MORE FROM GRAY
Dear reader of my blog,
I have added nothing to it since November 22nd last year, except slightly to revise the title of my play Midgeburgers to Midgieburgers, and improve a few lines. This play is now being rehearsed for an Oran Mor Lunchtime Theatre production that will run in the week starting Monday 16th April, with The Loss of the Golden Silence, a shorter version of a play first performed in the Pool Lunchtime Theatre, Edinburgh in 1973. Living a long time is sometimes useful.
Some earlier stuff in this blog is out of date. Dunfermline residents have won their fight to stop the building of an international business college in Dunfermline’s Pittencrieff Public Park. This scheme was strongly supported by Gordon Brown, the most likely British Prime Minister when Blair retires. For a long time the Harvard business corporation claimed to know nothing about the scheme, but admits it was responsible now that it cannot happen. We live among mysteries.
My criticisms of Glasgow Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery renovations are no longer completely accurate. More space has been made to let folk view the paintings upstairs. There are several other improvements, but the new layout still strikes me as cluttered and inconsequential compared with the old, which will never be reconstructed, but I believe as sensible an arrangement should one day be created again.
I was touched by messages telling me some readers have enjoyed some of these words I have thrown out into a common space. I have not recently added to them, being busy finishing my last novel (Old Men in Love published by Bloomsbury October 2007) and starting a thickly illustrated autobiography (A Life in Pictures, to be published by Canongate late in 2008 if I am spared). Part of the novel is an account of world history from the start until Scotland and England happen. It is meant to be very short and easily understood without using big numbers or words that need special educations. It is not yet quite finished and is largely due to the advice of Dr Chris Burton, Geology Lecturer in Glasgow University. I print it below, hoping some readers who understand parts of the subject more than I do will send me useful suggestions, though not too many of them.
I will end this early April entry with a wee recent verse.
I have added nothing to it since November 22nd last year, except slightly to revise the title of my play Midgeburgers to Midgieburgers, and improve a few lines. This play is now being rehearsed for an Oran Mor Lunchtime Theatre production that will run in the week starting Monday 16th April, with The Loss of the Golden Silence, a shorter version of a play first performed in the Pool Lunchtime Theatre, Edinburgh in 1973. Living a long time is sometimes useful.
Some earlier stuff in this blog is out of date. Dunfermline residents have won their fight to stop the building of an international business college in Dunfermline’s Pittencrieff Public Park. This scheme was strongly supported by Gordon Brown, the most likely British Prime Minister when Blair retires. For a long time the Harvard business corporation claimed to know nothing about the scheme, but admits it was responsible now that it cannot happen. We live among mysteries.
My criticisms of Glasgow Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery renovations are no longer completely accurate. More space has been made to let folk view the paintings upstairs. There are several other improvements, but the new layout still strikes me as cluttered and inconsequential compared with the old, which will never be reconstructed, but I believe as sensible an arrangement should one day be created again.
I was touched by messages telling me some readers have enjoyed some of these words I have thrown out into a common space. I have not recently added to them, being busy finishing my last novel (Old Men in Love published by Bloomsbury October 2007) and starting a thickly illustrated autobiography (A Life in Pictures, to be published by Canongate late in 2008 if I am spared). Part of the novel is an account of world history from the start until Scotland and England happen. It is meant to be very short and easily understood without using big numbers or words that need special educations. It is not yet quite finished and is largely due to the advice of Dr Chris Burton, Geology Lecturer in Glasgow University. I print it below, hoping some readers who understand parts of the subject more than I do will send me useful suggestions, though not too many of them.
I will end this early April entry with a wee recent verse.
THE EARLY WORLD
A sudden endless gas explosion made all the material in this universe. Some parts collided with others, swirling into gassy clumps that got denser and hotter and became radiant globes as they rotated. Big neighbouring globes began turning round each other; smaller ones became satellites of a bigger partner. The lightest materials* floated on their surfaces, sometimes cooling into floating plates of crust that grew bigger until their edges met, making a surface that only let out light where volcanoes exploded through. The air above this earth of ours was poisonous methane, ammonia and hydrogen gas mixed with water vapour. The earth’s crust thickened and the surface cooled until rain water could lie there without turning into steam. Water covered the earth with an ocean except where a great rocky continent, thicker than the submarine crusts, rose above the sea-level at the equator. Geologists call it Gondwana.
