NAPOMO, Day 2: Empty Vessel

Empty Vessel

I met ayont the cairnie
a lass wi tousie hair
singin til a bairnie
that wes nae langir there.

Wunds wi warlds ti swing
dinna sing sae sweet,
the licht that bends owre awthing
is less taen up wi’t.



Hugh McDiarmid, proving that he's actually more comprehensible in Scots (Or it would do, if anyone could actually face reading "On a Raised Beach", or the "Hymns to Lenin". McDiarmid is probably the only poet in the world to have been kicked out of both the Communist and the Scottish National Parties....)

NB: if you're struggling, try reading it aloud. A cairnie is, in this case, a field boundary marker, tousie means 'tousled', and a 'bairnie' is a baby or a child (a good old Germanic word, cognate with 'bear' as in 'to bear a child, to give birth' - the bairn is what is born)

I have a love/ hate affair with writing. Except when it's hate/ hate.

I have also been re-reading Hermann Kant's Die Aula, a heavily autobiographical story about an East German journalist who is looking back on the three years he spent after the war preparing for university, thanks to a new programme for bright proletarians who had to leave school without qualifications - and trying (a) to work out why the most talented and enthusiastic member of the class is now running a pub in Hamburg, and (b) to avoid confronting the fact that he betrayed his best friend out of jealousy, in a way we only discover towards the end of the book.

Which makes it sound very gloomy, but it's actually extremely funny, and written in a witty and allusive style. It's about how the past shapes us, but also about how we remember the past - and how we write stories about it. So the first sentence is still curiously recognisable to anyone who's trying to get words down on paper:

There's this man, he sits over a typewriter, smokes too much, blows dust off the keys, bites into an apple and thinks of Schiller,* stares at the empty paper and then at the clock, scrapes away at the sticky lower-case a until it's clean again, has yet another cigarette on the go, and he calls all that work.

He's lying in wait for a thought.†

(Da sitzt einer über seiner Schreibmaschine, raucht zuviel, bläst Staub von den Tasten, beißt in einen Apfel und denkt an Schiller dabei, starrt auf das leere Papier und dann auf die Uhr, kratzt an dem verklebten kleinen a herum, bis es wieder sauber ist, und nennt das alles Arbeit.

Er lauert auf einen Gedanken.)

*Schiller used to leave apples in his desk and not find them until someone else noticed the rotting smell...

† Perhaps unsurprisingly, no sooner has our hero found the thought, than he gets a telegram inviting him to give a speech celebrating the educational programme, now to be abolished, which he will spend the reset of the book trying to write. He never does get to give it.

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( Beware the ramblings! )