Loved this one. There's an overwhelming fact about Ireland I've never heard anyone mention, yet this fact underscores the actual, visceral experience of living here (here being outside of Dublin and out into the countryside): this land is *voracious*. It is fecund beyond belief: consuming, wearing, rotting, covering anything left outside in thick clumps of moss in a matter of days. Ireland's history is extremely deep, but what's maybe most remarkable is how much of that history has surely been quickly devoured by the land itself and is now irretrievably lost.
And maybe most would read that as depressing, or tragic. "All these girls grown old now/All that long hair in the grave/Realise, what's done is done/It's far too late to be saved" (https://genius.com/Laika-black-cat-bone-lyrics) The more of this I see, the more I see the task as one of understanding that the transience *is* where the truth and the beauty are to be found.
American actress Jennifer Jason Leigh once said, "Seeing hope is what breaks my heart. Every time." Young people, young families, full of hope, all wondering, "is something good going to happen for me?" When all that's waiting is the damp mulch and the rain.
It's the lesson of Ozymandias, over and over again. The world fools us that way, and we want to believe our eyes more than the truth, which is that given time, all we survey will be dust. This would be depressing, but for another truth; that Spring will surely come and new growth will follow.
"Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o'ersways their power
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower ?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of battr'ing days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays ?
O, fearful meditation : where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid ?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid ?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright."
Shakespeare Sonnet 65.
As with other sonnets by Shakespeare, I have committed this one to memory, to carry along with me, next to my heart where it will comfort me, and sometimes, somebody else...(along with the 100th Psalm)
And I am a firm believer now in the necessity of respecting our dead by remembering them, at least from time to time. That is an important part of being Man, for me. Being Man in a way that I would like to remain Man, in any case...
I wouldn't exactly say "all" that's waiting, because I don't know. And there is the "between" where time has the time to pass that is rather important, I think.
There is truth and beauty to be found in the transience, but I tend to think that they are not for the young, whose point in life is... not there. They are for the old, sometimes as a consolation. We are sinners to want the young to see the world we see, aren't we ? When they still have the revolutionary fire in them ?
In French : "si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait". If the young knew, if the old could.
Well, my point is more that the "between" is all there is. If we could actually spend our lives in that place (not claiming I'm any better than anyone else in this culture at this), rather than looking forward with vain/deluded hope, or backwards in regret, life would seem much less tragic, more bearable, and potentially much more joyous, graceful, beauty-filled and truthful. There would still always be tragic dimensions to life, but they wouldn't bleed so darkly into our days.
As far as what's waiting, the land is not hiding it from us. We are hiding from *it*. If you're speaking in religious terms, I suppose the way I see that is something like this:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity—Shelley, 'Adonais'
Every time I think that I know something, something else pops up that takes my certainty about it away.
I'm not sure that we allow ourselves to feel a tragic consciousness these days, though, and I'm not sure that that is what is bleeding so darkly into our days (but are everybody's days being bled into ? not sure about that one, either.). I think that maybe time that has not been consecrated is devouring us, as does time when it is not socially or spiritually structured. The Gregorian calendar is succumbing, and we are succumbing with it. This is agonizing.
I am not sure that we can feel joy, grace and beauty without their being accompanied by the tragic consciousness of mutability. Maybe that is why so many people in Western civilisation see so little grace, joy and beauty right now, and maybe even don't want to see them ? I'm not sure exactly what I see, but it is rather deadening, anesthetizing, or.. tries to be ?
Many years ago, when in spiritual crisis, I asked my paternal aunt for advice (and I was... older at the time already) and she said : take care of the house. The cooking, the cleaning, the HOUSEKEEPING and now I think she was right. When everything threatens to be borne away at light year speed, we are called upon to stay put (at least some of us ?) and "save the furniture" as the French say. But you can engage yourself to saving the furniture and have a tragic consciousness too, and feel grace, joy, beauty. They are all there in the world, if we can only manage to see them, I believe. And sometimes we can part the clouds for a minute ? and show them to people around us who are in desperate need of seeing them, too ? As long as we don't believe that we are permanently saving people for all time, maybe that is o.k. ?
I don't understand your sentences "as far as what's waiting, the land is not hiding it from us. We are hiding from "it". "
You write: I don't understand your sentences "as far as what's waiting, the land is not hiding it from us. We are hiding from "it". "
Was a response to your "all" that's waiting line. All I'm saying is the Irish loam has no hesitation or modesty in showing us what awaits: absolute putrefaction. That's a materialist reading of human mortality, I know, but ours are mortal bodies. If there is any sort of after-life, to me that appears almost irrelevant as we are not going to be living Christmas morning 2005 with our children ever again. Life ends. There is at a phenomenological level no hope. Hope is a delusion, and contrary to popular belief is not only unnecessary, but is an actively self-sabotaging way of viewing things.
Death is not an annihilation, however, it's a transformation. If you can find hope in that, well, I personally don't see it:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.—"Ariel's Song" Shakespeare, 'The Tempest'
Your line "I am not sure that we can feel joy, grace and beauty without their being accompanied by the tragic consciousness of mutability" is interesting, but it's completely false. I know it to be so because I was a young child once, and experienced all those things with almost absolute intensity accompanied by no such tragic consciousness at all.
