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...

and the wind and the rain and the need to connect

Self at Mount Oliver Summer Conference 1996

.... and now something moves something stirs within some ancient primordial instinct perhaps and yet and yet it is more so much more so much more it is as if the strings of the heart are being played by the hands of angels by the hands of angels delicate as the touch of tears as they trickle in the crevices below my sore tired eyes and yes there is indeed a deep down passion struggling to be expressed struggling to reach out and embrace the whole world to embrace all in its elemental primordiality to embrace the rains that lash the windowpanes and the wind that howls to catch the wind as donovan had it in a song of all and now let the music of the soul play on play on play on let the music play on and let it never end until we have shuffled off this mortal coil this mortal coil this brittle house of bones this brittle house of bones and there is so much to be embraced if the spirit is only willing if the heart is at ease with itself if the gut is listened to listened to listened to and this is so much needed today for we all want to go beyond the stress beyond the sturm und drang of life beyond the pain that bites beyond the weight of stones the weight the weight that presses down on little people little people whom i teach these weakest of the weak these brittle reeds in our gentle pool of care and yes this something this something deep within this yearning for union for unity with the centre point of all creation with the still point of being with that strong ontological centre of gravity that pulls us like little planets to its supporting sun and still the tears come and still the tears trickle for this life was meant to be experienced deeply deeply deeply and yes there is a deep down well of wisdom from which we may drink and all is a going inward deeply an exploration of the caverns and passageways of what it means to be alive to be truly human to be caring to be caring of others yes oh so very much caring of others especially those significant others and even the insignificant broken people who cross our paths on a daily basis and yes this desire is deep within this mystical desire for the great unity of being and these words cascade out looking for shape but like the rivulets that stream from a larger waterfall of being and these little streams are enlivening and nourishing and sustaining and hope giving and thirst slaking and there is more so much more like the music of bob dylon and that of leonard cohen a music a deep music a music a music which seeps into the soul like water into the parched soil like water slaking the thirst of the parched soil and so the music comes the music comes through their old cracked voices but the music the music is so young so young while the voices are so old and we are told we are told that the music is eternal that the music is eternal that it will go on and on and on and there will be young voices who will come and take up the tune and carry it on and carry it on and on and on and still the wind beats wild on my window pane and the rain washes down the glass in healing rivulets and these old eyes water and i listen and i listen to the music of the spheres somewhere within...

Recognition and Identity

A younger me - some 25 years ago - playing a guitar and singing!

...and identity whatever that is and perhaps it's something to do with memories and the way they shape themselves into patterns on the brain and burn down ever inwards to form to shape the mind the mind the mind which breaks or can break like frightful waves against the jagged cliffs and so interminably ever onward until the death of consciousness and indeed it often bemuses me as i grow ever more deeply conscious of the self ever more deeply in the cavernous pits of the mind and plumb the depths of identity and wonder where does this soul belong and still it dawns and continually dawns on this mind that there would be no pain without consciousness and just now i remember the suffering of another the suffering of an eighteen year old boy-man to be more precise who is living through the pain of depression the pain the pain the pain of that depression which this writer once knew thankfully for a short period of some 12 weeks many years ago many years ago and thankfully that burning into the self that cycling and re-cycling of painful thoughts has not returned has never returned and that is more than thirteen years ago now and i wish i wish i could make meaning and significance out of all this oh no oh no the task at hand is to write on and on and on to write and continue to write ever-onward ever-onward in just because there is meaning in the act of writing insofar as something happens something is shaped something pours itself out something at the heart of whatever it is that has made these atoms and molecules shape themselves into consciousness and as i write on i wonder at the littleness of it all at the littleness of the i against the vastness of space and i was and am taken by the words of the great romantic poet and philosopher - the great s.t. coleridge oh yes those words his words made my heart burn within me so many times when i was reading him like when he told the story that his father had often brought him by the hand as a young boy out into the country to taste of the darkness and to become habituated to the vast to become habituated to the vastness of the night sky and how little and how insignificant a mite we are in comparison to the expanse of space and the looking out into the vastness that great vista of emptiness with splashes of white light dotting its surface and yet the mind the consciousness that centre point that central place that viewing point that still point that solid ground of self or of ego or of consciousness which not only knows but knows that it knows and maybe that's what it's all about and yet the pain of that knowing the pain of knowing that one pains that the heart breaks that the mind breaks on its own mountains down as the great jesuit poet gerard manley hopkins once put it and all these writers are about making sense of human experience about making sense of the project we call life about trying to throw threads of meaning across great boulders of the unknown otherness of things in the vain hope of explaining them and ah and ah but these threads of little knowledge and smaller meaning will never hold will never hold because the vast epistemological task is so daunting so frightening so terrifying and these words are coming thick and heavy now as the tears attempt to form in my eyes and these fingers tickle these keys as this little brain with its mind trying to escape trying to run riot on its captors trying to escape the bounds and boundaries placed upon it by the physicality of its imprisoning brain and that's it that's it it's consciousness that's the transcendent self and that's what it's all about all about that projecting of that image of self that projection of that sense of self that's me this self-transcendence this self-transcending self this self reaching out for identity looking for a container of self in another in another wanting to be held like a little weeping baby wanting to be cradled in the arms of another wanting to be nurtured wanting to be held wanting to be recognised ah ah yes ah yes and the philosopher charles taylor is right it's all about being recognised by a significant other or others and being open to such cherishing to such recognition and the ability to reject all mis-recognitions as alien destroyers of the self as alien destroyers of authenticity of the truth that is the me that is the me or that is the i the i the i the little the little me wanting be held and identified and acknowledge by another in mutual embrace in mutual embrace...   

