On Returning to Courmayeur

The first time we went to Courmayeur  ended, to be honest, in a number of disappointments.

The little village near the base of Mont Blanc was, at least on the Italian side of the mountain, the point from which you could ascend  the famous mountain—at least high up its slope—by funicular.  It was a promising prospect, but the first time we went there, back in May 2014, we were waylaid by the ATM machine.

Italy is a country where the commerce of shops and restaurants is less…credit-intensive than at home.  And though, as we were to discover later, the people who ran the funicular up the side of the mountain were more than willing to accept VISA, our way from Courmayeur to La Palud where the lift began was a good 4 km away by a bus that was cash only.  So we had reached the end of our road for the day, quite literally.

Let down but not all that distressed, we spent some time wandering through the pedestrian areas of the town, its streets picturesque almost (but not quite) to the point of being dull.  It struck me as a kind of “movie Switzerland,” a little more tidied and boutiqued than I was inclined to enjoy, but not a bad place

for a few hours’ lingering. Since this was a Sunday, and since it was the middle of May, two weeks or so past the  end to Courmayeur’s  principal tourist season, we were a little out of luck even in falling back on traditional touristry: half of the shops were closed, and a number of the more interesting regional restaurants didn’t keep Sunday hours.

Lunch ended up as pizza, which I seldom mind, especially in Italy, but the one  I order included a raw egg as one of the toppings—something more interesting to see than to think about or eat, and a reminder to me that a very rudimentary grasp of the language is occasionally not enough when you’re trying to negotiate a menu. 

But it was right before we went home that our financial inconvenience became a little more than just inconvenient.  Became, in fact, embarrassing.

Rhonda wasn’t feeling that good, so we stopped in a little café for some pastry and coffee.  The snack served and finished, I discovered to my dismay that the place didn’t accept credit cards, either.  A stumbling explanation in bad Italian brought out a manager—a young man name Luca—whose English and generosity were more than my ignorance deserved that afternoon.  In short, we had the coffee and pastry gratis, and I would remember his kindness in the coming year, starting from the moment our bus headed back to Aosta, on board two passengers defeated at the low levels of global finance by inexperience and bad luck.

Needless to say, we set upon ourselves to right some wrongs when it came to Courmayeur.  A return trip, we decided, to ascend the mountain.  I announced as much in my Facebook status:

Headed to Courmayeur this morning, then an ascent of Mont Blanc. No, not with piton and rope, but in safe vehicles in which you can stop for coffee at dizzying heights. My kind of adventure these days.

So much of my prediction  was (once again) wrong.  Which calls for a little commentary, beyond simply advising other travelers never to predict how the day will go.

“Safe vehicles” was, I believe, more or less accurate.  The funicular turned out to be less like the stately one we had ridden in Ljubljana roughly a year before: shaky with bumps and scrapes, crowded with German skiers (and their skis), but all in all not death-defying, so yes, that would pass for “safe”.  And “stopping for coffee at dizzying heights” was true as well—perhaps even better, in that we had lunch with a view at a place called Summit 3842, where excellent polenta made amends for sausage that was so-so, and the view, though intermittent because of cloud and mist, ended up trumping it all. 

It was what lay in between that I hadn’t bargained on.  228 stairs, straight up and steep, no landings on which to lean or even collapse.  Even the skiers around us were panting.  It was my daily workout—perhaps my weekly one—and reaching the top, winded and sweaty, I had to allow that the food up there tasted better for the exertion, the view more beautiful because it was earned.  It was a couch-potato version of my own Mont Blanc climb, and laugh at me if you will, I was still able to make my climb without aid of piton or Sherpa.

And the view.  You understand Shelley:

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene;

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps

All natural drama and cataract and grandeur.  Extraordinary beauty made even more beautiful because it’s on a scale where we don’t figure in.  Indifferent Nature , the world before us and after us.  A kind of curious face to face with the Romantic Sublime—Edmund Burke and all that bunch, and knowing that our footprint is so light upon the mountains that they would be indifferent to our feelings of smallness and of insignificance.

