On
Marius Kociejowski’s The Quantum of
Happiness
By
David Hackbridge Johnson
Man and wife walk towards a distant
shore. But how distant, or rather how
close, is it? There are cliffs somewhere
to avoid, but where exactly is the lip hanging over oblivion? A mist descends and they lose sight of each
other, becoming pale ghosts indistinguishable from low clouds. Only by groping towards invisible compass
points do they catch sight of each other – their ‘blue-grey silhouettes’[1]
becoming at last reassuringly corporeal.
The man and wife happy to catch sight of each other are Marius and
Bobbie Kociejowski. This episode which I
have paraphrased from the former’s book, The
Quantum of Happiness, is used as a metaphor for the obfuscation of entire histories,
coming as it does after a brief history of the remote Caithness coastal village
of Balbea, a village cleared of its population with gleeful malice by the
factors of landowners in the 19th century.
The disappearance and emergence from mist might be a useful metaphor for
Kociejowski’s book, since he seeks to explore the nature of the Scottish
islands of Lewis and South Uist, not exactly as history, not as any kind of
reliable travelogue, but more as a search for the tentative locations of the
soul of the land and its people. The concept
of the soul is hardly likely to be pinned down easily, and so it proves as Kociejowski
surveys the islands in a kind of kaleidoscope of flora, fauna, poetry, waves,
almost forgotten language, and the singing of the psalms on the sea in
boats. All the qualities of Kociejowski’s
previous books are present: his gentle rather than insistent presence, his quasi-innocence
abroad stumbling through mists he penetrates almost by accident, his deep
interest in the paradox of remote voices that don't regard themselves as remote
– London being indescribably remote to Hebrideans. Above all it is Kociejowski’s ability to
listen that gives generous space to the people he meets both through the pages
of landscape and history, and through the person sitting opposite him in croft
or on a beach looking out to formations of waves that the native understands
and the writer seeks to transcribe with a pen gradually coming to terms with
the beauty and peril of water. You can’t
take a boat from Caithness to Lewis – you have to go from Ullapool, a port in
Ross and Cromarty. The dustwrapper of
Kociejowski’s book shows a little rowing boat coming to shore amid swirling
waves – will it make it?
Reviewing a book such as this is no
easy matter since Kociejowski does not breakdown his arena of action into
chronologies or ruthlessly demarcated subject matter, rather it is that
individual strands are woven together in the manner of tartan cloth, the
striking yellow and bold black of MacLeod – a prominent Hebridean clan, or the
muted greys and blues of South Uist, with perhaps a dozen other subtle shades
implicated by thread, movement and shadow.
In this way Kociejowski weaves together each section of the book so that
it might show a given element through its associated threads. Storytellers – he meets many – sometimes
cover similar ground but at a distance of several chapters. In addition to animating colourful historical
figures, folk singers, craftspeople, and sailors, Kociejowski makes words
matter – he pursues meaning to the roots as if making a time machine out of
syllables in order to get back to a primordial time where the souls of words
are born. The book begins with an
etymological discourse on owls, yet one infused with poetic imaginings. Similarly with apples – he surrounds them
with tales and associations derived from both meaning and mythology. Later swans appear in South Uist, only to be
mauled by sea eagles. This makes Kociejowski’s
book sound more fanciful than it is, for in addition to the complex subtleties
of mythology, it is full of rollicking good tales, unbelievable incidents, illuminating
spirituality and low down cruelty.
Kociejowski has been particularly
successful in responding to music in a way that is sensitive to both structure
and feeling without having recourse to overwrought technical language. He feels music like one who might write it. Sometimes he is forced to confront the
attempted erasure of music by overzealous priests.[2] This distrust towards communal entertainment
in music and dancing is best symbolized by the comforting communal fire placed
in the centre of the floor that existed for uncountable years before the coming
of religion which replaced it with the fire of damnation on strict Calvinist
lines – the warmth of togetherness replaced with the isolation of a burning
personal hell. As the Gaelic poet from
Lewis, Derick Thomson says, ‘replacing the fire in the centre of the floor,
which is a social fire, with religious hellfire.’[3] Kociejowski’s
description of psalm singing is both technical and spiritual, but he moves
quickly to a comparison between a particular style of singing to the natural world
within which it has its expression – ‘the correlation between the swelling and
subsiding of Gaelic psalm singing, the natural sounds of the island and of what
the island is made.’[4] Not everyone is captivated by Gaelic psalm
singing, so it is generous of Kociejowski to include a rather splendid piece of
acidic criticism from one Elizabeth Grant who describes ‘serious severe
screaming’ that causes dogs and babies to bark and cry.[5]
From the baffled ears of Elizabeth
Grant, Kociejowski move to the more redemptive view of Joseph Mainzer, a
German-born singing teacher and coal miner, who after several run-ins with the
authorities due to the subversive nature of his work, ended up in Edinburgh
where he became besotted with all things Scottish, writing his praiseworthy
tome, The Gaelic Psalm Tunes of Ross-shire,
and the neighbouring counties, in 1844.
