Okay. Well, welcome to the last torch seminar in the in the series before it moves off to California next next year.
I feel very honoured to be to be hosting you today.
And we have two amazing guests, Sue on Heart, the founder and convenor of the of the torch program here and and Danny Freud.
So let me tell you a little bit about what's going to happen.
We're going to have a 30 minute talk from Salon. Then there'll be a short break to help ourselves to some some drinks.
And then we'll have Annie Freud get her talk.
And we can then have a discussion at the end of the two sessions more open and allowing ourselves to discuss various issues.
So if you have any particular questions of really important clarification, you can interrupt the speakers.
But in general, if we can wait until the end of the sessions to do that,
the only thing then that leads me to do is to this, to invite us to and to come up so on.
As a fellow at Corpus Christi where she lectures along with me, I'm in the psychology departments there and so on.
And I've had many discussions about unconscious memory and and she's a has has taught in Cambridge and in Berlin and is about to move to California,
where we're very sad to be losing her too, but very happy that she's going to be going there.
So she's going to give us a talk on the memory in the new consciousness.
I thank you for coming. It's really great to see you here.
I'll try not to disturb the setup. Yeah. No, no, no, no.
At this one. So I've always been interested in where ideas come from, especially when reading books.
But where did you forget this idea? Why this book and not that book?
Why this poem and not some other? And when you ask novelists and poets about how they came to write a particular piece,
which I tried to do as much as I can, often as I can, they'll often say they'll only say, Well, they don't really know.
They'll say that. Well, and he's going to reverse this tradition today by telling us exactly how she comes to write a piece.
But often the writers and artists will say that the beginning of a piece is nothing like as concrete as an idea,
but something more on the level of a dilemma.
The writer has to push ahead into the dark, holding the glimmer like a candle and just fill out the options.
At this delicate point in the creative process, do not try to think consciously advised Kipling based on his experience of writing The Jungle Book.
He counselled Drift. Wait. Obey.
Harold Pinter described this phase in more radical terms, as he stated in his Nobel lecture in 2005.
I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say, nor can I have a sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened.
That is what they said. Most of the plays are intended by a line, a word, or an image.
The Given award, which comes right out of the blue into my head, is often shortly followed by the image.
The first line of the homecoming is. What have you done with the scissors?
The first line of all times is dark. In each case, I had no further information.
In each case, I found myself compelled to pursue the matter.
This happened visually, a very slow fade through shadow into light.
Something appearing right out of the blue is one of the most abiding images we have of the creative process.
It points to a connection between creativity and what we might call the unconscious.
But since the unconscious is by definition that which is not available to our conscious awareness,
elaborating the range of its phenomena with any conceptual precision is often elusive.
So it's often vaguely expressed as a premonition or intuition, a hunch, a sense of things more commonly, especially in the premodern period.
It was metaphor ized as muse, demon or supernatural inspiration.
The range of metaphors hardened into a philosophical and scientific concept in the 19th century.
Of course, prominent ideas about the unconscious can be traced all the way back to hypocrisies,
and the world of unconscious came into use at the same time as consciousness in the 17th century.
But it's around the middle of the 19th century that we begin to see substantial numbers,
a number of references to it in medical and philosophical publications,
and to witness the emergence of unconscious as a scientific object of investigation.
Between the 1870s and the 1930s, or what we might call the first age of modern research into the unconscious,
there was a proliferation of various models of unconscious processes.
The most notable developments came out of an were situated within the German philosophical tradition and French dynamic psychiatry.
But whether we're looking at the elaborations of the unconscious or the subconscious
in the ideas of Frantz Mesmer or the automatic writing thesis of Pierre Shani,
whether we're tracing it back with reference to Kant guts and Schopenhauer,
the unconscious in this first phase tends to culminate in the psychoanalytic models of Freud.
So on the on the right is the is the model that Foyt himself drew.
And running through these various models are threats of shared assumptions, three of which I will pick out.
The first is that the unconscious during this period was defined in relation to various ideas of consciousness and was configured as part of a binary.
The second is that unconscious processes were generally given primary agency over the conscious mind that the unconscious knew more,
it knew better, and so on. And third is the dynamic between the unconscious.
Unconscious was generally conceived in terms of either electromagnetism or more often pressure, especially hydraulic pressure.
So repression, suppression and control were foundational concepts.
These are the common threads that we have inherited and they're deeply interwoven into how we view ourselves.
Literature and culture today. So influential is the psychoanalytic legacy that it is routinely accepted that the modern subject is divided,
that the unconscious is a repository of deeper truths,
and it is at the level of the unconscious that we can really make sense of ourselves and our society.
And these basic principles have yielded powerful interpretive models, such as the collective unconscious,
the linguistic unconscious, the political unconscious, the postcolonial unconscious and so on and so forth.
Nevertheless, there have been questions raised about the ontological instability of the concept going back to the 1930s,
the ascendency of positivist models of knowledge in the 1930s.
That verifiability and experimental replicability is the standard of scientific inquiry,
leaving no room for mental anomalous phenomena such as feeling and the unconscious in psychology,
psycho physics and behaviourism took centre stage,
focusing exclusively on what was objects objectively testable and dismissing ideas
about the unconscious because they could not be empirically verified or measured.
This was a general intellectual trend.
By the middle of the last century, even the traditionally non-scientific disciplines aspired to positivist models of knowledge.
