Medha! Thank you so much for reading - I know you haven't been around for a while. 😘
1. I found the graffiti so interesting as a social archive. I feel bad about my post perhaps sounding that I'm encouraging the practice of making graffiti - I'm not, but I do feel that viewing it with a historical perspective is valid. *dilemma*
2. I know - 'graffito' sounds so weird, doesn't it? And gosh, I was soooooo inconsistent with my use of both singular and plural throughout this post - oh well, all part of the fun! 🤣
3. Awww, thank you so much! That was at the beginning of last month, and it absolutely blew me away! 😆
I am a retired teacher, but I can't stop teaching. This may be of interest to those who are not familiar with Italian plurals and diminutives: SPAGO = string. SPAGHI = strings. SPAGHETTO = small string. SPAGHETTI = small strings. Thus: GRAFFO is scratch. GRAFFI is scratches, GRAFFITO is small scratch and GRAFFITI is small scratches. Forgive me. I couldn't stop myself.
This is fabulous Rebecca. I’m a sucker for detritus, of all kinds. It strikes me that graffiti is kind of like marginalia... but for buildings instead of manuscripts. Really enjoyed this ❤️
That's a nice photo of you and writing on the spot! So sweet. There are various drivers for graffiti, it is multi-faceted and a meaningful form of engagement. I've never done one myself though!
Aug 5, 2023·edited Aug 5, 2023Liked by Rebecca Holden
How lucky you were to have seen the engravings.
I find old graffiti as telling as a social history. Rather like taking a walk around a cemetery and wondering about the inmates. Giving them a backstory in just the way you have. It's all quite personal isn't it? Giving substance to history.
As Jill says, like marginalia. I always give the scribes of marginalia some sort of backstory - it makes for good fiction.
I suppose we all want to leave our mark in some way - be it further generations, creative arts, philosophies. Leaving it on stone makes it acceptably permanent and much better than a spray can scrawl.
It had been such a surprise to find all of that graffiti, Prue - it was worthy of a t-shirt with the legend: 'I went to a fourteenth-century castle and all I was interested in was the graffiti'! 🤣
I love what you've said about marginalia - what a great idea. Little 'found' snippets like these offer us such intriguing potential stories to unravel and develop in our imagination!
Ah, Ozymandias - I haven't read these words since I was at school, Peter - thank you so much!
I'm so grateful to you for posting that scene from 'Life of Brian' - it's had me in fits!
In fact I had a Monty Python moment myself this week, and had cause to look up the 'Ministry of Silly Walks' scene! Here's the (very short) post in question if you fancy a giggle: https://rebeccaholden.substack.com/p/sunday-july-30
I've always found ancient graffiti fascinating. I also like the ephemera like graffiti where nobody is supposed to find it. Case in point: when we first decorated we had the wallpaper stripped away and discovered on the wall underneath a man's name scrawled in pencil and the year 1909. I wonder, when I come across things like that, whatever happened to that person, what sort of life did they lead?
Perhaps many of us wish to leave a legacy, and the questions become what, and how?
As a general rule, I am not in favour of this sort of graffiti. The reason Stonehenge was closed off to the general public was that people started writing graffiti on the stones. However, I will grant that some street art is absolutely amazing (there are some fine examples in London's East End).
Also, some is very funny. For example, one Council in England cleaned up a wall that was covered in graffiti, and the day after they'd finished someone wrote on it: "This wall is now in its second edition". 😁
Oh, I love that example you found from 1909, Terry - that's gorgeous!
I think you're right - it's a legacy of sorts, isn't it? I do still wonder about those lines on Grandpa's garage wall...
I'm not in favour of graffiti either, BUT at the same time, I'm conflicted - because gosh, it provides such a fascinating insight into times past, and asks questions. For instance, I'd love to know who those US soldiers were, where they were stationed, whether they had sweethearts at home (or here?) - that sort of thing.
LOL to the 'second edition' wall - that's brilliant! 🤣
This was a fascinating read! I also never knew about the term 'graffito' so I feel like I'm learning!
