'There's a certain Slant of light' - Asides (XX)

‘There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -’

(Emily Dickinson) 

*

Usually, I’m very comfortable in a church, quite au fait with the terminology and how to read the room (so to speak). Occasionally, though, I have a flash of self-consciousness, one that leaves me feeling unsettled and intrusive. Such was the case on my recent Tuscan travels.

The dome’s interior 

Strolling into Siena’s magnificent cathedral, the Duomo di Siena, looking both down, around and up, my flip-flopping agnosticism was offered a spark. A slash of light speared through the glass in the upper part of the dome, cascaded down onto the incredible marble mosaic floor, and created a luminous blue puddle. Here was the sense of one of those opportunities when I might be about to experience a conversion, but immediately followed by the thought, that through simply regarding the space and the instance as an aesthetic one, I was somehow going to ‘fail the test’. 

Giorgio Vasari:‘The most beautiful, great and magnificent pavement ever made.’

Outside in the warm sun of an Italian autumn, I felt the familiar prickle signalling the memory of lines from a poem that I’d read a few years ago. They’d resonated at the time and taken me even further back to a visit to King’s College Chapel in Cambridge on a dispiriting winter afternoon. 

Here is the poem, Greta Stoddart’s ‘Walking into Church’.  

*

Walking into church
 
is like walking
into someone’s mind.
 
I don’t know how to think or be,
how to look in the slant light.
 
I’m being watched. Am I being watched.
What is being thought of me.
 
I want to lay myself down at the feet
of someone who might do something.
 
What am I saying.
Who is listening.
 
Only the silence
that’s been made over the years by those
 
who’ve come to weigh their grief in the air,
left the light thick with it.
 
Say it: you are not alone.
I am not alone, I say.
 
Won’t you take me in, old thing
or forgive me at least for I know not
 
what I’m doing planting a candle
in this melting glimmering tray

*

There was, in fact, an opportunity to light a candle in a side chapel of the Siena Cathedral. Maybe next time I should do just that and heed the absence of Stoddart’s magnificently missing full stop.