Light comes from everywhere: the stone church

I seem to be obsessed with spring. This in spite of the fact it isn't even here yet: not for most of us. In the mild gloomy slick of Vancouver, winter never really comes, which is why croci are poking their purple Easter heads up above the soil, cherry blossom buds are ready to explode, and the roses at the Centennial Garden in Burnaby are already beginning to spear reddish-brown leaves directly out of their prickly, woody stems.

So I sit here in the a.m. with everything, or nothing, going on around me. I have become obsessed with Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (which my Windows Media Player insists on listing as "Right" of Spring), and am listening to it now. What was chaotic, or at least what seemed chaotic back then, and is supposed to be chaotic, isn't at all. Now, with new ears, or a brain blasted clean by forces I don't understand, it is the most orderly piece of music I have ever heard.

As orderly as Spring:

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

As usual, Hopkins had me until the second stanza, when he went all Mary-ish on me again, as he always does. Poor little man, celibate but yearning, yearning for men, boys, all those forbidden things he put just out of his own reach. 

Even if I could write, I know I could not write this, because the art of building airy castles out of cinderblocks is given to so very few. So I plough ahead (yes! "Plough". And American readers, please don't see this emphasis on Canadian spelling as a slight: it's just that the constant, enveloping election coverage is beginning to wear me down. This is almost as exhausting as the Canadian election that caused normally-sane people to draw Hitler moustaches on Stephen Harper.) Life is a keep-on-going, it's the only thing I've found that makes any sense.

Yesterday, something sneaked into the back of my head. A memory, or a dream? A dreamlike memory. It was a memory of a wall made of slate, or something like it. A room, no, a whole building that was built like a box. Square and unadorned. And there were stone walls, impossibly, emitting light, light that seemed to come from everywhere.

I knew this had happened to me, or else it was a dream so vivid it had left a burn-mark, a scar, a brand on me somewhere. My very skin was affected. I began to search my mind, but as with so many other fragile memories, I couldn't chase it or it would flee away from me. I had to sit there and see how much of it would come back of its own accord.

I was in a room, no, a whole building, and the walls were made of some sort of rock, and the rock was emitting light. Everywhere. I had no idea where I was in the dream/memory and couldn't place it, except that it must have been in our far-ago travels.

We had been to Utah to see Bryce Canyon twice (and surely, if God exists, s/he lives there in the sacred peach-gold turning of the light). I associated Utah and our trip to the States with minerals, rocks, petrified wood, but also religion. Could this not have been some odd little church (for I believed it must be a church) situated in the middle of nowhere, and made of some thin, porous rock, like alabaster? I asked my husband if he remembered it, and I got that tolerant, no-you're-crazy look I am so used to getting. He sort of acknowledged something like that might have happened some time, probably somewhere in the Southwest on our trips out there. 

But no. It couldn't be that. For some reason it seemed much farther back.

I started my usual internet search: churches made of alabaster/rock/translucent rock. Even names of minerals that would admit light. Nothing. It HAD to be translucent rock of some kind, and I was coming up empty, as almost never happens on the internet now.

But then.

Then, something, a photo of what looked like a rock plate with striations, and light just barely showing through it, not streaming but easing, glowingly. In fact, the rock faces on this wall - and there it was, a wall - were all glowing pinkly, redly, amberly.

It was a church.

It was a church in Switzerland, in a town called Meggen on Lake Lucerne - and yes, we had stayed near the lake for a day in 1998 - 1998! It was called St. Pius Church, and was the strangest Catholic church we had ever seen, bare, austere, just a box made of marble slabs. Marble so thin it emitted light, perhaps in that way Michelangelo exploited in his statues, giving them an almost phosphorescent glow. The place was so austere that it was almost severe: hard wooden benches with no backs, an altar too minimalist to be real with a cross suspended in the mid-air, and some sort of side-sanctuary made of cement - oh, cement! But I remembered it all, every bit of it, especially the way the light seemed to come from every direction.

The other strange thing, though, was how very little I could find out about this place. There was simply nothing but a very few Google images, with text either in German or Italian, or no text at all. The English text, what little I found, was in that stilted and often hilarious form that bespeaks the literal, translated word-for-word.

What I could (finally) winkle out was that this place was built in 1964 by - Fueg? Was that his name? The plain boxy shape was typical mid-'60s ultra-modern style, something I am trying very hard to forget  

This means the outside was almost howlingly ugly, like a particularly awful industrial building with an eyesore of a 1960s alarm-clock-looking tower outside it. It reminded me of the big TV aerial we used to have, the one you could literally climb.

