The Buddha of Grimshader

TORCUIL MacRATH of Grimshader celebrates his 80th birthday this year. He remains one of Gaeldom’s most original poets and scholars yet his work is little known outside of Lewis and among the readership of the now silent Gaelic literary journal, Gairm. PETER URPETH met the Bard in his Grimshader home on the Isle of Lewis.

IT WAS ON one of those days that winter seems to have borrowed from springtime that I first drove down to Grimshader to meet Torcuil MacRath. The day was washed with yellow sunlight and a cold sea breeze, it was ‘a good drying day’, as they used to say in the islands.

When I arrived at his house, which is slightly elevated above the road on a small hillock so as to give a fine view of Lochs and out toward the Minch, I stood with Torcuil, looking from his walled garden out over the neighbouring sealoch, watching as the salmon farmer’s boats fussed around the cages, bothered by seagulls.

“That’s Loch Urnabhaigh,” said Torcuil, “Urna is an Old Norse word for a bend in the coastline. The maps have that wrong when they call it Loch Grimshader.” Then Torcuil points to the freshwater loch on the other side of the road: “That’s the real Loch Grimshader,” he says. “It’s a freshwater loch. I have an old ordnance map that has them both called Loch Grimshader, and you know when you see that that something is wrong.”

Torcuil passes me a set of binoculars, and says that if I look between the cleft in the low hills some way before us over the sealoch, I can see the mainland mountains. As I look out into the thin mist that clings to the sea, I think that, in a similar way, Torcuil MacRath, writer, historian, philosopher – Bard Baile – peers between the clefts in contemporary Gaelic culture; peers back through the gaps in modern life toward the old culture of the Gael that to him is as large and real on the horizon of our times as those distant mountains were to me on that late winter’s day.

To categorise Torcuil’s work as being fiction or non-fiction, bardail or eachdraidheil (poetic or historical) work, would be to miss the point of the ancient origins of the Gaelic Bardic tradition, where no such distinction can be drawn, and with which Torcuil’s work has a resounding, sympathetic resonance.

But in many also, Torcuil’s work harks back even beyond the familiar construction of the Bardic Tradition to the filidh, the pre-Bard poets whose work was more self-consciously spiritual and linked to nature, more truly shamanic in the real sense of the word – predictive, interventional, ecstatic, an access point to the natural world and beyond.

Through it all Torcuil remains something of a paradox. He is a follower of the Church of Scotland, possessing a faith that seems immutable, yet he bemoans the influence that some strands of Christianity have had on his fellow Gaels, and switches easily between talk of the second sight  and other ancient beliefs and practises that were frowned upon by the Presbyterian church that for many took a stranglehold on the old culture of the Gael, and of a relationship with the natural world that is possibly close to the early Celtic Christian faith.

His thinking puts him closer to Shamanism, in a communion and dialogue with the whole of nature. Torcuil’s writing reflects a mind that knows no boundaries, geographic, social or spiritual, and yet he is rooted, deep and solid as heather, in the culture and language of the Gael.

Torcuil MacRath was born 80 years ago in Grimshader, and still lives on the site of the croft house in which he was born. His mother and father worked at the fishing at a time when Loch Urnabhaigh was full of herring boats, and Torcuil points out that it was the fishing that kept them going in the lean years of the 1930s.

He went to Grimshader School, which still stands opposite the house, and endured treatment he compares to the concentration camps. “It wasn’t a school he says,” he says, “you were beaten every other day and as far as I was concerned the problems there started on day one.  I had my left hand strapped to my leg to stop me from writing with that hand and to this day I cannot write with that hand. I was a bricky and a joiner and I did all that with my left hand, but I can’t write with my left hand to this day.”

English was, of course, the language of the classroom, and Gaelic the language of that playground. “The impression was given to us that the Gaelic language was of no use,” says Torcuil. But then again, Torcuil reveals that he had a great grandmother who was English, and her name was – Thatcher. As Torcuil says: “You see, that’s where the badness came from!”

We sit now in Torcuil’s living room, peats burn on the open fire and the stories begin to flow. One, concerning the second sight, seems relevant to the troubles of the current day. “There was a man living here, Donald MacLeod, called “Noi”, now he had the second sight,” begins Torcuil, slightly bent forward in his chair, accompanying his words with a steady, quiet thump of his hand on the arm of the chair, “and he was hearing this noise and he couldn’t understand what it was. He was saying that the noise was so close. Now, unless I am mistaken he was hearing the low-flying jet aircraft long before we heard them.”

Torcuil served in America recommissioning ships in WWII, and it was there that he encountered the work of writer Henry Thoreau, and became familiar with the manner in which Thoreau drew on the history and culture of the Native Americans, na Daoine Ruadh.

“Well, you see, I found that interesting because a lot of the MacRaths married into the Red Indians, and there is a lot of Red Indian blood in this island, particularly on the west side, you can still see them. I knew a fellow from this village who was over in America for years and years and, seemingly, the majority of the Gaelic speakers took very well to the Red Indians.

