An Ardnamurchan Journal

2008-09-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

29th September 2008

My friend Dogo Barry sets me a nice problem, one I’d already been pondering. It’s a question of how to continue a journal – a journey started - when I’m elsewhere.
Once, it might have been the sea paths, out through the Firth, west past the Mull of Kintyre, then north through the Sound of Islay & past Colonsay, west & north again round the Ross of Mull, the point of Ardnamurchan & east home. Now I follow the A82 north past Ben Lomond & Tarbet, rising up as I travel past Ben Lui to Tyndrum, where the hound & I stop, walk, drink water & to her delight, share a bag of chips. Then on to Orchy Bridge, across Rannoch Moor, through Glencoe, passing Glen Etive, cattle-fold to the sun, then Buachaille Etive Mor, Buachaille Etive Beag & Bidean nam Bian. The bridge at Ballachulish, then the ferry at Corran across the tidal rip (& it’s raining again) & over into Ardnamurchan & home.
This I do in memory. Ardnamurchan has become for me a state of mind. The seasons are strange here; as childhood may appear subjectively as summer-long leisure, these seasons of the ardnamurchan-mind come & go at their will, now autumn browns immediately followed by the greening of April.
I wrote this today & the following in April last year, for Practice Journal in California, which seems to have become a little unseasoned itself, its spring issue yet to appear.

April in the woods

No-one talks about Japanese prisons: how they might be a boiling hell for believers. You’ve been eaten by a machine of hell we somehow invented. A place was a good idea. Here I drink & watch sun on the second range of mountains but not the first. There is rain to the north & I’m supported by underground cables that buzz & hum through the world & surface wherever hell is manifested. There’s no appeal to the saints. There are so many because they’re all scruffy & drunk on something or other & we keep beatifying. The ewes here right now (though I didn’t want to mention them) are on pilgrimage across the saltflats & the radio speaks (or the man inside pulls the wires in ventriloquy) the story of a man dismembering a woman. Here I’m lifting the entire sky. It will stop raining. It will rain again. It is morning. It’s enough or maybe too much. To come home safe is all we ever wanted. Whatever home is. The pickaxe has toppled from where it was stuck in the thin crust of this poor earth & is rusting. Beasts & fantasies still live in the brain. But the soaring buzzard & dipping stonechat & spin of the very earth

Who started all this anyway & who said it was or could start & where will you go for it when the creek as you say runs dry. Why did you cut your birthday cake with a sword shazam when all the world is hungry & some maybe even most are starving. Hungry for what’s found at the heart of a nasturtium godsake it really is that simple. If not now when. & to wake up & find us all fed including the signatories to the bombs fed. & then the rain comes on again & where will you go for it. Come to it slowly approach it unawares. Nonchalance the order of the day. This is not philosophy more incontinence inability to stay sober & no-one is drinking here but come to it. Intoxicated with possibility. Enough of words for the now let’s examine the rocks and their twists & turns anticline syncline these & the water & its sweet rain can curlew can birch in the wind can fill the bay with salt water can let’s be up in the hills by the volcano sitting in a hot spring it’s called Hell Valley but we know what that means

Who for what for if you like we can talk of dharma of all the rest of that. More the distribution & disappearance as if they were ever appeared of species how to love the humble bee the bumble bee bombus and to sit patiently where there might be an underground nest & that person who demands tension has the weight of the atlas on his scapula & I know what another gin solves & why the thunderbug comes in thunder & who she brings with her what for being the only question & if it’s not to save & oldfangledly succour then there’s the door. The word knocks the skull to be let inside. Parasitic to synapses it exits diving off the tongue & flies & multiplies but dies in the winter & needs to start the cycle again it’s to escape that cycle we’re gathered here sweet ones

going north sing going south sing sitting still sing walking away sing oh buzzard♪ oh teacup waiting for me swallows visited yes♪terday leave the blue rope the line can slacken they’ll come back & the cuckoo oh

Friday goes & Saturday wine with it & two axes leaning by the wall & unmoved wood waiting for the unanswering tea if the reflection of the flag in the opposite side of the wobbly hut window moves in the wind what’s so to speak moving you would know my mind moving is agape its tongue lolling in purest wonder night stuff forgot forgot black tiny shadow traces of spiders in the north woods in the wren falls from the rowan jinks up for the stone where’s the in the where’s the cuckoo the empty (the! goosepair honk overhead

2008-06-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

19th June 2008

poems from the same series as the last couple of postings can be read online at http://gistsandpiths.blogspot.com/. There seems no need to duplicate them here when this link should take you directly there. There's part of another set there as well.

2008-04-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

April 23rd 2008

Sailean nan Cuileag

the pelt of sea its tongues
smooring & quenching &

plucking what will be left
at tide’s going air

of what’s uttered oystercatcher’s
pitch & pipe smew & craik of

curlew pulse of what’s given
what’s yielded what’s opened

2008-04-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

3rd April 2008

this is not an explanation or critique of the poem last posted, but another poem, titled

COMMENTARY

we construct landscape
as identity
there is no water imagine
imagine there is no sea loch
Resipole has its foundation
in syncline
cormorant curves in
that nothing which is something
already easing away
the mountain’s walking off
into that hour before
dawn that is the same every
where everywhere

2008-03-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

17th March 2008

Camas Torsa

glacier talks
under ocean moon

above Resipole rises & shrinks
tide swills & hangs

Spindrift’s gutting across
sun’s line of gulls

its engine throb hub
of the scoured world

2008-03-12T10:18:00.000-07:00

March 3rd 2008

wearing a summer hat.
walked out into powdery snow.

Shimpei Kusano: Certain Days

Leap Year’s day came & went. The smallest hind of Gobsheallach hill has not been seen for five days; in her place is a small stag, timid & keeping close to the two larger hinds as they move across the bay, exposed, & as they browse on the sparse green among rusting bracken. Has the small hind been shot, or is there some transformation happening here in this corner of a materialistic land where a white stag can be explained by leucism?

I’m content here, heaping language onto landscape, through winter’s mouldering, now watching spring’s shoots; but I’m leaving Ardnamurchan, on a day of blizzards alternating with the blue-blindness of cloud free skies. The dramas of the mountains, companionable Beinn Resipol & Beinn Hianta in Morvern & the doings of the waters: Loch Shiel, Loch Sunart, & Abhainn an Iubhair & the burns & puddles no longer ask my daily attention. Spring is a good time to leave; though here, in this journal I will still be writing, though more slowly, of the walking of last summer, last spring, grounded in memory & experience. The Atlantic wind will blow my nose cold from another quarter. Like any trumpeting swan I’m migrating; like any wild goose, I’ll land again on this bog, unworked since the sixties, near Airigh Bheagaig.

Back in September I wrote of the notion of a weblog (though I call this a journal) being a we blog. Of late, comments have been arriving & have been most welcome. They will be more welcome in weeks to come, as I post new entries, poem-drafts even; back-channel (as I write this, I see the south channel between the mainland & Eilean Shona) or here, publicly. The mountains’ll keep on walking & I in my green knit hat rushing to tongue the snow.

2008-03-01T02:38:00.000-08:00

27th February 2008

The moon’s sliding the sea into its tidal heaping back into the bay again.
How tender the hill is where the woodlands are thin; a child with solitary promise. Spring is here, whatever the weather, & it has been wild & wet, but mild with it. The colonies of birch with their hair-like traceries of twigs have small ochre leafbuds & are putting out their first catkins. Spring’s not reluctant, but I’m happy still to be in the bareness of the woods, finding great pleasure in the journey; enjoying the forms of the trees & their limbs, boughs, branches & twigs rising towards the increased light of advancing days. Unless it’s possible to appreciate the underlying structure of winter’s austerity, then surely it would be hard to welcome the leaf, blossom & fruit of summer. I’m reminded here of just how much like purple figs alder buds are, just at the point of ripening; it’s a matter of scale. The hazels have extended their lime green catkins; every branchlet terminates with a small club shaped bud. The contorted willows (weather does this, it’s not a true contorted form) have tiny rufous buds. Each fragile brittle length of woodbine ends with six newly opened leaves, while amid the tangle, in the sheltered hollows where burns roll to the sea, the first handsbreadth blades of flag iris thrust their sword leaves through rust brown rot from clearly visible rhizomes. The furze has been flowering a month & more, its almond scented yellow a discussion of dormancy with the iris, which will not show colour for a full two months yet. There’s a rippling cloud in every transient puddle; the newly minted translucency of holly leaves glows against the dark green waxyness of the old sharp foliage. The little faint buds of the dogrose call the pink-white flowers that’ll rise from stems. Aspens, still now, have heavy pointed chocolate coloured buds, which will soon start their wind whispering as leaves. Out at sea a curlew’s ringing its song. & the oaks - all ages leaning into the hill, woven with ivies, sheltering holly & birch saplings, their every branch-end knobbled & swelling , last year’s lobed & brown papery leaves still clinging, the mossy oaks are distending their strong pointed buff & sandy buds. Everything’s bubbling & fizzing its irresistible course through trunk & stem, through sap, bud & blood. On the rocks, lichens continue their concentric growth like soft moist meandering trails of night time snails.

There’s a convocation of crows in a half mile circle around me, from rock to outermost tree top; they bow & sing rasping beautiful songs & no-one to hear; no-one to see their spanning but the seven hinds of Airigh Bheagaig, eyebright & long soft leather ears pricked, & a solitary sceptical buzzard hunched in her own glamour.

I’m back at the Byre just as the sulphur coloured evening rain begins its downpour, lashing bud & me & the incoming sea alike.

2008-02-27T13:15:00.000-08:00

25th February 2008

On the ruddy golden coat of the warrantable deer the bright sunlight shone, so that the colour seemed unsteady, or as if it was visibly emanating and flowing forth in undulations.

Richard Jefferies; Red Deer

Having only yesterday performed the comedy classic of falling off a ladder, I’m hirpling about among the trees & in no position to go chasing over the heather & moss after the white red deer stag that’s been sighted in the west highlands. If white red deer stag sounds like an oxymoron, not to mention contradictory, that’s what the animal himself is. Of course, he has no idea (I guess) that he is in any way exceptional.

What makes him special is that he is leucistic. Leucism is a reduction of all types of skin pigmentation, resulting in a white skin or coat, unlike albinism, which is a reduction of melanin only. Leucistic animals have normally pigmented eyes. Leucism is also seen in the irregular patches on other animals - the hides of some cattle, where localized hypopigmentation gives the pied effect in differing patterns of Friesian herds, for example.

For me, that’s enough, but white stags have always exerted a kind of reverse shadow on the imagination. There’s lots of talk about the special nature of such a stag. Those who see him are sure (it’s said) to have a profound change imminent in their lives. A white stag also seems to have been conflated into a unicorn in past ages. Now we’re perhaps a trifle more materialistic; though Latter Day Shamans, Druids, & Wicca folk were outraged by the shooting & decapitation of a white stag last autumn on Exmoor, presumably as a trophy for sale. These folk, & to be fair, many others, including local farmers, not normally given to vapours of a mystical kind, spoke of the sacred nature of the animal. What they all feel on the shooting & beheading of red red deer stags is unknown.

Here, I hope it might give another kick start to the great deer debate & take it further than the usual hunting versus photo-opportunity for tourism impasse. The red deer in Scotland, indigenous to these parts, is too often seen as an opportunity; a resource. Whether for venison or the thrill of stalking with a camera, it raises so many questions, from landownership to local food sourcing, from woodland regeneration to wolf reintroduction, that I’m actually pleased not to be in any fit condition to bother the white one by walking in his area (I know his whereabouts): he doesn’t need me ogling him as a curiosity. His peers, the other stags, have no doubts that he’s one of them & another rival come rutting time. No more, no less.

I’m not much for walking anyway. Walking for me in the past usually had a purpose, like helping gather sheep, or walking to the hay meadow. Sitting still, contemplating the way the sun moves, or the tide comes & goes & to see what the woods, waters & fields bring my way has never been a problem though.

This year, I’ve been re-examining that attitude; spending time walking the woodlands in what Richard Holloway calls “exuberant purposelessness”. I have no purpose, other than to observe the poetry of clouds & winds; to cheer the dance of gnats & moths, to listen intently to the musical compositions of wrens & herring gulls. There’s no point to caressing the moss as I go, to saluting the ancient oaks; no point to commiserating with the birch on the loss of its limb. But I do it all anyway. It’s for no reason I study for half an hour the spider spinning a filament across my path, then walking round it. I have nothing in mind when I see the rising & wheeling of herons over Garbh Eilean & count them to be, today, nineteen in number. The woodlands are full, if not of purpose, then of clarity & movement. Each creature here has enough intent for me as well. Exuberance rises from the knowledge that I am not needed.The woodlands are as liberating of egotism as of ideas & objectives.

I have no need to follow unicorns.

2008-02-20T00:54:00.000-08:00

18th February 2008

3 events at Gobsheallach today

This morning, a column of cloud rises from Bein Resipol, from just below the summit into the upper sky. Volcanoes look like this.

At noon, a grey crow flies down to the large sheet of unleavened bread, stale & curling, that I’ve put out front of the byre for her. With claw & beak, she neatly quarters it & flaps away with the whole bread in her beak.

An eagle eats up the miles westward with an easy but fast flight. She is silhouetted for a moment against a pale moon, three days away from full.

2008-02-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

16th February 2008

What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue?

Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper.

Psalm 102

Juniper burns very hot, without smoke, maybe that’s why it was used in the whisky stills in the hills; no betraying smoke for the Revenue men to spot. Alastair Cameron tells the story of two other Camerons, Donald & Hugh, their ponies laden with whisky, who met a gauger for the Revenue at a river. “He did not reveal his identity, neither did they express any sign of suspicion.” “As there was a good flow of water”, Donald offered to carry the gauger across the river on his back, to save him from getting wet. The Revenue man agreed, but when in mid stream, Donald flung him into it, yelling to Hugh to give stick to the ponies & “take to your heels, son of John, son of Hugh.”

