Tetchy Madonnas when you need them – Michelle Lovric

Make your way around any corner in Venice and you may lock eyes with a Madonna in a niche or a miniature chapel. She might be painted, sculpted or made from mosaic tiles. There may be a candle, a lamp or a vase in front of her. She usually cradles the Holy Infant. These street shrines are known capitelli (or capitèi in Venetian dialect). Many date back to the 15th century, a time when they provided not just metaphorical and spiritual illumination but actual street-lighting. Most are to be found, for that reason, in ‘sottoportici’ (tunnel-like passageways) or by bridges and near jetties.

The city appointed people to set a lantern in every capitello by night. There was a tradition of leaving flowers there too. To lend sanctity to business arrangements, contracts might be signed in front of them. And of course a Madonna might serve as a kind spiritual proto-security camera on the street: few would want to commit a crime in front of those steady eyes. Those were times when no one would have dreamed of stealing a holy image, but most often, these days, the Madonnas are behind bars, like solemn canaries in ornate cages.


There are more than 500 capitelli in Venice: 136 in Castello; 91 in Cannaregio; 43 in Santa Croce; 43 in San Polo; 114 in Dorsoduro, of which 35 are on Giudecca; 83 in San Marco. It is interesting to note that the highest proportion of the figures are in the poorer zones of Castello and Cannaregio. The painting above, by James Holland, is entitled A Shrine in Venice (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). It shows women of the city sewing, talking and praying in front of a capitello, which serves both as an extension of sacred space but also as a meeting place.

I’m not the only or even the first person to notice that the Virgins inside these little chapels often look rather disapproving. I discovered that my artist friend, Christine Morley, who’s recorded many of them, has also felt the aura of severity that radiates from some of these Virgins. To Christine, they seem like stern gate-keepers to a world beyond the wall, a secret place behind the forbidding bars and grates of their niches.

Of course, over hundreds of years these Venetian Madonnas have seen it all, which may account for their expressions. Meanwhile, full of grace She obviously is, but is not the Virgin Mary one of the most put-upon women ever?

A couple of years ago, I started holding conversations (in my head) with some of these dimly-lit ladies-of-the-night as I walked around the city. Those conversations took a turn I had not expected. This is why: although each street-Madonna is as individual as Her artist could render Her, each personifies the same Mother of God. So I felt that the Madonnas from Castello to Santa Croce would in fact talk with the same voice and have the same preoccupations – including annoyance at noisy passers-by waking the Holy Infant when She’d just got Him down.

No matter whether painted or carved, my Madonna-of-the-moment was always irreproachably virtuous in tone, but also just a little bit reproachful, not to say tetchy. Irritation is a gift for a writer: it scratches up interesting vocabulary. So you won’t be surprised to hear that this slightly vinegary Madonna-of-many-manifestations soon became a character in a children’s book, The Wishing Bones, which will be published next month.

Children have always had the run of Venice. It’s safer than cities with carriages and now cars. In The Wishing Bones, I write of the ‘secret sacred ties’ between Venetians, binding all her citizens to one another with affection. The picture below right shows mother holding her child up to a painted Madonna at capitello near the entrance to the Doges Palace (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). A slightly older Venetian child, on his or her daily journeys, would pass by dozens of Madonnas, and it seemed logical to me that their universal Mother would probably have a few things to say to them. I imagined that Our Lady would be keen on personal hygiene in a city that was obsessed with health matters (if Venice ever got the reputation of being a sick city, her international trade would have been in danger). So I thought She’d probably want Her supplicants to have clean hands. Running noses would be absolutely out.


 

Venice identifies comprehensively with the Virgin Mary. The city’s very founding date – March 25th – is the same as that of the Annunciation. This scene is depicted in marble on the Rialto Bridge. But in my book, Our (understandably Ornery) Lady has to deal with rival protectresses of the city: mermaids who live beneath it. Pagan mermaids and Madonnas – bound to be a problem. Then there’s a convent where fake relics of saints are churned out by orphans working as slaves in cruel conditions – an offence to any mother. Saint Lucy’s bones have been kidnapped. A prophecy dictates that, if this happens, the secret sacred ties between Venetians will break down, leading to blows and blood in the street. Really, for a Madonna in 1740, when The Wishing Bones is set, there’s a lot to be tetchy about.

The whole issue of mermaids and Madonnas is played out, in everyone’s favourite church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli. Inside, Tullio Lombardo’s friezes of beautiful young mermaids enclose an ancient miracle-working painting of a Madonna. In The Wishing Bones, the young Miracoli mermaids, clearly victimized by adolescent hormones, briefly flee their frieze to join the villains. (Then they’re very sorry).

Back to the real-lifeVenetian capitelli. They have their own story arc. While loved and maintained by the state and the public, the street-Madonnas have not been immune to passing time. By the middle of the nineteenth century the little chapels were under threat, some degraded by the centuries, some removed or damaged during restructuring and renovations. So in 1870 a group of young Catholics set up an organisation to defend them. The city was divided into sections and groups of young Venetians patrolled the streets, making sure all was well with the capitelli.

