Yesterday evening in my native town, or village, as I still think of it (although it has grown since my departure to something more town-sized), I went into the corner shop that I used throughout my childhood for buying sweets — fruit salads and blackjacks (four a penny); barley sugar sticks; and best of all, those thin wormlike strands of sweet coconut-flavoured pretend tobacco, wrapped in waxy paper, called Spanish Gold, which I am certain could not be sold to children today.

Old Mr J, the shopkeeper, had very bad teeth and no doubt had been on the real Spanish Gold all his life.

But the stuff obsessed me, and moreover fitted in perfectly with my career plans: to be a pirate, to ride wooden ships on the Spanish Main and do other exciting pirate stuff.

So yesterday, after visiting my elderly father, I go back to the shop for the first time in many years, to be served by a man a little younger than myself (the original Mr J’s grandson), and I am at once inside a time warp. I am six years old and using up my entire shilling allowance on sweeties. Old Mr J is leaning over me with his blackened stumps and national health specs and calling me ‘the young doctor’, while stuffing a white paper bag with teeth-rotting goodies.

Driving back to Cardiff I am in a kind of self-induced trance, in which I am trying to distinguish between the things that actually happened in that (by now mythical) sweet shop, and the things that my memory has conferred upon it over the interceding years. I realise then that the shop has also entered my personal dreamscape.

And later, as so often happens, a kind of answer arises in the book that I am reading. Or else, I contrive to find a corresponding thesis in what I am reading that maps almost perfectly onto my experiences in my childhood home town.

Propped up in bed on Sunday morning, reading The Witness, a novel by Juan José Saer originally published in Spanish as El Entenado, or ‘The Stepson’ — and beautifully translated by Margaret Jull Costa — I follow the hazardous experiences of the young narrator, an unnamed cabin boy on a sixteenth century Spanish expedition, who is captured by Native Americans on the River Plate. The Native Americans, while exceptionally courteous to the cabin boy himself, are about to cook and eat his shipmates, when he experiences a moment of clarity:

I think that was the first time – aged all of fifteen – that an idea with which I am now familiar first occurred to me: namely that the memory of an event is not sufficient proof that it actually happened, just as the memory of a dream that we believe we had in the past, many years or months before the moment in which we remember it, is not sufficient proof that the dream took place in the distant past rather than the night before the day on which we recall it, or even that it occurred before the precise moment we state that it has occurred.

And how often has that happened? You dream a dream, and are certain that you have dreamed it before: or else, even as you are dreaming it, you have the sensation that you are re-dreaming a dream you had many years before?

It then seems almost as if the world you enter in dreamtime is a continuum that exists with or without your participation, and when you dream you simply dip into it, witness (that word again) whatever happens to be occurring at that precise moment. But — and this is important — you remember part of the dream landscape from previous dreams, and you waken with a feeling of déjà vu that makes you feel as if you had just returned from a familiar place.

Sometimes, like yesterday evening in the sweetshop, it is as if that place exists neither in reality nor in dream, but some place in between.

I have been working on a book about the Black Mountains of south Wales, which is where I grew up, and to which I have returned to live, along with my family. The book consists of around 24 walks in which I pursue four broad themes: (i) the landscape and natural history of the massif (ii) local history and legends, (iii) my reflections on recent writings about consciousness and selfhood, and (iv) the degradation of the environment and the climate emergency.

I haven’t chosen a title yet (nor have I finished the book, which is due for publication next summer), but I was thinking of a suitable subtitle, and came up with ‘Ruminations in the Black Mountains’.

And then someone pointed out that the word ‘rumination’ has acquired a secondary and more pervasive meaning in the past few decades, thanks largely to the psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and her work on anxiety disorders and depression. In her writings, Nolen-Hoeksema adopted the term ‘rumination’ to describe the way people with depression become trapped in repetitive loops of negative thinking and, because of the pervasive reach of modern psychology and self-help culture over recent years, this negative meaning has come to overshadow the older, more peaceful meaning of the word.

I always thought ‘rumination’ to be a rather beautiful word, with its roots in the Latin ruminare, meaning to ‘chew the cud’. Cows, sheep, and goats are ruminants, that is, they swallow food, bring it back up, and chew it again in order to fully digest it. In biological terms, rumination is thorough, healthy, and vital for survival.

The word ‘rumination’ brings to mind (to me at least) the vision of the wanderer, ruminating on things, as he or she walks among sheep and cattle, who are ruminating in turn.

The term, historically, has stood in as an allegory for thinking things through in depth, ‘chewing the cud’ even entering the language as an equivalent expression. To savour an idea, to ponder it deeply, or meditate quietly upon such a thing.

Francis Bacon, John Donne, William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, to name but a few, have used the concept of ‘rumination’ in order to celebrate soulful, pensive contemplation.

Henry David Thoreau, meanwhile, perhaps the ruminator par excellence, explicitly compared his own peaceful, deep, intellectual states to the quiet, contented rumination of cattle, treating it as the ultimate state of mindful, positive solitude.

But now ‘rumination’ has been hijacked as a clinical term to describe the way that certain unfortunates stew in the mire of repetitive and harmful thoughts. And the psychological literature is so dominant in self-help circles that this negative definition has completely taken over as the predominant usage of the word.

Well, that’s ‘rumination’.

Having started, I may as well continue.

Words and expressions I heartily dislike

Below, I have compiled of a list of my least favourite words and expressions in current usage.

Multiple as in ‘multiple people have been injured’ WTF? What was wrong with ‘many’ or ‘several’, depending on quantity? Do people genuinely believe that saying ‘multiple’ somehow makes them sound more intelligent, authoritative or sophisticated? An example of linguistic inflation—using a more complex word where a simple one works perfectly well.

Going forward. What other direction would time be going in, duh? What was wrong with ‘in future’ or ‘from now on’? A meaningless placeholder or stalling tactic.

Reach out to — Why the drama? why can’t you just ring them or send them an email FFS. (Link to an article about this one in the New Statesman)

Utilise instead of ‘use’. Another case of linguistic inflation. Do you really think I’m going to be impressed by the extra syllables?

Absolutely as a replacement for ‘yes.’ You hear it in such innocuous situations as “Would you like a top-up?” “Absolutely!” — which strips the word of all meaning, instead conveying a sense of phoney bonhomie: It has become a reflexive performance of enthusiasm, which inevitably makes the speaker sound disingenuous.

Perfect for ‘thank you’ or ‘that’s fine’. Why does it have to be ‘perfect’? Almost nothing is, so today isn’t likely to prove the exception. (I am guilty of using this myself, especially in its Spanish form).

and finally:

Literally — a classic case of what linguists call ‘semantic bleaching’, whereby a word loses its meaning through overuse,

as in:

“I literally died laughing.”

“His jaw literally hit the ground.”

. . . though of course there is a comic element to all of this:

'“She literally threw me under the bus."

Just out of curiosity I asked Substack’s graphics generator to reproduce the last expression for me and it delivered this alarming image in which the lady has grabbed what appears to be the gentleman’s ‘middle leg’ — and he is not in any way ‘under the bus’, not yet anyway. The bus driver is looking on with some concern.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

I filmed this isard, or chamois, a few summers ago while hiking above Coma de Vaca, in the Spanish (Catalan) Pyrenees. I came across the clip on my laptop this morning and thought I would share it.

I had hiked up from the town of Queralbs that morning, and reached the Coma de Vaca by midday, before continuing up towards the path that leads to the refuge at Ulldeter (ull+de+ter = the eye, or source, of the Ter river) where I planned to spend the night.

It felt as though we were the only living beings on the mountain that afternoon. There was an extraordinary silence all about us. The way the isard bounds down that slope, stopping to check me out, then carrying on its way, pausing again to make sure I am still there . . . it fills me with wonder, every time.

For years I thought that isards were wild goats, but they are in fact members of the antelope family, cousins to the gazelle. They are found only in the Pyrenees, the Cantabrian mountains of Spain, and the Italian Apennines. By the late 1950s the species had been hunted almost to extinction for the production of chamois leather. The population has since recovered, and there are currently estimated to be about 50,000 animals within the Pyrenees.

Not entirely unconnectedly, I received as a birthday gift a copy of the poems of Miquel Martí i Pol (1929-2003), one of the great Catalan poets of the last century. Here is my first effort at a translation of the title poem ‘Un dia qualsevol’, which feels oddly prescient:

On a day like any other

On a day like any other I will burrow
down into the earth, dig a deep hole
so that death might find me standing
—defiant, reckless.
I will stubbornly endure the rain 
and put down roots in the mud of myself.
Wordless, my breath will suffice
to affirm a strictly 
vegetable presence.
The skeleton that harbours me
will harden into rock, 
and I shall cry out —eyes wide open—
against the times to come
and their insatiable corruption.
Ridding myself of all turpitude
without trace or shadow,
I will never again turn my head
to gaze upon the past.

Since we have moved into poetry, I would also like to share a poem by Piedad Bonnett, the Colombian poet whose work I am currently translating for Carcanet, to be published next July, under the provisional title of What’s Terrible is the Edge. (Incidentally, I have shared three other poems by Bonnett on Raids on the Underworld). This poem, ‘Armonía’, (Harmony) opens my selection:

Harmony

Listen how the tigers love each other
and the jungle fills with their deep panting, 
and the night splits open with their ferocious lightning. 
See how the stars revolve in harmony’s
eternal dance and their silence 
overflows with vegetable whispers.
Smell the thick honey the trees distill, 
the dark milk their leaves exude. 
The entire universe braids and unbraids 
in infinite secret intercourse. 
Wise geometries interlace the forms 
of sweet snails and ungrateful serpents. 
In the sea is a siren song.
Touch my skin, 
tremulous for you and exposed to thorns, 
before the rhythm of my blood falls quiet, 
before it returns to water and to the earth.
 

And finally, another Colombian, Rómulo Bustos Aguirre, with a short poem that sings with bright and mischievous intent:

Story

I ask myself: why do I write poetry?
And from some place in the mysterious forest 
(in that other story that I am trying in vain 
to write with this poem) 
the wolf replies 
with a Socratic movement of his bushy tail: 
– The better to know you. 

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

Walking last week where the Pyrenees descend towards the sea, I came upon a young tortoise, to be precise Testudo hermanni hermanni, a rare, critically endangered native species found only in the Albera Massif of northern Catalonia. The tortoise was very bold, and his curiosity was such that his head protruded dangerously from his shell, despite my looming presence.

He scuttled off, but must have had second thoughts about me, because after a few seconds he pulled his head in and froze. I remembered how, some years ago, only yards from here, Bruno the dog (2006-2022) once scooped up one of these and I, preoccupied in my gathering of pine cones, assumed he was playing with a stone . . . but it was not a stone, and it took me a while to prise the poor creature from his slavering jaws, secure the dog, and release the (miraculously unharmed) tortoise back into the wild.

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Last Wednesday there was a full moon, and I decided to take a walk up to one of my favourite places, the Dolmen del Barranc, which was built between 3200 and 2700 BC., in other words, around the same time that — at the other end of the Mediterranean — the Minoan civilisation was kicking off, which is relevant, to me at least, as my head has been full of labyrinths these past few weeks, to the extent that when I dropped into the Spar in Perelada to buy a bottle of plonk for use in a risotto, there was only one possible contender, this little number, named Laberinto — a snip at 3.50 Euros.

To return to topic, the Alberas range provides a remarkable density of menhirs and dolmens (or burial chambers), which suggests that the region was permanently settled from an early date. The Dolmen del Barranc is a megalithic tomb designed for group burials, or for many burials over time. Constructed of slate slabs, it features a trapezoidal chamber and a dry-stone passage with a semicircular vestibule at the entrance. The capstone is split in two, and numerous rock engravings can be seen on it; some depict human figures, while others show geometric shapes and anthropomorphic crosses (see photos, below).

Nearly all of the burial chambers in these mountains are aligned towards some point in the quadrant between east and south, thus facing in the direction of both sun and moon as they rise. I once passed a very interesting couple of hours lying flat on my back on the capstone of the Dolmen del Barranc, on a night when the Milky Way was swirling in all its splendour directly above me, such that after a while it resembled a vast whirlpool and I had the distinct feeling of being sucked into its vortex.

On this more recent visit, the moon came up punctually at 9.15 pm, and I photographed it from my perch on the far side of the dolmen. Unfortunately the iphone isn’t great at capturing the moon — and the photo doesn’t do it justice, as the moon was actually huge, and of that startling blood orange colour . . .

Mirroring the Night Sky

Another megalithic site nearby is, for me at least, closely associated with the night sky. For several years, on and off, I tried to locate certain ‘stone sculptures’ or rock markings high in the Alberas, within the municipality of the village of Rabós. Puzzled by a signpost on a lonely track that reads ‘ESCULTURES 400m’ and finding nothing on a couple of earlier excursions, I was finally led to the place by my neighbour, Joan Castelló, back in 2015.

The rock markings are known locally as ‘Les Cassoletes’ — little cooking pots — as they resemble such articles in shape, and have been dug into a large flat rock. These markings also date from between around 3,000 and 1,000 B.C. There has been some speculation that the carvings were done more recently, in either the medieval or modern period, but archaeologists, such as Josep Tarrùs i Gallter et al, 1998, have dismissed this idea, in their study ‘Reflexions sobre els gravats rupestres prehistorícs de Catalunya: El cas de l’Alt Empordà’ (the article, which is in Catalan, can be found here). In their essay, the authors argue that the engravings are unlikely to have been made at any period other than the neolithic, since (i) there are common patterns of coherence in terms of locale and detail; the engravings are always found alongside megalithic formations (burial chambers, menhirs etc.); (ii) the techniques used in making the inscriptions are uniform across the area between Mount Canigou in France and the Cap de Creus Penisular, all featuring indents and grooves made by a hard object or chisel; (iii) the iconographic coherence: circles, cruciforms, angles, human figures and ‘cassoletes’ are found uniformly across the area.

But the scholarly study is resoundingly silent on what most interests me: what do the signs on the rock represent?

Whatever we do or do not know about our Neolithic and Bronze Age predecessors, I cannot help but speculate on the shapes presented on the rock before me. I do not think the sculptors of the Neolithic were any less serious in making their mark than were the cave painters of Lascaux: they represented the core matter with which their lives were concerned. Staring at the markings, I could only see them as reflections of what lay directly above: the constellations. And of one constellation in particular, which, like most people, I can usually make out even if I know very little else about astronomy, as it is one of the most clearly identifiable patterns in the night sky.

I could only see one thing when I looked at the rock, and that was a mirror image of The Plough, in the constellation of Ursa Major, The Great Bear.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

Last month, at the Chania Book Festival on the island of Crete, I took part in an event titled ‘When National Minotaurs Cross the Sea: Smyrna, Wales and Crete.’ I referred to this briefly in my last post, dated 9 July.

Since then, labyrinths, and ideas related to them, have been popping up in my life with remarkable persistence, and I learned long ago that when such things happen — when I am visited by some image or symbol more often or more forcefully than can be due to mere chance or happenstance — it is usually worth paying attention.

During my trip to Crete I was beset by sense memories — feelings that were ‘my own’ but which seemed lodged very much in the place itself, the streets of old Chania, the familiar expanse of the harbour, the old Venetian walls —memories which emanated from the very stones of the place, and which re-ignited long-buried emotions from the time I lived on the island, many years ago.

One thing that the Cretan trip has unlocked for me is a sense of the layered nature of lived reality. Within each flake or fragment of recorded experience, deep within each tenuous memory, lies the shadow or the scent of another, spiralling off into some (as yet unknown) possibility, another flake or layer of lived reality . . .

Alongside all the countless permutations and possible renderings of a lived experience, I would include the things that didn’t happen, but might have, all of them together comprising an interweaving, overlapping unified whole, in a way that resembles nothing less than . . . a labyrinth.

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Penelope Reed Doob, whose book The Idea of the Labyrinth discusses images and interpretations of the labyrinth from Classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, points to a fundamental paradox in early representations of the labyrinth, due to “its status as simultaneously a great and complex work of art and a frightening and confusing place of interminable wandering — the labyrinth as order and as chaos, depending on the observer’s knowledge and perspective.”

Leafing through her book, I came across the design for a labyrinth that was carved into stone at Rocky Valley, near Tintagel in Cornwall. There are, in fact, two mysterious spiral labyrinths carved into an exposed rock face, and they are startlingly clear. These carvings feature the classic Cretan labyrinth motif, which is identical to designs found on ancient coins from the island.

As it happens, the design is also that of the labyrinth on the wall of my study, facing me as I write. This is an early mosaic by my wife, Rose, pictured below. It was done, she tells me, without any conscious reference to the Tintagel design, but as the representation of a typical labyrinth.

While these designs share striking visual similarities to those associated with the mythological labyrinth at Knossos, archaeologists have disputed the exact age of the Cornwall carvings. Some scholars attribute them to the Bronze Age, while others date them to early Christian pilgrims in the medieval period or subsequent neopagan traditions.

The “classical” labyrinth design is seen not just in Crete and Cornwall, but also on rocks in Galicia, Spain, and in ancient tombs in Sardinia, indicating that these symbols spread along the very same ancient coastal and overland trade routes connecting Britain to the Mediterranean. Specifically, tin mined in Cornwall ended up in Crete.

Therefore it seems possible, or even probable, that the Tintagel design originates from the Great Island.

Synchronicity

But let’s consider this from another angle: the fact of me coming upon these images right now, on returning from Crete, a place that was my home during the early 1980s.

Why, in other words, are these images and thoughts coming to me now?

In the book Man and His Symbols, co-authored by C.G. Jung and a few close colleagues, the labyrinth is summarised as a kind of global cross-cultural blueprint:

In all cultures, the labyrinth has the meaning of an entangling and confusing representation of the world... it can be traversed only by those who are ready for a special initiation into the mysterious world of the collective unconscious.

In Jung’s psychology, the labyrinth is an archetype for individuation — the lifelong, often circuitous quest to integrate the conscious ego with the unconscious, ultimately discovering the Self (or the totality of the psyche).

Central as Jung’s interpretation might be (to my understanding, at least), it is not, however, the question that most concerns me right now.

Unicursal and Multicursal

Years ago, on Ricardo Blanco’s Blog (the predecessor to Raids on the Underworld) I wrote a piece that received a mild scolding from a philosophy professor, who claimed that I had confounded the unicursal ‘labyrinth’ and the multicursal ‘maze’.

Now, I was aware of the difference at the time, but was somewhat unconvinced by it.

In simple terms, the difference between a labyrinth and a maze is supposedly as follows:

A labyrinth is unicursal — it has a single, continuous, non-branching path that leads to the centre, meaning it is impossible to get lost. A maze, on the other hand, is multicursal: a complex puzzle featuring multiple paths, branches, and dead ends designed to confuse and challenge those who enter.

But according to Penelope Reed Doob, the distinction is a fallacious one, or at best a distraction. She states, in her book, The Idea of the Labyrinth, that our focus on the essential multicursality of mazes and unicursality of labyrinths is too narrow, and that mazes and labyrinths are essentially the same thing. And what ‘mazes’ and ‘labyrinths’ hold in common is far more significant than what differentiates them. In Reed Doob’s words:

“ . . . whether the labyrinth consists of a single path or many, whether choice is paramount or ignored, the course from entry to center is profoundly circuitous, turning to and fro and covering much more ground than is necessary to get from one point to another.”

