Category: Essay

Short general piece

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Essay

Good AI / Bad AI Addendum

I made a brief reference in my first AI post to:

the well-rehearsed issue of copyright infringement as the LLM hoover up any text found on the web

but it is too important an issue to be left at that: Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Damon Albarn are among 1,000 artists on a silent ‘AI protest’ album launched to emphasise the impact on musicians of UK’s plans to let AI train on their work without permission. (see this Guardian article). Copyright is important to ALL creative publishers of music, poems, literature, scholarly articles, etc. as it protects their work from unauthorised use and ensures fair recompense for use. The new UK government exemption allows AI companies to train their algorithms on the work of such creative professionals without compensation.

The issue is explained more fully in another Guardian article from the same issue (Tuesday 25th February). Andrew Lloyd Webber and Alistair Webber’s clearly argued opinion piece, “It’s grand theft AI and UK ministers are behind it. Oppose this robbery of people’s creativity” explains the problem in some detail and with some force, noting that the government’s consultation which ended this week “is not regulation, it is a free pass for AI to exploit creativity without consequence.”

Copyright ensures creators retain control and are fairly compensated. It underpins the creative economy. Put simply, it allows artists and creatives to make a living.

The point that both I and Robert Griffiths have made (see my first AI post) is made again here:

AI can replicate patterns, but it does not create. If left unregulated, it will not just be a creative crisis, but an economic failure in the making. AI will flood the market with machine-generated imitations, undercutting human creativity … 

… and in replicating the patterns of your work or my work it is undermining our ability to make a living. Copyright protections are the

foundation that allows creators to produce the high-quality work AI depends on. Without strong copyright laws, human creativity will be devalued and displaced by machines. 

Both articles are essential reading if you are interested in understanding how AI is set to move forward. Or indeed the stage it has already reached. We need to understand and deal with the problems as they arise. There needs to be more open debate and more understanding about ‘good AI’ and ‘bad AI’.

And, I repeat, the man and woman in the street need both to understand and to have a choice as to whether they use (or are exposed to) AI.

Postscript:

The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) has just made public their 24-page response to the Government Consultation. It is introduced by CEO Barbara Hayes here and the link to the full PDF document is at the foot of that page. It makes interesting reading (very!) but perhaps the most interesting issue highlighted is the amount of legal challenges that are likely to ensue if the proposed exception-based approach is taken:

The central issue giving rise to this uncertainty is encapsulated well in a paper coauthored by US and German academics: ‘The training of generative AI models does not limit the use of the training data to a simple analysis of the semantic information contained in the works. It also extracts the syntactic information in the works, including the elements of copyright-protected expression. This comprehensive utilization results in a representation of the training data in the vector space of the AI models and thus in a copying and reproduction in the legal sense. Consequently, the training of generative AI models does not fall under the exceptions for text and data mining.’ (Dornis, Tim W. and Stober, Sebastian, Urheberrecht und Training generativer KI-Modelle – technologische und juristische Grundlagen September, 2024).

In the US there is already a significant number of lawsuits relating to the use of copyright material by AI systems.

If you have concerns over the use of supposedly copyright-protected material being used, this report is a ‘must-read’ document.

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Essay

Good AI / Bad AI Revisited

There has been a lot in the news recently about AI – none of which, as it happened, did anything to change my views expressed in the 6th February post. But it – and a conversation I had with an AI user – did remind me of another issue.

As an information scientist, I was – I suppose like any researcher – taught to look at multiple sources and to verify my sources. So, for example, if I were looking for medical advice I would favour NHS (or the US equivalent) sites over most others. And – certainly – if I was being advised on a course of action or on a medication – I would compare a number of sites and read (evaluate) what they all had to say. I would also build into my evaluation a weighting based on the source. Weighting sounds like a complicated algorithm, but all I mean is that I would favour information from known sites (NHS, etc.) over that from an unknown blog. Because I could evaluate in that way.

