July 10, 2007

7/10/07
Cafe in the
Tower of London
3:00 PM

They shut the cafe as I was writing last time, hence the inglorious finish.  Now I'm eating at a touristy place inside the Tower of London--scone and tea.  That seems sufficiently British for me.

I have some qualms with my recounting the trip to Luxembourg while I'm here in England, still on vacation & all (or holiday, depending on how British I want to be).  I thought, originally, that I would keep up with things as I went along, but I'm not doing that at all; rather I'm only trying to preserve the memory of a blissful few days, now two weeks in my past.  Today I think I'll take a break and talk about right now.

Well, right now I'm eating a very awkwardly crumbly scone, and my hair looks terrible I'm sure, because I ran out of the house in a rush and put my hair in a hat, and now I'm eating and it seemed better to take off my hat at the table.  So I feel awkward and kind of like I must be an eyesore, and... whatever.  I'm really disliking how 8th grade self-conscious I am on this trip.  Grr.

Jim & I have been talking a lot.  Or rather, he's been talking a lot & I've been learning a lot about him, and art, and philosophy.  He's very well-read, probably more so than my father or grandfather--both of whom, paradoxically, he seems to still compete with, in his head.  He overthinks everything, which is something I'm prone to do too.  He's gentle, very much so.  He's creative and intelligent and he has well-formed opinions on everything.

It is interesting how quick we can be to form opinions, sometimes based on very little information.  Then we reinforce our quick opinions with whatever can be found to reinforce them.  We do this often in personal relationships, I think, especially when taking offense at something.  If we perceive offense, we don't examine whether we ought to have been offended; instead, we build up the offense and add implications and intent to it until it balloons out of perspective.  It's very odd.

I think it just means--don't let yourself get worked up on impressions and assumptions and perceived offenses or slights.  Slow to anger and all of that; both in the immediate sense and the prolonged sense.

Yesterday I went to the monument of the Great Fire of London.  It's high--a coupe hundred feet, and 311 steps.  I took a lot of pictures & signed my name with Gina's in the wall.  I guess the tower is as tall as...um, something related to the Fire.  I don't remember what.  But it made me remember how frail our lives are.  Everything can burn up in a week or two and your life will take a long time--the city will take a long time--to recover.

But even more than the frailty, I was struck by how huge everything is today.  If the Great Fire happened today, most of contemporary London wouldn't even see it.  Our new buildings and the enormous amounts of people crowded into our cities--we're just bigger, now, than anything before.  Even the monument, which was built to stand out in the city as a gigantic testament to history, is now dwarfed by the apartment buildings and offices around.

Effort is value, or value is effort.  This is why I sometimes think our civilization is worthless and will never be remembered by our eventual descendants.  We build buildings without thinking.  We erect structures like toy forts & tear them down when they're out of fashion.  There will be no pyramids or sphinxes left for future generations, from ours.

At the British Museum with Chris, we were observing how the style of Egyptian tomb art didn't change for nearly 2,000 years.  How is that even possible?  My uncle noted that the engravings may have had a religious form, which kept them all the same over the eons.  I wonder.  We also noticed the Egyptians paid close attention to the characteristics of the face, while the Assyrians let their faces be blank and unstylized in favor of accenting the muscle structures of their figures.  The Greeks, of course, did both--and they liberated their figures from the walls of tombs & let them stand apart to struggle both from in front and behind.  The Greeks were also the first to do anything significant with clothes and drapery.  Overall, it was a really enjoyable overview.  I still wonder what's up with the Egyptians--and whether we have the dates right, in reality...

The whole deal brings back the effort-value equation.  If we made enormous statues today, nobody would care.  We can cast them in concrete after planning them with computers and cutting them with lasers.  No effort--and no value now.  We marvel at arches that were hard to build--not at the arches themselves.

Stonehenge is perhaps the best example.  Nobody even knows what the structure is--but we're baffled by the effort required.  Hence, value.

I should get going & see more of the Tower.

But wait...  I wonder if the Effort thing is why I don't think Modern Art is natural.  It doesn't require effort so much as--well, effort, but not effort in the same way, not effort to paint a certain line or to perfect an expression on a face, but effort to say something new.  Hmm.  Things to ponder.

July 11, 2007

Indian Cafe
Salisbury
7/11/07
1:45 PM

I'm not entirely sure if it's okay to write while I'm sitting here.  It's kind of a nice restaurant.  But I"m the only customer right now, so I'm taking the liberty.

