pilgrim/prophet: St. James of Compostela
My late close friend Michael Curschmann was one of the greatest scholars of medieval German literature of the twentieth century. We were neighbors as well as intellectual buddies, and for years we had lunch together two or three times a month. Our conversations were rich and wide-ranging. His sudden death in 2017 was a terrible shock; I miss him terribly. He was brilliant and erudite. Those characteristics are not uncommon among professors at major universities, but in Michael they were directed by something rather rarer: a quirky and mellow wisdom. One example sticks in the mind. In his last years he was afflicted with very painful back and leg issues that made walking quite difficult. His doctor recommended a walker, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “I shall use a stick. A stick is sensible, dignified. A stick can even be elegant. Kant always walked with a stick.” And indeed I later learned that the highest-end model of the highest-end European stick-maker is called the “Emmanuel Kant.” It costs €333, and you can’t imagine sticking it into a mud puddle.
I had reason to remember this a year after his death when I myself was suddenly rendered unstable of foot. A dramatic side effect of the medical treatments that were staving off disaster on another front was bad neuropathy in my feet and ankles leaving me with an uncertain inebriate’s gait. First I got a couple of conventional canes. My daughter got me a quad-cane, but I feel about that the way Michael felt about the walker. I’m reasonably steady inside buildings and on paved surfaces, but I still like to get off the beaten track a bit. In the woods I need something fairly heavy duty, a really strong stick that offers support but can also beat around in the bush a bit. A major “off road” problem—fallen tree limbs—proved to be its own solution. I dragged a likely one home and cut a stout pole of convenient length. It worked fine. But as William Morris said, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”. This is the classical literary aesthetic of Horace from the Art of Poetry—a poem should both please and instruct—adapted to the industrial arts. My stout pole was useful, but was it also beautiful?
And so the medievalist in me kicked in. For reasons unrelated to my increasing antiquity, I am a bit of an expert on the iconography of canes, crutches, and walking sticks. Romantic artists thought that ancient prophets and Celtic bards, in addition to speaking very loudly, were wont to carry big sticks. So you get pictorial versions of Isaiah, Homer, Ossian, and others walking about with small tree trunks in hand.
There is something impressive in a seven-foot staff, but also something very heavy—seven linear feet of wood, perhaps—that diminishes the “useful” part, unless it is a skinny multitasking shepherd’s staff capable of serving as buttress, lasso, or club, all of which (and more) were implied in the symbolism of a medieval bishop’s crosier or crook. Both of those words derive from crux (cross) and therefore recall the metaphor of the Good Shepherd (who “lays down his life for his sheep,” John 10:11), famously used by Jesus of himself and then of the office of episcopacy and indeed of all good shepherds, such as Chaucer’s Parson, who visits the sick and needy throughout his far-flung parish not on horseback, but upon his feet, and in his hand a staf. But I must reserve the fascinating topic of crosses as crutches for another possible occasion. It vividly demonstrates some of the ways in which rank popular Christian superstition could link with deeply learned scriptural exegesis in creating the fascinating world of the medieval imagination. Today my plate is already full with sticks and adders, as opposed perhaps to snakes and ladders. For there is indeed a strong iconographic connection between staff and serpent.
Think first of the medical symbol of the Caduceus, emblem of the Greek healer-god Aesculapius. Snakes—non-poisonous ones, naturally—were a feature of the Aesculapion or “dream hospital” of ancient Greek medicine. They were considered benign rather than scary. In the Hebrew Bible there is the famous stick-and-snake contest between Aaron and the Egyptian magicians Jannes and Jambres (Exodus 7:10-12) and many places in classical mythology invoke the episode of the blind seer Tiresias, who had a major snake-and-stick problem. He had rashly intruded upon the sexual congress of two serpents with his walking stick, calling down upon himself a bizarre divine punishment. Scepters and snakes do have much in common, though one is unbending, the other curvaceous. So what I shall call the “snake staff” is perhaps an artistic idea so inevitable that it could penetrate even my mind. Just because you happen to be lame doesn’t mean your stick has to be as well.
In unkempt woods around these parts one frequently finds an unprepossessing multi-stemmed shrub, kind of semi-hardwood with a good bark, often ten feet or higher and taking up a lot of room, growing in near symbiosis with coarse, strangulating vines of pseudo-honeysuckle. The wood is fairly light weight, but sturdy. The vines, which are very strong, sometimes cling to a mini-trunk of this plant with great tenacity and, as the wood expands in its annual growth constrict and become buried in it. I first discovered this effect on a holly sapling, actually, while out searching for last year’s ad hoc Christmas tree. The visual results of this process are very striking and very serpentine. The holly has a fine-grained white wood which is quite elegant when stripped, but its smooth, thin, tight-fitting bark also presents a very handsome appearance. I found the serpentine scars on several scrub species, and I have been harvesting a few likely lengths from which I have experimented in making walking sticks of various designs.
From the functional point of view a stick used for walking on rough surfaces needs to be reasonably straight, very strong, yet fairly light. It also has to offer a firm grip, though this need not be of traditional semicircular form. Traditional manufactured canes achieve their curved handles through steaming, sometimes in conjunction with lamination. Finding suitable pieces of wood with proper “natural” handles is difficult but not impossible. My best so far is a fine, strong, light-weight length of black locust limb felled by a windstorm at my son’s farm.
The natural serpentine design can be more or less emphasized by digging out the entrapped vine (not always possible) and by the partial or total removal of the bark. The possibilities are endless, and one really needs a different stick for every day of the week. I probably need to lay down tools soon, however, if I want to save my marriage, for one man’s heptad of walking sticks is another woman’s patio clutter. Besides, my enterprise may be less original than I supposed. Somebody else—several somebodies--must be doing this somewhere because there are whole pages full of sturdy rubber cane tips of various diameters available cheap on Amazon.