By the twentieth century, the chapels were under a different threat – chemicals coming from the factory suburb of Marghera. A new generation of capitelli protectors, the Amici dei capitèi, was formed but later absorbed into one of the bigger organisations that protect sacred monuments, I.R.S.E.P.S.

It's not surprising that the gondoliers still have their own waterborne capitelli. These little green shrines are to be seen at the stazioni where the traghetto services run. Inside their mullioned windows you can make out tiny Madonnas. If Venice were living her best life right now, those Madonnas would be doing something to protect her from the cruise liners.

But this is real life, and fiction can only imagine away the brutal ugliness and danger of the cruise ships. That’s increasingly hard, with the news of the massive Viking Sigyn running down a smaller vessel on the Danube in Budapest two weeks ago; with the vast MSC Opera smashing, out of control, into a river-cruise boat and then into the Zattere in Venice on June 2nd; with the 30th anniversary of Marchioness disaster approaching in August; with the Thames now threatened with the arrival of Europe’s biggest party boat, the Ocean Diva, which is the length of a football pitch and hosts 1500 revellers. The great historic cities of Europe are succumbing to Dubai-ification.

 

Not just Venice but Barcelona, Amsterdam, Bergen and many others have succumbed to this brutal commodification by the mega-companies that run fleets of vast boats. The protest movements are energetic and creative, but what Venetians called 'interessi' are deeply entrenched. Too many people, it seems, have fingers in the pie: not just the cruise operators but also those institutions that licence piers and party boats; also, those companies that service and provide catering for them.

 

Too much greed leads to too many monsters cramming into the same far-too-finite waterways. The danger to life and the ruination of heritage views are all too visible; possibly worse are the invisible dangers of nitrogen oxide, sulphur and particulates, for marine fuel is many times more toxic that land diesel. These poisons make their ways into the lungs of the citizens and they also destroy public art. The statue at right, on the Gesuati church, is just a few hundred yards from where the MSC Opera struck the shore. In a city without cars, boat emissions are the only reason for the blackening and blunting of this saintly figure.

Writing about, and so living in the 18th century, I can blot the mega-ships off my horizons. However, into my next book, currently entitled The Palace that Ate Boys, has crept the notion of certain public offices in the city – those charged with protecting Venice – instead welcoming in a terrible blight in exchange for sackfuls of money …

Michelle Lovric's website
The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th in the UK.

Last week marked the second anniversary of the terror attack at London Bridge and the Borough Market. Five hundred people were locked in or out of their homes for days, as their streets became a crime scene. A year ago, at Southwark Cathedral, members of the community performed a play made up of excerpts of their longer testimonies. This year, the Cathedral has posted the text of Testimony online so everyone can read it.

Black-biled cats - Michelle Lovric

At Southwark Cathedral, the first Saturday of this month was dedicated to cats – a full day of lectures rounded off with a screening of Kedi, a lyrical documentary about Istanbul’s street cats. The ‘Caturday’ event was in part inspired by Doorkins, the cathedral’s own famous cat. Doorkins is no-one’s lap-cat, but she has, shall we say, a compelling presence. As a consequence, she’s become a star of Twitter and Instagram, as well as the muse of poets and writers. This portrait at left is from the cathedral’s website.




Image of Dr Walker-Meikle
copyright David Tett Photography

Our Caturday opener was an engaging lecture by Dr Kathleen Walker-Meikle, post-doctoral research fellow based at Kings College London.

Dr Walker-Meikle’s PhD (at University College London) was on the art of medieval pet keeping. She’s now the author of a fine litter of books on the subject, including three about cats. This lecture was based on her latest volume, Cats in Medieval Manuscripts, soon to be published by the British Library.

Of course Dr Walker-Meikle was preaching to the choir here in Doorkinslandia. But I must say that I’ve seldom sat in a lecture room that rippled so with delight. Image after image filled the twin screens, accompanied by text that was both learned and witty, delivered with infectious gusto and pleasure.

 

I can only recommend to any cat-lover that they run to their nearest cathedral shop buy this beautiful book. I couldn’t possibly do it justice in a hit-and-run précis. Dr Walker-Meikle has assembled over a hundred beautiful, hilarious and fascinating images of cats from medieval manuscripts all over Europe. As a (reformed) cat anthologist myself, I was pleasantly startled at the novelty and variety of what she has found, identified and interpreted.

 

the local talent approves

Why so many cats between the pages? Many of our surviving manuscripts were written in the scriptoria of monasteries. Nuns and monks, Dr Walker-Meikle explained, were fond keepers of cats, though they were warned that the activity might detract from the seriousness of the vocations. Therefore it is not perhaps surprising that so many cats found their way into the illuminations and marginalia of such serious texts as psalters and medical tracts, as well as hunting manuals, behaviour books, bestiaries and books of natural philosophy Cats are also present in clerical account books: one particular cathedral cat in Oxfordshire was awarded rations of his favourite cheese. The image that raised the biggest laugh last Saturday was an angry little sketch of cat above a large splash of discoloration and an appended scribal curse on the cat who had urinated on what must have been months of hard work.

