Saturday 4 June 2016

Digging

Photo by Alistair Christie-Johnston
Peat in Shetland Islands

In my email this week was a message from my uncle who lives in the Shetland Islands, far to the 
north of Scotland. He sent me this picture of his “peat bank” and wrote that, between his peat bank and his million dollar view, he has a unique kind of wealth.

I sent him in return a poem by Seamus Heaney called “Digging” in which Heaney compares the work of his grandfather digging peat and his own work as a poet digging for the good earth with his pen. 

Heaney writes about the way we find meaning in our lives. His father, like his grandfather, dug ‘Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods /Over his shoulder, going down and down/ For the good turf. Digging.’ What I read in the poem is a celebration of the way we can find purpose in our lives and a humble respect from a nobel laureate for his labouring forefathers. 

Meaning emerges in this poem through the juxtaposition of shovel and pen. Nowhere does Heaney write explicitly about the way meaning and purpose can come through digging deeply into the rich earth of our cultural world, but the understandings emerge as carefully shaped as the peat sods his grandfather dug from Toner’s Bog.

I’m far from the poet Heaney is, but my most successful writing has these same characteristics. Meaning emerges through the cracks opened by a metaphor and, like Ted Hughes’ “Thought-fox”, wearily tests its vitality as it enters the space between my mind and yours. It seems to happen almost by accident; an emergent phenomenon as improbable as any other miraculous birth.

...

Words seem to me anything but ordinary. The very possibility of words producing meaning - let-alone creative meaning - seems so unlikely that it’s necessary to stop from time to time to marvel. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote somewhere that imagination is “like snow upon a river, a moment there then gone forever”. In a recent email to a friend I described the creative process as oddly woolly - like herding sheep with little sense of cohesion until suddenly and miraculously they’re all there neatly penned and staring back at you. 

This reflection was based on the experience I had while writing a poem. While I was riding to school I though of a metaphor: "a camera photographing itself in a mirror." I’d written the first half of this post and the ideas were still sloshing about in my head.

What’s interesting is the way the poem emerged. The metaphor was the heart of it. As my journey progressed, the second part of the poem - the idea of the complexity of the mechanisms that capture an image - began to form and when I arrived I sat in my classroom and wrote it down.

Here’s the interesting bit: only when I read what I’d written did much of the potential meaning come to light. The lovely paraphrase of Shakespeare’s line “signifying nothing” - echoing Macbeth’s soliloquy at the death of Lady Macbeth - was unconscious but powerfully apposite. I know the soliloquy, but I had not remembered its use of the metaphor of the “player”; the performer as mimesis, the signifier of a world who’s meaning is futile at best, and incomprehensible at worst. Shakespeare, the greatest interpreter of our world who reminds us at every turn of the futility of
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interpretation. 

The form of the poem as a mirror was deliberate because I wanted the two ends of the poem to reflect endlessly back to one another. Structurally, the poem is a deliberate nod to the philosophic idea of the hermeneutic circle. What emerged from this structural device was the word “beyond” which becomes a fulcrum for the poem. It was the power of this word and of it’s mediation through “nothing/ beyond/ perhaps” that struck me afterwards as powerful. I didn’t write this. These words and the meaning I find in them assembled themselves. 

And as always I am in awe of the power of our minds to dance with the world. From the blade of my uncle's shovel through the echoes of a Shakespearian soliloquy, the terrible beauty of our world assembles.


She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.


— Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)