Tuesday 15 March 2011

(4) Boreray

*
we must find other kinds of happiness

– Tomohiko Ogawa

Our Konohana Sakuya Hime, fire goddess is the nuclear power station, Fukushima, particles of radiation blown to land on Glasgow.

Our fire burns on the waves

Our story is not common knowledge, but one Ian Stephen tells, of the beacons on Boreray

Our konoshi-ro, prohibited fish, are in the sea


4 Reflection: Mt Fuji
Alec Finlay, 2011

Boreray | Sendai

'fires are still burning'

When I used to give talks about poetics I was fond of reading a love poem of Ian Stephen’s, ‘Providence’, pointing out that the text also functions as a reliable guide if you were looking to steer your way, lining up specific named landmarks with their lights of red and green, to the safety of Stornoway harbour.

Providence, Strathgarry, Fiery Cross.
The Arnish light and the beacon.

Nadokoro, the art of names, stasis and change. A hill or moor keeps the same name long after the wood that covered it has gone. Oftentimes a name recovers or memorializes an ecology now radically altered, The Crag of the Wolf, Goat Island, The Forest of Harris.

Ian sometimes has the oddest turns of phrase in his emails; the same knots of meaning course thru his poems – as if the ways we have of talking to one another were intense intimacies delivered in a stranger’s tongue. Names anchor the poems, tidal emotions rip and swell around them.

Tensions of wind-drift and keel
in the tracings of wakes

But he was schooled in the spare exact speech of the coastguard, where words are lifesavers, and his spoken tales spook phrases together, coming to you as if they’d been on a wet rope flung over through a sheet of wind.

Our story is Ian’s story, of Boreray, Boraraigh that is, 5 nautical miles from Village Bay, Hirta, one of the St Kildas. The beacons burn for Sendai, Fukushima, names now felt in new ways, images of a wave bigger than any wave should be.


4 Stac Lee, Stac an Armin, Boreray, St Kilda

Seton Gordon, 1928


4 audio, Ian Stephen
Alec Finlay, 2010

4 'Is a thing lost…'
Michael Skelly, 2010

And this link, sent by our friend Stephen Gill, is for a short renga composed by the hailstones collaborative group in Kansai on the day after the tsunami, in a state of shock.

(AF)


Basho’s Oku and the Tsunami

The texts below featuring place-names mentioned in Oku-no-hosomichi are taken from the Guardian’s recent reporting of the Japanese earthquake. The relevant chapter (and corresponding blog) numbers are given in brackets.

'In Nihonmatsu (16), which is already housing 2,900 people who fled homes close to the reactor, officials said they were advised to prepare 10 new shelters for the next wave of nuclear evacuees.'

'Other footage showed the letters SOS spelled out on the roof of a hospital in Iwanuma (20), Miyagi prefecture.'

'Photographs from Sendai (22)– one of the worst hit cities – showed families crammed into schools. “The flood came in from behind the store and swept around both sides. Cars were flowing right by," said Wakio Fushima, who owns a convenience store in Sendai, which has around 1 million inhabitants and is 80 miles from the quake's epicentre. In the city of Shiogama (24 & 25), oil was leaking from a refinery into the harbour.'

'[Our family friend] lives in Shiogama (24 & 25) near the coast and had to be airlifted out by the army to hospital. his house is still standing, but his sister and her family are still without electricity, water, gas and petrol.'

'"We evacuated to high ground and a strong modern building so we are safe, but we haven't had water or electricity since the quake," said Yuta Kimura as she waited for her turn to use a well at a shrine in Matsushima (26 & 27).'

'The deputy mayor of Ishinomaki (29), another devastated coastal community, lying within Miyagi prefecture, said that he was coping with the same food shortages as the hundreds of refugees now sheltering in the city hall. "I eat one rice ball a day. Of course, I am hungry, but when I think what the other citizens have been through, it's nothing. I believe food is coming. I will be grateful for that," he said.'

'Ian Woolverton, who led the [Save the Children] mission, [said] “in other places like Ishinomaki (29) we found children in evacuation centres huddled around kerosene lamps."'

