Waves

Yesterday was a day of waves, waves of colors and sound.  Manchester United against Madrid.  Football (what Americans call soccer).

Barcelona Won 3-1,
Then Set About Killing Their Own Coach

The lads (of any age) were in the tube singing like a men's choir on steroids (or at least a half-dozen pints).  Dads brought their sons, likewise decked out in Manchester scarves and jerseys with game-pins fixed to them.  Waves of club songs swept through the tube, and just when there was a moment of silence, someone would heft out the first bars of another song, and the tide would rise again and beat against everything in the tube station.  But even outside: they filled up pubs across not just London but all of England.  Waves of song and cheering poured out of pubs from blocks away.

The game wasn't until the evening.  This was only the warm up.

Game-Control Central: Manchester Fans during the Game

The waves of sound are even more prolific when the Coup du Monde, the World Cup (the "football Olympics"), is on.  Once, while driving from Glasgow to Canturbury and passing through a number of villages on the way to the main artery, I noticed that the streets were entirely empty of people.  No one existed in these places.  And then, at a stop sign, I heard the sound pour out of a local pub as Scotland made a goal.  Magnificent.  It sounded like an entire stadium of fans.  Unfortunately, Scotland isn't really a team to expect for a World-Cup win.  One can hope.  After all, people root for the Chicago Cubs....

Another time, in London, Joni and I hit a pub in good time before a World Cup game began.  It was when Beckahm was at his pinnacle of play and fame -- and sported the blond mohawk.

Glory Daze for Beckham. What's He Got that I Haven't?  Never Mind....

The pub filled up, and we sat with a couple in town on holiday who had two young boys -- each sporting the Beckham Mohawk.  Cool.  It was a dazzling game.

 Certainly there are complaints about the increasing emphasis that society puts on sports.  Context?  The Romans had racing teams in the circus maximus -- charioteers: the blue team, the red team, etc.  And they had their devotees.  Similar to American sports today, whether football, baseball, or what not.  And in ancient Rome, sports served to keep a certain complacency among the citizens by way of entertainment.  "Give them the circus and let them eat bread" was the word.  In America today it's "give them NASCAR and let them drink Bud."

A friend of mine put it this way: America prides itself in hiding its light under the hood of a pickup.  Too true too often -- not to be snobby about a pickup.  While all focus and no frivolousness makes Johnny a dull boy, all distraction and no concentration on more important issues makes a nation stupid.

I tend to moralize about things and ought rather to merely describe what I'm seeing (and have had to go back and change these posts so as not to make martyrs out of  my readers.  That is, "you know what a martyr is?  Someone whose blogger is a saint.")

But I mean here to say that, despite the arguments that sports are a central part of what T. S. Eliot expressed -- something that keeps us "distracted from distraction by distraction" -- yet there is a grand moment in getting caught up in the game, in the fever pitch of a crowd cheering on the home team, in the crushing feeling at a missed goal, and in the "thrill of victory," which always feels like poetic justice over the "villains" of the other team.

Waves of color, waves of sound.  Sometimes it's grand to get lost in the collective goal of a team.

Antiques: The Presence of the Past

No Label Necessary Here

Camden Passage. Every Saturday in a little street just outside the Angel tube station is a place where some antique dealers have shops -- and others have card tables set up or even cloths spread on the ground -- to display the residue of human pasts.  You can find anything there: a used light bulb, Victorian door key, 18th-century nautical paintings, Louis XVIII chairs, an early 16th-century whale's tooth with a sex scene carved upon it -- and there's everything between.

I have all the light bulbs I need, no door for the key, no place for the chairs to fit in, appreciate the painting, but the whale's tooth says something: things (and maybe sailors) don't change much over centuries, do they?

While it is true that the antique market on Saturdays has diminished in quality and size over the last decade, there was a section of Camden Passage years back where you could find military paraphernalia.  I mean, for £11,000 (this is a little expensive: today that is $18,040), you could purchase a First World War DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross) awarded to a man who did some unheard-of stunts in a kite made of cloth and wood that had a heavy, metal dynamo with a fan on the front and which hurled him past bullets (or not) at the amazing top speed of 115 miles per hour.

