British Cruise.. another restart...

 

 

Greenwich & Canterbury were next destinations by the calendar, which I will continue to use as a spinal reference of time & place, while I reserve my creative proclivities to wander in some subjective, sometimes more contemplative, fertile, even if imaginary, parts of my own travelogue. Hopefully we'll all find a good cruise in the process!

Because time is one of my big bugaboos, Greenwich seems to be pretty much be "ground zero" for what I might consider many "crimes of the clock"! Such uncomplimentary comment is overstatement, but I'd be bereft without some place of focus for the construct of my frustrations. I'm simply more content to live in the present than to be in timing & future-planning mode... while also appreciating the scheduled timing bits... when they arrive in the present. Thus I get, by a bit of cheating, to the same joys & complaints everyone has about time... being "under the gun" of the clock. That's what I mean to suggest as a crime to my preference for taking a slower... more "civilized" pace... too valuable to be squandered with the time it takes to fully be me.   

Curiously, I felt content in Greenwich (London), the place where stands the now rather quaint observatory which functions as the center point of a world-wide construct, framing & running nearly everyone & everything now digitized into nanoseconds. [Nanoseconds X times-multiplied by infinity!] The place is a peaceful park... a surrounding garden for The Queen's Palace. 

 

The observatory sits on a rather subtle rise, seen between the two center columns (in this photo) of that  four-square, rather "Palladian" design by Inigo Jones, who was also an astronomer... as was Christopher Wren, the architect responsible for this historic royal complex from 17th century London, after the great fire. Many architects were polymaths: scientists, inventers, collectors, designers & builders in those times.

I'll go back (and forward--Dover was our next stop) to Canterbury to tell a story of my lagging behind Stephen & Mark as we approached the entrance of the cathedral with my camera dancing clumsily with my walking stick as I tried to capture these photos of the carvings on surrounding the portal... without enough hands to manage my devices.  I lost sight of my companions. When I managed to safely enter the shade & allowed my eyes to slowly adjust I became distracted & amazed by the light in the huge, graceful fan-vaulted volume of space holding its deep breath of ancient air. 

 This Cathedral let me play in several ways with Chaucer's Tales of personages-on-pilgrimage. I could begin to populate & add characters for some of the stories as I could see how the wear & abrasion of soles could sand divots into stone steps. 

I've long lived my own version of playing "monk" as part of my own consciousness during the quiet hours of contemplative work in my studio... perhaps echoing a distant past life of mine, working in a scriptorium illuminating manuscripts. Probably such quiet monk feet did not create the divots worn & sanded in steps & stairs so much as the rough footwear of weary pilgrims. But to see that unintentional sculpting there is to appreciate time in a viscerally visual manner.

The primary moral of Chaucer's "The Monk's Tale" is the fickleness of fortune and the inevitability of fate.

Because walking was a large & mostly welcome part of many days in this travel, my feet met many beautiful cobblestone streets & simply ancient, uneven pavements. I loved the exercise, even as I respected my need to be careful & cautious.  I have for some years habitually used a stick as tool & prop, playing-out my own version of being a flaneur, which is a notion I also love & embrace.

I've needed to attempt numerous gentle lessons & reminders with Stephen about his saying "look at that"...  pointing vaguely upward... while I am needing to concentrate on my footing with my evermore complicated eyesight. We gradually are teach/learning together the advantageous limitations of our evolving ages. 

I must now confess that I enjoy traveling the retrospective musings after coming home almost more than the mileage on foot...

He did not need to prompt me to "look up" once I passed through the doors of Canterbury Cathedral. The volume of space sucked my attention into full expansion.

Its precision of fan-vaulting moves so simply & smoothly skyward.

A very different geometry ruled the floor. Was this the beginning of my fascination with cathedral floors in the previous post?

 

 

In that moment, finding myself moving along alone, I simply began following my architectural curiosity, keeping only half an eye out for Mark & Stephen, exploring space after spaces: quire after side chapel; expansion after expansion; more expansions to accommodate more chapels -- all built with income from centuries of pilgrims' gifts honoring their pilgrimage to Becket's marterdom. Many steps accruing as the building grew to climb the gentle slope it occupied... at the top I turned 'round to began the return... when we found each other... they having been taken up with a useful docent's stories, making their own pilgrimage to match mine. Huzzah! 

Long ago in our travels Stephen & I came to appreciate being comfortable welcoming such bits of independence as we move around individually, experiencing differently... using our separate lenses to enrich our shared adventures.

Mark wanted to see Scottish castles, so this Beaumaris Castle in Holyhead, Wales was a rather handsome & concise preview -- having a moat & drawbridge before the gate with slots for a portcullis (now gone) as part of its defensive design, as well as crenelated walls & towers which were never actually finished. What great set-piece for one's imaginations! 

A different bit of engineering presented itself in the form of hydraulic stanchions dropping below the pavement (in Canterbury) to allow vehicle passage into a restricted area, when operated remotely by an authorized vehicle, before raising again into function afterward. Shades of quite a different version of the function of an ancient castle's draw-bridge?      

At the port in Edinburgh I took a quick education by close visual inspection as to the size of & strength of the wind turbines ready to be shipped to their sites, assembled & put to work. All along these coast lines we saw an abundance of such forward thinking...  by the time we reached Norway the boast topped out at a 100% power grid of renewable energy.... funded in part by their exports of abundant North Sea oil. Our country, even with our own abundance of oil & gas certainly lags severely behind in such competition!

The turbines are mammoth machines, built (in China) to be sleek... often more beautiful, I believe, than all the Interstate highway concrete infrastructure we all live with in order to transport goods & gasoline.

 

This technology seems to be another version of strong national defense -- that of protecting our planet with smarter use of renewable energy sources. A castle gate of another sort...

 

 I have few qualms about the visuals of the landscape...  although I also acknowledge our further need to make windmills safer for birds! All systems need constant tweaking to finesse function...

 'That vigilance & patience can fuse into true progress, I believe.