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| The Hermitage in 2003 |
Parts 4 and 5 of A Hermit’s Tale are really one (rather long) item because both are concerned with one subject: The transformation process that I experienced during an extended solitary retreat in Andalusia 2000-2014.
Previous chapters of A Hermit’s Tale can be found here: Part 1, Part2, Part 3.
A Cave in Granada
The Cave of the Heart is my preferred name for the place or state of meeting in which the contemplative Jew encounters the Divine. It was the title of a short book (Kuntres Maarat Ha-Lev) that I wrote in 2005—in the early days of my twelve year residence as a solitary Jewish hermit in a cave-house in Spain. In the following autobiographical essay (Parts 4 and 5 of this Hermit's Tale) I hope to describe what happened in my ‘Cave in Granada’ in more detail.
My primary intention in doing this is (i) to shed some light on the way a disability or unexpected spiritual trial can ignite a process of transformation, and (ii) to give the reader a clearer impression of what a Jewish eremitical life might feel like. One of my dearest teachers, Rabbi Lionel Blue, often pointed out that our lives are our own scriptures, and that—where spirituality is concerned—we should only write about what we have experienced ourselves.
My decision to return to life as a dedicated contemplative did not happen
overnight. It emerged slowly as my deafness progressed. In 1999, once I had accepted that I was
becoming so deaf that my life as a musician and a music teacher was about to
end, I chose to take some time away from
full-time employment to develop and finish “The Song of Caedmon”— an
orchestral-choral work I had been re-writing.
I accepted a friend’s offer to stay as a guest in her vacant mountain home in the mountain-top village of Comares in Andalucia and soon afterwards,I took her advice to make a new home in Spain. Her advice was pertinent because she had remembered my time as a Carmelite (a monastic order reformed by two Spaniards with Jewish ancestry: Teresa of Avila and Juan de la Cruz) but also she thought that the climate might be suitable as I had spent so many years living in the tropical climate of South East Asia. She was right—I can still remember the shock of facing the late autumn British climate in London on the way back to Europe—nor had I forgotten the romantic but freezing years living behind mediaeval stone walls in Storeton on the Wirral.
Following the re-location to Spain, my intention was to compose and to look for part-time work to make a living. I managed the former but the later eluded me. As with so many situations in my life, it seems that Providence had different and quite unexpected plans for me.
In 1999, after a few months living in Comares, and having no other property to tie me down in any way— I bought a small, unusual, and comparatively inexpensive home in Salobreña on the coast of Granada province. Shmuel (Ibn Nagrela) Ha Nagid had been encamped with his army in nearby Almuñecar and it is highly likely that he will have visited the castle of Salobreña whilst functioning as a general in the army of the Sultan of Granada.
The Phoenician name of this town was “Salambina” and I like to think that its name might be related to the Hebrew “Shalom-Binah”. For me, it certainly proved to be a womb-like gestator of the peace and wholeness that comes from intuitive understanding.
Situated in the shadow of that Arab castle, and in a pedestrian barrio of ten other houses whose Spanish residents were mostly members of one extended family, my new Spanish home was an old, traditionally-built house that nestled seamlessly into a dramatic rock outcrop in a cliff-face. Its site on Cuesta de Gambullon—Cliffside of the Bubbling Spring— had been a Bronze Age settlement and to me and to many visitors it had a strongly numinous atmosphere.
The
house was in the top left-hand corner of the barrio, a small pedestrian cul-de-sac that was set apart on a limb from
the rest of the town, directly under the castle, on the western side of the casco
antiguo (old village). The area was sheltered at the sides by tall trees and huge rocks.
These features gave it a rural feel even though the bustling
town was only a few minutes walk away. It was an ex-monk’s dream and it even came
with a pseudo-cloister in the form of a small but private and high-walled patio: ideal for perambulatory or sedentary secluded
meditations.
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| Patio cloister |
As a young Carmelite in the 1970’s, I had visited the rarely seen interior of the Carthusian monastery in Parkminster, and the layout of this little house with its enclosed garden resembled one of the many hermitages there. In fact that was the reason I chose it in the first place.
