What I like about Jim Aitken’s poems is the way they can surprise us by travelling at speed from A to B, and sometimes a lot further. The starting point may be a person, a place, an image, an event, or an idea, typically taken from a real-life here-and-now, while the destinations of the poems can be anywhere and anytime. A prime example of this fast-travelling is a lyrical three-parter called “Beachcombing”, a poem that comes early in Jim’s latest collection, Declarations of Love.

It starts with “a boot / of salty leather” that George Mackay Brown once found on his Orcadian shore, and wrote about in a poem of his own, “Beachcomber” – a poem, that, in his school-teaching days in Edinburgh secondary schools, Jim read and got his pupils to appreciate. That boot leads by association to other sea-tossed findings, including a seaman’s skull, and then, because our poet sees the world whole, and holds it in his mind as if in a net, we “dance the waves” back to the Mare Nostrum of the Ancient Greeks. Why, we may wonder? What is the relevance of such a dancing back? As the poem draws us to its conclusion, we find out:

The universal brotherhood
of brine understands no borders…

For fragile is what we all are,
vulnerable our condition…

 We are all at sea, all at sea...

The source of energy for this “Beachcombing” poem, as for all Jim’s writing, is a combination of a powerful imagination and what Fran Lock, in her insightful Introduction to Declarations of Love, identifies as a “radical empathy”. This empathy springs from a deep-dyed structure of thinking and feeling for the “mutually vulnerable community” of which we are part, as humans in the company of the rest of Nature. This empathy entails large measures of both anger and love. It is the second of these, the greater, that informs the book’s title, and inspires its contents. In Fran Lock’s words:

For Aitken, love appears not merely a matter of individual emotion, but also of perception – a way of encountering the world and its myriad “others”...

We can see how well these observations are borne out in a second poem from near the start of Declarations of Love, the beautifully cadenced “On Raglan Road Remembered”. It is in part a homage to Patrick Kavanagh’s “On Raglan Road”, one of the world’s great love poems, especially when sung, as by Luke Kelly, to a tune that seemed destined to partner it, namely "The Dawning of the Day" (Fáinne Geal an Lae).

Jim’s poem starts with “one of Autumn’s golden leaves /somehow landed on my shoulder”. This reminded our poet of a line from Kavanagh’s ur-poem, “And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.” From this starting point, Jim goes on to reflect on “the enormity of grief that there is”, citing those “who have died of Covid or drowned / Trying to cross troubled waters, leaving behind them war…” But he refuses to “leave it all at that”, thinking as he does of next year and new life and Kavanagh’s “clouds over fields of May”.

Jim’s choice of starting points and destinations is more than eclectic – it is extensive – and at the same time it is integrative. If Declarations of Love was a bale of cloth, all the poems in it are made of that same cloth. Following Hugh MacDiarmid, we might say of them that they are of the closest weave, “owre close for the point o’ a pin / onywhere to win in”.  Let us have a look at some more examples:

A dog sniffing scent, Pacman and Super Mario, Calgacus, drones, knowing the dancer from the dance, scumbag millionaires, being fair scunnered, a black padding cat all wrapped up in itself, a blackbird singing and needing no permission, ancestors, voices of the dispossessed, going on as a mode of being,

faces hard like rock and faith rock-sold too, grouse-shooters and Famous Grouse, Abbot Bernard’s vision and the Declaration of Arbroath, riverruns and all things merging in a global sea, am bradan fiadhaich, a spectre haunting Europe, putting clowns in power, cramped ships with chains, the naming of storms, standing beside a silent loch sensing ghosts,

wisps of grass peering out from the bottom of a shop door, new words with a Scots accent of voice and thought, a sixty something granny remembered as a twenty someone else, spying twa stars high in the heivens, chasing the deer, lighting a candle for a Big Issue seller,

smoke from your pipe, a childhood robbed early, geese scenting a cold turn to the air, a cannula renewing a precious life, an Arab in Scotland (one of our ain folk) extending us, writing our own version of the Beatitudes without the meekness, seeking the light, auld lang syne,

bees having their fill of fuchsias, Little Sparta on a cold hillside near Dunsyre, millions of words lighting up the darkness, a piece of broken glass among sea shells, Ukraine as the latest slaughter bench of history, guided missiles and misguided men, all things passing, if only...

If this list of content-matter appeals to you, the whole of the collection will appeal to you. I netted the list in a single quick trawl of the sixty poems in the book. How Karl Marx would have approved, given his favourite maxim, that Nothing human is alien to me! Here we see the deep philosophy that underpins the socialism that Jim embraces. It is a socialism of the heart and will, as well as of the intellect. It is humanist and internationalist and republican and green and local and personal, finding expression not only through political action of the party political kind, but also through cultural events and through education, trade unionism, PEN and family. So when I say that Jim is one of the best of our socialist poets, it is in the context of this expanded notion of socialism.

Declarations of Love speaks in the voices of the many, and speaks also for the things of Nature. Its sixty poems eloquently show up the monstrous injustice of the world, while indicating that this need not be the case. Capitalist exploitation, division, war, hate, etc. – no!  There is a better world possible, eloquently indicated by these beautifully varied poems.

Complementing this verbal beauty, the talented Edinburgh artist Martin Gollan, whose book illustrations will be known to readers of other poetry collections published by Culture Matters, has provided a striking visual commentary to Jim’s words, in a series of fourteen coloured pictures and two in black and white.

The last lyric in Declarations of Love makes a perfect ending, both in its looking back and in its looking forward. It is an invocation of the three bridges that Jim sees from his new home in South Queensferry, that span the Firth of Forth, “happed in mist / as if suspended in the cold mid-air”:

Three centuries of bridges and three centuries
of workers who aided their construction
with St. Margaret now a distant memory
to the ferry she created for pilgrims to St. Andrews…

These iconic feats of engineering that are already there, however, are not enough for the poem. Jim goes on to envisage a future in which other bridges of another kind can be built – those that link “all people over all the world”, from A, B and C to beyond Z.

Declarations of Love by Jim Aitken, with drawings by Martin Gollan, is available here. 

Echoing the Arch
In memory of Desmond Tutu
(1931 – 2021)

by David Betteridge

He was portrayed as a dancing man,
and one given to laughter,
but he marched as often as he danced,
and he wept.

He marched at risk of his life
for justice and for peace.
He wept at their denial,
and their breach.

How long, he cried, echoing the Psalmist,
how long shall I take counsel in my soul,
having sorrow in my heart daily?

He is remembered for his consoling
and for his reconciling;
but he as often challenged and confronted,
saying to his allies, when he thought
them wrong, as to his foes,
Stop and No and How long?

A poor boy, be became rich in talent;
he out-scholared his teachers;
a servant of his God, he led peoples
and nations; not proud,
he boldly assumed the role of Moses
facing down Pharaohs;
he made his words a sword,
and the course of his life
a long battleground.

Look to the rock from which
you were hewn, he exhorted,
echoing Isaiah.
He became that rock,
hard, resistant, a sure place
on which to build.

His arch spanned great divides;
he embraced spectrums of folk,
seeing them as one;
he was a rainbow of hope,
even when others saw none.

Lighten mine eyes, he prayed,
lest I sleep the sleep of death.

Dead now, sleeping now,
he lives on, lightening our eyes,
still dancing and marching,
and laughing and weeping
as we remember him,
still consoling and reconciling,
and challenging and confronting.

It falls to us and others now
to look to our own rock
and become it,
and to echo the arch
that was this great warrior.

Tidings

by David Betteridge

For Ken Robson, shepherd, of Stanhope Farm
in Tweeddale, with whom the author worked
two lambing seasons, in 1964 and 1965.
In his practice, Ken Robson brought
the term “good shepherd” to active life.

On the first day of Christmas,                                                                                                                                                                                                                        a bent trader said to me:
Blessed are they which do hunger
and thirst: for they shall make
my till ring.
He spoke merrily.

On the second day of Christmas,
the trader’s accountant said to me:
Cursed are the poor:
for they have too little cash to bring.
He spoke disdainfully.

On the third day of Christmas,
a banker-felon said to me:
Blessed are the meek:
for they shall shrink from saying Boo,
challenging my fat goose.
He spoke dismissively.

On the fourth day of Christmas,
the banker’s offshore banker said to me:
Cursed are they that mourn:
for they shall stir up others’ sympathy,
and let kindness loose.
He spoke maliciously.

On the fifth day of Christmas,
a cabinet minister said to me:
Blessed are the merciful:
for they shall acquit me always
of my every tort.
He spoke assuredly.

