Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interview Transcript 8

The main subject of these excerpts is Catastrophe Practice, which was first published in 1979. It contained "Plays for Not Acting," essays, and "Cypher," a short novel. 
The text below includes most of the material from a few separate sessions, and there is some repetition, however Catastrophe Practice was a very complex undertaking, so virtually any aspect of the author's commentary may be helpful to readers. I have tried to preserve the energy and flow of Nicholas Mosley's speech.

Directed by Richard Murphet, the play "Landfall," from "Plays for Not Acting,"  had been performed by Melbourne's "Anthill Theatre" in 1984.
--------------------------------

May 1991 "Can Ravé" Majorca 

J.B. - You started talking about love being less personal, less possessive, and an interest in the wider world, and that's what comes through in Catastrophe Practice. 

N.M. - Well, there were a whole lot of things that got me onto Catastrophe Practice. After I'd finished Natalie, Natalia, which was the last novel of this previous lot, the central lot of my novels, I thought I'd done that, I'd almost overdone as much as I could write about these people being on their tightropes, knowing this much about life, keeping their things up in the air, falling off and picking themselves up and getting up on their tightropes again. I thought I'd done that; I didn't want to go on doing that; I thought I'd done it as well as I could. So then I didn't quite know what to do. Then I spent this period of doing films, and so on. And over the years I suppose there had been this feeling [that] ...once one got used to the idea of oneself on one's tightrope, then one was suddenly free to look around and realize that it wasn't this sort of lonely business, that other people were trying to do this, and there were one or two people who would understand that they were trying to do this. And I then got the idea: well, of course, actually what is of even further interest in life, a whole new dimension is opened up by the realization that, if one is in relationships, friendships, in some sort of social contact with people who also realize this, then there's an interaction of these tightropes. Okay, one's doing this to keep one's own balance, and other people are doing things to keep their balance, and then extraordinary coincidences start happening. If they see what they're doing and carry this knowingness, and you see what you're doing, carrying some sort of knowingness, then there start to turn up conjunctions, coincidences... some pattern does seem to be being formed in the outside world, in which not only oneself moves, as a lonely entity, but other people move in relation to oneself, or by themselves, whether one knows this or not. Sometimes one doesn't know the relation to oneself. There's a sort of movement in a pattern, not only with oneself but with others in this state of knowingness. And then the whole wider pattern starts to happen and one becomes conscious of a pattern of interaction between oneself and other people whom one loves and who can sort of hold this feeling of knowingness. 

   [So] then quite another form of writing seemed to be called for: how can one talk about not just the lonely person keeping their juggling act up in the air, but also the interactions of these people, the patterns formed by this knowingness amongst people, in between different people. I wanted to find a way of trying to express this, which I found very difficult, because it could become so corny. Of course, novels are all about the interaction between people, but in an unknowing way. I mean, Hardy's novels are stuffed with coincidences, weird coincidences. Usually as a result disasters happen, as a result of coincidences, because they're all unconscious, they're not held. People have a sense of doom anyway, so coincidences are all foredoomed. But if one has a sense of liveliness, then there's a chance of coincidences happening for liveliness, this pattern of liveliness, the pattern of the interlocking impossible objects. And as far as I could see this was the case, this sort of thing did happen. Just when one thought everything was going to pot, one's relationships were hopeless or whatnot, they went through weird, dark, passages, but they came out alright. When I say alright, this begs a lot of questions, but, anyway, I wanted to find a style to write about this. 

   So I got the idea of these plays in which there would be six characters on a stage, who all knew they were on a stage. In the "Plays for Not Acting" these actors were acting; they started off, as far as the audience could see, as if they were just ordinary actors trying to act a play. Then the audience became aware, fairly quick, that they were actors knowing they were acting in a play. but who were also trying to give some message to the audience: look here, we want to show you that we know we're actors in a play; we're not doing all this nonsense of acting out a play and trying to pretend that it's real and expect you to sit there and be taken in that all this is real. We are characters on a stage and we know we are and we want you to know we are, and we want thereby to give you some message, some demonstration, of what this knowingness is. So... this was all very well as an idea, but it was very difficult to put it into any form in which anyone would have the slightest idea what I was on about, and so that was a struggle. But what else could I expect? I had to find a way of doing this through tortuous journeys, efforts, in the dark. That's alright. [chuckles] And it was quite fun doing it. But every time I got into despair, thinking it was hopeless, I'm just not being able to put over what I want to put over, I'd throw the thing aside, then I'd come back to it afterwards and I'd think, come on, I've got to go on with this, I've got something interesting going, it's just that I haven't found out how to do it yet. And so, twenty years later I'm not sure whether I have found a way of doing it, but I've tried, there's something there. 