It’s only ten or eleven miles from here that happened. I leave the new road, a highway for these parts, & backtrack a little onto the old road, leaving it immediately to cross Abhainn Coire an Iubhair, the river of the yew corrie, which runs, flatly at this point through a stone bed in something approaching ox-bows, north to south. The river is fed by so many small tributary burns that they have no names. To the west, curving round to the north is the corrie, a cauldron, a blind glen, with its head turned back on itself by Beinn Bheag. Here lies the actual cauldron, a lochan surrounded by twisted contours & contorted outcrops & upthrusts, all worn to a smoothness, save for where they’ve been more recently cracked by frosts. From here down to the sea loch, it’s steep-sided, a classic glacier scour. Along the river bed at this level, not far above the sea, the banks are lined with holly. With alder, which it outnumbers, it’s the only tree here. The dead spate-borne grass stalks are three feet up the trunks, showing the rough & tumble of the winter rains & snow melt, though all week it’s been dry & the river soon drops. Heading north & up, with the corrie sides enclosing now, the hollies peter out. Nothing but heather. To the east the ridge, Druim an Iubhair, becomes more pronounced. Iubhair, yew, in this instance, as with most other place-names containing it, does not refer to yew, but to mountain-yew, iubhair-beinne as Carmichael had it from Eoghan Wilson in the Blessing of the Struan, iubhair-creige elsewhere. Juniper. & there, at the turning west of the whole corrie, but on the low ridge to the east, it’s lowly growing.

In the nineteenth century, it was so common here that sacks of berries were sent to market in Inverness & Aberdeen, where they were bought by merchants to send to Holland to make their gin, jenever. Juniper & jenever are cognate, from the Latin juniperus, which is its genus name, communis being the specific; but the procumbent form of these beautiful conifers, one of three native here, clinging like a waterfall to the rocks from which it cascades, is the subspecies nana (syn. sibirica, alpina). This plant, to thrive, needs a certain lack of competition from heathers & grasses when seeds set; a controlled grazing provides that; but latterly the glens & corries have suffered from the sheep & are very much overgrazed, meaning the sheep (& deer) will eat the seedlings as soon as they appear. The fact that this has happened for more than one generation means that all the juniper is old & making little, if any seed. The future may hold only extinction; like the yew itself, juniper might only be found in captivity – churchyards, botanic gardens.

Which all adds to the quick joy of finding plants here, some with their flowing trunks as thick as my forearm; a pleasure only to be found by prolonged looking, sometimes in the bitter cold, as today. The scramble up a ridge, slick with seeping water, finger & toe-holds carefully sought, bringing a soft green, light to dark, slightly pricky-leaved plant up close, to caress, is to come to terms with the Gaelic name & to breathe in the plant. Mountain yew it certainly is. A true psalm zinging in bare rock, livening the whole corrie with its ancient presence.

I once spent an entire day at Taynish searching for these plants (though not the dwarf subspecies found here) without success (albeit with the consolation of chanterelles). As well as the overgrazing, maybe the illicit stills in the glens & hills helped the depletion to the point where I rejoice to see a couple of plants; where before it was plentiful enough to lend its name to river, corrie & ridge. Maybe the psalm is lament.

As it is, I toast the survivors with Waterford sloes potent ly & redly infusing Cork gin, a birthday gift made by Morven. My own small shebeen back at the Byre, with the shade of Donald Cameron.

2008-02-19T12:08:00.000-08:00

15th February 2008

The thing is, we get the point more quickly when we realize it is we looking rather than that we may not be seeing it.

John Cage: Lecture on Nothing

you who hurry toward leviathan woods,
you who walk into the gloom of clouds and mountains,
fasten up your raincoat, damn it.

Miyazawa Kenji: Traveler

Although I consider the soaring eagle to be a good omen for the day, I’m kept grounded myself by Miyazawa’s words as I make off up the hill from the loch. Even after noon, as this is, there’s pockets where that frost painting of bracken – a silvering outline of each brown dead frond – is evident, along with the woodland floor’s resistant crunch as I walk.

It’s axiomatic that if you go looking for the woodlands they’re not there; just the trees. Once you’ve given up looking (& a lifetime is too short) then you arrive. Here, against the backdrop of the loch, with split rocks from which moss’d ferned birch & oak spring up like woody fountains; among litters of lichened twigs, broken from boughs by storms, it’s easy to get caught up in the detail of the trees. Individuals: oaks with their leaders neatly snapped by gales, long fallen limbs debarked, each showing twists of growth round on itself; a triple stemmed ancient sheltering a holly. Out of the burn’s gorge rise hazels all keeled at ninety degrees to the slope, rising at right angles to that growth & bifurcating, a metre round, mossy, stretching for the light away from the always shade of the gorge. An ivy winds round a young oak, with its choking climb upward. There’s triple stemmed oaks, double stemmed oaks, rarely a straight singleton stem.

Slowly, I realise, as I follow deer tracks through all this, brushing spiderwebs from my face, that there are open spaces in the canopy (even though the leaves are still only buds, the twigging above can be dense) & that in fact, I’m looking at a sort of parkland or savannah brought about by intermittent grazing. I’m seeing the woodland. I give a little shake, moving with the dance of gnats in the afternoon sun in one such opening; I notice the flitter of small fragile-as-dust buff coloured moths. & there: even a red admiral butterfly fresh from hibernation, with its erratic zigzagging flight.

Among the oaks in this are hollies, which may or may not have started as infill among them. Sometimes hollies may predate oaks. Just on a small rise is a quartet of old fellows among the heather & fraughàn, bracken & ubiquitous moss, rising to ten feet up the oak boles; higher up are small ferns, perhaps the hard fern, Blechnum spicant (though my ignorance extends to ferns as well). These old hollies are almost within touch of each other; one’s a five stem with a stem dead, the next has three stems with two dead, the remaining two have healthy twin stems. They’re like broken toothed oldsters anywhere, sharing a rueful joke at the expense of youngsters around them. At their swollen bases is another indicator of spring coming from below: tender fresh leaves of wood sorrel, which is truly delicious & less vinegary now than at any other time throughout the year.

Birch & oak are indiscriminate in sheltering, here & there, juvenile sitka spruces, their seeds probably brought by wind or squirrel from the forestry plantation to the west. A small winged creature lands on my hand as I lean contemplating the mossy decomposing lines of trunks & rootplates. A dead oak takes at least a century to disappear completely, so these must have fallen at least fifty years ago, though the moss blanketing may have speeded up decomposition by a few years. There’s a young oak, maybe fifty years old, liberated into the light by the fall of these prostrate forms, perhaps; but like any crone, bent backed, growing three feet up, then at right angles to that, then straight up again. In the hummocks & tussocks of sphagnums (how I’ve tried to identify them; always I come back to: it’s a sphagnum, never further) there are birches sloughing their skins like any adder, along the lines of dead limbs all the way down to the floor. Moss seals & heals the lowest cracks; other birch branches from the same trunks are vibrant with new growth buds. The dead limbs, stripped of bark demonstrate clearly the twists of slow spiralling plants following sun clockwise. Scabs of lichen everywhere. Growth in, around & on everything, sap driven, moss softened, rain nourished. As many dead as living; as many wounded as healthy. A slow war of attrition with weather, browsing & life itself, even, especially, in February, bristling crawling & packed brimful on the woodland slope.

I walk & walk in pasture-woodland’s own reverie, until the sky is streaked with cirrostratus over the eggblue of morning & noon gone & the sun moves toward a Morvern evening to the west. There’s the rumble of high flying unseen jets; gossamer catches the low light finding its way under the heavy limbs. Oakwoods found & lost. I’ve been looking & seeing all along.

2008-02-14T04:30:00.000-08:00

14th February 2008

valentine

you are not here

walked by retreating tide uprooted oarweed has left an arcing trail one hundred & ninety four paces long

sand’s mirror of the crescent moon’s camber across kingfisher sky

sun cast water shadow ripples & bubbles on

ridges of sand the ebb moves across

surface coruscating with brilliance

oak leaves flattened along sand edge

oystercatcher imprints

Tornado jet contrail

thirty five curlews plainsong wheel & silver into that white

lichened anticline & syncline rising straight from the seabed

the print of hinds’ feet on the foreshore

a herring gull sings

heron & grey crow make refrain

where do the sea paths lead

where do the boulevards of cold sky lead

& the heart’s trance

looping & winding each other

as sound follows ear

as sea follows eye

as the heron invents us all through the flat shine of the tidal pool

you are the lichen inspector

you listen when the mussel beds crackle

you grade the ocean’s weeds

kelp & bladderwrack

you measure the frost inching up the oak bole

you speak to the troubled wren

& I’m islanded here where

you are vein & artery

2008-02-13T03:53:00.000-08:00

11th February 2008

After another clear sky day, the moon has set & above me is an ocean-field of stars of all magnitudes. Even this third night of dark-walking, how little I trust my senses. Trying to abandon hesitancy & step out, since I know the paths, I stumble over every pebble, wonder at the nearness of rock & tree trunk. Soon, however, eyes accustom themselves to starlight & I’m aware of other things at the edges of perception – the squeaking in the ditch, which would suggest a small rodent unwisely voicing at my footfall; something that could be the slightest of draughts from a passing wing; I’m straining towards physical understanding of this blackly transformed landscape.

After the unaccustomed brilliance of the day where all has been psychotropically bright, especially the trunks of these silent white birches, walking with no light but the boundlessness of stars is moving from dream to dream. In all the runnels & burns is a sparkling from the light of centuries past sent by distant luminous gas to enliven water.

Night birds sing. I can only look up; I’m stopped & still, mind silenced by light. Light that’s veering here & there into the red & green parts of the spectrum as those gaseous masses pulse like the throb of blood in my brain lighting my eyes.
There is no scale for this except, as ever, that of my own body. & its untrusted senses. I touch the mosses, I smell the drying soon-spring earth, I hear the whirr of a snipe as she plummets downhill; tonight, mortality has a metallic taste at the back of the bared throat. But it’s sight that’s rubric for imagination, allowing through these pupils untold immensities of light. Of light which is a greed & a curiosity for every corner of life.

2008-02-12T12:42:00.000-08:00

9th February 2008

gamb’yan gamb’yan
our dream
colour of dawn
our song
gamb’yan gamb’yan

gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)
gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)
gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)
gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)
gyawalot’gyawalot’gyawa-lololololi(t)

is part of Shimpei Kusano's wild but tender rendition of frogs’ voices in his poem Birthday Party.

With a paring of the storm moon high in the true blue sky, the day is clear for anything. Frogs have already found that clarity & a breath of spring for their clutching & spawning in the ditches. When they disappear again, they leave behind hundreds of eggs, each in a ball of jelly as proof of their passion. Or imperative genes. Amplexus is the clasp of a male on a female’s back; an embracing kind of copulation where the male fertilises the female’s eggs as they emerge into the water. The poet Shimpei Kusano, for whom frogs were a metaphor of life itself, had no doubt: genes & libido are one & the same, driving frogs; all living things. In an echo of the swelling moon, these eggs will grow to become tadpoles by the time of the last quarter of this moon. Each globe of jelly holds the beginning of a frog, a black speck far smaller than the head of a safety match.

Once I had an ancient glass battery jar & watched this development in the cold porch each year, never tiring of the astonishment of spring childhood, of the dream of life becoming. Now, I’m content to watch as I pass the shallow wild water. The frogs have sung their soft songs. To slightly paraphrase Shimpei Kusano in his epilogue to Birthday Party: “as author I have no desire to stop the choir at this party celebrating birth. by a ditch near the burn at Gobsheallach, by Acharacle, in the peninsula of Ardnamurchan in the western Highlands. a party of points tinier than sesame seed as yet. this ecstasy’s swaying echoing flowing place.”
A new spring & I step along the path together.

2008-02-07T13:53:00.000-08:00

6th February 2008

With heavy rain alternating with longer pauses from rain, insubstantial mist hovers over forestry & woodland alike. It rolls over rockfaces & slowly topples downhill. It’s hard not to see Chinese landscape scrolls in this as I walk along: pines, rock, water & mist unfolding; now obscured by brief abundant showers, here clearing to reveal a mossy worty oak. The ropes & tresses of the hills’ overburdens of water from a distance make their sinuous white way to the loch; up close, they fall sheer & bounce fiercely from boulder to outcrop in torrents & surges that would wash stags away.

The hinds of the bog pick their usual way west, with perhaps a little more elegant high stepping than usual; the wet ground, no doubt. Their three followers seem to have deserted them; maybe they were passing through, looking for their own territory.

Apart from the deer, there’s only a grey crow, on the road verge, moving with that odd sort of sidle strut that suggests stilt walking. Overhead, now the rain’s off for a while, just two ravens. They’re very low, negotiating the coast down on cool air, close enough for whiffling wing sounds to be heard. Their muted, offhand, gamelan calls to each other fold me in to another temporality. I pause; the birds hang in sky; then it’s movement again.

2008-02-06T08:55:00.001-08:00

4th February 2008

In the flat grey & foreshortening light, it’s hard to see the hinds, unless they move. Although I know they are there, if they’re still, & they usually are, then with the naked eye, even their white rear flashes can be mistaken for lichen on a rock. Their faded rust coloured broken coats are entirely the complexion of the winter bracken, broken down as it is by wind, & curling that way & this after a season’s rain.

The three hinds of this quarter, though, have been joined by another three. There’s no stand-off, none of the stags’ confrontational bellow. It’s more irritation on the part of the original trio; they move on ahead, grazing, browsing, moving further up the hill with flicks of the heads & eyes & ears as the others make small transgressions into the precise margins of sociability.

The same bounds apply to all the gregarious animals here. The cormorants on the rock beyond Eilean Dubh are absolutely evenly spaced. If one lands on the rock, having fished awhile, the whole colony must needs shuffle sideways to allow her in, but without breaking the pattern of spacing. The chaffinches bustle about fallen seeds, but keep within the same imperative limits.

There’s food enough for them all, & no need of overcrowding & jostling. I’m mindful of this, brought back to the Byre by thirst, as I make the first morning pot of tea for one.

2008-02-05T15:53:00.000-08:00

2nd February 2008

It’s been snowing hard since yesterday morning. Snow has settled all across the bay wherever there’s no incoming tide channels. It’s on all the windward sides of tree boles & in the clear parts of the woodland where I’m standing, west of the burn that flows into Sailean an Eorna. The trunks themselves are patchworked by mosses & snow drift, set against off white lichens with here & there a snuff coloured lichen on nearby rocks. Lungworts (Lobaria pulmonaria), also on the trunks, are a leathery green, vaguely lizard like. This is mature oakwood, with a few fallen trees, sparse & interspersed with holly & hazel. There’s a few birch trees here too. The fallen trees are almost certainly a result of storms, perhaps hurricanes. Some are split, the weight of large branches become insupportable in high wind, while others are toppled entire, with root-plates at right angles to the woodland floor, though it’s seldom horizontal on this slope leading down to the loch.

