Original subtitles

Alif Shafak and Robert McFarlane are two of the most dreamy and articulate

writers I know.

Alif has written 21 books, 13 of which have been novels, and she's the

president of the Royal Society of Literature.

Robert McFarlane, he writes about the natural world.

Birds, rivers, trees, mountains.

And he does so in such a poetic and enchanted way. His writing is just

infused with wonder.

I've had both of them on the show individually.

What I said is, hey.

I know you're really good friends. Let's all get together for one conversation.

And what I want to do is I want to hear the kind of conversation that you would

have over a cup of coffee, over lunch.

And so here, I'm like you, a fly on the wall for a conversation with two really

interesting writers.

All right, let's start with you. So when you're with a mountain, with a river,

and you're moved by awe, and you think about translating those emotions.

into language.

How is it that you go about doing that?

First of all, you accept failure.

Language will always be late for light.

It will never meet water, river, rock, mountain. That moment

of encounter, which is a moment in time and a moment in space when countless

streams of being and presence and sensation are all convened

in a moment that we call or we speak of ourselves as awestruck, wonderstruck,

astonished, language will never catch them.

And I think the question is how well language fails.

And it's actually in the shattering of language as it falls to pieces around

the untouchable moment that for me, the beauty... the beauty comes how how the

pieces fall what they're made of and what happens when you're out in the

field and what happens when you're at home at the desk yeah that's a i mean i

i'm extremely interested in the technologies of writing so i i write

across a lot of forms some of those forms i absolutely have to write in

notebook and that's typically song lyrics and short poems I really don't

like writing them on the screen I like working them out on paper I have

different size notebooks for different lengths I have tiny A6 ones bigger A5

ones and depending on you know whether I how much of it I need to see I'll choose

that notebook and I'll choose a pen that works as well I have a fountain pen that

has ink which carries the water of now 110 rivers in it so if I want to write

something very flowing I'll reach for the river pen

But there are other things that I need to write on the screen because I have to

be moving things around much more fluidly. And, you know, God bless word

processors for the flexibility they give, you know, for the kaleidoscopic

writers among us who are always twisting that telescope and seeing how the pieces

fall. I couldn't do that in pen and ink on paper.

It's the old writer's question. What do you write with? But I think it's an

interesting one.

Yeah, I can. I mean, the long hand is almost impossible for me. I don't like

my handwriting. I can't connect with my handwriting.

I was left-handed.

And at school in Turkey at the time, it was quite common to convert left-handed

children into using their right hands.

And I was very...

Difficult process for me. I remember in a classroom of about 40, 44 kids,

probably I was the last one to learn how to write.

And it was the first time I learned that I heard the word exile because the

teacher would say you have to send your left hand into exile, by which he meant

you have to hold it under the desk and then your right hand is above the desk.

So for me, the keyboard, the computer is a solution.

I mean, these are old.

teachings that are quite harmful and some of it goes back connected to

religion because the belief is two angels sit on your shoulders and the one

on your right shoulder writes the good things that you do in life and the left

one sitting on the left shoulder writes the bad things.

So the left hand is associated with sin and with all the bad things. So left

-handed children were at the time converted to using their...

their right hand. And I was one of them. And that's why I could never, still to

this day, my handwriting is quite messy, sloppy.

Even when I'm signing books, I pity the readers who are trying to read what I've

written.

I've always used a typewriter and then a computer.

Robert, you were talking earlier about a lot of your writing unfolding as a

mosaic. Is that something that you feel? Or do you feel like it's a little bit

more like to scroll your novels and you start on page one, you end up on page

400? It is never a linear process.

Like, for instance, there are rivers in the sky. I had to...

I didn't finish one character and then start another character and then go for

the third one. You have to do it simultaneously. It's almost like you're

weaving a braid of your hair.

So you have to jump back and forth in time, geography, location.

But I love that. I love that almost irrational jumps.

Sometimes I say to myself, this time I'm going to keep it quite minimalistic.

This time it's going to be a linear book.

And somehow I can't do it. It's just not who I am. Maybe because of my

personality, my upbringing, because I led a much more nomadic life.

There were ruptures. There were lots of migrations.

And this comes to me much more naturally. So there's a cosmopolitan

canvas that comes out sometimes despite me.

Which I don't want to over-extrapolate here, but we talked earlier about how

happy both of us are at writing while traveling. And I suppose as somebody who

has been pushed into exile and has moved and migrated a lot, you have to be,

right? You have to be ready to write on the move.

Yes, absolutely.

And the other thing, of course, you lament is not being able to bring your

library with you because that takes time. I mean, a library requires you to

be more rooted, right? It requires time. It's an accumulation.

So sometimes you have to memorize your favorite passages. Even if you can't

memorize them, at least carry those feelings with you.

I always think about, you know, what comes with us as we move from one

country to another, which was the premise of one of my novels, in a way.

It's called 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in a Strange World, in which we know it's

about a sex worker and we know right away that she's dead.

After the human heart has stopped beating, there are interesting studies

that show the brain can remain active for another few minutes.

So the entire novel takes place in those few minutes while the brain is still

functioning. And as she remembers her past, what are the things that stay with

us, you know, the good or the bad?

Is it some things that are more ephemeral, you know, the senses, the

smells? These seemingly small things have very long-term memory.