   It's an interlocking network of impossible objects, of these characters who not only carry the knowingness around with themselves, but are seeing their knowingness... interacting to form a pattern of life, both for themselves and in between one another, and between this group of them and the outside world. So the book Catastrophe Practice is three plays, with the same six actors in different situations, all trying to put their message over to the audience: this is the style of life that makes liveliness. This is what life is, we're not trying to put something over on you, we're trying to say, look, if you think, if you look at yourselves, you sort of know that this sort of thing is what liveliness is. And these characters do this. And there's a short novel at the end of the plays which tries to say who these characters are in so-called real life. What does "real life" mean? It's one more story, it's a story about who these people are, and everything's a story. But the fact that this is a story, that's a story - ‘round and ‘round you go [gestures] - that's an impossible object; that is life. You can't pin it down. Life is all the different ways of seeing it and knowing that there are these different ways of seeing it and knowing that you can see this, knowing that you can know this; and that is liveliness. And this is what the actors were trying to tell the audience, and I was trying to show this to the readers, and if no one had the slightest idea what was happening, who cares? That doesn't matter, that's up to whatever happens.

J - It's almost like being in two places at the same time: being part of a story and yet knowing somehow that one isn't part of that story. 
N - Yes. Well, knowing that you're part of a story, and by knowing that - insofar as you know that - you're not part of it. But that bit of you is sort of creating the story also. Your life is a story, but insofar as you can see that, you can create the story... [But] I'm not sure that you can... you can't plan the story. Any novelist finds that if he's doing well, his characters to a certain extent sort of take over, they take over and lead a life of their own. One can see one's story, but one's story has a life of its own. One's in relationship with it, one's moving through it, or whatever, but it has a life of its own. 

-------------

During lunch: 

J - Can you say succinctly what the style of not-acting is... if I were to ask you sometime! 
N - I don't know. I think one knows when one's acting, and once you know that, you can't not act. In a sense, the part of you that's not acting is the part of you that knows that you are, that sort of thing. But there are times when you are taken over by what's happening, by the circumstances, by the event that you're in. And then I suppose you lose the self-consciousness, the sense of acting and watching yourself acting. At moments of danger or passion: you get taken over by the activity. But really, the way I was using it in Catastrophe Practice, [the idea is] that the bit of you that is not-acting is the bit that knows you are. And this is the sort of level on which people can meet, the true level. Everyone has their own sort of act, as it were, in social life. In almost all human relationships you have some sort of spiel, you're acting out what you're landed with from your past, your upbringing, your parents, the society you find yourself with, what you've worked out for yourself, your own taste in something... you've worked out some sort of what might be called "act". 

   This is like language: acting is a shot at being what you really want to be, as language is a shot at saying what you really want to say. Which is all you can do, you can't ever get it absolutely right, you can't sort of "be yourself" - it doesn't mean anything. You can't say exactly "truths" - you have shots at it, you have shots with language, you have shots with your sort of acts. But the part of you that knows this, knows that this is the situation, says okay, and the person that you're with, they're doing the same thing. If they say okay, this is so, those two bits of you are in some sort of non-acting relationship, those two bits of you that know what the situation is.

J - And these are the bits that know you're doing a script, in your sense. 
N - Well, these are the bits that know you're doing a script, yes. The way in which I'm using the word script here, it is something that's given you as your makeup, from your heredity, your upbringing, the environment, society, all this sort of thing - what you have to do that you can't help doing. I'm using the word script to describe these characteristics, these styles of carry-on that one's landed with. But everyone is capable of seeing that this is the case, and although they can't exactly stop it, one's got to do something. One can't just sort of stop being. But what one can do is see that this is the case, that all being is usually some sort of acting, and that the bit of you that can see this is the bit that is not acting. And if there are two or three or four of you doing this, and if you're all seeing this, then there is something that is happening that is not acting, there's some understanding being built in between people that is not acting. You are actually learning. You're learning through each one of you recognizing that you have your spiel, act, your script, whatever you want to call it, and they have theirs, so you're all able to learn because you're all able to realize that this is what's happening.

