Among the Ruins

We’d come to Tintern Abbey because it was located just across the border, just across the River Wye, in Wales, the land of my distant ancestors. We’d also come because of William Wordsworth, who mentions the abbey in a poem that isn’t about the abbey at all but about his ability to remember and contemplate and be inspired by experience. The abbey itself is referred to only in the poem’s title—“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798”—which has to be one of the least inspiring titles about being inspired that has ever been applied to a poem.

But we came because I’d read Wordsworth in college, and I wanted to at least set foot on Welsh soil, even though we had many other places on our itinerary that beckoned to the east: Bath, Stonehenge, the medieval smuggler’s town of Rye, Bodiam Castle, and then, of course, London.

What we found on the sylvan banks of the Wye, much to our pleasure, were the ruins of a Cistercian monastery that Henry VIII had dissolved and plundered (after dissolving a few marriages first and founding the Church of England). The abbey’s roof is gone, some walls and outer buildings crumbled, but the primary structure of the church—its soaring pillars and archways—can stir the soul nonetheless. Instead of stone floor, you walk on grass. Here’s a place where the human endeavor to reach the heavens is pulled back into focus by the surrounding, tree-flush hillsides as seen through paneless windows and doorless doorways and by the verdant growth beneath your feet. The original spiritual activity of Cistercian monks is gone, but a spiritual connection remains and is in some ways magnified by the wreckage.

I sensed this would be the case before visiting, had Googled pictures of the abbey’s Old Red Sandstone remains while plotting our tour, but was not entirely prepared for the effect, especially since I’d seen other ruins in my life. In fact, visiting a ruin (or partial ruin) generally puts me in mind of a different poem—one by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was a generation younger than Wordsworth. In “Ozymandias,” Shelley reminds us how the ravages of time can take down even the most powerful of rulers, including the King of Kings whose monument to testosterone has decayed into “two vast and trunkless legs of stone.” (Fun fact: Shelley, who had a beef with Wordsworth for deserting his nature-loving radicalism and becoming too conservative, wrote a sonnet cutting his predecessor down to size.)

But then I pulled a Wordsworth and started thinking about how I was feeling. In truth, Tintern Abbey inspired me to write a song, though not immediately—only when I returned home and recollected my emotions in tranquility, as was Wordsworth’s wont for poetic discourse. For me, nature’s inclination toward recapturing the spaces once filled by lofty human achievement (sky instead of roof, grass instead of floor) provided a suitable check to human hubris, which is what Shelley warbles about in “Ozymandias.” It also became, in the narrative I was conceiving, representative of the ephemeral, no-promises quality of a traveler’s romance—of a guy who meets a girl at the ruins of a church, travels with her to other places, falls in love, and discovers that such a romance, much like the abbey, has an expiration date.

Things fall apart. Castles, churches, and sometimes love.

But time also provides opportunity for new creation. If time destroys (and doesn’t give a damn about it), it also avails the distance necessary for emotions to be recollected, sifted, sorted, compressed, cooked, cooled, and reheated. Love among the ruins—once ruined—becomes fodder for a poem, a story, a song, or a made-for-TV movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier.

And so I consume my fodder as I glance backward. I think of how we wandered the grounds at Tintern Abbey that day. Took our pictures, saw cows grazing in the nearby field, walked the nave, paused in the transepts, read placards about the night stair and the lavatorium and the presbytery, separated for quiet contemplation and converged for quiet commentary, jumped off stones (at least the kids did), and saw small indications of nature’s continuing impulse to seed new life into cracks and sills.

When we left, we crossed the River Wye and headed for Bath and the Roman times and, a few days later, Stonehenge, where time and human achievement took on yet another formulation in the grass beneath an open sky.

But the Sun is Eclipsed by the Moon

When I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in high school, I was delighted by Mark Twain’s use of a solar eclipse as a plot fulcrum. Hank Morgan, bonked on the head and woken up in sixth-century Camelot, leverages his 19th-century, American-bred knowhow to fend off superstitious Englishmen who would've had him burned at the stake. Not only that, his ability to magically blot out the sun convinces Arthur and his courtiers to make Morgan the king’s right-hand man.

Twain wrote the book as a satire of chivalric romance, and he shows Hank Morgan’s good side in his attempts to democratize Arthurian England and end slavery. But we also find in Morgan, who dubs himself “The Boss,” the mixed seeds of the flimflam man, carnival magician, and Gilded Age entrepreneur—much like the character played by Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.

Four years before Twain’s book was published, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines came out, using a lunar eclipse as a plot twist to the benefit of adventuring Victorian Englishmen. Twain might have been one-upping the British author, but both may have taken their cue from Christopher Columbus, who not only stumbled upon America but also set the tone for a certain strain of flimflammery that continues to this day. Upset that the local inhabitants of Jamaica had stopped providing food to his men (after his men had plundered their villages), Columbus used a lunar eclipse to convince the locals that his god was angry. Now, some might argue that Columbus was only being shrewd in using his greater cosmic knowledge to gain provisions, that the local tribe members on this island were simply being outwitted and outplayed as if they were contestants in an episode of Survivor. But we should remind ourselves that, if knowledge is power, then with great power comes great responsibility. Or so saith Stan Lee.

Know-nothingism is not the alternative, of course. Few people could spot a good flimflam man like Mark Twain, and few people made more fun of gullible mobs than Twain did. To rise above the mob, Twain suggests, we could use more empirical evidence and less romanticized superstition. We need scientific inquiry. Consider, for instance, that it took the study of solar eclipses to discover helium and prove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. 

