6 posts tagged “history”
I am always looking for cats. Seeing one is like witnessing the materialization of Egyptian worship - surrounded by incense and bare feet, carved into golden delicacies and marble scarabs. A sleepy deity tightly groomed and insulted by collar and tag, it now scowls at me with an ancient disgust.
The other day I saw such a cat, sitting at a window that was dim and greasy enough to hold a city's fingerprint, its dirty and unbecoming DNA. The frame was beaten with the fist of gusty weather - splintered by seasonal, prying fingers. Curled like an icon, it lay on a poor, inefficient throne: a threadbare couch that was the color of sickness - bilious and jaundiced.
The morning was confused that day, with a sky that was noncommittal and unfocused. But in a moment of clarity, light pounced at my discovery's throat, and quickly the tag glowed new and polished, like a stolen doubloon. And amongst the ghosts that tangled in the atmosphere, brigands on their ships appeared to regain their treasure. But when they saw the neck from where it so audaciously hung, they paused...then disappeared as the waterly light slipped away.
So, having stared down one enemy, the cat faced me, another inferior heat source. Bored with its dreams, I was no improvement. Its eyes were an amber judgement of discontent.
Perhaps it is a memory that all cats hold inside them that causes this frustration. It was a memory of distant fiefdoms and foreign names whispered in devout incantations. It was the knowledge that its ancestors were cradled by gods like exalted children; hunters destined to live forever inside pharoahs' tombs. And the knowledge that it now lived on common ground, watching spirits through dirty windows, crouched on a sickly bed, shamed by the "To Rent" sign on the front lawn.
There was a time when castles were painted white: pale warnings set in the world's wildest places. Their floors were carpets of rushes whose starry flowers blossomed in vain against the sour smell of garbage and unwashed bodies. There was a time when forks were considered effete and kings ate with their hands. There was a time when ladies plucked their hairlines and men dyed their beards purple. There was a time when a tournament was a graceless clash of up to 3,000 knights fitted into massive saddles draped with heraldic tapestries. There was a time when a life could end with a simple sword thrust or the complications from a pin prick: a time of violence and filth. Blood and disease flourished in the gutters.
There was a time when people lived in shacks - airless and dark. There was a time when light's invisible molecules pierced cathedral windows that arched into heaven and were spliced into fierce primaries: blue, red and yellow. The columns of color blessed the shadowy naves and transepts, the architectural crucifix. There was a time of rags and of mud. But it was a time of gold: it dripped into embroideries, it was hammered into walls that writhed with alchemic life. A knight's helmet could sprout antlers, grow branches, or cradle a falcon: all golden symbols of his brutal ancestry. There was a time when fear held men by the throat.
Yet it was also a time for books - spared from society's barbarism. Before the firt printing presses began to smear and creak, manuscripts were illustrated by hand - 'illuminated'. Decoration and calligraphy merged to birth tiny worlds of zoology and humanity that swirled like painted galaxies on skies of vellum and parchment. A living filigree of crimson dragons, twisted vines, flowers, birds, ships, animals that drooled and glowered, twittering insects: a hallucinogenic pattern that wove between letters and reclined within margins: buzzing and rustling.
Within a single letter, a ship will balance on a triad of moss-colored waves while below, the gray shadows of dolphins and whales balanced between air and water. Or, beneath a canopy dotted with fleur-de-lis, a king sits at a banquet, choosing from the plattes held up by his cowering servants. Beasts and monsters were curled and cramped inside their etymological cages.
Sometimes the letters sprouted leaves, serpent's heads that barked and spat, or faces with dark, Byzantine eyes. Once the pen completed its essential outline of the initial, it lept from the artisan's fist, erupting into a madness of pointillism and populations. Colors that were crushed out of berries, insects and herbs spilled into angles and curves that twisted into endless highways across the map of a single page.
There was a time when Art held a handkerchief to her nose to walk amongst the fog of humanity and stand at its shoulder.
She was born in Madrid, amongst hushed duennas and modest women. Her parents expelled the Jews from Spain. Her mother was the patroness of Christopher Columbus. Her father was the 'cunning fox' so admired by Machiavelli. Her sister was mad, refusing to abandon the rotten, cholera-ridden body of her dead husband. She grew up against the scarlet agonies of the Inquisition. She came to England when she was barely sixteen, the bride-to-be for a King.
The next year, in 1502, she lost her husband to the 'sweate'. She watched him, soothed him, pressed a damp handkerchief to his temples to absorb the thick, stinking sweat. She prayed.
