Pictures from an Elusive Exhibition

by Robin Fulton Macpherson

Many of my poems seem to approach the world obliquely and that´s the only way I can talk about them myself. Questions like “Why do you write?” paralyse my mental functions. I would rather talk about a few pictures: some exist outside my head, some don´t.
  The first scene is dimly lit and uneventful. We are in someone´s holiday cottage late at night, surrounded by a pitch-black forest near the village of Sprakensehl, about fifty kilometres south of Lüneburg. We had been persuaded to leave, for an hour or so, the smoke-filled and resonant Gasthaus where we were staying, by an American who seemed pleased to find English speakers. The Lady of the House, or Cottage, a German university lecturer, having found out that I had published a few books, demanded “What are your poems ABOUT?” A crisp reply was expected but not forthcoming. What I thought afterwards but hadn´t got round to saying was - “Ted Hughes writes poems about animals, yes, but that says nothing about Ted Hughes´ poems.”  End of story, and not much of a story, but that question still echoes in my head whenever I come across a poem that seems to run on rails towards a predestined conclusion.
  I don´t mean the Great Long Poems of World Literature. Dante´s awareness of how La Divina Commedia was to end informs almost every line of his three-part narrative, and Milton had to know how Paradise Lost would progress because his epic ambitions persuaded him to start in the middle of his story.
  I mean the fairly short poems most of us come across, as readers or writers or translators, and my point is that if we have “something to say” or “something to write about” and we know in advance what it is, then the obvious thing to do would be to write a letter-to-the-editor (if we have only a little to say), or to write an article (if we have quite a lot to say) or to write a book (if we have heaps to say). If we are really clever with words we could write comic or satirical verse, a genre not to be sniffed at. If we are pompous and self-conceited we could write didactic verse, a genre fortunately out of fashion these days.
  There is space in the world for all sorts of poetry, and those who try to convince us that poetry “is” or “ought to be” this or that can safely be ignored, but my own preference is for poems which give the impression of feeling their way along, of not quite knowing where they are going until they get there, of discovering what they are up to as they proceed. This may be the result of cunning on the part of a wily poet, but I doubt if that is common. It´s something which may well irritate the crisp people but that´s too bad.
   I´d like to call in two poets, one not so widely known, and one universally known. G.F. Dutton (1924-2010), Scottish “by residence,” distinguished bio-chemist, resolute host of a “wild garden” near the tree-line in Perthshire, wrote short knife-edged poems which often explore areas of experience where humanscome up against non-human conditions. He saw no essential contradiction between categories such as “science” and “art,” and indeed saw his poems as little experiments.
I like this way of seeing poems not as statements but as speculations setting off from an “as if.” The other poet is Borges, who in his Norton lectures in 1967-68 talked of poetry as something that “happens” between word and reader. A book is a physical object full of dead symbols. “And then the right reader comes along, and the words -  or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols  -  spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.” At first sight these two ways of seeing poems, the one seeming to rely on the brain as it sets up a hypothesis or two, and the other seeming to rely on the heart, waiting for a magic moment, may appear to be far apart, but they share at least one essential feature: a predilection for unpredictability and surprise.

   My second scene takes us back to the early 1940s. I´m perhaps five or six. I´m in the sitting-room of the Church of Scotland manse at Torbeg in Shiskine, Isle of Arran. The window looks east across a wide shallow valley with green fields and lines of hawthorn hedge. The Black Water runs north to south towards the sea: in reality a large stream but, with its deep pools, to me a dangerous river. The foliage of the trees cascades in the wind and rain. Grandmother, father´s mother, May Scott who married Edinburgh teacher William Fulton and has been a widow since 1926, is crouched at the piano, humming and mumbling through the music, making excessive use of the sustaining pedal. The different harmonies tend to run into each other just as the wet landscape outside runs in a haze down the window-panes. I may be doing her an injustice but that is what I imagine I remember.
   She played a lot of “glorious” Mozart (whose name she pronounced Mosárt), made frequent expeditions into Beethoven but I don´t know how she tackled the many demanding pages to be found there, and was full of contempt for “modern” music. “Bella Bartók - fancy having a girl´s name!” My parents were musical only in a mild way. Music was something heard sporadically, briefly and passively, never listened to actively with real attention. Hymn-tunes were much cultivated. I liked some of them and still do, but I became puzzled when I began to notice the words and found it hard to understand how grown-ups could blissfully sing lines which often made little sense. My own later interest in music owed nothing to grandmother´s many hours at the keyboard.
   Socially, a country minister in those days had an ambiguous position. Father was looked up to (“respect for the cloth” was the odd expression) and was given the use of an imposing house with an extensive garden, free as long he stayed in that charge. Yet his income, prettty low on the financial scale, hardly matched the dimensions of the house, a circumstance perhaps tacitly recognised by parishioners for when he visited a farm he always came home with some produce. This was managed without any sense of being patronising or charitable. It was never suggested to me that we were a touch different from the people round about us, but the idea seeped into me and caused me discomfort until I was old enough to think about it. My parents lost friends in the war (one of mother´s cousins fell in North Africa) and must have had many worries, but they never clouded my existence with them. In fact, I was lucky. As a minister of religion father was not called up. We weren´t bombed. We weren´t occupied.
  Not every day was happy, of course. It couldn´t be, life being as it is. There´s a very blue sky, with a very bright sun shining on very green fields, and I´m at a Sunday School picnic. A modern child might think the event rather miserly but during the war the smallest “treat” was a great event, so I was supposed to be happy. But I thought suddenly of one our Sunday School teachers who had died recently, “before her time,” and a panic of sadness consumed me. It was no use being told that she was now in heaven, for how could I know if the sky in heaven was as nice and blue as the one I sat beneath?