On the sixth day of Christmas,
the minister’s lawyer said to me:
Cursed are the pure in heart:
for they cannot be coerced
or fooled or bought.
He spoke frustratedly.

On the remaining days of Christmas,
others spoke in no better terms to me -
the world’s Herods, Judases, and the like -
venting evil against the world’s poor,
for whom they held a killing spite.
They spoke bitterly...

Wheesht, my troubled soul!
Ignore these stridencies of power;
instead attune, and listen hard,
and hear a gentler voice,
one that is kind and clear,
that goes against the louder strain,
and calls and calls for justice
and for peace, holding
them dear.

As down the ages,
so this bleak Christmas, once again,
steadfastly, this quiet urging
makes its never-granted claim.

Wheesht, attune and listen,
as a parent searching for a child listens,
or as a shepherd, cocking his ear,
concentrates to catch the sound
of his lost lamb’s bleat,
until he finds the place at last
where a burn has carried the poor mite
down, from a windy hill
to a wet peat!

To celebrate his 79th birthday, David Betteridge writes about swords, sickles and class struggle

I

Have a slow look at the drawing shown above. Is it not an image that captures our eye, engages our intelligence, and feeds our imagination, springing as it does from the artist’s own eye and intelligence and imagination? By means of his long-practised craft, the artist transports us into a Tale of Two Fields, of Two Bladed Implements, of Two Adversaries representing Two Classes, and of Two Ways of Life and Death. We see more than an illustrative drawing. We see an emblem, transcending the historic past in which it is set, and speaking of and to all times. This emblem is, I would claim, a gift to be treasured, likely to stick in our memories. It is beautifully stark in its overall impact, and subtle in its detail. Look, for example, at which blade overlaps which; and look at the two hands holding them. One is gauntleted, implying rank. The other is bare, implying the opposite.

The artist who drew our “Sword & Sickle” emblem above is Bob Starrett, best known as a political cartoonist. He is a latter-day “Eccles” or “Gabriel” of Clydeside and beyond, as readers of his Rattling the Cage know, and readers of the Culture Matters site, as also the many activists who have gone to him asking for campaign designs for leaflets or posters, and invariably got them, sometimes within a turnaround time of a day or a night.

II

Does it affect your appreciation of Bob’s drawing when I tell you that it accompanies, or might accompany, a poem? It was drawn at my request to accompany a four- line fragment that was written by William Blake in the early 1790s, probably in 1793. This was a time when war with France was looming. England was an armed camp, with troops being recruited and drilled in many places, sometimes disrupting farm-work. There were shortages of grain, occasioning protest and social unrest. Blake’s loyalties in this turmoil of international and class war are clear from this little poem:

The sword sung on the barren heath,
The sickle in the fruitful field:
The sword he sung a song of death,
But could not make the sickle yield.

Compared with associates who were active at the time - Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, et al - Blake was surely the most root-and-branch radical of them all, if that is not a contradiction in terms. To borrow a term from David Erdman’s book about Blake, he was a “Prophet Against Empire”, and the Empire that he stood against had many aspects, all abhorrent to him, all grist to his poetic and artistic mill, and all inter-related. So the Sword represents more than War, as the Sickle represents more than Peace.

Behind the Sword there is a nexus and a history of class rule, that Blake often signified in his poetry and his art by reference to the Crown, legitimised by the Church, and maintained by armies of soldiers, teachers, false prophets, and other agents of the Repressive State Apparatus, as modern parlance has it.

Behind the Sickle there is a nexus and a history of resistance to class rule, of which Blake was a part, both in his support for political action and in his production of literary and artistic works of opposition. These speak with greater reach and resonance today than in his own day. They draw on the earlier tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers (defeated) from the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, and feed into the rising Socialist Movement of the Nineteenth, Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (still not defeated).

Blake’s “Sword & Sickle” little poem was never published in his lifetime. It was hidden away in a crammed-full notebook, along with screeds of other writings and some drawings, from which Blake excavated the raw material for several of his finest books.

Out of this notebook came, for example, the highly wrought combination of text and design, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. One of the songs in it is the often quoted “London”. Here Blake showed a growing recognition of the growing centrality of Capital, industrial and commercial, in people’s lives. It provides a helpful context for the interpretation of the “Sword & Sickle” poem.

III

In its first draft, in the scribbled notebook, “London” starts as follows:

I wander thro each dirty street
Near where the dirty Thames does flow
And see in every face I meet
Marks of weakness marks of woe...

When it was printed and published, soon afterwards, the too-obvious adjective “dirty” had been amended to the much more telling “charter’d”, thereby pointing to the growing convergence of Law and the cash nexus that Blake observed all around him, at close hand, and suffered from himself. At the same time, as E.P. Thompson and others have detailed, the English working class was in the process of “making”, or self-making, as more and more folk were thrown on history’s scrap heap or herded into “dark satanic mills”. Blake was firmly in and of and for that class.

In the penultimate verse of “London”, Blake powerfully compressed his chosen images into telling rhymes. In doing so, he demonstrated how inter-related the different forces in his “Empire” were, in an evil hegemony:

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

E.P. Thompson, following David Erdman, notes that, in the 1790s, it was common among radicals to “stress the identity of interests of soldiers and the people”; and the chimney sweeps can be taken as representatives of all enforced Labour, and also of stolen childhoods, and hence of ruined, shortened lives.

There is a companion piece of verse that underlines the “cash nexus” idea that is part of the web of meanings implicit in both “London” and “Sword & Sickle”. It is the following quatrain, also to be found in Blake’s notebook:

There souls of men are bought & sold
And milk fed infancy for gold
And youth to slaughter houses led
And beauty for a bit of bread.

So, in interpreting both Bob Starrett’s emblem and William Blake’s poem that inspired it, we see more than a pacifist plea, or an anti-war protest. We see a root-and-branch opposition to class society, expressed elliptically in the languages of image and word respectively, and hinting, through reference to the Sickle, at its future undoing.

If Blake can be called a Prophet Against Empire, is it too fanciful also to call him a Prophet for Communism, or at least for those early defining decrees that Lenin wrote for the young Soviet Union, namely the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land. These were passed on 26 October, 1917 by the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. A fortnight later they were followed by a Decree on Abolishing Classes and Civil Ranks.

To echo and adapt Wordsworth remark on Milton, we might wish that Blake, thou shouldst have been living at that time!

David Betteridge writes about the poem 'History'

What interests me about the existence of archives is that you enter the past which is as it were in the present tense. And so it’s another way of people who lived in the past who perhaps are still living or perhaps are dead; a way of them being present....
- JOHN BERGER

“History” is a poem which packs a lot of meaning into its eight lines: 

History

by John Berger

The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.

The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.

The poem is included in a 90th birthday tribute published in Culture Matters.

Let us start with Berger’s cunningly chosen title, which points, or seems to point, to the poem’s content, or maybe to the way by which we might approach reading it. “History”, he announces. Why History, we wonder, and what aspect of History? So we read on, to find out what references there are to the Past, because History is about the Past, isn’t it?

Oddly, only Berger’s “the dead”, in both verses, seems to belong to the Past, until we consider that “the silence” is similarly devoid of life, and that “the earth” is a place where graves are dug. And, again oddly, all the verbs in the poem are in the Present tense, not the expected Past, namely “pockets” (twice) and “walk” (once). The poem seems to imply that the dead are alive, making their presence felt in the here-and-now. They are described as having a “pulse” that is “interminably constant”, and as having eyes that are “inscribed on our palms / as we walk on this earth”. (How like a painting by Dali this surreal image is!)

What of the living in this poem? Where are they? Who are they? As well as us, who walk about, looking and seeing and listening and thinking, Berger cites the thrush. He is thinking, perhaps, of the songthrush, that sings its song twice over, as is well known; or, if he is not, we, his readers, are free to conjure up that response if we wish, sharing as we do the wealth of the English language with the poet. Layers and webs and wisps of inter-textualities are all about, ready to pop into our minds as we read, bestowing an aura of extra meaning to a given text, while not contradicting it.

What presence does our thrush, full of song, have in the poem? The second half of each of the two verses tells us: first the thrush is “pocketed” by “silence”, and then it is pocketed by “this earth”, that is to say it is seized by death, or snaffled, or taken into possession, just like that. So the poem demonstrates both life-in-death and death-in-life. That is Berger’s History; or maybe it is Natural History, more like, to use an old-fashioned term. That is the constant dual reality in which we all have our being. That is the “mystery” of Berger’s little gem of a poem.

There is an alternative way of appreciating the poem, it occurs to me, looking at it again, starting not with the title and with times Past and Present, but starting with the poem’s references to Life and Death. Let us see how these twins relate, using italics and bold to distinguish them.

