The Circumflex

Years ago, when I still had some semblance of managerial status and the corporate world wasn’t so abashed about corporate entertainment, I attended a ‘fancy dress’ ball on a Second World War theme…perhaps it was on a notable date…1995?  Some guy, a client, turned up in a black SS uniform.  I was amazed you could hire such things!  He was a passable dancer and a woman on our table remarked to her husband how handsome he looked.

“Yes,” her partner responded.” But they weren’t very nice people.”

Those of you who are not Scots, please do not be offended by the understatement.  It was a killer remark.

I bought “The Kindly Ones” for someone else…one of my things: buying the books I feel I ought to read for other people – a perverse sort of self-denial.

It came to my attention through a London Review of Books review which was not kind to it but the final provocation to steal it back and read it (I will return it to the original recipient) was a comment in Slavoz Zizek’s ‘First as tragedy, then as farce’ in which he criticised, I felt, the contention that Littell’s book exonerated Nazi murders by the (self-deluding) excuse that each perpetrator had a ‘rich inner life’.  Zizek’s thesis seemed to be that listening to Rameau and admiring sunsets did not indulge the perpetrator in any way from the atrocity of their crimes – and that that rationale should be applied to each and every one of us in our moments of sombre reflection.  Slavoz doesn’t seem to have much time for the ‘man’s a man for aa that’ school of maudlin.

Well…fair enough.  I ploughed through the tome, delighted by the project and appalled by the insights, for the first 500 pages.  I don’t think it is Littell’s fault that the war went on so long ..his project of carrying us from the first amateurish massacres through the breathtaking horror of the Final Solution to the emptiness of the fall of Berlin was, as they say, ambitious.

The tide turned, in fact and in fiction, in Stalingrad and I (and I suspect Maximilien Aue, the protagonist) had learned my lesson by then.  What appals and chastens is the grinding out of horror from defeat but, accurately I suspect, atrocity is normalised by the last third of the book.  Its miserable grey plod toward oblivion is established and the impact of Aue’s ‘rich inner life’ is lost…the contrasts as he admires the sunset over Auschwitz as women and children queue and shuffle towards their murder… imaginable, understandable – yes!  The  man and his nation(state) has lost the plot.  But so perhaps had the author.

The great strength of ‘The Kindly Ones’…and where I disagree with what I infer to be Zizek’s ‘criticism’ of the book… lies in Littell’s necessary exposition of the corporate nature of the Nazi project.  Having lived through the corporate normalisation of ‘states of exception’ in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, I wholly recognise the process by which the unthinkable becomes the embarrassingly inefficient becomes the way things are.  This comparison is not specious.  Corporate cultures implicate their participants in processes and personal actions they would regard as unethical in personal life (or last year).  The key message, for me, in the Kindly Ones, lies in the morally-vulnerable humanity of Aue and his associates.

Some of the writing is brilliant – its hallucinatory quality in passages – so reminiscent of contemporary margins  where daily reality is often indistinguishable from the nightmare of the centre – its clever juxtaposition of sublime reveries with breathtaking horror.

The work was, therefore, somewhat undermined, in my view, by the element of ‘mad luck’ introduced into the narrative.  Aue’s emerging ‘issues’ with his mother and sister began to undermine the sense that Aue was the victim of corporate desensitisation…was Littell arguing that all SS functionaries were in fact psychopaths…that no one in their ranks would pass for ‘normal’ by the standards of the time?   The resort to increasingly casual murder is perhaps ‘realistic’ and (again) ‘understandable’ in the context but it ceases to be believable (and fiction must be believable) – for in doing so, the work does the disservice of rendering the whole atrocious Nazi project unbelievable. Of allowing us to pretend WE would never do something like that.   It seems to me crucial that we believe it, understand it, recognise it in ourselves and absolutely foreswear it.

