Historic Southwell

A cold but sunny winter Saturday found us in Southwell, Notts. — one of the hidden treasures of the English Midlands. The jewel in Southwell's crown is the Minster (see top and bottom pics), one of the finest yet least visited cathedrals in Britain. The style is Norman and early English, and in the fourteenth century the famous chapter house was added — ornamented with exquisite stone carvings of foliage, and the heads of 'green men' and other mythical creatures. The lead, pyramidal spires (Rhenish caps or 'pepperpot' spires) are the only examples of their kind in the UK. We didn't go in as there was a service going on, but instead wandered through the narrow streets of the town (though really it's little more than a large village; the Minster is known as the 'village cathedral'). We ended up in a little Saturday market, passing this quaint sweet shop on the way:

At lunchtime we took a break in the Saracen's Head, an old coaching inn dating from the fifteenth century. Both Charles Dickens and Lord Byron stayed here. And it was also here that King Charles I spent his last night of freedom before being captured by the Scots in nearby Kelham during the English Civil War. (The Scots handed him over to Cromwell's men — the Parliamentarians — and he was subsequently executed on 30 January 1649.) We drank our coffee in the long bar at the back of the hotel, watching the Liverpool v. Newcastle football match, but thinking back to much earlier and bloodier conflicts. The half-timbered walls, huge fireplaces and grandiose mirrors just oozed history.

Don't Look Back

Orpheus And Eurydice

Uphill he climbed, his girl behind.
He turned around, for love is blind,
Nor was he the obedient kind.
Fate held him in a double bind.
He turned around, only to find
His girl in Pluto's arms entwined.

Back at the top, he could not think
Or act or speak. He turned to drink.
Apollo raised one awful stink,
But Bacchus gave a tipsy wink
And Pan the Goat was tickled pink.
Distraught, he hovered on the brink

Of life and death. His choice was plain.
He'd leave the world with all its pain
Of loss, and seek his love again
Before his grief sent him insane.
Little to lose, so much to gain.
His lyre lay rusting in the rain.

So died he of a broken heart
(A sozzled liver played its part),
Descended to the Underworld,
Searched high and low to get his girl,
And now they wander, hand in hand,
Forever, through a happy land.

Bollingen Tower: Kindling A Light

At Bollingen, I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

Bollingen Tower, Lake Zürich

I'll end my series on literary and spiritual 'towers' with the tower built by the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung. In 1922 Jung began work on a spiritual retreat near the village of Bollingen on the northern shore of Lake Zürich — which became known as Bollingen Tower. He kept enlarging the house over a period of many years. His intention was to create an architectural symbol for the structure of the human psyche: the whole conscious and unconscious mind. After the death of his wife in 1955 Jung added a second storey, which for him represented an extension of consciousness achieved in old age. As a child, Jung had often imagined a castle on an island in a lake — a symbol of the unconscious inner stronghold of the self. Now his dream had become a physical reality.

Jung spent several months a year at Bollingen, where he was able to fulfil his great need for solitude. His life there was of utter simplicity: he cooked, chopped wood, fetched water from the well, sailed boats on the lake. He painted murals and carved in stone. Most of all he went deep within himself, into the dark recesses of his mind. He encountered universal archetypal figures such as the 'anima' figure of Salome, and the 'animus' figure of Philomen, whom he identified as his personal, spiritual guide. And he described these psychic discoveries in the manuscript that was published much later (in 2009) as the Liber Novus or The Red Book.

I've been fascinated by Jung ever since I read his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in my early twenties; and I'm constantly amazed how contemporary his ideas still feel. He did much research into the field of symbols and dream interpretation. He explored alchemy, astrology, the occult, literature, sociology and Eastern philosophy. He originated the terms 'extrovert', 'introvert', 'synchronicity' and 'collective unconscious'. Jungian thought still permeates our current concerns with personality, the self, the causes and cures of neurosis and psychosis, and the spiritual life.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. CARL GUSTAV JUNG

Thanks go to Ruth for inspiring this post.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Stones In The Sky

I built her a tower when I was young — / Sometime she will die — / I built it with my hands, I hung / Stones in the sky. ROBINSON JEFFERS For Una

Hawk Tower, Carmel Point, California. Jeffers built this entirely by himself.

In 1914 the great American poet Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una visited the Carmel-Big Sur coast south of California's Monterey Peninsula and were overwhelmed by its wild and pristine beauty. They decided to build a house there — Tor House — on a craggy finger of land called Carmel Point. They used granite stones and rocks gathered locally from the shoreline of Carmel Bay. After the house was finished, Jeffers continued to build, constructing his rugged Hawk Tower: a poetic retreat which inevitably brings to mind other literary towers — the towers of Hölderlin, Rilke and Yeats, for instance.

It's evident that Jeffers was a practical man, and a scientific one too. He'd studied medicine and forestry and astronomy and evolutionary science. But he was also well-versed in literature, languages, religion and the Classics. Truly Renaissance in his education. Ah, where have those times gone?

Sign-Post

Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how.
Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity
Make your veins cold; look at the silent stars, let your eyes
Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.
Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes;
Things are the God; you will love God and not in vain,
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At length
You will look back along the star's rays and see that even
The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.
Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength
And sickness; but now you are free, even to be human,
But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.

As a poet, Jeffers evoked the divine in nature, and was one of our very first poet-ecologists. He realised that, if we pollute our environment, we pollute ourselves — our own minds and spirits. He denounced the arrogant, destructive tendency of human beings, and lamented the self-created split between mankind and the natural world.   

Natural Music

The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.

Jeffers recognised the humbling truth that we are just part of the universe, not the centre of it; and that our high-minded ideas amount to very little in the face of raw nature and its extraordinary power and beauty. 

The Beauty of Things

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things — earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars —
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality —
For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant — to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

Robinson Jeffers

Thanks go to am for inspiring this post.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

The Hermit Of Muzot

Castle Muzot, Switzerland

During his feverishly creative final years, Rilke lived at Castle Muzot, idyllically positioned above the town of Sierre in the upper Rhône valley. Here he lived in silence and solitude, with no telephone, electricity or running water. His housekeeper, whom he called a 'ghost', kept out of his way as much as possible. Living on the second floor of his 'tower', Rilke worked at a heavy oak table with glorious views over the valley. He ate meagre vegetarian meals and saw almost no one except, occasionally, Baladine Klossowska (whom he called 'Merline'), his last lover and confidante. Muzot, and its surrounding countryside of mountains, forests, rivers and streams, became dearer to him than any place he had ever lived.

Here, in a letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis dated 25 July 1921, Rilke has just found Muzot, and is considering living in this enchanting place:     

So, if everything works out, I could live at Muzot for a while, with a housekeeper. The castle is situated at the top of quite a steep hill, twenty minutes from Sierre. It's a rural area, charming, and not too dry, with abundant springs — from it your gaze extends down the valley towards mountain slopes and the most wonderful depths of sky. A small, rustic chapel lies a little higher on the left among vineyards...     

Rilke in the garden of Castle Muzot

In the same letter Rilke continues to praise his new home in the Swiss canton of Le Valais:

In these last weeks I have often come very near to announcing my visit, and a peculiar current came into my rather sluggish spirit whenever I wanted to do so; but what keeps me here is this wonderful Valais. I was imprudent enough to travel down here, to Sierre and Sion; and I have told you what a singular magic these regions worked on me when I first saw them last year at the time of the grape harvest. The fact that Spain and Provence are blended together so strangely within the features of the landscape struck me immediately even then, for, in the final pre-war years, both these lands spoke to me more strongly and decisively than anywhere else. And now to find their voices united in a broad, Swiss mountain valley! This echo, this family likeness is not fanciful. Just recently I read, in a brief treatise on the plant life of the Wallis, that certain flowers appear here which are otherwise found only in Provence and Spain; it is the same with the butterflies: thus does the soul of a great river (and to me the Rhône has always been one of the most wonderful) bear endowments and kinships through the countries. Its valley here is so wide, and so grandly filled out with little heights within the frame of the big border mountains, that the eye is continually provided with a play of the most delightful changes, a chessgame with hills, as it were...

