‘We seek questions rather than answers, or at least we will avoid rigid conclusions’.

                       UB

The last story of my father’s four stories involved Kirstie, my grandfather, and one of his friends. The two men went to collect oysters from a bed near Carbost that Kirstie regarded as her own. Discovering them there, she began to curse them roundly in Gaelic. His grandfather’s friend, a Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern Languages at Glasgow University, responded by cursing Kirstie back in some ancient tongue. The strange language and the solemn delivery disconcerted Kirstie so much she retreated, leaving the two men free to continue their task.

These four stories gave me a sense that places could be deeply uncanny. Perhaps they reflected my father’s sense of social tensions between the Elders of the Free Church of Scotland and the traditional beliefs and practices embodied in the figure of Kirstie, or perhaps a fascination with the uncanniness of hinterlands.

On Skye in 1945 “witch” would be “bana-bhuidseach” – literally bana: “female”, bhuidseach: “wizard, sorcerer, witch, sorceress”. In 1970 a man looked at the anthropologist Susan Parman and muttered “buidseachd” (witchcraft) when a truck got bogged down while moving peat since ‘woman did not usually go out to bring home peats’. (Susan Parman Scottish Crofters: A Historical Ethnography of a Celtc Village p. 125).  English-language accounts of Skye’s folklore regularly refer to “witches” but there’s only one known legal allegation of witchcraft in the island’s history. There are, however, lots of formal letters from the Church Elders to the authorities asking them to take action against local woman identified as “witches”. Action not taken, perhaps because of the ambiguity inherent in “bana-bhuidseach”, which can also mean “wretch”, “scullery maid” or “temptress”. When one such letter was mentioned to a trusted local man, he replied that he had just recently employed a “wise woman” (in Gaelic boireannach glic), to “unwitch” his cow. It seems the authorities preferred not to attempt to disentangle one man’s bana-bhuidseach and another’s boireannach glic. 

‘Seeking and celebrating diversity and difference, and appreciating what we each bring to the collective experience. Aspiring to give a platform to people and issues which may often be ignored or insufficiently recognised’.

                                                                                                UB

Rebecca Solnit writes: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live…’. (The Faraway Nearby p. 3). In 1940 my paternal grandparents left Kent for the Isle of Skye to avoid living under the flight path of the German bombers bound for London that sometimes jettisoned their cargo into the woods around their home. My father’s diary from 1945 tells us he visited his parents there with his first wife, Monica, on leave between January 15^th and 27^th. (On December 9^th later that same year my mother would write her phone number and address into that same diary). In Scotland in late childhood and adolescence I heard my father tell the same four stories about Skye countless times.

One was about an accident when my grandparents were looking for a house to rent. My grandfather ran the near-side front wheel of his car into a ditch and left my grandmother there while he went to get help. This happened on a Sunday when decent people on Skye did no work, but a local woman passed my grandmother a cup of tea from behind a wall so as not to be seen, which would have resulted in the censure of her neighbours for “breaking the Sabbath”. 

The other stories all involved the uncanny. After a day’s climbing in the Cuillin, my father and his guide reached the road that would take them home in late afternoon as the light was fading. The guide then said he’d be returning the way they’d come rather than pass the standing stones by the road after nightfall. The last two stories concerned Kirstie, who my father called a “witch”. Whenever Kirstie needed an item of clothing she’d look for it on local washing lines. She’d then look at it until its owner, made anxious by the attention, appeared. Kirstie then praised it extravagantly until, fearing that all the goodness was being withdrawn from it, it was offered to her. More serious forms of “overlooking” were recorded by Robert Kirk,who writes that a man in his parish killed both his own cow and a hare ‘with his eyes’; the first by ‘commending its fatness’ and the second ‘having praised its swiftness’. (The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies p. 72).  

