Yew Tree Nights

Of Ruins and Full Moons

2012-02-08T01:29:00.000Z

We are just back from a bright full-moon lit stroll to the sea and all along the coast. We walked for almost three hours in the wind and seafoam roar, with the the strange undulations of bright light to dim night when clouds massed over the moon.

Earlier this evening I thought I would start to write here, but now I am a little moonstruck from too much time watching the silver curls of the waves and the moon sitting full above powdery white clouds, so there will have to be two story lines running through this post.

Elgin Cathedral

The roads are glittering with ice and silver light tonight. We met a fox in the street and passed a hill in a graveyard which looked like it had warmly lit windows looking out from under the ground. It was only a trick of the light, the street lamps reflecting off the graves, but it put us in mind of stories of fairy hills and troll parties where the hills are raised on pillars and bright lights shine out from underneath them.

But what I meant to tell you when I started pasting photos onto this little piece of your screen, is that in the past couple of months we have gone a-wandering a couple of times.

Our little trips brought us inside the bellies of ruined cathedrals, where the last bits of walls stand like huge old bones, patterning the sky beyond. We looked up into the worn-away faces of bishops turned to stone, or peered into little nooks in the walls where stone men stretched out in sleep, their arms folded across their chests.

In the centre of Elgin Cathedral we came across an old Pictish stone, its carved symbols just barely visible in the dusk. On the other side of the stone there is an elaborate Celtic cross. The light was falling out of the sky as we tried to take a picture, so I'm not sure how much of the carvings you will be able to see. At the bottom is a hunt scene, and at the top there are some of the designs that are found on a lot of Pictish stones, the meanings of which remain rather mysterious.

Inside one of the church towers monster heads grimaced at us from above. The wind whipped around outside and night fell. But that was not our only visit to a skeleton cathedral.

Looking down the old pier into St. Andrews

We also spent a fine day in late December in St. Andrews, with its splendid ruins of a huge cathedral as well as the ruins of a castle that housed the area's bishops before the Reformation.

That day was not so different from tonight: we spent hours on the wide, endless beach there in the wind and the twilight and the oyster catcher cries.

A Book of Sleep & Seven Remembered Dreams

2012-02-02T00:36:00.001Z

A few months ago I won entry into the Sketchbook Project through a giveaway at Pikaland. The book arrived in the post one morning and it had a theme: "I Remember You".

I started trying harder to remember my dreams. My husband made me a little book from leftover cuttings of the thick rag paper I use for etching, tied it up with yarn, and left it beside the bed.

I saved up dreams for a while before I started drawing anything at all. It turned out to be a funny thing to draw out a piece of a dream. Of course, it was not possible to draw a whole dream, so instead it became an odd compromise. Sometimes it made more sense to draw parts of the dream that only existed by implication, or parts that must have taken place before the dream started.

I got lost in the book. I thought of things I had heard about hypnagogic hallucinations where streams of faces flash past dreamers in the space between sleeping and waking. I thought of the strange menaces of sleep apnea. And then I thought about all the vagabond ideas that run all through sleep and into the spaces before and after it.

And so a troupe of thoughts runs along the bottom of every page, intersecting dreams and winding through the blank spaces between them.

In the centre of the book there is a sort of out-of-body experience where these ideas can be seen running down the pillow and into the mind of the dreamer. It seemed like the book needed a bit of an explanation, something to anchor it a little.

This sketchbook is small, only about seven inches tall and the paper inside it is very thin. Pencil is the only medium that such thin paper could hold up against, and even pencil shows through the back of the paper. Yet the more I drew, the more involved I got.

The book developed a weird sort of logic that had to be respected, a balance that had to be maintained.

Unlikely little memories and personal references began to sneak in as well. There is a little reminder of the time we were stopped by a man in India who opened his long trench coat to reveal rows of fake beards that he was trying to sell. Then there is the lamp that hangs above the bed and looks to us like a girl floating down from the ceiling, her skirt billowing out like a parachute.

The other day, as I was putting the last touches on this book of sketches, I decided to read through the dreams I had written down in the little book my husband made for me. Even after so much time I could remember all of them, all but one.

The forgotten dream:

"Strange, lovely bird - sort of like magpie - appears in our house, is very tame & friendly. And we wonder how it came inside. It tells us it followed us home & how it snuck in past us. Turns out to be a strange boy. He has one or two objects that are with him. A sort of container that is bigger when opened from one side than from another & other sorts of unbelievable things."

So I think I will continue to record my dreams in the mornings when I can, to see what surprises might be lurking there.

I used to do that a lot when I was growing up, filling up spiral-bound notebooks with the chicken scratch of early mornings. I remember that it became easier with time.

Because this sketchbook is so small, I thought it would be wiser just to post some details from it here, since they risk going unnoticed on a small photo of the whole page. There are still a lot of things that are not photographed here though, and so I have posted photos of the whole pages on flickr. That will also give a better sense of the sleep cycle structure of the book.

Oh, and this sketchbook, along with many, many, many others will be touring through parts of Canada, America, and also over to London starting this spring. There are tour details on the Sketchbook Project page. There will also be a permanent home for the exhibition in Brooklyn and a digital sketchbook library for those who can't see the books in person. I love the idea of being able to leaf through all these books, and think it is fantastic and thrilling that so many people have given so much to this project.

A Space of Time

2012-01-19T12:08:00.000Z

Sometimes I miss thunderstorms dearly. The weather here does not crash and clatter about in the way it did where I grew up. I miss frozen lakes and snow piled up into dirty grey mountains by the roadside, and sweeping white drifts everywhere else, days trapped in the belly of winter where no one expects anyone will venture out, and so the world becomes a wild, empty place to roam through and shape at will.

In the winter, ridiculously bundled in warm clothing, we would lose the sense of having bodies at all. Except, in the bathroom a screaming pain awaited the hands of children who stayed out too long, when frostbitten fingers would be forced under the hottest water that came from the faucet.

And in the summer, the plants grew riotously and it was almost impossible to imagine ever wanting to wear clothes at all. I thought only of the lake, but was sometimes dragged out of the water to wander through shady forests. We used to run outside to dance and shout at times when the sky turned suddenly green and eerie and the rain made rivers under us. In spring we slipped out barefoot and collected the biggest pieces of hail and hid them in the freezer. And autumn was sweetest of all.

Time works differently in places where the seasons are so varied. Each season is so intensely present that it blots out the others, making them seem lifetimes away. Here where things are more constant, the hours are always about me, and a space of four months seems as meaningless as yesterday. One must cast about a much more subtle eye.

And so we've decided to try and visit the prehistoric markers that managed to make it past all the time and people that have rushed across this bit of land. One day's strolling down the street and across the river brought us to a mossy cist near the bottom of a slope that rises above the river Dee.

These days are small windows of blue winter light that seem to have the stained-glass hues of one long sunset. The sun creaks itself a quarter of the way up the sky and then falls back behind the hills again. The birds fly backwards in the wind. And we hurry to reach the hilltops and home before dark.

Over empty stretches of burnt ground littered with bones, a high heap of stones stands ringed by fresh green moss and scorched gorse bushes. The stones and boulders that were laid together, built up on top of one another to make this cairn, have probably been here at least four thousand years. Past the cairn the city stretches out in rows, and oil ships sit on the horizon. It seems odd that the bony, blackened, empty place should stand ringed in by fences and industrial estates, a dump and a water treatment centre, and further on, the monkey bars of an empty playground. Standing next to the cairn in the shadow of that strangeness, one begins to feel like the wild creature that has crawled out of the woods and sits watching in the shadows at the edge of town.

Further up the hill there are at least three more cairns. Some of them are even larger than the first one. Where the exposed rock meets the grass, it becomes clear that just beneath one's feet there are many more rocks heaped together below the soil. It is impossible to know where the swell of the cairn begins and the rise of the hill ends.

And the light begins to fail. We push through gorse thickets in the dark, thorns catching at our legs. More of this funny timelessness where the sun slides up and down the sky with no consequence. We walk home in the false dark of street lamps. In the gardens snowdrops are already flowering. Though it is January there are sometimes daffodils and the odd tree is blooming. We move away from the expanse of the hilltop where the bones of the earth stand overlooking the city.

Sometimes I can find patterns, but mostly time expands and contracts in ways that mystify me. My words turn the same things about, and I have no sense of the direction onward from here. Back in Paris, around farewell drinks someone said "suppose time is moving slightly faster every day. No one would notice, just each day would be a little bit shorter."

Hip Hip Hooray!

2012-01-12T21:26:00.002Z

Last night the new year arrived on the north coast of Scotland in the tiny fishing villages which keep to the old Julian calendar holidays. In Burghead a fiery procession wound its way sunwise through the town, bringing bits of luck to the doorsteps of the people there.

On top of a flame-covered hilltop, the last bit of the Clavie, which is the name for the burning barrel carried through the town, burnt to the ground as people cheered. And so, the new year began.

There used to be celebrations like this one in many towns on the north coast of Scotland, but this is the last one that remains. I wrote about the Clavie last year too, so have a look here if you are interested in reading more.

As we made our way home, reeking of smoke and tar and full of stovies, clutching our piece of the Clavie to bring us luck, my mind moved back and forth over this past year and on to thoughts of the one sitting ahead.
I have been a little too much in dreamland the past couple of weeks and the time to get back to work and the regular pattern of daily life has come, I think. I have been gathering ideas around me, and I'm looking forward to bringing them out into the world, or at least my little corner of it.

Going back in time eleven days from last night, to the more commonly accepted time for celebrating New Year's Eve, we found ourselves at another fire festival. The photos below come from the fireball celebration in the town of Stonehaven, just south of Aberdeen.

This festival is much larger and also includes a pipe band, a drum group, and fireworks at the end. You can read more about it in last year's post on the same subject. We had a lovely night out, standing about waiting for midnight and learning about life in Kazakhstan and Borneo from a visitor met by chance, and then the hush and roar as bunches of fire went whirling past us... sometimes only just missing us as we stepped quickly back!

There is something hypnotic in these fire processions. Watching as the flames blaze past in the dark street, or trailing along behind them, emotions balance out between excitement and strange awe.

More than candy-coloured fireworks ever could, these raw flaming processions make a deep and dramatic impression. I hope that these tiny glimpses of flames and sparks will warm and quicken you a bit. Thank you for passing this past year with me and my thoughts. May you make your dreams come true this year!

Throwing fireballs in the sea.

A pane of glass, and the dream of summer and winter.

2011-12-29T13:53:00.002Z

Coming back down the hills, over the river, and toward home after a walk in the thrashing wind, there is a sheltered stopping place where flowers bloom even in the darkest days of winter. Outside, gales of wind, howling and roaring, shake the metal frame of the arboretum and scratch at the glass. We walk from room to glowing room of the greenhouse, listening to the creaking and watching clouds roll darkly beyond the glass sky.

It is strange to walk in a hothouse at night. Almost empty of people, there are shadowy corridors with only a little bit of coloured light at the end where a lamp's light shines off tightly growing bunches of flowers. Walking through the dark, towards that brightness, one can stop and smell a flower that has the scent of early spring, and another that hints at midsummer.

In the Arid Room, there is a sign that can be read in the daylight which says that on every day of the year there is a different type of bloom among the cacti. And so we hunt the flowers in the gloom, finding a few odd-shaped blossoms of lemon-yellow and magenta.

A blackbird and a wren live together in the high leaves of the tropics, where the humid air is thick and scented and drops of moisture fall from above. Orchids and Spanish moss press in on us only a few feet from the wild northern night that falls in early afternoon, and the hothouse seems like some kind of biological enchantment growing on this landscape.

In the centre of the glasshouses there are Christmas trees sparkling next to banana and palm trees, patches of poinsettias and cyclamens. A river of tossed coins and goldfish flows under tiny, arched bridges, and somewhere in the backrooms of the greenhouse a man is jingling his keys and calling out that this strange, glowing place is about to shut for the night. And so we slip back into the dark, churning sea of wind and whirling cloud to walk down the empty streets with their stained-glass entrances blazing, all the bay windows full of Christmas trees, and behind them families eating at long tables. On the longest nights we make our own light.

Wishing you a season of the brightest, most beautiful light this winter!

The sky touches every last thing.

2011-12-15T17:54:00.001Z

Only some fat flakes of snow whirled down as two men in their winter hats erected scaffolding on the house across the street. We took our old route down to the sea, looking for evidence of the snow all the while, but there were just some pockets of frost that the sun forgot to chase away from mossy grasses.

Little, glittering shards of the sky flew past and bit us. Small birds came running on their wings, back and forth to the tree at the window, and now the tree is bare of every last rowan berry. Now there is only a thrush that comes and sits on the chimney pots looking down its nose at me through the foggy wet morning window panes.

Towards the sea with coat pockets full of holes and chocolate and the danger of losing things in the lining. We saw another couple, as we slipped between some gravestones and up a hill to a tear in the wire fence. They laid down new flowers, laughed and called to each other as they hurried back and forth to and from their car.

Beyond a rickety wooden weather shelter by the road, the sea floor was swelling up out of the waters, pushing sandy streams down and behind it as it crawled toward the line of cars and cafés. Down toward the harbour, a pod of surfers rose and fell in silhouette.

This month goes creaking on, little tasks get crossed off lists, and there is a lot of hurrying here and there. One whole day baking, another on the phone. Buried on my desk is the old tile I use as a palette, and I am sure that the paints on it must be dried all the way through by now. I feel like, on some still December days, when the normal streets are empty and everyone is in the shops, if no one is looking it should be allowed to float slowly, deafly, up up up away into the cold, quiet blue.

Der Nikolaus

2011-12-06T15:56:00.000Z

Since today is the 6th of December, the feast of St. Nicholas for those who celebrate it, I thought I would send my own little Nikolaus out to you. My father used to tell me that on this day every year, in the town where he was born in Germany, Der Nikolaus would visit in the evening. As he passed through the streets, parents would run out of their houses to call him in for a meeting with their children. All the children knew that the visit of this big, rough-looking man in his worn red coat wasn't a great cause for celebration. The meeting between Der Nikolaus and a child involved an assessment of that child's behaviour since Der Nikolaus' visit the year before, and at the end of the discussion, either an orange or a beating was doled out.

