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Trembling and bewildered, I got on my bike to come home. Coming down through Ballinafad, I thought it will be a good sign if the front gates are open. Since there was no one living in the front gate-lodge, Michael Vahey had locked and chained them at the beginning of winter. It gave me hope when, against all odds, they were wide open. I went down to Patsy and Bridie Prendergast. Patsy was the gardener and he and Bridie his wife lived in the gardener’s house near the stables. Keeping it as simple as I could, I told them that something terrible had happened to me in the mountains. They did their best. Coming back through the garden in the small hours I thought it would be a good sign if my little clock had stopped at one thirty-one. Again, against all the odds, it had stopped, dead on one thirty-one. This was an old superstition of mine. Being the opposite or reverse of thirteen, thirty one was a lucky number, and there it was now, comforting me, giving me hope that I would come through.

For now, though, there was no relief.

Over the years, deliberately and of seeking set-purpose, I used to recite a Buddhist mantra:

Namo Amida Buddha

Buddhism is pleasant to look at, whereas, in its final redemptive moment, Christianity is horrible to look at. And yet, now that I needed help in a way that I never before did, I fell instantly and instinctively back into Christianity. Whatever else, Christianity was mother tongue. It was to Christ and it was to the God that Christ called out to in dereliction – it was to both of them that I now called.

El Greco’s ‘Christ in Gethsemane’ came sensationally to mind, that melting red-robed Christ with the yellow angel hovering above him, offering him the chalice, a suffering that anyone, even Christ, would attempt to bargain himself out of.

I had, in some measure, suffered the desolations of the age: Kepler, Pascal, Coleridge, Melville, Nietzsche and Arnold – to me these weren’t just historical figures of external historical interest. On the contrary, they were stages of a progressive distress that I would sometimes be very badly afflicted by. But I coped. I didn’t know that I could cope now. It is one thing to find oneself engulfed in an infinite universe that has neither centre nor circumference, it is something altogether for that universe to disappear, to vanish like a mirage, leaving you in the void.

There was another stage in the progressive distress. Sylvia Plath gave her name to it:

The hills step off into whiteness.

People or stars

Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath,

O slow horse

The colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells –

All morning the

Morning has been blackening.

A flower left out.

My bones hold a stillness, the far

Fields melt my heart.

They threaten

To let me through to a heaven

Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

In my case – it seemed sinful to claim it, it seemed like inverted Luciferean pride to claim it – but I had, I had been let through not to a heaven but to a void that was starless and fatherless.

I was in a no-man’s-land, no, I was in a no-man’s-nothing between a world lost and a God not found.

Golgotha, the place of the skull, the skull that projected a snake into the rope, the skull that projected a world illusion into the void, now, if it wasn’t pride to claim so, now it made sense to me.

Gethsemane, the place of the olive press, the press that presses all that you unconsciously are into full consciousness – the place of the olive press and the place of the skull, they made sense to me now.

Up until now, as a teacher of literature, and as someone who had remained in touch with Christianity through Christian art, I had played with the Christian myth. Played with it as I played with other myths. But now the myth had shown its hand. It had danced itself out of its mollifying veils, leaving me with naked sight of the press and the skull. And I wasn’t big enough. And I didn’t know any prayer that was big enough, none except Christ himself, none except Christ sore amazed in Gethsemane, none except Christ looking down into his own empty skull on Golgotha. The skull empty and the Son of Man has no where to lay his head, no where outside it, no where inside it.

Christianity was true, is true, not because Jesus is God – he might well be the one true God incarnate – but it isn’t because of that that Christianity is true, Christianity is true because in Gethsemane and on Golgotha Jesus lived a truth about us and our world, he lived it into shocking visibility, he lived it and it lived him. He walked into the olive press, the mind press, that brings everything out into the open. It brings all that we phylogenetically are out into the open. It brings everything that Nietzsche discovered in himself out into the open.

In Gethsemane, Jesus must have looked like Coatlicue.

He walked into the press. He looked down into the skull.

I had learned a lot in a few hours. Only this wasn’t learning.

This was simple seeing. In the mountain today I had been shattered 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.

Surprised, almost managing a smile of embarrassment, I was a Christian. Not a Christian again. I was Christian for the first time. […]

Waking every night at the hour of the wolf, my room would be thick with moral pollution. In the oldest parts of who I was, no, of what I was, I was on the boil. I pictured it. Down there somewhere among my oldest roots there was a witch’s cauldron hanging over a fire of deadwood gathered from the floor of Birnam Wood, and it was bubbling, toiling, troubling:

Fillet of a fenny snake,

In the cauldron boil and bake:

Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Adder’s fork and blind worm’s sting,

Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,

For a charm of powerful trouble,

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

It was as if my very blood, all of it, was a hell-broth. And all my humours too, in the Elizabethan sense, they were a hell-broth, varieties of the hell-broth, and now they had come to the boil and I didn’t have to go to a blasted heath to find fog and filthy air, it was here in my room, condensing on my window, condensing on sclera and cornea.

Did Dostoevsky know about it? Did he know about the hell-broth? When he talked about the bad blood of the Karamazovs?

I didn’t think he did.

Bunyan did:

But my original and inward pollution; that was my plague and my affliction; that I saw at a dreadful rate always putting forth itself within me; that I had the guilt of, to amazement; by reason of that, I was more loathsome in mine own eyes than was a toad, and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too: Sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart, as water would bubble out of a fountain …

When I was a lad I would take our horse to Paddy Horan’s forge, to be hot-shod by him. When he had shaped and made the iron shoe, he would put it back in the fire and he’d ask me to put my hand to the long, well-worn, wooden handle of his great bellows and keep the coal fire blazing. When the shoe was glowing red he would haul it out with a big tongs, lay it on the anvil, take his hammer and drive a pointed punch into one of the nail holes, keep it in his left hand, return to the horse, lift the leg he was working on onto his own bent leg just above the knee and he’d apply the cooling iron shoe to the hoof, burning a shallow mould for itself in it. A smoke would billow and plume upwards, and I often wondered why it was that the smell of burning hoof was the same as the smell of burning hair.

Hair and hoof.

Head and hoof.

Hoof and hand.

Hooves that haunt them

Always show

Our fingers too

Have cloven doors:

Like hooves again,

The close at cockcrow.

There were nights when I felt that God was applying the twelve plagues of Egypt to my soul in exactly the way that Paddy Horan used to apply the red-hot shoe to the hoof of the horse.

The smoke and smell of burning hair.

The smoke and smell of burning hoof.

The smoke and smell of burning karma.

My room overlooking the Owenmore. There were days when I looked out into a corner of Paradise. But, come the small hours of the night, that room was Paddy Horan’s forge. And I was burning. Centaur hoof in me was burning, and smoking. Minotaur horn in me was burning, and smoking. It was the road to the Labyrinth all over again. Only now it wasn’t just my mind that was singed by thunder.