One fallen limb, a metre round, is eighteen paces long, from the main trunk, but still joined; it’s a sessile oak; the main trunk a metre & a half round. Growth has been good from this limb, curving up & away from it, its recurving forms giving living space to a variety of epiphytes.

The oaks here have a massive beauty, fallen or standing, their relic lives entwined with each other & with all the other species of the woodland. Here, in a rootplate ten feet high (more than three metres) growing straight up, while the oak shoots from its recline, is a holly. It’s more than double my handspan round, the displayed upper roots all elbows & knuckles smooth as if polished. From the same plate is one of the ubiquitous birches, though smaller than the holly. Another oak, standing, has a massively thickened lower trunk, made that way by epicormic growth. Its girth is more than five metres round. Lying close by is another ancient of four metres’ girth with a partner birch, older this time, maybe a metre & a half round. The bole of the fallen oak is host, under the snow, to a small holly, showing only its first pair of true leaves – last year’s germination. Its roots will grow & assist the oak’s subsidence back into the soil & rock from which it slowly rose. The ivies run round straight trunks, which subdivide fairly low into main branches. Each subsequent division curves & curves again, some so much they seem to spiral on themselves, sometimes almost making knots.

I try to read the woodland, limb by limb & leaf after leaf. Its full story is conjecture. The epiphytes are an indication of ancient woodland, but it will have been worked here too, coppiced, perhaps, certainly bark stripping happened, & selective felling for charcoal. There may have also been plantings; though now there’s no indication of this. The woodland, like all worked landscape, is art, & as such, fictive. If I’m expounding on the great book of the woodland, the lives of the trees, their history & economics, then each tree, in its subdividing & recurving limbs, is reciting genetics, performing climate & topography, geology & its own personal survival so far.

My ignorance is boundless. Not only can I not know the trees’ stories, the woodland itself reaches beyond history. I can’t tell the names of the mosses & lichens. But I’m happy in my lack of knowledge; nothing at all can stop me from fully experiencing the setting & enjoying the secrecy of the trees; their utter stillness, which nevertheless they impart to me, here for a short while.

As I leave the oaks, just two feet from where I pass, & not at all bothered, a huffed up goldcrest is bobbing & pushing her head into snowdrifts, below which are small plants’ seedheads which she raids in her search for warmth.

2008-02-02T06:26:00.000-08:00

28th January 2008

It’s as well to have a pocket full of seeds. Last month I travelled to the deep south & this afternoon pulled on the old Donegal jacket I wore then, to make the happy rediscovery of maple seeds I had stashed. I’d been amusing the toddlers by throwing them in the air to watch them whirligig down with little rises in the puffing wind. None of us could get enough, marvelling at these patterns & dissemination of purest opulence.

Last autumn wherever I went in the woodlands I collected seeds. Oak & hazel mostly, which have spent all winter in my fridge. Now, with the time come to stratify them (some would have done this immediately, but I’m in no hurry, nor are the seeds), I’ve been casting around for a container that neither the hens nor sheep will upturn or rootle about in.

The sheep are fresh on the hill, released from the gated Park, foraging like me, nuzzling the salty sand piles the road men leave for icy weather. Mooching around with no set purpose, still foraging for seeds even now, there by the boathouse is a plastic blue shallow fish tray. It’s washed up on last night’s tide & perfect for sand & seeds, with uniform holes to let the water through. It’s under my oxter before I really think about it. I saunter home, an Ardnamurchan flaneur, with sea riches, thinking of the wealth of germination & the first leaves to come & dreaming of a tree nursery for these parts.

2008-01-29T07:32:00.000-08:00

24th January 2008

The drama of the night is the moon, a night after full, navigating high, with gale tattered clouds mottling its surface. Several times gusts waken me & the moon is still there, as large an appearance in the night as truth retained from dream. The booming in the house has fooled me a few times, too, thinking that someone is banging the door to get in. At one point I’m at the front to make sure that the gate is shut & it isn’t the flock looking for shelter.

The morning dawns on blizzards, with a full & high tide; white is everywhere. The sun makes brief guest appearances, but with the force of the wind, the clouds are driven in again, blackening the very brief clear spells. By mid morning, growling thunder has stepped up its volume & is now exploding round the hills. When the sky’s at its darkest, hail rattles the small branches & topmost twigs, battering on down, stinging noses & muzzles alike.

The day moves on, with curtains rising & falling on weather scenes. The woods, usually noisy with bird calls, a twittering of chaffinches, is silent. The bay & sea & skerries, normally full of noisy oystercatchers & burbling curlews, is silent. Bare bones of trees make grinding noises against each other in high wind. Only a pair of buffeted siskins moves, low down, fossicking for seeds, flighting close to the ground as I approach.

Hazel catkins seem to fold on themselves in the cold. Only the rhododendrons, those natives of Spain & Lebanon, with their spurts of growth since I last passed here & with their new terminal buds, seem aware of a spring that might arrive one day soon.

2008-01-25T09:03:00.000-08:00

23rd / 24th slipstream January 2008

There’s a hunger that compels at this lean time of year. The hinds feel it in scarcity, driven to feed the calves they carry, growing. The bared woodlands , framework for light made leaf, through terminal buds grope away from last summer towards another spring. I feel an urgency to make marks to represent all this. To re present before present is past. To signify the fleeting thin things of winter.

I’d wanted to make maps. A map marking seasons’ boundaries. A map that counteracted the victories of mapmakers, perhaps. A map that marked cleared villages here: Smirisary, Port a Bhata, Buarblaig, Inniemore, Uladail, burial grounds mossed over. A map of stories told by placenames, when story & tradition translated is no more than a loss.

I’d make a map of the boroughs & colonies of woodants – a story of community going & coming. A map of badger setts. Another of where the woodbine scrambles in its tangled way through branches of oaks; a map of the homes of the insects that make different kinds of oak-gall their home. Another of April’s early purple orchids. An underwater map that left aside the numbers on a chart, which show only depth in metres; the lives of tubeworms & mussels have depth for those who feel that imperative hunger.

But of course the oak or the birch is a map of itself. Lichens stain the trunks, mosses clamber the boles, worts & ferns & microfauna consider it a territory, an occupancy, a home & commonwealth.

The circumambulation of the hinds round Carn Mor may be the start of our art. Quartered, crossed, marked with hoofprints. We map ourselves in a physical act, not reverential but existential. The first art of the circle, of cup & ring marks on stone; the art of palaeolithic hand prints in ochres from earth.

My hind tracking is a wonder at the art of creatures in a territory – inhabitants of a map which is not distinct from their selves. The present can’t be re presented. Experience & memory impel the hinds in their search for sustenance & constrain me to my appreciation of their mapped world, from which I derive a feeding for the breathy spirit.

2008-01-24T12:27:00.000-08:00

23rd January 2008

The three hinds were passing outside the window again, moving easily & alert from east to west. They’re the same three I’ve been seeing at this hour of the early morning for a week or more. I’ve no real idea of the range of deer. I know they are hefted to a particular territory, but the size of the hill-ground, & in their case the bog, they consider theirs to occupy I can only guess at. I’ve seen them two miles from here to the east at dusk. They are easy to recognise, always three & one considerably smaller than the other two.

So this morning, giving a good half hour’s start so as not to alarm them in any way, I follow the three sisters (as I think of them). They’d outrun me & I mean them no harm, but I want to try to track them in their usual day’s routine. They need to cross the little road across the hill here, so I’m looking for their run, mindful that there are no sheep on the hill just now, so runs would be likely made by these three.

& there, where there’s the most shelter between the birches, leading from just beyond a stand of alders, is their line. I follow the meander of a path. They seem not to mind the boggy patches in hollows, which suck at my feet more than their small cloven hooves, though they must sink further, the way a high heeled woman would. But it makes the slots easier to follow, & the dark droppings here & there, show a regular route. I come across beaten down patches of bracken in dips, where they must overnight sometimes.
Sometimes a bite has been taken from a low fraughan, blueberry. The track’s leading up in a spiralling kind of way, west & up. The going is colder & rockier & of course I lose the track. Not before, however, working out that their only route needs to be to head back eastward round the curve of hill; that or walk off into the ocean.

Deer do seem to enjoy mooching on the sands here & there. I’ve seen them often enough, not browsing the sea’s weeds like the sheep, but rather contemplating waves. But here there’s no sand, just drops from the rocks.
I’ve travelled only maybe a mile and a half & not very high, but the direction suggests that they will head back to where I see them at dusk, keeping the sea to their left, circumambulating the hill to make for the lower bog & the degree or so extra warmth & the shelter it brings. They’ll be slowing down a little, with the calf each carries, half way through the gestation period, maybe not too picky about food, a little hungry; but nevertheless their occupancy of this limited stretch of hill & bog, bounded by the Atlantic, would seem to make a walk-round of about eight miles, taking in some three thousand acres of homeland, if my calculations are correct.

With the coverage of trees & rocks, with their ability to see & catch scent of me, their autumn bracken colouring & wariness, it’s no surprise that I see their traces more often than their presence.

2008-01-21T15:00:00.000-08:00

January 19th 2008

What do we call the shimmer of sea, each platt & wavelet, as tide pours in?
What word do we have for the shadow of a white birch limb on cracked white-lichened rock?

The wolf moon is bulbous, slung low over Moidart’s crumpled hills.
Two curlews raise their pibroch plaint of wild poetry & are gone.

2008-01-21T14:07:00.000-08:00

January 17th 2008

it starts of course
with the finished product.
nothing starts with the 1st.
Nothing. The end
is first. Always.
There is no beginning
unless the end
has been reached. First.

Ed Dorn (A Theory of Truth / The North Atlantic Turbine)

Sunart oakwoods are what they are because (among other factors like high rainfall) of the southern ocean’s heat borne here from the Gulf Stream, along the North Atlantic Drift, travelling thousands of miles, cooling a little on the way to invigorate our coastlines. These gloomy days, the Drift is perhaps threatened by icemelt entering the Atlantic & moved south by Greenland Sea currents. A cooling of the North Atlantic Drift could have strange & unguessed effects on the oakwoods, with temperatures perhaps falling by 5 degrees; though there may be increased rainfall, which might or might not counteract the drop in temperature.

The ecosystems we share with ocean current & climate are as fragile as wrens' eggs. Last spring at Aird Tobha the crofter was piking loads of the sea’s weeds from the foreshore into his trailer for the potato crop on his sandy soil, as Highlanders have done for generations; six hundred cartloads for a small croft each spring not being unusual. The weed in question was a Laminaria (digitata) which I’ve taken myself in smaller quantities for drying & adding to stock for soup. It’s every bit as good as the Japanese variety Laminaria saccharina which can be bought now at great cost in delis & “health food” shops. This saccharina is found here too, but is less common. There’s another Laminaria – bulbosa, that I’ve not found, appearing as it does only at equinoctial low tides & which Fraser Darling describes as “rather like coarse tripe turned inside out”. The Laminarias are also the chosen delicacy of sea urchins, whose skeletons, or fragments of, are washed up on all the open Atlantic shores here, common wherever the Atlantic Drift licks the shallows. These graceful creatures have an exoskeleton no larger than the size of a small apple, covered in spines & deep purple or pink. The mouths of urchins are underneath the skeleton & have five beak-like teeth for nothing much other than scraping seaweed.

If the North Atlantic Drift were to cool further, or divert slightly because of wind, what would become of these creatures, who depend on its warmth; what would happen to their food-source & my stock?

Build a better mouse trap, they say. At Aird Tobha, what I took to be a fish hatchery (it’s that too) turns out to be breeding sea urchins. They have twenty or thirty of both Paracentrotus lividus, the purple sea urchin & Echinus esculentus, the “edible” sea urchin. Edible here refers to us humans eating urchins, not in any Swiftian sense, but the sea creatures; though in Brittany, the urchin of choice is the Paracentrotus, (oursin violet) which is lightly boiled in plenty of salt water for two minutes, then cracked & eaten like a boiled egg. The purpose at Aird Tobha, though is not culinary, but for urchins’ scavenging qualities.

The plan, with the aid of the millions of eggs these urchins produce, is to stock waters around farmed salmon cages, where they will eat particles of fish food which have escaped the salmon in such large quantities, that together with their excreta, make the seas murky for divers. The urchins will also be fed seaweed, Laminaria & Alaria (probably esculenta, used until recently here & in Ireland in soups – I know this as oarweed) which will be bred specifically for this purpose.

All this mouse trapping activity is of course about financial feasibility. We like to eat salmon, but there’s too many of us, & salmon increasingly move towards extinction; no longer swimming inshore “thick enough to walk on” like a huge flock of underwater passenger pigeons. We invent then the farming of salmon, but the salmon cages pollute the seas. We breed urchins to clean the ocean around fish farms. To help the urchins on, sea vegetables are bred. This could be “viable on a commercial scale”: urchins & weeds sold to fish farms, salmon sold to supermarket.

I’m not sure where this cycle leads; if urchins, Laminaria & Alaria can be eaten by us, (& in harder times were) where might that leave the salmon & their farmers if we all took to eating them. How would Tesco market small purple spiny creatures & sea vegetables that would be pungent in a very short time from harvest? How long before we need to clean up after urchins? What will happen to fish, urchin, sea weeds & oak woods if the North Atlantic Drift cools & our climate with it?

The story of the tree surviving because it is too crooked, gnarled & cracked to be of any use to the carpenter also possibly applies to sea creatures. It seems they’ll only survive our predations if they are inedible to us.

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

FISH PRICES

Hake 60p-£7.50; plaice 60p-£2.50; cod £2-£3.40; lemon sole £1; whiting 20p-£1.40; sole £7.40-£14; roker 60p-£2.20; John Dory 50p; coley £1.20-£1.40; red mullet 60p-£4 (kg);megrim £3.50-£6; ling £1.50-£1.80 (kg).

As ever, monks (£2-£3.50) & witches (£3) everywhere.

Boats: Provider, Gratitude, Bountiful, Just Reward, Ocean Bounty. Also landing fish: Avocet & Osprey III.

