Each week I send out a short reflection from the road – photographs, sketches, and observations from old places that still have something to teach us. What follows is a moment from that ongoing journey.
Had I not seen the Sun
I could have borne the shade
But Light a newer Wilderness
My Wilderness has made—
Had I not seen the Sun - Emily Dickinson
Yes They Do
I'm in the room where I had my breakdown. I’m curled up in the corner of the bedroom again, and my face is hard pressed against the corded ridges of the carpet. I’m so close and present in this palpitating bubble, that I can hear my eyelashes scrape against the carpet when I blink.
I’m not there - I know I’m not. I tell myself I’m having a nightmare and, in a strange dream within a dream-like state, I start to hover over the room as a separate entity. I can see my body bent shrimp-like on the floor.
Nineteen hours earlier, before this fretful night, I’m pacing up and down the kitchen. It’s 6am and I’m waiting for a phone call. I’m booked in for an interview on a radio station about a project I’ve been working on. It’s a heart and soul video about my local community. The interview goes well, but I say something that makes the interviewer laugh. I tell him that the streets ‘speak to me’.
Nineteen hours later, in the midst of my nightmare, words echo around the room.
"What did you say? The streets speak to you? Are you crazy?"
I shout back from my hovering entity: "It's the grammar of architecture!"
There's laughter in the room, and I feel like a dandy, a flaneur.
“They speak to you?”
I scream into the room, and whilst I’m shouting and hovering, I see my doubled-self rise from the floor. He steadies himself on the sideboard and looks up to the ceiling, and with his eyes hardening, says: "Yes, they do."
If ever there is an argument for a building that might dispel the disbelief of a radio jock, then it is the Beauchamp (pronounced 'Beecham') Chapel at St. Mary's in Warwick.
In the working of the room and the placing of certain things this building speaks. The chapel is a powerful expression, not only of the ambition and might of the Beauchamp family, but also of the human condition.
The narrative isn't just within the material artefacts - it is also in the space that holds a certain resonance, a spirit that raises the hairs. There are things unseen going on here, and it focuses upon invisible lines and messages that are as powerful as those at Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland or St. Edmund's in Falinge.
"The narrative isn't just within the material artefacts - it is also in the space that holds a certain resonance, a spirit that raises the hairs. "
The message hangs upon the invisible. It stems from the eyes of Beauchamp and is channeled by his raised hands along the telling void between him and the depiction of God above the east window.
For me this chapel, constructed from the finest materials and fashioned from the most revered artists, is held together by that gaze.
This effigy of a man who became one of the most powerful people in England has, through the centuries, unbecome. Time has washed the 'old tenantry' away and the gaze is all that is left. What remains is that which cannot be corrupted by time: the human condition diluted into that stare - the yearning to connect, to envision and to hope.
In front, the promise of heavenly delights, but behind the day of judgement waits.
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Each week, this Digest offers a small pause – photographs, sketches, and reflections from historic places that still carry meaning. It’s a weekly practice of noticing, continuity, and learning to see more deeply.
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Andy Marshall
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