The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.

The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.

The poem makes these images of life and death work together – indeed walk together – very well. Line by line, we are made to see how Life and Death co-exist and interpenetrate, and do so “interminably”, being “constant” in their togethering. Significantly, the term “earth” belongs equally in both categories, as my bold italics is intended to show, earth being both the habitat of the living, and, jointly with silence, their “pocketer”.

So, as before in our first reading, we come to the same realisation of the poem’s “both-and” wisdom. Let us now explore the context – other times and places – in which Berger considered the poem’s themes. Here we can draw on the inspired scholarship of Tom Overton, Berger’s archivist; and what a voluminous archive it is that Tom has worked on, a whole vanload of boxes of decades of work driven from Berger’s house in the Haute-Savoie by Jamie Andrews of the British Library to its place of safe keeping and public access, in London.

Dear David

Thanks for writing... It looks like the section you quote comes from p16 of And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. But as so often with JB, he’s revisiting and rephrasing an older thought in a newer context: in this case a section of a longer poem collected in Andy Croft’s edition of JB’s Collected Poems on p 43, and annotated “Jura, 1973”. JB was often hazy on remembering the dates of his writings in general, but here I think the voice and thought sounds very much of that place and period...

Happy writing — please do send me what you make of it!

V best
Tom

Straightaway, following Tom’s advice, I went to Berger’s marvellously mixed reflection on Time and Space, and Death and Life, and, cross-cutting all, the power of Poetry, namely And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, published by Writers and Readers in 1984. I say “mixed”, because, like many of Berger’s books, it is a many-genred work, shifting rapidly and repeatedly between prose and poem, essay and memoir, fact and fiction, narrative and description.

Here is what I found on p 16: a passage in prose, prefacing the poem that we have been gnawing like a bone. In it, Berger notes the death of one of his friends, and then comments on it, and on all deaths. Key to that passage is the following thought:

Tony is no longer within the nexus of time as lived by those who, until recently, were his contemporaries. He is on the circumference of that nexus.... Yet he is also within that nexus as are all the dead...

I have to confess that I find the passage hard to understand. It appears to be self-contradictory; but then comes the poem, and in its eight lovely lines the contradiction is resolved, clearly and elegantly. A remark of David Constantine’s is proved correct, that:

Berger’s whole oeuvre – poetry, fiction, political and literary essays – is of a piece. Some poems... appear there not as lyrical interludes but as further condensations of accounts, events, characters, in the prose...
- Preface to The Long White Thread of Words: Poems for John Berger, Smokestack Books, 2016)

Chasing up Tom’s second reference, I turned to p 43 of Berger’s Collected Poems (Smokestack Books, 2014), and had a look at the poem printed there, also called “History”. Here, through the poet’s eyes, we gaze on a blue sky (not, as before, on the earth), and on buzzards (not on a thrush); but we have the same collapsing of Past and Present into a sort of Present Habitual, “regular as the sun / millennia powdered into blue /sky of all moments lived...” and we have the same sense of the presence of Death, co-habiting with Life: “the intent head / the yellow beak / the gut demanding food / talons that grip...”

These two poems by Berger both called “History” show him in a characteristic role, that of Death’s Secretary, to borrow one of his self-descriptions. “You see,” he said to an interviewer not long before his own death:

I think that the dead are with us…they are a presence. What you think you’re looking at on that long road
to the past is actually beside you where you stand...
- The New Statesman, June, 2015

Reading around, as we have been doing, looking for leads in and out of other texts, and seeking confirmations from other contexts, is akin, is it not, to Berger’s own practice as a writer, and his own practice as an artist and art-critic, too? Consider this observation from his Ways of Seeing (Penguin Books, 1972):

We are never just looking at one thing, we are always looking at the relationship between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.

Having done all this looking – looking at, and behind, and beyond, and between the eight lines of Berger’s “History” – how do we regard the poem when we return to it, as we are bound to be drawn to do, there being so much meat on its bone? There is still a “mystery” here, but one in which we can feel entirely at home.

History

by John Berger

The pulse of the dead
as interminably
constant as the silence
which pockets the thrush.

The eyes of the dead
inscribed on our palms
as we walk on this earth
which pockets the thrush.

David Betteridge writes critically and creatively about the artwork above, Nature writing, Bertolt Brecht, and eco-communism.

The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history - Raymond Williams

What you see above is a lino print called “Leaf of Tree”, by Owen McGuigan. 

It hangs on the wall above my computer at home, is mounted on white card, and is surrounded by a broad hardwood frame. It measures five inches across by seven inches tall. Looking at it, as I often do - it draws my attention to it, inspiringly - I find that it invites two kinds of looking: one from above, so to speak, as if I was a bird gliding over a fertile landscape, and the other slower, more detailed, as if I was an insect prospecting this way and that way at close quarters. How does this “Leaf of Tree” image strike you, I wonder? 

For most people, probably, the thoughts and feelings that the print arouses will be pleasant ones, and for three reasons. The first reason is physiological: the highest-density part of our eyes’ retina is most sensitive to green, so responds to that colour with greatest acuity. The second reason is aesthetic: the placing of one larger leaf, stylised, within a pattern of smaller leaves is very skilfully handled; we look, and we recognise beauty. The third reason is associative: the image triggers memories in us of previous leafy encounters, whether in the real world, or mediated through art or literature.

Those 35 square inches of art might stand for three or five or 35 acres of green growth, or more, or for the whole world if you think so; or they might stand for some smaller singular Dear Green Place, dear only to you. For me, the fresh green of “Leaf of Tree” conjures up a summer’s day in a wood in Argyll. I hear the waves slapping on Loch Etive, not far from where I stand. The sun is shining directly on, and through, a panoply of sessile oak leaves, highlighting their veins in all their intricacy. I am also reminded of William Morris’s lovely plant designs, particularly “Acanthus”, “Orchard” and “Willow Bough”. 

Building on these or similar associations, we might even go on to interpret the colour green and the idea of “green” in a symbolic way, seeing in growing things the very principle of life, as Walt Whitman did when he wrote his Leaves of Grass:

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition,
       out of hopeful green stuff woven...
I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic...
Growing among black folk as among white...
I give them the same, I receive them the same...
All goes onward and outward...
       and nothing collapses...

Having images such as “Leaf of Tree” on display at home, or stored electronically, is pretty commonplace. Looking at them, we can readily feed our senses and our imaginations, for the reasons given above. It is also commonplace to want to read and be reminded of green things, especially in dark times such as we live in now - and when are times ever not dark? Books about Nature are consistently in lists of best-sellers.

During the recent Covid-19 lockdown, my “Leaf of Green” took on especial significance for me. It inspired me to wrestle some green thoughts into a chapbook of poems, including the one given below:

While the pot boils

(Looking out of my kitchen window during the Covid-19 pandemic)

Even in these dark days,
the world does not forget to green
and grow.

My neighbour’s apple-tree progresses well,
no longer bare twigs, but leaves and flowers.

With fruit to come, it gives sanctuary
to a pair of nesting wrens,
who get on busily with everything
that their lives demand,
heedless of what we humans know,
or do not know.

The tree waves and bends
in the frequent wind. 
I note it does not break.
Like the wrens, it is industrious.

How readily Earth’s habitats renew,
recycle, and remake!

A critic of puritanical bent might argue that such “nature worship” or “nature wallowing” as is found in the above poem - and in Nature writing generally, perhaps - is a deplorably “escapist” habit, a turning away from the “real” business of dealing with the world. George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers) was an early example of this stern and restrictive school of criticism. In 1670, or thereabouts, he wrote to his followers as follows:

And therefore, all friends and people, pluck down your images; I say, pluck them out of your houses, walls, and signs, or other places, that none of you be found imitators of his Creator, whom you should serve and worship; and not observe the idle lazy mind…

Later, and famously, from a secular, communist standpoint, Bertolt Brecht wrote as follows, apparently as puritanically as Fox, but significantly not quite:

To those born later 

Truly, I live in dark times!
The guileless word is folly.

A smooth forehead
Suggests insensitivity.

The man who laughs
Has simply not yet had
The terrible news.

What kind of times are they, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

Being a great poet, and a man fully alive, Brecht carefully avoided the extremism that was found in Fox, who went so far as to prefer grey to all other colours. “Almost a crime,” Brecht declared; therefore not a crime, although some on the Left might still think it is, trapped in the notion that tree-talk can only be a turning aside from the realities of the class struggle, and therefore a holiday from the building of socialism. No, Brecht was careful to keep for himself a certain licence to talk about trees, and write about them, and delight in them. These things he did throughout the years of the Second World War and Cold War, up to his swan-song Buckow Elegies. Consistently, he used trees as an emblem for pleasure, well-being, and for continuity across generations.

