DRAGON – ENTRY FOR ENO MINI-OPERA COMPETITION

DRAGON

A hilltop. A man and a woman.

 

MAN

I thought you had visited

but the sawdust of my night thoughts

makes tables and chairs in the day

Creates a world of locked paths

Some nights I used to fly

Feel it in my stomach

Now there is an empty trapeze

where hope used to be

and my name is dry earth.

No man should know what I know

and not be believed.

Little clutter.

Is my mind.

 

WOMAN

This is a nice spot.

Hawthorn and wild rose.

I tried to clean and priddy

but you piled in secret

on secret.

 

MAN

I tried to release them.

Look at the summer meadow

The bluebells have died

and leave no mark.

These secrets leave me at this pass.

 

WOMAN

Others I couldn’t help

I see them in my dreaming day

night to me is an awfulness

of mundane cleaning

I stay awake as ranks of to be dead

empty their prayers like summer clouds.

There is still a hope

for you.

 

MAN

The weight

I must sit.

 

WOMAN

Take some water.

As you consider.

Remember.

There are other lives

ways of being.

Which would soon

clear your mind.

Freedom has still not

loosed all bonds. 

 

MAN

I haven’t taken

a proper breath

I feel

since I was young

my lung’s a dragon’s tail

such a snake is life

which can corner us

All friends to stone

it turns

all hopes to earth

in the end.

 

WOMAN

Come now.

A dawn would cause

your heart to lift.

This is the blackest hour.

 

MAN
I recognise you now.

You are the sweeper of dreams.

Are you real?

WOMAN
As real as anything.

A stream of water.

A cliff a bird.

 

MAN

I would pray for you

each night.

 

WOMAN

As I you.

 

MAN

My father told me

of your work.

You truly have

such feeling for

your fellow man.

 

WOMAN

Each one I lose

I feel

as if

I myself

the dark earth

had on

their coffin

a handful spent.

 

MAN

You may lose another

before today is out.

 

WOMAN

Tell me what

is the deadly weight. 

 

MAN

I knew enough

to stop a war

but the fearsome engine

turned on me

and I am left now

as bare as when

I came into this world.

I know that this is

all our ends.

But I had wished it were

not like this.

 

WOMAN

Take sail

A first step

Become another

A suit of words

and swift passage

MAN
It is this life alone

that I have lived

and this life

that I must play out.

But tell me first.

Of a small memory

you have found

A gentle toy of thought

That I may hold 

as I depart.

 

WOMAN

I could tell you

of the start of love

of the small glance

and aching heart

How distance feels

like time’s butcher

Of gold sun on waves

and time slowed down

as you store

your memories.

Of nape of neck

of eye

of her mouth.

 

MAN

This is my love

of which you speak.

 

WOMAN

Yes.

 

MAN

My god

My heart will break

and tear like bread.

 

WOMAN

It made you smile.

The smallest hope

of light in dark. 

 

MAN

What of the others

I leave behind.

And those who will not be saved.

Who wake today already dead

While those who play

Cast lots and praise

their actions

Cleaned of blood

London is built

on such bones of men

and mothers

The butcher’s apron

is our flag

But not only

does it winnow and kill.

It leads to death for us

as well.

WOMAN
Let us sit together.

Before the dead

arise and end

of day.

And look at this

beautiful earth.

And I will give

a moment of peace

Before blessed release

and journey.

END.

Meeting Alastair Reid

There are a number of writers and directors who I have been fortunate enough to spend time with. Without them, I doubt I would have got very far.

My Uncle Finlay Macleod was the first person to encourage me to write something. He had one of the first macintosh computers, just as glamorous then as now. I would sit in his study and write stories, I think one was about falling off a cliff. A friend of mine, John, fell off a cliff when I was young and I think it has stayed with me. The brace and the crutch he had to use. That he survived by falling in a rockpool.

Finlay had a cupboard full of fresh books, a play he had written called ‘Na Balaich air Rònaidh’ in a very nice white cover. They were like little cigarettes, very attractive and pure and I tried to work out how many I could take before anyone noticed they were missing.

