The Great Tapestry of Scotland

The Great Tapestry settled for a while in Aberdeen

and it really increased the amount of foot traffic passing through the doors of the Art Gallery.  



The Great Tapestry of Scotland – a unique project to stitch the entire story of Scotland from pre-history to modern times.

If you want to know more about the Tapestry follow the link here and this will also let you know where it is on its journey around Scotland. Go and see it if you can but allow more than one visit - we took two and would have preferred three or four.  


My concern here is to look at the poetry so I will focus on the panels about Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Burns (of course) and Robert Louis Stevenson.

This panel celebrates MacDiarmid's splendidly named poem "A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle". 

from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
BY HUGH MACDIARMID

The function, as it seems to me,   

O’ Poetry is to bring to be   

At lang, lang last that unity ...   

But wae’s me on the weary wheel!   

Higgledy-piggledy in’t we reel,                                                  

And little it cares hoo we may feel.

Twenty-six thoosand years ’t’ll tak’   

For it to threid the Zodiac

—A single roond o’ the wheel to mak’!

This is a very short bite of a long poem but I like the sentiment and it seems appropriate to the aim of the tapestry. This is what Wiki has to say about it: 

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is a long poem by Hugh MacDiarmid written in Scots and published in 1926. It is composed as a form of monologue with influences from stream of consciousness genres of writing. A poem of extremes, it ranges between comic and serious modes and examines a wide range of cultural, sexual, political, scientific, existential, metaphysical and cosmic themes, ultimately unified through one consistent central thread, the poet's emotionally and intellectually charged contemplation, from a male perspective, of the condition of Scotland. It also includes extended and complex responses to figures from European and Russian literature, in particular Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, as well as referencing topical events and personalities of the mid-1920s such as Isadora Duncan or the UK General Strike of 1926. It is one of the major modernist literary works of the 20th century. 

Here's the Burns panel focusing on the wonderful Tam o'Shanter:

Robert Burns    (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796)

Tam o’Shanter – a tiny sample

   

Verse 1

When chapmen billies leave the street,
And drouthy neibors, neibors meet,
As market days are wearing late,
An' folk begin to tak the gate;
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
And getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and styles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Where sits our sulky sullen dame.
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

Verse 5

But pleasures are like poppies spread, 
You sieze the flower, its bloom is shed; 
Or like the snow falls in the river, 
A moment white--then melts for ever; 
Or like the borealis race, 
That flit ere you can point their place; 
Or like the rainbow's lovely form 
Evanishing amid the storm.-- 
Nae man can tether time or tide; 
The hour approaches Tam maun ride; 
That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane, 
That dreary hour he mounts his beast in; 
And sic a night he taks the road in 
As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in.

                                                 Tam o'Shanter 

 I love this poem as an adult, especially the atmospheric descriptions and its mix of humour and lyricism.

                                             

Robert Louis Stevenson has also been hugely influential all over the world. 

The Scottish tapestry panel devoted to Stevenson quotes, "Tusitala - teller of tales, dreamer of dreams on gossamer sails."   RLS was one of the millions of Scottish migrants and Tusitala was a name he adopted when he lived in Samoa - it is the native word for "storyteller".  Illness forced him away from Scotland to warmer climates and childhood illness prompted this clever and sensitive child to become more introspective.  Hard to choose one poem by him as he was so prolific but this one is especially Scottish.  He must have been so homesick at times.

In the Highlands

IN the highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
   And the young fair maidens
   Quiet eyes;
Where essential silence cheers and blesses,
And for ever in the hill-recesses
   Her more lovely music
   Broods and dies--

O to mount again where erst I haunted;
Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted, 
   And the low green meadows
   Bright with sward;
And when even dies, the million-tinted,
And the night has come, and planets glinted,
   Lo, the valley hollow
   Lamp-bestarr'd!

O to dream, O to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render,
   Through the trance of silence,
   Quiet breath!
Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses,
Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
   Only winds and rivers,
   Life and death. 

 Robert Louis Stevenson

RLS died in Samoa - a long way from home.

The Scottish diaspora pretty much cover the globe and more than 4 million Scots left home for new worlds in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Of course, Sir Walter Scott also gets a panel but he's not one of my favourites and I must admit that his novels make me laugh! Perhaps I'll try again...

The Great Tapestry also celebrates ordinary people and the lives of its women - famous or otherwise which is as it should be.  Almost all of the stitchers who created the panels and helped to design and choose the content are women. 

These are two of my favourite panels of working women - fishers and knitters:

  

I don't think that Norman MacCaig features in the tapestry but perhaps he should.

In an interview still available on Youtube here he says in his typical provocative way, that he hates history because it is the story of violence - of battles and destruction; that he doesn't much care for mankind but likes some people.

In his introduction to the book about the making of The Great Tapestry of Scotland, Alastair Moffatt tells how he and the artist Andrew Crummy became very aware of  pitfalls when deciding what to include:  "....the military option, the temptation to see our history as a series of invasions, wars and battles, many of them grey defeats."

The tapestry is anything but grey and a definite victory.

For me part of the appeal of the Tapestry (and it has become hugely popular) is the vast scope of its timeline and the carefully selected details so that it encompasses so much of human experience. I leave you with some tiny details that the stitchers added around the edges of the main panels. There is even a selection of famous Scottish healthfood.          

  

              

Poet's Pub and Other Stories

Poet's Pub -  Alexander Moffat 1980 - Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

This imaginary portrait shows some of the most famous late twentieth century Scottish poets gathered around the central figure of Hugh MacDiarmid. A favourably situated seat allowed me to have a long look at this picture and to wonder about the people, the style and the fact that they are all men. I wonder what sort of portrait would appear now?  Our first female British laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, was born in Scotland and now lives in England. Perhaps we would see a very different sort of line-up clustered around the wonderful CAD.

Here's a sample of MacDiurmid's writing from one of his best known works:

HUGH MACDIARMID 1892-1978

SCOTLAND SMALL? from DIREADH I

 Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small ?

 Only as a patch of hillside may be a cliché corner

 To a fool who cries 'Nothing but heather!' where in September

   another

 Sitting there and resting and gazing round

 Sees not only the heather but blaeberries

 With bright green leaves and leaves already turned scarlet

 Hiding ripe blue berries; and amongst the sage-green leaves

 Of the bog-myrtle the golden flowers of the tormentil shining;

And on the small bare places, where the little Blackface sheep

Found grazing, milkworts blue as summer skies;

And down in neglected peat-hags, not worked

Within living memory, sphagnum moss in pastel shades

Of yellow, green, and pink; sundew and butterwort

Waiting with wide-open sticky leaves for their tiny winged prey;

And nodding harebells vying in their colour

With the blue butterflies that poise themselves delicately upon

   them;

And stunted rowans with harsh dry leaves of glorious colour.

'Nothing but heather!' -

How marvellously descriptive!

And   incomplete!

But the name that excites me the most from my reading so far is that of Norman MacCaig. (He's the tall, skinny one on the left of the picture.) I came across one of his poems, Stars and Planets, some time ago and have read it many times with great pleasure. I won't breach copyright by quoting it in full but I'd like to. Here is the first verse:

Norman MacCaig (1910-1996)

Stars and Planets

Trees are cages for them: water holds its breath
To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus.
Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground;
Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths.

There are some wonderful stories about MacCaig - famously he claimed that, for him, the time needed to write a poem was: "Two fags. Unless it's a wee one, then it's one fag." Who could fail to like a poet like that? Another bonus for non-Gaelic speakers like me, is that MacCaig chose to write in English.  If you haven't come across his work yet, do try to find some. He's a wonderful lyric poet with remarkable powers of observation.  Swimming Lizard is another one I can recommend.

This Blog Post is all about my trip to Edinburgh in March and it was a restorative and stimulating sojourn after a long, wet winter in Gamrie. I am still digesting much of my experience there. There were many other pictures in the National Gallery that grabbed my attention - most notably a self-portrait by Stanley Cursiter with his wife Phyllis Hourston and his model Poppy Low. This little image doesn't really give a sense of the picture itself  but I found it captivating and want to write about it some time.

Also a very old and strange (to modern eyes) painting from the late 15th century called The Death of St Ephraim and Other Scenes from the Lives of the Hermits. - Florentine School. It is on loan to the SNG and I hope it stays there as a visitor needs much time to study it.  I have found out a little about the meaning of the picture and intend to study it further - and of course to write about it. The gallery staff were very helpful when I emailed some questions and it's fascinating to see how differently people made sense of their world round about 1500. The painting is, to me, very beautiful with some charming details as well as some grisly ones. I especially love the line of spiky conifers showing up against the sky on the hill in the right hand corner of the painting.

