The Feral Cyst

“’If in dictate, all, then no man will be to bow and scribe…” has said the good Herodotus and from therein does stream our wan’d janitors paring crust from Europe’s augured failure-sepulcher; that is to say, we should take caution to creep not with heavy steps aside our history. Even the standing century has borne witness, in part, to the sight of its own stories already fraught to a crook by enmities masked in paradisaical bombast; and once usurped, they tales become twisted toward a braid upon themselves and yet will remain immune to all obloquy from their own tale-tellers (being not always wise to the minutiae of distortion).

As an example, it is none other than the Augustus Welby N. Pugin (and to some degree, his father, Augustus Charles) that would belch the panegyrics of a fevered diaspora backwards into to the Gothic world for all of London, and throatily, to instill anew (and yet spring himself) what is the inherent morass of the Dark Ages -- its wake in many ways ebbed not enough that we may walk unstung still along our own shores -- and while deliriums like these may cheer a moral ground, the stuff of their want is not always so far away as to require some misguided plan to attain it, perhaps the goal is met already ( recall that the whole of French medieval history can be at once found in all its blazonry, bitten into the walls of the Notre-Dame de Paris).
Doubtless it is precisely the rough communal hands and scriptless vigor of the Gothic that in their modern absence contribute to the style’s now varicose adulation among the zealous and the mad who, to our present day, still churn foam in their lips’ fold at its mention and betwixt their crests spill garrulous sermon singularly necessitating the Gothic style for the slightest moral debris of a given man; he, now only a vessel punctured to limpidity, with each hole bored by some unique malice of the classical style to such degeneration so as no nectar however graced may keep him filled! Pugin is just one of these sorts of acolytes and his fanatic plans of a ‘Gothicised’ London to bright a new piousness within the West amounts to little surprise, though when proposed into corporeality, its strategy flags toward putrescence. Pugin’s pastoral limbo, woven in the sweated, dreamless sleep that he, each night, devotes to the see Fathers in distant Rome, is rather (to combine our examples) as if the grim ‘Lady of Paris’ were somehow in each detail duplicated and subsequently, with enormous tackles, upended and hoist upon its sister -- a monster seeming for all the world to have sprung inverted from its seeded sibling, from her horned crowns; a tumor’d twin, these Siamese, scalped in a grandly flat second and identical basement chattering skinless shed and weirdly high above the grey streets of Paris; the feral cyst, this noma somehow leapt from the nether of blindness to coax a moral gene… we weep the centuries out our eyes for any man bent to God from cancer.”


Within Schwender’s manuscript, the preceding paragraphs were accompanied by an inset etching (assumed to have been his) labeled “The Feral Cyst or Pugin’s Proposal Illustrated in its Effect” The impassioned paragraphs here quoted were originally written in condemnation of A.W.N. Pugin’s stated theories concerning a country-wide Gothic revisitism. Schwender’s source for the “outrageous” supposition was taken from Pugin’s publication the year prior in which he outlines the desirable influences a “…newly and wholly Gothic London” would have on its inhabitants not to be limited to excessive health, piety, crime reduction and “… grace beyond any sense in the brow of our Lord God”.
Of interest to me however, is Schwender’s bizarrely trance-like etching of Notre-Dame (Schwender’s etching is not in fact based on the visage of Notre Dame of Paris but instead borrows certain elements of its ornamentation combined with those of possibly Mantes Cathedral or another of Notre Dame’s sister chapels of varying similarity; the reason for this discrepancy or confusion with the example he explicitly gives within the text – either by mistake or puzzling intention – is unknown).