Anam Cara

THE NEGATIVE SIDE

One of the amazing recognitions of Celtic spirituality and wisdom is the sisterhood of nature and the soul. The body is made out of clay. It has the memory of the earth in it, and not just the memory of the earth, but also in some strange, subtle, almost silent way, it has the rhythms of the seasons in it too. G. B. Shaw said that youth is wasted on the young, so springtime is always a season that somehow resembles the energy of youth. Autumntime seems to mirror the gathering and the harvest of old age. One of the amazing lines in the Bible that I really like is a line from the prophet Haggai, who says, “You have sown so much and harvested so little.” I feel that old age and aging is a time of great gathering, a time of sifting and a time of reaping the rewards of forgotten and neglected experience. Contemporary society worships youth: it worships strength; it worships image. It has a whole ideology of externality and it has no refined sense of the subtlety of the soul, the secrecy of the heart. Especially, it has no sensitivity of these interim regions where the great gatherings happen in human life.

Admittedly old age is a very difficult time—and I can’t talk about it from within because I still have a bit of youth left in me!—but it is a time when the body becomes more infirm, when you could be ill, when you could be alone, and it is also a time maybe when you become dependent. When I think of my own future and getting old, one of the things that would really disturb me would be my lack of autonomy and freedom, that I could be dependent on other people to go places, to take me out, to mind me, to get things for me, bring things in to me. I think that we need in our society to be very sensitive to that diminishing of the body’s vigor and passion and possibility and the lack of freedom that goes with that, especially when illness comes in old age. It must be very frightening for a person if you’re trying to forget that death is ahead and you’re trying to live every day as it comes, yet illness comes. Illness is the precursor of death when you’re old, and it frightens you, and small illness knocks a lot more out of you than it would have when you were a young person. So there is that whole tide of negativity that the old have to deal with. When you walk down the street and see an old person walking slowly, you just overtake them and go on. But you wouldn’t notice the achievement of that person looking for what they need, shopping or whatever, and being able to come back home. When an old person goes for a day out and comes back home and recovers from it, it’s almost a celebration.

It reminds me of the great Polish director Kieślowski, who made The Ten Commandments and Three Colors. Always in his films there is a crucial moment in the evolution of the plot when an old man or an old woman, anonymous figures, just pass by and the camera lingers on them. It is like an oracle or an omen of the future of time for these characters, who are in the midst of great passion and trying to work things out.

HARVEST TIME

So there is a negative side to old age, but that has to do with the externality. It has to do with the body, and my understanding of old age and aging is that as the body diminishes, the soul gets richer. In old age, one of the things you have, whatever way you want to construct it, is time. When you have time, your soul begins to decipher things more and more. Camus said that after one day in the world, we could live the rest of our life in solitary confinement, because so much happens to us in one day. If you look at that from the perspective of all of one’s life, there are thousands of years of experience packed into sixty or seventy years of human life, because the amazing thing about the human mind is it is never neutral. The amazing thing about the human soul and the human spirit is it is never in a state of non-experience. There is something going on all the time. Even when you are sleeping. There are rivers of dream-thought flowing through the earth of your body, bringing up all types of mythic, archetypal stuff, some of which belongs to you, a lot of which belongs to the clay and a lot of which belongs to the race. A human being is an endless, epic theater of activity. So in old age, time slows a bit, the outer draw to activity recedes, and you have time for the more contemplative side of things. One enters the contemplative side of one’s own life, and you have a chance then to decipher what has happened to you, to see the hidden depths of experiences that have occurred in your life. You really have a chance to weave a new shelter for yourself. I love the image of the Carthusian monks, the contemplatives, who wear this habit with a cowl on it, and that then is sewn up when they die and becomes the shroud in which they are laid out. I would look at old age in a positive way, as a time of weaving the eternal shroud, the things that you take with you into the eternal world.

I remember one time in Moycullen giving a sermon about how we shouldn’t get waylaid; our journeys shouldn’t get falsified, trying to carry the world on our shoulders, because we can take nothing with us when we die. I was up in the local shop afterwards, and one of the neighbors said to me that he liked the sermon and he said, “Do you know the way we say that around here? You’d never see a trailer after a hearse!” You can take nothing with you but the interior things, which have reached a level of refinement that there is no barrier that they have to pass through. In that sense, aging is the ultimate refinement and ultimate harvest.

