Black Wing, abundant light

I was in Zurich to talk about writing. The lands transformed incrementally as the train rolled from my local station through Scotland, England and France. Despite this, on arrival I immediately noticed my noticing - the senses sharpened by being somewhere different. The scent of roasting coffee beans spilled onto the streets; trams screeched on their rails; I rubbed my eyes in smoky bars. The effect of being a little outside familiar society, so powerful for a writer, always makes me think of poet and translator Alastair Reid, who has lived much of his life outside his native Scotland and writes so brilliantly on Being a Foreigner.

On my final day I walked with friends in the mountains. Climbing above a cloud inversion, we gazed through opaque silk to lake and mountain ranges dissolved by sunlight into a fairy tale distance. The chamois passing darkly between the forest trunks seemed befuddled by the perverse warmth of the late November day, stopping to blink at us, when we felt they should have run. My rock-climbing mind and muscle were briefly woken from hibernation as we pulled up onto the summit of Kleine Mythen above the village of Brunni, and shared the space with hungry choughs, while the still sky above us was grazed by the croak and sweep of ravens.

Then down into the cooling shade-filled valley to Einsiedeln where dusk gradually turned the clear sky a brittler blue above the sweeping façade of the cloisters and abbey which perch above the village. The gilded clocks on the twin towers were luminous with last light. The interior immediately hushed and stilled us. Our heads dropped back to revere the vault in which, high above us, was collecting the monks’ soft chanting for vespers, and their huffs of incense. Between the ceiling murals a candied impression of pink piping on a cake brightened the abbey against the black marble of the lady chapel that we stood close to.

When the chanting stopped, a dark line processed from the chancel, led by two lit candles. The monks lilted uniformly as they walked to the rear of the abbey - one long dark rhythmically swaying creature. They faced the entrance to the Lady Chapel, and lifted their voices again for the Black Madonna and Child within. Soft prickling stepped across skin.

The Lady Chapel is built on the site of a previous chapel said to have been established by 9th century hermit, and later Saint, Meinrad, who withdrew into the dark forest. He stayed there with only two ravens for company, experiencing visions until two men, seeking his supposed treasure, beat him to death. The ravens retaliated, pecking and pursuing the murderers so that the men were finally apprehended. The site became a centre of international pilgrimage, famous for the black Madonna, a carving from at least as early as the 15th century, who now appears in Spanish courtly dress, coloured according to the season.

Although it’s not exactly a religious feeling, I respond to the symbolism and the stories of early saints. I also take note of coincidences and strange synergies when they present themselves. The raven had made her mythical flutter felt . Having recently made a radio play in which a raven plays a significant role (wait till 22nd December!), and edited a book for Two Ravens Press, I was taken by the village sign for Einsiedeln which honours the two ravens of Meinrad’s story.

The Black Madonna drew me too. Although the Abbey authorities claim that it was candle soot over the centuries that coloured her skin, the congregation demanded she be painted black when a 19th century restoration tried to pale her skin tones. In Jungian thought, the darkness of the Madonna is closely connected with mysterious deep forests, the underworlds of Persephone or Isis, and represents an archetype of rebirth and renewal arising from the deepest darkness. My walking friends drew my attention to a paper by Jungian psycho-analyst Cedrus Monte which expands on this. Within the paper a beautiful poem was quoted, and the lines below struck me as relevant to the whole experience of the day – the brilliance of the walk and aspects of the abbey, the melancholy of Meinrad’s story and the shuffling monks.

‘Sadness, I need
your black wing.
So much honey in the topaz
each ray smiling
in the wide fields
and all an abundant light about me,
all an electric whir in the high air.
And so give me your black wing,
sister sadness.’

Somehow it wasn’t such a great surprise when I found it to be by Pablo Neruda, from the collection ‘Fully Empowered’ (1967. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.) And the translator? Alastair Reid.

A Book of Silence

I can't recommend Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence, enough. Published this week by Granta, it charts an intellectual, spiritual and often physical journey that she has taken in pursuit of silence and an understanding of its part in her life. As a walker and a writer, I found startling resonances with my own experiences in the sister state to silence - solitude - and gained new insights into the lives of hermits, mountaineers, divers and writers, amongst others. Having been introduced to Saint Cuthbert by Sara's short story, After Life, I spent some time recently walking between places he chose to be. The pull I understand him to have felt between the life of silent reflection and prayer and a life of public duty out in the noisy world, made Sara's exploration particularly fascinating and pertinent. It's a book that draws together many aspects of culture and nature, spirituality and creativity, and the risks we must each take in 'designing' a life that makes us happy.

The Hermit’s Hut

Take a simple cottage on its own on a west-facing Hebridean beach. Make the beach the open end of a valley that plunges from a long mountain ridge enclosing it behind. Give the cottage a window onto the sea. Scent it with drying kelp. Surround it with the lash and snarl of gale-force winds. But above this noise, allow the shingle to ring out as it slips back with the retreat of each wave.

Bring in night. Throw into the skies behind the cottage a bright full moon that pours window-shapes onto bare walls and floors. From the long crenulated ridge of the mountain behind, release white clouds to sail along the glen, over the roof of the cottage and out to sea.

Put a woman inside, a woman menstruating. To one side of the cottage, thrust up a towering escarpment. Call it ‘Bloodstone Hill’. To the front of the cottage, just within the crisp moon-shadow cast by the cottage and its two chimneys, seat a stag. Give him tall antlers. Have him roar and bellow to another stag unseen on the hillside. Let their exchange drift in through the gaps between stone and window-frame, keeping the cottage rocked on the edge of sleep throughout the night.

Myth? Fairy-tale? Poetic image? Or all three bound up in a real experience and a psychic state?

If you walk from place to place in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, it’s not long before you come across a simple bothy with an unlocked door, a couple of near-empty rooms, a notice asking you to keep it tidy, and a spade. This is simple shelter – refuge.

I find bothies echo oddly with the transience of lives that pass through them. People leave strange markers of their lives – a single sock, a copy of Private Eye, a piece of bone or horn found nearby. Perhaps these things seemed meaningful at the time, but they can take on an uncomfortable quality. And then there’s the sense lying quietly beneath the use of these cottages now- that they were once homes for shepherds, crofters, families.

In the last few weeks I have stayed overnight in three bothies and I was very glad of the shelter – to dry out, get out of a storm, wake up in a beautiful place. In these three cases I was alone, but one of the odd things about settling into a bothy is that you can never be sure what company you will have – human, rodent, or conjured by your own terrifying imagination.

To spend a night alone in an unlit bothy can be a primal experience. At Guirdil bothy on Rum’s red-cragged west coast last week, I read in the failing daylight by the window as the sun glanced through mackerel clouds and then succumbed into grey haze just south of Canna. The sense of archetype in my experience was highlighted to me by reading Chapter 1 of Gaston Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’.

In it he speaks of the poetic image of the house, and in particular he goes on to explore the ‘hermit’s hut’ – isolated, redolent of simple poverty, and of legend. The image, he says, ‘leads us on towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God.’ I began to see myself as a hermit, unconsciously making a pilgrimage towards solitude, pitting myself against comfort and the lavish opulence that my main residence of the week, Kinloch Castle, on the other side of the island, represented a century ago.