City, Chapel, Writing

June 24, 2019

City, Chapel, Writing

Guess where?

apartments across the street

Like U.S. marching band competitions, but with bagpipes and kilts.
I stayed for three bands, pretending to be a parent. Awesome.

museum

red phone box

Royal College of Physicians

That's a goll-dern castle up there!

Edinburgh

It’s raining in Edinburgh this morning. Another walk “uptown” is probably on hold for now, so it’s a good time to write.

Coming from the baby-land, where history (and I mean the recorded/built history of the colonizers) means going back a little over 250 years, I’m overwhelmed by Edinburgh, which IS history. Buildings that have become apartments and guest houses are older than the U.S., and they're adorned with incredible carvings and statues. Parks have sprung up around centuries-old statues. The city itself goes back to the 12^th century, which I can’t quite fathom. Edinburgh has really been the only stop that makes me regret not having a better camera along...

Rosslyn Chapel

Yesterday, I took wee walk (remember, everything here is "aw, just a 20-minute walk") to a bus, and rode 45 minutes to the tiny town of Roslin. Then, just a wee walk from the town’s centre, I got to Rosslyn Chapel. I’ve wanted to see the chapel for as long as I can remember, and, I’ll admit, Dan Brown’s movie The Da Vinci Code, made me want to see it even more. Brown postulated a connection between the chapel and the Knights Templar and Freemasonry, pointing out many of what he claimed were symbolic clues left in the carvings inside the chapel.

The Chapel was built in the 1400’s by William Sinclair, Earl of Caithness. It is still privately owned and has always been in the Sinclair family. A foundation has been established for the chapel’s preservation, and visitors help fund that foundation.

You enter through a new visitors’ center (with café and gift shop) and walk across a yard to the chapel. You’re not allowed to take photos inside, because it would “disturb and distract” other visitors (and because they want you to buy the comprehensive book, which I did). I got there at noon, just as the center opened. By the time I left a couple hours later, there were so many people, from all over the world, that there was barely room to move about the chapel.

When you walk in, it’s absolutely breathtaking. Except for the floors and a bit of plain stone wall showing, every surface of the chapel from the floors up is carved—window frames, spires, arches, pillars, altars, ceiling—everything. You can take a photo brochure with a key to help you find some of the carvings--all in stone--for which the chapel is most famous…

There are typical Biblical scenes such as the crucifixion and the seven virtues, and angels everywhere holding books, harps, flutes, lambs, and other things. But there are some not-so-typical carvings, too, like a devil standing beside two lovers, an upside-down angel tied to a post, a total of 110 carvings of the Green Man nature figure, gargoyles and dragons, an entire arch carved with various people from all social classes, each dancing with death (skeletons), an angel holding a wreath just so (making her look remarkably like a sile na gig), a carving of an aloe plant, carvings of thistle and sunflowers, and carvings some say are corn, fueling a theory that the Earl of Sinclair visited the New World before Columbus.

The Templar and Freemason stuff is fascinating, but honestly, the craftsmanship and artistry of the chapel is miracle and mystery enough.

Wondering & Writing

While I waited for the bus to go back, I chatted with an older Roslin woman. She asked the usual questions, where I was from and what I was doing here. I told her about the Magdalene research, but she clearly had not heard of the laundries. The same is true for my 20-something Air B&B host. Although the sampling is too small to be scientific ;) this suggests to me that knowledge of the Magdalenes doesn’t travel much beyond the towns where the laundries were located unless one reads the national papers regularly.

Also, I’ve gotten a bit more blowback on a laundry survivors’ FB page for using the word “stories,” which one survivor took to mean fiction. She reminded me, kindly, that these are not stories, they are real experiences that women like her had in “these hell holes.” This suggests two things to me: one, that this is not MY experience, and I need to choose my words very carefully; and two, that the laundries may, for some, have done damage that lasts a lifetime and is always very close to the surface.

It also makes me think about writing. Can we/should we write about experiences that aren’t our own? Are we appropriating culture by writing about a culture not our own? Can a non-Jew or non-German write about concentration camps? Can a non-Indian write about Native kids who were taken from their families and sent to (mostly Catholic) white schools? Can a woman write about a man? How much literature would exist if writers stuck to only their own experiences? Where is the line, I wonder? Can a non-Catholic American poet write poems about abused women at the hand of the Church in Ireland?