The Literature of
Orkney and Shetland

I’m writing this in the foyer of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. On Sunday, the day after me grandbairns were born a bit too soon, the same night the Fair Isle poet Lise Sinclair died,much much too soon, it was quiet, almost lazy, here. Here I am pitched into the joy and pain stuff Haldane Burgess is musing over. Appropriate enough – we all guddle around in the glurk and poets extract the diamonds. Bit fancy – but you get the drift. We’re immersed; they’re not. They cogitate, extract, refine – to everyone’s advantage, immersion being messy and overwhelming, leading to far too much red wine, chocolate or strong coffee, tears and shrieks and other high pitched behaviours. I am so glad you chose this poem.

Real life and death is awful sudden and imperious. Lise barely had time to turn her beautiful sore head, before she had to lie down. The grandbairns arrived fast. Time speeded up in our family – planes, trains, beds, e-mails. In Fair Isle, it stopped. I took Da Blyde-Maet on the plane. In the space between visits (off the ventilator – only one tube left – both out at once for a minute – no more antibiotics – one to cuddle – ears, look at her ears ) – I’m pondering its extraodinary appropriateness – only word that comes – for the moment I’m in.

The poem’s full of juxtapositions. We love extremes, don’t we. They’re much easier to talk about than the quotidian. So there’s that pain of childbirth, Eve’s punishment, contrasted with the sensuality of that rich sustaining blydemaet feast – a defiant celebration, in the face of all God’s – and Nature’s – blood and thunder.

‘Bit Joy an Hopp in aa dis life I see’ he says – and I do too! I do! The dialect gives it even more passion somehow – something to do with simplicity, down to earth ness. That’s good – down to the wormy earth of it all, with Time munching wearily on…the image is bang on – Time writhing, but learning joy. There’s no artifice here – big themes, right enough, but they’re wurs – oors- Aedie’s, Knox, Calvin an the Greeks. We know the value of a mouthfull o da blydemaet – it binds us all together, like a good head wetter.

It moves the heart, to gravity and awe, really, the bustle of life and death. I’m very aware of ‘ mony anidder deeper, graander life,’ and I do, despite it all, feel ‘Joy an Hopp’ like wur man Haldane Burgess. It’s the length of Eternity that’s the wonderful thing, I suppose. It’s wearisome and burdensome – but it’s rich an sustaining, like mother’s milk, and we all grow and flourish in it, then give way. And on it goes.

So sod Calvin, then. Sod the Presbyterian ‘Knox ridden’ gloom. Tak tent. Look at the peedie pink soles of those feet, that haven’t touched the ground yet. Take nourishment from the unceasing vigour that seems to be life.

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First storm of the winter; unfamiliar landscape again for me – not unlike the pair of us navigating Shetlandic! – tho I think I’m getting to ken Aedie a bit noo.

You see Time as a ‘screaming’ child ‘asserting presence and potential to the future, which will not foreclose upon it, independent, self determined.’ In other words, am I right, refusing to be pacified by the soothing milk that’s the promise Eternal life holds out.

I’d seen it, I suppose, in a different, maybe more female way – That generations have been soothed by the promise of eternal life, helped to get through the ‘deevil’s din’ which is life, by the promise of a return to pre-lapsarian perfection. That’s the place H B evokes at the beginning of the poem, where the ‘blyde – maet’ is Aedie’s own – he’s surrounded in it and doesn’t have to share it even, since Eve is his rib. There’s been no suffering, no monthly blood, no nine months labour; the blydemaet is simply that, glad food, apples without worms, all ready for the picking without the ‘hok an dell’ or the wet hairst and black stormy winter.

Eternity’s milk may soothe Time, in that philosophical world where the spheres squeak , the Fates spin, good triumphs over evil and there’s punishment and reward, and reasons why we are here.
But ‘dis life’ is H B’s concern. |Not for him Calvinist gloom …Life’s not ‘a treed o’ woe an pain’ to be tholed until we get back to the weedfree garden with the wormless apple – no. ‘Joy an Hopp’ was what Aedie got, ironically, once he was ‘dreeld oot,’ to work the croft and make that babies with another person, not a rib at all.

Eden would have been an empty place, for all its lushness, for Aedie and Eve. Perfection tamps the womb, as Sylvia Plath pointed out. The misshapen neep you grew yourself tastes better; the bairn’s strawberry marks are more beautiful than any angel’s unbloodied luminosities.

‘We’se aet da blyde – maet yet, an it sall be/
O mony anidder deeper grander life,’

The crucial and gentle positioning of that ‘yet’ in the middle of the resounding, final resolution to the question, what is life for – is strengthened by the dialect meaning it carries. We’ll always be eating blydemaet, throughout time – celebrating our survival into the next generation with little ceremonies that mean a lot to us. We’ll pass on granma’s shawl, though we loved it; we’ll bring out the bottle we kept since dad’s funeral; we’ll kill a beast and go daft with the sugar ration. Whatever’s rare in the future, we’ll splurge it to celebrate new life.

But we won’t capitalise Time and Eternity, like some folk do, and see them as an uneasy pair, doomed to struggle with one another, yoked together unhappiy till the release comes.

When you say he ends by ‘affirming the deeper grander life’ we ‘might wrest from the eternal life we live in,’ I’d stretch it a wee bit more and say he’s assuring us, in very Biblical tones too, a socialist prophet – that future generations will without doubt have as many diverse lives as we do, in all their complexities, and they all’ sall be’ worthy of celebration.

Carrying on the same image – human life as self-fulfilling, bringing its own rewards – Time itself, capitalised Time – and by implication, those who would seek to explain its relationship to Eternity in Calvinist terms – will learn by our example. Eternity’s not a ‘tik glaur,’ a punishment; she’s a woman with so much milk it’s soaking her blouse, a woman perfectly able to ride storms, soothe and nurture. She’s not going anywhere and she can come through anything. She’s Now.Do you think there was a new baby somewhere around when he was writing it??