This essay was originally published on 20 November 2022 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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A lighter subject not without its own shadow of melancholy

This essay occurred to me some months ago and was to be part of a much longer essay which examined the two principal aspects of our lives (whether we like it or not): our private lives, which may at times be a difficult but necessary source of our experiences and thus our enjoyment of life, and our public lives or our relations with the “public thing” and thus with something principally abstract and intangible at least in the modern state, equally necessary – albeit often in a very tenuous manner – and the source of our collective wellbeing. We all like to inhabit the first region, which doesn’t come without its difficulties and yet overcoming them is possible and the achievement rewarding, and no sane person would want to inhabit the second, but unfortunately the only way we can not do this is by deluding ourselves that it doesn’t exist even when disaster is but a few months away – as in 1913 and 1938, and perhaps again in 2022.

In July when work was getting on top of me, I went aimlessly wandering around the web too tired to stay with anything for long until I came across a video on the Scottish Poetry Library’s website, which tells of how Aly Bain, Andrew Greig and Billy Connolly went up to the Loch of the Green Corrie (also the title of a book by Greig) in the company of a camera crew, we have to suppose. The video includes interviews with various other poets and admirers, who didn’t have to struggle up the hill.

It was a pleasant distraction and spoke of friendship, artistry (that avoids smugness), and the necessarily erratic and sometimes inscrutable nature of our close relationships. The friends had been invited to the climb by Greig who had been there previously at the suggestion of Norman McCaig’s deathbed advice. McCaig had been Greig’s friend and slightly reluctant mentor, for the simple reason that he doesn’t seem to have been the mentoring kind. He was a master of sarcasm and a kind of comradely detachment. Certainly everyone had a McCaig story and for once it seemed sincere, because too often with this format everyone is so keen to be counted amongst the greatest and the best that they trip over each other. If this instinct was there, it was held back by the memory of McCaig’s disarming irreverence of any hierarchy. I am no expert and base these observations on the video and the book. However the video manages to put across the friendships being created or strengthened in the climb. They remind us that every friendship is a culture, and every marriage – whether officially sanctioned or common-law – is even more so. They may be stormy or sadly even violent, but they are always a culture with its own history and mythology. Real friendships are few in number, unlike Facebook ones, and they require what in our current society might be called “work”, because the idea of something that consumes our time and energy without providing something in return is alien to us – particularly in anglophone countries – but friendship should by definition go beyond self-interest. That, if you like, is what it provides: the chance not to be a selfish and clearly defined individual, but part of something bigger than ourselves.

One of things discussed on the climb was Gaelic (that is Scottish Gaelic). The climbers discussed the disappearance of the language from that landscape and MacCaig’s relationship with the language which his mother spoke. This led me to think about the language and its slow decline – hopefully something that can be reversed but more urgency is required if that is to be achieved. One thing did strike me once again as I listened to the climbers’ conversations, and that was the possible survival of the language purely as a second language. Not a dead language, but perhaps a half-dead language.

I knew someone back in the nineties who had grown up in Baile Chaoilis before the war and he said that at the time you couldn’t buy a pound of sausages there without knowing Gaelic. That, I think, was an exaggeration because most of the people would have been bilingual. However, it is quite possible that you would have been able to buy sausages and many other things in Gaelic, which would be unthinkable today. Moving further west to my mother’s village of Àrasaig, when I visited it in the sixties everyone over forty could speak Gaelic. Although I never thought about it at the time, that was a signal that the language’s days in that part of the country were counted. I knew an old woman who claimed to be the last Gaelic-speaker in the area, and that was in 2010 when she was ninety-seven years old. I think that we can surmise that no speakers remain there. To the west there are only the islands, so I can’t help feeling that a diglossic future awaits the language. The days of monoglot Gaelic speakers are gone (there were a handful of elderly women in the sixties and seventies who fitted that description, but they will no longer be with us), and perhaps that would no longer be desirable.

