The Lord of the Dance

Some call Satan the Lord of the Dance though this title is in dispute. His prowess at a minuet is unknown but he once accepted a challenge to enter a Highland Dance contest and lost to Gilly Callum of Strath Brora.

Gilly Callum was a member of a large and influential family whose name was supposedly remembered in the naming of the village of Kilcamkill, now Gordonbush, though there are those who would dispute that. There are always others ready to dispute anything we say so let us move on speedily into our tale, for such disputes are neither here nor there.

Gilly was a well set-up man with a shapely leg and a speed of moving them that made him a champion of the dance especially when he’d had a few good tankards of ale. Being a proud man he was well aware of his attraction to the ladies and equally aware that he left the other dancers standing so he was in his right to boast a bit, but one night he went a step too far and called himself a better dancer than the Devil himself and challenged Satan to come to a contest and let himself be judged.

Now Satan must have been having a quiet time or else he was himself a vain man and susceptible to a challenge for he accepted to come, to everyone but Gilly’s consternation. You may be sure it took some courage for a piper and a fiddler to come forward to play for the event and even more courage for a laird to agree to be the judge - or maybe they were to be judged by the amount of applause each got so the onus was spread amongst the onlookers. Nothing of these finer details are known but can only be guessed at.

So to Strath Brora one dark midnight Satan came to the place were Carrol Rock rises above the Strath on one side and the forests wherein at that time roamed gaunt, hungry wolves, rises on the opposite slopes. The owl hooted in warning and Satan entered the clearing whereupon the flames of the fire leapt higher revealing nervous clusters of human spectators, huddled into their capes in some fear of the Dark Master.

Satan being some aeons the elder chose the first dance as is the custom. He chose a Highland Fling and won at it fair and square. When they had supped and revived themselves Gilly Callum chose a Sword Dance telling the fiddler to fiddle as fast as he could and his elbow moved so fast it seemed s though he must saw through his instrument. Gilly kept pace with ease. He danced so lightly and with such skill his feet seemed to disappear from under him and his body simply hung above the swards. When the tune was over he was hardly out of breath.

It was Satan’s turn now and he stepped up to the swords. The fiddler began again as fast but no faster than before so all was fair. The hooves of Satan flashed around and about the shining weapons off which danced the reflection of the flames sending flashes of light about the glen. Satan was good but he was not so sure as Gilly and maybe less practiced for eventually he missed his step and the well-honed blades cut his hooves so he had to retire. Like the gentleman he was he admitted defeat, thereby showing himself to have some nobility of spirit whatever else may be said of him.

It surely must be seen that this proves Satan to be of finer breeding than the Old Ones on Mount Olympus for didn’t Pallas Athena change Arachne into a spider when the wench foolhardily compared her own weaving too favourably to that of the jealous goddess?

Gilly kept his own form that night and Satan clapped him on the shoulder in honourable acknowledgement of having found an equal at at least this skill.

To this day that Sword Dance is known as Gilly Callum’s Dance, though some may dispute it.

                   

Being seen and heard.

I’ve just had 2 short poems accepted by http://nutshellsandnuggets.tumblr.com a ‘blogzine’ (could there be an uglier word?) It’s always a buzz to get work accepted. I’d like to be able to say I write poetry because I love to and don’t care if it finds approval elsewhere, but I can’t say that honestly. The process of any artist isn’t complete until someone else has viewed it, in my opinion. Why do any of us write stories, poems, paint, sculpt, design weird buildings, knit Christmas pullovers, etc. etc? I think it’s to unite us to the rest of the human race, to communicate and to be heard. What could be worse than semaphoring in a fog. To be heard and seen - maybe to shock, or provoke, but anyway to get a reaction, affirmation that we are existing.

I’ve probably posted the following before but what I said then still holds:

Why I write.

I am obsessed with the thought of what it must be like to have 360’ vision, something we humans are quite incapable of, the nearest equivalent being the view from a very high place, or a plane, but that isn’t enough. It isn’t nearly as much as a poet hopes to express. A good poem (and I don’t consider my own to be in this category) goes above, below, and beyond, is global, transpersonal, cosmic, transcendent. A spiritual 5th dimension that has nothing to do with physics. That’s what the poet hopes to create and sometimes does, making it look effortless.

