Monday, October 25, 2010

Day 15

Odds & Ends

One of the fun things about London, a city with a long, complicated history, is that the odd, if not normal, is at least interesting. I had gone out one sunny day in October thinking to ride my local underground train to the end of the line to investigate the market town of Walthamstowe, only to discover that the whole line was closed for refurbishing.

Refurbishing is British for "repairs," "upgrade," or "mending tracks."

As a result of the closed line, I changed plans and walked south toward St. Paul's Cathedral, the Thames, and the Globe Theatre. On the way, I saw a notice for an art gallery, so I turned in at that small street and found this horse emerging from the wall.



The horse does not belong to the art gallery, which was closed, but to a cafe next door. So who thought of this -- the art people or the restaurant-business people? Or the imaginative cook? Worth a picture, I thought.

Within the photograph, I was also drawn to the pattern of bricks around the horse, although I would not have taken this picture just for the bricks.

Well, maybe I would have. Brick walls with similar patterns are everywhere in London, some of them very old, no doubt, but many not so old. Many walls (however deteriorated, worn, broken, moss-covered the bricks) actually date from the post-war years(1945 and after) when whole neighborhoods had to be rebuilt from the devastation of German bombs. Although the photo below is much older than that, it show the rebuilding that has gone on for centuries.



I will be writing about this elsewhere, but the brickwork and stonework speaks to me of a number of things: of our desire for permanence, of the flimsy fabric of life, of decisions supplanted by new decisions, of shifts in thinking, of changes of fortune, of our need to shore up what time and weather break down.

I don't yet know how to see individuals from these walls, but they are there.

My helpful friends usually remark that there must be a poem in this somewhere. I don't think so. I just like the possibilities. A difficult interest to explain, I admit.

* * *

Also attractive to me are the odd, grotesque faces one finds on medieval castles. This one, and the next, are from Windsor. Whatever their original function, and they did apparently serve a purpose, at least symbolically, these faces now look down at the tramping of modern tourists and express their ageless emotions: fear, anger, surprise, horror, or even, I suspect, distain.




Some serve as drain spout ornaments. In the rain they will appear to spew down upon the clueless slickered or soaking masses whatever reproach might be engraved in their stone faces.



These odd creatures pay the weather tax -- unless they are removed and hauled into a protected museum space to live under sterile and controlled conditions, where they suffer the indignity of the quick glance. Here they are routinely ignored by swarms of often bored or preoccupied students, by information-saturated tourists, or by obsessive museum goers.

Not to worry, if you miss them in the galleries, you can always buy a small model of this creature with his bulging eyes in the gift shop for . . . well, for a lot. Take him home. Plant him in the garden. After a while he will hide there too.

Out of their natural environment these little creatures are no longer interesting; their faces no longer strong conveyors of fear or anger or anthing else in particular. High on the castle wall they are just oddly appealing. Better to be out in the weather, above the frey, or like this cat, all but hidden from traffic on a ceiling at Canterbury Cathedral -- overlooked but still in the game, doing whatever it was made to do.

Look up!



Gotcha!

In this respect, I think the white horse running throught the brick wall in its obscure side street must have a better life than it would as a museum piece. It is neither tamed by its isolation nor trivialized by money making replication.

* * *

Something similar might be said for this last oddity. I was intrigued to find a fighter jet hanging nose down in the Tate Brittain a scant 12 inches or so from the marble floor. People were taking turns lying down beheath the bullet shaped nose cone for pictures. As with the horse, the jet took me by surprise.



For a second life as a museum piece, this disarmed, motionless bit of war armour still carries the emotional weight of its lethal design in this most august of final hangers.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Day 14




The Wild Man of Windsor

It defies the imagination, boggles the mind, confounds the mirror, leaves me speechless.

Well, almost speechless.

No wonder I avoid being caught out in someone's photograph. Not only am I the white haired old guy in the picture, but my cover has been blown. My claim to perennial sophistication is ended. His dudeness is dude no longer.

What folks back home want, apparently, are not pictures of buildings or landscapes that can be seen in better color from the internet. They want people.

