1 00:00:00,630 --> 00:00:06,780 Can you hear me? My name is Ross Pallister. And I'm chair of the English Faculty Board. 2 00:00:06,780 --> 00:00:15,330 It's my privilege to invite Alice Oswald to deliver her inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of poetry, 3 00:00:15,330 --> 00:00:30,660 Professor Oswald is the 46th professor of poetry and the first woman to hold the post in its 300 year history. 4 00:00:30,660 --> 00:00:35,280 I'm not I'm not going to delay you with the long introduction because you're here to hear Ali's talk. 5 00:00:35,280 --> 00:00:45,540 We're looking for with keen interest to hear this first lecture and as we'll be delivering a lecture once term for the next four years. 6 00:00:45,540 --> 00:00:53,280 Can I just mention that at the end of this lecture, please do stay and join us for a drink downstairs in room six? 7 00:00:53,280 --> 00:01:03,870 Can I remind you to turn your phones to silent and ask you not to film and photograph so that you can give your full attention to this lecture? 8 00:01:03,870 --> 00:01:18,330 The art of Evasion. Welcome. Thank you, and can you hear me? 9 00:01:18,330 --> 00:01:24,600 Please do let me know if you stop being able to hear me and I'm very pleased to be here, 10 00:01:24,600 --> 00:01:33,950 and I hope to use this slot mostly to adjust the balance between the living, this and the last illness of poetry. 11 00:01:33,950 --> 00:01:36,770 Both of those qualities are important, 12 00:01:36,770 --> 00:01:46,170 but it's my strong belief that the invention of writing has given a little bit too much power to the lasting ness of poetry. 13 00:01:46,170 --> 00:01:50,640 We tend to assume that the good poems are the ones that last. 14 00:01:50,640 --> 00:01:59,470 But of course, poems also need to live. And one of the requirements of living is dying, I vanishing. 15 00:01:59,470 --> 00:02:06,470 For that reason, I shan't follow the convention of projecting written poems onto the whiteboard. 16 00:02:06,470 --> 00:02:16,750 I'd like you to trust your ears and your memories. And your Imagination's antitrust, in fact, that a poem isn't always what happens in the words, 17 00:02:16,750 --> 00:02:23,410 but is the trace that the words leave inside you as it vanishes? 18 00:02:23,410 --> 00:02:30,520 It is very hypocritical of me to make that demand of you and then proceed to read my lecture from the page. 19 00:02:30,520 --> 00:02:41,920 But bear with me. I am in the early stages of an evolutionary process and I hope over the next four years to evolve into a performing lecturer. 20 00:02:41,920 --> 00:02:48,100 I haven't got there yet. So today I am going to be a lecturer from the page and please forgive me for that. 21 00:02:48,100 --> 00:02:55,410 But. The art of erosion. 22 00:02:55,410 --> 00:03:05,850 I was once driven in a taxi by a man who had no room for a piano in his house and had moved it under an apple tree. 23 00:03:05,850 --> 00:03:13,140 He told me he liked to hear the rain falling on the keys or sometimes fruit. 24 00:03:13,140 --> 00:03:20,050 And often the wind would arrive at night and bank branches on the broken LED. 25 00:03:20,050 --> 00:03:25,750 That was 10 years ago. I imagine it is worn down now to a skeleton of wires. 26 00:03:25,750 --> 00:03:35,920 I imagine on windless nights, the moon moves over the wires, playing silence. 27 00:03:35,920 --> 00:03:38,470 There are wonderful tunes composed of a piano. 28 00:03:38,470 --> 00:03:49,500 But if, like me, you are interested in the edge where the mind gives up and matter begins to describe itself. 29 00:03:49,500 --> 00:04:00,040 Then these weather tunes, these erosions, unpredictably composed by time itself, are worth celebrating. 30 00:04:00,040 --> 00:04:07,000 Perhaps, as Bergsten said, there is a mathematical order inherent in matter. 31 00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:15,920 And we have only to stop speaking. We have only to stop composing and performing and singing and thinking. 32 00:04:15,920 --> 00:04:29,420 To hear it. Beckett, inspired by Beethoven's music, which he described as a tonal surface eaten into by large black pauses, 33 00:04:29,420 --> 00:04:38,930 tried to make something similar to a weathered piano. He used to sit whole days in his cottage with no paper before him and no intent 34 00:04:38,930 --> 00:04:46,070 to write taking pleasure in following the course of the Sun across the sky. 35 00:04:46,070 --> 00:04:58,470 The experience of my reader, he said, shall be between the phrases in the silence communicated by the intervals and not the terms of the statement. 36 00:04:58,470 --> 00:05:04,020 It's as if he was working to where his mind a way to build for himself. 