The Voyage Out
Click on the image for an edited recording of a word and image workshop for Book Week Scotland, 18 Nov 2023.
Texts and images from “The Voyage Out” workshop…
The last look – between reality and illusion
I am reminded of a delightful series of infants’ books that were once popular with my nephews. Books of ‘touchy-feely’ textures; wool, nylon, sandpapery surfaces combined with animal images and phrases such as ‘That is not my cat’, ‘That is not my dog’ etc, and which would end with the gleeful statement, ‘That IS my cat…dog…dinosaur!’ When looking at the landscape painting by Reinhard Behrens during The Voyage Out writing workshop, I am having a similar sensorial experience. I am the audience looking into this artist’s space and thinking, that is not mine. And yet…
There is stillness in the air, even the birds are transfixed as if held by a willow pattern glaze. In scenes unfamiliar – a Cappadocia of snow-capped mountains, somnambulant Dolomites, an American prairie hosting a crossing by yaks – anything could happen. Or are they ponies? Hard to tell. They form an almost-unbroken line across the landscape, interrupted only by an oddness of grey and green, mindful of the flash of red used by Turner to bring us further into the painting; red to focus the eye. Here, a grey-green toy submarine to focus the imagination. It holds us in the way the hills and mountains are held by the weather.
A serration in the landscape between what is looked at and what is seen.
But what does any of it mean? An image composed of fancy and the imagination? The absurd? The fantastical? No frames of reference, none that confer any sense. A quest; a questing sense. Cervantes’ Quixote sense? MacNeice’s Roland-to–the-Dark-Tower sense?
These Alpine ridges, these fairy snow-capped towers of Cappadocia, these shadowy lower Dolomites, are not mine. This arctic prairie serrated by a slipstream of small horses, yaks, is not one I’m familiar with either. The almost imperceptible smallness of the grey-green toy submarine, a shining glitch merged with a landscape of possibility even if it is an assemblage of imagined parts. Almost whimsical, only it is not. Exploring landscapes and recording their beauty, perhaps before they spoil.
The last flash of light; the almost imperceptible ‘refractive green […] caused by the sun setting over the sea […]’ leading you, inwards…
As I look across these plains, I imagine filmic endings, too; Baz Luhrman’s Missus Boss looking out from her cattle station of Faraway Downs in Australia’s Northern Territory and seeing the next chapter of her life without Nullah, without Drover, beckoning. Altered to the person she needs to be, with Nullah’s song echoing in her ear, Missus Boss is driven to driving those no-good cheeky bulls to Darwin, again and again (in re-runs of our imagination).
Powell-Pressburger’s Joan Webster, missing Kiloran and the pipers on the road, takes one long last look at the landscape of the Western Isles—an open synapse of possibility—and in that instant decides to go back to a postwar life in Manchester that’s different from the one preconfigured in days at her desk of Imperial Chemical Industries. She knows where she’s going, this time…
The old surgeon’s bag from the archival recesses of a Naboland is not my bag but as I look into its interior world using the light from my iPhone, even as I’ve looked into Reinhard Behrens’ backlit workshop, I travel with it on a different kind of journey… a keening sort onboard a whaling ship bound for the Northern Atlantic. The dull, rust-spotted surgical instruments lodging within, I imagine pristine, polished, brought back into play as the surgeon uses them to probe and repair the wounds of his fellow whalers... igniting the cautery kit with matches from the box of Bryant & May... assessing human vitality and frailty with recursive inflations of his blood pressure cuff.
Through the opacity of the workshop window, shadows of tides and what they bring in…
is more than a mist in the west, a haar in the east
is more than storm trunks beached in a barnacle light
is more than uprooted bushes shrubbing sand, air-combed by its branches
is more than serried lines of seaweed ringing the bay as those rings do Saturn
is more than tidal walkers in eddies of twos and threes before the clock turns them back
is more than a solitary stake of memories pushing upward from the sea wall,
reminding you of an embrasure of bathing huts that once stood there
is more than the terrier after its run, and the flickering path through the dunes, inwards of the afternoon.
William Hume
Fragments of time
From a giggling burn running so clear
it seemed empty of any water at all,
I plucked a kidney-shaped pebble
which contained all the stars.
There was no backdrop to black infinity,
just a white-hot sky, skinkling
in the palm of my wet hand.
*
And this ruin rises up…
just bricks and mortar now,
or mud and lime. Peat bog and marl.
An old Casa enclosing emptiness,
beneath which old roots fan out
in hollow sinewy tubes,
where old fragments of time hurry
along to the depths
of the mountain’s layered skirts.
*
A cheese grater basks
in the opaque light of the window.
Miniature holes capture orange light
pulsing tiny arrows to feed me.
*
This amulet, a pear-heart,
the kind that lub-dubs, lub-dubs
in the chest just where it hangs.
Helplessly secure, a pendulum of hope
on a bulky silver chain flashing;
streaks of light held tight
within its sticky interior.
Wanda Mcgregor
Secret Islands
A twisted tennis racket that in its deformed, useless state reminds me of abandoned snow shoes: a bent wooden frame and the distorted squares made by unruly nylon thread.
*
Two-dimensional yaks trudge across the grassy high plateau
not really aware who is catching a lift. Otherwise, all
is like it should be: the snowy peaks, nameless passes,
polished foothills. Traces of structures
man-made; windblown grasses
and swampy puddles, not reflecting much.
*
A torn curtain, having lost its purpose to give warmth and privacy might well show in its tattiness, a map of new territories never to be explored. Whenever a breeze comes up and moves it, those island shapes distort and regroup in less accessible formations.
*
The white nylon string with frayed ends that came to the rescue when the aluminium frame of my orange rucksack cracked continues to do its useful job, thirty-three years on when it first accompanied me to Scotland, and then to Nepal.
Reinhard Behrens
Collected On My Journeys
I made a kaleidoscope for my child.
When peered into,
shapes of the Universe appear —
not from the colour of glass, but from
fragments of stars collected on my journeys
in the tiny submarine.
*
I took canvas sneakers to let my feet breathe in the dry heat. Through the thin worn soles I felt every sharp stone.
Tiny particles of desert sand remained in the seams. Dust and sweat folded into the fabric of shoes filled with memories.
Siri Macmillan
Tripping
Snowy mountains and hardy tundra
a fading castle. When will it fall?
Beasts parade in single file
an endless march from left to right
towing a rusty submarine
thirsting for water.
*
The cheese grater feasts on old pencils, acrylic paints and oil pastels too.
Devours colour and spits out confetti; a hundred tiny metal mouths, lipsticked with rusty rainbows.
*
The gold has gone from my passport
detail rubbed away by changing weathers and waters,
by fingers and fabrics that could have been kinder.
But somehow it knows
that its worth is in the fade, not the shine.
*
Shivering trees line the frozen landscape
zipping together the white, white earth and sky
branches and trunks staring at snow-cold ground
a melancholy submarine takes his reindeer for a walk.
*
Two little pebbles; loch-born
Smooth, grey, hints of blue;
the smaller balancing atop the larger
never slipping.
Together, a tiny mountain.
*
The Ice Kingdom can hold secrets;
small ones (and big ones too).
You whisper them in,
past the jagged gate and
the sentry seal —
a muttering of fierce, warm.
Toxic treasures to be tamed
in preparation for release to the wild.
Fiona Stirling
Foreign
he holds up the fleece
deep in the long coarse staples
crumbs of soft brown peat
I think about the winters
sinking into blanket bog
*
my coat is heavy
inside a down undercoat
keeps me warm and dry
even in this strange new land
I am home in my own skin
water underfoot
I look to the horizon
see mountains and snow
I must forget the ocean
tasting seaweed at ebb tide
solitary life is hard
the beasts over the river
are not of my kind
but I am on my own now
they have coats something like mine
a line of strangers
carrying for the masters
kishies on their backs
they take no notice of me
cannot tell me why I’m here
*
he tells the story
it was a long time ago
and so far away
he rolls up the fleece for me
I bring out a plastic bag
Jenny Elliot
(Ed - these are written in the tanka form.)
Feeling north
The jellyfish was an uneven lump sprawling across the regular trammels of the sand, a dense, solid, still sentient mass. I put my foot on it, pressed, felt the thickness of its being. When afloat again it would be huge, luminescent, while here it lay besmirched by a coat of sand, and hooked within it was a tiny half of a shell, its milky white inside like a badge.
The groundwater catches the sky, flat, white, striping the land, easing it open.
Pastel you said, or maybe acrylic, oily and still, amongst the penciled tufts of grass.
The gull eyed its egg.
The egg looked back, its
stony eye cold and veined.
The gull raised its webbed foot,
felt the egg’s firm form, the egg was unmoved.
Round, hole in the middle. Ridged, smooth, but faintly uneven, rubbed so, a long-lost coding below the surface. You got 4 for a dollar, 25c a ride, flat rate. For long enough, I thought Edinburgh and NYC were on the same latitude. Maybe an east-facing port is all it took to place me. The call of the gulls. But Edinburgh is 15° further north.
Anna-Louise Milne
On an early mid-winter morning, in a place both real and imagined, I came up around the side of a hill and there before me was a stag in all his height and strength, and beauty. For a second, or perhaps even two, he stood there regarding me, motionless as the landscape around us, and as grave and as endless—future, past and present all at once—before turning in one fluid motion, and disappearing into the grey air over the brow of the hill.
Kirsty Gunn
Brackish gushing eddies
roiling foamy
surging
How can I make words signify the ebb and flow of water… or dreams?
Gail Low