Judging from the poses of people being photographed in front of ancient, historic, significant, picturesque, or just plain famous places, the current fashion, especially among the young and beautiful (or those who want to be seen that way) is the ta-da pose. Groups hugging, laughing, signing with their hands. Groups of teenage girls jumping in unison -- the let's-appear-spontaneous pose.

I have seen the heroic pose, the mock heroic pose, the ganster-hand-sign pose, the withering glare pose, the arrogant dismissive pose, and the happy tourist pose. So many choices!

I was pondering which of these might work when this picture was taken. I will call it the moment of indecision pose. It's the tell-me-'when'-before-you-take-it pose. It's the senior moment pose. The clueless pose.

Well, in that modern all purpose phrase, it is what it is.

We are at Windsor Castle, after all, the home of kings and queens for the better part of a millenium. One ought to be dignified. Or if not dignified at least stiff, which is the American cousin of dignified.

I have come to see that I can play the role of the senior citizen. It is fairly easy. The white hair, as seen here in halo effect, and the wrinkles are pretty convincing, although one young man selling tickets for Romeo and Juliet actually carded me.

It was very considerate of him.

It doesn't matter. Here is the picture that proves I went to Windsor. I got the senior discount, too, which is no small benefit.

And in real life I play a much younger man.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Day 13





Scratching on the Walls, Or the Vandal Within


Among the things my son Ian and his wife, Kristen, wanted to see during their short visit to England was Canterbury. So we got on the bus at Victoria Station and headed out of London.

The bus was nice, the ride was smooth, the driver hollered at other drivers in a startling way at various points; but passage was otherwise unmemorable.

Canterbury, on the other hand, is memorable.

The town visually is dominated by its Cathedral, which appears above the trees before the town itself, and then as one approaches by its ancient rubble wall. It is the kind of experience that enthusiasts of the middle ages get crazy for – castles, cathedrals, ruins, cobblestone streets, knights, war horses, and lots of clanging swords and armor.

The knights and war horses have to be imagined, of course, but that is no stretch in this environment. Ruins are made to be re-imagined. For me that means, how did these men and women and children manage to live? How did they cope with the obstacles they faced every day, obstacles we have all but eliminated in modern life.

For some it means imagining the forces of history that converge here, that led to battles and high stakes intrigue, the struggles and daring that broke new ground. To the fantasy enthusiast it may mean imagining knights and kings and ladies into a “former glory” they never actually knew.

American history does not take us back to the middle ages, so we come with a kind of reverence for the “ancient.”

For us, places like Canterbury are laden with historical magic that is clearly impossible in America. So it is more than a bit disheartening to discover – after the glory of bright sunshine through stained glass windows, after the grandeur of the vaulted sanctuary, after the instructive and provocative plaques, after the stunning art gracing the stunning architecture, after the deeply sobering scars of ancient violence, after the soul stirring call to worship – it is more than a bit disheartening to find the etchings and scars of recent vandalism on the walls and pillars and woodwork.

Some of the wall scratching has historical significance. So I suppose we can forgive someone held in the Tower of London awaiting a future that might end at the executioners block from carving his name into the walls to remind posterity of his plight. But the new marks I don’t understand. Except for the very old, historically important etchings, most of the scratching and chipping is selfish, vandalism pure and simple.

I don’t think the issue is lack of reverence for the past or disrespect for religion or even a hatred for things British. Most folks who take a stone or a knife or a piece of metal and scratch something into the old stone surfaces or who cut lines and figures into the wood can’t be motivated by anything as noble as a desire to protest through vandalism.

No. I think the motive is both banal and self-centered. Look, I was here. But even that human tendency toward self assertion does not quite explain the marks that are just marks, the chips that just wear away, the gouges that resemble nothing so much as gouges.

A week after our trip to Canterbury, my wife and I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the Raphael Cartoons and Tapestries. At one end of the exhibition room was an enormous altar piece, depicting many things, including St George slaying his dragon. Along the bottom is a series of paintings depicting moments in the life of Christ.

As this bottom series of paintings is roughly at eye level, I took off my glasses and examined the paintings with my face just inches from the surface. When I got to the painting depicting Judas ‘s kiss of betrayal, I was shocked to note that Judas’s face had been scratched off with a pointed object. The face of Christ was untouched. Someone got back at Judas, I thought.

