The last Sneaky Feel of this week's residency is an intentional anti-climax. Enjoy our shared quotidian middle, friends.
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True story: I mostly dictated this one into my iPhone while driving down 9A one Thursday night (evidence below). Read it here!
Day 3, and I'm gonna hit you hard with this one. We all get the feels, but what are you going to do?
It's Day 2 of the Awst Press residency and here comes Sneaky Feel #13, in which Sylvia Plath and discomfort coexist in awkward liminal space (I know, big surprise).
Rave on, Sneaky Feelers!
Today marks the first day of the Sneaky Feels' weeklong residency at Awst Press's website! They'll be posting one a day all week.
Here's Monday's, #12, in which we go on the road, or On the Road, as the case may be.
Ok, so I'll put up two more SF's tomorrow and Friday, then next week is Awst Press's turn to host them! Tatiana Ryckman has chosen five new ones that fit together quite nicely, I think. Hope you do too.
Photo by Amalia Proctor
I'm ultra-excited to announce that some lucky Sneaky Feels will have a special place with the wonderful Awst Press during the last week of October! Five special, all-new Feelies have been assembled by editor Tatiana Ryckman for a limited (read: into online perpetuity) run that week, one a day Monday through Friday. It's a Halloween Spectacular (that really has nothing to do with the holiday)!
I can't wait to tell you about it! In the meantime, here comes another one!
I know, this "locker talk" stuff has been worked to death, but...
When I was in high school, I was on the football team. I didn't play much, but I was on the team. I remember plenty of "locker room talk," whether it was in the locker room or at the lunch table or wherever. One guy, in an intimate moment, confessed that he'd lost his virginity the previous weekend by raping an unconscious girl at a party. (He of course didn't use the word "rape.") I remember being deeply disturbed, but saying nothing; he was a big guy, and no one else seemed to think he did anything wrong. But I still think about that guy. In fact, when I hear Donald Trump and his "locker talk" I think of him and hope he feels a deep remorse that Trump seems incapable of.
But there was another guy on the football team who was at that lunch table, or locker, or wherever it was this rapist made his disclosure. That other guy, who is still my friend, would be embarrassed if I named him, so I won't. But I remember him waiting silently until the talk died down and he had their attention. "She's very young to have gone through that," he said, and got up and left. That moment of empathy for a person we'd collectively deemed just a body that got raped - I didn't say anything, so I was complicit - has stuck with me for twenty-five years as an act of courage and civil disobedience against a male culture intent on justifying and perpetuating its own violence.
Everything I told you is just talk, just like Donald Trump says his "locker room" conversation is just talk. But speech is action, just as silence is inaction. Not speaking out against a man running for our highest office who brags about sexually assaulting women is complicity in propagating rape culture, and it's not something for which we should easily forgive ourselves.
4YO: You've got bad blood pressure.
ME: Oh no. What do I do about it?
4YO: I don't know, some medicine? Maybe?
ME: For my broken arm?
The sad thing is, substitute a broken arm with pneumonia and blood pressure with high cholesterol, and that's pretty much my last visit with my previous primary care physician.
I had signups for revision meetings today in my freshman classes. I haven't really figured out a democratic way of ordering them, so I just put the signup sheet on my desk and told them to have at it. One of my students jumped out of his desk, hurdled another desk, and grabbed the paper to sign up.
ME: (In what I thought was a perfect meme voice) Damn, Daniel! (His name is Daniel.)
ANOTHER STUDENT: You already got some cred, Professor. But...Don't say that again.
A student of mine who’s on the college baseball team just stopped me on the quad.
PLAYER: Hey, we’re meeting in the library today, right?
ME: No, the librarian’s coming to our class.
PLAYER: Oh yeah, that was in that email you sent, right?
ME: Yes.
PLAYER: I have you in like two classes today, right?
ME: No, just one.