But then things began to fall apart. Yes, I DID remember transparent rock, light, and a very boxy, square building. But how did we find this thing in Meggen, Switzerland? We stayed in Lucerne, and I don't think we ever came across any tourist info about this awful-looking (from the outside) place. We were used to seeing overwhelmingly-ornate cathedrals with flying buttresses, glistening with garishly-coloured stained glass, Catholic ostentation in the extreme. Yet here was this bare, unlikely, almost-impossible place.

I don't remember the outside. Not at all. No one would go near such a building unless they knew about what was inside. This place would have necessitated a deliberate side-trip, and we didn't have time for that.

But I put my HAND on that rock!

It was cool-warm to the touch, not as cold as you expected, because it had soaked up sun rays even though the day was cloudy. Far from being echo-y and cold, the acoustics were beautiful, warmly concentrating sound as if embracing it.

This couldn't be the same place, though. My "memory", if that's what it is, is of a small place we happened upon while driving around in Utah. The outside looked much like the inside (I think, or at least was more inviting than this cinderblock factory in a nothing little town). Someone invited us in and told us that the place had only one natural light source. The light came through the rock walls, which were made of gypsum or alabaster (or something). There was no electrical wiring whatsoever, and at night they used candles. We didn't stay long after marvelling over the walls, because really, there was nothing else to see.

I understand how memories from different times can become conflated. I see how rare it would be for ANY cathedral to be built of marble slabs, carefully chosen to match their grain. I understand it would be extremely expensive, and that even inside, there would be aspects of it (a lot of metal to hold the slabs together, and a Cosco-like gridwork on the ceiling) that were ugly by necessity. There is no way that even a mini-version of this could be built over here. But I just don't remember the size, the scale of this thing. Though like real estate photos, the rare pictures of it (and I've used nearly all of them here) might make it look a lot bigger.

Adding to my confusion is the fact that on the internet, where I very rarely run up against stone walls, this place barely exists. There are no YouTube videos of it. People don't write about it in their travels because they don't go there. The outside is just plain hideous, plainer than plain, a dud.

I don't know what happened here. If this happened at all - and now it's up for grabs - it was eighteen years ago, our grandkids hadn't been born yet. . . and we were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary with what we knew would be our one and only trip to Europe. Unlike all my strutting, fretting, ostentatious "friends" on Facebook, I can't post lavish photos of Algiers and Bath and Provence and wherever-the-hell, the travel destination of the month, with even more enthralling pictures of ravioli from that fabulous little Tuscan cafe (and by all means, show me your food!), because we are too old and poor and our health too dicey to go overseas, or travel anywhere at all any more. 

So that is that.

This must be it, though. It must. Where else would you find a whole church (you can't exactly call it a cathedral because it's basically a box made of stone) built so strangely? When the light kisses and splashes the stone from the outside, the walls inside glow like beaten gold. Nowhere else on earth will you find light like this. If there were an earthquake, even a small one, the whole thing would come crashing down, for those marble slabs are all of 27 centimeters thick: just over one inch.

One inch of stone between you and the sun. Think of it. But why is the memory so mixed-together with something quite different? Bill does not remember this at all, and has a hard time believing we were actually there.

Which perhaps we weren't. Perhaps we were somewhere else? But I know I could not dream stone walls emitting light. 

I'm NOT trying to make a point here, except a rather queasy one about memory. Back when I was wrestling and grappling with PTSD (which had no name then) from my father's abuse when I was a small child, there was a sudden, very high-profile "movement" called False Memory Syndrome, in which believers (whose daughters all seemed to be claiming sexual abuse from family members) tried to force on us the idea that we could create any old memory we wanted to, usually from sheer malice and a desire to hurt our parents as much as possible.

This could not have come at a worse time for me, and I was so close to suicide I was hanging on by my fingernails. Every day I signed a contract I had drawn up for myself: I will not kill myself today, dated it, and filed it with my therapist. My sister sent me whole magazine stories about "FMS" (which, who knows, may have wormed its way into the DSM by now) with long passages underlined. When I tried to explain to her what I was going through, the way my guts were being pulled out in a long ribbon by something I NEVER wanted for myself or anyone else, she ripped the letter to shreds and mailed the pieces back to me.

