it is.
And what I find to be interesting is that sometimes you can put words to something and by doing that you kill it, you squash it, you kind of reduce it to something less than it is.
But then sometimes there's certain language that elevates something or changes our relationship to it.
So I'd say that my work isn't to redefine terms.
My work is to create beauty.
And beauty always has to do with conversational symmetries and asymmetries in the world.
So the ability to understand why we're angry about anger We get angry about being angry.
I get anxious about being anxious.
Yeah, exactly.
So to understand that and to experience that.
I mean that line would have been surprising to me when I wrote it.
I often say, poetry or good writing is the act of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know.
You knew.
Because you've dropped down into that place, because you're at that frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you.
Someone else is speaking.
Yeah.
It's actually the real you, that someone else is actually more real than the person you think is real on the surface.
And so that would have been a physical experience of what lay below anger that I felt in my body.
And I suddenly realized, all right, anger is the deepest form of care.
It's just you have no vehicle for that care.
Or the care overflows the small vehicle you have for it.
You've got to widen it, broaden it, break down around it, plow it up, re-sow the field.
It's always to do with.
I always think real creativity has and real writing has to do with undoing, process of undoing and uh, and often undoing with the you know, bringing the listener, the reader into, into the undoing as it's occurring, the physical, physical undoing.
There's a lot of dualities in your work of even the inward and the outward, where what you know meets what you don't know.
But the one that I want to ask you about is routine, because you're very perceptive in the way that something can either elevate us or something can lower us.
On one hand, you could say that routine can be this empty death spiral yeah, but also it can be disguised ritual yeah, and that routine can be anything but routine.
I think that's a beautiful way that you end that definition yeah, and i want to hear about your routine, the writer's routine.
Well, I have different routines at different times, according to the circumstances of my life, according to my traveling.
And so, during lockdown, I wrote the whole of Still Possible more or less in one place my lovely study, looking out onto a garden or walking.
Is this in Northern England?
No, in Northwest United States.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, Whidbey Island.
So that's where I spent lockdown.
So I was in Perforce in one place.
And so I was able to have a natural rhythm around going in.
But the rhythm changes and the routine changes.
When I start writing, I may just write half an hour a day or just opportunistically.
And then, as time goes by and the particular theme of the book starts to concentrate, the writing time gets longer and longer and longer.
Until at the end i might be, i might be writing 8 10, 12 hours a day, wow and uh, and then the whole thing breaks open.
So it's like a spiral going closer and closer and closer.
Yeah, but constellations 2, for instance, was written almost Well.
It was written everywhere I was.
I mean, even in the gym, I'd go over to my phone.
I'd get an idea, put a few lines down.
I'd be on an airplane.
I'd be in the tube in London underground.
I'd be with a laptop on my knee in a bus on an airplane.
And then the culmination of writing that was in a castle in central Italy.
And I had seven days where I was writing eight to ten hours a day.
And I got seven essays out of seven days.
So it was really fierce.
This was a different... Constellations 2, there are 52 essays in there.
But I wrote 68 essays in seven months only.
So that was a particular season of my life which may never return in the same way again.
It just came as a kind of fire and uh, in those seven days in that castle, which was the culmination of the writing, i had these out-of-body experiences almost daily, especially the essay on time.
Tell me about those.
Yeah, and time, i had this experience of the walls looking back at me.
You know these ancient walls that were seven, eight hundred nine hundred years old.
The castle walls of the room I was in.
And there's a line in there, we have so many pejorative images of time.
So we're constantly saying time is our enemy.
Time is against us.
We don't have the time.
We need to make time as if that would be possible.
Right, exactly.
So almost all of our phrases about time are the way time is our enemy.
But time would be very surprised to find this out, actually, because nothing could happen.
No human or cellular life could occur without the rhythms of time and growth.
So everything we know takes place because of time.
And yet we have this relationship with it, which is the relationship of an adversary, an adversarial relationship, right.
So the big breakthrough line in the essay was, time is not slipping through our fingers.
It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time.
We're losing the opportunity to live in time in a spacious, generous, timeless way.
So it's that willingness to pay attention until the name you've given to something breaks down and the essence speaks back.
So you could do this as a beautiful um, you could do this as a beautiful practice with people in your life who you're resentful about or you haven't forgiven.
And so if you spent time, a good 45 minutes or an hour, with the image of that person and the essence of that person and what they're trying to say to you, it would only be a matter of time before you came to a place of forgiveness actually, and understanding when their essence spoke back to you.
When you hear the real story behind their behavior, you always have the forgiveness, because it's not just them.
That's how you would be too, given different circumstances, given given the same misunderstandings that they might have been under.
Yeah, So I suppose writing is the ability to have the world speak back to you in its own voice and to bring the reader in to hear that voice with you or the listener.
How have you gone about memorizing all this poetry over the years?
I've just had this year, actually, just this... I never liked poetry at all.
