Flying in Winchester Cathedral

"We're going to Winchester today," said Dad yesterday, and he was sightly surprised to see both my brother and me gleefully exclaim "Yippee, Winchester cathedral!" "Where have you heard of it?" he asked. The answer is here - Cathedral, an awesome Crosby, Stills and Nash song. Reading the lyrics attached might help in understanding my text.

Winchester cathedral is an angel with Romanesque wings. Despite their name, though, they don’t look like they’ve much of an intention to take off into the air; unless an atomic bomb were to be dropped in the area, they’re much more likely to end their lives crumbling to the ground – the wings of a fallen angel – than flying up into the air. But the cathedral’s Gothic body, turned ever to the sky, is an altogether different matter. Once upon a time, when fashions turned in a new direction and it was time to execute the angels of ages past, it was a spiky spear thrust into the heart of the old Romanesque church; now, as the wounds of old have healed and this forced marriage of styles was cemented by the inevitable spread of Gothic elements to the old wings, the two architectures are intertwined in an everlasting embrace, each dependent on the other.

No Graham Nash inside. Instead, an unforgettable orchestral rehearsal. Massenet’s Meditations from Thais dedicated to the gentle creamy walls and round arches of the dreamy Romanesque angel. In a miracle of coincidence, a smudge of sunlight splashed onto the church window just as the violin shone on its brightest tone. And the finale of Dvorak’s New World Symphony was for the triumphant gothic arches, blasted into the air by trumpets, entwined by an oboey lattice of decorations. The cathedral’s skeletal frame resounded with the roll of timpani, at times sending shivers down my spine.

Despite frantic scanning of all passed gravestones on the part of my brother (who loves “Cathedral” more than any other CSN song), we never found the tomb with 1799 written on it. It’s no big surprise, as the cathedral is filled to the brim with graves (and of course 1799 might just be in the song because it rhymes with “mine”). Behind the altar, there’s what seems like a whole chapel dedicated to death. A last resting place reaches up to the ceiling, sumptuously decorated, with a sculpture of a decomposing body lying upon it. It does feel somewhat stuffy, slightly uncomfortable, all those people dead in the hope of eternal life; you can almost understand why someone could want to open up the gates of the church and be let out of here. Especially if that someone is high upon the altar.

But as a person who’s not under the influence of any chemicals save those naturally found in the brain, I don’t quite agree with everything Nash sings. I think he might be making the mistake of not distinguishing what Winchester Cathedral looks like from what it stands for. The same mistake the Puritans made when they smashed up the statues that used to occupy the various niches in the walls and when they blasted the central stained glass window into smithereens during the Civil War. These smithereens were later picked up by those who knew better and now form a new, abstract window that represents something more important to me than the religion it originally expressed – a fascinating history, human determination, and finally art.

Winchester cathedral doesn’t have to stand for religion. It can represent the same things as Dvorak’s ninth symphony or Massenet’s Meditation; the same things as Crosby, Stills and Nash’s songs. Sure, the air here hangs in delusion, is full of the memory of starving people robbed of their money for an offering to a God who, even if he existed, would probably rather simply see them well-fed; a God used to justify battles and murders and countless other abominations. You can never fully separate a thing from what it represents, but what creative act was ever undertaken without some delusion underlying it? The delusion of God, the delusion that drugs give you some magical grasp of the human condition and that Winchester cathedral is not the place, the delusion that posting an article on the internet makes it any more necessary to create it than if it were intended for the bottom of a drawer.