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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.