Trust, Education & Writing as Resistance w/ AL KENNEDY - Highlights

0:00The thing is to be essential. Then you get close to Universal Humanity, which becomes essential to the person reading you. So you have to leave space in your narrative for their voice to fit as they read it to themselves. I spend a lot of time doing this voice method, which is the Alfred Wolfson voice method, and he was a soldier in the First World War, and when he was hearing people scream for their lives, it was completely irresistible to hear someone scream for their life. He wanted to go into No Man's Land and Rescue them. It's unbearable to listen to. It's a full expression of their humanity screaming for you, and he was thoughtful, and the thing that puzzled him was why people don't agree to be fully expressed while they're alive. Why does it only happen in the last moment? Why wouldn't you live? Why wouldn't you live being fully expressed? You're listening to highlights from the creative processes interview with writer, activist, stand-up comedian, Al Kennedy. She is the author of Alive in the Merciful Country and other books. This podcast is supported by the Jan Moshalski

1:04Foundation. If you do the voice work with a group, there'll be a point where somebody is so open and so realized and so themselves. You suddenly have this realization about them, and with my voice teacher, we did a whole week where it's just back and forth, back and forth doing it, and I was listening to her, and then I just thought, oh, wow, you're Jewish. And it wasn't that I didn't know she was Jewish. It's just I thought, wow, your Jewishness is so close to your heart, so part of your fiber. And there was another guy, and you heard him, and heard him, and heard him, and it's like, oh, you're gay. That's one of the things and the pearl that you're making that's you. And there was another woman, and it was just, oh, man, you're just one of the nicest human beings I've ever met. There's something in you that's so untouched by the world. It's extraordinary that the song of somebody will tell you such articulate information, and it's so essential, and it's always so beautiful and slightly different, and saying it in

2:09words isn't enough, because it's something much more penetrating. It gives you such strength, but obviously if you're doing theatre, just the mechanics of being loud enough that people can hear you is useful. So the battle with fear is quite fundamental to being able to put marks on paper, and you have to build a space within which the fear can't get you. So this is the beginning of a very thick novel, larger in the voice of a primary school teacher, but also in this dark voice of a kind of unperson who's this sort of manifestation of everything wrong, any who a person becomes what they need to be so they can meet their time. That's my theory. Of course you need luck to make that work, and some people have no luck. That's why we're supposed to have mercy. Exactly when you're reading, this is a matter for conjecture. Still, I think I'm safe in assuming very many things will be appalling, and will remain appalling, or become more

3:10appalling after that. More comfortable circumstances may not appear because, as a species, we fail to impress. Sorry about that. I don't know what we were thinking. But also perhaps we'll be thriving, or perhaps we will be just about to thrive, or poised. Perhaps we will be learning and somehow living inside the fires we have lit, being happy and not consumed. Afterwards, when my walk out of the storm and into existing gently, building gently, will move on and rarely look behind. That's the hope, or something like it. You do have to hope, don't you? I read once, but an experiment with mice can find an awful little tubes filled with water. Left to themselves the mice would paddle and paddle to keep a float, but it wouldn't take many minutes before they would be utterly exhausted and close to drowning, at which point researchers observing what I have to assume was their idea of a reasonable and necessary experiment would have to fish the mice back out. The funny thing was that when the terrifying researchers returned,

4:15those same mice do the water torture tubes, because of course they did, the little creatures would swim and swim and swim twice as long, ten times as long and on and on. Somewhere in their tiny mouse brains, they trusted that when they were desperate they'd be saved, and this let them endure. I am unable to say if this was good news. Nonetheless, I do hope, and I also mean well. You need to these days. Yeah, the thing with that, I don't know if that's true, because that seems to be really a fast operation of evolution for no reason. There's no evolution repression for that to happen, so it's happening within our life, but when we say what does you do to Darwin for a drive, we accept that as one activity, but it's not, it's checking, wing mirrors, it's checking, review mirrors, it's keeping an eye on speed, it's controlling, direction, it's looking for hazards, it's knowing your route, it's dealing with whatever

5:18amount of technology there isn't, you do the choke or changing gears, if you have a car, we have to do that. There tends to be an analysis of how particularly young and suspicious people behave online, where instead of saying, what did you do today? I was online, they say, oh, you were looking at this and you were looking at that and you were changing from here to there to there to there, therefore you have no attention span. I was like, no, I'm a dude, I was just online, and I had a lot of windows open. What's your problem? When you look at the analysis, it's a little weird, because these are the same people who will watch a Netflix series for a day and a half. Don't tell me that you have to break all information and drama down into eight minute increments, because nobody has an attention span, when clearly if something is good and interesting, you cook people, that's how it works. So I'm just wondering, growing up with those influences in you, how do that pairing of education and the need to explore like the hidden parts of our mind,

