The Copenhagen Interpretation

Every possible moon
lay glittering and glistening,
and writhing around among the ripples of the pond
like an abundant catch of silver fish,

since all imagined moons are real,
and beat their wings and take flight
rioting across the liquid sky
into which Einstein has thrown the stone
that makes the ripples
that chase them to its edge

until at last the surface is smooth again,
stretched once more like a taut drum-hide
upon the horizon's rim,
and he reaches in
and retrieves the pebble
and tosses it into orbit

to take its place
alone among the heavens,
and shows to us only one face
alone among the stars,

the paltry world is the price we pay
for not bearing witness to the part we play.

Eclipse

At her very brightest

the moon suddenly veils herself

with the meagre light the miserly earth bequeaths her,

drawing the dawn rising on one half of the world

and the sunset falling on the other together
over her red blushing countenance.

for a while. Fifteen days later

she carries her own corpse in her arms

to its slowly swelling grave of light, 

but night is becoming jaundiced,
stained, and a proliferation of sodium,

our artificial, unwavering substitute for moonlight,

immune to the subtle intercession of clouds,

lacking the nuance to wax and wane,

not remote and mysterious,

but blunt, immediate, unrelenting,  

usurps her prerogatives,
and her complexion suffers

as the yellowing earth-glow
casts its sallow hue.

In protest she threatens
to suspend her routine resurrections,

inflict on us an indefinite eclipse next time,

and one more strange: a slightly dimmer day shall ensue,

hold sway where once night fell, and beyond, in the dark,

past where mirages of lamp light cast their spell

over motorway, footpath and cul de sac

an end more final will wait,

from which our light won’t save us,

for what stark extremes
can wake us from our sleepwalk

when we no longer allow moonlight

to preside over and gently alleviate
the darkness in our hearts.

Crustacea

I emerge from beneath

a very special little rock

show my barnacled face

and my rough, despised husk.

I feel my comical freakishness revealed.

My crab meat turns pink with a secret blush

but I can't seem to work out how

to crawl back under my rock again

and hide my disgrace,

so I wander across the sea bed

thinking I am unique

or at least, uniquely repellent

until I meet you

you

who sees me a different way. 

We try to embrace, to tragic effect.

We bump and scrape each other's shells.

My awkward claw's attempt at caress

is intimate

only in how it tickles onlookers

gazing into my rock pool

to ridicule its comic impossibility

while holding hands.

Our shells chime like bells

or champagne glasses perhaps

and we turn our encounter

into a thwarted dance

claws locked together

stepping from side to side

in silly celebration.

Imagine another surface though

not our rough hard outer crust

scarred and soiled,

solid, safe and impenetrable,

but one that projects our inner desire,

one that emerges from within

rather than keeps everything out,

one that becomes a membrane of light

surrounding us without hiding us

revealing us in its perfection

enveloped not encased

risking everything.

The most profound intimacy

is achieved simply by being together

in complete stillness

in a bubble of light in the depths

a little bulb of love in the dark,

a little private spotlight for two.

The intensity of every movement

is amplified by its impossibility

within our luminous misty armour

and instead of this ridiculous

public crab quadrille of ours

the most intimate caress

is one whose hidden effort

remains a secret

forever.

Étude

Other piano music of mine can be found here:
https://soundcloud.com/peter_clive 

Some electronic music of mine can be found here:
https://lomowall.bandcamp.com/releases

Other blog posts featuring music include:

• Turadh: http://moflomojo.blogspot.com/2016/03/nach-eil-turadh-ann.html
• Angel: http://moflomojo.blogspot.com/2016/02/angel.html 
• Christmas single: http://moflomojo.blogspot.com/2015/12/my-christmas-single.html 

Eidheann

The National Anthem

Written for Scottish Independence Day, 24th March 2016 ...

The National Anthem

Ah dinny ken an' dinny care
whit sangs ye sing tae stir yer pride
this is my National Anthem

Nae swagger, strut, nae solemn air,
nae need tae brag nor foes deride
this is my National Anthem

Ah dinny ken an' dinny care
whit wars ye won or lost, who's side
ye fought on or who lived and died,
what king or queen or prince relied
on you to save their silly chair
this is my National Anthem

Just man tae man the world o'er,
Freedom come all ye, let hope soar,
grow, flower of Scotland, evermore,
for Scots wha hae, withoot the gore,
warm-welcomed wi' a Hampden Roar
Jock Tamson's bairns fae ilka shore:
this is my National Anthem

Clach Ossian

Around the year 1732 General Wade was engaged in building roads and bridges in the Highlands of Scotland to allow British armed forces to travel north of the Highland Line in the aftermath of the 1715 Jacobite Rising. When penetrating the narrowest part of Glenalmond in Perthshire - the Sma' Glen - his men encountered a large rock which stood in their way. Its removal revealed remains buried under the rock: a cist full of burnt bones and some other scattered items.

This rock was Clach Ossian and was reputed to mark the last resting place of the poet Ossian. During the night, it is recorded, the sentries posted by Wade at the site of the road works reported the local people assembled at the location and gathered these remains and carried them up the nearby Dun Mor hill to re-inter them.

This was 30 years before James Macpherson began publishing the works he attributed to Ossian which are now widely regarded as forgeries in their entirety. However a more complex appraisal of this work is required.

Certainly it possesses some artistic merit irrespective of its origin, and would surely not have been as influential during early Romanticism otherwise. Also, one also needs to re-visit the total rejection of the potential historicity of the figure of Ossian, as it is likely that Macpherson did not fabricate the entire content of the work, but patched together found elements with interpolations intended to provide a degree of narrative coherence suitable for the literary tastes of his contemporaries. The blanket rejection of Ossian is overly simplistic and is not motivated by probity. Other agendas are at work.

This topic periodically crops up, and has done so again recently. How can one talk about this subject without mentioning the Book of the Dean of Lismore? In addition, how can one begin to talk about this subject without reference to Derick Thomson's "The Gaelic Sources of Macpherson's Ossian"? These primary sources and subsequent scholarship are crucial but inconvenient for the simplistic narrative that serves the anti-Gaelic agenda.

