Ep. 413 Malcolm Guite - Lifting the Veil: Beauty, Myth, and Re-Enchantment

Malcolm Guite joins me to talk about his new epic poem Galahad and the Grail and why these ancient stories still matter. We explore how myth and poetry can help us see what’s real, how we’ve lost a sense of wonder in a mechanized and disenchanted world, and why imagination is essential for meaning. Malcolm shares how the story of the wasteland speaks to our cultural moment - from ecological crisis to the rise of technology - and how beauty, story, and the recovery of the sacred can begin to heal what’s been broken. This conversation moves from Arthurian legend to theology, from poetry to modern life, and invites us to see the world again with clarity, depth, and hope.

Malcolm Guite is a poet, scholar, and Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He has published five collections of poetry and many other books including Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder, 2017).

In 2023 he was awarded the Lanfranc Medal for Education and Scholarship by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He lives in Norfolk and travels extensively to give poetry readings and lectures and also has a popular YouTube channel he calls “A Spell in the Library.”

Malcolm's Book:

Galahad and the Grail

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Transcript

Malcolm Guite: 0:00

Experiences of beauty often have a kind of transcendent element to them. It's almost as though the beautiful thing or the beautiful person or the beautiful landscape was is for a moment, translucent. It's kind of something, something more is coming through. We get a glimpse as it were, through time to eternity.

Unknown: 0:22

So hello

Joshua Johnson: 0:33

and welcome to the shifting culture podcast. Once we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make, we want to see the body of Christ. Look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, you know, the great stories don't just entertain us. They reveal something true about the world we're living in, and sometimes they reveal it more clearly than anything else. Today, I'm joined by Malcolm guyte to talk about his new epic poem, Galahad and the Grail. We get into why these ancient Arthurian stories still matter, how myth and poetry can help us see what we've missed and what it means to live in a world that feels fractured and mechanized and disenchanted. And we talk about the wastelands, about how the choices we make shape the world around us, how beauty, imagination and story can begin to heal what is broken and why recovering wonder might be essential if we're going to find our way forward. We move from poetry to theology, from myth to modern life, and we ask a question underneath it all, what kind of world are we actually living in, and can we learn to see it again? So join us as we lift the veil and show what the world is really like. Here is my conversation with Malcolm. Geit Malcolm, welcome to shifting culture. So excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining me.

Malcolm Guite: 1:55

I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for thank you for having me. It's amazing the miracle of technology that allows us to talk, not as good as being really in each other's presence.

Joshua Johnson: 2:03

But yes, it is true. Technology is amazing. This is this is great. Sometimes technology can take us into into places where we don't want to get to you have we're going to talk about Galahad and the Grail. Your new book. It is an epic poem. It's a ballad of sorts of Arthurian tales. So you're looking at King Arthur and the Knights, and why is this story something that you wanted to take on? This is an epic for you. What drew you to it? So I

