29 10 07

The landscape of my childhood was littered with snapped & chewed pencils, the wooden pencil being a necessary tool for turning wayward boys into scholars, as was the birch, according to the then prevalent educational theories, or at any rate practices. In all the little inlets of the loch, where the land descends in the grip of rock to the edge of the water grow those great colonisers, birches. Many, having seeded themselves in the most exposed places & grown to a certain age have snapped at the leading edge, leaving only a broken & chewed looking stub. They grow in fours, fives & sixes. Maybe one is weaker than the others, or closer to prevailing gales & storm weather & snaps. This leaves a wind passage, for they all draw a little shelter from each other, & one by one, the others crack, being brittle rather than sinewy enough to bend with the wind. The weight of leaves & twigs will fold the tree top down, where it becomes a titbit for any passing deer. Those that survive , if it were not for the deer & sheep grazing seedlings & in lean winters eating the bark, shelter other species of tree. They act as nurses to alders, oak, rowan, holly. If there were no sheep & no human interference, there would be good woodland regeneration in a short space of time.
I like to think of pencils made of birch wood, but I know that most are made from cedar, a few, still, from pine. In Tibet ten years ago, I would sit down wherever I could to rest from the thin air & write with my pencil – the only thing it’s possible to write with in the rain. Everywhere a shy child would appear at my elbow, even where I could see no houses. The girl, or sometimes boy, would look at my pencil, look at my paper & look at me. I let her write, or sometimes the very young would draw. The pencil would be reluctantly handed back. When I stood, I would make a small gift of the pencil. We can get pencils cheap. China sells them by the million. When I need a pencil now, I wander along the streets that Scottish schoolchildren use & find them littering the ground, unchewed, seldom broken.
The pencils may not be made of birch, but from Sailean nan Cuileag just over the hill, the last loads of birch brooms were taken away at the end of the last century. The brooms were used in the Clydeside steel foundries. They were made in dark winter, as piece work at 4½ d a dozen, less than 2p. Hugh Cameron claimed to Alastair Cameron to be able to make 24 dozen in nine hours, which included felling the trees. Timber was shipped from the little bays and inlets around here for centuries, Sailean nan Cuileag, Port na h-Uamha, Camusaine, (where the number of trees was recorded precisely, as 41,070) for building, for charcoal, bark-oak for tanning. Cameron, again, records “all the tree except the crash it made when falling was used”. In the 1870s fellers & snedders were paid 16 shillings a week, a high wage in comparison to the birch-broom makers. Lost trades go with lost language & their gear & tackle. For tanning, the bark was taken from the bottom of the tree before it was felled. In Gaelic this was called moganachadha, & was a skilled job in itself. The moss was scraped off with a sgrioban coinnich which was curved to fit the tree; smaller branches were peeled - spitheagadh - by girls. I’ve yet to discover any Gaelic speaker here who knows these terms who did not come across them as I did, in Cameron’s Annals, written within living memory.
Peeled branches, as well as pencils also littered my childhood, but then I didn’t have to peel them to earn a crust.

28 10 07

Two days’ heavy rain, driven by westerlies, & the burns overspill & topple white & fast down the hills. The bare rock faces gleam in lulls & rainbows flash on & off as the sun & rain chase across the heights, mostly north, sometime south. The ant colony nearest is sodden & quiet. I suppose the ants to be in hibernation. In what way they hibernate, Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Ant does not recount. It’s my ant bible; though it’s stuffed as full of myth, suppositions, parallels, wishful thinking & righteousness as the Christian bible, it has an easy story-telling & at times, elegant prose. Materlinck only writes of the ant at rest:

“When after a long adventure, burdened with booty three or four times her own weight, she returns to the nest, her companions who guard the entries hasten to meet her and . . . cleanse her of the dust that covers her, brushing and caressing her, and lead her to a sort of sleeping-chamber, far from the tumult of the crowd, which is reserved for exhausted travellers. There she soon sinks into a slumber . . .”.

I had visualised ants hugger mugger together, like sleeping puppies; hibernating like dormice or the hedgehog who lives the winter out under my raised wooden hut at Carbeth. But I’m sure this is not the case. In fact the colony gives every appearance of being deserted; wet through, there must be a drainage system inbuilt, just as there are ventilation ducts in the architecture. But to see the mushroom growing from one side is to doubt this. It may be Bolbitius vitellinus, it may not & seeing it, I’m reminded of the moss creeping once more onto the cold roofs of holiday & second home cottages now the fires remain unlit in ashy hearths. Wet again, the hound & I return, she to crunch her bone & sprawl across the floor (she’s the best part of five feet from nose to tail tip & uses a lot of space) & my glass fills as I listen to rain hard on the window & peel yellowed birch leaves from my boots.

