Today was daylight saving, which seems a little harsh, since I had to do two of them in one year. 

After our mandatory trip to the pier, Camilla and I went shopping today, browsing through the many charity shops and fingering garments with the warning: do not hold near flame, as well as strange Scottish coin purses and costume jewelry and knick-knacks. She got two plaid shirts which she will embroider, and I got hungry. 

So we went to a salad bar, where we were plied with garbanzo beans, mint feta cheese chunks, capers, arugula, chorizo, and other items which admittedly could be found in a salad on the other side of the Atlantic, but not like that, no, not like that. It was good, though.

Then we sat in the sun in the park while Camilla climbed a tree, as one does while telephoning. I worked on another illuminated manuscript-y thing, and we were both quite content. 

A trip to the end of the beach, which, since this is the weekend, was crowded with pink clad little girls and rock throwing little boys and Aberdeen terriers and burly men with sticks and fat women in mini skirts and skinny stooped old men with multi-pocketed vests and binoculars, and, of course, us.

Tomorrow at 7 in the morning we depart via bus for Leeds, whence we will take a plane to Venice.

I still wake up in the middle of the night. This time, it was a good thing, because drunken students were carousing just outside the window, singing "Midnight Special," and a number of Carter Family tunes which I dearly love. With an accordion. I read a few more chapters of Iain M. Banks' "Matter" and am not sure if I like it a lot or only enough to while away the wee hours of the morning. He is good at plot and invention but not so good at human psychology. Sort of like Asimov.

I peeled myself out of bed at the last moment and went off with Camilla to a remarkably boring lecture on how "Frankenstein" has been interpreted in plays and film. The professor read rather desperately from his notes and said a few things that I positively disagreed with. For example, he dismissed as fanciful the idea that Shelley deliberately left some aspects of her novel open to interpretation (that's why the various theater and film interpretations are so different).

Scott McCloud, in his discussion of the graphic novel, points out that characters like Tintin and Charlie Brown, who are represented with almost no distinguishing features, become Everyman. You can project yourself into their character in a way that you can't with a clearly defined character such as The Hulk or Wonder Woman. Shelley may not have known this explicitly, but the power of her novel surely is partly due to her use of the technique.

Luckily, our time was not entirely wasted. I worked on understanding how to make Celtic knots, the girl in front of me played Solitaire, and, according to Camilla, other students were shopping online.

I had a caloric but delicious pasta al forgo at an Italian cafe, a nap, and then went to the harbor to sit in the wind and meet Camilla. We strolled through a park, collected pussy willows, and climbed through Medieval alleyways to get back to the University part of town.

We shopped for dinner for Sara, my host. There is a teeny cheese shop, smelling like dairy and old socks and nuts and time. We got something gooey, something hard, and something silky. At a greengrocer's that smelled like rotten apples, we got apples and pears, and at a bakery, got seed bread and two teeny chocolate balls filled with whiskey truffle that cost as much as the bread. Then we went to Sara's and sliced and spread and had a very pleasant meal.


We talked about time from an anthropological point of view. Our Japanese friends say it is cyclical. Scientists say it is a one-way arrow. Some indigenous tribes see it as the eternal present. Our conclusion? That it depends on the scale you're talking about. We are in the third generation of stars, and are made of stardust that could not have existed 10 billion years ago. So, on the cosmic scale, time moves inexorably in one direction. On a human scale, it depends. In a pre-industrial culture, you could experience it as cyclical. If you had 20 pregnancies in your lifespan, and if your oldest children were beginning to have babies by the time you had your last few, and if you planted the same crops every year in the same season, you might indeed see it as a grand cycle, endlessly repeating. If you were more technological and prosperous, and had only one or two children, and your education and career followed a trajectory that changed according to your age, you might see time as I do, as a directional thing. In a rural economy, goats gestate for five months and chickens for one month, and cows are milked twice daily. In an urban environment, you cross the street at the green light and go to work at 8:30 and have lunch at 12. The perception of time is different; one is naturally driven, the other is arbitrary but useful. 


After washing dishes, I settled down to take this Celtic knot study of mine to another level.

Breakfast at Taste, lectures with Camilla. I could get used to this! 

There's some road resurfacing at Greyfriar's, and they found gravesite(s) there! I stared at some brown lumps and a group of people with paintbrushes squatting around them. Cool.

The big event of the day was meeting up with an old college friend for dinner. I had the idea that I might paint a picture of the boats in the harbor as a house gift, but what with being sick and taking a too-long nap, the hasty sketch I came up with was fit only for fire starter. At least I now understand what a lobster boat looks like. And a swan. To my regret, the puffins that bob around on the other side of the pier are too shy to pose.

