Eternity's Sunrise

A Way of Keeping a Diary

Marion Milner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135717551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoanalisi

Following on from A Life of One's Own and An Experiment in Leisure, Eternity's Sunrise explores Marion Milner's way of keeping a diary. Recording small private moments, she builds up a store of 'bead memories.' A carved duck, a sprig of asphodel, moments captured in her travels in Greece, Kashmir and Israel, circus clowns, a painting - each makes up a 'bead' that has a warmth or glow which comes in response to asking the simple question: What is the most important thing that happened yesterday?

From these beads – sacred, horrific, profane, funny – grows a sense of an 'answering activity', the result of turning one's attention inwards to experience real joy. What Marion Milner conveys so vividly and inspirationally is her lifelong intention to live as completely as possible in the moment.

With a new introduction by Hugh Haughton, Eternity's Sunrise will be essential reading for all those interested in reflecting on the nature of their own happiness – whether readers from a literary, an artistic, a historical, an educational or a psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic background.

PART ONE

Diary keeping on holidays

1

A first visit to Greece

I did not keep a written diary during the trip – there had hardly been time for that – but, on the way home, I left the cruise at Venice to spend five days by myself and then tried to write a chronological account of each day's most important experiences. I found, however, that the memories, when so written about, went flat even though I had a continuing sense that there was something beckoning me on to explore them. When I got home, having stopped trying to find words for a chronological account, the sense of being beckoned on to some crucial discovery returned.

In the dark background of my thought, like a fitfully lit cave, there were gleams as if from a not entirely buried confusion of treasure. And then something happened. When I let go of the attempt to find words to describe those events which had seemed the most important, and simply faced the dark confusion, just sat and stared into this cave of memory, I began to notice my thoughts coming back again and again to certain objects, those trophies and keepsakes that one brings back from holidays. As I watched what had seemed like a tangled mass of fragmented images, held it in the cooking-pot of my attention, some dimly sensed connecting links appeared to be forming themselves around the ideas of these objects. It therefore seemed that a good way to begin would be to reflect upon the trophies in detail:

This imitation reliquary, I bought it at Mykonos, – it's so crudely carved and with four Turkish coins dangling on the corners – obviously a modern imitation, it's made of cheap metal and the box doesn't open, but it's carved in a still living tradition, not mass-produced surely, for each one in the shop was different. The Crucifixion is on one side, on the other the Mother and Child, with the Dove swooping down upon them. Now I see that the carver had made the Mother and Child share the same halo; also the background to the Mother standing upright with the child in her arms is the cross? In fact the arms of the cross seem to come out from the shoulders of the Virgin, almost as if they were wings, as if she herself were winged.

Now this life-sized model of a wild duck (it's a teal, I think) made for a decoy, how I bought it on that island in the Venice lagoon, Torcello. It's so skilfully modelled and painted, if I put it on the grass here I find myself treading softly so as not to frighten it away.

And here is the bit of asphodel I picked from the oracle's shrine at Delphi and pressed it. The ‘flower of death’ so they say.

And now this sloughed-off skin of a snake that I found amongst the ruins on the island of Delos; birthplace of Apollo, they said, so no one else was allowed to be born there or die. But the owner of this small skin got itself born there and it was here that it shuffled out of its old skin when it grew too tight. It has shed even the skin of its eyes, here they are, tiny clear panes of skin – this weightless discarded relic that I hold in my hand, latticed like a dragonfly's wing with a dark zig-zag down its back – of course, it's an adder, I hadn't thought of that…

This seemed a promising beginning; for although I did not yet know what these trophies might signify, the writing about them had not taken away their feeling of significance: if anything it had increased it. So now I thought, if this method worked with the trophies, might it not also work with the actual experiences of the tour? Might it not be that I must disregard chronology and simply stare into the cave of memory and just wait? When I tried this it did work; memories began to crystallise out with a gentle incandescence; only at first they were not of the famous buildings and places we had gone to see, the public experiences, the shared sights, but small private moments that came nuzzling into my thoughts and asking for attention. Here are the first ones that emerged:

That morning at the port of Epidaurus, waiting on board the anchored liner for the small boats to come and take us ashore … after looking out at the flatness of the oyster-coloured sea and bright stillness of the morning mist, how I found myself staring down the smooth hull of the ship, watching a jelly-fish, its rhythmic pulsing in the water far below.

Crossing the narrow plank from the caique that had brought us to the shore, onto the slippery rocks of the Gallipoli beaches, watching a Greek sailor, dark curly-haired film star face, picking spiny black sea urchins out of the shallows – to eat, they said. And all those young men, from the 1914–18 war, buried up there on the hill.

