Juliet Waldron's Blog - Posts Tagged "lifetime"
Old Dead Friends
I’ve spent a lot of my life fixating upon dead heroes, which means, as we turn into October, I’m entering my favorite other-worldly season. (Maybe “hero” isn’t quite the word, but “famous historical personalities” is unwieldy.) Richard III came into my life early, just pre-teen, via a discarded paperback, “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey, fished from a wastebasket in the lounge of a 1950’s Barbados hotel. For some reason, this mystery story about a man whose chosen motto was “Loyalty Binds Me” and whose reputation had been unjustly blackened, started an obsessive fire in my brain which is, even 50 some years later, burning hotter than ever.
Richard started life in 1452, which is a long time ago—560 years at Fotheringhay Castle, now nothing more than a heap of earth where the original motte and bailey stood. As you can see from the picture, 500+ years doesn’t leave much behind! He was born on October 2, which makes him a Libra. If the Tudor spin doctors are to be believed, he was a seriously out of balance child of this supremely balanced heavenly sign. If the skeleton just recovered proves to be the King, it appears that he had a deformity at birth, a severe scoliosis, which would have caused his right shoulder to be carried high. He only lived for thirty-two years, but he (or his distorted shadow) has left a large mark on World consciousness via Shakespeare’s blood-and-thunder melodrama.
This blog is not about Richard, though. It’s about time, of which we humans don’t get a large slice. I’ve been flailing around more than twice as long as this particular dead hero, but have made not a jot of difference to the greater world. Still, King Richard, his fair wife, Anne Neville, and others of the bloody Plantagenet cousinage have been wandering about, talking, loving and fighting in my head since childhood. When the excavation in that Leicester car park came up with those bones--scoliosis, battle wounds, and all—it started the whole royal parade, complete with banners and drums, echoing inside my mind. The images come seeping out, a moving picture of antique glory superimposed over the ordinariness of daily life. I feel closer to these semi-imaginary long dead than I do to my neighbors. After all, these royal shadows have been with me from tropical beaches to Cornish cliffs and all the way to this present slough of suburban senior citizenship.
Richard started life in 1452, which is a long time ago—560 years at Fotheringhay Castle, now nothing more than a heap of earth where the original motte and bailey stood. As you can see from the picture, 500+ years doesn’t leave much behind! He was born on October 2, which makes him a Libra. If the Tudor spin doctors are to be believed, he was a seriously out of balance child of this supremely balanced heavenly sign. If the skeleton just recovered proves to be the King, it appears that he had a deformity at birth, a severe scoliosis, which would have caused his right shoulder to be carried high. He only lived for thirty-two years, but he (or his distorted shadow) has left a large mark on World consciousness via Shakespeare’s blood-and-thunder melodrama.
This blog is not about Richard, though. It’s about time, of which we humans don’t get a large slice. I’ve been flailing around more than twice as long as this particular dead hero, but have made not a jot of difference to the greater world. Still, King Richard, his fair wife, Anne Neville, and others of the bloody Plantagenet cousinage have been wandering about, talking, loving and fighting in my head since childhood. When the excavation in that Leicester car park came up with those bones--scoliosis, battle wounds, and all—it started the whole royal parade, complete with banners and drums, echoing inside my mind. The images come seeping out, a moving picture of antique glory superimposed over the ordinariness of daily life. I feel closer to these semi-imaginary long dead than I do to my neighbors. After all, these royal shadows have been with me from tropical beaches to Cornish cliffs and all the way to this present slough of suburban senior citizenship.
