11 September 2001: The British Museum

(I have no idea why some links to the British Museum work and some don't. I am working on it.)

More breakfast. No more postcard-writing, as I had no labels. Mmm, breakfast. We arrived at the British Museum just as it opened, and we stayed until it closed. From the journal:

Awe. Unbelievable. RDC just skedaddled back to the hotel for his camera, and I am sitting on a bench in the middle of Egypt. To get here, I crossed through the Parthenon, or what looked like it to me. When I entered the Great Court from the lobby, I gasped, having never before seen anything so breathtakingly beautiful in its simplicity and grandeur. All white marble, under a glassed roof, the square marble museum bounding the perimeter and the great round column of the reading room in the middle.

Our first destination was ancient Egypt. From there, we went to Roman and medieval Britain.

Yesterday at Westminster I expected something that didn't happen, even when I saw Elizabeth I's tomb and Mary Stuart's. It almost happened when RDC said, "Here's Chaucer behind you." It did happen just now: goosebumps. I have just seen the Rosetta Stone.

A family of lions. (Probably not, but that's what I like to call them.) Aha, they're not at all. They're statues of Sekhmet, a goddess "associated with destruction. According to myth, she was the fiery eye of Re, which he sent against his enemies. In this form she also appeared as the cobra on the brow of the king, rearing to protect him. Her name means 'she who is powerful'. She is represented as a lioness-headed woman, perhaps because the Egyptians observed that it is the female lion who is the hunter."

Also a ram, with a human figure (a shabti?) between its knees, with falcons for company.

Sutton Hoo. Roman Britain loot, amethyst beads, possibly Egyptian via Italy. The original helmet and a reconstruction. The Franks Casket, OMFB. A pair of confronted griffins that look like they're playing soccer. A long, sharp, curved bit of keratin that people thought was the claw of a griffin but actually is only the horn of an ibex (poor ibex).

An oil lamp with dolphins and a lion combined my favorite animals.

After Britain, Greece.

All day I took pictures of lions, dolphins, rabbits, and cool birds. And speaking of favorite animals, this lion, this lion, was my absolute favorite. I've been wanting some windchimes. Perhaps this model is available? The bells attached to the the lion's paws don't make me cringe, but that front one dangling from what looks to my ignorant eye like a Prince Albert, ow. Just ow. Ooo, it has a double Prince Albert. Great. Well, perhaps those cool wings distract it from what must be constant pain.

I'm fairly sure penguins were unknown in Europe whenever this little dude wsa carved or fired. But doesn't it look like a penguin? Maybe it was a puffin.

The sign said these were eagles and hares. I myself can't distinguish between hares and rabbits, so this counted double.

And I wasn't writing as much as I ought to, and the British Museum doesn't include everything in its search function, because I cannot discover what my little krakens' purpose was. The left one looks remotely equine, but sea monsters are often depicted with horse-ish heads, aren't they? And the right one is absolutely a sea monster. So they're kraken, and so say I. Ah, I did write it down. They're shaft-ends, whatever that means. Bronze. Etruscan.

While I took pictures of cool critters, RDC's eye was caught by anything blue. Things ought to be blue in his world. When he bought the digital wallet, I was really surprised he didn't hold out for the (out-of-stock, more expensive) blue one. Also, he doesn't have one of those Blueberry things yet, whatever those are.

These cameos were fantastic. Real cameo made of layered stone, and there were black glass vases with white glass fired onto it and then carved away, for a cameo effect. The detail in the leaves enchants me, and how the artist conveys the shadowy underside of the cape by leaving the thinnest layer of white....And a vase called the Portland vase, called cobalt but looking more black to me, absolutely exquisite.

I didn't think of it until we reached the Greek section of pottery and sculpture, but then I realized what I was feeling. Part of the sensation was awe, all of these objects and the ideas that created them founding my culture. Part of it was conscious: I am in London, I am in the British Museum, and this is what I am seeing. But I cannot doubt that on some level was I was perceiving was Dust.

All of these objects, flooded with the concentrated focus of human intelligence and consciousness. Reaching out a hand to a sculpture, I felt its age in something like a heat against my palm. It was magic.

We saw black- and red-figured pottery, we saw statues of gods and philosophers and patricians.

And then I turned a corner.

I had seen caryatids and pottery and lion-phallus windchimes. I had seen the Rosetta Stone. And then I turned a corner and I saw an entire temple. The left picture isn't so wonderful, but turning the corner to be confronted with that was the nth time the museum had made me caught my breath--the Great Court, the Rosetta Stone, the Franks Casket, the Sutton Hoo bits and pieces, the Dust, and now this, a Lykian temple.

And I still didn't know what the Elgin marbles were. Everyone had said, "Go see the Elgin marbles" and I was all "Fine, fine, sure," but no one had told me exactly what these particular marbles were. I've seen a lot of sculpture, and these are special why?

Such a stupid question.

The Elgin marbles, for anyone planning a trip to the British Museum who otherwise might give them a miss, OMFB, are bits of the Parthenon.

So when I saw the Great Court and I thought "Parthenon" because of white marble and simplicity and grandeur and wow, was that the Parthenon? No. And when I turned the corner and got the Lykian temple in the eye, was that the Parthenon? No.

Of course, neither are the Elgin marbles the Parthenon, but they are part of it. The 40-foot statue of Athena in gold and ivory was long gone by the seventeenth century, when occupying Turkish forces decided that the Parthenon, as a large building on top of oh, some high hill they've got in Athens, would be a fine place to store their gunpowder.