37 00:05:04,020 --> 00:05:12,170 Not a voice. But an ear with which to hear something in a world beyond him. 38 00:05:12,170 --> 00:05:21,110 And once or twice he heard it. It seems as if an invisible accordion were playing a materially, he said. 39 00:05:21,110 --> 00:05:27,260 And then in a rehearsal of Waiting for Godot, he asked his actors to repeat their lines. 40 00:05:27,260 --> 00:05:34,790 But this time to speak them with moonlight in their voices. 41 00:05:34,790 --> 00:05:41,630 Amongst those who write poetry, there are some who believe that poems have to be built up thought by thought. 42 00:05:41,630 --> 00:05:47,200 And there are others who believe that poems like Beckett's Moonlight. 43 00:05:47,200 --> 00:05:53,860 Or implicit in the air and need only be uncovered. 44 00:05:53,860 --> 00:05:59,550 I'm going to speak today about the second kind of poet. 45 00:05:59,550 --> 00:06:14,100 I call those poets. Poets of erosion because their task is not so much to fortify or decorate the language as to where some holes in it. 46 00:06:14,100 --> 00:06:29,560 Process of time work, it's such wonder that water, which is of kind so soft, doth pierce the marble stone asunder by little drops falling from a loft. 47 00:06:29,560 --> 00:06:34,820 Process of time work, it's such wonder. 48 00:06:34,820 --> 00:06:50,970 That water, which is a kind so soft. Doth pierce the marble stone asunder by little drops falling from a loft. 49 00:06:50,970 --> 00:06:56,520 Those four lines by it fall on the listener with a lovely weakness. 50 00:06:56,520 --> 00:07:05,340 The vowels get shorter. The beats get softer. The image breaks up into little drops. 51 00:07:05,340 --> 00:07:20,380 Process of time work, it's such wonder that water, which is of kind, so soft Duff Pierce the marble stone asunder by little drops falling from a loft. 52 00:07:20,380 --> 00:07:26,620 If it had stopped there, defeated by time or pierced by water. 53 00:07:26,620 --> 00:07:31,450 He would have left us the perfect example of what I call the art of erosion, 54 00:07:31,450 --> 00:07:42,880 in which speech gives itself so listening to its subject that it is dented or destroyed by it. 55 00:07:42,880 --> 00:07:47,020 Why its subject, unlike Becket, is not really time but love. 56 00:07:47,020 --> 00:07:57,340 And for that reason, he turns his initial act of erosion into an act of reflection, driving the thought through five more verses. 57 00:07:57,340 --> 00:08:04,810 And yet, in heart, that seems so tender received no drop of the still in tears that always still caused 58 00:08:04,810 --> 00:08:12,970 me to render the vain claimed that sounds not in her ears and so on and so on. 59 00:08:12,970 --> 00:08:25,060 To draw attention to time passing. To make a little structure like a moon dial or a water clock by means of which 60 00:08:25,060 --> 00:08:32,120 time is visible but not arrested is often a matter not of great art history. 61 00:08:32,120 --> 00:08:36,310 But of giving up. Of quieting down, 62 00:08:36,310 --> 00:08:50,910 of moving oneself out of the way so that light or water or wind or some other agent of erosion can fall on the poem without obstruction. 63 00:08:50,910 --> 00:08:58,740 In the living room of the houses of the Scheinman peasants, I'm quoting here from a book by Nielsen and filled in called Primitive Time Reckoning, 64 00:08:58,740 --> 00:09:03,540 a study in the origins and first development of the art of counting amongst the primitive 65 00:09:03,540 --> 00:09:09,300 and early culture peoples in the living room of the houses of the Sakineh and peasants, 66 00:09:09,300 --> 00:09:14,700 which were always built according to the Sun, i.e. facing east and west. 67 00:09:14,700 --> 00:09:23,100 There was in the southern windowsill beside the middle shaft of the frame, a line which was called the noon line. 68 00:09:23,100 --> 00:09:31,350 When the shadow of the shaft fell parallel with this line, it was noon. 69 00:09:31,350 --> 00:09:38,550 I'm always searching for such a son marked room, and I find it once or twice. 70 00:09:38,550 --> 00:09:48,080 And the poems of Robert Herrick. So good luck came and on my roof did light. 71 00:09:48,080 --> 00:09:54,630 Like Noiseless Snow. Or as the do of night. 72 00:09:54,630 --> 00:09:59,690 Not all at once, but gently. 73 00:09:59,690 --> 00:10:08,570 As the trees, all by the sunbeams tickled by degrees. 74 00:10:08,570 --> 00:10:18,690 So good luck came and on my roof did light. Like Noiseless Snow or as the dew of night. 75 00:10:18,690 --> 00:10:30,630 Not all at once. But gently, as the trees are by the sunbeams tickled by degrees. 76 00:10:30,630 --> 00:10:37,920 Now, that is what what might more accurately call a process of time working one of its wonders. 