Only now it was a Song of Experience not of Innocence.

I was afraid.

There were awful impulses simmering in me and maybe when I was off guard in the night they’d take over and I’d somnambulate to murder.

The only blessing I asked for was that I would be the only victim.

I thought about suicide. I imagined modes and means. In comparison with possible alternatives, it was the best kind of news that my parents could get, that I had stepped too close to a precipice on Ben Bawn. But looked at from the depths I was in now, suicide wasn’t the answer. However awful the process of dying, death itself was a little transition, I’d arrive with all my trouble, magnified now in the bigger light.

I saw three great doors in front of me: one into a monastery, one into a mental home and one into a high security prison.

It was in me to commit the unspeakable crime. And ask anyone and they’d say I was a decent enough sort of bloke, and if you asked me, if you asked me a few months ago, that’s what I’d say too, I’m a decent enough sort of bloke.

Where was it all coming from?

In the nineteenth century, Haeckel, a German embryologist, advanced a theory, not now scientifically respectable, that we undergo the whole process of evolution in the womb. In the womb I am paramecium. I am fish. I am amphibian, I am reptile, I am mammal, I am ape, I am human.

What I supposed was that each successive stage was now karmically active in me, the thirteen and three-quarters British Miles of evolution were karmically active in me and if this were so, then, dear Jesus, there’s a lot of burning and boiling ahead of me.

A physical appendix, a karmic appendix.

Dormant over incarnations, our karmic appendix comes to the boil, it bursts, and now, if we do remember it, it is ruefully that we will remember the curriculum vitae that got us our first job.

Little wonder that, emerging from Gethsemane, Jesus left his curriculum-vitae face, his and ours, in Veronica’s napkin.

I called out, give me a break, God.

Again and again in the night I called out, give me a break, God.

How can it be?

How can God not answer?

How can the stones not answer?

How can the salmon below in the river now answer?

How can a fox not come into my room and say, ‘I’ll carry it for you this one night, lie back and have a beautiful sleep.’

Who, in God’s name, wrote the Book of Job? What did he go through?

Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou keepest a watch over me?

When I say my bed shall comfort me, my couch shall ease my complaint, then thou scarest me with dreams and terrifiest me through visions, so that my soul chooseth strangling and death rather than my life.

He breaketh me with breach upon breach …

Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering. […]

I had decided that I would go and see Professor Feithin O’ Doherty in Dublin. Although now in the new campus, he was still in the Philosophy Department of UCD, and I had heard that he did some counselling, mostly with priests and religious.

That night I stayed with Bob Cannon and Romira Wovrill in their flat in Leeson Park. Bob had been a student at the University of Manitoba, he had gone to Oxford to do postgraduate work and it was there that he met Romira. Romira was now a lecturer in the French Department in Trinity and Bob was at work on a final draft of his thesis. We had dinner by the fire and it was a great pleasure to me to be back for a few hours in the intramural world of high culture.

Again that night I had a dream that frightened me. I am walking behind a horse-drawn caravan such as the better-off tinkers used to have. Suddenly I see that the horse has pulled away taking the shafts with him. I wake up, and now again, the hour of the wolf my torment, I am terrified by the thought that one part of my psyche might be pulling away from the rest.

That afternoon I met Feithin in his office. In case it would sound too grand, I didn’t talk about a felt affinity with Narada, with Andromeda and Hippolytus. But, in other ways, I did convey to him the full terror and peril of what I was going through. In the end I asked him if I should see a psychiatrist. On this he was very definite, I shouldn’t. I asked him why not and he replied that a psychiatrist would only complicate the whole thing with his or her favourite text-book theory. And anyway, you are handling it, he said.

Back on the bus I was desolate, and bereft, no remedy anywhere in sight. Was I handling it or was it handling me? And into what further awfulness would it manhandle me? All I could do now was go home and consent to it. Pliant and compliant, I would be water to it, letting it pour me into one after another nightmare, taking the shape, as water would, of whatever nightmare was nightmaring me.

Looking out through the window, I saw that we had turned into Morehampton Road.

There’s a Carmelite Priory somewhere along here, I thought.

I asked the conductor.

Next stop, he said.

I talked, in a room off the front hall, to Fr Celestine. An elderly friar in a brown habit, his hair close cropped, he looked to me to be blue with the cold.

Telling me that he was hard of hearing, he asked me to talk much louder, much much louder.

Thinking the case was hopeless I kept going but only for reasons of good manners. As soon as it was polite to do so I’d thank him and take my leave.

But it didn’t happen that way. Having heard me out, he came to life and, with fervent good will, he talked to me, telling me that the man I needed to meet was in Oxford, Fr Norbert is his name, and he has been through the fire, and there he was, this elderly, half-perished man, a survivor from medieval times, and he opening a door for me not into a mental home and not into a high security prison but into a friary.

Back in Connemara, I wrote to Fr Norbert. Within the week I got a slightly austere but good letter back. It certainly held the door open. […]

I had seen three doors in front of me, a door into a high-security prison, a door into a mental home and a door into a monastery. Without trying, this man had put me at my ease and it was to the door of a monastery or, more exactly, it was to the door of a friary that he was driving me.

Boar’s Hill, he told me, was six miles from town and soon we were climbing a gently winding, polite country lane, but for all I knew it could be a suburban lane. Hidden away behind those bushes and trees there might be houses that I couldn’t see. That aside, what was so new to me was that even the darkness seemed polite.

We drew up in front of what looked like a middling big house.

Once inside, soft as it was, Fr Victor’s voice dropped to a whisper.

‘They are at supper,’ he said.

Three or four steps down the long hall a great wonder of comfort and relief came over me.

I felt as Ishmael must have felt after he had climbed a rope-ladder up into the Rachel.

I’m home, I thought. I’m home.

I wanted to stand there and experience it, but Fr Victor was already showing me into the reading room where I left my bag.

Coming back out into the hall, he opened the refectory door for me.

The friars were eating in silence at three long, plain tables, one in front of me, the others at either side. I sat at the table on my left, and a minute or two later Fr Victor came back from the kitchen with my supper.

Since someone sitting in front of you could be a distraction, a disruption of reflection and solitude, the friars sat only at one side of their tables and the only sounds were the little sounds of their knives and forks, the sounds of cups coming to rest in their saucers.

Sitting at the table opposite me were four young men. Novices, I thought, still getting used to their medieval brown habits, not just as clothes, but as private and public witness to their Carmelite vocation.

Above them on the wall there was a small painting, a portrait of St John of the Cross in ecstasy.