(KC)


Gerry’s Sendai

4 audio, Gerry & Morven’s memories of Sendai, Carbeth (26.III.11)
Alec Finlay, 2011

For Eck: Sendai moments and others since time’s not linear.

just sitting
listening to rain sounds
cicadas too

Poems K & I have discussed:

Santoka’s wakeitte mo:

the deeper I go
the deeper I go
green mountains

and Basho’s

stillness
penetrating the rock
cicadas’ sound

Basho’s poem taught K – after three years’ thought – the difference between silence and calmness.

Cicadas constantly moving. They land, shuffle like a dog on a blanket and sing for a while, muted colours until they move on: opening wing cases and spreading wings in flight, red and powder blue sing louder and more vibrant than their songs.

Off to the studio with K, past the side walls of the Gardens to hear the cicadas – louder than the traffic – thousand upon thousand in full voice. K says he likes to think this is how Basho heard them. K listens every morning.

Basho again:

Sendai. Day of plaiting eaves with blue flags. . . . Painter here called Kaemon . . . he gave us sketches of parts of Matsushima and Shiogama. And added two pairs of straw sandals, cords dyed dark-blue . . .

ah to have blue flags
bound to one’s feet
straw sandal cords

Back at home and some years before I had written

three hundred years ago the poet Basho was walking steadily north
from the capital......pausing at Sendai he met the painter Kaemon
when they parted the artist gave the poet a pair of sandals......a useful gift for a walker......laces dyed that exact & unfathomed blue......of an iris
about which Basho makes a poem

reading the poem......I walk from my house under blown cloud to the Botanic Gardens......passing where Muslim sells flowers
in a tub he has iris for sale the precise colour of Basho’s laces
I greet Muslim & for less than the price of a loaf buy ten violet flags
equal parts bruised cloud & sunshaft


and now I found myself in Sendai keeping Basho company.


Basho also wrote the following day: Many old places brought down to us through poetry, but landslides and floods have altered paths and covered markers with earth . . . and hard to locate anything now . . .

The news of earthquake, tsunami, nuclear fall out.

I had written of survivors at the end of my first nuclear walk, after the words of a hibakusha; where two survivors pass each other on a bridge, tragedy eases as they pass, the unbearable borne:

They. were. helping. each. other.. But
they were barely making their .way. I
cried [ ]
these were mounds.. If I tried to .find
my. beloved. ones,. I. would. have.. to
remove the bodies one by one.. There
were.. all.- kinds.. of.. bodies.. in.. the
mounds.. Not only human bodies but
bodies. of. birds,. cats. and. dogs. and
even that of a cow.. I can't find words
to describe it. They were burned, just
like human bodies, and some of them
were. half. burnt.. There. was. even. a
swollen. horse.- Just. everything. was
there, everything.

How, how can I say it?












..................................................................dafa dafa dafa


..................................................................dahfoo dahfoo dahfoo
..................................................................she names each stone
..................................................................on the bridge with her
..................................................................small girl hand
..................................................................himself going
..................................................................opposite direction
..................................................................long nose pretty
..................................................................fierce teeth not
..................................................................kempt smiles
..................................................................inclines head

..................................................................dahfoo smiles back
..................................................................passes by
..................................................................neither going
..................................................................with dahfoo
..................................................................’s mother
..................................................................three more people who
..................................................................do not go

..................................................................between coming &
..................................................................going
..................................................................a fully awake world
..................................................................’s native land
..................................................................mntns & waters here
..................................................................to here
..................................................................sweet in
..................................................................belly
..............



..................................................................Inasa mountain
..................................................................Nishizake mountain
..................................................................Unzen
..................................................................Fugen mountain
..................................................................Heisei Shinzan
..................................................................further in
..................................................................eagles wheeling
..................................................................birds outsing cicadas

(GL)


Landings




Landings
Luke Allan, 2011

coda: email from Tomohiko


Hello Alec,

I don't have images of the earthquake.
But I like to tell you some,

I went to Hiroshima last week to visit an exhibition
by Simon Starling and I also went to Nuclear bomb museum.

All exhibits are very intense I couldn't say anything.

I lost words.

In that museum I saw many photos of town after nuclear bombing.
I thought both are very similar (Hiroshima and North eastern Japan).

Both are fields of total scrap, Hiroshima was blown away and burnt out and pacific coast of Touhoku was washed out.

You can't believe how Hiroshima recover after nuclear bombing if you see that photos. But they did.

