Gaelic Stories
There's a YouTuber I like called Van Neistat. He's one brother of the Neistat Brothers. The other brother is Casey. Casey Neistat.
Here's a link to Van Neistat's YouTube Channel - The Spirited Man. In it he explores his "analog, self-reliant life."
I like the way he uses archive. He's built up an enormous archive over years of filming what seem to be inconsequential moments in his life. Small moments.
If you were to look at most of these moments in isolation, you might ask the value of them. Filming himself walking along streets in New York. Filming his wee son riding a bicycle. Filming himself being sad. Being wild with anger.
But time does something to them. Small moments which you document almost without thinking can with time become precious. Sometimes you can catch the small moments which set the course of your life. When you set them against newer images, the passing of time becomes visible. Starkly so.
I've been thinking of the time I met musician, folklorist and photographer Margaret Fay Shaw. I wrote a post about Margaret Fay Shaw on my other blog. I was lucky enough to direct a documentary about her. She was 98 years old at the time. She would do some interviewing, get up, play some piano, bring a tray of drams in at eleven in the morning, tell stories. It was a fine shoot.
She was born in 1903 in Pennsylvania to a family with money. She was orphaned and in the 20s she travelled to attend school in Scotland, in Helensburgh. Then she came across the work of Marjory Kennedy-Fraser, who had collected and arranged Gaelic songs. It inspired her to find out more.
Margaret Fay Shaw went to the source. She travelled to South Uist in the 1920s to learn Gaelic. I can imagine that it wasn't an easy journey. I imagine that plenty of people questioned what she was doing. A young woman from Pennsylvania from a family with money, living in a blackhouse. Using her hard won musical talent to notate Gaelic songs. Luckily for us, she was "made of Pennsylvania steel."
The book 'Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist" came out of that. It is a jewel.
It is something I have been thinking of. Documenting and recording people who are here now. I have done enough of it to realise that over time, the voices of these people also become golden.
I do not know what goes into making writers. I can see looking back at a lot of my work, there is a connection to Gaelic stories. What would my work have been like if I hadn't been born there, brought up with Gaelic? Would I be writing at all? I am partly a writer because I saw other people close to me doing this work and I realised - I'm allowed to do this.
Lately I have been trying to depeen my knowledge. I am doing an MSC in Material Culture. I am learning how to read the land better, and how to dig where I stand. What I find is, the ground where we stand has unlimited stories for a writer.
I can also see that without people like Margaret Fay Shaw, so much would have been lost. And it has made me think that developing a personal archive and trying to find value in the small things which sometimes miss my attention is important. We maybe always have a tendency to think things will be here when we want them to be. But sometimes, they are gone before we realise we need them.
What is the ground you are standing on? What do you draw from it and what has made you a writer or artist?
Links to some other posts on gaelic.blog.
Gaelic Lullabies - Gaelic Lullabies are not just for putting children to sleep. Margaret Fay Shaw collected many tàlaidhean - a form of song that let women talk about subjects they weren't at the time supposed to - politics, for example.
Sùlaisgeir after the Second World War - In 1995, I recorded interviews with four men who had returned from the Second World War and taken part in the Sùlaisgeir tradition in Ness.
Taigh 'An Fiosaich - A house on the moor in Lewis, surrounded on three sides by enormous cliffs, built by a baptist minister. It's a great story.