As Irish children we were all brought up on a literary diet that included the work of perhaps the greatest poet in English of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939). As early as 1923, when he was 58 years of age he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, being the first Irish writer to be so honoured. The Nobel citation described his poems as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."
One of the poems/songs we learnt at primary school was one called "Down by the Salley Gardens" and it it is a song recorded by many singers since. Yeats wrote a note in one of his papers that this song/poem was "an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, County Sligo, who often sings them to herself." That old song, experts tell us, was "The Rambling Boys of Pleasure." Yeats' reconstruction of this song is as follows, and it is a song of regret for opportunities not grasped: Down by the Salley Gardens, my love and I did meet.
She passed the Salley Gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy as the leaves grow on the trees But I being young and foolish with her would not agree. In a field down by the river, my love and I did stand And on my leaning shoulder, she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs But I was young and foolish and now am full of tears. Down by the Salley Gardens, my love and I did meet. She passed the Salley Gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take life easy as the leaves grow on the trees, But I was young and foolish, and with her did not agree. Below is the sung version of this poem/song by one of my favourite female singers - Maura O'Connell:
There are no easy answers to any of the big questions. Indeed, as I have pointed out many times in these posts we engage in good philosophy when we set about questioning shallow solutions, indeed when we suspect easy answers as not alone being the easy way out but to be a simplistic twisting of and an undermining of the truth. Life teaches us more than "is dreamt of in our philosophy," as Hamlet perspicaciously pointed out to his university friend Horatio. In searching for meaning, life more often than not forces us away from neat cerebral and cognitive answers to our problems and throws us in at the deep end to either sink or swim in the murky waters of its mystery.
A Mystery to be Lived not a Problem to be Solved
Clontarf, Dublin, Sat 6 July, 2014
When I studied philosophy and theology back in the late 1970s the topic I chose for my 4th Year thesis was "The Mystery of Evil," and the title of this section of my post is one gem of insight I came up with from my reading. Another gem of a quotation I vividly recall reading was one which goes, "a mystery is not a wall against which we bang our heads, but rather an ocean into which we plunge." Life teaches us most assuredly, and bit by inevitable bit it knocks the corners off our initial egotistical take on life, chastens our hubris, challenges our certainties and sends us deep into our spiritual and cultural reserves as human beings simply to keep going. If we are reasonably astute and wise human beings we will learn from our mistakes and from the problems and pains life throws our way so that when we reach twenty years at our job we will have twenty years experience, not one year multiplied 20 times. Likewise with life - hopefully I have 56 years of cumulative wisdom and not just a few years multiplied by a fairly big factor. Hopefully, we all will have grown and learnt and deepened and heightened our experience of life and reflected on its significance and meaning with the help of others by the time we age substantially.
When I was doing that thesis which straddled the border ground between philosophy and theology, a not-so-close friend of mine called Paulene O'Rourke was undertaking her thesis on a more personal take on the mystery of evil, namely the problem of suffering and pain. None of her classmates ever got to read Paulene's opus, which unfortunately never really saw the light of day as sadly she ended her own life at the age of 21, having gassed herself in her grandmother's home where she had lived. This young student was one of the most intelligent girls I had ever met in life and was quite sophisticated and always appeared to me as being quite brave. Unusual for women at the time, she even rode a small motorbike. I was not close enough to Paulene to know that she suffered from clinical depression, compounded by the fact that her Doctor father had been killed tragically in Africa and that her mother had become an alcoholic as she had never gotten over the death of her partner. Too many painful events in life apparently conspired to bring a very sensitive human being to the tragic conclusion of her life in a lonely kitchen, suffocating from gas poisoning.