2008-01-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

January 13th 2008

The sea, at the little boathouse along by the jetty near Aird Tobha, has offered me a plank. It is five feet long & ten inches wide, with, at each end, the remains of three evenly spaced screws, loosened in their holes by the hammering of onshore surf. It’s as well not to refuse what the ocean offers, because it as easily takes away. This plank I welcome. It has clearly been in the sea a long time, heavy with salt, washed about the coast before the currents & recent gale stranded it here. It’s broken along one edge, which I can easily saw to make straight & true again as the tree once reached up. It’s pine. I’m guessing it did not grow in Sunart, though its history is uncertain. Once, is all I know, it was part of a tree; now planked & dressed it has a swaggering air, like any sailor at port. I’ll dry it, use it on my boat, as a part of the small dresser which needs to be built to take the Japanese biscuit barrel, the teacups & saucers, remaining china from my mother’s long-ago wedding. It will be sanded, oiled to show its sweep of grain, with its story of summers & winters past for those who read such things; living again & at home again as part of a boat, since that’s surely where it made its first home as plank. Next to the future dresser is the stove. Aldo Leopold writes that there are two dangers in not owning a farm. The second is of supposing that heat comes from a furnace. The offcuts from this plank will help fire up the stove for the baking of bread or the boiling of the kettle, to bring into play those teacups which will sit on the dresser's dressed plank. The heat of the pine trimmings will momentarily warm me, the teakettle, the water in the boiler & the boat herself.

I’ll be sitting, mind working all this in woodland, wondering if the sawn tree itself is from the Baltic or maybe - & here imagination makes a little leap – from the Scots pine I could not find at Bun Allt Eachain that Alastair Cameron writes of in his Annals. Either way, I’ll glean more than the plank; I’ll guess where the tree grew that works so hard to give a glow in several dimensions.

2008-01-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

January 12th 2008

The Sgurr Biorach is the highest sgurr,
but Sgurr nan Gillean the best sgurr,
the blue-black gape-mouthed strong sgurr,
the tree-like slender horned sgurr
the forbidding great dangerous sgurr,
the sgurr of Skye above the rest.

Sorley MacLean

The rain & squalls stopped yesterday & the sky turned blue. Frost rose from the ground very hard, under a sky in which every star could be plucked & the Milky Way spilled itself north. This morning is clear & cold & the road to Aird Tobha is icy. The sun is about as high as it ever gets at this time of year & shining on the sea leads over to Eigg & beyond Eigg, to the little peaks of Rum. They are all wearing snow on their heads & haunches & from this distance, maybe twenty miles, are of a perfect & delicate volcanic symmetry. They are set in a clear sapphire ocean & lead me further, over the hatchery dams, across the tide-low sands of Sailean Dubh, over the inland machairs: inland only so far as they are sheltered by west facing rocks. Where the tide has retreated, it has left goblet-thin sheets of ice across tussocks & over departed pools. Compelled forward by a need to see more of the islands, since I’m now at sea level, but with no sight beyond the nearest rocks, I move crabwise round Carn Mor, where the black terrier bitch that belongs here, to the man of the fishing boat, joins me. Like me, she picks her way delicately; frosted moss has a very thin crust. Where she senses a depth of water, she detours the long & drier way round. I move up & down, still skirting the Carn, past all the headlands – Rubha Fassadh nam Feocullan (which I take to mean the place of the pine marten), Rubha na Clioche Bàine, Rubha na Caillich round nearly to Rubha Mhic Artair. & there, when I finally get a clear view west are the islands: flat little Muck the southernmost, Eigg of course, with its own sgurr & guarding it from the worst Atlantic gales, the hills of Rum. But to the north are the Cuillins & Skye laid out as a summer’s day, north & slewing round out of sight to the west behind the great sgurrs of Sorley Maclean’s poem; Sgurr Biorach & Sgurr nan Gillean, Sgurr na Stri, Sgurr nan Eag & Sgurr Alastair with Sgurr a’ Ghreadaidh; their names a litany of solitude & geology; places known best by those who live there – eagles, buzzards, ravens & crows - but which pierced MacLean’s heart.

The way round the Carn is to move from the islands’ stilling presence, eastwards & inland along the south channel, Eilean Shona to the north. I’ve hunted the small terrier away: I have no knowledge of how she is with sheep, & I’m heading for Fhaodhail Dhubh where the sheep wander at will. I cross the burn at Port na Lathaich with its little groves of snapped & dead birches, the sky punctured by the ravens’ silhouettes & the rush of the water an arrhythmic counterpoint to the soft & melodious prunk prunk of the ravens discussing such a one as myself edging across the hill of the brush.

2008-01-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

January 9th 2008

The dog in the paper is said to flow from the trap at 40mph. The picture alongside the story shows a handsome brown dog wearing two collars. I’m not sure why two collars, but then any dog that fast can presumably wear as many collars as he likes. Like the hound here & myself, he appears to be quite indolent when he’s not winning races. He rises early, but simply to breakfast on toast & soup. His only exercise is a two mile walk & a 300 metre gallop on the straight. The hound on the sofa at ten years old does more than that & so do I, though I do without the gallop. I’d love to know how fast the gently snoring couch-hound can move. She certainly has almost caught a hind now & then. Maybe I’ll organise a time trial on the sands one day; it might be difficult, since she only runs in a circle with me at the middle.

I’d left the hound behind to go out for air between squalls (she hates weather), but the crofter, the Highland woman, her dog, the one with the same name as the postman’s baby (the old one that is. Postman, not baby. We have a new postman now. I don’t think there’s any connection.) : that dog loups up behind me & insists on tagging along a way, flushing snipe & looking round at me, tongue hanging, white tail-plume aloft, as though we’re partners. In these cold January days, with snow on the hills, I’d like to think he can also feel the spring just ahead of us or behind the old oak trunk, somewhere there. But I guess he simply needs to stretch his legs like me, & I’m his alibi for wandering away from the croft. We stand & look out at the bay, curlews & all, with not a word passing between us, a companionable silence as dusk gathers itself, with a squall moving in across the Atlantic. We turn at the same time to get back before the sleet, but it overtakes us anyway as we knew it would. At the byre, the slates of the house over by are turned gold in the sulphurous & nicotine light of the whirling weather front & the hillside bracken a scarlet as deep as any autumn rowan berry.

So the short days pass & the dog & I part company at the door – me for a dram, him for chasing a pickup moving along the hill to the croft house.

2008-01-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

January 8th 2008

Even when you take to the woods,
you're taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.

Wisława Szymborska

Away in the city for a while, captured by its busyness, bludgeoned by noise, I return through the blizzards home. Beinn Resipol, white in the night sky lights my way as surely as a crescent moon.

It’s not an escape here, but an engagement with the world as it is; something that’s not entirely as we have determined it to be. It’s just more apparent in Ardnamurchan that we have built over the rotting layers of sandstone & pitchstone, over the black basalt. Geology is obvious here, the topography where we settle in the hollows away from a climate predominantly of wind & rain. The woodlands have naturally been exploited and manipulated, the beasts & plants who live in, on, & around them exploited too.

This world, though, as it presents itself more clearly than elsewhere in a wholly built environment. It’s as well to engage & re-engage with small sounds that punctuate the quiet, the greenfinch darting for crumbs outside the byre, the hirpling grey crow making a single note before rising idly away as I walk by, reed buntings tseek-tseeking their calls back & forth, sleet falling onto the bare branches & boles of the oaks. Domestic noises too: after the power cut the click of the hotplate & the creak & groan of the heating kettle.

& the things whose noises I don’t hear, simply take in with silent eyes – the white capping of each hill from here to Morvern, & north to Moidart, the glisten of the tidal flats in the bay, below which live the worms whose songs are of dark & of crackling salt.

I’m at the top of the chain that starts below the worms & their subterranean songs, a chain (rather a web) of mutual dependence, of symbiosis & clear ecological interdependence. That knowledge is a barn full of riches. It’s also the wealth on which cities are built, & it’s here that I fully engage with that.

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

As a child, I pictured the ancient Greeks as philosophers walking back & forth, or standing still, lost in thought, dressed in loose robes, scattered across rolling hills bathed in sunlight. To enter the sloping woodlands this morning is to enter that place of my early imagining; the oaks sombre & silent, the random holly trees fresh with their green, aspens whitely standing & all apace on the hill, occupying precisely the positions of the philosophers, with here & there a rowan & an alder twined in earnest debate. Some have stood still so long that their feet have become buried in moss, which creeps up their boles to knee height; their limbs speckled with lichens like the liver spotted skins of the very old. Like any dialectic, winter has revealed the woodland armature, demonstrating, enacting, structure & formation of organic growth.

Here I have found the world as it is & also as it was for that child; a place of myth & of undisputed poetry, a place that has its location wherever I am properly awake & fully engrossed, enmeshed in things – which may be another definition of politic.

2008-01-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

January 1st 2008

When the tide’s at its lowest, it’s possible to walk straight out on the sea bed, north along the Black Sea-Ford for half a mile towards the island & small skerries in the South Channel. With no mark of a footprint on the sand except for the tracings the various sea vegetables make as they are swung back & round by the ebb tide. These vary from circles to what looks like a small child’s drawing of a three eyed elliptical alien, but is only an impression drawn by the sea of bladderwrack. Otherwise, no curlew has passed this way, no oystercatcher. Sometimes a stag or hind will pass here, but it’s a little soft today & they’re elsewhere in the hills grazing, sleeping, at this hour before dusk. It’s just ten days since solstice & already there’s a little more light in the mornings & even more noticeably in the evening, when the day is extended by about half an hour.

I head for the promontory of the MacNeill, across from the promontory of the Dividing, though of what I’ve no notion, unless it’s one set of broken skerries & mud sand flats, one set of salt flats & shoals & yet others to the west; though perhaps also defines the bounds of land-use & tenancy. It’s along from Port Ban & I want to walk as far out into the sea as it’s possible to get without a dinghy. The promontory when I reach it is sodden with the rains. Not just the past week or month, but of the centuries. Itself a rock into the channel, from whose bed it rises up, cracked & worn by sand-laden wind, in its twisting & walking & weatherings it has developed hollows in which water lies, covered by sphagnums rotting into what, given greater depth & another thousand years could become peat.

Skirting the deepest moss hags, given away by the red moss growing patchily among the green & yellow rising sphagnum, & sticking to the bare rock & the few patches of soft rush which give a firm foothold, I crest the slight rise to look out to the open sea, at this point uncluttered beyond the shoreline of tumbled rocks & rounded tide blackened boulders. & there, at this point where no one goes from one year’s end to the next, a silhouette against the glare of the ocean surface, is a man knee deep in waders, I guess fishing.

As I stand wondering whether to abandon the walk & make for the eastern headland after all, he slowly swivels his head & reveals the massive curve of an eagle’s beak. The sun had fooled me, along with the glare & conditioning of my kind to see human figures in the landscape. But there’s no doubt about it & a hesitant step or two carefully avoiding any more of the skyline shows me this cracked & unvisited landscape is hers, not mine.

Her three foot height is also bulky enough to have fooled me, but stood on top of a low boulder facing the sea she appears much taller. A heron swings away to the north & to the east a noisy pack of oystercatchers chatters by, piping their grumbles to the world. She’s still as I am, unmoved, focussed, her profile still to the west. I hold my breath, move closer, but even above the noise of the cold wind she has heard my squelchings & scrabbling on rock, & her head swivels a little further & I’m caught in that crisp & cogent stare. Without a word, I’m as apologetic as I would be having disturbed any new year angler; but she doesn’t trust me & I’m far too close at less than thirty feet, & she rises slightly, spreads her wings, which are so huge, I feel they would umbrella the distance between us, & takes off in a single flap & a long glide towards the big island north. She reveals a white tail & I take a breath as I realise what I should have known all along from her size – she’s a sea eagle. She dwarfs the skinny heron still making across the channel & is over, I think before I draw breath again, to disappear among rocks her own colour.

I sit, exhilarated; take a swig of malt from the flask in wonder & elation, & the seals edge together slightly. Throughout the drama, for it can best be called that: the facing of eagle & man, the seals have been as unnoticed as any other rocks, not fidgeting as they often do, silent, dozing. But the tension’s ended, & something has changed for them in the charged air & they yawn themselves awake & then back to sleep.

Frances Pitt, writing in 1946 saw the last nesting place of the sea eagle in Britain, the west cliffs of North Roe in Shetland. A pair nested there every year until 1908, when a local farmer shot the male. The female, a partial albino, returned each spring until 1918, after which she was seen no more. In 1947, Frank Fraser Darling writes of the sea eagle & its disappearance from Mull, Jura, Eigg, Skye, & the Shiants: “It is all a dismal story; and it is a matter for doubt whether, should these species try again to colonize this country, they would be allowed to breed in security. The vested interests of game preservation (by no means dead in a Socialist Britain), of a decrepit sheep-farming industry, in the West Highlands and Islands, the pressure of egg collectors and irresponsible gunners, are heavy odds.”

Not only are the vested interests of game preservation still strong, but they have seen off the attempt at a “socialist Britain”. Sheep farmers have changed however. My neighbours here, the man & woman of the croft were as pleased to see a sea eagle as I would have been, & it standing by the phone box at the road junction where no houses are for a quarter mile in any direction. Maybe it was expecting a call from Rum, which lies seven miles offshore, & where sea eagles were reintroduced in 1975, breeding from 1985. They’ve grown in numbers, though they are slow breeders, & spread a little in the past twenty three years, but there’s still only about two hundred individuals across the Small Isles, Mull & hereabouts.

2008-01-01T06:12:00.000-08:00

30 12 07

In Cill Chaluim Chille,
near the Camerons and MacLeods,
among the MacLeans and MacInneses,
in ‘the big graveyard above Loch Alainn’,
I chanced on MacLachlan’s grave,
not knowing it was there.

I know fine well where John MacLachlan, the Doctor of Rahoy is buried, since Sorley MacLean writes of it in his praise poem. I also know that there’s another grave over at Rahoy, & that intrigues me, as there’s no church or burial ground there.

The day’s not good for a foray to Rahoy, the other side of Loch Sunart at the inside length of Loch Teacuis; wet, cold, grey & blustery, but the grave is calling & I want to see what the Doctor would recognise there 130 years after his death.

At Kinlochteacuis birches & oaks show a distinct tendency for corkscrewing their growth into the air with the passing years, which I’ve noticed elsewhere in the woodlands, but it’s a clear pattern here. Despite the wet & the cold & the season, the woodbine is beginning to tenderly leaf &, oddly, there’s some delicate white bramble blossoms. Spring may come early for its own reasons, but the first signifiers I see have the imprimatur of ownership – Estate signs with stay away as a not quite hidden undernote: Private Road, Deerstalking in Progress During . . . the usual dreary preoccupation of people taken with the notion that Rahoy (& Kinlochteacuis, Morvern, Ardnamurchan, Scotland outside cities) is a sporting estate for the enjoyment of a few whose traditions enable them to escape thought & conscience.

