Moriarty / Higgins Introducing Moriarty

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-84351-792-4
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 120 Seiten

In Introducing Moriarty Canadian theologian and academic Michael W. Higgins compiles the essential writings of Irish philosopher and mystic, John Moriarty. This distillation of Moriarty's texts on ecology, mysticism and spirituality is a perfect introduction to the work of this complex and, at times, esoteric philosopher. Higgins' commentary provides an excellent guide to one of the country's most enigmatic modern thinkers and is an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in Irish philosophy and spirituality.

John Moriarty was born in County Kerry in 1938. He was educated at St Michael's College and University College Dublin. He taught English literature at the University of Manitoba in Canada for six years before returning to Ireland in 1971. Moriarty's writings reflected upon the nature of faith, spirituality and mysticism and mingled modern philosophy with ancient concepts. He died in Kerry on the 1st of June, 2007.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moriarty, John

Higgins, Michael W

Leseproben

Storytelling and Personal Journey

Michael W. Higgins

John Moriarty was a deeply autobiographical writer. He drew upon personal experience, anecdote, snippets and shards of memory, a vibrant and encyclopaedic deposit of stories, yarns, fables, myths, a veritable treasure trove of the fantastical and the inspiring, and wove all into a wide canvas of entertainment and edification. He was the consummate teacher and storyteller.

Whether regaling his readers/listeners – because he was the bard par excellence of post-Yeats Ireland – with stories about uncovering his ‘bush soul’, being transfixed by the void, discovering the sweet epiphany of love or exploring the deep resonance of the Fisher King myth for all ages and cultures, Moriarty knew the power of narrative, personal and communal.

One day, in a state that threatened to become perturbation, I cycled, not to Imleach dhá Rua, but all the way up to Loch Inagh. Leaving my bike, I crossed the plank bridge over the narrows between the two lakes and then I turned right, walking north along the forest road under the Bens. I had a tumbling mountain stream in mind and when I came to it I climbed and climbed, crossing from one to the other bank or making my way mid-stream, which meant rounding great boulders and clambering up over great bare obduracies of bedrock. Always when I came here I would sit in a little gorge that had in it a six-inch fall of water, a thing that would bring a lost humanity back to its paradisal senses. Quite simply, that underwater frieze of green, velvet mosses would compel you to re-estimate our galaxy. Today, however, I didn’t linger here. Rough though the going was, I kept climbing, climbing, until something I saw stopped me short. Washed down I surmised by a flood and deposited on bare bedrock was the skinned, pink-fleshed foreleg of a lamb. What gave it its terrible, lurid pathos was the fact that it was left there in the shape of a Christian genuflection. Looking at it, I thought of something Paddy Joyce from Clenchoaghan on the other side of the mountains told me. Up here one day seeking to track down some sheep of his that had strayed, he came upon a berried holly bush and hung up right in the middle of it was the whitened skeleton of a goat. Clearly, seeing the rich pasturage of its leaves, the goat had climbed up into the bush, had hooked his horns on its boughs, and couldn’t come back down.

The land and the goat.

The genuflection and the hanging.

The genuflection on a Gethsemane rock, the hanging from a Calvary tree.

It was like some awful re-telling of the Christian story. And so, far from Christianity being foreign to nature or, as Nietzsche might say, a poison and a pestilence to nature, it is, on the contrary, a living if still gruesome outgrowth of nature.

Anima naturaliter Christiana.

Mundus naturaliter Christianus.

Dispirited, I turned to come back and down, and then it happened. In an instant I was ruined. Ruined beyond remedy and repair, I felt. The universe had vanished from round about me. I saw a last, fading flicker of it and then I was in an infinite void. And the terrible anguish was, not only was the world I had hitherto relied on for my sense of myself an illusion, it was a deception. In terms of the Hindu parable, the snake had vanished but I could not sense the rope. And I felt very badly done by. The way I had lived for the past three years, curling up in the swan’s nest, healing my head in the hare’s form, baptizing myself out of culture, practising being a standing stone, seeking to walk the earth with a barefoot heart and a barefoot brain – I felt that all of this was a genuine search for the truth, not a merely speakable truth, but a truth I would surrender to, a truth I would live, that would live me, not just for myself, but for others as well. And now, in an instant, it had all ended in ruination. The world in and through which I had been a self, that was an illusion, it had vanished, leaving that infinitely isolated self in peril of disintegration.