Malcolm Guite: 2:39

think first thing to say is simply that I've loved these stories all my life. My before I could even read, my mother was telling me these stories. She was a medievalist. She really knew the stories well. She knew some of the medieval sources, so she told them to me in this very powerful, moving way. And there are various ways in which, you know, my heart was attracted to that. So I played at night to the round table as a kid. So there was that kind of childhood love of it, and then I studied them. I studied medieval literature at Cambridge University when I was an undergraduate, and had a chance to see the earlier sources. And I realized the earlier sources had beautiful and mysterious things that had somehow, in kind of airbrushed out of the modern retellings, which tended to be either kind of disneyfying, like the sort of Sword in the Stone cartoon, or or just lots of people smashing each other, you know. And it was a bit more to it than that. And particularly, I felt the kind of Christian mystery at the heart of it was being erased to some extent. So I wanted to redress that. That was part of it. I did it partly on the conviction that these great myths, the kind of great formative myths and stories of anybody's nation, which, you know, I think the matter of is these stories used to be called the matter of Britain. They were the kind of founding being stories of my own nation. And I think it's always good to look back and remember those. I think that one of my convictions is these stories are older and wiser than we are, that they know stuff, if you like, that we don't know and need to find out. And in fact, every generation that retells them finds something different in them, you know, and they need to be retold every couple of generations at least, at least for that. But to give you an example, I mean, I go back to saying My mother told me these stories. Now, my mother did not hold back, right? She didn't give me a kind of sanitized boundaries version. I realized afterwards, when I came to read the medieval manuscripts, that my mother was sometimes quoting those verbatim, because she had a kind of Now, here's the thing, I must have been about eight. It would have been like 1965 probably my mother told me the story, which is very much embedded in in in the epic that I'm telling of what's called the Dolorous stroke and the wasteland. And that's very important background. You don't understand them. Me, what the special healing that comes with the Grail, until you understand what went before. So my mother told me the story, and the story is this, you got to imagine me as being eight, my mother, there's a very rash Knight called Balin who kind of is very impulsive and does stuff with, you know, before he engages his brain, as it were, and he he does an act of violence at Camelot court and is expelled. And so he wants to go and prove himself and do some worthy deeds in order to be kind of back in Arthur's good books. But he takes a sword with him which has been cursed, and he's been told not to take it, but he takes it anyway. How dumb can you be? But anyway, in the story, ballin is after a knight who's he's trying to get revenge on a knight who's murdered some people who can be invisible. But he's told that there's a court where there's a feast where the knight will be visible. What he doesn't know is that this is the Grail castle. This is where the Holy Grail and the Spear of Longinus that pierce all these Hallows out of a chap. So he shows up at this and they're all supposed to leave their swords at the door, but he conceals a dagger, and in the middle of the feast, he gets up and attacks this knight. And basically he's broken all the laws of hospitality. So the king caught by some of the Fisher King. Sometimes he's called King pellum, sometimes King pelles, the king, who's his host, gets up and pursues him, right? So he runs away. My mother's telling this story. He's lost the he's had to leave his sword. He's lost the dagger that he did the stabbing with. He's weaponless. He's being pursued by the king. He's running through the castle trying to find a weapon. He thinks, oh, there'll be swords or shields or something hanging on the wall, and my mother told me story that he goes, as he gets to the deeper parts of the castle, and then the higher parts he he realizes there's something mysterious. He hears voices in the air. Then he hears, like angels singing, and hears these voices going, don't come any further, you know, wicked man. This is a holy place, you know. But he's like scared he's being pursued. So he finds himself eventually comes to this threshold, and their voices say, don't, don't cross. But he does into the chapel of the Grail. But he doesn't know it is the Chapel of the Grail, and he sees the holy grail covered in the in a veil, but above the holy grail hovering in the air, all by itself, he sees a spear, and from the spear, these drops of blood are falling down towards the ground, sort of disappearing here. And he should have fallen down and worshiped at that point. You know he's in that way of Holies, but the king is still pursuing him, and he does the worst thing he could possibly do. He just rushes forward, he seizes the spear. Doesn't even know what the spear is, and he turns. But this is the spear that pierced Christ's heart. This is the spear that should never be used for violence ever again. Indeed, it's arguable that after that spear Chris pierced Christ's heart, they shouldn't, and no spear should ever have pierced anybody's heart after that, because all the legends of the world came into that spear, and God replied to them with love and forgiveness. So to take that thing and use it. So he turns around and he wounds his host, the king, in the thigh. And as soon as he does that, that whole part of the castle falls down, and they're buried in darkness for three days and three nights. So him, the wounded King and the Grail, which is still giving light, and the spear, after three days, of course, Merlin shows up, and he moves the stones and gets them out. And then he says to Balin, you have struck the dollar a stroke. And not only because of you, is the king wounded, and his wound will never heal until the grailmite comes, but because the king is wounded, the land is wounded with him. The whole land is less for three quantities round wide, nothing will grow. The fish are dead in the rivers. The crops are rotting in the land. The cows can't carve the land is utterly waste. And then he's told he's going to have to ride out through this land. And as he rides through the land, everybody comes to their door and curses him. Everybody knows my mum is telling me this story, and I'm like, hey, whoa, but mom, you know, I couldn't, I said, But Mum, that seems so like, how can they even be like he didn't even know what he was doing anyway? How can there be a world? How could you even imagine a world where one man doing one rash thing could bring such devastation on all these people, you know, the whole even the land, like you can't sow crops and everything. And my mum had me out, and then she was one of those moments you're never going to forget. My mom talked to me and she said, it may seem terrible that this happened, but this is the kind of world we live in, and this is the world you live in. And I told you this story, because you need to know this. And then she told me, I'd sort of half heard it on the radio about nuclear war and mutual issue or destroy the coup and missile crisis was not that long before the fear of a nuclear winter. Now she said, we have to pray and work that this never happens. I. Now, luckily, my mum didn't leave me there in the wasteland. Yeah, not like TS Elliot, but so, so She then told me that before he rode off, Merlin said to guy, said to to Balin, the knight who did the dollar stroke. One day the good night will come and he will come and achieve the Holy Grail. And then with the spear, the same spear that wounded the king, he will heal the king the blood from the and when the king is healed, the wasteland will be healed, and there will be a time of healing and renewal. And Balin, at least, gets know that. So I knew that. So what, you know, I and then I asked for more stories about knights and horses, and I never forgot that. Now, here's the thing I learned, that in one way, at least these stories are true, that they tell you real stuff now, and I never forgot that. Now, when I was then a student in the late 70s, you know, second half of the 70s. I'm at university, but I'm also reading in the news. I mean, I realized about ecological disaster pretty early. I was thinking about, you know, all these things piercing the ozone layer I lived in. My parents were living in Hamilton, Ontario at that time, and there's a hell of a lot of pollution in Lake Ontario then and the defasquelle steel factories. So I began to think about the wasteland in a new way. And I realized the wasteland was also about ecological disaster and the choices we make. But again, I remembered the possibility of healing. So I thought, Whoa, there's another layer of meaning here. Then later on, when I became somebody who talked about the theology and literature and thinking about about philosophically, about the way we see the world. I became aware of what people are broadly calling disenchantment, or the need for the sense that the world has been reduced to just Rubble, just stuff, just dead stuff. You know, we think we can manipulate, but that's not the way most people it's not the way indigenous people see the world. It's not even the way we used to see the world, except for the last two or 300 years. And we've got a false way of seeing the world. And I realized the wasteland is also about that. I realized I'm part of a movement, you know, of what you might broadly call re enchantment, which is trying to say, let's let's forget the imminent frame. Let's not be materialists anymore. Let's recognize the spiritual nature. Let's world again as enchanted, and see how the eternal kind of sometimes shimmers through the temporal and how the spiritual touches the material, which is what sacrament is, and so on. We need to recover that vision. And lots of people, not just Christians, people, are realizing that. So I realized by retelling these stories, I could also be doing that. And in fact, in my account of the Wasteland in this book is very much about this question of disenchantment and re enchantment. My mother giving me that hard lesson about the world I lived in through the medium of a magical story never left me. Book you may see dedicated to the memory of my mother. It says in memory of my mother, Sheena geid, homemaker and storyteller 1918, to 2020. She was 100 when she died.

