Hanging with the Elephant

by Harding, Michael

  On another occasion, I was in the Joinery in Smithfield to give a talk about Mongolia and orgasms and horses’ milk. The Joinery is a small arts centre that offers creative resources to young artists. Afterwards, I chatted to a psychiatrist. She was drinking mulled wine and she had a lilting Ulster accent. I would have been happy to converse with her all night but I needed to push on. I had a gig in Cork two nights later.

  I drove as far as Portlaoise that night, thinking about psychiatry and mental health and wondering if chemicals had the capacity to inject happiness into the human skull. I checked into a hotel where a few teenage girls wearing silver tiaras and pink ballerina costumes hung around an empty dance floor in the lounge. A DJ played music so loud that it was impossible to talk, and a few unruly boys sat at tables slobbering their drink and shouting into each other’s ears. On a distant TV screen, Jeremy Paxman was talking to Russell Brand. I felt alone, but at least I wasn’t pretending I was happy any more. I guess that food, sex and belonging in a tent are only moments on the road of life. And so too is grief. Maybe meaning is further down the track. ‘It will come later,’ I told myself. And in the meantime all I could do was keep travelling.

  After the gig in Cork, I went to my hotel and ordered a drink and brought it to the residents’ lounge. I was sitting on a big sofa when a woman came over to me.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me sitting here,’ she said, as she sat beside me and gazed across the lounge, avoiding eye contact.

  ‘I read something that you wrote in the newspaper about your mother being a widow,’ she said. ‘Actually I’m a widow too,’ she added, as if she was confessing something ugly. ‘I’m fine most of the time, but I dread Christmas.’

  ‘What was your husband’s name?’ I wondered.

  She spoke it, and I felt his presence well up inside her as she began to weep. And then we shared so much detail about her life in twenty minutes that I couldn’t stop thinking of her all through my trip.

  ‘It was like an amputation,’ she said.

  And I just couldn’t get her out of my mind, even during Christmas, so I tried writing to her for the New Year, the kind of letter that I would never have been able to write to my own mother when her husband had died:

  I was thinking of you over the Christmas and of the years that stretch before you now as a widow. And I was thinking of all the years you spent with your beloved and all the drama at the end of his life. And how familiar you were with his body and with all its curves and edges and the smell of the sheets. And now all you have left is the emptiness in the bedroom when you walk into it, going from room to room, as if walking from one empty shell to another.

  Believe me when I say that the house where my mother had lived became a shell too, where she tried to protect herself from loneliness after her husband died. But please don’t protect yourself like that. Embrace the memories that you shared with me. The way he left things in the bathroom when he had finished washing, the sight of his clothes on the floor, the texture of his damp discarded towel. Don’t hide from the terror of that absence. Don’t be afraid to wonder how it might have been if you had grown old together. And when the grief has fully surfaced, make a mug of tea in the kitchen. Don’t be afraid of that ritual you always did with him, that collaboration of boiling a kettle, or laughing through the soap operas.

  And go for a walk in the garden. Examine the dead plants and the frosty clay that was so full of flower last July. Consider the resilience of cherry trees, the tight lawn’s endurance and the understated dignity of sharp hedge lines that he trimmed for decades.

  Walk along the avenue where in funereal solemnity he made his final journey away from you, out the gate on his sons’ shoulders before they put his coffin in the hearse. You always worried about him leaving you, but you never thought he’d leave like that.

  Walk back up the avenue and plan your future. The flowerbeds will still need attention in January. Promise yourself to begin again. He is gone now. Last year will be on his gravestone and this is another year. Commit to it and to now – even if now is empty. And when the flowers are stale on his grave, bring new ones. Say they are for him, and leave them there and then walk away. Which is only what any of us try to do after a funeral, with the help of others.

  AS I GET older I come closer to the type of isolation in which my mother had lived for years. And alone in Leitrim, two years after her death, I began to realise that life is almost comical in its brevity and in the hubris with which we live the early part of it. Nothing seems to be permanent, though I suppose that stories and the telling of stories is what matters.

  And my story is that more than sex or death or the remote possibility of God, there was one thing more fundamental to my way of being in the world than any other, and that was the all-pervading influence of a mother; and not just her influence, but her presence and her love.

  So I had a need to satisfy her. My desolation at not being successful was often catastrophic and sometimes drove me to alcohol and at other times to religion. And I suppose that going through the things in her house was a necessary way of clearing her presence completely from the earth.

  I even made a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, in the monastery of Jasna Góra in Poland, a few weeks after she died. I suppose it was a way of acknowledging that my mother and the beautiful woman in Catholic iconography were intertwined, and I wanted to make my peace with both of them and I hoped that the psychic power of the Madonna would melt something in me – something hard and cynical that had grown inside me over the years.

  Despite the enormity of Karol Wojtyla’s achievements in history, his papacy always uneased me. His elevation to the Throne of St Peter marked the end of the Church that I had joined. The short spring of hope and Christian renewal which had begun during the Second Vatican Council was over as he and Joseph Ratzinger began grinding liberal theologians and philosophers into the ground, and creating a façade of sanctity and orthodoxy behind which so many children suffered abuse, so much abuse was hidden and so many people were left bereft of any shelter in the confusion and storms of their ordinary lives.