This is more than enough for one post. I'll leave you with a picture of something I stumbled upon in St Andrew's Square:

Bruce Munro's Field of Light has been touring the UK for some time but I'd never managed to see it before. I was thrilled to walk into it and many other people wandering through the square at dusk were similarly excited and there were phone cameras and tablets everywhere attempting to capture the experience. (In my case not a very good result.) 

The next blog post will be about a trip to Aberdeen Art Gallery to see the Great Tapestry of Scotland - well it was two trips as it's quite a marathon to view and worth every second of the travelling time. 

http://www.scotlandstapestry.com/

The Crying Lone Flyer

  

The Seafarer
I came across this Anglo-Saxon text when reading about curlews for a poem I was working on. It features the lines:

Whiles the swan’s song

Had I for pleasure;                         20

Gannet’s clamour,

Curlew’s crying,

For men’s laughter;

The mew’s singing

                   For mead-drinking. 

It is not a cheery tale but fascinating as an insight to the attitudes of people at that time - a life of hardship and struggle for most led them to cling to beliefs about the afterlife. Of course, there is much scholarly debate as to the meaning and authorship (one writer or more?) of the poem but I suggest you read it and decide for yourself. 

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/English/Seafarer.htm

This link gives a translation by A.S. Kline which I particularly like.

Here's a sample:

This he knows not,

The well-found warrior,

What some must endure,

Who, wretched outcasts,

Widest must wander.

For now my heart writhes

Out of my breast,

My mind’s gone

Mid mere-flood,

Over the whale’s path,                   60

Widely wandering

All earth’s corners.

Comes oft to me

Greedy and eager,

Lone-flyer screeching

Whets for the whale-road

The heart unwearied,

Over the sea’s hold.

There is also a famous translation by Ezra Pound and many others are available.  You can find all this and more on Wikipedia and other free sites.

We have all had a difficult winter with exceptionally challenging weather, even by British standards. Our local seafarers are more likely to be chasing oil than fish at this time of year but they have had a hard time getting on and off rigs. In this corner of north east Scotland we have been let off lightly apart from one huge tidal surge on December 4th that caused a great deal of damage around the coast. 

Something brighter then -

on 27th February there was an especially vivid aurora borealis over much of the country and some amazing photos were taken.  This one was taken at Portknockie just a few miles from here in Gardenstown. The rock is known as  The Bowfiddle.

 I did eventually emerge from reading about curlews and enjoyed putting a poem together.

The Crying Lone Flyer

Sally Givertz

Had I for pleasure;

Gannets clamour,

Curlew’s crying

For men’s laughter;

(From “The Seafarer” translated by A.S. Kline)

The poem is as hard to pin down

As this bird with many voices:

The low whaup

The bubbling, rippling song

The plaintive curlee

The sound decorates my days

Lifts me from my chores

It flies overhead

It cries from the shore

Crying and flying

The magical in the mundane

Why this bird?

This elongated fowl in motley

With long wader’s legs

And unspecialised feet

The long curved bill

(pink underneath)

Delicate enough to tease

Tiny invertebrates

from damp sand

Tough enough

to dismember a crab

Numenius arquata

A speckled beauty

Or a folk-loric hob-goblin

Flying about in the

Grey dark of evening

Calling its eerie curlee

A lonely cry, a bubbling song,

A gregarious but wary bird

The stuff of sentimental memoir

And ancient art

Expressing the souls of men

It is now March and we are especially grateful to see the signs of spring this year after such a wet and seemingly endless winter. This area is particularly rich in snowdrops.

Next post 

April after I come back from travels to both Edinburgh and Aberdeen and hope to share words and pictures relating to the Scottish artists featured in the local galleries. 

Sally Givertz

Gardenstown

Scotland 

Cakes and Home-bakes

 The kindness of strangers 

The coffee walnut cake in this photo was made for us by a total stranger.  Thank you Maggie of Duntroon B&B in Nairn. She made this just because I told her on the phone when I booked that it was a wedding trip.

