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.