Suddenly coming upon a flock of wading birds, on Delos, how they were standing all together in a gleaming pool left by the rain, in the very centre of the sanctuary of Apollo, and all looking the same way … How they took flight and wheeled up in a great curve over the island as I came near. So unexpected, so alive, amongst the deadness of the ruins, as if I had surprised a god.

So far so good; but what about the official high spots of the tour, the famous places we had all set out to see? Having at least recognised the existence of these small private moments I could say to them: ‘All right, I know you are there but you will have to wait, I've got a lot more to learn before I know what you are trying to say.’ So now I could attend to the task of noticing what came into my mind about the public moments, the seeing of the places listed in the travel brochure.

The first site which seemed to be asking to be considered, though not the first one we had visited, was Mycenae; and when I tried to write down, as honestly as I could, what I had felt there, it gradually became clear to me that there was a problem to be faced about history.

All of us spilled out of our buses and littered over the slope of the hill outside the fortress. We'd just come from Epidaurus and were to eat our package lunch before going in. There's some intruding thought here, what is it? Oh, the Feeding of the Five Thousand. What nonsense, why think of that? But I do. And, looking up at the fierce simplicity of the Lion Gate just above us, a feeling hard to give shape to, perhaps ominous, no, momentous; if one goes through the gate, will one be different when one returns? What about Agamemnon, returning with his men from the sack of Troy and riding in triumph under this arch?

And now we also trooped up between the walls of Cyclopean stones, clutching our field glasses and cameras, and remembering how we had been told on the ship that there was some newly discovered connection between Mycenae and Stonehenge … then, clambering over the ruins inside the fortress, trying rather weakly, with the help of a little map they gave us, to identify the walls of what had once been the palace rooms … how bewildering it was, all of us doing the same, two hundred of us, wandering with our little maps, like dazed ants – except that there were many who did not seem as dazed as I was, only very busy and knowledgeable.

I could almost hate the so carefully drawn little maps, they made me somehow at a loss, as well as serving to pinpoint how little I knew about history. Certainly I knew far too little to begin to try and reconstruct the lives of all those who built this arrogant fortress so long ago. Just as at the Epidaurus theatre that very morning I had tried to grasp this tantalising past, to picture it, summon up the ghosts of the people who made the theatre, the workmen (were they slaves?) who sweated over it, joked, cursed, had families and the many thousand people who had sat on these stone seats (with cushions, as we had at the bullfight in Spain?) seen Oedipus Rex, argued about it at the end as they trooped out. But I had found then that if I did manage to reconstruct the past, vividly, I lost the present. I had been in danger of losing touch with my own particular group of tourists and missing my place in one of the flock of buses that was to take us up to Mycenae. In the end I had taken refuge in the present, the flowers, the sound of the cuckoo, the feel of sun-hot stone and a deep content in the shape of space made by the theatre. So now at Mycenae, where the past to be reconstructed was so much more remote, I began by clinging to the thought of Agamemnon, for at least I knew his story, and to the idea that I was seeing his palace. But then hearing one of the experts say: ‘There's no evidence whatever that it was Agamemnon's’. Perhaps the expert was not even talking about the palace – but I thought he was, and was angry, my sole bit of familiarity being snatched away – so I had wandered on, a bit forlornly, somehow unwilling to join with groups I knew, vaguely looking for something that was not on the maps, and watching an American woman hurrying about in circles, map in hand, her head down like a dog who has lost the scent and crying: ‘Oh, last time I could locate it and now I can't!’ But then, finding I was back near the Lion Gate, suddenly seeing a bird on top of it, a thick-set, bold, bad-looking bird, such a bundle of live unexpectedness that I was shot back into the present. So, putting away my map, I had sat down on the warm stone amongst the flowers and sweet-smelling herbs, hearing the sound of rushing water from the gorge below and the faraway singing of a bird, the sounds all emphasising the depth and height, the toweringness of the fortress and the space of the vast plain below stretching away to the sea; and I had thought, ‘No, I can't reconstruct the past, it's the present I'm concerned with, the goings on in the present of this same force that created these things, the Olympian Apollo, the story of Oedipus, the shape of the Epidaurus theatre.’ Somehow the very intensity of the bird's being, as he lorded it on top of the Lion Gate, compared with mine, bewildered by history, had shocked me out of the power of history's lure.

