David Crane interviewed by Jonathan Mark Tillotson
The following interview took place in a small kitchen in University College of The University of Durham, England, on a rather overcast afternoon at some point in 1997. I recorded the interview on an audio dictaphone and transcribed it into the form seen below..a rather slow process. But david was happy with the result.
Jonathan:
David, you say you believe in God, but what do you exactly mean by God?
David:
One of the things that rather embarrasses one talking about God is that people have an extremely elaborate and ready made set of ideas as to what God means and practically all the central features of what people understand by God are what I don't understand by it. Nevertheless, what's common to what I would believe and what other people would believe is the sense.... that God creates, is the creator of the Universe. And the two things that I want to say crucially about him are firstly that he's not omnipotent, and thus not omniresponsible, and secondly that he makes no use of fear; the consequence is, you can imagine, that I think the Christian God or the Christian notion of God is a caricature version of this, because there you have a God who is totally....omnipotent, an oriental despot, and a God who makes use of fear as his central weapon. Indeed he is weaponed against his creation.
Jonathan:
You would understand him as a personal God, having a particular relationship with each individual in an unmediated way?
David:
Yes...absolutely..I think when you die you go into a room and you find your friends there and after a bit you say "God?" and they point him out in a corner, where he's sitting having a drink...
Jonathan:
So he represents all that is familiar and most totally at ease?
David:
Totally familiar, and although his experience of things is different from ours he is able to meet us in ways that inspire no fear and particularly also of course no awe, because the kind of reverential awe with which people view God, the Christian notion, is itself a kind of fear.
Jonathan:
But then there's a type of awe, isn't there, that's peaceful and lovely, the kind of awe one feels towards beautiful landscapes and paintings..that's quite awesome.
David:
Yes..yes, I think on the whole, I take your point entirely, I think on the whole I want to use a different word for it. The kind of reverential awe one has in mind when thinking of the Christian God has about it, as it were, a quality of smoothed down or planed down fear.
Jonathan:
You say he's not omnipotent. My main problem with that, as I see it, is that he therefore doesn't have any hope to offer humanity at large, on this earth, unlike the Christian God, who gives hope for the Kingdom of Heaven and concerning whom we may conceive a progress through time; and you have the prophecies, something to look forward to and to console you in the sufferings of the Earth and the peoples of the Earth. However nice and kind and beautiful is the notion of God you depict, I was wondering, does he have a plan and does he actually really get involved in the problems of the world in a useful way?
David:
Yes, I think one of the things I wanted to say before is that where the Christian God is concerned you may have someone to accompany you in suffering passionately in the midst of all the problems and grievances and difficulties; for which, however, he is actually responsible, which makes, since he's omnipotent, for a rather odd set up. What I would want to say by contrast is that the reality of the universe is dualistic and that God, when he began on the creation, made a mistake and didn't realise that the darkness of non-existence would not yield.
Jonathan:
This was in the first few seconds?
David:
Yes, and I think we're in the first few seconds now and that not only has the darkness, the non-existence, not yielded to the notion of the creation but it's got in on the act itself and produces a kind of anti-matter, a kind of anti-creation, so we...see things like bits of animals or bits of things that are specifically designed for destruction and the causing of fear.
Jonathan:
So its quite similar to the Gnostic "Demiurge"?
David:
Well, yes, but I think that for me it's like trumpets sounding in the heavens to be on the side of the creator who is totally on the side of light; there's no way in which one can feel ill at ease with him, and naturally I think that in the end, he putting all his efforts into it and hoping that his friends will put their efforts into it, that we shall manage it, and that everywhere there will be things created and things existing and nowhere non-existence.
Jonathan:
Regarding this notion of darkness getting in on the act of creation you wouldn't want to
say, like the Gnostics, that matter itself is evil.
David:
No, no, absolutely not, I'm saying exactly the reverse; indeed I think that the physical creation is the very centre of the rallying point of light, and the point where it will finally centre itself is in the physical creation, and so what darkness has done is get in on the act by making versions of the physical.
Jonathan:
Why is the physical so important, why is it the rallying point of light?
David:
I think that I take seriously the notion of creation in its full range of possibility. Most of the Christian tradition, I think it's probably true to say, has, although acknowledging that whatever God creates must be good, rather underplayed the physical creation and suggested that it's a rather inferior part of the whole thing. I think we must by contrast sit ourselves firmly in the midst of what we know; what we know is the physical creation. The absolutely brilliant thing it seems to me is that out of the midst of absolute nothingness there arose a reality which means that when I push my finger down and it meets this table it doesn't go any further. That sense of solidity.
