The Orcadian

[imomus]

George Mackay Brown, the unworldly lantern-jawed Orkney poet who looked like a cross between Stan Laurel and Donovan, has dominated our last couple of days. We've been walking, my mother and I, up and down the fairytale-pretty main street of Stromness, his town. And I've been reading the columns he wrote for The Orcadian, the local paper (but read by Orkney exiles all over the world) between 1970 and 1996, when he died of alcohol-induced liver fatigue. He doesn't seem to have been a happy man at all, but he finds startlingly apt phrases, and his stories have a folksy clarity to them.

Mackay Brown found the urban nihilist Modernism of writers like Beckett and Burroughs (and even Muriel Spark) repellent, and turned instead to ancient themes, playfulness, directness, clarity, sincerity, sentiment. And, importantly, he looks incredibly Pictish and nordic.

We've seen so many neolithic houses, villages, burial sites now that they're all beginning to blur into one. Yesterday it was the Standing Stones of Brogar, and Skara Brae. Today we spent an hour inside a 5000 year-old burial mound which, on the day of the winter solstice, is flooded with light lined up between two hills and a distant standing stone. I should probaby have felt awestruck, but I think I have some kind of awe blindspot. All I think about is how we might be able to use some of these forms today. With that in mind -- copying some cool designs -- the things which have impressed me most have been the kidney-shaped Bronze Age buildings at Jarlshof in Shetland, a fringed hide hood and cape top combo found in an Orkney bog and restored by the Kirkwall Museum, and a restored crofthouse, with its capsule hotel-like box beds -- places of warmth and micro-privacy where adult crofters could fuck even with children in the room. Oh, and I love the wicker Orkney chairs, which supply semi-privacy by means of wicker. I love anything wickery. And the smell of burning peat.

This would all make much more sense with pictures. I've taken thousands, but they'll have to wait until midweek. Tomorrow I'll be revisiting student haunts in Aberdeen.

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

You're making Orkney sound pretty attractive to this history geek, you know. There's that living past there in those mounds of old rock, traced by human hands, that I'd very much like to ooh and aah at.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I quite like this Brown (http://www.georgemackaybrown.co.uk/Extracts%20from/PoemsIndex.htm) fella. His poems have the smell of the sea and of stones in them.

The Momus

Therefore he no more troubled the pool of silence
But put on mask and cloak,
Strung a guitar
And moved among the folk.
Dancing they cried,
'Ah, how our sober islands
Are gay again, since this blind lyrical tramp
Invaded the Fair.'

Under the last dead lamp
When all the dancers and masks had gone inside
His cold stare
Returned to its true task, the interrogation of silence.



An Orkney Tapestry: Martyr

Into the hands of every unborn soul is put a lump of the original clay, for him to mould vessels – a bowl and a lamp – the one to sustain him, the other to lighten him through the twilight between two darknesses, birth and death. He refreshes himself, this Everyman, with mortal bread; he holds his lamp over rut and furrow and snow and stone, an uncertain flame. Now and then the honey of a hidden significance is infused into his being. By the vessels that he has moulded to his wants he calls this mystery of longing The–Immortal–Bread, The–Unquenchable–Light . . . At death he leaves behind the worn lamp and bowl, and (a peregrine spirit) seeks the table of the great Harvester, where all is radiance and laughter and feasting.

And some there are – God take pity on every soul born – that love their lamps and their bowls more than the source from which clay, corn and oil issue for ever; and, their vessels failing at last by reason of age or chance, they set out dark into the last Darkness, a drift of deathless waiting hungers . . .

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Wonderful word, "Orcadian".

I'll be interested to see the textures you've collected.

All I think about is how we might be able to use some of these forms today.

Right there with you. (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2007/10/10/)

Summerisle has ran out of virgins.

[thomascott.livejournal.com]

"Oh, and I love the wicker Orkney chairs, which supply semi-privacy by means of wicker. I love anything wickery. And the smell of burning peat."

Good job you are not visiting the Hebrides...

Look forward to seeing the pictures.

cheese

[(Anonymous)]

i hope you didn't miss the grimbister farm cheese