It’s hard to come down from those heights without a little humility.  Another form of which was on my mind as we parted.  I returned to the little café, 10 euros in hand, intending a year-late payment of my debt.  The place was more bustling this time, having set up a gelato bar.  An amiable, tall Frenchman who managed the place let me know that Luca was gone now.  Time had passed, it seemed, regardless of the places in which my memory had stopped.  The new manager graciously declined my repayment, thanking me for remembering and considering, and returning with the intent to make old debts good.  It’s something you can never quite do, at least not in the way you intended: but the sublime is better, more humanized, when it contains good will.  ©2015 Michael Williams

On Genoa and the Port Town Aesthetic

Something about port towns asks for a different aesthetic, and Genoa demands its own terms entirely.  Its harbor widens into the Mediterranean, of course, and its place by the sea has almost entirely dominated its history.  The Genoese were famous as navigators and sailors, and their banking and financial community rivaled that of Venice, their neighbor and rival on the other side of Italy. 

Going to Genoa would prove to be a great adventure, because for once I had no idea of what would greet me.  My images of other Italian cities I have visited—of course Rome and Florence, but also Turin and Milan and Venice—had been shaped beforehand by the things I had read, but Genoa was fresh to me;  I knew the salami and Christopher Columbus, but little else.

We got off the train at Genoa Piazza Principe, the main station in the town.  It was built in the mid-nineteenth century, and it was only upon our return that I would get a good glimpse of its exterior—marbled and squat and beautifully sturdy, as though somehow solidity counted for a unique beauty in this decaying city.  Our hosts Anna and Carlo met us right off the train: Anna dear to us for some time, Carlo her boyfriend soon to be a welcome addition to our circle of friends.  We walked immediately into the heart of the town, and almost as immediately, I felt that it was unlike the other Italian cities I had visited.

The city slopes up from its harbor at the same steep angles I had seen before in San Francisco and in Wellington, New Zealand.  But the age makes a difference: Wellington, though set on perhaps the steepest incline, is a sloping city of parks and open spaces, and San Francisco has a certain consistency of architecture, all its beauty residing in its nineteenth-century buildings and its gracious pact between Victorian charm and modernity. 

Genoa is quite a different character.  Yes, it has some of the alluring seediness of a place like Venice—another city that gathered its power and reputation through sea commerce, from medieval times to the present.  But if you were to liken the two cities to, say, a pair of old courtesans, still shimmering in rich decay, Venice would be the one who had better preserved her looks, either through cosmetics or some lucky genetic gift. But Genoa was far and away the one who was better company, filled with good stories and shady transactions.

The streets of this city bristled with a canny, subversive life, and today it was overcast, the rain imminent.  Right from the start I saw the street vendors—not unusual in any Italian city, but more prevalent here, and perhaps more aggressive.  There were a number of Africans, migrants from what were no doubt desperate circumstances on that troubled continent, selling bead bracelets and small, cheaply carved animals.  There were also the Romani (Americans generally know them as “gypsies,” a term most of them resent); and then, quite common, the native Italian beggars, who migrate from table to table at the cafes, pleading insistently (and sometimes at great length).   Our friend Carlo, who seemed a calmly quiet young man, refused one beggar again and again, and yet again as we had coffee in a Genoan piazza.  I could see that, eventually, even his extensive patience was taxed, and I wondered how porous the “safety net” might be Italy, since a whole subterranean world seems built on a kind of drifter culture, especially in the slow, seedy climate of the port town.

It wasn’t long until, almost reluctantly, we were shown the statue.    Christopher Columbus was honored rather late in Genoese history, with the monument erected roughly 150 years ago.  A deeply romanticized portrait, Columbus like someone out of a Byronic poem, his hand resting on a “subdued Indian maiden,” as some descriptions would have it.  The sight was uncomfortable, and when you put it together with the street-vending refugees and vagabonds, you couldn’t help thinking that it all tied together ultimately—that the glamour of the city had kept its shifty undercurrent for centuries, and where other cities had found ways to make street life less visible, Genoa had kept it in a noticeable tension somehow as part of the picture.  It was a city that showed you the shadier side of the mercantile and capitalist economies in its balance with beautiful palaces and architecture.  Where American mythology would blame the beggars, and where the Left would blame the dukes in the palaces, Genoa set the whole picture before you with an Italian shrug:  è quello che è, or “it is what it is”—a maddening, cliché phrase to the American ear, but particularly apt in this complex city.

To please the tourists, the powers that be had dyed pink the water of the fountain at the Piazza Ferrari.  Anna and Carlo were mildly horrified, I think, by what was certainly a gilding of the urban lily, but we, of course, were those tourists in question, sucked in by the coat of paint, and also with little girls waiting at home, whose favorite colors were pink and purple.  So we took the photograph.  And it was only later that it occurred to me how this publicity stunt brushed against the edges of marketing—presented a place in a manufactured prettiness, when its real beauty lay in something more harsh and compromised and durable.