Trembling and bewildered, I got on my bike to come home. Coming down through Ballinafad, I thought it will be a good sign if the front gates are open. Since there was no one living in the front gate-lodge, Michael Vahey had locked and chained them at the beginning of winter. It gave me hope when, against all odds, they were wide open. I went down to Patsy and Bridie Prendergast. Patsy was the gardener and he and Bridie his wife lived in the gardener’s house near the stables. Keeping it as simple as I could, I told them that something terrible had happened to me in the mountains. They did their best. Coming back through the garden in the small hours I thought it would be a good sign if my little clock had stopped at one thirty-one. Again, against all the odds, it had stopped, dead on one thirty-one. This was an old superstition of mine. Being the opposite or reverse of thirteen, thirty one was a lucky number, and there it was now, comforting me, giving me hope that I would come through.

For now, though, there was no relief.

Over the years, deliberately and of seeking set-purpose, I used to recite a Buddhist mantra:

Namo Amida Buddha

Namo Amida Buddha

Namo Amida Buddha

Buddhism is pleasant to look at, whereas, in its final redemptive moment, Christianity is horrible to look at. And yet, now that I needed help in a way I never before did, I fell instantly and instinctively back into Christianity. Whatever else, Christianity was mother tongue. It was to Christ and it was to the God that Christ called out to in dereliction – it was to both of them that I now called.

El Greco’s Christ in Gethsemane came sensationally to mind, that melting red-robed Christ with the yellow angel hovering above him, offering him the chalice, a suffering that anyone, even Christ, would attempt to bargain himself out of.

I had, in some measure, suffered the desolations of the age: Kepler, Pascal, Coleridge, Melville, Nietzsche and Arnold – to me these weren’t just historical figures of external historical interest. On the contrary, they were stages of a progressive distress that I would sometimes be very badly afflicted by. But I coped. I didn’t know that I could cope now. It is one thing to find oneself engulfed in an infinite universe that has neither centre nor circumference, it is something else altogether for that universe to disappear, to vanish like a mirage, leaving you in the void. (Nostos, pp. 519–21)

*

I had asked Eileen if she’d like to go for a walk on her day off. It was a richly overcast day with a breeze strong enough to ruffle the surface of river and lake, the kind of day that a fly fisherman loves to open his curtains and look out at. And, sure enough, upstream from Ted’s place, there was a fisherman reeling in a played-out salmon and big Tom Joyce was below at the edge of the water, his long-handled, hooped net at the ready.

We turned our attention to the stonechats flying in loud alarm among the furze bushes, warning their young to take cover. But then we heard a dull thud. The salmon was already lying in the heather and Tom Joyce was bent over crashing a blunt stone down onto his flat and, no doubt, bleeding forehead. In a week or so someone would lift a lid and there the steaming, garnished thing would be lying in a bright but not grail-bright tray on a table in Paris or Cologne. The table would be covered with a starched cloth patterned throughout and at the edges with lovely lacework. The lighted candelabra would brighten the red wine. The silver service would sparkle, the jewellery would sparkle, the conversation also, and no one would hear the dull thud, thud, thud that we heard, the old stone-age thud heard no doubt fifteen thousand years ago by someone on the bank of the Dordogne, heard maybe by the very same man who painted the mural in the pit in Lascaux.

A sound from the time before the discovery of metal.

Going down the path to the eel weir, we crossed the bridge on to the island and then, unsteadily, we made it across the log bridge to the far bank. Keeping close to the river for a while, we ventured across the reed beds out into the wide open bogs beyond. Before long, the going uneven, we came to the first of a long string of lakes, called Arkeen Beg, that I had often come to seeking a particular kind of solitude. It had patches of dark shingle shore that had an iron ring to them. It had a small wooded island with a heronry. Today the herons were strangely silent, not even a single dispute over territory, not a single outraged movement from one to another roost. And as for the lake itself, a good salmon and sea-trout lake, two cormorants had it all to themselves. I looked intently at them and, as I half expected, one of them did look the worse for wear, quite bedraggled in fact. Only yesterday, crossing Tuaim Beola Bridge in the early morning, I heard a terrible alternately loud and muffled Mesozoic squawking. Looking over the parapet, I saw that it was an otter and a cormorant, he doing his vicious best to drag her down and she flailing him with her wings. Catching sight of me, the otter disengaged, dived and was gone, but the cormorant, poor thing, not seeming to know whether she was living or dead, she was just carried round and round, helplessly around, in the swirling current. So as not to further frighten her I held back. Eventually she became inelegantly airborne and headed up river, to this lake I guessed, and now again today, there she was, not so streamlined but, clearly, quite recovered from the shock and fright of it all.

On the way back downstream towards the river, we...