Life of human being is very weak in front of huge disaster but human being ourself are very strong on our hope.

And another thing,

Earthquake is by natural disaster but accidents of nuclear power plant is human error.

People from company of electricity says that this earthquake was out of estimation of them and that's why they are not in charge for this accident.

But all people are aware that that is not true. Truth is that they did dare to ignore the possibility of such big strength of earthquake. Reason is very simple. The reason is they wanted to build it.

Government and company kept to tell that we need nuclear power plant to keep this our wealthy life. And they built it at north east for Tokyo not for north east. They kept to tell it is totally safe that's why people of North east don't have to worry. If it was so, why didn't they build it at near Tokyo?

Now I really doubt our government. Japanese have known the fear of nuclear. But we have many nuclear power plants and it might be for our microwave oven.

This is really bad sad joke.

We must think about true wealth. We must graduate from philosophy on economy. We must find other kind of Happiness.

I am very looking forward to see you in may. I feel needs a workshop for season words for Haiku for each place and each environment.

Send best wishes to Mr.Ken and his Japanese friend.


4 hokku-label, for & after Tomohiko
(‘we must find / new kinds / of happiness’, after & for Tomohiko, AF)
photograph Alec Finlay, 2011

coda: tea

The tea for this station was 'Wuyi Red Robe Oolong', enough for one cup sent to Ian Stephen in Stornoway and Tomohiko Ogawa in Beppu.


tea for two
Luke Allan, 2011

intimations

Ian Stephen is a writer and artist from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. After 15 years in the coastguard, he became a full-time writer of poetry, prose and drama in 1995. Since the late 70s his wide-ranging work has been published in numerous UK journals, as well as internationally, in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland and the USA

Gerry Loose is poet, playwright, horticulturist, and garden-designer. His most recent book-length poem that person himself was published by Shearsman, 2009. You can also follow Gerry's blogs, Saari seasons & Carbeth: the unfinished hut.

Morven Gregor is an artist and photographer whose work distills those intimate, overlooked spaces around us, reconnecting them to those within us. She is the artistic director of the Birds of Paradise theatre company

You can read Gerry's, Morven's and Peter Manson's contribution for our station 38 - Glen Fruin - here.

A short renga composed by the Hailstone collaborative group in Kansai, the day after the tsunami

Colin Will is a poet and publisher. You can read his blog here

Pat Law's project 7 Sails was created in collaboration with, among others, Ian Stephen

Tomhiko Ogawa is a Japanese visual artist. Much of his work is concerned with landscape and montage

The UK Japan Society has created a disaster relief fund to aid victims of the Tohoku earthquake


Tuesday 1 March 2011

(37) Loch Etive


‘… or the time I've been
stretched in the sunshine, when I've heard

Ainnle and Ardan stepping lightly, and they
saying: Was there ever the like of Deirdre for
a happy and sleepy queen?’

– J. M. Synge, Dierdre of the Sorrows

Our Gassan’s Ben Cruachan

Our Swordsmiths' Hut’s where the smiths temper blades in which they eventually carve: Gassan: a mark of wide repute is the bloomery of Bonawe Ironworks

Our half-opened buds of three-foot cherry trees buried under piled-up reluctant snow are Annie’s espaliered nectarines that catch the warmth of the wall

Our recollected Gyoson Sojo's poem, which made buds seem to bud the more is Annie’s ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’ and ‘Rosemary Lane’

Our by and large against code to disclose what goes on here is Annie's stories not to be repeated

Our tanzaku are hokku-labels left flapping at the Ironworks, by the dun, down the glen, in the garden


37 poemcard (view of Loch Etive over Bonawe)
Alec Finlay, 2010

Loch Etive: That Time

We’d swithered about Gassan all Spring. If we’d known earlier about Beregonium – Barr nan Gobhar, Ridge of the Armourers – that would have been pair for the ancient Smith-cult founded by Tamaomaru, Kenkyu and his son Gassan. Then there was a provisional plan to send a climbing-poet or poet-goat up Beinn Mheadhoin, to bivvy under the Shelter Stone and cross the stepping stones. But that mountains beyond another mountain, Ben Macdui, and although Basho climbed to the snow patches almost as far as the gate to the clouds, we opted in the end for craft. We couldn’t resist the invitation to stay with Annie Briggs, at Kilmiddlefern, and that brought us close to dreich Bonawe.


