The Romance of Scotland

Our route around Scotland

Rushing around the highlands of Scotland has made me notice my character defects more.  Over seven nights, we stayed in five different places: Pitlochry, Findhorn, Drumnadrochit on Loch Ness, Glencoe, and Loch Long (near Loch Lomond but I got mixed up with the location). Every place we go, I wonder if this is the best possible place we could be, if I am missing out on some other place that might be even better, and I second guess myself about whether a castle or a waterfall or an activity is the right one. Sometimes because of time constraints we skip something we had planned (for example, we had to get to the Findhorn tour by 2PM so we had to skip seeing the herd of reindeer in the Cairngorms) and then I wonder if the thing we skipped wasn’t “better” than the thing we skipped it for. Luckily, I can turn to Matthew and he will make a decision for us, so that I am not going back and forth in agony. I am not sure what the source of this defect is – it is an asset as well, because it makes me plan so many fun activities and book ahead for things and we do end up having a great time in the end after I chill out.

Speaking of fun, I have been thinking a lot about how Romantic Scotland is. It all started the first day I was in Edinburgh in 1985, as a grad student. I had a room at Pollock Halls, right by Holyrood Park. I had bought an old copy of Ivanhoe and was sitting by the open window, drinking a dram of Scotch and reading, when I heard the cry o’ the bagpipes coming across the moor – someone was practicing.  Then and there, I decided to learn to play, and that was the beginning of my “Romance” with Scotland.

looking for Nessie

I guess by Romance I mean an imaginary idea about what a place is like, something that has often been ramped up by stories and songs and pictures. Romancing Scotland seems like an easy thing to do – it’s so beautiful and picturesque, and the weather is so moody all the time, and the history so bloody.  I used to get really annoyed by the stuffed Nessies and fake kilts and bad bagpipers busking in the streets (I was taught to eschew them by my teacher) but on this trip, I have embraced it all – the whistling winds and misty rains, the babbling brooks through the glens, the craggy cliffs and mysterious ruined castles on islands in lochs. You may have noticed Matthew wearing his tweed cap and wild beard – he fits right in on the hillsides here!

Mysterious ruined castle

Our first stop was Pitlochry, where we attended the Highland Games. These events are still pretty macho and male-oriented, but this gathering included a woman who was a grandma;  she had been the first woman piper in Pitlochry in the 1950s, and was now marching in the band with three of her children and three of her grandchildren! And her hair was dyed blue, the color of the Scottish flag! There was another woman, an American named Heather from Colorado, who was participating in the heavy events: tossing the caber, throwing the shot put

and the hammer. She came in last (and couldn’t even carry the 130-plus pound, 18 foot long caber very far, much less throw it) but she was hugely popular with the crowd of several thousand, who shouted things like, “Good on ye, Heather!”

Nessies 

The evening after the games, we were in a pub called the Old Mill with a bunch of the members of various pipe bands, and another American couple was staggering around, greeting everyone. They were dressed like nightmare versions of American tourists in Scotland: she had on red leggings with the Royal Stuart Tartan and a “ Scotland” sweatshirt with a tartan Nessie on it; he was wearing a kilt paired with an Arizona Sun Devils shirt. But everyone welcomed them, shook their hands, and seemed to enjoy their over-the-top appreciation of Scotland. For once, I didn’t feel impatient or judgmental – I was happy they were having such a grand time.

The Findhorn community today

We spent an afternoon at the Findhorn foundation, which is a legendary intentional spiritual community – the first of its kind, I think, in the UK, founded in the 1950s even before the “hippie” movement inspired so many of these places. It’s the granddaddy of them all – visited by Andre Gregory, Deepak Chopra, and many others. Since we eventually would like to have a small spiritual retreat center of our own, it was important for us to see how it works, how it’s faring, meet some of the people and learn the history. It was very interesting and inspiring, but it has grown really large and in addition to the 150 or so “members,” there are a lot of hangers-on, people who are “attracted to the ethos” and live nearby. They contribute financially to the community and participate in events and such, but don’t have to make a full commitment. We couldn’t decide if this was watering down the original intention, but without these extra people, I am not sure the community would be viable in this day and age. They have a lot of holiday homes and campsites and eco co-housing and caravan parks now, and you can pay 25 pounds in order to join in the community for a day, or several hundred pounds to join in for a week, and so on. Read more about how to get involved in Findhorn HERE

After a night in an inn that was built in 1734

1734 Inn

(Matt was worried he would fall through the floor of the room and into the pub below, but they had some of the best scallops and mussels we had ever eaten), we traveled over to Inverness, filming a version of Macbeth (short) at the historic castles on the way. We also visited the battlefield of Culloden, another Romantic place, where the Jacobite uprising made its last stand.