In search of big, glamorous metaphors, not of good counsel or guidance, I bought The Dark Night of the Soul in Winnipeg. At home that evening, a few pages into it, I pitched it from me. Even now I could still see it, bouncing off the wall down onto the sofa. I had ordered it again this last summer, and every day and night since then it made the difference, enabling me, almost, to latch onto a hopeful diagnosis of what was happening to me. And here I was now observing the same silence at table that he observed three hundred years ago.

The prior tapped a glass with a spoon, we stood up, we said grace, and then, the prior leading the way, we walked out into the hall where they welcomed me in a way that left no doubt I was welcome.

After supper, during the winter months, the hall was their ambulatory. They asked me to join them. Within minutes, I the only one not in a habit, we were talking about Connemara. Looking back on it a few days later, I could see that the silence and solitude they observed made conversation, when it was permitted, a particular pleasure. Now was their time to walk and talk together, and right up until five minutes to eight when the bell for compline was rung, we had a good time.

In church we sat facing each other, two rows of us on the far side of the altar, two on the near side.

Standing, we sang a hymn together.

Seated, we prayed the Psalms of the day – of the evening rather – we prayed them antiphonally, the sometimes hectic words crossing the space between us.

There was lectio divina, a novice reading from the lectern.

At the liturgical end of the Carmelite day, we prayed Simeon’s prayer of departure.

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before all thy people, a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people, Israel.

We sang a final hymn:

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide!

When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O abide with me …

Coming forward to the centre of the floor, the prior sprinkled us from afar with holy water, praying as he did so that we would have a quiet night and a perfect end. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.

We went back to our cells there to observe the Grand Silence until matins at a quarter to six next morning.

It had happened. Formally, I had crossed a threshold back into Christianity. I was, of course, acutely aware that I had done so on a hill that belonged to the boar before it belonged to Christ. Not so docile on the morning of Christ’s nativity as Milton might have expected him to be, the boar, very likely, would still have his say and way, his bristled say, his tusked way. […]

The Carmelite day began with matins at a quarter to six in the morning. From matins we went straight into a reflective, dignified Mass and then, everyone returned to his place, we either knelt or sat in silent meditation until half-past seven. Then we filed into the dining-room and had breakfast. After breakfast, everyone dispersed to whatever work had been allotted to them. We were back in church at twelve for a half an hour. Then we had lunch, after which we had recreation, walking back and forth along the drive for about three-quarters of an hour. With that we retired to our rooms, some for siesta, some for solitude. We were back in church for nones between two forty-five and three. We had tea and biscuits. We dispersed each of us to his work. At a quarter to six we were in church for vespers. Vespers done, we said the Angelus and then we meditated for an hour. Supper was from seven until about twenty past. Again now in communal recreation we walked and talked in the hall. Compline in the church was from eight to half past and then, having seen the Lord’s salvation as Simeon had, we dispersed to our cells to observe the Grand Silence until matins next morning.

Beyond the garden outside my window there was a field which was owned by one of the Oxford colleges. It had a public path running through it and it was as we walked it every day, up and down, for an hour after nones, that I told Fr Norbert the whole story of what had been happening to me.

I talked to him about a sense of dark, virulent infestation from within my own nature. I talked to him about the image-impulses of a sexuality grafted onto pig-killing and cock-killing, the gloriously combed and wattled head, a red accusation, looking back at us from our floor. I talked to him about a sense of Andromeda exposure to my own unconscious. I talked to him about my dread of centaurization, Minotaurization. I talked to him about my dread of a Nebuchadnezzar regression. I talked to him about this sense of having lost empirical foundation, of being in a no-man’s-land, no, of having fallen into a no-man’s-nothing between the snake lost and the rope not found. And there was nothing passive, I told him, in all of this. Actively and violently, it would besiege me, it would engulf me, leaving me aware of nothing else. I’d stand at the window and I wouldn’t see the river. In the early days I sensed a kind of Love in it, I told him, but not recently. Recently, it was all darkness, and all I could do was to be pliant and compliant, all I could do was to let myself be poured like water from one to another nightmare, taking their shape. And my prayer, I told him, was that I would be the only victim of all of this, that it wouldn’t harm the hair of another person’s head.

Strangely, he wasn’t alarmed, this white-haired, thin, frail-boned man in a brown Carmelite habit.

Always using the perfect words, the perfect image, he talked to me from far away. St Paul had said that we are or we can be a temple of the Holy Spirit. It seemed to me that it was in, and from within, that temple that he talked to me.

Listening to him, I would look down at the colleges, at the colleges and their spires, and I’d wonder, how come they don’t know him? How come that our world no longer holds this man, the likes of this man, in high esteem?

In one or another of the great Taoist texts, I had read that the sage always walks behind humanity, picking up the great things it has discarded.

Our world had discarded contemplation and in his presence I sensed our loss. With Columbus we substituted advancement local for advancement essential and again in his presence I sensed our loss.

I had long since felt it. The biggest defeat that England ever suffered was a defeat at its own hands, the destruction of its monasteries. Its gaping monasteries is the gaping dimension of England. Its gaping monasteries is the gaping dimension of Ireland. Wordsworth should have written another great poem, this time not a few miles distant from the ruin but within the ruin. Neither England nor Ireland can recover the loss until someone suffers the gaping.

Having met Fr Norbert, I couldn’t but be a revisionist. Someone had said that the Renaissance was a sunset that Europeans mistook for a dawn. After a few days of matins and lauds and vespers and compline, this revision seemed much less wide of the mark than it otherwise would. One day, in passing, Fr Norbert himself had said that the rule of St Benedict was Europe’s founding document. All of this I must think about. I must look again at the whole Western tradition. For my own purposes, I must look at it again.

Had I become addicted to depths?

Even now, from the side of Boar’s Hill, I was looking down at spires not looking up at them.

Had I been dominated, even lived, by a primary fear, that I mustn’t so much as look at the Ladder till I had reached the Labyrinth?

And yet, the teeth of a carnivore were in my mouth before the Sermon on the Mount was in my mind.

And where else therefore – in a fully acknowledging sense, where else but on Boar’s Hill, where else but on the hill of the boar would Carmelites live their Carmelite life?

Whatever very difficult chance we have with the boar we acknowledge, we have no chance at all with the boar that we don’t acknowledge.

But that didn’t let me off the hook? Had I looked at the boar to the point of fascination?

Had I looked as often and as long at the elevated Host as I had at the boar, how would I be now?

Had I brought all this thing on myself? Was I a sorcerer’s apprentice who had the formula to summon the Beast but not the formula to send him away?

Had I attempted Bright Angel Trail without invoking Bright Angel?

Without the help of Bright Angel, will we come to resemble the thing that fascinates us?

