A Plain Turkey?

With apologies to Benjamin Zephaniah and Dominic Rivron...

Was your turkey a nice one this Christmas?
Or was it on the bland side of delish?
Did you pep up its flavour with chestnuts
And some cranberry sauce in a dish?

Did the stuffing enhance its aroma?
Did the gravy disguise its dry meat?
Did the bread sauce improve its coarse texture?
Were the roast parsnips all you could eat?

Whether carnivore, veggie or vegan
I'm sure everyone would consent
That without all these lipsmacking trimmings
It would not seem like money well spent.

So next time just break the convention
And let all those turkeys run free,
Just pluck up the guts to make cutlets of nuts
With a jus of red wine and strong brie.

(Verses for vegetarians only)

Even lawyers like turkey-shaped soya,
And accountants coo over cous-cous,
Lords, ladies and louts like marsala-soaked sprouts,
Music teachers love cauliflower mousse.

All classes of people like cabbage
Fried up with some crisco not lard;
And if you're a goer, try spiced-up quinoa -
To cook it ain't really that hard.

(Verse for carnivores only)

Was your turkey a nice one this Christmas?
If it wasn't try roast ox next year,
Or a belly of hog or a spit-roasted dog
Or the rump of a well -fattened steer.

End Of Year Quiz

Since all the newspapers are awash with end of year quizzes at the moment (that Art Quiz in The Sunday Times the other day was well nigh impossible!), I thought I'd ask a question myself. With the death of Harold Pinter fresh in our minds, how about this one:

What has Pinter morphologically in common with Kafka, Brecht, Shakespeare, Dickens and Byron?

No? Then find the answer in my Mad, Bad And Dangerous post!

Their Passions A Quotation?

A final, reflective trawl through my personal notebooks of quotations... I hope you enjoy these astute remarks and observations as much as I've enjoyed rediscovering them. They are not particularly connected, though some readers will no doubt see connections...

I have never been married, of course, but often a spectator can see rather more of the game than some of the players. A CATHOLIC PRIEST on Marriage.

You can learn nothing from experience, at least in my experience. SIMON GRAY.

Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. FRENCH PROVERB.

Throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence. JOHN MUIR on Expedition Planning.

Brevity is the sister of talent. ANTON CHEKHOV.

There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent. From War and Peace by LEO TOLSTOY.

Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips. The Biblical Book of PROVERBS.

Attention is the natural prayer of the soul. NICOLAS MALEBRANCHE.

In the mother's body Man knows the universe; in birth he forgets it. JEWISH SAYING.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. OSCAR WILDE. From De Profundis.

There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters. ALICE THOMAS ELLIS.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. H. L. MENCKEN.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease. R. D. LAING.

We always like those who admire us; we do not always like those whom we admire. FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.

Entre deux amants il y a un qui aime et un qui se laisse aimer. FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.

The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it. FRANCOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations - always darker, emptier, simpler than these. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

Life without music would be a mistake. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. THOMAS MANN.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. WILLIAM BLAKE.

He who binds to himself a Joy/Does the wingèd life destroy;/But he who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in Eternity's sunrise. WILLIAM BLAKE.

I certainly feel, looking back on my life, that few pleasures I have known have excelled digging with a wooden spade in wet sand. J. C. POWYS. From his Autobiography.

My mysticism is not to try to know. It is to live and not think about it. FERNANDO PESSOA. From his poem The Keeper Of Sheep.

'That is the nature of women,' said Don Quixote. 'They reject the man who loves them and love the man who despises them!' MIGUEL DE CERVANTES.

The man for whom the development of personality is all that counts has totally lost all sense of the sacred. SIMONE WEIL.

The work of most writers is born out of contradiction. DAVID HARE writing in The Guardian about HAROLD PINTER being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Not a day goes by that I don't ride, 'til the infinite, the horse of my imagination. SALVADOR DALI.

I always thought that music was more important than sex. Then I thought, if I don't hear a concert for a year and a half it doesn't bother me... WOODY ALLEN.

I really enjoyed keying these out. I hope you enjoyed reading them. I wonder what this collection of some of my favourite quotations says about me?

