#dontbedead

SERIES THREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You guys I don't even like exclamation points okay this is for serious frenzy-feels only and if TWO YEARS' PATIENCE doesn't deserve a little extra punctuation then really I don't know what does. ALIVE SHERLOCK!!!!!!!! NOT-BACHELOR JOHN!!!!!!! ANSWERS!!!!!!!

Um. Anyway. My (student) Dr. John did some research at Bart's over the summer, and way back in February while interviewing with the lab we wandered around the corner to see if a little street-side study of our own might offer new insight to our, uh, occasional theorizing. And maybe we weren't entirely successful on that front, but we totally weren't disappointed.

Post-its, full-on letters, a dozen different languages, hashtags, QR codes, entire comics. And one favourite touch? On top of the telephone someone had left a full supply of loose paper, pens, and scotch tape for the unprepared. Fandom people are my favorite people.

With filming begun in March, the next time I stopped by the booth had been scrubbed clean and repainted. But one last visit just at summer's end proved that resurrection isn't just Reichenbach business — the shrine was in full swing, papered anew.

just a little experiential research here, don't mind us.

camden town, indostan.

Some days I have to invent reasons to get out of the house, to walk away from my desk and dissertation in the name of sanity or fresh air or just another human's face, if nothing else. This is not a pity party, by the way. Just this moment's reality, self-induced and (thankfully) fleeting.

Last week it was Camden Market. A short walk down the street and one bus ten minutes across Primrose Hill. I went with purpose: there was a shop in the Stables' stalls that sells architectural drafts of stained glass windows and, though I can't justify pounds sterling in the hundreds, I wanted to see them again. I like in museums the unfinished things, preliminary sketches like Patrick Heron's charcoal drawings of T.S. Eliot, or the ghostprints of St Jerome and his lion in Leonardo's Wilderness, or the squares of Manet's Execution of Maximilian stitched back together by Degas. I like seeing decisions made and unmade, all of them recorded, the raw end of a masterpiece — to me it strikes the balance right, the potential and the mess in equal measure. These sketches were like that. In February, when John and I first found the place, there were two ten-foot angels in the front doorway, the final drafts for a chapel in Sleepy Hollow, New York. They were nouveau work; bold solid lines, organic sensibilities. Pieces of them were colored, potential blues in wide stripes down the drapery, touches of rose and gold on their wings, and they held banners at their waist that fell diagonally to the floor — I can't remember what they said, simple truths, straightforward things, like God is Strength or Hope and Light. In February they'd seemed like actual messengers, saying things I needed to hear. I hate that I've forgotten. I only remembered that I loved them, and one in particular. I wanted to see that angel again. I wanted to remember what her banner said. I think I wanted to convince myself I needed to bring her home.

But she wasn't there. The shop wasn't there. I walked the length of the stalls once and then over again, matching my memory to the current setup. Lot 745. I remembered the loft with a notch for a ladder. Before, a daughter in the eaves, playing behind cardboard barrels while her dad rearranged the stock. Now, umbrellas from Myanmar in place of parchment tubes, and the pretty woman selling them didn't know anything about the previous tenant. I went to neighbors. Nothing. I went to security. Nothing. I talked to nine people and none of them even remembered the place's existence. To be fair, I don't know if I was doing a good job explaining. Stained glass sketches, I kept saying. Big boxes of rolled paper, like industrial school maps, but they were drafts for the windows in churches. From here, Europe, from the States. Oh and he sold pins! Thousands of them on felt panels along the walls. The collectible kind, you know, like you put in shadow boxes for a boy's room? No? Nothing.

So I went walking. I'd made the trip over anyhow, and if you know the Camden labyrinth then you know that you can never actually know it all. I could stand to get lost for another half hour. But we all know what happens when you get lost, right? You get a little found.

I walked into the shop because there were stacks of Tibetan singing bowls on a shelf behind buddhas organized by size, metal, and color. I've been looking for brass bowls to have on our reception tables in September, and the place looked promising. If I had looked closer I may have noticed it sooner: the shadow puppets on the walls, the bridal hair pins in the cup by the door. Instead it was the smell that hit me first, musty wood and dirty concrete, a faint floral note overpowered by heavy rain. It struck me like the monsoons it reminded me of — a two-second hint of a beginning, and then the deluge. I grabbed at a lintel carving from the nearest table, flipping it over to find a tag. 1904, it read. Jawa Timur.

