I thought of you today as I was reading an essay by Tom Leonard. It’s called ‘Beckett and Graham’, and I can’t remember where I came across it, but I think it was something in James Kelman and I thought about you because of you poetry path in, both in Athens and in Kassel from documenta 14 and the desire lines that you created out of Beckett’s early poem ‘Cascando’.
The essay is really interesting. Leonard was unwell and in hospital and couldn’t really do much except listen to the radio and read. And on the radio at one point W.S. Graham was doing a reading and he got to think about like how the voice of the poet becomes somehow in dialogue with the voice of the person listening. And there’s this whole process of thinking about how that reminded him of Beckett. And so I went from reading this essay by Leonard back to a book that I got in a secondhand bookshop that was about Samuel Beckett’s German diaries from 1936 to 1937 by Mark Nixon.
I’d flicked through the book here, and, of course, not only was your work there at documenta 14 that referenced Beckett but also the painting of Peggy Sinclair and also one of the books from Beckett’s stay in Germany.
Beckett, when he was in Germany, didn’t write much. I mean he was writing kind of a day book and what he was doing but I came across these lines of a poem that he started and didn’t get anywhere with. And he wrote in a letter to someone called I don’t know the first name but it’s McCreavy and he wrote:
“I have neither written anything or wanted to except for a short hour when the frail sense of beginning life behind the eyes that is the best of all experiences came again for the first time since Cascando and produced two lines and a half.”
So this was in 1937 (which actually, is the year that you were born, if I remember rightly?) and these are the lines:
Always elsewhere
In body also
The dew falls and the rain from
And that’s it. As for where the rain is from, Nixon picks up in later works by Beckett. So for Mercier and Camier there is the line:
“the rain was falling gently as from the fine rose of a watering pot.”
and then in Molloy, Beckett writes:
“then in my eyes and in my head a fine rain begins to fall as from a rose highly important.”
And so this references back to ‘Cascando’ and actually Nixon talks about how ‘Cascando’ was kind of inspired by Beckett reading Goethe (another important documenta 14 reference) and all these other things which is kind of cool.
But as for these two and a half lines of poetry, I was doing this reading and then I was doing the dishes and looking out the window. Here in Ohio, it’s been a really sunny cold day and as I was looking out the window, something flitted in front of my eyes and it was the shadow of a squirrel as it was running along the fence towards the kitchen window and I just got thinking about that shadow. And so what I did was I added a line to Beckett’s poem:
Always elsewhere
In body also
The dew falls and the rain from
A squirrel’s shadow
I guess there are a few reasons for the squirrel’s shadow. My partner Rebeka loves squirrels and but also it made me think of the author I used to work on as a classicist Apuleius of Madauros and he had this moment when in The Golden Ass when the narrator is turned into a donkey describes himself as being the inventor of the proverb ‘the shadow of the ass’, meaning something kind of irrelevant and superfluous. And also in Apuleius that in order to cure him being a donkey he has to find roses so I kind of like the idea of the roses being substituted by the shadow of a squirrel. And also Beckett had been reading Rilke while he was in Germany as well and we all know Rilke’s interest in roses.
And I read my poem to Rebeka and Eneko, our son, and I said to Eneko what do you think the shadow of the squirrel is like compared to other shadows in the garden. And he was like, I guess it’ll be moving. And then I asked him, what about the dew falling and the rain falling from it. So imagine the squirrel running through the garden after rain and then being like the the rain casting a shadow and the water casting shadow and then Eneko’s like yeah but water doesn’t cast a shadow. And I’m like oh okay that’s kind of cool. I hadn’t really thought about that. I haven’t checked up on that whether water casts the shadow in that way.
Anyway, after doing the dishes I went online and found out that this phrase ‘always elsewhere’ that feels like a very Beckett phrase, right? ‘Always elsewhere’ actually was used later when Beckett wrote the play ‘Cascando’ he inserted it in there as well.