‘We will work with awareness, care and respect to the environment, each other and all humans and more-than-humans, paying attention to our process, methods and our own becoming in this experiment by being’…

                                                                                                            UB

Do we need the arts to encourage attention, care and concern? Do they prompt us to a more sustained attention to the concreteness of the world and to the imaginal that permeates it, to what shows itself and to what’s hidden, to foreground and hinterland? Do they prompt a care that keeps us open, keeps us waiting for the unforeseen and allowing it to appear without preconception? Do they prompt a listening that goes deeper than thinking, an animal’s total alertness to the fullness of the world? Is her writing what sustains my daughter, a woman of forty-thee chronically ill since she was thirteen? 

As a boy my father would sometimes take me out before sunrise into a wood or plantation to stalk roe deer. It required me to learn a bodily attention to the woodland in its fullness, to everything and anything that might indicate we were in the vicinity of a buck or doe. I learned to walk silently, to foresee what would be under my foot next so as to avoid treading on anything that might make a sudden sound. To be alert to the breeze changing direction or to any alteration in my father’s movements behind me. To be fully immersed in the ebb and flow of the world of the wood. It was no surprise then to read recently that hunting in twentieth-century Corsica: ‘is still endowed with an almost magical and sacred significance’, so that the hunter ‘participates in what can be called an atavistic ecstasy’. (Dorothy Carrington The Dream-Hunters of Corsica p. 78).  

‘How can we create entanglements with human and more-than-human others near and far that experiment with – and point to – new ways of being’?

                                                                                                            UB      

James Hillman writes of animals that they: ‘wake up the imagination’. ( in James Hillman and Margot MacLean (1997) Dream Animals: Writings by James Hillman Paintings by Margot McLean p. 2).  Our sensing of the world is heightened by Rilke’s ‘noticing beasts’, by our acknowledging their knowing that: ‘we don’t feel very securely at home’ in the ‘interpreted world’. (‘The First Elegy’ trans. J.B. Leishman & Stephen Spender Duino Elegies p. 25) . They remind us of the mystery of presence, and ‘the childhood game of becoming-animal’ that ‘suggests …that children have a sense of themselves as emerging out of a … field of protean forces and materials, only some of which are tapped into by a child’s current, human, form’. (Jane Bennett The Enchantment of Modern Life: attachments, crossings and ethics p.51).

In folklore the curlew’s call is often linked to sorrow. Yet its haunting cry has a trailing, bubbling, musical, albeit mournful, quality that is also profoundly beautiful. Curlews flying at dusk are said to have given rise to belief in The Seven Whistlers. On the hill by his house at nightfall, a man called John Pressdee would hear seven curlews pass over, but with never more than six calling at any one time. If a seventh should call he believed the world would end. In Grace Wells’ poem Curlew eleven curlews enchant and lift her until she flys, despite her knowledge of, and sadness at, their dwindling numbers.

To the extent that a particular way of producing knowledge is dominant, all other claims will be judged with reference to it. In the extreme case, nothing recognisable as knowledge can be produced outside of the socially dominant form.

Michael Gibbons (The New Production of Knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies pp. 1-2).

The event I’m trying to describe seems at one time or another to involve all the different people we each are. In particular, I suspect, the part of us attuned to what Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill found indexed under: “Neacha neamhbeo agus nithe nách bhfuil ann” (“Unalive beings and things that don’t exist”). Beings and things ‘from “an saol eile”, the “otherworld”’. (Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Selected Essays p. 19).  But particularly, perhaps, thelistener to what hides in silences.

Rebecca Solnit writes: ‘To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it’. (Rebecca Solnit The Faraway Nearby p. 193). As a student I listened to Fairport Convention’s Tam Lin which, thirty years later, became a door to a particular hinterland. At the same time the Surrealist painter and writer Penelope Rosemont was spending her Sunday afternoons listening to the blues on Chicago’s Maxwell Street. Once, when Carrie Robinson and her band were playing, she noticed a man at the front of the crown go rigid, drop his bag of groceries, and enter a trance in which he hopped and spun to the music. Maybe forty-five years after first hearing Tam Lin, I read Katy Beinart’s description of Goute Sel, a performance she and Mabelle Williams, her Haitian collaborator, made for the Ghetto Biennale at Port-au-Prince. In it they mirrored each other’s movements and gestures during the remaking of a Vodou veve as an art performance. Katy writes:

… at some points during the ritual, I felt a loss of self and of my identity…. as the performance went on, I felt totally caught up in the making of the veve, to the point where I forgot about the presence of the audience. Afterwards, someone told me that one of the Haitians thought I was a real mambo and that they saw the performance as a Vodou ritual rather than an artwork.  

