Editorial
Introducing Issue #32
Are we bringing it all back home? While Gutter’s 32nd issue celebrates the local, unlike the image on Dylan’s eponymous album cover, the writers herein use no soft lens to present their surroundings. This is the local as the antithesis of the parochial. Although many of the pieces focus on the everyday, they examine its specifics and its generalities in all their strangeness when regarded askance.
The editors did not set out to curate this theme: is it possible subconsciously we sought small familiar joys in these disturbing times? It is there from the off, in the cheese aisle of Shona McCombes’s story ‘Raw Material’, with its dark, almost tangible hum, and in the tools and textures of the workshop and its woodblocks the protagonist pares like cheddar. And it is there again most literally in the final piece, Megan Cunningham’s ‘Homing’.
It seems that little could get as particular to the local as Kevin Cormack’s Orcadian poem ‘Birthright’, which perhaps asks of everyone-anywhere to consider the validity of idealised notions of home. For what use is our constructed sense of place if we do not inhabit it on its real terms? The commonplace is also there (in spades) in the gardener’s hands and transient parental moments of Jack Barker-Clark’s ‘Loam and Other Potions’ and its conversations with literature.
But there exists a contrapuntal line of menace in most of these pieces, sometimes unstated, sometimes explicit – as in Jim Ferguson’s ‘some kind of ugly haircut’ and its excoriation of humanity’s failure in Gaza. Then, in Sarp Sozdinler’s ‘The Monster of Bethlehem’, we find the grand design of domestic perfection subsumed by a painting, a strategy against architecture.
By and large, what we long for about place is its emotional resonance, its people, rather than its aesthetics. In this issue, we are fortunate to include several pieces by writers calling back through time or from across the globe. So we have Marjorie Lotfi’s ‘Leaving Tehran’, Tessa Sinclair Scott’s wilted Sydney frangipanis in ‘Bus Sonnet II’ and Dani Garavelli’s 20th century Ayrshire bungalow of the mind, ‘Lepanto’. Elsewhere, two poets make conversation with compatriots lost too soon: Laura Tansley’s ‘After Roddy Lumsden’ and Jan FitzGerald’s ‘On hearing of the death of John Burnside’.
Absent of place, universal refuge for humanity is found in language, in music. Chitra Ramaswamy’s short memoir walks us through time, song, identity and memory. She exhorts the reader to listen to Nina Simone's ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’, 'preferably on a long digressive walk in what you hope to be the precise middle of your life, its summit, though you feel you are falling.’ And in the Gutter interview on page 66, Anthony Vahni Capildeo reflects on the interplay of voices, music, identities and cultures across their fascinating, multifaceted lived experience as a poet and a person.
Humanity’s capacity to undermine its own wellbeing in the search for order is woven through one of our commissioned poems by new Scots Makar Peter Mackay/Pàdraig MacAoidh, whose ‘innocuous poem’ about otters is anything but. And little in the contemporary world characterises our self-sabotage so much as the looming presence of artificial intelligence, which Ruth Aylett imagines into her prescient poem ‘Only Connect’, with its ‘mass grave’ of creativity, scraped by machines that mirror us with lazy heuristics and platitudinous clichés.
Humanity exists in space-time. We are not bound by data farms and cables. When somewhere fails us, it is in our nature to migrate, to move. As Ramaswamy puts it, ‘Those of us who don’t belong anywhere have only people (and dogs) to whom we can attach.’ To that attachment, we would add a third: language. Hold this issue in your hands, and wherever you have been, come in. Welcome home.