It seems to me that while AI search engines/ChatBots may search far wider and faster than I could ever hope to do, there is (in my limited experience) no (or little) information provided about sources. I know that there is weighting built into their algorithms (a sort of sequential word probability at the lowest level) but I do not know whether that weighting extends to analysing sources, nor do I know – if it is – on what that weighting is based. (For a simple explanation of how basic weighting and large language models (LLM) work see this Aeon video – which does not mention sources!)

This means – I think – that if you use an AI ChatBot/LLM to do your research, you are relying on a probability that the answer is correct based – mainly – on word probabilities (of the… is the word ‘green’ likely to be followed by ‘leaf’ rather than ‘face’ variety) but with little attention to the various URLs/sources from which the information presented – if ‘information’ it is (Can you call a collection of words increasingly likely to work together ‘information’?) – is culled. I am not even sure whether source information is built into the algorithms.

And I have no information on how trustworthy that makes AI research-bots. Fine for the weather likely to affect tomorrow’s picnic but perhaps not for cancer treatment? Better than that? Worse?

Although – possibly – if you are searching for ‘facts’ (I mean ‘important facts’ such as the right medication as opposed to the correct ending of a quotation from Byron), the AI system goes beyond the LLM. But most of us do not know whether that is true… or indeed how the AI would interpret my word ‘facts’!

Or ‘important’!

And I think we are getting back into the ‘morality’ realms I dealt with in the earlier posting.

For now – while I am still able to choose – I shall use search engines (and I know these all have some ‘intelligence’ built in) that allow me to assess the degree to which I can trust the answer.

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Essay

Good AI / Bad AI

As a writer – possibly even a poet – I have concerns about the Large Language Models (LLM) of Artificial Intelligence. As Robert Griffiths wrote recently in PNR 281:

“But even if these programs could train on ‘good’ poetry, it is not clear how, in their production of what is statistically most likely in a word-string, they could produce anything original. It is not obvious that any analysis of the best poetry written before 1915 would have come up with the third line of Prufrock [“Like a patient etherized upon a table” since you ask]. That line was not already waiting in that poetry; it was not even waiting in language.’

Crucially he reminded readers that it arose “from a particular human being’s unique relationship to that poetry and the world.”

This echoed a part of something I wrote about a month ago. I too have concerns about AI producing art, fiction and poems for that very reason. AI used for necessary processes – such as NHS image scanning to speed up analysis and consultations – is a wonderful step forward. Unnecessary AI simply to make money for the lazy is not. In essence my concerns boil down to three issues which I have classified as to do with morality, followed by three further issues:

