‘T
EANNALACH
’
A FRIEND OF MINE WHO OWNS AN ART GALLERY TOLD ME THIS story. There was an exhibition in the gallery and a poet of no small renown had come in to view it. Just when he was finished a farmer arrived. This farmer came to the gallery about once a year. He lived on the shores of Loch Corrib. The gallery owner had great interest in and respect for him and so he introduced him to the poet. The poet then revisited the exhibition with the farmer, pointing out all the intricacies and hidden symbolism of the exhibition. The farmer listened carefully but said nothing. When they were finished, the farmer said to the poet: ‘Thank you very much. That was really interesting. You showed me in those paintings things I would never have noticed myself. You have a wonderful eye; it is a great gift and I envy you your gift. I don’t have that gift myself but I do have Teannalach.’ The poet thanked him but was mystified as to what Teannalach was. The farmer said: ‘I live beside the lake and you always hear the ripple of the waters and the sound of wind on the water; everyone hears that. However, on certain summer days when the lake is absolutely still and everything is silent, I can hear how the elements and the surface of the lake make a magic music together.’ So the story rested until one day a neighbour of the farmer was in the gallery. The owner told him the story and asked him what Teannalach was. The neighbour paused for a while and smiled: ‘They have that word all right up there where he lives. I have never seen the word written down. And it is hard to say what it means. I suppose it means awareness, but in truth it is about seven layers deeper than awareness.’
I love that story for its imaginative richness and its gentle art of displacement. The farmer disclosed his gift, a capacity for profound attention that could pierce the silence and hear the unheard music of the lake. That ‘Teannalach’ is a distinctive and unique local word testifies to a certain tradition of such listening. What kind of echoes might the word hold? Could it be an abbreviation of teanga na locha, the tongue or the language of the lake? Or could it be an tsean loch, the ancient lake – perhaps the lake beneath the lake? The story also underlines the hiddenness of beauty, a beauty that dwells between the worlds which cannot be reached with known language or bare senses. It only reveals itself when the mind’s attention is radical and the imagination is finely tuned.
T
HE
C
ELTIC
I
MAGINATION:
E
XPERIENCE AND THE
‘W
EB OF
B
ETWEENNESS
’
Thus beauty was revealed to man as an occurrence on the boundary.
HERMANN BROCH
BECAUSE WE TEND TO SEE OUR EXPERIENCE AS A PRODUCT, WE have lost the ability to be surprised by experience, the sense of the mind as a theatre where interesting sequences of complex drama are played. Whether we like it or not, the depths in us are always throwing up treasure. For the awakened imagination there is no such thing as inner poverty. It is interesting how contemporary English has the phrase: ‘to have an experience’, with the suggestion of possession, property and ownership. In the folk culture of the Celtic Imagination, experience was not a thing to be produced or to be owned. For the Celtic Imagination the focus was more on the experience as participation in something more ultimate than one’s needs, projection or ego: it was the sacred arena in which the individual entered into contact with the eternal. Experience in this sense was an event of revelation. In such a world, experience was always lit by spirit; the mind was not a closed compartment ‘processing’ its own private impressions, the mind always had at least one window facing the eternal. Through this window wonder and beauty could shine in on a life and illuminate the quiet corners where mystery might be glimpsed. A person’s nature was revealed in experience; it was also the place where gifts arrived from the divine. Naturally, experience was one’s own and not the experiences of someone else. However, it was understood as being much more than the private product and property of an individual. Expressed in another way, there was a sense that the individual life was deeply woven into the lives of others and the life of nature. The individual was not an isolated labourer desperately striving to garner a quota of significance from the world.
In the intuitive world-view of the Celtic Imagination, the web of belonging still continued to hold a person, especially when times were bleak. In Catholic theology, there is a teaching reminiscent of this. It has to do with the validity and wholesomeness of the sacraments. In a case where the minister of the sacrament is unworthy, the sacrament still continues to be real and effective because the community of believers supplies the deficit. It is called the ex-opere-operato principle. From the adjacent abundance of grace, the Church fills out what is absent in the unworthiness of the celebrant. Within the embrace of folk culture, the web of belonging supplied similar secret psychic and spiritual shelter to the individual. This is one of the deepest poverties in our times. That whole web of ‘betweenness’ seems to be unravelling. It is rarely acknowledged any more, but that does not mean that it has ceased to exist. The ‘web of betweenness’ is still there but in order to become a presence again, it needs to be invoked. As in the rainforest, a dazzling diversity of life-forms complement and sustain each other; there is secret oxygen with which we unknowingly sustain one another. True community is not produced; it is invoked and awakened. True community is an ideal where the full identities of awakened and realized individuals challenge and complement each other. In this sense both individuality and originality enrich self and others.
T
HE
W
ORLD
B
ETWEEN
THE HUMAN EYE ALWAYS SEES TWICE IN THE ONE LOOK: THE THING and the emptiness. This difference is registered by the eye and conveyed to the mind. Because the eye discovers and guarantees the world, it has little difficulty schooling the mind in the habit of separation. The instinct of the eye is not to trust sequence. The eye prefers to insist on the loneliness of the object. No object intensifies the neighbouring emptiness like the human body. The eye underlines this separation. Because the mind knows the passion and difference of the interior world locked inside the body, it easily comes to believe the individual is an island. The conviction that each individual is separate and utterly alone makes us blind to that subtle world that dwells between things.
Because the eye loves to hit its glimpse at the centre of a thing, it has no radar to pick up this in-between world. Though it may not be seen directly, the eye of the imagination will often be drawn to the edges of things where the visible and invisible worlds coalesce. There is a subtle and unknown intimacy around each of us which is usually more evident in our homes. The things we have, the clothes, furniture, paintings, music, books, rooms, all are infused with us. In truth, there is no distance between us and the things we live among. This nearness is intensified a thousand times when it comes to the people close to us.
There is no map for this invisible territory, yet sometimes its force completely engages your heart. The atmosphere between you and a friend takes on a life of its own; though both of you influence its rhythm and shapes, neither of you ultimately controls it. Indeed, it is fascinating how much we can awaken in each other. There are some people in your life with whom you felt a wonderful affinity the moment you met them. The more they told you, the more you felt as if they were talking from a common world you had somehow secretly shared before you ever came to know each other. Within the newly discovered affinity, so much can be assumed and intuited. Nothing needs to be said, tested or proved. You sense each other’s spirit and in some inexplicable way, you do know each other. Trust is not a question; you settled into an embrace of belonging that seemed to have always held you. Sometimes this interim world – this invisible territory – knows more than we do, even things we have yet to discover as we continue to imagine who we are.