Greatest hits...and myths...of Robert Burns

Sunday 20 January 2013

YOU'LL know him by his Twitter handle: @RoboBurns.

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We know that the life and work of Scotland’s Bard is testament to the triumph of creativity over personal struggles ... but it also shows that Burns was every bit as adept at fashioning an iconic persona as David Bowie, Madonna and today’s rock stars. A modern celebration of Burns Day by Pat Kane

His profile photo is mid-to-late 20s, head shaved but cheek aglow and eyes dark pools, a Celtic cyber-tattoo curling half-way up his neck. On weekdays, he's an IT temp-worker, servicing large, public bureaucracies. One side of his brain is fixing glitches and enabling broken pay runs amid the office dividers; the other is listening for bitter-sweet lines, feeling for the hurt and joy in the everyday.

He's got to belt home down the M8 today to pick up two squirming weans from a carnaptious granny and drop them off at a stone-faced ex (it's her weekend). But then: the weekend! By day on Saturday, @RoboBurns will code, loop, work on the flow of his lyrics (pitched somewhere between Leshmahagow and LA). He crowd-sources his projects, for both love and a wee bit of money. He'll do some hacktivism for a human rights site; or he'll mash up some political clips for the #indy campaign. Whatever. It's a bit-torrent of creativity: no boundaries. Then comes the beginning of the rest of the weekend, rolling in the deep of a Saturday night. He'll start in one howff (as granda used to call it), trawling in a net-full of geeks, teachers, leechers, radicals, ranters, relatives. Then they'll sprawl and starfish across the dens and halls of Glasvegas. Tapping covert notes on the revelries into his mobile, @RoboBurns will stay on the whisky all night; that's safest (though as for his pals -) What's never safe is the point at which the pools of his dark-brown eyes meet the crazy coloured contacts of someone else's. And if they're pretty and smart, worldly and friendly, then who knows where he'll end up in the wee small hours, or how long the walk of shame the next Sunday morning. For the thing about @RoboBurns is, he dearly loves the lassies, o ... That's my early 21st-century Robert Burns – roaming the streets of Scotland with a smartphone, a multimedia art practice, a job with the state, radical sympathies and an addiction to Saturday nights. Yours will be different. Yet the closer you look at the biography and writing of Robert Burns, the more startling his contemporary relevance becomes. Leave aside, just for a moment, the sheer heights of his poetic genius: there's no exemplar to be drawn from that, just reverent admiration. But Burns's life has much to tell us (mostly good, occasionally bad) about how to sustain and progress your creativity, amid the most grinding, unsupportive conditions. Burns's struggles around art-making, money and career, sexuality and family, ideas and politics are, to a very familiar extent, our own. For one thing, Burns was as masterful in the skills of hype and self-promotion as any modern commercial artist. He used his roots to wow the urban taste-makers of his time as adroitly as any scruffy band or conceptual artist right now, advancing roughly on unsuspecting metropolitan elites. Robert Crawford's recent Burns biography makes this crystal clear. Very early on in his writing career, Burns began to evolve a conception of himself as "The Bard" – the kind of "authentic" poet that Scotland, still struggling to reconcile its native linguistic and cultural traditions with the strictures and demands of Union, would need and love. Yet this was an 18th-century Ayrshire agricultural worker who, by virtue of his father's improving mentality and the input of a brilliant local teacher John Murdoch, was completely up to speed with London letters and the best of English literature. In the same way as an aspirational kid in a Scottish scheme today would use the net to enrich and deepen his or her taste, the young Burns voraciously read the foreign pages of newspapers and The Spectator magazine, drank in the elegances of Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope, conceived of himself as a "man of sentiment" (or what we might call today an "emo-kid"). Fascinatingly, Crawford suggests that actually getting to university might have wasted Burns's talent – making him embarrassed to draw freely from local language and lore. But by the time he mounted his pony and struck out for the literary circles of Edinburgh, following up a few leads of interest on a locally published first volume, Burns had his "peasant-poet" routine almost entirely worked out. It's often cited that the Burns "humble genius" myth first started with his Edinburgh reviewers ("this Heaven-taught Ploughman", Henry Mackenzie wrote in the fabulously-named journal, Lounger). But Burns's own PR had completely cued them up. The poet's prefaces and epigraphs in the Kilmarnock editions of his works go on about "The Simple Bard, unbroke by rules of art/He pours the wild effusions of the heart". He claimed to be an artless composer, while also referencing poetic greats such as Ramsay and Fergusson. And there's a bottom line here: in order to secure publication of his volume, Burns has to use his social networks to find advance subscribers – exactly parallel to the kind of hustling that creatives currently do on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter. In either case, declaring your modest artistic virtue is often the best default tone to extract cash: "Not the mercenary bow over a counter" as Burns wrote, "but the heart-throbbing gratitude of the Bard". Feigned simplicity, then as now, sells well. A contemporary of Burns, Robert Anderson, once asked him about the highly literate references buried in his poetry. Anderson reports Burns as replying that it was "part of the machinery, as he called it, of his poetical character to pass for an illiterate ploughman who wrote from pure inspiration". Joni Mitchell's line from A Free Man In Paris, "stoking the star-making machinery behind the popular song", comes to mind. As does Robert Zimmerman – otherwise known as the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan – and his oft-proclaimed love of Burns: both of them artful constructors of their outsider status for commercial markets. Yet if you can forge a market for yourself, you can sometimes sustain your art at its best. The acclaimed Burnsian (and son of William) Liam McIlvanney sees this carefully fashioned "heaven-taught ploughman" image as giving Burns real creative freedom. "He could deploy 'vulgar' language and subversive politics with comparative impunity," McIlvanney