  1. Morality 1. The ability to produce (in seconds, apparently) novels or poems or the works of art  – forgeries basically – is extraordinarily clever but… why? Apart from the amusement value of the last, who needs them? What value are they/do they have? A novel or a poem (even one of mine) is a representation of the author’s thinking: it has his/her imprint and imprimatur. It is essentially – leaving aside the individual creator – the art/creation of this planet’s life and represents a version of this planet’s thinking/beliefs/understanding of life etc at the point in time at which it was written. An AI creation is just some cleverly jumbled words with no life or meaning other than the lexical. Essentially I would suggest it has no value. Ditto the works of art. This is a waste of resources.
    Another thought is that it may seriously mislead readers, uncritical children learning to  or having recently learned to read, future generations (that could have serious repercussions).
    Additionally is the well-rehearsed issue of copyright infringement as the LLM hoover up any text found on the web.
  2. Morality 2. Like data banks and bit-coin, AI systems use huge amounts of electricity and water. Is this morally acceptable in a time when we are having trouble producing enough/enough cleanly? I suppose I would argue that it is OK for the image scanning type of work but not for creating valueless, gimmicky novels or pictures, or for enhancing – a questionable word – search results or providing a voice response when I ask about the weather – something I could do more easily on my iPhone!
  3. Morality 3 Finally – and maybe this should have been the first of the three – AI systems have no inherent morals or ethics. Arguably, neither do many of our leaders who make choices on our behalf, but at least they exist in the same bubble of morality as I do. Remember Asimov’s laws for robots – basically do no harm to humans – do AI systems have even that basic ‘morality’ built in? AI is (I think) used in legal as well as medical work – what moral and ethical safeguards are there. (Even at a lesser level than morality/ethics, can we be sure that the rules built in are the same ones that a judge would make?) Can the system vary them? Should it be able to? Should we – the general public – know what they are? Who decides on the morals/ethics?
  4. Security is definitely an issue – not just in government or armed forces systems. It does need to be addressed IN EVERY APPLICATION of AI. That probably means a minimum level should be set and regulated. (By someone!)
  5. Definition: what do we mean by AI? The term sweeps in general robotics – as on a production/assembly line – which probably have very limited intelligence beyond recognising parts, etc) through image recognition and control to Large Language Models which swallow and assimilate and ‘learn’ from huge, uncontrolled and unfiltered vats of text. Without permission. Without (so far as I am aware) any human interference, value adding or ‘explaining’. Shouldn’t there be some understood vocabulary or classification or Linnaean taxonomy beyond/below the ambidextrous AI? And shouldn’t we all (have the opportunity to) understand it.
  6. Choice. In many cases AI is being foisted on us whether we will or not. If I buy a new car my interaction with it may be largely by via ChatGP (I may ask out loud the navigation system to re-route me to a shop and it may reply, But that shop is currently closed, I’ll take you to…). Already search engines may incorporate it. What else does? Who knows? I believe that users should have the right to know – and have the ability built into the interface without having to argue with a nameless bit of AI on the phone! – to decide whether we want ‘ordinary, vanilla’ search or enhanced AI search. After all when all is said and done what is AI doing in the search that the search engine hasn’t been doing (more or less) (more less satisfactorily) for years? Essentially, I – as a human being – want to remain in control!
    And – another aside – shouldn’t users be able to decide whether the thing on the other end of a help line is human or artificial?

Link to my short story on Artificial Intelligence.

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Essay

You have to wonder…

… about an algorithm that recommends your own book – the book that you have written – for you to buy!

How often are we told how clever are these algorithms? How they improve your online experience? Keep your children away from the stuff you wouldn’t want them to see?

I have an author page on Amazon and all of my books are linked to it. Wouldn’t you have thought that the algorithm would recognise the same name – Chris Armstrong – on both the product being recommended and the recipient of the recommendation… and if it was still in doubt, check for an author page for confirmation?

It doesn’t give me much hope for algorithms!

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Essay Poetry

The themes of Lost Time

Cover design to follow!

I have just finished curating a selection of my poems into my next collection – Lost Time, and am now pondering the idea of writing a short introduction. Maybe this will be its first draft! The poems are arranged through six themes:

Covid – Place – Sea – Writing – Memories – Time

although it would be fair to say, and intentional, that the edges to the themes are blurred. To the extent that during the process I have once or twice moved a poem from one section to another. It is also fair to say that the distant shadows of lost love and passing time hang over the entire collection – lightly, I hope.

Time has always fascinated me.  Aristotle said that Time is the measurement of change and the idea that, as Professor Carlo Rovelli wrote (The Order of Time, Penguin, 2019) of Einstein’s fourth dimension, “time is memory” and again “time is ignorance” or even, somewhat philosophically, “we are time” was at least in part what underlies the long Elegies of Time which comes near the end of the book. But I will write more about that poem after the book has been published.

If you have been with me over a period of time that is long enough for you to have at least dipped into my other writings, you will have come across my ‘fixation’ with the horizon, a fixation which I have always ascribed to my time at sea. Interestingly, I learn that Heidegger identifies the internal consciousness of time as the horizon of being itself. I like that: in a simplistic way I have seen myself as standing at the horizon (I know, I know – you cannot stand at the horizon as – like an understanding of time – as you move towards it, it remains distant from you)… seen myself as standing at that magical line that does not exist, with my future flowing towards me and my past dropping away behind me over the horizon.

