July 9, 2007

7-9-07
Cafe outside London fire monument
2;00 PM

I seem to have lost attention mid-sentence.  Sorry for that.  We were in Luxembourg, as I recall.  I should say, this hotel was my first stay in a real European hotel.  The place in Charleroi was pretty Americanized, with a sterile front desk, bland low-budget exterior, chain-store logo and branding...all of that.  Hotel Ibis of Charleroi.  Not exactly...unique.

Anyway, Luxembourg.  Incidentally, I remember the room was 303, but I can't remember the hotel name--I think it was something like Hotel Bristol, south of Luxembourg proper.  The lift in the hotel was really not big enough for two people with luggage unless they were lovers.  The room was tiny and lovely with a constricted corner view of a little concrete square between buildings, and someone's rooftop porch.  They had seemingly random pictures from throughout Luxembourg city on the walls.  By the last morning there, we recognized all of the places in the photographs.

We deposited our luggage and went to see what there was to eat.  Our entry into Luxembourg took us across a long bridge that scanned a deep river gorge and thrust us right into the heart of the city, it seemed.  We gawked and skirted along the tops of the walls until we were hungry, then roamed the streets deeper in the city until we landed at a little touristy place and for dinner.  Gina ate my fish--she'd gotten a meat dish before remembering she couldn't cut things with just her left hand.  She declared it a landmark occasion nobody would believe back home, and asked me to take a picture.  It was really just a plate of fish, but it was a huge plate.  I was embarrassed and wouldn't do it.

I don't know why I've been so embarrassed all this trip.  For some reason, shyness hit me pretty hard, and it makes for some awkward situations.  Not that I'm usually especially brutish or courageous, but I'm not usually this reserved.  It's an odd occurrence of traveling for me, I suppose.

The next day was perhaps our longest day of exploring in Luxembourg.  We started on the walls in the south, and wandered everywhere.  We visited the main cathedral of Luxembourg first.  The church was beautiful and gilded throughout, but one room especially captured me.

It was a tomb for one of the duchesses of Luxembourg.  The walls were deep blue and the floor a dark marble.  The room was gated, and the approach to the gate was up a short stair flanked by lions rampart.  The floors shone & a little pedestal held a candle near the center of the room.  The actual sarcophagus lay in the back, flanked by more candles.  The room didn't speak very loudly, but it commanded royalty.  It defined "regal."  The room made me--a peasant, a creep from America--lust strangely for the power of a King.

My grandfather insists our bloodline traces back to the Stewart kings of Scotland, but my family is hardly royal.  We were farmers & shepherds & blacksmiths far longer than anything else.  Now we're artists, professors, and priests, but the same general theme remains.  We are peasants, not royalty--so says my uncle.  And yet, sometimes I feel an urge that can't be described as anything otherwise.  The urge to rule, to decide, to make & keep the affairs of state.  It's probably just normal lust for power; I don't know why I associate it with royalty.  But it does make me wonder about the origins of "royalty."  Even before Roman times, most nations agreed that their kings were only men--but men deserving, men anointed, men removed & sacred.  I wonder how this began.  In ancient times when men were only leaders of families, wasn't it just the Patriarch or Matriarch?  As families grew, did the line extend from the central core of families down through generations--as Abraham and the 12 tribes of Israel, for example?

Or at times did not men sometimes say, "I shall be King," and make it so?  Through conquest, through politics & guile and intelligence, by strength or by claim or by treachery, have not some men made themselves King?  We know it to be so.  And if so, is it perhaps true that royalty, while often inherited, sometimes occurs to men with no royal right or precedent?  Does royalty sometimes occur without cause or precondition at birth?  Is it only pride that says, "I should lead these people," or is there sometimes validity in such self-perception?

Well, so the demon of power-lust whispered to me in that cathedral, & I pondered that for a while.

After we left, Gina asked to stop in a bookstore--maybe the smartest thing we did that whole trip.  She got out tourist books & maps, and we picked areas to walk towards.  Then we started out.

We found a section of wall we'd not been on before, and the city stood behind us and the river valley was laid out in front of us.  She saw a bridge & said, let's see that!  I pointed to other parts & said I wanted to see them.  We decided to go by sight and figure out our way.

To start with, we wandered into more city along the cliffs & found a winding narrow alley with only a strip of sky above & the ground in front of us; we pushed down that avenue & came out at the bottom of the cliffs.  Along the way at some point we had been standing near some shallow caves I wanted to explore.  Gina led the way, and we crept into them (they were fenced off--poorly).

As we were coming out, we saw a police officer looking at our cave and talking on his radio.  Frightened, but still unseen, we quietly escaped our cave and wandered off into normal pedestrian channels, unmolested.  He didn't ever speak to us, so we went on our way.

At the bottom we stopped at a little wine store & picked up some red wine and kept going.  Then we found Gina's bridge, which she'd seen from the cliffs that morning.  It appeared to have been a colossal castle at some point, and during the approach we wandered off to the woods beside the road and looked more carefully at the shore.  I guessed that originally a drawbridge had been located there, drawing on my questionably developed knowledge of medieval architecture, on which I'd read a number of books in middle school.

We crossed the road and come down on the inside of the wall, and found I'd been right: now, a little roadway ran right through an old section of the curtain wall, across the current bridge; the original drawbridge had been below where I'd guessed.  At that point, the magic of discovering old fortifications hit us like a couple of little kids.

From there, we continued up the bridge to the edge of the cliffs; the narrow Brock promontory has been dug into, there, and it is honeycombed with old fortifications.  It was an incredible thing to stand below.  We crossed the river again and went up the other bank, past & through old dilapidated fortifications, overgrown with weeds, through fields and fences--we explored, young discovering ancient ruins for the first time in modern history.  Our tourist map from the bookshop became an old weathered treasure map from a time forgotten; the walls & stones were our treasures.  We pressed along the path that once had been walls, leaped over one fence to follow a riverside portion of another fence, and crossed a bridge to return, in a semicircular way, towards the city proper, as the sun set behind us and before us.

All along that day we found half-dismantled fortresses and buttresses, guarding the approach to the ancient city center.  At some point, sneaking down from the city, crossing between bridges down into the river chasm and along the far embankment, Gina found a church that had been built into the far wall of valley itself.  We crossed the river along the bottom and found the church, climbing around to examine it.  The weather wear on the stonework told of its age, and nature had fused the church to the valley floor, sharing a claim on that sacred space with humanity.  Another time we found ourselves at the top of an enormous grassy slope, steep as a roof, and ran headlong down its sharp decline, laughing with the danger and trying not to slip into a fall that would land in the river.