London, Wounded City

Walking through London in late June, I got the sense of a city at profound peace with itself, its past, and the world. I climbed up the monument at Trafalgar square, breathing in quite roar of the city air. I followed the moon down a curving street, a crevasse between two cliffs of Victorian edifices, to Westminster. It was quiet, and the full moon silently shone in the clear sky, a benevolent friend. On the south bank I strolled through the collection of theatres and art museums. Centuries ago, Shakespeare would have walked these streets. In this ancient city, gothic churches and modern glass innovations shared one skyline, one neighborhood, one fate. “Back the Bid,” advocated billboards. London was soon to find out that it will host the Olympic Games in seven years.
Near city hall, an outdoor exhibition featured aerial photographs of our home earth. Unreal colors and landscapes featured geological abstract expressionism coexisting with man’s efforts at eking out his livelihood. Boats and villages, caravans, and homes clung like barnacles to the rugged lands and fertile waterways of the planet. It is the stuff of life, natural and human. A giant map on the ground revealed the locations of all the images. I walked barefoot across it, across wonders and peoples in corners of the planet continents away. They were neighbors I’ve met for the first time. It was late, so I made my way back across the river along Tower Bridge, near the prison, palace, and armory so much a part of the history of this place. A little further down the Thames must have been the spot where Conrad’s Marlowe pondered with his sailing companions the first Roman legionnaires to set foot in this once savage land.
In this city I saw a culture trying to atone for its sins, an open, progressive society that accepted strangers as kinsmen, as brothers. Perhaps it was lingering guilt from the past. Over 300 languages are spoken in London. Paddington station, the terminus of my transatlantic journey and the place where I first set foot in this world, was a short walk from the Middle Eastern district. Its streets were lined with Arabic writing and halal meat markets. In Hyde Park, I saw a French-speaking West African father playing soccer with his son, a boy of only three. At Westminster protest signs lined the fences. Silent but loud, these hand-made posterboard protests evidenced a people that had once conquered the world, but had then grown weary of the burdens of conquest, for both sides of the equation. How was I to know that somewhere among these streets a new Gunpowder plot was in the works? At least to me, this nation, if not its government, was trying to define its role in the world as a tolerant peacemaker. While I sleep, chthonic plans are finalized. I leave for my studies in Oxford and wish the city farewell.
It was a severe shock to me when, two weeks later, explosions wrecked the veins that carried the lifeblood of the city. This same network of trains and buses I had traveled such a short time ago. How misguided, how uncharacteristic of an occurrence this was. Had those deadly undercurrents flowing from my country to the cradle of civilization and back again followed me here? Would this event incite the crusading hatred that it had back home? I feared that the evil, long dead and buried here, would reawaken from beneath the monuments of conquests past and topple the new, living city of peace. I saw visions of the British Museum, a moment ago hosting a celebration of Africa and its people, change into a voracious neoclassical monster. Hate emanated from its doors like hot electric fire—it was beast seeking to devour again the treasures of the world, that in its belly it might house more of the world’s booty, plundered from the cultures that met their end under the Union Jack. Before America started fucking up the world, Britain had done it first. Now with the shoe on the other foot and the rebellious colony, hot with hate and giddy with power, calling the shots, would rage again spill forth in the streets of London. A second round of bombings and the death of an innocent man in a trigger-happy police firestorm seemed to confirm my fears. The bleeding city was calling down Death on its enemies. From Oxford, an hour and a half away, we pondered these worries as we tried to go about the day to day business of study.

Memory: September 12, 2001
I’m in the car with my father; we are driving to a store to purchase my first real camera, an expense that I as a high school kid could not myself afford. I was in a photography class for the first time and needed it. We are silent in the car. Music no longer plays on the radio—that’s a diversion that now seems wholly inappropriate. The newscasters are ruminating on the previous day’s events, still trying to put it together. It is just before dusk, the sky is cool blue turning into fiery orange at the horizon. There are no more planes in the sky. It is a different world now, one where the colors don’t seem quite right. I get the camera and head back home as the sun sets. I will learn to see the world now through this lens. The radio plays on.

At Oxford, I write essays each week about history or literature. My English tutor asks me to skip lines on the loose leaf so that she can write comments. Looking at one of them I notice the difference in my writing between two lines. Must’ve taken a break there. A lot can happen between the lines. Between those lines of furious writing, I made new friends, broke with old friends, traveled around, and even fell in love. Once, several of us went with a tutor for a walk in the countryside. From the town we made our way through the park-like pastures of sheep and fields of grain. Great expanses of yellow-tinged green rippled in the wind, a nourishing, living being domesticated within its hedgerow enclosures. Along the way, a Roman villa had wedged itself into the land, finally finding a comfortable spot, becoming a part of the land, even as its walls crumbled. I did not bring my camera. These sights I would keep as my own, free from the photographic dissection of spaces and moments. Looking back at my snapshots of London monuments, I now see only stilted still-frames of frozen marble masonry, as if the buildings saw me photographing them and paused a moment from their candid conversations to offer a clichéd pose of my camera. None of the vibrant, bubbling life beneath is there, only dry stone caricatures. My memories are what contain the true life of the place, and the only interesting photos are of the friends I met there. Perhaps I should adjust my lens.
In my history studies at Oxford, my tutor always made me look at the past from the ground up. It is in this bubbling stew of peoples and ideas and life that history is made. The kings, battles and monuments only come later, a consequence, an artifact. It wasn’t the city that was wounded, but the individual people living there, trying to make a home for themselves in the midst of this earth. It is these people whose wounds would either heal or continue to fester. Hatred and war are poisons that disrupt their existence, physically and spiritually. The physical damage scars the bodies and buildings, but the worst damage is done to hearts and psyches, of both the victims and the perpetrators. We are fragile creatures; when we lash out, seeking to break others, we irrevocably break ourselves. The poisons must be contained before the frothing sea of humanity produces monstrosities out of its choler and bitterness. London, I believe in you still. Your citizens do not approve of the bombings, the police shootings, or the trouble behind it all. You just want to live.

Memory: August 10, 2005
It’s almost dusk; I’m in the air, my farewell flight from England. The sky is a cool blue turning to fiery orange at the horizon. Below, I see the lights and roadways of the towns and villages, colonies of life nestled on the ground like lichens growing on a tree. In photographing my time here I’ve taken ten rolls of film of the places, and sights and people and friends. I wonder to myself how they will turn out. How will it all turn out?

Against Faith

Faith means trust. One can have faith (or confidence) in a number of things, such as faith in the economy, faith in another person, etc. It is simply the belief that a claim is true or will that someone will act as they have promised. Faith in the religious sense means belief in a doctrine without necessarily having enough proof of its truthfulness to be reasonably certain. To believe something without adequate proof or evidence is a mistake. At best, it is the equivalent of guessing, at worst it is to go against reason itself. Unless some conclusive evidence can be found for the existence or nonexistence of a divine being, then the agnostic position is the only logical choice. Faith without reason is a grave mistake.