​Thinking about why we are liking reading George Eliot so much, I wonder whether moral dilemmas are really what all narratives are about, or all interesting narratives, and are what we read novels for, whether we are placed in the position of a character having to make a moral decision, sympathetic to the difficulties of the decision, as in a George Eliot novel or a novel by Anthony Trollope, or whether we read for insights into the characters of others, seeing how other people judge character and becoming alert to the clues other people are reading, or misreading, as in a novel by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens – with more or less subtle clues.  But then I wondered whether we even make primarily moral decisions any more, or whether we frame our decisions in other terms, as strategic decisions to effect particular goals.  (But how to do we decide on the goals?  Not in moral terms, but in terms of the games we find ourselves playing?) What is at stake in the decisions people make in novels now?  The contemporary novels that have made the most impact on me have been about the highest stakes moral decisions, and decisions that are almost impossible to make in an uncertain situation, a supernatural situation in both cases – the time-travelling scenario of Sandra Newman’s The Heavens, and the alternative life scenario of Jo Walton’s My Real Children.  Both are about the apocalyptic futures we are looking at, the apocalyptic futures that we are creating as a society, and what responsibility the individual has to try and avert the apocalypse, and a momentous, overwhelming responsibility is at least a plausible reading of the answer both novels could suggest although in both cases this reading is ambiguous.  In both those novels, too, as well as in the novels by Eliot and Trollope, the moral choices are never all that is at stake in the decisions that have to be made – even if the choice is made on moral grounds, it will affect the protagonists’ happiness, success, wealth, even the lives of others in ways that do not always neatly align, so that the right moral decision won’t necessarily work out best for the protagonist even though we want them to make it.  Maybe this is why many readers prefer Jane Austen to Eliot or Trollope.  As for my own writing, I don’t think my characters have ever made a moral decision in their narrated lives, they are driven by whim and circumstance, as perhaps am I, I can think of very few, if any, decisions I have really made on moral grounds exactly, although in another sense, I am always trying to do the right thing (for the hens, for my children), it is just a question of how, which is what I am usually all at sea over.  As for poetry, I can’t think of any poem I’ve ever written about a moral dilemma, and perhaps that is why I write poetry, not more (and not better) fiction.   

In thinking about hens, I seem to find clear evidence both for how distinct each hen’s personality seems to be from the moment they hatch out of the egg, and for how dependent their personality is on their place in the pecking order.  I have been spending some time in hospitals lately (not as a patient) and what is so striking is how many profoundly good people work there, people whose goodness seems absolutely intrinsically a part of their character, expressed in the smallest and most individual gestures as well as in the larger heroic acts of working long hours, beyond their shifts, day after day.  Obviously this goodness is not just situational.  It is hard to imagine any of these people going home and being less than good outside the hospital.  Perhaps it takes a certain kind of character to go into health care in the first place, perhaps even to look for administrative or receptionist roles within the health system.  Perhaps, though, also, the work required of them shapes their character, and the acts of care and attention their roles require them to perform become a part of who they are.  The Stanford Prison Experiment has largely been discredited, the experiment which divided students into prison guards and prisoners, and seemed to quickly lead to ordinary students becoming sadistic when given a prison guard role.  I am quite sure none of the people I’ve met in the hospital this week would become sadistic in a guard role situation.  George Eliot – whose fiction we’ve been reading to pass the time – doesn’t see character as situational either, or, rather, particular situations do bring out particular qualities of someone’s innate character, but the same situation would bring out very different qualities in someone else.  It is the particularity of the revealing responses to situations that is so enthralling in her fiction, as it is in the hospital. 