26 10 07

It’s been a long time since anyone called me son, but the old woman was surely entitled to do that according to age. It’s certainly a splendid thing to be called son by someone who’s not my parent. It reminds of a time (maybe imaginary) when the elderly were seen as wise in the ways of the world; when an old woman could respectfully be called cailleach. The term has overtones also of nun & of a childless woman. This makes it all the more endearing – a real human exchange is made in the one casual word. It’s full of genuine humanity, a trust that’s often far from us, with our care for our own narrow self-interest & that of our immediate circle. When we discriminate against those who are not “our” children, it’s possible to close an eye to other children’s suffering. Pick up a magazine to see how we objectify the starving, maiming & sexualisation of others’ children, scarcely able to part ourselves from the SUV which takes “our” kids to school.
Vandana Shiva, the physicist & eco-activist wrote that we go to the woods to learn democracy. (I paraphrase from memory). In these woods here, is a co-dependent community of trees. That community is symbiotic with all the other communities, the microflora, the flora,– from orchids to lichens – each with its contribution to the general woodland structure; the fauna & small creatures that I’ve already written of here in the journal: woodants, spiders, slugs, along with the beetles & wasps & flies. I have no idea how many species there are in these woods, never mind individuals of each species: the number is incalculable. Yet here is true democracy, with all these creatures having the right to exist (unless tampered with by a landowner who sees them as subject to his whims & economic will) in & of themselves, valued (is that too strong a word? I think not where absence of one leads to the degradation of the whole) equally for their contribution. Our recently elected government wants a conversation with Scotland. If it were to extend that conversation to the commons – the woodlands, the heaths & bogs, mosses & mires; to the voiceless, then we might all begin to live deliberately. The curlew at dusk has more resonance than the bleatings of parliaments; the small sound of a dragonfly laying its eggs in a sidestream, the tok tok of a stonechat, and the kind word of an old woman.
It’s not so much that we don’t value the trees & their fellows, we simply don’t see them. What we see is largely economic. What price can we derive from timber. Of course there’s an increasingly recreational attitude: what fun can I have in a woodland, as well as the neo-sacred & neo-mystic: how do the trees enhance my personal growth & healing (& nurture my delusions). We seldom allow woods to be for their own sake; that would be to admit that we’re all on an equal footing, co-existing in a fragile & complex space. There are no meetings with remarkable trees – all trees & therefore all woods, are remarkable. The Sunart oakwoods are also remarkable in their survival of economic appropriation. I’d like to see them survive for their own sake; not simply because they’re a place of quiet vitality in a busy world – they’re part of that same world - & can refresh busy people & inject a little calm into folks’ lives (which they do), but because they have as much right to exist as we do.
Meanwhile, here at Ard Airigh, I’ve been soaked twice & dried twice walking through the woods today. I’ve tried to step on as few plants as possible, but they’re forgiving, my tread only marginally heavier than that of a hind. Glimpses of the loch through the trees & the occasional sun shafts releasing the last delicate flies from where they shelter, & I’m still carrying the old woman piggyback in my mind.

20 10 07

Port round up:

Mallaig: Progress fishing the Minch, Wanderer III fishing the Firth of Clyde.
Buckie: Boats: Achieve, Aspire, Pegasus, Loyal Friend, Illustrious, Vigilant, Osprey, Silver Rock.
Pelagic vessel landings & nephrops at Mallaig & Peterhead. Witches all over.

17 10 07

the small rural
newspaper soon
read through

Ozaki Hosai, (whose poem that is, in translation by William J Higginson) the early twentieth century Japanese poet, led a troubled & alcoholic life. Perhaps his drinking arose from the fact that he was not allowed to marry the woman he loved, as she was too close a relative. He worked in insurance for many years, before becoming a Buddhist monk at Shodoshima (small-bean-island). A colleague in insurance described him as reeking of alcohol early in the morning. Although fellow workers wore business suits, Hosai owned no clothes except a pair of pyjamas & a tuxedo, which is what he wore to work.

the nail box:
every nail
is bent

Hosai was a chronicler of the overlooked. Just outside the door here, next to the roll of waiting-to-be-used sheep fencing, is a handleless feed bucket full of nails. Each one is rusty & as unusable as bent nails (though in years gone by I’ve straightened & reused many a pulled nail).
De tha dol?, too, our small newspaper here is very soon read through, scanned eagerly for news of distant neighbours, notices of any change in shop opening hours or a fundraising event. Though we go back to it the following day, for fear of having missed something. A sheep dog trial is a big event here, where we really do leave our doors open. Who’d come in but neighbours? There are no burglars, where even a visitor’s straying dog is seen a mile away by more than one pair of eyes. As I recall, there’s only been one theft recorded in De tha dol? in recent months – back in May, a sundial was taken from a garden in Ardnastaing & featured in the Letters Page. Neighbours come & go, entering houses at will, to leave mail given them by the postman for safe delivery. Once, here, my neighbour came in while I was away at the ferry. She was in need of a drink, but since I was not in, took a bottle & glass & had a drink at the table. Then, when I wasn’t soon back, wandered off with the bottle. I took this as a compliment. She knew me well enough to know I’d have happily joined her in a drink & sent her away with a bottle; if she’d appeared next morning in a tuxedo, we’d both have known that’s how life gets.
I’ve carried small poems of Hosai’s in my head for more than thirty years, the way sheds & porches carry tins & boxes of bent nails & torn-slotted screws. It’s proof, as if needed, that poetry, when rooted in the personal, the closely observed, moves far beyond the cultural grounding of its origin & becomes culture.

at midnight
a distant door
pulled shut

16 10 07

Andromeda galaxy, 300 billion stars’ light taking 2 million years to reach us, cold. At 21.09 tonight, stags are belling through rut, & through the air splitting roar, above the faint mountain horizon’s stars to the south, of a low flying fighter jet leaving only its faster than sound anger. At 21.11 the jet returns, a little north. & passes round again at 21.15. There’s a rustling in the dying bracken.

