My Time in Space by Tim Robinson

Author:Tim Robinson [Tim Robinson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843512875
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2012-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

How did that accord with my observations? I was enjoying the baroque theatricality of the side-chapels in Saint-Sauveur for its own sake, the gleams of gold in morbid gloom, the low secretive doors leading away into casuistical labyrinths, the unctuous swell of every form, the swaggering paunch of counter-Reformation Catholicism. But the phrase ‘au siècle des siècles’, ‘ad seculae seculorum’, recurring in the Masses we heard or overheard, moved me deeply. If it is the words of the cult, the constant and continuous repetition of its formulae over many generations and through an ‘age of ages’, that maintain the cathedral in existence, then without them the building, however well-preserved, is a ruin. And the question preoccupied me: What are cathedrals for, to us who do not sit by the smoky fire of religion?

If the cathedrals are to me primarily storehouses of space, height, darkness and light, and, externally, stone and sky and the sun’s heat, then they are the exact opposite of what they are to the faithful: portals of a transcendent non-material world. What then distinguishes them from secular architecture or even from abstract sculptures? Letting them revert to (mere) stone, to stone for which one cares only aesthetically, would be a catastrophic waste of a millennial resource. But I can hardly call upon the persistence of sempiternal error to support my fleeting truth. Very approximately, and as a first guess: for me the cathedral consecrates the here-and-now, the instant, whereas for the believer it conserves echoes of eternity. It would be easy to stray into spiritual mode and claim the consecrated here-and-now as being precisely an echo of eternity. But while I think that the universe may well be eternal I do not believe in Eternity, either in the form of the Life to Come, the Happy or Unhappy Ever-After, or as the ground, the metaphysical foundation stone, of temporal reality. So what does consecration mean? What do the cathedrals do, beyond the aesthetic, and the always more or less illusory and exploitative rooting, miring, of community in a century of centuries? An urgent question, connected with that of reappropriation (expropriation perhaps) of religious language.

Mozart’s Requiem in the cathedral; an intent audience, every note crystalline. The vaults of the roof, with many additional vaultings of shadow, contrasting beautifully with the brightly lit stonework of the choir and its seven pointed windows. Looking up at the roof it seems suddenly I am looking up into my own skull, and it has vast room for unknown faculties, it is a mountain seen from within. The visible skeleton of Gothic makes it a corporeal style, an extension of ribcage, cranium, the acts of standing, balance, even walking (I think of the lines of columns, and the afternoon light processing from one to the next as the great doors are slowly opened behind us at the end of the concert). Gothic speaks to the skeleton in one’s flesh, the lasting parts: spine, long-bones of arms and legs. The person potentially most conscious

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