Textualities

Depthless Ruminations on The Ticket That Exploded

Fergus — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 16:46:05 +0000

It is hinted at points in this novel that words are a virus preventing people from inner silence. If this is indeed the case then it seems like Mr Burroughs is gleefully using this principle to abuse us. When any single paragraph might have hundreds of meanings and is loaded with incidental poetry, grotesque imagery and apparent nonsense, it is hard to retain any peace of mind.

The Ticket That Exploded is the second in a trilogy in which Burroughs applies the technique of writing a paragraph then cutting up sentences from it, cutting the sentences in half, doing this multiple times and then forcing the half sentence in with an accidental partner. Thus he creates discordant bastard sentences that at best can be beautiful, provocative and intriguing, and at worst are a violent nonsensical mess that will make your brain ache trying to work out what’s happening. I think Burroughs knew this: that by using this experimental idea he would create a joyful obstruction of sense.

I consulted the internet community of wonderful nerds on how to enjoy this book. This may sound pretty stupid and indicative of someone with low intelligence (oh anonymous reader, you cold thing!), but I received rather sage advice: if you find yourself straining to find some meaning in the jumbled craziness of this trilogy, just let it wash over you. This works immensely. Sometimes Burroughs will riff on a motif that one must view as a whole. Individual sentences may not make sense but taken as an entire paragraph becomes food for yer brain. I’m still not at all sure if the actual ending of the book was at the end. This gives you an idea of what we’re dealing with and how little point there is in trying to explain the plot.

Maybe this enthusiasm sounds like the idiocy of a cult member; maybe I’ve fooled myself. Quite possibly true. From a cynic’s point of view this book is an exercise in incomprehensible indulgence filled with wilfully intense imagery. The last point certainly is true. With Burroughs it appears to be a rule of thumb that an anus must appear on every second page, ideally with many things (frog spawn, penises) in or near it. It is a self-flagellating process at times, reading this book, I admit. However, with The Soft Machine and Nova Express still to be read, there’s no time for anaesthetic.

STEPHEN NELSON

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:42:35 +0000

Visual poetry is under represented and under published in Scotland, so i was keen to show some here.

Temerity & Secret Talk

Pluent

Kundalini Concrete

Circumnavigation (Or The Envy of Democracies)

Affectation of the sages. Such airs! Such impertinence! We muster a common cause. A cold snap snaps shut. If I wake in time, I’ll be there. This oil has to be used. You take your cue from governments and bureaucrats. I take mine from hot air balloons. A tendency to over dramatise promotes servility. Dignity. Formality. Affection.

This is an age of barbecue and beans, a comedy of inbetweens or rebellion in a cup. Certainly not a reality I’m familiar with. How tired I am of inarticulate drunks waving banners of peace over fallen women! I’ve pledged my allegiance to space travel and flightless birds, less a surrender of will than a submission to the inchoate.

Sugar Qoating

An explosion of light on the dream screen. There are various ways to interpret what amounts to a global revolution. Your part gifted by M&S. Peace is the ability to reside within oneself regardless. It matters that I know when your birthday is.

Unable to distinguish the flame, I engineer an implosion. Omniverse. Now that I know I am infinite, I vow to no longer concern myself with matters beyond my reach. An extinguished gentleman. Karma. Power lies in the ability to ignore repeated requests to purchase recyclable carrier bags. An unfit mother. No, a full fat father. No, a son who has overcome the hollow reed of rejection.

Of all the dreams I had as a child one stands out. Holyrood or Hollywood. A papal delegation obfuscating its way through streams of insignificance. I dream of genii. I dream of Joni. Revolution in Beijing is television in Bombay, or Mumbai, or Wemyss Bay, or Wombai. My mother is an expert in the field of nutrition. She used to bake birthday cakes of a deliqious sweetness.

The Great King

The anticipation of astronauts relieved by a mild antiseptic. A woman’s top lip. You choose bed linen in accordance with the season. Aromatic stimuli. This at least is my projection. Towards an elegant euphoria.

What I dreamt once I may be about to experience as an unmistakable reality. How can I possibly communicate this without invoking the laws of my father the prophet Hezekiah? Once I dreamt of an unshakable reality enforced by a rigorous dogma. The spoils of diplomacy. Or denial. I have only twisted the essence and made us look inward. This is more about routing my being in the root of my being. Astronauts have trouble remembering the colour of grass in September.

At least I’ve not been duped by insufferable evangelists. Or, if I have, at least I haven’t gelled with duplicitous suffragettes. The position of dogs in the springtime bothers me. A sudden burst of flower arranging. Tired of the trickle, I anticipate a deluge.

Stephen Nelson sings in unknown languages & regularly throws words & images on to a blog at afterlights.blogspot.com. He can read minds at a distance of 10 paces.

COLIN HERD

admin — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:58:50 +0000

inspired by my babysitter’s
boyfriend, i’m studying the paintings
of Lorser Feitelson. i have had a monstrous
week and a half. a week and a half (and a half) of
large spilling slices. they suck me in to dream
like crazy of L.A.

as though i were suffering from a slipped
disk, i’m cultivating inner tranquility and
bright, chromatic abstraction. i’m swelling,
gently undulating, changing in thickness as i sway.
the first i heard of someone behind me was a tic-tac
crunched by an incisor. i know that sound. i know that
smell. i know a curtain drppn n bg clsng zp. the trouble

starts because what makes me tick, also makes me talk,
and therein lies the rub (i wish).
i am an atomiser
from which you can squeeze
a thin spray of hope (i hope):
::……………………………
………….     ………………
……….    ……..   ..   ……
.. …         …..      ..   . ..

the middle of the room is hardly
recognizable. i still have to panic
when i want something. still mushy
where it matters, you could say,
still lonesome after all these years. c
reamy silences like sssshhhh
(in a pram) but not right now
asleep at all, or having strange
dreams.

we’ll have to go
upstairs calmly, from where

i promise we’ll hear just as well.
you could hug me. because i am
an atomiser from which:
……… ……… …………… ….
……………………. . . . .
….. … ………. .. ……..
…. …. ………………. …. .
… … … … … ….
the furniture is gasping but
ignore it, it only thinks it can
pass judgment, forgets we
already own at least ten percent
of its gurgling, aching sorryful
bulk i bet. just a bunch of values
that we can refuse (pander instead
to our whims if it suits us)
so bright so bright they rot
(as i trip up on a confusing
linebreak) so bright they rot
ate longer than expected on
the hot rod, too soft, (ee), morose.