Some of the best people love to bake - sadly, many others are frightened of cake. 

Cake-oholics have such a strong desire to scoff the lot that they are unhappy around home bakes. Writing workshops focusing on food can be fraught with dangers as relationships with food seem to be dysfunctional in so many people. (But that's not a subject for a cheery blog post.)

BUT in Scotland there is still much enthusiasm and I've made friends and connections owing to the marvellous female freemasonary of baking.  In the Town Hall cafe in Oldmeldrum a friendly lady exhorted us to visit Delgatie Castle as it had won an award for the Best Home Bakes recently. The splendid Town Hall cafe is run by a group of volunteers and is always full of grateful customers. In winter here many things shut down but not these small local centres of cake-centred excellence. Delgatie Castle's Laird's Kitchen is open all year round and this little castle is run by another group of enthusiastic women as the Castle is now a private Trust and kept alive by those who value it.

On Radio 3 the other morning I was surprised to hear Fraserburgh (a local town) mentioned - a woman had phoned in about being proactive in music education.  She said it was no use waiting on the vagaries of unreliable governments and that we should create the things we want for our communities ourselves. I suspect that her musical education initiative involves cake in some way.

It seems that for many communities home bakes are a way of bringing people together and making them feel good. Here's a quotation from another local business based in Banff - Spindrift Studio bookshop and cafe -  "for Writers and Readers and Lovers of Cake". I am still looking for a grown-up poem about the value of cake - so many are childish and don't explain the appeal for adults.  Michael Rosen's Chocolate Cake was written for children but has its darker side. Link below. 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/michael-rosen-chocolate-cake/8833.html

The New Ground Gallery and Tea Room here in Gardenstown also deserves a mention for providing us with marvellous gluten-free cakes so that everyone can enjoy them (you'd never know).


Displacement Activity
For many writers baking is a creative substitute - we make a lot of cakes before settling down to write . It sure beats cleaning. 

There are many recipe poems

You may want to have a try at one.  Using the language of recipes, especially the verbs, can be very effective: fold, mix, blend, add, stir, combine, whisk, shape, cut, paint, decorate, smooth, taste ....

Also CAKE is a four letter word that is a good basis for acrostic poems. 

Copyright prevents me from including some poems here and it's good to respect the need of poets to make a living.

But here's a snatch from a poem I love and have used often in workshops:

Eating Poetry

BY MARK STRAND

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

There is currently a news item that claims German Stollen has become more popular than Traditional British Christmas cake. I don't have a problem with this as it means we can have both.  We can have our cake and eat it and then eat another. 

  

Dresden’s Christmas market was mentioned in the chronicles for the first time in 1474. The tradition of baking Christmas Stollen in Dresden is very old. Christmas Stollen in Dresden was already baked in the 15th century.

In 1560 the bakers of Dresden offered the rulers of Saxony Christmas Stollen weighing 36 pounds each as gift, and the custom continued. Augustus II the Strong (1670 –1733) was the Elector of Saxony, King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania. The King loved pomp, luxury, splendour and feasts. In 1730 he impressed his subjects, ordering the Bakers’ Guild of Dresden to make a giant 1.7-tonne Stollen, big enough for everyone to have a portion to eat. There were around 24,000 guests who were taking part in the festivities on the occasion of the legendary amusement festivity known as Zeithainer Lustlager. For this special occasion, the court architect Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann (1662-1737), built a particularly oversize Stollen oven.  An oversized Stollen Knife also had been designed solely for this occasion.

 Don't you love the idea of a giant community cake with its own oversized knife?

Scottish Christmas Cake 

A particular  favourite of many is the traditional Scottish Christmas cake, the Whisky Dundee. As the name implies, the cake originated in Dundee and is made with Scotch Whisky.  

In England we're more used to this sort of thing and as it's my last blog before Christmas...

You may need to know the names of those reindeer.....

NOW, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!

On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!

To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!

Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"

The Night Before Christmas

by Clement C. Moore  (1779 - 1863)

Happy New Year!

I want to add the name of a friend here.  I am writing this postscript in April and want to remember and celebrate another doyenne of home-baking, my friend Yvette Sutton who died on 17th April. Yvette had many other talents too but cake making gave her much pleasure and later on she turned a hobby into a business.  She will be missed by all who were lucky enough to know her.