George Mackay Brown (1921-1996)

George Mackay Brown died twenty years ago today.

Although this blog focuses mainly on Catholic social teaching, it's worth considering precisely how the arts -and in this case poetry- contribute to our life as social beings. At the funeral Mass, Archbishop Conti said the following:

I remember George describing the earth under the farmer's plough as being scourged -or was it the back of Christ he say being ploughed?...If my memory falters, it is because of George's characteristic interchanging of images, which revealed not only the twin sources of his deepest inspiration, namely his native Orkney and his adopted Catholicism, but also his easy integration of what for so many remain separate orders of life and faith. This is why his death at this season seems so right, for this is the season when the life of faith and the life of nature so marvellously correspond; when he who was hung up on the bare wood, and moistened it with his blood, made it to flower as the instrument of salvation; when He who ws buried in the dark earth, and shared it with its apparent sleep, burst forth from it revealing the new life of grace.

[From: Ron Ferguson's, George Mackay Brown: the Wound and the Gift, p.365]

Brown's work and Archbishop Conti's assessment of it above suggest two immediate thoughts for me. First, there is the link with Roger Scruton's use of the concept of the 'Lebenswelt' (roughly, the environment for human beings, constructed by our imaginative engagement with the world) and the need to repair and enrich it, in part through the use of literature and art. (For an article on this by Scruton, see here. For previous discussions of Scruton on this blog, see here.)

Secondly, and continuing with this first thought, Catholicism in Scotland can often be seen to be 'foreign' or 'other'. (The nineteenth century Protestant jibe of 'the Italian mission to the Irish' is relevant here as are more recent secularist attacks on the acceptability of Catholic understandings within a modern Scotland.) Brown reimagined Orkney as a Catholic landscape. He also reimagined Catholic Orkney as a central landscape rather than one marginal to Scottish and wider human concerns. Despite all the differences between them, Brown's enterprise here strikes me as at least analogous to Tolkien's construction of a 'legendarium'. Bradley Birzer's book, J R R Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth deals with this aspect in considerable detail:

[Birzer] also explores the social and political views that motivated the Oxford don, ultimately situating Tolkien within the Christian humanist tradition represented by Thomas More and T. S. Eliot, Dante and C. S. Lewis. Birzer argues that through the genre of myth Tolkien created a world that is essentially truer than the one we think we see around us every day, a world that transcends the colorless disenchantment of our postmodern age.

[From review here.]

A small selection of Brown's poems, read by him, can be found here.

[Details of image: here.]