A relatively uncelebrated Irish writer died on 1st June 2007 whose books have slowly been gaining recognition around the world as uniquely important. His name is John Moriarty and he was born and died in County Kerry, Ireland. After attaining a degree in philosophy in University College Dublin he worked in various countries, including a stint as professor of English in Canada, but also periods elsewhere as a manual labourer and he even found himself homeless for a short time in London. His intimate relationship with nature and open-eyed receptiveness to the sustaining powers of spirituality features regularly in his accounts. All these elements of his life were integrated into his writing and independent lecturing in later years.
Writer and reviewer Brian Lynch claims of Moriarty’s book
Dreamtime that he “takes on almost every one of the world’s religions and many of its mythologies, particularly Ireland’s in an attempt to embody a way to live in our time”.
However it is
Nostos, his magnum opus of almost 700 pages hardback which was published in 2001, for which he will primarily be remembered. Reading it is intermittently like walking in the good company of a gentle giant, and sitting by a fireside with an omniscient archetypal storyteller. The communication is gifted as a series of experiences; an encounter with something like modern saintedness. It is very special indeed, scintillatingly erudite and difficult to compare to anything else. Critic Aidan Carl Matthews spared no praise in announcing this autobiographical tome to be 'the greatest Irish book since
Ulysses' . He added that it “tells the story of his own life and the life of all those stories which our species has been sharing since the first annals of the primal savannah”.
Poet John F. Deane effuses that, “the patient reader of this book will warm to a generous spirit, to a mind and body devoted to healing the ills of the present by pointing to the past. The dull and dulling events of the life of a man intent on understanding are brought alive in this huge achievement in such a way that will move you with a belief that humanity has a meaning and relevance that can yet beautify our egotistical and polluted world.”
Nostos is the Greek word for homecoming, an appellation tagged in ancient times on epic travellers such as Odysseus. In the contemporary context it means something rather different. We have lost our contact with the earth and with the old stories and myths that we used to inhabit. Moriarty’s concern is the modern dilemma of the human race: how it acts like a refugee from the living earth; not knowing how to connect healthily with it anymore, but who must now look for a way back, a way to assimilate the parts of ourselves and come home to our ecologically grounded common destiny.
Nostos parallels the thoroughly soul-sick straying of the author, his missing the mark of the meaning of life, with the gradual stranding of other tribes such as the Aztecs after Cortez landed. Exploring places as disparate as Periclean Athens and Blackfoot Dancing Ground, neolithic North Kerry and London, Manitoba and Mexico, Kwakiutl coast and Connemara, the author strives against the odds of a myriad of doubts and despondencies to arrive at a form of sanctuary and embrace of what is at the core of the horrifying but glorious reality of our world. Nostos throws down the gauntlet to us, to admit that, and to act as if, we are
Homo sapiens sapiens.
As a Christian himself at heart, Moriarty regretted that “Christians, as Christians, had refused to embark on the modern voyage”,…as if, losing “confidence in Christ, and fearing for his safety, had confined him within the homely horizons of the Ptolemaic world.” The old ways and convictions that previously carried our mass consciousness through existential terrors just don’t cut the mustard anymore.
“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”.
He is not alone in this view. Numerous books have been released in the past few years, such as
Collapse by Jarred Diamond, which, backed by an impressive accumulation of hard evidence, allege that the Western way of life is hastening for itself the type of abrupt ruin that led to the disappearance of past societies such as the Mayans.
Examining the Bible and the revered narratives, old and new, of various cultures worldwide, Moriarty concludes: “…that does not explain
L’homme Machine looking up at
Mécanique Celeste. Having him in view, we might have to settle for a terrible truth: as is science, so is myth in arrears, in explanatory arrears, of who we are.”
“In a dreadful sense, our nostos is a
nekuia. It is an endless, aimless wandering in an Absence”
However, he does not shrink from the quest for solutions to this crisis.
“Recovering our nerve, we might find it is 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”.
He cautioned about vertigo though; that in pursuing the heights of progress in our re-colonising ourselves, without an equivalent downward depth expansion, we would topple over. He probed our capacity to evolve, wondering, “could our psychic sutures open to the point that we could safely take in any new truth about human inwardness or stellar outwardness that came our way?” He warned that “Europe’s recent horrors could be traced to the fact that we had chosen to live by Descartes’ over-clear and over-conscious ‘cogito’ rather than by Leonardo’s ‘
chioroscuro’”. Intelligence, depending on its quality, could be as much of an eclipse as an aid on the way, he chided.
He provides wonderful imaginary scenes almost as parables of alternative adaptive behaviours.
“One day, looking inwards into the origins of his own psychosexual trouble, the Fisher King will suddenly realise, in dread and alarm he will realise, that the
whyght samyte has fallen from his eyes and now, no way out, he will come to know what he always somehow knew, that it isn’t from impotence but from wounding potency that he suffers….at that moment…the spear will fall out of male sexuality…That, when it happens, will be real evolution.”
There is value in the aesthetic in so far as the perspective of the witness can really see. Contemplating in Chartres Cathedral, he muses, “Also, there is in this rose window an instruction for those physicists who sleep-walkingly assume that to know things in their causes is to know them as they inwardly and essentially are”.
Lucidly leaning on his wealth of learning and his keen observations, Moriarty retrieves outdated modes of comprehending the world and burnishes them so that they take on a modern and urgent sensibility.
In this very personal account of his life, the people he meets and those he loves, and in making transparent his profound thinking, his often hermit-like turmoil to grapple with what is of value to us, what can sustain us, individually and as a race, he excavates the beauty and purpose of our ancestors’ beliefs, and suggests how we can reconcile who we were with who we are as we face the dilemmas of our age.
'Clear days bring the mountains down to my door-step, calm nights give the rivers their say, the wind puts its hand to my shoulder some evenings, and then I don't think, I just leave what I'm doing and I go the soul's way.'
His final book, “
What the Curlew Said”, has been published posthumously.
For further information, goto:
http://www.johnmoriarty.net/-
goinghome