So, Lost Time: a few angry or resigned poems about Covid. Then, moving into the collection, place – mostly Wales but not entirely so – gives way to the largest group – poems about or reflecting the sea. Beyond their horizon (horizons?), you come to poems about writing and about memories, which seem to lead – at least in my mind – to poems on time. The light-hearted Killing Time (which is prefixed, appropriately enough, with a quotation from Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies: “For staying is nowhere”) is about waiting to go into the auditorium from a theatre cafe, and leads into the long five-part Elegies of Time. Unredeemable Time picks up the theme and the short Creation combines time with earlier themes: memory and writing. The Departed makes a fitting end to both the theme and the collection.

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Essay Poetry

The Welsh Swagman

I have been working on a poem about a farm. Or perhaps it is about its tenant for some fifty years from July 1848.

In ten years Joseph Jenkins created a farm that was judged to be the best in the county. He had learned everything there was to know about farming from his father and put that knowledge to good use, becoming prosperous and well liked in the community. He had little formal schooling – apart from some early learning he spent only a couple of terms at a school some five miles from his parent’s farm run by the minister of the church – but he learned to write… and so began a lifetime as a diarist.

Despite his initial successes, life on a Welsh farm was hard in the 1800s – he regularly rose before dawn to walk the fields and hedgerows and, although they employed house staff and farm workers both he and his wife worked from dawn until dusk. His successes brought him into contact with the local squirearchy and this in turn led to time away from the farm. Too much time away, particularly as much of it was spent in local hostelries. He repeatedly signed The Pledge but seemed unable to free himself of his liking for drink. Life on the farm became harder… to the extent that on several occasions his wife left him and returned to her father’s farm, sometimes some of the children went too. This seemed entirely wrong to Joseph who felt that he was no longer master in his own house and when, on another occasion, his wife searched his pockets for money from the sale of stock, his pride took a further blow.

Despite his adventures in local inns, he remained someone of note and lent his support and his voice in support of The Milford Haven and Manchester Line – the M&M Line – which would connect the deep water port in South Wales to the English industrial manufacturing centre. He understood the advantages that the line would bring to agriculture and to the rural economy and gave his full support to the project, often delivering speeches and canvassing for support. He was even invited to address a House of Commons committee on the line’s benefit for rural agriculture. Then, when work began on the line it passed through his farm and the work caused chaos in his fields and ruined his carefully laid hedges.

And so, one December night, some 20 years after he took over the tenancy, he packed two bags and, without a word, walked out of the yard, over the bridge near the entrance to the farm and onto the railway line, walking north to the nearest station. He travelled to Liverpool and took ship to Australia. His diaries for the 25 years he spent there have been published as Diary of a Welsh Swagman. Bethan Phillips’ book, Pity the Swagman, provides the back story and commentary – the image above is taken from its cover.

And then, it seems, he returned expecting to take over the running the farm from his son, almost as if he had never left. Understandably, especially when his old habits returned, the past arguments between husband and wife resurfaced, and life on the farm must have become well nigh impossible for everyone. Within four years the swagman was dead.

My poem, Trecefel, will not see the light of day yet. I am sure further proof readings will generate some editing! Maybe I am not quite satisfied yet!

Joseph Jenkins. Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869-1894.
Edited by William Evans. Macmillan Australia, 1977
Bethan Phillips. Pity the Swagman: The Australian Odyssey
of a Victorian Diarist. Cymdeithas Lyfrau Ceredigian, 2002

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Essay

Two Short Stories

There are two stories in When I Am Not Writing Poetry  that are linked – the one relating the ideas behind, and the birth of, the other.

The original ideas behind The Endless Border was to write about escaping from, and searching for life beyond, Covid. A journey made by two friends into the unknown. And I wanted to use their contrapuntal conversations – a little like Beckett’s Mercier & Camier – as a means of adding a further dimension to the story. At the same time it was to be a journey of discovery, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress [from This World], to That Which Is to Come came to my mind.