A poem should be the distillation of an experience or thought, the physical event mattering rather less than the effect the poem has on the psyche of the reader, which should go far beyond the words themselves. Words are the shorthand of the higher thought processes (someone else said that, not me). They are also the springboards into those higher processes.

                                    -----------------------------

Other opinions on the writing of poetry, the why’s and the wherefores.

 Robert Graves likened a finished poem to a round tower, from which no stone can be added and none taken away.  

Why am I writing? (taken from an article in ‘New Poets Press.)

  ‘This is the heart of the matter.  If you're writing to become
famous or immortal, you can save yourself a lot of time, effort,
frustration and disappointment by stopping now.   There are
literally thousands of poets alive today, probably hundreds of
thousands...now, name three famous poets still alive.  If you
were able to do that, name ten.  Very few poets can do so, a
few published poets can name perhaps half a dozen, but nearly
all could name over a dozen famous poets that are no longer
alive.  You don't have to be dead to be famous, but the best
measure of greatness is your ability to last and be appreciated
by those still living.’  

                 

The Laird of Burgie's Daughter

(Adapted from a beautiful painting by Holbein)

One fine spring morning the Laird and his daughter, a pretty young thing and, one may imagine, the apple of her father’s eye, were sitting together looking out of the window of the great house watching the ploughs working in the fields below. Of a sudden the girl asked her father, in a coquettish sort of way, what he would give her if she could stop the ploughs working just by looking at them. Thinking it was nothing more than a silly fancy on her part the laird played along with her game and told her he would buy her the most beautiful dress that could be found in the whole of the town of Forres, whereupon the girl, as proud of her new trick as if she had learned to dance a new minuet, did stop all but one of them.

Trembling, her father could think of nothing to say but to ask her why the one plough did not stop along with the others. ‘ The horse has a pin of Rowan tied with Bin Wood* in its harness and no power on earth can stop him’ she replied, cheerful in her innocence. 

‘How do you come to know all this and where have you learned these tricks?’ asked her father asked with a growing heaviness in his heart, for he knew already what must come to pass whatever her answer.

‘Meddy, the housekeeper has taught me many things father and she says I’m a good pupil.’ 

Sadly the Laird called his relatives together to decide what must be done. It was immediately agreed that the housekeeper should be burned for the witch she undoubtedly was and the laird’s daughter must also be put to death to wipe the stain from the family name. In view of her her youth (and the fact she was the Lairds daughter no doubt) she would be spared the burning. A doctor was sent for from Forres. He had her put into a bath of hot water, given an apple and sweetmeats to eat to distract her whilst he opened her veins and bled her until she swooned and thence slipped easily into death. 

According to some accounts Meddy the witch was burned on the lawn in front of the house, so the Laird could watch and have his revenge for the loss of his daughter. Others say she was one of the witches rolled down Cluny Hill in a spiked barrel then burned at the bottom where the barrel burst open against a stone.

 The Witches Stane lies to the east of the centre of Forres set into a wall and girded with iron bands under the tree-covered hill of Drumduan and the tower now known as Nelson’s Tower. When the above tale  was written for the local newspaper, the Forres Gazette, the tower was known as Trafalgar Tower and the hill of Drumduan was treeless. Over time much can change in a small market town but the memories remain.

        

My own highly romanticised image of  the young girl.

Bookbindings, and a tragic tale.

The monthly NADFAS lecture was on bookbinding - British bookbinding specifically. I enjoyed it hugely. Possibly I was one of the few who did. I saw some heads amongst the audience nodding after a while. The enthusiasm of the lecturer, himself a bookbinder of note, and the excellent slides of fine bindings through the ages, from 1458 onward, reminded me of the best parts of being a secondhand bookseller. Fine bindings rarely came my way, but there were enough to make me greedy, want to buy them for myself (I still wish I had) and ruefully dream of being amongst the echelons of long-established, wealthy bookshops who could afford to stock such precious items. 

