TessaRansford236

28.02.12
No. 519

The Cafe 2

Here’s my response to Anne Keenan’s request for ‘suggestions on a postcard’. 
     Her Korean/American professor might appreciate this list of Scots – www.geo.ed.ac.uk


     If I were asked to choose one outstanding Scottish personality amongst them to recommend to the professor, it would be John Muir, like him an expatriate.

Edgar Lloyd

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There is no need to

growl apologetically

about Scotland

Tessa Ransford

I try not to get upset with the ignorance and condescension of those who run down Scotland, and generally try to refrain from responding, but Anne Keenan (24 February

     

     The complete works of Burns would be an acceptable gift in any part of the world. He is appreciated and understood all over the world and translated into dozens of languages. The agricultural scientist, Professor Thomas Sutherland, one of the US hostages in Lebanon in the late 1980s was helped to keep going by remembering Burns poems he had learnt in Scotland as a child.
     The policies of saying no to nuclear weapons, no to university fees, no to foreign wars to preserve a consumer lifestyle, no to nuclear power, but yes to free health and education, encouraging investment in infrastructure and alternative energy, encouraging the local and the global, encouraging community land ownership, trying to improve social ills induced by poverty and rejection such as smoking, drugs, alcoholism and knife crime, trying to overcome endemic racism and sectarianism, trying to provide a welcome for asylum seekers and immigrants, trying to improve the prison rehabilitation system, trying to provide a more equal society, are nothing to be ashamed of.

Better to contribute to a better and independent Scotland, with a more
equal, enlightened and educated society, than grovelling apologetically
to the American professor.

     The paranoia about nationalism is on the part of those who are conditioned to believing they have to belong to a bigger system to be ‘secure’ or to ‘succeed’. I have heard people speak, for instance, of writers as not being ‘known down south’ as if this were the criteria for approval. Most European writers are not ‘known down south’ either, because the translation record is so appalling down south. It’s not wonderful here, regrettably, as literature funding is a pittance and translation finds itself at the bottom of the list, but this could improve with independence, like much else, including our broadcasting standards in relation to our culture, its past treasures and present interesting endeavours.
     Better to contribute to a better and independent Scotland, with a more equal, enlightened and educated society, than grovelling apologetically to the American professor.
     From John Macmurray, The Conditions of Freedom, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1950:
     To act freely is to take a decision and accept the consequences…
     Here then is the paradox of freedom. We are free to choose between freedom and security.
     The demand for security is the reflection of our fear; while freedom is the expression of our own reality. If we use our freedom to escape from freedom we frustrate ourselves: if we persist in this choice we destroy ourselves. If we aim at security we aim at the impossible and succeed only in multiplying the occasions of fear and magnifying our need for security. There is no security for us except in choosing freedom. For our insecurity is our fear, and to choose freedom is to triumph over fear.

Tessa Ransford is a poet and founder of the Scottish Poetry Library