“Are you shocked?” Anna would ask me later, as we passed through a narrow, Renaissance alley on our way to her flat.  The dark, cramped passage was the haunt of Genoese prostitutes.  Prostitution is open in Genoa, although technically illegal: the women work the daylight hours, standing in little alcoves off the alleys and the older, narrower streets.  Indeed, there was little to shock in the arrangement, unless it was how policy conflicted with practice.  Again, the city’s conflict between a nebulous idea (perhaps put forth in generations of advertising and tourism committees) and the essential heart and spirit of the city, rougher than any travel guide and yet alluring, an unabashed, unsentimental landscape in a long Italian history of maritime commerce.

The 18^th century sailing ship docked at the harbor was testimony to the city’s wonderful paradox.  Romanticized, like something out of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, it seemed to be readying itself for a voyage on the high seas, for trading towns and swordplay on the deck.  Next to it an African vendor hawked his bead bracelets, and it was only a short walk to a gelato shop and a restaurant whose front door seemed to open on the sluggish, oily water of the Mediterranean.  Genoa has it both ways in those moments and places when it is most thoroughly itself, a haunt for the pirates of adventure stories and for the subtle, nuanced piracies of today.  I left the city persuaded that I had yet to get a handle on it, but the rust and verdigris and decay that revealed itself through its prettier masks was part of its true and enduring beauty: that much I knew. ©2015 Michael Williams

On Turin and the Shroud

I would imagine that in our time, with the exceptions of Rome and Jerusalem, Turin has become the most frequent destination of the Christian pilgrim.  After all, it is the Duomo of Turin, the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista that holds the famous Shroud.

            And for Rhonda, and a little bit for me, we found ourselves moved in the middle of May on a pilgrimage of sorts, to view an artifact that I doubt and that she thinks might be.

            Yes, there are nuances and details, spaces between my skepticism and her entertaining possibilities.  She’s a good Catholic girl, and I am one of those people not hardwired for belief,  but this would have something to do with the both of us, we figured, so we left Turin’s Porta Susa—a long and horizontal (and disappointingly immaculate) train station in the western part of the city, bound for the cathedral by a meandering city bus. 

            Perhaps on trips like this, the pilgrim attunes his mind to approaches.  Perhaps it was why the passengers on the bus volunteered to locate our stop for us, an older man signaling well beforehand the prossima fermata virtually in front of the Duomo.  As always, a simple and benign prego to our thanks, the helpful and genuine friendliness of everyone we encountered from the train station to the presence of the Shroud a testament to civility at the least, to the courtesy of this solid and open city.

Turin struck my imagination as a city of piazzas and colonnades.  Of course, you could say the same of many of the large Italian cities, but somehow in Turin this arrangement called attention to itself, nowhere so strikingly as around the Duomo.  There sat the major cathedral of the city, San Giovanni Batista, blockish and externally plain when compared with its counterparts in Florence and Milan, tented and scaffolded in parts by the continual reconstruction you see around the monuments of this country.  Hugging a brick wall to our right, we walked a block or so and turned right, as we had been guided, toward the Giardini Real, the expansive park that abuts the cathedral and the Palazzo Real, the grand palace of the city.

It was here that the pilgrimage began in full, and the shops lining the streets—not simply the cramped, provisional booths selling photographs and wall-hangings of the Shroud (and even, on one occasion, a splendidly blasphemous dish towel), but also more respectable shops, it seemed, their wares a bit more permanent and a lot more expensive.  This was the stuff of medieval pilgrimage, where like the 1^st century Temple in Jerusalem itself, part of the space was ceded to Mammon.

This mercenary part of the journey didn’t bother me.  Perhaps it was my cynicism, in full flourish since we had learned that the Shroud itself, not its replica double, would be on display this summer in Italy.  At the time we discovered this, I remember thinking, “And the difference is…?” Because it makes no difference if the original Shroud is not the Shroud, I thought.  What, after all, could distinguish one version from another when both are images of some imagined thing, a representation of a collective desire for something to be more than it is?

Here we were on the sidewalk now, passing booths will all kinds of food—nourishment for the pilgrims, no doubt, though the sandwich of Sicilian sausage could also have been something more than it was.  The highlight of the movement through the booths was a young vendor selling pastries, who told me, in impeccable and subversive English, “That will be one hundred dollars.  We fill them with diamonds, you know.”

We had been told to expect hours of waiting.  The day was warm, and the prospect seemed miserable to me, as the one thing I hate more than lines is hot weather, but as we passed through a friendly but thorough security check and into a tented walkway, the temperature was not unpleasant and we seemed to be moving at an unanticipated pace.  All around us were languages we did not speak: I hear Italian, of course, but French and German as well.  I heard the recognizable inflections of American English, but missed the words in our surprisingly swift movement in the queue.  

We were bound toward shadows together, I thought.  And for some reason, it was no Biblical verse that came to mind, but the last lines of Bergman’s Seventh Seal:

 They move away from the dawn in a solemn dance away towards the dark lands while the rain cleanses their cheeks of the salt from their bitter tears.

Toward the dark lands we hastened, now being divided into small groups.  I clung to Rhonda out of the silly fear that the ushers would somehow divide us, and we would enter the presence of the Shroud separately, losing each other in the crowded shadows.  Fortunately, nothing like that was remotely possible, and we entered the cool dank air of the Duomo and were guided to a long, illumined display that I first mistook for the Shroud itself until, on closer approach, it was evident that what stood in front of us was a photograph.  A display in several languages described the Shroud for us, pointing out—almost like a lecturer’s highlighting, complete with pointer and magnified slides, the visual evidence marshalled for a crucified body, lacerated and pierced in the hands, feet, and side.

When you knew where to look, you were prepared for the viewing.  Even the pastries are filled with diamonds.

Into the hushed darkness we were guided, cautioned against flash photography, of course (sh the attached picture of the Shroud is not my own).  This attention to protocol intensified the shadow, made it a place outside of place, the courteous whispers of elderly ladies arranging us in rows and tiers before the famous artifact.  I thought of Rudolf Otto’s famous definition of the numinous: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The idea of the holy as mysterious, inspiring fear or awe and yet drawing in or attracting the beholder, and doing both at the same time.  

Beyond a ranging curiosity, seeing something that you owe it to yourself to see if it is on display, I confess to having no sense of the numinous on the fabric.  Yet in the hush of the room, the devotion was palpable: what these fifty people or so had carried with them from the reaches of the city, the continent, perhaps the world.  To some, this was the grail at the end of a journey, and to say, as has become customary, that it was the journey that mattered more than the arrival—well, that’s presumptuous, to tell this assembly of the devoted what meaning they were to gather in the presence of the Shroud and, even more presumptuously, how they were to gather it.  As for me, I needed no artifact to notice that the quiet around me was welcoming, that unlike the religion I have often encountered in my experience of coming up, of my struggles with a faith in the fifty years before I sat it aside at last, this was a quiet that beckoned me in with no agenda and a simple, abiding silence.  It seemed like a place at the table I might have taken had it been offered, or had I seen it, years ago. 

 Emerging into the spacious, far more secular grounds of the Palazzo Real, I was glad for the light despite the stillness I had left behind.  I could explain away the Shroud in a dozen ways, just as its defenders could stretch explanation to defend it.  But all this was wasted argument, between those of faith and those of skepticism, or perhaps more accurately, between people whose faiths settle differently.  I took those thoughts from the quiet space, realizing in that first breath of commotion and Palazzo and sun that, if the world is all I have, it contains places of turmoil and calm, and that, perhaps, is more than I could bargain for.  ©2015 Michael Williams

On Visible Cities

Note: This to be used as the head of a section to a proposed book of travel writings.

There’s a quote from Baudelaire I’ve always found funny: apparently, when asked why he didn’r write any nature poetry, his answer was simple and direct: “I don’t worship vegetables.”  Just the right amount of bluntness and smart-assery that reveals a genuine creature of the city.

The city is, for many of us, the landscape of record.  I didn’t grow up where that was the case: my two principal childhood homes were suburban and country, and the circles of my travels seem to take me back to small towns—places of mixed blessings that seem to be where I settle, as a rule.  But I believe the city is the arena in which the drama and situations of the 21^st century inevitably take place, and I believe there is nothing particularly fresh or insightful in saying that. 