No-one I think will doubt that significant amounts of "Ossian" were the work of Macpherson, however modern criticism can find passages that are more likely not to have been. For example, I personally am fascinated by how much of the section that makes reference to Caracal, the "king of the world", which caught Edward Gibbon's attention, has historical content.

(Gibbon speculated about memories persisting of Caracalla's ill-fated expedition in the 3rd century. One of the ironies of Wade's discovery was that approximately one and a half millennia previously Romans were engaged on the same enterprise, as the "glen blocking" fort at the mouth of Glenalmond built during the Severan expedition attests).

A close examination of the passage in question reveals two hands at work, only one of which is Macpherson's. Where one begins and the other ends is still a matter of conjecture. Often it is a matter of aesthetics rather than clear evidence.

Also consider the historical context: anglicised chiefs expelled the bards from their lands (for example the exile in Islay of Mary MacLeod, Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, from Skye, in the 17th century). Learned retinues who could recite and celebrate a chieftains lineage back to the Niall of the Nine Hostages and Conn of the Hundred Battles were dispersed. Poets were penalised not for their deficiencies any more, but for the deficiencies of their new anglophone audience who could not understand their work. Macpherson, as the author Alexander McCall Smith has observed, was probably motivated by more than just personal aggrandisement. He was also likely to be trying to rescue a vanishing tradition.

Consider the comments of Horace Walpole: "It tires me to death to read how many ways a warrior is like the moon, or the sun, or a rock, or a lion, or the ocean. I cannot believe it genuine." This is mere assertion, preference and opinion. Its weight relies on the status and authority of the speaker. These comments cannot be considered a serious contribution to the debate, yet all too often things like this are lazily allowed to be decisive.

Samuel Johnson required of Macpherson, who asserted he was translating ancient fragments of heroic Gaelic literature, that he "show him the original." However it is evident from Macpherson's idiosyncratic orthography in the hard copies he did produce that he collected from an oral tradition, precisely as Sir Walter Scott observed in his adjudication. Yet Macpherson's detractors' prejudice against the "rude unlettered" highlanders would not permit them to entertain the concept of a Gaelic orthography. The role of anti-Gaelic prejudice here cannot be understated. Today we understand that the Gaelic language is an ancient and well-developed instrument allowing highly expressive, subtle and direct poetry. In Macpherson's day it was dismissed as the barbaric utterance of illiterate savages, and to claim these savages were capable of nuanced and effective expression was an affront to the endemic bigotry of the metropolis.

Many independent collections of Ossianic poetry were collected during the 18th and 19th centuries. Indeed, in an ironic inversion of the charge laid against Macpherson, one collector passed himself off as the author. He was ignored rather than censured, and one might speculate that the reason for this was he was not guilty of the appropriate crime, one which allowed the entire culture to be dismissed rather than just an individual. It was Macpherson's fraudulent assertion that his compilation was a complete work of an ancient bard that allowed anti-Gaelic sentiment free reign. A comparison of these collections, in the hands of fair and acute criticism, is capable of shedding much light on the whole question of Macpherson's Ossian.

Ossian was doomed from the outset because at the same time as being confronted by metropolitan Anglo-British hostility it was outflanked by Irish nationalists who felt one of the figures from their national literature was being misappropriated and so challenged the authenticity of the work from that perspective.

The degree of invention in Macpherson's Ossian is not significantly greater than the insertions made into the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, by Elias Lönnrot, who imposed his own vision of coherence on that work. However the Kalevala has enjoyed a very different reception. And one might contrast the reception of Ossian with Tennyson's Idylls of the King, a work that celebrates rather than threatens an imperial British "mythistoire" more palatable to the establishment, or Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, adopted to legitimise Elizabethan imperial ambitions, or Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, promoting Plantagenet ascendancy over the Saxons in its day.

When Tennyson and Malory stitch together Arthurian material the sources on which they rely are not dismissed because of their artifice. Though Macpherson does not confess to the role of his own artifice in his creation, neither should his sources be dismissed. He is guilty of nothing that Thomas Malory, Geoffrey of Monmouth or Elias Lönnrot didn't do.

The rejection of Macpherson's Ossian is not just about the words on the page, but the particular political circumstances surrounding them as well.

One thing is beyond question, that the names of Ossian's heroes were familiar to the Scottish Highlanders from the earliest period, the country was teeming with poetical compositions having these deeds as their subjects, that the topography of the country was in every quarter enriched with names drawn from Fingal and his men, and that to say that the whole of this was the invention of Macpherson, is nothing but what the bitterest prejudice could receive as truth.

The highlanders who carried the remains found by Wade's soldiers up Dun Mor hill do not and cannot feature in the disputations heard in the coffee houses of London three decades later, as their actions pre-date the publication in question.

The article in the National referenced above discusses the origin of the names Fiona and Malvina. As an interesting footnote, I observe that in the National Records of Scotland it is recorded that 7 babies were registered with the name "Ossian" in Scotland in 2015.

The ridgeline

I make my ascent
through the mountain's teeth,
through impossibilities of fatigue,
through delusions of my own endurance.

From time to time
my eyes rise to the ridgeline,
before falling again
to more immediate obstacles and urgencies.

Bare birch and stalwart pines surround me
standing against the winter's brief noon,
wrapped in peeling strips of silver,
or clad in coarse filaments of grey-green lichen.

A sunless summer brought me
diffuse undifferentiated light
in this place, the sky flooded
with featureless white cloud,
which came down as hollow mist
and made leaves wet and bright
like a tribute of silver
offered upon a host of palms
held up without expectation
to the empty sky.
An applause of rain fell down
and soaked into the earth
over the ten thousand days
of my accumulated summers.

Now the trees support
a mute lead grey sky
barrelling over black rocks
and blacker waters.

I know
the colour does not drain from the world,
I know
this greyness I see is my weakening eyes
letting the vivid world slip.

My retinas are like
dry old boards,
warped and twisted.
Colour is fading paint,
blistered and flaking,
onto which my eyes can no longer grip,
bleached palettes
depleted of colour,
stripped bare
by the world's long
slow sliding light.

Sometimes,
in a clearing,
inadvertently reached as I grope
in aimless pioneering desperation,
escaping for a moment the thicket and the mire
I find the remains of a camp fire,
sometimes cold and ancient,
sometimes retaining lingering vestiges of recent heat.

