Suas Staidhre Lùbach (Up the Curved (or Winding) Staircase)

Glasgow, 2025

It's interesting how an image can draw you in (out?) and in searching for the meaning, the reason perhaps that this image captured my attention, I find a connection to something else equally as compelling. In this case, I found a poem called Remembrance Day by Marion Angus, a Scottish poet, forerunner of a Scottish Renaissance in the inter-war period marking a transition from the lowland language tradition of Robert Burns to the modernists like Hugh MacDiarmid and Violet Jacob.

Some one was singing

Up a twisty stair,

A fragment of a song,

One sweet, spring day,

When twelve o'clock was ringing,

Through the sunny square--

There was a lad baith frank and free,

Cam' doon the bonnie banks o' Dee

Wi' tartan plaid and buckled shoon,

An' he'll come nae mair to oor toon.,"--

'He dwells within a far countree,

Where great ones do him courtesie,

They've gien him a golden croon,

An' he'll come nae mair to oor toon.'--

No one is singing

Up the twisty stair.

Quiet as a sacrament

The November day.

Can't you hear it swinging,

The little ghostly air?--

Hear it sadly stray

Through the misty square,

In and out a doorway,

Up a twisty stair--

Tartan plaid and buckled shoon,

He'll come nae mair to oor toon.

This poem was published in The Lilt and Other Verses in 1922, and was written as a memorial to lives lost in the first world war. It bears the key themes of intimate loss, haunting silence, and memory of the dead; but it is not as far from what we might think of an empty stairwell as you might think. Let me emphasize up front--I am in no way minimizing the tragic loss of young men in battle, nor am I saying that a trivial stairwell in any way compares on any level to that loss. What I'm talking about is a feeling that is brought on by profound silence. I talked in my last post about third space, that is, a social environment distinct from home and work that is deemed essential for community building, mental well-being, and fostering social connections. I believe a stairwell meets that definition, and as to the silence characteristic of an empty stairwell I think mental well-being the most apt of its qualities.

The poem speaks to a young vibrant soldier who will never return to his home, while the photo shows an empty stairwell behind a mullioned glass curtain window, separating the inside from the outside. There is no visible entry point, and one might imagine that the world behind the glass is very different from the world in which you stand; a world of peace and quiet versus one filled with the rumbling sounds of non-stop living.

The atmosphere of the poem is of an "empty noiselessness" in which the silence of the Armistice echoes with extreme loss whereas the stairwell begs us to wonder if it is a place of refuge, a shelter or place of protection from danger or disarray--perhaps that posed by the outside world. A place that represents the turning of your back on the chaos of a world in turmoil.

The memory of the dead presents a ghostly absence, like the shadows and reflections of buildings seen in the glass. They might be the images of what once stood on that ground, or what lies behind you, unseen, standing above you, watching over you. And, the perception of a stairwell that climbs higher towards and into the sky, away and above.

Upon publication, a reviewer of the poem, Winifred Duke (see the reference and link below), said "to read [Angus'] verse is like sitting in an empty room where fingers tap on the window pane, and outside the house, something passes on noiseless feet" . . . like sitting on a step in an empty stairwell, fingers tapping on the glass, trying to get the attention of a solitary passerby who stops to take a photo.

Sometimes I don't fully realize what I've found until I start to think on it, write on it. This is one of those occasions. There was meaning enough in the image for me to photograph it in the first place, but after stumbling (do you believe in fate?) on the poem, and studying it side-by-side with the photograph, it is now so much more.

Finally, if you're interested, I titled the photo in Scottish Gaelic, based on the poem, Up the Curved (or Winding) Staircase. It is pronounced: Suas (Soo-ass, rhymes with "cool" + "pass") Staidhre (Sty-ruh like "spy" but with a 't', then a short 'u' sound) Lùbach (Loo-bach with the "ch" as a raspy sound in the back of the throat, like the 'ch' in Scotish "loch").

For more on Marion Angus and her poem, see Scottish Poetry Library at https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/marion-angus/ and Behind Their Lines, Poetry of the Great War at https://behindtheirlines.blogspot.com/2018/11/ballad-of-remembrance.html.