Bryan Islip's Blog, page 46

Rock of ages

From Japan this morning comes a reminder, in the form of a massive earthquake / tsunami, of the forces at work inside this planet Earth - and the fragility of all life on its surface, including yours and mine.

As I look out over the wind-troubled surface of Loch Ewe I see the Torridon mountains, made from some of the oldest and hardest of rock (Llewissean Gneiss) - rock that was folded up like a sheet of paper by the cooling of the planet.

Lapping the shore of Loch Ewe not fifty metres from where I sit is the salty sea - the North Atlantic in fact, which comes into the loch having swept around the Hebrides. I cannot help but wonder what it would be like to look out there and see a fifty foot wall of water approaching at a rate of knots!

I think I'll write a story about it, perhaps publish the story on-line as one of my short stories of the month. All I have to do is select a character, decide what he or she would do in the next few seconds, maybe half a minute, then decide the life or the death and the how, where, what, and why of the consequence. I've just had a thought. My character could be a God-fearing soul. Next door to us is a solidly built stone kirk, (church to those not of Scotland). Rock of ages indeed.

But as I write, the radio is conveying the extreme seriousness of this 8.9 rated 'quake. There is no fiction to equal such a devastating blow to the peole of Japan. Perhaps I'll leave my story for another year.

On Reading Shakespeare

There is - or certainly was when we lived there - a most wonderful used / antiquarian book shop in central Winchester. We spent many a profitable half hour browsing its dusty stock in between less important stuff like shopping. One day, in there, I came across a slim volume which was, in those hackneyed words,  to 'change my life'. Literally. Apart from what follows it taught me why and how the words and they way they are assembled can be of greater importance than the story they tell.

The book was written in 1928 by one Professor Logan Pearsall-Smith. It is called 'On Reading Shakespeare'.

In yesterday's Sunday Times columnist India Knight wrote '...I know perfectly intelligent adults who've never read Shakespeare and who, on seeing his work performed, find themselves unpleasantly and slightly humiliatingly baffled.'  She goes on to write; '... the most satisfying and joyful moment of my entire school career came when I finally - after years of being given notes and elucidations - was able to read Shakespeare on my own, and found it made beautiful, perfect sense. To deny a child this seems to me to be a piece of actual cruelty ...'  All this was provoked by Helen Mirren's statement that schoolchildren should not be subjected to reading Shakespeare and that they should see it performed instead.
Like Ms Knight, I am a great admirer of Mirren as an actress but ... 'The play's the thing', Helen. Twentyfirst century entertainers 'strutting their hour upon the stage' have nothing to do with it.

Here's an aside: I was shocked and horrified to read that the great one was currently starring in a new filmed version of The Tempest - a female playing the ultra old male Prospero! Is there no end to this nonsense of artificial male/female sameness? Yes I know small boys played the female roles in Shakespeare's day, but that was merely because the law did not permit females on stage. Our bard wrote enough amazingly good female parts for the ladies of the stage to want to perform his amazing male parts these days. Fifteen years ago we saw Vanessa Redgrave - another wonderful if genetically self-worshipping British actress  - play this same Prospero on stage at The Globe. Sorry folks, Ms Redgrave may have acted her socks off but her presence in the role spoiled the day to which, for years, I had been looking forward.

Professor Logan Pearsall-Smith's little book, apart from being in its own right possibly the most perfect piece of English prose I have read, advised the reader to get the Arden editions of the plays. These are the paperbacks with copious footnotes page by page that, if you read them carefully enough, will finally unveil for you the ise of language not just of England in the 16th/17th century but the true beauty of the bard's words and phrases. I read all thirty one accredited palys over a period of two years, during which time I read no other books, and still most days I will consult one of other of them. Since then I have seen many of the plays performed on stage and/or screen but the pleasure I found in the actors' / actress's interpretation of the roles pales into insignificance versus the same in my own, reader's, imagination.

Soom after this 'unveiling' I wrote a narrative poem describing my personal journey through our literary / poetical heritage. This is a part of my tribute to the good professor's little volume  ...


The book lies open in my handand as when something flashedbrightly in a muddy fieldand you stooped to pick it upand you were lookinginto the bright sun-coloursof a diamond,it opened the door, switched on the lightsand there for me that wondrous treasuryto brighten all my days,to hold an explanation for my nights:and thus in the beginningand the endingare the words.

Sex in the woodlands (2)

The other day I described our encounter with thousands and thousands of mating frogs and toads whilst on a walk around a local wood. I called that blog 'sex in the woodlands.' Now, I've no idea whether it was an interest in the natural history of amphibians or the sex word in the title but this particular item received a good number more than my usual ration of reader hits.

So I thought I'd try it again only this time it would be a true account of a similar if much longer ramble some years ago around the New Forest down south.

You know how, sometimes when you look back at an experience it has all the qualities of a dream, even when you know damn well it was not? Well this is one like that ...

We had been walking deep into the forest for about an hour and had stopped for our usual soup and sandwiches repast sitting on a fallen tree trunk when our young vizsla dog, Sorosh, ('beer drinker' in his native Hungarian) came back to us looking very, very woebegone and holding one foreraw up in the air. We knew at once what had happened. The New Forest is famous for its adders, and they don't take kindly to being molested by inquisitive canines. Furthermore we could clearly see the double toothed bite mark on his lower leg. Sorosh then laid himself down on the bracken, for all intents and purposes on his way to whichever haven misadventurous young doggies go to after this.

Panic? No. Yes. Dee sat beside him cuddling his head to comfort him whilst I and our bitch Mati raced off in the direction of the nearest habitation to summon help; a long, long way away. However after a mile or so I encountered some kind of a vision coming towards me in the form of a beautiful great silver grey horse, adorned with strange ribbons and bells, bearing a figure straight out of a Zane Grey novel. This equally beautiful young man wore no helmet, had a Mohican haircut and wore tasselled deerskin trousers, mocassin shoes and an open denim waistcoat over bare torso and arms. Speaking in an Oxcam voice he enquired as to my obvious problem. I told him about Sorosh. He said for me to go back to Dee and the dog and wait. He himself would go to fetch a forest warden and then gallop back across country to find Dee and tell her what was to happen.

By the time I and Mati got back the exotic rider had already been and gone from the scene, leaving Dee is a state of some excitement to add to her sense of horror about our seemingly dying young vizsla. Very soon afterwards the warden arrived, lifted the dog into his landrover and raced him away to a vet. A swift injection of something or other and he had in no time recovered. The vet told us such incidents were by no means uncommon. His own spaniel had been bitten three times, the last time by a female adder so large and powerful that it had knocked his bitch clean off her feet.

The bit I left out, the bit that added to the general surreality of the day and inspired the title of this blog, was that, on my way for help we had come across a couple shamefully older than me, (even), naked in the long stuff and having it, as they say, away! Mati, being a very friendly dog, was extremely curious about the behaviour of this couple, both of them by now trying to hide their faces as best they might. Of course I pretended to have seen nothing, whistled our girl in and raced on. The real problem came when, having had my meet with 'the vision' and on my hurried back track, I came upon that same couple, and them still at it. Mati this time greeted them as old friends. I'm quite sure they would have killed her if they could, and me too, who they must have thought a particularly boldfaced voyeur.

Sex / fantasy in the woodlands. But true, and all's well that ended well even if, in spite of all our enquiries, we never did find the identity of Sorosh's dreamlike mounted saviour.

Stac Polly

If you drive the road going north from Ullapool (yes, there is only one!) you traverse a region far wilder - more 'primeval' than this one where we live. It's called Assynt. It is a very sparsely populated - almost nil populated - place of  wind-swept moorlands studded with lochs large and small and with great, individually shaped hills; actually, they're 'mountains' if you're not a Highlander.

Stac Polly is one of these. It is very well known to hillwalkers and rock climbers alike. Years ago we would have tackled her ourselves but one look at her now is enough to dissuade us from any such thoughts. This is my latest pastel painting, size around 44 x 33 cm, completed yesterday. And this also is my accompanying verse.
 

Stac Polly
Here is a mountain, unchanging, saw toothed,reaching for an ever changing Assynt sky;a distant dare to those who would endure,or may enjoy the hardships of this 'wilderness'
She rises from her rain-soaked moorland bedby day a curve of greens, rock-greys; by nightblack bitch-face howling at the yellow moon:carved by that last great icy age, it's saidthat scraped north Scotland down to lesser heightleft skyline jagged as some piper's tune
From Polly's crest you'll see the silver seaacross whose puny waves lie Hebrides:look down upon those many shining lochsbreathe purest air where all things rest in peace.

Now and to come

Ranks of pure white snowdroplets range along the edges of our shrubbery borders, a hundred daffodils are shooting up, looking bright-yellowly around and asking 'what winter?', and yesterday we saw a great flock of black and white peewits (or lapwings or plovers, same thing) beating against the wind across the field where they always make their nests. Well more accurately where they lay their eggs and raise their young. Peewits aren't much at nest making, don't need to be when a depression in the grass serves the purpose.

A false Spring it may well be but it does feel good. Now we look forward to what we have learned to call 'the season' with a mixture of hope and fear. Hope that visitors to our B&B and our markets will arrive in numbers and with lots of cash in need of a home. Fear that they will come in such numbers that we will be swamped with the workload! But whatever, as they say; we will doubtless enjoy the contact with folk from far and wide. We always have.

The one major worry for me is that the pace of my work on the fiction writing front is bound to slow, and it is that which absorbs and interests me more than anything else. It was the prime reason for our move north in the September of 2002. Since then I have written and published two novels and a compendium of short stories and am now engaged continuously on my short story of the month project. I also have a third novel in the oven and take a lot of pleasure in writing this blog, so one way and another cannot be accused of moss-gathering. Right now I can say, like Michael Caine, 'Not many people know that.'

With all of this we deliberately allow ourselves the time to stand and stare for not doing so when you live here would be akin to walking through the Paris Louvre without looking at the Mona Lisa or any of the pictures. Every day here is a different picture. Today it's one of grey overcast, weak-weak sun trying its best, gunmetal loch, hills like the shadows of ghosts. Monet could paint it beautifully. I can only do my best.

Talking finally of painting, I've just finished another pastel - a landscape of the wide moorlands and great hills to the north of Ullapool. Watch this space.

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Culture v culture

All my life I've been at war.

I mean my nation has never in all that time been without feeling the need to fight under arms, invariably on foreign fields. Like all of us I have tried hard to cut through the zeitgeist rhetoric and to pin down the reasons for this strange desire to inflict hurt on others far from home.

At the age of 76 and courtesy of the moguls of cyber space perhaps I'm allowed to state my conclusions here, bearing in mind a due observation of the Laws, naturally. These, then, are they ...

Whether we like it or not all we humans are, each one of us, genetically a part of a culture. Call it race, call it tribe,call it nation, it's still a culture; i.e. a way of thinking and behaving that has been allowed to develop naturally over a few or many many generations; the more generations the stronger the culture. The fact that our or anyone else's culture is linked to a piece of planet earth called a country is in my view a long way secondary. One of my poems says 'This land is no more mine or yours than once it was the dinosaurs'. True? Of course. Our species, as all others, is here today gone tomorrow whereas 'our' division of land that we call a country is as it is and as it was for millions of years longer than us. It is just where the bulk of our culture is situated at least for now.

Of course all human cultures change over time given their, however reluctant importation of 'foreign' minority cultures. I myself am happy to be a part of that, being an immigrant in the Highlands of Scotland. But we call our nationality 'by birth', i.e 'by genetic inheritence', as English or Scottish or British or Bangladeshis or Chinese or American (or Native American) or Australian or whatever. Any one of the above or the hundreds of others - but not more than one.