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...

The Eternal Now

Sculpture at the American Military Cemetery, Normandy

Sculpture at German Military Cemetery.

and all spiritualities talk about living in the now the eternal now because it alone is all we have as the past is already gone and is merely a somewhat cloudy memory while the future has not yet come and is merely a fleeting vision if we are lucky and that's it my soul-friend the future and the past are illusory leaving us only to dwell in the eternal now that now that goes on forever leaving us with the mystery of time which we know only by the changes wrought on and in our very bodies and that is what ageing and growing old for me is yes that's what it is a coming to terms with the body-soul or soul-body as a unity ah yes that is what growing old is for me yes it is a coming to terms with my body an acknowledgement of its weaknesses and failings with all its bumps and lumps and imperfections exacerbated by the weathering of the years and my spirituality is a growing of my soul-into-body and my body-into-soul a growing beyond all atomization a growing beyond all splitting of the self because my self is so intimately bound up with my body that i know of no separation and ageing is carrying me beyond old certainties and old categories one reads of in dusty old books a going beyond the dualisms and dualities a going beyond cartesian categories of body and soul and yet those old rationalists knew a lot but they kept mathematically dividing reality and even Self whereas the modern thrust of psyche and of Self and of body-soul is to unity union and unification and to live in the now is to hear my stomach growl after the light meal i have eaten as it sucks in through osmosis whatever nourishment was in the food i ate and this is the now of my body and of my body-soul as it feels these keys and taps this flow of consciousness on this screen in front of me the nowness of it all and the dog barking somewhere at the back of my house and i acknowledge its presence as I do the feel and gentle rattle of the keys that give shape and form to these emanations of the Self or of body-soul or of soul-body and all the while i am becoming an Observer or Witness of all about me as well as all within me and i am becoming a Listener to Self as well as to Others and this is the way i can be in this world and a i type i feel like e e cummings who wrote without any punctuation becoming as it were part of what he was writing rather than the creator or objectively ordering person-writer-narrator as the ordering mind begins to notice and observe rather than to order and predict and determine or pre-determine and ageing for me is becoming a letting go a going beyond a wanting to control a going beyond a logical or rational ordering of things to meet my ideas of how things are or should be it's as if i was becoming a more neutral screen or plate letting all those stimuli from outside and even from inside register on it and meditation is teaching me to listen and in listening to accept to accept to accept to accept a small word worth repeating but its denoted and connoted meanings are so hard to achieve and yet i am painfully and gradually doing it and i love the fact that my mind now is teeming onto this page without control of my consciousness and i feel like i have dived into an ocean and am learning to swim learning to let go the Ego learning learning learning to knock it into shape to take away its desire for control dreadful control which has led to Hitlerian destruction and devastation ah my soul ah my body ah my body-soul ah my soul-body my oneness and unity of being i delight in you that delights in others and that brings some lightness to this world weighed down with the madness of manic capitalism which is gobbling us up like an ever hungry monster and so many of us are prey to our desires and the ads on t.v. and radio and magazines and Internet all yes all are purposely composed to lure the desires of the id of the id that cesspit primordially rooted in our being... now now now NOW...  that's all i need all i need as the i diminishes  

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...