6:18how do you feel that may have formed your ideas of what is true? Oh, goodness, that's enough. I mean, it was not a relationship that worked well for them, so as a small person, there was sort of thinking, well, why, what is this? Is it all, all they sort of interested in why people say something when clearly they're not doing that and describe themselves as something and clearly they aren't that thing? I find it understandable that people fall for very bad lies. It's disappointing, but clearly being educated, being taught how to read and how to really read, being mentally agile, it's hugely important for allowing you to live a full life, and to know who you are and be able to express yourself, and to be able to express yourself with nuance, instead of with violence, or to even understand what you're feeling, and it underpins democracy, as a bajillion people have said, and we're seeing now, you know, the Venn diagram is a circle of undereducated people who can be shoved to being

7:21de-educated and misinformed and misled and pulled into what they always get pulled into, which is some sort of form of fascism. Obviously, the influence of your mom, you know, I think comes through your respect for teachers. Why is it a teacher essential figure for you in terms of protecting the child's imagination from the adult world? I think because part of the complete decline and sort of destruction of the social discourse and democracy in the UK began very, very long time ago with the real savage attacks, multi-pronged attacks on education, on teachers, on teaching, from, you know, fatcher onwards, they knew partly instinctively and partly statistically and analytically that what you have to do is destroy education, and then you can do anything. What you have to do to diminish resistance is to destroy education. What you have to do if you're an ideologue and you don't want to exist in the real world,

8:23if you want to peel away from reality and just believe your daydreams, and as it happens there, the darkest daydreams they are. If you want to behave irrationally, then you have to diminish education and rationality and belief in an agreed reality and the very predictable consequences of actions and to believe mythologies about what human nature is. I mean, if you look at Minnesota, and of all the states, why would you try to do this in Minnesota? Nice. Come on. There's great interview last weekend with this guy who said a bunch of sensible stuff just to go in the crowd. Anananti Ice Demma and he said this beautiful thing which was they only have force they don't have love. That's kind of everything you need to know. Force does get the qualifier only. It's like it's

9:26not enough. It's not toxic masculinity and dick waving. I'm going to do it for you. That blows away in the wind. It has no underpinning. If you have love, eventually you're going to win. It's not the people aren't going to die. It's not terrible things aren't going to happen. But if you stay with that and you stay centered in that, you'll get through and you will not have turned into a monster in order to overcome monsters. Which is the big question. There's two sort of questions in the book and there's two answers. She's incredibly furious that people are being treated so badly and people are being killed by machinery which is designed to be a sort of murder suicide bag. But she goes with love and buster goes with, I'm going to shoot people in the head who've been bad. I've been doing it for money and now I'm just going to do it with bad people and that'll make me a good person. And it's like, yeah, no, it won't. Just makes you very, very broken. Yeah, Mark, there's one of the famous outer spike ups. Yeah, I mean, I think

10:30every government wants to infiltrate everything that could be oppositional. It's a very long established habit, even an Elizabethan habit that you would put into cells that you found that resistance. You would put in people who were double agents. But under Tony Blair, who was authoritarian in the way that Starmer is, he wanted us at least one spike up in everything. In green piece, in completely peaceful organization. So, spike ups everywhere. A lot of them were very, very awful. In fact, one of them, FEMA one, had had a nickname, which was like, and the cop, because he was so awful. And there's, there's a beautiful story of a demo in London where far right neo-nazis were attacking a radical bookshop and there was a sort of counter protest

11:31and it was quite violent. And two people, you know, one in the front row of the neo-nazis and one in the front row of the anti-fascists. They were both spike ups and they ended up punching each other and kind of kicking off the violence. It's like, this is insane. There probably wouldn't have been any violence if these two cops hadn't thrown the first punch. And there was an amount of sort of version provocateur, but apart from that being utterly undemocratic and reprehensible and unnecessary and they had a huge budget, massive budget and real impunity and they just kept going and gathering money and gathering power and gathering staff. Also, you know, what's the best cover? Oh, if I take drugs, if I sleep with somebody, if I father a child with somebody, then surely I'm not a spy. And Mark Kennedy was one of the famously revealed people. I mean, my experience of people, you know, in the 20s and younger is that they're kind of smart and hip to this stuff. Unless they've really been massaged and they're in like, you know, the insole

