Notes on All Saints' Church
Since I’ve been unemployed for over a month now, I’ve been getting up to nonsense that isn’t worth talking about.
Since I’ve been unemployed for over a month now, I’ve been getting up to nonsense that isn’t worth talking about. To tide myself over I’ve been visiting places and entertaining my vagabond fantasies. I do not hope to talk to people, but I look at them. In this small way I violate them and hopefully wound them slightly, like a dog slightly eroding a stately wall by pissing on it.
Against my urge to live ritually, in an unimpeachable and perfectly adapted routine, I have sometimes sought out events. I’ve slept in forests, dodging census takers and living on bartered food. I have sought out peculiar, pointless sights, for no reason other than to give my heart liberty. One such sight, an hour away by train, was a church, bearing stained glass windows made by a great artist of the 20th century, located in an otherwise unremarkable town. I wished to see this fresco and write about it.
Arriving at the train station I began walking to the church, passing through thick towns that gave way to dead zones, then to suburbia, then again to thick towns. All Saints’ Church was within a quaint hamlet some thirty minutes from the town centre, down residential streets until the surroundings became green. At some point gaps between the houses appeared and then grew larger. This contributed to a scattered, empty air, like the air of a nap outdoors. Now entering the church, a service was in progress:
“The ebbs and flows of global population that transform the city and village every hundred years leave conurbations untouched, contrary to popular belief. The village might be uprooted by the explosion of a certain family, the city by a new mass of people added onto the smouldering, death-smelling blob, but the town which undergoes movement inwards and outwards without having its inner stuff transformed remains a still and loose sort of life. The institutional analogue of the town is the airport or school, whereas biologically it is akin to the sea urchin or lichen, which persists through the illusion of being short-lived and flat.
I see these things are cyclical. Nowadays, nothing is cyclical anymore. Men used to live and die by a few degrees in temperature, which they didn’t even think to quantify. Human life exploded in centuries-long summers, men spilled out onto uncultivated lands to submit them to central authority, the census grew fat, and many more subsisted as hermits, foragers, woodland cretins, living unchartered lives, before the cold snap of overbirth set in, the placentas buried in the soil chilled the crops, and the stars moved to a peculiar orientation. With mass death claiming the finish line, the process began again. We discovered the universal loops, the ages that calendar all generations, by viewing these minor perturbances, and God himself lives in a circle.”
The vicar at the pulpit munched forkfuls of black pudding between sentences. I was confused by the nature of this sermon, which did not belong to any religion I recognised. Atop his cassock and collar was a thick, elder beard, and a demure, bald scalp. In attendance were three or four members of the elderly community, whose backs were to me. At this point I realised I hadn’t seen the windows I came to see, despite sitting for some time in the pews. Great tarps were draped over the windows, and the Church was lit with candles alone.
With the sermon over, I meandered over to the vicar, hoping to convey a lack of purpose in my movements. Now coming close to him I asked why the windows were covered.
“Yes, people often come for the windows, you know. It’s a shame we have to cover them like this.”
“Oh, are they being renovated?”
“No, no, not quite. We’re replacing them. We are commissioning a new artist to design some new stained-glass windows. Well, not just yet, we’re still looking for an artist to do it.”
“Oh, the windows have been taken out, then?
“No, no, they are just covered. It wouldn’t do to have no windows. We won’t remove them until the new artist has something in mind to replace them.”
“Yes, I see,” I sighed, uncomprehending.
Pritchard, as he identified himself, was a pillar of the community, since he worked also as a local councillor, and he contented himself in socialising with those beneath him, since he saw himself as at once above others and as a proper sort of man, comfortable with what his lessers would call base or vulgar. He considered these things base and vulgar too, but rejoiced in his elevated politeness, that he treated nothing as below him. As a result, he was happy to talk with me about the church and his mysterious sermon.
In material life, the stuff of conversation, daily habit, simple exchange, much can escape notice for centuries. Old customs might smuggle themselves into modernity, untraceable by all conventional aetiologies, which have as their limit the lifespan of man, three score and ten being also the limit of hearsay, with reproduction occurring usually in the twenties or thirties of a rumour (personified as Fama). The priest, I gathered, was the custodian of an unknown religion, one that had escaped notice. Each religion really bears hundreds of little religions like polyps, and this priest followed a religion that might predate Christianity on these isles. In this parish he preached his own ideas. He proudly stated:
“The bishop doesn’t care what I preach so long as the gods get their fatted calves!”
He began to brag, also, about the charitable work of his church.
“Around here, poverty is a mundanity, neither worthy of reverence nor minimal enough that its absence turns everything pleasant. Every day, when I walk through the centre of town, I pass schools of crackheads and naked, primordial loiterers, arranged in fraternities, which may well predate industrial capitalism. A bit beyond the centre of town you arrive at a middle place that used to be the town centre, and we run our food bank there. It’s interesting local history. There was a meandering migration. Businesses moved into new brick shells, each time a few more yards east. No one moved into the old buildings. Once enough stores were far enough east, let’s say set in stone for twenty or thirty years, the town centre had changed location. That’s more than enough time for a store to become functionally ancient. So, no one remembers the old town centre, other than old men like me. If you go there tomorrow morning, you’ll see the good work we do. Yesterday we served a hundred, all lined up in a row, like crows on an electric wire.”
After talking with the priest, a tiredness came upon me. I shook his hand and agreed to attend, at some point in the future, an exhibition at E., in Cambridgeshire, where there was the UK’s only museum of stained glass. There, the windows I came to see would be exhibited in all their glory. Stepping outside I knew that night was approaching, and I shouldn’t stress myself by staying awake. I reached one of the unnamed woods that sprang up at the vertices of the roads and terraces, only a few yards deep, but enough to conceal me. On this pleasant summer night, I could sleep out in the open. I was gazing on my back at the scattered stars, the last lights fading, when a bear set upon me. The government had decided to reintroduce the brown bear, which became extinct in this country one thousand five hundred years ago, in order to enhance the biodiversity of the area. The bear ripped my head off and ate a good portion of me.
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