SHANNONSIDE AND NOT A LIMERICK

[This poem has a connection of sorts with the previous article with its reference to modern Irish masculinities according to sociology. Great symbolism  should not be read into the below portrait pic. For readers outside the West  I wanted the image of a blue eyed, typically pale Irishman and I took what the Net offered. The individual most recalled  and for the shock of their unconscious style, not their long forgotten sporty interests,  had dark hair. He was also a bit older than the not Limerick born singer, Derek Ryan ]

      

Light  spills upon the estuary and signs

Towards the ocean’s breezy emptiness.

One feels pure expectation without cause

Despite  the air I breathe draws

Memories along and speaks

Of projects that could be pursued

If time were kind and fancies not so

Wandering.  I rest back incomplete

In ways that pleasure only and surprise

Could rouse to clear impressions….

As of a sudden such may do.

 

The river’s surface with its darting glint

Strikes not so piercingly as does,

Towards me now, with something vernal

In the smile, one friendly stranger’s face,

Eyes truly blue, inquiring and observing me.

Intent, indifferent, amused, surprised

Words course their rapids as expressions flow.

I think, “speak on” and  give but little back

So little do I really hear.

 

Later perhaps I’ll throw some net

That  gathers to a full response.                    v

This moment now I chiefly see

The radiant paleness of the face

The firm bow of the Cupid lips

And sudden sense the pity of

The unconscious charms and beauty,

Too unsung, of men, their loves and partings

Never told by Limerick’s walls or anywhere

In Erin’s mornings of this kind.

Other Ireland related poems can be found scattered about this blog. For some poetry that’s Dublin and Liffey side rather than Shannon and Limerick side see https://rollanmccleary.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/judas-stopped-at-dublin-a-poem-of-spiritual-pollution-and-ablution-in-yeats-2015/ Most read over time has been this : https://rollanmccleary.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/remembering-seamus-heaney-a-poem/

 

IRISH DANCE: MEANING IN MOVEMENT

IRELAND via AMERICA

New style Irish dancing, the Riverdance version, exploded onto the international scene back in 1994 when a troupe performed for the interval of the Eurovision Song Contest on April 30^th   in Dublin. The event and subsequent trend owed more to Irish Americans than local Irish. (More recently the home grown Caird group of dancers has made advances but employing modern rather than Irish music)

Lead choreographer and performer Michael Flatley  hailed from Chicago. The other star performer, Jean Butler, was from New York (the hubs of Irish emigration have long been New York and Chicago, Boston and San Francisco). When she was very young, under five, JB hated and soon abandoned Irish dance because of the long spells of holding arms close to the side which the new style has thankfully modified. Returning to Irish dance, aged nine, Jean would proceed to become the new art’s star, presiding goddess of a community which has been noted for some eye candy performers besides.

Recently I chanced to see a few RD performances on youtube and was left asking a few questions as regards its meaning, direction and people’s responses to its performance  –  some people, non Irish, have been reduced to tears evidently sensing, especially given Irish  history, a kind of triumph of life in its sheer verve.

I’m not a practitioner of Irish dance nor expert in its history (which  from the first reels in distant times has passed through the influence of the eighteenth century French and British Quadrille, not to say strictures of village priests as regards touching). But even just taking it at face value today, I feel I have a few clues along with new questions about Irish cultural character more broadly in addition to ideas I expressed in articles like Real Irish” and Irish Today. https://wp.me/p2v96G-17D

The overall impression is certainly one  not just of visual beauty but vitality. And while there isn’t the same flying through the air, there is still some affinity with the dynamism of Georgian dance and the Russian zone generally. It’s conceivable there’s some ethnic connection because while the main genetic lines of inheritance for the Celts appears to have been through northern Spain, there is also a more eastern line from Russia and eastern Europe, indeed the Celts used to say they derived from  Scythian  regions.

SELF AFFIRMATION



Amid  the verve (and there’s that aplenty compared with say even some Welsh dancers and cloggers), there can be a surprisingly  martial beat. This is possibly a compensation through  art for lost battles historically and/or reflects how victory has been perceived over time’.  The native  outlook in this area can  be  either spiritual/transcendent (there’s enough historical evidence for that feeling!) or more material yet spectacular with it.

