Transcript for the Piece Audio version of RN Documentary: Seamus Heaney: Bogging In Again

"Bogging In Again":
Seamus Heaney

[reading 1]
Into your virtual city I'll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost.

[intro]
Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.

Since then his lines have been quoted by world leaders, his new translation of "Beowulf" has become a best-seller, and he has praised rapper Eminem for encouraging interest in poetry among young people.

But in his latest collection, District & Circle, Heaney returns to some of the darkest images of his work in the 1970s...when the violence in Northern Ireland was still his main preoccupation.

Perro de Jong talked to the poet at the 2006 Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. About the perils of discarding history too soon...and the need to go back to the "first life" of memory and place when the world makes you feel "simply lost":

[interview 1]
Yes, well, my first life was during the War and what I hope happens in these poems is that the first life of memory links with the new life of the world we're in. I mean, the older I've got, the more I've become aware of first of all how protected I was from the reality of the world I was living in, and secondly how close I was to it, because the Aerodromes were there and the American troops were there for D-Day and the radio was broadcasting it in and so on.

[reading 2]
We were killing pigs when the Americans arrived.
Two lines of them, guns on their shoulders, marching.
Armoured cars and tanks and open jeeps.
Sunburnt hands and arms. Unknown, unnamed,
Hosting for Normandy.
Not that we knew then
Where they were headed, standing there like youngsters
As they tossed us gum and tubes of coloured sweets.

[voice 1]
A surprise: Seamus Heaney writing about the Second World War.

In the Netherlands the war is never far away...especially in literature. But in Heaney's poems it was conspicuously absent even though he was born in 1939.

At least, that's the way it was when I started reading Heaney, almost twenty years ago, and became so engrossed that I ended up moving to Ireland to find out more about him.

I soon understood that Northern Ireland had its own war, which didn't have the kind of neat ending like in 1945. History in Northern Ireland wasn't something for books and memoirs, it was always happening right here, right now.

Much has changed since then. But finally sitting opposite the man himself in a Rotterdam hotel, I had to ask what made him write about the war after all...at the tender age of sixty-seven:

[interview 2]
One of the things as I've got older is coming to terms with that. And of course any European growing up over the last forty or fifty years has had to take in, take on, the reality of the Holocaust also. So in an earlier book I had "our innocent childhood game of playing at trains on a big sofa in the kitchen," remembering that fifty years later, you can relate it to the world that was then going on and the world we are now living in, the world of posthumous knowledge of the Holocaust.

These things are paths to your inwardness, whatever that is. This is a very old fashioned language, but it's the only way in which I can 'credit' poetry to use another term. And I get in best, I think, well one way I get in for sure is through following the memory path. And the memory path is opened by these objects and things. And once the memory path is opened, the language joy accompanies it.

[voice 2]
"Objects and things," like this sofa from the 'forties or a settle bed or a heavy iron forge or a crock for churning butter.

Relics from other times that leave a trail throughout Heaney's work like scattered breadcrumbs ...leading all the way back to Death of a Naturalist, his celebrated debut published exactly forty years ago.

The new book, District & Circle, even opens with one - The Turnip Snedder. About a machine for turning turnips into fodder that's become as archaic and strange as its Northern Irish dialect name: 'snedder,' with its curious overtones of the Dutch snijden...meaning to cut.

[reading 3]
In an age of bare hands
and cast iron,
the clamp-on meat-mincer,
the double flywheeled water-pump,
it dug its heels in among wooden tubs
and troughs of slops,
hotter than body heat
in summertime, cold in winter
as winter's body armour,
a barrel-chested breast-plate
standing guard
on four braced greaves.
'This is the way that God sees life',
it said, 'from seedling-braird to snedder',
as the handle turned
and turnip-heads were let fall and fed
to the juiced-up inner blades
'This is the turnip cycle'
as it dropped its raw sliced mess
bucketful by glistening bucketful

[interview 3]
I'm not sure that I have an antiquarian interest in turnip snedders, you know. I mean, if I went to a museum of turnip snedders I wouldn't be entranced, you know. Or if I went to a museum of ploughs, I mightn't be entranced, or a museum of spades. But one spade, one turnip snedder: they open the path inward. I mean, it's like the way all life gets started. There's something - a spurt! - that changes everything and allows for the possibility of growth. And if there's a kind of implicit objection to that stuff - 'what the hell does that have to do with us' - then you'd like to say, 'well...it may not have much to do with you, but it has to do with me, and I'll make the English language swallow it and you can take it or leave it'! There's no problem, I think, with archaic matter as a subject matter. More important to me would be the thought that there's a kind of cruelty in the language. That there's a sense of the unremittingness of this process. 'The turnip snedder says: this is the way that God sees life, from the little seed to the snedder'. And it drops its mess, and so on.

