I blundered into the grail castle the first time, that’s how it always happens. I was sixteen years old, I’d lied about my age and got a job. It was a night job and I couldn’t sleep the day before, I was too excited. The job was a terribly hard job. I’d never worked hard physically in my life, it was hard on me and it was very hard on my feet. So I worked all night. I was horrified, I was stricken, I was really just bowled over by the harshness of life, and of the adult world, how hard people had to work. The roughness and the rudeness and the impersonality of the big factory where I’d gotten the job. When they finally let me loose about four in the morning, there was only one thing in the world I wanted more than a bath and my bed to go back to and take care of my bruised and exhausted body. But more than that I needed to see something beautiful, or my philosophy and view of the world just wouldn’t hold up. So I got in my car and drove up to the west hills of Portland, Oregon, which is where I lived, to watch the sunrise. And that was my first grail castle experience. That sun rose in a glory which I’ve experienced very rarely in my life, this was the first time of it, and curiously, I heard it more than I saw it. I tasted it and I felt it and I heard it, and I saw it and I touched it. It was such a profound experience that it touched all of those faculties. It was all the glory of the world wrapped up in one experience.
The term “grail castle” is a nod to the Arthurian grail legend, popularised by Chrétien de Troyes in the 12th century, which featured a mystical castle, a grail, and a visiting hero expected to speak the right words and thus learn the grail’s secret. In Troyes’ version of the story, the hero Perceval doesn’t get it right on his first visit, and needs to return to the castle many years later to complete his quest.
Riley interprets the grail castle metaphor as standing in for Johnson’s “inner world and the communion with beauty that it made available to him.” However, I’d go a bit further than that.
Earlier in the interview, Johnson mentions that he sees the grail legend as akin to his autobiography, and indeed the biography of every modern person. It seems to me that, to Johnson, the castle represents the hidden truth of existence, of the universe, that he is seeking in his own quest (life). I hesitate to use the ‘g-word’, for it comes preloaded with so many preconceived notions, but later Johnson talks about “making contact with God,” which in his formulation seems more akin to the Eastern tradition of experiencing the oneness of the universe and the loss of the self. After his difficult night, exhausted and browbeaten, the beauty of the sunrise gave Johnson his first glimpse of transcendence. Or as Lord Byron put it:
I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me High mountains are a feeling.
In Riley’s piece, he goes onto describe the first time he saw his own grail castle, when flying home after a trip around Southeast Asia:
I had spent weeks wandering the streets of Asia, looking up – at trees, at towers, at screens – and now here I was inside one of those lofty interiors I used to dream about underneath the sky, looking down [from an airplane], and the allure of these terrestrial lights was the same dream. As above, so below. The distance was the point. I knew that, but I was taken in. I entered the dream. I took the illusion at face value, knowing and not knowing. All of a sudden this stretch of land between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur was the most important part of the world. The nucleus. The doorway. The glint of a new reality sidereal and afloat on the Andaman Sea. I wasn’t seeing Malaysia, I was seeing what I had glimpsed all my life in faraway spots of light, but here laid out below me, map-like. A visible, navigable land.
I find it interesting that both Riley and Johnson had this effect induced by landscapes. There seems to be something about the natural beauty of the world, which, if we are in the right frame of mind, has the ability to knock us out of ourselves, out of our narrow perception of things, and give us a brief glimpse of something greater. Reading Riley’s essay, I found myself wondering whether a landscape has ever had a similar effect on me. I can think of only one experience that might qualify.
Many years ago, I spent six months or so working in East Africa. I travelled through Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania, alone, auditing local projects for an American NGO that had been funding their work. During the course of my visits, I’d walked along the open sewers of Africa’s second largest slum, watched the street-kids of Kisumu huff glue and pass out in the street, held the hand of a South Sudanese war refugee, pregnant with the baby of her rapist, and saw a man beaten to death by a mob in the street for the crime of pickpocketing.1 By the time I reached Lake Bunyonyi, in southwestern Uganda, I was ready for a break and a recharge.