The Jacobite rebellion is the subject of a lot of Romantic historical fantasy writing, including my own unpublished, unfinished novel Shona, My Love and my friend Anthony’s fabulous musical about the miser of Carlisle (a place where the Jacobites actually won a battle). More recently, I guess Outlander is all about that time period as well.  People love the idea of these doomed Highlanders sweeping through the countryside, loved by the simple country folk who adored Bonnie Prince Charlie – I mean, just the name itself is incredibly Romantic, conjuring up images of a girlishly handsome young man with soft blue eyes who fled, wounded from the battlefield and was sheltered by young Flora MacDonald before sailing back to France, ne’er to return. The heroines of these romances usually don’t fall in love with the prince himself – they fall in love with one of his strapping, large Highlanders – a rugged man with a hairy chest and a kilt. Of course, the romances themselves are often as doomed as the Jacobite cause itself and everyone ends up dying or deserting each other or sailing off to the colonies.

Queen Victoria and John Brown

Speaking of rugged kilt-hairy-chest-Highlanders, even Queen Victoria had a crush on one: her beloved servant, John Brown, who was her constant companion after Albert had died.  The Queen loved going on vacation in the highlands (they had their own castle there of course) and dressing up in a tartan ball gown at parties. When she died, she asked to be buried with a lock of John Brown’s hair in her right hand. Here's the preview of a great movie version of this called Mrs. Brown starring Judi Dench and Billy Connolly.

After the defeat of the Highlanders in 1745, some really strange things happened.  First of all, almost immediately, the bravest Highland soldiers who hadn’t died in the rebellion were recruited into the British army and became the fiercest fighters on behalf of the Empire in places like North America and India. This is pretty ironic, but not surprising. Second, the fiercest Highland lairds started hobnobbing with the British, and started clearing out their estates and putting sheep on them, which meant their tenants (whom they were meant to take care of) had no place to go, nothing to eat, and many starved to death. This was the famous “Highland Clearances,” themselves the subject of many haunting songs and poems and paintings.The ones who didn’t die had to go to America or Australia or Canada, which is why there are so many tourists from those countries today who come back looking for their roots. Third, and most weird in my opinion, these Highland Scots societies started springing up in London. I guess mostly displaced Jacobites wanted to preserve their culture, or what they kind of thought was their culture – these societies, which grew more and more popular in the 19^th century (what with Queen Victoria loving Scotland so much), created things like family clan tartans and highland games and Burns Night with the salute to the haggis, and all those things that evolved into the touristy Scottish stuff we have today.

Culloden battlefield

Writers like Sir Walter Scott also contributed to Scottish mania with poems about the Lady of the Lake and novels about Rob Roy and other mysterious, romantic figures. Burns wrote poetry in the Scots dialect and people ate it up. All the Romantic poets like the Wordsworths and Coleridge were also gallivanting around Scotland looking at waterfalls and writing poetry, so everyone wanted to go there. English aristocrats would go up to Scottish “hunting lodges” for the weekend and stalk around in the woods, looking for deer, and then dance at ceilidhs and sing Burns songs. It was super cheesy but everyone loved it – except for the poor crofters who were left up there, eking out a living. But today the descendants of those same crofters are making money on Air B and B and Nessie tours, welcoming people who want the authentic Scottish experience as much as they did two hundred years ago.

The matchless scenery of Glencoe

When we got to Glencoe, we stayed in a bunkhouse that was attached to a super ritzy hotel (like 450 a night). There were people staying there who were hiking on the West Highland Way, a walking path that takes you from Glasgow to Fort William, through some of the most gorgeous scenery in the world. Vans would take their luggage for them, and they would stroll along, stopping at these upscale hotels for the night to drink single malt Scotch and swap stories of their adventures in the glens. I didn’t mind these people, either – I was glad they were there with us, enjoying the Romance of Scotland. After all, we only walked a few miles on the trail ourselves, singing bits of the song “Massacre at Glencoe,” which recounts the underhanded murder of thirty-two members of the MacDonald clan who were a little late signing the loyalty oath to William of Orange.

