Yes.
Place is obviously important to your writing.
I was wondering where you considered home,
and where do you like to go to write?
Oh.
OK, that's going to have to be the last question.
Who are we, you know?
I mean, where is our home?
For centuries, people assumed that we
didn't belong on Earth at all.
Our home was elsewhere, we were souls
who were temporarily incarnate.
And the trick was to make your way back home.
There's no doubt, if you were Augustine, for instance.
Fourth century.
He could see Rome burning, but he
knew that that was not his home, it
was North Africa is home-- his home is.
At the source.
And I don't have that belief.
So home has to be, in some sense, terrestrial for me.
I'm deeply, deeply stained, the way
a flower would be stained by the particular soil,
by having grown up in Africa.
South Africa, I think, is my home as an animal.
But as I said, who are we?
I can do that any time.
That's just one of them, too.
We were doing this reading [INAUDIBLE]..
You know, the thing is, I mean, I'll come back to the question,
but if you think of where poetry was performed,
where it was heard, so much else is being heard.
Poetry is an oral form delivered in Africa.
Words included the sounds of the night.
Words included the sounds of the fire.
You would have heard the lions, as you do.
You would have heard the hyenas, you
would have heard the night birds.
And those are folded into the fabric of the poem,
so that the myth of Orpheus is not totally out of the head.
It's very much out of sense of what a home might be for humans
and most other creatures.
So that's, by way of free associating off
of that first level of, where's my home as an animal?
It is in Africa.
It is also in those parts of the world which,
for me, allow my creaturehood to exert itself most fully.
And those tend to be places, if I'm in the United States,
like Arizona.
It stands to reason.
Where am I not cooped in, bound as much?
Where is there a sense of openness?
Where is the sky large?
Where all their large land masses,
both horizontally and vertically?
Where are all the extremes which will not
allow life as we expect to have it given to us to survive?
Now that's a crucial sense of where my home is.
My home is not in a comfortable, prefabricated place.
I'm not at home there.
I'm only at home in a place where
my survival is put in question.
So that's another layer of an answer.
I adore the ocean.
I'm probably more amphibious than--
what do we call bipeds?
I don't know.
But I'm more of a sea creature than a human creature.
And so my home comes back to me on shorelines.
Where am I at home?
I can keep asking the question in different registers.
Where am I home religiously?
Nowhere.
Nor should I be.
Where am I home politically?
Nowhere now.
It's surely a question that drives people to the page.
Poetry is not a home.
Emerson made that very clear.
He said it was a vehicle.
It's a bridge.
You can't live on the bridge.
So it's a way of moving towards the construction in the soul
of what home might be.
Otherwise, we can't really keep concepts like justice alive.
Was that the beginning of an answer?
OK, well I really do thank you.
Very much.