While waiting for Camilla, I peeked in at choir practice. It was lovely hearing the small student orchestra and choir work on something Renaissance. I kept getting carried away by the intricate harmonies, when the conductor would stop them in mid-phrase and say, "All right, let's move to Bar 42!" He'd play a chord on the piano and they'd start somewhere else. Dizzying.

Keith is an astronomer and lives just around the corner from choir practice. He and his wife Anne have a cosy stone house with an Aga stove, a sick cat, and (despite the cat) a sense of peace. We sat at their kitchen table, eating burritos and reminiscing about our not-very-wild college days. There was a sense that, if there had been more time, we could have renewed and deepened a worthy friendship. 

I awoke at 5, 6, 7, and 10:00, and found myself scurrying to meet Camilla 10 minutes in the past.

We breakfasted at Taste and sat in the sun outside another cafe, where a potato shaped woman required us to buy something or leave. Fair enough, except that she had no customers. In her place, I might have considered giving us a free latte and asking us to remain longer. We would have been conscientious shills, I know we would have.

Camilla's morning class was again on Frankenstein, this time on the concept of Gothic. In the Augustan Age, "Gothic" meant archaic, primitive, crude, & irrational; and "classic" meant civilized, perfectly balanced, harmonious. Then the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke wrote that fear is a more powerful emotion than affection (he was never a mother, I deduce), and thus the sublime is greater than the beautiful. The idea of Gothic became a political one, with the Northern Races seen as democratic and the Romans as despotic. The Gothic novel, whose height was reached in 1790, 28 years before Frankenstein, was about power and tyranny, about the foreign and excessive, about deviance and incest. The intricacy of Frankenstein mirrors the intricacy of Gothic architecture, the labyrinthine journey to the interior.

Lecture on Ionesco, lecture on Baby Boomers, lunch at Vic, walk to Botanical Gardens, long sick nap, Taste for soup and apply to art school.

We started the day at Taste, a cosy cafe with the best croissants in town. Camilla took me to a riveting lecture on Mary Shelley and her novel Frankenstein. Shelley's mother, Mary Wollenstonecraft, died in childbirth and her father, William Godwin, was a forbidding man, a philosopher who was said to believe, "if you cannot write an epic poem which will knock all others on its head then you are despicable." Mary read at her mother's grave and, when she was 16, was swept off her feet at that very grave by the married poet Percy Shelley. Their philosophical affair led them to a life abroad, and to the death of Shelley's wife Harriet and her unborn child. All these intense events fed into the novel. You may take the intensely glamorous path of following your convictions, but it can also be narcissistic and destructive. In the book, the female characters all come to a bad end because of the ideals of their menfolk.

I wandered about while Camilla went to more classes. St Andrews is a dual town, one part for students, and the other for the usual sort of person. There's a ruined castle, stones of which were used to rebuild the quay at the tiny little harbor. There's a ruined cathedral with an enormous graveyard that's still used. A street full of lobster pots, a pair of swans, a handful of second hand shops and bookshops, and many little eateries. I am saying nothing about golf because it is an invisible world to me. (Speaking of which, please read China Mieville's The City and the City. Thank you.)

Camilla collected me from the windswept prospect and we went to a lecture relating the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Arabian Nights, and Jorge Luis Borges. It was a little hard for me to make the connections (it had to do with book as artifact vs. storytelling), but each individual chunk was fascinating. The lecture style around here is somewhat old fashioned, with the teacher standing in a corner with a microphone and a remote for their slides, and no interaction with the audience. I suppose it has to be that way, but as an elementary school teacher, I protest! Nevertheless, there were some genuine gems in her talk: In the British museum, cuneiform tablets were laid out on trays "like a jigsaw that some naughty giants threw in the air." George Smith, an engraver, was recruited to assemble them. When he did so, and found extra-Biblical evidence of a flood and of Noah, he tore off his clothes and ran about shouting. He was restrained, and afterwards  presented a paper to the Society of Biblical Archaeology. 

There was also a slide of a talismanic piece of clothing, written all over with magical texts.

Afterwards, Camilla went to the dorm for dinner and I tested a kebab place to have my first 100% terrible meal in Scotland. 

Sunday morning, of course one goes to church. But not just any church. Rosslyn Chapel, the setting for part of Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code," is a 25 minute bus ride away.

It is a lovely little place. Outside, there is a notice that explains that it isn't so much a sermon in stone as an evocation of the very trees and birds. Perhaps. It was very nice, anyway. Some of the stone carvings were very new, and others were eroded beyond recognition. It was nice to see that they're actively repairing it. Inside, it was a perfect little church, peaceful and lovely.