12:35community. If you can just pull them a little bit, but people 40 and above seem very vulnerable and very naive. And these people have looked at the researchers who analysed how did fascism take over a democracy with complex and beautiful artistic inheritance and all kinds of things going for it. How did that happen? And they've looked at Milgram and they've looked at Zimbardo and they looked at the research and they've said, okay, that's how it happens. So we'll do that again and we'll do it online and we'll do it in your home and we'll do it in your pocket and we'll do it in your TV. And we'll give you a story that's not true and see which story that's not true. You believe and we can do that super fast because that's really all AI is and we're doing the things that we're just doing very fast and we'll go, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing. Oh, you believe that one? Okay, we'll pull you down the rubber hole this way and it's like mums in there. You know, it's these weird places where 40 plus people hang out. They go, oh, immigrants stay in hotels. So

13:40and they get given food in the UK. That's because they're not allowed to stay anywhere else. They have no worth getting any accommodation. You're not letting them have cancel accommodation and you're giving them food because you want to allow them to work. That's literally the only way they would have food and shelter. What is love and beauty to you? The good thing is I don't know because it's always evolving and flowing and flexible and moving because if it weren't, it's either dead or it's beginning to die. It's creative and creation is movement and flexibility. The interesting thing we'd lock down was for those two weeks, everybody knows the the same. They're in the same situation. It's scary. We're all paying us huge amount of attention and what we're seeing is yeah, Middle Eastern guy telling us how to wash our hands. We're all washing our hands. It's just purposeless because it's an airborne but at this point all we know is you wash your hands and we're all washing our hands and we're all washing our hands which are the

14:42same hands for the same amount of time and we're all doing a thing together and we're looking at dance and it makes us cry and we're looking at music and it makes us cry and we're looking at paintings and it makes us cry and people are pushing pianos in streets and playing for old people and it makes us cry and people are standing on apartment balconies and playing the saxophone makes us cry. People are photographing leaves and going. I've never realised how beautiful leaf is. People are separated from the people they love. Huge amount of awareness of how much you do love those people. A huge amount of time to think everybody that I have lost in my life I still miss. I just didn't have time to think about it. The people that I love who are still there I love them so much and the things that are important are so simple and specific and beautiful and strong and we had two weeks of that. We had two weeks of our media being nice to us talking very clearly and slowly and not doing the bullshit and not doing the be angry about this. Be

15:44scared of this. It's like this actually is a real fear so we're going to talk to you like friends. The way media always should because we pay for them and they serve us. It's not the other way around and what you saw from there on you know everybody now has the lockdown as terrible because everyone went mad and it all became very dark. No, about two weeks in. All of the Peter Teos and Elon Nusks went shit humanity is becoming unified. There's a global force that understands it has much more in common than it had keeping us apart and is getting deep into empathy and creativity and doing beautiful lovely things for free for each other and we have to stop this and they just stepped on the gas and found the people who were vulnerable and who were really lonely and who couldn't cope with the in rush of things they were thinking and feeling because in the space and the silence the unmet needs and the unaddressed issues become overwhelming and governments

16:49weren't putting in help for that and governments weren't coming in and supporting and governments were giving billions. Hosing cash to people for bullshit just committing horrendous crimes when they could have been supporting people and creating this enormous beautiful unified resiliency and they just decided to give cash to their friends and each other and leave people completely alone as long as the moment when democracy failed as just as we were becoming ready to be the ideal citizens for democracies. And again it was a predicted effect of climate change it was a predicted effect of what human beings changed the planet was epidemics and pandemics. I think because I started working with people in care homes and family centers and prisons and and they had no privacy at all and the social worker driving you to wherever it was would always tell you intimate details of their life that you shouldn't you should be waiting until they

17:55wanted to share them. I would always know too much they had no privacy their creativity and their privacy was you just trying to make a tiny bubble of that for them because they had it nowhere else and that experience during which I was beginning to be a writer myself and seeing what writing did to them that it liberated them that it made them more articulate that it gave them more status that it scared people. It's like if I am with anybody for more than 20 minutes I can't reflect anything they tell me and I won't ever take your life because you end up at my age and you have no friends if you go that way. That's living the life of a vampire it's so nobody will tell me anything anymore I know shit because you're going to rip it off and make money from it how are that? If you want to pay rent for having been given a louder than average voice I think you can feel personally unbalanced if you don't do something with it that's useful and it's it's another