As far as I know, the city became the center of the Modern soul about the time it became a character in imaginative literature.  For all the Romantics’ infatuation with Nature, you have old Willie Blake writing Songs of Innocence and Experience in the height of their heyday, and you can’t imagine those poems outside an urban setting.  The city pervades them, even the crazy visionary stuff, but “London” and the Chimney Sweep poems are shot through with the dirt and noise and claustrophobia that would enter our imaginations for the next two centuries.  There’s Dickens, and Baudelaire like I mentioned.  And Joyce, and Eliot, and Kafka.  Yes, lots of writers tried to get out of town, but so many stories begin and end in the city these days: we are condensed, overpopulated, forced to live and die in the presence of each other.

But it isn’t as bleak as that.  In Milan only a week ago, I again brushed against the ideas of the Italian Futurists—Marinetti and Boccioni and their celebration of the art of machinery and noise and combustion.  Too bad some of them filtered that passion into Fascism, because they were certainly on to something in the human spirit.  We love the new, the brilliant and violent.  We love the crash and clamor of things, especially when we’re young, but in my case some of the affections lingered into middle age, so here I am—part of me Futurist, while another part romances the past and the layers of cities.

And as character in modern fiction, cities in modern times take on personality.  You get to know them gradually: at first they are mysteries, broad stereotypes of what you have sometimes heard, perhaps.  For me, the cities often take shape through what I have read: I cannot imagine Prague, for example, other than through the lens of Franz Kafka, although in doing so, I no doubt miss the city on a number of levels.  As it reveals itself through exceptions to type, the city unfolds slowly and with nuance, like Molly Bloom or Quentin Compson, and you acquaint yourself in stages, learning streets and districts and skylines as you might countenance and expression.

So this entry is intended to head up a section of my travel writings called Visible Cities.  The homage is obvious: Calvino’s book Invisible Cities is one of the most beautiful things written in the 20^th century, and I owe him much more than a title. Calvino’s cities were drawn as rich prose poems, fantasies on ideas and on the way we organize, construct, and give meaning to the raw materials around us.  No wonder he used the city: it is always a chaos almost always struggling to become something: experts on chaos theory (of which I am certainly not one) claim that it is the only way to explain the traffic patterns of cities, and since that assertion requires a knowledge of physics above my pay grade, I will just assume they have a point, and that the city’s disorder was a kind of vehicle for larger, more conceptual orders that Calvino managed to discover in its parts and unruly complications.

My approach is more myth than science. I plan to start with cities observed rather than conceptual, from the brick and mortar of American towns to the marble and stone of Europe, dwelling in the tactile and, I hope, balancing how they were once imagined with some of the accidents of their growth into what and who they are.  Budapest and Vienna, Prague and Turin and Genoa and Milan, Detroit and Dublin, Chicago and my own home town of Louisville, smaller than each of these and in almost all ways more parochial, and yet revealing wonders if you look long enough (It was Pogo, after all, who said, “If you squint your eyes just right, you can see the gold of the Incas”). The idea is that there is connection and order behind the building blocks of this very world, that the makers of London, say, or of Venice, had an idea they were building toward, perhaps unconsciously, and that idea was an expression of a basic way in which they were who they were.  That it isn’t crazy to personify Prague in Kafka, Genoa in Columbus or Venice in the cholera of Mann’s great novella.  That our imagination imposes myths on a place, or extracts the myth from its foundations, and it is sometimes, even almost always, hard to tell the difference between those two imaginings.  ©2015 Michael Williams

Of Ten Thousand Buddhas Summit Monastery and a Place Close to Home

It’s a roundabout five miles or so from my doorstep to the Ten Thousand Buddhas Summit Monastery.  The road there leaves Corydon and slips onto the Old Forest Road (for a Tolkien student, the perfect road on which to leave the familiar).  From there, it winds over farmlands, reaches an unforeseen fork and takes a left, dipping between small houses and trailers, past a house complete with car-pursuing border collie (it happens every time: he lurks by the fence row waiting), then takes a left on Mathis Road, where a pair of broken-down barns announce your final turn—a mile-long driveway, rain-rutted and muddy, impassable for a goodly third of the year as it ascends toward the sprawling little complex where the monks live.

The first time there, back in the spring of 2013, we missed the final turn.  The sign for the monastery is a painted arrow on a boulder at the foot of the drive,  but it is only visible from one direction, and the direction wasn’t ours.  So we wandered for ten minutes up Mathis Road until it was all but clear that we had missed the turn-off.  On the way back, we saw it easily, turned and started the climb.