Today I'm visiting Stonehenge.  But when I got to the train station at Salisbury, I saw an enormous cathedral spire in the distance, so I decided to go exploring.  It's beautiful, but almost entirely touristy now.  I went to a part of their noon service, but in the end I was just struck by how commercial it all was.  Fortunately they at least had candles for me to light; I lit a couple for Gina.

In Spain, after Luxembourg, Gina & I spent one day wandering the downtown parts of Valencia & visited their famous churches, whatever they were.  In most of them I was actually disgusted & repulsed by their prostitution to the tourism industry.  But the crux of the thing was--they had electric "candles."  You couldn't light a simple candle for someone.  You'd put in the coins and a little electric light would light up.  I refused.  Those churches actually made me angry.  This one--the Cathedral of Salisbury--interested me, and somewhat saddened me, but didn't hurt like the others.

Salisbury apparently has one of the 4 surviving Magna Carta copies.  I guess it was mis-filed in a library & survived here at the cathedral until it was discovered in the 1900s.  Funny circumstance.

The

(Editor's Note: nothing further)

July 11, 2007 (second entry)

7/11/07
Train between
Salisbury and
London
5:30 PM

I took a walk in a suburb area of Salisbury near the train station just now, because after I got back from Stonehenge, I had a bit of time before the train left.

I was reflecting on my time here in Europe.  The suburb I was in looked at first like any suburb I could find in the States.  A few differences I'd already perceived came to mind.  Things are smaller--dandelions, daisies, bumblebees & flies & ants.  Nature just seems to me to be miniature here for some reason.  And things were a little more authentically decorated--ivy on the brick, deep flowering hedges, that sort of thing, not the tightly-clipped gardens or store-bought yards in the States.  I also recalled how people dress a little trendier in Europe.

A wider difference then occurred to me.  Things aren't as planned.  Suburbs happen as people built homes many, many ears ago.  Things are older, they grew slower, so they aren't so precisely planned.  Th awkward sprawling clone suburbs of California didn't happen here.  That brought Age to mind, of course--things are a tad older here, and it lends to the authenticity of the feel of the land.

I wonder if I'm "taking it all in."  I don't have anyone to share all of this with--I mean I can tell Gina, over the phone, but she isn't here and she definitely isn't at those places with me.

I've realized not very long ago how odd it is that we have a concept of "waiting."  I know in a sense the concept of waiting is real enough--we wait for dinner, for a train, for a stage of life, for the opportune moment.  But in a real sense I also don't think "waiting" exists.  There are no periods of ceasing to exist, there are only occasionally even lapses in consciousness.  We say waiting, but I wonder what that really amounts to, concerning our metaphysical state of being.

This is a big issue for me because one of the things I fear the most is waiting, particularly waiting in an unknown state.  I have a 12-hour layover between New York and Denver coming up, which is currently starting to loom over my head rather ominously.  Before leaving Valencia, I worried and fretted that I would have to just hang around and wait in an unknown city (that speaks a foreign language, no less) for a couple of days.  I guess in both of these is an element of the unknown, but I think that's more a part of waiting than anything else.

It's not that I'm antsy & can't imagine life sitting still.  So maybe the fear really does come from the unknown.  But the general foreboding & dislike still come from waiting.

I don't like the waiting stage of life, waiting for marriage or a salary I can trust or success in my career or a sustainable reputation or whatever.  And yet, for disliking it so much, I'm not entirely sure it's actually something that exists.

we know not what to do

she is beautiful and tragic and
she knows not what to do
with herself
and neither do i
but to sit, and watch,
and clench a fist, and sigh

Rejection

so, this is how rejection feels...i don't think i completely disapprove.
it feels the way you think it ought to sting, perhaps just enough to make a boy a man.
and when the throbbing red pales into dullest gray--then may we know, dawn brings another day

i didn't write this poem just to make you cry...in fact i hope you never know it was to you.
it would have been a love song if Love hadn't been so dry, but i can't fault your heart for telling you the truth.

i'm wishing things were different when i know they're but the same--still i promise, as you asked me: i'll not whisper your name

well i can stand here for another thousand years;
and we can cry here another thousand tears.
nothing changes, nothing's new, yet
tomorrow is another day, another way to pose the question...

December 2004