Hölderlin's Tower

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), now considered one of the greatest German Romantic lyric poets, was little read and largely misunderstood in his lifetime. Even after his death it took at least another fifty years before his importance was recognised. One of the first people to acknowledge the genius of Hölderlin, and, indeed, to be influenced by him, was the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

A cataclysmic event in Hölderlin's life was his love affair with Susette Gontard, the wife of Frankfurt banker Jakob Gontard, who employed the poet as a private tutor. Hölderlin was dismissed when the affair was discovered, but the couple continued to meet each other in secret, until Susette fatally contracted influenza in 1802. Already showing signs of mental illness, Hölderlin never really recovered from Susette's death (she became the 'Diotima' of his poems), and his mental condition worsened.

After a fruitless stay in a clinic in Tübingen — where he was given three years to live — a local carpenter, Ernst Zimmer, took pity on Hölderlin, giving him a room in his house, a tower in the old city walls overlooking the river Neckar (see pic). Zimmer and his family were to look after him for the next thirty-six years until his death in 1843. During this time Hölderlin's own family and friends (who included the philosophers Hegel and Schelling) completely deserted him. The only mourners at his funeral were the Zimmer family themselves.

Another day

Another day. I follow another path,
Enter the leafing woodland, visit the spring
Or the rocks where the roses bloom
Or search from a look-out, but nowhere
Love are you to be seen in the light of day
And down the wind go the words of our once so
Beneficent conversation...

Your beloved face has gone beyond my sight,
The music of your life is dying away
Beyond my hearing and all the songs
That worked a miracle of peace once on

My heart, where are they now? It was long ago,
So long and the youth I was has aged nor is
Even the earth that smiled at me then
The same. Farewell. Live with that word always.

For the soul goes from me to return to you
Day after day and my eyes shed tears that they
Cannot look over to where you are
And see you clearly ever again.

FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN (Translated by DAVID CONSTANTINE)

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Yeats's Tower

In 1917 WB Yeats bought for 35 pounds an old castle with attached cottage on the banks of the river Cloon near Coole Park, County Galway, home to his dear friend Lady Gregory, and set about restoring it for his new bride Georgina Hyde-Lees, known as 'George'. He named his home 'Thoor Ballylee' ('Thoor' is Irish for 'Tower'); it became an idyllic summer retreat for Yeats and his family for twelve years. Here are some extracts from various letters he wrote enthusing about this new and inspiring environment:

... everything is so beautiful here that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.

We are in our Tower and I am writing poetry as I always do here, and, as always happens, no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry before I am finished with it.

... as you see I have no news, for nothing happens in this blessed place but a stray beggar or a heron.

It was here that Yeats wrote many of the rich and mature poems of his later years — including the 1928  volume he called, simply, The Tower. In Meditations In Time Of Civil War, one of the poems from this collection, he describes his home with these lines:

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,

A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,

An acre of stony ground,

Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,

Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,

The sound of the rain or sound

Of every wind that blows;

The stilted water-hen

Crossing stream again

Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,

A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,

A candle and written page.

The Tower contains twenty-one poems (I have my own Penguin paperback copy on the desk beside me as I write) including the well-known Sailing To Byzantium, A Prayer For My Son and Leda And The Swan. I'm particularly fond of the sequence A Man Young And Old, which begins like this:

First Love

Though nurtured like the sailing moon

In beauty's murderous brood,

She walked awhile and blushed awhile

And on my pathway stood

Until I thought her body bore

A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon

And found a heart of stone

I have attempted many things

And not a thing is done,

For every hand is lunatic

That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me

And left me but a lout,

Maundering here, and maundering there,

Emptier of thought

Than the heavenly circuit of its stars

When the moon sails out.

After the Yeats family moved out in 1929, Ballylee fell into disuse once more; but it was restored again in 1965 as a Yeats museum. The adjoining cottage became a shop and tea room.