“ . . . I cannot get a plot in my native country
though I’d pay a crown for a mere shoe-breadth.” writes the Doctor.

As the rains wet the woods & hills indiscriminately, my thoughts, gloomy to begin, are lifted by the knowledge of the reefs in Loch Teacuis here, which John MacLachlan probably never saw, but neither do the current landowners have control of. The land & sky is grey, but there are rare serpulids beneath the grey loch water, at only ten feet down. The home of tubeworms, the shell-like reefs twist up from the seabed at perhaps the same rate of growth as the corkscrewing birch & oak on the slopes that move down below sea level. There’s only four sites in the world for Serpula vermicularis reefs. The worm’s colours, bright red & orange, displayed in bronchial crowns outside the coral-like tubes, brighten my day immeasurably. Even the MacLachlan one would have smiled, taking a moment from his sadness & anger at landowners’ disregard of his culture.

The squalls set in once again from the southwest, with dusk not far behind. The grave, when I find it near the dun, is to a Naval officer who died in 1933, fifty nine years after John MacLachlan, & who is buried under a stone cairn topped with a cross. Nearby (“not knowing it was there”) I find another, newer grave, of a young Army Captain who died while climbing Ben Nevis in 2000, Colin Campbell his name.

The irony of a Captain Campbell’s final resting place being Morvern would not be lost on the Doctor; who would have known of the burnings on the Morvern coast: a retribution against those who joined the Jacobite cause in 1745. Philip Gaskell in Morvern Transformed records: “On the 10th instant, (March 1746) at four in the morning” [the writer is Captain Duff, in charge of the sloops Terror & Princess Anne, after having burned every boat he could find on the coast of Morvern & Loch Sunart, in a letter to the Duke of Argyll] “ I landed Lieut. Lindsay ... [&] Captain Campbell with twinty men from Mingary Castle, a lieutenant & fifty five men from my ship with orders to burn the houses and destroy the effects of all such as were out in the rebellion.” [Camerons, MacLeans, MacLeods] “They began with Drumnin M’Clean’s town and by six o’ clock at night they had destroy’d the Morvern coast as far as Ardtornish.” As well as 400 houses, several barns “well fill’d with corn, horse, cows and meal” [adds Captain Hay, another RN officer] were torched. The woodlands surrounding that entire part of the coast also went in flames – a scorched earth policy for sure – and in the ensuing two centuries, whatever else has been healed, the woodlands from Drimnin to Lochaline have never fully recovered.

The Doctor would not know the houses, holiday cottages here today (& I suspect he may have been as bemused as me by the welded steel stag on the big house lawn) but he would recognise the heavy hand of alleged landownership. The hills, the loch, the woods, remain unchanged.

In the scant oakwoods of Rahoy, Captain Campbell’s grave is marked by the planting of half a dozen small specimens of what looks to be an exotic species of pine, clustered round the bronze plaque and seat with fine views along Loch Teacuis & the hills.

My way home is lit by the white throat of a pine marten crossing the path.

2007-12-31T09:12:00.001-08:00

29 12 07

There is a need to approach Sunart oakwoods obliquely. Like sitting. Sitting very still, alert & relaxed, waiting for something to arrive: a deer, maybe, or an owl. If I look at trees in the dusk directly, they dance in vision; it’s the way our eyes are physically made. Look to one side & the tree is clearer. I approach trees sideways, a little nervous of their history & presence. I count geese, deer, list mosses, enumerate spiders, look out to sea with my back to the woods, holly & birch & alder all around. It’s as if to look directly is to somehow obscure a latency, a voice that I want to listen to; but it’s not enough to be attentive, scientific; it’s necessary to be receptive. I’m impatient. I’ll not live as long as an oak.

2007-12-31T09:09:00.000-08:00

28 12 07

At night I sleep dreaming under goose down. Heavy in the early morning on the peat bog I’m mazed by a solitary goose struggling to get airborne - a mastery of muscle & pneumatic bone over gravity - & when she’s joined by a vibrant honking hooting cavalcade of score upon score, following in an untidy raggle of flight, up, yapping up, then for me, awake now, it’s also willing them aloft to circle & make off celebrating life & flight; uplifting & uproarious all at once.

There’s two sorts of goose here, the barnacle, all black & white & the grey lag, with its pink bill. This enormous gaggle is the largest I’ve seen; up to a hundred birds. I’m still smiling as the skeins make off to the south barking all the way; & at four to five pounds weight each bird I’m still lost at the power of feather clad muscle; each of my watery steps across the bog makes sucking noises accentuating my weight, my pressure on the goose feeding grounds.

2007-12-29T01:56:00.000-08:00

26 12 07

Nine intoxicating things at Loch Sunart today

To stand in darkness rocked by a gale

Rain in the night

The order of birds that comes to finish morning hen food: three grey crows; a blown flock of chaffinches; one robin; four wood pigeons

The first lilac alder buds

Clubmosses

Foxglove rosettes

23 herons taking to the air & wheeling for 3 awe-long minutes, huge against sky above Garbh Eilean before landing to sit in rain like random boulders on a rock outcrop, muttering in convocation.

The raised head of a single seal at the same place from the sea

Water blueing after grey with the traverse of rain along the loch

2007-12-27T01:18:00.001-08:00

24 12 07

This one, the snow moon, wakes me at night; full & high. By day full double arcing rushing rainbows one above the other; in the spaces between grey showers & grey clouds, scraps of bows here & there on & off to the east & now to the west & then south.
Waves of what is come together, coincide for a while & dissolve, in the sky as in the bay.

2007-12-22T04:40:00.000-08:00

21 12 07

The day before winter solstice & all the ice & frosts have melted. Down at the edge of the bay two donkeys softly graze at the regreened but salty grass. The sunlight is radiant & the unclouded sky a zinging blue. The donkeys are dark against all this. They’re minded by a woman & a child. One is led from a grass cropping to the next; the other is free to roam, but stays close to his companion & the girl. Donkeys here in Ardnamurchan are a rarity these days, what ever might have been in the past. These are retired, though from what work I don’t know.

It’s more than thirty years since I backed a donkey into a donkey car to tackle him to bring in hay. While donkeys can be biddable, they always have minds of their own. Ours, a rig, had a habit of submitting to the collar, and backing up far enough to be tackled, then moving forward sharply so that the shafts dropped. The old TVO tractor that replaced him was not a lot better. It was commonplace at that time in Kerry for donkeys to take the milk from maybe a half dozen cows each day from the holdings to the collection point for the creamery lorry. Even then, they were being replaced by bulk tanks, coolers & tractors with cabs.

The donkeys here in Gobsheallach may never work & even on occasion bite, just to let you know their ancestry, but in the solstice sun here, now, there’s plenty of grazing for them. In Palestine, since the checkpoints were rigorously (re)enforced there’s not a lot of diesel or petrol getting into the West Bank or Gaza & donkeys are the general transport, serving as taxi & ambulance & draught animal. Beasts of burden. Grazing is scarce in a land one-fifth the size of Scotland but with more than two and a half million people. Many farms, frequently olive & citrus groves, have been annexed for a wall between Palestine & Israel; the trees are bulldozed & the land out of farming. On any other fertile ground, crops for people is the order of the day. Even with the price of a donkey twenty or thirty times what it was before the virtual sealing of the Palestinian lands, if grazing, or hay or concentrate can’t be had, there’s no future for donkeys in Ramallah or Hebron or Bethlehem.

2007-12-19T14:48:00.000-08:00

18 12 07

It’s light but the sun is not above the hills yet. Frost everywhere, from roof slates to the sheep-cropped grass, which is white, no shade of green. I set off across the brittle tussocks which only the highest tides cover. Tide last night was moderate & low was at half past five. I want to find out if the white out on the bay is ice. Coming off the salt flats I step onto frozen sand ridges which the sea has left. Wormcasts are frozen solid. Bladderwrack is frosted white. Any depressions in seabed (that’s what I’m walking on – the point where land is reclaimed by the sea in its continual cycle) are filled with shallow sea ice. At twenty past nine the sun glows at the hill line. At this time of year it’s so far south of east as to be disorienting; I think I’ve gone badly astray, a feeling heightened by the double blinding of the sun & its reflection in the iced sands. Squinting downward, I head directly into the sun, towards the three scattered islands where sometimes stranded sheep sleep in the summer, Eileanan Loisgte, the burnt islands. Another five minutes & the sun is clear of the hill & rising along its low arc. Even a couple of days from solstice where everything hangs & tilts, the brilliance is too much for me . I head into the black gloam of the islands & turn back along my footprints. My shadow , cast ahead, is thirty feet long. At this point, I’m in the middle of the bay among crackling mussel beds & the air’s cracked, torn apart by a roar that goes to my nape; ahead of it goes the Tornado jet itself, which I only catch a glimpse of with its wing missiles. The noise is visceral. It bypasses everything rational & goes direct to the thalamus - seat of primal reaction. I crouch down, vulnerable on miles of open sand. There’s no cover.

It passes. I straighten up & with the jet safely away shake my fist. I curse. Atavism recedes into the reptilian brain & I walk on back across acres of frost & ice, the weight of sky on the back of my neck. The mountains of Afghanistan are not so very far away. Not a bird stirs.

2007-12-18T10:12:00.000-08:00

16 12 07

With the very short days now, sunrise at about nine o’ clock & sunset at about half past three, giving six & a half hours of daylight, there is more of the night & consequently of the moon. The waxing half moon rises at noon & rides high in the sky most of this cloudless day until it slips behind the horizon thirteen hours later at one in the morning. Plates of surface ice hem the lochans all day.

As well as the weather, of importance here is light & clarity. On this clear cold day, when every breath is felt deep into the lungs, there’s much talk of how far can be seen & how clearly.

As the sun rises, the hills make one black & broken line to the south; in full sunlight, they resolve into three clean lines of hills, one behind the other, receding in distinctness. Even now, towards dusk it’s still clear. To the west, the hills of Rum make a jet profile against a low band of coral flushing the horizon. Overhead the high sky is a translucent duckegg blue. To the east & south the sun flares red on the hills, somewhere on the spectrum between the bracken & rusting plough at the grazing called Park & the flames of the fire burning the year’s end scraps at the Kentra croft.

As the sun sets, the lines of hills become one again against an ice-blue sky. Clarity dissolves to dark.

2007-12-17T09:51:00.000-08:00

13 12 07

The south wind has reached a storm, though still without rain. Outgoing tide is crossed by the force of the wind, spray flying high.

Whiteness of lichen rings on oak & the stems of birches, their peeling bark white as thighs, stand against a sky black as spilled ink, a silhouette in reverse.

Clothes pegs clack luminously along the clothes line back & forth like the beads of an abacus. A crow, just blacker than the sky, is torn away from the hill by the updraught & swoops down to a hollow like any gathered leaf.

Lurid is very close to lucid.

2007-12-12T15:21:00.000-08:00

11 12 07

A soft day. The southerlies seem to have brought milder weather, with harmless & haphazard smirrs of rain wetting nothing much. Matching that soft weather, I hear the calls of the ravens before I see them – a large silhouette flying across the hill just below my clear sightline attracts my attention & I’m momentarily puzzled when it swoops up as a buzzard. Then the two ravens appear & jink together, above & below the buzzard, sending it clear over the crest of Gobsheallach hill on an updraught of wind & curse. The raven pair then flies over to demonstrate possession of the entire south side of the hill. They might be performing a mating flight, such is their exuberance, wing to wing coasting, stopping short only of the upside down flight I associate with their mating. But I guess it’s too early for that & they are just whooping it up a little after their effortless eviction of the buzzard.

It’s their gentle glottal calls I enjoy the most - the triple hyonk pyonk donk followed by a musical note like striking a dry emptied small log with a heavy stick, a deep xylophonic note, a marimba & mallet. I’m entranced at their flight & their bonded ecolect, their overheard personal conversation.

By the bay, the thin peep & rising inflection of five oystercatchers, like so many whistling kettles, as they rise to settle twenty yards further along the tideline is uncertain quavering soprano to the tenor gargling of a solitary curlew.

2007-12-11T14:52:00.000-08:00

10 12 07

further in yet
further in yet
green hills

(Santoka, poet, hermit, sometime sake brewer, “good for nothing”,

Buddhist mendicant; translated by William J Higginson)

Today being Human Rights Day, I ponder more than usual the scream of the Tornado jet as it passes between Beinn Resipol & Beinn Bhàn west to east along Loch Sunart.

When I arrive at Camas a’ Choirce, the sun has already dipped behind Beinn Bhàn, the big hill above Laudale on the other side of the loch in Morvern. Although only about 50 yards across the water here, Morvern is hours away on foot. I climb the slope to Resipole, through forestry & remnant oak forest where the gorges of Allt Camas a’ Choirce (the bay of corn) & the rocks & gradients made it unprofitable for planting sitka spruce. Picking my way among the frost pockets which dissolve the bracken in winter’s attrition, cracking the ice in standing water, crossing & crossing again the deep cut burns to gain a little height, my pluming breath steams out, like any old horse at winter work & beads spider webs. The burns, small but insistent, are feeders for the torrent in the gorge, here & there dropping off less worn rock edges in waterfalls. There’s no sound here but the brawl of water – constant but rising & falling in cadence as I slowly make my way up alongside, now close enough to be splashed, now behind overhanging oaks, as the terrain dictates.

It was my intention to reach the snow line on Resipol, but when I finally clear the trees – my progress is slow, poking & peering, stopping & listening – I’m in the sun, having climbed higher than its angle behind Beinn Bhàn – & too hot in my sweater for the climb. The sweater, an Aran knit has just been darned for me by an expert in the village. It was made more than thirty years ago here in Argyll; it didn’t wear out, but was attacked by moths. I mention it because round about the time it was made, I was panting up Carrauntoohill, Ireland’s highest mountain, in my best tackety boots & met, near the top, after some particularly irritating scree, a man looking after his sheep. He had a cigarette in his mouth, & no more equipment than a flat cap & welly boots.