I am sure there are not ten thousand Buddhas at the crest of the hill.  Do we count the statues? the sangha (the Buddhist community)? a combination of both, or another form of reckoning?

Whatever the case, what does greet the traveler is an array of statues, fifty or sixty Buddhas, perhaps, in inviting postures of calm and welcome.  Coming up the hill for the first time was a kind of coming home—not in any profound sense of conversion or epiphany, because I’ve always been secular, skeptical, and (I hate to admit) perhaps even cynical when it comes to religious matters.  No, this homecoming was something more in the country of imagination and emotion, that feeling that you get when, after a long trip, you reach your own threshold, and the tension of wandering slides away and you feel that you can rest here, can put up your feet.

It was a feeling that surprised me, stripped of all but a residual spirituality—the call of the soul that a writer feels mid-novel.  For the thing that had brought me to the monastery was research—nothing academic or theological, but the kind of research all my novelist friends know about, the creation of the experience, of presence in a place, of paying attention to the senses as they take in what is around them.  In this case it was the glow off the white ceramic statuary, the smell of the surrounding forest and a faint undercurrent of sandalwood incense.

And most of all, the profound quiet of the place.  But more of that in a moment.

I was a few chapters into my work in progress, working title Ghost Month.  One of the novel’s heroes was turning out to be what I characterized at first as a “rock star Buddhist”—a Westerner with a sentimental attachment to the media image of Eastern serenity.  What happens, though, as a novel unfolds, is that a character surprises you; it became apparent early on that Dominic, in order to be anything beyond a shallow dilettante, would have learned something or other about the religion he embraced. 

I knew then I would have to brush against Buddhism in a way that was a bit more than a passing acquaintance.  So I began an internet search for nearby monasteries or centers, and with surprise (and a little embarrassment at my own ignorance) discovered the Summit Monastery not fifteen minutes away.  Hence the winding drive, the few minutes of being lost, and the arrival at this spot in the midst of this quiet.

The silence, oddly, did not carry with it a sense of removal.  I had grown up in a wide array of settings—city, suburbia, military post, and farm.  And I was reminded of my grandfather’s farm, the sloping field and the pond, behind it a still ten acres of woods.  A surprising sense of safety amid those trees, the high-pitched, percussive call of a cardinal and the ratcheting of cicadas.  It was all sound you could rest in, comfortable with the nearby road and the passage of the everyday. 

But with your feet on pavement, your thoughts could return to these woods.  It reminded my of something in Wordsworth, when the young man thought over his recollections of Tintern Abbey:

Oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration...

And it was later, not with Wordsworth's eloquence but with a gratitude to that eloquence, to that other monastery up in the Indiana hills and to the journey that had taken me there, I began to assemble my own thoughts and decided I would go back--this time, not simply as a matter of research.  Ultimately to make it a regular journey.

Over two years have passed since that first encounter.  I make regular trips to the Summit Monastery to meditate with the Rev. Thich Hang Dat, who has become friend and mentor in the interim.  And my understanding of what happened there that first time has changed in two years.

My failures of faith have been numberless—side roads taken hopefully, leading to dislocation and disappointment, steep roads I was too lazy to endure, roads through unsightly and mean country that I figured could not lead to where I was headed.  Whatever the case, the monastery settled in my later thoughts, I hope not superficially because I return to it again and again, practice the meditation I began there, consider it a wayside spot of sustenance and odd peace.

 

I will write more about it in the coming spring.  ©2015 Michael Williams

On Pilgrimage to Wellington: The Road to and from the Shire

Imagine a park high above the city of Wellington, New Zealand, a hemisphere and two seasons away from home.  There was a place where you stand on a woodland trail and look over and up through a canopy of trees into gray December light—it was gray that day, even if the season in the Southern Hemisphere was late spring. 

Wellington slopes as steeply as any city I have visited.  The incline leads from a kind of windy pinnacle (at least in the area where we stayed), the home of colleges and hospitals, down to a bright blue harbor and museums and level ground.  Your legs ached from walking the long journey, and the way back to where we stayed was strenuous as most mountain hikes.

Mount Victoria was our principal hike when my Tolkien students and I visited Wellington.  Small by mountain standards, it lies well in walking distance from the city, and upon its slopes lay the spot where, early in the Jackson movie, Frodo looks down the path, sees the air buckle and blur, and urges his companions to get off the road.  It was a moment in the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, and consequently, a moment on that hill took me back to another occasion, many years before and much closer to home.

