Time Travelling in the British Museum

Tags

British Museum, Marty McFly, ozymandias, percy bysshe shelley, Thomas Hardy, time travel

Pictures and Poems :  Volume 9

In the British Museum by Thomas Hardy

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

When we were at junior school we had history books that asked us to pretend to be time travellers. We were invisible and unable to interact with the travelled-to-world. It worked well. I enjoyed making the imaginary leap. I’ve just been listening to Brian Cox explaining how forward time travel is possible (and once we’ve built rockets that can get close to the speed of light we can really start motoring). It would be one way so no coming back to cash in on what we learnt. I think I’d pass. I’ve spent most of my life travelling through time using books and buildings as my vehicles of choice. They work remarkably well. Unlike HG Wells’ Time Traveller or Marty McFly, I can be in several different zones simultaneously without much danger of committing an act that makes my existence impossible and causing a vortex in the space time continuum.

Old churches do it for me, from the humblest chapels to the mighty minsters. I like to sit and smell the wood and ancient stones and contemplate and sometimes pray, and often I can feel either the sense or presence of those who also sat and thought of time and the apostle Paul a century or two before. Not ghosts. Nothing physical or supernatural. Just ideas. But real. Real at least in idea form, and that’s a sort of reality.I get it in galleries. I’m standing – me, yes me! – in the self same spot that Turner stood with brush in hand. Those are the marks he made. He’s present as much as I am. More so in some ways. In books the writer is with me, in the self-same room. I hear their voice. And the characters, the locations. Hardy doesn’t describe Egdon Heath to me, or Mellstock Church, he takes me there. I hear Clym Yeobright preaching or the hymns sung by the choir.

I don’t care to travel beyond my own country. I thought I would when time and funds were there but I don’t. Modern transport doesn’t appeal and I find plenty to interest me within an hour or two of home. And when I take the train to London I don’t get far from St Pancras where my two favourite buildings are: the British Library and the British Museum. The library an endless source of inspiration and reference but the museum sends me travelling like a temporal astronaut.

I lose all sense of time in there.  I feel connected to everything  both now and then. I’m in Bloomsbury in 2017 and Athens in 483 BC. I move along though Babylon, Egypt, Rome. I’m there (to a greater or lesser extent with each object) and the masons/carvers/sculptors are here. They are present in their work. ‘Look on my works  ye tourists and say, “Wow! This is amazing!”‘

What time is it Dr Wolf? What time is it among the Elgin Marbles? Is it 5th century BC and the world that carved them and placed them on Parthanon pediments? Is it the early years of the nineteenth century as they are removed from the temple and shipped to Britain? Is it 1817 and they are on display? Is it now, the very present moment as I stand and gaze in troubled awe? Is it even earlier in time or legend when Lapiths fought Centaurs? And it is all of these, and more.Poets have been drawn to this national treasure house. They’ve shared the feelings of wonder and doubts that question the presence of artefacts from other cultures, countries and civilisations sitting (beautifully safe, conserved and respected) in a country much further to the north. And they time travel too.

I’ve chosen just two; Thomas Hardy and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Between them they cover a range of thought and time but share a sense of awe and wonder.

In his poem Hardy creates (and partly adopts the persona of) a rustic some decades before his (Hardy’s) own time and places him in front of sculptures taken from Areopagus and sees only ‘ashen blankness’; a time stained stone from the base of a pillar. There’s a dialogue going on in the poem. Is there someone else in the museum with our rustic labourer? Maybe? Or maybe the dialogue is between an imaginary labourer around 1817 and the poet many years later. So we have a dislocation in time. At least two time zones. Add in ourself, in the present as we read, and we have three – all simultaneous. At which point the antiquity of the stone comes into focus. Not just from Ancient Greece but from Areopagus; a mighty rock in ancient Athens. And the rustic knows of the teachings of the apostle Paul; that he gave a sermon from the Areopagus and he knows it well. So well that it has a great significance for him.  We can now add the time zone of Paul; a very specific time when he said that God does not live in objects made by man. Where has the rustic labourer learnt of Paul? The likely answer is either church or school. Or both. Many characters in Hardy’s works take church going and the lessons from the bible seriously which provides support for the church theory. Thus we have our labourer on a Wessex pew listening to the scriptures and transferring this knowledge to an ancient object before him in the museum and bringing them both alive. In a few lines of simple and apparently rational verse Hardy has got us travelling through time like a ball bearing in a pinball machine. And yet the poem seemingly follows a straightforward beginning, middle, end, straight line.