11 10 07

There’s a solitary wood ant roaming the colony at the road bend. At the colony on the rock above this, yet more has slid to the rock below, but that landslide, that cityslide, seems abandoned. There’s not a sign of the multitude of webs of a couple of mornings ago. We’re all stunned by last night’s heavy rain. The geometric webs are made by spiders of the Araneidae family. A study on Islay by the Biology Department of the then Paisley College, of Peatland Spider Communities, may reveal, of the 24 spiders listed, that some are orbweavers, like those here. I cannot tell. I scan their names but all that’s revealed is the beauty of another language naming: Pardosa pullata, Alepecosa pulverulenta, Centromerita concinna, Lepthyphantes zimmermanni & Lepthyphantes mengei; the boldly named Pirata piraticus, the posing Antista elegans & Silommetapus elegans, & Oedothorax gibbosus. Some of these are the builders of the hammock webs I saw: money spiders to us. & for sure, they represent the riches of earth & the Earth. Orbweavers, money spiders, wolf spiders, together with other small fauna leading their stamped on & hidden lives, & with gastropods, literally bind the fabric of the earth together. It’s because of these small & slow creatures that I see each trunk a habitat, each stand of bracken or bog-myrtle a copse; a map of someone’s territory.

10 10 07

FISH PRICES
Fleetwood - 22,500 kilos on the market. Witches 30p-£1; monkfish £2-£3.80; flounder 20p-60p.
Fraserburgh – 14 boats landed 1,005 boxes. Monkfish £90-£200; witches £40-£60. Boats – Virtuous, New Dawn, Celestial Dawn, Arcana
Peterhead, 9 boats, 2 consignments, landed 3,205 boxes. Monkfish £2.20-£3.40; witches £1-£2. Boats – Lapwing, Budding Rose, Harvest Hope, Fruitful Bough, Fair Morn

**********************************************

I like the story I once heard of William Stafford. He said his habit was to write a poem every day. When asked how he managed to write so much, he thought a moment & answered “Some days I lower my standards.” The story may be true, is possibly apocryphal, but comes to mind writing this journal. I have too many words. What’s written here is spontaneous, I’ve nothing to lose but the words. It may be a broadcloth journal, from cutout bits from poems; the poems are the holes in the cloth from which they’ve been cut. Like the Jain image of the released spirit, a negative, since they’re not yet written. In the surrounding material are many repetitions in the pattern, like speech. What goes down here is only words. Attributed to Allen Ginsberg, (but certainly first articulated by Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan refugee who co-founded Samye Ling Tibetan Centre in Eskdalemuir) on spontaneity: First thoughts, best thoughts. If I think anything it’s probably: Having thoughts? Think again.

All words. I’m having a clear-out, there’s too many for my storage space. I’ve an incomplete set of oddities if anyone would like them, previously enjoyed (as car-salesmen say): unguent & ungulate. Some are words related to religion that I really should bin, like zealot & apocrypha, but they can be sold these days to newspapers. I have trouble getting out the word aspen, also, nearly always saying poplar instead. I blame Linnaeus. The botanic name of aspen is Populus tremula: the trembling poplar. I left a poplar for an aspen elsewhere in this journal. If you find it, it’s yours.

09 10 07

To walk across the coruscating mile of the bay in October sun, between land & clear sky, is to walk on rippling quicksilver. A heron stares at a limpid & disappearing rock pool. The pure, bubbling, unworded call of flighting curlews curves down to my ear. Halfway across I’m a tiny figure in reflected light, walking, walking, just one foot before the other.

