'We see one thing next to another. In time they get superimposed
and then who looks silly? Not us, as you might think, but the curve
we are plotted on, head to head, a parabola in the throes
of vomiting its formula …’
John Ashberry, ‘from Tuesday Evening’
Our shortcut through fields is orienteers in Inshriach Forest
Our rain is rain
Our farmhouse is Jon & Ali's flat in Kingussie
Our horse is 2 horses on the shinty pitch
Our Kasane is Heather
Journey
We drive east from Loch Duich past Lochs Cluanie, Loyne, Garry, Lochy, Spean and Laggan and stop at Loch Insh.
On the way Newtonmore advertises
SHINTY
THIS
SATURDAY
and the Waltzing Waters – The world's most elaborate water, light & music productions! And we wonder why Strathspey and not Badenoch's a dance-tune.
Loch Insh
8 hosomichi way-marker
Ken Cockburn, 2010
Despite the forecast the day clears as we drive. We continue beyond Kingussie on the back road, north-east, parking between an archaic roadsign and partially built house, and follow the path into Insh Marshes Nature Reserve.
8 Loch Insh oku
Alec Finlay, 2010
We're trying to navigate this Basho station – fields easy to get lost in, and the characters a courteous farmer, a pathfinder horse, and a little girl with a flower name – but no warriors, poets, priests of renown, it’s more nature than culture. Put another way, the best of culture here’s toadstool and mushroom, blue sails growing and shrinking at the far end of the loch. So we refer to these –
8 hokku-label, Loch Insh
('for 'Heather' read 'Kasane'', KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
8 circle poem
(...'for 'Kasane' read 'Heather'', KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
and other materials to hand –
8 hokku-label (Elegy for Soutar/blaeberry mou, AF & KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
Blaeberry Mou
The flitterin faces come doun the brae
And the baskets gowd and green;
And nane but a blindie wud speer the day
Whaur a’ the bairns hae been.
The lift is blue, and the hills are blue,
And the lochan in atween;
But nane sae blue as the blaeberry mou’
That needna tell whaur it’s been.
William Soutar (1898-1943)
8 Basho, homage to Soutar
Ken Cockburn, 2010
Blaeberries, suggesting the poet William Soutar; juniper, imagining a local brand of gin – and Ken makes more fourteens for Isobel's recent birthday.
8 Fourteens (for Isobel)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
There’s a lightness to our poeming here, mostly from exhaustion. We couldn’t do another station.
8 circle poem
Alec Finlay, 2010
8 hokku-label, Loch Insh
(‘In severe rain / use a paddle’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
Down at the waters edge we add a pair of hokku-labels to the same birch branch – Ken’s for Basho, Eck’s as a memory of childhood walks with Ailie and Sue, and their donkeysome burdens, Serpellete and Maus, up on the moor.
8 hokku-labels, Loch Insh
poems AF, KC; photograph KC, 2010
Don't worry,
the courteous farmer has a horse
that knows the way
(KC)
the donkeys
trot faster
heading
for home
(AF)
8 hokku-label (Cairngorm Sapphire)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
and Ken’s nod to the juniper, rare now, always a find.
We read the text in situ and sharing a giggle at Eck’s lisping ‘whores’ for ‘horses’ – well, they can both show you the way.
audio, Kurobane, Loch Insh (Basho’s station 8)
KC & AF, 2010
We're staying with Mr & Miss, Thomson & Craighead, aka Jon & Ali: artists who've shown at H.I.C.A. but who neither of us have met before. They both teach in London, but manage to spend about half the year in Kingussie, from where there's a daily direct train to King's Cross. We set ourselves off mapping contemporary arts in the wilder airts ‘beyond Shirakawa’, but our method is Basho’s: friendship and conversation, minds that meet over tea – Jon picked out the wildly named Goomtee White Ball Darjeeling from our selection – and sake or whisky – native Dalwhinnie.
The only forms that we utilise are tick-boxless: hokku, mesostic, wish; to which Jon and Ali kindly add the perfected domestic form of the meal; their table an episodic still-life, composed of varieties of oatcake, cheese, condiments, each with its own tale – this is Lisa’s blueberry jelly, that an unlikely heavenly rice-pudding made with soyamilk.
Their latest project, A Short Film About War, is a narrative made from gleanings, eye-witness reports, woven into Homeric interweb rite – echo of our visit to Kevin Henderson at Dunsinane, where we witnessed his memorial to the dead of Afghanistan.
Bell & Horse
8 Insh Church, Kincraig
Ken Cockburn, 2010
Outdoors, what we share with Jon & Ali is a sense that we’re still learning the landscape, daily, seasonally. Approaching Tom Eunan (Adamnan's Hill) we hear the pew-pew of ospreys on Tom Dubh in Loch Insh, think maybe kayakers have got too close. Insh Church (nearer Kincraig than Insh) contains St Adamnan's bell, one of five bronze bells remaining in Scotland… made around 900AD, and similar in size to the one that welcome the Kilmichael Cross home. Cracked, its peal has palled.
8 St Adamnan's bell
Thomson & Craighead, 2010
8 hokku-label, Tom Eunan
(‘Tom Eunan – / ring the bell for / the innocents’, KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
We walk through the raspberry-fringed old churchyard past the tidily landscaped new burial-ground, and reach the shinty pitch, undulating and dotted with flowers and toadstools.
8 Basho's horses
Thomson & Craighead, 2010
8 Basho's horses
Thomson & Craighead, 2010
I recall Basho's pathfinder horse, and hum the old song about San Jose.