When you think of school, what comes to mind?

For me, it was lectures, homework, sitting at a desk. And the worst part is

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Robert, how is...

Is looking at birds, which are small and always in motion, different for you from

looking at a mountain, which is big and always still?

Well, I'll take a shoot. Maybe you reject the categories. I reject the

categories entirely.

Okay, question. Big and small, we can probably relatively agree on, but the

white-tailed eagle does have an eight-foot wingspan, but the one that's

overflowing me at the lowest altitude did.

briefly block out the sun but yeah mountains big birds smaller let's go

with the comparative birds always in motion mountains always still know

mountains are moving because the the living mountain is this great network

and conglomerate of teeming thriving elemental material and um

and biological presence it's uh

There's a wonderful line from a Japanese artist whose name escapes me at the

moment. It says, place is always moving like a sleeping cat.

And I think that's true of a mountain.

And birds are sometimes still, of course, sometimes very still.

But I, well, sound, of course, because one of the great gifts of birds is their

song. And so if you are to write...

about about birds i think you need to let language sing a little as well so uh

the the for example cuckoo so how did it so um it was

just i mean that's a very simple one you of course have to set up this rocking

rhythm this kind of two two two tone and beat to it so i think that the entry for

cuckoo in the field guide begins um where to start with you cuckoo that one

to call perhaps from high on oak or yew that heralds spring anew then

beats out summer's hot tattoo the curious beauty of your feathers also

their smulty hue their smoky petrel blue and we mustn't forget of

course the monstrous trick you play on other birds that devious terrible

switcheroo so Cuckoo gives us, or gave me, that kind of the rocking rhythm, the

internal rhyme.

It's a bird that sets its own beat, we could say.

And then, of course, you're into that extraordinary thing it does, which is

printing counterfeit eggs in the female's belly, which it then lays in

the nests of the host species, meadow pipit, reed warbler, dunnock.

And individual cuckoos specialise in different kind of... different

counterfeits, and they print different eggs for different birds so that they

won't be rejected by the host parents.

And they lay them and off they go, the mothers, and leave the surrogate pair to

raise them. So then it moves into more of a kind of eerie folkloric account

of how that practice has woven stories and made meaning with and for

us. Does that make sense? A lot of sense.

Definitely. And I also think there's a need to listen, to be a listener.

I don't know if you feel that way, but when I'm writing, I feel like I'm

tapping into something that is bigger than me, that's older than me.

Definitely that's wiser than me.

And somehow that takes also the pressure away because I feel like I have to do a

lot of listening. I have to do a lot of learning.

But with learning comes also a lot of unlearning.

As you said earlier, we're all running from one place to another, from one

appointment to the next.

We're very used to looking at the world from our own little corner.

But then when you are listening, when you are learning, you have to leave that

corner and transcend a little bit. You have to become a student of that field.

And you have to become...

ready and open to learning and unlearning. The way Iris Murdoch puts

it, it's not a hierarchical, you know, gaze in which you, the writer, are above

things and looking down upon the world or trying to find people's failures or

flaws. Not at all. It's just actually you're dismantling that self.

So there is a moral almost obligation or aspect to it.

But also it's very egalitarian.

You know, you're part of something very delicate and complex.

And you recognize that it's functioning, it's moving, and you start to pay

attention. Nothing is too small. Nothing is big. There are no hierarchies, no

dualities. And that's something that very much speaks to me. Yes, yes. I

always wonder about that phrase, paying attention.

I almost don't want to use it because it seems to bring attention into the kind

of capitalist economy that we pay attention and in return something is

paid back to us.

I sometimes want to say we give attention.

That feels like that would be truer to the idea of unselfish and unselfing

attention.

happens the idea of paying attention has got installed in our language but yeah

maybe we give attention yeah i'm thinking about when you're looking at a

painting and one of the things i like to do is challenge myself to find like five

things in the painting that i wouldn't have noticed on the first glance and

things almost come out of the painting or whatever it is that you're looking at

that somehow had almost been lying dormant even though they had been there

the entire time do you think that's i sometimes wonder about the uses of

boredom we're taught in a in an attention fracking economy which is

always shattering and mining our attention for each monetizable unit

boredom is is is the enemy of that economy and we have been taught to fear

it to loathe it to wriggle away from it but actually boredom is an opening of

possibility as well. It's when the mind starts to wonder, perhaps, and starts to

notice things that were latent in the painting or the landscape or the person.

Do you find, does boredom become useful for you, Alef?

It does, actually. And I think it's so interesting that we're talking about

this.

Boredom is always...

belittled and underestimated.

Not only that but the need to slow down I think is so existential.

One of the many reasons I think all of us love literature so much is because it

helps us to slow down and to pay attention and to go within.

You make an inner journey but then you realize at the end of that journey is

that you have connected with your other.

with something beyond yourself and then you realize there is no other. The other

is my brother, the other is my sister.

It really gently dismantles those dualities.

But I find it very important that we slow down, that we don't pay this much

attention to information, but try to focus a bit more on knowledge and

wisdom. We were being told that we constantly have to achieve, move from

one thing to the next. And if you don't do that, then you're a loser. We have

now a political jargon, a new political lexicon that talks about not being a

loser. And I know we both, all of us, love the epic of Gilgamesh, but this is

one of the many reasons why I love the epic, because it really talks, makes us

think about failure, defeat.