A moment that, like so many good moments, had begun with a gift.  Bed fast for a summer because of a baseball back injury, I was lucky to have a pair of cousins, both wiser and more hip than I could hope to be; they set before me a copy of  Lord of the Rings—a long book, they told me, to shorten the summer boredom.  And shorten the boredom it did: I read the trilogy three times that summer.  But during that first reading, there was an instant of awareness that sealed a summer’s (and a lifetime’s) devotion to that book, to fantasy literature, and to reading itself.

In chapter 3 of the Fellowship, at perhaps the first iconic moment in the trilogy, the hobbits are leaving the Shire on a mission that none of them truly understand yet.  They encounter the first of the Black Riders, the reconnaissance of the Dark Lord of Mordor.  That moment I remember distinctly, as the hobbits slide off the road into cover, as the Rider paces above them, sniffing for them in country forever transformed for them.

And for me.

My eyes lifted from the page, and I emerged from that world knowing that this story meant business.  It was not the first serious story I had ever read, I am certain; however, it was the first time I had understood the seriousness of a story.  All of a sudden, the elements of the fantastic that had offered escape in the other books I had read no longer offered the same refuges.  They were no longer a departure from reality—not even merely a commentary on reality—but a reality unto themselves, thresholds to a way of apprehending things that transformed me forever and entirely. 

I gave myself to that story at that moment.  To fantasy fiction.  To story in general.  It was life-changing, and I hope all of you have or have had a moment like it, the start of an adventure that tells you who you are.

Thirty-five years later, I would find out some interesting things about that scene.  In a 1938 letter to his publisher, Tolkien maintained that in this very chapter, the story had “taken an unpremeditated turn”.  I can’t imagine that the turn did not lie in this moment,  that it surprised him just as much as it surprised me.  Just as much as it surprised and drew in two of our New Zealand guides—Colin Bleasdale from Flat Earth New Zealand Enterprises, and Hammond Peek who had both worked on the movie (Peek won an Oscar® for sound mixing on Return of the King).  Both told us that this was the moment in the film that sold the story to them,  that drew them into Jackson’s world and Tolkien’s behind it.

Of course, the place was really decades and continents away for me.  A summer, sunstruck and tedious, when it hurt to move and when the only real joy felt like Middle Earth.  It struck me in Wellington how the act of pilgrimage was simply the wedding of yearning and place, that the shrine could be Jerusalem or Canterbury or a tree-hooded road in a park you had never imagined when the journey began.  The journey was always one of soul and heart; yes, it was the travel more than the destination, as wise pilgrims are fond of saying, but there needs to be a place where soul and heart can rest and take sustenance, where they look back in wonder and tell you how far you have come.

We did the obligatory pictures.  I huddled with my students at the spot where Elijah Wood and Sean Astin had eluded Jackson’s Dark Riders, and comedy crept into the journey.  I was reminded that part of the wonder of the stopping place was how things beckoned you not to take the destination seriously, that its greatest importance was, like all other places, as a signpost for where you have been and where you are going.  ©2014 Michael Williams

Of New Zealand, Tolkien, and Pilgrimage

The act of pilgrimage takes a number of turns across a lifetime.  Sometimes you embark with the destination in mind, as medieval pilgrims did to Jerusalem or Rome or Canterbury, and sometimes you find out (as I imagine some of those medieval pilgrims did) that the meaning of the journey lay in the process, in what you encountered along the way. 

We have all heard versions of that simple (and simplistic) “either/or”; it’s not much more profound to say that every pilgrimage is a combination of both the planned and the accidental, the destination and the getting-there.  What interests me today, though, is a different take on pilgrimage—one that arises from both these categories and yet veers away from being comfortably either or both.

Sometimes you are on a pilgrimage, and you don’t notice until you get there.

It’s been eight years since Rhonda and I made the journey to New Zealand, along with several colleagues and a handful of remarkable students from the University of Louisville’s Honors Program.  It was a journey to be envied, if you asked a number of my writer friends: a Tolkien seminar that included The Lord of the Rings, then Peter Jackson’s movie treatment of the great novels, would be followed by two weeks among the film sites in New Zealand.  We carefully selected these students, guided (at least in my case) by their love of the books.  We passed over worthy candidates in a search for those whose application essays showed a respect, a curiosity, and an affection for Tolkien’s work, so in some cases the almighty GPA was less a factor (though these were Honors students with excellent grades) than a passion for the subject. 

