Within the craggy walls of the town, the activities of the day drew to a halt. The gathering knew what was about to take place just outside the city walls. They were ready, waiting at the designated place, anticipating bizarre proceedings. The townspeople congregated in the square at the yawning mouth of the colossal priory that had dominated the mountainous skyline for hundreds of years. For now, this edifice, a perplexing pastiche of Norman and Gothic architecture, remained intact. Villagers had heard whispers of cathedrals, abbeys and monasteries laid to waste remorselessly, burnt and pillaged. Official actions had not yet begun and at this glum hour of the morning, the intended events were masked by the bustling prosaic tableaux of the square: mothers with squirming children, studious young men, pensive sallow clerics muttering anxiously between themselves.
Wander past the heavy willow doors. Through serpentine passageways lies the monastic library, in which the great undertaking had begun. Books and codices on a great many number of subjects were heaved callously into carts. Vellum manuscripts once handled with the gentleness of a new and tentative lover spilled onto the stone floor, crushed beneath heavy feet. Chapters of the Old Testament in its original Hebrew, Arabic treaties on optics, manuscripts of English church music and elaborately illustrated medical dissertations.
It was to be a private execution of blaspheming texts: here the written word suffers the very same physical agony as a heretic or a revolutionary. Remaining books were ravaged for the most startlingly quotidian of purposes, paper torn away to polish boots, elaborately gilded bindings were melted down for household use, Vellum parchment used as a protective wrapping for the transportation of perishable food. The gruesome syncretism of taking a slab of meat cleaved open — slippery with blood and membrane — to be sheathed in a second skin of leather parchment, littered with the creeping tendrils of fragmented sentences.
Here the destruction of the library will not be discussed in detail: the event of the burning, displayed to the village public, is not what this writing concerns. It must be mentioned, however, that the event adopted the bombastic and theatrical spectacle expected from a tragic play, not a civic undertaking. It is almost impossible to conceive of such a wealth of printed matter — so enticing to combustion — decimated in this way. Libraries have the inherent vice; the very substances books are made up of contributes to their very destruction.
Katie Paine, An image for reference (After the dissolution of the monasteries), 2020, Ink and Pencil. Image Courtesy: Aaron Christopher Rees
It was not practical for all the volumes to be heaved into the square to meet their fiery death. Hours later, in the hush of twilight, those that remained were taken to a nearby pasture. Pyres were assembled like eerie follies, ornaments in a madman’s garden. An onlooker crept through the dark to watch out from hedgerows and amongst the branches of trees. As the last bell tolled marking the passing of an ash-strewn hour, this once gargantuan body of knowledge sat reduced to the finest of pale powder. What was known as Henry IIIV’s Dissolution of the Monasteries depleted the priory’s carefully assembled library of 600 tomes, to just three. Only one curious volume was spared the conflagration, absconded with the most stealthy of grasping hands: an old woman hunched over a walking stick.
It is a conundrum, to describe this text. To have called it one volume was a gross misrepresentation, but to call it two is also a deceit. A single-story unfurling across a pair of books. Why this curious text eluded its scorched fate, why it was banished in the first place is not entirely clear as it seemed to be more whimsical, more uncanny than profane. This book has fascinated archivists for its odd contents, certainly, but also for its narrow escape. The very fact it was condemned as deviant is what makes it enthralling: to publicly denounce knowledge is to simultaneously admit its formidable potential.
Neither volume followed the other in chronological order, in fact, read alone neither book made any sense at all. For if one was to inspect them closely they would see that each page corresponded with one from its partner, two halves of the tale unfolding concurrently. The books had been wrapped and stored separately in the library, as if their alliance was diabolical, certainly, they were handled with great unease by the librarian. Even more unusually for their time, the tale was not written in the academic vernacular of Latin or Greek, but in a local dialect. For some languages are sanctioned when others are not, some languages carry with them the might and endorsement of the establishment.
Entrance to a tunnel - Masada Fortress. 2019 Image Courtesy: Katie Paine.
The books told the tale of a pair of lovers considered threatening by the city in which they lived. It was never specified, but there was something other-worldly — or monstrous perhaps — about their union that inspired fear in their neighbours. Cast out of the city, the two hid in catacombs. Walled up, they slipped into a deep sleep. They awoke centuries later to find themselves lost, apart from one another, having slept all this time. The subterranean structure was not large — the lovers must not have been far from one another but when one cannot lay eyes on their love, cannot hear their voice, or reach out to graze skin the isolation is pulverising.
