The Art of Communication

STEPHEN WATTS was the first appointment in HI~Arts Embedded Poets Project, and gives his personal view on the work he will be undertaking in the coming months on the theme of suicide in the Highlands and Islands

THERE ARE FOUR or five things I want to do during this commission.

Firstly I hope and expect – and indeed am expected – to write: poems, but other texts too maybe, concerning suicide and issues of suicide. I also want – and am expected – to spend good time writing in ways not necessarily concerned with issues of suicide.

Secondly I will be working with a number of voluntary and statutory organisations and individuals – for instance, the Inverness Suicide Awareness Group, the Samaritans in Inverness and Cromarty, outreach programmes of Ross County FC, and contacts through statutory bodies. This work will involve a lot of intense listening on my part, that and talking with people coping with issues of suicide.

Thirdly, I’ll hope to meet and talk to writers and poets who may want to talk around the contexts of my work, or their work, and around issues of suicide. For most of this I will rely on approaches made to me, so please do contact me here at HI~Arts.

Fourthly, I hope to evoke or bring to the surface, poems and texts written about suicide and about intense emotions by people who might not consider themselves poets in the usual course of things.  In a way this is the most important thing that could happen:

I think that most people write a poem or two at some time in their life, write a poem or say to themselves a poem or song or chant that they’ve created. Mostly these poems remain unseen and unsung, One of the strong hopes of my work is that somehow some such poems might be sent to me or posted on the website.

If anyone wants to contact me about any aspect of this work, or wants to send any poems or texts related to this work, please do so at stephen@hi-arts.co.uk

I also want to pull away strongly from the notion of ‘suicide poet’. I don’t think that there is such a person or idea, and I do not recognise myself as such.

Part – perhaps most – of the success of this work depends on the responses I am able to evoke.

I also do not want to focus solely on defined issues of suicide, though of course I must to some extent do this. It also seems very important to me to see everything connected with this work in wider contexts: poetry, language, emotional response, language and stress, intricate paths through our lives, and issues of suicide. Nothing happens on its own, even if the balance between individual and community always changes, always varies.
 
I also believe that language is of itself affirmative and affirming – the very acts of speaking and writing, of placing our worlds into words, tend to confirm the life-thread that keeps us or, when it somehow breaks, loosens our hold on life. Surely such acts are themselves part of being alive and are innately celebratory.

And yet we write about death and we write about suicide.

Nancy Huston wrote apropos of premature birth in her novel ‘Prodigy’: “I brought you into this world and I won’t let anyone take you out of it. Live, my little one! Be strong! Live!” How painful, then, when the grown child is the one to let go of their own life. When that usually strong thread even in the adult breaks.

In terms of what I hope or intend to actually do :

Well, write myself for sure, poetry and prose and the thoughts behind them.

But also, to talk and in particular to listen, which I’ve always felt are basic arts of both life-awareness and also of writing – and awareness is what suicide lacks in its wider context.

That is why the ‘Suicide Awareness Group’ in Inverness, a group of individuals I have immense respect for, calls itself that, precisely because they see it as vital to widen out how aware people generally are of issues to do with suicide. I also think that poetry has over a long period of time, in some ways and to some people, been demeaned, made elite, sidelined, and I wish it were none of these.

I’ll expect to organise or take part in, or help facilitate, a number of workshops

I want to travel and I want to talk. I want to listen and I want to hear.

I want to be in Inverness, to go to Raasay, to go to Scourie, to Tain, to Evanton. I want to go to Caithness on the train as I went from Invergordon thirty years ago. I want to go back to North Uist and the Western Isles, I want to go to Stac Polly and Kinlochbervie. If you see me, please talk to me, please tell me what you think, but let me also have some moments to be silent, some minutes in which to think.

I hope that at least some of my work will be in the form of talking, interviewing, conversation and discussion. Three years ago I completed a project in the London Hospital in Whitechapel where I was working with Community Health Advocates who act as translators employed within the Hospital.

In a multilingual community this is a vital role, a vital art, enabling patients and families to know what the staff are saying to them and vice versa. I knew the translators well and part of the way I found myself working was to interview about twelve people in some detail.

I didn’t simply talk about their work, I asked about their lives, their childhoods, the experiences that made them who they were, both as individuals and as people who were part of a community, because this all provided a context for the full meaning of their work.