The congregation was small but of all ages. The service was the familiar Episcopalian one, and the sermon was on Mothering Day, today. I was struck again by the black/white tendency of Christian theology. The call to extirpate evil from all that we do, to follow only the good seems to me to be very dangerous. Not coincidentally, I just finished Carl Jung's The Undiscovered Self, in which, among other things, he says that when we repress something, when we don't admit that it is part of our human nature, then it finds some way of expressing itself anyway, but in a form that we don't recognize and hence cannot repress. Despite my queasiness about some of the things the minister said, I did enjoy his articulateness, and even wrote down one of his phrases, "The porridge-covered architecture (of northern Christian countries) and the strong East wind."

On one of the walls near the altar was the phrase, "Forte est vina. Fortior est rex. Fortiores sunt mulieres. Supra omnes vincit veritias," which I surely will use for my Latin students. It comes from a Bible story where King Darius judges whether wine, the king, women, or the truth are the strongest. Guess which he picks?

Afterwards, I talked with a woman whose husband had worked for the Scottish Salmon Board, but we never got that technical, which was too bad.

We wandered about through fragrant wild onion, viewing the ruins of Rosslyn Castle and enjoying the river at its base. Jelte stuck his head in the water, which made everyone happy.

We had greasy but tasty pub grub and then caught the bus back to town. Camilla and Jelte went off to look for John Napier's grave again, and again couldn't find it, while I napped.

Then, the train to St Andrews through green and tidy countryside.

Jelte says that he enjoys the crowding with the three of us in his micro-room. It's reminiscent of the African culture he grew up with. Indeed, as long as we have a place to go for much of the day, it truly is companionable. The dance of bodies, where we sidle past each other, take naps, and schedule showers, contributes human warmth to the meeting of minds that we also enjoy.


After a leisurely breakfast at the yellow cafe, the three of us walked (Camilla clattered in her wooden heels) through the stone lined streets towards the river, ducking precipitously down under the bridge to the packed dirt Dean Path that paralleled the ivy lined river. It rushes cheerily along, about 15 feet wide, enjoyed by strollers, dog walkers, and people with Important Destinations.

Our Important Destination is the Modern Art Museum. Like the other museums I've visited, this one is small and elegant. The collection is not what I expected from its title. I suppose the word "Modern" also can mean "Contemporary." 

I'm pretty sure they intentionally arranged the displays on the left hand side of the building to move from purely representational art through the shattering events of the 20th century to complete dissociation. It was like watching the process of a schizophrenic breakdown. Bodies become distorted, then detached. Henry Moore's sculptures detach shoulders entirely from hips. Art dribbled off the canvas, became thicker, more textured, colors became less vivid or more fully saturated. Shared public visions, nuanced or broad, are replaced by cries of despair or private musing.

More recently, it seems to me that fine art has become unmoored from any expectation. Anything from super-realism to full emotionalism to autistic motif repetition to cryptic layers of black shadow might appear. I find myself wishing that I could live another 200 years to see how this settles. In my opinion, the crumbling of the world order has not fully played out, as on the one hand, the developed nations must come to grips with loss of hegemony, and on the other hand, indigenous peoples must confront the presence of humans entirely outside of their mythologies.

I believe, but of course can't prove that as things continue to readjust they will never fully settle. The world is blessed with a myriad of functional cultures, which are being forcibly united through technology, the Internet, English, and capitalism, but none of these factors needs to penetrate fully into the depths of culture. People might raise their babies differently once they have access to vaccines or education, but you will still be able to tell the difference between Swaziland parenting and Russian parenting. It may be that everyone will own a pair of blue jeans but they will also feel a connection to the saris, bunads, or kimonos of their ancestors. In the same way, art will never again homogenize the way it did, say, in the Celtic monastery tradition. There might be global advertising fads, but there will also be fine art that is fully rooted in culture, personality, and history.

In the entryway, there was an anatomically precise twenty-foot resin sculpture of a newborn baby, still bloody from her recent ordeal, with one eye half open. The impact was intense. Babies hit us all, especially those whose hormones have been awakened through parenthood, in the instinctive part of our emotions.

Another high impact exhibit was of four lifelike resin sculptures of men in rumpled business suits, one with a stick in his hand behind two men on their hands and knees, and once facing them with a mirror in his hand. It looked like a Situation, a setup where the menace was undefined but palpable.

The final memorable piece, entitled War, was a shattered copy of Degas' touching sculpture of the 14 year old dancer (which I saw!! In Paris!!!). This one, though, was pregnant, with parts of her skin missing, some in an an anatomically believable way, others as though chunks of clay had fallen off. Wow.

Afterwards the three of us sat in the sun on the terrace, drinking tea, getting foot massages, and enjoying each others' company. My goodness! 3:30!

We galloped back home, stopping at a French cafe for some very good quiche.

After naps and chill in' we headed off for an evening of clubbing. You heard me right. Clubbing.

