Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Ten - Leaving with the Ghosts of Dartington

I feel reluctant to be writing this final instalment because it is the last day of the festival. I will have to find other things to write now, with the memory of what I achieved here to spur me on. Dartington’s ghost – of which I am certain there are several, including in my room – will linger with me still. And indeed, ghosts seems to be a running theme, in a way, of my three talks today, starting with Julie Summers’ The Secret Life of Britain’s Country Houses 1939-45. In this, she talked us through the history of several of Britain’s notable rural residences which were converted for the service of the war. There was the 13^th century Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, which was transformed into a maternity hospital with such beautiful Japanese wallpaper, the mothers thought they had died and gone to heaven when they awoke! Waddesden Manor owned by the de Rothchilds in Buckinghamshire which became a children’s home of great splendour, despite many of the furnishings being stripped out, where the children could roam freely, both inside and out. Aldenham Park in Shropshire, the former residence of Lord Acton, became a rather leaky and potentially haunted school with only one toilet, much like Audley End, Essex which became the headquarters for the Polish section of the Special Operations Executive, with 200 rooms and just a single loo! Others still bear the scars of their military past with unexploded munitions unearthed in their grounds or, in the case of Melford Hall in Suffolk, the need for extensive reconstruction. As the ancestral seat of the Parker Baronets, when the hall was given over for use by the army, much of the furniture was relocated to the excluded North Wing. This part was, through blatant disregard, subsequently burnt down during its occupation by the Royal Berkshire Regiment in 1942. All of this was delivered by Summers in a way which seemed to evoke the ghosts of the past, as well as a sense of desire to walk these historical halls ourselves.

Stepping further back in time, however, was Fiona Sampson and her talk on Mary Shelley (quite a popular topic given the importance of the date – 200 years almost to the day since Frankenstein was conceived). For Sampson, whose book In Search of Mary Shelley is a biography of the young author, there was the question of whether she had the right to be poking around in her private life, yet as Sampson remarked, Mary was involved in the biography business herself. With this brief act of permission dispensed with, she launched into colourful scenes of Mary’s birth on the night of August 1797, the rebellious symbolism of her remarkable tartan dress, and the events which spawned her famous novel. These began in the final days of her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814 as they passed by Frankenstein Castle while on a river boat on the Rhine. This, as Sampson continued, most likely stuck with Mary until the fateful night two years later when she and Percy, Lord Byron and John Polidori were reading ‘ghost stories’ or ‘schauerroman’ (shudder novels) and decided to write their own (we remember what became of this). In the process of detailing Mary’s life, Sampson often quoted from the various journals of those concerned, especially Mary’s, reading them in a manner which almost felt like Mary herself were present (see, another ghost!) Why the young author is only best known for Frankenstein, however, is because she was female and carrying her mother’s name – something the Brontës, writing in the same era, had less trouble with given their use of pseudonyms.

Having indulged in Frankenstein on the big screen with Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder’s hilarious Young Frankenstein (may Wilder rest in peace, he was a handsomely zany masterpiece), I hurried back over to the Great Hall for the final event of the festival: the Magical Tales and Political Poetry of Ben Okri. Although a little late for his introduction, Okri soon launched into the amazing process of ‘living with art’ (initially that of Rosemary Clunie for his book The Magic Lamp), and then living inside the art, before growing a beard and emerging with the text – the poetry – fully formed. This meant he also had something to say about the appreciation of art, suggesting that you ‘give every painting at least twenty minutes’ until you begin to see beyond the surface. And indeed, the poetry he produced in response to Clunie’s work was deeply profound, giving each a unique backstory as colourful as the art itself. So colourful, it seemed, that a robin decided to pay us a temporary visit, in through one small window and (somehow) neatly out the other side. As Okri remarked, ‘When a poet reads, birds listen’ which I couldn’t agree with more. This led on to more political poetry, gathered in his anthology Rise Like Lions, which addressed politics in its widest sense as ‘our relation to reality’, not just all ‘Trump this’ and ‘Brexit that’. Managing to include a small amount of audience participation, two split-gender choirs were assembled to read poetry by Maya Angelou and Bob Dylan, which helped accentuate the effectiveness and perfection achieved by reading poetry aloud. After all, poetry began its life as an oral not a written art. To continue the theme of ‘strange phenomena’, as Okri called it, his battery began to die. The battery on his microphone that is – though he played along in good humour, springing back to life when a new battery was fitted. And then, seemingly unprompted, a lamp shade fell from the wall. But these couldn’t detract from the inspirational effect he was having on the room, and the philosophy he was dealing in to help distinguish the writer as someone who writes every day, who makes it a bad habit, who writes ‘junk’ yet continues to ‘burn [their] hand into [their] art’. For Okri there is no blank page because each piece of paper has within it a ‘subterranean text’. This seemed to me a fitting end to the festival because Okri truly does have a way with words.

Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Nine - That's Some Heavy Stuff!