***************************************************************************

a brindled hound
a lichened oak

Inside a wood, it is hard to see it for the trees which overwhelm with their forms, twisted, broken, growing one in the other. The curling holly finds shelter in the oak, rowans crawling decade on decade round the rocks send out more roots, grip tighter, a birch trunk springs back on itself in a slow double bend; a complete alphabet, a language of forms & lives. I find it hard also to see the trees for this reason. It’s infinitely more complicated by the lichens & mosses. Mosses are knee deep in places and year on year take themselves further up into the trees. Where the mosses are not in evidence, the lichens bubble across trunks. Ferns, too, in the crooks formed by the reaching out of limbs. & of course, the old nurse trees will have saplings growing in them. Sometimes it’s possible to see what appears to be two or even three types of leaf on the one tree until the intertwining trunks, like ivies, can be separated from the moss & the ferns by the recalcitrant eye.
In places where we wander, say at Sailean nan Cuileag, the inlet of flies, there’s no such problem for the hound. She’s suddenly there ahead of me on the path, her eyes undeceived & undeceiving, she follows me, now to the east, then the west, ahead, behind, plaiting around me like a sapling alongside a veteran oak. She’s perfectly disguised for this woodland, soft footed, & in the October colours & light, all but invisible in her fur lines of broken amber & darker brown. We don’t take the same path - she has long delicate limbs, built for the speed of the chase, which would catch in the cracks of those mossy rockfaces I scramble up & down - but we end up in the same place – she’s a gaze hound: from within her grace she can see my upright lumbering form as surely as I see the bunching leathery lungwort on the oak trees we pass.

08 10 07

All morning Ben Resipole, Creag Dhubh, Bein Bhreac & the others can’t rise from the clouds. There’s no Sgurr visible to the west, no pointed Viking hills of Rum – Hallival, Askival, no Ainshval to be seen. The hound lies heraldic on the heather. Over by the parish church they slash & burn rhododendron understorey, but the smoke cannot clear the canopy, tangles in branches. Sheep amble past on their journey into the subconscious. While the mist hides, it also reveals: vast moorlands of webs, each with points of water at each intersection. There are two types of spiderweb here – one is floss & largely horizontal, but with diagonal digressions & sometimes seemingly random. This is all across the bog myrtle & up high into pale birches. The other kind is the geometric spiral from one branch to another of the oak & the rowan. The spiders must have (over millennia) adjusted web building techniques to what they hoped to catch, if hope is not too far-fetched a notion in the case of a spider. Like any fisherman, the mesh is larger or smaller according to the anticipated haul. Mist also amplifies the often unheard, the unlistened to: the booming surge of the incoming tide & crescendo of curlews. From all directions, the stags’ great groans of existence, their moaning lust for life driving them. Electricity volts through the hound’s lead to my hand; she’s seen them first - a stag & three hinds making unhurriedly for higher ground. Her ancestors sing in her blood, she trembles lightly. In another life I would have slipped her after them & followed her uphill.

07 10 07

Hill farming economics, 2007: Scottish Government subsidy per lamb slaughtered & incinerated: £15. [“ a welfare disposal scheme to slaughter and render up to 250,000 light lambs that would normally be exported, but which are stuck on Scottish farms and now in an unmarketable condition because of the export ban and livestock movement restrictions”]. Abattoir prices in Dingwall: (200 mile round trip from Ardnamurchan, includes ferry) for slaughter, £17 per lamb. Slaughtered, butchered & dressed, total per lamb, £30. (Cost to farmer). No local buyers for lamb (& certainly not mutton, despite aristocratic & chef noises off). Wethers at market: £2 - £3. Wool: no market value. Cost of lamb chops in supermarket: £3.67 per kilo. Cost of grassland, per acre, per lamb, unknown. Cost of supplementary feeding, variable, but expensive. From The Herald (October 6 2007): “The Northern Ireland Red Meat Industry Task Force, established to develop a five-to-10-year strategy for the beef & sheepmeat industry has concluded that suckler-origin beef and hill sheep have no future.” “The report also concluded that it is not possible to create an economically viable production model for an efficient producer of hill sheep unless the farmgate price increases substantially to approximately £2.80 per kilo. Such conclusions are just as relevant to Scottish producers and will set alarm bells ringing in an industry already in crisis from the foot-and-mouth and blue tongue outbreaks.”