When I asked my father if Der Nikolaus was all alone when he visited the houses, he said "yes. Well, unless maybe he had been out drinking with some friends before. He was a rough sort of man."

In case you are wondering: the 6th of December aside, Christmas itself wasn't so frightening for my father. He and his brothers would be called into the living room late on Christmas Eve to find that Der Christkind had visited and magically left behind a table set for a feast and a tree decorated with lit candles on every branch and presents beneath them. I was always astonished by the idea of an incarnation of Jesus as a baby that left a trail of magic and riches behind him, and I would ask to be told about him again and again. Sometimes I spent Christmas Eve with my father and his family and returned Christmas morning to celebrate again, in typical Canadian fashion, with my mother and her side of the family.

This year, I have tried to be more clever with my cards. I made them a few weeks ago, so they will hopefully arrive on time this year! And I tried to make the subject of the cards more obvious than last year, or the year before, since apparently not everyone wants to read the wee stories we tuck into their cards. At least this year I don't foresee getting little notes into February asking why I made a card with a picture of cows on it. St. Nicholas is so common there can be no confusion.

It also happens that my husband's family has a tradition relating to St. Nicolas' feast day: my husband used to always find little treats left for him in his shoes on the morning of the 6th of December. And up in Scotland this year, it looks as if tonight we might be receiving the wonderful gift of the first snow of the season. So I'll be keeping my fingers crossed for snow and wishing you lots of foil-wrapped chocolates in your shoes and hot spiced drinks by the fire!

Light at the End of the Year

2011-12-03T18:57:00.000Z

These long nights and short days are little poems of flickering candles and twirling notes. Sometimes, it is the slow part of the day. There are the sounds of dishes being washed and some northern-English Christmas carols from the archive my husband works on. There is one carol about a new bride who plays a game of hide-and-seek with her groom on their wedding night, but she is never found... until many years later a heavy, old chest is opened and a wedding gown is found with a skeleton inside. There is a pedal organ and many voices. Other carols are less strange, full of "hark, hark" and angels. In some villages there used to be bands that would wander about in the cold on Christmas Eve singing and playing music in the streets until the sun rose on Christmas morning. Apparently many churches made sure to acquire big pipe organs to curb this behaviour, bringing the music into the church and the choir under their control. I must admit I never suspected a beautiful church organ as being used as a force for control and loss of culture, among other things.

The night before last, we heard the most beautiful music from Hungary and Romania. I never have my camera when I need it, so there are no photos of upright basses, accordions and fiddles catching the light of candles stuck in old bourbon bottles, or women dancing past stacks of piled up chairs (only some glimpses from last weekend in Edinburgh for your eyes). But at least I can direct you towards the source of all the beauty: the website of The Jani Lang Band, and that of Tcha Limberger, who was playing along with the band as a special guest. The music was brilliant all night and all of the musicians were amazingly talented, but I was completely spellbound by Tcha Limberger's solo part of the evening. He sang, sometimes in Magyar and sometimes in Romani, as he accompanied himself on fiddle or on guitar. I didn't want it to ever end.

And as December settles in and blackbirds sit in the bare branches just outside eating red berries, as the afternoons turn inky and dark and gales blow in off the North Sea, I have to fight with myself not to hibernate. One more spot of brightness keeping me from a long winter's nap is Romica Puceanu, who I found out about by reading the lovely City of Reubens blog. Romica Puceanu started singing in Bucharest cafés when she was just 14, and she had a gorgeous, velvety voice backed by beautiful cimbalom, accordion, and fiddle playing. Little treasures like this are especially important in winter, I think. These long evenings need to be filled so full that it doesn't seem to matter if the sun ever rises again.

Windows and Wallflowers

2011-11-21T19:20:00.001Z

Wallflower

I have been off dissecting accordions with a group of old gentlemen and strolling the back lanes in the dark. I have sold raffle tickets (and won a mouth harp!), and drunk free whisky that made my arms go numb at an art show I contributed a couple of things to. I have been practising old tunes on the concertina around sunset these days. I have spent some lovely evenings in the homes of people who have thrown open their doors to me. In short, I think the anxious blues of the past months have been chased away, and we are settling into another winter. Now that absolutely all of our plans have fallen through, I can safely say that we are staying here in Aberdeen for a little while yet. I think it will be lovely.

Two very, very late or very, very early crocuses from the other day.

We will be heading down to Edinburgh later on this week, so I thought I'd share an old photo of some stained glass windows there that I always enjoy looking at when they are lit up at night. The whole matter of "nobody watching" is a little bit funny with all the crazy surveillance in the UK. But it does make me think of my grandparents and the strange joy they seemed to derive from keeping tabs on the neighbours.

"My mother knew everybody in this street. She could reel off the occupants of every single house; everybody could once upon a time. Now they come and they go. That's why these tragedies happen; nobody watching. If they knew they were being watched they might behave." (Click to enlarge)

Update: I'm back from Edinburgh with more info about the image above. The window displays are still in place, though they weren't lit up when I passed by the other night. On further, closer inspection it appears that they are not stained glass windows, but skillfully done papercuts with coloured tissue paper added. I was also able to find out that the artist is Astrid Jaekel and she has done other delightful installations like this one, which can be seen on her website.

A horn that can only sing to my eyes.

2011-11-07T19:21:00.000Z

By three p.m. the November sun has hammered itself into a thin sheet of gold leaf that rests on top of damp, bent-over grasses. Beaches that sit at the bottom of green cliffs with scuttle-down foot paths are already pulling the waves up around them and settling in for a long sleep in the early evening shadows.

Even as the light changes so quickly there are odd moments of birds suspended in the air just over head. Their wings flap hard but they hang in the same spot, unable to advance against the wind. The earth is whirling through space, but we have paused for a second.

In the coastal hills that roll just above the city, a huge horse walked over and pushed its enormous forehead up against me, with quiet half-closed eyes. Down on a rocky little beach in a craggy place, an old sea freight container sits covered in layers of paint and rust, full of secrets.

We crawled up into a rocky place below the lighthouse, with our feet hanging out over the cold waves and just enough room to sit, and as the sun set we drank hot milk tea from a flask and ate bannocks. A lonely seal peered up at us, and the city spread down the coast in roaring lights as orange as the sky.

A Lonesome Place

2011-10-28T23:10:00.000+01:00

A Lonesome Place, oil on wood 24.5cm x 30cm

The weather smiled on me and finally gave up a bit of light for taking photographs, and so now I can smile a funny sort of smile at you by finally sharing a new painting. I should probably mention that what you see in the images below is a lot bigger than reality (which is why specks of dust look enormous!). And the colours are, as usual, not quite right either, though they're the best I could manage in my little setup.

This painting began when we lived in Paris. We only had use of a bathtub, not a shower, which meant that washing long hair was a bit tiresome, and it was impossible to successfully be in a hurry about getting ready to go out. It also meant that sometimes ideas might swim past while one was lying flat in the tub mulling things over, looking up through the water, and listening to the pianist upstairs practising (the sounds were louder underwater). Just over a year ago, in the summer before we moved to Scotland, I fished this idea out of the water. When we moved, I carried its physical beginnings in my hand-luggage, but at that time it was only an underpainting, a little further along than it is in this photo:

And then thin layers of paint, with thick layers of time in between them, were piled one on top of the other. Paint dries so much more slowly where we live now, especially as winter comes on.

As I settled in to work on the painting, I fell into a world that had its own laws of matter.

For my paintbrush it was a tangled maze through transparent and solid forms.

As I wound my way through it I slipped in little details like feathered hair, and clothes that might have been a bed sheet stolen from a washing line, or woven out of a night sky. I tried to work in clues quietly.

I wanted to build an outdoor place, with an architecture of leaves torn from old manuscripts and trees that grew in stained-glass window arches.

In this crowded thicket of a painting, I hoped your eyes might dance a bit.

And now, all of my smallest paint brushes are down to their last one or two bent hairs.

A good sort of problem to have, I suppose.

Some time after the sun was extinguished...

2011-10-25T12:51:00.000+01:00

A little while ago, earlier this morning, we woke up, my husband not quite yet late for work (and me with a day off). The covers seemed heavier than usual, in fact, there was a real pressure weighing on the bed. But it was only some cloud that had slipped in around the window's edge, not to worry; it was easily brushed off onto the floor.

   And then, as early as that, the first mistake of the day was made: the heavy curtains were drawn back from the window, and contrary to custom, the room was not illuminated. No, rather, every last drop of light that had made up the gloom of the curtained room was sucked out, into the dark, dark day. I guess that light is out there now rioting around somewhere, giving even more strength to the wind that is galloping about and grinding down the houses.

    In Canada, snow may creep up around your windows, it may even cover your house, trapping you inside, but there is a limit to snow. Cloud, on the other hand, is a substance that may go on farther than the imagination can stretch.

   The rain is hissing on the window panes, and I guess I am alone now. Even if my husband is not carried away to Norway or further by this wind, he has very little chance of being able to fight his way back to me through all of this cloud, I should think. I would light the windows with candles, or make a big glowing, warm hearth fire to guide him back to me, but we've burned all our wood, all our candles. I think the best course of action is to hide myself away in a heap of blankets and hot water bottles. It's true that I will most likely meet my end smothered by my own accumulated clouds of breath, which help all this cloud to grow at a terrible rate, but I will scrawl out some pictographs in case my resting place is uncovered one day.

But for this long stretch of grey days, I would have posted a painting here, which I finished some time ago. Instead I'll leave you with a page from a little sketchbook of remembered dreams I've been working on for the Sketchbook Project, which I was lucky and won entry into over on the Pikaland blog.

May God preserve you from unending cloud.

Pacing October

2011-10-10T16:54:00.001+01:00

And then I became filled with anxiety, wordless troubles, and restlessness. Worries and aimlessness whirled around me like dead old leaves. Boxes sat unpacked, plans were left unmade, and an aura of indistinctness hovered about these dusty rooms. There was a swelling grief of unnamed things.

The only thing left to do was to retreat to the park and the woods on the outskirts of town.

Eating apples on a park bench, drinking hot tea from a flask. Walking until the night falls, heavy and inky.

At this time of year, early in the mornings and evenings the light is not yet lit in the hallway and staircase of our tenement. It is necessary to enter the yawning building and feel along the wall in the pitch dark, stumble over to the first tattered step and then begin climbing up the flights of stairs, hoping the neighbour is home so that at the landing, by the doorstep, some light will shine down from the window above their door to make it easier to find the right key.

We are still possibly moving countries again in a few weeks time, though nothing is close to sure enough for us to have started preparing at all. I paint a little and then worry that there is not enough time for the paint to dry before it will have to be packed up and sent away to wherever it is that we are going.

At least there are the woods and waves and howling winds.

The Other Side

2011-09-22T23:58:00.000+01:00

Before the nights settle in and overwhelm the days, and before summer seems almost too distant to be plausible, I thought I should finally post some more photos taken on my wanderings of a few months ago, when my mother visited from Canada and we set off down the walk, through the lanes and then down the many roads that wound us west.

If I'm honest, I'll admit that it seemed for a while that we could sum up our trip quite easily:

There were days of bare feet on the dashboard, mountains looming high on all sides, the road winding and worsening, becoming potholed, single-track dirt paths that clung to the sides of mountains, with any oncoming traffic initiating a sometimes precarious dance of backing into passing places and customary polite waves and nods.

And the landscape gave up its treasures, the wrecks of castles scattered about on lonely vantage points.

Sometimes they didn't emerge fully from their surroundings, and the forests wrapped themselves about them tightly.

Other times they were too exposed, and the wind and the years devoured them slowly.

There were lighthouses that dreamt of mosques, and stood on the shores watching ceaselessly for things that might wash up beside them, carried over the waves to them from faraway lands.

And sometimes those waves opened up into a great network of roads for us; some days we went from island to island on little quests we had set for ourselves.

On a calm day we landed on Staffa to visit Fingal's cave. We crept inside to hear the echos that inspired a seasick Mendelssohn, but the ocean was too still, and we heard instead only the approaching voices of others coming to explore the cave. So we went off to take pictures of our shoes on the hexagon-shaped rocks that make up the island, and explore.

Sitting by the edge of a cliff we had a visit from a group of puffins, and a group of midges, both of which hovered around our ankles, keeping close company.

The odd doddering gait of puffins, and their close, uninhibited carry on made me feel as if I had stumbled into a sort of fable full of gentlemanly animals that spoke politely and kept appointments for afternoon tea.

A minke whale swam alongside us as we left Staffa and the clear, turquoise waters turned a cold, opaque blue. We landed on Iona and wandered in a fog.

We slipped into the cloisters of Columba's church after closing time and then haunted the cathedral for a while before heading out into the cold, wet centre of the thick cloud that was sat on the island.

Other days we traded in our sea legs and we moved along the outlines of the mountains, though our eyes still floated across the formless seas.

We happened upon a few hidden pockets of paradise, waded in the shallow pools made by the many waterfalls that cascaded down from the mountains, their waters stopping to sit for a while in the shade of the trees before rushing over a cliff edge and falling straight down down down.

We ate mussels every night in little harbour towns where tiny fishing boats rolled and pulled at their anchors, or sat still and stuck when the tide was out and the harbour was transformed into an almost-empty bucket of sand.

And, always, there was more road ahead.

Somehow, I am not the best at keeping a holiday moving along from destination to exciting destination following opening hours and itineraries. The details that seem important are not normally written on maps.

And so we wandered graveyards and found glass tubes of angels outside of must-see castles that we did not see...

...we stopped and smelt the flowers leaning out of the closed-up gardens and then we tripped off down another lane, and another, until we were far away, far away like a September's night.

Wood Woes

2011-09-15T20:06:00.000+01:00

Wood Woes, I

Wood Woes, II

Wood Woes, III

   Three new etchings. Tiny ones that fit in the palm of your hand. I've been thinking about old tapestries with wild men leering or dancing through lush forests, tapestries that make you feel as if you are in the deepest woods when you look at them. In 15th century Germany there was a profusion of tapestries and other artworks with this theme. Those wild men, covered in their leaves or fur or flowers seem to waver between being portrayals of utopias and scenes that threaten violence.

