Making Memories in the Now
I love London with a passion that is never spent, but there is another English city I could happily live in – York.
The crashing waves of Brythonic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman occupation and the accompanying shifts in temporal and spiritual influence are all easily felt in York. Even without the heritagisation of the city, you can feel a concentration of history here. It is as if the medieval walls have not only kept back some aspects of modernity, but also retained some of the psychic flotsam of the past as the tide of power has ebbed and flowed through this former capital.
It is a beautiful city for anyone phobic to steel, concrete and glass. No building challenges the height and dominating presence of the Minster. Nowhere in England has a greater mass of medieval masonry. The Ouse rolls through its centre with its beautiful menace kept in check by thought none of its floods has managed to wash away the stone permanency of the place.
If its beauty and sense of history were not enough reasons to adore York, I have always been taken by the facts it is a city where walking is the only real way to navigate it and the more you interrogate it, the more wonder it reveals. Drifting in York can bring you face-to-face with the fifteen signs that mark the end of the world in a single stained glass window, the final resting place of the most notorious 18th Century Essex boy or explain the ancient association of cutlers and conspiracy. Its alleyways are not just shortcuts, but trips traversing the topography of spirit lore and mystery.
The place is home to my own good and bad ghosts, but York teaches you that what you cannot exorcise, you build around. Accept the past as the foundation for now, practice alchemy of soul and transmute bitter tears into aqua vitae. I can choose to dwell on the laughter days of living above the doll shop or the trauma screams. Feel possessed by the wraiths of Clifford’s Tower or recall the glow of smiles induced by feeding geese on banks of the river. All my history of York exists in same physical space, but it up to me what I revisit, it is up to me what I add to it.
So, I raise an Evil Eye Smoothie to the joy of making memories in the now and writing new personal history in a place where the past is always be present.
The crashing waves of Brythonic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman occupation and the accompanying shifts in temporal and spiritual influence are all easily felt in York. Even without the heritagisation of the city, you can feel a concentration of history here. It is as if the medieval walls have not only kept back some aspects of modernity, but also retained some of the psychic flotsam of the past as the tide of power has ebbed and flowed through this former capital.
It is a beautiful city for anyone phobic to steel, concrete and glass. No building challenges the height and dominating presence of the Minster. Nowhere in England has a greater mass of medieval masonry. The Ouse rolls through its centre with its beautiful menace kept in check by thought none of its floods has managed to wash away the stone permanency of the place.
If its beauty and sense of history were not enough reasons to adore York, I have always been taken by the facts it is a city where walking is the only real way to navigate it and the more you interrogate it, the more wonder it reveals. Drifting in York can bring you face-to-face with the fifteen signs that mark the end of the world in a single stained glass window, the final resting place of the most notorious 18th Century Essex boy or explain the ancient association of cutlers and conspiracy. Its alleyways are not just shortcuts, but trips traversing the topography of spirit lore and mystery.
The place is home to my own good and bad ghosts, but York teaches you that what you cannot exorcise, you build around. Accept the past as the foundation for now, practice alchemy of soul and transmute bitter tears into aqua vitae. I can choose to dwell on the laughter days of living above the doll shop or the trauma screams. Feel possessed by the wraiths of Clifford’s Tower or recall the glow of smiles induced by feeding geese on banks of the river. All my history of York exists in same physical space, but it up to me what I revisit, it is up to me what I add to it.
So, I raise an Evil Eye Smoothie to the joy of making memories in the now and writing new personal history in a place where the past is always be present.
posted by David at
10:18 PM
6 Comments:
A beautiful encomium. York sounds incredible.
I love London, but it sounds like York has done a better job of retaining its soul.
I spent a wonderful day exploring York. You're right about everything. I wandered the river, the streets so steeped in history it felt like it could nearly have been the middle ages, the mound and its depressing story.
Am i right in remembering it's the last walled city in England?
crankster - York is incredible. It has retained its soul, but I would argue that so has London – or rather parts of it have. London is a collection of villages, a shoal of souls that have entwined into something akin to a knot of living eels coiling through time together.
GC - Chester can claim to be the most completely walled city remaining in England, but obviously I prefer walking the walls in York.
David
I am extremely glad of your recent epiphony, as it is much the same as the one I would have gently pressed upon you if you had only let me.
From here on in, it becomes progressively easier to massage the bumpy history of the past into a more pleasant road leading to where you are heading.
I take my hat off to you, which as it's invisible, is a feat that few truly appreciate.
This is an intense and bittersweet time for me, but you've made it possible for me to travel vicariously to a place I visited only once, 30 years ago, and get some respite. You write beautifully, very evocatively.
I am also very glad indeed of your recent epiphany, as it is one that I have tried my best to bluntly press upon you through the combined mediums of witchcraft and friendship for much of this year whether you were ready for it or not!
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