What shall we be today?

This as part of a submarine. A periscope.
 
The Empire of England remakes its objects as they age, as purpose becomes obsolescence. Drains without feed are become submarines. Lamp posts without light, a temple's ruins. Alone, each seems to ask, "What shall we be today?"
 
I once attended an international conference on literature for children. Standing in the farthest reaches of the conference theatre, among the rafters like a planet in deep space, I heard "just-so" and "might-be" stories the likes of how coyote learned to call, or, crocodile came to smile, or, in translation from the near-Asian steppe, why mommy took a wife.
 

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You put your head to the window of the periscope and you can see them. The race that sails round and round the stationary scope. Traveling millions of miles if only in their own special sense of distance. Like a set of chattering plastic teeth at the end of a wind-up key held stationary, or, planets laid out on a mechanical form.
 
The mirrors that take the light down bend it along with the images of the over-land world above. I come out, below, with a broad nose and thin lips as is fitting an alternate reality. My eyes, sadly though, read like a bad poem. With gravity far beyond their years, those eyes - at first sight - spark broad panic. It dies down, but, not without much discussion of the blinkered code they might be sending.
 
Aware of your own distortion, you consider that the mermaids you see there, below, might be sea cows. Might they survive on the refuse washed down drains from the nearby open-air market's fruit and vegetable vendors, you allow yourself to wonder. Meanwhile, those below create myths in which we gain the role of gods. We should be honoured but wary. What goes down must come back up.
 
Indeed, whether mermaids or sea cows, they're ravenous with a propensity to belch. Initially, we've mistaken the gurgling sound for conversation. Attendant malodorous scents, however, neither suggest nor confirm that our hypothesis is false. But, they certainly rise as quickly as our hopes give rise to having discovered intelligent life beyond, if inside, our own world. If they, below, only knew what our scientists are saying!
 
Having described the submarine below as a kind of sit-n-spin, they've now moved on to postulate that those farthest aft experience age in advance of those closer to the spout. A society of contrarians labels the theory "Daft", outlining a mocking theory that considers those to the rear are stern and those forward are loopy. They refuse, simply, to allow prevailing theory to be edified by uncertain observations of the subterranean world. Indeed, reminding us of smoke-and-mirrors, they suggest, it may be our world, not that below, that is spinning.
 
   

Far and Away

I * L O V E * Trafalgar Square.  You never quite know who you'll meet there, or, sometimes how you'll communicate with them.

This is a lovely Japanese woman, whom I met on the Square.  She was bravely traveling alone without a word of English in her vocabulary.  Somehow, we managed with what I like to think of as international sign-language and the photos we'd logged on our cameras that day.  She was making her way across London, photographing herself in front monuments, buildings and bridges. I had on my camera what a friend calls "vacation snaps", only not my vacation.  A visual log of conversations missed or started.

When I was a student in college, in the early 1980s, I used to take off for the hills on weekends.  Literally.  The hills of Appalachia.  I'd go as far as half of my pocket money would take me, end up in some small town, and sit myself down in the public square with my camera.  Even when it had no film (and there usually wasn't film - I couldn't afford it), I'd point it at the passing traffic. Invariably someone would stop.  A conversation would pick up.  I'd be invited off for dinner and hard liquor. 

I can't tell you the number of times I heard, from those who took me away and gave me a room for the night, that I was incredibly stupid.  I suppose that the Silence of the Lambs was a possibility.  But, it struck me that if you invite a stranger into your house, the stupidity was mutual.  — It strikes me now, this is a person I've hidden from almost all of you.  Something about a photo of a woman whom I really couldn't talk to reveals it.  Maybe it's just age, with its impulse to review what is written in, as a preacher I met called, "The Lord's little book of light".