Jonathan:
That sense that it's through the physical and because of the physical and because of our familiarity with it that we are not alienated from ourselves in our worlds; that in it we are all very much at home.
David:
And I think that if we are truly at home and at ease in our physical creation and our physical bodies that they prove to be perfectly adequate habitations for whatever range and extent of imagination that we may have as an energy within us, especially if you think that in the end one has to think of the physical creation as relieved from fear, relieved from death, relieved from non-existence of all kinds.
Jonathan:
Would you say that your thoughts about God form the basis of your, for want of a better word, "moral" outlook?
David:
I feel a bit chary about that because I don't want to get into the position of allowing it to be supposed that I think of God as an authority.
Jonathan:
No.
David:
So what I want to say rather is that I think that it would not be surprising if when human beings looked inside themselves they found commonly there a certain fundamental sense of reality or a certain fundamental willingness that it should be such; the things that make them happy fundamentally are the same kind of things from one human being to another and that it's in that commoness of reaction-I am not thinking now of superficial dogmatic reactions or credal reactions but fundamental sorts of belief, the sort of feeling one has in the middle of the night- it's in that commoness of human reaction that one finds the authority to say what one wants to say, and it's that commoness that God put there.
Jonathan:
But what you say about God not causing fear, I imagine that sits very well and sympathetically with your own notions about not causing fear.
David:
Yes, and I think.....Yes I like that idea very much, the notion of things chiming together very well. And similarly I think one has the same feeling from one human being to another, that it's not the case that one human being, as it were, sits at the feet of another, it's that something that one human being says may chime off or trigger off something inside another. And if that something is worth engaging with then it must come from inside the other person.
Jonathan:
So you say fear is the ultimate negative dark thing.
David:
Yes.
Jonathan:
As fear manifests itself in a person or confronts a person how would you paint a picture of its consequences in the life of that individual? What does fear do to someone that's so awful?
David:
I remember just two or three days ago I was talking to quite an elderly woman about schools and she said that for the whole of her childhood there was a little physical weight in the middle of her chest, as though she hadn't swallowed something properly, which was the fear of going to school, and that in the end she got used to it. I think that what happens is that fear either produces outright panic and terrifically anxious reactions, either of a psychological or physical kind or more often, it seems to me, it's a weight or a burden one is habituated to, it's as though for the whole of one's life you had to carry two heavy suitcases around with you. And, naturally this takes up perhaps 90 % of one's energies and it habitually leads to certain, as it were, psychological ways of walking, certain cautiousnesses, it produces every now and then the hopeless fling of rebellion of one kind or another, as people try to get rid of what can't be got rid of, like a horse trying to shake off its harness.
Jonathan:
Your central active or moral orientation around fear is this notion that one shouldn't cause it, and you also believe, don't you, that those who are the most frightened cause the most fear.
David:
Yes, although I don't think the nexus between those two things is completely simple of course, it's quite complex in some cases to trace the connection. My supposition is that God doesn't cause fear, and so if that supposition is right it seems to me that all agencies which cause fear in the world must derive their authority, their meaningfulness, not from God but from the antagonistic darkness, and that goes for absolutely everything that works by using the instruments of fear, not only the things that society on the whole disapproves of, like burglars breaking in at night, but the forces that are meant to contain that criminal activity, for instance the whole of the police force; it goes for all the normal ways of educating people, the normal kinds of social disciplining... and that in one's own life, one should try to conduct one's own life...and I think I do it, I think I do it, its a kind of experiment, I think it works.... without using fear of any description, even the slightest, even when someone knocks on the door and you make sure you don't say Come In! because by doing so you put yourself over on to the wrong side of reality.
Jonathan:
What of the more institutional ways in which, perhaps subliminally and without our being aware of it, fear is intimately reinforced in our lives, sustained and kept there in the various forms of life?
David:
I think it derives a major part of its power from the sense that people are given from a very early point that some of the things they privately think or do or feel or are unable to prevent themselves from thinking or feeling or doing are things which would shame them in public or put them into prison or whatever. So what you make people do is bear a private burden of some kind......and the thing is to make people docile, and on the whole if people are made sucessfully docile, then to the degree that they are docile, to that degree they don't realise that fear is being exercised upon them, like most of the people in Orwell's 1984, who presumably thought that society was perfectly tolerable....they believed the propaganda, they believed things about the chocolate ration as people believe the propaganda now, and you have news now that tells you every day of interesting new punishments and criminal courts and what not that produce all the time the sense that fear is the proper way to keep the whole thing in order ........I think, by contrast, when one quietly talks to people in a small corner as we are talking now, in a small corner tucked away, that people are prepared to admit, as it were, very much off the record, the degree to which what they do is either governed by or hedged about with apprehension of one sort or another. It would be interesting to compute the quantity of human energy that simply goes to waste in the experiencing of fear.