Annie's garden through trees
Alec Finlay, 2010

But Etive caught our imagination and we looked at her both ways along the loch. Station 37 collages Loch Etiveside (August) and Glen Etive (September), this time and that, tracking the Deirdre myth inland from Benderloch / Beregonium, deep into the mountains, compassing the crown of Ben Cruachan W–E, looking for the places she and the three sons of Uisneach, Naoise chief among them, enjoyed their chaste picnics, by the side of Deirdre's waterfall in Glen Etive, or in her House of the Sun (Tigh Grianach), or in Naoise's wood (the Coille Naoise) in the bay between Achnacloich and Airds Point. (W. H. Murray)

Sora’s hokku (I)

the summit of clouds
but how many giving way
to the moon's mountain

Sora, tr Cid Corman

the summit of clouds
how many bow down
to Cruchan’s crown

ver. AF

37 Ben Cruachan
Alec Finlay, 2010
(AF)


Bonawe Ironworks


37 Bonawe
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Retracing our road through rain, past Dunstaffnage through Connel and Taynuilt to Bonawe Ironworks or (the 1753 spelling) Bunaw. Through rain we tread listless over Historic Scotland mown lawns by empty stone buildings, watertight with earth floors and dour HS capital-lettered signs. Brambles and elderberries rain swells but won't ripen kept behind lock and key. Rain runs down well-maintained slate roofs, curtaining the doorways. Rain runs down chimneys. Sleeves. Eyelashes. It matches my feelings, for I confess this is the first hour of the entire trip I've felt was tinged, or even soaked through, with boredom.


37 Bonawe
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Once charcoal heated these walls, birch and oak coppiced in 16-year cycles to sustain supplies, after woods down south ran out (for ‘Amazon’ read ‘Severn’). 10,000 acres of woodland produced annually 700 tons of pig-iron. The big sheds are for charcoal produced in the woods during the summer, the smallest for iron ore, brought here (easier that than move the trees).

For Anno 1753 the Iron Age calendar reads c.2453. Here cannonballs that subdued natives reluctant to embrace Empire were made.

There's a beached boat at the top of the rise.

for CATHERWOOD
read GATHERWOOD
(AF, KC)


Twa Blasts


furnace

man’s endless
desire for iron
feeds the ovens
a diet of charcoal
flame and lime


Evolutionary Furnaces

Bowl
Early Bloomery
Advanced Bloomery
BLAST!

(AF)


poem-rubbings








37 rubbed found poems
(Historic Scotland metalwork signs, pencil and rain, Bonawe)
Alec Finlay, 2010

(AF)


Two Duns: Loch Etive Precessional

I’m glad to exchange Bonawe for an adventure into the prehistoric unknown. Things perk up where there are duns. We’ve developed our Bluffers Guide over the summer and, after practising on Category D examples – Dun Telve, Dun Troddan, Dunsinane, Dunadd – we’re ready for the challenge of locating some less well known category C redoubts.

It dawns on me, in the drizzle, Dun Chatbach & Dun Creagach align, due W; beacons, either side of the peninsula, elevating the loch into a processional sea-aisle, marked by ceremonial fortifications, Ardchattan Priory, the heights of Na Maoilean and Beinn Mheadhonach, and Cruachan; making the real waterway a symbolic channel peeked with the anticipation of a sail, Naoise’s birlinn.

The loch bends deep, leading into the mountain fastness of Glen Etive, the secret sunbower we’ll seek out next trip.

(AF)


(I) Dun Chatbach

Dun Chatbach’s route runs with rain, sploshes beneath the railway bridge through the fractured rusting gate, west along a muddy path. If you hear the gush of a waterfall through the rain you’re on the right road. Trampling through soaked bracken we compared maps and split, Eck for the lower countours, where it was raining, Ken the high, where there was also rain.


37 Argyll nectarine
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Surprisingly, at such heights, Ken spots a nectarine, Bashoesque, or from a ballad or fable, a fruit perhaps from the enchanted forest through which the invisible soldier follows the twelve dancing princesses as secretly they make their way to the ball on the island.

proof? yes –
the golden leaf
he thought to pocket


37 hokku-label
(‘when will I understand / the water’s song? /When nectarines ripen / along its banks’, KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Eck’s got a good feeling about the bumpiness of his wild bracken field: excitement peaks when he spots a clump of wood-sorrel dry under the damp fronds. Pull back the rind of moss, like mandarin, or gouda, and here’s my rickle of Dun. Big wave to Ken up there in the nectarine grove, in the rain.


