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Authors: Jay Griffiths

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BOOK: Tristimania
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We fell in with a French-Canadian social worker, and the three of them decided to take off their boots and walk barefoot the last six kilometres. They asked me if I'd do the same, and the idea made me laugh out loud. The Camino had forced me to my limit, and burning my feet on boiling tarmac in a Spanish heatwave was just not part of my plan.

Bagpipes played us in to Santiago and we got lost fifty metres before the cathedral. When we finally found it, we went together to the Pilgrim's Mass, watched the vast censer swing, and said goodbye. I was sorry to see them go, but their plan was to walk on to Finisterre, and mine was to get drunk with my friend. When I saw her at the airport, I cried with gratitude and relief and all I could say for an hour and a half was ‘Thank fuck it's over.' The ordeal had been endured; all my stumbling, exhausted, aghast month was done.

We spent five days talking, eating, drinking, smoking and sleeping.

– We're surrounded, she said at one point, by unemployed angels.

I desperately wanted to go home: everything in me was yearning for my Ithaca, my cottage, my own patch of garden, my friends, my cats, my woodstove. But I had promised to go to Australia for my book's publication.

I remember little of the trip, except conversations with a few writers and, most importantly, one of my editors, kind and erudite, who saw how fragile I was. Mostly, though, I stayed in bed in my hotel room, getting out only to do talks or for specific interviews or meetings. It seemed a terrible waste of a trip, but I was keening with
nostalgia, the aching longing for home. As far from home as it is possible to be, I was horribly homesick. I called the trip short and changed my flights so I could go home sooner. But, in the meantime, it was only in Australia, at that enormous geographical distance from the Camino, that I really began to get a sense of perspective on what ‘pilgrimage' really means.

Pilgrimage is an ancient form of travelling for healing, when ‘travelling' kept its etymological roots of ‘travail' – it is a suffering cure. It is an ordeal to be endured. Perhaps this seems counterintuitive, for illness craves comfort, ease, tranquillity and gentleness, while pilgrimage shoves you into hardship and struggle. Yet to have survived an ordeal makes one feel strong. The relief which comes when the journey is over is more precious for the difficulties of the road, as drinking saltwater makes sweetwater more craved.

There is an automatic lift in the spirits when a difficult time is over, and it reminded me of that kids' game of standing in a doorway, pressing your hands outwards against the door posts for a minute, then walking away and feeling your hands rise on their own. So my spirits seemed to lift of their own accord once I'd finished the punishing pilgrimage. Day after day, I had driven myself onwards, weighed down with a rucksack full of psychological rocks, carrying almost more than I could bear and then, suddenly, in a blink, I could put it down and the lightness streamed through me, weightless in sunlight and I – Heidi.

There is more, though, in the relationship between Path and Pilgrim. The harder I had found walking the Camino, the more I had to mirror it in myself, forced to find rocks of determination to counter the stony paths. I had to become the path, so when it led uphill in a gruelling ascent, I needed to find an equally steep tangent rising within me. In 36-degree heat, I had to match the burning sun on the
burning road with my own fire. My obdurate perseverance had to be as relentless as the hours and days trudging through the
meseta.

The path is laid within us – while we are also inlaid into the path. All the pilgrims who have ever walked the Camino have created it of themselves; our feet have made the paths, our hands have touched the rocks, our boots have carved the holloways deeper into the earth. How much does the pilgrim make the path and the path the pilgrim? It's like Flann O'Brien's story of the postman and his bicycle, which over the years swap molecules in the friction of their journeying. How much of the bicycle is made of postman, or the postman made of bicycle?

A pilgrimage is also curative in creating a pause in one's life, a hiatus, a time when one is exempt from one's own familiar days. It offers an alibi-time, breaking patterns and habits. It gives sickness a chance either to slink away or be held in remission or abeyance. It is a
temenos,
a sacred space, not in place but in time, a set-aside time in which the ordinary is suspended and each day is a holy-day.

On a pilgrimage, the Way heals and so does the Destination. But where exactly is the destination? They say it is Santiago or Finisterre but, for me, my deepest destination was home. I was in Australia when I fully realized this, right on the other side of the world. My homesickness was not created by the distance so much as symbolized by it.

