Unlikely Stories, Mostly

Alasdair Gray

• Publisher: Canongate Canons
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781847675026
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Scottish Literature
• Index: Literature

In this volume of stories and illustrations, the author of Poor Things "perfected the blend of visual and verbal elements [that] characterized his work" ( Financial Times ). In "The Crank that Made the Revolution, " an enterprising inventor presents the world with his contribution to the Industrial Revolution: an "improved duck." When a man splits in two, it isn't long before his two selves come to blows in "The Spread of Ian Nicol." And a young boy witnesses a shooting star land in his back garden in "The Star." In these and other short stories of the strange and fascinating, Alasdair Gray reaffirms his reputation as one of Scotland's most original and important contemporary writers. In Unlikely Stories, Mostly, Alasdair Gray combines his surreal and darkly funny stories with original artwork to create a truly unique reading experience. This edition includes a postscript by the author and Douglas Gifford. "The book is a wonder of ingenuity, a varied and rich collection in which Gray's abilities as a visual artist and illustrator are placed not only beside but within the products of his fertile imagination as a writer." — The Washington Post "Not since William Blake has a British artist wed pictorial and literary talent to such powerful effect." — Financial Times

SIR THOMAS’S LOGOPANDOCY

The
Secret and Apcryphal Diurnal
of

SIR THOMAS URQUHART OF CROMARTIE Knight

Recently Discovered and Published

Against the Author’s Expressed Will & Command
for the

Instruction and Reformation
of the

Brittanic League of Commonwealths;

Wherein is recorded a dialogue with the late Protector Cromwell’s Latin secretary, which neatly unfolds a scheme to repair the divided Nature of Man by rationally reintegering God’s Gift of Tongues to Adam by a verboradical appliancing of Neper’s logarythms to the grammar of an Asiatick people, thought to be the lost tribe of Israel, whose language predates the Babylonic Cataclysm;

With auxiliary matter vindicating the grandeur of SCOTLAND from the foul Infamy whereinto the Rigid Presbyterian party of that nation, out of their covetousness and their overweening ambition, hath most dissembledly involved it.

Oh thou’rt a Book in Truth with love to many Done by and for the free’st spoke Scot of any.

THE EXACT VERNAL EQUINOX

ANNO CHRISTUS 1645:

IN THE TOWER OF CROMARTIE.

This diurnal to be maintained for my eyes and pleasure alone, I herein downsetting such honest self-estimates as throngers of kirks, courts and markets would castigate as vainglorious; and herein recording those embryonical conceits which quaquaversally disposed intellects too often neglect, abort and aberuncate for clamouring projects more fully formed; and herein deploying a style less orgulous, magnifical, and quodlibetically tolutilo-quent than is proper to my public emittings.

2 It is six years since my just action to reclaim the armaments raped from here by the Lairds of Dal-getty and Tolly led to the first death (a ball thro’ the occiput of my groom Frazer, an inept parasite but loyal) in that rascally rebellion which reptile parliaments of both nations attempt to dignify with the adjectival appellation great, as if grandeur were magnitude of multitude distinct from all noble and worthy intent.

3 It is five years since (for holding Aberdeen nearly a fortnight against the leagued forces of the Covenant) the Seventh Regally Annoynted High Steward of Scotland and Second to Overlord the intire Brittanic Island, did Knight me in the gallery of Whitehall three days before the publication of my Epigrams: Divine and Moral.

4 It is three years since my father, on deathbed in the chamber adjoyning, led my five brothers to swear, under pain of his everlasting curse and execration, to assist, concur with and serve me to the utmost of their power, industry and means, and to spare neither charge nor travel to release me from the undeserved bondage of the domineering Creditor, and extricate our crazed estate from the impestrements in which it hath been involved by his too good, too credulous, too hopeful nature; three years also since I voyaged beyond Byzantium, letting rents embank at home for the leniencing and clementizing of the Creditor.

5 It is one week since, homing it through London, I saw off the press my Trissotetras, wherein I lay the ground of an intirely new Science.