It's taught in such a horrible way in school.
I mean I wish I could just storm into schools and just talk to English teachers and say, what are you doing?
Because it's taught in such a left brain and analytical way.
And I realized this year, actually poetry is just an environment that I can step into and I don't.
I used to think I need to understand a poem.
No no no, I just need to like being inside of that poem.
And then if I can memorize it, then it's always in my head and then you know, we say that to memorize something is to know it by heart, and then it sort of makes the 18-inch pilgrimage from my head to my heart and almost becomes a part of me.
William Blake, to see the world in a grain of sand, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand.
What does that mean?
What does that mean?
I actually don't know what it means, but it also means everything to me.
When you learn it, you carry it as a beautiful question.
Yeah.
So how have you gone about doing this?
Well, literally one line at a time.
I think I was inspired to memorize because of my mother's fund of stories and poems in English and Irish.
So she'd sit at the foot of my bed and have all of endless poems and stories.
So it just seemed normal actually to have this, to have this store within you.
And actually if you go to Ireland almost out, you've only got to shake someone and two or three poems will come out.
Yeah.
It's just in the tradition there.
And so I started memorizing poems quite early, or they would strike me in such a fierce way that I would have them already, at least the operative two or three lines.
And then I did have great teachers growing up.
I was very lucky, whether it was in junior school or later at at uh, high school.
Um, i had really brilliant teachers and uh, and so poetry was always something that i felt was a secret code to life.
And when i first i don't know if you remember the i'll get back to the memory, the phenomenon of memorization in a moment, but i don't even remember when uh, when you were a child listening to the adult world, you'd say you'd often feel these people are actually crazy, these people are insane, they've lost the primary perspectives of life and their priorities are all upside down.
And i had this, i had this all the time actually, as a child.
So I actually felt that becoming an adult was a form of amnesia actually, of forgetting the primary experience and vision that a child had.
Now, I'm not saying a child's perfect.
You need a mature adult body to hold that vision.
But when I started to read proper adult poetry not just Walter de la Mer, you know the kind of poetry we were given for younger people I said, oh my God, here are adults who have kept the visions and acuity of childhood alive into adulthood.
I probably wouldn't have used that language, but that was my experience.
So I remember reading Ted Hughes and Tom Gunn and going, oh my God, it's possible actually to keep the vision I have now alive into adulthood.
So that was a really powerful thing.
And I started to memorize poems, I suppose as a way of holding on to that primary ground of attentiveness and intentionality.
You know, the world comes to find a child in very different ways than it comes to find us when we're adults.
But it can actually find both the mature adult and the visionary part of others at the same time.
So William Blake, who you quoted, he had songs of innocence and songs of experience.
But he didn't see innocence as a commodity that was replaced by experience.
He saw innocence as your ability to be found by the world in repeatedly larger and larger ways.
So that's real innocence.
So memorization, I memorized because I loved the poetry, actually.
I loved the beauty of the poems.
And I spent a lot of time alone, like Wordsworth as a kid, out in the fields and the woods.
And I loved to walk along and recite a poem to myself.
And so I just started building the repertoire that way.
And they would help me at times when I was.
And the more you build a repertoire of these powerful lines.
Yeah, For instance, earlier this year I had to pay real attention to break through a very difficult boundary in my life.
There are lines by Mary Oliver in a poem called The Journey where she says one day, you finally knew what you had to do and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice.
One day you finally knew what you had to do and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice, though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles men, my life.
Each voice cried men, my life.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible.
It was already late enough and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little, as you left, their voices behind the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds and there was a new voice.
There was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do, determined to save the only life you could save.
If you have that in your memory, that is an incredibly powerful ally.
That takes you physically into the part of you that has to walk through fire to get to where you want to go.
One day, you finally knew what you had to do and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice, though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles.
Yeah.
You're right there.
It was already late enough and a wild night and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
That's what it feels like.
Mm-hmm.
Now that I've been memorizing more poetry, I'll just be at dinner and I'll just recite a poem.
Yes.
And I've noticed that there's this look of astonishment on people's faces.
Yes.
And you can feel that you've crossed some sort of threshold between the language of everyday life and this sort of elevated language.
Yes.
And you realize how much everyday language... is just rooted in cliche.
And what a poetry does or what a poem does is it just It gives freshness to a familiar world.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I have.
You know I take I'm getting used to embodying that and not apologizing for that is even more powerful.
So, and that's been my work in life, actually, is to get poetry to as many people as possible.
And you probably know from your reading into my work that I've worked in the corporate world.
Of course.
Yeah, in fact, I've worked in this building with a bank two or three times, actually.
Is that right?
Yeah, through Said Business School.
We're in Oxford right now.
Yes, in Oxford, yeah.
This is the Rhodes building, yes.
Rhodes House, yeah.
So often therefore, I will be with groups of executives who've never confronted poetry in a real way in their life.
