Reposted by Dan Wall
Third Man Syndrome – the belief, at the far edge of exhaustion, fear or grief, that someone unseen walks alongside – has inspired Kathleen Jamie to write a new narrative poem where that presence speaks. She sets it among people who have met it.
#poetry #mountaineering
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
bbc.co.uk
BBC Radio 4 - Illuminated, Third Man Syndrome
Kathleen Jamie on the unseen presence that walks beside climbers at the edge of survival.
!["Your Majesty has belike heard that there are certain mystical women in the world called witches. In the shire of Renfrew, we have had, both in time past and at present, no small trouble with their pranks, and it is as thoroughly believed among the country folk as the gospel, that the witches are in the practice of gallanting over field and flood after sun-set, in the shape of cats and mawkins, to dance the La Volta, with a certain potentate that I shall not offend your Majesty by naming.
"I should here explain, that the witches, when they take the shape of hares, charm away the power of pouther and lead; so that unless the gun be loaded with silver, it will not go off, or, if it does go off, it will not kill, especially in the hands of a young sportsman; and that the best antidote to their charm, is for the sportsman, when he is an experienced hand, to put a pair of silver sleeve-buttons in his fowling-piece. When he does this, and fires with effect, it is said, and the fact is often well attested, the hare will never be seen again; […]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vmd2oqboco524fhpqdu7pnbn/bafkreiekwofadf7k7gvzedut2lcvpgcejskv5674lod3sm4y37a2qxtwji)
![[…] but beyond the next hedge, some dubious carlin will, in all human probability, be found riddled in the hips, saying her prayers backwards. What I have to tell is an undoubted proof of this, for it happened to myself in the presence of the late Logan of that ilk, a man of singular piety, and one of the best shots in the shire of Ayr.
"Being staying with him, we one day went out to shoot. It was in the afternoon. We started nothing, and we staid late, not very content, as your Majesty may well think, with such profitless sport. But I trow we have both had cause to remember long that afternoon; for in the gloaming, as we were coursing with our dejected dogs, the which were as disappointed as ourselves, we start-ed, as we thought, a hare out of a whin bush. It ran before us, in every gesture, lith, and limb, just like a hare, and the dogs pursued it as if it had been nothing less natural. We followed, never doubting that it was a hare.
"A fine har'st evening had set in, and the new moon, the sickle of Time, betokened, in the west. ern heavens, that Nature was binding up the sheaves of our days; but, nevertheless, we followed our game, never suspecting that it was any […]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vmd2oqboco524fhpqdu7pnbn/bafkreifre7k3576rdexkqt5jntdrxukleyw7uebuefuc6h5tzjsg52ryqi)