   But I think, sure, there are moments of danger. I mean, one of the reasons, I suppose, why people like danger is that they can feel they're being taken over by the activity. When you're a rock-climber and you're on the vertical face of the rock, for instance. But I'm not sure, I suppose you are very conscious of acting then. I don't know. It's a mixture of your experience and your consciousness. I don't know, that's another question, when you're taken over. It can be argued about, can't it, what exactly it means. 

J - Is that what is happening when Jason is working on the cottage, on a beam, or when we're putting up a beam, we're just doing a job? 
N - But we're watching ourselves working, we're conscious of ourselves working. If we just dash into the job without thinking we're apt to end up like clowns in the circus, with our heads in the paintbuckets. No, I think in working you are very conscious, you're doing the not-acting because you're very conscious of working, you see yourself working. Perhaps you see yourself acting with such simplicity... J - That might be the right word. N - ...that that is alright, whatever that means, yes. I mean, there's no split between different parts of oneself: when one’s working, one's in a harmonious relationship with the bit that's doing and the bit that sees itself doing.

J - When you're seeing yourself doing the script, are you consciously trying to subvert the script, or are you just noticing the script? 
N - No, you're certainly not trying to subvert the script, if I understand what you mean by "subvert." You're honouring it... No, hang on. Well, it depends what the script is. Sometimes when you can see your script going all wrong, not being what you want it to be - you can see your script becoming absurd - then the "watching-you" tries to subvert it or laugh at it or something, sure. There are times when you think your script isn't doing too badly, it's roughly doing what you'd like it to do, and so you say, okay. That's what you hope you can do with your script. 

J - But the most hopeful level of relationship is one where people jointly recognize that at any moment the script can be [this or that], that you're flexible as regards what you're doing. 
N - Yes, if one can bear that in mind, that's okay. I mean, so much of ordinary life, it seems to me - of course one doesn't know a lot about other people's lives; one knows about one's own, one knows about the lives one sees around one - but it seems to me that so much of everyone's life is taken up with sort of useless argy-bargy, with each person acting out their own spiel : Yakety yak, I think that... No you don't...Yes I do...and so on. And this goes on and on and it's completely pointless. But if you just stop and say, okay, now I'm saying what I feel and you're saying what you feel, and you know this and I know this and you know that I know... I mean, so what, okay, that's it, yes, sure. And usually when you say that, the whole problem is solved. I mean, one person goes and does one thing and the other does another; if you both have to do something at the same time then you have a few problems, but usually if you recognize the situation then it sorts itself out. But, you know, English television sitcom is just one long yakety yak of everyone doing their own spiels and making nonsense of everyone else and themselves. And everyone thinks this is absolutely uproarious. In fact, it's some vision of hell! But it is very funny. One used to be able to have a good laugh at the loonies in bedlam, but I don't see that it's all that much fun. 

   You go from the title of the first part of Catastrophe Practice, which is "Plays For Not Acting," then the titles of the three short plays, "Skylight," "Landfall," and "Cell," and then there's a little quote which is: 

Well, I was playing a trick with words here, of course; I was doing a riddle. "To act" has these two meanings: just to do something, and the other is to act in a way of putting on some performance, acting something that you actually are not - this is what it means on the stage, I suppose. But still I was saying that most acts in the usual sense of the word involve some recognition that you're putting something on, you're doing some spiel or script, as I say. But then, what is it that we are doing that is not pretending when we know that we are acting? I use the word "doing" about knowing: what are we doing when we know that we are acting? I might have said, what are we being when we know we are acting? But I think "doing" is better because we are doing something, we're doing our act and we're also doing the knowing as the act goes along. And this is where we can make contact with people. People in a group, even just two people in a group, all know that they're acting; they're doing their best, they're acting. But okay, there's no argy-bargy: everyone has their role, everyone has their rights, they don't conflict; there's no need to have an argy-bargy; everyone says their thing, does their thing, and one has harmony. I suppose it is difficult if someone says, Well I'm afraid my thing, my act I want to do at the moment, is to hit you over the head with a sharp axe - well, then you're in trouble. I suppose you say, Well, my act is to get out of the way, and you carry on accordingly. But at least you don't have a yakety yak. 

J - Well that's good, that will save us time this afternoon. 
N - [chuckles] Yah. 
J - Well, you know what you've done, I mean I'm speaking from a theoretical point of view; [laughs] you don't have to accept it. But by calling ordinary behaviour acting, you've just, with a word, boosted everything up a level. I mean, that's okay, but that's what's happening there. 
N - Yes. Yes, but this becoming accustomed to knowing that this is the case is the boost up a level for the whole human race, and this is what I'm saying, this is the hopeful monster. 

J - Yes, and then becoming aware of different values, different purposes. 
N - Yes... I mean, all the old values, the old words, are still operative, but they have different kinds of applications. You know, goodness, honour, truth, decency, dignity, or evil, horror, squalor... these words are still applicable, they still have meaning, but have slightly different applications. Their applications [are more firmly linked to] the context. It seems to me everyone knows this is true in a way; everyone even acts as though this is true. We actually do make rules about killing and causing pain, that causing pain is okay in some contexts and not in others. We admit this, but we don't hold this in mind. But it's always true. We only hold it in mind in things like war, that it's okay to kill a hundred thousand Iraqis, but it is wrong to kill two soldiers who are not Iraqis. 

J - Well. I think it's easy to be cynical and ironic, to say, Oh well, integrity is just something we talk about, it's not something we actually have to adhere to, but... 
N - You mean it's just easy to talk about these things. 
J - Yes, and anyone who tries to be serious about it is pretty naive; but I want to say that it is possible to be serious about it on the next level up, after we've said we can be cynical. 
N - Oh yes, I don't think it's cynical at all; I think what's cynical is to just pack it in and to say nothing means anything anyway. J - That's right. N - But if you go up a level you're into self-discipline, you're on the lookout to stop yourself from becoming an infant again - I want this, I want that, you know - you have to have the discipline to realize that, okay, you may want that, but this really isn't very interesting, because other people may want that, and the thing that is interesting is to recognize that [people want these different things as babies want]. The fact that you might be able to see that larger pattern is extremely serious, and there's a real morality to be found in the pattern, in the shape of the pattern, in what is required for the pattern. Is that alright? [laughs].

-----------

J - I think you said yesterday that the idea of the CatastrophePractice series of books was that through some kind of interaction - I think the expression you used was "a living network" - people might generate something other than just the awareness that they weren't characters, weren't personas. 

N - Sure, yes, I think that's right. At the end of the earlier stage of books, which ended with Natalie, Natalia, there was the idea that the best that a human being could do in trying to deal with the problems of life, with the predicaments they found themselves in, was to be like a juggler on a one-wheeled bicycle on a tightrope. This was my image of it. You kept going until you fell off - you got tired or something - and you damaged yourself, damaged the other people you fell on, et cetera. But you did your best, and then there was not much else to do but pick yourself up and get on the tightrope again as soon as you could. That was the image, but that was a fairly solitary image. You fell in love, okay, but love was a tremendous battle for self-preservation, really. Then after having dealt with that kind of idea, I thought, well, this isn't really enough: to talk like this isn't quite describing what life is actually like. Because if you start trusting this sort of thing, if you start trusting that to stay on the tightrope means something, that it works, then you find that you are in relationship with other people doing the same sort of thing. You start recognizing that other people are on their tightropes, as it were. And so you [are not just engaged in the lonely] "doing your own thing", as the saying is, but what you are doing - if you observe it, if you could stand back and see what you're doing, and if you could recognize that other people were doing the same thing - [is generating] interactions. There is, as you say, some sort of network of interactions happening, between yourself and the outside world, between yourself and other people, notably between yourself and other people who are involved in some similar kind of journey of understanding.

   And so when I got to Catastrophe Practice I wanted to get a group of characters who had known each other, influenced each other, and would recognize that they were not so much individuals on a tightrope, they were people on a sort of interacting network. And so I got these six characters: there were two older people who were rather guru-type figures to the younger - I mean, later on that's how I saw them; I didn't quite see this at the time - there were two older figures, there were two not so old figures - thirty, forty year olds - and there were two young people. And they were involved with one another in the usual ways, of passions, falling in love, of jealousies, envies, whatever it was, but because they all had this faculty, or wanted to have this faculty, of seeing that this was the sort of human predicament - okay, so one can see it, but what happens then? So I wanted to write some form of fiction which would be an expression of what happens then. I wanted to start writing what Charley in Accident said years ago, "we can write about people knowing," not just the lonely thing of what happens when one person has this knowingness, but when you know that you're with others, too, that you're in some interacting network with yourself and others and the world. And so that's what CatastrophePractice was supposed to be about. 

