PORTS OF CALL
by
Ciaran Murray
Castle Quarter Press
Zuisenji, Kamakura
Canberra to Kurukshetra
Last Post. Dublin 1916: Post Office, postmaster and post scriptum. ‘As day followed day, the government counter-attacked in overwhelming force, and the rebels, encircled, were pushed inexorably back. Artillery was brought up, and from the Post Office “we watch the leaping flame while gradually night darkens over the city... The interior of our room is bright as day... the light is so terrible that it strikes one like a solid thing as blasts of scorching air come in through the glassless windows... Crimson-tinged men move around dazedly. Above it all the sharp crackle of rifle fire predominates, while the deadly rattle of the machine-gun sounds like...coughing laughter”. An outlying rebel position was heartened by the conflagration, “for it showed the magnitude of the Rising, which we knew would change the whole position of Ireland”. Pearse, “his slightly flushed face crowned with his turned-up hat”, declared: “When we are all wiped out, people will blame us for everything... In a few years they will see the meaning of what we tried to do”’.
Sweetness from the Strong. The Rockefellers and the rock garden. ‘Jihei Ogawa...also worked on Murin-an in Kyoto, where rock-edged streams trickle through lawns to converge in front of the house. “It is a garden”, note Treib and Herman, “created by the movement, play, and fall of water from the nearby hills. Streams flow and fall; moving through the site; twisting through earth and lawn; brushing stones; washing pebbles”. The overall effect is of a gloss on Tennyson: “Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn”; while the “boundaries of the site are lined with tall trees that open only in one place to a controlled view of adjacent Higashiyama”’.
Square of Stillness. Aesthetic of the unspoken. ‘To say that some of the people I worked with on the Irish Times were writers is not quite as tautological as it may sound. Because I refer, not to the reporters whose printed pronounce- ments were topics for national debate, but to the anonymous editors who shaped them for the page, many of whom published in their own right. The best-known of these was the imposing but affable literary editor, alias the novelist Terence de Vere White. After someone told me he had known Yeats, and I asked for an impression, there was a pause, a look of comical dismay, and a single word. Terrifying! Given his eminence, he made his own schedule: writing through the morning, and ambling into the office during the afternoon. Not so the cheerful and generous travel editor, who was obliged to observe regular hours; but she told me that, by the time she came in at ten, she had, by getting up early, a morning’s writing behind her. The results of which became apparent in the later years during which it was rare to see an airport book-rack without a title by Maeve Binchy. The preoccupied Bruce Williamson wrote leaders and reviewed novels, but had a reputation as a poet, and confided an epiphany in the course of the war during which Churchill and Hitler, Truman and Mussolini, Stalin and the rulers of Japan (whoever they may have been), vied to redraw the map of the world: when, at the core of neutral Ireland, he paused in the court of Trinity College, and perceived that he inhabited one stillness within another’.
Garema Dream. Hemingway’s Chicago to Griffin’s Canberra. ‘Ich bin ein funke nur vom heiligen feuer Ich bin ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme “I am but a gleam of the sacred fire I am but a murmur of sacred speech”. A breeze sidles through, in the oblique light. There are awnings overhead; but at that time of day the sunlight slips under them, and picks out the grain on the timber of the tables. This was on Garema – the chap who directed me there pronounced it to rhyme with “dreamer” – Place. I used to go there every afternoon, when my work in the library was done. This is by the lake at the centre of Canberra, to which I walked each morning under the trees. Also within easy walk are the gallery – its sun-drenched Monet Haystack echoing the heat outside – the former parliament house, and the present one: where you can amble in, catch the continuation of the previous evening’s news, and see a copy of Magna Carta from the century in which it was signed... Griffin’s Land Axis rolls down from the new, symmetrical, parliament house on the hill, across the old one, still symmetrical, on the floor of the valley, and up again to the war memorial, no less symmetrical, at the foot of Mount Ainslie. Beyond the former seat of parliament, it is crossed by his Water Axis, the river Molonglo, flooded to form a naturalistic lake. This bears Griffin’s name; and it glitters when the wind moves over the water’.
The Vision and the Dance. Beautiful and Sublime, Apollo and Dionysus, Vishnu and Shiva. ‘At Pandharpur, sacred to an avatar of Vishnu (Vitthala), the present author was bemused to find a pilgrims’ hostel pervaded by the sound of a mantra glorifying Shiva. “Doctrinal tolerance is...one of the most remarkable aspects of Hinduism”... “The divinity worshipped under the aspect of form (saguna) may be male or female, a divine couple or an androgyne, but all of these are to be subsumed in the divinity which is formless (nirguna)”’
Dinn Ree to New Delhi
The Indians of Europe. Affinities between Ireland and India from ancient mythology to Yeats. ‘Like the sun-god, the earth-goddess has a variety of manifestations. The version by Tom MacIntyre of an eighteenth-century Gaelic poem that characterises its subject, Cathleen, as a “lovely whore” sounds like something you might overhear in a pub. But when you look at the list of boyfriends, you find they are kings of Ireland between the second and the twelfth centuries: the first three noted warriors – Brian, for example, defeating the Vikings – while the fourth was in turn defeated by the Anglo-Normans; hence her “long slide”. So far from being personal, then, it is an intensely political poem, with Cathleen the goddess of sovereignty who mated with each successive ruler in turn’.