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

06 10 07

It’s easy to make out the warp & weft of society here, how bards & poets are fabric, along with genealogists & story tellers. They’re in fact often the same person anyway, & there’s little distinction between personal history & society’s doings, real or imagined. Alec Dan Henderson, of Acharacle, in conversation with Donald Archie MacDonald, in 1967, as recorded in Tocher, discusses local folk of the time of the clearances: “The people were cleared away from Ardnamurchan. And he climbed out by Beinn Shianta and saw the places where the people used to be, and the old walls which were left. There was nobody there.” The he in this is the Doctor of Rahoy, one Dr John MacLachlan, a poet of whom Sorley MacLean writes: “ . . . your back was strong and straight / as you went up the face of Ben Shianta / with the burden on your shoulders / of seeing the land a waste / under sheep and bracken and rushes.” Alec Dan, although not a young man in 1967, may not have met John MacLachlan, who died at seventy years of age in 1874, but his memory is strong, & he sings a song from someone who had it from the Doctor of Rahoy: Direadh a-mach ri Bein Shianta; Climbing up Beinn Shianta. The doctor no doubt knew the Ben when its lower slopes were inhabited. The song has a verse: “And d’you think you’ll find peace, with your sheep and your cattle-folds?” addressing “Grey-headed MacColl of the evil deeds” who put out the people from their place. In the same poem [Dr John MacLachlan (of Rahoy in Morvern)] Sorley MacLean also writes of “The Cameron in Bun Allt Eachain, / that rare knowledgable man, / he told about a gleam of the sun / on beautiful Morvern / in the time of its emptying and its misery.” The Cameron, Alasdair Cameron, a road man, wrote elegantly in both English & Gaelic. Bun Allt Eachain is where I was walking yesterday, driven there by Cameron’s little book “Annals and Recollections of Sunart”, published in 1961, in which he writes of the nearby Tigh-na-Caillich: [which] “commemorates landlord despotism, which made a harmless old woman the victim of a son’s indiscretion. Why? Oh why, one may ask, should the iniquity of the son be visited on the mother – particularly when he did punishment for his crime of stealing a sheep.” I was looking for the “solitary Scots pine tree, a lone sentinel which has braved many a blast” at Bun Allt Eachain; but it was gone. Later I spoke to a man in Strontian who had known Alastair Cameron, or “North Argyll” his pseudonym, or “North” as he was affectionately known.
The Doctor of Rahoy, born in 1804, sees the results of mid-century clearance & makes a song. The song is sung in Ardnamurchan & Morvern, where it’s heard by Alec Dan Henderson and passed on; The doctor’s story is told, also in the middle of a new century, by one of the greatest Gaelic poets. (MacLean’s note to his own poem: “Dr John MacLachlan was one of the best Gaelic poets of the nineteenth century”) MacLean also remembers the knowledge of the road man, the Cameron of Bun Allt Eachan, where as a visitor I look for a Scots pine. In its topics, its feeling for people & its democracy of greatness, as neat an encapsulation of the last 200 years in the memory of Gaels as may be found.

That long memory is abroad in this parish today in other matters – the writing of a letter apparently questioning the mental faculties of another doctor of medicine, the calling to the General Medical Council, & “enforced” resignation. The consequences of that letter divided the usually polite co-existing communities here. There may be many odious reasons for clearances & more yet for sad & bitter resignations; but those who clear are not forgotten. Painted signs, nailed to oaks & chestnut trees, hung from deer grids & rock faces read “We support Dr Buchanan” all across the two peninsulas. Recently new signs have been hung: “Backstabbers Your Day Will Come” & the single word: “Traitor”

05 10 07

At the jetty & along, by the little wooden boathouse, there’s no blue & white china fragments on the shore. The crackling blue shining of the mussel shells deceives, though. & the insides of dog whelks on the rocks, broken possibly by crows, are quietly luminescent, faint mauve & nicotine-yellow spiralling chambers. Fish jump clear of the water here, almost beneath the Miocene other-world gaze of the black cormorants on their rock, twenty four in this colony, unmoving; watching wind against the tide. The small creel boats at moorings swing & fall & rise. The parchment grey-black leaves of aspens rattle onto the shore. Acorns drop & roll into the sea. It’s how the brindled hound & I measure each day’s incursion into another season.

04 10 07

I should have written: zealots, followers of the Word given, sent down; not fundamental-ists, since there is nothing of essence about them.

***************************************************************************

Away for a few days in Galloway & the Ariundle apples on the cherry boards of my desk have moved from deepsea to lit suns, with a rouged blush. The leafchart of bloods & wines, amber & umber, golds & saffron is again surrendering to the pull of earth & its gravity, its gravitas & its fun. The odd flashpoint colour of a sycamore branch, its leaves no longer producing chlorophyll green as the days shorten, moving beyond equinox towards solstice. Autumn always climbs sycamores a limb at a time, while the rowan’s tinted, tinged everywhere. A mirror to the rowan’s berries is in the scarlet dogrose hips, beamed forth & back, a recognition, a signal: the way light seduces.

In October sun Glen Tarbert wears a thick new pelt the colour of a fox. The sky’s not quite the blue of a kingfisher, but this is already a halcyon day. A passing dozy buzzing fly lands on my eyebrow & I wink. I remove the fly & wink again at the conspiracy of the day.

In his poem Why I am not a Painter, Frank O’Hara, not thinking of autumn, writes
There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life.

Terrible perhaps, in the sense of trembling, of intensity. Certainly, the hound beside me feels it & trembles in the face of it moving around us with an intensity that drives all the woodlands, all its creatures.

Tonight, somewhere over towards Creag Dhubh & the little lochans in the hills, Laga & Lochan Sligneach, the stags are bellowing. The Milky Way is all that lights our path. & the winking lights & long drone of the black plane in the dark where no airline flies.

We return, the hound & myself, to a phone message from a friend on his way to Syria, one place of his former imprisonment & torture. He’s asking for my prayers. Palestinian, Muslim, stateless, lately an imam in his own play, hating imams, he says, all imams. In my fashion, I silently respond: a bat, probably a Pipistrelle, just the one, flittering & swooping, looping over & over hard by the old rowan with its knuckled roots gripping rock outcrop.