Similarly I hope to talk to many people as part of my work as the ‘embedded poet’, not – and I would want to stress this – in a probing or a psychologically intrusive way, but rather in day-to-day ordinary ways that mark our lives, mine included. This is what I understand by the term ‘embedded’ in terms of my work as an ‘embedded poet’ in the Highlands & Islands.

I also want to pull away strongly from the notion of ‘suicide poet’. I don’t think that there is such a person or idea, and I do not recognise myself as such. I am a poet embedded in my own language and, in the context of my work for HI-Arts, very much concerned with issues of suicide but also very much with the wider contexts of people’s lives. The term ‘suicide poet’ has entered this vocabulary via media coverage, therefore I can sidestep it – but I have also to register its use.

I have not myself attempted suicide. I have contemplated it, I have felt myself at times of intense stress pulled quite close to it. I have also meditated a lot on suicide, not as a sociological phenomenon, but as a human reality that if we are fully alive we cannot avoid seeing close up. Some of the poets whose work I most love, Attila Jozsef for instance or Georg Trakl, took their own lives. And other very fine poets too : Sylvia Plath, Alfonsina Storni, Alejandra Pizarnik, Paul Celan.

I think that to be a writer, if by that we mean to use language and to seek not to lie (other than using the tropes necessary for real fiction), I think that to be a writer and to seek not to lie, we cannot avoid the confusions of living and therefore the contemplation of suicide. Moreover to be a writer and to seek to pull honesty into language means, so it seems to me, at times to know stress and to be close to the margins.

There are many forms of suicide, and I don’t simply mean many ways of completing an attempt at suicide.  I mean that there are many states of mind and body that can bring anyone, in theory, towards the point of suicide or self-harm.

Having said that, I see this commission and the work in a number of ways.
 
Part of my remit must, I think, be to look at stress, at mental and emotional stress, though of course these cannot be divorced from poverty or geographic remoteness.

Stress has a key place in poetry, as in our lives. Technically a poem will have stress within it, whether the formal stress of a particular form, a sonnet, or the hidden stresses of spoken language.

But poetry turns on stress in other ways – the deep stresses within our lives, and I would include happiness, energy, exaltation as a form of ‘stress’ as well as pain or sorrow, often evoke poetry, both ‘great’ poetry and the poetry of everyday reaction.

I think the greatest of Sorley Maclean’s poetry rose or was pulled by the poet himself out of deep stress : out of many other things, but certainly out of stress. And I think of his ‘unfinished’ ‘An Cuilithionn’.

Or I think of the life of George Campbell Hay, the broken and tremendous achievement of his long poem ‘Mochtàr is Dùghall’, and the lay of his life after he broke down in Greece near the end of the Second World War, the pattern of his life between homes and hospitals in Argyll and Edinburgh.

I am saying these things quickly, trying to put too much in too few words, but I mean what I say and it matters to me.

Always I want to work from the individual, never in terms of sociology or even of psychology as a starting-point. Only this concentration on the individual to my mind is legitimate in such a sensitive and focussed commission as this one is.

Or maybe in the gap between sociology and song …

Language is celebratory, language shakes us up, language opens us up to the core, language keeps us going, enabling us to communicate and to manage

I’ve worked extensively in schools and hospitals as a writer, and with homeless and ex-homeless groups and individuals. In most projects and pieces of work I’ve needed to be aware of various layers of personal and social stress, and I’ve found it essential and also creatively welcome to be so.

And I’ve found that silence or the difficulty of communication, of not being aware that other people want to or can hear – all of which may also be close to the heart of writing – may be part of what can lead to suicide.

I think that writing poetry parallels our lives, becomes part of our lives, in the balance of control and of letting go. I hope that poetry by its nature, by our natures, involves engaged commitment and creative empathy.

In late November, after I’d been offered this work but before I’d started, while down with a touch of ‘flu I began to read Orhan Pamuk’s novel ‘Snow’. I like Pamuk’s prose a lot, but I didn’t know anything about this book before reading it.

In the novel the narrator, in some ways a man not unlike Pamuk himself, journeys to a town close by the mountains in the east of Turkey for two apparent purposes – to report on the elections there and also to write about the sudden high incidence of suicide among young girls in that region and city. Something uncanny must have happened to let me unwittingly read that novel at precisely that time, and I took it as a good sign.

