pilgrimage and a name
Approaching St. Peters made me feel as if I were passing through a series of great invisible seals, progressively rarifying the atmosphere and removing the impurities of external being from me, so that by the time I passed under the facade, I was remembering what it was to breathe for the first time.
I forgot again, later on, but that was because the breath was stolen from me.
Pacing in, through vaulting of light that made the stones seem weightless, I began to understand that this process of sublimation was continuing, and would continue as I approached my own personal epicenter.
I circled, knowing the center of the spiral already, going through the proper motions, knowing who was waiting for me.
(In several regions of Christendom there is honored under this name a pious matron of Jerusalem who, during the Passion of Christ, as one of the holy women who accompanied Him to Calvary, offered Him a towel on which He left the imprint of His face.)
I noticed that the papal wardrobe bears a startling resemblance to the shell of a scarab beetle, and the wonder of synchronicity makes me think of popes in catacomb cocoons, growing to a new form, their old bodies ossified and petrified into monuments marked with their name.
Saint Juliana looks tired. I would be, too.
Longinus stands tall here, his spear upraised, made holy by a wound. His arms are wide, his face tilted up in his realization of the sky. One foot forward, never backward, faith carries on.
(She went to Rome, bringing with her this image of Christ, which was long exposed to public veneration. To her likewise are traced other relics of the Blessed Virgin venerated in several churches of the West.)
I spend some time sketching Longinus' face; his joy surprises me, stone as it is, for his witnessing must have been sobering, and the blood is not something he could ever pull out from his eyes.
Moving on, I notice Saint Theresa, with her quill and book, and a cherub with a flaming heart. She looks up as if startled, but expectant. True love.
Echoes of Latin and Italian flow over and under each other, past and present, welling at last in the Assumption of Mary, where light and time both pool in perfect counterpoint to the shining pallid misery of the Pieta.
(To distinguish at Rome the oldest and best known of these images it was called vera icon (true image), which ordinary language soon made veronica. Matthew of Westminster speaks of the imprint of the image of the Savior which is called Veronica: "Effigies Domenici vultus quae Veronica nuncupatur". By degrees, popular imagination mistook this word for the name of a person and attached thereto several legends which vary according to the country.)
In time, I find myself near the veil’s shadow. There are so few true shadows in the Basilica, however; too many streams of light shading through each other, making degrees of luminosity. Her statue stands before me, a girl made giant in stone, the veil spread between her hands, mouth open and eyes empty in a fit of rapture, perhaps. But as my pencil moves, memorizing the lines of her face, my eyes become inverted lenses, sucking in what the body sees and pressing it through the crucible of my mind.
(In Italy Veronica comes to Rome at the summons of the Emperor Tiberius, whom she cures by making him touch the sacred image. She thenceforth remains in the capitol of the empire, living there at the same time as Sts. Peter and Paul, and at her death bequeaths the precious image to Pope Clement and his successors.)
Beneath her feet rests the sepulcher of Saint Peter; the veil held over the keys to the Kingdom, which I find very appropriate. Ascension is never where you look for it. Shortly, I find myself descending the stairs hidden behind the statue, leading down under the nave, closer to the tombs. Bees are carved on the pedestal, and that reminds me of a dream where I was filled with a cloud of black birds, a hive of bone and bracken a mile tall, a reliquary for curses forgotten.
(In France she is given in marriage to Zacheus, the convert of the Gospel, accompanies him to Rome, and then to Quiercy, where her husband becomes a hermit, under the name of Amadour, in the region now called Rocamadour. Meanwhile Veronica joins Martial, whom she assists in his apostolic preaching.)
The ceiling below has vaulting of its own, but my mind makes it heavy with the niter of memories, and I look up at a sky of Byzantine history, showing the progress of the veil, and the reverence, and the magnetism it wraps around the heart.
