Dec 13 22
On a trip to Belgium with “F” we visited a defunct modernist abbey. Both being experienced with many ill-fated “best laid plans” a spirit of the dérive was maintained. The situation being such, our time was spent as if walking through a living aphorism.
The buildings of the abbey were set in a clearing of a fairly dense forest of scrubby trees, having more a feeling of gigantic invasive bushes, with nothing like the sturdiness of oaks or firs. (We later learned the soil strange — not being good for anything like farming.)
The building itself was very inward facing, this has obvious reasons — but not wholly. The failed religious experiment within a modernist context, albeit of a beautifully and sensitively appointed modernism, in a imperceptibly inhospitable woodland, foregrounded a feeling of behaviorist conceit or poorly calibrated pride.
We had arranged a private tour with the abbey’s caretaker. The engagement was studious and patient — but ultimately a performance through a translation. He gave the air of a man forced by invisible duty — a purpose eccentric but not for religious reasons — almost like the business of abstracted sharing was keeping other thoughts at bay.
Towards the end of our time we were confronted with two situations that we are fairly haunted by.
The first occurred in the rear upper section of rooms. Due to asbestos findings, they were undergoing a kind of casual reversal, the plaster walls having been stripped down to the studs. To be confronted by the banalest of 2x4s and electrical wiring, and wind-undulating plastic sheeting, in such friendless rooms — after hours of listening to the passionate precisionist theories of the architect — perfected a feeling of transcendental melancholic inevitability.
The second, was the visit to the grounds of the cemetery. This was where all the nuns who lived and died at the abbey were buried. The graveyard was very modest — another clearing in that thriving but unusable forest. The gravestones were large, black and flat (parallel to the earth) and arranged in two large semi-circular arcs (maybe 60 slabs in total). 60 people come and gone within a strange attempt. We knew we were looking at the finality of what previously had been a feeling of endless potential.
The buildings of the abbey were set in a clearing of a fairly dense forest of scrubby trees, having more a feeling of gigantic invasive bushes, with nothing like the sturdiness of oaks or firs. (We later learned the soil strange — not being good for anything like farming.)
The building itself was very inward facing, this has obvious reasons — but not wholly. The failed religious experiment within a modernist context, albeit of a beautifully and sensitively appointed modernism, in a imperceptibly inhospitable woodland, foregrounded a feeling of behaviorist conceit or poorly calibrated pride.
We had arranged a private tour with the abbey’s caretaker. The engagement was studious and patient — but ultimately a performance through a translation. He gave the air of a man forced by invisible duty — a purpose eccentric but not for religious reasons — almost like the business of abstracted sharing was keeping other thoughts at bay.
Towards the end of our time we were confronted with two situations that we are fairly haunted by.
The first occurred in the rear upper section of rooms. Due to asbestos findings, they were undergoing a kind of casual reversal, the plaster walls having been stripped down to the studs. To be confronted by the banalest of 2x4s and electrical wiring, and wind-undulating plastic sheeting, in such friendless rooms — after hours of listening to the passionate precisionist theories of the architect — perfected a feeling of transcendental melancholic inevitability.
The second, was the visit to the grounds of the cemetery. This was where all the nuns who lived and died at the abbey were buried. The graveyard was very modest — another clearing in that thriving but unusable forest. The gravestones were large, black and flat (parallel to the earth) and arranged in two large semi-circular arcs (maybe 60 slabs in total). 60 people come and gone within a strange attempt. We knew we were looking at the finality of what previously had been a feeling of endless potential.