You know, we don't have a hero who achieves everything, don't you think? It

just turns it upside down.

It does, it does. Yes, Gilgamesh is really the sort of the modern god-king,

the modern subject, in a way, at the beginning of the epic, where it's kind

of... force, pace, control, mastery, toxic masculinity. It's all

happening. And he's a terrible ruler as a result. And the people complain to the

gods and the gods say, well, we must find a way to balance him. And so they

bring Enkidu, the wild man who's made of moss and earth and sand and water and

river and wolf.

And then there's this sort of mingling between the wild and the city.

And these two forces are united and then of course comes more hubris and then

more tragedy and that eventually is is the arc that's that slows that causes

Gilgamesh to slow to pay attention which he finds very hard to do or to give

attention she finds very hard to do but slowly slowly learns and to love

something other than himself yeah absolutely and it's a woman who teaches

Enkidu or who brings Enkidu from the wilderness into civilization, which is

also interesting.

But as you said, at the beginning of the epic, I mean, Gilgamesh is not a lovable

person at all, quite the opposite.

So we don't have a hero in a classic sense.

If anything, you know, he does terrible things, but through friendship, loss,

grief.

defeat, failure.

He comes back at the end of the epic and he has changed.

I think it's also about many things, of course, about our fear of death, about

our desire to prolong youth.

But also I think it's about the possibility of change.

Talking about attention, there is a moment that triggers really Gilgamesh's

great conversion from arrogance to humility.

And it's his dear friend Enkidu's has died in his arms really

smitten by a disease that the gods have sent as punishment for the ecocide

or ecocidal felling of the cedar forest and then the slaughter of the bull of

heaven who is really weather and climate and nature in its wild in its wild um

atmospheric forms and He cannot believe that Enkidu is dead, and one reason

why he won't believe Enkidu is dead is because to admit Enkidu's mortality is

to admit his own mortality.

He's lying there hugging Enkidu, and suddenly, after six days of grieving

Enkidu, a maggot crawls out of one of Enkidu's nostrils.

And it's this amazing, fleshly, brutal, grisly, mortal moment.

In effect, Gilgamesh daggers backwards from this memento mori and then begins

his time in the wilderness where he changes his clothing and shaves his

beard and becomes long-haired.

That moment for me is what Roland Barthes would call the punctum, the

piercing moment of many in the epic.

We've come a long way. We've gone through the mountains and the forests

and the maggots. You know, you're talking about the word wilderness. And I

think that there's wilderness in both of your work. For you, there's obviously

the wilderness of when you're working on Is a River Alive, going out for many

days and just being with your notebook.

And for you, there's a metaphorical wilderness of the imagination.

The imagination, my sense is you get completely lost in these worlds and it's

a different kind of wilderness.

Absolutely. And I think maybe I would use the word nature or an ecosystem.

But again, I mean, it comes back to dualities because we have disconnected

from nature and we think we are above.

all other creatures, that we are the cleverest species, you know, above and

outside. We have turned ourselves into consumers of nature.

When I was writing The Ravists in the Sky, you know, we talked about

unlearning earlier. I had to do a lot of unlearning myself, particularly as I was

writing about the Yazidi minorities.

one of the most misunderstood, maligned, persecuted minorities in the Middle

East. And the reason why I'm mentioning it is because when you talk to Yazidi

grandmothers, when you listen to them, particularly in the month of April, when

children are running around, you know, jumping up and down as kids do, they

tell their grandchildren to walk slowly, to tread the earth gently, because

according to their faith, In the month of April, the earth is pregnant.

So you have to give it your attention and love.

These are the things that we have lost, those ancient teachings that are as old

as those mountains that Rob loves and writes so beautifully about.

That's a wonderful parable. And it's also an example of how ecological

knowledge is transmitted intergenerationally in the form of

story. And of course, to walk gently upon the earth in April makes sense

because... We don't want to crush the buds with our feet.

Tulips are fragile.

Tulips are fragile, exactly.

And so this is, I mean, this idea of story as the most durable transmitter of

ecological knowledge, emotional knowledge, social knowledge. Story is a

technology for encoding, protecting.

and then carrying story across immense spans of human time.

And we've both seen the tablets of Gilgamesh, which are made of clay.

And it is that seemingly frail vessel of river clay, river reed, sun,

water, time that has carried the oldest known written story to us with all its

warnings, with all its learnings. I still find that amazingly

Beautiful and touching, both the frailty and the durability.

Me too, me too.

And maybe it also is fascinating in the sense that because for a long time it

was transmitted via oral culture, you know, grandmothers, grandfathers telling

this story to their...

children or grandchildren, and then it was written on clay tablets.

It's actually much older than we know.

And there are different interpretations of the same story. For instance,

earlier, you used a very important word, ecocide.

So in the epic of Gilgamesh, what we know is that Enkidu and Gilgamesh, they

go to these cedar forests.

You know, they are the heroes.

But there is a tablet in Suleymaniye which talks about Humbaba, who is

supposed to be the monster of the forest, almost like he's our first

climate activist.

You know, he's an eco, I don't want to say warrior, but he's the one who's

defending the forest.