This is what the young and hip do in Edinburgh on a Saturday night. Also, this was St. Patrick's Day. The Old Town area, which is stony and staid by day, opens up at night. A couple days ago, I read an article in the Guardian saying that some shockingly high percentage of clobbers have accepted an unknown substance from a person they didn't trust and snorted it. I believe it. Buckets of alcohol flow, and remarkably convivial and mild mannered people crowd the streets and line up outside pubs. Everywhere is the smell of whiskey. 

Me, I'm taking meds which don't mix with booze so I was a bit out of my element. At the pub where we met with Jelte's business team, it was totally hopping! Bodies pressed against bodies, and everyone wore a smile. I tried to enter into the spirit of things but failed. The noise level was such that I couldn't make out individual words, just tonal barks. The only person I could understand was Jelte's stunningly lovely sister, whom I could lip read. I felt a bit like a curmudgeonly old codger who needs a hearing aide. At 11, when everyone moved to the dance club, I took my aging carcass off to home.

The streets were magical, magical in the old sense of fey and unexpected and shadowed. Lights, colors, crowds and crowds of cheery youths, a marimba player, street people with their pit bulls settling down for the night, shouts and snatches of song, a quartet of women older and fatter than me in glittering green hats venturing out with maps clutched in hand.  Not once during the 45 minute walk did I get a bad vibe. 

Under the impression that the Scottish Museum of Modern Art was near the National Gallery, I strolled through the gardens at the foot of the castle. Nope, the building that was marked with an A on my map search was the Scottish Academy, and a very friendly man explained this to me in seven different ways. He sent me around to ask directions at the National Gallery.

There was a burly bagpiper leaning against the fence, glowering at a younger version of himself who was piping in the courtyard. "Do you have bagpipe duels?" I asked, having been catapulted into a garrulous mood by the previous conversation and by my status of invulnerability as a tourist.

He was having none of it. Glower was what he wanted, and glower was what he was going to do.

"Duels?" he said icily. "No. We don't have duels."

All right then. I was about to move off, but he relented and made an effort. You could almost hear the social engines in his brain start up. "Where are you from?" he asked. Then we got into a fascinatingly awkward conversation, where every time one of us spoke, the other one had just begun to speak as well. I would think that the conversation was over and move off, and he would call me back with a trivial question that was clearly designed to keep us engaged further. It could have been the subject of a thesis paper on conversational dynamics gone awry. But I did find out that the other piper and he traded off every half hour. So.

Exactly the opposite happened at the National Gallery, where the guard at the door was the explaining kind of Scotsman. He waxed eloquent on the subjects of backpacks in the museum, and the impossibility of getting from there to the Museum of Modern Art. No direct buses, not possible to walk. This took a very long time to convey, so just for good luck I went through the museum again to steel myself for the long walk back to Jelte's flat.

There I learned that Jelte was still not back from Aberdeen, having had a very successful yesterday talking with community energy mavens there, who pressed conviviality on him and made it seem ridiculous to travel back home without another shot first. This led to a home stay and friendship.

I headed west to the Botanical Gardens, a map clutched firmly in hand. The map was of marginal help, since I didn't get the angles right. Streets are not orthogonal around here. You can head off and find that you have made a 30º miscalculation, which quickly veers off into walking in the wrong direction; erratic street signage doesn't help. It was quite amusing to be lost in a foreign metropolis. I found the Russian Embassy, next door to an unemployment office. I found an empty plinth where the statue of Flora Stevenson once stood. I bought pupusas at a food co-op, and met a crowd of people who looked like bikers at the entryway to a Baptist church that must have been a converted Catholic church. I walked along a stream and found a stone well with a statue of, possibly, Minerva. All in all, it was wonderful.

I arrived at the Gardens in time to gallop around quickly, see amazing trees and flowers, and sit down in pouring rain to sketch the glass house and decide it would be better to head back than to waste time wishing my pen used waterproof ink.

Which was a good decision, because just as I arrived at the flat, Camilla and Jelte arrived from opposite directions and we headed out for dinner.

It was a genuine Italian restaurant with genuine Italian waiters. My plate of gnocci with artichokes must have been about a thousand calories a bite, but what bites! Rich, creamy, seasoned quietly but expertly.

And finally, we headed off into the night at top speed, walking through parks, up hills, into stone passageways and through courtyards packed with wheelbarrows and plastic pipes and discovering a rock in a carefully racked gravel bed with a missing plaque and the carved inscription, "we find no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end" (from James Hutton, the guy who postulated that geological forces acted in the past just like we see them act today, and so we can deduce geological history), and passing by Athur's Seat and looking at maps in the window of a shop and viewing the place where squads of unhappy religious rebels had been hung (or maybe it was beheaded) and deciding not to look for Napier's grave because we had already gazed at Adam Smith's grave at another churchyard.