online: 23 march 2009 modified: 16, 17, 18, 19 march 2009 16, 18 march 2009 a realised dream (collective)
Mont-Saint-Michel
...writing in the empty work room of the monks... on the way down from the abbey church to the enclosed village and the shore... inside a conception realised...
...my strongest impression, and my greatest surprise, is the absence from the abbey church of the mass of statues, often realistic and sentimental, that to me (and perhaps to others) spoil many church interiors... in the church of Saint Michael there are few images, mainly plain walls, and an atmosphere of honest silence (as if in a quaker meeting house)...
...time only to begin this note on the descent from the warm and sunny terrace through pure yet icy spaces inside this huge construction in which the chaos of history (or the order of speech and action*) seems to have resulted in a thing sublime...
...in a chapel of the abbey church there is a modernist altar, with a crucifixion that is semi-abstract, though made with knowledge of anatomy (by Henri Besnard in 1927)... another chapel with only a simple cross... and a third with only a model of an ancient sailing ship, floating high in the air...
...i am standing now on the tidal mud of the causeway... looking up at the famous view of the golden spire of the abbey above (and seeming to grow out of) layers of earlier architecture... from defensive battlements at ground level through a former prison... to complex interior spaces around vast pillars supporting the sublime structures that evolved at higher levels... in this celebration of things christian at their best...
...my most vivid memory is seeing the well-known image of Mont-Saint-Michel (a pointed tower on a pointed rock) emerging above misty marshland and seeming to grow taller and larger until it filled the scene and caused everyone to look upwards at the unexpected details of this unique combination nature and artifice...
...and now, outside the architectural reality, sitting on a sloping rock bank that keeps the roadway above the level of high tide, i am looking at the bright sunlight glittering on the incoming tide water... beyond which are the flatlands of bog and marsh... and lines of trees that are still leafless in the wind and misty air... and now, from this touchscreen on which i write, is a line of gossamer thread lit up in the sunlight... as were other lines of gossamer today in the monk's garden, many levels above ground...
...from the outside there is what looks like a funicular railway track from a lower level to near the top... when you reach this point inside the structure you find there is indeed a rail track, but for sledges not wheels, and there is what looks like a vast wooden treadmill (propelled by prisoners?) for hauling materials up a slope of perhaps 80 degrees...
...as i wrote these words i was also witnessing three young women, perhaps Japanese, dressed as athletes or as dancers, jumping simultaneously before a camera to a sung rhythm, again and again, the biggest jump they could simultaneously enact... and this performance resembled that of four or five jokey young men (perhaps also from Japan) who, on the uppermost terrace, improvised another dance... also before a camera, and more collective and self-disciplined, i think, than might occur to European people...
...but perhaps my most most physical impression is of looking downwards, almost vertically, from various high platforms, at the seemingly tiny people and cars and coaches below... and the surrounding marshland, inhabited by very friendly sheep that are, i gather, a part of the economy of the place...
two days later:
...and what is missing from this this brief account of Mont-Saint-Michel?...
...i decide to write (in typewriter script) some memories of that extraordinary walk, both up and down that iconic structure, and to insert them in the spaces between the paragraphs already written... and thus to juxtapose, by chance, notes written on the spot with others written later...
...and now, as my list of memories is in order of importance, i decide to write and to insert them in that order, top down (a reversal of my usual way of doing things from bottom up)... which i hope will surprise me!...
...looking back now at the resulting text i am agreeably surprised, as often, by finding that a partially chance composition is more pleasing to me, and more informative, than what i could assemble without the aid of chance...
* 23 march 2009
today i realise that the writing of Hannah Arendt is most relevant to this collective work of many periods from the 8th century onwards... and particularly to seeing a pattern of speech and action in 'the chaos of history'...
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1958.
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