Introducing Moriarty E-Book

John Moriarty

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

John Moriarty is one of Ireland's most original thinkers. The Kerry-born poet, mystic and philosopher has long intrigued readers with his ability to challenge modes of Western thought and perception, and by his courage to act as a cultural shaman in pursuit of wisdom and truth. Introducing John Moriarty: In His Own Words gathers his core texts with commentary by theologian Michael W. Higgins and Moriarty scholar Seán Aherne. It is the perfect primer for anyone with an interest in the Kerryman's relationships with storytelling, mysticism, nature, spiritualism and ritual. In distilling these works by one of Ireland's most enigmatic intellectuals, this volume forms an essential addition to the library of anyone concerned with Irish philosophy and spirituality.

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An Introduction

Michael W. Higgins

I recognized him instantly. He is the model for the character John in Edna O’Brien’s novel The Little Red Chairs. A friend of the New Age aficionado Fifi, John has been dead for several years but his presence is haunting, ubiquitous, paying regular visits via ‘channelling’ to the welcoming Fifi.

This John ‘did rough work, digging and hoeing, quite content to do it since it kept him close to nature, and pursued his mystical studies at night … he would sit and talk at the kitchen table, expounding on God, paganism, Gaia, and St John of the Cross.’1 He was a fount of exotic wisdom to the credulous Fifi, recording his insights – scribbles of mystical consequence – which she kept in a shoe box. Such scribbles consisted of: ‘Let us return to the Bird Reign of Conaire Mor in which all things live Ecumenically with each other, man and beast uniting with nature in the grand scheme of things.’2

O’Brien never mentions John Moriarty but she draws the contours of his life with surgical finesse. But if he is an endearing and risible shaman in O’Brien’s fiction, in real life he is anything but.

O’Brien’s is the stuff of parody, of course, and she plays whimsically with a type of nature-loving, myth-dreaming, storyteller of forgotten truths in a plot that swirls with the sordid, churns up indignities the sane seek to deny, unearthing dangerous frauds who prey upon the credulous. It is a dark novel.

But I would never have recognized the caricature of Moriarty at all in O’Brien’s novel had it not been for an Irish Christian Brother – variously a high-school teacher, chaplain, hermit, guide extraordinaire to all things Celtic in the south-west of Ireland – one Seán Aherne, a man overflowing with energy, curiosity and love of nature, a man who befriended John Moriarty, became his disciple and shared his wisdom.

On one occasion Seán asked if I would be interested in seeing where Moriarty lived and died at the foot of Mount Mangerton, County Kerry. I said yes, but more importantly, I wanted to know who he was – and the journey for me began.

Although the author of numerous books and countless audio recordings (he was a regular presence on RTÉ, Ireland’s public broadcaster), he was not a paid-up member of the academy and remained an intellectual and spiritual outlier.

Brendan O’Donoghue, editor of A Moriarty Reader: Preparing for Early Spring (2013), remains convinced that ‘Moriarty is very much underappreciated. I think that very few have managed to realize what he has achieved. My doctoral supervisor at University College Dublin compared him to Dostoevsky, claiming that like Dostoevsky he was not only not understood in his lifetime, he was not even misunderstood.’3

In part that neglect may have been attributable to the considerable popular success – national and international – of his immediate contemporary, the former priest, poet and Celtic spirituality superstar, John O’Donohue. The acclaim that accompanied O’Donohue’s bestselling spiritual primer, Anam Cara, easily eclipsed Moriarty’s more esoteric writings in terms of popularity and accessibility. They wrote at the same time; they wrote in the same region of Ireland; they wrote on similar subjects; they wrote with a poet’s touch; and they died within months of each other.

