The Soul a City
by Sarah Law
“And then our Lord opened my spiritual eye and showed me my soul in the midst of my heart. I saw my soul as large as an endless world…and an honorable city.”
—Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 67
No matter my location, age, and state of life, I have always remained a Norwich girl at heart. Born and bred in this city long regarded as the unofficial capital of East Anglia, I have a right to regard myself as a local—or a Norfolk Dumpling, if you want to put it more colloquially, and less politely. I not only grew up in Norwich, but spent significant portions of my younger adulthood there, working, teaching, studying, flourishing, and stumbling. And now, as I’m packing and preparing for a move back to my hometown, in mid-life, with husband and cat in tow, I am wondering how I will reconnect with a place so fundamental to my sense of self. We are moving partly because it’s time, with rising prices and jobs that can be done online, for us to say goodbye to London. Partly to be nearer and available to my elderly mother, as she lives on in the same suburban bungalow that’s been her home for over half a century. I will be like a new arrival, a woman returning from far outside the city walls.
But in some ways, I have never left. And nor has this city left me.
***
One of the reasons why Norwich has a place in the memory, or psyche, of many who have lived there may be its own long history, rich in architecture, culture, and generations of human life. There is something transcendent about such cities; they resonate beyond their temporal and geographical coordinates. Medieval Norwich, in particular, was spiritually vibrant: religious establishments were almost literally on every corner, and the great Cathedral housed a thriving community of Benedictine monks (with a nearby Benedictine convent at Carrow Abbey). There were religious heretics too, many of whom were burned in the Lollard’s Pit on Mousehold Heath, not too far from a certain humble round-tower church. Then as now, this city was a place of profound contrasts; business and pleasure, but with mortality and eternity high on everyone’s horizon.
The fourteenth-century anchoress, Mother Julian of Norwich, spent much of her long adult life enclosed in a cell adjacent to that same small church, St. Julian’s (either St. Julian the Hospitaller or St. Julian of le Mans). As an anchoress, she took her religious name from the church she lived beside: we do not know her original name. She was a mystic and visionary, but also much cherished during her lifetime as a wise counselor, listening to the city dwellers and those who have traveled from further afield through her street-facing window. She was herself something of a still center in a busy city, full of clerks, merchants, publicans and scholars; several times afflicted with devastating waves of bubonic plague, the Black Death. We do not know if she was Norwich-born, but Norwich was surely her blueprint for the city life she had both withdrawn from and was continually bound to care and pray for.
Apparently geographically nowhere, Julian’s soul-city is an elusive concept, a place she finds within, rather than extraneous to herself, and a place where she encounters God, and God encounters her.
Mother Julian offers us in her Revelations of Divine Love a surprising meditation on the city. Apparently geographically nowhere, Julian’s soul-city is an elusive concept, a place she finds within, rather than extraneous to herself, and a place where she encounters God, and God encounters her. For Julian, the city was an image of her soul, a place both expansive and intimate; a place of escape from the self, and of self-discovery. How might we engage with such an idea today? Is there a way in which we might see our own souls as such cities? And might we even reverse the concept: to what extent does a modern city itself possess a soul?
Let me show you around the fine city of Norwich a little further.
Julian’s concept of the city was formed at a time well before our industrialized metropolitan hubs. But parts of medieval Norwich remain in today’s city; some prominently visible, such as Cathedral, Castle, and such pubs as the Adam and Eve. Some parts have been repurposed; one church, for example, as a puppet theatre; and fragmentary markers of the old city walls are tangible evidence of the city’s past boundaries. Then there are the geographical elements such as the river Wensum, along which the stones for the great cathedral were transported in the twelfth century. Interestingly, by the fourteenth century, migration to and through this East Anglian capital was significant, mostly comprising merchants from the continent (then an uneasy equilibrium of nation states). The city of Norwich offered a nexus of routes, as well as fertile ground for roots. A century or so after Mother Julian’s time, Strangers Hall provided a welcome gathering place for such migrants. It remains a popular city museum today.