Like an outsider who can never quite get inside, Mainzer emphasizes the
strangeness, ‘the secret and mysterious influences’ that the music held for
him.[6] Such was the interconnectedness between
singing, church, and the sea, that services would sometimes begin on the boats
that took parishioners from home to church. It is not hard to imagine a living
breathing link between the multifarious movement of waves under the boat and
the heterophonic singing that buoys it on its way to shore. Kociejowski puts it in this way: ‘As they
made their way in those boats, singing psalms, the sonic properties created in
nature’s amphitheatre were such that the sound they made could be heard for
miles.’[7]
At some point the singing in boats
stopped. Something essential becomes an
essence, a concentrated remnant of something become inert, preserved in the
aspic of nostalgia. Yet in a remarkable
resuscitation, psalm singing has returned to the islands by means of the Psalm
Boat Project. Waves of voices over waves
of the sea once more echo through the air.
An unwound thread is wound again to make it strong. There are arguments to be had here about
whether something that is rejuvenated as a project can really reach a past when
its activities were taken as a given.
Has the thread actually broken and is now tied together with a knot that
could slip at any moment? Such cultural
reclamations are always on a knife-edge – if interest flags or funding is not
forthcoming, the project sinks beneath the waves. But if the soul of an island is important, a
boat might be its receptacle, as suggested at by sailor and artist, Ian
Stephen.[8]
Much of the success of The Quantum of Happiness depends on the
quality of the stories Kociejowski is able to extract from those he meets on
the islands, as well as his asides and meditations which act as forms of
continuity. The book must contain well
over a hundred stories, some of them are told from different perspectives in a
kind of Cubist multi-narrative, others require complex genealogies to fix
individual tales within a continuum of genes.
There are many tales of a spiritual nature barely touched by organised
religion – indeed there is often an uneasy relationship between Calvinistic or
Catholic worship, and pre-Christian elements featuring spirits, benign or
malicious, and the ever-present hovering of the Evil Eye, this last entity recalling
passages from The Dream Hunters of
Corsica by Dorothy Carrington.
Any outsider seeking a temporary entry
visa to a culture alien to them is at the mercy of their hosts, and Hebrideans
prove mightily generous in this regard.
There is a curious incident where a rather one-sided flyting occurs – an
episode with renowned author and activist, Alastair McIntosh, presented as a
marvellously free-wheeling burlesque. Another host prefers the sound of the
television turned up full volume to the continuation of a potentially
interesting anthropological discussion with the deafened visitor. A particular phenomenon much noted by Kociejowski,
is the way in which certain storytellers, in recalling events from as many as
200 years ago, tell of them in a manner that suggests that the story only ended
a few weeks ago, or might even still be going on in the next room. There is a sense in which history is like a
concertina with the decades being telescoped so that generations far apart rub
together within the same stone walls and with the same flames flickering in the
hearth. This conjugation of past and
present is no more starkly demonstrated by the discovery of skeletons buried
under the floors of houses dating back to the Bronze Age. Modern burial customs put the dead far from
us, but when did this happen, when did the custom of keeping the bones of the
loved ones close by, end?
Lest it be thought that the people of
the islands can be neatly captured in hagiographies, there are a fair share of
villains: a nineteenth century mass murderer, Mac an t-Srònaich, who may have
been merely a nuisance rather like the legendary London-based Spring-heeled
Jack, ghastly factors who took a delight in driving crofters from tiny
farmsteads, and the loathed Ferguson family, members of whom were quite happy
to literally take the food out of the mouths of their underlings, yet from
whose stem sprang two sisters who proved vital to the folk song collector
Margaret Fay Shaw, who lived with them for several years, mining their vocal chords
for waulking songs and other folk material.[9] Gems hidden among the dreadful.
As well as all else suggested by the
book, Kociejowski conjures a poetic
landscape through descriptions of landscape and mankind’s moulding of it,
through the animals that populate it with their unknowable spirits, and being a
poet himself, by the spells of poets. He
frequently draws upon important Hebridean poets such as Sorley MacLean from
Skye, and Iain Crichton Smith and Derick Thomson, whose early lives were spent
on Lewis, but whose later trajectories led them away from a culture that they
kept alive by indelible memories.
