Toby Litt's Blog, page 17
January 28, 2019
Life Cycle: More Lyrics 1
This Saturday, Life Cycle – music by Emily Hall, words by me – is being performed in a new orchestral version by the Aurora Orchestra. This is happening at King’s Place. The wonderful Mara Carlyle is singing, and the brilliant John Reid is playing piano.
In advance of that, I thought I’d post some lyrics that I wrote for the song cycle (which is about motherhood), that didn’t end up being used.
If you’d like to listen to the whole thing, it’s on bandcamp and spotify.
The Things I Can’t Forget
The speeding car
the traffic jam
the who we are
the who I am
the rushing in
the waiting room
the pushing when
the boom-boom-boom
but most of all I can’t forget
the things which haven’t happened yet.
The gripping hand
the feeling worse
the midwife and
the second nurse
the breathing in
the blowing out
the seething pain
the growing doubt
but most of all I can’t forget
the things which haven’t happened yet.
In time long gone, in time to come,
I am your home, I am your home
The meeting you
the sensing then
the passing through
the moment when
the eye so clear
the eye so bright
the fading fear
the pure delight
but most of all I can’t forget
the things which haven’t happened yet.
The beating heart
the size and weight
the time apart
the time and date
the golden light
the sight and feel
the holding tight
the right and real
but most of all I can’t forget
the things which haven’t happened yet.
In time long gone, in time to come,
I am your home, I am your home
The newest new
the oldest face
the welcome to
the human race
the life, the laugh
the given name
the photograph
the tiny fame
but most of all I can’t forget
the things which haven’t happened yet.
In time long gone, in time to come,
I am your home, I am your home
EVAN PARKER: Poem
EVAN PARKER
e.g., Statements that aren’t statements
(although statements is what they appear to be)
but which function more as lyric questions
because they are asserted so assertively
that they cannot help but become
questionable to any able reader
who reads her own reading and
responds to her own first responses
with No
with No, that just won’t do
as any kind of statement, and who then
re-begins by sensing what echoes beneath
the attempt to unstate by overstating –
which is the space where once
January 27, 2019
Creative Non-Fiction: Poem
CNF
She told her not to
not to write it
and he went after her
to tell her
to ignore her
and to write it anyway
because it was either
that
or drown.
The Hurst, 2017
January 26, 2019
Receipt: Poem
Receipt
‘Would you like the sea?’
I say yes,
puzzled.
Tamp,
and another afternoon’s second coffee –
she is Russian, or Ukrainian,
and so I realise she said receipt.
‘I gave you a hard time earlier today,’
her Indian boss says, alongside
the machine where she’s making my milk
bluff.
And she, ‘Not so much,’ and gives
half a shrug
he doesn’t see because of his espresso sip.
‘Excuse me,’ says the man after paper towels
– on the counter, by the water – the man
who has just vacated that booth
near the window I don’t want
to want so much.
I step back, in fuller possession
of something.
November 23, 2018
Patience – A Novel
Today, Galley Beggar announced they will be publishing my novel Patience in August 2019.
I feel differently about this book to others I’ve written. It seems, to me, the best thing I’ve done. Not just written, done.
This is largely because I was visited by Elliott, a once-in-a-lifetime narrator who is nicer, wiser and generally better than I am. He is also a lot more patient – as he needs to be, given his circumstances.
If you would like to meet Elliott, he’s waiting here.
October 1, 2018
Wrestliana – Jemmy Dover
There were some things I didn’t expect to be able to find out, whilst researching Wrestliana. For example, in the ‘Preliminary Observations’ at the beginning of his novel Henry and Mary, William Litt says –
I have observed real dates and facts, which prevented me from complying with the desire of several friends, who wished me to introduce in this story some anecdotes relative to the well known characters of Jemmy Dover and Johnny Rule.
Who were Jemmy and Johnny? Local characters in the Whitehaven area, still familiar enough to be spoken of in 1824 (although the novel is set 60 years earlier). That was all I knew.