The tone for today was perhaps a lot heavier and more challenging than I’d previously experienced, inviting me to look into my own mind as much as those of the day’s speakers, and this happened right from the get-go with Jonny Benjamin’s talk The Kindness of a Stranger. There’s no denying how difficult and delicate the topic of suicide is to discuss, which is why he kindly gave us an ‘escape clause’, but as he remarked, being ‘brave enough to be vulnerable’ isn’t easy either. So, as Benjamin began his talk, I was already looking at him with a great degree of respect because of how vulnerable he was allowing himself to be before this room of strangers. But also, remembering the words of Robert Rowland Smith from yesterday’s talk on humanity, how much more human this made him. He talked us through his gradual descent into mental illness as he grew up, from visual and auditory hallucinations as a child to his experience of the Truman Show delusion to being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder which was ‘the end of my world’. At this point, he considerately stopped to assure us that ‘this story does get better. I promise’ as if giving us the strength to survive what was to follow: the story of his attempted suicide. And indeed, it did get better because, as he explained, on the bridge he was prepared to jump from he met a man who told him two things no one had ever said to him before: ‘You don’t have to be embarrassed’ and ‘I think you’ll get better’. This stranger had given Benjamin more hope than anyone ever had. Which wasn’t to say that he immediately got better, but he began to wonder why no one seemed able to talk about and treat mental illness with the ease and importance of physical conditions like broken limbs, heart disease, or cancer? Eventually he launched a social media campaign to try and find his unlikely saviour, and was surprised by the number of people – ‘silent heroes’ as he referred to them – who came forward, having allegedly done a similar thing for others that same day. But in the end, he found him, a man named Neil Laybourn, and the video of their meeting honestly made me tear up. Together, Laybourn and Benjamin have done incredible things for mental health awareness and services, even in the space of the tiny venue. Benjamin’s most profound remark for me, however, was that we don’t say we are cancer in the way we say we are depressed. If we learn to say we have a mental health condition, it no longer defines us, but simply lives alongside us.

As a brief interlude from the mentally heavy stuff, I went to see Mark Williams’ Frameworks which discussed something physically heavy: the historical development of skeletons. This required Williams to condense 4000 million years of history down into 40 minutes – a task he somehow managed without going over time. Beginning, as you do, at the beginning, he introduced us to the earliest skeletal creatures, stromatolites, formed by clumps of bacteria whose rocky fossilised remains can still be seen today. This was a world of ‘blobs eating other blobs’ until those blobs decided to join up to form creatures like sponges and gradually become more resilient, against each other and the environment. This meant very experimental skeletons - ‘humpty dumpty skeletons’ as Williams’ called them – were formed, the kind whose remains could not be put back together again because they were just so weird! Eventually we arrived at insects and molluscs and the story of Ming the potentially immortal clam. Ming, named after the emperor in whose rule he was born, was fished out of the sea at a little over 500 years old – and thereafter, died. One wonders how old poor Ming might’ve lived to be. Which brought us to another aquatic skeleton, the biggest in the world (and no, it isn’t the blue whale): the Great Barrier Reef! Coral is a skeleton, and yet that too is being killed. Even our nearest and dearest skeletal relatives, the apes, only exist in numbers at most equal to the total population of Leicester (this was the relative comparison Williams drew for us). But it wasn’t all doom and gloom, because when considering the future of skeletons, there were two points to make: that vehicles have essentially become our new ‘skeletons’ and that, so long as there are the right chemicals on other planets, there will be life out there.

With my head still spinning at the possibilities, I was soon back in the Barn for Susan Blackmore’s talk on consciousness. Far from the ‘Black’ in her name, she appeared as a rather exuberant and colourful figure who, throughout her talk, encouraged a great deal of audience participation. This primarily involved asking every member in the front row at odd intervals if they were conscious, but also included bringing a man on stage to ‘be a bat’, and questioning the sentience of various objects and organisms. The point she wanted to make was that consciousness was an illusion and that we were all ‘deluded’ – a point emphasised by her having an existential crisis over a piece of carpet! This was because there was no identifiable point in the brain which was ‘you’ – we can understand the function of every part but it seemed that the more we knew, the less we actually knew (is your brain hurting yet?) She applied several tests to her audience, including an attention test which tricked us into not seeing a man in a gorilla suit pass through. She then amended her question to ‘What were you conscious of a moment ago?’ which only made our brains hurt more. I will, in this case, leave you with a quote by William James: ‘The attempt at introspective analysis…is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’. Our attempts to explain the unexplainable, to give form to the formless (as Nick Hunt did for the wind), are only ever going to be met with futility. Which is probably why, when asked what consciousness is, Blackmore simply screamed ‘I don’t know!’

Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Eight - A Blast from the Recent Past

Everybody, I hope, I has heard of Frankenstein: the darkly horrifying literary masterpiece of a 19-year old Mary Shelley. What some people may not know is the conditions surrounding the conception of this legendary novel. In this morning’s talk How Frankenstein Shaped Our Thinking, the ‘Prof of Goth’ Nick Groom let us in on the secret. There in the gothic darkness of the Barn, we were invited to think ‘I am not here’, but instead exactly two centuries in the past, on the shores of Lake Geneva, among the likes of John Polidori, Lord Byron, and Percy and Mary Shelley whose quest for ghost stories birthed a new breed of literary monsters. From Polidori would come The Vampyre while from Mary would come Frankenstein. This was a story I had heard before, spoken by another eccentrically brilliant raconteur, Dr Karen Morton, during my study of the Gothic at Plymouth University. However, Groom’s story didn’t end there as he was interested in the concepts of humanity that Shelley had imbued her creation with. He remarked on the ‘weird science’ of the 19^th century, from parlour tricks with electricity to the not-so-legal history of anatomical studies which put the knowledge of the time into perspective. The ‘being’, as he called the novel’s monster, was a hybrid, a mish-mash of reanimated human and animal parts, yet this unnatural conception stood out as the primary factor denying it the status of ‘human’. With our modern scientific understanding, however, we know our own bodies to be just as hybridised: corrected with lenses, machines, and medicine, and supported by internal and external bacterial ecosystems. This creature was just like us after all, and, as Groom remarked, could most likely pass a Turing test. In the end, the only thing separating us and Frankenstein’s monster was our vanity (while, after the talk, the only thing separating me and Groom’s edition of the book was my wallet).