   It seems absurd that we moved in 1944 from Arran to Glasgow: accepting unexplained decisions from parents, I assumed, was just what children had to put up with. We moved from gifts of farm produce to bread queues, from relative plenty to a miserable income that kept us not far above the bread-line, and I think both parents were unhappy and irritable. But I was very happy with the change and on a wider view wish we could have stayed on there. The trams were exciting. Pocket-money was rare
but when it was to be found it went on exotic items like liquorice root and sherbet powder. I experienced life with electricity for the first time, but the house had none of the peeps and buzzes of modern gadgets, so it was still fairly quiet. That modern child would perhaps have found existence there boring, but up to a point boredom is useful for it can stimulate initiative and inventiveness.
  The picture this time is of the interior of the loft in the solid pink sandstone terraced house that served as a manse. It was an “ordinary” building sitting among others in a leafy street, not a gaunt solitary pile. I liked the loft. The rafters gave off a pungent resinous scent and the only sounds to be heard were occasional ticks from the wooden roof and the muffled chirping of house-sparrows. I felt secure from bossy adults. The adults around me were not always bossy, of course, but one could never be sure: they were liable to turn bossy without notice and for inscrutable reasons. I had a large but incomplete Meccano set donated by the lady next door, whose children had grown beyond such things. And I read about the small creatures I had found or hoped to find in ponds and streams on my solitary and sometimes rather frightening expeditions to the open spaces within reach. The last time I saw some of these, they had been covered by housing estates.

   The next picture is a black-and-white photograph - not just a scene inside my head - showing myself aged eleven or twelve on the footplate of a steam engine at Thurso station. Standing on the platform is Harry, the real engine-driver, who taught me how to shunt to and fro and piece together the wagons into a goods-train -  that is, he told me which lever to push or pull, I pushed or pulled, and found this the most exciting activity of my whole childhood.
  Mother´s family had deep roots in Sutherland and Caithness. Grandfather Murdo Macpherson had a formidable square jaw that said “You wouldn´t want to argue with me.” He was of substantial dimensions and rolled rather than walked. What he “was,” I never found out. In my family a child simply did not ask about the business of adults. Rumour had it that he had been a joiner but was too much of a perfectionist and too little of an accountant. He was a returning officer at elections so must have been regarded as reliable. He was a member of the local Masonic Lodge, and that too was of course an impenetrable secret. He spent his last years of employment as caretaker at the site of the wartime air base at Dounreay, staying on a while when the nuclear power plant was built.
  For several years we spent a month of the summer in Thurso. The night-train north from Glasgow was exciting, and so were my hours with Harry, but otherwise time dragged. The little that did happen seemed to involve water. Father took me on long fishing trips, some of which meant trudging for ages along the railway track. The local minister taught me to swim (a little). I was fascinated by the cliffs between Scrabster and Holborn Head, saving up images for a lifetime of nightmares about such places. Once we (myself, father, Murdo and another adult) were out in a rowing-boat fishing for mackerel. “Not proper fishing,” father declared, “for they bite at anything.”  We came close to a vast basking shark, idling along with its jaws open. Not dangerous, was the general opinion, but I wasn´t convinced: the nearest “shore” was a vertical cliff plunging down into deep water.