 Busy cats at work in a bestiary illumination:
one reaches into a birdcage; the second grimly removes a rat
from a tray of eggs; the third is napping

In terms of a taster, I’ll limit myself to my sphere of interest these days: the history of medicine. Cats, Dr Walker-Meikle explained, were believed to be subject to their humours just like humans. They were thought to be plentifully endowed with black bile, secreted by the kidneys and spleen and thought to cause melancholy. (And indeed when did you ever see a cat smile without Photoshop? And Doorkins's sombre temperament perhaps proves the point.)

Albertus Magnus warned that cats drown easily when made wet and that those who have fallen in wells must therefore be dried very quickly. Of course it was not surprising to medieval writers that cats, subject to cold and damp dispositions, had a natural propensity for the softest, warmest places in the house.

 Less happily, cats were sometimes deployed as an ingredient in medicine. Dr Walker-Meikle cites Albertus Magnus on the medicinal properties of wild-cat flesh when placed on the limbs of those suffering from gout, while cat bile was good for facial tics and pain. You could mix a black cat’s bile with jasmine to create a sneezing powder. Less dolorous to the cat was a remedy for a stye: rubbing the eye with a tom cat’s tail.

The audience was delighted to hear that Dr Walker-Meikle continues with her researches. She told us that she was currently writing a paper on mange as part of the Renaissance Skin Project. She has also written about snake bite in the middle ages. Finally, she shared the fact that when she started her cat researches, she did not share her home with a living cat. Now she has one happy owner.

You can follow Doorkins Magnificat on Twitter @Doorkins. The Cathedral Shop sells a selection of Doorkins merchandise – and a percentage of the profits goes towards gifts, food and treats for Doorkins herself.

Michelle Lovric’s website
Michelle is teaching a pair of Masterclasses called FLOW in London in March and April with Lucy Coats. For more details see here
Michelle's post on our sister-site about The Curious Incidence of Felines in Paintings of the Virgin Mary.

'Broken Beauty': terror and healing - Michelle Lovric

June 3rd, two days from now, is the first anniversary of the London Bridge terror attack, in which eight people were killed and 48 injured. It happened yards from where I live. When something like this happens, everyone asks, What can I do?

I’d spent the past few years working with the wonderful family of Milly Dowler on a book about their long ordeal. The Dowlers taught me many lessons about how to take testimony from traumatized people about their extraordinary and terrible experiences. It’s a difficult thing to do, and I made many mistakes while trying to understand and convey their pain as well as their incredible combination of dignity, true-heartedness and humour. But the Dowlers were endlessly strong and patient, and we got there in the end.

So when the terror attack happened here, to the question What can I do? my answer seemed to be: take testimonies; let people talk; give them the space to make sense of what they saw and went through. And that’s what I’ve been doing – more than a long novel’s worth now. The material was never intended for publication. But some of it will be performed in two services on Sunday’s anniversary at Southwark Cathedral, which has, from the first hour, taken spiritual responsibility for the necessary healing. We are so fortunate to have the leadership of Dean Andrew Nunn, Sub-Dean Michael Rawson, Canon Precentor Gilly Myers and many others who have dedicated themselves to cleansing and reclaiming places that saw violence, composing heartfelt liturgies and sermons and, most of all, reaching out to all those who were harmed physically and emotionally by the attack.

None of us who live or work here shall ever forget the victims and their suffering or the pain of those bereaved. They will always be remembered, and their damage has become part of the fabric of this place. We have also found things to bring back from those dark days here. The Cathedral has worked with Amir Eden, a young Muslim community leader, to make sure that the attack has had the opposite effect on this place to the one that the terrorists intended. Diversity, an anathema to extremists, has only been reinforced here. There has been an outpouring of love for our places of life, work, play and worship. There has been bonding between residents and business owners. New friendships have been forged; even several romances.

The afternoon of the attack anniversary will be marked by a special service for the bereaved and first responders in the afternoon. In the evening, the Cathedral will host a Grand Iftar for people of all faiths and none. In line with its inclusive, mindful approach, the Cathedral has also commissioned a work of art from Alison Clark. 

In doing so, they have entered the highly sensitive area of commemorating or memorializing terror.

