Anne Carson, Conversation, 26 October 2016

we're about to do my favorite thing of all when I first spoke to people at the Lannon Foundation the idea behind readings and conversations was that many a time people attend readings and go home as confused as they were when they came and the idea was to talk about the work that they had just heard read with the idea that you'd go home with the book and be able to read it and think about it further in ways perhaps that you hadn't thought of it before um in this particular case I'm as bewildered as I hope all of you are and I want to start by expressing that bewilderment now I assume that when we come to part three of this essay on theft threat threat excuse me we're meant to be silenced by a kind of confusion this wasn't made to be a solution yes yes and I've never seen you write before using the circumstances of mystery or of suspense or of thrillers and yet I don't know about all of you I was riveted both when reading and when hearing you read and I'm curious what kind of ending do you think the ending is what is accuracy we were talking earlier Michael and I about another a piece that's in the book float that's a new piece that's an essay on translation and in the format of an academic paper except that at the last paragraph we're in an academic paper the speaker says and now to sum up and then gives you a handy paraphrase of everything he's just said so you didn't really have to sit through it you could just come for the final paragraph I've never been good at that and as I said in that essay I don't know how to sum up and I do think that the best thing you can do in that place of summing up is to blast it open somehow you know perhaps with small means like swimming but just to I don't know what the word is diffuse the presumption that one can have thoughts alive in there in your mind in a room and then get a little nugget of summary of that and take it home and have it don't like that having the thought I like to be in the thought and then it goes away with the time so I think that it the accuracy is simply an abstract thing that can be introduced make the story go out of reach I love it I mean you know its endings are so boring when they satisfy the conditions that have been prepared for them yeah and when you ask in this piece what does an answer answer and how does an answer a fix to the question itta fixes like a stocking that has been taken off but still the blood-stained remains what an astounding preparation for us to feel in some very vital way bereft that's a good yeah that's a good mood to end on I think I mean not for us and on tonight but an effort of thinking to end on I was fascinated because you mentioned the stairways that are there without your remembering putting them there and it reminds me of something that I see everyone is stupid until they get smarter and I used to when I started out asked and rather stupid questions and I said well how did you link semana DS with Gertrude Stein and she said those were just both books on my desk I wanted to see what connected them and that is the method here to these characters do not exist this story is not a story this man woman doesn't study bloodstains or know about them there are no talking crows the whole thing yeah wait a minute Michael um but the whole thing is the making of something that the ioan ear hear and feel great need our need for answers our need to understand is perhaps the need that were most punished for in human life when we accept our inability to understand you name it grief what have you we start to feel a little bit better a little bit less Aristotelian huh or you can take that a step further letting go of the presumption of an answer or a tidy paraphrase then you can go on to think well what do I do with my mind my time in this room instead something exhilarating like just travel with it that's what the reason why but the answering is so frustrating to me is that it makes the thinking stop and the whole purpose of being together with other people in a room is to have thinking move somewhere I mean that is when you feel most alive in your life when you're thinking moves when you're thinking is still watching TV or whatever thinking the same thing you've always thought you might as well be dead I mean it is a deadness and living happens when your thought moves and I think it's not that hard to have that happen but you have to as you say relinquish some kind of complacency about about answering stuff yeah I'm going to have to get the tape to this conversation because I wrote these answers um there's a distinction then to be made between James Joyce on the one hand and Samuel Beckett who was once his secretary on the other Joyce felt that if you could amass enough information you could have Dublin within the pages of a book and Beckett felt if you could subtract enough information you could have something much more exciting nothing and I think that there are riders on the side of the something and riders on the side of the nothing and now riders like you we're trying to examine to put the something in the nother nothing next to one another I think that's true or at least throw them into a vacuum tube where they move around that reminds me this is not in any way relevant to what you're saying but the other day on the internet you ever read Wikipedia and it's full of the most enlightening typos and there was I think it was an essay about Beckett actually the phrase death is indeed nothing less nothing less one word they'd misspelled nothingness but this death is indeed nothing less is so perfect a summary of everything in Beckett you don't need to read there us yeah isn't it nothing less hover I interrupted what we're we do you have well you're going to out lovely me at every turn I uh do you have any explanation because you quote George Eliot in this piece and George Eliot is the person that people refer to when they're talking in particular about realism George Eliot and Anthony Trollope in fact they gang up together and they called Dickens mr. popular sentiment they launched a campaign but I'm curious because realism seems like a protracted seance that literature fell into and like fighting your way out of a bag we seem only now maybe to be escaping our need for its comforts huh you don't think I'm a realist excuse me you don't think I'm a realist you don't think I'm a realist I think that you Annette ceremonies of realism that's nice like that without it being realism exactly I think realism would bore you if you had to write it well yeah I get but see yeah I think though that there isn't any difference that there's I mean George Eliot trawl up what I'm trying to do it's all you know John Cage has this saying somewhere looking closely helps that's all it is in a different framework so I have a little tiny screen in my head George Eliot had a huge screen Trollope had like five heads worth of screens but looking at whatever shows up on the screen as closely as possible is all you can do to make a true piece of writing and that seems to me the essence of realism it isn't maybe about the color of the shoelaces that everybody had in the room but it is about whatever is actually on your screen yes yes and yet do you know this book this is a book that the people at new directions are published with four by and Carson it's a vast accordion and the accordion is a translation of a poem by Catullus the translation examined minutely because the Catullus translation is about a death a death of his brother and this is your occasion to examine the death of your brother and accompanying the translation we're not talking about something small we're talking about thrilling Kailash upon Kailash and as I went and and um hurry and I did a show together I played the sound of the fork opening on the radio because it is part of the book you can actually if you have one at home take it to the second floor of your house and drop it over this there and it will go two floors down and it makes a terrific unfurling sound it's not that bad for a book and it was made I think to realistically examine if anything could help in it you speak to the woman who you did not know who your brother was living with at the time of his death she answers questions in a very surprising and difficult way to take because she tells you things about your brother that you hadn't known and I think the whole prospect process of making something that whose shape you didn't know before you started who knows where it began did it begin with the brother's death or with a catalyst bomb at any rate the examiner of this will not know you can come away feeling that something has happened you have a book called grief lessons it's translation and after I read this book my father had recently died and I took a poem in Hebrew an alphabetical poem that begins with all of bad gimel dalet and I did what Anne had done because it felt like grief lessons it felt like maybe there is something about art that heals human sorrow and that we have to hope there is because art has always expressed human sorrow and who would know more about that than someone who can read The Iliad in Greek right well it was maybe I should explain people probably don't know this book the strange situation my father and my brother disappear in 1979 and showed up again in the year 2000 on the telephone he called me out of the blue and we had a conversation of a strange nature and it turned out that he had been living in Copenhagen for 15 years and had a wife and a whole life there anyway I arranged with him to a month later visit Copenhagen and meet up with him again and I bought a ticket after I hung up the phone and a week later I got a call that he had died so there was no meeting but I went and met his widow and his dog and then well let me say my brother was a mystery to me when he was alive and equally when he was dead so after I came back from Copenhagen that time I decided to make a book on to contain that mystery so I made I bought an empty book and put things on each page that were about him photos and little paintings and language and then on the left side of the book I analyzed as Michael says a poem of Catullus word-by-word so the two sides of the page kind of interact in a way that the word on the left-hand side evokes what happens on the right-hand side of page in a way but it wouldn't say that it gets anywhere as an explanation of who he was or who I was doing this with his life and death but going through that process change the whole situation somehow I can't say how I mean Michael says it helped him when his father died and I think that's true of other people who have spoken to me but I don't really understand any of why that works or what it's about or what it is really to sort of package grief in a book no it's kind of a barbaric thing to do what on the other hand I love the book there we are well in my favorite at this time pamphlet and float which is called variations on the right to remain silent there is a section or there are many sections and in this it's once again a demonstration of an Carson's belief in stacks which is the title of another pamphlet but there's notes it begins with a bit about the mysterious drug that Ulysses is given to avoid being turned into a pig by how do you say it querque seriously and then this material about John of Arc this material about Francis Bacon there's material about the poet her de lijn I mean and the gift of connection the structure of constructing staircases between these things has become to my mind more and more impressive over the times time that you've been working and so you say about Francis Bacon that what people call the violence of his work is not what bacon calls the violence of his work an interviewer is going on and on about the violence of the work and bacon is interested in the violence of the paint and in the paints ability not to depict violence but to be the essence of violence and therefore the interviewer at one point points to a swatch of white paint on a canvas and he said I was so sick of it I threw it at the canvas and then I decided to leave it there and that is the violence of that paint um to here I think in serious what does that word mean serious but at any rate in real writing the writing is what's doing the work the writing is not about something it is something it might be a structure of unanswerable questions or the question can I deal with my brother's death or any number of other unlikely things but this is the question art asks reality and reality has no questions to ask it seems to me in return that art is the asker of the question and really mean reality I think art is something to occupy your mind while you put up with reality no reality goes on you need to be doing something while reality goes on in its way and thinking is as I've said perhaps too much here thinking is what I prefer to be doing writing is the product of thinking but more and more as you say this is very insightful the staircase thing more and more what I do in order to think is just take five things it could be the five books on my desk or five words at random or five tasks some what gives me and try to make the mind move from one to the other just the connection is where the thinking happens and the connection that movement of connection is where it's suddenly exhilarating it's suddenly well that's what the immortality of poetry means it doesn't mean you live on after death it means there are moments of time in your life where you forget time you are immortal if you forget time I think language can do that for us but it has to be in that moving mode not stuck in thesis antithesis summary also in float there's a pamphlet called uncle falling yes on two very autobiographical sections about a childhood in Canada on northern Canada very and on hay and cold and silence and you say in the second part about your father that although you never had a long conversation in your lives that you liked each other fine that you joked with one another that on a two-hour drive to your wedding your first wedding he asked you do you think this fellow will stick with you and you answered yes and that was the entire conversation in the two-hour drive we drove on now you described both of you as tight-lipped yeah and um a bit remote um what I notice that's an astonishment in your writing any time I read a sentence of yours I see that there are two or three words that an ordinary person would put there that don't need to be there and they're missing and that the sentences are themselves tight-lipped and that here is a writer who might otherwise as you said be thought of as romantic but the extraordinary strictness with which you remove unnecessary gesture makes the writing spare and I would say doubly moving well bingo haha I think that would be the best I could do if I could do that because I've tried somebody said curry reminded me of this the other day somebody was talking to me about writing and said that the good thing I did in my writing was to have every word resist the next word or resist the way it should go and I believe that's accurate enough it's partly ordering us but it's partly trying to make the words take you into a fresh place and in that essay that Michael is talking about half it's about my father half it's about my father's uncle Harry who was a deaf hermit he lived all alone in the northern woods of Canada all his life and he was deaf so he didn't talk much and I think all of our the resisting nosov all our family comes from the example of Uncle Harry he was just a noble a noble unique person but he used you know five or six sentences in his life but he used them well that's an example that's where we stop I want to thank you and Norma Slee for the deep and straightforwardness of your answers and I want to pardon me for saying that I love you and I love your work and it's been a real privilege to be on stage facing you for this amount of time thank you you you

Channel: Lannan Foundation

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Keywords: Lannan, Lensic, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Readings and Conversations, poetry, classics

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Length: 29min 42sec (1782 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2017