The centred text of a poem, making the outline of a cow's teat on the page, threw me back to my childhood when we milked by hand in that famous winter. All frosted, the universe, but my cheek was warm on her flank when I stripped—that's what we called it, stripping—two quarters into the pail.
Black-and-white backs smell so pink in the byre. The weight of a full udder, its high shape between her hocks, and her sighing, her blowing, as I get the feel of it and she lets down her milk. Blessed animal, still giving her warmth when there's nothing outside but ice.
Neatsfoot oil, I thought today, a last gift rendered from her hooves and cannon bones. And "Near," an archaic name for cattle, or "Kine", "Dà" in Welsh, the same as the word for "good".
Nithraid was conceived as a public artwork to activate the riverside in Dumfries during the summer of 2013, bringing new focus and drawing people down to celebrate the River Nith. Now in its third year, Dumfries is preparing to welcome sailors upriver to the heart of the town as Nithraid 2015 sails into town on Sunday, 2nd August. Nithraid is free and open to all, and last year saw crowds of 4,000 lining the banks to watch the winning boats cross the finish line. Find out more about this year’s Nithraid here.
The discussion is open, and we invite contributions to our artistic conversations. Whether you have been involved in Nithraid in previous years or are interested in the changing face of public art and how a sailing race can also be an artwork, please get in touch via the comments box below. Alternatively, to send your contribution, please email [email protected].
When the Earth’s crust thickened and cooled deeply, it cracked, and four avenues dropped neatly in lines: four invitations for four rivers—Annan, Nith, Dee, and Cree. Water, washing soil over the rock, posted another invitation—for a beast to graze the land, to break it with footprints for germinating seeds, and to re-fertilise it with their dung.
We know the coos, slabbed together on a cold, damp morning, their breath hanging together like the breath of the Earth; or contented and dispersed across a summer field, chewing in deep rhythm. We know them as part of the oneness of our place.
Our land is pastureland, home to a kinship between humankind and cookind that has spawned a million inventions with milk, meat, and leather.
Our coos have been our wealth—their mobility precious in times when you couldn’t hide a field of barley from ancient raiders. Always moving from winter to summer pastures, and to market over Annan, Nith, Dee, and Cree.
Humans moved too. In tough times, we spread far across the seas, and as migrants found their feet, they called for their coos to follow. Great Uncle Jimmy raised Shorthorn cattle in Wigtownshire to send on boats to the Argentine. The canny exiles sent us meat home in cans. Corned beef is still the favourite food of one of Jimmy’s daughters, and the other drank unpasteurised milk straight from the farm all her days.
We are Nithraid, and this land is where we bide; so we race the tide up our river to release the salty spirit of Coo.
Nithraid was conceived as a public artwork to activate the riverside in Dumfries during the summer of 2013, bringing new focus and drawing people down to celebrate the River Nith. Now in its third year, Dumfries is preparing to welcome sailors upriver to the heart of the town as Nithraid 2015 sails into town on Sunday, 2nd August. Nithraid is free and open to all, and last year saw crowds of 4,000 lining the banks to watch the winning boats cross the finish line. Find out more about this year’s Nithraid here.
The discussion is open, and we invite contributions to our artistic conversations. Whether you have been involved in Nithraid in previous years, are interested in the changing face of public art, or are curious about how a sailing race can also be an artwork, please get in touch via the comments box below. Alternatively, to send your contribution, please email [email protected].
THE OLD MEN TAKE THE SALT COW DOWN TO THE RIVER TO DRINK.
THE OLD WOMEN REMEMBER WHEN THE FIELDS WERE FULL OF SALT COWS.
THE YOUNG GIRLS WATCH AS THE BOYS LEAP OVER THE BACK OF THE SALT COW.
THE YOUNG MEN SADDLE THEIR SALT COWS IN PREPARATION FOR WAR.
THESE THINGS BEING SO, CAESAR SET OUT FOR THE LAND OF THE SALT COW.
Senes vaccam salsam ad flumen ut bibat ducent.
Aniculae quando vaccae salsae agros olim operiebant recordantur.
Puellae pueros qui super salsam vaccam salient vident.
Iuvenes parati bellum suscipere vaccas salsas sternent.
