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Well, you write so beautifully about nature.
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You've been writing for 22 years and you've written about all different kinds of nature.
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You've written about mountains and rivers and you've written about time.
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And what I want to start off with is the sensitivity that you've developed over time.
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A sensitivity to be connected to this much larger world that we live in both in space and and in time.
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Where does that come from?
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And how have you cultivated that?
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hard to reverse engineer an answer for that.
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I I grew up uh I grew up in mountains.
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I think that's probably the the first answer to that.
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And and mountains sensitize you, right?
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They are intense spaces and places that the the light feels brighter.
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The the snow on the face feels sharper.
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The air you breathe, you feel it like a wire in your nose, it runs down into your lungs.
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And so everything kind of crackles and tingles in the mountains.
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And also because they're dangerous places, you you you have to be alert.
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And being alert means risk assessment, but it also means being open as the kind of atoms of the world meet you.
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So I sometimes say my heart is made of mountains and always will be.
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They're they're the the beginning and the end of all natural scenery as far as I'm concerned.
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So from that, I think at some level I learned an obsession with rock and ice and water and light and all the things that that flow through and build my work.
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And also I guess um they they kind of they wore they wore away the usual boundaries and shells of the self and they continue to do that in me.
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Tell me about that obsession with light.
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So, I was flying into New York the other night and uh it was sort of a dark kind of a very cloudy evening, thick clouds, and we're kind of landing.
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We go through the clouds and we get to the bottom of sunset time and there was this blood orange light that was shining through the clouds and it was marvelous.
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It was magnificent and I have my phone in my pocket to go take a photo and I go, I'm never going to be able to capture it. There's just no way. I stopped myself.
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I didn't take the photo and then I just started grieving that I'm never going to have the words to describe how beautiful this color light was and it's just going to be in my memory fading away every single day.
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And I was like, I wish I could describe this. How did I do that? Has it faded? I don't know.
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I feel like I can't explain it to you and it makes me sad. It was so beautiful.
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Well, there was a there was a slaughter in that sunset, right? It was sanguinous. It was bloody.
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It was It was It was wild.
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Um, language will always be late for its subject.
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When its subject is light, it will be it stands no chance, right? Nothing moves faster.
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Nothing is more alotropic.
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Nothing shifts its textures, its granulations, its forms more than light.
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So, I would say abandon the dream of correspondence.
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So, language will never ever meet light. Granite has no grammar.
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Granite has no grammar. So for me once you reach the point where you stop the futile questing after correspondence like oh how can my language possibly meet reproduce carry the thing I have just seen what can't cause dasting the thing in itself you'll never do that so
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abandon it and then and then you're you're no longer irritably questing after that and feeling that you're falling short instead lean into artifice So for me metaphor which is fundamentally a distortion of the thing Aristotle defines it metaphor as like unlikeness. So sort of matching one
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So sort of matching one thing to another but across time and space is one of the most beautiful ways of evoking but not and this is a verb I hate capturing nature.
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We shouldn't dream of capturing nature because then it becomes our captive and then it prows restlessly backwards and forwards in its cage and it's not itself.
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So is it like I'm thinking of an impressionist painting, right? I think of a Monae.
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He's not trying to capture the scene.
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He's trying to paint his impression exactly of the scene.
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The representation of perception rather than the thing itself.
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And perception is always multiply filtered. It's highly dynamic.
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It's psychologically textured.
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So water, I've spent a lot of time trying to think about how to write water recently as I spent four years writing this big river book.
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And over and one thing I came to realize is there is no single grammar of animacy, right?
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There is no one way to write water.
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There is an there is an obvious way to write water which is to let language flow as river does.
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and and I I absolutely have enjoyed playing with that.
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So, there are sentences in Is River Alive which go on for there's one that goes on for two pages.
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Um there's one that's 515 words long. And I did catch that. Wow.
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Well, and the dash I So, I'm a preposition obsessive and a punctuation obsessive.
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So the the dash, the m dash, that long dash, uh not the hyphen, but the one that that lives between words is to me is such a beautiful fluid piece of punctuation.
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I think it's my favorite piece of punctuation where a full where a full stop bangs down the hard end, the book end to a sentence to a thought. The dash is liquid.
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It it flows two ways, both ways.
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meaning can move against the current eddy back up the sentence or flow down the sentence.
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So looking at how we as it were traffic control meaning with a with with using the tiny stuff the punctuation and the prepositions which is something maybe we can come on to talk about the the buys the widths the next to the aboves the belows all of those. Let's go into it. Yeah. Okay.
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Well, I I love to speak for prepositions because they they they they don't get listened to enough.
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So, to give an example, um I sometimes talk about the ways in which I I write with nature.
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So, I write with rivers or with mountains like almost as a co-author. Exactly.
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And there the preposition is what makes the difference because if I were to say to you, oh, I I write about rivers, that's different.
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That's me speaking about the river.
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But writing with rivers, preposition shifts is is a new thing.
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That's where the rivers and I are co-thinking, our co-writing.
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And then there's a step beyond that which is being written by river and there we've we've gone so we've gone from about to by and we've gone metaphysically we've gone a huge distance. Whoa.
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And being I at at the very end of these years of River journey, I I think I came to know briefly and very consequentially what it meant to be written by rivers.
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Does the word a conduit feel right? Yes. You become a channel. Exactly.
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A conduit is a is a lovely word for it because it is a river word.
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It's kind of what rivers rivers are.
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I mean a water seeks a body. We're water bodies.
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doesn't always it will always find a container.
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Sometimes that's the banks of the river.
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Sometimes it's a wetland.
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Sometimes it's a human body.
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In this case, I felt very strongly that the that the river was was was almost creating language through me as a conduit to use your excellent word.
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Tell me more about how you weaved in the flow and the rhythm of rivers into your writing.
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Well, so rhythm is some is I'm an obsessive about many things.
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I'm an obsessive obsessive, but so you've so far heard me on prepositions.
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You should come on how I write sometimes.
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I feel like it'd be a good show for you to come on. That's a great idea. We can wig out. We can nerd out.
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All right, I'll set up a time to stay.
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So, you know, have a chat about a really nice library background. Um, yeah. Okay. Nerd to nerd. Um, rhythm.
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So, we we recognize rhythm as a function of of of poetry.
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you would that's something we actively listen for when we meet a poem when we read a poem we we hear it in our mind's ear a poem we sound it even fiction I mean James Joyce's Ulyses uh or Finnegan's wake deeply rhythmically alert text but in non-fiction I think partly because it has this weird name non-fiction the thing that it isn't um like it isn't fiction it isn't fiction that's that's the only way we define it it's What? Why? What is it?
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There's two kinds of books. Exactly.
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There's fiction and then there's ah the stuff that's not fiction. Not fiction. Right.
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Which I just find so strange.
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And and I think that almost subordinate relationship with fiction that non-fiction has is one reason why we don't expect it to be rhythmic, let's say, or to or to be sound patent.
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And rhythm and sound pattern are something that I have been obsessed with from the very beginning because they they work upon the mind, the reader's mind, the reader's mind's ear in ways that are different to propositional language.
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They're not telling you what to think. They're not an argument.
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They're not a set of of facts.
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They're not laying out propositions.
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They're working on what Heene once called the backwards and the abism of the mind.
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So I think it means that they get they speak to deeper down forms of knowing like in the same sense that rhythm you know when if we're dancing if we we we our brains are not rational rationally analyzing beat our bodies are moving with it in ways that are surprising and pleasurable and and but are involved with knowledge as well.
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So so rhythm what does that mean in terms of like non-fiction?
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I've so first lines I probably spend longer on first lines than than than than whole chapters and they get rewritten hundreds of times.
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So this is the first line of book first whole book. Okay.
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So much happens when you meet the first line of whole book. So is a river alive?
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12,000 years ago a river is born.
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First line of the wild places.
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The wind was rising so I went to the wood. Or let's take that one.
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The wind was rising so I went to the wood. Exactly. So there's a Exactly.
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We have we have alliteration.
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The wind, the wood, the went.
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We But we also have we have rhythm.
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And there's also a puzzle. Hold on. The wind's rising.
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But why would you go to a wood when the wind is rising?
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Isn't that the last place you want to be?
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It becomes a dangerous place.
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And so I you know how Hemingway sort of wrote these um he played with these sort of flash fictions long before flash fiction ex you know how how much suspense or puzzlement could you set up in a single in a single sentence.
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Um so very often I I try to test a first line like that 12,000 years ago a river is born. A river is born. What does that mean?
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Is it born forever in time?
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And and why 12,000 years ago?
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But also that one is less uh less rhythmic, should we say?
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But it's more mysterious.
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There's an ominousness about it. Yeah.
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Something something happened 12,000 years ago. Okay. Wow.
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We're about to go way back in time. Way back in time. Exactly. And then um Yeah.
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I think the next line is at the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes.
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Water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk. Rises and flows.
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rises and flows and on we and on we go.
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So flint flints lie white as eyes.
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We have the white in the eyes at the foot of a hill and then rises rises and flows rises and flows picks up the sound of that the eyes.
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So already the sound patterning starting to starting to happen and the reader's mind's ear as I keep referring to it gets activated by that.
