The Holy Grail

 

Scotland spread this consolation through every fold of its moors: fairies survive everywhere, even under the cataracts of sadness.

Daniel Du Lac joined me in the port of Thurso, facing the Orkney Islands. The archipelago shimmered on the horizon, less than thirty miles away.

We were heading towards the Old Man of Hoy, king of the stacks, in the south of the archipelago. Du Lac had arrived from Paris with a bag of ropes. For twenty years, my friend, a high-mountain guide, a wanderer of the peaks, always showed up whenever there was a summit to climb.

I had Benoît for the sea, Du Lac for the cliffs, Humann for the steppes: I was ready to travel the world. I compensated for my shortcomings with the art of knowing how to surround myself with the right people.

At the helm, Benoît grazed the base of the stack. The sandstone column rose a few dozen meters from the coastal cliff.

"It's a Celtic-Shaivite lingam," I said to Du Lac.

"There is a route to be opened on the south face," said Du Lac.

The sea stack rose, its 160 meters of sandstone covered in green moss. Its summit was crowned with thundering petrels and moderate gulls. Behind it, the coastline crumbled. It held firm. " I will maintain ," say the kings of Holland. "I am here," said the sea stack. We sailed in silence past the dead castles. The cathedrals had drowned. Only a spire remained.At the port of Stromness, while I was reading a translation of Ivanhoe , Du Lac's favorite phrase—the one that had been propelling me to the world's peaks for twenty years—ringed out in the cabin: "Tesson! We're leaving." As usual, I closed my book, buckled my bag, and obeyed. I never said no to Du Lac. Chardonne had experienced this kind of hypnotism: "You think you're acting, but you're being swept along." {5} . »

We took the ferry, disembarked at Hoy, and walked for two hours under a grey sky along the road that connected the port to Rackwick Bay. Du Lac carried the ropes, and I wore a kilt out of respect for the wind.

At Rackwick, a sign warned visitors: "Climbers are hereby strongly advised that no one will come to their rescue." Typical British manner: when you leave everyone to die in their own corner, there's no harm in being polite. In Chamonix, the soldiers of the high-mountain gendarmerie platoon preferred to save everyone, without any niceties. Their motto: "Your suffering gives rise to our duties." It was a different breed altogether from the obsequiousness of the British.

We camped in the moor, near a fern-covered spring. Twilight lingered, and so did the stack. Its summit protruded above the crest of the cliff. The wind howled. Du Lac protected the tent behind a rampart of sandstone slabs, which he erected with heavy panting. He was resuming the old megalithic labor.

At dawn, we climbed the Old Man. First, we had to descend the cliff to the sea via ledges of salty grass, then cross a basalt plateau to the foot of the majestic column. The cracks were damp. Du Lac was exultant, climbing quickly, securing himself to the few English pitons. With us was Benoît, who had never climbed any major rock routes. Since he made us do night watches, we got our revenge by dangling him over the sixth-grade overhangs. He didn't feel dizzy at all and found it amusing, though quite pointless, to play the monkey on a rock stained with guano. An Englishman we had met the day before on the ferry was returning from climbing the Old Man. We asked him his impressions: " Pretty horrible. "The seals' cries didn't help matters. Their bagpipe-like death throes echoed off the ruins. The birds were cursing us. The sea foamed. The sky rolled. The wind wailed and lifted my kilt. We felt out of place in this sepulcher. Suddenly, we were at the summit. Again, that feeling of complete gratitude, a fleeting moment. For a brief instant, the universe grants you at the summit what you didn't know you needed before reaching it.

The next day, I was belaying Du Lac on the south face. We forced a new four-pitch line of climbing, graded sixth and seventh, on unstable rock. Du Lac, moving from layer to layer, secured himself with tiny metal nuts wedged into the sandy cracks.

Then he reassured me, and I joined him. Everything was flaking away. Below, everything sparkled. The sun in the foam. The foam on the rock. The air vibrated. The seals bellowed. The birds were wild. The lake was blowing. If it had fallen, our metal armor would have torn away. We were once again on the summit of the Old Man of Hoy, bathed in complex splendor and primal joy.

What were we looking for when we were looking for the Grail? A cup of the most precious craftsmanship? A modest bowl filled with the blood of Christ? A vessel full of whatever we wanted to find there? Therein lay the genius of Chrétien de Troyes: to have revealed nothing, compelling the knight to never cease his quest, compelling the novel to never end, offering the reader to imagine whatever he wanted, encouraging him to always reread the tale.

"Grail": the Tao of the West, nothingness filled with its own mystery, a representation born of absence and poured into the void. The name of the Grail was legion. But unlike the satanic legion, this legion shimmered with meanings associated with the noblest virtues. Through the interpretations of the Grail, the motifs of the Western soul were gathered. It was the stained-glass window of the grandeur of being. Purity, prowess, valor, adventure, love, or faith—everything made sense, everything was Grail. O blessed century (the twelfth) when chivalry anchored a society to these virtues of strength and beauty. Then, high and low, pure and filthy, light and darkness, good and evil, white and black were not equal.

The knight on his journey sought the meaning of his existence and the means to elevate it to its highest definition. Under no circumstances would the Grail be reduced to a mere object—even one resembling Christ's cup. It was something else entirely. It could signify the culmination of the highest ambitions.

Another possibility: the Grail would correspond to the quest itself. Only the movement leading from darkness to light, that is, from question to answer, would then matter. The quest for the Grail would thus be defined by its own impetus. Born of its desire, living by its own mechanism, nourished by its own existence, the Grail was the quest. "The selfhood of the Grail," the pedants would say. One could imagine a lay:

— What are you looking for, knight?

— I'm trying to search.

— Will you find it?

— I don't want to find it.

— Where are you going?

— Where the quest continues.

— Will it ever end?

— Its purpose is not to have one.

Had I reached the Holy Grail atop this stack? On the platform, suspended between sky and sea, I stood at the point of contact between reality and the ideal. Reality was the sandstone. The ideal, the feeling that swelled in my heart of being where I was meant to be. Nothing made me want to descend. Neither the wind blew strong enough, nor had the rain yet fallen. My sense of plenitude beneath the immensity of the sky found a homeland of ten square meters bordered by one hundred and sixty-five meters of void.

For over two months, I had called this convergence of sensations, emotions, and observations, this crossroads of paths , the "emergence of the fairy ." Something could appear if one were willing to make the effort. The arrival of the fairy contradicted Yeats; life was certainly not " a perpetual preparation for something that never happens . "

Here, with bruised hands, standing at the crossroads of space, time and effort, I had reached the "fine point" invented by Vladimir Jankélévitch, the total instant where everything was accomplished, where man finally experienced the awareness of having achieved what he had desired without even knowing that he dreamed of it.

Du Lac put an end to these digressions. It's easy to drift in muddy meditations when fulmars howl over the churning seas. "Tesson, we must go down."

It was foolish to think oneself at home on the tip of a needle. Everything pointed to leaving.

A summit is never a sharp point or an end point.

Du Lac was right: we only knew how to unleash stages.

The race continued. They had to get out. Keep searching for somewhere else. And for now, get off the train. The quest resumed, the movement was reborn.

Moreover, Du Lac had already swung the fifty meters of rope into the void, its strands whipping against the rock in the wind. The Holy Grail was to set off again.

As long as we had to go and get it, it meant we had found it.

Sylvian Tesson

With the Fairies