Those who shaped the early 21st century ahead of the indyref

There was the hope of progress then that his successor seemed to find offensive and would oppose and seek to break down.

On January 1, 2001, who could have imagined what would happen on September 11 that same year?

Edwin Morgan, in a poem-sequence called “Planet Wave” which runs from “In the Beginning (20 Billion BC)” to “On the Way to Barnard’s Star (2300 AD)” focuses on that event in the penultimate poem, “The Twin Towers (2001 AD)”: “The shock-waves were a tocsin for the overweening imperium; / let them take note, let them think how others live.” But beyond that judgement, there is the power of the imagination. “I saw it,” says the poem’s omniscient narrator, “but you must imagine it.”

Think of those who escaped stumbling down stairwells,
Think of the ones who escaped only into the air,
Leaping hand in hand from highest windows
To be broken rather than burned: think of that.
Can you think of the pilots too, in the last moments…

That challenge to imagine things you would not normally or easily imagine, or that must have seemed entirely unimaginable, is the provenance of poetry and the arts, and right up until his death in 2010, Edwin Morgan was Scotland’s best exemplar of that truth.

READ MORE: A broad look at world events that led up to the first indyref (part one)

When the Scottish Government appointed him to the position of Scots Makar (effectively Scotland’s national poet laureate) in 2004, it was a happy choice, and when Morgan died at the age of 90, he had delivered more than anyone could have imagined by way of late poems. He published his final collection, Dreams and Other Nightmares (Mariscat Press) on the occasion of his 90th birthday. The last poem in that last book is a version of an old English riddle, and it offers one answer to the unfinished business of the world.

Up beyond the universe and back
Down to the tiniest chigger in the finger –
I outstrip the moon in brightness,
I outrun midsummer suns.
I embrace the seas and other waters,
I am fresh and green as the fields I form.
I walk under hell, I fly over the heavens.
I am the land, I am the ocean.
I claim this honour, I claim its worth.
I am what I claim. So, what is my name?

“Creation” is the answer. The secret the poem is delivering is simply that it is a process, the world is always in change and the arts help us find a way through.

When I was teaching at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 2008, I had the chance to ask some local people, late one night in a crowded bar, the necessary question about their preference for WB’s brother, Ireland’s greatest modern painter, the artist Jack Yeats. “You have a whole host of visiting professors here from all over the world,” I said, “and a good company of students, all reading the works of WB – but my sense of it is that for you guys, the great man was Jack, not William. Jack’s the boy. Correct me if I’m wrong ...”

“No, no,” they said. “That’s right enough. Jack’s the boy. Forget about Spooky Willie. Jack’s the boy.”

And that was because he kept coming back to Sligo. He never gave up on the people and the place itself. Such loyalty engenders affection, love, long-lasting regard.

It’s that close proximity, that sense of the local, which keeps the universal attached, earthed, in touch with us. And that’s what the increasingly “populist” politics of Britain and America were losing sight of. Yet if celebrity culture is the present climate, even that might be turned to advantage.

The most famous poet alive at that time, the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), highlighted the work of the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson in his 2009 book of translations from Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, which published not only Heaney’s English-language versions, but also the original Scots-language Henryson poems as well.

The virtue of this was evidently to use Heaney’s international fame to extend and enhance Henryson’s readership. This was evidence of literary intervention using the commodity-fetishism of 21st-century celebrity culture to promote the work of a major, relatively neglected Scottish poet, through the famous name of the Irish Nobel laureate.

The art of giving, representing others beyond the self, retrieving and renewing the good things, persists, and if the international context is pressing upon all of us, it is with the local, the specific thing, that great literature and great art are concerned.

And Heaney himself never lost this trace. In his last book, entitled, appropriately, Human Chain (2010), poems commemorating the dead rub shoulders with poems commemorating specific moments in a life – adolescence in the 1950s, or the birth of the poet’s first grandchild.

Between heather and marigold,
Between sphagnum and buttercup,
Between dandelion and broom,
Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,
As between clear blue and cloud,
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slanted roof,
I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.

Elizabeth Burns (1957-2015), one of the finest Scottish poets of the era, too easily forgotten, in her poem “The wave” describes the passing of a loved one with astonishing tenderness:

How his thinned face resembled his mother’s
How his voice became a whisper barely heard
How his breath grew shallower and came no more
like a low wave disappearing into sand
How he seemed then like a shadow,
something that had been solid and substantial
laid out flat; an outline, an absence
like darkened sand where a wave has been

And perhaps this is what stories and songs and poems and art alone can do, despite the world’s wars and its horrors.

So much, in retrospect, throughout that first decade of the century, seems now to have been leading inexorably into the second decade, and for many of us, the central public and political event of that decade was of course the referendum in 2014.

The first time I encountered the word “ignominy” was in the James Bond novel, From Russia, With Love (1959).

You remember the moment?

It’s in Chapter 6, “Death Warrant”: General Grubozaboyschikov, running his eyes down the file of the “Angliski Spion”, declares that he and his conspirators will now have to devise “an appropriate konspiratsia. And one that cannot fail!” Then to the recommendation at the bottom of the warrant, he adds two words: “To be killed. WITH IGNOMINY.”

I was fascinated. What does that word mean? I asked my father. I puzzled over it until I read the novel and understood the plot.

A friend of mine emailed the day before September 18, 2014: “Cheers to us all in the last 30 hours of Schrodinger’s nation …”

Another friend emailed from Geneva: “I’m counting on you to tell me it’s Yes. Very difficult to concentrate on work today; the repercussions of a Yes vote are going to be vast; No would be simple ignominy. All very strange.”

I replied next day: “Ignominy rules.”

The message came back: “I’m sorry.”

Then another friend, this one in Singapore, sent this: “‘Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure ... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

Live by this boys – Bring Me My Wine – We Ride Again!”