And from one university flashback to another, I soon found myself back in The Barn for a talk on owls by my former lecturer, Dr Miriam Darlington. While I had known her, her fascination had been with otters, but whilst writing a book on them, she had had a close encounter with a short-eared owl. This inspired her with the idea for her next book which, like a terrier (as she described herself), she couldn’t let go of. Apparently, this also prompted people to begin sending her owl merchandise (particularly Harry Potter) which she admitted to having to clear out on several occasions! No doubt this merch was cuddly and cute, yet the aim of her book was to ‘decutify’ the owl and to remind her readers of just how important these birds were. Through her research, Darlington had immersed herself in all things ‘owl’, from dissecting owl pellets (a strange activity of which she learned she was not alone) to travelling to a town in Serbia famed for its 800-strong population of long-eared owls, to meeting her fair share of vaguely ‘reptilian’ owl chicks (as he described them) which only a mother [owl] could love. One anecdote from her Serbian trip stuck in my mind when she remarked on her guide’s description of the local blue tits. When there were no longer any owls left to put rings on, he said they ringed the blue tits which were ‘vampiric’ and vicious in comparison to the owls. Yet in her examination of the owls’ pellets, there were the blue tits’ rings!

On my final return to The Barn today, I was invited to ‘get lost’, not out of rudeness but in a maze, as Henry Eliot’s talk The Art of Getting Lost was all about mazes and labyrinths. Surprisingly, there are several differences between the two, the first being that labyrinths have a centre and no multiple-choice paths, meaning you can’t get lost, unlike in a maze. The second is that the pattern of the labyrinth was one of the earliest recorded patterns scratched into cave walls some 5000 years ago, while mazes are only a mere 600 years old. Eliot went on to explain how mazes became the vogue for stately homes as ‘a sign of conspicuous consumption’ from Versailles to Hampton Court before turning to a more bizarre story which unfolded at Glastonbury in 1972. A fellow named Greg Bright asked Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis if he could make a maze on site; a year later, upon its completion, he was commissioned by Lord Bath to construct what became the longest maze in Britain: the Longleat Hedge Maze. Bright’s ambition even stretched to the theoretical ‘life-or-death’ novelty of a 9ft tall Antarctic maze, but then, in 1979, the ‘King of Mazes’ simply vanished. And if this wasn’t strange enough, Eliot soon started in on the psychological effects of a maze/labyrinth, and how by the time you reach its end/centre, you are a changed person; the centre is ‘a place of death and rebirth’. Then, in a similar vein of rebirth, he told us how he had managed to track down the elusive hermit that Greg Bright had become, persisting in his endeavours until he was finally allowed to meet him. As proof, we were shown – after much protest that we had run over time – a rather trippy video of Eliot’s meeting. Trippy in that the camera was often on an angle and the footage was backed by discordant music from Bright’s own former band. And in it Bright was seen to still be obsessing over mazes to the point that, far from having them on the brain, his mind must surely be a maze. After the talk, I made my physical escape from Eliot’s labyrinth, but the ideas his words had raised mean I am probably still wandering the labyrinth of my own mind even now.

Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Seven - A Fan-girl for Nature and Humanity

After last night’s footie failure, it seemed we all needed something to cheer us up – or at least everyone else did; I hadn’t even heard of the sport, let alone the fact that England were playing inside the world’s biggest drinking vessel! So here came Michael Brooke, described by his host as ‘a genuine article of expert’, to talk about The Secret Lives of Seabirds, what these creatures do when they are ‘over the horizon and far from our sight’ as he poetically put it. But to know this, Brooke had to have spent a great deal of time by the sea, and judging by his darkly frosted hair and tanned, trim figure, he had done exactly that. After briefly describing the various tracking devices employed, he proceeded to regale us with the extraordinary travels documented by many well (or lesser) known seabirds. A father guillemot, for example, had been recorded travelling up to 3000km with his fledgling on its first flight, while gannets off many British coasts enforced strict borders to their off-shore feeding grounds with absolutely no overlap. With the help of marine winds, Grey-headed Albatrosses have been known to travel at 130km/h – breaking British motorway speed limits, as Brooke remarked – while a whimbrel, encountering a hurricane on the east coast of the US survived being ejected from the storm at 150km/h! These recordings, many displayed in colourful lines across world maps, showed just how habitual – perhaps even instinctive – migratory and hunting patterns are in seabirds, which might just earn the humble puffin that much more respect.

Continuing the natural theme, my return to The Barn was for Nick Hunt’s Chasing Winds. While most people might want to travel the world to follow iconic rivers or see all seven wonders, Hunt was on a mission to follow winds. As he remarked, it is the names of things and places which compel us, and in the case of these four winds, it was the fairy-tale nature of their names – Helm, Bora, Foehn, and Mistral – which made them seem like characters he could meet, and which drew him to follow. This began in the Pennines, tracking down the ‘Helm’ whose many tales were of its destructive power, composed of demons with ‘whispering chattering voices’. This failed. His second, the ‘Bora’ in the Dinaric Alps, was equally destructive, yet seen as a ‘celebrity’ in nearby Trieste, Italy where Brooke met a man whom he described as a ‘meteorological BFG’ due to his collection of bottles of winds at the Bora Museum. His travels in search of this wind led him to encounter many strange characters, including a rowdy group of Croatian mountaineers who ‘enveloped’ him and proceeded to get him drunk. Nonetheless, this search also failed. His third was the ‘Foehn’ in the Swiss Alps, renowned for its ‘two-faced’ nature. While good at melting snow, ripening grapes, and creating the quintessential beauty of Switzerland, its dry warmth started forest fires and inspired what was locally known in Lichtenstein as ‘Foehnkrankheit’ or wind sickness. This latter effect was Brooke’s reward upon meeting and ‘wading’ through the humid train-like roar of the Foehn, yet, as he remarked, ‘that’s what I was meant to feel.’ To conclude his talk, he briefly introduced us to the ‘Mistral’, another celebrity, this time blowing across southern France. This one, he said, was linked to Vincent van Gogh whose paintings were often of scenes through which the Mistral blew, which led Brooke to suggest that, in van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, he actually painted the wind. This brought that Pocahontas song to mind of ‘painting with all the colours of the wind’; unfortunately, the only colour wind van Gogh seemed to be painting with was blue.

