The Poetry of Death
Wednesday September 24, 2008
It’s been a week of epitaphs. Last Sunday we were up in the village of Heptonstall in Yorkshire with a friend from Turkey. We were up there to visit some friends, but as we arrived a little early, we wandered with our visitor into the ruins of the old church of Thomas à Becket and admired the inscriptions on the stones beneath our feet. And then yesterday I was down here in Leicester for my first session teaching at De Montfort University, a session during which we were encouraging new students (just in case…) to explore the epitaph as a literary form and then to write their own epitaphs. And as I am the newest member of staff, my colleagues inveigled me into writing my own. So I decided to do so in the style of a Japanese jisei or “farewell poem to life”. Yoel Hoffmann has edited a magnificent collection of these Japanese Death Poems
Since I was born
I have to die
and so…
Kisei (1764)
Oh I don’t care
where the autumn clouds
are drifting to
Bufu (1792)
Death poems
are mere delusion –
death is death
Toko (1795)
It is, alas, bad form to write them in advance (and thus it is also awkward if, feeling the hem of death’s robe brushing against the back of your neck, you quickly scribble down a death poem only to find to your embarrassment that you don’t, in fact, die, but that’s another matter…). Bad form though it may be, I sat down to write my own jisei. I came up with the following.
Where there is a Will
there is a Way – but now
no Will, no Way.
But I think that the prize for the best Zen death poem must go to a Frenchman, and that is the old trickster and chess grand-master, Marcel Duchamp. In French it goes like this:
D’ailleurs
c’est toujours les autres qui meurent.
Or, in rough translation:
Anyway,
it’s always other people who die.
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Lies in Which not Everything is False
Wednesday September 10, 2008
According to Wendy Doniger, in the South Sudan storytellers begin their tales with the following intriguing formula. This, by the way, calls for audience participation, and so the lines in bold are the ones spoken by the storyteller, whilst the italicised lines are those spoken by the audience.
This is a story.
Right!
It is a lie.
Right!
But not everything in it is false.
Right!
This, more or less, is how stories begin in the South Sudan (although as I’m writing this in a cafe in Leicester I don’t have the book on me, nor do I have personal access to any South Sudanese storytellers, so this particular story may itself be a lie in which not everything is false…) I have always loved this little exchange, as it says a lot about the kind of relationship stories have with the question of truth.
As a fiction writer, I confess to being a habitual liar. This is what fiction writers do – they make stuff up. They tell big fat lies. This, of course, makes writing fiction rather a curious business from the point of view of ethics, and this is something that I wrestle with from time to time. For example, in the book that I’m currently rewriting, I am writing about a couple of historical characters. I am inventing motives, desires, ideas, thoughts, passions that they may never have had. Indeed, I am inventing motives, desire, ideas, thoughts and passions that they almost certainly didn’t ever have. This, to say the least, is a problematic way of going on, and if Aristotle is right (as I suspect that he may be) in his claim that the dead are not beyond harm and injustice, then this is something that deserves to be taken seriously.
But, having said this, the lies of fictions are lies in which not everything is false. And so the ethical waters that we navigate when spinning fictions (and all of us – not just novelists – spend our lives spinning fictions) are therefore rather choppy and turbulent ones.
I’ve been thinking a fair amount about the relationship between fiction and lies thanks to Ralph Flores’s interesting book Buddhist Scriptures as Literature
I’ll link to my review of Flores’s book when it is published, and I do not want to anticipate what I have written there in this blog. But what I want to suggest here are a few of the benefits, as I see them, of reading Buddhist texts (or any other texts that have an aura of authority to them) as literature.
Firstly, to read Buddhist texts as literature has the effect of thinking afresh about what can seem like a litany of stale pieties (of course, some people may prefer stale pieties, but if I must have them at all, I like my pieties – like my pies – to be fresh out of the oven). There is always a danger of reading texts to confirm what we think we know, rather than to find out something new. But reading, I believe, should be a process of discovery and perhaps also of transformation, a process of finding unexpected things, rather than seeking confirmation of pre-existing views. After all, if you always see the same thing when you read, then why bother reading? So reading texts as litearature gives plays havoc with the well-ordered systems of our orthodoxies. Monkey runs rampant in the halls of heaven. And, when the mess has been cleared up, heaven is probably all the better for it. Following on from this, to read texts as literature allows the possibility of a return of lightness, play, subversion and wonder. To read as literature means is to call into question the high seriousness with which we look at texts, and allows questions of the form ‘what if…?’ to multiply. Thirdly – and this is, I think, a reflection of the last point – to read texts as literature permits the return of a kind of relish that can so easily be lost when texts become well-worn. It can restore texts to life when they had become dead and cold.
