#Hugh MacDiarmid

[edinburgh-by-the-sea]

"But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream Fitful and dark, Unseizable in Leith And wildered by the Forth, But irresistibly at last Cleaving to sombre heights Of passionate imagining Till stonily, From soaring battlements, Earth eyes Eternity"

[scotianostra]

November 22nd 1926 saw the publication of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle by Hugh MacDiarmid, one of Scotland’s Greatest Twentieth Century poet.

It’s not easy trying to refresh my posts, and with over 11 years under my belt on Facebook  Scottish & Proud  and my Tumblr  page  Scotianostra, it’s always great when I come across something that does the job for me while amusing me at the same time.

My problem with this poem by Hugh MacDiarmid (a pen-name adopted by Christopher Murray Grieve), is not just that it’s too bloody long, but it’s written in the  Scots tongue, which many of us still do, well a very watered doon version of it, thanks to the education boards of Scotland’s past frowning upon it.

Well I won’t beat about the bush, I implore you to turn your sound up and watch/listen to the content on this Kiwi Lassies page. She is also on Twitter but her page is protected. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Her twitter page is @_LadyOrTheTiger

https://ladyorthetiger.itch.io/a-drunk-man-looks-at-the-thistle

[poem-today]

A poem by Hugh MacDiarmid

The Watergaw

Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle   I saw yon antrin thing, A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht Ayont the on-ding; An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied   Afore ye deed! There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose   That nicht—an’ nane i’ mine; But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht   Ever sin’ syne; An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken What your look meant then.

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)

Hugh MacDiarmid introduces, translates and reads his poem

[contremineur]

[huariqueje]

Poets Pub - Alexander Moffat , 1980,

Scottish , b. 1980 -

Oil on canvas , 183 x 244 cm.

[garadinervi]

The Flower Clock. A Selection of poems from the catalogs of the Asphodel Book Shop 1963-2003, Edited by Tom Kryss, Black Rabbit Press, Charlestown, OH, 2008, Edition of 75 [room 3o2 books, Ottawa]

Contributors: Lawrence Barth, Art Beck, Richard Blevins, Basil Bunting, Jim Burns, Ronald Caplan, Jim Daniels, Emily Dickinson, Edward Dorn, Ian Frazier, Marc Harshman, Weldon Kees, Dean H.Keller, Tom Kryss, Al Lawless, Jim Lowell, Tessa Alwyn Lowell, Hugh MacDiarmid, Thomas McGrath, Herman Melville, William Moore, bpNichol, Lorine Niedecker, Evangeline Paterson, Will Petersen, Carl Rakosi, Richard Rbenstein, Robert J. Sigmund, Raymond Souster, Hent Taylor, B.Traven, James Wrigh

Cover Design: Tom Kryss

[threeamserif]

"The Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid called Edinburgh, draped over the back rocks of an ancient volcano, 'a mad god's dream'."

Footprints - In Search of Future Fossils, David Farrier

[nevesmose]

So like I mentioned before, here's something I originally wrote way back in 2011 for Deviantart's much smaller and less friendly 40k writing fandom. Current day 40k tumblr really is a chill and welcoming place and it's lovely to share it with you all.

Suffice it to say I would write this very differently now than I did then. And maybe I will sometime. It's alright technically but very stiff, I would say is the right word, and lacking in confidence both in myself as a storyteller and in the story being told. The characters are okay though, I've always enjoyed creating grotesque people in my head and then describing them.

It was hugely influenced by my interests at the time being mercenaries/PMCs and Second Empire France and the French military more generally. It's a lot more French than it needs to be.

Just as one example of how I feel about it now, the beginning is quite flat because I was trying to be like Raymond Chandler without being old enough and/or drunk enough to pull it off. Now I'd lead with the fact that the planet is a dry arid place and keep hammering on that because everyone can relate to being too hot. Things like that.

Oh! Proof that I've always been pretentious about titles, too - this one comes from the first stanza of A.E. Housman's Epitaph On An Army of Mercenaries:

These, in the days when heaven was falling,

The hour when earth's foundations fled,

Followed their mercenary calling

And took their wages and are dead.