Although O’Donohue’s place in the Catholic pantheon remains secure, Moriarty is only beginning to come into his own. A more difficult writer who did not make compromises for his readers, who remained uninterested in celebrity status and who preferred a quiet, reclusive life over the perks of profile, Moriarty’s especial genius is best captured by the Irish intellectual and public broadcaster Aidan Mathews:

He may live in a caravan, a migrant among his settled readership, but he’s not Sister Wendy whose toothy quaintness in a pantomime habit reassures a mass audience that spirituality is really rather charming, and he isn’t Brother Ass either, awash with watercress and Paternosters in the easy ecofeminism beloved of Sunday supplements. … there is something magnificent about his single-minded oppositional stance in our deconsecrated world; and to watch him perform his rain-dance on the astro-turf is to witness an ecumenical invocation of all human spiritual authority, North, South, East, and West, against the power and dominion of technocratic consumerism, of the liberal laboratory outlook.4

Moriarty is Hibernian in his heart, his imagination, his sinews. His soul is one with the matter of Ireland.

But who is this peripatetic searcher, part academic, part gardener, part poet and part philosopher – a veritable bridge-builder among civilizations ancient and new?

He was born in Moyvane, County Kerry, in 1938 and received his secondary school education at St Michael’s College, Listowel. While still an adolescent he made the first of many shattering discoveries when he realized that by reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the story he lived in, the story that sheltered him, the overarching biblical narrative that he imbibed in church and school with its benign and uncritical fundamentalism, was no longer uncontested: ‘It was my calamity that I had fallen out of my story. … I had fallen out of a world into a universe that seemed infinitely indifferent, even hostile, to my purposes and yearnings. And the killingly lonely thing was, I didn’t know of anyone else to whom this had happened.’5

Perhaps university would yield a new certainty the old consolations could no longer provide. He spoke to his father who at first was surprised by the request of his fourth child that he wanted not to settle on the land and buy a second farm but rather go to university. He asked John what he wanted to do and his son’s answer was succinct and revelatory: ‘It’s a hunger that is in me.’6

This hunger was not to be sated, however, at University College Dublin, but rather ruthlessly intensified by the queries and probes unleashed by his reading of Kepler, Pascal, Coleridge, Melville, Arnold and Nietzsche – thinkers who in various ways underscored the common terror of humanity: the awe-inducing horror that we are barely awake in a universe unrestricted and expansive. Moriarty was not alone in his sickness, he now realized, but his own ‘menacing inwardness’ would lead him to distant ideas and distant places including, as Gerard Manley Hopkins would have it in one of his ‘terrible sonnets’ composed in a time of personal sundering and exile, ‘cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed’.

Adrift in London following his final university exams he became a vagrant, walking the streets and parks during the night, sleeping in a library during the day, living rough and unkempt. But he managed to secure a position as an assistant teacher of English at a Catholic boarding school for boys in Staffordshire. Still, it was more short term than expected. He succeeded in earning a premature termination following a parent’s complaint to the headmaster.

Footloose once again. But not for long.

He telephoned one of England’s foremost Catholic thinkers, James Munro Cameron, a convert from Marxism, a Balliol graduate, a distinguished essayist and occasional poet and head of the department of philosophy at Leeds University, who had earlier invited Moriarty to come to Leeds to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy. He was disposed to take up the offer. Aware that Moriarty was penurious, Cameron offered him a job tutoring first-year students in order to ensure him some revenue.

While at Leeds Moriarty wrote that ‘a lovely, lovely thing happened to me’: he met Marilyn Valalik. They spent numerous hours walking together across the high moorlands of north Wales and during this time of intellectual and imaginative reverie he found himself unmoored to Descartes and enthralled by the logic and wisdom of The Mabinogion, a compilation of ancient Welsh wonder tales.

So enthralled, in fact, that he found himself increasingly drawn to literature as a source that could address the existential angst that continued to plague him. He boldly told his first-year philosophy students that ‘for all its clarities, our Cartesian cogito is a cataract. In no way glaucous, wholly transparent, it blinds us to as much of what is out there as it lets in.’7 It is time for a new epistemology, a time for new or fresh seeing.

And then Canada came calling.

Or, more precisely, Manitoba.