Joshua Johnson: 13:29

Amazing to have that, that storyteller and your mom, these these great myths seem to get at truth. That is what is happening, what is really real, what's underneath the actual surface of the world. It lifts the veil for us. What story and myth does for me is it helps me embody this thing. It helps me live into that you telling the story of the Wasteland helps me not just give inspiration, but helps me embody something to say, we can actually then go and help again, the healing of this world,

Malcolm Guite: 14:10

because that mythical, mythic imagination becomes prophetic imagination, it becomes more so you, I noticed you use the word embody a couple of times, And I think that's a really important word. So for me, the best account of poetry, and you might say, not only poetry, but mythology, you know, legendary stories, the best account of what it is now it works, is unsurprisingly, given by Shakespeare, and it's in the it's the right stream. And here's this thing, you know, remember, he says, the poet's eye in fine frenzy, rolling doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, and then he says this. And as imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown, the poet's end turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing, a local habitation and a name. So there are. Things we need to know that may be unknown to us, but imagination and poetry, myth can body them forth, embody them, do something about it.

Joshua Johnson: 15:08

And your appendix, you you say you want to slip past the the wasteful dragons of secularism again and awake again in the modern world, that openness to beauty and mystery which prepares the heart for the coming Christ. What is that beauty and mystery in this, this poetry and the myth? How does beauty and mystery actually then prepare our hearts to receive the truth of Christ?

Malcolm Guite: 15:33

I think I put beauty and mystery together carefully, because there is something very mysterious about beauty. Experiences of beauty often have a kind of transcendent element to them. It's almost as though the beautiful thing or the beautiful person or the beautiful landscape was is for a moment, translucent. It's kind of something, something more is coming through. We get a glimpse, as it were, through time to eternity. I mean, my mother used to recite a poem to me, and I was little, which began out beyond the sunset. Could I but find the way? Partly what Lewis calls, you know, the yearning for the far off country. And I think, therefore, beauty is a kind of emblem, or even almost a portal to the divine. And I mean, I'm enough of a Platonist to say that I think beautiful, beauty has its origin in eternity. And I would go with the platanic triad, that beauty, truth and goodness belong together and come from the same place. I mean to talk Lewis again, he's telling a great so in The Magician's Nephew, when he tells the story of the creation of Narnia as magically transported to it, this ordinary London cabbie right East End oak, and suddenly they, like they hear the song of creation, and all the stars suddenly come out all at once, and they're singing and and the cabbie says something amazing. He says, blimey. He says, I'd have been a better man all my life if I'd known there were things like this. You know, his first impulse from the beauty is towards goodness. And it's curious. It's interesting. If you think about the word fair, the word fair is often used to mean beautiful. You know, fair made, you know, it was a fair sight. But fair also means just want to use, because there is something ugly about injustice. Do you know what I mean? And there is something that calls you to be just. If you see the beautiful a beautiful piece of architecture or beautiful painting has just proportions. So again, we use the word just, not only for ethical but for esthetic things. And I sometimes think that that one of the reasons why people can behave in such ugly ways is that we've constructed an ugly environment for ourselves. Sort of deforms our thoughts.

Joshua Johnson: 17:57

So how did you want to construct something beautiful? Why do you think poetry and this ballad form was the thing that you wanted to bring forth in the story, and not prose, not something else, but this, this beautiful form of ballad, then this is it

