Tag: the Great Silence

An evening benediction after the storm

We were in the middle of making up the bed in the campervan when the whole interior was suddenly suffused with golden light after a stubbornly grey day. After ten more minutes of sunset it was dark; the wind finally gave way and the leaky windows stopped singing.

It’s not just us. We stand at the edge of the campsite and see doors and tents opening everywhere as shadowy dusk-darkened campers take photographs they may never look at again. The feeble flash of the phone cameras is an ironic commentary on our hubristic relationship with nature. It’s a scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” enacted every time the sky clears as night falls. We wonder whether the Green Ray will momentarily flash across the sea but it never does and it doesn’t matter, because if it did, every sunset afterwards would feel like a disappointment. So we stand there like penitents at the edge of the land, waiting for a blessing ; a sign that all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

“Isn’t that just so beautiful” we murmur without quite understanding how the earth seems to stand still at these moments which, strictly speaking, are the moments of extreme dynamism when day gives way to night and we, in our exact place and time, experience the loss of the sun with nothing more than faith and hope to keep us safe through the night. Of course we rarely reflect on this but turn to go back indoors and open another bottle, but perhaps a holiday – there’s a clue in the name – is the time when time is made for wonder.

When we are at the far western edge; in Cornwall,in Pembrokeshire and on the Lleyn peninsula, we see the sun setting over the sea. The last word of each day, you might say, is emptiness and silence with no human structure or invention intruding. The setting sun is silent but strangely the Moon always seems to me to have an ethereal sound trailing behind her. The sunsets here unite the elements of earth, air, fire and water which, in the West, are the constituents of life itself. The Taoists add wood and metal and take away air but that seems to me to spring from another, equally valid conception of our place in the world in which we are makers. What defines us as human is not so much thinking as detached observers of what the Taoists call the Ten Thousand Things; but our capacity as makers. Wood; Fire: Earth; Metal and Water – the elements that lie at the heart of the forge, the pottery, the farm and the building.

Air, though, as the medium of sound, has to fall still for there to be silence. St Davids Cathedral, in the absence of the crowds, is one of the most silent places I know save for the Jackdaws whose chatter almost enhances the absence of sound. Early in the morning and late in the evening the Cathedral sits in a protected valley – out of sight of seaborn raiders – so deep that uniquely, from my limited experience, the passer-by looks down on the roof and tower; so the sounds of ice cream queues, the pasty and souvenir shops and the constant flow of buses, coaches and minibuses barely intrude. The silence seeps into your bones and it’s good. The silence searches your inmost being and occasionally – if you wait long enough and quietly enough – will even speak; say something important. You needn’t even go into the building, in fact it may me more of a distraction to go through the great wooden door and be dazzled by the work of human hands. Any old seat outside in the sun or the wind and rain will do but it’s fine to wait for a sunny day because that makes it easier to wait.

And if you find, like me, that hordes of people are a bit off putting, try St Non’s Well about a mile’s walk away and the traditional birthplace of St David, but perhaps more importantly a place to take off your walking boots and bathe your tired feet in the cool water. The well itself is almost invisible to coastal path walkers with their eyes and hearts set on a personal best target, so you can sit there in silence for ages without being disturbed. Those that do see you usually hurry away in case you’re a threat to civilized human life!

That St David’s is a holy place is without doubt; but I doubt whether any religion has more than squatters’ rights to its benedictions.

The only way is up

Many apologies for the long silence – 5 days is something of a record, almost Trappist on my part. We have been out and about doing the usual combination of walking, allotmenteering, grandparenting and so forth; but we’ve also been embracing a rather challenging fitness regime to shed the lockdown lard, so our walks have been both longer and quicker, and given that we live in Bath there’s no escaping some tough hills which are terribly character forming especially on an 800 calorie diet. I won’t bore myself, let alone you, by listing the sufferings mainly because it hasn’t been bad at all. We sleep like logs and always eat up everything on our very small plates.

So today we took ourselves up to the Skyline again, passing St Thomas a Beckett church on the way up, and later on from the top of the hill we could look down across Bath and see any number of towers and spires. I have very mixed feelings about churches. I remember being shocked, when we first went to France, to experience what a truly secular society felt like and yet it seems to me that we’re reaching the same kind of culture here in the UK by neglect. I always used to describe my own churches as “lost luggage offices” where people who were sometimes in great anguish could look for something quite intangible that they’d lost. The building itself seemed to do something very important but I never quite understood how it worked. I was just the keyholder. I would remind myself that Job’s friends were doing really well until they opened their mouths.

St Thomas a Beckett is a place I’ve never been inside. I’m fearful of churches now, fearful that they’ll smell musty and damp; fearful that some well meaning person will offer help and most of all, fearful of meeting my alter ego there. Silence is the only comfort. About ten years ago I was on a course at Canterbury Cathedral, and one evening after it was closed to the public and just getting dark, we were taken on a candlelit tour of the silent building. I think we all (it was a small group) – found the Great Silence when we came to St Thomas a Beckett’s tomb. On another occasion we (Madame and me, that is) went to Chartres with friends and against all my expectations of a kind of Disney/Blackpool experience, I was so powerfully moved that I took my shoes and socks off and walked with bare feet around the Cathedral for a couple of hours. The rest of our group went off for lunch and even in the midst of the crowds I found the Great Silence and I stayed alone.

I know it sounds a bit wacky but bare feet can channel that energy in a way that nothing else can. Because we don’t usually experience the world directly through our feet, it’s very hard to conceptualise what’s going on and it has to be taken on its own terms.

There’s something else that could be said about St Thomas and that’s the fact that he was prepared to make a stand. The capacity for confrontation should be counted as one of the virtues in my view.

But that’s enough of that because our walks haven’t been so focused that there wasn’t any time to stand and watch. Here’s a wasp, and this is the lovely thing about getting into nature because it’s not and ordinary wasp, the picnic spoiling type – although for all I know this one could be a demon when roused. But I noticed it nesting in quite the wrong place to be a common wasp – the rotten core of a felled tree. A quick look at the books when we got home and I discovered it’s called Vespula germanica – the German wasp – a bit bigger than the common wasp, and yes it does sting; so my courageous photo was made safer by the fact that only his bum was sticking out of the hole.

We’ve also spotted a kingfisher on the river bank a couple of times right next to a building site. Today we could hear some kind of raptors in the sky but couldn’t get a close enough glimpse of them to be sure what they were.The piercing peeeoo call, with two distinct ‘syllables’ sounded as if they could have been red kite, which I think have been spotted here; but it was impossible to be sure. However the robin was the winner with its sad, declining cadence. If robins sang in choirs they’d alway be in the minor key. Or perhaps it’s just the smell of autumn in the air getting into my imagination..

Just as we were leaving the Green and walking along the river bank I took a photo of the sun shining through the trees. Goodness knows why I found it so affecting but although I grumble about the loss of the summer, autumn is a season of great beauty and new beginnings – maybe it resonates better with my melancholic default. As I write I can smell another six litres of rich tomato sauce reducing on the stove. The allotment is so abundant at the moment that I could spend every day at the stove and feed the whole block.