Ben Camino's Ironic Isolation Meditation #8: Floating in Free Space (Savannah)

Ben Camino's Ironic Isolation Meditation #8: 

Floating in Free Space (in Savannah)

Yes, yes, of course, I'm using the "Georgia" font for this my most recent masterpiece. Although I do like Georgia, I don't particularly like the "Georgia" font, but rituals are very important though often neglected, as the inerrant fox says to the imminently-teachable Little Prince. And in writing about Georgia, one feels obligated to use Georgia. And to say "one feels" in honor of the old world charm (or perhaps it's the tourist hype) of Savannah, my subject, my scope, my scab. 

I know, I know, all the Slytherins (Jennifers) and perhaps even Griffs (Edwin) will say I'm just alliterating for the sheer sheerness of it, for the sound and the swell and the sizzle (ok, sizzle is a little much), and you might be partly right. But only partly. I alliterate, too, to find out what is on the other side. A chicken or a peacock? This will make sense eventually. I hope. In some universe. 

A year ago, completely exhausted from any number of things that should very well have exhausted me, I took a trip, the first of two such (although the second was not nearly as such as the first) to Savannah, Georgia, home of romantic old buildings, many brick streets, the finest private collection of C. S. Lewis first editions in this or any other world, the Savannah School of Design, old world squares with romantic names like Lafayette Square which really makes it difficult to get from point A to B very quickly in an automobile (Lafayette was not consulted), and a sort of ferry on the Savannah River that goes nowhere in particular but doesn't cost anything either. And the ocean. But more on that later. 

And, more important than all these things, an incredible French-style gothic cathedral, Saint John the Baptist -- built, burned down, rebuilt, redecorated, and eventually electrically charged by my visit there a year ago today. Or so it felt anyway. Not sure the fox in The Little Prince said anything about such things, but he should have. Instead he just went on and on about friendship, the ties that bind, rituals, and what is essential. You might have to read that book if you haven't yet or if you didn't see the play that my friend, Tracy Manning, recently produced just for me. Or so it seemed. Or so I dreamed. 

I loved Savannah for all the right reasons, including C. S. Lewis, Lafayette Square, friendship, the ocean, dark old stairways leading from one level of town to another to yet more brick streets down near the Savannah River where one can catch the Ferry going nowhere important (but costing nothing either), and the talented busker down near the river who  let me sing "When a Man Loves a Woman" with him (although he didn't share any of the tips). OK, really, I forgot what we sang. But it was pretty damn good. 

But mostly St. John the Baptist. It was beautiful, numinous, luminous, and sublime. I suppose I should mention too that it was almost a perfect example of what I think of as the perpendicular theme in architecture. If it were any more conspicuous about its attempt to point us towards the heavens, it would have to include real-life angels poised on the tops of the two sheer spires crying "step right up and be baptized into the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church." 

I sat in a pew there and took in the beauty, sacred and profane, heavenly and human. I loved it all. It felt absolutely right. I knew that I had come to Savannah not only to negotiate a donation of the finest private collection of C. S. Lewis first editions in this or any other world, but to be precisely there. To pray and to experience the kind of numinous awe that, you guessed it, C. S. Lewis writes about in his novel Out of the Silent Planet, the same novel in which he repeatedly evokes the perpendicular theme. 

I'm sure the fox said something about this. Or the Little Prince himself, who came to earth because he had heard "it was interesting." Of course, Savannah was more than interesting. It was a Wordworthian spot in time, a chance to say thanks and thanks and thanks to the greater than I, whether it be ocean or that incredible singing busker or the One to whom the spires and everything else, at least in that moment, seemed to be pointing.  To know that, as Wordsworth says to Dorothy at Tintern Abbey, these moments, these experiences (too weak a word) were food for the future, were consolation in sorrow, comfort in loneliness, light in the darkness. 

Late that night, on Tybee Island, in near complete darkness save for the pale stars (and a little afraid I was breaking some local law), I walked out on a boardwalk I couldn't see, towards an ocean I could only hear, to dip my hands and baptize myself (more facewashing than sprinkling) in all that beauty. A few months later, I returned to Savannah (and St. John the Baptist, but not the ocean) to collect and drive home with that amazing C. S. Lewis collection. I will leave the story of the great celebration when I returned, the bonus, the raise, the bouquets, the . . . thank you note? for another time. Really, that part is a very short sad story. As the fox says, what is essential is invisible to the eyes. 

But the best stories, even true ones involving C. S. Lewis and St. John the Baptist and Lafayette Square  and singing whatever it was we sang in the perfect echo chamber of buildings down by the Savannah River, keep growing and mean more the more they burrow into your soul. Or the more you read, which for me are perhaps the same thing. 

Anyway(s), I'm on a Flannery O'Connor kick (again) these days. Her strange genius and fresh, ironic disparagement of the world we have made and the creatures we have become (in the light of the glory we have been given) strikes like lightning in my soul if I have one. And I knew something about Savannah, but I guess somehow I forgot or was hypnotized into forgetfulness by the ocean and the ferry going nowhere and the C. S. Lewis collection and, no doubt, my visions of the welcome party upon my return. And even the very spires and perpendicular beauty,  inspired by God but very human as well, of St. John the Baptist, kept me too focused then to remember  what I won't now forget. 

So now, of course, I remember. My dear, precious Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah. And, from good Irish-Catholic stock, was baptized in St. John the Baptist Cathedral. And lived in Lafayette Square, right next to the Cathedral. And attended St. Vincent's Grammar School for girls in a building attached to the Cathedral. And her little precocious brain, besides training her chickens to walk backwards, and making special outfits for her ducks, was already devoted to the making of stories that would teach, delight, and, like her master, confound the Pharisees. 

If you know Ben Camino, dear reader, you know that his best friends are all dead. Most of them for several hundred years. But Flannery and I inhabited the same planet for at least a bit. And now I realize we shared a space. Not at the same time, of course, but I will always see St. John the Baptist (even if I never return) with an image of the child Mary Flannery O'Connor being baptized there, taking her first communion there, and, no doubt, sneaking a duck into mass once or twice. Like the fox who will never see a wheat field again without thinking of the Little Prince's hair, the ties that bind may be physical but they burrow into our imagination. As, of course, does the breaking of those ties (see The Little Prince and his Rose). 

Savannah, as I hope you can tell, is now a part of me. But like a ferry going nowhere, what you bring to it is as important as what is there. Before the know-nothings cancel Flannery, because it seems they will, I'm glad that we shared a luminous, numinous moment, somewhere perhaps on another planet, sometime between 1925 (her birth) and 2019 (my visit). I'm sure I asked her to pray for me. And she answered, "sure as hell."