Pilgrims & The Forces of Gravity

Conspire. Verb. From late Middle English: from Old French conspirer, from Latin conspirare ‘agree, plot’, from con- ‘together with’ + spirare ‘breathe’.

To conspire is to breathe together.

Now and again, time and space and people will conspire to become a poem.

For the last sixteen or seventeen years, I’ve had recurring dreams. They’re travel dreams, where I explore places beyond where I’ve been. All of them are set in and around this little city and the surrounding county where I did my graduate work.

One dream I had for a while had me walking from the hundred year old farmhouse where my wife and I lived right next to a river. In the dream, I found myself climbing the foothills “out back” and stumbling upon little hamlets and villages beyond. My mind filled in the details.

Another dream has me taking a specific road out of town. The road meanders beside a rippling creek before ascending up a mountain. There’s always a little stop midway up the mountain. Sometimes it’s a gas station, sometimes a brewery. No matter who is with me in the dream — sometimes it’s just me — we always stop there.

There are a few other dreams like these I’ve had over the years, all with the same kind of DNA. Mysterious roads. Unexplored territory. Strange enough lands. New adventures.

Perhaps it is important to say at this point that none of the places I visit in my dreams exist in the waking world. I know because I’ve made it a point on my last few visits back to this Shangri La to go to the places where my dreams start and to drive on the roads or walk the paths laid out in my dreams. And in the light of day, none of those places are there. What I’ve experienced instead is not exactly disappointment. Yesterday, for example, I found myself on backroads I’d never been down, following the bubbly, cresting hills of the Blue Ridge. It is Spring there. It had rained and was still spitting mist. Everything was as green as it gets, like an endless quilt of little farms and mill towns in every direction. I say I’ve never been down some of the roads, which is true, but I did pass one I used to live on: Cattleman Road. My last name is German for something like “cattle crossing.” I take this as a great conspiratorial mystery of my ancestors that I am here in this place.

This is strange in some sense. You live for years in a place like I did in graduate school and you think you’d take the time to notice where you are. I did not. My head was in books. And like a lot of theatre people, I spent all my days locked in a room, building imaginary worlds instead of enjoying the real one. There were good reasons for this at the time. But my dreaming mind tells me where the magic happened: out on the land, down those winding roads that pull me sometimes nightly back to them. My dreams make me a kind of pilgrim to those places, even if some versions of them are imagined or invented.

I took up the pilgrimage this weekend in memory of my friend, Bob, who died last week. We met there many years ago as Shakespeare students. Like many of our friends and colleagues, I found myself magnetically drawn to his sense of humor and his cunning insight into text. And he was a good actor. I think this drawing to oneself and to friendships is a kind of pilgrimage, too. People have a gravitational pull we are eager to notice and lucky to have when we encounter it.

My trip took me back to old haunts. Restaurants I like. Vistas across this gingerbread little city. On the fifth floor of a very distinctive building in the heart of downtown is an old, decommissioned Masonic Lodge. During my time in school there, our program rented out the lodge and that’s where we budding directors and actors rehearsed and sometimes performed our plays. We lived there. Classes. Rehearsals. Even parties. On the first floor of the enormous building is a Mexican restaurant and dive bar where we spent many a night talking shop, both then in grad school and in conferences every other year since. Center of the Shakespeare universe for us. My final project there was a play called The Two Noble Kinsmen, and it’s thought to have been co-written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Bob was in it. He played Theseus, the Duke of Athens. This is not a digression.

Among my strongest memories of Bob, who was sometime a fragile man in body though stout of heart, was when he did something rather innocuous in rehearsal and hurt his foot or leg. I can’t remember which. He was clearly uncomfortable, but elected to continue rehearsing from a seated position. Time did not heal all wounds and a couple of the cast members and I took him to the emergency room later that night and we waited for an x-ray and diagnosis. It was broken. Bob would continue playing Theseus. In a boot. With a cane. Sometimes the walking was too much and so we had to get clever a time or two. The Two Noble Kinsmen features a dance sequence with a baboon. Our friend, Brett, who wore the baboon suit each night, cheerfully picked Bob up as though he were the finest bride and carried him across the threshold of curtains and onto the stage. Such is the fortitude of theatre people. Brett himself had been hit by a utility van on his way to an earlier rehearsal. The lead in our play, Anna, had fallen down stairs in the Masonic building and severely sprained her ankle. Half the cast had some limping malady. And the show went on. Bob was an emblem of that: people go on. Stages. Pilgrimages. With their lives.

The Two Noble Kinsmen is based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, which is a collection of stories mostly about pilgrims making their way to Canterbury.

Imagine my surprise, all these years later, when I sit down for lunch and open a book as I’m waiting for chips and queso to arrive. The book is not about Bob. It is not about this place. It is assigned reading for the first course I’m taking in divinity school. It is about Love and God and Important Religious Things. But it is an unusual book because the first chapter is not really much about any of those things. Instead, what I find is a lengthy treatise on, wait for it, The Knight’s Tale. It’s all there: Arcita, Palamon, Emily, Theseus. The author has a point in doing this. It’s connected to Love, but also pre-Christian gods and their whims and a host of other things. I came to this place because it helps me remember things — to stitch memories back together. And the place, this time now, my little pilgrimage up here, the book — all of them, in a sense, open. Right at the same time, to mutual and cumulative effect. Time and space are conspiring and so am I.

I think this is what pilgrimages do. When we allow gravity to work — the gravity of home, of dreams, of friendships, of stories, of unexplored places and unexpected deaths — it will. We just have to fall into it. Or follow.

After lunch and more wandering, I found myself in an old Episcopal parish for a choral Evensong. The choir is traveling to Wells Cathedral in England this summer. More pilgrims.

This morning, I attended a Eucharist at another parish in a nearby town where my friend, Tom, is now the Priest-in-Charge. Years ago, Tom was my assistant director on a production of The Tempest we did with a cast of all young women. Nicole, Tom’s better half, was in the Shakespeare program with me and played many a role in other productions I directed. Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, for one. Tom’s sermon today was on friendship. I’m asking him for a copy. “I hope you have friends — one, a few, or many,” he began. And then he offered a wonderful, rich meditation on how people share their lives. And how, blessedly, they are still with us even when they are not here. Tom, this friend, immediately and unknowingly brought tears to my eyes with the opening phrases of his sermon. He did not know this weekend was about friendship. I’m not sure if he knew about Bob — or even knew of him those years ago. But it is no matter. He is part of the conspiracy, too. When we yield — willingly, openly, heartfully — to the conversation had among the Universe and its many pilgrims, we become part of the conspiracy. Like planets and bodies pulled into each other’s gravity for a time and then released, like visiting comets or shooting stars. Or like little pageants faded. Or songs. Or too short lives and empty seats in bars. Or dreams and people that stretch us beyond our present reality just a bit.

Death may be like driving down the roads you’ve never been down to places we’ve only imagined. In that sense, we’re all on the pilgrim trail. Godspeed.