Below is the slate slab Yeats had carved when he carried out the initial restoration: 

    

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

Tower Of Song

But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I've gone / I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the tower of song LEONARD COHEN Tower Of Song

It's a strange but interesting fact that Rilke, Hölderlin and Yeats — three of our most brilliantly creative European poets, and three of my favourite writers — all spent part of their lives in hermit-like seclusion ensconced in 'towers', from where they produced some of their most intense and inspired work.

Here's a quatrain I wrote the other day about the ambivalent private/public life of the artist. You may also interpret it from a blogger's perspective, if you wish. I suppose 'This public refuge' could be any soul-baring, personal yet published work (or work available to others apart from the writer) — and that includes a blog. I wrote it in French because I'm drenched in French at the moment (having spoken it a lot, albeit imperfectly, during my recent week in Switzerland). Also Rilke wrote most of his Castle Muzot poems in French.

Tour de Chanson

Ce refuge public

Demi-ouvert, demi-secret

S'offre au monde

Comme un Muzot de mots

(This public refuge

Half-open, half-secret

Offers itself to the world

Like a Muzot of words)

Rilke At Muzot

For the last five years of his life the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) lived at Castle Muzot — barely a castle, more a castellated house — which impressively overlooks the broad, high-sided valley of the upper Rhône. Rilke had been looking for a permanent place to stay in Switzerland since the summer of 1919. After two years of unsettled and fruitless searching he finally chanced upon a photo of Castle Muzot in a shop window in Sierre, and immediately fell in love with the place. It was available for rent. Thanks to the patronage of Werner Reinhart, who subsequently bought and renovated Muzot, Rilke was able to live there rent-free and relatively untroubled till the end of his life. It was here that he spent his most intensively productive years — completing The Duino Elegies which he'd begun in a gifted trance at Castle Duino near Trieste; writing The Sonnets To Orpheus in rapid bursts of frenzied inspiration; composing nearly four hundred lyric poems in French (many of them evoking the beauty of his beloved Valais, the Swiss canton where he now lived); and translating the works of Paul Valéry, his favourite French poet.

On Thursday 5 January I stepped from the railway station at Sierre in a quest for Castle Muzot. According to the girl in the tourist office it was easy to find — though she seemed rather surprised I was going on foot. Armed with maps, I set off uphill in the direction of Veyras. The rain poured down. Remnants of hard-packed snow made some sections of the pavement tricky to negotiate. After three-quarters of an hour I'd reached the village of Veyras, on the north-western slope above Sierre. I headed up the Route du Moulin. There, suddenly, on my right-hand side, behind a small vineyard, was Muzot! Smaller than I'd envisaged, more compact, more hemmed in now by the houses and chalets which had sprung up over the last fifty years. But it was Muzot nonetheless — despite the 'Private' sign at the gate, despite the cold and the rain, despite the mist partially obscuring the superb view down the Rhône valley. And there still, in the garden, stood the poplar tree about which Rilke went into such ecstasies!

    

 

Here's Rilke at Castle Muzot with the lover of his final years, the painter Baladine Klossowska (1886-1969) — or 'Merline', as he affectionately called her. She was married to the art historian Erich Klossowska, but they separated in 1917. Baladine was the mother of the artist Balthus and the writer Pierre Klossowska.   

This is the fine eighteenth-century building of the Maison de Courten, Rue du Bourg 30, Sierre. It's home to the Rainer Maria Rilke Foundation, which was established in 1986 to promote knowledge of Rilke's work through exhibitions, lectures, conferences and publications. The museum is open to the public between April and October each year. And every third year the Foundation stages a Rilke festival. 

Rilke is buried in the churchyard at Raron/Rarogne, a little further up the Rhône valley. The self-composed epitaph on his gravestone reads, enigmatically:

 Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,

Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel

Lidern.

(Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight

of being no one's sleep under so

many lids.)

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

Fribourg

Fribourg has one of the best maintained Old Towns in Switzerland — or so I've read. And I would not disagree, for on Tuesday 3 January I walked through Fribourg's charming and historic old quarter, and found it beautifully preserved. It had a distinctly Catholic and medieval feel. I wandered through small, atmospheric squares with fountains. I climbed steep streets which led up to the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas with its Gothic bell tower. I chanced upon all kinds of architectural nooks and crannies, and picked out tiny effigies of saints in walls and alcoves. Then, after admiring the fine sixteenth-century Town Hall, I crossed the ancient Pont de Berne, a roofed, wooden bridge spanning the river Sarine.

