23 August 2024
Winchester Cathedral
The air in the crypt around Sound II was thick with nine hundred and forty-five years of spirits. Seam lines and watermarks gave the sculpture an inhuman symmetry, but its leaden casing vibrated like skin. It was angled away from a window such that a black shadow halved its skull and shot from its heels. Arches in the ceiling rolled hollow hills over it. I took a picture of the figure with my phone and noted that it looked miles away on the screen. Upon this vertigo I ducked and spiraled up stone stairs out of the crypt and into the church’s towering rib cage. Gaze down I shuffled towards any way out when a black marble slab caught my sole. I was standing on Jane Austen, the “sweetness of her temper” at my toes.
Eventually I located an exit past a cross-eyed receptionist who said the double doors would feel locked but just needed an extra push. Their suction gave with a grunt and suddenly cut to clouds hung high in gray-blue over neon green sequin trees sprouting from little knolls scattered with life and graves. A mother pushed a stroller really slowly. Two young girls recapped a film on a concrete bench. A dog sniffing free from its lead lifted its leg to pee on a headstone next to a couple on a blanket who were giggling at an accidentally anthropomorphized drawing of a sheep. A waddling crow cocked its head at a berry on the ground. There was also a bloody-nosed beetle in the grass, and on my knees I could see its antennae bend from a gust of wind.