says. "By posing as someone who doesn't know any better, Burns disarms those critics who would seek to attack him for his satirical treatment of aristocrats and MPs in The Twa Dogs, or for addressing the monarch in an earthy demotic in A Dream. This very sophisticated use of personae, this conscious manipulation of his own image, positions Burns as a decidedly 'modern' poet." So is Burns doing the kind of strategic, seductive role-play we see in James Brown, David Bowie, Prince, Madonna, Lady Gaga? Yes and no. There's no doubt that Burns had a deeply rock'n'roll attitude to life, almost classic 1960s and 1970s Led Zeppelinesque. The essentially mistreated spouse Jean Armour – "her indoors", as the monsters of rock might say – bore him many children, but also endured her husband's constant amorous roving (and siring). However, Burns's near-anarchic commitment to revelry, drinking, male companionship, not just in real life but in his poetry, had a political edge (as it often has in rock'n'roll). This, at least, was a zone free from the meddling ministrations of state and church. And given the political and religious pressures of his time, Burns's libertarianism (blending into libertinism) can be understood, if not entirely forgiven. The late 18th-century Kirk regularly wielded its power to publicly shame those it regarded as immoral. At the same time, the authorities sent out agents and militia to sniff out those who had republican or revolutionary tendencies. Burns held fiercely insurrectionist views, and these could often only be expressed in works distributed privately, or anonymously, and sometimes even posthumously (Is There For Honest Poverty, his great radical anthem, appeared only after his death). The contemporary parallel for the political Burns, trying to reconcile his radicalism with his need to support his family, might not necessarily be located in Scotland. (Though, as our Twitter nerd at the beginning suggests, a contemporary Scottish Burns might be as interested in the Pirate Party, the Occupy movements and Julian Assange as the original Bard was in the French and American revolutions.) We might be more likely to find this version of Burns in a Middle-Eastern or East Asian state, just before or just after its "spring" moment. He or she would be struggling to find a way to express a desire for democracy and justice in their words, images, notes or blogs – barely sustained by a private life marked by chaotic or collapsed love lives, shortages of money, food and power, and the daily intrusions of an unreformed theocracy or oligarchy. Something like Asghar Farhadi's 2012 Oscar-winning Iranian movie, A Separation, is arguably more deeply "Burns-like" than any contemporary Scottish art, produced under less oppressive conditions. Roaming around in Burns's life – a difficult, overlapping, messy life, which teaches us (in Don Paterson's words) that hypocrisy is damnable, but inconsistency much less so – we keep finding parallels that remind us of when our modern times began, and how Burns was present at its turbulent starting point. Take financial crisis, for example. As Liam McIlvanney says: "Burns lived at a time of failing banks – the Ayr Bank collapsed in 1772, with disastrous consequences. Economic security was becoming increasingly chimerical for entire classes of people, including cotters and tenant farmers like Burns and those around him. His poems exploring this condition – like Lines Written On A Banknote – may sound newly relevant to today's readers." MacIlvanney is right: "Wae worth thy power, thou cursed leaf! ... I see the children of affliction unaided, through thy curs'd restriction." Burns wrong the Banknote poem in a state of economic anxiety, while he was considering a move to Jamaica as a manager in a slave colony. There's the hypocrisy charge, easily levelled at Burns: not only a relentless Priapus who wrote great and tender love songs, but a potential coloniser and government excise man who wrote The Slave's Lament and The Tree of Liberty. Yet what is more modern than to try to pursue progressive values, in a messy and compromised world? A world where every discardable plastic purchase irreversibly heats the planet; where every casual chomp in a coffee shop is implicated in half the world's food getting thrown away; where our offices and hospitals are cleaned and tended by those who have been sucked away from their homelands by globalisation? Our contemporary Burns would want to face all this, lyricise it, and in doing so make it universal and philosophical. Is there any line more deeply pertinent to our ecological crisis than those from To A Mouse: "I'm truly sorry man's dominion/Has broken nature's social union"? And if we want to figure out whether a world of brands and marketing is to be ripped up and torn down, or could somehow be put to enlightened or improving use, we might usefully dwell on the global impact of the Burns brand itself. In the US, there are more statues to Robert Burns than to any other single poet. His impact in Russia and China, and on writers such as Maya Angelou and Seamus Heaney, Walt Whitman and Toni Morrison, is well known. We probably underestimate the importance of that scene in when Harry Met Sally, when Billy Crystal stands at a New York party listening to Auld Lang Syne and wonders, "My whole life, I don't know what this song means ... Should old acquaintance be forgot ..." And Meg Ryan eventually answers: "It's about old friends." Could we ask for anything better than a verse of broad Scots being recognised every year, in most locations across this planet, as a tribute to lasting friendship and personal connection? There's no point in sanitising or simplifying Robert Burns. Indeed, in his firecracker rotations around some very recognisable poles – love and money, politics and philosophy, sex and regret – what we should be celebrating is Robert Burns's struggle to hold it together, and yet move forward, striving for as much eloquence and self-knowledge as we can in the process. Not a bad model for modern living. And you probably saw him out there, last Saturday night: that tattooed, shaven-headed guy in the corner of the club. Sneaking snapshots and videos; thumbing out notes on his phone. And occasionally, just to get the feel of it, @RoboBurns will step up for a birl with a lassie on the dance floor. Pat Kane is one half of Hue And Cry, and blogs at Thoughtland (thoughtland.info) For more information on Robert Burns, details on how to host your own Burns Supper and to download the app visit www.scotland.org/burns-night

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Greatest hits...and myths...of Robert Burns

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