TWAS 453: (photographs of two churches)

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The War Against Silence

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The War Against Silence was a weekly music-review column, and then a weekly column about music, and then a weekly column that was often inspired by music. It was written by glenn mcdonald, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through a decade of devices and dreams and sleepless Wednesday nights. It was against many things, beginning with but not necessarily including silence, and in favor of many more, including some of the things it was once against and eventually its own end.

It may or may not occasionally be updated in its demise.

Stone and Instants

453 · 2 October 03

For days together, (Fontaine de Médicis, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris)

in these new ancient streets, (Barri Gòtic, Barcelona)

we will learn to let moments escape. (El Raval, Barcelona)

What we know by our residual urgency, (Outside MACBA, Barcelona)

will know us by its own deterioration. (El Raval, Barcelona)

We will not barter for someone else's self-images. (Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona)

If these do not turn out to be our temples, (Park Güell, Barcelona)

we may still be priests in the corridors. (Casa Amatller, Barcelona)

These places will murmur to us of lucid rituals (Casa Milà, Barcelona)

in incandescent galleries, (Casa Milà, Barcelona)

like we are fugitives from toy horizons, (Casa Milà, Barcelona)

but we have only come to breathe in this light. (Sagrada Familia, Barcelona)

In these tours of other people's redemptions, (Sagrada Familia from Casa Milà, Barcelona)

as if architecture could constitute theology, (Sagrada Familia, Barcelona)

learning to whisper in another language (Sagrada Familia, Barcelona)

is never the same as inhabiting its poetry or prayers, (Casa Milà, Barcelona)

but where the words are foreign, the spaces between them are universal. (Sagrada Familia, Barcelona)

We will ask unanswerable questions of rhetorical oracles, (Notre Dame, Paris)

and if every one shows us to yet another center of the world, (Notre Dame, Paris)

we will know they mean that in any direction we get closer. (Notre Dame, Paris)

If we knew how to build churches, there would only be one. (Notre Dame, Paris)

If we knew how to build churches, we would leave stones alone and build fleeting cathedrals inside of instants. (Notre Dame, Paris)

And so our churches are empty, (Notre Dame, Paris)

and our stores are full, (Galeries Lafayette, Paris)

and we are lost in hours. (Sacré-Coeur from Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

Half of our truths see through us, (Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (Edouard Manet), Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

but half need us. (Untitled (Djamel Tatah), Centre Pompidou, Paris)

We raise fortresses around the things we think we know, (Venus di Milo, Louve, Paris)

not to protect them, (Mona Lisa, Louvre, Paris)

but to protect us. (Tour Eiffel, Paris)

Tomorrow we will be miles and days away from here, (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

and from each of these altars between churches, (Fontaine de Médicis, Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris)

we will learn to let go of every meaning but one. (Aéroport Charles de Gaulle, Paris)

Site contents published by glenn mcdonald under a Creative Commons BY/NC/ND License except where otherwise noted.