visions of

I passed an apocalyptic landscape this afternoon.  It was a startling sight, one that made me stutter to a stop and step backwards to stare again.  Mountains of rubble, cold steel, concrete, wire, stormy sky - my warm and idle thoughts, of dinner and hot chocolate and cryptic crosswords, fell out of my head and landed in a heap on the cold pavement.

It's all quite easily explained.  They are building a biomedical research facility across from St. Pancras train station, and I know, because we've had the fliers slipped under our door urging us to stand up and protest before our children die from deadly viruses leaked into the air.  But to be precise, they aren't "building" it yet - the site is a messy, barren brownfield with some tentative jabs made towards flattening and cleaning.  Yellow backhoes and graders sit frozen in the of heaps of rocks and concrete chunks and dirt and metal.  2011 they think they'll start the foundations.

For now the field sits empty, except for the detritus and the unused machines, surrounded by a high fence of narrow bars with a few optimistic signs depicting a clean and glowing building.  But where I walked I didn't pass those pretty pictures - just the sharp steel fencing.  And behind this ugly scar, in the distance, a few squat, rectangular office buildings, dull gray in color, no warm lights twinkling from their windows at this moment, so that floor after distant floor looked absolutely empty.  And behind those blocks BT tower loomed: an alien, an unsettling shape.  It was hard to imagine humans building such a structure, surreal, cylindrical, studded with satellites and antenna - it seemed unfathomable to picture a human inside the windowless, neon-glowing tower.

And behind it all the sky.  I woke up this morning to a London full of fog, low and white and almost as thick as in the old paintings.  By this afternoon the fog was gone, but it left behind a slate-dark sky, swirling - no, frozen mid-swirl - with bilious clouds.

There were no people in this landscape, no warmth, no brightness of color, no sign of cheerful survival.  And as it happened, my personal soundtrack - that is, my ipod on shuffle - had through its dumb mechanical insight landed upon the Decemberists "When the War Came."  So as I was struck dumb by this stark vision, Colin Meloy was whining in my ear: "and the war came with all the poise of a cannonball," and I was shivering in the cold.

And war came to this city more than once, Boadicia burnt it down and the peasants tore it up and the bombers blew it up down and sideways.  And this could be a bomb site, here or anywhere. And even when wars the wars have been kept firmly abroad an infinite iniquities have passed along these streets, and this is a problem with living in a city too full of history - the charming cobbled alleys and noble monuments live beside a multitude of darker ghosts.  And how much does it help to remember these shades of horror, and how much more does it hurt?  Plague and conscription and executions and the gin-soaked destitute, and what can all our words do for you now?

And it's all quite easily explainable, because in my classes, this cold week in November, we are discussing death and brutality - trying and failing to remember how many millions died in the first world war, arguing with careful words around how and why and whether one should teach the Holocaust, debating whether evil ever arrives in the form of Black Dogs and what a single murder means and whether graveyard conversations with the dead fit former characterizations, watching on-stage cannibalisms and reading about failed revolutions, reading memoirs of massacre and rape and reciting the war poems and just this morning on the tube I idly memorized Dickinson, I learned by heart that

success is counted sweetest
by those who ne'er succeed.
to comprehend a nectar
requires greatest need

not one of all that purple host
who won the flag today
can tell a definition
so clear of victory

as he, defeated - dying
on whose forbidden ear
the distant strains of victory
burst agonized and clear!  (a cruel exclamation point, I think)

Ah, it's took the flag, not won -  but I was close, and defeated, dying was on my brain.

(And sometimes I long for the clarity of chemistry classes, where debating the nature of grief and death and the immutable logic of genocide never arises as an academic responsibility - but it's not quite that simple, I know, froth-corrupted lungs could tell us as much.  But for political science classes, then, sociology, or philosophy!  it might be quite as fruitless - discuss the historical causes of atrocities, why they happen, how we can prevent them, sure, as unanswerable as asking how we express them and how words can cope with the strains of our moral demands - but at least it might feel more productive.  because I still can't believe the right words will fix the world.)

So yes, perfectly explainable, quite easy.  With these broken worlds in all the words I've been feeding to my brain, and the discordant murmurs of warfare in my ears, and the cold, nasty weather and brutishly short day, so short at 4 pm the sun was already setting in a colorless haze; with the hulking machines in the midst of detritus, the squat buildings as empty as corpses' faces, the communications tower a gleaming robot outlasting all the rest - no wonder that I was arrested by a vision of destruction.

and I stopped and stared and shivered for a moment, lost and empty.  And then a mother and child passed, this kid in a stroller and a Gap jacket staring in exactly the same direction as I was, out at the broken field and foul sky.  And I wondered, does he see what I see, is he gaping in shared wordless horror? Or does he see three big-treaded yellow caterpillars with diggers lifted to the sky?


And I burrowed deeper into my coat and walked past leafless trees up to our flat.  And here I've sat, for whatever my words are worth.  And now it's time for dinner, and hot chocolate, and a cryptic crossword, and some scraps of happier poetry.