what's in a tour

some days my time is defined by
a walking explication of architecture
and its relationship to benedictine culture

this is something that only a few people
take interest in on any given day
i think it's safe to say

there is excitement for me in the fact that
the buildings and the dialogs and the thinking
which i describe all can be referred to in time
by my inauspicious entry to the global comedy

i was born in 1956
it was then that the monastic vote was cast
in concrete and the preparations for building the
new st john's abbey church were begun

insofar as this summer was meant to be the summer
of extreme discourses and i had chosen the theme
"RAGE AGAINST THE IMAGE"
where i bring iconoclasm to a new and terrific highpoint
where i literally announce war upon all the photography in the world
i will commit myself to describing in words
what others might flippantly try to possess
with the lense and a flash and a digital tooodle dee doo

behold
formed mud
steel re-inforced concrete
trumpets blast
the 20th century is all amarch with possibility
mud brought to a high level of constructive applicability
new shapes new possibilities new engineering

i could meet you under the bell banner
it is an odd design
someone once suggested
"cosmic flyswatter"

a large parallelogram sits itself into
the hyperbolic and parabolic arches
formed of steel re-inforced concrete

in the middle of the odd rectangle
a diversion enjoyed by the architect
marcel breuer
the sketching of odd rectangles
there sits 5 or six bells
tuned to a scale
of sharps and whole tones
but largely suffering from crackage these days
the bells are strangely quiet only ringing at
10 to 7 in morning
10 to noon
10 to five for mass
and
10 to seven in the evening
when bird song dies down
then monks chant psalms

i have heard that joachim watrin and
and a monk called "big red"]
did the geometry neccesary for this thing to stand
the pilings tend down in a deep fashion
to equal the heighth
of the impressive but calmly understated banner

the banner faces due north
the steps and plaza uderneathe the bellbanner
are made of local slabs of granite
everyday there is a dance under the bellbanner
people skip by and click their shoes
kids on skateboards
children delighting in the surprisng echo under the arche
the entry to the big mud tent
begins here

two sets of large wooden doors
greet the persons who enter here
these doorways enter into the
baptistery
a place of almost unspeakable symbolic resonance
one should heare big loud bass drums walking into
such a space

an hour a long paragraph a book even
seems a paltry amount of type
to provide adequate insight into the
shere architectural and liturgical weight of this room
it is crushingly simple
wellformed wellcured concrete abounds
even the ceiling is meticulously worked out
with an odd rectangular box like grid pattern
six skylights offer hope
the baptistery itself is sunken
not a pool so much as a font
a gleaming polished steel sculpture
sits atop a blue granite bath
all this sunken and accessible by
slight stairs at the north and south ends
behold all daring christians
the meaning is about your salvation
the room is large and echoey
the floor is the characteristic brick
pervasive all over the new complex
of monastery and church
heavy wood panelling and cabinetry
are there
and two stairwells like wings to the side
take one down to the basement
where the evidence of bunker architecture
is all too evident

in another post i will allude to the
principle of relative obsolescence
in describing the spaces below the
large mainroom of christian worship
in collegeville

as for today
i am off to something else

resist and fight against all photography
trust none of it
RAGE AGAINST THE IMAGE
fight for what's important

( i know i sound tyrannical but i do allow pictures
when i do my song and dance)

perhaps tomorrow i will address
the problem of sound in the abbey church