We are, all of us, on the ‘Hero's Journey', in the term popularized by mythologist Joseph Campbell. It is an ancient story and a universal one, a public myth and an individual narrative. The hero – he or she – must both leave and return and, sometimes, the homecoming is more important than the leaving. I had ‘left' myself, psychologically, in a terrible withdrawal from sanity, and then I'd physically withdrawn to walk the Camino, so I needed to return, to come home to myself in all senses.

I flew back, stopping a night with my nephews, and found that my Camino was to be book-ended by them when the elder one said he wanted to spend a few days with me. So we returned to my house together. He delights me with the clarity and fierceness of his insight, the gentleness of his nature and the depth of his soul. Having him to stay is like having a dolphin in the house. Because I'd come home earlier than planned, no one was expecting me and I had no commitments or obligations. They were days of grace.

And, in these days of grace, I finally began to know that my month-long walking prayer had been answered; the Camino reconstituted me, but it was only afterwards that I could really feel it.

People who were made to learn poetry at school often speak of how, although they might have resented it at the time, sometimes, many years later, it yields its garlands of flowers. After I'd finished the Camino, the poems I had taken with me were flowering ever more abundantly inside me, my own personal anthology never so beautiful. (An ‘anthology' is, etymologically, a garland of flowers.)

One friend of mine had given me Rumi's ‘In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo: In Cairo, Dreaming of Baghdad'. It hints at the sweetest wisdom:

               
Either this deep desire of mine

               
will be found on this journey,

               
or when I get back home!

               
It may be that the satisfaction I need

               
depends on my going away, so that when I've gone

               
and come back, I'll find it at home.

In homecoming, my body, too, was happy. After the fire, how healing is water. The soles of my feet had hurt for hundreds of hours; they had become swollen with heat, and now they rested cool on fresh grass in my garden. After the thirst and heat of the Camino, I could lean my face against damp, dark moss, and I drank glass after glass of clear, cold water. After weeks of shared showers, insufficient hot water and skimpy little cardboard squares of travel towels, now I had deep baths, with proper-sized towels and, afterwards, my favourite dressing gown. I had the luxury of shady solitude, feeling how priceless is privacy after knowing that your body, awake or asleep, night and day without let-up, can be under the gaze of strangers.

The chancey nature of life on the road was over and I cherished the certainties of home. On the Camino, you don't know where you will sleep each night, but back home is the simplest calm, the humble benediction of one's own bed.

When I was ill before the Camino I had at times felt trapped at home, as if it were an echo-chamber for my psyche and would replay to me my own mind's shriek, ape me the shape of my madness. Homecoming now, I knew it gentle and gentling, newly seen and known, newly and familiarly beloved. Moment by moment, I could feel the consolation of home, my own habitat surrounding me, the intimate miniature world, handmade and tender, the tended home which tends in turn.

Homecoming meant being with my friends, too. When I was ill, my friends understood that ‘I' was not ‘myself' and they held to their knowledge of the person they previously knew me to be. On the Camino, for the most part, I had hidden, a gaunt ghost in my own days. For everyone on the Camino, one's ‘self' is peculiarly un-anchored from its past. It can be hard to be a serial stranger to others
and, walking ill, the dislocation was doubled: no one knew me, and I wasn't myself anyway. I was unhomed even from my own selfhood, homeless in my mind, but coming home I could feel myself suddenly sturdy in the eyes of friends, my character leaping back like a dog wagging its tail when, after weeks of separation, it eventually hears its own name called.

If this whole year's episode began with falling down a rabbit hole and continued through the dark underworld of suicidality, it ended with a sense of coming up into daylight, small but alive. It would prove to be some months before I was back to my full strength, but this was undeniably the start of wellness.

On the Camino, I had been spent utterly, emptied, dried, withered to nothing, but back home, at the end of it all, I felt a refreshment of sheer water. I felt daybright and eager, my prayers answered in a sweep of benevolence, a superlative generosity of pure largesse, pouring easy and abundant as endless liquid arpeggios. I felt like a small spring on a mountainside, the source of the Wye, water spilling up again and again within me, constantly innerly replenished, liquid life returning, life upwelling in unstoppable wellness.

