The Voice That Thunders, page 13
The simultaneity of the Pitjantjatra and ourselves is another “apparent perspective”, like the sky, and is what makes genocides of missionaries.
Somewhere in those twenty thousand years we sacrificed the numinous for our other greatness, the intellect. The mistake has been to atrophy our dreams. For the Pitjantjatra, both are equal, both spectra of the same rainbow. My intellect entered inner time as unprepared as a Pitjantjatra entering Sydney. But I survived, and have returned the better equipped to work. For now I know that, whatever the work is, it comes through me, not from me, and brings with it a proper pride, a pride in craft, not the hubristic pride of creation.
And I have no choice but to serve work; not only with the numinous aspect of Man, for which I make this plea, but with the intellectual and analytical force that is our history, and by which we move thought through outer space and outer time to other minds. The boundaries are endless. But we each have our role. Perhaps the artist’s job is to act as cartographer for all navigators, and I simply plot the maps of inner stars.
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POSTSCRIPT
Bill Wadsworth has died since the above was written, and so I am freed from the ethical embargo on using his name. He was a most complex man: an honest rogue, in that he was a hedonist, overweight, fond of material comforts and of getting them, and he charged his patients what he knew to be his worth. During a clinical session, he was always calm, and scarcely moved, except to pass the box of paper tissues. He could hold a silence as long as an actor can. But, once the clinical engagement was over, he became physically hyperactive, chain-smoked with trembling hands, talked intellectual and metaphysical rubbish fast and long, as if it were necessary for his own sanity for him to spout garbage after two hours of the merciless and calm logic with which he had countered my hysterical outbursts of rant as I struggled in vain to get off his hook. He died, too young, of a heart attack.
He has been accused of being a villain. I don’t know. What I do know is that, without his quality and agility of mind, his applied intelligence, harnessed to sympathy and empathy, I should not have survived. Moreover, after our first meeting, he did everything from then on free, never an account. When I questioned this, he smiled. An honest rogue, with dreams.
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1 This lecture was delivered at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, on the theme of “Science Fiction at Large”, on 26 February 1975.
8
Potter Thompson
POTTER THOMPSON LASTS for ninety minutes in performance, and took seventeen years to prepare. I cannot say whether it is normal for a librettist to conceive and structure an opera, because I am musically illiterate. I know none of the technicalities. A score is a pattern, and C sharp or B flat are meaningless. Yet Gordon Crosse asked me to write for him, and Potter Thompson is the result.1
The seventeen years of preparation were spent in my learning something of the difficulties of language, and produced five novels and a Nativity play. By the time the fifth novel had developed, I knew that I had reached a point where the words were picked clean. I was at the bone. To have gone further would have been to snap syntax and to be in danger of writing a blank page. The next words would have to be inflected: they needed to be sung.
Crosse must have sensed this development before he wrote to me. We met, and he told me that the Finchley Group wanted to commission an opera, and that he hoped that Michael Elliott would direct it. For me, this triangular relationship has been an extraordinary period, after the essentially isolated time as a novelist. Director, composer and librettist were working together even before a theme for the opera had been chosen.
None of the three of us believes that much good can come of writing by committee, and Potter Thompson was not written in that way; but there was a collaborative aspect.
The best image I can think of is the three overlapping circles of the ATV testcard. Each is itself, different from the others, but, where they overlap, the colours fuse to white. That, metaphorically, is the area of collaboration, and it was my job to find it.
There were requirements dictated by the nature of the commission: professional standards, based on children’s performances. We agreed that the piece should be immediately exciting, without loss of subtlety. I felt that a mythological root was needed, and I remember churning out myth after myth, while my collaborators shook their heads in a sustained display of non-collaboration. I was looking for the white overlap, and I was not succeeding.
Then I suggested the myth of the Sleeping Hero, a prime myth of Britain. My childhood had been spent on one of the sites of its manifestation, and it had generated my first book. It ought to have been my first thought for the opera, because, as soon as I mentioned it, we had our common ground.
The myth takes several forms, but the central story is of the man who finds the Hero asleep under a hill, starts to wake him, but stops short of the final ritual act. Our common ground was a curiosity to discover why the mortal refuses the immortal. Why does Potter Thompson not bring the shining Hero out of the hill?
To précis a work is to diminish it. To say what Potter Thompson is about is to limit your freedom as an audience; but, if I am to convey something of the alchemy of collaboration, I have to describe the material.
The opera begins with Potter Thompson sitting alone on the skyline of a hill. It is Bilberry Night of Lunacy Day: the old festival of harvest, now no more than a village romp.
Spring for ploughing, sowing.
Summer, strength, growing.
Autumn ripeness corn and reaping.
Winter eating!
Harvest is here and hunger is over,
The red hag is dead.
Picking of bilberries, singing and dancing,
Bilberry bracelet boy makes for girl.
The decadence is obvious. The event is as religious as a modern Rose Queen. The villagers try to involve Potter Thompson, but he will not be drawn. He snarls his aloofness.
They think they know!
It’s Bilberry Night.
They think it’s all over.
It’s just beginning.
Let them be merry and marry,
They’ll never have rest.
While they are leaping,
Winter is creeping.
I’m knitting a vest.
Harvest is here and summer is over.
Night stretches.
Knit one.
From this superficial conflict between a gang of villagers and a pessimistic recluse the action changes abruptly to something menacing.
Potter Thompson is seen to be not so much anti-social as frightened. His fear is the secret pain that Bilberry Night holds for him. Once, on this night, when he was younger, his “ceremony of innocence” was drowned. We are not told the details: they would probably appear insignificant: but the moment has become trapped within Potter Thompson, and he within the moment. The pain is so unbearable each Bilberry Night, so strong, that it is personified as the characters called Boy/Girl. They sing the first line of the opera.
And on a green mountain there stands a young man.
The threat of Boy/Girl and the villagers makes Potter Thompson try to run away. He falls on the rocks and down into the hill. Here, through a phantasmagoria, he undergoes a mystical ordeal of initiation into the elements of his craft: Earth, Water, Air and Fire; and beyond these to the Sleeping Hero.
For me, this development of the myth was the clearest instance of dictate’s stimulating, rather than restricting, invention. One adult professional singer, Potter Thompson, moves through, and is moved by, the vitality of children. Around his strength, ebullience can play, and together make something serious and new.
An example is the treatment of the Air Elementals. I saw them as dervish mops from a carwash. They dry Potter Thompson after his ordeal by water, working in pairs, as rollers. Yet carwash mops also resemble African masks. Children know the nice balance between humour and fear.
The Elementals who plague Potter Thompson are really his tutors, instructing him in the litany:
What moves Earth?
Water.
What moves Water?
Air.
What moves Air?
Flame.
What moves Flame?
Time.
Release from each element is always towards something that appears to be worse, and Potter Thompson moves only because he is goaded by the pursuing songs of Boy/Girl.
Boy/Girl link the external world of the village, the private world of Potter Thompson and the mystical world of the Elementals. They stand between ritual and tradition, and their words are close to those of children’s playground games.
BOY: She said and she said And what did she say?
GIRL: She said that she loved, But who did she love?
BOY: Suppose she said she loved me.
GIRL: She never said that, whatever she said.
BOY: Oh yes, she said, and that’s what she said.
GIRL: All dressed in white.
BOY: She’s for another, and not for me. I thank you for your courtesy.
PT: Bird on briar I told it to. No other one I dare.
GIRL: The nightingale sings –
PT: All my life, leave me not –
GIRL: That all the wood rings –
PT: Leave me not, leave me not –
GIRL: She sings in her song –
PT: All my life, leave me not –
GIRL: That the night is too long.
PT: Not leave alone. Take this load from me, Or else I am gone.
BOY: I am so withered up with years, I can’t be young again.
On the surface of the story, Boy/Girl hint at lost love in Potter Thompson’s youth: a wound that was the cause of his isolation and of his craft as a potter. At first, their role may seem to be romantic and lyrical, but they are an aberration, a sickness within. They are Potter Thompson’s prisoners and they torture him.
Boy/Girl drive Potter Thompson towards the Hero. Each step from element to element, Earth to Water to Air to Fire, is made to escape them, but the more Potter Thompson dares, the clearer Boy/Girl become. As he passes through the stages of his initiation, he is cleansed, there are fewer and fewer impurities in his clay and therefore fewer and fewer distractions from Boy/Girl, until, rather than face up to them, he enters the furnace of the sun to the Hero’s cave.
But they’re not here.
No Boy and no Girl.
If He wakes,
Will there be no more?
Will there be
Bilberry end?
My head no more
Rampicked by the stars,
No more agait with dreams?
In the consummation of the opera, the question that Gordon Crosse, Michael Elliott and I had to answer is answered, at least for us.
Potter Thompson has been a process of discovery. The process was brought about by sustained acts of aggression. We ganged up on each other. Since the concept had been mine, the initiative lay with me. We had discussed abstract principles, but nothing else would happen until there were some words.
I produced a draft, and the other two tore it up for me. I produced another. They tore it up. And so we went on, through draft after draft. I had to justify every move I made. Gordon Crosse would explain his problems in linguistic, not musical, terms; and Michael Elliott would point out each stupidity and non sequitur; and I would pick up the pieces and start again, criticised but not dictated to.
In this way I learnt our strengths and our weaknesses, and where to heed and where to reject. Finally, I knew when to tell the composer and the director to shut up; and they knew that I meant what I said. The next draft would be the libretto, good or bad.