We believe intrinsically, whether or not our culture allows us to say so, that our own culture is best - at least for us and at most, we suppose, for others. It is this 'at most' which is where the warfare begins. And it is this culture of ours that we believe is worth preserving and/or promulgating with our lives. It's why we are in Afghanistan. Some fellows in London say out loud that if we weren't there under arms the bad guys would be here under arms. Because we don't like their culture we believe they will try to destroy ours. Really? Does anyone truly believe that hundreds of our young lives lost, thousands more wrecked and a great slug of our nation's fast dwindling wealth dissipating hourly is worth that theory? And this alien culture we're trying so hard and with such little hope to conquer - it's 'bad' because it will not share our cultural values and because it is awfully unwilling to subjugate its own? Come on, let's start being sensible.


Of course because the culture of which we are each a part is geographically transportable the British and the the Jews, for instance, have historically been effective in transporting themselves (a.k.a. their cultures). Both have colonised half the globe over the few hundred years past. Pakistanis and Indians and Latin Americans are fast catching up. Plenty more fuel for shooting matches there, one would suppose.

My novel Going with Gabriel morphes, two thirds of the way through, into a world where wars are not possible because all groups are kept apart and are genetically mixed and becasue each lives under voluntary rules unique to themselves and not to any one culture / race / nation / tribe. That is of course a touch of Bryan Islip romantic idealism. I was not the first. At least three others came before me with it: Socrates, Wordsworth, Coleridge. Probably plenty of others too.

But if there's ever going to be a stop put to this madness of ever-escalating humanity and ever-escalating warfare between humanity someone has to come up with answers that meld the cultures and unify all the rules of human life on mother earth. Someone or something. I think so anyway, whether John Galliano agrees or not.

Wars and talk of wars

This is the preamble to my short story of the month for March 1st, (yesterday) ...
There's a lot more come back from Afghanistan crippled than in coffins to be driven slowly down Wootton Bassett's High Street. But how do you get back a life when your body now in ruins has been your temple? Ex-sergeant Macrae wants to do it by himself, for himself. For him no tears, no regrets, no recriminations.  
To judge by the initial reactions of those who have already read it, There Was A Soldier will touch many hearts and many a nerve. This story is not a paen of praise or a strong dose of hero worship for the men who go under our arms to Afghanistan or any other foreign field, and neither is it a condemnation thereof. So what is it? I don't know. Read it and tell me. 
All a writer can do is hold up a mirror. The higher the quality of that mirror the better (clearer) those who choose to look into it can see and understand the truth if that is what they want to do.
*******
Wars and talk of wars. Mr David Cameron seems to be keen on getting in on the act. Does our otherwise sensible Old Etonian really think Libya is a good place for him to make his mark on the pages of history? Someone should give him a rifle and a six month tour of 'duty' in Kandahar and an instruction to keep his mouth shut. He and his legion of civil service and military advisers have no more idea of what is in the hearts and the minds and the intentions of Algerians than his predecessor's entourage had, viz a vis Iraq, etc.  

The big C and the big X

There are things not often talked about in polite society.

They're not always the same things as our fathers and mothers didn't discuss - such no-go areas often change or even disappear over time. Cancer is a case in point. Once upon a time it was a definite no-no but these days it is perfectly acceptable to discuss it. A very good American comedy series (The Big C) even makes fun of it. Here in our little community folk generally  knows who has cancer (though not necessarily what kind), know who has had it and has recovered and know who is dying or has died as a result of it.

Much healthier all around I think, to talk, although it doesn't make it any easier when a relative telephones with the carefully lighthearted comment, 'Sorry to tell you, Bryan, but I have cancer'. As happened yesterday.

That would not have happened in times gone by whereas our parents were more than happy to talk about, for instance, genetic racial difference. These days it is unacceptable to do so, perhaps bordering on the illegal under the Race Relations Act. Our grandparents positively revelled in their oft stated self-perception of racial difference / superiority. (True or false, they may have been misguided but it did not make them bad people, did it?)