Serendipitously recruited by the mother of a student (she was an English professor on a lecture tour in Europe) to join the Department of English at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, he protested that his formation was in philosophy and that his ‘academic credentials are quite forlorn. The only thing I have, which is a Bachelor of Arts degree, I didn’t even go back to have conferred.’8 But it didn’t matter, this paucity of credentials. What mattered, and what clearly impressed the Canadian professor, was Moriarty’s quick mind, effervescent wit, storytelling abilities and rebel’s charm. It was, after all, the 1960s.

The ferocity of the hurricane-driven winds and waves that buffeted his transatlantic crossing prepared him for the fury of a prairie winter and reminded him of his need to experience nature, not simply to observe it. On one occasion, in an early March, he had his first taste of a prairie blizzard:

My first impulse was to go out into the fields beyond the university and experience white-out. … It was instantly and breathtakingly confusing. … I realized that there was no way I could experience white-out and not die, and so, if only to salvage something of my self-esteem, I turned and faced into the blizzard as a buffalo would and I asked it to reave and bereave me of the old ideologies of domination. … In this blizzard, it was somehow clear to me that we ourselves are the iceberg into which we will crash. Or no. Rather did it seem the case that we ourselves are the iceberg into which we have already crashed. At our very origin as a species, that’s when we crashed.9

Winnipeg in the winter solidified his geological/poetical intuition that Darwin was right. It consolidated his view that, disengaged from our primal instincts, our companions in creation and our humble if noble birthing as a species, we are solely heirs to the constrictive reasoning of Bacon, Descartes, Newton and their Enlightenment spawn.

A true disciple of William Blake, Moriarty saw in the English mystic, painter and poet, a thinker and visionary who understood the dread consequences of a dehumanizing Reason, the curse of Urizen or Single Vision: ‘Blake is surely right when he insists that our modern, materialist cosmologies have their sources in the poverties and impoverishments of single vision.’10

It was in Canada that Moriarty would begin to tentatively unfold his new cartography of the mind and spirit. As he says: ‘In Canada, for tundra reasons, it was with the most elementary forms of culture that I was happiest, and, among them, crying for a vision was as far as I could go. For some years now I was obsessed by the thought that Western Civilization had come to an end.’11 Moriarty knew that he had to find a new way forward, he had to articulate a new way of living.

It was time to journey to the essence of our earth, recover the primordial mythology, the narrative of connection that had been sundered. He must seek his ‘bush soul, my soul outside of society, my soul outside of civilization with all its restrictions and its Lady Windermere fans, my soul reunited with the terror and wonder of the natural world. And that, I clearly saw, meant returning to Ireland.’12

Queried as to what Canada meant for him, he responded with charity and insight: ‘Like so many others, I came to the New World thinking of a future. That it gave me. But, as well, it gave me a past, an alternative to our European past, to go home with.’13

Returning to Ireland, keen on hearing anew the vox hibernorum, discovering afresh the spiritual temerity of the Celtic monks, he also found that the lure of the ‘bush soul’ was going to be more literal than metaphorical and that it had to be so visceral precisely in order for him to enter more deeply into the process of rebirth.

On one occasion, having freed a distraught swan caught in a sheep-wire fence, her four cygnets waiting on her release, Moriarty marvelled at their beauty and dignity. While walking back to his home, he ‘skirted the small, almost dried-out marsh where her nest was. On impulse, I walked across and, lying down into it, I curled myself up as tightly as I could. In the end I was egg shaped, and I lay there a long time, acknowledging that I needed re-hatching, that I needed rebirth.’14

He was resolved that he ‘would be the mosaic-maker of my own mind, and pristine sensations of the pristine world would be the tesserae’.15 He would remake his own mind via his sensations and these would be by immersion – he would be utterly co-sympathetic with nature. He would need to slough off the encrustations of culture.

He found in Connemara the possibility of healing for those, like himself, ‘disabled by the terrors of the new astronomy, the new anthropology and the new epistemology’.16 He suffered from ‘somatically sensuous deprivation. Lacking the sensuousness of sitting for hours under a waterfall, of walking in high heather, of climbing a hill, of listening to a sheep-farmer talking in Irish about winters past and to come.’17

Connemara was to be the antidote to Winnipeg’s Urizenic tyranny. But Moriarty’s comprehensive rejection of the consolations of the bourgeois world, his repudiation of the serene rhythms of ordered Western thought and his radical jettisoning of inherited religious ‘truths’ would exact a terrible cost. It wasn’t going to be an easy rebirth. He would experience a dark night of the senses and a dark night of the soul, a levelling emotional void that would bring him to the cusp of disintegration. He ‘broke down’.