A 1918 DFC

Bits, pieces, flotsam and jetsam: antiques.  The things that flow in and out of people's lives.  Sometimes, obviously, people internally move away from the things they owned, selling them as they grow beyond the import of the objects.  At other times survivors of the deceased are left to figure out what to do with the objects left behind.  But the objects indicate one thing that the Modernists knew very well: the past is always present with us.

T. S. Eliot put it this way (in Burnt Norton):

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

In buying an antique, there is the hope that collecting an item of someone's past may give our own present a missing element -- and make our future moments more blissful.  True, no?  Well, that's bleak.  But is it solely our own discontents that force us to purchase?

I'm not so certain.  Some years back I bought a brass, black-powder cannon in Camden Passage and built a heavy carriage for it so I wouldn't harm the more delicate, original carriage when I fired it.

On New Year's Eve, I load the little noise-maker with black powder and a paper wad, take it out onto the deck over the snow, and light the fuse.  The fire and the bang bring in the new year with a lively POP replete with a flash of light; the cannon rolls back, and the neighborhood echoes the report.  On the 4th of July (which the English here would rather not mention), it's the same -- but without the snow.

Cannon from Camden Passage, with Heavy Carriage (above)

In firing the cannon, I don't think so much about the person who made this exquisite little object, nor about who sold it to the antique dealer in Camden Passage; I'm thinking of the miniature marvel of how it works.  But there's this: the previous owners' past has made a number of my present moments a delightful (and brightly noisy) place.

Other objects bring more somber thought.  For instance, in Camden Passage years back, there was a section of the market where Nazi paraphernalia was sold -- swastika flags, busts of Hitler, WWII iron crosses with swastikas on them (which WWI iron crosses did not have).  These things I do not want to see, touch, nor -- obviously -- own.  They are illegal to sell or purchase on the continent.  Some people, then, come to the UK to purchase them.  Still, in Germany two years ago, I found some of these items being sold at an outdoor antique market despite the laws.

I like my celebratory cannon.  It makes a humbly grand sound on a holiday.  In thinking of it going off this New Years' Eve with friends present, I anticipate its happy influence in future, even while it sits this present moment at my home gathering a little dust.  And in its past....who knows where it was?

Eliot was right about external time even though he was speaking about the internal significance of the past on our present moments.  Perhaps head to an antique market.  Find something of the past for your present and, in consequence, enjoy a unique moment in your future.

Tattershall Castle

 From Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows:

   The [Water] Rat sculled smartly across and made fast. Then he held up his forepaw as the Mole stepped gingerly down. `Lean on that!' he said. `Now then, step lively!' and the Mole to his surprise and rapture found himself actually seated in the stern of a real boat.

     This has been a wonderful day!' said he, as the Rat shoved off and took to the sculls again. `Do you know, I've never been in a boat before in all my life.'

      `What?' cried the Rat, open-mouthed: `Never been in a--you never--well I--what have you been doing, then?'

     `Is it so nice as all that?' asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leant back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.

     `Nice? It's the ONLY thing,' said the Water Rat solemnly, as he leant forward for his stroke. `Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING--absolute nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,' he went on dreamily: `messing--about--in--boats; messing----'

One place that over the years represents London life for me is the Tattershall Castle [link], a ship moored in the Thames.  No, you can't row her.  She's too big.  And she's permanently moored at the embankment.  She bobs in the waves, rises and falls with the tide, pitches in her moorings, and...doesn't go anywhere.  But she's fun to board on a social journey for all that.  After all, messing about in boats is the ONLY thing!

She has a nice restaurant below decks and two pubs above, fore and aft.  On nice days, you sit above decks on thick, varnished mahogany benches (as should be on a ship), and there are brass fittings (polished) studding the rails and gunwales.  You sit in the sun and watch boats working up and down the river.  On a rainy day, you can sit below in the restaurant and watch the river traffic out the windows.

Tattershall Castle

What is especially nice about having dinner and a pint on this ship -- and this feature is experienced most immediately by men, I suppose  -- is the helpful sensation one gets while peeing.  Yes.  It's true.