​I do know that hens are not human and humans are not hens so I make these remarks only out of my interest in the sociology of the hen coop, but I have found it very interesting what an effect situation has on hen personality.  One thing I have learned from keeping hens is how very distinct each hen’s personality is, almost from the moment the chick hatches out of the egg.  Fly was always a bold and adventurous chick who was likely to rise to her eventual position at the top of the pecking order of our flock, Orly was always more timid.  When I brought Brownie and Wilma into the coop, I selected a pair of hens who would not be dominant, worrying that Orly, who was lame by then, would be bullied, but I also asked for hens who could take care of themselves, worrying that Fly might bully hens who were too timid.  I was assured that these two knew how to stay out of trouble and would not cause any trouble themselves, and this turned out to be true.  It took some time before Fly accepted them as part of a flock, and for some time she was only interested in following me around during the day, shooing the others away if they came too close, but before too long they were a busy flock of three, when they weren’t back in the coop with Orly.  Orly retained her position over them in the pecking order, needing only to give them a sharp look for them to back away from her food.  At first, only Fly followed me into the bush on our spider hunts, but eventually Brownie started accompanying her, always keeping a few paces behind and letting Fly have first shot at catching any spiders we uncovered.  It was a long time before Wilma started to occasionally tag along, and I always felt she was tagging along after the other hens, rather than after me.  I always loved the sound of the hen feet trip-trapping over the bridge into the bush, feeling like the three Billy Goats Gruff.  They always sounded as if they were in a hurry.  After the loss of the other hens, Wilma herself was left with me as her only flock and it was interesting how quickly she took up Fly’s position following me around, waiting for me to shift the logs to reveal the spiders, digging where I was digging, talking to me about her finds, calling to me from the deck when I was inside the house.  Now we have the three little birds, Wilma is throwing her weight around in the coop exactly the way Fly used to and in a way Wilma herself had never done, giving a completely different impression of what kind of personality she has, as if personality were not innate at all but entirely situational.  It does make me wonder just a little about human psychology, and almost seems as if it ought to be interesting to think about this question theologically as well, except that it isn’t being high status that brings people closest to God but being rock bottom, and it isn’t only one person at a time in a community who can be close to God, but whole communities that are religious together.  But you’d expect the situation to be different for humans who are, after all, not hens.  (And of the three little hens, who clearly have very different personalities even though they have been brought into the coop at the same time, Maude already seems to relate to me as person to person, friend to friend, looking me in the eye, talking to me, and liking to be close to my side, even though she is not yet the lead hen of the coop.  Perhaps she feels like a lead hen because she doesn’t count Wilma, who is too far above her to be one of her peers.) 

I was talking to my friend Anne the other day about not wanting family to read our work, and how freeing it is that they don't.  I accidentally said this in an interview once and although Simon wasn't at the interview (not interested!) the brilliant Tara Black drew a comic of it and word got round, and back to Simon, that he wasn't interested in my writing and hurt his feelings a little bit.  But I was thinking about the I, Clodia poems and how I imagined every poem as being not simply a poem but a move in a complicated game, directed always at Catullus, as I imagined his poems directed always at her, always intended as strategy, but always, also, likely to misfire, to be the wrong move, to be taken the wrong way.   For me, it is as simple and uncomplicated for SImon to read my poems as not to, because they are not strategic moves in a game we are playing, there is no games-playing between us.  He isn't entirely uninterested in my poetry but he has no hermeneutic interest in it, he doesn't have to work out what I am saying to him with it, because for that, we can talk to each other.   There was a time, a few years ago, when I was lying on the carpet in our living room, and Simon was cooking in the other room, and I had the most profound sense of contentment.  I realised I was in the position I spent much of my childhood in, lying on a carpet, listening to my mother in the next room, and I remembered what it was like to be a child and be able to play the most complicated imaginary games in front of everyone, with some pieces of lego, or with coloured pencils on a piece of paper, or moving little figures and objects about, knowing that even with the outer workings of your inner life on display you were completely private because no one was remotely interested.  The child psychologist D W Winnicott called this feeling of profound safety being "alone in the presence of the mother."  I think my mother was very good at being present without being intrusive, and it is this sense of being alone in the presence of the world I think I find in writing now. 