I often wonder what exactly Paulene had written in her thesis. I wonder did anyone dare look. That's probably a useless wonderment because presumably it was heavy with pain. I remember one day Paulene stopped and got me to ride pillion on her motorbike into college. I remember her being full of life that day. And yet, and yet and yet? As the Irish songwriter and singer Paul Brady puts it in one of his songs, "Nobody Knows" the chorus of which runs:
Nobody knows why Elvis threw it all away Nobody knows what Ruby had to hide Nobody knows why some of us get broken hearts And some of us find a world that’s clear and bright You could be packed up and ready Knowing exactly where to go How come you miss the connection? No use in asking…the answer is nobody knows No use in asking…the answer is nobody knows
Creativity is just one possible doorway towards the assuage of pain and suffering. Once again, needless to say, it is no instant fix or panacea for pain or suffering. Rather, it is one very valid coping mechanism that we can employ. How many poems, paintings, pieces of music and sculptures have been created over the years of our civilization whose provenance have been the cruel crucible of pain and suffering? We instinctively know that the answer must lie in the thousands if not multiples of that figure. In the field of music we might mention the suffering endured by Ludwig van Beethoven and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and in the field of art and painting Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch and in the field of writing and letters Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway. Anyway, these are just names that occur to me of persons who have suffered from severe mental suffering and pain. The reader can add his/her own. An interesting article on creativity and mental illness can be found HERE. Beyond Creativity
Howth Village by night - from the Harbour. June 2014
I have mentioned this quality many times before. The other day I went into our National Gallery and viewed some of our wonderful paintings on display. To view them properly one needs to stand back, and, of course, that's why galleries have to be places with great space, or at least have a great feeling of space about them. Perspective can only be achieved at a distance. Is it not the same with all the problems of pain and suffering that life throws at us all too randomly? The perspective of time often heals them. I love visualization techniques as they are so powerful in helping us through or coping with problems. One such visualization that I like is to do, and which I find very effective in lifting my spirits, is to sit in what I call my semi-demi-lotus position (as I am so dreadfully poor at crossing my legs!). I then unwind by using the usual meditation techniques like relaxing the body through a body-scan or concentration on breathing etc. When I am suitably relaxed I envisage myself sitting in my little spot on the ground with my back propped against the wall, then in my library, then my house, my street, my locality, my city, my country and so on up through a bird's eye view of my ever diminishing self, and up further till I have an astronaut's view of the world. This I call my visualization of perspective. When we are depressed we are self-obsessed. Our little world becomes the only world. Perspective is a way of zooming out of self-preoccupation and self-obsession. We are one little creature on a very small planet in a very big expanding universe, one of some 7 billion plus inhabitants. It is often good to realize in a very counter-cultural way, at least for a while, that we may not be that important at all in the great scheme of things.*
The Great Spiritual Teachers
Reading and listening to what many of the great teachers and indeed founders of the various Religions and spiritual traditions have had to say is also important. I strongly believe that going back to what many of them said cannot be squared with what the so called Institutions or Churches that followed them promulgated. On this, I recommend a good thoughtful reading of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, especially the wonderfully powerful and imaginative scene where Jesus visits the Grand Inquisitor to tell him how far the Roman Church has strayed from what he was about when he was on earth. So going back to what Confucius, Jesus, the Buddha or Rumi said can be very inspiring.** One can find a lot of similar profound thoughts in each of these named above, and one can only be amused that it is so hard to find proof of such teachings in the works of the churches or organizations that were built on their foundations.***
Returning to the Music of Life
Let me in conclusion return to music by way of some further clarification or elucidation of a mystery which is truly almost beyond our understanding. Firstly, let me recall for you some of the lyrics of one of the songs, Anthem, by one of my favourite singers, Leonard Cohen:
The birds they sang at the break of day Start again I heard them say Don't dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be. Ah the wars they will be fought again The holy dove She will be caught again bought and sold and bought again the dove is never free.
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.
(my italicization: You can here Leonard sing this song HERE ) Perhaps a trace or an intimation of an answer lies somewhere in these lyrics. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps!
End Notes
* The great thing about philosophy is that it trains the mind to ask all the most difficult and awkward of questions. Not alone is this no harm, but it serves to deepen or to heighten our understanding and appreciation of everything. On the one hand, we can undervalue human life as is exemplified in all the most horrific of wars we poor humans have been engaged in since time immemorial. On the other we can over-value human life at the expense of our fellow animals and at the expense of the very environment which, unfortunately, we have almost destroyed. What a legacy we moderns have left for our off-spring! In other words philosophically we can ask the twin questions: How do we undervalue human life? and How do we overvalue that same life? Both questions are equally valid.