Malcolm Guite: 18:15

for you. So I think you almost answered the question in the way you've asked it about this beautiful form. The thing is this, if we take this thing that beauty is part of it, the point about poetry is, poetry is language aspiring to the condition of music. I mean, musicians have essentially two things to work with. They have tempo and they have melody, and within melody, they have harmony and counterpoint and so on. But essentially, there's the rhythm and then there's the variation of notes. Now poets have equivalent two things. The equivalence of tempo in poetry is strong beat or meter or rhythm, and the equivalence of melody are all the subtle effects. You can get rhyme, half rhyme, alliteration, assonance, all the kind of, you know, lovely like, so just to quote something in a ballad form, and was one of the ballads that inspired me, Samuel Taylor coleridge's rhyme with the ancient mirror Mariner, where he goes the fair breeze blew the white foam flew. The Furrow followed free. We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea. And you hear the sibilances of silence sea and all the fricatives of fair proof, you know first. But do you see all the interns? And you can do that for something beautiful, but you can also use it. You can get the sound of a tolling Bell, for example, same ballad, alone alone, all all alone alone on a wide, wide sea, and never a saint took pity on my soul in agony. You can hear it. Now, Gordon, is there an effect which affects the meaning that is coming through the music of the words? Another analogy that might help is the the effect of poetry as opposed to prose, is a bit like the music in a film. You're not entirely conscious of the music while you're watching the film, but the music is allowing you, it's deepening and heightening your emotional response. And if you, if you ever watch a movie that you've known and loved without the musical soundtrack, it suddenly seems quite flat and flimsy. You know, even though you weren't apparently paying attention to the music, the music was working in you and opening up certain levels of response to the story that might not otherwise be opened up. Now I could have written this in prose, but I wanted a beautiful form. And a final comment on this is that we've been talking about disenchantment and re enchantment in the word embedded in the word enchanted, or enchantment is the word chant. And enchantments are almost always chants. And chants rhythmic. So I am actually trying to enchant you with a kind of chant at an incantatory form, which is what the ballad form is. Then, can you give

Joshua Johnson: 22:22

me an example of that? Can you read, then from your Prelude about you taking up the tale? So just give us a flavor of this. Yeah, I'd love

Malcolm Guite: 22:29

to do that. And actually this, this Prelude is more or less exactly as it happened. Now, the thing is this, ballads precede literature. Ballads were made up and remembered and sung in pubs and homes and passed down from from you know, person to person down the generations. There are people up in Northumberland who'll sing ballads that were probably composed in the 16th century, and they've never seen them written down. They've just heard them and sung them. So a lot of my composition actually starts when I'm walking in the woods and I listen to it, I taste it on the tongue, I test it on the ear, almost before it ever gets written down. That's very much the scenario here. But as I read this, you'll certainly hear the ballad form, and you'll hear the sense of the rhythm, and also, I hope, the kind of like bells cascading, sort of rhyme. I love, I love rhyme. I've always loved that Dylan line in Mr. Tambourine Man, which is a masterpiece where he says, if you hear vague traces of skipping, reels of rhyme to your tambourine in time, I wouldn't pay it any mind. It's just a ragged cloud behind. It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing. You know, vague traces, deals that rhyme is what you're after. Okay, here we go. Take up the tale. As I walked out one morning, all in the soft, fine rain, it seemed as though a silver veil was shining over hill and Vale, as though some lovely, long last spell had made all knew again, and through that shimmer in the air, I seemed to hear a sound, as though a distant horn were blown in some lost land that I had known, that seemed to speak from tree and stone and echo all around and with The music came these words, poet take up the tale. Take up the tale. This land still keeps in earth and water. Magic sleeps. The Dryad sighs, the Naiad weeps, but you can lift the veil from where the waves wash, Cornwall's caves out to the White Horse Vale. The lands still hold the Tales of Old like hidden treasure, buried gold once more, the story must be told. Poet, take up the tale. Tell of the King who will return. Tell of the Holy Grail. Tell of old knights and chivalry. Tell of the pristine mystery of Merlin's Isle of gramarye. Poet, take up the tale, take up the tale of courtesy. Take up the tale of grace. Revive the land's long memory. Summon the fair folk. Let them be something of faery, wild and free. Still lingers in this place. Lift up your eyes to see the light on Glastonbury Tor then come down from that far Green Hill to where the sacred waters spill and shine within the chalice well and listen to their Lord. Yea. Listen well before you start be still ere you begin see through the surface round about the noise, the rush, the fear, the doubt, though modern Britain lies without fair logres lives within you may yet walk through Merlin's Isle by oak and ash and Thorn the ancient Hills do not forget. And you might wake their wisdom. Yet, who knows what wonders might be met on this midsummer morn. So I have taken up the tale to tell it full and free, the tale that makes my heart rejoice. I tell it for I have no choice. I tell it till another voice takes up the tale from me. It's beautiful. That gives you a taste of it.

Joshua Johnson: 26:28

That's so great. And it continues that way. And you start here right there in your preludes about lifting the veil, yeah, and it's a theme throughout, and we see the veil being lifted. And we see it happening throughout the story.

Malcolm Guite: 26:44

Eventually, the veil itself is lifted from the Grail, and that lifts

Joshua Johnson: 26:48

the veil. Yeah, and so what is this veil that you're trying to lift? What are you trying to help us see that we can't see at the moment?