i am an atomiser from which
you can hug a thin spray of hope
i hope …………………………………
…………. ………….. ………..

i collect the autographs
of famous redheads. was d.h. lawrence
a redhead? was henri matisse? intrigue.

in the hope that they are shared,
i gargle my dreams so loud it’s obscene,

and you humour me, a couple of
licks short of sensitivity and kindness.

ken kesey? swinburne? silliman? getty iii?
blake? i got jane asher already and am holding
out for will clark. i reckon my hobby came from
somewhere but i can’t for the life of me
think where, nor why. irresolution+twitchiness.

i know your love is cap-
sized, louche & side
ways on your head,
gaudy, red, obscene,
its rim dramatically tilting,
lop-sided, sweat-stained,
old. at

the same time, i know
my personality is like
a kilt. heavy, scratchy &
tartan. when you reel, it
feels like you’re shrugging
me off to the tune of my
fiddle. i flap about you.

Colin Herd lives in Edinburgh, where he co-edits anything anymore anywhere and reviews fiction for 3:AM magazine, poetry in the blog of Chroma Journal and exhibitions for Aesthetica. Recent poems have appeared in 3:AM, Gutter, Pop Serial, Shampoo and Velvet Mafia. colin-herd.com

DOROTHY ALEXANDER

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:50:17 +0000

Jennie Renton asked us to take over this website for a month and to do something with it; the best thing to do, we thought, would be to invite poets we know across lowland Scotland that we’ve either worked with, performed with, or whose work we like. over the next four weeks we’ll be posting the works of a Canadian ex-pat, a text artist, a performance poet and an extreme found poet, among others.

to launch this takeover, an impromptu night of readings, TROPIXTUALITIES, was held at Roxy Art House on Monday 16^th August. for a hastily arranged event, it was a great and varied night.

we encourage the leaving of comments. nick-e melville and rodney relax.

our first poet is Dorothy Alexander.

Three poems from Final Warning

– an ongoing series in which techniques developed out of found poetry are applied to a contemporary newspaper clipping. Poems are constructed from within a word pool formed by searching along and down through the base text. Letters, words, lines are then ‘re’placed in direct relation to it.

Found is posited here as an ecopoetic, not only because of its inbuilt credentials as recycler, but, more pertinently, for the non-hierarchical and inclusive nature of its processes. It invites acts of multiple attention (down to the smallest detail). It encourages heightened responsibility, in both writer and audience, for engagement with the word as depository and potential manipulator of meaning. My hope is that this dynamic of paying particular attention and taking responsibility serves as exemplar for engagement with larger issues and strengthens resistance to notions of outside agency.

The text used was an extract from the front page of The Independent on Saturday 3rd February 2007 whose banner headline was ‘Final Warning’, and which had five purported scenarios for global temperature rise by 2100 from +2.4° up to +6.4°.

Click on the fllowing links to see the poems:

sermons hurt/curb me

variations of critical

premonition from the plastic room

Poems from Final Warning have been published in How2 online journal, Black Box Manifold and in Product Magazine. A selection was exhibited at the Skylines Ecopoetics Exhibition / Language and L=A=N=D=S=C=A=P=E=S Forum at the Centre for Contemporary Art in the Natural World (www.mediaalive.co.uk/ecopoetics/) in June 2009. Links to other examples can be found at www.dorothyalexander.co.uk

Arthur Watson, Historian of Legerdeman Discovered

Richard H Evans — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:02:40 +0000

The foremost rule of conjuring is that the secret of a trick should never be revealed. It is therefore with some trepidation that Gordon Bruce and Bob Read’s engaging and entertaining accounts of the hunt for the mysterious Arthur Watson are followed by an exposé - a biography of their prey. However, perhaps this is one occasion when exposure of a magical mystery may be forgiven: in order to acknowledge a man whose contribution to the history of conjuring was overlooked for so long.
Arthur Watson was born in Lincoln in 1863, the youngest of five children born to Thomas Watson, an engineer, and his wife Ann. His childhood home was in Sincil Bank in the parish of St Peter at Gowts in Lincoln and he was educated at Lincoln Grammar School.
Watson’s original intention appears to have been to follow in his father’s business: in the 1881 Census of the United Kingdom, Watson’s occupation is listed as ‘machine apprentice’. However, a change of heart or of circumstances led him to alter his career ambitions and the following year he enrolled as an undergraduate student at Owens College in Manchester (now Manchester University), undertaking a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Music. As was the practice at the time, he sat the University of London examinations for the final part of his degree and was awarded his BA from the University of London in 1885.
By early 1890’s he was living in Hampstead, London. In the UK census of 1891 he listed his occupation as ‘musician’ (as he had when he registered readers’ card at the British Library the previous year). The early part of his career is unclear, but in 1910 he was working as a member of the academic staff at the University of London, where he later became secretary to the Academic Registrar.
Between 1898 and 1910 he published a number of articles in historical and antiquarian journals. Articles on the Sciopodes (1898) and the Tarasque (1901) concerned mythical creatures. These articles included depictions of these beasts in stone carvings in European cathedrals and their associations in mediaeval Christian lore. This early interest in mediaeval church carvings would prove to be his main academic focus later in life. Other articles, such as ‘Music Galleries’ (1900) and ‘Knives with Music Inscribed’ (1910) reflect his interests in music and history. Articles including ‘The Rebus‘ (1898), ‘Tumblers’ (1903), ‘The Funambulist’ (1904), ‘Jugglers’ (1907) and the two-part article ‘Conjurers’ (1909) have no clear association with his other interest - though they themselves share a common theme, being concerned with puzzles, entertainment and magic. All of these articles are scholarly works, demonstrating a remarkable depth of research and breadth of knowledge in each area.
It remains uncertain whether Watson had an interest in conjuring. There is no record of him having been a member of The Magic Circle or any other magical association. However, there are a few subtle hints in his article ‘Conjurers’ that suggest he may have had more than a passing interest in the art. In the opening paragraph of ‘Conjurers’, he states “Never were more wonderful feats accomplished than are performed at the present time”, indicating a familiarity with the performances of conjurers. Further evidence of his experience of contemporary magicians comes later in the same article, when he states “The conjurer of the present day usually attempts to interest his spectators, not merely by the tricks he performs…but also by his accompanying remarks”, adding the opinion that “conjuring may be effective without speech”. He also uses the word “patter” (still in use today) to describe the words used by magicians during their performance. Evidence of Watson having a more significant interest in magic - or perhaps another example of the meticulousness of his research?
Arthur was not the only academic in the Watson family. His brother, Foster Watson, was Professor of Education at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1895-1913. Foster Watson was a highly-respected educationist, whose interests also included philosophy and literature. He had a particular interest in the life and work of Joannes Ludovicus Vives, the 16th-Century Spanish humanist and educational theorist, whose work is quoted several times in his younger brother Arthur’s article ‘Conjurers’. Evidence, perhaps, that the brothers cooperated in this endeavour.
Following the publication of his article ‘Knives with Music Inscribed’ in 1910, there was an hiatus of eighteen years before his next publication, when he would have been 65 years old. Later in life, he developed an academic expertise in mediaeval Christian iconography, and in particular, depictions of the Tree of Jesse (illustrating the descent of the Messiah from Jesse of Bethlehem, based on a passage from the biblical book of Isaiah). It seems likely that this was an interest that he was able to cultivate during his long retirement. He completed a substantial amount of research in this area, which led to him being awarded a PhD in 1935 at the age of 72. The records of the University of London show that his Doctorate was awarded to him as an external candidate and not as an honorary degree - a significant achievement. Watson’s doctoral thesis ‘The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse’ was later published, and is still cited in present-day texts.
Arthur Watson died of pneumonia on the 15th January 1954 at the age of 91. As far as can be established, he never married and did not have any children. He was predeceased by his brother Foster (died 1929), who had married late in life and also died childless. Watson’s estate at the time of his death was valued at £7,100. The principal beneficiaries of his Will were his housekeeper and his sister-in-law - Foster’s widow. He also made bequests to the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum, the National Institute for the Blind, societies for the humane treatment of animals, and to several friends and former colleagues at the University of London. As Bob Read discovered, his collection of academic papers and photographs were bequeathed to the Warburg Institute with which he had a longstanding association.
Arthur Watson was cremated at Golders Green crematorium in London and, in accordance with his Will, his ashes were scattered. There is therefore no gravestone or memorial in his name: he remains characteristically elusive to the last.