** Going back to the thoughts and/or writings of these early founders can be both enlightening and often surprising, so much so that one begins to question how far removed institutional and organized Religions have come from the vision or charism of their founders. Confucius said much that is also found in Jesus Christ, viz., “Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire” which corresponds very nicely to what Jesus said: "Do to others as you would have them do to you." (Lk. 6:31) There is wisdom in many of their sayings which often should not be taken out of context and which should be balance by other quotations from the same spiritual leader. Context and balance is very important if we are given to quotations.
*** As regards the foundation of Religions and Churches it is often a moot question as to whether a so-called founder actually founded a particular religion or Church because in certain cases these were established by their followers. It is arguable that St Paul was the great founder of the Christian Religion while its Roman version could be seen as the child of the Emperor Constantine. I have no great interest in many of these moot points, save that in questions of truth and spirituality we must progress by taking into account all the sides of a story, all the perspectives as it were. For me no one Religion, Church or organization can have a manopoly on the Truth.
Una Chiesa a Garace, una bellissima citta' in Calabria
We do like to fool ourselves into thinking that our
words once written have some permanence.
Or at least we like to believe that they are somewhat more permanent
when written down that when merely uttered.
The orator’s words may move us momentarily and then they just fade into
the ether to be shortly forgotten. A
written encomium may be somewhat more permanent than its oral counterpart. Or a snatch of a song that we hear or even
sing is just that, a snatch of music that fades, even though somewhere in some
musty drawer – or perhaps even in the corner of some virtual world - the sheet
music exists. Thoughts come and go like their
close relatives called feelings. Once
again, they all fade into nothingness.
These thoughts written here could have been penned by
Qoheleth, that great wisdom teacher of the Old Testament, who kept repeating
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” He
was an existentialist before the word was invented. For him, life was just a fleeting moment in
the infinity of time, a mere nanosecond in terms of the duration of the
universe. When he saw humankind’s
efforts to battle the inevitable constraints of life he just kept repeating the
above sobering chorus: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
And so, I resume this journal of a soul after some
eight or so months. In the interim I have been involved in writing other words elsewhere. Some few readers of this blog have asked me
the reasons for the hiatus – well I just did not feel the need, given that I
was writing elsewhere. However, these
present thoughts were provoked by the sheer contingency of life. There is nothing as sobering as attending the
funerals of friends and relatives.
Nothing. Even philosophers and theologians baulk before the maw of
death. The litany of recent bereavements
runs: one friend’s son ended his life in his late twenties, two aunt’s
“shuffled off this mortal coil,” one in her mid eighties and another in her
late sixties, and then a colleague died from cancer after four excruciatingly
painful years of suffering – and he some three years younger than the thinker
or writer of these thoughts. And that
leaves us with the big questions – What is life at all? What could possibly be
its meaning? And mortality, what can it teach us?
Mortality teaches us the value of life, literally the
value of everything. When you sit
listening to a song sung by your favourite singer, the fact that he or she is
mortal magnifies its significance to the nth degree. Art is art because it is produced by mortal
hands, sung by mortal voices, composed by mortal minds and is inspired by
mortal imagination. Mortality gives value to the fleeting enterprise of human
hands and minds. The fact that
Michelangelo or Goya or Leonardo da Vinci or more recently Francis Bacon is
dead only adds to the value and significance of the work.
Then, when one reads about the silly attempts some
humans make to prolong life beyond its reasonable limits, one wonders again
about our significance, and not a little about the sanity of those who propose
such an idea in the first place.
Cryogenics is surely based on mere wishful thinking and sheer
shallowness of insight. That some poor fools among us might think we are that
important in the scheme of things is surely the funniest and most pathetic joke
possible at one and the same time.
