Shownotes Transcript
A reading life, a writing life, with writer and teacher Sally Bailey. Sightlines. Lines that travel from one point to another. All you can see, and then all you cannot see. Sightlines produce a story, an avenue, a walkway, a space to move through clearly demarcated.
I've been thinking of sight lines and how much we need them as writers and visual artists, as musicians too. Those lines we move towards, hoping to see something clearer. A sound, a sight we'd never seen before, a revelation. All artists hope for revelation.
And I sit here this morning now looking down the length of my boat on this sunny spring day when the sight lines are so open and so generous it's as though my boat is smiling wide from cheek to cheek a large U-shape and see now I'm making that line with my finger in the air my boat is grinning she is open and generous to the light to new
lines of sight. And I sit and I look down the length of my boat from the entrance, from the door set in the stern, where I survey my estate, if you like, my boat estate, my ceiling. She's full of wooden lines and shapes, small pieces of wood, organising lines. Everything is organised by lines if you start to look, and I follow those lines north to south, east to west.
starboard to port, stern to bow, back to front I go, following the lines to and fro, hither and thither, thither and hither, hither. And I begin to think of movement and I begin to move in my own mind away from here as I think about starting a new story, a new set of lines,
Because all stories and all compositions require movement through lines conducted by sight lines. Storylines. Lines running towards a composition. A whole. And these days, these days, I sorely miss movement. I sorely miss movement.
In the last few years, I've had to find other ways to move since this happened. This. This new set of lines I've trained myself to move along, but fortunately, fortunately, I have been well trained by circumstances. Circumstantial lines. All my life I have found ways of seeing things obliquely. I have travelled down lines.
No one else has. And I learned to do this as a child, in a house with no room.
No room at the inn. My brothers and I played games. We played games in a house with no room that involved creating space out of no space. More space. We needed more space in which to move our long, lagging limbs. We were long. Our limbs were long. And we longed to move through new sets of spaces and new sets of lines to create space from the void.
the void. We opened our arms and we opened our legs and we opened our eyes and we saw a new way of seeing through space and time. And we were ahead of the game, ahead of the knowledge game, because physicists these days tell us there are several dimensions of space beyond the third dimension. A fourth and a fifth. Think about
Geometry. Great artists did. Great poets like Emily Dickinson. She loved geometry. It was her favourite subject at school. All that extra dimension of space you cannot see sitting in parallel to this world. She called it eternity. And personally, I think you can discover an extra dimension of space anywhere if you learn to play.
You learn to undo yourself by play. Then you can stumble into new arenas and territories you didn't know were there. And now you see I have my hand, my right hand stretched out before me and my fingers are moving and I can see the lines of my hand, my thin hand.
and the bones running down it from the wrist, the back of the wrist, into my long fingers which I now lift to play as though I were playing a keyboard and a piano and I remember my mother sitting in the front room playing Chopin, playing Chopin with her fingers.
looking for new runs of notes to move down, a new set of lines to follow, those playful notes that danced before her eyes and opened up a new realm of space which we did not own in our house, which was so compressed and stuffed, full of tears.
As children we played a game and I want to tell you about that game. A game that required us to travel around our house without putting our feet on the ground. "Out, out, you're out!" we said if you put your feet on the ground. And so we climbed onto tables and chairs and we passed through windows.
If you put your foot down, if you put your foot down, we made the game up as we went along and we made new rules and new sight lines. But we did declare that if you put your foot down on the ground, you were automatically out. Out, out, you're out, my brother said. Out, out, you're out. And we became well-practised climbers like K.
We liked to elevate ourselves and leave places behind by eccentric means. "Out! Out! You're out!" We sounded like cats scratching around for a new place to lie ourselves out along a set of new sightlines. And we called out if we saw anyone's foot on the ground. "Out! Out! You're out!" Years later,
Years later when I came to Oxford and began teaching here in this grand city full of spires, sight lines reaching up to the sky and I lift my finger now to point towards the sky above me. Oxford, full of architecture which was gothic and strange and full of odd spaces you couldn't see unless you had the means to enter.
window ledges, balconies, roof compartments that only those who enjoyed those hallowed spaces could see and know a new set of sightlines. I had glimpses of these spaces often in rather untoward circumstances and I want to tell you about a night I recall. The night I spent climbing Mansfield College roof.
That night, that night I tried to escape as I had as a child from a big... The wolf, he'll come and get you and he will eat you out. Out! You're out! My brothers would say, you're out.
In fact he was a rather silly man, one of those men you meet across the course of time angling for something I suppose, always angling that kind of man, a silly clever man, a silly clever man made more silly and less clever by drink glug glug drink drink a benefactor, an angler because benefactors are always angling for something I find don't you?
An intellectual, he said. Well, he claimed, a man who liked to converse with women over drink because no man I've ever met can ever speak to me without drink. A man invited to spend the night in the principal's lodgings. A grand man.
grand in his own mind but then I suppose we are all grand in our own mind where we create very strange sight lines in which to position ourselves. At some point he'd been a television man, a man for the telly, a producer, watch out for those, producers I mean, and that night
That summer's night, my mission seemed vague. Entertain him, host him. What was it? What was I doing with this silly man? In any case, in any case, the hours passed. The hours passed fast. After the drinking and the hosting in a restaurant, we climbed up the stairway of the principal's lodging. Mahogany and grand. Grand and mahogany and gleaming...
In the moonlight it was June, and the principal called out to him in wry tones I recall, "Hello!" "Hello!" "Hello!" she said very grandly and knowingly with a wry grin on her face. A big wry grin like the Cheshire cat hovering
in a bay tree. She greeted him, the silly man, and her voice travelled up the gleaming wooden stairs right to the top. And then her smile turned around and looked down at us, we silly folk climbing the stairs. Me looking terribly awkward, holding on to the banister, not knowing quite why I was there, travelling up the stairs.
And I remember those sight lines and I remember those stairs and the entrance to his room at the top and the silly man, the silly man, it would only be accurate to call him that now in his current state, he fell flat upon the bed, flat upon the bed he fell.
It wasn't a very sophisticated seduction, if that was what was going on. Is this a seduction, I wondered to myself. Am I being seduced? Well, it isn't going very well. Seduction, I find, is rarely sophisticated and mainly very silly. So there, there was this silly man lying out on the silky eiderdown top at the top of the stairs in Mansfield College on the second floor.
And I, there was I too, thinking, how on earth am I going to get out of this? Out of here? How am I going to get out of here? Going back down the stairs, that particular set of sight lines was no longer an option because the principal would be down there sitting out in her grand drawing room, no doubt reading the LRB or the TLS or the Financial Times.
with a wry grin on her face. And I had to manage this. I knew I had to manage this. This cartoon world I had entered into. I had to manage it differently. I had to draw up my own set of sightlines. I had to re-compose. I had to re-impose.
The window was open. It was a warm night sometime in June. In June it was. Stories so often take place in June, I find. Have you noticed? My mother died in June on mid-summer's night. June is very heady. A good point for departure between one part of the year and the next. June, it cuts you in half.
So it was the middle of June and the silly man on the bed had fallen asleep. Laid out flat he was like a snoring pancake, very seductive, very sexy. The window, however, was calling me. The window, it was the window I longed for, her sightlines, her embrace. And so I went towards the window and I stepped out onto the ledge and I began to view my options.
my sight lines. We were up two floors, I reckoned, one floor below just a little way off. There was another lower lying roof. A bicycle shed, I thought. I could manage that. A bicycle shed. Students, I felt safer with that reference. Move myself away from any sighting of an ungenerous colleague, let's say.
A bicycle shed, I thought. I could manage that. As long as I crawl along, keeping myself flat as the serpent did in the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, I will be all right. If I make myself as flat as she, I don't want to betray myself to the CCTV. Do I? No. Nor, God forbid, an ungenerous colleague. Treacherous. A treacherous sorb.
In the Garden of Eden, the serpents, they come through and they bite. Colleagues, happy to see you come to a sticky end. Oh, hello, what were you doing on the roof last night, I wonder? Under the CCTV cameras. They got you. They got you, those cameras, they got you. This is Oxford, after all. The setting for so many crime novels, so many crimes.
So many people you wish to bump off but could not. Push them out of your sight lines I say. Push them.
So I stepped out. I stepped out and I don't remember exactly what kind of shoes I was wearing that night but I'm sure they were flat and sensible. Yes, flat and low lying to the ground. I lived on a boat after all. And one thing you soon learn when you live on a boat is the art of wearing sensible shoes. Margaret Rutherford would approve.
I was starting to feel quite jaunty and quite Margaret Rutherford. You know how it goes, that little jaunty tune in that version of Agatha Christie story she did so well when she was always going out in a sprightly manner, a sprightly manner, with her bow.
in a sensible pair of shoes to solve a crime. And so I folded myself up tightly and stretched out in the manner of Margaret Rutherford on a roof because she was often seen elevated above on a ladder or a wall or going out of a window with her bow. The man she had hired to help.
I didn't have one of those that night at Mansfield College, so I had to make up my own help. My own help. Help. And I began at that point, that very point, after I had folded myself up tightly and stretched out, I began to slither.
I began to slither, thinking about Margaret Rutherford and how bulky she was and how slender I was, so I had no excuse in my slithering not to be seen. I should not be seen and I was not as bulky as Margaret, so therefore, geometrically speaking, I stood a chance of remaining unseen.
and invisible. Although I knew there were cameras about, I must avoid. There should be, however, no sighting of Dr Bailey on the roof of Mansfield College lying low to the ground that evening in June. No. No sighting. No MI5, as my friend Nanu would say. No MI5. Definitely MI5, she says. Definitely MI5. My friend sees MI5 everywhere.
Definitely MI5 that one. Definitely. And that night, I definitely was a bit MI5. I knew it. I could feel it. And I was also a little bit Margaret Rutherford. So off I went. Off I went, slithering along, following my carefully planned sightlines.
I'd taken it all in, I'd done my recce, very MI5, I'd done my recce. The height between one roof and the next. And then the capacity of my shoes to take a fall, a jolt. The texture of the wall, the texture of the wall. How hard was she, that wall, and how slippery, and how much moss, and how many ferns, and how many prickly thorns.
would my bare legs be able to take? The roses are out in June, don't forget that. That is a convenient thing, perhaps, I thought. Or perhaps not, depending on how they take you. And sprinkly thorns, I thought. But then I also thought, June, June is a convenient month for assailing roofs and walls because you have a long night ahead of you. You have a long night in June.
A long night. So I advise you, those of you listening, those of you out there, to do this sort of thing, this sort of thing, in June. And I did. I crawled and I crawled and I reached the second wall, lower down, about six feet down, I reckoned, and I turned myself sideways, from horizontal to vertical. I am horizontal, but I'd rather be vertical, says the speaker.
The speaker with a sort of flat American accent in Sylvia Plath's poem. I am horizontal, but I'd rather be vertical. I am horizontal, I thought to myself, but I'd rather be vertical. And so I made myself so. I made myself vertical and fell down onto the bicycle shed roof, conveniently covered in bitumen or some such thing which allowed me to grip
my feet tightly like a cat with her claws and I lay low again. I lay low keeping my centre of gravity low to the ground and I pulled myself to the edge of the shed and I jumped again down to the ground but with no thud. No thud. As silent as a cat's claws. And I looked up
I looked up to the side of me and there was a familiar building. The American Institute. The American Institute. My accent is fading. My accent is fading. As America seems to be these days. The American Institute where, as it so happened, I had an office stuffed full of books and many of them poetry. I am horizontal.
But I'd rather be vertical, said the sad poet. An office stuffed full of books, and that is what I recalled as I lay low to the ground. And then this thought.
This thought, which was another kind of sight line, which took me off from a moment from my position on the ground, but that is what thoughts do. They take you off somewhere and create a new line, an adjacent wing, a flap on a box you open, an extra dimension of space you walk through in order to get somewhere new.
And I find that poetry in particular is that door that I can move through and find what it is I never knew I was looking for. And I was the only one in that building. I was the only one in that building at that time, at that particular moment in time, with an office full of books. Thousands.
thousands. And perhaps because I imagined I was feeding the five thousand, and perhaps I imagined I needed to do that, to do that with my thousands of books, all those students who pass through that door coming to learn about poetry. And it did strike me as very strange that no one else calling themselves a researcher or a teacher had books as I did. No one. No one but me.
But then times have changed. Times have changed. And these days you can get away with calling yourself a social scientist. What are you? I'm a social scientist. And what are you? I'm a teacher. I'm a teacher. And now, I'm a writer.
A social scientist means you make up charts of information. Have you seen my charts? No, I've not seen your charts. Charts of information no one really wants and no one particularly understands. But it gets you money, I learnt. It gets you benefactors, men sipping wine. Silly men.
With their charts, a strange sort of sightline running along axes towards what I thought when I looked at their charts, towards what I wondered. Where are your lines going? Where is your quest? Your journey's end? I never got an answer from those charts. Only a strange set of lines, a peculiar set of axes, and I wondered to myself, what does this mean for humans and why?
Should we care? But that was enough dithering around in someone else's oblique set of lines. I pulled myself away from that thought. I pulled myself back to now, to myself on the ground, because I needed to move on. On and on and on.
And I needed first to ascertain where the cameras were. Where were the cameras? Those little eyes, I spy you. But where, from where were the cameras looking? We live in an age of perpetual watching. Someone was bound to be watching. Or were they? Were they?
That night it seemed that no one was watching me. I was fortunate. Yes, I was fortunate. I got out of the gates of Mansfield College via the back route. Via the back route, which is how I have always travelled through life. Via the back route. The back gate, the back alleyway, the twittern. Around the back she comes.
Never through the front, like a cat over the wall of the back garden which leads into the American Institute on Mansfield Road. They have a garden too. They have a garden too. And I used to put on plays there. Very fine plays in June. In the middle of the summer, in a small, walled, elevated space we called a theatre.
And we filled the entire garden with human drama. Some of it in American accents, but it still went very well. There were no strange axes or random coordinates on a chart running to nowhere. Only precise human drama. Set out upon a set of lines, set within a set of lines. This garden
this place. Conveniently raised like a stage from the ground, we all sat upon and felt our feet firmly placed. A hovering rectangular space waiting to be filled with stories and actions. Because space usually determines the way we think and move and feel about who we are, who
We are. And any space, and any story I will tell you needs lines. Lines that determine where you go next, and what you can see, and who you can see, and not. And that night, I may have been seen by the CCTV cameras,
That night on the roof of Mansfield College because my sight lines were obscured by hope. I could only see the lines I had plotted myself from sill to roof to roof and then to the ground. And from the ground to the wall and the gate.
And me moving through those lines as a cartoon character, extracting herself from one silly cartoon plot to another. But at least this other plot, this second plot was partly her own, and at least the shoes she wore that night had been flat enough to carry her safely to her exit.
Stage left? Or was it stage right? In any case, that night I managed to escape from the silly man lying flat out on the bed, snoring, snoring, snoring like the big wolf in Red Riding Hood. Thank you for listening to A Reading Life, A Writing Life.
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