Oxford Blind Writers
Ellen Bassani
Seeing is Believing
I have ached to see monumental architecture for most of my life. This is
impossible because I can barely see my hand in front of my face. Yet an
unusual church in Ireland has shown me how to see in a different way.
The design of the controversial church in Glenties, County Donegal,
Ireland, had earned the architect a prestigious award, but it left some
parishioners unimpressed.
As a retired Catholic, I was interested in experiencing it for myself.
Churches have usually been inaccessible, dark places with soaring roof
and few touchable surfaces. Singing, and the unmistakable smell of
age-old dust, incense and candle wax, gave some food for the senses, but
it was never enough.
So I did not expect much when I went in, maybe another whiff of incense
or the atmosphere of a prayerful place.
I loved it immediately. The familiar smells were there, but it was the
power of what I saw that moved me.
What was I really seeing? Shafts of vertical and horizontal light
created geometric shapes. There were narrow banked windows on the left
side of the church. Beneath the horizontal windows, an area of deep
shadow was balanced by an explosion of natural light from plate-glass to
the right.
At the front of the altar, I realized the church was triangular. The
light was bouncing off the sweep of the roof as it raced towards this
glass wall. I could see arrowheads in the play of light on the ceiling.
In the past, I believed that because I did not see realistic detail, I
saw nothing of any value. Here, in this church, it was the lack of
detail itself that was allowing me to see beyond detail to the
relationship of shape on shape, and the textures created through the
play of light. Finally my imagination found something visual to work
with.
This amazing revelation fizzed around me. The poor woman who had come to
clean, was subjected to a lecture on the glory of her parish church.
I took her over to the font in acres of empty space and asked her to
truly look at its simple beauty. I showed her the arrowheads of light
flying upwards. Spirituality, I declared, was surely based in
simplicity. On and on I went, pointing to that warm, secretive space and
this focused pool of light.
Was she not also excited, I asked, by the magic of the triangle, to give
a sense of spaciousness, with half the volume of a conventional
rectangular shape?
Even the entrance lobby came in for acclaim. Too many times, when
entering dark, old churches, have I had to protect my legs with my white
stick, just in case a pew might be lurking in the gloom.
This time my guide and I glided through the glass doors into a spacious,
airy lobby, with plenty of room to walk side by side.
The woman must have secretly wondered if I was quite sane. Outwardly she
made all the right noises, like, ‘Really, I’ve never seen it like that:
yes, you’re right.’
Whether she was just being polite didn’t matter. I had discovered
something very important in that beautiful, imaginative place. Seeing
with the eyes is not just observing detail. There are many levels of
sight. Contrast, light-play and simple, uncluttered lines have a power
and delight, that I had blinded myself to most of my life.