Katherine Beinart 

(Detour and Retour: Practices and poetics of salt as narratives of relation and re-generation in Brixton’. Unpublished PhD thesis p. 383).

Today these events converge, prompting me to explore elsewhere by ear. “By ear”? Kathleen Jamie’s poem Tree on the Hill ends: ‘a hare with its world eyes, listening’. (in the London Review of Books September 10^th, 2020 p. 20). When I’m down south, her hare takes me north again to where the cry of curlews prompts the ‘gesturing beyond’ at the heart of Jamie’s poem. She also provided me with an abiding image of the world’s ultimate seamlessness. Asked about the relationship between “nature” and “culture”, she replied: ‘You’re washing socks in the kitchen sink with the window open and you hear a curlew call. Where, in that moment, are “nature” and culture”’?

‘Why is it so hard to imagine a better world? How to avoid the nostalgic, how to move beyond the cute, how to free radical imagination’?

 UB      

One day when out walking with N., we spoke with a man who told us he’d recently lost both parents within sixteen months, then his partner through medical negligence. He was also struggling to get stone locally for his walling work since his supplier had suffered a brain aneurism. Perhaps a decade younger than us, a borrowed pedometer tells him he may walk eight miles a day while moving near ten ton of stone. The arthritis in his hands means he now wears pressure gloves but still retains a wry humour. This exchange takes place in the North Pennines, home to N.’s maternal ancestors, a place to which we’ve returned annually for almost forty years.

N.’s here-and-now there is saturated by the past of her maternal family. By knowing the names of fields, the dead who farmed them and where they lived, her recall of parts of the long litanies of work and grief that cling to the buildings that were their homes. Her grandmother’s neighbour, sent home early from school when an aunt’s son was killed terribly falling into machinery at the mine, saw him laid out on their kitchen table. (His mother later lost her mind to grief). A great uncle who disappeared in a sudden snowstorm while returning from market across the highest point of the moor. Another who was a champion Cumberland wrestler. Her grandfather’s singing, and later his dying. A weave of inheritances, successes acknowledged and shames hidden, running back for generations to fade into an elsewhere that, somehow, is peripherally present. It spills from the presence of the dead who haunt us, are indifferent to us, or comfort us. 

Moon, starts and sea (for Paula Meehan)

‘How does art change the world? You have to believe in these encounters having some kind of meaning’.

UB 

A poem too can be a landscape. 

Paula Meehan offers two understandings of what a poem “does”. She inverts Auden’s claim that poetry “makes nothing happen”, suggests that in doing nothing a poem may stop ‘something happening’, stop time, take our breath away. Like the negative space of a drawing, it allows the world to be apprehended, revealed, sets us wondering. Poetry can also evoke fellow-feeling, solidarity. Meehan writes of opening a poetry reading in Canada with a poem by the indigenous Micmac poet Rita Joe to honour both her people and the place. She did so in part because she overheard someone dismiss ‘an aging woman writing a poetry of direct experience out of her own experience’, echoing something she was ‘well used to hearing and decoding, and resisting, at home in Ireland’. (Paula Meehan (2016) Imaginary Bonnets With Real Bees In Them p. 49). Poetry then as a caring through solidarity. 

The Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s poem An Obair / My Care meditates on time and on peoples’ inhumanity, grief and care. It refers to a woman friend dying in hospital, atrocities in Algiers and Serbia, her husband’s six-day coma, and the unconcern of the tides and ongoing spring. Despite this, it’s strangely positive, speaks of a walling of the heart as firmly as the castle it names, so that the poet can answer a friend’s ‘tired question’ about her children: ‘How’s the care’? It ends:

‘… This is the task.

