this too

PILGRIMAGE (V) - DEVIL

As following a path inexorably becomes a metaphor for life, so, as in life, inexorably, bad stuff happens as well as good. My bad stuff happened on a deserted path through scrubby woods not far from the city of Burgos .

I was humming happily, high on my detour to Silos, where landscape, church and the voices of the monks were golden, when a pale, meagre man, visibly high on something a lot nastier, appeared from behind a tree waving a big knife, took all my money and kept on wielding the knife for quite some time, while wildly threatening rape and violence. I was numb, paralysed by shock, and unresponsive – boringly so, I think, as eventually he stopped raving, sheathed his knife and wandered off, leaving me to stomp onward to the next village and phone the guardia.

The guardias civiles, a lingering relic of pre-democratic Spain. Eleven years ago, though probably not now, the older guardias were themselves left over from those times, as anomalous and as comic-but-menacing as their funny plastic tricornes. So I didn’t relish calling them out, but, miles from anywhere with no money (though my assailant hadn’t wanted my credit card – that would have meant the end of my trip), needing a lift to a cash machine and needing a crime report if I wanted to claim my lost money on my travel insurance, I had no choice.

So I marched – on automatic pilot still – to the next village and into the bar, and demanded their phone. The elderly guardia who came, accompanied by his wife, in an ancient jeep, was in a very bad mood, having been called away from his family Sunday lunch. You can guess the burden of his discourse, I’m sure: a woman walking alone in the countryside was clearly ‘asking for it’. The following several hours in the isolated ‘barracks’ were almost as nasty as the attack. The difference between cuchillo (kitchen knife) and navaja (hunting knife) is engraved for ever on my mind – rattled, I first used the wrong word. “A gitano, a gypsy, was he?” “No, definitely not a gitano!” – and much more such unhelpful discussion, along with the caricature of the rural policeman typing out his crime report very slowly with one finger… I was deeply grateful to the younger guardia who came on duty later, drove me back to Burgos to an ATM, and back again to the village and its refugio.

By unhappy chance, for the single time on my walk, I was the only pilgrim that night in the small, untended building with half a dozen beds. I locked the door and didn’t sleep, and wondered if I would be able to go on.

I did go on, the next morning, stiffly, wretchedly, through a flat agricultural landscape, thankful to be in open fields and trying not to look constantly over my shoulder in fear. It’s extremely rare to be robbed on the Camino. I was unlucky, you might say.  Well, as it turned out...

 VI - Angel...

PILGRIMAGE (IV) - CHOICELESS AWARENESS

Puente la Reina

The Pyrenees are a hard start, but a great one because once you’re over that (and over sleeping with twenty strange men), you pretty much know you’ll continue. A great start, too, because they are silent, grandiose and soaringly lovely, and you know there are more such wild, joyous landscapes to come… although not for a while. For the first few days in Spain the landscape was very varied: green foothills, pretty villages, not-at-all pretty villages, considerable time spent walking through prickly brush and along melting, roaring main roads in the endless peripheries of Pamplona, not to mention the afternoon spent skirting an isolated factory, where murky, viscous effluent trickled all around and across the path. Gulp. Spain in its endless variety, and many forcible reminders of what an extremely hard, rocky, prickly country it is!

I don’t drive a car and have always walked everywhere, in town and country. But the thing about a long, linear path is that it has to continue no matter what, so it takes you where you’d never normally choose to walk. And you keep going – no option. What a long walk has, though, is rhythm. It has joy and satisfaction, too, even on a bad day. A bad day is a good day when it’s over. So the good/bad duality, the instant evaluation, starts to be eroded.

When I summon sensory memories of the Camino, so much comes rushing back: sand, rock, rain and heat, prickly scrub and panting uphill… and the texture of cheap, slightly sticky nylon bedspreads. Walkers’ hostels that are free or extremely cheap, run by churches or local authorities, were sometimes furnished with loving care, more often a parade of the discarded and the tacky. They were sometimes not too clean, and you never knew who you might wake up next to. And they were palaces, cherished homes for a night, exquisite nests for exhausted bodies. Many years later, I read in Buddhist texts about ‘choiceless awareness’ – just experiencing the stream of phenomena as they are, not rushing to classify and judge. It’s a tough concept for the children of consumer society. A difficult concept, but not so difficult in reality. Here is the only available bed in a one-horse place and you need to lie down on it now, soft or lumpy, clean or grubby, alone in a cavernous dormitory or cramped in dubious company. You have no choice. And it’s fine. It’s a liberation.