37 Rind
Ken Cockburn, 2010


37 Basho with cult objects (fruit & Springbank single malt)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Following the bumpy wall mound further round I found a wee cutaway, no bigger than a sheep hole, with a scrape of cobwebby rubble: vitrification, my ceremonial beacon theories take flame.


37 hokku-label
(‘vitrification / on the cusp // of wall and sorrel / make this my Dun’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

The rain hasn’t stopped, but we’re brighter out here in the wild.


37 hokku-label
(no boat / today // Deirdre’s / sorrow // is the / rain’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

(AF)


(II) Dun Creagach

Our OS shows Dun Creagach by Achnacloich Garden, seawards, due west of Dun Chatbach. The house, stone-dated 1885, has a sign that reads WAY OUT / PARK HERE, so we park here, but when we leave we find it reall means DON'T PARK HERE, GO ROUND THE CORNER AND PARK THERE. Harder to parse than a hokku. The honesty box’s split wet wood is held together by a rusty padlock, and the leaflet’s proud of its 30-odd types of rhododendrons, though it’s a qualified pride; planting the woodland garden began with the inevitable task of first clearing dense masses of Rh. ponticum.


37 Achnacloish bench with rain
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Heavy rain discourages much exploration.

The rhodies the leaflet lists might make a contemporary Scottish XI – mostly familiar names, but with the odd foreign import – which today are set up 4–3–3:

Albrecht

Bailey Davidson Falconer Grierson

Hodgson Hunnewell Johnstone

Schlippenbach Thomson Ward

(Williams, unenviably, has to make do with a place on the bench.)

We reach the sort-of shelter of one of the look-outs above Loch Etive, an unofficial renga platform with a sea view of the Abott's Isle. Not sure what this tree is with jaggy leaves and long brown catkins. The lichened bench contemplates still microtonal sealoch-grey.


37 Achnacloish Dun Creagach & Abbot's Island
Ken Cockburn, 2010

There’s the dun, a wee treed cnoc with sea on one side and from here too steep to get down without slipping and that, of course, is the point. Sizeable sated mushrooms are oozing back into the earth. We look across to Beregonium as a heron glides across the water.

We drive back through intermittent light and heavy rain.


37 hokku-label
(‘the abbot’s flock / huddle on the shore / as still as stones // Loch Etive’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

(KC)


Annie’s Secret Garden

Basho’s love of tradition shines at Gassan, praising the smiths’ dedication to their ancient art; as Annie’s knowledge of traditional song shines.

Basho turns his gaze to the late gean; the same gean seen flowering in Edo so many months ago at journey’s beginning; here scattering petals over glistening snow. Stubborn, flower out of season, in a beautiful region. Annie guides us through her garden, tells of winter’s cold edge which caught the plums but spared the nectarines. All along we’ve been looking for the right Station 50, where Basho visits the old recluse, Tosai, who he hasn’t seen for 10 years. Has he turned senile now or is he dead? Told upon enquiring: “Still alive,” living at such and such a place. Quiet spot off the road a piece, modest weather-beaten house, all entangled in yugao and hechima and the door lost behind keito and hahakigi. Well, this must be it, and knocked at the door, bringing a humble woman out. It feels right that Annie Briggs should be our Tosai, and so we decided to make a portrait of our stay with her, but in a secret way, by recording her lovely garden hid in Kilmiddlefern.

(AF)

Glen Etive: This Time

We can’t help but criss-cross ourselves, each trip drawing together threads of different stations, into our Seamful Garment. Over a wonderful breakfast at Bunrannoch House (Kinloch-Rannoch), under our lodestone, Schiehallion, we talk the project over; the extent to which Ken values Basho as a guide for writing – the road north as extended flyleaf poem – and how, for Eck, there is an immediacy of reflective response, and sense of integration in the practice of hokku-labels, wishes and our oku-rites, which have their forbears and which are new to share.

