with the feet of its myriad bipeds

I've been trying to watch Zero de conduite all morning, and I keep pointing the remote at the telly and pressing buttons, but it remains unmoved. Apparently the electricals here go on the fritz from time to time. The internet's working, however, and so is the coffee grinder. I'm going to keep writing until I feel like doing something else, so you may want to read this in shifts.

So what shall I tell you about? I've found I haven't absorbed all the contents of my big fat Europe: a history by osmosis, so I am gathering scraps of information as I go. At the Victoria and Albert museum, I saw some lovely frocks from the wardrobe of Queen Maud of Norway. Whether she was assisted by some major undergarment engineering works or not, I don't know, but she stayed teeny and hourglass shaped until well into menopause, so she got to wear gowns like these. And I got to go and look at them, and make cooing noises, and then go and eat slabs of brie and chevre at Gordon's Wine Bar, and say a prayer of thanks to the feminist movement.

I also saw, in the Jacobean gallery, a portrait of an aristocratic lady, and next to it, the actual jacket she wears in the portrait. Can you believe that? The painting had recorded it perfectly accurately. The museums here are beautifully presented. I guess they have an embarrassment of riches--straying into the British Museum on my delirious first day here, I found room after room of Assyrian and ancient Egyptian bas reliefs and sculptures. I don't want to stop being amazed by the wealth of beautiful things here. I'm rationing my museum and gallery time to that purpose. It's worth sparing a thought for how all this stuff got here--I hadn't really considered the way great monuments and objets d'art get shipped around the world in dizzying quantities, mostly the result of war, political maneouvering and plain pilfering. I've concluded the best way to keep a treasure where you left it is to take it to your grave, although that didn't do a lot of good for the pharaohs.


leos out of their element

Which brings me to Highgate Cemetery. One of Lily's friends, Yoav, invited me on a tour there--it's the only way to get in, as you can't go in to the old section on your own. The highest ground in the cemetery is occupied by the grave of Julius Beer, a self-made German Jew who responded to snubs from London Society by converting to Anglicanism and constructing the most magnificent mausoleum in the place. The guide, who was a nice old man in tweed, said the statues inside were sought after by every museum in Europe. I wonder how long they'll last. My favourite grave was of George Wombwell, London's first menagerist--he began his travelling zoo with a pair of boa constrictors. He took them to pubs in a box and charged anyone who wanted to see them a penny. A statue of his pet lion sits on top of his grave.

The newer section of the cemetery, not being exclusively Anglican, had a greater variety of names, obviously including many Jewish ones. Yoav translated the Hebrew on one grave. In English, it only gives the deceased's name and the date of her death. The Hebrew records that her parents died in the holocaust. Yoav said, "She probably wanted their names on her grave because they didn't get one of their own." These reminders of profound cruelty all around are another thing I hope I never, ever to get used to.

That day I also went to Hampstead Heath, a wilder, less tulip-studded place than the other parks in the city. The views from the top of the hill were beautiful, perhaps nicer than those from the London Eye, which I went on a few days before with Jenn, against Den's advice to "jist blarg yer way up the top of a tall building instead."

I want to tell you everywhere I've been, but it's sort of inescapably banal, this listing. Collecting. I took a bus tour to Stonehenge and Bath--don't hate me, I thought it would be my only chance to see them. Which is probably true of Stonehenge, not having access to a car, but it did warn me of the dangers of tour travel. We had fifty minutes to walk a circle around the stones, with an audio tour on a phone-style handset. It was a strange sight, a stream of people silently walking their anti-clockwise route, holding black objects to their ears. Afterwards at the kiosk you could buy a sandwich and a "megalithic rock cake" for £5.50. It was still impressive to see, but I took a couple of photographs despite myself, and it was amazing how they drained the reality out of it. But then afterwards I was glad I had them.

Recording experience splits it--it's something I discovered with my diaries. When you are in an experience, you are mentally recording it, and you thin it a little by doing so--but the energy you've stolen from the lived moment gets poured into the record of it, and I'm happy to have it then. I suppose it is best to be discerning in how you record things, to be sure it was worth splitting reality in half that way. I bought sketching paper to take to galleries and museums. A photograph merely collects an object, and somehow neutralises its force, but drawing something actually brings out its beauty more sharply to the eye. Anyway, here's the offending article. It's quite nice, isn't it?



I don't like climbing back into a soporifically heated bus after I've seen things, either. Everything gets blended together into a lazy dream. The only way to put the life back into things, after you've drained them by ogling and photographing, is to walk and walk. There was a walk through a field of ancient burial mounds half a mile from the stones, but we weren't given time to do it. I must try and make friends with thoughtful people who own cars.