It appears to the present writer of these marshalled
thoughts that we must avoid two extremes – that of inflating our importance on
the one hand and that of deflating our significance on the other. We are the singers of songs, the composers of
music, the writers of novels and poems, the creators of art in all its myriad
forms and shapes, the builders of huge skyscrapers, bridges and roads that seek
to shape our world to our needs. We are
the thinkers of thoughts, the possessors of feelings which we express as
wonderfully and in a way that is as aesthetically pleasing as we can. That we are dreamers of other worlds beyond
our ken – mere pipe dreams or intimations of immortality none can tell – marks
us out from our fellow animals. And yet
does it matter at all? Does it really
matter? Perhaps the meaning lies solely
in the poem written, in the song sung, in the story told, in the project done,
in the sweat expended to bring it about. Therein lies its value, made meaningful
paradoxically by its sheer meaninglessness. Perhaps the only meaning we can find in this life
is the living of it to the fullest extent possible, and in making it as
tolerable as we can for all those we love and, indeed, for every inhabitant of
this little world spinning in the immensity of indifferent space.
We humans know more than we are conscious of, according to the late great Victorian Catholic theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman. In other words, the rational is only one small part of the human mind. There are also our emotions to consider. Newman did not talk about the unconscious as such, because for him those unknown spaces in the human heart were in fact the seat of the Holy Ghost as they would have called the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity in those halcyon days. This was the profound mystery of humanity and that of the human soul, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit at the very centre of human life. All Christians believe in this doctrine: viz., the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit.If you are not a Christian in the strict Church-going sense, but belong to those who are pilgrims on a more humanist journey through life, you can still be open to the fact that the above doctrine is a wonderful metaphor for the mystery that is at the heart of the human person.
These posts in this new blog will not be discursive or academic in any sense. Rather, they are going to be journal entries recounting my journey in search of Self. In this case they will be spiritual in the broadest sense of the meaning of that word. My understanding of "spiritual" is the innate ability within us to connect both with the mystery within us and with the mystery outside of us, both in others and in all the world in general. In that sense, I mean also our innate ability to tap into the source of life - whatever that may be - some call it God, others a Benign Energy at the heart of the universe, others Order, and others still the impersonal inner drive of the universe towards a more perfectly evolved manifestation of itself. Now, these posts, being essentially existentialist (if the reader will excuse the juxtaposition of two seemingly contrary words) my aim is to be personalist in tendency and to desist from any polemics here at all. In these pages, no pure philosophy or theology or science of any description will be found. In short these posts will be, in the words of the wonderful Pope John XXIII, "The Journal of a Soul."
The Music of the Soul
Ever since I was a young boy I can remember my teachers always telling us that "Music has Charms to sooth a savage Breast," and lines of poems that I like have a tendency to stay with me always. On checking, I find that these lines come from the pen of William Congreve (1670 – 1729) who was an English playwright and poet. On perusing the provenance of the lines, I further find that they are the opening words of a play called The Mourning Bride (1697) and are well worth quoting here:
Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I've read, that things inanimate have mov'd,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform'd,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.
What then am I? Am I more senseless grown
Than Trees, or Flint? O force of constant Woe!
'Tis not in Harmony to calm my Griefs.
Anselmo sleeps, and is at Peace; last Night
The silent Tomb receiv'd the good Old King;
He and his Sorrows now are safely lodg'd
Within its cold, but hospitable Bosom.
Why am not I at Peace?
As you will have realised after reading the above there is much profundity in these lines. The question: "What then am I? Am I more senseless grown//Than Trees, or Flint?" even when taken totally out of context as I am doing here, is so relevant to every human being. We, too, even though unbenighted by grief as the bride is here, can ask what it is actually to be, to exist at all? We can also ask the last question here, too - "Why am not I at Peace?" A teacher-friend of mine, long since retired, always said wisely that in the end we have to live with ourselves. There is much wisdom in this saying.
As I journey on the road - in via - to self-knowledge, nay, further, to self-acceptance, there is much truth in his observation. As I exist in my world, I find that I am a being with a moral centre, too. How am I to act in this, that or the other situation in which I find myself from one hour to the next as I journey through life. What is the moral self? This is also a question worth asking, if I am to live with myself with any degree of equanimity and peace of mind. As I pursue these reflections hopefully I'll come up with some existential answers to these questions. Quite clearly at this juncture I have nothing further to say about this moral self. These are not academic or polemic posts and so they will be solely the result of my reflections and meditations a personal discernment.
