 |
| An interior photo of Cologne Cathedral in Westphalia, Germany. |
"This is what linked all people, she wanted to say, in spite of time and space; this joined them in a timelessness, a spacelessness, in a collective mind that transcended all boundaries. This is what endured forever and ever, as long as the painting was preserved, as long as the written word endured. Sappho's few words, Plato's, Homer's... The works of a great artist entered that other kind of reality, the words of a great poet lived there; this is what human history is all about, our efforts to transcend our limitations, our petty wars, our fears. We build our cathedrals, paint pictures, write our poetry, our music, all in the same effort to transcend ourselves. They fill the history books with trash about conquests, wars, treaties, but, these are transitory. The human spirit sails above them, yearning for that other reality... finding it in moments of great art..."
- Excerpt from
Welcome Chaos, a science fiction novel by
Kate Wilhelm first published in 1983.
Inset right is an interior photo of the
Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais in Beauvais, France, found
here.
(Click images for larger views.)
"At about the same time Hugo began experimenting with a new approach to prose, based on telling the story of less than ideal characters—a poor bohemian girl, a deformed bell-ringer and a lecherous archdeacon—the three pillars of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Few fans of the novel, which has inspired several successful films, know that Hugo wrote it to save the famous Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame from demolition. During the Revolution Notre Dame had been used as a saltpetre plant. By the nineteenth century it had suffered so much neglect that builders wanted to reuse its stones for bridge construction. Gothic art was then regarded as ugly and offensive; so Hugo’s choice of the location was deliberate: it linked the grotesque characters with the ugly art. The first three chapters of the novel are a plea to preserve Gothic architecture—in Hugo’s words, a “gigantic book of stone,” which he, as a Romantic, found beautiful."
- Excerpt from
How Did Victor Hugo Save the Famous Cathedral of Notre Dame From Demolition? The photos - inset above and below - are of the famous
Notre Dame (de Paris) gargoyles which were found
here.
“He therefore turned to mankind only with regret. His cathedral was enough for him. It was peopled with marble figures of kings, saints and bishops who at least did not laugh in his face and looked at him with only tranquillity and benevolence. The other statues, those of monsters and demons, had no hatred for him – he resembled them too closely for that. It was rather the rest of mankind that they jeered at. The saints were his friends and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and kept watch over him. He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.”
- Excerpt from Victor Hugo's 1831 gothic masterpiece
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
“Everything has been said about these great churches,” Rilke wrote. “Victor Hugo penned some memorable pages on Notre-Dame in Paris, and yet the action of these cathedrals continues to exert itself, uncannily alive, inviolate, mysterious, surpassing the power of words.… Notre-Dame grows each day, each time you see it again it seems even larger.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke quote from a 2014 New Yorker article (7th in a series):
Street of the Iron Po(e)t by Henri Cole.
"This time, Paris was just what I had expected: difficult. And I feel like a photographic plate that has been exposed too long, in that I remain forsaken to this powerful influence... Out of fright I went right off Sunday to Rouen. An entire cathedral is necessary to drown me out... Would you believe that the glance of a woman passing me in a quiet lane in Rouen so effected me that I could see almost nothing afterward, could not collect myself? Then gradually the beautiful cathedral was finally there, the legends of her densely filled windows, where earthly events shine through and one sees the blood of its colors."
- From a 1913 letter by Rainer Maria Rilke to Russian-born psychoanalyst - life-long friend and one-time lover -
Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Inset left is an interior shot of
Rouen Cathedral found
here.
Inset right is one of series of paintings of
Rouen by Claude Monet (and
here).
Inset left (below) is another.
"Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe, which is disposable. You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us, to accomplish."
- Orson Welles, from his 1975 docudrama
Vérités et mensonges ("Truths and lies") which focuses on the career of an art forger. The "stone forest" in the quote was a reference to the
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres.
***
This is another of the 3 posts I had been working on - apart from the previous one - and it was a post I personally needed to create at the time. That is to say, like Rilke, I found myself (emotionally and spiritually) needing "an entire cathedral" to contain my high anxiety. Generally, I might have relied on the sight of
Sandia Crest - mountains and cathedrals, after all, have a great deal in common in a symbolic sense... they both represent the union of the cosmos and earth - but there's an underlying order in the structure of a cathedral, an authentic
Sacred Geometry evidenced by features like the (south) rose window (
inset left) from the
Cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris. What the mountain might intimate, the cathedral spells out in no uncertain terms. In this case, the source: the "dame," lady or mother, the infinite symmetry of the circular form from which the cathedral unfolded and inevitably returned.
(Appropriately) I'd been reading Kate Wilhelm's apocalyptic
"Welcome Chaos"... and came across the first paragraph (quoted above) which ultimately inspired this interlude post. The quote resonated with me because it occurred to me recently that what is generally considered the history of the world is, for the most part, the history of war and the acquisition of territory. For the rest of humanity's long saga one ultimately has to turn elsewhere...