Norwich has had its shameful episodes too; historical incidents born of bigotry and intolerance, as shameful events so often are. I’ve already mentioned the Lollard’s Pit (somewhat ironically, now the name of a popular Norwich pub); the antisemitic legend of child-martyr “Saint” William is one of several medieval fabrications that have clear parallels with baseless contemporary conspiracy “theories” touting stories of blood libel and child-sacrifice. And then there were rumors of ghosts: white women, gray women, ghostly horses, devilish black dogs. Not unique to Norwich or to city life, but part of it, and if less acknowledged today, the shadowy and the spooky linger still, awaiting their opportunity to resurge.
***
Norwich constitutes a unique mixture of the marvelous, the pedestrian, the spiritual, and the spookily suppressed. It is therefore like and also unlike other cities, and, at least on a figurative level, like the inner terrain of the human psyche, which also harbors all these qualities. While I do have maps of other places folded into my memory, I can say with some conviction that my soul is indeed a city—one very particular in its layout and history: not my own creation, and yet informed by my individual experience. My soul is not an unreal city (T. S. Eliot) or an invisible city (Italo Calvino) but an internalized one: a multidimensional map of the self that houses a plethora of seasons and sentiments; organic, in constant growth and flux as I feel myself to be, but also something significantly bigger and older than my finite conscious existence in this world. It’s very possible Mother Julian had a similarly personal map of this city where she dwelt, but she does not tell us.
Allow me to show you a little of my city-soul.
I can say with some conviction that my soul is indeed a city—one very particular in its layout and history: not my own creation, and yet informed by my individual experience.
Here then is the hospital, in whose corner room I was born, dislocated and difficult, and here the high school where I struggled with adolescence, brittle friendship, first crushes, and intoxicating literature; here the hotel bar where rite-of-passage underage drinking led to awkward clinches and kisses. My city then was burgeoning with possibility and terrifying with it. The red-light zone at Rouen Road (we schoolgirls called it Ruin Road) pulsed with forbidden sex, and erotic possibility seeped through the city streets in an inflamed network of veins. Sin City. At the same time came incipient self-consciousness of the teenage female body; its vulnerability, its inherent culpability. Shouts and honks from passing cars. The city saw me yet failed to recognize me, just as I barely recognized myself.
Back from university, I encountered a new layer of my natal city. This comprised all the trappings of young adulthood. Rented house shares. A visiting boyfriend. Pubs. Gigs. A job. The city fleshed itself out; its smells became my own. Cigarettes. Alcohol. A jukebox of hiccups and hangovers. Quick wit and nicknames for everyone and everything. You fitted in or you didn’t. Soft City (that’s Jonathan Raban). Bright Lights City. Working at Waterstones, with its multiple rows of bookish teeth, the bookshop floor was a Hydra Dentata, ready to bite. Customers browsed unaware, during their lunch hour skulks. I flickered amongst them like a tongue.
Then, anguish.
In fact, a series of anguished hours, scattered over my city-soul like a broken rosary. My father, dead in a hospice bed. My relationship over, and subsequent attempts at a love life skidding on black ice and guttering into a series of painful crashes. My increasing discomfort with retail, even literary retail as a career. I don’t remember which particular crisis precipitated it, but I well remember the evening I walked out, despairing, from my rented single room, into the empty streets, and encountered the city herself.
***
City walking has a long literary history. The flâneur of the nineteenth century led directly to the psychogeographer of the twentieth and twenty-first. An individual walks, observes, reflects, and is amused. Such an individual is often eccentric and amusing themselves, feeding their ambulant experiences into witty repartee, or written reportage. Dickens, for example, was a famous night-walker, purveying London’s seamy and deprived areas as much as its well-to-do quarters. More recently, Ian Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd have navigated the grids and circuits of the capital, creating a palimpsest of the personal, social, cultural and historical, all juxtaposed against the granular geographical setting. Significantly, Ackroyd explores the concept of “chronological resonance”; the resonance of past events echoing through a specific location up to the present day.
