1
00:00:01,130 --> 00:00:09,980
Okay. I'm going to start with two poems, one by a Ukrainian poet from Odessa and one by a Russian poet from Moscow.

2
00:00:11,570 --> 00:00:16,610
And the first poem is by Ludmilla Kazansky, and I've probably pronounced that wrong.

3
00:00:16,970 --> 00:00:29,060
And it's translated by Welsh in a more. She dreamed a humanitarian convoy is the title.

4
00:00:33,530 --> 00:00:37,460
She dreamed a humanitarian convoy entered the city.

5
00:00:40,030 --> 00:00:45,520
Covered with a sheet, head to toe. She sleeps, tucking her knees.

6
00:00:48,550 --> 00:00:53,050
Always on her right side while a wall watches her back.

7
00:00:54,340 --> 00:00:59,560
This is how one sleeps in the time of humanitarian wars.

8
00:01:02,080 --> 00:01:06,960
This is how in all times, all tribes sleep.

9
00:01:08,610 --> 00:01:14,490
Waking only from silence. Silence is a threat.

10
00:01:16,730 --> 00:01:20,630
During silence. Do not open your door.

11
00:01:22,410 --> 00:01:28,570
They are there. Humanitarians with inverted eyes.

12
00:01:37,440 --> 00:01:43,470
And this is a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Ilya Kaminsky and.

13
00:01:44,580 --> 00:01:49,930
Jean Valentine. This poem is written in 1950.

14
00:01:51,730 --> 00:01:58,260
And it's called I Know the Truth. I know the truth.

15
00:01:59,100 --> 00:02:05,420
Give up all other truths. No time on earth for people to kill each other.

16
00:02:07,150 --> 00:02:12,010
Look. It's evening. Look, it's nearly night.

17
00:02:13,330 --> 00:02:17,950
No more of your talk. Poets. Lovers, generals.

18
00:02:20,470 --> 00:02:25,860
No, no wind. And the earth is sprinkled with drizzle.

19
00:02:27,240 --> 00:02:32,310
And soon the blizzard of stars will go quiet. And soon.

20
00:02:33,240 --> 00:02:36,300
Soon to sleep under the earth.

21
00:02:36,750 --> 00:02:40,450
All of us. US who are alive on earth.

22
00:02:41,060 --> 00:03:04,840
Do not let us sleep. So this lecture is called Lament for the Earth, addressing the Challenge to Nature Poetry.

23
00:03:05,880 --> 00:03:15,700
And of course, that challenge goes on changing. The death of the earth.

24
00:03:16,480 --> 00:03:20,440
Famine. Crop failure. Aborted seed.

25
00:03:21,070 --> 00:03:24,219
Confused seasons. Dead bodies. Left.

26
00:03:24,220 --> 00:03:28,810
Lying thin. Cries of the living animals.

27
00:03:28,810 --> 00:03:32,200
Walking about as light as wicker. Work. Starved.

28
00:03:32,530 --> 00:03:36,200
Unsteady. Funeral fires.

29
00:03:36,950 --> 00:03:48,740
Oboes shrieking women. All this was imagined and written down almost 3000 years ago in the Homeric him to Demeter.

30
00:03:51,510 --> 00:03:58,710
Demeter is a prosperous goddess of seasons whose daughter became the bride of the underworld.

31
00:04:01,140 --> 00:04:04,200
Two traditions intersect in her story.

32
00:04:05,310 --> 00:04:10,049
The tradition of lament and the tradition of nature.

33
00:04:10,050 --> 00:04:18,030
Poetry. Both of which are attempts to communicate with something outside human structures of thought.

34
00:04:23,600 --> 00:04:29,390
And to that end, they express what Emily Sharon called the last stage of lyricism.

35
00:04:30,520 --> 00:04:37,580
When we're a thousand miles away from poetry, he said. We still participate in it by that sudden need to scream.

36
00:04:38,320 --> 00:04:48,170
The last stage of lyricism. Not all nature poets would accept the scream as their ancestor.

37
00:04:49,500 --> 00:04:59,100
There is, after all, a more well-mannered tradition, the tradition of the CI, which can be traced back through pastoral and elegy.

38
00:04:59,640 --> 00:05:02,970
And that's what most people mean when they think about nature writing.

39
00:05:04,710 --> 00:05:10,200
But the CI is not vigorous enough to escape what we think we already know.

40
00:05:11,830 --> 00:05:21,310
I would like to reinstate the screen as a formal requirement for thinking about the natural world, or if not the screen, then at least the shout.

41
00:05:26,760 --> 00:05:35,490
With that declaration behind me, I'm going to speak to you today about the earth, the mighty photocopier, which has no copies of itself.

42
00:05:37,830 --> 00:05:42,630
I hope to show some gratefulness for the supply of leaves just now.

43
00:05:42,810 --> 00:05:49,710
On the point of being printed. Each tree species with a set of replicas of last year's leaves.

44
00:05:50,190 --> 00:05:53,400
And yet each leaf particular.

45
00:05:56,030 --> 00:05:58,670
So that the character in that book has story.

46
00:05:59,600 --> 00:06:08,270
I mean, fulness who fell off his horse and was disabled and could do nothing else after that but sit memorising facts.

47
00:06:09,730 --> 00:06:16,180
He could remember not only every leaf in its singularity, but and I'll quote it,

48
00:06:17,410 --> 00:06:28,630
the truth was found as remembered not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had passed or imagined that leaf.