PLAYER: Ah, yeah. <Does that snap/point thing in my general direction while walking backwards away> See ya, baby.
ME: <silence>
No, I haven't started an art-pop band, though that would be a great name for one. I've just had a lot of the feels sneaking up on me lately. I've also been feeling a bit, um, non-productive with my writing, busy as I've been with teaching and fussing over an essay collection that I'm so, so tired of looking at.
So, in the Two Birds With One Stone school of thought, I've been writing my sneaky feels as they come to me - on the train, late at night, alone or with my family, sitting at my office desk, whatevs. I'm just trying to get back to the joy and horror and fuckitallness of producing words that mean something to me without knowing exactly what they mean.
I've been doing it for about a week, trying to catch at least one sneaky feel a day. Some have been shit, but some have felt ok enough to share. If anything, it's been nice writing without the pressure if thinking it has to become something. I decided sometime last weekend that maybe I'd start sharing some them here (but only the good ones). I picked out three, gave them a little revision to at least make them vaguely readable, and I'll put them up today, tomorrow, and Friday. I'll try to put a few up each week. I am finding that they share some formal attributes, but I make no promises to stay within them for future feels. Because of course, that's not how the feels work.
Feel free to share your own feels in the comment section. I'd change it to the feels section, if Squarespace would only let me.
I wrote this critical piece as part of the Best American Essays Spotlight series at Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. The series also includes a fascinating interview with luminous BAE editor Robert Atwan, Jenny Spinner's "Best American Essays Series as (Partial) Essay History," and Lynn Z. Bloom's "The Great American Potluck Party." Great company to keep, methinks.
With the start of school, the end of summer, et cetera ad nauseam, I somehow forgot to promote the publication of my longform essay in New Madrid Journal of Contemporary Literature! Thanks to Jacque Day for asking for it, and to Riley Hanick for editing it.
"I desperately wanted not to remember him as the beaten man fading into the walls of his rented flat, the hophead electrician some people of the town would undoubtedly use as an example of what can happen to anyone daring to step outside the bounds of conventional morality. No, I wanted desperately to remember the Blakean man-beast, pure energy bound by no reason, and the Nietzschean will to power, bound by no law, who could through the force of his own nature evade or destroy anything in his path, the world if necessary, and throw it all at my feet. I wanted him to be the myth I’d built around him."
...
"I saw across the table from me a man whose brother had just died, who couldn’t even allow himself to grieve—a man doomed to relive his mistakes until his own death, whose funeral the child to whom he’d given over his youth and his purpose would almost certainly not attend. I saw in him the immutable truth that we are all grievous angels, returning eternally to the scene of our first demise."
Ok, I promise this is the last I'll write about Scotland (for awhile, at least). I just put up a nice little interface, linked at the top next to The List and the Story. If by chance you haven't yet read that silliness yet, now you have it in a nice little package!
Wednesday, 6/1
The transition from coastal Highlands to urban Edinburgh was not entirely smooth. We spent roughly an hour circling Waverley Station looking for the Europcar rental dropoff, getting the distinct feeling, like centuries of other foreign invaders, that all these stone walls were completely impenetrable. After getting instructions from an annoyed man at the other end of a crackly speakerphone at the bus pickup to "take four straight left turns and keep going down" that were, incredibly, correct, I told the Europcar representative as my wife handed him the keys that I felt like we were in some heretofore undiscovered ring of purgatory. "That bad, eh?" he said, walking away. We then walked with our luggage the roughly half-mile to our AirBNB in the Grassmarket, a trek that seemed all uphill. Once we got to our apartment I took a short nap, and woke up with a bit more perspective. I always have a hard time adjusting when arriving in a city I've never been to; I think this might be at least in part because I want to feel at home immediately, as if there is some urbanite code I'm proxy to. But cities just don't welcome strangers that way. They might feign a welcome at tourist destinations like the Royal Mile and the Grassmarket where we were staying, but even a little perception makes it abundantly clear that this city, as with any city, existed well before you, and is functioning just fine without you, thanks. But the early glimpses are the ones that stay with a visitor - angles, openings, perceived familiarities, all of which greeted us when we left the apartment to venture forth into the Edinburgh evening.