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I think whether they know it or not, they start to hear internal rhyme and it just makes you kind of sit up.
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Okay, this is I'm not I'm not dealing with a kind of fact book here.
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I'm dealing with a with with a text in which something other other forms and forces are going to be active here.
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Yeah, maybe you can help me ground this, but I'm thinking about the different flows of rivers, right? There's rapids. Yep. There's still waters.
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We say still waters run deep.
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And then there's rivers that that that that kind of meander. There's straight rivers.
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Like there's every single flow that you could get in writing.
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I feel like you could find a river equivalent for that. Absolutely.
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And that's why I think the the idea that river language is is just fast language isn't isn't right.
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So because rivers move deep and slow, they pull, they they pause, they Yeah, exactly.
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pause, they Yeah, exactly. So there's a bit I I remember trying to work on so I paddled this huge river the Meshka ship with the Magpai River up in northeastern Quebec and we were dropped in by float plane and then we we we paddled out over and there's nothing like you get dropped
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we got dropped in at the head of this lake magpie that's 75 km long that's like it's from my home to the center of London Canadian scale boggles my tiny English mind but and then and then and then you and then you the river has you and you and and you follow the river through some wild water all the way to the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Lawrence.
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So there are so many as you say like kind of forms and almost species of water in the in in that 120 mi.
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And so when I came to write about it I I realized that the flat water the lake water needed a different set of rhythms and and tones.
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And then the river where the river was fast.
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That's where the dashes came and the liquid language came and the speed came.
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And I wanted the reader to feel what I felt like when that river picked me up.
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And so tell me how do you write speed?
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Is it like short sentences? Is it fast sentences?
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Like how do you write theum?
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Like is that is that what it is? What do you do?
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So I can give you an examp.
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So we're cutting into a sentence that is already um half a page half a page long and I am staring straight down into the hole at the waves foot and then I'm airborne and slammed into the hole head first and upside down.
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I am exploded out of the boat on impact as if hurled from an ejector seat down into the white hole and river is punching fingers up my nostrils and river is ramming fists into my mouth and down my throat.
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And I'm deep now but the right way up.
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So I grab handfuls of water and haul for the surface on them as if they're holds on a cliff or rungs on a ladder, but they dissolve under each grasp.
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And I'm kicking out and feel my feet bang against the against the rocks on the riverbed.
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And one of them catches briefly and and so on and so on and so on.
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So there's a couple of things there.
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And and is your friend, right?
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And is the is the conjunction equivalent of the dash.
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It just it tumbles and it tumbles and it tumbles.
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doesn't slow or stop or ask you to establish primacy or hierarchy between clauses.
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It just runs you on and and and and the clauses between the ands get shorter and quicker and and verbs become more active.
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River and I drop the article there.
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So it's not it's not the river, it's river rams fingers up my nostrils and river rams fists down my throat and I'm calling and and and and I mean it's very simple really.
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It's a syntax of panic of speed of rapidity in both senses of the word.
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So kind of kind of easy but when you read it you yourself become breathless.
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You can't you don't know when to breathe.
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And that's what it's like being buried in a rapid like that. Yeah.
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Tell me about how when you're out the notes become Oh, yeah.
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become books because you start off and you write these little scribbles. Yes.
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Just little scribbles here, little scribbles there.
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And you're not back to that word.
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You're not trying to capture the experience.
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It's just little script scribbles and then you go from there and then there's another step and then there's just the work of actually writing the book. How does that happen? Yeah. Thank you. It fascinates me. It is alchemical. It's quite mysterious.
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It's also very laborious.
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Uh so just to break it down into stages then.
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So because of the nature of the the big books I write, they often take between four and eight eight years, they take many journeys.
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There's a lot of fieldwork where I'm meeting people.
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I'm thinking with other people with rivers, with mountains.
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So on those I I have my phone.
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Um but but I prefer to use just these little notebooks.
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Uh they're just about about this size, about A6.
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So they they bend, they stick in a pocket, whatever.
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And into those I'm just always pouring what I sometimes call like um quailia or qualia like in in the philosophy of mind, those are just the phenomena of of perception.
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Subjective perception is broken down into into qualia.
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And by that I that's just a grandiose name for saying stuff.
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The bits, the bobs, the fluff, the pebbles, the feathers that stick in my in my mind as it might be a fragment of conversation.
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It might but most often it's an image.
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There's a there's a yeah, there's a real line that I'll come back to which is about what happens to image between notebook and and page, but I'll I'll come back to that.
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And so the notebook's there and I'm just they're so messy that it's fragments. There's no continuity.
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Sometimes I call them like micica, like shards of micica.
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They the stuff that glitters that that goes in there because you don't have time to sort of fully process this stuff when you're having encounter with river or people or mountain or whatever. Just got to get it down.
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Got to get it down and then and then not worry about it.
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But but that will be quite you know at the end of each day I'll often even if I'm 4,000 meters on a mountain or 100 miles down a river I'll still tired flick the head torch on in the tent and just lie there and just jot and jot and try and pull it out of the brain fresh cuz it's only a few hours old.
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You know what I've been doing recently?
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I just get a little piece of paper.
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It's like maybe 4 in by 2 in like smaller than an index card.
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And I've just been writing down thoughts that I have during the day with the goal of filling up the index card.
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And I'm always amazed at how many thoughts I've had that I didn't even realize that I had.
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And if I kind of force myself to get that full index card on the page, I'm like, "Oh my goodness, the number of interesting things that are actually happening here, maybe not even interesting, the number of things, whatever it could be junk, is actually way more than I thought.
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But I need to just just sit with it and let the thoughts kind of arise and arise. It needs space.
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It needs time, stillness.
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So the page in your description becomes like a condensation surface.
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So you have this sort of vapor that you've of thought that you've been working in and with but almost invisibly because it's evaporated.
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But then when but the paper then becomes the thing that condenses those thoughts. And I I speak for paper.
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pen and paper do things that pixel and and keyboard can't.
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I re I really believe that.
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What about more intimate? What is it?
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I think there's a Yeah, I sometimes say they're kind of the notes are are what you flip fresh from the fresh from the fire.
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Like they're hot and they're they glow.
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Um they're ill they're they're unformed in terms of ways that could be communicable to other people.
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Like nobody could read my notebooks and and and and follow a linear flow.
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I looked at them, they seemed completely messy and beyond comprehension. Exactly. Except to me. So highly encrypted.
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There's only one There's only one person.
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This is the original encryption. It's bad handwriting. Exactly.
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WhatsApp end to end has nothing on my if anyone. Yeah.
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So, so then how do you then turn a highly encrypted code readable, legible to only one person into a book that might be read by um you know 100,000 people if you're fortunate and and the answer is with a lot of work.
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But the next stage is when I come home from a big field trip, I will have, you know, five, six, seven, 10 notebooks all rammed and crammed.
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And sometimes I I will literally pick up feathers and bits of bits of earth and leaf and stuff and just stick them in the back of the notebook just as more pneummonics. Yeah.
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Um but then comes the what and and what happens at this stage is I sit with the notebooks and I'll work through page after page and now I am on screen and keyboard and there this kind of filling out happens because each of those little fragments to me becomes the end of a of a thread of memory.
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a thread of memory. So that's the only bit you can see is the tiny fragment and you but as you pull pull pull pull exactly pull exactly and and and they just keep coming and so there my memory seems to be able to kind of go back into what the fragment was and then the whole scene within which the fragment was jotted sort of opens around it and I
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find that very exciting and I then kind of summon that space as best I'm able in language or make a connection with and now is when pattern recognition starts to happen as well, you start to see this interesting mycelium of connections open up and um and this is where I'll just mention this Rilka line and see what you think of it. Uh so it's in his letters to a young
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Uh so it's in his letters to a young poet which I would say to any reader got to read it.
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Any writer that's actually at it's on the main table at my house right now. Flipping through it.
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Yeah, I was reading it last week. Oh, that's beautiful.
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slender, wise, dis distilled, just fabulous. Yeah.
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Writer to writer to writer as it were.
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It's um and he says I I don't know whose translation this is.
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The images of the eyes are now present, but now is the time to go and do the hard work on the images that lie inside you. Something like that.
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So I think what he's he's getting at there is the distinction between that kind of immediate um empirical sort of noticing the notebook the notebook work is at some level the image of the eyes but the heart work that's the really hard work.
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The hard work is the hard work.
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And that's that's what comes when you return to these to these images and start to kind of understand their relation to other parts to see how they've lodged in you to see how they resonate these. So that's the heartwork.
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Make that concrete for me. What's an example? Yeah.
23:24
Really, really good question.
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And so when I was writing a book called Underland, which took me eight years, um I came to realize that there was a a series of images that recurred across many of the journeys.
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And one of those images was perhaps unsurprisingly the image of the open hand.
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I say unsurprisingly because the earliest cave art is exactly I don't know if you know how those were made, but I don't know anything about it. Okay.
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So, they what you what you'll know if you summon them into your mind's eye is that they're not they're not hand prints.
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So, it's not that you get a a red print of the hand.
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You get the outline of the hand.
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And the way they the way it seems that the early artists, cave artists did this would they would they would um take a a mouthful of red ochre dust, let's say, and then they would place the hand on the cave wall and then they would blow the dust around it.
