Anchorite
a self-isolation zine
An Anchorite,
or anchoress, was a type of religious hermit common in Europe in the Middle Ages. A person would withdraw from society and spend their life enclosed in a cell, often attached to a church, to pursue a life of prayer, asceticism, and profound communion with God.
When
I first heard about anchorites my friends and I agreed it would be one of the better lots in life if you were born a woman at that time – you could read and write, wouldn’t have to marry, you’d be cared for well enough so as not to starve; you could be relatively safe from plagues or fires or other misfortunes sweeping through your town. You could spend your days reading, or thinking, or helping people with their problems, or talking to God. Having visions and being mad would be holy instead of profane.
From
the moment a person assumed their role as an anchorite, they would spend their life in a small cell attached to their church. This cell, sometimes called an anchorhold, would be around fifteen square feet and would have three windows - one facing the altar to view services, receive the Eucharist, and give wisdom and advice to visitors; one for food and other basic needs; and one facing the outside world, sometimes covered by a translucent curtain, letting light into the cell.
Anchorites
were subject to a religious rite of consecration that closely resembled the funeral rite, following which they would be considered dead to the world, a type of living saint. In Germanic-speaking areas, from at least the 10th century, it was customary for the bishop to say The Office of the Dead as the anchorite entered their cell, to signify the anchorite’s death to the world and rebirth to a spiritual life of solitary communion with God and the angels.
Literally dead to the world, A body of this earth And a soul in heaven, Communing with the angels; A half-living saint, Your little room an elevator to the afterlife.
My
dreams become more vivid; I ask my flatmates and they say the same. More vivid but more mundane; last night I dreamt I was in the co-op looking for fruit. The joy of the dream was that they had what I wanted, piles of fluorescent-lit strawberries in plastic boxes and satsumas in net bags you could plunge your thumb right into.
There
are multiple theories as to why everyone’s dreams are so strong, so strange. People have more trauma to process, more stress, a new crisis to work through in their dreams. (some) people, freed from late capitalist working hours, are no longer sleep-deprived, and for once get to dream unimpeded. Neither feel as if they apply to me; years of depression and anxiety have run drills in my brain for any disaster, already built the neural pathways to cope with this kind of stress. I’ve been unemployed for six months until recently, and if there’s one thing I haven’t lacked it’s sleep. I theorise that the cause might just be lack of stimuli, my brain desperate for narratives and excitement between the flat, similar days. A way to reach out of my body, of my confinement, of my cave.
I
feel I now have some small, petty sense of what it must have been like to live through the plague, and of what it felt like to be sealed, relatively safe, in your pure, holy little room.
Boredom is a very hard thing to make art about
In the half-hour before I’m fully awake I feel like things are normal
Did you feel that you could draw your curtain and be quarantined, sanitised somehow? Where is the need to be productive? To what village do I contribute or commune with?
Julian
of Norwich was one of England’s most famous anchorites. Her book, Revelations of Divine Love, is the first book in English known to have been written by a woman. During her life, the Black Death swept through England and killed over half the population of her home city of Norwich. At the age of thirty she became gravely ill and on her deathbed received visions of Christ. She lived most of her life in a cell adjoining St Julian’s Church in Norwich. Her book, Revelations of Divine Love, records her visions. Very little about her life is known.
Uniquely
for the mystics of the Middle Ages, Julian wrote about her visions. She was an anchoress from at least the 1390s, and was the greatest English mystic of her age, by virtue of the visions she experienced and her literary achievement, but almost nothing about her life is known. According to Julian’s book Revelations of Divine Love, at the age of thirty, and when she was perhaps an anchoress already, Julian fell seriously ill. On 8 May 1373 a curate was administering the last rites of the Catholic Church to her, in anticipation of her death. As he held a crucifix above the foot of her bed, she began to lose her sight and feel physically numb, but gazing on the crucifix she saw the figure of Jesus begin to bleed. Over the next several hours, she had a series of fifteen visions of Jesus, and a sixteenth the following night. Julian completely recovered from her illness on 13 May. She wrote about her “shewings” shortly after she experienced them. As plague epidemics were rampant during the 14th century, it has been suggested that Julian may have lost her own family as a result of plague. By then becoming an anchoress she would have been kept in quarantine away from the rest of the population of Norwich.
The act of restricting The act of restricting for a purpose The act of restricting for safety The act of restricting to look for something The act of restricting to look inwards The act of restricting to experience lack The act of restricting as accomplishment The act of self-restricting vs. the act of responding to restrictions placed upon you The act of restricting for the good of your community The act of collective restricting The act of resticting as exceptional vs. the act of resricting amongst the crowd
I
do not do this by choice; I suppose I could choose to flout the law, if I wanted to be selfish. But this is socially as well as legally enforced, a kind of communal loneliness. We’re all in this together, as a different Tory prime minister said of a different crisis; we’re all in this together.
It
feels wrong for a crisis to be this still. All our language for disasters comes from movies, where everything is big and explosive and visual – it’s so antithetical to sit quietly at home, the view outside your window not changing, while the world is collapsing somewhere else.
The
moral, heroic thing to do is nothing – stay at home, wash hands, miss your old life. Each day like a boring Sunday afternoon.
Every
Thursday now our whole estate opens their windows to applaud for NHS workers, a strange communal gesture in a time of austerity. Everyone leaning out of their own window, their own sealed separate flats, applauding and cheering. The first time it happened we were on the phone to a friend in Oxford, heard the cheering down there in the distance through the phone. My mother works for the NHS; I ask her if she’s heard the cheering but she’s been taking care of my grandmother who lives far in the countryside – I imagine them in her tiny cottage in the dark, isolated by distance as well as self-quarantine.
My
little window the internet, looking out to the community I’m situated in, talking to people, communing through the wall.
Laying
in bed energyless in the middle of the day I look up through the skylight. The sky is perfect bright blue and the seagulls, getting bold with the city to themselves, circle overhead. One morning I woke up to a squirrel peering in, little whiskers twitching. At night I watch the clouds rush over the stars and the grey-yellow city sky, or fall asleep to the rain hitting the roof.
I’m
writing this on the ninth of May, between the two different dates for Julian’s feast day. The Anglican Church commemorates her on the 8th of May, the day her last rites were delivered when she fell so sick, while the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the 13th, the day she recovered, returned from the brink of death with her head full of visions. She has never been canonised and is not officially a saint, but is frequently referred to as such - Saint; Blessed; Mother Julian. Her feast day is still celebrated as if officially commemorated, a kind of folk sainthood. She is revered at home, at the dining table, in private, canonized in the living room if not in the Vatican.
I
thought the word anchorite must come from the word ‘anchor’ – to be held, to be weighted, to be anchored in place. In the Anchorine Wisse, a 13th century guide for anchoresses, the anonymous author even writes ‘the anchoress is called an anchor, and anchored under the church like an anchor under the side of a ship’. The word is actually from the Greek ἀναχωρητής, ‘anachoretes’, meaning a person who goes away from their land or country. It does not refer to being held in place but to it’s opposite, the act of leaving, and in particular the act of leaving home. Somewhere in time, a linguistic shift.
“Jesus answered with these words, saying:
‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ ... This was said so tenderly, without blame of any kind toward me or anybody else”
Julian of Norwich ‘Revelations of Divine Love’
It
becomes a little mantra for me, in the dull, dayless isolation, reading the news and feeling the low hum of anxiety creep in all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. It’s the non-specificity that offers comfort, the timelessness of the “shall”. Shall is a future, shall is out there somewhere, all manner of things shall be well.
Clare Patterson March - May 2020 i: @clarejmpatterson t: @clarpttrsn
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well