Harold Pinter (1930-2008)

Harold Pinter, the finest English dramatist of his generation, died on Christmas Eve. He was a tireless fighter against injustice and political oppression, and penned many angry, campaigning articles for and letters to the Guardian newspaper. One of his bêtes noires was American foreign policy. He wrote this in an open letter to the Prime Minister after Tony Blair's election in 1997:

We have been reminded often over the last few weeks of Saddam Hussein's appalling record in the field of human rights. It is indeed appalling: brutal, pathological. But I thought you might be interested to scrutinise the record of your ally, the US, in a somewhat wider context. I am not at all certain that your advisors will have kept you fully informed.

The US has supported, subsidised and, in a number of cases, engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world since 1945...

... Oh, by the way, meant to mention, forgot to tell you, we were all chuffed to bollocks when Labour won the election.

Memory And Imagination

While the New Year is a time for anticipation and looking forward, Christmas is a time for reflection and looking back.

The future is by definition an imagined land. But what's often forgotten is that the past is also imaginary to a great extent. I've been looking back again through my old notebooks of quotations as I did before here and here. At the head of one of these notebooks I see that I've written this: to remember is also to imagine.

There was a time when I used to read a lot of John Fowles. I copied down these 2 quotations from his Victorian-pastiche novel The French Lieutenant's Woman:

His statement to himself should have been, 'I possess this now, therefore I am happy', instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this for ever, and therefore am sad'.

It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic. I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is literally too much with us now.

These short passages still resonate strongly with me. And how relevant the 2nd one is in these days of instant, unrelenting communication by text and email, by mobile phone and Internet.

I also used to read a lot of Aldous Huxley. These extracts are taken from Texts And Pretexts:

All 'feelings and opinions' are temporary; they last for a while and are then succeeded by other 'feelings and opinions'... The 'all' feeling is brief and occasional; but this is not to say that a metaphysical system based upon it must necessarily be untrue... Our experience is divided up into island universes. We jump from one to the other - there are no bridges.

The mind purifies the experiences with which it is stored, composes and informs the chaos. Each man's memory is his private literature and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.

The magic of irrelevance is one of poetry's most powerful instruments. Why are poetical phrases poetical? In most cases, because they contain ideas which we normally regard as irrelevant one to another, but which the poet has contrived to make relevant... Every good metaphor is the mating of irrelevances to produce a new and more vivid explosion.

Dominic Rivron has been ruminating recently on metaphor in his blog - how about that for a brilliantly succinct description of metaphor, Dominic?

In case we nail all our colours with utter and complete abandon to the mast of Art, it's salutary to be reminded occasionally that Art and Beauty can sometimes lead to dangerous excess (as Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray showed only too well):

The religion of imagination is a dangerous faith, liable to the most deplorable corruptions.

Finally in Texts And Pretexts Huxley states a great truth about nature that many cosy nature writers fail to recognise:

Very few 'nature poets' have the courage to admit that their goddess lives with an unknown mode of being, that she sometimes reveals herself unequivocally as the most terrifying and malignantly alien of deities.

I'm sure that Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers would agree with this!

Children Of Albion

Michael Horovitz, editor of Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, has written a wonderfully informative obituary of Adrian Mitchell in today's Independent. Do read it: www.independent.co.uk/obituaries/adrian-mitchell-poet-and-playwright-whose-work-was-driven-by-his-pacifist-politics-1208517.html

Many of the jazz/Beat/Beatles influenced poets in Children of Albion were also entranced by the poems, paintings and prints of William Blake.

The above illustration is William Blake's Vision of the Children of Albion.

Tell Me Lies

Although this poem is all over the media at the moment, I make no apology for reproducing it here. It's probably Adrian Mitchell's best known poem and it's still as devastating as it was when it appeared in the 1960s. I first read this poem in the Penguin paperback Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969) - edited by Michael Horovitz. Mitchell famously read it at an anti-Vietnam protest rally in Trafalgar Square in 1964. Over the years he kept changing the last verse. You can see a video of Mitchell himself reading the poem here. This is the poem.

To Whom It May Concern

I was run over by the truth one day.
Ever since the accident I've walked this way
So stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam

Heard the alarm clock screaming with pain,
Couldn't find myself so I went back to sleep again
So fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam

Every time I shut my eyes, all I see is flames.
I made a marble phone-book, carved all the names
So coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam

I smell something burning, hope it's just my brains.
They're only dropping peppermints and daisy-chains
So stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam

Where were you at the time of the crime?
Down by the Cenotaph drinking slime
So chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about Vietnam

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,
You take the human being, and you twist it all about
So scrub my skin with women
Chain my tongue with whisky
Stuff my nose with garlic
Coat my eyes with butter
Fill my ears with silver
Stick my legs in plaster
Tell me lies about –
Iraq
Burma
Afghanistan
BAE Systems
Israel
Iran

Tell me lies Mr Bush
Tell me lies Mr Blairbrowncameron

Tell me lies about Vietnam

Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008)

The English left-wing poet Adrian Mitchell died 2 days ago at the age of 76. Do read Michael Rosen's tribute to him in today's Guardian: (www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/22/poetry).

A Blaze Of Light In Every Word

Hallelujah

I've heard there was a secret chord
that David played to please the Lord,
but you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth,
the minor fall, the major lift;
the baffled king composing Hallelujah!

Your faith was strong but it needed proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof;
her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you to a kitchen chair,
she broke your throne, she cut your hair,
and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah!

You say I took the Name in vain;
I don't even know the name.
But if I did, well, really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word;
it doesn't matter which you heard,
the holy, or the broken Hallelujah!

I did my best; it wasn't much.
I couldn't feel, so I learned to touch.
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong,
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
with nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!

(additional verses)

Baby, I've been here before.
I know this room, I've walked this floor.
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch,
but love is not a victory march,
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah!

There was a time you let me know
what's really going on below
but now you never show it to me, do you?
I remember when I moved in you,
and the holy dove was moving too,
and every breath we drew was Hallelujah!

Now maybe there's a God above
but all I ever learned from love
is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you.
And it's no complaint you hear tonight,
and it's not some pilgrim who's seen the light -
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah!

From Leonard Cohen's Stranger Music: Selected Poems And Songs (1993)

These lyrics are so good I'm still completely awestruck by them - even after listening to different people sing different versions of this song for many years.

The Lord Of Song

With all media attention focused on Hallelujah at the moment, I thought it might be interesting to hear what Leonard Cohen himself said about this song:

On his approach to composing:

There are two schools of songwriting. The quick and me.

On the writing of Hallelujah:

The only advice I have for young songwriters is that if you stick with a song long enough, it will yield. But long enough is not any fixed duration, it’s not a week or two, it’s not a month or two, it’s not necessarily even a year or two. If a song is to yield you might have to stay with it for years and years. 'Hallelujah' was at least five years. I have about 80 verses. I just took verses out of the many that established some sort of coherence. The trouble that I find is that I have to finish the verse before I can discard it. So that lengthens the process considerably. I filled two notebooks with the song, and I remember being on the floor of the Royalton Hotel, on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor and saying 'I can't finish this song.'

On why Hallelujah took so many years to write:

They all take quite a long time. And it’s no guarantee of their excellence. I have a lot of second rate songs that have taken even longer.

On Hallelujah's elastic rhymes:

They are really false rhymes but they are close enough that the ear is not violated. In English, we love to hear these coincidences that we call rhymes. It does delight us for some odd reason, we are delighted by inventive uses of sonic coincidences.

On Hallelujah's universal appeal:

I don't know. It has a good chorus. We basically all lead the same kind of lives, and the more authentically a song touches on those areas, which are gain and loss, surrender and victory, popular music has to be about those subjects.

On the meaning of Hallelujah:

Finally there's no conflict between things, finally everything is reconciled - but not where we live. This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled, but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess and that's what I mean by 'Hallelujah'. That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say 'Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.' And you can't reconcile it in any other way except in that position of total surrender, total affirmation.

That's what it's all about. It says that you're not going to be able to work this thing out. This realm does not admit to revolution. There's no solution to this mess. The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say 'Look, I don't understand a fucking thing at all - Hallelujah!' That's the only moment that we live here fully as human beings.