I met all sorts of people.  Grannies who lost sons to the big cities up north or on the coast, and, who just wanted to feed someone.  Single men who wanted to talk about life far away.  Some were sailors, the closer I got to the sea.  I was taken in by couples, who wanted to talk about red-neck music, or, who spoke a language I barely understood.  Sometimes, we went to backwoods bars that smelled of beer on oak floors.  Then, there was Nate, the fellow who lived on a tobacco farm — had several barns in which to dry staked shoots — converted one into a disco.  A disco in the middle of nowhere, complete with mirrored ball and choreographed colored lights.  We kept in touch, infrequently.  I learned last year, he died in a car crash, broadsided at the intersection of two roads crossing a flat field in Indiana.  He had to cross the Ohio River on a ferry from western Kentucky to ride to his death; there's something poetically ancient in this fact.  There was the lesbian couple who'd been together for ages.  I remember they ordered what would be my first Hawaiian pizza.  The delivery boy knew them both well enough to come in for a Coke.  This was a time when the broadsheet of America outside small towns would have run them out.  There were good up-standing Christian women, and, small-town bankers, and, students from local colleges.  The latter wanted to talk about life in the "sin city" I'd come from, some thumped bibles, others were liberal with weed and dreamed of moving on.  I met police and undercover cops.  The undercover boys — they were always young — would come sailing into the public square like they owned it.  They wore tight fitting jeans and shirts untucked.  It was the black shoes and white socks, gave them away.  Then, there were the conflicted, usually male high-school teachers and seminarians, who just wanted to talk all night about nothing in particular.  Soft drinks were their choice of beverage; they needed a clear head, unless they took an impulse to action.

I wish, now, that I'd had film in the camera.  Their stories would come back to me the more easily if I had had photos to linger over.

Generations (above).  The elevator on Trafalgar Square is a glass cube.  With reflections of cloud cover imposing themselves, it seemed they might sail away into the sky.

Graduation Nebula

This image is from a few weeks back.  Graduation for the House of Hufflepuff, or is it Ravenclaw.  Actually, I think it's Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, if I read the colours correctly (http://tinyurl.com/9e9483q).

Cambridge Colleges graduate in the Senate House. (http://tinyurl.com/9vu9q5r). A neo-classical hall with a main gallery reaching the height of two floors. It's big, but not big enough for an entire graduating class, faculty and family -- not even of a very small College. Students and their families will be called into the house at appointed times and proceed through the standing room only ceremony (http://tinyurl.com/97ju9dz). Graduates, rolled diploma in hand, then wend their way toward the back of the House and exit onto the pavement of King's Parade.

As the graduation spectacle splashes out onto the streets of Cambridge, beside the cameras of townies and tourists, it's like carrion placed before buzzards. — Faculty, marshals for the day, keep order. — Students circle, awaiting colleagues. — Old money families mingle with the foreign and new. (I don't know if this makes sense, but you don't necessarily need to be a foreigner to be foreign amidst the commingling.) — The punt touts resign themselves to writing off the day; more than enough will make their way, on their own, ungoaded, to the River in due course. — The pick-pockets find easier pickings amongst the gathering crowds. — And, plain-clothes police make a good living nicking* the pick-pockets from their unknowing bait. — Meanwhile, forming a Saturnal ring, the photographers like me snap up pictures of the nebula.

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*Note: sadly coppers are now said to 'nick' their prey.

In the 1850s, the police 'copped' criminals. The verb, from the old French for 'to capture', seems to have fallen on hard times, if not into a house of ill repute, where it survives only by 'copping a feel' and, occasionally, by 'copping a plea'.

In any case, 'nick', the verb, has venerable history in the English of the early 1600s when the 'notch' it referenced was a small, literally a 'bolt-hole', a tiny cell in the local police station.

My, how did I get from graduation to government?

North & The South

Yesterday evening, a young woman stopped me not far from my house to ask directions.  Normally, I would have given directions referencing cardinal points.  "Go to the coffee shop and turn South", I might have said.  That's largely because I've never properly taken to the concepts of Right and Left.  Forget about all that "writing hand is right" stuff; such aids usually begin with the question, "Are you right-handed?".  How would I know?

It was easy, knowing North from South.  Living in Florida, working my way across the Caribbean, the sun always rose in the East, set in the West, and was overhead -- neither North or South -- at all other times.  Here in England, it's more difficult.  The sun rises in the South.  It sets in the South.  And, its southerly all day-time long.  ... When it can be seen through cloud-cover, that is.

