There is no use beating around the bush (Street/museum/experience synthesis)

There is no use beating around the bush: your author has a confession to make: he does not know what to write about. This, in part, explains why he is co-opting the writing techniques of previous adventurers over this terrain; this, and the indisputable fact that he read Didion on a scorching July day, rivulets of sweat running across his brow, but while reading realized that he was alive (reading Didion in Oxford, for those of you who need proof) and he became aware; everything was illuminated. They have magical applications, these words and these actions, and of course should be made note of, for it is their very existence that is important and irrefutable.

It’s not that nothing has happened. Quite the opposite, in fact. Things are always happening, and therein lies the problem. Which kernel of experience shall I pop into the process of writing this essay (microwave), the results of which shall produce something savory (i.e. popcorn)? For example, there was that time when your author absently gazed out over Trafalgar Square as the record breaking heat sapped his body of its last remaining energy. He leaned his elbows on the cool stone barrier, laid down his head, and burned with jealousy of the multitudes below with their rolled-up jeans and bare feet, gently kicking their toes in the waters of the fountain. His eyes traced the population in the square, noticing a couple playfully splashing water on each other with their toes; a man in a red beret peacefully combing a novel; children chasing one another, their mother not far behind; suits discussing God-knows-what over coffee and cigarettes. He simply wanted to cast off his backpack and lose himself in that place, at that time, for that moment. He was tired of tracing over maps, digging through his bag for a camera, debating what should and should not be done.

Sitting on a bench in the Brasenose quad, I inhale. Exhale. Scan the space around me, the swaths of green, forest green, and ochre contrasting beautifully with the yellowish hue of the college walls and mirroring my soul. Here is a moment I could grasp, a chance to reflect and relax at the tail end of a five week sensory hurricane.

And so your author, that esteemed and handsome lad, queued up a conversation he had on a bus to Painshill Park, the final Garden in a series of finales to a study abroad session in Brasenose College, Oxford UK, two-thousand and six. It was a depressing conversation; words that were said include:

--I feel, I know, that this experience has changed me in some irreversible manner, but it’s all too near and enormous to see it right now. We’ve crammed a semester’s worth of stuff into a 5 week period. It’s overwhelming! I never have time to stop and just take a moment to realize that hey, you’re in England, you are surrounded by beautiful things and beautiful people, there’s Big Ben and Westminster Abbey and a sign advertising Surprisingly Unposh Prices! and you need to savor every second of it.

--Give it a few weeks or years, even, and you can see it more wholly, as a complete thing with tentacles that stretch and grasp you even today.

--I have taken so much from this place but will leave behind: solitary walks through the arteries of Oxford; the cobblestone pathway and the welcoming invitation of Radcliffe Camera; pubs older than the United States, still releasing students from the bonds of inhibition, just like they did for ages past; Alberto the crazy drug-addled Italian, who we met at a chip stand and invited up to my room on a Thursday night, where he graced us with depraved stories of his 15-year old girlfriend; the blanketing grass of the Brasenose quad, locus of conversations, living quarters, and somersaults; the established utopia (no, really), that for me was a chance to reinvent and refresh myself, to look for myself in the faces of others, for the clouds to part and reveal the face of God.

--Why are you so upset over this?

--Because I become nostalgic near the end of anything fantastic. Because won’t everything change now, won’t everything pale in comparison to strutting through the streets of utopia, arm-in-arm with people with whom the only thing you share is that they, too, have seen the face of God, and are privy to what no one else could possibly understand? Won’t BIO 301M and IH-35 and the same buildings you’ve always seen seem insignificant, at least for a few weeks?

