26 TREASURES

My first reaction to the mask and wig of Alexander Peden is revulsion.

It’s not a pretty sight. The mask looks as though it’s made of vellum, with eyes gashed through the skin and horrorshow stitching around the sockets. It has a sharp elongated nose (the better to smell you with, my dear), wooden peg teeth and a thick red beard. The shoulder-length wig is peaty brown and matted.

My task now is to write a 62 word response for the 26 Treasures exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland.

I’m grappling with any response apart from a desire to run in the opposite direction, so look into Peden’s story instead.

Hunting the outlaw priest

Peden was one of the ministers who signed the 1638 National Covenant that opposed interference in the Scottish church by the Stuart monarchy. He was on the run from government forces for 11 years and preached at illegal ‘conventicle’ meetings on hillsides to thousands of believers. By 1670, preaching at conventicles was punishable by death. Peden would have worn this wig and mask in the hope of evading government forces.

(By the way, read ‘The Fanatic’ by James Robertson for a fascinating insight into the Covenanting ministers who lived and died during the ‘Killing Times’, when up to 18,000 people were brutally put to death.)

Despite being sent to the Bass Rock, the Scottish Alcatraz, Peden avoided the hangman’s rope and died a natural death aged 60. But he seems to be a footnote among Covenanting ministers, and many details of his life evade capture. However, there’s a chapter on Peden in ‘Scots Worthies’ by John Howie (which discredits talk of his prophecies), and you can see his bible in Greyfriars Kirk – open, appropriately enough, at the Book of Job.

One of a kind

I’d presumed that all Covenanting ministers would have worn masks. But curator George Dalgleish says that this is the only surviving example, and that there is no documented evidence that it was a common practice for Covenanters to disguise themselves this way.

And the closer you look at the mask, the stranger it becomes. How would you make your sermon heard through that tiny mouth crowded with wooden teeth?  Why are there feathers stitched around the eyes? Isn’t that a strangely theatrical decoration for a Presbyterian minister? And why are there spots of what look like greasepaint on the cheeks? Was this originally a theatrical mask, adapted for a different type of stage and performance?

We’ll probably never know. See the wig and mask and decide for yourself at the National Museum of Scotland - Kingdom of the Scots, Level 1.

On a morning of dense fog in November 1972, in a school playground, I saw a hand-held Casio calculator for the first time.

Those glowing digits – the economy with which seven cells described them – the sublime speed of calculation – impressed me hugely. To mathematical dunces everywhere, Casios offered hope. They placed the space age in our palms. They seemed the ultimate shortcut.

Perhaps similar excitement greeted the first appearance of Napier’s Bones (LEVEL 1 – KINGDOM OF THE SCOTS, NEW HORIZONS SECTION).

Invented by Scots polymath John Napier, the example of c.1650 displayed here comprises ivory numbering rods which, properly combined, reduce complicated problems of multiplication and division into simpler ones of addition and subtraction – thereby relieving a ‘tedious expenditure of time’.

Like Casios, the Bones blended promises of usefulness and self-empowerment, the allure of efficiency, portability,  affordability,  and the disappointing reality of fiddliness. In fact the design soon had to be modified for the rods to align reliably, but the device was fundamentally sound and proved hugely popular across Europe for well over a century.

Napier’s ‘invention’ had actually drawn upon and repackaged the work of many earlier philosophers in Italy, the Middle East and India. Its provenance and impact were international. And that for me is inspiring. I want to live in a receptive Scotland which is outward-looking, in creative dialogue across time, cultures and borders.

And yet Napier was, unavoidably, the product of his own era: a man also capable of sustained invective against popery, a man who argued in print for practical measures to purge the Court of non-Protestants. His diatribes recall other Scottish features recognizable today: sectarian fault lines, obviously; but also a continued appetite for schism and exclusion when faced with difference. Sometimes prejudice stems from ignorance, sometimes from calculative shortcuts.

As a form of technology, this exhibit may have been superseded, but I’m surprised by its continued potency, its capacity to evoke memory (something I’ve never managed on a calculator) and spark ideas. The absence of a known headstone for John Napier has prompted my decision to supply a 62-word epitaph.