“Although, you see, if you have been chased off your land it seems that you have a tendency to chase other people off the land, too. So that was happening, but on the whole Gaelic speakers and the Red Indians got on very well. Well, Thoreau was always writing about the Red Indians and so I looked into them.”

But it was not until many years later that Torcuil himself took up the pen and began to write. “I always had an itch for writing, but I never got down to it. When I was working as the postman I didn’t get the time but when I started at Arnish [the oil-rig fabrication yard] we had a lot of time on our hands there and I started to write Gaelic.

“I bought that little Gaelic dictionary, Abair, and I found that I knew how to write in Gaelic without knowing it, the grammar and so on. The first attempt I made I wrote to the newspaper and I kept a note of the mistakes I had made. And I sent then an article to Gairm, and I told Derrick Thompson, the editor, about the situation and he said to me that I didn’t need to worry about my Gaelic, and that was a great boost.”

However, the bardach came to him unexpectedly. On the way home from Arnish one night a poem came to him, out of the blue, and the rhythm and metre for it came from the sound of the car wheels on the road. Gairm published that poem, and then Ronald Black included that piece and another in the anthology An Tuil.

“I read a lot of bardach and many of those writers are what I would call gobhair na facal, word-smiths, they weave their words but they never rhyme, and I think that a bard like Murdo MacFarlane, will be known when nobody will be reading these poets. You see, if it doesn’t rhythm and you can’t sing it, it is only ever going to be in libraries. It is not going to be in people’s mouths. Now, they called Murdo MacFarlane a bard baile, but it is the bard baile that is going to be heard.”

As for his own inspiration, Torcuil says that his poems come to him without his seeking. Most are in his head when he wakes in the morning, and with a little tidying when written out, they are complete.

“Many people would say that that kind of thing is Shamanic,” says Torcuil. “People use that term in a loose kind of way, but I do see this as something that comes from beyond me. If I wanted to sit down and write a poem, I couldn’t do it. I see it as something that is beyond me. They just come, and that’s it.”

“From where do they come?,” I ask him.

“Well, that’s a question!” he replies. “I think that there is something beyond the mind that comes in, now and again.”

“Is that rooted in Christianity?” I ask.

“Well, I have my doubts about the Church. That there is another world, I have no doubt, and I suspect that the divide between this world and the other one is not that great. I suspect that because of certain incidents in my own life. There is that something that is beyond you that is the most important.”

“Is that allied to premonitions, or the second-sight?” I ask.

“Yes, it is linked to that, but apart from that I have this feeling of otherness, particularly in respect of nature. I have this feeling that this life is just a section of the whole, and a section that is probably not at all important as all that. Sometimes, nature just captures me unawares. It is not something that I can look for and find, it just comes. It is not something that I can say ‘I have that thing’. And I was aware of this when I was a young boy and, you see, education put it out of my mind. I never realised I had this thing until it came back to me in later life and then I realised that I had had this thing before.”

“Does this happen feeling occur anywhere, anytime?” I ask.

“Well, I have a suspicion that it happens when your mind is blank. I got some inkling of it when I read Henry Thoreau. Now, he was very close to nature and he said that the way to catch Nature is with a glance of the eye, catch it unawares. But I don’t agree with that. I think nature catches you unawares. So I don’t agree with him, but we are talking about the same thing. I know what he is talking about. For me, I have these incidents with nature that come like an electric shock. It takes your breath away. It is beyond understanding.

“I remember walking out there toward that loch and it came on me like an electric shock. It was as though the place was alive.”

“Was that in your family, from the past?” I ask.

“Well, I don’t think so. I think that religion killed all that. The sort of theological claptrap that was going on around here killed it,” he replied.

“But the problem is,” he continued, “there is so much confusion in the modern world, so much comes between you and all these things, but I am certain that a lot of the people here had it, but they weren’t talking about it. They were talking about the second sight, right enough, but this isn’t the second sight at all. I can’t give it a name. There is an article on this in my book, An Cearcall, and I didn’t give it a name then.

“Well, Alastair MacIntosh, the writer, asked me if I could give it a name, and I said I couldn’t. Well, he said I was a bit of a Buddha, as I don’t name anything! But I find that it gives you a lot of confidence when you write to know that there is something bigger than yourself. I certainly think that the Red Indians had this, and the people here did, too, but they didn’t talk about it.

“I noticed a big difference in people that I knew that had been born before 1914, and the next generation. It is difficult to pinpoint, but I will say that they were more secure, in many ways, more balanced.

“You see,” he continued, “I think that a lot of people, once they lost their Gaelic language they lost their identity and they became very easily blown off-course.”

Torcuil MacRath’s second collection of essays ‘An Cearcall’ is published by Acair, price £5.99.

© Peter Urpeth, 2003