C (4:51)

I actually think what I'm going to do is, if you don't mind, break the rules. Yeah, we're all about breaking the rules together and leave. I'd like to read some poems because I think before we get to know one another, you need to hear my voice. And then afterwards, I need to hear your voice. I'm going to read a couple of poems. I think I'll begin with Mental Fight. For me, poetry is essentially the beginning. People think of me as a prose writer and as a novelist, but primarily and secretly, I'm a poet. Poetry is my incantative relationship with everything. So it's fitting that I begin with poetry. It's from Mental Fight. Everyone loves a spring cleaning let's have a humanity cleaning Open up history's chamber of horrors and clear out the skeletons behind the mirrors Put our breeding nightmares to flight Transform our monsters with our light Clear out the stables in our Celebrated fables A giant cleaning is no mean undertaking A cleaning of pogroms and fears, of genocide and tears, of torture and slavery, Hatred and brutality. Let's turn around and face them let's turn around and face them the bullies that our pasts have become. Let's turn around and face face them. Let's make this clarinet moment a legendary material. ATONEMENT. AN AFRICAN ELEGY I read this for many years I've been reading this poem in Europe, and for the first time the other day I read it in Africa and it suddenly took on a different feeling. So I want to reread it again in Europe and see if it changes again. AN AFRICAN ELEGY we are the miracles that God made to taste the bitter fruit of time. We are precious, and one day our suffering will turn into the wonders of the earth. There are things that burn me now which turn golden when I am happy. Do you see the mystery of our pain? That we bear poverty and are able to sing and dream sweet things. And that we never curse the air when it is warm, or the fruit when it tastes so good, or the lights that bounce so gently on the waters. We bless things even in our pain. We bless them in silence. That is why our music is so sweet. It makes the air remember there are secret miracles at work that only time will bring forth. I too have heard the dead singing. And they tell me that this life is good. They tell me to live it gently with fire and always with hope. There is wonder here, and there is surprise in everything. The unseen moves. The ocean is full of songs. The sky is not an enemy. Destiny is our friend. Shall I pause there? Pause there? Sure, yeah.

B (9:16)

Tell us about the effect that Mental Fight has had on people. Tell us, if you would, about a thing called Mental Fight Club that was set up a few years ago by someone who'd be particularly inspired any saved by it.

C (9:32)

Well, in a way, I'm not the right person to be telling about that.

B (9:37)

If you like.

C (9:38)

Yes, you do that. But I'll just say very briefly that Mental Fight was a poem that I wrote unintentionally as a response to the enormous challenge and possibility of the millennium. I remember at the time, just before the millennium, there was a great deal of similar cynicism that the new century would be the same as the old century, and that in fact, nothing would change. And it doesn't represent anything. It's just an artificial date in time. And that people shouldn't therefore take it very seriously. I felt very differently. I felt that the New millennium, like all new millennia have, I thought it would have. It could have a tremendous evolutionary potential for the human race and for all of us. It may be an artificial time, but you see, for 2,000 years plus, we have been marking time. And so the marking of time has become a pattern and a habit and a cyclical thing in the human consciousness. So whether it's artificial or not, like any habit, it starts to develop its own resonance and its own power. That's why I felt that the new century would represent, if we used it and if we woke up to it, a new kind of evolutionary potential. And I feel to some extent, events have proven me both right and surprised me.

B (11:04)

Because he's not accomplished at blowing his own trumpet. I'm going to mention. I'm going to tell you the story of the Mental Fight Club. It's the brainchild of a woman called Sarah Wheeler. She suffered from severe. Still does, from severe depersonalization disorder. And she had gone through several months of ill health, culminating in a very difficult Christmas in 2002. She said, that night I was suddenly catapulted from depression to euphoria. But I had learned that the euphoric phases could be dangerous, too. Instead of going with it, I picked up a book. It was Ben ocri's great meditation on the predicaments that we face as humans. Mental Fight. He seemed to be saying that if we can face these predicaments, one of them being mental illness, then we can win through. Wheeler held a party to celebrate the end of the depressive phase of her illness. She says, family, friends, people from the group therapy in which I've been involved, they all came and six of us recited the first section of Ben Ockley's poem, and we just carried on meeting afterwards. Because of the response to the poem, I started to think that these meetings might be a way of drawing creatively on mental illness. Do you think one of the things that I want to talk about with you is the power of poetry to intervene in public life, in private life. What do you think about this particular instance of it and the relationship between perjury and. And the mentally ill?