6 This day, having entered upon the family mansion, I discover that by false inept bailiffs and chamberlains, deputies and doers, my rents and receipts have been so embezzled, malingened, pauchled and mischarged that little or no moneys have accrued to me, while the creditors have sold their claims on the estate to usurers yet more fanged, pangastrical and Presbyterian than themselves. It is a well founded prevision of Jehovus that I am, since Neper of Marchiston, the foremost Apostle in Brittain of that Holy Minerva who inspired Moses, Aristotle, Julius Caesar and the mighty Rabelais, for were I not the wisest, therefor luckiest man I know, I would be the most miserably depressed and straightened. So I here cast an accompt of the great goods of my condition, balancing the bads against them to see which predominate.

PRO ME

Ancestry: Toward the stock, stem, vine, clew, cable and navelstring of my pedigree Saturn’s scythe hath been so blunted that I can iluct its labyrintheon through innumerable changes of monarchy and estate among the Regal Houses of Scotland, Ireland, Portugal, Gallicia, Murcia, Andaluzia, Granada, Carthage, Egypt, Amazonia, Greece and Israel, back to Adam surnamed the Protoplast, who was quintessence of that red earth created in time, of nothing, by the word of TRIUN JEHOVUS the ETERNAL FATHER, SON AND GHOSTLIE MINERVA. AMEN.

CONTRA ME

Ancestry: Though verboradically demonstrable, the middle part of my geneology lacks inscriptory provenance, and will be doubted by pedant sciolasts and fidimplicatary gownsmen who can neither admit the eductions of informed inspiration, nor comprehend the congruency of the syllabic with the Sibylene.

PRO ME

Rank: I am Knight of Bray and Udol, Baron of Fichterie and Clohorby, Laird Baron Cromartie and Heritable High Sheriff thereof, having Admiralty of the seas betwixt Catness and Innernasse, and therefore Jehovus Depute (under the Steward Crown) in that part of Brittain autochthonously colonized by oriental polistactical patricians and their followers, which is why so many towns, castles, churches, fountains, rivers, nasses, bays, harbours, and the like, have from my family name received their denomination, and why the shire of Cromartie alone, of all the places of the Isle of Brittain, hath the names of its towns, villages, hamlets, dwellings, promontaries, hillocks, temples, dens, groves, fountains, rivers, pools, lakes, stone heaps, akers and so forth, of pure and perfect Greek.

CONTRA ME

Rank: Nothing.

PRO ME

Frame: In portliness of garb, comeliness of face, sweetness of countenance, majesty of very chevelure, with goodliness of frame, proportion of limbs and symmetry betwixt all the parts and joints of my body, I am heroical in the mould of, not Hercules, Ganimed.

CONTRA ME

Frame: Nothing.

PRO ME

Nature: Jovial, yet Saturnine, my venereal fervour (for the better ingendering of brain-babes) chastened by Diana, inharmonied by Apollo, promoted with Martial vigour, ripened through Minerval cogency and quickened by Mercurial urgency, though this last only in learning and combat, since I lack all lust to transmute baseness into coyn of any metal.

CONTRA ME

Nature: Nothing.

PRO ME

Home: This noble mansion-fort, the stance whereof is statelie, the tower of notable good fabrick and contrivance.

CONTRA ME

Home: The windows lack glass.

PRO ME

Library: Not three books therein but are of my own purchase, and all of them together (in the order wherein I will rank them) compiled like a compleat nosegay of flowers, which in my travels I gathered out of the gardens of sixteen several different kingdoms.

CONTRA ME

Library: Still unpacked.

PRO ME

Estate: Lands in the shires of Cromartie and Aberdeen yeelding a thousand pounds Sterling of rent, with many especial royalties, privileges and immunities, preserved from the days of Nomoster in the 389th epoch before Christ, untill the perfect age and majority of my father, who received it without any burthen of debt, or provision of brother or sister or other kindred alliance to affect it, whereunto was then added, by his father-in-law Lord Elphingstone, the then High Treasurer of Scotland, my mother, Lady Christian, with whom he received no inconsiderable fortune. Also the patronage of the parriches of Kirkmichel, Cromartie and Cullicuden.