I note on the internet some energy in condemnation of ‘Nazi porn’ – the glamour and glorification of the SS – a liking for their uniforms.  “The Kindly Ones’ and the bravura performance by Christoph Waltz as the polyglot Landa in Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’ are cited as witnesses for the prosecution.  I watched the film in Perth.  I thought it was a brilliant film about language and identity but was horrified by the violence (and I’m a Tarantino fan).  According to Haaretz, however, the premiere was greeted with cheers and applause in Tel Aviv…most of the violence is directed at Germans…some of them Nazis.  More people will see Tarantino’s movie than reads Littell’s book.  One takes three hours, the other about 2 months (I read slowly).  No one should come away from ‘The Kindly Ones’ exonerating Aue or his ‘real life’ associates…but they shouldn’t let themselves off the hook either.  A man’s a man for aa that.  And we are men (and women) too.  We should be afraid for our souls.

It is the sense of the spatial and the temporal which photography fails to capture.  No matter how artful the practitioner or how wide the lens, that spatial sense – the bending of the picture plane – and the depth of time and rock, the connectedness of natural colour – its dread – evades the mechanism.

My references are immediate and deep. 

A walk today, after a summer thunderstorm, in the forest around my house in Glenmuick – the tangible solidity of birches, the rasping texture of Scots Pine and the happy coincidence of vivid moist forest greens with the (complementary) pink granite hue of the track.  An immediate and vivid immersion in life.

And the sensed reality of Assynt, my magic place, and a deep knowing of the age of landscape, its process and stratigraphy, the violent presence of time.

I am fond of the work of  Peter Goodfellow, an artist who paints and curates not far from here in Strathdon.  What has long impressed me about Goodfellow’s work is  his evocation , almost kinaesthetic, of the rawness of rock – of the Scottish landscape.  This is landscape which is only ground – no figures.  Nor is it airy (though it involves skyscapes) nor watery (though it involves burns).  It is not pastoral like Constable, incendiary like Turner nor shimmering like Cezanne.  Perhaps it is as raw as Van Gogh but Vincent should have gone and found himself some proper mountains.

I write poems…no…as my friend Mandy Haggith points out, poems are discovered, like precious nuggets, in the landscape of a walk, a climb, a trek…they may require some setting but the matter is chthonic, immanent.   The walking meditation and the sublime sense of space, of being alone and high up, most especially when the temperature is well below zero, evokes poetry intended to invoke (using Don Paterson’s distinction) the rapture (no other word) of space, freedom, time, vertigo…dread.  I struggle to photograph.  Greed seizes me.  I click the shutter.   How can I not want to ‘say’?…which is to share.  And yet, depth is lost, space is loss, the image cannot be dizzy.

A similar experience surprises me in forests.  A sense of intimate moist enclosure. The play of light..it is the evanescence of light which makes one feel this moment is precious, this moment must be captured and shared with those one loves.  My son, who photographs, opines that all landscapes are clichés – Pound’s ‘enormous correlation of particulars’ overwhelms and inflates the value of the landscape image to worthlessness.  He is young.  He hasn’t yet realised that this light will never return, he will never pass this way again.  The momentary light on Suilven, the Pass Roland, Lewis, Tillyfourie.

Landscape, however, has no form – cannot be posed.  Landscape can only be commented upon and edited to taste.  The problems of likeness (what does it ‘look’ like) and scrutiny (how does it feel) are central to the form.  In the presence of photography – or even sound recording – art must evoke how a landscape feels – its spatial and temporal immensity not available to the mechanical picture plane.

This is as true in literature as in painting.

You’ll never guess what happened.  This is what it was like.

Travel writing is, I think, a great vice in modern writing- the novel of the ephemeral place.  It is true that we experience new places most vividly in the first 48 hours.  We notice things the ‘natives’ have grown blind to – but we do not see it, no matter how deeply we have researched out itinerary.  And even when we do linger longer than the average tourist everywhere is already commodified through photography – we all know what the Taj Mahal looks like.  Perhaps we can all guess what the backstreets of Luanda look like (at least from the back seat of an SUV).

But how does it feel?  How does landscape feel?  And to the depth of 3 billion years, the dreadful elevator descent of the imagination…oddly I do not press the buttons for the upper stories.