And they're wondering what this guy is doing.
My reputation may go before me, but they do not know how this is going to work.
And when i start in, i always i i describe it as kind of bow wave phenomena.
You know when a ship is first launched off its girdings into the water.
You know when the hull, you get this enormous wave that comes.
Yeah yeah, yeah you.
I've had that physical feeling in this very room here actually, of people saying, oh my god, something real is happening here.
And then the wave subsides and they're slowly floating out on these new waters.
So it can be quite a shock to the personality that's used to using language that distances, Language that guards.
Language that obfuscates.
Defenses.
It makes things fuzzy.
It makes things neutral.
So you don't have to feel.
You don't have to hear.
You don't have to see.
You referenced earlier the beautiful question.
And then we moved on to something else.
But where does that show up in your writing?
Finding a beautiful question.
What is it?
And how does that show up for you?
Well, I think it's the axis of invitation in every written piece.
And it's the invitation to the writer that simultaneously goes out if the writing's successful to the reader or the listener.
So it's the invitation to go further and to engage all your faculties in order to be able to answer it.
It's not easily answered.
And that's what's so intriguing about a good novel, is you go?
Oh my God, you know there's something being asked of me here and I don't know how it's going to turn out.
I'm fascinated.
I'm drawn in.
So there's a beautiful underlying theme and there's nothing more disappointing when a book doesn't live up to the questions that it started you off on.
Yeah, that's when we give up on a book is when you realize oh, this fellow's not never going to answer, never going to answer the question he or she set up at the beginning.
So beautiful questions are in a lot of our great religions.
So the Zen tradition has a whole theme around koans.
So these are stories and beautiful questions posed by Zen masters or people who were given the title of Zen masters after they passed away.
And so one of them.
For instance, there's a very simple one that I worked with for a long time, which is a bird calls announcing the difference between heaven and hell.
A bird calls announcing the difference between heaven and hell.
So there's a very disturbing question how could a bird call announce the difference between heaven and hell?
And, and like most beautiful questions, you turn your life upside down trying to answer it and try this, try that, and then one day you give up enough to be able to drop down to this other level larger, more powerful way of seeing and hearing.
And it's incredibly simple.
A bird calls announcing the difference between heaven and hell.
Heaven is if you had the bird and hell is if you didn't.
Just as simple as that.
But it'd take your whole life to take that small step of understanding.
So, um, so there are, um, I have a whole book full of beautiful questions that I've written out.
I just keep adding them whenever I ask them.
And often when I'm speaking, I'll overhear myself asking a beautiful question.
So, for instance, at the end of one poem called Coleman's Bed.
A bed in the Irish tradition is a place where someone dwelt.
It comes from the Irish word lobber.
Lobber.
Yeah, so lobber Coleman.
But in Irish English, it would be called Coleman's Bed.
It's a pilgrimage place.
That's where St.
Coleman lived beneath this cave.
In this cave, there's a holy well with water there, and it's a gorgeous place beneath the cliff.
I've been there many times, and so my beautiful question about Coleman's bed was why do we keep coming back to these places?
I keep coming back by myself.
I come back with friends.
I bring my walking tours there.
What is it about?
And if you're an Elvis fan, you go back to Graceland.
Something happened there that you're still asking a question about.
And you want to feel it and understand that now.
So, um, so I eventually, after a dozen years of going to Coleman's bed, I wrote a whole poem.
I won't recite it.
It's a long poem, but it's basically a series.
Someone actually one of my readers um uh chronicled 26 invitations that are in this poem 26 beautiful uh questions.
Yeah.
And, uh, but the last one answers.
The last lines answer the beautiful question about where we go, why we go to these places.
And the last lines are something like Ghost then, where others have come before us under the hazel, by the ruined chapel, below the cave where Coleman slept.
Become the stream that makes the rivers flow, and then the sea beyond.
Live in this place as you were meant to.
And then, surprised by your abilities, become the ancestor of it all.
The quiet, robust, and blessed saint that your future happiness will always remember.
So the question was why do we come to these places where someone, some ancestor of us, whether it's a musical ancestor or a creative ancestor or a religious ancestor lived?
Well, it's because we actually have that experience in our own life.
All of us can remember a moment, a threshold moment in our existence where you picked up the phone or you went out the door or you put yourself out to have a conversation.
You asked for a gift or funding for your work as you did.
And you were granted it.
And if you hadn't have gone out the door, if you hadn't have picked up the phone, if you hadn't have asked, your life would be immeasurably impoverished today.
So you could actually go back to the person you were in that moment and thank yourself.
In a way, it's making a pilgrimage back to that moment to thank yourself for what you did for your future happiness.
You were the ancestor of this happiness that you have now.
But the even more beautiful question that comes out of that is well, if I could do it, then how could I become the ancestor of my future happiness today?
What could I do today that my future self would come back and thank me for?
I've had that as a practice in my life, actually.