Joe Milutis, in an essay from 2009 that can be found in Cabinet magazine, makes an intriguing point regarding the historical distinction between ‘maze’ and ‘labyrinth’, and points out that another kind of agenda is at play in the use of the unicursal labyrinth as a metaphor for religious enlightenment or self-discovery:

While one might be tempted to compare the historical loci of the labyrinth with the geopolitics of today, the analogy might be too hasty, too easy. Yet a recent Op-Ed in the Boston Globe has taken the opportunity to make wild connections between mazes and Iraq, and goes as far as to say that we merely need to change the maze into a labyrinth to get out. Taking the lead from Hermann Kern’s impressive but finicky study of the labyrinth, some commentators have tried to distinguish the term labyrinth from the maze by asserting that the labyrinth is unicursal (one path that winds into and out of the center) while the maze is multicursal (many paths with culs-de-sac). As evidenced by this Boston Globe piece, the influence of this newly invented distinction is deep. New Age writers have attributed so many magical powers to this idea of a meditational walking labyrinth without dead ends—based primarily on their interpretation of the Chartres model—that, in order to protect the integrity of this magic, they have waged a campaign of terminological reeducation, whereby labyrinth initiates must not use the term labyrinth to convey anything other than the single-path, meditational design. To more subtle writers, this distinction does not stick. Penelope Reed Doob, for example, who starts her study of the labyrinth with a flat-out statement that mazes and labyrinths are the same thing, writes that our focus on the essential multicursality of mazes and essential unicursality of labyrinths is too narrow—a theoretical instance of “concentrating on accidentia, in the Scholastic sense: on attributes that are not absolutely necessary for a thing to be a thing.”

To my mind, a labyrinth (or rather, a maze, according to the classification described above) is not only a metaphor for the questing self, and a means of self-transcendence, it is also a way of getting purposefully lost, of going up blind alleys, of plunging deeper into one’s own lack of knowledge and coming back with something unknown, of finding surprising routes to places we never intended going. Of noting that the exit to the labyrinth is sometimes marked ‘Entrance to the Labyrinth.’

The Network

In the catalogue to an exhibition about labyrinths that I visited in Barcelona some years ago — one of the most absorbing shows I have attended — there is a short essay by Umberto Eco, ‘Et in Labyrintho Ego’.

In it, after discussing the difference between the unicursal labyrinth and the multicursal labyrinth or maze — both of which might be represented as a kind of ‘tree’ structure (above) Eco proposes a third type of labyrinth, the network, in which each point can be connected to any other point. You never get out of the network: you keep going round and round inside.

Eco defines it as follows:

In the network, every point can communicate with any other, allowing one to traverse it endlessly; and yet, the network cannot be laid out in a tree structure (as the other two can). Thus, whether the network is infinite or—despite its complexity—finite like the one in the previous image, one never exits it; one always circulates within, and the illusion of freedom arises because the network is so vast that it creates the impression of traversing it without limitations.

Come to think of it, a dictionary—and therefore our language—is also made up of networks. A dictionary tells us, for instance, that a dog is a quadrupedal animal that barks; yet we then have to look up the meanings of “animal,” “quadruped,” and “bark,” and each of these entries leads to others, continuing on to (apparent) infinity, without our realising that the network is circular and there is no way out.

I believe our knowledge is structured this way—something we come to understand when we start navigating the Internet. And perhaps the world is structured this way, too. And perhaps—for believers—so is God: the Necessary Being par excellence, who can never step outside Himself.

Hence the fascination with labyrinths. *De te fabula narratur*—the story is about you.

Eco’s summary of the third kind of labyrinth leaves us eternally scrolling some social media platform on our phone, perhaps the condition that most aptly encapsulates the lost souls of the twenty-first century. . .

Alternatively, of course, we might consider the ouroboros . . . but let’s keep that for another day.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

Received wisdom has always been ‘Never Go Back’, but I beg to differ.

I’ve been going back for as long as I can remember and although it sometimes incites moments of regret or remorse, or else presents me with a puzzle that needs resolving, I can truthfully say that I know no other way. The past feeds the present and, as a writer, the creative process usually involves the confluence of experience and imagination. And what is experience, if not our accumulated knowledge of the past? Even if we feel we have very little in common with our former selves.

In any case, the past always returns to us in some form or other, whether we like it or not — or, as I cited a couple of posts ago: ‘Yesterday comes round sooner than you think’ — so why not embrace it?

This was behind my thinking when I accepted an invitation to attend the 5th Chania Book Festival, in Crete, which took place in the final week of June. My thanks to Literature Across Frontiers for arranging my appearance at the Festival. I’d also like to acknowledge the support of the Arts Council of Wales.

One of my tasks in Chania was to lead a writing workshop alongside the Palestinian/Syrian/Swedish poet Ghayath Almadhoun on the theme of ‘Writing about Conflict’, moderated by the excellent Alexandra Büchler. I had never worked with Ghayath before and I was impressed by his professionalism, his warmth and, perhaps surprisingly, his humour. For those interested, his video poem ‘Evian’ can be found here. His poetry is published by Divided in the UK and Action Books in the USA.

I also took part in a discussion with the Greek-American writer Christiana Lambrinidi, with the head-spinning title: ’When National Minotaurs Cross the Sea: Smyrna, Wales and Crete.’ The event was presented by Pavlina Marvin, and her questions had us spiralling down labyrinths barely known to woman, man or beast, and across borders of space and time. The simultaneous translation for this event was superb: questions were posed to me in Greek and I answered in English. Audience members were equipped with headphones, and all went well, as far as I could tell . . .

The Past

I lived in Chania for just under two years in the early 1980s, and was the owner of a six metre fishing launch called the Aghios Nektarios (Holy Nectar), although, truth to tell, I was never much of a fisherman. Correction: I was a lousy fisherman. But I did enjoy loafing at anchor in my brightly-painted boat, a little way off the coast, waiting for nothing much to happen.

I had moved to Crete with the proceeds from an industrial injuries payout — I had an accident with a circular saw while working in a reproduction furniture factory in Shoreditch, east London — and when the money ran out, I made a living picking oranges, hauling sacks in an olive oil mill and other labouring jobs. And then — in what was the high spot of my working life before becoming a creative writing professor, two decades later — I became a waiter in one of the dodgiest restaurants in the world, the Diporto, (literally, the ‘Two Doors’) but known to its international clientele by a variety of other names, such as ‘The Fish Restaurant’, ‘The Pigs’ Balls’ (after an item on the menu) and even ‘The Unspeakable’ (this being a translation of the Greek ‘amaletita’, which refers to the previous item, more daintily known as ‘sweetbreads.’

The place acquired a status in my unconscious as a zone of eternal return, and for many years afterwards I would dream about To Diporto, finding myself in an oneiric Chania and having to seek it out, vainly scouring the streets and alleys of the town, only to find that it was no longer there, or that it was but had shifted location, changing its shape and its décor, constantly evading me.

The front entrance to this taverna could be found half way down Skridlov Street, the narrow thoroughfare that is lined by shops selling leather goods, for which reason it is known to locals and foreigners alike as Leather Street. I had wandered into the place on my first night in Chania, back in April 1981, and as soon as I set foot inside, I knew that this dingy, badly-lit, anarchic, cramped and disreputable little taverna lived up to my notions of the ideal drinking-den. The food was basic: a predictable range of fish and seafood, liver, pig gonads (obviously) and pork chops. There was no moussaka and there were no desserts. The wine was strong and rough, and served in old beer bottles. The owner, Michalis Kostakis, was sly and endearing: he only appeared to be slightly threatening, to those who didn’t know him My job involved waiting tables and transcribing all the orders into Greek on a little note pad, known as a blockaki. Like a true pro, I kept a pencil behind my ear for that purpose. Michalis spoke only Greek, though his English extended as far as yelling ‘Seedow’ (Sit Down) to anyone who came into the restaurant enquiring after moussaka, or anything else we didn’t have on the menu. My task was to persuade them to stay.

At night, several tables lined the narrow pavement outside the front: these were usually taken by carousing travellers, the post-punk detritus of northern Europe and stoned hippies who had gotten lost on their way back from India. The narrow front room held six or seven tables, a large display fridge, and boasted a single piece of artwork: a print of the parachute landings during the battle of Crete, in which a swarthy Cretan has just taken a swipe at a descending German paratrooper with his shepherd’s crook.

Michalis worked behind the stove in a little kitchen recess which overlooked both the front room and a section of the restaurant that lay at a slightly lower level and boasted an antique jukebox. The remainder of the clientele consisted of Greek naval conscripts carrying out their obligatory thirty-month military service, American naval personnel from the base at Souda Bay, assorted maniacs and oddballs, and local scrapings of the underworld, notably prostitutes from the Splanzia district and their pimps. One regular was a sixty-year-old German survivor of the parachute drop of 1941 with a weakness for pigs’ balls, who had returned to buy a holiday home in the land he had invaded as a young man. I was loving Creta from the first time I have come, he told me, unabashed. Which, considering the fact that he regularly sat at a table opposite the aforementioned poster, indicated a breathtaking cluelessness.

Another regular was the British artist John Craxton (about whom I have written before), whose painting Still Life with three Sailors (1980-85) is almost certainly set in ‘To Diporto.’

Atemporality and retrocausality

The warning to ‘Never go back’ seems to be directed to those people inclined to indulge in an unhealthy form of nostalgia, who go back in order to sample what they felt in a place before. But that is not why I go back to places. I returned to Crete, for instance, in the full knowledge that I am a different person, that I share very little in common with the RG of 1981-2 and, if truth be told, when I return to the places of my past I feel more like a tourist (or an alien) or like someone rewatching a half-forgotten movie in which one of the principal actors happens to resemble a former version of oneself.

Since I don’t really believe in the continuity of a single, intrinsic self, I don’t feel a particularly strong connection with the person I was back then. I might summon up a degree of compassion for him, might ’feel his pain’, if you like, but I have no sense at all that we are the same person.

In fact, as I get older, I find myself increasingly convinced that events do not occur in a predictable sequence across linear time, but rather that time, as we commonly define it, is a human-measured abstraction, and the fundamental nature of the cosmos is entirely atemporal. Time doesn’t really pass at all, and our perception that it does is due to our limited perspective on the world. It makes far more sense — to me at least — that past, present and future form a single, possibly infinite whole.

In other words, I am inclined to stick by Albert Einstein’s pronouncement that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Or, as T.S. Eliot famously put it:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time in unredeemable.

                 'Burnt Norton', from Four Quartets

And just to add to the mix, there’s always the possibility that the ‘present’, as we experience it, is as much a consequence of the future as it is of the past: the term ‘retrocausality’ suggesting the ability of the future to influence or alter the present — or of the present to do the same with the past. (For anyone interested, I have written about retrocausality here.)

Having recently become a grandparent, the idea that the present is in some way dependent on the future, and unravels in accordance with events yet to occur, has a definite appeal. And it’s certainly more attractive than the belief that one should ‘never go back’!

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

Today I’m off to Crete to attend the Chania Book Festival, an event that has been growing in reputation since its inception in 2022. Chania was my home for a couple of years in the early 1980s, so I’m excited to be returning, though a little apprehensive at the changes I’m bound to find.

This, the 5th edition of the Festival, is dedicated to the theme of ‘Worlds in Conflict’ , and since I am taking part in three events, I have been giving my attention to this topic. Currently our world seems engulfed in far too many wars, conflicts and other sources of suffering. Despite Trumpy’s claim to have ended ‘between eight and ten wars’, the facts — as so often in his obdurate and muddled pronouncements — point elsewhere. Conflict, and a sense of impending violence, if not of outright catastrophe, seems to be everywhere.

In seeking out examples relating to violence and conflict in my own work as a writer and translator, I come to land on María Rivera’s extraordinary contribution to the poetry of witness, ‘Los Muertos’ (‘The Dead’), which I translated for my anthology of Latin American poetry, The Other Tiger (Seren, 2016).

Rivera’s poem was triggered by the murder in 2010 of 72 Central American migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. At the time, groups of Central American migrants were in the habit of passing though Mexico on their way to a ‘better life’ in the USA, and Mexican criminal gangs began targeting these migrants in order to exploit them as forced labor, extort their families for ransom, or else forcibly recruit them into cartel ranks.

The Zetas gang massacred the migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, because the victims refused to become cartel mules. The following year, in an horrific sequel, the Mexican Authorities discovered 193 bodies in a series of mass graves, also in San Fernando. A second massacre had taken place. Over this period of 2010-2011, the slaughter of migrants somehow became symbolic of the extreme violence and corruption in the region. The Zetas managed these operations with almost total impunity because they had successfully infiltrated and placed local police forces on their payroll.

The value of a human life

The next year, 2012, I began my own travels in Mexico, meeting poets who might contribute to my anthology-in-progress. There were several States I was advised not to travel to, and the State of Tamaulipas was one of them. However it was a time of considerable unrest, and I did witness an extremely adversarial police presence in other States, and on more than one occasion the vehicle I was travelling in was stopped and searched.

One day, as I walked down a street in Xalapa, a policeman seated on the back of a pick-up truck trained his machine-gun on me for what seemed like a very long time. Although it was an act of blatant intimidation, I can remember thinking “try to act normal, stay calm” and the truck going by as if in slo-motion, the barrel of the policeman’s gun unmoving. And although it was a very minor incident, and was over within seconds, it made an impression for the implication that it carried; namely, the causal dismissal of the value of a human life. Far worse things were being done to other people, and I witnessed some of them. But I digress . . .

María Rivera’s poem has achieved a good deal of attention, both in Mexico and as a result of its translation into English, which I was encouraged to undertake by friends in Mexico, the poets Pedro Serrano and Carlos López Beltrán.

Honouring the murdered migrants

After completing a draft of the translation, I wrote to María Rivera with a few questions and received a very welcoming reply. She was gratified that her poem would appear, as she put it, across the pond, especially because the poem was written, in large part, to honour the 72 Central American migrants who tragically didn’t reach the United States and were buried in Tamaulipas. “It is,” she wrote, “a form of poetic justice to know that this poem has a migrant nature of its own.”

If you wish to read more about the poem itself and its composition, here is a link to an informative article and interview with Rivera, by the writer Dylan Brennan. As is clear from Brennan’s piece, ‘Los Muertos’ received considerable resistance from within the Mexican Poetry Establishment, if not outright censorship. As Rivera explained to him:

It was poorly received by other poets (still under the influence of Paz’s normative ethics) who thought that poetry shouldn’t (or couldn’t) deal with these themes, who recriminated me for the decision to not “poetically elaborate” (erase) the brutal violence suffered by those people. This, as far as I’m concerned, constitutes a form of open complicity with the crimes. I was even subjected to the machista suggestion that I should just concern myself with my interior world (with my husband and daughter) . . . I came face to face with the reality that, in Mexico, a supposedly democratic country, poetry can be censored by intellectuals and writers (transformed into the executing hand of the government), that the degree of collusion, in order to render victims invisible, not only implicated the criminals and the authorities but, also extended to members of the intellectual class who actively participated in the silencing of this Mexican horror.

Publication of the poem led to death threats and threats of sexual violence against the poet. Significantly, though, it also became a powerful tool for poetic activism. As well as reporting on the murders of migrants, it harnessed attention on the femicides taking place in the city of Ciudad Juárez, and the wider theme of the treatment of women in Mexico. It was embraced by the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity) and Rivera read it at major demonstrations where it was heavily cited by prominent activists such as Javier Sicilia.

‘Los Muertos’ also had an airing at the 2017 Hay Festival. At the event launching The Other Tiger, the translation was read by the poet and broadcaster Clare Potter, with an effect on the audience that was physically palpable.

The recording below was made by Clare in the rather more restrained environment of her home during lockdown. I posted it on Ricardo Blanco’s Blog on June 10, 2020. I recommend following the text below as you listen to Clare’s reading.

For those of you who can follow the Spanish — or who simply want to hear the original — there is also a link, here, to María reading her poem in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central square, during a national march for peace in 2011. And if you wish to read the poem in the original Spanish, please click here.

The Dead

Here they come
the decapitated,
the amputees,
the torn into pieces,
women with their coccyx split apart,
men with their heads smashed in,
the little ones crying
inside dark walls
of minerals and sand.
Here they come
those who sleep in buildings
that house secret tombs:
they come with their eyes blindfolded,
their hands tied,
shot between their temples.
Here come those who were lost in Tamaupilas,
in-laws, neighbours,
the woman they gang-raped before killing her,
the man who tried to stop it and received a bullet,
the woman they also raped, who escaped and told the story
comes walking down Broadway,
consoled by the wail of the ambulances,
the hospital doors,
light shining on the waters of the Hudson.
Here they come
the dead who set out from Usulután,
from La Paz
from La Unión,
from La Libertad,
from Sonsonate,
from San Salvador,
from San Juan Mixtepec,
from Cuscatlán,
from El Progreso,
from El Guante,
crying,
those who were given the goodbye at a karaoke party,
and were found shot in Tecate.
Here comes the one they forced to dig his brother’s grave,
the one they murdered after collecting a four thousand dollar ransom,
those who were kidnapped
and a woman they raped in front of her eight year old son 
three times.

Where do they come from,
from what gangrene,
oh lymph,
the bloodthirsty,
the heartless,
the murdering
butchers?

Here they come,
the dead so alone, so mute, so much ours,
set beneath the enormous sky of Anáhuac,
they walk,
they drag themselves,
with their bowl of horror in their hands,
their terrifying tenderness.
They are called
the dead that they found in a ditch in Taxco,
the dead that they found in remote places of Chihuahua,
the dead that they found strewn across plots of crops,
the dead that they found shot in la Marquesa,
the dead that they found hanging from bridges,
the dead that they found without heads on common land,
the dead that they found at the side of the road,
the dead that they found in abandoned cars,
the dead that they found in San Fernando,
those without number they cut into pieces and have still not been found,
the legs, the arms, the heads, the femurs of the dead
dissolved in drums.
They are called
remains, corpses, the deceased,
they are called
the dead whose mothers do not tire of waiting,
the dead whose children do not tire of waiting,
the dead whose wives do not tire of waiting,
they imagine them in subways, among gringos.
They are called
baby clothes woven in the casket of the soul,
the little tee shirt of a three-month-old,
the photo of a toothless smile,
they are called mamita,
papito,
they are called
little kicks
in the tummy
and the newborn’s cry,
they are called four children,
Petronia (2), Zacarías (3), Sabas (5), Glenda (6)
and a widow (a girl) who fell in love at primary school,
they are called wanting to dance at fiestas,
they are called blushing of hot cheeks and sweaty hands,
they are called boys,
they are called wanting
to build a house,
laying bricks,
giving food to my children,
they are called two dollars for cleaning beans, 
houses, estates, offices, 
they are called
crying of children on earth floors,
the light flying over the birds,
the flight of pigeons in the church,
they are called
kisses at the river’s edge,
they are called
Gelder (17)
Daniel (22)
Filmar (24)
Ismael (15)
Agustín (20)
José (16)
Jacinta (21)
Inés (28)
Francisco (53)
gagged
in the scrubland,
hands tied
in the gardens of ranches,
vanished
in the gardens of ‘safe’ houses,
fading away
in forgotten places,
disintegrating mutely
and in secret,
they are called
secrets of hitmen,
secrets of slaughter,
secrets of policemen,
they are called sobbing,
they are called mist,
they are called body,
they are called skin,
they are called warmth,
they are called kiss,
they are called hug,
they are called laughter,
they are called people,
they are called pleading,
they were called I,
they were called you,
they were called us,
they are called shame,
they are called weeping.