I've been lavished with chances to meet thoughtful people, actually. Lillian has made a great life here. Her friends are just the people I'd hoped to meet in Europe, and I'm grateful for the human connection. I find myself being charming, the way a snake charmer charms a python, so that I can keep looking at these people, drinking them in, as long as possible. Not that I always do a great job. I'm blunter than most English people, and sometimes I don't know where I've offended until it's too late. I do my best, from outside the weave of local society. I'm a traveller now. The English say "What are you like?" I'm like a train window, the world flows in as I move. I am here to receive impressions. I was afraid of this emptiness before I left. I couldn't bear the thought of being merely receptive--I told myself I'd analyse and form connections to suit my own mental projects and make it mine. I'm sure there's an element of that, but I have to be receptive anyway--travel leaves me no choice. I don't remember why I was so wary of it.


Lily and tulips

You know how I wrote earlier about how monolithically impressive all this architecture is when you are walking around beneath it? Well, from up high--and for £12.50 I got about as high up as you can get--entrepreneurism and democracy once again go hand in hand--it looked sort of scruffy. These buildings weren't designed to be seen from above, they were meant to tower over. And I think about the people who would have looked down, not up, before the London Eye was constructed, and the decisions that have been made from rooms high above the streets, and I think about power.

Engels puts it nicely:
"This enormous agglomeration of population on a single spot has multiplied a hudnred-fold the economic strength of the two and a half million inhabitants concentrated there. This great population has made London the economic capital of the world...

It is only later that the traveller appreciates the human suffering which has made all this possible. He can only realise the price that has been paid for all this magnificence after he ahs tramped the pavements of the main streets of London for some days and has tired himself out by jostling his way through the crowds... It is only when he has visited the slums of this great city that it dawns upon him that the inhabitants of modern London have had to sacrifice so much that is best in human nature in order to create those wonders of civilisation with which their city teems. The vast majority of Londoners have had to let so many of their creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused, in order that a small, closely-knit group of their fellow citizens could develop to the full the qualities with which nature has endowed them." [The conditions of the working class in England 1844.]

He is right about walking in the streets, and you feel it when you want to get somewhere quickly--everyone is out on their own business, seemingly ignoring you, but in some subtle way, they're all also ready to start a fight, if you want to give them cause. I brush past a man and he drops his mobile, and it flies into pieces dramatically as dropped mobiles do. "I'm sorry." "You knocked it out my hand. It wasn't me, it was you." He's very tall. He has friends. I find myself squaring my shoulders, and I say again, "I'm sorry, man", but this time it means, "Back off."

But to be fair, many people come to London because the size of it means that opportunites cluster here, and from what I can see, many people have made great things out of the struggle of daily life here. Anyway I'm not sure life is so very bucolic in sedate little towns where the line between looking out for your neighbour and policing them can be a fine one.

And, while I'm quoting, I have to include Henry James, because when I read this, I felt, not as if he were reading my mind, but that London really does have its own will and character, and it's acting on me in an uncannily similar way as it did on him. Maybe it's an element of travel in general. I'm not sure yet.

"London is on the whole the most possible form of a life. [That sentence!] I take it as an artist and as a bachelor; one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life...

Have now been in London some ten days and actually feel very much at home here--feel domesticated and naturalised in fact, to quite a disgusting extent. I feel that in proportion as I cease to be perpetually thrilled surprised and delighted, I am being cheated out of my fun. I really feel as I had lived--I don't say a lifetime--but a year in this murky metropolis ... up to this time I have been crushed under a sense of the mere magnitude of London--its inconceivable immensity--in such a way as to paralyse my mind for any appreciation of details. This is gradually subsiding; but what does it leave behind it? An extraordinary intellectual depression, as I may say, and an indefineable flatness of mind. The place sits on you, broods on you, stamps on you with the feet of its myriad bypeds and quadrupeds. In fine, it is anything but a cheerful or a charming city. Yet it is a very splendid one." [Selected Letters]

Two days ago I was thinking of taking a job here, because I couldn't bear to leave before I'd seen so many more things, but I've felt that brooding and stamping. London's there in my head, saying, "If you're a tourist, your time is nearly up--and if you're staying, you've got one hell of a thing coming to you." Okay, okay, I'm going. In a few days. There's still some stuff I want to do.