Also see http://textualities.net/gordon-bruce/watson-sherlocked/

Sources

1. United Kingdom censuses: 1851 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891.

2. University of London General Register Part 3, page 711.

3. Encyclopaedia Britannica Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information. 11th Ed, Vol X: Evangelical Church to Francis Joseph, Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, New York, 1910.

4. Athena (1920).

5. University of London, Senate House Library. Index to theses, ref 0-11297.

6. C. R. Chapple, ‘Watson, Foster (1860-1929)’, rev. M. C. Curthoys, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

7. Death certificate of Arthur Watson

8. The Will of Arthur Watson

9. Calendars of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration (England and Wales).

10. Bob Read. Searching for Arthur Watson in Textualities 1 - Magic Afoot: Rosslyn Lore and More, (Ed: Jennie Renton); Edinburgh (2006). ISBN 0955289602.

Arthur Watson: Publications
1898 Glimpses of the Anglo Saxon Boy. The Educational Review, June 1898.

1898 Sciopodes. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, October 1898; Vol 4: pp. 269-270.

1898 The Rebus. Antiquary, December 1898; Vol 34: pp. 368-373.

1900 Music Galleries. Musical News, December 22nd 1900; Vol 19, No 512: p 541.

1901 The Tarasque. The Antiquary, August 1901; Vol 37, No 140: pp. 234-239.

1903 Tumblers. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, July 1903; Vol 9: pp. 186-202.

1904 The Funambulist. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, October 1904; Vol 10: pp. 217-231.

1907 Jugglers. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, January 1907; Vol 13: pp. 1-16.

1909 Conjurers: Part 1. The Reliquary & Illustrated Archaeologist, April 1909; Vol 15: pp. 81-100.

1909 Conjurers: Part 2. The Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist, July 1909; Vol 15: pp. 176-191.

1910 Knives with music inscribed. T. Lea Southgate & Arthur Watson; Musical News 1910.

1928 The Speculum Virginum with special reference to the Tree of Jesse. Speculum (3) 1928 pp 445-69.

1934 Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse. London: Oxford University Press, 1934.

1938 Mary in the burning bush. Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol 2, No 1, July 1938: pp 69-70.

1947 Saligia. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1947; vol 10: pp 148-150.

1947 Manuscript of Virginum Speculum in the Walters Art Gallery. Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, vol 10 1947: pp 61-74.

1953 Catalogue of Trees of Jesse in XIII and XIV centuries. Typed manuscript, Warburg Institute

1957 The Imagery of the Tree of Jesus on the West front of Orvieto Cathedral. In: Gordon, D.J. (Ed): Fritz Saxl, 1890-1948: a volume of memorial essays from his friends in England. pp 136-146.

From the Ganga to the Tay

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:50:17 +0000

It is a pleasure, not to mention a challenging and rewarding experience, to immerse oneself in this epic poem of discovery over and over again, fishing out a new catch every time. From the Ganga to the Tay twists and turns through the pages in rivers of narrative on the banks of which are colour photographs by the author herself and by Scottish artist Kenny Munro, with whom she has collaborated on a number of arts projects. As Munro has observed: ‘The mythical qualities of Indian rivers is profound, with daily rituals imprinted in community consciousness. Scotland’s rivers were also recognised as the life blood of mother earth, and considered sacred, but cultural evolution seems to have clouded our ancestors’ respect for Scotland’s most powerful river, the Tay.’
Bashabi Fraser’s unique calligramatic poem gives voice to the Indian River Ganga (Ganges) and the Scottish River Tay, personified and entwined in a dialogue which evokes the sacred significance of these two vital water sources. The cultures of the people who live on their banks are described from a multitude of perspectives: as befits a social scientist, poet, writer and commentator who is highly active in developing the links between India and Scotland, Fraser draws into this poem every possible thread from what has been a complex tapestry of exchange and separateness, similarity and difference. Folklore and religion are explored in such a way as to draw out the diversity of tradition, the power of the Hindu belief system being met by the Celtic. As well as aesthetic and artistic facets, she tackles politics and economics - unusual poetic fare, but her commitment is holistic. Showing how deeply the exchange of culture and goods has marked the India-Scotland experience, she explores experiences of the two diasporas - of Scots to India and of Indians to Scotland.
However, as a post-Midnight child, Fraser avoids easy criticism of the British Raj. Hers is a more nuanced attitude, inflected with the values of Patrick Geddes, whose correspondence with Rabindranath Tagore she has edited; the influence of these visionaries is palpable in her approach. Guided throughout by the author’s steady moral compass and the value she places on sustained ecological and social diversity, From the Ganga to the Tay brings out of myriad contrasts an awareness of the fragility of ancient wisdom in a nuclear world.