There they go
María,
Juana,
Petra,
Carolina,
13,
18,
25,
16,
breasts bitten,
hands tied,
their bodies burned to a crisp,
their bones polished by the sand of the desert. 
They are called 
the dead women that no one knows no one saw being killed,
they are called
women who go out alone to bars at night,
they are called
working women who leave their homes at dawn,
they are called
sisters,
daughters,
mothers,
aunts,
disappeared,
raped,
burnt,
chucked away,
they are called meat,
they are called meat.

Here,
without flowers,
without tombstones,
without an age,
without a name,
without sobbing,
they sleep in their cemetery:

its name is Temixco,
its name is Santa Ana,
its name is Mazatepec,
its name is Juárez,
its name is Puente de Ixtla,
its name is San Fernando,
its name is Tlaltizapán,
its name is Samalayuca,
its name is el Capulín,
its name is Reynosa,
its name is Nuevo Laredo,
its name is Guadalupe,
its name is Lomas de Poleo,
its name is Mexico.


Translation by Richard Gwyn

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

The first part of Patrick McGuinness’ new book, Ghost Stations (CB Editions) escorts the reader on a tour of childhood memories, railway stations (some of them deserted or abandoned) and bridges. The interactions between time and memory — and the obfuscation of the latter by the former — are familiar themes for McGuinness, who, in a previous book, Other People’s Countries, uses the image of a key, cast in putty, as a metaphor for the nature of memory:

Watching an old police procedural, probably a Maigret, sometime in the early eighties while convalescing from glandular fever (an illness I experienced more as convalescence than as actual illness: I felt as if I was simply recovering from something, rather than actually having the something to recover from in the first place), it came to me: a thief pushing a key into putty so that its outline would be caught in the relief and he could copy it, then burgle the house.

That was memory, I realised: a putty with which you make another key, which would open the same door, but never quite as well. In no time, you’d be burgling your own past with the slightly off-key key that always got you in though there was less and less to take.

Regular readers of Raids on the Underworld will notice that I have cited this extract before, in a post about memory, but it is too apposite to avoid repeating here, and the way in which McGuinness is haunted by his Belgian childhood is a theme to which he returns in the new book.

But let’s first consider the title of today’s piece: “Yesterday comes round sooner than you think,” which occurs in the Preface to Ghost Stations.

I am slightly troubled by the ambiguity of the sentence, its hovering (like much else in Ghost Stations) between adjacent interpretations. If he were more of a pedant — or inclined to leaving less to chance— McGuinness might have written: “Yesterday comes round sooner than you might think” or “Yesterday comes round sooner than you think it will”, but instead he writes “Yesterday comes around sooner than you think”, which leaves the trace, or the shadow, of another proposal altogether, something like: “Yesterday comes round before you have time to think,” or else: “Yesterday comes round before you choose to think”. Which might also be true, but which is, I think, a proposal of an entirely different character to the one being offered us.

What the utterance suggests beyond a shadow of a doubt is that we have little volition in the matter: whatever else might happen, yesterday will come round.

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On the same page, we find this: “The idea of ghosts, and of ghost stations, might suggest a certain désuétude, an isolated, listless melancholy, but it’s really the idea of connections and connectivity that animates the book, as it animates the way I think and the way I try to write.’

And the connections keep coming, in ways that caused this reader to return to the page and read it again for myself, take it all in a second or third time, as though the first time round some shadow self had read it — or in case something had gone missing, disappeared up my sleeve or into the lining of my jacket.

And while the author takes us on a tour of Belgium railway stations, many of them deserted or haunted, and of his childhood home in the town of Bouillon, and of his school days in Clifton — “my English was piecemeal and full of holes. It sounded far away in my mouth, not quite mine . . . I felt like a ghost in the wrong haunting . . . Speaking English was like wearing a dead relative’s clothes . . .” — we realise we are on a familiar journey, one that by extension — through that sense of connectivity, and by implication — speaks to our own hauntings also.

Here McGuinness is contemplating Clifton suspension bridge:

. . . the bridge is always there: tonnes of iron and steel but looking, in the distance, delicate as lace, the cables taut as the strings of a harp. Sometimes you can hear the wind pluck them and fancy you hear a song. It is the song of the air which is the sound of falling. The boy who thinks he’d like to hear that song through to the end, that he’d like a long, long fall so he can hear it over and over and never hit the ground.

Uneven paving stones, the madeleine etc

Reading over my notes again, at 4.45 in the morning, after yet another sleepless night — I am making no excuses, but am currently adrift in an extended round of insomnia — some dim memory prompts me to pick up the final volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time which, by an extraordinary coincidence — or as necessity dictates — falls open on the page where Marcel, sunk into prolonged and miserable reflection about the stagnancy and pointlessness of his writing life; of being, in his words, unable to summon even “a spark of that enthusiasm which, if it is not the sole, is a primary criterion of talent”, he trips on an uneven paving stone, an accident that instantly triggers an involuntary memory of stepping on a similar uneven slab years before, in Venice, flooding him, by some miracle of happenstance, with a profound and timeless joy.

And this sudden realisation — that the past is not lost but permanently stored in some recess of the unconscious, and can be retrieved by a random trigger — unleashes a torrent of creativity that will eventually cause him to overcome his long-term writer’s block and bring about the vital epiphany that results in the book that we hold before us.

Or, as Marcel himself puts it (in the translation I am reading from):

But it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us; one has knocked at all the other doors which lead nowhere, and then one stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which one can enter —which one might have sought in vain for a hundred years — and it opens of its own accord.

Never content to state a thing once only, Proust follows up with several further examples of involuntary memory, moments when, in the course of everyday life some spontaneous cue arises that evokes recollection of the past in a way that is meaningful or transformative, the most famous of which, for readers of Proust, was the taste of a madeleine dunked in tea, which caused all of his anxiety and doubts about the future to disappear, “so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.”

Proust knows that his readers are students of their own various selves and his book is merely a magnifying glass enabling them to read what lies within themselves. That, he intimates, is what good writing does:

But to return to my own case, I thought more modestly of my book and it would be inaccurate even to say that I thought of those who would read it as “my” readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be “my” readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers — it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.

The other that dwells within

And to return to Patrick McGuinness, I feel that he does exactly what Proust proposes, but with a twist. At several points in the book, he remarks on his own alterity; on a sense of being othered from himself to some degree. He speaks of a second self living on in his childhood home at Bouillon, and later, in a section titled ‘Other Oxfords’, McGuinness describes his habit of ‘checking up’ on places he has lived in the past, as though doing so were analogous to visiting a former self.

And that is a tendency I share: every time I visit Cardiff I have to resist the temptation to visit the house that was my family home for 30 years and every time I drive past my childhood home in Crickhowell the same thing happens, although I can never quite summon up the will to knock on the door and say to whoever answers the door: “I used to live here; do you mind if I come in and have a look around?” Because, frankly, I’m not sure I want to meet the alternative self, or selves, that live out their lives beside the one that I currently call my own. I’m content, if that’s the word, merely to know that they are there.

I would venture that we assume a certain idea of selfhood that is at odds with our experience of ourselves as discrete, homogenous entities. In accepting the existence of these various alternative selves, we are left with a sense of uncertainty that is, paradoxically, more complete and fulfilling — although at other times more troubling — than one that holds to a single, unitary self.

All those previous selves that we have shed already, where are they now? Are they locked into a particular location, endlessly haunting the rooms and spaces we once occupied; or are they, as I prefer to believe, like the one that assails Proust’s protagonist, outside of time and location, dependent only on a crooked paving stone or some other random trigger to relieve us of existential dread, and enable us to experience the past and present simultaneously.

It seems to me, as I get older, that access to our various other selves, either through conscious or involuntary memory, seems to get easier. I am not sure why this is, nor am I qualified to embark on an enquiry into the fictive science behind this mystery: it is a subject that brings with it many questions, and few answers.

However, I am content to wait, enjoying the present moment as a juncture where my present self can interact with any number of ghostly selves, each of them mute and fleeting.

Such as those evoked, for me, by a box of cherries from Terrades or by the scent of mountain thyme carried on a sea breeze from the island of Crete . . .

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

In my last post I made reference to Lydia Davis’ new book, Into the Weeds, which is part of a series published by Yale University Press entitled ‘Why I write’.

So far, contributions have been forthcoming from writers such as Alberto Manguel, Eileen Myers, Greil Marcus, Natasha Tretheway, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Patti Smith. While I must confess to having little interest in the musings of those last two names, it is no surprise that these titles have been commissioned in the era of autofiction, given the inevitable self-scrutiny that the genre entails.

From the outset, I detected a degree of reluctance on Davis’ part to play along with the question of ‘why I write’; instead, she slips us a few tips on ‘how I write’, but spends most of her time dodging the question altogether, with extended riffs on the ideas presented by John Ashberry and Knut Hamsun — neither of whom really answer the question of ‘why I write’ either.

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Nor am I especially invested in the question, but I was interested to read about Knut Hamsun, having been a fan of the Norwegian long ago, in my teens, thanks in large part to the advocacy of Henry Miller, a writer who was then considered essential reading, but who is now pretty much cancelled. Hamsun too has been reviled because of his support for the Nazi regime, but Davis revives him convincingly, warts and all, to the extent that I would now like to read his last book, On Overgrown Paths — which title chimes, in horticultural manner, with Davis’ Into the Weeds. Hamsun wrote this book in his late eighties while on bail and awaiting the outcome of his trial for collaboration between 1945 and 1947.

Discipline

Within the first few pages of Lydia Davis’ book we learn that: “You shouldn’t pay very much attention to anything writers say. They don’t know why they do what they do.” (John Barth). Davis tells us this would have been a suitable epigraph for her own essay. She also cites someone saying to her: “You’re a writer: you must have a lot to say,” which she considers an assumption — after all, “I imagine everyone has a lot to say, writers and nonwriters alike. I can’t imagine anyone not having a lot to say — even if they keep their mouth closed,”

There are, however, a few instances when Davis confronts the matter of her own writing directly, including this one, which I find especially pertinent right now, during a spell of not-writing:

Discipline is not a problem once I begin working. Discipline is more of a problem when I am trying to persuade myself to work.

And then there’s this, which also resonates:

When I am asked why I write and instead think about how I write, the following occurs to me: in a longer project, one that extends over time, like the writing of this essay — and even, on a smaller scale, in a shorter project — there is sometimes, if I am receptive and circumstances allow it, a productive interaction between the active writing and the intervals away from active writing. The active writing produces new ideas, which get put into words on the page. Then, during the time away from writing, my brain continues its associations, continues to produce afterthoughts. And if I write these down, usually hastily, in the midst of other tasks, then I have notes to carry back to the desk, and these notes then provide a starting point for the active writing, in case I don’t have one already, which I often don’t. So this circular motion continues productively, one activity generating the other in a closed system.

How true this is (for me, at least), and how well it meshes with the idea that not-writing can also be a form of writing. If we are writers, any of the other activities that make up our daily lives — including walking and sleeping — i.e. when we are simply ‘being’ rather then ‘doing’ — are essential parts of the fabric of our writing lives. In sum, much of the work of the writer takes place when they are not-writing.

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Synchronicities

Given my tendency to observe synchronicities, having written my last piece about writers not writing — leading on to the broader question of ‘why write at all?’ — I come across a novel, written in Spanish, that approaches the topic from a very particular point of view.

I was alerted to the existence of Gustavo Valle’s novel, El brillo de los niños (which might be rendered as The brilliance of children), in a newsletter posted by the Colombian writer Darío Jaramillo, who is a writer I have translated and for whom I have a good deal of respect, so it is always interesting to see what he has been reading. Since I had just finished Lydia Davis’ little book, there was a sense of continuity in that both books address this topic, with the difference that for Davis it forms the central question of her essay (even while avoiding it), whereas in Valle’s novel, the question of ‘Why I write’ is voiced incidentally, as it were, by two of his characters.

I will paraphrase Jaramillo’s commentary, as follows:

Novels with characters that captivate the reader — he writes — are unforgettable because they turn into a kind of love story between the reader and the characters in the book. And in El brillo de los niños not one but two characters successfully seduce us. Two siblings — the girl, Yoisiberth, who is eleven, and her fifteen-year old brother Gusmarling — capture the reader’s heart with their tenderness and their determination to complete a task that immerses them suddenly and profoundly in the workings of the world. And they do so with a lucidity and sense of mystery that comes to us only when we are children.

The feat of Gustavo Valle (who was born in Venezuela in 1967) consists of narrating an adventure story in the shape of a journey, interjecting the reflections of his characters in ways that surprise us with their originality, humour and intelligence.

Two of the characters in the novel are writers, or at least they keep notebooks.

Scratching an itch

Here is what the children’s grandmother, Adela — says about why she writes:

Writing is like scratching an itch. Right there on the skin, where something has stung you and an allergic reaction has taken place. That sting tells us: here I am, take note of me. Don’t you see that something is sprouting inside me that demands your attention? The notebook works in a similar way. It’s an invisible rash. The skin of our obsessions and fears calls to us, urging us to press down with our pencils and scratch out lines.

Later, Yoisiberth asks Adela: “What do you write, Grandma?” And she would reply:

I write so that things don’t disappear. But sometimes I write to disentangle my worries. Writing is a prosthesis for thought. Thinking is like walking with osteoporosis; at my age, it’s hard to walk without pain, so I use a walker, a Zimmer frame. The diary is my Zimmer frame — or the walking stick for my ideas.

I also write so as not to feel alone. Those little letters in the notebook are my tiny companions. While I am writing in my diary the world is with me and I with it, but when I leave off writing, the world recedes and I am left on the sidelines.

I also write to make things up. To invent is to open a window in a smoke-filled room. We almost always invent out of necessity. The things we do that are not borne of necessity end up embarrassing us. One might write to share with others, to be read. But that doesn’t interest me. My reader is myself. And since I don’t know myself completely, then that reader is a stranger. I am someone other than myself. It is someone else who writes and another who reads.

It is a game of mirrors in which my image appears altered, modified. Writing is making a phone call to oneself. It is playing the piano alone. I shout in the desert; there is no one around me, but the echo of my voice reaches me. So writing is also a way of populating the place where I am, filling it with the echo of my solitude.

Adela’s grandson, Gusmarling, has inherited her writing habit, and having been separated from Yosiberth, and enduring a lengthy period of illness and a serious fall (after attempting to escape from the upstairs window of a house in which he believes he has been taken prisoner) he determines to set out again and find his sister. But first, in an iteration of the old belief that ‘I write in order to find out what I think’, he pulls out his exercise book and a pen.

He felt that if he put his thoughts in order, if he poured into his writing all that had happened to him or tried to investigate his condition, he would renew his strength and retrieve the physical condition he had lost with the fall.

Faced with the blank page, he felt as though he were gazing out over a field of sand or a sea of reflections that blinded him. He spent quite a while with pen in hand, letting tattered images drift by, unable to materialise into a sentence with which to begin. That first sentence laid the groundwork for everything that would come afterward. Two or three lines, sometimes fewer, which might arrive all at once, keep him waiting too long, or never come at all.

What did it depend on for the words to gather at the tip of his pen? What made them suitable—or incapable—of becoming the locomotive for everything that would follow? It was not an act of magic, nor the product of something long meditated upon. It was neither an unconscious act nor something produced under extreme vigilance. It occupied an opaque and slippery territory, where connections were established among ideas, images, memories, desires, and experiences, and he had to remain alert if he wanted to open the doors to chance and contingency.

Like so much else written on the topic — including the essay by Lydia Davis — however much the extract above might reflect our own experience of writing, conveying a valid sense of ‘how I write’, it is altogether unhelpful in answering the more elusive question of ‘why I write’. Perhaps that question — the title of the book series published by Yale — is a misnomer, and the ‘why’ can only be approached or intuited via the ‘how’.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

I try to imagine a painter painting a picture about not painting, and I fail.

To write about not writing? Frankly, who cares?

But I’ve done it myself. And I’ve written, with some fascination, about writers who stop writing (Juan Rulfo, among others . . . )

Having taught the dark art of creative writing for more than twenty years. I have frequently been confronted by the question of not writing — either my own inability to get started on a piece of work, or else fielding the anxieties of students about their own failure, or unwillingness, to write.

I should say, before going any further, that whoever invented the term ‘writer’s block’ has a lot to answer for, not least for the way certain individuals (novices, in particular) bandy it about so as to make themselves feel important. One of the most irritating phrases you get to hear is “I’m blocked”, bringing to mind a sort of ghastly ontological constipation.

But for many writers, the idea of blockage is interesting in itself, as it inevitably returns us to the question: ‘why write at all?’.

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A quick sortie into the Googlesphere brings up a 2017 piece by Emily Temple titled ‘8 famous writers writing about not writing’. The writers cited, in no particular order, are: Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Gustave Flaubert, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Sexton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Iris Murdoch. It is the entries from Kafka’s diaries that most intrigue me. They are from the first quarter of the year 1915:

JANUARY 20, 1915: The end of writing. When will it take me up again?

JANUARY 29, 1915: Again tried to write, virtually useless.

JANUARY 30, 1915: The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

FEBRUARY 7, 1915: Complete standstill. Unending torments.

MARCH 11, 1915: How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing. It doesn’t come off. A page now and then is successful, but I can’t keep it up, the next day I am powerless.

MARCH 13, 1915: Lack of appetite, fear of getting back late in the evening; but above all the thought that I wrote nothing yesterday, that I keep getting farther and farther from it, and am in danger of losing everything I have laboriously achieved these past six months. Provided proof of this by writing one and a half wretched pages of a new story that I have already decided to discard…. Occasionally I feel an unhappiness that almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity and of the existence of a goal to which one makes one’s way by undergoing every kind of unhappiness.

The entry for January 30th grabs my attention.

Here it is again, in a different translation (by Ross Benjamin), from Kafka’s Diaries, published by Penguin Classics in 2024) :

30 Jan 1915: The old inability. Stopped writing for barely 10 days and already cast out. Again the great exertions lie ahead. It is necessary positively to dive under and sink more quickly than what is sinking away in front of you.

‘Diving down’ and ‘sinking’ are the metaphors used here as the modes of accessing those elusive materials that will nourish one’s writing.

Which, in turn, invites us consider to those largely unconscious realms that feed the writer’s habit; the great sea of wonderment and illusion in which we travel when we dream, and also when we write.

This is what I had in mind when I titled this blog ‘Raids on the Underworld’. The idea that truly effective writing — writing worth its salt — involves the kind of deep-sea diving that Kafka craves (and here, fails to achieve). It was the message I attempted to instil in students over those years of teaching; not by instruction, of course — that would be impossible — but by steering them, individually, towards one or two writers whose work I thought might help get them going. It usually works like that. Read something, in poetry or prose, and let your mind wander for a while along the dappled avenues of thought, lured on by those piles of golden dust rising like pyramids on the distant horizon.

Something like that, at least.

But to return to the topic: what is interesting about Kafka’s quote is the way he represents the need ‘to dive under and sink more quickly than what is sinking away in front of you.’

The thing that is being pursued here appears to have its own volition: left unattended, it will ‘sink away in front of you’.

What is this elusive form that wishes not to be retrieved from the deep?

Is it a flake of inspiration, a shifting shape in the deeps of the unconscious soup that, if recovered, would provide us with precisely what we needed for our poem or story or essay?

I don’t have an answer, I’m simply posing the question . . .

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I could but I won’t

Moving partially to one side, as it were, so as to gain perspective, I wonder whether it is worth — instead of asking ‘why am I blocked?’— to pose the question of ‘why write at all?’