One of the books I wish I had kept was a lovely edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. There have been many beautifully bound editions of that selection of quatrains, elegantly translated by Edward FitzGerald, which has been described as a string of jewels. It was especially popular after the first World War when people were reaching out for comfort in spiritual paths, (not necessarily religious, the Rubaiyat is almost atheist in places). I had a customer who collected them and came back every year to see if I had found another. The price didn’t seem to matter. One he bought for £480, which was small beer compared with prices some copies can go for, but big for my small shop. 

The lecturer related the heart-breaking tale of a fabulously expensive binding for the Rubaiyat, designed and executed by an English binder. It was rich with inlaid gold leaf and actual jewels. Commissioned by an American, the finished book was carefully packaged and sent off by sea to its destination - on the Titanic. Some years after this tragedy another binder made a replica from the paper designs left by the original craftsman. This was again packaged carefully and stored in a bank vault in London. In the Blitz the bank was totally destroyed; even the vaults where decimated. 

An ill-fated design indeed. 

I don’t have a single copy of the Rubaiyat any longer but I have a few books whose boards or dust jacket designs I’m fond of. 

A bizarre dustjacket for a very bizarre book

An impressive series for the shelves.

Very 1950's but clever and effective IMO


.

A lovely Folio edition.

Monochrome - please no!

A wall hanging by Glenda Gerrard

I was looking through old photographs recently. They stirred memories of course and I was surprised to noticed that not only the photos but my memories are in monochrome, sepia at best. There’s a story circulating about a child who, taken round a nearby castle (castles in Scotland are simply fortified houses) expressed surprise that there was so much colour in the tapestries, soft furnishings and paintings, because he thought it was ‘all in black and white in those days.’ If he had been talking about the post-war years of my childhood he wouldn’t have been far out with his imaginings. 

My parents were poor but we didn’t stand out much from the rest of the village. Many people in those hard post-war years were in the same plight. What bits of furniture we had were hand-me-down from my grandmother’s home. It had never been graceful or pretty even in its heyday. It was utilitarian, made in a time of shortages. Ugly design, cheap wood overlaid with heavy, dark varnish. Two uncomfortable ‘easy’ chairs sat either side of the fireplace covered with some brownish material. There was a piano against one wall that I was supposed to be learning to play. After the Coronation there was also a television, bought by my grandmother. It stood proudly on a television table, of the simplest possible design, four legs, top, and a shelf underneath which held the legs stable and provided a resting place for the leather-coated Radio Times. (My grandson still marvels that we could bear to watch programmes in black and white!) In the tiny bedrooms orange boxes (made of cheap splintery wood in those days), covered with left-over bits of material, had become bedside tables for my parents and a toy box for me. In the kitchen there were more orange boxes, covered with lining paper, that held pots and pans. There was a rickety square table with three chairs where we ate. In a middle room there was a small gate-leg table which had to be treated with care and was only used when visitors came. A member of the family sat by the end legs in case a visitor should knock one of them accidentally, therebye plunging their meal into their lap. 

I remember this well enough. The colours that tint the memories are as dinghy as the days. My mother knitted constantly when she wasn’t at work in the Post Office Stores attached to our cottage. She often unpicked old jumpers of my dad’s to knit new. She darned and ‘made good’ socks, linen, shirts. Darning was a skill all women learned at their mother’s knee. Even I learned once, but was relieved to be able to forget with the advent of tougher materials and more money. 

Despite the lack of money, pride kept my mother and grandmother from getting casual about appearances. We were all three of us as properly turned out; as clean, pressed and respectable as could be. Granny Barber, who was housekeeper to a nice old gentleman recently back from India, bought my mother and I a coat every winter. My mother also had a handmade suit most years. So did I when I got older. Off the peg would have been dearer, and the nearest small town was, anyway, over ten miles away. None of these garments came in bright colours. Coats were black, ‘camel,’ or - oh dear - ‘nigger brown!’ How shaming to think of that now. (I also had a Golliwog. It seems I screamed when it was first presented to me. Anyway I always preferred the blue rabbit.) The suits were in soft tweeds of indeterminate greyish-brownish colours which is probably why I dislike tweed to this day.