I had a letter from my dad, hand-written in all-caps: NO! IT DID NOT HAPPEN! He had the document countersigned by a psychiatrist who used to treat me when I was fifteen years old. This doctor was certain it didn't happen, as if he had been there. One thing you can say about my family: they sure know how to discredit a person.

The point of all this is, I don't want to believe memories can be scrambled or altered by time. They were all telling me it didn't happen. At all. My sister is a lot older than me, which (she said) guaranteed it never happened. It's a sore point with me. I DO remember the essence of something, of putting my hand on the cool-warm stone which was so very smooth. I remember Bill and I, both of us, marvelling that such a thing could even be.

But why does part of my brain say, "no, wait a minute. . . "

Not that it doesn't exist at all, but perhaps that it existed in a different form, smaller, more rudimentary, and somewhere in the United States (for Canada would never produce such a mineral oddity - we don't have marble anywhere). Knowing also that such a thing is virtually impossible, unless a North American architect decided to copy it on a smaller scale.

So what is the point here? Does this have anything to do with spring? Of course not. We didn't even travel to Switzerland in spring, it was the fall. Maybe that lovely Donovan song I posted yesterday? Maybe the crocuses, the everlasting green of Vancouver - the memory springing up or sneaking in like new life from nothing?

Probably there's no connection at all. I have never wanted to post polished essays here, but explorations that don't ever happen in a straight line. Which explains all the P.S.-es, the "oh wait!" at the end of the posts. If discoveries don't happen in a straight line, surely memories don't come back that way, or are changed in some sense - but are they invented, as my family insisted they were, just for spite or for sport?

But I DID put my hand on that stone, meaning it existed then, and must exist right now, this very minute, somewhere.

As usual, there is a small P. S. (until more seaweed trailings stream from the oozing clump I pulled out of nowhere last night). Someone here has tried to describe St. Pius in lyrical terms. After that, an amen.

Project description

The geometrical rigour and the clarity of St. Pius’s proportions help give the church its presence in the majestic – and dynamic – alpine setting and within a heterogeneous residential quarter. The white of the marble appears to enter into a dialogue with the distant glaciers. This dialectic is set forth inside the church with the contrast between the rhythm of the 74 steel columns and the cloud-like painterly structure of the stone wall panels. From the exterior, the polished walls appear to be pure white, while at night the interiors are cast in a honey-yellow glow, and their velvety surfaces radiate warmth and physical presence. St. Pius’s has not received the widespread acclaim that the expressive churches by Füeg’s contemporaries Walter Förderer and Gottfried Böhm met with. (Frank Kaltenbach)

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So begins another spring

THE LULLABY OF SPRING

Donovan

Rain has showered far her drip

Splash and trickle running

Plant has flowered in the sand

Shell and pebble sunning

So begins another spring

Green leaves and of berries

Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by

Mother bird eating cherries

In the misty tangled sky

Fast a wind is blowing

In the new-born rabbit's heart

River life is flowing

So begins another spring

Green leaves and of berries

Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by

Mother bird eating cherries

From the dark and wetted soil

Petals are unfolding

From the stony village kirk

Easter bells of old ring

So begins another spring

Green leaves and of berries

Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by

Mother bird eating cherries

Rain has showered far her drip

Splash and trickle running

Plant has flowered in the sand

Shell and pebble sunning

So begins another spring

Green leaves and of berries

Chiff-chaff eggs are painted by

Mother bird eating cherries

You spoke. We listened?

You spoke, and Trader Joe's listened.

In January, Trader Joe's was one of 400 businesses to say "no" to customers openly carrying guns in their Texas stores.

Now, "in light of recent customer feedback and questions,"Trader Joe's has reaffirmed their policy and announced that guns are not welcome in their stores nation-wide.

When companies stand up for gun sense, we have to let them know we've got their backs so that other companies will follow their example.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. While I can appreciate the sentiment of this, it also made my jaw drop.

I have never seen a gun. Ever. The only person I've ever known with guns collected antique rifles that he never fired. I never saw those either.

It just doesn't occur to us. I mean.  You also have to wonder, is it still okay to covertly, secretly carry guns, so long as nobody at Trader Joe's sees them?

It's a language we just don't speak. I'm not trying to say anything but that.

Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles [800% Slower]

For every drop of rain that falls

Drano cleans and opens drains - and other things

This is so similar to those jaw-dropping "douche with Lysol" ads that at first I thought. . . oh, surely not! But it's a "not". Still, it isn't much of a stretch, is it? The husband has that same look of cold contempt, as if he is (justifiably!) about to leave her forever, while she broods over what her sin might have been THIS time. If the Drano doesn't work on her drain, she could always use it for something else. After all, the Lysol killed "germs" and everything else in its path, so might a drain cleaner work even better? But her husband might be in for a nasty surprise during those intimate moments.