Conveniently, I have just read a piece by Orit Gat in Parentheses, which is a sort of review of Lydia Davis’ new book about writing, Into the Weeds:

To read a book about writing in the midst of a period in which you are not writing remains inspiring. It gives permission to let yourself love something, still not do it. Or talk about doing it, still not do it.

What I like about Orit Gat’s piece is her willingness to embrace not-writing (rather than reprimanding herself for either idleness or procrastination):

One of the issues with my not-writing is that I could. But I can’t and won’t. I want to write an email to my literary agent titled ‘on not writing’. I want to email everyone who gave me deadlines and all the pending work I have to do saying, well, no. Instead, I do not write.

This is an admirable attitude, I feel, and provides an effective antidote to ‘writer’s block’: act as though it isn’t a thing.

Which, come to think about it, I, for one, always have.

And, as you will no doubt have noticed, the fact that Orit Gat isn’t writing doesn’t prevent her from writing the piece we are reading about how she doesn’t write.

Tyrranical prehension

But there’s something else (isn’t there always?). Riffling through my old journals I find something suggesting that the ‘need to write’ comes with its own pathology:

Half-preparing a class for my MA module ‘The Creative Process’ (I write), but actually taking time to enjoy the material — something that happens far too infrequently these days, especially in busy October — I stumble across a passage in Blanchot about something he refers to, perplexingly, as Tyrannical Prehension. It sounds like a stomach disorder, but is, in fact, far more sinister:

Sometimes, when a man is holding a pencil, his hand won’t release it no matter how badly he wants to let it go. Instead, the hand tightens rather than opens. The other hand intervenes more successfully, but then the hand which one might call sick makes a slow, tentative movement and tries to catch the departing object. The strange thing is the slowness of this movement. The hand moves in a tempo which is scarcely human: not that of a viable action, not that of a hope either, but rather the shadow of time, the hand being itself the shadow of a hand slipping ghostlike toward an object that has become its own shadow. This hand experiences, at certain moments, a very great need to seize: it must grasp the pencil, it has to. It receives an order, an imperious command. This phenomenon is known as “tyrannical prehension.”

The urgency of writing, the need to write right now, becomes pathologised. But we write, according to Blanchot, only when we have already begun to write:

Writing begins with Orpheus’ gaze. And this gaze is the movement of desire that shatters the song’s destiny, that disrupts concern for it, and in this inspired and careless decision reaches the origin, consecrates the song. But in order to descend towards this instant, Orpheus has to possess the power of art already. This is to say: one writes only if one reaches that instant which nevertheless one can only approach in the space opened by the movement of writing. To write one has to write already. In this contradiction are situated the essence of writing, the snag in the experience, and inspiration’s leap.

In other words, one writes even when not writing (writing already) — which you can link with Orit Gat’s piece, where she says ‘Because planning to write is part of writing. Because wanting to write is, also.’ That whole thing about feeling you are writing even when not-writing. ’One of the issues about my not-writing is that I could. But I can’t and I won’t . . . ‘

And reading over the first of those quotes from Blanchot again, I wonder to myself whether that is what not-writing is:

“a hand slipping ghostlike toward an object that has become its own shadow.”

Hélène Cixous and the Unforeseeable

Finally, I find some notes I took from a lecture given by Hélène Cixous at Cardiff University some twenty years ago. The talk was called ‘The Unforeseeable’, and I remember enjoying it a great deal. Ms Cixous was extremely elegant and spoke manicured English.

She said that the title of her lecture referred to the unexpectedness of what one writes, which is unforeseeable, even to oneself.

According to my notes, she said:

“You reach the point where the book, not the author, is writing the book.”

“With writing you go in one direction and find yourself forced in another direction. But paradoxically, the strength of the writer lies in his or her helplessness. Why might this be?”

She cited her friend Jacques Derrida as saying: “The work starts by itself.” He used to say: “It’s started” when asked about a new piece of writing.”

Coming from the godfather of deconstruction this struck me as a rather a strange utterance — verging on the mystical, even.

She said: “The book is unexpected, unforeseeable.”

I’m not sure what to make of all this.

And finally . . .

My notebook informs me that in another class I was teaching the same week as the Cixous lecture (not the MA class in which I discuss Blanchot but an undergraduate nonfiction class) a student turns in a piece about trying to hold onto a pencil, against the odds, while a force beyond her control seizes control of the hand with which she tries to hold the pencil.

This is very strange. Unaccountable coincidence or tyrannical prehension?

Coincidence or Synchronicity?

Unforeseeable, certainly, as I’m sure Hélène Cixous would agree.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

The name Capel-y-Ffin (literally ‘Chapel on the border)’ is often associated with the art — and the idiosyncratic Catholicism — of Eric Gill and David Jones, who lived here in the 1920s in a community set up by Gill at the Monastery, an imposing building of local sandstone, painted white, which stands there still, and was recently up for sale. But one hundred years ago, when Gill first came upon it, the Monastery was the property of the Benedictine community on Caldey Island, three miles off Tenby in the Severn Channel. It was from the monks on Caldey that Gill rented the place, at the top of the Ewyas Valley (often referred to as the Llanthony Valley, on account of the ancient Priory, fοur country miles down the narrow road in the direction of Abergavenny).

Jonathan Miles, in his book Eric Gill and David Jones at Capel-y-Ffin, makes the appealing observation that:

[A] border line is where two differences meet, often causing tension. It is a line of demarcation, often arbitrarily or artificially determined, which, once registered, can assume incredible importance. Seen from either side it constitutes a boundary, an edge, it provokes the necessity to admit otherness. The two great talents who worked at Capel-y-Ffin, David Jones and Eric Gill, both in their different ways found themselves, at least metaphorically or notionally, over some sort of border and in a strange land.

The story, too, is a strange one. Eric Gill (1882-1940) was a talented sculptor and engraver, who has gained posthumous notoriety on account of the incestuous relations he maintained with two of his daughters (and in his youth, with two of his sisters), events which he recorded in his diaries. In 1913 — prior to the abuse of his daughters — he converted to Catholicism, and seven years later co-founded a ‘Guild’ or community of religiously-minded artists and craftsmen in Ditchling, Surrey.

Gill believed that industrialisation had degraded the idea of labour (as in manual craft) along with contaminating the souls of men, and he wanted to resurrect the artist as craftsman, and celebrate manual labour as a form of religious worship. He was consequently opposed to such cosy notions as ‘art for art’s sake.’ Stone carving, engraving and carpentry embodied the kinds of manly practice that the Guild stood for.

His modus vivendi and the organisation of his community were based on patriarchal principles, and even though the Guild was centred around an integrated lifestyle in which there was, nominally, no division between family, religion and work, women were largely relegated to domestic tasks such as cooking and gardening, while the men got on with the serious business of making art. It is widely believed rhat Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, The Wedding Group (1968) was based on Gill and his circle.

In 1924, following disputes with his collaborators there, Eric Gill left Ditchling with his family, and several key members of the Guild, settled in Capel-y-Ffin. Back then, it was not an easy place to get to. The journey from the nearest station, ten miles away at Pandy, was a major undertaking, following an unmade, winding road. A lorry was hired to convey Gill’s extended family entourage of thirteen, along with their dogs, cats, goats, geese, ducks and chickens. More usually, guests would be collected from the station by pony and trap.

A broken engagement

Enter David Jones, a deeply sensitive and acutely intelligent individual, recently returned from a long stint in the trenches — longer than any of the other Great War poets —and a man who turned down the chance to become an officer because, as he put it, he was “not that sort of person.” How Jones fitted into this community has always struck me as something of a mystery: his character and attitudes seem so much at odds with Gill’s didacticism and sexual obsessions. However, it has been argued that Jones was somehow unaware of — or oblivious to — his friend’s more repellent tendencies. What is more, he had become engaged to Petra1, the second of Gill’s three daughters, and although she did not appear to be in love with him, was apparently happy to go along with the plan, up until the point when she decided she would marry someone else, the illustrator and engraver Denis Tegetmeier — another member of her father’s entourage and resident of Capel-y-Ffin — a decision that affected David Jones badly, and from which, perhaps, he never fully recovered. Petra went on to have six children with Tegetmeier and — according to her obituary — appears to have lived a full and happy life.

David Jones never married. Quite possibly he was affected by a sort of terminal indecision — which might well have been advantageous in his working practice, since it caused him to ceaselessly rework — or to destroy — countless paintings.2 In like manner, his poetry took decades to gestate. But, as Jonathan Miles points out, Jones was also deeply affected by ‘the Welsh tradition of heroic defeat’ and perhaps it is not too outlandish to suggest that this pessimistic outlook infiltrated his attitude to marriage, with Petra or anyone else.3

Although David Jones did not spend a great deal of time at Capel — at least not uninterruptedly, as he made various trips to Caldey island and to London — the Ewyas valley was central to his formation as a watercolorist and while at the monastery he developed the style that would define him as an artist. If a single painting exemplifies that style, it is Tir y Blaenau (see below)— the view eastward from the monastery itself — which, according to his biographer, Thomas Dilworth, hung above the artist’s bed for many years and which Jones claimed was the work from which all his “subsequent water colour thing . . . developed.”

Two chapels

Rarely is anyone about in Capel, except in the summer when Capel farm is occupied as a holiday let. Hamlet is rather a brave term to use for a place with only half a dozen dwellings spread over several acres, but with two places of worship, one Anglican, the other Baptist, the former with its door unlocked, the latter decidedly shut. Both of them were built in the year 1762, which inevitably raises the question of which of them is the ‘Capel’ referred to in the place’s name.

The existence of these twin chapels brings to mind the joke about the Welshman marooned on a desert island: when he is rescued after years of living a solitary life on the island, the captain of the rescue team is astonished to find that the man has built two chapels. Why, he asks, do you need two places of worship? Ah well, says the Welshman, pointing at one of them: that is the chapel I don’t go to.

Curiously, considering the number of times I have passed through, or headed off on a walk after parking on the roadside, I had never ventured into either of the places of worship until a summer’s day in 2022, when I visited both. The little church of St Mary the Virgin, as Francis Kilvert wrote, ‘squats like a stout grey owl among its seven great black yews’, and venturing inside, it feels almost as if I have entered one of those tiny sanctuaries hidden away in the Greek mountains, because the art work has a decidedly Orthodox flavour. There is a David Jones painting hanging by the staircase, to the right of the door. Or should I say a copy, or print of a David Jones painting, as the Tate Gallery in London houses the original.

It is early morning, and after a week of warm weather we are entitled to some rain, which duly arrives as I climb to Darren Llwyd, following the track to the Twmpa, also known as Lord Hereford’s Knob. As I go along, I am vaguely pondering Thoreau’s commendation that ‘to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.’ And how do you go about that? Not, I imagine, through conscious effort, but rather through a kind of non-doing, of which walking, if done without perturbation or hurry, might be an example. Letting things be and allowing thoughts — if they must come, and they will — to unfold in their own way. Slowing down. Today will be a slow walk. I will strive to be responsive to the quality of the day, as Thoreau would have it.

Many Worlds Intrusion

But there is a problem. My head is filled with complicated thinking. I am preparing a talk (which became an article) about the similarity between some of J.L. Borges’ ideas — as expressed in one of his short stories — and the hypothesis put forward by Hugh Everett, the founder of the ‘many worlds interpretation’ of quantum mechanics some seventeen years later. I’m currently mulling over an article I’ve just read about this hypothesis, and it has raised a few issues. The essay, by Philip Ball, which appears in Quanta magazine, challenges what it calls ‘the most extraordinary, alluring and thought-provoking of all the ways in which quantum mechanics has been interpreted.’ I won’t go into the argument that Ball makes in his article, largely because it is quite technical and most of the physics is beyond me (however, since most of the physics is, by their own admissions, also beyond the physicists who come up with this stuff, I suffer relatively few qualms).

In essence, the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) suggests that there are a near-infinity of universes, all of them superimposed within the same physical space but isolated from one another and evolving separately.4 In the MWI, the other worlds contain versions of you and me, but they are leading other lives, doing things that we do not. As Ball’s article points out, the many worlds interpretation is highly seductive: “It tells us that we have multiple selves, living other lives in other universes, quite possibly doing all the things that we dream of but will never achieve (or never dare to attempt). There is no path not taken.”

It’s a sort of comfort to know (or rather, to imagine) that there are innumerable versions of oneself doing stuff in other worlds, and the idea makes us feel less alone. It provides a sort of balm for all the fuck-ups of one’s past: at least in some of those other worlds a version of me acted otherwise, and the idea offers a strange kind of release, or even redemption. The idea appeals to the religious instinct, I suppose, and at the same time softens the tyranny of memory — which adds to its appeal.

In Borges’ story, ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’, we find the following passage:

Your ancestor . . . believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever-spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favoured me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.

This notion of infinite outcomes to any situation is a source of perennial fascination to Borges, and the idea seems especially feasible in this part of the world, the Black Mountains: I often get the sensation, when walking or driving across Gospel Pass and down into the Ewyas valley, of entering a zone where, more than elsewhere, the laws of everyday reality disintegrate. It is perhaps in the nature of borders, as liminal zones, to behave in this way — and the notion is especially powerful here, exactly as Jonathan Miles points out in the passage I quoted at the start of this piece.

It certainly appears to have been so for David Jones, whose work as an artist and as a poet was in many regards kickstarted by his various sojourns at Capel-y-Ffin. He discovered that what he called “the impact of the strong hill-rhythms and bright counter-rhythms” would have a lasting effect on the way he painted landscapes, as exemplified in a painting such as Tir y Blaenau, which, as Jonathan Miles observes, “Here the landscape is stressed; the bulk of the mountains presses the river rim er down to the bottom of the paper and everything appears in a state of flux as if some geological upheaval is taking place. Only the grazing animals check the disturbance of the scene which gives the impression of pressing in on the viewer.”

But Jones’ sojourn at Capel also affected the way he regarded the land at large, his time in the Black Mountains feeding the historical and mythological subject matter that he would eventually conceptualise in the lines of his poem, ‘The Sleeping Lord’ in which the land of Wales itself is represented as Arthur in repose:

yet he sleeps on
                                         very deep is his slumber:
how long has he been the sleeping lord?
are the clammy ferns
                                          his rustling vallance
does the buried rowan
                                          ward him from evil, or
does he ward the tanglewood
                                          and the denizens of the wood
are the stunted oaks his gnarled guard
                                          or are their knarred limbs
strong with his sap?
Do the small black horses
                                           grass on the hunch of his shoulders?
are the hills his couch
                                           or is he the couchant hills?
Are the slumbering valleys
                                           him in slumber
                                           are the still undulations
the still limbs of him sleeping?
Is the configuration of the land
                                           the furrowed body of the lord
are the dark ridges
                                           his dented greaves
do the trickling gullies
                                           yet drain his hog-wounds?
Does the land wait the sleeping lord
                                            or is the wasted land
that very lord who sleeps?
                                 

Looking east, the road towards Hay snakes along the mountainside like a road in a children’s story book, and as I reach Hay Bluff, and the wide Wye valley stretches out below me, I am struck once again by the yellow, almost rusty light of these uplands on days of low hanging cloud. It is like looking at the world through an amber filter.

My route now follows the Offa’s Dyke path leading towards Hatterall Hill, with the Olchon Valley to my left. I follow it with tiring footsteps in the now persistent drizzle, and only when I come to the turning off point, two miles south, does the weather clear.

The unexpected sunshine adds a spring to my step, and I descend rapidly down a steep path through shoulder-high ferns, almost to the valley road, but turn off just before, along a pretty, wooded track, one of those paths best encountered in the early evening light of a summer’s day. And before joining the valley road, on the right, stands the Baptist Chapel. Of course, I can’t go in, but there is the demure and mossy graveyard, and a most hospitable bench, in which I can sit and take it all in. It is a wonderfully tranquil spot, beside an imposing yew tree. There are worse places to spend eternity, I imagine: at least for this version of you, either in this or whichever world you find yourself.

Notes:

I map out a circular route that begins and ends at the Tabernacl chapel, a third of the way up the Grwyne Fawr valley. I plan a route because I have become more fastidious, as I get older, about leaving clear directions at home, just in case. This notion of following a predetermined route is something quite alien to me, however, and it goes against every fibre of my being to stick to it, and not to wander off on subsidiary trails, onto paths that lead nowhere, or else to places I never imagined going. Especially those places, in fact.

Which reminds me of the closeness in sound — though not in etymology — of the verbs ‘to wander’ and ‘to wonder’, frequently the source of confusion to speakers of English, native and non-native alike. Whereas ‘wander’ derives from the Proto-Indo-European wend — ‘to turn’ — ‘wonder’ is from the Old English (i.e Germanic) noun wundrian, an object of astonishment, which, as a verb, came to mean ‘to inspire curiosity in’. It occurs to me, however, that wandering might be regarded as a kinetic version of wondering — wondering in motion, as it were. So the two words are connected, after a fashion, at least to me.

And so it is, quite early one morning in late July, that I park the car opposite the chapel and set off up the hillside. I keep to a rhythm, there is nothing original in that, it’s the only way to go, one step after another. But that’s why it feels so good. The rhythm of the breath. A steady pace. I pass the badger-faced sheep, which, on this particular farm, have been known to give me the evil eye.

Below the Stone of Revenge, I take the lower path, which, after half a mile or so, follows the eastern flank of the Mynydd Du forest. I turn sharp right onto a rough trail up to Bal Bach, and from there the vista opens up over the Ewyas Valley, with Llanthony Priory directly below.

From here I climb to Bal Mawr, and it is now that the green becomes greener, to my eye, at least; a green, as a poet once said, that is close to pain. In the distance, to the south, Mor Hafren, the Severn Sea, is clearly visible, which only occurs on a day such as today, and there aren’t so many of those. I stop to drink water, and am greeted by a solitary hiker, a man of around my age, walking in the opposite direction. He is the only human I have seen since leaving the road, and I will not see another for at least three hours, and then at a distance. Which is not unusual for a weekday.

A line comes to mind from a book I recently read, which has been playing on my mind. Augustus John’s biographer, Michael Holroyd, writes that John could never be one person, that he didn’t know who he was, that he kept reformulating himself (as an example he says that John kept changing his handwriting, as I do). Solitude on these walks often stirs up lightly dormant threads of thought, or of worry, and I am at once cast adrift on the shores of an old and bitter dispute, brought on by that ‘could never be one person’; whether, indeed, there is such a thing as core identity, reinforced by the continuous tellings and retellings of a discrete and autonomous self, the narrating ‘I’ of its own life story, or whether, rather, we are episodic beings, as Galen Strawson proposes, a sequence or series of fleeting selves that dissolve and reassemble in different iterations over the course of a lifetime, but which lacks any central unifying narrative that constitutes what we might think of as a single, ongoing ‘self’. But does it have to either/or? Can I not be the bearer of (or container for) a more transitory and fleeting self and yet retain an underlying constancy, of the kind once called a soul?

Birds and beasts

These ruminations are brought to a close when I spot what looks like a carved tombstone, a rectangular and large white rock, thirty metres below the ridge. I scramble down to inspect it, only to find it is a natural rock, covered by a strange scabby whiteness, some kind of fungus, nothing more.

As I follow a vague track down towards the Grwyne Fawr reservoir, a tiny chick adorned with flecks of fluff, peers up at me from the mat-grass. This baby bird is a meadow pipit, and when I stop to take its portrait, I hear the worried chirruping of a parent bird nearby, and so move on.