77 00:10:37,920 --> 00:10:43,590 The voice begins in darkness with only a dream sense of something different. 78 00:10:43,590 --> 00:10:49,290 The word light in the first line gives off a glimmer of double meaning over the course of four 79 00:10:49,290 --> 00:10:56,400 lines moving through the weird interior shine of night snow and it's imagined transition into dew. 80 00:10:56,400 --> 00:11:01,060 The pun rotates and shows its other side. 81 00:11:01,060 --> 00:11:11,840 It is suddenly, Dawn, the voice ends abruptly, with real light still moving over the trees towards its new line. 82 00:11:11,840 --> 00:11:20,820 So good luck came and on my roof did light like noiseless snow or as the dew of night. 83 00:11:20,820 --> 00:11:32,780 Not all at once, but gently, as the trees are by the sunbeams tickled by the greens. 84 00:11:32,780 --> 00:11:42,080 Well, I was writing those words, I noticed a grey triangle of window shadow shift across my paper and I began to plot the movement with dots. 85 00:11:42,080 --> 00:11:46,520 And I passed the diagram to an engineer who was sitting nearby and he said, yes, 86 00:11:46,520 --> 00:11:54,500 the whole table with all my books and pens was sliding round at nought point one centimetres to the minus one per second. 87 00:11:54,500 --> 00:12:04,880 And the Sun was visibly saying, Sir, if I had been using photographic paper, which responds to light by the erosion of its dyes, 88 00:12:04,880 --> 00:12:19,790 then I might today be standing here reading a direct transcription of sunlight. 89 00:12:19,790 --> 00:12:26,810 These serotypes, types of seaweed are from the history of Science Museum, about 100 yards from here, 90 00:12:26,810 --> 00:12:33,860 and they're actually much more beautiful if you go and look at them in the research room of the Science Museum. 91 00:12:33,860 --> 00:12:38,360 Nobody should photograph them because they are. That's not allowed. 92 00:12:38,360 --> 00:12:56,290 But the real things are a five size in a little blue exercise book, and the background is deep Prussian blue, and they're incredibly finely detailed. 93 00:12:56,290 --> 00:13:02,350 Here they look a little bit blurred. 94 00:13:02,350 --> 00:13:13,620 They were made in the 19th century by Anna Atkins, who placed specimens on to light sensitive paper to create a series of silhouettes. 95 00:13:13,620 --> 00:13:16,440 The process is an erosive one. 96 00:13:16,440 --> 00:13:26,790 Sunlight eats the iron salts and leaves behind a blueprint just as a coat put down on the grass will leave its image there. 97 00:13:26,790 --> 00:13:34,910 Robert Hunt, another early photographer, thought the process so easy it was almost a sign of weakness to use it. 98 00:13:34,910 --> 00:13:39,710 They are so exceedingly simple, the results, he said, are so certain, 99 00:13:39,710 --> 00:13:44,990 the delineation so perfect and the general character so interesting that they recommend themselves, 100 00:13:44,990 --> 00:13:53,330 particularly to ladies and to those travellers who will though not able to bestow much attention or time on the subject. 101 00:13:53,330 --> 00:13:58,570 Desire to obtain accurate representations of the botany of a district. 102 00:13:58,570 --> 00:14:02,500 We have seen specimens of the British alga executed by a lady. 103 00:14:02,500 --> 00:14:04,240 This is this lady by the CIA, 104 00:14:04,240 --> 00:14:14,370 a type process that are remarkable for the extreme fidelity with which even the most attenuated tendrils of the marine plants are copied. 105 00:14:14,370 --> 00:14:18,360 On behalf of the ladies he disparages and the travellers. 106 00:14:18,360 --> 00:14:25,050 I do not think there is anything harder for an artist to achieve or at least to wish to achieve than simplicity, 107 00:14:25,050 --> 00:14:29,780 speed of execution and fidelity to detail. 108 00:14:29,780 --> 00:14:36,500 A number of contemporary artists have come back to photographs, which is what these are in pursuit of these or similar aims. 109 00:14:36,500 --> 00:14:47,450 Susan Dirges, for example, leaves photographic paper in rivers on moonlit nights to make a visual version of speaking with Moonlight in Your Voice. 110 00:14:47,450 --> 00:14:59,690 Gary Fabian Miller shines electric light through flasks of coloured liquid to make pictures of the pictures in his mind. 111 00:14:59,690 --> 00:15:10,150 I think of Harriet as a pioneer photographer. Working like Beckett to get a light print in his voice. 112 00:15:10,150 --> 00:15:22,170 When I read his poem, a shutter opens and then another and another, and the dawn in four slides moves physically over me. 113 00:15:22,170 --> 00:15:30,630 By contrast, when I read Wordsworth's intimations of immortality, which is a constructed, not an eroded poem, 114 00:15:30,630 --> 00:15:42,020 I stand a little lesser and lower down and behind the poet, and his prevision falls like a shadow between me and the Sun. 115 00:15:42,020 --> 00:15:51,290 There was a time when Meadow Grove and Stream the Earth and every common site to me did seem a parallel in celestial light. 116 00:15:51,290 --> 00:15:54,920 The glory and the freshness of a dream. 117 00:15:54,920 --> 00:16:06,280 It is not now as it has been, if your turn where say where I may buy night or day, the things which I have seen, I now can see no more. 118 00:16:06,280 --> 00:16:11,710 The rainbow comes and goes and loveliest the rose, the moon doth with delight. 119 00:16:11,710 --> 00:16:21,910 Look around her when the heavens are bare, water's on a starry night, a beautiful and for the sunshine is a glorious birth. 120 00:16:21,910 --> 00:16:31,970 But yet I know wherever I go that there has passed away a glory from the Earth. 121 00:16:31,970 --> 00:16:37,700 T.S. Eliot called her a minor poet. Careful to articulate what he meant by that. 122 00:16:37,700 --> 00:16:44,090 Not that Herrick was a lesser poet, but that he didn't have the singleness of purpose of the major poets. 123 00:16:44,090 --> 00:16:48,680 Herbert Donne Milton and I might add Wordsworth. 124 00:16:48,680 --> 00:16:52,430 And strictly speaking, he is right about her. The poems are minor. 125 00:16:52,430 --> 00:17:01,490 They might even be slight. But what interests me is that they are sometimes quiet enough to have sunlight in their voices. 126 00:17:01,490 --> 00:17:06,320 And I can't help asking, is that because he is a minor poet? 127 00:17:06,320 --> 00:17:19,950 Is it because the trajectory of his life considered as a performance piece is one of the best examples of the art of erosion? 128 00:17:19,950 --> 00:17:22,560 Herrick was born in London in 1891, 129 00:17:22,560 --> 00:17:31,650 and he wrote what critics have called his major poems in the company of other urban poets like Ben Johnson and Thomas Carruth, 130 00:17:31,650 --> 00:17:35,400 although it's hard to date his work, according to John Creta's chronology. 131 00:17:35,400 --> 00:17:46,700 Poems like Karina's going amazing and to his friend Wickes complex pieces with some singleness of purpose all date from those early London years. 132 00:17:46,700 --> 00:17:55,310 At the age of 39, Herrick was made vicar of Dean Pryor on the edge of Dartmoor. 133 00:17:55,310 --> 00:18:03,140 And something of that place began to seep into him and damage his concentration. 134 00:18:03,140 --> 00:18:11,590 His poems dwindled to Eight Lions, Four Lions, Three Lions two. 135 00:18:11,590 --> 00:18:25,070 He took to writing epitaphs, many of them addressed to himself, and he noticed and regretted his decline and blamed it on his whereabouts. 136 00:18:25,070 --> 00:18:36,020 Call me no more as heretofore the music of a feast since now, alas, the mirth that was in me is dead or ceased. 137 00:18:36,020 --> 00:18:45,720 Before I went to banishment into the loaded west, I could rehearse a lyric verse and speak it with the best. 138 00:18:45,720 --> 00:18:57,630 But time I mean, has lead, I see my organ fast asleep and turned my voice into the noise of those that sit and weep. 139 00:18:57,630 --> 00:19:11,910 But time Amy has laid. I see my organ fast asleep and turned my voice into the noise of those that sit and weep. 140 00:19:11,910 --> 00:19:21,330 Now, that is a very good chronometer, time has turned his voice into the noise of those that sit and weep a sniffing, 141 00:19:21,330 --> 00:19:32,400 hissing, sighing, dripping breath, broken noise similar to the sound of Wyatt's water, which is of kinds of soft. 142 00:19:32,400 --> 00:19:38,670 I can hear it again in that two line poem, she by the river sat and sitting there. 143 00:19:38,670 --> 00:19:51,830 She weeping, made it deeper by a tear. She by the river, sat and sitting there, she weeping, made it deeper by a tear. 144 00:19:51,830 --> 00:19:59,570 What exactly is the sound of a TIA entering water, if you can imagine it, then you are listening to the true note of Herrick, 145 00:19:59,570 --> 00:20:08,050 a tiny plotting unsound as quiet as the quarter rain between weeping and deeper. 146 00:20:08,050 --> 00:20:13,360 It is the same sound as Beckett's immaterial, according. 147 00:20:13,360 --> 00:20:23,430 It is the merging melting sound of one transparency sliding into another like two ghosts meeting in the underworld or like this. 148 00:20:23,430 --> 00:20:31,110 And as a vapour or a drop of rain once lost, can never be found again. 149 00:20:31,110 --> 00:20:40,430 That is a strange self-raising thought, imagine a man shining a searchlight on the sea looking for a raindrop that has disappeared. 