Jeffrey Greene

National Museum of Scotland On the ground floor called "Beginnings," a fertility stone is displayed in the diamond-hard blue halogen, a line etching of an erection with two equal circles, as one sees in graffitti in the Underground. The stone is attributed to the Picts, of whom history says little, besides the Latin picti, painted people, tattooed. When set side by side with Latin engravings and Roman military hardware, the artifact makes them seem pitiful. In the museum you rise through time, the text written in first person plural as if all who enter are complicitous with the articles of defiance, Robert the Bruce, the long unveering heredity of defeat, the room of thumbscrews and "The Maiden" for severing heretical heads of witches, upward to the Reformation, then the rout of the Highlanders and the exile of the Bonnie Prince, until the museum seems like a deep well where the fertility stone of the painted people rests at its bottom, universal hieroglyph on which someone made a wish.