   The title of these prints, which highlights the depiction of the relationship between people and their surroundings, is also a homophone of "woodwose" which is an old English word for these wild people that stalk the forests. I am pleased to have found a title that is a bit tricky and ambiguous, where what is read out might not be what is heard and understood. After I had the prints finished and was searching around, trying to prove that I did not make this word up, I came across a link to "am fear liath mòr" which means "the big grey man" in Scots Gaelic. It seems that right here in Aberdeenshire, in the Cairngorms, there are legends of a wild man haunting the peak of a local mountain. A strange and wonderful surprise.

   The wild person as a sort of creature, with possible origins as a deity or perhaps as a species apart from man, is intriguing. I had a friend a long time ago who, one day, out of the blue, went quiet and then asked me if I believed in Sasquatches. It is gladdening to think that the woods can be such deep and mysterious places. And then there are the stories of mystics and saints and recluses that go off for one reason or another and live at the mercy of god or nature. In fact, this blog's title comes, in a roundabout sort of way, from one such story... from all the nights that 'Mad Sweeney' spent huddled, sheltering in yew trees, half-man, half-crazed and half-holy.

Eyes on the ground.

2011-09-13T20:44:00.000+01:00

At the edges of the woods the leaves are turning. Yellow leaves sit on the mossy ground and trick even the most discerning eye into seeing tiny, golden chanterelle mushrooms growing just a few steps away.

Deep in the woods, though, things are greener, and that's where the most mushrooms can be found, dotting the old logging roads, or standing alone in the shadows.

In the small clearings small folk still bask in the sun...

... and stretch their wings before the colder days ahead.

Wandering away from the others deep in the shady green of the woods, the day begins to feel like a dream or perhaps a long underwater swim. Who can tell how much time passes before a far off call comes from the others, before it is necessary to break a shortcut through the undergrowth, gathering bouquets of twigs in my hair?

We ate chanterelles at every meal for a week after our little foraging expedition.


(Sorry for the ugly kitchen floor, but renters can't be choosers, I guess.)

Our arms were heavy with our harvest. We sat down on the grass and sorted them, a friend telling us which ones to cook together, which ones needed the skin removed before eating, and saving us from a poisonous one that snuck in somehow.
So it was chanterelles with scrambled eggs for breakfast, and in soups, in sauces, on toast, with potatoes... every way you could possibly eat them, we ate them. Luckily, it is almost impossible to get tired of anything so delicious, and fragrant as chanterelles (they smell like apricots).

Garlands of drying mushrooms

We dried the rest for later.

A lively topiary hedge we found on the way to the woods.

So, in between the busyness and bouts of maybe-moving madness, we've been having a little bit of a wild mushroom obsession over here, pouring over mushroom books in the evening and making spore prints and things. But the best source of knowledge of all comes from friends that have been picking mushrooms in the woods with their families their whole lives. Lucky us to have friends like that!

And whenever this blustery rain moves off, I'll take some photos of the tiny etchings I mentioned in my last post so I can share them with you, now that they are finished. I hope September is treating you well!

A Hush and a Roar

2011-08-30T01:08:00.001+01:00

This morning we walked stones circles with friends before work. The nights have been full of sideways sheets of rain and winds that gnaw the sides of the buildings.

I have been trying to pretend the summer isn't over, loyally wearing a summer dress in wind and rain and eight-degree temperatures, so as not to offend August (even as she blows my umbrella inside out).

We had to work on Saturday and so we missed our friend's last year of piping in the Lonach march. But on Sunday night we went out into the wild weather to see his band troupe up and into a small stone church at the start of its service, so that it was overflowing with wild piping and the granite was racked with music. And then at the end we followed them off down the hill, into the rain.

There is something a bit magical about marching through the countryside.

In the church I heard a man say it was wrong, but I love the world, and I love it dearly. As the first crisp, shivery bits of autumn set in I find I love everything ten times more. This evening stirring cocoa on the stove, cool crisp air came in at the window, bringing voices from the street, and from another direction a single pair of high heels ringing hollowly on the pavement, and it came back to me just how much I look forward to hearing these sounds on autumn nights.

Saturday, after working in the market all day, selling things in the chill and rain, I came home and lit the fire. All evening I worked at my copper plates amid the crackling and popping, as if I were in an engine room at the boiling centre of everything.

Summer and autumn are running zigzags past each other. I noticed the other day that our calendar rather strangely and abruptly runs out of pages after August. How funny to see it written so plainly that we are reaching out, out into uncharted waters now. The lease is almost up as well, and there are so many decisions to make. Time to gather acorns, I suppose.

A quick sketch in blurred photos.

2011-08-23T17:45:00.000+01:00

A small hello from the world beside my desk before starting on some copper plates. The sunsets are creeping up and making it harder to catch a bit of daylight to work by. The rooftops are emptier too, except for the occasional return of the gulls that hatched a few months ago. These end of summer days roar by so quickly. Yesterday we sat down on some driftwood at the seashore. Some dolphins went leaping through the waves down the beach and back up it again, and the whole evening was gone, just like that. Perhaps I need a little pad of paper with me so I can pin some of these moments down on the pages. There is a stack of wood by the fireplace now, waiting for the cold nights.

The oceans of my shoes, the rivers of my back.

2011-08-15T19:52:00.003+01:00

In the woods yesterday we happened to meet some builders of leafy houses, gathering ferns and sticking them into place just so. We said hello and passed on, finding the skeletons of a few more houses further down the way, left over from other days, I guess. We peeked into some mossy corners of the forest, where my friend had seen good mushrooms growing before. But between the rain showers and the mad sun, we had another purpose, and it grew low to the ground, in the heathery bog up a hill.

The darkest, sweetest wild blueberries.

With bellies already full of raspberries from down in the woods, we set about collecting bottles full of blueberries to bring home to husbands who had to be at work or write dissertations. The berries were ripe, overripe, falling between our fingers to the ground sometimes when we tried to pick them. The rain returned and we persevered, wandering off in separate directions, calling back at each other through the downpour. When the rain finally came pelting down in a sheet we sat in a dry place beneath some trees to wait it out.

It was possible to see all the way to the sea past Aberdeen (just there on the right). It looked for a moment as though the sun might stay out for a while, but it was not to be. As we walked down the path, which had become a river, the rain started up again. By the time we were in the woods, the sky had grown so dark, that the shadows under the trees had darkened into a sort of false night. Even though it was not cold we could see our breath in the moist air.

We decided to go off in search of a statue that looked like a round wooden room with no roof. On the way we encountered many mushrooms, only one of which was edible (a nice cep). My camera was having a bit of trouble with the weather, so these photos of beautiful, but poisonous, mushrooms come from another walk in another wood, a week or so ago. You'll have to imagine the gloom of the rain dark forest on them.

It was a lovely day altogether, even beyond the afternoon in the woods. We woke early (for a Sunday) to walk down to the Aberdeen Art Fair in the city music hall (where I had a print showing) to see the work of a friend. Then there was tea and melon in the sun, and cupcakes for dessert. Late in the day there were bowls of fresh wild blueberries, work on tiny drawings, and another fine rainbow at the window before the evening came and the full moon rose.

When fire and water are not opposites.

2011-08-10T23:05:00.001+01:00

Four of us set off westwards, having only met a short time before. Mountains danced circles around us in the daylight, and when the evenings came on we searched for dry, even land, for trees, and sheepless places. We hoped to sleep beside water. One night the tiny strip of woods between the road and a loch gave us shelter and firewood and wild mushrooms for breakfast. And water as smooth as a looking glass, until the rain came.

On our little journey we learned a lot about the moods of mountains.

It turns that on Skye you never pass the same scenery twice, and sometimes maybe you don't pass by anything at all... except clouds and fog and mist!

We turned up on the Isle of Skye on a bright blue-skied day. Some mountains wore tiny cloud hats. Looking up at them, I felt filled with a longing to climb up and experience the pleasure of temporarily having a tiny palace of mists and vapours to roam about in.

Though, in the end there was no need. We sat on a hill and cooked fish on a barbecue, enjoying the sun, watching the cows a little beyond us, looking far out across the sea. Though there had not been anything but a hint of cloud at the very edge of the world when we sat down, before the food was cooked it was clear that something had altered.

The temperature for one thing. Even once we had put on jackets and scarves, it was no longer warm enough to enjoy the sweet, summery picnic we had been waiting for all day. (I've been taking my breakfast with Moomins the past few days... so please permit me to say that it was a little like a Groke had passed by).

Soon there were no more hills or mountains, only the damp grass at our feet and a world of grey and shadows. So it happens that we passed some of the most scenic spots on the island, without getting any idea of how they look.

We made up for it in other ways though. Eating a homemade dinner and homebaked cake that had flown with our friend all the way from Poland on the first morning of our trip. Another night, scrambling eggs by the sea, with an audience of many sea gulls, we even spotted a whale passing by. There was also some collecting of firewood from recent clear cuts, and then fitting it into every possible space in the overfull car, so we could sit around a fireside in the rain. In fact, I am not sure there has ever been so much outdoor cooking under such rainy conditions. Perhaps it was the buffalo grass vodka that flew in from Poland too?

Fires and vodka you say? Please don't think we wrecked the place... only the flattened grass from under our tents would have indicated where we set up camp. Promise.

We became spoiled for waterfalls. At the start of the trip we called out excitedly at each new discovery of water crashing down a cliff or mountain. By the end of it these cries were being qualified: "oh, only a small waterfall over there". The place was just too beautiful.

And even on the way to and from the island, there were wonders.

Like the famous Eilean Donan castle, beneath which the king of the otters is said to lie buried in a coat of silver.

And inside of which we found a nest of swallows, with all the chicks sitting in a row. We had unwittingly stumbled in on their feeding time, and scared away their mother, so they were probably a bit peeved when this photo was taken.

One of my favourite parts of the trip was the part of the journey where we wound our way past the mountains called The Five Sisters of Kintail, though I was too awestruck to take any photos.

The road home followed the long sides of Loch Ness with a special stop in at Fort Augustus to sneak onto the grounds of the old monastery there. It's all private residences now, so we really did have sneak, past the wealthy families playing catch on the expansive and empty lawns, past the post restaurant. My husband's school was founded by Benedictine monks that came from Fort Augustus. The monks who taught him ate lunch every day under murals of the founding school. So we snuck.

And then it was all over too soon, and we were home again, minds full and sparkling from days so packed with goodness, and our campfire smoky smell suddenly seeming so brash in the closed up apartment.

The spinning top takes a nap.

2011-08-03T22:59:00.000+01:00

Today haar came in off the sea, a thick fog that rushes in and makes everything disappear all at once. Soon again it drifted out on the waves, the sun came out, the evening fell, then blue night caterwauled in the lanes. Between this post and the last one I have travelled across Scotland and back twice. There have been whales and castle gardens, hermit crabs and harpists, campfires and sitting in cold pools made by mountain streams. My mother came over from Canada too, and we hunted in the woods and on the hills, by the sea and into the city shops for pretty things together. And at the end of all of it, I feel still too wrapped up in travels and talk to write much of anything in this neglected little place. Today someone asked what I am working on right now, and I had to say I wasn't sure. But soon, soon I will have pictures to share and stories to tell, and I will catch up on yours.

Old Markers and Overgrowth

2011-07-12T15:41:00.000+01:00

These summer days are falling like peony petals. I only glimpsed a dropping movement from the corner of my eye, and later I found a whole pile of days lying there, one on top of another.

I spent a morning curled up near the trunks of that rowan tree, which still stands guarding the entrance to an old croft where the wind and hours have played a long time between the crumbling cottage walls.

These days some passing cows sheltering from the rain are the only ones to enjoy the tree's protection from witches and fires and getting lost.

And I was only hiding under the leaves from the sunshine, looking out over the start of the highlands, watching the shadows of clouds passing, green hills turning blue.

And growing one more thistle to add to the forest of them that stand in the old field.

A friend showed me the old road to Edinburgh, where kings and armies passed long ago. It was just a bit of grass going indistinctly uphill through the broom, overlooking the rowan and the cottage. The sort of place where one might just chance to walk now.

The plein air painters set up their easels, balanced blocks of water colour paper on their knees, drank flasks of coffee and tea. I set down my things and went strolling the crest of a hill, found a forest of ferns, sat under the scotch pines.

And then the clouds began to grow weary of rushing past, dragging their shadows through the grasses behind them. They sat on the hills and breathed their cold, misty breath on our bared arms and sang crisp breezes across the valleys.

Jackets came out of bags, tubes of paint went into them. The last of the strawberries were divided, and the easels were folded away. Packs on our backs, we wound down the old Edinburgh road, then down the overgrown farm track, with two rocky paths through the grass for wheels, and between them a wide lane of waist-high grass. Tiny birds passed low over crop fields and halted on stone walls.

And as we journeyed home, we found the road was marked with strange and lovely sights: earth houses, and Pictish stones with lines that weaved themselves into crosses, horses, marching feet, crescents and combs.

And since then there have been many days to sit in a window and watch the raindrops trace long patterns down the glass, writing out maps of the wonders hidden so calmly in the hills, not so far and not so near home.

Marginalia

2011-07-04T18:25:00.004+01:00

At our house, the long daylight hours of June were etched into copper and then pressed deep into rich, heavy paper. Seagull cries from the rooftop world just outside the window were frozen, fossil-like, in the metal plate, and the strange landscape of my Aberdeen was written out in a sort of medieval iconography, full of tottering allegories and loving details.

Marginalia, etching, 15 x 20cm

A foreigner's city portrait, for a place that is more used to landscapes.

It all started around the beginning of June, when a little card arrived one morning in the post announcing that there would be a printmaking festival in Aberdeen in July and calling for work to be submitted.

So I started sketching and drawing and redrawing...

...and finally this print (and two others, older ones) will be among the prints on display in the Claremont Studio until the end of July.

I also have three prints in the 10th Lessedra World Art Print Annual Exhibition in Sofia, Bulgaria (which started in June and goes until the end of August). Its an enormous show of miniprints with people from over 50 countries participating. They've made a separate page for each artist in the show, mine is here. I've really been enjoying looking through the works, and I can't wait to receive a copy of the catalogue.

Looking at the work of the artists who participated in the Lessedra show last year made me want to be in the show myself this year. And I am a little in love with Bulgaria, and really enjoyed visiting Sofia a few years ago, so having my work on display over there is especially sweet.

