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.
Wednesday, June 20
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.
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)
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 19
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
she knows not what to do
with herself
and neither do i
but to sit, and watch,
and clench a fist, and sigh
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