It only rained the first day I was in London, thankfully. I had booked a trip many months in advance and, finding a deal on accommodation, decided to spend a full week there. The morning I arrived, I underestimated how much my backpack weighed with time as a variable, and the muscles around my neck and shoulders were sore from having also to carry an umbrella. I stopped underneath a bridge in front of what I thought looked like a former distillery to set down the backpack.
It costs a lot to live in London, even on a typical salary. I don’t know why I am surprised. One person I later met told me she thought the cost of food (groceries) was reasonable, but we agreed the cost of dining out was exorbitant, at least for Canadians. The exchange rate when I was there was roughly 1.7 to 1. That’s almost double including foreign transaction fees. If I remember correctly at least the prices include tax, so you don’t have to account for it in the arithmetic.
I began to think of London as a park city sometime after I visited Greenwich Park and Hyde Park. There’s a lot of green in London, but the waterways are in bad shape. I might have thought about the air quality. I liked how you could do anything or nothing at all. I liked when the sun would come out from inside the clouds. But then after a while it would be too bright. I thought I was lucky, but that my visit wasn’t characteristically London (the rain and fog). Maybe I was right. In my dreaminess I had to remind myself, by looking it up on my phone, that London is not where parks and gardens were invented. Too much time has elapsed.
I walked to see the London Eye in the middle of the day, at sunset, and after nightfall. There’s something about the Eye that gave me comfort. That there was something that knew more than me, had seen more, and therefore was wiser. I had the proper London breakfast with black pudding and baked beans. I passed on the grilled tomato. There was never a set menu that had everything I wanted.
The National Portrait Gallery is a nice place to stop by if you’re in the area. I’ve been thinking about portraiture lately. I thought of John Berger’s book, Portraits. I wrote something about it a while ago. Here is part of it, excavacated:
I like how Berger begins some of his pieces with a personal window into his life, the “today I” construction so universally understood as a transference of intimacy. “Today I went to the street market in a suburb south of Paris…” “One July evening this summer, I went up the highest field, high above the farm, to fetch Louis’s cows.” It makes art, or the subject of his criticism, sound not so distant, not too far away from inner boredom, or quotidien obligation.
Portraiture relies on honesty as a medium of transfer. Without vulnerability a portrait is not a portrait. So there is art in it, even if art and photography cannot be conflated. I believe photography has, and will have, a more pervasive effect on our world than artificial intelligence. It’s a matter of which came first, of course, but also the sheer power of the image and its visuality. It has fundamentally altered our states of thinking and being. It has given way to the algorithms that proliferate it.
I was thinking about what a portrait is while sitting in the new Varda Café-Bar (a space for “creative spirits” and tea) at TIFF Bell Lightbox. There was a screen that was playing a rotation of black and white portraits of directors of some of the most celebrated films at this year’s festival. It would be naive to think a photograph can capture the “truth” of a person in a given moment. But there is an emotional integrity that is filtered through the lens. A person smiles—does that mean they are happy? We see the joy, not the pain. But that doesn’t mean they are not happy. All is possible with light, which also blocks the possible, shapeshifts it into something it cannot be.
When I visited the National Portrait Gallery I saw many powerful images and tried to read whatever descriptions were available. At times it made me sad to see tradition loom so large. Earlier I had been to Tate Britain to see the centuries of portraits unfold. I heard an expert on Canaletto talk about the passage of time. I also had read, in the airport and on the plane, Hilary Mantel’s essay, “Royal Bodies.” I guess I don’t agree with its conclusion, which is to say I don’t agree with Mantel. It’s the optimism I suppose I find appalling. I don’t know why the essay would have, in the end, to do with cruelty. It’s a question of our sympathies, which are the only flowers we have to give in the absence of flowers, which also cost a lot.