Malcolm Guite: 26:57

Well, one of the sort of sources for me again, we go to Coleridge. Coleridge wrote, I think, another great account of what poetry does. And he, after he and Wordsworth, wrote the Lyrical Ballads, which just, you know, beget invented romantic poetry and changed the course of English literature. 20 years later, Coleridge looked back on that, that animus Mirabilis, you know, where they wrote these poems, including the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. And he kind of asked the question, what were we trying to do? And he says this. He says Our aim was, and I'm quoting him directly now, is to awaken the mind's attention. And then he says this, to remove the film of familiarity, which our selfishness and solicitude. Solicitude means greediness, trying to get stuff, the film of familiarity which our selfishness and solicitude has cast over the world. Wherefore we have eyes that see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. What he's saying is, we've, we have cast over the world this film of familiarity. We've, we've reduced it to ordinariness. We've, we've tried to dominate it. We've seen it as just dead stuff that we can manipulate. We've completely lost our sense of all and wonder and mystery, and therefore, we've missed out on the meaning of experience. We're very good at breaking stuff up and analyzing the constituent bits, but we're very bad at seeing synthesis, synthesis and harmony and wholeness. So to quote, I can illustrate what it is we might see if we did lift the veil with another metaphor, again drawn from Coleridge. So he has this wonderful poem called frost at midnight where he's thinking about how he wants his son to be to grow up. The little kid's just a babe sleeping, and he's just, you know, got the babe slumbering in a cradle by his side, and he's sitting up and thinking about it. And he's thinking about how he was sent to this awful school in London and taught kind of analytic reason, and told that the world was just bits and pieces that you could manipulate. And he just felt like he was losing his vision, because he says, My child is going to be different. He says, Thou, my child shall wander like a breeze by lakes and sandy shores beneath the crags of ancient mountains that mirror and you see. Then he says, So shalt thou see and hear? And he does not say, so shalt thou see and hear certain geological and meteorological phenomena which might be exploitable. What he says is, so shalt thou see and hear the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language which thy God utters, who doth teach himself in all and all things, in himself, great universal teacher, he shall mold thy spirit, and by giving make it ask extraordinary what he does later in his first is in coleridge's time, and indeed in ours, the dominant model of the cosmos, of the universe we find ourselves in, was essentially mechanistic. It's like a big piece of clockwork. It's like a series of interacting mechanisms. And Coleridge said, actually, what if that's the wrong metaphor? What if it's more like a poem than a piece of clockwork? Now, in one of his lectures, Coleridge says, Look, I could give you a poem, right? I could give you a physical piece of paper with the poem, or you could take up my book here, right? You could, you could take it to pieces, and you could do a chemical dissolution of the paper and find out exactly what the elements were in the paper. And you might even be able to figure out which trees were originally pulped, you know? Then you could notice the print, and you could do a geometric study of each letter. Then you could do a statistical study of which letters recurred. And you could go on like that for a year or two, accumulating massive knowledge about this physical thing in front of you, right? And never even know is a poem. But then, if I wandered in and said, Hey, get this, and I read you a bit to it like. Had just read you the poet. You go, Whoa, it's a poem. It means something now that doesn't take away from any of the stuff you discovered about the paper and the ink and the shapes. In fact, some of the stuff you discovered, like which letters came where and how frequently certain letters recur, might ultimately help you to understand the poem, but only if you know it's a poem. So what I think we've been doing for the last two or 300 years in the West, in the scientific West, not, I mean, you know, good science is a good thing, but is we've been, we've been analyzing the paper and ink of the poem. Forgot, it's a poem. So again, CS Lewis, towards the end of his life, wrote an interesting essay about, partly about the relation of reason and imagination, which he felt was kind of screwed up in various ways. And he says an interesting thing about the distinction the different kinds of real and real truth that these two faculties, reason and imagination can get you. And then he says it very pithily in one sentence, he says, reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning. So reason gets you to know what stuff is there, but you then need to know something more. T, S. Eliot put it another way, he writes two questions in one of his poems, the choruses from the rock just two questions. And think to think, he wrote this before digitization, before the age of the computer, he wrote two questions. Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? So hierarchy, so the more information you have, it's information is completely useless if you don't have bodies of knowledge to organize what the information means. So I remember when we were all being told we're in an information economy, and then people realize you actually need a knowledge economy. Unfortunately, nobody has attained to a wisdom economy yet. So the point is, we need knowledge to know what to do with information, but the more knowledge we have, we need wisdom. And once we realize we need wisdom, then that's where we start needing. We need our scriptures. We need the great myths and legends. We need the stories. We need the plays of Shakespeare. We need all these works of imagination to rekindle wisdom in us,

Joshua Johnson: 33:57

as you were talking about that. You're talking about, this mechanistic age that we live in, the age, really, of the machine. We were talking about reason and imagination. I mean, you have a piece here in in your book, and one section actually reveals the face of somebody that has created a wasteland of the earth. And there's cogs and machines and things in there that human has become machine. Yeah. And so how do we know we are human? What does being human mean in this world of machine?