Hallelujah

Forget Alexandra Burke. Apart from Leonard Cohen's own, THIS is the best version of Hallelujah! IMO, of course. I'm open to other suggestions...

Jeff Buckley (1966-97)

400th Post

I've been wondering what to write about in this, my 400th post. I see I began blogging one and a half years ago, on 23 June 2007. Perhaps it's a good time to look back a little and remind myself of some of the thoughts I've had and the subjects I've covered?

H - itchhiking

A - uvergne

P - ennine Way

P - yrenees

Y - eats

C - amino

H - uw Warren

R - S Thomas

I - ngmar Bergman

S - hirley MacLaine

T - homas Merton

M - ilosz

A - ligot

S - toats

I still can't think what to write about. Oh, well, perhaps inspiration will descend tomorrow!

Nigella's Christmas Treats

After an anxious and frustrating day - which began with my 90 year old father going into hospital and ended with Marks and Spencer running out of chestnut purée - watching Nigella's culinary La-la land on the telly just now prompted my wife to say, rather wistfully: I wish I was going to her house for Christmas...

Mmm... I see what she means..!

Piute Creek

With all this very interesting talk about Gary Snyder and wilderness in some parts of the blogworld at present (http://www.canoeinthemist.blogspot.com/), I thought I might post here one of my very favourite Snyder poems, Piute Creek, which is taken from Riprap, his 1st book of poetry published in 1959 (the title poem Riprap is also very fine).

Piute Creek

One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air.

A clear, attentive mind
Has no meaning but that
Which sees is truly seen.
No one loves rock, yet we are here.
Night chills. A flick
In the moonlight
Slips into Juniper shadow:
Back there unseen
Cold proud eyes
Of Cougar or Coyote
Watch me rise and go.

I think this is a wonderful poem. I don't want to do a critical analysis; suffice to say, Snyder's life-long preoccupations with Zen Buddhism, wilderness and mankind's ambiguous relationship with nature are pervasive. The line All the junk that goes with being human/Drops away... is just fantastic. (You experience floatingly that drop from rock to creek in a brilliantly effective enjambement.) I've found some of Snyder's other poetry collections rather more challenging - with their personal obliquities and beatnik flow - but Riprap, this 1st collection, remains a small, radiantly shining jewel in the pantheon of American 20th century literature.

(Another of my posts on Gary Snyder - which includes his poem Riprap - is here.)

Siddhartha

Siddhartha laughed warmly. 'Yes, I have become a ferryman. Many people have to change a great deal and wear all sorts of clothes. I am one of those, my friend.' Siddhartha to Govinda - from Siddhartha by HERMANN HESSE

Every harlot was a virgin once. WILLIAM BLAKE

I'll end my brief postings on Hermann Hesse with a piece from Siddhartha, probably Hesse's best loved book. This is taken from the last chapter, and is one of Siddhartha's revelations to the monk Govinda, his friend from youth:

'Knowledge can be communicated but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. I suspected this when I was still a youth and it was this that drove me away from teachers. There is one thought I have had, Govinda, which you will again think is a jest or folly: that is, in every truth the opposite is equally true. For example, a truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly saint or sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real. Time is not real, Govinda. I have realised this repeatedly. And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.'

6 Facts About Hermann Hesse

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. HERMANN HESSE Wandering

6 facts about Hermann Hesse:

1. Both of his parents were Christian missionaries.

2. He had intense conflicts with authority figures such as his parents and teachers - which resulted in him being placed in special schools, even in a mental institution.

3. He worked in bookshops until the publication of his novel Peter Camenzind enabled him to lead an independent life as an author.

4. He was exempted from military service due to an eye condition. All his life he was afflicted with nervous disorders and headaches.

5. He underwent long periods of psychoanalysis following the death of his father, the sickness of his son and his wife's schizophrenia.

6. He knew Carl Jung personally.

Evenings

Evenings the lovers walk
Slowly through the field,
Women let down their hair,
Businessmen count money,
Townspeople anxiously read the latest
In the evening paper,
Children clench tiny fists,
Sleeping deep and dark.
Each one with his own reality,
Following a noble duty,
Townspeople, infants, lovers -
And not me?

Yes! My evening tasks also,
To which I am a slave,
Cannot be done without by the spirit of the age,
They too have a meaning.
And so I go up and down,
Dancing inside,
Humming foolish street songs,
Praise God and myself,
Drink wine and pretend

That I am a pasha,
Worry about my kidneys,
Smile, drink more,
Saying yes to my heart
(In the morning, this won't work),
Playfully spin a poem
Out of suffering gone by,
Gaze at the circling moon and stars,
Guessing their direction,
Feel myself one with them
On a journey
No matter where.

From Hermann Hesse's Wandering

Wandering

What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find. HERMANN HESSE

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself. HERMANN HESSE

The truth is lived, not taught. HERMANN HESSE

Not long ago I posted a few thoughts about the walking and travel books which had most stimulated my own interest in walking and travel. I mentioned Patrick Leigh Fermor and Robert Louis Stevenson, John Hillaby and Eric Newby, Laurie Lee and Hilaire Belloc. Other bloggers suggested some of their own favourites: Wilfred Thesiger and Robert Byron, Hamish Brown and Nicholas Crane, W. H. Murray and Thomas Firbank. Recently I remembered another delightful, short book about a walk from southern Germany into northern Italy - probably the book that influenced me most of all during my adolescent years: Hermann Hesse's Wandering.

At that time I used to read a lot of Hesse. I suppose he's the natural choice of the (male?) 'sensitive teenager'. I think I must have read everything he ever wrote - except, surprisingly, The Glass Bead Game, his last major work - for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1946. I used to devour him. Siddhartha, The Journey to the East, Steppenwolf, Narziss and Goldmund - once started I couldn't put these books down until I'd read every single word. I've mainly avoided revisiting Hesse - I instinctively felt it would be disappointing. Adolescent crushes usually are when you attempt to re-experience them in later life.

Wandering. Subtitle: Notes and Sketches by Hermann Hesse. Published in paperback by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux of New York in 1972. At a price of $1.95. My own copy - which I have here beside me as I write - has the same cover design as the image above. Like much of Hesse it's romantic and poetic, full of adolescent dreaming and German Sehnsucht. The book is arranged as a series of brief meditations - 23 in all. Each meditation is prefaced by a naif watercolour sketch and ends with a poem.

I daren't reread it. I don't want to deflate in any way my strongly idealized, young man's impression of this book. What was important then may not be so important now. And yet - haven't we all still got some of that youthful yearning, that romantic longing, that impossible idealism, that teenage melancholy somewhere deep within us? I hope so. I think so. I know so...

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

From Wandering by Hermann Hesse 1918

Changes

Changes by David Bowie

I still don't know what I was waiting for
And my time was running wild
A million dead-end streets
Every time I thought I'd got it made
It seemed the taste was not so sweet
So I turned myself to face me
But I've never caught a glimpse
Of how the others must see the faker
I'm much too fast to take that test

Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Don't want to be a richer man
Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes
(Turn and face the strain)
Ch-ch-Changes
Just gonna have to be a different man
Time may change me
But I can't trace time

Santander

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. CYNTHIA OZICK

On Sunday 26 October I took the bus from Bilbao to Santander. The landscape is impressive - it's wooded and mountainous; but the towns along this section of the Costa Esmeralda have been spoilt by plagues of crassly and cheaply built blocks of flats. Nearing Santander I caught sight of the snow-capped range of the Picos de Europa - the highest peaks of the Cantabrian mountains. The rain had now set in - Santander is known for being mild but wet. This is the cathedral - renovated after a fire, but some Romanesque features still remain:

And this is the Museo de Bellas Artes:

The centrepiece painting in this art gallery is an 1814 Goya portrait of King Fernando VII (Goya painted many portraits of Fernando). It's astonishing to think what shocking scenes he portrayed soon afterwards...

The next day was my last day in Spain. The weather was still wet and miserable. I hung around in a café opposite the quayside drinking fresh orange juice and feeling tired and rather depressed. The ferry sailed at 4 pm and would arrive in Plymouth at 10 o' clock the next morning. The Brittany Ferries ship was a new one - very smart and clean - and my little cabin a masterpiece of micro-design. I managed a fairly good night's sleep despite the movement of the ship - in fact I quite enjoyed this rolling motion, though I know that some passengers were seasick in the night.