This is the work that is not easy’. 

(Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill ‘My Care’ (trans. Bernard O’Donoghue) Northern Lights pp. 85-87).

I feel that the “hinterland” is a prime subject for poets, being the “place” that appears when we pay attention to the flowing-together of a here-and-now and an elsewhere. A place of awareness that may flair up when a skein of geese lifts and calls from the upper field above the farm before circling and wheeled north-west into the wind. When the faintly grained orange of a carrot is seen beneath the blade of the peeler. When the scent of grass newly-cut in the steep field but one above the cottage comes down on the wind that ripples the still uncut grass until it’s a sinuous green-gold sea. When we first see this year’s purple orchids lurking beside the river path, then find them again in the lea of a weathered spruce plantation high above the rough grazing land. When the mind falls silent as I write and I turn to see the dying chestnut trees across the road, the white butterfly passing beneath them, and the blue-shirted man with the small dog who appear through the gap in the wall. When their passing provokes Magnus, failed trainee guide-dog and now family pet, to exuberant barking. When glimpsing a roe doe grazing in the ragged margin between the wood and the road, or when evening sounds fade to the silence surrounding one bird singing. All of which takes place, as the news and the daily toll of roadkill remind me, under the undiscriminating eye of ever-present death. In the poem My Grandmother in the Stars Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us that:

                        Where we live in the world

                        Is never one place.

                                    Naomi Shihab Nye (Tinder Spot: Selected Poems p. 115).

That flowing-together seems to happen when we attend, in the the here-and-now, both to that present-ness and to what haunts us – an image, a dream, a fragment of a text, or maybe a living sense of the past flickering just beneath the surface of the carefully neutral language of an archaeological report. That awareness is where Denise Levertov’s poem September 1961 takes place. Where we catch the scent of the sea on the night wind while travelling the road ‘the old great ones’ have left us to find our own way. (Denise Levertov New Selected Poems pp. 34-35).  It’s where we can hope to disentangle what animated Morris Graves’ art as ‘a key to and a measure of the spiritual and the divine’, from the reductive (and embarrassed) ways what those terms refer to are taken by those who don’t see that his work is ‘open to all metaphysical systems and approaches’. (Theodore Wolff in Morris Graves: Vision of the Inner Eye p. 13).  

‘Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met’.

Rebecca Solnit The Faraway Nearby pp. 248 -9.

I have made twenty-two postcards for Utopias Bach. Although as images and texts the cards reflect personal concerns, many of these concerns are shared and relate to the Values and Questions section on the Utopias Bach web site – https://www.utopiasbach.org (Quotes from which are marked throughout simply “UB”). Some cards also raise questions that have been with me a long time, about inspiration in relation to the historical status of women, particularly as these questions may relate to the present and to groups like Utopias Bach.

I will “post” a new card on this site each day for the next twenty-one days.

For many years I worked in the space where place, memory, identity, and landscape meet. I started out understanding landscape as it’s used by ‘aesthetes, antiquarians and landed gentry’ but at some point I came across an earlier usage, one that corresponds to Landschaft: ‘a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground, something small-scale that corresponded to a peasant’s perception, a mere fragment of a feudal estate, an inset in a Breughel landscape’. (Barbara Bender Landscape: Politics and Perspectives p. 2).  A small, cared-for place, perhaps potentially a model for Utopias Bach? So this sense of “landscape” is my starting-point, but modified, used in Rebecca Solnit’s sense of ‘human psyches as landscapes’. (Rebecca Solnit The Faraway Nearby p. 25). The site of a folding together of questions: of place, memory, and identity, particularly as concentrated through poetry. So twenty-two postcards as reports of field-walking in psychic hinterlands.

Some sections of text would be far too long to fit on the back of a postcard. They have to be imagined as written in very small, almost microscopic, handwriting.

Best wishes,

Iain