Marcello Di Cintio

Archive for May, 2010|Monthly archive page

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Poetic interlude: Philip Larkin’s “Church Going”

In Uncategorized on May 26, 2010 at 3:59 pm

As I mentioned in my last post, I am writing a short essay on the unique joys that come from engaging in religious ritual – especially in the rituals of faiths I don’t believe in. During the course of my travels over the last decade or so I’ve had the great pleasure to commune with believers. I spent a week among Benedictine monks in a forest monastery in Togo. I witnessed the ‘raising of the dead’ in Benin. I spent one Christmas in a Catholic Church in Burkina Faso and another in Bethlehem. I watched Hindus burn Ravan in effigy on Mumbai’s Chowpatty Beach, and fasted for Ramadan in Iran.

I am in love with ritual, but I am unsure why. This is what I am trying to figure out for my essay.

In the meantime, my research led me to a poem by English poet (and atheist) Philip Larkin called “Church Going.” It is a lovely poem and speaks to the idea of being a non-believer in a sacred place. Here it is:



Church Going

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Philip Larkin

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Two in progress; one under consideration

In Uncategorized on May 17, 2010 at 7:56 pm

My residency is winding down, the Walls book is simmering in the proverbial bottom-drawer, and I am devoting most of my writing time to magazine projects.

I have two pieces in progress now. I will be writing s feature about becoming a first-time father last Fall. The month before my son was was born, I found out that my brother was buried in St. Mary’s cemetery and that his name was Sandro. I always knew my mother suffered two miscarriages before she had me. And I knew both were boys. They would have been my only brothers and my son’s only uncles. But until last year I didn’t know that they were given names, and I didn’t know that the eldest, Sandro, had been buried in a plot overlooking MacLeod Trail and the Stampede Grounds. By the time my son, Amedeo, was born Sandro would’ve been forty years-old. Amedeo would’ve been his only nephew.

I am using my discovery of Sandro as an entry into a story of Amedeo’s birth and the discoveries inherent in first-time fatherhood. I will write about the prenatal classes that, for all their information, make men feel like buffoons. I will write about my writer’s fascination with the vocabulary of birth: Ripening. Crowning. Linea negra. Fontanelle. I will write about the dash from the wrestling room to the delivery room – I was at practice when I got ‘the call’ – and our nurse’s soothing Nigerian accent that reminded me of my time in Africa. I will write about my grandfather’s disbelief and pride when he discovers we are naming Amedeo after him.

I’ve never written ‘straight’ memoir before. My travel writing is more about the places I visit and the people I meet than they are about me. I am both excited and nervous to write this story. It will appear in an issue of Alberta Views this Fall and I will spend my upcoming week at the Banff Centre finishing it off.

First, though, I am polishing a draft about Algeria for a travel magazine called Afar. I’ve been wanting to crack into Afar ever since the magazine was launched last year and have been pestering the editors with ideas. Eventually they bit.

I am writing a short essay on my time in the M’zab, a valley in Algeria on the Sahara Desert’s northern edge. My visit to the M’zab coincided both with the birthday of the Prophet Mohammad and with Catholic Easter (and, as it turned out, with my own birthday). I eavesdropped on Algerian Muslims as they celebrated Mohammad’s birthday with sung prayers and firecrackers. A few days later, I attended Easter Mass with the Catholic “White Fathers” in their hermitage. My story for Afar is about the joys of engaging in ritual even – or, perhaps, especially – as a nonbeliever.

Finally, I have something under consideration. A story I wrote for Geist, called “Wall of Shame,” has been nominated for a National Magazine Award in the ‘Travel’ category. This is only my second NMA nomination – most of my writer friends seem to collect them by the half-dozen – and I am a happy guy.

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Running Fence”

In Uncategorized on May 3, 2010 at 3:56 pm

In 1976, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude fulfilled a decades long dream and erected their most fantastic work to date, “Running Fence.” They built a nearly 40-kilometre fabric fence that ran through California ranchland, across rural roads, over hillsides and, eventually, into the Pacific Ocean. The fence itself was about 5.5 metres high and composed of  a sturdy white nylon that was originally designed for automobile airbags: a new innovation in 1976. Like all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, “Running Fence” was temporary. It stood for only two weeks, and when it was taken down, no trace of it remained.

“Running Fence” is being remembered in an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum where the archives of the project are on display. “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence” features drawings and photos of the project along with the stories of the local ranchers who helped build the fence and through whose land the fence threaded through. The exhibit runs until the fall.

I am fascinated by the “Running Fence” in relation to my own project on walls and other barriers. Those who follow this blog know I’ve spent much of the last three years touring barriers that tear apart cultures and despair those who reside in their shadows. Palestinian villagers, Saharan refugees, Indian farmers, Cypriot poets, and illegal migrants from Africa and the Indian Subcontinent all shared with me their stories of separation, division and collision with the barricades.

Yet Christo’s fence united people. The project brought together builders from around the California county where it stood. Ranchers who never thought much about art before found themselves united with their neighbors to help produce the massive installation. The builders were part of the art. Christo said that the work…

is not only the fabric the steel posts and the fence. Everybody here is part of my work, an integral part of the process of making that project. Twentieth-century art is not single individualistic experience. It’s the very deep political, social, economical experience I live right now, with everybody here.

Now, twenty-four years later, the irony is rich. The “Running Fence” of 1976 runs parallel to, and not far from, today’s US-Mexico border wall. This barrier, and those like it around the world, act in opposition to Christo’s fence. They are structures of exclusion. Christo’s fence fluttered in the wind. It reflected light. According to a film-maker who produced a documentary of the project, the clicking of the metal poles sounded like Buddhist monks. Today’s fences are built with concrete, steel and wire meant to tear flesh. Aside from the occasional siren wail, these fences are silent.

I wonder what Christo would say about the contemporary building boom of barriers. What would he say about Israel’s Wall around the West Bank or the US-Mexico border fence? How did his “Running Fence” manage to unite when today’s fences strive to divide? And, most compelling, what does his fence say about ours?

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