Marc Sherland

From the Ganga to the Tay by Bashabi Fraser is published by Luath Press ISBN 1-906307-95-4.

In the art of Bashabi Fraser the cultures of India and Scotland richly blend, and in this magnificent poem the two living traditions speak to each other through the riverine oracles of the Ganges and the Tay.
RICHARD HOLLOWAY

A rich blend of mythic, historical, and geographical storytelling, her poem explores aspects of India and Scotland from a radically unusual perspective, paying tribute to the close links between both post-colonial nations.
MARIO RELICH

Buy From the Ganga to the Tay here:
http://www.luath.co.uk/acatalog/From_the_Ganga_to_the_Tay_.html

Find out more about Bashabi Fraser at http://www.scottishbooktrust.com/contacts/bashabi-fraser

Bashabi Fraser discussing the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes
http://patrickgeddes.co.uk/interview_bashabi.html

Kenny Munro’s exhibitions and projects are described at
http://www.kennymunrosculpture.com/

A Moose Loose Aboot the Hoose

Michael Lister — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:03:51 +0000

ROBERT BURNS

To A Mouse
On Turning Her Up In Her Nest, With The Plough,
November 1785

Ad Murem
Nidis Aratro Eversis

from

James Grahame
Poems in English, Scotch, and Latin

Printed for the Author by J. Neilson
Paisley
1794

The Burns industry in Scotland enjoyed a busy year in 2009, what with the Homecoming Festival, a three-day conference at Glasgow University, and the publication of three rival biographies, along with all manner of other sorts of events and tributes to mark, in case anyone had forgotten, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s birth.

James Grahame’s tribute to Burns, however, is not of recent date. As Burns collectors will know, it was first published in 1794, and as far as can be ascertained this work has not been reprinted in modern times. Not that any claims are being made for it as ‘The Last Great Burns Discovery’ - that unlikely subject was more than adequately treated by Hugh MacDiarmid in 1934 in his irreverent short story of that name.

From the middle ages, when literary works were being created in vernacular languages across Europe, there existed at the same the practice of translating vernacular poetry into Latin. Indeed, at the height of the Renaissance, there flourished in Scotland a number of Latinist poets that included George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston. Such was the interest in composition in this classical language that it concerned not just the creation of new, original works, but extended to the latinisation of work of other writers, for example Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid underwent this transformation by the English writer Francis Kynaston, who had also given the same treatment to some of Chaucer’s work. Coming as a late example of the practice, James Grahame’s tribute to Burns nevertheless belongs to that tradition. (An even later example is Alexander Leighton’s 1862 The Principal Songs of Robert Burns Translated into Medieval Latin Verse, and which won the praise of Thomas Carlyle.)

The volume in which Grahame’s translation appears was first published anonymously and printed for the author by J. Neilson in Paisley, the author having ‘imposed secrecy as to his name.’ It may be of interest to some that the poet’s great-grand-nephew was Kenneth Grahame, who wrote The Wind in the Willows, and that both were kinsman of the traveller, writer and politician R B Cunninghame Graham.

According to the hand-written note on the title-page of the British Library’s copy of Poems in English, Scotch, and Latin, (BL 11632f51), James Grahame, 1765-1811, was ‘a son of a respectable gentleman of Glasgow…bred to the law, he began his career as a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh’, and was admitted Advocate in 1795. Like Burns, he was a radical in politics, though unlike Burns, Grahame later became an Anglican clergyman. Grahame was satirised, as was Burns and others too, by Byron in his poem, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers:

                                    Lo! the Sabbath Bard,
                                    Sepulchral GRAHAME, pours his notes sublime
                                    In mangled prose, nor e’en aspires to rhyme;
                                    Breaks into blank the Gospel of St. Luke,
                                    And boldly pilfers from the Pentateuch;
                                    And, undisturbed by conscientious qualms,
                                    Perverts the Prophets, and purloins the Psalms.

Byron’s own footnote reads: ‘Mr Grahame has poured forth two volumes of Cant, under the name of Sabbath Walks and Biblical Pictures.’

In my transcription of ‘Ad Murem’, I was assisted by Latdict.com, ‘a free, online English-Latin dictionary for the poor and curious’. As for any infelicities in the transcription, mea culpa!

WEE, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murdering pattle.

EHEU, parva nitedula, qualis nunc tremor implet
Pectora! ne subito celeri te proripe cursu;
Insectari te nollem rulla truculenta.

            I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
                                    Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion,
                                    An’ fellow mortal!

Naturæ imperio humano fœdus sociale
Ruptum mi dolet, et justam me dicere cogit
Illam suspicionem, qua sit ut exsilis a me
Terrigena comite, in terram tecum redituro.

            I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
                                    ‘S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
                                    An’ never miss’t.

Haud equidem dubito quin tu furere aliquando.
Quidni? animal miserum, te certe vivere oportet.
Granum e mergite tota, ecce petitio parva!
Grana a te sumpto, damnum haud dignoscere possum;
Et mihi quod superest cœlo fausto fruar illo.

            Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
                                    O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin,
                                    Baith snell an’ keen!

Angusta illa domus mœstam dat fracta ruinam;
Structuram invalidam spectas dispergere ventos;
Nec virides ullas stipulas, illam ad renovandam,
Usquam suppeditant arva. Interea imminet asper
Mordaces referens ventos acresque December.

            Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
                                    Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
                                    Out thro’ thy cell.

Agros tu nudatos vastatosque, hyememque
Vidisti tristem properantem; spemque sovebas,
Obtecta hic ut contra aquilones degere posses;
At scindit nidos crudeli vomere aratrum.

            That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
                                    But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
                                    An’ cranreuch cauld!

Congeries hæc culmorum exigua et foliorum,
Trito dente fuit, multo et convecta labore;
Nunc operam perdisti, et tectis exul ademptis,
Frigus acerbum perferres pluviasque nivales.

            But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
                                    Gang aft agley,
An’ leave us nought but grief an’ pain,
                                    For promis’d joy!