Hmmm. Very interesting. I have been writing on Paul's leave here (if you permit, Paul) for a while now, and I am sure that I have quoted Ariel's song as an inaugural moment in my life long love affair with William Shakespeare, Ariel's song in a William Godwin illustrated version of Charles Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare" that came down to me from my father (he scribbled in it, naughty boy), that is still in my possession, albeit without the illustration from "Romeo and Juliet" that I spent hours in front of as a child, that's how beautiful I thought it was. But Ariel's song was no mean stuff either, and its music has been around me for a lifetime, in itself a beautiful.. monument that I keep coming back to.
On children's consciousness of tragedy, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "Margaret are you grieving over golden grove unleaving ?" comes to mind, as well as the incident where my five year old son brought his father and me to task, asking us "why we had made him since he had to die", after visiting his grandfather's grave. He definitely put us on the spot that time, and he had a real gift for putting us on the spot. He did NOT spare us in certain areas, thankfully... verbally.
It shocks me the way American contemporary culture is so devoted to transforming children into shallow, edulcorated things (without tragic consciousness ?). I was confronted with it many years ago after relating this incident to a group of American expat writers who were very uncomfortable with the idea of my 5 year old saying what he said. But... he DID say what he did, and no, I am not a monster because he was capable of thinking it. I don't think so. He had his moments of joy and grace growing up too.
I recall reading the typical age children first understand they will die one day is 11. This understanding appears to be unique to our species on this earth and certainly has had a massive impact on every human culture. I'd venture the impact in this particular culture is a frantic, neurotic flight from death. I once apologised to my adult children for bringing them into this world, telling them the 90s were a silly time where we thought Al Gore was on top of this climate change stuff. Turns out they were not holding it against me, and claimed they were happy to have been born. Hopefully it stays that way, as I have had some bitter thoughts about what my own parents could possibly have been thinking bringing me into the world just a few years after the Cuban missile crisis!
I suppose what I'm advocating fundamentally is a more genuinely animal way of living and dying. I think this culture is nearly a complete void in terms of wisdom and has nothing to say worth my hearing, with extremely rare exception as with, for example, Iain McGilchrist. When a dying fox crawls into an old burrow beneath a tree, it may be going to die, but it apparently believes it is going to rest and heal, to emerge later when it feels better. In fact, most animals wander off away from their kin when dying, so no foxes may be dying in burrows, but my point holds.
Is there some way to thread that needle between a comforting ignorance and existential terror for humans? To die beneath the tree rather than hooked up to drip feeds in a hospital bed, surrounded by frowning doctors and concerned family-members? Seems to me there is a great deal more dignity in the former, but it likely comes down to how ready one is to release their own mortal clinging and simply experience the pain, and the cold, and the smell of pine needles, and the cloudy sky, and the sound of wind through leaves, until the end.
No plans, no expectations, no regrets. Seems to me a human might still believe she will heal and emerge again, once rested and restored, only in a new form, or myriad new forms.
And yes, established religion can for some serve this function, but too many of us have had our minds vandalised and strewn with absurd detritus and quasi-true information by this culture to trust those with any real conviction any longer. I'll concede most at the Abbey these days are likely Christians and believe if I just thought like them I'd be fine about this stuff. I don't, however, and never will. Don't @ me about it.
Great piece, really enjoying this series. I moved to a rural area of upstate New York during COVID and one of the things I soon noticed was how many old family plots are dotted around the countryside, including one on the property I bought. The difference here is that almost all of them are still lovingly tended to. The headstones may be worn and off-kilter, but the owners make sure the grass is trimmed, fences mended, etc.
A local veterans group keeps a list, and makes sure that a fresh American flag is put on every veterans grave each Memorial Day. There is a Revolutionary War vet buried in my plot, one of the original settlers of my little hamlet. Maybe in a few hundred more years, people will have forgotten, but as long as I live here, I feel a sense of duty to make sure I honor the old guy’s memory, and the work he did in life to help found the country that took in my own Irish ancestors when the famine drove them here.
God told Adam "Cursed is the ground for your sake" . It is comforting to me to know my bones will turn to dust. It will be a blessing to shed this body and finally be free. In Gods time though not tripping on death just think it would be horrible to be stuck here forever. Were born into the grave.
Someone once said that there's nothing sadder than an abandoned farm. There is truth to that, but I'd say the same about abandoned graveyards. I find sadness there, but also consolation, in the knowledge that the people buried there are "known only to God." I don't know if it's an Orthodox (or Catholic) custom to cross oneself and say a prayer when passing a cemetery, but over the years it's become a habit of mine.
I suppose it is how you see it. I find it comforting that we return to the mother (earth) all of us, despite our power or wealth. And from her (the mother) comes new life. Always liked this line from Mary Oliver. ' I think the earth remembered me she took me back so tenderly"(I'm not sure of the exact wording but close). Back to green shoots ,moss, mushrooms etc.
Reclamation of the gentle kind and fresh water with its own poetry.
Was intrigued by Alyward House - the family seems to have complicated if unsurprising later religious history. https://bit.ly/3uv8Yx7
I have valued over my lifetime the sensibility of the major poet WB Yeats who lived and shared Irish national aspirations and was unscathed during the civil war among the nationalists in the temporary Irish Free State, 1922 - 23. For what it is worth, Yeats was a friend and something of a mentor for the American Poet Ezra Pound, without sharing Pound's later hopes and faith in Mussolini, but that is another story.
Yeats is one of my all-time favourite poets. A true genius. During the revolution and civil war he supported the uprising, but as an Anglo himself, and a protestant, he had a necessarily complicated relationship with the emerging Catholic state. All of which made his poetry about it better. 'Easter 1916' was castigated by his would-be lover, Maud Gonne, for being too uncommitted to the cause. But Yeats, whilst supporting the overthrow of the British, could also see the 'terrible beauty' that the uprising would unleash, and that made his understanding far more layered than simple politicking would have given him.
