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.