"The Song that Gives the Key to Perfection," David Sylvian, Shree Ma
Marguerite reflects on the oddities of life and Goddess practices in lockdown Biarritz.
Hello! You’ve found Faye’s Wing, a series of multimedia scenes about the creative quest for fulfilment beyond a fixed spiritual identity. It comes out every Wednesday, and features music and visuals from contributing artists. If you are new here, I suggest you start at the beginning and read the story sequentially. You can also check out my project overview for more info, or view the list of scenes you might have missed.
Listen, Oh Goddess, while i elucidate the excellent song which gives the key to perfection…1
Biarritz, Spring 2020
We settle into a sheltered life. Whether it's thanks to time, homeopathic pellets, or the effects of home, I am healthy again. I count my blessings as the news turns grimmer by the day. A more spontaneous cook by nature, I take to pondering over menus and weekly grocery lists, heading to neighbourhood shops alone. In these early days, before permissions go electronic, access to paper and a printer are the only mandate to movement, with France declaring that outings must be documented by a self-released permit called an attestation de déplacement dérogatoire au confinement. The length of the title alone summons the national obsession with paperwork. Without an office setup in our temporary home, I hand-copy the official wording and join a line of half a dozen retirees at the corner print shop, which has been elevated to the rank of “essential service” overnight. The line stretches halfway up the street; forty minutes pass by the time I get my stuffy moment amongst the towers of whirring machines. I try to make small talk with the owner as I wait for a stash of blank attestations, wondering out loud if the Mairie is open.
'I make copies. I am not an information desk, madame,' he says, waving at the weary line. He is overwhelmed, frightened, and my attempt at connection now seems frivolous.
'Of course, you are a busy man.'
Oh yeah, I remember. Feeling like a child who should know better was one of the reasons I left my homeland. At least now I can clock it and move on.
Since the self-released permits trump an international passport as a means of accessing free movement, having a printer becomes imperative. I scour For Sale adverts in our neighbourhood and settle on a second-hand one that won’t require breaching our restricted movement zone to collect it. The seller is eager to tell me that his job allows him to drive around, and offers to drop off the printer. Handing him cash outside our building as his eyes dart around, his engine is idling, I wonder if I’ve unwittingly entered next generation smuggling.
'What about the USB cable?' I ask, peeking into the battered box he has plonked on the pavement.
'No cable. Everyone has got one nowadays.'
I sigh. Somewhere in our empty flat in Bristol is a box filled with all sorts of spare cables.
'I guess I’ll have to order one online,' I shrug with a smile.
Uninterested in my needs or niceties, he shoots off before I make it up the stairs again. A few days later, having received a replacement cable, hooked everything up and spent hours on troubleshooting videos and user forums, I give up. The printer is faulty. I’ve been fooled. Thoughts of wartime France flicker back. Have we already reverted to an era of goodwill vs black-market scams?
The government fumbles with safeguarding measures. PPE manufacturers and Etsy makers of all things cute and safe have not yet hit the big time with face coverings, which are dismissed as superfluous in these early Covid days. As a whole, everyone is fearful and shell-shocked into following rules to the letter, barely daring to call out for a baguette, lest our voices spread contagion. Overhearing English from across a garden hedge one day, I greet my neighbours, a bold move by pandemic era standards. They turn out to be a friendly British family, who offer to include our orders in their weekly collection of raw milk and farm-fresh produce. In the space of a week, priorities and necessities have radically shifted, and I never fail to thank our bakers, grocers, postmen effusively with each vital interaction.
Just like in Bristol, Ben and Sacha share a room and crack jokes. From the back of the flat, conversations waft up from a courtyard, where two pensioners spend afternoons lobbing bar counter politics at each other. Once, while Ben is strumming his guitar in the toilet, his only private hangout here, one of them shouts a song suggestion through the transom. We really are in this pandemic thing all together. Now and then, the boys go for a run at dusk, cagey about being out, even though keeping fit is permitted. Luke sleeps all day and is up all night, only ever leaving his bed for meals, to carry shopping up or to take out the bins. In the evenings, we stand on our dinky balcony banging pots in support of medics, but the novelty wears off and our end of the avenue is silent again two weeks later.