Artists memorializing the Holocaust have come up with interesting solutions to the issue of how to address a brutal incident with no natural poetry to it at all. Some insisted that memorials should not be in places of grace and beauty like parks, but on busy street corners. The Monument against Fascism, Hamburg-Harburg (Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, 1986) was a 12-metre column designed to sink slowly into the ground, so it never became a taken-for-granted part of the built environment. Looking at it was not a passive activity: viewers were invited to make their own engravings in its lead-clad surface using a special pen provided. Before it sank below the ground in 1993, this ‘counter-monument’ attracted abundant initials, scribbles, graffiti, including swastikas and even gunshots: so the attitudes of the present were inscribed on the past in a dynamic way. The artists wrote of their column, ‘One day it will have disappeared completely and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the long run, it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice’. Another thought behind the artwork was this: each generation needs to find a new way to address the Holocaust. It can never marked ‘done and dusted’. Creativity must do constant battle with forgetfulness when it comes to events that should never be repeated. In this way, society will not be allowed to become desensitized to the crimes of the past. They will stay fresh, shocking and relevant.

So it’s not easy to conceive mindful and appropriate ways of memorializing a terror attack. How do you aestheticize suffering and violence? Should you even do so? How do you express the unspeakable? How do you show respect to those cruelly denied the chance to speak for themselves?  Involuntary errors of taste and judgement can easily occur if you commission art with good intentions but neglect to consult all the stakeholders in an area that has been subject to terror. For example, we residents are distressed to watch the thousands of people taking jokey and romantic selfies in front of these sparkly hearts that suddenly appeared in Stoney Street a couple of months ago, described by Network Rail as a memorial to the attack.

Image from Network Rail's Media Centre

No decent person willingly shows disrespect to the dead. The selfie-takers are doubtless decent people. But to them the artwork evidently manifests as happy, funny and romantic. They simply don’t know what they are doing, which is why I am not including a photograph of them. It wouldn't be fair. They have not been given a choice because neither the event nor those harmed are named in the mural. (The name of the artist is, however).

There have been other decisions (and omissions) here that have hurt the bereaved and also those that have distressed local people who were caught up in the nightmare of the night.

Southwark Cathedral, however, has navigated the difficult waters of memorializing with grace and energy. Key to that is, of course, confronting the damage and not brushing it under the carpet, pink-washing it or privileging commercial considerations over attention to grief and trauma. Alison Clark's artwork addresses both damage and healing in ways that are integral to the experiences of the night. In the course of the Testimony project, I took Alison's account, which she has kindly allowed me to post below. So often, I discovered that the key to the way people reacted to the night and its aftermath could be found in their own past experiences. Alison is no exception.

Apart from Alison’s work, there will be other lasting memorials in and around the Cathedral. The 3pm service will include the blessing of four corbels commissioned to mark the anniversary. One is a portrait of Wayne Marquez, the British Transport policeman who distinguished himself by his bravery on the night. Another corbel immortalizes Doorkins Magnificat, the Cathedral’s resident feline. Doorkins has her own book, Facebook page and Twitter account. While the clergy were cordoned out of the Cathedral in the days after the attack, they received many anxious emails about Doorkins. It turned out she was fine and being fed Chicken Caesar Salad by the police. In the Cathedral courtyard, there will be a blessing of an Olive Tree of Healing, planted in the Cathedral Churchyard in compost made from the floral tributes laid on London Bridge a year ago.

Mary Hoffman has kindly agreed to swap her slot with mine this month, so I could bring this to you in time for the anniversary, and so that you might also have a chance to come to Southwark Cathedral to see Alison’s beautiful and subtle work and perhaps also to participate in one of her mending workshops.

                                               

                                              TESTIMONY – ALISON CLARK



Alison during her artist residency
at Northlight Gallery, Stromness August 2017

November 2015, artist and academic Alison Clark’s in Paris. She’s nervous about delivering the keynote address at a conference the next morning. Returning to her guesthouse after dinner, she receives texts from her children: Are you all right? Then there’s a Facebook notification, ‘You are in a security zone. Let people know if you are OK.’ That’s how she learns about the attacks on the Bataclan, the cafes, the supermarket. It’s traumatic on many levels. The scale of the killing and maiming is horrific. Terrorists gunned down diners in a restaurant like the one she has just left. The university’s on lockdown; the conference is cancelled, including her keynote address. Alison recalibrates. Anxiety about the speech cedes to real new fears, new priorities. How to leave? Is it safer to stay? Her heart breaks for her French colleagues. For them, the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 has linked up with this new one. For Parisians, it suddenly feels as if the threat is endless. Once violence has entered your life and begins to repeat, all bets are off. Anything could happen next.

For Alison herself, the Bataclan also brings back also the 2005 suicide bombings that took 52 lives in London. She was working in Bloomsbury at the time and walked along the route where, later, a bomb blast blew off the roof off a Number 30 bus. She’ll always remember the missing posters afterwards on the lamp-posts in Bloomsbury. Add to that her academic post in Oslo, where Anders Breivik killed 77 people in 2011. Too many times already, Alison has seen a community in crisis, has heard people say, wonderingly, ‘It could never happen here. But it just has.’ Alison thinks, on a deep level, you connect these events. It becomes cumulative. Because of Breivik, her fear is tuned not to a single group like IS but on the dark potential of all humanity. Her repeated encounters with terrorism have taken away any sense of entitlement to security. For Alison, who has been peripheral, a witness, it’s more a feeling of inevitability, an unacknowledged preparedness.

