Having Come Back

It is hard to believe that it was four days ago that the plane peeled off the ground in Manchester and set down in Chicago.  Those four days have passed in a mad rush, which is odd considering that much of them has been spent sleeping.  They feel like an eternity and the blink of an eye at once; in some ways, I still feel like I can just hop on the Tube to get where I need to go, but the knowledge that the Tube is thousands of miles away make the week or so since I was in London seem nearly eternal.  I fell in love with London while I was there, in the same way that you fall in love with a piece of music, or with dancing.  As much as you say you want to hear that particular strain all the time, or never leave the barre, even utterly exquisite moments can be assimilated into tedious routine.  That is why I think I will just leave London as what it is now:  a place I really, deeply love, and which I visit when I get the chance.  I love the city, but I don’t think I could live there, not least because it is a city.  That said, it made a valiant attempt to pull me in, and I will always appreciate that and remember it fondly.

The campaign began in earnest the day after we landed in Heathrow.   Setting out quite early in the morning, we walked, and then walked some more, until finally, I saw it: Big Ben, standing quietly against the cloudy, dove-gray sky.  Had it been a person, I would have expected her to be dressed in a silky dressing gown, sipping tea as she gazed peacefully across the Thames.  It suddenly struck me how very old the city in which I was now standing actually was, a realization that did not go away once we reached Westminster Abbey (established 960).  I have always loved old places.  Growing up in the States, I haven’t had much exposure to old places made by man, but there is a different kind of grandeur to be found in a cavern system or an old stand of pines.  London has something in common with both of those places; it is a place of layers, as a cave is formed of different striations in the rock or a tree forms new rings as it grows.  In that way, London feels organic as few other cities I have been in do.  I was walking along the same river Shakespeare might have while trying to think of how to end Hamlet’s final speech, possibly even taking the same route as him – and that was just a matter of course.  Kings might have taken that route too, and so might have Archbishops.  It was impossible to know anything for certain; London is just so incredibly old, its layers so compressed together into one town that the significance of one of them is impossible to separate from that of another.  That is one reason why I fell in love.

The next day, we went to, among other places, the British Library.  I spent a good bit of the time we were there wishing that the Reader card application office wasn’t closed on Sundays, but, alas, it was.  So I wandered where I could.  One thing that it is important to understand about me is that libraries and I have always gotten along – largely because books and I always have.  There is something in nearly every book I have read that I can admit an affinity for – in short, if I can’t find something to relate to in a book, there is something seriously wrong.  Because of this, I knew that I would find the Treasures of Britain exhibit in the library absolutely wonderful.  However, I may have underestimated my response to it.  Turning left once past the doors of the exhibit, the second book I came to was none other than the Beowulf manuscript.  For a moment, I just stood there, not quite believing what lay in front of me.  Then, because I am a ridiculously curious literature major with a bit of a penchant for Anglo-Saxon, I tried to read it.  The only word I got was ‘helm’.  There were headphones beside the glass case, and so I put them on and listened to an actor whose voice could educate a hurricane on the proper attributes of the word ‘stormy’ describe the monster Grendel and his attack on Hrothgar’s mead hall, all the while looking wistfully at the flame-edged pages before me.  After a while – once I looked over my shoulder and saw a rather impatient-looking older woman waiting behind me, that is – I realized I had been monopolizing the manuscript and sheepishly moved on.  I came to the Old Hall manuscript, in which old songs had been laboriously and immaculately laid down so they would not fade from memory.  Three things in me collided – the lover of books, the lover of music, and the lover of old things – and I freely confess that, looking at that book that was exponentially older than I am or any of those things in me are, one of few records of old songs that yet remained, and only separated from me by a pane of glass and a foot or so of space, I wept. I don’t remember much else of the exhibit, except the Magna Carta – because, you know, Magna Carta – but eventually, after wandering a bit more, I made my way out of the exhibit and to the library café.  I sat there, munching on a Jammy Dodger and collecting myself a bit, and decided that next time I was in London, I would have to come to the Library on a day that was not a Sunday.  Quite apart from the cool factor of having a Reader card to the British Library, I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m going to need it one day.

A Sonnet

One step into the dark, and then one more
Until we come to light, oh darling mine -
But that journey may shake us to the core,
So shall we brave the night to chance sun's shine?
And what of it - the darkness we will see
Is stifling to the chance of dazzling light.
Why should we, in the lack of dawn-light's sheen,
Press further still into this stretching night?
And yet the darkest night is full of stars;
Each one burns from the simplest act of love
And makes the paradise within our hearts
As real within us as the skies above.
If hand in hand we storm the pressing dark,
Perhaps, my dear, we might just reach our mark.



This was written in class last Friday.  I hope you like it, and I hope the significant otter does too.

Regarding Dreams

For lack of a better word, my subconscious is a bit of a tease.  It provides me regularly with vivid dreams, including one I remember from last month, when, during a slow zombie invasion of the island I lived on, the most terrifying creature by far - the one that jolted me out of sleep and made me jump back in my bed, gasping - was a squirrel.  Incidentally, not a zombie squirrel.  Just a regular one.  But even a normal squirrel will get angry if you poke it with a stick to try and ascertain its zombic nature.  And then jump at you.

However, upon learning that I needed a dream to report for class, it refused to provide me with any.  At least, any worth reporting. 