He's the guardian of the forest. He cares about all the animals and the

birds. So all I'm trying to say is depending on who is telling the story,

the story changes.

I wonder when you're writing it, whether it feels like a wild experience.

I mean, David asked if it felt like you were entering into the wilderness of the

wildness of the imagination.

Sometimes I think writing feels like the greatest act of exerted control that I

can undertake.

And other times it feels like I've stepped into a coracle on a river in

spate.

Those are the two extremes of the experience of writing.

That's so interesting.

I liked actually David's metaphor very much because always I experience it as a

space that I enter into, but I feel the same way about language.

Also, so for me, language is not like a tool or an instrument that I am using

for practical purposes and I'm putting aside.

Rather, it's a space I enter in and I breathe in. It shapes me. It changes me.

You're a very different person when you're writing, let's say, in Turkish or

in Spanish or in English. Why? Because languages change us. They shape the way

we think.

When we have more words about a particular issue, to describe a tree or

a bee, we will think about bees in a different way.

So the vocabulary also matters. The cadence also matters. I don't know if it

makes sense.

And I think we both care greatly about rhythm as well. Rhythm, cadence,

something we've talked about before.

We think of rhythm as...

a kind of inadmissible property of nonfiction.

Similarly, sound or internal rhyme, sound patterns, echoes, broader

leitmotif arrangements, bigger symphonic patterning across a work of nonfiction.

This all feels like either the domain of fiction or of song or poetry, but I

think it has to be recognized and brought into nonfiction as well.

Nonfiction can sing.

It can set up patterns of, of memory within itself it can work above and

below propositional forms of language and that to me is when it becomes really

really interesting so i coming back to listening um i listen to language uh

very very carefully and to rhythm and sound and even even with big big non

-fiction works the first lines of books are always become very important 12 000

years ago a river is born is river alive the wind was rising so i went to the

wood um first line of the wild places and the first line of underland is the

way into the underland is through the rhythm trunk of an old ash tree and and

then just working on almost a kind of opening song really that that

signals to the reader that they are and here we come back to the stepping over

the threshold of language that they are entering a space where language will at

least be intent attempting to inhabit them

to become part of them in some way that exceeds or subtends the argumentative or

the propositional.

And I mean, fiction, this is what you do, right?

It's so interesting. I mean, the way you feel, you know, about nonfiction

and poetry almost, that they can come together. I think I feel the same way

when it comes to...

prose and poetry you know the art of the novel I mean I am generalizing but there

are some novelists for whom plot is the most important thing they're much more

plot driven

For some other novelists, I think characters, they're much more character

-driven. And then there's a third group of novelists for whom language is a

passion, and they want to write prose that reads like poetry. I think Flaubert

was one of them. I always felt closer to that third group.

So for someone like me, for instance, to stop writing in my mother tongue...

because my first novels were all written in Turkish, it really felt like cutting

off my hand, like cutting off the hand that I was writing with. And then you

have to recreate yourself.

When I say yourself, you have to refine your literary voice.

You become a student again.

So that was a very painful, difficult process. But at the same time, it

enriches your imagination.

Because as you said, you pay more attention to words. You don't take

anything for granted.

We are back with attention, which I think is becoming the key word of our

conversation.

I've always struggled with people who are like, boredom is important, boredom

is important.

And I'm like, that's not quite it.

I agree that stillness or not consciously doing anything is important.

It's something else. It's like a space where you can let your mind wander or

something. You pay attention to something. I'm trying to figure out what

that thing is.

Maybe it's distraction combined.

Maybe it's distraction rather than boredom that perhaps I find more often

generative if I'm being absolutely honest. So I'm thinking I sometimes have

my best ideas and there's more often running. So I run every day and run

quite long distances. And something about...

I will very often be sending myself voice notes while I'm running and then

later trying to decipher these kind of panting messages from my tired self to

my recovered self or sending emails on the go or even writing on my hand if I

have a pen in my pocket.

And again, I think that's because my body has entered.

some some other kind of task my brain is concentrating on you know navigating the

what's underfoot and so on and so forth and then there's a it seems to free and

this is very familiar you know we know the mind works best at three miles an

hour says Kierkegaard and mine happens to work probably best at about six or

seven miles an hour but each each to their own but

Sometimes when you are giving absolute attention to the task in hand, that's

when it becomes hardest.

So maybe you shake thought free by doing other things sometimes.

It does resonate with me. I mean, I don't run, but I walk a lot. And it's

always, you know, you get the best ideas, as you said.

in that movement, and then you have to send little notes to your sound. I do

that as well.

But one thing maybe I don't like, and we talked about this earlier, I don't like

silence. I don't feel comfortable when there's too much silence around me.

Maybe it's the effect of Istanbul on me.

It's such a noisy city, and I've lived in a part of Istanbul that was even

noisier at night than during daytime.

So I loved, you know, opening the windows and you just let the sounds of

the city seep in.

And the other thing I don't feel very comfortable in is when it's very neat

and pristine and tidy.

I like my own chaos, you know, it's fine. I can operate in that.

The books and the notebooks, that's fine, but it's the silence and the

perfection that I'm not comfortable with.