Then it was Crosse’s turn to endure. If we had worked well, my sense of language, which Crosse himself calls “symphonic”, would give him enough music; and at least he knew that I could not interfere with his art. Yet I suspect that the director and the librettist were able to help the composer less than the composer and the director had helped the librettist. Music is a more private world than language.
The triumvirate was a good instrument. But Potter Thompson, which I am proud to have found and to have shaped, stands clearly as the work of Gordon Crosse.
* * *
1 This essay was first published in Music and Musicians, January 1975.
9
Philately & the Postman
“CREATIVE NATURE AND Communication” is the subject you gave me. By coincidence, last night I finished typing the novel I have been writing since December 1965. It is called Red Shift, is about fifty thousand words long, and the last twenty thousand words have come in the last twenty days. Therefore, I am not sure which is real, the book or this afternoon.1
In case any of us have met before, I apologise, since I have learned, from experience, that my participation in conferences does not work. It has become personally so distressing, a useless exercise for me, and, I suspect, for the audience, that I should not waste the time and the energy.
Before I made that decision, I was able to gauge that, within ten minutes of my beginning, abuse would start to flow towards me. The only people who ever just sat, and looked, and knew, and sometimes nodded when other people were behaving quite hysterically, were ladies in black. So I have been decoyed into thinking that I am fairly safe here.
I shall address myself to a theme, then it will be your turn to come back at me; and there will be no gain for us unless we are direct, since we are in a unique gathering at a unique moment. We have not been together before: we shall not be together again. So if I say anything that seems to be too dogmatic, I may be saying it in order to clarify the question in my own mind: and you must be equally strong in your response.
It will not be the personal abuse I mentioned: the sickening, saddening kind. An example of that would be the time when a teacher of teachers accused me of having written in one of my books, Elidor, a vitriolic attack on the British working class. A German publisher, by the bye, turned down the same book because, he wrote, it contained a philosophy from which Germany had suffered too much already this century. Perhaps I ought to read the book again some time.
I shall talk about the demands of creative energy first. It is a dangerous thing to do, rather like performing my own appendectomy, and I shall not probe very deeply. I must be careful here with the word “creative”, because I think that what it is for me is not necessarily what it is for you; and, from the failure to recognise the difference, comes a lot of the distress that teachers and I experience when we have to endure what appear to be our respective stupidities.
Now, from my point of view, the creator with a small “c”, I work not because I want to, but because I cannot, beyond a certain stage, resist the internal pressure to write a book. I do not know what that pressure is. Some of it is connected with the period of my life between the ages of fourteen and nineteen; and that is a common element in creativity. Dylan Thomas said that everything in his work happened to him between seventeen and nineteen. And we should all remember that within us there is an adolescent who is still there, still remembering, still laughing, still crying. I speak only for myself when I say that the kind of activity I find worth the price, in writing, exists at the end of my ability to cope. There are people who work on a slacker rein, and those people I do not wish to know about. There is a man whom as a man I like, and whom as a writer I cannot evaluate since I have not read his books. But, as a writer, I consider him a blasphemer when he tells me that he will give only a calculated amount of time to a novel, and at the end of that time even though he can see the faults and how to put them right, he will not do so. That, to me, is an abuse of any ability he may possess.
Throughout our discussion I shall tend towards a religious imagery, mainly because I think it is apt for the subject, but also because we must try to communicate with each other, and communion is hard.
I had better say that I am not a Christian. I find that the quest is as valid a theological experience as the attainment. I should like, on my death bed, to be able to write, “I see”, and to have just the energy left to put a full stop, not to whatever I may be in the cosmos, but to that part of it that can go no further.
In day-to-day terms it is not a problem. If I go through life accepting that there may be a black door with no handle and that I am going to pass through it to instant oblivion, then I must work twenty-seven hours a day, because the moment I have now may be the only moment I shall ever have. If, on the other hand, there is an infinite mind, there is an infinite spirit, an infinite power, an infinite wisdom, then, by definition, I am a part of it. I am a part of its experience, its manifestation, and it would be blasphemous of me not to work twenty-seven hours a day to fulfil that greater power, that greater talent, that greater energy. So I must continually put myself at risk; and if you see in my work things that are dangerous, they may well be there. Books are the most powerful means I know for the expression of truth and of lie, the most constructive, and the most destructive, product of the human mind.
That is what I see, roughly, to be the creative role as far as it relates to me. To go out every day and to risk everything. Anything less is wrong, anything less a denial. If you do not understand, I cannot explain it further; and, if I have said it properly, there is no need for me to say more. But we must make a clear definition and distinction here. I have spoken about creation, creativity, creativeness as a possibly pathological activity that may benefit others. As teachers, you may bring your own form of creativity into the classroom, but you must not ask a child to undergo that degree of exposure; you must not.
In the classroom, creation should go back to its root source, just as education should. The Latin “educere”, to lead out, to draw out, should be applied, not to the adult’s gratification or career: not in your terms, but in the terms of the human soul you should be enlightening but may be darkening.