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So that so in effect they're creating a stencil.
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Some of the earliest art is stencil art with the human hand as the stencil.
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So then you take the hand away, you don't have the hand, the mark of the hand, you have the mark of the absence of the hand. Right?
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And there's something very beautiful and ghostly about that that what we see is not mark but absence of mark.
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And I became obsessed with that and realized I, you know, I'd see it in graffiti in the Paris catacombs like made using spray can 20 years earlier rather than 36,000 years earlier.
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But there was a commonality between those.
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And I began to realize that the open hand was part of a repertoire of of images that would become the heartwork of the book to use term.
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So what you're saying there is you see this image of the hand in the absence of the hand. You see it in Paris.
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You see it in the old cave art and then you you get to the keyboard you say okay there's something deeper going on here.
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And then that is when you begin to pull on the thread to figure out what is that deeper thing.
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And then to even go back to early in our conversation, that's when the work of impressionism kind of comes into the writing or something. Yeah.
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So, it's sort of about pattern recognition again to use a phrase I used earlier.
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And and I don't teach writing very much because I teach at Cambridge my whole time.
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But, um, when I when I do teach writing, the the first rule I give would be writers is ass on chair. Um, turn up for work. It hurts. It's not much fun.
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You feel like you're banging your head against a blackboard. Don't run away from it.
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Don't fetishize the working environment.
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Don't think you have to get the angle, the fune angle of your pencil exactly right on the writing desk before you can possibly begin to start writing. Ass on chair.
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Show up for work every day and put the time in.
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Second thing, look out for patterns.
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M and so the open hand I suddenly realized that the open hand was recurring throughout my notebooks include not just that kind of cave art hand placement but also the open hand of of greeting of gesture of community of welcome.
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And so I began to find ways of just highlighting the open hand wherever it occurred in in my journeys in my writing.
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and and that then becomes a sort of pattern that lights up and uh for the reader and for the writer and that that lighting up is exciting when it happens. Yeah.
27:02
As I was reading Is River Alive, one of the things that occurred to me is that there was a sense of awareness that you had a connection with nature, an attunement that I think we lose as adults.
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and you were talking to your son and the conversation went something like, "I'm writing this book about Is a River Alive?"
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And your son said, "Duh, of course."
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Like, "That book's not going to be very long."
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And it made me realize like there's there are these things that kids know. Yes.
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That are facts about the world.
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Obviously, it's like that.
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And then as adults, we we lose that.
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And somehow when it comes to nature, you haven't lost that.
27:48
Well, I I think wonder is an essential survival skill.
27:53
Oh, tell me about wonder.
27:53
Well, wonder is is is jaw-dropped, right?
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It's the moment where you are just stepped back by the world's by the miracle of the world and and the freely given miracle of the world.
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A rain a rainbow is like I mean a rainbow is I I think when you see a rainbow you still stop and of course oh my goodness the most magnificent rainbow.
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I just stood there by the windows like wow the hell is that? Every time. Every time. That's wonder.
28:23
And every time rainbows are like that they're they're the charismatic megaporner of wonder, right?
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They do it often and well the other thing about a rainbow is it's utterly bespoke.
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That is it was your it was David's rainbow.
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It was no one else's rainbow in the way it appeared to you because it's a prismatic function that the the water is lensing light and separating light into its constituent wavelengths.
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But the precise nature of that color and the and the position and form of the rainbow in the sky is if you'd stepped a yard to the right and become a different person, you'd have seen a different rainbow. So that's wondrous.
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And science finesses the real into wonder.
29:05
Like science is science doesn't mean unweaving the rainbow.
29:10
It can help us continue to be astonished by the world just understand a little bit better how it works.
29:14
So I don't see science and wonder as as opposed.
29:18
But I um I always struggle with that.
29:20
When I was a kid I used to tell my science teachers I don't want to know.
29:22
I don't want to know because for me there was a way that science was taught that actually stripped the wonder out of the world.
29:29
And I didn't like science class because I didn't want to know about the stars in the sky.
29:33
I just wanted them to be like little dots that God or whatever hung in the sky and that was that. Cool.
29:39
Well, you and John Keats, the poet, who who who did castigated science for, as he put it, unweaving the rainbow. So, yeah.
29:47
So, you you have a you have a friend in a in a ro in in a romantic poet, great great author of ode to a nighting girl, no doner.
29:53
And so, don't let's not unweave the rainbow.
29:56
Actually, I think unweaving the rainbow is is part of the is fine. I'm fine with that.
29:59
But wonder is super powerful and it's kids have it, right? Not always.
30:04
No, I mean children, but I sometimes call children wonder.
30:08
Like that they're not astronauts, they're wonder.
30:10
They're continually voyaging in in wonder.
30:11
So when I write for children, I try to let wonder kind of take charge as it were, but also with an ear to rhythm and sound.
30:20
So I wrote a a spell in this big book of spells, nature spells for children. You wrote this?
30:24
Yeah, I wrote this called The Lost Words working with this wonderful artist called Jackie Morris.
30:29
And so I wrote, for example, I wrote a spell for the otter.
30:31
And the idea is that children would speak these aloud as spells.
30:35
They would become spellcasters and they would kind of conjure back these creatures or plants or birds.
30:41
So the otter the otter spell begins. I'll see if I can do it.
30:44
So otter enters water without falter.
30:48
What a supple slider out of halt and into river.
30:55
This shape shifter is a sheer breathtaker.
30:58
a sure hearts stopper, but you'll never spot an actual otter.
31:01
Only ever bubble scheme or shadow flutter.
31:10
And then it ends, um, run to the riverbank, otter dreamer.
31:13
Slip your skin and change your matter.
31:16
Slide your outer being into water and enter now as otter without falter into river. Um, nice. something like that.
31:27
So, but you can hear the again the liquidity of the flow of the internal rhyme and the and the and the otter and the language and and and such like.
31:37
So, I think there's wonder, there's otter, there's rhythm, there's pace, it that at least is what I'm trying to do.
31:44
And then watching children actually take take those and speak them aloud as I get these wonderful films sent to me of children kind of on river banks speaking the otter spell and then like where's the otter? Where's the otter?
31:58
Well, what you're talking about with wonder. It reminded me of awe.
32:04
And there's a poem by William Blake and it starts like this.
32:08
To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.
32:10
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. Yes. Like Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right.
32:19
Like to see a world in a grain of sand.
32:22
Like there's a way of activating and awakening your mind that it's just a grain of sand. Come on, let's go on.
32:30
Versus like it's a grain of sand.
32:33
Think of the lineage of that grain of sand.
32:36
how it got there and all the times that the waves have come over it, the feet that have touched that thing and like just in a grain of sand, the variance of what we can see or not see can be so vast.
32:47
And I think if you're writing about nature, that applies to everything, right? Yeah.
32:52
Blake's a wonderful example.
32:54
And uh he also says the uh the green tree uh is to some people just the thing that stands in the way and to others it will set them weeping something like this.
33:06
So again it's that kind of u it's the it's the perception of perception as it were.
33:13
So yeah and the other thing about that say about that bloke poem is of course it's tiny.
33:17
It is itself a grain of sand in that sense but it it contains or speaks to eternity and universality.
33:22
So Blake Blake's playing with scale there.
33:27
And I think when when when you realize that the human scale are six foot bodies or whatever is is Thank you. Thank you. I'll take six feet. Six feet. All right.
33:38
I'll lend you I'll You're welcome back anytime.
33:40
I'll lend you a couple of inches.
33:41
They uh they're sort of how we measure and see the world, but they're only one one scale.
33:46
And in fact, we we stand sort of vitigenously above all of these extraordinary micro scales and then the macro scales above us.
33:54
And that fascinates me like there was this moment in the early 17th century when the microscope and the telescope was suddenly cracking open the scales of the world.
34:04
And Galileo was seeing the mountains on the moon and Anton Van Leonhoke was using a microscope to peer into a droplet of pond water and see it as he put it teeming with analcules.
34:16
Suddenly all these other scales of life and structure were revealed through technology.
34:20
And technology is is amazing at that.
34:23
But yes, as a writer, I'm I'm often interested in in in nesting different scales um uh next to or within one another. Yeah.
34:32
The other thing I wanted to get at is the the blinders of rationality. Oh, great. And you're right.
34:39
For those who like me have been largely raised on rationalism to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult counterintuitive work.
34:48
It requires unlearning a process much harder than learning. Yeah.
34:54
And the question is what is unlearning?
34:57
How do we how do we unlearn? What is unlearning?
35:00
That's what I was trying to get at with the kids that there's a way that kids see reality more clearly than adults do. But it's also enchanted. Yes.
35:09
And it's filled with mystery and awe.
35:11
And that was one of the through lines of stepping into the body of your work is like, whoa, there's something there that I don't know how to put words to, but it's sort of a question to pursue, you know. Thank you.
35:26
I I I I see the universe as or the the universe we inhabit as how to put this shadowed by mystery.
35:36
Like actually we uh I think of these early, you know, the early cave explorers, the early cave painters.
35:40
When you hold up a light in a cave, especially if it's a flame light rather than a torch light, you light up just a tiny bit of the cave wall and you barely aware of the the extent of it around you.
