extracts from
A Thread Too Bright for the Eye

by David Aldred



'Now and then the honey of a hidden significance is infused into his being.'
from An Orkney Tapestry:  Martyr

The poems and short stories of George Mackay Brown do not reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary, rather ordinary becomes extraordinary in itself.  We are nature, the perceiver and the perceived become one and the same thing.  The apprehension of this mystical union releases a charge of energy which can elicit a convulsion, an involuntary revelation, in the reader that Mackay Brown suggests can infuse our hearts.  These incidents are like flashes of lightening at unexpected 'moments of being' projecting us into an altogether different territory.  The skyscape is suddenly illuminated making the world far brighter and much darker simultaneously for an instant.  At the heart of this contrast, between the polar opposites, we glimpse a hidden meaning, sense a deeper connection afforded by instinctive emotion.  We may taste 'the honey of a hidden significance.'

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In Mackay Brown the passions and appetites of physical sensuous life themselves become timeless and are transformed into works of art.  In many poems fishing boats are celebrated as the fruit of labour.  These boats are given names like literary works or saints:  Merle, Charity, Swan.  But we never forget that such artifacts literally are life-sustaining and on which the community depends.  Equally we are aware that legends and stories (of which poems are a particularly intense and compact form) are vital too for life worthy of the term.

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In the five quatrains of Further than Hoy  we are persuaded that 'the thread too bright for the eye' lies beyond Hoy, history, fame, song and death in turn, and the place where, soup-like, 'the legends begin to thicken' is beyond history.

Further than Hoy is where the bright thread ends and begins, and poetry is the vessel to take us there.  Reading Mackay Brown tells us that there is something further than tenderness, further than cruelty, further than love, that can move among us, moving us.  In one story the men traditionally travel away from the village to hunt or go to war.  Periodically they return, often victorious, full of their heroic adventures but only the poet, who stays at home with the women and children, possesses the power to overcome their strength and move them to tears by distilling their yarns into verse and giving it back to the community.  Slowly, over the tellings, stories are refined to legend.

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The poetry is often 'imagistic' in that bread and wine do not represent, but are, the body and the blood.  Mackay Brown's catholic sensibility is reflected in the primacy of transubstantiation in his work.  Things coalesce.  The moon is a 'buttered bannock'.  A scrape of butter is 'a bit of sun on a dull day'.  Three herrings are the fare for a ferry crossing, the silvery scales are coins of moonlit payment (the Ferryman).  Hooks are stars, stars are fish.  The stars are night daisies.  Because the material objects that inhabit the world of Mackay Brown are few and simple, and set against an austere backdrop, they are repositories of extraordinary power.

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Another important force in Mackay Brown that can unexpectedly give us a glimpse, from a different perspective, of this 'thread', is humour.  The power of art can be said to be manifested in its ability to deliver sudden insight, frequently at an unexpected moment after our initial engagement with it.  Often a strong emotion crackles that is impossible to translate back into language.  We lose something of our sense of individuality and experience some new connection.

Mackay Brown's use of humour is a metaphor for this, and, in its own right, provides another, less well-observed, mechanism for creating the same complex response.  Humour precipitates a release of energy after tension, is usually involuntary and can also bring about an apprehension of that land that is 'further than Hoy.'  In the stories of Mackay Brown simple perfectly-timed lines often provide the charge for this spark.

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Poetry is bound to reflect upon itself, it is its own inescapable prison.  Just as minds inhabit bodies.  But by studying this reflection we are, ideally, enabled to break free from some of our own, or at least to see beyond them.  Another prison of the poem is time and space.  Mackay Brown attempts to breach these walls by using a circular path of development and by creating an interpenetration of time so that a whole poem or an image or an object inside transcends and connects, telescopes time into a moment that resonates with an entirety of past, present and future.  Time itself assumes physical form, becomes space.  In Winter:  An Island Boy 'Time was a bird with white wings'.  The story Five Green Waves' begins with the sentence 'Time was lines and circles and squares' and ends with 'Time was skulls and butterflies and guitars'.  The circle is a vital motif.  The gulls move in 'clean circles'.

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Poets 'carve the runes'.  Through writing poetry Mackay Brown is inscribing the stone of the present and 'interrogating silence'.  Before and after the dance is silence.  The poet writes so that 'A well/Might open for wayfarers.'


 

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David Aldred
June 2002