Caesar his rebus factis ad terram ubi vacca salsa habitat discessit.
Nithraid was conceived as a public artwork to activate the riverside in Dumfries during the summer of 2013, bringing new focus and drawing people down to celebrate the River Nith. Now in its third year, Dumfries is preparing to welcome sailors upriver to the heart of the town as Nithraid 2015 sails into town on Sunday, 2nd August. Nithraid is free and open to all, and last year saw crowds of 4,000 lining the banks to watch the winning boats cross the finish line. Find out more about this year’s Nithraid here.
The discussion is open, and we invite contributions to our artistic conversations. Whether you have been involved in Nithraid in previous years, are interested in the changing face of public art, or are curious about how a sailing race can also be an artwork, please get in touch via the comments box below. Alternatively, to send your contribution, please email [email protected].
Vacca! The strange case of the lost locative. The Cow, subject and object as symbol. After Bonum, and Beckett (ablative, or is it genitive?)
Vacca, (the)Cow nominative, Vacca, Oh, Cow, vocative, Vaccam, you cow, accusative, Vaccae, of (the)cow, genitive, Vaccae, to or for (the)cow, dative, Vacca, by, with, from, or in (the) cow, ablative
Remember that? Of course, it would have been Mensa, table, when we of a certain generation of the modern era were learning the first declensions; female gender singular. The Latin primer, being an expression of the late classical form, omitted the locative case of colloquial or early Latin. Ah, that hushed and subtle tongue.
Oh, the locative, (vocative case, denoted by Oh… as in: Oh, Caesar… or an exclamation mark, as in: Christ! Look at the time…) the locative! It must not be forgotten for it describes the rightness of place and the infinite distance of one location from another. It was reserved for speaking of small islands alone in the Mediterranean; no archipelagoes here, no chains of thought, no Peloponnese or Balearics, no reefs, no connections to the mainland by causeways impassable at high tide, or bridges or small ferry boats. No, and no barren rocks.
The locative speaks of being separate, of being appropriately self-contained, and it can refer to being in the earth, to death and burial, that is, to humiliation. Or, to being at home, at the hearth, focum, foc, and being in the field or fields, when that had some meaning. Specific, you see, to a state of being in place, self-sufficient, separate, discrete. If they had thought of it then, on line, on the net, would be a perfect locative; in a state of separateness described by the place—the net.
Being in a State of Grace? The Cow’s case: (genitive surely; the case of the Salted Cow, but…) Our cow’s argument is locative.
Oh, Locative, (vocative) You obsolete case; you last fragile threads of pre-classical illumination, Be exhumed in this ritual
And roar your bovine craving at us for the case we are losing from the locative field. But, pitiless grammar will not bring the bull. You shall die fallow, unfertilized In the shallows.
Cleave then, oh beast, With your split hoof and state your case, Standing up to your classical canons in it. After all, This is the sharp season of your atomized shit. Homunculus eyes focus on a darker green field. Yes, pump it out, boys. More shit, more grass, more beef, more milk, more shit, more grass, More gas, yes. More, more, more. That is our locus, our focum vivendi, our domicile, And we are such classical agrarians. It is the locative case of Shit.
Cow! (Vocative) You are sacrificial, you see? To the modus, (modo, to or for the way, dative case) to the modus, While the grammar of thought, the rules of understanding Are wiping this island from the charts. But some pre-classical urge, some visceral memory knows An identical ritual killing takes me too. Letting go so much for the sake of so it is a sacrifice alright, And we, in our improved datives, are sensible of thy gift, oh Cow, And preserve thee, black and leathery, from a hook somewhere We can no longer quite describe.
Salt beef, my life. Oh, holy shit.
Salt beef at Blum’s on the Whitechapel Road, And the long walk home through the pre-classical period When we were emergent, Or what passed for young, and understood where we were. But Blum’s, oh my dears, is gone. It was, not is And in its place, I leave my dybbuk. For we too are ephemera, Singing our hearts out In the locative case.
Nithraid was conceived as a public artwork to activate the riverside in Dumfries during the summer of 2013, bringing new focus and drawing people down to celebrate the River Nith. Now in its third year, Dumfries is preparing to welcome sailors upriver to the heart of the town as Nithraid 2015 sails into town on Sunday, 2nd August. Nithraid is free and open to all, and last year saw crowds of 4,000 lining the banks to watch the winning boats cross the finish line. Find out more about this year’s Nithraid here.
