The Scotsman

The tries ‘we’ scored were great, but I’m interested in a different kind of try

- Kirsty Gunn

Afull week and more has passed but my husband is still riding the clouds and replaying highlights and the full start-to-finish glory that was the rugby game at Murrayfiel­d.

“You’ll not even need to say what game you’re referring to when you write about it,” he advised me. “Everyone will know. And you can be sure I’ll not be the only Scotsman reader watching those re-runs.” Scotland played … beautifull­y, he tells me.

Not only did they win, but they won in gorgeous, hand-banging, shout-it-from-the-rooftops style.

Though what would I know? Absolutely nothing. I was born and brought up in New Zealand so you might think I would have some clue about rugby but sport’s not my go-to activity and I’ve never understood the mass emotion around any kind of game. All the prep and anxiety. The shouting at the television. The need for stiff whiskies and teeming pubs. Crowds bunched up in a great mass on march to the field.

The whole thing makes me feel like going off into a quiet corner to read poetry. My husband takes our younger daughter to Murrayfiel­d and they love it, both shouting their heads off in the cold, making friends with strangers and coming back with husky voices and all sorts of first-person-plural talk. Oh, “we” did this and “we” did that. We played well in the first half, and so on. We let the ball go, or we dominated it, or we lost it … As though they themselves were down on the field, churning up the grass and oomphing their way through the scrum.

And all I can think, from my vantage place of sonnets and vilanelles, is how exhausting rugby looks, and hard work and bruising and hefty, somehow. I thought it when I was a child, growing up in the land of the All Blacks. And I think it now.

Of course I’m delighted about Scotland winning, though. I’ve seen various team members talking on television – and they all seem so pleasant: polite and self-effacing and generous. It’s lovely to witness that aspect of national pride – even though any kind of “national pride” makes me feel a bit wary – sparkling away in good manners and a sense of fair play. If only all activities that celebrate countries’ individual­ity and stamp were expressed with such decency and valour. Unfortunat­ely, though, to my mind, the marking of differenti­ation, one tribe from another, generally has less pleasant ends. And on top of that, certaintie­s, like winning or losing, being “the best”, are for me certaintie­s I could generally do without.

In fact, more and more I feel myself drifting towards uncertaint­y as the most interestin­g and productive state of mind. Uncertaint­y allows further questionin­g, more discussion. Uncertaint­y is not to say “I’m right” but it’s to say, “Tell me more. What’s that? I’m interested.” It’s one of the many reasons I’ve been becoming more and more engaged by the essay as a potent and important literary form. Because the essay, by its very definition, is a kind of writing that keeps ideas live, makes all kinds of conversati­ons possible. It’s thinking on the page in the most creative, open-ended kind of way.

I’ve written some essays before, have published them, but now am becoming more and more involved in the teaching of them, too. This is because of the work being done on the subject of essay writing and reading by Dr Gail Low at the University of Dundee. Through her, essays as an academic subject are showing themselves to be imaginativ­e, thoughtful, enquiring. They are developing into pieces of work that are full of questions instead of pat answers. They give the students room to experiment with and learn about their intelligen­ce, instead of just encouragin­g them to re-phrase the known ”truths” of establishe­d critics and points of view.

The essays Gail has students write are very opposite of those set tablets of text Humanities students normally feel they have to produce in order to get A grades and progressio­n. Her classes buzz with uncertaint­ies … and it’s wonderful. Everybody is awake and at it – asking whether what they’re asking might be interestin­g? Asking if what we are told is interestin­g is interestin­g at all?

These are vital questions for our young people. For us lot, too. For don’t we, too, need to be educated in the business of being thoroughly alert in the world; not accepting for one moment any old status quo, or article of “truth” or “fact” that is put about as being “right”.

For this reason, of the essay’s importance and all-round relevance in our constricte­d Pr-dominated age, Gail and I will be hosting an Internatio­nal Essay Conference at the amazing Hospitalfi­eld in Arbroath this summer. All readers are invited!

Two days of doing nothing but thinking about trying to write differentl­y, and so learning to try and and think differentl­y; letting the trying – the essaying – in itself, be the thing. More details to follow; watch this space! But the internatio­nal essay superstar Philip Lopate will be talking with us, and a whole host of creative and literary luminaries who love nothing more than to keep on trying. There’s something going on here that relates back to my rugby talk at the beginning of all this … But isn’t it true? That tries are great?

 ?? PICTURE: SNS GROUP/SRU BILL MURRAY ?? 0 Skipper John Barclay raises the Calcutta Cup aloft after Scotland beat England
PICTURE: SNS GROUP/SRU BILL MURRAY 0 Skipper John Barclay raises the Calcutta Cup aloft after Scotland beat England
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom