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Canigou

The places we desire are only times…

Mourid Barghouti

 

1955, midsummer. In the small town of Arles-sur-Tech at the foot of the French Pyrenees, Francesc Pujades looks south towards the Canigou massif. His life has been lived in the shadow of these hills, and he has walked them into his bones. He has lost count of the number of times he has climbed the Canigou itself.

On the other side of the massif lies Catalonia. Like many in the Roussillon borderlands, Francesc can trace a family line across the mountains, back to a time before they became a political as well as a topographical frontier. He knows the history. He knows that the Treaty of the Pyrenees, signed in 1659, saw the Spanish crown cede control of Northern Catalonia to France, in exchange for which Louis XIV renounced his claim to the southern lands, the County of Barcelona. He knows too that a little over three centuries later, the Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer wrote his epic foundational poem of Catalonia, Canigó, in which the medieval war between Christians and Saracens for control of the Iberian Peninsula is the backdrop to a tragic tale of forbidden love drawn from folk mythology.

Gentil, the son of a nobleman, falls in love with a shepherd girl, Griselda, during the celebrations to mark the Feast of St. John. His father disapproves, and Gentil, who that very day has been made a knight, is dispatched to defend a strategic castle on the northern side of the Pyrenees. There, one night, as he gazes up at the snow-capped peak of the Canigou, his squire tells him that what appears to be snow are in fact the ermine cloaks of the mountain faeries draped over the mountain. Legend has it, the squire says, that any mortal who acquires such a cloak may have whatever he most desires. Dreaming of Griselda loved and lost, Gentil abandons his guard post and heads for the summit.

Francesc Pujades gazes up at the Canigou and begins to dream. Tomorrow, he thinks, is the 24th, the Feast of St. John. He knows the centuries-old tradition whereby vigil fires are lit to mark this day in June. A cleansing of spirits, a celebration of light as we turn once more toward winter. He has often helped with the building of these St. John’s fires in Arles-sur-Tech, but this year, he decides, he will go his own way. He gathers a bundle of firewood and sets off towards the mountain. By early evening he is at the summit, and as night begins to fall he lights a bonfire whose flicker can be seen across the Roussillon plain. The following year he does the same, and this time the towns and villages below wait for the mountaintop signal before lighting their own St. John’s fires.

An idea had been kindled in the wider imagination. In the years that followed, the flame lit at the summit, la Flama del Canigó, became a mother flame used to light countless other torches that were then relayed to towns across Catalonia. At first this chain of belonging was limited to the Catalan lands on the French side of the mountain, but in 1966 it stretched across the border into Franco’s Spain and was used to light a St. John’s fire in the town of Vic, just 70 kilometres north of the Catalan capital, Barcelona. Nine years later the dictator was dead. A tradition had been born.

The choreography of the event today is a work of communal imagination. On the Sunday before the Feast of St. John, small bundles of firewood are carried to the summit of the Canigou by volunteers from towns across Catalonia. Each is tied with a ribbon, striped yellow and red as the Catalan flag and bearing the name of its place of origin: Vinaròs, Lleida, Perpignan, the length and breadth of the land. Like wishing trees, some of the bundles have stuffed within them little notes, the handwritten desires of those who have laid them on the mountain. There they remain in readiness for the fire to come.

On the day before St. John’s Eve, a short ceremony takes place in Perpignan. Once a fortified gate to the medieval city, El Castillet is now home to the Catalan Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions, and there, in a small alcove, the mother flame has burned continuously since 1965. Three bearers stand at the ready, each holding a storm lantern. A wick is passed from source to lamp, the flame leaps, the bearers depart. That evening they reach the summit in the company of many, guided by head torch and song. At midnight an unlit torch is brought towards a lantern that has been carried from Perpignan. The flame catches, the torch is raised, and a short manifesto of belonging is read aloud. The incantation ends, the torch is lowered and the bundles ignite, warming the faithful and casting countless desires into the cold night air. La Flama has been renewed. Now, other lanterns are brought close to the fire, and once lit are carried back down the mountain. By dawn they will be on their way — relayed on foot, by bike, by car to hundreds of towns across the land. A thousand fires will burn that evening, each traceable to a single source.

I have failed twice to climb the Canigou. One time the car died halfway through the four-hour drive from my home just south of Barcelona. The second time I got as far as the Cortalets hut at 2100 metres before turning back. Seven hundred metres for another day. The memories of that time have yet to settle. Not because I failed to climb a mountain, but because of those I met along the way.

Personally I have little time for epic poetry in praise of homeland and identity, but I am drawn to another kind of story that is easy to find along the eastern tail of the Pyrenees. Stories of separation and loss, of borders crossed in the hope of holding on to something of a life. Stories that show us what we have to lose. So take the train from Barcelona and alight at the border, at Portbou. From there the Canigou is a six-day hike and the approach is arduous, but it brings its own rewards.