That's probably why we both like writing on trains. Exactly. I like the clutter

and the chaos and knowing that I have an hour and 22 minutes to get a thought

down. When I'm talking to younger writers, sometimes I say, you know,

beware the fetish of the desk, basically. There's the idea that the

desk has to be...

feng shui'd into a into a perfect set of orientations and the pencil has to be

sharp and the notebook has to be right and this the silence has to reign and i

think that that That can bring you to this devotional state and then actually

you're confronted by the problem of writing rather than the problem of

preparing to write and it can be a bit abrupt.

So I like the pragmatism, the kind of messy pragmatism, because for me

writing, it's not an unfurling of sentence after sentence after sentence

in a perfect woven fabric. It's much more...

uh mosaic and and kaleidoscopic moving pieces around in order to recognize

their relations rather than seeing those relations intact and do you feel that

the whole way as you're writing a book or do you feel that only at the

beginning and then it takes on a more orderly form later on there's this

thrilling moment i don't know if you have this where you've worked on a book

for let's say five years and watched it come into being and done this sort of

wax on wax off work of a kaleidoscopic work of twisting and twisting and

twisting seeing the patterns form and reform and then recognizing the

relations between them and then there's this rush in the final five

ten percent of time of writing a book where suddenly

all of the the big heavy sort of monumental moving has been done all the

architectonics are in place you you understand what it is you're saying or

helping to articulate and then suddenly you're like ah that there this here this

here this here and the whole thing accelerates and then Auden says a poem

comes right with a click like a closing box

That's not quite true for a 500-page book, but a series of clicks. It's like,

ah, that box is closed, that box is closed. Do you have that kind of rush at

the end where you can see what needs to be done? I'm aware I'm speaking to you

as you nearly finish a novel.

To me, what's interesting is it really doesn't matter whether it's your first

book, fifth book, tenth book.

You always go through these valleys of anxiety, mountains of depression.

And one week you feel like, wow, I got this. I have an amazing story. This is

going to be great.

And then the next week you look at what you've written and it's so bad and you

just throw it away.

And that's okay. What I learned over the years is that too is part of the

journey, the writing process. You can't control everything.

Maybe there are different approaches. Maybe some authors do much more, you

know, focus on the cerebral.

plotting that goes into the structure of a novel. But I really love writing with

intuition as my guide. Of course, you do a lot of thinking, research. The

research process is immense.

It's a bit insane.

But there comes a moment when you feel like, okay, now I can take off. Now I

can fly.

And from that moment onwards, I really don't know what exactly I'm doing, but I

trust my intuition.

And then I like it when my characters surprise me. And as you said, as you

near the end and all these pieces start to come together, it's almost like

spiritual, something very mystical is happening and you're not necessarily

controlling it.

There is a flow.

that you have to respect.

You have to respect the characters. You have to try to understand them. Even the

characters that might seem to be minor ones.

Nothing is minor in a novel.

So that holistic approach is very important for me. When you say mystical,

do you feel like I'm not conscious of what I'm doing, but I'm doing it? Or do

you feel like maybe there's an outside force that is basically the guiding

hand? Maybe I'm trying to find a third approach.

There is a lot of, of course, thinking.

I do find echoes of myself in what I'm writing.

But I need to tell you that for me, literature is not necessarily

autobiographical. And I think we live in an age in which we...

We put too much emphasis on the autobiographical side of fiction.

I mean, in many creative writing classes, the first thing that we teach

is write what you know, which is admirable, which is important, but...

Whole fiction writing cannot be reduced to that motto.

So we have to say, write what you feel.

If we say that, then a male writer can write about the female experience if

there is a genuine connection, if you really put the necessary effort into it.

Why not? You can go beyond the boxes of identity that are there at first glance.

So for me...

I respect the autobiographical side of literature and there are amazing books

that fall into that description, but it's the transcendental aspect that I'm

much more interested in. This is how I started writing because I thought my

life was very boring and I had nothing to write about, you know, about my life.

But I was much more interested in going beyond the life that was given to me and

try to see what it looks like if I could become someone else and then someone

else. And then you realize the person as I saw as the other is actually not that

different than me.

I mean, I am primarily a nonfiction writer, though. I write, I suppose,

fictional forms in the sense of libretti and verse novellas and so forth. But

thinking about it from a nonfiction point of view and coming back to the

elemental and the wonderstruck at the end of Is a River Alive.

I thought I'd finished that book three times.

The first time was recognizable to me.

We'd paddled to the sea over 12, 11 days, big, hard river

running. And I remember so clearly we made seafall, which is always a hugely

powerful moment for a river, for a river follower.

And it was a bright day and we...

we were carried out by the current out to sea this is in the um uh st lawrence

the gulf of st lawrence and suddenly i heard this crying this high high crying

and there were several notes to it they sort of braided and i it was uncanny

because i couldn't work out what they were and then i kind of punched the

water i was in my kayak because i i realized that they were um

They were jet skis. And I thought, what a terrible, pathetic moment at this

holy encounter where water comes together with other water.

And then I realized they weren't jet skis. We paddled on, and I realized that

they were seals.

And there was a colony of seals out on a rocky island just off the coast.

