[APPLAUSE]
I don't know how to say thank you
for that introduction, which is--
it's just goes to the core of everything.
Nor for those two poems beforehand.
Thank you so much and the choices that was beautiful.
[APPLAUSE]
I love you choosing John Clare.
That was an unexpected one, wasn't it?
Clare is a--
I think how much you've read about Clare and read Clare
but I hope you stay with it because he's
a strange exemplar of all the things we're talking
about here this evening.
And a wonderful tragic figure and a much greater poet
than is generally realized in English.
And that's the very beautiful poem of his.
Despairing though it almost is you know.
And that introduction I hardly know how to--
you've sort of touched on so many things
that I want to talk about.
Of course you know Shelley said and Shelley
was one of my early heroes when I was 16.
Shelley said poets are the unacknowledged legislators
of the world.
Unacknowledged is so important.
It would be terrible if they were acknowledged you know.
Just imagine what kind of--
[LAUGHTER]
Of course it would be terrible in a different way, which would
be more and more interesting.
But you know when you start--
when you ever get a real subject in any writer in this room
and I imagine the room is littered with writers.
[LAUGHTER]
It seems to be a small thing.
And then the more you deal with it,
the more you realize that it's everything.
Any subject can do that.
A friend of mine who's a writer and a Dante scholar at Stanford
Robert Horg Harrison his first book is
called Forests you think--
I thought when I heard about it well,
that'd be interesting it's probably
about cutting down trees.
Not about trees.
The subtitle then I looked at was the Shadow of Civilization
and I thought oh boy this is getting much more interesting.
And then it becomes an image of the whole attitude
of Western culture toward the forest
as the image of the unknown, the dark, the dangerous,
the endless, the overpowering, in the whole
of our civilization and he traces it from Gilgamesh
to Beckett and with of course Conrad's Heart
of Darkness thrown in and some great passages of poetry.
And then the second book is the Dominion of The Dead.
And you think well the dead, we think of our people we've lost.
He realized that the more he talks,
the more he writes about the subject
and the more he brings up the writings on the subject.
He realized that this is maybe the central subject
I mean that we are constantly being guided and trying
to measure ourselves up against and learning from the dead.
What would our world be like if it
were involved only those who are alive among us including
the endangered polar bears.
we would have no Shakespeare.
Just think what we would have.
We would have no literature, we would have none of the arts
and we'd have nothing but a few days ago.
Pretty impoverished world.
And when you get a subject like--
I avoid these words the West.
Why?
I've been asked why I called this the green world because I
distrust all of the language that we use for this subject.
I don't like talking about nature.
It's as good a word as we've got I suppose.
But the assumption has come to be that nature is something
separate from us as though we were not nature,
as though the traffic problems were not a part of nature.
As though everything that happens as though the Iraq
debacle were not nature.
As though our bad behavior were not nature.
Everything is nature.
We're not separate.
We are not separate.
And this is the--
I suppose the assumption from which
I began the assumption itself.
As a child I didn't understand this idea of the separation.
And I remember walking along the street in the city
across from New York City, North of Jersey City with my mother.
In those days there were flagstones on the sidewalks.
I think flagstones have not been seen
in most places for a long time but they
were much more beautiful than what we've had since.
But between the flagstones blades of grass were coming up.
And I asked my mother where they came from.
And she said well, the Earth is under there.
And I remember the strange feeling of elation
that the Earth was really under there.
That this was so reassuring to me.
And I was probably three years old, somewhere
between three and four.
But the idea that the Earth was right there.
It was waiting.
It knew what to do.
The grass knew how to grow and do--
the grass knew how to grow.
And in spite of, maybe there was nothing wrong
with the buildings but I mean they weren't the whole world
and the Earth was there and the Earth
knew what it was doing all the time.
And this is still a matter of great reassurance to me.
And I felt then and I've always believed
that this idea about being concerned with the environment
is ridiculous.
I mean why are you not concerned with the environment,
the environment is you.
You don't exist without an environment,
you don't exist without the environment.
We don't exist without it.
We are not a unique species that can exist entirely
by itself in the whole of the unknown universe.
I mean, what an incredible-- what an incredible arrogance
we've arrived at.
Every so-called pre-literate culture knew this
and they were perfectly sure about it.
Somewhere along the line we developed a doubt about it.
We have it-- we have it in the Western world
and the whole succession to the Abrahamic covenant
one of the problems about having a special relation
with a single God is that you're right.
Imagine what that means.
I mean God is on your side.
Look at what's in the White House.
[LAUGHTER]
God is on your side and whether God knows that or not.
And that means anything goes you know
because you know you're right, which
means that everybody else is wrong
if they don't agree with you.
And we certainly are seeing how that works itself out
at the moment.
But the cultures, the great cultures before us
from which we've come which are ourselves all
knew better than that.
And mythology language itself knows better than that.
It's embedded.
You take etymology of almost anything
and you'll come back into knowledge about these things
which we're sort of pushing aside at the moment.
One of the troubles about having a firm conviction
about these things if you're a writer
is the danger of preaching, starting to become--
it becomes two dimensional.
Because alas, you're right.
[laughter]
This is true.
You can get to be fundamentalist just about anything
the moment the moment you're right.
Nietzsche said a wonderful thing.
He said one of the only things really
to be said for winning is that you can say, well,
now I've done that and I know what that amounts
to let's try something else.
Which means let's try losing for a change.
And there are a whole extremely profound and unlimited
philosophies and ways of looking at reality which
are not limited in that way.
Which say you know let's start with loss and let's follow loss
and see what that-- and I think this is--
I think this is where language begins.
I think this is where poetry begins.
And I don't mean to--
I don't mean to sound gloomy about it.
I don't think it's gloomy at all.
I think that I believed that for example language and poetry,
I said this earlier today so I apologize for those
who are hearing it twice.
I believe that the origin of these two things
is pretty much the same.
They probably started at the same place, maybe many times
at the same place.
It's not many days since you saw a picture of an Iraqi woman
who's just lost a son.