In the local language, Bunyonyi means the “place of many small birds,” and it was as idyllic as it sounds. At 22km long and 6km at its widest, the lake has plenty of space for its 29 islands, one of which was home to my hotel, which I reached via a local fisherman’s canoe. There was little phone signal, few guests, and I was free from work commitments for a few days. I spent my time reading a book (East of Eden, borrowed from the hotel’s bookshelf), swimming, and gazing out over the vista.
One evening, as the sun arced downwards for the close of day, drowning itself in the waters until the whole lake shimmered gold, the dark figure of a fisherman paddled directly into that sunken orb, and my eyes, which had been tracing his passage through the water, were momentarily blinded. When I blinked to restore the image I was suddenly gripped by the realisation that what I saw — the lake, the sun, the sky, the rolling green hills of Africa — was all there was. This lake was all lakes; that sky was all skies; those hills and trees and bushes were all the hills and trees and bushes of the earth; and that man out there, in his canoe, was all men; he was I, and I he. In that instant blazed the full glory of existence, in a single, unified whole; it was the grail castle.
The revelatory moment, like all moments, soon passed, and I was back to my singular self again, with all my thoughts and fears.
In the time since, I’ve approached something close to that feeling again only once, after many months of meditation practice: the loss of self, the realisation that if you can turn consciousness in on itself, the centre drops out, revealing nothing but pure awareness. It only lasted an instant again, but I remembered Bunyonyi well enough to recognise it for what it was. I hear that if one is more disciplined than I, and practices meditation more often, with better focus, one can induce this feeling almost on command.
It took Perceval twenty years to return to the grail castle, but it needn’t take us that long. One gets the feeling it’s always there, in plain view, but hidden from sight. One needs only learn how to look.
Nature’s beauty reveals the grail castle to us the first time, then it’s up to us to find our way back.
✍️ Tell me: have you ever seen the grail castle? Was it a landscape that induced it for you the first time?
Of course, I am only summarising the worst things I saw on that trip; this piece doesn’t have the space to mention all the countless positive experiences I had, which far outweighed the bad. Sub-Saharan Africa is not all war and poverty and disease as is commonly portrayed in the news, films, and literature. It’s a beautiful place filled with beautiful people. I often daydream about going back.
There's a sense of the endless and time-stop in such moments, and a kind of unity of sensation, perception, and conception. Went there once via meditation. It wasn't easy. Never felt the need or compelled to go again though could see how it would be worth it. Also wound up there once doing the hardest work of my life, in a sawmill as a teen. I thought I knew hard work as an athlete - I did and I really didn't. After a day's work in the sawmill, stacking every bit of wood the mill cut each day, sometimes I would go home, eat, then sleep till work the next morning. More often I could stay up a bit, but sometimes I would come home and not even eat, just go to sleep till work the next morning. So rough it was wholly exhausting. And then one day, on break, we stood at the edge of the open mill during a deluge and the rain looked like liquid translucent bars and it was the most transporting experience in the world, eternal and singular and time stopped. Totally dry, felt like we were underwater looking through thick bars of water. When time stops and things keep moving, it transports. A novel, unique, all-absorbing moment, new experience. I couldn't believe how it kept going on and seemed to go nowhere. Transcendence, I guess, via a sensation, a transportation, and a recalculation. Ultra life. And then you go back to the screaming noise and bone-breaking grind of the mill, but you've seen at least one infinite value of life and it has impressed you to your core, and not only because it's such a unique - seeming - experience. You are touched, imprinted with an impossible vision that for a moment was real and of the highest value. I think there are traces and sometimes plenty of this in our daily interactions with life, with people, if we are sensitive to it. May even be the key to memory. And possibly a touchstone of religion, philosophy, convictions. Sometimes the infinite and eternal concentrates and sweeps aside the temporal and spatial order. Or seems to. Then it passes and there's the day to navigate.
I have been able to experience the Grail Castle many times in my life the way you have described it, I am an older man now so memories add up. Each occasion involved suffering then healing of the spirit through nature which only took a moment in time. I never equated those moments to the Grail Castle, even though I have read the book Parzival by Wolfram Von Eschenbach. But I think you may be correct in that metaphor. I really appreciate you sharing this insight.