The hills which separate Portbou from France are passable in places. Most of the paths, however, are barely discernible, and the maquis scrubland offers only the barest shelter from relentless summer sun and bitter winter wind. You would not choose to walk here, but people don’t always have a choice. During the winter of 1938-39, thousands took to these hills and sought refuge across the border as Franco’s rebel troops pushed deep into Catalonia. One war ended, another began. Eighteen months later, in September 1940, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin, followed a path in the opposite direction as he fled Nazi-occupied France. When he reached Portbou he was told that his Spanish transit visa was no longer valid, and hence, the following morning, he would be handed over to the French authorities. Later that evening, in room 3 of the Hostal Francia, he swallowed a large dose of morphine.

The dead can bring new life to a place. These days it is Benjamin who draws strangers to Portbou. They come to see the memorial sculpture, or to read his name engraved in stone on the wall of what was once the Hostal Francia. A few come to walk the hills along a waymarked trail that is named in his honour. Follow his footsteps into Spain, or do as I did and trace them back to France.

Half an hour after setting off from Portbou I reached a fork in the road. The waymark was clear — I should take the rising path to the right. The way, however, was barred by a gate, and strapped to its ribs was a sign, hand-painted in Catalan:

Walter Benjamin did not come this way. This is no memorial, because there was no path here before 1965. Private property. Keep out.

I clambered over the gate and began to climb towards the ridge along a path that became progressively thinner and steeper. After a while I no longer saw any waymarks, and I began to wonder if I had veered off. But from what? Genuineness, as Benjamin once wrote, is beyond reproducibility. Did it matter whether his footprint was pressed deep into the ground beneath my feet? I felt him at my shoulder, contemplating what had been created in his name. Consider the path, I heard him say, not as a forgery but as a translation, one that is faithful to the spirit of a lost original.

Eventually I emerged onto the ridge and stopped to rest in the shade of a solitary holm oak. I had met no-one since leaving Portbou, and no-one was waiting for me at the border. I ate a handful of walnuts and drew long on my water bottle. Then I stepped across an invisible line and began my descent into France. In Banyuls-sur-Mer, I found a cheap hotel just off the seafront. The receptionist waved away my passport.

Early the next morning I set off inland from Banyuls along the GR-10, the long-distance trail that runs the length of the Pyrenees along the French side. Up, up, up went the path, from time to time cutting across the zig-zag road that winds its way out of Banyuls. I tried to pace myself, stopping for a few minutes as I reached the marker post at each pass between ever higher lines of hills: the Col de Llagostera, the Col de Gascons. By the time I reached the grassy flat top of the Puig de Sallfort, I was a thousand metres above sea level. In the midday sun and seen from high above, the waters of the Mediterranean were iridescent, a shifting collage of greys and greens and blues. Cornish is the only language I know which can capture this in a single word: glas. Imagine the early settlers of a place we now call Cornwall. What lies in the foreground of their imagination, along whose roads do they come and go? The sea. So first a word for the colour of the indivisible sea. Grey, green, blue. Glas.

Facing west once more, I saw far in the distance the telecommunications antenna atop the rounded summit of the Puig Neulós, the final peak I had to traverse before reaching a bed for the night in the Chalet de l’Albère. Four more hours the signpost said.

Before supper that night in the Chalet I went out on to the wooden terrace and looked towards the setting sun. There it was, the silhouette of a mountain, four days walk away. I thought of Gentil, gazing at the summit and dreaming of Griselda, dreaming of finding what most he desires.

Famished and exhausted, I went back inside and made for a small corner table where I could eat alone. I was about to sit down when I heard his voice for the first time.

‘Assieds-toi avec nous’

It was more insistence than invitation, but said with a gentleness that made me want to accept. His name was Jean-Jacques, and he had set off that morning from Banyuls in the company of his brother, Pierre. Over supper, I shared with them my stories of Portbou and the Canigou, and I learned that they were planning to walk the GR-10 as far as Mérens-les-Vals, a week beyond my own destination.

‘Nous monterons peut-être au Canigou ensemble !’, said Jean-Jacques.

Or maybe I’ll need to be alone, I thought.

The following morning we left the Chalet together, but I was soon lagging behind and eventually lost sight of them as the path descended through woodland. It was there I came across one of the most beautiful trees I have ever seen, a tree that existed only for an instant, in a moment of perfect light. The skin of the cork oak had been stripped from its lower limbs, revealing flesh of burnt sienna, ochre, the tone shifting as sunlight flickered through the leaf cover, mottling the sheen of the naked trunk with darker spots the colour of Grenache. It was as if what flowed through the tree were not sap but wine from the Roussillon, drawn from the earth into which its roots sank. The light shifted, the colours faded. I gathered three small strips of cork from the ground and placed them carefully in my backpack. One for myself, two as a gift at supper tonight.

Around mid-afternoon I reached the hamlet of Les Illes and made my way to the Hostal dels Trabucayres. There on the wall to the right of the door was a marble plaque, like a fragment of an imaginary guest register from February 1939.

As the Spanish Civil War approached its grim conclusion, the country’s elected leaders gathered one final time in a farmhouse on the outskirts of La Vajol, an end-of-the-line village in the frontier hills. Lluís Companys, the president of Catalonia was there. So too was his Basque counterpart, José Antonio Aguirre. And then there was Manuel Azaña, president of a now fractured Spain. There were no choices left. In the company of others whose names elude history, the three presidents followed a path that led from La Vajol to the Col de Lli, and from there down into France, to Les Illes. Relations between the three were strained, and it is said they walked apart, but they are together on the marble plaque.

Par ce lieu le 5-2-1939 passerent

chasses d’Espagne

par l’agression Nazi fasciste international

les Presidents

de la Republique, Manuel Azaña

de la Generalitat, Lluís Companys

de Euskadi, José A. Aguirre

La France leur accorda le droit d’asile

The right to asylum. What did they feel, those defeated presidents, as they stood at the Col de Lli that cold February morning, the whole of Spain at their backs? A sense of having failed their country? Relief at the possibility of refuge? What would it have done to them had they known that Franco’s dictatorship would persist for almost four decades? None of them would live to see democracy return to Spain. Azaña and Aguirre both died in exile, in 1940 and 1960, respectively. In August 1940, Lluís Companys was detained in Brittany by the German military police, who handed him over to the Spanish authorities. Two months later, he was taken from Madrid to Barcelona and shot by firing squad in the fortress atop Montjuïc, the city hill on which an Olympic stadium would be built fifty years later. They called it the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys.

On the door of the Hostal a handwritten note told me I would have to wait: Fermé jusqu’à 17 h. I rang the bell in hope and heard an upstairs window opening. Looking up I saw Jean-Jacques beaming down at me.

‘Go round the side,’ he said, ‘and I’ll let you in.’

The owner was running an errand, but he’d already asked her to save me a bed. That evening I told my two companions about the ephemeral tree and gave them each a piece of cork. We filled our glasses time and again, and went to bed heady on Grenache.

The next two days followed a similar pattern. Although we would set off together, I was unable to keep pace, my creaking frame no match for their lean and wiry bodies. Once they were out of sight I slipped into my own quiet rhythm, savouring the slow approach to the mountain. On the long descent into Arles-sur-Tech I looked towards the Canigou massif and thought of the poet Verdaguer, of Francesc Pujades, and of what they had spawned. Without the stories it was just a mountain hewn from granite and gneiss, but the stories matter.

When I reached the valley floor I stopped to look at a tourist information board by the bridge across the River Tech. A black and white photograph, taken in 1910, showed iron ore being transported by cable car down from the Batère mines, high above the town on the western flank of the valley. To the right of the photograph, three paragraphs of text in French, a brief synopsis of the history of the mines. Across the bottom of the panel, in black marker pen and capital letters, someone had written: EN CATALÀ. SOM PAÏSOS CATALANS. Write in Catalan. These are our lands.

The iron mines closed in 1987, but part of the building where the miners once lodged and ate has been transformed into a mountain refuge, reachable from Arles-sur-Tech along a path that climbs for over ten kilometres to an altitude of 1500 metres. Late that afternoon I limped along the tarmac in front of the refuge and saw Jean-Jacques and Pierre outside on the covered terrace. I joined them in a beer and showed them my problem, the sole of my right boot hanging loose at the toe. Jean-Jacques took the boot and told me to wait. I had been walking for five days, and now, just a day from the Canigou, the summit seemed further away than ever. As I was finishing my beer, Jean-Jacques reappeared, the sole of my boot glued and bound with duct tape.

‘Leave it taped until morning,’ he said. ‘It should hold as far as Cortalets.’

We walked together that final day, my flapping boot marking time, and I was glad of their company. For five days the skies had been clear, but the weather was changing, a storm was building. As I looked up at the sky I heard the voice of my Catalan father-in-law as clear as when he last spoke to me in this life: Cielo de panza de burra, agua segura. Rain for sure when the sky’s the colour of a donkey’s belly. Jean-Jacques smiled at the image.

‘If we had a donkey, you wouldn’t have to walk any further.’

At the Cortalets hut we ate lunch together, and then went outside to say our goodbyes. I glanced towards the summit, then down at my ragged boot. Spots of rain began to fall.

‘Remember,’ said Jean-Jacques, ‘it is just one time. Le Canigou t’attend !’

I reached into my backpack and took out a tiny bundle of sticks, tied with a black and white ribbon.

‘In case you climb the mountain,’ I said, handing them to Jean-Jacques.

The jeep taxi was waiting, one place left. Thirty minutes down a pitted access road, back to the valley below.

