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On Flanders Moss a drowning or a resurrection? #BrexitDay #indyref2

Homage to Joseph Beuys ‘Runrig’

I particularly liked the rhythmical way Mary read out the names of the different parts of the peat bank, it sounded like poetry. Sitting side by side at the big desk she pointed to each word as she read (you can see her finger at the bottom of the photo). Mary spent all her working life as a primary school teacher. Even though I am 52 I loved the way that she explained to me her community’s peat cutting words and language as though I was one of her wee pupils (which I was).

Winter turns to spring. Day to night. On the liminal surface of the bog the deep blue of the unfathomable galaxy is reflected in the thin veneer of the water. Sphagnums and moor grasses disappear into the deep black mystery of the earth. Worlds above, worlds below. What is real, what reflection? We flickering across the twilight.

The geese have flown home from the peatlands now that winter in Iceland is past, leaving nothing but footprints and us to talk about them.

 

On the peatlands cutting traditions and knowledge are handed down generation to generation resulting in just enough peat being cut to last the year. Experience tells that after this amount of time it will become either too dry or too wet to release enough energy be useful. A partially used, decaying stack is a sad cairn marking a leaving, an illness or a death.

Food poverty and fuel poverty are inextricably linked. The people at this food bank told us that without gas or electricity cans of soup are useless; tins of tuna and tins of  potatoes can be made into nourishing, if cold, fishcakes. In the peatlands at least people, if able to cut their traditional banks, can warm themselves and cook a hot meal.

Spent- disused oil rig parked up in the River Forth, behind is Edinburgh, capital city, home of RBS.

Looking eastwards to the rising sun across the Minch from the peat moors of Lewis you can see Norman MacCaig’s “frieze of mountains” on the mainland.

“A Man in Assynt’

‘Glaciers grinding West, gouged out
these valleys, rasping the brown sandstone,
and left, on the hard rock below- the
ruffled foreland-
this frieze of mountains, filed
on the blue air- Stac Polly,
Cul Beag, Cul Mor, Suilven,
Canisp- a frieze and
a litany,…’

Peel back the surface even high up in a Glasgow estate multi- a modernist tower house- the myth of the ancestral Highlands,  a monarch in social(ist) housing.

https://www.freightbooks.co.uk/product/disappearing-glasgow/