By the third week, we are restless and crave fresh air. There is something perverse about the expression prendre l’air when you need permission to get some air and so many are on respirators because they cannot breathe at all. Ticking boxes on our forms, we head out in the fading minutes of spring light. Luke hasn’t properly been outside since that day at the beach together, and there is an eerie elation about wandering as a family again, even though the streets are too quiet and most of the shutters remain bolted closed. A chic surf and foodie destination for second-home Parisians and Bordelais during the holidays, the town has swollen somewhat since Easter, but is definitely not at full capacity. An odd divide is felt at the corner grocer’s, between those who were here pre-lockdown and those who have taken advantage of the holiday shuffle to sneak down. Clutching my basket and list, I walk a thin line—not quite a cheat, not quite a local, either.
Our steps echo down amber-lit streets, not passing a soul for the fifteen minutes that take us to the seafront. Even smug dog walkers have receded to the safety of their screens for a nightly fix of terror, as reciting morbid statistics becomes the new religion. Barricades block the promenade and beach: it’s illegal to swim, surf, or see the ocean up close, so we turn instead to the lighthouse. Our fragile sense of ease is slapped down when we spot three flashing police cars circling a dinky motorbike. Our banter stops. Instinctively, our backs straighten, we walk closer together and turn back. All the way home, weaving past Belle Époque homes and elegant villas, we listen for the revving motorbike and brace for a spot-check, feeling the ice-cold hand of guilt, even though our stroll is lawful. Pushing the front door shut, the adrenaline rush from our benign outing has exhausted us. We all turn in earlier than usual, crushed by the new normal of living amongst ghosts.
Throughout that first month, I spend hours calling a swamped French Consulate in London, sort out schools in both countries, and listen to my calls ring unanswered as I orchestrate our removal. I keep having to make big decisions at a sickening speed. On a random weekday morning, an impatient removal man telephones, wanting me to tell him then and there what will go into storage. Our conversation is surreal: “Take, take, leave, take… No, wait… in the back cupboard behind the dryer? Leave… leave, leave. Sigh. How many cubic metres left? Take…! Christmas decorations… Leave? Oh, I don’t know… What about the frames, can you get them in? Good, good. Take.” In under seven minutes, he has charged through our flat, ticked boxes on a form, and sealed the fate of what will constitute any future sense of cosiness and familiarity.
A friendly Clifton grocer has agreed to bring our recycling and rubbish down, in exchange for kitchen furniture and the coffee table the boys made for my first Mother’s Day in England. Though his kindness is exemplary, I cannot shake the feeling that I am at the mercy of strangers when he also asks for my cutlery, toaster, and kettle. What else has been eyed up or pocketed during these unsupervised visits? Charity shops are no longer collecting things they seemed so keen on a few weeks back. Though I pay a fortune for a cleaner, the letting company charges me an extortionate amount for removing 'detritus'—Victorian furniture and lovingly collected bric-à-brac, which I suspect they will either sell or keep for themselves. Of course, it’s only stuff, yet these mundane disillusions hurt, perhaps because I had so little to begin with. After all, this is already round two of letting go of a household.
Our formal practices are thankfully still paused throughout the removal chaos. The Teacher encourages me to lean into each new challenge, to draw on my inner resources as I lighten my worldly load. She reminds us all to cultivate gratitude during these challenging times, and to start collecting votive materials for our next ritual cycle. I’ve already had first-hand experience of what to grab in an emergency: a red carry-on, jam-packed with brass and copper ritual implements and liturgies, ever prioritising the Goddess to reach spiritual fruition.
The time comes to release our effigy of the Goddess back into nature, and we are told to offer Her coconut form into a body of water or undisturbed nature. Biarritz in lockdown turns what might have been a meaningful ceremony into an exercise in absurdity. Everything here is so polished that even leaving offerings in a wild spot becomes a practice, and unpaved soil a destination. With beaches now off-limits, the ocean is ruled out, while all the public gardens within my one-kilometre perimeter are too glaringly manicured. In the end, I use my penultimate permission to slip out after nightfall, effigy and petals in tote, and have no choice but to lob Her sandalwood-smudged coconut “head” over a locked fence. Missing a smartly dressed lady by a couple of inches, I murmur apologies and a mantra as it impacts into a boxwood with a thud. Hopefully, the Goddess’s sense of humour for these irreverent times is also divine.
As the end of our pre-booked month nears and lockdown is prolonged, I manage to secure a longer lease on another holiday let to see us to the summer, when rents quadruple. More dérogations are needed, since the country is at a standstill: one to visit the place, and another for our removal, a hyperbole for cramming suitcases and bags of groceries into the rental lady’s Mini Cooper and driving a few streets down. Our new home is more spacious, with a patio overlooking well-tended lawns. Spring is in full swing, unfurling magnolias. At the bakery, the sweet waft of fresh chocolatines is an opportunity for socially distanced chats, and the boys now take turns accompanying me to the lavish market around the corner.