The view from the door to our AirBNB apartment building
At the notable corner
We had dinner at a steak and mussel place, which allowed us to inject ourselves into one of the most aesthetically interesting urban street corners in the world. Then, determined not to waste a minute of our one day and two nights together in Edinburgh, we found a literary pub tour. Led by two actors, one of whom plays a bohemian drunk and the other a literary scholar, the tour started at the Beehive Inn at the Greenmarket public square. No photos were allowed on the trip, which I was fine with; it was an active and lively tour, and we definitely would have missed something if we'd taken time to snap photos. The two characters talked about Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, all while negotiating with locals hanging out in the closes outside the pubs where we were hanging out, including a homeless man walking his bike and howling in pain at some unseen horror (during the Stevenson/Jekyll and Hyde segment, by the way). After the official part of the pub tour concluded on Rose Street in New Town, my wife and I hung out a bit with the two actors, free-associating about frankfurters, papaya, Stevenson's "Apology for Idlers," and curriculum development (my wife's ostensible reason for being in Edinburgh). I left thinking I had a possible essay that we collectively dubbed "Here We Go Again." This paragraph will probably have to suffice.
Thursday, 6/2
Edinburgh Castle was the first we visited that felt alive—not rebuilt or left in ruins, but crawling with activity. Government officials marched to their duties flanked by high-stepping military, cannons loudly saluted the noontime hour, a band marched playing the theme from Star Wars (brazenly playing Darth Vader’s entry music as a series of high-office officials walking into their building). If Stirling Castle felt like a once-teeming metropolis, Edinburgh Castle felt like the metropolis’s crown jewel. And it didn’t hurt that it actually houses the crown jewels.
Next to Edinburgh Castle is the Camera Obscura, which houses more than a century of optical illusions, musical contraptions, magic even. We ascended too quickly for me to know this for sure, but I got the feeling going from the first through the sixth floor and onto its roof that each floor took us further into the past, to the root impulse of the original camera obscura—taking the real and making it unreal. This alone allowed me to contextualize the unreality of the spinning tunnel thing on the first floor that had me clutching the rails dizzily despite the room not moving at all, and the sense, in the dark with a roomful of other tourists, that I was watching the street below with a child’s awe, not as a piece of contemporary infrastructure but as an ancient, ageless reflection that our barker could manipulate simply by moving the mirrors.
We spent a half hour observing Scottish Parliament at the startlingly modern building (so modern, in fact, that I found it too ordinary to photograph). During our time there they were arguing about benefits and entitlements for the elderly and disadvantaged - similar issues our American congress argues, though we're only allowed to observe it on C-SPAN. I couldn't help thinking how I've now seen in person more of the inner workings of Scottish government than my own.
Perhaps the only aspect of the Edinburgh landscape that can overshadow Edinburgh Castle is Holyrood Park, a gargantuan lump of land on the other end of the town square that we could see from every vantage point in town. From a distance it looks like a single mountain was removed from the highland coast and dropped onto the city near parliament. At its peak is the mystical Arthur's Seat, which may be but was probably not the site of King Arthur's Camelot. As we approached the mount, we looked at the map of possible ascents, but decided to to follow the trails that generally went up. Either we seriously underestimated the time and distance to the top, or we took the longest way possible. Either way, it was worth every step. We traversed stone steppes (that spelling just feels right here) and vein-like paths up and around the goliath, looking up and down a green and blue and dots of yellow gorse all around us. We saw the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel and followed blackbirds around the bends, where they caught wind and floated in the breeze coming from the water we didn't know until then surrounded Edinburgh on most sides. And when we reached the top together, I looked at my wife and felt a fire burning inside me that was so intense I thought my chest would combust. And I looked at the other people gathered around Arthur's Seat - parents with small babies, teenage and twenty-something friends, speakers of languages I didn't understand - and for these moments I was completely sublimated in a beloved community of fellow wanderers, souls joined together at this summit for just these few specks of eternity.