  We can move on now to another real picture, to a water-colour, not perhaps an exalted specimen of the art but a lifelike depiction of Loch Araichlin, and if the lady who painted it did so from life then she had gone to some trouble to do so. Two or three times I spent a day fishing there, with father and another man, probably the water-bailiff. First came a slow drive north the length of Strath Helmsdale, on a single-track road, to the southern tip of Loch an Ruathair. Then came an hour-long struggle westwards high-stepping through wiry heather over ground full of thigh-deep holes in the soggy peat. Once on the loch, the tactic was to row against the wind and then set the oar at a cunning angle, allowing us to drift down-wind while casting. I tied my own flies (Butcher, Grouse and Claret, Teal and Green) but found the actual process of using them rather boring. In fact, the boredom here was so extreme that it became pleasant, like a trance. People who have been to the Gobi Desert or the Antarctic would think nothing of the heathery wastes along the unmarked border between Sutherland and Caithness, but to me this was the ultimate remoteness. The chit-chit of an occasional stonechat, hard to locate, and the sad wail of a curlew, and above all the lap-lap-lap of the small waves made the enveloping silence inescapable and unfathomable. Those waves have been recorded and stored in some corner of my brain for I can hear them whenever I want to.  
  By this time we had moved north from Glasgow to Helmsdale, the result of another unexplained, unquestioned and unquestionable paternal decision (most likely on father´s part). In the late 1940s this fishing village on the east coast of Sutherland was relatively busy but to me it was a desert after the liveliness of Clarkston. We arrived as electricity was reaching this part of the country. We were back in a “proper” manse, large, draughty, cold, with servant bells in the kitchen which no servant had ever jumped to and a “butler´s pantry” which had never experienced a butler. The manse, the church, and the tall war memorial (whose clock chimed the quarters day and night) stood on raised ground to the south of the village. The river was crossed by Thomas Telford´s old stone bridge, from which I would look far down at the water. At low tide I could see the weedy stones on the bed. At high tide the water was still and deep and evil.
   I commuted one hour each way five days a week for six years between Helmsdale (evenings and weekends and holidays) and Golspie Senior Secondary School (timetable hours only). I felt I existed in neither place and this got me down to the extent that I experienced something akin to depression. I developed phobias about the deep water in the harbour, the cliffs up the Caithness coast, and even certain streets in Helmsdale and Thurso. I took to the piano, seriously and very systematically, practicing for as many hours as I could.

  That takes us to the next picture: it shows us a high-ceilinged room in a New Town flat in Edinburgh. Many pianos of various shapes can be glimpsed. The tall thick curtains are full of jagged holes. And here is Walker Cameron, gifted pianist and teacher, and an uncle has given me half a dozen lessons with him. He is kindly and as helpful as he can be, but alas his verdict is that my teacher in Helmsdale -  the only one available, and she was not yet fully qualified  - has neglected to teach me anything about the use of muscles and damage has already been done. Start again, if you can, but it´s probably too late.
  I think I was about eighteen and I was very disappointed. On the positive side, I had at least got some idea of the inner workings of many of Bach´s “48” and of Beethoven´s piano sonatas. I have been returning to these regularly for almost seventy years, finding more and more in them. These, and not a few other musical works, have a powerful effect on me which has not been matched by anything I have come across in literature. We can do subtle things with words, but our grasp on them is not always firm: they often wander away and even if they do usually come back there´s no guarantee. In the eyes of the custodians of the word this might put me beyond the pale. Actually, many people have found or invented interesting things beyond various pales and in sundry backwaters.

  One last picture: Tyne Commission Quay, just down river from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. My view is from the top deck of a ship ready for the nineteen-hour or so crossing north-eastwards across the North Sea to Stavanger. Cars and passengers are on board, all the doors are clamped shut, little men in dirty green luminous jackets have unlooped the ropes. In the course of nearly four decades I have watched a scene like this well over a hundred times. A narrow gap opens between the side of the ship and the huge rubber tyres lining the harbour wall. That is how all journeys, whether trivial or decisive, begin, with a tiny space that expands, with a scarcely perceptible movement that gathers momentum. My “native land” is still around me but I am already severed from it, unable to drive up the road onto the A1 and turn left to go south or right to go north. The gap widens and hordes of gulls swoop over the churning water: they seldom seem to find anything worth snatching. We slide down river, where the last rotting vestiges of a thriving industrial past have more or less been tidied up and new apartment blocks with glass balconies line the “redeveloped” sections of the riverbanks. Leaving the river and meeting the sea outside the breakwater, the boat takes on a restless motion, but once clear of the shallows it settles down to whatever that most fickle stretch of sea has to offer.
  Motorways, city streets, facades, interiors are all stored in niches in my memory; the real-life equivalents, all that weight of hills, fields, buildings, shrink westwards in the fading light, soon to become an indistinct line that may be land and may not be. There are people too, just out of sight round the curvature of the earth. I used to think of my parents beyond that line. Up to 1984 they were both somewhere there; after 1991, neither.
  If you move to another country and stay there for a long time you find yourself in a dilemma. The new country becomes familiar but is not and never will be home. The old country, when you visit it, is of course very familiar but there is now an unbreakable glass wall between you and that familiarity; you are no longer at home when back home. Out in the middle of the North Sea, with absolutely nothing on the horizon, I have often felt an íllusion of being “at home,” of being free of that dilemma for a few hours. If seen from a plane high up, the boat would be a little cigar shape with a short white wake, hardly moving. If seen from the cold fishy deeps, from below, it would look much the same but not very secure, with all that depth to sink down through. No doubt Archimedes was right, but when I´m remote from land and have nothing to stand on but tons and tons of metal, I may be allowed to wonder.

An unhappy PS: in 2008 DFDS discontinued the Bergen/Stavanger/Newcastle route, which left their Esbjerg /Harwich route as the only North Sea ferry crossing from Scandinavia. In 2014 that too was discontinued. That leaves their Amsterdam/Newcastle route. It´s a long drive from anywhere in Scandinavia to Amsterdam.