The wholesale renunciation of his culture, creed and civilization, the no-holds-barred approach he took to his past formation, his total absorption into a new mode of being, commanded in the end a psychological and emotional cost of personally devastating dimensions: Walking down from the mountain near Loch Inagh it happened. ‘In an instant I was ruined. Ruined beyond remedy and repair, I felt. The universe had vanished from round about me. I saw a last, fading flicker of it and then I was in an infinite void.’18

Swimming in a vortex of the self’s unwinding, with little in the way of a still point, directionless and vacant, Moriarty somehow intuited in the heart of the maelstrom that he ‘needed help in a way that I never before did. I fell instantly and instinctively back [my italics] into Christianity. Whatever else, Christianity was mother tongue.’19 Undoubtedly, this wrenching experience was a potent mixture of the metaphysical, the psychoanalytic and the poetic. It was an emotional collapse or an acute clinical depression or a luminous insight accorded only the mystically inclined, or, most probably, a combination of all three. But it was indubitably a graced moment.

Moriarty conceded that up until now he had ‘played with the Christian myth,’ but his transfiguration on the mountain shattered him ‘into seeing. And it wasn’t with my eyes that I saw it. It was with whatever was left of me that I saw it … I was a Christian. Not a Christian again. I was a Christian for the first time.’20

Convinced that ‘emerging from Gethsemane, Jesus left his curriculum-vitae face, his and ours, on Veronica’s napkin’,21 Moriarty needed to craft a new theological narrative showing that Jesus lived a primordial truth, that it lived him and that his descent into the bowels of our geological history, of our material evolution, was an enfleshment too shocking to contemplate and too dangerous to ignore.

But if Moriarty was in intellectual turmoil and spiritual upheaval, his psyche was in meltdown. He suffered through dreams ‘nightmaring’ him without respite. He needed help and he found it on Boars’ Hill, Oxford, in a Carmelite priory, with one Friar Norbert.

Moriarty ‘told Norbert the whole story of what had been happening’ to him, outlining what he graphically dubbed the ‘dark, virulent infestation from within my own nature’. He was unsparing in his recollection:

‘Is it madness?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Why do you not think so?’

Quietly, he made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

‘In madness,’ he said, ‘the circle is closed. The person is engulfed, is often deluded and isn’t able to distinguish what is really profound from what is trivial. In your case the circle is open,’ he said, parting his fingers. ‘You can walk round about your experiences and you make sense when you talk about them.22

Although Moriarty could makes sense of his experiences, there was something as equally conceptual as intuitive going on; he was engaged in a larger task, a rethinking of dogma, a creative alignment of creation and redemption centred in the mystery and power of Tenebrae. John of the Cross, he argued, took Tenebrae seriously and so would he.

As traditionally re-enacted, Tenebrae involves a triangular stand with fourteen candles, each of which is extinguished following the serial chanting of the psalms of lamentation, until only the apex candle, the fifteenth, remains lit. Darkness penetrates; darkness encroaches; and then with the remaining candle taken below the altar or to a crypt, all is darkness.

Tenebrae defines the way of reconnection with our evolutionary path. This trail brings us to the earth’s layers of evolution, to prehistoric times. This trail, a harrowing of hell less in Dantean and more in Darwinian terms, is pioneered by Jesus for all things, ‘for stegosaurus and rhinoceros as well as for mollusc and Moses’.23 Moriarty understands that this immersion in our geological past, this trail to the subterranean pulse of our species, must be reconfigured into ritual, ‘into sacred things sacredly said, into sacred things sacredly done’.24