Distant Prospects. The gardens of Ireland as counterpoint to landscape. ‘“The Irish union of man-made landscape with innumerable natural loughs, rivers, mountains and sheltered harbours”, assert Edward Malins and Desmond FitzGerald, “is an achievement unique in European art”... When we work our way round to the west of the country, we find, as at Powerscourt, another memorable conjunction of Italian and Irish elements on Garinish Island, in Cork, where the “highly civilised classical nucleus” of a formal garden is “in stark contrast” to the surrounding wildness; in which, beyond a patio centred on a “still, aquamarine-tiled, rectangular pool”, a Palladian pavilion with “tripartite openings separated by marble columns” frames a view of sea and mountain’.
Plunge to Oblivion. The mantra in Buddhism and Hinduism. ‘As the Scott Glenn character, in the film Vertical Limit, cuts through the rope which alone keeps him from hurtling to eternity, he utters the mantra Om Manipadme Hūm’.
Mandala Mountain. Kūkai, promulgator of Esoteric Buddhism in Japan, and still a living presence there; his encounter in China with Indian tradition and the interaction between Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese. ‘Saint, savant, shaper of his people’s self-expression: these are factors that distance him. In the stories retold by Hearn, he has become altogether superhuman. Here he is represented as writing an inscription above a gate, without need of a ladder, by flinging the brush in the air, upon which it not only did the work by itself but returned to the artist’s hand; or across a river in flood, by moving the brush on his side, whereupon the letters appeared in writing on the other; or completing the character for “dragon” to such effect that it came to life, “moved terribly in the waters...and ascended in a whirl of tempest to heaven”... What diminishes that distance, brings him within our purview, is where he is a human being one can recognise: who, in deference to his deepest sense of himself, would not serve that in which he no longer believed; who found in a far country that which was most intimate to him – and which, as it would seem, surpassed anything he might have imagined’.
Braganza to Hyderabad
Vanished Worldviews. The haunting of an Irish town by the Celtic past; of an Islamic author by the classical. ‘In front was the glassy river; across it, beyond a thicket of reeds and rushes, a line of hills that now, on the horizon, were pale and luminous. Behind, above a slope, were the woods within which lay the palace. And here is what intrigues me: that palace and river had related names. “Eighteen hundred years ago, Ptolemy of Alexandria named the river that flows through my home town as the Birgos, and the people who lived on its banks as Brigantes, worshippers of the goddess Brigantia, whose name is cognate with Sanskrit brihatī, ‘the exalted one’, a term also used of divinity in India”. The roots brig, “high place, hillfort” and brigant, “high place or person” have been found across the Celtic domains: in Brescia, Briançon and Bregenz as well as Braganza; as if the palace invisible amid its woods were a shadowy reincarnation, in its original landscape, of some archaic prototype’.
Wholes within Wheels. The wheel as mechanical creation and metaphysical concept. ‘He was my grandfather, and he was a carriage-builder. He encouraged one to shape the remnants in his workshop into the forms that they suggested, only insisting that one respect the grain of the timber and the edge of chisel or plane. On Sundays, when the workshop was closed, he might take the light carriage, or trap, from his coach-house, harness it to the horse he kept in a nearby field, and bring us for a spin along the winding ways of the Ballyhoura Hills... It was not that he was behind the times. In a garage across the street was a spacious family car; but it had sat on blocks since the outbreak of World War II for want of petrol, which was confined to those whose services were thought essential. It was the same in my hometown: there was a forge at each of the cardinal points, and goods were delivered from the railway station on a long, broad, horse-drawn dray. So it was due to an accident of history that I witnessed the end of an ancient craft, the significance of which is explored by David Anthony in Horse, Wheel and Language. Anthony explains that “wheel, axle and vehicle together made a complicated combination of load-bearing moving parts”: which, being “planed and chiselled entirely from wood...had to fit precisely”. Another problem concerned the draught – “the total weight, with drag, pulled by the animal team” – a way to lower which was to “reduce the number of wheels from four to two – to make a wagon into a cart” – or a dray into a trap – the draught of a two-wheeler being “40% less than a four-wheeled wagon of the same weight”’.