“Lovely trees,” he exclaimed in “Finnish Landscape”, and “Such scents of berries and of birches there!” He saw no need to repress his delight in Nature. It resurged again and again, gaining expression in other poems that he went on to write, often about gardens, including, most luxuriously of all, his friend Charles Laughton’s garden on the Pacific coast near Los Angeles. Brecht singled out the fuchsias for praise: “Amazing themselves with many a daring red”.

Always the dialectician, Brecht contrived to plant negatives among his positives, creating a complex context for his celebration of green beauty. So, in “Finnish Landscape”, written in 1940, with war spreading from country to country and across continents, he wrote:

 Dizzy with sight and sound and thought and smell
The refugee beneath the alders turns
To his laborious job...
[He] sees who’s short of milk and corn...
And sees a people silent in two tongues.

And in the Californian “Garden in Progress” (1944), he added to his picture the fact that there was “crumbling rock” destabilising the garden.  Even as the gardeners worked to finish their planting, “Landslides / Drag parts of it into the depths without warning.”  Meanwhile, the poet was aware of the gunfire of warships exercising off the coast, and thought of “a number of civilisations” ready to collapse.

The same delight in the things of Nature as Brecht’s, again voiced in communist terms, and again set in a complex context, is found by the wagon-load in William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Near the end of this imagined visit to a future commonwealth, Morris’s alter ego William Guest is told by his guide, Ellen, that:

O me!  O me!  How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it...

Here Morris’s green utopia is used as a method of criticising capitalism, of opposing it, and of rejecting it, while at the same time re-imagining how a society might better function in future. His utopia is as much a dramatising of a communist “structure of feeling”, as defined by Raymond Williams, as it is an outlining of a political programme. It is an early example of eco-communism, where Green and Red go hand in hand, albeit simply.

There is an eloquent passage in Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art where he quoted Brecht regarding the same critical use of utopia as Morris deployed:

Dreams and the golden “if”
Conjure the promised sea
Of ripe corn growing...

To Brecht’s “Dreams and the golden ‘if’” we might add our own corollary: “Hope and the green leaf”.

II

So far, we have looked at the “Leaf of Tree” image as a finished product, its only context being provided from our own store of memories of similar green things, and images of things, and writings about them. Your store will be different from mine, of course, although I guess - I hope - that there will be enough commonality between them for us to agree that “Leaf of Tree” is well worth looking at, and looking at many times, and that doing so is a rewarding experience: in a nutshell, that it is life-affirming.

Now it is time, in the second half of the essay, to show the process by which “Leaf of Tree” came into being, and to put it in its full context -  a context that includes its artist, its time and place of production, and the culture out of which it came and into which it feeds. Knowing these extra things about the image is unlikely to change our first opinion of it, but may give depth and confirmation to that opinion, and increase the range of associations that the image prompts in us.  “Oh no,” a formalist critic might protest, narrowly, “we should only be concerned with what lies within the frame.”  We, preferring a cultural materialist perspective, will not be deterred.  As when we get to know anything or anyone new, so with “Leaf of Tree”: we want to ask of it, Where are you from?

Here is where “Leaf of Tree” is from: namely a garden shed on the very boundary of Glasgow and Clydebank. The artist is Owen McGuigan, a former shop-fitter, now retired. He is well known in Clydebank and beyond as Clydebank’s best archivist and celebrator.  His principal medium is photograph and video, although latterly he has also used drawing, print-making, jig-saw and wood panel burning as media for his vision.  Visit his website here, and be bowled over by its very great volume, beauty and range of reference. All in all, there are sufficient images archived on Owen’s website to satisfy legions of social historians and Bankies wanting a visual record of their hometown, legions of art-lovers, and to inspire legions of poets. 

Owen has contributed to the Culture Matters website, on the subject of ship-building’s double legacy in “Profit and Loss” (28 January, 2017), and on war and peace in “The Pity of War” (23 July, 2018) and “No More War” (10 November, 2019).

I have picked out a few examples of Owen’s work below, to keep his “Leaf of Tree” company: -

Trees in winter, Dalmuir Park

 A garden game, devised for grandchildren during the Covid-19 lockdown

Cleaning up the Forth & Clyde Canal: a recent photo

The Clydebank blitz: a jigsaw composition

 Elegy for Glasgow School of Art: aftermath of its second fire, June, 2018

Profit & Loss: Ship-building anatomised

Dogwood and spider

Even these few examples give a good impression of Owen’s range of styles and subject matter. What unites them is a strong shape, a clear content, and skill. They are all labours of love, produced in Owen’s leisure time. This fact gives them a special significance, rescuing them, and rescuing Owen, from any nexus of commodities and marketplaces. In Raymond Williams’s words:

The real dividing line between things we call work and the things we call leisure is that in leisure... we make our own choices and our own decisions. We feel for the time being that our life is our own.

The garden shed that is pictured above is only one of Owen’s favoured workshops. That is where he works when he works alone. On other occasions, when he works with others, sometimes as a tutor, sometimes as a learner, always collaboratively, then he has two other places to go to, both close to home. One of them is an arts centre in Dalmuir Park, in an old park superintendent’s house; the other, rejoicing in the name “The Awestruck Academy”, is in a defunct snooker hall in Clydebank’s pedestrianised town centre. 

Ten thousand such cultural hubs across the land, for community use, sited wherever “To Let” signs are commonest, would serve the people there in the way rising sap serves a tree. Ten thousand such hubs devoted  specifically to socialist and trade union work would specifically serve the labour movement. There are several pieces on the Culture Matters website exploring this notion, notably Rebecca Hillman’s “Rebuilding Culture in the Labour Movement” (27 November, 2017), Mike Quille’s “Culture for the Many, Not the Few” (13 December, 2018), and Chris Guiton’s “Profound New Visions of a Better World” (10 June, 2019). They underpin the argument being advanced here.

Regarding the two cultural hubs in Clydebank that Owen favours, and is fostered by, he mentions them in a contribution he has written for this essay, giving the “Leaf of Tree” back-story.  From it, you will realise that the image that is at the heart of this essay is unique: it is the first, and so far the only print made from Owen’s linocut:

I have had a fascination about trees since I was a boy, from climbing them in Whitecrook Park with my two sisters in the 50s, and our mum taking us berrypicking at Blairgowrie during the school holidays, where on our day off my two sisters and I would go to the forest around the loch and light camp fires. I can still smell that. Later in life, my nephew David and I did a lot of hill walking. We walked the West Highland Way together, and I loved walking inside a silent forest. The family and I even built a cabin up at Carbeth, in the hills, which we had for twelve years before vandals set fire to it.

So, over the years, trees have been a recurring theme in my work. More so when I joined the Dalmuir Park Art Class in 2013. We did a lot of nature-themed projects. Last year we all did a big tree mural, and over the year we added various elements to it reflecting the seasons. I made a video of this project:

Usually, when I sat down at the art class to start a lino- cut, I never planned what I was going to do. An idea of a tree inside a leaf popped into my head. The final title was a play on the words “Tree of Life”, an image that has always fascinated me. I made some Christmas decorations of it, although it was a lot of work, as they were handmade. 

The first linocut that David saw was at the Awestruck Academy in Clydebank, on a board that someone had set up with several linoprints. David was taken by the image, and I said I would print one for him. I looked through all my linocuts, and, as usual, it was the one that was missing! Then I remembered that Sandra Anton, the Community Ranger that runs our art class, liked the linocut herself and wanted to display it at home, so I let her take it. I asked her, but she had been decorating and stored it somewhere, and couldn’t find it. I then did a new linocut especially for David and printed it for him. This was the inspiration for David to create his latest poetry book.  

III

Looking again at Owen’s “Leaf of Tree”, taking into account both the context and the process of its making, we can agree that the image suggests much more than a bit of green growth. We can agree, in reality and metaphorically, that a leaf - any leaf, anywhere and everywhere - is sustained by a twig, and the twig is sustained by a branch, and the branch by a tree’s bole, and the bole by a system of roots, and the roots by the soil into which they dig down and spread.  And we can agree that the tree - any tree - might well not stand alone, but is part of a greater habitat.

So Owen, by analogy, is a vigorous part of a pretty extensive living, growing and interdependent People’s culture, rooted in Clydebank, but reaching further by means of the internet. The culture that he and his co-producers spring from, and feed back into, is a foreshadowing of the greater culture to which Socialism will lead; but it is not only a foreshadowing. It is also a preparation for that greater culture, sharing good practice and educating desire now.

Brecht, as we have noted, kept an appreciative eye open for trees wherever he went. He was speaking equivocally when he commented that, during political crises, “To talk about trees is almost a crime.” No! On the evidence of Owen’s image of a green leaf, and all the associations it carries for us when considered in context, as in this essay, we can state, unequivocally, that not to talk about trees is almost a crime.

The green leaf delights the eye,
and leads the mind to a hundred habitats
where it may either rest or roam.

Hope and the green leaf inspire the wish
that such green habitats - where humankind
keeps step with Nature’s ways - might be
for all of us our proper home.

Labour and hope, if only shared
world-wide, and people-wide,
will make at last that vision real,
bringing to detailed life the concepts
of our commonweal.

In the year of the CPB centenary, David Betteridge remembers Maurice Levitas, stalwart of the CPGB and a veteran of Cable St. and the Spanish Civil War

You have made me build upon reality as upon a rock...
You have made me see the logic of the world
and the possibility of happiness...

- from Canto General by Pablo Neruda

Picture two young men playing chess. Both are intently studying the board, considering their moves; but one is even more intent than the other, straining muscle and nerve, heron-like. He is the embodiment of focus. Then he swiftly reaches out a hand, lifts the crucial piece, makes his move, and sits back. The game has not been won, but neither has it been lost. La lucha continua.

On reflection, the image of a heron is inadequate. That fish-spearing bird with its keen yellow eyes is necessarily an opportunist. It has only one strategy, which is to find a time and a place that maximises the chance of a fish swimming within range of its beak. A chess player, however, must deploy many strategies, chess being a drawn-out complex of possibilities and unpredictabilities, constraints and openings.

A better image for our intently studious young man would be that of a military commander. Imagine (say) a latter-day George Washington or General Giap sitting alone in his tent, in a dangerous place, part-way through a long campaign. He is interpreting his maps, analysing from every angle the order that he will give to his troops the following morning. Aristotle, who thought a lot about such matters, called this highest order of decision-making phronesis, sometimes translated as practical judgement; and he cited military commanders along with ships’ captains as being arch-exponents of it.

Zoom in now, like a film-maker, and picture in close-up the chess pieces that our two young men are playing with. These pieces are ill-shapen, hard to recognise as kings, queens, knights, etc., having been improvised from well-chewed crusts of bread, tweaked and squeezed while still mushy between finger and thumb, and then baked hard in the sun. The board is also improvised, from a grubby scrap of cardboard. The black squares, like the black pieces, are made dark with mud and cigarette stubs, and the white squares, which are far from white, are represented by the dun colour of the cardboard that lies between the shaded squares.

The young hands which fashioned these chess pieces and this board, and the guiding eyes and brains behind the hands, are more used to handling weapons than bread-paste; and in the case of the super-intent man, more used in previous years to handling the curved needle of an upholsterer, the pick and shovel of a labourer, and the blowlamp of a plumber. (I can tell you this, from knowledge that I gained later.)

This is Spain that we are picturing, towards the end of the Civil War. Our young men are members of the International Brigade, captured some months earlier on the Aragon Front, battling against the Fascists. Now they are interned in a prison camp at San Pedro de Cardena. Every day, there is the chance of a beating, or a ritual humiliation, or a putting to death. The man I am singling out for your attention will go on after release – as part of a prisoner exchange – to become, eventually,  a teacher and a teacher-trainer, and the author of a book on education, Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Education. He will also become the first person to translate all of Pablo Neruda’s book-length Canto General from its original Spanish into English. The copy that I have, from which I have taken my motto text (above), was photocopied for me from the original by the young man’s future daughter Ruth, some years after her father’s death at the age of 84 in 2001.

I am referring to Maurice Levitas, a stalwart of the CPGB, a veteran of Cable Street as of the Spanish Civil War, and a great influence for the good over many decades, in several countries and in various contexts. Some of you reading this will have known him through his political work. I knew him through his teaching, being a student of his at Neville’s Cross College in the late 60s, although I realise, as soon as writing these words, that the distinction between “political work” and “teaching” is one of convenience only. Morry, both in his theory and his practice, approached both occupations with the same devotion to the same concepts, skills and attitudes.

It is these concepts, skills and attitudes that I want to review in this memoir, to see how they might feed into our continuing struggle for revolutionary socialism, leading to communism, as they fed into Morry’s. I reckon that we can find all we need for this review in our picture of the young chess player in Spain, in the same way as a tissue sample holds and reveals a person’s DNA.

First, and most obviously, just being there, a combatant in Spain, proved Morry’s understanding of internationalist and anti-fascist politics, and proved his courage to translate that understanding into action. Lying behind his internationalism were the virtues of solidarity with and openness to others, and lying behind his anti-fascism were the virtues of hunger for justice and anger at its denial.

Consider Morry’s ability to turn the focus of his mind to playing chess with a fellow prisoner-of-war, even in the context of constant deprivation and threat: there we find evidence of a great intellectual vigour, I think, allied to a resilience of spirit.

Looking ahead, in a flash-forward of history, we know that the first thing Morry did on being released from the camp was to start campaigning for the release of another prisoner, Frank Ryan, leader of the Irish Republican Congress, who was still interned. A sense of loyalty was strong in Morry all his life, not only loyalty to comrades joined in struggle along the way, but also loyalty to his guiding principles. It is sometimes hard to reconcile the two. So it was that at certain turning points, notably 1968 and 1989, Morry’s independence of judgement led him to diverge from others on the Left, including me, but he never wanted that to disrupt or divide.  

When I consider what features might be desirable in a political party, as I increasingly do, I suppose I am looking for the same virtues that I found in my mentor Morry, only writ large, that is to say written into the political party’s collective body and soul, and passed on through collective action and education and, crucially, by example, from generation to generation.

I mentioned Pablo Neruda’s Canto General earlier, and Morry’s labour of love in translating it, not that it was ever read by more than a few friends and family members, which is a pity. Here we have a Communist epic of world importance, a book-length sequence of poems that narrates the history of the Americas, that celebrates the continent’s beauties and riches, that celebrates the labour of its people, transforming Nature into Culture, that identifies with the poor and oppressed in their fight-back against exploiters and tyrants, that looks to a Communist future. Here we have a Nobel Prize-winning poet, Neruda, at the height of his creativity, tested and confirmed in his politics by the Spanish Civil War, as was Morry, albeit in different ways. Here we have a Chilean Walt Whitman combining the “we” of a whole class, indeed of a whole world, and the “I” of an author who sees his task as being our representative voice. No wonder Morry was drawn to this work, and devoted himself to translating it.

There is a section of Canto General that is highly relevant to our consideration of Morry’s political virtues, and how these might be writ large in a political party. It is the second-to-last section of the last part of Canto General, the part called “I Am”, where Neruda takes stock of things. He addresses his peroration “To My Party”, that is to say the Chilean Communist Party. I have already quoted from this Section XXVII of “I Am” at the beginning of this piece, as a motto text. Here are some more lines from it:

You have gathered in me the force
        of all those who live...

You have made me indestructible because with you
       I do not end in myself...

You have given me the liberty
      which the isolate does not possess...

You taught me the unity of mankind
      and the differences among them...

In these terms and for the reasons given, Neruda praised his party. In similar terms, with some poetic licence, a student (myself) praises his old teacher (Morry). Practising the same virtues that Neruda identified and Morry embodied, parties of the Left today will succeed in the continuing struggle, finding a way forward out of our present entrapment in defeat - or seeming entrapment - and make our next necessary move.

You have made me an adversary of the wicked
and a wall against frenzy...

You told me of the rectitude that the tree requires...
You taught me to set bondage alight like a fire.

La lucha continua.

David Betteridge takes us along Glasgow’s Byres Road, enjoying several works of public art by the late Alasdair Gray, who died on 29 December, 2019, the day after his 85^th birthday

Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies. What do you think? - Alisdair Gray, Lanark

I

This is a stub. Many more hands and minds besides my own would have to be set to work, to write a piece giving proper value to Alasdair Gray’s achievements. Like his admired William Blake, he was an artist as well as a writer, a lover of both the epic and the miniature, a deviser of both encyclopedias and minute particulars. He ranged over many genres, deploying details from his own life (a long one) and his own city (Glasgow), but at the same time he regarded the whole world with its many cultures and many histories as his oyster (not forgetting the cosmos in which the world has its unique place). He was, as Ali Smith wrote in an eloquent short obituary, “a renaissance man”. He was, she judged, the very heart of that revival in Scottish life to which he contributed, and from which he drew strength. 