Sed non indicium tu, parva nitedula, solas es,
Quam vana est mens prudens et præsaga futuri:
Consiliis, quæ muribus et mortalibus ægris
Arte ineuntur summa, haud raro casus iniquus
Accidit: et, speratæ lætitiæ vice, crebro
Nil inventum est præter tristitiam atque dolorem.

            Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e
                                    On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
                                    I guess an’ fear!

Attamen haud incertum est, præ me te esse beatum;
Hora etenim præsens solum te tangere possit;
Quum retro, inque dies mœstos mea lumina verto,
Et quamvis non prævideo, auguror atque tremisco.

Yannis’s Harbour

Keith Aitchison — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:47:43 +0000

‘Don’t expect too much,’ Joanna urges. ‘It’s what? Thirty years? It can’t be the same.’

‘I won’t,’ I say, but my excitement rises with every kilometre that takes us closer to the white house beneath the lemon tree.

I had been walking and hitching across Crete in late summer, living mainly on bread and fruit. One evening as dusk was slipping through the mountains, I came to a track leading off the main road and down towards the sea.

The prospect of soaking my feet in the sea was irresistible.

The track led through terraced olive groves, their glossy leaves and knotted boughs sapped of colour in the twilight. By the time I reached the shore, the cicadas had fallen silent. There was no moon and I decided it was too dark to risk bathing among the jagged rocks. I sat down and ate the last wedge of bread, drank sparingly from my water-bottle, rolled myself in my blanket beneath a tree, and slept.

Twice I woke and looked through the curtain of branch and leaf to stars crowding above the horizon, no sound but the quiet breathing of the sea.

My third wakening would be a little after dawn.

‘It’s somewhere around here,’ I say, measuring bay and headland against distant recollection. Suddenly there it is, a meagre scrape of dust and pebbles curling down through olive groves walled with slate-blue, pitted stone.

‘We’ll need to walk,’ I say, hoping this will be permitted. ‘It’s a mile or so - remember when we would do seven miles before lunch?’

‘That was before your leg started acting up again,’ Joanna places a restraining hand briefly on my arm, ‘and it was aching this morning - don’t shake your head, I heard you groaning in the bathroom, trying to get it moving.’

‘It’ll hold up. It’s as keen as I am.’

‘Try and be sensible, would you?’

‘Please nurse, the doc says exercise is good for it.’

‘The doc meant physio, as well you know.’

I sigh and look miserable, which often works and does so again today.

‘Oh, for God’s sake - but if it seizes up… Hat and stick, then. And slowly.’

To a rasping chorus of cicadas, we start down the track towards the sea.

The red dawn picked out the outline of a man. The light behind him, and my eyes dazed with sleep, at first I could see neither his face nor expression, though he could see the both of mine as, startled, I stared back at him.

‘Theos!’ He was just as alarmed, hand rising in the Orthodox signing of the Cross.

Then, he paused, bent and peered beneath the tree at me for long seconds; his hand fell away, his voice softened, quietened.

‘Ochi. Ochi.’ He stepped back.

‘Kalamera,’ I said hastily, wishing I had more Greek, wondering if this was trouble. ‘My name’s Neil. From Skotia.’

‘Neil,’ the man repeated, quietly, shook his head slowly, as if clearing away the last of some waking dream, spoke in good English with an American accent. ‘Gave me a shock, pal, asleep there, beneath my tree. Stand up, let’s have a proper look at you.’

The early light showed his lean, lined face, sharply curving nose and heavy greying moustache - nothing else he could be but Cretan, Yankee voice or not.

He offered his hand with a smile.

‘I am Yannis, and you are welcome.’

His hand was rough, scarred, as I would soon learn, by years of hauling on salt-soaked rope and nets. I don’t know quite what he made of me in worn jeans and grubby shirt, but he could see what I needed.

‘My land, my guest,’ he nodded along the shore path. ‘C’mon. Wash up and eat.’

As I tugged on my boots, Yannis looked back into the grove, crossed himself once more and murmured something quietly, perhaps a saint’s name.

A few dozen steps away, so close I could hardly believe I had seen and heard nothing of it even at night, a small house stood some metres higher than winter storms could throw their angriest waves. With white walls, blue door and window frames it was no different from a hundred others I had passed on my journey, except that over its flat roof a lemon tree spread a sheltering cloud of green leaf and yellow fruit. I washed in aching cold water, spring snowmelt collected in the mountain aquifer and stinging my head beneath the pump’s spout.

‘Omelette,’ Yannis called me indoors. ‘Not good as you’d eat in a New York diner, I guess, but not too bad.’

Best food I’d eaten for days.

The track seems hardly used anymore, grown with summer-dried weed, pressed in by blue-spiked thistle and dried poppy-heads nodding on brittle stems. Olive trees are ragged and untended, leafy green creepers wreathing fissured trunks, branches twisting unpruned, the ground below thick with brush and weed.

And then, a wall. A high, breeze-block wall, streaked with slapdash mortar, stretching clear along the hillside to block the old track. We stand before this ugly intrusion, look both left and right where it frowns over neglected groves and dead trees lying ripped and crumbling among their living kin.

‘We’ll have to go back.’ Joanna tries to pre-empt what she knows from experience is in my head, but I say it anyway.

‘We can make our way round, I think.’ Instincts in charge, I peer into the grove’s shadowy seclusion, where a thinning of brush stretches like a ship’s wake.

‘You’d better take very good care where you step,’ Joanna says. ‘I can’t drag you back through that.’

The canopied shade alone is worth the effort. As we thread between the stubborn branches our feet catch on tatters of rotted netting splashed black with unharvested olives left to shrink and decay.

‘This is so, so bad,’ I complain. ‘They love these trees. It’s almost religious.’

‘Atheists around here, obviously,’ Joanna agrees.

A familiar sharp pain stabs its warning into my leg.

‘You sleep beneath bare sky, like a shepherd?’

‘Now and again - not every night.’

Amused, Yannis shook his head, began to fill his pipe. We were seated over emptied plates in the subdued light admitted by the small windows. I looked around, saw the silver-mounted icon of the Madonna and infant Christ, faces stylised to give the child a precocious gravity, his mother a profound solemnity. It is as if they already saw the road to Golgotha. On the further wall, a portrait of an old bearded gentleman in black frockcoat and wing collar whom I would learn to recognise as Venizelos, below him a shelf holding a dozen ageing books and a parade of polished wooden frames with sepia and black and white photographs of people mostly in stiff, self-conscious poses.