In those days, before property developers destroyed much of the municipality’s natural beauty, it overlooked a coastal valley filled with sugar-cane fields and countless wild birds. (I was once even visited by a hoopoe). From its roof I was able to sit on a bench before a Mediterranean sea-view that was crowned daily by an idyllically beautiful and expansive sunset.
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| View from my desk |
In earlier days, that bay of Almuñecar was the point of maritime entry to Spain of the invading Islamic armed forces from Morocco. Many of their soldiers were Jewish mercenaries. In the later mediaeval era, Almuñecar had a thriving Jewish quarter though little memory of it survived the expulsion of 1492.
Two of the house’s four walls were actually part
of the natural rock face, untouched save for being whitewashed with lime cal
annually. The living room and dining area was thus a cave, lit by a small
sky-light band of opaque glass bricks that filled the enclosed space with sunlight—warm in winter,
cool in summer— and the perfect place
for silent solitary encounter with G-d. It even came with its own "cleft in the rock" in the corner behind the pillar.
As I spoke very little Spanish and there were few English speakers in the town, my idyllic domestic situation lent itself naturally to the development of a life of solitude, and I was able to experience ‘expanded time’ away from the hustle and bustle of the workaholic life I had left behind.
I will admit—I thought I had entered my own custom-made Paradise, and I will remain grateful for the rest of my life for the blessing I received in being able to live in such a place for fifteen whole years, subsisting solely on my own savings until I was forced to sell it by encroaching poverty. Storeton had been heavily mortgaged, and this Spanish Hermitage was thus the first and only property that I have ever fully owned.
As one visiting friend remarked, the rock walls of the Salobreña hermitage seemed to envelop me in a protective embrace. I certainly felt that way about it myself as I set to work on two fronts: to compose and to come to terms with the loss of my hearing.
The routine which quickly developed went something like this: Occasionally I was visited by old friends from the UK who stayed with me for three or four days. This would happen maybe once or twice a year. For the rest of the year I lived alone, left the village about three days in a year, and left the house once a day on a regular, short walk up and down the hill: partly for exercise, sometimes for food shopping, and often for a solitary and anonymous café con leche in a locally run and patronised cafetería where I was made to feel most welcome but was otherwise left in silent peace.
The entire time was spent in almost total silence.The few Spanish words of business spoken on the shopping trip, or in a brief greeting with my neighbours as we crossed paths in the street were my only ‘live’ human contact. The rest of the time was spent in the house or in its small high-walled garden doing manual jobs, reading, studying, composing, writing letters—and eventually—praying.
At first, such silence and solitude was not consciously sought out, but slowly and surely
it materialised as a path on which I was being asked to walk with full
intentionality of purpose.
Little by little, as the rhythym of that solitary silence enveloped me, and as my clinical deafness deepened — I began to examine what was happening to me. I was well aware that I had landed in a comfortable home, in good general health, with enough money in the bank to be self supporting without income for a few years. I have never for one moment forgotten that enormous good fortune.
But at the same time, I found myself stripped
of the character-supportive motivation and prestige that a job-title or
job-description brings; saddened by the hearing loss that now drastically
limited the musical and educational activities which had been my life; far from
old and dear friends and from the
comforts of hearing and speaking English—my own first language—and I found
myself set down thus psychologically exposed on a spiritual mountain top. On a ‘bad’ day I became increasingly lonely
and self-pitying.
The Song of Caedmon
The story behind the text of the Song of Caedmon is the reason I chose to spend so much time and effort working on this particular composition. It had a message for me personally and I wanted to share that with a wide audience through music.
The original story is to be
found in Bede’s Historia
Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum written in the early eighth century C.E. and it recounts the dream vision of a cowherd
at Whitby Abbey on the Yorkshire coast. In the dream he heard the Voice of G-d asking him to sing. Being untrained and uneducated he demurred
but, on being pressed by the Voice, he
produced the following song:
Anglo-Saxon original
Nù sculon herigean
heofonrìces Weard,
Meotodes meahte ond
his mòdgeþanc,
weorc Wuldorfæder,
swà hè wundra
gehwæs,
èce Drihten, òr
onstealde.