35:54
And as you move, the light follows you, but is only ever lighting up.
35:57
That's that's where we live.
35:57
I mean, rationalism, we think rationalism is the great light that floods the universe and tells us the secrets of everything.
36:05
Francis Bacon in 17th century says let us let us torment nature until she yields her secrets to us.
36:10
Um but nature's secrets far outstrip the the tormenting tools of rationalism.
36:17
So I I suppose I um I I enter each landscape, each encounter, each book aware that there is no um possibility of catching and representing everything.
36:32
So then it becomes a case of what what do you light up and also what mysteries do you allude to?
36:38
Do you do you recognize I mean on the river I had this encounter at the end of this big big river journey at the end of four years of of of river travel with something that I can only describe as a kind of river being.
36:51
It felt like a very godlike presence.
36:53
Um uh how does language even come close to representing?
36:59
That's the bit where I really felt I was being written by an external force. So what happened?
37:03
You were Well, we'd been traveling, you know, this hard river journey for 10 12 days.
37:11
We've been buried by the river.
37:13
The river was running really high, huge wild river.
37:15
That time of year, normally running about 150 cubic meters a second at the outflow. Here it was running 275.
37:24
So it was like a it was it was um it was more than double its normal or it's approaching double its rate.
37:29
And and so we every day we were we were tumbled, we were we were swimming, we were bashed off rocks, we were running huge six-foot waves sometimes and that just wore us away.
37:42
And each night we'd pitch camp and we'd have to catch fish for dinner.
37:44
And you know, it was just just hard travel, but also metaphysically it was kind of wearing me away. It was unlearning me.
37:53
And that is where we come back to your question.
37:55
The river did the unlearning and it did it physically, but it also did it metaphysically.
37:59
And it it said, well, what what what do you mean this this is just water?
38:04
This is just dead matter.
38:06
That's sort of what the river was doing to me.
38:08
It was showing me its agency, its will, its presence, its force.
38:13
And and I a great deal changed for me in that in that time.
38:18
And then at the very end, I just I think I describe it as kind of these two auras as it were, my aura and the river's aura, just sort of overlapping and setting up an interference field for the first time and becoming very very aware of this this thing that has been moving through that landscape hugely consequentially for again 10 to 12,000 years.
38:41
So and and so I felt small.
38:44
I felt one among many kinds of being and it was a I suppose a an experience of of the divine of of something like faith temporarily visceral visceral and mystic and utterly fascinating and changing forever and then and then you're left with the question how do I how do I find language to carry that and again it doesn't have to carry it it merely needs to kind of register some some analog log to what happened then because you'll never carry that.
39:19
I think that another thing that you do is you find these questions these they're narrow questions but they're expansive.
39:31
You know there's the question from Yonas Sulk who says are we being good ancestors and then you ask can a forest think does a mountain remember and then is a river alive river alive right tell me about those questions yeah so the the very first book I wrote in my um early to mid20s was a book called mountains of the mind I grew up as a mountaineer and a climber as I mentioned and the that was a book that began There's a question.
40:01
It's a very old and famous question. Why climb mountains?
40:06
And um why do we climb mountains?
40:06
Why do I climb mountains?
40:08
George Mallerie who died on Everest in 1924 famously responded in New York in 1922 when when asked why are you climbing Everest?
40:17
He said because it's there which became this sort of legendary answer but uh but actually gets does not help me at all.
40:25
I know exactly you're right.
40:25
I'm like I want to be like wow that's profound.
40:29
I don't think that helps me one bit.
40:31
It's a bit like my son saying to is a river like, "Well, duh." Yes.
40:35
So, well, that one I feel like is like your son is just smack dab, right?
40:38
But the Okay, because it's But the Everest guy, I'm like, okay, you know what I mean? Well, I hear you.
40:46
It has become the the kind of most used answer to the question, well, why do we climb mountains?
40:50
But so the me so the view is nice.
40:53
It's challenging, but yeah.
40:57
yeah. And well it took me 300 pages to answer the question in a man of the mind took me 300 in is a river alive and and I didn't come to the end of any of them but I think having that puzzle that enigma the enigma wrapped in the mystery I think is a is is a is a phrase for it
41:13
these these are deceptively simple questions why do you climb a mountain because it's there is a river alive yes um but no actually when you begin to ask them they so they become don't know how to put it they become let Let me give a caving example. It's the it's the the
41:27
It's the it's the the portal.
41:31
It's the port the the narrow portal, seemingly narrow portal.
41:33
And once you can make your way through it, dive the sump that it leads to, and then you surface into this immense space.
41:41
And that is the space of complexity, of of mystery, of polifany, of many voices.
41:50
It's crazy how much you see that mythology, right?
41:51
That's the closet Narnia.
41:53
You walk through and you enter a whole new world.
41:55
There's so many examples of portals and that's what they always are. They're narrow.
41:58
You step through the narrow gate and then vast expansiveness on the other side.
42:06
The wardrobe that leads to the other landscape, the bungalow you duck duck into and find yourself in a cathedral.
42:11
The the portals fascinate me.
42:11
And actually, you've you've helped me to a really useful crystallization of that, which is those questions are portals. They're they're modest. They're the wardrobe.
42:22
They're the modest entrance point.
42:24
And then you push through the through the fur coats. Whoosh, you're into it.
42:27
And in fact, Mountains of the Mind that you've reminded me um now begins with an image of from Narnia.
42:31
The very first page has an image of of my grandma because I remember my grandmother's wardrobe with her fur coats hanging in it up in the mountains and I would push through into that dreaming that I would step through into a winter landscape and then actually that that the mountains help me do that.
42:49
So yeah, the questions are are portals.
42:52
The other thing I should say I do at the very start of a book other than find the question that is the portal is I write myself a letter. Whoa.
42:58
Uh my future self a letter and I because I know these books are going to take once I've committed to them once I've found the portal question they're going to take me three four five six seven eight years.
43:10
I change a lot in that time.
43:14
The world changes a lot in that time.
43:15
The book of course will mutate and metamorphose a lot in that time.
43:20
So, so I tend to write I tend to write, you know, dear Rob, the future Rob.
43:28
And then in that letter I try to dis to say what I what my heart hopes the book will be, how I think it will be shaped, what it's resonances or key metaphors might be, where where I'll where I want to go, and then eventually what I what I want it to do in the world.
43:46
And they're all tentative, right?
43:49
I'm not these are not it's not a set of commandments.
43:53
They're a um an evocation of how I'm feeling about the book at that very very very early stage.
43:58
Then it's what I love is looking back at those letters when I finished the book and and seeing the relationship and sometimes it's hugely discrepant and other times it's surprisingly close.
44:11
So with those questions, do you like hang them on your desk that because here for is a river alive, it's so obvious.
44:20
Okay, it's the title of the book, it's the driving question, you're just going to think about that over and over again. Yeah.
44:24
Is it always that kind of explicit and concrete?
44:26
Trying to think I so I I don't pin questions on my desk, but I do pin put quotes.
44:32
So, for example, uh on this with this book, there's this amazing line from Ursula Luin that she wrote very late in her life and she says something like um I think it's right before the first chapter after the prologue.
44:49
And if you just want to read, I think that's where it is.
44:51
One way to stop seeing trees or rivers or hills only as natural resource is to class them as fellow beings, kinfolk.
44:59
I guess I'm trying to subjectify the universe because look where objectifying it has gottenness.
45:08
To subject is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit.
45:12
This is the bit that I really focused on.
45:14
Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of mind and imagination. Yeah.
45:22
It ends it ends strongly.
45:22
A great reach outward of mind and imagination. Exactly.
45:29
And that that's what that helps us think back to the portal.
45:32
So the question seems simple, the key that unlocks the door, but actually the real work is because to really answer yes, if you're not a 9-year-old to the question, is a river alive?
45:44
Those of us raised on rationalism, it requires a great reach outward of mind and imagination.
45:50
So Luin helped me keep thinking I have to keep reaching.
45:55
I have to keep reaching outward. Mhm. Sorry.
46:01
There's so much that was just like washed on me.
46:04
It's almost hard to like I don't even know where to I don't even know what to ask. The river is going.
46:11
How much of writing a book for you is an adventure versus like a plan?
46:13
Actually, let me just follow a river analogy.
46:16
Like say that you're white water rafting.
46:21
Like there's we're going to go from point A to point B, but how you're going to get there is going to be nuts and hopefully you make it there, right? Yeah.
46:28
Uh where does that analogy break down? Where does it hold up?
46:30
So with the with the river book, more than any other book, I felt torrented from from the beginning.
46:36
So we'll stay with the metaphor.
46:39
Uh but actually I felt rather than rafting downstream, I was walking upstream.
46:42
And you know when you're when you walk in a river Yeah.
46:47
And and you feel the muscles of that thing, right?
46:50
A river is a it's a it's a powerful presence physically and it's and it's unseasing. It's relentless. Exactly.
46:57
It's just push push push pressure.
47:00
And one thing I've found from physically walking in rivers, which I do quite a lot because they make great paths, especially where the forest is thick on either side, is that when you have your feet planted, you're fine.
47:13
River is not going to push you anywhere.
47:15
It's when you have to lift a foot to make progress.