It seemed unlikely anyone would have bothered to write about them. But then, in William Dickinson’s Reminiscences of West Cumberland, published 1882, I came across this –
A herd was employed to watch the cattle from the corn, and to drive them, young and old, home at milking time in the evening. The young cattle were turned to the common over night, and the milch cows to the enclosed lands… Horses were not allowed there, and sheep rarely, or as trespassers. The field is high and exposed to all weathers, and the keeper was often sorely annoyed by the cattle madly galloping about in hot weather… After the crops were cleared off, the herd was dismissed till his services were required in the spring ; and the cattle were turned on in winter according to the number each was entitled to put on in summer. The last herd, Jemmy Dover, whom I knew for some time during my schoolboy and youthful days, was an eccentric “daft body,” exceedingly irritable, but strictly honest and dutiful. His chief whim laid in collecting and wearing a number of chains, seals, and keys to his ponderous old watch ; and he was fond of exchanging them with the servant men and lads, who indulged his fancy by giving him a good number in exchange. He had been known to wear nearly a score of these at a time, of sundry patterns, worthless of course, from a shoemaker’s wax end and cord to the brightest of lacquered brass ; with coins, seals, and other nick-nacks in abundance, till the sheaf-like collection overbalanced the watch, and then was reduced and stored bye till wanted for trading with, or again appending. To fill up his time while herding, he used to knit coarse yarn stockings, &c., and in winter he assisted and handled the “dolly” with vigour at the washing days of his acquaintances, with little beyond his board for remuneration.
It’s hard to imagine more charming, or moving, discovery. Still, I couldn’t find space for it in Wrestliana.
Johnny Rule remains obscure.
June 2, 2018
Wrestliana Doings
As some of you may have been directed here by the Galley Beggar newsletter, here’s some info about the forthcoming Wrestliana and wrestling-related events.
I don’t usually post this kind of thing, but it would be great if you were able to come along and say hello:
7th June 2018, 7.30pm – Wrestliana launch at Cakes and Ale Cafe, Carlisle, £3, includes a glass of wine. Booking.
8th June 2018, 7.30pm – Wrestliana reading, talk and Q&A at the Jerwood Centre, Grasmere, followed by a complimentary drink in the 19th-century inn The Dove and Olive Bough (the house now known as Dove Cottage). The beer is generously provided by Grasmere Brewery. Booking.
16th June 2018, 3pm – Smackdown! Toby Litt and Carrie Dunn get in the ring and talk about wrestling and other things, Greenwich Book Festival, Room QA080, Queen Anne Building. Booking.
30th June 2018, 7pm – The Oldest Sports – A Literary Celebration of Boxing and Wrestling, with readings and performances from Lynn Nead, Sarah Victoria Turner, Oliver Goldstein, Declan Ryan, Anna Whitwham, at Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London, Booking.
Copies of the limited edition are still available.
May 7, 2018
Wrestliana – Touchline Philosophy
TOUCHLINE PHILOSOPHY
The touchline, or its prehistoric equivalent, is what makes us human.
I have thought about this a great deal, but am still worried that it’s the kind of anthropological speculation that has no force. Anyway, here it comes.
There have been many suggestions as to what, if anything, makes humans different to animals.
One is that humans use tools and animals don’t. Here, you have to be very accurate about what you define as a tool. And this seems a weaker and weaker argument – but the defining moment at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey shows, simultaneously, weaponization and humanization. Our ancestor learns to use dead bone to crush live bone. Ape becomes man, and a jump-cut suggests that everything that follows was causally inevitable: the technology of death is always already high-tech.
Other proposed differences are that humans can anticipate their own deaths and animals can’t. That humans have written language (ignoring the scent-signs of dogs). That humans are possessed of immortal souls, granted us by a divine being. That humans tell stories.
It is also suggested not that humans play games (kittens do), but that humans have sports.
I would counter this, and I am sure I am not alone, by saying that our humanity depends upon our ability to draw a line in the sand. (Latterly, to paint touchlines.)
On a more essential level, the drawing of the line in the sand creates a meaning. That’s our terrible gift – to create from space, place.