But it would be remiss of me not to also give you Hugh MacDiarmid's response from his Another Epitaph On An Army of Mercenaries:

It is a God-damned lie to say that these

Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride.

They were professional murderers and they took

Their blood money and impious risks and died.

Aren't mercenaries interesting?

[edinburghfilmvideoarts]

Took a moment to think about the ‘film poem’ in an online meeting with @integratedartists Alastair Cook. Considered with the help of Sarah Neely and Alan Riach ‘Demons in the Machine’ (2009) ; and Margaret Tait’s ‘Hugh MacDiarmid: A Portrait’ (1964) .

“Attention paid in ‘MacDiarmid’ to the class- and culturally-coded linguistic registers so often associated with traditional documentary modes shows Tait’s alternative approach to documentary in action. In 1964, BBC radio and television was generally sustained by voices whose received-pronunciation English was at the far end of the spectrum from the sounds of vernacular Scots voices. The musical settings of MacDiarmid’s poems by F. G. Scott used by Tait bring the Scots tones and their velar fricatives into a high art medium, a fact which must have affronted certain contemporary arbiters of taste. By quoting such material, Tait’s MacDiarmid evokes large questions about authority, the dissemination of information, how it is sanctioned or disapproved, and therefore how people are empowered or disenfranchised all questions equally central to the poetic work of her film’s human subject.”

[alrederedmixedmedia]

Alredered Remembers Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, on his birthday.

"It is time we in Scotland put England in its proper place and instead of our leaning on England and taking inspiration from her, we should lean and turn to Europe, for it is there our future prosperity lies."

Hugh MacDiarmid

[readingvocabulary]

Hugh Macdiarmid~~~

yclept

auscultation

[scotianostra]

On 11th August 1892 poet Christopher Murray Grieve was born in Langholm.

C M Grieve, or Hugh MacDiarmid as he is better known, was a journalist and writer of poetry and prose. He is now recognised as the principle force of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, a movement which radically altered the landscape of Scottish writing in the first half of the 20th century.

MacDiarmid worked as a journalist prior to the outbreak of the first world war, and in 1914 he was appointed to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps in Salonica, Greece and France. He developed cerebral malaria in 1918 and was sent back to Scotland to recover. Two of his poems, Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries and At the Cenotaph, angrily refute the notion of war as anything but futile.

After the war, he continued to work as a journalist and spent most of the 1920s living in Montrose, where he became chief reporter at the local paper. He was later appointed Justice of the Peace and a member of the county council.

After a time living in the remote Shetland island of Whalsay he moved to a cottage (with little in the way of comfort) near Biggar. Although never having made much of a living through his work he was much admired and his political beliefs saw him travelling to the old USSR and China.

MacDiarmid was interested in language and came to believe that the Scottish psyche could not be expressed in the English language alone, and had to be developed and written in a synthetic Scots to achieve a coherent national voice. He began to evolve a synthetic Scots gathered from many regional variants, and to reclaim archaic language which, once used by the Makars, had fallen from use.

For a man not keen on sentimentality he had a deep felt love for Scotland and wasn’t shy in showing where he belonged by wearing the kilt often.

There is a memorial to MacDiarmid just north of Langholm. It takes the form of a giant book and was designed by sculptor Jake Harvey as seen in the second pic.

Scotland Small?

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 around 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!

[anra-thejourneyman]

A ghost of a border

Historic boundary between Scotland and England defiled and forgotten

ANDY MURRAY

The Herald

Monday 20 October 1997

AT THE WESTERN end of Europe's first artificial frontier an old wheel of dangling perished rubber is colonised by primitive vegetation and a watering can, probably last used in the heyday of Buddy Holly, is all but assimilated into the woodland humus.

Sentimentality had lured me to the jungle here. Home Rule was on the horizon and I wanted to celebrate by tramping along the Scots Dike, where my ancestors had once plundered. Alas, scheduled ancient monument number 294 is but a ghost of the border that was delineated in 1552 - ''the last and fynal lyne of the particion'' of the ''Debatable Land''.

Nearby, Langholmites have symbolically patrolled their burgh boundaries every year for generations to ensure that they have not been encroached. Scotland's least well-known historical monument has been defiled, never mind encroached. Its mutilation is lamentable. This divider of national identities, built by international treaty to pacify a no-man's land once regulated by cut-throats, is vanishing from the topography.

Until the foresters came, the Scots Dike was a fascinatingly significant and very conspicuous earthen rampart running between the River Sark and the River Esk; a memorial to terrain that had once been as turbulent as Hell's Kitchen would become. Between 10 and 12 miles long by three-and-a-half miles at its broadest part, the debatable land was a hotbed of desperados, bounded on the south by the Solway estuary, and in the north by Tarras Moss, which Hugh MacDiarmid would later describe as ''a Bolshevik bog''.

Felonious Grahams and Armstrongs ran this swathe of marshland; bereft of patriotism, these godfathers of rustling and pillage switched their allegiance between England and Scotland by sniffing the wind. In 1542, when defeated Scottish soldiers fled the swamps of the Solway Moss, reivers murdered many of them ''and for the rest took horses, boots and spurs, and any doublets worth taking.''

Charters of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries put the debatable land in Scotland, but England often occupied it. Eventually, it became neutral territory, a disputed principality ruled by hoodlums. Livestock grazed the fields by day but had to go by nightfall, lest they be pinched by Clym and the Cleugh, Hobbie Noble or Jock o' the side.

In 1543 Henry VIII demanded Canonbie priory, and seven years later the English warden tried to annex the debatable land. His counterpart in Scotland then burned every house or shed in sight.

''All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy all and every such person or persons, their bodies, buildings, goods and cattle as do remain upon any part of the debatable land, without any redress to be made for the same,'' the march wardens proclaimed.

Settlement came in 1552 after the Treaty of Norham Commissioners and a mediator, the French Ambassador, Claude de Laval, met at Edward VI's mansion in the south of England to draw lines on maps. Both the Scotsman and the Englishman wanted the lion's share of the demilitarised zone, but the Frenchman decided on a compromise. A ''greitt cord of gold and silk'' was bought to ''hing the greite seill of the Confirmatioun, upon the treaty.''

In pre-JCB days the men who dug the Scots Dike were probably thirsty by the time they were finished. Two parallel ditches were excavated and the earth was piled up into the middle to form a mound between four and six feet high, and eight to nine feet wide. Diggers started at either end and planned to meet in the centre, but Monty Python-like, they failed to join up by 21ft.

Stones bearing the arms of Scotland and England were erected at either end of this forerunner of the African and US state lines, and eight other sandstone boulders were walloped deep into the bogland. It was the long goodbye for the likes of Ill Drooned Geordie, Wynking Will, Jok Pott the Bastard, Nebless Clem and Buggerback.

Stinkhorns rule now, it is hard to locate some of the lichen-bedecked stones in this untended scrubland. An uprooted birch trespasses in Scotland like an ent out of Lord of the Rings. Fog belongs here, along with damp-loving organisms that grow out of glaury holes. There is something eerie about the sheep that graze in silence in the English glades.

Douglas of Drumlanrig had spearheaded the partition of the debatable land. In Scotland foresters are at work on the estate of his descendant, the Duke of Buccleuch; they cut right up to this ancient dividing line: brushwood sprawls the border, oaks that grew out of the ''fynal particion'' have been reduced to trunks. Several saplings still stand like skinny sentinels. It's like a scene out of Indiana Jones.

You have to zig-zag between Scotland and England to dodge obstacles. A burn gushed out of the gouged dike. Much of the northernmost ditch has been erased, long since colonised for drainage of successive plantations. Fences criss-cross the dike and the lack of stiles indicates a dearth of walkers, as does a rickety bridge that cannot have seen human feet for decades (and, ultimately, the barmaid at the Marchbank Hotel at the end of the line, who tells me I am the first to come in and say I have walked the dike).

A deer darts through debatable land from Scotland into England, where tax may be 3p cheaper. I trudge between ditches, neither in England or Scotland, stateless, in limbo until I get to the next marker stone, which is two-and-a-half-feet proud of the ground next to a decaying jumble of barbed fence posts.