My friend Rose’s father was a brilliant linguist who spoke more languages than I can count and was always learning another one.  The translation career he could have had! – as I helpfully pointed out to him.  “Why would I want to waste my time translating from a language I already know,” he said, “when I could be using the time to learn a new language?”  It is the other way around for me, I love translating above anything else, but cannot make myself take the time to learn any language well enough to actually be able to do it.  But is translation about language? Translation theorists have come so far in recognising the complexities of finding linguistic equivalences that translation can only exist through a kind of “collusion between translator and reader” in which “readers choose (or accept or authenticate) translations that are fit for purpose,” as Simon Perris puts it in his book about translations of Euripides (The Gentle, Jealous God – brilliant title).  For Theo Hermans, one of the translation theorists Perris cites, it is not the reader but the author, or a publisher, who authenticates a translation, establishing the equivalence of one text with another by “explicitly describing a target text as a ‘translation’ of its source text.”  What equivalence can’t be in “an inherent feature of relations between texts.”  No two languages are identical, after all, or they wouldn’t be two languages, they’d be the same language.  So what are translators doing?  All Perris can say about a translation is to call it “a text which repeats or gives an impression of repeating a text in another language,” but to suggest it “repeats” a text in another language raises all the questions that equivalence raises so we are left with a text which “gives an impression” of repeating another text, which makes me think of the improv comedy routine in which the comedians burble away in languages that aren’t languages at all.
But the assumption here is that the translator is translating the language.  If we assume the translator is translating meaning the problem largely vanishes.  If language refers to things in the world, another word can equally refer to the thing, and while this is more true of the objects themselves than the associations, codes, and contexts they suggest, all of this kind of interpretation of meaning happens even within the same language when a book is read in another country, or another time, or even just by a different reader. A literary work – or a conversation – isn’t just made up of words but by patterns of meaning, the unfolding of a narrative, the revelation of a relevant detail, the withholding of another, the repetition of a thought or a memory, the comparison of one thing with another.  No one writes in original words, all originality of thought comes out of the relation of one word to another, one thought to another thought.  Translation doesn’t translate words, it translates patterns.  And of course a pattern can be repeated in another language!  It is never going to be an exact equivalent but that is what makes translation such an endlessly enthralling and creative art.  Any translation is a creative translation, the most faithful perhaps the most creative of all.  The translator Lily Meyer goes so far – as have other translation theorists – as to argue that to translate a book is to write a book, which of course it quite self-evidently is – in one sense.  But there is more to writing a book than coming up with the words, which is all the translator has to do (and considerably helped by the fact that words for the words are already suggested in another language).  The idea that every translation is an original work might seem to solve a philosophical problem but I am still sure it would be cheating to translate a book from another language and pass it off as your own work.  Translating is about language, then, because writing books isn't really about the words at all.  
 
 
 
 
 

When I was young and heartbroken my friend Diana drew me a picture of a toothbrush with teeth instead of bristles.  I had completely forgotten this but it is recorded in a diary I kept at the time and surprisingly it did seem to have consoled me somewhat.  Only Diana could have come up with such an unlikely and yet effective gesture.  This is by way of thinking about grief and form.  One of the reasons why I find Robert Lax’s port poem so consoling is that it is almost pure form, just a repetitive arrangement of formal elements that offer such minimal meaning.  I have been reading and rereading two books of poetry this year that are organised around structures of grief, no, structures for grief, or for the expression of grief, or the organisation of grief, if I am not now just repeating the same words in various arrangements, which is in fact one of the ways grief can be expressed (or organised, or structured).  One of these is Anne Kennedy’s Moth Hour, in which she looks back to the death of her brother in 1973, and runs a really very lovely poem he wrote through a series of variations.  In the essay at the very end of the book she tells how she listened, in the days and months after his death to Beethoven’s Diabelli variations.  These poems that begin as variations on images and lines from Philip’s poem take off, as Anne writes of the Beethoven talking off, into more and more complexity, looping in more and more memories, stories, daily detritus, daily treasure, language play and language seriousness, till they swell to a kind of crescendo of thinking and feeling in the long lines of variations 30 and 31.  Philip’s poem imagines the self caught in a jar like an insect, fed on leaves and The Book of Tea, with a pen and paper to write on.  It is a poem as much about the child on the outside of the jar, instructed “to collect your imaginary mind.”  The imaginary mind is collected in these variations, which becomes, in variation 30, the collective imagination, entrapped and yet watched, and loved, of the generations X, Y and Z, defined in part in opposition to the “They” of variation 31.  I love the word “they,” all the ways in which this most wonderfully flexible word can work, and perhaps most especially the paranoiac way in which it seems to designate some controlling group responsible for everything that has gone wrong, in a world controlled and constructed far beyond our own volition, even as we become a part of the controlling, destructive generation.  “If I keep going with this poem I will break poetry,” the poet writes.  Almost!  But poetry is hard to break.  Already in variations 32 and 33 the pull towards the aphorism can be felt, but the repetitions and images also keep open the resonance of poetry.  The second section, The Thé, is miraculous, in its combination of brevity and reach, aphorism and whatever the opposite of aphorism is, something beyond narrative and poetry, and I have been thinking about brevity and poetry in ways this extraordinary work extends, but that will have to be for another post because I am discovering another rule which is these have to be written in one go, or edited in one go if I’m taking something I wrote from somewhere else, and I was going to write about Vana Manasiadis’s  The Grief Almanac, which is another complex and lovely collection of poems structured around grief.  The complexity of grief structures is suggested before the book is even opened, with the mesmerising cover art by Marian Maguire offering directions for the eye to take upwards and downwards, backwards and forwards, looking like a labyrinth without quite offering pathways to anywhere.  This is a book of indirect correspondances between the left-hand side pages and the right-hand side pages, each side offering its own way through a navigation of memory and response.  The collection ends with the yearning for (and promise of) a continued call and response between mother and daughter, and such a yearning, and such a promise, is all through the book in the ways memories sit opposite descriptions of art-works, narratives are presented in letter form, the past is pulled into the present, the present breaks into pieces, days cannot be disentangled one from another.  “The present pulls the plug on the present moment by moment,” Anne Kennedy writes in Moth Hour, and in The Grief Almanac Vana Manasiadis writes, “I’m leaving too, the me you knew, the me I knew with you.”  Grief sharpens the present moment into such a dazzle, such a dazzle of departure.  As Anne Kennedy also writes, “Beauty is the thing that goes surprise!” 