There are many reasons for loving the poem. Many perhaps more important than this. But existing in different moments  simultaneously is an idea that appeals to me almost as much as Hardy’s revolutionary idea, in 1893, of having a working man enter the glorious portals of the British Museum to have a look. And significantly, to respect his thoughts.

In the British Museum

‘What do you see in that time-touched stone,
When nothing is there
But ashen blankness, although you give it
A rigid stare?

‘You look not quite as if you saw,
But as if you heard,
Parting your lips, and treading softly
As mouse or bird.‘It is only the base of a pillar, they’ll tell you,
That came to us
From a far old hill men used to name
Areopagus.’I know no art, and I only view
A stone from a wall,
But I am thinking that stone has echoed
The voice of Paul,‘Paul as he stood and preached beside it
Facing the crowd,
A small gaunt figure with wasted features,
Calling out loud‘Words that in all their intimate accents
Pattered upon
That marble front, and were far reflected,
And then were gone.

‘I’m a labouring man, and know but little,
Or nothing at all;
But I can’t help thinking that stone once echoed
The voice of Paul.’

by Thomas Hardy

My second British Museum poem is one of the most requested on Radio 4’s Poetry Please. Ozymandias is  widely studied and loved by students and non students alike.

If anything the time zones and scales in this poem are even more complex. Here is a poem written about an object in the museum that was still on board ship bound for England when the poem was written. Thus the poem already (without making it obvious) extended into an unknown future as it left the poet’s pen. The past includes the following separate periods of time (and the list is by no means complete) : the discovery of the broken statue (widely believed to be The Younger Memnon statue of Ramesses II)* as a historic fact, the poet’s version of the discovery (including a fictional traveller from an antique land), the thousands of years that it remained undiscovered, the parts of the statue that remain lost in real life, the vast and trunkless legs of stone from the poem, the period of time when the statue was originally on public view, the carving of the statue, the reign of the semi-fictional king, Ozymandias and the reign of the actual king, Ramesses. Oh then there is the modern reader reading the poem in the present, the modern reader contemplating the poem later on over a cup of coffee and even the modern visitor to the British Museum doing what I did and standing before the very statue and reading the poem (which is conveniently included in the information plaque to one side). And I did say “Wow!” …several times.

 

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

 Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

 

 

 

• * My photograph is not of the Young Memnon statue. I was so taken by suddenly being confronted by Ozymandias that I forgot to take the picture and I didn’t want to break from my rule of only using my own photographs in these posts.

Day 227: Reading My Way Out

Tags

Dickens, Franz Kafka, George Shearing, Jack Kerouac, Jane Austen, Kafka, Lorna Doone, Shakespeare, The Catcher in the Rye, Thomas Hardy, Tom Sawyer, Tom Sharpe, Victor Hugo, William Boyd

Mostly concerning Books

I left school a terrible dunce. I got good grades in English and English Literature though. Partly down to a good teacher or two and partly down to the fact that I’d discovered the pleasures of reading at an early age. I just hadn’t discovered that many good books.

My mother read but I can’t recall a single conversation with her about the books she read. My father wasn’t a reader. He claimed to have only read one book and that it was green. At other times he’d claim his sole literary achievement was Lorna Doone. There was a flaw in the believability of his claim. He was just too good at quizzes. He could identify any Shakespeare play or Dickens’ character from the tiniest quote. He could manage most of Henry the Fifth’s St Crispin’s Day speech and was apt to confuse Polonius’ advice to Laertes with his own fatherly advice to his three boys.

Some time after leaving home I took him on a walking holiday in Swaledale and we spent several days recalling his Yorkshire childhood over fells, camp fires and pints of beer. He’d excelled at school but left at fourteen to learn a trade. Sport consumed most of his spare time but one day his bicycle hit a car sending him spiralling over the handlebars and going an awful long way to putting an end to himself, and by logical progression, an end to me as well.

Toothless from that day on, his recovery was slow, painful and boring enough to necessitate the drastic action of actually reading a book. In fact during the eight weeks he was laid up he read his way through the complete works of both Dickens and Shakespeare which constituted the entire library of his and his friends houses. A near photographic memory held onto an awful lot of those works until Alzeimer’s wrought its cruelty.

After that he read the occasional book on engineering or biography of a favourite rugby player. His stock of literature was from those two teenaged months. Oh, and he was a devoted reader of a decent newspaper throughout his life.

