Authenticity and Self-Acceptance

and so once again i sit and type these words without the normal punctuation marks in the tradition of the great James Joyce he who let his soul shine forth in sheer authenticity against a society set in stone ah yes he let his self pour forth on every page and in every word that he wrote and how he took all the criticism and rejection i'll never know and yet he persevered and kept right on going calling a spade a spade saying it as it was never once covering up the truth as he saw it and here i go again this evening writing these cyphers which are shaping themselves into words and words into sentences with thoughts running after them rather that the other way around and yes that's what i so love about the creativity and spontaneity of the stream of consciousness way of writing that thoughts are chasing words rather than words chasing thoughts and i will write on here without censorship because being true to self is the most important thing any of us can do in life and today i did so much so much and yet i am not too tired perhaps i'm a little enervated by the way i seemed to let my connection with life lead me through my day and what a day it was beginning with a funeral yes yes yes yes a funeral the inevitable call of the grave which is a universal call and the funeral was that of a young man of 43 years of age the father of one of my sixth year students poor boy poor young man struggling to make sense of life as it is and he only after getting his father back in his life and i was touched by his pain his pain and yet i am powerless to do anything for him but be there with him but be there for him among the many hundreds of others who attended that funeral and the songs that were sung and the hymns that were sung are playing away in my deep unconscious as i write for they touched me they touched me but not in a phony religious way but in a deep spiritual way for these were little children from the young man's little sister's school for that choir had come to lend support to lend their voices to sing this grief ever more loudly and beautifully to the heavens and then they sung their little hearts out bless them bless them and the words of Jesus come into my mind as i type on and on suffer little children to come onto me for theirs is the kingdom of heaven and i so wished to descend into the well of my self into the well from which my soul springs and taste its healing waters to return to the child within me to the little boy sitting in the back lane long ago that little innocent boy who i was playing away happily with a little toy lorry playing away playing away happy and the little boy then and these boys around me now here and now and their poor friend who had lost his father and his grandmother his father's mother still alive and i type and wonder what it is all about at all at all at all and the words of the great John Henry Cardinal Newman come to my mind and i must keep reminding myself that i have not sinned against the light oh no i have not sinned against the light and by light here i mean the light of my innermost self the light of my own authenticity that innermost light even though i am using Newman's words for him for that great Cardinal for that great luminary of the Roman Catholic Church he meant the Light of Christ and i capitalise i capitalise because i realise the power and the control that those purveyors of the TRUTH in capital letters would have wanted it and oh no i want to be modernist and post-modernist and post-post-modernist and so on and so forth and that is why the stream of consciousness suits me because in it truths run free truths run free in lower case letters and these are authentic encouraging and approachable truths not fearsome ones blaring themselves out shouting shouting shouting in capital letters oh no oh no i am feeling so reduced so small so insignificant and i feel like Yeats' great sentiment in one of his great poems i feel like my soul must clap its hand and louder sing for every tatter of my mortal dress and like Hopkins i feel so much this evening that i am in the mud that i am wearing man's smudge like that great Jesuit poet and Greek and Latin scholar that oh he knew great desolation great torment and great despair no wonder he wrote about wearing man's smudge and sharing man's smell and i feel like one of those prisoners looking down from prison bars and seeing the mud but envying the other prisoner who saw stars or as Oscar Wilde put it we are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at stars how i yearn to look at the stars and to leave the gutter heave myself up and embrace the universe in love yea even make love to the universe yea  yea yea even make love to great Mother Gaia Mother Earth Mother of the Earth and i want to write on and to return inward and downward into the chambers of my heart to make my home there to be comfortable there to be true to myself to be at home there to be true to myself to be enriched by the joy of being myself despite all the mud and slime yea yea yea despite all the mud and all that slime that seems to clog my soul at times and i was truly present today for that young man truly present because i was truly present to myself wanting to be there wanting to be really me in solidarity in solidarity yea yea yea in solidarity with the fragility of it all with the impermanence of it all with the finitude of it all with the ending of it all with that sad ending knowing knowing knowing that i had no control over anything over anything except my self except my self now at last coming home coming home coming home to self...