At home again I soon slipped back into work and routines, and a month went by before I realized that I hadn’t shared with my two French companions the few photographs I had of our days together. I sent them off, but heard nothing for a while, until one day I received an email reply from Pierre, only from Pierre. He had, he said, some terrible news. Jean-Jacques, suite à un accident de vélo très grave, est décédé.

In one of the photographs, taken on our final morning together, I am standing with Jean-Jacques by a marker post at the Col de Cirère, an altitude of 1731 metres. We have been following the rise and fall of the same path for almost 90 kilometres, and we have climbed, all told, over 4500 metres. In the photograph, exhaustion shrouds me like an aura. As for Jean-Jacques, he is smiling, strong, ready for more. There is not a hint of death in his eyes.

Looking at the photograph I remembered something from a story by John Berger in which he encounters and converses with his long-departed mother. She speaks to him on behalf of the dead, and asks of him just one thing. Write down what you find, she says, and do us the courtesy of noticing us.

One day soon I will return to the Cortalets hut and spend the night in preparation for an early start the following morning. The weather will be fine, my boots robust, and I will climb the Canigou. From the summit I will look, first south towards the place that has become my home, then north towards Arles-sur-Tech. But I will not dream as some Catalans do from here. The place they desire is a time when this mountain was a feature of home rather than an emblem of what has been lost. And while something of their land has become my home, and I have been welcomed by most with open arms, the place I desire is far away on an Atlantic coast. It is granite and gorse, bladderwrack and kelp. It is the taste and smell of salt and sardines. And it is a boy scampering down the dunes and out across the wet sand towards the tidal sea, still cold despite the summer. A boy oblivious to the fact that this is only time, and that one day it will be lost. Oblivious to the fact that there is a word in Cornish for the longing he will feel years later as he sits atop a far-off mountain. Hireth.

 


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A Gift From The Sea

The day has been overcast, but now, as afternoon drifts towards evening, blades of light are cutting through the thinning cloud at irregular intervals, mottling the sea in real time. In Cornish a single word, glas, can capture the colours of the water, but here, east of the Tamar, at the edge of Torbay, the story of the world is told only in English, and so I need four words to describe what I see: blue, green, pale grey.

How can a language have a single word stand for all these colours? To understand why, imagine the early settlers of a place we now call Cornwall. Where does their eye first fall, what lies in the foreground of their imagination, along whose roads do they come and go? The sea, so first a word for the colour of the sea, undivided, whole. Glas. It then begins to make sense. The sky is the colour of the sea, plants are the colour of the sea, the sea is the reference for interpreting the land.

Scanning the water I spot two patches of darker grey. One of them dissolves again, but the other grows with proximity until it is just a dive’s length from the stone jetty on which I’m standing. I can see the whole of his shape now, a large bull, his flippers extended as he glides to a halt before me. He pushes his head through into my world, snaring me with ebony eyes whose gaze is a lesson in curiosity. I fumble for my phone, desperate to capture the moment, but unwilling to look away. He submerges again, but, to my relief, only to move even closer to the shoreline rocks. He’s head and shoulders above the surface now, looking around, although not at me. I, however, am transfixed by all of him: his mottled belly hanging still in the pellucid water, his twitching snout with its watery snuffles, and his majestic whiskers, the vibrissae without which he would be unable to locate the movement of prey in the deep, dark sea.

He shifts his attention to me once more, locking me with a stare I find unsettling. It is as if he is examining me, peering into my human form in search of a selkie, daring me to shed my borrowed skin and return to the sea. I am released from his spell by the actions of a fisherman further along the jetty. Packing up for the day he casts a couple of fish heads into the water, their plop plop drawing my watcher away. He is a shadow once more, diving for easy prey, all grace and skill, dignifying the sea with his presence.

I linger for a while, expectant, hungry for more, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Time, then, to reel in my dreams and head for home, alone again but for the music in my head, the voice of June Tabor carrying on the tale in song.

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Reflections on Homecoming, Two Centuries Apart

When we lose a loved one it is not uncommon for objects that had themselves been lost during that person’s lifetime to re-emerge. Sometimes we discover things we didn’t even know existed.

In the months following my father’s death in 1994 one of the objects that resurfaced was a small red book with a golden anchor debossed on its front cover. For many years I showed what now seems like a discourteous lack of interest in its content, but more recently, while reflecting on all that had led me to make a home away from home, I have revisited the little red book time and again, as if looking for a thread to pull and tie to those from which my own life has been woven.

Towards the end of 2015 I was invited to submit a piece of writing to a website called Cornish Story. An initiative of the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter, the stated goal of Cornish Story is “to promote a greater knowledge of Cornwall and the Cornish Diaspora overseas”. The website hosts both written and visual work, and if you’re interested in Cornwall and its history then it’s well worth a look.

