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.
No comments:
Post a Comment