I consider this isolated evidence of others:
this stone circle
gathered round cold damp dead charcoal
where our paths towards the ridgeline lie crossed.
I feel the enduring terror of our mutual solitude.
I cannot undo the monotonous panic I feel
cannot unpick this knot of past and future paths
cannot acquaint myself with the strangers
who meet in me in mock intimacy
contemplating the mysteries of this place
knowing they offer no enlightenment.

There is no epiphany,
only tedium.
The trees are stiff dark ribs,
a grating
against the sky's distant solsticial pallor
gleaming
beyond the congregated shadows,
within the bars
of this cage containing me
from which
there is no escape
in my ceaseless ascent,

yet I know there are gaols
whose bars are things one is supposed
to see beyond
to where we find
and seize our freedom
in places to which no constraints can extend,
playing tin tunes upon the bars
that carry beyond them.

Each step in this forest falls
both in the cage
and beyond it,
and I work my way to the ridgeline
through the filtered mist
of the splintered sky's grey interstices,
where every step is a promise and a betrayal.

The lies I tell myself to keep going
oscillate between paradise and apocalypse.
I make my way
though accidental accuracies
and well-meaning mistakes,
but the truth is,
I cannot recall the origin or purpose of this ascent.
Certainty has given way to conjecture,
memory to imagination.
I have released my past,
and all my possible fugitive futures
have gone cloud-climbing, delirious,
out of reach in the mountainous skies.
away from this blasted and birdless place.

Perhaps my journey began in an abandoned encampment
not dissimilar to the ones I encounter on my path.
I don't remember.

I know that no answer will be found
there on the ridgeline,
only the prospect of another summit,
as yet unseen,
and everything I can win
will be overthrown or forgotten.
I wonder if anything ever can be left,
what victories are possible,
once one reaches the ridgeline
and moves on.

Perhaps a solemn birch will stand, someday,
looming out of the unfathomable mist
at some other soul
in the place I must briefly pause
before I continue out of sight
beyond the ridgeline
in pursuit of what I can't yet know,
in whatever new shape and form is required.

But trees fall,
and eventually even the ridge itself will shrug and subside
as the earth turns and the subterranean ache of ages
disturbs its endless slumber once more.

Victory is relative. There are only varying degrees of defeat.

All achievements are meaningless in the end,
whatever finishing lines we cross are all erased,
and whatever we did to cross them,
whatever price we paid,
is, in the final analysis,
indistinguishable from madness.
We rely on a transformation we cannot comprehend
to save us from annihilation,
and beforehand
it is impossible
to tell the difference between them.

"Thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old"

"Unless like swallows she doth use some strange barbarian tongue"

(Clytemnestra, speaking of Cassandra the prophetess, in Agamemnon by Aeschylus)

What better demonstration of the corruption of our democracy is there?

What better demonstration of the abject learned helplessness of our commentators and our media is there than their utter inability to interrogate and hold to account the individuals elected to high office on the very points that compelled them to quit? And of our politicians than their inability to oppose them on those points?

Our "opposition" MPs abstain or endorse a series of measures they know to be motivated by nothing more than toxic tory ideology, measures which drive poor and disabled people to despair and mass suicide in a grotesque voluntary holocaust that unburdens the rich of their maintenance, rather than "rock the boat", rather than appear "unelectable" to the corporate interests of the wealthy whose malign antidemocratic influence constrains their every deliberation.

And then the chief architect of the very measures they endorsed declares them mistaken, and resigns from the government! How slavish those MPs are revealed to be! What malleable, unprincipled creatures they now seem!

And he is lauded! He is carried aloft on the shoulders of those he liberates, jostled as those shoulders heave because of the joyful weeping of those that carry him! His hands still red and wet with blood as he joins them with the hands of others in new fellowship! It appears that all that is required to be the hero is to kill one less victim than the villain.

We are hostage to the epiphanies of great men.

That is not democracy.

And as for the media, who failed to interrogate the holders of high office and left them to interrogate themselves? Our votes do not confer conscience! Our constant vigilance is the conscience of the great! You have failed in that respect. You only talk of the fallacies of austerity now that they are admitted by its own ministers. You are animals unwittingly waiting for the knife who only notice the slaughter that surrounds you when the butchers argue among themselves and disrupt the familiar routine.

And so those the media reviled and failed to comprehend, those who spoke with tongues of swallows, are vindicated at last, but in accordance with their curse, in the least acceptable way. To be proven right by a confession that exculpates the criminal! Sturgeon and Corbyn share the curse of Cassandra in the gift of knowledge that does not profit them.

Each knows a freedom awaits that is not in the gift of great men, and which will be withheld while the great are allowed to arrogate all beneficence.

A nation by any other name

"The rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part Only the little white rose of Scotland That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart."

(Hugh Macdairmid)

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"

(William Shakespeare)

"Scotland is just a word"

(Kezia Dugdale)

I feel some sympathy for Kezia Dugdale. She assumed a leadership role too early in her career, at precisely the wrong time in the trajectory of the organisation she leads. It would have been better, in my opinion, if she had spent more time developing her skills less publically, outside the unforgiving spotlight she finds herself in. I would have liked to have seen how a slightly older and wiser Kezia would have performed in the legislature of an Independent Scotland. Perhaps I will still get the chance, although it looks like some wilderness years may intervene for Kezia if the polls regarding next May are to be believed.

I do not believe this older, wiser Kezia would confuse the general with the particular, the necessary with the sufficient, what makes us human with what makes us Scottish, the way Kezia did yesterday. She gave a speech at the Scottish Labour Party conference (i.e. the conference of the Scottish accounting unit of the UK Labour Party). The speech was relatively familiar, to the extent that it re-iterated tired and historically unsuccessful Scottish Labour dogma that relies precisely on these casual, lazy conflations and the fallacies with which one may conjure as a result of accepting them.

"Scotland is just a word" she stated. She was describing the priority over hollow assertions of identity rightfully given to our mutual obligations to each other, to ensure our physical welfare and mental well-being, making her point by means of a rather unfortunate false dichotomy contrived to support Scottish Labour's somewhat proprietorial attitude towards the concept of social justice. This gambit of claiming what is not actually in dispute as some unique revelation specially entrusted to Scottish Labour is a tactic that is as transparent as it is ineffective.

