West Lake, Hangzhou

The first time I saw West Lake in Hangzhou, I was dumbfounded. It was October, at sunset, and as I watched the sun go down, from a pavilion behind me came drifting the sound of local opera, as musicians and singers came and went, often dropping in off their bikes to request a song, or to play a tune or two. It was magical.

And, having read about the beauty of the lake for many years, to see it for the first time was a very emotional experience. I wept as I stood there. Later, having lived close by, and seen it through the seasons, it became familiar to me, but never less than ravishing - in sunshine, in the rain, and even, once, in the snow.

Many years after I left Hangzhou, I went back, to find the city centre all but unrecognisable: the old streets were gone, replaced with mirror-glass towers and multi-lane highways. Qingchun Lu, once the main street - Marco Polo had walked it - was a twisting, organic muddle of Art Deco banks, traditional 2-storey houses with wooden upper walls, and unlovely Stalinist buildings, but it had real character. All gone now. But the lake remains inviolate, and lovely as ever.

We destroy so much, humans. God's spoilers.....but we can build true sometimes. West Lake is lovely because men made it so.

Will we ever learn again how to build true and lovely things, without damaging our mother, the Earth?

the turning world

we never know what songs an stories are hidden in the stones around us, in the hills and the mountains, and in the whisper of the sea - unless we take time to listen

so, at this failing moon, I watch the wind and the tides in Hong Kong, as once I watched the Border seasons turn, and I sit here calmly, and I think of how the old old world turns

there are invisible bridges we cross every day, unknowing, and descents we can make into the world of dreams (if we choose to), a world - or worlds - at our finger's end, if we just reach out and touch

what small lives we lead, and so much to explore.....


And today is the birthday of my poor dead brother, for which I have no words but constant loss and a sore heart.

The Lady's Brig

On a bend in the Ettrick Water, below the ruin of Newark Tower, the Lady's Brig used to be my favourite way to get to the tower from the Ettrick road. It lay, a haunted, tranquil spot, at the bottom of a slope covered in mixed woodland - ash, oak, birch and rowan - and spanned a deep pool fringed with hazel bushes. As a teenager I used to love the dark peaty water, where I'd see the kythe of a salmon's back from time to time, and, fresh from Robert Graves' "White Goddess", I'd dream about the salmon of knowledge, which gained its wisdom from the hazel nuts that fell into the pool. I'd read there, or just sit and dream an afternoon away, lulled by the rush of water, the birdsong, and the breeze in the bushes.

The last time I was there - two-three years ago - it was dilapidated and closed.

And the houses I remember from my childhood? 26 Point Rd., Apapa, Lagos is still there - or at least the address is: I had a Nigerian scam e-mail once from that address. That fairly put the heart across me.... In Edinburgh, what was my grandparents' house in Abbeyhill, is still there, as I think is the Edwardian villa we lived in on Carronshore Road, near Falkirk, though the Carron ironworks, where my dad worked, is long ago demolished. My mother's family house - Croft Cottage in Selkirk - is there yet, though much altered and occupied by strangers.

I know people whose family have lived in the same house for generations, who still have all their old toys and schoolbooks - I have none of that. Much of my past is known only to me and my brother now, as most of my family is long dead.

Which brings me to something I've long wondered about: how much can we trust our memories? Trying to write about my childhood in Nigeria once, I asked my brother about the chimps. You see, when we were in Lagos, Dad had a doctor friend who raised chimpanzees, and we would play with them on the white sands of Victoria beach. He asked if I remembered the albino one, and I didn't, so I asked Mum, and she told me that it wasn't the chimp that was albino, but the houseboy who looked after them. My brother had conflated the two.....(I still remember the smell of chimps.)

I think we seem to have discrete childhood memories like little snapshots, and as we turn them over in our minds, we link them together to create the illusion of movement, like movie film does.

Zhuangzi talks about someone who wakes from a dream of glorious feast, and weeps for what he's missing. And, he says, one day, there will be a great awakening. Maybe so with our memories?

Where would the Lady's Brig lead me now, if I could cross it again?

The long way home?

I've been living away from Scotland since 1991, and here in Hong Kong since Christmas 1999. My time here is coming to an end soon - I'm on my last contract, and will leave in summer '09, latest.

So I'm thinking about endings and beginnings - or, at least, my dreams are all about endings and beginnings. Not the same thing.

It's maybe the best way to a calm and happy life, if you can learn to manage your goodbyes. For me at this moment as I'm coming towards my second Saturn return, I'm impelled to ask, as I was 30 years ago, "What am I for?", but this time I also have to ask myself if the answers I provided then are still useful.

This was when I began to be a translator and when I began to write and publish: as I defined myself then, I was a meditator (2 hours daily!), a vegetarian, firmly located in Scotland, and pretty much at peace with where I was going, though I couldn't see how to achieve it.