This was the view of Santander as we left the port:

And this my last sight of the Spanish coast before we sailed into the Bay of Biscay:

What would England hold for me on my return? Would it seem familiar to me, strange to me, or "awesomely unfamiliar" as Cynthia Ozick puts it in the quotation at the top of this post? I should see in the due course of time, but I had a feeling that changes were on the way...

Bilbao Guggenheim

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness. FRANK GEHRY

Before catching the Santander ferry I just had to spend some time in Bilbao - mainly because I wanted to visit the Guggenheim Museum. It was worth seeing for the architecture alone - never mind the exhibits. Designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry it opened its doors in 1997 and was quickly admired all over the world...

Outside the museum next to the Nervion river stands one of Louise Bourgeois' spider sculptures (I've seen another in front of London's Tate Modern). It's a rather menacing, double-edged statement about the jealously protective yet also frighteningly domineering aspects of a Mother (if you look closely you can see the spider eggs). Bourgeois had a similarly ambiguous relationship with her own mother, of whom she was in awe...

Inside this incredible museum building there's a permanent exhibition of 8 labyrinthine, weathered-steel sculptures (a series of twisted torques, spirals and ellipses called The Matter of Time) created by minimalist sculptor and video artist Richard Serra.

There's also an eclectic, themed exhibition running till January of artworks on loan from the Kunsthistorishes Museum in Vienna, one of the oldest art museums in the world. It contains everything you could wish for - from Greek and Roman antiquities to paintings of the highest quality by Arcimboldo, Velázquez, Dürer, Van Eyck, Holbein, Titian, Rubens and Tintoretto.

Several intense and happy hours passed very quickly. When I finally emerged outside into bright sunlight once again it was easy to see how Gehry had been influenced in his curvily organic architectural design by an obsession with ships (Bilbao has a long history of shipbuilding) and fish (look at those overlapping titanium panels which resemble fish scales reflecting the light...)

This newly married couple obviously found the Bilbao Guggenheim an impressive and sympathetic photo-backdrop...

El Peine Del Viento

At one end of San Sebastián's La Concha ('Shell') bay is a set of 3 steel sculptures by the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002). The work is called El Peine del Viento ('Comb of the Wind') and was completed in 1976. Whatever you think of these pieces - which are full of tension - they do seem to fit well into the environment of this often stormy bay.

I found an interesting, subtle, gently curving, striated rock formation close by this monumental, aggressively thrusting, masculine sculptural work. A feminine contrast formed of natural stone? A bit of yin and yang going on here perhaps...

San Sebastián

And this is San Sebastián. In the early evening it's a ritual to stroll along the promenade and admire the clean sands and the semi-circular bay. This bay must be heaving with people in the summer months...

Pamplona

Before I went home on the ferry from Santander to Plymouth I spent a few days in Pamplona, San Sebastián and Bilbao. This is Pamplona...

Yellow Coquille

We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time. T. S. ELIOT Four Quartets

So this was the end of the road. The Via Tolosana and the Via Aragonés had been completed. I'd walked 870 km from Arles in French Provence to Puente la Reina in northern Spain. It had taken 46 days - from 7 September to 22 October - at an average daily distance of 19 km, which included 4 rest days in Toulouse, Pau, Jaca and Sangüesa.

In Obanos, just before Puente la Reina, I'd joined the Camino Francés, the most popular and famous pilgrim trail of them all - the trail I'd walked last November/December. I had no desire to carry on and retrace last year's steps to Santiago - mainly because of my aching feet. At the beginning of the trip I did have half a notion to continue to Compostela via a beautiful but much more arduous route along the coast, the Ruta de la Costa. However my feet were not in good enough shape for that. Also my only guide book to this route was inadequate and confusing, and accommodation along the route was limited. Some of the albergues were closed in the winter as well. Perhaps I'll do it another time..?

I think the photo with which I began the account of my journey says it all - so I've reproduced it above. The orchards. The dead tree. The yellow coquille. And the dusty, sandy trail.

Buen Camino!

