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That's at the end. You'll be there soon
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ashlyme: The Cicerones (2002). I have not read the original story by Robert Aickman, but it reminds me once again that I should know more of his work than "The Stains," much as I love it. This one is an even more indirect narrative, barely more than a suggestive sketch of encounters, but it chills.
Mark Gatiss looks terrible in a pencil moustache, but it suits his English traveler1 with his Brylcreemed hair and his spotted scarf, his Baedeker and his insistence on getting into the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in time to see its famous painting of Lazarus. The time is unspecified, as is the setting—perhaps mid-century, as perhaps somewhere in Central Europe. (The sign on the cathedral door appears to be written in Czech.) Patrick Leigh Fermor might have walked through this country on his way to Constantinople, but he would have known at least a few words of the language and he wouldn't have treated an ancient sacred place as just one more box to tick on his tourist's progress. He would have said a prayer for the young couple on the train (her so heavily pregnant, fingers running a constant rosary). Gatiss' traveler doesn't know what to do with people. His small talk is evasive and unconvincing, his smile an embarrassed grimace. We're not so sure he knows what to do with art, either.
In fact, we're not sure about much in this story, which is why it works. In a conventional tale of the supernatural, each of the cicerones of Saint Bavon's would reflect or challenge something about the man they purport to guide, but nothing here is direct, only unsettling. A slim young gentleman with dove-colored gloves and the local accent discomfits the traveler by referring to the cathedral as "holy, holy, holy," an expression of the numinous that echoes like a threat. A brash American youth in a T-shirt as tight as Stanley Kowalski's whisks the dropcloth off a painting he didn't want to see—the bloody martyrdom of a saint—but his provocative assessment of the traveler is even worse. A silent altar boy with the red mouth and dark brows of a fairy tale points him toward a clock, which is made of stone. And at last an English boy dressed in the same oddly bright, rich garments as the altar boy and the heavy, faceless figure the traveler saw or thought he saw slumped in the pulpit like an optical illusion or a late delivery from the Cadaver Synod emerges from behind a catacomb door carved caveat intra muros tacet desine fata deum flecti and offers at last to show the traveler some of the treasures of the cathedral he came to see: "Would you like to see one of the other bishops? There might not be another chance." The traveler, who lives by his timetable, who was so impatient with the cathedral's inconvenient hours, cannot refuse. Turning back would acknowledge a wasted day, even when every instinct of the horror genre screams at him to get out before God knows what. And so deeper he goes into the crypt, led by his insistent, insouciant, unexplained countryman. We are encouraged to expect a nasty shock: some whiplash turn, some appropriate punishment for an unimaginative art-seeker. High in the hollow-lit stained glass of the chapel, we saw a blood-red devil with wasp wings, seizing a pale human figure by the arms and neck. But the sudden stop of his story is even more unsettling. The more you try to make the different pieces of strangeness fit together, the more it diffuses. I have my theories about some of what the traveler walked into, but I cannot make all of it cohere and I don't want to. It's a mood, not a moral. It's thirteen minutes of your time. Surely you can spare that. The cathedral is not yet closed.
1. The character is credited as "John Trant," but I do not believe he is ever addressed by name onscreen. I assume it's a holdover from the original story.
ashlyme: The Cicerones (2002). I have not read the original story by Robert Aickman, but it reminds me once again that I should know more of his work than "The Stains," much as I love it. This one is an even more indirect narrative, barely more than a suggestive sketch of encounters, but it chills.Mark Gatiss looks terrible in a pencil moustache, but it suits his English traveler1 with his Brylcreemed hair and his spotted scarf, his Baedeker and his insistence on getting into the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in time to see its famous painting of Lazarus. The time is unspecified, as is the setting—perhaps mid-century, as perhaps somewhere in Central Europe. (The sign on the cathedral door appears to be written in Czech.) Patrick Leigh Fermor might have walked through this country on his way to Constantinople, but he would have known at least a few words of the language and he wouldn't have treated an ancient sacred place as just one more box to tick on his tourist's progress. He would have said a prayer for the young couple on the train (her so heavily pregnant, fingers running a constant rosary). Gatiss' traveler doesn't know what to do with people. His small talk is evasive and unconvincing, his smile an embarrassed grimace. We're not so sure he knows what to do with art, either.