Now in my room, I become grateful for this essay. The one you’re reading. To be more specific: I am grateful for the writing of this essay providing me a chance to reflect, to sit still for a bit, and just breathe a little more deeply this rarefied air. To sit and reflect: that is getting nearer to the heart of the matter here. That action is calming. I have no all-inclusive, all-illuminating vignette, but I can look at a patch of this quad and tell you that we laid there one night, singing “Fourth Time Around” and letting all thoughts of tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow cower in the sheer luminosity of today, today, today. The kaleidoscope was a bit more focused that night, as it was the night we were separated from our Pub Crawl in Dublin. While watching a woman juggle flaming pins I overheard a man playing guitar behind us, and asked him if I could play it, which resulted in me playing, amongst other things, ironically enough, “Fourth Time Around,” accompanied by the usurped guitarist, who once lived in the United States and was quite familiar with Dylan, yes.

I also think of the time when I patted down Alberto, convinced that the fucker had stolen my harmonica (it was on the floor underneath my chair). Looking to the window, I recall hearing an overly intoxicated chap pissing in the alley outside. I glance through my blog and laugh about the time I raced through a hedge maze in search of a golden dragonfly ensconced in a plasticine frog. Why do I think of Alberto, or hear the intoxicated chap relieving himself, or laugh about the hedge maze? Has all this been corrupted by my own perceptive biases, and changed by the shortcomings of my memory? I do not know, but I think that I do not care. I am simply glad to be recalling them, to associate one afternoon in Rousham Park with giddiness and freedom, whether or not I actually rolled all the way down the hill; whether or not Patrick beat me to the bottom; whether or not the hill actually existed. For if you were to ask me, I could have made it completely to the base, defeated all challengers; in fact, somersaulted that Vesuvian terror with euphoric deftness, released from intimidation and self-consciousness, relishing in the feeling that this will always, always, matter.

The London Menagerie (Novel synthesis)

The books we read for class appear to be, at first, four remarkably different novels, sharing only longitude and latitude. Dickens’s novel is half journalistic expose, half soap opera. It deals with…well, a billion things – poverty in London, the emotional and financial damage wreaked by bumbling bureaucracy in Chancery Lane, orphans of the court and skeletons in the closet – but it is reasonable to assume that Dickens probably never thought that “all art is quite useless,” as Oscar Wilde would have us believe. Or maybe he wouldn’t – dive under the surface at your own peril. Like him, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway deals with the upper class. But not really. Whereas the plot structure of The Picture of Dorian Gray is subjugated by Wilde’s own aesthetic philosophies, and is stylized to the point that it unravels like a Gothic theatrical parable, Mrs. Dalloway’s plot structure is the medium for Woolf’s own meanderings on existence, closeness, trauma, and is stylized to the point that her stream-of-consciousness, ruminating form becomes an accessory of her aim, a continuum of sensory impressions and thought bubbles. Like Woolf, Zadie Smith is innovative in her use of form, but her novel deals with people on the opposite side of the tracks as Clarissa Dalloway.

What do they all have in common? London.

It is interesting to consider such disparate novels as products and records of the same city. What can they teach us? I’ve given up trying to learn about “London,” because that’s simply a term applied to a plot of land. So I think the correlation between the four novels is rather broad and simple, but it has to be that way, because it all rises to that. They are documents, records, of a place where the world congregates for afternoon tea. Each one is a cabinet into which are placed a few representatives plucked from the vast menagerie that is known as London. The problems of Jo and Esther are not the problems of Clarissa; and yet, are they not both problems of London? The realism of Dickens, the satire of Oscar Wilde, the meditative prose of Virginia Woolf, the irreverent humor and self-reflection of Zadie Smith are the same elementally. They all add to that menagerie.

Paul Tillich said that "God does not exist. He is…beyond essence and existence.” In a way, you can substitute the word for London for God. And maybe go to Hell…anyway, the issue is timelessness (or being outside of time) and the irreducibility of the inconceivable. A spiritual presence may exist in one way for you, but never the same way to anybody else. Same with London. It is the personal experience of each character, the goals of each author, the forms applied, the modes of publication – everything went into the writing and publication of the novels, and everything that happened in London between then and now.

