The boy, the father, the lover and his sister
A former crusader named Frederick arrives at the Abbey of the Treasure of the Gods, with Marin, his young son. The two are accepted into monkhood. It is very soon noticed that Marin leaps into his new life with an unusual enthusiasm. He enjoys being a monk, but in an inappropriate way – with eyes open wide, with energy and appetite, with joy.
Sometime after their arrival, Marin is chosen to carry the statue of the Madonna down to the village. He gets a lot of attention from girls his age. Soon after this event, an unmarried bar girl is found pregnant, refuses to name the father, and is dumped in a cowshed, where she lives through most of her pregnancy. Freezing, starving, beaten and in pain, she lets out the name of the father – Brother Marin.
Marin is promptly thrown out of the monastery, while his father, deeply ill, slowly sleeps his way to death. Marin is sent to a swineherd’s hut, to live, barefoot, to eat and sleep like pigs, in the dirt. Marin, living on scraps, foraging for nuts and berries and drinking from streams, slowly recovers from grief at the loss of his father. He is eventually heard to sing, occasionally. He lives rather more like birds and squirrels than like pigs. He also looks a little too healthy for his living conditions.
Image: Priyadarshini John
When the bar girl’s baby is born, she is given away after just three months, back to the Abbey from which at least one part of her had come. The Abbott decides to add her to Marin’s punishment, and she is given to him as an added burden. Because Marin doesn’t look like he’s suffering at all, lately. He has been observed picking wild flowers and capering about the place.
Marin names the baby Marietta, makes her makeshift nappies and washes her in the stream. He feeds her milk he collects from mountain goats and a surprisingly healthy mash of berries, nuts and honeycomb. He talks to her and sings to her. He tells her her father’s name: Frederick.
But when the next ‘showing of the Madonna’ comes around, he cannot resist. He must go to see it, and he must take the baby girl with him. And when her grandparents see her, they snatch her back, because who could resist such a beautiful baby?
And Marin, it is decided, will be given a reprieve from his punishment, and accepted back to the Abbey, where his new job will be shovelling shit out of the privies.
But Marin, by this time, has lost too much. Count his losses:
- His father
- His joy in being a monk
- His wild life in the hut, the flowers he used to collect
- His baby sister, who broke his isolation
- The Madonna who had gifted him a unique opening of the heart, and then watched it close, without saying a word
So, covered in shit, lost in the derangement of isolated labour, far from the human capacity for tolerance, Marin dies, a few months later.
But when they come to collect his body, they smell, not shit, but flowers. Roses, lilies, blackthorn, in the heart of winter. Undressing the body, they find that Marin is in fact Marina, disguised by her father as a boy to be brought to the monastery, a secret revealed too late, too late.
The longer the monks gazed at Marina, the more the room filled with sweetness.
Impossible Saints
I found the story of Marin in Michelle Roberts’ Impossible Saints. All these little stories of improbable (but truly not impossible) saints are entwined around a larger story of St Josephine, loosely, it says on the leaf, inspired by the writings of St Teresa.
Roberts’ little stories are not mythologies or pamphlets. They are not even chronicles. They are fairy tales, wildly leaping from the real to the unreal, as and when she chooses. Like all stories of sainthood, they follow a pattern of isolated rebellion. Lives trapped like moths somewhere between beauty, divinity and darkness. Unarmed, unharming rebellions. There is a rule of law, a rule of doctrine, a rule of societal expectation. Like fairy tales, they are not bound to follow those rules.
Image: Priyadarshini John
In the story of St Marin, there is a sublimely non-violent breaking of every rule to arrive at a place that is not completely human.
There are many horrifying deaths in this book, and I cover them with the scent of Marin’s flowers. Those were times of mostly tragic rebellions – successful in their attempt at escape, but unable to evade the crushing relentlessness of people’s imaginative capacity for violence.
When I first read this book, I did not completely understand the significance of St Josephine’s life and her central place in the narrative. It was a tree that I didn’t look at too closely.
Now I understand it a little better. Josephine’s life, unlike the fairy tales, is rich, subtle, deeply interactive, built out of fulfilled and unfulfilled dreams and relationships, passionately intimate and introspective, in her time as a nun, her time not being a nun, her time of twilight. She dies, not of people or person, but of cancer. It is one of the most complex forms of rebellion – to live a complete, passionate and creative life, and to stay alive, in a time when everything stands against a part of you or all of you.
The smell of flowers
I found this book at a time when I was haunting libraries. When I opened it, I caught this smell of ageing roses, and it stayed through every page. And when I read about the smell of flowers, I became both bewildered and befuddled – I wondered whether I was hallucinating the smell. Like the stories, it was both disturbing and intoxicating. Just a few months later I found it in a pile of books that were being retired from library duty, put on sale. Of course, the sensible thing to do would be to buy it. I didn’t.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Instead, I told myself that it would come to me later. It didn’t. For years and years, the stories came back to me but the book didn’t. I did a lot of asking hopelessly in bookstories. It is possibly not in print anymore. But a friend found it for me, almost twenty years after I had first read it.