A walk of a few hundred yards along Byres Road, in Glasgow’s West End, affords a good introduction to the man and his work. 

II

 On the corner overlooking the Botanic Gardens, there is a former church, now converted to a bar, restaurant and performance area called the Oran Mor, which in Gaelic means “big song” or even, some would have it, “great melody of life”. That epithet describes Gray pretty well.

As you enter the Oran Mor from Byres Road, look down at the white and grey marble floor of the porch. There, carved into the tiles, you will see “WELCOME”, in 32 languages. Gray took great care with the lettering of this message, as with every aspect of every part of his quite substantial contribution to the Oran Mor’s conversion. For all those words of greeting that were in the Roman alphabet, he designed his own lettering, using sans serif block capitals that slightly taper away from you as you read them. This lettering he called Oran Mor Monumental.

Go to the third floor. There, extending across the breadth and length of the ceiling, you will see one of Gray’s largest and most ambitious works: a painting that combines myth and legend, Biblical reference and astronomical lore. “It’s a song of praise to the colour blue,” wrote Figgy Guyver, after a visit she paid to view it, and also “a heartfelt, humanist plea for people to come together for a better future.” This plea is directly expressed in words, as well as art. In gold lettering, across the roof beams, we read: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” This motto, borrowed from the Canadian author Dennis Lee, has been widely adopted as a motto for modern progressive Scottish politics, thanks to Gray’s use of it. 

Looking up, you will see a cross-section of Creation boldly and beautifully represented. As in Gauguin’s famous Tahitian triptych, big questions are asked: “Where are we from?  What are we?  Where are we going?” and answers are given, if we search for them. The planets and the Milky Way give us a sense of Time and Space. The Tree of Life drives its roots into fossils and skeletons. A varied fauna and flora inhabit land, sea and air.  A naked Adam and Eve kneel, entwined in one another’s arms. A phoenix rises. 

The present day and the present city are not forgotten, either. Contemporary citizens, including folk who worked on, and work in, the Oran Mor have their likenesses portrayed here, honouring their labour. Gray’s is a democratic intellect, and a democratic aesthetic, and a democratic structure of feeling.                

As you leave, as a companion piece to the “WELCOME” on the way in, you will see, and walk on, a set of 32 carved tiles bidding you “GOODBYE”. Many of Gray’s books end on a similarly friendly note, from his early masterpiece Lanark onwards, as if he wanted you to feel that reading the books was akin to visiting him, maybe at home, maybe in a shared public space, and he was your host. “Goodbye,” he says, as you turn the last page.  I see him as a latter-day Interpreter, as in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. In his House, we are shown “excellent things, such as would be helpful to [us]”.

In fact, the more you immerse yourself in the print-world of Gray’s published works, the more parallels you discover between them and buildings. As you make your way through them, the books seem to have doors and windows, and rooms and corridors, and stairs and landings, with good labelling and sign-posting so you do not get lost, all in Gray’s distinctively bold, clear style.

Gray was fortunate in having Canongate as his publisher for Lanark, as for many subsequent books, as its owner Stephanie Wolfe-Murray gave him creative control over all aspects of its look, from the grand plan of the art-work to the details of line-spacing and indentation. Like William Blake or William Morris before him, Gray was enabled to work in the combined roles of artist,  artisan and author.

III

After leaving the Oran Mor, turn left along Byres Road, and very soon you come to Hillhead Public Library. It was much used by Gray in the second half of his life, when he lived at various addresses in the West End, just as, in his earlier years in the East End, Riddrie Public Library had been a favourite haunt, being almost a home from home for the inveterate bibliophile. 

In his retrospective memoir, A Life in Pictures, Gray tells of an occasion when one of his teachers at Whitehill Senior Secondary School invited him to give a lecture to the school’s Literary and Debating Society. This he did, with specially drawn illustrations projected on an epidiascope. These illustrations are recognisably by the same hand, and from the same mind, as all his later art-work, including the Oran Mor ceiling. Gray appears to have developed his skill and found his genius very young. His chosen subject for the lecture was “A Personal View of History”, no less, typically encyclopaedic. He started with The Ice Age and The Stone Age, and ended with The Industrial City and The Triumph of Socialism.

Along this onward march, full of epic horrors, two sunnier episodes are celebrated. Babylonian priests are pictured  “recording an eclipse, having devised an alphabet and calendar that made writing history possible”. Later, the schoolboy lecturer showed his audience The Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus tells the people of the slave-based empires of the world that “every human soul was equally valued by God”. Regrettably, his art-work for that episode was mislaid, as he explains in A Life in Pictures. 

For the end-point of History, The Triumph of Socialism, he chose as example and symbol the nearby Riddrie Public Library. “I thought,” he tells us, “this well-planned, well-stocked public library was a triumphant example of local egalitarian democracy.” Here we find the bedrock of Gray’s later more developed politics. He never lost his youthful Spirit of Forty-Five. Again, as with The Sermon on the Mount, we only have his word for it, as, for some reason, the drawing of the Library “was to be”, but was in fact never actually drawn. 

IV

I started writing this short guide to Gray’s visible legacy in Glasgow’s West End shortly after his death at the very end of 2019. For inspiration, and for refreshing my memory, I followed the route that I am here recommending. Arriving at the wide inviting entrance of Hillhead Public Library, I found that I could not pass it without going in.

There, next to the librarians’ issue desk, was a display of all Gray’s books that they had in stock, and a table set aside where his fellow-readers were invited to sign a book  -  not so much a Book of Condolences, more a Book of Celebrations. Already, after only a few days of the library and the book being open after the New Year holiday, page upon  page of entries had been written. As I read through them, I became aware that “Alasdair” had been well-loved as a local worthy, a kindly man, and a great conversationalist, as interested in his interlocutors as in himself; but, at the same time, “Gray” was well-regarded as an important author-cum-artist, who had put his native Glasgow and Scotland on a world map, and also brought the world to the very streets of this city. This “fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian”, as he once described himself, had made his mark, a large and indelible one.

There is a point of correction to be made regarding Gray’s self-description as a “pedestrian”. For his final few years, after a fall that nearly killed him, he was a wheelchair user.  Undaunted, after seven months in hospital, he was to be seen again, visiting his  favourite places, going about his many ploys, and continuing his last great project, his re-telling of Dante’s Divine Comedy. How like Blake, who also immersed himself in the old Tuscan’s Hell, Purgatory and Paradise!

V

 After Hillhead Library, proceed further along Byres Road to another place where Gray’s presence is felt, namely Hillhead Subway Station.

Look across the entrance hall, beyond the turnstiles that lead to the platforms and trains. There, confronting you, is Gray’s final work of public art, a mural made of ceramic tiles, two metres high and twelve metres wide. “All Kinds of Folk” it is called, and so it is identified in elegant lettering to the left. Alternatively, it is called “Folk of All Kinds”, to the right. In the middle is a panoramic view of the streets and buildings of Hillhead, the busiest part of the West End. The panorama is so boldly three-dimensional that you can imagine yourself walking there. It is flanked on both sides by panels of equally bold drawings of the very kinds of folk whom Gray imagined using the subway.

He gives us Lucky Dogs and Financial Wizards, Hard Workers and Brain Babies, Lovely Mums and Bonny Fechters, Lassies and Lads, Cocky Chaps, and others. A|few beasts and fairy-tale figures are thrown in for good measure, including Urban Foxes, Fiery Dragons, Birds of Paradise, and Unicorns. The effect is to make you smile, and that was Gray’s intention, as he indicates in a bit of verse inscribed on the wall:

Do not let daily to-ing and fro-ing
To earn what you need to keep going
Prevent what you once felt when wee
Hopeful and free.

Now look below the station’s “Exit” sign. There, in black block capitals, you will read that same motto that you saw in gold on the Oran Mor ceiling, regarding early days, a better nation, and working. Those block capitals, by the way, like all the lettering here, were specially designed for this project. They are based on Gray’s own handwritten letterforms, for that reason being known as Gray Display.

VI

I had got this far into writing my piece, when Covid-19 closed down everyday life as we are used to living it. The three places that I have described above  -  the Oran Mor, the Library, and the Station  -  are now in lockdown, as is a fourth place that I would have directed you to, namely a restaurant and bar in a lane off Byres Road, the Ubiquitous Chip, the decor of which, on a lavish scale, was Gray’s work. (He was paid for doing it, it is said, by the promise of free dinners for ever.) 