   It started off with three plays. I called them "Plays for Not Acting." I'll try to explain what I meant by that. There were these characters on a stage, and these plays were written as though they were straightforward plays, but there was a difference. And the difference I was trying to deal with was this: it was the idea that in our ordinary lives there is a certain sense in which we're on a stage, we're given parts to play by our heredity, our upbringing, our environment, the social scene, by chance, by the very sort of structures of language which we habitually use, and so on. And at the same time we can know this, and that part of us which can know this in a sense isn't acting, because it's standing back from the bits of us that are in our scripts, our roles, our acting, and therefore insofar as it's standing back and watching this, it is not acting. And so I actually called these plays "Plays for Not Acting," [because although] my characters were actors, they were acting, they were trying to find and to demonstrate to an audience some style of what it might be to be these characters carrying this knowingness around - knowing we're actors but standing back from it - to demonstrate not only the style of one's own behaviour but also what would happen on an interacting level, on the network between themselves and other people. I had this little line at the beginning of the plays, a little quote made up: 

And then these characters try to demonstrate this. They can't talk about it directly, because they are in their scripts, and if they start describing to an audience in normal descriptive language what they're up to, then they're just in one more script. So this knowingness has to be unspoken, very largely unspoken, but it is the sort of knowingness that poetry has, that people are trying to express in poetry. Poetry is saying something... there are all these resonances just around the corner, just off-stage, and these people on the stage, they seem to be both trying to demonstrate something to an audience which can't quite be said, and they want the audience to understand that something is happening that can't quite be said. They look at the audience, they wonder who is getting what they are trying to do. They're conscious of something off-stage, that what really matters might be what's going on off-stage. After all, [whatever] stage one is on, one's stuck in a limited drama; what's important in life, in love, in the great big world, might be going on off-stage, and one must be aware of this. And they want the audience to know they are aware of this, and so on, and so on.

   This kind of attitude was to a certain extent very much influenced by Brecht's idea of the theatre, that the last thing you wanted to demonstrate on a stage was a marvelous performance of just the characters. What was the point of that? You wanted to tell the audience something; you wanted to tell the audience what was happening, what life was like. Brecht sort of wrote about this, but I didn't feel he'd quite got it, or quite got what I wanted to do, because he actually wrote very good dramas. He got his actors talking to the audience and telling them things, then going back on the stage, to and fro, but it didn't seem quite what I was trying to do. My actors act the parts that have been given them, they know they're acting parts, they want the audience to know they're acting parts, and they want to give the impression and knowingness that, in so doing, they're aware of something else happening off-stage. And they're creating this liveliness in the audience's mind: the audience isn't just lying back saying, My goodness, wow, ooh, ah, and so on; they're thinking, Oh yes, I see, do I see? oh yes... The actors are searching, they're involving the audience in the search for what life is really like, what human experience is really like. They're demonstrating it, they want to involve the audience in it. And this is something that you can't quite grab and hold; you think you've got it and then it's gone again, and so on. That's what I was trying to do.

   It was not easy. I spent an enormous amount of time writing Catastrophe Practice, thinking I was not being able to get the style I was looking for, giving it up, going back to it, thinking, Oh, come on, I must make one more effort because what I'm trying to do is really interesting, I just can't quite get it, one more effort, one more effort... I went on doing that for years, and I'm still doing it. Miraculously, there is a paperback edition of Catastrophe Practice coming out, and I'm still trying to make it a bit better, a bit more what I'm trying to do. But it all depends on little hair lines - Do you see it? Yes, no, yes... It really is like a sort of spider's web: if you pin it down too closely the whole thing goes; if you try to grab it, there's nothing left of it.

J - So there's no one interpretation of what's going on in the plays.
N - No, absolutely not. Interpretation isn't really the point, I suppose. The point is the realization that what is going on is unspoken, and that this is a representation of human life and the sort of wonder of human life. This is what's so extraordinary; this is the liveliness of life, as one might put it, that one doesn't quite know what's going on, but one is always on the edge of knowing and not exactly being able to pin it down. It's always a search and a learning and an excitement and a wonder and a moving, a sort of pulsation - all that sort of language, you know. It's difficult to get the language; one has to use what words are there.