But there is one final reason that I think that reading Buddhist texts as literature is beneficial, and this relates to the Sudanese storytellers I have quoted above. Think of the following:
This is a Buddhist text.
Right!
It is a lie.
Right!
But not everything in it is false.
Right!
If any reading of a Buddhist text started like this, it would have an interesting and, I think, extremely positive effect. Because to relate a story knowing that it is a lie in which not everything is false is to place an ethical demand upon both the teller and the audience alike. It means that the text cannot be used as a refuge from the business of thinking about our lives, both individually and collectively, and it means that it is down to us to do the hard work of seeing what sense the story can make of our lives and seeing what sense our own lives can make of the story, amidst the play of words and images and falsehoods. In fact, I’d like to see the words of the Sudanese storytellers prefacing all the sacred books of the world, from Kant on downwards… But I am not holding my breath for the coming-to-pass of this particular brand of utopia.
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Some Books I Love
Friday July 11, 2008
Still busy getting ready for the move, so this will just be a short post. My local branch of Waterstones bookshop is doing a display over the summer about local authors, and have got in touch to ask me to recommend three of my favourite books, and to write a bit of blurb about each. After a bit of thought, I came up the following list. I’ve included the blurb that I sent to accompany my recommendations as well, just for the sake of it.
Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities.
It is said that half of the world’s population now lives in cities. Calvino’s slim collection of dreams and fables and tall tales is perhaps the sanest guide there is to life amid the endlessly proliferating sprawl. Should be required reading for all town planners.
Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe.
An extended poetic meditation on absolutely everything, Lucretius’s book is an exquisite love-song to the material world. My idea of utopia is of a place where, instead of a Gideon Bible, in every hotel room there is a copy of On the Nature of the Universe.
Tove Jansson. Comet in Moominland.
A comet appears in the sky and the world is threatened with destruction. A philosophical muskrat pronounces that the end is nigh. And Moomintroll and friends set out to the Misty Mountains to consult the astronomers. Jansson’s book is a reminder of the fact that, even in the darkest times, there is much value in friendship, and in the baking of a good cake.
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Writing Tools
Friday July 4, 2008
If it’s been a bit quiet over here for the last few weeks, at least it is for good reason: in a couple of weeks, I move up to Yorkshire, after almost seven years in Birmingham. We’ll be living in Pudsey, half way between Leeds and Bradford, and I’m looking forward to a change of scene; but at the same time, moving always takes more time and energy than you would anticipate. So I’ve been preoccupied with packing things into boxes (books, books, books…), applying for jobs further north (curse those Microsoft Word application forms) and so on. I should be properly installed up north by the end of July, and then I’m off on holiday in August; so it may be a quiet summer here on thinkBuddha. We’ll see…
On top of the whole business of moving house, I’ve been trying to get some writing done. And here, amid the many distractions offered by a life that is currently in transition, I have been relishing the wonderful piece of software that is JDarkRoom. JDarkRoom is inspired by the Mac program WriteRoom (see the link here), and is, in essence, very simple. It is a full-screen text editor that offers a distraction-free writing environment. It is only when you actually use such a thing that you realise how distracting using a standard word-processor actually is, with all of the bells and whistles, not to mention all the other things that may be open at the same time on your desktop.
JDarkRoom, on the other hand, just provides green text on a black background (although you can change the colours if you like), a few keyboard shortcuts and that’s it. Writing in text files allows you to concentrate on the content and structure of what you are writing, rather than on fancy formatting. I am astonished by how effective it is as a writing environment. If you are fed up with the way your mind flits around whilst writing on your PC, JDarkRoom is the tool for you. Hell, it’s almost as good as using a typewriter. And not only is it a pleasure to use, reducing both distraction and eyestrain, and allowing for a calm and concentrated space in which to write (and one should, to paraphrase the great Leonard Cohen, choose the rooms one writes in with care), but it also feels pleasingly retro with that green on black.