You see, you have a pint, sit talking and boat-watching for any amount of time, and then -- as the need becomes more evident -- head for the head (as they say on a ship).  So you stand there at the urinal, and the Tattershall bobs and rolls on the waves of a passing boat or sways in the strong tidal current moving up or down the river.  And as you sway you think (it's all very logical) -- "No!  No way!  I've only had one pint -- and food with it!"  One bloke along the urinal line pipes up: "Blimey!  Ah'm swayin' like six pints and Ah've only 'ad woone!"  He commented further on his savings -- it's not the cheapest pint in London.

Tattershall Castle in Her Glory Days

Which brings up a question: when exactly were her "glory days"?  She's certainly bringing in more money for her owners now without ever leaving a mooring than she did when underweigh as a lake ferry. And it's pretty soft work these days.

Ironies.

Not to dwell on beer (which is a marked and standard feature of life in England), but..."IPA" bitter stands for "India Pale Ale."  And if I drink one or two of these, you know what happens?  Yes.  I - P - A bitter....  After all, it's good for what Ales you.  Oh my Guinness.

My.  That was stout.

So boats and ships: England being an island has at the center of its collective identity the presence of the sea.  For most of the history of this country, if you wanted to get somewhere else from here, you had to go by ship, and then -- later in English history -- by plane.  Now, of course, there's the amazing Chunnel: the tunnel under the English Channel (or as the French call it, the Pas de Calais).

It's easy to forget England is an island, especially with planes and the Chunnel, but it remains, as Shakespeare called it,

 This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle...

Just think of England as a castle with a great mote round it -- or, it's sort of like a boat you can't row 'cause it's too big...and it's permanently moored.

Houses Far Afield or Near

Dude Bill

It's an odd thing -- visiting the house where one of the greats among humans was born.  For instance, a house five centuries old shows a little wear: wood floors rubbed down to a shine by millions of shoes, wood railings worn smooth by half a millennium of hands, hearths buffed a millimeter lower into the stone that once faced the famous owner's foot.

In short, little to nothing original remains, even if it all has been well preserved.  Inevitably, old boards and decaying stone have been replaced.  So the stray hair of the poet, the trace of DNA, and the dropped crumb will have disappeared beneath the stray hairs, exfoliated cells, and crumbs from centuries of visitors.  Whether our expectation is articulated or not, we expect (strangely and beyond all probability) to see some trace of the person, some finger print, some remnant of body, soul, intellect, or work overlooked in a corner of some room -- we expect that there will be something untouched, a connection for us that another visitor has not seen.

And everyone wants to own something of the person.

Will's birthplace, John Shakespeare's house

Tuesday involved a nicely meandering train ride to Stratford-upon-Avon, to the house where Shakespeare was born, his father, John's, house.  The birth room remains largely intact, as does, a couple miles away, the cottage of Anne Hathaway, despite an addition.  That cottage is where, it may be assumed, Will first met Anne, willed her to do, which she wantonly wished, and, winging his willie, Anne, 8-years-his-senior, was for some moments wistfully willful and then with his child.  The question was "will 'e marry her?" -- yes, 'e will.

What transpired during their years of marriage has long been debated, not least in relation to stuff in the plays.  But in Will's last will, he left her "the second-best bed."  Was she unfaithful during the years he spent in London, away from Stratford, or (another of perpetual possibilities) did he leave her that bed -- an extravagantly expensive item -- out of great affection, out of an intimate message of deepest love?  Perhaps that was the very bed they first shared and continued to use over the years.

 

Carving and inlay (right side of the headboard)
of what is believed to be the 2nd-best bed.

Touching the talent seems to be the issue for those who visit the houses of the famous.  Is it to touch the hem of the great, the fringe of the robe worn by...and thereby derive some essence of that greatness?  Perhaps.  But I gather they are few who can visit a place like the birth room and regard it with clinical detachment.

So what is it we want, after all?