  Maybe that’s what happened to me. I couldn’t belong in Joseph Ratzinger’s Church, so maybe I cut myself off from the spiritual consolation of believing that there is someone beyond the stars that cares for us all with love. But there’s a strange tenderness creeps up on me when I am emptied of dogmas about the substantial nature of the universe. The freedom from certainty makes me feel vulnerable, and I get a sense of what my teacher means when he says that this emptiness is the mother of compassion.

  Usually when I’ve been to Poland over the years, I have tended to ignore the triumphal crosses on the streets of Warsaw or on the spires of medieval churches in Kraków. I was never quite in the humour of making pilgrimages to the Black Madonna at Częstochowa.

  I was more interested in the story of those who had clung to the cliff for centuries, and who when they let go merely fell into the abyss at Auschwitz. I am not a Jew but sometimes in Polish ghettos I have had an overwhelming feeling of loss and absence and it’s hard to believe in little elephants that hang from daisies or in any other sentimental religious posters that might suggest we could be saved by God if we would just let go.

  I remember being in Łódź one winter, walking around the old Jewish ghetto in the snow, when I saw the full moon rise on a Friday evening. A pallid moon, it rose above the blackened trees and I felt so empty that I fled instantly back to the comfort of my hotel and had a hot bath.

  The Grand Hotel on Piotrkowska Street is a world of old carpets, art deco, high ceilings and a hush of musty grandeur that has remained unchanged throughout the twentieth century; a hotel that has kept the hot water running and the doors opened continuously since then, and though I didn’t notice any other guests in the dining room, the waiter spoke in whispers.

  When I was passing a red-bricked church near where the ghetto used to be, I felt a lump of shame in my chest and found it difficult not to thin
k harshly about the Roman Church and all the popes who followed so eagerly in the footsteps of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who first made an issue of the cross. In his visions the cross first appeared like an upturned sword, by which he might conquer the world and which caused him to go looking for the true cross – the thing that popes for centuries afterwards asserted the Jews had used to kill God.

  I didn’t feel much Christian fervour as the plane landed in Warsaw, nor on the train as it ploughed through the windy clouds of snow towards Łódź on the eve of the Sabbath, nor did I feel much confidence in any god as I walked the derelict streets that were once a ghetto to 700,000 Jews.

  After the bath, I watched from my window as men on a cherry picker cleared ice from the roof. Then I downloaded images of the moon and the sour, dark alleyways and backstreets that I had taken with my phone – images of young boys with ear-rings selling onions from the back of a white van, an old man pulling two bags of coal on a buggy as his wife lit a cigarette and held it to his lips in the freezing fog, and a hatless woman who dropped her bag of McDonald’s food in the snow. I could smell the chips as she sighed and I wanted to hug her and say, ‘I know how it feels to lose something.’ But neither she nor I knew what it might be like to lose everything.

  And neither of us were Jews. At least it’s not likely that she happened to be one of that tiny remnant who survived the Shoah.

  The following day, I went to a Jewish restaurant and devoured a bowl of chicken soup, as good as ever my own mother made, but when I asked the girl who served me if it was owned by a Jewish family, she smiled and said she didn’t think so.

  I left for Warsaw that Sunday. A man on the railway tracks in a yellow jacket was chatting on his mobile. I suppose he was talking to his wife about what to get in Tesco on his way home or some other ordinary business.

  Snow always amazes me; the heaps of it stacked up and the salty falling of it, and the cloudy fog of it, and the very stillness in the middle of it.

  But in a Polish monastery, I hoped I would find a way to return to my faith. After all, I had been ordained a Catholic priest, and though I resigned very shortly after I was ordained, I had never been laicised. I had clung quietly to the hope that all my devotion to the icons of my childhood would some day awaken in me once more what is called the grace of God. But I was nervous of going to such a conservative place as Jasna Góra. I suspected it might be dark and poor and full of rain and old women in damp coats and hats like they used to wear in Ireland in the 1960s. But it just seemed like the right place to go after my mother died.

  So I travelled to Częstochowa in September. It was a bright autumn afternoon. The sky was blue. The town was asleep. The trees on the sidewalk were yellow. The supermarkets were open, but there wasn’t much business. I bought a bottle of water and an apple. Derelict men hung about outside, smoking, lying on the ground, scratching their beards, and sizing me up as beggars do when they’re about to beg.

  A wide-open avenue inclined upwards towards the monastery, with trees lined on both sides. Young lovers smoked at street tables outside restaurants. There were men on bicycles and young girls walking dogs and couples just wandering with shopping bags or eating dainty fresh eclairs with their fingers as they strolled along. A pregnant woman in her twenties was waiting for me at the hotel reception, and she led me to a room with dark wooden floors and a black rug at the foot of a king-sized bed and a balcony looking out on the street. Tiny spotlights in the ceiling lit the room with a soft peach light and a jacuzzi in the bathroom was lit by a red lamp on the wall. This was a very modern hotel and I thanked the pregnant woman and said I was delighted.