Also, this graffiti is much more interesting then what I used to read on the backs of toilet doors in the pubs around Brighton; I would say there were certainly declarations of lust as opposed to love 🤭😂
And gosh, yes, toilet door graffiti - now, that's fascinating in its own way! As part of my linguistics degree - a module called 'Language and Sex' - a course compatriot and I looked at graffiti. Our essays were different, but we hunted down our research in a team, and shared our corpus. We were looking at differences in male and female graffiti, and because of having to know who had written what we of course focused on toilets. Our bar bill was immense - we had to buy beer bribes for all our male friends we'd sent into the gents with notebooks and pencils...! 🤣
This is so interesting to me, Rebecca. Not a negative word here. Graffiti of this kind has a history and a purpose. I visited Maeshowe, a neolithic chamber in Orkney and there was graffiti there left by Vikings in the 9th century! One of the bits was loosely translated as "For a good time, go see Helga." But the best graffiti I ever saw was in bright red paint on a train platform in Belgium. It said ( nearly screamed) BABA - I WANT YOU! I could only assume, that Baba went by in a train every day where she could not miss seeing this declaration of devotion. Thank you for your brilliant writing.
Oh wow, that Orkney graffiti sounds amazing - and gosh, I hope that Baba and the writer of the graffiti eventually found each other. What a great story!
As always, thank you so much for reading, Sharron. I'm so glad you're here. 😊
How wonderful! I love thinking of graffiti as a cultural artifact--especially super old graffiti. Walls are such an alternative-punk kind of writing space.
It's interesting to see how many ways people leave their mark to record their existence on this planet during a certain time. This is especially true in comparing such acts in different places. I recently posted a story, "Kilroy is Alive and Well and Living in the Great Basin," that tells of many different ways people do this: shoe trees, rocks placed on the playa, arborglyphs, dollar bills on barroom ceilings, etc. People have the need not to feel alone in vast spaces.
It's amazing, isn't it? I'll check out your post - thank you so much, Sue. Thinking of other ways that people make their mark on the landscape, I think cairns at the top of mountains are rather lovely - and that's because of their anonymous and therefore rather more innocuous nature than graffiti.
Speaking of bar room ceilings, there's a pub in Cambridge - The Eagle, I think it's called - has an incredible ceiling with graffiti that is the burned (with a lighter!) names of WWII airmen. It's extraordinary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle,_Cambridge
Thank you for the wiki about The Eagle. Again, people need to leave their marks. As for cairns, I love your attitude. There seems to be quite the contraversy in National Parks here about people buildings cairns. Some sites hold dozens if not hundreds. Litter, it's called. I call it having fun engaging with nature and rocks. Cairns are also used as trail markers, so that is one part of the issue, but it they're all in a space together, it's obviously NOT a trail marker. Meanwhile, beachgoers at Lake Tahoe seem to think it's perfectly okay to leave their trash, chairs, clothes, food coolers, sanitary doodads, etc. on the beach after a weekend of fun. Hundreds of volunteers cleaned up over three tons of garbage after the 4th of July weekend and there's a robotic machine that sifts the sand for tiny stuff. It's appalling. We are indeed a strange species, Rebecca.
Gosh, I hadn't thought of cairns being a form of litter! I get that it might be confusing on a trail where cairns are used as markers FOR that trail - I hadn't thought of that.
Ugh to the stuff that people leave behind, and that littering seems to be so acceptable to some people. I hate it in particular when people throw their rubbish out of car windows - I guess they think they're keeping their car nice and tidy? 🙄
I would wager that people who trash a beach or other beautiful public place are quite comfortable that someone else is going to pick up after them. "It's someone else's job to clean up the environment. So I'll just leave this soiled diaper here alongside the TP and tampons. If the guys can leave their beer cans, then I can leave my stuff too." grrr
This was so interesting, thank you. Your article about graffiti is, in a way, similar to my recent thoughts on tattoos. I've been thinking about the cultural, seemingly global trend, of tattoos. It seems to be the vast majority of people have one now. It's always been an individual display of self-expression and I love how much it is embraced and become the norm. Everyone from tenured profs at renowned universities to religious leaders has one, just as everywhere from European castles to Canadian skateboard parks has graffiti. As you write 'adding words to the landscape to leave proof of life for posterity' I think adding design to our skin also brings our inner world out, for posterity perhaps.
Apologies for the random sidebar and for taking the conversation in a different direction but that's what great art does, which is what your article and photography are! It makes us think.
Wow, Donna - that's just so interesting! I hadn't thought about tattoos, but of course you're right: skin is a canvas, a surface to apply art, words or both, and tattoos are the ultimate in terms of a permanent statement of self-expression!
'...adding design to our skin also brings our inner world out' - I'd never thought of tattoos in this way.