In the autumn of 2005 Orhan Pamuk was brought before a court in Turkey for acts of so-called subversive writing against the Turkish Government. Although the case against him was dropped in February this year, other writers and journalists remain under threat of action.  They are the subject of considerable international concern and interest from International PEN and other human rights groups round the world.

Language is celebratory, language shakes us up, language opens us up to the core, language keeps us going, enabling us to communicate and to manage. The same with all the other things in our lives, and that, at heart, is why I am looking forward to this commission and to coming back to the north and west of Scotland so much.

I want to end with two poems, not directly concerning suicide, but concerning other sorts of sudden death and the reaction to such deaths of those who remain. In these instances, by chance, I was one of those who remained, and the senses or grief, pain, guilt, anger, outrage and always of love are, I think, close to some of the feelings to be found nearby the pained heart of the experience of suicide.

I wrote the first poem in 2001, soon after the death of a close friend; the second I wrote in 1992, ten years after the death of my daughter who had lived for exactly one week.

Sometimes a poem can be written very quickly, sometimes it takes longer to arrive.

For My Friend Max Sebald

 
Two months ago I was
talking to you in the Lithuanian forests : telling you
how old women from out of Druskininkai were walking
the blue floors of those stretched oceans with buckets
of mushrooms and moss

There space is old, trees are tall, memory is pain,
history is full of partisans and a sufi music conjures all
of us to whirl where the stalks of the forest barely sway.
I sensed you there because of the rotting of the music 
and I knew you’d care.

Your room still is full of photographs
your realm looked after by trees. You who eschewed all
computer trails have been taken away by a skidding wheel
by black ice or a seizure of the heart, lifelong discourse
and your daughter’s hurt

All I can do now is stagger
round my rooms mewling out your name Max, Max :
what will happen to language now, now you are not here
and who is left and how many remain of the anarchists
on the ice-floes of speech

These last weeks I had been
writing you postcards in my head : Max come to Whitechapel.
Come soon. Come and talk. Come and walk. Where are you ?
Why did you ? : but this has become an explosion of words
on the scarp of my pain

We’d talked about walking
from my village to yours : cutting a section across the Alps
or a section through a glacier’s brain. From Precasaglio
in the Alta Valcamonica to Wertach in the Allgau.
Now I will do that without you.

Before we met and surely ever since
we’ve been talking to each other. And even when the other
was not there we’d carry on in monologues to hear. I shall
go on talking to you for as long as my mouth can speak :
or what is the point of language

From where did I come
to this scarred field : you first heard my voice in your car,
you last lost your own voice there : what silence in the water,
what bird-smoke, what rough circle in our language has
brought us back to here ?

Dear friend, what is the use of speech :
I now asking of you questions you can no longer reach –
yet as you drift off to the snow-hole of your hills I hear
you say “they are ever returning to us, the dead” –
Max, I am listening …

17th/19th December 2001 (& early January 2002)

Song For My Daughter

After you had been on this earth seven days
you took your leave of it.
We knew you were dying only on the seventh day
and your mother held you in her arms and sang
the lullaby of your breath.

You were born in one hospital and
 died in another
with an ambulance drive between.
That was the only journey you made on this earth
other than the voyages inside your mother’s womb
and I was near to you all that time.

One ride in traffic through the crushed ventricle
of London streets.
But what could you have known of any of that ? I
who registered your birth and death in one go
do not know what you know yet.

Your mother sang you a Hindi lullaby as you went
O little lovely body of the ebbing
breath, she held you in her arms. Both of us were near
you, but could not go with you, nor could we mend
the bruised aorta of your heart.

Neither aura nor language were given you, nor
that we should recover our past.
Neither pain nor laughter nor the singing madness.
You who were born not to be, here in the heart
of the world.

I could have written a few short sentences saying some of these things. If I’ve written other things at too great length it’s because I wanted to open out the whole context and arena of this piece of work as far as I can and to try to make everyone feel at some ease with what I am trying to do.

Please contact me about this work, to question anything or to comment about anything or to send me your poems or texts :

Stephen Watts can be contacted at stephen@hi-arts.co.uk

© Stephen Watts, 2006