All in a Whirl. The labyrinth of love. ‘That evening we were put up in one of those hotels where they seem to assume that everyone watches television, and there is no decent light to read by. So I went to the lobby, where an American tour group of what looked and sounded like college students exploded in happy pandemonium. That was what made the two sitting near me, dark man and fair woman, seem so much out of place. He frowned with the effort of getting out his words, while she seemed to find it equally difficult to formulate indifferent observations about the places they had passed through. Then it hit me: they had fallen for each other; it was the first time for both of them; and they did not know what to do about it. It was she who in the end found a path from the maze through which they circled in search of each other. What floor had they put him on? Oh yeah? Hey, she was on a different floor; and she slipped in the number of her room. I do not know what happened after that; but I like to think of them as waking to a sense of wonder: “And now we stare astonished at the sea, And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us”’.
Looping the Cord. Joyce’s death-in-life imagery in the stories of Maugham. ‘For Eliade, to negotiate the labyrinth is the ‘supreme rite of initiation’: a venture into the unknown, into disorientation and darkness, out of which one returns to the light inevitably transformed. He that will lose his life shall find it’.
Expert Tictacs. The landscapes of Kashmir Shaivism. ‘His initiation by the guru had been followed by the invocation of the Katha Upanishad: “Like the sharp edge of a razor, the sages say, is the path. Narrow it is, and difficult to tread!” Initiation is by definition a setting out, not an arrival. “Kundalini rises to the sahasrāra and returns to the mūlādhāra at the base of the spine, again and again, until she ultimately becomes stabilised in the sahasrāra and does not return... When Kundalini finally becomes established in the sahasrāra, the union of Shiva and Shakti takes place”. From now on, the path will, as Ashok acknowledges, be in essence internal: vismayo yogabhūmikāh. “The unfolding of yoga is full of wonder”’.
Dublin Street to the Tree of Shiva
Angles. English tragedy, the noh and nuances found in translation. ‘Nobody who has been admitted to the mystery of printing – to the babel which combined the noises of a foundry with the excitement of a first night at the theatre – can ever recover from it. A printer on The Nationalist once remarked to me, under the clatter of the machines, that in Germany men of his profession still bore the right to wear a sword. It does not surprise me: print has altered the world. From a single shaky manuscript it gave the youth of Catullus to the Renaissance. It humbled proud clerics at the Protestant revolt. It was the literal fulfilment of the alchemist’s dream: of lead transmuted to imperishable ore’.
Speaking in Tongues. The languages in Ireland: Richard Geoghegan, Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory and beyond. ‘Or one might take the poem that haunted Stephen Daedalus: “On a green bed of rushes All last night I lay, And I flung it abroad With the heat of the day. And my love came behind me – He came from the South; His breast to my bosom, His mouth to my mouth... Leabuidh luachra Bhí fúm aréir, Agus chaith mé amach é Le teas an laé. Táinig mo ghrá-sa Le mo thaébh Guala air ghualain Agus beul aír bheul’.
Trees of Tragedy and Transformation. The diffusion of the otherworld apple along the Silk Road; of Buddhism from the tree of Bodh Gayā. ‘Cunningham set out for Bodh Gayā. In the course of successive visits, he had observed the “old Pipal Tree” in a state of increasing decrepitude, until its last remnants were swept away by a storm. Digging below the site, he came upon traces of earlier incarnations, and concluded that “there must have been a long succession of fresh trees raised from seed, from the time of Ashoka down to the present day”... Its branches writhe and snake over the path – filtering and reshaping the light – along which pilgrims circumambulate endlessly, telling beads or twirling prayer-wheels, pausing only to prostrate themselves on the marble paving, or touch their foreheads to the sandstone railings which fence in the site; while monks chant, robed in crimson and saffron, to the pounding of drums and the reverberation of gongs’.
Books about Books...about Books. The confluence of Dante and Japanese aesthetics in Ungaretti and Hemingway. ‘You cross the dusty plains north of Delhi, along the Grand Trunk Road which carried the Mughals to their cool water- gardens in Kashmir, and along the way you may still see some of the pillars with which they marked the miles. Then, having turned down successive side-roads, you come to a spacious tank overlooked by a platform. On this a banyan-tree shades a marble image of a chariot with two figures inside, one of them evidently instructing the other. For this is Kurukshetra: where, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, Krishna “admonished Arjuna On the field of battle”. There was an unreal atmosphere in the car as we headed there. Driver and guide had decided I looked like their prime minister, and the joke was repeated whenever we passed a poster with his face on it. If this was silly, it was so in the earlier sense that is linked to German selig: they seemed as irresponsibly happy as schoolboys on an excursion. The reason became clear when we arrived. Both spent a long time in the Krishna museum, poring over every one of its images; it turned out that they had not had occasion to visit the place before, and the guide expressed gratitude for what he described as a blessing. It was now apparent that what they were on was not an excursion, but a pilgrimage; and that the word I had been looking for to describe them was ‘giddy’, again in an earlier signification: that of being possessed by a god’.