Perhaps like James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, they gained additional
perspectives from a distance that they might not have had with the island under
their noses – three Gaelic poets thrown into the central melting pots of Glasgow,
Edinburgh and Aberdeen, where Lowland language predominated, but against which
they were able to prevail, in poetry at least if not in daily conversation. Kociejowski’s conversations with folk singer
Mary Smith (Màiri Nic a' Ghobhainn), offer the most telling example of how the
core of a language survives in a person far from home and living in a culture
where not one other person speaks Gaelic.
To paraphrase from Smith: a Gaelic speaker leaves the Isle of Lewis for
America, marries and has children. He
never speaks Gaelic in America since there is no one else there who can, but
after becoming ill he can't remember any English and his family haven't a clue
what he is saying. The man dies speaking
Gaelic, the bedrock of his articulation is the last thing that survives of him,
and the intervening tongue is erased.[10]
Songs not only help to fix a language
but also help to fix historical events not otherwise recorded in textbooks or
contemporaneous newspaper reports – tales of healing and cursing, micro-histories
culled from the dire totality of The Clearances, farmland falling fallow due to
the lack of an heir. The stories are an
amalgam of fact and folklore – something as unlikely as a curse that sends
hapless daughters flapping their arms or squawking like seagulls, can have its
space in a real history of conflict between families. The history preserved in the contours of
songs is not of the type amenable to hard and fast evidence, rather there is a
relationship between song, story and history in the manner of musical
variations on a theme. The intricacies
of the supposedly simple interactions between two antagonists can become a
branching narrative with twigs and leaves heading out in all directions, where
the wind takes them to the next recipient in the manner of Chinese
whispers. In this type of context
verisimilitude is at the mercy of prevailing currents. Kociejowski seeks to follow as many as he
can.
What happens when stories remain
untold is related in the chapter called ‘The White Road’ wherein is the
tantalizing history of Kociejowski’s attempt to meet the eccentric alternative
archaeologist Margaret Curtis, who over many years developed theories about the
Calanais standing stones on Lewis as part of a sacred landscape charting the
progress of the moon. Kociejowski was
desperate to arrange a meeting with this legendary personage. A phone call prior to Kociejowski’s traveling
to Lewis set up the possibility of a meeting and an exchange of cash for a tour
of the stones. Arriving on the island, Kociejowski’s
attempts to contact Curtis fall on stony ground, so to speak. It is only later that Kociejowski learns that
she has died, and with her, the planned but never-executed grand work on the astronomical
significance of the stone works. There is
a desperation here in Kociejowski’s attempts to capture off-kilter knowledge
before it is lost forever. I am reminded
of similar attempts I made with the conductor Jonathan Butcher to track down
the musical compositions of Dr David C. F. Wright, whose work list ran into the
120s, yet whose apparent fervour for rancorous dealings with his neighbours had
left him totally isolated in his flat on the Isle of Wight, so isolated that
his death went unnoticed for days and the landlord instructed refuse collectors
to clear the flat before anyone had any chance to examine its contents. Dr Wright's entire oeuvre was sent on a barge
to the mainland to be pulped. Similarly
I find myself coming up against escaped poems, disappeared with the death of my
dear friend Richard MacDonald – he kept them all on his mobile phone, probably
washed away by the sea upon whose shoreline he suffered his fatal
accident. Do send me your poems, I urged,
only a few months before during our last conversation. The circumstances of Margaret Curtis’ life
forbade collaboration due to her renowned eccentricity, a word that eventually
became a euphemism for the insanitary conditions in which she lived. How many others have taken their work with
them in this way? One thinks of the
Irish quarter-tone singer, Maud MacCarthy, whose husband John Foulds died in
India and whose compositions she loaded up on a flat-bottomed skiff to be sent
down the Ganges in the hope that they would make it back to England. They were never seen again. Kociejowski mourns the loss of Curtis’ strange
scholarship, a scholarship more to do with learning from landscape than from
books. The stones themselves in Kociejowski’s
words, ‘have, for the moment, gone back to the grey business of being stones,
she who animated them gone.’[11] If Kociejowski is a collector of people and
cultures on the cusp of disappearance, Margaret Curtis is one that got away.