So, for example, in philosophy, the rise of logical positivism rendered what is not testable and falsifiable as meaningless.
This is a technical term that is meaningless in literary studies.
There was the rise of new criticism which scrupulously excluded non verifiable questions from interpretation.
In this general climate, Karl Popper famously dismissed psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.
Much has changed in the last 50 years, but the scepticism still remains today.
For example, Angus Nichols, who was one of our speakers in the series,
gave an excellent presentation on whether the unconscious actually exists objectively, independently of its theoretical elaborations.
For Nichols, the unconscious is more a metaphor than a scientific concept,
and if one speaks of it at the level of concepts, then it is a concept that creates its own object.
That is to say that the background framework surrounding the unconscious pre-existed
the specifics and is only during the act of narration writing about it,
talking about it that the unconscious emerges into an entity.
In this view, the unconscious is a classic case of an effect produced by the discourse which purports to investigate it.
Meanwhile, in the last 40 years, a different line of thinking about the unconscious has emerged from altogether elsewhere.
In the new field of cognitive neuroscience. Developing what we might call the cognitive unconscious.
Crucial to the advances of the cognitive unconscious.
Was the discovery in the 1980s in neuroscience of unconscious perception and unconscious memory,
which established empirically that very little of what goes on in the brain is available to awareness.
The cognitive oncologist offers a rather different model from the psychoanalytic unconscious.
But in spite of the differences, the cognitive angle has successfully reinstated the unconscious as a legitimate scientific topic,
including the psychoanalytic unconscious developed around the turn of the last century.
And we can see this in the new field of neuro psychoanalysis.
Mark Soames, who pioneered this field, was also one of our speakers.
But there are differences. And again, I'll pick out three.
First, the cognitive unconscious is not defined in relation to consciousness, but investigated as part of a variety of mental processes.
The structure of mind is thus not binary but modular.
Second, unconscious processes are not given agency over the conscious mind, but are seen as working together and in parallel and in combination.
And third, the dynamic between the unconscious and consciousness is not one which is hydraulic or magnetic, but a relation of connected networks.
So to elaborate,
the modular view of brain and mind proposes that there are specific regions and specific neural circuits for carrying out particular functions,
and that they all work independently of one another as well as in parallel and in combination.
So for a basic example, we, we often hear about the four lobes of the brain,
which gives rise to mind as having certain features we associate with them the frontal lobe.
So thinking and planning and moving the occipital lobe,
seeing the temporal lobe with remembering an emotion and the private lobe with spatial function.
A more concrete example of the modularity of the human brain is illustrated by our Five Senses vision.
Hearing. Taste. Touch and smell.
These are any controls sculpture sense, which you just saw.
Annie, who teaches at the Royal College of Art in London, has done a series of sculptures which show ephemeral scans of the brain converted into
three dimensional structures of amber resin as the subject experiences each of the senses.
And these are on permanent display in the Wellcome Collection in London.
To now to probe deeper into how the unconscious features in this modular view of the brain.
I would now like to discuss two landmark discoveries in cognitive neuroscience that are relevant to the cognitive unconscious.
First is Michigan and Leslie Unger latest work on visual pathways.
And second, the taxonomy of memory charted by Larry Squire.
Before I begin, I should say that I won't have time to discuss the experiments themselves, but only to draw upon the conclusions.
The details of the many experiments that led to the model of the brain that I'm about to outline can be found in this book.
Oh, sorry. That's another shot of any controls. I have a sense, and this is a book of memory from mind to molecule by Larry Squire and Eric Kandel.
So first, unconscious perception. What is it to perceive unconsciously?
This is a figure showing Leslie England's discovery of the what's and the where pathways.
So even a very simple perceptual process like identifying an object visually, like a pointer or a single word on the page,
involves information about the outer world travelling from the retina to the thalamus, which which is about four or five senses fast go.
And we had a talk on this topic by Gordon Sheppard on Proustian memory, which is wonderful.
Anyways, it goes to this the thalamus arriving fast in the visual cortex V1 and the v2 and v three.
And the neuroscientist who pioneered the identification of areas v1 v2 v three.
We also had as a speaker say music he who spoke about significant form, which is a brilliant, brilliant seminar.
So it goes to V1. And what Myshkin and Ungerleider discovered is then the information travels through two pathways, two main pathways.
So you can see the green pathway and the red pathway through the top dorsal stream here.
Devoted to spatial processing, the web pathway, passing information about where the object is culminating in the parietal cortex.
Sorry. Yep. Here. That in the parietal cortex by neurones that respond to movement and location.
Neurones that are specific to movement or location. It also travels through the bottom stream.
The temple. What pathway? Which are areas that specialise in object processing?
What? The object is culminating in the temporal lobe area by neurones that respond to information about size, colour and orientation.
Up to there are about two 100 million neurones representing each box.
Between about 10 million and 100 million. So information about the object.
So where and the what moves in series and in parallel.
As you can see, fitting for to the temporal lobe.
Sorry. To the frontal lobe. To link to action. To the amygdala.
Here for information, emotional processing and to the medial temporal lobe for memory and so on.
All of this is achieved according to Ungerleider, in less than 50 milliseconds.
Arrestingly they and others discover that information that travels through the
web pathway that the to the top dorsal stream is for the significant part,
inaccessible to consciousness. It's primarily unconscious while information in the what pathway, what the object is, is chiefly conscious.