Jonathan:
So you definitely see a relationship between the presence of fear and the diminution of energy.
David:
Yes, and I think the energy which is chiefly focussed upon by this means is probably sexual energy, but this is just an element of the whole picture of energy. Imagine, though, the difference between the child who went to school in the usual way and the child suddenly released from any obligation ever to go again; one talks of release advisedly; even though they like school, and I'm not saying that children don't quite often like school, there would be things about it that they would be delighted to be freed from.
Jonathan:
Would you say, looking at the world collectively, at the larger picture, that the getting rid of fear in everybody's daily lives, that that itself would lead to, say, the destructon of suffering, poverty, sickness and war and things like that?
David:
No, because, as I say, darkness has got in on the act of creation itself. There are things that afflict us, things that are not traceable to causes that would be affected by our collectively deciding not to cause fear to each other. Its only part of the picture, but I think nevertheless a very large part of the picture, and I think that to wake up one morning and decide that you are not for the rest of your life willingly ever again going to cause any kind of fear to another human being, or to anything, to an animal, gives you such a delighted sense of freedom, makes the world seem suddenly so different, and casts such a different light upon all the social institutions which we see all around us, that if even quite a small proportion of people decided to do that it probably would change a great deal- there would be for instance no recognisable newspapers since most newspapers operate on a diet which is perhaps 80% fear, 20% the desire born out of fear.
Jonathan:
So you don't see it solving all problems.
David:
No, by no means, no. I think that what it does is, it seems to me, that it puts one firmly on the side of the high god who is occupied also with the other things, with volcanoes and floodings...
Jonathan:
You do see the larger shape of darkness one day being dismantled.
David:
Yes, yes, undoubtedly.
Jonathan:
But this getting rid of fear is just the first step, perhaps?
David:
Yes, or a parallel step, part of what must happen; and it seems to me the most obvious way in which we might find ourselves on the same side as light, the most obvious and most energetic way in which we might help; and, as I say, besides that it makes you happy.
Jonathan:
Do you have any idea what is this parallel step that God's doing?
David:
Well, I find it terribly difficult to know, of course. It seems almost as though the texture of creation at the moment is like a pullover knitted from white wool and black wool, and sometimes the knitting is so intricately conjoined together that it takes a long time to unpick the knitting; how to keep the shark without the shark's teeth? My sense of the matter is that in these first few seconds of creation God has paused and stopped doing anything but trying to unpick the knitting and confront this nothingness, and that we do the same. One of the things that I think may be the case is that if one never causes fear, you actually do begin to unpick the knitting in yourself, and to unpick the knitting, or to do something towards unpicking the knitting, in other people and in so doing you're part of the big unpicking that's going on.
Jonathan:
And all the while more energy's being created for the unpicking.
David:
Yes, and who knows when the point will come when the vital stitch will have been freed, and then it just unravels-who knows; I do have the sense that at some point it will suddenly terrifically unravel, just as for instance, in a very different way, the communist set-up in Russia suddenly unravelled- producing of course as a consequence all kinds of different sorts of darkness and fears, so one doesn't want to be too simple-mindedly optimistic....
Jonathan:
Briefly, your sexual morality has to be understood within the context of your opposition to fear, in every sense.
David:
Absolutely, and no other. Sexual morality, sexual energy, is one of those things that is surrounded, both in Christian terms and in terms of societies deriving from various kinds of religious notion, is surrounded by prohibitions of all different sorts and very different kinds, of different sorts of superstition rather like the dietary prohibitions of the Mosaic Law and things like that, things you may do, things you may not do.
Jonathan:
The sort of aggressive liberation of sex advocated by someone like Aleister Crowley,
which used fear centrally obviously, you would abhor as much as the teachings of a
monk.
David:
Absolutely, absolutely yes, if one's instruments are always ones that chiefly record the presence or the absence of fear, yes, the extreme ascetic and the aggressive libertarian rate about the same, and one can see, indeed, can one not, that the one is in a certain sense, the obverse of the other.
Jonathan:
Could you say something briefly about English literature and your involvement with it, why it is that it is the central field of your concerns?
