Tales of the Tower

I spent the day at the Tower of London yesterday and two things struck me.

After hearing a number of stories about weapons, torture and beheadings from the Yeoman Warders and our tour guide, I thought how strange the impulse is to enjoy telling and hearing gruesome and gory details about things that happened in the past. The macabre is a kind of folk entertainment; debased fairy tales, like the horror genre and slasher films.

I suppose this response is a form of self defense, to cover our discomfiture? To deflect feelings of sadness about the horrible things humanity did and still does to each other? The centuries of graffiti carved into the walls of the Bloody Tower were so poignant.

But there was also a kind of jokey, patronizing tone to some of these stories—"Our ancestors were right bastards, weren't they? But we're above all that kind of thing today." To which I say, yes and no.

Even the glorious Tower ravens—who, being ravens, love soaring, diving, airborne acrobatics more than all things—even they have had their feathers clipped so they can't fly away. While the ravens are loved and cared for by the Ravenmaster, they are still the last prisoners of the Tower, aren't they?

So on the one hand was the knowledge of all the suffering that had happened in this place, which seemed a fulcrum for drama, dark deeds, violence and cruelty.

But later on, as I wandered up and down spiral staircases and peered out tower windows, I thought about how vast swaths of humanity have surely made progress and enacted many reforms since those lawless days, despite the fact that there are still too many places where violence reigns.

A heart-opening welling of love came over me...for the English and their treasured history, for preserving this amazing gift of the past that they now offer to the world. It feels like generosity. It feels like I have been given the gift to live here for a while, and to experience this people's incredible sense of place and tradition and belonging.

Yesterday was the opening day of Parliament, and fusiliers began to fire the traditional 62-gun Royal Salute toward the Thames as our group entered the Tower. The shots echoed off the stones, puffs of sulfurous smoke tickled my nose before being whisked away on the wind, and there it was again—that sense of alternate reality that probably seems perfectly normal to any British person.

The Tower is a symbol of how London itself is living history, how people here live within and alongside history. In addition to all their individual stories and family stories, they are part of a much larger story...a Dickensian type of story, richly peopled, moving through darkness and light.

Inside the Jewel House, I entered the dramatically darkened room and stood on the moving sidewalk, which ferried visitors past either side of the Crown Jewels. And the great prisms of light that flashed forth from the Cullinan Diamond in the Sovereign's Sceptre entranced me so that I rode by another four times. And even to the story of that starry, lancing silver light, there is probably an accompanying human darkness, somewhere.

That is just our story.

Hitting the Roman jackpot

I hopped on the bus today on the Strand and opened the London Standard to this:

More than 10,000 artifacts and an entire streetscape have just been uncovered during excavations for a new office block in the part of London called "the City," which is where the Romans founded Londinium.

What's more, these amulets, leather shoes, brooches and other objects* have been preserved incredibly well since for 2,000 years they have been in waterlogged ground created by the Walbrook, one of London's "lost rivers." (Maybe similar to the way that bodies are well-preserved in Ireland's peat bogs?)

What made this so cool was the fact that I was in the City when I read this news, because I had just spent the previous two hours in the Museum of London's Roman Gallery. The museum itself is located next to the remains of London's Roman wall, not far from where what is being called "the Pompeii of the north" was found.

That's the thing about living in a land that has been heavily populated by humans for thousands of years...the past feels closer than it does in the New World; there is a sense of continuity, and a physical reality of layers upon layers. 

(North America has been inhabited by people for thousands of years, too, of course, and they honored many places as sacred, but built very little.)  

In London, one can look at one's environment and see the built evidence of past centuries. Sometimes I feel like I'm walking around inside an enormous movie set, but it's real. History feels solid, material, instead of an being an abstraction, the way it does in areas where signs of ancient human habitation are rare or non-existent.

Combine all this with the exhibition on Pompeii at the British Museum, and it's an especially good time to be in London for history geeks.

*Including an amulet made of bone that features a phallus on one end and a hand making an obscene gesture on the other end. Both of these symbols were seen as good luck, according to the archaeologists. Oddly endearing, in a lowest common denominator sort of way....