The molten minerals under the earth’s crust had currents slowly cracking it apart, making long submarine canyons on the ocean floor with bottoms constantly restored by lava welling from volcanic vents. Boiling water above the vents was stopped evaporating by over a mile-deep weight of colder water above, and in these hot depths particles, circulating in a broth of dissolved chemicals, formed drops that grew larger when they touched and merged with similar drops. Drops that thus grew too big for their skins split in two of equal size and went on separately. Such drops evolved into single-celled creatures we call living because they sense things outside their bodies that can nourish and help them reproduce, and have the motive power to reach for them. The evolution from chemical drops to living cells has never (yet?) been achieved in a human laboratory, but first happened in deep water, for in those days the earth’s air let through lethal ultra-violet sunlight that penetrated water to a depth of over thirty feet. In submarine canyons or the bottom of deep pools the sun’s rays and earth’s heat, though reduced, were strong enough to support generate and support single-celled microbes that were the only living things for at least three quarters of life’s history on earth.
In watery depths these tiny primitive creatures fed on dissolved chemicals and each other, breathing out carbon dioxide that rose, mixed with the air above and began screening out the ultra-violet rays, letting larger water plants evolve near the surface. More complex bacteria converted carbon dioxide into oxygen, until the air above was two per cent oxygen letting a kindlier sunlight shine on sea and land. Life now crossed the beaches, entering the rivers, lakes, swamps and plains of Gondwana, first lichens, mosses and fungi followed by primitive insects and the segmented worms that are ancestors of every lizard, fish, bird and mammal with a backbone. The whole upper earth, solid and fluid, came to hold every size of living thing: spores, seeds, insects, bats, birds in the air – herbs, trees, amphibians, lizards on land – plankton, seaweeds, sponges, fish, squid, sharks in the ocean – crawling things in submarine volcanic vents, rock pools and soil. This living layer around our planet has been called the zoo-sphere and is thinnest at the poles, thickest in tropical rainforests. There were many such forests on the swampy continent of Gondwana.
The earth’s interior usually moves more slowly than the zoo-sphere but is never still, currents in molten rock under the crust always moving apart huge plates of rock on one side, ramming them together on the other. Mountain chains are raised when one is forced over a neighbour, then rain, wind, frost and lichens start wearing them down. Rocks and gravel fall into glens between mountains, rivers wash grit down to plains, mixing it with dead plants and creatures, creating new earth where catastrophic climate changes and earthquakes have crushed vast ancient sections of zoo-sphere under new rock layers, making coal seams, mineral-rich strata, subterranean reservoirs of oil and gas. Gondwana was broken into smaller continents by the earth’s inner currents which drove them so far apart that they joined again on the far side of the world near the south pole, which again cracked into continents that drifted north and started roughly corresponding to those we know, though at first not in the order we now know them. The oceans between them widened or narrowed or disappeared. The great plate of crust carrying Indo-Australia collided with Eurasia, elevating the Himalayas, our highest therefore youngest mountain range. The Alps are hardly middle-aged. The Wicklow Hills are all that remain of much more ancient mountains.