Bonnie Prince Charlie died in Rome at the age of sixty-four, a sad and dissipated alcoholic. However, his fans will always remember him as that twenty-five year old would-be monarch, marching across the land, being cheered by the country folk, blue eyes sparkling in his handsome face. As we drove down the shores of Loch Lomond this morning on the way to our last stop, we sang “Ye’ll tak the high road and I’ll tak the low road,” not minding that it was cheesy and cliché. We have loved every minute of our journey through the Scottish Highlands.

Yesterday morning, we had the pleasure of attending Sunday services at Marchmont St. Giles Parish Church, the place where I was baptized in 1986. The Minister, Rev. Dr. Karen K Campbell gave a great sermon about humility, in connection with the reading from Jeremiah 18 about the potter and the clay. “’Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does? declares the Lord. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so you are in my hand.’” The word “humility” comes from the word for “earth” or “clay.” At the time I was baptized, I was a graduate student in the philosophy department in the David Hume Tower, which we can see from the window of our Air B and B. In the words of Thomas Merton, “I was in the thick of my thesis, making hundreds of mistakes that I would not be able to detect for several years to come, because I was far out of my depth.”
I was out of my depth in other ways as well in those days. Bill Wilson puts it this way: “This lack of anchorage to any permanent values, this blindness to the true purpose of our lives, produced another bad result. For just so long as we were convinced that we could live exclusively by our own individual strength and intelligence, for just that long was a working faith in a Higher Power impossible. This was true even when we believed God existed. We could actually have earnest religious beliefs which remained barren because we were still trying to play God ourselves. As long as we placed self-reliance first, a genuine reliance upon a Higher Power was out of the question. That basic ingredient of humility, a desire to seek and do God’s will, was missing.”
As we were coming into town on the first day, and I told the taxi driver that I had gone to Edinburgh University, he said, “It’s one of the top ten universities in the world, you know.” In the days when I was proud of that fact, I thought humility was some kind of groveling contempt for oneself, a quality to be avoided at all costs. I was desperate to show off my accomplishments and to accomplish even more, because in those days my self-worth was tied to external accomplishments. If I prayed, it was to complain to God or to tell God what to do. Luckily, over the years, repeated humiliations have taught me the folly of reliance on my own intellect, my own accomplishments and achievements. At Marchmont yesterday, we sang a hymn based on Psalm 139 with the line “for the wonder of who I am, I praise You.” This is the meaning of humility for me today – I didn’t make myself, did I?

The castle from Princes Street Gardens; 
Ian once played "Lament for Major General Reginald Harmon" here

The other day, Matt and I were walking past Edinburgh Old College and I asked Matt if he wanted to look inside the courtyard because it was one of the most beautiful examples of Robert Adam Scottish Enlightenment Neo-Classical architecture ever, and he said sure, so we went in and there was this man in highland dress carrying bagpipes.  My old teacher, Bob Beck, taught me to scoff at pipers in full highland dress walking around Edinburgh, because they are usually buskers, not very talented, giving bagpiping a bad name, so I was suspicious. But we went over and struck up a conversation with his companion, who turned out to be an American woman who worked for the Virginia Tattoo. She said he was going to play the bagpipes for some kind of medical school event and who was he? None other than the pipe major for the Scots Guards, Ross McCrindle. For those of you unfamiliar with the world of piping, this would be the equivalent of seeing a random cellist playing in the Edinburgh Old College and then realizing it was Yo-Yo Ma.
He was totally friendly and humble, and very patient with me, even when I showed him the picture of myself in the Vet School Pipe Band.  He asked who my teacher was and I said Bob Beck. He had never met Bob, but said he sounded like quite a character, which he certainly was. I told him how Bob had returned his MBE because he thought he did not want to be a “Member of the British Empire,” how when I had played poorly he had said, “Sounds like the Queen’s comin’ round” and other bits of Bob Beck wit and wisdom. Ross played a little bit of the piobiareachd “Lament for the Children, the jig “”Troy’s Wedding,” and per my request, “The Australian Ladies.”  When I asked him to play that last tune, the look on his face and he said, “That’s sort of an unusual request.” I told him it had been my “signature tune” for the MSR (March, Strathspey and Reel). He replied that it had been his late father’s favorite, and he had never heard anyone request it before. As I listened, I thought of Bob Beck, and his father, both of whom have returned to the earth now.
Ross plays "The Australian Ladies" for us 

The next day, we climbed Arthur’s Seat and looked out to incredible views over Edinburgh Castle, the Royal Mile, the Firth of Forth, and Duddingston Kirk,