On the train to Stratford, the man next to me, who appeared to be from Sri Lanka or India, was reading Bill Bryson's book Notes from a Small Island, which is about England.  Bryson is from Des Moines, Iowa, where I also grew up, and some of the places he mentions humorously in his books are places I know well (as do how many others throughout his and my generations?).  Will Bryson's old family home become a place of pilgrimage?  Well, it's not that Bryson would ever be seen on a level with Shakespeare, and Des Moines is no literary capital: anyone with any talent has left this place long before they were known to have had any.  Nevertheless, I wondered if the fellow passenger in the train would like to have heard something of Bryson's home -- both the town and the house he lived in.  I wondered if he wanted something of Bryson as well as of Shakespeare.

I didn't ask.  He was busy with his family, then on his cell making business deals in both Hindi and English. Between looking back to his book, then to his wife, and his attempts to settle their fidgety child, I figured some days are just too busy for any thinking about Bryson, who, by the way, wrote a bio of Shakespeare and who also walked through the house, the birth room, and Anne's cottage at some point.  Perhaps it was he who spied a grey hair on the hearth that the bard had dropped....

Yet Bryson, who has lived in England since his early adulthood, views his hometown without the undue affection that people show to the houses of the famous.  He has instead clearly marked Des Moines as needing remedial work if it would become culturally fit for human existence.  The difference between yogurt and Des Moines?  Yogurt has an active culture....  Iowa or England?  If you want to live in mind and spirit, the choice is obvious.  Yes.  But who can afford it?

Shakespeare probably went through the same questions as these in leaving Stratford for London -- questions Bryson also no doubt contended with in leaving Des Moines for London.  If you want to advance, you have to go where advancement is possible.  It may be expensive, but so is the waste of a truly gifted soul and intellect in a place that fosters only the mediocrity of a big fish in a small pond (a consideration relative to the size of the pond and the fish).

Bryson's recent work includes a book, A Short History of Home, in which, I shouldn't wonder, he probably speaks of his childhood digs.  But it's doubtful that -- except among a very few Des Moinesiacs -- Bryson's childhood home will entertain pilgrimages.

On Wednesday, I took the students to visit Dickens' house on Doughty Street, which has been maintained much as it was in Dickens' day, complete with some of the author's furniture, including the desk at which he wrote his last words.  Suffering a stroke, he left the novel he was working on unfinished.  And even with such an item remaining there, other pieces of furniture were temporarily in France for an anniversary celebration (i.e. his A Tale of Two Cities, which has to do with the French Revolution).  So it is not merely that people want to visit, but want to borrow from, the houses of the great.

Dickens' house, Doughty Street

C. S. Lewis's home outside Oxford, The Kilns, was one I don't recall Lewis cared much for but tolerated, yet was a house that his brother, Warnie -- who lived with his brother -- absolutely loathed.  I believe the events transpiring in the house dictated his feelings towards it.  As a grad student in 1984, I visited the small house; I went back in the early 2000s.  He wasn't there either time....  Of course.  Yet isn't that what we really want?

 The Kilns in Headington, North of Oxford

What I remark is this: the adulation in people's minds regarding great people and their homes.  This adulation, the attempt by a pilgrimage to evoke some part of the great person's spirit, ability, talent or fame, is a seance in reverse: it is the living who visit the place of the departed instead of, by seance, the dead who (supposedly...) visit a place of the living.

Archaeologists can point to plenty of reasons why the houses of the great (or not-so-great) are important to us in what we learn.  In any case, it's a curiosity what we do.  Chaucer gave this reason for people like himself to travel from the Tabard Inn near London to Canterbury:

to Caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

That is, in my translation, 

to Canterbury they wend

To seek the holy blissful martyr

That helped them when they were sick

Sheldon Vanauken told me that some of his Catholic compatriots believed that a personal possession retains something of the spiritual residue of the person who used it over time: the favorite pen, the bed, the chair....  And that spiritual residue is present in objects of the pious as well as of the evil, the object itself being an item indifferent to whatever forces act upon it.  So the belief goes.

We want something from the great, from the very houses they lived and died in, whether you believe in spiritual residue or not.   But I think what we seek has already been given us: their works, their thoughts, their entertainments, their recorded experiences.