I’d been lucky. A primary school teacher read us some Victor Hugo. I’d come across Tom Sawyer through a children’s television version and had had to study Henry the Fourth part One and To Kill a Mockingbird for O level. It wasn’t very much in numerical terms but it was quite something as a set of keys to explore books from. A girl I knew gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and I read it cover to cover and thought it the most wonderful book imaginable. I’m still fond of it but it’s slipped down a peg or two in my rating over the years. Once I’d enthused about it, she gave me Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Suddenly I wasn’t  an unqualified school-leaver but a rebel without a cause, a ‘beat’ off in search of George Shearing’s piano playing. I never got far with the search, forgot about the teenage anxt and search for the freedom of travelling for a while. I was too busy making very little money doing dead end jobs Monday to Friday and spending the surplus in Huddersfield pubs on Friday and Saturday. I did continue to read though.

I took an unlikely liking to Jane Austen and would sneak off for a toilet break with a copy of Emma in my warehouse coat pocket. When working for a bus company I’d travel to work while poring over the pages of Thomas Hardy while my fellow travellers digested the Daily Mirror and reached for a packet of Embassy for the first good cough of the day. Strange to think that people used to smoke on buses.

It was while serving petrol at a Leeds Road filling station that I encountered Franz Kafka. There was something quite fitting in his terrible tales of injustice and imprisonment either in a labyrinthine legal process or in the body of a beetle while I was trapped in a job that offered mindless subservience, repetition and a frightening level of urban pollution (my neighbours were a major trunk road, a huge chemical works and a dye works based on the Silesian model.)

Once I’d graduated to being a caretaker at Huddersfield Polytechnic I had access  to a phenomenal library (it may not compare with the great libraries of the world but it was twenty times the size of any library I had ever seen). Also I had the brains of the lecturers to pick and that led onto my own discovery of Dickens. I mostly worked an 8-4 shift but would vary this with what were known as “earlies” and “afters”. I liked “afters”. I didn’t finish until 10.30 but from six o’clock onwards there was the occasional door to open or lock and several hours of undisturbed reading. It wasn’t unknown for late working fellows to pop in to see me with a bundle of suggested titles. I think I became something of a pet project for them. Let’s get the caretaker into College.

It couldn’t last. I detoured into Stoke and found that the worst part of production line work is that you simply cannot read. I was cheerful and chatty on the shop floor where time dragged like a penance. In the canteen I was left quietly in a corner where I discovered that the terrible grind of mindless work in the Potteries had given Arnold Bennett the material for some of the greatest books in the language.

I couldn’t take more than a few months of that and found a job up in North Yorkshire as a relief warden for the Youth Hostel Association. It was perfect. Half the time I was posted to big hostels where the staff were fantastic company. The other half found me looking after tiny out of the way buildings. I read and read. In Haworth I was the only person I knew who had read any Brontë novel, let alone most of them. In Selby I devoured Trilby and William Boyd and Tom Sharpe. In Malton I read Patrick White and Emile Zola. In York I forgot about books and went skating on the frozen river.

It had all been leading up to returning to full time education. I felt a huge need to be among people who read, and was lucky to end up in Manchester. There the student age was older. There were quite a number of us who wanted to find out those things we’d missed out on when we were at school, and were determined not to waste the opportunity. (We were also there to down a few pints courtesy of a grant provided by the British tax payer (a debt I believe I have now repaid though my own contributions to the exchequer)).

I left school at sixteen something of a dunce; few qualifications, little ambition and no drive. The only thing I had going for me was a love of reading. I read voraciously and every one of those books was a rung on the ladder from doing what I was told to do, to doing what I wanted to do. And what I want to do is read.

Day 105: Curiouser and Curater

Tags

Amy Winehouse, Aysgarth Falls, Charles Dickens, Chris Bonnington, Garry Schofield, Kettlewell, Michael Grandage, Renaissance, River Ure, Sky News, Starbotton, Thomas Hardy, Yorkshire Dales

A Cycle on the Celtic Fringe … Part 15

 

The senior wardens were away on holiday when I arrived in Kettlewell in the late summer of 1982. That’s why the Yorkshire region employed a peripatetic warden and how I came to spend two years exploring the county in a way that gave me greater access and greater insights than all but the very privileged. I’d met Graham at meetings and functions and would have enjoyed his company and local knowledge. He was, and still is I believe, a funny, cheerful and immensely competent man with a big Chris Bonnington beard. Hostel legend had it that the money earned from wardening was surplus to requirements and went into a retirement fund. His wife lived on site but worked as a nurse. Most of these legends are started by the jealous and the mean spirited. I hope this one was true. This couple deserved to be a few zeros ahead on their bank statements and the griping, green eyed sloths who made spiteful comments about others’ financial ease deserve stomach cramps and isolation.

