Carcassonne Church

Sound’s surface was smooth, unpocked by the evening’s cold drizzle now rendered dry and silent and far from those sheltering below. The cold remained. Stonewalled and tall, the church was a space of echoes and dusk, lacking the electric intensity buzzing outside its doors. Creaking floorboards of the devout and merely interested expanded, reveling in their rare ascendance. A sole elderly woman, head bowed, kneeling, kept up a constant, inaudible supplication – willingly taking-on physical strain in the hopes of something greater. Sharp pecked whispers, loud voices floating disembodied from the street, the thunderclap of failure as a padded door, let down by a hinge, announced each new entry. Rarely. Silence had brought majesty to the empty pews.


In writing the above I tried to mimic some Tolstoy style, most directly the piece below, taken from The Cossacks.

'Along the surface of the water floated black shadows, in which the experienced eyes of the Cossack detected trees carried down by the current. Only very rarely sheet-lightning, mirrored in the water as in a black glass, disclosed the sloping bank opposite. The rhythmic sounds of night — the rustling of the reeds, the snoring of the Cossacks, the hum of mosquitoes, and the rushing water, were every now and then broken by a shot fired in the distance, or by the gurgling of water when a piece of bank slipped down, the splash of a big fish, or the crashing of an animal breaking through the thick undergrowth in the wood. Once an owl flew past along the Terek, flapping one wing against the other rhythmically at every second beat.'


And here are my actual notes that I quickly jotted into my notebook while trying to keep my rain jacket from rustling too much.

Prayer that lasts, drone front left, sharp pecked whisper behind, cars, loud voices on the street, creaks, floors, pews and bodies. I’m out of place. Everything echoes. Silence brings majesty. Time for supper


Finally, here is the first thing I started writing based on the experience in the church. Very brief and unedited.

A Catholic church, when not in the throes of mass, is a place of sanctity and silence. Calm and calming. Despite this, it is part of the real world; to claim otherwise renders a church useless in the search for salvation.

At the highest moments of sanctity, the moments when Jesus is really laying it on thick, that’s inevitably when the baby cries, because the baby doesn’t give a flying flip about Jesus. The baby wants fed or the baby wants the shit removed from its pants. Little things, which in their own ways are far more important than eternal salvation.