So it's a very powerful way of actually shaping your existence and shaping your personality and shaping your future self.
You know, obviously when you prep for one of these interviews, there's always...
There's always just different things that you're thinking about.
And I was thinking about, hey, what is my beautiful question?
And last week I had a conversation with a friend.
So we're going on a walk in Covent Garden in London.
And I was telling him a story about there's a scene in the movie Good Will Hunting.
And they're on a park bench.
And Robin Williams is talking to Matt Damon about this difference between knowing things intellectually and knowing things experientially.
And I was in Boston and I went to the bench and I just love this scene.
I said, I have to memorize it.
So I'm working on memorizing it.
And then about two weeks later, I'm with a friend who is he's doing very well for himself.
He's worth more than nine figures.
Right.
And he looks at me, he goes, what's the point of doing all this?
What's the point of doing all this?
Like, don't you have things to do?
And I told the story of my friend in Covent Garden and he's like, no, no, no.
This guy's completely missed the point of life.
Like the point of life is not to put more numbers in your bank account.
It is to do something.
Like you know, drink from the sipping straw of beauty and things that you love.
And he got really angry about my friend's reaction.
And so the question that I've been thinking a lot about is what's the point, which to me feels like that kind of invitation, which is like I don't know the answer, but there's a beacon there that I feel like I need to go follow.
Yeah.
Well, it's usually when you're the things that that the point is is what makes you feel as if everything's right with the world when you're doing it.
So writing's one thing for me where everything in the world feels as if it's in the right place.
Gardening is another one for me.
What about writing does that for you?
About writing?
Yeah.
Well, it's a fierce attentive one-pointedness.
Yeah, that has a strange kind of massive amplitude at the same time.
So it's breaking through the narrow understanding that you have at the moment, even though this understanding you have now may be greater than the understanding you had 10 years ago.
You're now breaking through to new territory, new landscape.
Your physical body should have a sense of enlargement and broadening your heart, your emotions, your robustly vulnerable presence in the world, all of these things.
So when that's enlarging, when you're growing, when you're getting more generous, when you're getting a larger sense of humor, A sense of humor is a kind of spiritual practice.
A sense of humor tells you, whatever context you've arranged for the world, there's always another context that makes your context absurd.
And so if you know that, pre having your context made absurd, then you can laugh along with it when the universe humiliates you.
So it's just the next humiliation is just along the road.
Biggest thing I've picked up about sense of humor is we've had a few deaths on my dad's side of the family the past few years.
And man, we laughed so hard at the lunch after the funeral.
We just, we laughed so hard as a family.
I'm like, what's going on there?
Yeah, it's the broadening of the context.
Tell me about cliche.
In some sense, poetry, good writing is the antithesis of cliche.
So cliche is a kind of enemy, a kind of adversary.
Yeah.
Yes, it's this too solid naming of the world.
I mean, the interesting thing about cliches is that they're often cliches because they're actually stubbornly true.
But being able to keep that truth alive and conveyed in a way in which it's heard again.
So it's no use saying to your heartbroken daughter at 16 oh, there's plenty more fish in the sea, which is the old cliché.
That does absolutely no good at all.
So it's more witness to the broken, being witness to the broken heart.
And that's where the language that will arise that is not a cliche.
Yeah.
So one's language that's looking from the outside in and the other is language that's speaking from the inside out.
And it's interesting that the word conversation comes from converse in Latin, which means inside out, literally.
Inverse, converse.
Converse is outside, inside.
And so a really powerful conversation is always where you feel as if your inside has been nourished as much as your outside. your your outer senses of the world i mean john o'donoghue you're Your late friend, he had a line when he talked about, when was the last time you had a great conversation?
Or when was the last time you had a conversation?
And he says a conversation that wasn't just two intersecting monologues, but a conversation where you over basically says, overheard yourself saying things that you didn't know, that you knew.
Yes, he was quoting me there, actually.
Really?
Yeah, that's my line there.
So unfortunately... Well, okay, where did that idea come from?
I love that idea.
But Oscar Wilde said, great poets don't plagiarize, they steal.
He said, yeah.
So no, I mean, if you use it in the right way, then you know, there's john and i used to have really fierce conversations together and in fact they'd often be so fierce we'd fall out and then we'd have to make up again afterward.
Yeah, we were much younger.
We probably.
It wouldn't, probably wouldn't happen if he was still alive today.
At this level of maturity i don't think it would happen now.
But then, you know, when we still make both making our ways in the world, we used to have these weekends where we would challenge each other.
So we probably started stealing each other's life.
You know, from those, you know I'm sure I came up with that, I would say.
And then it was really interesting, speaking of conversations after he'd gone uh, I started to begin sentences with something John would say, and I'd finish it with my own voice, or I'd start with my voice and I'd hear myself finishing with John's voice.
There was this incredible permeability, which occurred after he'd passed away at the height of his powers.
And for instance, uh.
