[Get Out of Your Own Way]
Let the boy try along this bayonet blade
How cold steel is
and keen with hunger of blood
Blue with all malice, like a mad man’s flash
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads
Or give him cartridges whose fine zinc teeth
are sharp with sharpness of grief and death
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple
And God will grow no talons at his heels
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls
I like that one.
I like all of them, but that one’s very beautiful, I think.
[The Pity of War The War Poems of Wilfred Owen]
[Get Out of Your Own Way]
Explain that “Get Out of Your Own Way” thing.
It’s just to remind me that...
who I think I am gets in the way of who I am.
You know, so “Get Out of Your Own Way”
is just a constant reminder not to
get carried away with ideas of myself...
and just to go back to basics.
There’s a sort of expression in Zen Buddhism, which is “beginner’s mind.”
And I attempt to apply it to my own daily life.
“Beginner’s mind,” in other words, you don’t know bugger all.
Work on that premise.
[Penny Rimbaud is a writer, poet,
[philosopher, painter, musician, and activist.]
[In 1977, alongside Steve Ignorant,]
[he co-founded the pivotal anarcho-punk band Crass.]
Well, I first adhere to this philosophy from...
the roots of it were in my very, very early childhood,
you know, of complete disillusionment with the presented world.
I was born during the war, the last World War.
My father was away at war,
so I never met him until I was about three or four or something.
And... you know, when he came,
I didn’t like him because I’d had a nice relationship with my mother,
which wasn’t interfered by this man who suddenly came into my life.
And he came, up until then... I can’t remember it, of course,
but I was comfortable.
I spent a lot of time under the kitchen table
because it was safer from the bombs.
But, you know, I was probably happy under the kitchen table
or in the arms of my mother.
And then Dad turned up with tales of what he called “the real world”
and tales of war.
He didn’t actually tell many war tales,
people were too... busted or hurt or terrorized
to ever be able to tell the real tales of war.
But he was a very unhappy man, understandably.
But I didn’t understand that, understandably.
So from the start,
I wasn’t going to buy into his idea of the real world.
And the crunch came when I took a book out of my parents’ library.
It was a black-covered book and it was pictures from Auschwitz.
It was a book about the death camps.
And it just was like a storm, you know, because I thought,
“That’s the ‘real world’ he’s talking about,
all these bodies in a pit?”
And it terrorized me.
I thought, “I can’t live in that. I won’t live in that.”
So that was the birth of how I think.
I wasn’t going to accept the world I was being handed,
because it was cruel, I could see that.
I didn’t need to look much further to see the cruelty,
so I reacted against that.
I reacted by not wanting to learn about it,
so I was a terrible failure at school.
In my terms, I was a great success in school
because I managed to get thrown out of two.
Well, I think that’s a very successful treatment of
what they call education
because I had contempt for that education.
A few of us used to go to the local coffee bar,
which was called The Flamenco.
[At] that time, I was really into blues,
Leadbelly and people like that.
A mate of mine could play the guitar,
and we used to go down there after school
and play the guitar and sing these blues songs.
And lots of the girls from the girls’ school used to come along,
and we used to drink frothy coffee and smoke cigarettes.
Anyway, so the local paper decided that
bohemianism from public school boys and girls wasn’t acceptable.
So I was grabbed and dragged off to the headmaster
and got a thorough caning, and then I was expelled.
But I wouldn’t comply with anything, I didn’t do anything at all.
I didn’t go to classes,
I just hung out and went for walks and... just didn’t do anything.
Slowly and gradually... within that, there was
the formation of, if you like, a philosophy.
When I was about 14, the family went on holiday in Positano, in Italy.
I met up with this artist
who used to sit on the little alleyway down to the beach
with paintings that looked a bit like Monet’s waterlily paintings,
he’s selling them to the very wealthy tourists that inhabited Positano.
And he gave me a book about Zen.
And Zen made complete sense.
I mean, it was like a spark of light in all the madness.
And certainly over the last six or seven years, I’ve been practicing.
In other words, meditating every day, going on retreats,
studying the scriptures, et cetera, et cetera.
Not that I regard myself as Zen,
but it’s the closest thing within the material world
that makes any sort of sense to me.
And it inspires me.
And I mean that, something like “Get Out of Your Own Way”
is archetypally Zen in what it is saying.
And bit by bit, it introduced me to all the sort of outcrops of that.
I mean, it sort of made me...
very receptive to, for example, to the Beats,
who I got to be reading when I was probably in my early 20s.
-The Beat Poets? -Yeah.
Because that was so heavily one of their influences.
You know, Zen had a terrific influence,
particularly on the West Coast of America.
So it opened up doorways to a huge range of stuff
that otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten hold of.
This is Dial House.
One of the outcomes of what I’ve been describing about my childhood was
knowing that I didn’t want to live like that.
I tried. I became a professional.
I went to art school.
And then after that, I started doing professional portraiture.
I painted pictures of people.
And then I got a teaching job,
which I fell foul of, in my own head, very, very quickly.
So I sort of partly resigned, but really I was pushed out.
And I came back here.
I was living with two other of the lecturers from the art school,
and I said, “Look, I don’t like this way of life.
I want to take the locks off the door.