He hits so deep. I watched the movie 'No Country for Old Men' (for at least the 10th time) the other night with a friend who had never seen it. Afterwards, I read her both 'Sailing to Byzantium' (obviously where the novel/movie gets its title) and a few passages from Ecclesiastes. Much to my surprise, 'Sailing to Byzantium' brought tears to my eyes--I could hardly get through it. As has 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death' which I once shared with coworkers on the topic of why we humans often take seemingly unnecessary risks. Heck, long ago, I even set "The Song of Wandering Aengus' to music. I was never much of a songwriter, but it was one of the few that people really ever responded to. Obviously due far more to Yeats than Leahy.
It was probably sometime in the mid-nineties that after an evening of drinking at a pub with friends and waiting to sober up before driving home, I walked directly over to the local bookstore with the sole intention of purchasing Yeats' Collected Works. After all the regrettable book purges of the past few years of moving around (nearly everything I now own fits in my car. Two moves is as good as a fire, as they say) I still have it.
All of which is to say, that those who haven't read him, should. It is well worth it.
And I hadn't ever known about the Donavan version. He emphasizes the sadness of the poem. I like it. In contrast, I attempted to capture the longing and unattainable aspiration of it. I have to think there was more than a little of his relationship with Maud Gonne in the poem. With that in mind, in hindsight, if I were to set it now, I might emphasize the sadness of it. Then I was still a young man.
Much I do not understand of his mind, his times, his language, but still can go there. Yes, those 'mackerel crowded seas'. 'Easter 2016', of course, and 'Nineteen Hundred and Ninteen'. In my old age I turn to the 'Municipal Gallery Revisited'. John Synge? He altered something in my puzzled mind when I was barely out of childhood. Such stuff goes long distance.
Philip- Yes, beautifully put. When long ago I first dove into Yeats, what surprised me was the music of it. Which at first, I will admit, being myself an unwitting American child of Whitman, seemed kind of sing-song to me. It didn't take long to get over that. His music is profound, which means--almost by definition--I won't understand it. All the better.
Along with Dostoevsky, a few of the novels by Cormac McCarthy, the music of Arvo Part, among very few others, Yeats' music stays with me all the more as I get older. As I recounted above, deeper than I had realized.
Yeats : yes, yes... I learned "A Prayer for my Daughter" by heart, that's how much I loved it, and still do. And the Crazy Jane poems... they speak to me deeply now that I am an old woman and not particularly ashamed to be one. I will look up the other poem you mentioned in my book of the collected works... (;-) )
The sing-song is what music is all about. And the music of words, too, I think.
Last night I listened to a very amateur version of Brahm's German Requiem, with many passages from Ecclesiastes in it, and despite the very amateur version, Brahms shone through, and Ecclesiastes too, and I wept silently through much of the performance, that's how strong it speaks to me, and echoes in me still after 40 years with it. Some things, at least, don't fade or diminish even though others do. Thank God.
Debra- It is good to read you here as well. I have made what amounts to a great circle. Literally a circuit around the continental USA. (A beautiful drive, I must say). But also very different circles as well. Things are still a bit up in the air at the moment. Hopefully, they will be more settled soon.
It is early here and am about to head off to work. I intend to respond more fully to your comments this evening. For what it's worth.
Yeats' poetry I find to be so unusually memorable. He's not even my favourite poet (Shelley's fiery linguistic acrobatics never cease to amaze), yet for nearly 40 years since I first read them, lines from 'The Witch' or 'A Drinking Song' or 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' will rise unbidden to the surface of consciousness and I'll find myself again leisurely marvelling over the immaculate craftsmanship. Perhaps my favourite lines of his are these, from a letter to his mistress rather than from any poem, though they read like poetry. And they make me chuckle in arch recognition. It's not a particularly elevated sentiment, but for an honest gentleman getting on in years, well, truer words:
"I shall be a sinful man to the end, and think upon my death-bed of all the nights I wasted in my youth."
I mean, he's writing *perfect* poetry without even trying:
I shall be a sinful man to the end,
And think upon my death-bed
Of all the nights I wasted in my youth
It's something you'd expect to read from Bukowski, though Bukowski never had the chops to write that well.
I tell you, proximity to the ghost of Yeats alone makes emigrating to Ireland worthwhile.
And yes, I wish I could join all the ghosts and all the living in Ireland. I have felt the call too often. Even so, I hope to get back there for another visit before I shuffle off...
And there is this side of Yeats as well, which is fully complementary, I think, to your quote above (and you are absolutely right, it is beautiful poetry, It's as if he couldn't help himself but to write so). From 'Vacillation'.
This piece can be read as human history. For what do we leave behind but rotting remains, perhaps decorated briefly by our immediate descendants. A headstone, perhaps, or mausoleum or by a simple cross. For a shorter time, flowers will occasionally appear, but eventually, even the best-kept cemetery will fold back into wilderness or be paved over or replaced by buildings. Even buildings, like the big houses, will burn, be destroyed, or decay.
I am a firm believer in reading in context. Macbeth is a man who has not led an upright life, and who has gone astray in a big way, shall we say. I think it is best to take what he says at this critical point in the play with a grain of salt and remember that.