One of his areas was uh was master Eckhart, the great 13th century Dominican mystic.
And, uh, So because that was his territory, I made sure I didn't go into it at all.
And I left that to him so we wouldn't get competitive about it.
And I'm sure he did the same for me too.
But after he passed away, I started.
I felt as if John intuitively, was encouraging me to talk about Eckhart.
And suddenly I had this wide dispensation and permission to speak about Master Eckhart and to work him into my own life.
So that was a beautiful inside-out and that's a beautiful conversation between someone you think is gone but hasn't.
One of the fascinating conversations is with people who we've lost in our life.
And the older you get, the more conversations you have with people who have actually left the lighted hours of your life.
And for many people in their last years, all of their conversations are with the dead.
But the interesting thing is, is they're actually live conversations.
They're not, if they're good conversations, they're not repeated.
There's a strange sense whereby you feel the other person is maturing on the other side of the veil in a strange way.
Yeah, and it could be just in your own imagination.
We don't know.
But it actually could be that you're relating to the mature part of them that was always there, even though their personality may not have been able to exhibit that central maturity that they had.
That, as you uncover yourself, you're able to uncover what they held that you couldn't understand about them.
So I often feel like I'm still in conversation with John in a mutually revealing way about the world.
And I'll often see the world through John's eyes, as if I'd given him the privilege of coming back and being in this room with people which he loved.
You know, speaking to people.
Or here, he could be here, you know, he's so articulate.
So he could be at the end of that desk there.
And even now I feel suddenly there's three of us here talking.
It's a very powerful phenomena which we should acknowledge, actually.
And sometimes it's an old teacher.
They may still be alive somewhere, but it was a teacher who spoke to you in a certain way and granted you a different life by what they said and what they saw in you.
That person's with you, walking as a companion, a conversational companion with you.
Let's talk about the most...
The richest and the most cliche topic of all, which I would say is love.
And I want to hear about how you have gone about writing about love.
You write in all our songs, our poetry and our dramas, both ancient and present day.
It's always about love, love, love one way or another.
That's right.
I often say it's really disappointing to serious young poets when they eventually find out that it is actually just all about love.
This can't be true now.
The Beatles had it all along.
You know, I went on a little exercise where I would just basically keep a mental note.
You sit in a cafe, you go to any public space.
What percentage of songs are about love?
Yes.
It's over 50%.
Yes.
It's all about love.
Yes.
And so that's a word that also can cover over what is actually inviting you into.
And we all know in a relationship, in a long relationship, you're on the phone.
Yeah, I love you.
Love you.
Yeah, I love you.
Love you.
Love you.
Love you.
Yeah.
And it's just yeah, click you're and you're on to, and so you know, being able to speak about uh, the greater uh uh, it's all i mean.
It's really all about heartbreak and the way love leads you to increasingly deeper and fiercer forms of heartbreak, And there is no path a human being can take without having their heart broken.
It's great to get that straight.
There actually is no protective path you could take where you will keep that imaginative organ intact.
You will have your heart broken.
And so you might as well have it broken over something you really care about.
So I I couldn't believe, actually in constellations too that I actually wrote an essay on love when I was writing it.
I was saying, what are you doing?
I think I say in the essay, this is an impossible task.
Um, but it's all about, uh, it's all about granting life to things and people other than ourselves.
What do you mean?
Well, it's giving people away.
So you know you your, your son or your daughter is born to you, and the promises you make, the promises of love you make to begin with, are all about absolute protection, which are really appropriate.
With this being in the cradle yeah, nothing's going to happen to you on my watch.
Yeah that's, that's the fatherly promise.
Yeah and uh.
But then if you kept to that promise when they were 14 or 15, you'd strangle their possibilities of life.
And the necessity for giving them away happens much earlier than that.
So giving away the promises of love you've made to have them replaced by the larger promises that come along, and having your heart broken and having to do it and uh, and having them go out the door and be in the world, i mean uh, you've only to see your child disappointed by the world and by the adult world in a way for which you have no remedy.
To have your heart broken for your child because you had the same thing and you don't have an answer to it.
Those disappointments they've got to live with them themselves.
So, so i think real love always becomes a beautiful proximate witness.
I have that in the in the essay on friendship.
Yeah, the ultimate form of friendship is is witness to be present, you know, to have listened, to have heard and to sometimes have helped, you know, but mostly just to being at the side of a person in whatever way you can.
And then one kind of love often needs to mature into another kind of love of.
It may be that romantic love has to mature into the love of a friend, or even of a father or a mother or a brother or a sister.
It's not sustainable in the form that you first started.
And so we often say, well, I can't love them.
And so you walk off into your, into your opposing corners here.
No, it's just a different form of love.
And it's going to break your heart to actually get to that next form of witness and presence.
But it's much easier because it involves heartbreak.
It's much easier to turn the person you're separating from into the enemy rather than go through the heartbreak of finding the new form of love.
