Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [59]
What could I do? What felt right, that steamy May afternoon, was an easy walk. The cathedral, St. John the Divine, right around the corner, is a place I love, even more so because it remains unfinished, great theater of aspiration, lifetimes till it’ll be done. In fact the new plans for it continue to become stranger, more surprising: a design for a sort of greenhouse, high above the transept, will someday have the walker or worshiper below looking up through the great stone vault into trees.
Sacred spaces have enormous power, even when one doesn’t subscribe to the way their builders or users construe the holy. There’s something undeniably affecting about ritual actions performed in places that have been set apart and consecrated. Once, when Wally was ill, I lit a candle for him at an altar in a mission outside of Tucson, where Latinos and the Tohono O’odham people (who’d built the church, under the yoke of Spanish Jesuits, early in the 1700s) came to pray to a wooden effigy of St. Francis Xavier, pinning onto his pretty dresses and petticoats little metal milagros, images of whatever in their lives needed healing, from body parts to tractors.
I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t believe that my candle lit to Francisco Xavier was going to make a bit of difference in the progress of Wally’s illness, much as I might wish it. But there’s something in his spirit and in mine that was benefited, joined to our community of fellow pray-ers. Something in us, in this way, is honored and held up, lit.
I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John’s; it had seemed just a destination, a manageable whim. But my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space—like those spaces in dreams, or like Wonderland, whose immensity opens out from the tiniest passage—and walked without hesitating down the right-hand aisle, halfway down the enormous length of the cathedral, to the altar I hadn’t consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who’d died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards, a bank of candles. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there.
Because the black current that M. had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I’d grown just enough of a skin to function, these last months, but the strength I’d been feeling wasn’t, in fact, real. It was a gesture toward going on in the world, toward continuance, but I wasn’t ready to continue, I hadn’t finished confronting that deep internal sense of desolation. I’d needed to know I could go on, but I’d also been needing to collapse.
Which is what I did, some timeless tear-span of minutes sitting on a little ledge at the base of an immense column of naked gray stone. After a while, I could walk to buy a candle—a light, for Wally, his flame rowed with the others there, a double line of representative flickerings, so few of them really that each might stand in for ten thousand dead.
The candles are held in wrought-iron stands, in metal trays filled with sand to anchor the glassed votives and loose tapers people place there. In the sand, next to a vacant space, was a tiny stick of wick, nearly invisible now, a half inch of flame seeming to lick up out of the sand itself, all that was left of some man or woman’s light. I used that flame to light Wally’s fresh candle—new, the flame high over the rim of the glass, while others around it burned halfway or nearly to extinction. A little arpeggio of lights, each floating above its liquid level of wax, to represent countless and increasing vanishings. Kneeling in public makes me feel self-conscious, posed, but I got down on the padded rail anyway. Then I forgot my self as the floodgates opened again.
The weeping steadied, in a while, to a different rhythm, a more sustainable breathing, a stillness. People came and went—boyfriends, teenagers, a Hispanic woman who knelt alone at the altar, crossed herself, prayed, smiled at me as she rose. I asked her if