The crime novelist Peter May was inspiring in two ways – he likes fine food and wine and taught me that this was important in life. ‘Never trust a woman who doesn’t like wine and cheese,’ he would say. He taught me a lot about how to structure your day as a writer, especially when writing novels. He would also go to France to write and once I went to visit him in his village (he now lives there). He found a small house with a terrace for me.

It had a view down the valley and Spring was happening. I looked at the green valley, the lunchtime glass of cider, the sunshine and I said that I felt a little guilty at how fine it all was and how lucky I was. In fine Peter May style he said ‘Ying Yang!’ He is the only person in the world to call me this. ‘Ying Yang! Don’t be so effing stupid! This is payback! This is payback for all the crap you take being a freelancer. Don’t be such an effing Calvinist’ I think that was the time all vestiges of Calvinism were joyfully displaced.

A good while ago, Finlay and I filmed a documentary together with the Scottish writer Alastair Reid in New York. If you haven’t read his work, I urge you to, especially his essays in books such as ‘Oases’.

He was born in Galloway, a son of the Manse, and had been in the Navy during the war. It was then that he learnt that there were many different ‘ways of being’. His only real constant point of contact was an office in the New Yorker magazine – he went to Spain, learnt Spanish, and he writes well of what it is like to be a foreigner in a different country. Not a tourist, a foreigner. He also writes about having two languages – English and Spanish.

He spoke eloquently about Calvinism and named things which I knew but had not made sense of. His essay ‘Digging up Scotland’ is a wonder. As well as ‘Oases’ I would suggest ‘Notes on being a Foreigner’.

I was, what age… twenty six when I met him and he was just the right person to meet as I was planning to go around the world for a year. He had done a trip from New York in a ship once, stopping at major ports in South America and meeting writers. He had translated Borghes and Neruda and been involved at the start of the flowering of South American novelists. He had been friends with Robert Graves. He had sailed across the Atlantic in a schooner. He is fearless.

I had already booked my ticket and although both Finlay and Alastair thought I was going to too many places (I was), I wrote down some journeys he suggested. One in particular was crossing the Andes to go from Puerto Mont in Chile to Bariloche in Argentina, three ferries and three buses. I did this journey, having ran out of money and being rescued by an Argentinian family who put me up and gave me a hundred dollars which I could pay back when I wanted.

I think I had been travelling for long enough by then, I wanted to get home. But I still went to Neruda’s house in Santiago and to the cafe that Borghes used to sit in, in Buenas Aires.

Every place I mentioned my father would say ‘many a footstep I left behind there,’ just showing that it is very hard to be original. But at least meeting people like this gives you a glimpse at how you can make what you want of your life if you want to. There will always be someone who tells you that you shouldn’t do something, especially something chancy. People like Alastair Reid are an antidote to this world view.

On our final night together there was a thunder storm, Alastair was staying in Greenwich Village at the time I think. The lights went out and we shared a bottle of whisky we had brought over. I listened. Finlay and Alastair roamed widely from Carpentier to Neil Gunn to naming every player in long ago Scottish football teams.

I have seen Alastair twice since at the Book Festival in Edinburgh, and we still live in hope that he will visit Lewis some day. It was a short time we spent together in New York, but contained in it were tiny glimpses of different ways of being for me. Most of the time, you have no idea how important something is when you are in the middle of it.

I was talking to a neighbour on the island not so long ago, a beautiful day on the island. I mentioned this and he said the words I had been waiting to hear. ‘We’ll pay for it’. I thought of Alasdair and skipped down the street.

SCOTLAND by Alistair Reid

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’

Somersaults – A play for the National Theatre of Scotland

‘Somersaults’ – written by Iain Finlay Macleod. Directed by Vicky Featherstone for the National Theatre of Scotland.

‘Somersaults’ came out of a conversation with Vicky Featherstone at The National Theatre of Scotland. She asked if I felt any grief that the language I spoke was dying. I had never really named the feeling in that way before, and it led me to an exploration of the connection between identity and language.

