letting the soul catch up
on generosity
I wrote this in my travel diary in May, but am uploading it two very late months later in its original form. Wherever you’re reading this, pretend it’s spring.
I write this from Chios, an island in the Aegean Sea that Homer is rumoured to have lived in. For two weeks, I will stay in a beautiful old house with four other artists, our host, and her sausage dog. Three of them drift often into speaking Greek, a language I do not know, and I love that this is the soundtrack of my coming days.
There are heavy stones on the ledges of every window in town to keep the shutters from rattling, but still, the wind here is so strong that it shakes the panes. Primal things keep battering against the glass all night long, but I sleep well, rocked by dreams. At night, I walk through the village to find tea without caffeine and feel as if I am bearing witness to something ancient, written in the bricks and curling balconies, in the way the wind whistles through the pathways. Flower garlands hang on people’s front doors, poems for a promised spring.
For a long time, I’ve been thinking about where I want to live. Not where I will live, because that brings with it a whole host of logistics that aren’t worth wondering about until I have to, but which landscape I might complement best. Will I be a good grain of sand on the Atlantic coastline, a worthy bauhinia cutting in the Hong Kong botanical gardens, a suitably melancholy ash in a London graveyard?
It’s Taurus season. I want to feel capacious.
This morning, while trying to find a picturesque path that will lead me to the beach, I meet a beautiful little dog who reminds me of someone I lost. He’s sniffing around an abandoned ice-cream freezer, and I see him just as I stoop to pick up a small bunch of geraniums on the ground. He runs over to me, his heart-shaped metal collar jangling. His name, it tells me, is Max.
Stroking the back of his ears, I wonder where he’s from, who he belongs to, just like how yesterday we wondered which family the little children dancing around the patio of the citrus museum café belonged to. He has another collar around his neck, a more industrial one that looks like a tracker. I wonder if I should call the number on his metal heart. Maybe in a little bit. Maybe after I find out what our meeting means.
I walk down the road, and he follows me, wagging his tail. Soon, he’s the one leading, and I follow him because what more perfect guide to the local surrounds could I have asked for than this sweet, intelligent stranger who is friendly and for the most part clean and who doesn’t require me to make any conversation? It is almost ten thirty, the afternoon’s forecast is rainy, and I don’t want to turn my data on or have to make any decisions.
Can you take me to the beach, I ask Max.
The town we are in feels labyrinthine, or perhaps maze-like. Streets snake around one another, and every time I key a location in on my phone, it says the name of the premises, and then Unnamed Road, which delights me. The difference between labyrinths and mazes, I recently found out, is that while a maze is full of dead ends, a labyrinth has only one path to the center. (Center? Centre? I always use “center” for the middle, or the heart of the thing, and “centre” for the mall, but I don’t know if this is my own made-up idea of what the center holds).
Labyrinths are all about finding different pathways to the same thing. Like riddles, they bear strange marks of the mythic. I’ve been stuck in a bit of a tangle in my mind for the last few months/years and I need moments where I catch sight of the red thread glinting. On my first psychedelic trip, I keep seeing spiralling labyrinths in the green grass, in the sand-coloured carpet. I wonder, in the moment, if what I’m seeing are actually the contours of my mind.
Max takes me off the road, down a grassy path littered with stones and small flowers. The sea sparkles ahead and I feel listened to. Halfway down, we stop at an open-air chapel with large domed windows sculpted into the sandy stone. Inside are two small shrines: one in a rectangular groove in the wall that looks like a fireplace, and one propped on an old cabinet. There are empty brass candleholders, a blue willow tablecloth and images of Mary and Christ hanging on the wall and in little frames. Miniature receptacles are nestled into the stony ledge: red jars, silver egg-cups, tiny brass bells, all bearing the sign of the cross. A white wooden cross is perched aslant against the groove in the wall. Max wants to go back outside. Before we leave, I give my bunch of geraniums to a worn paper image of Christ, unsure if we will see each other again.
When I get back home later, I look it up and learn that the word for this place is an exokklisi (εξωκκλήσι), a private or family chapel tucked into hillsides and olive groves, dedicated to a particular saint or in fulfilment of a vow.