I forget which French critic opined the Irish are introverts who project themselves and perform. I’d say this is substantially true and also that, as such, they prefer not to perform unless, including at war, memorably, dazzlingly. One thinks of how during the Elizabethan era for  a few short years Owen Roe O’Neill  held the British invasion at bay and was temporarily “the wonder of the world” across Europe for it. Centuries later the Easter Rising, “a revolution of poets” as some would call it, was spectacular in another way – very much a mind over matter, symbol-laden affair.

The tone and music of Irish dance as for much else in the culture, leaves one to wonder  As against western ballet or opera, in which a single dancer or singer can enter to alter the whole register of a performance as they introduce a specific idea or psychology, musical accompaniment for the eruption of  Irish performers onto the scene could seem impersonal/tribal by  comparison. It can be independent of myth (rich though that legacy otherwise is) and simply a  given. Poetry as of The Love Songs of Connaught has a touch of the operatic about it and western opera like Tristan and Isolde can draw upon Celtic myth, but the national musical tradition does not give much space to individual feeling before perhaps pre-nationalist Thomas Moore composed nationally sentimental songs for Georgian drawing rooms.

It’s the music itself, independent of story or persons, sets the scene danced to, excited and cheerful, serious or sad. The dancer can only express what’s most individual and vary the theme via the brilliant complications of the step dance. But that is perhaps why the steps can be so complex and virtuoso. It’s here the individual interacts with the predominant theme and makes variation upon it……if that is quite what is aesthetically and therapeutically desired.

OVER AND ABOVE



Western opera needless to say inclines to the passionate/orgasmic. One senses plenty of passion in Irish music and dance and despite the limits long placed upon it by the priests; but where exactly is the passion directing? I am reminded of the lines in Yeats’ Among School Children.

Oh body swayed to music, O brightening glance.
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

In harmony with certain mystical/unitive tendencies of the Irish mind,  themselves perhaps genetic, the aim of the often single dancer is often to be simply at unity with him or herself  and in this condition as the music and/or Nature, (and with mythic Erin just possibly a secondary consideration for a few).

I think this element of quasi-Platonic abstraction is the reason that within Irish art realism and portraiture have never been especially prioritized. Instead, the elaborate knotwork, symbolic of nature and eternity, and reflected in the music, aims to take you elsewhere and   therapeutically  join with other energies. It seems to prefer this in lieu of resolving this worldly  human problems like the relationship woes of an Isolde. Again to cite Yeats, it’s more a case of

Come away oh human child
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand…

COLOUR AND REVERIE



Beyond the messages and function of music, colour also counts for something in the transcending equation, not least shades of  the highlighted green which is not just a national colour but according to occultists a magical/psychic ray in itself. Rather as Irish Americans have renewed and highlighted dance (and been praised for some of the colours and costumes used in doing so), so arguably the greatest, most psychologically representative “Irish”/ Celtic painter of modern times is the likewise alienated Irish Australian Justin O’ Brien (1917-1996). This artist who lived much of his life in Italy, skilfully revives and adapts especially medieval images but subordinating the whole to vivid,  thought, dream and mood triggering  colours. Centuries before him, the masters of Kells used the most precious substances available when it came to colouring the figures it was not necessarily important to them to achieve realistically.

“Can you hear what I’m seeing?”

This sentence is from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and it involves just one pun in a book chock-a-block of puns and near or accidental secondary meanings. “Seeing” here is really “saying” which a type of Irish accent will displace. However, it belongs with the aims of Irish art which is to vary and impose realization of new meanings and possibilities to the point of epiphany and revelation. The bible, especially its Hebrew part, is full of puns translation often cannot convey. The secular and godless James Joyce was nonetheless right to be taken up with Jewish and Irish affinities and problems he reflected through the character of the Jew, Leopold Bloom, an unconscious prophet and deliverer of special messages.

