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‘To the fairies, we are the dead and they are the immortals.’ –– John MacInnes
‘The living can assist the imagination of the dead.’ –– W.B. Yeats
Congealed Air
The fairies have been brewing in my work for some time. In one instance,
it took the editing of a tattered notebook for me to realise that the Scottish
modernist poet Kristján Norge (1930-61) had in fact become a member of
the sìth, or a fairy –– terminally trapped in the pages of his third work Until
the Twilight Fails. Published this year as a facsimile of this last notebook in
Norge’s possession, which was discovered in 1977 on the Hebridean Eilean a’
Bhàis, the original is now kept –– or caught –– within the Shetland Museum
and Archives.
Entrapment is a theme that looms large in fairyological summoning. Often
the conditions of fairy encounter demand –– as wary counterpoint –– human
concealment, banishment and entrapping. This is the price paid for curiosity,
as was paid by the intrepid Reverend Robert Kirk in 1691 for exposing the
behaviour of his parish fairies in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns
and Fairies, written when living in Aberfoyle manse at the foot of Doon
Hill. Originator of the term ‘fairy-tale’, Kirk’s previous involvement with
the fairies had been benign. At Balquhidder, sparkling moss lines the sharp
incline of ‘Tom nan Aingeal’ (or ‘hill of fire’, a historic druidic site) ––
that rises above the now ruined Old Church, studded with cyclamen and
animated by a tawny burn –– and still delights anyone looking for the fairy
mound mentioned in the minister’s careful writings.
In the Edinburgh University Heritage Collections, a magnifying glass is
necessary for me to enlarge Kirk’s miniscule scrawl –– ‘as if written by the
fairies themselves,’ comments the curator –– scrawl caught in notebooks the
size of matchboxes. It has been pointed out that Kirk’s congregation would
have been equally conversant with habitual fairy behaviour, cohabiting, as
they did, with the local fairy population. Yet none of the literate among them
elected to write it down. Kirk was alone in his efforts and interminably tied to
them, possibly becoming the body of ‘congealed air’ he had defined as solely
fairy. When confronted with Kirk’s rather sombre-looking grave, tradition
has it that his soul is in fact trapped in a pine tree atop Doon Hill, and it is
this duality of presence that suggested to me a fairyological motif of the ‘cochoisiche’,
as the doubled-self indicative of fairy culture still at large within
the broad fields of Scottish topography, cartographics and literature.
A singularly Scottish Gaelic phenomenon –– one not encountered outside
its Highland and Island environments, according to scholar John MacInness
–– the ‘co-choisiche’ is translated as a ‘fellow-walker’ or, as Kirk terms it,
‘Reflex-man’. Just one of a suite of Gaelic doubles or fetches, which includes
the samhla, taibhse or manadh, MacInness comments that the figure of
the ‘co-choisiche’ differs –– it is ‘apt to be roaming around unknown to
its ‘owner’ as a potentially malign, mischief-making and unsocialised entity
emulating both the physical presence and bearing of its likeness. This is
the ‘co-choisiche’ manifesting as James Hogg’s malignant Gil-martin in The
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, as Hyde in Stevenson’s
dubious tale. In a spirit of puckish mischief, we might say that Kirk’s real
and human remains lie in the grave, whereas his ‘co-choisiche’ is at large
–– though trapped, for its misdemeanours, in a pine tree. Or we might
argue that the bones of ‘congealed air’ belonging to his ‘co-choisiche’ rest
in Aberfoyle kirkyard and that his real self, but in spirit form, is stuck in
the tree. Arguably, his ‘co-choisiche’ could be perceived as behaving in a
more contrarian manner by dying and abandoning Kirk to his fate altogether.
Death can be rogueish. Always a doubling.
Sìthichean Tracts
Sìthichean terrain is a land of mounded places; a corpus of neolithic barrows
and other peaceful earthworks, banded by paranormal temporality where
‘thinning’ occurs between this world and the other. Such a sìthichean tract
occurs in tandem to the real world, but is also of the real world at liminal
points of encounter. MacInness writes: ‘the human base and centre is the
baile [‘human habitation and arable land’]; that of the sìdhichean [fairy]
is the wilderness. The baile is where ordinary time –– what students of
comparative religion call ‘profane time’ –– runs; the sìdhean, where ordinary
time is suspended, is the place of ‘sacred time.’ Usefully, the word tract,
by definition, variously comprises a system of body parts, an area of land,
or an extent or lapse of time. And so, in the figure of the ‘co-choisiche’,
perhaps, lies a demonstrably simultaneous metaphor for this underlying body
of fairyland itself –– a somatic presence mirrored and heightened by aspects
of fairy phenomena. As a sìthichean tract comprised of working bodily parts
it might be animated, for example, by numinous breath which manifests
as fairy wind, via various otherworldly winds belonging to Scottish fairy
domains, including the ‘sluagh nam marbh’ or host of the dead and the
‘oiteag sluagh’, described by George Henderson as a ‘breeze of the dead, often
heard in the high corries.’