David:
It seems to me a great piece of good fortune that to me literature is, as it were, in our society the main market place where human reality can be discussed- not theology, not philosophy, not highly technical subjects like mathematics or physics. It's the reason why I don't like the notion of being a specialist in literature; it seems to me a market place, and that what one does is look at things that some human beings have written in a state of great excitement or great desire to communicate with others and to say "what conclusions are we to come to about such human beings and such highly intense states?"; it's as though suddenly one accumulated round one not only the people one meets in the street and one knows but the whole host of people now dead who are, as it were, excitedly, urgently pressing in upon you. And it seems to me one's understanding of what is happening there.... naturally I understand in terms of the sort of understanding with which I approach the rest of reality; Naturally because English is my native tongue, this time round at any rate, English literature is the central part of my arena, but I try to make the arena as large as may be; and it seems to me that if one takes seriously the notion of a human market place for literature then it makes very little sense at all to set up one's tiny little reserved area in one corner and say I'm a specialist in late eighteenth century satirical poems. One should try to walk abroad as easily as may be, and of course a lot of modern specialisation in the present idiotic state of universities is the direct result of fear, managerial fear coming in upon you, telling you you must do this, you must do that, you must publish this...you must publish that.
Jonathan:
Do you think authors of the twentieth century are more honest and more liberated regarding fear, given the Freudian sexual liberation, etc?
David:
I don't think anyone could deny that of course more (because more people are around) but more literature and more great things have been written in the twentieth century than in the past, but I think the hopes that one might have had, as the twentieth centutury began, that all manner of liberations might occur have not been really very significantly realised; it's amazing how subtle an anti-creator darkness is, how subtily it gets in on the act. But I do think that, especially for me, one has the feeling that a lot of people are only holding on to the very edge of assent to the things that are normally assented to in our society.
Jonathan:
Can we just pick three of your favourite writers from Chaucer to the present, and could you say something briefly about why you like them so much?
David:
Shakespeare's got to be the chief one. He's so vivid an explorer of the genuine complications. You see always in Shakespeare the standard answer, the standard view, the credal system or whatever dissolving under the pressure of his imagination of events and of people put inside it. It's as though he leaves you with an open mind in all directions, he clears the arena of a great deal of rubbish, leaving one of course not with answers but with, as it were, crucially perceivable questions. The trouble about inadequate credal systems is that because they produce things which are thought to be answers most people, most believers, can only perceive the questions in terms of the answers given, and it seems to me the very first manoeuvre one must make is to try to get rid of the inadequate answers, inadequate that is in terms of one's real assent, when one really asks oneself how one really reacts, and then as a consequence to get rid of the inadequate questions and ask the most searching questions, and I can think of no writer who to the degree that Shakespeare has done asks the most searching questions.
Jonathan:
So you'd use the word "genius" of him?
David:
Well I don't like any word that produces a sense of hierarchy because in hierarchy I sniff various kinds of reverential awe.
Jonathan:
Would you not ever so slightly be guilty of some particular kind of political correctness of your own, with respect to language and its uses.
David:
The only thing I have against political correctness is that it's backed by fear and what it produces is a kind of newspeak- certain terms which one is supposed to use or not to use on pain of general disgust, but the notion that one nevertheless in the interests of accuracy and not being misunderstood one tries to pick one's way carefully through the words that are available in one's native tongue seems to me fine, and I find, I think poets often find that when using common words, they may want to use them in very special ways or not to use some that offer themselves as available simply because you can so easily fall into assumptions about things which are not the assumptions you want to make.
Jonathan:
The danger of using language creatively, if one does not bear in mind how how other people are understanding a word?
David:
Yes, but ideally I can't be doing either with the kind of language which is supposed to inspire because of its priestly, mysterious, hieratic quality, because that in its turn substitutes for communication a kind of hierarchic fear, people are supposed to bow down in front of it; universities are full of such language.
Jonathan:
We've done Shakespeare, another one?
David:
As you realise, what one is doing is picking things out at random, but Wallace Stevens has got to be one.
Jonathan:
Why?
David:
I think that impishness. Wallace Stevens seems to me to be able to locate the jester, as it were, the impish element in language and in situations which is always looking in not the official direction. The subtlety of the extensiveness of the eyes that he can find inside a situation that are not looking in the official direction, as for instance sitting in a lecture you're not concentrating upon what the person is saying but looking at his left shoelace, I find absolute delight in; and it seems to me- though I wouldn't suggest Wallace Stevens, as it were, was in the direct way of Shakespeare terrifically revolutionary- that a sly revolution is what it's about. And then I suppose I would like to say Adrienne Rich because I try to think about her that she's been for decades now engaged in the kinds of arguments in favour of liberation that have been going on in the rest of culture; and one knows about such arguments in favour of liberation that they very often turn out to be using precisely the weaponry of fear which made the old system so noxious; I have the sense that with her she tries not to, making of course, as one does, mistakes in the matter but I feel as I read her latest poems that I can disengage from the propaganda, as it were, someone genuinely involved in trying to make human beings freer and happier, more imaginative and more energetic and more delighted with being alive than they were before, and that she has set her face against various kinds of police state, whether it be the political sort as one finds in America or the moralising sort or the psychological sort.