My final talk of the night, however, was one I was immensely excited for as it dealt with the idea of what it means to be human, something which simmered beneath the surface on my recently completed dissertation. Leading this talk was Robert Rowland Smith, whose book AutoBioPhilosophy, used deeply personal experiences i.e. his own, to try to answer this complicated question. Several themes arose in this talk, among which was fate and how changes of fate can alter our perception of ourselves and other people. Smith’s father, because of severe illness, eventually was no longer able to recognise his own son, effecting a ‘stripping away’ of the self which left his father with this ‘naked soul’, and Smith with an understanding of how much of a stranger our closest companions can become. He then asked us to consider the unconscious repetitions in our lives and the red voice of our doubt (which, by the way, should never be suppressed or you’ll end up in a car with a member of the Mafia – read the book, it’s all in there!) But what he was building to, and what I was itching to know, was what his idea of ‘being human’ was and it was this: that, despite our resilience, we are still vulnerable, and it is that vulnerability (and our response to it) which makes us human. He went on to gush over meeting his ‘hero’ Jacques Derrida, the ‘myth made real’ (a philosopher I dreaded during my degree) and how modern philosophy should return to its roots, to the time of Socrates walking about the streets and winding people up with his ideas. Smith wanted academics to ‘get out of their ivory tower and do stuff’. Yet all I could think about for those last 20 minutes was how his theory of humanity coincided with mine. I won’t bore you with the specifics (though you can guess I was doing my own ‘gushing over a hero’ in the signing tent), but Smith helped to remind me once again of just how eye-opening this festival can and has been.

Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Six - Curing What Ails You

With a whole morning to myself, I decided to check out the nearby Deer Park which revealed itself to be a beautiful expanse of tall forest, alive with even more birdsong than I had experienced a few days ago. Admittedly, I only ever saw one deer, whose spotted hide promptly vanished back into the tree cover from whence it came, leaving me to complete the rest of my walk around the forest’s perimeter, returning to Dartington Hall with plenty of time to spare before my first talk. This talk was to be Prescribing Poetry, by ‘poetry psychiatrist’ William Sieghart. His job in recent times has been to cure any number of mental ailments with what he terms ‘bibliotherapy’, a method he himself has benefited from on several occasions. First during his early years at boarding school, and later in the wake of his experience seeing a man hit by a car. He remarked that, when it was over, the only evidence was the blood on his hands, and poetry helped him to come to terms with the surrealism of this experience. It also taps into something we all share, the desire to recognise that, as the Way with Words brochure states, ‘I’m not the only one who feels like this.’ Yet, as Sieghart explained, being the one to listen to a stranger’s problems is as ‘humbling’ as it is insightful. And from these insights came his anthology, The Poetry Pharmacy, whose often short yet profound poems could ease loneliness (the most common ailment Sieghart’s ‘patients’ complained of), anxiety (calming what he uniquely dubbed the ‘tumble-drier mind’), and even Alzheimers. This latter point was remarkable in that he observed how much more ‘present’ sufferers became having read poetry. In recent times, he continued, poetry has become more of a ‘P-word’, something which seems to frighten us, but when this type of therapy could conceivably save the NHS a lot of money, it becomes a little less scary. Throughout his talk, I was also pestered by the inability to think of who his voice reminded me of, but as his deep yet gentle and well-spoken words filled the Great Hall, I realised I could’ve been listening to none other than Benedict Cumberbatch. He even faintly resembled the man himself – a little more advanced in age, of course. And this only enriched my experience of hearing such beautiful lines as ‘I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being’ by the Persian poet Hafiz, or when he prescribed a poem to Theresa May which suggested she ‘begin again’. I left feeling equally consoled and inspired!

This was complemented by a later talk in the Barn, Atheism and Ambiguity with philosopher John Gray whose most recent book is inspired by William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. Similarly titled, it charts Seven Types of Atheism, from New Atheism and secular humanism, to religion being replaced by science or politics, misotheism whereby god is hated and refused, and the Atheism of Silence (God is beyond language). There was a seventh but I couldn’t quite understand it. His initial explanation of atheism was compared to John Keats’s ‘negative capability’ wherein our love of mystery exists ‘without the irritable itch for certainty’ i.e. we enjoy the mysteries of life without explanation. But, when it came to time for questions, Gray made one of the most interesting points of all: that religion was in fact an ‘intellectual error’ which somehow served an evolutionary function. That, like sex, as much as we deny it, religion won’t go away. So, while atheists may have no need for a god, they still need a replacement. This made the potential future of religion particularly interesting as Gray pondered what it might be like if robots, like in Blade Runner, developed a religion. A very curious idea which is, indeed, why Gray wrote his book in the first place: for those who are curious. And now, it seems, so am I.

Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Five - A Trip through the Mind and Back in Time

Today has progressed more steadily than I could’ve imagined, in part due to the arrival of clouds (at last!) which have cooled things down slightly, but also because of the regularity of each talk, with a 45-minute break in between. Their subject matter, however, was far from regular, starting as I did with a man of many trades, Raymond Tallis whose talk Making Sense of the World touched upon several issues familiar to me. Despite our ‘pin prick bonces’, as he playfully worded it, we have achieved a great many things, not least of all because we are the only creatures with a fully developed sense of causation, driven by a totally pure sense of curiosity. In other words, we want to make sense of the world. If Tallis’s snazzy purple glasses and blue-and-white striped deckchair blazer weren’t inspiring my own curiosity, this point certainly did. As I later explained to him, in my own nervous fashion, I had recently finished a dissertation on power and the cyborg which dealt with issues of ‘making sense’ through objectification, so to hear elements of my own research spoken about was certainly refreshing. However, as he continued, this ordering of the world didn’t seem essential for survival – a bee does just fine without it – in fact, our enforced transparency of the world might be having the adverse effect: making it invisible! Our acquisition of knowledge, to quote Tallis, ‘cannot diminish the mystery of knowledge’, and neither, as was the inevitable turn, can God. Tallis handled this part of the discussion with a self-assured eloquence, even when later asked what our replacement god(s) should be – to which his condensed reply was simply ‘I don’t know’. He just had so much to say and yet so little time to say it all in that it was no wonder I felt my heart sink when I saw the price tag on his book Logos: The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World. I will, however, consider adding it to my [seemingly never-ending] library in the future.

And speaking of never ending, my next speaker was Penelope Lively, a woman whose honorary titles have been growing year by year. Now, at the age of 85, she is Dame Penelope Lively DBE, FRSL, winner of the 1987 Booker Prize for her novel, Moon Tiger. Her talk, however, was uniquely centred on gardens, something which she feels is embedded in our ‘national psyche’; we, as Brits, are a ‘gardening nation’ (to the point that her son once remarked how she and her husband had a 15-minute conversation about carrots!) We live in anticipation of the things growing in our flowerbeds – or at least the women do, while the men fuss over their lawns (a feature I recognised in my father). She spoke of the garden as an expression of order and creativity, flourishing even in a poky basement-flat yard in London. Draped in a leaf-pattern blazer, she very much resembled an emerging flower-bud herself, and could feel like one standing as she was before a crowd of folk her own age. So much so that I almost began to feel like the rogue weed in an otherwise immaculate lawn.

Ironically, for Terry Waite’s talk on The Power of Solitude, I did not feel so alone: solitude has often been an attractive state to me. As a former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Waite was involved in hostage negotiations throughout the Middle East in the early 80s, until he became a hostage himself in Lebanon in 1987. During this talk, he recounted – in a staggeringly composed and reflective manner – how, for nearly five years, he was forced to live without books, human interaction, or natural light, conditions which would drive the average man insane. To channel this anger, he initially starved himself, before turning to the more constructive method of poetry. Without any physical means to record his writing, Waite wrote mentally, a dangerous decision given what one can find in a brain so starved of company, yet, as he remarked, ‘suffering need not destroy’, it can deepen the soul. This allowed Waite to survive, to light up his darkest hours and, now a free man, even begin to enjoy his own company. His booming voice throughout reminded me of the late Sir Christopher Lee, which seemed to soften the edges of his story with a fantastical tone. Yet somehow, I was still able to believe this man had been through hell, more so than his anecdote about retiring a bishop whose continual drunkenness had caused him to fall into an open grave, not once but twice!

Which leads me to my final talk in The Barn, at the fullest (and hottest) I’ve ever seen it. This may have been due to my decision to sit right at the back, the highest point in the room which, as we all know, is where the heat would be. Fortunately, I soon forgot about the heat as the soft-spoken Robin Ravilious stole my attention. Her nostalgic talk on the photography of her late husband James Ravilious was filled with some of the 1,700 images from his 17 years of work capturing the local community of Beaford, Devon (at the behest of John Lane, Beaford Arts Centre director). A self-taught photographer, James managed a professional degree of softness and light, despite the monochromatic nature of his pictures, as well as a natural, ‘honest’ composition. Many of his subjects from Beaford show us a very different world in the old days of farming, including three men dragging a ram up a road in a tin bath tub, and a cow stuck in a henhouse. There is also a lack of political correctness, as evidenced by another shot of a hunting party with no two guesses what is at the centre of a writhing pack of dogs. But, as Robin remarked, James always needed an ‘actor’ and would wait for one if necessary. Sometimes the actors came to him, as seen in a biblical picture of a man lying on the ground in just his pants (who apparently lived outside their house like this for four days!) This kaleidoscope of black and white people and scenery did for me what no history book ever could have: they brought history back to life. For that one hour, we were all in 1970s Beaford.

Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Four - Finding Home

Poetry and the church go together like a finely aged cheddar and a bottle of red - at weddings and funerals especially – so it was unsurprising to hear that the speaker of today’s first talk, Why Be Poetic? was led by Canon Mark Oakley. A large, balding, smiling man, Oakley married (will the puns ever end?) humour and profundity in a talk which amused as much as it educated his audience on the finer points of poetry. His most profound image, for me, was the idea of poetry as the voice of a mother to an unborn child, a ‘soul language’ which we instantly recognise, even amid the distractions of everyday life. Regarding what makes a good poem, Oakley remarked that it should be like a rock thrown into water, its ripples having a wide-ranging (and ultimately positive) effect. This was rather appropriately balanced by his response to my later question regarding a quote by Iain Sinclair. For Sinclair, poetry is that ‘splinter of bone that is left when the rest of the skeleton has been devoured’¹ (enduring yet indigestible like a fish bone), to which Oakley remarked that poetry can also be like a fish: if it’s bad, it stinks. And considering how few words one often gets for their money in a book of poetry, that can be an expensive stink too! But when, as Oakley rightly continued, our poetry is very often dictated by the natural rhythms of our own bodies – our heartbeats and breaths – so we fall back into the ancient tradition of oral poetry, of creative listening, and of reconnecting with a voice that is so wholly home.