Alison and her husband Jonathan are mid-air when the attack takes place at London Bridge. The moment their flight from San Francisco lands, Jonathan’s mobile tells the horrifying story of what has happened in a place that is close to their hearts. Southwark Cathedral is where Jonathan was consecrated Bishop of Croydon just five years before.

As the wife of a clergyman, and an academic based between Norway and England, Alison’s moved around constantly. But Southwark Cathedral is where she has chosen to be a permanent member of the congregation. She attends at least twice as month. There’s something special about a Cathedral community. Southwark in particular is famously inclusive. Despite being a cathedral, it is as cosy and welcoming as a parish church.

When she hears what happened there on the night of June 3rd, Alison’s feelings swerve back to the night of the Bataclan; a city in lockdown; police bristling with weapons; a tangible atmosphere of fear; the obsessive watching the news, always tuning in for the next announcement; the eerie silence of a bustling city arrested in its empty 5am persona even in the middle the afternoon.

Alison feels deep personal concern for the people at the Cathedral, not just for their safety but knowing what it will mean pastorally. Andrew Nunn, the Dean, is so hands’ on. His responsibilities will be endless. Alison knows how close the cathedral community is to the Borough Market. The two are almost synonymous. It’s painful to learn that the clergy are excluded from their Cathedral by the police cordon. Over the following week, her sadness increases with every day of the lockdown. It is just the time pastorally when the door should be open. 

The first time Alison returns to Southwark Cathedral is for the Trinity Sunday service, a week after the attack, when it finally opens for the first time for a large gathering. It feels really important to be there. Standing in the courtyard, hearing the bells that summon the worshippers, it feels like a reclaiming of the sacred space. The bells ring in a sense of hope. Inside, she listens to Andrew’s sermon, in which he explains the damage caused when the police, hunting for terrorists, used battering rams first to shatter the glass doors to Lancelot’s Link and then to force open the sacristy door. Something stirs in her when Andrew says that the door will not be replaced. Southwark Cathedral will not hide the violence experienced but incorporate it into the experience of the church. In the end, Alison thinks, that’s how healing happens: by acknowledging rather than hiding from pain. It’s fundamental to our Christian faith that Jesus through His suffering has made us whole. A broken Christ brought salvation to humanity.

What stays in Alison’s mind is the way the sacristy door marks the entrance to the heart of the Cathedral. As an artist working in paint, print and drawing, a sense of place is the focus of all her practice. She prefers to be quiet and understated, privileging what is already there, listening to what people, places and things have to tell her. ‘What is it like to be here?’ is the theme running through her academic work too. It’s how she tunes into children’s experiences. Another fundamental aspect of her practice is the idea of acknowledging brokenness and turning it into something beautiful.
 

Alison emails Andrew with an idea for a piece of art based on the damaged door, as a meditation on brokenness. He gets it straightaway, mentioning that a member of the Chapter had told him that, in the Japanese art form kintsugi, you draw attention to cracks with gold rather than pretending that they are not there. (Anne Rooney wrote a post about it here). Andrew and Alison agree that she will take a four-week artist’s residency in the Cathedral, two weeks on either side of the anniversary of the terror attack. ‘Broken Beauty’ will be the name of the project.

For the first ten days she’ll work on the sacristy door, using a range of different materials including translucent Bible paper and scrim, printmakers cloth for wiping inked plates. As with a brass rubbing, she’ll run an ink-roller over paper pinned to the door. The areas furrowed with damage will not hold the ink, and so will appear as white. That’s where Alison will fill in the with slender rivers of gold paint. The effect will be subtle, won’t shout what is. Making it will not be performative, but the public can watch the process. It’s not about me doing it. It’s about the idea and the piece. Part of the work will be the sacristy door, but also impressions of other places where fabric of the cathedral has been damaged either through violence or degradation over the centuries. Taking impression with a new medium reveals new things the eye never saw before.

Printmaking in progress in Southwark Cathedral May 2018
 

On this anniversary weekend, the work will be displayed in one of the Retrochoir chapels, a quiet, dim and meditative space, which also has a prayer board where visitors can write requests. Two existing pieces will be displayed in the adjoining space.


'Quilt' (detail). Constructing the quilt
with monoprints on tissue paper (August 2017)

‘Quilt’ is inspired by Jesus’s saying, ‘Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.’ It’s made of nine men’s white cotton handkerchiefs, overlaid with monoprints of dried seaweed roots that look like flowers or mourning bouquets. A seam of gold is sewn through each monoprint. Handkerchiefs, of course, are for soaking up or wiping away tears. Men’s grief, so often hidden, is made visible here. A personal thread runs through this piece: Alison’s father died on Alzheimer’s in 2012. He was a man who had a very well-kept handkerchief drawer.


Heirloom (detail).