Dim sum at Spitalfields

update on posting comments--new, simple method for lazy people

Okay so I'm a luddite, but while looking for other information entirely I found the page where I can allow anyone to comment on my blog--not just registered users. So now you don't need to go through the process I told you about in that earlier post. You can just click and comment. Hint.

gerwools and geezers

people I've met
Peter likes real blues and loaned me the annotated Lolita. When he gets into a topic, he tucks his wine glass under his arm so he can gesture with both hands.
Kerry calls in sick to go to the British Museum sometimes. The only things she argues about are art and history. She offered to get me work doing gardening in Notting Hill. I'm thinking about it.
Yoav I met at Fifty Foot Wave. We leapt straight into big conversation. He has worked on every continent in the world.
John has an uncle who used to have a shop on Carnaby Street in the sixties. He recommended a wine bar to me that I'd already been to, and I pretended I'd never heard of it, and thanked him for the recommendation, and later a mutual acquaintance totally sprang me.
Suzie and James are warm and welcoming. They've been husband and wife, and business partners, for 31 years. They have an art collection, a house in the French alps (James wants to put a python in the roof to keep the pigeons under control, but the housekeeper refuses to feed it) and an awesome knowledge of cheese. They are the sort of rich people who make me want to be rich.
Den is a former prison guard with a fetish for white trainers. She has loaned me a London for free book and a pair of jeans. When I told her I was a bit sick, she said, What is it? Maybe I can help. One day she walked into a spiritualist church for a lark, and walked out with voices in her head.

Den says
I never asked for it, yer know. It's annoyin. They're like those people who hang around you because they have no friends, and they're really borin. Then she scowls and rolls a cigarette. God is loov, and loov is God. It's that simple. God's not judgin us nearly as much as we think. That's why I hate religion. Half these people wouldn't be botherin me except they think God's angry with em, and they won't move on. They're so full of guilt they can't think straight. There's no tellin em. She licks the edge of her rollie and looks exasperated. I don't know how I know this stuff, I jist do.

how to post comments to this blog

A bit of housekeeping, dearies. It seems you have to be a blogger member to comment. So you are now all blogger members. Your user name is KatrinaReader, your password is Europe. Just use those to post your comments to my blog. Click on the link beneath the post youa re commenting on that says "0 comments" (or "1 comment" or "54 comments" depending on how controversial I've been). Log in using the dodgy fake user name and password supplied above and post your comment.

I had to create a blog for you too, so it's Erehwon2.blogspot.com. You may as well get on there and create a post. This could be bigger than all of us. A babel babble of different voices, all on one website nobody is ever going to read. It's so postmodern it hurts.

penny dropping

travel like
I bliss out on people’s smiles. Everyone here is a pleasure to see, because each face is one I might not have seen if I had not come. Each corner I turn is a revelation, like a new layer of scenery in a Restoration play, because just think if I had never rounded that corner. This feeling is familiar. A chance meeting on the street on an unhappy day. A tramp bearing red lilies, a dog in a jacket.

stamps
I found a small shop, with a sign out front saying stamps. Inside was a wall of dark wood pigeon-holes full of yellow paper and lever arch files, and a man behind a dark wood desk. He was large and flaky-faced, with a navy suit and a walrus moustache. I asked him for stamps to Australia. He explained that stamps had just gone up yesterday. The day before yesterday, said an equally barrel-form man in red beard and brown cardigan who swept in from another room. Yesterday, the day before yesterday, they wondered and dithered together. I said I would take five, at the new price. The handlebarred man opened a clothbound book and a slew of stamps of all denominations scattered out. What’s all this, he blustered, and sorry, I was interrupted in the middle of something, said redbeard. The first man busied himself with tweezers, organizing the stamps back into their paper-banded rows, finding my five 37p stamps. I remembered I had no cash. He directed me to a post office five doors down.

penny dropping
A little knowledge, I know I know, but I don’t have a lot. What else has a person with a dinky, complacent liberal education got to work with? All I can do is synthesise disparate facts like mad, and take wild guesses, and hope to fill in the gaps as I go. How does one “do” Europe? I want to see a play (I can only afford one) and I can’t decide between Euripides’ Hecuba, or Tristan and Yseult or The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union. And that, there, is a pretty good illustration of my dilemma. But to consider the twentieth century alone: for the greater part of it, people must have felt like dice in a cup. Every time they thought they knew the world, and their place in it, and what you can expect of human decency, they were swept up and rolled and spat out again. “We didn’t trust anybody who hadn’t been in the war,” says Hemingway of Paris in the twenties. Understandable—could they even be seen as the same species, people who hadn’t had their sense of meaning tested that way.

I found a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery of a woman I’d never heard of, a painter called Anna Zinkeisen. It’s a self-portrait in a modernist utopian style. I think she’d made herself resemble Artemisia, her painting smock looked very Renaissance drapery. Anyway, it was grand and beautiful. The picture was painted in a disused operating theatre. In the mornings Zinkiesen would nurse soldiers, and in the afternoons she would paint their wounds for the Royal Academy of Surgeons. The paintings that came before and after this portrait don’t bear thinking about. And in the same gallery was a display of photographs by Lee Miller. As a model she was a photography icon in her own right, but as Vogue war correspondent in World War Two she was among the first to photograph the atrocities of the battle fields and, eventually, the camps. It’s the combination of her status as a great beauty and her photo journalism that get to me. Because how some people saw what everyone saw then, and could still find beauty and art important—I wonder at that commitment. Pitching the best of human culture, the love for fineness in the world, against the stupidity, cruelty, crass politicking of it all.