After all, Ecclesiastes is there to answer him : what remains of a man is also.. his "works" (and not his work), but there remains something. Enough, maybe, that we should be careful in our lives, and OF them.
Banishment to Connacht seems to have been a constant theme among the Irish in America. I ran across a story involving the "Connacht curse", though the specific curse wasn't given in the story. The term has come alive again in videogames.
Given the thoughtful discussion in this thread I am a little abashed to contribute this tangential thought, but maybe Paul will appreciate it. In 2017 a Belfast man told me that what unites Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants is their mutual hated of The National Trust.
Back when I lived there in the 1990s, a visit to The Giants Causeway was like going on an unstructured hike to a wonderful natural site (albeit with tour buses).
Now it’s all “musee-a-fied.” Imagine what the Trust would do with the wells!
I am very homesick for Anglo-Saxon graveyards right now, in France, where graveyards look like miniature cities. The very idea of being buried (but the French are heavily into incineration right now, in their obstination to root out the Christian practice of burial) in a city makes my stomach turn. There is a beautiful graveyard in Newark, Nottinghamshire ? (forgive my imprecision) where you could spend hours walking through, looking at the tombstones, in a refreshingly GREEN PLACE that is not laid out like an American city street, and where there are not countless rows of identical little white crosses either. I have always loved wandering around GREEN graveyards, where a blade of grass can flourish without being doused with weedkiller. Where the tombs are set in the grass (but not little identical white crosses, I repeat).
On the National Trust houses... my midinette mentality made me pull up nonexistent roots in the "mother country" where old things are torn down regularly and incessantly to make way for the new, as much for ideological reasons as for other ones. The U.S..... is not a country for old men, and was not designed to be one. I wanted to be in a place with a physical memory, where the past was more materialized ? and I could still see it a little bit.
All the running to keep up/afloat rather tires me out these days, and makes me want for the pace to slow down, the monuments to stand a little more still (although places on the East Coast and West definitely have their still standing monuments), for a little longer, even if I know that we will all turn to dust in the long run. (But before I turn to dust, maybe I will turn to compost for my beloved little worms outside, who.... spend their days working on the soil, for their good, and mine, and the good of the earth.)
France... Michel Houellebeq had a character witness his grandmother's grave being dug up after his family failed to pay the fee required to keep her buried. Found that such a strange policy! The other day I heard (is it in the new movie?) an anecdote where Napoleon was surveying a huge battlefield covered with the corpses of French soldiers and dismissively waved it off saying, "one night in Paris can replace all these men." This statement is both outrageous and morbidly funny.
I'm not sure France has a very different relationship to human mortality than any other Western nation, though I'm not sure I can think of anything else quite like those catacombs of skulls beneath Paris. One of my best friends is French and the older I get, the more annoying I find him. There's a kind of frenzy he displays to appear unpretentious by refusing to consider anything too seriously. I suspect the French of being terrified of ridicule and hence theirs is a profoundly and deceptively conformist culture.
Years ago the British music journalist Simon Reynolds wrote an essay in defence of pretension, particularly for artists, in part saying "all it really means is to aspire to something." He further went on to assert that true pretension was making a show of aspiring to nothing at all.
And it's amazing to me how doggedly so many cling to that: aspiring to nothing.
A few years ago, I was in a museum of fashion in Lyon for an exposition about Yves Saint Laurent, and in the following exposition/exhibition ? there was a quotation comparing the French to other European cultures. I can't remember that quotation correctly now, but it boils down to the idea that, unlike the Italians, the French come into the world totally naked and with their eyes poised to see what their neighbors are doing, to be able to copy to a T what other "creators" are doing, and as fast as possible. No true originality, but slavish copying everywhere, and in every domain. Lots of emphasis on how necessary it is to copy, up to... René Girard, who makes a formal defense/justification of copying everybody and everything ? but this attitude has its limits, in my opinion.
Which also makes me think about something I read this past week about the sin of coveting, or "convoitise" as it is called in French. The idea is wanting to have what somebody else has, and I believe that coveting is the motor of the French revolution. Coveting is a deadly sin because it engenders a constantly mealy mouthed attitude toward life, and the feeling of being entitled to have what the neighbor has. It engenders people who have their eyes glued to windows which HAVE TO BE TRANSPARENT in order for them to see what is behind them, just in case somebody might have something that YOU do not have, but which, of course, you have the sacred right to have. Sordid. And of course, coveting is a a big motor for a consumer society too. Keeps it humming.
Who wants to be mealy mouthed , or sordid ??
Better to be noble, she says, even if you get carted off to the guillotine by all the Coveting people, or crucified by the Coveting people too...
I look forward to hearing your insights, Jack, and particularly as they must come from such a great variety of circles. My circles are very small. But sometimes I feel as though I am the equivalent of Pluto on its orbit, and... there is some value in being Pluto in orbit, when it comes to having a certain perspective on circles and orbits.
I think the well is beautiful
Loved this one. There's an overwhelming fact about Ireland I've never heard anyone mention, yet this fact underscores the actual, visceral experience of living here (here being outside of Dublin and out into the countryside): this land is *voracious*. It is fecund beyond belief: consuming, wearing, rotting, covering anything left outside in thick clumps of moss in a matter of days. Ireland's history is extremely deep, but what's maybe most remarkable is how much of that history has surely been quickly devoured by the land itself and is now irretrievably lost.
And maybe most would read that as depressing, or tragic. "All these girls grown old now/All that long hair in the grave/Realise, what's done is done/It's far too late to be saved" (https://genius.com/Laika-black-cat-bone-lyrics) The more of this I see, the more I see the task as one of understanding that the transience *is* where the truth and the beauty are to be found.
American actress Jennifer Jason Leigh once said, "Seeing hope is what breaks my heart. Every time." Young people, young families, full of hope, all wondering, "is something good going to happen for me?" When all that's waiting is the damp mulch and the rain.
It's the lesson of Ozymandias, over and over again. The world fools us that way, and we want to believe our eyes more than the truth, which is that given time, all we survey will be dust. This would be depressing, but for another truth; that Spring will surely come and new growth will follow.
Jim, beautifully put!
"Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o'ersways their power
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower ?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of battr'ing days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays ?
O, fearful meditation : where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid ?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid ?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright."
Shakespeare Sonnet 65.
As with other sonnets by Shakespeare, I have committed this one to memory, to carry along with me, next to my heart where it will comfort me, and sometimes, somebody else...(along with the 100th Psalm)
And I am a firm believer now in the necessity of respecting our dead by remembering them, at least from time to time. That is an important part of being Man, for me. Being Man in a way that I would like to remain Man, in any case...
I wouldn't exactly say "all" that's waiting, because I don't know. And there is the "between" where time has the time to pass that is rather important, I think.
There is truth and beauty to be found in the transience, but I tend to think that they are not for the young, whose point in life is... not there. They are for the old, sometimes as a consolation. We are sinners to want the young to see the world we see, aren't we ? When they still have the revolutionary fire in them ?
In French : "si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait". If the young knew, if the old could.
Good wisdom, succinctly put.
Well, my point is more that the "between" is all there is. If we could actually spend our lives in that place (not claiming I'm any better than anyone else in this culture at this), rather than looking forward with vain/deluded hope, or backwards in regret, life would seem much less tragic, more bearable, and potentially much more joyous, graceful, beauty-filled and truthful. There would still always be tragic dimensions to life, but they wouldn't bleed so darkly into our days.
As far as what's waiting, the land is not hiding it from us. We are hiding from *it*. If you're speaking in religious terms, I suppose the way I see that is something like this:
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity—Shelley, 'Adonais'
Every time I think that I know something, something else pops up that takes my certainty about it away.
I'm not sure that we allow ourselves to feel a tragic consciousness these days, though, and I'm not sure that that is what is bleeding so darkly into our days (but are everybody's days being bled into ? not sure about that one, either.). I think that maybe time that has not been consecrated is devouring us, as does time when it is not socially or spiritually structured. The Gregorian calendar is succumbing, and we are succumbing with it. This is agonizing.
I am not sure that we can feel joy, grace and beauty without their being accompanied by the tragic consciousness of mutability. Maybe that is why so many people in Western civilisation see so little grace, joy and beauty right now, and maybe even don't want to see them ? I'm not sure exactly what I see, but it is rather deadening, anesthetizing, or.. tries to be ?
Many years ago, when in spiritual crisis, I asked my paternal aunt for advice (and I was... older at the time already) and she said : take care of the house. The cooking, the cleaning, the HOUSEKEEPING and now I think she was right. When everything threatens to be borne away at light year speed, we are called upon to stay put (at least some of us ?) and "save the furniture" as the French say. But you can engage yourself to saving the furniture and have a tragic consciousness too, and feel grace, joy, beauty. They are all there in the world, if we can only manage to see them, I believe. And sometimes we can part the clouds for a minute ? and show them to people around us who are in desperate need of seeing them, too ? As long as we don't believe that we are permanently saving people for all time, maybe that is o.k. ?
I don't understand your sentences "as far as what's waiting, the land is not hiding it from us. We are hiding from "it". "
You write: I don't understand your sentences "as far as what's waiting, the land is not hiding it from us. We are hiding from "it". "
Was a response to your "all" that's waiting line. All I'm saying is the Irish loam has no hesitation or modesty in showing us what awaits: absolute putrefaction. That's a materialist reading of human mortality, I know, but ours are mortal bodies. If there is any sort of after-life, to me that appears almost irrelevant as we are not going to be living Christmas morning 2005 with our children ever again. Life ends. There is at a phenomenological level no hope. Hope is a delusion, and contrary to popular belief is not only unnecessary, but is an actively self-sabotaging way of viewing things.
Death is not an annihilation, however, it's a transformation. If you can find hope in that, well, I personally don't see it:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.—"Ariel's Song" Shakespeare, 'The Tempest'
Your line "I am not sure that we can feel joy, grace and beauty without their being accompanied by the tragic consciousness of mutability" is interesting, but it's completely false. I know it to be so because I was a young child once, and experienced all those things with almost absolute intensity accompanied by no such tragic consciousness at all.
Hmmm. Very interesting. I have been writing on Paul's leave here (if you permit, Paul) for a while now, and I am sure that I have quoted Ariel's song as an inaugural moment in my life long love affair with William Shakespeare, Ariel's song in a William Godwin illustrated version of Charles Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare" that came down to me from my father (he scribbled in it, naughty boy), that is still in my possession, albeit without the illustration from "Romeo and Juliet" that I spent hours in front of as a child, that's how beautiful I thought it was. But Ariel's song was no mean stuff either, and its music has been around me for a lifetime, in itself a beautiful.. monument that I keep coming back to.
On children's consciousness of tragedy, Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "Margaret are you grieving over golden grove unleaving ?" comes to mind, as well as the incident where my five year old son brought his father and me to task, asking us "why we had made him since he had to die", after visiting his grandfather's grave. He definitely put us on the spot that time, and he had a real gift for putting us on the spot. He did NOT spare us in certain areas, thankfully... verbally.
