ASLE 2015, Moscow, Idaho

Earth Writing, Geography, and Memory

Audrey Cameron

​Audrey Cameron has been a member of the English Department at North Idaho College since January 2008.  She earned her PhD from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she wrote her dissertation on the politics and poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid. 
Laura Godfrey
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Jonathan Frey
Hilary Hawley
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Shelley McEuen

Audrey Cameron
​We Must Begin With These Stones

Hugh MacDiarmid’s 1934 poem "On A Raised Beach" confronts the “stone world” of the geology of a raised beach formation on the unpopulated island of West Linga in Shetland. In 1933 Hugh MacDiarmid had moved to the neighboring Shetland island of Whalsay, which is five miles long and two miles wide with, at the time, a population of less than one thousand. The Shetland Islands’ peripheral status is marked on almost every map of Scotland, where it is usually identified in a small box in the top right corner, too far north to fit the regular scale. In "On A Raised Beach," MacDiarmid wrestles with the aesthetic and philosophical crises that led to his move to the extreme periphery of Shetland where he was living in extreme poverty and, as he noted in his letters, “cutting myself completely away from civilized life” (250). At the same time, the theologian D.M. MacKinnon admires the poem as an expression of  what he describes as “aetheist ontology” (165) in which MacDiarmid, the Marxist materialist, confronts the “inoppugnable reality” and notes “I grasp one of them [stones] and I have in my grip/The beginning and end of the world” (The Complete Poems 432).
 
Gaelic poet and critic Iain Crichton Smith was not alone, however, in his criticism of the poem as being too concerned with ideas and apparently therefore “unpoetic” (Smith 128); as Louisa Gairn notes, Crichton Smith sees the poems as expressing a “terrible apartness” (“MacDiarmid and Ecology” 88).  In her study Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature, Louisa Gairn engages Crichton Smith’s criticism with her assertion that “the search for ways of encountering and expressing the non-human world through poetry is central to MacDiarmid’s later work” (9-10); in her essay “MacDiarmid and Ecology,” Gairn asserts that On A Raised Beach “confronts one of the central questions of ecopoetics: the possibility of reconciling humans and the world of nature through the medium of writing” (82).  For Gairn, the poem’s use of synthetic English (an approach that builds on his early work in synthetic Scots) creates a type of “linguistic ‘othering’” that points, as she describes it, “away from anthropocentrism to look at the world from a different point of view” (90). The precise geological terminology in the opening of the poem illustrates MacDiarmid’s technique:
            Cream-colored caen stone, chatoyant pieces,
            Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
            Glaucous hoar, enfouldered cyathiform. (The Complete Poems 422)
 
The poem attempts to express the materiality of the stones in this obscure and remarkably precise word choice. For example, “celadon and corbeau”  are contrasting shades of light and dark green, while “bistre and beige” are dark and then light brown; so this line uses exact, contrasting alliterative patterns.  It is also key to note, however, that as the poem tries out various vocabularies to express the stones, including, for example, Norn, an extinct language of Shetland, there is always recognition of the impossibility of this task. Thus, the final lines of the poem blend geological and rhetorical terms in a playful synthetic language that works to express stones as poem/poem as stones without resolution:
            Diallage of the world’s debate, end of the long auxesis,
            Although no ebrillade of Pegasus can here avail,
            I prefer your enchorial characters – the futhorc of the future –
            To the hieroglyphics of all other forms of nature
            Song, your apprentice encrinite seems to sweep
            The heavens with a last entrochal movement;
            And, with the same word that began it, closes
            Earth’s vast epanadiplosis. (The Complete Poems 433)
 
The word “diallage” perhaps encapsulates that playfulness as it  is both a rhetorical term for arranging various arguments to a single point and a geological term for a type of lustrous mineral of multiple colours found in igneous rock (usually bronzish to green in range). In the last word “epanadiplosis,” MacDiarmid uses the term that describes the technique of beginning and ending a text with the same word  in a final assertion of the stone’s position as the “beginning and end of the world.”
 