Malcolm Guite: 34:31

The story of Galahad and the Naiad there, and the the necromancers, when they take this helmet off, he's just become a machine. I actually wrote, To be honest, partly as a parable about AI and I talked about him became, you know, we become the idols that we make. So here's the it's about idolatry. So here's the thing, why did we lose the old idea that the world was a poem or a text to be read or a book and get the clockwork idea? Well, you can exactly time it historically, basically as soon as we'd invented clockwork, we had a self regulating mechanism. We went, Whoa. Maybe the world is like this. So we make something. Now, if we make something, it is necessarily lesser than we are. We transcend the things we make, right? So we're taking something which is lesser, and when we're squashing, taking the greater and squashing it down into the model of the lesser that we did when we made we made clocks, and then that, we made the world clock. And as a result of that, we then began to tyrannize over ourselves, and even strap clocks onto our wrists and push each other around to do stuff at exact times, which we never used to do. I mean, we, you know, we did stuff, but we did stuff by season. I mean, the machine, which was meant to be our seventh, even clockwork became our master. There's a great Charlie Chaplin movie that demonstrates that way, he's kind of stuck on the face of a box. So what happens next? We invent computers, and we have this distinction between hardware and software, and we have this process of programming a computer to change the tasks it can do and alter the outcomes that you get out of it. And some bright spark says, Oh, wow, we must be just like computers. And we start using these absurd things. We talk about reprogramming people, which is blasphemous and horrible. And then we talk about the software, you know, we have to change our mental software. And then we use this awful metaphor that people use all the time. Time about, oh, I was hard wired to do this, which is a way of diminishing your own free will and, you know, escape. So we have made something which, because we've made it, is necessarily lesser than ourselves, and then we will make ourselves into the image of that. And that's why I say in that part of the poem Galahad, sometimes we become the idols that we make, we actually diminish into the thing that we've made. So that was just normal computers. We were doing that, and I was a school teacher at the time, and I was with every fiber of my being, resisting the rhetoric that was coming from government and from headmasters about programming and reprogramming. I said this is subhuman. It's inhuman the word education, the Duke. Duke is the Latin word educe means to draw out from something. So education is about drawing out and opening out what is within. It's not about programming. It's not mechanistic. You know, let computers do what computers do best, but don't let them do what. Let's not confuse computers and people. Now, I just feel that AI is a hideous extension of that where we've made, I mean, it shouldn't be called artificial intelligence, because it's not intelligent. It should be called, it should be called averaging interface. What it's doing is it taking tons of stuff and running it past you so quickly, and then finding what is essentially a very clever version of auto correct. It's just trying to predict on a statistical basis, but you can use that to kid people. And you give it a name. You call it Claude, or whatever you know, or Siri or Alexa, or you know. And then you start because you have an imagination, even though it doesn't even have an imagination, you use your imagination to start having a relationship with it. Now you're really screwed. You know, that's why. I mean, I love the imagination. I think it's redemptive. But I'm not unaware that scripture talks about vain imaginations, empty imaginations, and I think the the kind of giving the gift of personhood from us to the computer, which really means we just pretend the computer is it's no different from a kid pretending they're doll as a personality in talking to it, you know, all the beautiful creativity when a girl is playing with her Barbie is coming from the girl, not the Barbie, you Know. And kind of we know that with kids, but we forget it with ourselves. I mean, it's extraordinary. There was a really amazing thing some years ago, some guy was caught having climbed over the wall of Windsor Castle with a crossbow who was going to try and assassinate the queen. When it all came to court, it turned out he was having a relationship. Wasn't. It wasn't even a full AI. It was a sort of chat bot, you know, with this girl that he'd named. And the Future program was just affirming everything he did. It said almost just, you know, I think I might be called to be an assassin. Just, Oh, that's so cool. I would really admire you if you're, you know. Just, and this guy had got to the point in this closed loop, you know, obviously he was a shy guy. He didn't have any real relationships. He had this imaginary girl. There was a computer who ends up reinforcing the idea that he can now, instead, try to impress this girl. It isn't a girl at all. I mean, it's a repetitive program, and he's going to kill the queen to impress her. Now, that has really lost the plot. But, I mean, you know, that's an extreme example, but we could all get there quite easily. That's partly I'm using my story to body forth what that problem is. I mean, it's more particularly about pollution as well, but because the other thing is, the AI is constantly using energy and water, which are the two things we're most short of we

Joshua Johnson: 40:23

started in this conversation, there in that answer about clockwork and about time, and we, we're time bound creatures. We're in this thing of time. I find myself yearning for the timeless, for something outside of time. And you know, if God is love and love is outside of time, God is outside of time, I yearn for it. We just soon have

Malcolm Guite: 40:51

a minute, then it's taken away from us and we lose it. You know, Boethius said eternity is not like an endless string of minutes, like we have them now, where you've no sooner had it, and you lose it, and you have to wait for the next one to come along. He says, eternity is a Nunc stands, an eternal now a standing, you know, all of time, you know, yeah. And now you yearn for the eternal. So do I. And there's, I think all our poetry and all our music has an element of elegy in it, because now we live when things fade and pass away. You know? I mean, there's a poet. The poet Jeffrey Hill, has a great line where he says, I founder and desire for things unfound. I stay amidst the things that will not stay. He's riffing on Heraclitus, famous dictum panta Ray, everything flows. Everything flows away from us, and yet we long for this. So part of that's part of what's going on. Plots by Bill, you know, one of the things I tried to capture in the moment when the veil is lifted and the Grail is revealed is some sense of time touching eternity.

