And you know what the sound is if you see the picture even
in the New York Times.
It's a one long, unbearable vowel
and there's a name for it, ululation.
But that vowel, which is saying, I've lost everything,
the world is not real, I don't want it, I don't want myself,
I don't want the world, I don't want anything to do with this.
I mean, the only answer to losing is to say,
I want to lose it, you know?
I want it gone.
I don't want to have anything to do with it.
And the destructive and angry aspects of grief
are all there in that terrible sound of pain and the attempts
to break it, the attempts even to breathe,
the attempts to stop it, to control it,
to make something out of it are the beginnings of consonants.
I think that's how language begins
with a expressively powerful feeling, through which there's
no one has no way of dealing with it.
And I think that's how poetry begins.
I think that's why poetry is different from the other arts
because it uses the same thing that is original language
itself and poetry is always going back to original
language, to that moment where you're dealing with what cannot
be said.
Why do people turn back to poetry in wartime
or in times of great crisis or when they lose a loved one
or when they fall in love or when they're profoundly angry
and just don't want to do the obvious thing?
Which is that's the the rarest of them, but it does happen.
It's because poetry is about what cannot be said.
Prose is about what can be said.
Prose is about subject and what can be communicated about it
but poetry is something-- it comes
to being that too but it is something else first
and it remains something else all the way through.
Shakespeare, the Groundlings stood for five hours,
many of them couldn't read and write
and they stood and listened to Hamlet.
What were they hearing?
They weren't hearing the denotative value
of the words, which the scholars are still scrabbling about.
They were hearing this--
some current that was underneath the words, which communicated
directly in which they were getting through five
hours of show of Hamlet.
And if you play back a great recording,
I mean a great performance of Hamlet,
you can just listen to that aspect of it,
apart from the glory of the language itself.
I'm jumping ahead deliberately because the connection
with the natural world, so-called,
as a child, which was such a relief.
Later on, it seemed to me again that the writing,
that language, the poetry--
as soon as I was five years old, I
wanted to write poems because I wanted
to write the things that we sang in church, you know?
That was a different kind of use of language
and I like that use of language.
I like words like the spacious firmament on high,
you didn't know what they meant but they sounded wonderful.
And it never occurred to me that there was again
a distinction between that feeling and the feeling
of elation at seeing the grass growing between the flagstone
and it's never occurred to me that literature
and the writing, the poetry, literature all together.
Imaginative literature was alien and at odds
with a love of the green world, of growing
things that the rest of life.
I couldn't figure that one out and as I grew up,
I loved them both.
I loved poetry, I loved literature
and I loved any chance to get out into the woods
and into hike and beyond the lake and then
to paddle a canoe and any chance to be part of that.
The first time I--
I mean I can remember an unbelievable experience
of coming over a hill on a farm in Pennsylvania
and seeing this great swale of meadows and woods
behind it and in the afternoon light
and thinking and not thinking and just to me,
it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life.
I just couldn't express it.
And it was not until 20 years ago that the group of people
were asked to a conference in Missoula, Montana
who were writers and writers and writers on the environment,
and I remember saying at that conference, most of us
grew up feeling that we were freaks because we
like both of these things.
We cared passionately for both of these things and we
didn't feel--
we didn't feel there was a distinction between them.
Well, I want you to imagine.
I want you to think about reading poetry,
reading imaginative prose.
With that assumption in mind, rather than the other way
around, I mean do you like you know,
trees and flowers and butterflies
or do you like literature?
I mean the-- we've been on enough probably university
campuses, where the literati and the botanists,
I mean there's not a bus service between them.
The botanists don't read anything except botany
and this is really depressing sometimes.
They never read anything.
And the literary people don't have any time
to pay attention to these things,
and they still think somehow they're above it all.
It's just ridiculous because there's not
a matter-- there's no should or duty in the whole thing.
I think in spite of what's happening,
in spite of what we're doing, the recognition of the fact
that when we were fetuses in our mothers' wombs,
we went through all of the forms of life before us.
We have been an insect.
We have been a lizard.
We have been all of these creatures.
We didn't stay there very long maybe,
but it wasn't very long ago either.
And somewhere, we remember all that.
We are connected with it all.
We know it.
It's not a matter of anthropomorphizing,
that sort of silly 19th century way of sort of belittling
an attitude, which suggests that our feelings, including
pain and joy may have something to do with that of the animals.
I mean it's taking the ornithologists a very long time
and rather reluctantly to admit that birdsong probably
has a lot to do with pleasure.
Oh, dear.
That might be anthro-- more of anthropomorphizing.
I mean, when the thrush never bothers to repeat itself
and the thrush never does repeat itself.
However many times you hear, it's
like Schubert doing variations.
He'll come up with a new variation.
And if the others were imitating him to get it wrong,
he'll come back and correct them and say, no,
don't do it that way.
But I've got a better way of doing it
and he'll do it the next way and do you think
this has to do with territory?
And do you think it has to do with mating?
Yeah, sure.
But they've known about that for a long time.
They're onto something else.
Why shouldn't it be pleasure?
Why shouldn't that pleasure go all the way back
to the amoebas?
Why shouldn't there be a difference
between pain and pleasure and what you avoid
and what you don't avoid?
That expresses itself in ways that they
all equally understand.
Isn't it a great joy to think of being part of that?
Rather than being somehow superior to it
and utilizing it and making, you know,
turning it into a commodity?
Goodness.
What do we do to ourselves when we turn that into a commodity?
That we become commodities ourselves.
I mean, we think of ourselves-- and you know, we say it,
time is money.
Time isn't money.
We may say that and we're warping our minds
and saying it and cheapening our minds and saying it,
but how can we talk about these things
without seeming to preach about them?
And it's you know, the time is running out on us too
and I don't mean the money--
I don't mean money's running out of us
but I mean time is running out.