Great Halls of Memory
Such a long time since last visiting The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Completely misremembered its architecture and style. In my mind it was red brick and High Gothic, but no, now, at least, it seems to be Victorian Neoclassicism, all columns, domes and marble cladding. Perhaps there are corridors, rooms, floors, wings in different styles, different times, different memories.
Ascend the staircase,
The head that looks out,
The open dome,
The caverned stone skull.
Nothing else but a memory palace. Slow the heart, slow the eye,
The crowds blur and fade,
Their footsteps to whispers,
Their passing to plumes, dust motes dancing
.
All that remains, motionless, eternal: the memories, the constructions of memory, the shaping and honing of memory. The forms frozen and holy, the skilful turn of chisel and burin. Dark stairwells, cold. Curved stone scrolls, careful, less inhabited. The images of the dead, a maintenance of expectations,
The mental bones,
The bones of the mind,
The fossil fragments of heart,
Congealment.
Not as it was. Not as it seemed. Mind matter welded to timeless earth. An imposition of perfected memory, fabricated, polished. These we keep. These we cherish. These we honour – the bones of our ancestors, deep in our skull cities.
A record of dancing dust.
A reassessment of forgetting.
Mr Brown would come from afar,
Smiling sweetly ( eyes like jackdaws).
He would know, he would number the portals, the gateways, the porticoes, rearranged by time and place for fond ghosts to find then lose themselves. Hungry ghosts, longing, bored, wandering vestibular chambers.
Neither are they our memories
Harboured here.
Not ours, but wrenched,
Wedged, removed
From forgotten, desolate ruins.
Passed down by the impecunious,
The vanquished, the uninterested.
Our own little memories, ghost memories, too, no more sweetly harboured at sunset satisfied. They, wandering, away, pick trinkets in other lands, embellishments. Each time told remembered the last time told, the last time, told. An evolution of maps and stories, a hearsay, an edifice of straw and mud, an edifice of marble, collated by grain and polish, by echo, by echo eroded, by echo reborn.
Nothing but chaff and chatter
That fades at closing time,
The weight of stone time,
An instant frozen.
A pin dropping.
all the photographs here were taken on my visit. It was not my intention, time and equipment were not sufficient. But I salvaged a few blurry images and worked them a little.it is a place to go to summon strange juxtapositions,reflections,spaces
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