Colour, like some musical notes can be precise to raise us above the material. It belongs with the sounds and perfumes Baudelaire would find in the poet’s temple of symbols supplying correspondences (I have myself found that for any poem not satirical and naturally prosy, focussing the colour of skies may be what captures a mood or  memory and shapes a poem). I surmise a lot of Irish/Celtic art in any sphere is sort of intoxicated reverie, and plainly Riverdance is all of intoxicating for many, But the notes of music, which unlike colours depend upon a time factor to register, may be more potent to carry us beyond time into the timeless. But a question arises how abstract can and should this eternal be to perception? At this point I must try and tie a few ends together and come to a provisional conclusion.

SORT OF QUEER….OR SOMETHING



A good few years ago and before the “queer” word became more associated with controversial woke and neo-Marxist ideologies, someone not into Celtic culture observed to me they found Irish culture “queer”. What they meant and with elements of gay camp in mind, was that it often  presented a train of  constant variations on a theme, the theme itself often only half stated before dissolved in a process sometimes  feminine, sometimes  gay  for sheer decoration and irony to the point almost of decadence.

In harmony with this I sense there is something Ireland may not have understood, or due to history not been allowed to realize and express, but which is evolving  amid new trends. Historically, some like Matthew Arnold have perceived Ireland as “feminine”; but it is not, or at least not only, a woman or the triple goddess archetypally.

Mental Images are of the feminine yin side  and the feminine – if one  surrenders to it as in the dance – presents nature’s whirling kaleidoscope of fleeting images and impressions it can be  hard to capture and make variation upon, unless to determined excess  and the point of incoherence. This may be fine up to a point – art can use excess – but on the broader psychological  plain of culture, any parallel process may swallow up desired revelation and cancel out the male function of Logos. James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is a perfect example of overkill with loss of would-be revelation through the pun, the poem, the philosophy or whatever. Unsurprisingly, the book Joyce would have written had he lived, was to have been an altogether sparer, more precise work.

Finnegan’s Wake does not make progress in the implied task given it by  the previous Ulysses of reaching greater order and humanity through the coming together of  Bloom Father and Stephen Son and the Logos function over against the Great Mother  yin one of Molly and other females of the story. Although women are more disposed to talk than men, paradoxically, archetypally, Logos belongs to the male. It is Adam who names the beasts in the garden (Gen 2:19), not Eve. Ecriture Feminine  is tricky and represents a largely doomed, failed project. For focus above impression, Logos and/ or the yang/male function needs to help order and define. If it does not, a certain chaos takes over. Something of the kind is present in the troubling sociological study “We don’t really give a Fiddler’s about Anything” 1) where unclear, silly or absent young Irish male notions of the masculine help bolster a refusal to be serious about society and politics and almost anything that might concern responsible individuals in  control of their lives.

NOT EXACTLY PROTESTANT BUT 

   David Geaney      Caird

It’s not quite true as historian R.F Foster has maintained that modern Ireland has, sort of , finally gone  Protestant. To be really true there would need to be a greater cultural/psychological emphasis upon the value and definition of the masculine or even discreetly the gay. But it cannot be denied some aspiration to the more emphatically masculine awaits in the wings and even seeks  to take wing through dance.

In astrology anything to do with dance is a sixth house matter and in the birth chart of the modern Republic, Venus rules Ireland’s sixth house. And this arts related Venus is suitably found in that most male and patriarchal of signs, Aries, at 27 degrees closely conjunct the national sun at 27 Aries. Small wonder there is a martial feel to much of the new dancing and the art quickly became internationally representative for Ireland to the whole world!

The actual day that shot Riverdance to international fame, not least through its strong emphasis on Scorpio, bespeaks an element of sexual liberation or transformation through the dance form. But that’s another story. Except that I think, despite the pioneering choreography of Flatley and the star turns of  Butler, possibly more symbolic of the unconscious drive to highlight a repressed or ignored yang,  the non-Riverdance performer but five times World Dance champion, David Geaney doing brilliant things solo, leaves a special mark on what is more broadly in process. Perhaps the (via TikTok) super popular Caird group by being an all male team further advances a trend towards a more yang art  The question is can what is developing in dance and elsewhere  be widely enough intuited  and protected.   A subtle “alchemical” process must not be supressed or dismissed as a national issue at variance with especially EU globalist dreams (uncritically accepted by the nation’s inept leadership) of a borderless world in which all cultures mix regardless of historic identity and their natural stage of growth.