But has that process changed at all, or could 'The Turnip Snedder' just as easily have been included in Death of a Naturalist (1966)?

"I think it's a different kind of framing or distancing or perspective. There's a poem in District & Circle, it's called 'A Shiver'. It's about hitting a fence post with a sledge hammer. And that's where it begins: in that stored sensation in the body, that the upper arm and the whole body remembers the satisfaction - the dangerous satisfaction - of total hammering. No holding back. Every power exercised to strike hard. And even then, I think, something in you knew that this was 'defendu' a little, just to exercise such merciless power. So of course you come to 'shock and awe', you come to Iraq, you come to a time when you're sitting watching TV and you went 'b-boom.' And you're sitting in Dublin watching this hammering of the world by bombs. And again, the young fellows are up there - 'ch-chk' - with impunity, letting it go. So what I would like to do...what I hope happens in these poems, is that the first life of memory links with the new life of the world we're in in some way, you know."

[voice 3]
Shock and awe. Iraq. Last year's terrorist attack on the London Underground. Even 9/11 makes an appearance in District & Circle, suggesting a world permanently at war. A world where memories of the violence of the Northern Irish Troubles have come back to haunt the poet. A world where 'Anything Can Happen'

[reading 4]
You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses
Across a clear blue sky.

Anything can happen, the talles towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops. making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next."

[interview 4]
It's true that there's a sense of war: the Second World War increasingly, then our own mini-divisions in the North, and now the shocking world we're in where it seems war is casually waged and almost with impunity by the superpower, you know."

At the time of the Northern Irish violence of the 'Troubles' you quoted Shakespeare: 'the times are out of joint' as a way of describing that. Is that something you would feel is relevant to now as well, 'the times are out of joint'?

When I quoted that it was about a chronic condition in our own small island. The times were almost chronically out of joint there. But no, I think the times have been put out of joint now for a hundred years or more maybe. I mean, the Islamic versus the Western or the fundamentalists on both sides. Whatever has happened, I think, in the Middle East will be very hard to live down and live around. There is a deep, deep, deep unease and dumbness surrounding the Israel-Palestine situation. The West is understandably dumbed because it has no moral leg to stand on. Then, the Middle Eass, the Arab world, the Islamic world, observes the silence of the West on what is a volatile and unjust situation, and we have landed ourselves in a very unforgiving and chronically dangerous situation. I mean, it isn't just Israel and Palestine but I think that's a precondition for a pre-judice to start with. And then the prejudice is totally justified by the action of America over the last eight or ten years. I like to quote Yeats' grand statement, which is helpful in that it expresses something clearly but unhelpful in that it doesn't tell you how to proceed. But Yeats said, of himself, 'I have tried to hold in a single thought reality and justice'. And it seems to me that that is the command not just to the poets but to the sentient intelligentsia. At this time, to hold in a single thought reality and justice: it's almost impossible."

[voice 4]
William Butler Yeats, Irish poet and Nobel prize winner, who died in the year of Heaney's birth, 1939.

In 1990, Heaney came up with his own version of his predecessor's famous dictum, in his first play, The Cure At Troy. But instead of justice and reality, Heaney was writing about history and hope.

"Once in a lifetime," he wrote,"the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up...and hope and history rhyme." They would go on to become his most-quoted lines.

[interview 5a]
"First of all, I should say about those verses that they were written in a chorus in a play. I wouldn't usually allow myself such grand utterance. Howandever, this was in the play where a chorus' function is to make grand rhetorical statements like this.

For hope and history to rhyme, history would have to stop and become something essentially different. And maybe there was a sense that, at that point, it was and now there's a sense that it isn't...