As I went down the row of paintings, I discovered other figures disfigured, vandalized, scratched out. It was, uniformly, the bad guys who got hacked. I looked again at the Judas painting. It was not a recent obliteration; the gouges were old. It’s both encouraging and disheartening to conclude that the urge to this kind of destruction is not a recent acquisition. We are neither better nor worse as humans than we ever were, apparently. Still, I can’t understand why we keep doing it. My memorable trips to memorable and timeless places will always now carry the scars of this banality.
Our urge to leave our marks, even if it mars or destroys the priceless, is not the worst in us coming out. But it just may be the most pointless and shallow.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Day 12

A Night for the Ballet

Last night during the second interval at the ballet, Romeo and Juliet, I passed the time by thumbing through tickets that I keep in my small notebook from my entertainments in London. The list, which does not here include museums, art galleries, walking tours, and popular tourist sites, and time wandering about with a vacant expression, looks like this:

9 plays

2 concerts

1 foreign film

1 opera

1 ballet

I total these up, I suppose, to impress myself as much as anything else.

I have been busy during my seven weeks – to the day – in London. The last four weeks have entailed necessarily monkish living. My wife has been back in the States to oversee the arrival of my fourth granddaughter and to visit again my third granddaughter, herself a very new arrival. Tuesday next she return, and not any too soon as it is clearly time for us to end this monkish separation.

Nine plays. The drama is becoming a bit addictive. It will be a shock to leave London, with its many daily dramatic options, to return to my real life, my normal life, my previous and future lives (all of these) in the rural village I call home.

The opera, I was reminded, emphatically, is drama too. Drama with all the elements of stage plays and music. Such drama! I was encouraged to see an opera before I came to London, so I was acting partly out of that sense of directive. I chose to see Faust, mostly because I am interested in the Faust legend and in the various versions of his story that have been told through the years. This operatic Faust was a visual spectacle, including as it did, both an exploding atom bomb against the backdrop as the curtain rises and a thirty foot tall white cross blazing in the foreground at the play’s climax.

But the real drama of opera happens with the ears. Faust is an aural drama, astonishing, compelling, and moving, with a breathless, draining climax. “Intense” is the word a much younger person apply to the experience.

What drama does with spoken word and opera does with sung words, ballet does without words. Movement, primarily dance, and expression is all.

Here too I had been encouraged to attend a ballet. But I had other motivations as well. Having seen, to date, three Shakespeare plays in the last month and with plans to see Hamlet when it opens in November, I thought I ought to see what Romeo and Juliet would look like as ballet. Then, too, I have become interested in those arcane aesthetic things that are easy to dismiss or to belittle (I am guilty of both): staging, performance, use of space, gesture and expression, costuming, suggestion, lighting, projection, rapport with the audience, uses of tradition, and so forth.

It is likely I will not become a fixture at the ballet – well, my village does not have one anyway – but I came away properly chastened and humbled by the performance. True to the story I know from Shakespeare, our young lovers kill themselves, needlessly, in this rendering too. Or maybe it would be better to say convincingly. I was as entangled as intended as the story played itself out.

I am glad now that I went to the trouble of getting to the theater. I almost let it go. A mere two hours before the curtain was set to rise, having been shut out yet again from seeing another drama, I noticed that the 7:30 performance was to be the last. I went on line but found the online ticket option closed.

To add error to urgency, I left home 45 minutes before curtain trusting the bus would get me there, only to see it move away from the bus stop as I approached. The next bus was 20 minutes off.

Thirty-five minutes till curtain, I began the race walking stride I hoped would work.

I made it by the skin of me teeth.

I was at the ticket counter when “One minute till performance. Take your seats, please,” came over the PA system. It was a lie, of course, as so much in the theater is. The lights did not dim for another five minutes. And I was thoroughly put out by the people who had dallied about the lobby until the last second.

But the lie had done its job – I was seated. Hot and somewhat breathless, but seated.

And it was a fine seat too – best seat in the house for my pensioner’s discount. Unobstructed but for the man and woman in front of me who kept bobbing about, locking faces and looking gooey eyed at each other from start to finish. Has all sense of what is appropriate been lost? I went to a lot of work to see Romeo and Juliet! This is serious drama! Do you think we could just pack in the public displays and watch the ballet please?!