(In the region of Bordeaux Veronica, shortly after the Ascension of Christ, lands at Soulac at the mouth of the Gironde, bringing relics of the Blessed Virgin; there she preaches, dies, and is buried in the tomb which was long venerated either at Soulac or in the Church of St. Seurin at Bordeaux. Sometimes she has even been confounded with a pious woman who, according to Gregory of Tours, brought to the neighboring town of Bazas some drops of the blood of John the Baptist, at whose beheading she was present.)
Passing further down, I am no longer walking on the smoothed stairway. This is a place where my senses are stripped so raw that all I have feeding me is the vibrations of my own mind, the half-remembered dreams threading together into a veil of my own. I see the murals, and the statue, and the mosaics, but all are colored with my own palette.
I remember another dream following stairs with a sense of dread and great depth, where I could smell blood.
So much in spiritual belief is touched with blood, or stained with it.
(In many places she is identified with the Haemorrhissa who was cured in the Gospel, a woman plagued by an ‘issue of blood’)
And at last, I meet her at eye level, caught in marble and mural by Benedictus 8, with a spanning web about her catching moments in time like strangled flies; she is shown wiping the agony from Christ’s brow, being driven away by the Romans (perhaps they knew what she was about), she shows the veil to the rest, who fall into it, consumed by the pain and passion there.
I notice that halos are rather lacking in these pictures.
She of course looks modest.
In my dreams, she spreads the veil wide, and the green that shows under her demure eyelids leaks dark red at the corners, the paths to Golgotha traced in quavering lines towards the corners of her gentle mouth. The veil is a mirror for ruin, the ultimate end that symbolizes a crux in destiny.
The stone of the altar makes my fingertips thrum, as if this place is a spine imbedded in her very flesh, and I can feel the sluggish pull and push of her pulse through it; it is a familiar rhythm to me.
I am reminded of what her name means to me.
Through this, I heard the slight grinding, the turning of a key in a lock rusty with disuse, and I offer her a moment of my breath.
My eyes grey, I ascend the cold stairs again, moving from the bottomless unconscious back to the golden architecture of ephemeral wakefulness, my spine forever graven with a thousand words in blue fire and lead that whisper that minute to me even today.
I forgot again, later on, but that was because the breath was stolen from me.
Pacing in, through vaulting of light that made the stones seem weightless, I began to understand that this process of sublimation was continuing, and would continue as I approached my own personal epicenter.
I circled, knowing the center of the spiral already, going through the proper motions, knowing who was waiting for me.
(In several regions of Christendom there is honored under this name a pious matron of Jerusalem who, during the Passion of Christ, as one of the holy women who accompanied Him to Calvary, offered Him a towel on which He left the imprint of His face.)
I noticed that the papal wardrobe bears a startling resemblance to the shell of a scarab beetle, and the wonder of synchronicity makes me think of popes in catacomb cocoons, growing to a new form, their old bodies ossified and petrified into monuments marked with their name.
Saint Juliana looks tired. I would be, too.
Longinus stands tall here, his spear upraised, made holy by a wound. His arms are wide, his face tilted up in his realization of the sky. One foot forward, never backward, faith carries on.
(She went to Rome, bringing with her this image of Christ, which was long exposed to public veneration. To her likewise are traced other relics of the Blessed Virgin venerated in several churches of the West.)
I spend some time sketching Longinus' face; his joy surprises me, stone as it is, for his witnessing must have been sobering, and the blood is not something he could ever pull out from his eyes.
Moving on, I notice Saint Theresa, with her quill and book, and a cherub with a flaming heart. She looks up as if startled, but expectant. True love.
Echoes of Latin and Italian flow over and under each other, past and present, welling at last in the Assumption of Mary, where light and time both pool in perfect counterpoint to the shining pallid misery of the Pieta.
(To distinguish at Rome the oldest and best known of these images it was called vera icon (true image), which ordinary language soon made veronica. Matthew of Westminster speaks of the imprint of the image of the Savior which is called Veronica: "Effigies Domenici vultus quae Veronica nuncupatur". By degrees, popular imagination mistook this word for the name of a person and attached thereto several legends which vary according to the country.)