On looking back at this memory of Mycenae it almost seemed that, just as I had to abandon the attempt to remember in chronological order when writing about this holiday, so also I had to abandon something else in the experiencing of it, abandon all effort to be intelligent, in the ordinary sense of the word, about what I was seeing. It was in this connection that the next memory came nosing at my door. It was the image of what happened at dawn on this very day of visiting Mycenae:

Being woken in the night by the silence of the ship's engines having stopped, vaguely imagining they had broken down and we were adrift in open sea – but it didn't seem to matter so I had gone to sleep again. Waking once more, this time to the gentle movement of the ship, looking out through the porthole to see it had grown dimly light – and there, instead of an expanse of sea, nothing but the smooth surface of rock, gliding by, so close it seemed I could have stretched out my hand and touched it. Then, silently climbing down from my berth, leaving the others sleeping in the cabin, going up and out onto the top deck, all alone, the cold sting of morning air in my face and smelling the wet wood of the deck (it had rained in the night). Seeing that the ship was gliding between two great dim walls of rock that loomed up on either side, up to the narrow strip of brightening sky far above me … And from the rock-face constant flutterings and soft screaming calls. Looking closer I had seen there were birds on all the ledges of the rock (they looked like small kestrels). And as the light grew, the face of the rock becoming golden sand coloured … But how cold it was, so I'd gone back to my cabin and the sleepers, yet carefully holding the memory, like a wild bird's egg in the palm of my hand … And, how, when I woke again we had come through the Corinth Canal and I was in a new sea – the Aegean.

Our next port had been Piraeus and our next site the Acropolis. Here again I had to abandon an idea of myself, not only the idea of being an intelligent identifier of ruins, but now also of being a sensitive appreciator of architecture; for, in front of the Parthenon I had not been transported, I had not been able to make anything more than an intellectual contact with what was there, I could see that it was a great wonder of the world but could not respond to it in my bones. In fact, the only real impact of feeling had been with the smooth, worn marble of the steps, so springy under my feet as we climbed up to the great entrance to the Acropolis. And the same with the monastery church at Daphni, which we had gone to see in the afternoon, there had been no uplifting of spirit as I had gaped up at the famous mosaic of Christ Pantocrator. It had just seemed to me rather threatening. I had tried to comfort myself for this fact that neither the Parthenon nor the Daphni mosaic had spoken to me, though they seemed to speak to others. I had said to myself that perhaps it was enough to have seen Olympia, Mycenae, Epidaurus and to have come through the Corinth Canal, all in one and a half days; or perhaps it was because of the totally unfamiliar experience (since the days of my boarding school) of doing everything in a crowd; whatever it was, I felt sad, for I had no notion then that I would ever be able to come to Greece again, and not in a crowd, and that then they would speak.

What in fact had remained, as the high point of this day's sight-seeing, was a kind of inner tapestry of shining gold mixed with grey, infinitely subtle variations of a grey pebble colour, a grey that seemed the perfect companion for gold; and against this background of gold and grey the intricate shapes of bracelets, cups, necklaces, daggers, masks, helmets, brooches – in fact, the treasure from Mycenae shown in the National Museum at Athens.

The next memory which called for attention was the first view of Asia, seen from the island of Chios. By now, having come to suspect that moments of solitude were essential, if only to digest what had been seen, I had not gone with the others to the monastery, Nea Moni, but strolled along the quayside to where the fishing boats were beached. I wanted to draw them; but it had grown cold so I wandered back and found a friend sitting alone in a café. What should we do? We were cold and surfeited with sights. Perhaps it would have been better to have gone with the others? In the end we acquired a taxi to show us some of the island.

Driving up a hill, through olive groves (knowing no Greek we could not ask where we were going), coming out from the trees to see the hill was crowned with a high white wall. How our driver led us to a door in the wall, and knocked, saying something in Greek about the Turks. And then a grubby looking old priest opening the door and showing us silently into a white-walled courtyard with a whitewashed church on one side of it. Being led round workshops where nuns were working, not speaking at all, just working in silence, some weaving, some painting, copying bad religious pictures or putting bright paint on hens’ eggs for Easter …

Then our guide leading us into the chapel and showing a glass-fronted cupboard, like a bookcase – but all the shelves stacked with human bones – bones of the nuns massacred by the Turks, he told us. How he then led us right across the courtyard, opening the far gate in the wall, which we passed through and which was shut behind us. Then all three of us standing there, gazing down the steep slope of the hillside to where, far below, was the sea beach, the unheard waves making a white scalloped border to the blue. And there, beyond a wide stretch of sea, misty forms of land. ‘Turkey,’ said our driver. But, in front and to the left, mountains, the mountain hinterlands of Chios. A lovely view, yes. But the momentous thing about it – silence. Standing quite still, flooded over with it, enveloped in it, permeated by it, taking great gulps of it, soaking it into one's very bones and marrow. So the three of us had stood, our driver as still as we were, the steady activity going on behind us in the workshops of the convent, the dead bones of the massacre, the ship down there in front of us waiting to take us on to Troy and Istanbul, all forgotten. Only these great gulps of a drink of the gods – silence. Then – after how long I have no idea, for time had stopped – from round the seaward corner of the convent wall, a mother goat appearing with her three kids; and the kids skipping, skipping as though some vital current flowed through the contact of their hooves with the rock of the hillside, making them so full of itself that they could do nothing else but leap – and break the contact. We laughed. The silence was over, though not broken. I felt it was still there, an ever-present background to the noises. So we had returned to our taxi, skirting the convent wall, a half-heard nightingale singing in the valley below us.