________

I recall two partial solar eclipses from my childhood in the Pacific Northwest. The first was probably the one that occurred on March 7, 1970, when I was in kindergarten. My class marched out of its portable at Sunny Hills Elementary to the playground and lined up to look into pinhole boxes so that we wouldn’t go blind. I felt a bit perturbed that I had to watch at a remove, that what I was witnessing was a representation of the actual thing—a shadow puppet on a wall. Seeing the moon partially fill in the dot of sunlight on the piece of paper was sort of like watching a hesitant student take a multiple-choice test. Of course, today I’m appreciative of the precautions our teachers took in preserving our five-year-old retinas. My middle-aged retinas thank them profusely.

The second partial solar eclipse likely was when I was sitting in 7th-grade math class at Pine Lake Junior High, just across the road from Sunny Hills. The teacher might have made a reference to the eclipse as he taught us how to calculate the area of a rhombus, but for the most part we just sat in our hard plastic chairs as day outside turned to not-really-night and the buzzing fluorescent lights became increasingly annoying. It’s possible that this moment marks the beginning of the end of my mathematical aptitude, but I’m not certain.

If I lost interest in math, however, I did not lose interest in the larger scientific questions that math could help solve—I just didn’t want to be the one performing the equations. What I liked most, and still like most, are the stories related to cosmic events and how people have tried to explain them, use them to their advantage, or simply give in and feel the awe of the moment. Herodotus writes of an eclipse that ended a six-year war between the Lydians and the Medes. Like the stadium lights going out at on a Friday-night football game, the lack of illumination put an end to hostilities. During the Peloponnesian War, Athenian general Nicias (with a little help from his priests) took a lunar eclipse as an omen to tarry around the harbor of Syracuse, only to be routed by the Syracusan fleet. So saith Thucydides.

Even in modern times, people get weird about eclipses. Annie Dillard, writing about a total eclipse in my home state of Washington (one that I have no recollection of but which occurred when I was still in junior high), notes the near hysteria: “From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching.” Dillard was in the Yakima Valley at the time, standing on a hill of wild barley, but where was I on that Monday morning in 1979? Learning to square dance in P.E.? Snoozing, open-lidded, through another math class? Why did this particular eclipse escape me?

Well, I had no choice but to be in school, learning, learning, learning. And maybe I didn’t even care at the time. It wasn’t the sun and the moon that concerned me most that year so much as sports, girls, and hobbits.

The following year I read about Hank Morgan and his exploits among the Knights of the Round Table (probably about the same time that I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Such spoofery helped loosen some of the cataracts of childhood gullibility from my eyes. I was probably also listening to Pink Floyd and The Who at the time and thinking: The Boss? Hmmm. Same as the old boss? . . . We don’t need no thought control. I was, at least internally, starting to question authority.

Fortunately, some authorities have the ability to inspire. My youngest daughter, who had a fantastic 8th-grade science teacher last year, is excited to see the upcoming eclipse, so much so that she’s incredibly disappointed that we can’t travel one state south to experience totality. Marching band camp at the high school has precluded that option. (“Trouble with a capital T!” I can hear a certain flimflam artist singing in The Music Man.) So we will instead head somewhere local on Monday morning, perhaps even our own yard, to see if the world as we know it will end.

Based on what I’ve learned so far, I don’t think it will—but there might be screaming.

Curs in the Kitchen, Curs in the Church

She had transformed me to a curtal dog, and made me turn i'the wheel.

—Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

A few Novembers ago, during a time of year when radio shows are prone to discuss best practices in turkey cooking, I caught the tail end of a discussion about turnspit dogs. I don’t remember much about what was being said, but I do recall thinking: “Hmm . . . Turnspit Dogs. Good band name—or great band name?” (Never mind that I didn’t have a band.)

After some investigation, I learned that turnspit dogs (Canis vertigus, or “dizzy dog”) were used in kitchens during the 16th century to power the spits on which meat or fowl were cooked. Now extinct, these dogs were small and short-legged, possibly related to Welsh corgis. Some were curtailed—that is, these curs’ tails had been cut off. Most interesting to me (and perhaps a reason for the tail lopping) was that they worked inside something akin to a large hamster wheel, which was mounted on the kitchen wall and rigged mechanically to keep the spit rotating.

Turnspit dogs replaced boys who used to crank the spit by hand, but by the end of the 19th century these dogs had been replaced by other mechanisms such as the steam jack or the clock jack. Curiously, turnspit dogs, though considered ugly compared to other canines, often had another function. Come Sunday, they could be found in church, warming the feet of their masters beneath the pew.

I did this research in part because I wanted to write a song for my imaginary band. I wanted the song to be introductory and a statement of arrival—sort of like The Monkees’ theme song. I was, of course, way ahead of myself. Someday, I'll record the song, which for now is a bluesy ukulele number and offers up this sing-along chorus: “Whoa-oh, whoa-oh-oh—curs in the kitchen, curs in the church.”

In the meantime, I’m happy to use Turnspit as the name of my blog, which represents the nature of serendipitous inspiration (what’s on the radio at the moment you turn it on, what you might hear in a snippet of conversation). As often happens, one idea connects to another—and if you keep the wheel spinning, you might just get something flavorful to chew on.

What might such proteins consist of? Music? Tudor-era rotisserie cooking? Who knows? I like to be surprised by the connections that are made. I like to explore how subjects intermingle like guests at a dinner party.

Finally, I just discovered a band from Yorktown, Virginia, called The Turnspit Dogs. They specialize in popular music from the 18th century. There’s also a song called “The Turnspit Dog” by a band called MANKIND.

Oh, well. I suppose if MANKIND had a similar idea, it must be valid.

Cheers! And thanks for your indulgence.