Somewhat luckily, less than 30 years before someone had drawn the entire Parthenon, much of whose sculpture was still intact. The friezes, a fraction of which is on the left, stretched around all four sides, starting from the southwest corner and proceeding around a long then a short side and a short side then a long side to the opposite corner, where the rows of cavalry, infantry, pedestrians, and sacrificial beasts meet all the gods in the northeast corner. The room in which these pieces--rubble--are displayed is maybe 50 by 300, and bits of frieze (over the inner set of columns) line the long walls. Metopes (on columns on the outside of the temple) and the in-the-round sculpture (in the gables) are on the short ends. (Lord Elgin, the Brit who pinched them, left Greece some for its own.)

What I really like about the gable bit to the right is how the sculptor used the sharp angle of the gable in his representation. On the left, Helios rises from the ocean (even though the backs of these figures faced the wall of the gable, they're fully detailed). His neck and right arm survive, and one of his four horses. They are rising from the sea, so for there to be only an acute angle of horses and god makes sense.

(Trivial memory: immediately after I graduated from UConn (the second time), I cleaned houses until I landed a real job (ahem). One of my first victims was a UConn professor husband/ Eastern professor wife. I admired a wood sculpture in their living room when I was having the tour and the professor told me it was Zeus and Hera, and continued to tell me that Zeus was the king of the Greek gods. Oh really? But then, he was a history professor, and moreover, he was the head of the department, and I was a history major (the first time around) and now four years later was cleaning houses, so perhaps his assuming I was a complete ignoramus was justified.)

We spent easily an hour and a half just in this area. We got the audio tours (free again) and learned about the low relief, high relief, and in-the-round sculptures. We learned how the sculptures represented depth--say, ten cavalrymen abreast--in a three-dimensional space no deeper than how much the right horse's head, above, emerges from its two-dimensional plane. We listened to the speculation about the significance of other representations. Wow.

After seeing remnants of the Parthenon, the rest of the museum failed to be an anticlimax. Or I should say, the rest of the museum that we saw. It's vast, and we had to give entire continents and cultures a miss. But we saw this great babboon. We saw winged lions with the bearded heads of men. With five legs, a detail that escaped me until this moment. We saw mummies and shabti and jars shaped like different critters to store your guts in. We missed the hawk-headed sphinx, though. Poop. I would have liked that. We did see Venus bathing (luckily she's not as modest as Artemis).

Another painful decision was to give the British Library a miss. I had wanted to see the Beowulf manuscript. But the Library is not immediately next to the Museum as I'd thought, and I didn't know whether the ms was on public display, and we got much more from our limited time staying where we were. Another reason I was content to give it a miss is that one of my motivations was to see where Roland Mitchell sits in the opening scene of Possession. Which, looking, I see happens in the London Library, which we should have gone to, if we were going, the day before. But I wasn't going to drag RDC around to my favorite book sites. Not this time. Even though I had had a very small cow that morning when I found Oakley Street on a map.

Gracechurch Street, where Elizabeth Bennet's relatives live in Pride and Prejudice, is one thing. But Oakley Street, where Penelope lived, is an entirely different story. Literally: it's in The Shell-Seekers. But I would love to see what sort of street it is, what sort of houses are in it. I had thought that Rosamund Pilcher had made up the name. I should read more maps.

The Reading Room in the British Museum is stunning, breath-taking, humbling. You want to sit down and read everything and then write it. From the air, you get an idea of its size, but not of its beauty. We got to experience some of St. Paul's Cathedral's Whispering Gallery effect, because the guards--kind of like the guards in "Seven"--stood about chatting despite signs asking for silence and we could hear them everywhere. I touched lecterns where Marx and others sat studying when the coal-sodden air of London allowed enough daylight through for anyone to read. I saw the bristly pads into which the ink from many someones' pens dripped.

---

We had leisurely cups of espresso and tea before our world changed. We split a slice of chocolate cake. We walked the few blocks back to our hotel to freshen up for dinner, and while RDC fussed with the digital wallet, I turned on the television, because the message light was flashing. It was a message that the hotel's phone system would be down for a few hours that day. After I canceled (note U.S. spelling with one l) that message, the next thing to flash on the screen was an emergency number for U.S. citizens. I managed not to think anything of that either and fumbled through the on-screen menus to get to actual television and CNN, because that's what I do when I'm on vacation.

The first thing I saw was the title: "Attack on America." Even then, I was reading before processing images, and for an instant I thought of the media's tendency toward hyperbole. Then the images struck me, smoke against a clear blue sky, and the scrolling subtitles sorted themselves out in my hindbrain. Speechless, I whacked RDC on the back, willing him to turn around. He turned. And we watched, and learned, while believing took longer. It was 1:30 in New York when we began to watch, so all the attacks that were going to happen had happened, and the Twin Towers had collapsed. And planes were grounded. And his security would not say where the president was. And people were dead.

We immediately began to try to call our families, but my sister got a line through first. At 7:00 that morning, Nisou had called to set up plans for meeting in Paris on Friday, which is how I learned that the phone number I included in the itinerary I had sent to Haitch, Nisou, and my sister was wrong. I am so very glad I didn't send it to my mother as she had asked, because if she had tried to call the number and been unable to get through, she would have been scared witless. My sister, being wired, was able to find the hotel online and get a real number, just as Nisou had done hours before. So the phone rang, and I answered it, and my sister exclaimed, "Jwaäs!" and I began to breathe again myself, because I knew she had a week off and I wouldn't've put it past her to nip off to Los Angeles for a few days, not that she has ever expressed an interest in going there. After establishing that we were each okay and that she would call our parents--I gave her DMB's numbers too--she told me, "Look, you're there, this has happened, but you're there. Go out."

Only a few doors down the street was an Indian restaurant, not the one SPM recommended but still quite good, with food RDC said was spectacular. All I knew was that I was past eating. We played with our food and received sympathetic looks from people who heard our accents. Back at the hotel, we did what we haven't done in years, which is to fall asleep in bed with the television on.