On the Silver Globe (Andrzej Zulawski, 1977-88)
"More and more often I want to film myself."
There’s a convent on Bayswater road called The Tyburn. Outside it there’s a large wooden rood. In the early 1980s I used to pass the convent a lot. The rood always needed to be looked at. Not a case of wanting to look at it. It required it.
If I went past the Tyburn on a bus and did not look at the rood I would be annoyed with myself for missing it.
I still walk past this sometimes.
Occasionally I’m in the area with my children, and I take the time to point it out to them. Hey, who knows. Maybe one day their descendants will point it out to others too. This all depends on how long the rood stays there.
It’s made of wood, and wood is largely cellulose. There’s a cross-section of a sequoia in the Natural History Museum which is 1,300 years old. It’s older than Islam. It still looks fine. But it’s indoors, not outdoors. However, outside the Natural History Museum there’s a fossilised tree which is three hundred and fifty million years old.
If you extract cellulose from wood and turn it into insulation material and insulate your house with it you can expect it to last somewhere in the region of 20-30 years.
The Tyburn convent was established in 1903. Allegedly fulfilling the prediction (or what some call ‘prophecy’) from Gregory Gunne in 1585 that one day a religious house would be founded on that site.
I went into the convent for a visit somewhere around 2004. I was accompanied by many people, including a Polish woman, who wept.
Approximately 96% of you is oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. The remaining percentage is mostly calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. The final building blocks are termed ‘trace elements’, and are boron, chromium, cobalt, copper, fluorine, iodine, iron, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, silicon, tin, and (incidentally my personal favourite element name) vanadium. Those trace elements may be miniscule in quantity, but are essential for life. Without them you’re just a funny shaped rock.
In the 1980 TV show Cosmos Carl Sagan puts all of these materials into a large pot and stirs them with a stick to see if life formed. It didn't.
As a child on the beach my Mother quoted Carl Sagan. She told me to pick up a handful of sand and to count the grains of sand I was holding. When I said that I couldn’t she told me that there were more stars in the sky than grains of sand on earth. I looked up. But it was day.
Once upon a time there were no stars. They were formed by clouds of dust and gas, which was mainly hydrogen and helium, gathering together and becoming denser and denser, and eventually generating heat. When the fire gets going it reaches a heat in excess of 10 million degrees centigrade and nucleosynthesis begins to occur. The hydrogen and helium nuclei fuse together and form other elements. The hotter it gets, the more ‘complicated’ the elements get. When a star explodes it produces gold.
Scientists disagree, but somewhere between 93% to 100% of what you are made of came from a star. The length of time between those elements being created and those elements forming together to create you is breathtaking.
The Tyburn convent got its name from the Tyburn Tree (which went by a large number of aliases). It was a gallows in what we now call Connaught Square (very close to Marble Arch). Between 1535 and 1681 105 Catholic martyrs are known to have been hanged at the Tyburn, and the convent exists in memory of these deaths.
If you travel west down Bayswater road you’ll eventually come to a pub called The Swan. The Swan was where many prisoners had their last drink before being hanged. Thomas Gainsborough stayed there at some point (probably in the 1770s) and painted it.
In the 18th century Thomas Gainsborough attended a talk given by Joshua Reynolds in which the master pointed out that blue should never be in the foreground of a painting. Gainsborough did not like Reynolds' pomp and posturing and painted The Blue Boy (1770) just to spite him.
Reynolds didn’t actually do many of his paintings, he simply came up with the designs, and the workers in his studio executed a lot of the finishing.
In the 1960s Andy Warhol would do the same thing.
In the 2000s Anish Kapoor would do the same thing.
When a body died at the Tyburn the crowd would rush forward. There was a belief that there were healing properties in the body of someone recently hanged. Sickly children would have dead hands pressed against their face. Hair would be torn from the corpses.
It is estimated that around 50,000 people were executed at the Tyburn, between the first recorded hanging in 1196 and the final one in 1783.
When you die the first thing to start is autolysis, otherwise known as self-digestion. Your body breaks down. This process either continues into putrefaction, or is interrupted by something, and putrefaction then either slows down or stops.
The fossilized tree outside the Natural History Museum must have been deprived of oxygen, that’s the first step. It would have then been in contact with specific minerals required to petrify/fossilize wood.
If those conditions were to happen to the rood outside the Tyburn then perhaps it could be there for ever. Well… not for ‘ever,’ but for a much longer time than it would be if it were just wood, or silicon.
If it were to fossilise then maybe generations I can't even possibly imagine could see the rood and point it out to their children.
If those fossilisation conditions could be created for a person, let's say you, then perhaps you could exist for ‘ever’ too. You could then point out the rood on my behalf to those future generations I can't even possibly imagine.
On the beach I threw that handful of sand in the air to see if it would scatter enough for me to have a chance of counting the grains before they fell back to Earth. Growing up my mother told me many facts and figures acquired by science. It was only after she died that I learned she was deeply religious. If she were still alive, I wouldn't know.