To return, however, to some of the criticism of MacDiarmid and his later work, there has traditionally been a concern with the ways in which MacDiarmid’s Marxist materialism loses sight of human suffering. The poet Edwin Morgan, for example, responded to one of MacDiarmid’s later poems, “Glasgow 1960,” that imagines a future in which the poet gets on a bus and instead of going to a football match, the crowds are off to a stadium to discuss philosophy. In his “Glasgow Sonnets,” Morgan writes:
            Hugh MacDiarmid forgot
            In “Glasgow 1960 “that the feast
Of reason and the flow of soul have ceased
To matter to the long unfinished plot.
Of heating frozen hands. (Sonnet IV 200)
 
Similarly, Crichton Smith points to the ways in which MacDiarmid seems unconcerned with humanity in the following: “if Communism means among other things a concern with people, then MacDiarmid was not a Communist” (132). It is perhaps possible, though, to consider his work in terms of the relationship and potentially productive tensions between ecology and Marxism. Seen through this lens, MacDiarmid’s work looks to the intersection of social and political relations and the natural world. In reconsidering the poem, it seems useful to look to Lance Newman’s “Marxism and Ecocriticism” and his conclusion that ecocriticism can help to “return Marxism to its most productive force—a focus on the process of human self-determination, the hard and rewarding process of making liberatory ideas a material force in this world” (22). If the poem explores the question of how to reconcile humans and the natural world, On A Raised Beach also confronts the question of the relationship between the stone world and social and political realities, grappling with the same possibilities that Newman envisions:
            I grasp one of them and I have in my grip
            The beginning and end of the world,
            My own self, and as before I never saw
            The empty hand of my brother man. (The Complete Poems 432)
 
In a poem from the same period, “The Skeleton of the Future,” MacDiarmid connects geology, Lenin’s skeleton, and political revolution in a juxtaposition of images, in which the materialist MacDiarmid finds the “eternal” in Lenin through the stones of his tomb:
            Red granite and black diorite, with the blue
            Of the labdorite crystals gleaming like precious stones
            In the light reflected from the snow; and behind them
            The eternal lightning of Lenin’s bones. (The Complete Poems 386)
 
As ecocritical approaches open up productive readings of MacDiarmid’s work, so too do his later poems offer up a place to explore the intersection of ecology and Marxism. In On A Raised Beach, MacDiarmid ultimately asserts the interdependence of the struggle for social and political transformation with the impossible yet necessary struggle to understand and express the stones of the raised beach:
            . . . As all thinkers and writers find
            The indifference of the masses of mankind, -
            So are most men with any stone yet,
            Even those who juggle with lapidary’s, mason’s, geologist’s words. (The Complete             ​Poems 430).  

​Works Cited
Crichton Smith, Iain. “The Golden Lyric.” Hugh MacDiarmid: A Critical Survey. Ed. Duncan Glen. Edinburgh, 1982. 124-140. Print.

Gairn, Louisa. Ecology And Modern Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Print.

---. “MacDiarmid and Ecology.” Edinburgh Companion To Hugh MacDiarmid. Ed. Margery Palmer McCulloch and Scott Lyall. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. 82-96. Print.

MacDiarmid, Hugh. The Complete Poems. Ed. Michael Grieve and W.R. Aitken. London: Penguin, 1978. Print.

---. The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Ed. Alan Bold. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984. Print.

McKinnon, D.M. The Problem of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Print.

Morgan, Edwin, “Glasgow Sonnets: Sonnet IV.” The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Literature. Ed. Douglas Dunn. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. 200. Print.
​
Newman, Lance. “Marxism and Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. 9.2 Summer 2002. 1-24. Print.

Earth Writing, Geography, and Memory, Continued.

Hilary Hawley
What Lies Beneath: The Making and Remaking of an Urban Waterway
Shelley McEuen
The Stories We Tell, The Landscapes We Deserve:
“Reading the Dynamics” of Rock Creek as Neglected Urban Wild Space
Jonathan Frey
Landscape with Strip Mall
Laura Godfrey
​“…where the shingle mill was…”:  Pleasure and Misery in Hemingway’s Remembered Geographies
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