I remember well the pale yellow outfit I was bought for Easter one year. It was glorious! A real colour at last.   

In one of the Chalet School books by Elinor Brent-Dyer (I think) the girls were to be dressed in beautiful satin and organza dresses for a festival. A chosen few would have velvet trains of various colours and they would be decorated with flowers. I’ve probably made some of that up, but the most exciting and enduring memory was the description of the colours they were choosing: Blue delphiniums, yellow primroses, pink wild roses, orange Californian poppies, scarlet field poppies, all out of season but never mind. I dreamed of having these costumes for myself.  

It is for this reason I wish I could have been a painter. Or an artist in stained glass. I love stained glass. The stained glass of Notre Dame in Paris stays with me, the tombs, architecture, and carvings have long since faded. 

This longing for colour has caused me to rebel. In my seventies now, to fit in with my contemporaries I think I am supposed to wear drab - beige, greys, muted colours. I try to avoid these. They lower the spirits. 

One last thought on the colour theme: A friend born in Scotland who lived a large portion of her life in California, remarked that she had to have a different wardrobe for each country. No - it wasn’t because of the weather, it was the prevailing colours. In the strong light of sunny Cal bright clothing is usual. In the softer light of the North of Scotland we wear more muted, heathery tones. We mirror the misty grey-blues and subtle purples of distant mountains, ochre stretches of sand, and the dark mystery of the forests. 

Don't be afraid of the Dark.

I continue to be inspired by Virginia Woolf whose work I dip into when I want some new light on old perceptions. Today, thanks to the marvels of Google, I came across an article about her by Rebecca Solnit in the New Yorker 2014. She focuses, for a start, on Woolf's comment: 

“The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think,”

It isn't a statement that has come from a negative mood but is a positive reflection on what the dark - or unknowingness - has to offer us. Humans beings tend to want to know everything, to understand, to have rational explanations for their world. The darkness, real and figurative, is scary. The French call dusk the time “entre le chien et le loup,” between the dog and the wolf, between the tamed and the wild, the unpredictable, the dangerous. It is also a time of merging, love making, new beginnings, enchantment and mystery.

John Keats, after a walk with friends, made the following observation about his thoughts during that walk: “several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature.… I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Thinking we know or understand what is happening in the present, because we refer each moment to experiences in our past, can blind us to new realities. It is said that the greatest discoveries have been made by people who are capable of looking at things without preconceptions. 

Lawrence Gonzales says: 'It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.' 

I find that hard, if not impossible. And that's why I need VW who seems to have that faculty. She celebrates the darkness as she walks the London streets when everything is unclear, is denied definition. And she argues with those who believe introspection is best indulged indoors, a solitary experience like that of monk in his cell, the writer at her desk. Woolf disagrees especially with the supposition that staying at home in isolated peace can bring new insight.  “For there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience.” Going out into the anonymity of a city street at night will active much more. “….when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!”

I have Virginia Woolf and Rebecca Solnit to thank for this morning's new horizons. 

Burning the Vardo

This also is by my artist friend, Glenda Gerrard, the poem sewn into the fabric.

My circle of writerly friends all have areas of life from which they draw their inspiration. Nature serves to inspire Tom and Andy in quite different ways. Andy for the sheer love of the landscape and its moods, Tom for the life lessons he reads into everything growing, ebbing and flowing, decaying and regenerating. Eileen writes of love and loss, making something eternal and transcendent out of each small moment. Glynis writes gripping stories. She often sets them in historic or prehistoric times and relishes the research involved. I wasn’t sure I had a specific source until I looked at the growing collection of verse I’ve written over the last three years. It seems I’m moved by people and their innumerable quirks, also by food and the homely objects around me. Then there are several poems that come from random images I pick up in my reading. For instance a year ago I read a novel in which a gypsy featured and with her the Romany custom of burning the vardo after its inhabitant dies. It’s unlikely that this custom has survived as caravans are increasingly expensive. It’s even more unlikely that the dead ancestor was ever burned along with their home, as far as I can tell, but still the idea of going up in flames along with the possessions that have meant so much in life, stayed with me. 