I went walking on the Camino alone, over forty, and not particularly fit. A daft, graceless enterprise, it was, with low expectations. Of course, I’d limp and sigh and linger while taller, fitter, younger more experienced walkers would keep passing me and disappearing over the horizon. They did. And that was a liberation too. Only this path, this time, these aims and obstacles, and a miraculous, relieved arrival somewhere every day.

Eunate, photo by Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James

I’m so glad I set off alone, for so many reasons. You aren’t really alone, of course, on a path walked by so many – far fewer eleven years ago than walk it now, but still I never went a day without meeting other pilgrims, walking and on bicycles. In October, outside the Summer holiday season, some were young and unemployed; some, like the bank-manager and the psychiatrist, had left their jobs and were unsure what next; many were newly retired from work and free for the first time ever to leave home for many weeks, people like S and E, who left their home beside Lake Geneva on foot the day after E finished work on his 60^th birthday. They set out accoutred with Swiss comfort and precision. By the time I met them several weeks later, they’d posted home their sleeping bags, all their books except the Spanish dictionary and most of their clothes. They each had one change of underwear only, and when it wore in holes they looked up the Spanish for knickers and purchased more

I could speak to most of the pilgrims in English, French or Spanish. Being much in demand as a translator made up for my slow pace and small daily distances. Fit, fast walkers could cover 25 or 30 miles in a day. I, on the hard, stony, uphill-downhill path, with my stuff on my back, could cover 12 or 15 miles, and more than once I had to stop for a day, my feet swollen, burning and leaden.

Quickly, though it was wonderful. New friends and new landscapes every day. Movement, achievement, variety sufficient unto themselves. Life reduced to the path, and the path as a metaphor for life. Just one foot in front of the other. Choiceless awareness.

In the Rioja vineyards, near Logroño: photo by Michael Krier

PILGRIMAGE (III) - CHEATING ON THE FIRST DAY

A good place to start, if you didn’t have time to begin as far away as Le Puy or Vézelay in central France, was St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, on the French side of the Pyrenees. You walk on the first day over the mountains, crossing the frontier into Spain, and spend the first night at the monastery in a place of great historic and literary resonance, Roncesvalles (great website, worth exploring).

I knew St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, having visited there while on a seaside camping holiday at St-Jean-de-Luz. A pretty, familiar town, it felt like an easy place to start. It is the hardest place to start. Day one, on unaccustomed legs, with an unaccustomed back-pack, right over the Pyrenees, with nowhere to stop until you reach the other side.

The road begins to climb right outside the town, and the scenery is glorious: rocky peaks, lush mountain grass and clean air. It’s hard walking. Hours and hours, with still no sight of the summit and the pass into Spain. Painful breath and heavy legs. Oh god, I wasn’t going to make this – all a terrible mistake!

I was sitting on the roadside when up drew a shepherd and his dog in what had once been a car. It still went, with a bump and clang, but now had no doors. Did I want a lift to the pass - it was all downhill from there? I did. This was 'not allowed' of course, the whole point being to do it on your own two feet. But it was that or giving up on the first day. No one saw me hop in and hang on tight, or scramble out again a few minutes later and squint upwards as he pointed out a clump of trees and rocks: "that’s the frontier; then it’s all down hill through the forest".

It was all down hill then, indeed, a long and mysterious walk through the oak forests to Roncesvalles - the fear of not making it to the summit replaced by the fear of getting lost among the ghosts of Roland and his army.

Towards a stream that flowed amid that land
Sones fell Gue into perdition black
All his sinews were strained until they snapped
And all the limbs were from his body dragged
On the green grass his clear blood gushed and ran

(Read the Chanson de Roland in the original Old French, and in English translation – and another translation. I’m sure there are versions now that read better to modern ears, but not on line).

The first sight of the monastery’s outline in the early evening – oh! And then the shock: unisex dormitories. Large and cramped, with large, sweaty bodies, and some of these guys could snore for, well, for wherever they were from. I slept. It was fine. As much a rite of passage as reaching the mountain pass.

In retrospect, I don’t think it was cheating to take that lift on the first day – the only one I took. I wasn’t going to make it, if he hadn’t come along. The Spanish bank-manager told me later how he’d been laid up for a day with a bad knee, and then taken a lift for 20 miles to catch up with his new friend the Dutch psychiatrist, so they could continue the walk together. I don’t think that, done for love, was cheating either.

Photos of the Pyrenees by Maureen Measure and of Roncesvalles by Michael Krier, UK Confraternity of St James.

More to come, but not one post for every day of the walk...

PILGRIMAGE (II) - WHY?