So even a cognitive task as apparently simple as visual identification, which takes milliseconds,
entails the integration of conscious and unconscious processes to complete it.
Every conscious experience we have is actually the result of a background of unconscious processes or puts in another way.
Unconscious processes pervade our conscious experience on every level.
In addition to being separate and modular, we can see that the perceptual pathways presented in like this figure are connected.
Which takes me to the second difference between the two models.
The model of mine proposed here is a connected system of networks, not a hydraulic system founded on pressure.
The pathways in this figure, as you can see, are reciprocal.
Information travels backwards as well as forwards.
That is to say, perception isn't just a passive detection of stimuli in the brain.
For the information to be experienced as perception, the brain organises the fragmented stimuli into a coherent whole.
Different neural structures connect with each other, reconstructing the incoming data in the light of memories acquired through prior
experiences to enable us to gauge the meaning and the value of the information.
So the eyes are not just telling the brain information about what and the where of the object,
but the brain is also telling the eyes, as it were, what it is you are looking at and how you should feel about it.
So to summarise, the information pathway are not only modular but connected and building on perception to memory.
If we think about memory as an extension of perception and experience, we find that neuroscience also figures memory as modular and connected.
This is Larry Squire map of the long term memory system published in 1986, where he classifies the different kinds of memory.
Larry gave the first opening seminar with Simon Kemp, who is here today,
which is a wonderful occasion, and he's already talked a great deal about all this.
But I'll just go through the main points. So, Larry,
classified long term memory in two different systems that are separate and independent with distinct neuro anatomical structures that support them.
For example, neurones specific to the declarative memory system in the hippocampus are these hippocampal pyramidal neurones.
These are our friends that help us to remember things. So going back to the chart.
So what is what is declarative memory here? So these are this is memory that we mean when we normally talk about memory.
These are the facts and events that we can consciously remember.
So autobiographical memory, cultural memory, historical memory are all declarative because we can remember what it is that we remember.
And they they are stored in the hippocampus in this area.
It's explicit memory, but there are other kinds of memory, memory that we can't remember or we don't know that we have.
Memory, Esquire writes, is not a single entity, but it is composed of different systems.
Only one of these systems, the declarative, explicit system, is accessible to awareness.
The declarative memory system, what the conscious mind cannot access goes under the umbrella of non declarative memory or implicit memory,
which is a large family of different kinds of memory.
So we have skills and habits, priming, conditioning and non associative learning skills and habits which are stratum related.
These are when we remember how to do certain things without thinking like for example, various motor skills like riding a bicycle,
swimming, typing, texting, what we normally call muscle memory and perceptual skills as well.
Like looking in the mirror and knowing automatically that the left and the right are reversed or recognising numbers, letters, musical notes.
They're also everyday habits which are striatum related, like putting on the left shoe before the right shoe perhaps,
or buttoning up the shirt from bottom to top as opposed to top to bottom.
There's a great deal of very interesting research on treating dysfunctional dysfunction in the circuitry of the striatum for OCD,
which is habit related priming here is distributed over the neocortex,
and this is the ability to identify things that we have seen before faster when we have, then when we see them for the first time,
even when we don't realise that we have seen them and there's a lot of research on this that the area that
I'm particularly interested in is priming and prejudice in social neuroscience by people like John Barr,
classic conditioning, you know, from Pavlov, but now also includes emotional learning,
which is amygdala related, like fear phobia, all kinds of preferences, including love and attachment.
There's also skeletal muscular conditioning, for example, eye blink conditioning and so on.
And there's non associative learning here.
The reflex pathways like habituation, for example, not really noticing the backdrop of our everyday experience,
like when not really noticing when members of our family they have a has a haircut because we are habituated to them or conversely
sensitisation by being hyper aware of something that has hurt you in the past out of the context in which it has occurred.
I think we are all very familiar with this.
All of this will be expressed as a way of seeing and being in the world, not as a memory, but as an instinct, as intuition, as personality.
So what is significant about non declarative memory in the context of this discussion is that it doesn't seem like memory at all,
but looks a lot more like what we would call the unconscious.
But in contrast to the psychoanalytic model, the cognitive unconscious, as understood at present,
does not have the powers to twist and foil our conscious plans, nor does it necessarily protect staff, protect our need of which we remain on aware.
It is more the whole aggregate of experience recollected in non declarative form,
less an entity that will return to haunt us with its semiotic and the bitterness powers than a shape which,
like a riverbed formed by the accumulation of flow patterns, mould and guides our behaviour,
habits of thinking and feeling, selective perception and behavioural inclination, patterns of reacting.
The blindness and the sensitivity of our personality can be recast in terms of
different forms of non declarative memory that we have accumulated over our lifetime.
All over. All of the memory a baby acquires is unconscious memory, which, as a grown person, she will experience as a disposition.
If a two year old boy is knocked down by a large dog as a grown man, he will have no recollection of this incident.
But he may have a fear of dogs, which he will understand as a personality trait, not as a memory.
Pinter's very slow fade through Shadow into Light can be discussed as non declarative memory shaping into consciousness,
just as the array of metaphors of the unconscious,
such as muse or demon, can be explored through the categories of different kinds of declarative and non declarative memory.
Even belief structures and value systems are now reconfigured as various blends of conscious, unconsciously acquired memory.
As Squire and Kandel point out.