This portrait was painted at about this time. A widowed cherub, with gaze lowered and focused on worries she was too young to name. Thoughtful, she eyed an unfair fate that mocked her and gamboled at her feet.
Her weeds are black and plum; her chains are simple weaves, and scallops - emblems of the pilgrims of St. James - bite the square shoreline of her bodice.
For seven years, she waited. She wandered the palace, ignored by her distant parents, a shadow to her father-in-law. He and his advisors were too busy grooming the golden lion who was growing into adulthood in their midst. They had plans for him; they imagined a marriage with a princess whose veins would tangle Europe like vines, drenching countries in their royal sap. A sad princess, already used, was not good enough.
In 1509, it was time for another son to be crowned. And this Spanish princess - despite, or possibly because of, palace politics - was the chosen bride. On June 11, Katherine of Aragon was wedded to Henry VIII. Witnesses noted her thick hair, a river of melted bronze shot with gold, pouring down her back. Her plump oval face, pink and white, agreed happily with the English vision of healthy womanhood: innocent, yet of good child-bearing stock.
She was the first, and she had him at his best. He was fit, virile, slim, athletic. He still had his shy ways: his childhood was a sheltered one and he trod carefully on the words of his tutors as if each syllable was an eggshell. He was optimistic and careless. He was a handsome boy. And she was in love.
But he grew up. Power drove her heel into his neck and taught him the ways of cruelty, impatience and greed. She stood in the way of...so many things. But she would not move: her core of resolve was an alloy of steel buried in the meek earth. Quietly, she kept Anne Boleyn listening at the keyhole. She was the silent figurehead around whom the people rallied: against the king, his new religion and his filthy mistress. The Vatican was in awe - she was exotic, she was fearsome: she was honest.
But honesty does not breed kings. Her babies died, one after the other, except for one daughter. And this child, in time, would suffer too.
And when Katherine lay dying, she was alone once more, even denied communication with her daughter. Did she think of her years as a young widow, a living ghost in dusty velvet? Maybe all she remembered was her final letter to her husband - the words hanging before her eyes like curtains - that ended with a vow of shattering devotion:
"Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things."
The world is full of ideal pairings. Lord Peter Wimsey and Mervyn Bunter. Nick and Nora Charles. Sunsets and silhouettes. Sage and Gold. Pearls and onyx. Moon And Sixpence. Cheese and more cheese. I had imagined that I could think of them all.
However, years, ago, I was in a bookstore in London - and if anything good is going to occur to you, the odds are that it will happen in a bookstore. And if you are in a bookstore in London, well, those odds are overwhelming. Something was bound to happen.
Wel, what happened was that I came upon THE ideal pairing. So sublime, so perfect, that just thinking of it makes me imagine a world where the sun is perpetually setting, where the rays are always lengthy and golden, where the landscape is noble and the air is purring.
Castles. Cats. One rules the horizon, the other rules the home.
So what attracts a compact body of fur to a vast expanse of stone?
Well, surely it is the people who are in residence, their generous hearts laying down the drawbridge for pink-padded paws to cross. The kitchens ae warm, the chairs are plush and thickly upholstered, huge stone fireplaces flare in a medieval blaze: what cat wouldn't feel worthy, and right, in surroundings like these? And as castles are usually embraced by towns, and as towns are inevitably warmed by public houses - well, a cat might feel inclined to roam a little, too. A look of yearing in green or amber eyes, a plaintive meow: and a waitress or pubman might relent and part with a wedge of kidney pie, a slice of roast beef, a sausage or two. Perhaps for the evening the cat will curl in a corner and sleep, cozy in its homely nest - its ears full of the clinking of glasses, the scent of earthy, simple cooking swirling about its nostrils.
But in the morning the cats will return to their towering, granite homes. Why? Breakfast, surely. But could there be a more subtle influence at work?
The premise of the book is delightful: 20 chapters - a few pages each - of castles and their whiskered tenants. Each entry is full of photos: dark and evocative (Smudge crouches, herald-like, on the rocks of St. Michael's Mount), bright and comfortable (Ginger meows in the sun at Bunratty Castle). With castles on one hand, and cats on the other, this book is one strong and marvelous handclasp.
Through the pages cats are trotting down steps that are smooth and rounded with centuries of human steps, shod in colored fabric, leather or chain mail. What draws those felines there? Do they hear those steps? Are they following their paths? Do they sense assignations - war - barefoot servants too?
Cats peer through battlements. Their eyes glow in the broken spaces. Do they feel the anxiety of a soldier, long dead, looking beyond these stone teeth, across the borders, to see approaching armies: the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh?
