HEAVEN UNDERFOOT

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Looking at that picture, I supposed the Arno had flooded the baptistery in some ancient season when Providence was occupied elsewhere. A river has little respect for consecrated property. Give it sufficient rain and it will baptize the bishop along with the furniture.

But it was the floor that interested me.

Forty years ago, in a Christian religious shop in Madras, I bought a curious object: a yantra of the cross. I had expected Christianity to keep its machinery behind the pulpit. Here was a specimen offered for sale.

Yantra is commonly translated as “machine” or “instrument,” which struck me as an honest name for a sacred article. It promises an operation without first requiring a committee to declare a mystery.

For years it sat on my desk at work. Now it is buried among my possessions. By “buried” I mean that an expedition might recover it, provided the expedition had funding and no dependents.

Then I went to Florence.

The baptistery, older than the cathedral beside it, had patterns in its pavement that reminded me of my little Christian machine. I went to the Tribuna in the Uffizi and found geometry conducting similar business there.

I investigated and came away understanding that the pattern represented heaven.

This was a considerable discovery. I had spent my childhood looking upward for the place and was now informed that I had been walking over it.

After that, the design followed me through paintings. Once a man purchases a particular hat, every stranger owns one. Once he discovers heaven in a pavement, the museums become positively congested with eternity.

At Pisa I noticed panels on the leaning tower bearing shapes I could almost have taken for a yantra of Ganesha. I do not offer this as an archaeological conclusion. Archaeologists possess measuring instruments; I possessed a suspicion and comfortable shoes.

Still, I wondered.

Had the same pattern traveled? Had different people arrived at it independently? Or was my mind carrying a stencil through Europe and applying it to every respectable wall?

A man ought to consider the last possibility, especially when the first two make him feel learned.

Meanwhile the tower leaned on, indifferent to whether its ornaments belonged to heaven, India, or the mason who had collected his wages for them.

That was what troubled me about the journey. I could never get the buildings to explain themselves. They had stood for centuries accepting interpretations from passersby and had acquired the admirable habit of making no reply.