Our mutual obligations to each other are what make us human. We welcome refugees on the basis of our shared humanity. These obligations are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the formation of a national community. Kezia spoke as though she didn't know the difference. That the national community may share a situation, values, history, references and culture is what enables its members to articulate and understand these common priorities in response to their specific circumstances. All responses to universal and rational demands arise among real and particular sets of circumstances. And if that national community's right to self-determination is recognised and respected, this response may form the basis for authentic, constructive collective actions and arrangements to address these priorities, as manifested at that time and in that place.

To dismiss Scotland as "just a word" is to understand everything about what is to be done and nothing about how to do it. It is to know all that is sacred but know nothing of sacrifice. It is to discard the repositories of our realistic well-seasoned hopes in pursuit of the transient images of the ideal that are wrought among the clouds. It is to cripple the very imagination from which the solutions to our problems emerge. It is to demean all the struggles in which Scotland was the vessel in which we invested our dreams and visions of the future. It is to devalue the inheritance of thought and purpose we are bequeathed as a consequence and with which we arm and instrument ourselves for the struggles of tomorrow.

To say Scotland is just a word is to say nothing about Scotland at all.

An craobh le dùileagan òir

Fàs air an taobh dhubh:
an craobh le dùileagan òir's
sgrath sorcha's umhach,

ach gun aithne dhuinn,
mar chnàimh-gobhlach a' ghealaich
thall tiurr na h-oidhche.

Am measg na meuran
seinn anns an dorchas ùdlaidh
eun dòchais fhathast

Growing on the dark side:

the tree with golden leaves

and bright brazen bark,

but unknown to us

like the Moon's wishbone

beyond the high water mark of night.

Among the branches

in the dismal darkness

a bird of hope still sings

Echo chamber tourism: questions every unionist should answer

The Scottish Independence debate is currently characterised by rather polarised opinion, with different entrenched points of view being repeated unopposed in the echo chambers of rival camps. The release of GERS figures last week gave me an opportunity to quit the autonomist bubble and spend some time in the unionist echo chamber as I participated in various online discussions about the figures with people who felt they undermined the case for Scottish Independence.

I think it is always a good idea to get out of your comfort zone, leave the pro-independence bubble for a while, and climb into the unionist echo chamber, to get some perspective, gain an appreciation of your opponent's point of view, and avoid confirmation bias. As Aristotle said, the sign of an educated mind is the ability to entertain a point of view without necessarily accepting it.

Unsurprisingly, in the unionist echo chamber you find that the people who are often reduced to mere caricatures within the narrow confines of exclusively pro-independence discourse are in fact just like us, and we (the pro-independence group) in turn provide the raw material of casual derision there. Like us, they often have a strong sentimental attachment to a particular identity, in their case British. They are utterly convinced they are right: their heterodoxy is not part of some cunning ploy. There is the same spectrum of reasonableness, from individuals with whom one can engage in meaningful, informed debate, and with whom one can respectfully disagree on some issues and find common ground on others, to tribalistic simpletons who spurn every offer of intellectual intercourse from their perceived enemy as if it was a potential threat.

There are some differences. There is a sense of confusion, disappointment and anger that old certainties are being questioned, unnecessarily as they see it. This conservatism, with a small 'c', sees a tendency to be more relaxed with positions like climate change denial and structural misogyny, championed by pillars of conservatism such as the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, than one finds among advocates of Scottish Independence.

This is important because it sometimes seems the logical apparatus of positions such as climate change denial is adopted by unionists in their opposition to Scottish Independence. For example, the selectivity with which climate change deniers approach evidence is also manifested in the way unionists handle economic figures, with data examined over whatever time period results in a trend that supports their argument irrespective of the requirements of objectivity, even if it is a blatantly unrepresentative snapshot describing a specific set of circumstances, such as the recent GERS figures.

Those formulating the unionist position are faced with the challenge of ensuring it isn't weighed down with this baggage: making sure it doesn't become just one more cause espoused by those whose privileges are eroded by post-imperial decline and who lash out quixotically with a spurious sense of victimhood against a variety of targets such as fox hunt bans and, indeed, wind farms, and so, as a cause, is just as easily dismissed as those other tantrums.

In contrast, supporters of Scottish Independence are promoting a disruptive and innovative point of view and so are more often allied with other progressive positions reliant on well constructed logically coherent arguments and properly evaluated evidence to achieve the necessary penetration for these points of view. The challenge for those formulating the pro-independence position is ensuring its advocates stay positive, focussed and respectful, to convince others, and where disagreement remains, that it is not dismissed, but forms the basis of a stimulating contest rather than a disgruntled and bad tempered dispute.

It seems there are some unionists who are less satisfied with their victory in the recent referendum than their opponents are with the manner of their own defeat. It is clear that the reason for this is that the objective for these unionists was not really to secure a majority in the vote, despite the way the campaigns were conducted, but to eliminate the pro-independence position entirely, and there is resentment in some quarters that we are still here at all. Unionists continually bring up the issue of a second independence referendum as a result, portraying the merest possibility of one as a massive threat, while accusing their opponents of a degree of obsession only they are displaying. What really threatens them is that support for Scottish Independence should continue at all in any form. For them the choice is between nostalgia and anarchy, and no politically reasonable victory can ever be decisive enough.

Many unionists will not be persuaded to change their minds by us, for the very same reasons many advocates of Scottish Independence will not be persuaded to change their minds by them: given that many of the questions involved are only answerable in hindsight, sentimental attachment to identity determines their opinion. Nevertheless, there are questions we can reasonably ask, even if the most we can hope to achieve is acknowledgement of this irrational aspect of entrenched viewpoints.

We should remember our challenge is to minimise but not to eradicate the irrational. The procedures we use to implement our priorities must be governed by rational considerations, but those priorities themselves have irrational influences, and to pretend otherwise is actually a form of tyranny. Politics is the accommodation of contradictory priorities formulated on an irrational basis. Politics is the reconciliation of two wrong answers, not the promotion of single right answer. That is an administrative and technocratic issue. For example, Scottish Independence should be handled as a matter of domestic Scottish politics, whereas climate change should be dealt with administratively and globally on the basis of the recent Paris agreement.  

