So, since our trip to Skye in late October I have been alert for fragments of a long piece called “The House of Trees”. It is an archaeological process: I have seen the overview, the aerial photographs of anomalous markings. I suspect the subject matter, what lurks below the undisturbed grass, intimations of structure, an outline, a definite definition. Season by season, I return to gaze from different angles ( the low light or high light revealing something or nothing), tentatively trowel away a little soil ( gold being such a flighty treasure, turning to tin can or brass if not approached with delicacy). Gradually an accumulation of relics, lines, phrases, rivers, posies is piling up. So I have decided to display some current finds, unreconstructed, scrubbed, labeled.
The sections so far can be defined thus:
The pivotal images are a small derelict burial chapel beside a moorland road. Initially I was drawn to it by a large twining ivy plant, white and bone-dead, crawling up the roofless walls. But also a small group of yew trees under which a relatively new gravestone had been placed, so that they acted as a living green monument, evergreen in a windswept, wan landscape.
On the other side of the island, on the main road to and from Portree, we passed several times a deserted croft, again roofless, but this one filled with a copse of young trees. It was not in the middle of nowhere, but on the edge of a small village, newer houses just a stone’s throw away.
Both images of time, of mortality, of people living and passing on. The history of Scotland is depressing: bleak repetition of small conflicts, betrayals, squabbles, misunderstandings, bigotry, famines, disasters, displacement, loss, exploitation of the poor by the rich. As such it is not so different from any other nation’s histories. Perhaps Scotland’s historians were less persuaded by a ruling elite to gloss and gild the facts. The small population, the difficult terrain, has meant that lost villages, deserted houses have not been swept away by succeeding generations. The bitter, unthinking inhumanities that so stain a country’s historical development still remain, accusing, daring the passer-by to forget at their peril.
And the rigid, bombastic stupidity of councils, governments and landowners often encourage a wistful nostalgia for something that never was – a free and unified nation.
The romantic, Isle of Skye, (and by God, it is romantic), for example was parcelled up between bellicose clans, each taking possession of one of the peninsulas. MacDonalds, MacLeods, MacGregors and more, all continuing the Celtic Iron Age ( British) tradition of cattle raiding their neighbours, taking hostages, not trusting each other.
And parallel to this, the mythic grandeur of the Highland imagination ( again, a relict from pre-Christian cosmologies). The Second Sight, the Secret Commonwealth of the Fairy Nations, the spirit haunted wilds, the thin veils between Other worlds that pervade the folk history, the music and the sense of place. It is this that first fuels the project. Sitting in silence one evening I had a sense of being watched by the curious non-human eyes of the island’s Good People, and the memorable fancy that they began weaving, implanting, encouraging images, words, ideas. With that came the contrast and similarity between these mythic entities and the nation’s yearning for Independence, Freedom, Self Rule that re-emerges every generation or so ( and to a lesser extent every Saturday night when “Flower of Scotland” gets slurily echoed down the cobbled streets, especially after the traditional thrashing by England of the nearly always lamentable national football team.).
Time is different in mountain country. Each valley, each glen runs at its own speed, collecting its own data, developing its own reasons, its own story. The horizons are small, the world is a house with walls of green and brown slopes. Legend piles up, each place named for the event it remembers. Memory inhabits and flavours.
The city has its own time too, but it is a time shared by all other cities. Its urgencies are not local, it is fed by roads from elsewhere, it feeds also on its inhabitants, who are within its complex alimentary canal, slowly dissolving. Few cities exist within the landscape. They squat upon it, learning to disregard the geography as the years progress. Cities are not self sustaining. They are parasitical, drawing on the goodness from beyond their walls. Without the constant inflow of raw materials and nourishment, cities will quickly collapse in on themselves, self digesting in panic and confusion.
Anyway, here is the first part, as it is at present. (I will post a few other completed sections in the next few days – so far about ten parts).
THE HOUSE OF TREES
Part 1: A Harbouring of Voices
Come tumbling
Like birds for crumbs:
These lines
Bidden and unbidden,
Broken and insistent
Like gulls.
Small as sparrows,
Bright as chaffinches,
Cautious, sidelong, black watchfulness
As of crows.
Woven, twisted, rooted-
A faint echo from the hill.
For here is not the silence of the far North
Nor its diamond thinness of light.
In the dark the bones gather together,
Get up and dance,
Mutter and gesture seeking meaning,
Seeking purpose.
Plaintive, scolding
Finding tongue.
Whose voice
Is the possessor of truth?
It rises and sinks back hidden,
Forming and unforming,
Like a cormorant on slow black waters:
It will be where it was not,
Leaving no ripples of history or intent.
simonhlilly 
I have always admired those drawn to specific places and their deep possible histories. Constructing projects from these, creating them forward, seems an enormous challenge and pleasure to me. I commend you and look very much forward to how it progresses in and through you. Thank you for the time and effort.