We’ve a long road round to Loch Ruthven, taking in stations past and still to come – Schiehallion, Glen Lyon (Fortingall), Falls of Dochart, Colin’s Ben Dorain, Outlandia, Loch Ruthven and H-I-C-A – but it's station 37, Glen Etive, that we’ll do today. When we were at Annie’s our boat trip up Loch Etive, to see the seals and mountains, was cancelled due to rain, so all we could gain was the damp grey curtain of Ben Cruachan, seen from Dun Chatbach. We wished to go round the bend.

Now, a month on, we’ll wend our way in from the head of Deirdre’s glen, south until we can see the E of Ben Cruachan, joining the skylines. (Up at H-I-C-A that evening, discussing the project with Gair, I realise that we're not so much describing our journey as the places we go – there's no particular sequence to the blog.)


(AF, KC)


Back to the Future

Our road goes S-W-N.

Tullochcroisk–Schiehallion
Starting slowly, at Braes of Foss, here’s Schiehallion from the E, tracing the path Ken took in June. Ken’s recalls the Maskelyne Memorial (and spots a fine fly agaric straight out of Performance). Schiehallion was the first landscape represented using contour lines, and later on the west coast, a pebble that’s a mini-mountain complete with its own contour lines.


37 Maskelyne Memorial
Ken Cockburn, 2010


37 Fly agaric, Braes of Foss
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Schiehallion–Anchorage
At Fortingall the meadow of the standing stones is new mown. (Allan Pollok-Morris catches us a winter view).


Allan-Pollok Morris, 2011

Past Kenmore Eck spots Anchorage, a new lochside cabin, diamond square, with a flighted double-triangular roof, windows only on the lochfacing side.


37 Anchorage, Loch Tay
Ken Cockburn, 2010


37 hokku-label
(‘prow / ploughs / waves’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Anchorage–Killin
At Killin we leave a wish on a willow by the Falls of Dochart for Judith, as she again makes her way to Edinburgh for radiotherapy (4 weeks of 6 done now).


37 wish, Falls of Dochart
Alec Finlay, 2010


37 Sora, Killin
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Killin-Buchaillie Etive Mor
Pointed the right way now, we park by a Marisian lochan on the north side of Rannoch Moor, 20 miles as the crow flies from where we sat yesterday afternoon, eating Ruskinian trout and taking heather tea.


37 hokku-label
(‘islanded/cloud/shadows // cloud/shadowed/island’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010


37 Rannoch Moor frog
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Ken recalls a story about W.S. Graham taking a notion to walk over the moor, unprepared for conditions, and when a storm blew up had to take shelter in a sheep fank. (The story was related by Robert Frame in Edinburgh Review, no. 75, and is also referred to in this essay on Graham by David Cameron – no, no, another one). Our pal Peter Manson tells our pal Gerry Loose that every time he walks past West Graham Street in Glasgow he wishes he was tall enough to white-out the 'e' and 't'.

Buchaille–Loch Etive
Buchaille Etive Mor marks the turn off down Glen Etive. Later that day we would meet her lover.

B
U A
C H A
I L L E
E T I V
E M O R

winter’s near
in your
snowy cone


37 hokku-label
Alec Finlay, 2010

(AF, KC)

River-Rapido

Not far down the glen, below Stobh a Ghlais Choire, there’s are a flock of multicoloured kayakers bobbing like ducks – young guys, adepts and flakeys, with girlfriends on folding chairs by the vans. The cropped kayaks fly the falls in rapid flight to a freezing pool – plop – icy douk – & they’re caught in the pull, back paddle or sheer into the rock face either side. Now we see why they’ve got snub noses.








37 Kayak-falls (I-IV)
Alec Finlay, 2010


37 white water
Ken Cockburn, 2010

(AF, KC)


Snow-Diamonds on Windshields

Further into the glen, at the corrie, Stobh na Broige, the marker bears a wintery patina.


37 hokku-label
(‘tree roots hold / through the flood / of scoured scree’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Basho strikes a Ruskinian pose.


Ruskinian Poses (KC)
Alec Finlay, 2010

Further down the rivers’s Loch Urr, with small densely wooded islands; a lochan oddly bypassed by its own river. Here cheeky Sora tweaked the paps of The Buchaille.