It was easy too, if more conceptual, to fix cardinal points whilst living in the American North.  In Cincinnati, Gainesville, Lexington, Washington, and in New York City — even when I worked in Gaborone (Botswana),  water was always fixed in the South.  Of course, directionality was aided by the position of my bed, which — while not deliberate — always gave me a southern footing.  It was grand, laying in bed at night, watching lightning storms tearing up the Ohio River valley.  Here in Cambridge, the River Cam bends like a lower-case 'n', arching north westward, around the city centre.  And, inside, at home, there's nothing to tell what direction my bed is oriented.  

More confounding, the arching shape of the River Cam lends the impression — to someone used to walking, anyway —  that the city bends over on itself as if on a Möbius strip.  Like the highways in Cleveland (Ohio), if you want to go south out of downtown, you head north.  "Its counter-intuitive," the taxi driver tells you, "but it's one in the same."  Of course, in Cambridge, the fact that major streets change names virtually every block or so doesn't help in the giving of directions either.  You imagine that people, here, used to live and work so close to home that they needn't ask directions, and, never need know, "Dem Bones" style, that Hills Road becomes Regent, becomes Saint Andrew's, becomes Sidney, then Bridge, and Magdalene, Castle, and Huntington all within one linear mile.

At the short of this story is one question: How do you give directions when cardinal points and left/right have not meaning?  Street-view.  Not the Google Maps product by that name, but the view that pops into your brain like maps used to.

"Go to the coffee shop that you can see in the distance", you say.  You might qualify the distance in meters, "12 metres or so".  "There you'll see a big 'S' laid into the pavement."  This is one of four cardinal points, laid in as decoration, public art, rather than direction.  "Follow in that direction.  Turn at the next intersection."  It a T intersection — most intersections here are —  and there is only one way to turn.  You might add that a cycle shop stands at the intersection, possibly give the new street its name: "That's Paradise Street".  And, "You'll find Guthrie Court half-way up the street. It's the big building.  The one with marquee lights on over the large double doors."

Is it a wonder that in the former British colony of British Honduras, now Belize, you can still address an envelope to "My cousin, the barber, three doors down from the parrot (a reference to the sign that's faded on the wall where it was painted), 'round the corner from the old pink shower tree (a cassia tree that flowered only well into the dry season, but that is now little more than a rotting trunk), Centre, Belmopan, Belize".

Caps of Cambridge

I bet that the architect read Coleridge.  

That aqua copper bit, the tower roof, resembles the tents one sees painted on the page of early Turkic (Mongol Turk) texts.

Coleridge's Kubla Kahn was published in 1816.

The University Arms Hotel, on Parker's Piece, was built in 1834, the year Samuel Taylor Coleridge died.

Just one more Coleridge inspired architectural jot, the copper cap of the Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge. 

The cap takes the form of a Mongul warrior's helmet.

[Aside:]

This photo also contains a Cambridge curiosity, a gift of the city's Nightclimbers.

Look carefully at the tail fin of the whale weather vane. That's a red Santa's cap.

The Nightclimbers delight in scaling impossible heights - at night, of course - and leaving something behind.

In one story of their escapades, a Nightclimber's cap appeared on one of the ornate towers of King's College Chapel. At great expense, the College erected scaffolding to reach it. The night before the scaffolding reached the top of the tower, the cap was removed ... to a facing tower.

Why do Universities have "Chairs"?

Until I moved to Cambridge, I'd never given much thought to the nature of the American university "named-Chair", assuming the operatic scenes in which God descends to the stage in a chair, deus ex machina.

Here in Cambridge, the letter of David's contract to the Woodwardian Professor of Geological Sciences spelled out some curious terms. The Professorship is Cambridge's oldest named "Chair" and perhaps England's oldest as well. (Oxford has dubious competing claims, all theologians of course.)

Terms required that he had to live within 20 miles of Old Saint Mary's Church, for example. And, his election had to be approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely -- hearkening back to a time when earth-bound fossils bore discoveries that shook the firmament of Heaven. (... before Creationists, of course, corrected the timeline: man and dinosaurs lived side-by-side, cheek-by-jowl, hand-in-glove, foot-in-mouth.)

Among other terms, he had to spend a weekly allotment of time in the Sedgwick Museum of Geology, which was founded upon John Woodard's fossil collection. Specifically, he was required to sit at Woodward's desk -- still found in the Museum -- and warm Woodward's chair.

