AA: I wouldn’t want to give the impression that all the poems are about sex, or are dealing with eroticism, because you’re doing so much other interesting and amazing work there. I think another theme, if we can try to draw one out, would be that a lot of the poems are suggestive. They use a kind of imperative mode or voice, but they’re not instructions; they’re more suggestions towards what I understand to be freedom. Like freedom from the ‘self’, I guess. I’m thinking about the poem ‘inoculation’, which ends with: ‘know less and less and less’. And, there’s one that feels sort of like a sister poem to that called ‘Technique’, which has the lines: ‘what counts is that you’ll no longer be driving yourself off sanity’s cliff / anxiety will leave you like a troupe of fleas’, which is so good.
AP: Anxiety’s so itchy, right? It’s an itchy feeling.
AA: Very much so. It strikes me that this must be an area of interest for you. If we’re talking about eroticism, the self is obviously there… but to have a degree of separation from myself and the ego, um, seems like another important thing that you’re looking into. Is that fair to say?
AP: It’s an interesting thing to ask.
I’ve been around enough non-western interested circles, have spent time around Buddhism’s idea, and more importantly around people reading Buddhism and giving interpretations of what they think ‘it’ means. I have my, uh, equally, I’m sure, ill-informed take on that. So, it’s tricky when you raise this question of the role of the ‘self’. This also dovetails totally with what I do in my [scholarly] work. If one goes into certain lines of ontology, then the self is a pure construction. So, it’s buildable and constructible and, therefore, sometimes, dismantlable – whether by choice or by, you know, force.
I think a mistake that can be made is that… or rather: you only want to lose a self once you’ve got one. And that’s why feminism, for example, needs to find balance when it comes to this kind of boysy [or entitled] take on Buddhism, which I find dangerous for women, actually. It’s a work to make a self; you don’t just get one. [Marginalised groups, or people with neglected personal or bigger histories, don’t always get one …] One could go to Winnicott for that, or to other people in psychoanalysis. What I’ve found in my scholarly work is that the self is constructed by repeated actions and habits, by the things that we do over and over at every register in our being. Whether it’s the heart beating as a habit to keep us alive or the skin cells creating themselves, whatever. To get back to body image stuff, the hateful things we utter under our breath over and over, they too build a ‘self’; they build a certain kind of flesh. Hate can build flesh or it can unbuild flesh, or it – [like love, or care] – can transform flesh or bone or posture or whatever.
I’m interested in not taking the ‘self’ too seriously but I also, in my own practice as a feminist, I have spent years building one, building one that was strong and stable enough to withstand the gusts of the world. I don’t just go: ‘Oh, I should just drop this self’ or, ‘in this scenario, it’d be best if I’m totally ‘compassionate’ [self-effacing] and let the truck of life run me over. Well, no. This is not what Buddhism is after, I don’t think.
And I’ve wondered if Buddhism possibly comes out of times when the ‘self’ may have been simply more established [or inter-connected]. In communities with a sense of being loved – let’s hope – or where one had a place. I don’t know. To have a ‘self’, there’re a whole lot of things required. Sometimes people dive into Buddhism thinking it’s an answer. ‘Buddhism’, here taken as interpretations or readings of certain things, in translation quite often, et cetera. It’s such a fraught world of literatures … But yes, I think the self is something we construct. We construct it every day. We can make decisions around that construction. As Judith Butler might say, not arbitrarily. Not: ‘I’ll do whatever I want’, but there is wriggle room, and there are some things we may not wish to ramify. We can place intentionality in other ways. We have to build a self, otherwise we fall apart, and we feel terrible – that feeling of existential, or even ontological, wobbliness, which is so horrible in my experience … when, for example, I haven’t built myself well enough – that day, that week … Or there’s hostility around, and I need to be stronger, actually.
Weirdly once you realise that you build the self – that it’s not there in a kind of given way – then you’ve got both options at once. You build a sort of energetic stability in yourself – whatever that is for a person, as well as knowing that that is also not fixed, [essential or natural]. You build it, and thus you can also tinker around with it. Not a self that is a brand. It’s a ‘self’, [not a product]; it’s your person …
AA: This is crazy, like it’s exactly what I need to hear this exact day. I’ve been doing, I think, far too much work dismantling what – as you’re speaking, I’m realising – a self that probably needed a bit more bolstering. Yeah, I have been in those exact Buddhist circles, literal circles … where the feminine is totally maligned, totally discounted, and made very pathetic, really. Ah, and all the women in the room are like: ‘yeah, yeah, no, totally. Because … something-something-ego …’ and it’s just very surface level.
AP: I’ve been there! I’ve had friends, too, come and talk to me about how their relationship’s going bad, how their partner’s abusive and how they probably just need to work on their compassion. And I’m like: ‘No! You don’t need to work on your compassion. You need to work on an exit strategy.’ This is very different; do not confuse your registers of religious involvement. You know, spiritual misreadings.
Misread poems. It’s less dangerous, but don’t misread those other texts.
AA: ‘Registers’ is such a great word. I feel like that that comes back to what I was driving at before: how these poems operate on multiple registers at once. I want to dive into talking about the last poem in the book ‘Mauerpark’. So, I know when I wrote to you about the book, I mentioned that this was probably my favourite. And you said that there’d been a bit of conversation around its inclusion. It’s got so many wonderful lines in it, and it all seems to be set in a coherent time, but it’s doing that while also pointing to other moments, doing that looking-from-multiple-angles-at-once thing. First of all, I’d like to hear about that conversation around getting it into the book if you’re willing to.
AP: Yeah. Well, it’s a very old poem. It’s at least 13 years old. An old poem and it’s never been published anywhere else. I’m quite interested in a vernacular sensibility at times, more than maybe some of my poems imply. In the past, my work has been very vernacular, intentionally so. I had a love of Bukowski – a politically-incorrect love of Bukowski’s work, and of other kinds of particularly vernacular works. There was something quite … pedestrian about ‘Mauerpark’. I didn’t feel like I was doing anything ‘clever’. It was a labour of love. There was this one day in Berlin and we were happy.