One Text of the "To be" speech from Hamlet

A Swan Dive, If You Reaaally Wanna Know

As a graduate student in London 1984: that was the first time I went to the Swan in Cosmo place.  At that pub you could meet locals, lawyers from nearby Lincoln's Inn, people who had children in the nearby children's hospital, and who not?  Of an evening, tables and people would spill onto the pavement on both sides of Cosmo Place, just leaving a path wide enough for families on their evening walk, parents slowly drifting by with their kids in strollers and jammies.

One warm evening in summer, two men invited me to bring my pint and sit at a table on the pavement with them.  They both treated me kindly and to pints -- sternly refusing to let me take my turn at buying a round ("yoo're a stoodent and need yur mooney" said one),   So I learned pubs: it's about people, a "public house" in the real sense.  It's not an American bar.  Even dogs are welcome (every type), but they all -- canine or human -- must behave.

The Swan, flowered on a Sunday
first to the left on Cosmo Place.
The Queen's Larder, further on, by the phoneboxes

One man was from Glasgow, the other from Exeter, in the south.  A true Scot, the man from Glasgow was, and Glaswegian [link] is a language far from Edinburgh's smoother notes even if these towns are but a wee hop apart by train. In short, Exeter had to translate almost everything Glasgow said to me, and what things those two lads taught me.

Exeter's job: he sold camping gear for Lowe and asked if I'd seen Lowe bags in the states.  Saying that, "yeah--in the states they sell anything from large frame packs to fanny-packs," I saw them both suddenly wince, look round at the crowd and shush me.  Glasgow said, as I recall, "ghrthpuntichlock, ween abrightlightkitinyourattic," which Exeter gave me to understand was Scots for "we dinna say that in polite company here, laddie: 'fanny-pack' is impolite slang for the most intimate part of the female anatomy."  And so the two traveling salesmen, one from north, one from south, and a green student from America met up and spent a long evening talking about America and Britain, comparing expressions of each country, philosophizing about wives and jobs (neither of which I had as a student), and trying to imbibe yet another pint.

At a late point, a woman hovered by us who, to all indications of decimation and fogginess, was working on a habit more heroin than ale.  A seat was open at the table and, wishing to sit, in her perpetual movement of slow and relative motion, she asked, "D'yamoind if Oy siddown 'eeuh?"

The guys had already noted her lolling and swaying to the cosmic forces.  It was not a warm "Yeah--awroight."  She sat -- immediately bummed a cigarette from Glasgow, and announced "I'm nawt from round 'eeuh, if ya reaaaly wanna know."  No one took notice.  She repeated this a number of times before Exeter shot back in the middle of a story he was telling: "well, we didn't ask, did we, so we really don't want to know -- if you really wanna know." The slight seemed to bounce off her.  She only waited silently a bit, smoking, until Glasgow rose to get another round for us all.  She was on again: "well a girl could really fancy a pint 'ereself, if ya reaaaaly wanna know."  Exeter said "get yer own pint, eh?"  Glasgow came back with three pints and a half-pint for her.  She said "Well I would've loiked a full poynt, if you reaally wanna know," which set not only Exeter into a remark, but made Glasgow smolder a bit as well.

By the end of the evening (perhaps it was the ale), the two men took occasional and then more frequent glances at her.  They delayed their departures -- the game of "whocanstaylongestandgetthegirl?" had begun.  I was the first to rise to take my leave.  There were hand shakes all round and many thanks from me and wishes of good luck from them.  Glasgow looked to be leaving as well.  I don't know when, or if alone, Exeter left.  But I've often wondered what happened to the other human there, the woman whose life had wound down to a thin thread of "if you reaaaaly wanna know." In the decades since, her phrase has remained a regular linguistic feature at my home -- used to offer information that a listener didn't ask for, as in "Yes, it was I, indeed, who cleaned the fireplace this morning, if you reaaaally wanna know...."