The piece I submitted drew not only on my own experience of walking from Catalonia to Cornwall last summer, but also on some of the stories I had discovered in that little red book. You can see the piece as presented on Cornish Story here, or simply read on.

***

Dehwelans / Return

I arrived in Plymouth aboard the Armorique, he on the William and Amelia. I had walked a thousand miles across France from Catalonia, and had then been ferried across the Channel in just six hours. He had set sail from New Brunswick and had endured thirty-nine days on the Atlantic. His name was Richard, and he was my great, great grandfather.

In 1984, aged nineteen, I left Cornwall for London. There I studied, laid the foundations of a career, made friends and fell in love. When things fell apart I did what countless others have done before me and looked elsewhere in hope. The choice of Barcelona was not a random one. I had Catalan friends and had spent several summers visiting them and their city. So, in January 1998, I returned there with the idea of spending a year, maybe two. Nothing permanent, just long enough to get back on track.

Richard Nance was born in Roche in 1791, and he was a carpenter by trade. On 14 June 1818 he left Plymouth aboard the Mary, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia. I know this because he kept a diary of his voyage, a pocket-sized book that passed down the family line to my father. On the opening page of his diary, Richard expresses the hope that he is going “for a better country, a more hospitable clime where it is possible that I may enjoy the Blessings of life in a far greater degree than I can in my native country”.

He reached Halifax in August 1818, and from there sailed on to Boston, where he soon found work and a small house to rent. On his second day in Boston he wrote in his diary that he believed “the New World to be much better for the labouring classes than the Old”.

The idea of walking from Catalonia to Cornwall came to me a few summers ago. By then I had long since settled in Barcelona, but that year I spent my holiday trudging across the north of England, following a coast to coast trail imagined by A.W. Wainwright. When I returned to Barcelona I realized that the experience had taught me a lot about what we gain by travelling on foot, not least that it is a way of finding new and deeper meaning in our relationship to place. Over the years, I had come to call Catalonia home, but this had always had its counterpoint in a longing for Cornwall. By walking between the two, I would follow that thread of longing to its source.

Having recorded his outbound voyage and arrival in some detail, Richard Nance then wrote nothing in his journal for two years. When entries resume, it is clear that the promise of the New World has faded. Permanent employment has proved elusive, and he has decided to return home.

He departed New Brunswick aboard the William and Amelia on 22 July 1821. On 10 August the ship met with a terrible Atlantic storm that lasted four days. In words reminiscent of Psalm 107 my great, great grandfather described the experience as follows: “Now the vessel skims the frightful ridge and again sinks into the deep abyss. In such dreadful scenes as these, horror and dismay seizes the vitals of those who are unacquainted with the wonders of the Lord on the face of the deep”. Amidst the gales and the mountainous seas, however, he found solace in the purpose of his journey, writing that “the best of all is every heave of the billows wafts us nearer to our native spot endeared to our memory by the ties of love and friendship”.

Although my walk across France this summer was arduous both physically and psychologically, the seascape on my Channel crossing could not have been more different to what my forebear experienced on the Atlantic. Mizzle fell upon the ferry’s decks as it pulled out of Roscoff under a sky the colour of Delabole slate, but I barely noticed the swell as we headed out into the Channel. Warm and dry inside the giant, metallic cradle I soon dozed off, and by the time I awoke, the early morning grey had given way to white and blue.

When I heard the announcement that we were half an hour from Plymouth I went out onto the upper deck and waited for the land to form. Gulls wheeled above me on the wind, and turning to starboard I spied the yolky head of a gannet skimming seaward. As we passed the breakwater and entered Plymouth Sound I went and leaned on the portside rails, from where the first villages of Cornwall – Kingsand and Cawsand – could be picked out with the naked eye. The ferry held a north-easterly course, and then, as it drew level with Drake’s Island, arced ninety degrees west, bringing it head on to the docks. I switched to starboard once more and anchored my gaze on the red and white hoops of Smeaton’s Tower. Approaching Plymouth almost two centuries ago, my great, great grandfather would also have seen this tower, yet not as a memorial on the Hoe but as a working lighthouse further out to sea on the Eddystone Rocks. Even more than I, perhaps, he would have looked upon that tower as a prelude to home.

After landing at Plymouth, Richard Nance secured passage on a boat that would take him along the Cornish coast to Charlestown, from where he could travel over land to Roche. Due, however, to what he describes in his journal as “contrary winds” he had to wait almost two weeks before making the final leg of his journey home. I know nothing more about his life.

Ten days after my own arrival at Plymouth I reached the end of my walk, Cape Cornwall. I climbed up onto the promontory to where the old mine stack still stands, and there I sat, staring out over the sea, my mind drifting off across days and miles. Finding it hard to take in, I took out my iPhone and scrolled through the GPS tracks, reassuring myself with hard data that the walk had been more than an act of imagination. The numbers were there – 77 days, 1132 miles – but they only told part of the story. On the first page of my journal, however, I found something that captured more of what I felt there on the Cape. The day before leaving Catalonia I had recorded some thoughts, hopes and fears about the journey ahead, and among these jottings were some words written by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado: “¡Ay del noble peregrino, Que se para a meditar, después del largo camino, en el horror de llegar!” / Pity the noble pilgrim, who stops, at the long journey’s end, to reflect in horror upon having arrived.

It was time to go. I started down the path that leads to the remains of St Helen’s Oratory, but before I’d gone more than a few steps I was brought to a halt by a flash of red moving among the rocks. Red bill, red legs. Palores. True to its Cornish name, which means digger, the chough was pecking at the earth, just a few feet away. Of all the experiences I had been gifted during my walk, this unimagined encounter with another returnee felt like the ultimate reward for my efforts.

I thought then of the silence in my great, great grandfather’s journal, of how he wrote in detail about his two Atlantic crossings but very little about what happened in between, as if what mattered most was leaving and returning. Perhaps he was aware of the Cornish word dehwelans, and of the psychological sting in its tail. For dehwelans means not only ‘return’ but also ‘atonement’. It is in the act of returning, it seems, that a Cornishman makes amends for having left.

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52 Artist Dates 2016

Two of the most enjoyable – and certainly the most stimulating – weeks of 2015 were those I spent at Rosemerryn, a house-in-the-woods-cum-writing retreat near the village of Lamorna, way down in the west of Cornwall. I learnt much, and received an enormous amount of encouragement from the two tutors, Kath Morgan and Jane Moss, who have now set me a playful challenge for the new year: 52 Artist Dates. As they say on their blog, the Artist Date is Julia Cameron’s idea for a block of time that aspiring and established artists devote to stepping aside from their work to engage in simple, fun activities that nourish their creative spirits. Or as Julia Cameron herself puts it: “the Artist Date need not be overtly “artistic” – think mischief more than mastery. Artist Dates fire up the imagination. They spark whimsy. They encourage play. Since art is about the play of ideas, they feed our creative work by replenishing our inner well of images and inspiration. When choosing and Artist Date, it is good to ask yourself, “what sounds fun?” – and then allow yourself to try it.”

Mischief, imagination, whimsy, play. It sounds like fun to me, so I’m going to take up Kath and Jane’s challenge and see where it takes me. Over the coming weeks I’ll post a weekly update on how I’m doing, and if you’re taken by the idea as well, then I’d love to hear about your own Artist Dates.

As we’re already into the second week of 2016, I’ve crammed my first two Artist Dates of the year into one week, and I describe them below. A final word. Alongside whatever task or activity I end up doing, I have also set myself the challenge of learning one new word in Cornish each week, with the word being linked somehow to whatever it is I have done.

Artist Dates No. 1 and No. 2

– Go to the hardware store and buy something with whatever change you have on you at the time.

– Use the thing you have bought to work on an object at home.

I have vague memories from childhood of accompanying my father to the ironmonger’s in town. High, dark-wood counters, walls lined to the ceiling with shelves and nooks and boxes of things I didn’t know the names for, and an inescapable mustiness that, I now realise, foreshadowed the end of an era. They don’t make shops like that anymore, and I no longer use the word ‘ironmonger’s’ except when referring to the past. Nowadays, I buy my nails at the hardware store. God knows where I learnt to speak like that.

It’s somehow encouraging that with only €1.53 in your purse, you can still buy something useful, and have change to spare.

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Two sheets of sandpaper, one coarse, one fine, came to 90 cents.

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When I got home I cleaned out the fireplace and restacked the wood pile, and in the process found the ideal piece. Having broken several bones in my life, a femur fragment from a stout-legged wooden animal seemed like just the thing I would enjoy working on.

 

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Cornish words:

askorn n. bone

tewes n. sand


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A Short Walk By The Crooked River

Before I left the house this morning I travelled to the other side of the isle, from North Cornwall to Norfolk in the company of Helen Macdonald. In an article published just before Christmas in the New Statesman she recounts her annual pilgrimage to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve at Welney in Norfolk, the wintering site for thousands of whooper and Bewick’s swans. Her description of the spectacle is as vivid and original as anyone who has read her recent book H is for Hawk would expect. What does a thousand-strong chorus of Arctic swans sound like? Until this morning I couldn’t have told you, but through her words I can hear them now, I can hear what she calls a “vast amateur brass band tuning up in an aircraft hangar”. But what most caught my attention was something she expresses towards the end of the article: her delight, while watching the swans, that they are as at home in Norfolk as they are in the Arctic.