Mention Bonnie Prince Charlie and I find my mind drifting towards shortbread: those iconic Walkers’ tins full of petticoat tails, with the vivid red tartan sides, and on top a highly romanticised painting of the Prince in full Highland rig, complete with lacy jabot and wig. How many of those tins must be sitting in houses about the world, containing sewing things or forgotten collections of post cards?

 

Prince Charles Edward Stuart has suffered more than many historical figures from such embellishments. It is hard to disconnect the man from all those romantic accretions, but looking at this travelling canteen in the National Museum, reminds you who and what he really was.  This object is about as far from a mass produced biscuit tin as you can get. It was made by a top Edinburgh craftsman, the wonderfully named  Ebenezer Oliphant and was most likely as a 21^st birthday gift to the Prince.

Fashionable Ingenuity

 

The canteen is all about brilliant craftsmanship and it is completely on trend with its rococo swirls and silver gilt finish. It is a beautiful piece of clockwork made for eating. The forks and knives are made in two pieces and must be unscrewed for storage in the silver-gilt egg-shaped case. There is a corkscrew and a nutmeg grater, as well as a little salt and pepper shaker, not to mention a quaich. This is an object of conspicuous consumption, and would have seemed dazzling at a time  when most folk thought themselves lucky if they owned a pewter spoon.

A Princely picnic

 

I have chosen to write my piece in the form of the words for an eighteenth century da capo aria.  Handel’s Italian opera had been the rage in London about the time this object was made  – and opera was a luxurious, aristocratic pastime, indulged in by people who would have aspired to a piece of silver like the travelling canteen. Handel’s intricate, glamorous music seemed the perfect inspiration for this extraordinary object.

The more I thought about him, the more Charles Edward (or Carluccio as he was known to his family) seemed like the perfect hero for a Handel opera. He is an exiled prince – young, noble and handsome with a great destiny ahead of him that he must fulfil or become a tragic figure. As was the custom of the time the Prince Hero would be sung by a male soprano, very probably a castrato. These voices were prized for their purity and emotional force, and like Bonnie Prince Charlie himself, particularly admired by women. If you listen to modern singers like Andreas Scholl, Robin Blaze and Phillipe Jarroussky you will get some  idea of the power and beauty of this style of singing.

So I began to imagine Prince Charlie as a figure on the baroque stage, stopping the action to dazzle the audience with an aria. So we discover him picnicking in a grove, musing on his condition and the piece reflects the different musical moods of a da capo aria:a lyrical opening section, then a contrasting central section with a different musical mood and idea, followed by the opening repeated but this time with intricate ornaments improvised by the singer.

 

All I need now is someone to write the tune. Any offers?

I was involved in organising a centenary celebration, Ainmeil Thar Cheudan, of the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean from the island of Raasay when I was invited to produce a piece of exactly 62 words in Gaelic for the 26Treasures exhibition. At the end of April I had spent a gloriously sunny Sunday, without as much as a midge or a tourist, re-reading his collected poems O Choille gu Bearradh/From Wood to Ridge on a walk near to home on the coast by Ob Snaosaig and Camas Baravaig and Dùn Choinnich down to Knock Bay in Sleat, Skye, which island, of course, features in so much of his work. I had also been invited around that time to produce a c900 word essay on MacLean and the conference and decided I would write it in similar circumstances. It rained for the whole month of May and the first chance I got was about a week before the event was due to be held. I procrastinated again of course and I decided to defer it until his centenary birthday celebrations in October. Instead, I took some notes I’d researched the night before about St. Ninian’s Treasure. I wrote the poem Faodail (a word MacLean uses a lot) in about an hour in the same spot looking out to Knoydart on the mainland from Buaile Mhòr where I’d been reading O Choille gu Bearradh a month or so beforehand.

