we went to cologne by car. R. had business there, and i had no desire to stay alone in Frankfurt for even 8 minutes or more. maiko sat in the front of the car, next to R. they sped along the highway, and talked a lot. shreds of conversation i picked up, mostly highschool and college memories. They had the meeting in a hotel near the station, so i just went for a walk.
i found a church. There are many of them in Cologne, the dome of course, but i mean a different church. i ended up spending the entire afternoon there, in the chapel of saint Ursula. in the golden chamber to be precise.
the walls are covered with mosaics of bones and skulls, and gilded busts of the holy Ursula and her virgin adepts. The walls reach high up, bones and more bones where ever you turn your head.
legend has it, that Ursula, a devout catholic, was engaged to be married to the king of England, a pagan. he loved her so dearly that he converted to Christianity, leaving Ursula with no option but to approve of the betrothal. before the wedding however, she set out with a group of female followers on a pilgrimage to Rome. she felt it her obligation to do so, her pilgrimage was the barter for the sins her future husband had committed by not having chosen the only true path of religion before. In Rome she had a dream that she and her group would be killed brutally by the Huns. this premonition did in no way deter her from the journey home. Ursula felt that this was her destiny, and her female companions went with her. The women left for cologne, and as the legend has it, she and her virgin army were indeed massacred. The leader of the Huns had offered to spare them, if Ursula would marry him instead of the English king, but she refused. Ursula and the 11 thousand virgins were slaughtered in a most brutal way, their heads were cut off, arrows shot through their bodies, the were left in a field to bleed to death. The site of the onslaught is, so does the church want us to believe, where the chapel was built.
the chapel, in all its eeriness is of a strange and sinister beauty. i tried counting all the busts and heads, but there were just too many of them, probably 11 thousand indeed. there is no historic evidence to the legend of Ursula, but this church does a good job in making the story tangible. bones in circles, in triangles, in squares. Latin words made out of bones. skulls. golden showcases with more bones in them. gilded hands with the bones of the martyresses encased in them, the shape of a heart, a sun, all bones.
throughout the centuries different fashionable paraphernalia were added, the crude medieval shapes are joined by baroque cherubs, which makes the sunlit chamber with it´s black and white chequered marble floor all together more lugubrious. that whole day i was the only person in there. the days when people would come to pray here for salvation of the soul are over.
it is weird with buildings. the big ones, i mean. they are the ones to tell us where the true powers lie in societies. the achievement of immortality has somehow always been intertwined with buildings of power.
in Europe, the very old big buildings are churches and cathedrals. the catholic churches´ regime held the people in it´s inexorable grasp. true devotion was demanded, wandering off that path could mean torture by that same church. but the true punishment lay in the afterlife: hell. only by being an ardent and virtuous believer one could rest reasonably assured of a place in heaven. The quest of immortality was ever present even in those days: the catholic church offered us immortality of the soul: having been good, we would be rewarded by going to heaven and becoming a nice little angel. sinners and unbaptised children had the choice of hell and limbo. Saints were immortal, their bones cast in gold, relics to be kept until judgement day, when they would guide the true believers into kingdom come, like the poor Ursula and her maidens. no matter how hard life was, if good, you could earn yourself a little spot in heaven.
and though this idea of immortality seems to be rather philosophical on the surface, the belief in medieval times was most definitely a very physical one: the bodies of every man and woman that had once lived on earth would rise from their graves. those of the saints would be without blemish, youthful and strong. This is why many relics of saints were used so often in the churches, a smithereens of a single bone of a saint would be enough to conjure him back to life when the end of time would arrive. the sinners would be festered and worm ridden, ready to be taken to the devil. The church held its stronghold long enough, but slowly the powers shifted.
after the renaissance entered the time of kings and emperors. they used the architectonical vocabulary of ancient roman empires and that of the church. the droit divine was translated in the palaces they had designed for themselves. look at Versailles, where the sun king ruled. The emperors just wanted themselves to become immortal, the people should remember them forever. their palaces should reflect the death-defying omnipotence of the rulers. heaven had become a place on earth, being around the emperor was being around the closest thing you could get to god.
in the 20st century the totalitarian regimes liked to go big: Hitler, with the neo neo classicist style of Albert Speer, sampling Greek and roman architecture to emphasise a fake historical evidence for the validation of the 1000 year rule of the third Reich. Had the national socialist architecture followed a logical historic path, the buildings would have had to have the looks of the huts of the ancient Germanic tribes. this would of course have undermined the image of grandeur and wisdom the ideology needed.
Kim il Sung, who also claimed an godlike status for himself, and even had a national religion made up for him, the Kim il sungism, which is still taught in north Korean schools to date, had a design made for a tower that should literary reach for the skies, it was never built however. Ceaucescu in Rumania, the African dictators. bigger was better to them. their buildings were often just bleak copies of other dictators: Ceaucescu had become inspired to built his "palace of the people" when visiting north Korea in the beginning of the seventies. The Palace in Bucharest is the second largest building on earth, after the pentagon. Idi Amin in Uganda , who never tried denying the rumours about himself being a cannibal, saying the blood he bathed in made him immortal and would protect him against any injury; for his palaces he happily mixed and matched roman, Greek and Stalinist styles.
at the end of the millennium a altogether different power emerged: the new money. no longer were it legislative or governmental buildings that rose in overdimensional proportions, it were banks and global corporations who built their temples of money and consumer driven greed. high, sleek, semi transparent molochs emerged in every cosmopolitan city around the globe. within a couple of years, the new money was where the power had transferred to. look at most governmental buildings these days: so often do you see worn out carpets, dilapidated office furniture. there is no power in the governments anymore.
the churches and palaces of previous centuries have become museums. whenever i would go in to a church on my travels, i only met tourists, and an occasional old man or woman in desperate prayer.
With the new power of the multinationals a matching religion has emanated. although, when looking closely it does echo the same desire for immortality: the worship of an eternally youthful body. decay is considered a crime, a flaw, a sign of deficiency, a sin. not fitting in the image of nouveau capitalism.
plastic surgeons have become the new father confessors, fitness centres the new holy mass: "Worship your body in its youthfulness! Deny the devil called atrophy, or you will pay for your weakness!" the holy mass of the devotion to eternal youth seems like a very lonely one to me. trying to achieve the impossible: to look like the photoshopped images that are fed into their minds on a daily basis by advertisements. all these people in the "health clubs" treading on these fitness machines like rats in cages. sad.
i wonder where the next revolution will take us to. i know one thing for sure, look closely at which institutions build big. that is were the power will have shifted.