I sit on a rock outcrop that’s bare among heather, smoothed & weathered over millennia, the kind that elsewhere in Argyll has been carved with enigmatic neolithic cup & ring marks. The flesh of the mountain. I sit for the best part of an hour, cooling, senses at a threshold level, simply receptive. When the sun starts blinking again behind the mass of the mountain, so do I. Resipol, at about 2,700 feet, is a Corbett, not so tall, but the snow seems to recede with each step I take & the rises between me & the peak seem to grow in number; I think of the poem by Santoka. I’m not concerned with mountain tops; faced with a choice of going further up, ice & snow above or down before dusk into frost, I take the path of the unhurried stag, preferring to leave the tops to their volcanic dreaming & move downhill, the body’s song in my every step.

The oaks corkscrew on themselves, their lower branches brushing my head as I pass under. Undisturbed webs are thicker here; the trees wound with ivies, climbed by lungwort & lichens, buttressed with mosses, into which my singing springing steps sink. Among the oaks are scattered younger hollies & birches. Lower, the oaks are cracked, torn & broken by winds; they fall partly to lean on their fellows. Their slow growth still seeking the upright. Along the burn the deep quiet pools alternate with white spume as water hits bed boulders. The floor of the spruce plantation the other side is black & silent, only small creatures negotiating the tangle of branches down to knee height on a man. The boundaries we set are not held to: among the sitka are yearling hollies, their hard seeds perhaps passing through the gut of a songbird to grow where they land; among the oaks are sitka saplings, seed brought by wind & squirrel. Full of laughter I move faster downhill, tapping the bracket fungi on birches, a little dance past the last lime green leaves of low fraochan - the sweet blueberries of summer gone.

2007-12-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

06 12 07

On the sea: a low guttural r-rak & moaning moo-oo-airh

At the headland: croaking & retching, frarnk & a liquid bubbling trill cour-li crwee croo-ee

In the oakwood: a cascade of notes ending with a flourish – choo-ee-o then chwink wheet chwit & a persistent scolding wheet tsack tsack & tit tit tit & a prolonged breathless jingle of high notes

On the hill: a croaking clucking plainsong & a deep high metallic prronk

In the sky: pee-oo mee-oo

Birdsong is hard to approximate in our alphabet & there’s a huge debate about its musical notation, with some commentators claiming that, Messaien & Handel notwithstanding, it’s nonsense to transcribe birdsong into Western 12 note scales, since they sing microtonally. Charles Ives describes microtones as the notes between the cracks on a piano. For sure the “words” used to describe birdsong here, which I drew in part from Peterson, Mountfort & Hollom’s Birds of Britain & Europe, my companion for all my adult life, are perhaps unrecognisable as the liquid languages of birds I encounter this morning on a walk to Port a’ Bhata. It’s also been argued that human music is a response to & (to begin with at least), an imitation of birdsong. There’s no doubt that it’s the same impulse that has me laughing & rasping aloud a fragment from the Song of the Volga Boatmen as I step yet again into ankle deep mud, slotted with deerprints along the path stags & hinds have trodden for how long.

Birdsong is a response, a pure clear communication of heart & mind & body together, spontaneous; & to hear, among hills & bays, is fathomless & silencing.

But nothing silences the possible.

2007-12-08T02:34:00.000-08:00

05 12 07

The urge toward naming is to make anchors for ourselves in an unreliable mutable world.

The rain’s finally stopped, though the wind is as strong as ever. In Antrim last week at a fish farm the entire harvest of salmon, about a hundred & twenty thousand fish was killed, when a mass of mauve stinger jellyfish, Pelagia noctiluca, filled Glenarm Bay. The numbers of mauve stingers was in billions & their mass extended over ten square miles & was thirty-five metres deep. Some salmon died of stings, but most were asphyxiated - the bulk of jellyfish prevented the flow of ocean water into their cages. The high tides & storms probably broke up that swarm, but ocean currents would have sent the jellyfish this way eventually. They have been sighted in the waters around Eigg & in Loch Sunart. Among the boats that work these waters is Speedwell out of Salen on Loch Sunart.

I walk to the fish farm in Ardtoe, from where Eigg, less than an hour’s sail from here, can be seen most days. The fish farm is called that still, but is really a hatchery, with its own tanks & waters behind dams away from the shore.

The Bay of Ardtoe, which has no name on the maps, only on the Admiralty Charts, is broad, full of small bays – from Camas an Lighe, the overflowing bay on account of the burn there, where the sands are said to sing in certain conditions, to Sailean Dubh, the black inlet. There’s a scattering of skerries – Sgeir an Rathaid, the skerry of the road, Sgeir nam Meann, kid skerry, Dubh Sgeir, Sgeir a’ Chaolais.

I stand on the rise above Rubh’ a’ Mhurain (sea bent headland). Sea bent is Arundo arenaria: a grass that, according to Umberto Eco in The Search for the Perfect Language, Linnaeus diagnostically describes as “single flowered within calyx; involute tapering pungent leaves."

I clamber down to the strand. There are no birds in this wind except a pair of cormorants far out toward unseen islands, low, skimming the crests. There is a large belt of kelp washed up to high tide line, but no mauve stingers; in fact Eigg might as well not be there, it can’t be seen either, whatever might be swarming in the waters around it. Only a black terrier is moving here, running from one end of the tide-diminished Sailean Dubh to the other at the water line, barking at the incoming ocean. The wind hustles me back onto my heels.

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FISH PRICES

Fraserburgh: monk: £70-£80; witches: £30-£60.
Boats that landed: Guide Us, Ocean Way, Ocean Reaper, Transcend, Replenish, Concorde, Accord, Gratitude, Serene, Deliverance, Just Reward
Peterhead: monks £2-£3.80; witches 80p-£1.50; megrim £1.50-£4.
Boats that landed: Constant Friend, Ocean Harvest, Our Guide

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The names we give out, sometimes at random, to creatures we share space with can sometimes return. The fact that sheep, Ovis aries go by many names, according to gender & age – tup, ewe, lamb, wether, gimmer – doesn’t diminish our need to give them personal names. If we get personal names wrong, it’s more or less insulting. So a certain tup with one eye, who once inhabited the byre where I now stay, has been offended by my misnaming. I’m happy to set the record straight, though I was only trying to protect his identity: his name’s Billy, not Charley.

Other times, like the hound here called Dharma, the naming of animals can have unsettling effects. A ewe by here, from a blackface tup to a Hebridean ewe (I’m guessing) with black & white markings, has only an unofficial descriptive name. To burst into the bar then, to announce “the badger’s had a lamb” can be the occasion for some puzzled looks among tourists.
Likewise, to encounter a man as it’s getting dark, slamming his door behind him & setting off along the road yelling “Whisky!” is something summer visitors find only too believable of west highland men. They don’t stop long enough to learn that it’s his dog’s name.

2007-12-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

04 12 07

My news for you
the stag roars
winter snow
summer is gone

wind high and cold
the sun low
quick its course
sea running strong

deep-red the bracken
its shape lost
everywhere the cry
of the wild goose

frost has hold
of the wings of birds
season of ice
these are my tidings

Something catches my attention this evening. The wind backs up & blusters somewhere else for the first time in three days. My ears ring in the absence of fast moving air; it’s like a reversing truck, how I imagine tinnitus to be. As my ears adjust & begin to stretch my hearing for something else – a curlew maybe; perhaps the hiss of tide retreating - the wind & rain return.

If the anonymous poet of the Scel lem duib, (the poem here translated from the Irish with spare elegance by Geoffrey Squires) were to visit Ardnamurchan today & sit here, back to an oak tree in a hollow, watching the tide in the bay, he’d find the land unchanged. Although the stags have now stopped their roar, rutting over, the wind is high & strong & the wild goose frets across the moss. The word scel is usually translated as poem or song. Geoffrey Squires, with more than elegance, has the right of it by using the English tidings, & news. It’s truly news; a report as fresh this evening as when the poet was first chilled by that wind 1200 years ago at the end of summer.

Even in my waterproof fleece-lined German ex-army trousers (swords to ploughshares, or at any rate breeches) the cold strikes home & I move across the hill into the wind & back to the byre, where the spider is sheltering from the weather.

I’d thought her at first to be a house spider, Tegenaria saeva or domestica. She’s certainly the right size – approaching an inch from eyes to spinner, excluding legs - & moves fast enough; though with a strange patience, if it’s that, she’ll keep still while I bring the lens to bear on her abdomen & dramatic pedicel. We’ve been moving around each other from room to room since the southwesterlies first arrived, & by now I’m convinced she’s not a house spider, but like any other creature this past week is avoiding rain & the wind that blows rain into cracks & fissures. She has no web that I can find, no cocoon shaped web-dwelling from which to run at prey. Her abdomen is black, as is her carapace, but she lacks any abdominal markings that I can see. I leave her be, both of us in the dry, unfurling bracken days a memory. When I’ve towelled off, she’s nowhere in sight.

2007-12-04T09:15:00.000-08:00

03 12 07

I’m woken in the night by squalls of rain syncopating & sloshing on windows & skylights. The sky is black, with rain rushing in on a southwesterly. The morning dawns slowly with no let up in rain; in fact it’s becoming fiercer. Wind birls around the byre battering at every window, not just in the prevailing wind direction. The topography here sends the winds into a flurry of indeterminacy, blowing from every quarter, sometimes seemingly at once. It’s like dusk all morning. Rain eventually falls away in the early afternoon, but I still don’t get too far from the house. Over on the peat bog by Shielbridge, 16 barnacle geese rise reluctantly from the small dug-over sloughs, cackling at my intrusion on their sheltered grazing. They rise as one tattered organism, slowly, peeling heavily into the wind to land a hundred yards away from where I walk, leaning into the wind. Barnacle geese were once believed to come, not from eggs, but from barnacles on the sea shore. Like me, folk learn things through observation; if you’ve never found a goose nest, because they breed in the Arctic, anything is possible. The shellfish & goose connection is an earlier notion of how things relate: ecology.

From here, looking west, the bulk of Eigg is visible, though not the loom of the Sgurr; there’s no sign of Rum behind it. I move back into the wind which the Shipping Forecast had told me is force eight becoming force nine later. I need no forecast to careen into it at a buffeted angle to keep moving forward, just as the geese used the precise & minimal amount of energy to escape my passage. Since the geese are feeding & I’m not, I begin to think of food, (eggs?) with maybe a tot of rum in honour of these two near small islands, surrounded by storms today, & on which doubtless, few geese are moving beyond the next grassy beakful & even fewer people are straying far from the fireplace. A day for a glass of rum in the twilight, window-gazing.

2007-12-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

29 11 07

Ten in the morning & the waning moon rides high in a wild sky. There’s every kind of cloud here, cumulus, black in its lumbering rolling mass, stratus & alto stratus, pulled into ribbons by the wind, all tinged at their edges by the morning sun. The wind pulls tears from my eyes & spreads them across my cold cheekbones. In the bay a cormorant coasts along the gusts, unruffled, a winged lizard, then turns back into the wind for a rising drop into the teeming sea & straight under, wings folded. There’s only one mushroom under the birches, a charcoal burner, Russula cyanoxantha. Despite its name, this one is good to eat, witness the slight nibbles that a hind has taken. I guess it’s a hind since I’ve seen no stags this way for days. I’m happy to share; I picture it with a breakfast egg, whatever the hind may envisage.

John Cage, an avid mushroom hunter-gatherer, cooker & eater, is not above spreading fallacies concerning mushrooms. In Indeterminacy, he writes “Certain tribes in Siberia trade several sheep for one Amanita muscaria and use the mushroom for orgiastic practices. . . . . The Vikings who went berserk are thought to have done so by means of this same mushroom.” The key words here are orgiastic, which goes counter to all the evidence that this was once the intoxicant used during shamans’ curative practices; & berserk, for which there is no evidence, though it might perhaps have been a constituent part of an alcohol based cocktail that would send anyone wild; berserk if you will. I’m happy, though that he perpetuates mycophobia, I wonder if it mightn’t have been his intention. A mushroom gatherer will do anything to send people away from their patch with the idea that all mushrooms are deadly poisonous. I have several ruses myself. John Cage, again: “Guy Nearing sometimes says that all mushroom experts die from mushroom poisoning. Donald Malcomb finds the dangers of lion hunting largely imaginary, those of mushroom hunting perfectly real.” The fact is, though, that mushrooms are one of the last remaining wild foods available here, as elsewhere, & as such belong to those who find them. The law, a notorious ass, & with it the most risible of landowners, would suggest that anything found on a laird’s land belongs to him; including wild fruits & fungi. As well then to clear the land of noxious & poisonous mushrooms that I’ve seen deliberately trampled by those afraid of the orgiastic berserkers who might ingest them. Good with eggs, though, with just a little garlic.

Mushrooms & their association with the woodland here (as everywhere) have a beautiful symmetry. The mycorrhizal connections allow an exchange between tree & fungus of carbohydrates for mineral nutrients which each would find difficult to access otherwise. The exchange is made with a colonisation of the roots of oaks & birch or other trees by fungi. Look for healthy woodland, healthy trees, & they are made so by the fungi which grow on & around them below the soil. Some fungal mycelium mats outlive generations of trees.

Deer nibbling the fruiting bodies – mushrooms - may also bark young trees, but their droppings enrich the woodland floor, making yet more nutrients (droppings derived from their browsing in the Sunart woods) available to tree & mushroom alike. What the Sunart oakwoods may have been like centuries ago, can only be a matter for conjecture. A few years back, the ecologist Frans Vera put forward the theory that’s been debated since, that woodland in Europe (& therefore Scotland) was a savannah, with groves & grasses kept open by herds of roaming deer & other mammals. This runs counter to our belief, founded on folklore & perhaps a wish-fulfilment daydream that the ancient woodlands covered Scotland coast to coast in a single continuous closed canopy. Sweeny ("This clearing is too open, / without trees; . . .”) & the Green Man live there.

Whatever the cover of the trees in Sunart’s Atlantic oakwoods six thousand years ago & despite being a resource for timber products, the arrival of sheep altered it to such a point that ecologists & conservationists today have difficulties in trying to restore woodlands. I make no secret that I have a fairly low opinion of the intelligence & usefulness of sheep. I'd trade several for a big cep or some chanterelles any day. They were an indirect cause of great suffering (Landlords being the true manipulating culprits) during the Clearances & today have little economic purpose; but I have nothing like the spleen of the good Doctor of Rahoy, John MacLachlan, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century on sheep, shepherds & the subsequent decline of woodland, by then well under way. He writes (in Donald Meek’s translation from the Gaelic):

“Alas for my plight here, as I am so lonely,
going through the wood which I once knew closely,
when I cannot get a plot in my native country
though I’d pay a crown for a mere shoe-breadth.

