10 – What do cathedrals, churches, mosques, shrines, synagogues, and other religious monuments inspire in you?

Ted Hughes used to berate street preachers, telling them he didn't want religion, he wanted god. A mainline to the wellspring of the universe.

I feel that churches and shrines are misguided attempts to capture part of this energy, god-traps, always empty. Like trying to catch the sun with a mirror. The vast volumes of cathedrals, inspire nothing different than the vast volumes of aircraft hangers, or the strange giant-large corridors of the colossal American convention centres whose halls can swallow thousands. Whatever else was there in the cathedrals, if anything ever was, has fled, faded, been forgotten.

I've been in the halls of evangelical christians, seen the people enthused, infused (confused) by the holy spirit. But emptied, the halls are just halls. A place cannot hold on to that feeling.

Shrines are different.

And I'm not talking about the catholic roadside tat that spots the French roadside. I'm talking about the weird personal shrines that reflect a single person's attempt to come to terms with the world and the shocks of unhinging experience, the peeks behind the flapping curtain of the sky, the totems that anchor direct and often terrifying personal experience of god to a place and time on earth.

That almost sounds positive, but I find them deeply unsettling. The distinctive oddness of so many of them - a characteristic they share with outsider art - highlights the contingency of every single aspect of our society. People like to imagine that if we could run time through again what we'd get in the way of society and custom would be pretty much what we currently have, just a different roll of the dice. What these show is that when you roll the dice the dice turn into screaming inchoate tentacle and tooth monstrosities that eat your eyes.

It also makes me feel strangely happy that we have organised religion to channel these impulses in most people who experience them. A state of divinely inspired anarchy is scarcely worth contemplating and probably wouldn't last too long.

I also find more temporary expressions unnerving. One summer while bouldering in the fontainbleau forest we came across an... offering, I guess, of fruit in a clear, flat space between the rocks. There was something about it that unsettled me. The overripe, flyblown fruit was obviously unwholesome. The careful arrangement, the remote location, all seemed to radiate meaning like a lode of uranium, twisting the world around it.