London in 35: Day 13: The Long and Ancient Backbone

Natural History Museum

The South Kensington station was a frenetic state of confusion as baffled travelers tried to find their way out of the District Line. I was grateful for having reached my final destination and scrambled out of the center of chaos as quickly as I could.

Diplodocus

Up on Cromwell Road, the crisp chill of the wind, flash-froze the last remaining heat the underground had entitled me.

I made a sharp turn at the top of the street, scurried through the Imperial College of London, and continued shivering my way down to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Cromwell Road was a wide and active street, lined with prim and elegant consulate buildings.

As I passed by the embassies of Yemen, Oman, Venezuela and France, I noticed a tall brick building with large edifices and colorful stained-glassed windows. It looked like a cathedral or a castle.

But these days a lot of buildings were beginning to look like cathedrals or castles to me.

The Long and Ancient Backbone

The stark, black branches of the tree that grew in front it, superimposed against the “castle” walls, was almost haunting. “Castle” + haunting tree + bleak day = I must go in. As I neared the front entrance, I realized it wasn’t a castle at all. It was the Natural History Museum (close). The front hall of the Natural History Museum is immense.

Aside from the 90-ft long Diplodocus dinosaur skeleton that greets you the moment you set foot in the front hallway, the first thing you notice is how immense it is. The brown and red brick walls that created the space, curved into tall arches that ended in sky lights across the ceiling.

The echo of footsteps and the machine-like rumble of the moving crowd, bounced off turns and crevices in the arcade, reminding me of a railway station.

Paleontologists

The falling sky that poured in from the top, distributed the daylight with an even hand. Numerous children in matching smocks and shirts oooh’d and ahhh’d every dinosaur bone they came across.

I couldn’t tell you what any of the exhibits on display were, because I didn’t go into any of them. The central hall held me captive and fixed me there. Held hostage by the enormity of the great space, I circled it twice watching the walls as the light moved.

Stacked beyond the round arcs and columns, were shifting staircases running up and down the length of the room, reminding me of Escher’s infinite steps.

Dancing monkeys

On careful observation, the revelation of carved, stone monkeys clinging to tracery sides, was as unexpected as it was whimsical.

St. George slays the Dragon

A display of primate skeletons hung from the ceiling. The bold, white lines of their plastic bones against the dark shadows of recessed arches made a dramatic and potent contradiction. I stared at them affirmatively, awaiting their joints to come to life. The entire moment a hint of “Jurassic Park” meets “Night at the Museum.” But of everything I saw, it was the Diplodocus skeleton that seduced me most. Its tremendous, haunting, presence commanded the center of the room. Its imposing, osseous enormity was too much to ignore. As I stood underneath its behemoth, grey tail, I looked up. The disc space between its bones narrowing as it made way to its final point. Blocks of black bones created an outline more threatening than the actual beast itself could ever have been. Aligning myself carefully in the middle, I crooked my head all the way back. Down the center of the vaulted ceiling ran the spine of a great dinosaur. Two ancient, parallel spines, side by side, holding and supporting the structures that contained their mysteries. The first, a spine of carefully architected stone and engineering, the second, a spine of a prehistoric immensity. Both relics of a strongly created past. The thoracic bones supporting the ribcage of a formidable beast, creating an empty thorax that once held its heart, its huge innominate bones like modern sculptures onto themselves. The structural arches of the building, carved a hollowed space, preserving the artifacts of time in its great front room. Both mythological vaults of cavernous space, the museum arcade and the paleolithic thorax, stored within their tremendous crypts, the primeval stories of our beginnings and the primordial covenants of our past.

Escher's Infinite Steps

Walking through, what seemed like a warehouse of misplaced and forgotten sculptures, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, I realized that history was full of terrific “spines,” the central backbones of support, on which stories were built. The massive and domineering cast of Trajan’s column, halved for display in the center of the room, was one of them.

The Trajan Column

The imposing and looming 98-foot tall column, that still stands in the center of Rome today, built in 113 AD, was the vertebral column of the city, the center spine on which all important revolutions of thought and structure came from and toward. The golden-titled spines of ancient and dusty tomes, shelved in upstairs libraries, were the backbone of history’s greatest discoveries. Their kyphotic binding holding together the pages of treasured secrets and ancient histories.

The "warehouse"

The lumbar curve

Carved lumbar backs of stone and bronze, were the precise technique of Master sculptors. Their calculated dimensions ensured the entire piece would balance on the solid center backbone onto which marble stories could be told. The vaulted ceiling of the Natural History Museum, the enormous Diplodocus vertebrae, the Trajan column, the leather bound encyclopedias, the spines of Master carvings, these were all historic vertebrae, the long and ancient backbones of the past that ran down the center of time. The backbones upon which stories of the past were tied to with the spinal cords of thistory.