gmb website - 80th birthday

80 quotes from GMB in celebration of the 80^th anniversary
of the beginning of his journey

~ 17.10.21 to 17.10.2001 ~

George Mackay Brown was not a great traveller. He rarely left Orkney, apart from his studies in Edinburgh and his stints in hospital. He made a few journeys, notably with Gunnie Moberg, to London, Shetland, once or twice to northwest Scotland, and to Ireland where he met Seamus Heaney and began a lasting friendship.

He was not a good traveller either. Gunnie tells the story of his train ride to London; sitting up in his bunk all night, sleepless, because the stations kept flashing past and he wasn't aware there was a blind to pull down. Other journeys closer to home by boat are often described by George, tongue in cheek perhaps, as something close to ordeals.

But in lots of ways, George was one of the greatest travellers. His journeyings involved delving into history (especially the Orkneyinga Saga); chronicling the every day lives of island people; explorations of faith and the spiritual element; glimpses into his own life though he did not overburden us with sentiment. He had an awareness of people's journeys on the world scene too and wrote about them expressively in such poems as For the Tibetan Refugees.

Even his own last journey was the stuff of myth and history, as told by Archie Bevan. His requiem mass was, perhaps uniquely, held in St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall. According to an usher on duty at the time, the notes of Farewell to Stromness, played by George's friend Peter Maxwell Davies, dropped into a silence you could touch.

In celebration of the 80^th anniversary of George's birth, eighty snippets from his collected works give glimpses of his deep understanding and connection with his subjects, and his unique ability to put this into simple eloquent words.

