Let Us Disappear Into Praising

This post is dedicated to Ruth's blog synch-ro-ni-zing, which came to a close this week. There were real and heartfelt tears wept in blogdom, I assure you. Let us praise and celebrate this fine blog in all its beauty, creativity, intelligence, numinosity and generosity of spirit. True soul-work indeed.

Hymn

Praise the sky to the tree
And praise the tree to the ground
Praise the word on a leaf
And paraphrase some praise in song

Ride the curve of a question
Streaming down the wing of a swan
Uncurl your tongue with a holler
Or fly on praise without sound

Exhale the body to praise the air
Burn brittle sticks of hate
Clean the room with incense
Sniff the glue of "Celebrate"

Blossom a path to the plum
And flower-fountain the moon
Waterfall your hair on rocks
Then tease it out like the sun

Shout in yellow and laugh out red
Amen the sinners, admonish the dead
Swing on the tire to praise the clock
Then hug the hammock and sleep full stop

Heat up your heart 
And mercy your mind
Climb on the couch, bounce 
Your jiggles divine

Puff milkweed pouts and explode the pod 
Shake your bones till they’re humble
Fill that space with God!

RUTH MOWRY

Praise, my dear one.
Let us disappear into praising.
Nothing belongs to us.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Lyrical Paris

I conjure up an imaginative Paris, half-real, half-mythical: Jacques Prévert scribbling poems on café tablecloths; Baudelaire, in drug-induced somnolence, stumbling down alleyways through puddles of spilt absinthe; Sartre and de Beauvoir debating existentialism in Les Deux Magots; Jean Genet finding epiphanies in Art Nouveau urinals; Henry Miller wallowing in nostalgie de la boue and celebrating the lotus flower and its muddy roots; Rilke’s panther pacing up and down its cage in the Jardin des Plantes; the mentally ill and terminally insane in the Salpêtrière, endlessly gesturing; government ministers and their mistresses legislating and fornicating in the Palace Bourbon and the Palais du Luxembourg; portrait painters in Montmartre flattering their sitters by accentuating the good bits and airbrushing the dodgy bits; pretty sirens in the posh bars of the Boulevard Saint-Germain beckoning in the tourists for a flinchingly expensive glass of red; smart prostitutes patrolling the Bois de Boulogne like efficient businesswomen, while the lurid, tacky ones smoke crack in the backstreets of Pigalle; fashion-accessory shih tzus and chihuahuas trotting by their Versace and Gaultier-clad owners along the Champs-Élysées, or being carried in handbags like exquisite, tiny invalids; clochards swigging cheap wine on the quays near the Pont Saint-Michel; the open-air bookstalls lining the Seine’s Left Bank, a scene unchanged for a hundred years; the mathematical, metallic chic of the Tour Eiffel . . .

. . . but, above all, I imagine the songs of Paris, those innumerable clichéd, romantic songs, crooned by an Yves Montand or a Charles Aznavour, and those more authentic, lived-in songs from the big heart of a diminutive Edith Piaf, and I trawl through these songs, and am drawn inexplicably to a dozen of them; then I steal a line from this one and a line from that one, like a jackdaw filching rings dropped in the Tuileries Gardens, and arrange them in a different way, cut-and-paste fashion, until a poem emerges from this musical bric-a-brac, and finds itself. You might call it a cento or poetic patchwork, an assemblage or lyrical collage . . .

Lyrical Paris

We may never get to Paris
And find the café of our dreams
So I’m leaving for Paris
Don’t try to find out where I am

April in Paris
Chestnuts in blossom
Holiday tables under the trees

Sous le ciel de Paris
Marchent des amoureux
Sous le ciel de Paris
Coule un fleuve joyeux

Paris c’est une blonde
Qui plaît à tout le monde

I’ve got nothing to lose
But the hole in my shoes
And small change

The pavement cafés
On the Champs-Élysées
Are deserted
And the trees are so bare
On the Boulevard de la Madeleine

I walk the boulevards
And I ask the moon and the stars to find you
But we don’t exist
We are nothing but shadow and mist
Nothing but shadow and mist

I’m throwing my arms around Paris
Because only stone and steel
Accept my love
Because nobody
Wants my love

Essential Tulips And A Gorgeous Madness

My favourite British daily newspaper is the Guardian (and its Sunday sister paper, the Observer). I don't see a copy every day, but I do buy the Saturday edition whenever possible, mainly for its excellent Review section on the arts. It's so well written. If I have the time, I'm quite happy to spend an hour or two doing the Quick Crossword, then reading/skim reading the whole supplement from cover to cover, perhaps marking out bits that have caught my attention. I see I've highlighted these three pieces from last Saturday's Review:

Nicola Barker on Thomas Merton:

'Up with the revolution of tulips. Tulips are not important, they are essential. Yes, sing. Love and Peace, silence, movement of planets.'

As soon as you start reading him [Merton], you find yourself transported to the wooden porch of his hermitage in Gethsemani, Kentucky. It is night-time. The crickets roar. You are perched on an uncomfortably comfortable stool, watching the fireflies flit through the darkness. 'Lord God of this great night,' Merton sighs, 'do you see the woods? Do you hear the rumour of their loneliness? Do you behold their secrecy? Do you remember their solitudes? Do you see that my soul is beginning to dissolve like wax within me?'

Stuart Jeffries interviewing the Swedish author Sven Lindqvist:

One of Lindqvist's earliest books was called Advertising Is Lethal. 'It's a critique of advertising and marketing. I wrote it when I had recently married and we had to buy everything to make a household. I revolted against the idea that I would have to do work I didn't want to do just in order to pay instalments on a sofa. I'd much rather not have a sofa and use my time to do some reading, writing, loving and experiencing life.' (Me too! SW)

The Saturday Poem: The Alibi by James Fenton:

My mind was racing.
It was some years from now.
We were together again in our old flat.
You were admiring yourself adjusting your hat.
'Oh of course I was mad then,' you said with a forgiving smile,
'Something snapped in me and I was mad for a while.'

But this madness of yours disgusted me,
This alibi,
This gorgeous madness like a tinkling sleigh,
It carried you away
Snug in your fur, snug in your muff and cape.
You made your escape
Through the night, over the dry powdery snow.
I watched you go.

Truly the mad deserve our sympathy.
And you were driven mad you said by me
And then you drove away,
The cushions and the furs piled high,
Snug with your madness alibi,
Injured and forgiven on your loaded sleigh.

All wonderful quotes, don't you think?

A Grey Day In Paris

I do not know what I thought Paris would be like, but it was not that way. It rained nearly every day. ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Bordeaux To Paris

On the Monday I took a train from Bordeaux to Paris. This journey under grey skies brought me back to earth with a jolt. The landscape I passed through seemed tedious and ordinary, especially beyond Poitiers, and flat, featureless, arable fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Or perhaps I was just feeling a little tired and jaded after my long walk...

I arrived at Gare Montparnasse in the early evening. It was pouring with rain, and I walked for half an hour through the rain to the Hôtel de Nesle, a cheap, tiny, off-beat hotel near Place Saint-Michel. The next day I explored Paris, city of love and romance, but on this occasion I didn't find much of either. I think it was something to do with my mood, which had become dull and listless...     

The famous 13th-century stained glass windows of La Sainte-Chapelle.

La Sainte-Chapelle under grey Parisian skies.

The centre west portal of Notre-Dame. This stupendous example of Gothic art depicts the Last Judgment.

Notre-Dame de Paris. The cathedral's three rose windows — north, south and west (you can see the west one here) — are some of the great artistic masterpieces of Christianity.

Le Pont des Arts. Here couples pledge their undying love for each other by attaching a padlock to the railings and throwing the key into the river below. 

Near the Rue Mouffetard on the Left Bank.

The Pantheon.

The Pantheon is a mausoleum which contains the remains of distinguished French citizens. Here is the memorial to aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince.

Underneath the the Pantheon's central cupola.

The university of the Sorbonne.