Or when they fit themselves neatly inside an arrow slit: can they hear the winding of the crossbow? Can they feel the arrow bite through the air? Can they see the banners below, with their signs and symbols - held high, or grasped in the hands of corpses, shredding in the wind?
Some cats prefer the gardens, the whitewashed statuary - they sleep at the bases of balustrades, or by the feet of vases, carved with swags of concrete foilage. Maybe they dream of the gatherings that were once held there...dresses no longer of sweeping medieval cloth, but rigid with whalebone and petticoats, decorated with Elizabethan stiffness or Rococo madness. Perhaps their ears twitch as they listen in on distant conversations: about executions, Armadas and revolutions. Or they hear the thunder of hooves as horses and riders disappear into the forest for an idyll of bloody and most unfair sport.
This book shows cats of any and all description peering around corners, hiding behind gates, snug behind crenellations, walking down flagged paths...all attracted to these historical surroundings for the open-door policies of nearby kitchens, yes, but I would like to think that they also come to these castles for the sounds, voices and visions of long ago, for the inescapable life that still surrounds these places.
And that is why I'm drawn to these places, too.
Where do you go to get away from it all?
Submitted by Hops.
Get away from it all? Everything? Well, that would involve complete oblivion - sleep, or maybe something darker.
Now, if today's question is edging towards escapism - a state of mind wholly desireable, totally unrealistic and one proven to be unhealthy (like any vacation, departure is a pleasure, but the return trip is a grim pain, with more rocky landings then I care to recount) - well, if I can't be here:
And if I can't see this:
I would most certainly escape into history.
History is a comfort. You are reading and learning about people that died away centuries ago. And yet, in the hearts of the readers and the minds of the teachers, they live on.
History is sights, smells, textures and events that you can only imagine. And there's the escape: your mind. History's facts are caught fast in your imagination, like flies in amber.
Peering through the eyes of people shimmering through history's fabric, shouldering their feelings, placing your feet in the mud of their battlefields, in the dust of their unpaved roads...you're experiencing something that is a chronological impossibility. And there's the rub. And that's the escape.
In North Hollywood, there is a marvelous bookstore named The Iliad. I gave it a visit last Friday - laden with food as I was, I was still agile enough to be able to scurry through its doors.
Inside, it is slaughtered with books (Does that make sense? I mean that the interior is simply OVERWHELMED with books). All ages, all categories. I mean, there's a shelf labeled 'Oddities'! Who couldn't spend a minimum of 2 hours there?
I bought an armful of books, one in particular that I'd like to mention. The title page reads thus: "Souvenir of the Willesden Carnival and Torchlight Procession, for 'The Daily Telegraph Soldiers' Widows and Orphans' Fund', Held on May 16th and 17th, 1900". Willesden occupies a handful of NW London.
It's a narrow, hard-covered book. Ten dollars. A title unusual enough for me to want, and cheap enough for me to buy. Which I did.
Now, in the early summer of 1900 the Boer War had just begun and the Seige of Mafeking had just lifted. So the theme of many of the floats was patriotic in nature. For instance, above is a float dedicated to Col. Robert Baden-Powell (known as "B-P"). He was largely responsible for the the British troops' survival of a seige that lasted over 200 days, using some rather clever tactics. But look at the photo carefully, peeps - there is a CHILD posing with a rifle.
Swivel to the right - sorry for the quality of the scan - to see a sad thing. The lettering on the side reads 'His Last Letter' and features a Florence Nightingale-type of nurse (don't think the uniform had changed much from the Crimea) and a fellow officer, with helmet doffed.
But there are some things which are just plain evil (turn eyes warily to the left).
And yes, what is a carnival without ladies and their festive bycicles? Go, Miss Allnutt!!
But there's more: this place was in possession of what all bookstores should have: an RK, or Resident Kitteh. I heard her mewing softly from behind the check-out counter, and when I asked - delightedly as well a a little hysterically - 'do you have a KITTY here?', her owner answered in the affirmative before going to feed her, which is really all Zola had on her mind at the moment.
Zola is a one-eyed, petite, floofy tortie kitteh, with a sweet, musical meow. When I was about to leave, I saw her again, completely settling down into 'Ignoring Aubrey' mode. But I was able to skritch her between the ears, and suddenly I was worthy of her presence. Such a dear, pretty creature. I took her picture from the Iliad's website (am I allowed to do that?). Her bio on the site is terrifying: she spent her first two years in a hamster cage, never receiving the care of a vet. Untreated infections led to the loss of one eye and some teeth, as well as leaving a scar on her remaining eye. If anyone is near The Iliad bookstore in North Hollywood, give it a visit, buy some wonderful things and give Zola some love.
