In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

  Quite apart from its habitually dismal atmosphere and lurking horrors, the church was the scene of a series of unsettling episodes and one singular and alarming event. A strict Freudian (and therefore a crude Freudian, unlike Freud himself) might identify them as ‘screen memories’: those remembered events which act to occlude the real matter of memory, whose outlines the analyst draws out from behind the mask of these manifest disguises. The first is itself a kind of occlusion. I must have been about ten years old when it first happened: a series of fainting episodes which arrived quite punctually halfway through the Sunday Mass we always attended (eleven o’clock: the ‘Family Mass’). I remember that, on each occasion, it started with a gradual and unnerving awareness of the space around me. The vastness of the church seemed to swell and contract around me, the amplified voice of the priest oscillating in time with this movement, as if the whole building were breathing heavily. I became uncomfortably aware of the borders of my field of vision: the nameless paintings seemed to crowd at its edges until I realized that it was not their dark shapes that were intruding towards the centre, but a more amorphous gloom, pressing towards a brightness somewhere in the vicinity of the altar on which I tried to focus.

  The first time it happened, I must have leapt back from my kneeling position before the shadow closed around the figure of the priest who now seemed to be speaking from a distant and tiny vantage far in the depths of space, because I remember clearly that as I was led out of the church (I can no longer say whether it was my father or mother who took me home), I felt sure that I had just been on the point of death. An unlikely outcome, of course, but a certainty that seized me in the subsequent months during which the same terrifying plunge towards the edge of consciousness became an inevitable part of my family’s weekly worship. Perhaps it says something about my parents’ odd reticence to address my increasingly nervous disposition at that time that I became so convinced of the proximity of my own demise. More likely, it was one of those secret fears that a child tends as if it were the guarantee of his own singularity: an image of something just below the surface of family life which might at any moment undo its texture of habit and routine. It seems clear to me now that I had turned my vague comprehension of my mother’s illness into my own minor drama of physical failure, and that my fear was somehow bound up with this place: the church which seemed already to promise a deathly future.

  ¶ Homily

  During the school holidays, my mother was in the habit of taking my brothers and me to the church on a summer afternoon: a regular visit I never questioned at the time but which I now recognize as part of her increasing recourse to prayer in the face of her failing physical condition. On those bright afternoons, the building seemed especially oppressive, its acres of cold marble lit by numerous tiny candles to which we would add a few: always my mother’s last gesture before leaving. Often, the dolefulness of these visits was given an extra layer of tedium by the ritual of confession. I can picture, on the day in question, the immediate sequel to one such ordeal: I am seated beside my mother, towards the front of the church. We have just emerged from confession and I am dutifully rehearsing my allotted penance, though no longer, I suspect, entirely crediting the idea I had always had of the purifying effect of absolution. I have ceased to imagine that somewhere to the right of my heart is a pure white sphere, just now washed clean of the black sinful stains that had accrued over weeks: it is my immortal soul. Seated in the church, I am vaguely aware of the presence, in the pew in front of us, of a familiar figure: a shabbily dressed man whom I have often seen in the same place, and who I understand to be at least eccentric, possibly ‘simple’, at worst mad. As always, he sits quietly, attending to a small pile of school exercise books on the seat beside him. He opens each book in turn, flicks through the pages, reads for a moment, and replaces it in the pile as he takes up another. He is almost part of the furniture of the church: a figure I have grown used to, as I’m used to the fading green fabric of the kneeler at my feet or the brass plaque above it which records the name of the donor who paid for this particular pew. I try to keep my eyes on its polished surface, but I am aware of a movement to the right of it: the copybook man is on his feet and moving towards the altar. He reaches the thick gilt gate at the centre of a low marble balustrade which separates the altar from a wide central aisle. He opens the gate and crosses the dark red carpet to reach a high pulpit to the left; at the top of its steps he places his collection of tattered copybooks on the lectern, looks up and begins to speak. I have no idea what he is saying; the microphone in front of him is switched off. I am now completely terrified, though I notice that the people around me – my mother, my brothers and the usual scattering of elderly churchgoers – seem only mildly perplexed, even amused, by this unintelligible sermon. I can’t make my mother understand that I am utterly unnerved by the figure before me, who seems already to have thought better of his homiletic adventure and is even now gathering his books together and edging away from the pulpit. Eventually, my mother seems to notice my agitation, and we leave hurriedly; as we cross the car park and descend the steep hill to the gates of the church grounds, she tries to convince me that there is nothing to be afraid of, that he is only unwell, a ‘poor soul’. And although I understand that my reaction was unnecessary, indeed unfair to an unfortunate individual who posed no threat, I am haunted by his image for days, more unsettled than I will ever let on, as if I had witnessed some sudden unveiling of the everyday, its revelation as a sham; as if I’d glimpsed the possibility that anybody, myself included, might, without warning, do the same.