I was greeted by their assistant who, again I’m relying on a thirty year memory, I believe was called John. He was perfectly capable of looking after the place himself without importing me from Malton, but he didn’t live on site and hostel rules require somebody to be there at all times that there are guests on the premises. John had a wife and baby daughter, was training for the church and lived in a cottage in the delightfully named Starbotton. He was determined to save what money he could by cycling to work each day and going without beer. He was spectacularly unsuccessful in both aims during my time there, and I’m taking neither credit nor blame. For a future minister of the church he was well versed in the concept of will power and the lack of it.

I arrived half way through preparations for an evening meal for thirty. Once the main bulk of the meal was done and things that required prepping were prepped and things that needed to be in the ovens were in the ovens, he told me to “Take the first shift.” and recommended the Blue Bell.

“Do we make food for the pubs as well?” I asked.

“No, you take the first shift down the pub. Get some neck oil and I’ll have a couple once we’ve served the main course.”

It was the first time I’d heard the euphemism – neck oil – but it wasn’t the last time that week.

Neither of us had a great deal to drink but there was a relaxed regime that spurned set duties, set times, rules for rules sake. A couple of beers didn’t upset the smooth running of what was one of the friendliest of all the Dales hostels.

At the Blue Bell the landlord’s son is home from university, is helping out and is giving the best demonstration of the art of the barman that I have seen outside specialist cocktail bars. It’s busy but no-one is neglected for more than seconds and everyone is served perfectly poured drinks. In a world where you’re never far away from someone moaning about why they can’t do their job properly, it was a treat and a lesson to see someone so pleasantly and competently in command of his work. The beer in the cellar barrels was well kept but was given something extra by the way it was pulled. Wine bottles were opened with a waiter’s friend (wine was still a rare request in English pubs at that time and was often served from boxes rather than bottles. When it was served from bottles the barman usually struggled with one of those awkward corkscrews with levers. To see dextrous use of a waiter’s friend impressed me greatly) and given time to breathe a little before glugging into sparkling glasses. Even spirits were made attractive under his expert touch.

I have always enjoyed watching jobs done by people who really know what they are doing; Garry Schofield playing rugby, Jon Seal teaching an English lesson, Michael Grandage directing actors, Andy Kempe showing drama teachers how to do it, the music director of the RSC getting 50 tone deaf teachers on a course to sing Renaissance madrigals in less than an hour. This young man was in that class and I think I was the only one in the pub who was aware of it.

I dozed on the bed for an hour listening to the stream flowing under my window. It didn’t add up to £65 but it helped. I made tea and ate my second successive supper of oatcake biscuits, cheese and apples. I walked around the village and took strolls both up stream and down before returning to my room. The bar was filling up but bar rooms no longer hold much appeal for me. I spent thirty years looking for the perfect bar, failed to find it and now have greater success in the search inside the pages of Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. Tonight I continue reading The Old Wives Tale and drift off to sleep to the gentle babblings of the rill before nine o’clock. I sleep exactly eight hours and awake refreshed and hungry.

It’s a traditional country inn in the middle of the dales so the breakfast is served in the bar with Sky News dominating on a giant plasma screen. A gunman has been shooting teenagers in Norway and Amy Winehouse has been found dead. I’d regretted the television but it’s quite a news day and it has my attention.

I have a big bowl of cereal which look a bit like cornflakes but aren’t, a glass of juice and a decent full English. The landlord looks a bit like Eamon Holmes and wants to have his chance to comment on current affairs. I find it possible to not disagree with him in the fifteen minutes it takes to get through the meal. I’d have lingered over the bacon had it not come with a side order of casual bigotry. By 9.15 I’m pedalling the stiffness out of my legs and passing through Starbotton. It isn’t anything like I’d preserved it in memory. I wonder where John is now and pedal on.

I find the room key in my back pocket and determine to post it back or send it by anyone who is Kettlewell bound when Eamon himself pulls up and relieves me of the burden.

At Buckden I have a choice; the long way round taking in Aysgarth Falls on the River Ure in Wensleydale or over one of the great climbing roads in Britain. If I’d got my cycling legs with me there would be no competition. I haven’t but I take the mountain road anyway. As I pass a farm, two teenage farm boys ask if I’m heading to Hawes. I puff and pant in the affirmative. They smile at each other conspiratorially and merely call out, “Good Luck!”