Took a day off this week and went to Kew Gardens, a huge botanical park west of London. I'd mistakenly assumed it would be among London's extensive free offerings, but it's not--£13 admission. (Student concession reduces it by all the way to £12!) Still, since it took me so long to get there, I wasn't going to turn around and head right back to East London. I ended up enjoyed it so much I became a member. I'm now a Friend of Kew. I hope to go back regularly. It's good for my soul to get out of the city and stroll in open spaces. The indoor areas at Kew (the word "greenhouses" doesn't do them justice) are remarkable. One room in the facility dedicated to the Princess of Wales has stunning cascades of orchids. Another small building is an ingeniously designed shelter for alpine plants. The palm house is like a well ordered jungle. (That has to be as glaring an oxymoron as I've written in a while!) I spent most of a day at Kew and saw only a small portion of the Gardens. Among my favorite parts was the patch of witch hazels, one of the first outdoor flowering plants. (Across the street from my house a bush has been in bloom since New Years, but most everything is still dormant. I do see daffodil spikes standing in some garden plots though.) I'm sure there will be new things to see at Kew the next time I go.
I took the day off because I've been quite discouraged of late. I won't go into much of that here, but it's been hard. A combination of the classes, my other work schedule, the weather, my continuing sense of isolation, and living in a cold damp house that just isn't a place I'm inclined to go back to to relax. There's mold growing in my bedroom, I discovered yesterday. But I also read that February is the coldest month in London, and Isabel says the second term is the hardest one, so hopefully some of this will lift soon.
In class we've moved from paintings to poetry and back to painting. I think I mentioned that our final Creation project is to present a painting--my group chose a cubist painting by Braque (a painting I really don't like but am having some fun working with anyway)--and somehow to incorporate music and poetry into our presentation, or at least into our preparation. How, of course, is left up to us. A lot of what we've been doing is listening to a piece of music, or observing a painting, or working with the sounds of a poem, and then setting the music or painting or poem aside and continuing to work out our expression through movement without the presence of the piece of art that inspired it. So what you would see or hear us do in class doesn't include the painting or poem or musical piece itself; but is rather the interpretation of it. It's not exactly modern dance, but that's probably the easiest way to describe it. That makes it sound pretty dreadful to some, I know. And maybe it is dreadful--it's really hard for me to tell, which is part of my discouragement these days.
The poetry section was close to my heart. I enjoyed much of it, especially the search for a poem to work with. I knew they wouldn't really want me to work with this one, but I chose to share Billy Collins' "The Lanyard" with my classmates anyway. Several asked about it afterward. It's just so accessible, and beneath the humor, subtly lovely. Spurred to find another poem, I came across several by James Wright. It was hard to choose among them. I settled on one that latched onto me quite slowly, but I really came to love it. It has something to do with the stretched yearning of the long vowels ("dreaming of heroes") and the tragic, almost fatalistic imagery of the last verse, bending back on the opening lines and the boys' fathers' lost and ruptured youth.
Next week we move on to architecture. One of the teachers wants us to visit St. Paul's cathedral, so I went there for Evensong yesterday. Another place and time to which I'll return. I do find that there's something in the artfulness of that kind of liturgy, sound, and space that I miss.
London wants for beauty. Yes, there are great collections of art in museums you can visit for free, and some of the buildings are beautifully proportioned, but much of the time this city feels cold and brutal. Or if not brutal, then certainly impersonal. I'm rediscovering my need for courses of beauty in my life's diet. I'm not getting enough of it. Interesting that the poem I found so moving ends with such battering images, perhaps redeeming or reclaiming them in some way.
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