People do not generally remember consciously the circumstances in which they acquire and assimilate the moral principles that govern their lives.
Many of our dispositions and styles that make up our personality are acquired similarly as non declarative knowledge.
These principles and dispositions are acquired gradually, almost automatically, like the rules of grammar that govern on native language.
So if I were to point to the chief difference between the cognitive unconscious and the psychoanalytic unconscious, it would be the role of memory.
So this is the psychoanalytic version of memory where you have memory.
But in the, in the pre conscious, which is a little segment and you've got the whole of the unconscious stored within sorry below.
By current neuroscientific accounts, we fail to remember not because we have repressed our traumatic memories as in the Freudian model,
but because of factors like non rehearsal, synaptic weakening, destruction, suggestibility blocking and so on and so forth.
Dan chapters outlined this in his book, Great, great books, The Seven Sins of Memory.
So within this model memory, from far from playing a small role, as in the Freudian model in the cognitive landscape, memory is the new unconscious.
Squire and Kandel write these various forms of non declarative memory are ancient in evolutionary terms.
They are reliable and consistent, and they provide for myriad unconscious ways of responding to the world in no
small part by by virtue of the unconscious state of these forms of memory,
they create much of the mystery of the human experience.
Here arise the dispositions, habits and preferences that are inaccessible to conscious recollection but nevertheless are shaped by past events,
influence our behaviour and mental life and are an important part of who we are.
So I'd like to conclude by comparing the two models of the unconscious at the level of language and figuration instead of its ego and superego.
We could discuss neural circuitry, systems and pathways.
Repression might be prefigured in terms of dysfunctional connectivity.
Libido and Jewish salts have been related related in terms of dopamine and oxytocin levels.
Reward circuitry takes the place of the pleasure principle,
which is to make my point of the conceptual frames that established the two models clearly reflect their historical period.
Freud's topographic model owes much to 19th century hydraulic engineering, which was regarded as the latest technological invention,
as well as geosciences, which was one of the dominant disciplines of the day.
It also reflects the repressive and hierarchical structure of that of 19th century European middle class,
patriarchal family and the ideologies arising from it.
The cognitive unconscious of the 21st century is no different in this regard,
embodying the historical moment from which it emerges that the brain should be cast in terms of hubs, networks and information pathways.
It's not surprising. After the digital revolution, the network is the predominant organising metaphor of our time.
From the neural network to the social network, connectivity captures the basic condition of the 21st century.
In the post patriarchal ante, hierarchical identity performing localised liberal democracies of today separates independent modules.
Connecting through connected connected networks is a paradigm that is applicable to a far wider sphere than just the brain.
That is not to suggest that the cognitive unconscious is less legitimate for resonating in the culture of the 21st century.
But the language in which the model is rendered does point to the fact that science emerges from specific
historical and cultural conditions and will reflect those conditions even as it works to improve on them.
As John Starr has pointed out, the model of the model of the mind has throughout history been figured in terms of the latest
technology from the ancient Greeks who thought of the brain as a catapult to likeness,
who thought of it as a mill. To the Victorians who likened it to the telegraph, to Freud's hydraulic and electromagnetic models,
to Daniel Dennett, early model of the mind as a television.
Our model of how the mind works is inescapably geared to our times.
The cognitive unconscious provides biological evidence that the very slow fade through shadow
into light actually exists at the neuronal level and is not just a metaphorical construction,
but how these processes are going to be conceptualised will be established by the figurative frames that make meaning possible.
The frames change the way we see the processes, so the unconscious fluctuates between concept and metaphor,
between the different levels of meaning, from being a product of the discourse as well as the kernel of being that gave life to it.
Thank you. Okay.
Well well, thank you very much again for coming.
And now we have the second speaker of the day who said, and I quote, The writer,
painter and author did put her and her history in an English literature at work universe.
That's right. And and written a number of important, interesting volumes of poetry.
The one that I like the name of is the. The best man that ever was.
And that. And now the remains.
But. And others. So I'm looking forward to hearing.
All right. Hello. It is really nice to see you. And I'm so grateful to someone for inviting me.
It's a huge honour and lovely to be in Oxford.
So with that work, it was a long time ago at a time of personal conflict when I couldn't make my life as I wanted it.
I began psychotherapy. I sat in the chair and began to sing.
Wouldn't it be loverly from My Fair Lady? And the therapist noticed my distress.
He was on Continuum. And he said to me, You are Eliza Doolittle and I am Professor Higgins.
Eliza is a wallflower girl who wants to be a well-spoken young lady in a flower shop.
And she wants Professor Higgins to teach her to speak properly.
And what she doesn't realise is that to fulfil a desire, she will also have to have a new self.
You are a dissatisfied administrator and you want to be an artist.
And to do that, you will also have to have a new self.
And that is what we are going to do together in this room.
Here is a poem that illustrates the kind of quandary I was at the time.
It is called Avoids Officer, achieves the true pose and a voice officer is somebody.
It's a local government kind of role where the job is to put people in flat that are hard to let.
And the key pose is, I'm sure many of you practice yoga here is the very difficult asana in which the
heel is wedged comfortably but firmly in the groyne and the arms are raised.
It's very pressed on the arms, raised above the head. And when you do that, you really do feel you got somewhere, avoids the officer,
achieves the true pose at times it seems that really that what she really ought to be doing with her life is for the aether to decide.
