The Chapel of Angels and Bones

Hanging from a cliff at Sitio, is a beautiful and tiny chapel (the ceiling featured here). I've visited this chapel on every trip to Nazaré, and the place (rich in it's own legend and origin connected to the appearance of the Blessed Mother) holds a kind of mystique for me that I am yet to unravel. Aside from  its absolute and obvious beauty there remains in this place a  physical symbol of an aesthetic state of being, a transcendence, as if the chapel is a doorway to another doorway.  I copied these lines from Fernando Pessoa in the notes from my journal documenting the day: My dreaming of you will be my strength, and when my sentences tell of your Beauty they will have melodies of form, curves of stanza, and the sudden splendors of immortal verse.

This day left an whisper in my ear, but memory continually eluded my conscious mind over the week since I left Portugal. Until yesterday, when a friend said he believed angels often inhabit tangible substances and give those places life. His words made me think that angels, as he described them, become the sign pointing to the next sign. The "presence", if you will, that brings inspiration/creativity  into the bloodstream. 

By chance today, I picked up two books that I have had on my shelf for awhile, George Steiner's Real Presences, and Real Presence by Nathan Mitchell. * Steiner, a linguist and cultural critic, poses questions towards transcendence (or divine presence) in modern culture, while Mitchell, a theologian, is speaking more directly the the concept of the eucharist as it exists in the Roman Catholic faith (note: this is a gross simplification of both of their works, please read them, and forgive me the understatements).

What struck me was that both "presences" were host in this chapel at one time or another, and still reside on some level side by side. Steiner argues in his work that a covenant exists between language and the world, that "whereever and whenever human beings experience meaning, they implicitly affirm the presence of Ultimate Meaning..." and asserts that this meaning can be understood as God, as Plato's "Ideas", as Descartes' self-consciousness, as Kant's transcendent logic, or as Heidegger's "Being" - that "it" remains the center to which all of these roads lead (Steiner 121). 

The chapel has convinced me: certain ideas, like certain books are as bone, and the responsibility of the artist is to  chew them carefully,  to suck their marrow, or swallow them whole, whatever means necessary to obtain their meaning in the fullest measure, to intuit the Source that grew the bones in the first place; the body where Art lives.