Castle Hill to the Circuit of Krishna
Alignments. Carlow as mythic space; Humayun’s Tomb as elaboration of quaternity; light in Das Lied von der Erde; Yourcenar’s Genji as epic of enlightenment; dawn prayer in a chapel by the sea; the solar chariot and yoga; golden vessel in the Maitrī Upanishad. ‘But this time...they have moved beyond name and memory, for they inhabit an eternal present. The candle burned on the table, The candle burned. Stage, by stage, wonderingly, he has been absorbing her attainment: her unfathomable patience, her selflessness. He is astonished to find that he has crossed a threshold where her ecstasy bestows upon him a deeper fulfilment than his own. Gradually, he begins to comprehend the true greatness of this person he has too long taken for granted. The deceptively passive Lady from the Village of Falling Flowers, now acting as psychopomp, leads him to a place he has never known before – I have opened the door to the city of nectar And thoroughly entered into its abode – where, in their nightly intertwinings, they re-enact a ritual of enlightenment’.
Mirror on Mirror Mirrored. After Emily Blunt encounters Matt Damon in front of a mirror, they flee through one optical illusion after another in a realisation of the philosophy of history (The Adjustment Bureau). Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman also flee, this time from an apocalyptic future, in a John Woo film that balances the director’s enactment of Hollywood violence with the pacific intrusion of a dove deriving from his Christian convictions, the two interweaving under the yin-yang sign of his Chinese antecedents (Paycheck). And this last reappears in a third tale from Philip K. Dick, which explores the alternative history of a Japanese occupation of California, with its aesthetic consequences (The Man in the High Castle). ‘Dick acknowledges two sources for his representation of Japanese aesthetics. One is an anthology edited by Donald Keene, from which the Buson haiku is quoted; the other is D. T. Suzuki’s Zen in Japanese Culture, in which the author considers two kinds of wu: the wu of Taoism (無, emptiness) and that of Zen (悟, enlightenment); and, though the two might be said to be related insofar as enlightenment can be described as the realisation of that emptiness which, like the hollow of the wheel, is the fulcrum of existence, it is the latter, argues Jianjiong Zhu, which is here intended: a contention borne out by the text’.
Presumed Imminent. The web of Penelope’s reverie in Wallace Stevens’ ‘World as Meditation’ expands to take in his influence by Japanese print series and ink painting (‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’), in an exploration of his romantic worldview. ‘“Someone is moving On the horizon and lifting himself up above it. A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope, Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells”. This resolves the apparent contradiction of the opening, Ulysses’ approach from the east suggesting that Penelope has fused him with the sun-god, seen here as the individual (“someone”) who reinvigorates her world: as in the theory according to which the two were identified. In the words of John A. Scott: “Professor Menrad, München, 1910, ...sees in the earliest form of the poem, Der Urmythos der Odyssee, the description of the manner by which the sun-god after many struggles reaches the earth, and he names this earliest form Des Sonnengottes Erdenfahrt”. Scott goes on to pour scorn on the hapless professor’s contortions; yet Menrad’s account of the epic’s mythic core might serve as background to the English poem: “Penelope in his theory is the earth, and Odysseus is the sun-god kept back from his bride, the earth, by the cold and the storms of winter...” In Stevens’ words: “That winter is washed away”’.
Beyond Mongoose and Snake. The severely anti-romantic novel of India by Mircea Eliade (Bengal Nights) is replied to by its subject, Maitreyi Devi, in another (It Does Not Die), which seems to oppose, but in the end complements and curiously completes it, raising the interaction between them to a level of transcendence ironically influenced by Eliade’s philosophical musings on the nature of time. ‘Now at last she knows that, however he may have wished to exorcise her image by defiling it, he had been tormented as she was by the abiding, inescapable, urgency of their love. For Eliade, “the sacred is...both revealed and concealed in the profane”. It might be said that, where Mircea had concealed the narrative of their love under the appearance of the profane, Maitreyi has revealed its true nature as a modality of the sacred... This comes after a conversation with Mircea, in the course of which she says: “I have come to see that you whom weapon cannot pierce, fire cannot burn”. And he evidently recognises the allusion, since he replies in a murmur of Sanskrit: na hanyate... “It does not die...”’.
The Battlefield and the Bedroom. The pilgrim circuit through the landscape of Krishna’s youth, centre of a devotion reminiscent of that in the Song of Songs. ‘Haberman “looked up to find a young...woman... Her eyes were deep and dark, simultaneously mischievous and mysterious...” He ran into her again near another body of water, Prema Sarovar, the “Pond of Love”, and suggested that he visit it, which he did. “The pond is octagonal and is surrounded by sandstone encasements which consist of eight steps leading down to the water”. He sat beside it, then suddenly became aware of her standing behind him. She sat down too, and directed him to look into the water. “She told me that she could see that I had another body but...it remained dormant because I was too intent upon my ‘research’... She instructed me to return my gaze to the surface of the pond... A whole new world became visible. I was looking at a dense forest of flowering trees in which stood a woman and a man... The two embraced and suddenly the image was gone”. So was Haberman’s guide; and, when he sought her out, she said simply: “Prema Sarovar is where Rādhā and Krishna first experienced love for each other”. His last glimpse of her was when, after smiling a farewell to him, she was “absorbed into an indistinguishable crowd”. Her name was Māyā: as if to suggest the goddess who conjures up illusion, and in the fullness of time dissolves it’.