Towards the end of this Krypton Factor hands the ultimate sacrilege: a blue plastic container labelled Teat Dep affixed to a tree - obviously cannibalised as a dispenser of pheasant feed.

Our border is almost obliterated, although the rot set in many years ago. The eastermost stone had long disappeared by the First World War when James Logan Mack, an Edinburgh academic, first recorded the vandalism. Astonishingly, a service railway line had been lain down on top of the dike.

''The method of dealing with the removal of tree trunks was to fasten chains to them, which in turn were attached to a locomotive, and as they were dragged away they tore to its very foundation this precious old relic of the sixteenth century,'' Mack recalled in his book The Border Line in 1924.

''Had its destruction been deliberately encompassed, it could hardly have been done in a more effective manner.''

Mr Denis Male, depute-convener of Dumfries and Galloway Council, has urged the authorities on both sides of the border to consider reinstating the crumbling dike and establishing amenity walkways for tourists. An OS map of the haunts of the Border Reivers is due out, and a clan centre is proposed for Langholm as part of ''Reiver 2000'' to mark the millennium.

''There could be no better way of celebrating the end of a thousand years of marking where Scotland meets England, particularly when devolution is in the pipeline,'' says Mr Male.

I do not envy him his task. I rang Historic Scotland's press office four times, but as I wind up I still wait clarification from north of the dike. South of the dike, English Heritage says it was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1949. The organisation advocates ''good management'' and its spokesman was concerned to hear of dereliction.

The Registrars of Scotland have no recorded title. Theoretically, ownership runs to the middle of the mound, but what mound? Scheduling came too late for this particular part of our national heritage, and dubiety over who owns what in the border scrubland proves that it is still debatable land.

Mr Gareth Lewis, factor of Buccleuch Estates says: ''You would not plant trees along there in this day and age. People did not value such things as the dike last century.

''We have an open access policy, although the dike is not terribly interesting and there is no focus, such as a place where some famous reiver was hanged, which might not endear it to tourists.''

The saddest comment made to me during my research into the annihilation of the most interesting part of the Scotland-England border came from a local worthy. Mr Raymond Kerr said ruefully: ''My feeling is that folk don't care any longer. They would tidy it up quick enough if the Queen was coming.''

Dumfries and Galloway was one of only two parts of Scotland to say no to tax-raising powers for a Scottish parliament. Perhaps the ruination of south-west Scotland/'s own mini-Hadrian's Wall serves such as self-effacing populace right.

[adventuresofalgy]

When Algy, sleeping beside his dragon friend in deepest Patadragonia, was just on the point of waking up from his dream Wi’ a Hundred Pipers, he had a momentary vision of himself as a lone flufy piper, standing on the shores of Loch Linnhe on a typically chilly autumn day, while storm clouds gathered overhead...

He was reminded of a famous poem by Hugh MacDiarmid:

It requires great love of it deeply to read The configuration of a land, Gradually grow conscious of fine shadings, Of great meanings in slight symbols, Hear at last the great voice that speaks softly, See the swell and fall upon the flank Of a statue carved out in a whole country’s marble, Be like Spring, like a hand in a window Moving New and Old things carefully to and fro, Moving a fraction of flower here, Placing an inch of air there, And without breaking anything. So I have gathered unto myself All the loose ends of Scotland, And by naming them and accepting them, Loving them and identifying myself with them, Attempt to express the whole.

[Algy is quoting the poem Scotland by the 20th century Scottish poet Christopher Murray Grieve, best known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid.]

Today (8th May) is the day when the full result of the Scottish parliamentary election and its implications for Scotland’s future will be known, so...

Submissions on Scottish Theme Invited This Weekend

Algy will be reblogging images and other media related to Scotland on his sideblog @lovefromalgy this weekend, so if you have any original photos etc. with a Scottish theme - ancient or modern 😎 - that you would like him to share, please send Algy a link, or mention @adventuresofalgy or @lovefromalgy in your post, or use the lovefromalgy submission form.

[weil-weil-lautre]

Of Life and Death by HUGH MACDIARMID