Cathedrals
Have you ever been to a cathedral? The tallest stand at over 400 feet tall, mountains of stone that throw themselves at the sky as high as gravity will allow them. They peak in elaborate stonemasonry; tiers and spires sometimes so lofty and thin that they seem to split the sky. If you come close enough to one and look up, they take away the sky completely. They were all the rage for a while. You certainly don’t need me to tell you that, if you have ever seen pictures from European cities. Some cities decided that having one was too ordinary and went with four or five instead. The basilica in Guelph is not so grand compared to some European cathedrals, but it is visible from anywhere in the city. It heaves up from the earth in two towers of pale stone. An enormous circular window over the entrance looks out at the world like a single wide eye.
On the day the girl and her friends visited, they had a lot of trouble getting in. The main door was locked, but being intrepid they decided to circle the entire building and try every single door they could get their hands on. There were quite a few of these, all red and all tightly shut. After going around once one way and once the other they finally did find one unlocked, a side door up a bit of a stone ramp. A sun had been painted above the door, with a lamb basking in its mimicry of warmth. They crossed the threshold. It was deeply silent in the sanctuary when the girl and her friends went in, a heavy white silence, and the air hung thick with...something. They walked on hushed feet as they wandered between pillars and past arches, down aisles of smooth, dark pews. The high ceiling was teal and green. The girl lost track of her friends at some point, drawn in by the light, where it caught in exquisite windows. Stained glass captured ancient scenes of old men and young women in vibrant, glowing hues. That day the sun cast blotchy dapples of color on the walls and floor where it shone in.
Here I will add a small note, since there is something I know about this girl that I haven’t yet told you. She grew up being told about right ways and wrong ways. She had been raised singing particular songs about this being called God (in standard English), listening to people talk about this same being repeatedly with much fervor and certainty. Religion had been with her since the beginning. She knew churches and cathedrals, and, more essentially, she knew the lines you do not cross.
Guelph Cathedral, being a Catholic basilica, had been laid out in a particular way, and she understood enough of it to know some of the significance of the central display. It rose on a small dais in front of the pews, a series of ornate panels topped with tiny imitations of cathedral roofs. The centerpiece, a statue of a woman likely the Virgin Mary gazed gracefully upward. It was all beautiful in its own way. It was also forbidden. A rope barrier clearly marked it off-limits. Perhaps because it was holy, or some vague thing like that.
The girl looked at it. She walked around it, since it could be passed on both sides. She looked left. Right. Her friends were not in sight, and neither was anyone else. The light bounced quietly off the green ceiling.
No one saw her cross the line.
It was important to her that no one see. It was possibly the sort of thing that could get you kicked out of a Catholic basilica. She ducked around the rope barrier, pittered up the few stairs behind it, and then she sat at the foot of the display. This untouchable place, all ornate in white. ‘Why?’ she thought. ‘Why is it forbidden? To preserve it, or to protect it from tainted human touch?’ That was the question she asked it when she sat beneath it. It was not an unfriendly place, though she was jittery from checking every few moments that no one was coming. But it was not unfriendly. That too was important.
She did not count the seconds, but somehow she knew when it was time to move. She left as quickly and as quietly as she had come. Shortly after taking refuge in an aisle, she met her friends again. Perhaps it was still the jitters from having broken an unstated cultural rule, or perhaps it was something else, but she wanted very badly to laugh. Something rigid had bent when she poked it. She was extremely pleased with herself. A few more people began to filter in. Well, the friends said, the day was moving on, and there was sightseeing in Guelph still. They left, the girl still bubbling giddily. She stepped outside into blinding sunlight.
There is a book titled A Monster Calls. The girl was reading it on that trip to Guelph. She had brought it with her. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the story. It was written by Patrick Ness and illustrated by Jim Kay. The main character, a young boy, stands at a crossroads: his mother is ill beyond curing, he himself is bullied at school, and he is sent in the middle of it all to live with his grandmother, whom he hates with seething passion. It is while he is still at his own house that the monster begins calling. It is tree-ish, enormous, and not what could easily be called benevolent. On each of the occasions it visits, it tells him a story of some other time it appeared. They are hard stories, with no easy answers, and the boy finds that the monster is slowly seeping out through him into his everyday life.
