So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu

This is not an easy post to write, which is why I have been putting off writing it since January.  I had always vowed that, if I decided to put Hints to Lady Travellers into mothballs, I would do it cleanly, not just disappear and not post anything for five months.  Hmm.

This blog gave me a sense of purpose at a time in my life when (confronted by so many possibilities) I often felt adrift.  Documenting my travels, from London, to Cape Town, to Melbourne, and back to Dublin, helped me to make sense of the other, inner journey I was on.  Blogging about the people, the experiences, the friends I made, the nephews I gained, helped me to develop my own voice as a writer.

But while, for several years, Lady Traveller was my main role, my vocation and avocation all rolled into one, more recently the demands of my job, plus my changing circumstances (homeowner!) have conflicted with the demands of the blog.

And so I have decided to say, perhaps not goodbye completely, but goodbye for now.  I will still continue to read about lady travellers, to keep the lady traveller spirit alive in my own doings, to visit islands, to seek out strange museums - and encourage others to do the same.

I can't think of a better way to end this interlude than with these words by the Greek poet Cavafy, via The Poetry Foundation:

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Windswept West Coast

This is what a beach on the west coast of Jutland looks like in November.  (Jutland is the furthest west of the many islands comprising Denmark.) You'll have to imagine the wind.

I felt this was a palette I understood: grey skies, wind bleached sea grass, grey sea.

This is a fishing village perched between the beach and the fjord - even more windswept, if that's possible, since it gets the wind from both the west and the east.

I appreciated the attempts at brightening up the landscape.

I liked the Danish flags adorning many of the buildings.

But most of all I liked the beach.

Poppies Revisited

I went back to the Tower of London this week to revisit the poppies.  I went for a few reasons.  First, because I wanted to see how the installation had grown since I last saw it. Second, because the poppies have become a realio, trulio PHENOMENON of their own.  Everyone, from the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones (‘prettified’, ‘toothless', ‘inward looking’), to Boris Johnston (‘awe-inspiring’, ‘global visitor attraction’) has weighed in and every day, crowds of people stream across Tower Bridge and round Tower Hill to see for themselves.

The sea of poppies has indeed grown since September, and the poppies almost fill the space between the Tower’s outer perimeter and the main wall.  I was struck by how well the installation works as a visual statement: the sweep of vivid colour against the monochromatic stone draws your gaze.  It’s simple, powerful, and – crucially – looks amazing in photos.  But while simple, the installation isn’t simplistic and it’s doing it a disservice to suggest the poppies have been popular because they appeal to the lowest common denominator. Every time I look at this flood of red I remember the title of the work: ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’.  From a distance, it does almost look like the Tower is surrounded by a blood-filled moat. 

I think, too, that we are always moved when we see evidence of war narratives being shown to be composed of individual stories: a poppy for every dead soldier.  That said, the effect of this is, for me, diluted by the fact that the poppies do produce something of the effect of military graveyards: all those serried ranks of identical white crosses, all those identical red poppies.

I think Jonathan Jones made a valid point that a fitting testimony to the dead of World War I would represent all of the soldiers who died – not just the British combatants.  But that memorial would have looked very different.  Because what struck me as I walked across Tower Bridge this week is that almost every person was wearing a poppy pinned to their coat.  It is a quintessentially British symbol and this is a quintessentially British memorial. 

Given my general pro-poppy stance, you might be wondering if I’m also wearing a poppy this November.  I did consider it.  I thought that maybe in what politicians like to call the new era of British-Irish relations I could embrace a symbol that has a difficult and unhappy history in my homeland.  I thought that wearing the poppy might be a way of honouring my Great-Uncle Jim, who served in the Royal Artillery and died in Northern France in 1917.  I remembered my ‘your people shall be my people’ approach to ANZAC Day.  In the end, I decided it still doesn’t feel right for me.  But, on Sunday, the Irish Ambassador will lay a wreath on the cenotaph in Whitehall as part of the Remembrance Day service.  And that feels right.

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UPDATED TO ADD: even as I wrote about the Irish Ambassador taking part in the Remembrance Sunday service, I wondered whether I was right about him laying a wreath of poppies.  I was not.  In fact he laid a wreath of green leaves.  http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/irish-ambassador-lays-wreath-at-london-ceremony-1.1994009 

Becoming a Bird

The Treachery of Sanctuary is an interactive installation by Chris Milk that combines motion capture and projection to create a sophisticated but beautifully intuitive update on shadow puppetry.

Stand in front of the triptych of screens and, as you watch, your shadow transforms into a great bird, gaining huge, Angel-of-Death like wings that respond to your every motion.

It's part mesmerising, part terrifying to see your winged alter ego rising up from the mirrored floor.

But before you can get too caught up in this shadowy persona, your bird avatar starts to disintegrate, each piece flying away and becoming part of the ghostly flock that hovers around the edges of the installation.

If you follow this link to the story behind the piece's creation, you can trace its origins back to the cave paintings at Lascaux.  We are fascinated with shadows.

*

The Treachery of Sanctuary was on show as part of Digital Revolution at the Barbican in London and can be seen next at the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology.  

Looking Back at the Louvre Lens

The Louvre Lens (a satellite of the Louvre Museum in the Northern French town of Lens) displays its main collection in one enormous 'grande galerie', more than 120m long.  The art is arranged in slices along a timeline, so that as you move through the space you moved through the history of art.  What with the white plinths, the strict geometry and the reflective walls, it's quite an effect …

But there's another effect, too.  As you walk through the gallery, almost all of the sculpture is facing you -

which means that if you happen, like Orpheus, to look back - you see a sea of naked bottoms.

Evidence of the law of unintended consequences or a deliberate decision?  I'm not sure which would please me more, but these photos still make me laugh.