With a brazen creativity, Moriarty takes the original Tenebrae ritual and baptizes it anew: the ritual of our further and final evolution. Lamenting the fact that we have allowed our awareness of Christ in the Garden of Olives to eclipse our awareness of Christ in Gethsemane, our awareness of Christ on Calvary to eclipse our awareness of Christ on Golgotha, Moriarty argues with unnerving ingenuity that having crossed the Kedron, the Torrent,

Jesus goes forward in a double progress. In the first, setting out as Lamb of God, he goes forward through the Garden of Olives and Calvary, and, hell harrowed, he re-emerges in the Garden of the Sepulchre. In the second, seeking to pioneer the mystical way, not just for himself, but for all things, he goes forward as microcosm into Gethsemane, on to Golgotha, and, Ordovician desert dust in his hair, he comes back and, in all the world, there is neither bush nor star that isn’t surprised by what has happened to it. In the second progress, occurring simultaneously with the first, Golgotha is the place of the skull, not also like Calvary, the place of a timber cross. It is the place not of physical but of mystical death, a dying so total that we are able in the end to say what Tauler said:

NON SUM.25

In his attempts to rewrite the Tenebrae ritual for a new age, Moriarty had no less an ambition than to unite the mythologies of the ancients, the theologies of diverse faiths, the histories of animate and inanimate matter, in a grand strategy of redress. To recognize that in reclaiming evolution as a divine trajectory and restoring ‘the whole psyche for sanctity,’26 Jesus redeems as he harrows.

This is not orthodox stuff and yet it has in it a deeply orthodox DNA. If Moriarty’s heterodox reimagining of the Triduum Sacrum provides ample evidence of his conjoining of evolution with the Paschal Mystery, of his prophetic testing of the limits of doctrine and of reason, his reorientation of the sacral and the mundane is rooted in his ‘Celticism’. If he was a scientist manqué, a mystic in the making, he remained always the storyteller, the modern bard deploying his love of orality with his philosophical insights, insights that were not drained of their vitality by the categories and discourse of the apparatchiks of the academy, blind to vision.

As the Canadian Catholic political philosopher Charles Taylor says in The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity: ‘It is through story that we find or devise ways of living bearably in time.’27

‘Living bearably in time’ in and through the telling of stories, the very making of the human narrative, is an activity touched by divinity. As Moriarty reminds his readers, ‘it isn’t only houses that shelter us. Only a great story can shelter us.’28

Although Moriarty needed to redefine, reimagine, re-appropriate this great story, he did so by digging deeper into the sacred caverns of prehistoric times and by exercising the bardic role of a new Patrick. He defined the state of religion in modern Ireland in stark terms; and he would have no truck with an ersatz Celtic spiritualism, an ahistorical love affair with a faux Celtic heart that makes light of the ancient myth dream and its authentic Christian soul.

That new Patrick is Moriarty. By the time he died in 2007 he had provided a new vision, a dreamtime – a creative commingling that seeks to bind in a fertile unity the immanent and the transcendent, the geological and the mystical, in a post-binary quest for a universal integration of matter and spirit, a pan-Christic labour that incorporates the wisdom traditions of all faiths. Nothing less than this.

This Celtic mode of perception, wedded to a theophanic grasp of the truth that is Jesus or Eternal Imagination, provides the substratum that runs through Moriarty’s life: an epic visionary of Creation’s ever-fecund unfolding.

1 Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs (New York 2015), p. 15.

2 Ibid., p. 20.

3 Private correspondence with Brendan O’Donoghue, 12 January 2016.

4 Aidan Mathews, ‘Turtle Was Gone a Long Time (Volume 1: Crossing the Kedron)’, The Furrow 1998.

5 Brendan O’Donoghue (ed.), A Moriarty Reader: Preparing for Early Spring (Dublin 2013), p. 252.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., p. 280.

8 Ibid., pp. 280–1.

9 Ibid., p. 288.

10 Ibid., p. 303.

11 Ibid., p. 290.

12 Ibid., p. 294.

13 Ibid., p. 297.

14 Ibid., p. 302.

15 Ibid., p. 308.

16 Ibid., p. 309.

17 Ibid., p. 312.

18 Ibid., p. 316.

19 Ibid., p. 317.

20 Ibid., p. 318.

21 Ibid., p. 321.

22 Ibid., p. 328.

23 John Moriarty, Slí na Fírinne (Dublin 2006), p. 26.

24 Ibid..

25 Ibid., p. 127.

26 Ibid., p. 21.

27 Jerry White, ‘Figure of Speech: How language constitutes human consciousness’, Literary Review of Canada, July/August, 2016, p. 7.

28 John Moriarty, Nostos: An Autobiography (Dublin 2001), p. 21.

Chronology

1903: : Jimmy Moriarty, John’s father, born 29 July in Baile an Lochaigh, Dingle, Co. Kerry.

1904: Mary O’Brien, John’s mother, born 16 January Barragougeen, Co. Kerry.

1929: Jimmy Moriarty and Mary O’Brien married in Springfield, Massachusetts.

1938: John Moriarty born 2 February in Moyvane, Co. Kerry.

1943–51: Attends national school in Moyvane.

1951–6: Attends St Michael’s College, Listowel.

1956–8: Attends St Patrick’s Teacher Training College, Drumcondra, Dublin.

1958–9: Teaches in Christian Brothers Primary School, Portarlington, Co. Laois.

1959–62: Attends University College Dublin and graduates with First Class Honours in Philosophy and Logic.

1962–4: Lives in various locations between Moyvane and London with a spell teaching in a Catholic boarding school in Staffordshire.

1964–5: Tutors in the Department of Philosophy at Leeds University.

1965–71: Lectures at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.

1967: Summer trips to San Francisco, Mexico, Vera Cruz.

1968: Summer trips to London and Greece.

1968–9: Year off on half pay. Lives in France.

!969–70: Back in Canada, with trips to the Shetland Islands and London that summer.

1970–1: Final year in Canada. During the Christmas holidays he took a road trip from Manitoba through the Midwestern states to the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

1971: Quits his position in Canada and returns to Ireland in June; lives on the island of Inisbofin off the Connemara coast until September, then relocates to Ballyconneely on the mainland until 21 December, when he moves to one of Lynne Hill’s cottages at Toombeola, near Roundstone, Co. Galway.

1972–4: Rents the cottage at Toombeola, living frugally, dependent on his savings from Canada.

1974: Begins work helping in the kitchen of Ballinahinch Castle Hotel in March and lives in the staff quarters there.

1974–6: Works and lives part-time in Ballinahinch, part-time at Toombeola.

1976: Spends a week in the Carmelite priory at Boar’s Hill in Oxford and returns there for the summer from May to September.

1977: Spends the year at Boar’s Hill, living with the monks and working in the gardens until he becomes ill and returned to Connemara in November.

1978: The early months of this year were spent at Toombeola recovering from illness, during which time he decides to seek work as a full-time gardener. Finds a position working for Robert Guinness at Lodge Park, Straffan, Co. Kildare.

1978–80: Works at Lodge Park until the sudden death of his mother, Mary Moriarty, in early January 1980. Returns to Moyvane and spends that year living at home with his father.

1981–2: Returns to Lodge Park and works there until the summer of 1982, after which he returns to Toombeola and begins working as a gardener on two local estates, Leitirdyfe and Lisnabrucka.

1983: Starts building a house on a site his neighbours, the McCahill family, give him.

1983–95: Spends this period in Connemara, living in his house at Toombeola, while gardening, writing and giving talks at various locations around the country. The Lilliput Press publishesDreamtimein 1994.

1995: Moves to Coolies on Mangerton Mountain near Killarney, Co. Kerry.

1995–2007: Lives in Coolies while writing his Turtle trilogy,Nostos, Invoking Ireland, Night Journey to Buddh Gaia, What the Curlew SaidandSerious Sounds(all by Lilliput) and his Slí na Fírinne publications. In 1997 he hosted a six-part television series,The Blackbird and the Bell, forRTÉ.

2007: John Moriarty dies on 1 June at his home in Coolies, Killarney, Co. Kerry.

Chronology by Mary McGillicudy.