49
00:06:31,440 --> 00:06:42,990
I suppose the mindfulness must sometimes have resembled these images of the several selves of a popular leaf by Gary Fabian Miller.

50
00:06:45,430 --> 00:06:50,380
I wish a poem could work like that. Turning slowly green as it proceeds.

51
00:06:51,550 --> 00:06:58,030
This is what Gary says about these leaves in the spring of 1985 in Lincolnshire.

52
00:06:58,300 --> 00:07:02,530
I made a record of the photosynthesis of a poplar tree as it was leaving,

53
00:07:03,130 --> 00:07:09,760
investigating the emergence from the body of a translucent, pink, green veined cluster of cells.

54
00:07:10,450 --> 00:07:15,790
Then the flood of all the colours we call green percolating the leaves as the spring days lengthened.

55
00:07:17,030 --> 00:07:25,820
Each morning I gathered a ribbon of leaves, placed them one at a time in the enlarge a clip, and printed directly from and through them.

56
00:07:26,840 --> 00:07:34,340
I followed the same routine for 30 days until the tree had reached its full chlorophyll rich greenness.

57
00:07:47,260 --> 00:07:52,570
Or there are these beach leaves by Andy Goldsworthy about to be scattered by a current.

58
00:07:53,970 --> 00:07:59,100
The photographer has overtaken the incident and found what it feels like to be incidental.

59
00:08:01,510 --> 00:08:10,510
This image makes me want to think about the complaint of Joab, who said, Wilt thou break and will break a leaf being driven to and fro.

60
00:08:13,290 --> 00:08:18,900
Perhaps it's a moderate to pay so much attention to leaves. But there it is, once fun, as has been mentioned.

61
00:08:19,140 --> 00:08:22,680
Then the question of singularity must be addressed.

62
00:08:23,610 --> 00:08:31,880
Or, as Hopkins might have put it, the question of solving and unsettling, which motivates all human behaviour.

63
00:08:33,760 --> 00:08:37,210
There is a trace of Hopkins in the mania of fitness.

64
00:08:37,750 --> 00:08:46,330
There is a trace of fullness in the beautiful black and white detail of this photograph by Salgado.

65
00:08:48,780 --> 00:08:58,570
Not one leaf missed out. After looking at that photograph, I had the sense for several days of having seen the leaves as they see themselves,

66
00:08:59,440 --> 00:09:04,180
or if sight is too small a word for the absorption of light by chlorophyll.

67
00:09:04,690 --> 00:09:14,050
Then at least I had an impression of the speed of light and the copying faculty of light being similarly caught by the lens and the leaf.

68
00:09:15,190 --> 00:09:24,250
As if trees had waited millions of years for a camera to acknowledge their dark light to through nonlinear understanding of time.

69
00:09:27,080 --> 00:09:39,020
This is a dangerous direction of thought. It would be healthier to speak like Glaucus in the Iliad with his gentle, generalising grievance.

70
00:09:40,840 --> 00:09:45,130
Glaukos was about to throw a spear at a man when the man called out to him.

71
00:09:45,190 --> 00:09:48,190
Who are you, sir? I haven't seen you before in this battle.

72
00:09:48,970 --> 00:09:53,020
To which Glaucus answered. Don't ask about my background.

73
00:09:53,890 --> 00:10:03,490
My lineage is like a lineage of leaves. The wind blows the leaves to the earth, and the following spring breathed new life into the woods.

74
00:10:04,240 --> 00:10:08,890
That is how one generation dies and a new one takes its place.

75
00:10:11,850 --> 00:10:17,070
Well, those, broadly speaking, are the two styles I mentioned, the sigh and the scream.

76
00:10:19,050 --> 00:10:23,070
The tradition of humans mattering as little as leaves.

77
00:10:24,450 --> 00:10:29,130
And the tradition of leaves mattering as much as humans.

78
00:10:30,660 --> 00:10:35,790
Replaceable and irreplaceable loss. I don't know which is worse.

79
00:10:41,040 --> 00:10:45,060
Two types of lament match those two types of loss.

80
00:10:46,100 --> 00:10:58,340
There is Chronos, a professional and consoling lament composed most often by men in its various forms the elegy, the ode, the epitaph, the obituary.

81
00:10:59,090 --> 00:11:04,670
Chronos brings perspective and information to the bereaved and a kind of calm.

82
00:11:06,170 --> 00:11:10,880
Chronos provides the tone of this short poem from the Palatine anthology.

83
00:11:13,930 --> 00:11:18,950
Dear Earth. Take into your body. The old I'm into ghosts.

84
00:11:20,020 --> 00:11:24,639
And remember his hard work for your sake. In you.

85
00:11:24,640 --> 00:11:28,300
She always firmly set the standards of olive trees.

86
00:11:29,570 --> 00:11:34,640
So in return lie gently round his aged head.

87
00:11:35,740 --> 00:11:38,770
And dress yourself in flowers in the spring.

88
00:11:43,600 --> 00:11:50,890
It is quietly implied by this poet that olive trees and flowers are a fair replacement for a man.

89
00:11:52,240 --> 00:11:59,290
Like Glaucus. This poet turns a self into a type that is throwing us.

90
00:12:04,220 --> 00:12:10,970
Gosh, is the female tradition, the keening tradition, and it does not accept replacement.

91
00:12:11,540 --> 00:12:18,140
Neither the replacement of one life for another nor the replacement of one moment for another.

92
00:12:19,460 --> 00:12:25,160
Keenan dwells. How? Repeat alone.

