Ball game III

Reading poetry always makes me feel like I'm watching Zinedine Zidane in his prime. Even in the slow motion replays, I can't see how he did it.

It's frustrating. Prose flows freely from my fingers. But I couldn't write a good poem if you promised me endless wealth and nubile women for doing it. Yet my sister turns out wonderful stuff, especially now she's retired from the classroom.

Then there's Gregor Steele, who I'd expect to possess similar skills to mine, since he's a physicist, teacher and writer too. But Gregor is a published poet, something I will never be. He's even been interviewed about his poetry, during which, when asked where he had grown up, he replied: 

"Have you read my poems? I haven’t grown up yet." 

And that got me wondering. 

Perhaps - though I can see my mum's eyebrows rise at the thought - I am too mature and sensible to write poetry. Maybe you have to look at the world through the eyes of a child to do it well. 

I know it's true in science. Kids are curious and creative, the traits a scientist needs most, and lots of scientists have childlike qualities that annoy their husbands, wives and partners.

My son tells me it's also true in art and Pablo Picasso agreed with him. "Every child is an artist," he said. "The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” 

So this morning I asked my sister to talk to me briefly about the process of writing a poem, and with some reluctance she did so. Helen has this paranoid fear that I'm going to write down everything she says.

"I'm often inspired by something visual," she tells me, stroking the cat in her lap to help her think. "So I try to paint pictures and make connections using the absolute best words I can find. 

"That's not what all poets do, mind you. A lot of poetry is about introspection and emotion. I'm interested in emotions but not to the same extent as many poets."

"Do you try to see things through the eyes of a child?" I ask and she hesitates. 

"I'm not sure about that," she says. "Poetry writing is quite artificial. There's craft to it as well as art and you have to learn to do it well. Kids can reel off rhymes and it's a great way to teach literacy. But it's not poetry." 

"Now I'm confused," I say, scratching my head to emphasise the point. "What makes the kids' stuff just rhyme while yours is poetry?"

"I didn't say they couldn't write poetry," she says. "They can learn and I used to love teaching them. You get amazing stuff out of kids' heads. As I said, it's about trying out words and phrases, choosing the best and connecting ideas." 

"So once you've got a piece of writing, is there something you can point to that makes this one a poem and that one just a rhyme?"

"See now you're asking me the same question you keep asking Dug," she says, shifting in her chair and getting a dirty look from the cat. "'What is art?'"

"I know and he's getting impatient with me too," I say. "Last time he said it would take too long to explain, because I'm not an artist. And he didn't want to try because thought can hamper creativity."

"That makes sense," she says. "Self-consciousness is good but not too much of it. Words and phrases often pop into my head from who knows where. Dug talks a lot about flow and I know what he means. Don't you?"

"I do in football," I say. "But when it comes to poetry I don't even know where to look for the tap."

She glances down at the cat, scratches his ear, then looks up and smiles. "Let me explain it using something you understand," she says. "You like that Ridley Scott film Black Rain, don't you?"

"I do," I say. "Great soundtrack and I love the bull-at-a-gate way the hero goes at problems."

"What's that line of his I've heard you quote?" she prompts and I play a few in my head and choose the likeliest.   

"'Sometimes you got to forget your head and grab your balls,'" I say.

"Go away and try that," she says. "And stop asking so many questions."

To be or not to be - who cares?

My sister is a big Shakespeare fan. Me, not so much.

"Hamlet is a long evening of nothing happening, at the end of which everybody dies," I tell her, as we're sat in the living room of her house, during a long evening of nothing happening, at the end of which nobody dies.

"I'd rather be stuck in a lift for the weekend with Noel Edmonds than sit through four hours of Hamlet's self-obsessed chuntering," I say.

"No you wouldn't," she says.

"No, I wouldn't," I say. "But it's close." 

"Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet - these are wonderful plays," she says. "A Midsummer Night's Dream is packed with poetry."

"I'll give you that," I say. "'I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows...' Lovely stuff." 

"'Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine...,'" she says. "The first time the teacher read that to us, it sent shivers up my spine."

"But you need more than evocative words and clever rhymes," I say.

"Like what?" she says. 

"Like plot," I say. "Humour. How about a happy ending once in a while? I'm with John Cleese. You can be serious without being solemn."

"I think when you're young you're drawn to that dark side," she says. "I know I was. I read a lot of other serious writers like Graham Greene. All that tragedy to other people is comforting when you're struggling with adolescence. 

"And there is humour in Shakespeare," she says. "For a long time after his death he wasn't taken seriously by critics, because he mixed humour with tragedy. But humour doesn't last. You think people will laugh at Peter Kay's jokes in five hundred years?"

"Dunno why they laugh at them now," I say. "But it's not just the depressing endings and black-hearted behaviour. It's how Shakespeare says the same thing in forty different ways. There's a preening quality to that. He reminds me of Paul Jones."

"Who?" she says.  

"Blues singer. You thought he was lovely when you were 14."

