Reasons to Walk The Camino: (2) Negative Capability And The Via Negativa

If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark. ST JOHN OF THE CROSS

The term 'negative capability' was first coined by the Romantic poet John Keats as a description of a state in which man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Keats turned a seemingly 'negative' state of mind into a 'positive' force, and realised that too much reliance on intellectual logic could imperil another kind of knowledge, which clothed itself itself more mysteriously, more obliquely: mystical knowledge, spiritual knowledge, artistic knowledge, a direct and unfiltered awareness of beauty, the revelations of the heart and the emotions.

Keats was not alone in recognising the potentiality and necessity of doubt. Several centuries before, the Spanish mystic St John of the Cross described a semi-comparable state in his poem, The Dark Night of The Soul. In this poem, Christian union with God comes about only through difficulty and darkness, pain and suffering, doubt and conflict. One also thinks of John Bunyan and his Pilgrim's Progress, and of many Christian saints, mystics and thinkers: Thérèse of Lisieux, Mother Teresa and Simone Weil, for example.

The via negativa (or negative theology or apophatic theology) is a theological approach — common to many religions — which attempts to describe God by negation, by describing what God is not rather than what God is. The Middle English poem, The Cloud of Unknowing, advocates the abandonment of all preconceived notions and beliefs about God; it's only from a state of 'unknowingness' that we can ever hope to glimpse the transcendent.

This belief in unbelief, this embracing of doubt and denial, this surrendering to mystery and uncertainty, this discovery of the positive in the negative — is an attitude to life which appeals to me very much. Plato quotes Socrates as saying that the only thing he knows is the fact of his ignorance. Tolstoy writes in War and Peace that the only thing we can know is that we know nothing.

But how does all this relate to the Camino? Surely we follow the Camino in order to learn, to achieve a goal, to put our lives in order? Well, perhaps. But the truth is rather less obvious, less clearly structured than this. In fact I've come to realise that the Camino — like life itself — is a via negativa, a path unwinding as much in darkness as it is in the intense light of the Spanish sun. (My poem Camino Fever contains the line How dark the soul in the dead of night! But how bright the morning sun!) There are bandits as well as angels along the way. There's bitter loneliness as well as unexpected, sweet companionship. And some days it feels as if you're taking one step forward, then two steps back. The Camino's lessons, answers and revelations — if lessons, answers and revelations there are — leak out slowly, if at all, and often only many years or decades after the Camino is done (though, of course, the Camino is never finished; it goes on for ever).

I have walked several Caminos through France and Spain — the route from Geneva, the route from Le Puy, the Arles route, the Vía de la Plata, the French Way — and I've walked some sections twice. I've also trekked round the south-west coast of England, and followed many other short and long-distance paths in Britain and Europe, which may be considered pilgrimages of sorts. (Though 'pilgrimage' is a loose term, like many terms. 'Pilgrimage' can mean different things to different people, as can the terms 'path', 'destination', 'illumination', 'revelation', 'transcendence' and 'Camino' itself. These notions are open to differing meanings, emphases and interpretations, and we can colour them with our own personal subtleties, and that's good, because words and ideas are fluid and malleable, and the truth seeps out through the cracks within them and the spaces between them, and in their combinations and juxtapositions, and in their poetry.)

These long walks and pilgrimages have become lodged in my being for ever. They define part of who I am, and I ponder them often, and their significance. But their significance is far from clear, and their meaning reveals itself only sporadically, like occasional pinpricks of light in a darkened sky. The following are just a few of the thoughts and questions I ponder.

Recently I began a pilgrimage to Rome, but returned home after a few days suffering from fatigue, aches and pains, deafness and a punishingly heavy backpack. Did I learn nothing from my other Caminos? Or will I perhaps learn more than I've ever done before from this abortive Camino?

Why did I feel such an overwhelming sense of anticlimax when I reached Santiago for the first time? 

How can I reconcile these two conflicting images in my mind: the happy pilgrim approaching Santiago and the recent tragic train crash near Santiago? 

Why do I embrace those Camino micro-friendships when they offer themselves, but soon tire of the proximity (often a much-too-close proximity in dormitories!) of other pilgrims, and long for my own company again, despite the omnipresent threat of loneliness and isolation? 

Why do journeys turn into exaggerated epics when recalling them to oneself afterwards, or recounting them to others? Why does one forget about the long stretches of boredom, of depression, of suffering? Do our memories ever recall anything accurately? (I suspect not.)

Why did I decide to walk the Camino, and why am I always compelled to go back? (Most people think I am crazy. You've walked across Spain three times? Why?)

Questions, questions . . . and there are more, many more, because questions like these are endless and eternal, and probably unanswerable, and asking them is part of what makes us human. I don't really know why I've walked the Camino, or why I go back, nor will I ever be able to grasp the Camino's full significance, nor will I ever be able grasp the full significance of anything (for only God can do that, only God in his or her or its ineffability and 'unknowingness').

Let us be content to remain, if we can, in a state of uncertainty, mystery and doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. For perhaps only in this negative-positive way can we attain an inkling, a brief flash of the truth.

Reasons To Walk The Camino: (1) The Slough Of Despond

This is the first piece in an occasional series I'm calling Reasons To Walk The Camino.

The name of the slough was Despond. JOHN BUNYAN The Pilgrim's Progress

It was another time and another place, and she was younger, but not that much younger. She was old enough to have suffered a little, and to have experienced melancholy, and to have survived this suffering and melancholy. She carried some scars, and some hurt, and some confusion, but she still had faith in the future, still saw the glass half full rather than half empty. Until one day, one quite ordinary and uneventful day, a pit opened up before her feet, and she fell right in.

She stayed there in the darkness for a week or two — or was it longer? Her thoughts were grim, and she tried to push away these negative thoughts. She was almost completely immobile during this dark time. Movement was an effort bordering on torment. Better to remain still, to breathe slowly and regularly, to breathe deeply and determinedly, in and out, in and out. She prayed the walls of the pit would keep straight, as they appeared to bulge, then deflate, and rock from side to side.

She must have eaten and drunk throughout this period, but she cannot remember what she ate or drank. In fact, she cannot remember eating or drinking at all. She did not seem to want to read, or even to be able to read. Noises reached her consciousness only intermittently: snatches of music, mainly Bach, Mozart and Brahms, and some pop songs from her past, Johnny Halliday, Françoise Hardy. There was no world outside the pit, outside her mind, outside her body (which was curled up in the foetal position for most of the time).

Then one day the fog cleared, and she tried to walk, which she did shakily, and she realised she was not in a real pit, but actually in the bedroom of her house, and it was a morning in early spring, and the sun was dripping like honey through the curtains, and the blackbirds were scolding each other and making alarm calls in the garden.

And she gave thanks to the bedroom, to the house, to the garden, to the sun, to the blackbirds — and probably to God and to the Infinite Spirit and to the whole universe too. She gave thanks that life was change and flux and a process of becoming, and that nothing lasted forever, even dark pits into which we might fall. She resolved to avoid these pits in future if she could, and if she could not, then at least she now knew they would eventually dissolve and disappear and change into something else: perhaps a warm room with a bed and a blanket and the sun filtering through the curtains, or even a wood or a forest or a green valley or a high hill or a rocky mountain. Or a path which wound through the wood or the forest or the valley, and up the hill, and over the mountain.

It was at that moment she decided to walk the Camino. And she has been walking the Camino ever since.    

Poetry And Walking

When my sister and only sibling, Elizabeth, died from a brain tumour at the age of 29 in August 1987, I found myself turning to poetry for succour, consolation and a deeper view of things. I called on Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and other English Romantic poets; I visited Lorca, Levertov and RS Thomas. I also began walking more and more, and further and further. In the simple act of walking, in the natural human activity of placing one foot in front of the other, I encountered a kind of fragile peace; and the sublime scenery I often walked through seemed to provide, at least partly, a benign and numinous response to my unanswerable questions.

I kept a written log of my walking routes from April 1987 to May 2006. Looking at it again recently, I'm reminded that a few weeks after my sister's death Carmen and I stayed for a while in Porthmadog (Wales), where I climbed the little hill of Moel-y-Gest and the mountain of Cnicht, and ascended the Roman Steps from Cwm Bychan. The landscape here in Snowdonia is wild, dramatic and breathtakingly beautiful.

My mother, Joan, died in November 2004, and again I turned to poetry: this time to the poems she'd  transferred to her commonplace books in a painstaking and neat hand, or cut out from magazines with scissors and pasted into her scrapbooks; and also those chosen by WB Yeats for The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Mum had been awarded this book as a prize for 'General Proficiency' at the end of her 1937-8 year at The Municipal High School for Girls in Doncaster, Yorkshire.

Three years later I completed my first Camino, and lit candles in memory of my sister and mum at various significant stages along the Way. Here's the wonderfully crazy signpost at Manjarin in the Spanish Montes de León:

My father, Fred, died in January 2009, and almost exactly one year later I walked the Vía de la Plata. I dedicated this Camino to him. We did not have an easy relationship, but all is now more peaceable. The last words he spoke to me were: 'You know I love you, Robert'.

