Walking as a secular 'Dhikr'
Lost and found in Spain's great wilderness, with Bab'Aziz
Just like, I suspect, many other poets, I sometimes reach an impasse; sick of my shtick, sick of myself, of the stale repetition of leaning into commonplace but unremarkable vices, sick of my desk and all its ‘documents’. But I’ve also learned to love these interregna, prefacing as they so often do, a poetic transmogrification into something else.
Dropping my son off at work, waiting tables at a lavish wedding at the impressive sanctuary of La Virgen de la Fuente, in Peñarroya de Tastavins, I decided on a whim to take a long walk. Peñarroya, despite its ugly fringe of pig farms, is a handsome mountain village with some well-preserved and grand houses overlooked by a colossal massif, and I had a mind to hoof it up to the top.
I was ill-prepared, rather shamefully. I had water, a rucksack, a coat, some old and friendly boots, but nothing for lunch. I stopped in the bar for coffee and heard someone ordering hot sandwiches to go; pork loin cooked in garlic with green peppers and tomato. Madre mía. But this threadbare end of a threadbare month in all these threadbare years doesn’t permit such indulgences. I would be walking and fasting. Muy mal.
The previous night I’d watched the beautiful film ‘Bab’Aziz’ by the Tunisian writer and director Nacer Khemir, in which a blind and elderly dervish wanders with his granddaughter, hoping fate will lead them to a desert reunion of Sufi musicians, as of course, it does. It’s an astonishing film, similar in some ways to Tony Gatlif’s transcontinental epic of Romani music, ‘Latcho Drom’. Without lapsing into slushy orientalism, Bab’Aziz is a sumptuous and sinewy creation, in Persian and Arabic, with a narrative form redolent of Persian Sufi poetry, and you’ll do yourself a great kindness by watching it. The whole movie is available on YouTube, but here’s a clip:
In many ways I’ve come to regard walking as a secular form of what the Sufis would call Dhikr, amongst the various goals of which are a renunciation of the self and worldly concerns. As I started to sweat with the steep ascent I took a wrong turn, drawn off the path by an uncanny familiarity. I’d been this way before, on a horse, and found myself remembering every canyon, every scree slope and precipice. Here we had to dismount, here is where I saw sparks off the shoes of a horse in front, as it scrambled for traction. Here we stopped for the horses to drink.
It was quite the adventure; a little band of about a dozen of us took the Camino de La Rogativa, which has an interesting backstory. After the plague of 1347 left most of the people of the Valencian village of Vallibona cold in the ground, seven young men made a desperate trek over the mountains to Peñarroya in search of wives, returning with them to save their village from extinction. Every seven years a pilgrimage is made in their honour by hundreds of people from both villages.
It was hard enough on a horse, I recalled, as I stumbled, slightly seedy and out of shape, following fate or my nose wherever they would lead me, much like the eponymous dervish Bab’Aziz, in the movie. Reaching back to fiddle with my rucksack, I remembered and found a big bag of salted peanuts I’d stuffed in there for exactly this eventuality. Food, water, legs. Up.
Fretting rather needlessly over time and the light, I pushed myself pretty hard, overtaking a Spanish family out looking for mushrooms with some sulky tweens. Spanish people are very good at life, I’d say, enjoying the day as they were, while I hurried past them, a gaunt and demented ascetic in battered boots. They said they were headed to the Tossa, a high peak with panoramic views into the three kingdoms of Aragón, Valencia and Catalonia, but I never saw them again, even as I retraced my steps on the descent. They must have given up on it and sensibly got away for a decent lunch, while I was flailing and scrabbling over the scree.
The steep sections of rock covered with treacherous pebbles defined the barrancos, alternating as the path snaked on and up with tall stands of Scots pine, or Pi roig, as we’d call it. Here my footfall was almost silent over the spongy bed of bronze needles. I scouted about for the sun’s position in the sky and pushed on, stopping now and then to let my sclerotic tissues rearrange themselves and get with the program. I remembered the same exhilaration from our horse trip, betrayed over the rise by a false summit. Keep going, a little further up, a little further on.
I could hear wild boar above me, and had to clear my throat and even clap my hands to drive them away, this would not be a good place for a tussle. One Christmas day, while helping me bandage a 3-inch gash in my dog’s abdomen, my neighbour remarked that the tusks of the boar are lethal, and they know very well how to use them. There were goats too, a pair of young Ibex on the other side of a gorge alerted me with their ‘cheep’ alarm call. I’m always pleased to see them, their population having been decimated by an epidemic of mange.
At last, trembling and soaked with sweat, at least partly from the exertion of allowing the many tendrils of worldly preoccupations to uncoil, I clambered up a crevice and emerged onto the summit of La Tossa. The slope down into the valley was sparse and rocky, facing the south with a bed of wild thyme under vigorous juniper bushes and holm oaks. Truffle country if ever there was, and sure enough, round the base of the oaks the wild boar had clearly been rootling and feasting.
As I sat with the last of my greasy peanuts and noticed mares’ tail clouds at high altitude, which mean rain on Monday, the air was completely still. A chough flew overhead, a bright blaze of goldfinches swept past at speed and I realised I could hear the unmistakable hissing and screeching sound of vultures feeding, somewhere far beneath me. Deep down in a golden meadow by a ruined farmhouse illuminated in a shaft of cold sun, around a hundred Griffon vultures were throwing up the dust as they ripped into whatever carrion they had found, presumably a goat succumbed to the dreaded mange. As I watched, agape, more arrived just overhead, glancing briefly in my direction before pulling in their wings to lose altitude as they corkscrewed their way down into the forgotten valley below, where almost certainly no one ever goes.
Did I find what I went looking for? Always. Whatever it was I was biting my nails about; pension contributions, ageing, politics, poetry, all fell away after the great exertion, a cathartic bit of good kif, a wild and incredible natural spectacle. The descent was rough, hard on hips and knees, but I knew that when I woke up this morning, felt the ache in my frame and then remembered why, I would see how an emptiness had been slowly refilled with a quiet light.