Coming Down

There are many ways you can punish yourself to win the favour of God.

The Anchorites withdraw to caves and cells under churches and rock on their heels in the dark. On Mount Athos men gather, black robed and silver bearded, in a monastery that threatens to spill from the cliffs into the sea. Some prostrate, some flagellate, some raise limbs to the sky until they wither. We have each settled on our own tastes in abstinence and poverty. We are each keeping a secret book on who is suffering the most.

My method is that I stand on a pillar and stay very still. My pillar is about 15 feet tall, this is considered fairly average, modest, appropriate. I made a vow- I move only to eat and drink, the rest is stillness and silence. In this state the earth and heavens lurch away from me and then come crawling back. Shadows spill and shrink, darken and fade on the sand. Some days in the west, scalloped nimbus clouds unfold on the updrafts, drawn out thin as fish scales. Sometimes the clouds muster into thunderheads, great galloping forms, marble white at the crests, slate grey bellies gorged with rain. I do not move, I do not speak.

I’m not sure where we pillar dwellers sit in the scheme of things. The highest category of attainment in this racket is reserved for those people who die in astoundingly gruesome ways in service of the faith. This sort of thing is not my style but it's what everyone really wants to see- Saints who die in situations that read more like morbid craft projects than executions. Saint Bartholomew was flayed alive, then beheaded and crucified upside down in Armenia. In such cases, where there is disagreement over method, every executioner gets what he wants.

You’ll often get a story like that of Saint Lawrence, who stoically endured being roasted on a large iron griddle, quipping to the executioners, "Turn me over; I'm done on this side". These sorts of infuriating people are in every working guild and field of labour. Gluttons for punishment who set the bar so ludicrously high that the master (God in this case) gets warped expectations. Nobody afterwards ever works a day that's good enough. 

Then again, everyone who lives this kind of life treads a fine line. Go too far, or indeed not far enough, and you may be branded a coward, an attention seeker or a lunatic. The verdict on this is largely in the hands of the fly-blown loiterers who keep tabs on us. 

Those of us who achieve sainthood or sainthood adjacence invariably attract followers. I must act as though their presence is a pleasant surprise. They must act as though they are there to pay a solemn homage and that, by the mere sight of my example, they will become holier by association. Most of the time I carry off this pantomime. But all are surely aware of the fraught, creepy energy that underpins the business.

I don’t like my followers. It’s a relief to admit it. They travel long distances to me, often on foot, to pay homage, which is nice. But the long sweltering journey, shuffling across the plateau, leaves them worse for wear. They arrive thirst crazed with busted sandals, adoring, resentful and squinting at the view. I get people trying to trick me out of silence by hurling miscellaneous items and verbal abuse. Some people try to climb the pillar, often doing themselves injury. They hoist up offerings of food on a little rope and pulley- for these I am grateful but not yet so distant from the memory of my life before as to like this food or think it’s good. Very occasionally a woman will test her seductive powers on me, trying to coax me down, but these people are rarely attractive. I suspect my cohort of the faithful are, and will remain, viciously unhappy and disordered people.

Despite what they believe, I have never had ‘The Divine Vision’. It is not something you can seek out. By all accounts it spills out of the air like a breeze. All you can do is maintain the conditions, the celibacy, simplicity, scarcity and catch yourself whenever you start hoping.

One gets used to the gnawing hunger. The skin tans and tightens under the sun. The sharp pains dull to aches and go numb altogether as the body learns to become stone. In my experience, if you can get through the first few days you can ride out a year with relative ease. This is not the reason I'm giving up.

The vow of silence has also been fairly simple to uphold. I had developed a simple philosophy- God spoke in the beginning. Words gathered and poured from His cloud spun throat like embers. Words like "sky", "day" and "night". He spoke the words that set the heavens and earth in motion, He said "let there be stars in the vault of the sky". He said it all beautifully. He said enough. 

When I was a boy I saw a man's throat opened by a blade in an alleyway in Thessaloniki. Folds and passages, cords and tissues, spilling like an overfull pitcher of wine. It struck me then and still, how grotesque the mechanism is, how crude. What is a man's voice when compared with the voice of God? When I watched the man die it was a summer morning, the air was flyblown and already too hot. I was loitering about, just watching. This was my profession, even as a young man. That day, at dawn, down on the docks, an old man was staring out to the Aegean, playing the pipes of his askaulos, two reeds and a goat skin bag. It was a high, tortured sound, as though something of the goat's fear had survived in the skin. And forever the two sights, the two sounds, the throat carved open and the bagpipes, were tied together. The same panicked, illiterate bleating. Air squeezed from a bag. That was what could be said of the voices of men. Silence, then, was holy. This was the sort of thing I believed, before I wanted to come down.

There is a little girl who comes to see me. She is not like the others, she is quiet and cheeky. She comes in rags, dust caked with matted hair. She usually arrives just after dusk when everyone else is gone, ambling out of the blue distance with a candle. 

On the windy evenings she hunches over the flame, shielding it, a precious thing. When she reaches the foot of the pillar she looks up at me with a mischievous face. She slips from her shoulder a bag that is not there, reaches into its capacity of air and draws out a series of invisible items. She places them in the dish for offerings with much care and ceremony. She hoists them up to me and waits with an expectant smile. 

I take out each item, one by one. I hold them up to the moonlight and turn them over in my hand, like a silversmith. I nod, I smile down at her. I can tell, even from 15 feet away, that she is so very proud. 

When I have seen and held up all she has to give me, she stands up straight, very serious and bows to me. The joy I feel is so total I can hardly breathe. She blows out her candle and walks away. 

Ever since she started to visit me, I cannot stop worrying about the little girl. All the seething light of the steppe has dulled my vision, but I squint and strain to watch her for as long as I can, getting smaller and smaller and melting into the dark. I feel sure she is an orphan, she has that wild look. She goes off in the direction of some low hills in the west. I imagine her clawing the sand for water. Shivering at night. This world is hard on children. I often see, from the vantage of my pillar, what happens when young animals are separated from the pack.

One night I watch for the girl and her candle but she does not come. My heart, which usually strikes a slow and even rhythm is squirming and arrhythmic, my stone limbs start to quake. There are many ways you can punish yourself to win the favour of God. I don’t know where the line is drawn between the vain and the holy, but if the girl is out there dead I will be standing on the wrong side. 

She never speaks, perhaps she doesn’t know how. But I hear her speaking louder than any voice out of heaven, “Old man, come down out of your suffering, come down and save my life”. I bring my withered body to the pulley and tug to test the strength of the rope. I lash it around my arm and waist and climb down like some princess down a cord of tethered bedsheets. Halfway down the winch sags and snaps. I land down hard on my arse and roll around in the dust, winded, grunting and sucking in air. The girl slinks around the pillar and points and laughs. She laughs till she has run out of air and the laughing is silent and, buckling, she rolls about with me in the sand. She pretends to be me, landing like me, going bug eyed, making my noises. When I have my air back I laugh too and the sound burns in my throat. 

Over us hangs galaxías kyklos, like a slow drifting pillar of smoke and shattered light. Orion and Lyra, Pegasus and Andromeda. She takes from her bag all kinds of liniments and balms, bandages and poultices to heal me. She draws them from the air. She lays them on my skin.