Arrived in Byzantium, Yeats prayed:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing masters of my soul …

Had I listened to the singing masters instead of to the ololygmos and the low lowing, had I gone north to Byzantium instead of south to the Labyrinth, how would I be now?

Virginal devotion to Aphrodite didn’t save Hippolytus.

And, in a poem called ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’, Yeats tells us that having spent his life in the contemplation and service of ideal images he eventually had to come back down to where all ladders begin, in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

At least Yeats had served ideal images which was more than I could say for myself.

I remembered the last couple of lines of a piece I had written when I was a student in Dublin:

But that was another time, another place by a waterfall, and our love, our first, was ours, a silver lining in search of a cloud.

In terms of Kundalini yoga, I faced down into the base chakra not up into the crown chakra, and, like Herakles and Perithous in the underworld, maybe I got stuck there.

Ten days in the presence of ideal images in a Carmelite friary had left me in a state of contradictory unease about the whole course of my life.

Excalibur and the farm fork.

The lotus and the gentian.

The lotus has its roots in the mud of a shallow pool or pond or lake. With and in its stem it rises up through the increasingly bright water. Its great, green pads resting on the water it opens out to the sun.

I had gone the way of the gentian and the farm fork not the way of Excalibur and the lotus. And maybe I was now paying the price.

I waited till the last day to come to my greatest fear.

‘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. Also, ours is a contemplative house. If it was madness we wouldn’t have been able to go about things the way we do. Instead of being a disruption, even during the quiet of an hour-long meditation, the contrary has been the case.’

Before I left, I had a long talk with Fr Livinus, the prior. We agreed that I would come back in May for three or four months. […]

In May, now that the summer staff were arriving it was a decent time for me to go, so I set off for Carmelite enclosure on Boar’s Hill. Enclosure there didn’t mean living within a high, surrounding stone wall. There was no such wall. Indeed, the place felt fencelessly open to the world around it. Carmelite enclosure was a different thing altogether from what you’d find in a fortress or a prison. It was living, in original and continuing response to a call, within the rule of the order. It was letting the rhythm of the Carmelite day become the rhythm of your life. The Carmelite day had a very definite purpose in view. It was a thing designed to foster assent, and through it ascent to God. St John of the Cross, as a co-founder of the order, had written a book called The Ascent of Mount Carmel and, in page after page of it, this ascent is anything but an invitation to self indulgence or self promotion. To seek oneself in God is little different from seeking oneself in the world. It is still selfishness. Indeed, of the two, to seek oneself in God could be the more dangerous, and this William Law knew only too well:

Now religion in the hands of self, or corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame than passions only employed about worldly matters: pride, self-exaltation, hatred, and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions what nature left to itself would be ashamed to own.

When it comes to giving instruction and guidance, St John of the Cross will not be seduced by a desire to be popular:

O who can tell us how far God wills that this self-renunciation should reach! In truth it should be as death, a temporal, natural and spiritual annihilation in all things which the will esteems; herein is all our gain.

It isn’t a question of exchanging worldly gratification for spiritual gratification. On our way to the summit, when the time comes, we must be willing to renounce both.

Not disabled by a desire for applause and approval, St John of the Cross took Good Friday seriously. He took Tenebrae seriously. Tenebrae in so far as it implies that we must go beyond the natural light of our eyes and minds, for, instead of revealing God, that light eclipses God.

A doctrine shocking to humanists, both Christian and secular. So it is unlikely that we will ever erect a Statue of Liberty who has a quenched Tenebrae harrow in her upraised hand.

A Statue of Liberty as secular Europeans understand it.

A Statue of Moksha as Upanishadic Hindus understand it.

I imagined it: A Statue of Bright Angel set high at the mouth of every great river, at the mouth of the Lena as well as the Colorado, at the mouth of the Mekong as well as the Congo. In one of his hands, held low, the karmic cup; in the other, held high, the quenched Tenebrae harrow.

On the train to Oxford, I was trying to imagine what I was letting myself in for.

Our medulla didn’t sing our ‘Marseillaise’ with us.

Coatlicue isn’t a signatory to the American Constitution.

It is easier to overthrow an outer socio-political ancien régime than it is to redemptively integrate an inner, phylogenetic ancien régime.

And then, of course, it isn’t a question of redemptively integrating an eruptive, irrational below into a rational, law-abiding, bright above. In the sense in which Freud understood it, consciousness is as much in need of redemption as unconsciousness is.

Christ’s parables are wholly subversive of everyday, ego-centred consciousness, in short of worldly consciousness.

Christ isn’t saying that where the id is, the ego shall be. Rather is he saying that where both ego and id are, the beatitude of the kingdom of God shall be.

Venus de Milo will as fiercely resist entry into the kingdom as will Coatlicue.

It is hard to imagine how utterly subversive Jesus was. In his parables subversive to an extent that must embarrass recent revolutionaries. In his Passion subversive to the point of undergoing the emptiness of the empty skull.

No, for sure, Gethsemane isn’t a chaise-longue in Vienna, nor is Good Friday a Quatorze Juillet.

Gethsemane and Golgotha are the great revolutionary words, but please God they will never get caught up in revolutions because almost everything that does get caught up in revolution gets lost.

Gethsemane and Golgotha must emerge among us in another way, in an evolutionary not in a revolutionary way, in an unobtrusive, quiet way, without banners or speeches, without guillotines or gulags.

Travelling through what was more or less a post-Christian country, through a country of spires no longer aspiring, I was trying to conceive what it might mean to cross back into Christianity.

To go for broke? As Narada did the day he asked Vishnu to show him the secret of his maya? As Jesus did the day he turned to cross the Kedron?

I only had to spell it out to know that I wasn’t able for it. Ever since the day under the mountain there was a deep and constricting hangover of fright in me. And anyway this wasn’t something I could do on my own. It is only with God’s grace that I would ever be ready for the gift of final dereliction.

One thing I knew of the Carmel on Boar’s Hill – the rhythm of life there would enable me to walk more wisely than I had been doing on my own. To meditate in church with others for an hour was safer than to meditate alone and for hours in a beech in Imleach dhá Rua.

Fr Norbert had assured me that what I was going through wasn’t madness. But that did not guarantee continued good health into the future. Living as I was from day to day, sometimes from moment to moment, I envied the Psalmist who prayed, saying,

Blessed be the name of the Lord, for he hath shewed me his marvellous kindness in a strong city.

In Job the protecting city wall went down. In him the repressing grid went up.

Watch out for calamities on your open road, Walt. Watch out for calamities called Job, Jonah and Narada.

The Carmelite day sheltered me. It comforted me.

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.

Being a Christian house, Chilswell Priory was of course a house at a frontier of human seeking. A house at the wildest frontier of all it was, the frontier of Parable and Passion.