Our culture has gone so much into falsity that we don’t acknowledge that at all. It is very interesting, if you look at the anthropology of tribal cultures, that the elders were always the people of wisdom. Nowadays, we put them away in old people’s homes. Sometimes people have to be put into old people’s homes when they can’t be managed, but some of the loneliest places I’ve ever been are old people’s homes. I remember one particular place I used to visit. When you went in, twenty little worn, winnowed faces with hungry eyes would look up at you as if you might be the visitor that they’ve expected maybe for months, or maybe in some cases for years. It used to take me a couple of days to recover from it, because it is so lonesome. It’s lovely to have a friendship with an old person, because you learn so much from them. The Bible says that you should always ask for advice from a wise person. Old age and wisdom usually go together, because when you’ve been through the treadmill of experience you know what counts. You know the chaff from the real grain that brings nourishment. Old people have great wisdom and great light, and when they are not governed by fear there is incredible permission in them. You often get more encouragement in relation to your own wildness and sense of danger and carelessness from an old person than from anyone who is stuck in the middle of a system or a role or the kind of atrophied complacency that often passes for achievement and respectability.

THE GIFT OF MEMORY

Since I was a child, one of the things that always haunted me was the way everything passes away. In relation to death, that is the ultimate transience, when someone you love goes away, falls away out of visibility into the invisibility of death. I often think there is a place where our vanished days gather, and that place is memory. One of the fascinating things about old people is the way that they stay around the well of memory. If you are willing to sit with them, you won’t get analytical sentences from them about was it this or was it that, or could the meaning have been one, two, three. What you will always get is narrative about events from their childhood, which are never straight replications of what happened, but are the bones of the event, enfleshed with image and with anecdote and with narrative. In a strange way, nothing is ever lost or forgotten; everything that befalls us remains within us. There is within you the presence in a refined sense of everything that has ever happened to you, and if you go looking for it you will find it. I always think that in our time, memory has been hijacked by the computer industry, and the more correct term is “recall” rather than “memory.” Memory is a particularly intimate and sacramental human phenomenon and there is a great depth and density to everyone. The image in nature that is really profound in relation to that is the tree; all the rings of memory enfold all the years of growing, blossoming, dying, budding, blossoming, growing, dying, and enfold all the elements of experience. In a similar way, within the clay part of each soul, the rings of memory are there and you can find them.

A lot of the experiences that we have in the world are torn, broken, hard experiences, and in broken, difficult, lonesome experiences you earn a quality of light that is very precious. I often think of it as quarried light. When you come through a phase of pain or isolation or suffering, the light that is given to you at the end of that is a very precious light, and really when you go into something similar again, it is the only kind of light that can mind you. It is the lantern that will bring you through that pain.

One of our difficulties in contemporary culture is this massive amnesia. We forget so much because we are addicted to the moment. If sad, difficult things have happened to you, and you have earned quarried light, again and again you should visit the light, and almost like the light around the tabernacle that signals the presence, you should allow that light to come round you to awaken the presence that is in you, to calm you, to bring you contentment, and as well to bring you courage. When a person is aging, one of the things he really needs is courage.

I love the word “careless.” You know the way people say, “Well, he’s a careless kind of an individual.” In one sense, that can mean that there is no responsibility in him. In its literal sense it can mean that he is care-less, that there are no false burdens of care on him, and that when he comes to the threshold of an experience, he enters it with full availability, full courage and full wildness. It would be lovely in old age, as the body sheds its power, if each of us who would be pilgrims into that time could shed the false gravity and the weight that we carry for a lot of our lives and if we could enter our old age almost like a baby enters childhood, with the same kind of gracefulness, of possibility, and the same kind of innocence, but a second innocence rather than a first one.

