Page 19 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae
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and the vivid form handed down, as she records, in the   Thus the little bank behind the kirk in Glen Urquhart
                               poems ‘Christ’s Kirk’, ‘The Cherrie and the Slae’ and   reaching out to embrace the overflow of its congregation
                               ‘Montgomerie’s Stanza’. Thus the poetry itself becomes a   only makes more poignant the emptiness of all the other
                               historical landscape.  In this particular symbiosis between   glens in that wide compass.
                               poetry and landscape, she comes close to David Herd      Poetry and song are a subtext in all this, but
                               in his Scots Songs of 1769. (Before Burns, Herd was a   they do also surface directly, in the title of the show itself,
                               pioneer collector of Scots ballads.) In the introduction to   for instance, and in the references to Hamish Henderson’s
                               his first collection, Herd argued that the richness of the   collecting and the tinkers who were for him the conduit of
                               tradition of popular song in Scotland was itself symbiotic.   so much music. Poetry is there directly in Standard Habbie
                               As though part of nature, it sprang from ‘the romantic face   and in Ben Dorain, too, but it is at its most immediate in
                               of the country and the pastoral life of the great part of the   the drawing And I bleer my een wi’ greetin. Poetry and
                               inhabitants.’                             song have enjoyed the dualism of words and music, their
                                      In Glen Urquhart and Glen Moriston, the link   symbiosis indeed, since the time before writing. Reid’s
                               between language and landscape is different. It was   analogy of verbal and visual language suggests a similar
                               because of the size of the congregation in Glen Urquhart   symbiosis of the aural and the seen. In her work, Helen
                               that an outdoor extension to a large kirk already equipped   MacAlister takes the example of that symbiosis and extends
                               with a gallery was necessary when all the congregation   it in a new direction. In And I bleer my een wi’ greetin, she
                               gathered for communion. Those numbers in turn reflected   makes this explicit. She refers the line from the song to
                               the fact that, uniquely, these two glens were spared the   a remark of John Purser’s on the achievement of Burns
                               Clearances. Like the last fragment of the old Caledonian   uniting words and music in his songs, ‘for it was a new
                               forest that survived hidden out of reach in nearby Glen   thing, to enter so deeply into the feeling and inner mood of
                               Affric, until the First World War Glen Urquhart and   a tune and realize it in language.’
                               Glen Moriston remained a viable fragment of the old      The line in the drawing is from “Ay Waukin’ O,”
                               Gàidhealtachd. Indeed, the bank behind the kirk was still   the sad song of a girl who cannot sleep for the absence of
                               in use in living memory and the benches until recently   her lover,
                               still stood stacked in a little stone-built hut nearby. The
                               outdoor gathering of this Gaelic community was therefore a   Lanely night comes on,
                               monument to a different, more sombre exchange between   A’ the lave are sleepin,
                               language and landscape: the tragic correlation between   I think on my bonie lad,
                               the Clearances and the geography of the Gàidhealtachd,   And I bleer my een wi’ greetin.
                               their ethnic and therefore linguistic parameters. Situated in
                               the Great Glen and at the midpoint between Strathnaver      Helen MacAlister renders the sadness with
                               and Argyll to north and south and Strathspey and Skye   the words set against blank white, in Gaelic against bàn,
                               to east and west, Glen Urquhart and Glen Moriston are   perhaps, the word for fair-haired as in Donnchadh Bàn
                               geographically just about at the centre of the Highlands.   MacIntyre himself, but, as she remarks, also the word for
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