Morgan - A Book of Lives

There is a commerce between inner and outer, between brightness and shadow, between the world and those who think about the world. Is it not a mystery? The parts cohere, they come together like petals of a flower, yet they also send their tongues outward to feel and taste the teeming earth. Did you want classic columns and predictable pediments? A growl of old Gothic grandeur? A blissfully boring box? Not here, no thanks! No icon, no IKEA, no iceberg, but curves and caverns, nooks and niches, huddles and heavens, syncopations and surprises. Leave symmetry to the cemetery. But bring together slate and stainless steel, black granite and grey granite, seasoned oak and sycamore, concrete blond and smooth as silk the mix is almost alive it breathes and beckons imperial marble it is not! Come down the Mile, into the heart of the city, past the kirk of St Giles and the closes and wynds of the noted ghosts of history who drank their claret and fell down the steep tenement stairs into the arms of link-boys but who wrote and talked the starry Enlightenment of their days And before them the auld makars who tickled a Scottish kings ear with melody and ribaldry and frank advice And when you are there, down there, in the midst of things, not set upon an hill with your nose in the air, This is where you know your parliament should be And this is where it is, just here. What do the people want of the place? They want it to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.

A nest of fearties is what they do not want. A symposium of procrastinators is what they do not want. A phalanx of forelock-tuggers is what they do not want. And perhaps above all the droopy mantra of it wizny me is what they do not want. Dear friends, dear lawgivers, dear parliamentarians, you are picking up a thread of pride and self-esteem that has been almost but not quite, oh no not quite, not ever broken or forgotten. All right. All right.

Forget, or dont forget, the past. Trumpets and robes are fine, but in the present and the future you will need something more. What is it? We, the people, cannot tell you yet, but you will know about it when we do tell you. We give you our consent to govern, dont pocket it and ride away. We give you our deepest dearest wish to govern well, dont say we have no mandate to be so bold. We give you this great building, dont let your work and hope be other than great when you enter and begin.

So now begin. Open the doors and begin.

Man is chelovek, the Russians say, The one with a forehead, the one with forethought, The one whose mumbling and chuntering will not do, Who knows it will not do, who lolls or bounces Half-formed but strains for form, to be a child And not a bundle! The bungler, the mumbler Takes the deepest breath we are allowed, Whistles the horizons dawn right down Across the book of earth, audits the figures, Tongue and teeth and lips in line, near-perfect, Ye see yon birkie cad a lord, the poet Has hooked one leg over his simple chair-arm, Sometimes tapping the beat upon his snuff-box, Sometimes singing an old and well-loved air To startlingly original effect. Hell print it too! Wont it be in a book? An open mind is proper in this case. Its only poetry, after all. Someone I cant remember thousands of scribbling names Has said Poetry makes nothing happen. I find that slightly fundamentalist. Yes, but do I go along with it? I do not go along with it.

No, I dont. Do I protest too much? Probably! Think of what I said about the child. He is a man now, let us talk to him. Ask him how far he thinks his birkie Registers on a Richter scale of insult. Hes dead? Well, get a good dictionary. Talks the thing.

Dialogues the thing. If any parliamentarian should be so remiss As to think writers are interchangeable, Or stupid, or irrelevant, or poor doomy creatures, Punishments may have to be devised, I say may, we want to persuade, not scold. What is it but language that clamps A country to glory? Ikons, concertos, Piets, gamelans, gondolas, didgeridoos, Luboks, a brace of well-tuned sleigh-bells These are very fine, of course they are. But better still, always far better still Is the sparkling articulacy of the word, The scrubbed round table where poet and legislator Are plugged in to the future of the race, Guardians of whatever is the case.

We are observers, explorers. We heard there was a murmuring of mussels, a clatter and a chatter somewhere in the gravel-beds of unbonny Scotland, almost like voices threatening something Damn sure we were threatening something! Do you know a thousand of us were killed in one day not long ago I heard it was eight hundred Eight hundred, ten hundred, it was a massacre. Your pearl poachers breenged through our domains like demons with their great gully knives and scythed us to shreds for what might be, most likely might not be, a pearl, a pearl of price, a jewellers price. I hear a shuffling of papers. Prepare yourself. We are our wisest, neither clique nor claque but full conclave.