Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do

Exploring

Exploring In “Little Gidding,”T. S. Eliot got things wrong when he wrote, “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Exploring does not weave experience into a carpet that enables a person to fly back through years into diapers and knowledge. From exploration comes awareness of disjunction. One thing may lead to another, but the only connection between the two is mind forged and weak as memory. Events happen discretely. Eleven days ago I wandered the collections of Dada and surrealism in the Dean Gallery. Sprawling across an upstairs room was “The Lamp of Sacrifice,” cardboard replicas of the 286 “places of worship” in Edinburgh. The replicas were big, some steeples almost as high as my waist. I didn’t stay in the room long. The aroma of cardboard was nauseating, and I fled downstairs to the tearoom and bolted a double cappuccino. Afterward I walked back to my flat on Blacket. By the time I reached Brougham snow had begun to fall. That night I awoke at two o’clock. Although I’d pulled the curtains by my bedroom window together before going to sleep, a seam had opened. A futon of snow covered the garden. Lights from the city bounced up from the snow, turning the sky yellow as old slipware. I spread the curtain and looked into the garden. Two foxes hunted along the walk, digging and brushing their noses through the snow. Occasionally they lost their concentration, and they gamboled like children escaping a stuffy classroom. They came within a foot of the window. Exploring 83 Then the bigger darted up a flight of iron steps while the smaller ran a circle around a rhododendron, disappearing on one side then reappearing on the other, almost teasing, barking, “Now you see me. Now you don’t.” Four days later I walked across town to a dinner party in an apartment off Colinton Road. Snow was falling heavily, and I walked slowly and gingerly, the trek taking fifty-two minutes. I wore boots and carried my dress shoes in a cloth bag given to me six years ago by the University of Tennessee Press. When I reached my destination, I took off the boots and put on my shoes, sitting in the hall outside the apartment. Because a new carpet had recently been laid, my host didn’t want me to leave the wet boots in the hall, thinking they might stain the rug. Instead he took them into the apartment and placed them in the bathtub, the toes pointing toward the drain. “Dada,” I thought when I saw them in the bathroom , “influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s urinal.” By the next afternoon the snow had melted. I went to the library. On the third floor I rummaged through neglected books. Opposite a shelf sagging under the works of Graham Greene, I met a retired member of the English department. We chatted for a time, and I asked about a man I had not seen in three decades. “He died last year,” the man said. “He had a heart attack.” “Here today,” the man said. Later I stood in the courtyard of the institute. A magpie gnarled through the afternoon. “Here today,” I repeated, listening to the bird. People are curators more than explorers. Life itself resembles a museum more than it does a journey. Experiences furnish rooms, the doors to and the contents of which are always changing. Time strips walls and empties cases. Often rooms remain shut so long they vanish from memory. New rooms appear, some cluttered, others almost bare. Ultimately items jumble together, here a collection of seashells, there enamels, along the hall a toy train, on a shelf a fox stuffed for conversation —the whole a gallery of moments that once seemed poignant but now are insignificant. My explorations repeatedly lead to museums. For me museums are comfortable places. Time has educated my eye, that is, so blinkered my sight that my vision rarely strays from the familiar. On Saturday I walked down the Royal Mile to the Canongate Tolbooth, now a museum called the People’s Story. Exhibits depicted the lives of ordinary folk living in Edinburgh from the eighteenth century almost to the present . More often that not, history records stupidity and brutality, its pages 84 Edinburgh Days belying optimism and illustrated...