Burning the Vardo

Sparks fizzle in her hair.

Blue-and-white ware 

crackle and split.

A treasured silver teapot melts like wax.

The old hat flies on thermals to a branch,

defiant, till the last dark crimson flare, 

destroys its memory of her proud head.

Eyes filled with smoke and tears

bubble and burst.

In the white hot centre

she hangs, skeletal.

The Water Kelpie of Pityoulish

  

               

A group of children (some say there were seven some say ten of them, I don’t myself know the exact number or their names but their mothers and fathers most certainly did) were playing by the loch-shore one day when the youngest of the group, the son of the laird of that region as it happened, noticed a most beautiful pony grazing nearby unattended. It was pure white and though there was no sign of its rider it was both saddled and bridled. The young lad called the others and they approached the pretty creature cautiously with but one thought in all their young heads - to catch it and ride it!

They knew at once it must be the palfrey of some great personage because the bridle was of crimson velvet and the stirrups of polished silver but all they wanted was a ride on its back and there seemed to be no harm in that. The pony continued to graze peacefully until they were almost within touching distance then it took a few teasing steps toward the waters of the loch. The children, understanding animals well and especially those destined to have humans on their backs, simply thought it was shy of being caught and pursued it carefully. This little dance persisted for a while until they where all quite near to the water’s edge whereupon one of the children managed to lay hands on the wonderful bridle and gave a cry of joy. The other children followed suit in grabbing hold of either the bridle or the reins, all but the smallest child who had been first to see the pony but was too small and had been pushed to the back of the crowd. He only managed to touch the reins with two of his small fingers. As it happened he was glad he had been so treated because in less time than it takes to tell the cries of joys turned to cries of terror as the the pony circled toward the water dragging them all with it and they found they where quite unable to let go. The youngest child with great presence of mind and not a little courage took out his dirk and cut off the two small fingers thus escaping to watch in horror whilst his companions where pulled screaming and crying into the dark peaty waters of the loch, never to be seen again.

                                     

The Social Duty of the Poet.

Grandiloquent title eh?  I couldn’t resist it. It’s provocative.  Does a poet have a social duty at all? At the Monday group a friend prophesied that there would be a rash of poems by people pretending to have enough insight into the minds of refugees to write (often in the first person) about the experience. The rash has already started to spread. 

There are some who feel it IS the duty of art to make observations and statements on current events. Make it as immediate as possible. That's what artists did in the past, before the days of social media, they gave accounts of events, often terrible ones, that the folks back home would never hear of otherwise. 1st WW artists did what the war correspondents of today do, they documented atrocities (if they weren't paid to glorify.)

Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia, upbraided American poets in Harper’s magazine 2013, for being “oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning . . . timid, small, in retreat . . . ever more private, idiosyncratic, and withdrawn.” That’s just for starters.

“Their poetry is not heard but overheard,” he grumbled, “and sometimes is too hermetic even to overhear with anything like comprehension.”

Edmundson’s central complaint: Our poets today are too timid to say, “‘we,’ to go plural and try to strike a major note . . .  on any fundamental truth of human experience.” He claims that in the face of war, environmental destruction and economic collapse, “they write as though the great public crises were over and the most pressing business we had were self-cultivation and the fending off of boredom.” “All that matters to these narcissistic singers is the creation of a “unique voice.”

And then, naturally, there are the literary theorists with their insistence on the impermeable barriers of race, gender and class, these liberal post-modernists keep anyone from saying anything about anything but his own private world. “How dare a white male poet speak for anyone but himself. . . . How can he raise his voice above a self-subverting whisper?”

Good point, that last. But what is the answer? IS it ethical to write as though in the mind and experience of a refugee, however acute we believe our ability to empathise and our power of imagination? Or is it just piggy-backing on another human being’s terrible experience to get some glory for ourselves? I don’t have the answer. Suspect it might be: ‘It depends how it’s done.’ Not very satisfactory.