THE END
Jonathan:
David, you say you believe in God, but what do you exactly mean by God?
David:
One of the things that rather embarrasses one talking about God is that people have an extremely elaborate and ready made set of ideas as to what God means and practically all the central features of what people understand by God are what I don't understand by it. Nevertheless, what's common to what I would believe and what other people would believe is the sense.... that God creates, is the creator of the Universe. And the two things that I want to say crucially about him are firstly that he's not omnipotent, and thus not omniresponsible, and secondly that he makes no use of fear; the consequence is, you can imagine, that I think the Christian God or the Christian notion of God is a caricature version of this, because there you have a God who is totally....omnipotent, an oriental despot, and a God who makes use of fear as his central weapon. Indeed he is weaponed against his creation.
Jonathan:
You would understand him as a personal God, having a particular relationship with each individual in an unmediated way?
David:
Yes...absolutely..I think when you die you go into a room and you find your friends there and after a bit you say "God?" and they point him out in a corner, where he's sitting having a drink...
Jonathan:
So he represents all that is familiar and most totally at ease?
David:
Totally familiar, and although his experience of things is different from ours he is able to meet us in ways that inspire no fear and particularly also of course no awe, because the kind of reverential awe with which people view God, the Christian notion, is itself a kind of fear.
Jonathan:
But then there's a type of awe, isn't there, that's peaceful and lovely, the kind of awe one feels towards beautiful landscapes and paintings..that's quite awesome.
David:
Yes..yes, I think on the whole, I take your point entirely, I think on the whole I want to use a different word for it. The kind of reverential awe one has in mind when thinking of the Christian God has about it, as it were, a quality of smoothed down or planed down fear.
Jonathan:
You say he's not omnipotent. My main problem with that, as I see it, is that he therefore doesn't have any hope to offer humanity at large, on this earth, unlike the Christian God, who gives hope for the Kingdom of Heaven and concerning whom we may conceive a progress through time; and you have the prophecies, something to look forward to and to console you in the sufferings of the Earth and the peoples of the Earth. However nice and kind and beautiful is the notion of God you depict, I was wondering, does he have a plan and does he actually really get involved in the problems of the world in a useful way?
David:
Yes, I think one of the things I wanted to say before is that where the Christian God is concerned you may have someone to accompany you in suffering passionately in the midst of all the problems and grievances and difficulties; for which, however, he is actually responsible, which makes, since he's omnipotent, for a rather odd set up. What I would want to say by contrast is that the reality of the universe is dualistic and that God, when he began on the creation, made a mistake and didn't realise that the darkness of non-existence would not yield.
Jonathan:
This was in the first few seconds?
David:
Yes, and I think we're in the first few seconds now and that not only has the darkness, the non-existence, not yielded to the notion of the creation but it's got in on the act itself and produces a kind of anti-matter, a kind of anti-creation, so we...see things like bits of animals or bits of things that are specifically designed for destruction and the causing of fear.
Jonathan:
So its quite similar to the Gnostic "Demiurge"?
David:
Well, yes, but I think that for me it's like trumpets sounding in the heavens to be on the side of the creator who is totally on the side of light; there's no way in which one can feel ill at ease with him, and naturally I think that in the end, he putting all his efforts into it and hoping that his friends will put their efforts into it, that we shall manage it, and that everywhere there will be things created and things existing and nowhere non-existence.
Jonathan:
Regarding this notion of darkness getting in on the act of creation you wouldn't want to
say, like the Gnostics, that matter itself is evil.
David:
No, no, absolutely not, I'm saying exactly the reverse; indeed I think that the physical creation is the very centre of the rallying point of light, and the point where it will finally centre itself is in the physical creation, and so what darkness has done is get in on the act by making versions of the physical.
Jonathan:
Why is the physical so important, why is it the rallying point of light?
David:
I think that I take seriously the notion of creation in its full range of possibility. Most of the Christian tradition, I think it's probably true to say, has, although acknowledging that whatever God creates must be good, rather underplayed the physical creation and suggested that it's a rather inferior part of the whole thing. I think we must by contrast sit ourselves firmly in the midst of what we know; what we know is the physical creation. The absolutely brilliant thing it seems to me is that out of the midst of absolute nothingness there arose a reality which means that when I push my finger down and it meets this table it doesn't go any further. That sense of solidity.
Jonathan:
That sense that it's through the physical and because of the physical and because of our familiarity with it that we are not alienated from ourselves in our worlds; that in it we are all very much at home.