When I was (once upon a time) a project manager in the offshore oil industry I had a salutary lesson from an offshore construction superintendent.  We were ‘discussing’ the constructability of a modification and were brought up short by his insistence that a column, not documented in drawings or 3D computer models, obstructed the ‘design corridor’.  I insisted that the design was feasible…his was response was “I don’t ******* care what your computer model says, I’ve got a reality model in front of me!”

Why landscape?  The mountain stands before us! 

But that, my friend, is a moment from now…and you are not me.

In one of the last South Bank Show programmes on ITV,  David Hockney, in discussing his work, highlighted the importance of scrutiny in the creation of an art work.  He expressed the belief that human beings have an eye for scrutiny…they see it and relate to it.  This, he said, was why you can look at a Rembrandt self-portrait for hours but a photograph, typically, for no more than a few seconds.  That ‘enormous correlation of particulars’ noted by Pound in 1962 is there in every photograph…a skilled photographer (or photo-shopper) can manipulate the image – shift focus, change exposure, blur, burn or filter – but the camera does not choose what to see/say…it sees and says everything in its purview.

In our examination of the scrutiny of others we see their humanity – like us or not – likeable or not – this is what they see/say about the world.  We connect with the creator and, if we are lucky, we see something we hadn’t noticed, didn’t know and was worthy of our scrutiny.

Something emerges from this…that that which we cannot see must be passed over in silence…cannot, to build on Wittgenstein’s formula, be spoken of.  There is no point repainting a photograph taken from the Hubble telescope or an electron microscope…that seeing which can only be mediated through machines is not seen, it is processed, it is data…all we see is the machine – the feed.  Imagine stars and microbes…inform yourself of their ‘configuration’ – understand anatomy, astrophysics, crystallography, plate tectonics, hydrology – but this knowing only informs scrutiny.  You can’t see what you know any more than you can know what you see.

Our scrutiny expresses desire, compassion, disgust in its emphasis on the telling detail, in its distortion of a limb, the twisting of a tale, the detailing of an eye.

Truism or not, the core discipline of art is looking not making.  Making – craft – is absolutely essential to the realisation of art – to say what you see skilfully and authentically – true to the intent – but making is meaningless without looking.  Looking – not imagining – or if imagining, only in so far as that is looking beyond the conventionally apparent into some unnoticed relation or aspect – the stuff of dreams or kinaesthesia or paranoia. 

So then, isn’t ‘art’ experience focussed through a human lens – the phenomenon of scrutiny.  The analogy to the camera seems paradoxical.  Lens, focus, art creates a mechanistic grammar for a far more numinous process of acquisition, incorporation, transformation, temporisation, narrativisation and production.  What happens is not the instantaneous bending of light but the transmutation of experience – splat! onto the paper, into the throbbing air, onto the screen, into the clay or fabric, stone or steel.

Does it matter?  It is not matter it is code.  There is that old debate, isn’t there?  Truth and beauty – their correlation?  Can crafty cynicism produce a thing of beauty?  Isn’t there always a truth in there…sometimes an ugly truth which radiates?

In the pursuit of likeness then, we must invest scrutiny in the world and in the work – and the more knowingly  we scrutinise, the harder we work it, the more we transmute and essentialise the objects of our scrutiny, the greater will be the expressive value of the result.  It has to be raw, unmediated – no collaborations, no reproduction (that’s another matter entirely).  The thing itself is raw.  Raw scrutiny.  The image of one of Goya’s black paintings – Saturn eating his own children – comes to me now.  The image haunted my childhood – a colour plate in Classical Myth and Legend.  I was not terrified for the dismembered child but for Saturn…and of course it should have been for Franscisco Goya.  Raw scrutiny.  That which we ingest to shit gold.  Sorry.  No way around that statement. 

Odd – to find my way from David Hockney, who seems such a nice, well-scrubbed, sorted sort of a man, to Goya and Saturn.  But somehow the trajectory takes us through Rembrandt’s eyes…consider for example his self-portrait of c.1665…yes, I know it is a reproduction!  But look at his eyes and see what he saw.  Be told!