From one talk of finding home to one of losing it, I transitioned to Raynor Winn’s Walking Forward in the blissfully cool Barn. Having been given a week to vacate her home and the news of her husband Moth’s life-limiting illness all in the same week, Winn decided to walk the South-West Coast Path (as you do!) She described how surprisingly freeing and enlivening this decision was; how there, among the magical wonders of nature, Moth defied the consultant’s odds of survival. With it came the obvious financial problems which led to living off a single packet of instant noodles per day, and the bizarre realisation that she was ‘that sort’, the kind who scrounged pennies from a drain because it was all she had. When meeting people along the way, she explained how she and Moth always received the same uneasy reaction to the story of having ‘lost their home’, so she changed it; having ‘sold their home’, they became the ‘lucky bastards’ who could go wherever the wind took them. Yet not all encounters were as acidic, as she remarked that they’d met a homeless man who had embarked on the same journey after reading Winn’s article in The Big Issue. He claimed that being on this path had given him a sense of purpose. A second anecdote, however, made me smile as Winn recounted the time Moth was mistaken for the poet Simon Armitage who happened to be walking the South-West Coast Path at the same time. He and Winn were invited for dinner with a stranger who asked for a quick poem. All I could think was, I wonder how perplexed this stranger (and indeed Armitage himself) must have been when the real Simon Armitage came by? I couldn't quite muster the courage to ask, but I was at least pleased to hear that now, as Winn explained, things were looking better: they are renting a place, Moth is still alive (and was in the front row), and more writing (and walking) is definitely in their future.

¹ Sinclair, I. (ed.) (1996) Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology. London: Picador

Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Three - The Day I Became a Twitcher

I never thought I’d find myself bird watching today, yet to fill the time between breakfast and my first talk of the day, that is exactly what I did, amateur though I am. Jackdaws were in abundance, as too were young blackbirds, while the air was alive with the sound of coal tits, wrens, swifts, and goldcrests – more than I initially expected. I arrived at the Great Hall for the talk with the echoing twitter of the coal tit still resounding in my ears. Yet that was not the end of the day’s lasting impressions by far. My first speaker, Anthony Seldon, in his talk Educational Revolution: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence, promised us an ‘adventure’ (or at least some ‘really good tricks’ if his PowerPoint failed), and as Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, he indeed delivered. As he talked us through the three educational revolutions that mankind had already undergone, I could feel Seldon’s inner educator coming out, encouraging raised hands while gesturing with his own. He meticulously laid out the infuriating shortcomings of our current educational system – which revealed just how homogenised and blind the system has become to the true meaning of intelligence. It is a manifold concept which encompasses not just our minds, but our culture, spirit, and body too. And, as Seldon explained, this could be resolved through artificial intelligence, to supplement the physical educational workforce and tailor the system to an individual child’s needs. Because in Seldon’s own words, one shouldn’t ask ‘how intelligent is a child?’ but ‘how is a child intelligent?’, a subtle but compelling difference which opens the definition wide up, and eases the stresses of mental health set in motion by our failing educational climate. AI, it seems, is the way forward, the way to reclaim our humanity, even when it’s just getting started.

Having refuelled (this time at the Round Table Café) I entered the Barn for the first time today, and immediately noticed a delicate coolness hanging in the air like the classic pleated theatre curtain suspended over the stage like a bizarre cloud formation. This latter metaphor is rather apt given the topic up for discussion by my next speaker, Richard Hamblyn, dubbed the ‘Master of clouds’ in the Way with Words brochure. He related how over the course of last year, he had encountered various unclassified cloud formations which his ‘superior officer’ at the Met Office had greeted with enthusiasm. But with each new discovery, like a man with an over-excitable dog, the enthusiasm from his superior began to wane. From homogenitus, the man-made cloud (aka contrails) and the poetic cataractagenitus (originally the ‘Niagara Cloud’ due to its presence over waterfalls), to the uncanny Brocken Spectre, a rainbow-haloed shadow cast on mountainside clouds, in total twelve new names were birthed. A fact which, given our modernity and current development, amazed Hamblyn to no end (and gave him great joy in pressing ‘Add to Dictionary’ on his computer). But if that wasn’t mind-warping enough, he wasn’t done there: in response to a question regarding this Brocken Spectre, he posed that, as a rainbow is an optical illusion, philosophically, if no one is there to see a rainbow, it doesn’t really exist. Thus, we all carry a unique rainbow within us, that only we can see. On the flip side, of course, more clouds, like canaries in a coal mine, also means our atmosphere is getting more polluted. But unlike the miners of the day, we just don’t seem to see the warning signs. Too busy staring at our personal rainbows most likely….