29 09 07

It’s also hard for me to walk about here & return with nothing in my pockets. It’s frequently a leaf or a blossom for a jug or jar on the table. There are so many shades of green. Today it’s three little red apples & a conker. The conker is small & is probably one overlooked by everyone else; not that many children pass this way. Adults don’t bother. Conkers have the rich sheen of polished furniture. They glow in the afternoon sun. They’re wealth with no work on my part. & I’m always reminded of Basho giving the horse chestnuts of Kiso as presents to city folk. Sometimes this comes out in translation as acorns. It’s the present of that autumnal wealth that’s important, not the form it takes. Basho is saying, with his simple gift, the very obvious: here’s true riches. The apples are tiny – from wilding trees, small, spherical & deep red. What promise; of course as bitter as sloes. But in cooking, they’ll be transformed. What delights of apple jelly they’ll make, together with the long greeny-yellow apples whose pronounced separate base, a swelling upwards, is like cumulus gathering. Those came last week, stuffed in my pockets from the tree no-one bothers about on the road to Ariundle. How can I pass over the fruits of trees’ labour? They shine three times. Once in the finding, once in the cooking & at last, in the greedy devouring & savouring.
Pome: the characteristic fruit of the apple family, as an apple, pear, or quince, in which the edible flesh arises from the greatly swollen receptacle and not from the carpels.

How many years since I first read Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach? I take it from the shelf & read from A Memory Of The Players In A Mirror At Midnight, written in Zurich in 1917:

Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears.
Pluck and devour!


27 09 07

It’s harder than that. I said I’d go to the woods. Send words back. Maybe one at a time. & then the meter reader comes & he’s too short. Oak. There’s one word. It’s a hard word. The words are metered too. Maybe I should spit them out fast: oak, alder, aspen, birch, holly. No elder yet. Maybe that’s what’s holding me back. No elders. We must invent it all for ourselves, just as they told us. Is it the poplars trembling in the wind or the rain hissing on the sea at Ardtoe? Pine. I can’t read all the leaves of this wooden book. & instead I must add to them. How fortunate to be born human & see the leaves turn from those green shades to yellows & reds & all on the same pillar. & to smell the moulded centuries underfoot, cladding the jutting bedrock.

& a friend calls so we talk of apple trees instead.

26 09 07

It’s just after the equinox. Tonight it’s full moon – the harvest moon. This moon rises due east & sets due west. The length of a day is equal to the length of a night, but night, a cockstep at a time, is catching me unawares each twilight. There’s a threshold here. From here I can stare into winter. It makes me edgy seeing the blackness in this morning’s brilliant sun, reflected in the little pools of last night’s rain left among rushes. Today’s tides will be high & already the bay is preparing itself, with a calmness in the dazzle of sun, for the tons of water which will later pour in to cover its cold sands. The clouds are piled high to the south. Bare rock outcrops on the slopes glimmer, blink back in an unaccustomed brightness. Peat hags hold their water like the toothless crones they are, only tufts of bog cotton above on skinny stems. Pismires are slow today, stunned by the cold westerly. Ben Resipole’s eastern flank hunkers in shadows. The last bee is at the last scabious flower.