Joshua Johnson: 41:55

Yeah, the sacred meeting the ordinary. And I love this little line that you have as the ship reaches the island, and you talk about the island being in and out of time,

Malcolm Guite: 42:09

yeah, that whole section about the island of the way, is my attempt to body forth those visionary moments that we all have, yeah, like, if those visionary moments were a place, what kind of a place would it be? And to be honest, the person who does it, I was kind of partly inspired by, is actually Tolkien's description of Lothlorien. There's that whole passage when they cross the river into Lothlorien proper. Freddy says it was like somehow going in and out of time, and they the elves seem to be living in a slightly different time from them and so on. And you like that bit

Joshua Johnson: 42:45

about the island? Well, what does it look like for for us, this time bound creature, to like, get towards the timeless? Like, how does that interplay work out for us? What does it look like for us to move towards the timeless? So I think the poet

Malcolm Guite: 43:03

who, I mean, some poets, have got this, e Cummings, the American poet, had this wonderful line. We talked about the colossal hoax of clocks and calendars, that when you've had this moment of touching the eternal, you know, uses the rest. But the poet who really does it is J S Eliot, I think so he's trying to talk about this timeless moment, or the intersection of time, and the time is, and he goes this. He goes quick. Now, here, now, always a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything. So I tried to write about it actually. I'll just see if I can grab it quickly here in my sequence of poems, David's crown on the Psalms. There are lots of ways of interpreting Psalm 137 by the rivers of Babylon. We sat down and wept there. We hung up our hearts harps because we remembered Zion. So you can think about it being in exile. You can think about Babylon as oppressive regimes. You know they were longing for Jerusalem, but one of the spiritual interpretations of it is that we're longing. We're longing for the true Zion. We're longing for eternity. And for me, the river of Babylon is the river of time going past. So maybe I could just read that Jude notes, kind of off of this. I give the Latin titles of the Psalms, super flumina. Flumina is the river the flowing. Here we go, that we might find in Christ complete assurance. We still recall these stories of the past. For in them is the pattern and persistence of our long exile from the things that last. For we live Super flumina, time flows away from us, and all we prize is lost the moment we attain it, like the rose that shows eternity yet fades and falls. So all our songs and music still disclose the tragedy of time, the voice that calls us from eternity must always make an elegy we beat against time's walls. For this is Babylon. Our captors take the best in us the moment it is born. But Babylon will fall. We will awake. We will awake out of time into eternity. You know, sleeper

Joshua Johnson: 45:37

awake, beautiful. You know, at the very beginning of this conversation, you talked about how this, this gal head of the Grail, this Merlin's Isle epic that you're doing. The Arthur stories are the stories of Britain, the great myths of Britain. How does this rendering? How is this uncovering and lifting the veil of what is truly the story of Britain?

Malcolm Guite: 46:03

Very good question. I do think sometimes countries are in danger of forgetting themselves or forgetting the heart of who they are, and they kind of need these stories to remind them. But this is a dangerous thing, because myth can easily be abused by people and used in a wrong way. So I'm trying to, you know, find a man too. So first of all, you may have remembered in the prelude I wrote, I said, See through the surface, round about, the noise, the rush, the fear, the doubt, though modern Britain lies without fair logres lives within and logres is the name. It's the Celtic name in Welsh for the kingdom that Arthur. Ruled. I was making a contrast between logres and Britain, actually, because CS Lewis does it at the end of that hideous strength. There's this wonderful conversation in which he uses the words Britain and the word logres to help us body forth. Or imagine, if you like, the soul of a country, a country losing its soul, a country losing its identity. And this would be a very different if we talk about America. I mean, America, you know, is a great and daring experiment in a way of living, and what it might mean to be a republic, what it might mean to be a government for of the people, for the people, by the people. That's, you know, that's the soul of America, right? Every so often, America gets to a point where it's in danger of losing its soul, and it has to be recalled to its origins to become itself again, right? So here's a little bit from CS Lewis's book, that hideous strength, where he makes this comment about Britain and logres, which is we've had a big influence on me in writing his poem. So he this, somebody says, in the book, they say, there's something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call logres. Haven't you noticed we are two countries after every Arthur, a Mordred behind every Milton, a Cromwell, a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers. Don't you feel it, the very quality of England. If we've got an ass's head, it is by walking in a fairy wood. We this is great. We've heard something better than we can do, but can't quite Forget it. Don't you see it in everything English, a kind of awkward grace, a humble, humorous incompleteness. So that's part of what's going on. We need to remember that. But there's another thing now. There's, I'm going to be briefly political for a moment here. So we're having a lot of tussling back and forth in Britain over immigration. And there's quite a few fairly, I think, essentially, racist or bigoted kind of right wing people who'd like to make immigration into an issue, to divide people amongst themselves so that they don't notice. You know that the billionaires are actually the people. They say, Stop the boat. Stop the small boats. It's actually the big boats. It's the yachts that are the problem. Anyway, there's neither here nor there. Now they've taken the St George's flag, the Red Cross, which is where my gala heard us, and they're using it in various ways like that. Now, I totally get the feeling of ordinary people in England who are resentful that what they think of as metropolitan elites, and particularly, you know, left wing have denied them pride of place and love of nation. Like I'm all for pride of place and love, but human life did not originate in the British Isles. All of us came here from somewhere. And the beauty of the English language, which I love and serve, is that it's built up out of about four languages. You know, there's Celtic Latin, there's Anglo Saxon, there's Norse, there's French, there's Anglo Norman. That's what makes it rich, and what makes the British character Rich is precisely that we are Celts and Saxons and Vikings, and now we are also people from all over the continent of Europe, the Jewish people who came here, particularly as refugees and the great they've all contributed, you know. And you know very much so the Indian and Pakistani people come here, contributed nine different ways. Now here, here's the thing. We think of the tales of King Arthur as the English epic. Rightly so. But the first thing you need to know about the English Epic is that the hero, Arthur, was not English. He was what he was, spoke a different he didn't speak English. Who did he fight? He fought the Saxons. He hated here, the sound, but he became a symbol beyond that immediate struggle between the Celts and the Saxons. Eventually they got on. And in the end, Arthur could be a king for both of them. He could be and you know, in in the full if you take the full Grail story, the whole story actually starts with some people arriving in a small boat from the Middle East, Joseph of Arimathea, bringing the Grail and the thing. And I want to love this country, and love the stories of it, and love the way it's woven and together of the many, the many peoples of these islands. And actually, I think the story of King Arthur is a really good example of that, because it isn't even written down in English until about 600 years after the event, the first bits are in Welsh, then they're in Latin, then they're in Anglo Norman, then they're in French, then they're in Italian and High German, then finally, They're written down in Middle English, like Jeremy. So, so I have a bit it's not in this first volume, but it's in the second volume where Merlin, before he kind of goes into the earth, has some last words for Arthur. And Arthur has had this dream about these two dragons, the red dragon and the white dragon, always fighting each other. And he sort of knows that the Red Dragon is. Celts, and the white dragon is the Saxons, but they could be any two races or any political point. And then in his dream, he sees this golden dragon. And because the red and white dragon are fighting each other, they're destroying the townships. They're breathing out fire. Their tails are sweeping down villages and things. And in the dream, he's saying, How can I stop it? And then he sees this golden dragon that flies between the two of them and and spreads its wings out to both of them, and the the Red Dragon becomes red gold, and the white dragon becomes white gold, and there are kind of pacified by the by the golden dragon. Merlin basically says to Arthur, you that's why you called Arthur pen dragon. You know you are the golden dragon and his hands, and the Golden Dragon will be the king whom both the Celts and the Saxons honor. Well, I want that to be a parable for our times. This may not happen, because lots of people may buy my book and think, hooray, good old Britain. You know, I'm glad of Arthur. You know, what about these that's fine if they want to buy it. You know, what I hope is by the time they've finished it, beginning to imagine in a different way, because I don't want to, I don't want to come across as trying to be, you know, dismissive or contemptuous. I know lots of people in my own small town who are seriously worried about immigration, who feel resentful about jobs and housing and education and sometimes all that has been handled really badly, and there must be better ways of handling it. So it's not that you can't there, but there is a conversation to be had. But I have no time whatsoever for people who often don't even live here, and actually then stir up trouble and set one community against the other, because they can exploit that. And I want, in that sense, I want to tell this story as a reminder that we have these essentially multi linguistic, multicultural roots, and that has been a strength and not a weakness,

Joshua Johnson: 53:45

of Great Britain. It's a great strength. This book, Galahad and the Grail, is the first of four volumes that you're doing on Merlin's Isle, these Arthurian stories. It's a fantastic book. It also looks fantastic. You have incredible artwork in there as well.

Malcolm Guite: 54:02

The Illustrator is a genius. I mean, it's just getting better all the time as well.

Joshua Johnson: 54:06

Yeah. And, I mean, this is a, this is a book that it's just beautiful, something that, you know, I probably will want to pass down to my son, and then hope, yeah, they could pass down to him, to they're

Malcolm Guite: 54:19

making it beautiful, like, Yeah, well, I hope it'll be on shelves. You know, my hope is that it'll be passed down the generations. In fact, at the very end, I have the character symbols say you must pass this tale down the generations. And I hope that's,

Joshua Johnson: 54:34

Is there anywhere that you would like to point people to? How could they connect with you and what they're doing, or anywhere specifically you'd like to point them to to get the book. Well, in

Malcolm Guite: 54:43

terms of getting the book, go to rabbit room and go like rabbit room, Merlin's Island, you'll find all their pages. If you're in North America, they're the people. If you're in the UK, it's Canterbury press. But in terms of me, and there are two things, I mean, they've, I've got a little website where you just go malcolmgate.com and you'll find it. But the other thing, which is maybe my main thing, is I have a YouTube where just once a week, I read out something to you for 10 minutes, you know, and I sit and smoke my pipe and chat, and that's called a spell in the library, and I think quite a few people like that. So that's if you want to get to know me and what I do that, if you just go Malcolm guy at YouTube, or Malcolm guy at spell, or something like that, you'll get that

Joshua Johnson: 55:21

excellent Well, Malcolm, thank you for this conversation. Really enjoyed speaking with you, talking to you today, of actually, then lifting the veil, opening things up for us, and what myth and imagination can do, the story, the poetry, the ballad, the story of the Holy Grail and the Knights and Arthur, and how that actually opens us up to the truth, to see that there is some beauty and mystery that could then open us up to Christ and can bring us and that we could start to then body forth this word. It's just a beautiful book. It was a beautiful conversation. So thank you. Great. I really enjoyed

Malcolm Guite: 55:59

having it. Thanks for having me on. Much appreciated. Thanks. You.