8 hokku-label
(‘Do you know the way / to Kurobane?’, KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
8 at Uath Lochan, (l to r) Alec Finlay, Alison Craighead, Emma Nicholson, Jon Thomson
Ken Cockburn, 2010
We’re joined for lunch by Emma Nicholson, newly of ATLAS (Arts Team, Lochalsh and Skye). Then a walk round one of Jon & Ali’s local highlights, the 4 Uath Lochans in Inshriach Forest, SE of Loch Insh.
8 Uath Lochan
Ken Cockburn, 2010
Sunlit birks against a backdrop of black clouds look unreal. The lochan supports waterlilies and kayakers, novices and a tutor, and no ospreys here to mind.
8 hokku-label, 4 Uath Lochans
(‘blades / in the / glade’, AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
8 hokku-label, 4 Uath Lochans
(‘buds of cottongrass / and bandaged moss / bind the lochs', AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
We’re immediately asked by 3 teenage orienteeters if we've seen a red triangle, and we have to say no, but we smile realising we’ve been gifted Basho’s easy to get lost – and we’d thought it was the poets who would get lost!
8 hokku-label, 4 Uath Lochans
(‘many paths, hereabouts – / the orienteerers ask the poets / the way’, KC)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
We can’t help seeing the combination of vertiginous pines, misted mountains, wispy clouds, water and tall swaying reeds as the landscape of Chinese poems and paintings of the ‘Mountains and Rivers Without End’ era. To honour this view we adapt Iain Crichton Smith's ‘Chinese Poem’ to the scene.
8 hokku-label, (after Iain Crichton Smith)
(‘Sacked from the department / I am alone here. By the lochan / drinking tea from a flask in the rain / I think of distant friends.’ KC & AF)
Ken Cockburn, 2010
Then magical rain drops tinkle glass on the lochan’s meniscus, each sound the shape of a teardrop. Pathos becomes comedy in this list of returned library books left in the middle of our path. (We’re tired poets now, after all these days of writing labels in places, so such foundling poems are welcome).
8 An Inshdursley reader
Ken Cockburn, 2010
An Inshdursley reader
Bella
Kaymon the Gorgon
Sea haze
toilet of doom
Surprises according to Humphrey
Starlight dream
Horrid Henry wakes the dead
Ruby Rogers get me out of here!
Tell me about it
Ruby Rogers get a life!
As the walk winds on round the lochans, 'setting out' merges into a reassuring 'nearly there now'.
4 hokku for the 4 Uath lochans
(I) (for Jon)
the wind
makes
the quiet
the pines
make
the silence
(II)
there were
woods here
before there
were woods
(III) (for Ali)
It's all
back
from here
(P.T.O.)
It's all
back
from here
(IV)
look closely
and the pines
begin to bend
(AF)
8 hokku-label, (4 Uath lochans)
poem AF, photograph KC, 2010
8 hokku-label, (4 Uath lochans)
poem AF, photograph KC, 2010
8 hokku-label, (4 Uath lochans)
poem AF, photograph KC, 2010
8 hokku-label, (4 Uath lochans)
poem AF, photograph KC, 2010
Ma Belle
Fourteen chanterelles
Ken Cockburn, 2010
8 Gleaning
Alec Finlay, 2010
The afternoon ends cosily, damply, in a nearby wood, where we pick chanterelles (this arrangement’s for Isobel again). An undertone of moral crisis enters when each of us in turn spots the best specimens flourishing over the fence, in the back garden of some folk who clearly won’t pick them. In the end we don’t invoke the right to roam, but Eck leaves a confessional poem.
8 My Neighbours Chanterelle
(‘most of all / I desire / the chanterelle / of my neighbour’, AF)
Alec Finlay, 2010
Our old pal Davy Polmadie told us of a rumour that Kurt Schwitters used to Summer near Kingussie, in an old manse with pebble-dash walls, where he was cared for by his companion ‘Wantee’, made friends with field mice and composed collages from musty copies of the Sunday Post and People’s Friend.
Somehow fitting that just over the fields was the birthplace of that other great collage artist, ‘Ossian’ MacPherson. Perhaps it was one of these visits which inspired this undated poem of Schwitters’, celebratory of Ben MacDuhi?
‘Whenever you are standing on a high mountain you feel free and
happy. You see around you bigger and smaller mountains, you
feel the music they play together, nothing irritates you, nothing
seems to trouble your sight. You feel happy.’
(KS)
Before we leave we exchange memories of Berneray: Jon & Ali love that louse-shaped little isle as much as Eck, though their trips have never overlapped. They are just off to the west of the west; we follow them the week after. I wonder if they’ll see Sado?
intimations
Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead have been working together as visual artists since 1993, exploring sound, video, and the internet: Thomson & Craighead
HICA (the Highland Institute for Contemporary Art) is an artist-run space located near Inverness in the North of Scotland.
ATLAS (Arts Team Lochalsh and Skye) is a new initiative for creating exceptional contemporary arts projects across the region, unbound by a specific gallery or venue. Led by Emma Nicolson, ATLAS will work with local schools and communities to bring high quality visual art to the islands.
For more details on the island of Berneray and where to stay, visit the Gatliff Hebridean Hostels Trust website.
guide
Insh Church is at the N end of Loch Insh, off the uncategorised road that runs between the B970 and the B1952. The Uath Lochans lie S of Loch Insh in Inshriach Forest, and can be reached by leaving the B970 at Insh House and heading S. The chanterelles can be found in… no, that’s our secret.
coda
8 shown the way by a horse...
('Take the horse / he knows the way / when he stops get off / he'll come home alone', AF after Sam Hamill)
Peter Foolen, 2011
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