I did not finish reading Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – not at the last attempt anyway.  It wasn’t that it fell by the wayside.  It wasn’t too difficult.  (it was difficult but it wasn’t TOO difficult).  I got to the end of the 5^th chapter – Sentences –and I couldn’t go on.  More than hard-core pornography, the BBC news and films by Mel Gibson, Postmodernism was ( I decided) bad for me.  OK : I was a bit frayed at the edges anyway at that point….and I was reading it whilst touring California… but I couldn’t endure the relentless exposition of nothingness.  It’s a shame.  I really wanted to finish it.

When I was a boy of about fourteen I was quite good at drawing.  I had a knack of drawing fighter planes and such…got high marks in exams until my art master (allegedly ex-RAF) leaning over my shoulder to see what I was doing, said,  “That’s very good.  Are you thinking about doing art next year?”

“No,” I said.  “Latin.”  (One couldn’t really ‘do’ art and ‘academic’ subjects together – you were one or other.)

“Oh,” he said.  That year I almost failed my art exam.

I returned to painting about 10 years ago – landscape watercolours –  but gave it up again because it was taking up too much of my writing time…it’s gratifications were too immediate…it was a distraction from the big task – TO BE A WRITER!

Now, I have Fredric to thank for my reconnection with drawing and painting. 

It started as a sort of meditation. 

I had a psychotherapist who said, in the context of my writing and my life, that I refuse to gratify.  I withhold – not truth, not even pleasure but hope and reassurance.  Comfort.   My writing is a telling of tales – clyping we say in Scotland – at best a bearing of witness. 

This occurs.  This is how it is.  You should know this.  And/but…

My work could only be worthwhile (I thought) if it achieved ‘likeness’ – though the likeness I achieved was rarely ‘likeable’: it failed to gratify.  And this prejudice was stronger in drawing and painting (where I had invested little in learning and practice) than in writing.  Though my  taste is for Schiele, Goya, Picasso, Rothko, Emin, Breugel,  Currin, Koons, Serra, Freud I wanted to draw and paint ‘likeness’.  Which leads to the inevitable question – like WHAT?

In part, of course, it is a matter of craftsmanship – draughtsmanship and mastery of colour.  Picasso apparently emphasised the importance of ‘drawing’ in ‘an artists’ development, though perhaps he meant ‘looking’.  But then he was more of a draughtsman than (say) Matisse or Gauguin and perhaps less of a painter.  But both elements (and any consideration of colour must surely extend to texture) must be integrated in pursuit of likeness – the value invested in the reader’s recognition – for a graphic image is read/decoded just as surely as a text. 

Ah!  THAT is what it is like!

A dissonant chord.  A sensation of vertigo.  A focus on the fetish.  A colour beyond nature but apprehended.

And then there is the matter of form…

Ezra Pound in his 1962 Paris Review Interview commented on the ‘enormous correlation of particulars’ inherent in the camera and observed that this threw up the question of ‘what needs to be done and what is superfluous?’  Mechanically captured images and recorded sounds saturate experience.  Almost everyone has seen or heard (or can see or hear) everything ‘public’ encapsulated in one or other of the canonical forms of reproduction.  The world of stuff is continuously mined for ‘images’ and the images traded globally, essences extracted, derivatives devised and by this populist/corporate mapping and cross-referencing of the space, reality is fractured not healed.    

And yet, as artists, we must offer resonant likeness, the subject’s realisation of how-it-seems/ how-it-feels that evokes an entirely novel increment of solidarity in the reader – a moment in the physical not temporal sense – an opening up of space, the creation of reality through new recognitions.  An art-work is a device after all – Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

I suppose, name-dropping again, it’s the Gramsci thing – the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will…or Beckett’s ‘Fail again. Fail better.’

I hate stories.  They are not true.  Life’s not like that.  And yet they are all we have.  We.  The bedrock of solidarity..a make-it-that contingency, an ironic smirk.  Our only access to shared ‘reality’.  Ah well!

Back to the drawing board.

We will try to do better….

A friend of mine, the musician Ken Slaven, took the fatalistic view, whenever prospects seemed more than usually dire, that, in the end, we’re all just a thin black line in a cliff.  I have always respected Ken’s wisdom.  It has an appropriately secular and grounded sense of eternity.
 

It seems, according on a recent article on BBC Radio 4’s Material World programme (30^th Jan 2008), that geological stratigraphers are embarked on a project to assert a new benchmark in the fine Vernier gradations on the world-cliff by declaring the end of the Holocene period and the dawning (around 1815) of the Anthropocene, the geological period during which ‘future geologists’ will discern the fingerprint sworls of human industry and social organisation on the geological record.
 

The distinctive darkness of industrial society’s thin line is, as in all geological discourse, characterised by differences in the composition of sedimentary deposits.  What endures is an elemental flavour of metals, radiogenic elements and whatever persists over time of granulated polymerised hydrocarbons.   There will, allegedly, be a lot of concrete – reef-like rashes of structure, accretions and agglomerations here and there – Shanghai, New York, Rio -  and fossil remnants in drifts, one imagines, like  a sea-bed litter of ammonites, trilobites and molluscs.
 

I question, however, the appropriateness of the term anthropocene.  The distorted sedimentation patterns described are not the consequence of human activity per se (which has chuntered along for a million years or so before 1815) but of a process called capitalism (private or statist).  It is this ‘social’ process, deemed as self-actualising and inevitable as climate in most current discourse, which drives the redistribution of metallic elements, the creation of plastics, the concentration of CO2 and the accretion of concrete.  Wouldn’t we be better calling the epoch the Capitalocene?  Given the unsustainability of an infinite process of expansion, Capitalism,  in a world of finite resources, this at least has the virtue of bounding the epoch, imagining an upper bound on this stratigraphic layer. 
 

The contributors to the programme, at one point, embarked on a somewhat silly debate over whether the anthropocene marked the end of geological history – after all, what could come after?  Either we persist till the end of time (or we evolve) in the anthropocene or it ends with us.  Presumably the aggressive colonising arthropods from the planet Zarg will not use this term to describe the preceding era (if indeed nomenclature is part of their ‘culture’). Anthropocene, Holocene, Cenozoic – the whole slab of marble will be binned in the same debacle.
 

At least Capitalocene, containing as does Capital its intrinsic limits, provides humanity with a get-out clause, a glimmer of hope that there is a paler phase beyond this lateral smudge of heavy metals, dioxins and polyurethane.  Adoption of the term Anthropocene suggests a short-sightedness which ill-behoves geologists.  Come on guys!  Give us a break!

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Having watched three “well-intentioned” Hollywood products in the last three months -Syriana, Babel and now Blood Diamond I am struck by the queer distortion in these ‘liberal’ efforts to expose or at least explore the evil of the global condition (did I just say ‘evil’? iniquities would be a better term ).   And by exploring end them? 
Each seem to exhort individual consumer and moral choice (Don’t buy diamonds!), presenting this as the only available recourse.  As with climate change, individual responsibility rather than corporate and state ACCOUNTABILITY are the only permitted requests.
In otherwords, do NOT take revolutionary or even ‘parliamentary’ action against corporate interests – and accept this ‘Africa’, “a godforsaken continent – emblem for all raw material sumps and cheap labour pools.   Read more »

Whilst visiting London with my eleven year-old son to attend the Royal Society of Literature AGM and award ceremony, I took the opportunity between the zoo and the National Army Museum to visit Damien Hirst’s Beyond Belief exhibition in Mason’s Yard. 
I have found in the past that my children “get” Damien Hirst and conceptual art generally far more and more willingly than representational art in the form of room after room of flat paintings.  Can’t get them through the door of the National these days and Tate Modern is a challenge but they have carried with them the pickled sharks, bisected pigs and maggot-riddled sides of beef whilst completely discarding Holbein. (They are also partial to a bit of Grayson Perry)