47:17
So one foot comes up and then you're only on one foot and the river is pushing you off balance.
47:21
So actually it's stepping forwards.
47:24
It's the act of walking that unbalances you.
47:29
Writing a book is is like walking upstream in a river.
47:31
You can get to a point stabilize yourself but when you come to take the next step you lift that foot that's when river knocks you off balance.
47:41
It's also really exciting and that's how you make progress.
47:43
But I found very strongly that the river was also showing me the direction.
47:47
I didn't need to worry about direction. It felt very intuitive.
47:50
But but each step was because the force of the flow of ideas and people and encounters and and rivers themselves was so strong.
47:58
It was unbalancing, torrenting in fascinating but not always easy ways.
48:03
You've been talking a lot about your relationship with Rivers and what is your relationship with other people in the bookw writing process.
48:13
We sort of got it actually with that Ursula quote, right?
48:17
Where you get other writers who are almost giving you seeds and then you can basically take those seeds and turn them into something else. What about peers?
48:26
How does that show up in your writing? Such a smart question.
48:28
Such a smart question. and um and they they they are themselves um kind of river presences like I a person is not a a fixed and sealed thing right we know this we are we are we are all in motion and changing all of the time we're all
48:45
in flux and so but I love people I you know a lot of nature writing a phrase I hate but a lot of nature writing used to be thought of as kind of almost peopleless it was it was only about the land as it were but I mean John Mure I don't think of people whenever I think
49:02
of his writing I always think of the mountains and right and in fact Mure very shabily treats and and sort of dis discards the native presence in in those in those landscapes and particularly in his in his early work when um what he calls Indians come into view in the
49:19
landscape he will he will kind of shuffle them off he will frame them out so um and uh and I have come to love writing about people and it's partly that I hang out with I try and get myself to to travel with people who fascinate me. It's back to being an
49:37
It's back to being an obsessive obsessive and almost pe almost all the people who fascinate me are people who are themselves fascinated by stuff.
49:43
Obsessive obsessive specialist specialist.
49:45
So um so for example Juliana Fertie this uh Chilean Italian field micologist mushroom fungy specialist who I traveled with in Ecuador.
49:56
She's one of the most amazing people I've ever met. And she can hear fungi. She's a dowser.
50:01
She can she can sense buried water.
50:04
She can tell you flow rates.
50:05
She's like has an astonishing sensitivity to water.
50:08
And that's I think inseparable from her sensitivity to to fungi.
50:13
I was traveling with her in this cloud forest trying to find find make second collections of two new species of of cyloe of magic mushroom as we might call them.
50:23
and she she could hear them before she could see them.
50:26
She could sense them round three bends in the path.
50:30
Uh, and I know you're you're you're as puzzled as anyone else I've told this story to, but I watched it happen once and and I was there when it happened a second time.
50:39
She just sort of says, "Ah, I think I think they're near now."
50:44
We were two more turns in the path and then, "Woohoo!"
50:46
which is what she calls when she sees a fungus.
50:49
And she's down and there one one specimen in each case.
50:55
Single fungy in a huge cloud forest.
50:57
And I should say she's she's a serious hardcore field scientist, right?
51:03
She's written the field guides to the fungy of Chile.
51:05
So we're not talking about a kind of, you know, crystal swinging mystic.
51:09
I mean, she's hardcore scientist.
51:11
She's uh but she goes about things a different way.
51:15
So how do you write someone like that?
51:16
In a way, it's the easiest thing.
51:18
You just transcribe them, right?
51:20
Their speech is incredible.
51:23
Their way of being in the world is incredible.
51:24
I I love it when, and I find it particularly with this book, people talk about them as characters.
51:28
So, it sounds like this is a novel.
51:31
It isn't a novel, but they are characters. They're incredible. Incredible characters.
51:35
So, the books are filled with dialogue because but it's true dialogue, as it were. Best fit true dialogue. Yeah.
51:44
There's a poet I like, his name's John O'Donn. Oh, yeah. And he has this line.
51:49
He says, "When was the last time you had a conversation?"
51:50
A conversation that wasn't just two intersecting monologues, but a conversation where both people found something within each other within themselves that they didn't even know that they knew.
52:02
And the way that I imagine that is like you're kind of building a fire in conversation like what we're doing right now.
52:08
It's like I can't do this on my own.
52:10
You can't do this on your own.
52:11
We're in this together now. We're actually creating.
52:13
We're in a process of co-creation.
52:15
And that's what conversation is.
52:18
And he talks about that and the last line is so beautiful.
52:20
He says conversations like that are food and drink for the soul. It is like wow.
52:29
And all this is to say in the writing process when you're with somebody like that woman or your friend who you go kayaking with, there's probably things that can get into your book that you would never be able to get on your own. Totally.
52:43
They're almost a kind of coowriter for you. Absolutely.
52:45
I love your idea of building a fire together.
52:48
I think that's that's I actually almost prefer that to John O'Donn's metaphor, food and drink for the soul.
52:53
Though it's Odon Hughes, it's fascinating how many people his because he was sort of a quiet writer and um but I have so many conversations like this where there's one line or a poem or something and just lights people up. Tell me about poetry.
53:09
like you learn poetry as a kid and also one of the things that we sort of talked about before but is how rhythm sound and tempo they can kind of move you as a reader in ways that exceed the actual pros itself and that's what poetry does.
53:26
It's almost more than the words but it's it's implicit.
53:31
And I think this is why you have to memorize poetry is because it's only once it begins to be known by heart, we say, right?
53:37
Once you know it by heart, then you begin to see all the rhythms and they it's almost like a flower.
53:44
Like it takes a while to bloom, but once it does, wow, it I didn't know it could do that. Exactly.
53:48
The blooming is a lovely image for for it that it's entered you and then and then the seed is sewn and then and then the blossom comes.
53:56
And I mean I the last 10 years I've been lucky to collaborate with um artists with so I've written liberty for full length coral works.
54:06
I've also written a bunch of albums and actually have to say songwriting writing lyrics has become I I think all of these have helped me with with is a river alive.
54:15
I think that's the book that I've spent the last 22 years learning to write and particularly the last 10 because actually writing lyrics, writing liberty, writing poetry.
54:25
You wrote a reququum, right?
54:27
Written a full length requ Yeah.
54:29
That's going to be like a 75 minute huge coral work.
54:32
It's going to premiere in Helsinki. So, can we do this?
54:36
Can we just go through Liberty and then all of them?
54:38
I just want to hear kind of quickly like what those forms have taught you about as a as a long form writer. Yeah, exactly.
54:45
So, we'll start with Liberty.
54:46
What did that teach you as a long form writer?
54:48
Well, so I've I've written I've written for for for opera.
54:53
I've written for we created an improvised jazz opera that was about 15 years ago, which we performed in a former nuclear weapons testing site, which was very cool.
55:01
Um, and I expected you expected to hear, but the most recent one, the one I've just finished, is called The World Tree. Okay.
55:08
And it's uh uh it's about this do did you follow the story of the felling of the sycamore gap tree in the UK?
55:16
It was chopped down in the middle of the night by two two men who just wanted to visit harm upon it.
55:23
It was an ic completely iconic tree on Hrien's wall.
55:25
It featured in Robin Hood Prince thieves.
55:27
Anyway, the it was a huge national and indeed international thing and it was it so it's about it's it's a deep history of forests and and and trees and people in the north in the northern parts of the northern hemisphere.
55:41
It's called the world tree.
55:43
But what what did I I learn from that?
55:45
Well, writing for voice, especially for multiple voices, you you have to work so closely on, for example, just the way one word transitions into another.
55:54
So if you have a glottle stop like a at the end of one word that then that that the that the singer then has to overcome to flow into the next word.
56:05
That's fine if it comes at the end of a line but if it comes in the middle of a phrase or a thought doesn't work.
56:11
So you begin to think about this the kind of sound currents of single phrases and the singability and that is not something as a writer you would quite you would quite think about.
56:23
But um in in writing song lyrics, I one of the thing the single thing that that has taught me most clearly is to let images lapse into looseness with one another. Let me put it like that.
56:41
And by that I mean as a as a teacher at Cambridge, as a pros writer, I'm I'm I'm basically a control freak.
56:48
I'm like, I have to make meaning mean exactly what I want it to mean.
56:53
And so you you work with syntax in all of these really really naughty and complex ways to kind of carry meaning.
56:59
So I wrote a song called Uncanny Valley with my friend Johnny Flynn.
57:03
It's a re it was so we all got lost in the uncanny valley.
57:06
Took a wrong turn at the end of the alley.
57:08
Uh no one had a map and no one kept alally in the uncanny valley in the uncanny valley.
57:15
And so it it when you speak it, it sounds almost like a nursery rhyme and it you I'd be embarrassed if I'd written that flat for the page, but when you when you sing it and set it to beat and and Johnny immediately looked at that and he said, "I want I want to set this offbeat."
57:33
So when you when you hear the the language and the and and the guitar backing they they sit slightly um in friction with one another and that gives it this uncanny offkilter sort of slight lightly strange and from the beginning everything is off balance.
57:52
So that's so they're letting language lapse into looseness, letting images live with one another um uh in ways that they start to cross-pollinate in weird ways.