After a heart attack, Carl Jung once dreamt that he was hiking through a hilly landscape when he came upon a small wayside chapel, the door held ajar, and stepped inside. Unlike the exokklisi, his dream chapel held ‘no image of the Virgin on the altar, and no crucifix either, but only a wonderful flower arrangement’. Facing him on the floor in front of the altar sat ‘a yogi—in lotus posture, in deep meditation. When I looked at him more closely, I realised that he had my face,’ Jung recounts in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. ‘I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: “Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.” I knew that when he awakened, I would no longer be.’
By the time Max and I arrive at the marina, the sky looks dark and angry. There’s a tangle of kelp on the rocky shore that preoccupies him while I look around. The water is the same promising blue as from far away, tossing against the anchored boats. There isn’t a soul in sight, and for good reason, with those doleful clouds. We turn back after a few minutes, and he leads me up a different path back to the town.
Recently, I’ve started having mentorship sessions with a young writer who’s working on her first novel about a doll that’s been brought to life by a malignant child witch. She is ten years old (!) and has already written more than 10,000 words. Her imagination astounds me. While going through the third chapter together, she points out one of the secondary characters, the doll’s bookish friend. ‘That one’s me.’ When I asked her why she isn’t the protagonist of her story, she just shrugs. ‘I don’t really think of myself that way,’ she says. ‘I wanted to write about my friends.’
I was struck by this. At her age, I used to think I was destined to be the hero of my own life, capable of every single thing and then more. If people didn’t understand that, it was okay, because I didn’t often feel I needed to be understood. Writing about my own life felt like the only way I could speak as my deepest self, because not everyone would make the time to read what I’d written, and I liked knowing that. I liked knowing that not everyone had access to the secret of me. I was waiting for the right person, the right reader.
On the way back up the hill, Max stops at a gate to say hello to some other dogs, and I wonder if this is where we will part ways. But soon, he catches up to me again and leads me back up to the town, wending through the streets until we stop not far from where I first met him. I like that he always looks back every now and then to check I am still with him.
Tomorrow, the weather promises to be beautiful and I am going scuba diving for the first time in four years. The last time was on the Perhentian Islands, while getting my licence, and it was an ordeal. I threw up on every single boat journey, including the ones to and from the island. Each dive, which I had hoped would be a meditative experience, was tarnished in some way by the rot of lingering nausea. I don’t know why I am deciding to do this all over again, but something needs to be rewritten in the water for me. My housemate for the week is a scuba instructor in a peripheral life, and he tells me not to worry because there will not be any boats. We will slip straight in from the pier and sidle back out, like seals.
A man with a puppy steps outside of his house, and bends to stroke Max, calling him by his name. ‘Does he live with you?’ I ask, and he shakes his head, pointing a few doors down. ‘He lives there,’ he smiles. Max trots forward and outside his house, someone calls his name happily. Nobody seems concerned about his absence.
The house I am staying in is just up the hill. I turn and murmur a quiet thank you to Max, who catches my eye for a flicker of a second before disappearing inside.
❦
When I return from Greece, a blood vessel has burst in my left eye. There is no pain, but it means that I look a little bit more menacing than usual. ‘Are you okay?’ an air steward says, gesturing to the whites of his own unbloodied eye. Not really, I want to reply. I want to say it upsets me to be leaving this beautiful country with its devastatingly delayed flights and perfect water and rocks I collected from the shore confiscated in a tray held out by a woman in a crisp airport uniform. One had bird’s feet fossilised into the stone, and I was going to gift it to my lover. I want to say I do not understand why there are so many Greek people on this flight deciding to leave the sun and salt for the greyness of England. ‘Not a man on earth can see a day ahead, groping through the dark,’ I want him to say back, like Jocasta, mother of Oedipus. ‘Better to live at random, best we can.’
A few days later, after a series of undramatic bureaucratic ordeals that make me want to cry and a sleepless night from a UTI, I attend my fourth session of analysis. I consider rescheduling, but my analyst has a very pretty office with good chairs and a sculptural assemblage of twigs in the fireplace. I need some beauty today, in this cold, hailing place that is not a stone’s throw from the Aegean Sea, on whose pebbly shores I probably contracted my infection.
We sit on her nice chairs and I tell her about my meeting with Max. The town we were in was filled with dogs and cats, and every day, whether on a walk or eating crepes in the square, the same characters would amble onto the stage: Elvis, the gigantic beagle outside the taverna; Menios, the sausage dog who belonged to our host, nudging lemons from the garden over the wooden floors in unsubtle bids to play with him; and my favourite, Bella, the beautiful brown and white dog from down the road in desperate need of a bath. She would trot over in the evenings for a cuddle and then take off when she felt like it, a goofy smile on her face.
