A Journey into the Crypt of S. Maria Concezione (Creative Writing Assignment #4)

Emerging from the threshold we are again in Rome. Cars and buses slide past in the mild morning air. Down on the steps below a gypsy woman with a sleeping infant begs for coins. A group of muttering tourists pick their way along the sidewalk. These are the objects of every Roman day, they are comforting in their ubiquity. But the paint has begun to flake on the images before us, just as it has from the massive green doors that stand as sentinels on so many Roman streets. Already looking at the gypsy woman we can see something that we had not noticed before. Below the skin, beyond in time. Our eyes will not show us this future, this continuity. But after the crypt we know that the eyes hide and distort a great deal.

Hallucination differs from other types of vision in that it is necessarily a product of the mind. It is a trick that one plays upon oneself unconsciously. In the crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione there are no hallucinations. Could our minds have dreamt up these contortions of the senses? Like the vertebrae that swirl about its ceiling, this place has a way of twisting around and through every expectation. We walk forward and back while chandeliers of tailbones hover above our heads. We observe the piles of femur bones stacked meticulously. On the walls ribs sprout into blotched ivory flowers, walls of skulls play with the light to create delicate patterns. The dried monks continue to penitently pray as they have for so many years now, their brittle-skinned hands wired tightly together.

Here there are no hallucinations for there are only two elements whose existence is undeniable: death and beauty. This space is a crypt but it might also be a temple to the two essential qualities of life. The medieval mind would have approved of this place. We may try to believe that these countless fragments of so many humans are only a hallucination, but what they say to us cannot be called hallucination for both will eventually assert themselves onto us. When we see the frail skeleton of the Princess, holding her bone hourglass, we see a matrix of calcium deposits, but we also see through to death and beauty.

The monks who made this place made it as a “memory palace” of the simplest sort. There are only two memories that this subterranean complex preserves. They are present in the tailbones that weave their way across the ceiling, in the distorted and hollow faces of men who knew that eventually they would contribute the fabric of their existence to creating a memory for someone else. Here we are, surrounded by the dead, imposed on by the dead.

This place cannot be left to words. The word “human bone” is so common and the experience so rare that the word and object no longer mean the same thing. We read “bone” and picture a Halloween decoration, we see a cross formed from finger bones and we experience something very different. The monks must have known this, known that when we left the crypt, we would be able to see, if only for a short time, the death and beauty in the outside world.

Leaving the crypt feels like returning to a hallucination. The gypsy woman’s infant has woken and is crying. The cars and buses slide past, dragging with them the cares of the day. Yet if we are careful we may be able to sway to one side of this mixture of hallucination and reality, to see what the medieval mind could have seen, to see what it already knew existed beyond the sight of our everyday eyes.