  What I remember of this place, then, is in fact my urge, on these occasions, to flee it. It was not so much a solid place as a void into which I used to feel I might fall: I would gaze, in distracted moments, at its upper reaches, and wonder what it would be like to drift towards the distant ceiling and hang there, looking down on the congregation below. And yet it was also the site of a very palpable set of sensations, the locus of a form of boredom and lethargy which I do not think I’ve felt anywhere else. Perhaps it is only as children that we experience a species of tedium that verges on physical pain. This boredom has to do with the intolerable weight of things, their pointless perdurance and arbitrary condensation into, for example, the vastness of the church’s empty upper reaches, less uplifting than insufferably weighty. It is apparently one of the inescapable duties of parenthood to inform a child of the sinfulness of boredom (a favoured theme of my father’s: it is only now that I wonder whether there was an ironic inflection to his resort to the cliché that only the boring are bored). But boredom, surely, teaches us something beyond mere stamina; it informs us of the dumb endurance of things despite all efforts to make them speak and move according to a system (the combination of architecture and theology, say). And if the church taught me, as it seems now to have done, that the spiritual lesson I was supposed to learn there was nothing but a gloss over fear, shame and suffering, it must also have inculcated in me a sense that at the heart of all that was just the meaningless persistence of matter. I know this much: never have I been so extravagantly, so painfully, so metaphysically bored as in the hours I spent surrounded by its iconography. The philosopher Leibniz once wrote that ‘marble has ideas, however confused’, and it strikes me now that the substance of that building had a kind of miserable eloquence, that in the yellowed veins of its stones was a message about the physical world itself. The marble, I think, may have got into my blood.

  ¶ Removal

  By the time my mother died in the summer of 1985, I had grown to truly loathe this place. In my mind, for a moment, it is still always Gothic, before I remind myself that its late-Victorian pretensions are in fact to a more sturdy and Romanesque design. My hatred of its obscenely mottled marble columns and monstrous arches increased in proportion with the frequency of my mother’s visits. The church functioned already, it seems, to separate us from our immediate locale, and to partake of a different sense of place from that encouraged,
for example, by the local school I attended till I was ten years old, and the church to which it was affiliated. Mount Argus church was in fact in an adjacent parish to ours, and we went there, rather than the more modest, airy and modern (mid-twentieth-century) church of our parish, a few hundred yards in the opposite direction, largely because it had been for decades the church to which my father’s family had gone. (It was, and is perhaps still, traditionally the church of the city’s police force, since the days of my grandfather’s joining what was then the Dublin Metropolitan Police.) I recall an enraged priest from our parish church actually accosting and berating my mother from the pavement outside our house, bellowing intemperately (probably drunkenly, I now realize) that his church wasn’t ‘good enough’ for her. I think I can plausibly date my definitive falling away from faith to that afternoon, and the sight of this florid-faced, proprietorial cretin, comically talking up his own particular franchise on the divine.

  I understood, however, that there was something unusual about our church. It was a sort of family secret, a habit that set us apart. It seemed somehow more rooted in a vaguely defined ecclesiastical history than any of the others (and there were many) we visited over the years. I think I may even, when very young, have got it into my head that God lived in our church: the others were just temporary residences hastily pulled together out of second-rate materials, prim decor and decidedly less supernaturally charged paraphernalia. I marvelled at the apparent informality (I didn’t know it was just another sort of stricture) of country churches where women and children sat at the front while their menfolk, having loitered at length outside, smoking and talking in low voices, shuffled in to lurk, standing, at the back, as if the whole affair were no more deserving of their devout attention than a speech by some local dignitary or a show of less than prime livestock. Elsewhere, the crucifixes were less gruesome than I was used to, the altars seemed shrunken and hardly fit to house the central mystery of the Mass, the confessionals lacked the requisite embellishments that towered above me, promising elaborate punishment, and the statuary was too cheerful by far to capture properly the solemn benediction of a saint whose sufferings, at our church, would have been startlingly emblematized. Still, despite the deity’s fleeting presence in these other churches, there was a kind of relief in escaping the gorgeous horror of ‘our’ church for less imaginatively demanding spaces, like the parish church we visited three Sundays a year during our summer holidays in Kerry.

  We never made it to that church in the summer of 1985. Instead, we arrived at Mount Argus on the evening before my mother’s funeral for what is called, again according to a terminology which is both literal and euphemistic, ‘the removal’. I remember nothing of it; not the tall black gates of the church grounds, nor the towering façade of the building itself, with its huge stone angel perched between two massive spires. In my memory, the angel is golden, and though I know this to be an invention of my later recollection of a figure that could be seen plainly several streets away from the church, it is still gilt and shining as I try to picture that evening. I don’t recall the scene as we entered the church, the backs of the mourners gathered tightly at the front, nor the coffin which must have been inches away from us in the central aisle, nor the service itself, nor the walk back out of the church to the waiting car. The following morning is clearer in my mind: I remember hoping my legs would not buckle under me as I walked from our seat at the front of the church to the altar to read a prayer; I remember the endless parade of mourners who shook my hand and that some of them (those I didn’t know) murmured that they were sorry for my trouble (I recall too how I dreaded this phrase five years later, standing in the same place); I remember the long procession towards a square of daylight at the rear of the church, and how as we passed the place where my family sat every Sunday morning I had an odd sense that we were still there, that if I could just focus on the right spot in the crowd I would catch sight of my childhood self, starting to feel queasy and light-headed in the midst of the throng.