Then I got sick, and that changed everything.  Over the course of sleeping most of the weekend, I had a multitude of dreams.

During one, for instance, my boyfriend and I were picnicking on the shore of a lake.  He was eating a roast beef sandwich, and I had a cheese-and-tomato one (I only eat meat on rare occasions).  I was wearing a light blue sundress.  We heard a rumble in the forest behind us, and, turning, saw a whole stampede of mythical creatures coming toward us - dryads, naiads, centaurs, nagas, fauns, griffins, dragons, all those lovely beasts.  The creatures parted to run around us and our blanket and disappeared, one by one, into the depths of the lake.  Suddenly, we were transported to the top of a hill, at night, under a blanket of stars. 

Others were as mundane as shopping with my mother and not being able to find a pair of jeans that fit quite right.

In honor of reading Hamlet...

Probably my favorite of Hamlet's soliloquies (yes, more than "To be") performed by one of my favorite recent Hamlets.

Pardon me while I strut and fret for a bit.

I'm not particularly verbose.  This has posed a problem on many occasions, when my lack of words has come across as unhappy, angry, or disapproving.  There are very few people to or around whom I really talk.  Because of this, I've always felt sort of off among the characters Shakespeare created, and having played a few, that's somewhat problematic.  Even Hamlet, who spends a lot of time by himself, seems to spend most of that time talking.  Even though there are characters I relate to, I can't imagine myself as a character.

At the same time, though, I understand why this is. These characters' entire existence is showing an episode of their lives to people, and in order to do that, they must speak.  They've got their hour upon the stage, two or three if it's a long one, and that's it.  In that time, they have to show us everything.  What they want, why they want it, how they're going to get it, and why we should care.  When the last line is spoken, they fade into nothingness, existing only in the imaginations of the audience and the actors who play them.

And yet these characters, existing only when they are observed, are everything.  They correlate nearly directly to real people and the archetypes those people inspire.   Everyone knows a Cassius, or a Lady Macbeth, or a Helena, or even a Bottom.  Both nothing and everything, created in the clay of a few thousand words, these characters tell the stories the only way they can.  By talking. 

Which brings me back to my original point.  I know for a fact that my vocabulary is nowhere near that of Shakespeare, and I don't speak nearly as often as his characters.  But that doesn't mean my words are any less powerful for their lack in number.  Much more important is the choosing of words, picking their perfect rhythm, finding the ways in which they fit together and click.  I like words, and I believe they like me too.  Even if they don't come out of my mouth that often.

Thoughts about Nothing

Well, I mean, not nothing.  It's something.  Except it's nothing.  But, I mean, by thinking about it, we give it substance, so it's something.   I digress.

In a favorite book series from when I was younger (not Harry Potter favorite, but maybe second- or third-tier) called Keys to the Kingdom, a boy named Arthur has to defeat the seven faithless executors of the will of the Architect of the Universe, in the process acquiring the aforementioned Keys.  Long story short (and spoiler alert!) the same substance that the Architect used to create the Universe, and its centerpoint, the House, called, appropriately enough, Nothing, ends up encroaching upon the House to the point that the House cannot stand, and so Nothing destroys the House along with the Universe.   (End spoiler alert.)  The fact that the House, and through it the Universe, are destroyed by the same substance that was used to create them, is reminiscent of our own life/death cycle: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Nothing to Nothing.  Capital-N Nothing.  It's also quite evocative of Lucretius' idea that we can better enrich our lives in the knowledge that we are finite.  Humans have beginning and end points; whatever you may believe about the afterlife or its absence, we do not continue after death as anything like ourselves, if we do continue. 

I was talking earlier tonight with my friend Matt, who is a mathematics student, over a late dinner.  We were discussing math, because it's something that he can talk about at length and that I want to know more about.  On a whim, if a Shakespeare-driven one, I asked him who first came up with the concept of zero.  Apparently, in Western civilization, it was the Indians.  Another culture (I think it was the Babylonians, but I'm not sure) had a vague sort of idea about zero, enough to make a placemarker symbol for it, but they didn't really get the concept.  Our ideas of nothing are sort of like the second one - we know that there's something going on with nothing, but we really don't know what.  We just know it's nothing, but at the same time it's something.  For all we know, nothing could be a sentient black hole with squidlike appendages slowly crawling its way toward us and consuming our minds with considerations of it so we're easy targets once it gets here.

I think I may have just given myself a nightmare.

A Summer's Day

So, I was talking last night with my lovely boyfriend, and I told him that we were assigned to, for extra credit, go up to a stranger and recite the "Summer's Day" sonnet.  Then, because it's a lovely sonnet, I started reciting it.  (Well... I may have googled it.)  I got about two lines in before he interrupted me, laughing, and asked if he was a stranger. 

The conversation quickly moved on after that, but it made me think.  Shakespeare and his works make up one of the most unifying facets of the English language.  People from almost any corner of the world can hear the words "... and Juliet is the sun" or "To be or not to be" and instantly think "Shakespeare."  The sort of charm that Hughes discusses, that made it possible for Shakespeare's works to be appreciated by both the aristocracy and the common people, extends to allowing people today to enjoy it, if not understand it entirely.  Shakespeare sort of dissolves strangerhood, in a weird way.

(Also, I tried using the "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech on a couple of friends, and they just rolled with it.  I need to find some less-literate friends.)