Create Myself Anew

‘Tis true my form is something odd,

Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, E1

But blaming me is blaming God;

Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, E1

Could I create myself anew

Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, E1

I would not fail in pleasing you.

Bomb damage in the Post Mortem room (1944), Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, E1

If I could reach from pole to pole

Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, E1

Or grasp the ocean with a span,

Works Department staff (1860s), Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, E1

I would be measured by the soul;

Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, E1

The mind’s the standard of the man.

Evacuating children (1940), Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, E1

Joseph Merrick’s version of Isaac Watts’ False Greatness (1706)

Dr Salter’s Daydream

The center of every man’s existence is a dream.

Diane Corvin's Dr Salter's Daydream, Bermondsey Wall East, Bermondsey, Southwark, SE16

Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle.

Diane Corvin's Dr Salter's Daydream, Bermondsey Wall East, Bermondsey, Southwark, SE16

That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

Diane Corvin's Dr Salter's Dream, Bermondsey East Wall, Bermondsey, Southwark. SE16

From GK Chesterton’s Twelve Types (1903)

Tate Britain

To add to his intellectual repetoire, he had memorised a particular line from Paradise Lost.

Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

He would recite it at appropriate times to impress and secretly belittle those he was in conversation with. He had swooned over what he deemed to be “the greatest British prose by a great Briton” until one conversation with a stranger had him in high water with poetry expert.

Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

His lack of knowledge was exposed and he floundered, failing to tread water in a shallow sea.

Sir Luke Fildes' The Doctor, Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

His copy of Milton’s opus, untouched and dutsy at the bottom of a pile of books, was located and destoyed with an anguished abandon.

Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

This episode had never been mentioned again.

JMW Turner's Self Portrait, Tate Britain, Millbank, Pimlico, Westminster, SW1

But it still simmered in the depths of his mind; resurrected every time he felt diminshed or unimportant. It simmered now.