On Arthur's Seat

Ruined  St Anthony's Chapel in Holyrood Park

where the matron of Masson Hall (the ladies’ boarding house where I used to live) had attended services. She loved to tell us the story of the time she saw a young lassie sitting in the pew during the service one Sunday. Everyone else was going up for communion except for this young woman, who sat there, weeping piteously, too full of shame to approach the altar. When everyone else had taken communion, the minister came over to her with the bread and wine. He looked down kindly at her and said, “Tak’ it, lassie; it’s meant for sinners.”

fine Georgian architecture

Not Going "Back to School" for the First Time

This time of year, for the past thirty years, I have started getting ready to go back to school. I have certain rituals: posting the poetry slam masterpiece "What Teachers Make" by  Taylor Mali

and the "anyone, anyone?" scene from Ferris Bueller's Day off, and then I start thinking about my introductory lectures and lessons and readings for each of my classes.  Not that I ever stopped thinking about teaching, as I sometimes joke about “teacher brain” and how whenever I see something, no matter how horrible, my mind starts working to figure out how to incorporate it into the classroom.  For the first time ever, at a museum, I just looked at the exhibits without thinking about where to fit the material into the curriculum.  I simply wrote about it in my blog instead.  I’d love to do a lesson on historiography, comparing different treatments of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism and how it has been dealt with by the Ford Museum, the City of Dearborn, the Anti-Defamation League, etc.  But no more – I have left my teaching job and am traveling the world for a year before going “back to school” myself, to Seattle U, where I plan to pursue a M. Div. and hope to become some kind of chaplain.

I am thrilled to be switching gears at this time in my life.  Matthew spent more than a year undergoing treatment for colorectal cancer, and is now cancer-free.  What better time to take a year off and travel the world? I am turning 56 this year; what better time to step back and re-examine my life, and return to a lifelong dream of divinity school?

I want to be very clear, however: if not for the changes at my former workplace over the past several years, there would be NO WAY that I would be taking these actions.  My original intention was to live and die at the school I loved, the school founded by three legendary teachers, the school that made me the person I am today, that gave me my living and my vocation, my dearest friends and my sense of purpose, for the past almost 30 years. I would have been like my own high school English teacher, Meta O’Crotty, who taught (literally) up until the day she died.  Legend has it that one day, at the age of 70-or-80-something, she said to her students, “I’m not feeling very well” (probably in the middle of a lesson on Virginia Woolf) and went home early.  Later, they found her seated in a chair, with the Oxford English Dictionary open on her lap.  She was dead. Some wags have inquired, “What word was she looking at?” If only we knew.

That would have been me.  Instead, I spent this week in New York, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and attending a performance of “A Fidler Afn Dakh,” the Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof.  At the show, I struck up a conversation with a fellow theatergoer, a fifty-something woman who happened to be another teacher who had also just left her job at a formerly radical independent school in New York.

When a school styles itself a “progressive” independent school, they usually mean (according to their website) that they are committed to social justice, inquiry-based interdisciplinary education, and all that good stuff that educators like John Dewey believed in. The website boldly proclaims that the school "remains faithful to the spirit of its founder,”  who created an experimental public school in 1921 on the Lower East Side serving mostly Yiddish-speaking children of Jewish refugees who narrowly escaped the pogroms. My new friend had just returned from a Yiddish summer camp https://yiddishsummer.eu/, where she had been learning Yiddish protest songs and klezmer music for several summers in a row. She told me this was one of the most radical acts of resistance possible these days – to preserve and speak the Yiddish language, to become a living Holocaust memorial. This explains why she was attending the “Yiddish Fiddler.”

She told me that Angela Davis had attended her school. I learned that Rank Smith, who became director of after the founder passed away, was brought before the HUAC. In his testimony, Rank told the committee, “We are a private school, but essentially we don’t believe in private education…in a democracy the main scheme of education has to be public education. We are a private school by accident rather than intent. We would prefer to have a public school system where every citizen would take pride.” Eleanor Roosevelt was a supporter of the school and served on its board for decades. Anne and Abel Meeropol, who adopted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s children after they were executed, sent them to the school as well. Later, under the pen name Lewis Allen, Abel wrote the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” made famous by Billie Holliday. In 1964, students participated in the Congress of Racial Equality protests for a fair world at the World’s Fair in New York that year. After a group of protesters that included Bayard Rustin and James Farmer were arrested for blocking the entrance to the New York City pavilion, students from this school volunteered to replace them – and were subsequently arrested also.

