The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song.
But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird's can be,
That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer
Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,
Though through them no man can see,
No man nor anything more recently born than themselves
And that is everything else on Earth.
Hugh MacDiarmid, from 'On a Raised Beach'.
There are many kinds of revelation. But the most powerful is the vision which transcends the mental boundary between life and non-life, and Scotland is a place where this sort of revelation often approaches. Staring into a Scottish landscape, I have often asked myself why - in spite of all appearances - bracken, rocks, man and sea are at some level one. Sometimes this secret seems about to open, like a light moving briefly behind a closed door. In writing about birds and stones whose 'inward gates' are open, MacDiarmid came as near as one can to finding the answer.
Neal Ascherson, from Stone Voices: In Search for Scotland (London: Granta, 2002), p. 26.
This summer, once again, I too went in search for Scotland, its birds, bracken, sea - and especially the rocks. The stones.
There is something about the Scottish landscape, in its barrenness and inhospitality, in its constant play between light and shadow, that deeply touches the heart. Your perception of time undergoes a radical change: 'a lesson in the unimaginable forces and lapses of time which have gone to shape the world', as Ascherson magisterially puts it.
You feel closer to the beginning and ending of things, part of the lichen which tenaciously holds to the less exposed crevices and surfaces of the land. Precarious, barely surviving under the harsh weather, the ruthless geology.
There is nowhere else I would like to live. Yet, I couldn't possibly live there.
It lives only in the imagination, my landscape of dreams.
There is something about the Scottish landscape, in its barrenness and inhospitality, in its constant play between light and shadow, that deeply touches the heart. Your perception of time undergoes a radical change: 'a lesson in the unimaginable forces and lapses of time which have gone to shape the world', as Ascherson magisterially puts it.
You feel closer to the beginning and ending of things, part of the lichen which tenaciously holds to the less exposed crevices and surfaces of the land. Precarious, barely surviving under the harsh weather, the ruthless geology.
There is nowhere else I would like to live. Yet, I couldn't possibly live there.
It lives only in the imagination, my landscape of dreams.
Lake Torridon / Loch ThoirbheartanWest Coast, Northwest Highlands
Scotland
August 2010