Tell me about finding your path as a writer.
I mean, to try to make a living as a poet is just an insane proposition.
I mean I'm sure that in retrospect you're like I kind of see how I did it, but pretty tough thing to do.
Exactly.
And one thing I like about your work is that you give permission, even more than that encouragement, to beckon into the unknown, driven by the compass of your heart, even if you can't define where you're going or sometimes, why you're even doing it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think a huge part of it I mean from a biographical point of view.
I've got hundreds of stories about how I made my way as a poet.
But I think the essential thing is asking for visible and invisible help.
And visible help is transactional help.
It's just, can you help me do this?
Can you help me do that?
Will you publish my book?
Will you loan me money to publish my own book?
With all of these asking for help, you have to ask for help.
You can't do it by yourself.
But invisible help we tend to think of as in religious or almost psychic terms, but actually you can think about it in a very practical way.
Invisible help is the help that you do not as yet know you need.
If you're not paying scintillating attention, you'll walk right past it, even if it's been offered to you.
And all of us can think of times in our previous life where we were offered help and we said no, I'm fine, I can do it.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
You know, the solo egomaniac approach.
Yeah, I'm going to do this.
I'm the writer.
Therefore I no uh.
Often years later you will look back and say, oh my god, if i only i'd have said i could have saved myself years of drama, if i'd have just said yes to taking that help, yeah.
So the great corollary of that is again and it leads to another beautiful question what's the invisible help?
I'm walking right past today.
What am i not paying attention to?
So I used to put myself in really fierce, attentive states about where I needed to ask for help and where I needed to go.
There was one year, for instance, right at the beginning before I went full-time as a poet, where I made a kind of promise or vow where I would do one thing every day for a year towards my going full-time as a poet.
And this is pre-internet, so it might have been writing a letter.
It might have been reading a Shakespeare song and memorizing it, so I had it in my repertoire.
It might have been talking to someone about speaking somewhere.
But every day I would consciously do.
So in a year, that's 365 days.
Contributions yeah, and it's a building attentiveness, yeah.
So that was one phase of it, and then i was finally invited to speak to 600 people to give what effectively, was my first talk as a poet.
I was part of a big conference down in california place, beautiful place called the asilomar center, these gorgeous arts and crafts wooden buildings, and so i'm in this massive hall with 600 people and i'd gone through the few days before, i'd gone through this unphysical undoing at the prospect of being given the opportunity to live out all of my dreams and therefore, the big fear was who would you be if you fail at this now?
Who would you be if you're given the opportunity to be the poet you want to be?
You've got an hour and a half to speak in and you can't do it.
So I went through this incredible physical undoing where I literally couldn't get out of bed at the conference center for days.
I was just absolutely drained.
And I, and the night before I couldn't, I couldn't prepare.
I was so excited.
I said, I'll wake up in the morning.
I'm bound to rally.
I didn't, I woke up in the morning.
I thought as if the plug had been pulled.
So when they came to my chalet you know to bring me, I felt as if I was being led in front of a firing squad 600 strong people.
And the interesting thing is, I got on stage and I, Within a few minutes, all of my symptoms dropped away.
My memory was flawless.
And in the middle of that talk it was just as if I heard the trumpets blare saying this is what you're supposed to do for the rest of your life.
There's a line in William Wordsworth where he says, in the prelude later on after that blind beggar scene, when he goes back to the lakes, he says, I made no vows, but vows were then made for me.
I made no vows, but vows were then made for me.
Bond unknown to me was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, a dedicated spirit.
And on I walked in blessedness, which even yet remains.
I had that exact experience in the middle of that talk.
At the end of it I had a standing ovation and I went back and resigned my position running this educational course.
So it was this incredible attentive state that led to breakdown.
There's no way you can follow your passion without having your heart broken.
And it's about the identity that's not big enough to carry what you wanted to carry.
You think you are going to do it, but no, it's your future self that's going to do this.
Your future self is going to be a fiercer, more attentive version of the person you are now.
It's the person who's emerging from within.
And it's going to have to break through your present inadequacies and your, your refusal to see, and then then the world comes and finds that, that part of you, when you've opened the channel.
So i talked about those inner and outer horizons earlier on.
Yeah so, putting the inner horizon in conversation with the outer horizon, this creates a very fierce powerful, charismatic personality in between.
And then if you put what's below the horizon inside you in conversation with what lies beyond the horizon outside yourself, that's what we call mystical experience, that's the unknown speaking with the unknown.
There's a gorgeous koan in the zen tradition.
Zen master said not knowing is most intimate.
Not knowing is most intimate.
Not knowing is getting to know.
So the part of you that's just forming, getting to know the part of the world that's just forming.
This is incorrect.
This isn't.
This is the tango you know.
This is the dance yeah, the magic.
Well, two things come to mind.