Pressing on just in spite....

London Bridge, 1999

and still the talk goes on and on and all those voices with their answers ah but there are too many too many answers surely they must know that answers are all so cheap too easily tripping off the tongue too easily summing things up too easily too easily and now the years have slipped in way too quickly way too quickly ró scioptha ar fad as they put nit in Gaelic that other language of my heart that claims my allegiance so often and yes the years seem to be folding in on themselves like dough being kneaded and the image of my mother's knuckles over the years as she rolled out the pastry for this or that loaf of bread and into the mix she was poring weeks and days and months and years and sprinkling the dough with the fruits of her labour and oh she worked so hard so hard to make ends meet and still the image of her weathered knuckles haunt me as i write these words these wee cyphers that dot this screen in an order coming from somewhere in my unconscious and i remember gerard smyth all those years ago sitting in the staff room of my first school greeting me one winter's morning and asking me what was it all about what was it all about at all at all and then how i was taken aback at such a question so early in the morning and i was undone so undone as undone as t.s. eliot's crowd swarming like ants over london bridge a crowd flowed over london bridge i had not known that death had undone so many undone so many and i was undone then that morning with your question gerard as i knew you were getting at the meaning of the whole enterprise we call life and back then i hadn't known that the poor lad had been given a short time to live having had a congenital heart condition since he was a child and no wonder he had asked that question because he was facing the exit door and i type on and and on here and let the words come randomly or as randomly as i can into my mind and thence out onto this screen and my mother is not far from death now either as we look forward to her ninety fifth birthday that she has lasted so long is a miracle beautiful beautiful soul also so constant always so dependable always there strong strong strong soul in a wizened body poor vessel poor weak vessel and i and i i don't know don't know anymore after all after all the books and notes and courses and i like gerard wonder what it is all about and i am moved as i type these words moved by the fragility of things the very brittleness of life and the randomness of it all the randomness the sheer randomness and then the strange theory of chaos so strange that patterns emerge from the chaos patterns and order from the chaos belying randomness what a paradox what a paradox that there is order in randomness and i wonder and i wonder is there randomness in order too and so i write and so i write to rid my soul of the ache of being of the ache the ache of soul ah the soul the soul which cannot be separated ever from the vessel of the body and as i type these cyphers as i type them the words keep coming and i am so convinced that the soul cannot be separated out from the body not for me not for me the cartesian dualistic lie of the  ghost within the machine no no no there is something greater at issue here some new unity of matter and energy of body and soul call it what you want yes call this unity the body-soul or the soul-body you simply cannot have one without the other and i will type these words as i plumb the dark corridors of my labyrinthine self those shadowy passageways of self and i find these words this stream of consciousness the only valuable guiding light through the shadows through the shadows and i follow i follow i follow towards the light at the centre of the chamber like a volume of spermatozoa squirting up the vaginal passageway of the ancient tumulus or womb of time at brú na bóinne or newgrange and like gerard i ask and i ask and i implore i implore all the deep down gods of the psyche of the psyche and my question is on my lips always like gerard what is it all about what is it about at all at all and much more importantly i try i try to be as honest and as sincere and as congruent and as authentic as i possibly can...