Red Fort to Crystal Palace
Siren Shores. The lure of desire in Hearn, Homer, Joyce, Berio, fin-de-siècle Vienna (by way of Cruise and Kidman), Schoenberg, Waddell, Maugham and Hearn. ‘My first encounter with Lafcadio Hearn was an unforgettable image: a sightless singer with hieroglyphics inked over his head. It was in a magazine article of 1965, when I was still an undergraduate, about the film Kwaidan, which dramatises his story of how the singer, to the sound of the lute, chanted the fall of the house of Heike – the fight on the bitter sea... the straining of oars, the whirr and the hissing of arrows, the shouting and trampling of men, the crashing of steel upon helmets,...the piteous perishing of the women and children...and the death-leap...with the imperial infant – to an audience that he could not see were the Heike dead – all the listeners uttered together one long, long shuddering cry of anguish; and thereafter they wept and wailed so loudly and so wildly that the blind man was frightened by the violence of the grief that he had made – and how the Heart Sutra – the Doctrine of the Emptiness of Forms – that is to say, of the unreal character of all phenomena or noumena... ‘Form is emptiness; and emptiness is form. Emptiness is not different from form; form is not different from emptiness... Perception, name, concept, and knowledge, are also emptiness... But when the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then...the seeker...becomes free from all fear, and beyond the reach of change, enjoying final Nirvana’ – was painted upon his body to make him invisible to them; but his ears were forgotten, and these were torn off. After I began to work on my local, Carlow, newspaper in 1968, I used my visits to Dublin to seek out Hearn’s writings in the bookshops there, with their stalls and barrows outside. In the Ireland of the 1960s, his books were not easy to find. When I applied for some through the Irish Central Library for Students, one came to me from England, a second from Northern Ireland, and a third from Scotland... A family friend, in the meantime, had confessed to possession of the Stevenson biography; and here I was struck, as one must be, by the resemblances with Joyce: the combination of sexual and intellectual rebellion against a black-thorned and hobnailed theocracy... However, it occurred to me that I could best come to terms with the subject by visiting Japan; ...and..., ...in 1972, ...to Hearn’s burial-place. I reported to the Irish Times of having found “a sad seventeenth-century temple, with dust swirling around its courtyard, and Zoshigaya, a Buddhist cemetery dense with trees and alive with the noise of cicadas”. While, in the bookshops, “Hearn himself was up and alive. I felt ridiculous: I had treasured the slim volumes in blue and gold that I had come upon from time to time on the Dublin quays. Here you could find him anywhere, in garish paperback”... Then, in the late autumn of that year, I was captivated by the Japanese garden; and when I discovered that its naturalism was the catalyst for the Romantic movement, and that the individual responsible had lived just outside my hometown, this became a story I had to tell. And, as I found in it the “fundamental notation” of its time, that took a quarter of a century. However, it also provided a larger context for Hearn. In the meantime, I had had an opportunity to visit the site of the blind singer’s ordeal. It was after nightfall when I got there, and the place seemed to be in darkness. But along the path to the sepulchral monuments I saw a light, and heard the sound of a lute. It came from an enclosed platform, on which sat a figure in kimono. But there was no writing on his head, and his ears were intact’.
Blueprint of Being. The emperor Frederick II as youth in Palermo; as king of Jerusalem and philosophical interlocutor with the sultan of Egypt; as promoter of Arabic numerals; and as creator of Castel del Monte in the Islamic pattern of the eight-pointed star. ‘It does not seem implausible, then, that when Götze traces the geometrical figure created by linking the centres of the corner towers at Castel del Monte, he should identify it as the eight-pointed star which is a characteristic Islamic motif: which, indeed, for Frederick’s contemporary, the Spanish Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi, represents the blueprint of all being. For him, the visible world partakes of quaternary form, as does the invisible; and, in the ultimate union of the two, one square is superimposed over the other, resulting in the outline of this octagonal star’.
Trains of Thought. ‘“Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet...and you select...I don’t know...that lumpy blue sweater, for instance...because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously...to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And...it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice...that exempts you from the fashion industry...when in fact... you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room”. Some might feel that the same holds true for the history of ideas.’
Reverse Narration. The Moonstone as inversion of the Koh-i-Noor narrative. ‘You could say it was the story of his life, this odd little man with the untidy beard and the misshapen head. What he did for himself he did for the empire: stood outside looking in, and found the view uncommonly strange... “While we are still fighting for the possession of India, benevolent men of various religious denominations are making their arrangements for taming the human tigers in that country by Christian means. Assuming that this well-meant scheme is not an entirely hopeless one, it might, perhaps, not be amiss to preach to the people of India, in the first instance, out of some of their own books – or, in other words, to begin the attempt to purify their minds by referring them to the excellent moral lessons which they may learn from their own Oriental literature”’.
Xanadu to Zuisenji
Gateways. ‘In a shaded courtyard of red walls and grey tiles stands a massive stone cube inscribed with images of the Buddha, while inside four sculptures of him face in the four directions. The building is called the Temple of True Awakening (Zhenjuesi, 真覺寺), after that on the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment: so bodying forth that condition, or attainment, in which all manifestation is reabsorbed into its source’.
To the Realm of Osiris. Sketches.
Games of Death and Life. ‘Smoley goes on: “Shiva takes his defeat with aplomb and simply retreats to the forest. That is to say, consciousness can detach itself from its experience; it can free itself from its own contents. This detachment is the goal of...meditation, which can produce...a kind of consciousness without contents which is both peaceful and blissful... Parvati goes off in search of Shiva again, and eventually they reunite. That is, after detaching itself from its experience, consciousness reunites with it, but this time in...more balanced fashion... Consciousness is aware of all it experiences – thoughts, feelings, even passions come and go – but is not enslaved by these things, does not cling to or identify itself with them”’.
Quartet. Sketches.
Tales within Tales. ‘There is a story by Maeve Binchy in which two people, both of whose closest relationships are under strain, meet at an airport and instinctively dislike what they see in each other; but who, when they find themselves side by side on the plane, experience a deepening rapport. They part with regret, not knowing that they will meet again; but the reader does. And this implies a sequel of which the dénouement, given what we know of the two, seems inevitable, but which is all the more satisfying for being left untold’.
Vortex. Sketches.
A Doll Carved of Moonstone. ‘Among the sites of pilgrimage for the worship of Shiva are the fire-mountain of Arunachala and the ice-cave of Amarnath. And then there is the rock. “According to tradition among Kashmiri scholars, it was at the base of Mahadeva Mountain in the ninth century that the sage Vasugupta was directed in a dream to a massive boulder. As he stood before it, the rock overturned as if by divine will and revealed, inscribed on its underside, the seventy-seven aphorisms that comprise the seminal text of this system, the Shiva-sūtra”... Muller-Ortega comments: “Vasugupta...had ecstatically, and in some irrevocable fashion, recognised...the uncontainable consciousness that is called Shiva. Thus, when...Vasugupta dreamed, it was reality rather than illusion which was projected on the inner screen of his awareness... That which is Shiva, the absolute light of consciousness, reveals itself to him in these aphorisms...through which the primordial and unspoken perception that the ultimate consciousness has of itself is able to emerge into language”’.
Eve of Venus. Sketches.
Latin Quarter to Mount Koya
Voyage. Sketches.
The Japanese and the Jackal. ‘Towards the climax of this story, when the hunter has also become the hunted, the would-be assassin, disguised as a middle-aged clergyman, is brought face to face, in the heart of Paris, with the detective who is directing the search for him... It is an intensely dramatic moment; but is it more? One might not ask were it not that the pattern is repeated: in his next novel, The Odessa File, Forsyth invokes it again – twice... And yet again, in The Deceiver, hunter and hunted once more cross paths, once more unknown to each other... Is this simply a structural device? Or is it a personal cipher, like the signature on a painting? Or does it imply some larger design in human existence?’
Incident at Ithaca.
snowfall floods
our basement room
with light
Malintzin and the Conquistador. ‘More generally, the title of Camilla Townsend’s study – Malintzin’s Choices – implies a more appropriate, and ultimately more historical, approach: “she was clearly a resourceful and intelligent young woman, a survivor”, who “did what she could within her own context to preserve her sense of herself”; as opposed to evaluations informed by hindsight, potentially as many and varied as the evaluators and their individual agendas. In the words of Trevelyan: “Every true history must, by its human and vital presentation of events, force us to remember that the past was once real as the present and uncertain as the future”’.
The Secret Life of Sharawadgi. The work of Piet Oudolf, planter of the High Line in New York, has been located in the tradition of sharawadgi. ‘The genius of Addison...was that he transplanted the aesthetic of the Japanese garden, not through simplistic imitation, but in terms of his own, English, surroundings: “Why may not a whole Estate be thrown into a kind of Garden...?”... “Oudolf”, says the exhibition catalogue, “considers the design for the Hauser & Wirth art gallery in Somerset as the commission where he had the most freedom”... The...vista is of a strikingly beautiful, almost psychedelic brushwork of buff and gold, maroon and violet, scarlet and crimson and rose. Here Addison’s vision of “the natural Embroidery of the Meadows”, “helpt and improved by some small Additions of Art”, has found a realisation, one would imagine, beyond his wildest dreams.’
City in the Sky. ‘Bäumer...speaks of “the nature of Shiva as shūnya”, citing the Svāyambhuva Sūtra Samgraha: “The...yogīn who contemplates Shiva’s Void-nature, his mind merged into emptiness, ...reaches emancipation”, again referring to the Vijñāna Bhairava... “Bhairava is the aspect of Shiva... who, in the yogic ecstasy of his cosmic dance, destroys one world to create another, obliterates illusion to uncover reality”...; while Vijñāna is defined as his “essential nature”: “supreme consciousness”. Here Shiva is represented as “the subtlest and the highest void, ...shūnya...in the sense that he is transcendent to all manifestation and defies all characterisation by the mind”. The yogīn, accordingly, “should concentrate intensely on the idea that this universe is totally void... Then...his mind is absorbed in shūnyātishūnya, the absolute void, i. e., Shiva”... “As, at the heart of the temple of the same god as dancer, lies an empty room”’.
Intimations of Avalon. ‘Vergil was born, it has been observed, “not in Italy proper as then understood, but in Gallia Cisalpina, the Celtic lands below the Alps, fully assimilated to Rome only in his own lifetime. It is hardly surprising, then, that traces of a dual identity should have been found in his work. ‘This poet whom we regard as so typically Roman’, declares Garrod, ‘was half a Celt’. Curtius has detected it even in his style: side by side with the clarity and concision of the Latin, its metallic and marmoreal solidity, he finds, in the great talismanic passages – in lacrimæ rerum, in amica silentia lunæ – what he describes as the aura of infinity... Vergil’s poetry, notes Garrod, ‘is essentially a poetry of spiritual conflict, of divided purpose, of unattained desire’... In the dream- like calm of the first Eclogue, where the language is at its most magical, as the old man drowses peacefully to the sound of doves in his ancient elms – nec gemere aëria cessabit turtur ab ulmo – it is against the background of the civil war evictions on behalf of the veterans of Octavius Caesar, the future Augustus, who are characterised as barbarus and impius... And it is tempting to see, behind this lament over local tragedy, the intimation of a more comprehensive dispossession: of that archetypal conflict between Celt and Roman, where the single combat in pursuit of honour, marked by bright garments and totemic armour, was doomed before the khaki collectivism of the drive to empire.
“Vergil’s first poem and his last, writes Gilbert Highet, ‘both deal with weary exiles travelling slowly through a hostile world in search of a home’. This would help to explain why his acceptance of the Augustan imperium was always conditional, and why the Aeneid is infused with such desperate sadness... The conflict within the hero has always seemed the core of the work, and its resolution in favour of duty over feeling...a tragedy..., Aeneas’ duty to dissolve the sacred marriage with Dido and go on to the founding of Rome being described as a gigantic task. Yet when he encounters her spirit...Vergil has always made his readers feel that his hero is hopelessly in the wrong”...
‘In the course of Aeneas’ war for Italy, we hear: at vero ingentem quatiens Mezentius hastam / turbidus ingreditur campo. quam magnus Orion, / cum pedes incedit medii per maxima Nerei / stagna viam scindens, umero supereminet undas, / aut summis referens annosam montibus ornum, / ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubile condit: / talis se vastis infert Mezentius armis. “But now Mezentius, shaking his mighty spear, / advances like a whirlwind on the plain. Great as Orion, / when cleaving a path he stalks on foot through the vast pools / of mid-ocean, towers with his shoulder above the waves, / or, as he carries off an aged ash from mountain-heights, / walks the ground with head hidden in the clouds: / so Mezentius strode in his giant armour”. ‘Upon which Eleanor Winsor Leach comments: “As he approaches Aeneas on the battlefield, Mezentius...is on his way to the light. The sad outcome of this combat will force him to re-evaluate, and to regret, the entire course of his career... As a bloody tyrant, hated and exiled by his own people..., Mezentius ...moves in blindness”...
‘In Blade Runner, too, it is a question of humanity: whether the hominoid (Rutger Hauer) or the ostensible human who is hunting him down (Harrison Ford) possesses it in greater measure. And, as the hunted, expiring, gives his life back to the hunter, he utters the lines: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”. Surely, lacrimæ rerum.
attackships off the shoulder of
– supereminet undas –
Orion’
Byzantium Reimagined. ‘Byzantium was once at the centre of its world; and at the centre of that centre, drawing all the lines of the landscape together, stood, at the command of the Emperor Justinian, the church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia... “When...Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus sent ambassadors to Constantinople to explore a possible conversion to Orthodox Christianity, his men witnessed the liturgy in the Great Church and exclaimed: ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or beauty, and we are at a loss to describe it. We only know that God dwells there’”... Pentcheva quotes the scriptures to the effect that Wisdom “is the radiance of ineffable light”, and notes that the cupola “shapes the central void” of Hagia Sophia “into a luminous sphere”. All these observations – the overlapping of sound and spirit, of light and Logos – might be regarded as an elaboration of the great prologue to the Gospel according to John’.
River of Light. Sketches.
Córdoba to Valparaíso
Insinuations of the South. The Anglo-Irish poem (Gogarty, de Brún) about a ship from Valparaíso and the dreams it has evoked for successive generations: ‘Over the golden pools of sleep / She went long since with gilded spars; / Into the night-empurpled deep, / And traced her legend on the stars’.
Bonaparte, Bolívar and the Obsessive Biographer. ‘“Men and horses”, writes Harvey, “fell from the path, often thousands of feet, noiselessly...; while the cold moon, according to O’Leary, shone with a ‘metallic lustre’”’.
Carlow Contrapositions. Sketches.
Viceroy, Revolutionary, Visionary Divergence. ‘Bernardo was to deploy his imagination, not on behalf of a mythical Irish barony or an extinct Araucanian city, but of a nation that did not yet exist’.
Triangulating a Classic. Jennifer Fitzgerald & Constant J. Mews, An Annotated Edition of Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2022): ‘The critical apparatus as a whole, with its engaging and illuminating introduction, detailed notes, documentation of the author’s involvement with her subject, guide to subsequent research and rich bibliography, takes up more space than the novel’s original text, and in a fashion no less searching and enriching... Waddell’s understanding of her subject is evidence, not only of a great scholar, or a great stylist – or, rarer still, the two in combination – but a great spirit. And this definitive edition of Peter Abelard provides further evidence of what she herself knew very well: that genuine scholarship requires, not only depth of erudition, but empathy and imagination’.
Sharawadgi and its Dwellings of Dream. ‘“I am almost as fond”, wrote Horace Walpole, “of the sharawadgi, or Chinese want of symmetry, in buildings as in grounds or gardens”; and this he discerned in Gothic architecture. Two mistakes here: as sharawadgi was Japanese rather than Chinese, so Gothic, in its origins, was not asymmetrical. But as in mathematics the product of two negatives is positive, these two misapprehensions would merge into a movement’.
Wohin? Sketches.
Trails beyond Trails. ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s father was a greengrocer and fishmonger, his mother second-generation Irish. The family being Catholic, he was sent to a Jesuit school: where, he recalled, “a boy could...choose the time of day for his punishment...; and putting off the punishment for as long as possible, Hitchcock decided later, was an early education in the power of suspense”’.
Karma Rekindled. Sketches.
‘Ciaran begins with Nevil Shute and A Town Like Alice, and moves rapidly... to the General Post Office, where his father, Arthur Hamilton Norway, served as a high-ranking official... Keith Jeffery, in his book The GPO and the Easter Rising (Cork, 2006), ...states: “Shute appears to have taken his own quiet revenge for the ill-treatment he believed his family had received at the hands of the 1916 insurgents”... Ciaran provides a more sympathetic reading that places Shute on the side of the Irish... This little book offers travel sketches: travels in history and literature and travels in actuality to where history and literature are interwoven in ways that add much to our understanding, that stimulate comparisons one had not previously imagined’ – D. Ó Maol Blagaide, An t-Ultach
‘Another stunning achievement’ – Charles De Wolf, author, Glimpses of Genji through the Looking-Glass of Language
‘Fantastic’ – Ken’ichi Matsumura, translator & editor, The Voyage of Bran
‘Meticulous scrutiny of sources and...unique talent for adding detailed footnotes that equal his main text in analytical profundity’ – George Sioris, Stray Leaves of Historical Writing: East and West
‘Wonderful peregrinations’ – Andrew Fitzsimons, author, What the Sky Arranges, A Fire in the Head, The Sunken Keep
‘A truly global body of work’ – M. A. Cooney, author, Confessions of a Kamikaze Geisha
‘Cornucopia’ – Jennifer FitzGerald, editor, Helen Waddell Reassessed
Urglin Glebe to Aladdin’s Vault
Sharawadgi: Borrowing the Illimitable. Afterword: Aesthetic of Inclination.
Sharawadgi as the Sublime.
Sharawadgi to Serendipity. Afterword a. Sharawadgi Setting; b. Sharawadgi Synthesis.
Mirror on Mirror.
The Cathay of Araby. ‘This, clearly, is a very different Aladdin, considerate and understanding, from the one we were originally introduced to, with the mandalaic completeness of the palace he has designed for Bedrulbudour emblematic of psychic integration, the jewels of which it is composed an elaboration of the treasure originally predestined for him, and its twenty-four windows suggesting a complete cycle of the sun, in darkness as in light’.
Moon after Moon.
A Sword for Montana: Waterford. Thomas Francis Meagher (‘Mar’) as condemned felon in Ireland.
A Sword for Montana: Waterhouse. As restless convict in Australia.
A Sword for Montana: Washington. And as charismatic general in America.