Next, out of the silence of Chios, there emerged a whole series of memories, all of them leading up to the great moment of entering St Sophia, Hagia Sophia.

Waking to a sea of sound, an enormous, non-stop clamour of men shouting at each other and when I peered out of the porthole seeing that it all came from an uncountable tangle of little fishing boats, massed together on the water. I had no idea what it was about, but when I looked beyond, I found myself gazing straight at a calm misty horizon of domes and minarets – Constantinople. So here we were, docked in the Bosphorus.

How we'd gone ashore and been driven round outside the great walls of the city that was Byzantium, stared at the Golden Gate through which the Byzantine emperors rode in state, gazed at the long vista of towers on those huge walls, walls which had so long held back the invading barbarians – and then, glancing down, how I'd noticed the neatly tended dark earth plots in the great ditch where the moat was, now showing fresh green shoots in tidy rows, instead of being full of the corpses of the vanquished barbarians.

Then, inside the walls, before the shut doors of the Kariye mosque, when waiting to see the eleventh-century mosaic (the high point of the trip for the Byzantine experts among us), how I'd suddenly become aware of, perched amongst the bare black branches of a tree by the mosque door, a rose-coloured dove, round and fluffy and being itself so intensely and satisfactorily; but then hearing a flutter and swoop of powerful wings behind me, I'd turned and seen there were large dark birds, chicken hawks, someone said, alighting on the house across the bare earth of the square and for a moment I felt a pang of alarm for the dove. But then, inside the mosque, we saw the mosaics, of such delicacy and tenderness, and one, of the Virgin's death, her soul shown as a winged infant leaving her body and being received into her Son's arms.

And so, at last, Hagia Sophia. Crowding in, as usual, but this time into an immense, dim, enclosed miracle of space. And there it was, the dome – a floating completeness, an all-embracing presence, a space, yes, but not just a space, perhaps a quintessence of all space, made more intense, more real by the flight of a pigeon across it, a tiny, moving speck, the time the pigeon took to fly making the reality of the space more graspable. Incredible that this floating wonder is made of stone, it hangs there, just being complete in itself, not going anywhere, not pointing to anything, not aspiring to the heights like a Gothic cathedral, not directed towards a special holiness like the altar in a Western church.

After this came the memory of our visit to Delphi, our last day on Greek soil. I remembered telling myself the marvel of being on the very spot that was for so long the centre of the living myth of the ancient world, a place created out of people's longing for guidance in the crises of their lives, a place where they actively acknowledged their ignorance and the fact that they had gone as far as their reasoning would take them, a place where, after long journeyings, they sought a power beyond the limits of their common sense, looked for a wisdom that seemed to come out of the confused utterings of the trance-like state of a woman in the darkness. But the image which held all this for me, in memory, was not the ruined temple of Apollo, nor the steps of the Sacred Way leading up to it, but the soaring eagles (or whatever they were) in the immense space of the valley below the shrine, a space contained by the brooding, enveloping, ever-silent presence of the mountains. And what I had brought away with me in my hand was the bit of asphodel picked in the sanctuary.

Here I remembered too how, after seeing Mycenae and the remains of a temple, I asked one of the professors whether anything was known about what gods were worshipped there, and was told some sort of mother goddess, Earth Mother. Later, steaming homewards up the Adriatic, I asked whether there were any statues from ancient Greece of a mother goddess with her baby. The professor said he knew of none. Certainly I had not seen any, only older children being carried, and by gods, not goddesses, like the famous Hermes at Olympia carrying the young Dionysus and the more archaic terracotta of Zeus carrying the boy Ganymede.

And then came Venice. As I have said, I had arranged to leave the tour and stay on for five days by myself to see Venice again, with a shadowy idea that there was something special I was looking for. Vaguely, it seemed to do with not having been able, on a previous visit, to feel that this huge, intricate, sprawling mass of brick and stone, of enclosed spaces made for people to l...