Thank you so much for such a thought-provoking comment! Brilliant! 😊
Aug 6, 2023·edited Aug 6, 2023Liked by Rebecca Holden
E. Burgess gets high marks from me. Simply beautiful. Making marks is marking history. Loved this post. P.S. Graffito would be a great name for a good dog.
E. Burgess' inscription was absolutely beautiful: not just for the skill in consistent lettering but also for the positioning of it on the arch like that. Amazing work!
Yay re Graffito as a dog's name! I met two dogs a while ago called 'Doodle' and 'Scribble' - they were both labradoodles, so I could see how their owners had come up with those names! 😊
Also: the picture following "And these characters are beautiful" are Chinese. Jim says Mandarin and Cantonese characters read the same but are pronounced differently. His take on the graffiti: the 2nd from the top is Ke (with a line over the e) and the 3rd from the top is xiu (with a line over the u). He estimates that the four different letters are "modern" Chinese characters and may be someone's name or place. He didn't recognize, nor could he find, the combination of characters 1 and 4. He's continuing his deciphering hunt.
Oh WOW, Mary - that's amazing! Thank you so much Jim for your insights! And actually, being a name or place would fit in with the context. Those Chinese characters were positioned just above the Roman numerals for 1979 - I wondered whether they had been done in the same hand? They looked incongruous together, but it was a beautiful combination!
Ok, a few things...
1. Graffiti as cultural artefact. I love this perspective!
2. Graffito?! That blew my mind!
3. I have been MIA for a bit and just saw you were a SS featured publication! I don't know when that happened but hurray for you! That's fabulous!
Medha! Thank you so much for reading - I know you haven't been around for a while. 😘
1. I found the graffiti so interesting as a social archive. I feel bad about my post perhaps sounding that I'm encouraging the practice of making graffiti - I'm not, but I do feel that viewing it with a historical perspective is valid. *dilemma*
2. I know - 'graffito' sounds so weird, doesn't it? And gosh, I was soooooo inconsistent with my use of both singular and plural throughout this post - oh well, all part of the fun! 🤣
3. Awww, thank you so much! That was at the beginning of last month, and it absolutely blew me away! 😆
I am a retired teacher, but I can't stop teaching. This may be of interest to those who are not familiar with Italian plurals and diminutives: SPAGO = string. SPAGHI = strings. SPAGHETTO = small string. SPAGHETTI = small strings. Thus: GRAFFO is scratch. GRAFFI is scratches, GRAFFITO is small scratch and GRAFFITI is small scratches. Forgive me. I couldn't stop myself.
Sharron, thank you so much for this! Terrific explanation!!! 🙌
This is fabulous Rebecca. I’m a sucker for detritus, of all kinds. It strikes me that graffiti is kind of like marginalia... but for buildings instead of manuscripts. Really enjoyed this ❤️
Thank you so much, Jill - and gosh, what a fabulous observation on graffiti as marginalia for buildings. That's brilliant! 🙌
That's a nice photo of you and writing on the spot! So sweet. There are various drivers for graffiti, it is multi-faceted and a meaningful form of engagement. I've never done one myself though!
Thank you so much, Kath! LOL - I hadn't realised Jim had been taking my picture - I guess it's an occupational hazard of being married to a snapper! 🤣
Hahah! You're lucky because some wives are training instagram husbands! 😂
🤣
The message you were asking about is in an ancient Mayan script and translates as "Beware of pickpockets"
🤣 Thanks, Terry! I knew you'd have the answer. 🙌
AN answer, anyway... 😉
I aim to please.
Love this post Rebecca especially the declarations of love! We're all just leaving our mark in whatever way we can. ❤️
Thanks so much, Denise! I'm a little worried about where AF's going to end up, though. And who with...! 😆
I'm sure they have a smile on their face wherever they are 🤣
AF is absolutely smiling, Denise, but I'm sadly not sure that HM is, now that KP is on the scene...! 🤣
Perhaps HM had a lucky escape! 🤣
How lucky you were to have seen the engravings.
I find old graffiti as telling as a social history. Rather like taking a walk around a cemetery and wondering about the inmates. Giving them a backstory in just the way you have. It's all quite personal isn't it? Giving substance to history.
As Jill says, like marginalia. I always give the scribes of marginalia some sort of backstory - it makes for good fiction.
I suppose we all want to leave our mark in some way - be it further generations, creative arts, philosophies. Leaving it on stone makes it acceptably permanent and much better than a spray can scrawl.
