Fred D'Aguiar
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Walberberg 2005: Whose English? |
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The hidden pool table at Walberberg, hidden away in the Rhine Valley , tests everyone's coordination and candour after a long day of in-depth discussion, digesting large meals and prolonged applause. To find the pool table you must make a sharp left at the top of steep stairs that lead up into the gables of the building. The pool room is too small for the only piece of furniture in it, the pool table. In fact, certain shots cannot be taken, muchless made, because the short cues bang into the walls of the room. In the far corner of the room there is a store room full of essential supplies: bottles of mineral water and cases of wine. Next to that room is an elevator, a very small elevator, it should be said, and on one wall of the slanting room there is a skylight window that was always dark when I was in there because pool at Walberberg is only ever played at night and late at night too.
The talk of Walberberg creates the environment for unending games of pool (singles, doubles and triples) at Walberberg. The writerly sessions are 100% attended with one or two hung-over exceptions or else momentarily interrupted by bravely hung-over souls who venture into a 9am session and stumble out halfway through too sick to remain in the room. This is rare, for the most part everyone breakfasts by 9am and then there is a mad rush up the 13 steep steps where a sharp right leads into the conference room in the gables of the 5 storey building. Sessions are so rapt in concentration that often the speech is electrified by tiny particles of thought that travel across the room from the head of the speaker to the heads of the many focused listeners. Air in that room is similarly static ridden with intellectual and factual activity. I tell you it is hard to scratch an itch in that room. You just do not want to move and you ignore the itch as a by product of your too much concentrated mind and body. One emerges from the pressure-pot of a day's worth of sessions in the conference room and heads straight for the pool room in order to decompress.
This particular Walberberg, chaired by the intuitively smart and gifted Ali Smith, and my second time there, turned out to be the last of the legendary series at the Dominican monastery. This last meeting must go down in the annals of pool playing in cohoots with literary talk as just about the best of the lot. The balance of a cue between the index finger and thumb as it is positioned in front of a ball that must be sent off a side cushion and back into another ball that is intended for an opposite pocket is such a delicate trick that any tremour of the hand translates into a inelegant miss. The breath is held and the hand is steadied. The thrust of the cue is softly, softly: no strength, no force, just grace, and a steel focus to steady the nerves and suppress that fine tremour.
Just so talk in the seminar room appears to be a fine balancing act of telling the delicate little ship of the story of writing without laying on too much of the vessel-sinking ballast of theory. Just so you find yourself as spectator or participant equally committed to the success of the enterprise of that exchange of ideas or that shot that must go into that pocket to justify the next bottle of Chardonnay chased with glasses of still mineral water.
Over the days the tension of playing and playing again mounts into a carefully calibrated though nonchalantly voiced set of wins and key shots made or missed. The talk at the seminars, the reading by the authors builds a similar momentum. Each author augments the work of the preceding author. The Walberberg Handclap - long and loud and sustained and rapturous applause – increases by decibels and minutes with each day of conferencing. But the time the special guest, Jeanette Winterson arrived, the applause was an event within the event of her marvelous and riveting contribution to the four days and three nights.
I knew something was not quite right when on the second evening at around 10pm I ducked into the pool room and a number of academics were staring intently at the pool table and debating some philosophical idea related to it, or so I thought, not understanding German and assuming wrongly that the days proceedings in the conference room had in an unending sort of way spilled into the pool room. But it was not Kierkegaard who was under discussion (I wondered if his idea of perpetual return was being related to pool) but the missing cue balls. Sure enough the table was bare and when I got close and stared at the empty green lawn of cushion the academics switched to English and let me know that the balls were all stuck in the table because a cloth used to block the pockets the night before had worked its way down into the guts of the table. Marijke Brower, to her credit, always the fixer and arranger and smoother of crinkles to guarantee a cool running of things, tried to find the right people with keys and insider's knowledge but it too late to raise anyone who knew anything we needed to know. After a brief huddle to sip our drinks and discuss our options we decided to upend the table and shake it so that the cloth might slide out of the way and allow those cherished balls to exit into view.
We counted to three, lifted, shook and shook and rested and lifted again and shook. Each time a couple of balls rolled out as a concession to our sweaty efforts to shake the life out of the thing. It took many shakings to get the full compliment of balls for a game and since the offending cloth was still stuck inside we decided to block off all the pockets to save the balls from ending up trapped once more inside the table. The precise method for blocking off the pockets entailed another conference of sorts. The confab it should be said was necessary because a kitchen cloth alone proved insufficient to stop a ball. Someone came up with the idea of wrapping a glass tumbler in a kitchen towel and then placing these in each pocket. With three of us working at it each person was responsible for two pockets. We placed the glass on the kitchen towel which was spread out on the pool table and then rolled the glass in the towel. The neat bundle was then stuffed into the pocket. Then we cued up and banged away to our heart's content. My favourite shot, witnessed, I believe, by Jonathan Barker, was my only spectacular shot at the conference made as a U2 CD played in the foreground. I could not line up the cue without hitting the wall behind me so I decided to perch on the edge of the table and push the cue behind my back sending a ball off the far end of the table and back down towards the black. When the shot successfully sank the black a loud cheer, a version of the Walberberg Applause, from all eight of us squeezed into that little coffin of a room, almost raised the roof off the monastic ideal.
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