– How are you? a friend asked me.

– I'm fine. Really
fine.

I've never said it with such feeling. Fine. ‘Fine' meaning ‘well'. Up from the good earth, a wellspring of fine water. Fine as a shining field of sunflowers at dawn. Fine as a field of stars in a midnight sky.

ARTIST-ASSASSIN

Poems

Getting My Bearings

When sight is condensed to starlight

Quick to eternity

When mind has thrown its anchor

Back to a raging sea

When the rudder has sheered away in my hands

The boat a stormwracked wreck

And my sails lie in tatters

Mast splintered across the deck

Then reeling round its compass points

Psyche's reason undone

Before behind within and down

Shakespeare Hopkins Donne

I'm steering by the poets now

I'm steering by their song.

Out of Order

At two in the morning

I emailed my friends

Asking if I'd left my hat at theirs

With an urgency previously reserved

For an only-apparently greater loss

An appalled finding:

I find that I have lost

My reason, logic, and – once –

My words.

There, I've said it, as I said it aloud

To myself, on my knees in my study.

Terrified of losing my notebooks

I mark them with my address

Check frantic in my bag every minute or less.

My friend's cancer-scare

I was with her there

In the hallways of the hospital

‘This is where I left her.

Can you tell me where

She is?'

‘Are you the patient?' an orderly asked

Three times and

Three times I denied it, then

I got the giggles disorderly

At the comedy of loss.

I have lost my mind

My words

My friend

My notebook

And my hat

In no particular order.

Giddy

(for Marg)

Happiness also fathoms things.

My giddy friend plays

Jove, the bringer of jollity,

A one-goddess ode to joy,

She is all the world giggling,

Gravity in reverse,

Serious about frivolity,

A superfluity of light.

Nocturnal in C Sharp Minor

(for George)

I

There is a fathom of a different kind

Which knows the call of the high seas

Where the siren voices steer

And waves have a resonant frequency with mind

The cadences are sheer

Beguiling.

What sounds like song to the mad

Is a deadly wassail

Composed by suicides past

A ship of drunk poets singing up

The tsunami which shatters them

Alluring.

What looks like madness to the sane

Is a self-bewitching:

Spells of the psyche hurled

On its own waters, crying

For the pitch that will rhyme them

Enchanting.

The howling causes

Fractured chords

The devil's interval

Augmented fourth

From crest to gulf

From eros to thanatos

From music to madness

From poetry to anguish.

II

I am a nocturnal in C sharp minor

At three midnights in one: the day's, the year's and mine.

Midnight's alcohol-saddened third

The winter solstice a frost-sharpened seventh

And the minor key's treachery dominant

Seeking the resolution of a chord

Which has been playing me for years –

When the very word suicide has the sweetest ring

In the inaudible octaves far above and below.

I want to die: the phrase is music

I am not the pianist but the keyboard now

Resounded by every hand which has ever touched me.

Tonight transposes all the sounds across the highest Cs

A pitch too much for me –

I have become part of the siren frequencies

Captivated by the acoustics of the deepest seas.

I am being sounded by the sustained notes

At the furthest fathoms of hearing

The high wires which thrilled Odysseus cry for my reply

Knife in one hand, telephone in the other.

III

If I could call into the night

If someone could outshout the siren voices for me

If they would please pick up the phone.

Please pick up the phone:

The prayer which all of those who've been there know.

I know it's late, I know I'll wake your child

I know you know I wouldn't be ringing

Unless what is ringing in me is a terrifying bell –

I am wrung out – I can find no reason not to –

– I have no reason now.

The phone wires ring.

I don't exist

Between notes

Lost for words

Between books

Unharmonized with life

Between no one and no one,

Unless someone could please

Please pick up the phone

My prayer is answered

I ask: Please

Tie me to the mast

Put wax in my ears

So I cannot hear

These terrible siren voices.

BOOK: Tristimania
4.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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