Scotland Day20: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous and Back Again

I visit the Crossraguel Abbey ruins on my way to Girvan on the western coast of Scotland and like any good tourist, I take all the free literature on offer and snap pictures that years from now will make absolutely no sense without a remembered context.

And that’s kind of what the ruins themselves seem like to me: a thing that makes no sense without its history remembered.  Thus do they become sublimely ridiculous and wonderful all at once, their own context having slipped into history long ago.

Abbies are places where people lived out the entirety of their lives, so in addition to worship spaces, there had to be places for beds and places for latrines.  And here remain evidence of all three and more besides.

And two of my own favorite views were views not available at the time the Crossraguel community was active, way back before the Reformation:

The view of the cross against the sky while standing within the choir (what my lot would call the   sanctuary or simply the church), for the simple reason that there would have been a roof impeding the view.  Looking toward the cross, one can actually still see the roof line.  It seems somewhat ironic, in a sad sort of way, that what directs my own eye to God (often an upward thing for me) in this space is possible only because the place is in ruins.  When it was a living community, the cross was not there to direct the gaze upward; rather, it stood higher than surrounding landscape to draw the people in for worship – serving as a literal signpost: here’s the church.  People thus could spot it from miles away.  But they were meant not to be sky-gazing; rather, they were meant to be earth-walking.  And that, surely, is the better purpose.  Isn’t it?

The view from through the waterways serves as a wonderful frame for the visual of this quiet space sitting as it does adjacent to the motorway.  The viaduct structures I look through served as the sewage system.  Literally I stand in the midst of the fairly complex latrine system in order to look through, look beyond.  I wonder whether folks in centuries yet to come will one day stand in the places where my own waste once coursed and ooh and aah at the view.  Maybe they’ll read historical records – things like this blog even – and decide to give that particular pleasure a miss.  Besides, I’m pretty sure our plastic pipes, even emptied of all dross, won’t have the aesthetic appeal of the stone-laid tunnels, gulleys and gulches – more’s the pity.  Isn't a society that views even the courses for the removal of waste as things not only of utility but also of beauty, a society from which we might have much to learn?