I used my own experience as a speaker of Scottish Gaelic as a starting point but I hope the ideas that are explored go far beyond this – we all speak a language, we all create ties to certain places, we all create our reality using the language we have.

I have always been interested in the writing of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borghes. He was bilingual – speaking Spanish to his parents, and when he visited his grandmother she would speak English to him. He didn’t think of them as different languages – he just associated different ways of speaking with different people.

He believed that we use stories to create our reality – you come home from work, you tell a few stories about what happened to you. You use words and stories to create the world around you.

The interesting thing is whether we see the world differently in different languages. Is speaking a different language, as the Scottish poet Alasdair Reid says, a little like putting on a different coat. Are we different people in different languages?

What happens when the language needed to do this starts to disappear, the words you rely on to create the world around you. This tiny thing – the loss of one little word – is it important?

I would be interested in your thoughts on the piece. You can comment on the National Theatre of Scotland’s blog:

nationaltheatrescotland.wordpress.com, on Facebook or on Twitter @NTSonline #countmein. Or go towww.nationaltheatrescotland.com for all the links.

Writing & Weaving

Five years ago I was living in Newport Beach in California. If you had told me then that I would have moved back to the Isle of Lewis, bought a textile company and learnt how to weave, I would have called you a taxi. But it just shows how right John Lennon was when he said that “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”

I grew up watching my father weave, he has done it since he was a young lad. I did odd jobs around the loomshed while he worked, filling pirns and beaming tweeds. I was interested in other things though, I left the island and worked in the media after University – as writer and director. I also ran a television production company (named after my father’s nickname ‘Zebo’.)

I always had an interest in business as well as the arts and a few years ago, I found out about a weaver on the island who was retiring and putting his business up for sale. He didn’t weave Harris Tweed, his cloth was called ‘Breanish Tweed’, a husband and wife team who had been working hard at it for thirty years.  

The more I learnt, the more amazed I was at what this man had done. Iain, the weaver, had built up a jem of a business, selling his unique lightweight cloth to the best tailors and fashion houses in the world – Savile Row, Vivienne Westwood, Oxxford Clothing in Chicago. The list went on, and it was an impressive one. The business was about to disappear because nobody wanted to take it on. It had been on the market for a few years.

I had been looking for a business to put my energies into for a while and, quite naively, bought it. Extremely. Naively. My father taught me how to weave and I would fit it in, in the evenings around my writing. My mother was a textile designer and she taught my sister and I that side of the business. My father went round the village looking for old looms that nobody wanted, most of the old single width looms had been thrown in the dump long ago. We rescued a couple, got a couple more for spares. We took on another weaver, a young woman called Karin Slater. She is still the youngest weaver on the island as well as a fine poet.

I then hit the road to try and get some of these customers back. The business had been wound down to nothing. On top of the technical challenges of creating the cloth, there was my own inexperience in the trade, the daunting challenge of visiting companies at the very top of the game.

I visited London a lot. Then Vienna. We got a new agent in the US. Gradually our customers came back and new ones bought cloth from us. Our best market now is Japan, closely followed by Germany. Textiles is a lot like the arts, the learning is a constant. It is an exciting world, the bespoke tailors are so skilled, the fashion houses so creative – there is an incredible energy to this machine.

I learnt a lot – one of the most interesting aspect is how trends are decided. We are working at the moment on patterns and colours which will be in the shops in Autumn/Winter 2012. If anyone is interested in how this happens, I can write something on our Facebook page if you get in touch – http://www.facebook.com/Breanish.  

We are now giving work to five weavers in the village and best of all, the people that my parents taught are not teaching other people. We will soon be the last people to weave in this traditional way, using this old loom. And once a tradition goes, which it can do very quickly, it is almost impossible to relearn it. So it makes me very happy when I walk through the village and hear the old looms going.

It can sometimes be hard to find time to combine writing and business, but I have finally accepted that this is how my life is and that I’d better just get on with it. The two lives are fairly separate, although I’m starting to find that looms are sneaking into my plays in the most unexpected places.