This-- I think it's characteristic of-- these
are old.
The-- '76.
It's physical.
I mean, hey, man, it's physical.
[LAUGHS]
[LAUGHTER]
I've got news for you.
You're really in real bodies, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
Someone shouted and said, age is your body.
So this was Duncan.
Yeah, Robert.
He said, one's body is phenomenal say for the first--
I would figure-- about 17 or 18 [INAUDIBLE] who changed us.
Both boys and girls, men and women--
certainly well remembered-- have shifts in their physical body
which effectually change their sense of their own presence
in the sense that is proposed as a person in the world.
Voices drop.
Physical-- breasts, penises, the whole bit.
So your voice, for men, a boy having his voice
drop suddenly, talking more--
et cetera.
And then, you get to be 20, 22.
And things feel reasonably stable.
One thing-- you can make it wiped one night.
And you can be up and pretty much together
by the next morning.
And things happen.
Obviously, said accidents occur, illnesses and whatever-- that
imposing time.
But nonetheless, your body is reasonably dependable.
You put it to bed at night.
And pretty much, when finally you get up in the morning--
[LAUGHTER]
--no metamorphosis.
[LAUGHS] But then, you get to be, say, late 40s, early 50s.
And you find that you can't see as clearly.
You used to be able to see the feathers
on an eagle at 20 miles.
But now, you find you can't really read the phone book.
[LAUGHTER]
And so you get a pair of interim specs for $6,
$10 in the Walmart or whatever.
But I remember for myself--
is the dentist saying, not "this will fix things,"
this filling, whatever it was.
He would say, well, this should hold you.
[LAUGHTER]
[INAUDIBLE] a different imagination [INAUDIBLE]..
And so all of that begins to change.
Your physical way of being in the world alters.
And only this time, you recognize not ironically
or even with terror that you're not
in a passage that's going to take you to young manhood,
whatever.
This is it.
This is the, as Williams puts it, the ascent beckons.
As the ascent beckoned--
and memory is a kind of accomplishment,
since the places it opens, places hither
forth unknown, [INAUDIBLE].
That's what everything being always right now
is really [INAUDIBLE] interesting, therefore
because of.
So in the last few years, I did not really
engage with the kind of an appointment in Samarra, Dodge,
or trying to avoid, quote, "death by moving to wherever"
or even trying to change remarkably.
But I wanted community with a hundred times
that's absolutely voracious.
And so far less interested in simply
what I do as I am in what other people are doing,
and working with various visual artists, or terrifically,
with musicians who aren't there simply to back me up.
But one of the most terrific compliments I ever got
was Steve Swallow saying that I was as good a horn player
as he'd ever worked with.
And I don't play any instruments.
So that's pretty good.
I thought about, as Charles had remarked earlier
in the evening, he says, as soon as I speak, I speaks.
He says, this fact something-- speaker speaking.
I had much the same take on it.
I was trying to give a lecture to the [INAUDIBLE]
School of Art on imaginations of art as a public fact.
And I was asking them, for example, do they themselves
as visual artists think there was any way
to validate their activity other than the market,
or the gallery, or the museum?
Is there anything else that they knew of that
might give them validation?
I know that as poets, there better be something else.
Because that validation comes, if at all, very late.
Anyhow, they don't get it.
But I used this poem as the end of that lecture.
"If I were writing this--
which I am writing--
if I were writing this with the prospect of encouragement,
or had I begun some work intended to be what it was
or even then and there it was what had been started,
even now, I no longer thought to wait.
Had begun, had found myself in the time and place writing
the words which I knew, could say.
Ring, dog, cat, car.
Was rushing, it felt, to keep up with the trembling impulse,
the connivance, the words contrived
even themselves to be, though I wrote them,
thought they were me.
This is not the end of the poem.
I think it's a bad mistake people
make when they present their writing that they
think they're writing.
Because that's really, really the case.
[LAUGHTER]
And I said, with the connivance of the words
contrived even themselves to be, though I wrote them,
thought they were me.
Once in, once out.
Turns a roundabout.
Seeing eyes get the nod of dogs and mistaken god,
god's a mistaken dog.
Get you home on time rhymes with time on time in time for two
for tea, begins and ends it.
The blue gray edge, trees line it.
Green field finds it.
Eyes look.
Let the aching heart take over.
Pride to eyes blurred.
Be as big as you were.
Stir the pot.
Whenever it's sense, look for what else
is meant in the under thought of language.
Words of apparent, scene light turns off
to the ambient luminescence.
They're insufficient-- no electrician's.
Same sight, shadows at edge of light.
Green field again where hedgerow finds it.
Read these words, then.
And see the far trees.
Hear the chittering of the birds.
Share my ease and dependence."