Field Notes.
Florence, June 2012
Cool quiet, dimly lit echoes through the space. Footsteps enter, on the verdegree tiled floor. Slow paces, doors and pews creaking under human weight. Deep green grey marble and cool blue white. Hushed tones, behind the rope. Back in time and space. The hushed aisles of youth, a grander ceiling. Plastic chairs stacked speaking of an administrative capacity. The turnstyle throws me through.
Archangels above circle crude symbols of the beasts. Relics of a time before, distant even to this ancient crafting. An earlier past.
Filtered light seeps through, halogen blinds.
Centuries of dirt of smoke of acrid scorching incense catching in same, different throats. No sign or line. Nothing of a modern, old age touches. Crisp cotton and lace, an uncertain, glaring concession to modernity.
Gilded saints gold reflects.
Trappings of power of wealth of the splendid Divine.
Lamb and rose and saint and beast.
Unknowable sign and signified.
The temporal shift behind these doors to another space, a third behind them all, outside beyond yet all. Watched over by these symbols, older even than the Saints, these stories. Mysterious and speaking of an older language even to these builders, their inscribers.
Behind testing knocking the mic
Music crackles
Through broken speakers
The connection bad
I try to look devout, failing
Remembering an inherited past, never here
The music stops, crackles, fails, tested.
In stops and starts.
Echoes and fills the space.
A sellable soundtrack to conversion.
Leans and stares, ear pressed to the cool mesh.