It was my intention to illustrate my conducted tour with photographs taken specially for it, but that cannot now be done until Glasgow and the world return to the old normal, for good and ill, supposing that is possible. What with “self-isolating” and “social-distancing”, and shutters being up, it is as if we are suddenly inhabiting a nightmarish or dystopian or purgatorial or infernal scene of a kind that Gray might have included in the “Unthank” chapters of Lanark. You can, however, find plenty of already existing photographs online, and so compose your own visual commentary for the itinerary.  You might well begin here and then progress to Gray’s official website, and then delve into his publisher’s website.

My thanks are due to Canongate for giving me permission to enliven my text (above and below) with illustrative material from their files. Maybe, post-Covid-lockdown, I will be able to return to my tour of Gray venues and take photos of my own, for splicing  in.

How, then, are we to leave this inconclusive ramble? There is no better way than in Gray’s own words. In an interview that he gave in the year before he died, to Gutter magazine (Spring, 2018), he remarked on the pleasure he took from being able to work and create, even in old age and ill health; in fact, especially in old age and ill health. At the time, he was putting the finishing touches to the “Heaven” part of his Divine Comedy, “Englished in prosaic verse”, as he put it, after Dante. In words that reveal a great deal about himself, Gray concluded the interview as follows:

Everyone who makes something that survives them has overcome death to that extent: especially if it is another human being.  It may also be a well-built wall or other work of art.

VII

ENOUGH TO LIFT MY EYES TO

An imagined meeting with Alasdair Gray,
in a Glasgow street

“There’s not a street in Glasgow,
Anyplace, or Purgatory that I don’t know.
I’ve sojourned here for all my years,
studying the root and consequence
of the world’s good and the world’s ill,
watching both succeed, pondering
how the one can let the other grow.”
Looking up intently from his wheelchair,
like a tree’s last stubborn leaf
lit by a late sun, in a winter’s wind,
not torn, not shaken even,
he held my attention as he spoke.
I thought of the Ancient Mariner,
as for a long moment he had me
in his close focus there.
We were like two islands in a flow
and counter-flow of passing folk.

“For self-protection,” he explained,
“or, if hurt, self-heal, I carry with me
images and words that speak truths,
some from the past, some being formed.
Reviewing them can feed them present life,
and make them for a moment real.
“Whoever harrows any kind of Hell
must do the same. But…” -
he cautioned with a work-worn hand -
“know this: there is no certain Paradise
at journey’s end, perhaps no journey’s end;
but I have seen, for sure,
occasional glimpses of a far-off hill,
part-grey, part-green, chequered bright.

“It is not the steep slope
that Dante wrote of in his Purgatorio.
Rather, it is some high point,
beyond our city’s boundary,
that catches now and then whatever rays
there are of the day’s light.
It is enough for me to lift my eyes to.”
Then, "Look!" he cried,
and gave a sudden whoop of joy,
pointing across the street to where,
in a park, a chestnut tree stood tall.
“Imagine,” he said, “imagine playing there,
swinging on a knotted rope,
collecting conkers, being Tarzan,
being a dryad, trying not to fall.”
Studying that tree, we saw -
he made me see - a rain of golden orioles.
As if so many falling meteors,
as if directed by a hidden hand,
in a swoop, they cascaded to the tips
of the bare boughs.
There they perched for a short while,
overlooking the neighbouring ground.
Talismans, they flashed forth
against the evening’s blue.
I see them now, transfiguring
the landscape of my mind’s-eye view. 

David Betteridge notes how Remembrance Sunday at least marks the huge cost paid by the enforced many, not the few

Watching the ceremony from The Cenotaph on TV this morning was an experience of mixed thoughts and mixed emotions. The huge scale of warfare in present and past times, and on a global scale, was well highlighted by the programme, and the huge cost, paid by the enforced many, not the few. Also highlighted was the central role played by, and given honour to, royal and political elites. There they were at The Cenotaph, some in military uniform, some guilty of, or complicit in, or condoning of war crimes, their faces standing properly to attention.

Sadness was there, of course, especially among veterans, remembering and honouring the dead and the ruined and the bereaved, who, of course, include millions of those on the “enemy side” and in “civvy street”. After the two minutes silence, and the wreath-laying, we were treated to the spectacle of the march past and the taking of the salute. Flags and red poppies were to the fore, in profusion, dominating the scene!

How I wanted to see or hear the voice of “No More War”, or at least some hint that the next war was not being legitimised or consoled beforehand. Some of us on the Left may be pacifists, some may see a justification for armed self-defence, or for wars of liberation, but few of us want, I guess, the sort of ceremony that we see each year from The Cenotaph: homogenised and packaged in such a way that it seems as much a glorying in military power and presumed “national unity” as a questioning.

White poppies, of course, have stood as a symbol for the sort of thinking and feeling I am trying to express here, ever since the Co-operative Women’s Guild first produced and sold them in 1933. Similar thinking and feeling is to be found in a red poppy mosaic by the Clydebank photographer and archivist artist, Owen McGuigan. See “The Pity of War” on this website, where that mosaic and the process of making it are examined in depth. Under Owen’s hands, the red poppy of Armistice Day is deconstructed into the blood and dirt and grief and waste and futility that is essential to all wars. He called his mosaic “100 Years”.

As a footnote to that article, “The Pity of War”, I would like readers of Culture Matters to see the mock-up that Owen made for “100 Years”. He wanted to test how well he could stick the pieces of the mosaic down on a board, and how long they would be sure to stay in place.

See below, where the basic design elements of the larger mosaic are experimented with. To me, this mock-up is a very fine little work of art in its own right.

Note by the artist, Owen McGuigan:

While I was working on the “100 Years” mosaic, it occurred to me that I should make a test piece, because, thinking ahead, I knew that the mosaic would be grouted with light grey floor tile grout when it was finished. I wasn’t sure how the grout would react with the plywood shapes, and I didn’t want to ruin the mosaic after all the time and effort I had put into it. Hence, the creation of “Blood, Tears, Death & a Broken Heart” (shown above), which incorporates the main elements of the large piece, mounted in a birch plywood frame.

I finished this piece seven months before grouting the “100 Years” mosaic, and displayed it at an art exhibition, and in a craft shop, to see how it would react to different environments. Fortunately, it was very stable with no reaction.

 David Betteridge re-tells an old tale, inspired by John Berger, Timothy Neat, and Margaret Bennett, with drawings by Bob Starrett

The Cave of Gold

by David Betteridge

On 23rd February, 2017, in Edinburgh, an event was held by the Royal Scottish Academy, in commemoration of an honorary member who had died a few weeks earlier, on 2nd January, in Paris. That member was John Berger, the Marxist critic, writer, and artist, who was not only honorary, but honoured, and also greatly loved. You only need to read a few of the obituaries that were published at the time to get a feeling for the fact that here was a friend to many, a giver and receiver of goodwill, as well as an artist, critic, story-teller, essayist, poet, dramatist, film-maker, etc. of international reach.

Ali Smith’s obituary, written for “The Guardian” on 6th January, provides a good example. She concluded that, “A reader coming anywhere near his work encounters life-force, thought-force – and the force, too, of the love all through it.” Then there is Jacob Brogan’s obituary, written for “The New Yorker” on 9th January. “It was hope,” he wrote, “that allowed Berger to write so beautifully... Hope names a commitment to change the world.” And there is Yasmin Gunaratnam’s obituary, written for “Red Pepper”, on 19th January. “Immersed in his story-telling and stories about him,” she explained, “I saw up-close what he meant by a story-teller’s hospitality, how language and writing can offer a sense of community.”

You will also find voices raised in hostility to John Berger’s memory – as in Michael Henderson’s obituary, for example, in “The Spectator” on 4th January – because, being anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist and fiercely combative all his life, in fact being “Permanent Red”, to quote the title of an early collection of his essays, Berger quite properly made enemies as well as friends.

The Edinburgh event served as the best of obituaries, a multi-disciplinary and multi-genre affair, attended by a multiplicity of friends, including some who had never met the man, or corresponded directly with him, but who felt they knew him through the comradeship of his works, as Gunaratnam described.

One contributor to the event was Timothy Neat (artist, photographer, biographer, poet, historian, teacher, and expert in mushrooms and honey), who screened a film that he had made in 1989, “Play Me Something”. In this film, John Berger plays a leading role, that of a story-telling Stranger. The story that he tells is one of his own, the last in his “Once in Europa” collection, about a chance meeting of two lovers-to-be at a Festa de l’Unita on the Venetian island of Giudecca, one of the couple being a cattle farmer from inland, the other a shopworker from the city.