A few million years ago the Arctic ice cap expanded south until Scotland and similar northern latitudes were under a mile-thick layer of glaciers, changing the sea level, coastlines, the nature of plants and animals. Elephants, rhinoceroses, ground-sloths and other vast creatures survived by evolving thicker pelts. By this time the first thinking humans had come out of Africa, creatures that had evolved from squirrel-like tree-rodents able to eat nuts, snails, berries, eggs, carrion, fruit and lice. Our unusually wide range of choices began with this variety of edibles (“Do I dare to eat a peach? Shall I part my hair behind?”) and increased when we scrabbled on the ground, grubbing up roots like pigs, tearing up fresh or dead meat like foxes. But we grubbed and tore with forepaws, not snouts or teeth, so our often unemployed mouths were free to make a lot of noises that became a way of sharing thoughts possessed by no other animals. We developed unusually big brains by using hands to grasp more and more different things while talking about them, until our ability to remember and initiate different actions wiped from our nerves most instincts needed by other beasts to survive. At least half a million years ago one-year-old children, like those today, tottered on unsteady legs through a bewildering world when birds of that age, hatched from an egg, had learned to fly, had mated, built nests and fed their own children. The instinctive love of parents helped them grow into adults because adults had conscious knowledge, knowledge of how to make fires that helped us survive the ice age. Other species were killed off by great climate changes, or survived by evolving different kinds of body and instinctive behaviour. Our kind survived by hunting other creatures, roasting their flesh, turning their bones and skins into tools and clothing.
Our brains achieved their present form nearly half a million years ago and we have ever since kept the same pattern of body by changing our minds, habits and societies with very few physical adaptations. Hunters in the north grew fatter and paler, those in the south leaner and darker. Where food was abundant the average human height became six feet or more, exhaustion of a poor food supply made us dwarfish, or led to warfare and emigration. On Chinese plains unmigratory farmers grew extra inches of gut to get more nourishment from their rice. But pigmies, Eskimos, Mahatma Ghandi and Condleeza Rice are of the same species, our shared body pattern prolonged for generations by constantly diverging into thousands, maybe millions of very different communities, each fitting the geology of lands where we lived. Landscape defines the most lasting nations. A vast plain watered by three rivers explains why China is the largest, most peopled, most ancient nation. A smaller but equally self-centred nation was made possible by successive layers of limestone, chalk and clay forming a saucer of land with Paris in the middle. The Baltic Sea explains why such close neighbours as Norway, Sweden and Denmark have different governments though very similar languages. And like the four different species of finch, turtle and cactus that evolved on four Galapagos Islands, the world’s islands acquired unique human societies.
When the Atlantic was quite a narrow sea a few islands to the east had the same geology as North America nearby – granite rock (the oldest in the world) and metamorphic rock (broken granite volcanically mixed with newer stuff.) Slow convulsions detached these islands and eventually rammed them into an island off the west coast of Eurasia, an island of the same limestone, chalk and clay that formed France. The resulting archipelago was visited in the 4th century BC by Pytheas, a Greek explorer who gave it a Greek name. Romans who took most of their science from Greece later Latinised the name, calling it Britannia.
Like all efficient imperialists the Romans ruled lands they invaded by dividing them along geographical lines. After sailing round Britain they divided it into three parts, calling the south mainland Albion, the north mainland Caledonia, the western island Hibernia, now called England, Scotland and Ireland. They decided the conquest of Hibernia was not worth the expense, and attacked the mainland through Albion which was closest to their French property. Their military encampments became centres of a road network covering . . . (at this point the author gave up)
A RECENT VERSE: CROSSWORD TESTAMENT
The molten minerals under the earth’s crust had currents slowly cracking it apart, making long submarine canyons on the ocean floor with bottoms constantly restored by lava welling from volcanic vents. Boiling water above the vents was stopped evaporating by over a mile-deep weight of colder water above, and in these hot depths particles, circulating in a broth of dissolved chemicals, formed drops that grew larger when they touched and merged with similar drops. Drops that thus grew too big for their skins split in two of equal size and went on separately. Such drops evolved into single-celled creatures we call living because they sense things outside their bodies that can nourish and help them reproduce, and have the motive power to reach for them. The evolution from chemical drops to living cells has never (yet?) been achieved in a human laboratory, but first happened in deep water, for in those days the earth’s air let through lethal ultra-violet sunlight that penetrated water to a depth of over thirty feet. In submarine canyons or the bottom of deep pools the sun’s rays and earth’s heat, though reduced, were strong enough to support generate and support single-celled microbes that were the only living things for at least three quarters of life’s history on earth.
In watery depths these tiny primitive creatures fed on dissolved chemicals and each other, breathing out carbon dioxide that rose, mixed with the air above and began screening out the ultra-violet rays, letting larger water plants evolve near the surface. More complex bacteria converted carbon dioxide into oxygen, until the air above was two per cent oxygen letting a kindlier sunlight shine on sea and land. Life now crossed the beaches, entering the rivers, lakes, swamps and plains of Gondwana, first lichens, mosses and fungi followed by primitive insects and the segmented worms that are ancestors of every lizard, fish, bird and mammal with a backbone. The whole upper earth, solid and fluid, came to hold every size of living thing: spores, seeds, insects, bats, birds in the air – herbs, trees, amphibians, lizards on land – plankton, seaweeds, sponges, fish, squid, sharks in the ocean – crawling things in submarine volcanic vents, rock pools and soil. This living layer around our planet has been called the zoo-sphere and is thinnest at the poles, thickest in tropical rainforests. There were many such forests on the swampy continent of Gondwana.
The earth’s interior usually moves more slowly than the zoo-sphere but is never still, currents in molten rock under the crust always moving apart huge plates of rock on one side, ramming them together on the other. Mountain chains are raised when one is forced over a neighbour, then rain, wind, frost and lichens start wearing them down. Rocks and gravel fall into glens between mountains, rivers wash grit down to plains, mixing it with dead plants and creatures, creating new earth where catastrophic climate changes and earthquakes have crushed vast ancient sections of zoo-sphere under new rock layers, making coal seams, mineral-rich strata, subterranean reservoirs of oil and gas. Gondwana was broken into smaller continents by the earth’s inner currents which drove them so far apart that they joined again on the far side of the world near the south pole, which again cracked into continents that drifted north and started roughly corresponding to those we know, though at first not in the order we now know them. The oceans between them widened or narrowed or disappeared. The great plate of crust carrying Indo-Australia collided with Eurasia, elevating the Himalayas, our highest therefore youngest mountain range. The Alps are hardly middle-aged. The Wicklow Hills are all that remain of much more ancient mountains.
A few million years ago the Arctic ice cap expanded south until Scotland and similar northern latitudes were under a mile-thick layer of glaciers, changing the sea level, coastlines, the nature of plants and animals. Elephants, rhinoceroses, ground-sloths and other vast creatures survived by evolving thicker pelts. By this time the first thinking humans had come out of Africa, creatures that had evolved from squirrel-like tree-rodents able to eat nuts, snails, berries, eggs, carrion, fruit and lice. Our unusually wide range of choices began with this variety of edibles (“Do I dare to eat a peach? Shall I part my hair behind?”) and increased when we scrabbled on the ground, grubbing up roots like pigs, tearing up fresh or dead meat like foxes. But we grubbed and tore with forepaws, not snouts or teeth, so our often unemployed mouths were free to make a lot of noises that became a way of sharing thoughts possessed by no other animals. We developed unusually big brains by using hands to grasp more and more different things while talking about them, until our ability to remember and initiate different actions wiped from our nerves most instincts needed by other beasts to survive. At least half a million years ago one-year-old children, like those today, tottered on unsteady legs through a bewildering world when birds of that age, hatched from an egg, had learned to fly, had mated, built nests and fed their own children. The instinctive love of parents helped them grow into adults because adults had conscious knowledge, knowledge of how to make fires that helped us survive the ice age. Other species were killed off by great climate changes, or survived by evolving different kinds of body and instinctive behaviour. Our kind survived by hunting other creatures, roasting their flesh, turning their bones and skins into tools and clothing.