It shocks me the way American contemporary culture is so devoted to transforming children into shallow, edulcorated things (without tragic consciousness ?). I was confronted with it many years ago after relating this incident to a group of American expat writers who were very uncomfortable with the idea of my 5 year old saying what he said. But... he DID say what he did, and no, I am not a monster because he was capable of thinking it. I don't think so. He had his moments of joy and grace growing up too.
I recall reading the typical age children first understand they will die one day is 11. This understanding appears to be unique to our species on this earth and certainly has had a massive impact on every human culture. I'd venture the impact in this particular culture is a frantic, neurotic flight from death. I once apologised to my adult children for bringing them into this world, telling them the 90s were a silly time where we thought Al Gore was on top of this climate change stuff. Turns out they were not holding it against me, and claimed they were happy to have been born. Hopefully it stays that way, as I have had some bitter thoughts about what my own parents could possibly have been thinking bringing me into the world just a few years after the Cuban missile crisis!
I suppose what I'm advocating fundamentally is a more genuinely animal way of living and dying. I think this culture is nearly a complete void in terms of wisdom and has nothing to say worth my hearing, with extremely rare exception as with, for example, Iain McGilchrist. When a dying fox crawls into an old burrow beneath a tree, it may be going to die, but it apparently believes it is going to rest and heal, to emerge later when it feels better. In fact, most animals wander off away from their kin when dying, so no foxes may be dying in burrows, but my point holds.
Is there some way to thread that needle between a comforting ignorance and existential terror for humans? To die beneath the tree rather than hooked up to drip feeds in a hospital bed, surrounded by frowning doctors and concerned family-members? Seems to me there is a great deal more dignity in the former, but it likely comes down to how ready one is to release their own mortal clinging and simply experience the pain, and the cold, and the smell of pine needles, and the cloudy sky, and the sound of wind through leaves, until the end.
No plans, no expectations, no regrets. Seems to me a human might still believe she will heal and emerge again, once rested and restored, only in a new form, or myriad new forms.
And yes, established religion can for some serve this function, but too many of us have had our minds vandalised and strewn with absurd detritus and quasi-true information by this culture to trust those with any real conviction any longer. I'll concede most at the Abbey these days are likely Christians and believe if I just thought like them I'd be fine about this stuff. I don't, however, and never will. Don't @ me about it.
Great piece, really enjoying this series. I moved to a rural area of upstate New York during COVID and one of the things I soon noticed was how many old family plots are dotted around the countryside, including one on the property I bought. The difference here is that almost all of them are still lovingly tended to. The headstones may be worn and off-kilter, but the owners make sure the grass is trimmed, fences mended, etc.
A local veterans group keeps a list, and makes sure that a fresh American flag is put on every veterans grave each Memorial Day. There is a Revolutionary War vet buried in my plot, one of the original settlers of my little hamlet. Maybe in a few hundred more years, people will have forgotten, but as long as I live here, I feel a sense of duty to make sure I honor the old guy’s memory, and the work he did in life to help found the country that took in my own Irish ancestors when the famine drove them here.
God told Adam "Cursed is the ground for your sake" . It is comforting to me to know my bones will turn to dust. It will be a blessing to shed this body and finally be free. In Gods time though not tripping on death just think it would be horrible to be stuck here forever. Were born into the grave.
Someone once said that there's nothing sadder than an abandoned farm. There is truth to that, but I'd say the same about abandoned graveyards. I find sadness there, but also consolation, in the knowledge that the people buried there are "known only to God." I don't know if it's an Orthodox (or Catholic) custom to cross oneself and say a prayer when passing a cemetery, but over the years it's become a habit of mine.
I suppose it is how you see it. I find it comforting that we return to the mother (earth) all of us, despite our power or wealth. And from her (the mother) comes new life. Always liked this line from Mary Oliver. ' I think the earth remembered me she took me back so tenderly"(I'm not sure of the exact wording but close). Back to green shoots ,moss, mushrooms etc.
Reclamation of the gentle kind and fresh water with its own poetry.
Was intrigued by Alyward House - the family seems to have complicated if unsurprising later religious history. https://bit.ly/3uv8Yx7
I have valued over my lifetime the sensibility of the major poet WB Yeats who lived and shared Irish national aspirations and was unscathed during the civil war among the nationalists in the temporary Irish Free State, 1922 - 23. For what it is worth, Yeats was a friend and something of a mentor for the American Poet Ezra Pound, without sharing Pound's later hopes and faith in Mussolini, but that is another story.
Yeats is one of my all-time favourite poets. A true genius. During the revolution and civil war he supported the uprising, but as an Anglo himself, and a protestant, he had a necessarily complicated relationship with the emerging Catholic state. All of which made his poetry about it better. 'Easter 1916' was castigated by his would-be lover, Maud Gonne, for being too uncommitted to the cause. But Yeats, whilst supporting the overthrow of the British, could also see the 'terrible beauty' that the uprising would unleash, and that made his understanding far more layered than simple politicking would have given him.
RE: Yeats.
He hits so deep. I watched the movie 'No Country for Old Men' (for at least the 10th time) the other night with a friend who had never seen it. Afterwards, I read her both 'Sailing to Byzantium' (obviously where the novel/movie gets its title) and a few passages from Ecclesiastes. Much to my surprise, 'Sailing to Byzantium' brought tears to my eyes--I could hardly get through it. As has 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death' which I once shared with coworkers on the topic of why we humans often take seemingly unnecessary risks. Heck, long ago, I even set "The Song of Wandering Aengus' to music. I was never much of a songwriter, but it was one of the few that people really ever responded to. Obviously due far more to Yeats than Leahy.
It was probably sometime in the mid-nineties that after an evening of drinking at a pub with friends and waiting to sober up before driving home, I walked directly over to the local bookstore with the sole intention of purchasing Yeats' Collected Works. After all the regrettable book purges of the past few years of moving around (nearly everything I now own fits in my car. Two moves is as good as a fire, as they say) I still have it.
All of which is to say, that those who haven't read him, should. It is well worth it.
I'd like to hear that song! Did you ever hear Donovan's version? It's very Sixties but I like it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQUT6mS0eY8&ab_channel=Sissham
Wandering Aengus is one of a few Yeats poems I can recite by heart. It's just fantastic. He was the real deal.
I just emailed it to you. For what it's worth.
And I hadn't ever known about the Donavan version. He emphasizes the sadness of the poem. I like it. In contrast, I attempted to capture the longing and unattainable aspiration of it. I have to think there was more than a little of his relationship with Maud Gonne in the poem. With that in mind, in hindsight, if I were to set it now, I might emphasize the sadness of it. Then I was still a young man.
I love the Christie Moore setting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rz_m8TnHhYw
His version emphasizes a kind of quiet melancholy. Beautiful.
I hadn't heard of this. Will listen. Thanks.
Much I do not understand of his mind, his times, his language, but still can go there. Yes, those 'mackerel crowded seas'. 'Easter 2016', of course, and 'Nineteen Hundred and Ninteen'. In my old age I turn to the 'Municipal Gallery Revisited'. John Synge? He altered something in my puzzled mind when I was barely out of childhood. Such stuff goes long distance.
Philip- Yes, beautifully put. When long ago I first dove into Yeats, what surprised me was the music of it. Which at first, I will admit, being myself an unwitting American child of Whitman, seemed kind of sing-song to me. It didn't take long to get over that. His music is profound, which means--almost by definition--I won't understand it. All the better.
Along with Dostoevsky, a few of the novels by Cormac McCarthy, the music of Arvo Part, among very few others, Yeats' music stays with me all the more as I get older. As I recounted above, deeper than I had realized.
I hope you are well. -Jack
I'm happy to read you here, Jack.
Yeats : yes, yes... I learned "A Prayer for my Daughter" by heart, that's how much I loved it, and still do. And the Crazy Jane poems... they speak to me deeply now that I am an old woman and not particularly ashamed to be one. I will look up the other poem you mentioned in my book of the collected works... (;-) )
The sing-song is what music is all about. And the music of words, too, I think.
Last night I listened to a very amateur version of Brahm's German Requiem, with many passages from Ecclesiastes in it, and despite the very amateur version, Brahms shone through, and Ecclesiastes too, and I wept silently through much of the performance, that's how strong it speaks to me, and echoes in me still after 40 years with it. Some things, at least, don't fade or diminish even though others do. Thank God.
Debra- It is good to read you here as well. I have made what amounts to a great circle. Literally a circuit around the continental USA. (A beautiful drive, I must say). But also very different circles as well. Things are still a bit up in the air at the moment. Hopefully, they will be more settled soon.
It is early here and am about to head off to work. I intend to respond more fully to your comments this evening. For what it's worth.
I hope you are well. -Jack
Yeats' poetry I find to be so unusually memorable. He's not even my favourite poet (Shelley's fiery linguistic acrobatics never cease to amaze), yet for nearly 40 years since I first read them, lines from 'The Witch' or 'A Drinking Song' or 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' will rise unbidden to the surface of consciousness and I'll find myself again leisurely marvelling over the immaculate craftsmanship. Perhaps my favourite lines of his are these, from a letter to his mistress rather than from any poem, though they read like poetry. And they make me chuckle in arch recognition. It's not a particularly elevated sentiment, but for an honest gentleman getting on in years, well, truer words:
"I shall be a sinful man to the end, and think upon my death-bed of all the nights I wasted in my youth."
I mean, he's writing *perfect* poetry without even trying:
I shall be a sinful man to the end,
And think upon my death-bed
Of all the nights I wasted in my youth
It's something you'd expect to read from Bukowski, though Bukowski never had the chops to write that well.
I tell you, proximity to the ghost of Yeats alone makes emigrating to Ireland worthwhile.
Beautiful. Yeats is truly a marvel.
And yes, I wish I could join all the ghosts and all the living in Ireland. I have felt the call too often. Even so, I hope to get back there for another visit before I shuffle off...
And there is this side of Yeats as well, which is fully complementary, I think, to your quote above (and you are absolutely right, it is beautiful poetry, It's as if he couldn't help himself but to write so). From 'Vacillation'.
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
Geez, fifty is still so young, right ?
So precious, that blaze.
lovely
This piece can be read as human history. For what do we leave behind but rotting remains, perhaps decorated briefly by our immediate descendants. A headstone, perhaps, or mausoleum or by a simple cross. For a shorter time, flowers will occasionally appear, but eventually, even the best-kept cemetery will fold back into wilderness or be paved over or replaced by buildings. Even buildings, like the big houses, will burn, be destroyed, or decay.
In Shakespeare's immortal words:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare replied above, in a sonnet.
I am a firm believer in reading in context. Macbeth is a man who has not led an upright life, and who has gone astray in a big way, shall we say. I think it is best to take what he says at this critical point in the play with a grain of salt and remember that.
After all, Ecclesiastes is there to answer him : what remains of a man is also.. his "works" (and not his work), but there remains something. Enough, maybe, that we should be careful in our lives, and OF them.
I'm not sure what your point is.
What is not clear ? Where to start ?
Banishment to Connacht seems to have been a constant theme among the Irish in America. I ran across a story involving the "Connacht curse", though the specific curse wasn't given in the story. The term has come alive again in videogames.
http://polistrasmill.com/2022/06/08/natural-justice/
Given the thoughtful discussion in this thread I am a little abashed to contribute this tangential thought, but maybe Paul will appreciate it. In 2017 a Belfast man told me that what unites Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants is their mutual hated of The National Trust.
Back when I lived there in the 1990s, a visit to The Giants Causeway was like going on an unstructured hike to a wonderful natural site (albeit with tour buses).
Now it’s all “musee-a-fied.” Imagine what the Trust would do with the wells!
Well put. Very well put.
Ah.. those "good intentions"...They backfire every time, right ? IN THE LONG RUN.
Graveyards...
I am very homesick for Anglo-Saxon graveyards right now, in France, where graveyards look like miniature cities. The very idea of being buried (but the French are heavily into incineration right now, in their obstination to root out the Christian practice of burial) in a city makes my stomach turn. There is a beautiful graveyard in Newark, Nottinghamshire ? (forgive my imprecision) where you could spend hours walking through, looking at the tombstones, in a refreshingly GREEN PLACE that is not laid out like an American city street, and where there are not countless rows of identical little white crosses either. I have always loved wandering around GREEN graveyards, where a blade of grass can flourish without being doused with weedkiller. Where the tombs are set in the grass (but not little identical white crosses, I repeat).
On the National Trust houses... my midinette mentality made me pull up nonexistent roots in the "mother country" where old things are torn down regularly and incessantly to make way for the new, as much for ideological reasons as for other ones. The U.S..... is not a country for old men, and was not designed to be one. I wanted to be in a place with a physical memory, where the past was more materialized ? and I could still see it a little bit.
All the running to keep up/afloat rather tires me out these days, and makes me want for the pace to slow down, the monuments to stand a little more still (although places on the East Coast and West definitely have their still standing monuments), for a little longer, even if I know that we will all turn to dust in the long run. (But before I turn to dust, maybe I will turn to compost for my beloved little worms outside, who.... spend their days working on the soil, for their good, and mine, and the good of the earth.)
France... Michel Houellebeq had a character witness his grandmother's grave being dug up after his family failed to pay the fee required to keep her buried. Found that such a strange policy! The other day I heard (is it in the new movie?) an anecdote where Napoleon was surveying a huge battlefield covered with the corpses of French soldiers and dismissively waved it off saying, "one night in Paris can replace all these men." This statement is both outrageous and morbidly funny.
I'm not sure France has a very different relationship to human mortality than any other Western nation, though I'm not sure I can think of anything else quite like those catacombs of skulls beneath Paris. One of my best friends is French and the older I get, the more annoying I find him. There's a kind of frenzy he displays to appear unpretentious by refusing to consider anything too seriously. I suspect the French of being terrified of ridicule and hence theirs is a profoundly and deceptively conformist culture.
Years ago the British music journalist Simon Reynolds wrote an essay in defence of pretension, particularly for artists, in part saying "all it really means is to aspire to something." He further went on to assert that true pretension was making a show of aspiring to nothing at all.
And it's amazing to me how doggedly so many cling to that: aspiring to nothing.
Excellent.
A few years ago, I was in a museum of fashion in Lyon for an exposition about Yves Saint Laurent, and in the following exposition/exhibition ? there was a quotation comparing the French to other European cultures. I can't remember that quotation correctly now, but it boils down to the idea that, unlike the Italians, the French come into the world totally naked and with their eyes poised to see what their neighbors are doing, to be able to copy to a T what other "creators" are doing, and as fast as possible. No true originality, but slavish copying everywhere, and in every domain. Lots of emphasis on how necessary it is to copy, up to... René Girard, who makes a formal defense/justification of copying everybody and everything ? but this attitude has its limits, in my opinion.
Which also makes me think about something I read this past week about the sin of coveting, or "convoitise" as it is called in French. The idea is wanting to have what somebody else has, and I believe that coveting is the motor of the French revolution. Coveting is a deadly sin because it engenders a constantly mealy mouthed attitude toward life, and the feeling of being entitled to have what the neighbor has. It engenders people who have their eyes glued to windows which HAVE TO BE TRANSPARENT in order for them to see what is behind them, just in case somebody might have something that YOU do not have, but which, of course, you have the sacred right to have. Sordid. And of course, coveting is a a big motor for a consumer society too. Keeps it humming.
Who wants to be mealy mouthed , or sordid ??
Better to be noble, she says, even if you get carted off to the guillotine by all the Coveting people, or crucified by the Coveting people too...
Yes, the well is beautiful. Thanks for taking us to see it, Paul.
I look forward to hearing your insights, Jack, and particularly as they must come from such a great variety of circles. My circles are very small. But sometimes I feel as though I am the equivalent of Pluto on its orbit, and... there is some value in being Pluto in orbit, when it comes to having a certain perspective on circles and orbits.
This was very good. Many thanks, Paul.
A haunted well, maybe not, but certainly eerie.