The Cathedral of San Francisco

It's a dead heart in the middle of the city. It's dead because if you were to cut it nothing would bleed from it. The gash would just sit gaping open like the mouth of a fish after suffocation. It's cold despite its earthly red color which would otherwise connote heat. The dichotomy doesn't work. The color would make you believe it should still beat, it should still feed the city with warm life. But it doesn't. It sits lifeless save that warm color of blood that covers the walls. The blood scabbed over long ago, to the point that now the Cathedral of San Francisco has begun peeling. Flakes of scab exfoliate off the walls revealing fresh pink flesh underneath. The wine colored paint chips are crushed into the sidewalk by passersby. The chips mix with dog feces and cigarette butts. They are the sands at the base of the temple, the sign of age and deterioration. Perhaps that's where the cold lifelessness comes from, from the fact that it is in the process of death, or ruin, or of being forgotten.

The city of Salta ignores its heart save a few religious nuts that still go in to pray. They're nuts because only madness would lead you to want to enter that sanguine structure. It's a house of God that has graffiti on the walls and smells of urine. It's piety is issued, not felt. Even the convent attached to it, tumor like, seems atheistic. I have not seen the nuns inside that are rumored to live there. Nor have I heard their prayers. Has God?

The pedestrians that walk by seem to have already forgotten it as the life organ of the city. There is little reminder of the heavenly, just pollution choked streets that extend from the crimson mass like black arteries. Its superior vena cava is a byway. The left subclavian is a mess of motorcycles and vintage Mercedes. It's a circulatory system filled with swarming flies and exhaust, extending to the ends of the city where finally the veins can release the chaos and breath.

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I like the Cathedral of San Francisco. Sure it doesn't sound like it, what with all the death and filth metaphors. But I like it like I love Picasso's Guernica, which is about the massacre of innocent townspeople in the Basque Country. I stood and stared at that painting for half an hour, not able to take my eyes of it. I did the same with the Cathedral of San Francisco in Salta, Argentina. There is emotion in it. Emotion that does not have to come from optimism or from the conventions of what you are supposed to like. You're not supposed to like dead hearts...but you do like the color crimson, you like ruins, you like antique like deterioration. I like the idea of a cold religious temple. There is something telling in the idea, something darkly playful.

I suggest a visit to the cathedral if you get a chance. How would you describe it?