creativity and so on, but that as soon as we started to develop an alphabet and the
written word, the energy if you like, the emphasis, crossed over to that other side of
the brain which was used for hunting, for killing, for doing things and so he says
that the more we become involved with the written alphabet the more aggressive
we become. Now I think there the caveat is, well, yes, that’s in the sort of literature
we have today which is directional, which is functional but that highly imaginative
literature, I think is the sort that is accessed by the other part of the brain, that is
into this I maginal Realm.
TK: Well, as a matter of fact when I was on book tour in America for The Great
Shame just recently, I was ploughing my way through Jarrard Diamond’s book and
he raises this interesting question of the first alphabets being devised for tax
collection, which is definitely the sort of killing side of the brain, and he says it takes
quite a time before that the first instance of another kind of way of the alphabet
being pressed into service for the playful side of things, is when ... is a wine jar
which says, this is the wine jar of so and so, and those who drink from it will not be
immune from the enchantment of divine Aphrodite and that is, he says, the earliest
instance of the alphabet being used for more than tax collection and organizing a
broader system of government than a clan or a village. You know, even in the
alphabet, you know it’s interesting that the very first instance he mentions a
goddess. So it’s almost like your bloke the Alphabet and the Goddess, the goddess
then trying to invade the alphabet because it becomes essential to the sedentary life
and in a way creates the concept of art, something that maybe one out of ten
people do or one out of a hundred.
Anyhow, I feel this stuff very strongly at the moment because I ’m writing
from the point of view of three women. I ’m trying to reproduce what degradation is
to women and what beauty means and so on and the process I began in Woman of
the I nner Sea, in fact the stuff I was just transferring at the start of our talk was an
interweaving; one of the women is in the 1840s and the other two are in the 1980s
and 1990s and you’ve got to work out how best to interweave them amongst each
other.
W H: Just adding on to that, is there a sort of organic wholeness in your work? For
example, I think that Victim of the Aurora, Gossip From The Forest, Season in
Purgatory and Schindler’s Ark seem to be chronologically linked.
TK: Ah, yes, yes. Of course, there was a phase when I was writing a lot about
Europe ... and so some of those books like Gossip From The Forest were an attempt
ron
(Ron)
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