With the clean smell of pine trees buffeted by wild Atlantic winds and the relaxed Biarrot mentality, face coverings increasingly dip beneath noses. In blustery 80-degree weather, a heavily masked jogger elicits chuckles, the Prime Minister’s weekly roundups are no longer enough to keep people indoors, and rumours build around the crisis being mishandled. As a collective raised eyebrow forms with each conflicting policy, my curiosity takes me down alternative explanations of the malady. But the Teacher is not interested:
Teacher: I’m not going into the 'why' very much. That can take up a lot of mental space in a way that is not helpful. My focus is on remembering that this is Her too. Leaning into that, living into the Goddess’s nature of it all. This is not separate from Her. We can’t really know 'why'. We can’t predict or control any of this. She says, ‘deadly or not, contagious or not, this is me, too.’
What if this is just what happens in the Kali Yuga, the Dark Times? Om, we bow to confusion and ignorance and disharmony. Our practices were made for these times, they give us context to meet the world where it is and increase our capacity to meet reality.
Swallowing questions and frustrations, I focus on what is in front of me, most of which contradicts the darkness that we are meant to be experiencing. Sure, the world is a mess and people are dying—but that’s nothing new. The cold, dark echo of hospitals and the fierce ways of the Goddess feel removed from our privileged, balmy reality. There’s a truth disconnect—I am enjoined to believe what I see and hear on my screens, both the media-frenzied ones and in Kula2 Zoom gatherings, but neither fully coincides with my day-to-day physical or inner experiences, and I’m in a jumble of emotions—grateful, giddy, and slightly sheepish about the grace of our escape and new circumstances. As a global crisis unravels disease, financial uncertainty, and isolation, my body is healthy again, my mind and heart are at ease, and our family life is harmonious. Yet there isn’t really anyone with whom to rejoice, beyond us four.
I am used to swimming upstream, after all. I married when friends were partying, led a life of leisure as they sweated out their careers, divorced when they were swaddling babies, discovered penniless living when they started buying second homes. Was the last decade of anguished toiling a dress rehearsal for these collapsing times? Not only have I been working from home all along, but I am well versed in teeth-gnashing, displacement, and end-of-month miracles. Even my spiritual life mirrors an inverted reality; just as I embark on a three-year cycle of increasingly dark aspects of the Goddess, we are blessed with more ease, warmth and light than we have experienced in years.
Indeed, having finished a foundational year with She-Who-Births-the-World-and-Everything-In-It, we meet a form of the Goddess from a Nepalese tradition, who is not interested in family comforts or worldly success, but in moksha, our spiritual fruition, or our “endarkenment”, as the Teacher calls it. This one does not have children, even though she has given birth to the whole cosmos. She will not scoop us up in Her arms and console us. Though she is not nurturing in a human way, we are told that she will satisfy our deep spiritual hunger. We are far from Lakshmi, Saraswati, and the other auspicious feminine forms I worshipped in my twenties, or even from semi-fierce goddesses. The former serve the masculine, while the latter have equal footing with it. We are about to meet a primordial, 'unspousified' form of the Goddess, whose role is to show us the false premises we have built our life on and what needs to go.
Because Her ways are more tumultuous, fiercer, hotter, and not designed to be compatible with family life, we practise as a group to make things gentler. Nightly sits are now longer, messier, fussier, and afford less compromise. The list of offerings is more difficult to source, too. We learn to make mantra-infused ghee from unpasteurised organic butter, and there is raw milk to be poured as an offering, with the names of one-hundred-and-eight new attending Devis to be memorised and imprinted into our body.
Ever the nerd, I keep my focus off the glaring uncertainty of everyday life, with its onslaught of information and required coordination. There is comfort and anchoring in knowing that, whatever storms the headlines may bring, I will sit for two hours, repeating the same lines, tracing the same mandalas with holy water and rose petals, offering the same closing prayers and thanks. By two in the morning, when my recitations come to an end, the exhaustion is such that my mind is given a reprieve from thought, and I fall into velvet stillness.
“Siddha kunjika stotram” (song which gives the key to perfection), from a holy text called the Chandi Path, sung by David Sylvian and Shree Ma. NB: these mantras are for illustrative purposes only; this is neither “The Teacher” or the same path.
School, tradition, family, tribe.
Again, Marguerite shares with us such a frank, emotive account of her experience during lockdown. Her strength and vulnerability are captured beautifully.