Hè ærest sceòp
eorðan bearnum
heofon tò hròfe,
hàlig Scyppend;
þà middangeard
monncynnes Weard,
èce Drihten, æfter
tèode,
fìrum foldan, Frèa
ælmihtig."
Bede’s Latin:
Nunc laudere debemus auctorem regni caelestis,
potentiam creatoris et consilium illius,
facta Patris gloriae.
Quomodo ille,
cum sit aeternus Deus,
omnium miraculorum auctor exstitit,
qui primo filiis hominum caelum pro culmine tecti,
dehinc terram custos humani generis omnipotens creavit.
Modern English:
Now let us praise
the Guardian of heaven
The Maker’s might
and His mind’s thought
The work of the
Wonder Father
How of all the
wonders that are,
the Lord Eternal,
laid the first stone.
He shaped the earth
for earthy man
He made him a
heaven,a heaven for roof, Holy Shaper
Ruler of Middle
Earth, Mankind’s Guardian
Lord Eternal, when
all else was created
He made him the
earth, Lord Almighty.
He reported the event to Abbess Hilda—whose monastery was unusual in that she presided over both male and female monastics on one site—and he was given every encouragement to continue composing poetry and music. He eventually became a professed monk in that establishment.
The
story bears a message of
encouragement for all those who doubt their ability and underlines the
effectiveness of encouraging support from
one’s mentor or spiritual guide.
Here is part of my setting of the Anglo-Saxon text as it appears at the start of the composition, to be sung by a boy soloist and then taken up by a solo soprano:
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| (click on graphics to enlarge all scores) |
ooo0ooo
Many readers will note that the autobiographical sketches I have presented in this “Hermit’sTale” have been just that: sketchy. This is because the Tale is written merely to provide some outline background to the texts I have written on Contemplative Prayer and lifestyles. In these sketches therefore, I have tended to leave out all references to personal relationships except for my relationships with my formal teachers. Of course we learn from everyone we encounter, and in recounting the story of the Song of Caedmon I must make an exception, and honour a special person who was not one of my formal teachers. In fact she was my ‘Hilda of Whitby force’ par excellence.
Here is the tale:
In my youth, as a student at St Anselm’s Sixth form College, I had a close friend at school, Thomas—and very soon his family became my adopted family. Quite unexpectedly (for both of us) his Manchester-born mother, Claire Machell (née Ockleston) became the closest friend of my adolescence. I was seventeen. She was in her fifties. She was a Roman Catholic, training to become a religion teacher, and a person newly discovering the comparitive freedoms of Vatican II, Focolare, and Liberation Theology.
We spent many evenings, sitting in the corner of her ever-active kitchen while the rest of the family watched the television, argued politics, or made music in the front room. We often discussed the spiritual writings of both classical and modern theologians—but our discussions were most especially focussed on a person’s relationship to G-d in contemplative intimacy and prayer.
She also 'believed' in me (and the musical and religious creativity she thought I had been blessed with) one hundred and twenty percent and— just as St Hilda encouraged Caedmon to write poetry— she encouraged me to write “spiritually active” music for fellow spiritual seekers. For this reason, the first (1977) and all subsequent versions of the Song of Caedmon score bear a dedication specifically to her.
In later years when I lived in Storeton and could
not afford to heat my home
during the winter, I returned to her
centrally heated home for some physical
and spiritual warmth and comfort. By that time, most of her children had moved
out and so the piano was largely unused. I composed the second draft of the Song of Caedmon in
her front room—sustained by her food, drink, and overflowing kindness. She was
always there for me. May her soul
have an aliyah.
ooo0ooo
Earlier versions of the Song of Caedmon had been performed by school orchestras in my places of work both in UK and in South East Asia, and all versions of the work featured orchestral and vocal parts for professional players and also elementary parts for raw beginners. As had been the case with the 1979 composition entitled Sinai (described in A Hermits Tale: Part Three) I saw these performances of the work as a kind of place-holder in time and space, designed to generate a prophetic experience in both the performers and the audiences.
