March 2008

In March of 2008 Almost Island had three days of writers dialogues and readings, Almost Island Dialogues:Two, at the India International Centre in New Delhi. The participating writers were the Italian writer Claudio Magris, the British poet George Szirtes, the Chinese poet in exile, Bei Dao, Indian writers Irwin Allan Sealy, Udayan Vajpeyi, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Vivek Narayanan and Sharmistha Mohanty.

The discussions centred around issues in poetry and prose, and included two exclusive sessions: one on the work of Bei Dao, the other on the work of Claudio Magris. The evening readings, held outdoors on the lawns bordering Lodi Gardens, were bilingual where so required.

The audience for the discussions came from a variety of backgrounds:students, musicians, literary theorists, filmmakers, and of course, writers. They had been given, a month prior, some books by the participating writers, so as to make the discussions more full and rigourous.

Here is what George Szirtes had to say about the Dialogues on his website, George Szirtes

05.03.08 : HEATHROW

...is remarkably efficient today. Terminal 3 is definitely better than Terminal 4, The long bus journey from W to here spent reading G M Hopkins, Claudio Magris, Bei Dao and Paul Celan. All useful. It is a long time since I read Hopkins, especially the prose. What a splendid observer, thinker and feeler he was. Bei Dao is very good too. I know Magris chiefly for 'Danube' - the book I have been dipping into is Correspondances. There is a roughly Sebald shaped cloud there and in many other writers now. The world registers itself as history, association, musing and melancholy.

Delhi is 31C apparently. Not so here, though the airport is the usual stifling, airless, holding station. Hours to go yet.

06.03.08 : DELHI 1

Arrived here late morning in bright sun. Hot and close. As usual little sleep on the plane - which was, I add as an advertisement, a Jet Airways (India) flight. It was much the most comfortable journey, seats well designed, leg room, great courtesy, excellent food, the screen sharp and clear and loads of movies to watch, starting where and when you please. That is economy class. I assume the first class / business class are given massage and a personal visit from Kylie Minogue.

I watched No Country for Old Men, right through and am still quietly dwelling on it. Wonderful statuesque cinematography, hard-comic dialogue, a nightmare killer, bodies everywhere (but surprisingly little violence) - a contemplation on how anyone, anywhere, can come to a rough end and how death looks like faintly like Charles Bronson in a crude wig. It was like being thumped on the head with hammer wrapped in a hundred layers of bandages. Kind of droll after a while. Oh yes, and brilliant. My head still hurts.

Here, greeted by organiser and friend SM. The usual threading the eye of the needle traffic...

More later. Did I say it was hot and close?

07.03.08 : DELHI 2

Time snatched as we are kept busy. This morning it was Bei Dao and self talking about poetry and language. This afternoon it was Bei Dao on his own poetry with a lot fascinating material about The Cultural Revolution and some of its inadvertent side effects. Claudio Magris talks tomorrow. I read with Vivek Narayanan tomorrow evening.

The readings are in the gardens of the annexe, in front of a beautiful young tree. They are very well attended, the audience - as I have noted before in India - closely attentive. Then music, of which more later. Have to dash. Outside, the world.

07.03.08 : DELHI 2B

A late post after tonight's evening readings in the same garden. Not quite such a big audience this time and there is the distraction of mechanical noise in the background, but the readings are fully focused. Meanwhile, a cat leaps off the far wall, slinks one way, slinks back, leaps back on to the far wall, returns, repeats the exercise twice more. A brindled cat, though mostly in shadow. I register this while listening.

It is warmer, a little humid. In ten days time the gods will turn the heating on full blast and my chances of survival would be much reduced were I still here.