And, in that journey to self-acceptance music has helped me greatly. Returning to my opening lines in today's post, I believe the power of music is such that, although at times it may be combined with verbalization as we find in song lyrics, there is much in music that hits us at an unconscious level, at levels of being far deeper that we are cognitively aware of. As we listen on and as we note our reactions with ever more trained an ear we will become more aware of these hidden depths. There will be deeper stirrings of our being which may even bring a tear to our eyes as well as balm to a tired spirit. I am not at all a music cogniscento and know little except that which stirs my soul. I will finish this post with two versions of one of my favourite songs - Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen (the composer) and the late great Jeff Buckley. Both these renditions rock me to the foundations of my being.
Intense was the word that a good friend used to describe me when I was in my early twenties. He added that he meant absolutely no criticism by that description. Nor indeed did I take it as such. And other synonyms for intense are passionate, powerful, profound, forceful, heartfelt and concentrated. I'd still accept any of those adjectives as descriptive of my way of being in the world.
Having recently read much philosophy from the early Greeks right through to the contemporary Charles Taylor I am still enthused with a passion for wonder, with a desire to embrace life in its fullest measure. From my readings in philosophy and literature I find a singular lack of intensity and passion in the world in general. That's why we need our religions (in the spiritual manifestation, not in the power manifestation, of those entities, I hasten to add is what I have in mind here), our theatres, our cinemas, our traditions and our literatures, and especially our music.
In the psalms we read that "Deep calls to deep at the sound of Your waterfalls; All Your breakers and Your
waves have rolled over me." (Psalm 42:7; New American Standard Bible, 1995) I remember these words clearly since the time I was a young novice in the Augustinian Order many years ago. Deep calling onto deep always moved me to the very foundations of my being. A I sat there in the early mornings in the cool and incense-laden oratory, season in and season out, I remember touching depths within me that I certainly had never plumbed before. Some past pupils who, with their dad, are expert potholers come to mind. What is it in the human heart that wishes to push its being deeper and ever deeper. These past pupils are now doing just that, and doing it physically, literally crawling on their bellies down and further down and further down still into the bowels of the very earth. As I sat there all those years ago I felt that I was spiritually doing what these lads do physically, except that I was crawling down, down, down into the caverns of the heart, or of the soul, or of the spirit, or indeed of the Self. And yes, I am using all these words here synonymously even though I am aware that there are differences between their connotations in various areas of study. But for my personal purposes here they refer to my deep sense of my own being.
And so, in short I am moved to new depths always. I rejoice that as I age I am able to go deeper and am able to bear more pressure. It's rather like diving deeper, as the deeper you get the more the water presses down on you. And so, again, as I sit here listening to the haunting voice of the great Canadian singer Neil Young singing Old Man and my eyes are filled with tears as he brings me deeper with his words:
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
Twenty four
and there's so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.
Or again listening to the late great and wonderful Irish Folk singer Liam Clancy weaves the same wondrous effect on my soul. Try listening to his rendition of Those Were The Days on YouTube here:
Or again listen to the late great Jacques Brel singing his powerful rendition of Amsterdam which you can view hereunder:
Or again, I dove much deeper still when viewing Des Bishop's tribute to his late father Mike, RIP, in tonight's documentary on RTE 2. You can view this in three parts on YouTube here:
And so all of these things serve to carry me deeper and deeper into self. Whatever Self may be it is to be found only by pushing oneself to the limit. Des Bishop, Jacques Brel and Liam Clancy all push themselves to the limit because the self is a reality of the limits and of the horizons. Again many other metaphors can come to mind here. The Self is a reality of the extremes, that's why the human soul is wont to go on pilgrimage. Look at all those great mountaineers who seek to climb the highest mountains. Bring to mind all those explorers of yesteryear who sought out the very limits of the world. Think of those astronauts who seek to explore the wonder of space. Call to mind the English Captain Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, explorers of polar regions both. Nothing but the pursuit of self, the pursuit of identity could carry them up to and beyond the threshold or portal of death.