I
particularly wanted the orchestras
and choirs to be
composed of adults and children; gifted professionals and
struggling amateurs. This produced a rather strange score in which some orchestral parts included sections that were within the grasp of elementary level students; some quite
basic but with challenges; and
some only possible by virtuosi. Here
is the
moment when the full choir enters.
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| click on graphic to enlarge |
Here
is an extract from the score which is
intended to represent a celestial
gamelan. (The crotales need to be played by several players and dampened as in gamelan....ideally they should be homemade as are the bells used in the composition)
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| click to enlarge |
After completing the score in 2006, I approached several well-connected academic and professional contacts in a quest to obtain a performance of the work...but to no avail... and I was not really surprised by this: The unusual mixed ability scoring and extensive resources required were daunting. Also, there may well have been errors in the score which I was unable to detect once the deafness had progressed beyond the red-line, and I may well have overworked the material to the point of its structural collapse.
During the period I was working on the Song of Caedmon, I lost the ability to hear most of the upper frequencies and harmonics of the music I was writing. When using the playback features of the Sibelius notation app that I used, it became impossible for me to distinguish a tone from a semi-tone or the timbre of a voice from that of a flute, violin, or trumpet. In despair, though I finished the work as far as I was able, I gave up trying to proof-read and edit it.
I still have a digital copy of the score of the Song of Caedmon, and I have a hope that someone with greater ability might recast the melodic lines and general concept of the work as I left it, regarding them as building blocks that they might craft into a totally new and more perfect work.
For every Mozart there are myriads of Salieris and
realising after so many years of work on the project that I was a “Salieri” was painful
but a great exercise in ego-control. Travelling through the labyrinth of the seven or eight versions of the Song of Caedmon that I had
worked on I had emerged to realise that the
real lessons learnt were extra-musical: The
power of inspiration;the
value of being encouraged by a
loving mentor;the determination that can produce relentless perseverance; and that
we do not always attain the completion
of our projects ourselves. As
Pirke Avot has it:
“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it”
Pirke Avot 2:14
This seems to be the principle lesson I am so often invited to learn...both throughout my life and to the present day!
Here are the closing bars
of the score, which features an offstage
choir:
ooo0ooo
In Spain, my newly eroded and transformed opinion of my worth as a composer had produced a brutally honest assessment of my technical limitations, but the onslaught of clinical deafness really put the lid on the process.
Deafness had presented me with a challenge in self-esteem, with an obstacle to finding employment, and with a deterioration in the social and communication possibilities left open to me. It then precipitated something much more serious: a loss of trust (bitachon) in G-d though not of faith (emunah) in His existence.
I remember many solitary walks in the desolate and barren paths through the unkempt and plastic-greenhouse filled outskirts of the town of Salobreña . Unable to bear the claustrophobia of my seemingly pointless confinement I would cast myself out of the house seeking wide open space.
As I walked further away from inhabitated dwellings a repeated silent scream emerged, playing over and over in my head: “Can you see me! Can you hear me!?” This was my only prayer at the time.
For the first two years in Spain when I was struggling with this acute religious alienation I really felt more alone, deserted, and self-pitying than words here can express and I had no sense of anything approaching a conscious connection with the G-d I was screaming at. But to this day, I believe G-d was watching and listening even if I was unaware of it and feeling unable to link-up. G-d was, as it were, watching and listening for me to stop wriggling in anguish and see the path that He had prepared for this moment and was about to reveal.
The musical, aural, social, and spiritual experience that I have just described was almost overwhelmingly depressing. At the time it seemed like tragedy, but I am well over all that now. Hindsight—seeing the back-view as the Divine Glory passes by the cleft in the rock[i] — now makes the whole thing seem like a blessing in disguise. Any trials I had during those years, I now see in proper perspective and I am not looking for sympathy. I have written about them here simply because they turned out to be the door which opened into the positive experience of contemplative prayer which has been my life and its source motivation ever since.