Actual 1961 Nuclear Attack Message

Listen at your own risk.

Dial-up sound 700% slower (Creepy)

Visions of a Cold War Kid

When I was a kid, back in the 1960s, everything was The Future. I was constantly hearing about what life would be like "In The Year 2000".

It was a never-ending refrain: "By the year 2000, we'll" (all be walking around on the moon, have domed cities with climate control, zoom around in flying cars like on The Jetsons, have our living room rugs vacuumed by a robot).

And computers. Yes, computers were a definite menace. Every episode of The Twilight Zone had a computer in it, and man, they were EVIL. They always turned out to be the villain, the dark force behind every bad thing that had happened in that smudgy, surreal, black-and-white half-hour. 

It was almost as bad as Star Trek, where by the end of the show the evil computer would start to smoke and jibber as Captain Kirk managed to convince it to self-destruct in order to save the universe. Though why computers would have smoke coming out of them is anyone's guess. Call Bill Gates, something must've shorted out.

In this futuristic scenario, convenience and sterility meant everything. There was no food. Of course not! Food came in the form of pills. Green pill, vegetable. Red pill, meat. Etc. I used to brood in my morose child-way (for even then, as now, I was deeply depressive and fearful, though I told no one) about the demise of food. How food was, as my Dad used to say, "going out of style". No, actually, what he said was my brother Arthur was "eating like it was going out of style" when he attacked a giant stack of Aunt Jemimas. And I took it literally, that eating really WAS going out of style: something I could readily believe, with all that talk of pills. Soon one of my favorite activities, something I always thought I could depend on, would become obsolete.

I was a Cold War kid, though I had no idea there was ANY kind of war on, cold or otherwise. Walter Cronkite, who knew everything, often talked about something called The Iron Curtain, and I knew it was all the way over on the other side of the world, but I didn't know what it was.  I knew something about the Great Wall of China, and maybe even a little bit about the Berlin Wall, so all these things got conflated into a massive, completely solid, miles-thick curtain, a ramparts cutting across Russia and keeping all the Americans out, or the Russians in.

Communists were bad, but not as bad to us as they were to the Americans. We had a funny attitude towards the Americans then, though no funnier than it is now. We felt sorry for them, and we feared them slightly, though because Canadians always "stand on guard" (it's in our national anthem about 18 times), we held on to our values pretty securely. Americans were crazy: they were The Beverley Hillbillies, they were Dragnet, they were The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Though I knew a lot of people who cried when Kennedy got shot, at one point my mother told me quietly "he wasn't our President, you know," and it gave me a sense of perspective.

No one talked about this, but around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (which I knew absolutely nothing about: only that I woke up screaming every night for weeks), the TV stations from Detroit would frequently do A Test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. "This is only a test." A logo would flash on the screen: Civil Defense, a name I found inexplicably terrifying. Then came this bone-penetrating sound: BOOOOOOOOP. When I posted a slowed-down version of an old computer dial-up modem, every hair on my body stood up because it reminded me of This Is Only A Test. I would freeze in place, go numb. I don't remember another person ever being in the room with me when this happened, and I told no one about it. I was sure that the world was about to end.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s, when - I swear this is true - I heard a very loud air raid siren outside. Yes! Just like in the movies when the bombers are swooping down on London during the Blitz. Droaaaannnnnnnn - that doomy sound. (You know what I'm talking about.) I phoned up my friend and babbled. I heard it, I heard it, I heard the siren. What siren? It sounded like an air raid siren from an old World War II movie. Oh - maybe they were just testing it out.

Oh.

I wonder now: as with the Emergency Broadcasting System, the sirens are there to be used, not just "things" or abstract concepts. It made me wonder - still does - if every city has air raid sirens or some mysterious way of alerting its citizens of certain doom. For some reason, what comes to mind is what my scientist husband told me about NASA. Before every prolonged space flight, each astronaut is given a cyanide capsule in case they get stuck out there and can't get back.

Growing up doomy leaves marks on you, it does. My joy is always darkened. Recently I had to take down a post that literally sent my very modest readership scattering for cover. Four longtime readers bailed in just a few hours. No kidding, they left. The only reason I could think of was what I had just posted. It truly was a sort of vision of how Armageddon might unfold. And it might. Although I realize we all have to live as if it won't.