The second piece, ‘Heirloom’ shows the artist’s intervention in a small collection of sand-dollars, a form of sea urchin. Intricately beautiful, these flat shells look as if they have been hand-etched by God, each with a little flower or star at its centre. They’re so fragile that it’s hard to find a whole one. Rather than discarding the broken ones she’s gathered, Alison painted them in the black Sumi ink normally used in Japanese calligraphy. The strong pigment is absorbed by the shells, tracing the natural fault-lines and patterns. Then she traced the broken edges in gold, creating a kind of natural kintsugi. The treatment reflects the process of bereavement, but also an acceptance that even the broken pieces – like us, after an attack – have value, and are beautiful. The piece acknowledges that we are not neatly put together after tragedy but that somehow there can be a beauty again, even if broken. Unlike genetics, this materiality is inherited in physical form. 'Heirloom’ explores the idea that the things we end up passing on are not necessarily those of monetary value but are the objects that preserve memory and are about who we are. The longer they exist, the more they are loved, the more damaged and fragile that they become, and the more they are – and should be – cherished.

Heirloom (detail) May 2018 Alison Clark Southwark Cathedral 


After the anniversary weekend, Alison will host two workshops in the Retrochoir. Attendees are invited to bring a piece of mending, sewing or knitting. Seated in a circle of chairs, people of all faiths or none can gather together to mend and talk. At a practical level, this quiet exercise will draw attention to a prayerful space in the Cathedral where people can seek solace. On a deeper level, the workshop will enact the process of repair to something that’s fragile and beautiful and cannot be discarded just because of damage. Acknowledging that painful truth is part of rightful mourning.

Extract from Testimony - a memory project.

I went to visit Alison in the Cathedral as she completed her prints this week. I was moved to see the work all together and also to think about the many hours she'd spent in the Cathedral absorbed in documenting the fabric of the place. This is the kind of art that does not prescribe a reaction but invites the viewer into a meditative space with infinite possibilities. Drawn in, the viewer engages and invests. Within each finished print are many stories. Looking at them, I 'saw' images of forests and clouds. Another viewer might of course find other things. From one angle, the gold paint blazes. From another, the gold effaces itself and the story of the stone and wood is dominant. Past and present are in interplay here, as they are whenever we consult our memories.

Alison and I talked at length about the role of terror, art and memory. Afterwards, she wrote to me, 'I don’t think commemorating is what is happening here, or only if it is understood as ‘reminding’ not honouring. This is about remembrance - the exercise of memory. Anniversaries of terror events are about remembering. Another definition of remembering is to be ‘mindful’. In a small way, art can provide one avenue for individuals, organisations and communities to be mindful of past events and present realities. 

'Broken Beauty' finished panels hung in the Retrochoir. Photo: Alison Clark

Alison also drew my attention to my own role as documenter: 'The theme of reminding is one of the purposes of history. To remind is 'to write history', 'to narrate'. Listening and documenting is one way in which contemporary history is made.'

I wish I could say this was my own insight. When I started the Testimony project, I did not really know why except that it felt imperative. It is only over the last year that purpose and uses have emerged. Throughout that time, it's been a privilege to be part of conversations with people like Andrew, Michael, Gilly and Alison, and I am grateful, on behalf of this community, for all they have brought to the healing process.

You can book here to attend one of Alison's (free) mending workshops on June 4 and June 7.

The TESTIMONY project is open-ended, If you were affected by the June 3 attack and would find it helpful to have your testimony taken, or if you would like to add your account to the project, please email mlATlovric.demon.co.uk (substituting '@' for the 'AT' - this helps cut down spamming).

Michelle Lovric’s website

Sunbeams in a bottle – Michelle Lovric

My local celebrity seems a cheerful chap, even in death. This is Lionel Lockyer’s grandiose tomb and effigy in the north transept of Southwark Cathedral near my home in London. 

 

The Cathedral has been in the news lately, for sad reasons. It had hosted the funeral of Keith Palmer just days before the nearby Borough Market was targeted for another terrorist attack. The whole area became a crime scene, with the cathedral sealed off within the police cordon.

 Elegant and grand as Southwark Cathedral is, it’s difficult to remember that the building was promoted to cathedral status only at the beginning of the last century. Before that, it was been variously known as the church of Saint Saviours and Saint Mary Overie, named after a local ferryman’s daughter, as legend has it, and the small dock that survives at the end of Clink Street near London Bridge. The survival of that dock is now under threat of a £5 million development that wishes to wall it up, with the replica Golden Hinde floating inside like a rubber duck in a bath. But that’s another battle and another blog for another day. This one’s about a famous quack of this parish and his particular wonder-drug.

When Lionel Lockyer was consigned to this tomb in 1672, the church was still Saint Mary Overie. Perhaps his effigy’s smile can be attributed to the amazing effect of his ‘miracle pills’ that failed their inventor only at the ripe old age of seventy-something. These pills, like all quack medications, claimed to be able to cure absolutely everything from gout to scurvy to syphilis to rickets to infertility to gout. And, like all quack medicines, they boasted a special ingredient – in this case, sunbeams. These solar ingredients were essential, the quack claimed, ‘dispelling of those causes in our Bodies, which continued, would not only darken the Lustre, but extinguish the Light of Our Microcosmical Sun.’