The Sorbonne.

Place de la Sorbonne.

After two weeks' walking through remote, rural France, I soon found the grand buildings of Paris — those monumental symbols of wealth, power and privilege — rather oppressive. I began to feel unwell, and a cloud of lethargy and mild depression enveloped me...

Cahors To Bordeaux

On my last day of the trail, Saturday 19 May, I waited at the bus stop in Limogne for a bus to Cahors. No bus came. Instead a car arrived, and a blonde lady driver stepped out to greet me. 'The bus has broken down,' she announced. ' So I'm taking you!' Whether the bus had actually broken down, or whether the staff hadn't turned up because it was a French public holiday weekend, I never did determine.

However, I had no cause to complain: my 'private taxi' (I was the only passenger) took me in comfort and style on the forty minute journey to Cahors, and not only took me to Cahors but went the scenic route down the valley, then up over the tops, with stupendous views over endless forests cut by deep, limestone gorges. And all for the price of a few euros (the lady absolutely refused to accept a tip). And this charming 'bus driver' and I talked non-stop, so it was good for my French too. In short, as you can see, I was picked up by une femme inconnue on my last day of the trail, which doesn't happen all the time on pilgrimage, I assure you. A wonderful instance of how 'trail angels' can materialise even when the trail is over...

In Cahors the weather turned, and the rain teemed down...   

The Pont Valentré in Cahors. This bridge over the river Lot is one of the finest medieval bridges in Europe.

I chose a slow way home from Cahors, and caught a train to Bordeaux, where I slept the night...

The view from my hotel bedroom in Bordeaux.

The Église Sainte-Croix in Bordeaux.

A moss-covered St George slays the dragon on the western façade of the Église Sainte-Croix.

 Detail of carved stonework from the west portico of the Église Sainte-Croix.

I befriend two university lecturers in a Bordeaux bistrot.

Bordeaux bistrot girls.

The Café du Levant near Bordeaux railway station.

Bordeaux railway station.

The Quiet Pilgrimage

The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience. HILAIRE BELLOC

Place works on the pilgrim . . . that's what pilgrimage is for. ROWAN WILLIAMS

Not long before I went to Spain, I read an essay in the journal Artesian by a Czech writer called Vaclav Cilek, cryptically entitled Bees of the Invisible. Cilek — himself a long-distance wanderer — proposed a series of what he called 'pilgrim rules', of which the two most memorable were the 'Rule of Resonance' ('A smaller place with which we resonate is more important than a place of great pilgrimage') and the 'Rule of Correspondence' ('A place within a landscape corresponds to a place within the heart.') 'The number of quiet pilgrims is rising,' he observed. 'Places are starting to move. On stones and in forests one comes across small offerings — a posy made from wheat, a feather in a bunch of heather, a circle from snail shells.' I had come across such DIY land-art often myself: the signs of unnumbered 'quiet pilgrimages', of uncounted people improvising odd journeys in the hope that their voyages out might become voyages in.

Perhaps, though, each era imagines itself to be increasingly on pilgrimage. As Merlin Coverley notes in The Art of Wandering, the pilgrim is among the most venerable figures of literature. The true boom-years of religious pilgrimage were, of course, medieval — but the Victorian decades saw a strong surge of interest in pilgrimage both as practice and metaphor. Hilaire Belloc's bestsellers The Path to Rome (1902) and The Old Road (1904) — the former an account of what he called his 'mirific and horripilant adventure' of walking to the Holy Sepulchre — carried that interest over into the 20th century. 'Pilgrimage,' wrote Belloc permissively and encouragingly, 'ought to be nothing but a nobler kind of travel, in which, according to our age and inclination, we tell our tales, or draw our pictures, or compose our songs.'

ROBERT MACFARLANE From his recent Guardian essay Rites Of Way: Behind The Pilgrimage Revival. (You can read this excellent essay in its entirety here.)