David:
And I think that if we are truly at home and at ease in our physical creation and our physical bodies that they prove to be perfectly adequate habitations for whatever range and extent of imagination that we may have as an energy within us, especially if you think that in the end one has to think of the physical creation as relieved from fear, relieved from death, relieved from non-existence of all kinds.
Jonathan:
Would you say that your thoughts about God form the basis of your, for want of a better word, "moral" outlook?
David:
I feel a bit chary about that because I don't want to get into the position of allowing it to be supposed that I think of God as an authority.
Jonathan:
No.
David:
So what I want to say rather is that I think that it would not be surprising if when human beings looked inside themselves they found commonly there a certain fundamental sense of reality or a certain fundamental willingness that it should be such; the things that make them happy fundamentally are the same kind of things from one human being to another and that it's in that commoness of reaction-I am not thinking now of superficial dogmatic reactions or credal reactions but fundamental sorts of belief, the sort of feeling one has in the middle of the night- it's in that commoness of human reaction that one finds the authority to say what one wants to say, and it's that commoness that God put there.
Jonathan:
But what you say about God not causing fear, I imagine that sits very well and sympathetically with your own notions about not causing fear.
David:
Yes, and I think.....Yes I like that idea very much, the notion of things chiming together very well. And similarly I think one has the same feeling from one human being to another, that it's not the case that one human being, as it were, sits at the feet of another, it's that something that one human being says may chime off or trigger off something inside another. And if that something is worth engaging with then it must come from inside the other person.
Jonathan:
So you say fear is the ultimate negative dark thing.
David:
Yes.
Jonathan:
As fear manifests itself in a person or confronts a person how would you paint a picture of its consequences in the life of that individual? What does fear do to someone that's so awful?
David:
I remember just two or three days ago I was talking to quite an elderly woman about schools and she said that for the whole of her childhood there was a little physical weight in the middle of her chest, as though she hadn't swallowed something properly, which was the fear of going to school, and that in the end she got used to it. I think that what happens is that fear either produces outright panic and terrifically anxious reactions, either of a psychological or physical kind or more often, it seems to me, it's a weight or a burden one is habituated to, it's as though for the whole of one's life you had to carry two heavy suitcases around with you. And, naturally this takes up perhaps 90 % of one's energies and it habitually leads to certain, as it were, psychological ways of walking, certain cautiousnesses, it produces every now and then the hopeless fling of rebellion of one kind or another, as people try to get rid of what can't be got rid of, like a horse trying to shake off its harness.
Jonathan:
Your central active or moral orientation around fear is this notion that one shouldn't cause it, and you also believe, don't you, that those who are the most frightened cause the most fear.
David:
Yes, although I don't think the nexus between those two things is completely simple of course, it's quite complex in some cases to trace the connection. My supposition is that God doesn't cause fear, and so if that supposition is right it seems to me that all agencies which cause fear in the world must derive their authority, their meaningfulness, not from God but from the antagonistic darkness, and that goes for absolutely everything that works by using the instruments of fear, not only the things that society on the whole disapproves of, like burglars breaking in at night, but the forces that are meant to contain that criminal activity, for instance the whole of the police force; it goes for all the normal ways of educating people, the normal kinds of social disciplining... and that in one's own life, one should try to conduct one's own life...and I think I do it, I think I do it, its a kind of experiment, I think it works.... without using fear of any description, even the slightest, even when someone knocks on the door and you make sure you don't say Come In! because by doing so you put yourself over on to the wrong side of reality.
Jonathan:
What of the more institutional ways in which, perhaps subliminally and without our being aware of it, fear is intimately reinforced in our lives, sustained and kept there in the various forms of life?
David:
I think it derives a major part of its power from the sense that people are given from a very early point that some of the things they privately think or do or feel or are unable to prevent themselves from thinking or feeling or doing are things which would shame them in public or put them into prison or whatever. So what you make people do is bear a private burden of some kind......and the thing is to make people docile, and on the whole if people are made sucessfully docile, then to the degree that they are docile, to that degree they don't realise that fear is being exercised upon them, like most of the people in Orwell's 1984, who presumably thought that society was perfectly tolerable....they believed the propaganda, they believed things about the chocolate ration as people believe the propaganda now, and you have news now that tells you every day of interesting new punishments and criminal courts and what not that produce all the time the sense that fear is the proper way to keep the whole thing in order ........I think, by contrast, when one quietly talks to people in a small corner as we are talking now, in a small corner tucked away, that people are prepared to admit, as it were, very much off the record, the degree to which what they do is either governed by or hedged about with apprehension of one sort or another. It would be interesting to compute the quantity of human energy that simply goes to waste in the experiencing of fear.
Jonathan:
So you definitely see a relationship between the presence of fear and the diminution of energy.