But I never saw Max again. I went back to his street, and the house was silent. Perhaps they had gone away that same day, for a holiday or for other reasons. Perhaps I had dreamed him, or he had dreamed me. ‘I know he exists, because I have photos of him,’ I say to my analyst. ‘But I didn’t see him again.’
It reminds her, she says, of a scene in the Old Testament, in the apocryphal Book of Tobit, where a little dog appears seemingly out of nowhere, follows the hero on his journey, and is mentioned only once again upon his return. Tobit’s family has fallen on hard times and his son, Tobias, goes to seek money for their family from distant relatives. Hearing their prayers, God dispatches the archangel Raphael to accompany him on his journey in human disguise, and they set out together, ‘the young man’s dog with them’. The animal wanders into the story unbidden, and is mentioned only once again: after the men catch a fish in the Tigris, and the disguised Raphael tells Tobias that its heart and liver can drive out Sarah’s demons, and its gall can cure his father’s blindness, they set off for home, ‘and the dog went after them’. He has been with them the whole time, noiseless, faithful.
‘We don’t know why he shows up,’ my analyst says, ‘but for some reason, he was important for the journey.’
In Andrea del Verrocchio’s painting Tobias and the Angel, painted between the years 1470 and 1480, the little dog walks beside Raphael, not Tobias. The animal is faint, almost translucent, not entirely of this world. In fact, all depictions of this story that include the dog show the animal next to the angel: in Karel Dujardin’s 1660 painting, the brown dog sniffs at Raphael’s elbow as he leans warmly over the boy; in Titian’s 1530 painting, they are both on Tobias’s right, the dog’s tail grazing the angel’s robe; in Francesco Botticini’s painting from the 1480s, the dog is a pillowy cloud of fur behind Raphael’s sandals, as is the case with Antonio del Pollaiuoulo’s 1460 painting, and Filippino Lippi’s—not to be confused, Wikipedia warns, with the painter Filippo Lippi—painting from the 1470s.
Are they one and the same, the dog and the angel?
Karel Dujardin; ‘Tobias and the Angel’ (c. 1664-1665).jpg
My favourite is perhaps Karel Dujardin’s depiction, not least because his little brown dog most resembles Max. Unlike almost all the other paintings, here the boy and the angel are not walking but seem to be pausing on their journey in wordless conversation, their eyes locked. Raphael stands behind Tobias with his right arm around the young man, who is gazing up at him enraptured, his mouth slightly open in awe or confusion. The dog looks up at the angel with the same expression. We can see the white wing shining against his dark green robe, but it is artfully obscured from the boy’s view, just as the reader knows from the beginning that Raphael is an angel, although Tobias remains in the dark until the very end. With his left pinky, Raphael gestures to the underside of his left eye, a gentle smile on his face. The gigantic fish caught from the Tigris is clasped in the boy’s arms; we can presume that Raphael is explaining how its entrails can cure his father’s blindness.
I look at this painting through my own left eye, its disturbing patch of red at the inner corner—also known as the medial canthus—that the internet assures me will be gone in a week or two. If I was gazing up at the angel the way Dujardin’s Tobias is, he would see it in all its redness, perhaps tap it lightly and tell me how to cure it.
I tell my analyst I have been feeling a little out of sorts since I returned from this trip, not quite settled in the folds and nooks of the life I had been building. A jet lag of the soul.
A long time ago, she tells me, her own analyst used to travel deep into the Amazon almost every year. It was a long journey, involving a flight and several crossings on land in different vehicles. On one particularly long bus ride into the rainforest, her driver stopped the vehicle every hour or so to lie flat on his back for five minutes. Puzzled, she eventually asked another passenger—or perhaps it was a translator; the details don’t cling to me as they used to—why. ‘He’s letting his soul catch up to him,’ they told her.
As my analyst speaks, I realise that there is a lineage of conversations passing between us: the morsels of memory her own analyst gave her that she is giving to me, and the particularities she chooses to share from her own experiences of living. Rather like Max sharing his favoured path to the sea with me, I feel I’m being guided by psychopomps in various guises, trip-sitters who hold my hand as I venture into unexplored realms. I want to say this feels generative in how it incites new ideas in me, new things to write about, new journeys to spiral in and out of, but the better word for this, I think, is generosity.
❦