The End Of The Trail

Limogne marked the end of my trek, my two-week, 300 kilometre journey south-west from Le Puy through some of France's most stunning scenery. I'd walked almost half-way to the Spanish border. Before catching the bus to the railway station in Cahors, I wandered up into the woods above Limogne in search of this dolmen. It seemed the right thing to do. I'm not sure why.  

Dolmens are burial sites of immense antiquity. Most are five to six thousand years old, though some are much older. You can find them in Europe, Asia, India and the Middle East. Interestingly, Korea has the largest concentration of dolmens in the world, probably accounting for 40% of the world's total. 

These structures — which consist of several upright stones supporting a flat, horizontal capstone — were usually covered with earth and smaller stones, but in most cases this outer covering has worn away, leaving only the 'skeleton' of the tomb behind.

Here are my backpack and walking poles at the end of the trail. I left them resting against this tree as I examined the dolmen and pondered on time and space and distance, and on how my life had brought me here to this remote spot in rural France, and on love, and the pain and the ecstasy of love, and death, and other weighty matters. Then I took a few photos, shouldered my pack, grasped my walking poles, and set off back down the path to Limogne in the dappled sunlight.  

(Dolmen: circa 3500 BC. Backpack and walking poles: circa AD 2010.)

Gréalou To Limogne

Pond between Gréalou and Cajarc.

The small town of Cajarc huddles by the river Lot in a bowl of chalk cliffs.  This is Cajarc's attractive Tourist Information Office — situated in a converted former chapel.

A canalised section of the river Lot.

The village of Gaillac on the other side of the river.

The path becomes stonier and stonier.

Coquilles Saint-Jacques.

Between Cajarc and Limogne.

Lot

In Livinhac I crossed the river Lot, where I spent a happy time watching some huge frogs and listening to their loud, unearthly, grunting noises. Shortly after Livinhac I passed from the department of Aveyron into the department of Lot itself. This lovely scene is somewhere between Livinhac and Figeac...

On the way to Figeac.

The village of Faycelles, which lies just beyond Figeac, is a perfect gem. Most of its houses seem to have been renovated or restored. However, the lady who owned its bar-restaurant, La Forge, told me that the village was not what it used to be: it was harder and harder to make a living, and many shops and little businesses — such as the butcher's and other bars — had ceased trading.

It was lunchtime, and the sun was beating down, so I had a beer, and relaxed, and enjoyed the medley of 60s pop music pulsating from the bar. Unfortunately I became so relaxed that it was quite hard to start walking again...  

Faycelles.

But I had to carry on, as I'd booked a place in a chambre d'hôte called L'Atelier des Volets Bleus in Gréalou — which was still twelve and a half kilometres away. I stopped briefly to admire this superb view over the Lot valley...  

View over the valley of the Lot.

Two pilgrims with headscarves enjoy a picnic lunch. (You can see my walking poles resting against the base of the stone cross.)

A barn typical of the Lot.

Soon the trees closed in, and I walked for many kilometres through dense, deciduous woodland, along paths bordered by mossed, tumble-down stone walls...

Dense, deciduous woodland...

Mossed, tumble-down stone walls...

More of the same...

You come across a number of these small, round, drystone huts in the area. They are former shelters for shepherds, known as caselles...

A caselle or shepherd's hut.

Caminante, No Hay Camino

Wanderer, your footsteps are


the road, and nothing more;
 

wanderer, there is no road,
 

the road is made by walking.
 

By walking you make the road,
 

and on glancing back 

you see the path
 

that you will never tread again.
 

Wanderer, there is no road  — 

Only trails upon the sea.

ANTONIO MACHADO

Sainte-Brigitte

Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone / They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on. LEONARD COHEN The Sisters Of Mercy

Janosch and Árpád.

Opposite the Église Saint-Roch in the village of Saint-Roch, a few sweaty uphill kilometres beyond Decazeville, you will find a pretty little gîte called Sentinelle. The Chemin de Saint-Jacques brought me here late in the afternoon of Tuesday 15 May. Two Hungarian pilgrims, Janosch and Árpád, had already stashed their backpacks behind the door. We chatted and joked and swapped stories, and I decided to spend the night there rather than carry on to Livinhac as I'd originally planned. Brigitte, the feisty hospitalière, one-time nurse and fervent Catholic, breezed in. She bid us take off our boots. She showed us the shower, the toilet, the small bedroom crammed with mattresses. She said she would cook a meal for us later, but first there was church.