Climate change, terrorism, the nuclear weapons we all seem to have forgotten all about - and human evil - the collapse of the power grid - and the other thing no one mentions any more (though it was discussed incessantly in the 1960s), OVERPOPULATION - these things could converge on a fragile, already-overburdened world. And I don't want it to happen, folks. Don't ever think that. But back in the '60s we bickered and fumed and wrung our hands about the planet being choked with humanity at two billion people, and - strangely, very strangely to me - we virtually never think, talk or write about it now that it has exceeded seven. 

It's lonely putting your work out there, where there is this unpredictable response, or even non-response, along with wildly uneven exposure. Once in  a while I go back into old posts, unable to find something, and I see that a post has gotten something like 10,000 views (one on footbinding in China, for example, or Carrie Fisher and her electroconvulsive therapy). The next post will get, like, 15 views. I've tried to figure it out. Someone told me to use more intriguing search terms, but what if it's a video with a cat and a rabbit? 

But I find I can't write "popular" or go by a formula. I write because I have to, because I don't feel whole without it. It is what I have always done to survive and to try to make sense of the world. This matters more to me than format - or it must, because everyone else's blog is now solid white with huge lettering, and mine isn't. Though I changed the name of it at one point because someone told me Margaret Gunning's House of Dreams was "embarrassing" (hey! Not to me! It was satire. It's awful when someone doesn't "get" satire and says YOU'RE the dummy), I haven't substantially updated the site since I started it, it's still in the old brown-paper-bag format that I find easy to use and "not plastic" (as we used to say in the '60s). 

Recurrent themes run through personal blogs like this whether you want them to or not. Certain obsessions pop up again and again. Blogs are supposed to have a theme, and this one doesn't, but is nevertheless (in view of my obsessiveness) always in danger of becoming repetitive. One definitely-recurring theme is paranoia and the end of the world, as previewed by the Emergency Broadcasting System tests that broke into my Quick Draw McGraw cartoons. BOOOOOOOOP. And sirens going off that aren't supposed to. Or maybe they're just testing them out.

Food being replaced by pills never took off as a concept. Not even close. No one could have predicted the current truly astonishing levels of obesity back when 250 pounds was considered grotesque and horribly unhealthy. Computers are ubiquitous and run everything, but if they're as evil as we thought they would be, no one notices any more. They HAVE taken over our lives, just as Rod Serling/Gene Roddenberry tried to warn us, but now we aren't afraid of them any more. We like it just fine.

If George Orwell were alive today - but he wouldn't be. I think he would have committed suicide at the developments in surveillance that are now completely standard. Like frogs in hot water, we not only don't notice we're being boiled, we kind of like the sensation of the heat.

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My Meowy Valentine: Victorian greeting card art

My funny Valentine

Sweet, comic Valentine

You make me smile with my heart

Your looks are laughable

Unphotographable

Yet you're my favorite work of art

Is your figure less than Greek?

Is your mouth a little weak?

When you open it to speak

Are you smart?

Don't change a hair for me

Not if you care for me

Stay little Valentine, stay

And each day will be Valentine's Day

Is your figure less than Greek?

Is your mouth a little weak?

When you open it to speak

Are you smart?

Don't, please don't change a hair for me

Not if, not if you care for me

Stay little valentine, stay

And each day will be Valentine's

Every day will be, every day will be Valentine's Day

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"But it looked OK on paper!"

I promise, some day I WILL do a post on the Winchester Mystery House, which is full of such nonsensical/incomprehensible features as windows built into the floor and staircases that lead nowhere. Meanwhile, these are design fails, like this playground equipment for when you're babysitting a particularly poisonous little brat.

Just waiting for that major derailment!

"Oh, what a beautiful mor - " CLUNK.

I am trying to figure this out. Do you go UP this wheelchair ramp? Or do you go bumping down the stair part first, then - . And how would this work for strollers?

No doubt here - you have to love pain.

Great garage for a flying car, maybe like the one on The Jetsons. Is that their driveway, blocked by a fence, running at right angles to the house? As I look it it, though, it's plain the architect just put the garage on the wrong floor.

This staircase would've made Sarah Winchester proud. Or at least it would have made sense to her. Perhaps the designer went to a seance.

Now this is just wrong.

Little People, Big ATM?  Can't be a drive-through, unless you're lying on your belly on a giant skateboard.

I like this! I do! Trees deserve their own space on (or in) the property.

This one, though, I truly do not get.

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