Endowed scholarships pre-date Woodward; but, it is quite possible that Woodward gave the world it's first named chair, as well as a greater number of old rocks. 

Undercroft

What is the most expensive Corbusier?     — I’ve just sat down at the Free Press, a pub in Cambridge (UK).  This is where one of the Claire College Men’s rowing teams come to drink.  And, that voice?  That belongs to the young man staring at me from across the table.  The question is his sort of Billy Goat’s Gruff.  The price for continuing to sit here is answering the question correctly.  A list of more than eighty-five thousand waits for affordable Council housing, I respond, anticipating that the question has something to do with buildings.  I’ll come to learn that I can’t read his mind.

Corbusier?  I know this one! I tell myself.  I used to date an architect who had a facile affair with the ideas of Corbusier.  Le Corbusier, to use the moniker preferred by the man in his life.  The Swiss, become French architect.  His ideas sought to change how architects thought about architecture in early in the twentieth century.  They were ideas that extended from the architecture of buildings to the architecture of the moveable objects within buildings — meubles, the French call them.  Le Corbusier’s ideas — accepted and lauded, repudiated, rehabilitated, restored, and repudiated again — come around like wooden horses on a merry-go-round.

It’s wise, knowing so little about Le Corbusier, as I do, not to address the question that I’ve been given.  It has the scent of the first of a series of “interview questions”.  The University of Cambridge’s admissions interview questions are notorious for spelunking through the minds of its applicants.  One question will lead to another, and, another ever deeper, ever more telling of the interviewee’s aptitude for cognitive processing, reasoning and ultimately judgment, or, conversely, the aptness of iron to rust.

I am of no mind to determine how rusty my mind has become.  I’ve just come from a walk across the city.  It’s been a hot, cloudless, yet humid day.  And, like a mad dog, I’ve made the journey under a noon-day sun … like an Englishman.  I’m tired.

Throughout the lunch hour, I’ve dodged the shuffling footfalls of young women, to distraction.  Why so many women?  I can’t help but notice them, as they clique in the center of the street.  — All the while, the BBC World Service is whispering into my ears.  It has implanted discussion of a crowd navigation study into my thoughts through ear-plugs wired to a radio.  It’s not quite the cognitive implants discussed in a previous story on the future of robotics.  I can’t access the whole of Wikipedia or Google as I wend my way. —  Nonetheless, as I seem to be caught in a slow-moving human tsunami headed toward the food stalls of Market Square and the restaurants of King’s Parade, I am reminded of a Japanese study  on refugee movements.  Published coincidentally after the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, it too discusses crowd navigation.  Unlike the study being discussed by the World Service, the Japanese study has been picked up by programmers in the gaming community, to inform zombie simulations.  This quirky detail and something about the shuffle brings me to this moment of awakening.

I acknowledge that focusing my attention momentarily on the women of Cambridge might come off as sexist.  I can’t help it.  No matter how hot it is, I walk fast.  And, they’re in my way.  Besides, the men of Cambridge haven’t given me much to contemplate.  I’ve noticed, they’re observing behaviors that can be found in almost any Friday-night country-and-western bar across North America.  Like wolves watching a flock of sheep, they’re on the margins, scrutinizing the women as they pass, perhaps waiting for one to stray.  The women, this while, — free-association assures me — are not sheep.  Zombies, rather.  And, here they are.  They’re putting their posses through paces that form the catwalk of the Lion Yard, a malled shopping street through the City Centre.  Apparently, it’s thē place to be seen.  Each pose, remarkably alike.  Mannequins interrupted in the course of construction.  Upper torso precariously disjointed from the lower, with only a hand-on-hip keeping them together.  I’ve seen this walk — this wounded bird behavior — before, I recall, among ground nesting birds, luring a predator away from the nest.  Perhaps, the clique is the nest!  Surprisingly, it is strapless summer shoes — for all intents and purposes, dress flip-flops, not the impossibility of their poses — that gives them their over-glossed zombie movements.  I may be reading them incorrectly.  Perhaps, this is their lure.  They’ll capture the men one-by-one as they attempt to strike.  Devour them.  And, divine the future from their entrails, over a relaxing cup of mint tea.  Men are made to be discouraged! I hear one of the women say.

My noon walk — full sun in a cloudless sky — was a drastic reaction to the last two days, living with a sinus headache.  I haven’t been thinking clearly.  The more I walked, the more my sinuses felt as though they were draining.  Now, though, that I’ve settled before my inquisitor at the Free Press, I can feel sinus cavities filling.  I’d been bailing, it seems.  With that realization, I’ve given up, though I doubt a half-pint of bitters will be enough to drown me. 

My inquisitor looks to be a kind of Harry Potter.  He’s got the glasses anyway, even if they might be a bit too big.  And, the smile.  He’s wearing his black academic gown, over a grey suit, with a bow tie.  What’s the most expensive Corbusier? he asks again in an up-tempo tone.  I’ve noted his hair-style, too.  It’s 1960s FBI chic.  Straight and flat.  Look, I say.  “Look” is an American expression — derived from the English of 1940s British movies.  Look here, a character would call attention to himself.  I do say.  American’s have shortened the phrase to its most essential.  The British have almost entirely abandoned it.  Look, I’ve had an exhausting day.  I plead.  I’m in no mood for twenty questions — still mindful that more interview questions are likely to follow.  Alright, then, he says in chipper agreement.  Just one!  What’s the most expensive Corbusier?  

He gets marks for persistence.  He’s staring at me.  His eyes are swimming in those glasses.  I’m struggling not to look at them, to understand the meaning of “expensive”.  In what sense? I think.  —  To build?  —  To insure?  —  To purchase on the resale market?  —  In terms of up-keep?  —  With or without regard to location?  —  Perhaps, in terms of square feet?  —  Or, the incomparable English measure of value: the number of bedrooms, no matter how small.  

With the closure of an up-market furnishings store only blocks away — its windows hosting a Le Corbusier chair and a love seat at discounted, but still outrageous prices — it will later surprise me that I haven’t thought about Corbusier’s furniture.  No wonder they’re going into administration, I’ve heard one person after another remark.  “Going into administration” is the British expression for “going bust”.  The opening of a Poundland just next door put a point in the shape of a one pound coin on the expense of the furniture.  How, I wonder, would the people from the second hand furniture store a few blocks away value this stuff if it were donated for resale?  Perhaps years of expectation built at America’s Walmart stores leave me anticipating the eventuality of couple staring through the window.  They might remark on the furniture with fresh insight.  Look, she might say disapprovingly.  They caint even spell Lee right!  While he might ask, Who’s Lee Core-busy-err anyway?  His question might be ridicule, if it didn’t seem linguistic slap-stick.  If only my inquisitor knew where my mind might have been, …

It’s summer in Cambridge.  The churches are open for tourists alongside lunch-time services for the devout.  These churches have become my refuge.  Failure to cake myself with sunscreen before leaving home has left my fair skin vulnerable to burn.  I’m not the only one to have taken shelter in them.

     — In one, an old ladies church brigade.  They, the ladies are multiplying, the way bunnies used to.  The gardener has just done a bit of trimming-up outside; and, they’re coming in with the clippings, using them to decorate altars.  Many of the clippings will have the faint wilt of a funeral come Saturday morning.  Several already do.  — Hmm, feignt willed? —  The grasping curl of such a leaf, still green.

     — Serendipitously, the approaches of another church bear the scent of death; though frankly, it is difficult to determine if the smell originates from the refuse bins of the church next door.  Its narthex has been turned into a fairly exclusive dining hall.  Young men in cassocks serve meals from silver platters.  Slender men clothed in impeccable suits and women wearing designer dresses handle their silver settings like doctors in an operating theatre.  The great pane of glass that allows the passer-by to see beyond them, down the nave of the church, must shield them from the stench that has clawed its way up my nose.

     — Back inside the neighboring church, I find the homeless.  There: tens of tens of preoccupied faces turn to me as I enter.  After awhile, most turn mindlessly back toward the altar.  They leave the impression that they’ve always been there; and, like sunflowers; always searching but never moving away.  A bit later, as I turn to leave, one of them stands.  He crosses in front of me to bless himself with holy water, while I open the door onto a portico.  He follows.  Asks for change.  The few coins that I give him will not change much.

