I remember Dom David Knowles' book, Bare Ruined Choirs, a celebration for, and lament over, the empty, roofless monastic buildings of these islands. Now, Alex has set me looking at Abandoned, a site where Uryevich collects pictures of 'abandoned plants, unfinished buildings, industrial sites. Most of them situated near to Moscow' — haunting, silent, empty places that have a melancholy weight to them, as does this one, an unfinished and abandoned Moscow hospital:
Another of Alex's links was to an abandoned psychiatric facility in Whitby, Ontario. I suddenly remembered the psychiatric hospital where, as a schoolboy, I had sometimes made occasional visits, organised by my school, to chat to patients: Powick Hospital, Worcestershire. Formerly the 'Worcester County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum', it was shut down in the 1980s but is still talked about because of the experiments with LSD conducted there. (In 2002, the NHS settled the claims of 43 former patients out of court, at a level well below the expected.)
Even without reports now online about forgotten children, Powick lives on in my mind as somewhere unhappy and disorienting. I see there is a website, British Asylums ('looking at the era of the “Lunatic Asylum” system during the 19th and 20th centuries. The site largely focuses on the asylums themselves from their origins as providers of sanctuary and care through to their demise in the dying days of the 20th century'), and a Middlesex University index of English and Welsh lunatic asylums and mental hospitals (and a lot more information besides, including a Mental Health History Timeline).
I think of John Clare (1793–1864), committed in 1837 to a private asylum and then, in 1842, to the Northampton County Asylum for the remainder of his life.
I am — yet what I am, none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:—
I am the self-consumer of my woes:—
They rise and vanish in oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes:—
And yet I am, and live — like vapors tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise:—
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I loved the best
Are strange — nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man has never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God;
And sleep as I in childhood, sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below — above the vaulted sky. |
The punctuation adopted here is based on that in Robinson's & Powell's 1984 Oxford Authors Series edition and aims to present 'I am' as Clare wrote it. (The poem was written in the Northmapton County Asylum when Clare was in his mid-fifties.) Helen Vendler: '… because Clare was unschooled in standard grammar and punctuation, his manuscripts presented his publisher [Taylor] with the problem of "corrections." By himself, Taylor transcribed the cascade of almost illegible manuscripts (a scribe failed at the task), changing misspellings, inserting punctuation (Clare used almost none), rectifying Clare's dialect-grammar, and suggesting cuts. Clare reacted to the corrections sometimes with gratitude, sometimes with irritation. Increasingly, he wished to assert his independence; yet he depended on his publisher to see his works into print. He went so far as to try to leave Taylor and solicit subscriptions by himself for a volume that he could himself control, but he could not manage to collect enough subscribers.'