Unsweet is the sound that has roused my reflections,
as it comes down from the heights of Morvern –
the Lowland shepherd – how I hate his language! –
bawling yonder to that slow dog of discord.

Early on a May morning when it is time to arise,
I hear no music on branches, nor lowing on moorland,
but the screeching of beasts in the English language,
yelling at dogs to make the deer scatter.

When I observe the towering mountains,
and the lovely country which was once Fionn’s homeland,

I see nothing there but sheep with white fleeces,
and countless Lowlanders at every trysting.

The glorious glens where one once found hunting,
where dogs on leashes were held by young fellows,
I see nothing there now but a ragged shepherd,
and his fingers blacker than the crow’s pinion.

Every old custom has been sent packing – . . .”

His poem equates the degradation of the woods with the erosion of language & Gaelic culture, a process that continues to this day. An ecological balance, once unbalanced, must find new purchase on the land: ecology as entropic biodiversity.

2007-11-29T03:29:00.000-08:00

28 11 07

I seem to inhabit time backwards these quick days; a regression into memory. As a child, I heard of Eskimoes having hundreds of words for snow. Now I know that Franz Boas the anthropologist recorded just four: to mean lying snow, falling snow, drifting snow & snow drift. This, in just one language of the many of the people I now know as Inuit. Maybe there are many more Boas was not told. Here, there’s rain. It’s falling straight down & is constant. This morning’s Shipping Forecast gave six options for rain around the country: occasional rain, rain then showers, rain or showers, continuous moderate rain, slight drizzle & rain, & finally, occasional rain or drizzle. Before going out, I try to decide which I’m seeing through the kitchen window. It must be continuous moderate rain. Fliuch; wet then, in Gaelic. There’s no wind. Our words in English for rain – drizzle, showers, heavy rain, squalls, pour into my mind as the moderate rain falls on my green knitted hat.

One of this year’s piebald lambs – a cross of a blackface tup with a Hebridean ewe – with one and a half thin horns, nuzzles the hens where they disconsolately scratch the sogged turf. Up the hill water abandons its usual courses across & through thin soil, & being pragmatic, takes to the roads to follow its way to the bay. Which might be fresh rather than salt in all this rain. Fresh now, as though it’s the first time I’ve seen this (though in truth it’s an abiding memory from I don’t know when), on every hard rush blade, at the junction of each now-dead flowerhead & stem, drops of water catch my eye, rinse my sight.

At the point that looks out to the Atlantic, the morning’s heron voices her displeasure at my appearance & cracks long wings over to the island, to the looping, lingering call of her always companion, the curlew.

As the short day eases into dusk, the rain clears & a dilute sun sets a little west of the Tor of Beeches, its off-vermilion blush momentarily lending the hills a purple light among clinging clouds; as though the heather was again flowering as it did in summer. As the small stems of stork’s bill, Erodium cicutarium, flower unseen & unseasonal, by the sea’s edge right here, right now.

2007-11-29T03:27:00.000-08:00

24 11 07

By Castle Tioram the fat handfed black pheasants are strident in their protest at the mere sight of the hound & myself. The dithering birds chak-chak at the hound, who, since they’re behind a wire fence, affects not to notice them.

A red squirrel climbs the Scots pine anti-clockwise, finding tiny things of interest there; its incurved tail meagre & rufous. It cares as little for all of us as the hound for the pheasants, as I do for the man who pays the breeder of the birds, reared only to be killed; food a long way from consideration.

The hound makes a hiccupping sally towards a rabbit on the island the castle sits on.

A herring gull mourns overhead.

2007-11-28T13:45:00.000-08:00

23 11 07

At sunrise, together with a hind limned against a lightening sky, I watch as the bay becomes gold across its newborn sand. The news bulletin told me of Palestinians waking to the bulldozing of precious & ancient olive trees uprooted to make way for the concrete wall. The sun gilding sand is heart stopping, an organ played on by the blood of hind & human.

The hind moves on delicate black hooves over rock & heather, downhill, elegantly scratching her ear with her right rear leg; maybe, now in calf, she’s in as contemplative a mood as myself. I move up hill in a sky rapidly silvering then greying as the sun rises above the bay, above Ben Resipole’s hip & above rain clouds moving in from the Atlantic. The birches & the moss below are full of the flit & dart of chaffinches. The males echo the day, with their blue-grey crowns & rosy breasts, with the upcoming generation, or so I take it to be, slightly less coloured, but they’ll grow into it. The female is altogether olive brown. A grey crow, one of a pair in an alder, is wiping his beak on a branch, with a knife-sharpening motion, to take off traces of breakfast.

Under alder & birch & oak alike, the skeletal remains of bracken keel & reveal the green vividness of sphagnums & the herringbone pattern & green corduroy of shield ferns, (Polystichum aculeatum is my stab in the darkness of my own uncertainty). In the oaks grow polypody – Polypodium interjectum, their green multiple tongues dripping & refreshingly free of cant.

Dusk comes a little earlier each night, bringing greater safety, but greater hunger to the deer. The Glen Tarbert stags are down from the tops; three of them that I see have almost identical broken left antlers. They’re young & their rivalries are over, leaving only those cracked anti-trophies of male hormone flow, subsided as tide in the inlets. At Camas a’ Choirce, a solitary fossicking badger trots & snuffles between pounding rain squalls, light on her feet, her belly low-slung & her body-mass-index enough to frighten humans. Mostly nocturnal, she (I have no way of telling the sex of this animal) will spend more time sleeping in the longer colder nights, but have no food shortages just yet; the woods an autumn larder of roots, worms, carrion & mushrooms. At Kentra, young hind calves trot ahead of me, bemused by my torchlight in the pre-moon dark.

Clarity arrives with the full moon. Although there are clouds, the light is brilliant, lighting the white of sheep up on Gobsheallach hillside with a shining matched only by the luminescence of lichen rings on the rocks I finger as personal touchstones as I pass. Scale is confused in such clarity where I find it hard to ascribe anything but equal value to what is in front of my eyes wherever my glance falls – a lunar illumination scaled to fit human perception.

2007-11-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

20 11 07

There is a second flush of growth in oak & other trees, known as lammas growth. It happens in the summer & is a response to temperature & other factors favourable to a fresh surge of growth. The tree is most prone to this when it’s young; it doesn’t happen in old trees. Nicolas Battey, writing in the Journal of Experimental Botany: “This decline could be conceived as learning from experience . . . A youthful tree shows lammas growth. It seems an enthusiasm, an impetuous response to summer warmth and light. With age, it declines, and the tree settles down to more sedate growth.” It’s a kind of freedom of expressive growth; it’s not the expansion of spring laid down the previous year. I don’t doubt that trees also learn from experience; to see any tree in Sunart oakwoods reacting, however slowly, to prevailing wind & the falling of old limbs from gales & lightning is to see trees balancing on rocky slopes in a decades long dance.

Lammas Day (“so call’d from the Mass said for preservation of Lambs”) is perhaps a Christian pilfering of Lughnasadh, the festival to celebrate the start of the harvest season, the growth that has given the first fruit.

It may be there is a correlative to trees’ lammas growth in the ragged robin & the spear thistle; a learning & an urge to make a fresh spurt, an utterance of life. An impetuous response. A song.

Also with a new burst of expansion are the jet planes, which have not yet made their eastward migration, but were only waiting on fine weather to make their high-sky vapour hieroglyphs, which fade to parentheses & the symbol for eternity; a figure eight on its side. These offensive jets (I’m using the MoD term) are Harriers & Tornadoes. Somewhere between the swept back wings of Tornadoes are Storm Shadow & Brimstone missiles, as well as General Purpose Bombs & Cluster Bombs which sow their submunitions over a couple of acres to flower at will. In other fields. Some of these aircraft rip to Ardnamurchan from Lossiemouth, about 150 miles as the crow flies. The vapour symbols are probably scrawled by a defensive Typhoon; the Eurofighter.

Among the boats returning to land fish today are: New Dawn, Celestial Dawn, Fruitful Vine, Fruitful Harvest, Harvest Hope & Ocean Harvest.

2007-11-21T06:56:00.000-08:00

19 11 07

I can feel the frost coming. The air is cold & still. Chimney smoke over by Kentra, not moved by any wind, drops to the bracken & rolls, spreading like liquid. The sky has cleared itself of sulky grey & the moon has already risen high. There are two sunsets this evening. One, the colour of an angry boil against a few delicate stratus clouds slips behind Torr Beithe, the tor of beeches, now conifers. The other, the colour of salmon flesh is hard against me in the sea by Eilean Dubh. A curlew’s thin thread of a call as she rises stitches the two.

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

With the moon nearly full, the shadow of the two rowans just by here & my own shadow as I pass by them are as distinct as any negative formed by the sun. There are no Leonids, comets or shooting stars; the moon is enough, picking out the shine of rock. This moon is the Blood Moon, it’s written on my almanac, with vague neopagan overtones.

2007-11-20T15:05:00.000-08:00

17 11 07

sleet or snow?
feels good it soaks into.
my body wet.
mistily moistened.
snow or cold rain?
acanthus rooting above me gone bad for the cold?
or those withered leaves suffering heavy snow?
what’s that faint sound coming on?
a jet?

I find it hard to observe frogs closely without being distracted by fragments of Kusano Shimpei’s poems. That one is from monologue of a hibernating frog (translated from the Japanese by Cid Corman with Susumu Kamaike) & it’s what frogs should be doing round about now, not leppin across roads in front of cars & pickups & heavy boots. But there they are. Making sure they don’t dry out; though in Sunart oakwoods, it’s just about impossible to dry out. There’s no doubt though that the year is somewhat warmer for longer than is usual. Over on the north shore of Loch Sunart, close by the wrecks of two small boats, ragged robin, Lychnis flos-cuculi, is still in flower. Here at Gobsheallach, right outside the door are the tall purple flowers & foliage of spear thistle, Cirsium vulgare; up the hill, as elsewhere around, male catkins of hazel share a branchlet with as yet unshed & now lime green autumn leaves. I mention this in the bliss of ignorance. The thistle & ragged robin are summer flowering, yet here we are in mid November. How easy to use phrases like global warming; the truth is, there are complex factors at work here, which such easiness undermines. It’s certainly the case that plants have a wider period of flowering than memory or text books generally allow. Frogs make up their own minds, according to temperature. & Kusano. & here we are in a temperate zone (& therefore basically not too extreme), in what amounts to a rainforest, made so partly by the north Atlantic drift. Frogs may come & go as they please, to a certain extent, using the glucose in their blood as a kind of anti-freeze; though I grant, not of their own volition. When they do hibernate, it’s in a hibernaculum. What a grand word for sleeping in mud.
But neither the frogs nor myself are sleeping the winter away yet. There’s a half-moon, lying on its back among broken clouds, the way I feel to be, looking up at the few visible stars, but no sign of the Leonid meteors, which are only for three days from the 16th to the 18th of this month; nor of the shooting stars that my star chart predicts. Peter tells me also that I might be able to see the comet Holmes, in Perseus, not too far (though that has to be relative) from Andromeda.
I see only the frogs tonight

proceeding quietly single file.
long silent single file.
file of frogs proceeding.

from Lululu’s funeral (accompanied by Chopin’s funeral march) Kusano Shimpei.

2007-11-19T04:50:00.001-08:00

15 11 07

swords into ploughshares

a gunmetal sea

& when I write grey skies I think of Gertrude Stein. These are not grey skies but curling greyladen clouds, formless in whisps & solids, changing their formlessness as wind drives them. Light & dark according to density, the load of moisture they hold, that they are. Nothing recognisable, as different from yesterday’s grey sky as the shapes clouds don’t become. No trees, faces, monsters. They’re all down here, where here is. All morning behind that grey a reverberance above cloud tops; another unseen jet rolling over the sky, rumbling the hills here. I’d thought the manoeuvres & ravening aerobatic displays over, that air force jets had ended, another seasonal event, going into underground hangars like the woodants, to sleep & dream of becoming. But this is probably a last summer visitor who can’t wait to catch his fellows in their fall migration to the middle east, the mountains of Afghanistan & plains of Iraq

2007-11-16T11:28:00.000-08:00

13 11 07

Is a stag an event? There’s no wind, droplets of water on every aspen, birch & oak, as well as at the tip of each stalk of hard rush. Ambling across the bay west from Kentra, two hours ahead of low tide, pausing only to scratch, the dark necked stag owns it all. I move up the hill to cut him off & sit quietly where he’ll come ashore. To see things, it’s easier to be still than to lumber behind. I sit for maybe twenty minutes until the damp seeps in. Experience says he’s scented me & moved off below or above. There’s no further sight of him.

In the afternoon I walk round the headlands on the bay’s sands & there’s his slotted hoofprints leading in to an inlet east of where I was sitting in the morning. It’s among the poised & ponderous heron prints, each foot just about the span of my hand. The ridges & wrinkles of the bay are crisscrossed by worm casts & the meanderings of small whelk trails & the musings of other shellfish creeping. Just as the outlines of heron, stag & fish prints are softening in the moisture retained in the sand’s striations, so are the lower slopes of watercut hills of rock around the bay blurring into cloud; the peak of Ben Resipole rising into sun. The stag’s away.

2007-11-13T10:02:00.000-08:00

11 11 07

-- through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.

Thinking about William Carlos Williams’ short poem A sort of a song. That reconciliation is difficult, even when I know there’s no real separation, no such thing as independent existence. It’s what Dogen meant when he wrote of mountains constantly walking. The bedrock does not protrude from the mosses, it wears them. The trees don’t displace air & water, but contain them.

The night of the new moon & the rain has not let up any, coming in hard twisting ribbons curling across the woodland. In a search for shelter, or maybe just restless, frogs leap high across the road. A sullen elk-wet stag, shaggy & hunched, steps out from my torchlight & behind the dripping oak at Camas a choirce.
The following day in Morvern, by Laudale, the wind persists, buffeting until the shelter of the trees at Aird Beitheach, the high birches, is reached. Leaves swoop back into these trees with the wind, dipping from tree to tree, up at the last moment to land on the topmost twigs, to resolve themselves into a flock of tits & treecreepers, momentarily leafing the bare birch & oak in their own fashion. At night small mammals are constantly running across the road, perhaps mice or voles, tawny brown & rushing from one side to the other before revealing their nature as dried leaves scuttering in wind.
Then, last night, pulled from the trees, the last downtwisting small birch leaves, despite the intense cold, become what they maybe were all along: flimsy breezy moths. There’s a brown owl sitting on the fence, fully awake, & I guess tired of moths.