Identifying the self

Student in a large room in Versailles Palace, School Trip October 2011

...and so we come in one by one one by one from the cold street where we were anonymous ants on an equally anonymous anthill and identify ourselves by being this or that president this or that secretary this or that treasurer of this or that organization in this or that city in this or that country and so on and so forth and that is it indeed let there be no doubt about the littleness of the human situation the littleness of us ants on this giant anthill and yes yes yes how we strive to give ourselves identity how we strive to get ourselves known by giving ourselves this or that distinction and our little great egos we little ants and here we go to the agm the agm of egos sitting here defining this or that or the other term in this that or the other motion before the gathered number and yes there are always those old original founders or as they say in the gaelic those old seanfhundúirí those old pedantic soldiers from long ago those old conservative members who like to be heard who like to dot every i and cross every t and yet i too like such precision which has care for such exactness for such a legalistic turn of phrase for such efforts that rage against ambiguity such a clarity  yes clarity clarity that elusive clarity of which the great Albert Camus was in search all his great little life and i am alluding here in my mind to his wonderful book The Myth of Sisyphus and there he was Camus Camus the former great Algerian goalkeeper and wonderful writer who dared question all the old assumptions who dared to be different who raged against disorder only to end up as disillusioned as the said Sisyphus interminably rolling his lonely rock up a lonely hill only to have it roll down again and again and all he said was absurd absurd there was no rhyme or reason to the whole enterprise even if one could call it an enterprise in the first place as an enterprise surely by definition should have some meaning or even in a more dreadfully wordy phrasing of the same thought every enterprise should have some meaningfulness attached to it oh what a term meaningfulness and how does that word differ from meaning anyway or even does it exist but still let it stand for this stream of consciousness needs it and so my thoughts and words go round and round and so these words on this page spew forth searching out thoughts these words are chasing thoughts if i may use another metaphor and yes that is another old question another old philosophical chestnut which comes first the words or the thoughts the thoughts or the words the chicken or the egg the egg or the chicken and so i continue to write or so these words continue to stream on in an effort to give birth to something upon a page and all is circular and i return Joyce-like to my start or Joycean even to those beginning words of Finnegan's Wake which rattle around my mind riverrun past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to our beginning where we all come in from the anonymity of the anthill into the room where we all seek to sing our soul to identify our little selves one against the other one with the other over soup and sandwiches and tea after all the talk after all the talk we are only human oh so human we need this sustenance and the triviality we need these small trivial acts this exchange of pleasantries after the importance of our meeting...

Undone, Undone and yet again Undone

A Picture of my 94 year old demented mother

...and it's difficult to understand always difficult how those random juxtapositions happen from this death to that and to the other and thoughts and dreams and images always fleeting of faces long since departed come to this mind unbidden and still the world goes on from losing this bank card to the other to losing one's way in a new city or in some other strange place to breaking a rib being mugged failing or passing or honouring an exam and all this juxtaposed randomly always randomly always randomly and then the passion of the little man who will be president that little man with the big voice and the bigger vision that big vision of what we can be as a nation of what we can be as a people if only we have the courage of our convictions the congruence to be true to self like old Polonius recommended to his dear departing son: yea yea yea and this above all to thine own self be true and all that follows yea yea yea all that follows that one in that case can never be false to another to another to any other human being or even any being as i remember my childhood dog my childhood dog still licking my wounded or cut knees ah yes and the randomness of it all and now there are keys on our calculators to generate numbers at random and all and still as a thinking mind and as a hurting soul i long for an order to the chaos of these thoughts and yet in the seeming chaos of this uncensored stream of consciousness i write on and on and on in order to plumb the depths of my being in order to be true to my self whatever or whoever that may be and i am aware so well aware that even in the randomness of these words there is a thrust to order there is a thrust to meaning there is a thrust to authenticity and to the truth that lies buried like gold in the caverns and caves and passage ways of my being and so that little man our new president with his big voice and greater dream and greater vision is leading me leading this little thinking being this little insignificant mind typing these little random words always random but always in a randomness seeking order ever seeking order and meaning and i think and and i meditate now on the slow death of the wife of a work colleague random death for me but a bitter painful soul-searing one for the poor colleague and his two soon-to-be-orphaned children and this randomness and the suddenness of it all like a shower unexpected pelting down seemingly out of nowhere on a fine day such a fine day and yet little lives are ending ending ending in big and greater pain and it is not you or i at least not yet and as i type i meditate like Sogyal Rinpoche on the Tibetan book of the Living and the Dead on this coming death which is a little death for me and on the coming death of another colleague trying valiantly to struggle on and not to give in i praise his courage and yet i cannot let go some of the injuries he has inflicted on me and on other friends of mine but i know that as i go on and on and on those injuries are getting less and less as they are all about ego all about ego-ego-ego-ego which goes on and on unless vanquished and so these words are stuttering and halting and random and seeking order and meaning and they are not behaving as well as i should wish and yet the little unseasonal daisy in my lawn half-way through an unusually warn November is too random too unusual and yet that is life so random and that is what the great professor Stephen Hawking says that all is random that living and dying is all a matter of luck all a game of chance which we are invited to play and yes that is where some personal philosophy or wisdom comes into play we must learn to play as creatively as possible whatever random hand of cards we get in life and press on and on and dress ourselves appropriately or as appropriately as possible for whatever weather we encounter for whatever winds lash against the canvas of our earthly tent we call our body-soul or soul-body or whatever or whoever we as named are in all our humanity and animal-ness in all our weaknesses and strengths in all our littlenesses and greatnesses in all our brittleness or leochaileacht as a Gaelic poet put it and so and so the sheer randomness and juxtaposition of a drunken man slobbering over a half-eaten dinner and the silliness of two dogs copulating or two teenagers screwing on a settee or or or and these words fade into nothing and trail away away away into nothing nothing nothing...

