Harry Potter’s wand

When I was in high school I took a class called Actor’s Craft. One of the monologues lying around was from a play called Equus by Peter Schaffer. A psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, is telling a colleague about a dream he’d had the night before. In it he’s a Mycenaean high priest presiding over a sacrificial ritual. In front of him stretches a line of children and as each approaches he is grabbed by assistant priests and thrown on an altar. Dysart, in a golden mask, then eviscerates the victim and casts his entrails upon the ground to be scried over by the assistants. The problem is that Dysart is beginning to feel “distinctly naseous” by the process and knows his face is turning green and sweaty behind the mask. He also knows that if the assistants realize this he’ll be the next across the altar. Again and again he cuts the children and soon he feels the mask begin to slip. The other priests can see his green pallor and grab him, throwing him across the altar… and then Dysart wakes up.

This monologue has fascinated me ever since then and I honestly don’t know why. It could be the ritual, the blood, the horror of a nightmare, but when I heard they were staging it on the West End I knew I’d have to go see it. Even better, it turns out the play is THE talk of London since it stars Dan Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, running around naked.

I liked it, it was really well produced and well acted (though I kept worrying that Richard Griffiths, playing the psychiatrist, was going to drop dead on stage), but I’m not sure how I felt about the play itself. See, the main characters are the boy, Alan, who is passionately fixated on horses for a bunch of psycho/religious/sexual reasons, and Dysart, the psychiatrist, who is late middle-aged and becoming disenchanted with his profession and his life. He feels, in contrast to the boy, that he has NO passion, exemplified by his relationship with his wife whom he cares about but with whom he has settled into a drab routine (his wife isn’t a character, just referred to). He says that he’s never in his life felt about anything the passion the boy feels about these horses and envies him for it.

So the theme of the play, and Dysart’s dilemma, seems to be: is it even desirable to “cure” the boy when it means taking away this passion? It’s an indictment of psychiatry turning everyone into drones for the sake of making them “normal”.

My problem with that is the corollary to it: is it right to keep someone in torment because it, by proxy, alleviates the dissatisfaction you have with your own life? I mean, the kid is obviously tortured and if someone gave him the choice he would undoubtedly choose to not have nightmares every night and to not feel impulses to, say, blind horses. There’s a minor character who brings up that point, but the play obviously favors the other side.

The thing is, and why as a play it failed for me, is that it presents these two extremes (keeping the kid passionate and crazy or passionless and normal) and nothing in between, which is far too simplistic. Sure, it makes for better drama, and you really wouldn’t have a play if you alleviated the tension between the two extremes by introducing a compromise, but I can’t buy into the dilemma if it’s an artificial one.

What else? Oh yeah, Harry Potter’s bits. I know that’s what you really want to know about you pervs. We were too far back to see anything clearly. Whether that’s a statement on our seats or Harry’s wand I can’t help you.

Dvblin

Last weekend I finally made my way to Dublin, a place I’ve wanted to visit for years and years. It’s a beautiful city, a livable city. Whereas in Paris the greatest attractions are in tourist, landmark spots, in Dublin they are found in pubs and the walkway along the river Liffey, in everyday activities.

The exception is one simply unbelievably awesome tourist trap: Dvblinia.

Think of the cheesiest exhibit at a Renaissance festival possible. Now imagine it sprawled across 3 floors of a darkened 19th century neo-gothic building connected to the oldest cathedral in Dublin and you’ll have Dvblinia. Amazing.

After paying for your tickets at a desk manned by a bored older couple you enter a dark, empty, slightly musty smelling “Dublin fair”. Apparently Dublin fairs were often attacked by zombies because it had the eerie feeling of someplace abandoned and left to rot; motley colors mocking an aborted celebration. The “fair” twisted around a make-shift corridor created by “fair” booths: food, armor (with a sign encouraging you to try on a helmet; I don’t even want to know what might be crawling around in those helmets), spices, scribes. Exhibit after exhibit, empty even of fake people.