I’m not sure we ever know why, really. Perhaps it always goes deeper than the mind can stretch.

There’s my first ever visit to Spain, in 1973, when I was 19, with S. I loved S. Looking back, I would have liked to marry her. But women weren’t marrying women in those days. I’d never have thought of such a thing in relation to myself, and I’ve never felt that way about a woman since. But I loved S – oh yes, a lot. So the thoughts and memories of that time are intense. We were two bright working-class girls, all at sea in Cambridge, which was much less cosmopolitan than it is now, but still most of our fellow students of modern languages had grown up in more than one country, while we had scarcely been out of England. We knew so little about anything, had no idea where we should go in our first long university Summer vacation.

The FEVE route - nearly all the way to Santiago

S had been brought up Catholic and must have known about Santiago de Compostela. It must have been her idea, I think, to travel on the FEVE (nice website), the slow, extremely cheap narrow-gauge railway all along the North coast of Spain. I don’t remember much detail of that journey, having then none of the assumptions or reference points I look for now. We found extremes of picturesque and horrible in Franco’s Spain – fantastic kindness and closed minds, dusty poverty and smelly drains.

On the long, slow train journey we saw a few walker pilgrims, returning from Santiago. They were grimy and wind-burned: very exotic. I can see them now. So it goes back as far as that. 

More than twenty years later, the name of a dearly beloved novelist, David Lodge, as presenter led me to watch a TV documentary about the Camino. (He published soon after a lovely, lovely novel featuring the Camino, ‘Therapy’, wherein a successful but unhappy middle-aged man…) On TV, the Camino looked beautiful, interesting and in places intriguingly remote. I knew a lot of the world a little by then, and Spain quite well. But I’d never been back to the green, rural and industrial North.

But neither of these was the immediate reason. That was the commonest one: overwork, middle age and an inchoate longing for ‘something else’. I’d been working 12 years for the politicians. We all worked like shit and never took all our annual leave. I was owed several months, so requesting one month was not unreasonable. “I’d like the whole of October off”, I was surprised to hear myself say.

 III – Cheating on the first day…

PILGRIMAGE (I) - SACRED PLACES

This is the church of Santa María, a crumbling, impressive, beguiling 12^th century Romanesque wonder in the small town of Carrión de los Condes, Palencia, Spain, on the Camino de Santiago. It’s where I discovered that a non-believer doesn’t have to dislike churches.

Dale mentioned pilgrimage, reminding me that I’d been meaning for the longest time to write about the Camino de Santiago.

I meant to when Udge was travelling along the Camino and walking parts of it in May this year. On his return home, Udge wrote: "I have much to think about, and much to do, after this trip: certain things have been put into new perspectives, and certain changes must be made”.

I meant to when Tamar wrote movingly of her long walk along Hadrian’s Wall in June. " It was more than just the walk”, Tamar wrote, after describing the long days, the rain and mud and throbbing muscles, the huge physical and emotional achievement of completing such a tough walk. "It actually did not have to do with whether I could make it or not. It had to do with something deeply emotional inside me. A culmination of self-alteration and reflection work these past four or five years or so… All the way there, during the long days of walking, and in the nights as I fell into a deep, fitful, dream-filled sleep, I knew I was preparing to say goodbye…. I am no longer connected. It is not that I need to disconnect. I am, already, dis-connected. Free. Beyond all that. It has taken place. I just don't care any more. The exclusion of me has been so complete that I am now, by choice, dis-connected. No need for major decisions or acts of re-action. It is done. I have, in fact, moved on. No need for big decisions, dramatic actions. It is done ... I came to say goodbye - but that, too, was done. In March. Between January and March. Six months after fifty seven and a half years of learning how I came to be who I am”.

Such are the reflections of thoughtful people who have been on, or even touched, a pilgrimage.

With the big subjects, it’s hard to know where to start. I flicked through some websites and found these photos, was back there in a flash. If you can’t find a beginning, start in the middle.

Early evening, mid October 1996, Carrión de los Condes. It had been a wet day’s walking. Water dripped from the lime trees outside the refugio, the hostel for pilgrims walking to Santiago de Compostela, which adjoined the church. The plaza, which must have been normally dusty and sandy, was churning mud. The refugio’s occupants for that night were in the bar across the road, clustered round a bottle of red wine and a plate of chorizo slices. The old Swedish hippy, the middle-aged Spanish bank-manager, the young Dutch psychiatrist, and me.

The refugio’s fifth occupant, the young French airline executive, the only practising Catholic among us, had gone to early evening Mass and would join us soon for dinner. Here he was, in fact. The old hippy waved him expansively to the empty seat and moved to fill his glass. But the young man hovered in the doorway.