Post-Holiday Angst

it is so long since i wrote a stream of consciousness that after a year it is about time i let my teeming mind overflow or even act as a conduit for what has arisen within where the metaphor of mind plays interesting games with the brain and somehow i know i ache as i write these lines in that old existentialist sense after having spent the morning raiding nietzsche and lou salome and paul rée for ideas and yes i know that in that triangle of love in that ménage a trois mostly and totally intellectual as it was there yes there was a psychic or intrapsychic depth a depth only keen thinkers could know and yet and yet so much of that thinking was linked with suffering so much of that thinking was linked with pain and this does not surprise me because these great kindred spirits were existentialists who fought against all convention they were frontiers' men and women yes they were the ones who railed openly against society they were the prophets and the seers into the depths of the modern soul and how much they knew especially nietzsche of the catastrophe ahead that all that enlightenment and rational stuff could only lead so far so far so far and it did indeed it would eventually lead to two great world wars oh they were right there was and is no linear progression of truth or of science because everything as the great jesuit poet gerard manley hopkins put it wears man's smudge and shares man's smell as he so well put it in a poem uncannily and ironically called god's grandeur and it was nietzsche who proclaimed the death of god that is the death of humankind's true beliefs because they had sold those beliefs very cheaply for a mess of pottage and i will go on having just come back from a two week vacation in the sun where i read much about the depths of the soul the sheer frightening depths of my own soul and this is what i learned on the pulses of my own heart as the romantic poet john keats i think put it that truth is only truth when felt on ones own pulses...

Gated garden, St Ann's Park, Raheny

and how can i deny the truths that rose to meet me and rise to meet me now as i type these poor words this stream of consciousness here in order to plumb my own depths find my own truth as nietzche would put it after all that's what it's all about not about finding the truth in capital letters like an objective truth out there cold cold cold - no no no that truth is warm it courses in our own veins always always coursing and let me be true as nietzsche and ree and salome and yalom and all the philosophers and psychiatrists  i like to read are true to themselves as this is the very heart of existentialism and i want no marshalled thoughts here no comas no periods or fullstops nothing like that possibly what e e cummings was about possibly what james joyce was about possibly possibly possibly and all is possibility if only i become brave enough to take a chance and in the end learn to own my own fate learn to love my own fate as nietzsche was wont to put it and he did express it in a beautiful latin phrase amor fati the love of one's own destiny and even yet i can subscribe to this hard and difficult and painful though it is and i can subscribe to his metaphorical doctrine of eternal recurrence because once one has really found and integrated one's truth one's very own unique truth only then only then can one choose rightly and wisely because once one has realized and integrated that truth there is nothing left to choose anymore because that is existentially you and you alone or i and i alone...