I enjoyed the preface nearly as much as the verse.
Living in america, unless one seeks knowledge of precolonial times, the history is very shallow and filled with violence and exploitation.
There is no mythology here, there are no ancient places of mystery and magic; at least none of “american” origin.
This is a newly stolen land, conquered by genocide and cursed with the darkness of its conquerors.
Everything that is built and made here is designed to be temporary, to be exploited, used up and then abandoned. It is a country based upon planned obsolescence.
Perhaps five hundred or a thousand years from now the crumbling cities of america will provide inspiration for the poetry of some surviving human who has no knowledge of how they came to be.
Thanks for your appreciations. It is an interesting project to self-observe: some elements seem pretty fixed, others swash around or pop out of nowhere. New angles emerge almost complete. Secondary endings appear. Different voices with different tones insist on being heard. This morning a completely new thread popped in regarding the Islands of Britain. But I still have to catch one of the main themes and pin it down. Tides coming and going…
It is difficult to conceive of a place not embedded in a past one owns. The psychic reality of belonging must play a very different tune. We visited the States for a short time a while ago ( Northern California). Like Japan, there seem to be very few places that have settled and belong in the landscape. Everything seems just placed, plonked, like a movie set. ( In Japan, of course, there is a deep sense of history, but it seems to abide with the people, not with the buildings, which to a large extent are new. Even the oldest Shinto shrines get completely rebuilt on a regular basis. Wood and earthquake prevent the longeviity of stone). I wonder if the insistency of the movie industry and its world domination of the American Myth is an unconscious attempt to root a legitimacy for the nation,( as well as its busybody interference with other countries affairs, a lamentable habit it probably got from the English ( actually, Norman French) aristocracy.
Simon, you’re narrative prefacing the poem was very insightful–having the real feel for the hands of the earth pushing up to grab at things, holding them down.
I thought your verse good too, but in some way less poetically evocative than the prose was–could be your insistence on simile over metaphor in the verse, whileyour prose just exude metahor–is rooted in it.
American film, in this country is the keeper of the myth that was the ‘manifest destiny’ that is what America is. We have never learned to reinvent ourselves
with ease. It is because we are at ease with who we areand at the same time always seeking an identity rooted in dream time. Our history is so small compared say, to what you describe of Skye. There are no myhic hands reaching up out of the earth to grab at us because we have always been on the move. Neil Gaiman I think hit the nail on the head in tapping into the favt that America has gods that are mortal.Whatever immortality was to be seen in the gods of America was relegated to reservations long ago. That is why Hollywood exists. To create and recreate the gods of our dreams, but that kind of worship becomes incestuous over time, and dangerous. >KB
i
These pieces, in general, often look back to the rhythms and rhymes of traditional poetic forms, folk song, bardic elegy. Not in any studied, academic way, but just in the feel and lilt of the words. I have no problem with simple strategies like simile, so long as they point the internal camera of the reader in the direction I intend. This Part One is more of a sort of Prologue, describing the way the ideas arise and subside. Its always a balance in this sort of piece between giving pictures and giving the development of ideas. Some parts have more the song about them ,some more of the rant! One of my favorite poets is Matsuo Basho. His work effortlessly moves from prose to haiku, making elegant use of different forms of narration. Each form like a different actor playing a different part, a different voice.
Ahhh Basho moves me over the line.
Had not thought of depositing more than an appreciative comment here, Simon. But the cormorant got me thinking otherwise and then the comments of others push me. First, this is very intriguing opening and for all the reasons already stated I appreciate it. I first arrived at the second part where a certain reference sent me looking for the first part.
Oh the American Myth of itself is quite a force–and one that can not sustain itself in reality. The dark history, even the depths of the slave based economy, are seldom explored by blind flagwaving modern Americans whose patriotism thrives on ignorance. It is indeed a country of thoughtless consumption and waste.
But–the land spirits sitll live underneath all the concrete and asphalt. If you ventured into the Redwoods in Northern California they dance a piece more freely than in many other parts traversed by the disconnected populace. Indeed, as Richard says, this is stolen land–but stolen from people not from itself. Yes, it has the stink of ongoing genocide in the air. Still the land lives–and speaks when so inclined. Sometimes all that’s needed is to listen carefully in spite of all the current self destructive chaos crowding the ear space. But it is indeed present and wind kisses at the most unexpected moments.
namaste
One of the themes to be explored in later parts of “The House of Trees” is that belonging is not to do with bloodlines or family histories, but with a heart, body connection to the land. We managed to get to a few of the Redwood Groves, not for very long, but long enough to make a good contact with the energies there. Nowhere in the world is like anywhere else in the world, but everywhere talks to everywhere else. Yep, listening is the key!