"The priest has sent me to fetch you all for a tour of the church", he said. Oh. We thought we’d made it clear before Mass. No. Really. H, the young Frenchman (of whom more later) gave me a rueful look: "He’ll be over here himself if you don’t come. I don’t think he takes no for an answer. He says all the pilgrims always…". He spoke in a mixture of Spanish and French, with me translating rapidly into English for the Swede and the Dutchman. We looked at one another and sighed. The priest and his sister were our hosts, a bed in the refugio free to anyone walking the Camino. We got to our weary feet, confided the wine and chorizo to the barman, who was smiling and nodding, filed out and across the square.

The priest was waiting, small in his black cassock and beret, dwarfed by the fine, ancient doorway. This, sharing his domain with the passing stream of strangers, was his joy. His quiet learning and love of every stone made it a very special tour. We ended beneath a small painted wooden Madonna in a high niche. He spoke of her age and history, and of polychromatic technique. "I talk to her every day. She told me this morning that you would be coming", he beamed, ever-so slightly self-mocking, but sincere.

We were hooked. I was, certainly. I’d scarcely been inside a church since I left my Church of England primary school, where twice weekly attendance was compulsory. I loved Romanesque architecture for its great age, its warm, enclosing curves, it’s vivid carved men and beasts from a time and mind-set so far off they might be from another planet. This had been one of the Camino’s attractions for me. I admired from outside, though, and never went in.

That day in Carrión gave me back the refuge of churches. Not the religion or the institution, but the spirit, the intimacy, the shades of those who built them and of all who’d prayed there down the ages. For the rest of the walk, I went into the churches and found there the same ineffable strength and mystery I found on the pilgrim path itself.

As for so many, so it was for me. The Camino began as a physical journey, but became a spiritual one; began as a journey of escape from myself and became a journey towards myself; began as a journey with a goal and became one whose purpose was in every moment of the way; began as a journey for a month and became a lifelong path. That is to say, it began as a journey and became a pilgrimage.

Much more to say…

Photos © Instituto Cervantes (Spain), 1999-2007

STILL WET

under cover

about to break cover

HAIR STREAM

yellow hair straw dog corn dolly
dolled up? me? hardly
messy cotton-haired more like
like the hair on a doll
hair on a mummy
older colder pretend-hair
bleached

MEGA, META, METTA

The Global Cities exhibition (some good videos on the website) at Tate Modern. Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Shanghai, Tokyo.

What you notice most is how you too are in the picture, how the faces around you, of those looking at the pictures, are from all the cities depicted and many more. The faces, gestures, shapes of every exhibit find their echo in the audience. We are the exhibition.

I had an interesting experience. Arriving hot and weary, I saw with some dismay that it was information-intensive: boards full of text and graphs to read and films to watch, detailing change, growth, migration, resources, statistics, comparisons - many separate, related projects.

Usually a conscientious tourist and viewer of exhibitions, anxious to take everything in, but simply lacking the energy for that, I drifted, looking at the pictures, looking at the people, snapping photos, absorbing random images.

Wondering out again some time later and into the gallery cafe, I found to my surprise that I was filled with vivid, intense, thought-provoking impressions. I'd received in this way a very strong experience of the exhibition and really got it: the endless variety, but endless sameness of cities, the chaos but repeated patterns, the beauty in ugliness, the ungraspability of millions crowded together - but here we are, obliged to be here and get on with it.

Click on photos to enlarge

Sometimes, often perhaps, the struggle to get one's head around it all is only counterproductive. I struggle to get my head around the city in a way I'd never try to to get my head around a vast forest. Content with the mystery of what creatures may lurk in the forest undergrowth, I'm daunted and repulsed by the city, so I'm always trying to 'know' it in some unknowable totality, to exercise my judgement where there is no conclusion to draw, only mind-boggling variety and constant change.

With less effort, less struggle to control the unpredictable, unknowable environment of the global city, perhaps I might be more accepting of it. It isn't going to go away. Even if I move to the country one day, the cities will keep growing, keep becoming more and more similar, but also more diverse, fragmented and ungraspable.

The detail, the face in the crowd, the moment's connection, over and over again: these are all there is. Can I let go, try to stay open to the uniqueness of a stranger?

SURVIVED BY

R's plant.

I've tried not to be mawkishly obsessive - it's just a plant, after all - but it's had better care than the office plants usually get from me.

It was flowering when he died last year. So now it's flowering again.

Still with us. So is he.

WET