Anachoreo

The Greek verb anachoreo meant withdraw or depart, or withdrawing to a safer place.

No tongue can tell nor explain, no mind understands, the grievousness,[1] but I will attempt to write this tale. And, having read this, if you do not understand, I cannot help you. This is a miraculous work, of which one can tell you nothing, unless it is a lie.[2]

Some items cry out to be stolen. But not words, yet I refused to tell this story for a long time, as an exercise in humility.[3] Now, however, I’m writing this, and although you will want to think it’s about me, it’s not. It’s about a body, first of all bodies and how because of this, I am not the person I was, but am changed into someone else,[4] and this is a new life.[5]

I wonder if you will understand if I tell you, it’s about the supreme one, in the form of a woman.[6] It is for Her. She who needs no dedication. She’s been returned and all shall be well[7]...

She was the symbol of a matriarchal culture, or a goddess of a militaristic society which placed special significance on women’s ability to produce soldiers. She was a cult object for a group, or a personal item of one human being. She was worshipped. Sacrificed. She is grotesque, she is beautiful. She has no name; she has many names. She is mother; she is virgin. She is a hunter and the pursued. Goddess. Human. Totem. Toy. A self-portrait divinely inspired. A caricature. She is all of us. My hands shake as I write this, but She is me.

Until the hour I saw her, she had been hidden from me.[8] At the moment, She is an object, a priceless statuette, a little over four inches tall, made of limestone, with minute smudges of red ochre. She exists but She is gone.

Stolen, they said.

Returned, I replied.

There is no language to speak of Her, except with the voices of other women, whatever She may be, gracious or merciless; to me it is all one.[9]

If I uttered a word, breathed a sigh or cast a glance towards any person who could understand me, my humanity would be well content.[10] But communication, like excavation is delicate; the closer one approaches truth, the bedrock, the smaller the tools become, until they’re nothing more than brushes tracing the edges of meaning. So too, in excavating a story. Sometimes, there are solid façades of written records like bricks and mortar, other times meanings are teased out of fragmented folktales. The source of this old wives’ tale is a note in the records of an abbey. I tell the tale here.

Gentle yellowing sunsets are reflected limestone walls that support cupolas that pink and blue in correspondence to the evening sky, which is pierced by slender pencil pines supplicating the towers they imitate. The dim interior, where crowds of gilt icons reflect smoky candles of the devoted is quiet. See every surface plastered and frescoed in dedication to some saint, whose meagre remains were feted annually.

In this realm, draped effigies occupy shadowed niches, their melancholy features betraying the influences of this great cathedral. The experienced eye dates it to the early 16th century, but based on much older foundations. Its builders are nameless.

That there was an architect and a commissioning prince is certain. That the cathedral exists is truth. All else is another type of history that predates the building and its oft plundered treasures, writing, and perhaps civilisation.

And the tale continues: this knowledge is taken to be nothing but women’s whispers and the stuff of childhood nightmares. The sensitive admit its visceral effect on the body is not unlike that of the clouds of incense in this venerable space and best banished with a brisk walk amid the pine-scented mountain air.

This house of reverence is also a shelter for the dead, built over a crypt for its bishops and monks, whose nearby monastery is gently decaying in their long absence. The crypt, the vaulted grotto beneath the cathedral, was not quarried, but refined by masons cajoled into delving into its cavernous secrets. From atop that limestone ridge, they stepped into the bowels of the earth.

Some versions claim the builder couldn’t finish the crypt or strengthen the foundations without a pact with a she-devil. Nonetheless, it wasn’t the devil the community turned to; it was custom more ancient. Other versions reveal the mason was reduced to working alone and thus began the rumours that a sacrifice was ordered to see the work progress, with the builder’s wife walled in to save the building. However, this is the version of the story I prefer.

The crypt was sealed, but the hearsay persisted. It grew into a fireside yarn and travellers fashioned it with their own familiar particulars, until its provenance was eroded entirely. However, the bones of the story remained, jutting out of the surface bedrock, just like the church on the mountain. Before the decision to seal it was approved by the bishop, the mason ventured in one last time. With his flickering torch he went beyond the last hewn step into winding passages. At one point, the mason slipped and his torch fell, guttered and went out. His hands, breaking his fall, sank into the silten earth and, reaching in the dark, his fingers found and clutched a solid ball, which he held as he crawled, feeling his way towards fresher air, where he knew the stairs started.