Steppes
The veins
St. Anthony's Chapel
Arthur's Seat
I must qualify, before saying another word to recount my two days in Edinburgh, that it rained not a drop during any hour of our stay. I felt a little guilty when I read Stevenson's words from the first couple of paragraphs of his essay "Edinburgh" in the Scottish Poetry Library on our way back from Holyrood Park: "The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy estuary from the slope and summit of three hills. No situation could be more commanding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for noble prospects...But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beat upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes flying southward from the Highland hills." From this and from all I understand about Edinburgh - hell, about Scotland - I feel the need to equivocate that our stay should be taken with a grain of salt, or perhaps as a grain of sand, miscolored but not prominent enough to be noticeable in the vastness of the lovely town's historical landscape.
Friday, 6/3
I left Edinburgh first thing in the morning. My wife walked me to the commuter bus just after sunup. Riding through New Town, I wondered if I would ever get to know this city any better. While on the moving walkway on my way to my plane at the airport, I noticed a quotation from historian Murdo Macdonald:
This got me to thinking about my initial comeuppance on entering the city, and the deepening sadness I felt as I got to know it better, knowing how little time I had here in Edinburgh, in the highlands, on this stony archipelago. Cities—like the land and sky, like people—are never completely knowable. Every person to interact with them, whether for a day or a week or a lifetime, brings upon them one’s own preconceptions, expectations, and mythologies. In this way, they are maps for finding ourselves.
Monday, 5/30
On the road to Oban I noticed that I seem to have a semi-permanent taste of whiskey in my mouth. I imagine this to be the permanent state of many Scots. Also on the road to Oban, I noticed a few thickets by a loch with trees so big they seemed to be ecosystems within themselves, with ferns growing through the bark of their trunks and flowers growing out of the stumps where trees and branches had been cut. This seemed to reaffirm my notion of Scotland as a place where the years compound the life they've produced.
Dunstaffnage Castle
We stopped on our way into Oban at the pleasantly under-curated Dunstaffnage Castle. My iPhone's memory was full and I was having technical difficulties making memory space, so I only got an initial shot of the castle's facade, which actually reiterated the, well, everyday feel of the castle. Quite a few locals - workers on lunch, locals walking their dogs and taking advantage of the generously blue skies - were sauntering about the grounds, looking relatively unconcerned with the historical significance of this monument, leaning instead into the sensory experience of this evanescent moment. Unlike most of my other memories of Scotland, I see this one as pure, unadulterated by frozen images, only translated through words into this experience I now share.
To summarize Oban: It is an oceanside town composed mostly of tight angles and steep inclines. It has a distillery named after it which I was not terribly fond of, and lots of townie bars I enjoyed much more. Most of the B&B's and guesthouses look out onto the city from the tops of its many bluffs, including the Greencourt Guesthouse where we stayed. We ate languostines, crabs, and salmon at Ee-Usk (Gaelic for "fish") one night and the Waterfront Fishhouse the next. It is easily accessible via mass transit, with both a train station and a ferry hub in the town center. One of its most prominent street signs warns against "Fouling," with a symbol of a dog defecating that's specific enough to include steam rising from its symbolic shit. On the street leading up the hill from the town center to the guesthouse district is an activist coffeehouse built into an incline so steep that the downhill side of the storefront is roughly three feet shorter than the uphill side. It is a city of tourists, but also a city replete with private gardens, and friendly cats with bells around their necks.
