September 22, 2014

The Lock Gate 1942Robert Colquhoun1914-1962

A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle Hugh MacDiarmidfull textPART 2

The munelicht's like a lookin-glass, The thistle's like mysel, But whaur ye've gane, my bonnie lass, Is mair than I can tell. Were you a vision o mysel, Transmutted by the mellow liquor? Neist time I I glisk you in a glass, I'se warrant I'll mak siccar. A man's a clean contrairy sicht, Turned this way in-ootside, And, fegs, I feel like Dr. Jekyll Tak'n guid tent o Mr. Hyde... Gurly thistle - hic - you canna Daunton me wi your shaggy mien, I'm sair - hic - needin a shave, That's plainly to be seen. But what aboot it - hic - aboot it? Mony a man's been that afore. It's no a fact that in his lugs A wund like this need roar!...

There's nocht sae sober as a man blin drunk. I maun hae goat an unco bellyfu' To jaw like this - and yet what I am sayin Is aa the apter, aiblins, to be true. This munelicht's fell like whisky noo I see't. - Am I a thingum mebbe that is kept Preserved in spirits in a muckle bottle Lang centuries efter sin wi Jean I slept? - Mounted on a hillside, wi the thistles And bracken for verisimilitude. Like a stuffed bird on metal like a brainch, Or like a sea on a trump o rock-like wood? Or am I juist a figure in a scene O Scottish life A.D. one-nine-two-five? The haill thing kelters like a theater claith Till I micht fancy that I was alive ! I dinna ken and nae man ever can I micht be in my ain bed efter aa. The haill damned thin's a dream for ocht we ken, - The Warld and Life and Daith, Heaven, hell anaa. We maun juist tak things as we find them then, And mak a kirk o mill o tham as we can, - And yet I feel this muckle thistle staunin Aatween me and the mune as pairt o a Plan. It isna there - nor me - by accident. We're brocht the gaither for a certian reason, Ev'n gin it's naething mair than juist to gie My jaded soul a necessary frisson. I never saw afore a thistle quite Sae intimatley, or at sic an oor. There's something in the fickle licht that gi'es. A different life to't and unco pooer.

Reminiscences of Scottish life and character Dean Ramsey (1908)

Community Texts

Woman with Paper Flowers1944Robert MacBryde1913 - 1966

Nomos of the Earth: Original Instructions

We are living through a catastrophe unprecedented in human history in which what we’ve lost is the world. We have to face that, but we have to face up to the reality that we have also been set free by this devastation that, with a thousand voices, declares itself an expired way of life, “the abandoned ruin of a dead civilization.” There is nothing to cry for anymore. There is no use clinging to a future we were promised, which will never come anyway. There is, equally, nothing left to critique, to be outraged or indig- nant about. It is just our time, our epoch, and there is only us, here, and now. Only the decisions we make here, now. If we accept that, the question becomes acting in a way that is adequate to the situa- tion we face. Adequate to history, to our shared, historical, revolutionary task. The door is open. Walk through it.

Backgammon PlayerRobert MacBryde 1947

from Symphony No.11 …the inner recesses… (for Mary) I This flesh breathes expands and contracts divining a place in the universe outside the door’s lifeless shadow the grey strata of clouds rising in the east and to touch this residue which clots the morning dawn an ink’s pooling Rorschach design a panther of retracting night shrouded in the forest waking to wind through alcove windows to plainchant echoes from atonal dreams II There is a point of beginning of abstract generalities of the solitary heart amid an intermittent rain of the stranger’s glare in a room where the doorway swings closed and where the fate of Schrodinger’s cat depends upon eyes observing the degeneration of atomic nuclei and the silent sentience of forgotten lives left on the cutting-room floor

Woman with Leaping Cat Robert Colquhoun 1945

Why Walking Helps Us Think Ferris Jabrnewyorker

In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.” Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.” Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing.