Scotland

Scotland Images

In the Hostel

What loneliness, how it breeches!
The ear freezes from
this counterfactual screaming,
but the ear
listens, and cries.

See how it pokes this
Decoy, voyeurish, unmanly
Heart. Vanishing in this hearth
Of words, like firewood licked
Away by time, by words.

Deeper and deeper you
Dream away poverty.
For there attains the greatest
Purity, wealth, truth.

So the deepest soil conceals the darkest springs to seed the plant of life, for life is but soil in which the vineyards of fulfillment grow, above us, towards the sun.


In the twilight lowland highways

William Wallace
And Americanism as frothy pies.
“How turgid and disgusting!”
Hamlet heads cried.

As prating, syncopated dawn arrives,
And flushes towards needless noon.
It hangs its head in evening fog,
Evening – wounded and hollow,
Like life across an empty spoon.


Scotland in a paragraph

One begins travelling with several expectations: this is the starting point of a trip one takes when one travels, and its consummation with fact brings the conceptions of agent alongside the sensations of the aesthete, enhancing the novelty of the experience. I justifiably expected little from any landmass within a three hour train ride from England, and had the pleasure of having them smashed by landscapes comparable in muscular scale and sublime beauty to bolder alpine ranges, and a Moorish, otherworldly uniqueness that spoke of lower England expressing itself through someone else, perhaps - its unconscious.


Mounting Arthur's seat

This hill overlooking Edinburgh is indeed natural Scotland in miniature, a display of robust wildness that is well-tempered in the shade of its self-recognition, tussocked against the unclarity of its marine winds, expressing itself in a tone continuosly dry and fascinating, like a desert in possession of an unwilling inheritance of volcanic wealth, and rebelling in the inevitability of its nature. It overlooks Edinburgh, the city of intimate voyeurs, where display is meaningful still, still untainted in the purity of the rural-inflected heart. And what of the clamborous travellers, rich with the winds that continue against the hills in the sunshine bright? Our stares ascend to the endless air, but the life of the city, and its momentous history, wafts.

Aphorisms/Platitudes

Vision is always directed outwards: especially when one introspects.

Our lives are full of error: correction comes in the memory.