But Aberdeen is proving to be a splendid city to be in this summer as well, with two printmaking festivals on during the month of July! I'm hoping that tomorrow I will be able to get around to see what is going on in the different galleries. From what I saw when I was handing in my prints, the other works should be lovely.

The hands of the clock got lost in the fog.

2011-06-26T19:05:00.000+01:00

Looking back now, it is hard to say what has happened these past few weeks. Not much remains but a blur of a bent back, a sore hand and tired eyes from too many hours at a desk and a copperplate. At the window there have been the capers of seagull chicks on the roof tops. There must be about ten chicks living in easy view these days. Some will be flying soon and others are still taking shaky steps up and down the roof slates, around and between the chimney pipes. Some pink and yellow roses sit in a jar, a merry little song brought from the garden of a neighbour. There is a patchwork quilt of fallen petals on the table cloth below them. I've hardly left the desk at all.

Last weekend was the sole exception. My father-in-law flew into Edinburgh from France to spend the weekend, and so we took the train down to meet him. We feasted on the museums, strolled the palace, climbed the hills and followed the waters. Mists hung on the corners of every building, rains washed the streets and a million fingers pressed their camera shutters closed a billion times.

BEhold how good a thing it is / and how becoming well / Together such as brethren are / in unity to dwell / It is an honour for me to cease from strife.

Inside Holyroodhouse there was an exhibit, 'The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein' which was a little paradise to visit. Since there were not too many other people there, we were able to linger over each print and painting, tracing all the details with our eyes. It was possible to be breathed in by the paintings, to lean close and see all the subtle hatching and cross hatching in only slightly varying pigments that made up the seemingly smooth skin tones. And then to step back a little, and a little more.

And then there was wandering in the rain, through the gardens and the ruined abbey behind the palace.

We also happened upon the recently completed 'Battle of Prestonpans Tapestry' in St. Mary's Cathedral. Inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, and telling the story of the Jacobite rising of 1745 in 104 panels, it is apparently now the longest tapestry in the world. The whole thing can be seen online here, and it's worth having a look.

And all this past while it has been raining and raining and the temperature around ten degrees. All those days at the desk seem all the more blurred and jumbled because even the sun stopped marking the usual hourly procession across the walls and floor. There ceased to be hours and minutes, or evenings, mornings and afternoons, there was just a dull timelessness. I didn't have to start the day at one end of the desk where the light is good in the morning, and slowly inch over to the other side as the time passed. There was just empty working hours and endless stories on the radio.

But the other day I finally finished the etching that I was working on, and so the hours have regained their form somewhat. Time is rolling by nicely again, the hands of the clock creaking on like the spokes of wagon wheels spinning past. Finally I begin to feel like maybe the days may be going somewhere again.

Soon I'll share the new etching with you, and now I'll be answering emails again, and leaving comments on your blogs, instead of just reading them and keeping to myself. It has really been a bright spot in my days, to sit down with my lunch and read through the glittering treasure box overflowing with all your posts.

I am hoping to grab hold of this strange and squally summer, with its night frosts and gales and live it a little bit more fully than I have this past little while. No more insane, self-imposed deadlines for a while I think. I would like to have at least a few adventures before the berries are all off the branches.

Strolling the River

2011-06-08T00:56:00.000+01:00

I thought I would take a break from the rainy night and drawing out crowds of grotesques and flowered borders. I thought I might drink some tea and paste up pictures of a tea drinking spot by the river where we propped ourselves on some rocks, our feet just above the water and drowned leaves.

We walked out of the city and through a wood, until we found horses to picnic with and hills to run sliding down in the wrong shoes, since we weren't expecting to walk so far when we set out. We found a trapeze artist's bridge across the river and a narrow path to wind through grass and flowers on.

A heron swooped past, going up river.

Further on, anise-scented forests grew. Purple flower blankets were spread out over the soil, and white blossoms stood waist-high. Being lost in a green place on a sunny afternoon is a great pleasure, and must be relished.

Especially when there are the sweetest smelling wild roses to be found and strange faces peek out of the undergrowth.

I am continually charmed by this city where one can stroll a little too long and find cows or dolphins, depending on the way one points their feet. I treasure that.

Cushie-dous an a keekin-gless

2011-06-02T11:32:00.000+01:00

These days have been for strolling sunny pathways and picnic lunches on trees uprooted in the recent gales. I've been baking bread, eating marzipan in the churchyard, and taking trips to the art gallery timed to beat cloudbursts. A pair of old polyurethane ink rollers turned to an orange puddle on the window ledge, but they were in such bad shape already that it didn't matter and the colour of the mess was secretly a delight.

A couple of weeks ago I was commissioned to illustrate a lovely Doric language story called 'The Last Een' by Linda Smith. It was this year's winner of the Toulmin Prize, an annual literary competition in the North East of Scotland. Not being from Scotland, it's always interesting for me to puzzle my way through the Doric. I love finding words like watergaw (an incomplete rainbow), stammygaster (a great and sudden disappointment), and shargar (a stunted person). (The title of this post would be 'Wood Pigeons and a Mirror' in English.) The story and my illustration can be found in this month's edition of Leopard Magazine.

   Many families of herring gulls have been nesting in the chimneys across the street for the past while. And yesterday, drawing by the window, I looked up to see that one family were nudging along a new chick as it wobbled up and down the roof tiles. While it hasn't been helping me to concentrate on the things I should be working on, it's lovely watching the little guy sticking out his wings for balance and trying to run up the rooftop, or flopping exhausted on its belly and falling asleep before it can renew its efforts to climb upwards. Meal times have been exciting and noisy spectacles, attracting extra gulls, and making it difficult to talk on the phone.

   Oh ho, who can believe it's June already?

Beware! On windblown nights we haunt the park.

2011-05-27T13:55:00.000+01:00

   Last night, just a little after midnight we went out to spy aurora borealis, without much hope. Earlier, on the way home from the store, to buy some things for dinner around ten pm, the sky had been full of the strangest light. If the sky were a dome, dark clouds sat at the very top, and around the bottom edges, closest to the ground, a clear turquoise light filtered in. On our midnight stroll in the park, the clouds were still in their places, but since night had fallen they were making an almost white dome now, with edges that scowled darkness.

   The trees were swaying and singing 'ssssssshhhhhhhhelter, sssssshhhhhhhhells, sssshhhhoal, ssssssshhhhhhapelessssssss, ssssssshhhhhhhhiver' in the park, the closest darkest place we could think of. There were so many clouds that we knew our aurora hunt would be in vain, but geomagnetic forces were high, pulling us from the house nonetheless.

   Even in the park it was not really dark. We could easily see more than if there had been a very bright full moon, though there was no moon to be seen. In a circle of enormous rhododendrons we walked from pink to red to white flowers, pressing our faces into them, feeling like shades of ourselves that had somehow slipped into a wonderland, where daytime was just a little darker than we were used to, where the flowers almost glowed. I think some of the clouds fell a little at the end, riding on the waves of leaves that churned and tossed wildly in the treetops.

   Finally we were brought homewards, hauled in gracelessly by a net of morning commitments. Away from the strange luminosity in the park, through the rows of little houses where gardens of flowers hummed in their sleep. Across the empty road, to look into the framing gallery's window, seeing landscape photography in the orange street light. Pulling misty air into our lungs, because inside the rickety old door voices must turn to whispers as we climb up up up the staircase.

Landscapes in Seafoam

2011-05-23T22:26:00.000+01:00

The house is shuddering and shaking. The slates of the roof are pulling themselves free and dashing themselves to the ground. Somewhere the wind catches on a corner and whistles shrilly as it passes.

The green leaves are being torn from their branches and the gulls are shrinking, hiding in corners with their feathers pressed in close.

And so, I suppose, am I.

On this evening of roaring and rushing, I thought of the calm place between the sea and the land, of the patterns on the rocks and the weeds that stand sometimes on the ocean floor, and sometimes at the end of the earth.

We walked out across an eternity of volcanic rock to the place where the rocks grow too slippery to walk on. We tread onward, good sense be drowned. Creeping and slipping, drinking the salt spray air, we tottered to the edges of tide pools, and very nearly into them.

My husband brought back a handful of patterned photos. I grew algae and sea mud up one of my legs and brought that back, to churn around in the desperate storms of the kitchen washing machine. It seemed nicer somehow to share the photos.

A Ghost Story

2011-05-19T15:31:00.002+01:00

In March, in the comments to another post, a ghost story was requested. I didn't forget, but I needed some time to find a good story. I thought about all the ghosts that are said to haunt the streets of Aberdeen (from the reports, it seems they would probably out number the living population passing through the streets on most days). But those are not really stories, just anecdotes of sightings, cold draughts, and mysterious footprints or invisible hands grabbing at ankles. A ghost just walking past is hardly more interesting than any other sort of stranger walking past, really. So the days rolled by, and the search for a story sat on the periphery of things, waiting for something good to come up.

In Shetland, we bought a book, The Foy and Other Folk Tales, written by a local storyteller, Lawrence Tulloch who comes from a long line of Shetland storytellers. There are all kinds of excellently told stories in the book -- trow stories, a tall tale competition between sailors, portraits of people who used to live in Shetland, stories of witches, selkies, and of course of ghosts! And there was one ghost story in particular that captured my imagination....

However, the problem of how to tell the tale arises now. Since, if I had heard the story out loud, I would just tell you my version. But since I read it in a book, and I would be writing it here for you, it seems a little awkward. Should I tell the tale in brief summary? Should I work it around and change it to suit me? I think I will give you the story as I remember it, without checking back. But also I want to stress that I highly, highly, highly recommend reading the far better version of it in Lawrence Tulloch's book.

   A young man was engaged to be married. A week or so before the wedding, he was on his way to visit the father of his bride-to-be to seal the deal with a drink, as was the custom in Shetland. As he was walking there, he noticed that his dog had been following him, and now they were half-way to the house and it was too late to bring the dog home again. He shouted at the dog, telling it to return home, but it was no use as the dog was still young and not yet well-trained. So he ignored the dog, hoping it would get bored and go home on its own.

   A short while later, after they had passed a cemetery, he noticed that the dog was playing with a human skull, throwing it up in the air and chewing on it. He took the skull away from the dog and buried it, saying "if you were alive, I'd have invited you to my wedding, but since you are not, I hope that you can rest in peace". Then he continued on his way.

   The week passed quickly and sooner than he could believe he found himself in the happy situation of dancing at his own wedding with his lovely new bride in his arms. Everyone had packed themselves into the home of the newlyweds to dance the night away to wedding music played finely on the fiddle.

   Late in the evening, a knock sounded on the door. People living in Shetland at the time were not accustomed to knocking before entering; it was usual just to walk in and announce yourself when you came to a house. It was perhaps because of this, that when the knock was heard, all music, talk, and dancing stopped abruptly.

When the groom opened the door, he found a man that he had never seen before standing before him. The stranger requested the groom to come away with him. The groom refused, saying he would not leave his own wedding. The stranger, however, was so persistent and so persuasive that eventually he succeeded in convincing the man to accompany him, just for a short while, mind you.

   The young man and the stranger walked out into the night together. They walked for quite some time, and gradually it dawned on the man that he was walking past houses that were unfamiliar to him, though he knew the island well. Eventually they came to a great house on a hill with many rooms, and the stranger invited the man inside.

   The inside of the house was lavishly furnished. The stranger motioned to the young man to take a seat in a big, overstuffed armchair. But as soon as the groom took his seat, he jumped out of it again.
Hanging directly above the chair was a millstone, suspended from a single hair.

   Now the young man was alarmed and wanted to know what the stranger was about. He angrily lashed out at him. But the stranger remained very calm. He took a deep breath, smiled, and said "do not worry, I will not let my mill stone fall on you, just as you did not let your dog play with my skull". He continued that he did not want anything from the young man, but a bit of his time. Taking hold of a candlestick that was on the table beside him, he scratched a line into it and said that the man could leave once the candle had burned down to the line.

The young groom wanted desperately to return to his wedding. Still, he sat back in the chair. His eyes were fastened on the candle stick now, and he did not say another word to the stranger. As soon as the candle flame reached the line in the wax, he jumped up from his seat and ran out, and the stranger did not try to stop him.

   He raced through the streets of strange houses, back the way he had come. Things began to look familiar to him again and he was much relieved. But when he rounded the bend in the road to the point where he could see his house, his heart dropped. There was no music coming from the house, and there were no lights, nor any signs of a celebration. It was still before sunrise, and wedding parties always last through the night. Something was clearly very wrong.

   The young man entered the house and found only an old woman that he did not recognize sweeping the floor. When he asked where all the people from the wedding had gone she looked confused and said there had been no wedding. Very distressed, he came back at her "this is my house, it was my wedding". The woman was silent for a moment and she looked at him strangely. She used all her effort now to straighten out her creaking back and stand up straight. "When I was young, my grandparents used to tell the story of a wedding that was here many generations ago, where the groom left and never returned."

   Hearing this, the weight of time fell upon the young man, and he changed before her eyes and became middle aged, then he grew very old and wan, and finally he fell into a pile of dust. The old woman stooped back down again, swept him onto the board she had been holding, and threw him into the fire.

Chacun a le droit à deux sandwiches.

2011-05-12T17:38:00.000+01:00

A week ago now there were a few days where we were timing ourselves to the comings and goings of boats, beginning to grow used to seeing seals everywhere we went. Seven of us set off north to the Orkney Islands, a tiny moving French village with me as the lone foreign resident. These years of living in different countries have been a lesson in the strange moving borders that every country has; borders which can accommodate living rooms and basements in other countries all over the world. And so last weekend, with a few of the teachers at the French school here, a tiny piece of France took off with me in tow, descending on hostel kitchens to make crêpes and conversations.

Greenest grass and bluest skies. We were followed all through Orkney by herds of cows and swarms of sea birds.

We whispered to calm the jumping and charging of startled bulls, but it's true that often we set the birds soaring and whirling about, all cries and open mouths.

We crawled on hands and knees through the entrances of cairns, little hills with doors perched high up on the hilltops.

