Next 12 months in September would be the tenth anniversary of the 2014 referendum marketing campaign. Although the consequence was gut-wrenchingly disappointing those that had been 16 then and first-time voters will likely be 26 in 2024, and the vast majority of them will nonetheless be for Yes, with a want to see their nation reassert her independence. The optimistic spirit of 2014 – the closest Scotland got here to a 12 months of magical considering – nonetheless survives, regardless of setbacks and hostility from each media outlet – as ballot after ballot exhibits assist for independence at a gradual 50+%. This is nothing in need of miraculous, particularly when you think about the brain-rotting antics of the SNP. Surely to god they can’t all be in MI5?
From Kyle of Lochalsh to Kyleakin the magical considering crosses the Skye Bridge, from Ayr to Inverness it marches to maintain the magic alive. The younger paved the way in Edinburgh to say that Scotland can and may rejoin the European Union, that they’ve a confidence in Scotland, that there’s one other solution to be freed from the racist millionaires who sit in Westminster and to rise above the mediocre aspirations of the three essential events in Holyrood. What the younger know is that each governments have failed Scotland. The one on the Thames is malevolent. The one beneath the Castle Rock is disappointing. The former will go down into the pig-swill of historical past and be consumed by the very monsters they’ve created. Of the latter the younger folks ask: the place is the lifelike technique for reaching independence apart from the one produced by Believe in Scotland? Just what the fuck have you ever been doing for the final decade?
Recently I watched on STV a mind-numbingly clueless consultant of a Labour think-tank attempting to get his head round what the Scotland in Europe rally in Edinburgh meant. All he might provide you with was that if all these hundreds of individuals – a sizeable proportion who can be younger – spent their time going across the doorsteps on the up an coming Rutherglen and Hamilton by-election then their time can be higher spent. Even the presenter was left a bit agog at his incapability to see Scotland as a nation and the marketing campaign for independence as one thing else apart from a celebration political election marketing campaign challenge. The reason behind independence crosses over all of the boundaries of Scottish society and politics. This is Labour’s nice betrayal of the Scottish folks – they maintain us trapped within the jail of the Union by their senseless (and groundless) adherence to it. The solely future for Labour in Scotland lies within the acknowledgement of the necessity for a simply constitutional settlement for an historical nation and the reasserting of the sovereign rights of the Scottish folks. Unless Labour recognise that this settlement is the priority of the folks of Scotland, and never within the energy of any authorities apart from our personal to grant it, then Labour are gone like snow off a dyke North of the Tweed and the Solway.
This set me to considering – what, really, is a rustic? How can the wrestle for independence be greater than a hopeful gaze to the longer term coupled with a fearful look to the previous? I’ve learn and agree with Believe in Scotland’s independence road map and Salvo’s Stirling Directive – you may learn this for yourself here – and am inspired by each. Yet in some way our nation is greater than this. Where does Scotland begin and cease in our consciousness? What is it fabricated from, apart from rocks and bathroom? For our folks – for any folks in any nation – the reply have to be love. A type of love that’s each energetic and passive, that offers and takes, which strikes forwards and again on the similar time. This is what the American author James Baldwin needed to say about it in his 1963 non-fiction guide, The Fire Next Time,
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
That “sense of quest and daring and growth” is what we should embrace. It is a synthesis of future projection and of reminiscence. A rustic, a person, with out a reminiscence, is a ghost. John B. Yeats, the daddy of the poet W. B. Yeats, as soon as wrote in a letter to his son,
“The best thing in life is the game of life, and someday a poet will find that out.”
Needless to say he didn’t suppose that his son, William Butler, was that poet. John B. Yeats was attempting to get his genius son to come back out of the fairy mound and to watch the folks, earlier than it was too late. That was the longer term he was attempting to safe for his poet son, primarily as a result of they’d shared recollections and the daddy needed his son to acknowledge them.
My first reminiscence is of my mom’s heartbeat as she advised us tales from Homer and the Norse sagas, and the musical sound and rhythmn of milk hitting a pail as my Gran milked a cow as she sang the beast a tune from Strathnaver. How might I neglect that? That for me is Scotland: my mom’s tales and my Gran’s songs. I’ve held onto all of them my life. Which is simply as nicely as a result of in my first week at Dunnet main faculty I encountered Dick and Dora, Fluff the Cat and Spot the Dog. I’m afraid they’d no company and held no curiosity in comparison with Achillies and Hector, Sveinn Ásleifarson and Magnus Erlendsson. Having learn by way of Dick and Dora as soon as and expressed my derision I used to be given a duplicate of the King James Bible and advised to take a seat on the again and skim it and if I had any questions simply to place my hand up. Which finally I did. “What,” I requested Mrs Docherty “does begat mean?” “What do you mean?” she answered wearily. “Well, Miss, there’s pages and pages of it!” My declaration was met by stony silence. Somebody else had their hand up and that was the top of that. My mom was a district nurse and midwife and through the years I quickly realized what begat meant. I additionally realized, by way of the King James Bible, about language and what it might do. This to me is Scotland
The first strains within the King James Bible are, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” These are mighty and resonant phrases for a younger boy to learn and listen to in a Caithness main faculty within the early 1960’s. Now, like Tony Blair famously declared, I “don’t do God”. But I’m a playwright and I do theatre and in 1994 within the village of Helmsdale in east Sutherland the Grey Coast Theatre Company mounted the massive group play, “The Great Bunillidh Volcano”. The efficiency started with a younger boy from the first faculty, standing proudly in entrance of the Bridge Hotel, and he addressed the viewers with these phrases, “In ay beginnin wis nuhain. Then thur wis suhain.” Then the play was on and the manufacturing moved by way of the village taking the inhabitants of Helmsdale with it. That is a reminiscence and in addition a future. The folks of Helmsdale nonetheless discuss it and they’re Scotland.