A few weeks ago it was sickly humid in the city and coming in to work via tube was a sweaty gross sardine-style affair that made all the black suits extra grumpy and aimless tourists. But a part of me recognized the heat on the air, the thrum of traffic in the wet haze — something in me reveled in it. And you know those moments where some sight or smell or small bar of music smacks you through the soul with a memory not necessarily specific but all-encompassing? London, London, London, INDONESIA. A few weeks ago all it took was the fleeting second between stepping off a curb and into the street. I was turning off Tottenham Court Road but could've sworn it was instead the rubbled crossways in Tebet Dalam, that I was going to walk around the corner to eat rujak on broken benches while Ari chastised me for trying to pet every vagrant cat in the neighborhood. I nursed an empty ache between my rib bones the whole rest of the day, craving condensed milk and an open window on a Metro Mini.

So walking ignorant like that into Indostan (you would think the name might've given it away ...?) nearly knocked the breath out of me. Boat letters! Krepuk tins! I visited each familiar face like I might puppies in a pet store, hungry to memorize them, desperate to make them mine. The end wall was one massive panel carved and painted bright turquoise, pink, red. From the ceiling hung model pinisi, gamelan pieces, bright colored dewi in full flight, arm-wings outstretched. Odd visions accompanied it all: sitting cross-legged on a dirty mattress with a toddler holding a hymnbook; morning light filtered pink through an old sarong across the window; thousands of candy wrappers tied to a tree — an old man's mania. An art piece in homage to beauty in blunt places. I was delighted; I was devastated. It is unsettling to time travel. 

I am still looking for the stained glass shop. I sent an email to the market managers but haven't heard anything. The marrow seems heavier in my bones these days, thick with thinking. There's a rhythm of Cummings beating there, too: time is a tree (this life one leaf).

field notes // kensington.

london 2012.

Just a small collection of my daily walk from last year in London before I get too far into this new one. Mostly from my phone, unfortunately. January Resolution: take actual pictures with actual camera.

milk, etc.

In England you can buy your milk by the pint, in little jugs exactly like the American gallon size except  obviously not gallon-sized because it is a pint (that's the point) and it fits in the side door of a refrigerator in line with mustard and jam and the pesto jar. I am telling you this because it is one of my favorite things in a small way, and because if I do not blog my Aunty Jules will call my mum and together they will begin to plot the ultimate demise of the turkey feather girl who (admittedly) has lived two months too long at the top of these posts and it is a new year and a new beginning and a new me. Or so the magazines say.

Another one of my favorite things is to walk across bridges and also to watch water move, and it is no secret that I love the Thames even when mostly it is brown and muddied and murk. I like people watching in train stations and reading books on the tube, and the anticipation of reading a book on the tube. I like anywhere to sleep with the windows open and a few nights ago woke to foxes rummaging in the bins outside. They would find good things and sing sad-sounding bird songs to their fox friends and their fox friends would reply from a few streets over to meet in the shadow of the churchyard and circle up to share their good things and laugh.

(There are of course things I don't like. The water pressure (negligible), the laundry machines (nugatory), Super Target (none), the complete impossibility of customer service (not necessarily Britain's fault; America seems to stand alone in this regard and that's fact, not nationalism). I still every single time forget which faucet is what temperature and wash my face with cold water and brush my teeth with hot. Sometimes I wish our oven made more sense.)

Yesterday I met an old friend at church who has just moved here as well and after the service we walked down Exhibition Road and got on the Circle Line and came up out of Westminster station just under the bright face of Big Ben tolling the quarter hour with Boudicca lit up by the Eye behind her and it was just one of those intensely quintessential London moments that constantly knock me off my feet. We crossed over to South Bank and talked about being human and learning to love and also to let go, and in the space between Jubilee Gardens and a saxophonist Tom suddenly turned to me and said "Look at all these people living all these lives!! This is awesome!" And given that I just came back to this blog post long past midnight, I'm going to leave it at that. Hi, 2013. Think I'll like you a whole lot.

footnote.

