Anti clockwise tales that’s what we need, that’s why we are here.
Kelly Jenkins and her clique tossed back their hair and headed for the common room. Why would such a gorgeous boy prefer a cathedral mad oddity to them? He would wake up one day and then…each girl smiled, privately convinced of their beauty.
Clara hardly noticed her colleagues. If they were not there, perhaps they hadn’t ever been there, never coinciding. Everything about them suggested clockwise anyhow.
A special chapel beckoned to Clara; its name and shape remained uncertain, yet glimpses began to break through into her day. Being alive to her senses gave Clara vivid pictures, made music in her head, and even electrifies her fingers in the middle of some daily routine.
Quite simply, Clara’s cathedral assembled itself out of one world and began to create itself in another. Nothing remained as it was. My cathedral loves both worlds she told her brother across their breakfasts. It’s a special sort of excavation. Things transform, they have to recognise that they are in transit and once they do, then I find them and they can rest again as part of my cathedral. We may start as one thing Ted, but we never end up being that thing for long. We cannot stay until we find our homes. It’s a leap. Ted shrugged and left her to her sketches across the cloth. She called them her blessings. Blessings were scripted in ink and everyone had strict instructions to leave the blessings where they were. Clara signed her sketches ‘Yaguar’ and reminded those who forgot, that her new name meant ‘she who kills with the leap.’ Clara meant this flexibly most of the time but not all of the time. A leap just about said everything about her life nowadays, especially when she narrowed her eyes and sprang.
Something in her hands conquered the individual identity of each selected piece for her cathedral , smoothing it into another character. Words like cloister and presbytery grew shapes in her head and started to tease her, to haunt the edges of her mind until they found a way through. Magically, these words came alive in the most unlikely of places. Charity shops seemed best for a while but were overtaken by markets and odd shops in areas where everyone had moved away. Every place revealed some gift or gesture of support to her vision. It was as if her thoughts had left her head and were rediscovered littered about her ordinary life The choirs suggested themselves at the back of her Aunt’s petrol station, when Clara found some tiny glass figures promising luck and protection. Even her Aunt had no idea how they came there and the cathedral enjoyed their company being lonely for so long. Clara promised that one day they would sing at Christmas and no one felt mean enough to argue.
Routine helped discovery, propelled you into the leap. Dailiness was underrated, it hypnotised you into forgetfulness, into a thoughtlessness that released you into adventure. Keats inspired her, she craved untrodden regions for her mind. Whilst friends pursued boys and exams, Clara started to make notes, to create her own philosophy for she was building her cathedral to imagination. It was a true leap of faith.
A brown leather note book became her private diary. Only turquoise ink could express her thoughts for they were alive and must be respected for their integrity and vision.
Do not look as if you want something. Be curious to what lies away from you. Ration your mind. Correction; ration your clockwise mind.
Every school lesson seemed bent on training clockwise minds so the cathedral liberated Clara into a different space where she could think in another way; when she shut her eyes each night , the cathedral magnified its size, became blazoned with colour, and music began to travel along the nave, mingling with the sounds of the seated visitors high into the lofty reaches of the roof.
Every evening at 5-10 pm, She clambered up the stairs carrying yet another cathedral secret. Ritual made the cathedral more real. Faith in the moments when something arrived for her cathedral explained all the bits in between. It wasn’t that she found life dull, just interim, an in-between space where she waited to return to what expanded everything. Only once did the cathedral get to school unannounced, and that was when she was working on the tall windows in front of the main altar. Everyone seemed ill at school, lessons cancelled, and the design started to grow beneath her fingers as she sat through yet another supply lesson, where the only thing supplied was time. So the Clara took the leap, holding tightly to the vision of moonlit night softening the features of contemplative Saints and animals that brought silence to the watchers as they gazed out of the eyes of the window.
The window Clara spoke of belonged to her Great Lady Chapel, where the heavenly light would bathe all visitors in indigo blue. Far more uplifting than her original attempt which ended with a dismal crowd watching over the last mortal remains of a dying saint, released from the tortures of this world whilst he clung onto a humble crucifix.
The cathedral blossomed. . The main event was the lofty roof. The biggest leap. Her ‘people’ could enter through the doors and wander about taking pictures, inhaling the woody musk of new and old time, yet what the special ones felt compelled to do was to look up. Until you looked up then this would appear to be just another large medieval church, occasionally marbled, flecked with moments of lurid terror on the faces of the saints and disciples painted there. Blood was prevalent, easy to create, and it was what the worshippers expected: however it was the indigo blue light that led her creatures to look up. For even in this miniature world, sunshine managed to bathe the floors and windows, inviting wanderers to stop and stare; contemplating the ways in which hands of saints stroked across the wood even coming to rest across your head, as if in blessing or weary acceptance of suffering.
Upstairs though remained a mystery to the architect. Clara believed she built the landings and stairs during a long dream, returned to night after night until it was completed. Her hands knew more when she was asleep she claimed, writing in her diary about spontaneous art.
How do you relate to your hands? Does Day time stifle their freedom, their curiosity, their care? Turquoise ink asked the question, imagining the freedom of their secret life. Their night walks.
Ted agreed to take his sister to a large museum for the day because it was in the same city as a medieval cathedral. Trains were fun and Clara packed her bag the night before hoping he assumed for more ‘bricks’ and ‘blessings’ as she called them for that ‘bloody church’ as their father termed the multi coloured construction in her bed room.