37 Sora’s Tweak
Alec Finlay, 2010

The maps dotted through the glen say you are here; the road atlas has nonsense villages where there are less than a few scattered houses, Loch Etive, Druimachoish, Glenceitlin.

(AF)


Warning: Goose

We giggle at a handmade roadsign with a goose drawn on. Around the corner we watch on as the car ahead is stopped by The Gualachulain Goose stood right in the road, hissing big hisses, then attacking from the side, where the car’s armour is weakest.


37 WARNING: GOOSE ATTACK!
Alec Finlay, 2010

(AF)


Deirdre’s Loch Etive

We lunch by the loch, backs sunwarm to a large erratic, looking over to the portable pier below Meal nan Gobhar, where the goats were, where now the harvested timber’s being taken to ferry out. Traipsing the tideline – holly and alder and a tangled debris of branches and clogged grasses – we each make 14s, Eck ties a wish and a hokku-label, and sets a buckshee trainer to swing.


14s (rhodie leaves)
Ken Cockburn, 2010


14s (sticks)
Ken Cockburn, 2010


37 wish, alder
Ken Cockburn, 2010


37 hokku-label
(‘another day gone / watching for the sun // to catch the sail / of Naoise’s birlinn returning’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

There are apples from Tamsin's allotment; Ken picks out three pips, one for each of the sons of Uisneach. These we will need shortly.


37 hokku-label
(‘i.m. the apple-trees / of the three sons / of Uisneach’, KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Sora gathers sticks for Naoise’s beacon. Mrs Climber from the fire next door kindly offers us a burning branch, but Sora explains that his beacon's poetic – as in, entirely useless – rather than of practical purpose. Mrs Climber flicks her smouldering taper into the loch and tells us how the Buchaille is her lover, has been for years. Just last night she came up late from Glasgow, but 'The Great Herdsman' bumped her off; now the city beckons again so there'll be no reconciliation today. Fresh-faced bundles of bright hues, a terrible dresser, just like my climbing pals at Uni.

37 Beacon (for Naoise)
Alec Finlay, 2010

(AF, KC)


Grianan

Deirdre and the sons of Uisneach escaped here from Conchobor's Ulster – a idyll in the waste-places, Malick style, where they lived peacefully among the local tribes until the game failed them. The return to Ulster was always going to end badly.


37 hokku-label
(‘Deirdre and Naoise / exiles happy a while / in the badlands’, KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

We want to find – or at least have looked for – Deirdre's Stob Grianan, ‘sun bower’, or, ‘sun house’ (‘Tigh Grianan’ says the sign by the loch). Seton Gordon located this at Dalness, the big house, fenced off from the road. Peering up the Allt Lairig Eilde, which Deirdre used to follow over to Glencoe, there’s a line of thin deer fences protecting the millennium forest, and a path leading onto Stobh Dubh, the back way to Buchaille, far beyond our legs today.


(‘for Deirdre / 3 apples’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

Eck sinks three finger-holes and Ken plants the three apple seeds in the lee of a rock. Then Ken clambers down to the burn with a label for a rowan, dooking his right foot for his troubles. At the mouth of the glen, back at Buchaille, we stop by birches with labels and wishes, and Eck dooks his right foot in a bog for his troubles.

37 Basho labelling
Alec Finlay, 2010


37 hokku-label
(‘berry-laden rowans / sheltered in the gorges / clinging with sturdy roots’, KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010

In our new game, paper–mountain–cloud (see Outlandia) the symbol for mountain (the hand held straight, and at an angle, thus \ ) originated here.


37 ‘Rock’
Alec Finlay, 2010

37 wish (birch), in the lee of The Buchaille
Alec Finlay, 2010

(AF, KC)

Coda: Buchaille skyline




































37 Buchaille skylines
Alec Finlay 2011

intimations

Bonawe iron furnace, founded in 1753, is the most complete charcoal-fuelled ironworks in Britain.

Achnacloich Garden overlooks Loch Etive, with Ben Cruachan eastwards and the Island of Mull westwards.

Allan Pollok-Morris' exhibition 'Close: A journey in Scotland' (22nd January - 5th of June 2011 at the United States Botanic Garden Exhibition, Washington DC) features an 40 of Allan's large format prints and film. He was recently interviewed by Sandy Felton, here.

Annie Briggs' recordings include The Hazards of Love (1964) and The Time Has Come (1971).