Tuesday, 5/31
Unlike Skye, Dr. Johnson quite liked Iona, the small island we took two ferries to reach on our second day in Oban that is known as the birthplace of Christianity in Scotland. I could see why he liked it, though perhaps I felt a little underwhelmed simply because, after Skye, it was more of the same. It was just a very high level of the same.
One of my favorite things to do is to sit and ponder the passage of time. From the seconds passing as the wind ripples a field of buttercup daisies to centuries-thick slabs of stone arranged into temples, the isle of Iona is well-suited to this activity. Centuries are glanced over in historical markers, but I imagine the slow passage of time in the tiny prison cells, the punctuated sessions passed in the little reading nooks with slivers in the stone that look out onto the beautiful, menacing ocean. Sitting in a dark, tiny reading room at the top of a tight spiral stone stairway at Iona Abbey and looking out one such sliver onto the blue water surrounding the island, I imagine years and years of monks, nuns, and abbots reading and writing here, in this place founded at the advent of Scottish Christian history by St Columba in A.D. 563, interrupted periodically by colonizing kings and invading Vikings, some perhaps thrown from their reading nooks into the prison cells just meters away, eventually settling with the rise of Scots democracy into a hippyish enclave surrounded by livestock, a small children’s nursery, broken down boats, and cerulean water. I imagine looking up from my book, perhaps swearing forced allegiance to yet another reformation, then getting on with the important business of getting on with it.
Sitting and looking at the photos I've taken so far, I'm reading from Knausgaard's My Struggle (Book II, p433): "When I was outdoors walking, like now, what I saw gave me nothing. Snow was snow, trees were trees. It was only when I saw a picture of snow or of trees that they were endowed with meaning." Even here, as I've been temporally in this country, this mythology, this restricted code, I've felt myself becoming attached to the photos I've taken, the pieces into which I'm cutting up and preserving the landscape, to the ways I'm entering into an ancient (by human standards) culture by cutting it into these pieces I can digest. Before I even got home I ordered Johnson's account of his journeys through this same land centuries earlier - in this small way I feel like I know him, through this shared bit of land and sea, caught in words.
If the passage of time was a theoretical consideration while on Iona, it was a practical consideration—nay, a sword of Damocles—once we left it by ferry and drove across the Isle of Mull to the Oban ferry. Scotland’s highways, for all their one-lane, sheep-ridden charm, are not a place to drive in a hurry. Never was this more readily apparent than when traversing the 36-mile length of the Isle of Mull to and from Iona. After spending the day on Iona and eating a smoked venison plate at The Keel Row, we thought an hour and a half would be sufficient to reach the last ferry. It was, by less than five minutes. We were especially surprised at how many tour buses not only use these one-laners, but don’t use the passing places; they simple roll along, and god help the poor mortal driver who doesn’t get out of their way.
In the handful of minutes waiting to load onto the ferry back to Oban, I looked down at the solid stone beach. The cracks were what most drew my attention - out of every one, and even in some of the shallow pockets worn into them by centuries of water lapping upon them, were small, bonsai-like hedges capped by purple flowers. I thought of the thicket I'd seen from the car on the way into Oban. This moment was already gone, but the stone would remain. And so would the flowers.
In almost every public space in Oban, including the pubs, were posters laying out the pros and cons of the upcoming European Union secession referendum, or Brexit as I heard it dubbed on my return home. This was my first real experience with the revolt that has now come to pass. To a man (and woman), every Scot in every tavern and every public place was for staying in the EU. Even I, with my going-on-a-week's education in Scottish history, could see why: The EU had been much kinder to Scotland in its fifty-plus years than England had been to Scotland in the thousand or so years previous. I was tempted to compare the referendum to the U.S. voting cycle, the xenophobia that seemed to drive British voters to the xenophobia and racism that drives Trump voters here. But then I thought, People don't talk about these things in American bars. Official political discourse like all these posters is not allowed in public places, and some misguided sense of personal privacy allows Americans to think it their right to vote on uncritiqued prejudice without revealing it. Unlike the UK and the rest of Europe, we don't have millions of refugees fleeing a brutal dictator knocking at our borders; in fact, we whine and cry when our President allows 10,000 - 10,000! - of them into our borders. I thought then about my tendency to despise the line of thought that clings to cultural purity, and yet one of the primary reasons for my attraction to Scotland is its cultural singularity, its purity.