There’s one obvious thing about all these referenced names. They’re all male. “Flâneur” was an intrinsically male denotation. A woman walking the streets alone, especially at night, was considered altogether unacceptable—unless one was a man seeking illicit pleasure; then she served her role. These days, while there are some perceptive women psychogeographers (Sonia Overall, for example), a woman walking alone at night is more concerned for her safety than her reputation. The haven of a City of Ladies (de Pizan) remains a medieval fantasy. But still. It was no hostile stranger I met when one evening, wracked by my own internal grief, I found myself walking. Not in the middle of a Dantean Forest, but in the middle of the historic city I had known all my life.
It was, perhaps, between eight and nine o’clock at night. Too late for the working crowd and the daytime shoppers. Too early for the desultory weeknight pub-and-clubbers. Pubs are everywhere in Norwich; essential watering holes for the stressed and bored, the disenfranchised and the disappointed, and, occasionally, those surprised by success. If I were a man, I would probably have gravitated towards one, thirsty to numb my existential distress. But I would have felt neither comfortable nor particularly invisible as a solo woman alone at the bar. The streets with their thickening blanket of silence and absence were the better choice. I do not remember the season, but I think of it as autumn; the dusk of the year, just as it was dusk that day, and just as I sensed a personal descent into darkness too.
Gentleman’s Walk in Norwich is, thankfully, not so gendered as its moniker these days. For generations now, a wide pedestrianized precinct, it spreads its paved presence between the old open-air market and the enclosed, art-deco Royal Arcade made up of boutiques and eateries, all closed up for the night like flowers. The place was deserted. I walked around and through it, hands thrust into my coat pockets, and felt the cool air on my face and in my hair, like a lightly scented balm. I remember the hot sting of my own stuck tears, although I do not remember precisely what they were for. The expansive evening quiet soothed them, and more.
I was seized by an ineffable sense of the city accompanying me as I walked through it, listening to my own stymied narrative.
I was seized by an ineffable sense of the city accompanying me as I walked through it, listening to my own stymied narrative. How strange it was—the emptiness of the place was not an emptiness at all but revealed as an underlying presence that had always been there. Part-luminous, part-numinous, this city was breathing alongside its troubled daughter. I continued to walk—I slowed my pace, but not so much as to loiter—and the paving stones beneath my knee-high boots responded as something organic, sustaining. Circular wooden benches which mark the end of the Walk and lead up to the medieval Guildhall (now a crystal shop and café by day) offered me the curve of an embrace. Behind them, a few taxi cabs waited in their limbo between rush hour and last orders, bulky, but placid. I could have sat down then but didn’t want to risk an unwanted approach. I turned down a further pedestrianized street and planned a circuit, round to the other side of the Walk, and in time, back to my room.
The more I walked, the greater grew the sense of an intently listening presence around me. Gradually my misery faded and transformed into an obscure sense of privilege. Here was this long-lived, wonderful city, showing herself—and yes, by now I did instinctively think of the city as female. All her historic scars and victories shimmering just below her surface. Although dusk was thickening by the minute, her kaleidoscopic self distilled into a dense white suspension—not a searing light, but more like a mist: the living essence of the city’s soul.
Walking became stillness. Silence softened into wordless dialogue.
The city’s soul, I realized, was my own.
I’m not clear on how I ended my walk, or what I did in the hours and days afterwards, except I was aware of this: I had been welcomed, and empathized with, and heard. Julian of Norwich listened to those who sought her counsel at the anchorhold window, and saw how soul and city could in some ways be made one (or the medieval participle, “oned,” as she would put it). I understood that I was one with my own city, figuratively and literally—and spiritually, too. Even though it’s been overused as an uplifting but simplistic soundbite, I associate that evening walk through my city with Mother Julian’s most famous saying: “All Shall Be Well, and All Shall Be Well, and All Manner of Thing Shall be Well.” Perhaps Julian, as prayerful genius loci, is the true soul of this city, just as she was in her lifetime—the contemplative center of a turning urban world.
Sarah Law lives in Norwich, UK, and is an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. She has published six collections of poetry, and her novel, Sketches from a Sunlit Heaven, is forthcoming from Wipf and Stock. She edits the online journal Amethyst Review.