(Sun Ra chanted ‘Space is the Place’ – philosophically, that’s just wrong. (I think Sun Ra meant more like ‘the place to be’.) Space isn’t the place or even a place. Until we make a place of it, space is just space. And as soon as it becomes place, it ceases forever to be space. Even if the earth is vaporized and the vapor infinitely dispersed, it will still remain as a place – the place in space where place once was. This is existentially different to space that has never been anything other than space. In which case, maybe what Sun Ra meant was ‘Space will be the place’.
Animals can create territory, but they cannot create spaces. They do not have a there and a here. (This is the origin of Heidegger’s word for what we are, and what other beings may be, da-sein. There-being, place-holding.) The interior of a beehive is just that, the interior of a beehive. Conditions inside it (light, humidity) are objectively different to those outside. But climactic conditions within the circle of Stonehenge are exactly the same as conditions outside. What has been created there, on a very sophisticated level, is a sacred space. (I am using the word sacred here in a minimal way; because it’s less cumbersome than existentially different.)
I, as a human, can stand with you, as a human, on a flat beach, and with my finger I can draw a circle in the sand, and point to it and say something about it. For example, ‘If you step inside this circle, the person you love most will soon die horribly.’
Now, whatever you may think of me, or of sacred spaces, the space within that drawn circle has – whether you like it or not – become existentially different. It has become a meaningful space, a place. If you step inside the circle with bravado, you have acted in relation to that created meaning. You do not need to believe I am a shaman or a magician in order for this to work.
Just as equally, because we are both human, you could draw a circle in the sand and existentially define it for me. ‘If you step inside this circle, you will gain your heart’s desire.’
Yet what you say about the space of the circle, and what its threshold means, is secondary. The important moment comes as I watch you draw the circle, silently. I realise, because I am human, that meaningful space is being created. Space is being turned into place. And meaningful space, which may have begun with the circle surrounding the fire in the cave, has continued through stone circles, the cathedral, the international border, the core of the nuclear reactor, the social network.
Humans, like sports coaches, can create a space with relation to which you can only either be in or out. Animals can’t do that; they don’t have in and out.
I think this ability, making place from space, precedes language – although equivalents to in and out would have been among the first truly necessary words.
In and out are, I’m not denying, related to territory, as in animal territory. ‘Don’t to in there, a lion lives in there’ or ‘Don’t go past that tree, a monster will kill you if you go past that tree’ – these are very useful warnings, meanings, to be able to convey. But warning is different to the drawing of a circle.
From the drawing of a circle follows all drama – within this space, I am re-enacting, acting, telling. I am not myself.
Archaeologists say they are unsure exactly what was the purpose of Stonehenge. With certainty, I would say, the purpose of Stonehenge was to make the space within it mean something different to the space outside it. Stonehenge makes a place. What archaeologists are trying to discover is the meaning of that purpose, the meaning of that meaning. (The meaning of a meaning is something very hard to excavate.)
Similarly, the purpose of the touchline is to make the space within it mean something different to the space outside it. Here, it says, is a place where…
And while my son is on the playing field, he is within a differently meaningful and a meaningfully different place. He is, whether I like it or not, within a sacred space.
The pitch is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
The law of the land recognizes this difference: if you slide-tackled another man on the street, you could be done for assault and battery. Although the law has changed recently, with regard to acts of violence that take place on the football pitch being prosecutable, it’s still true that the game could not take place without the players agreeing to tolerate (whilst on the pitch) physical treatment they would find intolerable once off it. There was outrage recently during a match between two Premier League teams, when a player slid into another player who was off the pitch and was not (because he could not be) given a yellow or red card.
A fox can stroll through Stonehenge without noticing anything other than that its progress is obstructed, here and there, by stones; I cannot stroll through Stonehenge – I, because I am human, enter it.
Similarly with Notre Dame cathedral. Whether you are atheist, agnostic, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh – you still enter Notre Dame cathedral, and you still step onto the pitch at Wembley.
I take the touchline seriously. If I cross it during a match, and go onto the pitch, it means something.
