Another Country
What is life, really, but a journey through the Hall of Locks and Keys in a colonial museum?
Creatures, croeso! This is one of about four things I can semi say in Welsh now. On the one hand, Welsh pronunciation seems like one of those martini recipes where it’s like, wave a bottle of vermouth over a glass of gin, throw the bottle away and add an olive, where vermouth = spelling. OTOH I live in the land where Arkansas and Kansas are pronounced as if they’re at war and our shared colonial mother, in her dotage, has lost the ability to say the middle bits of “Cholmondeley”; so we’re none of us heroes.
Wales is beautiful in the springtime. I’d feared coming here, and packed like five pairs of polar fleece leggings, but until today it’s been reasonable and even occasionally sunny. Everything’s lushly green and blossoming—cherry blossoms, lilacs, I’d missed these joys in the desert spring of Silicon Valley. Clawing witchy trees with their elf-haven roots sunk in the banks of mysterious little creeks. Pheasants, grouse (it took me forever to remember that this is the plural), magpies, blackbirds, one swan here in Cardiff with nobody looking at him. Those little English roe deer that make ours, at home so delicate, seem like hulking brutes. Possibly every sheep in Creation? I am just not convinced that there are more sheep available elsewhere. It’s just past lambing season and everywhere we went there were these darling little white and black and black-faced lambs capering and springing, and driving my partner mad with longing—she spent much of her childhood in Wales, which is part of why we were here, and remembers the little lambs suckling her fingertips.
Wales observations: People here are chatty! Their “hello” is, “You all right?”, which is a bit unnerving. We’ve met a bizarre number of northern Californians, also. Even when we went to Mass at a Carmelite convent, the nun who opened the door was from San Francisco! Chatty, friendly people so far. Almost all the food has been great btw, Americans have to retire this joke now. We had one highkey insane meal, so high-end that there was a dessert “inspired by the forest floor,” and that was amazing in a psychedelic way, like you’re wandering through a forest in a dream or a Disney film, or like the marzipan mushrooms and whatnot on top of a buche de Noel were somehow real. But we’ve also had great luck with corner shops and curry-in-a-hurry. (Specifically I’ll call out the fish & chip shop a block from St Teilo’s in Whitchurch, and Spicy Shack by the Embankment in Cardiff Central.)
We started in London, where we returned to the Brompton Oratory (where my partner and I heard Mass together, unknowingly, over a year before we met) and also the V&A, one of my favorite museums in the world. She tolerantly paced beside me as I rhapsodized about weird medieval guys. See below for photo of me in maybe my favorite part of the V&A, the ironwork hall. Beautiful in itself and also touches so many chords of fantasy: this is the ironwork from The Satanic Mill or The Wicked Enchantment, this is what the Thieves’ Guild steals, these curlicues frame the Diamond in the Window, these are the keys that unlock the Gate of Hours or the secret garden.
Then to her childhood haunts in Glamorganshire, which in my own childhood was the site of, like, postapocalyptic reemergences of King Arthur, like a nuclear cicada. Black rocks and driftwood and crashing waves—and a funfair—a place for every kind of childhood dreaming. Then pilgrimages to Rievaulx and Walsingham—and Cley-next-the-Sea, where we met a local who had known Dunstan Thompson’s partner! (She remembered him as “a very gentle creature.”) “Do you want to see where they lived?” Amazing. Then my partner went home and I stayed here to work with a group of Welsh Catholics.
The Reformation still stands out on the land like a wound, you know. A romanticized wound. All those heart-stirring broken monasteries that still act as memento mori, and still draw souls to Christ—but no longer because people live there and can show you the life that blooms from the Cross. When we were at Walsingham and trying to find the little Catholic basilica, we asked one man who said we should ask in the Anglican shrine: “They can tell you how to find the opposition!” He said it with irony, but not a light irony—my partner said she felt it, here, that experience of being a minority, which of course you never feel in Alta California. She kept experiencing the little shock of realizing that the old, glamorously medieval churches were never the Catholic ones (at the moment).
The actual lady who worked in the Anglican shrine was very sweet, and directed us with, “It’s about a mile away—they call it the Holy Mile because so many pilgrims go to both,” and there was an Orthodox sanctuary in the same building, which was an unexpected bit of ecumenism. The main church at the Catholic shrine struck me as basically suburban in architecture—not quite “I’m at the Catholic church/I’m at the Pizza Hut/I’m at the combination Catholic church and Pizza Hut” but in that genre. But there were pilgrims there from several countries, and little kids yelling, “Bombs away!” as they tried to leap the hedges after Mass. And a plaque with quotations from a joint Catholic-Anglican statement on the Virgin Mary, which is a salutary reminder that Christ’s Body is wounded but we are all trying to be members of that Body; and a case with relics in chronological order from Sts Peter and John the Beloved (!) up through Ven Matt Talbot and St John Paul II, which is its own kind of statement. A working church that keeps working.
It would be overstating it to say that the famous red-gowned portrait of Cardinal Newman is as ubiquitous in churches here as Our Lady of Guadalupe back home; but it does feel like, as with the Virgencita, those portraits are making a controversial argument about the national character.
Links Losers Like
If your library card gives you access to Kanopy, you can now watch “The Last Unicorn.” Please let me tell you why you should! (Oh man, revisiting that essay, the images they chose for illustrations are perfect.)
I believe Catherine (sorry, I think she’s officially Sister Catherine) did the Orthodox version of the Walsingham pilgrimage back when she lived in London, several lifetimes ago.
Cael taith bleserus a diogel yng Nghymru!
Forrest