18:57way of looking at the power of words and looking at the power of narrative it's another way of feeling good about humanity and in the same way that stand up is if you if something's happening in the world and the narrative is sloppy and the accuracy is crap and the media approach is really gullible and ridiculous. Something happens one day the following day you're in a stand-up club the audience which is at least drunk if not drugged up they get it they absolutely get it it's not that they're all cynical it's just they get it people are very sharp really underestimated that that was a big educational thing and when you're at an event particularly actually we did an illegal all-day literary event in Trafalgar Square and then next to Trafalgar Square because we got thrown out of Trafalgar Square every author and there was I can't say like 40 authors turned up every moment of that was pure magic and every moment of that was the best

20:05literary event that any of us have ever experienced and you had a bunch of young people who laterally were soaking wet and sitting on concrete and underposs surrounded by cops who also seem to be having caught a nice time because you're always really talking to the cops the people you're talking to they know all this shit they know more than you do they're more active than me you know that's why I started being funny up there because it's like couldn't take myself seriously I'm not doing anything you're always talking to the cops I saw an African-American guy commentator who who I like watching and he talks about lots of things but he had this little film I've been radicalized by being online the you are always radical no the world you're radical before that online the world moved I just stayed in place but you know there was this guy saying how can you be happy and how can you be making jokes and how can you be posting light-hearted things when you know Renee good was short which was terrible and was a complete tragedy but the the guy was saying yeah the list of names as long haven't you see I

21:11I just we didn't say enough what that happened it's the thing about living in ideology not reality there's like if the cops are allowed to shoot anybody multiple times in their car eventually it will be everybody if people are allowed to execute disabled people eventually they'll just execute other people and then it will be everybody and then your country will be inflamed it comes down to education just crack a history book at all and you will know you have entered a murder suicide cult and one or the other will get you I mean that's the big thing I'm worried about actually is not if but when mega collapses the site it's gonna be the new testament of well it's the the psychic injury if you look at what happened in Nazi Germany though there was a wave of suicide there was a wave of guys particularly committing suicide and taking their wife and families with them because I've been told reality is this way and the only way I can survive is in

22:14this world and it's all on fire now and I have no capacity and I've been given those support and I have no tools to deal with this so I must die and I'm really worried that there will be mass suicides amongst mega when it falls and you have to live a life relying on a thing that makes no sense and it's to do with vibes and to do with I woke up this morning and this happened and I wrote it down and it seems to want to be that and it seems to join with this and we're not taught how our minds individually our minds work we're not taught how we learn or how we find the roots of story and there's a whole lot of work to do with your intention yeah if I'm going to be a writer what is my intention what is the detail the granular detail at this moment of time because it will change or me being a writer what would allow that to be comfortable and powerful for me and then you have intention on your practice of writing and then you have intention on an individual

23:18piece of work and if I'm doing masterclasses I that's how I teach it now because that seems to make sense but if you're building a character it takes like three years of doing the research that you would do to find out about King Charles the First but every piece that feels right or is a piece that came to you to be expressed that feels right that you don't know where it came from and don't mess with it if it arrived it's good eventually you have a little bag of bits and they feel as if they belong together and I've talked to different authors about how you know they belong together and nobody can say which is cool it's terrifying but it's cool you live with the terror everybody sort of says it's like falling in love you know you have you don't know why you just you know you have and eventually you have a plot bag and an individual event bag and a theme bag and you have a character bag say in the character bag you have bits that feel right and seem to belong to an entity then you're creating an autobiography and a psychology

24:20and a history and a context and a milieu and an interior color palette and an interior middle dictionary of mythology and symbolism as if they were a real person you're asking questions but you're providing answers and you're asking questions and you're providing answers so you're doing the same research you do for a real person it's just that you're providing the most reasonable answer and the one that feels right and it's a long process to create a person from scratch but it becomes coherent because at the same time you're creating a plot or you're creating other symbolism and you're creating other people that interact with them but that's how you build somebody and if you commit to that process you have this opportunity to build somebody who never was that somebody else can inhabit which is two miracles it's two things that can't be true

25:20that you make true and then you do the other miracle which is you put some marks on paper pulp and it makes somebody hear something and see something and feel something and be somebody who never was in a place doesn't exist at a time that isn't there it's like miracle upon miracle upon miracle but you do it a step at a time step at a time step at a time you teach creative writing you also study theatre at university right yeah and it was much more useful I found as it happened because in order to you know you discover you have a body and you move and you exist in space which means you sort of have an understanding of that there is a focal point in a narrative if there isn't one it all seems to sort of float about you know you know avoid which isn't what you want and you discover you have a voice and you begin the exploration of voice and the voice in your head and the voice on your page and the voice out loud that freaks slightly different things but they intertwine and if you improve one if you deepen one