58:01
The other thing with that that I always love talking artists about is the ways that serious artists are conscious of things that are below the register of consciousness for the consumer of that work.
58:17
Like those things you're talking about, I would have never thought about those things.
58:21
thought about those things. I could probably listen to Uncanny Valley a hundred times and be like maybe I'd get to wow there's something uncanny about the song but what you're saying is this is why that's happening sort of the
58:32
puzzle pieces aren't quite matching up and that is a feature not a bug a feature not a bug exactly what seems like a glitch is precisely that this is a song about glitch and uh and and then I kind of carried that over to I mean the biggest glitch as it were glitch in is such a cool word. Such a Such a cool word. It's such a cool word. It's such a cool thing. It's such a cool word.
58:56
It's where It's where everything starts to kind of vibrate and the hologram flickers and reality is doing strange things and rationalism's limits start to be met.
59:05
And the biggest glitch in the matrix I've ever known was the encounter with this river being.
59:09
And so there you have to start to find ways that language can can glitch itself.
59:14
So again, something I learned in songwriting carries over in in into the into the big books and then poetry. Yeah, poetry.
59:25
So I mostly for ch mostly for children.
59:28
But here's a here's a glitch poem for you actually.
59:30
So a a ren this beautiful quick little bird that moves so fast you can barely see it.
59:35
So when Ren was from stone to furs, the welder around her blurs for Ren is quick so quick she blurs the air through which she flows. Bum.
59:50
So there it's all about the glitch really.
59:53
It's about speed and then and then and then glitch because the ren is so quick.
59:57
She seems to pass out of sight. She seems to glitch.
1:00:03
We got to talk about words. We have been.
1:00:05
We got to talk about words. No, no, no, no.
1:00:07
Now we're really going to talk about words.
1:00:08
So tell me about place words.
1:00:10
Like how you've collected place words for terrain, elements, light, life, place names. Yeah. Yeah. Top of names.
1:00:17
Now we're really going to talk about words. All right.
1:00:18
Well, let's get some words going. The onasticon. Um the uh the top name.
1:00:22
So toponym is a a place name.
1:00:25
Onamasticon is a like a gathering of of of words particularly for places obviously glossery lexicon.
1:00:31
So all of my books have have glosseries.
1:00:33
Um, I'll give you I'll give you a few I'll give you a choice view from the glossery of not not because I want I want people I don't use big words because I want people to think I'm a big word user.
1:00:46
I use them because they are fantastically precise. Descriptive. Yeah. Descriptive. Precise.
1:00:54
And I think precision is a function of lyricism. Yes.
1:00:56
function of lyricism. Yes. So um so these so here's here's a view from the um uh from the glossery of is a river alive um sump a pit or pool into which waste liquids are drained a cesspit supervoid in astronomy a very large part
1:01:13
of the universe containing very little or no known condensed matter galaxies superclusters etc I have a cool one go on then run oh run and you pronounced it pretty well that's because I you transliterated I literally went to Google and I was like, I'm not going to be able to pronounce this. So, I'm going
1:01:29
So, I'm going to get the actual pronunciation on my piece of paper. So, I practiced that. You did good job.
1:01:35
So, you're talking about precise the shadows cast on the Mland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day. Yeah. Run. Exactly. What's that? Four syllables.
1:01:49
But there it takes us in English uh a paragraph really a long sentence to to to describe.
1:01:54
So this I should say this is from GA Scot Scots GA um and it specifically it's from the Western Isles dialect as it was sort of um idioelect of of Scots.
1:02:06
Well what I would imagine is as much as anything the language of nature is really diverse as you move around the world. Diverse. Exactly. Yeah.
1:02:17
I spent a wonderful two two and a half years collecting.
1:02:20
So I was raiding old glosseries um in in libraries, regional libraries because in the 19th century people were making these dialect glosseries and looking always for words for water, for land, for weather, for forests and trees, for for moth, for mountain, words of relation with place, precise, lyrical, fascinating, strange, sometimes absurd.
1:02:42
Um and I would also go and interview language keepers as it were.
1:02:45
What are language keepers?
1:02:47
Well, so there as I guess the elders of their communities, especially where languages are threatened.
1:02:52
So Scott Galla, it's got as low as sort of 53,000 speakers.
1:02:54
Uh it's starting to bump back up a bit now, but it's highly regionally specific.
1:03:00
So I came to know an amazing man to whom the book is dedicated called Finley Mloud.
1:03:06
And Finley was a language key, first language galaxy speaker, but bilingual in English.
1:03:11
Um, and he had made part of his remarkable life's work ga gathering the the language together and recording it because a lot of it's oral culture like you wouldn't necessarily think to write down the specific run.
1:03:24
Um but so he handed me uh this amazing document of Pete glossery which was like 150 words for aspects of Mand and Pete on Lewis alone and I just like wow and that's where I met Run for the first time.
1:03:39
Tell me about language death. Yes, it happens. River death happens. Language death happens.
1:03:46
I mean like language death is very simple to to define.
1:03:48
It's where the the last living um speaker of a language dies and then the language survives in in recordings in you know virtual record in paper record of course but it's it's no longer being passed on that's language death and when a language dies knowledge goes with it because language is a knowledge storage system and when you and and some some aspects of that knowledge cannot be translated across into another language.
1:04:16
They're not alienable from the language itself.
1:04:18
So language death is a kind of bioultural collapse as well, a deletion of of of of knowledge often that's been born and carried over many many generations.
1:04:29
I asked you earlier about getting the early notes and then we sort of talked about revision, but I know every single sentence gets revised 200 times.
1:04:40
Like tell me about the revision process.
1:04:42
How do you take something that is eh and turn it into Yeah.
1:04:47
Well, I don't know if I do turn it into Yeah.
1:04:49
But it I definitely try and move it away from eh and I am such a m I'm a muddy mucky messy writer.
1:04:55
So I sometimes liken it to potting like being a potter and uh you know in potting where you your first thing you do is you you have your bucket of clay and you reach down take a huge wet handful of clay and then yeah down it goes on the wheel.
1:05:13
And then the next bit is the hard work.
1:05:15
It's like the treddling I think they call it.
1:05:17
So you're sort of pumping that foot treddle and that begins to spin the plate.
1:05:20
And then and then the work the the fine work begins which is where you begin to shape the bone shape bone shape or the pot or whatever.
1:05:29
And then eventually once you've got that form then you start to do all the ornamenting and so on. But it is messy work.
1:05:34
I am not a writer who has to finish one sentence before he goes on he or she goes on to the next.
1:05:40
And a piece of advice perhaps I would have for I often give this to writers who are stuck with a block like I can't begin the book or I can't proceed with the book.
1:05:51
I'm like don't worry about that. Just just leave it.
1:05:54
Actually I have two pieces of advice. Let me give this.
1:05:57
So the first is when you end a day's writing leave make sure you know what the next sentence is going to be.
1:06:03
So when you wake up the next morning Yeah.
1:06:07
you're like oh yeah I'll finish that.
1:06:08
And that just gives you that little bit.
1:06:10
It's like pushing off on the bike and then and then you're cycling. Good analogy.
1:06:13
So, um so that's like the hook and eye and and and the other is like if you're really stuck, don't worry.
1:06:18
Just go downstream, jump into the book further down and just write that bit.
1:06:24
And sometimes and I build my books out of bits like it they're sort of mosaics.
1:06:30
So I write them often very nonlinearly.
1:06:32
I'll be like, "Okay, I know what's going to happen in that paragraph or that scene or that bit of the river or that that journey or that encounter."
1:06:38
So, I'll write that as a set piece and I'll be doing that with a hundred set pieces even as I'm trying to kind of remember the flow.
1:06:49
So, I'm not at all scared of um distraction, discrepancy, diversion.
1:06:55
It doesn't have to be this beautiful linear writing.
1:06:58
I don't know how Richard P writes.
1:07:00
I know Alan Hollinghurst, the English novelist, won the book prize and many other things.
1:07:05
He writes perfect linear flow handwritten sentences.
1:07:08
He'll write a page a day.
1:07:10
He once I once heard him say, then he'll stop and then he'll write the next page the next day and then he'll stop.
1:07:16
If you write 365 pages a year, you've got yourself a novel really quickly.
1:07:21
That is an anointed human being. That's how Exactly. That is that is rare.
1:07:26
Well, I think it must be. And I am the opposite.
1:07:29
I'm like, "Okay, mosaic tile here." Do you like writing it? Yes.
1:07:34
I mean, it is not coal mining.
1:07:38
You know, I think writers can really whine about how hard writing is.
1:07:41
And at some level, I think we need to recognize that you're sitting on the whole comfortably behind a desk.
1:07:48
And yes, there are external pressures and maybe worried about financial circumstances or deadlines or family.
1:07:55
You know, we're all we're all under under many kinds of of pressure, but the the actual writing work it it it can be a bit hurty, let's say.
1:08:06
It's like it's brain hurty.
1:08:06
You don't want to do it because it's it's hard. So natural. Yeah.
1:08:10
Well, it's to me it's pretty naturalized now after 22 years. Takes 20 years. Takes 20 years. 20 years.
1:08:17
I actually feel vindicated. Okay. Exactly. Silly natural. Just takes 20 years.
