Cryptic Sound

In this column, I wander around buildings. This week I take us on two different trips down into the crypt, the mysterious church space below the nave and choir.

In the crypt of Winchester Cathedral stands an eerie sculpture that is a study in opposites. 

The arched stone undercroft is ancient, even predating the medieval Gothic sanctuary that soars above it.  But the sculpture is modern, 1986, installed by contemporary renowned British artist Antony Gormley. 

The crypt is cold and hard and impersonal; we associate crypts with death and graves and fear.  People mostly stay upstairs in the nave.  But the statue depicts a very alive human figure, indeed it is a made from a cast of Gormley’s own living body.

Crypts are built as solid hard foundations, dug deep in the dense dark earth.  But this crypt appears soft and fluid each winter when the persistent groundwater of the region floods it up to three feet deep.  Then the dark space becomes shiny and shimmering, reflecting the water in motion.  The sculpture was fashioned intentionally to withstand and even embrace its months partially submerged, wet and fluid.

Crypts are quiet, silent as a tomb.  But Gormley named the statue “Sound II.”  Sound?  One writer suggests Gormely wants us to look at the sculpture and “be still for a moment, to ‘sound’ the depths of our own spirit.”

The hands of the human form are cupped and the face is looking down at what it gently holds – water.  Not only does the sculpture stand up to its waist in the water, but an inner pipe brings water up into the hands. (So we are told – no crypt tours in the winter, too wet.  I was there in June and it had just reopened two weeks earlier.)

There are tombs in the crypt, but this sculpture is about life.  Like all life, born of water, seeping from ocean ancestors, the sculpture reminded me of Venus rising from the sea atop another wet cup.  And the dark fecundity of the space was womb-like, another wet source of life.

To find such a contemporary sculpture in a church is profound.  Sound II is not explicitly religious art, an icon of a saint or deity.  But it evokes birth and baptism. And life.

Church Dreams

A soaring Gothic cathedral draws the eye – and the heart – upward. “Glory to God” is usually spoken (or sung!) looking up, not down.

But I am most moved when I go down, down into a cathedral’s crypt, the deep space below nave and choir.  Often a remnant and reminder of an earlier church, and certainly essential in holding up the massive uplift above, the crypt (literally “hidden”) carries more meaning than just its function or its interesting early chapter in the building’s history. 

Some years ago when I started meditating regularly, a picture came to me that helped me turn off my monkey brain for that simple 20 minutes.  I don’t think I intentionally chose the image -  (“I will now focus on this!”) - it just seemed to arrive.  It was a door in the wall of an old church nave, and I knew that the door led down to the crypt.  I could vaguely place it, either Bourges or Winchester, it almost didn’t matter.  I would soon be going down into dark and mystery, the hidden and forgotten, the foundation, the dank wet smell of old stone, the residue of memories of masons and monks.  But for now, I stand at the door.

I’m rereading French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.  Drawing on Jungian study of dreams and memories, he suggests we pay attention to our day and night dreams about houses we have lived in, which he calls “topoanalysis.” He writes, “The chief benefit of a house is that it shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” “The unconscious is housed…Our house is our first universe.”

He writes about how we should take seriously our dreams of walking through the rooms of our childhood, and suggests we are more at ease with our dreams and memories of attics, and more wary of going down into the cellar. Like Jung, he says that dreams of water and of cellars are deep dreams of the unconscious. 

Bachelard writes, “The cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar are buried walls, walls that have the entire earth behind them.” 

That sounded like a crypt to me, that cellar imagery.  We can take his imagery of house dreams and applying it to churches.  For medieval worshippers, at places like Bourges or Winchester, the massive cathedral might have seemed like a universe, limitless sky above, mysterious darkness below.

It’s the same for me, there’s something about those old churches that seems like a universe.  As I dream or meditate, I stand at the door to the crypt.  And I’m headed down.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter