Uplift

and then there is nothing like action to lift a drooping spirit to be up and doing because such action brings us beyond that microscopic looking at self that magnification of everything out of all proportion and like a strange and powerful medicine it transforms us through the sweat of our brows and so i cut the grass and prune the hedges and in so doing to an extent i prune away at myself i cut off all those decaying bits of self-pity and shake free all those ripe fruit and beyond ripe fruit which must needs fall to the ground and in a sense that is what we are doing when we exercise or go to the gym or perform any physical activity as these bodies that we possess are stone age ones and they need to be exercised as too much living in the mind can bring a person down down down and a balance is needed between the spiritual the intellectual and the physical and we need to be rooted in our bodies which after all are all that we have got and we can only dismiss the body at our peril and as i age i am beginning to become more comfortable with this body and realise with st francis that it is brother body it is all that i have and soul or soul is just not contained therein like a fluid in a container oh no oh no there is a unity of being between body and mind between body and soul and so i like the formulation body-mind or body-soul because these two realities which we separate for convenience are really not two realities at all they are ONE ONE ONE calling to the universe in a ONENESS in a oneness in a oneness and we feel that we are whole and this writer needs to feel whole needs to take stock needs to sit with and listen to what the body can tell him and not to get lost in the mind or intellect for that really is often an escapism and escape from the reality of the material body and yes the body is material and yet and yet it is more because i am not just a material body i am in fact a body-soul a body which feels and thinks and moves and cries for joy and sorrow and so i am a body-soul or a soul-body and never again the cartesian dualism for me which divided the reality that we are and left us with nothing but a soul or spirit inhabiting the husk of a body the shell and that and that is all in the past and i write and i write and i let the stream of consciousness flow because i need to comfort myself by allowing my unconscious my great unconscious to speak and to go on speaking and i want to listen because i know that i know so much so much more than i am actually aware of and so like freud i want to make my unconscious conscious i want to be open to all nooks and crannies to all the corners to all the shadows to all the demons as well as to the spaces of my unconscious that have a little more light i want to take out all the dusty ornaments that are lying in the dark corners of my mind i want to accept all the creepy crawlies all the mess and sweat of life all those ants that live under all those un-upturned rocks and yes i want to go around the labyrinth and dungeon of my mind and upturn those rocks and let all the shadowy parts of myself all the neglected parts of my self all the suppressed and oppressed parts of myself let them all out and let them dry off in the sum and become that dried and lifeless fruit they really are for then all my fears will be dried up and lifeless and will not be crawling around and frightening me in my dreams and yes we are just that a unity a strange unity gathered up from bits of this and bits of that within us and i am many selves seeking a union in a greater or basic self if only i could find it and i am left with this with this with this and i repeat it because i need it to sound like a chorus calling to my soul indeed more properly to my body-soul to gather together all the bits and pieces of this ageing self and let it bloom until it is time for the fruit to fall until it is time until it is time to go back to the earth from which i came... 

SAD

.... and this is the summer season unusually damp and wet here in ireland land of mists and more mists and sixty shades of grey as well as sixty shades of green and the sun has departed and no wonder we feel sad and sad is named so well that is seasonal affective disorder and we must surely suffer from it here in hibernia named winter by the romans and so i sit here in my attic den and am slightly down and hope that by writing these few words i will exorcise the devil and these words alone bring me back to some thirty years ago and i in  a monastery fastness on the side of the dublin mountains not far from the famous or infamous hellfire club to which we used climb as young men to put in an afternoon that would not lie heavily upon our souls and i remember passing one other student who asked me what i was thinking and i said i was exorcising my demons and boy that's what physical activity does it helps us exorcise those demons that haunt our souls nay haunt our body-souls for this writer is no believer in cartesian dualism this writer is seeking a holism yes a holism that knows only this solidity that i am at the moment this solid blob of flesh this solidity or solid blob of flesh that can think and write and move and do this solidity that wants no self-pity that wants to explore its real nature of which it is at once a captive and yet and yet can fly away on paths of escape in imaginary lands of thought and i sweat and i sweat in my attic room for it is at least 20 degrees centigrade today and my keyboard has become a little sweaty with my fingers and i think of the great gerard manley hopkins sj who wrote of human beings as bearing man's smudge and sharing man's smell naked we came into the world and naked we shall leave it and as i type i realise that there are many things i have let slip many things i must do things that i have been too lazy and too disinclined to do almost like freud as if i wished to let those cares go let them fall away and embrace an ageing that knows that letting go that knows that dying and that death is so much part of this body-soul that i am so much part of this thinking mass of flesh that i am and yes it sounds so good does that phrase thinking mass of flesh that will become a stinking mass of flesh and then no more no more no more and the great freud himself called this the death instinct and he was so right so right so right and all the things i must do are pressing in on me pressing in on me and yet i know that after this writing after this stream of consciousness i must go and do something because doing something is part of my rescue my rescue of this self struggling to know itself struggling to come to terms with what it is with who it is with the shadows that fall as well as the strong sunlight of italy that i tasted for a while and these fingers now are caressing these keys as the stream of consciousness traces itself across the screen of my laptop mirroring the screen of my mind and i am calling out like the psalmist of old the psalmist of old whom the old scholars traditionally called david he the leader of the jewish nation all those years ago and these thoughts keep falling down and shaping themselves like a stream that finds a channel like a stream that finds a channel and i will find a channel and that will be my identity that channel that will be carved from the earth by the beads of sweat on my brow and i need courage to do all this diving down into the unconscious and owning all those demons that live in the shadowy corners of my mind and how i need a fellow soul an anamchara as they put it in the irish language to lead me forth by the hand and say don't think so deeply just go with life just go with life and follow where it leads...

Where does the heart lie?

Mount Etna, July 2008

and where does my heart lie at all and it is quite yeatsian being a veritable foul rag and bone shop of all bits and pieces collected over the years this and that experience this and that meeting of this and that person and as i age i perceive that a certain cynicism is growing within that things are simply not as they seem that my heart has collected so much rubbish and yet it is that rubbish which has made me which has cut me out as the person or character that i am and i feel singularly diffuse as i type these words singularly lacking a centre singularly like the hedgehog rather than the fox that great metaphor used by the ancient philosophers and especially by one of my favourites in the history of ideas in the writings of the great isaiah berlin oh yes i feel like the hedgehog rolling in the field and picking up every little thing in my spines collecting this and that and the other and all of these sundry little pieces are collected in my heart even if they do fall away over time as i move on in life and all of the things i have collected and some of these things are bits and pieces of this and that and the other person and i wonder truly what it has been all about and then a good friend's remark about the comment made by his mother nearing her death as to what the whole project called life was all about at all and that too has stuck in my heart along with her weary 

Mount Etna smoulders... July 2008

wise old face woman of great wisdom and woman of great love and then my own mother with her memory wiped clean wiped so clean that almost nothing is left... and then all those existential things that weigh upon my shoulders as i age and what is the mind then just some vague or not so vague metaphor for some kind of consciousness emerging from the matter that is the brain and am i no more than a collocation of atoms as russell once described the human animal and human animal is a term i love for when we use human being we are putting so much weight the weight of whole cultures on our creaturely shoulders that i often think we cannot bear poor animal self poor bodily self and within deep within but never as a ghost within a machine for the body is no mere skeletal house for the indwelling of the soul or self or whatever because the body-soul or soul-body is indivisible a continuum for one arises out of the other out of the other arises the totality or rather in and with the other rises the totality of the self... and still i wonder and still the wonder grows as to what it is all about at all and in these christmas times when people rush around like headless chickens looking for this that and the other present for this that and the other thing where lies the heart where lies this heart this rag and bone shop of my soul of my self where lies it all at all at all once it lay on a womanly shoulder safe and yet that once is just that once for the years have faded as have memories of that encounter and yet there is no loneliness here there is no regret for the heart cannot regret its hedgehog ways its hedgehog ways its collecting of this that or the other person over the years all it can do is press on and those beautiful words of jesus that the son of man had no where to lay his head ah maybe he meant that he had nowhere to lay his heart and where is the heart of jesus these christmas times and where is the heart of buddha and where is the heart of vishnu and of every other hindu god and of every single religion under the sun and where is the atheistic heart and the agnostic heart as they are all made of the same crooked wood of humanity...

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...