Baldwin was proper – recollections, like love, shouldn’t be a masks that “we cannot live without and know we cannot live within”. They are the cultural soil from which significant lives develop. This isn’t with out wrestle and on the coronary heart of this wrestle it’s tough to recollect what’s essential. For instance it’s typically the case that we are able to neglect that the reason for Scottish independence is an heroic one. We are confronted by an enormous energy and the result, as but, is unknown, if not binary: both the UK persists in its repression of our want or it doesn’t. We both obtain independence or we don’t. Either the SNP wins a majority of seats on the subsequent common election or they don’t. It is a type of insanity to suppose that Scottish independence will imply that life goes on as regular as soon as independence has been achieved. We are difficult a whole system and I recommend that when the Union is dissolved each side of our cultural and financial lives will change. We have to be ready to “Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being,” as Rumi the 13th century Persian poet wrote. “Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty.” Or, because the Sardinian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) put it, “The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.”
A superb instance of this dwelling with out illusions and overcoming half-heartedness, to achieve out to majesty, is the poetry of Rob Donn Mackay. Not a lot the poetry itself, which is a music unto itself, however the truth that it exists in any respect. Rob Donn (1714–1778) was a cattle drover from Strathnaver in North West Sutherland. He didn’t learn nor might he write in his native Gaelic. His poems had been composed on the tongue – and primarily to pipe tunes – as Strathnaver, at the moment, was totally an oral tradition. Nothing of Rob Donn was printed in his lifetime. The Gaelic literary institution thought little of the Bard of Strathnaver and regarded his Sutherland Gaelic as being crude and unrefined. When a collection of his poetry was finally printed lengthy after the bards demise the poems had been almost unrecognisable so altered and refined had the editors thought to make them, a lot to the disgust of the folks of Strathnaver. Now Rob Donn Mackay has extra poems and songs extant within the Bàrdachd than every other poet thus far. Why this has come to be is as a result of the folks of Strathnaver memorised all of Rob Donn’s poems and saved them alive of their custom, to today. I can not consider a higher act of collective love than that. This is reaching out into the majesty. This, most undoubtedly, is Scotland. Magical considering and practical actions. Surely that have to be the motto of our dream?
As a poet and dramatist I’m at all times seeking to mix the private and the political, the intimate with the epic. Each particular person who assembled in Edinburgh, and at each rally and assembly throughout the nation sooner or later, to declare their perception in Scotland and their want to see their Scotland re-connected on her personal phrases with the remainder of the world, has their very own story, their very own recollections, and in so being are a part of the collective vitality – they, most actually, are Scotland. They do what they do from love and the way precarious and elusive are the concepts with which we try to clarify the thriller of affection. A thriller that’s a part of a higher one: the human being, who, suspended between likelihood and necessity, transforms their predicament into freedom. There is an intimate, causal relation between love and freedom.
Our politics transcends the fabric world though the fabric world will kill us all. What is a rustic? What is the alternative of magical considering, love and freedom? Well, it’s this. It is not only oil corporations which can be raking in huge income on the expense of the general public. Across the UK many large corporations are posting large income, as their costs soar. The prime 350 corporations within the UK have doubled their revenue margins since 2019, in response to recent analysis from the Unite union.
Why is that this occurring?
Many corporations are utilizing the duvet of inflation to push their costs up past their elevated prices and so making extra revenue. Unite has dubbed it “greedflation”. Overall, which means the ‘flows of wealth’ from bizarre folks to the wealthy are rising. And that is driving inequality. Inequality development within the UK has been put into hyperdrive by this cost of dwelling disaster, as large corporations and the wealthy drain increasingly more wealth from the remainder of us. There is not any thriller to it. It’s referred to as exploitation.
This why we’d like an impartial Scotland. This why we’d like love and magical considering. This is the sport of life. Let’s play it, wholeheartedly and after we march alongside our metropolis streets and Highland by-ways allow us to have an actual sense of quest and daring and development which is the top is what magical considering is. It is love.
©George Gunn 2023