There is so much music. Even as I write in a corner of the accommodation lobby, a woman on TV is singing. Mani Kaul, the film maker, was explaining the principles of a raga to me at lunch apropos last night's concert. The concert was a single 45 minute raga and though I know next to nothing about a raga I thought I could tell that the melody was constantly avoiding the tonic. It began with about ten minutes of deep quiet ornamented moans at the bottom of the fretboard, then working its way up the with ever clearer melodic patterns until it got to the top at which point the melody line went into repeat mode and the drum, which had been utterly unemployed till then, took over, creating an extraordinary range of rhythms. I can't remember the name of the instrument though I do have it written down upstairs. It consisted of two gourds (that is to say shapes derived from gourds) with the long fretboard between. Four strings. Knowing nothing about something usually means one quickly gets bored, but not this time. Part of it was suspense, seeing how long the drummer would wait, fingers at the ready, before he actually did anything. It turned out to be a little over half an hour.

This is, of course, the crudest and most ignorant of descriptions. Nevertheless it IS a description. Diffidence is not my middle name.

After the readings tonight a group of us was discussing the caste system and comparing it to English notions of class. They are, we concluded, quite different because the English system is less overt and no one knows where anyone else stands in the pecking order of respect. Hence the deathly diffidence of the aspiring lower middle class. Hence the silences, the changings of subject matter, the fear of manners, of looking too big or too small, of putting one's foot where one's mouth should be. There is, from a foreigner's point of view, a thin charm to this, but, God knows, it's thin!

09.03.08 : DELHI 3

So what do we talk about?

The relation of experience to writing; the notion of experience, of fact and its interpretation; about style; about history; about the self and its shadows; about the Danube and the Cafe San Marco; about the Cultural Revolution, the Misty Poets and Mao; about the fragility of life; about Goethe and Newton; about film and music; about speed and slowness; about Browning and Nietzsche; about time; about function and amelioration; about failure; about the shipwreck of knowledge; about kinds of knowledge; about art and photography; about theory and its relation to practice; about the notion of trust, about some idea of responsibility (is what we do of any use to anyone?)... and mostly these themes hang together under specific headings. Bei Dao is moving and dreamlike and oppositionist, a severe critic of the American psyche, visionary, precise, warm, clear. Claudio Magris has read everything and cannot quite follow Nietzsche on interpretation, is funny and wise and endlessly humane; Allan Sealy, gentle but passionate, tentative, almost diffident in manner but firm and adventurous in mind; Sharmistha Mohanty speculates wisely, searchingly and patiently about what lies between fiction and documentary because such things are important; Vivek Narayanan leaps and probes, his mind running fiercely. As for me? I talk my head off, as usual, watching myself that I should not run away on what seems intoxicating, the taste of eloquence, a quality I admire - but distrust in myself.

And there are the other interlocutors, all of whom keep me pepped up, mind racing. And as ever, next to the sense of mind-on-adrenalin, a kind of deep-sleep melancholy about the very notion of that excitement. Inevitably, at a certain point of such proceedings, especially in circumstances so continuous and intense, the melancholy grows steep and, frankly, I can see no point in any of this - in anything of much. That is also the point of exhaustion. It lasts about an hour or so, then I am up again, sprinting.

This afternoon I suggested to Bei Dao we visit Old Delhi. Third time for me, but he has never seen it and it is an experience not to be missed. India is extraordinary. On the one hand the newspaper delivered to my door every morning with page after page of female film stars and starlets in cheesecake poses, plus a few growly looking male film stars, next to articles about International Women's Day, which seems to be entirely a matter of Shilpa Shetty lookalikes sprouting heels, chests and money. On the other hand the great humbling zoo of Old Delhi with its alleys, beggars, Moslems and Hindus, its rickshaws, its stalls, its thin goats, its crowds; crowds so dense you wonder how they can move at all. The great sweep of the poor and not so poor who remind me of paintings by Repin.

Do I feel comfortable there? No, not comfortable. I am a spoilt European. But I do feel human, my sense full. I am not in the least afraid. I think I trust these people as they trust each other. It is not very far, but it is something.

11.03.08 : REFLECTIONS ON DELHI: 1

A long 19 hour journey from beginning to end. Home late. This afternoon to London, the Guardian newsroom.

