Magritte Macphail
It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of the world.
Art for me is not an end in itself, but a means of evoking that mystery.
René Magritte, on putting seemingly unrelated objects together in juxtaposition.
A rusting this,
a dented, pot shaped that,
an oatgrinder, half a caravan
the other half
slumped, sinking in the field,
sprouting a telly,
a welly
all evoking
the essential mystery
of the world
(west highland office)
and scattering it
across the croft,
like the rusted parts
of an old Trabant.
But, lone piper
of the unexplained,
do we need surrealism
and its strange signs?
We have the fairy mounds,
the circles,
fluctuating broadband.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2014. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2014 was Roderick Watson.
Author’s note:
The painting related poems of a friend, who is also a visual artist, first got me interested in the Surrealists. The title may be something of an example of the juxtapositions mentioned in the quote from Magritte (a name that may remind some Scottish readers of ‘Margaret’). The details? For years a neighbour had an old Trabant on his croft, crumbling away. Such crumbling vehicles were once a feature of more than a few crofts on the Isle of Mull; which often contain other oddities sharing space. There is an old oat grinder standing by the house where I live. I suppose I may have had the small stone circle at Loch Buie in mind at the time of writing. Things improve, but broadband was somewhat unsteady in the gale season and, well, other times. The question is only semi-serious. Which is a way of saying that it is seriously unserious, or unseriously serious.