C (12:35)

Well, in this, with Sarah's case and the Mental Fight Club, I sort of have an attitude of. I'm humbled by it. I'm so humbled by it that I just slightly catatonic. I just. I'm very moved by the fact that she's found great strength in this poem. I take it to be her strength. I take it to be. If I'm really honest. I say that in a way, the reader creates the poem. So it's her strength and her vision. It's what she's seen, it's the possibility she's seen in the power of poetry to do this for her and for other people. So in a sense, it's her poetry, it's the poetry of her spirit that's at work here. And I think poetry is powerful precisely to the degree that readers bring their poetry to poetry, if you get what I mean. A war cannot read a poem, whether it's a poem by Shakespeare or Blake and be inspired. It takes living, aware consciousness to be aware and to react to the richness and the power in poetry. So poetry is nothing more than a celebration of the creativity of readers, finally. So to that degree, poetry is just there as a silent, invisible potential. So just waiting for whatever it is that can come and unlock it and transfer that energy into its own possibilities.

B (14:26)

So you're blending poetry and prose, poetry and storytelling in a very exciting way in the new book in Tales of Freedom. What is different about poetry from prosecution?

C (14:49)

Poetry is silence and prose is speech. Poetry is. Hearing and prose is listening. Poetry is seeing and prose is looking. Poetry is. Meditation and prose is contemplation. Poetry is. Spiritual and prose is psychic. Poetry is timelessness and prose is time.

B (16:10)

When you say spiritual, what do you mean by that? It infuses your work, of course.

C (16:22)

I mean hinting at things that are beyond the three dimensions. Hinting at things that can only be glimpsed of in the mind, not with the eyes. It's a controversial thing to be talking about in our age. I think it was Saul Bello who said, it takes courage to use the word soul in our time. Let's not use the word soul. Let's just use the word transcendence. I feel unavoidably that we live in things. We also live in transcendence. We live beyond things. I believe that there are two parts of us, the physical and the non physical. I believe that we're not just what you see. We're not just our flesh, our hands, our hair, our nose and our skin. I believe we're also something immeasurable inside us and all around us and part of us. I think this element is missing a great deal in a major aspect of contemporary life. We just totally dismiss or don't even consider the possibility of a higher dimension to this human spirit. We just address ourselves as emotions, bones and flesh. And yet I think everybody senses in some moment or other, in some dream or other, they sense there's something more to them. And I think I've always felt it's important to put this back into the picture and the story of humanity.

B (18:31)

Do you have. Do you come from. Do you draw on spiritual traditions?

C (18:38)

Yes, all sorts, spiritual and non spiritual traditions. And one of my favorite spiritual traditions is one that emphasizes the stillness and the silence of things, which is Taoism. I'm very eclectic in spiritual terms because I believe that all traditions, whether it's the Western spiritual traditions or the Eastern or the Islamic, that all traditions are intrigued by the higher dimensions of us. Everyone's got a garden that's leading to the infinite. All cultures have that garden.

B (19:23)

And how. How have you gone about expressing these non material, non emotional, spiritual aspects to carefully. Do you find it easier to do in poetry than in prose because of the subtlety, the formal freedom?

C (19:53)

I think the problem isn't the form.

B (19:54)

That one writes in.