Which is where we come in. Our reading of these documents (historical, literary) helps define London for each of us, just as the reading of Dickens informed Smith about a London that is impossible to encounter. We can’t know Smith’s London, though she’s implanted somewhere in that plot of land, but reading her – and Dickens, Woolf, and Wilde – informs us of that London, of a point of view and set of circumstances that are entirely unique. Pieces of the menagerie – we picked them up, arranged them, and then walked through them.

Yellow Teeth (The Novel, vol. 5)

At first glance, the respective cultures of the characters populating White Teeth are indispensable to their realization on the page and their conception in the reader's mind. We are reminded that "Clara was from somewhere. She had roots” (23). Clara: ugly but grew beautiful, discontinued witnessing Jehovah, exposed to sexual deviance by Ryan Topps, from Lambeth (via Jamaica). Samad: war veteran, cheated on his wife, repudiates pagan holidays, proud Bangladeshi. You get the idea.

But looking closer, I find it interesting that Archie's cultural history is nowhere to be found. Archie is apathetic, an undecorated war veteran, suicide attempt survivor, but his identity is not really defined in any way by cultural lineage. Where his grandparents are from is less important. I don't fault Zadie Smith for this exclusion: I think about the people I know and how their respective cultural lineages factor into the shaping of their respective identities, and (forgive my broadness) it seems that many of the white people I know are either ignorant or simply not proud of their cultural roots.

Why is this? It could be that minority cultures existing in America or England are drawn together in concentrated pockets by the very problems imposed by being in the minority. A hub like London allows for this type of congregation, and that communal acceptance in place of its possible, prior absence helps one to grow and celebrate his or her roots. The converse, of course, is that the majority is never really forced to do this. The majority has the numbers advantage, but (historically and unfortunately) not the wisdom to refrain from exercising it immorally. This had led to colonization, slavery, complete usurpation, “ethnic cleansing,” etcetera, but also (ironically enough) to the de-purification of classical Anglo cultures. Clara is Jamaican and British, Samad is Bangladeshi. I don’t even know everything that constitutes my cultural identity. I know there is German blood somewhere in my past; French; Creole; at least 25% Italian – I should explore my family history to a larger extent sometime. The point is, my root canals are tangled, collapsed, intersecting, and the same probably holds true for Archie. He does not have a strong cultural identity because it’s reasonable to assume he doesn’t even know what it would be.

A quick recap, in pictorial form

Trekkie in Stratford














Big Phil-e style at the Museum of London













Diminuitive in London












Observant in Dublin











Dissapointed en route to Dublin













Poseidon- like on a punt in Oxford













Chill at the Hellfire Caves













Perplexed and pained at West Wycombe













Disembodied at Stowe Garden


These are all the pictures I can fit, apparently. Do enjoy, though, and know that there are many more where these came from.

The London Central Mosque and Me (The Street, vol. 4)

I was a little intimidated at first, walking into the London Central Mosque. Being white and obviously a tourist, an outsider, the differences were immediately obvious. But my discomfort derived more from a sense of intruding spectatorship. Here was a cultural center, sure, but more importantly, here was a place of worship, and I am watching others in a most personal, holy experience, having little conception of what exactly was going on. Just watching. Entering in a large group made matters worse, as Sarah pointed out in class. I wanted to be exposed and to learn - and what better way than do jump right into that situation which makes you uncomfortable? - but I could not help at first but feel that we were a distraction. I thought about how I would feel if I were praying in a Christian church, only to look back over my shoulder and see a gallery of foreigners watching curiously but cluelessly.

I wandered around a bit, aimlessly, trying to get my bearings and some sense of what I was here for, to set goals for myself, double and triple checking my cellphone to make sure it was off. A man directed us to the library, and up there I flipped through a book on Persian poets and another book called The Meaning of the Qu'ran. The library closed during the afternoon prayer, so I went downstairs and watched some more.

As Sara pointed out in class, the act of watching necessitates and solidifies a separation between I and The Other, and my guilty feelings of intrusion would've prevented me from watching had I not been entreated by various people to watch, learn. And so I did. It is uncomfortable at first, but I think one has to swallow that, ignore that or view it as necessary, for the sake of knowledge and experience. It is a difficult dialogue that, for the greater good, need occur. It is better to be uncomfortable than ignorant.