It had been such a surprise to find all of that graffiti, Prue - it was worthy of a t-shirt with the legend: 'I went to a fourteenth-century castle and all I was interested in was the graffiti'! 🤣
I love what you've said about marginalia - what a great idea. Little 'found' snippets like these offer us such intriguing potential stories to unravel and develop in our imagination!
😊
Two thoughts to engrave in the rock face of this solid post:
1. The Latin-language graffitist in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, who gets a grammar lesson from a Roman centurion. https://youtu.be/M3gNdGHsEIk
2. Thanks for this “I woz ‘ere,” Percy Bysshe Shelley.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ah, Ozymandias - I haven't read these words since I was at school, Peter - thank you so much!
I'm so grateful to you for posting that scene from 'Life of Brian' - it's had me in fits!
In fact I had a Monty Python moment myself this week, and had cause to look up the 'Ministry of Silly Walks' scene! Here's the (very short) post in question if you fancy a giggle: https://rebeccaholden.substack.com/p/sunday-july-30
I've always found ancient graffiti fascinating. I also like the ephemera like graffiti where nobody is supposed to find it. Case in point: when we first decorated we had the wallpaper stripped away and discovered on the wall underneath a man's name scrawled in pencil and the year 1909. I wonder, when I come across things like that, whatever happened to that person, what sort of life did they lead?
Perhaps many of us wish to leave a legacy, and the questions become what, and how?
As a general rule, I am not in favour of this sort of graffiti. The reason Stonehenge was closed off to the general public was that people started writing graffiti on the stones. However, I will grant that some street art is absolutely amazing (there are some fine examples in London's East End).
Also, some is very funny. For example, one Council in England cleaned up a wall that was covered in graffiti, and the day after they'd finished someone wrote on it: "This wall is now in its second edition". 😁
Oh, I love that example you found from 1909, Terry - that's gorgeous!
I think you're right - it's a legacy of sorts, isn't it? I do still wonder about those lines on Grandpa's garage wall...
I'm not in favour of graffiti either, BUT at the same time, I'm conflicted - because gosh, it provides such a fascinating insight into times past, and asks questions. For instance, I'd love to know who those US soldiers were, where they were stationed, whether they had sweethearts at home (or here?) - that sort of thing.
LOL to the 'second edition' wall - that's brilliant! 🤣
I doubt that the council thought so!
🤣
This was a fascinating read! I also never knew about the term 'graffito' so I feel like I'm learning!
Also, this graffiti is much more interesting then what I used to read on the backs of toilet doors in the pubs around Brighton; I would say there were certainly declarations of lust as opposed to love 🤭😂
Thanks, Lyndsay!
And gosh, yes, toilet door graffiti - now, that's fascinating in its own way! As part of my linguistics degree - a module called 'Language and Sex' - a course compatriot and I looked at graffiti. Our essays were different, but we hunted down our research in a team, and shared our corpus. We were looking at differences in male and female graffiti, and because of having to know who had written what we of course focused on toilets. Our bar bill was immense - we had to buy beer bribes for all our male friends we'd sent into the gents with notebooks and pencils...! 🤣
Interesting toilet door graffiti exchange, I remember in a women's bathroom at UC Berkeley, 1980s:
What is the safest form of birth control?
Tubal litigation
Please explain how attorneys in subways applies?!
Oh wow! 🤣
This is so interesting to me, Rebecca. Not a negative word here. Graffiti of this kind has a history and a purpose. I visited Maeshowe, a neolithic chamber in Orkney and there was graffiti there left by Vikings in the 9th century! One of the bits was loosely translated as "For a good time, go see Helga." But the best graffiti I ever saw was in bright red paint on a train platform in Belgium. It said ( nearly screamed) BABA - I WANT YOU! I could only assume, that Baba went by in a train every day where she could not miss seeing this declaration of devotion. Thank you for your brilliant writing.
Oh wow, that Orkney graffiti sounds amazing - and gosh, I hope that Baba and the writer of the graffiti eventually found each other. What a great story!
As always, thank you so much for reading, Sharron. I'm so glad you're here. 😊
How wonderful! I love thinking of graffiti as a cultural artifact--especially super old graffiti. Walls are such an alternative-punk kind of writing space.
Thank you so much, Jillian! I love that: 'an alternative-punk kind of writing space'! 😊
It's interesting to see how many ways people leave their mark to record their existence on this planet during a certain time. This is especially true in comparing such acts in different places. I recently posted a story, "Kilroy is Alive and Well and Living in the Great Basin," that tells of many different ways people do this: shoe trees, rocks placed on the playa, arborglyphs, dollar bills on barroom ceilings, etc. People have the need not to feel alone in vast spaces.