My third speaker was something of a last-minute decision (unlike the mental seesaw I occupied when deciding to buy his book afterwards). The man to whom I refer is writer and artist, Sean Borodale, and the book was Asylum, his newest poetry collection written on-site in the caves of the Mendip Hills in Somerset. This was a rather appropriate topic given the current events in Thailand, and indeed the cool dimness of the Barn, the decision to ‘come in out of the sunlight to a darker place’ (to quote Borodale), felt very much akin to a cave. Yet for Borodale, these underground spaces were also theatrical, a ‘theatre of emergency’ for cave rescuers who needed to ‘rehearse’ real life situations; the fissure into which Oedipus attempted to disappear in Antigone; the mouth in the mask of the Earth. Having come from art school, Borodale was himself a performer, considering writing ‘a trace of a performed event’, yet his reserved speaking manner, and the curtain of hair he almost seemed to retreat into suggested otherwise – until he began to read. Here was a voice made for poetry, a romantically Gothic tone which emphasised every sound with the necessary degree of softness (hissing his s’s) or slate edged hardness (cutting his c’s), so beautiful I almost cried. As he later explained, the effect of in situ writing allowed him to do as Wordsworth did, to hold the poem open and allow the experience to shape it, or as Ted Hughes did, capturing the immediacy of the events. This came to the fore particularly regarding the effect of his voice upon the stone, the duality it created by being echoed or seeming to emanate from outside of him (an effect mirrored in several repetitious poems in Asylum). This also allowed for the cold sense of solitude and abjection beneath the earth to pervade Borodale’s writing, a tone I admired from my recent studies of the Romantic poets. Back in the bright light of day, I eventually caved (pun intended) and bought Asylum, though I may have a hard time indulging in these lines without Borodale’s sensual narration.

Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Two - The Big Names [Dropped]

I’d already been in this space yesterday evening, yet in the morning light, with its sultry pallor beaming off the outside walls and glazing the high flanked windows, the Great Hall felt more alive. The air circulated more freely through the open panes; more suitably for the morning and the vastness of the stone walls. Into this immense space stepped a character who seemed to mirror that change: Telegraph journalist, Bryony Gordon. Described as ‘unpredictable, wild’ and ‘a lot of fun’ in the Telegraph office for her self-deprecating humour and spontaneity which often bubbled to the surface like mini fireworks, her talk, Taking the First Step, seemed slightly contradictory. This was because Gordon’s talk was about her steps towards beating mental illness, specifically OCD (or the form known as ‘Pure O’: not the ‘good type’ of OCD as her husband had remarked to her). But, because of this spontaneous nature, she helped to showcase the optimistic side of mental health: the joys of waking up without a hangover after being over ten months sober (for which Gordon felt Marvel should offer her a place on the Avengers) and the decision to get fit. She described how this began in her husband’s trackies, Star Wars shirt and Converses, rehydrating from a sippy cup, looking like ‘a woman on day release […] from [her] own head’, and evolved into running not one, but two marathons. At this point, one of the attendants executed a perfectly timed (but accidental) mic drop. The first of these marathons she was seemingly talked into by Kate Middleton, the second she ran in her underwear – a real life nightmare of being naked in public. And the Royal anecdotes didn’t end there as she pulled out the Prince Harry card too, describing how, during a one-on-one podcast, she got him to open up about his own experiences of mental health. This theme has permeated her life, it is the reason she is here, and ultimately Bryony Gordon would like to see mental health put on the school curriculum.

Fast forward several hours – after I have wandered Dartington Hall’s vast and beautiful grounds, and enjoyed a late lunch at the Green Table Café – I found myself back in the Great Hall once again for Robert McCrum’s Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture, the tenth of its kind since Hughes’s death 20 years ago. Looking ever so slightly like the late Poet Laureate, McCrum had had the good fortune to work with Hughes (and several big names besides) as the former editor-in-chief of Faber and Faber. Having suffered a stroke only a few years before Hughes’s death – an experience somewhere between ‘a bad trip and a Lewis Carroll nightmare’ - McCrum never lost his ambition, and it showed as he hobbled up to the podium to deliver his lecture which read much like a eulogy to the dearly departed Hughes. Leaning crookedly upon his silver-headed cane, he still managed to stand tall and reverend-like. In the Great Hall, we as a crowd communed with Hughes’s spirit just as Hughes himself communed with the likes of Eliot, Blake, and Shakespeare – the latter forming the obsession which drove him to write the notorious Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, the lecture’s primary focus. McCrum delivered the details of Hughes’s life and its tragedies with a level of emotion which occasionally seemed to overwhelm him, from the death of relations to the failure of the aforementioned book. By the lecture’s close, I swear he was wiping tears from his eyes, yet, as he remarked regarding all big writers, their books may get ‘longer, baggier, and sillier’, but as a dedicated publisher, Faber and Faber were there for their writers.

On that emotional note, the hall emptied, yet I chose to stay put as I knew the next guest was going to draw quite a crowd (the ‘Sold Out’ label on the schedule board was a subtle hint). And indeed, by the time 7.45pm came around, the once empty hall was full to bursting, people even lining the walls on the window bench seats like an informally dressed choir, while the floor was a sea of faces and white noise chatter. And who were they waiting for? Only paleopathologist, TV presenter and author Alice Roberts, here to talk to us about genetic history. Just as humans are a mutated form of chimps and Neanderthal man, so too do other unassuming organisms have intriguing origins. It may be hard to believe, but Butch the chihuahua deserves his name after all because he is, in fact, a grey wolf – or at least descended from one. For more than her allotted 45 minutes, Roberts delivered her lecture on three of the ten species in her book Tamed whose origins and functions helped shape our own lives, and she did so in a uniquely comedic fashion. She aired her irritations at geneticists, depictions of laboratories and operating theatres, Paleo diets, and the realistic uses of ‘ritual objects’ (which Roberts remarked were most likely toys, in the same way Octonauts figures are toys – yet somehow a future archaeologist will still insist they’re idols!) At the same time, this was a highly educational talk on how our obsession with farming and domestication not only may have eradicated much of the Earth’s Neolithic megafauna, but has now converted at least 40% of our planet into farmland. And yet, as her rant included, teenage kids did not consider science to be ‘creative’, a seeming blow to future generations of scientists who need to learn to ‘stop fighting the wilderness and learn to thrive with it!’, a message I wholeheartedly support.

Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day One - Vikings, Tigers, and Naughty Schoolboys

So it's been, well, far too long since my last post here, but now I have reason to which, if you have read the title, is a particularly big one. I'm here in sunny Dartington, Devon, for my first Way with Words Festival. Continuing in my conviction to be more spontaneous in June, I decided to apply for the student bursary which would allow me to come here and wouldn't you know it, I only got accepted! Now I'm here, it has been suggested to me that I write up brief reviews of some of the talks I attend to put onto the company's website (details to follow when my stuff is actually published) and, in my own unstoppable fashion, I have been doing just that!
I did, however, forget to post last night's reviews here, so I will double up today and post both (separately).

~

If it wasn’t already apparent from the image of the stereotypical horn-helmetted, axe-wielding bearded berserker on the overhead projector, my first talk of the Way with Words Festival was to be on Vikings. Delivered by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Ice and Fire was a highly intellectual lecture on the passage of our Nordic ancestors from their homeland in Finland, Sweden, and Norway, across some parts of Europe, the outer Arctic, and even America. This revealed just how much of our own native language owes some of its diction to the Vikings (even the word glitter!) following their settlement in the UK, particularly towards the Midlands which on Barraclough’s map showed up as an infected blue mass of dots. It was here, she remarked, that many place names, like Grimsby, Ormskirk, and Twatt show their Norse etymology. Ormskirk, for example, derives from the Old Norse Ormr meaning serpent and kirkja meaning church, while Twatt, also from Old Norse, is þveit meaning a small parcel of land. And each of these words, and later passages from sagas and alliterative poems – of which the Vikings were also fond – was read by Barraclough in a fluid tongue which, along with her beautifully Nordic hairstyle, could’ve fooled me into believing she was a Viking too. She had, after all, spent her last two summers in Greenland as part of her research – which unfortunately didn’t include the country’s lack of roads. In place of her plan to hire a car, she hired a gorgeously photogenic Icelandic pony with blue eyes (a photo of which she showed us, partially silhouetted as it stared out across the Greenland wilds). She went on to remark on a walrus ivory statuette ‘reject’ of a polar bear she found in a midden, discarded as one would a first attempt at a love letter. And then to her bizarre knighting ceremony with a walrus penis bone at the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society in Arctic Norway. This was followed by a run-down of several inscriptions left across the North (including Orkney) by Nordic pilgrims, which often translated to ‘I woz ‘ere’ or whatever the Norse equivalent is. And finally, a trip to Svalbad, believed to be the home of monsters, trolls, and the gateway to the Underworld. Upon her return to her seat for questions, I was mentally shaking the snow from my shoulders as if I had come along for the ride.

By contrast, my next two speakers were presented through on-stage question and answer sessions. First Lucy Mangan with Childhood Reading. With her slightly dishevelled hair, simple frock dress and glasses, she visibly emanated the introvert she claimed to be: the bookworm who, through her voracious appetite for literature, could experience the world ‘without going out to meet it’. Yet her drily humorous remarks belied this introversion, referring to her father as her ‘dealer’ of books, and her mother as the ‘Noisemaker 2000’, always speaking her mind. When questioned on her interest (or disinterest) in certain children’s authors and story tropes, she always had something witty to say, from being ‘allergic to [the] whimsy’ of anthropomorphised animals to the anxious questions raised by The Tiger Who Came to Tea (Where did it come from? When would it leave?) And while poetry, for Mangan, has ‘too much’ feeling, fairy tales apparently possess ‘not enough’. Concerning Ladybird books, however, she began to extol their educational virtues, not just on the history of the Greeks and Romans which she learnt from them, but pretty much every subject on Earth. To the point that one could feasibly pass an exam on their information alone. ‘I passed my history exam on Blackadder’ she joked. Having displayed the voracity of her literary appetite, one question regarding books she might be proud not to have read threw a metaphorical spanner in the works. ‘I wish I hadn’t read Twilight’ she offered, but overall, Mangan had to admit her varied taste in genres means she simply wants to read everything. And I can’t blame her.

My final stop of the day was John Lister-Kaye’s Looking Back, a talk regarding his most recent publication The Dun Cow Rib (which I decided to purchase after the first twenty minutes). From my position at the back of the Great Hall, Lister-Kaye’s most distinguishing feature was his fluffy white owl-like eyebrows, and as the best known British naturalist, it only seemed fitting that he resembled such a creature. His answers during the first half were even simple and unassuming as an owl, yet he describes himself as once being a ‘rambunctious hyperactive child always in trouble’ and apparently hasn’t changed. Only after these first twenty minutes did he begin to open up, colourfully reciting parts of his book with additional accents and humour, and describing scenery with his eyes shut as if reliving his childhood right there on the stage. But what really helped me to identify with Lister-Kaye was the well-contained emotion regarding his relationship with and the death of his mother. As a boy of 5, sent off to boarding school, nature was his only diversion from the confusion of her illness, and it seemed to ring true for me too, having lost my own mother 6 years ago. This knowledge lent him a gentleness which jarred with the boy he once was, who was expelled for cutting the tail feathers off his headmaster’s peacock. Now he is an older man, engaged with projects in restoration ecology – a term he prefers to ‘rewilding’ – and has founded the Aigas Field Centre in Strathglass, near Inverness. His passion for nature and its conservation seems limitless, and even from reading the first few pages of The Dun Cow Rib, I can see where that passion stems. His mother – as did mine – meant a lot to him, and her memory seemed to guide his work, just as I hope mine is.