POSSIBILITY

There is great wisdom in the mystical tradition and in the Catholic tradition, and the Catholic tradition always recognized that the contemplatives need ritual to make their way through the deserts of solitude. If you sit down in an armchair by the fire and you allow the days, like big empty gray rooms, to come around your head, you will turn and feed on your own negativity. Contemplatives survive because the day is divided into times of praise, prayer, ritual, and in order to survive solitude one needs ritual. There is really no kind of education for getting old. You get old, you begin to lose your power, suddenly you find that you are left with it, you are on your own with it, and no one sees it like you do. There is so much that could be done to make people aware of the possibilities that are in old age. Old age, like illness, is a time when you really need to mind yourself. If you get hooked on some of the down-pulls of gravity in your soul, it can be a time of torture so that you pray for release—to die would be total peace. If you look on it as a time of possibility, amazing things can happen. A good axiom in life is to try to see the possibilities in a situation. Often in a situation, it is the walls we see, it is the door where the key has been thrown away that we see, and we never see the windows of possibilities and the places where thoughts and feelings can grow. In old age there is a lot more time, and freedom comes with that. In old age one can totally reorient one’s life and find fascinating companionship with one’s own soul.

How we view the future actually shapes that future. Time isn’t like space at all. When you think of space, you think of Connemara with the mountains stretching out with no walls at all, and if you look at Clare you see the little fields and the space stretching out towards the mountains and towards the ocean. We falsely think that time is like that too. You walk through the field of today and then you cross over to the field of tomorrow and then to the field of the day after that. But it’s not like that. Time comes towards us unshapen, predominantly, and it is our expectation that shapes the time that is coming. So expectation creates the future. If you bring creative expectation to your future, no matter what difficulty may lie in wait for you, you will be able somehow to transfigure it. Whereas if you bring really negative expectation to your future, you will turn yourself totally into a tower of misery. It is amazing actually, when people are in limit threshold situations, the resources they can call on which they would have never been aware of until it really gets very difficult. Nuair a thagann an crú ar an tairne, as they say in Connemara—when the pressure comes on you. There’s great wisdom in perspective and distance. It is usually when we are myopic and close up to a thing and we can’t see its contour at all, that it totally imprisons and controls us. Whereas sometimes when you step back, you get another view, and you pick up a way of relating to the event or the situation which frees you predominantly.

One of the most beautiful films I have ever seen is a film by the Japanese director Kurosawa. It’s called Dersu Uzala, and it is told about a platoon of Russian soldiers who go in to map an area of Outer Mongolia. The leader of the troop is a very elegant, dignified, intellectual man, and he comes across an old Mongolian man who is very wise. An amazing friendship builds between the two men, which is a classical theme in literature—the mentor and the disciple—and they get very close. The young man is learning so much from the older man and they deepen this amazing spiritual friendship, but what the young man doesn’t realize is that his passion, his sense of life, his curiosity are enabling the old man to prepare for his dying. There is one famous moment in the film when the old man suddenly sees a tiger, and it is a moment of pure dark epiphany. You know in that moment that he knows he is going to die, and the rest of the film just fills out the moment. It is an amazing film about a way of ritualizing one’s leave-taking of the world—with dignity, with courage, with great peacefulness, and as well with a sense of what you are actually leaving behind to those that you love.

TEMPERAMENT, NOT TIME

There is a story that my brother told me about a pub near us at home. You would never get a lift going to the pub if you wanted to get there. You would go to a little village in order to get back. He was driving home one evening and he was passing this man who was going in the direction he was driving in, so he said, “Will you sit in, John?” and John said, “No. Even though I’m walking this way, I’m going the other way!” It is a good metaphor for the false direction that masquerades as power and as achievement in contemporary culture. A lot of that is misdirected, and we need to steady ourselves and have a look at where we actually are. I really believe that age depends on temperament, rather than on time. I know people who at twenty-six and twenty-seven with the gravity that is around them, the seriousness, the lack of any little bit of spring or wildness in them are really about ninety! I know people of seventy, eighty and even eighty-five years who have the minds of seventeen-year-olds! They never managed to get old at all! For some strange reason, the passionate heart never ages, and if you keep your eros and your passion alive, then in some subtle, inevitable way, you are already in the eternal world. Several years ago I wrote a poem called “Cottage.” It is about time and the fact that we don’t recognize the days that we have; and part of the lack of integration in our lives is that we feel they don’t recognize us either—

Cottage

I sit, alert

behind the small window

of my mind and watch

the days pass,

strangers,

who have no reason

to look in.