She'll make a film about an early time before thought or cloth or pity or desire, when all was flappy,
all obscure, half baked until a moment with a sink, a silkworm santa clause into the fibres of a mulberry leaf.
As a delaying tactic, she finds another Frenchman.
They meet in a bar so crowded that after shouting for half an hour at one another, they take a taxi to his place.
She has had to repress her dismay at his jacket, and when it launched, it's off and she touches him.
She recalls the final parting with her therapist.
Someone who'd wear that shade of lipstick must lack the judgement to unmask her roots.
This is a life lived in a lunchbreak when your desires have been pushed away and the
corporations discourse is about as interesting to you as the microbiology of the plant,
that's when some new word or thoughts suggests a whole new set of possibilities.
And standing on one leg in prayer, she knows her real deficiencies have yet to flower.
When I'm working on a poem, although I always have an intention, it's rare that I feel I'm its author.
If a word or phrase comes to me, I do not feel that I have chosen it.
It's more like a card that has been dealt to me in a game.
Like many poets, I tend to distrust anything that feels too deliberate in the act of writing.
I often experience words as insubstantial, stale, alien and somehow flabby.
It's only when a word or phrase carries an inexplicable sense of conviction.
There's the sort of momentum becomes available to me.
It's like that moment which you get into a very decrepit car and without hope, you turn the key in the ignition and it chokes into life.
It's only much later, usually long after publication, that my poems begin to reveal their meaning for me.
It's one of the great pleasures of writing. I shall read a poem that deals with this theme.
It's really only writing this piece for you today that I realised what this poem is about.
I wrote the word manipulation on a sheet of paper, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I felt as if I was intruding on someone who wanted to be left alone.
The manipulation of words. I dropped one down and like a somebody that it turns and looks at me as if to say, okay, you've done fine.
Go and amuse yourself somewhere.
And here I am now, on this beach strewn with the limbs of old love, the crumpled newspaper of new love, his crossword, my striped windbreak.
I wander down the line of surf pocketing debris that I've pocketed before the half
sunk shows and fluttered over with the orange and blue twists of Chandler's cord,
the lozenge of this brick wall, smooth disparities in my urge to signify and insist there's nothing to improve for.
It's a brick as unlike any other as I was when I loved another.
And everything he loved about me then, even though I knew he didn't care.
With all my force, I love it. I have to see. And on the subject of words,
I feel that one way of understanding the essence of any important relationship is to recall and reflect on the words a person is spoken to.
In some ways, you could say that the words and the relationship, they may have been spoken for you to make something of,
and therefore, even if they may have been difficult to receive.
Precious and even transformative.
I am blessed with a good memory for these things, and many of my poems emerge through the words that have been spoken to me.
I hope I can find them again.
As you happened to be. He was talking to me about the great composers fingering the air with his long fingered hand,
how that music gets inside you and shapes you, how it takes command of your life, even to the extent of making you appear.
Maybe not exactly as you would like to be seen, or even in spite of who you are, but rather as you happen to be.
And when I asked him what he meant, he said, Supposing someone said they hated Beethoven and loved Scarlatti.
What would you think? And I thought, how strange, eccentric and ornate that sounds.
But apart from being the kind of question I'm going to pretend I haven't heard, it can't really mean anything, can it?
And what would I admit to? And so I got into my car with my little shifty eyed judgements,
wondering at what point along that spectrum I'd place myself always so fearful and competitive and terrified to be seen plumping for anything.
And then after he died, when I told you what he said,
you said that you always hated Beethoven and all romantic music, feelings and violins, and that you love Scarlatti.
Simple, but of course it. His mother is.
These are words spoken to me by my father probably some 15 years ago.
Birth control. This really ought to be the most marvellous thing.
But aren't words strange?
But after all, what could be better than the beginning of a life and control necessary for everything that life has to offer?
And incidentally, one of my favourite things. Okay, here's another one.
This was spoken to me by a friend in Sri Lanka, a guide whose name was Lal with them around.
And it was a very enjoyable experience and we are still in touch and we will go there again and again.
The intermediate is no good. There were homemade devils tied to the roofs of all the village houses and it really November.
I asked you if this was a hangover of Guy Fawkes.
From the days of British rule, a kind of intimacy had been established between us, and that's the astonishing figure of the Buddha.
In an Oregon of scallops rocket out the sky like a vast blancmange.
You touched my knee with your forefinger and said, Eliminate the darkness, my friend.
You pointed out the monkeys playing catch on the balconies,
the red drum pupils perched on the fence posts, and the man, the scorpion on the flap of his bed.
And I felt my phone give out in my pocket. We drove along the wide street where women famed for their yellow,
pink and lilac dresses sold fruit to the passing trade, looking for an adaptor for my charger.
And it came to me that at the end it came to me that adaptors can only go outwards from their countries of origin.
And this was confirmed by the vendor in the shop where electrical goods were sold.
We were feeling peckish and stuck at the stall and sold phosphorescent garden furniture
and had a round of drinks and pale fried eggs with peas in the echoing canteen
and watched the giant monitor lizards sifting the garbage while you were sight
of Grey's allergy and advanced mouse model of intelligent luxury in the museum.
A graceful young woman with impeccable diction and a mild but educative manner showed me the go glide mask of temporary madness.
That's the one for me. I thought and felt better immediately.
The source of great pleasure to me that I read time well go by Michael Ondaatje and he covers he
thought you were saying things so obviously you need to take them then take them anyway onwards.
