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Of Rampant, Pizzled Magic 🐉

Waxing lyrical in the labyrinth of London 🌔

Allyson Shaw

06 Mar 2025 — 3 min read

I moved to London twenty years ago. The city met me head on as I landed on English shores. I grappled in its swift embrace, alight with its endless puzzles. Here was a city that had a place for me, even as it bled me dry. In London, there is a place for everyone.

Last week I prepared to leave for London as if I were going to meet a lover, a being vast and strange, an entity that knew me once and perhaps remembers. We go back to our pasts to find the self we left-the person we were. We look for who we were when we were in it.

In Lon-don. The two-syllable bell still tolls for me.

American novelist Herman Melville said that London was one of two places in the world where ‘a man could most effectively disappear.’ The second place was the South Seas. As a woman of a certain age, a childless cat lady in the age of neo-fascism, I can attest this works well for my gender, also. This disappearance is not an erasure, rather, a magic trick. What happens to the magician’s assistant in all her sequins and tulle? She is still there behind the illusion. She counts breaths, thinks of her supper even as she evaporates from sight. The swirling grind of London is the magician’s flourish, the tap of the hat and then—ta-da!

I can be convinced for a moment that this is all I ever wanted.

On this visit I stayed near the Thames, in the dark heart of the City (the very centre of London) with pizzled dragons at its corners, tongues out, erect. My UK publisher’s HQ on Fleet Street was a curse’s throw across the river, over the heads of teeming humanity. I used to work near St. Paul’s; my soul fodder for an investment bank. It was the only place that would hire an American immigrant with an MFA in poetry. Terrible, boring, long story short—I am a Londoner at heart. The labyrinth of old smoke still has meaning for me.

An image of a circuit labyrinth in the Chartes style, hung on a beige tiled wall — Labyrinth at Southwark Tube Station. British artist Mark Wallinger created one for each station to mark the 150th anniversary of the London Underground.

I travelled to London to see the Mike Kelley retrospective at the Tate Modern. Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley’s work has been a touchstone for me since I was a wayward teenager. Kelley was a permission-giver, a shamanistic trickster figure hell-bent on dismantling toxic masculinity. I was curious to see his work contextualised in the Tate, and whether it still resonated with my adult self. Kelley was my psychopomp leading the way-but through what? I look forward to unpacking this on the full moon and posting more here.

One room of the Mike Kelley show at the Tate Modern. In the foreground is Kelley’s ‘bananaman’ costume complete with ectoplasmic-like ‘excretion’.

I also wanted to see the new Hunterian Museum, a place that was once sacred to me. It is utterly changed; perhaps I am the one changed. I will be untangling the visit to this difficult reliquary at the new moon.

The difficult cabinet of curiosities that is the Hunterian Museum

I caught the final days of the Medieval Women show at the British Library, too—ultimately it was superficial—oversold and overcrowded. Perhaps I’m too close to that subject matter, as I have devoted years of my life to researching the ecstatic experience of Medieval women and am intimately connected to their stories.