Face to Face with an Auto-Icon

Friday, November 21, 2008
London

NYU-London has the rather unusual custom of 'making up' days lost to holidays. Because we recently had a week's long Fall Break which caused my students to miss one class, we had a 'make-up' class today. This meant that I taught for 2 straight days in a row, something of a change for me--though I better get used to this as I have a Monday and Tuesday schedule for next semester.

So, it was something of a ho-hum kind of day--nothing very exciting happened. I taught my classes and but for the fact that I used my lunch break to go out in search of a true oddity at University College, London, there's not much to report.

But the oddity was horribly odd indeed. I went to see the "auto-icon" of Jeremy Bentham whose name you might recognize as the 19th century philosopher/economist who came up with the theory that the greatest happiness of the greatest number would make for the greatest harmony in society. He was one of the founders of University College, London, and since he wanted to remain a part of the institution long after he passed away, he decreed in his will that his body (read skeleton) should be placed in a prominent part of the university where all could see it and that he should be dressed in one of the suits he usually wore. The Dean of our program, the newly re-christened Liberal Studies Program at New York University, Fred Schwarzbach, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of London, told me about Bentham's bizarre will way back in September and I had been promising myself that I would take a stroll there to see it for myself.

I had to ask around to find my way to the right spot. I stopped one of the UCL undergrads walking by me andd said, "Excuse me...can you tell me where the auto-icon of Jeremy Bentham is?" She responded in all seriousness, "Well, I don't know where that is...I know where HE is". Oh well!

I expected to see a body lying in a coffin or, at any rate, in a horizontal position. Imagine my shock when I found Bentham's skeleton, all fleshed out, of course, clothed in one of the stipulated suits, sitting in the foyer of the college's grand Neo-Classical building complete with dome and quadrangle, in what looks like a telephone booth with a small tea table by his side. Apparently, the head which for some reason, was detachable, used to be used by students as a football and the governors of the college finally thought it fit to place it in a safe in the college. The head that now sits on Bentham's body in the booth is a wax replica--the kind of thing that you see at Madame Tussaud's. At any rate, I only stayed there for a couple of minutes, read the extract from Bentham's will and the explanatory note put up by UCL and fled because it gave me the creeps. Between the day I spent in Barnes and this afternoon, I seem to have had too many close encounters with ghosts, dead bodies, coffins and graveyards.

After teaching my two classes today, I took the bus and went to the National Portrait Gallery at Trafalgar Square where I spent an hour and a half completing my perusal of the portraits on the second floor. In a museum in which art works are arranged chronologically, I have now gone as far as the 19th century and shall start with the contemporary sections on my visits in the next couple of weeks. It is hugely enlightening to read the curator's notes that provide wonderful information on the sitters and the painters. My Writing students are working on an assignment that requires them to research and respond to three portraits in the museum and my visits have allowed me to study the ones on which they have chosen to focus.

I also realized, after having looked at them more closely that the Annie Liebovitz portraits of the Queen are not in black and white (as first appeared to me) but in faint color--they look as if they are in black and white because her expressions are so forbidding, so lacking in any color (pun intended!). There is a special retrospective on Liebovitz's portraits at the Museum at the moment and I intend to spend an evening studying them carefully.

It is expected to turn bitterly cold overnight--of course, that would have to happen on the eve of the day I have chosen to visit Cambridge. Still, I refuse to allow this to chill my enthusiasm. I shall bundle up and be gone at the crack of dawn in time to catch my 8.30 am coach at Victoria. I intend to use the journey to read up on Cambridge from the pages that I have photocopied from many guide books and if the weather promises to be as biting as the forecasters have predicted,I shall probably spend a great deal of time in the Fitzwilliam Museum rather than on the banks of the River Cam! This will not be half bad as the last time I was in Cambridge, 22 years ago, I did not have the opportunity to visit the Fitzwilliam because I had dallied too long in the Backs! Well, even if I had to wait for 22 years, I am sure the contents of the museum will make it seem worth the long wait.