A completely bilingual community is what we should hope for and it is entirely attainable. This means a society in which its members have complete command of both languages (that includes grammar and phonology, which are quickly degraded in the weaker language as occurred with English in relation to Norman French). Diglossic situations (such as English in the fourteenth and fifteenth century) are creators of new languages, and they occur when members of the language community are no longer fully in command of one of the languages – or in some cases both of them. When I was in the countryside in Romagna a few years ago, I listened to some men chatting away in both Italian and Romagnolo, seamlessly switching from one to the other. People don’t like you commenting on their speech because most speech is a spontaneous thing, particularly in an informal context like theirs, but I had to find out what governed their switching. I steeled myself and walked over. I had never met any of them before, so I apologised before asking. They thought about it for a little time and looked at each other, slightly awkward after this interruption. Finally one of them spoke up and explained that when they spoke of country things, such as planting and harvesting, or fishing and hunting (once a mass sport in Italy), they spoke in Romagnolo and when they spoke of “politics and television”, they spoke in Italian. I liked that juxtaposition of “politics and television”, but it made perfect sense because both forums were dominated by the national language. In this case their command of Italian was complete, but their command of Romagnolo was probably waning. In fact there is evidence that where there is full bilingualism the grammar and phonology is often better than that of monoglots in each language, but as one of the languages weakens the phonology of the other, they gradually fuse into a single entity usually very close to the national language, and this produced what in Italy are called italiani regionali – that is to say versions of Italian that are comprehensible but strongly influenced by the dying language or dialect in terms of accent and grammar. At the same time, the weaker language fills up with calques from the stronger one (words borrowed from the latter and adapted to the morphology of the former). This future for Gaelic is slightly better than complete language death, but I still feel that a great deal will have been lost irrevocably and this triggered my poem which came to me as I listened to those climbers, none of whom were learning Gaelic as far as I know:
 

It came so easy to their curling lips,
puffing their aspirates
with no aspirations
of being anything but themselves.
A language up-ended
that starts with the action,
twists and turns with syntactic skill
and whispers from suppressed
ironic smiles.
 
What have we done?
Those who now walk the hills
can at best struggle with
the upward climb of an alien syntax
steeped in lost nuances.
No longer easy does it come
to ungainly lips
practised in the Saxon tongue.

Language is the thing that unites the public and the private, and it works at least a little differently in each sphere. It communicates our emotions and thoughts – though not exclusively – and governs our most intimate relations, but it also soars into the rhetoric of power often pompously and winds its way insinuatingly through our public debate inventing new words as it goes. It carries our past with its literature and before printing its poetry mainly. It moulds us. 

I cannot help feeling that when a community changes its language, it changes the way people interact with each other on the most personal level. A language, as I have repeated perhaps too often, governs the way we think and, in our personal lives, how we act. The public life, which includes religion, will change much less, as I think is shown in this quote by Donald McDonald (locally known, I think, as Donald Doc) reflecting on change back in the early sixties on the Isle of Lewis:

We have now further education for the adult; men do not work so long, and so have more free time at their disposal, and the modern inventions, the radio and the movie van, are reaching out to every village in Lewis. Most of our natives are suspicious of what these two may bring. Will they upset their ways, and interfere with their religious beliefs, which many believe are the only real and true beliefs? I fear them more in case they are hastening the departure of our dear Gaelic language, for the searchings and probings into the wonders of the Creator will refuse to be stilled or thwarted; and I fear that in the future this go-getting Anglo-Saxon language will be the one in which these mysteries will be unfolded to the bodachs [old men] of Bragar, Brue and Brenish.

Donald MacDonald, Tales and Traditions of the Lews (Birlinn), p. 221, also quoted in In Praise of the Garrulous.

This is but a tiny example of how the public is in danger of suffocating the private, the local and the endless cultural continuums that cross our continents. The driver has for millennia been empire, then came technology and finally the so-called Global Village. This is not Luddism on my part, but an appeal for us to imagine and consider ways in which we can use technology to improve rather than dominate, diminish or even destroy our lives and avoid the complete homogenisation of our societies. I don’t have the answers, but it is obvious that how we live now will lead to our own destruction. Only if we ask the right questions can we eventually come to an understanding of what we can do – always bearing in mind the dangers and unexpected outcomes of all change. In short, we need to restore humanity to humanity. 

Allan Cameron, Pitigliano, November 2022