“I’m not the person I once was. Indeed, I may never have been.” — R.H.L.M. Ramsay

I attended a presentation recently that should, on its surface, have harmonized with Agincourt. On deeper consideration—as I listened with anticipation to its author, hoping to find a kindred spirit, but began to see its design through words other than those I’d supplied as a first-time casual observer of beautiful drawings hanging on a wall—it came to be something else; something quite different. What you see is not always what you get. At the end of an hour, I was left with so little frame of personal reference as to be speechless. Imagine that. Nothing to say. And today, almost as little to write.

It was a curious experience, coming to this gradual realization that what had initially intrigued me may well be the Anti-Agincourt. That two notions of playing in the sandbox of history could be simultaneously both apposite and opposite was a surprise. If I am shaken in some way, disconcerted, it is largely due to my own misperception; my misreading of what had hung so objectively before me.

Go figure. I’m trying to.