There was a terrible deja vu about turning on the news Monday night, to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame ablaze. It's hard to believe it has been almost eighteen years since New York's twin towers, but it came back as if it were yesterday, and frankly, for this lover of gothic cathedrals, watching this fire was emotionally much harder. Putting aside religion, even spirituality, these buildings do seem to be unique places of amplification, transporting human yearning and human music out beyond space and time. When a cathedral burns (and it happened a lot in the Middle Ages, evidently, and even York Minster had a serious fire in the 1980s), I wonder if the sounds of conflagration are also amplified. There was no real audio in the news images I saw, and for much of the time, even the observing crowds were silent, stunned.
You cannot help but kind of scan your own personal connections to a place. I visited Notre Dame on a school trip to France when I was 15...I remember being overwhelmed by its scale and beauty, although my "thing" about cathedrals hadn't quite taken hold yet. Monday night, a BBC interview with a prominent musicologist underscored Notre Dame's importance to western music. Many innovations in Christian chant and the development of organum and early polyphony took place there, with the specific acoustics of the building in mind. My own MMus thesis was about a piece of 12th century music that was written in Aquitaine, in Aquitanian neumes. I doubt that it was ever sung at Notre Dame, but I was fortunate enough to see the original manuscript in 1981 in Paris's Bibliotheque Nationale. And my other tenuous link is having met Notre Dame's current organist out at Helena, Montana's Catholic cathedral, when he gave a spectacular recital a few years ago. Notre Dame's was one of the largest organs in the world; organists are in shock.
The impulse to rebuild just as it was before is understandable, although to me, kind of foreign. I've had to drag myself out of the smouldering ashes of so many aspects of my life and focus on the future so many times, I have rarely wanted to return to how things were. But then, I seem to be an unusually "post-" everything kind of person. My life seems to have largely taken place beyond the structures and strictures of the present. Still, I hold all of us in my heart, as we try to decide what of the past to keep or rebuild, what to incorporate or re-purpose for the present, and what to walk away from. If this event is a symbol for nothing else, surely it is that.