1:08:20
You're you've you've been writing I mean really writing how long? 10 years now. Yeah. 10.
1:08:24
Okay, you just got another 10 to do and then it'll be fine.
1:08:27
It be like freewheing on a bike with no hands on the hand like a like a guy in a hammer.
1:08:34
Um well, it it doesn't still feel like that, but it's we're back to ass on chair.
1:08:37
It's like just show up and even if you even if you only get a paragraph that day, your book's a paragraph longer.
1:08:43
How do you feel about using chat GPT and AI in your writing?
1:08:46
Oh my goodness, look at those eyes.
1:08:51
I mean I don't and uh and I cannot ever imagine doing so.
1:08:56
The only AI I use although I do try and switch it off is is obviously like spell check.
1:09:01
You know you get the the red and that is a kind of AI and I suppose it's been it's been scrutinizing us for a long time but actually I because my writing often is highly violating of grammatical norms.
1:09:15
Um they're the like the grammar check goes wild does not like it and I'm like good this is this is excellent.
1:09:20
I could give you an example of what as it were Grammarly does not like.
1:09:26
So this I I sometimes um like to remove verbs from from sentences.
1:09:33
I leaving them technically not sentences but this is um seeing this huge Canadian river for the first time from the sky.
1:09:40
Um, my first sight of the river itself catches my breath. New paragraph.
1:09:48
A world snake in the green. New paragraph.
1:09:51
Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. New paragraph.
1:09:56
House-sized boulders on the banks.
1:09:56
Time falls from the rock faces above. New paragraph.
1:10:01
Water blue black and glossy in the deeper calmer runs.
1:10:03
Peep brown where it stretched towards and away from rapids.
1:10:08
shurning green, gold, and cream in the falls. End paragraph.
1:10:11
So that's five paragraphs, five sentences.
1:10:14
Sounds doing weird stuff.
1:10:17
Cliffs dropping near sheer to water.
1:10:20
Um, and Grammarly Grammarly does does not approve.
1:10:24
Uh, which I take to be a badge of success.
1:10:30
It's sort of the paradox of Grammarly that it makes the average piece of writing, I think, much better, but it hurts a kind of write.
1:10:38
It takes away from distinctiveness and individuality that underlies so much great writing.
1:10:45
I think that's so well put and I like the idea of it hurt hurting that.
1:10:50
I think that's a good way of putting it.
1:10:53
that's a good way of putting it. Sam Salammon Rashi yesterday I think said uh writers have nothing to fear from AI until it can do comedy and I thought that was an interesting idea like the hardest thing of all is to make us is to make us laugh but um I I think I think
1:11:09
writing broadly does have a lot to fear from AI and we should resist it including the absolute piracy of of our books that we now know large language model composers have been undertaking for uh for for years now and feeding absolutely feeding them without any kind of recompense or licensing or permission sort into the creation of LLMs. I want to hear more about
1:11:32
I want to hear more about what you do to make something feel visceral.
1:11:36
Like I've been thinking a lot about that word visceral and you talk about claustrophobia. Yes.
1:11:42
And the way that that can feel visceral.
1:11:46
There's a line from William Golding where he talks about sympathetic kinesthesia, twitching limbs, rising heart rates, faster breathing, like and that we can actually experience something vicariously.
1:11:55
So, early on in the conversation, we were talking about not trying to capture something, but this isn't the opposite, but it's but it's actually making the reader feel what you felt and having that feeling feel vivid. Yes. Transferring that. Wow. Well, it Yes.
1:12:12
So visceral from as it were viscera from the guts like how do you make a reader feel it in the guts.
1:12:20
Um and I mean curiously our this is where feelings of nerves you know we talk about butterflies in the stomach we feel that kind of characteristic tingles anxiety or panic underland which is the book I wrote about which is highly kind of
1:12:38
claustrophobic in many ways although it's also about the immense immensities of the underworld and the ways they open us up as well as close us down but there is a passage in that where I am crawling through the Paris catacombs. And I would
1:12:50
And I would say that the area under your chair and between the legs of your chair, so about a foot, is considerably bigger than the p I mean it the affordance of this passage was so tight that my nose the back of my head was on the base and then my nose was on the top. Oh my goodness.
1:13:09
And I had to hook my rucksack to my ankle and drag and then the only way I could you could kind of move was just like worm like moving your way under.
1:13:18
And then this this shuddering started, this vibrating started.
1:13:20
We were in it was a rock passage limestone and and I came to realize and the whole ceiling was everything was juttering and the vibrations were passing through the rock through my body and back into the rock. It was a train.
1:13:32
It was a it was a a tube train. We were under Paris.
1:13:35
So it was a metro train and I realized it was passing directly overhead of of and I mean that probably was the time I felt most afraid in eight years of of of the underland.
1:13:46
Anyway, the roof didn't collapse. We made it through.
1:13:48
But so many people have stopped reading at that point.
1:13:53
I've had must have had a hundred people in readings and talks come up to me and said, "I loved Underline, but when I got to that bit too much, I just had to stop. I had to jump. I had to jump ahead."
1:14:03
I was fascinated by this because being able to vicariously affect your reader's body, Yeah.
1:14:08
not their mind, but being able to make them kind of clench, make their heartbeat beat raise, make them go outside under a clear blue sky so they can recover from the claustrophobia, even though they were reading it in a room like this. That's power. It's power. And it's fascinating.
1:14:26
And I I came to realize claustrophobia is much more vicariously powerful than vertigo.
1:14:30
And vertigo is quite powerful.
1:14:32
So when I'd written a lot about vertigo, you know, people were like, "Oh yeah, I felt I felt a version of that."
1:14:38
But with claustrophobia people like I had to stop reading this.
1:14:39
So it's just yeah sympathetic kesthesia is where you're affecting not mind but but body and then mind.
1:14:48
And it's a it's a it's a fascinating power.
1:14:53
Worst claustrophobia I ever had was my first MRI.
1:14:56
I didn't really know what an MRI was and I just showed up and it was horrible. You got it. You felt it.
1:15:00
What the kind of Oh, it was terrible. I asked them to stop. I had to go back.
1:15:05
They had to say, "Do you want to do this?
1:15:08
Do you not want to do this?"
1:15:09
I said, "Fine, I'll do it."
1:15:10
And it was just a terrible experience.
1:15:14
There's just something about claustrophobia that when you get it, you you want to hit the eject button and just get out of there so fast. Yeah. Yeah.
1:15:23
I went It's a strange kind of pain.
1:15:25
It it it's it's a strange kind of suffering.
1:15:27
It's more suffering than pain. Yeah.
1:15:28
And it's so mental, right?
1:15:30
Because you would have known the rational part of your brain knows this is this is an MRI scanner.
1:15:34
like this is not going to collapse and and crush me.
1:15:38
It's not going to harm me. It's doing me good.
1:15:39
Many thousands of people have been here before me.
1:15:41
But yeah, I I once thought about when I was writing Undone, I thought about getting a business card which just read I do these things so you don't have to. So kind of but um yeah. Yeah, the underworld.
1:15:52
I haven't been back into the underworld much since I surfaced in in about 2018, I must say.
1:15:59
Whereas rivers I'm going to they're going to flow on through my life forever. Nice.
1:16:01
I want to do kind of a fire round.
1:16:04
I want to ask you about language from different cultures and what we can learn learn from them.
1:16:07
So we'll start with old English. Okay.
1:16:12
Old English used to be known as Anggo, now old English.
1:16:13
Uh the so the kenning a canning is a beautiful trope of old English which is where you hyphenate two words together to make a metaphoric version of another.
1:16:24
So bone cage bone cage hyphenated means the skeleton the body. Whale road is the sea.
1:16:36
The sea that the that the that for example that the ships sail on is the is the whale road that that that becomes the sea.
1:16:43
And they um this profusion of kennings which is so characteristic is just a beautiful metaphoric generosity sort of fusing two bits of language together.
1:16:56
And once you start to play with Kennings, it's very it's very hard to uh to to not play with them.
1:17:00
There's a spell I Kingfisher spell I wrote which begins something like flame flicker lightbringer rivers quiver something like this D there.
1:17:13
So they're all hyphenated hyphenate. So there's old English.
1:17:16
The kenning is so strong.
1:17:16
And also in middle English so gane and the green knight for example 14th century great epic poem of of travel and nature.
1:17:27
um alliteration and rhythm are absolutely central to that the so-called the the ax of the stress and I I've learned so much from that alliterative tradition of old English the yeah poems like the seaf farer gain and the green knight really really strong for me so alliteration and kennings heard Gaelic well compressive precision I suppose we we we've talked about run the the shadows cast clouds on Poland on a sunny on a sunny windy day.
1:17:57
Um me many versions of of that and also what's called sometimes called GPS the ga positioning system. So what's that?
1:18:04
Well place sensitivity is so coded into a lot of GA place names.
1:18:10
So for example, I'm a mountaineer and this is not heard GA but but GI and Norse together.
1:18:15
So you can tell the shape of mountains depending on the names before you see them.
1:18:20
So for example, a Ben like Ben Nevice or Ben Moore will be a that's like a generic hill will tend to be quite rounded.
1:18:29
Stobinian for example will be a a sharper peak skillian means literally a scarier tooth that will that will typically be a a very sharp peak.
