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.