NOTE

1)  Academia  “We don’t really give a Fiddler’s about Anything: The ambiguity, contradictions and fluidity of Irish Masculinities”    Clay Darcy, 2019  Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies“

 

ECHOD: A POETIC FRAGMENT ON THE TRINITY AND CREATION

[Echod is Hebrew for Inclusive as opposed to single One. This poem was published last July at the end of my ’Muslim’ Goethe feature, but it seems original enough to own its independent space. This makes it a bit easier of access for anyone who might wish to see and discuss it. Now a little edited from the original, the poem was first loosely conceived as a sort of bardic address or chant to the tribe concerning the new true teaching. Images here leave something to be desired. The Trinity simply is not well or at all illustrated in Christian art. Traditionally there is a dove fluttering above an older and  a younger seated man and it will be apparent I regard this as distorting of the belief ]    

Hard is and always was to tell
Eternal mystery and the purpose of this world.

Beginningless, and boundless too, was God
Whose fullness and deep consciousness as One
Was all supreme, though One as Three.

Not even outside the Union  was there –
Could such exist – a Nothing which might stand
As rival or as enemy against the còmplete
Whole of all that in themselves just were before
Space, time and this wide universe arose.      (1)

Light of itself, like love, would move between
And through the Three who were themselves those
Energies in which the blissful wholeness dwelt.

Within that union, was One who
Could contain and represent all Three,
In function most like Source and Active Will.
The Second was their Spiritual Mind,
The Third their feeling Soul responsive to
Each slightest motion of the other Two.
And know that this exalted Three were like to fire,
And air and water of a spiritual kind.                        (2)

And air with water are what chiefly formed
This earth when sudden change, unknown before,
Caused Three to labour at creating worlds.              (3)

No more the  Three once needed than themselves
Save that, as life itself, they always
In their closeness caused or shed
Some surplus of their energies
Like streams outpoured from mountainsides, or
Echoed song, or stars adrift within a galaxy:
Such were angelic beings arisen
With some awareness of God’s mind and will.      (4)

Amid perfection’s circle, who with certainty
Will tell how, uncreated, evil came about?
What force could shape it? None. Yet by
The motions of freewill, imagine that it was implied.
Pure love, perfection’s self, knows only how to love
And give and share in freedom of the open mind.

But always possible, though never thought,
Was love refused, a love not  shared  but turned
Instead within towards the self in vanity;
And from its self-regard could rise ambition,
And Jealousy with full desire to be
A worshipped One in power unshared.
And through love’s compromise once made
All boundary and limits came about.              (5)

No person can exist except through God
Yet no dark  soul  can with divinity reside
Alone Creation could be hoped to heal,
Through limits set by time and choice,
What was new conflict for the Whole.      (6)

Within the One, much like a womb, God made
From out Supernal Self and imaging Third
A space for world and time which then his Second
Breathed upon and organized. In this arena
Wholly new, a will especially to love in truth
Could be decided for eternity. And caught in time
Until time ends, angels of wrong choice
And souls at variance with God would be
Confined in Hades’ darkness from the light.
And since it cannot be that souls may die,
Nor live at all unless through God
Already some exist in fire that’s all
They can know of the God denied.                        (7)

The One had willed creation to resolve discord
Perfection of the Second could scarce forgive
While, nearer to a mother’s heart, the Third
Was more disposed to pardon. Divided thus     (8)
Began the pain of God and suffering worlds
Till Judgement Day resolves all fate.

NOTES

1)  The doctrine of an ex nihilo creation is irrational, arguably unbiblical and the result of some early Christian arguments with Gnostics who regarded matter as evil. Obviously, and as Jewish mysticism has speculated, the creation was made possible when God created a womb-like space within himself.   Biblically we are told that everything was created through and by Christ (Col 1:15) who, being divine, exists at some level throughout creation, not just in one place (a reason I suggest the sun dims at Christ’s death, and there are issues involved which I touch in the poem  The Hidden Deity https://wp.me/p2v96G-wZ).   Also we are told the world was not from nothing but “formed out of and by means of water” (2 Pet 3:5) which, esoterically at  very least (but I suggest there’s more), makes for a wonderful symbolic  fit with perennial ideas that the Lord/Messiah is somehow water-related whether like showers come down, (Joel 2:23, Hos 6:3)  or all that astrologers perceive as represented celestially and cosmically by Neptune.

2)  Given the semi-subordinationist statements of Jesus even in John’s gospel most devoted to the divinity theme, it is helpful to imagine the Trinity as akin to the Kabbalistic apex of the Supernals with God the Father being Keter (the Head), the Spirit/Mind that organizes at Hokhmah  and the Soul/body that feels and carries at Geburah these two both facing one another to form the base of triangle beneath Keter. While many Christians would dismiss much or all of Jewish mysticism which can exceed itself in speculation, a few of its basic principles are noteworthy. This is especially the case as there anyway looks to be some connection between Kabbalah and Essene thought and some connection of Jesus’ thought with the Essenes, the only Jewish sect we know of which entertained messianic ideas of a divinising kind.

3)  In Kabbalah there are only three elements, fire, air and water with earth being derivative from them. The Genesis creation story is begun by God assisted by the Spirit who like a bird broods over the waters  fecundating them – esoterically air is male and water female and we perhaps have here an implicit ying yang. It could be deemed problematic that Christ is male, but as the Sophia which even St Paul calls him, he represents the divine female principle.

4) I can be wrong about the origin of the angels. It is not clear when and why they are created (deliberately or more automatically?) but they possess a will and choice and  thus some rebel with the Satan.

5)  According to St Augustine the devil fell through pride; but within the context of the heavenly, the withdrawal inwards of self-love or vanity seems more feasible as the first step towards evil within a place of only mutual love and perfection. Also vanity is implicit in the Ezekiel’s vision of Tyre as a Satan who becomes proud because of his beauty (Ez 27:18) which seems indicative of vanity before pride.

6) Creation with the dimension of the material and time helps establish a measure of distance from imperfection for God while for creatures it allows a space to exercise a degree of free choice for or against God.

7)  The Eastern Orthodox view of hell regards the damned as living through the same light/fire that illuminates the redeemed. God is primarily and ultimately spiritual fire (See the vision of Ezekiel for example). A soul can’t die like a body, it must live forever, it cannot be annihilated otherwise God is not “Lord of Life”. The damned would appear to be those who  continue to exist through God as fire but without the benefits of the other elements. Thus like the rich man in the parable of Lazarus in Luk 16, this soul is tormented by thirst because spiritually or materially, the water element is absent.

8) The mental and abstract, organizational perfections of the Second (akin to Hokhmah) and the understanding and feeling of the Third (akin to Geburah) create a tension between them and the One will of the Head. There are various symbolic grammars and archetypal motifs to evoke this. I like best as easiest to demonstrate in even everyday psychology, the will to exclude among perfectionist Uranian individuals and the will to include of pardoning Neptunian ones, but I realize this is a bit Jungian and not an acceptable comparison for many. But the main point is that until the final decisions of Judgement Day, there is a tension and conflict within God seen at its most extreme at the crucifixion where Jesus, “become” sacrifice and the sin alien to divine perfection, is or feels temporarily abandoned by God like the damned to Hades (hell). No Arian type doctrines that deny the Trinity fit the spiritual and psychological dynamics of the Passion story and one might as well say that Jesus never died on the cross or did so without much purpose. The maverick theologian Uta Ranke Heinemann dismisses the whole atonement doctrine as “theology for butchers”. I suggest this kind of thinking is an example of the German theological messing about on which the West is choking.