Barcelona, September 1991
I follow the hobbling ladies from la Boqueria down to the cathedral. Their laundrette bags doubling up for cuts of pork or fowl and a chunk of cheese perhaps, topped up with an assortment of collards. I have watched them many times from a gravely respectable distance, my hulking shape bearing aloft my heavy head, light their votive candles and curtsey precariously holding on to the side of a pew before the wooden effigy of the clement Christ. These ladies almost finished with life but never with caring for others do not seem to expect the sculpture to reply to their orizons, even if the artist attempted to make it appear the Redeemer was always ready to talk to them with his mouth parted and his head turned attentively to the base of his cross.
This morning, before going to work at La Bolsa, to teach my unwilling class (fourth year stuck on the Basic book - but we'd soon change that...), I mustered the courage to believe I too had the right to access to the Christ.
Swallowing back down my discomfort with so much flesh and blood and bone - so much man, in such a pitiable state (stuck to the corner of where the apse begun leaving little room to pass) - before my first cortado of the day even, I find the catholic† believer in me.
And the air turned sapphire
I give my fire to the Lord to bear,
Who, master of the running of blood but too of the congelation of it, set it opaline.
He hands me in return the turmaline, with its 12-fold secrets and tells me to study its nuance and above all how it increased, polarised and metamorphosised to set fruit, juist like a plant, that I may attune to the reverb of its cosmic root in is slithers of laminate, so that I might learn how to craft colour in the crystalline.
Am I to become His temple builder now!? I remain mesmerised despite my scorn by His precious blood that comes per drop like mercurial pearls or rose Otto oil. In fact it is now swirling in a figure eight about my body, not in red but sapphire blue, Krishna blue, centaury blue, Madonna blue, cornflower and bluebell blue till my body is resounding like tubular bells and all this music shows me that I have the same temple he has and so he won't be needing another one for himself, no thank you, but kind of me to ask.
No, I just need you to be trust my Ecclesia, my Sophia‡. Forget about my body. Forget about the body of men. It is only distraction. Be as old as you were born, age not, while you become childlike, and hear my breath instead.
And so his blood ran into matrix-rivulets that made me daughter, sister, mother, midwife and bride to be. That I might card love with my life like the world ether her cumulus and sirrus cloud. That I might compact a netherworld of dark potential, gaseous, viscous, sedimental, and from this place let redemption sweetly rise, in healing vapours scented with myrrh and frankincense, and rose, of course.
IAM this love eternal so obviously carved into time name by name, face by face, death by death: the geometry of love.
Girded by this love I wash my lover's feet, which pace out the sphere of genius and creation with crystalline precision.
footnotes and picture credits:
- The turmaline for September is taken from Friedrich Benesch: Das Turmalinejahr; a priest from the Christian Community specialised in this cyrstal of crystals (in which light is most purely consolidated).
- find your way around the Boqueria, here: Mercado
- My collage contains photo of my own fire opal, frog spawn, the yellow birds by Paul Klee, and the sculpture of Christ in Sevilla Cathedral.
- †
- Music:O Ecclesia, Hildegard of Bingen Translation of Latin text here
- ‡Please go here for more information on the illustration and Sophia in general.