So I was just thinking about how all these things kind of come back and you might ask what’s this got to do with you? But it’s because what happened a bit later I was thinking that I wanted to to send you a message just to see how you’re doing. Kind of wish you happy holidays and look forward to seeing you when we come back to Glasgow in the summer next year.
And I was reminded of something that Ross Birrell wrote for your entry in the documenta 14 Daybook the like a diary the ‘Tagebuch’ book about you and he said that when Douglas Gordon was asked what he’d been taught during his time as a student of the environmental art course and he writes:
“the influential department at Glasgow School of Art established by David Harding in 1985. His reply was to sing not how to sing but simply to sing.”
And whenever I think of singing I think of you and you know that time before I sent you my grandmother singing.
And then I realized I wanted to add another word to the poem and so and kind of keep that ‘from’ hanging that Beckett left there. And so this was the poem that I wrote and I wanted to share with you today – as a gift from me to you:
Always elsewhere
In body also
The dew falls and the rain from
A squirrel’s shadow
Sings
I don’t know if Ross let you know but I’ve restarted the Minus Plato blog now called minus plato? – lower case with a question mark) as a kind of preparation for the various 10 years anniversary of the exhibition in 2027. A kind of slow way of me commemorating it and thinking about its impact on me. What I’ve been doing actually is I’ve been speaking the blog posts and then transcribing them and so that is why I am sending you here for this transcrption and the spoken message to you, so both you and others can hear and read it.
And I think the reason I want to do this comes back to Tom Leonard. The text ‘Beckett and Graham’ is from a book called Passing Through: Poetry and Prose, which has a forward by James Kelman and this was reissued by the Tom Leonard Literary Estate.
It was initially published by Brian Hamill through his imprint the common breath. Brian died very soon after the book was published and so they Michael Leonard, Tom Leonard’s son, published it as a kind of memorial for Brian Hamill’s work and his engagement with his father. And I’ve been thinking about Tom Leonard a lot recently mainly because of some of the writings that he did around the first Gulf War and also for his constant commitment to the Palestinian people as well.
And he you know with the incessant news that we’re bombarded with and just opening up Al Jazeera today what the breaking news is tents housing displaced in flames after Israel attack on South Gaza. And this is in Al-Mawasi the tent camp there. And so coming back to Leonard made me think of that.
And the the other thing was this was you know thinking about Leonard the cover of this book that the ‘Beckett and Graham’ essay is in has a street lamp with light kind coming down. And I remember after October 7th last year and the response by Israeli military I would be in Bilbao sitting outside the place I’d go into first swim and then I would be working in the library there and I’d sit under this street lamp, in the dark of the early morning.
And in the last text in the book before actually the text that James Kelman read for Tom Leonard’s funeral Leonard is a text called ‘Autumn Leaves’ and he is writing about this cover and in it the email that he included an image of that’s based on this cover he says a poem:
“written a while back when I had walked under a lamp on a path by the Kelvin Walkway and saw the silhouette of my father bunnit and all.”
And then this was the text that was reproduced on Leonard’s grave ‘passing through’.
It is my father’s shade
that lengthens before me
then fades to the dark
where the shade has gone
and to which I walk
And I was thinking about my own father but also how that squirrel shadow is a very different image of the shade as well.
And thinking back to the desire lines and the text and the what your work has meant to me and our conversations as well. Although they’ve been few they’ve been very meaningful to speak to you about that work. When I think back to the inspiration for that vision of love that Beckett mentions in ‘Cascando’ as coming from the mayor at Piraeus and for the refugees many coming from the Syrian war, which, as you know, has been in our minds due to the remarkable events in Syria recently.
And, I just wanted to share that with you and I just want to wish you happy holidays and I hope you’re well and I look forward to seeing you next year. And at some point I’ll tell you about when I first came across the work of W.S. Graham when I was a teenager. But that’s a story for another time.