Cuween Cairn

Inside, we slid into the most claustrophobic inner chambers, and we wondered at the stone work that was still standing and keeping out the rain after so many thousands of years. Sometimes there were carvings in the stones, like the famous runic graffiti left by Vikings in Maeshowe, other times it was just us shining our lights in the dark.

We traced the perimeters of stone circles, clockwise. We were warned on more than one occasion that to walk in the other direction would possibly curse us for life. After all, it is really better not to be provocative where lifelong curses may be involved.

The Ring of Brodgar (above) is said to have been formed when a group of giants were dancing their rounds one night. They lost track of the time and were caught in the light of the rising sun, which turned them to stone. Another standing stone a little way off, known as the "comet stone" was their fiddler.

The standing stones on Orkney are unique. So flat, so angular. Stones like these can be seen everywhere on the islands. Inside the cairns, the ceilings are always big, flat capstones of the same sort, and even modern houses can be found with roofs that are just six or more of these stones laid side by side as giant roof tiles. Some of the fences on the islands are just rows of flat stones stood up end to end for miles.

And of course, there is always the stone furniture inside the famous Skara Brae, a neolithic settlement which appeared by the sea after a horrible storm in the Bay of Skaill blew away the mound of earth that had been covering it.

And then all the old cemeteries by the sea.

As the sun set on the last day of April we went to a lighthouse and stood looking out on the ocean from the top of the cliffs there. Beneath our feet were cities, countries of sea birds nesting in the rocks, all the way down to the water. There was a lot of wind and bird sounds. A couple of puffins sat and watched us watching them. Best of all were the many seals in the rough water, coming ever closer, more and more of them arriving to join in the meeting.

In Orkney, and in Shetland, the word for seal is "selkie". And in these islands there are many stories of selkie people, who can change from seal to human or human to seal. Stories of selkie women forced to marry men from the islands and stay in their houses until the day they escape, back to the sea and their own husbands there. Stories of families of selkies, alone and wary of persecution. Stories of women who fell asleep on the beach and nine months later bore strange children which made them outcasts in their communities. Sad stories of complicated domesticity and longing for other lives.

These are stories that are not easily forgotten, and I find that I go over them again and again in my mind. They are eloquent statements of situations that one would not necessarily be willing or able to describe straightforwardly.

And then again, they can also be enchanting, mesmerizing, like the sea. Even as a child, stories like these fascinated me. I spent a good part of my childhood praying, Praying, with all my might that I would somehow be allowed to live underwater. My mother couldn't drag me from the lakes in the summer. Swimming from morning to night, she used to bring lunch to the end of the dock, so I could reach up to her and take handfuls of grapes or crackers to eat without leaving the water. I still have traces of a silly sort of envy of fish, seals, and otters, similar to how some look at birds and wish they could fly. So the resonance of these stories is both deep and shallow. Perhaps I should say it grows with age and with our ability to make sense of our emotions.

This is one of the few trips where we have had a car. Car trips are all starting and stopping, I think. One place followed abruptly by another somewhat unrelated one. Everything was beautiful, every place invited lingering. It was lovely to eat lunch each day on another and yet another white sandy beach. And while I really, really appreciate that we were invited to come along in the car... still, how nice it is to feel a place get into your bones, to approach a place from far off on foot.

Church built in a hangar by Italian prisoners of war during WW2. The inside is all painted with trompe l'œil and angels.

There were so many things. One day, we were walking down the main street of Kirkwall. We were just passing in front of the big, red cathedral and watching people posing for photos in their hats and dresses and kilts after a wedding ceremony, when a dim roar coming steadily closer announced a blackening.

I had heard of blackenings before, since they still occur in the North East of Scotland, as well as on the islands, and one of my husband's classmates is writing a thesis on pre-wedding customs... but I had never seen one.

The faces on the happy wedding-goers went a bit pale as a group of young men covered in black muck and beer hauled their soon-to-be-married friend kicking and fighting out of their truck, stripped him, and bound him on to the cross that stands in front of the church. They proceeded to pour more beer on him and taunt him before climbing back in their truck and driving away, banging boards on the side of the truck and shouting.

Then, after a few stunned moments of silence, the wedding-goers slowly started to shyly make their way over to the unrecognizably filthy, drunken man on the cross so they could pose for photos beside him before his friends returned. This stretched on for a while, with the friends joyriding in circles through town again and again, only stopping at the church to harass their friend, and it ended in the sea.

I suppose there are always some things that you just can't anticipate when you are planning a wedding.

Ruins of the Earl's Palace

But, as always, there is far too much for a short telling... even a short telling that is a long time coming. We've been back in Aberdeen for a week and a half and we've been so busy. I've been working on this post in the spare minutes at the end of each day, and so now I find that it starts and stops, a little like a car trip. Before you know it the whole thing has passed, and there you are in your living room again, with memories of a whirl of sights.

All the rainbows end the next street over.

2011-05-10T11:39:00.000+01:00

A few hours ago, painting by the window, a bird flying by cast a giant shadow. We looked up to see two rainbows arching all the way across the sky and then back to earth again.
For a few moments there were five of them, four pressed up against each other, and the larger one floating above. Slowly they faded out. About an hour later they returned just as full and strong for one last stand before sunset poured all its colours into the sky and turned it black.

Westward, northward, and over the fields of blue.

2011-04-28T13:48:00.000+01:00

In a few hours I'll be headed back out to sea (after a meander through the Highlands and a night in an old re-purposed train carriage car). It's the long weekend of May Day, and in addition, we peasants have a Friday holiday thanks to the royal wedding, and so we are off to the Orkney Islands with friends.

This Friday I will sadly be missing the opening of the Aberdeen Artists' Society 77th Annual Exhibition in the beautiful Aberdeen Art Gallery, but some of my mummers will be dancing through it in their wintry Romanian costumes. The exhibit, which is free, will run from the 30th of April to the 28th of May, if anyone reading this happens to be passing through Aberdeen. I am really looking forward to seeing what else is in the show. When I went to drop off my things, I was completely overwhelmed -- the room was brimming with the many, many artworks that had been submitted, and I grew flushed and sheepish. But the doorman wished me good luck and that must have clinched it for me.

And now I'm off to stuff my little rucksack full! Passing good luck wishes on to you...

Even the boats wore coats.

2011-04-25T18:05:00.003+01:00

Another day out in a studio by the sea with the landscape painters this past Saturday. We returned to the little fishing town of Gamrie, a place we visited last October, and which I have written about before. This time I felt pressured to make a landscape myself. No one was holding a gun to my head, of course, but I sort of painted as if someone were.

A thing to line the back of a drawer.

Or maybe a thing to put above a desk as a warning: "paint for yourself only, or else you will paint other people's paintings".
I do not like this painting.
It does its job well enough, I suppose, in that it shows the view from the window... but maybe I don't feel that it is a job worth doing, for me personally. The colours in the photograph of the painting are bad too, which doesn't help as I look at it now, but even the original seems to me very dull and very pointless. I had no interest in painting this, and it is meaningless to me.

As I was finishing up my little watercolour chore, the sky soured and the rain started.

When I had started painting, the morning had looked like the dream of a morning. A light mist hovered around everything, the sky peeked out blue, the gorse almost danced on the bright greens of fresh spring growth. The tide had been out and there were lines of black rocks on the yellow sand. Way down the beach, the sea glowed turquoise.

By the end of the painting the sea had hauled herself back up on to the shore, where she sat motionless, as glum as the sky. The people in the houses started fires and the smoke chased all the birds from the rooftops. The hills turned dark and the colour went out of everything.

I had been planning to go for a walk along the coast once the painting was over. Instead I drank tea and looked at the paintings of the others. When the shower let up a little, I did go out for a walk, but it was a rushed one, and I felt shut off from my surroundings.

No walk is a waste though. Wet hair and sandy boots, I made my way up past the harbour, through the little houses where people shut themselves away all day.

A group of young men was screaming at the end of the pier.

Oh, but days like that are good for something. They are a reminder not to turn away from the things that are really important. Passion is a thing that moves in two directions.

Foil Wrappings and Bells

2011-04-24T16:04:00.000+01:00

Standing eggs on end after breakfast, seeing shadows of the yolk in the sunshine through the shell. Chocolate eggs in the sugar dish, in the matchbox, resting above the ties in the curtains and inside a pair of wooden clogs. There was even a small chocolate egg inside the casing of a clock. Blue skies, soft music, and open windows, a lovely day to you!

A coating of dust a million thoughts deep.

2011-04-21T01:40:00.001+01:00

    It is impossible to ignore this season, I think. It has been sliding its way in through every crack and cranny, superimposing itself on top of boring daily errands. In this city which is all built of grey granite, and often stands under grey skies, the sudden burst of spring colour seems exaggerated and the nicest kind of startling. People here are quite clearly mad for gardens.

   A few days ago we went to the opening of a tiny museum in an old house on a cobbled street by the university (unfortunately the camera stayed home). It is a museum with two small rooms with display cases whose contents (from the large university collections) will rotate often, but there are also tables and chairs, set out so you could come in and sit with a friend and maybe have a snack if you like.

   Their first exhibit, called '100 Curiosities in King's Museum', was modelled on old curiosity cabinets. Professors, children, poets, students, and many others who had visited the store rooms of the museum were asked to choose an object from these collections and write one hundred words about what made it interesting to them.

   Then, when guests to the newly opened museum arrived they were handed a little book with all of these people's thoughts on the objects being shown. My husband was one of the contributors, so we were some of the lucky ones invited to the opening, to crawl around from display case to display case reading the little books that brimmed with excited anecdotes, recollections, explanations and reactions.

   There were paintings, charms, taxidermy animals, old scientific teaching aids, stone objects that were sculpted by the ancestors of homo-sapiens, folk art from far away places, a narwhal tusk.... everything! A tiny Gaelic prayer book with a key tied to it sat next to a tiny note saying that the person who had acquired it for the collections had got it from a 'cunning man' who used to put the key in the book on particular pages and tie the string around it in order to work magic. The note complained they didn't know where in the book to insert the key to make it work.

   As interesting as it is to see the notes of past curators next to the object on display, the note sort of encapsulates a lot of what can be negative about museums: the whole problem of removing things from their context (and sometimes through stealing). This sort of re-contextualizing of the exhibit was interesting though, and it was a gesture of giving the objects back to the public.

   It also made me think of the layers and layers of meaning that are sitting on top of every object, and especially museum objects, which are seen by so many people, coming from so many places. The tiny layers of paint on the paintings are only a foundation for the invisible paintings that sit on top of them.

But to speak of lovely objects, I should mention that the post brought in some treasures this morning. A short while ago I was the very lucky winner of a giveaway of a batch of fabrics designed by the very talented watercolour painter, Holly, of Golly Bard.

I love Holly's work... lots of beautifully painted portraits of bugs and birds and branches, and I am thrilled to have these lovely patterns to feast my eyes on everyday. My photo doesn't do them justice, they are far more lovely and delicate in person. You can find loads more of her gorgeous artworks on her blog or in her shops.

A home has curtains of blossoms and carpets of rushing stars.

2011-04-18T13:51:00.000+01:00

Down a little street never taken before, there sat rows of stones and bones and explosions of flowers and bird songs. A tiny forest clearing with sweet air and honeyed light tucked away in a city nook with walls on all sides.

Blackbirds, crows, and pigeons sat starkly in flowered branches where the petals were thicker than snow. I said that if I were a bird I would pass my Aprils in that delight as well. And I spent too long there anyway, my face pressed into flowers, or ducking in between the tombstones, and in standing very still, watching the little showers of petals.

All week I have been dreaming with the flowers, as I passed by them in gardens and hanging from window boxes, all their shades of blue, all their vibrant reds and purples. But a tree like this surrounds you, pours its magic all over sky and earth.

And it is hard to force one's steps back towards home. How dull to be shut up inside the same place where the long dark days of winter sat while the wind moaned and complained as it flew past the chimney.

So much better to lay out on the grass in the park while little dogs run by, or watch a steam train pull in at the station, surrounded by clouds of old men with cameras. To wander aimlessly until you come to the secret, shady places where ferns unfurl their fronds at that too-quick and too-slow pace that plants use to disguise their movements.

You might even find yourself in a part of town where the houses become castle-like and the people avert their eyes quickly. There will be the odd gargoyle up near the eaves, and behind the back garden walls there is an entire ravine locked away for the private pleasures of others. Only, the sounds of the water rushing and the extra-abundant bird songs can not be locked away so neatly.

We went there specifically to meet with a tree that we met in the pink gloaming of another day. It peers down from a front garden, from another world.

A little ways on, there stands a house where a lone fishing rod stands with its line spread out across the sky. At the end of the line is a kite in the shape of a bird.

Another tiny thing to wonder at on the way home, past the tulips and through the streets, and finally up the stairs to our door. I think the only remedy for an old, wintry, granite house is to fill your mind with all the flowers and green of a spring day, so that you can fill the house with dreams like bouquets.

The ship was a cockle shell floating in a pool of water.

2011-04-10T22:39:00.001+01:00

We have been across the waves in the land of wind, fog, and trows. We've been up hill and down hill, around the many long and narrow glacier-carved bays, big packs on our backs, all through Shetland in every kind of weather except calm.

When we left home we brought our tent, thinking we would spend some time out with the land. But when we crawled ashore, we quickly understood that our little tent would be no match for a wind that we could lean on as we walked. Instead we spent our days blowing around the islands, and our nights safely tucked away into böds, which were originally little stone buildings set up for fishermen to sleep in on the nights when they were able to come ashore. Nowadays böds are generally heritage buildings with bunks inside, sometimes with running water and electricity, sometimes without.

A home the size of daffodils.

We slept one night in the house of Betty Mouat, a woman who was accidentally swept away to Norway in the hold of a boat one day in the 1800s. Another night we stayed in an old farmhouse surrounded by sheep, beside a long finger of the ocean. We also slept on a pier in an old fish-salting / boat storage building / knitting factory. But the most lovely böd of all was the former home of the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, an old stone house sitting halfway up a hill with a pony and horse looking in at us through the windows as we read out poems and stories by the light of peat fire and candles. We had the pleasure of the creaking old places all to ourselves, since no one else seemed to be interested in holiday making in early April.

Old family boats become roofs when they have finished their days on the sea.