It's amazing, isn't it? I'll check out your post - thank you so much, Sue. Thinking of other ways that people make their mark on the landscape, I think cairns at the top of mountains are rather lovely - and that's because of their anonymous and therefore rather more innocuous nature than graffiti.
Speaking of bar room ceilings, there's a pub in Cambridge - The Eagle, I think it's called - has an incredible ceiling with graffiti that is the burned (with a lighter!) names of WWII airmen. It's extraordinary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle,_Cambridge
Thank you for the wiki about The Eagle. Again, people need to leave their marks. As for cairns, I love your attitude. There seems to be quite the contraversy in National Parks here about people buildings cairns. Some sites hold dozens if not hundreds. Litter, it's called. I call it having fun engaging with nature and rocks. Cairns are also used as trail markers, so that is one part of the issue, but it they're all in a space together, it's obviously NOT a trail marker. Meanwhile, beachgoers at Lake Tahoe seem to think it's perfectly okay to leave their trash, chairs, clothes, food coolers, sanitary doodads, etc. on the beach after a weekend of fun. Hundreds of volunteers cleaned up over three tons of garbage after the 4th of July weekend and there's a robotic machine that sifts the sand for tiny stuff. It's appalling. We are indeed a strange species, Rebecca.
Gosh, I hadn't thought of cairns being a form of litter! I get that it might be confusing on a trail where cairns are used as markers FOR that trail - I hadn't thought of that.
Ugh to the stuff that people leave behind, and that littering seems to be so acceptable to some people. I hate it in particular when people throw their rubbish out of car windows - I guess they think they're keeping their car nice and tidy? 🙄
I would wager that people who trash a beach or other beautiful public place are quite comfortable that someone else is going to pick up after them. "It's someone else's job to clean up the environment. So I'll just leave this soiled diaper here alongside the TP and tampons. If the guys can leave their beer cans, then I can leave my stuff too." grrr
Grrrrrr, absolutely. Some people are just horrid!
I feel emotionally invested in these inscriptions!
LOL, Chris, right?! 🤣
This was so interesting, thank you. Your article about graffiti is, in a way, similar to my recent thoughts on tattoos. I've been thinking about the cultural, seemingly global trend, of tattoos. It seems to be the vast majority of people have one now. It's always been an individual display of self-expression and I love how much it is embraced and become the norm. Everyone from tenured profs at renowned universities to religious leaders has one, just as everywhere from European castles to Canadian skateboard parks has graffiti. As you write 'adding words to the landscape to leave proof of life for posterity' I think adding design to our skin also brings our inner world out, for posterity perhaps.
Apologies for the random sidebar and for taking the conversation in a different direction but that's what great art does, which is what your article and photography are! It makes us think.
Wow, Donna - that's just so interesting! I hadn't thought about tattoos, but of course you're right: skin is a canvas, a surface to apply art, words or both, and tattoos are the ultimate in terms of a permanent statement of self-expression!
'...adding design to our skin also brings our inner world out' - I'd never thought of tattoos in this way.
Thank you so much for such a thought-provoking comment! Brilliant! 😊
E. Burgess gets high marks from me. Simply beautiful. Making marks is marking history. Loved this post. P.S. Graffito would be a great name for a good dog.
E. Burgess' inscription was absolutely beautiful: not just for the skill in consistent lettering but also for the positioning of it on the arch like that. Amazing work!
Yay re Graffito as a dog's name! I met two dogs a while ago called 'Doodle' and 'Scribble' - they were both labradoodles, so I could see how their owners had come up with those names! 😊
Also: the picture following "And these characters are beautiful" are Chinese. Jim says Mandarin and Cantonese characters read the same but are pronounced differently. His take on the graffiti: the 2nd from the top is Ke (with a line over the e) and the 3rd from the top is xiu (with a line over the u). He estimates that the four different letters are "modern" Chinese characters and may be someone's name or place. He didn't recognize, nor could he find, the combination of characters 1 and 4. He's continuing his deciphering hunt.
Oh WOW, Mary - that's amazing! Thank you so much Jim for your insights! And actually, being a name or place would fit in with the context. Those Chinese characters were positioned just above the Roman numerals for 1979 - I wondered whether they had been done in the same hand? They looked incongruous together, but it was a beautiful combination!