John Moriarty is one of Ireland’s most important thinkers whose work speaks poetically and powerfully to many of the critical personal, cultural and global crises we are facing. Moriarty is a shaman, a wounded healer, whose patient is, as O’Donoghue tells us, Western culture itself. His diagnosis is that we have developed a pathological and dangerous way of seeing our world and ourselves. This way of seeing is so endemic that we are not even aware of it, yet it shapes our values and the choices we make everyday. Moriarty’s prescription is radical: nothing less than a new way of seeing, one that views everything within and without as ‘enfranchised’ and that views ourselves as intimately and dynamically contiguous with our world. To come into this way of seeing requires a change in direction that can seem daunting, even overwhelming. Moriarty, however, does not just set up the challenge nor present us with a set of abstract ideas for us to do with what we can. His ideas, stories, poetry and biographical material are offered as a vibrant weave in which we are invited to participate. To read Moriarty is to make a shamanic journey with him and, in the process, to be initiated into that other way of seeing and of being in the world.
I have had a number of encounters with John Moriarty, although, sadly, never in person. They began in 1994, the year his first book, Dreamtime, was published. I bought it, excited by its title as at the time I was researching stories of Aboriginal Australian dreamtime. I recall standing on the pavement outside Hodges Figgis bookshop in Dublin, holding the book in my hands, mesmerized by the image on the cover of a man with a face fissured like Burren limestone, an intense, dark, haunted gaze, and a crazy mane of hair, leaning on a shovel. I was so frightened by that look that I put the book on a bookshelf and did not read it until many years later. In 2007 I bought What the Curlew Said, published shortly after his death. Once again I recall being entranced by the image of Moriarty on the front: that same mane of hair, wild and woolly as ever, elbow resting on a giant lichen-covered rock, forest and mountains behind him. Now, however, something in his look was different. There was a certain surrender, and a softness, and a deep sadness: the look, to borrow D.H. Lawrence’s words, of ‘a man who has come through’, or, in his own words, of one ‘who has allowed nature happen to him’. This time I read, or, more accurately, consumed the book, cover to cover, and many times over, and it became a gateway back into John’s other work, which has inspired, challenged and delighted me, and continues to do so.
A place I feel I meet John Moriarty deeply is in a shared love of ‘The Red Road’, of Native American Indian wisdom and stories, and through a sense of how these can lead us to once again ‘walk beautifully on the Earth’.1 He says, ‘When I came back from Canada to Connemara it wasn’t Aristotle or Plato or it wasn’t any of the European philosophies or psychologies that helped me to stand again on the Earth below in Connemara … it wasn’t Descartes, and it wasn’t even Shakespeare … it was some old, aboriginal stories, it was some old, Native American Indian stories that took me by the hand and took me back to the Earth.’2
Since living here in California I have been fortunate to become part of a Tiospaye, or Native American Indian fire circle, which gathers regularly for ceremony. I have often thought of Moriarty as Wolf, the water pourer, welcomes ‘the grandfathers’, ‘the oldest beings on the planet’, ‘the stone people’, into the lodge; as he tells us that just as these now reddened stones have returned in the fire to their original state, so too they will now restore us to our original state. I have felt close to him as I have fasted on my ‘altar’, my vision-quest site on the hillside, as I lay on the earth and looked up into the night and cried for a vision. I have remembered his redefinition of the heroic: ‘A hero like Cuchulainn isn’t what we need. We need another kind of hero altogether … A hero now isn’t someone who goes out and fights the sea. A hero now isn’t the person who comes home with the greatest number of enemy heads on his chariot. The hero now isn’t someone who wields a sword – it’s someone who puts down his sword and lets nature happen to him.’3 I have taken heart in his words that, ‘the best way to experience grace is to surrender to gravity’,4 and when he writes,
‘It is a small step for me,’ he said.
‘It is a small step for me but a giant step for humanity.’
Altogether more significant is a journey to
The Earth.5
Because of John Moriarty I made a journey last summer with my three daughters to the Grand Canyon, where we descended on Bright Angel Trail to the Colorado River. The impact he has had on me is why, after more than thirty years in medicine, I am trying to redirect my work to best act in service of the Earth. Moriarty, as Bright Angel, has deepened my delight in being alive and brought me closer to the world.
In his opening words Brendan O’Donoghue offers a metaphor for his hopes for this Reader: that it may serve as a pathway into the dense forest of Moriarty’s writings. Moriarty’s writings are challenging, and yes, dense, and, at times, seem to move in repetitive and circular currents. What some find challenging in his writing, however, is not, I believe, so much the complexity of his ideas as his way of communicating them, which is, ironically, when one persists, the very thing that makes his work so rich and deeply rewarding.
Moriarty is a mystic, a philosopher–poet, and a seanachi, a master storyteller in the oral tradition. We need all our faculties to read Moriarty and especially our intuition and poetic sensitivity. Perhaps we also need not to try too hard. In the words of the old Irish proverb, which I hear in the music of Moriarty’s voice, ‘Éist le tuile na habhann agus gheobhaidh tú breac’ (Listen to the flow of the river and you will catch a trout).6 But we also need a guide, which is where O’Donoghue comes to our aid. This Reader does indeed provide a luminous pathway into the wild landscapes of Moriarty’s writing. It does this in a way that is both intellectually rigorous and infused with deep affection and respect for Moriarty and his work.
I, for one, am deeply touched and grateful for this Reader; for myself, yes, but also for Mitakuye Oyasin, ‘for all our relations’.
NOTES
1. John Moriarty, One Evening in Eden (Kerry: Slí na Fírinne Productions, 2007).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. John Moriarty, What the Curlew Said: Nostos Continued (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2007), p. 376.
6. Carmel Fitzgerald, The Weather is a Good Storyteller (Dublin: Ashfield Press, 2004), p. 92.