So what are the questions every unionist should be able to answer? Let's consider the recent GERS figures and the challenge they pose.

Question 1: either Scotland's current fiscal position is confronted by a short term or a long term challenge. Which is it?

If it is a short term challenge, would you not agree it is the competence of the government of the day rather than the credibility of independence per se that is in question when dealing with it effectively?

Today George Osborne presents his 2016 budget, and a variety of fiscal challenges confronting the UK will be discussed at Westminster. No-one argues that any of these challenges mean the UK should alter its constitutional status and give up its independence. Osborne's incompetence is not mitigated by surrendering sovereignty. So why should the merest possibility that a Scottish government might not perform perfectly when confronted by a short term fiscal challenge be a reason to continue to be denied self-determination?

When we consider the question of EU membership, we see the very architects of Project Fear's scaremongering about Scottish EU membership during the Independence Referendum campaign complain and contradict themselves now the subject is Brexit. Just as we see in the case of Europe, today we will witness hypocrisy so blatant it verges on amnesia as Osborne makes his own fiscal issues a matter of his government's competence rather than the validity of his country's constitution, barely one week after he and his unionist cohorts have been arguing exactly the opposite in relation to Scotland.

Question 2: if it is long term we must ask, what is it that is unique about the Scottish situation that imposes this challenge?

The answer to that, in a country blessed with an abundance of human and natural resources, is that Scotland is not independent. That is principal way in which Scotland differs over a long timescale in comparison with similar nations. If the current fiscal position is an indictment of any constitutional arrangement, logically it can only be an indictment of the Union.

In attempting to argue otherwise the opponents of independence are merely trying to undermine the credibility of independence by suggesting it relies on the competence of a single party. This is the origin of their "SNP Bad" monomania. However the Yes Movement destroyed that spurious conflation forever. As a result the unionists are now engaged in elaborating their own irrelevance because they don't know what else to do other than attack the SNP in an attempt to damage the credibility of Independence.

They are badly damaged by this logical self-mutilation. Consider their unalloyed jubilation at any news item that is detrimental to Scotland. They rejoice at a fall in oil prices because of the adverse impact it will have on Scotland's fiscal position over the short term. There are much more important long term questions to discuss in relation to oil prices, but everything is subordinated to the single issue of preserving the Union by trying in any way possible, at any cost in terms of the logical coherence of their arguments, to undermine any possible case that might be advanced for Scottish Independence.

The real issues surrounding the price of oil relate to the need globally to transition to a de-carbonised post-capitalist circular economy that is not dependent on fossil fuels and does not degrade our shared environment. In this context we should be considering the rising sovereign debt among Gulf states rather than the impact of oil prices on the Scottish deficit.

Question 3: what impact will sovereign debt among Gulf states have on mid-term oil price projections and what are the implications for an orderly transition to the necessary new global economic framework?

This is the real question unionists should be asking themselves in relation to oil prices. Saudi Arabia is incurring a 9% deficit this year because of the low oil price it has partially caused through politically motivated over-production. It has to service this self-same debt through oil production. This sets up feedback that might lock the Gulf into a cycle of high production > low oil price > low revenues > high deficit > high production if it crosses a threshold where increases in production to service debt lower prices and therefore revenues available to do so critically.

Question 4: we - both advocates of Scottish Independence and unionists - should be asking: is this a bad thing?

Short term, perhaps, but over the longer term? It may be the case that it prices out fracking and incentivises de-carbonisation. There will be global economic pain as a result, but should we manage this as part of the global transition to circular economics rather than avoid it and cause worse pain later?

The lost city of Dundee

The deserted ruins of the ancient city of Dundee

Ancient legend

According to ancient Celtic myth there was once a fabulous city of the blessed, built on a hill and overlooking a broad expanse of silvery water, where a race of uniquely sagacious druids lived. 

One day the people of the land were asked to solve a riddle, and their fate depended on providing the right answer. Almost alone among the various districts and demesnes of the land, the inhabitants of this joyous gard answered correctly.

However many of the rest of the people dwelling in the land had fallen under the malign influence of a sinister enchantment causing fear and doubt, and so the land was lost and lay blighted. Eventually the location of the city passed from memory entirely.

Modern scholarship

The BBC Question Time team has spent years investigating whether there is any truth behind the legend of the lost city of Dundee. Are they based on lingering folk-memory of a once great civilisation that fell into decline and decay? Or does it represent an ideal, such that the city never actually exist other than as the fantasy of a monk in a medieval scriptorium?

Recent excavations and discoveries in archival material have finally shed light on this fascinating question.

Watch Question Time on Thursday 10th March, available afterwards on BBC iPlayer, where a panel and invited audience of experts in history, archaeology and anthropology discuss and speculate about what the people who lived in this ancient city would have been like, what were their main concerns, and even what their opinions would have been of our world today.

Meuran

(Cliog a' mhóraich ann uinneag ùr)

The feeders

The latest GERS figures once again expose the unionist tendency to revel in Scotland's misfortunes. Nothing excites an opponent of Scottish Independence more than seeing an economic downturn, a drop in oil revenues, or any blow to the economy that can be presented as conclusive proof we are incapable of running our own affairs. There is a gleeful feeding frenzy upon every item of bad news. Scotland's inadequacy is joyfully confirmed by every disaster.

At the same time we are told our best interests are their only concern; that we should be glad they saved us from ourselves during the referendum; that we would be in a terrible situation if we had not followed their advice. Talk of "pooling and sharing of resources" is solemnly intoned, having apparently now become the socially acceptable code for "too wee too poor".

The suspicion arises that they don't just think we should not be independent. It is not just our best interest that is their only concern. There is something else they are getting out of it. It starts to look like they actively want us to be dependent.

Think about it: we are told we are not to leave a relationship; we are told we consume more resources than we are entitled to; we are told this is acceptable, however, as long as we allow them to remain in control; in that case they tell us they will ensure we are provided with whatever we want; they then derive their satisfaction from our incapacity. But should we relinquish their control, we are told we will starve!

It starts to look like they are feeders. Scotland is the overweight female they want to keep confined to the house, and whom they will ply with all the bounties and blandishments of union for as long as she acquiesces to this arrangement and leaves them in charge.