  Another summer in the same church: the same faces passed in front of me; I stood on the same altar and looked down at the same two bodies of dark figures, either side of my father’s coffin. This time, I was to deliver one of the two readings, and not only did my voice only waver once, but later I was told that I had displayed an impressive calm and even managed to modulate my delivery sufficiently not to sound as if I were reading a passage I had rehearsed several times in my head the night before. I understood that my self-possession was a function of my distance from the whole spectacle. I think, in fact, that I had given up any sense that all of this was happening to me: rather, the church had somehow taken over and I was simply submitting myself to its demands, to the sinister urges concealed in its stony soul. I remember that I hated it more than ever that second morning, and couldn’t wait to get out, away from the rituals that meant nothing, the hideous familiarity of every inch of the stone and wood (now garishly renewed; the church had closed and been refurbished some weeks after my mother’s funeral), the vilely ornamented confessionals and pathetic, placarded attempts at quickening the deathliness of the space with invitations to less life-sapping formulations of the Mass. I felt too that the funeral had exposed our ancient family secret: our affinity with this monstrous architecture, this unbearable weight of solid silence and droning piety, these poisonous clouds of incense and candle smoke.

  ¶ Terre de Marie

  Some time ago, when this present book had yet to come into focus in my mind, and before I had properly acknowledged that a reflection on memory might also be a reflection on my memory, I spent an afternoon in the junk shops of a small coastal town near my home. Amongst the debris of numerous nameless lives, I discovered – lost, perhaps, for decades – at the back of one such establishment, a curious object. It is a small white folder, considerably tattered, on which is printed, in fading red letters, these words: ‘Véronèse présente: Lourdes, Terre de Marie. 32 Diapos sur film Kodak, avec texte Français, English, Italiano, Deutsch’. A flimsy booklet is attached to the inside of the front cover, and its thin pages describe, in thirty-two numbered paragraphs, the contents: a series of tiny slides slotted into a crackling plastic grid, which I unfolded with a quite unexpected, and still unfathomable, sense of familiarity. The slides, as the title suggests, depict, in colours that are still lucidly those of photographs which appear to have been taken in the 1960s, a variety of views of the French town and its famous shrine.

  I have never been to Lourdes; the place exists for me only in my imagination – as it does, I suspect, for even the most devoutly educated of my generation – as a distant, if not somewhat disturbing, anachronism. There was a time, of course, when this place – its name traditionally mispronounced: one could trace, I imagine, the date of its disappearance from collective fantasy according to the silencing of the final ‘s’ which generations of Irish voices gave it – seemed to me to be a distant outpost of Ireland itself: an offshore appendage of the world I knew as a child. It was, for example, for many years the only foreign place to which I could be sure members of my family had actually been. I knew little then of its history, beyond the familiar and periodically rehearsed tale of Bernadette Soubirous, who, in 1858, was said to have witnessed, over a period of two weeks, the apparition of the Virgin Mary. I had heard nothing, for example, of the controversies which attended its early celebrity: the struggles which unfolded, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, over both the original episode and its historical legacy: the fame of Lourdes as a place of healing and pilgrimage.

  I wonder now precisely what brought my mother to Lourdes. The question is in part a foolish one, and its answer painfully clear: she wanted to be cured. But I cannot, despite my recollection of her periodic trips there, quite imagine how she must have felt as she set out on her journey, nor whether that hope of relief from her symptoms was for her a real possibility or the unthinkable end point of a continuum that must have included the more modest aspiration to spiritual con
solation. I remember that she travelled on at least one occasion with one of her sisters, and that later the prayer group she attended weekly at our local church went en masse. And I recall that on those occasions I had an image in my mind of what a ‘cure’ meant, drawn from a story which is itself obscure in my memory: of a woman healed (of what illness I never knew) at one of the huge prayer meetings my mother attended every few months. The single detail I recall of that event is this: that the woman’s body was overcome at the moment of her apparent cure by an extraordinary heat. I remember that my father dismissed this supposed miracle (and the bout of glossolalia which, my mother reported, accompanied it) with a word I only vaguely understood (‘hysteria’) but which I would later come to resent even as my own scepticism grew. And so I must surmise that what my mother hoped for was something more than spiritual consolation or the comfort of a collective act of pilgrimage. She must, I think, actually have imagined a real physical transformation. The historical accounts of those ostensibly cured at Lourdes treat dramatically of this instant of transfiguration, recounted always as a kind of convulsion, struggle, and final expulsion by the pilgrim’s body of his or her disease. Even in the viciously sceptical account of Emile Zola, whose novel Lourdes, in 1894, was variously received as either a scandalous slander or a timely revelation of the miracle factory that the shrine had become, it is hard not to be moved by the fictional testimony of one Marie de Guersaint, a character who claims to have been healed at the moment the Eucharist, in procession, passed by her: