Silver-Branch Perception

	Book review on What the Curlew Said by John Moriarty Reviewed by David Lorimer published in Network Review No 100
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Last autumn I was privileged to give the first John Moriarty Memorial lecture at the Clifden Arts Festival in Connemara. We landed at Shannon airport and drove up into the sunset towards the wild west coast of Ireland where the skies and the sea speak of the freedom of the human spirit. I am convinced that John will eventually be recognised as the greatest Irish writer of his time. Few people have plumbed the depths of themselves and of our culture, its literature, poetry and myths as deeply as John. The first volume of his autobiography, Nostos (Homecoming) runs to nearly 700 pages, intertwining the journey of his life with that of the evolving human being. This book continues the story up until his death in 2007. A brilliant student at University College Dublin, he taught English literature at the University of Manitoba for six years in the late 1960s, returning to Ireland in 1971 at the age of 33 in order to find what he calls his bush soul. For the rest of his life he worked as a labourer in gardens, living in a small cottage and writing in the evenings. As his work became better known, he would travel by bus or hitchhike to conferences at the weekend, returning to his gardens the following week.

 Working in gardens on his own in nature enabled John to reach the silence within himself and in his surroundings. In this book he describes the work he did in three different gardens, which leads to the title of this review - Silver-Branch perception - a direct apprehension of nature without the intervening screen of the rational mind. This perception is reflected in the title of the book itself. How do other species apprehend the world? For John, the call of the curlew is an opening in the world, an opening 'not into somewhere beyond the world, rather is it an opening into a mode or mood, mostly unvisited, of the world itself.' Sitting silently for long hours in an oak wood, he came to know that 'all elsewheres, supernatural and natural, are where we are.' With such eyes, mortality becomes a sometimes wonderful, sometimes dreadful way of experiencing our immortality, leading him to the insight that 'Time is Eternity living tremendously, living dangerously.' On another occasion, he is watching a heron, as I did myself in Wales only this afternoon. John falls into his 'fishing-silence, his fishing-stillness' which reveals to him that the knowing mind is 'obstruction between us and things, between us indeed and our own being.'

The poet is initiated into what John calls sympathetic knowing. This is the knowing of Wordsworth rather than Darwin, the knowing of Goethe rather than Descartes, romantic or poetic contemplation rather than detached and objective observation. This leads John to ask how much of what is in the bills of Galapagos finches did Darwin see or not see, ' and if he saw little of what is in them, what does this mean for his account of how life has evolved?' The universe, John concludes, is not fully penetrable to human intelligence, and he asks if Wordsworth in his little boat did not row himself further out into things in a skip than Darwin sailed out into them in a ten-gun brig. In other words, poetic insight perhaps penetrates more deeply into the nature of things, and yet the empirical knowledge of science holds the privileged position within our society; quantitative analysis prevails over qualitative perception. However, as John has already observed, these subtle and unknown modes of being are not beyond the empirical mode, they are immanently and wholly coincident with it. We just need to use both modes of perception together.

Another central theme of the book is represented by the layers of archaeology within the human psyche, which John calls the phylogenetic ancient regime. He asks if we can in fact be redeemed. The hammerhead shark will not and cannot be redeemed, nor can Tyrannosaurus rex. For John, perhaps we cannot be redeemed either, so Paradise regained can be forgotten. History is not encouraging in this respect. Revolutionaries try to take a detour around the phylogenetic ancient regime, but the beast repressed emerges powerfully as a result. The ideal of reason is drowned in a bloodbath of extremism. Only by journeying by night boat through the underworld, by harrowing the shadow, can this regime of the guillotine and the gulag be transcended. Mythologically, for John, only the Christian revolution does not take a detour around this regime, around the reptilian brain. It passes through the olive press of Gethsemane, the crucifixion, the harrowing of hell. This is both an individual and a collective process.

Towards the end of the book, we live through John's experience of cancer, his tiredness, his chemotherapy, his realisation that he has to take his leave of the mountains of Connemara, so that his homecoming, his nostos, is also the leavetaking. His body has turned against itself, he is now engaged on the journey of death; and, as he observes, there is physical death and mystical death. Physical death does not remove the obstructing ego, only God can do this for us. The self, as Eckhart and Marguerite Porete discovered, can disappear or be lost in God. Taoism would express this in terms of subtraction, Christianity as kenosis or emptying of the self. As John puts it: 'We subtract perception. We subtract cognition. We subtract the dualising mind. We subtract all sense of self and other-than-self. We subtract all sense of the solitary self. We subtract the will to do, the will to be. We subtract desire. It is when we are completely out of the way that it happens.' This formulation brilliantly catches the surrendering aspect of the human condition where instead of grasping we let go, instead of acquiring we release, instead of adding and accumulating we subtract and diminish. By doing this, we arrive at and express the core of the soul, the ultimate destination of existence, which John reaches, expressing it as trackless dark infinity, going home, journeying to the heart of being. The particular is to be found in the universal, and the universal in particular, the human life in the divine, the divine life in human. In John's life and journey, in his vast and profound understanding, the human spirit has taken an important step, not burying and denying its violent inheritance, but rather transforming it alchemically into a realisation of essence. What a book, what a man, what a life!

My John Moriarty memorial lecture can be downloaded from the SMN site as with other Members' Articles.

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