Soon the river entered a deep gorge. I passed a trout farm and followed the river for several kilometres. The Sarine had eroded a twisting course through the soft molasse — a friable mixture of sandstone, shale, conglomerate and marine deposits. Over the millennia the river had smoothed this rock into sinuous shapes, scooping out depressions and carving pinnacles, and undercutting it to form exciting overhangs. My circular route then doubled back to Fribourg along field paths which tracked the topmost edge of the ravine. The weather was hardly cold, considering the time of year, and long, low scarves of cloud indicated that a mild Föhn wind was about to blow. A spectacular sunset lit up the city as I climbed back down. 

Fribourg (Freiburg in German) was famous for its weavers, tanners and dyers in medieval times. It's now a popular university town, with a population of 40,000. Lying on the border of French and German speaking Switzerland, it is, as such, bilingual. It's an arty place, an academic place and a gastronomic place. I ate in two restaurants there — one Lebanese, one Italian — and both were very good.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

Winter Escape

Postcard: view over Montreux and Lac Léman towards the seven summits of the Dents du Midi.  Out of sight to the west (the right) an intimidating chain of mountains — the northern limit of the French Alps — plunges precipitously down to the lake in a jumble of snowfields, cirques, bare grey slopes and glaciated valleys.

In a bid to escape the madness of Christmas and the mayhem of New Year, Sunday 1st January found me on a Eurostar train to Paris then a TGV-Lyria train to Geneva. I'd half intended to walk a few sections of the Swiss Chemin de Saint-Jacques/Jakobsweg, but in the end I did shorter, circular walks, and visited some of the historic towns and villages of Switzerland's south-west corner: Lausanne, Montreux, Sonzier, Glion, Fribourg, Sierre and Veyras.

Lake Geneva, or Lac Léman, formed the centrepiece of my stay. I was at once seduced by its ever-changing moods and colours. I saw it in rain and sunshine, mist and snow. From the hills above Montreux the Alpine panorama on the far side of the lake was magnificent, particularly the jagged peaks of the Dents du Midi, which loomed menacingly over the flat, broad valley of the river Rhône's upper reaches. This mountain chain, in the Swiss canton of Valais, has seven summits, or 'teeth'; and in October 2006, after several years of boiling hot summers and subsequent thawing, a huge mass of rock detached itself from La Haute Cime, the most easterly peak, causing a massive landslide.

One outstanding walk took me from the heights of Sonzier up the Route du Pont de Pierre, past skeleton trees and crashing waterfalls, over an old stone bridge which spans the Gorges du Chaudron, through Glion (the view of the Dents du Midi from the Buffet de la Gare's restaurant window is quite breathtaking) and back down to Montreux with its charming old quarter.

On fine days I watched a low sun progress over the French Alps, bathing the snowy peaks in a rosy light. On milder, mistier, rainier days the mountains, which dropped sheer onto the lake's southern shore, all but disappeared. Sometimes the orange glow of a streaky sunset lit up the western horizon. And by night a waxing moon trailed the sun across the sky, but following a higher orbit — silvering the lake, which, along its northern edge, already twinkled and shone with headlamp beams from the snaking autoroute and the lights of all the shoreside settlements between Montreux and Lausanne.

Occasionally a Föhn wind warmed the valleys, producing briefly an exceptionally soft microclimate. Buzzards yelped, and herons beat a slow, direct and airy course above the streams and rivers. Little railways twisted impossibly up steep, wooded slopes and around rock faces, connecting remote hamlets and farmsteads. Even when hidden in a gorge or cutting, you could still hear the screech of their metallic glide. And among new buildings and modern chalets were scattered older, eighteenth-century houses, painted green and gold, with slate roofs and wooden balconies, and tumbledown wooden barns, little changed for centuries.    

Postcard: view looking east from Lac Léman across Montreux. You can clearly make out the shadowed ravine of the Gorges du Chaudron.