If you ever go to an author event or reading, during the questions somebody will almost inevitably ask the writer what they actually write on: ‘Do you use a pen, a typewriter or a computer?’ I don’t know why this question is always asked, but it is. But, just for the record, this is what I use to write at the moment: jDarkRoom coupled with LaTeX to typeset and structure my documents – which makes writing and editing a pleasure and also produces documents of aching beauty (although it is regrettable how many in the humanities insist on MS Word documents for submissions). To these two, you only have to add the wonderful JabRef for managing citations, and Zotero for collecting bibliographic information from the web, and you have something close to writing heaven. These days, I hardly have to open MS Word (or that lumbering great beast Open Office) at all, aside from filling in those pesky job application forms…
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Tune In!
Monday March 24, 2008
For a few days, I’ve been taking a bit of time off, seeing friends and reading books and doing anything other than sitting in front of a computer screen. But I thought I would log on to tell readers from the UK that this coming Wednesday, the 26th March, I’m reading my story, The Philosopher on BBC Radio4 at 3.30pm. (See the link here... By the way, whilst we’re at it, what’s with that “rather improbably” inserted by the BBC website editor? Cheeky…) The story was commissioned by the Walsall Black Readers’ Group, who proved stimulating commissioning editors.
So, if you happen to be around on Wednesday afternoon, tune in and have a listen. I think there’s also a “The Making Of…” documentary about the five stories that are being broadcast this week – the others are by Helen Cross, Mil Millington, Lindsey Davis and Nicola Monaghan, and all were commissioned by various readers’ groups – on the Thursday morning at 11.30.
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Lift Off!
Thursday March 29, 2007
Today, at long last, my novel Cargo Fever
I’m particularly looking forwards to the launch event at Waterstones this evening. It will be an huge pleasure to get together with old friends and members of my family, as well as with the public who, all being well, will be queueing to get their signed copies.
I won’t be partying too hard, however, as tomorrow I’m reading a paper at the British Society for Literature and Science annual conference. The paper is on Calvino and Lucretius, and is a response in part to the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu’s recent claim that materialism (a philosophical position of which, as long-term readers of this blog will know, I am rather fond) is a “demon” that needs to be cast out. I’ll be using Calvino and Lucretius as a way of exploring what I call a “cheerful materialism” that can reconcile science and literature, ourselves and the world. The conference looks like it is going to be both fun and rewarding, although the only down side is that my paper is at an ungodly 9.30 tomorrow morning. Now that’s what I call demonic.
Anyway, with all this going on (and with the submission of the latest PhD chapter, which I sent off yesterday), I’ve been somewhat neglectful of thinkBuddha over the last couple of weeks. My apologies to you all, and after the weekend, I’ll be back in full swing.
Thanks to Alex for the image!
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Cargo Fever Launch
Friday March 9, 2007
Despite the appearance of relative calm here at thinkBuddha, activity beneath the surface has been feverish for the last few weeks, because my first novel Cargo Fever, is to be launched in Waterstones in Birmingham, UK on 29th March 2007.
Published by award-winning Tindal Street Press, the book tells the tale of Englishman Sam Rivers’s attempts to smuggle a semi-human creature from the forests of Sumatra to the northern coast of Australia. Publishing News have already called the book an ‘exotic adventure novel, thronging with picaresque characters, raucous magic and unfamiliar customs.’ Cutting across religions, cultures and philosophies, from the Buddhist Taiwanese fisherman who hopes for a favourable rebirth (if not into a Pure Land, than at least into the middle classes), to the Dutch missionary who worships at the shrine of Reason, to the people of the island of Kenukecil and their traditional adat beliefs, the novel asks questions about who we are, where we come from and where on earth it might be that we are going. Here’s a picture of the cover, which is very pretty.
The launch will be in Waterstones on Birmingham High Street. All thinkBuddha readers in the vicinity would be more than welcome to come along! Doors open at 6pm, there will be readings and an interview starting some time around 6.45, and of course there will be chance to get your very own signed copy. From 8pm onwards we’ll then be retiring to the Sunflower Lounge, one of Birmingham’s hippest independent venues, to celebrate in style with wild and quirky tunes from DJ Owen Davies. There’s a map of the two venues here (thanks, Elee!)
If you would like to attend the launch, it would help if you could let me know either by getting in touch using the thinkBuddha contact form, or by sending a quick e-mail to the publishers on info@tindalstreet.org.uk. Do also feel free to bring as many of your bibliophile friends as you can – just give a rough idea of how many might be coming!
If you can’t make it to the launch, you can still snap up a copy of the book by going to Amazon. The following link should take you right there:
If you pre-order a copy, it should arrive soon after the launch. For those further afield, the book is also available on amazon.fr and amazon.de, and is coming soon from amazon.com.
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