Because it is relevant to my last post and because I read it last week and have yet to stop thinking about it:

To the Londoner of my generation, the London sky has another dramatic significance which—once our present boredom  with the whole subject is overcome—is memorable. It has been a battlefield. One day in 1940 in the entrance hall of the BBC I heard the sirens howl. One of the maternal ladies at the reception desk called out, "Air Raid, please" (one is inclined in London to say "please" for everything, and one must certainly say it out of deference if a V.I.P. like the Angel of Death is announced), but she was in fact telling the boys to close the steel shutters. I shall not forget that large white cloud bellying against the blue in the afternoon and, as my stomach turned over, seeing a flight of silver Spitfires dive into it. I froze with fear, hope, anger, pity. Many times afterwards, Londoners in the black-out heard the sky grunt, grunt, grunt over them, then howl and rock, or saw it go green instead of black, the whole 700 square miles of it twitching like sick electricity and hammered all over by millions of sharp gold sparks as the barrage beat against it like steel against a steel door. The curling magnesium ribbons that came slowly down were a relief to see, in that unremitting noise.The glasses and plates, the curtains, the favourite vases, ferns, clocks, and photographs, the pens on the desks, the ink in the pots danced in their places throughout the night in evil monotony hard to endure. The sky was extravagant; the earth would occasionally come to life in scattered carrotty fires, and on the bad nights, when the docks, the East End, and the City were burned out, the tide being too low to give the firemen water, London turned crimson. Even then, people made the "historic" remark, the remark of experience. Nothing like this, they said, had been seen since 1666. One cloudless August afternoon near the end of the war, green snow fell in minute insulting particles all over Holborn. We saw them when we got up from under our desks, where we had ducked when a bomb had fallen a mile or so away in  Hyde Park and had blown the leaves off the trees into these mysterious smithereens. It had seemed, for a moment, like a new venture of the London climate, which we knew to be capable of anything. 

        Seven  hundred thousand dwellings were damaged in the County of London, that is to say more than eighty per cent of the total. And  of these, nearly a third were totally destroyed. Little was left of the docks or the City. And about 30,000  people were killed, more than 50,000 injured. On December 29, 1940, all Paternoster Row went, and a favourite phrase, imported from American films, was that "London can take it," whatever that may mean. London did nothing so exhibitionist, showed none of the characteristics of the prize fighters' ring, as seen by publicity agents. London was quite simply morose, fatalistic, frightened, depressed, and fell back on that general practicality of mind that counts as calm. The climate had predisposed us to expect the worst and to disbelieve in the facts. Fatalism is the English religion. "London can take it" is just the beer talking. At the George, in Great Portland Street, I do recall two drunks discussing the kind of funeral they wanted, with a lot of circumstantial detail about the correct amount of flowers, during a bad half hour. And there is no one who could not supply a list of old aunts, grandmothers, and so on who stuck the thing out, immovably, sustained by a vigorous social disapproval of the whole shemozzle. Private life rules the world. 

      It was the silence of London in the early evening that struck one. One had never known it to be dead quiet before. The machine had stopped. One walked down mile after mile of empty streets to the sound of one's own heels only,  and voices carried far, as if across water. I remember two painted old crones sitting out alone on a bench in Lincoln's Inn Fields, when I was fire-watching. They were, no doubt, caretakers, and I could hear their voices far across the square. They were talking about actresses and distant connections of the Royal Family, of course. One night I saw a soldier come fighting out of a pub and get his teeth knocked out.  One could hear them fall as distinctly as pebbles, a hundred yards away.

—V.S. PRITCHETT 

Every Sunday I walk past the V&A on my way to church. During the war the museum was used as a canteen for the RAF and a refuge for children evacuated from Gibraltar. It was hit repeatedly; the worst bomb exploded just outside the Exhibition Road entrance and the façade is to this day mottled with the effect of the shrapnel blast. The doors were blown in and nearly every iron grill, gate, and window destroyed. The museum remained open to the public. Today I walk past the inscription cut into the stone around the wreckage. The damage to these walls is the result of enemy bombing during the Blitz of the Second World War 1939-1945 and is left as a memorial to the enduring values of this great museum in a time of conflict. It makes me proud to be human.

remembrance day.

Last week, Veteran's Day, another eleven I love. And I like how it is done here, how weeks of reminding lead up to the big remembrance. At street corners and subway stops, next to the till, outside the bookshop, the grocers, the opera. Paper poppies in boxes, ten pence or ten pounds, paper poppies in boxes. Mine from the window overlooking the gardens at Kensington. I carry it home in cupped hands because I don't want to bend the petals. I wrap the stem in tape colored like the sky so that it stays close against the safety pin, so it lays flat above my heart. I pin it to my coat collar. I pin it to my shirt. I pin it to my sweater. Every day all week long I wear the poppy. Everyone is wearing poppies. Business men who get off at Bond Street wearing black,  punky teenagers taking up too many seats at the back of the train, a wrinkled woman folding into a taxi cab, tiny children in mittens. Between trains we walk so quickly, going so many places. All of us and our poppies. Row on row. 

We are the dead. In my head I hear words I learned a dozen years ago. I remember them all. I walk along the river after dark. I walk for miles.