Chin-Wag Part 3: Little Gidding

[warning: the picture is not a picture of Little Gidding. I will upload the right photos when I have my computer again]

Little Gidding is a place in the countryside of Cambridgeshire and T.S. Eliot said nice things about it most importantly that it is "the world's end" and is "the intersection of the timeless moment" and isn't that a nice thing to say about a place so why not go see it? There is a group of thirty British people who walk five miles to get to Little Gidding on an annual pilgrimage and it just happened to be the day you came. If you get a little lost on your way because people who have tongue rings do not give very good directions, you'll miss most of the service but will still get to have tea. You might meet a nice man from Ecuador and his friend who is named either Bonny or Johnny or Lonnie and has bad teeth and doesn't know English well so you just stand by him weirdly until one of you leaves. Did you know the word weird comes from the Medieval word Wyrd which means fate? I think that is interesting.

The haystacks in the field are impossible to climb and you might rub your eyes and regret it a lot when you learn you are allergic to hay. The flies will get bored and leave when they realize you are not cow poop. The wind will be cold and strong because it blows across so many fields to get to where you are. There are trees but mostly fields and the sky is so big and open that you will feel like the patient etherized upon a table but without the etherization or whatever it's called.

Even if you are not reading Hamlet you will feel alone. Maybe "what you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning" so it is okay you don't have any great thoughts and only feel like an ant like Charles the First might have when he visited here before he was executed. You might think about Van Gogh who shot himself behind a haystack in a wheat field. At first I thought it must have been storming then too and he was also watching the clouds move across the sky towards him and feeling the rain blow on his face and the wind was making it hard to stand but then I decided it was sunny. When it gets dark like that you want to shout at the sky and survive and prove you can beat it so I bet there were birds chirping instead.

It turns out you can climb the haystacks and you only picked the wrong one before but your friend can show you the right one. When you get to the top you will wish you had memorized poetry with bad weather like when people curse storms but all you know is "Blow foul winds, blow!" from when King Lear was on the heath and since you don't know the rest of the speech you just yell "Lear on the heath!" which is not very effective. You can try various Attempts to Contain the World poses and your friend will do the Calmly and Strongly Confronting Life pose which says a lot about her. You can talk about that more when you are safe inside the room made especially for short people.

The next day you can visit Steeple Gidding and see that it is disappointingly well-kept and visited too often for it to be cool even in the slightest. Be sure to talk to the cows on the way there because they are nice and will look at you for a long time and not even get bored. On the walk back you will remember the old man from the bus ride who held a photograph of a row of houses and traced the bushes connecting the front yards with his finger. I guessed that it is where he grew up because the photographs were from the 40s and he was about 70 but maybe it was where his wife grew up and she was too sick or dead to make the trip. Either way he was very careful with the photographs and kept them in a yellow envelope. What was crazy was that the hair on his arms was still blonde. I noticed because he had tattoos that were only blobs because the ink ran together and at the same time he had shoes that velcro shut. Weird.

Today a different old guy walked by me and two people all reading Canterbury Tales in Port Meadow in Oxford and he said "By jove! Look at those swots" and we smiled because he was smiling even though we didn't know what he meant. Swot is British slang for a studious scholar, but the word is "often used derisively" and maybe I should be offended but when British people talk it is best to smile and laugh or say something witty.