ALL WRITING
Seven days at Sea. Journal. Butterflies. No personality. Sea-sickness. Red Century Note Book: poem about boats, built with skill, care, but now abandoned. Picked up for a day fishing for lobster, for fun, but they don’t provide. Circumstances and desire ask for more. A welcoming body is not made ill by its visitors. It absorbs its visitors into itself or makes them at home — accommodates them. A simple receptiveness. Responding with the self, in the self, or pushing away. But not just swelling in impatient resentment. This is an idea only. Situations or occasions to unmake us. A choreographic situation — to resist the optimum viewing point. Journal of Days at Sea: after sleeping so much yesterday I didn’t sleep much during the night and woke with a sore throat and a pain in my chest. Always listing the time. The time she sleeps to and from, the time of lunch, of dinner, the time of her cabin inspection. Sentimentality is a falsification of emotion. Sentimentalism is dishonesty about feeling. But what ever is anything else, I’d like to know. You too, you’d like to know, if you’re reading this, I suppose. I went out of myself so far I couldn’t get back. And there I was and there was me, the two of us quite separate. When does a thistle become a mysterious object? I love little matter, its coat is so warm, and if I don’t hurt it it’ll do me no harm. Life is inconsistent. That is what life is. And yet people refuse it. A continual swell. A surge. I was thinking about that man — you know who I mean, Jesus, what do you think about him, really? Do you think he was a complete fraud? Crowded into dreams, giant fairs and vast landscapes, occupy, have a moment. Time is elastic. People will do anything to you that you let them do. Anything at all, however awful. Do you like this look that I’m making for you — have made? It isn’t easy to know what war is without having been in one. Of course I used to get those mad impulses towards fashionableness too. The difference gets more and more recognisable. Anyone could lapse at any time I suppose. But it’s not sin, nor a fall in either sense. Not in vitro, they are in vivo. That’s really why I don’t get so very close. The monstrosity comes from something quite ordinary seeming to be extraordinary. A kind of lurid unusualness. In a way, those who are apparently nearer are the more difficult to meet. Different kinds of people. There are different kinds of people. I don’t want ever to have to say goodbye again. There has been too much separation. But it is not a phenomenon of wartime only. It goes on all the time, and is in a sense is what life consists of. And what is necessary is acceptance of the separation when it is inevitable. Refusal or insistence on unnatural separation (insisted on in anger or in fear or perhaps in an attempt at logicality) is what causes the inner split, separation of the self from the self. Things become very apparent. The eyes aren’t looking so much as … something else altogether. Emitting, or engulfing, I never know quite which it is. They have a terrible blankness in them and at the same time a sort of calculating — a look emitting — but not of planned antagonism. Something with Shetland ponies perhaps? Riding up the stairs because someone has read about this in a book. But several ponies. The flowers. A girl with their names. There is a pause by the musicians. She shows him. She is young. “These grow on my grave” she says. “How do you know?” he asks, and she gives him a look. The mythology of course is a bit muddled, but why should that matter? Interpretations. Other people’s interpretations of what I say or think are nearly always wrong. Mistaken. Gossip with a ladder at the window. Journal of Days at Sea: after sleeping so much yesterday I didn’t sleep much during the night and woke with a sore throat and a pain in my chest. A curious moment with the butterflies. I suppose they might as well spend their one day of life at sea as anywhere else. Define a place, or the feeling of being in a place with the sense this gives one, not of restriction but of the infinite variations available. Voluntary variations according to viewpoint. The word is what contorts and distorts rather than conveys and confirms. I love the word too. The trouble is that the hearers and readers have to love it also or they don’t fondle the word into their understanding. They hold it out there and polish it, keep it separate from themselves and call it a principle. They use it to explain with but not to understand. Facts exist whether I know them or not. It is not the collection of facts but the reverence of facts. The actual thing itself though, not the rolling out of the great under consciousness, the extension across sleep from