The Face in the Well: Rebecca Watts
Rebecca Watts reflects on animals, social masks and her new collection The Face in the Well
In the summer of 2022 I spent a fortnight dog-sitting for strangers on the Dorset coast. The situation was perfect: a modest house with a landscaped terrace overlooking the sea, a glorious heatwave, and a fully grown Bernese mountain dog called Lenny. Perhaps because perfection can’t be borne – or, more optimistically, because the relentless heat had on this particular day shortened our otherwise admirable tempers – my partner and I stood on said terrace at midday, in the full sun, arguing about something so inconsequential that it became impossible for us to reason our way out of it. In the privacy of home, this kind of pointless wrangle tends to boil over into a cloud of ill-feeling that takes a few hours to disperse. Here, however, we were not alone. Responding to our raised voices, Lenny trotted over from his shady spot under the lilac, sat down beside us, and softly planted his leonine paw on my partner’s thigh. Enough, the paw said, in a language of gesture infinitely more eloquent than any human speech. A little confused, we glanced down at him for a moment before resuming our exchange. A few seconds later: the paw again. Enough. Not a coincidence at all. We looked at the paw, then at each other, then into Lenny’s calm brown eyes, and our animosity evaporated. Ashamed and humbled, and reunited in our amazement at this creature’s intelligence and empathy, we were left wondering who was looking after whom.
I don’t generally consider myself to be an ‘animal person’. I didn’t have a pet dog or cat growing up – just a couple of goldfish, with whom it was difficult to attain a nuanced relationship. When I visited my friends’ houses I was typically scared of their pets – not at all comfortable with the mounting anticipation that they might at any moment jump up or paw at me or sit on me or lick my hand. Claws, fur, teeth, tongues… I didn’t like the idea (or the reality) of those at all. An anxious and obedient child, I invested all my faith in the controlled omnipotence of adults – parents, teachers, and their proxies whom I encountered time and again in songs and stories (God/Jesus, Father Christmas, Mary Poppins, Miss Honey, etc.). Though I knew some of them weren’t real, these adults ruled the world. They could fix anything, and they had a plan in place to ensure good would always triumph over bad. If I could only follow their rules and try to emulate their actions, everything would be ok. Wouldn’t it?
Cut forward to my growing sense that, through my fearful aversions, I missed out on some important life lessons that I suspect can only be internalised through routine proximity to animals. The lessons I’m thinking of are far removed from the workings of language, though we sometimes try to call them by such names as ‘authenticity’, ‘spontaneity’, ‘intuition’ and even ‘love’. Perhaps these are energies or dynamics rather than fixed entities, which is why slapping labels on them withers them; like raindrops on mothwings, words dissolve them into cliché, as though they never existed. And yet, in other times and places, we have known them completely; they have driven us, and our understanding of the world, most of the way to where we stand today. As babies and young children we lived by them, until we were taught alternative principles and structures by which we should live.
In my earlier poems, animals often showed up as omens, symbolising qualities in the human relationships with which the poems were primarily concerned. My newer poems are open to the possibility that animals as themselves, rather than as symbolic entities, might have something fundamental to show us; that perhaps, if we listen hard enough, we might hear echoes of their individual motivations and vulnerabilities deep inside ourselves. I don’t know, or wish to know, what a mouse, a shark or a wandering albatross would think or say had she thoughts and language resembling our own. My project here is not anthropomorphism, but rather its opposite. What I’ve tried to do is to pay attention, and thereby move a little closer, to the intuitive, spontaneous, hungry, vulnerable, playful creature I think I must once have been, and that as an adult I generally pretend I’ve left behind.
The poems in The Face in the Well invite you to imagine what life would be like if we didn’t pretend so much – if we were brave enough from time to time to peel back our social masks and acknowledge some of the other faces hidden underneath. Might we recognise and occasionally meet each other on a more equal footing? Might we be kinder to one another? Might we have more fun? Nuar Alsadir’s 2022 personal-political essay Animal Joy and Ted Andrews’s oft-cited 1993 spiritualist compendium Animal Speak are two books I happened to encounter in the past few years that sharpened my curiosity and gave me the confidence to write the poems I wanted to write. Should you seek these books out, I hope you find them as marvellous (in their very different ways) as I do. And should you feel inclined to dip into The Face in the Well, I hope you enjoy the poems’ exploratory movements as they perform their thought experiments in a variety of costumes, both animal and human.
This week's text is by Rebecca Watts, author of The Face in the Well, which is published this month! You can use the code JNFB2025 for 20% off and free UK P&P.
Please join us on the 23rd January at Heffers in Cambridge for the in-person launch of this book! Rebecca Watts and Peter McDonald will both be discussing their new collections, The Face in the Well and One Little Room, and will be hosted by their fellow Carcanet poet, Adam Crothers. Tickets are £5, and come with a glass of wine upon entry - book yours here.
If you aren’t able to make that date, do not despair - you can also join us online at 7pm on Wednesday 5th February to celebrate the launch of The Face in the Well! The reading will be hosted by Vona Groarke. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along. Book your place here.