150 00:20:40,430 --> 00:20:50,100 Will this the mellow touch of music, most doth wound the soul when it doth rather sigh than sound? 151 00:20:50,100 --> 00:21:00,790 The mellow touch of music, most doth wound the soul when it doth rather sigh than sound. 152 00:21:00,790 --> 00:21:05,500 These micro sonic poems are inadvertent self-portraits. 153 00:21:05,500 --> 00:21:15,590 It's Herrick himself who is vanishing. And in the brokenness and silence of his later work, I can hear the rainy interference of. 154 00:21:15,590 --> 00:21:21,290 In case you don't know, Dalton, it is what they call a granite upland between north and South Devon. 155 00:21:21,290 --> 00:21:25,740 And you enter it over a threshold of categories. 156 00:21:25,740 --> 00:21:33,960 As soon as you hear the clunk of cattle grid under your wheels, you open the car windows and you smell erosions. 157 00:21:33,960 --> 00:21:41,640 Please pause for five minutes and imagine the weather carving the great granite lamp of Dartmoor while I play you cattle grids, 158 00:21:41,640 --> 00:23:37,450 a section from a symphony by John Driver, who is in the audience based on his recordings of dark horse cattle grids. 159 00:23:37,450 --> 00:23:48,800 That's put you on. I don't think that what categories in her day. 160 00:23:48,800 --> 00:23:56,810 Instead, there was the clattering of Dean Bourne, whose waters rise on Dartmoor, to me, swimming in it in the 21st century. 161 00:23:56,810 --> 00:24:01,730 It is a well mannered Blackstone stream with an almost human voice. 162 00:24:01,730 --> 00:24:08,210 But to herrick, it was a symbol of all the blurring and transgressions for which he hated Devon. 163 00:24:08,210 --> 00:24:13,700 Rock it out and rock, we discovered Iron Man and rock, are they ways all over? 164 00:24:13,700 --> 00:24:20,250 He said. Herrick was frightened of losing his human coherence. 165 00:24:20,250 --> 00:24:25,280 And you can understand his fear if you look at contemporary accounts of Devon. 166 00:24:25,280 --> 00:24:30,830 In the 17th century, it took eight days to ride from London to Exeter and beyond Exeter. 167 00:24:30,830 --> 00:24:36,990 The roads were often no more than grassy tracks liable to flooding. 168 00:24:36,990 --> 00:24:45,750 Tristram Risdon, in his choreographic account of Devon, completed a couple of years after her arrival, described the inhabitants as very laborious, 169 00:24:45,750 --> 00:24:53,550 thorough and unpleasant to strangers travelling those ways which are cumbersome and uneven amongst rocks and stones, 170 00:24:53,550 --> 00:25:01,020 painful for man and horse as they can best witness who may have trail their old. 171 00:25:01,020 --> 00:25:08,600 Imagine Herrick transplanted from Cheapside into that foggy, haunted county. 172 00:25:08,600 --> 00:25:17,020 If he had been a major poet, he might have kept his eyes on God and suffered no change of style. 173 00:25:17,020 --> 00:25:21,810 But her great strength is his weakness. 174 00:25:21,810 --> 00:25:30,270 He let the police filter into him like a piano under an apple tree, the structure of his poems began to break, eaten away by the weather. 175 00:25:30,270 --> 00:25:35,790 And here in there, the clink of a dead note interfered with his thinking. 176 00:25:35,790 --> 00:25:50,720 Lost to the world, lost to myself alone here, now I rest under this marble stone index of silence, heard and seen of none. 177 00:25:50,720 --> 00:25:55,920 Lost to the world, lost to myself alone. 178 00:25:55,920 --> 00:26:10,070 Here now, I rest under this marble stone. In depth of silence, heard and seen of none. 179 00:26:10,070 --> 00:26:12,380 In 16 47, during the Civil War, 180 00:26:12,380 --> 00:26:19,250 the parishioners of North Devon delivered a petition to the government complaining that the whole county had suffered more than any other. 181 00:26:19,250 --> 00:26:26,560 The effects of fire or plague in free quarter plunder payments and loss of stock and trade by sea and land. 182 00:26:26,560 --> 00:26:31,990 That same year, Herrick was expelled from Dean prior to his royalist sympathies. 183 00:26:31,990 --> 00:26:42,630 He professed to be delighted. Dean Bourne farewell. He said, I never wish to see Dean or they warty incivility. 184 00:26:42,630 --> 00:26:50,010 But a dozen years later, after the restoration, he pleaded to be sent back. 185 00:26:50,010 --> 00:26:59,130 Devon had softened him. His attitude had shifted or to use his own invented word. 186 00:26:59,130 --> 00:27:11,750 It had trans shifted. I sing of times trans shifting, he says in his opening poem. 187 00:27:11,750 --> 00:27:26,250 And the word itself trans shifts as he speaks it, starting in Latin and then melting into old English, a hybrid word for a mutable poet. 188 00:27:26,250 --> 00:27:36,510 I'm very taken with this words, trends shifting to shift is to move predictably to trans shift is to be buffeted beyond your knowledge, 189 00:27:36,510 --> 00:27:41,350 to shift and then be shifted by that shift. 