Nick Ripatrazone reflects on a tender and attentive book of illuminating poetry documenting the journey to Santiago de Compostela
Nick Maione, an American poet and Byzantine iconographer, has released a new book with Angelico Press – a New York City-based Catholic publisher – titled Infinite Arrivals. The collection is a mixture of lineated and prose poems that document Maione’s journey along the Camino de Santiago. Maione’s book enters a rich tradition; a literary precedent worth contemplating.
The Camino has compelled pilgrims and attracted seekers for centuries. The route, culminating in the Galicia region of Spain at the Basilica of Santiago de Compostela, has also inspired poets and writers.
A poem written in praise of a hospital at Roncesvalles, along the Camino, includes a famous stanza: “Porta patet omnibus, infirmis et sanis, / Non solum catholicis verum et paganis / Judeis, hereticis, ociosis, vanis, / Et, ut dicam breviter, bonis et profanis.” The poem affirms that the hospital welcomes all, “infirm and healthy,” both Catholics and unbelievers: “both good and profane”.
Dated to the early 13th century, the provenance of the poem is unclear. Early editors attributed the work to Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the bishop of Toledo, who possibly spent time at the hospital in 1210, although later curators have doubted his authorship. Regardless of its creator, the poem captures the paradoxically universal and particular nature of the Camino.
Much later, the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski wrote of Santiago de Com- postela. Clare Cavanagh’s translation is inviting: “Light drizzle as if the Atlantic / were examining its con-science,” the poem begins. “Santiago,” Zagajewski writes, “is Spain’s secret capital.” The pilgrims “exhausted / or eager,” can be seen to “wander its streets”. Yet the narrator focuses on a woman near the cathedral who “leaned on her backpack and sobbed”. The poem’s final stanzas are curious: “The pilgrimage is over / where will she go now // Cathedrals are only stones / Stones don’t know motion // Evening approaches / and winter.”
The piece recalls another of Zagajewski’s works, the poem “The Churches of France”, dedicated to Czes-ław Miłosz: “The churches of France, more welcoming than its inns and its poems, / Standing in vines like great clusters of grapes, or meekly, on hilltops.” Those churches, at night, are “dark vessels, where the shy flame of a mighty light wanders”.
In the 1980s, the novelist Jennifer Lash – convent-schooled but lapsed – journeyed the Camino while battling breast cancer. Early in her memoir On Pilgrimage, she says she wants to be an observer, and asks a series of questions: “Where are the seekers? What inspires them? What are they finding, maintaining and creating?” A nun asks Lash if she is “on a pilgrimage of thanksgiving”. A bit guilty, Lash says she is on “a quest, a general, rather random voyage of discovery”. The nun is “immensely disappointed”, but perhaps the book itself is a form of penance. “Return,” Lash writes later, “must be within the shape of every adventure, and certainly of every pilgrimage.”
Maione’s pilgrimage begins on Aug-ust 25 at the San Trophime Basilica in Arles, France. From a beautiful poem early in the book: “Mass ends in / procession for St Cesaire, who swings us around the / ambulatory, past his relics, and towards the bright doorway / gaining terrible speed. We’re flung at last out onto the hot / square as from a trebuchet, body parts all singing their / trajectory.”
Infinite Arrivals is a tender and att-entive book. In one poem, he kneels in front of the door of a “locked church in Languedoc” and peers through a keyhole while his “lips brush lightly” the door. In the book, Maione is often a guest, and perhaps that is a good mode for poetic observation. At one farmhouse, “The father invited me in for water.” Maione describes: “Their home is a magnificent mess. I get stuck to things. / Everything is coated with a cider / just-pressed from the perfect whirrings of a lonely child / and the bruised fruit of her woemason father, / trying to raise his memories / as well as his daughter.”
Although spiritually fed, Maione re- minds us that faith can have its physic- al toils. “I fall asleep feeling my heart- beat in sore feet,” he writes. In a later poem he is exhausted: “I was finished. After all God does not ask us to be / successful, but faithful. Not to accom-plish some task but / to be someone.”
Maione’s journey concludes 1,770 km later at Santiago de Compostela. A poem late in the book is especially revealing. The priest says to the pilg-rims that “Only you and God know why you walk / And probably not even you.” The end of Mass elicits something like the clarity of ecstasy: “Afterward everyone stumbling around the church / Crying like they were drunk / Terrified of themselves / For having resembled love / For an instant and known it / They weren’t ready / They were only people.”
Pilgrimage, like faith, is rarely a straight and sure line. Maione’s illum- inating book fits well into a storied tradition, and I think his work reflects the spirit of Jennifer Lash’s conclus-ion: “As they talked together of The Way, the obstacles, the people, the different refugios, the signs; crosses and bridges, passes and chapels; with groans, again and again, at the word Figeac, you felt the great importance of physicality in the quest. Moving alone, with silence as the single comp-anion, seems a most profound means to register the natural balance of world without, and world within.”
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