N - What I haven't explained, I suppose, is that there are three plays. I started with one, then I thought I had to write two, and then I thought I had to write three, for this reason, that the point was that these are not fixed characters. These are actors able to act different parts, like people in real life, and they actually find themselves, the same six actors, in three different plays. These plays could be played on three different nights, or one after the other, if anyone wanted to do this. They're in quite different plays, but they're the same characters. And there's a bit of them that knows that they're the same characters; every now and then they make signs that they do recognize that they have been, together or separately, in the other plays. Sometimes they get a line wrong, from the wrong play, and they say, No that's not quite right is it. The point of this being that, again, I didn't mean this to be a trick; I meant this to be a real effort to say what life is really like, what our experience of life is really like. It would be easier for us and for everyone if we all recognized this; we wouldn't be always trying to pretend that human life was something that it was not. This is, of course, what causes all the problems, all the enmities, all the arguments, all the wars, the cruelties, everything - one is trying to force things into what they actually aren't. Whereas if one recognizes what they are, it seems to me, there might be harmony, because it would be true. 

   Anyway, that's the plays. Then at the end of the plays, I thought, to make sense of the scheme, the artistic scheme that I envisaged for the book, I ought to write a short novel to say who the people were off-stage. They were always conscious that they were actors, but human beings actually do have a life in which they marry and make love, eat and sleep, whatever. So then I wrote a short novel about these six characters, who were obviously the six actors in these plays, and they were in some dramatic situation. They were characters in a university town, human beings at a moment of crisis: there were student riots, and so on. And they again demonstrate this sort of interaction; they're fond of one another, they're all related to one another, there's some jealousy, there's fondness, love. But yet they do recognize that they're all in some relation, and the way their knowingness of being in a network in relation to one another is demonstrated is in the fact that the middle-aged couple have a child and all the characters become involved: almost unintentionally, they find themselves involved in the preservation and guarding of this child in this dangerous situation of the riot on the university campus, as it were. And this was both a story, a so-called real life story, as it were, and also some symbol, that what one was hoping to preserve. to create, to find, as it were, out of this kind of attitude, behaviour, knowingness, was something new being born, some new attitude, some new form of understanding, that could be symbolized by a child.

   And this novel was called "Cypher". The dictionary definition of a cipher is [reads] "A manner of writing intelligible to those possessing the key; also the key to such a system." So it was both something that was only intelligible to someone who had the key; it was also the key! I liked this, because this was the way of seeing the kind of thing I was trying to do. It was written in the form of this straightforward story, but at the same time of course it had to be recognized - or I recognized, and I hoped other people would recognize - that this wasn't the last word. I wasn't saying this was what these people were. This was just one more shot at demonstrating what I and my characters wanted to demonstrate, which was the style of this network, this knowingness, that I was talking about. 

   And then, having got to the end of "Cypher," I then saw that I had to go on and write further "real life" stories - "real life" in inverted commas - make further, perhaps more simple, more straightforward efforts to put the message over in novels, stories, about who these people were, how they'd come into the position of being these sorts of people, having this sort of knowingness, and finding themselves in these situations, or finding themselves in the situations which this sort of stories would represent. And so I then in fact spent the next goodness knows how many years - ten or twelve years - writing four more works of fiction - Imago Bird, Serpent, Judith, and Hopeful Monsters - about the young man, the middle-aged couple, the young woman, and the older couple when they were young. The older couple when they were young were the hopeful monsters, and they started off the whole thing. They were a boy and a girl born just before the First World War, growing up in the 192O's and 193O's, who in that context started off, were the first protagonists and discoverers, of this sort of knowingness - not the first discoverers in the history of the world, I mean, but in my story. They were the people who as it were set the ball rolling and became some sort of teacher figures to the younger people, sort of mentors to the younger people. J - And that was Max and Eleanor. N - Yes, that was Max and Eleanor. That was Max and Eleanor in Hopeful Monsters, yes.