Our brains achieved their present form nearly half a million years ago and we have ever since kept the same pattern of body by changing our minds, habits and societies with very few physical adaptations. Hunters in the north grew fatter and paler, those in the south leaner and darker. Where food was abundant the average human height became six feet or more, exhaustion of a poor food supply made us dwarfish, or led to warfare and emigration. On Chinese plains unmigratory farmers grew extra inches of gut to get more nourishment from their rice. But pigmies, Eskimos, Mahatma Ghandi and Condleeza Rice are of the same species, our shared body pattern prolonged for generations by constantly diverging into thousands, maybe millions of very different communities, each fitting the geology of lands where we lived. Landscape defines the most lasting nations. A vast plain watered by three rivers explains why China is the largest, most peopled, most ancient nation. A smaller but equally self-centred nation was made possible by successive layers of limestone, chalk and clay forming a saucer of land with Paris in the middle. The Baltic Sea explains why such close neighbours as Norway, Sweden and Denmark have different governments though very similar languages. And like the four different species of finch, turtle and cactus that evolved on four Galapagos Islands, the world’s islands acquired unique human societies.
When the Atlantic was quite a narrow sea a few islands to the east had the same geology as North America nearby – granite rock (the oldest in the world) and metamorphic rock (broken granite volcanically mixed with newer stuff.) Slow convulsions detached these islands and eventually rammed them into an island off the west coast of Eurasia, an island of the same limestone, chalk and clay that formed France. The resulting archipelago was visited in the 4th century BC by Pytheas, a Greek explorer who gave it a Greek name. Romans who took most of their science from Greece later Latinised the name, calling it Britannia.
Like all efficient imperialists the Romans ruled lands they invaded by dividing them along geographical lines. After sailing round Britain they divided it into three parts, calling the south mainland Albion, the north mainland Caledonia, the western island Hibernia, now called England, Scotland and Ireland. They decided the conquest of Hibernia was not worth the expense, and attacked the mainland through Albion which was closest to their French property. Their military encampments became centres of a road network covering . . . (at this point the author gave up)
A RECENT VERSE: CROSSWORD TESTAMENT
Dirty stuff, dust, turmoil in lowland Scots
is stoor; stofzuiger Dutch for hoover. Love
desire lust are English, désir Francais,
lust Deutsch. Rare spirits, sprites, geists, ghosts inspire
esprit. Great Yeats creates, sweet Keats repeats,
eager Edgar Poe try poetry games.
Dog shout, tree skin, water car meet in one
word, a curtailed world. See saw so we em
bark, go out into nothing like candle flames.
is stoor; stofzuiger Dutch for hoover. Love
desire lust are English, désir Francais,
lust Deutsch. Rare spirits, sprites, geists, ghosts inspire
esprit. Great Yeats creates, sweet Keats repeats,
eager Edgar Poe try poetry games.
Dog shout, tree skin, water car meet in one
word, a curtailed world. See saw so we em
bark, go out into nothing like candle flames.
GOODBYE
posted by Alasdair Gray at Tuesday, April 03, 2007
6 Comments:
I know you didn't ask for input on the poem, but is there a typo in line 5? I'm thinking "sweet Keats repeats" would work better.
Hello Alasdair
I was very pleased to hear the sound of your voice on radio four this morning, 12 April 2007.
You made me very happy.
It is now lunchtime. My usual melancholy state, as I sit writing endless editorial for these damned trade magazines, has returned.
Not to worry. I have my Beetle restoration to look forward to tonight. Hope you have a good day.
Fergus
fergusacooney@gmail.com
Dear Mr Gray,
It's a pleasure to have you back in the blogosphere. Many of us are waiting impatiently for your new novel. Oh, and Oran Mor is looking fabulous.
All the best,
Gregory Norminton (Edinburgh)
Dear Lisa Boucher,
Thank you for pointing out the error that deleted Keats by repeating Yeats. It is now corrected.
Yours truly, Alasdair Gray
I'm sad about your renaming. I have a running battle with a friend who insists on calling the creatures "midgies". To me, the word has connotations of midgie-raking; the insects have always been midges.
Dear Chris,
I appreciate your wish to separate midges from midgieraking and midgiemen, but find Midgieburgers too couthily Scotch to resist.
Yours truly, Alasdair Gray
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