Inward Sight, Outward Seeing

“Auden distilled life into rhythm – sound and syllables dancing on the circus of the tongue – but my father had a seeing sense.”

Later I found it under a monastic habit and in an isolated world of silent nuns and stony corridors, in a priory with bars and walls to keep us in, and the whole wide world out. I found it in mortifications intended to desensitize but which, over time, only served to heighten all sensation to the point of exquisite enjoyment. The ascetical practices themselves were one thing, death-dealing hammer blows to human nature. But that that nature could bounce back was indisputable, so that, when eventually I left the cloistered world, my experience of what others call ordinary life was ecstatic.  Fruit. Blue skies. Walking barefoot on the beach. I walked like a resurrected being, finally at home in the once-rejected body which, as I was approaching menopause, was pumping hormones more powerful than any I’d known in adolescence. Life itself was psychedelic.

My time behind bars was up, and I was free. Free as I’d never been before to explore the world and to enjoy each tiny taste and measure of it, as delighted as a toddler with a box of chocolates. The sensation of being alive rolled over me like a wave of constant pleasure, and I let it carry me, first to a caravan in rural France where I celebrated as a hermit for my first six months, and then, when the money ran out and I got a place to study at Oxford, amid the dreaming spires of a city I already knew but now – oh how much better than the town of O and A levels.  

It was here I’d once felt the grey sky falling down upon me and clinging to me like a dirty rag, after a sexual incident with a teacher. It was horrible. At sixteen I was walking as though clothed in sackcloth. Now, midlife, I was clothed in sunlight, and if anybody ever asks me – Were your desert years in the monastery wasted years? I have no hesitation in saying NO.  I learned reliance on a higher power, and, through deep and harsh restraint, a true appreciation of the world and of my own incarnate state. Dad didn’t live to see me grow up properly, his mind was already going as I left my teens. Monasticism might have been my way of grieving when he finally departed, in my early 20s, his body turned to ash, his soul directing me from above. His eye was eagle-like and panoramic, possessed of an acuity of vision that was now surely cutting through the clouds. Because my father had a seeing sense, a sense of site, a love of ground and place and tone and vision.  He was a lover of the sea and of the early light, and light, as we all know, can never die.