Being hard of hearing or deaf or disabled in any way is not necessarily a nisayon (test) from heaven. Everybody has their own burdens and difficulties in life and they are not necessarily perceived as being negative by the one who experiences them
Furthermore, in the religious life of a wholehearted spiritual seeker, perseverance and fortitude in the overcoming of obstacles is almost a standard benchmark of genuine progress and development. On this the mystical and philosophical sages of all religions agree.
Those who embark on a search for intimacy with the Divine often encounter a paradoxical change in their spiritual perception along the following lines: On the one hand they will temporarily lose any sense of intimacy with the G-d they seek, even in some cases to the point of rejection and divorce; and on the other hand, if they persevere, they will allow themselves to be found by Him when the time is right.
That appointed time may seem long in coming and we are counselled to remember that G-d may not always choose to grant it— but if we are blessed, we only need to make one step towards Him—once such a time has come — and He is with us in a flash.
This Divine-Human dance is often repeated on a kind of spiral of learning. With the passage of time and with maturing experience of the process, G-d seems simultaneously more distant and yet somehow closer; our love for Him is purified by awe at His otherness as we travel upwards and inwards to meet Him. That is a journey that never ends, and while we are on it we become aware just how little we know, or ever could know—despite being aware that we are progressing in intimacy and nearness with Our Source. There is a profound hope that we may experience Union with that Source and many share my own thirst for that. G-d alone knows if and in what manner that might be possible.
Something of this perceptual paradox is described in Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s tale of the Heart of the World—a parable which appears within the Tale of the Seven Beggars:
The mountain with the stone and the spring stands at one end of the world. The Heart of the World stands at the opposite end of the world………When it (the Heart) stands facing the mountain it can see the peak upon which the Spring is, but as soon as it comes close to the mountain, the peak is hidden from its eyes.[ii]
It is also, as I discovered quite
recently, a key concept in the profoundly Sufic mysticism of Rabbi David ben Joshua Maimuni (1335-c.1415).
He was the last of the great literary
descendents of Maimonides who formed the Judeo-Sufic movement known as the
Egyptian Pietists/Hasidim. In his “Guide to Solitude” (Al
Murshid) written in Arabic— Rabbi David ben Joshua described the contemplative’s paradoxical malaise and he
quotes an unnamed [iii] Muslim poet’s refrain to express it poetically:
When He is
distant, He torments me,
And
when he draws near, I retreat in fear.
When
I disappear, He appears,
And when He appears, I disappear.[iv]
For this poet, the experience is transformed into a statement on bitul hanefesh (the Sufi concept of fana). The cure for the anguish of separation from the Divine is thus contained within the experience of alienation itself, for Rabbi David, it is only through the anihilation of the ego that the mystic can experience deveykut and begin (as it were) to be obliterated into the Divine Ocean, and then (as it were) see through G-d own eyes.
Almost all contemplative mystics have produced written or quoted intimations of such (often repeated and cyclic) dark nights of the soul and their transformed break-ups and re-unions with the Divine. Neither are they the exclusive experience of the great and holy alone: All of us seem to have to go through this process if we are to grow up spiritually.
Durch diese hohle Gasse muss er kommen.
Es führt kein andrer Weg nach Küssnacht
For me it describes the gate of
transformation before whose threshold I was standing and which I will describe in Part Five.
©Nachman Davies
Safed
March 5
2024
Part Five of A Hermit's Tale is HERE
[ii] From ‘The Seven Beggars’ , trans. R’Aryeh Kaplan in ‘Rabbi Nachman’s Stories’ , page 34 ( Breslov Research Institute, Jerusalem/New York,1983)
[iii] The poet quoted may have been Ahmad b. Mohammad an-Nuri (10th Century), Dun-Nun, or Abu Hamzah as-Sufi all of whom wrote almost identical versions of this text.
[iv] see P. Fenton, Obadiah et David Maïmonide, Deux traités de mystique juive ,Lagrasse, Verdier, 1987, page 233.