190 00:27:41,350 --> 00:27:44,230 To become trans human trans morphic, 191 00:27:44,230 --> 00:27:56,180 the way du trans shifts into mist or the way a piano trans shifts from a civilised instrument into a meteorological one. 192 00:27:56,180 --> 00:28:02,640 To sing of trans shifting demands, great feats of erosion. 193 00:28:02,640 --> 00:28:11,810 You need to see through matter to the durations that are wearing it away. 194 00:28:11,810 --> 00:28:24,330 Lovers, how they come and part. A gauges ring they bear about and still to be and not seen when and where they will. 195 00:28:24,330 --> 00:28:31,380 They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall, they fall like do. 196 00:28:31,380 --> 00:28:40,380 But make no noise at all. So silently, they want the other come. 197 00:28:40,380 --> 00:28:56,170 As cannons steel into the pair or plum and air like leave, no pressure to be seen wherever they met or parting place has been. 198 00:28:56,170 --> 00:29:05,230 A gauges ring they bear about them still. To be and not seen when and where they will. 199 00:29:05,230 --> 00:29:10,420 They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall. 200 00:29:10,420 --> 00:29:16,950 They fall like do but make no noise at all. 201 00:29:16,950 --> 00:29:21,080 So silently, they one to the other come. 202 00:29:21,080 --> 00:29:36,130 As colours steel into the pear or plum and air like leave no pressure to be seen wherever they met or parting place has been. 203 00:29:36,130 --> 00:29:42,670 There you have it, another weathered poem, a poem about unknowable, inaudible transitions. 204 00:29:42,670 --> 00:29:47,060 Is it a love poem or is it really a gardening poem? 205 00:29:47,060 --> 00:29:52,100 A poem about the erotic movement of colour over fruit. 206 00:29:52,100 --> 00:30:03,850 Is it a cavalier poem or is it really a silent type or realist poem looking not at the fruit, but at the rays of light moving towards it? 207 00:30:03,850 --> 00:30:21,010 So silently, they one to the other come. As colours steel into the pear or plum and air like leave no pressure to be seen. 208 00:30:21,010 --> 00:30:29,440 I can imagine Herrick in his prior garden, getting up early to inspect his fruit trees. 209 00:30:29,440 --> 00:30:38,410 I have done the same myself last summer, I recorded the movement of colour over a Victoria plum throughout the course of a week. 210 00:30:38,410 --> 00:30:45,990 Day one, the smallest of 45 green plums, has just a rash of pink around the stalk. 211 00:30:45,990 --> 00:30:50,670 Data, the rash is still there, five mm wide and circular. 212 00:30:50,670 --> 00:30:58,300 The green flash is going yellow. Day three, all the plums on that branch have a whitish look. 213 00:30:58,300 --> 00:31:05,200 The small plum is suffering a kind of sunrise and spots of crimson and yellow of bursting up through its surface. 214 00:31:05,200 --> 00:31:18,620 The ripening seems to be happening cell by cell. Day four, Yellow Haze all around the branch, the pink has let fall a plume of move down one side. 215 00:31:18,620 --> 00:31:21,320 Day five, it looks like a spreading fire. 216 00:31:21,320 --> 00:31:30,610 The I can't quite believe it keeps jumping back to the thought of green, but all kinds of colours now seem to be gathering under the skin. 217 00:31:30,610 --> 00:31:40,440 Day six. Sadly, on day six, while turning the fruit to inspect its underneath, I snapped the twig. 218 00:31:40,440 --> 00:31:49,760 A good example of the way our observations interfere with our experiments. 219 00:31:49,760 --> 00:31:53,840 But anyway, there was something forlorn about the whole endeavour. 220 00:31:53,840 --> 00:31:58,070 It was like the story of Kitty Jay, who is buried on Dartmoor every morning. 221 00:31:58,070 --> 00:32:04,120 There are fresh flowers on her grave, but nobody has ever seen them delivered. 222 00:32:04,120 --> 00:32:07,690 Every morning out of nowhere and leaving no trace in the air, 223 00:32:07,690 --> 00:32:18,370 more purple had arrived in my plum tree and the process of recording this made me aware all week of radiations rather than solidity. 224 00:32:18,370 --> 00:32:28,450 And yet the notes I made in Blue Biro on the wall calendar each day, more elaborate could not begin to describe what was happening. 225 00:32:28,450 --> 00:32:36,900 For all my close inspection, I never once saw the actual movement of the colour. 226 00:32:36,900 --> 00:32:49,350 There remained a mystery inside each shade shift so that I failed morning after morning to catch the actual living ness of that plum performance. 