Living in a Prayer

See what I did there? All part of my secret masterplan to insert lyrics from the glorious nineteen-eighties in an audacious attempt to turn back time and restore to the world big hair, spandex trousers and shoulder pads. I’ve already managed to slot a couple of Wham hits into my preliminary PhD pensamientos without any adverse reaction though I’m not sure that kind of defeats the purpose. What’s the point in being playfully subversive if nobody really cares?

But I digress. The teaching is almost done and next Friday sees me set out for Cataluña and three weeks walking along some of the lesser-known caminos. Dedicated followers of this blog will recall that I’d planned to set out with a group to walk the first few stages of the Camino Frances, from St Jean Pied de Port over the Pyrenees to Pamplona. Subsequent events, mostly spending far too much time attending to the educational requirements of the sons and daughters of the Somerset bourgeoisie, caused me to rethink: I needed to spend some time on my own. 

Talk about splendid isolation. Two years ago I made my debut on the Santiago pilgrimage by following the Camino Francés and then, because I literally couldn’t stop (and I do mean literally), carried on to Finisterre where the ocean stopped me in my tracks. I dislike labelling any popular path a pedestrian motorway – it smacks of perambulatory snobbery – but towards the end of the walk I did develop a misanthropic streak which I think intensive tutoring has reawakened. To that end I’ve decided to follow three much less-frequented Caminos: the Ruta del Ebro, the Camino Catalan and the Camino Castellano-Aragonés.

Talk about solitary figure in a landscape. I fully expect to meet absolutely nobody else during my three weeks on the road. At the moment that doesn’t bother me, whether I’ve become stir crazy by the time I reach Burgos is another matter altogether. What has been uppermost on my mind is the idea of making a pilgrimage that doesn’t take me all the way to Santiago. Does that turn the pilgrimage into a ‘mere’ six-hundred kilometre hike? Do I have to go ‘all the way’, if you’ll forgive the euphemism. 

There is, I hope, method in the madness. In between negotiating long journeys up and down the A303, the highway that leads from Hell to happiness, I’ve been ruminating on the tenuous link between landscape and theology. Or, more specifically, the link between landscape and liberation theology. There’s a useful chapter on pilgrimage in Frédéric Gros’ ‘A Philosophy of Walking’ in which he refers to ‘Gyrovagues’ – itinerant monks who ‘journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, without fixed abode.’ They were denounced as wretched by Benedict of Nursia, who accused them of indulging their passions and cravings but it’s a notion that appeals to me, a theology of itinerancy and deviation. An interesting article on them can be accessed here: http://www.scourmont.be/Armand/writings/pilgrim.html. 

In moments of intellectual adversity – and believe me, they are legion – I turn to my trusted tomes. In this case the truly inspiring ‘Life out of Death: The Feminine Spirit in El Salvador’ by Marigold Best and Pamela Hussey. Many years ago I had the privilege of meeting Sister Pamela; she confirmed my theory that the smaller the nun in stature, the greater her theological presence and radical thought. Revelation came in an interview with the Honduran theologian, Carmen Manuela ‘Nelly’ del Cid who speaks about the plight of peasant during the Salvadoran civil war: 

‘[they] possess a sense of nomadic spirituality such as the Israelites had in the beginning. We have lost this because we have become too settled. They haven’t lost it because they are always expecting to move on. They discover a God who walks with them and so they can also identify with a small God, a God who hasn’t got an answer to everything, a God who is so weak that he suffers with them. But he is a God who is with them, there, and when they discover this more clearly they become capable of greater commitment. They discover that there are things that need to be changed.’ 

I learned most of my theology on the ground, in Central America, El Salvador in particular. It was in Morazán, El Salvador that I came across Nelly’s God who comes among the peasants, ‘who has identified with them’. And a Jesus who was killed for ‘being a big-mouth, for speaking out and denouncing injustice’.

Nelly’s theology reminds me of Angela Carter, it doesn’t just subvert traditional theology, it inverts it too. A big-mouthed Christ who walks with the poor; a Virgin Mary with a bit of an attitude - Our Lady of the Clenched Fist.

A tenuous link or girt, humungous leap of faith? Clearly I’m opting for the latter but only time will tell. The journey starts next Friday, on the 10:30 from Bristol to Paddington. Then it’s Eurostar, SNCF and RENFE to the Catalunyan town of Tortosa where the fun begins in earnest. There’s a reason for taking the train – slow travel; all will be revealed in time.

Expect more activity on this blog in the next month.