At the reservoir, the water level is the lowest I have seen it, and although swimming is not encouraged, it certainly isn’t unheard of — and I have swum here myself. But I am not tempted by the water today.

Just before the dam, beside a cluster of hawthorn trees, lies the body of a young pony, its eyes pecked out by ravens, a pair of which hop around nearby, watching me closely.

In this dead pony are all the dead ponies I have ever come across on these moors. The sadness of these dead creatures is immeasurable; nothing can be sought out in their pitiful blind eyes.

A hundred years ago, when the reservoir was under construction, some of the workers would commute by foot from Talgarth each morning, and back again at night, a walk of around seven arduous miles each way, following the stream north, and descending down Rhiw Cwnstab. My plan was to head the same way, as far as the stream’s source, and then turn left up toward Pen y Manllwyn and Waun Fach, but at this point, having crossed the bridge at the head of the dam, and noticing tracks straight up the hillside toward Waun Fach, I take a short cut. The path is very steep, so I stop off to feast on the tiny blue fruit known as lusi duon bach in Cymraeg, and in English as winberries, bilberries, or whortleberries — but locally as whimberries — which grow abundantly here. Unfortunately they do not keep well, and reduce to mush very quickly in warm weather, so I don’t take any home.

The summit and environs of Pen y Gadair Fawr is sacred ground. I stop to eat my sandwich and gaze in wonder at the majestic lines that sweep down between Pen Trumau and Mynydd Llysiau, allowing the distant shape of Mynydd Troed to slip perfectly between them, as an elegant foot might slip inside a cosmic slipper.

Two types of desecration

The Mynydd Du forest lies to the east of the ridge, a vast conifer plantation covering over 1,260 hectares that stretches half the length of the valley. For the past fifty years this forest has been a blot on the local landscape. In its recently published ‘Summary of Objectives’, Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru/Natural Resources Wales claims that it will aim to ‘diversify the species composition of the forest, with consideration to both current and future site conditions . . . will enhance the structural diversity of the woodland . . . incorporating areas of well thinned productive conifer with a wide age class diversity, riparian and native woodland, natural reserves, long term retentions, and a mosaic of open habitats.’

That is all well and good, and I only hope it comes to pass, because the argument for the planting of native broadleaves has been around for decades now, and in the meantime expanses of the mountain are stripped bare (the term ‘asset strippers’ comes to mind) leaving an ugly void, as the conifers drain the soil of nutrients. I reflect back on a conversation I had with a farmer in the Grwyne Fechan valley last year, who told me how the forestry companies are supposed to plant a percentage of deciduous trees in among the pines, but the approach is tokenistic at best, or else frankly cynical: profit and exploitation of resources is the only serious motive. The landscape I pass to the south of Pen y Gadair Fawr looks and feels like an abandoned battlefield. An arboreal graveyard. Nothing much seems to be alive, apart from the few sheep that nibble listlessly at the edge. I endure a tremor of familiar, useless rage, and continue on my way.

Further on, I come across a flattened patch of grass between the ferns, scattered with wrappings from protein and chocolate bars, empty cans of energy drinks, crisp packets, used tissues. I look around. The rubbish covers quite a small area, and there is a breeze, so the litter louts have not long gone. I gather up all the mess and fill the plastic carrier bag that I use as a damp-proofing cushion, and stuff the lot inside my rucksack. Who on earth would leave their trash behind in a place like this? When I round the next hillock I see, in the distance, a group of half a dozen young people crowded around a map that one of them is holding; Duke of Edinburgh participants perhaps? Who else under the age of fifty would use an actual paper map? They look as if they are descending towards the Grwyne Fechan valley road. I think of going and gently explaining things to them, but they are too far away. As I watch, they seem to work out their route, and move on down the hill. After some deliberation, I decide against pursuing them and doing a stunt as the crazy old man they met up the mountain. It’s wonderful (I want to think) that these kids have an opportunity to walk in these hills, but could they please do so without trashing them? The next day I ring around a couple of places that provide accommodation for groups of this kind, at Llanthony and Maes y Lade. Neither of them had excursions up in the hills yesterday, they say. I have quite a long chat with the guy from the Maes y Lade Centre, which is run by Essex Youth Service and provides residential holidays for youngsters from that county. He seems genuinely concerned and insists that the kids who come to the centre are taught to respect the local environment. That’s good, I say, and mean it.

Sphagnum and return

Forms of sphagnum have been around for 400 million years, and the soft, absorbent moss has been used widely for poultices, for nappy (or diaper) material by Native Americans such as the Cree, and as insulation by the Inuit. What strikes me most about this little patch of moss or migwyn, however, is the almost luminescent colour, a blend of orange, white and gold that startles in the light of late afternoon, the moss dotted with strange upright stalks, daubs of white fluff attached, resembling candy floss, and fragile to the touch. I am flummoxed and make a mental note to research my sphagnums.

The last stretch of the hike involves a slight ascent up to Crug Mawr, high above Patricio and its tiny church. Looking west I catch the full contours of the Table Mountain, the iron age fort of Crug Hywel. As I sit there in the silence, a red kite appears, glorious in its poise, suspended in impossible stillness high above the trail that forms the Beacons Way, no doubt scanning for any small rodent unwise enough to twitch beneath the ferns. It hangs there for a brief and delicate eternity, barely ruffling a feather, before suddenly swooping, levelling out and gliding at speed a few feet above the ground, then falls upon its prey — too distant for me to identify — which it holds between its vice-like talons and soars away.

The descent towards the valley lane and the chapel is not kind on the knees after these fourteen miles, and I feel the weight of my years. When I get to my car I am joined by an eager young sheepdog, who throws herself into the stream ahead of me, an invitation of sorts. I take off my boots and sit on a rock, my grateful feet soaking in the cold water as the hound frolics briefly in the shallows, gnawing on a stick, before she is called away by a farmer’s whistle. It is evening now, and a cool breeze blows down the valley. I drink the last cup of hot chai from my thermos and reflect once more on the notion of the self, and core identity, before dismissing the notion entirely, and throwing away the dregs of my tea. My own core identity, if I ever had one, has dissolved into the flickering remnants of the day.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

Since my last post on organ transplantation, a series of fortuitous events has led me to wonder whether there is not some wider conspiracy at play — one that keeps returning me to questions of consciousness and personal identity.

Immediately after writing my last Substack post (but before posting it), I was listening to ‘Start the Week’ on BBC Radio Four, because a writer whose work interests me, Michael Pollan, was being interviewed about his new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. I enjoyed Pollan’s earlier book, How To Change Your Mind, and he is an engaging speaker. Furthermore, it is not every day that one gets to listen to someone who willingly and enthusiastically starts experimenting with psychedelics in their sixties. Such resourcefulness is to be applauded: moreover he writes about those experiences with intelligence and candour.

So I was intrigued to hear about his new book on consciousness, which turns out to be about, well, just about everything — and to which I may return in a future post. However, it was a remark by one of the other speakers on the programme that grabbed my attention, and that was Fay Bound-Alberti, author of a new book called The Face, which addresses the fascinating history of what is colloquially referred to as the mug, kisser, phizog or boat race, and drawing attention to the fact that for most of human history people did not know what they ‘looked like’, because they did not have access to mirrors. She then went on to discuss the sad and troubling story of Isabelle Dinoire, the first recipient of a face transplant, who underwent a tragic meltdown after undergoing the operation. Following a leak to the British newspaper, The Sun, Dinoire discovered that her donor was a woman who had died by suicide. Since she, too, had attempted suicide, Dinoire experienced a profound and unsettling sense of connection to the donor, raising difficult questions about the boundaries of selfhood and the extent to which one might come to incorporate the life of another.

It was, perhaps, a coincidence that I should be reminded of this less common kind of transplant — it is often forgotten that the skin is the body’s largest organ — but I thought little else on the matter until the following day, when I switched on the radio just as a ‘File on 4’ report was starting up. The programme reported on a crisis of heart and lung transplantation in the UK, and how far behind other European countries we have fallen in recent years: how we used to be a world leader, and now rank very poorly (the report singled out Birmingham and Manchester as having significantly depleted transplant services).

Having had two nudges, I should — according to the so-called ‘rule of three’ — have expected a third, and sure enough it came along. The following day I travelled to Spain, and driving home from the supermarket, I switched on the radio, only to discover it was ‘world transplantation day’ and listened to a special report on a Catalan language station about the success of the country’s transplant services, learning, along the way, that Spain consistently ranks as the world’s most successful country with regard to organ transplantation.

Expert response

I was so impressed by this string of coincidences — or synchronicities, as I choose to regard them — that I was moved to write to my own transplant surgeon, with whom I have been in touch, on an off, over the 19 years since I had my liver transplant. Prof. Steve (as I shall call him) is a surgeon of considerable reputation, as well as being, in other regards, a man of extraordinary talents and perspicacity, and I sent him a link to my piece on transplantation, as I thought it might interest him.

Prof. Steve wrote back to me within a couple of hours. I quote him pretty much verbatim:

“The subject is fascinating and would indeed be a good subject for a more comprehensive analysis or story. I have learnt a few things about why people decline the offer of a transplant through my career which I will share with you:

Fear of loss of control or surgery itself. This is not about integrity of self but more to do with fear of undergoing incomprehensibly massive surgery with all of the attached changes imposed by immunosuppression. Or actual loss of control which is an essential component of surgery. The patient gives up all control and consciousness and hands this over to a team of barely known people who undertake life-changing procedures. This is more than some people can cope with. The irrational fear that people have of dying on the operating table has always fascinated me. The chances are not significantly less remote than being struck by lightning and yet people are consumed by the possibility of this rare event. I have even asked the question “what would be so wrong with dying during surgery, as you would know nothing about it?” To which the answer is usually about not being ready, lack of preparation — or “I suppose so!”

Guilt. I have had a number of patients who have told me that they do not want a transplant because they know their disease was self-inflicted through alcohol or drugs and no amount of reasoning in trying to assuage this guilt will change their minds. It is uncommon but it does happen. The guilt is usually self-directed or put into an equation where they may be depriving a more (in their minds) deserving person of the opportunity at life. The irony of course is that patients with alcohol related liver disease have among the best outcomes from liver transplantation of anyone. I remember having more than one organ donor who died as a result of falling off a bar stool and have always doubted that they would be too concerned over the circumstances of the person that received their liver.

Altered self (psychological). The situation you describe in your Substack piece captures very well the concerns that a few people have of their self being altered by another person’s organ. The most interesting end of it is the one that you have explored, where people have concern that an organ from someone else might change the essence of who they are. For me this means changing their thinking, or some core aspect of their being which defines their personality. It is difficult to comprehend if you don’t believe in such things (which I don’t — apologies from a scientist).

Altered self (physical). You may know this, Richard, but a number of patients who have had face and hand transplants have had real problems accepting their transplants. These transplants are of course the only ones that we can see for ourselves as most organs are buried internally where the sun doesn’t shine. The face and hand transplant recipients now undergo very extensive counselling because a number of them have deliberately stopped taking their immunosuppression —deliberately rejecting their transplants physically and metaphorically.

Xenotransplants. I once undertook a study with the help of a bunch of first year medical students. Their job was to question healthy members of the public, medical professionals and patients on a kidney transplant waiting list about their views on the acceptability of receiving a xeno transplant from a pig. No members of the public would entertain the idea; medical professionals were divided, but every single patient on the waiting list said they would accept a pig organ if all other things were OK, i.e. safety of surgery etc. Xenotransplantation is now a real probability rather than a possibility with advances in gene editing, which allows you to get around problems of rejection and also possible transmission of pig retroviruses which can effectively be edited out.

A few things for you to reflect on in the context of why people refuse transplants.”

‘The face is our identity’

Of all these helpful points, it was the reference to ‘hand and face’ transplants that grabbed my attention, and in the days following our exchange of emails, I did a little research of my own . . .

I recalled the case of Nastassja Martin, the young French anthropologist who lost part of her face to a bear while doing fieldwork in a remote corner of eastern Siberia. I reviewed her book, so had already spent a good spell of time thinking about her case. After some hasty intervention at a provincial hospital in Russia, Nastassja returned to Paris for further surgery. There she received a visit from the hospital psychotherapist who asked her how she was feeling, “because, you know, the face is our identity.” Nastassja looked at the therapist, aghast, and asked her if this was the kind of information she offered all of the patients at the hospital’s maxillofacial clinic!

If ‘the face is our identity’ — an issue that attracts a good deal of attention in Fay Bound-Alberti’s book, cited above — we might return to the case of Isabelle Dinoire, the first person to receive a face transplant. She needed one because she was badly mauled by her dog after falling unconscious following what was, by her own account, a suicide attempt. The events were reported in The Guardian, as follows:

After a bad week, Dinoire, who was a seamstress, had taken a large dose of sleeping pills “to forget” her troubles. She woke on her sofa and tried to light a cigarette, and then noticed blood and the presence of her dog beside her. Looking in the mirror, she discovered her terrible injuries.

For months before the transplant, she had “the face of a monster”, she said. She had no mouth and her teeth and gums were exposed, skull-like, in a “reminder of death”. Most of her nose was missing. But she said she had no hatred for her dog Tanya, who she felt had been trying to save her.

It was through British press reports that she discovered her donor had killed herself. She said she felt a bond to her “twin sister” through their suicidal urges. “That it was someone who wanted to die, like me … It’s odd to know that she saved me,” she said.

After the transplant she said she was determined to make a success of her life, learning to eat and speak and also wanting to be able to kiss.

Two years after the transplant she described in a book that the hardest thing was accepting the inside of “someone else’s” mouth. “It was odd to touch it with my tongue. It was soft. It was horrible.”

She said of the discovery of a hair on her chin: “It was odd. I’d never had one. I thought, ‘It’s me that has given it life, but the hair is hers.’ Sometimes I put my hand to my face to check that it’s still there.”

Since Dinoire’s partial face transplant, more than 30 people worldwide have had similar treatment.

Given that the Guardian report was published nearly ten years ago, I imagine that number has since increased. In case you are interested, here is a link to a recent podcast: The ‘guinea pigs’ who had face transplant surgery – also at The Guardian.

Whether by means of a face transplant or that of an internal organ — and in spite of Prof. Steve’s scientistic objections — the idea that, with transplantation, we might somehow ‘absorb’ elements of another person’s personality (as well as their DNA) seems to have strong currency amongst many recipients.

In my last post, I referred to this as a sense of ‘alien intrusion.’

And, on the topic of alien intrusion — and again ‘by chance’, I yesterday came upon an article suggesting that we are subject to this kind of thing all of the time, and in ways that appear unavoidable. In other words, we are all an assimilation of different parts or elements, and frequently act as hosts to ‘alien’ DNA.

The stranger within

A review written by Gregory Radick for the current issue of the Times Literary Supplement, titled ‘The Stranger Within’, opens with the information cited at the top of this post, that cells from other people have probably taken up residence within each and every one of us. This certainly puts paid to any worries I raised in my last post about the individual’s ‘uniqueness’ being put at risk by the insertion of a transplanted organ, such as the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño seemed to fear.

The book under review is Hidden Guests: Migrating cells and how the new science of microchimerism is redefining human identity, and its author, Lise Barnéoud, argues that ‘microchimerism’ — the term refers to low-level genetic diversity within an organism due to DNA from other people — implies that not only are you likely to inherit DNA from the inhabitants of your mother’s womb from before you were born (i.e. older siblings, whether they survived or not), along with traces of your mother’s mother and other female ancestors, but also, alarmingly, from the sperm of any man with whom your mother had sex before she conceived any children. This is because:

The many ejaculated cells not occupied with fertilizing an egg can embed themselves in vaginal tissue, going on from there to circulate in a woman’s bloodstream and entrench themselves in tissue all over her body, heart and brain included. If that indeed takes place, then you may harbour DNA belonging to the sexual partners your mother had before your father.

And if you are the recipient of a transplanted organ — the source of that specialised paranoia that I discussed in my last post — you are liable to other forms of microchimeric infiltration:

Cells in a donated organ, for example, don’t always remain tidily sequestered, but can go roaming, wreaking havoc on the host’s health and even, if a sample of their tissue matches the DNA in the blood, hair or semen left by the donor at a crime scene, resulting in wrongful imprisonment. If you are ejaculated into, there is a chance you will gain some new DNA. And of course, if you carry children of your own, you may be host to their cells. Your hidden guests can thus be a motley, multigenerational crew.

Microchimeric intrusion might prove to have benefits also: disorders currently considered autoimmune diseases may not actually be caused by malfunctioning (self-attacking) immune systems, but by well-functioning ones “belatedly detecting and attacking microchimeric tissue.”

I understand that our own selfhood or identity is something that we tend to regard as unique and special, bordering on the sacred. But how much of this is a cultural belief, rather than a given? In terms of the history of Homo sapiens, to what extent is the idea of our unique individuality a relatively recent trend? Do we not belong — as countless indigenous peoples have believed for countless millennia — to the vast intermeshing complex of the forest and the stream, the beaver and the bear, the antelope and the ant? Our sense of corporeal uniqueness may simply be a delusion, shared by many, but ultimately false.

We are each of us unique in other ways — the make-up of our imaginations and our dreams are uniquely ours, for instance, so what is so alarming about the notion of microscopic elements within our bodies originating ‘somewhere else’. Are we not, after all, co-extensive with the world that brought us into existence and continues to sustain us?

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

On hearing this, Emilie’s dad says ‘Absolutely not.’ In fact, he goes on to say, ‘I would rather die’. Emilie is shocked by her father’s outright refusal. And so was I, when I read it, because I know from experience what chronic liver failure does to a body, and how wretchedly ill one becomes. In the final stages — which fortunately I avoided, thanks to the transplant — it is a disease utterly without respect for one’s person: the terminal hepatic patient dies, as my own father, himself a physician, once kindly informed me, with blood and other matter oozing — ‘gushing’, I think he said — from every orifice.

So one wonders why Emilie’s father turned down the offer. Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult to find out what he says on the matter. In an article for the Irish Times, Richard Pine — for reasons I do not fully understand — considers the idea of a transplant to be a ‘threat’. According to his own account, after coming to in hospital, he is told by a doctor that he won’t be able to give up drinking without help. “AA and a social worker were threatened. I told him that I can do it through willpower.”

I can — just about —get why someone might not want to join Alcoholics Anonymous (though what on earth does a social worker have to do with it?). If Richard Pine can give up the booze through willpower alone, good luck to him. However, more relevant, with regard to the topic I wish to address, is his attitude toward organ transplantation:

The other threat dangled over me was a transplant. But it’s not for me. I’d rather have a brain transplant. If I decided to drink, it would be in the full knowledge that it would kill me, probably quickly . . . And it would be a squalid death.

Hmm. He’s right about it being a squalid death (see my father’s remarks, above). But I just don’t get the thing about not wanting a liver transplant. He doesn’t say why he was so opposed to having one. I mean, if he misses drinking so much (and it’s clear from his article that he does, or did, in 2014) then, hey, if he accepted a transplant he could start out again with a clean slate, as it were . . .

However, Richard Pine is not unique in his rejection of a liver transplant.

Did Bolaño’s hesitation cost him his life?

