Architecture, Art, and the Exhaustingly Endangered

The University of London's School for Oriental and African Studies, SOAS, has an Endangered Language Documentation Programme that funds linguists doing research on disappearing languages all over the globe. Oddly enough, it is this institution -- an English one centered on Asia and Africa -- that will fund our work on Arapaho, so they flew both me and my advisor Andy to London for a week of (brutally dense) training. It's a very encouraging way to start my PhD -- professionally funded international travel -- but until today my exposure to the country was limited to a conference room. The training in microphone techniques, linguistic documentation software, strategies of elicitation (getting people to say what you want in a natural way, which almost always means they can't realize you want them to say it) -- all that has been fascinating and invaluable, but since 15 linguists from around the world have 6 days to understand everything, the stress level and grumpiness has been getting difficult to stomach. Today was our one day off, but I'm staying three days extra to take a train to Wales and add an automatically validated Harry Potter (in Welsh) to my collection.
The day was wonderfully refreshing. I chose two spots to see, and to think about: St. Paul's Cathedral and the crypts below it, then the Tower of London (which is really more like a castle historically used as a prison complex). The rose garden around the cathedral was gorgeous; the wrought-iron spikes atop the boundary fence certainly looked like a sufficient deterrent. The cathedral was designed in the baroque (enormously ornate) style by a scientist named Christopher Wren. A raging fire ate up all of London in 1666, so at the age of 31 this brilliant fellow became an architect, and designed 52 churches so London could replace the many it had lost. It felt very much like a smaller version of the Notre Dame from the inside -- the sort of place where you find yourself whispering without meaning to.
From there I took one of those big red double-decker buses to Tower Hill, where the juxtaposition of architectural styles and the density of buildings really showcases London's urban history. In the lower part of the wall in this picture you can see the slits through which archers fended off those attackers foolish enough to get into the moat at the base of the wall; the upper right-most part of the old brick is mostly dark but with patches of lighter colors owing to reconstruction after bombings in WWII; then there's that obvious, weird, phallic glass bit so very impossible not to notice above it all. It seems as though the city multiplied in a desperately haphazard manner, densely filling every available inch with a building. The history of the fortress itself can best be described as shockingly violent; more than 100 people were publicly executed in front of eager crowds, some of whom were so madly thrilled to see beheadings that they crushed and injured each other in the process. Apparently the upper-class prisoners were treated to private executions instead, and kept in their prison towers with retinues of servants.
My last stop was the British Museum, which is truly a wonderful place. This beautiful art -- does one call that a statue? a sculpture? -- stands in their atrium, which is indisputably another work of art. The museum is free and allows you to take pictures, both of which are an incredible gift.
It houses what is to me, as a linguist, the absolute Holy Grail: the Rosetta Stone itself. It's a large dark hunk of rock (looks like marble) with the same law carved in three different languages, one after the other. The first language is Egyptian hieroglyphics, the second a long-dead script called Demotic, and the third Greek. This allowed historical linguists to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics, since by the time linguists came around, everyone who understood hieroglyphics was also long-dead.

Antiquity

There is a bell at the British Museum that is 100 times as old as I am. Not just 100 years old, which alone is sort of unfathomable in a practical sense (especially if you're Bigwig or Fiver), but 100 years for every 1 year of mine -- 3300 years old, shaped in the oldest bronzeworking culture of which the museum had evidence. Some time in the 13th century BC a metalworker in Southern China fashioned the large bell of hot metal, and since then it has slowly crept from deep brown to a mottled emerald green. Imagine what that man's creation has witnessed! Imagine that man himself; he lived before plastic, so he would have worn only things made from fiber, animal furs and wood -- in an age before grocery stores and doctors' offices, so he'd have been lucky to be as old as I am before the spirits took him. Long before bikes or cars, he would have seen only the land upon which he was born, perhaps several days' walking distance from it, equivalent to a person born in Boulder never seeing past the humanfarms of Westminster. Since there were no magazines or photographs when he lived, the only faces that could register as attractive or otherwise would be those with whom he actually interacted -- his sister, his mother, his cousins, his friends, his wife. With no television and no internet, the only lives he could compare to his own would be in his immediate environment: no one would have far more than him, no one far less.

What a different time that old bronze bell still breathes. How fleeting must seem the greatest, most epic of our tragedies and triumphs. A piece of metal crafted by hands like ours, by a mind like ours, in a world almost unthinkable to us -- that one man's work now rests behind glass in a museum that is visited by millions of people every month, reminding us that what we do may last. One man in an ancient village in Southwest China has set millions upon millions of others to thinking: maybe I too can make something with my time here that will outlast the millenia, change the world with my hands too in a way that will set millions upon millions to thinking...