Motorcycles and Castles

This morning over breakfast, Denise and I talked about why it is that we like castles. Our conversation meandered here and there and included a discussion of Pirsig's 'classical' and 'romantic'.  1974, Robert Pirsig wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and in it he describes a motorcycle journey across the US.  Throughout the book, he enters into deep philosophical discussions, and relies often on two very different concepts: the 'classical' and the 'romantic' ways of looking at things.

He first uses these concepts in a description of riding his motorcycle. In the classical realm, his motorcycle moves forward according to Newton's laws of motion.  Fossil fuels are ignited by a spark that fires cylinders that drive cams that turn a chain that compels the back wheel to spin.  An alternator collects energy from the motion and charges a battery that provides energy to create a spark, as well as run a headlight and honk a horn.  The rider turns directions by changing the trajectory of the front wheel with the handle-bars, increases speed by compressing the accelerator that then provides more fuel to the engine, and stops by engaging a front and rear brake. And on and on.

In the romantic realm, the process of riding a motorcycle can evoke in the rider a feeling euphoria: the rider has 360 degrees of vision, can accelerate and slow down easily and quickly, can smell the flax in the fields, feel the heat of the sun on one's skin, the pull of gravity ascending a hill, and the bumps along the highway.  The rider feels liberated and powerful.

As for castles, from a classical standpoint, they were designed to keep people out.  If the defenders could keep a besieging army outside a castle's walls for a year, eventually the besiegers would give up and go home.  However, if the defenders could breach the walls and the inner keep, the castle had failed its primary purpose, and the inhabitants inevitably would meet a nasty end.  The eventual use of gunpowder rendered castles useless at keeping people out, and nobles stopped building them. Today, the castles of Europe are either in ruin or rebuilt and inhabited by wealthy people like J.K. Rowling: however, they are no longer used to keep out attacking armies.

The Keep at Warkworth castle, Northumberland 

But there is something much more to a castle than a series of thick walls designed to keep people out. While doing my graduate work in Newcastle, I got to know many castles in Northumberland.  My favourite, by far, was Warkworth castle.  It is in semi-ruin and maintained by the National Trust.  The keep (inner part) is virtually intact, and because there is not so much tourism in that part of England, one can explore it alone most of the year.

Warkworth's floor plan
(1: vestibule; 2: hall; 3: chapel; 4: great chamber; 5: kitchens; 6: pantry and buttery)

While the architecture of this castle is intriguing, this castle is far more interesting from a romantic standpoint.  Perhaps a castle somehow reminds us of what it was like to live in a womb where we were protected, safe, happy, and warm. Looking through the windows of Warkworth's keep at rolling, green hills and the frigid North Sea beyond, one feels completely safe.  But there is more to it than security. Because castles sometimes were besieged for a year at a time, they had to be 'liveable' or people would have been driven to the depths of depression. While big, strong thick walls were necessary, a castle also needed 'light'.  Rather than cookie cutter floor plans, architects designed each floor on a different plan of very different characters, connected to each other by a grand staircase and also 'hidden' staircases.  One such hidden staircase is in the back of the kitchen fireplace, another in a 'garder-robe' (toilet). Castle architects needed to be creative and imaginative, using the resources and topography available to them. The castles of those long dead people were interesting then, and continue to be interesting today.

And there is one more thing.  As a kid I and my friends and siblings made all sorts of different forts. Over those long prairie winters I would sometimes collect all sorts of stuff around the house and make grand forts in the living room. Sometimes if there was enough snow, we would tunnel down into the snow-banks and make forts. I even remember the occasional attempt at an igloo. In the summers, we would head off into the woods and make tree forts.  There seems to be something in us that compelled us as kids to make forts.  It could be that by doing so, we satisfy a need to nest.  Who knows. Whatever it is, I have had the same feeling inside Warkworth's keep that I did inside a fort made of pillows and bed-sheets in my boyhood living room.

Indeed, castles evoke in me something that goes far beyond glacis, moats, baileys, and all the other cool aspects of castle architecture. While castles are very intriguing classically, they are far more interesting from a romantic point of view.