Dreams have always played a large part in my imaginative life,
and I have recurrent dreams that I've been having all my life, which I often use to write my poems.
The most frequently. Recurrent one is that a lake or swamp appears in my living room or living space, and it takes over.
The swamp has dense and shallows and is full of deformed,
spectacularly horrific and gorgeous creatures that change their shape and colour before my eyes,
delighting and threatening me by turn as they slither towards me, just will perform some dreadful act of consummation.
I've often wondered about what this dream means.
As a child, I was obsessed with finding live animals and was always looking for them lizards, insects, frogs, caterpillars, fish, crabs and snakes.
Once my stepfather, who was concerned for my development and growing up, told me that this was an obsession I ought to outgrow.
And I was thinking about this,
and it occurred to me that what I might have been up to at that time was something which is called Participation Mystique,
where the viewer and the object viewed somehow don't have boundaries.
And for example, I suppose an example of this is where where the hunter dresses in the colours and maybe the textures, all of the hunted animal.
And I think I was in some sense seeking a sense of sort of literature to the this legitimacy for myself and power.
Once I found a beautiful orange and blue nudes in the huge woodpile behind my grandfather's house.
And completely demolished it in the hope of finding more completely blocking the path.
For days in my maternal grandfather's house, among his huge collection of ancient artefacts,
there was more a piece that I used to pass every day on my way downstairs.
Otherwise, I'd naked go riding on a rampant bear.
And to my delight, I'm able to show that, you know, I thought that girl was me.
I've always loved the paintings of Rousseau and perhaps the symbolic power spread into my dream life.
As a child, I remember often feeling that I was an animal.
I feel to poems that are related to this dream.
The first of these is the yes and the no and the terrible.
Thank you. This was written I was part of a project organised by a friend and fellow poet Simon Barraclough,
who took the film Hitchcock's film Psycho and sliced it into 12 pieces.
And I got the last bit where you see the people gathering outside the courthouse.
It was a it was a very difficult experience. The yes and the no and the terrible.
Thank you. I don't know what to say about you.
There is nothing to say about you except that you are, in my mind, hideous complexity.
It is only a film that I have watched too many times and I have often driven long distances worrying about money and the people I have wronged.
Many films have swamps with dead bodies hidden in them, and I feel implicated when the car is winched to surface.
Then everything will be proven. The wounds of the weapon, the approximate times of death.
The missing girl, Paul Arbogast. We are almost at the end.
I can go back to my own swamp and its wisecracking inhabitants.
There are stitches coming loose. The psychiatrist theory is watertight.
She was a cleaning, demanding woman.
He was always bad. So yes and no.
And a marion for whom no one cried. And the terrible.
Thank you. And here is another one.
Slightly more benign may be a backwater.
Some find, even 40 million years ago when this place was just a backwater in an endless marshy zone.
Batteries of cataclysmic forces gave rise to a major hiccup in the evolutionary paths of all its early residents.
Those who'd once walked upright were now engulfed below, and those who tunnelled in the dark now out of the sky.
But none of them could thrive for long because a fatal weakening in the
accumulated layers of silt caused fragments of the land to break and float away,
becoming then impaled and thereby anchored on a range of some aquatic mountain peaks whose subsequent volcanic blasts,
while laced to what play waste to what had been before, gave birth to new,
more varied types of land mass who still live mostly underwater and where eventually
the left wing of the waterfowl species of staggering variety converged on every shore,
along swamp, swamp and running for that were as yet no rivers as we understand them,
and begun adapting to the elemental tasks of digging, hunting, feeding, nesting, [INAUDIBLE] and making calls every need.
Mating. Rearing young. Warning of dangers far in the air.
Laying traps, sticking to a favourite spot.
Migrating in great numbers to a distant clime play host to parasites, boring holes forming colonies with queens and grooms.
Overcoming obstacles using camouflage.
Surviving without food. Complete competing for a mate.
Committing suicide. Two creatures lay together in a time of mass.
The male of a scrawny physique along the head.
And she appeared quite fused to her, brought back in a protracted, almost unmoving copulation.
The waving of her warty snout, adorned with an impressive array of spikes, showed the true appreciation of his neighbours.
A sudden sound half bent, half sighing, broke the primaeval silence.
The fellow loosed, his amorous hoad shook himself twice, and without a backward glance to which is lady love.
He looked away. She lay a while contented in the sun, and, having slithered down among the lily,
piled into the water with her muscled waves began to scoop up clouds of mud,
hunks of knotted weed and twigs, and have a little rascal shaped nest with built the top of it.
She flattened, then formed into a shallow dish, and then she laid a clutch of perfectly loosened eggs,
each one with a dark column of life coiled inside it.
In reflecting about the way the animals, real and imagined, inhabit my psychic life,
I am reminded of this wonderful statement by the French intellectual George but-I the animal is not closed and inscrutable to us.
The animal opens before me, a depth which attracts me and is familiar to me.
It is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me.
That which deserves the name death. And which means precisely that it is unfathomable to me.
The first poem in my second collection is called Squids on It.
It recalls an incident when I was at Cambridge, a headland and beach on the public peninsula in Dorset, the place I go to for inspiration.
And I was walking along one of the long stony spits that goes far out into the sea.
And I saw a small squid lying just under the surface of water, staring straight into my eyes.
