Substance And Memory

What the passage of time often dulls is the memory of circumstances upon which the historic monuments of antiquity were built. Forgotten are episodes once witnessed beyond thick, redoubtable walls. History assumes a mythical status, as distant as the hills and hedges in the misty morning, as romantic as the motifs of chivalry and courage that embellish the ghosts and legends of a violent and mournful history.

The stained stonework of Wales and England remain as the silent souvenirs of ambition and fear that eventually laid waste to king and knave alike. Parapets are barely preserved, craggy against the spiritless, scudding clouds. While lilies float in murky moats, the ceaseless, sopping rain strives eternally to scrub away the essence of oppression and force. Amidst blood-drenched soil, graced now by daffodils, death is redeemed.

The awesome cathedral, the formidable bastion of faith that accompanied the enlightenment of medieval Europe, remains a overwhelming reminder of man’s everlasting hope in the battle to gain redemption from the hell-on-earth over which the castle held sway. That man can build houses of fear amongst houses of peace attests to his unfailing mortality, and to the ultimate downfall of ambition and greed that defines both medieval and modern man.

Viewed from without, impenetrable walls and imperious towers seem somehow tragic, forsaken. Under heavy limbs, nature, scheming and opportunistic, demands recompense of Saxon stronghold and Norman keep alike. Beech grows, gnarled and twisted, as if tortured by time and catastrophe. Fallen promises lay like the dead trunks of once-mighty sentinel oaks, casualties of ill-conceived necessity, or neglect. The mottled bark of the plane tree echoes the blemished, ill-defined circumstances of fact and fable. And in the deepening dusk of the northern sky, heavy boughs cling to and cleave the crumbling substance of mankind’s will to survive, and to dominate.

Forgotten stones fall, one by one, unnoticed and unnamed, and the walls see each spring bloom followed eventually by autumn leaves, dead and dying at their base. The long reach of time will reclaim the stone, clutching, possessive, back to the earth from whence it came. The substance of monuments will fail. The memory of man will fade. Only the memory of trees will claim the lessons of forgotten mornings.

What have we learned?