It's OK, Alaric, I don't mind your making fun of my remarks. Two definitions
may help us:
"responsibility": In its primary meaning, it is defined (SOED) as being
answerable for what you do, liable to be called to account. This is the way I
am using the word. Other meanings more justify Alaric's dislike for the word,
for they have middle class or indeed aristocratic connotations: morally
accountable (1836), reliable and of good credit and repute (1691), respectable
(1780). I do not claim myself to be a responsible poet, but I have always
tried to make my work answerable for what it says. No doubt in some circles
this is regarded as a fault -- if so, that is part of my being answerable, in
this case to those who prefer open-ended interpretation, which I have no
aggression towards.
Yet I have no fixed definition of morality whatsoever, except the one --
perhaps very "bad" -- that I have at each instant of performing my life. This
is not so far from Alaric's "irresponsible", though in practice it might lead
to different kinds of action. But I do mean being responsible to your own
life, and that includes living it in the "best" way you can -- whatever your
definition of "best" is at any moment, including any influence from social
attitudes towards your (this is the impersonal "your") sexuality, whether you
think individualistic revolutionary action useful, what you think a poem
should do next, and so on. Bad people's "best" will be bad most times they
act, no doubt, but then we have the argument revived. If I don't personally
think it a good idea to ignore "government", it's not something I can well
argue: how can I attack the flamboyant notion that letters "make us think they
take us seriously"? I've talked to several MPs about this and they all agree
that a lot of letters on one subject (I think it was one who had held senior
cabinet office who said that 25 was a lot and 200 exceptional) sometimes do
make them rethink their voting. Amnesty, in a recent advert, quotes
government officials and even a torturer admitting that letters make a
difference. My own attitude comes from experiencing the political vacuum
Margaret Thatcher exploited -- the lack of "virtue", not least on the left-
wing side, in a nation that let her gain power by supplying her own definition
of "virtue", which had a few things going for it amidst the "bad" -- in my
interpretation OF COURSE.
In my own use, "virtue" is defined as whatever I personally mean by it as I
write the sentence down, think, or perform an action, and so is open to
interpretation, etc, etc. I can't, again personally, just duck out of the
issue of trying to work out what it is, because to take revolutionary action
-- as if that trumped the question -- implies a personal definition anyway,
often a very virulent one. Demonstrations are not always useful. The book I'm
at present writing is a prose/poetry meditation on such issues.
"mistakes". The mistakes that cause war are diplomatic ones, as was, I think,
clear from context. In the case of Iraq, it was Bush's ambassador to Iraq in
1991 who made the mistake, misled by American mistakes in policy throughout
the 1980s and perhaps by her own State Dept, who let her take the rap. Iraq
then made the "mistake" of invading Kuweit -- they misread US intentions
because the ambassador had not been clear enough. This language is easily
understood, surely. Global trading as the "secret" driver -- secret because
usually hidden in the political rhetoric, even if obvious in other terms (not
always obvious to the less informed, by the way, or they would not have fallen
for the Diana hype: it's possible to spend too much time with other poets).
If you want me to go into the deeper economo-political causes, or to the
malevolent causes of war endemic in the way we have run our world affairs back
to Cain and Abel (or to the origins of the world in the Dine Bahane), give me
a few years to research the book, please. Or would you prefer a disquistion
on Aristotle and the various meanings of "cause"? I am not, in any of these
things, an expert.
The relevance of this to poetry lies in the phrase "being responsible to your
own life", and Alaric, if I may presume to say so, no doubt is that, and is so
in the senses I mean. Don't see where he gets his passion from otherwise. The
word "responsible" got hi-jacked by the middle classes, politicians,
clergymen, etc., and so did all allied words such as "morality", "best", and
so on. We have yet to reassemble our attitudes. (As is shown by our utter
inability to decide whether cloning humans is a good or a bad thing. What
happens to "responsibility" then? And so on.)
Current multi-relevancy of morality-type words is, to take a wild metaphor,
like using the probabilities of a Schroedinger wave equation to pre-determine
the likelihood of what goes into the flash-point of action (a mystery hidden
in the heart of process); but, once the action is taken, the result is
determined, fixed, but then is open to new interpretations. We need an
"ethics" (if you use this word the whole post-modern world explodes) capable
of facing up to a modern notion of process roughly of this kind. And, to
start another hare, some weird influence from the future seems involved:
that's a concentration in my own thinking right now.
(Alice Notley says it was Denise Riley who read at the South Bank, not Alice.
Most of Alice's English readings have been organised by Nicholas Johnson,
including one extremely satisfactory reading with Andrew Duncan and Aaron
Williamson for a lot of old ladies in Plymouth. She wishes other poets had as
much fun. Jeeze, I feel like Douglas Clark reporting the views of Fred
Beake.)
This will be my last posting for a while as I've got very busy, but I do want
to reassert that I think such questions are artistically relevant. Can't do
poésie pure, listees, sorry. Bye for now.
Doug
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