Dad did not appreciate the finer subtleties of poetry as such, but he did love the words to the Wesleyan hymns he played on the organ each week at the Methodist village chapel. Only the other day I was leafing through his Methodist Hymn Book and alighted on John Bunyan's Who Would True Valour See (from Pilgrim's Progress):

Who would true Valour see
Let him come hither;
One here will Constant be,
Come Wind, come Weather.
There's no Discouragement,
Shall make him once Relent,
His first avow'd Intent,
To be a Pilgrim.

(The Monk's Gate arrangement by Vaughan Williams, adapted from a traditional English melody.)

Needless to say, he also loved the words of the Bible, and of course the words of the Authorised King James Version are poetry indeed. This is the title page of one of his Bibles:

Poetry and walking have been my salvation in the most challenging of times. There are times when I feel they have actually saved my life, or kept me sane at the very least.

Sorrow

Why does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?

Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,

I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I let them float up the dark chimney.

DH LAWRENCE

(Collected by WB Yeats in The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse 1892-1935.)

The Country Of Beulah

Luminous scene from the Camino... (Thanks, Rita)

Now I saw in my dream, that by this time the pilgrims were got over the Enchanted Ground, and entering into the country of Beulah, whose air was very sweet and pleasant, the way lying directly through it, they solaced themselves there for a season. Yea, here they heard continually the singing of birds, and saw every day the flowers appear on the earth, and heard the voice of the turtle in the land. In this country the sun shineth night and day; wherefore this was beyond the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and also out of reach of Giant Despair, neither could they from this place so much as see Doubting Castle. Here they were within sight of the city they were going to, also here met some of the inhabitants thereof; for in this land the Shining Ones commonly walked, because it was upon the borders of Heaven. In this land also, the contract between the bride and the bridegroom was renewed; yea, here, 'As the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so did their God rejoice over them.' Here they had no want of corn and wine; for in this place they met with abundance of what they had sought for in all their pilgrimage. John Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress

Exile; Darkness; Rejection; Separation; Guilt; Lost and Confused; Flight; On the Road; Camino; Seeking and Searching; Wishing, Hoping, Dreaming; Longing and Yearning; Acceptance; Healing; Grace; Wonder and Revelation; Light and Illumination; Union and Transformation; Agape and Universal Love; Redemption and Rebirth.

Traditionally and mystically there are 3 stages of the Camino: from Roncesvalles to Burgos lies the Way of Reflection; from Burgos to Leon the Way of Penitence; from Leon to Santiago the Way of Glory. I had begun the Way of Reflection. Would I ever attain the Way of Glory? The Solitary Walker Death In The Afternoon

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path. The Buddha

To Be A Pilgrim

The fifteenth-century mystic Thomas a Kempis said that no matter where a person was he or she would always be a 'stranger and pilgrim', unable to find peace unless united inwardly with Christ: for him true pilgrimage was an inner journey along the pathway of the spirit, with the living Christ as the ultimate shrine. In John Bunyan's great allegorical work The Pilgrim's Progress, the pilgrimage is one of overcoming moral obstacles and gaining self-knowledge in order to arrive at the Celestial City. Its readers become pilgrims in the imagination, accompanying Christian as he walks through the Valley of Humiliation, resists the temptations of Vanity Fair or escapes from Doubting-Castle.

Pilgrimage may not, then, necessitate a physical journey - for Kempis and Bunyan it is possible for the pilgrim to remain in a cloister or a prison cell. Even so, inner pilgrimage, like its external counterpart, still implies movement - towards a new spiritual state of being. Therefore, whether pilgrimage is made physically or contemplatively, the idea of journeying remains central to it: the pilgrim must make a journey because he or she needs time - time to reflect upon personal dilemmas or wrongdoings, or upon the great mysteries of life, such as fate, suffering and the nature of God. For the pilgrim the journey, with all its vicissitudes, is not the wearisome preamble to truth - it is the necessary way to truth, the living, arduous and joyful process by which truth can be attained.

Pilgrimage has inherent challenges and demands, highs and lows - it is a journey not to be taken lightly. Nowadays it is possible to travel to pilgrim shrines quickly and in comfort, but many prefer to expose themselves to a slow, sacred metamorphosis, realizing that the hardship of heat, cold, rain, blisters and fatigue can open the mind up to old memories and new possibilities, and can effect an emotional and spiritual purification. The destination - the shrine, the mountain or the church - signifies not the end of the journey, but the start - a portal into a new way of being, of seeing life afresh with spiritually cleansed eyes.

From James Harpur's Sacred Tracks: 2000 Years of Christian Pilgrimage (2002)

My photo shows the pilgrim tree-shrine I passed somewhere in south-west France. Where it was exactly I can't remember.