David:
Yes, and I think the energy which is chiefly focussed upon by this means is probably sexual energy, but this is just an element of the whole picture of energy. Imagine, though, the difference between the child who went to school in the usual way and the child suddenly released from any obligation ever to go again; one talks of release advisedly; even though they like school, and I'm not saying that children don't quite often like school, there would be things about it that they would be delighted to be freed from.
Jonathan:
Would you say, looking at the world collectively, at the larger picture, that the getting rid of fear in everybody's daily lives, that that itself would lead to, say, the destructon of suffering, poverty, sickness and war and things like that?
David:
No, because, as I say, darkness has got in on the act of creation itself. There are things that afflict us, things that are not traceable to causes that would be affected by our collectively deciding not to cause fear to each other. Its only part of the picture, but I think nevertheless a very large part of the picture, and I think that to wake up one morning and decide that you are not for the rest of your life willingly ever again going to cause any kind of fear to another human being, or to anything, to an animal, gives you such a delighted sense of freedom, makes the world seem suddenly so different, and casts such a different light upon all the social institutions which we see all around us, that if even quite a small proportion of people decided to do that it probably would change a great deal- there would be for instance no recognisable newspapers since most newspapers operate on a diet which is perhaps 80% fear, 20% the desire born out of fear.
Jonathan:
So you don't see it solving all problems.
David:
No, by no means, no. I think that what it does is, it seems to me, that it puts one firmly on the side of the high god who is occupied also with the other things, with volcanoes and floodings...
Jonathan:
You do see the larger shape of darkness one day being dismantled.
David:
Yes, yes, undoubtedly.
Jonathan:
But this getting rid of fear is just the first step, perhaps?
David:
Yes, or a parallel step, part of what must happen; and it seems to me the most obvious way in which we might find ourselves on the same side as light, the most obvious and most energetic way in which we might help; and, as I say, besides that it makes you happy.
Jonathan:
Do you have any idea what is this parallel step that God's doing?
David:
Well, I find it terribly difficult to know, of course. It seems almost as though the texture of creation at the moment is like a pullover knitted from white wool and black wool, and sometimes the knitting is so intricately conjoined together that it takes a long time to unpick the knitting; how to keep the shark without the shark's teeth? My sense of the matter is that in these first few seconds of creation God has paused and stopped doing anything but trying to unpick the knitting and confront this nothingness, and that we do the same. One of the things that I think may be the case is that if one never causes fear, you actually do begin to unpick the knitting in yourself, and to unpick the knitting, or to do something towards unpicking the knitting, in other people and in so doing you're part of the big unpicking that's going on.
Jonathan:
And all the while more energy's being created for the unpicking.
David:
Yes, and who knows when the point will come when the vital stitch will have been freed, and then it just unravels-who knows; I do have the sense that at some point it will suddenly terrifically unravel, just as for instance, in a very different way, the communist set-up in Russia suddenly unravelled- producing of course as a consequence all kinds of different sorts of darkness and fears, so one doesn't want to be too simple-mindedly optimistic....
Jonathan:
Briefly, your sexual morality has to be understood within the context of your opposition to fear, in every sense.
David:
Absolutely, and no other. Sexual morality, sexual energy, is one of those things that is surrounded, both in Christian terms and in terms of societies deriving from various kinds of religious notion, is surrounded by prohibitions of all different sorts and very different kinds, of different sorts of superstition rather like the dietary prohibitions of the Mosaic Law and things like that, things you may do, things you may not do.
Jonathan:
The sort of aggressive liberation of sex advocated by someone like Aleister Crowley,
which used fear centrally obviously, you would abhor as much as the teachings of a
monk.
David:
Absolutely, absolutely yes, if one's instruments are always ones that chiefly record the presence or the absence of fear, yes, the extreme ascetic and the aggressive libertarian rate about the same, and one can see, indeed, can one not, that the one is in a certain sense, the obverse of the other.
Jonathan:
Could you say something briefly about English literature and your involvement with it, why it is that it is the central field of your concerns?
David:
It seems to me a great piece of good fortune that to me literature is, as it were, in our society the main market place where human reality can be discussed- not theology, not philosophy, not highly technical subjects like mathematics or physics. It's the reason why I don't like the notion of being a specialist in literature; it seems to me a market place, and that what one does is look at things that some human beings have written in a state of great excitement or great desire to communicate with others and to say "what conclusions are we to come to about such human beings and such highly intense states?"; it's as though suddenly one accumulated round one not only the people one meets in the street and one knows but the whole host of people now dead who are, as it were, excitedly, urgently pressing in upon you. And it seems to me one's understanding of what is happening there.... naturally I understand in terms of the sort of understanding with which I approach the rest of reality; Naturally because English is my native tongue, this time round at any rate, English literature is the central part of my arena, but I try to make the arena as large as may be; and it seems to me that if one takes seriously the notion of a human market place for literature then it makes very little sense at all to set up one's tiny little reserved area in one corner and say I'm a specialist in late eighteenth century satirical poems. One should try to walk abroad as easily as may be, and of course a lot of modern specialisation in the present idiotic state of universities is the direct result of fear, managerial fear coming in upon you, telling you you must do this, you must do that, you must publish this...you must publish that.
