MORE OBELISK WALKS

My obelisk ‘thing’ continues: let’s call it an interest rather than an obsession at this stage.  It ties in with walking, of course.  I don’t in general go walking in search of them, but if in the course of a walk I happen to see one, then my heart leaps up.  

This in turn partly ties in with my love of graveyards (I don’t think I’m a full-on taphophile).  If I’m walking and I see there’s a cemetery nearby I tend to walk through it, and although I don’t necessarily expect to find an obelisk there, it’s surprising how often I do.  As in this cemetery attached to Saint Saviour’s Church in Walthamstow:

Or in the churchyard at Stithians in Cornwall:

I was there with automatist Paul Spooner -  we were having a Sunday afternoon walk - and we stood and looked at the obelisk.  I suppose I was looking at it with rather more fascination than he was, and the time must have been a minute to one, because a minute later the church bell rang very loudly and simultaneously, out of nowhere, a fierce blast of wet wind hit us in the face.  It scared the life out if us.  This is what Paul Spooner looks like, when not having the life scared out of him:

I came across this war memorial obelisk in Manchester (I was there for the cricket):

And a different kind of war memorial obelisk in Chelmsford:

If you’re visiting Colchester General Hospital you’ll find this rather inscrutable one right by the bus stop:

And if, by any chance, you’re in Bristol and you walk down to the Arnos Vale cemetery, you may well think you’ve hit the mother lode, obelisk central:

And just last week I saw this one in Circus Place, adjacent to Finsbury Circus in London.  

It’s quite an eye-catching beast, and it commemorates George Dance the younger (1741 - 1825), an architect, who in 1768, so while he was still in his twenties, became Architect and Surveyor to the Corporation of London, a job he inherited from his father, George Dance the elder. 

Now, a true connoisseur of obelisks will look at the George Dance memorial and protest that it isn’t really an obelisk at all, because it lacks a pyramidion – the pointed bit at the very top, 

That’s perfectly true, and there’s a good reason for it.  The monument is in fact a sort of ventilation chimney – those indents on the shaft are in fact air holes.  Down below street level there is, apparently, a gas storage facility and the passage of air in and gas out prevents explosions, which is obviously a good thing.  But that also means that this obelisk is hollow – so again, it’s not an obelisk at all, since a true obelisk has to be solid and made from one piece of stone.  Still, you can’t be too sniffy about these things.

Nor can you be sniffy if you’re on the train from Manningtree to London, somewhere north of Cherwell Heath, and you look out of the window and see a large white obelisk flashing by.

They’re scattered all over the place if you know where to look, and they mark the points at which duty was payable on coal being taken into London by rail. An obelisk seems rather a grand marker for such a workaday activity, and they do come in various kinds and sizes, some much grander than others, and some not obelisks at all.

PROBE

Meanwhile Nicholson probed ever deeper into the Obelisk 

Jungle of Death. 

(photo by Yana Wormwood Smith)

OBELISK FIELDS

I set off to try to see an exhibition of photographs by Paul Thompson, of coastal navigation markers, in a gallery close to Old Street.  This kind of thing:

But when I got there the place was locked up, and peering in through the windows it definitely didn’t look like there was an exhibition of coastal navigation markers inside.

I’d seen these markers from time to time and hadn’t known what they were: they looked like baskets you might light a fire in. though I never saw one that looked like it had had a fire in it recently. I’d also read that Paul Thompson had done a lot of walking while making these photographs, and if I’d got in and if there’d been anybody to talk to, I’d have asked about the walking aspect, but no, there was none of that.

I was disappointed but not devastated, because I knew I was right by Bunhill Fields, the Noncomformist cemetery, burial place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake.  This is John Bunyan, with pigeon:

I’d been there before and I’d even taken a picture of the Daniel Defoe memorial, and yes I did remember it was an obelisk.

But back then I wasn’t the obelisk obsessive I am today, and now the whole place looks like obelisk central.

I walked around for as long as seemed decent, though you can’t actually walk among the graves, and then I went back to Old Street station.  And here’s a thing – the entrance to the Tube has become vaguely Tokyo-esque.  I mean there’s no Michelin-starred sushi bar, but there are places to eat and drink, places to buy stuff and even a bookshop – Camden Lock Books, which was great, and they had a pile of Merlin Coverley’s Occult London, which I’ve always been meaning to buy, and it was now reduced in price, so I bought a copy and I do hope the author gets some royalties.

Coverley has also been known to write about walking and psychogeography, and in Occult London he (inevitably) quotes Iain Sinclair:

         “The triangle of concentration.  A sense of this and all the other triangulations of the city: Blake, Bunyan, Defoe, the dissenting monuments in Bunhil Fields.  Everything I believe in, everything London can do to you, starts here.”

         

I had read that before, of course, and it had, and still does, leave me with the big question: where in the world does everything I believe in start? I have been thinking about this for years.  I’m still thinking.

Anyway, here’s Paul Thompson’s website:  https://www.paulthompsonstudio.com

THE OBELISK MAN

Funny things, obsessions.  Some of them last so much longer than others.  Some wear off and are gone quite quickly.  Some come and then go away for a while and then return. And in some cases it seems that the obsession is  pursuing you, rather than the other way round.

And so I return to my mild, yet ongoing and very possibly expanding, interest in obelisks.  I’ve written about them a couple of times before on this blog but I keep seeing them as a walk through the world, and this seems in some oblique way significant. 

On the one hand obelisks may be seen light coming down from heaven and being focused rather precisely.  On the other it’s seen a phallic symbol of male power.   I really have no dog in that fight – although as phallic symbols go it seems a bit hard-edged.  And when I see them on my travels I’m not sure I think of them as either.  For me it’s more about  variations within a definite form, as with the martini.

Towards the end of last year I was in Chicago.  I didn’t go there looking for obelisks, I didn’t expect to see them, and yet Chicago seems to be Obelisk Central.  

They’re all over the place. It has a lot to do with Frederick Law Olmsted who designed large chunks of the city, including parts of what’s apparently known as the "emerald necklace.”  But it’s not restricted to that area.

And taphophile that I am, I went to the cemetery named Graceland (no Elvis connection) which I’d read about on Atlas Obscura, and which I think they rather over-sold as featuring  “magnificent opulence.”  I’ve seen opulenter.  But for me it was just the biggest cluster of obelisks I’d ever seen.

And then once I arrived in London I went to Brompton cemetery and there are lots of obelisks there too, though not nearly as many in Chicago:

And then in the deer park in Richmond

And on display in the British museum, which wasn’t really all that surprising

But there are also a couple tucked into corners in the Museum’s Great Court, which doesn’t seem very respectful.

And there were some in a shop window opposite the British Museum – I guess if you can’t sell an obelisk there, you probably can’t sell one anywhere.  That's the image at the top of this post.  I bought one, naturally.

And then in Battersea Park at the weekend I saw a set of them by children’s zoo, unnoticed by the passing afternoon strollers. 

This is by no means a complete list of recent sightings.   But here’s a thing; as I walked in the cemetery in Chicago I saw this:

And as I walked in the Brompton I saw this:

Walkers get everywhere, and most of us know a memento mori when we see one.