As a poet I was also interested in experimenting with the text on the page. I was aware that the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam had written of The Inferno and especially the Purgatorio as “glorifying the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking,  . . . In Dante philosophy and poetry are forever on the move, forever on their feet” and I wanted my text to move along at a slow walking pace and for the conversations to be at the same leisurely pace. Both inconsequential and significant, casual yet intrinsic, in time and timely. Seamus Heaney wrote of stepping stones – those “stations of the soul” – that venturing out on them into the middle of a fast running stream left you on your own, at once giddy and rooted to the spot, moving yet stationary, and I saw my little pieces of text as the stepping stones on our journey: we were never quite still yet we balanced on our path, pausing, walking, stopping, ambling aimlessly yet crossing a divide. We were:

“attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and the challenges and entrancements of what [was] beyond us”

Seamus Heaney. Something to Write Home About. (in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001. Faber & Faber, 2002)

A similar suggestion of slowing down the reader was voiced in an interview in November 1980 with the poet Helen May Williams, when the poet Lee Harwood said:

“I like a few words scattered around the page. The idea is that you should just say the few words that are a block, and then a silence, and then the next block. And hopefully, the way you lay it out on the page will suggest the length of silence and so on. One can never notate completely accurately; you can try to hint at it…”

Lee Harwood Interviewed in Leamington Spa, on 29th November, 1980 Link

I tried to slow down the reading of my story to walking pace by inserting random spaces into the text slowing us down as we were aware of all life flowing past. Slowing down the reader. I suppose it may work for some readers but perhaps not for others. We were looking for a future. Searching for the horizon so as to stand on the edge of the past and see a life ahead. This picks up a theme from my long (as yet unpublished) poem, The Elegies of Time (watch for my next collection of poems!) and from many of my other poems, as well as creating a connection – explicit in my title – with my favourite englyn (a traditional Welsh short-form poem): Y Gorwel, by Dewi Emrys.

Behold an illusion like a wheel’s rim,
A magician’s work surrounds us.
An ancient distant non-existent line,
An endless border it cannot define

The englyn as originally written in Welsh is:

Wele rith fel ymyl rhod – o’n cwmpas,
Campwaith dewin hynod.
Hen linell bell nad yw’n bod,
Hen derfyn nad yw’n darfod.

Translation from the Welsh by David Llewelyn Williams. The Cambrian News, Society Newsletter, Welsh Society of Vancouver, Canada, July 2012 [p.7]

The second story, The Birth of a Story is about the writing of The Endless Border. In structuring The Birth of a Story, as with the first story, I wanted to experiment with form and parallel discourses, exploring the boundary between prose and prose poetry/concrete verse; and also to explain the thinking and ideas of the original, The Endless Border. Once again, I was experiment with structure and voice, bringing in other voices and thoughts to the writing process. My walking companion, my Reader, is ever present and I imagined editors and other commentators watching the text grow and, in some small way, contributing thoughts that influence the writing.

Some of the original references are explained (for example, the banjo!) and there is further exploration of the process of writing, of the source of what Philip Larkin would have called “words of my inner mind”:

“another author’s experience of writing, an experience he had related to and understood, but at the same time, thought that it didn’t quite describe it as he felt it. The idea of a dog inside his head pushing his thoughts out onto the paper…”

The dog inside his head came from: Kamel Daoud: ‘February 7 – While it’s snowing outside: the real secret to being a columnist’ In Chroniques. NY: Other Press, 2018.

In The Birth of a Story I was exploring the processes and the influences that brought about The Endless Border: for example,  I recognised religious overtones in the suggestion that ‘the word’ (and thus the process of writing) and ‘the way’ are synonymous (both the process of writing the original and the walking of the path were voyages of discovery) and perhaps, in consequence, one of the voices came from the doubting disciple, Thomas:

 “Lord,” said Thomas, “we do not know where You are going, so how can we know the way?” 

John 14:5-6.

Dhyāna in Hinduism means contemplation and meditation as a means to self-knowledge.

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Essay Poetry Short Stories

So Many Books on the Go!