Jonathan:
Do you think authors of the twentieth century are more honest and more liberated regarding fear, given the Freudian sexual liberation, etc?
David:
I don't think anyone could deny that of course more (because more people are around) but more literature and more great things have been written in the twentieth century than in the past, but I think the hopes that one might have had, as the twentieth centutury began, that all manner of liberations might occur have not been really very significantly realised; it's amazing how subtle an anti-creator darkness is, how subtily it gets in on the act. But I do think that, especially for me, one has the feeling that a lot of people are only holding on to the very edge of assent to the things that are normally assented to in our society.
Jonathan:
Can we just pick three of your favourite writers from Chaucer to the present, and could you say something briefly about why you like them so much?
David:
Shakespeare's got to be the chief one. He's so vivid an explorer of the genuine complications. You see always in Shakespeare the standard answer, the standard view, the credal system or whatever dissolving under the pressure of his imagination of events and of people put inside it. It's as though he leaves you with an open mind in all directions, he clears the arena of a great deal of rubbish, leaving one of course not with answers but with, as it were, crucially perceivable questions. The trouble about inadequate credal systems is that because they produce things which are thought to be answers most people, most believers, can only perceive the questions in terms of the answers given, and it seems to me the very first manoeuvre one must make is to try to get rid of the inadequate answers, inadequate that is in terms of one's real assent, when one really asks oneself how one really reacts, and then as a consequence to get rid of the inadequate questions and ask the most searching questions, and I can think of no writer who to the degree that Shakespeare has done asks the most searching questions.
Jonathan:
So you'd use the word "genius" of him?
David:
Well I don't like any word that produces a sense of hierarchy because in hierarchy I sniff various kinds of reverential awe.
Jonathan:
Would you not ever so slightly be guilty of some particular kind of political correctness of your own, with respect to language and its uses.
David:
The only thing I have against political correctness is that it's backed by fear and what it produces is a kind of newspeak- certain terms which one is supposed to use or not to use on pain of general disgust, but the notion that one nevertheless in the interests of accuracy and not being misunderstood one tries to pick one's way carefully through the words that are available in one's native tongue seems to me fine, and I find, I think poets often find that when using common words, they may want to use them in very special ways or not to use some that offer themselves as available simply because you can so easily fall into assumptions about things which are not the assumptions you want to make.
Jonathan:
The danger of using language creatively, if one does not bear in mind how how other people are understanding a word?
David:
Yes, but ideally I can't be doing either with the kind of language which is supposed to inspire because of its priestly, mysterious, hieratic quality, because that in its turn substitutes for communication a kind of hierarchic fear, people are supposed to bow down in front of it; universities are full of such language.
Jonathan:
We've done Shakespeare, another one?
David:
As you realise, what one is doing is picking things out at random, but Wallace Stevens has got to be one.
Jonathan:
Why?
David:
I think that impishness. Wallace Stevens seems to me to be able to locate the jester, as it were, the impish element in language and in situations which is always looking in not the official direction. The subtlety of the extensiveness of the eyes that he can find inside a situation that are not looking in the official direction, as for instance sitting in a lecture you're not concentrating upon what the person is saying but looking at his left shoelace, I find absolute delight in; and it seems to me- though I wouldn't suggest Wallace Stevens, as it were, was in the direct way of Shakespeare terrifically revolutionary- that a sly revolution is what it's about. And then I suppose I would like to say Adrienne Rich because I try to think about her that she's been for decades now engaged in the kinds of arguments in favour of liberation that have been going on in the rest of culture; and one knows about such arguments in favour of liberation that they very often turn out to be using precisely the weaponry of fear which made the old system so noxious; I have the sense that with her she tries not to, making of course, as one does, mistakes in the matter but I feel as I read her latest poems that I can disengage from the propaganda, as it were, someone genuinely involved in trying to make human beings freer and happier, more imaginative and more energetic and more delighted with being alive than they were before, and that she has set her face against various kinds of police state, whether it be the political sort as one finds in America or the moralising sort or the psychological sort.
THE END
posted by Jonathan at 12:35 AM
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