26:27you deepen them all and they get joined by the triple strand of the reader I don't want order biography because it's cheap and ridiculous and it's not enough and it's theft the thing is to be essential if I go into me and I'm essential then you get close to universal humanity which becomes essential to the person reading you there will always be fear but you have to say yeah but you're waiting outside the door until I need you and then I will use you to rewrite because you will become the fear of what if they don't understand me which is a useful fear but the other fears I need you to not be around just now yeah that's so that goes back to the naming you whatever character whether it's you know talking about people's essential goodness whatever but naming the thing now who is it without all the pretense and I think back to your novel day and the character alpha day we only discover sometimes who we are when we're tested sometimes you know when we can get to who like prisoner of war camp we you know

27:29crush down to who you are essence and what you're trying to protect and what life meant to you so I think that's great yeah creative writing or living living advice it's not just creative writing well if you have a good education system you don't have to be in a work camp or go to war or cling to wreckage after your ship went down to find out who you are you kind of have that information it's either the worst experiences of your life or the most beautiful experience but you know the Quakers say great pain or great joy opens the gates of the soul I think they've now rewritten it and I don't like the form of wording but that used to be the form of wording and that's it you know and and it can be joyful that can be assisted by friends and beautiful or it can be hellish and relationships and everything yeah it's not doing well but I mean you have to really emphasize it's a huge self-dealing stock bubble based on theft we've decided to ignore

28:30the fact that it's based on theft it's not particularly popular it's not really that useful or producing anything of quality and it's a it's multiple different appearing and disappearing entities who give money to each other in a closed loop it's inherently hideously unstable it may be too big to fail but I don't know if it is and it's never going to turn into general AI it just isn't at the top of it are these ideologues who are genuinely delusional who think they can upload their consciousness to general AI and they'll become godlike figures who live forever and in ain't that it's just a vast plagiarism machine which fire hoses chicken nuggets slurry at people who very quickly have realized largely chicken nuggets not my favourite food anyway also don't want to eat them every day also please take this off

29:37my customer service area please remove this from my page that I'm trying to write it's stupid and it's designed to be the only kind of person that all of these polygarchs want which is a woman who is endlessly reassuring sexually available and placating who will agree with everything they say that's the worst friend in the world I have a lot of friends who reflect back as well I mean there's this idea of GOD god but also great outdoors being spiritual I mean if you read Moby Dick it's hugely about the the essential spirituality of water the the healings of being near it or on it or in it we are very watery creatures salt watery creatures without salt we die bird song anything there I remember being in the at least being in

30:40you know the holy land you could see why it gave birth to three major world religions because it's so pitiless but so beautiful and we're so irrelevant to it and it's so clear we're irrelevant to it and that it could kill us that we have to do something about that relationship but it's achingly beautiful and extraordinary and atmospheric and dominating and you get a sense of scale it's also inspiring you know all of the advisors if you start take a walk if you start take a walk and be somewhere beautiful look at something beautiful be in an elevated place be in a place that's larger than you to make yourself and your problems go back to the right size of scale but yeah micro and macro always love nature and I love Ravens you know I put a lot of Ravens into the novel just because they're adorable and and some places that I love you know New England

31:45London Essex Sark beautiful colonzy they're all places that I loved and I was writing it mainly during lockdown and I'm able to go do any of the places that I loved so I kind of went back to them there's so much toxicity with old people telling young people what to prioritise I hope they have a planet they can live in I hope they have a survivable future should they want advice I would offer it but you know hopefully they realize everything good is about love and anything that isn't about love whatever had it's wearing whatever the resurrect is whatever the mask is it will eventually destroy you to some degree and you have to be smart about that my my father my grandfather was a card shop and he would beat you at poker he would beat you at anything

32:47he could count cards he could cut cards to any card that he wanted and he taught me there are people out there with skill sets you can't even imagine pulling stuff that you would never occur to you which makes you vulnerable because you can't imagine the mindset of somebody who would do expert said that's why you go and see a stage magician you don't understand what they're doing because you don't understand how somebody would build a device to put a note inside a loaf of bread inside a box for a living because of course you can't that's not why you're going you're going because it's wonderful but he you know he taught me everybody's a mug everybody can be like to but it's it's how you respond to that you you know there are predators and dark darknesses swimming in the ocean as you paddle along it's how you respond to that and how you keep yourself and others as safe as possible in a world where there are always

33:48going to be shadows and depths it's never going to be perfect but maximum safety maximum manifestations of love and joy we hope you've enjoyed listening to these highlights to listen to the latest episodes or learn more about participating in exhibitions or interviews click on subscribe thank you for listening