Puente La Reina Revisited

In Puente la Reina ('Queen's Bridge') last year I'd stayed at the excellent Albergue Padres Rapadores at the town's entrance. This time I thought I'd try somewhere different so I headed down the Calle Major to the Albergue Santiago Apóstol which lay at the top of a hill on the far side of town. On the way I crossed the famous bridge. This magnificent bridge had been built specially for pilgrims bound for Compostela in medieval times...

The albergue was big - and modern and clinical and not very atmospheric. But it was clean and quiet - though the strong wind which got up later that night did rattle the windows. I had an interesting conversation with Florian - a German boy and the only other occupant - then made my way back into town for a final meal with my Spanish pilgrim friends, Carlos and Javi.

The next day I visited the church of Santa María de la Vega y del Crucifijo. The origin of this church is linked with the Knights Templar (I've written before about the Knights Templar - they are closely bound up with the Camino. Indeed, the chapel of Santa María de Eunate I'd visited the day before is also associated with these crusader Knights - its design recalling the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem). This is the 13th century church porch...

... and this the polychrome effigy of Santa María, the Virgin Mary, I found inside...

Journey's End

4 veteran Spanish walkers arrived soaking wet later that night to join Carlos, Javi, a Spanish couple on mountain bikes and myself in the albergue in Monreal. They'd walked more than 40 km in one day and were exhausted. One of these 4 friends - a huge man with intense, dark eyes and a black beard - could have come straight out of a painting by Goya or El Greco. He was a living portrait of either axe-murderer or saint - I never did decide which. After applying various creams and medicaments to their feet and knees, the group had a boisterous meal then retired to the dormitory. Unfortunately as soon as one of the party put head to pillow he began an earth-shattering cacophony of snoring which seemed set to last all night. After a while I just couldn't take it. So I pulled my mattress from the lower bunk where I'd been attempting to sleep and dragged it downstairs into a narrow, sloping lobby area between the albergue's kitchen door and its exterior entrance. Even here you could faintly hear these tremendous snores. However I did manage to get a reasonable night's sleep in the end - which is more than can be said for the other unlucky pilgrims.

Early next morning I walked by Monreal's parish church...



... and the beautifully restored church of the Natividad in the hamlet of Yárnoz...



... then had a brief rest at the Fuente de la Paz (Peace Fountain) in Guerendiáin...

After 13 km I stopped for lunch in the village of Tiebas where I met up again with most of the pilgrims from the previous night. We ate in the bar. The guilty snorer looked rather crestfallen. Apparently his 3 companions were refusing to sleep in the same albergue as him any more! As usual I ate the rarely sensational but always OK menu of the day (menú del día) - normally a 3 course meal costing about 9 or 10 euros and consisting of something like soup, pasta or paella as a starter, followed by a simple, unadorned piece of chicken, beef or veal with a few patatas fritas, and a yoghurt, caramel custard (flan) or tart for dessert. You helped yourself to however much wine you wanted from a bottle plonked down on your table. A café solo (black coffee) or café cortado (coffee with just a dash of milk) finished off the meal.

The Camino passed close by the Canal de Navarra, a recently completed, beautifully engineered irrigation channel...

... and paralleled a railway line for a short distance to reach yet more wind turbines...

... until it finally brought me to the place I'd been dying to reach all afternoon: the chapel of Santa María de Eunate. The chapel is octagonal in shape with an exterior, free-standing, roofless arcade or cloister surrounding it. It's very beautiful, and very special, and very old - dating from the 12th century. Luckily it was open so I went inside and spent quite a long time there. I illuminated 8 candles (they were the electric sort which lit up when you inserted coins in a slot) - for my wife and for my 2 children, and for my father who turned 90 this year, and in memory of my mother and my sister, and for myself, and for this troubled but wonderful world...



... before completing the final few km to Puente la Reina, my day's destination - and my journey's end, for Puente la Reina marks the point where the Via Aragonés meets the Camino Francés...

Here are 2 photos of the famous medieval bridge in Puente la Reina (which I also photographed last year). The 1st is looking into town...

... and the 2nd is looking out of town. Notice the yellow arrow pointing the Way. This would be my last yellow arrow of the pilgrimage...