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

Saturday, one of the group -- having a severely injured back -- could stand no more walking about London and needed to rest her back (and had endured a trip to the hospital on Sunday).  So she and I made our way (slowly) back to the flats from the group outing to Notting Hill market.  While she rested, I went to Greenwich to catch up to the group, missed them by minutes, and then trudged back to Bedford Place to check on the patient, who, as it was now around 6:00 p.m., would need food.  To the grocery store, then back to the flat.  "Do you want curry chicken salad I can make here and you can continue to rest, or do you want to go to the pub round the corner for fish and chips?"

So...at the Swan over fish and chips we sat and talked of England, Bloomsbury, books, and everything.  She is a bright soul, an astute being, and she listened kindly to a few tales of my student days while sipping her cider.

And another evening, a few of us went to The Queen's Larder, another pub at the end of Cosmo Place, and enjoyed a pint -- but more: talk with an elderly couple from Newcastle on Tyne, down to London for a short holiday.  With them there was much delightful talk about England in the 60s, and Newcastle, and Sting (who is from Newcastle).  Sting was highly admired by the couple because he goes back to his "Local" (pub) occasionally to see his working-class mates in the northern town. The couple cared not at all about the Beatles who, unlike Sting, stayed in the posh south -- London -- and do not go back to visit their old mates in Liverpool.  A lovely couple in their autumn, they are, and the old guy gave me a thumbs-up when they left, saying "it war very nice ta meet ya."  And so to meet them also!

It's a public house, not a bar.  And everyone petted the little dog who courteously nosed round and greeted newcomers.  If you reaaaaaaly wanna know.

Sovereignty of Soul

The British empire had a long run, though certainly not as long as the Romans', whose "world" lasted for 1400 years and included "invading" or "colonizing" a good part of Britain.

At one point in her reign, Queen Victoria knelt on a little wooden stool, covered with sky-blue velvet, and was named "Empress of India" without, of course, anyone asking the peoples of India (which, then, included Pakistan) what they thought of the arrangement.  It has been called by various names, including a noun springing from a word used by Rudyard Kipling, "Jingoism:" forcing one's culture upon another.  The Greeks called it "Hellenism" while the Romans, modeling the Greeks, saw it more euphemistically as the pax Romana -- the peace of Rome.  That is, although you have been invaded and are under Roman rule, you could continue practicing your own culture unless your culture (and politics) contradict Roman ideals (laws); it was a way of appeasing unrest, but coming under the rule of another usually doesn't grant much peace to the oppressed.

Henry VIII tried this on with the via media, the middle way after separating England's church from Rome's (because the Pope wouldn't grant Henry a divorce).  Since the pope would not play the game, Henry said, "OK: I'll take my ball(s) and go home, start my own church -- the Church of England -- and I will be the head of it."  Using some of the ideas from those protesting on the Continent (Luther...Calvin), he proceeded to build his Anglican (Anglish/English) church on a balance between Catholicism and Protestantism to appease both sides: that middle way.

And the next generations of Tudors? His daughter, Bloody Mary, burned her father's (Henry's) church leaders in the streets of Oxford for going against the Catholicism she held to.  And what about Elizabeth I (Mary's half-sister, who eventually took the throne after Mary's reign)?  This Elizabeth, at her coronation, hefted her father's English Bible above her head, brought it down and kissed it pp thus changing it all back to Protestantism. She then chased down as treasonous those who supported the Catholic cause. This included her cousin, Mary Stewart, who was queen in Scotland and who tried to help the Catholic, Spanish king invade England and turn it Catholic again.  Elizabeth delayed executing Mary despite the continuing danger of her machinations...but eventually had no choice: "off with her head."  So it was.

At root, "jingoism," "colonizing," "empire building," and the requisite "ideological prescription" administered under duress come to mean any arrangement where one person with power forced their views, their ideology -- their game -- on (or is it "into"?) others who would rather claim their own sovereignty but are put in a place where it is nearly impossible to resist without being killed.  The tendency to "force" another person's soul exists in the human personality at an individual level.  And in its most violent extremes it is rape (literal and metaphorical).  In its more peaceful cloaking, it is political expediency and smiling coercion "for your own good" and "you'll learn to appreciate it."

I think we do well to appraise institutional forces and movements at individual levels because the aim to dominate is firmly seated within human nature.  Henry wanted a divorce: England adopts a new faith.  And Hitler? And McCarthy...?  It has always been about personal ideologies if not merely greed.  Whether openly and violently forcing another, or surreptitiously cloaking one's true aims of domination with "flowing robes of sanctimony" (to use Clarence Thomas's words -- with some not-so-small hints of irony) -- neither is correct.  Rather, the humanitarian offers the view, guides the approach, informs the vacancy within an individual's human paradigm...that is all, and it seems to be everything in humane human relations: recognizing an individual's sovereignty over his or her own soul.

It's ironic that forcing one's beliefs on another is something we claim to loathe.  Embodied in a regime (tortuous and deadly often as not), we stand against it.  Embodied in the individual, the personification is, to me, most loathsome.  If I can go back to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway: they are people in the habit of "forcing your soul," which Woolf says "makes life intolerable -- [they] make life intolerable."  They say 'must.'"

Bloomsbury, a section of greater London just to the north, stands as an ideal to me because of what is and has been here: the British Museum (some Brits call it the big "BM" with a slight grin at the Bowel Movement implication).  The BM is where Marx (was that Groucho or Karl?) and Hegel wrote their communist documents (another ideology asserting itself in painful measures hither and thither in the world), and the BM is where George Bernard Shaw wrote works like Pygmalion, which implicates males and intellectuals as imposing their views upon women -- and doing so merely for their own amusement.  More: this part of London more largely is where T. S. Eliot, Lyton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, her husband Leonard, and Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell among others of the "Bloomsbury Group," or "Bloomsberries," spent their days writing, thinking, and painting in large part about and against a society and a people who "force your soul" by imposing their will upon that of others.  I do not follow the thinking of the Bloomsberries everywhere, but the ideal to me is this:

Isn't it a gift?  Being able to wander London -- mentally wander through books and the minds of those who have been here -- all on our own without undue measures forced upon us to do so, and in whatever direction we seek?  Isn't it a gift to inform our own paradigms, experience as we would do, not as someone dictates we should or "must"?  This is personal sovereignty and is when life is richest, when it is a gift and a light.

When I was a student in England -- on this very street, Bedford Place -- I was allowed to wander London as I liked, laissez faire.  And it allowed me to drink in England -- its ideas and ideals -- and largely opened my eyes a great deal wider.  I am different because of those days, days when I was glad to be left alone to wander and learn as the city and its lights came to me.

I could not be happier today than if I should be able to give my students the same opportunities without impediment.

 ~     ~     ~     ~

Neologism of the day: Flogger  n. one who follows a blog, expecting daily entries. ;)

The Red Thread

 A brief passage from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway:

"And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread, which would stretch and stretch ... as they walked across London; as if one's friends were attached to one's body ... by a thin thread...."

And so it is with friends, is it not?  No matter where you wander, or where I go, we remain connected as we go through our days.

But more.  There's this, from a Wiki:

"According to [a Chinese] myth, the gods tie an invisible red string around the ankles of men and women who are destined to be soul mates and will one day marry each other....  The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of time, place or circumstances. This magical cord may stretch or tangle, but never break.

"One story featuring the red string of fate involves a young boy. Walking home one night, a young boy sees an old man standing beneath the moonlight (Yue Xia Lao). The man explains to the boy that he is attached to his destined wife by a red thread. Yue Xia Lao shows the boy the young girl who is destined to be his wife. Being young and having no interest in having a wife, the young boy picks up a rock and throws it at the girl, running away. Many years later, when the boy has grown into a young man, his parents arrange a wedding for him. On the night of his wedding, his wife waits for him in their bedroom, with the traditional veil covering her face. Raising it, the man is delighted to find that his wife is one of the great beauties of his village. However, she wears an adornment on her eyebrow. He asks her why she wears it and she responds that when she was a young girl, a boy threw a rock at her that struck her, leaving a scar on her eyebrow. She self-consciously wears the adornment to cover it up. The woman is, in fact, the same young girl connected to the man by the red thread shown to him by Yue Xia Lao back in his childhood."