Other pilgrims arrive, and the dynamic Brigitte busies herself massaging sore limbs and cutting up cauliflower and trying to remember our names. Then a ragged bunch of us cross the road to have our créanciales stamped and to celebrate Mass. The priest is old and shaky and apparently the survivor of two recent heart attacks. Brigitte helps him find his glasses and the right place in the Order of Service. She is his aid and supporter. The choir sings the Kyrie, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei. The choir — well, I mean the choir of Brigitte: she's on her own, toute seule, with her sweet, quavering, descant voice, battling the sins of the world like a female Saint George, her eyes piercing yet other-worldly. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy... We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth... Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world: grant us peace... She believes; she has no doubts. Slim and petite, she is strong and invincible with faith. She is the backbone of the gîte, the church, of the tiny settlement of Saint-Roch. 

And she is kind. And attentive. And interested in all these crazy pilgrims with their crazy stories about China and India and South America. And she serves delicious food tasting of her own garden: vegetable soup, and quiche, and carrots, and cauliflower, and potatoes — all subtly flavoured and spiced — and chocolate tart. And wine, though not a lot. And when other pilgrims roll in, tired and hungry, they are fed and watered; and somehow she produces another mattress from out of nowhere, or finds a sofa for them, or a comfortable corner of the floor.

And when we leave the next morning, after coffee and bread and home-made jam, she wishes us Bonne Route and kisses us and waves till we are out of sight, and the priest waves too from the window of his house by the church, though I'm not sure he can see us very well, as Brigitte is not there to find his spectacles.

I doubt if any of us will ever forget Brigitte...

(You can read more about Brigitte here.)

Birds, Beasts And Flowers

I hardly came across any mammals on the Chemin except for the domestic kind, but wild flowers, birds and insects were abundant. Although many of the species I saw were familiar to me from the UK, there seemed to be a much greater diversity and distribution here in south-west France.

Birds of prey included buzzard, kite, kestrel, sparrow hawk and possibly an eagle. And the call of the cuckoo was the musical backdrop to the whole fortnight. Some more unusual birds I spotted were redstarts and shrikes — redstarts are only locally common in Britain, and shrikes very rare indeed. (Shrikes are also known as 'butcher birds' because of their habit of catching insects and small vertebrates, then impaling their bodies on thorns.)

Shrike.

The 'chirping' of crickets could be heard most days. This loud, rasping wall of sound is produced by the males when they rub one wing against the other to attract the females, a behaviour which is called 'stridulation'. I'm pretty certain they were crickets, and even saw one basking on a wall near Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole. However, checking the natural history websites, it seems crickets tend to 'stridulate' at night rather than in the daytime. What's going on here?

Cricket.

Buttercup, dandelion, ragged-robin, cuckoo flower, wild daffodil, white narcissus, bugle, spurge, tormentil, wood anemone, cowslip, wild strawberry, dog rose, stitchwort, campion, scabious, poppy, St John's wort, speedwell, yellow archangel, lungwort, vetch, clover, marsh marigold, violet, wild pansy, herb robert, oxeye daisy, peony, butterbur, honesty, selfheal, comfrey, broom, bird's-foot-trefoil, scarlet pimpernel, cow parsley...

... were just some of the flowers I found growing along the path. Lungwort (pulmonaria) is unbelievably common, whereas in England this tends to be mainly a garden flower. (Lungwort is so called because its spotted leaves were thought to resemble diseased lungs, and it was therefore used to treat pulmonary infections in the days of sympathetic magic. You can find a post I wrote on sympathetic magic here.) I also saw several different types of orchid, including the rare bee orchid, and later identified with delight herb Paris and pasque flower — both firsts for me.

Lungwort.

Pasque flower.

Herb Paris.

Bee orchid.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)