This happened in the early 'nineties. After the Berlin Wall had come down, after Mandela had got out, after the Velvet Revolution, after Poland, Czechoslovakia and so on. And at the time it was one of the bleakest moments in Ireland. There were terrible things happening in 1991, you know: Greysteele killings and murders. So there was an element of refusal. Rather than anodyne, there was a defiance maybe in it, you know. But admittedly, it was then used by Mr. Clinton, Mr. Adams, various people. It's still a fair enough phrase, a fair enough aspiration. But to hold in a single thought reality and justice is a sterner job. It says: hope for a great sea change, hope for a moment when hope and history rhyme?it is aspirational, but Yeats' is imperative. You must try to hold reality and justice in a single thought.

[reading 5]
History not to be granted the last word
Or the first claim... In the end I gathered
From the display-case peat my staying powers,
Told my webbed-wrists to be like silver birches,
My old uncallused hands to be... [fade]

[voice 5]
Refusing to grant history the last word may be more realistic than expecting it to rhyme with hope. The voice that makes this claim is a familiar one: it belongs to the star of what's arguably Heaney's most famous poem, The Tollund Man.

The poem traced a connection between the life of Ireland's own peat bogs and a body discovered in a Danish bog in 1950.

I must have been ten or eleven when I first read about The Bog People, as the Danish archaeologist PV Glob called them. Glob's book had inspired one of the pupils of my history teacher father to write a paper, generously illustrated with photographs. Being at home with the flu, my father gave me the paper to read so I wouldn't get bored.

It turned out be an unforgettable experience. Almost thirty years later I can still feel the shock when I saw him, The Tollund Man, and the other bog bodies, preserved perfectly...even after more than twenty centuries.

Seamus Heaney must have felt the same shock when he read the book some years earlier. But he found something else as well - evidence, that the violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland was part of an intricate, age-old pattern.

[reading 6a]
Someday I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild-pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin-cap

[voice 6a]
With this pledge, Heaney launched one of the greatest adventures in twentieth-century poetry. And one of the most controversial ones. Because according to Glob, the Tollund Man was a victim of a ritual, Iron Age murder:

[reading 6b]
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body

[voice 6b]
Heaney's critics were incensed that he was linking the cult of an Iron Age goddess to the violence in the streets of Belfast and Derry.

[reading 6c]
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

[interview 5b]
At the time of the Troubles you very explicitly distanced yourself from a way of thinking that was very much focused on only the here and now; that was reducing what was happening to journalistic clich?s if you like: 'elaborate retorts - isn't it terrible.' Is that what happens when you get big, traumatic events like that? That people have a tendency to fracture history and reduce it all to the here and now. And is there a role there for poetry?

I don't know whether poetry?you cannot make any of these things stick as a job of poetry, you know. Poetry's job is to write the poem that is either beautiful or true or true and beautiful or surprising or ironic or whatever. And that, actually, is partly why I didn't go for the here and now. Because I couldn't make it work in my own way of writing. It's the transmission of it into the language, into image, into action - I mean, literary action or imaginative action - that's important. I mean, I'm not writing a report on the current conditions I'm making up images, you know, whatever. Those things carry, they have carrying power, they have staying power. Because of cadence, because of language. Yeats, towards the end of his life

So you have to have faith not in the data, but in the transmission of very few people have even been in a bog. I have a special awareness of what bog life is, but I would like to think that a sense of remoteness and a sense of the mystery of it and a sense of it as a locus of strangeness would be there in writing about bogs, you know.

[voice 7]
In District & Circle the Tollund Man is back, stranger than ever. But the world around him has changed. The Northern Irish Troubles are over, and new intangible threats have taken their place. Global terror, global warming in a world Heaney calls the Virtual City.

Even the bogs that preserved the Tollund Man are threatened in a way unthinkable thirty years ago. Alarmed, the Tollund Man wakes from his long slumber...and calls the poet back down to earth from the lofty heights of Nobel laureate.

[interview]
Yeah, bogging in again so to speak. That's why I'm grateful to the old Tollund Man walking back in. He comes into an insubstantial world. I mean, the evacuation of sense, sensuousness from the world?the virtual world is a bit paradisal isn't it? You waft at angelic speed through the airwaves. I bring the Tollund Man into this world and he's smelling of peat and grass and turf and water and he's calling us back to the first place, you know.

[reading 7]
Into your virtual city I'll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes
Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost
To you and yours, out under seeding grass
And trickles of kesh water, sphagnum moss,
Dead bracken on the spreadfield, red as rust.

I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit
And spirited myself into the street."

[applause]

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