The last morning's discussion was partly about the relationship of seeing to reading, or, as I tend to think of it, the relationship of primary experience to secondary experience. This could take a long time discussing so just the briefest kernel of the issue.

Allan Sealy begins by telling us about his experience of the Arctic and the Aurora Borealis and his desire to write about the deserted red-stone city of Fatehpur Sikri, the ancient Mughal stronghold that I visited some three years ago, without first filling his head with knowledge. He wants to distinguish between first-hand experience and book-learning.

On the other hand we had the long debate the day before about the relationship, following Nietzsche, between fact and interpretation, which claims that there are no objective facts, only interpretations, so, as the pomo theorists have it, it doesn't matter if you fall out of a window and break your neck, gravity still remains merely interpretation - part of a narrative or discourse - not fact (a crude example but see Sokal, et al).

The young bright sparks particularly love this kind of theorising because they are all theory and no experience and because it makes them feel clever and superior. They have sharp white teeth and nothing to bite on, so they attempt to redress this disadvantage by denying that anyone ever has had anything to bite on. So, for example, Bei Dao's experience of the Cultural Revolution means nothing in particular. He, as well as we, is simply part of a historical process. They can state this for a fact. They can say something about the historical process, observing it from some vantage point outside it. History is their enemy. I remember one young theorist dismissing Max Sebald's oeuvre as 'Central European miserablism'. Dresden? Miserablism. Same message. We young, our teeth sharp: you old, your teeth blunt, and not through biting. We smart and cool: you thick and sentimental.

They look at us pityingly.

One young novelist said he has striven hard to get rid of all facts in his book. (He will nevertheless expect something that he can interpret in terms of rupees and dollars for his endeavours to help him go on interpreting.)

OK, he is wrong, but one has to go some way down this path with him before turning round. As Claudio Magris implied, he could not run the full distance with Nietzsche on this but that doesn't mean the mad philosopher was mad. My own line is that there are clearly some differences between seeing-as-fact and reading-as-interpretation - that there is a difference between seeing the Aurora Borealis and reading about it, or seeing pictures of it - but that:

a) We experience reading too;
b) We do not go naked before objects, nor did Allan see the Aurora Borealis with a naked, innocent eye;
c) The imagination is also a fact.

In other words experience - our apprehension of first-hand facts - is complex. We cannot put aside what we know, we can only delay its impact by an act of the will. The second-hand can act on us much as the first-hand can. The writer needs to hold knowledge at bay only to the extent that it follows half a step behind. It has to follow, or nothing gets done. If it doesn't follow at all we are lying to ourselves.

Furthermore, since it is impossible for us to truly know each other (even our closest and most intimate contacts remain a closed book in some respect) or ourselves (we do not have thoroughgoing knowledge of ourselves), the contact with the world through the agency of another human being's mind in the form of a book or a film or anything else strikes us as almost as real as anything else, or, at any rate, part of reality. In other words, a novel, a poem, a work of visual art or a piece of music is not necessarily worse for working through or being about other such works; that it is in fact unavoidable that it should do and be so. A writer need not have been in a house fire to write about a house fire. It might help if he had burnt his finger sometime but even that is not a requisite. Something however is. What? We don't know, not exactly, but we have been there.

Are we merely personal interpretation and no fact? Certainly not. We have a responsibility to each other because the one thing we do know is that our arguments are not perfect, even our arguments about interpretation. And beyond the failure of the artistic enterprise to convince us that the world has substance and form, is comprehensible, and is, in fact, out there, beyond language, beyond, as Magris had it,“the shipwreck of knowledge” there remains the fact of the voyage itself, and there remain our fellow voyagers.

Each and every individual voyage is wrecked, but hope remains. We set out in hope and are aware that it is good to do so, that beyond the place where we personally founder, there are further places that constitute an image of the real: that the sea has been real, the boat has been real, the sweat of our companions has been real. The enterprise of art is an attempt to give a value and shape to that reality: to sing very close to the music of what happens.

Look, I can still taste the salt. Look at the marks on my fingers. Watch these glittering eyes.