Stones and the women

Stone has been on my mind, not just because stone is so visible in drystone walls and flagstone and boulder and rock and pebble, not just because one is surrounded by the stern silent stoniness, the impassiveness of stone, and not by trees (where is my Maytime of beechen green and shadows numberless?) but because it all reminds me of once reading a passage from a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid, On a Raised Beach, extracts I read in a book about Metaphysics by Donald M MacKinnon, one of those revelatory books that restore your faith in philosophy because you know you are palpably in the presence of a poetic intelligence among so much vacant, directionless, visionless analysis. I once heard one of the four or five women philosophers who flourished from the late fifties, Anscombe, Foot, Warnock, Murdoch, Midgley, I cannot remember which, probably not Anscombe, who was asked in an interview why they were so different from the male philosophers of their generation. Oh, the men had all gone off to the war, and we were taught by MacKinnon. I cannot really remember how I came upon the book, maybe it was a rare moment of browsing in the university library, anyway, it was wonderful and gripping and it had this long passage from MacDiarmid at the end. Perhaps the ubiquitous presence of stone on this rocky island made me think of McKinnon again, made me think of the experience of reading him and its effect on my imagination, enabled by MacDiarmid. I found the book on the internet and it arrived yesterday and at once I realised how tricksy imagination can also be, because the extract was so much shorter than I remembered it. In fact, at first I couldn't find it. At last I came to it and read it again, and since it was so long ago, it was as for the first time, and very quickly I had to throw it down because there were lines I could not read with conviction. That itself is a strange experience, reading bad verse becomes impossible, I can feel the badness in my bones and I rebel with unexpected violence, or maybe it's just embarrassment, I remember having to stop reading out loud a passage from Yeats because it was so bad, the conviction drained at once from my voice ...

The inward gates of a bird are always open.

It does not know how to shut them.

That is the secret of its song,

But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.

I look at these stones and know little about them,

But I know their gates are open too,

Always open, far longer open, than any bird's can be,

That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer

Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,

Though through them no man can see.

Perhaps it is the McGonigle quality of the last three lines, and maybe it would be better if I knew what it was for birds or stones or men to have their inward gates open. Anyway, it does improve and perhaps I am unjust, but what remained in my imagination, and was not found now, was the echo and repetition of the word, stone, stone, stone, aeons, as he says, of stone, upon whose surfaces the residue of extinct humanity dries and shrivels like seaweed in the sun.