Color and Light

Part I

“It just seems so touristy,” she stated, probably unaware that anyone else in the room could understand her.

I wait for the irony to dawn on her. She’s in an amber shop in the Gdansk Old Town and is concerned that the shop is too heavily designed to cater to tourists. However, it doesn’t sink in. 

“Don’t YOU think it’s a little touristy?” she repeats, waiting for her male companion to agree.

I stand close-by, perhaps drawn by their English, gazing at a rack of immaculate amber rosaries with little silver crucifixes. The weather has just turned warm and the stones remind me of sunlight. I struggle to resist a childish impulse to touch them, to create enough energy to get them clack against each other. Antique and transparent, there is something undeniable in their beauty, a simplicity that I usually feel rosaries lack. Realistically, the amber (if it is real) supersedes the crucifix, the idea of the crucifix, and religion in general. Millions of years of hardening has turned tree resin into this: a piece of jewelry that brings one closer to God by grasping something almost as old, nearly as infinite as prayers dissolve like ringing bells in the cosmos above a chapel.

For a moment, I’m almost fooled.

She does have a point. The shop is overtly designed to cater to those with access to disposable income and poor impulse control. However, I’m baffled to think of who would buy some of these items. From the ceiling hangs an amber chandelier, garish, gauche, and bordello. Beyond bordello. It has all the good taste of some Wild Western Saloon with a promiscuous name like “The Birdcage” or “The Dusty Rose,” the kind of place that ensures everything can be bought with the right amount of money and subtlety. I imagine for a moment trying to bring it back to the states, filling the space in my suitcase for an amber light piece, ghastly but somehow lovely in its unabashed confidence, its whiskey-colored unexpectedness. There would be odd looks from customs agents, shrugs, and laughs on my end as I lugged it back home where it would no doubt hang in a closet that I’d never open again.

Nearby, there are tiffany lamps with panes alternating between mother-of-pearl and amber, illuminated from the inside, filling the room with a burnt-red glow that makes me grateful for the thaw from winter.

The woman finally tires of his silence and walks out the door.

The man looks around, and, although he sees me, slips an amber rosary into his pocket.

He winks and follows her out into the white light of three o’clock.

Part II

I’ve always distrusted churches.

Particularly, I’ve always distrusted opulent churches. The layers of paint, flake gold, and deep caverns stained by colored glass seem subversive, designed to keep people from noticing something quite obvious.

To their credit, size and color are effectively distracting.
I’ve seen churches house everything from fingers of saints (Budapest), the arm of a thief (Prague), and even stone grottos (Washington). None of these surprises were welcome. Decadence and body parts, like size and color, can hide anything if you are clever enough with their placement.

However, this was one church that seemed unwilling to hide a thing.

The building had, I am told, been destroyed in the War (what hadn’t been?). The towers served as chimneys for the fires inside the chapel, melting bricks, and collapsing a ceiling. It seems improbable now. The vaulted arches seem absurdly high, threatening, and difficult to look at. A dull-colored crucifix dominates the sanctuary. The pews are wooden and the walls are ghost-white. The windows are clear, spilling sunshine in erect pools across the room and revealing whatever there is to see. There are, of course, alters, shrines, and presumably monuments to saints, and the departed. An astronomical clock stands in the corner, saints and stars combined in one magnificent piece of machinery.

There’s nothing left to be illuminated and it makes me anxious to leave.

I exit through a side door, overwhelmed by the honesty a building can have when no one bothers to color it in.