25 09 07



******************************************************
who decrees decay
allows for growth

********************************************************

The little fly, meanbh-chuileag, Culicoides impunctatus, needs blood for its life cycle, which it draws unasked through its rolled mouthparts from mammals unfortunate enough to be in its vicinity. This, on lower, wetter ground in Ardnamurchan, is most of us who venture outside; with one hectare (about the size of a shinty field) reckoned to host to as many as 24 million larvae of that particular fly.
The adults draw energy more acceptably from flowers’ nectar, but it’s also a detritivore, feeding on rotting vegetation.
Among its predators are the insectivorous plants - sundews & butterworts, but even together with others – dragonflies, swifts, pipistrelles, palmated newts & the common lizard, these cannot keep pace with the sheer numbers of these midges with their bloodsucking habits.
Round about now, the midges begin to fade away, adults dying off in the colder, wetter & windier weather that’s blowing in after the autumnal equinox. They are generally all gone by October. The final instar of the larva, however, overwinters in the ground, making sure of species continuance & mammal discomfort (mainly deer & humans) next year. The females, it seems, smell our breath & the presence of lactic acid. The first bite, & taste of blood, & she’ll release pheromones to attract her sisters. Maybe the answer is to neither take milk nor to breathe. Nobody has ever recorded dead vegans being bitten.
The disappearance of the midge happens at the same time as the migration of the martins that flickered over & round the byres all summer. Here in Gobsheallach, their nesting sites had been disturbed by recent building works & the prowling cats, but having flown for up to three months from sub-Saharan Africa to get here, they don’t give up easily. With the hills changing from purple to brown, though, they’re away south again, apparently landing long enough to rest & then make the dangerous journey maybe fifteen thousand miles north, a hundred and sixty odd miles a day, to arrive in time to help eat midges.
Bluetongue fits into my imagination somewhere between bluestocking & the nose of a permanently & amiably confused drinker. The bluetongue virus could affect the other controversial mammals in these parts, along with foot & mouth: sheep. Although the virus has so far been found in the UK only in a part of England, maybe five hundred miles from here, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) estimates that the midge which spreads this virus (the same genus as the meanbh-chuileag) can travel maybe a mile a day; “However, if caught in suitable meteorological conditions midges can be carried much farther distances, especially over water masses, i.e. more than 200 km (124 miles)”. Bluetongue virus was first described in South Afrca, coincidentally where “our” housemartins have been recorded landing.
Sheep here are practically as wild as the deer they share the hill with. Although, safely grazing on sea grasses & on the tidal islets in the bay, the small black Hebridean sheep & their sometimes piebald lambs are approachable enough. As is Charley, the one-eyed tup, who wants only to overwinter in my kitchen; drink my malt for all I know. Difficult to control, then. I’ve seen crofters, aunties, uncles & postmen pressed into service, with dogs sometimes hindering the gathering for shearing or dipping, all running & shouting across the sands, over the thrift & campion, re-enacting somehow a Keystone comedy. The midges, though, have no such trouble with sheep or deer.
Another sort of clearing of the land, again with financial subtexts, may soon afflict people here. The advent (coming with the wind) of the bluetongue midge, neither amiable nor at all literary may take up where unscrupulous landlords left off.
The Sunart show, just after the first foot & mouth movement restriction orders in the summer, was a sad affair: no sheep or cattle. A wet west Highland day, with only a hectoring Loch Lomondside farmer displaying his sheepdogs’ skill in herding (flocking?) ducks from one part of the central ring to another, not once but twice.
Ardnamurchan, described in one attempt to attract tourists as “almost an island”, jutting as it does with its odd rhino head into the Atlantic between Mull & the small isles of Rum, Eigg, Muck & Canna, its eye a ring-dyke of volcanic origin, is most definitely not an island – as if water were in any case a safeguard from viruses.
The commonwealth of martins & the interlocking communities of deer, humans & midges ebb & flow. With the midges & the martins, the motorhomes move at their stately pace along the single track roads, southing, overwintering, perhaps, with bluetongue midges. Their place in local economy is debated; with a former B&B crofter, (her croft now one of the best examples of Sunart oakwoods) speaking of their coming into the area coinciding with the decline of her business. As they depart, the other caravan dwellers return – the travellers are back in Glen Tarbert – a glen of winter deer. The travellers were here long before the holidaying motor home-owners; before the feudal-minded industrialists who bought sporting estates in the late nineteenth century. Alastair Cameron, in his “Annals and Recollections of Sunart” records of their spring arrival (together with the long disappeared “milestone inspectors”) in the first decade of the twentieth century: “it was nothing unusual for me on my way home from school to meet three or four squads of them with their carts and horses. Stewarts, Macmillans, Johnstones, Williamsons, and up till 1908 or thereabouts, Browns and Wilsons were the most regular.” They were kindly received, with their tales & tinware.
People cleared for sheep; sheep cleared for deer; conceivably deer & sheep both giving way to a virus; travellers yielding to tourists. Depopulation continues.
more later

**********************************************************

21 09 07

“ . . . after it’s over – it’s gone, into the air. You can never capture it again.”
Eric Dolphy said this in interview about live improvised music, although it was spliced in to his final recording – Last Date. I guess it’s how I feel about this semi-spontaneous journal I’m starting here. The journal, of course, can be recaptured in a number of ways after it’s published on the internet; it can be rewritten, too – but it appears here for the first time in its mostly unedited form. Drafts always make me a little nervous.
I like the notion of a blog. A weblog. An Indra’s web of communication, with each node a word, a syllable even.
Indra’s net - an infinite web with a jewel at each vertex, each jewel reflecting all the other jewels - a metaphor for interconnectedness. I enjoy the near-democracy of a blog. Near-democracy, because, although anyone can write anything for her own blog, in fact it’s restricted to those with access to the internet, to a world which denies its constituent parts in a way unthinkable to a true democrat. A human form of communication, then. Not a web tree, (as I am surrounded by a web of trees here in Ardnamurchan, together with their allies, co-dependants & symbiotes) or even a log, home to mosses & lichens, coleoptera & fungi, failing a tree; though it will be a record of sequential (sometimes circular) data – a log.
A true weblog might be a we blog – an assertion of a democratic notion. What would the collective we blog (we be log) of a colony of insects read like? Of bees or of ants? Perhaps not too far from our own concerns.
I’m not sure then, if this is a blog, a weblog; it’s not a we blog; nor is it an eco log nor an eclogue. More, perhaps a journey-work, a travel, a travail among trees in Sunart woodlands & their varied communities. I can’t speak for anyone but myself, of course, but it may reflect a place where these communities are paramount; since nothing on a human scale, much, happens here.
The tide comes into the bay, then goes out. The bay is, at high tide, just outside the window here. It connects with, & is part of, the Atlantic ocean. My perceptions connect me to it. These we blog words, this travail, read by you, connects us.
A true work, to emphasise this, our interdependence; what the poet Thich Nhat Hanh calls interbeing.
Another dram, anyone?

**********************************************************

I’m given an unexpected release of tears this morning. On the CD player, I’m playing Verdi’s Requiem, with Ezio Piza & Beniamino Gigli, the great tenor of his day. The formality of the Latin verse, in the Italian pronunciation, suggestive as the words of a lover. Piza’s profound bass rolls in the low & rocky Ardnamurchan hills. I listen to the Dies Irae & “the trumpet scattering wonderful sound” & I’m moved. The words & music reach into me to find something I didn’t know was there, & the Quid sum miser: “Who am I, wretched man, to say, whom ask to intercede, when the just man is barely safe?” forces what’s inside to my eyes.
Recorded in August 1939, with the full atrocities of another miserable war breaking .
I heard the day’s news: Israeli planes in Syria, soldier killed in Hellmand explosion, UK to retain certain types of cluster bombs, US private contractors open fire randomly in Iraq; fundamentalists killing each other & us. How do I reconcile this requiem – a plea to a god in whom I can’t believe – with holy wars?
I can take no more & turn off the actual music, pull on my boots & hat, walk out & up the hill.
Every day here at Gobsheallach, I visit the wood ant colonies. They are in a dip in the road, a single track. To the north, ascending the hill, are thin birches & wind-broken small oaks, all sitting among mosses & ferns and outcrops of rock emblazoned with lichen circles. To the south, where the burn gathers force, are alders, whose first spring growth had a fine papal & sexual purpling.
These little colonies – for they are little, unlike those classic ziggurats on the other side of the bay at the edge of the sitka plantation – have grown despite the maniac flailings of the hedging & verging machine, which, during the growing seasons, periodically demolishes their citadels. But their colonies survive. I don’t know what will become of the other communities when the plantation over there is clear felled.
I love these ants. They are Scottish wood ants, Formica aquilonia (though this colony of perhaps a hundred thousand may be Formica lugubris. There is plenty to mourn). Seangan, in Gaelic, the noun common to all ants: pismire; this one’s a fairly large ant with a dark head and abdomen & red thorax. Scarce in most of Britain, though as its name might imply, apparently plentiful here. Her work is never over. One mound is on the flat into soft earth, with bracken shading from the heat of the summer sun. Another is built on a rock outcrop. Here, at some point, a portion has slid off the slanting surface some three feet, to land, broken, on another pointed rock below. Upon this rock I will build. These ants move nest-building detritus, broken bracken & leaf fragments, from the lower wreckage of their city to the upper, to rebuild their labyrinths of underground chambers & grottoes. Maeterlinck, the Belgian playwright , (later, Count Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck) in his 1930 “The Life of the Ant”, writes of their architecture: “ . . . in the ants’ nest we should find the horizontal style predominant, with innumerable and apparently aimless meanderings, an endless extent of catacomb cities, from which none of us, were they built upon our scale, would ever emerge.”
Maeterlinck ‘s earlier book, “The Life of the White Ant” was a plagiarism of Eugene Marais’ “The Soul of the White Ant”. Marais, a South African poet, scientist & morphine addict killed himself with a shotgun as a result.
All summer I’ve watched them at this task. Today is overcast, threatening rain; the temperature is dropping, but still there are ants walking backward up three feet of bare rock overhang. I track one: she’s hefting a fragment of dried bracken four times her own length, as she ascends, never pausing, scaling a height thirteen hundred times her own: her height, since she is female & since I have seen others almost standing erect, caressing each other with their antennae, communicating what’s unknowable to me. The three feet of the rock, though, isn’t much when considering that most of their foraging is done in the birch & oak canopy many times this height. Here they milk sap-feeding bugs, like the aphid Symydobius oblongus, of their honey dew, which is drawn down by a gentle stroking; the honey dew, rich in sugars & vitamins, is the aphid’s natural waste matter. This aphid is lovingly tended like any prize buttermilk-rich Highland cow. The ants, as well as farming aphids, tend their pastures. They prey on herbivorous insects, sawflies & moths, which, unchecked, could soon deplete the tree pastures they feed on.
This climbing ant, in four minutes, as near as I can tell, has reached the upper city & disappeared into a newly made doorway, away from the prevailing rain. For now the rain has started. The queens here are moving into autumnal diapause, stopping their production of eggs, which have been laid unceasingly since their spring nuptial flight. The flying males are allowed their moment of ecstasy, then die. Requiem; then hibernation. I stare out across the bay where the tide is ebbing away. Above, two hooded crows veer lazily away as they spot me. Something unseen, perhaps a heron, shrieks on Eilean Dubh, the black island, one of the two conjoined tidal islands in the Atlantic gate of the bay’s mouth.
On the walk back to my cottage, the rain on my face, I gather enough chanterelles for my supper, together with some deer-nibbled birch bolete to dry for stock. There is a dead shrew, perfect on the metalled road, left to lost unstrung rosaries of sheep droppings.
Inter oves locum praesta, sings Gigli - Grant me a place among the sheep.
(to be continued)

*********************************************************