Some have also seen the thread tied between mothers and daughters; Lucy Kaplansky's CD Red Thread and title song have to do with this myth.

And in Nguyen Du's tale of Kieu, there's this, about two people betrothed, but fates intervene and they are separated:

By the red leaf, the crimson thread,
we're bound for life—our oath proves mutual faith. (ll. 459-460)

It's painful to leave for other places, leaving people behind.  It pulls.  Yeah: we're still connected, but the thread pulls.  And I suppose it's the weight on the pull, the degree of pain, that lets us know who is most precious to us.  Old Mr. Emerson in E. M. Forster's Room with a View perhaps said it best:

The only impossible thing is to love and to part.

In my case, it's not the "for forever" that Emerson meant.

I feel the pull already.  Friends, family...Michael..., but mostly, of course, my love.

London

Conrad wrote about London in the Heart of Darkness: "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."  Yes, and not always so long ago; I recall a homeless person in London a few years back shouting to an early morning sky at near the top of his voice, "London!  You've ruined me!"

Conrad's story is related by Marlow as he sits on the ship, Nellie, resting at anchor on the Thames. Marlow speaks of it as the Romans' entrance to the island as they pushed the Pax Roman further into the darker reaches of their world, and he leaves ambiguity about time and the river:

"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago -- the other day ...."

Was he thinking of it the other day, or was it that the Romans arrived there -- given the history of all things, their arrival being comparatively recent -- just "the other day?"  Both, probably.  In the long history of things, "We live in the flicker" Conrad says, and yet the Thames seems impervious to time, despite the changes on its banks.

T. S. Eliot spoke of the river as a "brown god."  But I can't see it as anything but an ancient king, living still and bearing daily the weight of English history upon its back.  It takes an immense liquid breath, the tide moving upstream, expanding its sides, and then -- slow hours later -- in the immense stillness of the tide's pause on some "still point of the turning world," it flows downstream again, Old Man Thames exhaling until the ribs of its banks and stony shoals are exposed.  And another day, then, has flowed in and out as humans lived out their flicker on its back or on its banks.

It is a fine thing to be on the Thames -- not least on one of the moored ships that serve as a pub. You sit with a pint in the sun and watch the boat traffic and the people and look up and down the river, hearing the sounds of the city, the water coursing by, and feeling the ship rise and fall gently on the current and the waves of passing boats.  And, like Conrad, you think of the river's history -- history from before the city was here.

One fine story about the Thames is that which regards Handel, who first conducted his "Water Music" upon the river for George I.  A number of versions exist about this performance on 17 July 1717, and the stories all agree about the musicians' barge pulling along side the royal barge and the music being played.  But my favorite version relates that Handel -- who had fallen out with George by taking his duties the king too lightly -- wrote the Water Music to appease the king.  After the entire work was performed, Handel asked if the king enjoyed it.  Yes, George indicated.  "Play it again."  Handel: "All of it?"  George: "All."  And so he did, the story goes, not twice but, on request, three times.

It's not so much a comment on how well George liked the work, but a reminder to Handel of his place as the king's servant.... 

I would like to sit upon the old king's back again, to rise with the swell or fall with the ebb.

And so...a little Water Music [Link].  (What remains a favorite bit of music that I first heard when 16 is the section from 2:04-3:00.  Get a Handel on it!)

18pdr's Blog

18pdr's Travel Blog

This 'ere blog'll tell ya bowt me travels fah n' woid, if ya reaally wanna know.

This blog talks about travels external and internal: the places we go in this world as well as our inner journeys.  The past is always present; we travel back daily in our memories, and sometimes that past drives straight into our present and influences our futures.

Time isn't the only thing that goes on internally.  We travel to other people's paradigms -- visiting them, learning by them, and sometimes taking souvenirs from them.  We also watch others travel into and out of our lives.  And I suppose we also travel into others' lives -- often leaving lasting impressions: love, hurt, aspiration, reparation....  And there are travels of faith -- so you'll also find journeys of faith here.

The visual below is a progressive image of the vehicle I've been traveling around in during my years.  (Ironic thanks to Keith for making the flash file, below, and its little "ending.")