I reached the end of the “fair” and could hear a banging coming from the next room. In it was a woman, a live visitor, throwing something at another display. I figured maybe it was a reproduction of some medieval throwing game Dubliners played. But as I moved closer, I could see that it was a scene of a fake woman in stocks. The live woman was throwing fake vegetables at the fake woman. Over and over again she threw red plastic tomatoes: thwomp, thwomp, thwomp. I swear she did it for 5 minutes.

The best display was the one about the Black Death. It was the liveliest.

After two floors of such exhibits the third and final floor explored the life of ancient Vikings. Apparently they were insanely violent because all I can remember of it is a display of severed fake animal heads fake rotting on fake spikes. They didn’t really describe why Vikings decided to display rotting animal heads. They were just happy enough to reproduce it.

The last time I was in Coney Island I went on a haunted house ride that’s the best ride I’ve ever ridden. It’s not scary exactly, but if you’re in the right frame of mind it’s a good four minutes of screaming and laughing. It’s just fantastic. Dvblinia is the best post-modern time I’ve had since then. If you ever go to Dublin and are in the mood for some old-fashioned po-mo, I highly recommend a visit.

I love mushy peas

I really do. There’s something just so abominably, wonderfully wrong with them. Their color should not appear outside of radioactive waste. They have no texture and a really weird flavor. But I love them.

God help me, I’m going native.

Sorry, Surrey

We had an off-site meeting at work the other day and I was walking to it with some co-workers. I’m always interested in where people live, both within and without London, though my concept of geography is an embarrassment. Not just English geography, but American geography as well. Hell, even NY geography baffles me. I’m not as bad as my sister, though: the first day she drove herself to high school she got lost. In the town where we grew up. On her way to a school she’d been to daily for two years.

As we were walking to the meeting Hannah was telling me about her town. “It’s a little town, I’m sure you’ve never heard of it. It’s south of London.”

Ah-ha! I knew the county south of London!

“Is it in Kent?” I asked.

“Sorry?” she said.

“Is it in Kent?” I repeated.

“Sorry?” she said.

I thought, Wow, my accent is really terrible if someone can’t understand a single syllable word. I repeated it very carefully: “Kent…”

Before Hannah could answer again Roland, who’s from Chicago, said, “She’s saying Surrey. Not sorry, Surrey.”

And that was pretty much the amusing high point of the entire off-site meeting. It’s good Roland said something because that could have gone on forever.

Another time a co-worker, Mark, told me he was from a place near the Scottish boarder called Carl Isle.

“Oh cool! Is it really an island?” I asked this because of the whole Isle of Dogs not really being an island thing. He just looked at me blankly. “You know, because of Isle? Carl Isle? Is it really an…” And then I realized he’d been saying Carlisle, which is a city up near Hadrian’s Wall, and that there probably aren’t many islands in the northwest of England.

To be fair to myself, accents are more than just the elongation of vowels and glottal stops. For one thing intonation can be different. Hannah’s “Surrey.” sounded like a question to me because of how her tone rose on the second syllable and so I translated it to “Sorry?”. Likewise breaks and pauses in words and sentences may be different. I would pronounce Carlisle with no break in between syllables: “Carl-lisle,” while Mark pronounced it as almost two different words: “Carl-isle”.

It was George Bernard Shaw who said, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” Of course, he was Irish.

Here’s a link to an interesting blog I found about the differences between American English and British English. (She’s a far more regular blogger than I am. I promise to try harder. I’m talking to you, Mo’leary.)

Parlez-vous anglais?

One of the reasons I was so keen to move to London is its access to Europe; there are so many places I’ve never been that I want to see, and the first of these was Paris.

It’s so easy to get to Paris from London. There’s a train, the Eurostar, that takes you out of Waterloo station directly into Gare du Nord, one of the main stations across the channel (it also takes you directly to Brussels and indirectly to places such as Amsterdam, Antwerp, and tons of other places through northern Europe).