227 00:32:49,350 --> 00:33:01,660 What was required was not more detail, but less. Her eight lines of which only to describe the fruit somehow allow the process its mystery. 228 00:33:01,660 --> 00:33:16,200 As colours steel into the or plum and air like leave no pressure to be seen. 229 00:33:16,200 --> 00:33:22,130 There is another fruit watcher. In a hotter orchard. 230 00:33:22,130 --> 00:33:37,410 At an even earlier hour. Homer in book 24 of the Odyssey notices not the colour of his grapes, but they're gradually increasing weight. 231 00:33:37,410 --> 00:33:44,580 You gave me and named for me one Divine Rose. All kinds of grapes growing right in succession. 232 00:33:44,580 --> 00:33:50,360 Whenever the hours of God weigh down on them from the air. 233 00:33:50,360 --> 00:34:02,030 You gave me and named for me, 50 Vine rose, all kinds of grapes growing ripe in succession whenever the hours of God weigh down on them from the air. 234 00:34:02,030 --> 00:34:07,250 It's a wonderful scene when Odysseus has come home and is trying to prove to his father 235 00:34:07,250 --> 00:34:14,730 that he is who he is and he's doing it by means of talking about the the fine rose. 236 00:34:14,730 --> 00:34:21,380 If Herrick has the gift of weakness like a net curtain, letting the light shine through his language. 237 00:34:21,380 --> 00:34:26,790 Then Homer has the greater gift of absence. 238 00:34:26,790 --> 00:34:36,060 He is simply not there. And nothing is known about him, not even whether he was one poet or several. 239 00:34:36,060 --> 00:34:42,050 And just as her ex unsteadiness tuned his voice to trends shifting. 240 00:34:42,050 --> 00:34:51,780 So home is hidden, this, which is really just his embeddedness in other voices, gives him access to things unseen. 241 00:34:51,780 --> 00:34:58,500 And puts no mediating obstacle between the unseen and the audience. 242 00:34:58,500 --> 00:35:09,880 All kinds of grapes growing ripe in succession. Whenever the hours of God weigh down on them from the air. 243 00:35:09,880 --> 00:35:17,020 Great flowers as they fill up with water turned upside down and sink closer and closer to the Earth. 244 00:35:17,020 --> 00:35:29,490 Homa invites us to read that movement as a downward pressure from the air, and the verb he uses is the same he uses elsewhere of both snow and rain. 245 00:35:29,490 --> 00:35:36,900 As a winter swollen river smashes down the walkways with its current and the flowering vineyards can't hold it back with their fences. 246 00:35:36,900 --> 00:35:42,760 Whenever the rainstorm of God weighs down on that river. 247 00:35:42,760 --> 00:35:56,060 Like on a winter's day, the snowflakes fall slightly and everything gets covered from above whenever the snowstorm of God weighs down on the world. 248 00:35:56,060 --> 00:36:05,030 All three images compressed together inside the memory of the performer rub off on each other so that the falling hours is a half snow, 249 00:36:05,030 --> 00:36:11,370 half rain and the air itself is made visible. 250 00:36:11,370 --> 00:36:17,610 The lines last no more than two moments designed to be heard out loud, not read from the page. 251 00:36:17,610 --> 00:36:23,570 Their language is winged. Passing gone? 252 00:36:23,570 --> 00:36:34,220 And yet in that flash glimpse, they see further than Herrick. They see the actual oppression in the air, which Herrick missed. 253 00:36:34,220 --> 00:36:40,430 And they see time itself, not in its mechanical, but in its natural seasonal form. 254 00:36:40,430 --> 00:36:56,580 The hours or seasons of variable characters based on the variable divisions of daylight, they are the original trends shifters. 255 00:36:56,580 --> 00:37:07,340 In May 2020, the Cornermen Museum in London is employing a hermit who will live for a month in the clock tower. 256 00:37:07,340 --> 00:37:16,680 His task is to stop time. And even now, he is preparing all kinds of erosions, inscriptions if operations, 257 00:37:16,680 --> 00:37:26,450 musical interludes and excavations and straightforward acts of demolition to fulfil that commission. 258 00:37:26,450 --> 00:37:34,760 Luckily for him, no one is going to find out whether or not he is successful, it will be like the Yugoslavian wedding procession, 259 00:37:34,760 --> 00:37:43,990 which froze for 100 years on the way to church, then thawed out and carried on regardless. 260 00:37:43,990 --> 00:37:45,640 I have spoken to this hermit, 261 00:37:45,640 --> 00:37:55,600 and he told me that his vision of time is inspired by the Buddhist concept of an in the word for it is culper and this is what a culper is. 262 00:37:55,600 --> 00:38:04,720 The Buddha described the mountain even bigger than Mount Everest. Once every 100 years, someone wipes the mountain with a small piece of silk. 263 00:38:04,720 --> 00:38:15,540 The mountain will be worn away before the kalpa ends. I don't know how you would stop that kind of time. 264 00:38:15,540 --> 00:38:19,800 It is so material, so it is home as time is different. 