‘We’re writers; we needed to write.’

Is there a link between Quaker worship and creative collaboration? Philip Gross on the art of holding the space between us

It is hard to say this without sounding pretentious or mystical, but we seemed to be hearing voices. Two poets with thirty years of writing experience each, Lesley Saunders and I had all the craft it takes to say what we meant with our poetry, but this was something different. It was the summer of 2016, in the midst of the upheavals of the referendum, daily news of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, jagged fault lines opening in politics all over the world… The air was full of raw feelings and entrenched opinions on all sides. To add more of our own would have shed no light on the conflict around us. But we’re writers; we needed to write.

Our collaboration grew from a chance remark after a poetry event: ‘I think what I’m feeling is grief,’ said Lesley. ‘What can I do with it?’ Send me a poem, I replied – not trying to say everything, but unfinished, open-ended, and I’ll reply. Three months later we had a book-length manuscript. A Part of the Main is a conversation between poems, rather than between the writers, with different sections picking up voices of histories, angers and hurts that were far from our own.

It need not have been so. If we had believed that the point of poetry was to express our feelings, we’d have ended with a couple of pages of like-minded lament. But something else occurred. We found ourselves imagining a female figure gazing seaward – think of the classical stories of Dido or of Ariadne, abandoned on the shore. So far, so wistful. But suddenly the undergrowth behind her parted, and another face peered out.

The shore, it turned out, was an island; there had been a storm at sea, so who else would the face behind her be but Shakespeare’s Caliban? Some of the things he came to say in the pages that followed were nothing like our own emotions. He had a voice of his own –

      …not pretty, for sure.
nor are some of the words
      the crowds are chanting, but 
it does nail us here, in the heart 
      of the times.

He was angry, aggrieved. It had been his island; he was feeling dispossessed. There was little question which way he’d have voted in the referendum. Out, out, out.

He was a shape-shifter, too, appearing sometimes as Grendel, the monster in the Anglo-Saxon mire in Beowulf, sometimes as King Lud, mythical founder of London, sometimes as Ned Ludd, the breaker of factory looms, all those dim flickers of history and legend medieval writers called the Matter of Britain. Other wavelengths crackled in – the voice of migrants cast adrift, an underpaid care worker of no settled status, an immigration officer, and, always within earshot, the sound of the sea.

I have never been more aware of the almost-independent life of these voices than when the two of us were reading from the book in Quaker settings – in the Quaker Centre Bookshop in Friends House, London, or in several Meeting houses. Sometimes in discussion afterwards, someone would quote back a line, and I would be genuinely not sure which of us had written it. Nobody owned it; it spoke for itself. There was nothing inherently Quaker in the words we were speaking – often strikingly not. It was the way they were held, in all their difference, by the space between us that gave them such resonance.

In half a lifetime, now, of Quaker worship, I seem to have absorbed the shape of Quaker Meetings into my soul. Looking recently at that Quaker image familiar from the walls of many Meeting houses, James Doyle Penrose’s The Presence in the Midst (considered by Rowena Loverance in the Friend, 15 December 2017), my first thought was: ‘But where is the space?’

In that painting tight-packed benches face point blank at the elders’ bench. It may be recent that unprogrammed Friends’ practice has tended to the circle, but this is the Quakerism I came into. At best, when a Meeting feels ‘gathered’, there is a tangible sense that we are holding the space between us. Everyone in the circle has a responsibility for the care of it, mostly by a calm, alert, attentive listening. In thirty years of leading writers’ workshops, this has been the shared, productive space I’ve wanted to create. Collaboration between individuals is the same thing par excellence.

I’m not suggesting that collaboration in the arts and worship are the same thing, but each offers a clue to the other. In either, the space between us can be flat and dull, or it can be a tingling medium through which the slightest live impulse can pass.

All performers know a ‘dead’ space when they face one, and so do most of us in ordinary conversation – just as we recognise the opposite, the cared-for quietness that catches every nuance, in which even the speaker comes to hear themselves more clearly than they can in their own head.

Quakers love and use, but do not worship, silence. Silence has as many tones and dialects as speech. When Lesley Saunders and I began exchanging poems, we were stepping into a space we knew and trusted, the shared culture of poetry in which each line is held a little longer in the air – that’s the micro-silence at each line break – so we can catch the echoes, as the layers of its sound and meaning unfold. Centuries of reading, speaking and listening have gone into constructing that relationship, like the acoustics of a building. In the same way, centuries of Quaker worship have built an invisible architecture, in which if we speak (and this can be a daunting thought) we will be specially, particularly heard.

A Part of the Main would have gone nowhere if we had been ‘of one mind’. There needed to be distances between us so that something with its own life could emerge. Friends in Meetings can be disturbed to discover differences, in theology or temperament, between us. Spoken ministry makes use of the equipment we have. The impulse of the spirit in an academic will come out in the language that they have; be careful before you dismiss it as being ‘all in the head’. A singer may sing; a poet will reach for a metaphor… as naturally as a Kenyan Friend might minister in Swahili. If we all thought the same, there would be no space between us into which a new leading could step – and maybe no appetite or need to notice if it did.

The gathered-ness of Meeting is as much to do with how we listen to each other’s ministry, and through it, as in the words being said. That is collaboration – feeling for the new direction, for the freshness of surprise, for the lift of the spirit. And now and then we touch it: something that

      moves
of itself, without moving, as
      silk flows, its waves
            of moiré, something of
      us and between us, made of
you and me, yet neither me nor you. n

A Part of the Main is available now from Mulfran Press.

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