Here are some of my observations about Paris:

1) The people are much nicer than rumored, and I speak very little French. A “Bonjour, parlez-vous anglais?” and a sad smile over the fact that you don’t speak the language always engendered a polite response, and often a very friendly and helpful one.

2) Some of the people there are way too friendly, specifically the men. It started with the guy selling crap to tourists by the Eiffel Tower who told me he loved me, followed me down the street and tried to hold my hand, and ended with the guy in a suit by the fountain at the Jardin des Tuileries who got angry when I told him I couldn’t talk to him because I had to catch a train back to London. In between were more guys selling tourist crap, random older men who would smile to the point of leering and try to make eye contact while passing me on the street and the guy who tried to get me to ride on the back of his motorcycle (I think that’s what he was saying, it was in French). My favorite was the guy in the Catacombs:

Back in the late 1700s the cemeteries in Paris were overflowing with bodies and it was becoming a health hazard as disease was spreading through the population living nearby. They decided to move the old bones into the limestone quarries underneath the city, extensively excavated in Roman times (they were what provided all the building material for the world there above ground). So for many years caravans at night would transport anonymous remains down there until an estimated 6 million were interred.

The bishop presiding over the re-burials decided the bones should be placed in an orderly manner in the newly formed ossuaries and instructed the workers to make patterns from the bones. I am positive this was done with a morbid sense of humor, as, at least along the part of the catacombs open to the public, smiling skulls form patterns amidst piles and piles and piles of femurs.

The place is spooky. Spooooky. It’s why I wanted to go there. It’s also why there was no way I was going in alone.

The entrance to the catacombs is a simple black door right across from the Denfert-Rochereau Metro station. You go in, pay your admittance fee, then walk down 86 spiral steps to two exhibition rooms with posters depicting the history of the quarries and how they became the catacombs. After that you walk through labyrinthine passageways, dark and dank and echoing, leading to the ossuary.

There weren’t many people visiting the catacombs that day, which I would usually find swell as I hate crowds. But, like I said, I was going to need some other people walking down there at the same time I was. I pretended to read a history of limestone quarrying in France over and over again waiting for the only other two people in there to head down the passage first. Apparently they found limestone fascinating because they spent forever in front of each placard. “Just go already,” I muttered under my breath, until, finally, they did. I gave them about a 20 second head start and then plunged in after them.

Walking down those hallways was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Electric lights are set up every few yards, and while they allow you to see they don’t extinguish the feeling of darkness all around you. There was no one behind me and this made me nervous because I could swear someone was following. I was getting ready to see Gollum or the fucking Balrog.

Instead, beyond the people in front of me I saw a flashlight beam. One of the catacomb employees was coming from the other direction. He said, “Bonjour” to the couple in front of me and then stopped to talk to me.

“You speak English?” he said. (They always seemed to know, even before I said a word. It was weird.)

“Yes,” I said. The people in front of me were moving out of sight.

“So, you’re from the U.S.?” he said.

“I am,” I said, peering over his shoulder at the corner around which the only other people in the entire catacombs had just turned, “but I’m living in London.”

“Do you know the history of the catacombs?” he asked.

“Uh, they were limestone quarries…” I began rattling off all the interesting facts I’d learned about limestone while waiting to walk with the PEOPLE WHO I COULDN’T EVEN HEAR ANYMORE BECAUSE THEY’D GOTTEN SO FAR AHEAD.

“No,” he interrupted, “I mean there are six million people buried down here.” He looked at me meaningfully. I looked back at him meaningfully too, but I think our meanings were different.

“So, do you want to get some coffee or something later?” he asked.

Oh dear God. I was going to have to walk the rest of the way ALONE because this guy wanted to hit on me?!?

“Uh, I can’t,” I said, “I have reservations tonight and all this stuff planned for tomorrow…”

“Oh, ok,” he said. “Well, enjoy Paris!” And he walked away, back the way I’d come, his flashlight beam bouncing in carefree bobs until it disappeared in the distance.

Great.