The English version (also 62 words, if indeed word is the word) is in a form I have recently adopted – I call it intertonguing or subversion or traduction – as I have come to the conclusion that Gaelic poetry, and MacLean’s work is a case in point, is untranslatable. (In spite of regular residencies, most recently at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Gaelic College in Skye, the full-time professional poet is not for me, I’m sorry to say, and I make my living primarily as a translator for, amongst others, the Scottish Parliament, but that’s quite another matter). The English version given here does not indicate, for example, that the original includes homophones for Shetland and Pict and that the Gaelic for excavation and research originally meant to ransack, deriving, like many Gaelic words, from Norse, in this case, from rannsaka, to search a house, according to Alexander MacBain’s delightful Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (1896). MacBain’s work, by the way, is not to be confused with Charles Mackay’s ‘fanciful conjectures’ published as The Gaelic Etymology Of The Languages Of Western Europe, And More Especially Of The English And Lowland Scotch And Of Their Slang, Cant and Colloquial Dialects in Copenhagen in 1877. Mackay, who was educated at the Caledonian Asylum in London, also published Songs and Poems (1834) and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). The word in Scottish Gaelic for Ulster also denotes a treasure (and echoes tasgadh which also means burying) and seòid means both jewels and heroes. Lochlannach primarily means a (Norwegian) Scandinavian but also, by extension, a marauder or robber, in Irish Gaelic at least. Dùn nan Gall, of course, denotes Donegal – there are places of the same name on the islands of Islay, Tiree and Mull, all in Earra-Ghàidheal/Argyll – but also refers to the Northern foreigners recorded in the name Innse Gall or Hebrides. The last line, it occurs to me, could refer to both the site of the discovery and the current location of the object described. Ciste – still with me? – means both the treasure found and the kist or receptacle in which it has been deposited or the case in which it’s on display and so on.

 

I have yet, as I write, to see St. Ninian’s Treasure for myself or, for that matter, to visit Shetland, but I was indeed fortunate that the project object randomly assigned to me related to an island. The animal aspect of the find reminded me of MacLean’s great friend Hugh MacDiarmid - who knew Shetland well - and the poem Perfect (On the Western Seaboard of South Uist) about a pigeon skull on the machair, a found, if not stolen, treasure if ever there was one.

 

I never did get round to writing that other essay.

 

 

26Treasures comes to The National Museum of Scotland

Let me come clean right away:  I’m a prehistory groupie – an indiscriminately enthusiastic, dyed-in-the-woad fan of the really, really, seriously old.  When I got the go-ahead from the 26Treasures people my little heart leapt and I saw in my mind some arcane, ancient object that would whisper to me through the veils of time sort of thing – ideally something from the National Museum of Scotland’s Level 0.  Or, okay, I’d stretch a point and be happy with something from Level 1. 

(The National Museum of Scotland is organised from the bottom up – Level 0 starts 650 million years ago, Level 1 covers the period 900 – 1707 AD, and so on up to Level 6, where the exhibits are from the beginning of WWI to the present day.  One of the guides says she tells people they can start in the far distant past and work up, or be like an archaeologist, start at the top, and dig down.)

But 26 Treasures has a strict approach to giving writers their objects.  You don’t get to choose something you’d like, or something you’d feel comfortable with.  You don’t get to choose at all.  The museum curators select 26 objects and these are randomly assigned to the writers.  So, what did the luck of the draw give me?

Drag chains for BAE ship

Level 6

Scotland:  A Changing Nation

Ah.

I’d never even been that high in the museum.  I had to ask for help to find the lift!  Ridiculously, I found I was getting nervous on the trip up … and then, there it was.  My object.

Four obviously enormously heavy, red-rusted metal links, “cut off the drag chains which were used for decades for the launch of ships from the Fairfield yard at Govan, now part of BAE Systems.” 

Well!

In another setting, they would be a modern sculpture, but here it wasn’t the beauty of their interlocking shapes that was the really amazing thing about them.

You haven’t really seen a drag chain till you’ve seen it in action. 

On the wall behind the links two videos were showing, including one in black and white of the building and launching of a ship from, I’d guess, the 1950s (based on hair styles).  The footage of the drag chains was ASTONISHING – hundreds of them in great heaps, smoking, screaming, galumphing towards the water like gigantic metal sci-fi monsters, pitting themselves against the weight of a brand-new ship racing away with the full blessing of gravity behind it.  The drag chains don’t win – they never win - but they fail magnificently.

Another of the guides told me they aren’t going to be launching ships that way any more – just building them in dry dock and then letting the water come to them.  So soon there’ll be no need for drag chains.  They’ll only be found in museums, like my four, not out in the world doing their amazing drag-chain thing.

And even though Level 6 is still not my natural habitat, and even though I didn’t know what drag chains were not so long ago, now I think that’s a crying shame.