Tristimania

by Jay Griffiths

  In my previous mixed-state episode, when I had climbed Kilimanjaro, I had got altitude sickness very badly, with vomiting and headaches and hallucinations (I thought huge banks of snow were white grand pianos), but had refused to come down until I’d reached the peak. I am incautious with altitude, always going higher, faster and further than I should.

  Each of the first few days was exhausting. I was walking to my limit and I took Samuel Beckett’s line as my mantra: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. I can’t go on, I’ll go on. On the second or third day, I collapsed on the path, at a bend. I could hear cyclists coming. I hoped they’d be able to stop in time, but I couldn’t move out of their way. I remember trying to shout out something, but they couldn’t hear because they were yelling and whooping to each other; they were young, energetic, hugely enjoying themselves. They swerved around me, swore at me and swept on without stopping to ask if I was okay. I don’t blame them: that state of vigour finds it hard to comprehend weakness, as strength can sometimes fail to understand vulnerability. They probably thought I’d just chosen to stop in a stupid place.

  Of course, the Camino is fascinating culturally, spiritually, socially, physically. But it was an ordeal to me, an endurance test. Reading the poems which my friends had given me was the single best part of each day and I could lose myself for an hour or so. I read a Borges poem, ‘The Art of Poetry’, in Larrasoaña, sitting on a low branch of a tree by a river which flows under a medieval arch. Under the tree, buried among the roots, was an almost completely hidden horseshoe, and it felt like seeing luck itself, almost buried but still glimpsable. The poem recalls Ulysses weeping when he saw Ithaca again, and it made me recall my own Ithaca of art – my work, my words – and I found it unbearable to think about anything I had ever written or ever would. More widely, I was finding my past an anthology of nasty memories; instead of dog-roses, lilies, violets and love-in-a-mist, ‘Here,’ says remembrance, ‘take this,’ and sticks me thistles, nettles and brambles, poison ivy and hogweed. No rosemary and too much rue. Remember to forget, my footsteps seemed to say, until, after a while, I might even forget to remember and the present tense would spring up, leafy and laughing.

  The nights were worse than the days because I had terrible nightmares which waited in the mattresses like fleas. The accommodation in almost all the hostels was in dormitories, with no privacy whatsoever, and I knew I was disturbing people around me with my disturbed sleep. One time I woke up screaming and woke everyone else and, although people were kind, I felt embarrassed at leaking my tears and nightmares out all over the place.

  I can’t tell you much about the Camino itself: I hardly remember much of the actuality of it. It was more prayer than journey, a prayer studded with poems and lit with little kindnesses like candles on the way. A gentle old man offered to carry my rucksack up one particularly steep hill. People everywhere seemed to read my face like an open book, and several strangers told me point blank that I needed to learn to accept offers of help, said it was clear I was struggling badly and needed to ask less of myself, that I must realize that I needed to stop. But, from when I was very young, I have felt that I must look after myself in order to be safe. Also, I don’t have an off-switch and my will to do this journey was greater than the weakness which undermined me. If willpower has a negative aspect, this is it. I was doing something which was foolhardy: that toughness and hardiness which comes from foolishness rather than wisdom.

  I walked with a mixture of suffering and dogged determination, having to endure the ordeal which I had set myself. Loneliness shrieked like the wind around rocks on high passes. I’ve never longed more for a kind friend beside me, and I felt like the poet of ‘The Seafarer’, far out to sea, feeling the hardship of being without companion or comfort or consolation yet wanting – yearning – to roam the sea, alone.

  Lonely but always surrounded by people: it was the worst of both worlds. Little even made me smile, although the graffiti along the Camino is priceless, especially the thoughts written, etched, chalked or sprayed along the way. (One pilgrim had left a note in pencil, blunt and comic, saying that the only problem with the Camino was that he’d gone seven days without being able to masturbate.)

  In a town called Lorca, I read Lorca’s essay ‘Theory and Play of the Duende’, about the surging force which makes real art: ‘The roads where one searches for God are known . . . [but] seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood . . . that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles.’

  No church, no matter how grand, neither the cathedral of Burgos nor of León, was as beautiful to me as one ruined hermitage. Dedicated to St Michael, between Villatuerta and Estella, it was completely empty yet absolutely full of prayers, written on scraps of paper: fluttering, forlorn, whispering, weeping, imploring prayers. Hundreds and hundreds of them were written on the back of biscuit wrappers, on pages torn from journals, on old cartons, on the back of receipts; all hand-written, simple prayers from pilgrims, unique and – surely – blessed. St Michael defends and spares, Lorca had written. So I asked for defence against depression.

  At the Fuente de Irache, the drinking fountain flows not with water but with wine, and so, in a metaphorical sense, did the fountains of hospitality along the way. Many hostels are run by volunteers, called hospitaleros or hospitaleras, who look after the pilgrims. (Since everyone is called a pilgrim, no distinction is made over which religion someone follows, or whether they believe in any kind of god at all.) The hospitalero job is vital, not only to create practical lodgings but also to make a one-night oasis of kindness for pilgrims, a wellspring in the desert.

  One day’s walk included a twelve-kilometre stage with no shade, no village and nowhere to stop, and I was walking in 36-degree heat. As no one else was daft enough to attempt that particular stretch in that temperature, I was walking completely alone. At one point, feeling that my head might explode with heat, I scuffed a small hole in the earth under a vine, poured some water in and put my head in the damp, shallow hole. After a while, I walked on. Then one of my boots fell apart. The upper simply divorced the sole. Boots that fit properly are crucial on the Camino and I thought I would have to stop walking, find a large town and buy new boots, which worried me, because wearing a new pair of boots is likely to cause blisters. When I reached the next stopping point, Los Arcos, there was a Flemish confraternity of St James, and I went in, crying with relief, exhaustion, sadness and physical discomfort. They saw my boots and tutted sympathetically. One of the Brothers of the Order looked at my feet, thought for a moment and told me to wait. He left, and came back with a pair of boots which another pilgrim had donated a few days before. They say that ‘the Camino provides’: you will be given what you need. These boots not only fitted but they were Merrell boots – really good-quality walking boots – and I would go on to do the rest of the journey wearing them. With not one blister.

  Even with the new boots in my hands, I was still crying. The woman at the reception desk looked at me kindly and asked what was really wrong.

  – I’ve been very ill, I said.

  – Very up and down? she asked.

  It must have been written all over my face. She gave me a room of my own, and the people who ran the hostel called me La Inferma (the ill one) and treated me with real sweetness. There are things you can do in a room of one’s own, and only one of them is writing. I appreciated that probably more than the hospitaleros would have done if they’d known.

  One day, I heard a bell tolling over fifty times, a weeping, dying toll. I read Rilke’s poem ‘Let This Darkness be a Bell Tower’, and felt as if it had been written for this state of mind I was in:

  What is it like, such intensity of pain?

  If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

  The Way is both the literal path, signposted with shells, but your Way is also metaphoric: your manner, your habit, your practice. I tried to see the ethics of the Camino as akin to
the fairy-tale ethic of being on the path. Keep going; be observant; be kind; be generous; trust that the Way will provide; know that there is only now.

  I read a page of quotes from Homer one day and didn’t know who to pass it on to. The hostel where I stayed that night was small, and very few people understood English. But there was one man who, although I hadn’t spoken to him directly, was clearly English. I went up to him.

  – Sorry, I said, I know this is a bit odd. But do you want a page of lines from Homer?

  He spluttered.

  – It’s odder than you think, he said. I’m a classics teacher.

  And he began quoting me the original ancient Greek.

  At a town called Viana, I experienced a biblical hospitality. I was so exhausted when I got to the hostel that the hospitaleros told me later I’d gone completely white and collapsed into a chair which they’d rapidly pulled up for me. They gave me water. One of them knelt down in front of me. She took off my boots and peeled off my socks. She brought a bowl of water and a towel, and she gently washed my feet. And I cried. The priest at Santa Maria Cathedral in Viana came to the hostel in the evening and asked us about our reasons for doing the pilgrimage. I was too choked to answer in English. Saying it in Spanish kept a little distance between myself and the words.

  – It’s a prayer to get well.

  – God will answer it.

  – I don’t believe in God.

  – That doesn’t matter.

  A few days later, when I reached a hostel, as usual – as bloody usual – on the edge of all forms of exhaustion, the hospitalero, within five minutes, took me aside.

  – Is there some medication you’re supposed to be taking which you’re not? he asked quietly.

  Whoops.

  Many of the characters I met on the Camino seemed to have stepped out of the realm of stories. A Frenchman, Roland, called himself (and looked like) a clown; he reminded me of Touchstone, and his speciality was finding four-leafed clovers everywhere. The one person I met coming the ‘wrong’ way was a conman, insistent that he talked to me and walked with me. All my instincts were jangling.

  – I walk alone, I said.

  He pursued me. A Catholic friend of mine had very much wanted me to walk with a rosary and, at this point, I saw its immediate protective power: I took it out and pushed it towards him.

  – I walk with God, I said, almost hissing.

  Then he left me alone.

  Within three days of starting the Camino, I had bought a phone and called my doctor and also a few friends. Within nine days I’d begun drinking a few beers at the end of the day. Within ten, I’d bought tobacco. But I was still holding out on antidepressants. I walked and prayed and read and prayed and walked. Walking alone, I often had the feeling that someone was walking just a few steps behind me, and it was a kind, protective presence. Apparently, many other people have felt the same, and some of them call it God.

  I saw a man in a religious procession with his hair in tufts of singed swathes. There was zealotry in his face – something medieval about him. A woman sat knitting in a church porch one afternoon. She was ancient and unearthly, like a legendary eternal attendant: her only activities were to knit and to switch the lights on in the church if a pilgrim visited. I stayed a night in a hermitage off the main path, and one of the few others staying was a young Italian guy who was covered in religious tattoos, including a crown of thorns and an enormous face of the suffering Christ. He planned to walk the last hundred kilometres in bare feet because, he said, without pain there was no pilgrimage. He was tattooing his soul as well as his body. In one of the hostels, an ancient and frail woman, clearly disturbed and very confused, was putting on a pair of knickers which looked like mine. Sure enough, when I looked for my own, they had vanished. Outside in the courtyard, a man was painting the old buildings, with their storks’ nests and bells, using coffee granules and a tiny drop of water as his paint.

  One morning, coming out of a hostel, I couldn’t immediately find the way.

  – In the mornings, follow your shadow, a passer-by told me.

  The enigmatic beauty of that line made me cry. (Predictably.) He looked at me gently and said with real feeling:

  – Buen Camino.

  – Thank you, I said, and buen Camino in your life, too.

  For the Camino is both footpath and metaphor for one’s life.

  I met a Swedish journalist who was clever and funny and kind and was walking even though blisters and sores were bleeding right through her socks and her toes were crumpled, blackened bruises and she limped and winced with pain at every step. We stayed together several nights, and one of the many poems I gave her was Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Wild Geese’.

  The soles of my feet hurt constantly, hammered thousands of times a day by sharp little stones. If I walked to the point of exhaustion, I’d get very low because I was so physically tired. If I didn’t walk to the point of exhaustion, I started thinking about how little I cared about my life. I had thought that walking the Camino would be a good idea and that if I tried my absolute best I’d be okay, but I was discovering that it was just too hard, and that made me feel disappointed with myself, as well as seriously self-pitying. Buckets of the stuff: revolting self-pity.

  To make matters worse, by the halfway point, there were only two nights when I hadn’t had nightmares and only one night in the first two weeks when I had slept more than six hours, so I was exhausted from sleeplessness. I walked compulsively, a fugueur, needing to keep going in case, if I stopped, I’d never be able to move again. My instinct was (rightly or wrongly) still driving me to view this pilgrimage as a way to get well, to walk the whole hideous illness right out of my system. I felt I had to trust that instinct: ‘nor did I look at anything with any other light or guide but the one that burned in my heart,’ wrote St John of the Cross, in another of the poems I’d been given, stressing the light of insight, greater than the light of noon.

  Indoors, depression coffins the mind. Outdoors, the mind is opened. A pilgrim is, in Spanish, peregrino or peregrina, because one is crossing the fields: per (across) and ager (fields). As you walk, you follow the symbol of St James (Sant Iago), the yellow scallop shell, painted on rocks, posts, bins, on tiles or plaques, lined in cement, scrawled, spray-painted or carefully carved. Sometimes the shell morphs into a yellow arrow, and there are thousands upon thousands all along the way, the sign that you are on the right path.

  The origin of the shell’s association with St James is that a horseman was once saved from drowning by the saint and, emerging from the water, both man and horse were covered in scallops. It is a simple but profound symbol for it is drawn like rays of the rising sun or like the spread fingers of an open hand. It looks like courage, like generosity, like dawn, like the rising of happiness; it is a symbol which protects and vanquishes.

  All you need to do to find your way across the whole country is follow these shell-beams, the open hand of an open day. In the caravanserai of days, every day the same yet each entirely distinct, there are no large choices: follow the shells – which also, by taking you on the path from east to west, align you with the two largest signatures of nature, unmissable and utterly reliable: the one the track of the sun each day, the other the path of the Milky Way (also called the River of Heaven), which reflects the Camino, splashed across the sky. This is why Santiago is known as ‘de Compostela’, for compostela comes from campus (a field) and stella (star). While the capricious shooting stars toss surprising wishes around the night, the constant starlight on the road to Santiago, a compostela of the sky, is a constant signature, an affirmed firma of faith.

  While the destination may be predetermined, yet the manner in which you choose to walk the Way is your choice – like life, of course. The way itself is a surrender to an older order, a Monks’ Trod, and yet it is re-determined daily by each individual, and sometimes it takes determination of the grinding kind to walk through both life and the Camino. You follow the path and the path is al
so recreated within yourself.

  One day as I walked I learnt Yeats’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, its rhythm making the path easier. That evening, among a group of pilgrims, I heard an Irish accent. I felt shy, as awkward as before, but I wanted to give each poem a good home every day.

  – Do you want a poem? Dunno if you might want to read it.

  The man gave me the widest sort of surprised smile. He had, he said, been longing to read poetry for years, but he had absolutely no idea where to start.

  – This would be a good place, I said. Take it. It’s by Yeats.

  I called my doctor every few days. He was gently but firmly trying to persuade me to go back on antidepressants, but I felt that, if I couldn’t come off them here, I’d never be able to. At the same time I felt stupid, hearing myself refusing medicinal help. One day, he commented on the birdsong, which was so loud over the phone that he could hear it hundreds of miles away. I picked up a feather from those singing birds to give him when I was home, and in the meantime it was a talisman to remind me that I was still safe, could still talk to him every now and then, could still feel a line of safety in my hands on the mountain path.

  I heard it said that, in the middle section of the Camino, something within you dies. It is a meseta, flat and relatively featureless, a hard slog of a week’s walk. Halfway through my life, halfway through the road, mezzo del cammin, this part was like walking through my illness again. According to some people, it is the most tedious part of the route, but it is filled with millions upon millions of sunflowers in August and no yellow like it. All you can see is acres of yellow and, every day, a huge page of turquoise sky. I was swimming in flowers, daily. But then one day I saw them differently and I thought of van Gogh, whose sunflowers are not laughing but crying, pain-swept with the mad yellow of the overbright light in the mind. I cried for his hurt and humiliation.