A Candle For Mike

It was the dark look in Kafka’s eyes. A warning. “You might think that taking the train to Mechelen tomorrow will be an easy trip, brief, barely eventful,” they seemed to say staring out at me from the lampshade in the basement of the Parliamentarium, “but trust me, you’ll feel the frustration of sitting in a dark tunnel waiting for the stopped train to move, and then when it moves and stops again, you’ll undergo the frenzied absurdity of rushing up and down stairs and stalled escalators to different platforms, and different tracks as you try to match changing arrival times with changing destinations.”

Ella will give you the details. The journey was nothing if not Kafkaesque.

Mechelen is a town where restored beauty, in this case 16th century architecture (with some 14th & 15th century cathedrals looming in the background), is an excuse for turning old buildings into boutiques and attracting people who don’t want the clatter of industry getting in the way of shopping.

My goal was to find St. John’s Church. I had to cut across a large square where the Grote Markt was packing up. (Probably thriving and crowded with visitors while we were still sitting on our train in the dark tunnel.)

I went down a cobbled side street that was being worked on (cobbles seem to need a lot of maintenance) and then veered into an alley. There it was, nothing fancy, nothing Gothic, just a modest structure in the land of ornate ostentation. Inside was a tryptych altar piece painted by Rubens.

It was melodramatic in the typical florid Rubens fashion, but it was also dark and colorful at the same time. There’s a miracle happening, Rubens seems to say, but it’s the mystery behind it that makes it holy. The shady altar reminded me of the dark Rockefeller Chapel that was background to the Sunday morning ritual my brother and I grew up with at the University of Chicago.

My only brother, Mike. He died unexpectedly last week. He had just turned eighty-three. I lit a candle for him. It was an electric candle. An involved member of the Menlo Paark branch of IEE , he would have appreciated that. No guttering flame, no runny wax. A candle with a light that will last as long as the batteries keeping it going, a light in the foreground of a dark, mysterious beauty.