To be a Pilgrim...and is it a Progress?

As a ten year old I remember being read to by an eccentric Head Teacher. His favoured authors were Dickens, Wordsworth and Bunyan and along with A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and Daffodils I vividly remember the strange world of Pilgrim's Progress. I also remember singing John Bunyan's resume of his book set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams (although to call him the composer of this folk tune seems to be pushing it!). The story and especially the hymn spoke to my early love of chivalry and Arthurian romances; the idea of the lone traveller setting out on a quest for something usually mistily shrouded but quite specific is very strong in my psyche. 

A reminder of the story follows:

The English novel begins behind bars, in extremis. Its first author, John Bunyan, was a Puritan dissenter whose writing starts with sermons and ends with fiction. His famous allegory, the story of Christian, opens with a sentence of luminous simplicity that has the haunting compulsion of the hook in a great melody. "As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream."A "Denn" is a prison, and Bunyan wrote most of the book in Bedford county gaol, having been arrested for his beliefs during the "Great Persecution" of 1660-1690. He shares the experience of prison with Cervantes, who had the idea for Don Quixote while incarcerated in La Mancha. Like so many novels, The Pilgrim's Progress blends fact and fiction. As well as being the record of Bunyan's dream, a well-known fictional device, it is also an archetypal tale – a quest, fraught with danger. Christian's pilgrimage takes him through the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and the Delectable Mountains in a succession of adventures that keep the reader turning the page. With his good companions, Faithful and Hopeful, he vanquishes many enemies before arriving at the Celestial City with the line that still reverberates through the English literary tradition: "So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

In Hollywood terms, the novel has a perfect "arc". It also contains a cast of unforgettable characters, from Mr Worldly Wiseman to Lord Hategood, Mr Stand-fast and Mr Valiant-for-Truth.

(The Guardian Best Books List)

I suppose now with the benefit of hindsight I can appreciate the steeping of my young mind in protestant Christianity. I went to Methodist Sunday School, loved singing hymns, and later joined the Boys' Brigade in the family tradition. And always this image of a lone traveller in all my favourite hymns: "Who would true valour see", "Courage, Brother, do not stumble", "My faith it is an oaken staff, the traveller's well loved aid", "Will your anchor hold in the storms of life?" and of course, "When a Knight won his spurs". I was never encouraged to analyse these hymns, just sing them in an open voiced, unapologetic manner that marks one out as brought up Northern Methodist. Of course, they're all suffused through with brave journeying, overcoming whatever problems you have, and reaching the destination which is always there if not a little mysterious.

Another favourite hymn was Jerusalem: "And did those feet in ancient time..." Blake's hymn of political striving and resacralising the landscape interpreted by me as the goal of my incipient socialism and Green awareness.

Pilgrim's PROGRESS? Christian has his Celestial City, Blake his too. One is personal and the other is collective (and practical and active, a very important aspect for me). My pilgrimage will hopefully be both, my Celestial City or Blake's Jerusalem, will have no gates to pass through, no secret codes of entry, no chosen few. It will be full of humanity of every faith( and none), colour, gender, sexuality, ability, or any other boxes we so readily make, and will be swimmingly full of compassion. This possibility is what I hope to highlight and celebrate! So yes, definitely a progress in terms of a greater good than that around at the moment.
So on an individual Bunyanesque way, how do I see my progress. It's certainly goal oriented which is to get back to my starting place, home in Cromer. Will I be changed? I hope there will perhaps be insight, self knowledge, even some sort of grounding and rooting in the Norfolk landscape and its many treasures. Personally, my goal is less easy to define, in fact it is very misty in the best Arthurian tradition, perhaps, as with the Way of Taoism, to travel is all that's needed .

Palimpsests

 

A palimpsest is a document, usually written on vellum, that has been scrubbed off so that another document may be written on the same vellum. The rub (sorry) is that the previous document is never completely effaced and traces of it remain, especially the guidelines. 

These three maps are about 240 years apart with the middle one about 120 years ago. For me, what shines through is the basic consistency in routes in and out of Cromer, the rough pattern of settlement and the wealth of churches (in both senses).  Norfolk in the Middle Ages was a rich farmland where sheep were reared for the fine fleece (only surpassed in quality by Dieulacres Abbey, but that's another rabbit hole!) Turkeys thrived and were driven to markets in London, don't think lorries, think a chap and his wife and a dog herding them! Cromer became a holiday resort and quite a few rich bankers built halls. A railway came and went, and the coastline subtly changed as coastlines do. In the twenty years I've been here I've seen many cliffslips and the odd precarious house tumble.  

Through all the maps some little details stay the same giving the landscape a history, a deep sense of its own timescale. We take our little dog up the Avenue most days, it's the straight bit of lane leading to Northrepps Hall and we have a couple of pictures from 1890 showing it almost identical to now.It's a delightful walk!

 Maps, like palimpsests, show changes in values: when does an arable field become a housing estate? And when does a railway become a footpath? It's all here in the maps. What isn't as clear is the underlying motivation for this change.

I guess we who were born in the fifties believed in progress as the underlying driver of change. In my Technical School it was very much taken for granted; by rational scientific thought and good engineering and architecture we could and would build a better world. Now, I'm not so sure. Humans are complicated creatures who think they are fundamentally rational and will carefully consider whether the projected change is beneficial and, more importantly, for whom.

Here's a thing. 

It's a genuine, medieval palimpsest. It was made, as you know, by scraping an existing document off the vellum to be able to write a new document. Please bear in mind that this is before printing (unless you are Chinese) when every document was the product of painstaking copying in scriptoria.

The uppermost document, the darker script, is a prayer book. The work that has been diligently scraped and rubbed away is mathematical text by Archimedes, written in the third century BCE and copied possibly in the tenth century. It is a groundbreaking piece of work showing some understanding of what became the calculus of Newton and Leibniz as well as advanced geometry and mechanics. It is the only way we have access to Archimedes' thought. And in the thirteenth century, in a monastery somewhere in the Middle East run by Orthodox Christians, this fountain of mathematics, natural philosophy and logic was scraped away for a prayer book which was so unimportant it was not even cut, sewn nor bound. Ironically it is thought that the original Archimedes sheets ended up in an obscure little scriptorium to keep it safe from the marauding crusaders who destroyed anything in an unknown script as heretical.

But back to maps......I suspect, from what is happening elsewhere, the next map in the Norfolk series may be covered with solar panels while we throw away sheep's fleece and import more and more food....

Progress? I'll talk about that in my next entry........

Just Me and my Bicycle

I've tried the organised Centuries in Norfolk and Suffolk, I really have. I was led to understand that the buzz of lots of cyclists would add sparkle to the day, that other people chatting to you as you ride would help the miles whizz by and that a mutually congratulatory beer with other finishers would add to that sense of achievement. I'm not a curmudgeonly chap. I like dinner parties, chatting to folk at Kentwell Hall reenactments, helping children make LEGO models at the Radar Museum, and I absolutely love flirting while shopping, but there's something gloriously freeing about solitary cycling. I can't explain it if you don't get it. Other cyclists just detract from the simple joy of silently gliding through country lanes or dodging traffic in towns. 

That's why I've chosen to go solo! I shall be meeting quite a few Faith (and No Faith) communities, I'm meeting up with my Kentwell apprentice at Julian's shrine, a few Zen Buddhists may accompany me on the ride out of Norwich and a couple of friends have generously given me a bed for the night in Dersingham. I don't think I'll be lonely!