In time, I find myself near the veil’s shadow. There are so few true shadows in the Basilica, however; too many streams of light shading through each other, making degrees of luminosity. Her statue stands before me, a girl made giant in stone, the veil spread between her hands, mouth open and eyes empty in a fit of rapture, perhaps. But as my pencil moves, memorizing the lines of her face, my eyes become inverted lenses, sucking in what the body sees and pressing it through the crucible of my mind.
(In Italy Veronica comes to Rome at the summons of the Emperor Tiberius, whom she cures by making him touch the sacred image. She thenceforth remains in the capitol of the empire, living there at the same time as Sts. Peter and Paul, and at her death bequeaths the precious image to Pope Clement and his successors.)
Beneath her feet rests the sepulcher of Saint Peter; the veil held over the keys to the Kingdom, which I find very appropriate. Ascension is never where you look for it. Shortly, I find myself descending the stairs hidden behind the statue, leading down under the nave, closer to the tombs. Bees are carved on the pedestal, and that reminds me of a dream where I was filled with a cloud of black birds, a hive of bone and bracken a mile tall, a reliquary for curses forgotten.
(In France she is given in marriage to Zacheus, the convert of the Gospel, accompanies him to Rome, and then to Quiercy, where her husband becomes a hermit, under the name of Amadour, in the region now called Rocamadour. Meanwhile Veronica joins Martial, whom she assists in his apostolic preaching.)
The ceiling below has vaulting of its own, but my mind makes it heavy with the niter of memories, and I look up at a sky of Byzantine history, showing the progress of the veil, and the reverence, and the magnetism it wraps around the heart.
(In the region of Bordeaux Veronica, shortly after the Ascension of Christ, lands at Soulac at the mouth of the Gironde, bringing relics of the Blessed Virgin; there she preaches, dies, and is buried in the tomb which was long venerated either at Soulac or in the Church of St. Seurin at Bordeaux. Sometimes she has even been confounded with a pious woman who, according to Gregory of Tours, brought to the neighboring town of Bazas some drops of the blood of John the Baptist, at whose beheading she was present.)
Passing further down, I am no longer walking on the smoothed stairway. This is a place where my senses are stripped so raw that all I have feeding me is the vibrations of my own mind, the half-remembered dreams threading together into a veil of my own. I see the murals, and the statue, and the mosaics, but all are colored with my own palette.
I remember another dream following stairs with a sense of dread and great depth, where I could smell blood.
So much in spiritual belief is touched with blood, or stained with it.
(In many places she is identified with the Haemorrhissa who was cured in the Gospel, a woman plagued by an ‘issue of blood’)
And at last, I meet her at eye level, caught in marble and mural by Benedictus 8, with a spanning web about her catching moments in time like strangled flies; she is shown wiping the agony from Christ’s brow, being driven away by the Romans (perhaps they knew what she was about), she shows the veil to the rest, who fall into it, consumed by the pain and passion there.
I notice that halos are rather lacking in these pictures.
She of course looks modest.
In my dreams, she spreads the veil wide, and the green that shows under her demure eyelids leaks dark red at the corners, the paths to Golgotha traced in quavering lines towards the corners of her gentle mouth. The veil is a mirror for ruin, the ultimate end that symbolizes a crux in destiny.
The stone of the altar makes my fingertips thrum, as if this place is a spine imbedded in her very flesh, and I can feel the sluggish pull and push of her pulse through it; it is a familiar rhythm to me.
I am reminded of what her name means to me.
Through this, I heard the slight grinding, the turning of a key in a lock rusty with disuse, and I offer her a moment of my breath.
My eyes grey, I ascend the cold stairs again, moving from the bottomless unconscious back to the golden architecture of ephemeral wakefulness, my spine forever graven with a thousand words in blue fire and lead that whisper that minute to me even today.