How this anomalous pair were so feared in their community was not made explicit in the prose of the manuscript: almost as if the lovers’ profound strangeness should be readily understood outside of words. The book’s lyrical, considered prose and accompanying illuminations evoked a complex world that was somehow known in the body. Language to cast indelible images.
Strange pairings like this seem to echo across the years. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff clutching at the limp and pale body of Catherine as he lays her in her grave: a ghostly coupling so troubling it becomes a compulsion that transcends logic, defies all propriety. Theirs is a union that from its conception curses one another and all that surrounds them. Heathcliff sobs: ‘Do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you’. Or the coupling of Oberon and Titania in A Midsummers Night’s Dream, embarking on games with a romantic logic inscrutable to bystanders. Cryptic dalliances in a forest that sits outside of time: floodlit full moon in one scene, plunged into the gloom of a waning moon the next. The climax of their mad tryst culminating with Titania’s slumbering body lain in the arms of the actor Bottom, made a fool with his donkey’s head.
Lovers haunt the periphery. Perhaps banishment is considered such a catastrophic punishment because to be expelled from the centre towards the margins is unbearable. The institution is the most culpable of such purges. A hostile body. The human body is made spongy in places, brittle in others within the immense, gaping corpus of administration. We are not cradled: letters of the law, the state, the institution are not home for us. We hold one another inside this treacherous place. The sharp edge of the serif of an A rubs the shoulder raw, the sleek margin of a hyphen punctures the womb. The porous body of a passage of prose. The tongue of a scrawled sentence slick and darting, disconcerting. The kind of contact bureaucratic institutions enact is ostensibly gentle or benign, but it carries with it an inherent ferocity. We know what it is that we do to one another. When our bodies collide in conflict it can be a calamity, but when words intrude on bodies, overpowering them, incapacitating them, it can be a most violent trespass.
Katie Paine, Lovers separated by the giant of time, 2018, Inkjet Print
Fig 1. A clearing of grass, whether field or cultivated garden, it is unclear: it simply resides in an enclave of space. A well, emerald with moss, inhabited with a school of salmon swimming in concentric circles through glades of dappled green water. The well is enclosed by nine hazel trees.
Fig 2. The Ouroboros: a snake devouring itself — a serene symbol surrounded by odd scrawls of elven creatures gorging on one another.
Fig 3. Lovers’ limbs entwined in sheets, their embrace unwittingly surveyed by an incarnation of Lucifer.
Fig 4. Women assemble upon buttresses of a castle, besieged by knights. Roses cascade from their fingertips onto the bristled cheeks of the advancing men. Each lady’s face is cast a peculiar and incandescent shade of green: like the verdant apparition of the green knight, approaching Sir Gawain at Arthur’s round table.
Fig 5. A woman is giving birth surrounded by her ladies in waiting. She looks to the corner of the large room in which two paintings hang: one the Madonna and her child, the other of the woman’s mother holding herself as a newborn.
Love may be the only adversary of time. In the Irish folk tale Children of Lir, the children of a King are cursed, transformed into swans and left to be battered in the rage of swollen seas for 900 years. They return to their homeland to find their father long dead. The anguish of waiting. The two volumes of the book had yearned for one another from across dusty corridors. The lovers wander the catacombs, determined to be reunited.
Katie Paine, A gift from my beloved that was not asked for but that was welcome, 2020, Watercolour Ink and Pencil
In the midst of this malevolent territory of time, how might love be retained within the body? Behind the eyes, the pit of the belly, the parting of a larynx, lips making room for sentences and phrases carried over and passed through generations. Our words found a way to meet one another far sooner than our bodies met: a tentative verbal caress.