In retrospect it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. It was only a short distance to the chamber before the ossuary where a handful of people were hanging out, reading displays on those buried there before disappearing through a door under a sign reading, “Stop! You are entering the empire of death!” But those minutes alone in the passageway were hairy.

More observations:

3) The food, of course, was fabulous. Everything from the sweet, chocolate chip baguette (I cannot remember for the life of me what it was called) to the lovely dinners I had at little restaurants, it was all wonderful.

4) You need an entire vacation to even make a dent in the Louvre. I didn’t even go near the Mona Lisa. I figure she’s like the Paris Hilton of the art world, famous for simply being famous, and there were many other, less crowded, exhibits to see. My favorite, I think, was the Rubens room.

5) Foucault’s Pendulum is AWESOME.

6) The ducks in Paris are way too friendly too. After the Louvre closed it was a nice evening and I had a few hours before I had to catch my train, so I hung out for a while by the fountain at the Jardin des Tuileries. It’s a beautiful garden where the Tuileries Palace once stood (in both Paris and London there are two events that seem to scar the the soul of each city. In London it’s World War II and the Great Fire of 1666. In Paris it is World War II and the French Revolution. The Tuileries Palace was destroyed in 1781 during the Revolution.). I was reading a book in one of the chairs, enjoying the end of the day, when I felt something peck my foot. I looked down and these two ducks, a male and a female, were staring up at me. “Shoo,” I said, and went back to reading.

A few minutes later another peck at my foot. It didn’t hurt at all, it was as if someone was tapping my shoulder. I looked down and again it was the ducks. “Go away!” I said. There were plenty of ducks around the fountain and all were very tame, but I’ve never seen anything like these two. A girl nearby tried to get the two to come play with her but they wanted nothing to do with it. They just walked around under my chair and when they came out looked up at me with unblinking duck eyes.

I figured if I ignored them they’d go away, so I went back to reading my book. And indeed they seemed to lose interest, eventually submitting to playing with the girl who actually wanted their attention. I read for a while, then suddenly felt something poking at my right hand pocket. I screamed, startled, and looked down and there again were the freaking ducks. Everyone started laughing, except for the ducks who just stared at me. I said to the ducks, “That’s it, I’m going home,” and headed off to find my train (pausing of course for the suited guy who got annoyed when I told him I had a train to catch).

There were too many things I didn’t have time to see, like the Sacré Coeur or the Musée d’Orsay, and I obviously have to go back. The ducks will be happy to see me.

Haksmoor, finally

St. George-in-the-East was third church I visited and by this time I was tired. So tired. The sun was heading toward the horizon and I really wanted to be out of east London before it set; my little pothead friends had been sweet but there’s a difference between being open minded and just being stupid.

My next church was Christ Church Spitalfields, the pinnacle of Hawksmoor architecture. It’s a forbidding church, it looms over the Spitalfields market across the street, aloof and judgmental. Mary Kelly was killed right around the corner from here, the last of the Whitechapel victims. She and her friends would frequent the Ten Bells Pub right next door.

The gates to the church were closed and I couldn’t get into the yards (tours are only offered on weird days, like every other Tuesday that doesn’t fall on an odd day and only if it’s sunny), but the church’s aura is real. It’s creepy. It’s occult. It’s just… I’m at a loss. You just need to visit it.

I hadn’t eaten since I’d left my flat and I was starving. I had notions of inducing a mystical experience by fasting, but pretty much all I induced was light-headedness and a tumble over by St. Anne’s. I thought I could remain loyal to the spirit of the day if I ate at the Ten Bells, but it was crowded with tourists. It’s a stop on Jack the Ripper walking tours (there’s a list on the wall with the names of the ripper victims and one added to prove some magical working theory). So I decided to move on without eating. It was getting darker anyway.

It was a mile to St. Mary’s Woolnoth. I’d run across this church by accident a couple weeks before while walking to the Bank tube stop from Trafalgar Square. I was about to descend underground when the building caught my eye. I remember thinking, “What the hell kind of building is that??”