Sex in older age or underage is another of those shibboleths and as much so now as in history, even though there is nothing more calculated to stir the interest of film or theatregoers, of TV viewers, of book readers or of advertisment noticers than heterosexual behaviour between participants aged sixteen to, say, fifty. So, I ask myself - as a writer of fiction - how about a novel based upon the sexual awakening of a pair of ten to twelve years olds (part one) and that same pair's sexual decline and fall, aged ... ?(part two). I could miss out the middle bit of this couple's sex lives on the grounds that it has been so well trawled over already and by so many.

Watching sport, reading female writers

I've just enjoyed a weekend's top class sport on TV. Pick of the crop was England's cricket 338 run tie with India in the 50 over world chanpionships. Then for sheer enjoyment Italy v Wales at rugby union followed by Arsenal losing (sorry K) to Birmingham at football then Scotland v Ireland and England v France tied for runners up. Oh, and I nearly forgot an Englishman (Luke Donald) beating a German (Martin Kaymer) in the final of the World Matchplay golf.

Why do so few women have as deep an interest as do most men in competitive sport? Silly question really. A bit like the classic 'why are we here?'. We are because we are: they don't because they don't.

Along the same lines, why have I so often shied away from the works of most women writers? I say most because Margaret Attwood is one of my 'top ten to read' writers - and Dr Rachel Carsion created four of the my top ten non-fiction titles; (Silent Spring etc).

The question occurs because I have at last begun (and will finish) Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I've been to Chawton and have stood in the little upstairs room where that novel and several of her other novels were written. It was said that she deliberately kept the downstairs door hinges unlubricated, thus she could hear when anyone came in whilst she was working pen in hand. At which point she would cram all her papers away out of sight in her desk drawer. Big question marks over young ladies who wrote stories in those days!

After all these years of denial Miss Austen grabbed me by the figurative throat right off in chapter one. What brilliant writing - her instant depiction of the relationship between Mrs Bennett and the long suffering, female surrounded, ultra diplomatic Mr Bennett! All the poor man was trying to do was watch the sport.

On the other hand it is said that male novelists cannot really hope to 'see the world' through the eyes and the mind of a female of our species. Hmmm - we shall see. Two of my first four short stories of the month are written through a woman as viewpoint character.

Sex in the woodland

Yesterday we walked the one and a half mile circular footpath around Laide wood, stopping as usual for our mini picnic at the seat alongside one of its pair of beautiful lochans. No wind so not a ripple on the lily padded water and no sound - except ... geese high overhead talking to each other? We scanned the ice blue skies. Nothing. The honking, grunting calls just went on and on. Then we noticed ripple rings on the lochan. As we knew there were no fish in its shallow waters* it must be - it was - frogs! Closer observation showed them in their thousands, almost all underwater; no, in their tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands. Great pulsating knots of them locked together in their annual mating ritual.

For eleven and a half months of the year you would not come across a single frog in Laide wood or its lochans. So where had they all come from, how long had it taken them to reach this place of pleasure, hopping and crawling through the roughest, wildest of tangles? Most intriguing of all the questions, how did they 'know' that this was the right time and the right place?

As we ate our lunch surrounded by such wild sexual excitement and with latecoming hoppers around our boots making for the action it was difficult to avoid feelings of intrusion, almost of voyeurism. We looked more closely at the creatures still on dry land, discovered that some were typically green and shiny frogs but others had the unmistakably dark, drier, warty skins of toads. A positive cornucopia of mixed race croaking swimmers! Surely not inter-breeding?

At this point we remembered previous years when we had been much puzzled by thousands upon thousands of whitish, inside out frog skins distributed all around the edges of this lochan. True, there was a heron in the area and herons do enjoy frogs, but there would have needed to be dozens of those birds to dispose of so many victims. And could a heron skin a frog? Then on Autumwatch TV came the answer. Otters like to catch, skin in one practiced flick and eat frogs. Once, years ago and before the wood was purchased and 'civilised' by our Laide Wood committee, we had forced a way through to this very same lovely little lochan. Once there our pair of vizslas were surprised by - or perhaps surprised - a massive looking dog otter that sprang from the vegetation and disappeared underwater. At least one question answered!

* For the very first time, yesterday Dee spotted a tiny fish in the water. Hooray.