Rannoch anniversary.

I am not done with this place. This place is not done with me.

The iron line crosses future, past. *

Fifty years ago today Joseph Beuys and Richard Demarco travelled to Rannoch where Beuys performed and ‘action’, an event of art. It involved holding aloft a piece of calf’s- foot jelly, of that much I know, but not the significance for him. Perhaps the lifeless gelatinous delicacy that pulsed with life from his own hand to effect a beating heart was an attempt to assuage the bog gods.

I am yet one more artist, one more traveller whose soul has been captured and carried off below into the black deep space of subterranean time, stored for the next thousand years or more. I shall bury a lock of my now greying hair as an act of my own resistance with a word carved on wood that reads ‘thrawn’. Me, it. It, me.

Rannoch Moor, Rannoch dear beloved place.*

(* Lines from a poem about Rannoch Moor by the poet Jackie Kay, that in its handwritten form are framed on the wall at the station. )