It was in November I had a recurring dream motif about a terrier.  It wasn’t a recurring dream but a recurring terrier that appeared in dream after dream needing to be released.  It did seem as if my unconscious was hard at work trying to tell me something I was repeatedly failing to grasp.  A terrier is a good image itself for the work of digging up something still alive from under the ground, but I wondered whether I could hear terrier as a version of the word worrier, a worrier being not someone who makes you worry but someone who themselves worries, who worries away at things like a terrier might worry away at a sock.  A terrier would be someone who allows themselves actually to indulge in the feeling of terror.  I have a way of telling myself “I am not okay but I will be okay,” but maybe I need to stop saying that, or maybe the terrier is not myself but represents someone else’s terror which needs to be heard. 

This kind of reading might seem to depend on Freud’s idea of dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, with the unconscious having all the answers that we consciously repress in order to carry on with our lives as they are.  It is such a resonant idea about how the self plays out I am not going to entirely let go of it, but it doesn’t seem to be very accurate.   What is now known of the unconscious is not the controlling, crafty unconscious that Freud distinguishes from the pre-conscious but something far more like that pre-conscious itself, unarranged, unobserved material that means nothing.  Dreams as we dream them seem to be best understood as nothing more than a kind of preconscious array of images that are only assembled into any kind of meaning as we wake.  What they mean has nothing to do with the unconscious but everything to do with our waking consciousness, consciousness being all about narrative.
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It is Coleridge, not Freud, who comes closer to being the Freud for our times, Coleridge who a century earlier was exploring how the narrativizing, meaning-creating consciousness makes ghosts out of pre-consciously perceived phenomena. And it was not Freud, but Coleridge, who invented the term “psychosomatic.”  Consciousness, in other words, is quite mysterious and powerful enough to be going on with.  On the other hand, Coleridge also claimed to have dreamed the Kubla Khan poem, and Simon last night dreamed about zombies that were impossible to tell apart from humans.  “Then how did you know they were zombies?” “Because they were chasing me.”  “Did you get away?”  “Yes.  I tricked them.”  “How?”  “I told them to go that way” – pointing the other way.  