J - Was there a particular time when you realized that you might be able to get a particular style of language, a style of writing, which might generate the kind of awareness that you were trying to, in a way, describe? 
N - Well, I suppose I'd been working on this sort of thing ever since Meeting Place, or certainly Accident, yes. And I'd got this sort of solitary, rather lonely language going by Impossible Object. I'd got people saying things and then thinking thoughts slightly different from what they were saying. They were standing back from what they were saying and wondering whether what they'd said was right: Perhaps I should have said that...what if I'd said this... listening to what other people were saying, watching themselves and watching other people. I had been working on that sort of language in Impossible Object and Natalie, Natalia, and so on, but what I hadn't really got hold of so much, or been interested in, was this idea of a network. What happens when you do get some "ease" in this way of thinking, this state of mind? It did seem to me in my experience that this was how it worked, that different things happened in actual life, in one's relationships with other people, and different coincidences popped up in real life. One wasn't quite ever sure of this, you couldn't pin these down. If someone said, this is just a load of nonsense, just chance, just coincidence, you're seeing things that aren't there... well, this may be true, but this is what I feel, what I experience. So I think with Catastrophe Practice I wanted to try to find a style of doing the network, and then with the books that followed on from that yes, I wanted to find a sort of style and a way of telling a story that would express this interaction between the inner knowingness, holding the knowingness, and the experience of things happening in the outside world that was in relation to this, that a pattern of things happened in the outside world that one felt were related to the ability to hold this knowingness.

---------

J - In Catastrophe Practice I think you say that hopefully the ideas will play on the grid and riddle like happy children. 

N - Oh yes. Well, that was my characters. By the time I wrote Catastrophe Practice I hoped I'd found a style in which these terrible predicaments of humans - which were epitomized to me in something like the war, the terrible demands one made of oneself in these situations and the horror that one realized about oneself in accepting the processes of war - .I hoped I'd found a state of mind or way of describing states of mind in which these sorts of predicaments would be bearable and one could get through the facing of them. Okay, this is what human beings are like; okay; we've got to live with it. One can go through the agonizing about the human situation, the predicament of the human psyche, then, okay, one accepts it. And then after a time I don't see why one shouldn't be happy and then play with it, with something of the innocence, I suppose, of children - but children in the image that I was also using by this time in the Catastrophe Practice books, of someone who had gone out of the Garden of Eden, through all the hell, all the work of trying to understand oneself and society, gone right round the world, and then in at the back way. One might achieve some state of innocence on a higher level, not because one doesn’t know the shit that humans have in themselves and are landed in, but because one has got through it and [says] okay, I accept this. And then you can perhaps play again, or play as one has not been able to do before.

J - The innocence, then, is something like strength to take on the problem again, to face the predicament again? 
N - Well, I think the predicament is always there, isn't it. Yes, the predicaments always there, it's not really the strength to take it on again, it's the ability to in some sense say, So what, it's always there, so what? But, of course, if it then hits you over the head - if you're someone suffering in war, if you're in Baghdad and a bomb lands on your head, it is not much use your saying, So what! You can say "So what" and if you can get away with it, okay, but people suffer pain, yes. The phrase "So what" isn't of great relevance when you're in pain, or anyone else is in pain. But in some sense even that isn't true. All the best nurses, the people who help people in pain, remain cheerful. Nurses who say, Oh, my god you're in pain, I'm in pain, they aren't any help. The nurses who help people in pain are the people who make them laugh.

J - This is getting you onto something else; I mean, shifting the mind to some other perception of the situation it's in... 
N - Yes, but that's what I'm always on about isn't it, sure. When one goes ‘round the world and in the Garden of Eden the back way, one's "innocence," in inverted commas, is that one has achieved a different perception of the situation one is in. One is still in the same situation; if one's a human being one's a human being. There might one day be a mutation catch on and we won't be human beings, or we die out and there'll be cockroaches or something, but still, as human beings the best we can hope for is a different perception of the situation we're in. 

J - The characters in Catastrophe Practice seem to be eager to take on the responsibility of recreating the meaning of the context they're in every moment, seeing it from new perspectives continually. 
N - Well, seeing it from a new perspective, but they don't worry about meaning, they've stopped worrying about meaning. Meaning is what happens. If you start worrying - Now I see this, but what does it mean? - then nothing happens at all. I see that, and I see that, and I see that - and then looking back at the end you say, I see, that's what happened, here I am now. But that's the meaning, the meaning is what happens. I mean the pattern - you can call it a pattern - but what happens is seen as a pattern, in a pattern. But the meaning is what happens. When I say "the meaning is what happens," of course this ties up with the idea of what grows, the meaning is what grows, yes.

J - A good one liner!