Black Marsden: A Tabula Rasa Comedy

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Acknowledgements are due to authors and publishers as follows: Oliver and Boyd Ltd for quotations from The Scottish Tradition in Literature by Kurt Wittig; The Clarendon Press for quotations from John Knox by Jasper Ridley; The Bodley Head Ltd for quotations from Haunting Edinburgh by Flora Grierson; Penguin Books Ltd for quotations from The Legend of John Hornby by George Whalley; Faber and Faber Ltd for quotations from Writings from the ‘Philokalia’on Prayer of the Heart translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer; Cassell and Co Ltd for adaption of a quotation from Highland Days by John Gordon.

I came upon him in a corner of the ruined Dunfermline Abbey of Fife like a curious frozen bundle that may have been blown across seas and landscapes to lodge here at my feet. On the journeys I had made through Fife last year I had been aware of the harlequin cloak of the seasons spread far and wide into strange intimacies and dissolving spaces. For example I had looked down upon the sea from another ruined abbey at Culross; I recalled evenings bridled by early lights along the Firth of Forth; all this seemed at times sunken into a transparent film or subaqueous world. The ancient palaces and corridors I visited were an extraordinary and naive cradle of kings woven nevertheless into complex, sometimes implacable legend. This combination of naive and complex features was true of kings whether in pre-Columbian America or pre-Renaissance Scotland or Europe. The idea obsessed me and I found myself at liberty to trace its contours around the globe since winning a fortune from the Football Pools.

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