Babel
The story goes, once we all had a common language and spoke the same mother tongue and all was harmony. The people said to themselves let us make a tower so we can be as tall as God and maybe we can be as great as he is or greater, and so they built together, gathering materials, and they made it strong and they made it high.

Stained glass windows, columns of pure gold, mosaics of turquoise and cobalt, staircases of marble, it was a marvel to behold, nothing compared either before or after the skill and craft that went in to the tower of Babel. They reached as high as the first layer of cumulus and the atmosphere started to get thin and become cold. They were wondering how to continue.

But God reached in his basket and pulled out coloured birds by the handful and threw them up free into to air, each one different and varied, each one with a different song. The birds flew down to the builders of the tower, like a rainbow shower. The birds sang so beautifully, so loud that the workers could not hear each other speak.

The highest scaffolder turned to a brickie and said, what is this marvel? But the brickie could not understand him, what did you say? He asked the scaffolder looked baffled he didn’t understand a word. And so with the lack of understanding and language, building work stopped. The pointers, chippies, sparkies, roofers, plasterers all got down from their places on the scaffolding mystified and went back home, and the tower was never finished and that is why we love a ruin and why we speak in different languages and tongues.


ink drawings by Frances Norton 2017

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