by ANTOINETTE FAWCETT
As I creakily practised my yoga moves in class the other night, I heard someone ask one of my mat neighbours, who had only joined the group that evening, why he had decided to sign up.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘Ah’ve ’eard it keeps a man lish.’
‘Aye’, said the man who had interrogated him, ‘that it does.’
Lish is one of those lovely Northern words that almost seems to enact in the mouth what it describes. There’s a soft quick touch of the tongue to the palate as the word starts, then a deep, gentle swift vowel [ɪ], followed by a long supple ‘sh’ [ʃ]. One can hardly say the word without feeling happy and positive, and I haven’t seen a single use of it with any negative implications. It’s a light word in both senses (in its small weight and its soft shining), seeming to symbolise youth, suppleness, vigour, and active growth and life.
The Oxford English Dictionary does, in fact, use the word ‘active’ as part of its very brief definition. Other dictionaries and glossaries help to fill in the details of meaning, of which The Dictionary of the Scots Language is the fullest and most complete. It gives ‘LEISH’ as the main spelling, and tells us that it means ‘active, nimble, strong and muscular, athletic, supple’. It also makes it clear that this word is shared with its Northern English neighbours, although all the illustrative quotations are, of course, Scots.
How interesting then that Nicholson, in a poem called ‘Cave Drawings’, uses the word ‘lish’ to point up a series of contrasts between the active and inactive, between vitality and frailty, between mortal life and near immortal art.
‘Cave Drawings’ appears in Nicholson’s collection The Pot Geranium(1954), which was the first ever Poetry Book Society Recommendation (Jones, 2013, p. 147), having previously been published in Poetry (London) in 1951 (Vol. 6, Winter 1951, p. 8).
It is quite a brief poem that meditates on the origins of art and the human impulse to make it (Collected Poems p. 229). The Cave Drawings of the title are probably those discovered in Lascaux, France, during the 2nd World War. This is Palaeolithic art of a mysterious purpose and power and its images still entrance us more than seventy years later.
In the first stanza of the poem Nicholson tells us that it is not the hunters, the physically active, who create (and invent) art, but that this is made by the old ‘and the lame’ – those to whom the hunting life is not accessible.
The old, the ill, and the disabled, the poem says, make art not directly from nature as such, but from their memories of running ‘in the sun’. For such people the light, and everything that happens in the world of light, has stamped an impression that continues to glow in the dark, in ‘stained-glass colours reflected from the brain’. So, while the aged and the injured may no longer be ‘lish’, they can create living art within the shadowy fire-lit cave.
In the second stanza the imagery continues to explore the contrast between light and dark, and yet the light provided by the fire-brand, placed in a cleft in the cave wall, is ambiguous and frail. It is there to take away the fear of darkness, but also seems to bring the shadows closer, changing them into ghost-like creatures that ‘flap about among the flame’.
Then, right at the end of this two-stanza poem, Nicholson focuses in detail on the act of creation. A boy in the cave, coughing and choking in the smoke from the flames, snatches up a flint and scratches onto the rock:
Two fore hooves and a lish, live mane,
[…] there in the crocketty light they seem to move.
Nicholson seems to be imagining the very first act of creating such horses. And it is a young person who is this first artist.
But there is more going on here than might at first meet the eye.
Why is the boy in the cave with the old and lame? It can only be because he is ill in some way and can’t ‘run in the sun’ with others from his tribe. Otherwise, unless he is very young indeed, he would surely be helping his people with their daily activities.
It’s tempting to see the boy as an analogue to Nicholson himself, coughing and choking not only because of the ‘frayed ropes of smoke’, but because of sickness. In Nicholson’s case, this was TB, which deprived him of the chance to go to university or to do any kind of physically taxing work.
It seems to me, then, that Nicholson is locating the urge to make art, whether visual or verbal, within physical or psychological damage: the sick boy of the poem can’t hunt in the light of the sun, but instead creates life within the darkness of the cave – quick, spontaneous, lishand vigorous art. This, I imagine, is what Nicholson himself thought he was doing when he made himself into a poet within the cave of his attic bedroom, after his return to Millom as a young man, weakened by his as-yet uncured tuberculosis. Without the sickness and frailty, Nicholson may never have become a writer; without shadow and suffering and darkness, he seems to say in the poem, human beings may never have been hurt into art.
Yet, although the body isn’t ‘lish’, the words of the poem are. They’re full of a colloquial liveliness and apt imagery, making us see the whole scene in our mind’s eye, just as the young cave boy’s first attempts at art are so successful that the horses he has created ‘seem to move’.
Interestingly, this is exactly what Jacques Marsal perceived when he first entered the cave in September 1940. He saw a ‘cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave; each animal seemed to be moving’. Marsal was one of the four boys who discovered the ancient hidden drawings of Lascaux – not an artist himself, but someone who revealed how deeply the artistic impulse is woven into our human spirit.
It’s almost certain that Nicholson was thinking of the horse drawings from that discovery, when he made this poem, perhaps one like the so-called ‘Chinese horse’, where the mane, head and hooves stand out in black against the white background and the burnt ochre body. A sturdy horse, certainly – but lish too, with its mane cast forward and onto its neck as it gallops away from the arrows flying towards it.
As I creakily practised my yoga moves in class the other night, I heard someone ask one of my mat neighbours, who had only joined the group that evening, why he had decided to sign up.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘Ah’ve ’eard it keeps a man lish.’
‘Aye’, said the man who had interrogated him, ‘that it does.’
Lish is one of those lovely Northern words that almost seems to enact in the mouth what it describes. There’s a soft quick touch of the tongue to the palate as the word starts, then a deep, gentle swift vowel [ɪ], followed by a long supple ‘sh’ [ʃ]. One can hardly say the word without feeling happy and positive, and I haven’t seen a single use of it with any negative implications. It’s a light word in both senses (in its small weight and its soft shining), seeming to symbolise youth, suppleness, vigour, and active growth and life.
The Oxford English Dictionary does, in fact, use the word ‘active’ as part of its very brief definition. Other dictionaries and glossaries help to fill in the details of meaning, of which The Dictionary of the Scots Language is the fullest and most complete. It gives ‘LEISH’ as the main spelling, and tells us that it means ‘active, nimble, strong and muscular, athletic, supple’. It also makes it clear that this word is shared with its Northern English neighbours, although all the illustrative quotations are, of course, Scots.
How interesting then that Nicholson, in a poem called ‘Cave Drawings’, uses the word ‘lish’ to point up a series of contrasts between the active and inactive, between vitality and frailty, between mortal life and near immortal art.
‘Cave Drawings’ appears in Nicholson’s collection The Pot Geranium(1954), which was the first ever Poetry Book Society Recommendation (Jones, 2013, p. 147), having previously been published in Poetry (London) in 1951 (Vol. 6, Winter 1951, p. 8).
It is quite a brief poem that meditates on the origins of art and the human impulse to make it (Collected Poems p. 229). The Cave Drawings of the title are probably those discovered in Lascaux, France, during the 2nd World War. This is Palaeolithic art of a mysterious purpose and power and its images still entrance us more than seventy years later.
In the first stanza of the poem Nicholson tells us that it is not the hunters, the physically active, who create (and invent) art, but that this is made by the old ‘and the lame’ – those to whom the hunting life is not accessible.
The old, the ill, and the disabled, the poem says, make art not directly from nature as such, but from their memories of running ‘in the sun’. For such people the light, and everything that happens in the world of light, has stamped an impression that continues to glow in the dark, in ‘stained-glass colours reflected from the brain’. So, while the aged and the injured may no longer be ‘lish’, they can create living art within the shadowy fire-lit cave.
In the second stanza the imagery continues to explore the contrast between light and dark, and yet the light provided by the fire-brand, placed in a cleft in the cave wall, is ambiguous and frail. It is there to take away the fear of darkness, but also seems to bring the shadows closer, changing them into ghost-like creatures that ‘flap about among the flame’.
Then, right at the end of this two-stanza poem, Nicholson focuses in detail on the act of creation. A boy in the cave, coughing and choking in the smoke from the flames, snatches up a flint and scratches onto the rock:
Two fore hooves and a lish, live mane,
[…] there in the crocketty light they seem to move.
Nicholson seems to be imagining the very first act of creating such horses. And it is a young person who is this first artist.
But there is more going on here than might at first meet the eye.
Why is the boy in the cave with the old and lame? It can only be because he is ill in some way and can’t ‘run in the sun’ with others from his tribe. Otherwise, unless he is very young indeed, he would surely be helping his people with their daily activities.