265 00:38:19,800 --> 00:38:23,400 It's a series of 12 characters who are devoted to dancing. 266 00:38:23,400 --> 00:38:31,860 It's the hour when a woman eats his lunch or the season when flies gather in sheds or it is the pre Olympian goddess of night, 267 00:38:31,860 --> 00:38:39,330 or it's dawn who wears yellow clothes and has a liking for young men whom she snatches up and sleeps with. 268 00:38:39,330 --> 00:38:45,500 It's relatively easy to stop that sort of time. 269 00:38:45,500 --> 00:38:52,130 Even inside the meticulous clockwork of the Odyssey with its 20-Year divisions and its turning phases of 270 00:38:52,130 --> 00:39:00,700 the Moon with its chronic metrical numbers of fruit trees and symbolic quantities of arrows and axes. 271 00:39:00,700 --> 00:39:13,480 Even after all that careful counting. Athena manages to stop time in Book Twenty Three so that Penelope and Odysseus can enjoy a long night together. 272 00:39:13,480 --> 00:39:20,650 Now, Dawn, with her pink hands, would have risen on that weeping had not the great Eid goddess Athena thought differently. 273 00:39:20,650 --> 00:39:23,890 She held the long night back at the Outwood Edge. 274 00:39:23,890 --> 00:39:37,150 She detained Dawn on her golden cushions by the ocean and would not let her harness her forfeited horses who bring the daylight to people. 275 00:39:37,150 --> 00:39:42,610 The Iliad, set in the ninth year of the Trojan War, has 218 similes. 276 00:39:42,610 --> 00:39:53,140 And each similarly operates on the narrative like Athena interrupting the flow with an image of the present moment. 277 00:39:53,140 --> 00:39:57,730 Notice the change of tents when, for example, automaton is killed, 278 00:39:57,730 --> 00:40:08,280 so he fell like when Oak Falls or white poplar or Tall Pine, which carpenters in hills cut with axes to make ships. 279 00:40:08,280 --> 00:40:18,050 Or Sesto? Standing close, he speared him in the right jaw, breaking through his teeth and pulled him over the rail as a man on a jutting rock hooks. 280 00:40:18,050 --> 00:40:22,100 A vigorous fish from sea to land with lion and shining bronze. 281 00:40:22,100 --> 00:40:29,610 So he hooked or gaping with his spear. 282 00:40:29,610 --> 00:40:38,530 It is part of every storyteller's art to look up out of the story and re-engage the audience with a contemporary reference. 283 00:40:38,530 --> 00:40:46,420 At these times, shifts would surely have been marked by changes of gesture and to. 284 00:40:46,420 --> 00:40:48,670 To hear the Iliad in performance, 285 00:40:48,670 --> 00:40:58,940 moving in and out of past and present must have been a bit like Beckett's experience of a tonal surface eaten into by large black pauses. 286 00:40:58,940 --> 00:41:05,800 Except that in Homer, the poses are not blank. They are unspeakably bright. 287 00:41:05,800 --> 00:41:14,830 Like when the wind dies down, the stars stand out, glittering around a shining moon, each steep headland, every crag and cliffs can be seen. 288 00:41:14,830 --> 00:41:24,750 The sky breaks open to its very depths, showing every star and the shepherds heart is glad. 289 00:41:24,750 --> 00:41:36,210 All the silver of that simply comes pouring out of the phrase you run off and whoop every aspect of either the sky breaks open to its very depths, 290 00:41:36,210 --> 00:41:41,190 endless brighter spells from the heavens, down from bright heaven bursts. 291 00:41:41,190 --> 00:41:51,390 The boundless, brighter from heaven above the boundless brighter is wrenched with light out of the sky, slides a deeper, unspeakable sky. 292 00:41:51,390 --> 00:42:01,650 The night sky opens and the real secret sky bursts downwards. 293 00:42:01,650 --> 00:42:10,800 Asbestos, which means unsayable describes Aether, which is the immaterial far away a reggae means under split and it all happens. 294 00:42:10,800 --> 00:42:19,270 Uranus end with a downward heaven sent movement. The angles are exactly the same as in that passing informational line about the 295 00:42:19,270 --> 00:42:25,050 greats in which the living hours leave Earth woods from deals the sky god. 296 00:42:25,050 --> 00:42:33,920 Every phrase of Homer follows the same ecstatic line from nothingness into being and then back again. 297 00:42:33,920 --> 00:42:40,750 It is like the opening of a camera shutter letting light fall suddenly onto the language. 298 00:42:40,750 --> 00:42:49,240 And that is, I think, what Beckett meant by speaking with Moonlight in your voice. 299 00:42:49,240 --> 00:42:55,125 Thank you.