Everywhere we went people told us stories, showed us around, brought us in for cups of tea. We went over there expecting only to be with the hills and the coast, the seabirds, otters and seals, and we did experience that as well, but also so much more...

A bus driver stopped us as we were getting off the bus at the end of the line, to kindly and skillfully tell us a story. The tiny house you see floating on the sea above is a tiny boat-building workshop, and home of a friendly craftsman of astounding skill, who rowed us out for a visit one morning. Every day was full of miracles and coincidences.

We hiked to the hill tops and found lakes up there, floating next to the sky. The wind howled and made our eyes water constantly, shook us so that it was hard even to take a photograph.

And that is why it was a dismay to return and look through all the photos we had taken. Out on the hill tops and down in the glens, the land was speaking, and the sky was rushing past us. It's disappointing enough to find that a photo has not managed to reproduce the colours of a place, that the land looks flatter and duller, but such a stark loss of vitality was disturbing. It is perhaps a landscape that should not be photographed but instead played on a fiddle, or said in a poem, or maybe danced.

And so I guess this will have to be a post of failed attempts, because I do want to share this wondrous place with you, even in an imperfect way. So please at least imagine that these photos are howling and soaring at you, that your clothes are whipping out past you, that you are standing leaning forward past the point of balance but not falling.

A woman who had moved to Shetland a few years earlier told me that since her arrival she had tried everything to plant some trees there, but all their leaves were shredded, their needles stripped bear, their roots torn out of the ground by the wind. And everywhere in the fields you find mysterious-looking little rings of stone walls called plantiecrubs that people have built to plant cabbages and things inside.

One nice thing about all that biting wind is that if you get drenched walking about in a downpour, your clothes are likely to be completely dry again by the time you reach the end of your walk.

And it does seem like just maybe all that wind can blow away dusty, wintry, old thoughts, too, giving a sort of clarity, an expansive feeling.

A fine thing when in every nook and cranny there are stories unfolding full of spring happenings...

And there was also the island of a saint, connected to the mainland by a narrow passage of sand, as if the ocean had parted just enough for those willing to plunge their feet and legs into the cold waves to cross over.

And there were underground houses to wander through too... old, fantastic things that were revealed one night long ago, when a storm blew away all the sand that had been covering them.

The first day we arrived was a Sunday and everything was closed. We sat on a beach in the cold eating a dinner of almonds and sharing a piece of fudge, since that was what we had. A seal danced past.

Other evenings, mists and rains wrapped around the land, and we wrapped ourselves around stoves full of peat and driftwood, heating water for tea over the fire. The doors shuddered, rattled, banged in their frames. Perhaps out in the dark, trows walked in the footsteps we left in the boggy hilltops by day.

We spent the last day in town, tired and sad to be leaving.

The wind was force seven when we set out from the harbour that evening, and it increased as the night went on. Waves slammed against the windows on the top floor of the ship, everything rocked fearfully all night. And when we reached Aberdeen in the morning, we were told there had been calm weather the whole time we were away, as if the drunken boat had been only a dream.

* * *

And today I think the whole city has been out in the sun and warmth, strolling the promenade by the seaside, riding the ferris wheel, lining up for ice cream cones. There are flowers and tiny leaves on the trees here, like a paradise has fallen on us. We even saw dolphins jumping out of the water by the pier this morning. The city seems to have completely transformed itself in our absence, but maybe we too have changed, ever so slightly?

In the eyes of trees and mountains...

2011-03-30T16:54:00.000+01:00

On this foggy afternoon, I have been looking through old photos of a winter journey to Turkey a few years ago. I have been meaning to get back to work on illustrations for a long poem written by a friend of mine. And so I have been milling around, looking for photos of towers, and Cappadocia is the land of towers. Great towers built half by nature's hands, half by human ones. Where a city rises out of the ground looking to me a little like the ruins of Bruegel's Tower of Babel. A place where stones shaped like toadstools stand in patches, and sometimes they have little chimneys sticking out oddly, pushing out puffs of smoke, the only betrayal that they are homes. There are whole underground cities. If you climb up into the old abandoned ruins of towns built into mountains, you will surely come across a few churches, some carved out of the rocks more than a thousand years ago.

And so I thought I would share a small few photos of the many we took on those January days. I know that I am still marvelling over the things I saw in Turkey and even still wanting to one day move into the enormous labyrinth of Istanbul for a longer stay. I loved looking across the enormous Bosporus to the other side of the city on another continent, listening to the call to prayer, watching huge boats on the sea of Marmara, standing on acres of time and place. Everything there felt to me so monumental. More than ever I felt so lucky, it felt so important to be one tiny particle in that beautiful city of many millions, stretching backwards and forwards in time forever. And in Cappadocia I was again staggering under the weight of so much history. I thought perhaps you too would be dazzled by the many windows in the mountains, the many amulets for protecting against the evil eye hanging on bare branches, that it might set your imagination rushing towards a little of the feeling of that place.

The Village Under Frost

2011-03-18T20:42:00.000Z

Outside, the night is falling and the full moon has pulled herself up just above the houses. But tonight I will not write you a meandering little passage about the moon. Instead I will present you with a painting finished recently. Maybe it is the sister of a painting I finished about a year ago, which I have written about before. It is true that the two paintings were started at around the same time. This time last year, I thought I would surely have them both done before summer. How to explain this long period between brushstrokes, I do not know.

(detail)

But in a way, this was the perfect time to finish this painting. Last weekend's surprise blizzards and my absorption in this painting's wintry landscape have allowed me to indulge in that last bit of winter I was secretly craving.

(detail)

I often like to set myself a tight colour scheme to follow for each painting. Winter scenes are lovely for all their reddish browns, ochres and greys. Bare branches and barren fields are very underrated from an aesthetic point of view, I think. And I love how cloudy skies make colours seem richer, earthier.

(detail)

The particularities of this landscape were heavily influenced by a winter visit to Romania a few years back. I remain fascinated by that country. The old wooden churches and hoar frosts, the misty strangeness of the countryside while everyone sits indoors huddled around their giant tiled wood stoves for warmth.

But the setting could have been different too.

(detail)

And then, these hands you see holding onto these branches could instead be raking them across the sky, or pulling them across the earth. I suppose both this painting and its "sister" painting are of moments a little like that.

I find myself wondering if I've gotten giantesses out of my system now, or if they will be making their return some foggy day in the future. But this evening, I think it best to leave that aside, and instead go out for a walk in the lovely moonlight.

Mountains and Marvels

2011-03-15T10:51:00.001Z

Saturday morning some visitors arrived with the snow. The wind wailed in sideways, the night fell clattering upon us, and we cackled and brewed up some dinner. The evening produced a kitchen of vapours and rain lashing the windows, a table crowded with dishes.

The next morning we took ourselves up into the hills, to a stone church with bright blue doors. No one saw us come and no one saw us go, but we found a stone circle tucked away in that churchyard. A recumbent stone lay beside the grave stones, unable to overlook the hillside for the trees. I stood still for a second to imagine a winter's night, the moon rolling slowly across the sleeping stone's back, from one side to the other. I tried imagining quickly the long, slow hours of watching its creeping stillness, like sleeping.

But then we were off, throwing ourselves into the snow covered day and the narrow, winding roads. We stopped and crept through an old souterrain at one point. It was almost invisible at first, and then we saw a little arrow and almost right next to us there was a hole, a little square door that went straight into the earth. We bent ourselves and crouched until we passed through into a room where we could almost stand in the pitch black, wondering what might sit invisibly just beside us, almost touching us as we stared without seeing.

But it was not long before our eyes met with a marvel...

...A castle that seemed like it had just come to a stop on a hill of fresh snow. I just couldn't quite believe that it had been standing there for long. It seemed like, unwatched, it could slide across vast spaces like a chess piece, or something from Kin-Dza-Dza, or maybe it could grow up the side of an icon and be carried around in someone's bag.

Here it is on a visit to a more humble castle.

And then, this is it on its way to meet with an even taller Sequoia, which had, itself, travelled a long way in its youth, before settling in the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland.

This fine tree was kind enough to grant my wish of two weeks ago, of mountains and giant landscapes. I shrank to a whisper beside it.

And the next thing I will show you is whisper-like as well. In the snow that blew horizontally across the ground, in the deafening wind that choked and pushed us, on a string of a road that clung to the side of a mountain, we came across them. Perhaps thirty or more.

They only stopped and watched us, they did not hurry away.

I am sure there were sounds then, but I remember only that a great hush fell on everything.

There would be no need to run, for creatures that can make time stop.

They just stood still as the bare trees, catching my heartstrings in their antlers.

And then, their spell cast, we turned away from our otherworldly meeting and back towards home, only stopping to peek through the gates and wild hedges of another castle or three.

A staircase, a crooked tree, a dart.

2011-03-08T14:20:00.001Z

   Today the clouds are running fast across the roof tops and the gulls pass the window on wobbly flights, fighting the wind. Still, the sky looks like an opal. And if the chimney is roaring and moaning today, perhaps tomorrow it will coo and gurgle with the song of the wood pigeon who lays on top of the warm, flat chimney pipe on calmer days, sending her music down to me.

    Wrapped in layers of clothing, it is possible to work all day with the window open now. At least that's what I like to do. The temperatures are between 6 and 10 degrees these days, so maybe this is something like swimming in spring as soon as the ice melts off the lakes... a lovely but lonely pleasure.

   On Sunday I went back to Delgatie castle, which I've written about before, and spent another day out with the painters. It seems that I got even less done on this outing, only part of a sketch this time. I mostly spent the day tramping across the soft mossy floor of the woods, or winding up and down the spiral staircase that the castle is built around, passing through the gloomy rooms, reading about ghosts, having tea and scones with cream, and listening to the piano being played by another painter in the ballroom.

The grounds of the castle have many wonders. The walls there have, in places, begun to sprout horns. There is a tiny mill pond with a tiny, stone mill house and a rusted wheel. There are swans, old ice houses covered in moss, rickety stables, and little log cabins for the tiny, round Shetland ponies to sleep in. There is also a wishing well.

Written on the stone above it are these words:

Invoke beside the lady's well

This skillful marksman's deadly spell

Declare thy wish his little dart

Will emerge an adamantine heart

The woods were a splendour of song bird melodies and falcon shrieks, and in some places there were so many pigeons cooing up in the trees that everything seemed to thrum along with them, like a sort of collective breath. At the end of the day there were newly painted marvels to gaze upon (one showing tooth marks from a pony who had noticed an easel left alone and unguarded during a tea break). Then there were bag pipes spotted in the back of a car, and a tiny concert followed.

On the way home, so much talking, looking out the window at Bennachie (Beinn na Ciche in Gaelic, "peak of the breast"), the tallest hill around, green today, all the snow melted.

Standing Still in Seven-League Boots

2011-03-01T23:36:00.001Z

The flowers push up and our legs are swinging out out over them, up hill and down hill, visiting our haunting grounds. Along the way are curls of green in the earth and hard, red buds clinging close to bare branches, and in some places, pussy-willows make little bounds, back and forth, in the wind. It seems like the air should ring out like bells, the same high metal note over and over.

We move through the cold places to be warm, watching nature scrabbling along in her brown twig coat, dead leaves for a collar and flowers at her feet. There has been too much of indoor life lately, brewing plans and staring up at the blank ceiling on mornings. Too much mental note-taking of the various versions of me that inhabit me, trying to calculate which ones are doing and which ones are resting. And so I have started wishing for mountains, tall, bright places to throw lonely thoughts off of.

Or to be very small perhaps, never to forget that landscape would always overwhelm me. It is just a question of remembering, I suppose. And trying to stop my one eye from looking always to the future while the other looks always to the past.

But if I could manage all that bright stillness would I still feel the restless, wildness of spring?

Things like waiting for the first thunderstorm of spring, and running out into the nighttime city streets to be in the thick of it. Walking an uphill street as the water rushed down past our legs, a river a foot deep. Lightning and thunder flashing and rumbling in our bones. Clothes that dripped for two days on hangars by the door.
I wouldn't like to miss things like that.

So our legs stretch longer and longer across the landscape as the evening slips off to a golden resting place, ducking out at a moment when everyone, dazzled, forgot to keep taking notice.

In the dark, we move on invisible legs through waterlogged grasses. The wind comes in off the sea and there is only the feeling of feet and earth. Sometimes I cease to move forward and backwards at once, and my eyes fall on the vastness of the tiniest of stars. The wind roars silently through my lungs and the mountains would be useless, compared with the space above.

The Small Bit and My Blessing

2011-02-18T02:02:00.000Z

   One of the benefits of being married to someone studying folklore is the beautiful volumes of folktales which tend to appear around the house from time to time. A few months ago, peering into the yellowed pages of the teal and gold one in the photo there, marked "Sgeulachdan Gaidhealach" (Gaelic Stories), I came across a story called "The Girl and the Dead Man". (I should perhaps mention that the actual title of the book is not Gaelic Stories, but Popular Tales of the West Highlands, collected, written down and translated by J.F. Campbell, dual-language Gaelic-English). The story was collected from Ann Darroch of Islay, who said she'd heard it as a girl from an old storytelling woman who used to earn her living telling stories beside the kiln fires where people used to come to dry their corn (wheat). It is a short story and is very worth reading online here if you can't find an old paper copy to curl up with.

   The story is about three sisters who go off into the world, one by one, to find their fortunes. Before leaving, their mother bakes each of them a bannock and then cuts it into two pieces. In turn, she offers them "a' bhlaidh bheag 's mo bheannachd na 'bhlaid mhòr 's mo mhollachd" (the smaller piece and my blessing or the big piece and my curse). As it often is in stories, the eldest two sisters are greedy and choose the big piece, the first of many selfish choices that will ultimately ruin them. The youngest daughter takes the small piece and is blessed.

My favourite part of the story comes when the youngest daughter finds herself alone with the night "wreathing" around her. I love that particular description of the night. The whole story is so vivid that it seems to wreathe around in the mind. But anyway, she is out in the darkness, and she sits down to eat her bannock, and then, all around her, she finds a host of creatures looking for a share of it. In particular there is "an t-sreath chuileanach 's a da chuilean deug", which Campbell left untranslated, saying that 'the narrator, the translator, the transcriber, the dictionary, and the "old men"' had failed to make sense of it. He said it was a sort of bird which had twelve puppies. Another theory is that it was a mistake in transcription, which would make it a "sow (triath) of the whelps with a litter of twelve". Of course, triath also means leader, so it could be read as " the leader of the whelps" according to that theory. Basically, it is still quite ambiguous, the way the best things often are. What is clear is that this creature, whatever it may be, is also accompanied by all the birds of the air, and they are all hungry.
    So they ask the girl for some of her bannock, and while her sisters had refused to share, saying they didn't even have enough for themselves, the youngest daughter says she'll gladly give it if they will keep her company. They eat and everyone has enough, and then the birds and sreath chuileanach and its puppies all put their wings around the girl and they huddle together to keep each other warm.

I liked the idea of a sort of bird-like dog or dog-like bird for the sreath chuileanach and so I went along with that. It has been said, around this house, that the sreath chuileanach and her puppies do not look very ferocious. It seems normal to me that it should be this way, in the way a family dog is beautiful or cute when she is relaxing at home, but when any perceived threat arises, she turns into a grotesque and furious creature, with bared teeth, angry eyes, a wrinkled snout, and hairs standing on end. In the story, the first two sisters perceive the sreath chuileanach and puppies as terrible monsters, while the third sister calls them pretty. In this peaceful scene, they can't have their feathers and furs all on end, or ferocious expressions.

The photo of my etching above is the best I could manage with my camera. I couldn't capture the range of tones of the actual print, and the photograph of it is somewhat washed out. As for the story, it continues on past this moment with the girl and the birds, and has a scene of dancing in the woods with a dead man, and other wonders (read it!), but this was the moment I wanted to capture.

So many stories have the same moral messages at their cores, about the importance of good living, generosity of spirit, co-operation. I am impressed by the fine imagery this message is dressed in for this particular story, and I also appreciate that the story has this scene as a moment of bliss at its centre. The repetitive formulaic passages that many oral Gaelic-language stories have (though, I would imagine this is probably found in other traditions as well) are also interesting to me.

An example of these sorts of passages, from later on in this story, would be: "The wages she had were a peck of gold and a peck of silver; of nuts as she broke, of needles as she lost, of thimbles as she pierced, of thread as she used, of candles as she burned, a bed of the green silk over her, and a bed of the green silk under her." Or in other tales, people might fight one another to such an extreme that they affect the landscape, making "the hard places soft and the soft places hard..." and such descriptions tend to stretch on and have a special sort of rhythm in their original languages.

They can be found over and over again embroidering different tales. My visual nod to this oral tradition was to try to construct the image by filling up the copper plate with patterning. This gave a sort of meditative quality to the work as well, which seemed perfect to me, considering the ideas behind it.

This meant that I spent a lot of time making tiny little lines and dots. For an etching, the same image will be drawn over and over, line by line many many times. In the local art museum there is, if I remember correctly, a painting of the sea by Joan Eardley with a caption that says it was painted quickly and roughly because she was such a passionate painter and so on and so forth. And I really like Joan Eardley's work, but I do get very tired of hearing about how slapping up paint on a canvas is real, passionate art... the faster you do it the more passionate and artistic you are... a good artist can see a person falling and have them represented on the page before they hit the ground and such like. Passion is also in perseverance. There could be no other way to explain so much effort, so much time.

Etching is necessarily about doing, the redoing, then undoing, and doing again. It starts with the first study for the copper plate:

And then this must be transferred, line by line and dot by dot, on to the plate itself:

Next, all those lines must be scratched into the hard ground on the plate:

Then, if all has gone well up until this point and all the chemicals have behaved as they should (which they really did not the first few times with this plate!) the plate is placed in acid, and the lines where the hard ground has been scraped away are bitten into the copper plate. The plate will probably make a few trips back and forth to the acid bath, with adjustments being made in between. Next, to have tones, not just lines, in the plate, one might start down the slippery slope of aquatint which can also be a very long process... though instead of copying over lines many times, it tends to involve tracing over brush strokes many times. And usually it also involves scraping away, layer by layer, the surface of the copper in the places where things should be lighter. The back and forth between darkening in acid and lightening by scraping and burnishing can go on for weeks sometimes until the desired tones are found through test prints. Each test print seems to involve a feeling of hope, and then, for every print until the last one, the realization that the end is not so near as it had seemed, and then back to work. But I think I am slowly growing more patient, and I do hope that I will one day manage to live the good example of folkloric heroines.

To a pomegranate, the sun sets here.

2011-02-06T21:50:00.000Z

Sunset running into the spaces between fingers, above the wrist.
The small shudder and crack of a pomegranate opening.

The sky yawns cold blue clouds
as a sigh of red leaps across the room.

Bending down, picking up
the reddest of rubies from the dirty carpet.

A moment later,
a last precious seed is found
casting its small shadow across
the tabletop.

The precise moment when spring ran out of the thicket.

2011-02-02T20:09:00.008Z

European robins are not messengers of spring.

I thought I should lay low, I thought I should say hello. Today was groundhog day in Canada. He didn't see his shadow, and so it will be an early spring there. While, in my heart of hearts, I think that spring has landed in the west of Europe already.

   One cold day in Ireland in the Connemara gealtacht, I was humiliated in front of my Irish-language class peers for foolishly saying that Spring began on March 21st. Then, even after demonstrating that I could understand the question in Irish and knew the months of the year, I was asked again, and so again answered that it began on the 21st of March. Apparently, Spring begins on the 1st of February in Ireland, and don't forget it! Though, I suppose that even when we lived in Paris (where it was Chandeleur today), it always seemed fairly Spring-ish by February, so maybe it is true, after all. I don't mean to suggest that I think it won't be cold again, because Spring can be cold. What I mean is that there's a feeling of Spring in the air, while back in Canada probably the only thing in the air is snow.

   So, holding fast to the habits I was raised with, I am still burrowed away, bear-like, in my den -- all books and paintbrushes, tools to scrape away at copper plates, and long dreams in the still-dark mornings. There's life and candlelight in here though... soon maybe there might be some signs of life, in the way of a painting or etching.

   Now off to bed I go, to study Russian, and think on Chinese New Year dragon dances. When I was young, I used to sort of think, that despite the peoples' legs sticking out, the dragon dances were danced by real dragons, hiding underneath the long dragon costume. And tomorrow, if we still lived in Japan, we would be throwing beans out from each window of the house and saying a chant to ward off any ogres that might think of stealing in and surprising us. Happy year of the rabbit!

The sky stood on the roof and spat.

2011-01-25T11:12:00.001Z

A haze of rain and seagull song at the window. I don't think the ocean would be visible from the high point at the end of the street today. It seems, rather, like a day for a walk with a seal, up river from the sea, the line where the water stops blurred by the wet air. Or maybe for strolling in the still-cobbled parts of town, rivers of rain under the eaves of the granite buildings.

First though, copper plates, acid baths, inky hands and radio dramas. And tonight, Doric language poetry. I can't believe that January has almost finished creaking past us, all wrapped up in the longest, darkest nights, and the brightest, shortest days. I am wondering if, in Scotland, February sometimes wears flowers in her hair.

Memories rode into the house on a cloud of cold breath.

2011-01-22T01:45:00.000Z

I have been thinking of our old house in Japan. The rickety, unheated, old house where winds rushed up skirts from between the floorboards and where, in winter, a blanket of snow would sometimes rest on top of our bed covers in the morning, having slipped in through the cracks around the windows during the night. A paper-door maze of squeaking tatami mats and too-low door frames that I was forever forgetting to duck for.

My best-loved bicycle sits just off to the right in a shelter meant for a car, but so much nicer for bicycles and geckos.

It was a house on a street too narrow to have been meant for cars. There was a small field of vegetables on one side where bonnet- and apron-wearing old ladies would spend their days, while most of the men slept so they would be ready to spend their nights fishing squid in tiny boats strung with lines of enormous light bulbs. In the winter, the winds that blew off the sea were strong enough to keep you standing if you tried to fall in to them, and always the mountains sat on all sides of us, some of them even standing in the sea.

Dr. Seuss trees from the bedroom window.

I had been thinking of all this as I stoked the fire this past week, in the time after our boiler broke. Luckily for me I had two gifts to keep me warm: a hanten brought back from Japan and five pairs of very thick socks (or foot sweaters, as the letter said) knitted in stripes of colour and sent to me from an old friend in Canada (they arrived just the day before the heat went off).

A hanten is a sort of padded coat for wearing inside during the winter in rural Japan.

Of course, we managed much better here, with the fire and all, and the problem was fixed without too much delay. Men came shouting at 8AM the other morning, calling to each other from the loft to our apartment, searching out the boiler, and most probably making us very unpopular with all the other tenement dwellers, though they were very friendly to us. But it seems that once the cold memories had crept in, they were hard to chase out. I was left thinking of the mountains...

... each of them with a name that the very old man next door would tell us as he sketched out maps for us. He used to surprise me with bouquets of stolen flowers and sit in our kitchen talking (with my husband translating for me) until his wife would come and chase him back to his house, full of the amazing Buddhist statues he had carved or sculpted.

I've also been thinking of that sea, so different from the North Sea. In August there is the Japanese festival of the dead, Obon, and after that no one swims in the ocean for the rest of the year, though it stays as warm as bathwater until October. Perhaps they never know the joy of swimming on the nights in early fall when the sea lights up into an infinity of underwater stars. The luminescence of the water grows more intense with every swimming stroke, splashing about causing sunken fireworks, star showers. We came across this phenomenon without warning and, disbelieving our eyes at first, filled with wonder.

And the other wonder of that sea at night, the illusion of bonfires moving slowly across the water at the horizon. There was a lot of discussion of the possible explanations for this, until, months later, we finally learned that it was the fishermen shining great bright lights to attract squid to their boats. Still, I doubt that even if we had stayed there a hundred years, that all of the daily marvels of the place would have ever been transformed into satisfying bits of explanation and fact.

Little Lights in the Darkness

2011-01-16T23:47:00.001Z

Long, windy nights with fever and flu on the loose are the best times for wrapping up in covers with tea. I have been reading Leonora Carrington's The House of Fear but a few films and things have caught my eye:

Toell the Great an animation from Estonia about a giant who lived on the island of Saareema. Follow the link in the you tube comments section to read the story of the film first (it will make more sense this way), and maybe don't show the film to small children (nightmares!). Recently Henk of Outsider Environments Europe posted about two windmills on Saareema which were made into statues of Toell the giant and his wife, Piret.
Sib (Eng: The Apple), an Iranian film about two twelve-year-old girls who have been locked inside their house since birth. It is apparently based on a true story, with many of the people involved in the story acting in the film. It was directed by Samira Makhmalbaf (when she was only 18!).
Learn how to make your own paneer (a soft Indian cheese for cooking with). So easy and so yummy in curry!
Listen to Hardanger fiddle music played by Haakon Solaas. There have been a lot of recordings featuring Hardanger fiddles being played around my place in recent months, but not many of them are freely available online, so only the one link. The first time I heard this instrument it was not being used to play Norwegian music but something rather more experimental -- but I am a huge fan of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh's brilliant music, both traditional Irish tunes, and tunes of his own making.
And lastly, though problematic, the ethnofiction Nanook of the North is a film I had been meaning to watch for some time. A much better film to do with Inuit culture would be the Inuit-made, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. It is a retelling of an Inuit legend and was filmed entirely in Inuktituk (there are English subtitles). In writing this post I just discovered that all three films of the Atanarjuat trilogy are available to watch in HD online here! I've yet to see the final two films, but I was really impressed by Atanarjuat (the first film) when I saw it in theatres. Though the beginning of it is a little disorienting, it is absolutely brilliant, and really worth sticking with.

Hopefully something in that list will capture your interest for a little while at least on one of these wintry evenings. Though it must be admitted, the long nights are slipping away now; today the sun didn't even set until 4pm!

Old Calendars and Fire

2011-01-13T19:28:00.004Z

In some parts of Scotland, holidays are still held according to the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian one. A distance of eleven days and nights sits between New Year's Eve celebrations outside and inside of these towns. In one such place, the fishing village of Burghead, the new year is brought in shortly after sunset with the burning of the Clavie.

The clavie is made from an old whisky cask which is fitted on to a post and filled with tar and wood and other flammable things and then set alight. In the first photo you can see the Clavie King lighting and adding wood to the Clavie. Once lit, the clavie is hoisted onto a man's back and carried clockwise through the town.

Other people follow the procession through the tiny streets of the village, while others peer out of windows or stick their heads out through attic trapdoors to watch the spectacle go past.

Frequent stops are made, in front of the houses of notable people. At each stop a man will reach into the fire and pull out one of the burning embers to present it to the people living in that house. Embers from the clavie fire bring a year's good luck. Some say they can be used to light the new year's fire, or are tied to first-footing traditions, others seem to say that they can be kept in the chimney to ward off witches.

After the clavie has been carried all through the town, it is carried up a hill where it is set into a hole in the centre of a pile of stones that rather looks like a chimney sticking out of the ground. Next, bucket after bucket full of flammable liquids are thrown over it until the flames reach very high indeed. A good part of the hill also catches fire.

Can you see the clothes of the men in the photo above smoking? Standing on another hill nearby I could feel the heat. I can only imagine how the people near the fire must have been feeling.

I do believe that is the Clavie King hopping about the flames.

Men are always coming and going in and out of the fire, and bringing back embers of the Clavie. People from the town come up the hill holding dampened dishtowels to carry the embers home in. Some of the embers will be sent on to family abroad.

And slowly the flames get lower and finally people start to stamp the last of them out. Then, one by one, to home or over to the pub to hear the singing and eat a free meal of stovies and pea soup until the countdown at midnight.

A flicker of light where a day ran past.

2011-01-10T01:36:00.000Z

Short days of tiny wanderings. A visit to a medieval churchyard, built circular so that there were no corners for the devil to hide in. A delicious dinner in an old stone house where a family of enormous peacocks, that arrived one day from who knows where, roosts high in a tree. Some days I spend all my hours happily at our new table (a lucky find by the curb on a late night wander) in a beam of sunlight, working on etchings until the the sun runs off the edge of the sky and the light fails. An exercise in patience lately, and nothing more, thanks to chemical problems and cold rooms. I try to console myself with thoughts of Buddhist monks making complicated mandalas that they will destroy after. It's so hard not to think of time as wasted when there is nothing to show for a week's work, but even I must admit, it is a very good lesson to remember to make living the true artwork.