CONTRA ME

Estate: Twelve or thirteen thousand pounds Sterling of debt, five brethren all men and two marriageable sisters to support, and less to defray all this by six hundred pounds Sterling a year, in a time of frantic anticivilian warres and garboyles, than my father inherited for nothing, in a peaceful age, to maintain himself alone. Meantime the Church Commission maintain in my kirks three cutpurse Mammoniferous ministers of their own make who, loathing my loyaltie to the Episcopal liturge, demand for their tythes a fifth of the rent of the land, and combinate in synods and concils with creditors and neighbours to put upon me alone the charge of garrisoning troops in this district, thereby intending to inchaos the structure of ancient greatness into the very rubbish of a neophitic parity.

PRO ME

Tenandrie: All are descended (as they themselves avouch) from pregenitors who accompanied my ancestors Alypos, Belistos, Nomostor, Astioremon and Lutork in their borignarie acquest of the land, receiving from these such good yeoman leases for the digging and manuring of it that they very suddenly took deep root therein, and bequeathed to their children the hereditary obedience owed to their masters. Each hamlet by that means having its own Clan, as we call it, or name of kindred, none will from that portion of land bouge, any inter-flitting between coterminal parrishes being as mutually displeasing to them as an extrusive exile to the Barbadoes or to Malagask. I have farmers who dwell in the selfsame house inhabited by their ancestors from dad to brat, sire to suckling, above nine hundred years together and though none can read, they nevertheless exchange discourse with any concerning the heathenish deities of the Grecolatin Pantheon, whose temples, delubres and fanes, of a circularie, oval, triangulary or square figure, my own forefathers erected in groves and high places before the time of Christ, the stones whereof may still be ascribed to Jove, juno, Palas, Apollo &cetera by the eye of the intelligible Mythologist.

CONTRA ME

Tenandrie: These much plundered and rouped of goods, gear and rents by the soldiery without hope of redress; while their Kir-komanatickal presbyterian pastors vilipend, pester and flite them for tenaciously clinging to their frets of old, which often send them at set times to fountains, oak-trees, little round hillocks and stone-heaps where, with preconceived words and motions, they worship in accordance with the poetical liturgies of Hesiod, Theocritus and Ovid; And my ministers demand that I magisterially prohibit and persecute these practices as things of charm, fascination, inchantment or infernal assistance! There is a silly old wife who, for doing some pretty feats wherein she has been instructed by her mother, according to a prescript set down in some verses of Homer, whom neither had the skill to use, is accused of witchcraft by one who, being a professor of the Greek, whipt a boy for not getting these verses by heart: as if it were a duty for him to study what is felonie for others to enact. Being resolved to conduct myself by the light of reason, I openly acquit many of both sexes whom flagitory zealots accuse of incubation, succubation and peragration with fairies and am forthwith reputed an obstinate assertor of erroneous doctrine. Even as a raw youth I would not without examination trust to aged men in matters contrary to commonsense and experience, for I caused brought to my father’s house one of either sex that were supposed rivals in diabolical venerie, the male with the succub, the female with the incub. The young man was two-and-twenty years old, very bashfull, yet prone to lasciviousness, and a handsome youth; she was some five-and-twentie, nothing so pleasant as he, and had it not been for a little modesty that restrained her, a very sink of lust. All this I perceived at first view, and after I had spoken kindly with them in generals, I entreated them with all gentilnesse possible, to tell me freely whether it was so or not, as it was reported of them; and their answer was (for they were not suspicious of any harm from me) that it was true enough; whereat I straight conceived that they had a crack in their imagination. The better to try an experiment thereon, I commanded to be given unto each of them an insomniatorie and exoniretick potion, for stirring up a libidinous fancie; I also directed one of my footboys to attend the woman with all possible respect and outward shew of affection; the like I required of one of my mother’s chambermaids to be done in behalf of the ...