In fact, we're not sure about much in this story, which is why it works. In a conventional tale of the supernatural, each of the cicerones of Saint Bavon's would reflect or challenge something about the man they purport to guide, but nothing here is direct, only unsettling. A slim young gentleman with dove-colored gloves and the local accent discomfits the traveler by referring to the cathedral as "holy, holy, holy," an expression of the numinous that echoes like a threat. A brash American youth in a T-shirt as tight as Stanley Kowalski's whisks the dropcloth off a painting he didn't want to see—the bloody martyrdom of a saint—but his provocative assessment of the traveler is even worse. A silent altar boy with the red mouth and dark brows of a fairy tale points him toward a clock, which is made of stone. And at last an English boy dressed in the same oddly bright, rich garments as the altar boy and the heavy, faceless figure the traveler saw or thought he saw slumped in the pulpit like an optical illusion or a late delivery from the Cadaver Synod emerges from behind a catacomb door carved caveat intra muros tacet desine fata deum flecti and offers at last to show the traveler some of the treasures of the cathedral he came to see: "Would you like to see one of the other bishops? There might not be another chance." The traveler, who lives by his timetable, who was so impatient with the cathedral's inconvenient hours, cannot refuse. Turning back would acknowledge a wasted day, even when every instinct of the horror genre screams at him to get out before God knows what. And so deeper he goes into the crypt, led by his insistent, insouciant, unexplained countryman. We are encouraged to expect a nasty shock: some whiplash turn, some appropriate punishment for an unimaginative art-seeker. High in the hollow-lit stained glass of the chapel, we saw a blood-red devil with wasp wings, seizing a pale human figure by the arms and neck. But the sudden stop of his story is even more unsettling. The more you try to make the different pieces of strangeness fit together, the more it diffuses. I have my theories about some of what the traveler walked into, but I cannot make all of it cohere and I don't want to. It's a mood, not a moral. It's thirteen minutes of your time. Surely you can spare that. The cathedral is not yet closed.
1. The character is credited as "John Trant," but I do not believe he is ever addressed by name onscreen. I assume it's a holdover from the original story.
no subject
I can make nothing of St. Bavon, patron of falconry.
Was that child a boy bishop? They were often chosen on the Feast of Holy Innocents, and the overturning of church hierarchy goes back to Saturnalia: inversion and the slaughter of children.
What does the clock say? I can decipher it in part, but can't fit it all together.
Thank you.
Nine
no subject
That's what I mean about diffusing. For all I know the name was chosen because it was evocative. Possibly it's because Hieronymus Bosch once painted him. Possibly it meant something to Aickman. Possibly none of the above.
It makes sense if the traveler does meet the "other bishop" the last cicerone offers to introduce him to: in which case I don't imagine he's the previously mentioned Bishop Triest, but I don't imagine he's alive, either. I would also believe he was never alive and perhaps never even human, which I think would not preclude anything in this place.
Was that child a boy bishop? They were often chosen on the Feast of Holy Innocents, and the overturning of church hierarchy goes back to Saturnalia: inversion and the slaughter of children.
I didn't even know of that tradition!
What does the clock say? I can decipher it in part, but can't fit it all together.
It doesn't all fit together, which I assume is intentional. The last four words are part of a line from Aeneid 6.376: Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando (Cease to hope that what the gods have ordained can be altered by praying). Caveat intra muros means let him—or her, but in this case I think it's him—take care within [these] walls and tacet means s/he is silent. I can't make a sentence out of that. It would need at least one relative pronoun and the quotation from the Aeneid cuts off before the main verb. It does make a foreboding.