93
00:12:25,490 --> 00:12:31,350
Okon uttered her story. Keening does not just mourn.

94
00:12:31,620 --> 00:12:43,740
It expresses an altered state of mind, a kind of amazed timelessness, or, as Denise Riley describes it, the extraordinary feeling of a temporality.

95
00:12:47,150 --> 00:12:54,590
In Riley's case, a temporality came over her with a thud, not as a theory, but as a response to losing her son.

96
00:12:56,070 --> 00:13:04,860
In her book length essay Time Lived Without Its Flow, she writes of realising that inhabiting the drift of time is a mutable perception,

97
00:13:05,610 --> 00:13:10,980
one which can stop leaving you breathing but stranded stockstill.

98
00:13:14,750 --> 00:13:19,820
Female element is an attempt to articulate that unspeakable state.

99
00:13:21,430 --> 00:13:24,460
It has traditionally been loud, shrill.

100
00:13:25,000 --> 00:13:29,080
Performative. Aural, repetitive, disturbing.

101
00:13:29,350 --> 00:13:42,540
Non-linear, inconsolable. It's drift is against daily ness, against forgetting, against life itself, even to the point of stirring up revenge.

102
00:13:42,810 --> 00:13:49,110
So that at least since the sixth century BCE, there have been legal restrictions on its practice,

103
00:13:49,590 --> 00:13:54,720
with the result that it only appears in literature in disguised or sanitised form.

104
00:13:57,410 --> 00:14:01,040
Often this type of lament refuses to use human syntax.

105
00:14:02,310 --> 00:14:12,020
It adopts and interspecies language in which women shriek like birds or stand with arms raised as if they turned into trees.

106
00:14:18,470 --> 00:14:26,740
And they do this not just by way of complaining, but as a means of communicating with beings which are outside time.

107
00:14:27,750 --> 00:14:32,850
The Dead, for example, who need to be reminded where they are or the gods.

108
00:14:34,570 --> 00:14:41,560
So that almost inadvertently keening speaks a kind of Esperanto in which trees,

109
00:14:41,800 --> 00:14:50,290
birds, corpses, gods, humans and the earth itself can communicate across timezones.

110
00:14:53,260 --> 00:15:00,670
I'm very interested in this Esperanto because it suits my sense that trees have a different way of inhabiting time,

111
00:15:01,300 --> 00:15:10,240
which Salgado communicates through his overtaken instance and which Funes must have known in the all at once worlds of his memory.

112
00:15:11,990 --> 00:15:17,840
Lime trees, for example, growing steadily in close knit colonies for hundreds of years.

113
00:15:18,350 --> 00:15:26,000
When you look into the crown of a Lyme, it seems to express a kind of future perfect or continuous past,

114
00:15:26,630 --> 00:15:32,570
which, like bereavement leaves you breathing but stranded stock still.

115
00:15:35,850 --> 00:15:41,070
You might learn how to grow a tree or eat its fruit or worry about its survival.

116
00:15:41,670 --> 00:15:47,430
You might write a nature poem explaining the damaging effects of pollution and protective lichen,

117
00:15:48,240 --> 00:15:55,080
or even like David Attenborough, speed up a film of trees in order to insist they are similar to ourselves.

118
00:15:56,610 --> 00:16:04,570
But that is all so much threat to us. None of those approaches meets the central, imaginative demand.

119
00:16:04,870 --> 00:16:13,600
But time itself is part of a tree singularity and you cannot apprehended without altering your mind.

120
00:16:24,440 --> 00:16:35,020
You principle of song. What are you for? Perking up under any spasmodic light to trot out your shadowed warbling.

121
00:16:38,010 --> 00:16:43,080
Mint. Slight killer. And sleek down your fur, Ines.

122
00:16:44,330 --> 00:16:48,860
Slim as a whip wire shall be your hope and ultra flexible.

123
00:16:51,050 --> 00:16:54,050
Flap Finley sheet of beaten ten.

124
00:16:55,080 --> 00:17:00,060
But won't affectionately plump or cushioned and receptive lays.

125
00:17:02,500 --> 00:17:07,160
But little song. Don't. So instruct yourself.

126
00:17:08,900 --> 00:17:16,370
For non hanging around to hear you. They have gone bustling or stumbling well away.

127
00:17:24,360 --> 00:17:31,149
Denise Riley's part song for her son. Composed stopping lee of 20 sections.

128
00:17:31,150 --> 00:17:38,950
And the one I've just read you is the first provides a musical answer to some of the conceptual questions raised by her essay.

129
00:17:41,990 --> 00:17:49,310
Inside the seizure of bereavement, she asks, How could such a striking condition ever be voiced?

130
00:17:50,410 --> 00:17:59,140
What can we do with such solitary expressions of violence in new and hitherto unexpected states of temporal perception?

131
00:18:01,500 --> 00:18:09,720
Her essays claim tentatively offered, is that poetry is itself an expression of a temporality.

132
00:18:11,850 --> 00:18:20,460
A poem she says may well be carried by an oscillation, a to and fro, rather than by some forward leaning chronological drive.

133
00:18:21,120 --> 00:18:26,220
It both sanctions and enacts an experience of time, which is non-linear.

134
00:18:29,470 --> 00:18:34,540
All poems, of course, contain that oscillating or circling drift.

135
00:18:35,870 --> 00:18:43,520
But some poems also omit something closer to raw noise, something like The Scream of children.

136
00:18:45,290 --> 00:18:49,790
To a person screaming, the sound never escapes the present moment.

137
00:18:50,360 --> 00:18:56,630
The mind has to cease in order to scream. And there is a trace of that in Denise Riley's poem.

138
00:18:58,340 --> 00:19:04,200
Flap thinly sheet of beaten tin. When you.

139
00:19:04,200 --> 00:19:13,470
Benton It produces a tin cry, weak and inadvertent, a horrible image of defeat by grief.

140
00:19:14,890 --> 00:19:18,340
Thin sheet beat ten.

141
00:19:19,670 --> 00:19:23,150
That line traps me in its mirror and I stand in front of it.

142
00:19:23,270 --> 00:19:31,670
Stockstill remembering memory. Hearing every other inadvertent sound given off by a human in shock.

143
00:19:35,980 --> 00:19:44,080
I met a musicologist recently who could hear the voice of tin trapped in a bronze rivet alloyed with the sweeter,

144
00:19:44,410 --> 00:19:47,140
pinker, more radiant sound of copper.

145
00:19:49,510 --> 00:19:59,830
He had hung two rods on threads from each hand, and he chimed them together to hear how the bronze inadvertently uttered first a smashing,

146
00:20:00,250 --> 00:20:04,300
then a ringing, then a shrill, tingling and a thrum.

147
00:20:07,230 --> 00:20:16,590
He called it the timbre of bronze, and he defined timbre as the spectral difference between one type of sound and another.

148
00:20:17,430 --> 00:20:26,530
A measure of singularity. What he was hearing was the self of bronze.

149
00:20:27,680 --> 00:20:30,830
Like the various selves in that Hopkins poem.

150
00:20:31,070 --> 00:20:42,080
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same deals out that being indoors each one dwells selves goes itself myself.

151
00:20:42,230 --> 00:20:45,230
It speaks and spells crying.

152
00:20:45,290 --> 00:21:01,219
What I do is me. For that I came. Having listened to the self of bronze, the musicologist picks up an iron rivet and strikes it, and an older,

153
00:21:01,220 --> 00:21:11,930
more dignified pane rings out in which he can hear long bands of iron dwelling in rocks, pressure of monarch and contamination.

154
00:21:12,350 --> 00:21:15,980
Mining washing. Blast of a furnace.

155
00:21:16,220 --> 00:21:20,750
Hammering. Shaping. Chiming. Yes.

156
00:21:20,750 --> 00:21:27,350
He grasps the whole biography of iron in its roaring note more like a pang than a clank.

157
00:21:29,300 --> 00:21:34,520
And after the pain of iron, then comes the xylophone.

158
00:21:35,950 --> 00:21:38,260
He braces himself for the xylophone.

159
00:21:39,040 --> 00:21:49,239
Each of whose bars remembers a rosewood branch grieving in the Amazon and the constant passing of the life of light colliding with each leaf.

160
00:21:49,240 --> 00:22:00,140
So. And while most of us are getting on with work, revving engines, drilling, barking, chattering, lecturing,

161
00:22:00,950 --> 00:22:11,630
or often flying silently through virtual worlds with no weight at all, it is good to know that a musicologist is sitting in a high room in Sheffield.

162
00:22:12,020 --> 00:22:16,640
Absolutely actual and echo located a listener.

163
00:22:18,620 --> 00:22:28,790
His feet on the floor, provide roots for his lifted, owns his head build and drum like lessons with its skin,

164
00:22:29,660 --> 00:22:34,820
with its very eyes to the trembling past lives of leagues.

165
00:22:41,670 --> 00:22:45,840
When Gerard Manley Hopkins was a child, he was taught to draw by his mother.

166
00:22:47,070 --> 00:22:54,270
And developed his own practice of copying the stance of a subject with his body before putting pencil to paper.

167
00:22:56,010 --> 00:23:00,190
Chinese calligraphers have a similar practice when copying a text.

168
00:23:00,450 --> 00:23:04,170
They begin by inscribing the forms onto the surface of the heart.

169
00:23:04,600 --> 00:23:08,580
Then they cover the original and copy from the heart onto the page.

170
00:23:08,820 --> 00:23:19,410
In one flourish. That way they can draw out the expressive character of the script, which goes beyond the merely informative scheme of a template.

171
00:23:22,660 --> 00:23:26,890
Not every artist allows for this copying pause.

172
00:23:28,130 --> 00:23:34,490
3 seconds of interspecies shock before drawing a line or making a sound.

173
00:23:36,330 --> 00:23:40,590
You might call it the keening style of art as opposed to the elegiac.

174
00:23:41,070 --> 00:23:44,860
But Hopkins has a better word. Pre-position.

175
00:23:46,460 --> 00:23:57,110
He speaks of a preposition which flushes matter as if he had found from inside the feeling of a pose, a flush of already then which produced it.

176
00:24:00,340 --> 00:24:09,970
Perhaps he could have used the word personality, which is the word Tagore used in 1925 when speaking about the a priori shelving of the census.

177
00:24:10,940 --> 00:24:16,580
Personality to go said, is the one thing that lies at the basis of all reality.

178
00:24:17,510 --> 00:24:21,020
Apart from personality, there is no meaning in creation.

179
00:24:22,040 --> 00:24:25,910
Water is water. Because I am I.

180
00:24:28,410 --> 00:24:32,910
But preposition is a less closed word than personality.

181
00:24:34,050 --> 00:24:40,620
Preposition suggests the existence of a communal priest self, which is singularly felt.

182
00:24:41,610 --> 00:24:52,200
And that's why the poetry of Hopkins is so dance like as if he were moving from one pose to another to find out that being indoors, each one dwells.

183
00:24:54,730 --> 00:24:58,510
Hopkins only used the word preposition in his early journals.

184
00:24:58,870 --> 00:25:09,040
He later substituted the words in escape and in stress, which imply that he was no longer copying gestures but still noticing perspectives.

185
00:25:09,610 --> 00:25:16,820
As, for example, in this sketch. Of an ashtray made in 1870.

186
00:25:19,660 --> 00:25:26,170
And he writes underneath it, this skeleton in the shape of a strand of ash I broke at Wimbledon that summer.

187
00:25:26,620 --> 00:25:32,920
It's worth noticing for the suggested globe. It is leaf on the left and keys on the right.

188
00:25:34,600 --> 00:25:39,490
A year later, March 1871, he's looking at ash twigs again.

189
00:25:40,540 --> 00:25:45,760
This is the time, he says, to study in shape in the spring of trees.

190
00:25:47,470 --> 00:25:52,420
For the swelling birds carry them to a pitch which the eye could not else gather.

191
00:25:53,410 --> 00:25:56,920
Four out of much. Much more. Out of little.

192
00:25:57,280 --> 00:26:00,580
Not much. Out of nothing. Nothing.

193
00:26:02,140 --> 00:26:09,520
The male ashes are very boldly dotted with the heads of the balloon which touched the outer ends of the branches.

194
00:26:13,380 --> 00:26:18,420
I thought it would be interesting to set out this journal entry in lines as if it were written in free verse.

195
00:26:19,490 --> 00:26:26,240
You can hear the way the language lifts from a commentary to a shout when Hopkins writes an actual poem,

196
00:26:26,630 --> 00:26:31,400
and the very noise of the verse catches the prepositions of the trees.

197
00:26:32,970 --> 00:26:40,920
The Journal entry is like a musicologist describing a xylophone, whereas a poem, for example, Finzi Poplars,

198
00:26:41,400 --> 00:26:49,710
is like the moment when he lifts his mallet and hits the xylophone, which sings the very falling of the trees which made it.

199
00:26:51,820 --> 00:26:59,530
My Aspens deer whose area cages quelled, quelled or quenched and leaves the leaping sun.

200
00:27:00,550 --> 00:27:04,630
All felled. Felled are all felled.

201
00:27:10,930 --> 00:27:23,020
So there you have two listeners from different centuries, but with similar enthusiasms attending patiently to the selves and pre selves of things.

202
00:27:25,440 --> 00:27:26,310
And there are others.

203
00:27:27,490 --> 00:27:38,470
With prosthetic ears and sleepless brains listening harder, listening further listening beyond the scale of what it means to listen.

204
00:27:39,820 --> 00:27:46,120
An array of underwater hydrophones can hear icebergs whipping off the coast of Antarctica.

205
00:27:47,140 --> 00:27:58,900
What does it mean when a huge white, unstable ship emits a sound which can't be heard except by computers which draw what they can see like this?

206
00:28:04,720 --> 00:28:11,710
To be told that the image on the left represents the harmonic tremor of ice moving smoothly over the seabed.

207
00:28:12,100 --> 00:28:19,240
While the one on the right has suffered. An ice quake is to notice a certain numbness creeping into me.

208
00:28:20,580 --> 00:28:25,230
Like Joe being questioned by God about the scale of his operations.

209
00:28:27,420 --> 00:28:30,570
Where was down when I laid the foundations of the earth.

210
00:28:31,350 --> 00:28:40,220
Declare if thou hast understanding. Who had laid the measure thereof if diagnosed or who had stretched the line upon it.

211
00:28:42,190 --> 00:28:47,680
Whereupon other foundations thereof fastened or who laid the cornerstone thereof.

212
00:28:48,520 --> 00:28:53,590
When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy.

213
00:28:55,620 --> 00:29:01,080
Or who shut up the sea with doors when it break forth as if it had issued out of the womb.

214
00:29:01,920 --> 00:29:08,690
When I made the cloud, the garment thereof, and thick darkness, a swirling band for it and break up for it.

215
00:29:08,700 --> 00:29:15,690
My decreed place and set bars and doors and said hitherto, Oh, come, but no father.

216
00:29:16,350 --> 00:29:19,740
And here shall I proud waves be stayed.

217
00:29:23,200 --> 00:29:28,120
In other words, water is water. Because I am I.

218
00:29:30,460 --> 00:29:34,360
The argument between Jobe and God is all about singularity.

219
00:29:35,320 --> 00:29:45,250
Jobe asks, Will they break a leaf being driven to and fro, and in the character of a leaf, he refuses to be unsolved by his companions.

220
00:29:45,970 --> 00:29:49,060
He keeps refuting their logic with the same phrase.

221
00:29:49,270 --> 00:29:56,740
I will maintain my ways before God insisting that his suffering is not about punishment but personhood.

222
00:29:58,090 --> 00:30:05,290
Jobe does maintain his ways before God, but it isn't certain that he would maintain his ways before the fall.

223
00:30:05,320 --> 00:30:13,600
High sensors and 24 low sensors orbiting the Earth on satellites in search of heat from ballistic missiles.

224
00:30:14,900 --> 00:30:23,510
To address those strange instruments and carry on living under the hypothesis of what they might detect is to meet a ray of nothingness,

225
00:30:23,960 --> 00:30:28,880
which defeats the self from inside out. And that is a harder challenge.

226
00:30:33,800 --> 00:30:41,600
Which brings me back to where I started with the death of the earth, famine, quick failure, aborted seed,

227
00:30:41,900 --> 00:30:49,580
confused seasons, dead bodies, left lying, thin cries of the living animals walking about as light, as wicked.

228
00:30:49,580 --> 00:30:54,020
Work starved. Unsteady funeral pyres.

229
00:30:54,470 --> 00:31:05,720
Hobos. Grieving women. All of which was imagined, acted out and written down almost 3000 years ago in the Homeric him to Demeter.

230
00:31:07,160 --> 00:31:10,940
Which is a poem composed before 700 B.C.

231
00:31:12,460 --> 00:31:18,580
It's about 500 lines long. It's anonymous and in common with the other Homeric hymns.

232
00:31:18,940 --> 00:31:22,540
It's something halfway between a prayer and a poem.

233
00:31:23,640 --> 00:31:28,440
In other words, its language is not just aesthetic, but purposeful.

234
00:31:29,530 --> 00:31:35,080
It aims to make metre present. Demeter.

235
00:31:36,720 --> 00:31:45,780
She's known as the corn goddess. Although her name is apparently a Christian form of gay matter, mothering earth to him,

236
00:31:45,780 --> 00:31:52,500
to Demeter, is a making present and imagining forth of the Earth itself.

237
00:31:57,160 --> 00:32:03,750
And when the earth appears. She is an old, old woman.

238
00:32:05,060 --> 00:32:15,410
Dressed in dark clothes, sitting under an olive tree by the side of the road, suffering the painful cramps of grief.

239
00:32:20,120 --> 00:32:24,110
She withdrew from the company of gods. She came down from the mountain.

240
00:32:24,530 --> 00:32:28,220
She travelled into human cities and their fertile fields.

241
00:32:28,520 --> 00:32:42,860
Disguising her looks. No man, no well-dressed woman recognised her as she sat by the road under the shade of a bushy olive tree, suffering her grief.

242
00:32:43,920 --> 00:32:49,230
Like a very old woman. Beyond having children. Beyond the blessing of love.

243
00:32:56,050 --> 00:33:03,160
She might be any one of us as she sits there, copying the posture of human endurance.

244
00:33:04,950 --> 00:33:09,540
Or perhaps it's we who copy the metres posture whenever we suffer loss.

245
00:33:10,170 --> 00:33:19,320
That's what the myth offers a conflation of personal and supernatural grief being dramatised by the natural world.

246
00:33:22,660 --> 00:33:25,900
As everyone knows, Demeter lost her daughter, Persephone.

247
00:33:27,190 --> 00:33:31,000
The story says that poor Stephanie was picking flowers. Roses.

248
00:33:31,270 --> 00:33:34,990
Violets. Hyacinth. Crocus. Iris.

249
00:33:35,500 --> 00:33:43,770
Narcissus. Positioning herself, as the poem describes her, was Calyx faced.

250
00:33:45,060 --> 00:33:48,450
And she was wandering in a soft field beside the sea.

251
00:33:50,600 --> 00:33:59,600
She had companions with her. But the Narcissus, a kind of wild daffodil, had been set there as her own particular trap.

252
00:34:00,020 --> 00:34:04,920
Her weakness. To use Helen's excuse, brilliant expression.

253
00:34:05,610 --> 00:34:10,800
It was not for Stephanie who picked the flower, but the flower that picked her.

254
00:34:12,720 --> 00:34:22,790
And this is how it's described. It was astonishing and flowering a miracle both to gods and humans.

255
00:34:24,420 --> 00:34:37,320
From its bulb that grew 100 heads. And the scent was so stupefying that everything the earth, the air, the earth and the salty sea began laughing.

256
00:34:41,350 --> 00:34:46,630
A few months ago, if you'd stepped into a glasshouse at the Botanic Gardens just down the road from here,

257
00:34:46,930 --> 00:34:52,240
you might have verified that description even as you slid the door open.

258
00:34:52,690 --> 00:34:56,650
The scent of a narcissus rose to meet you like a ghost.

259
00:34:56,860 --> 00:35:00,040
Astonishing. Flowering, miraculous.

260
00:35:00,370 --> 00:35:06,220
Stupefying. Such a shock to the senses that you would have stood there laughing.

261
00:35:09,280 --> 00:35:16,360
Narcissus has the same route, or perhaps I should say it has the same bulb as the words narcotic and narcolepsy.

262
00:35:17,140 --> 00:35:24,840
It means pure seizure. And even as I said, I lose myself and start to drift.

263
00:35:25,740 --> 00:35:28,860
Like the stephanie. I'm in danger of falling into a swoon.

264
00:35:29,190 --> 00:35:32,250
Abducted by the memory of that unworldly scent.

265
00:35:34,600 --> 00:35:38,320
May the first. This is Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal.

266
00:35:38,980 --> 00:35:44,230
Found some daffodils. Wild but fading. You see the squares of the scaling.

267
00:35:44,240 --> 00:35:52,000
Well, when you have several in your hand. The bright yellow corona is seeded with very fine spangles, like carnations,

268
00:35:52,120 --> 00:35:57,160
which give it a cluster and lie on a ribbon, which makes it like cloth of gold.

269
00:36:00,580 --> 00:36:02,440
I bought a patch of wild ground.

270
00:36:02,980 --> 00:36:11,920
This is Ted Hughes now gathering speed in order to overtake the instant I bought a patch of wild ground in March, it surprised me.

271
00:36:12,700 --> 00:36:19,810
Suddenly I saw what I owned. A cauldron of daffodils boiling gently.

272
00:36:24,280 --> 00:36:28,540
That night on my pillow, my brain was a chandelier of daffodils.

273
00:36:30,140 --> 00:36:34,100
Wings pouring light, faces bowed.

274
00:36:35,070 --> 00:36:42,690
Dressed for heaven. The souls of all those daffodils as I killed them, had gone to ground inside them.

275
00:36:43,330 --> 00:36:44,140
They were packed.

276
00:36:45,750 --> 00:36:56,190
I could see right into their flame stillness like seeing right into the eye pupil of a person, fast asleep, as if I'd lifted the eyelid.

277
00:36:59,060 --> 00:37:07,460
I could see right into their frame stills like seeing right into the eye pupil of a person fast asleep.

278
00:37:08,380 --> 00:37:10,810
As if I had lifted the eyelid.

279
00:37:16,130 --> 00:37:26,960
Anyone who passes the Narcissus, if they know the myth of Demeter, will read it as a pictogram of perceptions, amazement and Demeter shock.

280
00:37:28,660 --> 00:37:32,560
The three of them are wired to each other in a circuit of memory.

281
00:37:34,030 --> 00:37:43,920
Narcissus. A noun, meaning numbness, rapture, a temporal amazement, concussion, a frilled flower or flower,

282
00:37:44,190 --> 00:37:49,140
secretly cleaned, soaked, scented, inaudible but shaped like a fanfare,

283
00:37:49,350 --> 00:38:00,030
a sculpted scream, an ear trumpet, a lamentation, a preposition or prior haunting, a ghost of light already trapped inside the capacity to see light.

284
00:38:01,150 --> 00:38:04,540
Claimed by such a being forcefully vanished.

285
00:38:06,130 --> 00:38:09,190
She became the bride of Hades, God of the underworld.

286
00:38:09,790 --> 00:38:12,970
She crossed from one timezone to another.

287
00:38:16,000 --> 00:38:19,510
And as she disappeared, she screamed with a shrill sound.

288
00:38:20,170 --> 00:38:25,690
She called out to her father, but he was elsewhere, sitting in a temple deafened by the hum of prayers.

289
00:38:26,770 --> 00:38:29,950
The voice of Stephanie went on screaming behind her.

290
00:38:30,250 --> 00:38:34,150
The mountains echoed. The sea echoed. Demeter heard it.

291
00:38:34,510 --> 00:38:39,040
I heard her voice throbbing through the barren air as if she was suffering violence.

292
00:38:39,400 --> 00:38:47,470
But I couldn't see her anywhere with my eyes. Only the son who sees everything knew what had happened and said.

293
00:38:48,400 --> 00:38:52,660
Mighty Demeter. You deserve to know I respect you.

294
00:38:52,660 --> 00:38:55,990
And I pity your agony for your slim stemmed daughter.

295
00:38:57,390 --> 00:39:06,600
It was use his fault. He gave her as a bride to Hades, who with his horses, snatched her up and carried her screaming into the misty dark.

296
00:39:07,500 --> 00:39:11,580
But, Goddess, give up your great lamentation.

297
00:39:12,830 --> 00:39:17,940
Give up. You got us. So much noise.

298
00:39:18,510 --> 00:39:22,860
It's like a damaged field recording of the festival, which this poem commemorates.

299
00:39:24,130 --> 00:39:32,620
The earliest Indian mysteries, celebrated at least just outside Athens, included a dramatisation of The Myth of Demeter.

300
00:39:33,750 --> 00:39:42,810
The ritual took nine days and it began with people carrying boxes from at least Athens, in one of which lay the statue of Yankees.

301
00:39:43,290 --> 00:39:49,080
God of shouting. Imagine what happened when the box was opened.

302
00:39:49,860 --> 00:39:54,000
What a relief for anyone who'd been repressing a shout for the last 12 months.

303
00:39:54,450 --> 00:40:03,900
And what an insight, what an end stress to endow the very act of shouting with divinity so that each person's voice could have a share in it.

304
00:40:06,960 --> 00:40:08,340
Once the shouting had begun.

305
00:40:08,700 --> 00:40:17,820
Then there was a day of sea bathing, a day of pig slaughtering, a night vigil, a dream incubation, then a 20 mile procession to this,

306
00:40:18,000 --> 00:40:24,930
with various stopping places at the boundary between Athens and Elise's descendants of

307
00:40:24,930 --> 00:40:31,709
King Crocus tied saffron yellow threads round the left wrist and right ankle of each.

308
00:40:31,710 --> 00:40:37,260
And if you initiate while mockers shouted obscenities from a bridge.

309
00:40:39,470 --> 00:40:47,180
Then there was night long revelry, torch lit, dancing, and at last the sanctuary at a Lucious was entered.

310
00:40:49,460 --> 00:40:57,460
What happened next was secret. But a trail of references suggests that the hymn was spoken in the dark.

311
00:40:58,240 --> 00:41:05,530
It's possible that a shadow performance took place, followed by a blaze of light in which an air of corn was cut silent.

312
00:41:07,430 --> 00:41:12,110
Then people went out dazed into the fields where they shouted at the sky.

313
00:41:12,350 --> 00:41:22,250
Rain and at the earth conceive. One man who was there said, I came out of the hall feeling like a stranger to myself.

314
00:41:23,340 --> 00:41:29,340
And another historian said the life of the Greeks would be unliveable if they were prevented

315
00:41:29,340 --> 00:41:35,190
from observing the most sacred mysteries which hold the whole human race together.

316
00:41:37,890 --> 00:41:41,180
And luckily. They still.

317
00:41:43,580 --> 00:41:50,930
Do it. If I can get it to work.

318
00:41:53,540 --> 00:42:04,940
I might need help. He.

319
00:42:12,560 --> 00:42:22,860
You can see.

320
00:42:31,460 --> 00:42:36,380
Oh, he's.

321
00:42:42,760 --> 00:42:46,030
I think that the difficulty of saying it is all part of it.

322
00:42:48,800 --> 00:42:56,690
It was users fault. He gave her as a bride to Hades, who with his horses snatched her up and carried her screaming into the misty dark.

323
00:42:57,350 --> 00:43:01,700
But Goddess, give up your great lamentation. Give up your keening.

324
00:43:03,870 --> 00:43:08,280
Demetre did not give up. She swept screaming over the earth like a bird.

325
00:43:08,550 --> 00:43:16,740
She sat by the roadside crying. She went to work as a witness for the family of met an error and tried to make matter near his baby immortal.

326
00:43:17,070 --> 00:43:21,990
But it didn't work. And that is when the whole earth went into shock.

327
00:43:24,200 --> 00:43:31,130
Then she completely withdrew from social life. She sat there, wasting with longing for her daughter.

328
00:43:32,060 --> 00:43:35,330
She brought a terrible, cruel here to our fields.

329
00:43:36,360 --> 00:43:40,080
The ground sent up no grain. She had it hidden in her grip.

330
00:43:41,100 --> 00:43:44,760
Quantities of curved ploughs pulled in vain by oxen.

331
00:43:45,750 --> 00:43:49,770
Quantities of white barley. Falling in vain on the mound.

332
00:43:51,280 --> 00:43:55,240
She might have murdered all humans with her evil famine.

333
00:43:56,500 --> 00:43:59,530
And stopped all the joy of festivals to the gods.

334
00:44:00,340 --> 00:44:03,800
But. We know how the story ends.

335
00:44:04,520 --> 00:44:08,210
You relents. The Stephanie is fetched from the underworld.

336
00:44:08,450 --> 00:44:12,980
But having eaten a pomegranate, she's condemned to return for a third of the year.

337
00:44:13,730 --> 00:44:18,740
And that is how time starts up again. And the seasons are created.

338
00:44:20,280 --> 00:44:30,810
Damita is given the title A Role for us, which means Minister of seasons, keeper of the Hours, and yet through the performance of the poem.

339
00:44:32,010 --> 00:44:41,330
The yellow flower. The shouting. The double shock of a mother and a daughter and the vision of the death of the earth.

340
00:44:42,290 --> 00:44:47,630
A photograph of stock time has already been printed into us.

341
00:44:54,270 --> 00:44:59,010
It's worth remembering what so much of said about the mystery of Elisa's.

342
00:44:59,850 --> 00:45:03,900
I came out of that place feeling like a stranger to myself.

343
00:45:08,420 --> 00:45:12,980
Poetry doesn't offer arguments, only small alterations.

344
00:45:14,220 --> 00:45:20,790
So I'd like to end this lecture by noticing a couple of prepositions which just might be starting to alter.

345
00:45:23,810 --> 00:45:28,370
In 1928, Paul Valery wrote an essay called The Conquest of Ubiquity,

346
00:45:28,550 --> 00:45:38,390
in which he pointed out that all the art forms include a physical part which has been altered by our altered understanding of matter, space and time.

347
00:45:39,540 --> 00:45:44,970
In the hundred or so years since he wrote that, I say, I wonder whether there's been another, more serious alteration.

348
00:45:45,720 --> 00:45:50,640
I wonder whether subjectivity itself has been damaged but might still be repaired.

349
00:45:52,800 --> 00:46:00,690
In 1935, Walter Benjamin, inspired by Valerie, wrote an essay called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

350
00:46:01,410 --> 00:46:07,530
Whose claim is that the whole premise of art has been altered by the reproducibility of sound and image,

351
00:46:08,070 --> 00:46:15,360
since it's no longer possible to communicate mystery, which he called aura by means of the actual presence of an object.

352
00:46:18,210 --> 00:46:25,530
Both those lines of thought. Go back to the Battle of Troy, where Glaucus sort of removes his presence,

353
00:46:25,530 --> 00:46:31,440
removes his subjectivity by likening his family to a flock of reproducible leaves.

354
00:46:32,790 --> 00:46:38,130
Don't ask about my background, he says. My lineage is like a lineage of leaves.

355
00:46:39,220 --> 00:46:44,350
The wind blows the leaves to the earth and the spring breathed new life into the woods.

356
00:46:45,340 --> 00:46:50,020
That's how one generation dies. And another one takes its place.

357
00:46:52,190 --> 00:46:59,600
The correct response to his devaluing of the human might have been for Diomedes to kill him there and then.

358
00:47:01,040 --> 00:47:04,730
Instead, the two men discover that their parents were acquaintances.

359
00:47:05,330 --> 00:47:08,180
They swap honour and make a promise of friendship.

360
00:47:09,260 --> 00:47:18,590
It's as if they had suddenly seen another way of looking at the leaves, like foon as seeing each leaf in its singularity.

361
00:47:19,580 --> 00:47:24,190
And that is what I call addressing the challenge of nature poetry.

362
00:47:26,620 --> 00:47:26,980
Thank you.