The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño also expressed reservations about having a liver transplant. According to one of his closest friends, the Mexican writer Juan Villoro, who was with him for much of the time during his final weeks, Bolaño believed that something essential about himself would be changed or compromised by the introduction of another person’s liver into his body. As Villoro wrote to me after visiting Wales a few years ago, during which time we had discussed the Chilean author in some detail: ‘I talked to Roberto a lot while he was waiting for his liver transplant. He was uncertain about the benefits of living with an alien organ. He felt too unique and too singular to be relieved (sic) by another person. During Easter, he told me: “I guess the guy who is going to give me his liver is dying now in a car accident”. He signed the papers to receive the transplant, but too late.’

Bolaño was reluctant to sign the document that would put him on the transplant list, and his delay meant that he died before a suitable organ was available.

It makes me wonder, this reluctance to accept the gift of another person’s liver, or any other organ for that matter. It comes down, I suppose, as Bolaño appeared to believe, to some idea about the uniqueness of the self; that the physical body we inhabit is somehow integral to our personhood, and that, by extension, this personhood is unique and indissoluble. Or unique and constant. Such a belief implies that receiving a stranger’s organ will fundamentally change who you are.

This, it seems to me, is not far removed from the belief, in many cultures, that the major organs (the heart and the liver) carry the essence, the personality, even the soul of the individual.

Some patients fear what is termed ‘intrusive anxiety’, which manifests as a constant, distressing awareness of the foreign organ. They may argue that the mental toll of feeling like a ‘cyborg’ or a ‘hybrid’ outweighs the life-extending benefits of the surgery. Finally, some recipients allegedly experience fear of ‘foreign’ DNA, and regard the presence of donor DNA in their system as an intrusion that renders them no longer ‘fully themselves.’

I never had any such misgivings about my own transplant. I never felt as though my personal identity or uniqueness were under threat by living with an ‘alien’ organ. On the contrary, I was profoundly grateful that someone should offer to share their leftover body parts with another person — a stranger — once they no longer had any use for them. A little bit of that person lives on with me, I guess, though I never quite think of it (or of him) like that. After the initial operation, in which the new liver was attached to the inferior vena cava, the portal vein, the hepatic artery, and the bile duct, it gradually became assimilated and is now a part of my own intricate system of pumping blood and bile, and is, as far as I can tell, happy in its new home. It certainly hasn’t given me any cause for concern in the nineteen years that it’s now been in residence.

But I believe what bothered Roberto was something else: the diminution or ‘spoiling’ of his unique individuality by the insertion of an alien body part. And this seems to depend on accepting the idea of an essential self that can in some way be encroached upon (or be sullied by) an alien organism. Since I do not suffer from an especially strong sense of the essential or permanent nature of my ‘self’, this has always seemed less of a worry.

I wonder too whether the reluctance of the two men discussed here to accept a transplanted organ is something to do with the transgression of implicit boundaries? Remembering my anthropology, I wonder if there is anything in the literature to do with purity and pollution in our attitudes to organ transplantation . . .

The self and the other

In 2006, my hepatologist told me I had less than a year to live without a transplant, so the choice for me was whether to live or to die. I was a doting father to two teenage daughters whom I wished to see into adulthood. I had a wife — their mother — whom I loved, and still do. I felt there was a great deal more living to be done before calling in the chips. I also felt that I had a few more books that wanted writing before I was done. That, certainly, was important to me. The sense of a job left unfinished, and a life left to live. I could not have conceived of delaying the offer of a transplant, far less rejecting it. My personal boundaries — if that was what they were — didn’t feel that significant. But they do to others, Roberto Bolaño (and quite possibly Richard Pine) among them.

In an article titled ‘The Utterable and Unutterable Anthropological Meaning of the Body in the Context of Organ Transplantation’ Silke Schicktanz and Sabine Wöhlke discuss the way in which organ transplantation evokes a sort of ‘transmortality’ in Pedro Almodovar’s 1999 movie Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother). In the film, we follow the life of Manuela, the story’s protagonist (played by Cecilia Roth) after her son Esteban is hit by a car. Manuela, whose job is to oversee organ transplants, questions whether she should agree to the donation of her brain-dead son’s organs. She finally gives her permission, but going against all the rules, she then searches the hospital records and finds out who the recipients of the organs are. The heart has been sent to the city of La Coruña, to which Manuela travels, and seeing the recipient leaving the hospital, she imagines her son’s heart in his body. At least, that is the idea as the camera pans in on the man’s chest, and thus on his new heart. This, argues the authors of the article, can be understood as a symbol of transmortality: Esteban may be dead, but an important part of him — his heart — lives on in someone else’s body.

Needless to say, this works both ways. People who have organ transplants joke about how they have been infiltrated by ‘the other’: I know, I’ve done it myself and heard others do it. There are probably people who genuinely believe this stuff; that their bodies, as organ recipients, have in some way been affected by the alien presence. However, this is unlikely to be something we organ recipients would discuss with our surgeons, who, unsurprisingly, take a far more pragmatic approach to the transplantation process.

Schicktanz and Wöhlke conclude that: ‘Despite the efforts of psychiatrists and surgeons to put forward a merely mechanistic understanding of the parts of the body involved in organ transplantation, many recipients believe that a connection is made between their selves and the other in their bodies. Thus, transplanted body parts are more than just material things.’

Xenotransplantation

However, such discussions broach entirely new territory when applied to the matter of xenotransplantation, (organs transplanted from animals). In January 2022, The American Journal of Transplantation published news of a successful kidney transplant from a pig into a brain-dead human, carried out by surgeons at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA; and in March this year — the current issue — the Journal of Hepatology reports that on May 17, 2024 a liver was transplanted from a genetically modified pig to a 71 year old man in China. The transplant was deemed a qualified success: the recipient lived for 171 days.

This blasts the debate about ‘intrusive anxiety’ into a whole new dimension. ‘Alien intrusion’ might be a term used by those reluctant to undergo a transplant — or horrified by an existing one — from a fellow human being, which they regard as a violation of their self-identity or integrity. Bad enough to have a stranger’s liver, but a pig’s? I am certain that this new area of transplantation will prove an ethical and existential minefield . . .

To conclude, I find it fascinating to learn that so many organ recipients are genuinely apprehensive about the connection between themselves and the ‘other’ to which they are acting as host. Although I have very occasionally wondered about the life of my donor (a large man of forty, was all I was told, whose liver was correspondingly larger than average) I have never been concerned about matters such as whether or not he may have been a serial killer or a satanist cannibal. I’ve assumed that such a person probably wouldn’t be of a philanthropic bent, and therefore wouldn’t be likely to volunteer themselves on a transplant donor scheme. I was fifty when I had the operation, so the most I can say is that my liver was ten years younger than me. But is it still? Seeing as the body replaces itself with a new set of cells every seven to ten years, and some of our most important parts are revamped even more rapidly, I have now undergone at least two complete renovation cycles since 2007. So can I assume the liver is now the same age as the rest of me? I’m not sure, nor do I much care.

Which returns me, necessarily, to the question of why on earth I, or anyone, would refuse a transplant: since I myself am in a perpetual state of change and re-invention, with cells dropping off and self-regenerating in a never-ending dance, who is to say where I end and the rest of the universe begins?

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

Today’s post is a little longer than usual. But despite appearances, there is a common or unifying theme to what follows, so please bear with me . . .

For much of my early life — excluding a chaotic and self-destructive sojourn in London between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four — I lived in Cymru, Crete or Catalunya. Then at the grand old age of thirty-three, after a close encounter with the grim reaper in Barcelona (pneumonia and pleurisy, a consequence of poor lifestyle choices and sleeping rough), I returned to live in the first of these places, known to most of the world as ‘Wales’, a word which derives from the Anglo-Saxon word wealh, meaning ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’.

Paradoxically, we Welsh are known to the wider world by a term used by settlers from Germany to describe the native Celtic inhabitants of the country they had invaded. By contrast, our own name for our country is Cymru, derived from the Brittonic combrogi (fellow-countrymen). So although we call ourselves ‘compatriots’ we are known to the outside world as ‘foreigners.’ So it goes.

Sunday was Saint David’s Day — Dydd Gŵyl Dewi — the national day of Cymru, celebrated with daffodils and song, although I find myself far away, in the shadow of the Albera massif, in Spanish Catalunya. I celebrate by taking a walk in the afternoon sunshine, parking the car at the Font de Conill (Rabbit spring) and heading north towards the border with France, before turning east and climbing to the Coll de Belitres (one of two local mountain passes so named, the other being a major crossing place between Spain and France during both the Spanish Civil War and World War Two, situated a few kilometres to the east, between Port Bou on the Spanish side, and Cerbère, on the French).

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Messages from the burial chamber

From there I return to my starting point, passing, en route, one of my favourite monuments, the Dolmen del Barranc, a Megalithic burial chamber. The ancient people who built and maintained these monuments, from around the fourth millennium B.C., knew how to honour their dead, placing their graves in sites that command dramatic vistas. There are several engravings on the main roof slab, which is still preserved: they were made by chipping away at the stone, probably with a tool made from a quartz river stone. I have no idea what they represent, but a few years ago I came here on a summer’s night, climbing up from the river in the dark, while wild boar snuffled and grunted in the bushes to the side of the path. When I got to the burial chamber, I lay down on the great slab for a good long while. The Milky Way was directly above, and it felt as though I were being sucked into an infinite vortex of light. When I eventually arose, and walked back to the village, I strapped on a head-torch, and much of the way I was accompanied by a host of dancing moths, attracted to the light from my lamp, just as I had been absorbed by the hypnotic light in the sky above me as I lay on the monumental slab.

Returning to my walk of yesterday, I had spent the morning reading the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s latest book, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now, in which — if I might simplify grossly — the author examines and critiques the way in which, in the contemporary world, the generations have become isolated from one another, the ‘middle’ generation tending to behave with an arrogance that comes of having seized the present for its own ends, and thereby presuming to control the conditions of admission to the future as well. This generation stands between the old and young, often causing a break in generational tradition, curbing the curiosity of the young and repudiating the wisdom of the old. Clearly Ingold is not talking about all members of that generation but of a general tendency, as he puts it, that comes from being in charge, so busy with their world making that they pay no attention to their elders or juniors. (I have my reservations about the specifics of this argument, as it seems to me that my own generation — the grandparents — as well as the one before us, shoulder a good deal of the blame for the shitty state of the world right now —but I get the point that follows).

Ingold argues for a shift away from the mindset of Generation Now toward a ‘collaboration of overlapping generations’, such as may be found in certain indigenous cultures where there tends to be a far greater intermingling and interconnectedness between generations, as well as a more vivid sense of continuity, of being part of a lineage that stretches back into the folds of history; a connective tissue trailing back through legions of ancestors into the realm of myth.

There are elements (i.e individuals) within Generation Now, Ingold argues, who have no interest in either past or future, only in prolonging and enriching their own stay on earth, even turning to Transhumanism, whereby death is just another problem that can be averted for as long as possible, and the human condition can be dramatically ‘improved’ through the use of advanced technologies. Proponents of Transhumanism believe that humanity is a ‘work in progress’ and science can be recruited to overcome biological limitations such as ageing, disease, cognitive constraints (by merging with AI in order to transcend natural brain capacity) and eventually death . . .

But while these technologies may help secure ridiculously long lives for the ridiculously wealthy, what of the rest of us? And why would anyone want an artificially extended life at any cost?

A rope of meadow grass

Having recently become a grandparent, and increasingly aware of my place in a genealogical continuum, the line of enquiry proposed by Ingold interests me a good deal. To illustrate his argument, Ingold uses the metaphor of rope, made from meadow grass, in which each stem of grass is a human life, and every strand twists around others, representing relations between immediate kin and the wider social group life. As he explains:

The inclination of particular lives to go their own separate ways exerts a friction that tightens the bonds of community; while, conversely, any loosening of communal bonds tightens the intimacy with which these lives rub along. The counterpoint of tension and friction — what the Ancient Greeks called Harmony (armonia) — holds it all together. No one, of course, lives forever. But as fast as some age and eventually give out, others are born and enter into the twist. Thus, despite the turnover of individual participants, social life can carry on indefinitely, with a rhythm born of the cycle of human generations.

Thus it comes as no surprise to learn that the burial chamber at El Barranc was cared for and serviced well into the Bronze Age, indicating a long history of activity — and fitting the pattern of many Iberian dolmens that served as collective burial sites from the late Neolithic and into the Bronze Age. This suggests that the monument was actually in use, continuously or sporadically, over a period of around two thousand years.

From Capel y Ffin to the Angel of History

My walk took me along the river course of the Orlina (my granddaughter’s middle name), which I had to cross twice, before climbing to the pass. And, as I walked I began to reflect — not as unconnectedly as it might appear — to a talk I attended last week on the poet and artist David Jones, specifically about his time living at Capel y Ffin, in the Llanthony valley, near to where I grew up and now live, in the Black Mountains of south Wales.

The talk was given by Peter Wakelin, an expert (in the best sense) on Jones’ work as an artist, and took place in the Cwmyoy village hall as part of a series of talks hosted by the Llanthony Valley History Group. Peter’s talk included a quote from David Jones, extracted from a personal manifesto, sent to his friend Jim Ede in 1935, about his role as an artist within the broader Celtic tradition, in which he claims

a certain affection for the intimate creatureliness of things — a care for, and appreciation of, the particular genius of places, men (sic), trees, animals, and yet withal a pervading sense of metamorphosis and mutability.

How perfectly that reflects my own belief — more passionately held as I get older — that we are part of a wider community than the purely human, that we share an ‘intimate creatureliness’ with people, places, trees and animals. Nowhere do I feel that intimacy more powerfully than here in the Alberas, or equally, in the oak and beech forests above Y Fenni, on the Deri, or in St Mary’s Vale.

But place is relative, after all. I, like others, have my own special places, where my sense of being alive is more acute, which no doubt coincides with what, in the Celtic world, are customarily known as ‘thin places’. And it is in these locations, such as I have been fortunate enough to know, that the relevance of interconnectedness, community and the genius of place are best celebrated. In times such as these, when almost everything in the political world is going to hell, we need such places more than ever.

Connecting the past with the present, both through monuments such as the Dolmen del Barranc, as well as through shared family and genealogical histories, has never seemed so crucial. Tim Ingold reminds us that Walter Benjamin, responding to a monoprint by Paul Klee titled Angelus Novus or the Angel of History, wrote a short piece in 1940 just before his suicide (at nearby Port Bou), as a fugitive from the Nazis. And this in turn, reminds me of what I wrote on this same topic over fifteen years ago, in The Vagabond’s Breakfast:

‘Walter Benjamin writes that there is an angel who remembers the whole of history. His face is turned towards the past. He would like to pause and piece together everything that was smashed in the ongoing catastrophe of human affairs but there is a wind blowing from paradise and it is so strong that it gets caught up in his wings and he can no longer close them. The storm (which we call progress) drives him helplessly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of rubble grows higher and higher.

It seems to me our personal histories are also formed this way; our consciousness of being in the world is an amalgam of debris swept together in the storm. Sometimes random objects; boxes, jewellery, pencils, pins, sticky tape, pieces of string, old coins, get caught up in the rubble and confuse the process of recollection. Fragments of other people’s history, detritus from other minds and other worlds, errant particles, floating songs and poems, all make their way into the vaults of memory.’

I am going to leave the last words to Tim Ingold, who resists the monumentally blinkered and narcissistic obsessions of the current zeitgeist, which he defines as ‘Generation Now’ and offers instead a view preferred, among others, by the Chukchi people of northeastern Siberia, for whom death, when it comes, is not an end-point, but a melting back “into the very flux of creation whence it came, and from which everything originates.” We can resist the overweening arrogance of Generation Now, he argues, by adopting attitudes that embody a humility before the natural world and a strength of purpose, summarised as follows:

Together, grandparents and grandchildren are in touch, in ways that target-driven intermediaries . . . are not, with more enduring rhythms of time. This is a time not of diachronic replacement and succession but of continuous renewal, of weather and the seasons, of breaking waves and running rivers, of the growth and decay of vegetation and the coming and going of animals, of breaths and heartbeats. This is the age for which Angelus Novus yearns. Were young and old to put their heads together, could they bring it back?

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

The night before last — 10 February — I was awarded a very special prize for doing something that I love: translating poetry. The book in question was a selection by the Mexican Fabio Morábito, which I made in collaboration with the poet, and published by Carcanet. The prize was the Premio Valle-Inclán for translation from Spanish, awarded by the Society of Authors at the British Library in London.

Some people say the translation of poetry cannot or should not be done, but I disagree. It’s simply a question of taking the original poem on its own terms, and shaping it into something new in another tongue. You make a new poem, effectively, using the original as a guide. I like to do pretty close translation, aiming to replicate meaning, tone and rhythm wherever possible, and finding alternatives when it isn’t.

With regards to translation I had a mentor, of sorts, in Edith (Edie) Grossman, whose masterclass I attended in London back in 2013. Edie taught us that translation was a vital, creative act rather than merely a literal substitution of one text for another. She helped me to understand that translators must be accomplices to the author, focusing on tone, intention and rhythm, so as to render a new, living text. In this way, too, we bridge gaps between cultures, and help to foster a greater understanding of the other. Edie helped me enormously, not least by providing the most fabulous blurb for my anthology of Latin American poetry, The Other Tiger.

I had another mentor too, even though I only met him once, a couple of months before he died. He was a friend of Edie, and of my old pal, the Scottish poet Tom Pow. That man was Alastair Reid, translator and friend of J.L. Borges among others (he also hung out with Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquea, Alvaro Mutis and other members of the so-called Latin American Boom). On the topic of translation, Alastair, was at once forthcoming and intriguingly elusive.

He told me that, for him, translation was a kind of bewitchment, but also an activity that necessitated a good deal of background excavation. He claimed, perhaps surprisingly, that translators were far more interested in mistranslation than in good translation, because mistranslation was so revealing. There was, he said, this curious linguistic no-man’s-land that only translators know about, and from which emerges an astonishingly rich list of untranslatables, each item revealing something about the nature of language itself. That, he said, is why translation was not a business simply of transposing something into another language, it was about getting to the very edge of saying, where, if you look closely, you can see the curious unspoken depths that are being touched by one or two words.

These ideas were compounded by another writer whose ideas have touched me over the years, John Berger, and whose words here seem to touch on the essence of translation:

True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.

One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless ‘thing’ and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the thing that is waiting to be articulated.

This practice reminds us that a language cannot be reduced to a dictionary or stock of words and phrases. Nor can it be reduced to a warehouse of the works written in it. A spoken language is a body, a living creature, whose physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.

Journey of the sixteen-year-old poet

To expand on the metaphor of the journey, I would like to mention a poem that, for me, exemplifies Morábito’s achievement, offering snapshots from the other side of the mirror.

‘Journey to Patzcuaro’ chronicles an adventure undertaken by the sixteen-year-old Fabio, only a year after his arrival in Mexico, and was one of the poems I most enjoyed translating. There is a special delight in accomplishing a translation of a poem in one clean sweep that is at once similar to, but different from, the sense of achievement in one’s ‘own’ work.

Fabio himself speaks of this in an interview with Barbara Bertoni, when he says that to translate a poem that you love is ‘to chew it over, appropriate it almost organically . . . rewriting that which was already written. It is a way of understanding something that cannot be fully understood by a simple reading, by trying to pin down what you feel might otherwise flee.’

In ‘Journey to Pátzcuaro’, arriving in the town at dawn, the young poet crosses the empty plaza, the sun’s first rays illuminating a statue; he observes the deserted doorways, and no one can hear him, no one see him, ‘like in a painting by De Chirico.’

In an extraordinarily lucid moment, the adult poet reflects on his decision to reject the offer of a fine room, spacious and well-lit, overlooking the square and its statue, because he ‘didn’t dare take it’, a decision, he says, that, had he chosen differently, might have changed his life forever: ‘Maybe now I would be someone else, / everything would be different, / I wouldn’t write what I write.’ This recreation of the fragility of the moment, in an unfamiliar town in a new country, strikes me as encapsulating much else that we learn from Morábito’s poetry, as though we too were setting out in a strange land, confronted by an array of decisions to be made, any one of which might mark us for eternity. It is this exposure to the unknown that venturing into the work of a new poet will sometimes afford us, and whose sense I can only hope is transmitted by these translations also.

JOURNEY TO PÁTZCUARO

At sixteen years of age
with no clear purpose in mind,
I bought a ticket for Pátzcuaro.
I travelled all night
in a half-empty bus.
I could have gone
to Zacatecas or to Querétaro,
or any other place.
I never travelled to the sea,
the sea was where old people went,
it detracted from the journey’s heroism.
I arrived at Pátzcuaro
at dawn,
the square was empty,
the doorways deserted,
only my footsteps could be heard,
like in a painting by De Chirico.
The sun’s first rays
lit up the head
of Quiroga’s statue.
A woman came out to sweep
the pavement outside a hotel
that seemed to me luxurious
(because I was sixteen)
and offered me a room.
It was on the second floor.
It looked out over the statue,
it had a balcony,
and a fine table
next to the window,
it was spacious and well-lit.
I didn’t dare take it.
And that was the ideal
room for me,
it had the radiance
of my sixteen years.
Maybe now I would be someone else,
everything would be different,
I wouldn’t write what I write.
Who would offer me
such a room again, overlooking a statue
in the silence of a square?
Maybe I haven’t aged since then,
I’m everything I was at sixteen
or a little less.
In another hotel
dark and dull,
three or four blocks from the square,
in which I took a room,
someone yelled at me to shut up
when I began to play the guitar.
There was no balcony and the window
gave onto a grey patio.
Gradually I grew to hate myself
for not knowing how
to make that journey.
Why did I come to Pátzcuaro, to Janitzio,
why did I lug around the guitar
that I barely ever played,
why play it at all, if it
only hastened my return
and everything left me so indifferent?
Why travel
in order to return,
to test myself, with blinkered eyes?
I was within a hair’s breadth
of acting my age,
perhaps,
within a hair’s breadth of touching the depths
without pain.
The old vice of my kin
of believing in experience, not in my eyes,
and not grabbing anything on the fly,
as though it were a sin!
I wasn’t four days in Pátzcuaro,
and only for the first minute,
only then was I perfect,
when I wandered past the doorways
and no one could see me, no one hear me,
like in a painting by De Chirico.

Farewell

Below, I’m posting the text of the poem I read on the night. Since we were asked to limit our acceptance speeches to two minutes, mine was pretty brief. My words can also be heard on YouTube, at the video linked with the Society of Authors’ Translation Prizes 2025:

The relevant part comes on at 55 minutes 50 seconds.

DESPEDIDA

Los martes
llegaba un mendigo
con mandolina
a la sombra del cidro
bajo nuestra ventana
de persianas verdes
que abría mi madre
para darle dos manzanas;
nos mudamos un día,
nos fuimos lejos,
el martes llegó el mendigo
a nuestra casa abandonada
y sé que estuvo
largo tiempo tocando
su mandolina
baja nuestra ventana
a la sombra del cidro
antes de irse para siempre
de la colina
de nuestra casa.

FAREWELL

On Tuesdays
a beggar used to come
with a mandolin
to the shade of the citron tree
beneath our window
with its green shutters
that my mother would open
to give him two apples;
one day we moved,
went far away,
on Tuesday the beggar came
to our abandoned house
and I know he was there
a long time playing
his mandolin
beneath our window
in the shade of the citron tree
before leaving for ever
the hill
where our house stood.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

1.

A few days ago, out for a walk in the village of Rabós, a double rainbow appeared in exactly the same position that I photographed it in May 2021, and if I had been a couple of hundred metres up the road, the photos above would have been practically identical. Do double rainbows reappear in precisely the same place, at recurring intervals? I have no idea. So I ask chatGPT, and feed in the precise geographical location and times of viewing, along with the two photographs. The AI does its thing, collating weather reports for the area over the past century or whatever, and I am informed that: “This specific rainbow landing is realistically possible once every 1–3 years. Seeing it twice in five years is uncommon, but not surprising — especially if you’re observant and outdoors at the right times.” So, I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time but, all things considered, the second sighting was not too spooky. Plus I learned that the correct term for where a rainbow ends is a ‘landing.’

2.

I am currently reading an excellently researched biography of David Jones (1895-1974) by Thomas Dilworth. Jones is a poet and artist whose work has intrigued me since my teenage years. Suffice to say that for various reasons he is the focus of my attention right now and, as if to confirm this, I receive an email from the Llanthony Valley and District History Group announcing that a talk by Peter Wakelin titled ‘David Jones at Capel y Ffin’ is due to take place on 25th February. On the same day I receive a WhatsApp message from an acquaintance completely oblivious to the goings on of the Llanthony History Group, who lives in another city, far away, and cannot possibly know of my interest in David Jones, but who sends me a link to an article about . . . . David Jones. Coincidence or synchronicity?

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3.

James Dickson Innes and David Jones were both Welsh artists of extraordinary talent, whose lives may have overlapped in London in the years immediately prior to World War One, but if so, no record of such a meeting exists. Innes, born in 1887, was eight years older than Jones. We know that both of them were ardent fans of Turner and, unconnectedly, both visited the Post Impressionist Exhibition of 1910, held at the Grafton Gallery, Mayfair, about which Virginia Woolf wrote: “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” Both men were linked with the now infamous sculptor and engraver Eric Gill: Innes held a joint exhibition with Gill — his first — at the Chenil Gallery in 1911 while Jones became closely associated with the artist in London and at Capel y Ffin in the 1920s, and was for a while engaged to Gill’s daughter, Petra. Both Innes and Jones were passionate about their Welsh heritage, and both painted the Welsh landscape repeatedly.

4.

Here is an extract from my journal, dated 4th January 2024:

I have been wondering about the capacity of the mind to focus on anything for more than a few seconds at a time. A lot has been published on this topic in recent years, especially relating to children’s use of the internet and social media. An article I read somewhere suggested that the maximum attention span is around eleven minutes, but that seems optimistic: when engaged in mindfulness meditation, for example, it can be difficult for me to maintain focus on my breathing for more than eleven seconds.

Nevertheless, and despite all evidence to the contrary, I decide to try and focus only on my breathing and on taking one step after another, over the course of a longish walk. I would impersonate a being with no mental baggage, with ‘nothing extra’, as Shunryu Suzuki puts it. Despite the fact that I have tried this before, and failed, I want to see whether I can maintain a sustained awareness of myself as only a walking, breathing entity — or at least a being with this intention, which may or may not be the same thing — over the course of the entire walk. I know that I am setting myself up to fail again, but I will do it anyway, just to see . . .

So, on a January morning — the first day of the new year on which it is not pelting with rain — I set off on a circular walk from Llanthony Priory. My plan is to climb up to the Offa’s Dyke trail, follow it for a couple of kilometres, turn west down the steep track towards The Vision farm, take a right along the lane to Capel y Ffin, climb to the Ffawyddog (which separates this valley from Cwm Gwyne Fawr) and follow the ridge down to Bal Mawr and thence back to Llanthony. Twenty kilometres, give or take. Six hours including picnic lunch and stops to admire the view.

Before I get to the first turning, on the relatively flat stretch along the Offa’s Dyke path, I am doing pretty well. I am practising in the same way as I meditate, by breathing and focusing on my breath, step after step. I lose myself from time to time, of course; the mind turns somersaults in the usual way, and I slip into the habitual internal commentary, but I am doing OK, although, of course, I am not ‘getting anywhere’. Nor do I want to. There is, needless to say, nowhere particular to get to, except one step after another, one breath at a time.

But the fact is, however much I try to convince myself otherwise, I am crap at this. My mind is playing jumping jacks. Within minutes I am all over the place. I have no sense of being a consistent individual, a single thinking feeling entity for more than thirty seconds at a time, maximum. The fundamental thing that distinguishes me from the moorland pony with the swollen belly that I pass along the way is that while the pony is no doubt conscious, I am conscious that I am conscious, and I rather doubt that she is. I am conscious that I am conscious, and that is why I am putting myself through this pointless exercise. I’m not saying that the pony, or the walker’s dog that I see approaching on the far horizon is a lesser being, but I am pretty damn sure that neither of them is spending their time worrying about the permutations of their consciousness, or their failure to keep their attention on one thing at a time.

As I walk, I am getting a sense that there are two distinct ways of regarding the self, or one’s own inner personhood. The first type of consciousness is that I am aware of myself as a physical human being, a human being considered as a whole. This is the human being I encounter in the mirror when brushing my teeth or shaving, the one who looks back at me, and whom I dimly recognise as the same human being I have always been, albeit with obvious differences from the person I was, say, forty years ago, and with minor variations from the person I was yesterday. Let’s call this one the outer self.

The other type of self is, in the philosopher Galen Strawson’s words, an “inner mental presence,” one who has the ability to observe and record the antics of the outer self. This “inner mental presence” is the one I am trying to keep track of as I walk, and finding it incredibly difficult to do so. And, as I have (unthinkingly) just written ‘I’, this poses the question of a third participant, the ‘I’ that is monitoring the inner mental presence as it, in turn, attempts to stay focused. Does this suggest three constituent parts to my identity? — (i) the physical body striding over the moor, (ii) the inner mental presence experiencing thoughts and feelings, and (iii) the ‘I’ making a note of all this; commentating, as it were, on the ‘inner mental process’? Or are there more, an infinitely recursive number of selves, each of them monitoring the one within the adjacent ‘layer’ of selfhood? This is precisely the kind of conundrum I encountered on reading Borges for the first time, or by studying fractals, or taking LSD or psilocybin . . . and yet it is a valid mode of thought, because . . . otherwise I would not be thinking it, surely?

Clearly, I have strayed from the original plan to stay focused on nothing but my breath and putting one foot in front of the other (was that the plan?). I now have to contend with the overwhelming issue of multiple selves, and how to select one among many . . .

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Perhaps the most striking thing I can say about this inner mental presence is that, at best, one is in a state of constant renewal. The poet Harold Brodkey says “our sense of presentness usually proceeds in waves, with our minds tumbling off into wandering .… This falling away and return is what we are”(my italics). How true this feels, I think, as I pound the turf, the familiar muddy turf of these red sandstone hills. Despite the permanent feel of the landscape, and of my place within it, I cannot help but feel that something is always just beginning, and — whatever else I am — I am a part of it. And yet, and yet . . . my mind keeps ‘tumbling off into wandering’, an awkward phrase that at once brings to mind the errant perambulations of a lost soul.

I turn off Offa’s Dyke path towards the valley and the descent gets pretty steep, and because of the rain, the track is slippery. As I near the bottom of the hill I turn back and see a figure high above me on the same path, silhouetted against the skyline, utterly unmoving. It seems to be the figure of a man. The image reverberates with me in a curious way, almost as though it were lifted from a Caspar David Friedrich painting. It feels somehow prescient, as though this figure were not only observing me, but had also registered me observing him. The irrational thought occurs to me that this figure, this personage is somehow significant, or will become so. It is one of those moments when you half-grasp a sense of something about to happen imminently, but only in the vaguest way. Half an hour later, at a gate that opens onto a field close to the valley road, the figure on the hill catches up with me. He is about the same age as me; that is, getting on in years. Without necessarily intending it, we fall into conversation. Neither of us, I suspect, is much given to chatting while on a walk: the very reason one does a walk like this is (usually) that one wishes to be alone. Also, I sense — correctly, as it turns out — that he, if not exactly in a hurry, has somewhere to get to, which I do not. Not in the short term, anyway.

“I see that the road” — he says, pointing at the lane that runs from Llanthony to Capel y Ffin — “has finally been fixed.” The stretch he is indicating has been under repair for many years. A sign proclaiming that the road is closed has warned motorists coming down (or up) the valley to that effect almost for as long as I care to remember. “Oh good,” I reply, adding that I have never taken any notice of the ‘Road Closed’ sign anyway. “Ah, so you’re local, then,” he retorts, with a lopsided grin. “Well, kind of,” I say. “I grew up nearby but live in Cardiff . . . and you?” It transpires he is from Capel itself, but has lived in Abergavenny for many years. It turns out he knew my father., whom he refers to as “a legend.” I let the comment hang there a while. I’m curious, but I don’t ask. Recognising some kind of kinship (as ‘locals’, at least), we talk about the different valleys of the Black Mountains, and their respective qualities. It turns out his own father had a special affection for the Grwyne fechan valley, as did mine. He enjoyed the quiet there, says the man.

We pass a cottage, once a farm, now a holiday home, like most other places in this valley. “When we were children,” the man says, “we used to come carol singing here at Christmas — here and the other farms.” He sounds happy at the memory rather than sorrowful at the fact that nearly all the farms hereabouts have been bought up as second homes, by strangers from across the border, people from London and Bristol. But it makes me sad; no, it also makes me angry, but my anger is pointless, and not directed at any particular individuals, just at the disappearance of a way of life, sadness at the death of a small community, fragile as it was.

We approach the old monastery, where David Jones lived on and off in the 1920s, in the community set up there by Eric Gill. The man tells me that he grew up in that very place, and that there was a painting by Jones on the wall of one of the bedrooms. His father was concerned that the painting was deteriorating and in danger of being lost. He wrote to David Jones, asking if he was interested in conserving the painting, having it restored, and Jones replied, saying no, on balance he thought it best to let the work gently fade away “like an old soldier.”

Next door to the monastery lies The Grange, a large house and pony trekking centre, and the man explains that he has arranged to stop off for tea with an elderly relative who lives there. I continue alone, and climb to the Ffawyddog, where I take a break at a rock called the Blacksmith’s Anvil, sit and eat my sandwich, drink tea, and enjoy the view over the moor towards the Grwyne Fawr reservoir.

Within twenty minutes, the man reappears, climbing the hill behind me. He has caught up with me, as I guessed he would, and stays a while longer, munching on a sandwich of his own. I tell him I wrote a novel set in the valley (The Blue Tent), and he expresses interest, and surprise, because he thought he had read everything published about the place. I tell him I’ll send him a copy, and he scribbles out his address in pencil, on a small notebook he carries with him. The taking of pencil and notebook on a walk in the hills reveals something about a person, I feel. My handwriting has improved since I retired, he comments, with a wan smile, although I have said nothing. I assume, correctly, that he will want to continue on his own, as he is a fast walker — “no one keeps up with me except my brother” — and he needs to be at the Llanthony car park at 4.15 pm for his lift home. There’s no way I could keep pace with him, although I am no slouch myself. I let him leave, and within a couple of minutes he is almost out of sight. He stops still, briefly, near the rocks at Chwarel y fan, and it is a replay of the first time I saw him, above me on the hillside across the valley, silhouetted again the sky, statuesque, looking about him. He vanishes into the amber light of late afternoon.

5.

Which has returned us, reasonably enough, to the theme of walking, and the related notion of the wandering mind. Back here, in the Alberas, we rarely get much snow, but just beyond the local ridges one can glimpse the massif of Canigó, sacred to the Catalans, (spelled Canigou in French), like a great white slumbering dragon. Walking in the nearby Serra de Gibert this week, we came upon a tree below which Bruno the Dog liked to sit and wait whenever we did this particular walk. The photo on the left is from a few years back, when Bruno was still with us (I miss him badly at times), and the one on the right — taken from the opposite direction — from last weekend, with Canigó in the distance.

Here is the mountain as viewed from near the military base at Sant Climent Sescebes:

And here is Canigó as depicted by James Dickson Innes, in one of his paintings held at Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Museum of Wales:

6.

Inspired by the photograph above, we returned on Sunday to catch sight of Canigó from near the hamlet of Els Vilars. Unfortunately it was overcast and visibility not so good. As compensation, here is a photograph of the author standing next to a sign warning of falling projectiles in the military zone behind me: there were none, at least not today, not here. But I must add: unlike for many others, in Ukraine, say, or in Gaza, where approximately 140 people were killed by Israeli forces just last week, 32 of them on Saturday. I cannot begin to understand the pain and suffering of the people who are being subjected to these horrific attacks, day after day, during what we are being told is a ‘ceasefire’.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

Walking along the ridge known as the Ffawyddog, overlooking Cwm Grwyne Fawr to the left, and the Llanthony Valley to the right, you enter a state of watchful trance. You try to remain attentive to the details, but these are relatively few when walking through cloud, which swirls about you, as though you were on the deck of a great liner, plying the folds of the sky. Far off to the south, a mysterious light beckons, the distant glow of somewhere.

You know where you are headed, but are aware that if you go the way you had planned, you will be walking down the mountainside in the dark and, contrary to usual practice, you have not brought your head-torch. You decide to take a short cut, despite all the received wisdom about short cuts. There are times when it is necessary, and this route is known to you. You remember the line from Roethke’s poem “I learn by going where I have to go,” but no, that is not necessarily true, not always. Sometimes you learn nothing by going, only that you should never have left.

And sometimes the place you are headed is not where it was; or, as Gertrude Stein put it, there is no ‘there’ there.

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You cross paths with a wandering pony, a grey, but of a strange hue, as though stained with blue dye. You stop and speak to her. She watches you, you feel, a little disdainfully. Another ambient biped taking a shortcut over the marsh, talking to horses, imagining they are someone they are not. It is difficult enough surviving on this moor without having to conform to the fantasies of some passerby.

Etymology

You are having difficulty negotiating the uneven, boggy terrain, stepping between clumps of bleached moorgrass, but the shortcut is effective and you cut a chunk off the circuit, and eventually descend through rock and moss to rest by the stream, the Grwyne Fawr, the Big Grwyne (though it is hardly large, even in comparison with its sibling, y Grwyne Fechan, the Little Grwyne) and as for the etymology, some sources will claim that grwyne derives from gweryn (an older variant of gwern, meaning a wet and marshy place), and this seems likely, given the terrain. But I have also read that the name derives from gweryn’s homonym, gwerin — the people, the folk.

This is interesting, not least because many indigenous peoples call themselves ‘the people’, ‘the folk’ etc, to distinguish themselves from ‘the others’, whoever they might be — usually neighbouring tribes. In fact the neighbouring tribe or people are often called ‘strangers’, ‘foreigners’ or even ‘barbarians’ (the Greek word indicating that foreigners sound like sheep (baa-baa).

I wonder at the assimilation of people and their land, and of the names they give themselves and others. The inhabitants of this land are called Cymry, which originally meant ‘compatriots’, which is much the same thing as calling one’s own tribe ‘the people’, ‘the folk’ — and to extend that sense of belonging and peoplehood to the immediate environment, one’s home patch seems a perfectly natural thing to do. (In Welsh, this is referred to as one’s cynefin, a multi-layered concept meaning ‘place of belonging’, enriched by geographic, cultural and historical associations, and evoking a sense of rootedness and identity). And yet the name ‘Welsh’ comes from an Anglo-Saxon word, wealh (plural wealas), meaning ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’, thus the native Celtic Britons were called ‘others’ by the Germanic tribes who occupied their land.

All things considered, the name of this wet and boggy place is far more likely to refer to its wetness and bogginess than to it being the place of origin of ‘the people’, attractive as the notion may be.

The future is dark

So you sit and eat an apple under the curious gaze of another blue-dyed pony. You pour coffee from the flask and watch as nothing much takes place. Here the cloud begins in a dense sheet around thirty metres above the stream, hugging the sides of the mountain. Due to the meteorological conditions it has no choice to be anything other than a cloud, but there is no ‘it’, you tell yourself, just billions of tiny water droplets, visible water vapour, crowding around the upper reaches of the mountain.

Then, for a brief spell, the cloud breaks up toward the south and east. A few late crows quibble at the gibbous moon.

As you descend the path past the reservoir, night is falling, and by the time you are past the dam, darkness has settled, and you remember Virgina Woolf’s famous remark, “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” What on earth did she mean? Woolf wrote this in her diary on January 18, 1915. These were the early months of World War One, when there were grounds for profound pessimism, the fields of Flanders by then the setting for “catastrophic slaughter on an unprecedented scale,” as Rebecca Solnit would write in her essay, ‘Woolf’s Darkness.’

Perhaps there is not a lot more to be gleaned from Woolf’s enigmatic sentence (written, after all, in a private journal, where we often leave all kinds of half-formed and speculative sentences) beyond the suggestion offered by Solnit, that “we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.”

Negative Capability

In this sense, ‘the future is dark’ does not seem such a daunting phrase. Both despair and optimism can be grounds for non-action. From here it is an easy step to meet with John Keats walking home with some friends one night; Keats, for whom several things dove-tailed, and the phrase ‘Negative Capability’ came about, by which he meant when one “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

In other words, life being not so much a problem to be solved, as a mystery to be experienced.

It is significant, too, that Keats’ discovery came out while walking, and that, according to Solnit, “wandering on foot can lead to the wandering of the imagination and to an understanding that is creation itself”, an assertion with which Woolf would no doubt have agreed, what with her own habit of wandering, made famous in her essay, ‘Street Haunting.’

And it is not only a wandering of the imagination that is prompted by such excursions. At the evening hour, especially, the time that the French call l’heure bleue, we are granted a certain irresponsibility, a gift bestowed by darkness and lamplight (in the city, at least) with the result that, in Woolf’s words, “we are no longer quite ourselves.”

That line comforts you, gives you hope. And does that ‘certain irresponsibility’ translate from the city, with its streets illuminated by lamplight, to the hills, where the distant glimmer of lights from some town or other might be seen reflected on the clouds?

Rural wandering and urban wandering are entirely different experiences, but in both cases ‘wandering’ is what the mind does when left to its own devices, and this is as it should be. The wandering of our minds corresponds with and complements the wandering of our feet, our wandering in the world.

To the underworld

Then I remember a passage in Hilary Mantel’s ‘Ghost Writing’, which offers another view into the labyrinth:

But perhaps a ghost is not something dead, but something not yet born: not something hidden, but something that we hope is about to be seen. We want to go to the underworld, back into the darkness of our own nature, to bring back some object of impossible beauty: we know it probably won’t work, but what matters is that we keep trying. The consolation lies in the attempt itself, the mercy that’s granted to the hand that dares to stretch out into the dark: well, we say, I am only human, I’ve gone to the brink, I have done all that I can.

“Back into the darkness of our own nature”: this is key. Our own natures are ‘dark’, and what makes Woolf’s comment so refreshing is that she acknowledges this darkness as de facto, as this is it.

We emerge from the darkness of the womb, and return to darkness; there is nothing intrinsically strange about the darkness. The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

And here, where darkness falls, the future opens up before us.

It is noticeably cooler now. A light shines from the window of a solitary farmhouse, half a mile down from the dam, the only dwelling in the upper reaches of the valley. There is always, in that descent towards human habitation at nightfall, a sense of safe return, something as primeval and as reassuring as a fire, a hearth, the comforts of a shelter, the company of kin.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

In June this year, the Tate Modern (London) will be hosting a major exhibition of the works of Frida Kahlo.

So I thought I would take the opportunity of sharing my memories of visiting her museum, back in April 2014. That was the year that I made several trips to Latin America collecting poems for my anthology The Other Tiger, and taking notes for what would eventually become Ambassador of Nowhere: A Latin American Pilgrimage.

What follows is an extract from that book, in which I spend a day in Coyoacán, immersed in all things Frida Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo once said that her life had been defined for her by two disasters: being involved in a horrendous traffic accident at the age of eighteen, and meeting Diego Rivera. Ironically, considering Rivera’s immense status in Mexico as one of los tres grandes – the three great muralists of the post-revolutionary era (the others were David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco) – Frida has since been raised to a higher position than Diego in the hierarchy of world fame, especially since being adopted as a feminist icon, a collocation that is regularly employed in reference to her. The litany of torments that she endured at the hands of men and her own damaged body over the course of a lifetime may have contributed to this status, yet Frida does not come across as a victim; she was an exceptionally resolute woman who made her choices and stuck with them in spite of the many misfortunes that befell her.

I took a bus from Condesa to Coyoacán and walked up the hill to San Angél, where Frida lived and worked – in separate buildings, connected by a footbridge – with and without Diego Rivera. In her house I watched a short film about her life, then crossed the elevated walkway to Diego’s studio, a monument to his earthy, sensual energy, where a number of his large, papier-mâché models were on display, as well as a series of phographs of the artist at work.

I was struck in passing by the resemblance Diego bore to Dylan Thomas, about whose life and work I was, at the time, somewhat reluctantly occupied.

The physical similarity between the two can only be glanced from certain perspectives, but for me at least, it is noteworthy. Apart from the classic 1940s bohemian style, there is something very particular about both men’s dimpled double chins, fleshy lips and shifty eyes, a soft pudginess of face and body. Such is their fame and familiarity in their respective homelands that both Diego and Dylan are often identified by their first names only.

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I returned down the hill to Coyoacán, in search of food. I had been told that the market stalls offered good value, but had just recovered from a bout of gastroenteritis and diarrhoea (the famous Montezuma’s revenge) which had left me bedridden for a couple of days, and I needed to exercise some caution with regard to what I ate. The long walk, and an unexpected attack of loneliness, as well as my inability to choose between the many places to eat in the marketplace in Coyoacán, where I wandered uselessly for half an hour, conspired to lead me to a nasty, strip-lit pizzeria, where I consumed something doughy and bland, before pressing on with a visit to Frida’s blue house, originally her parental home, where she eventually settled.

Leon Trotsky, briefly her lover, was a neighbour, until he received an ice-pick through the skull, wielded by Ramón Mercader, an emissary of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Mercader spent twenty years in a Mexican jail for his crime, but was awarded the Order of Lenin in absentia by Stalin, and was later named a Hero of the Soviet Union. He lived out the remainder of his days in Castro’s Cuba. Allegedly his last words were: “I hear it always. I hear the scream. I know he’s waiting for me on the other side.”

It had clouded over and there was a queue outside the blue house when I arrived, and the straggle of beggars and street people selling cheap wooden toys added to a general sense of misery. Inside I joined the mass of people crowding the rooms, phones in hand, but I certainly didn’t feel like taking photos of the paintings, all of which can be found in reproduction. This didn’t deter a very large gringo with an iPad, who barged his way to the prime spot in each room, oblivious to the presence of others, holding his device before him like a weapon. I did however photograph a poster of the inter-uterine development of the human child, as this seemed pertinent to Frida’s own story: she had always wanted children, but suffered numerous miscarriages.

I was moved practically to tears by visiting Frida’s home, not so much by seeing her instantly recognisable paintings, but by the objects she kept around her, especially the extraordinary collection of Mexican votive miniatures and the clothes she designed, including the painful-looking contraptions she was forced to wear as a result of her deforming accident.

Stepping outside the crowded house and standing in the small garden to smoke a cigarette, I reflected on the phenomenon that was Frida Kahlo, and the curious, almost fanatical adulation she attracts in some quarters, which seemed disproportionate, as though exemplifying the way that our mediated culture exaggerates and contorts the realities of individual lives and achievements. I tried to understand my irrational, enraged response to the man with the tablet leaping ahead of me into each room, and a black cloud still hovered above me, here in the garden, a cloud holding all the injustices of the world and letting fall a thousand miseries amid the sorry remnants of Frida’s life, come to ground beneath the Mexico City drizzle.

Several years later, as I write this, I try to reach inside my own unaccountable sadness that afternoon, but cannot find anything to pin it down, or recover its underlying cause. It was just one of those days that crop up unannounced and which fill the solitary traveller with a seeping, insidious gloom, reminding you that even in the world’s most populous city, you can feel utterly demoralised and alone. My mood that day brings to mind Patrick Leigh Fermor’s uncharacteristically bleak interlude one third of the way through The Broken Road, when he suffers, in his words “one of the rare attacks of gloom and doubt that now and then tempered the zest and excitement of my travels,” which, after a long rumination on the possible sources of his dejection, give way to “a more general and far more disturbing problem, one which only assailed me at moments of depression and low resistance: what on earth was I up to?” As I have mentioned before, this existential question with regard to my wanderings in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America cropped up occasionally and made me distrust everything that I had taken for granted when I set out, even to doubt the validity of the whole enterprise; the hubris of attempting to map the poetry of an entire continent, and these misgivings were accompanied by a fear that my own lack of intellectual, organisational and linguistic resources would never do justice to the task I had set myself.

On leaving the blue house, I walked straight into a heavy downpour, but the rain suited my mood. I carried on aimlessly through Coyoacán, soaked to the skin, and visited a church where there was a Christ on the cross, with a head of real human hair, bleeding profusely and realistically from the wound in his side. But this contemplation of suffering, following on from my visit to Frida Kahlo’s house, only raised the question of how little Mexico is doing for its women. The number of femicides (defined as “the killing of females by males because they are female”) first drew widespread attention during the 1990s in Ciudad Juarez, and the numbers have continued to rise across Mexico to this day, standing out as one of the horrors of recent history. Recent reports claim that approximately ten women are murdered every day in Mexico, though the number of these declared to be the result of violencia de género (gender violence) is disputed.

Extract from Ambassador of Nowhere: A Latin American Pilgrimage (Seren, 2024, pp 145-9)

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.

December might provoke thoughts of the year’s turning, but this year the approach of midwinter has been strangely complicated and enhanced — or turned inside out — as I shall attempt to explain . . .

This follows on the heels of a week in which I was immersed in the act of clearing out the attic of our house, unpacking, among other things, around 1500 books, and doing other bits of house clearing, otherwise known as the gentle art of death cleaning — what the Swedish call döstädning and the Japanese shukatsu — which effectively meant the removal of all those books from the attic and sending some of them off in boxes to ‘World of Books’ and shelving the rest in new IKEA bookcases on the upstairs landing.

On ageing and new life

Also — not unrelatedly — I’ve been dipping into psychologist and analyst James Hillman’s book on ageing, The Force of Character, while simultaneously spending time with my extended family (and reflecting on past times) in the build-up to the so-called ‘festive season’, comprising the pagan celebration of midwinter — Yule or Alban Arthan, which celebrates the midwinter solstice — or, for most of us, Christmas. Hanukkah too is considered a midwinter celebration or “wintertime festival of lights”.

In other words, whatever your religious/cultural preference, we celebrate the great revolution of the earth’s turning — and a new year’s beginning (though, to be frank, early January in these climes rarely has much about it to suggest the sprigs of new life associated by the idea of ‘new year’.)

But new life there is, at least in this neck of the woods. Last Tuesday, to be exact, heralded the arrival of a first grandchild, Mati Orlina Girardet, the daughter of my daughter, Sioned, and her partner Hallam. I won’t try to account for or begin to explain the quality of emotion this has induced in me (for fear of failing to do it justice) but suffice to say that it has been an extraordinarily beautiful and somewhat mind-blowing experience.

Acquiring a new identity — as a grandfather, or taid — is one that, in my reckless youth, I would never have predicted for myself, such were the dangerous games I played. So I am doubly, trebly grateful for the joy that has presented itself.

But sharing in the joy of new life brings with it a complementary and opposing drive to dig deep into history, to unearth the past. Unless we know where we come from, how can we know where we — or our descendants — are headed? As Hillman puts it:

The further back you can reach in imagination, the more extended you become. Your character and its oddities find echoes in similar characters who walk the streets of imagination, displaying essential qualities freed of the confusing disguises worn by actual family and friends . . .

And then:

Growing into the roots of tradition lengthens life backward. We can extend downward, too — into descendants; into apprentices who seek out our character traits — and also outward, into the family of images pasted into the photograph album and dumped in the keepsake drawer. I become extended through others whose images animate my solitary cogitations as well as through the daily others who come calling to see how I’m getting on.

Inquisitive curiosity into the lives of others extends our lives. This is not sharing; it is artful listening. The other person is a fount of lifeblood, which transfuses vitality into your soul if you can provoke the other with your listening. Probing — sniffing for lowlife, tidbits of scandal, tasty morsels of salacious gossip that awaken the appetite for the teeming life around you — loosen the limits of personal self-occupied concerns. Backward, downward, outward extend a life beyond its borders and free it from attachment to personal identity, character freed of that greedy bully, Me.

I find it reassuring that a man such as Hillman should admit to this: and to follow in his footsteps would be a privilege for me. I too would be happy to fish imaginatively in the pondlife of those other, long-ended lives, diving into the distant past, in a way that makes sense of my present.

The ancestors

For many, if not most traditional cultures, ‘the ancestors’ represent an ongoing, living presence that links the past, present, and future, rather than people who are simply ‘gone’. The idea of ‘the ancestors’ usually carries several connected meanings, the first of which is a shared sense of continuity and identity. By this I mean that the ancestors embody the history of a people, or a tribe—whence they came, who they are, and how they should live. Remembering ancestors helped preserve cultural identity, language, customs, and collective memory.

Alongside, or contained within that pervasive sense of continuity and identity, one’s ancestors were often thought to provide moral guidance and wisdom, notably though the laws, traditions and values we inherited from them.

Spiritual protection of some kind was also part of the deal: in many indigenous cultures the ancestors are believed to remain spiritually active. They may protect their descendants, bring blessings, or —if neglected— cause misfortune. Rituals and offerings maintained harmony between the living and the dead.

The relationship with ancestors also emphasised a connection to land and place. A particular feature of the landscape might be associated with a specific individual to the extent that going to that place suggests a visit to that deceased individual herself. This is a custom that has its equivalents in many cultures: thus a hillock or a rock might bear someone’s name, but few will know who that person was, or why they have been remembered that way. In a more general sense, respect for ancestors often goes hand in hand with respect for the land they lived on, reinforcing a sense of belonging and stewardship.

There are other ways that the ancestors penetrated the lives of the living: a sense of community over and above individualism might be the most noteworthy. The idea that individuals are part of a larger lineage, that one’s actions reflect not only on oneself but on the ancestors and on future generations. That is so far removed from modern views on individualism as to sound like something from a fairy tale. But for much of humanity, our lives are regarded as being cyclical: we honour those who came before us and are responsible for being a good ancestor to those who follow.

All things considered, the ancestors, in a traditional culture, symbolise continuity, guidance, spiritual presence, and collective responsibility, grounding human life in something much larger than the individual. Almost all of which, at the start of the 21st Century, has vanished.

And that absence, it seems to me, lies at the core of our contemporary sense of abandonment and dereliction. Something has disappeared from most people’s lives in the postmodern world. We have, most of us, forgotten the stories about ancestors that might have formed the basis of an evening around the camp fire.

I am not seriously advocating that our time would be better employed listening to our gnarled elders reciting the feats of noble forebears in an endless cycle of repetition: I can only imagine what effect evenings around the campfire listening to Grandfather’s tales might wield on the very limited attention spans of our younger generations. Such counsel might have been of value to the young when the earth was underpopulated and the forests intact, when the rivers ran clean and the oceans were free of plastic. But we have left all that behind. We have other distractions, far more sophisticated and entertaining.

How, I wonder, do we go about forging a sense of self if we do away with all that has come before?

No wonder we have been struggling with the question of ‘who we are’ in the centuries since Western, industrialised societies decided that the ancestors were best laid to rest and, for the most part, forgotten. And this was some time before Nietzsche declared that God was dead.

A sense of ourselves

And these thoughts have emerged after spending a weekend with my extended family— sharing a few stories, and remembering. It doesn’t take much to ignite a memory. Perhaps I am remembering things that I personally was not around to remember. Perhaps I am tapping into a collective memory of sorts. One that we have lost but which many of us are frantically attempt to restore through a subscription to Ancestry, or some such. How fragile is our hold on the past; and yet how valuable it might be for our youngsters to be a part of this thing that is bigger than our own contrived individualism.

How we assimilate a sense of ourselves, and what we know, has been central to my aims with this Substack blog over the past year, and none perhaps have occupied me more than the idea put forward by Jung and seconded by Hillman that we know very little about ourselves — and that this might not be such a bad thing.

Being embedded in a bigger history might have provided support for those in a traditional society, but today that is a distant dream. We no longer know who our ancestors were, except in a very superficial way. And as a consequence, it might be argued, we don’t know who we are either, and it’s probably best to admit it.

I have touched on this before (in a footnote to the final page of my book Ambassador of Nowhere) where I cited exactly the same passage from Jung’s autobiography as did Hillman in his book about ageing, to wit, the extraordinary paragraph in which C.G. Jung, despite a lifetime following the maxim ‘know thyself’ ends his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflection:

I have no judgement about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about . . . Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man. The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.

And some thirty years later Hélène Cixous would write: “I know that it’s by being unknown to myself, that I live.”

Although I find it hard to accommodate Jung and Cixous under the same roof, the conclusion that both of them reach is not so unusual, nor, for me at least, disheartening. I would much rather not know who I am, and in that not-knowing, achieve some degree of serenity. By admitting the limits of our self-understanding we remain open to the unimagined worlds that remain beyond our comprehension.

On a collective basis, we might see ourselves as part of a process, going back through the generations. But that doesn’t negate our ‘not knowingness’, our ultimate inability — or is it simply a choice? — to clearly distinguish ourselves from the elements into which we will ultimately merge. Hillman suggests that ‘character’ — the facets of an individual that make him or her who they are — are implacably rooted in the stories and imaginations of those who are left behind, as well as in the things they touched, the spaces they occupied, even as the individual in question gradually loses the sense of familiarity with who they were:

Our characters become the fertile source of fictions that add another dimension of life to our lives even as we fade as actualities. Jung realised this truth in his very late years, finding he had become unfamiliar with the character he had assumed himself to be. His self-same reality became porous, infinite, susceptible. As he wholly loosens into the world of “plants, animals, clouds” and is assimilated by the natural world, his character in the imagination of the human world continues to last, and goes on generating stories of who he really was.

So, after a week in which I was immersed in the gentle art of death cleaning, followed by a weekend in which three branches of our family met up for a meal and spent time together, and the arrival of a beautiful new family member — all of this comes together and coalesces in a way that can only make sense to me if I believe in myself as a part of a larger whole; in the immediate sense, by belonging to a family with whom I have strong ties of love, and a history going back through the so-called mists of time, and myself — as I recently wrote — the chance incumbent in a long line of ancestors, as if all the genetic material inherited from countless generations, a connective tissue trailing back millions of years to pre-human and pre-mammalian ancestors, through to aquatic tetrapods and beyond, were at once amassed and assimilated in my own person, and I was here because of that random reproductive chain stretching back to the primeval slime, all of which fills me with wonder, even though, as I get older, it becomes more and more apparent that I have very little idea who I am.

And that in itself, it could be argued, constitutes a variety of self-knowledge.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator from Wales. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews etc can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.