Sandstone Press

The precarious lamp

Posted by RLD on 24th May 2009

Matching the nuts, bolts and lubricated surfaces of practical outreach to an inbuilt, foundational internationalism is one of Sandstone’s great challenges.  We might say it is one of the great challenges to our present, rapidly altering world. The past does not give way to the future without a struggle.  The internet is a great aid, of course, but books are solid objects that have to be stored and transported, and readers have to be persuaded that these compendiums of thought and feeling are worth laying down their pounds, dollars or euros for.

A glance at the Contacts page of our web site will show that we now have a Distributor for the US and Canada.  We are also in contact with a South African company and entertain, I believe, reasonable hopes.  England and Ireland have been possibly more stubborn and I sometimes wonder if we have to earn additional credibility to breach the wall of music hall Scottishness that is a particular handicap south of the border.

Thankfully Joseph Murphy’s AT THE EDGE is gathering a fair amount of attention in Ireland.  Sean Moncreiff’s interview of Joseph on Newstalk Radio seems to have been a big boost.  Before 24 hours were past I was speaking with Hughes and Hughes, one of Ireland’s great book chains, and it looks like they will be stocking AT THE EDGE soon.  Perhaps with a little persuasion they can be persuaded to stock some of our other books.  I hope so, because our authors are all worth reading and all, I would say, are bridge builders.

Thinking about these things takes me back to earlier connections with Ireland.  A few years ago I took the Northwords team across to Galway to visit the Writers Centre there.  Friendships were made that are still solidly in place and Fred Johnston, the outstanding poet and novelist who leads the Centre, occasionally reviews our books.

Earlier still I represented the Neil Gunn Trust at the opening of the Maurice Walsh Memorial in Listowel, County Kerry.  It was a particular privilege to share a platform with the novelist Brian McMahon who, in his speech, warned against the dangers of playing up to ‘stage Irishness’.  That went home.  Deep friendships were established then also, and I was more than pleased to return to read at Listowel Book Week beside Ron Butlin.

Many of the people who befriended me on those visits were committed Christians and I wonder, with sympathy, how they must feel about the recent revelations of child abuse in church institutions in Ireland.  The sustained, almost universal cover-up must be even more crushing to people of commitment and faith.

Almost at the same time, in Scotland, we have had a huge kerfuffle about a practicing minister who, while moving from one congregation to another, decided he has had enough of subterfuge and come out as a homosexual man in a stable relationship.  This ran to demonstrations outside the General Assembly and eventually a vote in favour of Mr Rennie to a ratio of not quite two to one.

What is it about Christianity and Islam that needs this unwholesome, controlling focus on sex?  Is it not time to take virginity, and for that matter motherhood, off their pedestals?  Judaism doesn’t seem to be half as bad, nor do the religions of Africa and India.

Very few ministers or priests impinge on my moral thinking.  I lean more to the poets.  It was in Hughes and Hughes’ shop in Dublin Airport, on the way back from that first trip to Kerry that I picked up Seamus Heaney’s THE GOVERNMENT OF THE TONGUE to add to the collection of his work that was growing on my shelves.  The exploration continued for years, and in a sense still does, but in time, as is natural, concentrated on the essential.

In the closing poem of ‘Station Island’ (1984) he encounters the ghost of James Joyce who counsels, ‘that subject people stuff is a cod’s game, infantile’, and ‘it’s time to swim out on your own and fill the element with signatures of your own frequency’.  Later, in ‘The Haw Lantern’(1987) Diogenes with his lamp goes seeking ‘one just man’.  Between these positions, the injunction to live freely and the cautioning on unjust actions, lies the whole world of morality.

Located in the same space is also a great damning of tradition and loyalty, and the requirement to think for ourselves, to break with the obligations of faith.  Later still, in ‘Seeing Things’ (1991), he would be faced with the consequences, ‘there is no next-time-round.  Unroofed scope.  Knowledge-freshening wind.’  I remember reading it, and with that remembering find myself suddenly in darkness, but find myself not alone.

From somewhere beyond the beyond a lamp hung on the end of a twig appears.  The twig bends to its weight and behind it walks an old man in rags.  He turns the lamp this way and that until a black clad man also appears, picked out by the carried light.  ‘Refer to the Book,’ says the man.  ‘Unnatural practices cannot be condoned, especially among our leaders.  Levitical law . . .’

The light is removed and now hovers above another man.  In bespoke red cape and golden mitre he kneels in incongruous humility.  ‘At this difficult time we salute the courage of those who must now face the consequences of their actions, those church men and women who ruined the young lives that were placed in their care.  We must not rush to judgement.  We must be mindful . . .’

It is inconceivable that the abuses now uncovered in Ireland, the United States and elsewhere have not also occurred in Scotland and England but, as with our Presbyterian friend, the Justified Homophobe, the party line goes out and the darkness fills with the locksmith sounds of minds as they shut and ranks as they close.  Ireland, you are not alone, the first man is a Scot and the second English.

The old man is not finished; by no means.  He walks steadily towards me now, with his precarious light that predates all Christian traditions and teaching, predates Judaism and all the other faiths.  It came out with the Bang, and soon my eyes narrow against it just as the others’ did.  The old man’s face behind the lamp, its thin skin and bald, speckled head, the flat planes of his temples with the thick vein pulsing there, Diogenes the Cynic, I feel I know him.  His expression isn’t judging after all, only knowing.  He is beyond disappointment.

‘Those women,’ I say, ‘were as needy as me, and chose the same road for their own reasons.  Am I to blame for how things turned out?  The few wholly good, love-drenched things I’ve done with my life, judge me by them.’  But, he’s gone.

Read THE HAW LANTERN by Seamus Heaney http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/poems-2-e.html
Visit Hughes and Hughes http://www.hughesbooks.com/