1:18:40
Um so or Ben Kruen uh means the hill of the forge and it's actually shaped like a big a big kind of forge building.
1:18:49
So coded into gic place names are descriptors.
1:18:53
So the gic positioning system GPS is if you can understand the place names you can kind of read the landscape with them and locate yourself.
1:19:02
Man, it really gives you an x-ray vision into the natural world these words. Yeah.
1:19:06
And they go, you know, way way way back. So yeah. Yeah.
1:19:09
Um so book bulletive moore literally means um the big shepherd of the the glenn the valley of etive.
1:19:20
So Moore is big bul is the shepherd and etive is is is the valley.
1:19:26
So and that stands like a kind of guard peak at the head of this incredible glenn of of etive. So bulive mo more.
1:19:35
How about the Irish versus the English?
1:19:37
What are the similarities the differences?
1:19:38
I think what's shared is an absolute relish for what Heene calls the palp and heft of language.
1:19:43
The palp and heft of lang.
1:19:46
So palp as in palpable like the the feeler but the texture of words the way and then heft how they weigh in the hand. Um so what does he say? What a turn of phrase. Oh.
1:19:57
Oh he just he just did that all the time.
1:20:00
I mean no one taught me the palp and heft of language better than better than Sheamus Heene.
1:20:06
He says, "Keep your mind clear as the bleb of an icicle."
1:20:09
And the bleb, it turns out, is not the icicle.
1:20:15
It's that single droplet of water that that melts down and then hangs at the end of the icicle and then drips off.
1:20:21
But when it's hanging there, it's the bleb.
1:20:23
And the clarity of that, but also the way it shapes the world when you look into it.
1:20:27
That's what he needs talking about.
1:20:29
Keep your mind clear as the bleb of the icicle.
1:20:33
H how about English writing?
1:20:37
Well, I mean, where to where to start and where to stop?
1:20:39
It's the water I swim in.
1:20:42
Um, I I think sometimes you want language, English, to be transparent as glass.
1:20:48
You don't want the reader to see anything between them and what it is they think they are living with you.
1:20:52
And sometimes you want it to be opaque and thick and rich and and and and full of palp and heft and and for the reader to feel each word and to weigh language and to feel language.
1:21:07
If you get that wrong, it's a tremendous interference.
1:21:11
The reader feels like they're winging through, you know, through through through heavy heavy water and they're being weighed down by the heft of language and they it they just want to get away.
1:21:20
But if you get it right, it becomes almost a physical um set of performances of of lifting feel the body's resistance to to idea to word to to language and and the mind's leaning towards it or or moving away from it.
1:21:38
And so yeah, making the readers making the reader dance with with palp and with heft can can be wonderful for writer and for reader.
1:21:50
But other times you want them to forget language is there entirely.
1:21:55
What do you make of the early 20th century writing advice about removing needless words? Remove it. Remove it. Get simple. Get down to the essence.
1:22:03
It's just seems to be the antithesis of what you do. So what is going on? When is that true? When is that not true? Is that just no? That's bad advice.
1:22:08
Like how do you feel about that?
1:22:10
So Walter Peter who is one of the great Victorian he says one of the great Victorian kind of essaists uh he said burn with a hard and gemlike flame.
1:22:20
I want to burn with a hard and gemlike flame.
1:22:23
And I think he much earlier than the Hemingway and others and later Raymond Carver we could call them like the subtractionists the people who for whom taking away is almost always the right thing to do with language.
1:22:36
Um I think per and burning with a hard gem like flame is thinking about something something similar.
1:22:41
I sometimes I think that's really important and you heard the verbalist sentences earlier.
1:22:46
It's like I mean they're not Hemingway or Carverian but they they they are gemlike like there's a there's a facetedness to them and they're just like bok b each of them is a sort of lapidary image and and I don't try and connect them or causally relate them.
1:23:04
It's just image image image image and that we could to change the form.
1:23:10
That's what uh it it's like flashing those up as uh on on the mind screen.
1:23:17
It's like a kind of brain cinema that's that's there's a vividness to that.
1:23:22
Um but then adding um yeah I'm not a a subtractionist except at times but other I mean I just think each each each landscape each encounter asks a different bespoke presence of of language and sometimes you take away and sometimes you add um uh yeah that's so I I just think you just judge where where you are and what you're trying to do.
1:23:54
We've talked a lot about making writing vivid and I want to go deeper on that of capturing astonishment. Yeah.
1:23:58
Of not exaggerating like we're not trying to exaggerate this but also we're not trying to diminish no the astonishment that you feel. How do you do that?
1:24:08
How do you think about capturing the truth of that?
1:24:11
I think what what you say about exaggeration is a really helpful note and I to to writers um and to myself I you know hyperbole is your enemy.
1:24:20
um straining too hard is your is your enemy.
1:24:25
I mean that that way purple pros lies I think.
1:24:28
So so finding exactly the the urge with astonishment is to render it with a similar kind of extravagant vivacity of language and actually that that that can leave a hollowess and a a falsity to to it I think.
1:24:44
So again I I think uh so resisting the impulse to explain astonishment I think is is important.
1:25:00
So, the the the the unknowables that that I experiences that I've had in in my 22 years of writing, including a a a ghostly encounter on a hilltop in in England, sleeping out alone on my own in a in a, as I subsequently found out, would hilltop wood that has a long history of of haunttology and and spectral encounters.
1:25:24
I didn't know any of that at the time.
1:25:25
But how do you how that's an astonishment, but how do you how do you write it?
1:25:30
Well, I just try almost phenomenally I to adjust the empirical basis of it.
1:25:36
Just tell it how you felt it.
1:25:39
And we're back to not representation but the representation of perception.
1:25:42
And let the reader and maybe this is where subtraction becomes important because when you when you don't try to say everything or overlard everything with with with language, the reader becomes a participant.
1:25:53
They they are co-creating with you. They're filling in gaps.
1:25:58
So um so letting things drop out that feel vital to you.
1:26:01
And it's again don't overexlain.
1:26:04
And maybe this is where lyric writing is helpful.
1:26:08
letting sense and cause drop out because then the reader steps in and kind of fills those gaps and becomes your coowwriter. Yeah.
1:26:15
I think sometimes if you have sentences where you dot the eyes, you cross the te's, you make the edges kind of right angles 90° really well put, you omit the space for a reader to to contemplate it, to stir on that sentence on their own.
1:26:32
And I think that a lot of my gripe with, hey, focus on clarity.
1:26:34
Be really clear in what you're saying is a lot of good writing is you're gifting somebody a turn of phrase or a sentence that they can actually think about for a long time.
1:26:48
And in order for that to be a fruitful experience, the sentence has to contain some mystery. Yeah.
1:26:53
And that's the only way that it can be a sendoff for somebody else to make their own.
1:26:59
AB absolutely absolutely and even even when one is is working with a single sentence so I think there's a sentence in is a river alive in English there is no verb to river but what could be more of a verb than a river now in a sense that's a finished thought but in another it is a a sendoff it's like hold on so what does that oh right yeah we we don't talk about rivering this or being being rivered um But of course, is a river a verb? Yeah. How do we translate? So, yes.
1:27:33
So, the it it again, we're back to the portal.
1:27:36
It's like it's you you you you lend initial ascent to the idea and then it kind of complexifies in retrospect. Yeah.
1:27:43
Hey, this was this was wonderful. Yeah. Holy cow.
1:27:49
We we we we're only just embarked on the river.
1:27:51
We got another 3 hours downstream us. No, I'm only kidding.
1:27:53
But that was a crazy conversation. Wow.
1:27:55
It's so cool to talk to someone who loves language as much as you do.
1:27:58
We two nerds wigging out.
1:28:01
That is what just happened. Wigging out. Thank you, David. It was total pleasure. Yeah. Brilliant. Brilliant.
1:28:08
You know, I have a gripe with that word. Oh, go on.
1:28:10
Let's Let's end Let's end the wig out with a gripe. So, this my gripe.
1:28:14
So, in America, we overstate everything. We overstate everything.
1:28:19
And the English very understated. Okay.
1:28:20
And so, like, no, it's pretty good.
1:28:23
In in like English, English is like, "Wow, that was actually great."
1:28:28
But there's one word that we are the English overstate and not the Americans and it's brilliant.
1:28:32
I get out of a taxi in London, I say, "Hey, thank you."
1:28:36
They say, "Oh, brilliant."
1:28:36
I'm like, "It wasn't brilliant at all.
1:28:38
This is the most mundane the most mundane like basic thing."
1:28:42
And uh that's my gripe with the word. Okay. Brilliant.
1:28:46
Specifically with English people. I thank you.
1:28:48
I I consider myself chastised.
1:28:50
It's a Well, it's if you swap it because it's a word of light, right? Brilliant means radiant.
1:28:54
But if you swap it with radiant, then you realize how silly it sounds like if I'd got you got out of a taxi and the taxi driver said that was radiant. What?
1:29:04
But no, we've fully naturalized brilliant. But this was brilliant. This was brilliant.
1:29:08
It American brilliant or English brilliant? English brilliant.
1:29:12
It's an exercise for the listener.
1:29:12
All right, that was good fun. Cool.