And they were calling, and it was a choir of seals. And it was deeply,

deeply haunting.

beautiful moment made all the more powerful from having thought they were

jet skis and then watched them convert into into something much more mystical

and strange i thought that was the ending and that but then the river

itself wrote wrote the ending and that that that experience of of being

written through by water i've never had before

I then had a secondary version of it just up at the quiet little springs near

my house where I walked up again having thought the book was finished and

suddenly a drama played itself out in the theatre of my mind and it was almost

as though the springs, the water itself was the projector, the magic lantern

projecting this drama which was of me dead, my children mourning me, time, the

river having run on, them going to the springs to put a pinch of ash.

Into the water to remember me and it was something I was a ghost and but I was I

was made spectral By the by the presence of that water and so I narrate these as

semi mystical experiences because they are and they were one of them the first

the seals was was real the second the river was was hugely powerful and and

almost as though I'd been inhabited in ways we've been discussing and the third

was was eerie and sad and beautiful to see my children still

alive and bright and in the world and remembering me and the humility of

knowing that time the river is always flowing and we are always in its current

and we're never standing dry footed on the bank so again perhaps this is a

conversation about how fiction and non-fiction they move at times within

the same currents and flows, or they inhabit the same eddy pools, and they're

porous to the same encounters some of the time.

We both appreciate maybe the elements of, I don't know, for lack of a better

word, I'm going to call it magic.

There is magic in life, in daily life, in even the most ordinary, seemingly

ordinary moments.

That's one of the reasons why I don't like this term, magical realism.

Because it assumes that there's the world of magic and then there's the

world of reality and you have to bring together these two very separate

elements. Whereas I think in life, everything is constantly mixed.

It also, in my opinion, comes down to this notion of time that we have.

We want to think of time as a much more linear, steady march.

But when you pay attention to a river, a tree, a rock, Just the soil itself,

there is no linear time there. Even when you follow the journey of one river, it

makes you question, is time much more cyclical?

That linear time is an illusion.

And rivers can move against themselves. They can flow uphill. Huge counterflow

channels in a big river will very happily flow uphill and they'll be...

I mean, I've crossed eddy channels that are hundreds of meters wide in a really

big river. And it's almost eerie because it's counter-gravitational and therefore

water always runs downhill. Well, no, it doesn't. Not in a counterflow. And then

the line between the flow and the counterflow is called the eddy line. And

that's where the twist that flow...

gives to counterflow and counterflow gives to flow, creates spirals.

And that's what, when we look down at water, if you see those spirals, that's

because there's a helical spin being given by flow meeting counterflow. And I

sometimes think of those spirals as temporal.

A river teaches us that time moves in circles, it moves in spirals, it moves

against itself. It's not that linear flow.

They also have a very wonderful hydrological function, which is that

they oxygenate the water column.

So that, again, that is a kind of nourishing act where time becomes

complex and flow becomes complex. It draws life down into the water column,

into our ideas of experience. I think one of the things that we're talking

about here is the limits of rationality. We really associate rationality with

truth. But there's elements of reality that...

reason doesn't take us all the way there. So I had actually forgotten that

it was you that told me that the world is pregnant in the spring. And since we

were last together, I've moved to a place where I live with a garden in my

front yard.

And I really struggled this winter. I had been living in Texas. I moved to New

York. It was cold and whatnot. And to watch the world come alive again.

Holy cow.

I thought about the world is pregnant in the spring a hundred times. I had

completely forgotten that you had said that. And all this is to say, I saw the

world more truthfully because of that.

irrational way of thinking. You know what I mean?

Yeah, fascinating.

And they're much more sentience than we recognize, I think. I mean, you know,

trees, plants, definitely.

I was raised by a very traditional grandmother myself until I was 10 years

old. And in her world, I mean, mountains said something, trees spoke, stones

whispered, but you have to become a listener. I didn't appreciate it at the

time because to me, when I was a...

child that sounded very irrational but as you get older you appreciate it more

and more one of my earlier novels the island of missing trees i briefly want

to say mention this because that deals with difficult subjects like um civil

war division partition it's about this beautiful island of cyprus

beautiful people, culture, but there is a partition line that separates a

majority Christian population from a majority Muslim population, Greek

Cypriots from Turkish Cypriots. And perhaps more importantly, depending on

whom you talk to, there are clashing memories. The past is remembered

differently, and the wounds are not healed yet. They're still bleeding.

So how do you approach such a difficult subject without yourself as a

storyteller, as a writer, creating more division of us versus them?

And it was a tree, it was a fig tree that allowed me to approach this

subject. So sometimes I think if we can take a step back and let nature be our

guide, we find another perspective into even the most difficult convoluted

subjects.

and political divisions.

And yet that is a hard place to reach now.

Your description of the fig tree as your kind of teacher and with

the way it roots and joins and binds.

Put in mind a country example, which is the two men who fell the Sycamore Gap

tree on Hadrian's Wall, which was a kind of shock.

rang fascinatingly around around the world seemed to become the event seemed

to become a lightning rod sort of drawing these bolts of feeling from from

from clouds in in all directions when those two men were eventually tried and

and sentenced one of them said but it was just a tree yeah

and in that moment

That also kind of condensed an entire way of thinking and feeling about the

living world, which is that it is inert, meaningless, that we do not make meaning

with it, that it has no life, no autonomy of being in its own right, no

rights, etc. All of these presuppositions which rationalism,

technocracy, an engineered world, calculability.

the coherence of the real as the Enlightenment has bequeathed it to us,

all of which are structures of feeling and cognitive empires that have brought

immense good, and we're surrounded by them in this room, immense blessings to

people such as ourselves, have also illegalized, outlawed, or invisibilized

whole other ways of feeling, including the idea

As your grandmother raised you to think, a tree might speak, a mountain might

remember, and a river might be alive.