(It is interesting to think about why we say ‘on’ the football or cricket pitch, on the field rather than ‘in’ the pitch. I think it is because the meaningful difference of the space has gone so culturally deep that it has penetrated the actual playing surface – the very grass itself has become one with this meaning. When people speak of the ‘sacred turf’ of Anfield or Lords, they mean exactly this. The touchline itself is almost no longer perceived – that space would remain sacred even were the painted boundary removed. Similarly, if you cut a divot out from beside the penalty spot of Anfield or the wicket at Lords, it retains its aura even if you transport it to the moon. (However, you can’t play on it.) Wrestling and boxing remain closer to the origin of the line drawing. The playing surface isn’t sacralised: you are in the ring, and if we move the ring ten metres to the left, and you walk ten metres to the left, you’ll still be in the ring. If you are on centre court at Wimbledon, you can’t be that if you are ten metres to the left.)
Humankind may exist within a bubble of meaning, and outside that bubble meaning may not exist, but even if that bubble pops it will still once have existed, and that means something different (even outside the bubble) than if it had never existed.
By our meaningful existence, we change the meaning of everything else that exists. Unless, of course, we have no meaning – unless there is no bubble. But that doesn’t work either. Even if this non-bubble pops, or doesn’t pop, what is left behind still exists in relation to the delusory belief in meaning. (Even if our belief in our meaningfulness is a delusion, that delusion is qualitatively different to meaninglessness.) It could truthfully be said of us, even if it never will be said, Once there were beings who believed themselves to be meaningful. The fact that, in the future perfect, it could possibly be said, even if there is no saying because no entity capable of saying anything – the fact is significant, is meaningful. Perhaps it is even consolatory. When Mitsuko Uchida playing Schubert is gone, Mitsuko Uchida playing Schubert will still meaningfully have existed. (By which I mean, within the bubble.) When you are gone – and all that relates to you is gone – you, and it, will still have meaningfully existed. When the meaning of the meaning of your existence is gone, it will still – whatever effaces the totality of things – it will still once have been.
I imagine a civilization on earth that rose and fell biodegradably; they existed, they were meaningful, where we have been, and we know nothing of them. They left no fossil record. Yet we still ourselves exist in the context of our ignorance of them. Just as the fact of gravity obtained before Newton, so the fact of Civilization X obtains even in our ignorance of it.
Similarly, the meaning humanity is altered, essentially, by the existence or non-existence of other forms of being out in space (or, you’ll say if you’ve followed me, in their fardistant places) far beyond our touchlines.
May 5, 2018
Junot Díaz – ‘My Full Account of Cruelties Towards People’
Last year, I gave a lecture on ‘Success!!!’ and how to cope with it. I quoted Junot Díaz extensively, and approvingly. (I also used some words from him as the epigraph of my non-fiction book, Wrestliana: ‘You wrestle with your family your entire life.’)
In the midst of the dismaying, appalling accusations against him, I wanted to go back and see exactly what I’d said – to see what I’d assumed about him. (The whole lecture is here, if you want to check it out. I haven’t changed it.) But what sticks out most from is not what I said about him, but what he said about himself, in his interview with Hilton Als. (Video is here.)
I don’t think this sentence of Díaz has been picked out in the coverage:
Has anybody tabulated my full account of cruelties towards people?
In retrospect, it reads as if Junot Díaz knew what was coming. He was guessing there would be a fall from grace, that would put his literary reputation either in question or in the trash. I said he was speaking ‘self-disgracingly’; I also said he was wise and funny.
It’s notable that he says ‘full acount of cruelties towards people‘ not ‘full acount of cruelties towards women‘. Perhaps he swerves again at the end of his answer, saying ‘a structural exclusion’ rather than something else:
What I am aware of, being here, is that I am representative of a structural exclusion.
He has now become representative of something else entirely. And an account of his cruelties – full or not – is being rapidly assembled.
The lecture ran like this:
Essentially, my advice to you is to maintain your headspace; at some level, you need always to be thinking of your writing.
You will need to become very good at being interrupted, at being an interrupted being.
Here is Díaz speaking to Hilton Als wisely, self-disgracingly, about success.
Q: You describe this childhood of deprivation, and this experience of growing up with crazy role models. How do you explain the fact that you succeeded so beautifully, and didn’t succumb to all the other terrible things that could have happened to you and follow these dysfunctional paths?
JD: But who says I haven’t? I’m not just being tendentious. This is the mythography of America, progressive, where you have this idea that everything moves upward, and people are always on this journey to improvement. So, “How did you make it?” Listen, this is very important to understand, I don’t speak the language of “make it.” Our moment, in late capital, has no problem, through its contradictions, occasionally granting someone ridiculous moments of privilege, but that’s not what matters. In other words, we can elect Obama, but what does that say about the fate of the African-American community? We have no problem in this country rewarding individuals of color momentarily as a way never to address structural cannibalistic inequalities that are faced by the communities these people come out of.
And the record ain’t done yet. Has anybody tabulated my full account of cruelties towards people? I just mean . . . I don’t think we can safely say just because someone has some sort of visible markers of success that in any way they have avoided any of the dysfunctions. That is the kind of Chaucerian, weird physiognomy-as-moral-status. We don’t know anything about anybody. Yes, I have made a certain level of status as an artist and as a writer, but what I am reminded of most acutely is not of my “awesomeness,” or some sort of will to power that has led me through the jungle. What I am aware of, being here, is that I am representative of a structural exclusion.
I think this is the best way – to think beyond success, beneath success, to think the less of oneself, to think the less of success.
But the crucial words are in the last sentence. ‘I am representative.’
If you read the first reviews Junot Díaz received for Drown, you will see him being appointed as representative – as representative of Dominican Americans. To say Junot Díaz is extremely conflicted about this role is to understate; to say he is extremely funny about it is true.
Here is a sentence from the second story in Drown, ‘Fiesta, 1980’ –
‘Tío said, Wait a minute, I want to show you the apartment. I was glad Tía said Hold on, because from what I’d seen so far, the place had been furnished in Contemporary Dominican Tacky. The less I saw, the better. I mean, I liked plastic sofa covers but damn, Tío and Tía had taken it to another level. They had a disco ball hanging in the living room and the type of stucco ceilings that looked like stalactite heaven. The sofas all had golden tassels hanging from their edges.
[Drown, pg 24-25]
Imagine if I’d written that paragraph but had made some funny observations about ‘Contemporary Ghanaian Tacky’ or ‘Contemporary Pakistani Tacky’.
A representative is able to say stuff about those they are representing that from anyone else would be offensive or even racist, because they have that cultural authority. But pressure is also put upon them to cast those they are representing in as good a light as possible. Otherwise they’re harming the community that produced them, the family that nurtured them, etcetera…
When Junot Díaz published Drown, he was welcomed, hailed, feted as a new voice who could bring readers exactly the right kind of new news. He was someone marginal who could, it seemed, easily be centralized. He wasn’t entirely Other; he was writing mostly in English. To read him you needed a glossary but not a translator.
Junot Díaz knew all this might happen – if he was lucky, or unlucky: the appointment as representative, the cultural assimilation. To ward off the evil eye, he chose as an epigraph these words of Gustavo Pérez Firmat – the writer and scholar, born in Cuba, raised in Florida:
‘The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don’t belong to English
though I belong nowhere else.’
To read Junot Díaz’s Drown, as a white, middle-class American, was an act of cultural graciousness. It was to show one was paying attention to what some of one’s fellow citizens, less fortunate, less literate, were getting up to. Curiosity was answered, because Díaz had secret knowledge. He wrote and spoke with cultural authority about a culture and the way it related both to the dominant culture and a handful of subcultures. To read Drown was, for white, middle-class Americans, to slum it pleasurably in Contemporary Dominican Tacky. It was to sit on the plastic sofa covers, and accept them.
How can Junot Díaz reasonably cope with this – all this cultural situatedness – other than by disregarding it?
Well, I think he could do what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has done. She has turned around on those who have appointed her as representative, and she has addressed them and the wider world, she has taken on the role of moral spokesperson reluctantly and absolutely – just as Arundati Roy did, or James Baldwin. She has written polemically, and to do this she has set aside the fiction she would rather be writing, because she’s decided it’s more important to represent than to disregard. It’s a brave thing to do, and she’s doing it well. Junot Díaz answers the questions when they’re asked of him, and brings up the subject when it’s being avoided, but he has yet to write a polemic – and I doubt he will.
—
I would be interested to hear what you think of this.