(No ideas
but in things)

Williams wrote in the same poem. Things have their own ideas, they’re themselves, sometimes idea-less, happening, an event, walking their own way.

2007-11-12T14:09:00.000-08:00

09 11 07

SHIPPING NEWS

A maritime seasonal gauge at Ardtoe Jetty is the number of boats at moorings. In the summer there's a dozen or more small boats, a couple of which are working boats, bringing home in an infrequent way, lobsters & crabs. These boats, mostly pleasure craft, are brought ashore, one at a time, as the oak & aspen leaves fall around them. Today, there’s only three boats & two RIBs. The RIBs act as tenders to the two small fishing boats, OB 108 being one, & will ride the winter here. The only boat I've seen there with a name, Tarbaby, has gone.

Caledonian MacBrayne ferries from Mallaig to Eigg, Rum, Muck & Canna did not operate yesterday in the storms & squally winds.

Among the boats from Fraserburgh & Peterhead that put out: Valhalla, Tranquility, Ocean Pioneer, Contest, Courage, Accord, Achieve, Celestial Dawn, Arcane, Fear Not, Opportunus, Harvest Hope, Challenge, Fruitful Bough. One boat put out from Scrabster: Seagull.

Monks & witches landed everywhere.

2007-11-12T04:50:00.001-08:00

08 11 07

A gale here & stronger wet squalls coming with northwesterlies. Rain’s dashed down against the slates but the strength of wind curling round Gobsheallach hill contrariwise pushes it upwards again to sing over the roof ridges. Rain takes turns with bouncing hail. The hound is unnerved by the squalls; facing them the air is forced into her long nose & sets her sneezing, behind & she’s forever looking over her shoulder to see what the noise back there is bringing. In a sheltery dip she puts up a sudden snipe from the bracken where neither of us saw it until it flew a few feet. It slid sideways in the wind & curved up slightly, in that deceptive way of snipe, before, blown, clipping a small birch trunk & then running into the heather & over the rock; more pheasant than snipe. She may be sheltering or may have been pushed down by the gale & injured a wing. If that’s the case, it’s the fox who’ll benefit tonight.
It won’t be the same fox, but the story is told of the fox trotting down the hillside here & along the road past the house over by. The man of the house sees the fox, bold as brass, & fearing for the hens, runs inside for maybe a gun, but comes out with only a hearth brush, which he lobs anyway at the fox. The fox, nonchalant, turns, throws a look, grabs the brush in his smirking teeth & trots on his way. When the farm is having a new shed built, two-three years later, a fallen trunk needs to be moved; in a den underneath, dry & in good condition is the red hearth brush. I think it’s in use to this day.

2007-11-09T03:44:00.000-08:00

07 11 07

The wind’s blowing up from the west again & from the point above the ants that looks out over Eilean Dubh I can see ocean spume. Although the ants are in full hibernation, beside their small dwelling I find a pair of Scarlet Hoods. These mushrooms are blood red with a waxy feel & shine among dead bracken & deepsea green moss. They’re also edible, so into my hat they go for safe passage home. Then, with the easy optimism of an early find, the hound & I set off mushrooming in the woods.
The woods, like me, are not sure if autumn is coming or going. The oaks are browning & crisping their leaves, one tree at a time. It’s not age, nor yet exposure that causes this patchwork undressing, but perhaps an expression of health or of individuality, with here a mature tree in green leaf, there a partially clad elder & here a stripped fifty year old youngster. The taller hollies are vibrant with berries, a signifier of a bad winter, it’s said. Other hollies here seem close cropped, perhaps by deer; certainly they’re very low & appear to be layering into small groves, but no taller than mid calf. They have no berries, so maybe they are too young , or simply all male trees. The willows are still leaved. The Scots pines are direct from a Chinese mountains & waters landscape scroll, with their backdrop of soft-toothed hills. A signature is the final spindly foxglove, with its single purple bell.
It’s a joy to walk in these damp, duff-smelling moss clad woods; I think of Sweeny, exiled, mad, & his naked wanderings in the woods of Ireland & Britain: “Dense wood is my security, / the ivy has no edge.” in Trevor Joyce’s perfect translation. & “I occupy in alien woods / an old retreat; / in my familiar square of trees / shrewd centre of such intimate quincunx am I”. Quincunx, where he counts himself a tree. Indeed, it’s so silent here, that the slight sibilance of our exhalation is equal to the fall of sap in these oaks.
Of mushrooms, though, not a smell; save for a single psilocybe. I stravaig north & west; past the trunk where once was frosted chicken-of-the-woods, a dim memory in the skillet now, past the small stand of beech & deeper into the oaks, where, still serving my stomach, I take the consolation of a bite of wood sorrel (Sweeny: “Though you relish salted hams / and the fresh meat of ale-houses, / I would rather taste a spray of cress / in some zone exempt from grief.”) But the truth is, the sorrel’s tough & at the uttermost end of its season.
Once, I would have been pleased by the psilocybe, but with deep woods & scarlet hoods singing bloodred in my brain, now they stay unplucked. Hinds & stags have no such scruples, browsing through the woods. Nor the slugs. What does a slug experience, nibbling on Russula emetica: the Sickener? Hard to imagine a slug with vertigo, or seeing flashing lights, or even vomiting. These are the toxic effects on humans of this little cherry coloured mushroom. Fly agaric seems to be eaten with impunity by deer. It has, of course been taken for its psychotropic qualities over the ages in northern woods. I’ve eaten it raw and any psychotropic experience – the flashing lights, organic curlicues of Green-Mannishness & an overwhelming certitude (of what, is never asked) - is second only to uncontrollable shivering & prodigious, endless vomiting. Americans also assert, helpfully, “it fries the liver”. It has also been taken when passed through another’s liver. Some stories have it the liver of a deer, others the livers of the rich, (poor people being unable to afford the mushroom: but this doesn’t stand scrutiny, much; poor people need only go to the woods. But again, parenthetically, we might ask what else have the rich ever done for the piss-poor). Mrs Beeton might say: first catch your deer. & what would the rooted & branched stags experience in the way of apparition & delusion from psychotropic agarics? Safely through a liver, then, the urine may be drunk: result – intoxication without toxicity. I’ve met men who’ve drunk turps & even brasso & achieved a kind of Sweeny-state; they’d maybe drink urine too, if they were half the believers that our current ranks of neo-shamans & Latter Day Druids are. Sweeny was never half so deluded.
The hound looks at me – I’ve sat still long enough. All day, we’ve seen nothing moving but a wren; heard nothing but the running water of burns among boulders thick with moss, & now the lowing of cattle over the hill towards Polloch. It’s just two Scarlet Hoods then, with my supper eggs & potato. At the kitchen table, I’m eating & leafing through Dogen’s “Instructions to the Cook”: (“When you prepare food, never view the ingredients from some commonly held perspective, nor think about them only with your emotions.”) & out flutters a small clipping. It’s dated by me in pencil 12 11 05, almost precisely two years old. It’s from the Guardian, & in entirety reads: “Swedish papers reported the tale of the rampaging, drunken elks that threatened to attack an old people’s home. The old people were saved, but the elks were following well-documented behaviour that included attacks on joggers and cyclists after feasting on fermented apples.”

2007-11-08T04:54:00.000-08:00

06 11 07

Smoke’s curling out from the top of the chimney; the day is grey, a shade somewhere between the meditating heron’s back & the negative-blackness of the cormorants barely skimming the salt water. The light begins to fail at four o’ clock on November days like this & a prolonged dusk adds to the sombreness of the day. Sea in the bay reflects nothing. There’s no break in cloud cover, only layerings of darker & dark. I’m taken by surprise, then, by the vivid yellow of the furze bushes to the west of the bay. As I warm my eyes with their glow, I’m distracted by the dartings of a wren, brown in her cave of spikes. Sheep graze furze in hard winters; I’m thinking it would need to be hard indeed to get past those inch long spines, which are in fact its leaves. It was once ground as cattle fodder & is still fed to horses who apparently delight in it. I’m lost in the quick jinking of the wren & the hardiness of this plant, when the rich almond smell of the flowers reaches my nose; it’s zesty & sends me straight back to childhood kitchens & marzipan. Warmed by memory, scent & sight, I stroll on, nonchalant in the cold wind.

2007-11-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

05 11 07

In Scandinavia, the burning of birch has led to whole technologies of the wood-burning stove. Although it gives off a good heat, it’s no sooner lit than burned through. There’s plenty of it here, as in Scandinavia, but here also we have oak, the quintessential firewood, lasting long & burning hot. Firewood has been taken from these woods as long as people & woods have co-existed here, with folk still taking logs & brushwood, though nowadays most wood, if felled & if removed (rather than left for the slow energy burn of beetles, wasps & spiders & their kin) goes for other purposes. In other times, holly was said to burn like wax; plenty of ash was laid to a fire, burning as it does green or seasoned. I still start fires when I can with knuckles of ash, from faggots collected under the trees when storms crack off limbs & shower down twigs. Likewise the whitethorn, which burns hot & is said to bake the best bread. Rowan also burns hot, but though I’ve saved the trunk & arms of a storm-felled rowan for three seasons, I’m too superstitious to burn it; rowans guard a house, & although I sometimes believe this & sometimes don’t, it’s just not polite to burn your guardians.
The bonfire to celebrate Guy Fawkes (though there was no effigy of himself or the Pope) was a huge wigwam of scrap wood on the foreshore at Salen. I’ve no idea what types of wood it was made up of; though it’s a fair bet that most of it came from elsewhere. As far as I could tell, it was salvaged from demolitions & renovations of local houses; though there appeared to be the sides of an old shed, entire. It felt mean at a fine public festivity, of which there are too few left, to be thinking of the use all that wood could be put to. When the man from Salen said, almost in a whisper, that it was a shame to see all that heat wasted, I couldn’t but agree. But; & but, the anarchist, the peasant at the tumbrel, the child in me, was overjoyed to see the fire catch & take in the offshore wind, flames neither dancing nor licking, but drinking the wood. It was the sparks that danced in that elemental dance, retaining the shape of the hot updraughts, pushed this way & that like stars at the beginnings of time; that same dance of purest elation, driven by the same force, to be seen in shoaling fish & swarming bees & the swoop of starlings at dusk as they prepare to roost & pour into a tree or ivied wall.
It all made a fitting spree for the passing into winter, although it was past All Saints & All Souls Days. The flames, if you believe such things may have helped souls of the faithful attain their places elsewhere. Saints needed no such help, having probably already been roasted to ensure their sojourn in the clouds. With harps. (or is that angels?) Myths are fun. & the month is called samhain in Gaelic anyway, meaning harvest & surely a time to remember the dead & that we’re alive & with a fine crop.
The commemoration of a man who didn’t succeed in blowing a parliament to hell & which led to excesses of anti-Catholicism (why do I think of the Revd. Paisley & his refined sense of smell: “No pot-pourri here!”); the celebration of Halloween, itself a kind of Christian theft of the harvest hullabaloo of Samhain, at which cattle bones were thrown in fires to ensure prosperity for the coming year (indeed the word bonfire or bonefire is said by some to be a direct translation of the Gaelic tine cnamh), all makes for a mix where, like at the edges of the fire, at this fringe of the Sunart oakwoods, distinctions become blurred. Perhaps the more so because it’s damned cold & we’re outside the pub clutching our whisky glasses, but within sight of the still crackling blaze on the shore & its sense of redemption for those damned in the myths. Though I note that over the road the big house was once a Temperance Hotel, so maybe the whisky will lead us all to perdition. Or to laughter: the same place for an unbeliever.
The children, tumbling in the wet, leaping from the walls, clattering into shins & yelling, are there already.

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My prevailing sense of anarchy, the child in me at this bonfire, has echoes in an unpublished chronicle I’m privileged to read - A Highland Boyhood in Ardnamurchan, written by Angus Cameron, who grew up here & like most of his generation in the peninsula, had no English before he went to school. It was loaned to me by my neighbour, a cousin of his, but even though she & one of her sisters & another relative try to unravel the knot of kinship, it remains tied & unresolved as to what degree of cousin.He writes of Kentra in the years of the First World War: “As the year rolled round, Hallowe’en was looked forward to with great fervour, as a crowd of us would dress up to go out “guising” and get involved in a host of pranks and tricks. Boats and carts would be removed and replaced in somebody else’s croft or patch. The shoemaker (Allan) guarded his boat carefully, but as soon as he left for a cup of tea, we would have it shifted. One year we put it beside John George’s potato pit, exchanging it with John George’s cart, which we left on the shore.”

2007-11-05T15:17:00.000-08:00

03 11 07

It’s the old way, still the way of most of the world, but it’s become remote & we try to banish it: to walk unaided by light in darkness. How apart & rare. Now ten days after full moon, four until a new moon. No houselights east or west. A little dim starlight as the west wind frays the lumbering mass of greyed cloud. To slowly feel the way with cautious feet. To feel alone in silence. To feel cold in dim mountain bulk, the absence of complication, world reduced to the slow & slowing unseen but present; like the presence of the liver & spleen in the body – unfelt but known of. Stags in the dark. Birds roosted. One step. & another

2007-11-05T08:26:00.000-08:00

31 10 07

Five days after full moon & still there’s light through torn clouds greater than the starlight, looming Ben Resipole at the end of the road I’m walking. No lights but for these. All the steading lights are out across the bay; the stags are no longer moaning in Moidart or Laga. Late curlews waver their calls across the leaden sea at Eilean Dubh. The cold bites the bridge of my nose & I’m suddenly & unassailably happy & singing: the sign painted on the road bend is SLOW & oh I don’t hurry; I step slowly into the night’s mysteries & out across the turf under which a million infinitesimally small creatures lead their lives in the forever dark, through which owls & bats swoop thick & noiselessly & the slugs slowly curve their way. Fresh rain drops on my hatless head; my neighbours the mountains dream on.

2007-10-29T13:45:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-10-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-28T10:49:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-28T05:58:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-19T05:09:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-18T08:28:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-10-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-10T04:02:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-09T13:04:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-10-09T13:03:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-10-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

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”

2007-10-06T03:51:00.000-07:00

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.

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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.

2007-10-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-04T12:31:00.000-07:00

25 09 07

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who decrees decay
allows for growth

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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

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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?

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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)

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