A Hut at the Edge of the Village E-Book

John Moriarty

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The new collection from John Moriarty, edited by Martin Shaw.There is a radical agency in John Moriarty's work not always acknowledged. As our heads spin with mythological cross-referencing, poetical leaps and the philosophical bent, it is clear that there is nothing domestic, nothing tame, about John Moriarty. The power of Moriarty is that he has found a thousand beautiful ways to say something very disturbing: we have to change our lives.In this small book of big thoughts, award-winning author, mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw situates Moriarty's work with respect to our eco-conscious era and a readership seeking spiritual and philosophical guidance. Moriarty asks of us only one thing – that we move our gaze from seeing to beholding. And there the trouble begins, when we realize there is a world beyond us far bigger than our temporary ambitions.A Hut at the Edge of the Village presents a collection of Moriarty's writings ordered thematically, with sections ranging from place, love and wildness through to voyaging, ceremony and the legitimacy of sorrow. These carefully chosen extracts are supported by an introduction by Martin Shaw and foreword by Tommy Tiernan, a long-time admirer of Moriarty's work.According to Shaw, 'These are not pastoral times we are living in, but prophetic. We are at a moment when the world as we understand it has been turned upside down. The challenge is that there are fewer and fewer people who can interpret such happenings in a deep, soulful way. Moriarty can do that. When culture is in woeful crisis, the insights never come from parliament, senate, or committee; they come from the hut at the edge of the village. Let's go there. There is tremendous, unexpected hope waiting.'

Leseprobe

AHUT at theEDGEof theVILLAGE

ALSO BY JOHN MORIARTY

Dreamtime

Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, Volume I: Crossing the Kedron

Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, Volume II: Horsehead Nebula Neighing

Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, Volume III: Anaconda Canoe

Nostos, An Autobiography

Invoking Ireland

Slí na Fírinne

Night Journey to Buddh Gaia

What the Curlew Said: Nostos Continued

Serious Sounds

One Evening in Eden

AHUT at theEDGE of theVILLAGE

JOHN MORIARTY

Edited by

MARTIN SHAW

with a Foreword by

TOMMY TIERNAN

THE LILLIPUT PRESS DUBLIN

First published 2021 by

THE LILLIPUT PRESS

62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill

Dublin 7, Ireland

www.lilliputpress.ie

Copyright © The Lilliput Press and the Estate of John Moriarty

Introduction, drawings and commentary © Martin Shaw

Foreword © Tommy Tiernan

Paperback ISBN 9781843518006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.

A CIP record for this publication is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

The Lilliput Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

Set in 12 pt on 16 pt Garamond by iota (www.iota-books.ie) Printed in Spain by GraphyCems

Contents

Foreword by Tommy Tiernan

Introduction: The Trouble and Rapture of John Moriarty

Horses Walking Spellbound

— On Place —

In That Divine Darkness, the Fishing Was Good

— On Story —

In That Divine Deepness, the Fishing Was Good

— On Story —

I No Longer Smelled of Thunder

— On Ecology —

The Digging Fork

— On Eros and the Wound —

Silver-Branch Beholding

— On Hugeness —

Crossing the Torrent

— On Christianity —

Hamlet to My Own Skull

— On the Death Adventure —

Genius in Every Stone

— On Sore Amazement —

Foreword

I was in a bar after a show one time and a friend of mine who’d just been to see me said, ‘Have you heard of John Moriarty?’

‘No,’ says I.

‘He’s the man for you,’ he said.

He refused to say too much more about it other than that John was a kind of storytelling theosopher. That was enough for me and the following morning I started digging. This was pre-Internet now so it was into a bookshop and yes they had something by him but weren’t quite sure in which section. Spirituality or Biography or maybe hang on it might be in Literature. We eventually found it on the shelves marked Irish Interest. A wonder book by the name of Dreamtime and one look at the cover and I was hooked.

There he stood looking out, an unmannered bushman of the southern mountains. The book was full of stories. Old ones retold and reimagined. It was dead history brought back to life. Tales that for generations had had all the danger and life taken out of them by academics and folklorists were suddenly revitalized. John’s philosophy of storytelling was that you don’t approach them with your own agenda. You absorb the story, know it in your bones and then without deciding how you’re going to tell it just open your mouth and let it come out the way it wants to come out. You surrender control and the story emerges differently from different people. John’s wisdom, instinct and experience as well as his profound poetic sensibility meant that when the stories emerged from him they resonated with all these qualities. It was one thing to read what he’d written but another altogether to hear him tell them.