Here too, we have the sighted field of Scottish supernatural awareness: a
seeing land of the two sights or ‘an da sheallagh’ which encompasses preand
retro-cognition in a double vision of both the living world and the
world of the dead. This is fairy sight, embodied in death. Spectre-haunted,
it has several definitions in Gaelic: ‘an dà-shealladh, an dà-fhradharc and
an taibhsearachd.’ The second means the ‘power of vision’, and folklorist
Lewis Spence says the last may be ‘translated as the gift of supernatural sight
[…] associated with the word taibhsear, a seer, or prophet, and taibhs, the
visionary thing seen.’ Whilst the seer is undeniably human, such sightedness
is unequivocally otherworldly, fundamentally belonging to the realms of the
sìth. For fairy orality we have small tongues gifted with enchanted song
and their aurality appears to inhabit the lesser-known territory of second
hearing. Sea and land caves can be usefully positioned as speaking and hearing
orifices, for example. The ring, the mound, the cave, the fort, the barrow:
the features of fairy. The sea, rivers, lochs and burns: fairyland’s blood, sweat
and tears. The heath, sand, peat and bog: its flesh. The trees: its bones. Fairy
consumption and appetite via enchanted food adds gut to our corporeal fairy
body and its projected psychology onto humans is determined by absence
–– through entrapment, kidnap, vanishing –– feasibly an absence of normal
selfhood or peaceful-mindedness.
Thus embodied with a corporeity of fairy characteristics, the geographic
anatomy of Scotland might almost be said to be comprised of them. And, in
turn, by anatomising this land as a fairy corpus, other useful analogies and
states appear. The ‘co-choisiche’ of geographic and geologic Scotland, in this
context, is fairyland.
Second Sight
If Scotland is glossed as fairyland, then certain figures emerge as innately
fairyological –– one of them being Robert Kirk. Others join him, however,
mitigated by the types of numinous dualism that the ‘co-choisiche’ enjoys.
The apparently renegade James Macpherson, for example, whose ‘cochoisiche’
clearly created a taboo text detailing a Jacobite fairyland prior
to the fairy exodus due to the ‘Big Sheep’ of clearance culture. Cromarty
geologist Hugh Miller –– himself a possessor of numinous gifts –– recounted
that departure of the fairies, ‘the most poetical of all our tribes of spectres,’
in The Old Red Sandstone, published in 1850. We might say that James
Macpherson’s ‘co-choisiche’ got on a pack horse and made two journeys
in the late 1750s covering Wester Ross, Skye, North Uist, South Uist,
Benbecula, Mull and Argyll, accompanied on his forays by a relation: Lachlan
Macpherson, tacksman of Strathmashie in Badenoch, and an old friend, Ewen
Macpherson — both literate Gaelic scholars, then collated, edited, compiled
and translated The Poems of Ossian which thereafter became inexplicable as
a doomed fairy landscape to reasonable London men of letters: it was a
paradigmatic shift too far from the logical scope of their means. We might
also say that the overlay of fairyland onto Highland landscapes pre-possessed
by wandering deer, sighs and echoes, rustling winds and talking stones and
shadows belongs to the same duality that enabled (within the confines of the
argument) Macpherson to revive it and Kirk to be imprisoned within it. Yet,
this is likeness and not duplication per se: entities of mutable and mutual
fabric that seemingly comprise fabrication. Where Macpherson was aware
of Ossianic cycles performed in domestic settings across the Highlands and
Islands, he was also closely related to chief Ewan Macpherson of Cluny, who
led the clan in Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s campaign culminating in the
infamous 1746 Battle of Culloden –– as a nine-year-old boy had witnessed
its aftermath as ‘barbarities unheard of ’. A certain transaction had occurred.
Arguably his Ossian was an excavation of a culture at several removes. Not
merely a ghost text, it now seems obvious that Ossian can be read as a fairy
tract: a fairy terrain: a sìthichean land of the dead.
And of course, Ossian himself was said to be born of a red deer in the
tradition of the fairy women of the Highlands and Western Isles who could
metamorphose into hinds. Gregorson Campbell informs us that ‘in Skye it
is said that after the poet’s birth his mother could touch him but once with
her tongue on the temple. On that corner [air an Oisein sinn] a tuft of fur
like that of a deer grew, hence the poet’s name.’ In keeping with his origins,
Ossian was understood to belong in part to that alienated otherworld and
can best be perceived through the lens of an dà-Shealladh. Because the roots
of the poetry are inherently sìthichean –– Ossian being the offspring of deer
–– perhaps all crumbles into the realms of fantasy, of romance in the mid
eighteenth-century recapitulation of violences pitched against a rebellious
claim to court. Ossian could be charged up by circumstance, Culloden could
become fairyological. Things have been corrupted, stolen, vanished, made of
glamour. . . artifice. Mutability becomes camouflage.