It’s tempting to see the boy as an analogue to Nicholson himself, coughing and choking not only because of the ‘frayed ropes of smoke’, but because of sickness. In Nicholson’s case, this was TB, which deprived him of the chance to go to university or to do any kind of physically taxing work.
It seems to me, then, that Nicholson is locating the urge to make art, whether visual or verbal, within physical or psychological damage: the sick boy of the poem can’t hunt in the light of the sun, but instead creates life within the darkness of the cave – quick, spontaneous, lishand vigorous art. This, I imagine, is what Nicholson himself thought he was doing when he made himself into a poet within the cave of his attic bedroom, after his return to Millom as a young man, weakened by his as-yet uncured tuberculosis. Without the sickness and frailty, Nicholson may never have become a writer; without shadow and suffering and darkness, he seems to say in the poem, human beings may never have been hurt into art.
Yet, although the body isn’t ‘lish’, the words of the poem are. They’re full of a colloquial liveliness and apt imagery, making us see the whole scene in our mind’s eye, just as the young cave boy’s first attempts at art are so successful that the horses he has created ‘seem to move’.
Interestingly, this is exactly what Jacques Marsal perceived when he first entered the cave in September 1940. He saw a ‘cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave; each animal seemed to be moving’. Marsal was one of the four boys who discovered the ancient hidden drawings of Lascaux – not an artist himself, but someone who revealed how deeply the artistic impulse is woven into our human spirit.
It’s almost certain that Nicholson was thinking of the horse drawings from that discovery, when he made this poem, perhaps one like the so-called ‘Chinese horse’, where the mane, head and hooves stand out in black against the white background and the burnt ochre body. A sturdy horse, certainly – but lish too, with its mane cast forward and onto its neck as it gallops away from the arrows flying towards it.
This photograph of a painting of a dun horse at Lascaux is in the public domain.
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AFTER-NOTE
The first professional published photos of the images on the cave walls of Lascaux appeared in LIFE Magazine in 1947, while Nicholson’s poem ‘Cave Drawings’ was first published in 1951 (see above). It’s not unlikely that Nicholson may have seen or heard of the issue (Feb. 24th 1947) in which these images appeared, and that they simmered in his head till the poem was composed. |
There’s an interesting article on the TIME website, in which the photographer Ralph Morse is interviewed about his memories and impressions of that assignment. This also quotes from the original article, in which the artistic equipment of Cro-Magnon man is discussed:
“In [Cro-Magnon man’s] most expert period, […] his apparatus included engraving and scraping tools, a stone or bone palette and probably brushes made of bundled split reeds. He ground colored earth for his rich reds and yellows, used charred bone or soot black for his dark shading and made green from manganese oxide. . . . For permanence, the finest pigments of civilized Europe have never rivaled these crude materials.”
This explains why Nicholson imagined the boy as snatching up a flint when he begins to draw his horse on the wall. A flint, as Nicholson knew from his interest in stone, is the classic Palaeolithic tool – used not only for cutting, but also for engraving and scraping, just as mentioned above. As Nicholson stressed in so many ways in his writings, the lishness of life is intricately linked to the solid stone and rock on which our world is built.
Antoinette Fawcett
References
In addition to the books and websites cited directly in the article above, I have made use of Kathleen Jones’ 2013 biography of Norman Nicholson: Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet (The Book Mill, Appleby).
For further images of the horses and other creatures, the French website Lascaux culture provides a complete overview.
“In [Cro-Magnon man’s] most expert period, […] his apparatus included engraving and scraping tools, a stone or bone palette and probably brushes made of bundled split reeds. He ground colored earth for his rich reds and yellows, used charred bone or soot black for his dark shading and made green from manganese oxide. . . . For permanence, the finest pigments of civilized Europe have never rivaled these crude materials.”
This explains why Nicholson imagined the boy as snatching up a flint when he begins to draw his horse on the wall. A flint, as Nicholson knew from his interest in stone, is the classic Palaeolithic tool – used not only for cutting, but also for engraving and scraping, just as mentioned above. As Nicholson stressed in so many ways in his writings, the lishness of life is intricately linked to the solid stone and rock on which our world is built.
Antoinette Fawcett
References
In addition to the books and websites cited directly in the article above, I have made use of Kathleen Jones’ 2013 biography of Norman Nicholson: Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet (The Book Mill, Appleby).
For further images of the horses and other creatures, the French website Lascaux culture provides a complete overview.