New Statesman Scotland - A place to moan for Scotland
Without Day is a recently published anthology of "proposals for a Scottish Parliament". In an invitation for submissions, its editor, Alec Finlay, states: "None of the proposals will be realised. They are in this sense 'without day'. Freed from physical or temporal limitations, they may be monumental, or suggest the smallest intervention, action, or idea."
In a prefatory poem, "Recall", Robert Crawford laments the thousands who waited in vain for this day and "who whistled the auld sang toothily under their breath". If Without Day is a singing out loud to mark what the introduction calls "a long-awaited symbolic moment", it also constitutes a wonderfully rich collective endeavour, a poetic text in which numerous strands of "Scotland" may be identified.
Crawford's elegiac and inclusive impulse is echoed in many entries, one of which, for example, envisages a "Hall of Unsung Heroes and Heroines", featuring "marble and bronze busts of Scottish people of which nobody but their immediate families has ever heard". Similarly, there are entries to mark parliament's suspension between 1707 and 1999: one with an archive of blank-paged volumes recording Parliamentary Proceedings during these years; another with a hot-air balloon filled with the estimated breath which "would have been expelled since the final sitting in 1707 to the reinstalment".
What is perhaps surprising is how vitally connected many of the almost 90 contributors feel to Scotland's natural environment: "rocky ground and mountaintop" are still a stronger presence (here at least) than tenement or estate. The names of the Munros, for example, will be painted on the walls within the parliament "as a reminder that the mountains have a vote". The site is to be planted with mature birch, larch and pine and circled with rowans; in memory of the great Caledonian forests, the names of all forests that have disappeared are to be cut into stone or drawn with charcoal.
Water music will be heard in a recording of the "flowing waters of all burns, streams, becks and rivers" on the Scottish border. Jam jars of seasonal wild flowers are to be placed beside each MSP. Namings and listings - geographical, natural, cultural - are one of the many satisfactions to be found here: "a queeny,/a fluky goal,/a dwam,/a poor-box shilling,/a shot star,/a stug of burning bush,/a fit-ba,/a V of migrating geese,/a lily-loch".
Of course, the nature of those who inhabit this landscape must be taken into account: "Our heritage of darkness and cloud. Our people happier in shadow and drizzle than in light and sun." For such a people, it is right that within the parliament there should be confessionals, where our representatives may moan for Scotland: "Their grievances cover everything: the English, traffic congestion, football. It's an endless drizzle from a cloud of discontent."
Scotland's craftsmen and women will be well used in this imaginary parliament. In addition to a remarkable chair, clock and bell, they will be required to inscribe exhortations and grim epigrams into stone, and onto banners and wall hangings: "If ye dinnae wipe that smirk aff yer fais/yell be hanged as a murderer wan day."
Hypocrisy emerges as the most reviled political vice in Without Day. A special room will be constructed for "its safe discharge". "Balance", "poise" and "grace" will be treasured values. "A liberty tree will be planted in each village in Scotland."
For this will not be a parliament without aspiration or vision. Contributors look even wider than the "Vital Peripheries" - and higher. They wish to "form a coalition with the stars", to "see/the corridors of power awash/with the glacial slush/descended from the heights/of gleaming Sirius".
And of humour? There is, among much else, a tantalising suggestion for a film about Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, with the main parts taken by Norman MacCaig and Sorley Maclean. "MacCaig as Holmes is tall, lean, high-cheekboned. He plays the fiddle but knows his limits. He is an expert on ash." "Maclean as Watson is much more rough-cast, hard-headed and serious-minded than his popular film image. When they go into action, he carries the gun." Without Day is a marvellous celebration of the fact that the parliament is at last in the bag; now perhaps, with our own promised film studio, such creatively cast films - sure-fire hits! - won't pass us by.
Without Day is published by Pocketbooks at £7.99. There is an associated exhibition at Edinburgh's City Arts Centre
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