It was a very pious event (security has its own piety) with queues of well-heeled it artistas forming up on the side of the White Cube in Mason’s Yard-corralled by a steel chain. It was a warm day but wondering about thunder.  The first spots of rain were falling. 
Tall elegant security guys (more capoeira than pugilism) batched the audience into the building in groups of 10 to spend two minutes (without bags) in the darkened room.
There are no steps, cables or irregularities in the floor,” they assured us. 
Two minutes to view the physically brilliant object and then out.
The object is a diamond-encrusted human skull in a glass display cabinet.  The room is pitch-black.  The object did evoke refelction on the brilliance of human intellect, the sparkle of consciousness-the dazzle of being alive.  Got that!  Tick! (And of course deeply pretentious bling-bling!)
And I hope that was some of its intent. But the Aztecs had already been there.
Down-stairs, after the brief ‘audience’ (in silence), more interesting paintings of delivery by caesarean section – a neo-realist treatment of the surgical environment and an interesting interplay of painterly and photographic visual conventions (background figures blurred by movement in painting to create the illusion of stillness (focus) in the foreground figures (which is of course counter-intuitive). 
The boy, as expected, had no patience for the still earnest of the paintings.  He has no dread of death or awe of dazzle.  Pace and terror are his only consolations.
Well that was shoddy,” was all he said.
 

This title, stolen I admit from the poem in by David Weevil which I first encountered in A. Alvarez’s book The New Poetry when I was in my late teens, keeps circling and recycling in my creative consciousness.  Sharks have always been a liet motif in my work and now some bright young spur has snapped it up more effectively (in my view) than Messrs Spielberg and Benchley ever managed.
I attended the Debut Authors Festival organised by Pru Rawlinson at the Traverse, in Edinburgh, on the 9th and 10th of June.  I had attended a previous event in this series a couple of years before, reading at the Jam Session on Friday. 
I am fascinated by the subtle distinctions drawn, in the publishing ‘industry’, among readers and by writers themselves, between new writers and debut authors.  I am reminded of a comment over-heard at the Aye Write Festival back in February. 
A small child enquired of his mother in the corridor “What’s a publisher?” 
And his mother, crouched down beside her child, replied, “You have to be published to be a real writer.”  There speaks a writer who has not yet the courage of her convictions I fear.
So we come writers, real or unreal, to festivals to hear the same advice from authors, agents, publishers and self-help gurus and to check out the new voices – the successful select(ed) who have achieved that subtle metamorphosis from tadpole to frog-not yet to Prince.  At least for a brief moment they have become ‘real writers’.
I am aware of a number of author-acquaintances with no contract for their next book seem anxious.  They know their status as “real” is extremely provisional.  They are not yet real.  It is in the gift of others and whatever passes for the muse in the modern world.  We are only as good as our last (published) sentence.  There is no such thing as an unemployed author.  ‘Real writers’ earn-this is an element of the reality- only dead non-commercial writers have equivalent substance.
So, wriggling my long black tail and hoping my legs were budding nicely from the black-blob of my body, I attended two sessions at the birthing pool. 
At the Love Against the Odds session on Saturday 9th, four new voices were introduced to a healthy audience of sceptical readers and, I suspect, unreal writers.  Annie Freud and Priya Basil both read well from interesting and amusing texts. 
Priya Basil’s novel- Ishq and Mushq – offered affectionate well-weighted prose – always surprising from one so young – and, I felt, honourable in comparison with Daljit Nagra’s poetry encountered at St. Andrews earlier this year.   A good debut.  Applause.  She hops away, green as spring grass, into the undergrowth.
And Annie Freud’s exploration of the quirks and complications of the erotic and affective (The Best Man That Ever Was)  was clever and insightful.  Worth the asking price.
Alas, the other two debuts fell flat, I felt. 
The act of reading aloud should indicate a deep affection and connection for the words a writer has selected and set, even where the reader is understandable nervous or unpractised.  Julian West’s reading from her novel Serpent in Paradise suggested work engineered and rather than written, a text constructed from its notes not spun around an armature of research and insight. 
James Hopkin admitted (with pride) that his text lacked narrative drive-;”It’s about the words”-and I to share that ambition-but the words must warrant reading. 
I found the event cheering. 
Two workmanlike voices I respected and felt deserved publication encouraged me to feel that there was hope. 
Two dire efforts encouraged me still more. 
Luck as well as effort determines which tadpole makes it to the bank.
Imagine my surprise, dismay and pleasure then to discover next day, at the Dark Imaginings session, a truly compelling voice. 
First, an honourable mention to Jonny Glynn’s skilful reading of excerpts from his pacy novel, 7 Days of Peter Crumb.  His reading compelled interest and attention but it was Stephen Hall’s manifesto-segment from his (first) novel The Raw Shark Texts which immediately connected.
Readers, I bought the book. 
Hall is to be roundly excoriated as at clever, skilful, inventive author who has created an exciting, playful and intellectually stimulating text. 
I HATE that he has achieved this and achieved this so young!  (And I suspect there is no greater compliment one writer another. 
I read the text over the course of a few days in July this year-and I do not read quickly.  In the early pages some details irritate-too free with the compound adjective I felt – but the novel’s early and convincing evocation of paranoia (I know the territory somewhat) and incipient madness gives way to an ingenious serial reframing of detective, fantasy and adventure tropes whilst completely convincing the reader to embrace the very premise which marked the protagonists as “mad” in the first place.  My hand was wet!  Hall is a real writer.  Take my word for it and failing that – buy the book.  In fact-just buy the book.  Enjoy!
   