     — A last church bears a steeple studded with dove-cotes.  (All of the other churches have had dull towers, capped with parapet walls.)  It suggests refuge, though it looks like the nose of a military jet climbing toward a stall.  As I approach, I notice a steady sting of individuals pushing-in then swallowed-up by the church’s ancient wooden doors.  Yet, once inside, there is no one.  Not a soul, but mine.  

     So, tell me, I hear my inquisitor speak, as I shake off the unsettled recollection of what I see next, what is the most expensive?  Here, I recall the moment in the Indiana Jones and the last crusade movie when the last of the Knights Templar encourages Jones to choose wisely.  This face, my inquisitor’s, is beginning to look familiar.  I haven’t yet placed it.

     My entry to this church gave pause to the procession of those entering.  It’s now resumed.  A woman, followed at some distance by a man, walks nervously up the nave’s center aisle.  One after the other, they pause and genuflect, before the altar.  Rise, and, cross themselves; head bowed.  Then, they turn and briskly walk toward what, in a traditional church, should be the sacristry.  Before its door, they stop — pause, as if they feel themselves being watched.  The woman crouches, lifts a brass ring from the floor.  She opens a trap-door, descends into an undercroft.  He follows, his hands treading the door until it closes upon them.  In the time that I remain in the church, this same procession continues.  All of the traffic is one way.  No one ever lifts the door from inside and climbs out.  For a brief moment, I fancy that I’m witnessing the dead returning to their crypts.  But, it’s the lunch hour; and, I haven’t yet eaten.  Hunger, I know from a life-time of migraines, can change what I see.

So, here I am.  —  Back at the Free Press.  My half-pint still has its head.  My inquisitor still has his question.  And, a plowman’s lunch has just arrived.  

What is the most expensive Corbusier?  I say repeating the inquisitor’s question.  I don’t know, I answer.  La Chapelle de Ronchamp, Notre Dame du Haut? I say, fearing my inquisitor’s next question, Why?, or the retort, No! Choose again.  The latter would be difficult to resist.  I know that a demand is not a second question.  

Instead, he has another, unexpected demand.  Look into my eyes, he says.  — Isn’t that the question Bela Lugosi’s Dracula asks, before he bites?  —  All this while it seems, I’ve been doing nothing but looking into his eyes.  Rolling around in those big circular glasses, I’m reminded of birthday cards with cartoon faces and paste-down plastic eyeballs.  Black irises swimming, like fish in a bowl.  My mother used to use those eyes on stuffed animals she made as prizes for the church carnival.  The fear is that, if I answer correctly, I may be forced to take him, as a prize, home with me.  

What is the most expensive Corbusier?  He repeats himself, adding, This is not a question, rather — he pauses — a predication.  It’s an odd clue — predication, but nothing of this exchange has been anything other than odd.  Corbusier is the most expensive, I say hesitantly.  Yes! Shouts my inquisitor, Indeed.  I’ve been wrong about the question.  It hasn’t been an entry examiner’s question.  It has been a beer drinker’s question.  It is then that I recognize the face.  The young man is a replica of a youthful Le Corbusier.  For all I know, from the heat and exhaustion of the day’s walk, it is Corbusier, himself.  He’s begging recognition before he returns to the undercroft and the stone that knows his name.

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The Japanese study of refugee movements: 
Asakura, Koichi and Hiroki Aoyama.  Movement algorithms for refugee agents for virtual disaster simulation systems.  Published in: KES-AMSTA'11 : Proceedings of the 5th KES international conference on Agent and multi-agent systems: technologies and applications.  Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer-Verlag, 2011.  Pp. 583-591.

Drowning in a half-pint of bitters: 
I will remember later that Le Corbusier died by drowning during the lunch hour.

Poundland: 
Something like a Dollar Store.  Only more expensive, if you’re thinking in US dollars.

Walmart: 
The owner of ASDA supermarkets in the UK.  
Something like a Poundland, only better.  An American one-stop discount store and market town rolled into one.  Any one of its “outlets” covers the pitch of four football fields, if not more, with everything from groceries to food, pharmaceuticals to electronics, clothing to gardening supplies, and so on and on.

The face of the young man: 
Corbusier