I seem to have books in most rooms of my house that I pick up, read, and put down at different times of the day. The cache in the lounge is probably the most interesting (and mixed). I started reading short stories – a format I had for years shunned in favour of lengthier, meatier books – a few years ago when I was given Paul Auster’s Collected Prose – a collection that I would unhesitatingly recommend to anyone, as indeed I would his wife’s collection that I came to next – The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis – although I see that I have not quite finished the final story! Or perhaps I did finish it and have just left a tantalising bookmark behind! I am still working my way through the prose writings of Seamus Heaney – Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001 which is a more difficult read: essays such as ‘The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh’ or ‘Yeats as an Example?’ demand slower, more thoughtful study and are perhaps less late-afternoon-lounge than writing-room. I think I shall move the book! Recently I received Tess Slessinger’s Time: The Present – Selected Short Stories – all written, and very much of the age, in the 1930s, they are a fascinating look at the political and, perhaps more to the point, the cultural scene in New York at the time. They are beautifully written in her very identifiable style. As yet untouched and at the bottom of the lounge pile, Alun Lewis Collected Stories is a natural successor to his Collected Poems, which I have in the writing room. The final lounge book – floating at the top of the pile by reason of the subject matter and the ease of reading that makes it easy to dip in and out in spare five minute gaps – is Mo Gawdat’s Scary Smart, which deals with the advance of artificial intelligence into our lives. His style does tend to talk down to his readers and repeat facts to ensure you have grasped them as he emphasises them for the third time – a style seemingly enhanced by the generous line spacing and the comic-book inserts of mid-text comments. But it IS a very interesting book!

There are often – well always – poetry books in the lounge pile and I am currently reading a few poems a day from both Ruth Bidgood’s New and Selected Poems and – only just acquired – Dominic Fisher’s A Customised Selection of Fireworks. Sometimes these make their way up to the writing room, where they join a library of other poets. Apart from Alun Lewis and the Library of Wales Poetry 1900-2000 near my desk you can find Jeremy Hooker – like Dominic Fisher, a one-time Aberystwyth poet – R S Thomas, Idris Davis, Vernon Watkins (encountered again in another lounge book, Iain Sinclair’s wonderful Black Apples of Gower) and a plethora of Anglo-Welsh poets as well as many American beat poets, Malcolm Lowry, Leonard Cohen, Ella Frears, August Kleinzahler and Samantha Walton. A friend once gave me Adonis’ If Only The Sea Could Sleep: Love Poems – a little book to which I often return (I wish that was my title!) and – in the same vein – I have added Attar  and Rumi to my library.

Other books that have crept through the lounge over the past few years include James Lovelock’s Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, followed – not too long after – by Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None; Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets and (by the same publisher, Penned in the Margins, since, sadly closed down) Tom Chivers and Martin Kratz’s Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City. Having planted apple trees, it was interesting to read Raymond Blanc’s The Lost Orchard and, for a similar reason, Maoko Abe’s ‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms – currently unfinished and moving from room to room!

The dining room has fewer books – more actually, if you include the bookshelves themselves – but fewer current or recently current books! And they are a more mixed collection: a book about Leonard Cohen: Harry Freedman’s Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius and Cohen’s own A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories; Karen Armstrong’s Buddha and Nancy Wilson Ross’ The World of Zen and last, but certainly not least because of the subject’s connection with the farm on which I live, Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869-1894, edited by William Evans and its companion by Bethan Phillips, Pity the Swagman.

Oh! And there will always be a thriller or novel of some sort on my Kindle that I read as I fall asleep! The latest was the first part of Elena Ferranti’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend, which so immersed me in the life of its characters that I frequently found myself still reading an hour after I had lain down!

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Essay Poetry

Memories

Catching up on some unfinished reading from last year, I came across a poem by Derek Coyle in the Spring issue of Poetry Salzburg Review. I am guessing from the descriptions of a childhood Christmas that he must be around the same age as I am! More to the point the final lines chimed so closely with comments I have made in this blog about memory that I thought it worthwhile making the link. There was a longish post here: Who is Trystan Lewis? Who am I? starting with another blogger’s apparent desire to erase some of his past (!) I rhapsodised on the importance of preserving our memories, our histories of our past selves to pass on to children and grandchildren, bringing in the poet, Helen May Williams’ blog where she wondered whether the person she was last year was the same as the person she was now, and whether that person would be the same in a year’s time. I finished by suggesting that writers should spare a thought for the generations to follow who may wonder why Grandad had a… or what Grandad did… and what he was like when he was younger… was he the same man then as the man they came to know? Helen May Williams commented:

Memory is selective. An individual may go mad if they have a photographic memory that erases nothing from the record. A culture might die under the burden of excessive memorialization, and it might expire when the archives are totally destroyed. In all things we cultural curators must make choices and critical selections.