I don't know if non-Europeans can understand that. Can I paraphrase you, M? You said that Australians and Americans didn’t understand Schindler’s List or Life is Beautiful. We saw them and thought, well, it wasn’t all bad. Some people did good things in a bad situation, and that makes it all ok. Europeans saw those films and said, nothing can ever neutralise what happened, but we can acknowledge some people’s attempts to transform it. Here, the darkness of the wars of the twentieth century is an immediate fact. It suffuses everything. If any poetry is possible after Auschwitz, it must always be an antiphonic response to those horrors. I can't go to a gallery, or open a book, without it being there. It's important to know that.

under dreaming spires

Shop signs along the 38 bus route #1: Mummy’s Love Business Centre --- African movies to buy or rent --- internet --- international phone cards

The first day in London I just walked. Everything new to the eye, such a sharp pleasure—the narrow, scribbled streets out in Hackney, where I’m staying, shop signs small and high up on their facades to be read from the top deck of a red bus—the buildings getting taller and grander towards the hub of things. And then a day of walking through the burroughs around the West End with my mouth hanging open.

The architecture feels both organic and sublime—it looms like canyons and mountains loom, to make you catch your breath. And in every line of it is the human mind. Somebody made all of this, for our pleasure and purposes. I guess Europeans must necessarily have a different view of the importance of human culture, because they live their lives under these domes and spires and other metaphors for transcendence. At least, that describes the large public buildings. The scrappy, slangy architecture of the pubs and cafs and townhouses also feels full of humanity. Ornament! Centuries of it, piled together in an archaeology of taste—chimney pots and finials and odd-shaped tiles. Damn, pardon my lyricism, I’m absorbing all these gargoyle curliques and extruding it in my prose. But listen: I don’t know how I feel about the grand public buildings yet. They’re wonderful, wonderful candy for my brain, but then they have nothing to do with me really. What do they mean to Londoners? Do they inspire the highest human endeavour, or are they self-congratulatory folly? People commonly get paid £5 an hour here, and a McDonalds lunch costs £3. What’s Christopher Wren to them? Alright, alright, Marx researched Das Kapital in London, I suspect someone’s covered this ground before.

For me, the reveling tourist, it’s all exciting. I’m sheepish about not having been interested in London before I came. I thought it wouldn’t be exotic or challenging enough—but how colonialist of me, to assume the green and pleasant land would feel too homey to be interesting. In fact, it doesn’t feel like home at all. All I want to do is rove around and take in the strangeness of it. The freedom I have merely to walk and stare feels like decadence. I keep expecting somebody to tell me to stop it. I’m extending the rebel-rebel feeling by being as Scroogey as possible in this grossly expensive city—hurrah for 75p soup and roll. It would be asceticism if I wasn’t gorging myself on art all day. And if I wasn’t seriously wanting to buy every single thing in this shop.

I haven’t done anything particularly touristy yet, except for looking above head level in the streets and carrying an umbrella (smug me, with my vinyl canopy while locals turn their collars up to better channel the rain down the backs of their necks). I did browse through the Transport Museum at Covent Garden. The gift shop was selling g-strings printed with a map of the Underground. For anyone still looking for the clitoris, it’s at St Paul’s. And I walked through Soho playing my best Britpop and Swinging London mental soundtrack, but it didn’t make all the Gap stores go away. No, Soho is fun, and a marvel of compactness—I keep walking in and trying to explore it, only to find that I’ve popped out the other side again, like those fist fights under blankets they used to do in vaudeville shows.

What else? I’m being totally looked after, with my sister in town to hang out and with a cosy bed at my friend Lily’s house. She lives in an area known as Murder Mile—apparently they’re all drug gang slayings, and if it was good enough for the Hacienda, it’s good enough for Hackney. It’s the cuddliest ghetto I’ve ever seen. Everyone has a little garden with a falling-down fence and a garden shed. There are squirrels and daffodils and twittering birds, and the locals pass each other in the street and say orright dawlin? Lily feeds me and hugs me and plies me with brochures. She lives in a household of lovely lady nerds—one’s an Industrial Arts teacher and blues enthusiast, one’s an aeronautical engineer (she researches metals for aeroplane bits, with a focus on which ones are less likely to corrode or fall out mid-air—she got on the internet the other day to google the elasticity of iron, which I find disturbing) and I’m not sure what Den does, but when she got sick of waiting to find out what happened in the end of Fingersmith she asked “the spirits”—-so somebody on the Other Side is reading lesbian historical fiction, or maybe just watching the BBC series.

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If you know anyone who might want to read this and doesn’t know about it, please let them know. I’ve been very, very bad about keeping in touch with everyone.

testing one tsew, one tsew