  The monastery was different. It was surrounded by massive walls just beyond the leafy park across the road. I entered under the arch and along a cobbled avenue to the main church. The little cobbled street was silent like a medieval village, without traffic, apart from a few Franciscans in robes, nuns, priests, and old women coming and going from the church.

  Some priests walked about with a great sense of humility, their heads bowed and their faces turned inwards, but others swaggered in their cassocks, eyed me with suspicion and authority, and some old nuns stood like generals at the door of the visitors’ centre, like the countrywomen of my childhood who could rule their houses as little tyrants.

  But it wasn’t them I had come to see. I had come to worship the sacred mother; she who is enshrined in the icon above the tabernacle, and who would soon enfold me in her tenderness. I blessed myself at the water font and stepped inside.

  In the shaded church, poor people were kneeling and standing and walking and lighting candles. There were young nuns with slim bodies kneeling very still in the pews with such physical discipline that I could feel grace oozing from their stillness. A fat priest was saying mass on a side altar. A little bull of a man with red ears, he ploughed through the liturgy like he was starving and needed to get at his porridge.

  And for everyone in the church, and for me as well, there was just one single focus for our attention. It was behind the railings of a small chapel, in the far corner; the Black Madonna, the exquisite and ancient icon that holds a glance more haunting that the Mona Lisa and more embracing. A red sanctuary lamp hung before the image and a silver monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament sat on the white altar cloths below it.

  The icon drew me in to pray and worship and to remember with nostalgia the gestures of devotion I had learned as a child. I felt years of alienation from the Church beginning to dissolve.

  There was something so intense about the presence of love in the small chapel that no irony or cynicism could be tolerated. This was home. And I too had a right to be here.

  ‘I am here in a safe place with you,’ I whispered.

  I remained for a few hours, sometimes sitting beneath the icon in close proximity and sometimes walking away, down the back of the church to sit in a pew remote from the others.

  Sometimes I felt that the bodies of nuns around me were vibrating with love, and I watched how they prostrated themselves on the floor as they came and went. One particularly beautiful face wrapped in her nun’s starch habit turned and gazed directly at me and for an instant I had a wild urge to prostrate myself before her. But I desisted, although we did kneel a long time side by side before the icon. And the more I offered my body in reverence to this mother, the closer I felt to the men and women around me, as if in some very deep way we were brothers and sisters.

  When the bells rang, a little priest came out as chirpy as a cuckoo from a clock and sang the mass in Latin. I went to the altar to receive the sacrament. And as the litany of the saints washed over me, a great sense of remorse overwhelmed me and I began to cry.

  I don’t understand what happened that day. It certainly didn’t reawaken in me any fervour for religion. But it did heighten my awareness that without some connection with the great mother of all things, and without acknowledging her grace in the air, in the trees, the mountains, sea and sky, I would be lost forever.

  While the beloved was in Poland, I turned to the east, reading sutras on my Kindle and watching the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh on YouTube. In fact, I even improved at the meditation. I suppose everything is a question of practice. And through the six weeks of her absence I had gradually become accustomed to the silence. Each day passed without much event. The postman would throw more pamphlets from various political parties in the letterbox around noon. I collected my takeaway lunch in Drumshanbo around 1 p.m. and ate out of the small silver dish in the kitchen listening to the tail end of the RTÉ news. In the afternoons, I dozed at the stove, though gradually the weather improved and, by April, Leitrim was enjoying a foretaste of summer.

  I spent a lot of time talking to birds, the horse in the field next door, the cat, Simone Weil and other folks whom I conjured out of the air. Even my dreams became clearer, and I dived into them at night like a swimmer in the water.

  One night, I dreamed that the president of Russia was a cuckoo bird on my roof, an
d he was shaking the chimney, because our chimney is not in good condition and of course in winter the strong winds blow the rain up the tiles, underneath the flashing so that the white walls of the cottage turn brown along the line of the chimney breast. So the idea that the president of all the Russias was up there with claw feet shaking the chimney pot did me no good at all. And what was worse, he was wearing no clothes, and his skin was covered in feathers. Of course, this was only a dream. But I didn’t know that, because we don’t know we’re dreaming when we’re dreaming. I thought I was lying outside on the grass beneath the clear sky and that the cuckoo flew off the chimney and hovered above me, blocking the sun.

  I woke up in distress, but at least I was in bed. It was about 7 a.m. and I could hear the real Mr Cuckoo singing his song farther up the mountain, near Scardan Waterfall, which is the spot where he seems to announce himself every year.

  Later, I was in the studio, wondering if it was time to close up the stove for the summer, when a swallow flew in the glass patio door, carved a circle in the space above me, and landed on one of the rafters that crosses the apex roof.

  ‘I used to live here,’ he said.

  I said, ‘No, you never did, this was only built last year.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there was a green shed on this exact spot when I came in previous summers. And now it’s gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ I confessed, ‘there was a green galvanised shed here but I was obliged to take it down in order to build this lovely studio.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s not so lovely for me, is it? Where am I supposed to go for the next five months to rear my little chickens?’

  His feathers were oily black with a tint of blue.

  ‘Can I stay here?’ he seemed to ask, as he shifted sideways on the rafter.