C (19:55)

I think the problem, if we're going to call it a problem, is the form that is doing the reading, the form in our minds. Because we're so predominantly eyeballs and senses. We can only react to and relate to things that have got to do with eyeballs and senses. And so those other things can only be hinted at through resonance. One has to work with the skepticism of the human mind. One has to work with it, not against it. Why don't I read a bit? Illustrate. I'll read. I read something from a new book. Called the Clock. Very quickly. I have to explain that the new book is called Tales of Freedom. It's composed of a novella which is part poetry and part prose and many other pieces which is an amalgam of the story, the short story and the haiku. And I call it the stoku. I couldn't think of a better word. If you can, please let me know. And this one's called the Clock. It's the first time I'm reading it or anything from this book, by the way. So you're. This is a kind of christening. It took place in the Bois de Boulogne on a somber moonlit night. We stood in a clearing among the chestnut trees. We were all in 18th century costume. The moment arrived. The duelists stood opposite one another with their pistols primed. Then the most unlikely thing happened. The man whose second I was, whom I partly knew, suddenly cried out. He pointed at something in the midriff of his enemy. We looked to see what troubled him. We saw a large, round, shining clock about the enemy's waist. He wore it like the buckle of a belt. The Numbers were black against the luminous dial. My acquaintance was mesmerized by the clock. He was transfixed by it. He kept pointing. Then he began gibbering. The clock had somehow poisoned his mind. I said, for God's sake, old chap, it's only a clock. Look at it, he whispered. It's fiendish. Take your mind off it. I said, that's impossible. It's an abomination. His enemies stood impassively with his second. They gazed at us. My acquaintance fell apart before my eyes. He was utterly unable to rid his mind of the clock. I hadn't wanted the damned duo anyway. I had no idea what his cause had been and was never told. It remained a secret between the two enemies. I'd got roped into it by honor, false friendship and the favors I owed. Damn the favors one owes. They lead one into other people's hell. There was nothing anyone could do. My acquaintance had succumbed to an appalling paralysis. His enemy had been patient. Night darkened, and then dawn slowly appeared. His enemy had waited many hours for my acquaintance to recover. He waited silently, like a monument, a stone statue of some disdainful Roman God. My acquaintance, however, became less than human with agonizing passing of time. Shivering, muttering about the infernal nature of the clock. My acquaintance had a mental breakdown as dawn broke. Eventually, we had to carry him from the middle of the clearing to the waiting coach. It was understood that there would be only one coach. The loser being presumed to have been killed. We had to take the coach. The enemy was magnanimous. He was silent. He was as implacable as a marble figure on a plinth. At night, in a strange city. He and his allies simply stood there in the gathering dawn. With a luminous clock, brilliant about his solar plexus. My acquaintance never recovered. We took him to a hospital. Then his hallucinations began. Then his madness. I visited him often. Whenever he saw me. He asked about the clock. I was evasive in my answers. Then I stopped going to see him. He was infecting me with his instability. It doesn't take much, does it, to unhinge a man. Especially if in a clearing at night under a moonlit sky. A mind cannot unfix itself from a symbol. Now I go through life not fixing my mind on anything or anyone. There's a sort of freedom in this.

B (26:12)

Thank you very much, I think. Shall we bring in the audience at this point?

C (26:16)

Oh, absolutely.

B (26:18)

They should work a bit more, but I really want to bring you in.

C (26:21)

They should work as much as they should work as Much as we're working.

B (26:25)

Hard work anybody any questions and contributions.

D (26:30)

It's a sort of a common question. There's a lot of strands in your writing and your contribution, your gift to the public that relates to my personal efforts with poetry. Mental Flight. I read in preparation publishing my first poetry book some years later I met Sarah Wheeler and we spoke and she talked about how Mental Flight, the very book I had read had influenced her and that she wanted several people to do something with the different chapters of the poetry. And I did something with Parmade of politics and mine made a little film which they used to be mental side. And I think he did poetry for probation chiefs. Probation chiefs. Point I'm making is that your. That mango tala bread has been hugely influential on a separate other communities, not just zero Wheeler. It's a whole community real influence that motivated. So the question then is to what extent does the writer yourself in particular consider the positive impact or even negative impact of your writing? If they say true artist is not concerned with the public, let us do what they do. But to what extent are you influenced by those who are going to.

C (28:08)

Oh my goodness, what a big question. I need a stiff whiskey to answer that question. I'm influenced only to the degree of the source of my writing, where it comes from or what it comes from. And I think maybe finally the source is some unavoidable concern that I have about us, about being here. I don't know why people write, but there's something about our being here, here, alive now that concerns me on all its levels. You may use a small word like love if you want. You may use another slightly bigger word like justice, but I think it comes from that finally. So when you say what you say, I'm very, very moved. And at the same time I feel like I shouldn't be hearing it. Do you know what I mean? Because one wants to do what one does as purely as possible. You understand what I'm saying? So thank you very much and give my love to the whole community. You have a follow up question?

D (29:46)

I do, I do. I want to interrogate you a little bit on that because.

C (29:52)

I mean I've.

D (29:53)

Got an ego when I tend to hear things that have been positive about what I've put out there. It's always a pleasure to hear. And I know from experience that you're a very generous man in that you say that's my work, you do what it does for you and so on. But I'm just intrigued and you know our response. But I'm Just intrigued as to why you sort of. Sort of almost pull yourself in a bit of an isolation from the. You may see it as admiration, but the universe is probably seen as positive feedback. But there's this divide that I pick up. But you don't all respond. I'm just saying it's an observation that.

C (30:36)

Well, well, yes, an important observation, but I mean, think of the opposite. Think of the opposite of what you're saying because I'll be on to you guys like a rash. Exactly. I'll be. I mean, a profound irritation. I mean, I don't think you want that. And I think also there's something actors do that fascinates me when they're preparing for a performance in their rehearsals. Is anybody here an actor? Are you an actor? Oh, my goodness. We'll come to you in a minute. They just have this brief moment with people around and they get them to boo, right? And then after that they get them to clap, to applause. Applause. And the whole point, of course, is to learn to perform purely regardless of the booze or the applauses. There's a gentleman of the back, sort.

D (32:00)

Of off the back of that.

C (32:01)

I was wondering if for you.

B (32:02)

So.

C (32:05)

Whether it's the writing of it is a very personal experience or whether it's publicly. Oh, wow, damned if I do, damned if I don't. Personal, but personal, the public is implied in my personal in the sense that I. Just a little bit crazy, but I actually slightly believe in the novelist dictum that, you know, I am you. A German romantic died at the age of 30 and wrote all these incredible echigrams and one of them that I hold very dearly is I am you. So that's implied in the personal.

B (33:05)

Could I bring in another romantic to help us with this? Percy Bysshe Shelley. I'll read you a little stave from his essay on defense of poetry, which he wrote in 1819 at a time when there was a very oppressive government in place in Britain and a great deal of great deal of what became violent opposition to that government. He says, for the literature of England, an energetic development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and free development of the national will, has arisen, as it were, from a new birth. In spite of the low thoughted envy which would undervalue consideration contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual achievements. And we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who've appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty. I presume he's talking about the Civil war there which drew up our greatest British poet, apart from Shakespeare, John Milton, the most unfailing herald, companion and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change, an opinion or institution is poetry. At such periods there's an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The person in whom this power resides may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric light which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all penetrating spirit. And they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations. For it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophant of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present. The words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire, the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Ben, you wrote the acknowledged legislators, legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things. You are, even in your other worldly moments, a worldly poet, a poet of this world, a poet committed to intervening in this world. What is your relation to. What do you think of a passage like that? What is your relation to the spirit of the age? How does it move you? How do you influence it?

C (36:05)

What an exalted passage. Very powerful passage. Well, I think the artist, the poet has to feel as much as possible themselves, carried by the spirit of the age. But what a dangerous thing to say, because how do you know that you're carried by the spirit of the age and not the spirit of the ego or the spirit of your publishers, or worse than that, the spirit of your agents? What is the spirit? What is the spirit of the age? Do we look for the spirit of the age in newspapers, the opinion pages, the comment pages of newspapers, television screens? Do we look for the spirit of the age in the House of Parliament, in the debates of the day? What is and where is the spirit of the age? Is it the motorings of blind children in Barbados? I did it because of the bees or of the mad in Mauritius? Is it something that one. Shall I read?

B (37:30)

Please.

C (37:35)

Okay. What shall I read from? I'm asking the audience. Shall I read about change? Or should I read about chaos? Or should I read about Picasso? Choose. It's your choices. The change one is really good. Change. Careless. Change. Change. It depends on what I find first. Okay. Why are we about. Change? Actually, I read. I'll do all three very quickly. We'll start with Picasso. This is called Lessons from a Master. Extracts to Pablo Picasso. Be influenced by new materials. Multiply your language. Let the material speak. Impose a form or follow the flow. Transcend morality. Don't be your censor. There is no destiny or destination in art. Be open to conducive environments. Always give the child something to do. Form follows vision. Humour is the relaxation of the anxious intelligence. To have no purpose in art can be conducive to creativity. To refresh is as important as to instruct. Keep your artistic libido alive. Follow the sunlight of your creativity. Art is joy in the river. Time rewarded. That's just extracts. Should we do change or should we take some more questions? I feel I haven't heard very much from people. How are we doing for times?

B (40:27)

We have only seven minutes left.

C (40:30)

Oh, plenty time. Plenty time. We can do a lot in seven minutes.

B (40:34)

How about we take another question now and end with change because.

C (40:38)

And then we'll end with change. Yeah. Okay. One final two short questions, please.

B (40:59)

Why meditation or home shape?

C (41:05)

You mustn't take my distinction too rigorously. It was given in the moment. But I'll try and give a very quick answer. Well, Contemplation is a clear, logical thought. You follow a thought clearly and rigorously in prose. What strikes you about beautiful prose? The best prose is the clarity of its movement. Yeah. It's not mindless. It's not driven by association of thoughts. You don't start a great passage doesn't start with a. A frog and then end by talking about the color green and then end by talking about a skyscraper in Germany that is green. Do you get what I'm saying? It follows a river of thought very clearly and rigorously. That's contemplation. Meditation is about emptiness. The space is empty for things to come into. So poetry at its best, to clear your mind, actually, rather than fill it. Please, is there somebody.

B (42:42)

There's somebody there and somebody here.

C (42:45)

You first, please. Well, that's a really big autobiographical answer. You're asking for there about secret and public things and things that can be said and things that can't be said. But very briefly, I'd say that actually the change was happening all along, really. And incidents at the shrine was part of that change. And if there's one component of many that I draw your attention to, it's the fact that I became profoundly, deeply dissatisfied with the description of the world that I found in realism. I just simply didn't get the world as described by realism. It told me about things, but didn't tell me about the spaces between things. For example, it told me about thought, but it didn't tell me about dreams, about the things that the gaps between thought. It told me about history, but it didn't tell me about the place of myth in history. That is history too. And so I needed a new style. I needed a new tone of voice in which to catch this new reality. And I went through a long period of literally taking my writing apart. I had to go back to the beginning of language like a kid, learn the language from scratch. But behind that, I think I'd say it was a great anguish and a great, great personal suffering.

B (45:03)

I'm going to have to be bad cop here and be strict because we have to clear the room in time. But Ben will be around afterwards.

C (45:10)

But you do have a question.

B (45:12)

Very quickly.

C (45:23)

In less than. My goodness, in less than two minutes. Cultural influences. Just about every aspect of culture is capable of striking the mind awake. Everything, everywhere. Do we have time for a quick reading or should we just quit the room quickly?

B (45:40)

If you could read change, I think we just have enough time and Laura will sign us off.

C (45:45)

But you see, the thing is, you're sort of slightly assuming that you know what the length of change is.

B (45:49)

No, I'm assuming it's dancing with change. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's something else.

C (45:55)

It is something else. No, it's the same something else. Okay. Dancing with change. This was written in response to something that a professor said at Trinity College, Cambridge.

B (46:15)

So.

C (46:19)

Quotation mark. Change is good, but no change is better. End of quotation mark. It rang through the great hall as it has resounded silently through the ages. It rang past the faces of stern masters and poets and lords of learning, asleep in their hidden academies. Change is good. Newton unveiled the unchanging laws and freed us into new sight. This inheritance has become one. Under eras of division and and strife. Havens and deep places have to be protected from the raging winds and the glowing deserts. The corridors have widened. Fields have Given way to new trees and new cries of ecstasy. Dream inspires no longer dream the same things. Monoliths hold books now, and philosophies sprung from harsh evolutions wither thought. Freedom has given birth to unfreedom. Reason has triumphed over the unbounded creative spirit. The air is drier where no change is better. Old ways kept old, protected from the devils of the gate turn the bones white and stiffen the mind's luminous dance into new ages and happier flight. Change is a God that Heraclitus saw in the ancient river. And as we keep things the same, the river works beneath us. The God works his gentle and sad ironies on our eyes, hidden from the encroaching devils at the gate. The river runs, the fields sprout strange new mushrooms. Libraries yield new books in the changed margins of the old. And reason, trapped in philosophies held in iron, turns on itself like a caged tiger and prowls the diminished boundaries of a shrinking world, shrinking because of the horror of the devils at the gate. Song is sweet, music prays to change, Poets pray to the goddess of surprise. And mathematicians would be unmoored in those realms where no change is a wild river of factors. Love is seduced by change itself. Unchanging time, serene, remains indifferent to our iron will, our willed philosophies. The world grows or shrinks of its own necessity, its own vision. The river makes all things dance to a music they never understood at the time. And the giants who built walls meant to be proof against time and the desert ravages found in their sleep that the walls have become. Change had moved, had dissolved, had sprouted the feared things, or worse, that the feared things had seeped in underfoot or through the air, had changed the frontiers of their rigid dialogue. Walls invite invasion, walls end up trapping within the demons meant to be kept out. For the demons merely turn into the giants, growing them like a silent cancer. Oasis attracts the eyes of the hungry. Protected places illuminated by fame attract the rage of the unlucky, the unfortunate, the dispossessed, and all those who are shot out in the outer darknesses of our age. All around Leonids, planets, stars are whirling. The cosmos shrinks and grows dreams and flows under the immutable spell of change. All around, lives collapse, empires quietly fall in and cave in from natural exhaustion. Dynasties give up the ghost of ambition. Towers rage with the unmeasured cadences of festering hunger. Continents drift apart, peoples no longer recognize one another and wars eat up fathers and frail sisters and houses fall on one another and roads break out into unhallowed speech. It is natural to want calm places where stillness dwells, where cool waters flow, where concerts radiate music and grace, where the mind contemplates crystals, pure forms, glowing legends, complex melodies and books that keep their hidden thoughts in the silence of their musty pages. It is natural to want serenity and flowering gardens of lovely symmetry. And Virgil's spreading beeches and the lost happy times of the wise ones who were wise in the knowledge that the mind can comprehend all. But the river flows and so must we. Change is the happy God that Heraclitus saw in the golden river. Spread illumination through this darkening world. Spread illumination through this darkening world. No change is good, but dancing gracefully with change is better.

A (53:13)

Excuse me. Basically, I think what I'll just say is we'll just let that lie there, shall we? I think I was so inspired. Thank you very much for this, for your inspiring input today, and also. Also Palashwee Ben Ocree. Thank you very much. Can we have another round of applause?