Happy Hogmanay!

2011-01-01T11:23:00.002Z

Last night we made our way down the coast, into the town of Stonehaven for Hogmanay celebrations. We arrived early and strolled around the harbour and up the pier, past all the little fishing boats. Looking up, we could see a line of snow that sat on top of the cliff there, but in the darkness it seemed to hover in the sky. We stopped into a little pub and brought drinks out with us to sit by the water, with the sounds of rocking boats and people talking and laughing all around. It was like arriving in a place you have dreamt.

It was mizzling all around us as we ate dinner, but I would like to think that if there can be "soft days" as a friend from Belfast used to say, there can be soft nights too, and so it was a lovely, soft night and we were hungry and the food was fine. Around 11pm pipe and drum bands started to walk up and down the High Street.

Maybe you can just make out their socks and the tips of their pipes appearing out of the darkness, under the clock tower?

And then as everyone started counting down the last minutes of the old year, as we kissed and shouted in 2011, a bright glow could be seen on the walls of the houses down at the end of the street near the harbour. Then two pipers came walking and piping up the street... and behind them fires swung through the air.

A group of white-haired ladies standing next to me called out the names of the men and women swinging the fireballs, cheering them on.

The lady next to me told me there were 45 people carrying fireballs...

... and that there was a long waiting list of many more people who would like to be carrying them.

One of the men there was in his seventies and had been carrying the fires for over fifty years.

She said the festival had been going on for at least 200 years in written record, though it was surely a lot older than that, but no one could say when exactly it had started.

The fireballs swung so close to us, gave off such heat. Sparks were everywhere and the smell of burning. Sometimes the men or women carrying the fireballs stopped swinging them for a moment and ran over to the sides to kiss someone they knew. And then they were off again, twirling the fires round and round them.

In recent years I've had some good times on New Year's Eve -- last year back in Canada and making the first footsteps in new snow as we followed sounds of music always just past the next hill; the year before in a pigeon house built into a mountain in Cappadocia, Turkey; the year before that speaking with a professor, him in Romanian, us in French, on a train through Romania; and the year before that in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains; and before that, on a train again, going across India woken up by our fellow passengers to celebrate the new year. But all of those were lovely experiences that just happened to fall on New Year's Eve. As far as New Year's celebrations go, this is definitely my favourite of any year.

And finally, the people and fires turned back towards the sea. All of the fireballs were thrown into the harbour, and then the sky filled with fireworks.

A wonderful happy 2011 to you!

A Clowder of Cats for Christmas

2010-12-29T21:59:00.001Z

Since before Christmas we have been making nightly rounds to visit the houses of some cats whose families have gone back to France for the holidays. This has meant lots of midnight walks in the empty snow filled streets of Aberdeen. Yesterday, the snow and icicles turned to fog and mist, and we had to walk in the middle of the road, so that sheets of ice would not clamber and rumble down the roofs to land on us, sweeping arm-length icicles along with them.

Despite how it looks in the pictures (which we took on a damp night of half-melted snow, when the orange city lights bounced back at us from the clouds), the skies have been clear mostly, and it has felt like just us and the moon passing through all the streets of crouching, old granite houses. On the snowiest nights, when we have to walk in single file, my husband tends to walk in front, his little clouds of breath thrown back over his shoulder like a second scarf. I have been happiest on nights where it was too cold for slush to come up into the holes in my boots. The houses here often have big, bay windows in front, so that they look like display cases at this time of year, each filled with its own Christmas tree and decorations.

On still nights like these, winding our way through the city as it sleeps or celebrates quietly indoors, I feel that we are blessed to be outside in the cold air, passing the warmly lit windows, breathing the wind that blows off the ocean and picks up the coal smoke from all the Christmas fires.

On Christmas night, not Christmas eve, but the night of the 25th, the lights at the first house we visited were not working. We had to feel around in the dark to feed the little black cat that lives there, who seemed to be only a pair of lonesome green eyes that night. As we were playing and talking with her a little, it sounded as if someone was trying to force their way into the house, and we went to investigate with our hearts leaping and ears prickling. In the end it turned out to be another cat, a giant black cat, who was trying to break into the house.

After leaving that house we made our way to the next house, where another black cat, the brother of the first cat lives. He seemed a little on edge that night, so we sat with him a little while. But after we left there, for whatever reason, the streets seemed full of cats, and all of them completely black. It was just an odd happening I suppose, but normally we don't really come across any cats on our walks, so it did seem somewhat strange to be surrounded by so many black cats all on one night.

It put me in mind of some stories that Henry Glassie collected in his book Irish Folktales, which tell of cats and the mysterious meetings they have to choose kings, to conduct trials where they may determine guilt or innocence, and so on. In one such tale, a Mr. Buckley of Co. Cork describes how, as he was returning home from an unsuccessful day at a market in a far off town, a cat jumped out of a cemetery he passed along the way and said, "Tell Balgeary that Balgury is dead". The man was dozing in his cart as his horse pulled him home, and so discounted what he had heard. Upon reaching home, his wife was anxious to have news from the market. But, as he had had a particularly bad day and not done much talking to anyone, he had no news for her. Noticing she was getting annoyed by his lack of news, he told her of the only bit of news he had heard, the news from the cat in the graveyard. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, their cat, which had been sitting by the fire jumped up and said "The Devil fire you! Why didn't you tell me before? I'll be late for the funeral." And then the cat ran out and was never seen again.
The story is, of course, much better read in full than in the quick description of it that I have given you here. And I would really recommend the book, which is full of lots of wonderful stories, collected with care.

The other thing I thought of with seeing all of those black cats that night was the Japanese story of Schippeitaro with its band of dancing, screaming phantom cats. I think it's possible that the illustrations of this story had more of an impression on me than the actual story itself though. In fact, one of my favourite things I brought back from Japan is an apron with these ghostly cats dancing across it, though I have a hard time recalling the ending of the story (but perhaps I just don't like the end).

But I suppose it's getting to the time that I should soon be getting ready to go and look in on the cats and bring them their dinners for tonight. While writing this entry I reread those stories in the Henry Glassie collection, and I came across a bit of advice that relates to these posts about talking animals and things: "never ask a cat a question. She might answer back. And, troth, if she did, it is seven years of cruel luck you will have brought on your shoulders. Aye, indeed." - Malachi Horan

Just like that. Perhaps I should be more careful with all of my 'ça va?' and 't'as faim?' sorts of queries!

Wells running with wine, trees growing indoors, animals telling stories.

2010-12-19T18:04:00.002Z

On Christmas Eve, according to Breton tradition, only man and serpents sleep. Man, because he is forgetful and ungrateful, and the serpent because no evil can take place on this night, so there's nothing to do. On this night no ghosts or witches roam the earth, the fires of hell stop burning, and the wells and fountains run with the finest wine during midnight mass. And also, at midnight animals can speak the language of man. Cows especially are said to take this night to address all of their issues from the past year, to talk to each other of things they've seen and travels they've made, recount stories they've heard, and to discuss things to come.

   A few years ago my husband and I came across François-Marie Luzel's Nouvelles Veillées Bretonnes, a book full of folktales from Brittany. Luzel grew up in Brittany in the early 1800s, and spent many long, winter evenings listening to neighbours and visiting storytellers in the glow of the hearth. In his books of veillées (evenings of visiting and stories) he strives to keep the stories he later collected as a folklorist in their original context, as much as is possible in written form, by including the conversations that prompted the stories, trying to sort of transcribe the evenings, rather than just the individual tales. It is in this book that we found the transcriptions of two Christmas Eves, as people sat around their big, oak yule logs talking before going off to midnight mass.
   On one of these evenings someone told the story of Arzur, a man who does not believe the tales he has been told of talking animals, and decides to prove everyone wrong by sneaking into a barn on Christmas Eve and spending the night there.
   So off Arzur goes, and hides himself away in the hayloft. At first there is nothing out of the ordinary, and he begins to feel quite smug. But as midnight strikes the cows begin to talk. They do not seem to have noticed his presence and start discussing the humble birth of Jesus "between a cow and a donkey", then one cow reproaches another for disobeying the farmer on the previous day, and so on.
   By this point Arzur's heart is pounding, he's distraught, he can't believe what he is hearing. But it gets worse for him, and what he next hears makes his blood run cold. One cow asks her brother what they will do on the following day, and he responds: "Tomorrow we will have to pull the hearse so that we can bring the body of Arzur to the parish cemetery to be buried -- poor curious, indiscreet, unbelieving and impious Arzur who is even now in this very barn, listening to us". All of the other cows repeat in a sort of ghastly chorus: "We will draw the body of Arzur to the cemetery!"
   Arzur, dying of fright, and thinking that the cows plan to murder him for having spied on them, jumps up from his hiding place and runs home. The cows do nothing to stop him going, acting as if he were never there at all. Shaking with fear, Arzur takes to his bed, and never leaves it again, except to go to the cemetery the following day, his hearse drawn by the very cows that he had heard talking on Christmas Eve.

When I started thinking about Christmas cards this year, this story came back to me. It's not that I am afraid of my loved ones missing church. I have come across other Breton stories about the importance of not skipping out on midnight mass (like the one about a hard-working shoe-maker whose wife warns him to be careful not to lose track of time and miss mass, but he, nevertheless, gets carried away with his work and ends up getting a visit from Ankou, the Breton personification of death). But what I love about this story is not its religious bent, but rather the portrait it paints of a vivid, mysterious world where miracles happen all the time, though it is better not to test them.

So, even though I have been working long hours in the cold recently, and coming home tired, hungry, and frozen every evening, I have forced myself on, filling this apartment with printed card after printed card, until all the tabletops were covered, and strings of cards were hung up like prayer flags. The cards should be flying out into the world on Monday, late I know, but my best wishes for a magical Christmas will be going on ahead of them, and on to you reading this. May your Christmas be full of wonder and stories around flickering fires!

Of coldness and loss of feeling in toes...

2010-12-08T00:43:00.000Z

Some visitors managed their way from France, over snow clouds and ice-jammed streets, to be with us these past few days. Today, at work, people seem strange again, accents sound thicker, as if I had been away to someplace much farther than the local sights.

Yesterday before planes and goodbyes, we took ourselves a little down the road, out to the ruins of Dunnottar Castle. No one else was around, so we were free to wander all the dark and empty rooms, using the clouds of our breath to transform stray sun beams into columns of light. We wound our ways up spiral staircases, wailed ghostly at lost members of our group, listened to the pigeons coo and hum inside the tower they had taken for their own, wrote snowy messages and left giant bird footprints across clear patches of snow.

The day was full up with the pleasure of exploring a wild and windblown place, and it was surprising to look at the photos later. With all of the emotion and chatter stripped away, only the bones of the day were left.

The land looked only bare and cold, the buildings only geometric and broken, a collection of surfaces in sun or shadow. I felt as if I had not been to this place at all.

The bleakness of lost hours seemed to be mirrored back on me from these bits of captured light. Though still visible, the places I had stood would no longer hold my feet.

I've never before felt so estranged from photos that I couldn't remember for certain the act of having taken them.

Looking long enough, I start to wonder...

... are they the ghosts or am I?

The sun swam up from the bottom of the sky and winked.

2010-11-28T11:22:00.002Z

Winter has looked in on us these past few days. It has been snowing since Wednesday.
First there were big, slow, feather-like snowflakes, then hail, then the small fast snowflakes that once gave me a fright as a child. Sitting in the passenger seat of the car, I watched them coming towards us as we passed under streetlights on the way to my grandparents' house one evening. In some half dreamy state they looked to me like the clawed, bewitching hands of a malevolent, frosty man. Once seen, it was impossible to unsee, and I still think of it on nights when flurries run past a light too quickly.

Still, I love snow and ice and the weird and lovely tricks they play on the landscape. I grew up in a place that could be radically altered in a short time when the weather picked up. One winter I had a small ice palace to myself, made on the surface of a lake when bitter winds threw the waves up high and froze them one on top of another before they fell, leaving a long wall standing on the frozen lake, about a kilometre from the shore. If you walked for a while on the wall, before long you would find little round rooms at your feet and you could sometimes crawl in through a hole in the ceiling and enter them. Then you could sit in the calm, round coldness of the place and listen to the wind roar overhead, waiting to see if some marvel would appear. If you had your skates you could try your luck on the bumpy lake ice on the way home. But if you weren't able to roam about on icy lakes, similar places could be built in the yard of snow.

For all the beauty of winter, it is an eerie time I think. The snowy sky that is white and luminescent in the middle of the night, while some days never seems to lighten up at all, especially here in Scotland. The times when things fall so silent that you can hear the snow falling, or when a blizzard is thick enough that you can't see your own hands in front of you. The strange feeling when you look around you and realize the world has turned odd and blue and spirited, that the sun has set faster than expected and you have unwittingly entered a wonderland not meant for you.

Last night, just after midnight, there were three weirdly bright flashes of lightning, punctuated by two rumbles of thunder, and then nothing. I didn't think it ever stormed in that way in winter, but the season has so many oddities, who knows.

Oh, but now I think it's time for the tall night to sit on my eyelids, while the trees dance their roots across the sky at the window. Time for dreaming.

In a letter, I would send the sound and smell of rain on wood.

2010-11-22T10:49:00.005Z

Hello to you on a rainy Monday. Over here this morning, the sky is pulling the wooly greyness of her winter blankets across the sky. I am told that there is snow on the mountains already, and soon there will be some in town as well. The small plastic radio babbles on the floor in the corner and our eyes peer at this or that thing in the dimness. I count the shoddy day light hours, never exacting from them all that I plan to. But, I am trying to teach myself not even to notice them at all, that supper is not eaten around nightfall, days of painting can curl themselves around lamplight any time, and a working-day tiredness comes only from work and not absence of sunlit hours.
The clothes horse stands well-dressed and waiting, a lone magpie passes at the window. Assemblies of folklore books gather on the tabletops, on the floor. If the rain stops for a moment I will buy us milk for our tea, and the wind can sweep up from the sea and over the rooftops to push me back up the hill as I walk down it towards home.