blood to blood. The emanation of feeling, feeling the feeling that is its counterpart, its correspondence. There is often more than one reason for a mistaken meaning. A similarity in sounds often has a significance other than chance. “Ok, I’ll give you that one.” The circumstance of chance can surrealistically link words or facts with surprising relevance. Words come out of something quite deep in human wear and tear. Suppressed pain splits the self from the knowledge. Both mind and heart. Are both split, or is it that one is split from the other in the state of detachment from the self? “I don’t think so for it makes it into that ‘leaving the islands’ theme.” It’s not that so much as anybody going away from anywhere. But this happens to be here. The sound of the footsteps in the street. Creak up. Creak down. Crack up. Crack down. The bright plants grow low. Down below runs the burn, through the heather, the rushes, the grass, down past the old camp there and off towards Orquil Farm and out to the sea and Scapa. Try adding to this score a spontaneous idea for someone, or everyone, in the room. You don’t have to answer this just I’ve run out of blank paper. The healing. The making whole. The spell. S-P-E-L-L. Denials and silences destroy. Fact is done and remains. Not only the word perpetuates. All that has been is perpetuated anyway, in the ether, in the odour, in the germplasm. Things always get killed by what we start imagining ourselves as. What is it that happens? Do you stop growing? Is that all that the peace and acceptance at last consists of — the feeling of arrival? The end of the perceptual restlessness? Readiness to stay. I am still growing, I feel, but within myself. Not expanding now, but deepening. Whatever I am, it’s unacceptable, I’m unacceptable. So shut up! Stay away from everybody. They don’t want you. You’re no use. And the writing, the films? What about all that? Is it just a useless impertinent generosity? Oh, that? No, we don’t want that. Another time. Thanks a lot but, no thanks. Feeling that I’m in the wrong time, not that ‘I’ am, but that what I produce is for another time. But this isn’t a confidence, it’s more a fear. Yes, it is suitable that you should go to trouble for us but we don’t want to know what the trouble consists of. No, that is excessively boring. One publisher’s reader has said that the characters in my book never really come to life. My idea was that some of the life must come from the reader. When words are separated from feeling — like words spoken by a budgie. Speaking ‘between’ is not done by words. All that happened still exists, and not because of the record of it. The record is always fictitious. Fact is done and remains. It is this, it is this, it is this. For instance, did Gwen and Jo sleep together? I leave it to you. I suppose they did. Others might suppose they didn’t. Incidents don’t really change things. I don’t mean to say that saying it means the opposite. Just, the saying it has very little to do with it. Yet something to do with it. We don’t really have the words. But that’s not all that it is. The words have to be used in other ways than for statement. Statement is what is out of place. And yet apparently, contradictively but not so, statements are what must be said. Not the final statement, I seem to think, but contributory statements. Trouble is, people seem to think you’re stating the whole. As if I could be so stupid. Roses are red, violets are blue, that’s not saying what I’m thinking about you. The blues. As sung on a gramophone record by Mildred Bailey. Long ago. I remember it. You see, I have to tell you these little facts, dig them out of my storehouse, present you with the information, the reference. I’m trying to get at what I mean by this. If you feel like writing me a long letter or another book about it, please do so. A river is known in its hurry part. You follow it up. I was thinking about the relation of words to the senses. Is smell the only sensation that we don’t feel impelled to out into words all the time? Certain houses have a certain smell, and certain kinds of houses have a certain kind of smell. A garden is a composition in night smell and time. I was usually in a great hurry to get things finished — a piece of work completed, sealed, and set there. But nevertheless I am going to go on writing for as long as I go on. So don’t be surprised if it is inconsistent. And of course you could ask “why?” To which I can reply “WHY NOT?” Or give the infuriating answer slightly bigger children give to slightly smaller children: “Because I thought you would ask.”
A portrait of Margaret Tait. Transcript of It is this it is this, it is this, a performative video-essay by Laura Edbrook & Sarah Forrest, 2016