Katie Paine is a Naarm-based artist and writer whose practice investigates systems of meaning-making, specifically the role that language and images play in constructing narrative. She has exhibited at SEVENTH Gallery, Kings ARI, c3 Contemporary Art Space, La Trobe Art Institute, Daine Singer, Irene Rose and ACMI (Channels Festival). She has written for Art + Australia, Lifted Brow, Next Wave Festival, Un Projects and Art Almanac and for a variety of art galleries. She is currently a Master of Fine Art Candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Within the craggy walls of the town, the activities of the day drew to a halt. The gathering knew what was about to take place just outside the city walls. They were ready, waiting at the designated place, anticipating bizarre proceedings. The townspeople congregated in the square at the yawning mouth of the colossal priory that had dominated the mountainous skyline for hundreds of years. For now, this edifice, a perplexing pastiche of Norman and Gothic architecture, remained intact. Villagers had heard whispers of cathedrals, abbeys and monasteries laid to waste remorselessly, burnt and pillaged. Official actions had not yet begun and at this glum hour of the morning, the intended events were masked by the bustling prosaic tableaux of the square: mothers with squirming children, studious young men, pensive sallow clerics muttering anxiously between themselves.
Wander past the heavy willow doors. Through serpentine passageways lies the monastic library, in which the great undertaking had begun. Books and codices on a great many number of subjects were heaved callously into carts. Vellum manuscripts once handled with the gentleness of a new and tentative lover spilled onto the stone floor, crushed beneath heavy feet. Chapters of the Old Testament in its original Hebrew, Arabic treaties on optics, manuscripts of English church music and elaborately illustrated medical dissertations.
It was to be a private execution of blaspheming texts: here the written word suffers the very same physical agony as a heretic or a revolutionary. Remaining books were ravaged for the most startlingly quotidian of purposes, paper torn away to polish boots, elaborately gilded bindings were melted down for household use, Vellum parchment used as a protective wrapping for the transportation of perishable food. The gruesome syncretism of taking a slab of meat cleaved open — slippery with blood and membrane — to be sheathed in a second skin of leather parchment, littered with the creeping tendrils of fragmented sentences.
Here the destruction of the library will not be discussed in detail: the event of the burning, displayed to the village public, is not what this writing concerns. It must be mentioned, however, that the event adopted the bombastic and theatrical spectacle expected from a tragic play, not a civic undertaking. It is almost impossible to conceive of such a wealth of printed matter — so enticing to combustion — decimated in this way. Libraries have the inherent vice; the very substances books are made up of contributes to their very destruction.
Katie Paine, An image for reference (After the dissolution of the monasteries), 2020, Ink and Pencil. Image Courtesy: Aaron Christopher Rees
It was not practical for all the volumes to be heaved into the square to meet their fiery death. Hours later, in the hush of twilight, those that remained were taken to a nearby pasture. Pyres were assembled like eerie follies, ornaments in a madman’s garden. An onlooker crept through the dark to watch out from hedgerows and amongst the branches of trees. As the last bell tolled marking the passing of an ash-strewn hour, this once gargantuan body of knowledge sat reduced to the finest of pale powder. What was known as Henry IIIV’s Dissolution of the Monasteries depleted the priory’s carefully assembled library of 600 tomes, to just three. Only one curious volume was spared the conflagration, absconded with the most stealthy of grasping hands: an old woman hunched over a walking stick.
It is a conundrum, to describe this text. To have called it one volume was a gross misrepresentation, but to call it two is also a deceit. A single-story unfurling across a pair of books. Why this curious text eluded its scorched fate, why it was banished in the first place is not entirely clear as it seemed to be more whimsical, more uncanny than profane. This book has fascinated archivists for its odd contents, certainly, but also for its narrow escape. The very fact it was condemned as deviant is what makes it enthralling: to publicly denounce knowledge is to simultaneously admit its formidable potential.
Neither volume followed the other in chronological order, in fact, read alone neither book made any sense at all. For if one was to inspect them closely they would see that each page corresponded with one from its partner, two halves of the tale unfolding concurrently. The books had been wrapped and stored separately in the library, as if their alliance was diabolical, certainly, they were handled with great unease by the librarian. Even more unusually for their time, the tale was not written in the academic vernacular of Latin or Greek, but in a local dialect. For some languages are sanctioned when others are not, some languages carry with them the might and endorsement of the establishment.
Entrance to a tunnel - Masada Fortress. 2019 Image Courtesy: Katie Paine.
The books told the tale of a pair of lovers considered threatening by the city in which they lived. It was never specified, but there was something other-worldly — or monstrous perhaps — about their union that inspired fear in their neighbours. Cast out of the city, the two hid in catacombs. Walled up, they slipped into a deep sleep. They awoke centuries later to find themselves lost, apart from one another, having slept all this time. The subterranean structure was not large — the lovers must not have been far from one another but when one cannot lay eyes on their love, cannot hear their voice, or reach out to graze skin the isolation is pulverising.
