Michael Harding: 'Cork is friendly, more like a country town than a big city'
Walking is a wonderful thing. Author and playwright Michael Harding has always been a good walker. When in Warsaw writing books, he walked the city's snow-covered streets to clear his mind and work through ideas. Where he lives near Arigna, on the Leitrim/Roscommon border, he's surrounded by fantastic wilderness for trekking. He describes walking as like a chanting in the body.
'The human brain can think in duality. You're always thinking of two things. While listening to the radio, you'll be thinking of something else. The way meditation works is you find a mantra, candle or icon in the image of a Buddha. If you focus on that, you'll notice your brain's other side is like a river flowing with thoughts. If you keep at it, you get disengaged with those thoughts and you reach a calm state."
Harding says that, while walking, a similar thing happens. 'Your body takes the place of the icon or candle. The body gives you this repetitive rhythm that brings you into a calm trance. When you walk, you'll find a lot of thoughts flowing through your head. Gradually they die down. Then the interesting things in your mind surface. That's why writers like walking. Writers say if you've a problem with your writing, go out for an hour's walk and come back and it will be solved.'
The problem Harding had was what to do with his father. He died in 1976 when Harding was 22 years' old. He was a sensitive man, but reserved, traumatised by a childhood of poverty in which his mother died when he was an infant; his father drank; and his only sibling, a sister, died young from TB. He clawed his way into the middle classes by doing correspondence courses in accounting, but the shame of covering up so much devastation in his family never left him.
Part of Harding's dilemma was he never knew the warm, gregarious side of his father, who was a charmer in his younger days, but retreated into life's shadows in middle age, and the sanctuary of his drawing room, reading books, waited on by his wife, unknowable to his children. As a teenager – and later in his twenties in grief – Harding took to pubs to fill the void where 'every old man was,' as the poem says, 'my father'.
Harding, one of the great soul food writers, resolved to do the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage to try and connect with his father's ghost, which he writes about in his memoir, I Loved Him from the Day He Died.
'When I got to the Camino, I felt my father had followed me even though he was 50 years dead,' he says. 'I was able to go back over memories and realise I never understood him. He was a remote character. He died when I was young. There was a gap in my life, and ever since. I filled it sometimes with the company of more boisterous men, men older than me who were passionate and romantic and full of camaraderie, all of which was not in my father. He was aloof.
I Loved Him from the Day He Died: My Father, Forgiveness and a Final Pilgrimage, by Michael Harding.
'I was missing fatherhood, the experience of intimacy with him. I spent many hours in pubs with other men to substitute for that. I discovered on the Camino this idea of saying, 'I didn't understand him because he was too remote' was not as relevant as being able to say, 'I actually loved him' but it was an incomplete relationship.''
Harding's father wrote book reviews for the Irish Press newspaper, commissioned by David Marcus. There's a sense writing was where his heart lay, but those dreams were frustrated. Harding had a lightbulb moment in Cork – during three months he spent in the city in 1981 as a priest ministering at a nursing home in Montenotte – that writing should be his real vocation. He still thinks fondly of that summer.
'My abiding memory is cycling down the hill into the city on a summer's day. I remember it as gorgeous weather. I worked as a chaplain, but lived like a poet. I never really took the old institution seriously. I'd be cycling down the hill with a good shirt on, just being alive, having all these options of places to go like The Long Valley or Counihan's.
'There was another place called Café Lorca on Washington Street, across from an Augustine church. It was trendy. It was an old shop front and they turned it into a cool café. In the evenings, they served wine, lit candles, and played folk music. It was probably two people who'd lived in Spain who came back with some imaginative way to invent a Spanish café in Cork. It was lovely."
Harding was plenty good things to say about the southern city. 'Cork isn't modernist or alienated from itself. It's friendly, more like a country town than a big city. It's a sophisticated city of the empire – the architecture, the style, the commerce and merchants. The irony is I've lived in places like Fermanagh, where people argue about Northern Ireland being British, and Fermanagh is not a quarter as British a city as Cork, but you're not supposed to say that. Cork is uniquely Irish within the context of Britishness. There's something special about Cork.'
Michael Harding will read from
I Loved Him from the Day He Died, Thursday, May 1, at the Everyman in Cork. See: www.everymancork.com
Camino de Santiago
The Camino de Santiago is a pilgrim route dating back to the tenth century. It concludes at Galicia's Cathedral de Santiago de Compostela in Spain's northwest where, it's believed, the Apostle St. James' remains reside, but it has no singular starting point. Camino routes begin as far away as France and Portugal. The most popular jumping-off point is Sarria, 126km from Santiago, where Michael Harding began his pilgrimage. He allowed himself 10 days to reach the great bell.
Walkers on the Camino de Santiago, Galicia, Spain. Picture: iStock
Harding travelled lightly and dressed idiosyncratically. Inside his yellow backpack, he kept his passport; underwear and socks; a light anorak which he discovered wasn't rainproof; medication and vitamin supplements; and the top half of a double-breasted suit, bought for €15 in a charity shop. He wore the bottom half for the walk. He couldn't bear wearing short pants. The suit, brown like a monk's robe, was 85 percent wool, but silk-lined, which had a cooling effect on his legs. On his feet, he wore sandals.
'On a pilgrimage, you embody faith rather than think it,' says Harding. 'Every mile walked is a prayer. You're moving closer towards the sanctuary in Santiago. You talk to people and have the craic. Nobody's religious in an overtly nineteenth century way, but at the same time you're walking to mass.
'A journey transforms people. You get it in Greek philosophy, Buddhism, in Sufi stories. They're outside their natural environment, at a distance from their families, children or partners, from their work, home and vegetable plot. They're taking time out from life to do a pilgrimage. A mentor deity is at the end of it, whether it's Buddha or Jesus. They get closer to this Jesus moment every day they get up. It's a beautiful intensity. Through interaction with people of common mind they're changed.
'On the Camino; everybody's there for a reason. People will tell you, 'Well, my mother died last year, and I promised her I'd do the Camino.' 'I've a sick child and I thought I'd do the Camino.' You do something like that, and in some way, you find a resolution to your grief, your pain or your anxiety.'
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