A real time update (3) Trinity Sunday

Saturday 26/5/2018

Total Distance from Canterbury 1,295.2km

Total Days walking: 56

Tonight I am in Pavia, in Lombardia, still in the north of Italy with something between 700 and 800km remaining to walk. Pavia is an ancient cathedral and university city, on the banks of the Ticino River, which feeds into the Po.

Another update just because some people think if I am behind with the blog something might have happened to me! Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday, celebrated on the first Sunday after Pentecost. I preached once on the Trinity in Nairobi and received a small card in the post a few days later, written in that rather characteristic perfect handwriting of retired primary teachers in their nineties. It said ‘Dear Fr Redmond, I am happy to say that half of what you said on Sunday  I did not understand, because the half I did understand was rubbish.’ It went on to specify several particular failings, which were more to do with style than dogma. Trenchant criticism can be beneficial and a learning experience. I won’t say more about this, but there was a specific complaint about the use of the words ‘septic’ and ‘tank’, more than once. One tries to preach from where one is at. But this renowned elderly Irish Sister, who had worked in Kenya for over fifty years, was not impressed.

The image at the top is one I saw this week in a little church of San Pietro in a place called Robbio. The church dates from the 12th Century and there are wall paintings dating from the beginning of the sixteenth Century. At first I thought it was a depiction of the Emmaus story, but I think now it is a relatively rare depiction of the Trinity as sort of identical triplets. Note that they each appear to be celebrating the Eucharist. It dates from 1507. This type of depiction was condemned by the Council of Trent (1545-63), which said that the three members of the Trinity should not be depicted identically in art.

The purpose of this post is to think a bit about blogging. Which makes is a sort of metablog. A meta-something is a ‘something’ about ‘somethings’. So a meta criticism of a film would be a criticism of other criticisms of the film, rather than of the film itself. A meta narrative is a narrative about other narratives. And so on.

Why blog? I don’t know really. I just decided I would do it. A couple of times before I have done a daily posting on walks in Spain, but not very long posts. Here is an example. And it continues here. It was as much for myself as for anyone else. And I have included a few stories along the way, about a bovine incident, an ovine incident and Black Friday in Spain. All done with thumbs on my iphone, which is hard work.

I decided to blog as a sort of discipline as I walked this time, partly so that I would keep a record, again more for myself than for others. I have stated already that I will not discuss snoring, or bedbugs or blisters. And as I am now in paddy fields every day, around the rice growing area near Vercelli,   discussion of mosquitoes will come under the same ban. There are enough people talking about those things. The details of my route may be of interest to other walkers, but often there is not a whole lot to say about it, in terms of the actual route I chose, although there may be interesting things to say about the places I have stopped at. For those who have specific questions about routes or equipment or guidebooks, I am very happy to respond to email or FaceBook or Facebook Messenger. I am easy enough to find.

If you want a completely unedited record of where I went, including every time I got lost it is all there on Strava.com under my own name. You may have to sign up to see it, but it is free. This link may bring you there – it is hard for me to test it because I am signed in. The same traces are also on Wikiloc, but I can’t seem to manage to edit the descriptions anymore, so they are a bit abstruse. If you need help with either of these do contact me tim@walkingtim.com

I bought a tablet and also a portable keyboard for blogging, but for various technical reasons which I will not bore you with I still need to do 90% using my thumbs on the iPhone. And when I do use the keyboard, it is marked in French, but writes in English, so I have to be careful not to look at the keys which bear little enough connection to the character they produce.

But again why blog? Two pieces of poetry strike me as meaningful in thinking about this.

The first is from WB Yeats (1865-1939) and they are probably my favourite lines from all his output, though that is a rather contested field.

They come from a longer poem called A Dialogue of the Self and the Soul. You can read the whole poem here.

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

I have been walking for fifty-six days today and I have only had a walking companion(s) for a few hours out of Canterbury and for a few days in Switzerland. Otherwise I have been completely alone. That is very cumulative, and I have to say I enjoy it. I like my own company. It means you can attend to thoughts with no interruption and you don’t have to give explanations. ‘I am content to follow to its source, every event in action or in thought’. It can be something remembered from long ago or something seen along the way and frequently it is a mixture of those two. There is plenty of time for pondering. And the reward is often there: we must laugh and we must sing, we are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest. And in the long stretches all sorts of links and connections can be made, and one thing leads to another.

The other lines are from Dante (1265-1321). I am in his country now.

He was one of the first people to write important literature in the vernacular instead of Latin. He used the Tuscan dialect of Italian, helping to make it, to this day, the basis of ‘standard’ Italian, if there really is such a thing. His Italian is not always easy to read, in the same way that Shakespeare is not always easy to read, even for native English speakers. In my first year at Cambridge I remember attending two series of ‘open lectures’ which is to say that they were not part of anyone’s course. One was given by  a German, Sir Nicholas Pevsner. He was famous at the time. I may come back to him another day.

The other was given by a Dominican priest, whose name was Kenelm Foster. He seemed very old, although having been born in 1910, he was in fact younger than I am now. He was dressed in his Dominican habit and a duffel coat, which was a touch eccentric.  I just checked his obituary and it includes the line ‘Kenelm’s mother was a Digby-Beste with roots going back into the mists.’ If, like me, you do not know what the significance of that is, I fear we are not going to understand it even if we did know.  A friend of mine quotes a friend of his who states that ‘Catholics at Oxford are all either Birkenhead or Brideshead.’ Yes I know we are talking about Cambridge but I think it applies there too. Kenelm was definitely from the Brideshead end of the spectrum. Kenelm Foster was Lecturer and later Reader in Italian at the University. He had been brought up by his grandmother and governesses in Italy. He quoted from Dante in Italian and commented in English. I think most of it went over my head, but the opening lines of the Divine Comedy, which are the opening lines of the section called the Inferno, are quite well known. If you are interested there is a very good web presentation here.

I will give you a fairly long quote in English as you need to get the flavour. But first just the first few lines in Italian,

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, 
ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte
che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.
Ah how hard it is to tell,
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh –
the very thought of it renews my fear!
It is so bitter, death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.
How I came there I cannot really tell,
I was so full of sleep
when I forsook the one true way.
But when I reached the foot of a hill,
there where the valley ended
that had pierced my heart with fear,
looking up, I saw its shoulders
arrayed in the first light of the planet
that leads men straight, no matter what their road.

……. and later these lines describes one of my days exactly although my desert was made of snow!

After I rested my wearied flesh a while,
I took my way again along the desert slope
my firm foot always lower than the other.

It is worth reading more of it in the link I have given above if you are interested. It is a nice translation.

Essentially it is an account of the poet at the age of 35 (the mid-point of his life) beginning on the evening of Maundy Thursday, when he finds himself led into hell (as a visitor) by Virgil. It is a very long poem with much symbolic imagery. But it is quite concrete too. and I suppose in simple terms he emerges understanding something more about life.Those lines about being lost in the savage wood ring true!  He goes on to talk about dangerous animals – leopards and lions. I have had trouble this week with bees and snakes, of which you will hear in due course. I began my own journey just after Maundy Thursday. It is hardly the mid-point of my life, but I am now more or less at the mid-point of my journey. Forests have closed in on me and mountains have loomed. You can imagine Dante doing the Via Francigena.

So that is more or less what I am at. Do please get in touch – I enjoy hearing from people.