"So I did," she says. "He was."

"Well he's still performing and my pal Iain tells me he's one of the best harmonica players in the world. But he's got a narcissistic personality that comes through somehow in his music. Don't ask me how.

"I get the same feeling with Buddy Rich on drums and Shakespeare with words. It's like 'Look at me; I'm wonderful.' It damages the art by drawing attention to the artist."

"But Shakespeare is so inventive," she says. "I love that about him. Half the clichés in the English language weren't clichés then. He made them up. Language and literature would be hugely impoverished if Shakespeare had never written a thing."

"I'm not so sure," I say. "Dickens is just as fluent, inventive and articulate. But what he's got is humour in his phrasing and rhythms. And he says something once and moves on. He's absorbed in the story, same as you are. He's like Steve Gadd on drums or Dylan on the harmonica."

"I can't take all the dirt and squalor in Dickens," she says. "It's repulsive."

"I see," I say. "Murder, suicide, rape and incest are fine in Shakespeare. But you can't take dirty fingernails in Dickens?"
  
"No I can't," she says. "The one thing I agree with you about is Hamlet. It's not a great plot and the hero does go on a bit, I'll give you that. The best criticism of Hamlet I ever read was in a school essay by your son David."

"Now he is clever," I say.

"Funny too," she says. "His essay had just one sentence in it. His teacher wasn't impressed, but I thought it was great."

"Yeah, what did he say?" 

"'Hamlet is a big girl's blouse."

Maxwell's house

Forty years in the navy have given Duncan Ferguson a salty sense of humour and a bluff way with fools.

"Is it a Scots Pine?" I ask, as he leads the large party of visitors on his Glenlair estate to a towering evergreen, by the side of the track near the old stables.

"Good heavens no," he barks. "It's a Wellingtonia*. They were planted in large estates up and down the country, in memory of the Duke of Wellington."

"So that tree was alive when James was a boy then?" I say, not having the sense to shut up and fade into the background.

"What's that?" he says, the hint of a smile on his face, his left hand cupped behind his ear. "You were a boy then?"

I shake my head and struggle on. "When James Clerk Maxwell was a boy, that tree would have been growing there," I say. "He would have played around it?"

"Of course he would," he tells me, marching off towards the stables, followed by his fascinated entourage.

For Captain Ferguson is a man on a mission. 

The estate he grew up on, and still occupies, was once home to one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) played on the same grass and paddled in the same streams as young Duncan did when he was a boy, seventy summers ago. 

It's a name known to every physicist and engineer - and almost nobody else. "The whole of modern technology is based on the discoveries of James Clerk Maxwell," the Captain had explained at the start of our tour, outside the blackened stone of the old house, gutted by fire in 1929.

"But what do you think of when you hear about Maxwell's house?"

"Coffee," says a brave soul from the crowd.

"Coffee!" agrees the Captain, with a look of disgust. "It's a disgrace. We Scots can be very ignorant." 

Not wishing to appear any more so, and having already seen the stables, I peel off and head in the opposite direction, towards the Lair burn that runs below and behind the old buildings. 

The inspiration Maxwell gained, along this little stream, from waves on water and light on leaves has been captured lovingly by Howie Firth.

But the man himself had put pen to paper long before, and recorded a few of the feelings the stream inspired in him: 

"Where the mavis builds her nest,
And finds both work and rest,
In the bush she loves the best,
On our ain burnside."

As I wander the banks of the Lair, lush at this time of year, my mind drifts back to the most memorable lecture of my student days. Doc Adam, a crusty, tobacco-stained physicist, whose gruff ways concealed kindness, had been weeks carefully placing little pieces of scaffolding to help us ascend the edifice of Maxwell's equations. 

Then at two o'clock on a wet Wednesday, without any preliminaries, he walked briskly into the lecture-theatre and wrote the differential form of Maxwell's equations on the board. A few minutes of manipulation and he had derived the wave equations for the electric and magnetic fields in free space, and shown that they travelled at the speed of light.

It was a moment of breathtaking beauty, when the structure of the physical world seemed set to reveal itself to those of us who had taken the time to learn its laws and language. 

It didn't. That was the peak of clarity for me. The following term I encountered quantum mechanics and my future wife, a combination that soon dispelled any sense of certainty or reason. Insights nowadays are far outnumbered by foggy confusions. 

But as my eyes focus on unfamiliar surroundings and I discover I'm lost in the woods again, I realise something, at least, with certainty. I am still grateful to James Clerk Maxwell for the glimpse of profound understanding he gave me, so long ago.

* The giant redwood, Sequoiadendron giganteum, is the largest tree by volume in the world. It can grow to 95 metres tall and live for 3000 years. On its introduction to Britain in 1853, the species was briefly named Wellingtonia gigantea, after the recently deceased Duke of Wellington - until it was pointed out that the name was invalid. Wellingtonia had already been used for another plant. The name persists, however, particularly in England.