The problem with placing an emphasis on economic indicators to discredit Scottish Independence is you make yourself a hostage to fortune. Once these indicators turn around, as they inevitably do and will, you face having to alter your position accordingly, or end up looking like a hypocrite. Saying Scotland should not be independent because some economic indicators are temporarily adverse does rather commit you to supporting independence when those indicators become favourable.

This situation arises because the unionists keep Scotland in its place by demanding she satisfy requirements no other country would be expected to fulfill. In this instance, Scotland has for the first time in over 30 years contributed less to the UK Treasury, proportionately, than she has drawn out. Uniquely, this sort of situation is considered inconceivable for an independent country. Scotland must stay in bed - indeed, must keep her fat ass in bed - unless and until she can prove conclusively she will never put a foot wrong if she should ever dare to get up: the control strategy of a feeder.  

The truth of the matter is that independence is a political rather than economic consideration. People want independence: to ensure policies that deliver social justice are adopted; to see an end to Trident; to see and end to food-banks; to repudiate the toxic and morally repugnant doctrines that inform UK government policy; to act towards others with a degree of compassion that cannot be monetised and counted as a revenue or an expenditure; to articulate solidarity with those from whom we are alienated by the Union, such as refugees, the working poor, and the disabled, who the UK government are currently inviting to a voluntary holocaust. People want independence to enable them to think for themselves.

There will always be an argument to persist with the status quo if one ignores political imperatives. But established procedures must not take precedence over political priorities. Procedures are formulated to deliver political objectives. They are not an end in themselves. History is littered with examples of the officers of the obsolete and the stewards of the stale ridiculing the folly of the new. "If I gave people what they wanted I would have made faster horses," is a quote attributed to Henry Ford. GERS is unionists' yearly opportunity to inspect the hooves and teeth of the Scottish economy. Independence is an engine they cannot yet imagine.

So if they have stated that Scotland's best interests are their foremost concern, they will have no choice but to relent when they day comes when they find the female they have held captive with morbid obesity has taken the initiative and changed the regime, lost the weight and got fit and lean, and is standing at the threshold. They will have to hide their disappointment as she takes control of her own destiny.  

And it is a great shame that short term unionist agendas and political motivations mean no-one asks the really meaningful questions. Irrespective of the price of oil today, how do we best make the transition to the decarbonised post-capitalist circular economy that represents long term sustainability? Irrespective of Scotland's constitutional position, how do we ensure that all citizens are engaged and all agencies are democratically accountable at all levels of government from the local to the global so that every challenge is met as effectively as possible, from fixing a pothole to mitigating climate change?

My choice of an independent Scotland is not because I want to isolate and insulate myself from these issues. It is not a way of staying in bed. It is precisely because this is the best way I see of calibrating my response to the challenges arising at all levels: those facing my street, and those facing my planet.

Sgiathan: trì-chòmhla mu dheidhinn lùtha

(Cliog a' mhóraich ann uinneag ùr)

The first man on the Moon

Victorian adventurers imagined
they would be met by men on the Moon,
savages to civilise,
or civilisations to conquer,

but when we eventually got there
all we found was a silent world
whose every scar remains
after billions of years
without a breath of air
to erode their raw serrations.

She was born from violence
when worlds collided
to form one which hid
in the other's shadow.

We are made of the same substance,
you and I,
but from separate creations,
and I am sorry the soonest I could reach you
was much too late to be of any use.

I spent hundreds of millions of years
forming my lipid membrane
behind which I conducted my genetic dance,
learning new steps that let me stumble
from sea to land, my mighty mitochondria
performing great feats of metabolism
to allow me to stand upright, to walk, to run,
and not evolution, but the teleology of love
teasing thumbs and fingers from my stumps
so I can grip the stick and steer the ship
that brings my love to you,

only to find I am too late,
billions of years too late,
only to find myself alienated
by the violence of your birth,

but I can build a garden where we can walk
on the dark side of the Moon,
with stars for flowers among the ruins,
a crater's rim for walls,
and perhaps,
when life on Earth is over,
and the Geiger counter chatter of radioactive decay
replaces all futile protestations of love ever made
before they fell silent in the final nuclear embrace,
we can be together among the interstellar dust.

The Tin Drumpf

Trump's success should not come as a surprise to anyone. What do you expect?

Take a once great democracy: one founded on faith in the individual's capacity for reason and moral judgement; one that relies on its citizens' intellectual courage and appreciation of the common good.

Insult it with lies for generations. Let public relations firms conceal corporate abuses. Let advertisers debase language until it is merely a pleasant noise devoid of meaning, to persuade people to purchase items they do not need. Let governments offer bogus evidence to justify illegal wars for which the public will pay and from which private interests will reap profits too scandalous to disclose.

All while the media distracts and dumbs down the public. Any respect for the values and ideals which sustain society, on which a functioning society relies, are eroded. Intelligent debate is belittled while every broadcast and print medium offers easy alternatives to beguile the people and prevent any meaningful engagement with issues that matter.

Until all that remains is self-interest and tribalism, and the once great democracy has been so utterly cheapened and degraded that elections summon a mob of short sighted self serving bigots to the polls. The people crave anything for guidance, even the most spurious dog whistle and knee jerk, rather than endure the pain of self awareness and realisation of what they have become, and will vote for anyone who promises them they no longer have to invest in the effort of thinking for themselves

Trump's success is not shocking. It is inevitable.

Of course the irony is that the best presidential candidate to challenge the establishment and encourage a grassroots renewal of America's democracy is, in fact, Bernie Sanders.

Drinking with yoons

Some friends are at a cocktail bar. There are two groups.

The members of the first group pay £10 into the kitty each. The members of the second group pay £8 into the kitty each. However the second group is much larger than the first and so accounts for most of the money in the kitty.

They get a round in with the money from the kitty. The average cost of the cocktails chosen by the first group is £11. The average cost of the cocktails chosen by the second group is £10.

It turns out they have had to start a tab at the bar because the kitty wasn't enough to pay for the round. They are all going to have to pay into the kitty again.  

The members of the second group claim they are subsidising the first group's drinks because they are more expensive. The members of the first group point out that the amount of the kitty they paid is greater than the amount of the bill that is for their drinks.