With a legacy like that, what radical, subversive, progressive teacher wouldn’t want to teach there until the day she died?

Unless, as my friend and I found, there is no “there” anymore, because the school has been reshaped by the board and the head of school into a very different institution, a place that actually stands in the way of teachers doing the work they love, and more importantly, prevents them from following the school’s original mission, which was centered on faculty who modeled thinking and acting with integrity.  The current administration of a school like this has very little connection to the original vision of a rigorously compassionate, fiercely intellectual community dedicated to a life of integrity and service. Radical teachers do not “retire” from or even “quit” such a place. What happens is this – the school disappears, and the institution that replaces it in the same building, usually contemporaneously with a fancy remodel, is not a place for such teachers, is not kind to such teachers so they must leave, or be forced out, to seek out other communities, perhaps a younger school, perhaps to found their own school, perhaps to try their hand at something else.

I can’t begin to fathom all the reasons why these types of institutions change over the years, but I am guessing it has to do with a change in the parent and student population, the political climate, the overall culture of the area they live in (Yiddish speaking Reds and granola crunching professors move out; Microsoft and other moneyed types move in) and above all, of course, money. True progressive education is hard. Really hard. And most private school parents today don’t want their children to have a really hard time. They don’t pay forty or fifty thousand dollars a year so their kids can feel uncomfortable and angry and get arrested for putting their bodies in harm’s way for the sake of social justice. They want their kids to go to good colleges – to think critically just enough for that, and no more. Not too much critical examination of their society a la James Baldwin, more learning how to excel in such a society. Heck, last year's senior parents didn't even want their children to spend 20 hours working on a political campaign, because it might interfere with college applications or worse, get in the way of sports.

The original Northwest School was founded by geniuses who were also teachers, and who knew what genius teachers needed to do their best work. I recently read a short entry from the writings of Paul Raymond, in which he described an original student-centered classroom:

“The teacher I love above all others, however, is a young man – just 24 this year – whose field is biology….The first class he ever taught began with him absent. There was a note on the blackboard:

            ‘Hi! This is biology 1-A. I’m Mark Terry. This is a lab. Look at any of the equipment or magazine or books, if you wish. Please put things back as they were at the end of the period. This afternoon and tomorrow morning I am going to the mountains to get some stuff. Up to 5 people may go each time. Sign up below, then meet me here at the right time.’

The ‘stuff’ he brought back were roadkills: skunks, possums, cats, etc. His next class began with a few words about how sad it was that the animals were killed, but, at the same time, how fortunate, because Mark wished to add them to his skeleton collection. He then enlisted the students’ assistance in recovering the skeletons.

            That, of course, was by no means the end; it was the beginning, not only of anatomy, but physiology and even animal behavior and many other wonderful things, all charted along lines eventually determined by the students.”

I was very pleased and honored that the seniors asked me to speak at their graduation this year. I loved teaching them, especially the International Students and my philosophy class, and wanted to keep the focus on the “kids,” while at the same time making it very clear that the instantiation of the Platonic Form, the spiritual vision of the founders, is no longer in the physical building very much. I based my speech on a Platonic Ideal  as I understood it, as I learned it from the founders, and also on The Grapes of Wrath, the part where Tom Joad gives his famous speech to Ma about how “when there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be around.” (I just quoted that from memory, so it might be inaccurate, but if you’ve read that book, you know what I’m talking about). I am including the video of my speech, if you care to watch it here.

I was honored to learn my teaching craft from Paul Raymond, Mark Terry, and others who, like Thomas Merton’s great teacher, Mark Van Doren, “would start talking about whatever was to be talked about. Most of the time he asked questions. His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had ‘educed’ them from you by his question.” Merton writes that Van Dorn was able to ennoble his students, and in turn was perfected and ennobled by his vocation. This is what is meant by the original founding statement of the school – the quality of education is dependent on the quality of the faculty, and that old Northwest School “offered a faculty.” This new iteration of the school simply offers a program, a program offered by just about every other run-of-the-mill progressive, liberal arts-based independent school in the whole system. There are still some genius teachers there, but they get the message, in no uncertain terms, that they are interchangeable and replaceable and expendable, like the interchangeable blocks in the new schedule. I wish them well today as they go back to school, to try to honor and ennoble their students, and their profession, for another year.

sic transit gloria mundi, right?  #embracetheconstant