Heard beyond our natural defence-works, heard behind and beyond our psychological and spiritual immune systems, heard when we are as defenceless as we are in dreamless sleep, the parables are the real Tuba Mirum:

Tuba, mirum spargens sonum

Per sepulchra regionum,

Coget omnes ante thronum.

The parables having been spoken among us, there is no need for another summons to final assize. A Last Judgment has already passed upon us and our world. A Last Judgment has already passed upon our way of seeing and knowing the world, on our way of being in the world.

Daily in Chilswell Priory we lived within hearing of the parables. Daily, we lived within hearing of the Good Friday cry of dereliction. Daily, we lived within hearing of awful renovation, renovation of mind and heart, renovation in seeing and knowing. The parables becoming forms of our sensibilities and categories of our understanding.

Those who have ears to hear let them hear.

Those who undergo the ephphata, the be opened, of their baptism, and are thereby enabled to hear.

I would think of the ancient Egyptian ceremony called Opening of the Mouth. Performed on the mummy, it restored his or her senses and faculties to the dead person, senses and faculties with which to be immortally aware of the immortal world.

But the adze of the ancient Egyptian priest – in the Carmel on Boar’s hill it had become a Tenebrae harrow.

As Christians, brought there by our baptism into the Passion and Death of Christ, we lived at an apocalyptic frontier. But we lived here in moderation. In ritual and ceremonial moderation. The Actaeon impulse to which I yielded and which so nearly destroyed me in Connemara – here that impulse had given way to a kind of dignified sophrosyne, a lovely, almost charming wisdom.

After the first couple of weeks of surrender to it I began to have a sense that the Carmelite day is grounded in a just estimation of who we are, not sociologically, but in our openness to heights and depths not often acknowledged in our modern maps of reality.

It was something I had felt again and again in Mexico. At the root of Aztec religion was the Actaeon impulse. They attempted to live too pyramidally close to their gods. Also, unaware of our frailties, it must have been that the little mushroom god opened a chonyid door and there he was, the wide-winged eagle perched on a cactus, its fruits as red as human hearts.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

That was a proverb of hell, of hell as Blake conceived it, that you wouldn’t find over the door at Chilswell.

Chilswell, Child’s Well, a well to which in the old days children with particular illnesses would be brought in the hope that its waters would heal them.

It reminded me of a holy well beside the Owenmore. Under oak trees, I had often cleaned it of its accumulation of leaves, revealing the coins at the bottom.

And now, Chilswell and the Owenmore in my mind together, I saw it. In the way that the Owenmore was soul to me when I came to it having no soul at all, so now in a time of disorder I had found order in Chilswell. […]

One day a young English girl called Katie came in from the first cottage.

With mounting disapproval leading to outright condemnation, she had a good look round and said, ‘Your house is a mess.’

For a good while she directed her eyes, thereby directing my eyes, to this, that and the other thing.

‘Can I got up stays?’ she asked.

‘Off you go,’ I said.

I could hear her walking across the bare, board floors. Walking and, every now and then, stopping, I presumed, to take the whole awful thing in.

She came back down.

‘Even upstays is a mess,’ she said.

She had another disapproving look round.

Her mind made up, she looked at me.

‘Did you go to church today?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘I don’t wish to be cruel,’ she said, ‘but there’s a very good chance that you’ll go to hell.’

In one regard I wasn’t mellowing with the years. Not pausing to count the cost, to myself and to others, I would take an intolerantly ethical stand on issues. Having ready access to anger, I would wield whatever virtues were to hand in the way that cavemen are believed to have wielded their clubs. As a consequence, I didn’t last long in Ballynahinch, and within a few months of walking away I had left Connemara and I was working in their eighteenth-century walled garden for Robert and Sarah Guinness at Lodge Park in Straffan in County Kildare.

Grand in a moderate way and Palladian in style, Lodge Park had the look and the feel of an Ascendancy house. It consisted of a main house with two curved passages coming forward from it to two much smaller wing houses.

To my great surprise I was given one of these wing houses to live in. The big room downstairs was almost of drawing-room size. It had tall windows, and a fireplace big enough for a log fire. From my bedroom upstairs I looked down on the Liffey, on Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, making her way, languidly here, to her feary father.

I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.

Going late that night to my bedroom window, I looked down at her shining in the moonlight, between dogwood bushes.

Greetings to you from a western river, Anna.

Greetings to you from the Owenmore, Anna.

I’ve a story to tell you, Anna.

Walking one day in the hazel valley below his royal ringfort, Bran Mac Feabhail heard the music of the Otherworld. Looking around him, he saw a silver branch and it was out of it the music was coming. That night, although all gates and doors of his ringfort were closed, a woman of the Otherworld stood before him and she sang ten times five quatrains to him. It was her way of bringing him the wonder of the Otherworld, her way of inviting him to follow her over the waves.

Next morning, his company consisting of three groups of nine, Bran put out to sea. At first sunlight on the third day Manannán Mac Lir, God of the Sea, came riding towards them in a four-horse chariot and singing them out over the manes of his horses he sang to them, thirty stanzas he sang to them:

Caíni amra laisin mBran

ina churchán tar muir nglan;

os mé, am charput do chéin,

is magh sccothach ima-réidh.

A n-us muir glan

don naoi broindig a tá Bran,

is Mag Meall co n-iumat scoth

damsa a carpat dá roth.

At-chí Bran

lín tonn tibri tar muir nglan.

At-chíu ca-déin I mMagh Mon

sgotha cennderga gin on.

Taithnit gabra lir a sam

sella roiscc ro sire Bran.

Brunditt sscotha sruaim do mil

a crích Manannáin mic Lir …

Manannán Mac Lir, God of the Sea.

Manannán drawing aside the veil, not between his world and our world, but between his way of seeing things and our way of seeing them.

In other words, there is only one world but there are visionary and everyday ways of seeing it.

That, in short, is Manannán’s revelation to us.

To me, standing on a western cliff one evening, the ocean was a vast metaphysical shiver, it was a thing shivering at the thought of its own metaphysical and physical hopelessness, its immensity was the immensity of its hopelessness. It was itself, not anything else, that had given it the creeps. But then I remembered Ireland’s greatest divine revelation, Manannán singing to Bran and through Bran to me, telling me that where I saw hopelessness he saw delight.

To Manannán, the ocean is Mag Meall, the Plain of Delights, and that’s why, instead of being pitched and rolled in a sea-sick boat, he rides gloriously over it in a four-horse chariot.

Are you able for it, Anna?

Are you able for Ireland’s greatest divine revelation?

Are you able for the news that it isn’t into the engulfing arms of your mad feary father that you are journeying?

Are you able for Manannán’s news, the news that it is into a visionary way of seeing yourself and all things that you are journeying?

Please, Anna, as you journey down past Adam and Eve’s, don’t sing your own song, the song that Joyce taught you, sing Manannán’s song, sing it so that all who live in Viking Dublin, in Norman Dublin, in English Dublin, in Anglo-Irish Dublin, in Irish Dublin, sing it so that all of Dublin deep and wide can hear you, so that King Sitric and Molly Malone, smelling of mussels, can hear you. […]

This year again I went home to be with my parents over Christmas. Having had prostate cancer for the previous couple of years, my father looked thin and wasted, and the high step gone from her, it was with a slow shuffle that my mother moved from the table to the stove or from the stove to the bag of turf.

She hadn’t lapsed from the old liturgy, however. Every evening after dark she’d remember three or four times and she’d ask my father

Did you close the door on the hens, Jimmy?

On my advice, they had left the house and the land to Chris, and since he and Aisling, his daughter, would be arriving later that day I decided to make room for them by leaving on the morning of New Year’s eve.

As she had done every morning during my years in St Michael’s in Listowel, my mother called me at about eight in the morning. Waiting for me at the top of the table was the same breakfast she always served.

I had noticed that she and my father divided the day between them, she getting up in the morning and doing the breakfast and things, he getting up around midday and doing the rest of the things, including the dinner and the supper, and the hens, of course, she’d make sure that he’d tend to the hens.

As I watched her move about the floor I wondered if she had ever been hugged, hugged and sheltered in the deep places of her life.

Having said goodbye to my father in their bedroom, I came back down to the kitchen and I drew her to me, this once mighty woman, and I held her for a long, long time.

In Lodge Park, seven or eight nights later, I dreamed that I was standing in the gable end door of Nora Cronin’s house below on the side of the Mail Road. I was very surprised to see a new house next to it. I asked Nora about it. Pointing to a hill in the east, she told me that an O’Brien woman from over there had recently moved into it. When I turned back in, Eileen was in the room. There was a heavenly light in the room. It came from a loaf of bread, amazingly white and with an amazingly gold crust, on the table. A morsel of it was offered to us. I took it, Eileen didn’t.

Next night I dreamed that I was walking to Moyvane, our village, with my mother. For some reason that I couldn’t figure out, we were walking, not on the road, but in Kissane’s meadow, down the hill towards the little stream that runs under a little bridge, more culvert than bridge, called the Droighedeen. I could see the new church, big and cement grey, in the distance. I looked behind me and Moll Buckley’s house and then Michael Connell’s house were sinking, even as I watched them, they were sinking below the horizon. Finally, even the high smoke from Michael Connell’s house was gone.

I woke up.

No dreams I had ever dreamed had so intrigued me. In no way frightening, they fascinated me into silent wonder that lasted for all of two days, and more.

A few evenings later, in the afternoon, Sarah Guinness came into the garden. Chris, my brother, she told me, was on the phone. He wanted to talk to me.

‘I’ve bad news for you,’ Chris said.

‘Jimmy?’

‘No, Mary, she dropped dead an hour ago.’

It was night when we arrived. One side of the road and the yard were full of cars. The house was full of people.

In the room my father was sitting by the end of the bed. Trying to keep them warm, he had her feet in his hands.

Seeing me come in, his anguish deepening, he came towards me.

‘She came up into this room the morning after you left,’ he said, and she asked, “Why did John hug and hold me the way he did just before he left, Jimmy?”’

At her Funeral Mass two days later I went up to the altar rails to receive.

On the way back down I noticed that Eileen had stayed put.

We were in the cemetery shouldering the coffin down towards the grave. Phyllis my sister was walking just ahead of me. ‘Good God,’ she said, ‘there will be talk on the other side tonight. Do you see who she is being buried beside, Nora Cronin.’

Instantly, I remembered and understood the dreams I’d had.

The hill in the east that Nora had pointed to was Báragogeen, where my mother came from. Her maiden name was Mary O’Brien. Turning back into Nora’s kitchen, I had taken the heavenly bread, Eileen hadn’t.

In the second dream, the smoke from Michael Connell’s chimney the last sight we had of it, I had walked with her below the horizon of this world.

Watching my father looking down into the grave, John Barrett remarked that we might as well stay in our Sunday clothes because we’d have to come back to bury him in a couple of days.

I stayed at home to look after him.

His grief was passionate and outspoken, and having lived for so long in the expectation that he would go first, he was finding it difficult to adjust.

‘Maybe there is a providence in it,’ I suggested. ‘Since praying comes so naturally to you maybe you were left behind to do just that, to pray for her.’

From that moment he had a purpose and he took to it the way he’d take to saving a meadow of hay, he put everything that was in him into it. It was as if he had taken over where I had left off, just under the horizon of the world.

So as to be within nearer reach of him in the night I moved my bed up into the parlour. Anxious on his account, I’d wake every couple of hours and I’d hear him praying. These were dark January nights, and listening to him I’d feel that he had rowed the house out into eternity.

From this distance, the big farmhouse kitchen intervening, I couldn’t hear what his prayer was. Curious one night, I got out of bed and I went to within a couple of feet of his room door. As I anticipated, it wasn’t the Our Father or the Hail Mary. It was in his own words that he was attempting to open and negotiate her way for her.

May Jesus who died on the Cross have no hard feelings against you, Mary.

That from the man who, coming in from the cowstall one night, hung up his quenched lantern saying, ‘I’ve come to dh’end a thinken, John, but I shtill haven’t found dh’answer.’

It was as if the Kena Upanishad had spoken itself in our house:

There goes neither the eye nor speech nor the mind; we know it not; nor do we see how to teach one about it. Different it is from all that is known, and beyond the unknown it also is.

My father quenching his lantern and, during the tremendous nocturnes of Holy Week, an alter christus quenching of the Tenebrae harrow.

Acittava, meaning going beyond mind, is the Mahayana Buddhist word for it.

Wu hsin, meaning going beyond mind, is the Chinese Ch’an or Zen word for it.

The Cloud of Unknowing and the Dark Night of the Soul are Christian mystical words for it.

Having cycled to St Michael’s in Listowel to learn classics there, I had coined the word metanoesis for it, but I’d trade it any day for the farmyard simplicity of my father’s quenched lantern.

It was the Grene Knight who, riding into the hall at Camelot on new year’s day, turned the quest for the Grail into a quest for the quenched lantern.

I well remember how the poet puts it:

For unethe was the noyce not a whyle sessed,

And the fyrst cource in the court kyndely served,

Ther hales in at the halle dor an aghlich mayster …

And we think the Italian Renaissance is of some account, and of course it is; and we think that the publication of The Social Contract is of some account, and of course it is; and we think that the experimental proof of E=mc2 is of some account, and of course it is; but, singly and together, they are small fry compared to that Mandukya moment when

Ther hales in at the halle dor an aghlich mayster

Our journey north to the Grene Chapel is a journey into and through three realizations:

1. The empirical mind is the third eye’s blindspot.

2. There is a rare state of mind that makes the head obsolete.

3. Conscious and unconscious, psyche is the blind not the window.

All three realizations are in the simple sight of him, are in the simple sight of that aghlich mayster riding away, home to the shamanic north, with his quenched head under his arm, demonstrating that there is a wisdom which isn’t of the thinking mind.

The aghlich mayster’s quenched head.

My father’s quenched lantern.

My father’s journey to dh’end a thinken.

Sir Gawain’s journey to dh’end a thinken.

It was there at the Grene Chapel that Sir Gawain was asked to undergo the terrible but liberating transition to metanoesis.

It matters hardly at all that he wasn’t as true to his word or as brave as he might have been. What matters is that in him European humanity rode north, all the way north, till we came within hearing of the wonder breme noyse.

Mystically interpreted, that wonder breme noyse is the Kena mahavakya:

There goes neither the eye nor speech nor the mind …

Mystically interpreted, Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight is a very great Upanishad and he, the Grene Knight, the aghlich mayster, should be as upanishadically famous among us as Yajnavalkya is upanishadically famous among Hindus.

We have a bedtime story for you, Johannes.

We have a bedtime story for you, Blaise.

We have a bedtime story for you, Samuel.

We have a bedtime story for you, Herman.

We have a bedtime story for you, Matthew.

We have a bedtime story for you, Friedrich.

We have a bedtime story for you, Sylvia.

What a great requiem we have

What a great granting of peace we have

We have a coal.

We have the comb.

We have found our way back into commonage consciousness.

We have the farm fork

We have the lantern, lighted and quenched

We have kept our rendezvous at the Grene Chapel

In the Grene Chapel we pray:

May I be as out of your way awake, God, as I am in dreamless sleep.

More simply and more tremendously:

In Christ we have endured and come through the Great Tsetsekia

In Christ we have endured and come through the Great Tenebrae

We have a culture, more, we have a world to bring you home to, Ishmael.

And Ishmael, we remember, is the collective name for

Johannes in horror

Blaise in terror

Herman having shuddering glimpses

Samuel Taylor in dejection

Matthew in recoil

Friedrich fallen silent

Sylvia seeing through the mystical cosmetic

It being in our nature to do so, we pushed off.

In spite of us, our prayer aboard the Pequod became our prayer in the Grene Chapel.

I imagined a less unworthy Sir Gawain submitting to that prayer:

In hope of final favour I am willing to undergo

the darkness of Good Friday, God.

In expectation of your enabling grace I am willing

to undergo it in a rite called Tenebrae.

A Tenebrae of my senses and faculties.

A Tenebrae of chakras opened and closed.

A Tenebrae of what Hindus call the third eye and

of what Christians call the eye of the soul.

A Tenebrae of self-seeking and self-will.

A Tenebrae of self-awareness.

A Tenebrae, however graciously bruising, of the

eclipse that I naturally and spiritually am.

In this Sir Gawain has reimagined the Grene Chapel. In this he has reinstituted a Queste without which we will surely fall away from a proper and creative sense of who we so precipitously are, but so blessedly can be.

In spite of us, a sense of final and glorious possibility keeps breaking through.

In spite of us, our transtorrentem destiny has come upon us.

In spite of us, our

NOSTOS

is upon us. […]

I arrived back in Lodge Park in good time for early spring work in the garden.

In the literal sense of the word, I was working in a paradise, and there was something more than irony of the literary kind in that. I wasn’t cut out for paradise, and I wasn’t just thinking of the old song, give me land, lots of land, don’t fence me in.

In the way that a doctor might say that I was threatened with pneumonia, I was threatened with the Nebuchadnezzar calamity:

The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar, and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagle’s feathers, and his nails like bird’s claws.

Idumea, the threat of it, was never far from my mind:

But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness. They shall call the nobles thereof to the Kingdom, but none shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing. And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons and a court for owls. The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest. There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered, everyone with her mate.

It was Freud’s hope for humanity that where the id is, ego shall be. From day to day, although with weeks, maybe months, of remission, I lived in peril of the opposite, where ego is, the id shall be.

Nebuchadnezzar and Idumea.

Nebuchadnezzar and Narada.

In my case it was Narada who opened the door to the threat of Nebuchadnezzar.

And of one thing I was sure, there was no earthly remedy. Nothing short of heavenly pharmacy would do.

It was by a desperate act of faith that I lived:

I can’t sense you or know you or name you, God. I can’t find you inside me or in the world outside, but however I am, or wherever I am, I am in your blissful safekeeping, God.

In heaven, on Earth or in hell I am in your blissful safekeeping God.

In hell I am in your blissful safekeeping, God.

No, Anna, the beginning and end of all things isn’t feary, but the only evidence I have for this is that I’m not on all fours eating grass like an ox, the only evidence is that my hairs aren’t eagle’s feathers and my hands aren’t bird’s claws.

Let Dame Juliana talk to you, Anna:

Thou shalt not ben overcommen.

Let Fénelon comfort you, Anna:

God felt, God tasted and enjoyed is indeed God, but God with those gifts which flatter the soul. God in darkness in privation, in forsakenness, in insensibility, is so much God, that He is so to speak God bare and alone …

Let Jean Pierre de Caussade comfort you, Anna:

As long as those crucifying operations last, everything – spirit, memory and will – exists in a terrifying void, in sheer nothingness. Let us cherish this mighty void, since God deigns to fill it; let us cherish this nothingness, since God’s infinity is to be discovered in it.

Anna and Sylvia.

Did you know what de Caussade has just said, Sylvia?

cherish the terrifying void

cherish the nothingness.

Can you hear that, Narada?

You have been carried into the nothingness that heals us of nihilism.

Can you hear that, Ahab?

You have harpooned your way into the naught in which God’s infinity is to be found.

Mostly not recognized, wonders have occurred, We have rehabilitated our sense of the Abyss:

St John of the Cross talks about the abyss of faith.

We have rehabilitated our sense of the dark.

St John of the Cross sings

Oh noche, que guiaste,

Oh noche amable mas que el alborada

We have rehabilitated our sense of the naught:

Walter Hilton talks about the rich naught. In itself this triple rehabilitation is an exodus from a metaphysical anxiety that has preyed on us all the way from Enuma Elish to ‘Sheep in Fog’.

And now, refounding our psyche and our culture, we can exchange Excalibur for the farm fork, and Ahab’s harpoon, that we can exchange for a Tenebrae harrow.

Not of course that we will ever need to use the farm fork. The Colorado has already done our digging for us. And, Christ having taken it on, Bright Angel Trail is redemptively integrated, Bright Angel Trail is aisle. So the fork is in sign of Christ’s achievement, the Christ who commanded St Peter to put up his sword.

Narada, Anna, Ahab and Sylvia – Tauler has news for ye:

The great wastes to be found in this divine ground have neither image nor form nor condition, for they are neither here nor there. They are like unto a fathomless Abyss, bottomless and floating in itself. Even as water ebbs and flows, up and down, now sinking into a hollow, so that it looks as if there were no water there, and then again in a little while rushing forth as if it would engulf everything, so does it come to pass in this Abyss. This, truly, is much more God’s Dwelling-place than heaven or man …

Can you credit it, Sylvia?

Starless and fatherless though it is, the dark water is God’s Dwelling-place.

It is the news, it is the Rachel, that Melville might have sent to Ishmael.

News, a Kabbalist would say, of God as En-Sof.

He must know somethin, Anna.

He must know somethin

He don’t say nothin

He just keeps rollin along

into En-Sof, we suppose. […]

And then, out of the blue one morning, Mr Guinness and myself had a big row. It became a battle of wills. I was up against him, but more seriously, I was up against me. In the sense in which Heraclitus had said that character is destiny – in that sense I was up against me.

On the third day, he came into the garden and handed me a letter. No, he wasn’t giving me the sack, but he was determined to have what I was determined to have, victory.

I gathered up the tools, I put them in the barrow, I wheeled it up past him and Patsy, the farm manager, and within an hour I had packed and was gone.

I lodged for three nights with Patsy and Bridie Prendergast in Coolcarrigan. Charlotte Bielenberg located me and insisted that I come and stay with her and Tommy in Caragh House, beyond Prosperous.

Though I didn’t need to, I earned my keep and my dignity by working in the grounds. I put an advertisement in the Irish Times and within a few days I had some replies.

Charlotte drove me around Leinster. We had a great time, a happy time, but the whole thing seemed quite unlikely, she a German countess unable to disguise her style and her class, and me a one-time man of letters who had more recently practised being a standing-stone in a western bog – even to ourselves we were an odd outfit, Bonnie and Clyde coming up the long avenues. And as well as that, I’d sense that in these posh places also I’d be walking on eggs, and I didn’t need anyone to tell me that when I walk on eggs I break them.

No job, no money, no place of my own – now, I thought one night, is the time to do it.

While I was at home looking after my father I had elaborated the groundplan of a new temple and it had occurred to me that I would some day go to the centre of the country and plant it as I would an acorn.

Unsure of itself at the best of times, the idea was a response to the big re-inaugurating dream that had dreamed me into its purposes a couple of years earlier. In it, although not overtly, I take Western civilization by the hand, I lead it out of Marduk’s Street into and along Old Compton Street, into Wardour Street, into eighteenth-century parkland regressing to savannah, all the way back and down, and again down, I lead it, to a swordless second chance with Tiamat, she screaming sacrilegiously in her older than ancient sacrilegious sea.

What I discover is that the hope of her is not in vain.

Later on, seeking to further inherit the dream, this time altruistically, I came to see a double projection. First, reflecting our dreams of it back to us, we project Tehom into Turiya, and then, reflecting our dread of it back to us, we project Tiamat in Tehom.

These, our Mesopotamian projections called home, we can begin again, I thought.

And I had a groundplan, in conception and purpose a wholly unhesitant alternative to Esagila and to all its self-proliferations in an essentially sad succession of realities.

As I imagined it, the new temple would give architectural shape to Christian godwardness, to godwardness become a trail, to godwardness become the Triduum Sacrum Trail, to godwardness that begins Bright Angel Trail, deep not just in but with the Earth.

Unexpectedly, but in trepidation, I was going with the impulse.

I hitched to Coolcarrigan and I talked to Bridie Prendergast about it.

I could see it. As I talked, she very fiercely retreated and occupied the centre of her being and with her eyes she peeled me, leaving me with the feeling that at my core I was little else but the ash she shook from her cigarette.

‘Yes,’ she eventually said, ‘it’s a beautiful idea. Do it. Go and do it.’ […]

And yet it was in the hope of a Christian culture that would promote our further, indeed our final, evolution that I had gone to plant a groundplan, as I’d plant a seed, at the centre.

A sense I had was that I had walked out of those long, injurious cycles of time that stretched from Bit Akitu to the Pequod, from Enuma Elish to ‘Sheep in Fog’.

Like the House of Atreus, Western culture, indeed our Western world and to some extent also therefore our Western psyche, have been founded on what Aeschylus would call a protarchos ate, a primordial, generating act of insanity. And Melville would say, they have ended in such. Long ago, though, Jesus jumped ship, not to save his own skin, but to cross the Kedron and inaugurate the utmost alternative to Bit-Akitu culture. As I imagined it, the new temple would give architectural, ritual and cultural shape to that utmost alternative.

The tremendous import of this becomes evident in something Heidegger says:

The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.

As the inscription would have it, it will bring us into being. But not just that. Hindus talk about sat chit ananda.

Hitching lifts the next day in the intermittently pouring rain, I made it back to Caragh House.

I had done it. Yielding to a big, maybe wayward impulse, I had sown hope for the Earth into the Earth, that stupendous vocation we have so recently seen for the first time from space.

Weeks later I still wasn’t sure that I’d get away with it.

But if, in his mercy, God did make the groundplan to grow, then there might at last be requiem for Kepler in his horror, for Pascal in his terror, for Coleridge in his dejection, for Melville in his shuddering, for Arnold in his recoil, for Nietzsche in his collapse, for Sylvia in peril of the dark water.

The difficult, derelictive requiem, the Triduum Sacrum requiem, that will good-shepherd us into Requiem Eternam.

If the Lord does not build the house, they labour in vain that build it.

If, in his mercy, God were to build the new Triduum Sacrum Temple, then we would surely see an end to our

Year One Reed

Recovering our nerve, we might find it in us to stand to our full moral and spiritual height and this we will do when we acknowledge

that our transtorrentem destiny is upon us

that in us our planet can be an evolutionary success

And so there is one more thing I would like to do. Thinking of nebula and Newton, eohippus and horse, elk and Black Elk, Galapagos and God, I would like to return to the floor of the Grand Canyon and to rename the Earth. And having so recently seen it from space, and with its continuing evolution in mind, I would like, standing there under its strata, to call it

Buddh Gaia

For that, indeed, is what it is. By reason of all who have come to enlightenment in it, it is brighter than optically bright stars, it is brighter than stars still stellar.

mitakuye oyasin