Sue Tordoff
West Sussex
September 2001

Into the hands of every unborn soul is put a lump of the original clay, for him to mould vessels – a bowl and a lamp – the one to sustain him, the other to lighten him through the twilight between two darknesses, birth and death. *from Martyr, Orkney Tapestry 1969*
	Wait a while, small voyager On the shore, with seapinks and shells. The boat Will take a few summers to build That you must make your voyage in. *from New Child: ECL, 11^th June 1993, Following a Lark, 1996*
We move from silence into silence, and there is a brief stir between, every person's attempt to make a meaning of life and time. from For the Islands I Sing, autobiog. pub 1997
photograph by Gordon Wright	The turning of the tide is no precise event in the sea-quartered day. A swirl here, an eddy there, Atlantic-drawn, turns back on itself, yearns for the quieter waters of bay and harbour. *from Orkney Tapestry, 1969*
And think in Orkney Of the old friendship of stone and man, How they honoured and served each other from The Friend, pub in Travellers, 2001	photograph by Gordon Wright
	We are all one, saint and sinner. Everything we do sets the whole web of creation trembling, with light or with darkness. from For the Islands I Sing, autobiog. pub 1997
I am interested in facts only as they tend and gesture, like birds and waves, in 'the gale of life'. *from Orkney Tapestry, 1969*
	With sobbing lungs I reeled past kirk and alehouse And the thousand candles Of gorse round my mother's yard. from The Storm, pub in book of same name 1954
Norway hung fogs about me. I won the girl Ragnhild From Paul her brother, after I beat him at draughts, three games to two. Out of Bergen, the waves made her sick. She was uglier than I expected, still I made five poems about her from the Five Voyages of Arnor, pub in book of same name,1966
	Sometimes, half-a-century ago, we stayed in the country for a few summer weeks. It is strange how, in a small place like Orkney, a few miles can transport a child into an entirely different world. *from Orkney Tapestry, 1969*
The Tinker He'll be gone through the gray door of the wind. He must have drunk the moon bottle, that bright unchancy stuff, to the last black drop. from Saul Scarth, pub in Wreck of the Archangel, 1989
	A cry from the city square, 'He is fallen. .' 'His shoulder is bruised. .' Then trumpet, wheel, a scatter of hooves. from Good Friday: Women of Jerusalem, pub in Following a Lark, 1996
January the first was, generally speaking, a day of thick heads, parched palates and coated tongues. Thus inauspiciously each year begins in Stromness, and the citizens would be horrified to think of it beginning in any other way. *pub in The Orkney Herald, 9.1.51*
	Paul gathered whelks and sang Till the flood set in from the west, with a sound like harps, And one by one the seals entered the new water. from Horseman and Seals, Birsay, pub in The Year of the Whale, 1965
And we left our beds in the dark And we drove a cart to the hill And we buried the jar of ale in the bog And our small blades glittered in the dayspring And we tore dark squares, thick pages From the Book of Fire from Peat Cutting, pub in Fishermen with Ploughs, 1971
	The king had gone out in a purple coat Now the king Wore only rags of flesh about the bone. from Stations of the Cross, pub in Winterfold 1976
Dear Gyps, That foolish wind, little does it know that it curdles the marrow in the bones of man and cat and makes us quite ill . . . especially delicate creatures like you and me. from Cold East Wind, Letters to Gypsy 1990	George and Gypsy photograph by Gunnie Moberg
	The old-fashioned Orkneyman has a good stiff toddy before bedtime. Surely the pure, rich essence of the barley will exorcise the dark spirit that has come to haunt the body's serene cloisters. So I had a generous toddy (or grog, for I thought that rum would make a pleasant change). . For half an hour life was all calypsos and pirates and Spanish gold. But in the morning the dark spirit had resumed control with all the former symptoms . . . English Flu, from Letters from Hamnavoe, pub 1975
A boy leaves a small house of sea light. He leaves the sea smells, creel and limpet and cod. from Island School pub in Wreck of the Archangel, 1989
	When I saw the first star-coldness I was a child. I have seen faces the sea has eaten and pain-clenched faces And faces like flowers, gathered. *from Dead Faces, Seal Island Anthology 1875, pub in Voyages 1983*
A holy man had written: Prayers, charities, alms, blessings These be the little flames Outlasting diamond and emerald and star-in-the-granite. *from Foresterhill, 1992*
	I sat in the gardens (Princes Street, Edinburgh) and watched the latest fashions going past; young girls wearing midi-coats, which gave to all that springtime litheness and old-fashioned trollopy look; yet wear them they must, it seems, when some fashion prince in Paris or London cracks the whip. A Trip to Edinburgh, 1971, from Letters from Hamnavoe, pub 1975
Looking back fifty years, we seemed to spend a large part of our summer holiday at Warbeth, bathing and picnicking, and searching among the pools for shells, crabs and seaweed. The Atlantic songs were always in our ears. *from Orkney Tapestry, 1969*	photograph by Sue Tordoff
	The Third Stone The third pit is dug. Stone Sips the brim of darkness. The stone tree Will have tonight its star-leaves. *from Brodgar Poems, 1992*
We call the track to the peats The kestrel road. *from Roads, Fishermen with Ploughs, 1971*
	It is the word, blossoming as legend, poem, story, secret, that holds a community together and gives a meaning to its life. *from Orkney Tapestry, 1969*
There, under a skeleton sycamore – above the sea – a cluster of snowdrops, Children of snow and sun Who must die before the lark sings. from Under Brinkie's Brae: January, pub in Northern Lights 1999
	They were to do two plays of mine called 'Witch' and 'The Return of the Women' at the Close Theatre in Glasgow last weekend. The post one afternoon brought me two complimentary tickets (not that I could possibly travel so far, at such short notice). *from Letters from Hamnavoe, pub 1975*
Chime of ice chains between Sky and freezing burn. Swans on the loch are crystal Scultpings. from Snowman, pub in Wreck of the Archangel, 1989	photograph by Gunnie Moberg
	The Northern Sky Orkney turns upon poles of light and darkness. A summer midnight, the north Is red with the two lamps of dawn and sunset. from Haiku for the Holy Places, pub in Travellers 2001
By now the coldness had struck into my very marrow. My hands were of a corpse-like blue colour, and my teeth chattered when I tried to speak. So I lay, with two other members of the crew, in a sheltered apartment in the bow, and we smoked. *on board a lifeboat for a practice run, Island Epiphanies, pub in Northern Lights, 1999*.
	Peter, I mourned. Early on Monday last There came a wave and stood above your mast. from The Death of Peter Esson, Tailor, Town Librarian, Free Kirk Elder, pub in Loaves and Fishes, 1959
I rent and till a patch of dirt Not much bigger than my coat. I keep a cow and twelve swine And some sheep and a boat. from Eynhallow: Crofter and Monastery, pub in Winterfold 1976
	The untidy cloud carpet below shredded thin. The rich checkered straths of Aberdeenshire lay below now, in full sun. Soon we were bouncing gently onto a runway at Dyce. What a transformation since I last flew! It is like a huge bazaar of shops and bars and cafes – and so many people in transit! I all but lost myself in that vast labyrinth, and had to ask my way back to the starting-place. from Orkney Tapestry, 1969
We have lost the relish for the eternal drama of light and darkness, to a great extent. Civilisation has ruined the natural rhythms. But not, I think, entirely. *from Letters from Hamnavoe, pub 1975*
	If you have a taste for such places – and I do – it is one of the most lyrical of God's acres in Orkney. How many generations of the nameless dead, reaching far back beyond the tombstones, lie here? How old is the roofless kirk, flourishing inside with all the sweet wild tangled growth of midsummer. visiting Hoy Kirkyard, from Orkney Tapestry, 1969
Who'll ever know what star Summoned him, what mysterious shell Locked in his ear that music and that spell, And what grave ship was waiting for him there? from In Memoriam I.K. pub in Wreck of the Archangel, 1989
	It may be that the time of year when a person is born influences his whole life. At any rate, I think of Burns as a winter poet, not in the sense of coldness and sterility, but of the joyousness of winter (including whisky, ghosts, fiddling and dancing and singing, secret kisses under the stars, and warmth and goodfellowship round the fire). *from Letters from Hamnavoe, pub 1975*
Rackwick (Hoy), beyond any other place in Orkney, keeps its own astonishing weather. Or rather every day is a little book of weathers, and the pages keep turning. *from Orkney Tapestry, 1969*
	I wish I was Andrew Standing With a bright shivering ring Beside that tall whiteness In the hushed barn Tonight When the minister urges the gold circlet from fingers to finger. from Seal Island Anthology 1875, pub in Voyages 1983