How this anomalous pair were so feared in their community was not made explicit in the prose of the manuscript: almost as if the lovers’ profound strangeness should be readily understood outside of words. The book’s lyrical, considered prose and accompanying illuminations evoked a complex world that was somehow known in the body. Language to cast indelible images.
Strange pairings like this seem to echo across the years. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff clutching at the limp and pale body of Catherine as he lays her in her grave: a ghostly coupling so troubling it becomes a compulsion that transcends logic, defies all propriety. Theirs is a union that from its conception curses one another and all that surrounds them. Heathcliff sobs: ‘Do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you’. Or the coupling of Oberon and Titania in A Midsummers Night’s Dream, embarking on games with a romantic logic inscrutable to bystanders. Cryptic dalliances in a forest that sits outside of time: floodlit full moon in one scene, plunged into the gloom of a waning moon the next. The climax of their mad tryst culminating with Titania’s slumbering body lain in the arms of the actor Bottom, made a fool with his donkey’s head.
Lovers haunt the periphery. Perhaps banishment is considered such a catastrophic punishment because to be expelled from the centre towards the margins is unbearable. The institution is the most culpable of such purges. A hostile body. The human body is made spongy in places, brittle in others within the immense, gaping corpus of administration. We are not cradled: letters of the law, the state, the institution are not home for us. We hold one another inside this treacherous place. The sharp edge of the serif of an A rubs the shoulder raw, the sleek margin of a hyphen punctures the womb. The porous body of a passage of prose. The tongue of a scrawled sentence slick and darting, disconcerting. The kind of contact bureaucratic institutions enact is ostensibly gentle or benign, but it carries with it an inherent ferocity. We know what it is that we do to one another. When our bodies collide in conflict it can be a calamity, but when words intrude on bodies, overpowering them, incapacitating them, it can be a most violent trespass.
Katie Paine, Lovers separated by the giant of time, 2018, Inkjet Print
Fig 1. A clearing of grass, whether field or cultivated garden, it is unclear: it simply resides in an enclave of space. A well, emerald with moss, inhabited with a school of salmon swimming in concentric circles through glades of dappled green water. The well is enclosed by nine hazel trees.
Fig 2. The Ouroboros: a snake devouring itself — a serene symbol surrounded by odd scrawls of elven creatures gorging on one another.
Fig 3. Lovers’ limbs entwined in sheets, their embrace unwittingly surveyed by an incarnation of Lucifer.
Fig 4. Women assemble upon buttresses of a castle, besieged by knights. Roses cascade from their fingertips onto the bristled cheeks of the advancing men. Each lady’s face is cast a peculiar and incandescent shade of green: like the verdant apparition of the green knight, approaching Sir Gawain at Arthur’s round table.
Fig 5. A woman is giving birth surrounded by her ladies in waiting. She looks to the corner of the large room in which two paintings hang: one the Madonna and her child, the other of the woman’s mother holding herself as a newborn.
Love may be the only adversary of time. In the Irish folk tale Children of Lir, the children of a King are cursed, transformed into swans and left to be battered in the rage of swollen seas for 900 years. They return to their homeland to find their father long dead. The anguish of waiting. The two volumes of the book had yearned for one another from across dusty corridors. The lovers wander the catacombs, determined to be reunited.
Katie Paine, A gift from my beloved that was not asked for but that was welcome, 2020, Watercolour Ink and Pencil
In the midst of this malevolent territory of time, how might love be retained within the body? Behind the eyes, the pit of the belly, the parting of a larynx, lips making room for sentences and phrases carried over and passed through generations. Our words found a way to meet one another far sooner than our bodies met: a tentative verbal caress.
Katie Paine is a Naarm-based artist and writer whose practice investigates systems of meaning-making, specifically the role that language and images play in constructing narrative. She has exhibited at SEVENTH Gallery, Kings ARI, c3 Contemporary Art Space, La Trobe Art Institute, Daine Singer, Irene Rose and ACMI (Channels Festival). She has written for Art + Australia, Lifted Brow, Next Wave Festival, Un Projects and Art Almanac and for a variety of art galleries. She is currently a Master of Fine Art Candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts.
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Runway Journal is produced by a voluntary board and pay our contributors above industry rates. If you have found some delight in this content, please consider a one-time or recurring monthly donation.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches.
We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway is supported by