A box set of recordings was released shortly after his death, just John in front of a small group of people, talking, theorizing, storytelling and they are as important an artefact of Irish culture as you are ever likely to come across. His rhythm, sensitivities and bush brogue are enough to make you swoon. You know you are in the company of a master, an Ollamh Fodhla, a wise one. He’s covered the ground that he’s talking about, you can trust him.

He not only told Native American tales, Greek myths and Sufi parables but he also turned parts of his own experience into a series of what he called Irish Upanishads. They’re six wisdom stories from his life that read or heard in progression offer a trail from the innocent wonder of childhood to a bliss beyond all adult knowing, encountering and traversing all the dark lands of consciousness on the way. Sounds complicated and effortful but it’s not. The stories come across as stuff you might hear in a conversation with a stranger on a bus but they contain such immensities that I’ve been going back to them over and over for years.

It’s difficult for me to follow the thread of John’s writing sometimes. I don’t understand some of the cultural references and I can’t always keep up with the imaginative leaps that he makes but he’s holding my hand when he’s telling a story. He’s talking to all of us when he’s doing that. He had an obligation when standing in front of a crowd to make himself understood and the way John did that was the same way that all the great teachers in all the great religions did before him. He translated theory into parable.

There has never been anyone like him really, in Ireland anyway. To have someone like Martin Shaw act as a guide through the safari of John’s imagination is a great blessing. To listen to Martin is to hear another master speak from the bones of experience. We are lucky to have him emerging into our consciousness right now, still writing, still probing, still gifted.

Tommy Tiernan, April 2021

Introduction

The Trouble and Rapture of John Moriarty

‘It might be time, if we aren’t going to sicken further, to break out of our cultural grow-bag. It might be time to make contact with wild nature.’

Dreamtime, p. 172

There is a radical agency in John Moriarty’s work that we don’t always acknowledge.

As we behold the mighty wallop of poetical contortions and mythic philosophizing, our erudition (or lack of) may feel exposed, vulnerable. And most of us don’t like that. Deep information usually arrives with dismay. So we may opt out. Easier to put the book down and go find something milder.

Because there’s nothing domestic, nothing tame, nothing corralled about John Moriarty. The horses have broken from the stable.

The power of the message is that Moriarty has found a thousand ways to say something disturbing: We have to change our lives. And that’s always radical, usually uncomfortable.

A Moriartian consciousness is not dependent on you living in rural Ireland, it’s not dependent on you being a Christian or religious in any conventional sense. He asks of us only one thing: to move our gaze from seeing to beholding the world. He would call that Silver-Branch perception. And there the trouble begins. Because that beholding can instigate disintegration. The moneylenders flee the temple. We begin to understand the sacredness of defeat. There’s a world far bigger than our temporary ambitions.

Rilke tells us it’s what we secretly long for, that defeat, and Moriarty does too: that our hubris aches to kneel at immensity’s door. Sometimes we may feel exhausted by his work, not fit for the task, but it actually has a kindly arm round our shoulder, urging us on. As the Sufis say, there is an angel up ahead. Life is complex, and any response worthy of the name is equally so.

This beholding tenderizes us, be-dreams us, nourishes us, challenges us. Most of all, it creates relationship. A kind of relationship that makes the hallucination of empire impossible to maintain. Thinking alongside John, we are suddenly wrestling angels, eating honey from the body of a lion, feeling the five fathoms depth of Gethsemane. He tells us that our life is our prayer mat, and we better start paying attention. Beholding is the thing – not art grants, more applause, or being born into another family or circumstance. This is it, this is more than enough, we start right here in the grit of our lives. He’s far more pragmatic than you may expect. Many of his greatest stories take place within just a couple of hours in his life. That we commit to the luminosity of the ordinary.

This is how I would situate John: in many indigenous cultures there would come a point where the young people start to get reckless, start to push against the confines of the tribe. They would be groping for their wingspan and weren’t afraid to get ugly to achieve it. This is the exact moment when they would be taken to the hut at the edge of the village. This is when they fasted in the dark wood or high mountain. In short, they needed to encounter something mightier than themselves. Something wilier, more complex, exacting, demanding. Something to call forth the best in them.

Moriarty’s books are a hut at the edge of the village.

Against all the possible odds, in this half-dead, burning time of ours, we have an elder worth his salt. A teacher who hasn’t franchised the living spirit of his thinking, combed out the knots and watered the beer.

When you go to John’s hut you will be presented with more than you can handle. That’s the point. And in that very disorientation, some soul may enter. Moriarty’s work is endlessly generous with its assumption of your own previous knowledge of myth, folklore, history. So generous it can leave us wheezing and sometimes baffled.

Stay with it. What may seem like an imposition is actually an invitation. I suggest we accept such a rare offer. This is a chance to attempt to become a proper human being. Save yourself a doctorate, and just follow his leads. You may find yourself at Jerusalem’s wall. Temporary confusion can have a ritual underpinning. It’s checking out if you are serious or not. The rewards are substantial.

It is deeply oral what Moriarty is doing. His themes circle around each other again and again, certain stories are invoked repeatedly, book after book. This isn’t an imaginative failing: in a new age this is a very old-age way of teaching. The only strategies in which John traffics are depth and massiveness. He’s isn’t trotting out punditry, the books were specific in theme: Divine Ground. Both in and around us. Plotinus said the soul adores the circle, and never have I read a more circular canon. This is a magical and effective technique. Almost like Sufis whirling. As I say, we have entered the hut. We are turned from the plough to the vision pit. I wonder if whole passages are not entirely for humans anyway. So, when you find a dream, story or incident being shared a second time, or a third, there’s something in it for you. I once wrote this: Underneath a motorway there was once a road, underneath the road there was a lane, underneath the lane there was a track and underneath the track there was once an animal path. Hoof prints under the concrete.

Culturally we are sickened but addicted to the zip of the motorway. We often expect our writers to be equally pithy. What we rarely expect is a man gently tracking hoof prints when all we can see is concrete. The work frequently doubles back, bellows like a stag at bay, does its strange work of disturbance and renewal.

And I want to talk about the chant. John’s chant.

I was fully grown by the time I came to Moriarty, well into my second book. I knew what erudition felt like on the page, I had sat for thousands of hours in wild places, four years in a tent. Been broken open by the mysteries and left gasping. But what I had not encountered in a Western writer was the chant. The sing-song of his philosophy. The patterning of a sweat-lodge prayer in the fundament of his words, the high keen of a griever in the lintel of his images. That alone is achievement, sustained achievement. That was the specific key John threw to me, and I thank him right here for that. That key unlocked something. Beauty and rigour are not enemies. As a boy he wanted to be known as the ‘singing lad’ and I think he achieved his ambition.

So you will sense that I am proposing that John Moriarty and his work has the quality of an elder woven within its thread, that you can actually trust it. He’s not invested in you mimicking his incant, rather in you finding your own. All the quests, all the night sea voyages, all the distant islands, lotus-eaters, Chapels Perilous, may be encountered within a mile of your house. Or maybe not. But a Moriartian consciousness is quite achievable in Detroit, London, Arnhem Land or Delhi.

I am presenting a small, thematic sample of John’s writings. The themes range from place, love, wildness, through to ceremony and the legitimacy of sorrow. His astounding production of works in a relatively short time will more than provide a feast leading from this glimmering collection of seeds.

We offer these writings not just out of admiration, even love for the man, but out of urgency. These are not pastoral times we are living in, but prophetic. They are a moment when the world as we understand it is turned upside down. What we could think of as initiatory times. The challenge is there are fewer and fewer people that can interpret such happenings in a deep, soulful way. Interpreters that don’t simplify the issues, or soundbite them, starve them ragged with statistics, but ground our perception of their disclosure. I think John Moriarty can do that.

We may face a highly disturbing future. And many have forgotten that the future to the ancient world is not an idea but a goddess – the Romans name her Antevorta, her sister is called Postvorta. She is the Past. Both of them dwell within a bigger deity, Carmenta. Carmenta comes from the Latin carmen – spell, song, prophecy. Carmen is the root of the word charm. So to commune with the future, Antevorta, you have to charm it. Both the future and the past. And most important: you have to address both at once, because they flood into each other endlessly. That’s called the Present. And it is a gift, really. If you can just bear it.

Moriarty’s work has sufficient charm to attract a goddess: it faces both ways, communes with both sisters, witnesses the endless back and forth between them in the present of our own lives and times. To some that is a reckless idea, to others maybe the only thing that could save us.

Towards the end of his life, riven with chemotherapy, John threw fistfuls of his hair out his window, hoping they would commingle with the sheep wool floating about in his neighbour Tim Conner’s field. A few months later that hair was the lining of a chaffinch’s nest where she laid her eggs and reared her young.

Let us all have a nest with a lock or two of John’s hair in it. God knows what could grow from it.

Wherever he peered, things started to emerge, take shape, become more of themselves. The Earth was grateful to have his gaze on it. John Moriarty calls the same thing from us. It’s a weight, that bequeathment. Your legs should totter a little. As you will witness in his words, to live near soul is to live near aliveness, which is to live near longing and sometimes pain.

At least a third of this book I transcribed by hand for publication, feeling – as John’s wyrd did its thing – like a Lindisfarne monk, working late. The River Dart rippled outside my cottage where Ted Hughes use to fish, and the owls heard evening readings of John’s by the waters. I felt lucky. The drawings here announced themselves all at once on the last day of work.

When culture is in woeful crisis, the insights rarely come from parliament, senate, or committee, they tend to come from a hut at the edge of the village.

Let’s go there.

There is tremendous, unexpected hope waiting.

Martin Shaw, April 2021

Horses Walking Spellbound

— On Place —

A lot of John’s place he carried within himself, his psyche. But we understand that such a soul was vast, spilling out for acres around him. I doubt he’d claim its residence solely within. And the last thing he’d endorse was immunity to surroundings: ‘where I am, and who I am are vastly bound up together’. But over a lifetime those locations change.

John’s place is sometimes shivering in a London street having slept rough all night, waiting for the library to open with its flood of warmth and education. John’s place is sometimes in a Manitoba blizzard walking with Black Elk. John’s place is sometimes in Greece, adrift in swan feathers and the revels of Dionysus. There is homeless John, horny John, grieving John, no attempt at a franchised Guru-hood. John’s cart of language rolled through many cultures, always bending its weight to the essence of their character, not inflicting dominion.

He urges we follow a dolphin’s curve, love the crooked, adore the specific.

The scope of Moriarty’s reach was not an exercise in philosophical empire-making, it was an informed, sometimes painful openness to the intelligence of the universe. There is a cost in such openness, even if there is little choice in the matter.

For now let us hear of his first axis mundi, first Holy Hills, first Temenos. Let’s hear about north Kerry. Let’s have him walk us across the darkness of the yard with the lantern lit, munch the hay of his thoughts, and especially bless his father’s providing the money to send him to university rather than buying a farm.

Let us hear about the small magics that dart between bog and copse.

And if you come across rotten eggs in the far field, you may want to stand up and walk away.

Unless you’re Jameen Kissane that is, facing down the witchiness.

Lapwings I remember. My mother lighting the lamp and in the field in front of the house lapwings calling, every call a complaint. Or so it seemed to me. And the wonder was that even when they were being battered by hailstones they didn’t alter their complaints. They neither lengthened or deepened them. In all weathers, and at all hours of the night, their complaints were as elegant as their crests.

What saddened me is that they were so frightened of me. I only had to walk into the field and they instantly would become a flock of shimmerings swiftly swerving as they flew and then, as though quenching themselves, they would land farther off, among the rushes maybe, where I’d no longer be able to see them.

That’s what had happened this evening, but now again at nightfall they had come back to the richer feeding grounds beside the house and that I was glad of because if ours was a house that lapwings could come close to, then surely also it was a house that angels would come close to.

Surely tonight they would come close because since darkness had begun to fall this was Christmas Eve and Madeline my oldest sister was singing ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’, and Chris had brought two bags of turf from the shed, and Babs had bought two buckets of water from the well, and already, its flame perfectly calm, the lamp was giving more light than the fire, with its raptures big and small.

But lamplight and firelight, that was every night,

Tonight was different.

Looking at the crib in the deep sill of our front window, I could see that the light of the highest heaven was in our house.

It was a night of wonders.

Tonight, all night, the gates of heaven would be open to us.

Riding animals higher than our horse, and wearing glittering vestments not clothes, the three Wise Men might pass through our yard tonight, and if they did our father would show us the tracks in the morning. Plain as could be, we saw them last Christmas morning.

And Santa Claus would come and he would bring us what we asked for. To Babs he would bring a blouse. To me he would bring a game of Snakes and Ladders. And to Brenda and Phyllis he would bring dolls.

And soon we would have supper with currant cake.

There was no denying it, it was wonderful, and in a glow of fellow feeling with all our animals I went out and crossed the yard to the cowstall.

Pushing open the door, I looked in and at first I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing, no candles lighting the windows, no holly, no crib, no expectation of kings or of angels, no sense of miracles. What I saw was what I would see on any other night, eleven shorthorn cows, some of them standing, some of them lying down, some of them eating hay, and some of them chewing the cud, and two of them turning to look at me.

Devastated, I had to admit it was an ordinary night in the stall.

Coming back across the yard I looked at the fowl house and the piggery and the darkness, and the silence that had settled on them couldn’t say it more clearly. Christmas didn’t happen in the outhouses. Christmas didn’t happen to the animals. The animals were left out. And since the animals were left out, so, inside me somewhere, was I.

(Nostos, pp. 5–7)

My problem was that for my first ten years in school, I was at the back of the class. In the end, I came to see myself as my teachers saw me and as everyone in my class saw me. Without knowing it I made a compact with being last. And when, eventually, my exam results showed that I was first, I regarded it as a fraud. Nothing so trivial as a fact could give the lie to an old sense of myself.

Being last, it never occurred to me to put two and two together and conclude that Betty Guiney was fond of me. Even when she was on the bar of my bike and we were alone coming home from a dance in Listowel, and her hair was blowing back in my face, I never once leaned forward into it.

(Nostos, p. 18)

It suited me to be backward.

But we weren’t only backward in good ways.

One day, opening a wyand of hay in the West Field, my father found four bad eggs at the heart of it. This, as it would to any neighbour for miles around, brought the cold sweat out through him. But he had to stand his ground. He had to deal with the evil, because this was piseogs, a kind of witchcraft, certainly more wicked than mere superstition.

Settling a bed of hay on the four prongs of his fork, he took the eggs, praying as he did so, and laid them on it. Then, careful that no egg would fall off, he walked towards the river. And the river, he was so glad to tell us when he came home, had taken the awful thing out of our land.

Only slightly denigrated from its Neolithic enormities, this kind of witchcraft was as common to our locality as bushes were. No year went by but some awful new story did the rounds. One story had it that a woman opened her door one morning and a skinned calf fell inwards across her threshold. Another story had it that a priest who openly confronted the evil had, within a week, to confront it, in truly sensational form, within his own church.

The evil, it was clear, was not afraid of God. It was not afraid to go into his holy house and fight him there.

That terrified us.

Among us the fabulous had become fact.

Among us the enormous had become norm.

Dimly, we were aware that this form of witchcraft was based on the belief that like creates like. The bad eggs or the bad butter or the bad meat that someone placed in a field would turn the cattle that grazed that field into its image and likeness. In other words, this didn’t work by the physical transmission of physical bacteria. It worked by ritual power of sympathetic magic. Living where we did we too lived under a golden bough. Only in our case the bough was not so golden as it was at Nemi.

And so, a God who was serene and distant and uninvolved was no good to us. We needed a God who was willing to be incarnate.

Agnes Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

Agnes Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

Agnes Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem..

We needed a God, who, whatever the cost to himself, was willing to come down out of his bliss and, like the river, carry this evil out of our world. We needed a God who was willing to live on amongst us in his sacraments. We heeded the prayer Danny O’ used to pray before going to bed at night, the prayer in which he invoked the protection of the four angels at the four corners of his house, the prayer in which he invoked the protection of the four Evangelists at the four corners of his bed.

One year, on the third of three Rogation Days, it fell to me to go to every field of our farm and sprinkle holy water on it. Crossing the gap into the West Field wasn’t easy, but I did it.

Then one day Jameen Kissane did the terrible thing. Finding butter in the field behind his house, he brought it in and ate it.

For weeks afterwards, coming as he did every night to our house, we were afraid of him. He had eaten evil. He had eaten the witchcraft of the ages. He must be contagious. He must be avoided.

In Wales, in the old days, when someone had died, a tramp who walked the roads would be informed and, without delay, he would come to the corpse-house. Once there, he would be invited to sit at table and eat a meal specially prepared for him. Ritually, this was the sins of the dead person, and it was these sins, however mild or murderous, that the tramp was eating. Such a tramp was called the Sin-Eater.

Jameen was our Sin-Eater, but to our astonishment no harm settled on him. That should have been the end of his life beneath the golden bough, but it wasn’t, not yet.