A Scot and Her Granddaughter
This lovely jester in the Stirling Castle Museum.
A grandma says to her granddaughter, “look, honey, it’s the queen of Scots.” The little girl stood silently, clad in gray pajamas. Mary Queen of Scots looks at back, sitting emblazoned on a plastic poster – the background of the oval portrait has deep clouds of crimson. Her own dress an almost sanguine shade, intense and humane.
“You look a little like her. Do you like her?” The grandma asks.
“No,” says the little girl in a full Scottish brogue, “I hate Scots.”
A staggering silence, with the grandmother jaw’s stuck to the floor, fills the room before she replies with an extremely calculated: “but Anne, you’re Scottish.”
In her full, thick-mustached, brogue, the girl replies “no I’m not. Scottish is a nationality not an ethnicity, so I’m not Scottish.”
My stifled chuckles swell. I translate a few into awkward coughs, but I simply had to eavesdrop as I went about the Castle Stirling exhibit.
I adore her. There’s so much wrong with everything she’s said that the only reasonable thing to do is listen and enjoy. And with that moment came an air of peace.
But it got me thinking, surprising eh, about where I come from. I mean both the Ross that types, and the letters that live on this website. “I” means a lot of things, you know.
They are different things, the “I’s” on the page and the “Ross” that typed, yet intrinsically connected by a single point of time – an overlap of creator and created.
This led me to thinking about why I chose to spend my life as a liar and thief who’s trapped on these digital sheets. It’s fun. That’s one reason; but really to be afforded the ability to step into other worlds with nothing more than the mind is magic. Being a practitioner of that magic isn’t something that I really chose, it more of just came to me.
Now this is going to make me sound like a blasphemer of the English major committee, but I like math. The art of logic in that distilled form is beautiful, sure, but there’s so much more to being than to just strip down logic until nothing’s left. So the question still remains, if I like math and was pretty good at it, why did I choose to make absolutely no money by going into the arts?
I think the real reason I didn't pursue science is because it felt destructive. In science you take the most beautiful, complex, problems and shave away at them until they're understandable, like a few letter blocks in a nursery.
Whereas art seeks to understand complexity, that is human complexity, and not reduce it but to embrace all of it; it's gnarled and branching limbs reaching for some grounding.
I wanted to embrace the complex and create more out of it, not simply sliver it off until there's nothing left but an elegant formula in a textbook somewhere. Sure, that formula could give us computers, but it doesn't grasp the beauty of the mind body problem and that of the physical realizer because it has completely reduced it.
Below is a few pictures of the graveyard beside Stirling Castle, quite a cool place to walk around.