There is no smell of old roses in this copy, so it was not a hallucination. I had just gotten lucky that first time, and who knows what had made that book so special.
But I found it harder to read, harder to bear, because when I get older my ability to accommodate suffering and violence shrinks, mysteriously. I keep grasping at straws and holding onto them like they’re anchors, ropes, lifelines tossed out into the ocean on a very stormy night.
Counting the blessings
I counted Marin’s story as a redemptive one. It is a punishing story, but there were two anchoring ropes that I held onto:
- Marin was blessed with an unusual capacity for love and an open heart, so as long as there was something beautiful left in the world, he could not be punished.
- I believe that if you live in disguise long enough, you become two people – the disguise and the disguised. Marin had a hidden person, Marina, who completely unknown, was therefore unpunished.
I treated the revelation of Marina as a triumph. I told myself that Marina could not die because her life was unknown, invisible, secret.
To be punished without ever having committed a crime is one of the most common narratives in the world. Every day, a new way can be found to make vulnerability a crime. Marin’s wide-open gaze was the most vulnerable thing in the monastery, and sure enough, when the shit started to fall, it would land on him.
And yet, his rebellion was even more inevitable, because he was not making a conscious resistance, he was simply someone who could not be punished.
As for Marina, she didn’t have to interact at all, she could stay among the flowers and the birds and the bees and the mountain goats. She retained their essence, for both of them.
The monk and the yogi
When I was in yoga teacher training, when we were studying Pattanjali’s sutras, we were told, repeatedly, that we were not yogis. I found this deeply redundant, because I had never called myself a yogi or wanted to be a yogi. A yogi, for me, is a kind of monk. I thought there were two ways to do yoga:
- The practice is a part of your life. You use it to stay alive, to integrate, to participate and to take pleasure in living.
- The practice becomes your life. You give everything to it, and you give up everything else.
The second, for me, is monkhood, a divergent path, not mine, not mine.
But Pattanjali had made only three, very tiny and humble sutras about asana, which formed the bulk of my practice. The first is so calming that it must be said out loud – sthirasukhamasanam – a pose of steadiness and ease. Steadiness and ease. How could you not be invested in a life that offers you access to steadiness and ease?
The next sutra goes on to say that at some point, effort ceases, and the infinite becomes visible (duck-egg blue is its colour, says Death, in Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music).
The third sutra concludes that when you find this place, you achieve a point of balance, which is also a freedom from suffering. Somewhere between hot and cold, light and dark, they explain.
It was not in an enlightened pose like a lotus, but in a gruelling everyday lunge that I first encountered a flash of understanding. One day, I found myself not making any effort in the lunge at all. I was perfectly poised between my front leg and back leg and they were working on their own to keep me there and there was no pain, no strain.
This has always stayed a flash, always been physical, but I did gain a very rudimentary understanding of why someone would want to be a yogi. To capture the moment and keep it going, forever. But moments are enough, also.
Somewhere between hot and cold, light and dark, pain and pleasure. Somewhere between Marin and Marina, was a thing that could not be held captive, and could not be punished.
There are a million ways to rebel
Maybe vulnerability will always be a crime. Maybe there will always be someone or more likely an entire society, hierarchy, group or state to punish you for it. Fairy tales are personal narratives, tiny stories of survival. Michelle Roberts’ stories are fairy tales but unusual in that they’re stories of death. Because, finally, sainthood is only achieved after death. They’re dark lessons in what could happen, what worse thing could happen, and what happens after the worst has happened.
But, like fairy tales, they also offer unique lessons in rebellion – specifically personal rebellion. You could:
- Change form, become an animal and disappear into the woods
- Be excited by birds, collect flowers and sing, in your outcast state
- Live your life in a whisper
- Live out, both parts of your dual nature, make a creative enterprise out of living itself
The life and times of isolation
In the past couple of years, isolation has been the most aggressively touted and marketed system of living in the world, and for many people, it will be an impenetrable fortress. The greater the isolation, the more intense the vulnerability, which, as we keep remembering, is the must punishable thing in the world.
It is somewhere around the same time that I found Impossible Saints, and it is a useful reminder in the Isolation Times that rebellion is not such a big word, not at all, it does not need masses or a million voices or even placards.
It can be like this – living on the edge of a pine grove, collecting flowers, foraging for nuts and berries, loving something or someone that is even more vulnerable than you. Or catching a glimpse of something which may or may not be duck-egg blue in colour. Or just spotting a blue duck’s egg.