‘Your family?’

‘Three generations,’ Yannis said proudly. ‘Grandparents in the old costume, father and mother in best clothes, 1920s styles. Me, my young brother Manolis, before the war came here.’

A young man and a teenage boy, relaxed with arms around each others’ shoulders, smiling into the camera, this earlier Yannis with a hint of reserve, his brother eager and open, guileless.

‘You have a look of the island,’ Yannis lit his pipe, pointed the spent match towards me. ‘I saw that beneath the tree, even in the dark. Not too tall, black hair, good nose.’

‘Big nose, you mean.’

‘Everyone here has a good nose, unless they’ve blown in from Athens or wherever,’ he surveyed me benevolently. ‘Give it a few years, grow a moustache, you’ll pass for a cousin down from the hills.’

‘Where’s Manolis now?’ I looked again at the boy’s unaffected smile. ‘Did he go to America with you?’

Yannis paused, sucked on the pipe, blew out grey smoke.

‘Who knows where he is. Only God knows everything.’

An awkward silence as Yannis too gazed at the photograph, then he grunted and

shook his head as if to clear his mind.

‘I feel like company, talk and company. Tell you what - stay here some days, help me with the fishing, eat good food, drink wine, fill your belly. You’ll be stronger for your journey, and I’ll have used English properly the first time in years.’

And so I had stayed three days in the white house beneath the lemon tree.

The raw breezeblock wall is suddenly lined in carefully joined limestone ashlar. We come out of the trees into the swollen heat where a slew of smooth tarmac hosts rows of smart cars broken by groups of slender white poles carrying the national flags of Europe and the Americas. A man sits on a bench in the narrow slice of shade afforded by an arched gateway, the white logo of his tan uniform announcing him a retainer of ‘RESORT ZEUS’. Beyond him we catch glimpses of fountains, palm trees and clumps of oleanders, elegant buildings of limestone, shining glass, marble and porphyry.

‘Looks like money,’ Joanna observes. ‘Not your sort of thing at all.’

A little past the olive trees where I had slept that first night, Yannis’s small boat - which I think he called a ‘varkey’ - lay tied alone in the lee of a reef extended by a curl of heavy rocks to form a small, rounded harbour with room for maybe three of those small boats in its sheltered water.

‘My grandfather’s work,’ Yannis said proudly, patted one of those red boulders I knew I could never lift, not even were there two of me. ‘They were men in those days.’

Not a good sailor, I stepped awkwardly into the boat to sit uncertainly on the middle bench while Yannis stowed nets alongside the engine housing. He smiled at my knuckles clutching tight and pale, paused.

‘You can wait on shore, if you want. Weed the lettuce patch, okay?’

But I had said I would fish, and nervous or not, I was going with him.

And once used to this little craft, dusk on that sea was unforgettable as the sun sank across blue water, a slight wind raising just enough of a wave to slap gently at the wooden hull, the smell of salt water mixing with Yannis’s tobacco smoke. Even the whiff of engine fumes could not spoil it. When we’d hauled in the net and had our slippery catch in a couple of pails, we turned out of the dark towards the town’s string of lights and people waiting by the quay for the scatter of little boats bringing in their fish.

Cretans are great talkers, full of courtesy and passion, but Yannis kept his exchanges brief, did not join the good-humoured chaffing I guessed was about where the worst and best hauls had been that night, how this or that fisherman had known where the bream and mullet would be waiting to throw themselves into his net.

A man around Yannis’s age came up and spoke to him in a quiet voice, seeming, from his accompanying gestures, to be inviting us to come and eat at a bright-lit taverna facing the harbour. The little crowd had turned to watch, faces silently expectant as a Greek chorus waiting on the play’s denouement, but Yannis only looked around in disdain, cast off the bowline and took us back to the night sea. I said nothing, of course, but later, as he waited on the wood fire to burn down to hot embers for grilling a couple of bream, Yannis took a pull of his harsh red wine and began to talk.

‘I don’t like them, in that town,’ he said broodingly. ‘I thought, when I came back

from America, maybe I would forgive, but when I see their faces, it’s impossible. Because of them, I lost Manolis.’

‘How?’

‘The war. Not the one against the Germans. The war afterwards, against ourselves.’

He appraised his glass, emptied it on the ground.

‘These memories need better than wine.’

Potentially clients, we are allowed into the complex. I have to admit it’s impressive.

‘You see,’ the assistant manager is from Athens, speaks excellent English, as befits one who took his doctorate in business management at UCLA, ‘this is six-star accommodation. If you bought one of our few, very few remaining timeshare units, this luxury standard would be yours to enjoy for as long as you wished.’

He sweeps an earnest hand across the spacious plazas and gardens, shining palaces and finally an Olympic-sized swimming-pool towards whose further end a small white-walled house once stood beneath a lemon-tree.

‘And the shore?’ I ask. ‘When I was here before, it was all rocks, with a little harbour over that way.’

‘We dug out the rocks,’ he beams. ‘Sand now, perfect sand - thousands of truckloads. We offer the best beach on Crete - see?’

The red rocky shore has given way to a silver expanse studded with reed sunshades and wooden loungers. I stand on the boardwalk edging the glaring sands. The old pain is tightening its grip.

‘I suppose you ripped out the harbour as well?’

‘No, no.’ The young man is used to awkward customers. ‘It’s still there. Quite a feature.’

Yannis brought out a bottle of pale raki, poured a shot for himself and one for me, each four fingers deep, offered no water.

‘The town was strong for the Communists. Manolis was idealistic and they worked on that, with all their talk of brotherhood and equality. I tried to persuade him not to go with them and join their militia. We fell out. He called me a fascist - me, who had fought the Italians and the Germans!’

Yannis took a long pull of the raki, stared into the night.

‘I forgot he was my brother. I…struck him.’

The bream lay forgotten. Yannis dropped his gaze, to the fire’s red embers.

‘What happened?’ I prompted. ‘What did Manolis do?’

Yannis lifted the bottle and walk unsteadily along the path towards the harbour.

The harbour is changed. The rocks are still there, but overlaid with a walkway with a brass railing. No trim little varkey with fishing nets. Instead, a gleaming powerboat which has leaked fuel and stained the water shabby rainbow. I look beyond the limestone facing of the boundary wall to where the hillside trees slowly forget the hand of man.

‘It’s a pity about the olive-groves,’ I say. ‘I’d never have thought Cretans would let

them go wild like that.’