As well as being narrated in Berger’s voice-over, this story is partly dramatised in the film, and is embedded in a second film-drama about strangers meeting on the Hebridean island of Barra. As they sit waiting at the tiny airport for a delayed flight to Glasgow, they get drawn into the Stranger’s story-telling, and, in the process discover unexpected affinities. This latter drama, the Barra one, is acted by a motley selection of players, including the cultural earthquake, Hamish Henderson, and the great folklorist and singer and teacher and publisher, Margaret Bennett. She rounds off the film with a singing of the magnificent Gaelic song, “Uamh an Oir” (“The Cave of Gold”).

At our event on 23rd February, again Margaret Bennett sang this song, and explained to us its significance in Gaelic culture, conveying as it does truths about gifts and debts, beauty and horror, tradition and hope, all in a few minutes of compressed beauty.

What, you may wonder, has such an ancient song, from Scotland’s cold Atlantic seaboard, got to do with Berger’s modern story about a workers’ rally on a warm island in a Mediterranean lagoon? Is it not a strange film that sets out to make a unity of such opposites, including such disparate characters? The answer lies in the relevance of the story to our political imaginations. Neat’s film and Berger’s story inside it express an age-old longing for a future that transcends the past, and gives us a pre-echo of dreams come true, even when we know such a thing will be difficult to achieve. “Play Me Something” celebrates love, hope, and the need to change the world politically to achieve a fully human community : the very values highlighted in the Berger obituaries quoted above.

Berger’s friend and mentor, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Fischer, made a convincing case for such “heart of the heartless world” creations as “Play Me Something”. He saw them as a necessary complement to cultural creations of the “tell it like it is” sort. He argued for a both-and culture, without which we cannot see the world, and time, and ourselves as we really are, in the round:

... the function of art is to re-create as every individual’s experience the fullness of all that he is not, the fullness of humanity at large. And it is the magic of art that, by this process of re-creation, it shows that reality can be transformed, mastered, turned into play.

Being a poet as well as a philosopher, Fischer underscored his case in verse, in an elegy:

Deep in the dreams of the world’s morning
may the future’s face be mirrored,
and may legend become the goal
of a mature people...

(See Fischer’s “The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach”, translated by Anna Bostock, 1963, slightly edited above.)

With these ideas buzzing in my head, I decided to delve into the history of the song that Margaret Bennett sang. There I discovered a Gaelic ur-story, of deep resonance, from which the “Uamh an Oir” song sprang, a story which I already knew (in part) under the title of “The Silver Chanter”, but which I had not realised was kith and kin with the song. It is one of the great stories of the world, from the same deep source as Orpheus.

Inspired by its magic, I decided to try my hand at re-telling it. Here is that re-telling:-

“WE HAVE WORDS...”

We have words; we have tunes. Having them, we have wings. We can be eagles, or wrens, or swallows, or snow geese, or golden orioles, or any kind of bird we like. Fly with me now. We have a cloudless sky, or can imagine one. Look, below us, there! lying off Scotland’s Atlantic coast, do you see a mountainous island shaped like a riding-boot that has come apart at the top? Zoom in close now! Do you see a high cliff facing West, and at its foot the entrance to a sea-cave? The cave is called Uamh an Oir, the Cave of Gold.

I can tell you four things about this cave. One: it is very deep. Some say it extends as far as Fairyland; others say it extends as far as Hell. Two: somewhere in the cave there is a hoard of gold; or maybe it is the glow of the setting sun falling on the rocks at the cave’s entrance that makes it seem a Cave of Gold. Three: the cave is guarded by a ferocious Green Dog. It hides in the dark, always ready to kill. Four: no-one who has gone into the cave has ever come out.

One day, centuries ago, a piper stood on the cliff-top, in a grassy hollow, out of the wind. He was a tall young man, as strong as a bull leaping. At his feet lay a little grey dog, his constant companion. The young man’s pipes were in his hands, but he was not playing. He was groaning and sighing, despairing of ever mastering the instrument. How he longed to play the music that was in his heart and head, but not yet in his fingers!

A woman appeared at his side, so quickly he didn’t see her coming. “I have watched you,” she said, “over many days and many years. I have seen, and heard, your devotion to the pipes. You deserve to succeed; and you deserve to be helped.”

She was slender, like a birch tree. She wore a velvet cloak the colour of moss. She had bare feet. The young man realised that this woman speaking to him was one of the Fairy Folk.

“Answer me this question,” said the fairy woman. “Think hard: would you rather be a famous piper, with wealth and honours, but without much skill; or would you rather be a skilful player, the world’s best, but without fame?”

The young man’s answer came swift and sure: “I would rather be skilful,” he said.

“In that case,” said the fairy, “you will be rewarded not only with skill, but also with fame. Your answer proves that you are worthy of both.”

The fairy then pulled a strand of hair from her head, and took the young man’s pipes from his hands into her own. She wrapped the strand of hair round and round the pipes’ chanter, tying the circlet with a tight knot.

“As long as that hair remains in place on the chanter,” she said, “your playing will have in it all the beauty that your heart and head long for; but there is one condition that you must accept: a year and a day from now you must stand before me, in Fairyland, which you will enter through the Cave of Gold, and there you must play for me.”

The young man accepted the condition. Then, as quickly as the fairy had appeared, she disappeared.

For the next year and a day, the young man travelled among his clans-people. He travelled far and near, high and low, playing for them, his little grey dog always with him. Like spring rain and summer sun, the magic of his music refreshed all who heard it. They were happy as never before. They felt vigour and health rise up in them. They made peace with their neighbours, wherever there was conflict. They saw their cattle and their crops grow fat. It was a golden age, still remembered, still spoken of; and the echo of the young man’s playing is still heard in the best of today’s piping.

On the 366th day, the time came for the young man to keep his promise. As the sun began to set over the sea, he went down from the cliff-top by way of a zig-zag path, down to the Cave of Gold, his dog trotting after him.

 A great number of his clans-people went with him, to wish him well. They were afraid for him, knowing that the cave was a great swallower of lives; but “No,” the young man reassured them, “I will be back soon, believe me. The power of my music will tame the Green Dog, and any other beast or fairy or person who might wish me harm.”

The piper went into the cave, his dog too. All the while, the piper played; and, as he played, his clans-people plotted his progress, step by step, even after he had disappeared into the dark. You see, there is a kind of speech woven into pipe music. If you listen with understanding, the pattern of the music’s notes and grace-notes speaks to you, and you know all that the piper intends you to know.

After a few minutes, the piper sent this coded message: I’ll be back with you, out of this cave, with a tale to tell, maybe good news. I’ll be back in less time than it takes a singer to start and finish her song.

On he went, further and deeper. The sound of his playing grew fainter. Then he sent this second message: I’ll be back with you, out of this cave, in less time than it takes a calf to grow to a heifer, and give birth to her own calf.

On and on he went, towards his meeting with the fairy woman, until the sound of his playing was so faint it could hardly be heard. Then he sent this third message: I’ll be back with you, out of this cave, in no less time than it takes an infant boy at the breast to train as a warrior, and become the chieftain of his clan.

It was nearly nightfall now. The setting sun showed only its topmost rim over the sea’s horizon. Its golden glow on the rocks at the cave’s mouth was darkening to grey.

Suddenly, there was the sound of a scrabbling of claws on these rocks, and the piper’s dog hurtled out of the cave, its eyes wide with a great fear. All of its grey hairs had been shed. Naked, it trembled in the gloom.

The clans-people standing there strained to hear what next the piper might communicate.

Oh, that I had three hands came the young man’s utterance, only just audible, from far underground, maybe from Fairyland, maybe from Hell. Oh, that I had three hands - two hands for the pipes and one for my drawn sword!

After that, there was only silence.

                                                  ******************

To hear Margaret Bennett’s beautiful and compelling singing for yourself, see here.....

......Or get a copy of the CD produced by her son Martyn in 2002, “Glen Lyon”. It is a notable recording, full of imaginative musical effects and sound effects, and includes “The Cave of Gold”, sung by Margaret Bennett, as one of its tracks.  

I started with John Berger. I want to round off with a poem inspired by remarks of his about the power of song, remarks contained in a late compilation of his writings, “Confabulations”. He wrote: “A song narrates a past experience… it fills the present… it leans forward…” None better than “Uamh an Oir”.

Songlines

by David Betteridge

Imagine a song so crammed with gold
it rings like a giant gong
or the Big Bang
conveying memories and desires,
facts and dreams,
traversing time.

As one voice in tradition’s relay dies,
another joins, keeping the beat,
keeping the tune,
chasing forever each next year’s Spring,
each next sunrise.

Imagine!
Sing!

Our song bestows on future folk
the world’s past,
for the world’s gain.