Munich Footprints

It’s not often you’ll see me get up at 4.10 in the morning, unless it’s due to an infrequent bout of insomnia. But that’s the necessity of an early morning flight. So there we were at 7am, three large teas down already in my case, and a long day ahead. It does take time, as I noticed during last year’s summer holiday and am having to remind myself again, to relax and let go of all the inevitably uncomfortable work thoughts that persist in buzzing away in the tired mind, but as K- said very wisely at dinner tonight, ‘no matter how much work I do it’s never enough; no matter what I’ve left undone no one will die because of it.’ I must add that to my list of mantras.

So here we are in Munich and have seen a little part of it through that haze of post-flight exhaustion which makes everything heightened in a slightly surreal way. The shops we passed are all enticing but dutifully shut, it being the Sabbath. But a couple of large and atmospheric churches were open, so I lit a votive candle at both. The first was Theatinerkirke, full of white and light. Look up to the highest parts of the ceiling and feel your sense of gravity wobble and start to dissolve. Rough guide denotes this building as on the cusp of baroque and rococo but it’s the light spaces thereby contained that impress. That and the side chapel of the black Madonna, to whose myriad flickering lights I added my 50cents.

Then to the cathedral the Frauenkirche, the largest gothic building in southern Germany, which while larger had a the greater atmosphere of simplicity. Lots of history and objects of interest of course but I was struck by the odd dark footprint in a floor tile just inside the main entrance: made, so the story goes, by the devil himself, ‘stamping in rage after architect Jorg van Halsbach won a wager with him to build a church without visible windows by pointing out a spot where pillars hid every one’ (according to the Rough Guide). And indeed, standing in the devil’s footprint, this is the case.

A story of little historical veracity no doubt, but it has made the project and its architect live on in the memory the way straight facts would not. I don’t know where Halsbach himself dined out on the tale as it were, or whether it was constructed without his volition, even after his death. The strange and supernatural anecdote often achieves a momentum of its own. Interestingly this is discussed in ‘The Secret Scripture’ (I can’t pretend I’ve got very far) when Roseanne looks back on her father’s early life, and the snippets of ‘autobiographical’ supernatural sailor’s stories he used to tell:

‘It was as if such an event were a reward to him for being alive, a little gift of narrative that pleased him so much it conferred on himself in dreams and waking a sense of privilege as if such little scraps of stories and events composed for him a ragged gospel…[and later]…It strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them.’

Little scraps of stories. I suppose in a way that is the nature of journaling and blogging too, noting the improbably encounter and embedding it in a wider cultural or spiritual framework so that it enlarges the mind or soul of the writer and perhaps becomes lodged in another’s memory too.

Tremendous rain has washed away the day, so more tomorrow.