J M Coetzee describes listening to Bach as a boy, with no education in classical music, and feeling “I was being spoken to by the music as music had never spoken to me before.”  Thinking how he can have come to have such a transcendant experience, Coetzee observes that in Bach’s music “nothing is obscure, no single step is so miraculous as to surpass imitation,” but in combination the notes represent “the incarnation of ideas of exposition, complication and resolution that are more general than music.  Bach thinks in music.  Music thinks itself in Bach.”  I have also learnt to listen to Bach by listening to Bach.  I was surprised by this anecdote all the same because it comes in the middle of an essay, “What is a Classic,” that is mostly about how a classic is defined by its own cultural status, and about how the emphasis of earlier writers like T S Eliot on some transcendant realm of literature is a way of justifying the propagation of an imperialist ideology.

Far more obviously than music, literature engages with ideas that are cultural, historical, political, ideological.  Claiming any kind of “transcendant” or “universal” experience of literature is easily read as universalizing historical values, as if what you are claiming is that a classical standard of beauty or literary value is the correct standard against which all literature can be measured, and as if you are claiming values such as stoicness, perhaps, or fidelity, should be held to as universal values transcending politics and history.  But if literature also “thinks itself” through the individual artwork, perhaps this can allow a universality of access that is independent of any universal agreement about the values, or concepts, involved, just as you don’t have to have any particular commitment to the note C sharp to appreciate its place in a Bach sonata?
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What does happen if you put a concept, like empire, or loyalty, or friendship into the place of the note C sharp?  Can we really understand a concept in purely formal terms?  Even before we come to the question of allegiance, there is the question of comprehension: are we hearing anything so stable as a note on a musical scale?  How do we know we are not reading the text off-key?  Are we, to a certain extent, making up our own tune?  This is when we turn to classical philology, to “roll back the years and reveal to us the original in all its gleaming, pristine purity,” as classicist Charles Martindale puts it, to emphasise the absurdity of such an enterprise, as if the original were ever “pristine,” outside of history and free of competing interpretations.  For a reception theorist like Martindale, concepts are always multivalent, and the shifts in meaning and interpretation across time are a part of the rich multiplicity of readings that a text allows.  A text is not a well wrought urn, as Cleanth Brooks has it, with the suggestion this also inevitably evokes (although only inevitably if you’ve read Keats) of the frozen figures on the urn, forever beautiful because forever still.  If a text is made up of concepts, these are inextricable from the play of ideology and ideas outside the text, in the historical moment in which it was written and beyond. 

Yet I hold three positions on this, all at the same time.  With Martindale, I see a text as having meanings that extend beyond the text, that are culturally constructed, and therefore also always changing.  At the same time, I also see a value in the work of the philologist and the historian to establish the significance of the terms and concepts at play in the texts, the work that allows us to hear C sharp as C sharp.  But I also think the text itself demands we hear C sharp as C sharp.  A philologist reads the word in relation to other textual uses of the word at the same historical period, but in each case the meaning of the word is defined too by its position within the system of values proposed by the work itself with its own “ideas of exposition, complication and resolution.”  To a certain extent, our understanding of the concept of loyalty, or empire, or gratitude depends on what it must mean, aesthetically, for the work of literature to work as a piece of literature.  (Just as we can determine the pronunciation of words in part by the demands of a rhyme scheme or the metre.)  And I think this means that we can be free to love the place of the concept within the aesthetic order of the text, without having to have any allegiance to the concept outside the text.  It is a suspension not of disbelief but of value.  Just as we believe in the ghost haunting a ghost story without having to believe in ghosts outside the story, so we can be haunted by beliefs or values we do not hold, but can allow to run through us as we haunt, in our turn, the literature we read. 
 

Listening to birds is one of the things I like best about every day and I like watching them, too, as Diana and I did yesterday while sitting and talking under a pohutakawa tree for so long the birds who had flown away all returned and got on with their lives above us.  But all I am seeing is birds, not particular birds with personalities – I can tell the difference between a tui and a blackbird but not between one blackbird and another, and I can’t tell anything about a particular bird’s personality by watching it.  Yet when I think of how individual each of my hens is, it must be true that each blackbird has a quite distinct personality, quite unlike any other blackbird.  The song that Keats’s nightingale sang may have been the self-same song that another nightingale sang to Ruth when she stood in tears amidst the alien corn, and there is something consoling in thinking of us still hearing the same bird songs now that people heard centuries ago, but the individual bird that sang then was irreplaceable, one of a kind, with its own world map of everything it knew, and with its own quite individual personality.