The second group claim the first group would never be allowed to run up a tab on their own anyway and it's only because they are with the second group that they are even allowed in to the cocktail bar in the first place. Beside, they wouldn't even be allowed to use pounds to pay for drinks on their own.

Some people get a little bit upset but no-one loses their cool.

Epilogue

They split into two separate rounds and get very drunk together and have a great night out. The next day the GERS figures are published.

Nach eil an turadh ann

Turadh

Rudeigin beag airson an latha grianach a' th'ann an-diugh ...

Are beards a feminist issue?

Is it "mansplaining" when you describe something in an overly-elaborate, condescending way to another man, or only when you do that to a woman? If it is just when you are doing it to a woman, what do you call it when you do it to another man?

The asymmetric nature of the relationships and interactions with which feminism is concerned mean you cannot simply formulate an equivalent "ism" for men. And men can't simply adopt feminism and be feminists in the way women can, because they do not share the same experience. They can be supportive, certainly, but they risk being obstructive if they introduce their own experience into feminist discourse. At the same time, they can't simply ignore their own experience. So what is to be done?

Most men approach this from a position of privilege. That is not to say that men cannot be oppressed or disadvantaged in multiple ways. However they still benefit from structural advantage in many areas where gender is an influence, and need to acknowledge this. Liberating the oppressor is very different from liberating the oppressed. For example, we often see a uniquely male dysfunction arising from a spurious sense of victimhood and thwarted entitlement associated with the erosion of privilege, rather than any real disadvantage. The remedy for this dysfunction does not arise from feminism, it arises from an authentic male response. Feminists may inform men about the consequences of male dysfunction for women, but it is up to men to recognise how they themselves are diminished by it, and to fix it.

Men's discourse about their own experience must be fundamentally different from women's. For example, historically we see codes of conduct that regulate male behaviour place very different emphases compared to similar norms for women. We see obligations to protect precisely because men are considered more capable of harm. The way men are oppressed by the norms that constrain them is fundamentally different and cannot be analysed on feminist grounds. Men don't just need their own version of feminist discourse. They need an entirely different kind of conversation, and one that does not need to include female voices in the same way feminism does not require male voices.

Just as there are ways in which men cannot speak for women, there are ways in which women cannot speak for us. Men must engage with this rather than neglect it on the basis that the only terms of debate are feminist terms, because that abandons what is uniquely male to negative, dysfunctional interests that are only too eager to appropriate, distort and weaponise it to reclaim lost privilege. Men must find their authentic voice if a constructive dialogue with women is to be achieved.  

I don't think this relates in any way to a so-called "crisis" in masculinity, as sources of male self-worth disappear with the declining industries and communities in which male prowess was previously demonstrated and valued. This just infantilises men. There will always be social changes. If there is a "crisis" it is not specifically or intrinsically male. I am interested in something more adult and enduring.

A greater degree of universality is attributed to the codes applying to men because of the greater degree of power men historically have been able to enjoy. So, whereas a woman can risk being "unfeminine" or behaving in a way that is "unsuitable" for a woman, men's behaviour has been judged against a set of criteria with a higher status and priority. A man risks behaving in a way that is unsuitable for a person, rather than just unsuitable for a man, in these moralities. A problem with this hierarchy of obligations is that it requires women to be grateful for acceptable conduct on the part of men. It deprives them of the option of total indifference.

So from this point of view the answer the questions I started with are 1) no, if you are doing it because she's a woman, and 2) being a dick. And if we need a label for the space or the discourse where men articulate their understanding of and response to feminist issues, I am struggling to think of anything that sounds cleverer than just "not being a dick" on this basis.

I don't really have a neat proposal for what we (as men) should do, just a few words about what we shouldn't do. We shouldn't try to invent our own "ism" as a way of discussing male issues. At the same time, just "not being a dick" is not enough.

Black Friday

We should aspire to more than material gratification. This Black Friday let's make sure we do not lose ourselves in the moral labyrinth of the aisles where the world is packed and stacked and served up to us as though it was a series of discrete opportunities for consequence free consumption.

Do not let wealth and the accumulation of possessions be the limit of our ambition. We dress our malls and market places up in marble, but they are not temples, and barter is not prayer. We are diminished and demeaned in this least ambitious of all societies when we limit our imaginations only to those salvations that can be bought. We drown in shallows of ostentation drained of any real meaning even as we revel in acquisition and wallow in materialism.

When we allow ourselves to become pre-occupied with our own material circumstances to the exclusion of other considerations we will inevitably crave distractions from the injustice we see all around us that would otherwise perturb us with discordant reproach. As we surrender to material distractions we subordinate thoughts and feelings to stimulus and manipulation and become vulnerable to the tinsel thin pretensions of every charlatan. Eventually we mistake our chains for freedom and reject the unwelcome liberation that would interrupt the complacency of our servitude.  

We are set against each other to compete for trifles. We willingly queue to participate in a ritual for which we have been prepared by hours of advertising and decades of conditioning. We sprint and stampede to the shelves when the doors open. We measure ourselves against our success in a struggle to spend. We win disposable triumphs. We allow the self-serving solemnities of charlatans to persuade us of who we are and what we want. We are cheapened by every discount and enslaved by every illusion of choice.

But there is no truth so unbearable that falsehood is inescapable. The poverty of our knowledge should appal us. The deficiencies of our conduct should appal us. Our lack of concern for our fellows and our environment should appal us. The remediation of these shortcomings should take precedence over any material inconvenience we imagine we suffer, any discrepancy we attempt to fix by mere acquisition. We must strive for moral accomplishments before we consider material ones. We must seek to understand our place in the universe.

Gymnopédie

More than 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees arrive in the UK every year seeking asylum.

These words, these desiderata below, are of course a fantasy. They can only ever be a veneer we apply to the unvarnished horror of real events. Nevertheless, I believe they still serve a purpose. For what it's worth, I dedicate them to all the orphans and unaccompanied children of war, and to their fathers.

Gymnopédie

"Bear the wounds afflicting you with grace
and spend your anger in constructive ways.
We do not know the stories that could be told
by those who hurt us, and for our part,
they won't hear ours unless we speak
considered words calmly with compassion.

"Be the measure of yourself my son.
Do not be content to satisfy others,
but make your own mark at the range
and fire until you hit it, and in life,
always find your aim within yourself
and persevere even when mocked by others
who abandon theirs for comforts more brief
than the indelible knowledge of becoming
all you want and can and should become.

"And this at last: always know you are loved.
When every tongue that would announce it
has fallen silent, and is corrupted and forgotten,
still, love remains, and no matter where you are
I will be there."

                                                        With that
the boy's father finally succumbed
to shrapnel and blunt reperfusive shock
among the ruins of the home they once knew,
leaving him in the arms of the night
to face the desert and the darkness
and the journey
alone.

List of 13 possible tasks

I have been enjoying the work of Rob Macinnis, a photographer and artist based in Brooklyn.

Like all excellent art, his work is provocative, and as a scientist, I had a particular response to his "list of 13 impossible tasks". It is a list of possible tasks.

My response is of course perfectly legitimate, despite its scientific motivation, not least because I believe the distinction commonly made between art and science is artificial anyway, and is generally used only as an excuse for ignorance by those who know little about either. In this day and age there is no reason not to be familiar and comfortable with both approaches to investigation.

So, the list of 13 possible tasks I present below is not intended to be trite or dismissive, but rather, is an act of sincere engagement with an original work that I admire. The original list of 13 impossible tasks is as follows.

1. Take photographs of invisible objects.
2. Describe the world as if it never existed.
3. Imagine that the number one doesn’t exist.
4. Create déjà vu in my studio.
5. Catch light in a box.
6. Change a fact into an opinion.
7. Find true randomness in nature.
8. Build a piece of artwork using the laws of physics from other universes.
9. Make a room that causes its occupants to think of nothing.
10. Make a blind contour drawing of a planet at full size on a notepad.
11. Make the world silent.
12. Build objects that are immune to gravity.
13. Begin a conversation with another version of myself.

The list of possible tasks I present in response are in fact the exact same tasks. I offer them with the following notes.

1. Perfectly possible, just not very interesting. I have some pictures I took from a window in my house which everyone thinks document my environs (rather poorly). They are actually just photographs of the glass in the window frame. How many people suspected of being strangely agoraphobic birdwatchers are actually just hyelophiles? 
2. The Matrix. Plato's Theory of Forms. Gnosticism. A staple of religious and phiosophical thought. Indeed one might consider religion to be impossible without the capacity to describe the world as if it never existed. 
3. Developing a logically consistent theory of number almost cost Bertrand Russell his health. Between 1910 and 1913 he and Alfred North Whitehead wrote the Principia Mathematica that sought to dervive mathematics from logical principles. On page 379 of Volume I of the 1st edition they begin to prove that 1+1=2. This task was completed on page 86 of Volume II, accompanied with the comment "the above proposition is occasionally useful". In 1930 and 1931 Kurt Gödel proved that the kind of formal system Russell and Whitehead were attempting to construct must always remain incomplete. So it would seem it is actually more difficult to imagine that the number one does exist than that it doesn't, in any meaningful rigorous mathematical sense. 
4. Now you mention it, your studio does seem oddly familiar to me. I was a fly on the wall in a previous life and a fly in the ointment in this one. 
5. This is how a laser works (the box is an "optical cavity")
6. Every statement of fact is provisional. All knowledge is conjecture, including the statement that all knowledge is conjecture. The incompleteness of my knowledge extends to my knowledge of its incompleteness. I do not know what I do not know. Do you know what I don't know I don't know? We rely on each other to point out what we have each individually overlooked, and all epistemology is irreducibly social in nature as a result. Where does fact end and opinion begin under these circumstances?
7. True randomness is in fact only found in nature. Specimens of pseudorandom sequences presented to us by computers are generated by entirely deterministic algorithms. It is the statistical mechanics of subatomic particles that prevents us falling through the floor, and everything falling to the centre of the Earth. 
8. The laws of physics are the practically useful ways in which we state various conservation principles: conservation of energy, mass, momentum, and so on. The fundamental principle underlying these is the conservation of information. For example, quantum theory requires that the information known to the observer of a system at any given moment is included in the experimental outcome being observed. One might define quantum phenomena as those observations that would seem odd otherwise, and are manifested most obviously when the volume of information that completely describes the system being observed is similar to the information acquired by the observer during the act of observation. In a sense it is misleading to talk about quantum physics, as all physics is really quantum physics, but what we subjectively consider "quantumy" is most evident only under certain circumstances. At the macroscopic scale we see a universe described by contours of information: null geodesics in General Relativity indicate paths along which lossless transmission of information may occur at the speed of light. All representations of reality, in art or simulation, violate this fundamental conservation principle, which is the defining attribute of reality itself. You can imagine simple situations in which this principle is violated: imagine an elevator that ascends to the same floor you just left, a door through which you enter the same room you are exiting, any situation with arbitrary elements that require additional explanation, every Escher-like recursion that will regress an infinitum without external interruption. Every act of interpretation adds to the information in the artwork, and every effort necessary to make sense of something that does not make sense of itself indicates the existence of a work of art whose logic and appreciation requires laws of physics from a universe other than our own.  
9. A coffin.  
10. Perhaps a giant roll of note paper could be gradually unrolled and filled in, eventually wrapping the world up in its own depiction. 
11. Sound is a psycho-acoustic phenomenon. Strictly speaking, the scientific answer to the question of whether or not a tree falling in the woods where no-one can hear it makes a sound is it does not. The world will become silent immediately upon us achieving our own extinction. 
12. This is possible but requires the destruction of the universe. 
13. On the one hand this task might be achievable by means of time travel. One might cultivate a Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair of quantum entangled particles and use one of the particles at some point in the future to traverse a time-like rather than space-like interval in spacetime to travel back in time, effectively teleporting in time rather than space, and talk to the earlier version of yourself that possesses the other particle. However, an argument against time travel would be the proposition that time itself is an illusion and there is no future. In a sense we travel into the past constantly, but the conservation principles discussed above mean that the only pasts to which we can travel are those that are indistinguishable from a potential future, which makes meeting ourselves impossible. In this case the task can be accomplished if one realises one only has to begin the conversation. The opening gambit can be recorded and listened to on another occasion without a requirement to reply.