St. Mary’s is the only Hawksmoor church within the actual City of London. It’s really got no churchyard at all, standing amongst the buildings in the city’s financial heart. By time I was there that night it was, indeed, night and my pictures are lacking.

I didn’t spend too much time there; there wasn’t much to see. And I was exhausted and hungry and losing the Hawksmoor magic. All I could think about was seeing the Bloomsbury church and sitting down at a nice restaurant. I had to pee too.

It was really dark by time I reached St. George Bloomsbury. The gates were closed and I could barely see anything. I decided I really needed to go back there during the day sometime, but that was besides the point. I had made it! I walked to every one of Hawksmoor’s churches. I had followed the ley lines or the Eye of Horus or whatever, walked all over east London and made it out alive. Amen and hallelujah.

Hawksmoor part 3

I kept seeing more and more eyes as I walked on to the next church, the Eye of Horus following me. Or me following it. The most disconcerting was a shop sign of simply two slightly sinister eyes peering out to prospective customers.

Also as I kept walking the neighborhood started getting more economically stressed and, just like NY, more ethnic, though the population here is Arabic. The street on which St George-in-the-East sits is bordered on both sides with council housing, people sitting outside on steps next to clothes blowing on clotheslines. I felt uncomfortable and felt guilty about feeling uncomfortable. No one bothered me. A few people stared, but I was a stranger here and this was their home.

St George-in-the-East is another of the Hawksmoor churches associated with murder. In 1811 two infamous mass slayings happened in the shadow of the church, known as the Ratcliffe Highway Murders. Two families were killed inside their own homes, brutally and mercilessly. It is said that Hawksmoor had originally wanted to build the church on what would later be the site of the first murder. The bodies from the murders are buried in St George’s churchyard. Eventually they caught a lodger and convicted him of the killings, though theories abound on whether he was the actual murderer, the only murderer, or simply a scape goat. He committed suicide in prison (or was he murdered himself?) and his body was dragged through the streets by an angry mob, staked through the heart and then buried at the crossroads of Ratcliffe Highway and Canon Street (suicides, not to mention serial killers, were likely to turn into vampires and two ways to make sure THAT didn’t happen was to put a stake through the corpse’s heart and bury him at a crossroad. I guess it nailed him down and, if that didn’t work, confused him about which way to go. Vampires apparently aren’t the brightest bulbs on the monster Christmas tree).

Whether some mysterious force evoked such evil or the more mundane malevolence of poverty and urban violence were the actual triggers obviously can’t be proven, but it does add further fuel to the Hawksmoor fire.

The church itself looms much like the rest of the Hawksmoors. This is the other church with a pyramid on the grounds and I was eager to see this one as well. But as I ventured closer I saw a group of six or seven teenagers sitting on its base. Here was the question. Did I go up to the pyramid as if a gang of teenagers lounging around didn’t faze me? Or should I just give up and move on? After all I was in the middle of the projects and white in a non-white area. They could have knives. They could be doing drugs. Or, I scolded myself, they could just be kids like any other kids (of course, I don’t really like kids to begin with, but I didn’t think about that). I finally decided I was being unfair judging these boys and I’d be annoyed with myself if I’d just left, so I walked up to the pyramid and started taking pictures.

I stayed on the opposite side from where they were sitting, though they kept sneaking anxious glances at me. I ignored them. This pyramid wasn’t as striking as the one in St. Anne’s; it is on a pedestal and is carved with designs instead of stark like the other, though the designs are now covered in the ink of more modern artists.

“Can you even see it through the graffiti?” one of the boys said.

“I’m trying but it’s not easy,” I said.

“Are you a tourist?” another said.

“Not really,” I said, “I live here but only for a month now.”

“Where are you from?” asked another.

“No wait,” another one said, “let me guess. Australia?”

“Nope,” I said, “New York.”

The one who had spoken first said, “Hey, that’s great! My cousin lives in New York. If you want to see some really pretty views you should walk down this road. You get to the river and there are all these boats…”

“Actually,” I said, “I’m walking around to all the churches built by the guy who built this one. They’re all really weird. I mean, think about it. Who builds a pyramid in a churchyard?”