Within this Gaelic thanatography of retro- and precognition, the second
sight waters and it is a sight of wary contradictions. Entrapment within
perception is a state which clings to Macpherson’s perceived motives, but it
is one indicative of Gaelic otherworldly phenomena.
Second sight becomes second site. From Irish Ossianic roots conveyed to
Scotland, the poetry is reiterated –– activated –– in the violent, warrior-like
context of 1746 and so emerges as a thanatological fairy text set against the
vivid backdrop of Culloden.
From sightedness to sitedness, Macpherson’s tracts are robustly damaged in
the foregrounding and hindsight of his own familial experience of the conflict.
Sight and site also correspond to mythic Ossianic blindness: the visionary as
somatic actuation, the perception of fairies as belonging to an other-sighted
perceptual awareness similar to dream, nightmare, reverie, imagination. Such
imaginal integrity is purely sìthichean –– the poet’s mound, the sleep of death,
positioned as sighted sites or sited sights of heightened awareness. As a wary
metaphor, perhaps the fairy encounter asserts itself here as pure imagination;
to be ‘away with the fairies’ is not so much psychological disturbance as a
flight of imagination, a departure from the logical self to the imaginal self.
Time is lost. Visions occur. A ‘coming to’ deposits the individual back within
the normalcy of their everyday awareness. The ‘coming to’ for Macpherson
embodied the vicissitudes of Gaelic diaspora.
The Place of Their Doom
Little wonder then, that Victorian Scottish fantasy writer George MacDonald’s
tribes of fairies are displaced migrants of forfeiture, forced to wander. The
passage below is redolent of the Highland and Island Clearances, of which
MacDonald must have been keenly aware and culminates in a meta-narrative
for the rigours of the 1746 Dress Act which prohibited the wearing of tartan
by male clan members:
‘[. . .] when the wickedness of any fairy tribe reaches its
climax, the punishment that falls upon them is, that they
are compelled to leave that part of the country where
they and their ancestors have lived for more years than
they can count, and wander away, driven by an inward
restlessness, ever longing after the country they have left,
but never able to turn around and go back to it, til at last
they find, not their old home but the place of their doom
–– that is, a place where their restlessness leaves them,
and they find they can remain [. . .] they sit down to
weep, and to long after the country they have left. This is
not because the country to which they have been driven
is ugly and inclement –– it may or may not be such:
it is simply because it is not their country [. . .] when,
therefore, a tribe is banished, it is long before they can
settle themselves into their new quarters. Their clothes
do not fit them, as it were. They are constantly wriggling
themselves into harmony with their new circumstances
–– which is only another word for clothes –– and never
quite succeeding.’
MacDonald urges his reader on: despite the hardships of the north, the
fairies ‘longed for the clear, cold, pensive, open sides of the far-stretching
heathy sweeps [. . .] to a grey, wild, torn sea.’ Yet, more intrinsically,
MacDonald shapes the loss or absence of fairy culture as describing the
topography they leave behind as deathly –– ‘a kind of deadness falls over
the landscape. The traveller feels the wind as before but it does not seem to
refresh him.’ Here, the tract of fairyland is punishable. The ‘co-choisiche’
landscape has misbehaved beyond forgiveness, beyond reclamation. Fairyland
itself is banished and a deathly wind now blows across a deadened landscape.
A sìthichean situation, catching its breath.
Until the Twilight Fails
For poet Kristján Norge, questions remain: is he pressed between the pages
of his notebook as himself or his ‘co-choisiche’? If a ‘co-choisiche’, is the
tract he occupies itself fairyland because he exists within it? Is that fairyland
part of his ‘co-choisiche’ sphere –– a doubling of landscape as text, held
within a notebook and then reproduced in print form? Or does the book
merely depict his description of being trapped within it? A deluded map.
A perpetuity. Sight and site collude with the mutable definitions of ‘sìth’
and ‘sìdh’ which are rooted in both peace and place. . . the resting place of a
character at large. Where the author must shut the book on their inventions.
An enforced peace. A frictive fairyland. Twilight becomes outsourced neon
tubing. Argon gibs in the flex of reiterated electrical pulses. Twilight equals
the blue gas of electrified breath charged with presence. A fire heart in the
gloaming that perspires symbolic falsehoods. Entrapment in an unending
dusk whose dearth of light makes the lettering hard to see, who causes
erratic flickering, whose medical spirits swab down the sightline of sheet steel,
whose rigid form is unyielding to the anatomist’s skill, whose flesh judders
under the implications of the blade, turning peat/heather/bog/lochan, who
lies in a swab of flies and turns in the nitrates of bad spell. Who ––
Kirsten Norrie