LAND’S END. BLOG’S END.

By the Atlantic Ocean, well into spring.

From the town of Fisterra, there’s one more tiny stage to complete: a walk to the lighthouse at the tip of the cape.

Here it is. It’s a lighthouse, but with tourist and dining facilities. One can’t walk further than this.

Last marker.

Last cross.

On the way back to town, an exquisite turquoise cove, Nearby, a last Romanesque church, Our Lady of the Sands, twelfth century.

***

Just briefly, a word on the unavoidable Camino topic, dodged to this point.

You experience the supernatural or you don’t. If you do, you may have ways of connecting with the supernatural which are more suited to the educated, modern individual, ways abstracted from physical and sensual forms, from the material clutter of tradition.

Others, however, have approached that same realm exclusively through story, picture and characters – through the material clutter of tradition!

A word about that. I’ll try to sound dispassionate, anthropological.

Several human characters appear repeatedly, pictured and storied along the thousand miles of Camino from Le Puy in central France to this last tip of land in Spain.

One character, called Roch, is connected with physical and mental well-being, potential energy: in short, with a healthful stasis.

Another is called James, and embodies decision, active resolution and the sane expense of energy. A healthful kinesis, maybe.

Another character might be akin to Goethe’s Eternal Feminine. This personage, portrayed more than any other in wood, stone and paint along the Way, represents an unlikely cosmos-bending force: simple human emotion, but purged of all defective passion.

The suppliant talks with these figured characters as human to human.

Sounds like nice old tripe.

Yet what’s that pull we feel, before we start the Camino de Santiago? Even the supremely clever Goethe, though never a Christian or a grimy pilgrim, peeped through the apparent and rational, felt a similar pull. Seems right to quote the last verses of Faust here, because they are journey-related, because I had to end with something, and because we are living in the age of Goethe: that peculiar age where faith has no place at all, but where faith is indispensable.

Sorry about the German, but it just doesn’t translate. Skip it if you don’t read German or don’t like Goethe. Don’t know how much sense I’m making, since I don’t do abstraction. Maybe the quote’s a facile and pretentious way to wind  things up – but, in its foggy way, it belongs. There’s no argument here: no Hitchens versus Berlinski. I’ve chosen the text because of the centrality of the man who wrote the text. Romanticism, a radically revised medieval spirit,  still is tangling with skepticism, rationalism, enlightenment, secularism – that’s still our big wrestle.

Goethe is saying we are indeed heading somewhere in eternity, but with few clues. Our science is wrong but not wasted, Faust’s old probing, do-gooding, blundering soul will not be flushed after all – but it’s the Eternal Feminine which is drawing us onward….

…I don’t do abstraction well, do I? In fact, I’m terrible at it.

Here’s a pic from inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Le Puy, where my journey started a thousand miles away to the east. Below is the quote.

Alles Vergängliche
ist nur ein Gleichnis;
das Unzulängliche,
hier wird’s Ereignis;
das Unbeschreibliche,
hier ist es getan;
das Ewigweibliche
zieht uns hinan.

***

Last evening as a pilgrim. Well, for now.

I’d clambered down to the town beach and found a suitable little shell, more a clam than a scallop, but ridged the right way.

Dinner was a plate of gambas, in one of the numerous fish eateries.

After dinner, a stroll.

A tiny girl skips down a flight of steps, surprises me.

¡Hola!

I’m not señor. After France, the lack of formal address is still odd. Going with the Galician familiarity toward kids, I answer:

¡Hola, guapa!

Further along, a little boy is sitting on the step of his house. He looks up at me with that macho composure so essential to Spanish males.

¡Hola!

¡Hola! A flat answer from me, respecting his attempt at male brusqueness.

He seems happy with his tone and mine.

¿Qué tal?

I tell him I’m good, ask if he has a tip for the upcoming Madrid-Barcelona clash. And does he like Messi or Ronaldo? (I know the answer: Spanish boys want to play like Messi but they want to be Ronaldo.)

I pass on.

The frequent bars and eateries are pretty full, even at this quiet time of year. Full of brusque Spanish men, of Spanish women with a surface of tart-and-tomboy in this male tilted society, and more of those forward, rompy Spanish kids.

And I know I’m soon going to miss something.

I’ve grown accustomed to my hosts, and their ways. Maybe the scarcity of pilgrim company had a purpose. Something I haven’t come looking for has come looking for me.

While I was intent, in my dawdlish way, on a long, quasi-international line called the Camino de Santiago, the love of Spain and of its people has caught me from the side. Caught me good.

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