‘We can’t find anyone to work them.’ The assistant manager seems hesitant. ‘The locals, they don’t care for this hillside.’

‘Maybe they don’t like the development,’ Joanna suggests disingenuously.

‘No, no, the truth is, they think the hill is unlucky, some sort of superstitious nonsense.’

He sees our exchange of glances.

‘When we were clearing the trees, just there,’ he points a few metres along the sweep of sand, ‘the diggers uncovered the bones of a man. That’s what started it all.’

I take a deep breath. My leg begins to shake as the pain bites deeper.

‘Nobody would tell us anything - very suspicious of outsiders,’ the assistant manager shrugs. ‘You were here before - did anyone say anything to you then about a young man going missing?’

The sweat pools around my eyes as I gaze one last time at the harbour. In my mind’s eye, I can see Yannis drinking raki as he stares melancholic into the dying fire.

‘No.’

We go back along the shore. Where once grew olive trees, I pause, rest on my stick, bow my head, murmur a name. And then another.

Valerie Gillies Interview

Jennie Renton — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:24:50 +0000

How did the project begin?

It all began with working on the Lyne Water in the Borders. One or two of the springs that feed into it have a lot of associated local folklore, which I realised ties into world folklore about wells and springs. I remember hanging over the edge of a well where one of the Lyne Water springs flowed out and noticing it had a very characteristic voice - almost like a speaking or chattering voice. I began to wonder, what if every pure source of water, like a spring or a well, has a different sound. How interesting that would be from the point of view of poetry and creating words, where poets get their words or sounds. Was it the case that every spring is different, just as every poet is different? That was what inspired me to start going to different springs, listening to them and recording their sounds, photographing them, drawing them in my notebook. I wanted to travel to them, find out what they’re like today, find out if people still visit them and what they have to say about them. I set out on my first field trip with a little recording machine and a tiny camera, the smallest I could get. I was on tenterhooks until I could establish that there was a difference in ‘voice’ between one spring and another - I could have been wrong, water pressure might have been fairly similar everywhere. I felt pure joy when I played back my recording of the second spring I visited and it sounded dark and slightly sinister compared to the more cheerful, chattering one that I’d heard first. Since then I must have visited 120 springs and wells and they are each totally different.

In The Spring Teller, is the teller the voice of the well?

The title has a couple of meanings embedded. A spring teller is a diviner, someone skilled in finding where water is, usually by dowsing. The word ‘teller’ contains the feeling of telling the story, communicating the rhythm and the individual voice of each spring. At the outset I knew that these poems would all be different rhythmically; it was almost as if the springs themselves were suggesting a whole new idea of poetics or metrics.

Divining. What on earth do you think is happening there?

I don’t know. I just know that it works. On my field trips I’ve always got a pair of divining rods with me. Some of the springs are very overgrown, you need to be prepared to search for them. I was taught to use divining rods by a friend who’d spent years putting up fences in the Borders and used divining rods to find the best place to put a fence stob. He taught me in a very practical way how to use them. Anyone can do it, the rods are like an extension of our own arms and hands.

I’ve heard that diviners can even tell quantities and depths of water.

Yes, they will ask their rods, how many metres down? Something in us knows it, but it’s difficult to get it spot on unless you have the rods. Very curious.

The idea of ‘healing wells’ is regarded as a bit esoteric. But I once read that monkeys in the wild use particular plants for curative purposes, and that really makes me wonder how they work that out. It makes me think that deep inside all of us is an inherent understanding of the properties of the natural world and that science is a way of drawing out that innate knowledge.

Traditional methods of determining the curative powers of particular springs were quite scientific. Any water coming from the water table through the rocks in different locations is going to contain different chemicals. People experimented with different waters to discover which worked for what - for instance, water containing iron could be a curative for people with anaemia. A condition called ‘dry eye’ used to be very prevalent in Scotland in the days when people sat around the fire at home being kippered by the smoke, and the application of water from certain wells was known to relieve that irritation. Interestingly, I met an American eye surgeon on one of my Highland trips who told me that an ingredient used to treat dry eye symptoms associated with modern air conditioning and central heating contains one of the chemicals found in water from these ancient ‘eye wells’. In the past, people who couldn’t afford medicine used these wells: the healing wells were the doctors of the poor.

The Victorians were very interested in taking a scientific approach to the power of water. The British Geological Survey analysed samples and recorded the chemical traces they found (although the constituent elements can be expected to have changed somewhat by now). There was also strong interest in the architecture of old canopies, or well-houses. I looked at some wonderful Victorian drawings of medieval well-houses before visiting them, often to find them looking a bit more battered. I like to get a sense of the history: which wells were famous, which were travelled to. I would go to wells that had been renowned in the past, wondering if anybody still visited them, or if they still existed. I have Ordnance Survey Explorer Maps for Scotland which give the names of springs in blue if they still have water, or in black gothic if they’re dry. Sometimes the springs have broken up down the hillside, sometimes they’ve moved - springs can get offended and move! Like in folklore, you know, if you say rude things to them, they dry up! But then they appear somewhere else.

Did you find it surprising how many people still visit these wells?

Wells are still fairly sociable places and yes, it’s surprising how many people go to them and take away bottles of the water. I love some of the recordings I have of wells where you can hear people laughing and chatting in the background.

Did you actually get down to writing while you were at the wells - did ideas float to the surface of your mind there?

Yes, and I was always writing or sketching in my notebook. I have built up quite an archive of the sounds from the wells, and hundreds of photographs, some of which appear in The Spring Teller. These are places that people have regarded with awe for hundreds of years - this pure, fresh water will once have been rain that seeped through to the water table long ago and reappeared, purified as it’s come up through the rocks, so you could be drinking rain that fell a hundred years ago, and so on, back through the water cycle.

Interview with Iain Orr

Jennie Renton — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:05:40 +0000

‘Biodiplomat’ Iain Orr, a former British Consul-General in Shanghai, shares his thoughts on diversity, islands and albatrosses.

Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combing all this evidence… It is only by combing the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine ‘truth’ here, that is to say, to find the picture that sets out all the known facts in the best arrangement and that therefore has the highest degree of probability. Further, we have to be prepared always for the possibility that each new discovery, no matter what science furnishes it, may modify the conclusions we draw.
Alfred Wegener, The Origins of Continents and Oceans

Do you think there is such a thing as the collective imagination?
Yes, in that certain ideas are going around at any particular period. Take the theory of evolution. In the nineteenth century people were learning about more and more different species and asking questions about where they came from. They were starting to conceive of geological time. Biblical explanations of creation were becoming problematic. Nowadays, everybody is used to the idea that the land areas of the Earth have moved around a lot: you look at the globe and see how neatly South America fits into Africa. But for this to become ‘common knowledge’, it first had to be imagined as a possibility. The German scientist Wegener was the first to notice it and have the imagination to think of rocks as actually being able to move; that however solid rocks may seem, they can move like water - though obviously a lot more slowly. When Wegener made that observation in The Origins of Continents and Oceans, first published in 1915, he was pooh-poohed. But what he said proved to be accurate. This was the inception of the theory of plate tectonics, and a fresh way of understanding the world.

How that happens really interests me. A man who worked with a Tibetan herbalist told me that one day, collecting orange membrane from under the bark of a tree, he had asked how its medicinal properties could have been inferred. The reply was: ‘Clairvoyance.’ Although Tibetan medicine is strong on testing by trial and error, that doesn’t explain the original intuition.
Certainly, somebody has to start asking questions and an exploratory mind - scientific or poetic - will be sensitised to look for clues. In my experience, answers sometimes come through using a model, for example, a house with all sorts of rooms representing different ideas. In literature, simile is a model. For instance, when Burns wrote ‘My love is like a red, red rose,’ he was comparing love to something that is thought of as being beautiful - there’s the idea of a scent, of something that is rather intense; and in the background, the idea of the rose having thorns - love can bring pain as well. So far, the model holds together. In the poem the simile is functioning in a particular way and it doesn’t matter that it has limits. But remove poetic sensibility, and look what can happen. I remember once typing in ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ and my spell-checker came up with ‘repeated word’, and suggested getting rid of it! Get rid of the poetry!

It’s humbling to know that the world will change, whether through human agency or not.
Yes. And while people talk about climate change as a major problem, I think loss of biodiversity through population growth and our willingness to purloin the habitats of other creatures is just as important. Of course, there’s a limitation to that, in the sense that we are terrestrial. We can’t live in the ground…

Or in the oceans… nor can we directly experience the world in those terms.
That’s right. We don’t have the magnificent sense of hearing that some marine creatures have, or the chemical senses - a shark will know that something has been bleeding two miles away. It’s an experience of life that you can only try and imagine. In order to have coherent experience, you do need boundaries. A creature sensitive to every light or sound or electromagnetic wave would be overwhelmed by sensation. Limitation is necessary. Humans couldn’t function without it. Take memory - the most important thing in having a good memory is the ability to forget. If you couldn’t forget, you would be overpowered.

That’s how Sherlock Holmes said he solved crimes. By knowing what to eliminate, he saw what he needed to see.
And that again is probably something common both to the scientific and the poetic imagination.

Was it Michelangelo who talked about taking away the stone to find the shape waiting inside? Perhaps that’s what the process of gaining knowledge is, a paring back to something innate.
Yes, and in any language, there will always be the discipline of its innate structure. Depending on structure, the vowels and the consonants, you can get different effects in different languages. For a writer, language is the essential raw material, just as the basic arithmetical rules are for a mathematician.

It’s funny to think that spoken language is breath, your mouth moving the breath and creating sounds, communicating.
Well, you and I are having a conversation in the same dialect of English and we’ve got a shared cultural background, but you know, I had an extraordinary experience at the British Library at a live performance of part of the Kyrgyz epic poem, the Manas - recited, with musical accompaniment, in the Kyrgyz language. There was no simultaneous translation and yet it was extraordinary how much of the power of it came across, even for those who didn’t know a word of Kyrgyz. You can tell so much just by looking at a storyteller - there are so many ways in which meaning is conveyed.

A friend of mine saw a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Calcutta, which used seventeen different Indian languages. Although she only understood about two-and-a-half of those, she said it was perfect for a play that in many respects is about miscommunication. Which reminds me - my original intention was to ask you about your fascination with islands. Why islands?
Probably that goes back to childhood experience. My father’s first job after demob in 1945 was as Church of Scotland Youth Organiser for the West of Scotland and one of his tasks was to organise youth camps on Iona and so we spent summers there. It’s a wonderful size of island, about two miles long, a mile at most at the widest. As a wee boy I could actually walk right round it. Which comes back to the question of boundaries: the thing that defines an island is that it has very clear boundaries in a way that a town or city doesn’t. When you say ‘Edinburgh’, you may have a vision of the Castle but you don’t have a vision of the city’s shape, as it were. If you know an island well, you know it by its shape. And with a small island - where you can get up to the highest point and look in every direction and see the sea around it - you have a three-dimensional sense of that bit of land, defined by water. An island is a very powerful way of representing the idea of identity - of something that is, and has its own reality. One of the great appeals of a small island is that a question about it is likely to be answerable. You can stand on Iona and ask, ‘How many people live here?’ and the answer is, literally, within grasp. Whereas, if you asked that question on the edge of the Eurasian landmass, by the time you counted, generations will have been born and died.
Islands are worlds in miniature. As a boy, I loved going round the beaches and looking at the sea anemones in the rock pools, and finding the lovely wee cowrie shells that you get on Iona; I felt aware of the fish in the sea and got to know all the different habitats. Islands hold an abiding romantic appeal. I was brought up on Treasure Island and Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe, so perhaps that’s why islands have such a powerful appeal to my imagination.
In a scientific sense, islands are a bit like the canary down the mine: how they are faring is a good measure of how human beings are affecting the planet. It has to be said that of the birds, mammals and plants that have become extinct in the last five hundred years, something like eighty percent are island species (which is partly to do with the fact that the isolation of islands is a driver for speciation). There are so many island species under threat - and the same can be said for many human communities and cultures.

I gather that one of these species under threat is the albatross.
In my imagination the image of the albatross is very powerfully present. In flight, with its huge wingspan, riding the currents of air, it’s a most wonderfully gracious bird. In my last job at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I was concerned with environmental issues in remote British territories such as South Georgia, the Falkland Islands, Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island, where albatrosses nest. They are in great danger from long-line fishing fleets - the bait attracts them and then they get tangled up in the lines. Of course, there’s a very easy solution - to weight the lines so that they are held deeper. But persuading rogue fishing fleets to do that is difficult. The albatross is an iconic bird and if we lose it, it would be a loss for the whole world.

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