Shuttlebus – Fairmont St. Andrews hotel to St. Andrews Cathedral (ruin).  On the in-car muzak – The Corries ‘sing’ Rise and Follow Charlie with the energy and pep of two geriatric convicts filing through a giant redwood with a blunt two-man saw.  For the toorists I suspect.  Eventually the boys (now long gone from the Scottish cultural scene) cannot sustain this lyrical abrasive any longer and switch to a dirge like Scots Wa’ Hae in ¼ time and a key of F-flat.  Hail Caledonia.
Given my current wrestling with Scots as language in Line of Sight I was particularly interested in Scots writing as presented at the recent StAnZa festival.  Trouble was, there didn’t seem to be a lot of it in evidence and what there was stalked by self-translation.
Poems in Scots – Janet Paisley and William Hershaw – St. Johns Undercroft.  Recognising that the event paralleled the 100 Poets Gathering (so all the poets were being in the century), did the audience really have to have such a mothballed air – a good 30 years older than the average festival goes and with a tendency to mutter through the performances.  The event began with a spirited sermon on Scot’s status as a language in its own right – hellfire and damnation on anyone daring to hint that it was only a dialect.  Jamieson’s dictionary provided – it was asserted – proof incontrovertible of the language’s majority as a free-standing tongue.  The MC – a very engaging guy who never introduced himself- also implied that Tagore might have used the word ‘jissom’ – which I found implausible – though his point was well made – the more used language lacks the aforesaid – is worn smooth and threadbare by over-use and consensus making – the power is in the minor languages, the languages still fresh, raw, beautiful – seams not yet mined out.  General support – so far so good!
And  – leaving aside my reservations on the poetic standing of dramatic monologues – Hershaw and especially Janet Paisley’s verse in Scots was powerful, flavourful, muscular,  ruddy and hale.  Janet Paisley’s commissioned Verse of Welcome to Edinburgh was a rich pudding of a poem (clootie dumpling) – over-generous with the big ticket Scots words – clamjamfrey and such – but a clever clebration of the language and its generosity.  Imagine our dismay (therefore) when translation was repeatedly offered and foisted upon us by both poets.  We can’t have it both ways!  This was an audience that came to hear Scots and these were poems written first and foremost in Scots – as an act of identification/separation and as a means to access the ‘jissum’ in new/old forms.  Why then bowdlerise and parody the music and muscle of these texts by rolling them flat (and that was exactly the effect!) – deflating them and rolling them flat into RP English – the new esperanto – the international exchange protocol – completely comprehensible and permutated into dullness. 
Interestingly, Robert Alan Jamieson – a Shetlander – exhibited the same feartness – translating an excellent Shetlandic verse – Kennin – into English for his audience.  Perhaps this is a moment of ‘politeness’ for the foreigners among us.  But I think not.  I think, beyond the music and the voice, we worry that we are not understood – lack faith in our insular convictions – but it’s alright – I can do it in English if I need to.  Trouble is – we can’t.