Home. As a child growing up in Wadebridge, one of the things I loved was to stand on the bridge across the estuarine River Camel and watch the mudbanks re-emerge as the water receded with the ebb tide. There was something reassuring about their reappearance. The world may have seemed different for a while, but at bottom nothing had really changed. Best of all was the grassy mound that sat just upstream of the bridge, and onto which a pair of swans would regularly clamber and there wait patiently for the river to return. When I left home aged 19, the swans and the river were among the few things I acknowledged missing.

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Today the afternoon skies are heavy and grey as Paloma and I set out upstream along the Camel Trail. We’re not planning to go far. We’ll walk until the light begins to fade, and then head back for tea. But that will be enough, for this is rich terrain that is best taken in small amounts that can be savoured. We follow a south-easterly line below Treraven Wood and begin to cross the meandering river at Pendavey Bridge, led on by a gentle honking. Reaching the midpoint of the bridge we see there are twenty or so Canada Geese pottering around the riverside. They seem as unmindful of me as I am of everything else as I stop to photograph them.

IMG_0517Canada geese (Branta canadensis) alongside the River Camel

The woodland opens and the water, now on our right, flows straight for a stretch, belying its original Cornish name, Dowr Kammel: crooked river. On the far side bank, the strip of filamentous grasses seems to shiver in time to our own movement, as if it were a sound waveform capturing the music of this place.

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It is then we spot the second skein of geese and begin to hear and see their announcement of imminent flight. Honk waddle, honk waddle, honk waddle, honk honK hoNK hONK HONK HONK… “¡Qué escándalo!” says Paloma, and there is indeed a considerable racket as the birds take to the air and head downstream. Quiet returns, and we decide to press on for another ten minutes or so, as far as Polbrock. There we climb the steps up onto the narrow road that runs along the top of the twin-arch bridge: one arch spanning the disused railway line along which we have been walking, the other the river itself. From our new vantage point we gaze upstream and marvel. At this distance and shorn of leaves the trees are impossible, with our knowledge, to identify, yet they are no less beautiful in anonymity.

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What was it that the poet Neruda wrote in response to a world of too many names? Pienso confundir las cosas, I have a mind to confuse things. Or as one of my clinical supervisors used to say: Forget the diagnosis, listen to the patient! Sound advice, but not always easy to follow. And so, our vision prejudiced by training, we fill the lacunae with what we think we know. “See that tree there: don’t its branches look like Purkinje cells? And that spindly one to the right: isn’t that a motor neuron?” This is how we bring the anonymous trees into focus, by imagining the foundations of life.

The light is fading now, and we need to head home. As we descend the steps and start back along the trail I think of how my father loved this place, and of how in leaner times he had fished this stretch to put food on the table. For him it was not just a place of recreation, it was somewhere that through care and respect would continue to provide. In his own way, that is what he communicated to us as children. I realize, then, what it was I had felt up there on the bridge. A sense of permanence.

I quicken my step so as to catch up with Paloma, and together we stride out, hand in hand and singing into the dimming of the day. By the time we reach Pendavey Bridge it is almost dark, and that is why we almost miss them, there on the upstream side: six mute swans plopping patiently, one at a time, off the riverbank and into the rising water. A whiteness of swans. The collective noun is right in this light.

IMG_0539Mute swans (Cygnus olor) drift towards Pendavey Bridge

Despite their name, swans of this species are not actually mute, although they would never pass the audition for an Arctic brass band. But they are the swans I know, and they are doing what the River Camel swans have always done. They are moving between land and water, between two homes.

I watch them until they pass beneath the bridge, and then I turn to Paloma. “Come on,” I say. “És l’hora de tornar i fer les maletes. It’s time to go home and pack.”


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Midsummer Fires

Arles-sur-Tech is a small town at the eastern end of the French Pyrenees, and it is overshadowed to the north by the Canigó massif. These lands at the southernmost end of the Languedoc-Roussillon region have deep connections to Catalonia, both its language and traditions. On 23 June 1955, Francesc Pujades, a resident of Arles-sur-Tech, took it upon himself to continue a centuries-old European tradition by lighting a bonfire to mark the eve of St John’s Day. What made Pujades’ initiative stand out was that his fire burned at an altitude of 2,784 m, at the summit of the Canigó. The idea that followed was that a torch lit from the fire could serve as a mother flame, la flama, from which St. John’s fires could be lit in succession throughout the Catalan lands. As a symbol of a cultural identity that refused to be extinguished despite the prohibitions set in place by Franco’s dictatorship, la flama had considerable value, yet not until 1966 would the torch pass south of the Pyrenees. Today, however, la flama de Canigó is relayed freely throughout the land on both sides of the mountains, and St John’s Day is now a national holiday in Catalonia. As I walked home just before midnight on St John’s Eve, the streets around the main square of my Catalan hometown, Sant Pere de Ribes, were still alive to the sound of snappers, whistling rockets and conviviality.