Both nights in Oban we watched UK game show The Chase at a bar while drinking Caledonia Best ale, neither of us knowing there is actually a U.S. version of the show. We followed along with the leadup to the EU referendum, and also as the verdict was handed down in a horrific child murder case involving a two-year-old boy who was beaten to death by his mother and her girlfriend. This was during the same couple of days when U.S. social media exploded after a gorilla was shot while possibly trying to protect a boy who'd fallen into its cage at the zoo. No one in Oban had yet heard of this gorilla, and when I told the bartender about it, she laughed. I laughed too. She told me this two-year-old boy had fallen off the social radar after his daycare workers had noticed signs of abuse, and had spent months thereafter in a cage in their home. He died in their bathroom of a ruptured heart caused by blows to his body. Everyone in the bar stared at the TV, in shared horror at the crime that had not receded in the months of the trial. I saw no relief on any of their faces at the just verdict. For the rest of my trip, continuing to observe the ruins of empires and the lives and deaths of important, historic, abstract visages while hearing and seeing about the latest battle for sovereignty, I thought most about that boy and his tiny, destroyed heart.
Saturday, 5/28
My image of the passage from the West Coast to the interior was one primarily of shrinkage, like going from the edge of the world to its warm, pulsing center. While speeding down the relatively wide highway A82, we watched the sun slowly set over the stone-flecked hills, then drove through darkness into and out of numerous tiny stone-built hamlets - Benmore, Comrie, finally Dunkeld - mostly via one-lane highways made more navigable by their simple fact of their almost complete desolation. The only life we saw were the frequent animals - deer, sheep, hedgehogs - crossing the roads in front of us as we passed further and further into a part of Scotland that felt somehow both manicured and wild. We arrived at Kinloch House after 1 a.m. Not wanting to wake hotel visitors who were staying in rooms overlooking the entrance, we parked in the far lot. Out ran a man in the most well-pressed suit, with the most perfectly trimmed beard and the most well-enunciated English, who seemed a bit put out that we didn't invite him to carry our luggage but invited us once we were settled to come out to the fire with him and have a drink. "After a long journey," he said, "everyone deserves a seat by the fire." My most pressing thought was an intense, almost shameful self-awareness that we have the money to be rewarded for our mistakes by drinks at the fire with well-dressed men with perfectly trimmed beards who speak perfect English.
Sunday, 5/29
Even the wheelbarrow's placement feels intentional.
We woke up as if from a nightmare into the most wonderful dream. After bathing in a tub with a golden faucet shaped like an old-time telephone, we had breakfast seemingly with a server for every meal item. I don't watch Downton Abbey, but my wife kept invoking it. After breakfast, our host encouraged us to take a stroll through the grounds before departing. Walking through the perfectly manicured walled garden, I thought to myself, My god, our little garden at home is so small-time. Every color on the spectrum seemed to be represented in the flowers and leaves and buds, and the birdsong seemed to include every note on the high end. Everything was just so well-cultivated, and this place is in the middle of nowhere. It is meant to be experienced by few, the few. I didn't want to leave, but neither did I want to get used to it.
We decided to spend the day in Pitlochry, a small township that boasts an inordinate number of distilleries even for Scotland (my favorite was Blair Athol, though we didn't get to try Ebradour because it's closed on Sundays), a relatively hidden waterfall called the Black Spout, a hydroelectric dam with a salmon ladder, and a wonderful restaurant called the Old Mill Inn that serves a special Sunday meal of sliced beef covered with gravy and puff pastry the size of an infant's head, all of which can be experienced on foot over the course of a longish afternoon. After mistaking Pitlochny for Loch Lory, I realized that almost everything in Scotland has loch, noch, or ness in its title.