The look. You shot me. Milk Blue Squid of Cambridge was one of recognition to you.
I must have seemed an ogre, the kind that mothers warn that children of something in you stiffened,
and the whole wild treble clef of you leapt five foot clear of the water, then vanish to the blood.
Iraq. Love you. As I did, I would have been the death of you.
And so half honoured and half humbled. I went back along the beach to the obsessive clink of fossil hunters hammers and the bird and
buggies over the bridge and up the narrow foot long palms where the eyes of people coming down,
declining to meet one of those returning to that cause.
My third collection, The Remains, was written after the death of my parents and quite a lot of other important people in my life.
It emerged somehow from the huge collection of broken china pieces that I dug up from the years when I was making my garden.
It felt somehow that having buried my parents, I was unearthing a new set of ancestors.
I became so adept at finding them that I could detect them poking through the earth after a shower.
Here is a small sample of them. I want you to have a look and one I'm going to get from contact.
I'm not going to do them. No, no. Let's meet with them a while.
I was taking away and this this appears and this is true from within the pattern.
He is unhappy because he knows he's going to be put to death because he's fallen in love with the emperor's daughter.
I found that in the morning and in the afternoon I found this lovely little purple girl's feet.
And I believe that there is Alice in Wonderland shoes when she's talking to the caterpillar who's making the whole cup on top of the mushroom.
RAMONA And then another nice thing was my daughter, Miriam.
My obsession with broken anythings was having a holiday in Greece, and she got her babies to look for things among the among the sand.
And she found these pieces.
What is so lucky about them is that these are Greek fragments and they look Mediterranean in the way that absolutely nothing I pick
got from my father jokes that that lovely sort of open yellow and this sort of bugs him and these kind of wonderful gorgeous.
Anyway, once again, I'll use I'll use these pieces to make the design for the cover of my book.
And having started to paint again, I can't I really couldn't bear to stop.
I painted a number of pictures that have been included in the book.
This one? Yeah. Going to do the right thing here.
Yeah. This one is of my husband's hands holding two Worcester apples.
When I finished the book, I discovered not only do I want to paint, but in fact I need to.
I feel complete. I feel quite incomplete if I don't have a painting on the go.
And although I've made paintings all my life,
I often spoilt them or weakened them somehow towards the end by rushing too fast and wanting to accrue too quickly.
And perhaps because I've been dazzled for so long by my father's work, I didn't apply to myself.
But painting with the kind of diligence, passion and commitment that would have made it exciting enough for me.
Since the book was published, I've been painting in earnest without needing the justification of a collection of poems.
I find myself free to enjoy the thrill of very hard work, probably for the first time in my life.
And painting is hard work. You have to put in the hours.
You have to get to know the structure, texture, quirks and secrets of your model.
You have to handle resistant materials. You have to have exacting standards, prepare the surface, deal with mess and stickiness,
breathing in the fumes of turpentine, mixed colours make each brushstroke tell.
Pay attention to the different registers of the composition and think about how you're going to interpret them.
Go to bed in despair and get up in despair.
Deal with your own incompetence and exhaustion.
Also, painting requires a very particular kind of energy, determination, even ruthlessness in that sense.
When I paint it different, when I paint a different part of me is engaged.
Everything is deliberate, solid material made by my hand and by my desire in principle.
A poem can be written on the back of an envelope or even a bus ticket, using the words that might be spoken when buying a bottle of chocolate.
And while my poems become ever more dear to me as time goes by, once I finish the painting, the action and the excitement are over.
And I just want to get on with the next one. What I'm trying to say is that my poetry composition and picture painting are not easy partners.
Another of my most recurrent dreams is that I discover a new room in the house.
It's not as strange as it may seem. Houses have their complexities and limitations,
and the space could have perhaps remained hidden behind a partition wall or any significant door which could have been painted over.
The dream, when it happens, is always new and fresh.
A door that I somehow missed opens and I find a marvellous empty space free of clutter and devoid of history.
I enter with joy and claim it for myself. It is my favourite dream.
I wrote this poem for him before the very final deadline of handing in my completed manuscript.
But I have to say, it's a bit. It's a poem. Been writing all my life.
The room isn't there. Sometimes I dream I'm in a room that isn't there.
The many years I've lived here not noticed it before.
An unexpected boom. Such blessed emptiness is going to change my life.
What should I use it for? And Grey, the morning comes, I wake.
The rooms are as they were. Each one with its function and its mess.
And all this time, it dwells behind the door. A simulacrum of my mind, my womb, my unlived life.
My life to come. Or could it be life? Then that brings me here.
Treading its naked boards, sitting at a table on a wooden chair and rushing to the window to take in the view.
The trees outside. Spring. The blossom on the grass.
At the beginning of this year, I began this painting, Hidden Day, 1933.
It's based on a very small photograph of the house my paternal grandparents used to rent for summer holidays on the Baltic Island,
hidden there, where their three sons could play happily outdoors.
They were German Jews and left Germany for Britain in 1933.
I've had the photograph in my possession for a long time and I always thought that one day I would use it to make a piece of work.
The meaning for the photograph for me is this although it was probably taken shortly before
Hitler came to power and in some ways represents the most terrible suffering and loss.
The image of the modest cottage bathed in sunlight with its untidy cobbled yard littered with household objects,
celebrates informality, domesticity and freedom.
The cottage is no longer there, but I will visit hidden, say for the first time this coming autumn.