I want everything to be shared.
I’m not into this you with a cupboard with your food in it
and me with a cupboard.”
I didn’t like that. I wanted to open it up.
It's only recently I've come to realize
I was also trying to open up my heart.
So it was sort of like an “open door, open heart” policy.
And then I just basically waited and let life happen.
I was working on the farm,
potato picking, because that’s how I started making money,
doing things like working on the farm
or working at the coal yard during the winter.
And Steve turned up, and he was a very, very **** off
working-class kid who knew there was nothing
for [him] out there, you know, being offered.
He knew that this place was a haven.
Our degrees of **** off-ness, of unhappiness, found voice.
And it was quite a jubilant voice...
in downright naughtiness.
And it was a real, “Well, **** off then.”
And then, very soon... the third element was Eve.
She’s the great unacknowledged force of Crass, if you like,
because she had a very, very profound influence on both Steve and myself
through her thinking,
which is, I would say, pretty radical feminist.
So it was that threesome, initially,
which was the puckish naughtiness of Crass.
That’s the first time I saw Crass.
My friend had the Yes Sir, I Will poster on his wall.
Right.
Can you explain what it is?
Yeah, well, this guy who’d had his face removed through shellings
or through fire, I think, in the Falklands War.
And there was a gathering after the war, a sort of...
do they call them celebrations, glorifications?
Whatever they call them.
When Prince Charles came to Simon Weston,
he said, “Get well soon.”
And Weston’s response was, “Yes, Sir, I will.”
And it says it all, doesn't it?
I mean, it’s a pure piece of haiku.
It’s the greatest poem that was ever written.
It wasn’t that that inspired the writing of...
which made up the sort of 45-minute rant that Yes Sir, I Will was.
But it certainly inspired the title and the...
it’s repeated, that encounter with Prince Charles and Weston
is repeated at the end of the piece.
So that’s an anti-war statement,
you know, it was my War Requiem, if you like.
That’s a pretty grand way of putting it,
but... it was the best I could do at the time
to explain my... sense of revulsion and disgust
and despair about man’s inhumanity to man.
Which is very much an absolutely core feature of Wilfred Owen’s poems.
How were you attracted to Wilfred Owen?
Oh, mainly through the War Requiem,
Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.
Owen wasn’t really very highly regarded
within the sort of canon of English poetry
until Britten set his poems into the Requiem Mass,
which was in the early 60s.
And it coincided with an increasing repulsion of war.
Up until then, the great war poets were generally slightly jingoistic.
Owen’s message was very much more passionate,
very much more... nonjudgemental.
I know that Owen became shell-shocked
and came back to Britain and was in hospital,
and he could easily have not returned.
But he did return, you know, to his death.
But he returned not because he believed in the war,
by that time he didn’t believe in the war.
What he believed in was his men.
And that’s a very deep form of love, I think.
And that’s what I found performing his poems.
I mean, it’s fabulous that Derek at One Little Indian [Records]
was interested enough to say, “Yeah, that’s great. I want you to do it.
And I’ll finance it, I’ll find you a really, really good studio,
this deserves a really good studio.”
It’s nice when someone says something like that.
How did you meet Derek Birkett and One Little Indian?
Well, because I produced their first single,
he used to be in a band called Flux of Pink Indians.
Bjork was what kind of made One Little Indian big, right?
Yeah.
Good. Right, so shall we go from the start?
Initially, having decided I wanted to perform Owen’s poems,
I looked to what musicians I felt would best accompany me.
Kate, the cellist,
I describe her as an avant-garde romanticist.
So she manages to work within the avant-garde field
with incredible romantic fluidity, which I liked.
Liam Noble, who’s an extraordinary and very well respected
frontline avant-gardist.
He’s totally unpredictable
and an extraordinary interpreter.
He doesn't take the obvious.
Sing me at morn but only with your laugh
Even as Spring that laugheth into leaf
Even as Love that laugheth after Life
Sing me but only with your speech all day
As voluble leaflets do; let viols die
The least word of your lips is melody
I will not do anything unless it openly and overtly promotes
the cause of peace and love.
That’s my only interest.
I mean, that’s my...
calling, for want of a better word.
Well, Owen is one way of defining both,
peace and love.
Sing me at eve but only with your sigh
Like lifting seas it solaceth; breathe so
Slowly and low, the sense that no songs say
Sing me at midnight with your murmurous heart
Let youth’s immortal-moaning chord be heard
Throbbing through you, and sobbing, unsubdued
You can't look to any authority but yourself.
And neither can you be ruled by any authority but yourself.
Even those who acknowledge,
they say, “Oh, I can’t exist properly because the police are such pigs,
or because the laws are so... .”
Well, who’s accepting the police, or who’s accepting the laws?
You are, so it’s your responsibility.
It’s not their responsibility, it’s your responsibility.
So there is no authority but yourself.
And what that simply means is don’t look to others
and don’t be cowed by others.
Don’t be fearful of others.
That's their business, not yours.
And it’s only because people don’t simply look at life in that way,
to realize that they are the only authority.
They are choosing to buy into it or not buy into it.
It’s because they don’t realize that that people will live fearful lives.
You don’t have to feel fear,
it’s just something you buy in to.