XXVII
With the discovery of a labyrinth of underground burials in Rome in 1578, a rich deposit of early Christian bones was disinterred; bones that could be an insanitary nuisance or an untapped resource. The mercantile wing of the Catholic church, with its well-honed commercial instincts, its relic franchise, its travel bureau for guaranteed safe passage to the next world, business class to heaven, recognised a mastercard opportunity. German shrines and religious houses required a cash-magnet attraction for pilgrims. They needed miracle-working exhibits, blackened by falsehood.
Decorated in gold thread and pearls, nun-worked lace and fine cambric, spattered with emeralds and rubies, these manufactured replacements for the idolatrous effigies destroyed during the Protestant Reformation were known as Katakombenbeiligen or ‘catacomb saints’. Lutheran carriers had no qualms – for a price – about transporting the ossuary sacks and rattling caskets across the Alps.
New beings emerged from the slumber of sandstone into the smoky backlight of display in cathedrals and restored churches. Veiled, lips rouged, wigged in silver strands, these skeletal saints, ‘rescued’ from the dignity of death, were paraded in travesty: their invented biographies a surrealist hypothesis for an emerging theme-park theology.
Saints matured into chained books. Engravings were printed as ‘souvenirs of translation’. Delicate watercolour images would be stroked against the smooth cheeks of alabaster idols in order to steal some of their animating power. Heretical texts were commissioned ‘to reinforce the role the newly arrived relic would play in the lives of the faithful’. A carrefour of false memories like a prophecy of broadband television. ‘The impression so far, to me wandering blindly among the monuments of its classicism, is not very agreeable.’
XLVII
No sooner pillowed in Lewisham, in a dead girl’s bed, than the restless visionary was booted and away, rising with labourers to tramp to Welwyn, where his sister was employed as a teaching assistant. The fading stalker followed as rain returned after parched summer months. Passing the Poor Clare Monastery beyond High Barnet, he thought of the other inextinguishable prophet of the Great North Road: John Clare. Poor John. Drenched, ditched and hedged by an endless stream of commuters, reps and white van bullies testing the motorway system, the late pedestrian empathised with Clare’s delirious account of his Journey Out of Essex, that four-day trudge from Epping Forest to the cottage in Northborough, where he would be ‘homeless at home’. The poet’s urgent report is a one-breath confession, spontaneous and uncensored. Vincent’s London letters announce the coming era of ‘mad walkers’ and deep-topographers. Looking at Prisoners Exercising, painted in Saint-Rémy in 1890, the stalker thought of Clare in the Northampton asylum and the despairing abdication of the sonnet version of ‘I Am’. ‘And plod upon the earth as dull and void: / Earth’s prison chilled my body with its dram.’
XXXIV
Promising so much on the morning of the day of optimum sunlight: STOP BREXIT SAVE BRITAIN. Vincent’s heavy boots strike no answering spark from melting Kentish tarmac. The final pleach of native darkness is suffocating beneath the fuss of a scarlet raptor, lingering between pylon cradle and an unmanned concrete railway ramp with provisional mudflats. Silage sings like proper man perfume. And the frantic wings of butterflies born from recent dung are carbonized before tourists can take a pot shot. Willing campers, long shorts and whistles, strut out between tall hedgerows, not so very far from the Saxon Shore Way. The convicts did not know where they were. ‘We only came to check Stonehenge was still standing,’ said the mini-break comedians, transporting vials of duty-free Nina Ricci, to bin in the cathedral city as billable donations for scavengers. ‘England is Dickens and poor people.’ And visa-denied oligarch investors for whom we have no further use. Awayday saints, wriggling in front of the cameras, confess to culture blight and travelling in steroids. Creeping agenbite. Quitter Londres. All they could see was a milky and sourceless flick and glare of flashlights.
XXX
Cover art: Katakombenheiliger Bonifatius, spätbarocke Leinenfahne von 1743 from Baindt – Hortus Floridus. 750 Jahre Kloster Baindt 1990, author unknown.