Yeah, I think that one of the gifts that any artist can give is

just a new way of seeing.

So I just went to this wonderful exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, Monet in Venice.

And it was really well curated because what you saw was all the ways that

artists have depicted Venice throughout history.

And people had the sense of this is what Venice is like.

And then Monet comes to Venice and has a completely different view on Venice that

anyone in the who knows how many hundreds of years before could have

seen. But nobody had seen that before. It's like, wow, that is expanding my

sense of possibility.

And then we talked about this last time to see the world in a grain of sand.

Yeah. To hold infinity in the palm of your hand. Like those words, they.

Like expand the aperture of the mind and awaken you to new sense of possibility.

Dan Shepard says, if I had other senses, there are other things I would know. And

we do not only have five senses because we

have literature as well and we have art. And that is another set of ways of

seeing and being. When at its most powerful, at its most consequential.

I suppose the letters I get from readers that make me happiest are the ones which

say, you've changed the way I see the world or you changed the way I saw the

world for a day or a moment. And I think, well...

Good. Yeah, those are the most precious moments, you know, when a reader comes

and says, I read your book. I loved it so much. Now I'm talking to my fig tree.

Or I wrote a tree and now I see trees differently. I see rivers differently.

I look at the world differently. That is incredibly moving. And then the step

that is beyond that is the one that joins attention to action, for me at

least, which is when people come and they say, I read your book and I joined.

my local river guardianship group, or I'm campaigning for the rights of

rivers, or I volunteer my local nature reserve.

And then I feel wonderful. This is an example of how, what do they say,

culture wipes the floor with policy.

I'm not sure I always agree, but there are times when it can, and it can enter

individual lives and trajectories with great consequence.

And that feels exciting.

Yeah, to be super concrete here. So this is from Their Rivers in the Sky.

You know, you say the inspiration for this book came with a small idea, a

raindrop that landed on my palm one day while I was walking by the River Thames.

I stopped and stared at that raindrop, admiring the light reflecting off its

surface. There was such beauty and mystery, strength and resilience in its

ephemerality. And then you begin to ask, where's this raindrop been?

Where has it traveled?

And now all of a sudden we've just expanded the sense of possibility,

awakened the imagination and taken something that was like a mundane

claustrophobia of just a freaking raindrop to now it's enchanted with all

this space and life and you can just follow your imagination.

Yeah, yeah. And earlier, David, you mentioned William Blake. It's the same

thing, isn't it? You know, you look at a grain of sand.

You don't take it for granted. You want to see the whole universe inside.

That to me is a very mystical approach at the same time. You know, you look at

the microcosmos and you see the whole macrocosmos in it.

Again, no human being is ordinary.

Nothing is small. Nothing is above.

You want to adopt a much more cyclical approach to life. This is not something

we can do in our daily lives.

When we leave this room, we are always, you know, I'll be rushing.

somewhere else, you'll be rushing somewhere else. But when we sit down at

our desk, when we journey into literature, into the, you know, writing

process, then I think you are able, it's almost like you're using a different

part of your brain and you connect.

with the macrocosmos and the microcosmos at the same time, and those dualities

disappear. I wish I could be like that all the time.

It would be quite tiring, perhaps.

John Muir says something like, I live in an infinite storm of wonder, and I sort

of think, sounds great, but I think I end each day pretty knackered.

The tiny thing, you remember, the grain of sand reminds me of a conversation, to

me, unforgettable conversation I had with a glaciologist called Robert

Mulvaney, who works with Bass, the British Antarctic Survey.

And he said, put out your hand. And out of a little container, he tapped several

grains of sand.

And he said, look at those. And then he gave me a little jeweler's loop. And I

looked at them.

They were beautiful, as almost everything is when examined at high

magnification. Strange.

And he said, those are taken from the ice at the end of an

ice core that we drilled.

in antarctica so they were they were they came up with the with the with the

end of the core and he said he said those grains of sand are

from when the bedrock of antarctica was forming as a desert and

suddenly the we're back to the micro and the macro the the deep time contexts of

the world exploded into their vastness out of that tininess.

And those moments are extraordinary.

And our technologies allow us to inhabit, this is not a kind of anti

-technology notion, because when Anton van Leeuwenhoek first ground

the lenses that allowed microscopic vision, he peered into a tiny drop of

water. This is in the early 17th century in what we would now call the

Netherlands, the lens grinding capital of Europe at the time.

And he suddenly describes what he could see in this drop of pond water, which

was a quote, a world teeming with animalcules.

And we fall, when we know how to look, we fall through scale after scale after

scale. And then We lose gravity and we rise through scale, after scale, after

scale. These are thrilling things.

Microscopes can do it to us.

Literature can do it to us too.

