First let me ask how do you begin? When you write how do you find a beginning?
The beginning is usually a good place to start. Let me see.
Well, the jejune, the awkward and the raw utterances of a first draft are processed into something more dignified and intelligent. Between the scribbled notes and the typed script lie so many inner conversations between imagination (the writer self) and reason (the editor self).
Inspiration?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti inspires me by his love and understanding of San Francisco (which he has named “an island in the mind”), his poetics fusing a metrical regularity with a freedom of spirit, his longevity, his radical compassion, and his ability to reach out to a wider audience than almost any English-speaking contemporary poet who does not set his words to music.
But why do you write?
I write to explore the feelings and motives behind the surface of people’s actions. I try to empathize with several points of view. I value expressing myself by communicating and collaborating with others to explore the possibilities of language, the meaning of identity, the beauty of imagery, and the harshness of reality. I do not take sides unless ethical standards demand that I do. Anyone who seeks to look beyond the obvious will be interested.
But you have a point of view?
Yes. I have faith in many things. But I have doubts also.
If there are no areas of doubt there is no real faith. Nobody actually believes completely in every aspect of a faith. There is always something to be questioned or clarified or revised, then reinterpreted, or dismissed. The true self is the hidden self. Like Veritas (the goddess of truth) it keeps itself sequestered in a well. Let us imagine the well as hidden by thorns and stinging nettles. It is unknown to the world.
So there are always opportunities to doubt?
And into the area of doubt may come the serpent with its false promises that deceive the unwary into denying their true nature. Yet doubt also may be fecund ground for the speculations of art. There is a poetry of discovery that can be written anywhere. The more unexpected the poetry the effective it is. The transforming effect is the social ole of art. Literature especially explores the nature of these transformations. Implied in these explorations is their purpose.
But what do you think is the purpose?
The purpose should not be stated openly because it is a subtle process, something more valid by its reticence. The discovery sought is a synthesis of of human nature and its experience. We become ourselves in the course of understanding ourselves. Human nature is not a fixed position, a sun round which the celestial bodies move. Every life is lived in the act of transformation if it is a life worth living.
This may suggest, perhaps, that you’re concerned with the idea of time?
We speak of time moving forward, but it is we who are moving. We think we are still and stable. That is, according to Pascal. Surely he is right? We want the future to appear now. At the same time we wish for the past to linger. Never or rarely are we content to live in the moment. How can we be? I have to anticipate the future to know what next I shall write. I must be able to read it after it is written.
Let me ask you, if I may, about what you discover when you write.
Slowly, carefully the hidden self emerges into the daylight. Writing reveals that inner self. This is an inescapable consequence of writing. If the writing is true the self is true. The writing might not be autobiographical but it must be personal. Rarely have I written about myself. Yet I am there in the midst of things even as I observe them from a distance.
Is that really the case?
I am every character. I am in every place.
So it is about you even when it isn’t?
Well, yes. It’s a question of discovering oneself. The essential quality of creativity is an inner stillness. Only when we centre ourselves do we begin the process of discovering the voice. The voice within us that is the real voice. Life on the surface is illusory. We must find our way down into the well where Veritas waits.
So where is your truth?
John Wain once said that writing a short story will reveal all the moral, political and religious feelings the writer has. My respect for Wain is boundless, but that statement is surely too schematic about something indefinite. A writer’s point of view should be evident in the fabric of the writing, but by allusion and inference. Overstated terms clunk, destroying the delicate threads of writing.
Writing reveals the writer, but not always in obvious ways. To write a narrative in the first person is to imagine another life, to inhabit another self, to become another self. And yet the reality of the writer does not change.
It’s a matter of empathy?
The acts of writing and reading are forms of reliving. We draw upon our experiences when we write. We bring something of our experience into our reception of a creative work. We filter the words through our archive of personal memory. It is a re-creation. Of course memory is a re-creation. The past is reconstructed which means it is not perfectly recalled.
Can you say what you mean by memory? As a writer, what is memory to you?
All memory is a witness. It is a witness to time’s haunting music, past and future. Mnemosyne gave birth to the Muses. Memory is a source of inspiration. To be inspired is to breathe air that is divine, that is other-worldly. Memory is an awareness of another life, a higher possibility – but not as a distant object, and certainly not as mere fancy. It is a possibility to be realized here and now. Memory enables us to be more than ourselves, and to speak a language with a life beyond the world of facts and tasks.
Are facts not important?
Facts do not occupy a sacred space. Objective truth is encompassed by perceptions. These are shaped by emotional attitudes. There ways of feeling that determine the nature and direction of conventional wisdom. That ‘wisdom’ may not be the whole truth. There are other ways of feeling that accept facts to support an argument. But facts do not exist in isolation. They only make sense when they cohere. They must be interpreted according to context. There is truth, and it is inviolate, but it is not always easy to discern especially in a climate of lies.
Surely there are self-evident truths?
Fact and comment are thought by some to occupy different theatres of experience. In this view truths are self-evident, easily verifiable and generally accepted. This allows a free range of expressions. In a world of self-evident facts reason prevails. One can ‘defend to the death’ this liberty because irrational and foolish opinion will be rejected.
Is that really the case?
In the real world so much opinion is irresponsible and indefensible. Selective facts masquerade as the whole truth. Meaning is derived not from facts alone but from perceptions of the evidence. Fact and comment are related moral agencies.
This seems naturally to lead to my asking you how you feel about the world in general now. I mean, how do you respond to what is happening?
I hear the songs of another kind sung. The melody is half-familiar but now it has a curious discord, and the words make little sense. This is not the world into which I was born, nor is it the world I expected to inherit.
There is a frame of mind that thinks everything now must be mediated through technology. Living has to be validated by technology before it can be acknowledged. The machine becomes not an extension of human experience: it becomes the experience. As for living, machines can do that for us. We are expected to enter the labyrinth in order to live. The world is not enough. It is too primitive for the sophistication of hyper-reality.
You feel humanity is losing touch with reality?
A face in a fashion magazine is airbrushed of blemishes. It has the gloss of a photograph. Too perfect to be real, it is an ideal that never can be possible. Flesh has vitality. It is tangible. So, too, with a painted canvas. It is not smooth but contoured and cracked. You can see the artist’s brush at work. You can feel the living presence.
You seem alarmed. Would that be a fair comment?
It is close on two hundred years since Paul Delaroche said on first seeing a photograph that painting is dead. Fortunately for us that is not so. Great art continues to be created on canvas. It can be reproduced in still photography or on film. There are many in this world without access to art at first hand who can experience it by the means of recording and preserving. There is, however, no experience to compare with actually seeing for oneself. If we are fortunate enough to have the means do so, surely we not only look at a work of art, we linger gazing with our eyes at what is before us. It is a privilege to cherish.
We seek to express ourselves so that we may understand ourselves, and that others may understand us. This expressive art we may name as freedom. It is not total licence but a way of responding to the world without fear of being misheard.
To be confined and isolated is not freedom, even if it is a voluntarily confinement. I lock myself in a dark room, all the while assuring myself I am roaming a light, open space.
So there is hope?
Humanity has developed through imaginative consciousness. In every generation it tells us that things could be different. We are urged to learn from the past, and to move forward. We are not slaves to a timeless order of existence. We make things, and by doing so we make things happen.
About the Author
Geoffrey Heptonstall is a widely published poet, contributing to anthologies and magazines throughout the world. He lives in Cambridge where he taught Writing for some years, and was a regular contributor to Chichester University’s Thresholds Forum. He is also a playwright with many plays and monologues broadcast, performed and/or published.
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