I'm okay to go on. Okay. Yeah.
Here is another poem that also came from a dream.
I find myself standing in an area enclosed by sets of double, double steel doors like you see on the top floor of a sort of posh department store.
And a woman in a sort of official clothing came towards me and told me that I had been recruited to take part in a sort of national
service where I would be taken down to the centre of the earth and then brought up again a bit like a sort of the astronauts mission,
except in reverse or going down rather than up and down.
And then when I began working on this poem, is this even the Order of life was it was an induction.
All of life was an induction, such as you get when you start a new job or when you're prepared for an operation in hospital,
you know, going to the dentist, going to a party, going fear to get you on a plane, getting on a train,
starting a new relationship and adjusting everything seemed to be, Oh, you don't know what's going to happen anyway.
This is the poem induction, which was a new book and a joke on my way around it.
Yes. Induction.
I am here to welcome you and to help you prepare for it's about to happen.
I can see that you're hoping that we've decided to call it off for today, but I'm afraid that's something we never do.
We consider ourselves very lucky that you're here at all.
And our years of experience, of tortures. It's always better to go a go ahead as planned.
First, at the risk of repeating what has already been said in the letter,
you have been personally selected for this by people who know what they are doing.
We have no doubt in your ability to cope and the chances of anything going wrong with technical
front are so minuscule as to render any concern you may have as insignificant at this point,
we usually offer a glass of water as you won't be taking anything with you once the doors are closed.
Secondly, that is the silence that governs our practice. There has been some debate in the public domain about why up to now we haven't
opted for the so-called virtual route and looked at ways of mimicking reality.
The consensus is that absolutely nothing beats real human beings, the richness of their emotional responses, that capacity for facing the unknown.
It's truly humbling. And our concern for the integrity of any data we do gather is genuine.
In return, our job is infinitely more rewarding,
knowing that we're doing our utmost to secure your level of cooperation and make you as comfortable as possible.
I think that's everything. Comfort. If you would kindly undress in one of our cubicles, your protective clothing is ready for you to put on.
And it came long before I ever thought.
I have my poems republished. I dreamt that I found a book of poems lying in the gutter outside my house.
It was called a rare London Cheese's. And it was sort of it was kind of blackcurrant colour and the lettering was sort of custard yellow.
And I picked it up and discovered that it was a book I had written. I was simply wonderful experience.
Apparently, lots of poets do dream about that. Anyway, then I woke in my actual bed and put up my hand to pick the book up.
And of course it wasn't there. And here we go.
This is the poem. Rare London Cheese's rarity.
Must have been all down to keep design alive and me as I follow after a butterfly.
Looking forward to the moment when our record is yellow. And this Saturday it will stay with me for nothing more than out of the sun.
Surprised me with its heat and that the sea was a blue I'd never seen before.
If I mention London, it's because of Delamere. The sadness in the backs of terraced houses, the chimney pots and attitudes of strife,
the feathered discolouration of the render and the way each window seems to be leading its own relentless seeker to life.
She's commands respect. It has ancestral status,
it is aspirational and suggests connoisseurship that would exasperate wait not for the greed with a swathed in musty or dripping ashes,
they will change your humour and London cheeses. How can I ever say what you think?
This one Red on the Cheeses is the title of a book of poems that picks up in a dream from the culture of my street.
I opened it and felt the jolt of publication as I scanned the intention of the scope with every line.
A moment later, I awoke to find it wasn't that nor these words, nor my name on the spine, and I refer indulge poem to a painting by my father.
This one, called Waste Ground was houses to me is one of the absolute masterpieces of 20 years of 20th century poetry.
That paintings actually in my in my mind. And that's that's how that how I happened to write the second stanza of that book.
Okay.
Really, at the end, I want to I want to introduce this poem by saying something about subject matter and meaning and subject matter, meaning of poems.
T.S. Eliot wrote that the chief use of meaning in a poem, in the ordinary sense,
may be to satisfy one habit of the reader to keep his mind diverted and quiet while the poem does its real work upon him,
such as the imaginary burglar is always provided.
It was a nice piece of meat for the house dog and some years ago I attended an interview with Paul Muldoon,
who said that when he writes a poem, he really doesn't know what he's doing.
And I found that so incredibly enlightening and helpful.
After my mother died, I found dozens of her notebooks in which there were lists of,
and I'm quoting here, romantic boys names, favourite dishes, girls names,
beginning with I and beloved French actresses,
an ambition of ambition form to write a list poem and then watch nothing but the things listed I thought should die.
Can I die? Is it going to be okay?
Anyway, I did it. This is it. Here we are.
Okay. There's a little bit of technical for although I have to go.
I'm going to concentrate resource nobody and lose that piece of all.
VB. We've seen American Baudelaire's vessels that market dear worth tactile meuniere
fishermen of African formula homeland decathlete A.T. formed you blizzard chassis.
You should take supersu footy attitude it to on to shop people with a rubbish plant.
But you do that yourself. But wasn't split but more clear.
But trying to get that. Sorry to slow it up a bit.
Why don't I? Oh, here we are, signore.
So it's just a little bit tricky to get you, right, signore?
W. Here we go. Signore W Seymour Mogul.
Opposing third year shuffle the masses more or the home Julia Bardo Deneuve Cazares Birkin.
You pale a journey. Umu Gaspar Binoche.
Thank you for listening.