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September 27, 2005 |
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By Norman Fischer | 9/27/2005 @ 9:23 am
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From Zen Abbot's Journal Vol 49
September 27, 2005
Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach
July, 2005. We were much hampered in London by the closing of parts of the tube line. We stayed at the Guest House of Laurence Freeman's Monastery of Christ the King (though Laurence wasn't around), which is at the very end of the Piccadilly line, the line hardest hit by the bombings. So what is usually a direct thirty minute tube ride to central London was now an ordeal of subway to bus, bus in a snarl of traffic to subway, and then changing lines again, the journey taking more than two hours each way, and full of anxiety with the changes, where to catch the bus (bus stop changed every day), which bus to take etc. (finally we got used to this) as well as the many incidents on the subway of delays or re-routings caused by further security alerts. Londoners, transport workers as well as riders, were quite patient. The British are justly famous for their stiff upper lip, they are good humored about it all and generally quite kind. People helped us out wherever we went, in London and out, and bore their own travails with good cheer. One night, at Cockfoster's station, the old man at the ticket counter talked to us at length about how the British are used to disaster, have borne so much of it in the past, and will therefore survive it now. With a sense of the serious weight of the past on his face, he told us of his experience during the war. Then a teen-age boy, he remembered well the bombings. Once, he said, he stood on the rationing queue and saw a woman, ahead of him a short distance, almost collapse with joy when someone told her that her husband, who'd been away at war, had survived and would soon be coming home. "These are things you do not forget," he said, his brow furrowed with a deep concentration beneath his thin neat steel-gray hair, as if in telling us this story, he'd conjured up the moment, with the fortitude of optimism that it carried.
We were sight-seers in London, standing in the great streets, looking at the great buildings, the Parliament, Westminster Abby, Piccadilly Circus (a mad crush of tourists), Trafalgar Square, we saw them all in a clip. We saw Dutch paintings and the family silver, porcelain, and jewelry at the Queen's Gallery. Buckingham Palace, the wonderful wide Mall, fountains, and so on. Most of the tourists seemed to be Indian or African, and there was a sense of appreciation of the noble British Moment built into the boulevards and buildings, solid, forgiving, magnificent, a moment in some ways, one might say, now quite past, but it did not seem so on this day, with the sun so much shining, and the air brisk, and London still such a great and important city. Though we didn't see the actual changing of the guard (that happens at 11:30 a.m. with full parade and many grenadiers) we did see the small change that takes place every few hours, as one guard replaces another in the same unit. Marched to the sentry box with two escorts, the new guard greets his predecessor, they salute one another, change places, and the old guard is marched off to the door into the palace compound, which is built as a huge rectangle enclosing a wide courtyard space in the middle, into which he disappears. There's also a very wide area in front of the Palace enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. This is for processions, carriages in the old days, lots of horses, so it is an open dirt area, no garden.
We went to Kew gardens. On the opposite end of the City from Cockfoster's, the tube trip took us almost three hours, and even then we couldn't get there, because of a security alert, so had to get off the tube, take a bus, and then walk quite a distance. But the weather was beautiful and the gardens were pleasant. We saw tropical plants and water lilies in hot houses, the extensive formal rose gardens, the herbaceous borders. What was most impressive though were the park-like extensions of the grounds, long pathways with quiet meandering vistas, trees and shady places for benches. That sense of being able to look off into the distance to see verdant fields and walkways, well tended, rolling out before you. But Kew is a scientific garden for the study of plants, and is not as beautiful as many of the gardens we saw outside London.
From London to Canterbury and points south. Our plan, in coming to England, had been to do a walking tour. We'd met the sister of one of Aron's friends, who lived in the Cotswolds, a famous walking place, and had arranged to meet her, and to be launched on our tour from there. But once in England we were confused about whether or not we actually wanted to do this. After many frustrating days of discussions, finally we sorted out that Kathie wanted most to visit several specific gardens, and that this desire was incompatible with walking in the Cotswolds, or any other ambitious walk. So we did that, visiting, near Canterbury (a twenty mile bike ride through lovely fields, on small country lanes) Goodenstone, a country estate where Jane Austin's brother had lived, and where Jane'd frequently visited. Surrounded by quiet and lovely pasture land, rolling on and on gently, sloping downward, with sheep in modest and manageable numbers, the manor house was large but not overwhelming, a square brick structure built commandingly on a hilltop with a hedge-enclosed rather plain garden in front. The main gardens were behind the house, several of them, naturalized in the English style, each garden quite different from the others: a woodland garden, a rock garden, herbaceous borders, and so on. Not many people here visiting, no gift shop or coffee shop.
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September 1, 2005 |
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By Norman Fischer | 9/01/2005 @ 4:09 am
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From Zen Abbot's Journal Vol 49
Aug 5, 2005
Charlotte's Way, Muir Beach
… earlier that same day we'd gone to the (Berlin) zoo, something Kathie always wants to do in any city we visit (last summer we were in the Basel zoo). I'm dragged along for the ride, and this is fine with me. We did see two spectacular sights. One was the big cats, lions, tigers, etc. at feeding time. Huge raw pieces of cow meat thrust into their cages, from a low trap door, the cats prowling back and forth back and forth obsessively, nervously, and seemingly automatically in anticipation of this (and one is impressed by their sheer size, power, and seriousness of purpose — which makes for an awesome force of living energy). I watched the lions especially for a while, a male and a female, each grabbing his or her hunk of meat and dragging it off, licking at it affectionately, chomping on it, licking, chomping, using the huge paws to hold it steady in the massive jaws, the head bent to one side, huge teeth and tongue visible. At one point the female left her food and the male came to take it. She then took his and dragged it back into a far corner of the cage to continue the process (he wasn't shy to remain close to the front, where the spectators, of whom he seemed oblivious, stood). There seemed to be a lot of activity going on, a lot of masticating and licking, more than actual eating. Some of the other cats were given whole birds to eat, and they were working their jaws quite a bit to get rid of the feathers that had stuck to their teeth.
The other amazing sight was of elephants mating. This was preceded by a very long — possibly forty five minutes — or at any rate we saw forty five minutes of it — courtship ritual. The male, considerably larger than the female, gently pursuing her, stroking her with his trunk, play-fighting, caressing, head to head, poking her with his tusks, the very long tubular penis growing not exactly erect or hard (it seemed, rather, flexible) but anyhow coming out of the body and being so long it nearly dragged along the ground. Making efforts to mount and she resisting by turning her body away, seeming not to do so with testiness or unkindness, but rather gently and encouragingly. The penis was then retracted and, a after a brief moment of their being apart from one another, the courtship resumed with play-fighting and trunk-clutching all around the enclosure until finally the male fixed her in place with his thick clumsy front legs on her neck, and mounted her, rearing up almost to a standing position. There was a massive though calm-seeming working of his rump, a labored contracting of it, so as to thrust the penis in further, as the female seemed to stand quite still on all fours to receive it. After only a few moments (neither making any sound that I can now remember) there was ejaculation so powerful it blew them apart — blasting the penis out — and there was a huge quantity, buckets, of sperm that was visible dripping everywhere on him, her, and covering the ground. The male then, quite subdued now, and looking rather dazed and not so steady on his feet, walked off to one side and simply stood there collecting himself while the female stood solicitously close by. Many zoo-goers had gathered to witness all this with much appreciation and humor (though awe would have been more appropriate) while snapping many pictures.
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