Brother Sun and Sister Moon

I’m sure everyone has blessings worth counting and those who do count them are blest indeed. One that I’m particularly grateful for is the blessing of space: physical space, time too; or a metaphysical combination of both.

I wake at 3:30 and dress myself warmly against the autumnal chill in the house, quiet as the proverbial mouse because there are others under this roof who consider this time is for sleeping. I wish I could have woken earlier, so that the space of this velvety night might have embraced me in its loose folds for longer

This space is measureless to man. Perhaps it is infinity that I crave. And perhaps that’s a precious quality—like gold-dust only more so—that’s hidden: seeded in the interstices of time.

For those who labour and are heavy laden, “space” may be the precious gift for which they will pay a king’s ransom. A holiday! What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, yet have no respite from someone jerking his chain? As if he were a dancing bear.

Cut to a 1973 film by Franco Zeffirelli: Brother Sun and Sister Moon:

If you want to live life free
Take your time, go slowly
Do few things, but do them well
Heartfelt work grows purely

—sung by the group of helpers—lepers and other followers of Francis as he starts his mission in Assisi — who rebuild (“day by day, stone by stone”) the ruined church of San Damiano.

Says a critic:

No wonder the people in the film all think Francesco is mad. He’s not skipping through the poppy field towards the Emerald City on a yellow brick road, but prancing around the flowers to ludicrously lame Donovan tunes by himself like a loony in a Monty Python sketch. Sadly, Zeffirelli never meant to make a comedy.

Of course, I must confess to being a bit crazy/masochistic to have watched this three times during my lifetime, but I kept forgetting how bad the film is.

Yes, he must feel a guilty pleasure against his better judgment. It’s funny how critics, when they feel the urge to slate a film which they actually enjoyed, are reduced to sawing off the branch on which they sit. A movie can only exist by virtue of cinematic conventions, and if you want to show the feeling in a character’s heart, you have to show it pictorially, in song, instrumental music and/or the spoken word. That the life of St Francis should have been conveyed to the late twentieth century in the sickly-sweet plangency of overripe Hippiedom — well, how better could it have been done? How else could it have been done? As hagiography, Zeffirelli’s essay is entirely successful. Whilst being historically accurate (to the best film standards), it makes sense of one man’s instinct to find space — an astonishing vector in the context of a stifling medieval society; and it demonstrates the intensity of the sacrifice needed to live in that space. In those days, you had to embrace “Lady Poverty” and be a beggar.

My life is nothing at all like St Francis’. But I do love the film, and Donovan’s songs within it: not in my cynical but my sentimental self, where something precious is stored.

Yesterday I had plenty to do and I felt these worldly things closing in on my space. Instead of succumbing to their pressure, I got outside at the earliest opportunity to make a small pilgrimage. In various places I have “shrines” in commemoration of “moments”. There is no altar or plaque to mark the spot but I know where they are geographically and I’d marked this particular one with a blog post on 8th April 2008:

I have to follow my nose, like a dog suddenly unleashed. On Sunday morning we had a good snowfall and I had to go and walk out in it, saying to myself “Where is a grandchild when you need one? We could build a snowman, go tobogganing.” But the nearest grandchild was 35 miles away and the snow would melt by afternoon. So I walked in it and when I took the public footpaths that criss-cross the hillside, going behind back-gardens and in between old factories, I did manage to get lost which was nice, for the usual landmarks were altered. But I was listening to the altered sounds most of all: not just the crunch of snow under my boots, but a certain hush, for the snow deadens sound. The effect was not as noticeable as I remembered but today as I set out in sunshine, I listened to the ambience with no expectations, which is the only sensible way, and I realised that this—savouring the underlying hush behind all sound to taste its attributes—is a way to get beyond the normal consciousness to another dimension co-existent with the ordinary ones. Beyond that, I don’t have words for it.

I left the house when millions across the country were on their way to work, and walking to the spot of my pilgrimage (illustrated in my photo), I passed a line of cars going up the hill—drivers leaving town—and a similar line of cars going down the hill—coming to town. The ones going up the hill had not long started their cars and the air was heavy with engines grumpily muttering on full choke. It was easy to weave between these stationary monsters and get to my footpath, and I felt that if I were behind one of those steering wheels, I wouldn’t be enjoying that blessing of space.

Then I remembered how easy it was, in 1972, to drop out from a commuter’s existence, to go and live in a country commune, even with a wife and two small children; till that became oppressively hedonistic, and we dropped out of the commune too, and joined a guru cult. Which in some ways was like being a minor friar of St Francis. Indeed, it was the cult which put on the movie show where I first saw Brother Sun, Sister Moon. We all recognised ourselves in it.

I suppose what I mean by “space” is a place where the spirit can expand, in which we can say with Blake that “One thought fills immensity”.