Oh boys and girls, the things I've seen and done since then. I've climbed the Great Wall more times than I care to recall, I've seen pink dolphins on the Amazon, and watched the stars over Machu Picchu. As a boy I dreamed of visiting Rome, Florence and Athens, of walking the streets of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and I've done it. I've loitered in cafes from Amsterdam to Berlin, got stoned in Morocco, woken on the overnight sleeper from Sydney to Brisbane to be gobsmacked by the other-worldly weirdness of the Australian bush under a full moon. I got lost one night on the black sands of Karekare beach outside Auckland, under the strange southern stars, I've many times been at the taking of drink with poets and other such hooligans in Auckland, Wellington, London, Edinburgh, and many other places besides Hong Kong, and I've played music or been on stage reading poems in Bali, Thailand, Vietnam, China, New Zealand, Portugal, France and Spain, and all over England and Scotland.

So many things to do still.......

My friend Thor's wee laddie said to him the other day, "Dying's like a bubble: POP! and it's gone....but it's in the water, really." Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings cometh forth wisdom: I've never heard a better description of the moment of nirvana, the absorption into the universal Buddha mind (may all living beings get there).

Maybe there are no goodbyes in truth. Love is incontrovertibly unconditional: it transcends the conditional, man-made concepts of time and space, so maybe when we love, we love for once and for ever. If we truly open our hearts to the magnanimity of the living multiverse, why shouldn't we?

The living wisdom of the salmon flickers in the granite below us, and between the stars.

IN ILLO TEMPORE

IN ILLO TEMPORE

I dreamed a courtyard of rose-red stone, hung with flowers, filled with sun. And as we stepped into the ancient house, I took you by the hand, and you delighted in the place: here is where we live, you said.

Birds stumbled through the liquid leaves, scattering their song across the sky, and all through the summer dim, we wandered the courtyards of Scotland, until the sky paled to opal and summer filled the morning up.

More than a returning, this, more than reconciliation. Across this border now, in my once-remembered country, the ancient stones turn red and warm, glow like honey in the perfumed night - and I know you again, find you at last, in an endless turning to the light.

Outside the courtyard, beyond the stones, beyond the mornings and the hooded nights, outside of then or now or soon, or here or there or other where, I will always take your hand, beneath the roses and the singing sun.

Ningbo, China, 23-24 May 1989


Dreams of wholeness, of integration, of union: what is it that fills the spaces between the stars, or binds the quantum strangeness of particles? Is love the dark matter that holds the universe together?

I woke that first morning in Ningbo, knowing that I had been given a great gift, and the poem I began was only a reflection of something larger: the next day's dream completed the story, but I'm still unable to say it any other way. I didn't see it then as a love poem, though it can be so read. For twenty years I had lived in Scotland and my waking hours had been largely spent reading Chinese and reading about China, but China never came into my dreams. When at last I arrived in Hangzhou, I dreamed - as you'd expect - about Scotland, but this was the first sign the two could be integrated.

Why am I dreaming about that time in my life?

and all dark things before it are made bright

i the green gless a saumon soums
bull i the stane
i the wan gless a seamaa hings
the bull's i the stane
i the gowden gless an eagle's risin
the bull's i the stane
the stane's a derk gless

i the derk gless
seamaa, saumon
stauns the bull
fauld yir wings about uis
sterk an strang
seamaa, saumon i the stane
strang i the mirk
fauld yir wings about uis
doun i the derk gless
seamaa, saumon i the stane
the sterk bull stauns

Engines of contemplation, dark mirrors where understanding swims unseen, empty vessels where dreamers read their future and divine their past?

Can it be true that the stones watch over us, raising bright wings radiant with meaning, to keep us from harm?

Only at this moment, here at every second, love is made manifest. All that is true for us stands true for ever: subtle the paradox inhabited by lovers, and endless the ocean in which they swim.

No visitor from the stars but is the same as they are
(Hugh MacDiarmid On a Raised Beach)

and all dark things before it are made bright
(Swinburne)

saumon i the stane?

Whit's that aa about?

(Salmon in the stone, for non-Scots-speakers)

The ancient symbol stones of Scotland display images of animals that can still excite us to awe or wonder, though we know nothing of what they meant to their creators. Salmon, eagle, bull, horse and deer - they can draw us toward a reverence for the natural powers that surround us - air and water, earth and fire - and inspire us towards wisdom.

We call them Pictish for lack of any other name, but since recent DNA evidence suggests that most of us in Scotland have always been there, and that we are in fact mostly descended from speakers of the lost languages of the British Isles, I'm comfortable, as a half-Irish Border Scot with Scandinavian tinges, to call them my own, and to call out to them in my dreams.

its

our dreamin

time

hairts

muves

muves

our dreamin hairts

time

be na feart, be na feart

And in our dreams, these emblematic figures move us toward becoming who we are. Each step we take towards becoming who we are, each insight or vision, slowly helps us to inhabit the world better. We also inhabit the word, and that is the poem's function: the marriage of words and worlds.

So what can the salmon in the stone tell us?