Bear with me a moment. I recently took a class called History of Criticism, which sounds dastardly boring and probably would be if it were taught by the wrong person. However, in my case it would not be an overstatement to say that it changed my entire outlook on life and relationships. On the surface the class was about how ways of looking at literature have changed through time. But the professor made it clear from the beginning of class that analysis was not all we would be doing. These critical theories are real people’s perspectives not just on literature but also on the world and other people.
They reveal things about how people really think and feel.
One of the more modern critical theories we covered was something called “monster theory.” Its main advocate, Jeffrey Cohen, describes the whole idea in a series of seven theses. To be very, very basic, his argument is that the ways cultures create monsters tells us something about how and why we label certain things or qualities of people as monstrous. He says a lot of things like this: “The monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us.”1 One foot in the acceptable, one in the unacceptable. Or maybe both in the unacceptable. “For the most part,” he says, “monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.”2 And his point, of course, is that the part of society calling this thing monstrous is terrified of that difference, even as they sneer at it.
Our girl hadn’t read Cohen, but she knew about sneering at difference while being afraid of it. She knew more about it than she would have cared to admit, because she had grown up with it and been instilled with it. Perhaps that is partly why, just then, she was beginning to look at the world and wonder why her people called so much of it monstrous, defiled, and fallen. A Monster Calls sat at a certain boundary for her and bled from one side to the other.
I won’t presume to say that she thought A Monster Calls was about her. But she looked at the great tree monster, twisted and heartless and compassionate all at once, and she thought the eyes of her own heart looked back, clouded with inner storm. ‘But monsters?’ you may ask. ‘Weren’t we just talking about lines and cathedrals?’ And (if you are asking that question) I might politely interject that we are not really talking about any of those things, in the end. We are talking about a girl. A girl can hold both cathedrals and monsters inside her at the same time. A girl can see monsters in cathedrals and cathedrals in monsters.
Our girl was leaving, already leaving the sanctuary, where one is meant to believe that God is, where one is supposed to be safe; she walked the boundary so precisely that a single twitch might send her one way or the other. She had written in her personal journal that very morning, the morning before Guelph Cathedral: “The truth of my actions is that I do not believe it, and that I do not trust...That’s just what it is.”
Some years later, though far fewer than it felt like, the girl stepped onto cool stone again and breathed in the dim smell of Strasbourg Cathedral, France. This was about the third or fourth cathedral she had visited in a little over a week did I mention Europe has cathedrals by the bucketload?
Strasbourg Cathedral is truly a work of art; some of the things done in the stone look as though they shouldn’t be allowed to exist. The arch over the front door alone contains dozens upon dozens of human figures enacting scenes of life, of death, and of religion. Our girl did not know this at the time, but it is also one of the tallest cathedrals left in the world. It is essentially impossible to get the whole thing in a single photograph. It was hushed inside, despite the large quantity of people. The men letting people through the doors had a dire air about them. The girl had come here with her brother this time. She trailed his much taller figure through the aisles and peered at the wealth of art they passed. Paintings, sculpture, stained glass, architecture itself, all well attended to. She took pictures of the altar on its dais, and the entrance to the crypts diving beneath it. They walked a circuit of the enormous red brown space, passing small booths selling bric-a-brac books in French, tiny replicas of iconic windows, and candles to support the cathedral’s restoration. Scaffolds inside hid various art and bits of the wall that were being worked on.
The girl looked to her brother, and he nodded that he was finished. There was still so much to see and do. The girl walked out with the other tourists, into sunlight again; out of stone trying to be alive, into the busy street. The cathedrals in her mind were monuments of something past. Something quiet, deep inside that once had claws but has lost them. Their beautiful windows glittered with precious color in her mind’s eye, but they faded a little in a full color world. Music filtered through from the next street over. Milling people rumbled with speech. The girl snapped a few selfies with the cathedral, and then she and her brother moved on.
NOTES
1. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” in Monster Theory: Reading
Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.7
2. Ibid.
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Hannah Cox is a junior pursuing a Baccalaureate of Arts in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Linguistics. She enjoys tea, cats, and all things steampunk.