the bells of st. machar's

This is St. Machar's Cathedral, located just up a treelined road from where I live. I hear its bells mingling with those from King's Chapel every hour (listen here!) ; a prominent marker in my neighbourhood's soundscape. Everytime I hear them I always remember the bit from R. Murray Schafer's note in Voices of Tyranny, Temples of Silence, where he notes that "The parish used to be defined as that area over which the parish church bells may be heard; when you can no longer hear the bells you are in another parish -- or none at all". (He goes on to discuss how missionaries used the church bells as a way to 'civilize' an indigenous landscape, which is very interesting & a very disturbing, insidious possibility, the colonization of sound/by sound...)

To get there, you follow a long straight cobblestone trail called the Chanonry (a beautiful word, I think, but it's rather prosaic in meaning: it just refers to houses or estates, usually belonging to a minister) and the church is perched on a hill overlooking Seaton Park. It is a rather storied building, this 'high kirk' -- apparently built by one St. Machar, a 6th century Irish monk, but whose identity is rather misty. The tale goes that God (or St. Columba) told him he was to built a church at a place where there river curved like the staff of a bishop. Sure enough, below the kirk twists the river Don. And so he set about ringing his church bells in hopes of 'civilizing' the Picts.

Little of the original building still stands, and the newer walls have a more sensational history. Part of William Wallace -- specifically his left quarter (not exactly sure which bits that entails) -- was buried within the walls in 1305 after the English cut him up into little bits to warn other Scottish resistance fighters what fate they would meet if they persisted. Really, though, it's quite a peaceful place. Holly and yew and willow trees abound, and thrushes and English robins are always singing (listen here!) amidst the branch-tangles. I also look forward to hearing choral and classical music concerts inside the church in the coming weeks, as part of this music festival.

I like the kirk-yards here, with so many trees growing above the toppled monuments, green-hued tombstones slowly being reclaimed by moss just as the bodies lying beneath them decay. The graveyards here are sanctuaries -- even the one in the middle of downtown, at St. Nicholas Kirk, which has been colonized on both sides by shopping centres. There is such a peace in these places, & I love watching people sitting on benches in cemeteries, talking quietly, pondering, eating their lunch. Children playing, people meeting, reading, writing there. There's no strange North American 'ewww-creepy-place-full-of-dead-people' taboo, something I have always found strange as I grew up bringing food to relatives' graves as part of the Ukrainian tradition of memorial feasting. (I often feel like reminding such people that the earth, the dirt everywhere they walk is made of dead people, everything is, really...) Anyway, I like this sort of interaction with these places of memory. It's a unity that pleases me, and perhaps this attitude towards graves it is a surviving remnant of old Gaelic and Pictish beliefs in the complete entwinement of the worlds of the living and dead.

I like reading names on the stones as I pass by... looking for Lawrences (my paternal grandmother's maiden name, her family is from Aberdeen), & finding myself always a little startled when I notice a Ferguson. I see it an awful lot here, and there's always a strange moment of recognition... even though I'm not even sure if I'm related to the ones in these parts. & I've been thinking about this, my lack of connection to, and knowledge of, my Scottish ancestry. How I thought (absurdly, really) that maybe it would magically awaken upon my arrival on the auld sod. Instead, there are just these odd little flashes, when I see a little Scottish lad who looks like a doppelganger of my father as a young boy, all red-blond hair & freckled-faced monkey grin -- or an older man, with a slender nose and ruddy cheeks. Old ladies with tall proud backs and the sharp eyes of his mother, my grandmother, with her determined chin and a stoic grimace against the wind. However, I've not yet seen any reflections of my own face.