Hear Our Silence

Yesterday, I attended a press pre-view of Philip Groning’s adventurous art film, Into the Great Silence, a unique account of his two month stay with the Carthusian monks of La Grande Chartreuse.

The charterhouse, high in the French alps, remote from Grenoble, was founded 900 years ago by Saint Bruno. And it is the mother house of the Order.

I found the film overlong (it runs for almost three hours): but Groning has waited almost 20 years for access to this citadel of hermit monks. So that his precious footage must have seemed too good to waste. It is a daring essay in portraying a way of life that will strike any viewer as almost unfathomable. A life of constant prayer, attending to God in silence and solitude: seeking the unknowable according to an ancient path - reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation.

Groning chooses an almost fragmented storyline. We are visited by a continual series of isolated scenes - a monk in cell at prayer, now the bell tolls and the community hastens to church, we pass outside to the awesome surrounding mountains, now rain, now snow, now the spring thaw.

Groning uses all his skills as an art director: but does he offer us even a glimpse of the true spiritual odyssey that has captivated him for so long. In part, but I can only feel that the silence and solitude that the Carthusians practice is best left unseen.

Spoken of, perhaps, even interpreted and translated outside their cloister. But as to watching them ‘do it’, I reckon it doesn’t altogether work. But I may be utterly wrong. The film is on limited release from December 29. Details of relevant cinemas available from Martin Gough at Soda Pictures.

martin@sodapictures.com

I was given an amazing thank you yesterday: a three hour birding cruise up the Exe estuary.

Thank you Lotty.

Creaking ancient flat bottomed cruise boat, loaded with Oldies.

And the birds attended our curiousity. Brent geese are piling in, their soft round white rumps expressing their pleasure at wintering here rather than in Iceland. Avocets lined up like guardsmen, sweeping the sand shallows for their shrimps. Obliging mussels, instantly yielded their orange souls to the stab or scissor precision of a multitude of oyster catchers. Upon their shoulder, the predatory crow and herring gull.

The high moment: twin clouds of dunlin, their brilliant swift air display now buff now white against the still blue sky defying the peregrine overhead.

Later upstream towards Topsham: here we came upon a huddle of golden plover, utterly still like a grounded autumn sunset. They feed at night in some safe plush meadow upon the earth worm. For now they spend their day, safe as statues.

Home now against a November sunset: the honeyed hunter moon looms over the tree framed horizon.

I have only just become aware of this amazing project to be sited at Staveley as the M1 threads through Derbyshire towards Sheffield. Almost 200 feet high with its elliptical base measuring some 60 metres, the Pyramid consisting of three giant stainless steel triangles will serve as a giant sundial as well as a modern day Stonehenge. The latter function is afforded by the two smaller towers which will mark sunrise and sunset of the summer solstice.

With 60% of the population living within a 90 minute drive and an estimated 45,000 cars passing the site each day, the pyramid will become a beacon of regeneration for a region that was so badly hit when Maggie closed the coal mines.