In contrast to the light and spark of the night before, the town awoke to slate-grey skies, and around midday an intense storm blew in over the Mediterranean, rinsing the air of the gunpowder perfume that had hung heavy into the early hours. When the storm cleared I went out to walk some of the trails that wind their way through the vineyards, scrub and woodland that surround Sant Pere de Ribes. The dirt track I chose is lined to the west by carob trees, and at this time of year they are festooned with unripe glossy-green pods.

Unripe pods on a carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua)

Unripe pods on a carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua)

As the carob is also known as St John’s bread it seemed fitting to be following this path on his feast day. It also felt good to be alone after so much companionship the previous evening. Alone, that is, except for the birds, who seemed to be relishing the freshness of the storm-swept air. To my left, finches gold and green flitted over and among the vines, while ahead of me on the path, swallows swooped back and forth like stray fireworks. The skies, however, had yet to clear, and maybe it was this, their colour, that turned my mind to Cornwall. St John’s fires would also have been lit in many towns across my homeland, most notably, perhaps, as part of the Golowan festivities in Penzance. In Cornish, the verb golowi means both to enlighten and to illuminate, from the noun golow, light. Until the end of the nineteenth century it was common for the Feast of St John to be celebrated in Cornwall with bonfires, flaming tar barrels and torches, but adminstrative anxiety over insurance claims doused these traditions, which only re-emerged in force during the 1990s. Nowadays, festivities last a whole week, from St John’s Eve right through to the Feast of St Peter on 29 June.

As its name would suggest, my Catalan hometown of Sant Pere de Ribes also celebrates its annual festival on St Peter’s Day. So, barely a week after the St John’s festivities the streets were once again filled with the sound of fireworks and the hum of expectation. Before joining family for the traditional St Peter’s Eve supper I decided to retrace my steps from the previous week. The afternoon was much hotter this time, and I walked quickly past the carob trees with an eye on the shade offered by the small wood that lies at the head of the trail. Just before I reached the cover of pine and holm oak I stepped off into the scrub to inspect what is a dispenser of sweet carnality to all who walk this path in early September, a gnarled old fig tree. Now, in June, however, only green gobstoppers clung to its branches.

A fig tree (Ficus carica) in June

A fig tree (Ficus carica) in June

I pressed on into the wood and was glad that it offered a shaded path back down to the edge of town where my in-laws live. I reached their house just as the final guests were arriving, so I quickly showered and joined the party for an al fresco supper of cured ham, stuffed omelettes and grilled sardines, followed by a traditional sweet flatbread washed down with a bottle of Cornish sparkling wine that I had been saving for the occasion. As night closed in we waited expectantly for the aerial maroon that would signal the ten-minute countdown. As my in-laws house sits on the western permiter of town it offers a perfect vantage point from which to enjoy the firework display that is launched each year from the tenth-century castle nearby. On the stroke of 11 the first rocket was fired into the air, and for the next twenty minutes the skies were filled with willows and palms, serpents and strobes. The best, however, was yet to come, as the centrepiece of the St Peter’s festivities is a diabolic street parade culminating in the main square. Hessian-clothed and hooded demons of all ages take to the streets, holding aloft staffs from which fountains of fire shower sparks upon the expectant onlookers. The first time you witness it, it all appears quite mad.

St Peter's Eve celebrations in Sant Pere de Ribes

St Peter’s Eve celebrations in Sant Pere de Ribes

As I watched the parade I wondered whether next year I might spend these days in Penzance or in one of the other Cornish fishing communities that mark the Feast of St Peter, their patron, with bonfires. I remembered, then, something I had read back in March on the BBC News website. The item described how the only complete copy of the Catholicon Anglicum, a fifteenth-century Middle-English–Latin dictionary had been purchased by the British Library in order to save it from export to a private collection. Interestingly, one of the entries in this dictionary refers to ‘ban fyre, ignius ossium’, the bone-fire from which our modern bonfire is derived. As a young child I had encountered a similar Latin expression, fragilitis ossium, which for all its apparent authority did nothing to help me understand why my bones broke so much more easily than those of other children. The modern term for brittle bone disease, osteogenesis imperfecta, captures more of the problem, since we now know that the fragility is caused by a genetic defect that affects bone formation. Bone is a composite of two materials, a mineral called hydroxyapatite (a form of calcium phosphate) and the protein collagen. In brittle bone disease it is the latter which is deficient, either in quality or quantity, or both. Collagen is important as it gives bones a degree of flexibility, while the job of the mineral hydroxyapatite is to provide a complementary hardness. Too much collagen and our bones would be rubbery; too little or poor quality collagen and they become fragile.

As in so much of life, balance matters. A summer of too many wildfires can cause lasting damage to the scrub and woodland landscapes that surround my Catalan hometown, yet its people nonetheless turn to fire as a way of celebrating the feast days of St John and St Peter. For those who lived through Franco’s dictatorship it is a reminder, perhaps, that they now live in more enlightened times.