The unassuming splash at the left was, just milliseconds earlier, a flying salmon
My favorite part of Pitlochry, successfully predicted by my wife, was the salmon ladder, a strange and wonderful part of the hydroelectric dam that simulates an upriver migration for the native salmon at the Pass of Killiecrankie. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but it seemed to stimulate the salmon in the river itself enough to take periodic leaps into the air above the current. I became temporarily obsessed with trying to catch a salmon in flight, sitting at the bank with my iPhone steadied on a section of the rapids that seemed to have the most fish-flight activity for a good fifteen minutes. After a number of misses - fish out of frame, too slow at the trigger, etc. etc. - I finally caught, or thought I caught, one in the air. Alas, I visited the salmon ladder at Pitlochry, and all I got was this lousy splash.
The Pitlochry hydroelectric dam and salmon ladder
On the road to Perthshire in the middle of the previous night, I’d gone ahead and found a place to stay on this night, even though the bank holiday was technically over. I’d found what looked like an old Victorian plantation on the outskirts of the small township of Alyth that had been converted into a hotel and restaurant, interestingly named Lands of Loyal. Similarly to Kinloch House, the place was situated outside any town proper, and surrounded by a garden. It was older than Kinloch house, more ramshackle, with a skeleton key to our room door and a giant main hall with deep-cushioned couches, a whiskey menu on every coffee table, and an elk head above the fireplace. The owner, a soft-spoken middle-aged woman who made the immense space of the main hall feel warmer when she entered it, told us about the yaks—I mean cows—that grazed in the lawn next to the fountain outside the dining room, about the twins cats that looked like small leopards prowling the estate’s perimeter, about the history and community of Alyth, a township composed almost entirely of stone. She reminded me of the man at Kinloch House the night before, only she, like Lands of Loyal, felt less formal, more organic, like she and her hotel had grown out of the culture here rather than being planted into it fully formed.
Wednesday, 6/2
After traveling back to the coast for two days in and around Oban, we traveled quickly through Stirling on our way to Edinburgh. Our first stop was Doune Castle, the main draw of which I freely admit was the fact that a certain scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail was filmed there, and I felt a distinct air of whimsy around the place. I took a quick photo of its front, imagining a crazy Frenchman farting in my general direction, while a couple of women arranged miniature gnomes on the lawn to photograph in front of the castle.
My mother was not a hamster, and as far as I know my father had no contact with elderberries.
Stirling Castle, a few miles down the road, was a significantly more immersive experience. Second only to Edinburgh Castle in immensity among the castles we saw, it feels not just like a home or a stronghold, but like a metropolis. Like Edinburgh, it sits atop a bluff surveying the land in every direction. Inside its walls are many alley-like corridors, a number of booming-ceilinged auditoriums, a public square, shops and reliquaries, prison cells, immense kitchens and dining halls, and purple flowers growing directly out of the stone constructions everywhere. These tiny purple flowers, which I’d by then seen growing out of the stone coast of the Isle of Mull and the base of the Old Man of Storr, had come to represent Scotland itself to me: flourishing from antiquity in places they don’t seem to belong, stubbornly syncopating its landscape by making their homes in the least habitable places. I now understand why those rascally Scottish twins dedicated their 2001 album Persevere to this ravaged archipelago.
Deciding where to go this morning with her seven-year-old sister:
7YO: Let's go to a museum.
ME: It's nice day. I think we should do something outside. Central Park?
4YO: But I don't want to go to a museum!
ME: I know, I just said we're going to do something outside.
4YO: But I don't want to go to a museum!
ME: Listen to me. We. Are. Doing. Something. Outside. Not the museum. I've said it twice now.
4YO: No, you didn't. You said it three times.