The discussion is open, and we invite contributions to our artistic conversations. Whether you have been involved in Nithraid in previous years, are interested in the changing face of public art, or are curious about how a sailing race can also be an artwork, please get in touch via the comments box below. Alternatively, to send your contribution, please email [email protected].
This is what I’m thinking: we must not lose the deep meaning of Nithraid. After all, we sweated blood to get this far. We must affirm Nithraid in the flow of world art with every action. That is our responsibility to art and to people.
The main point, of course, is to show Dumfries to the wide world as a place where things are happening. But if we are to show the art world that socially engaged public art is the way to go, then we must show them that we have resolved the problem of the redundant art object.
Here it is: the cow, the cow delivery system, the Nith, the we the people, the thing of things!
What are we saying?
We are saying that this cow thing is alive and well and living in Dumfries!
It was once a linguistic object, but here and now, it is a liberated thing.
The reason it’s liberated is because we gave the art object the voice of a thing, and that thing is everything!
The Dumfries Nithraid cow is the thing of our imagining.
It is what we are and always were.
We are the Nithraid thing.
Nithraid is the liberation of the object once known as ‘cow’.
First, we cover it in salt because salt imbues and confirms the cow as a once-object standing in reserve of our existence (for our use as required).
But then, as the cow sinks into the River Nith, we, the people, sing a mooing song... moo... moo... moo...
The salt is washed away to reveal the new, precious thing in the context of things. And this act deconstructs and disrupts the limitations of our own object-centric thinking.
Nithraid was conceived as a public artwork to activate the riverside in Dumfries during the summer of 2013, bringing new focus and drawing people down to celebrate the River Nith. Now in its third year, Dumfries is preparing to welcome sailors upriver to the heart of the town as Nithraid 2015 sails into town on Sunday, 2nd August. Nithraid is free and open to all, and last year saw crowds of 4,000 lining the banks to watch the winning boats cross the finish line. Find out more about this year’s Nithraid here.
The discussion is open, and we invite contributions to our artistic conversations—whether you have been involved in Nithraid in previous years, are interested in the changing face of public art, or are curious about how a sailing race can also be an artwork, please get in touch via the comments box below. Alternatively, to send your contribution, please email [email protected].
Here’s the rainbow scum in the peaty puddle, the floating wabbling moss pressed to a trickle, to the stony sykes and the burns with the overhanging alder banks, the Marr, the Scaur, you know them all. Plunge pools between the rocks where something cold in the shape of a tiny fish slimes to the stones and you dare not touch it, innocuous though you are. The falls and the places of the saved, the plains flood, bunds and bridges now, drains and stinking outfalls, rich weed and confluences, abbey ruins, mills, houses, fishing beats those who should and those who shouldn’t, lord bless us and slow us every one.
Now here’s a river that flows both ways twice a day, here’s a river with a bore, here’s a river of great salmon and otters in the town centre, here’s river that worked, here’s a river that sent a thousand swanskin gloves in a single ship, here’s a river that’s been trained and straightened, blasted, dredged, bridged, forded, made electricity, turned the town mill. It’s the replying torrent that floods the town and carries off the eroded hills, it fills and empties with millions upon millions of tons of seawater twice a day and here’s a benign stream of clear tea stained water with islands and ducks and white flowering weed.
Here are the docks and wharves o’ergrown, the flattening merse, the ooze, the whetted wind that opens the distance to the sea. This is the sea. The Nith is a constant with darkness laying along its meandering silty bed. No day is the same yet…
The Rise of Denmark in full sail on the River Nith. From the collection of the Dumfries Museum
Mark Zygadlo is part of the Stove’s Nithraid team, developing the boat race itself and this year has also been working to create a large installation in the centre of the River Nith. This year’s Nithraid takes place on Saturday, 13th of September. A dangerous dinghy race from Carsethorn upriver, the boats will arrive in the centre of Dumfries with the high tide at approximately 3.45pm. There is a lot going down on the Whitesands all afternoon, full details on our Nithraid page here.
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