Question 1

Why call yourself an ollav, and not a poet?

Accepted Answer

Because poet is what remained after the office was confiscated. The ollav was the master-grade of the Gaelic poetic caste — jurist, genealogist, satirist, a man whose praise could seat a king and whose satire was said to raise blisters on a king's face. Then Walter Scott took a Lowland word of contempt for a bad fiddler and, with the genius of the romantic forger, rewrote a caste of legal authority into a quaint Highland minstrel. The poète maudit — Komrij, Wigman, the doomed darlings — is the last, declawed echo of that confiscation: the poet readmitted to society on the condition that he be harmless and, preferably, dead. I say ollav to remember that the poet was once a function the state could not afford to ignore.

Question 2

What is the difference between fantasy and daydream?

Accepted Answer

A daydream consoles you for the life you are not living; it hands you the image of the thing so that you will stop demanding the thing itself. Fantasy is the opposite faculty — an organ of perception that lets you see what is not yet real and could still be made real. The entertainment industry sells the first and calls it the second. It floods the child with pre-manufactured wonder so that the organ of fantasy never has to grow; and a person who has never once exercised that organ will mistake consumption for imagination for the rest of his life. The capture is gentle, nearly total, and begins long before school arrives to finish the work.

Question 3

What is a psyborg?

Accepted Answer

Not a cyborg — there is no metal in it. The psyborg is a human being whose inner life has been quietly outsourced: whose dreams arrive ready-made, whose rebellions are licensed and merchandised, whose sense of wonder runs on a subscription. It is bred, not built, and bred kindly — by cartoons, by franchises, by a school that rewards the prompt return of the expected answer. The mark of the psyborg is not misery; it is contentment. That is the whole difficulty: you cannot free someone from a cage he experiences as a hobby.

Question 4

You keep returning to the mushroom. What is mycophilosophy really about?

Accepted Answer

It is not about a mushroom; it is about a spine. The real question of The Book of the Empress is why life ever consented to become vertebrate — why it accepted the bluntness of bones and a single central nervous command-line, when for more than a billion years it had thought sideways, as mycelium: everywhere at once, patient, networked, with no centre that needed defending. Mycophilosophy is the suspicion that centralisation was the original fall — that the brain is a late and anxious organ, and that the older intelligence, distributed and unhurried, is the one we abandoned and are now rebuilding, badly, in our machines. The Empress is my name for that decentralised mind; the mushroom is only her clearest signature left in the visible world.

Question 5

What is the eternal hazing — de eeuwige ontgroening?

Accepted Answer

Every institution renews itself by making the newcomer suffer what the institution once suffered, until the suffering begins to feel like belonging. A literature does it to its poets; a nation does it to its young. The Dutch post-war peace was such a rite: a generation that had been poisoned learned to call the poison order and to administer it, carefully, to the next. Ontgroening is my word for the ceremony by which damage is laundered into tradition. It is eternal not because it must repeat, but because at the precise moment it could be refused, each generation chooses instead to pass it on — and calls that choice maturity.

Question 6

Why the obsession with single words — etymologies, neologisms?

Accepted Answer

Because a word is a fossil of everything a culture once permitted itself to think. The Dravidian nāraṅga once carried five meanings at once — a colour, a sap, a libertine, a living being, a twin — and reached our languages carrying only one: a fruit. The other four were not killed; they were forgotten, which is worse, because a forgotten meaning keeps acting on us without our consent. What I call language-magic is only the discipline of digging those four back up — making a verb of a noun, hearing the buried twin inside the orange. It is not wordplay. It is the one archaeology that excavates the future as well as the past.

Question 7

Who is "Ally," and why argue with yourself on the page?

Accepted Answer

Ally is the voice in The Book of the Empress who interrupts me the instant I become impressed with myself. I gave the sceptic a permanent seat because a thought that cannot survive its own sharpest objection is not a thought — it is a mood wearing the costume of one. Most writers hide their doubt and present only the polished result; I would rather stage the argument and let the reader watch me lose a few rounds. Very often the truest sentence in the book is the one Ally says.

Sogar aus meinen eigenen Augen

Martijn BendersM. H. H. Benders

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Why call yourself an ollav, and not a poet?

What is the difference between fantasy and daydream?

What is a psyborg?

You keep returning to the mushroom. What is mycophilosophy really about?

What is the eternal hazing — de eeuwige ontgroening?

Why the obsession with single words — etymologies, neologisms?

Who is "Ally," and why argue with yourself on the page?

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