The pills were sold in boxes stamped with Lockyer’s coat of arms. They retailed at a hefty four shillings a box, and were available from some forty London establishments, including ‘Mrs. Harfords at the Bible in Heart in Little Britain, Mr. Russel’s in Mugwel Street near Cripple Gate, Mr. Randal’s at the Three Pigeons, beyond St. Clements Church, in the Strand, Thomas Virgoes, cutler, upper end of New Fish Street and Mr. Brugis, printer, next door to Red Lyon Inn, in Newstreet near Fetter Lane.’

Apart from sunbeams, the pills’ ingredients were a sworn secret. Lockyer claimed to have shared his recipe with only three trusted men. 

Some time around 1650, Lionel Lockyer began to print handbills about his Pillulae Radiis Solis Extractae. These quickly became known as Lockyer’s Pills, perhaps because that title was far easier to pronounce.

He was happier to say what was not in the drug, promoted as ‘a gentle remedy for all ailments in all persons regardless of sex, age, and constitution’: it was apparently free of harmful chemicals like mercury or sulphur of antimony. Thus it made a claim for itself as an early champion of the ‘wellness industry’ – even for the healthy it served as a ‘preservative against all accidents as contagious aires, for which it stands Centinel in the body and not permitting any enemy of nature to enter.’

 Case studies and testimonials to this effect were abundant and graphic. Among the 74 cases he relates: ‘Mrs. Dixon suffered for two years at least with a griping, gnawing pain in the belly, and by the use of my Pills, and God's blessing upon it, was cured; For before she had taken of my Pills six times she had a live worm come from her by Siege, four yards long; the woman lives in Dead-man's Place in Southwark, near unto the Colledge Gate. Her age is about thirty-two years, the worm came from her the latter end of May, 1662. If any desire to see the worm I have it by me’.

Lockyer cited the case of a young man who ‘told a friend of mine, that he had the POX, who gave him two boxes of pills, and in three weeks time he was perfectly cured, although he scared went to bed sober all that time, and within three weeks time he married a wife and both of them very well to this day.’

Then there was James Carr, afflicted with nose cancer and failed by numerous physicians and surgeons. Two boxes of Lockyer’s pills and Carr was cured. 

Indeed, Lockyer continued, if army and navy physicians and surgeons had given his pill to their patients, they would have saved tens of thousands of lives.

But Lockyer’s legend was not safe in his own advertising. A rival apothecary expended considerable bile and expense in a campaign against him. William Johnson sought to debunk the whole sunbeam story, saying that he analysed the pills and found them rich in the dreaded antimony. The exact same medicine, he said, could be had for 3 pence an ounce, compared to the 16 shillings Lockyer charged. He demanded that Lockyer should ‘either confess himself ignorant, or a Notorious Lyer in Print.’

Lockyer claimed to have a royal customer, adding a letter from a ‘Person of Quality’ who claimed that on June 13 1664 Lockyer calcined the powder of his pill in front of King Charles.

This letter seems to have provoked an American apothecary named George Starkey (quack-title ‘Eireneaus Philalethes’). His response described Lockyer’s Pills as ‘A smart Scourge for a silly, sawcy Fool’. Starkey threw mud at Lockyer’s credentials, describing him as a former tailor and a butcher. He too described the precursor of the sunbeam pills (christened ‘mercurialis vitae' by Lockyer) as ‘a very common and churlish medicine’ consisting principally of salt of antimony dyed bright red with cochineal.

Starkey even took exception to Lockyer’s quackish deployment of Latin, saying that he deserved to be untrussed and beaten bloody for his lapses.

Lockyer appears to have responded with yet more testimonials and handbills. It is thought he may have distributed upwards of
200,000 copies. And it served him well – his estate, on death, was revealed at more than £1900 in cash, plus a quarter share in a shop and leaseholds of four buildings.

 

 

His will provided for a substantial donation to charity as well as a sumptuous funeral for himself, and the Saint Mary Overie effigy resplendent in a fine wig of bouffant curls and a fur-trimmed robe.

Quack medicine is all about the advertising, which, in this case, continued even after the Lockyer’s decease. The brand-friendly epitaph reads:

Here Lockyer lies interr'd enough: his name

Speakes one hath few competitors in fame:

 A name soe Great, soe Generall't may scorne

 Inscriptions whch doe vulgar tombs adorne.

 A diminution 'tis to write in verse

 His eulogies whch most mens mouths rehearse.

 His virtues & his PILLS are soe well known..

 That envy can't confine them vnder stone.

 But they'll surviue his dust and not expire

 Till all things else at th'universall fire.