For me, science very often finesses the real into a greater wonder. I don't

oppose science and wonder, science and enchantment. Actually, this is the

famous conversation Keats...

allegedly accusing Newton of unweaving the rainbow I don't subscribe to the

unweaving the rainbow thesis and some of the most astonishing literature I read

is technical literature is the literature of science dark matter

physics the fact that we we can detect the consequences of

the

27% missing mass of the universe but otherwise cannot compel it to interact

with our technologies, our experiments, our perceptions at all. We know it's

there but it declines to have anything to do with us. That to me is thrilling

and as mysterious as any recess of the human soul.

Just to follow up, the mind is always more nourished when we leave our own

maybe comfort zones or our own disciplines and just become curious

about someone else's field and try to learn from that field. Yes. So, for

instance, when a novelist perhaps pays attention to neuroscience or water

science, I don't know much about these fields, but then I want to learn.

your curiosity becomes your guide but equally when a water scientist falls in

love with film theory or when a director you know film director is drawn to

poetry

Those are the moments, I think, when the mind is much more nourished. And we are

so atomized, the way the academia works or multiple disciplines work.

I don't think there are enough conversations, and we're not encouraged

enough to read widely across the board.

Nothing is highbrow literature, lowbrow literature, whatever talks to us.

from graphic novels to cookbooks, political philosophy.

Whatever speaks to us in that moment is the right book for us.

But I always long, long for that, you know, interdisciplinary and

intercultural conversations.

How can we...

encourage them indeed indeed geologists in my university cambridge um know to

steer clear of me because i just come up to i'm like what's that rock what's that

rock what's the kerbstone made of i love yeah i'm a sort of labrador puppy with

scientists because i find what they do so extraordinary and they're super

specialists so yeah i i actually i wrote my master's thesis on the relations of

the new physics, as it was called in the 1990s, and contemporary British poetry,

and looking not just at what science was giving to poetry, but what poetry was

also. giving to science.

Well, what we're saying reminds me of this quote from Werner Heisenberg. He

says, the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an

atheist. But at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you.

He was a good writer as well as a genius physicist.

Which kind of proves his own point, that the genius physicist was such a

wonderful writer.

Yes. It proves a version of what we're talking about.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Let's close here. I'm really curious to hear how the two of you, having written

so many books, been doing this for so long, think about improving your craft.

I think, you know, so many things go through our head, but we have to always

remember the core.

How did we begin?

What was the main motivation?

So for me, when I look at my life, the desire to become a writer, a novelist,

what you might call a career.

came to me much later, the need for books was earlier, was much more

existential, was much more deeper.

And I was an only child, I was a very lonely child, and really books were my

companions. And they showed me that there are other possibilities in life.

That is the feeling that I try not to forget, particularly in times of crisis,

confusion, turbulence, such as the world we're living right now in.

I think our need for literature is deeper, you know, is greater.

It's not a luxury that can be pushed aside.

So when I look at my life, I feel that it's literature that gave me a chance to

go beyond that little box that I found myself in. I mean, I was being raised in

a very conservative, very patriarchal, very inward-looking neighborhood. This

was my maternal grandmother's neighborhood after France.

And it was books that showed me. It was Charles Dickens. It was Don Quixote by

Cervantes. You suddenly connect with characters who seem to have nothing to

do with your life, and yet you are with them. You're traveling La Mancha with

this crazy knight, and you love him, you know?

I believe as human beings we are storytelling creatures, not only that

we're story-remembering creatures.

Without stories, human beings are just numbers, just categories, just

obstructions. So everything in life, everything we remember, we feel, is

filtered through stories.

And personally, as a writer, I have to remember that.

The moment you start thinking about your career, success, how many books you're

going to sell, whether you're going to get a prize, which are all very human

things, you know.

Camus, Albert Camus has this...

beautiful quote, essay.

He says, let's applaud those authors who say they don't want to be read, they

don't want to be recognized, but let's not believe them.

So every writer wants to be read. Every writer wants to, of course, get an award

and be appreciated. These are very human feelings and we need to be honest about

them. But all I'm saying is our main motivation can't be that.

The main motivation is that childhood beginning that we... we felt it was

almost like an existential need for stories for transcendental journeys and

that's the thing that I try to go back to again and again the data centers we

need are public libraries couldn't agree more

Elif took us into the past and I'll take us into the future to answer this we are

living through an age of

crisis in this beautiful fragile planet of ours which is driven by us

which costs us as humans terrible immiseration and is also

destroying a fabric of life that has been millions of years in the weaving

and it seems to me that no one writing now

can or should be writing

from beyond the shadow of that.

That doesn't mean they need to be addressing it directly, but all writing

that is written into this moment will somewhere in its heart, somewhere in its

core, not have the splinter of ice that Graham Greene famously said novelists

had in their heart, but have something like a splinter of love.

And I sometimes think

I submit my work when I begin a new project to what I've come to think of as

the casket test, which is, if this book were dug up in a hundred years and read

from the future, looking back to our precarious present, not

would the person reading it think that it had solved anything or clarified

anything, but had it tried, had it attempted to wrestle with, engage with,

dream of ways out of the crisis that we find ourselves in so the

casket test for me is the future looking back at the present and asking of us

have have you tried have you really tried with all that you have and all

that you can can bring to this form this text this moment i think i fail

but i think asking ourselves the question is is a really good discipline.

Thank you both.

Thank you.