In the confusion and relief once he had returned to the light, his object was forgotten, slipped absently into his tunic like a wizened apple. That evening, the master remembered his apple and brought it forth. It was small and roundish and caked in layers of soil. He chipped away at it, before his wife gently washed it and soon features emerged in the limestone. For stone it was, cold to the touch and much worn. It was a body, a misshapen form. Two stumpy footless legs protruded from a distended belly at its widest point. Above the pregnant torso hung two pendulous mounds, breasts, but there were no arms and above the chest it terminated in a thinning neck and a small nub, upon which patterns had been scratched in circles. The mason had not seen its like before. That evening, the mason dreamed of dark places; the little statue by the bed.

In the night, the earth too dreamed, and rumbled. By morning, dust had cleared but sections of the crypt’s roof were weakened. Cracks appeared in the columns and walls supporting the foundations. The apprentice summoned the mason, who examined the edifice in the dawn light. Later, the prince summoned the bishop and the mason. The mason, alone of his workers affirmed he could save the cathedral. The bishop crossed himself and assured the prince that through prayer and works the Cathedral could be saved, but there was one proviso. The cathedral, once dedicated to a great man of faith had to be rededicated. To a woman. They chose St Katherine.

Katherine, patron saint of students and nuns and a woman who never existed. I laughed when I read that. They forget the real and invent what they need for their own purposes. Thus, the genuine end of the story was that on the wife’s advice, the mason returned to the cave beneath the crypt, reburied the figurine and planted the grove around the cathedral in penance and those actions saved it. They renamed not the church, but the buried idol and there she lay for centuries, while above, monks sang devotions to their saint. Their goddess.

Here, I’ve imagined that mountain, before the wars and disease swept the land, before the prayers were silenced, the crypt. Forgotten except for one document, read by one student. I see this book with the eyes of my soul and hear it with the ears of my spirit and feel it in every part of my body.[11]

And my story? The ruins of the building were mapped. Inevitably, excavations revealed the crypt, those hewn stairs, and then the caves beneath. In one moment, the world was filled with wonder[12]: She was found. However, as in the old stories then came the fall. She was taken, analysed, packaged up and displayed…no tongue can tell nor explain the grievousness.[13]

That was the error, this life is my penance. Can I rejoice in the remedy?[14]

This place is a prison[15] yet I’ve no doubts about what I did. It was no mere human decision[16]. The law says I’ve been led astray, but I’ve returned to the earth what belongs to the earth. This is right, as is my end, immured here, deep in the ground of my beseeching[17]. Although I turn to the expressions of other women, taking from them the rules and maxims of virtue[18] beyond mere human laws, I’m not frightened. Everything passes away and I shall not be overcome.[19] What happens to me, whether I am in prison; however, it turns out, is the work of love.[20] As with what I wrote on the card I left in place of Her: reason, you will always be half-blind.[21] In court, my accusers got the quote right, but I will offer no more of this world.[22]

Every church is the house of God, every body a house of a soul. Flesh is stone, to be shaped. Bodies, like the earth, must be governed in service to the Spirit. Mine too in this beloved prison.[23] But older ideas refuse to die and the mountain, whose sacred grove had been home to the goddess, remains. She is safe again. Do you understand? I’m more confused than satisfied with the words I have used to express myself, but I have found nothing better.[24]

Oh, you in whom I am endlessly born and out of whom I shall never come[25] I say I have been saved; it’s a relief. I’m scratching out these words from the light from a small patch of sky high up the wall: so blue. While there are no names in this forgotten place, it is here where love will be seen[26] since I am the fulfilment of the tradition. This body walled in, buried. I told the judge: I acknowledge my crime to correct previous and greater ones. It is enough for me.[27]

Here is this world, this room and this precious beloved of mine,[28] this last record of what many women have done before, in countless stories: give themselves. Like them I wait in the dark, where time is no more than the point of a needle, and when time is over, so is suffering.[29] Therefore, we will lament no more[30]