“He’s a freak!” the one with the NY cousin said.

“Hey,” said another one, “have you ever seen British cannabis?”

“Nope,” I said.

He showed me a giant handful of green. “You want some?”

“Thanks,” I said, “but, you know, I have asthma…”

“So do I!” said another one.

“And you’re still smoking?” I said. “You should be careful.”

“That’s why he has braces,” said another.

“No it’s not!” said the asthmatic braces wearer.

“Hey, do you want to take our picture?” said the one with the NY cousin.

“Sure, if you want me to.”

“OK!” he said, but no one else was quite so enthusiastic: “ARE YOU CRAZY??”

Someone else said, “Just please don’t tell the cops on us.”

I laughed. “I don’t care what you do. I’m not going to tell anyone.” They were relieved. (This, of course, turned out to be a lie since I’m reporting it here, but I don’t think they’d mind.)

“Well, have fun…” I said and they all said good-bye as I made my way out of the churchyard toward what is considered Hawksmoor’s masterpiece: Christ Church Spitalfields.

The moral of this story? Kids often are just kids, whether they’re getting high in a 7-11 parking lot sitting in a car or getting high in a churchyard sitting on a 275 year old pyramid built by a freak.

Hawksmoor part deux

If you google map the distance between Greenwich and Bloomsbury, where the western-most Hawksmoor church sits, it’s 7.6 miles. I figured that wasn’t too bad. Of course I didn’t think about how google mapped it in generally a straight line while I would be walking from point to point in a less than straight line. I think it was about 3 miles from Greenwich to Limehouse, a mile and a half from Limehouse to Shadwell, 1 1/4 miles from Shadwell to Spitalfields, another mile from Spitalfields to Bank, and then 1 3/4 miles from Bank to Bloomsbury. That ends up being 8 and a half miles, which isn’t too much more than the google maps estimate, but when you throw in walking around the church grounds I was pushing 10 miles. I’m just saying, that’s kind of far.

The next stop on my pilgramage was St Anne’s Limehouse. I crossed under the Greenwich footpath and walked up the western edge of the Isle of Dogs. It seemed longer than I thought it would, if only because there wasn’t too much to see. Most of the Isle of Dogs has become gentrified, with new housing complexes littering Westferry Rd where I was walking. New ugly housing complexes. Seriously, I’ve never seen such ugly housing complexes.

I finally made my way up to the Canary Wharf area, which is just as gentrified as anywhere else but at least it’s kind of pretty by the water. I watched the river go by from above for a while, calming, washing away the grime and the vampires.

Next I had to cross some traffic to get off the peninsula and into Limehouse: through a traffic circle and down an on-ramp on narrow pedestrian sidewalks. As the third double decker bus whizzed by less than a foot to my left I looked up and in the distance saw a grey steeple looming over the rest of the buildings and I knew it was St Anne’s Limehouse. There was nothing else it could be. I didn’t need a map; I just followed the steeple.

I made my way towards the church until finally the only thing separating us was a boarded up construction area. I looked through holes in the boards and could see it for the first time in full. I know it was all in my head. I KNOW. But damn, it looked creepy.

I turned and took a step forward and pitched forward, stumbling onto my hands and knees. I’d missed a step down from the curb, which, if you know me, you know isn’t that strange. But a little pebble had embedded itself deep into my palm when i fell. I had to pull it out and as I did blood flowed from the wound like stigmata, I thought. Like stigmata? Do Anglicans even believe in stigmata? I laughed at myself, but nervously.

I entered the churchyard from the side, wondering if I was even supposed to be there. The gate was open, though, and no one told me to leave.

Graves and monuments stood in the yard amidst pebbles and green grass. The area in back of the church, where the congregation entered, was locked off so I wandered around to the front. I stopped walking to look at the church and jumped as I found myself nearly leaning on a tomb. I haven’t been afraid of tombs since I was a baby. As a kid I used to beg my parents to take me to the mausoleums at Pine Lawn on Long Island. But this entire place gave me the heebie jeebies.