This verse is lost, his PILL Embalmes him safe

 To future times without an Epitaph.

 And indeed the pills survived their originator. One James Granger reported seeing Lockyer’s Pills still for sale by Newbury the Bookseller in St Pauls Churchyard one hundred and fifty years later, in 1824.


Michelle Lovric’s website

Michelle Lovric is the co-writer of  My Sister Milly by Gemma Dowler, published on June 29th by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Books

HISTORY YOU CAN LIVE INSIDE by Emma Darwin

A few weeks ago, my daughter's school Chamber Choir was singing Evensong in Southwark Cathedral, so I went along to listen. Many years ago, when I first crossed the Thames to live South of the River (which as all Londoners know is slightly more drastic than crossing the Channel to live permanently in France), in the daytime Bankside was busy with suits, doctors, and wholesale cabbages. But outside the working week it was Tumbleweed Town: anyone who could fled to the salubrious suburbs, and those few who couldn't had nothing to tempt them out of their grim blocks of flats.

Now the council blocks have been done up, there are university halls of residence, lofts and flats and family houses for urban living, there's Borough Market, the Globe, the Golden Hinde, the London Assembly, at least ten branches of Prêt à Manger, and you can walk along the Thames Path, from Deptford on your bank and St Katherine's Dock on the other, to Lambeth Palace and the Houses of Parliament. It's full of people living and working and drinking and talking. In becoming more modern, Southwark has become more ancient: it's once again the mirror-image of the city across the tide that gave birth to it.

Southwark Cathedral wasn't built as a cathedral, but as a church: St Mary Overey (as in, Over the Thames). So although it's a fine bit of Early English Gothic it's not particularly large or complex. But it still has that unity in difference which is the great joy of mediaeval architure: the pointed Gothic arches don't come just in large and small, but can stretch broad or high, vaulting above your head, or stooping to make a canopy over a baby's little tomb. Some of the columns are like bundles of saplings, others are great, ribbed tree-trunks; you walk through puddles of colours where the light from the stained glass windows splashes down as regularly as a wave.

There was a hymn, all solid, Anglican harmony, and then the Responsory: call-and-answer with the choir. And then the choir sang alone, weaving in and out of each other as pitched and patterned by Orlando Gibbons, and I remembered Peter Wimsey, in Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, saying to his Harriet, "Anyone can have the harmony, if they'll leave us the counterpoint".

As one of Gibbons' contemporaries nearly wrote: Licence my roving notes and let them go / before, behind, between, above, below... But I couldn't - for good manners' sake - rove on foot during the service, thought I've done so in many other churches. So I sat still, and allowed my mind's eye to rove instead, imagining how as you walk and look the clusters of saplings in the different aisles set to partners and then pass on, the ribs like branches stretching out to join those of another tree overhead; triplets of windows dancing between bigger trunks; the arch that opens to a whole new chapel of variations; the path that leads you on, curls you round the back of the altar and brings you to the centre again, under the still, pendulum point of the crossing.

They say that architecture is frozen music. In which case, I thought, gazing up the column by my shoulder to where it sprang up and out into the vault, music is surely liquid architecture. What I'm sitting in - what those nameless medieval masons built - is a fugue in stone; a fugue that you can live inside. And perhaps a piece of music is therefore a building that sings.

So where does that leave the reader and writer of fiction? Like music, writing can only exist for the reader in time but, unlike music, it can only sing one note at once. The Donne (mis)quotation suggests that poets may be closer to music: their words have explicit patterning, repetition and sound. But fiction does have architecture: a novel has pace, scale and proportion, as I found when I started thinking about writing a novel as building a bridge. Ian McEwan says the first thing he knows about a new novel is "the maths", by which, as Pythgoras and Stravinsky would have agreed, he also means "the music". In fiction we can play as we choose with echoes and repetitions of ideas and images, as well as with sounds, and build them into something which you can live inside: the world of the novel not just in the sense of setting and characters, but a structure of sound and rhythm and image.

And historical fiction? Well, there's your answer: Bankside. Many historical novels take the reader to live in the year and moment of the action: - steam trains screeching and puffing above Dickens' head as he tries to rescue a six year old prostitute; two monks turned out of their priory as Henry VIII's men pull the lead off the roof; families emerging from the Tube station air raid shelters to see if their homes are still standing.

Other historical novels are also novels about history. The Golden Hinde is a replica of Francis Drake's ship that he sailed round the world, and there are modern American schoolchildren clambering about on it, snapping each other on their mobiles. But in the 1970s it was moored across the river, and my sister was on it - only because the Tower queues were too long - when the IRA bombed the Tower, killing one and injuring forty people. The Golden Hinde is a world you can enter and live in, a world at once Now, and many Thens, a world built of ribs and beams: wood, tarred and caulked to sail as well as it did five hundred years ago, dancing over the waves with the wind singing in the rigging. The replica embodies the history that it hasn't actually seen but also what it has seen, as novels about history do: a historical novel is history you can live inside.