and newman had it right you know when he said it was impossible to separate out the thinker from the thought that these two were inextricably links and that other old phrase i learned from thew great lecturer i had years ago the great barney kelly that phrase from the french enlightenment thinker buffon that le style c'est l'homme meme and nietzsche knew this and all his friends knew it and no wonder he was one of the first existentialist because he knew the man could never be separated from his thoughts and that was salomé's writing in her memoir on nietzsche and that was her recommendation to anyone wishing to read the words of this complex oh so complex philosopher and she said we must direct our attention to the human being and not the theorist in order to find a way in nietzsche's work and yet strangely newman who was anything but an existentialist knew this too and of course all this shows how fallible are all our categories and after all are not all philosophers tired of telling us that they do not want to be forced into this or that school of thought after all each is uniquely themselves and so i write in a confusion  here yet in a healthy confusion that is integrating all the subpersonalities in me all the positive and negatives even the bisexuality in me and the tension between both poles that is alive in me these days the tension the tension the tension from which comes often the inspiration to write the inspiration to set things down on paper

and like nietzche and breuer whom yalom has walking through a cemetery in vienna i walked through the cemetery where my father is buried yesterday and it quietened my soul salved my conscience it was as if life was greeting me in death yes in death in the very inevitability of dying and death and i read the headstones like i would my prayers when i was a boy all those years ago when i was a little lonely boy so long ago yet in a strange way just like yesterday and as i bowed my head before my father's grave i stood in the silence in the profound and deep yet bright silence and watched all those lovely honey bees go from flower to flower on the fuchsia bust resplendent in red in blood red blooms among the dead and they were all there all there people or souls whom i once knew liam o. not far from my father's grave and pat mc. not too far away either and i walked and walked but could not find my cousin mary's grave but it was somewhere there somewhere but i had thought of her yes i had and then the unmarked grave of my past-pupil who drowned one night on his own vomit jesus he was only sixteen only sixteen not even started out on the journey we call life and i waled and walked and walked and sort of cried silently inwardly in my own soul at the impermanence of things at the fleeting nature of time and at the frightful inevitability of dying and death and death and dying and yet of life and living...

and the sound of the wonderful honey bees brought me back to tommy quinlan's grave back to the grave of my dad my dear old dad who once told me that someday that someday i would understand and he was so right so right so right and it is like that great drama by eugene o'neill that we studied in college all those years ago like that great play long day's journey into night where mary tyrone says to her son that life teaches us to accept what we cannot understand what we cannot understand and yet and yet there are those like nietzsche and salomé and even i who wish to understand and yet that is the cross we have to bear our deep desire to understand and in the end there may be no understanding per se and yet and yet we are meaning-making creatures and we need to make meaning and whether that meaning is in the end meaningful in an objective sense is irrelevant once it is meaningful in a subjective existential self and so

i will write and i will write i will write myself beautiful and ethical and true and moral and congruent in these words that come not just from my thoughts or from my mind but from the whole man from my thoughts and from my person as salome says above ah yes these thoughts are from the very centre of my being  from what it feels like to be human from heart and from head from deep within me and it is a cry for meaning like monck's famous painting the scream and even if the universe is indifferent we have friends or at least this writer knows he has friends who will listen to his tales of weal and woe

... then the sound of the combine harvester and the tractor from the next field to the cemetery drew my attention drew my attention as the world of basic work continued but it was a work that binds us humans to the earth from whose bounty we spring and on whose bounty we live great mother earth great mother gaia in all her rich abundance as the harvest was now being cut and the farmers are so happy this year as there will be a bumper harvest for a second year in a row and life and the living and the planting and the growing and the reaping go on apace and will continue to go on and it is all a cycle a cycle yes a cycle and it is those who deny the cycle and believe in the illusion of the linear myth that truly die...

As This Thaw Sets In ....



I took this picture on Howth Head

...as this thaw sets in I sit and listen to whatever it is I am inside call it soul or self or mind or psyche or spirit or heart or whatever energy forces me to write these lines these lines that will come out in an effort to express whatever it is that I am inside and I press on because I have rested enough and waited long enough like a Beckettian diminished hero even anti-hero who fills the space about him with words that do not connect with words that further do not connect with those words of others and all I've got is these words here because the expression of what I wish to say is so so hard so far beyond me as I struggle to make these words behave upon this page ah they are recalcitrant troops indeed and somehow it is a lack of connection I feel tonight as I write these cyphers in search of words in search of sentences in search of paragraphs in search of articles in search of short stories in search of novels in search of some meaning and somehow somehow it has long since hit home it has long since been accepted by my mind or heart or soul or self or psyche call it what you will long long since accepted that the menacing lies in the search not in the destination that the real pleasure lies in the carving of the sculpture in the painting of the portrait in the composing of the sonata and I still reel somewhat from this gradual ageing of my body from this gradual getting to know this BODY-SOUL or is it SOUL-BODY this being this oneness or wholeness of being or self that I am this grappling  with this attempt to come to terms with what is breaking down in me with what is growing up in me with what I am putting together like a surreal crossword puzzle or even a surreal jigsaw puzzle and sometimes I regret I was not born with greater skill in writing with deeper depths to plumb and then I take heart from the sonnets of the great Bard of Avon from great great Shakespeare with his wonderful and wondrously magical language ah those words
ah all those iambic pentameters unrhyming ah and all those soliloquies and all those poems and poems those Shakespearean sonnets and how that great man was often in awe of this man's or that man's gift or talent that so great a genius as he could have envied the talent of others is mind blowing and yet he tells us that in one of his sonnets sonnet 29 it is how he desired all these things because When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,//I all alone beweep my outcast state,//And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,//And look upon myself and curse my fate,//Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,//Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,//Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,//With what I most enjoy contented least.// all of this, yea all of this heartens me because if even the great bard himself could be full of self-doubt then we lesser mortals can be too and I will write on and I will type these keys till my neck pains me and my fingers begin to trip themselves up in pursuit of even a few insights into this life heavy as it is with unthawed snow with unthawed sorrows seeking a thaw seeking to run away in rivulets and drain drain into the dry earth and begin to irrigate it begin to bring it the balm of healing begin to bring it the dew of pity for a deathly thirst and bring that soil to life to let the soil be dampened with compassion and then to allow the shoots of hope crawl slowly to the air and stab its stems upward towards the blinding sun and that is what my poor soul needs and like Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Howth Harbour at Night

I write my prayer in his words in his words send my soil rain yea yea yea send my soul rain ah I think it was this last the priest-poet or poet-priest said and I have long ago emptied my anger from the Wells of my soul and I am thankful for these small mercies that no anger lingers now no anger lingers now and I type on and all the neuronal connections come to life as synapses leap to life like engines in the metaphorical car of my imagination and I want these words to sing I want them to sing like Shakespeare's words did once and still do sing when great actors give them voice upon the stage or even when the poor drooling schoolboy gives them voice in a stuffy classroom on a wet and rainy day and I want these words to give voice to my soul just the way Gerard Manley Hopkins sang forth his joys and sorrows in musical words upon the page in inscape in instress and in all his sprung rhythm springing forth like strange characters or Jacks from boxes catching us off guard or like a Robert Frost busy with the actuality of living and yet giving that actuality of everyday-ness life in words as saws leaped up and cut off arms or like the snows that fell silently and how he lingered and stopped by the woods where they fell and contemplated the slow miracle of it all the slow miracle of life and I am needing slow miracle and snowfalls in my heart of hearts and in my soul and in my Body-Soul or Soul-Body and I need the frosts of cares to come like they did to the short-lived mind and heart and soul and psyche and spirit of the great poet Chidiock Tichborne before he lost his life in the Tower of London and then to have those care melt away in the thaw run away in rivulets that tickle the grass and the ground and the concrete as they disappear down gulleys and drains and run away to the sea and yes I want to write and yes I want to let my heart go and spread itself across the pages of my second book and to let my soul sing and louder sing as the great W.B. Yeats great Nobel Laureate of Literature said let my soul louder and louder sing for every tatter of its mortal dress and these words linger in my heart where the centre will hold oh yes the centre will hold because there is a Still Point which the heart or mind or soul can achieve there is a Still Point there is a zazen there is a sitting there is a sitting a place where the Body-Soul will sit cross legged in thanks for being alive in thanks for being alive in thanks for these poor words upon a page in search of a prayer to speak its simple beauty...