But as I said in a earlier post, Some would argue that no genre is more fictitious than a biography,

…memory is a curious thing! As some past event is recounted for the first time a small fact – the colour of a dress or the positioning of a piece of furniture in a grandparent’s house – might be added, perhaps hesitantly, doubtingly, in error… but in the very act of speaking about the event that erroneous image is cemented into the memory – fixed to the extent that on subsequent retellings the blue dress is there, in the picture, as your mother stood in front of her parent’s sideboard. And now there is no question in your mind that you are describing things as they really were! An autobiography is the curated sum of our imagined memories.

The ‘curating’ may be unintentional rather than ‘critical selections’! But back to Derek Coyle’s Christmas! “Dad sits shoeless by the table / the first tea of the day in his hand” while “mother, she is busy about the Brussel sprouts”. So true! Later he catches a younger me:

and me in brown square patterned slacks
before jeans or corduroy.

But it is at the end of the poem that he reflects on tricksy memory! He remembers his father’s mother with her curly hair and spectacles, always smiling, as I suppose grandmothers always do.

But maybe I am lying

and these are all just memories
robbed from photographs I’ll steal later.

Coyle, Derek (2022) Those Christmas Mornings.
Poetry Salzburg Review 38 (Spring 2022) pp.158-9.

Categories
Essay Fiction

Who is Trystan Lewis? Who Am I?

Much of The Dark Trilogy deals with my past. A while ago I read, and felt that I had to respond to, a blog post – Clearing Out – by Andrew Green, one-time National Librarian of Wales. He had written:

I’ve been clearing out.  Clearing cupboards in the front room, full of books, files, magazines, papers, photos, games, maps and other detritus.  Many of them have been there since the cupboards and the bookshelves above them were built some thirty years ago…

The cupboards have yielded plenty of surprises. Some things I’d entirely forgotten I’d kept. Funeral services of long-dead aunts and godmothers… Some things have been easy enough to discard… But between the can-go’s and the must keep’s there’s another class of object I worry about, the borderline cases.  Take this newspaper article with an image of me and other hopeful cyclists about to set off from Cardiff City Hall to Aberystwyth to raise money for Nicaragua. If it goes, so does all evidence of me as I was then.  But that raises a serious problem – a problem, you might say, in the philosophy of time, or of consciousness.  Who was I then?  And I am the same person now as I was then? 

By chance, almost exactly a year earlier, the poet and writer Helen May Williams had written in her blog:

“When I was seven years old, I remember writing an essay about ‘Who am I?’ In it, I pondered whether the person I was last year was the same as the person I was now, and whether that person would be the same a year hence. I still don’t have the answer to that question.”

My response to Andrew Green – I think I thought that it doesn’t matter whether you are a different person (better/worse!) now to the person you were then: both histories of you are equally important and go to making up your life – was:

I am the last person to talk about de-cluttering… I keep everything!

But there is another side to your archive. I have had so many conversations with relatives – my sister, my sisters-in-law, etc – wishing that they (and I) had paid more attention to the stories that our/their parents told during the years when they were alive. So many attempts to identify people in photographs! So much history lost! To the extent that I am currently working on an annotated and illustrated timeline starting with my grandparents to pass on to my grandsons… who may or may not be interested. Now, or ever! I had thought it near finished. But, alas! Your piece suggests a further annotation: ‘Objects’ [in my cottage] – the pair of china figures, the pewter… much of which came from my grandfather’s house… or the fake fur coat I bought in Liverpool in the sixties!

Spare a thought for the generations to follow who may wonder why Grandad had a… or what Grandad did!

… and what he was like when he was younger… was he the same man then as the man they came to know?