I suspect great screeds have already been written out there about Surfacing, the new collection of essays by Kathleen Jamie. We've all been waiting a long time, or so it seems, but here's where the writing of Kathleen Jamie differs from so much else that I read, because Findings and Sightlines have each become a sort of vade mecum on my shelf and I hoped that Surfacing would do likewise....become not two but three books I couldn't manage without.
Findings became a true vade mecum. Inspired by Kathleen Jamie's account of her visit to Maes Howe it was a book that travelled to Orkney with me three times. In 2012, when Bookhound and I took the Tinker back there, I pencilled in our own journeys around the islands,next to Kathleen Jamie's, in my copy of Findings. I read it again now and can remember the days so clearly.
On June 3rd we drove out to Hoxa tapestry gallery at St Margaret's Hope
On the 4th we went to Maes Howe and my dad bought me the Complete Works of George Mackay Brown...
At 8pm on June 5th the three of us stood in the middle of the Ring of Brodgar...
Each morning we woke to the distant whale humps of Hoy..
For those who might not know of it, Maes Howe is a
'Neolithic chambered cairn, a tomb, where 5000 years ago. they interred the bones of the dead.'
On the Shortest Day the sun sets directly in line with the entrance tunnel and shines on the far wall of the chamber. It's a moment that Kathleen Jamie goes in search of in Findings, but in doing so sees and finds a great deal more.
When I went back to Orkney with my dad for the Royal Oak commemoration in October 2013, and knowing it would probably be his last visit and memories must be stored like treasures, he and I went inside Maes Howe with a guide and he was enthralled. That evening, as we watched the sun set over Loch Harray, I read bits of 'Darkness and Light' from Findings to him.
'You are standing in a high, dim stone vault. There is a thick soundlessness, like a recording studio, or a strongroom...the world you have entered into is not like a cave, but a place of artifice and skill. Yes, that's it, what you notice when you stand and look around is cool, dry, applied skill. Across five thousand years you can still feel their self assurance.'
If I could have scattered a thimble-full of my dad's ashes in Maes Howe when Bookhound and I went back for our Ruby wedding anniversary in 2016 I would have done (I know, I know, you're not supposed to and I didn't) instead they went safely, and with much love and sadness, into the tidal waters of Scapa Flow at Waulkmill Bay.
I found it incredibly hard to leave Orkney after this visit.
And, with so much riding on it, I'll admit I opened Surfacing with some trepidation...
Supposing Kathleen Jamie had somehow gone off the boil...
Lost that vision for which I am so grateful...
Those seemingly tiny observations, often just a few words, but that work like depth charges in my mind.
Maybe, I've got older and wiser (yes to the former, jury out on the latter) and the alchemy I first discovered in 2005 wouldn't still be there...
As if.
And I knew I would have no worries from the first line of the first essay 'The Reindeer Cave'
'You're sheltering in a cave, thinking about the Ice Age...'
That first essay calibrated my senses, eased me away from the present and back in time. I thought about it, imagined it, sensed it, knew it.
This was all excellent preparation for a much longer journey to the Alaskan village of Quinhagak where Kathleen Jamie joins an archaeological dig. As the tundra melts artefacts are surfacing but this recovery of the past is not without controversy...is it unwarranted interference with the dead, or an opportunity for the young to learn about a heritage that has been lost to them for a generation or more.
There will be a return to Orkney for another dig...more surfacing...
And a piece I loved with a passion 'The Inevitable Pagoda' about those shards of crockery so often found in a ploughed field, or in our case the garden and yes, there is always the pagoda from the Willow Pattern
Each is a glimpse of a life and a time. It begins to sound like a clamour rising like mist from an empty field. All the stories, the voices, the dead...'
You look out over the new-ploughed acres as over human history, and the next field too and the next, all the fields...
Ach.
They fill your hands, these fragments, these stories, but with a wide gesture, you cast them back across the field.'
Whilst Kathleen Jamie casts her pieces back into the field ours are kept in a jar. Our stories have surfaced over twenty-five years of digging this garden and we have kept them in a jar because, from the census returns, we 'know' the people who may have touched them...
John and Betsy Geake (both born in the 1790s) or maybe it was their granddaughter Alice who dropped the plate.
Maybe Ann Hendy threw a dish at husband William...
Honestly the stories we invent.
And then Surfacing, the essay of the title...
'You're losing their voices. When did that happen? You're forgetting the sound of your mother's voice, and your grandmother's...and today you realise you can't quite bring their voices to mind...'
My eyes actually welled up at this.
Never so true.
And when Kathleen Jamie mentions that her grandmother had diphtheria as a small child a memory of my own surfaced out of absolutely nowhere... that my mum had also had diphtheria as a baby in Liverpool in the mid-1920s and I knew next to nothing about it, and never will....
'And where did they put her, to isolate her and her infection in that crowded house? You can't reach her now to ask.'
How on earth did my mum survive that.
And as I turn the final page on Surfacing I realise that thankfully, whilst I may have got older, so has Kathleen Jamie. She too has surfaced, her memories surface as do mine, the experiences that are universal for so many of us; the empty nest and independent children (and in my case barn owls too) the loss of her father, that sense of time regained as your family responsibilities shift and what to do with it, the opportunities that present themselves, the chance to see and do new and different things and view them in a changed light. And to view the past in a changed light.
In a recent interview Kathleen Jamie suggests that she is not an emotional person and I suspect this might be a favourable asset for an essayist. Maybe it leaves plenty of space for the reader's emotions to flood in, because mine have and will continue to do as I spend time unlocking everything that this book holds. I will read it over and again. It will hold different meaning and relevance each time I pick it up and I will be grateful that such writers exist.
If you are new to the writing of Kathleen Jamie I can promise you these are books for our times. Someone prepared to look at the world without the rose-tints and reveal what matters.
Books that will make you see and think differently.
And if you know Kathleen Jamie's writing and had been wondering about this one, dither no more, you need it on your shelf.
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