It was a good standard to apply.  We chose excellent company—bright and creative, irreverent and intellectually engaged.  I don’t remember what the grades were (A’s and B’s, no doubt), but I remember the people and their work with fondness, as the class evolved into a mutual labor of love.

The trip was, as you might imagine, a kind of crown to the experience.  Yes, they were supposed to work in New Zealand, but I kept assignments feather-light, the idea being to leave them to their resources, to let them become a Fellowship.  All disciplinary matters were in the capable hands of my colleagues, John Richardson and Luke Buckman, and to this day I have no idea whether any student was upbraided or even corrected.

The travel experience was not uniform.  There was pleasant and funny testament to this (one young woman boarded an airplane for the first time, and her exuberant whoop when it lifted off the ground kept me smiling from Louisville to Chicago on the first short leg of the journey), and there were circumstances more perilous and accidental: my passport was “inquired into,” as my name is not the most uncommon in the world, and one young man implied, loudly and teasingly and in the middle of LAX airport, that the inquiry had to do with “alleged connections to the IRA”.  Those connections were so deeply alleged that he had made them up on the spot, but the post 9/11 discomfort in an international airport was, believe me, very real. 

Despite my close brush with cavity search, the rest of the trip to our destination went according to plan.  And here we return to the subject at hand, because it was on a hilly little farm near Matamata on New Zealand’s North Island that it became clear to me how I had been a pilgrim all along.

Some of you may know this story, but when I was fourteen, a baseball injury placed me on my back, more or less, for an entire summer.  It turned out that the problem rose from my having a mild and undetected spina bifida, apparently more common in our region than was known at that time, mostly (oddly enough) in males of Welsh descent.  While I was laid up, my cousins Tom and Gary (two other males of Welsh descent) introduced me to the trilogy in the hopes that a long book could tide me over in a long, inactive summer. 

It did just that.  And in addition, it redefined me, as epiphanies are supposed to do. 

The revelation came for me, as I will tell in the next entry, in the third chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring.   For now, it is better to consider where it led me.  For after having read the trilogy, I knew that my story would center on stories, on reading them and telling them.  I would discover in the years to come that stories were my principal way of understanding the world, of vesting it with meanings both evident and veiled, both communal and deeply private.  Myths were stories, after all, and through telling tales we brush the edge of myth, even now in a world where the most simplistic among us pride themselves in being myth-free. 

It was a lesson I took with me, through college and graduate school, to my stay in publishing and on into writing, through my conflicts with fellow academics who considered the trilogy a “children’s book” without having read the trilogy (or, I would guess, much children’s literature), and who considered me (verbatim) “not a real writer” for embracing Tolkien, heroic fantasy, speculative fiction in all its shapes and forms.  Things have changed with the academicians, and with me as well, because it took me a while to realize that my journey and its branching, resultant conflicts were all pilgrimage as well.

On the Matamata farm it hit me.  This was a place Jackson had negotiated with a sheep farmer, who refused to speak to the eminent director until a contested televised rugby game was complete.  This was the place that housed the movie’s version of Bilbo’s Party Oak and the opening scenes set in the Shire.  Green slopes tumbled down to a fence row and a small, weedy pond not much bigger than the one in my grandfather’s east field, visible from the house in which I had read much of Two Towers.  The smell rose in the warm December air, fragrant and fresh, though there were sheep turds underfoot you’d have to watch for.  One of the students sat on the slope above what had once been Bag End, which was now a white oval framework bedded in the bright green of the hill, and he leaned on his knees, quiet and teary, on the edge of being overwhelmed by his emotions, fixed to this spot he was no doubt coloring and peopling in his memory and imagination. 

I sat down by him, put my arm around his shoulders.  Cautioned him that, if he started to cry, I would, too.  We looked off to the west, at the tree and the pond, each imagining a different Shire that was our mutual destination and home.  One of the young women produced a recorder and began to play the soft, solitary theme song of Jackson’s trilogy, and it never sounded so good and so lonely and so transformingly communal. 

It was, indeed, the stuff of pilgrimage.  The search for meaning and healing, in which the destination is less the goal than the place you set down the things you carry.   ©2014 Michael Williams