In America, most of the knowledge one receives about Islam is filtered and distorted by the media. The only times (until Wednesday) that I'd heard the phrase "Allahu Akbar" were on news reports of suicide bombers in the Middle East. You hear from our news anchors and our President how diametrically opposed American values and the Islamic faith are, and while I always viewed this as sensationalist, I had little counter knowledge. I knew Islam wasn't this, but then, what was it?

I was helped with this question by a man named Faisel, who, walking through the foyer after prayer and, seeing a group of us standing around, invited us into the prayer room for a little discussion/tour. I took off my shoes and, in a small way, what I once viewed as a barrier was made permeable. We sat in a tight circle in the prayer room, and Faisel discussed the Five Pillars of Islam, some of the meaning and history of the Qu'ran, the core tenets of the faith, the history of the London Central Mosque, and other things. He was very helpful and engaging, and was clearly interested in sending us off more knowledgeable than before. One thing he said that I found particularly interesting was the fact that there is only one version of the Qu'ran, and it has remained unchanged. He made clear the delineation between God and man; that God has no personal relations with man, unlike the beliefs of Christian religions; and that is why the Qu'ran must remain untainted by man. He said that there are thousands of scholars who have committed the entire book to memory, which I found amazing. I know no one who knows the Bible cover to cover.

I left the mosque feeling much more comfortable than when I'd arrived. An entire religion which is usually portrayed in binary terms in American popular culture had been illuminated, if only for 30 minutes, if only bits and pieces of it, if only by a few people. But the void between myself and the otherness which was so foreign to me just hours earlier - a void so impeded and clouded that the object on the other side wafted nebulously, would not come into focus - had, in some small way, been narrowed.

And in this moment...(The Novel, vol. 4)

Mrs. Dalloway is one of those few precious books that have profoundly altered my perception of what the novel is capable of. Everything from the form to the subject matter to the language ignited something within me, showed me new ways of doing things - oh, literature can be this - in such a way that the experience was wholly unique. Woolf's handling of characters offers a novel perspective into their seemingly mundane moments, thoughts, sights, etc. Her language weaves a tapestry between disparate beings; meanders down this or that side path, in doing so illuminating histories and memories, cracking open every hour and letting life rush out. The stream-of-consciousness form, in a way, makes each character a medium for the author's random, disassembled ruminations that might otherwise not find themselves in the novel; the characters become fragmentations of the author, each of them splitting off from the contextual core of the book as underground caverns are dug for them. This method of writing keeps characters from becoming stock and almost circumvents the issues of character manipulation and extortion that we discussed concerning Bleak House.

What resonates most with me, however, is the feeling of absence and solitude that pervade the novel. There is a definitive failure for one human being to personally connect with another, and because of this, the characters are always lacking that "something central which permeate[s]; something warm which [breaks] up surfaces and ripples the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together." Clarissa, Rezia, Septimus, Peter - all are looking for the semblance of themselves in someone else, so as to not be the one in streets looking for anyone to let them know "I am unhappy." Is this a post-war sentiment? Have we been exposed to an overload of horrors, become too aware, possibly too psycho-analytic (with apologies to Spencer), too traumatized? Woolf expands and complicates the notion of what could be considered traumatic. Anything from sexual assault to the smallest submission of the will, or the most personal upheaval in one's life, is treated as traumatic. And this trauma is largely what distances the characters, removes the naturally close, turns the characters inside. But part of the beauty of Mrs. Dalloway is the subtle hope infused in the knowledge that the characters - and by extension, us - are all searching for connection, solace, and meaning amidst a world that is absolutely absorbing for some, spiteful and ignorant for others, fanatical to still more - and facing this diversity on the page that stands shelled in every kernel of life, I could not help but to look deeper inside my own life, past labels and expectations and outside influence.