On the other side of the church was the monument that is likely responsible for Hawksmoor’s notoriety and occult status. Next to a tree on the west side of the church is a stone pyramid, about 9 feet tall. It’s smooth on all sides except for the one facing south, which has some sort of crest carved into it and, above that, the words, “The Wisdom of Solomon”. There’s no reason for it to be there. It doesn’t belong if that makes any sense. But it’s sure as hell there.

I took lots of pictures of the pyramid. I walked around the grounds some more and then came back and took more pictures of the pyramid. I looked at some of the graves and then went back to the pyramid. I touched it. Nothing happened. I took more pictures.

Finally I left through the front gate. Directly across Commercial Road from the church is a decrepit building with a faded sign advertising a garage. And on either side of the sign are two big 777’s. Probably just the street number, but still. Weird.

I began walking towards Shadwell and a block from the church was a housing estate (the very British term for the projects). Next to the estate was a boarded off area and on the far side of the log was a grafitti eye. Was it the Eye of Horus? Was it some disaffected kid from the projects tapping into the church’s energy, into the ley lines and occult powers running through the area? Was it a coincidence? In the shadow of the church my mind made connections and inferences that seem inane now but made absolute sense then.

Next: I make friends with some high teenagers. But you’ll have to wait until Tuesday because I’ll be in Paris for the weekend… I’m sure that will be another post.

Hawksmoor

Nicholas Hawksmoor was an English architect who lived in London during the late 17th and early 18th century. He is responsible for 6 of the most prominent churches in modern London lying mostly throughout the traditionally poorer eastern part of the city. They have a occult mythology surrounding them stemming from their strange structure and Mason symbolism and also the proximity of some of the more horrible chapters of British serial murders: Mary Jane Kelly, the (canonically) last and most severely mutilated of the Jack the Ripper victims was killed less than a block from Christ Church Spitalfields; the Ratcliff Highway murders happened near St George-in-the-East and the victims were all buried in its churchyard. The murderer hanged himself in jail and his body was dragged through the streets and dumped into a hole at the crossroads of Cable Street and Cannon Street Road next to the church with a stake driven through the heart (the better to stop a vampire from rising).Now if you’re a skeptic you may think, sure, more violent crime is bound to happen in an economically impoverished area, that makes sociological sense. Psychogeographers in London, such as my man Iain Sinclair, will disagree. They’d tell you that the churches are on power points in a grid of ley lines throughout London and that Hawksmoor either consciously or unconsciously tapped into these power points by the positioning and designs of his churches. They’d also say that churches map out a representation of the Eye of Horus. I’m bound to agree with the skeptical, but the indestructible little romantic inside me loves the idea of mystical grids and occult conspiracies. I liked Foucault’s Pendulum a little too much (and those of you who’ve read The Da Vinci Code but not Foucault’s Pendulum, Bad people! Bad! Get yourself a copy already). So I decided I would walk these supposed ley lines and visit all six of these churches in one day.

I left early Saturday, and by early I mean 12:30 pm or so. I took the Docklands Light Railway down to Greenwich and walked over to St Alfege, church number one on my Hawksmoor tour.

I had been to the church the last time I was in Greenwich . Like many of the Hawksmoor churches the first thing you see is the towering steeple above the surrounding trees and buildings: with the exception of St Mary Woolnoth and St George Bloomsbury (it was dark by the time I got to those two) I didn’t need a map once I was in the general area of each church. The steeples guided the way.

St Alfege was the only one inside which I could walk around as all the others were closed to the public while I was there. A smiling older woman was at an information desk in the vestibule as I entered. “Are you Canadian?” she asked me.

“No, American,” I said, puzzled.

“Oh, OK. Canadians often come here because James Wolfe is buried here.”

Indeed beneath the northwest corner of the church is buried one General James Wolfe, a British military officer who defeated the French in Canada during the French and Indian War in the late 18th century. (Fun fact: like how the Civil War is often referred to as the War of Northern Aggression by those in the American south, so the French Canadians call this war the War of the Conquest.)

“I’m actually visiting of all the Hawksmoor churches in London today,” I told her.

Her face lit up. “That’s wonderful!” she said. She handed me a plastic paddle enclosing directions for a self guided tour for church visitors and brought me to the altar where four lit candles formed a square around a plaque. “This is where Saint Alfege was martyred. Give or take a few meters.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Or more than a few. Really, who knows? But this is where the shrine is.”

St Alfege, it says in the church, was the 29th Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1012 he was martyred by Danish pirates who were holding him for £3,000 ransom. Knowing his people were already hurting and that £3,000 would be a terrible blow, he refused to let them pay and told the pirates to kill him instead. And they did, blugeoning him with ox bones and the shafts of their axes until one pirate, out of mercy, struck him a killing blow to the head.

The woman began to set up for a concert later that evening as I took my walking tour around the church. Like many places in London it had been gutted during the Blitz in 1941 but was rebuilt according to Hawksmoor’s original designs. It’s beautiful now. Walking around London you truly get a sense of how much was destroyed during World War II. It’s easy to develop a profound respect for the British–not only were they able to stand against the Germans but they’ve completely rebuilt and rebounded.

Next: It’s a really long walk to Limehouse. A reeeaaalllyy long walk…

Greenwich

Pronounced like the village not the Greenwitch (shoutout to Susan Cooper!)…

Right across the Thames from where I live is Greenwich, famous for its mean time. Connecting it to the Isle of Dogs is what’s called the Greenwich Foot Tunnel (see picture), a tunnel under the river where pedestrians can cross. It was originally opened as a replacement for expensive ferry service allowing workers living south of the Thames to commute to the docks to work, but now it seems to be mostly full of children and teenagers who find the echo OH SO FUN and enjoy hearing themselves scream. Or maybe it just seems that way to me.

On the other side of the river I walked around the town. Greenwich is part of London, but in effect London, outside the City of, is made up of towns and villages and Greenwich is one of these. I never made it up to the Observatory, that’s for another day, but I did wander around Greenwich Market. It was crowded and touristy and full of much crap, but still fun. There was a booth with guys giving accupressure chair massages; seeing that was seeing a long lost friend. The man giving the massage asked, “Do you want soft, medium or firm?”

“Firm,” I said. Firmly.

He looked at me amused and said, “Let me know if it’s too much for you…”

Let me tell you, it was not. I wanted to explain to him that I was used to Korean women kneeling on my back and walking around with bruises for days but I was too relaxed to say a word. I will go back to the Greenwich Market again if only for more chair massages.

There was also a little indie music/dvd shop there with signs begging for customers, warning that if you didn’t shop there it would inevitably close down. I felt like I had a civic duty to support my adopted country and not long after that I emerged with a new CD (Scarlet’s Walk–Tori Amos) and a DVD (Antonioni’s Blowup, the prototypical depiction of swinging mod London).

Eventually I found myself at St Alfege’s church, one of the six churches built in London by Nicholas Hawksmoor after the great fire in 1666. I LOVE the Hawksmoor churches. Depending on whom you ask, they lay on ley lines running through London and were built with pagan symbolism in the architecture. Indeed, many horrible events have taken place in the shadow of the churches. The bloodiest of the Jack the Ripper murders happened across the street from Christ Church Spitalfields. The Ratcliffe Highway murders occurred on the very spot Hawksmoor had wanted to build St George-in-the-East; the victims were buried in the cemetery where the church was actually erected and the murderer was buried on the crossroads next to it after committing suicide (his skeleton dug up years later with a stake through the heart).

According to my new hero Iain Sinclair, London author and psychogeographer, the churches lie at the angles of a sign of Set and are cult centres, temples for malignancies which have yet to be laid to rest. Of course I need to see them all. Saturday I plan to walk to all six churches; a rather long walk but I’m very excited. I’ll report back if anything unusual happens….