References

Marigold Best and Pamela Hussey: ‘Life out of Death: The Feminine Spirit in El Salvador', CIIR (1996)

Frédéric Gros’: A Philosophy of Walking, Verso (2014)

Fecundity and Desire

It is, I suspect, a symptom of the depths to which modern urban life has sunk to that, to a man and a woman (but mostly the latter), we dream of some rural idyll in the depths of the countryside where the splendid prospect of isolation and a simpler means of existence acts in stark contradiction to our busy, cluttered lives. That is, whenever we have time to dream, for in these days of corporate identity even these private acts of rebellion have been seized upon by a ubiquitous mediocrity.

María Inés de la Cruz The Woodlanders (with apologies to the late Mr Thomas Hardy), Virgin Black Lace 2004

The Carteresque landscape - full of erotic menace

Here’s a confession that’ll immediately lose me half my (admittedly meagre) readership and probably have me up before the courts martial of progressive geography and liberation theology: I have an unnatural – some might say morbid – fascination with feudalism. A fatal attraction; that which ought to repel me lures me into its baited, decadent trap, like a moth to a flame.

It’s been a suppressed yearning, only daring to raise its shaggy-haired head above the parapet on rare occasions. Like the weekend just gone when I ventured out into the erotically-charged landscape of Cranborne Chase. Something about wandering across and through this pastoral landscape brings out my inner sado-masochist; not the kinky fetishism of a bit of slap and tickle but a full-blooded, full-on sado-masochism that’s as cerebral as it is sexual. More Angela Carter than E L James.

In fact, it’s all Angela Carter and absolutely no E L James.

The Chase is the perfect backdrop for indulging these daydreams, walking the perfect ritual to conjure up images of fecundity and desire; it’s not dissimilar to saying the Rosary; the rhythm of my booted feet like the cadence of a Hail Mary, repeated over and over again. Both act as a conduit that translates one from the mundane to the metaphysical. It takes me not so much back in time – to some faux halcyon-haloed rural golden age – but out of time. I am the land, the land is me.

The forest is always encroaching, like a game of ‘What’s the time, Mr Wolf?’ You turn your back for a minute and next thing you know it’s stolen another couple of metres on you. In Angela Carter’s The Erl-King, a maiden wanders into the woods and is seduced by a personification of the forest, a ‘tender butcher’ with ‘white pointed teeth’. She’s intimidated by the forest, terrified she’ll ‘diminish to a point and vanish’. Yet she describes their relationship as ‘two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument’. She is both seduced and repulsed my him as his touch both ‘consoles and devastates’ her.

‘Watch your back!’ warns my guardian but I’m no innocent Red Riding Hood; no passive victim, more victim as aggressor. The Chase brings out the wicked feudalist in me and dream myself the Lady Squire, a woman whose earthly benevolence belies a dark side. A woman who demands her droite de seigneure but toys only briefly with the groom and saves all her lust for the bride.

Then, as I emerge from the wood and approach another isolated country house the reverie makes a volte-face and I’m the Lady Squire’s trembling maid, suffering her anger in a delicious mélange of fear and anticipation whilst she admonishes me:

You fail the to realise that as far as this part of the world is concerned, democracy and liberalism are mistrusted as modern concepts that have never really caught on in the popular imagination. On the contrary, people trust and respect authority. They like rules, they know where they are, where they stand in the scheme of things. I think you will find that any attempt to subvert my jurisdiction will be met with contempt and disbelief. Think about it, which of us has the greater honour and integrity? You, a jumped up, common or garden whore, one of the great unwashed – or me, the Lady Squire? As far as everyone here is concerned, I am democracy.

María Inés de la Cruz The Woodlanders (with apologies to the late Mr Thomas Hardy), Virgin Black Lace 2004

See what I mean about being given the could-shoulder by my disillusioned acolytes? I know I shouldn’t give these visions credence but I don’t try very hard to expel them from my imagination; the faster I walk, the harder I pound my feet on the sun-baked tracks, the more lucid and focused they become. Reminds me of St Jerome, an early Father of the Church, whose detailed descriptions of women’s clothing and exposed flesh turned his condemnations into pornographic exhortations. Like self-flagellation, the greater the pain and the punishment, the more profound the pleasure.

The earth in late August feels like it’s slipping away in a post-coital ecstasy; having shagged itself senseless spring and summer long, it’s turned onto its side to enjoy a last cigarette before falling into a lengthy, blissful sleep. I recite a few lines from Ode to Autumn, the ones about watching the last oozings of the cyder press hours by hours but then write in my notebook: DON’T GO DOWN THE KEATS ROAD.

Don’t go down the Keats Road. Now there’s an imperative on which to ruminate during my next hike ...