Part of Kociejowski’s purpose, and
this is true of almost all his books, especially those on Damascus – the subsequent
history of which city has erased virtually everything Kociejowski knew, including
the friends he made there – is to catch cultures not as picture postcard
snapshots, but as a long view with past and future fanning out from a central
viewpoint that gathers to itself the non-touristic, the hidden, the way of
treating a certain cloth, a way of singing ancient songs. Kociejowski wants to get behind the boon and
bane of modern technology – virtually everything about The Quantum of Happiness relates to ways of life that are
essentially pre-electronic. Pastoralism,
crofting, fishing, boat-making, are all still present on the islands and are
simultaneously contemporary and ancient.
But Kociejowski is careful not to tip over into idealism, into spurious
desires for impossible returns to an unreachable past. The world moves on like an agonizing glacier,
but it leaves standing proud those erratics that moved with it but were not
subsumed into bedrock – these are the standing stones of a culture that clings
to its sense of being and soul.
There is a chapter on the significant
stone works on the Isle of Lewis made by Will Maclean. Although clearly referencing the
architectural styles of crofts and cairns, these monuments are not follies in
the 18th century sense, but are a combination of local materials with a sense
of the commemorative. Some recall the
struggles of crofters thrown off their land as a result of The Clearances, as
landowners switched from managing their land in small parcels to vacating them
either for sheep farming or for the destruction of game by the idle rich. Looking at Kociejowski’s photographs it is
possible to get a flavour of the impressive scale and import of Maclean’s work. Moving to the artist’s retrospective in
Edinburgh, I was particularly attracted to Kociejowski’s description of a box
sculpture consisting of a man’s face with butterflies emerging from his
mouth. There then follows a disquisition
on the butterfly for whom the Greeks had the word psyche, or soul. I can't help offering an anecdote of my
own. When my first wife spent the best
part of six months in a side room of St George's Hospital, Tooting, her life on
a knife-edge, she liked to tell me that when she woke up she always looked over
to the window where she saw a butterfly perched silently and unmoving. It gave her courage to continue to believe
that she might live – a little winged talisman.
When she first mentioned this I was somewhat curious, thinking perhaps
she was hallucinating because of the morphine she was being given. I walked over to the window to discover that
it was a butterfly-shaped lick of paint left over from careless decoration of
the window sill. I spent months not
telling my wife that it was a lick of paint.
To both of us it became the butterfly, it was like her soul waiting on
the threshold, not knowing whether to re-enter her or fly away. The site of this psychodrama or ‘psychedrama’
has been swept away with the new developments at the hospital but in my mind's
eye, and it is now 22 years since my wife's death, I see the butterfly still,
hovering between life and death.
No doubt aware of the anthropologist’s
curse and the risk of extraction without benefit, Kociejowski, as an
acknowledged outsider, keeps a light hand on the tiller, taking navigation from
his interviewees, rather than pushing them carelessly into uncharted
waters. He reserves commentary on his
conversations for telling asides rather than grand conclusions based on
preconceived narratives. This keeps the
book full of surprises, as if a traveller were without maps coming across
historical sites of memory with a certain innocence intact. Innocence is not naivety; Kociejowski is too
intelligent a writer to take everything at face value since his own mind is too
probing to be switched off. Although the
culture he writes about is clinging to the stones and the moss for survival, he
realises that the people are too obdurate to be romanticized – as he says, if
you were to dare romanticize them, ‘they would laugh in our faces.’[12]
The islanders have been welcoming to
Marius Kociejowski. Some have trod the
path of telling too much, or not enough, wanting to tell and then not wanting
to tell. But most have given generously. All cultures have their secrets, meaning that
there will be lacunae in Lewis, South Uist, or Hammersmith and Tooting for that
matter. We have the book in hand, and
although the tapestry of a culture can never be completed, what we have here is
a remarkable garment in prose that is receptive, perceptive, and respectful to
a remarkable island culture. It is a
culture not remote to those that live within it, but will appear remote to
those outside. Marius Kociejowski brings
this world closer.
©DHJ
[1]
Marius Kociejowski, A Quantum of
Happiness, Haus, London. 2026, p. 16.
[2]
See the disturbing incidents recorded on pages 39 and 40.
[3]
Op cit. p. 43.
[4]
Ibid. p. 63.
[5]
Ibid. p. 71.
[6]
Ibid. p. 73.
[7]
Ibid. p. 82.
[8]
Ibid. p. 58.
[9]
Kociejowski reveres Fay Shaw’s Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist (1955), as
do I. It was my friend the composer
Ronald Stevenson who first introduced me to Fay Shaw’s work. He composed his solo piano work, South Uist Folksong Suite, in 1969
[10]
Op. cit. p. 121.
[11]
Ibid. p. 159.
[12]
Ibid. p. 235.