The Map Drawn On Vapor (II)

The pillars underneath the Hendon flyover maintain their discreet stoic silence. We pass on, down backstreets of the mind towards the symbol city's immaterial heart. Along Commercial Street, through Bishop's gate, Cornhill and Cheapside, to St. Paul's. This is the hub. Here, all the lines of meaning stretched from Boadicea's grave to William Blake's converge. The vector's ranged from Cleopatra's Needle to its monstrous twin upon Canary Wharf cross here, upon that stone set into the cathedral walls, brought from Jerusalem in the Crusades, brought from the temple of King Solomon, his seal, the Pentacle, reiterated here across the face of London, etched in church and obelisk and grave.

St. Paul's. The pagan darkness after the collapse of Rome saw here a temple of Diana so revered that early Christian monks despaired of a conversion and complained "London worships Diana and in the suburbs of Thorny they burn incense to Apollo". Thorny is now Westminster. In 610, Christian convert Ethelbert of Kent destroyed Diana's shrine and built St. Paul's, a church of Christ. In Norman times, 1081, it burned and was rebuilt as a cathedral. Wandering through this maze of correspondence and association, let us pay attention to St. Paul himself, a proto-mason. There in First Corinthians 3:10, he states: "As a master builder I have laid foundations and another builds thereon." This staunch misogynist clashed with Diana at Ephesus, where her followers humiliated him. Here's his revenge. Diana shackled, hemmed in by a pentacle of obelisks and phallic solar signs with her abode re-dedicated in his name. Late as the 14th century her sacred animals, the buck and doe, were sacrificed with fanfare here. King's mistresses, in penance, roamed St. Paul's by night dressed as the Goddess of the Moon. Mother of Churches. Until 1925 the women of the City hugged its pillars to induce fertility. The notion of Diana cannot be erased. In Hilbert space, the concept of the Goddess is bound inextricably in the cathedral's mortar. Fifteen years ago, the Royal Wedding's sudden change of venue from Westminster's solar altar to this more appropriate site. As the mammalian dome of the cathedral rears before her, swaying in the sunbaked coach, she feels a sudden nausea and sees their eager faces as they line her way, she hears their voices, touched by old hysterias, as they call out her name, as they invoke her. As they say: "Diana, Diana, Diana."

After the Great Fire, Wren rebuilt St. Paul's. Five chains encircling its dome as ancients chained the statues of their Gods to bind their power. Here is Diana chained, the soul of womankind bound in a web of ancient signs, that Woman might abandon useless dreams of liberty, accept that she exists only to endlessly reflect the harsh male brilliance of a father Sun. The monuments that loom on this untouchable plateau cast shadows and have solid consequence. Be careful here. It is the merest mental stroll, a single step through this projected landscape, to a reconstructed Fleet Street, an inferno smouldering beyond those sooted panes. The metal giant pulse of rotary drum, migraine of shuttling linotype machines. The Hell of printer's demons, fingers black with all the world's sins. Here they build a paper planet. They unfold our greeds, and our anxieties. They tell us when to cry, and how to vote and who to think of when we masturbate. They are the engineers of our exhaustion, crushing pressure front of fact and innuendo, booming in these subtle latitudes. And so to Bride Lane, the etheric Bride Lane overlaid in an elusive gel upon the current brickwork, Bride Lane bleeding into history and fable through the wrought gates of St. Bride’s, the printers' church. In 1864, young Mary Walker, age 19 was wed to printer William Nichols here. She had five children by him. Edward, Percy, Alice, Henry, and Elisa. William left her for the midwife who assisted with Elisa's birth, whereafter she began to drink, slipped into prostitution and in August 1888 was taken to Buck's Row and cut to pieces by a faceless and chthonic force, first victim in the Ripper canon. At the old Montague Street morgue, William Nichols generously forgave his wife for all that she had done to him. Next door to the imagined church is the morphogenetic echo of the building we inhabit. The St. Bride Foundation Institute and Library which, like every edifice in this psychosomatic realm, has its intuited dimension. All the rooms we are not in, the closed doors passed upon arrival, though remote from us, these secret spaces flare, exposed upon the brain's emulsion. Rumoured cellars ankle deep with water when the buried River Fleet's in flood. Locked mausoleum drawers of type, the coffined vowels, protracted screams in sans-serif, italic sighs, the raised face of each character, briefly perceived beneath illusory fingertips. Even this present chamber, real and tangible to us, has its suggested twin. Century old splash & echo of those driven young Victorian men in postcard bathing suits, the self-absorbed intensity of every length, a filigree of snot on each joke shop moustache, inflamed by the composing into blocks of some obscurely racy classic text, they seek the cold plunge, sublimate in the delights of Sparta. If this room is mirrored in Idea-Space, what of we, the people in it? Are we not as much composed from figment and belief as this construction, as this street, this city, with our personal mythologies and our impostures, with our pasts which truly are the mass and matter of us, yet have no continuing existence, save in memory and mind. Inside this haunted auditorium, a numinous crowd, shifting, restless in their seats. These magic lantern shadows that we cast. The isolated cones of nightlight that we know as self, continuous mutter in the centre of us, monologues we have mistaken for the world. Could we go further in? Past all idea of place and the reflections places make in us? In our conjectures, might we breach that private night to which we designate the letter I? Move into our collective skull, this firmament of bone with the topographies of our awareness ranged beneath. Stay close together. These are stairways beyond substance. Things get slippery here, beyond the wavering flame of our attention. Only dark.