The first is a line from joseph campbell yeah, where he says if you can see the path laid out ahead of you, it's not your path, your own path you make with every step you take.
But then you talk about the authentic watermark.
The authentic watermark, you said that somewhere and i thought that was beautiful.
Oh right yeah, i think.
Yeah, i haven't used that in a while actually, so that was in one particular seasonality of my writing life.
Yeah, but it is a lovely something that shot through through you in a way yeah.
So there's gorgeous lines by Antonio Machado, Spanish poet.
And these lines are very famous in the Spanish-speaking world, actually.
And I'll just say them and then translate them.
But he says, Caminante no hay camino, si así camino al andar, al andar si así al camino.
Pathmaker, there is no path.
You make the path by walking.
By walking, you make the path.
There's this actual contact.
So often when you're going through a really fiery, difficult time in your life, we'll often feel that in a very physical way.
All you can do.
You don't know what the hell is happening, how you're going to actually handle all this, and all you can do is put your one foot in front of the other, and the best foot is the loving foot.
One loving step at a time, but you don't know what form the love is going to take.
It's always to do with you being more present, more generous, more invitational, more robustly vulnerable, And those are all you could say that writing is.
Is that one loving step at a time where you don't know what form the love is going to take at each, at each threshold?
Well, you talk about the word vulnerable, and I think that the kind of writing that you're pointing at is extremely vulnerable, because what you're trying to do is almost surprise yourself and hear the things inside of you that you don't know were there.
And even as I say that, I can feel myself getting fearful because it breaks.
It transcends my sense of control.
Yeah.
Yeah, where do you feel that fear, for instance, my heart racing or something?
Yeah, sweaty palms?
Yeah, i've just.
Do you have a physical?
Yeah, it's towards my stomach on the right side.
Yes exactly, but there's uh, that's just the unexplored self and i think that that's both the, that's where you're.
Also you will write from.
Yes, it's that physical contact there that has a voice to speak to you.
So to be able to keep that.
What seems like a pain, it's actually a frontier between not knowing and getting to know what you don't want to know.
Thank you very much.
And uh, there are certain heartbreaks we had as children where you absent to that.
We all absent ourselves from our body as children when we get shocked by the adult world or by the world in general.
So the child's occupying that part of their body when they're hurt and they will say to themselves oh, i'm never going to inhabit that part of my body again because i'll get hurt again.
Yeah, So we walk out of them.
And we often will take our voices out.
We take our voices up above our shoulders so that we're not in the body that got hurt.
You bring the body back down, there's a different person there.
But it can be painful to bring your voice back down into your body, because that's where you feel more and where you'll be asked to feel again and walk back through that portal and back through that door.
So in the writing you can actually put your hand over that part and, almost like you put your hand on a speaker and feel the vibration of the woofer.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that's a membrane, too.
That's where the revelation is, actually.
So when I'm writing, I have that internal...
I have that internal membrane that I feel.
Yeah.
It's like a Seamus Heaney, the great poet would have called it.
He called it a coal face.
Yeah.
Where you're?
You're digging the seam of coal out to the ground underneath, working at the coal face.
That's a fun, a fun prompt or exercises.
If you're thinking through a beautiful question, to just put your hand on different parts of your body and try to see if your body's trying to speak to you.
What's that thing called that the doctor puts on your chest where they can, a stethoscope.
It's like stethoscoping your body for words.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's one way in.
Yeah.
It's one way in.
Yeah.
You grew up being influenced by influenced, inspired by different poets Dylan Thomas Yates, Robert Sun, Gary Snyder, Ted Hughes.
How do you be influenced by writers without having their voice drown out yours?
Because very soon you get your own version of it.
So I was very influenced when I came to the west coast of the United States by the beat poets and that confluence between China, Japan and the west coast of the States, between this easy vernacular on the West Coast and tanker and haiku.
And I found it incredibly freeing because I grew up in this country, in Ireland.
You know where the literate inheritance is like a jungle.
It's so thick you have to break your way through with a machete, you know, to make your own way.
It's like being a visual artist in Italy.
They're so overwhelmed by the inheritance, it's hard to find your own way.
And so Italian artists trained to emulate paintings and drawings that they see in the museums that are in every town and city there, and you can feel as if eventually, as if you have no place.
And the same phenomena can happen in britain.
Britain's a very logophilic society and ireland too it's a word loving society rather than a visual arts.
Yeah, It's theater and it's writing.
And, and so suddenly finding myself on the West coast, I found this sudden speaking of horizons.
I mean there were literal mountain far horizons in the Pacific Northwest and California that were very nourishing, but also I felt these, this inner spaciousness and the ability to write in the style of Robert Sund, Gary Snyder, you know.
There was a line by Robert Sund which really struck me, which was something like when I get home, I'll open the barn doors and see the hides of white horses shedding rain.
When I get home, I'll open the barn doors and see the hides of white horses shedding rain.
It was just so beautiful.
It was just so spacious.
It was just so clear.
Just that single line was a doorway for me into a new kind of spaciousness in my own writing.
We'll close with this.
So last year, the highlight of my year, was I got to officiate one of my best friend's weddings.
And...
You know, what's really hard about officiating a wedding is?
I've never done it before, but we live in a culture that's so tinged with irony and cynicism.
And I'm a pretty earnest person.
And even me.
I had a really hard time leaning into the gravity of the language that you need at a wedding.
I had a really hard time with it.
Yeah.
The groom wanted me to read a poem and we were looking and looking and looking.
It was quite a frustrating experience.
And the night before he texted me and he said, I want you to read The True Love by David White.
It was a really moving experience.
Because finally, after all this struggle and all these years, you simply don't want to anymore.
You've simply had enough of drowning and you want to live, and you want to love, and you will walk across any territory and any darkness, however fluid and however dangerous.
To take the one hand you know belongs in yours.
To take the one hand you know belongs in yours.
And it so beautifully captured their relationship in a way that was poetic.
And that's what moved me.
That it felt like you had written it for them.
Yeah.
It came out of my own inheritance.
As a child I was really even though I wouldn't have been considered a religious child I was really moved by all the biblical stories.
And that was helped by the fact that at our Sunday school the teachers there were really fine storytellers.
So it felt like I was going to story time every Sunday, but it was all of these biblical stories.
And yeah, and it was just enchanting.
And then we had these books actually with.
On the left-hand side there was the biblical text and then there was a big empty square on the other side.
And they gave you a stamp when you turned up, which you'd lick.
It was about as big as your face, actually, the stamp.
Took every last drop of saliva in your mouth to lick the stamp, and then you'd place it opposite, you know, and so it would be moses before, before the burning bush, or be peter stepping out of the boat onto the water, and i often feel many of those images are stamped right through me actually, Wow.
Watermarked right through me.
And so these biblical images sometimes just emerge, even though I'm not a Christian poet.
I was immersed in the inheritance.
And the stories are metaphorically powerful for us, whether we consider ourselves Christian or not.
So the image and then the other image is from my biography also of a man in the Western Isles of Scotland where they had this old tradition of having prayers for every part of the day prayer for opening the curtains, letting the light into the house, you know, prayer for unsmooring the fire and getting the ashes going again, and a prayer for going out the door.
And there used to be an older fellow came down to his fishing boat in front of our marine biology station there and uh, i used to watch him while i was drinking my tea in the morning and before he touched an item of his gear he would always take his hat off and press it to his chest and say a prayer to the boat and then to the waters around.
Yeah, And that was a beautiful question for me for years was I had no equivalent of that in my life?
What would it be if I had that equivalent, that kind of reverence for my work and what carries my work?
For him, it was the ocean, this thing that can carry you and nourish you and kill you as soon as you look at you at the same time.
And then so many times, love's about saving your life from your previous life.
So they all came together in the poem.
There's a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours.
There's a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you've waited years and especially if you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way.
I'm thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides, I remember an old man who walked every day on the grey stones to the shore of baying seals, who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water.
And I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them, and how we're all waiting for that abrupt waking and that moment.
We have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love.
So that when you finally step out of the boat towards them, you find everything holds you and everything sustained your courage.
And if you wanted to drown, you could, but you don't.
You don't because finally, after all these years and all this struggle, you simply don't want to anymore.
You don't want to anymore.
You've simply had enough of drowning and you want to live, and you want to love, and you will walk across any territory, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours.
The fascinating part of the biblical story is that when Peter first steps out on the water towards the figure calling him across the stormy sea, he starts to drown only when he turns his face away.
When he looks back at the boat.
What sustains him at the surface of the stormy waters is the the attention and intentionality on the star that calls him.
It's only when he takes his way, his eyes away from that.
It's only when he loses the witness and the invitation and the presence and the gravity field that's pulling him that he starts to drown.
So stepping out onto a surface that part of you doesn't believe will hold your weight, could be the definition of the journey of love in marriage.
That is one of the core themes in scripture of it's like turn your eyes upon Jesus.
It's the thing that you're looking at is the thing that sustains you.
And the first commandment is to look up.
The 10th commandment is don't look left or right.
And so you can sort of, even in the image of the cross, see the vertical and the horizontal there and you mentioned it earlier, you alluded it, you alluded to it of that, the essence of your work is the cultivation of beauty.
Is that you feel like the thing you're looking at, beauty in the sense of the uh invitation to the next uh territory inside yourself?
That's equal to the astonishing beauty of the world.
Yeah, and the relationship between inner and outer forms, and how satisfying it is when they, when they move as one together.
So it's bringing the inner and the outer together and disappearing in the meeting itself.
Well, thank you.
Sometimes I have conversations where I'm like, wow, I can't believe this is happening right now.
And I very much felt that.
Great.
Thank you so much.
This was just wonderful.
Thank you.