From Echoes of Memory

LONELINESS

I think that it is impossible for a human to be lonely. I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but the example I would give is when I left Connemara and lived in Germany for four and a half years. I was a bit shocked at first because I knew Connemara very well and I was very close to the humans there, and suddenly when I was in Germany in an apartment on my own, it was utterly solitary. If you want to get away from humans, and you want to be really on your own, Germany is a great place to go! The people don’t bother you at all—if they want to come and visit you they will ring you up beforehand. What struck me was the dual nature of the mind, the inner companionship of yourself. When you say “Hello” to someone, you are breaking in to a conversation they are always having with themselves. So we are always actually in permanent dialogue with ourselves, and therefore solitude is a very rich time. It is the purification of that dialogue. I think what happens in loneliness is that we panic; we somehow see ourselves as isolated and distant from others, and then we really feel abandoned. And there are a lot of people very lonely because they are literally abandoned. Nobody cares about them. There are a lot of other people in relationships, in connection, who are cared for and loved, and they still feel lonely. That is their own responsibility. They feel self-pity, or they feel obsessed with themselves, whereas if they let the rhythm of their solitude run and trusted it, they would be grand. I have learned myself painfully that you can only relate to someone if you somehow have the courage and the need to inhabit your own solitude. You can only relate out of your separateness, otherwise you are just using the other person to shield you from your own solitude. Old age puts you right into confrontation with that possibility, opens it up to you and calls on you to trust and to honor the eternal thing that maybe has been sleeping within you.

LIBERATION

Old age is a time of great freedom. One of the things that militates against freedom for most humans is the weight of responsibility—all they have to do, and their constant obsession with the current project and with the project of life. If there are people depending on you, you have made your responsibilities and you are on the go all the time. You have a whole barrage of expectations coming towards you. You are part of a system or a network which is coming towards you as well, and you have so little space and so little free time for who you really are, for what you would really love to do, for what really deeply concerns you. That is why an awful lot of people in contemporary culture postpone their real lives until they retire.

They work like hell to get everything worked out and everything achieved, and then they believe that when they have that done, they will have time to enjoy. Some of them do actually achieve it. But sometimes if you get into that habit too deeply, you become what you do, and even when you have the time, you are not actually able to enjoy it. Ideally, old age can be a time of great liberation and freedom. It is a time when a lot of the social mystification and mythology calms down, and you return to the essence of things. I think it is not accidental that the body is pared down in old age, because it is part of the creative process. If you are writing a poem, you might have fifty versions of the poem, and might ultimately end up with six or seven lines after maybe having written sixteen hundred lines. The distilled essence comes out. I think in old age, with the paring down of the body, the paring down of social connection and the paring down of mobility, there is a chance for the distilled essence to actually show itself. You often glimpse that distillation in the faces or the eyes of old people. To put it another way, old age is a time of theater. Very often the old body is the ultimate actor’s disguise, and inside that old body is pure distilled essence, and it is a gracious, sacramental moment when you meet it. Patrick Kavanagh has said that we were taught to prepare for life rather than to live it.

That is maybe the primary intention of all holiness, spirituality and love—to free us for our lives. Gabriel García Márquez said somewhere that to live is an art, and no sooner have we begun to learn it than it is already time for us to be departing. There are people now at this moment confronted with their leave-taking. They will be going out of the world in an hour, in a week or whatever, and would give anything to have another week or a month or a year, and they won’t have it. And here are we, even if we are old, we still have time, and time is always full of possibility. It would really be a great gift that an old person could give to themselves, the gift of recognizing the possibilities that are in that time, and to use their imagination. The imagination is the gateway to a full life, and people who awaken their imagination come in to a force field of possibility and there are doors opening everywhere. I think it is unknown what you can do if you begin to see it. But so often, we allow the image that other people have of us to stop us from entering our lives and we become literally what they want. I think in old age you are gone beyond that! You have wild permission! Old people could become very subversive and very fascinating if they actually claimed the possibilities that they had and if they talked out a bit more, said what they feel and didn’t stand back and let the so-called young people, the yuppies and the entrepreneurs, run the whole show. Old people have far more fascinating things to say than an awful lot of what passes for wisdom in contemporary culture. It would be lovely to hear them speak.

One of the most amazing poets of the twentieth century is Czesław Miłosz, and he has a beautiful poem on old age called “A New Province.” There is a lovely line from another poet, Derek Walcott, where he says, “Feast on your life.” There is nothing more beautiful that can be put on the table of your mind than the feast of your own life. To put it another way altogether and to use a Catholic metaphor: every person’s life is a Eucharist, an individual Eucharist, and you are the priestess or the priest who makes the sacrament of your own life happen, and so we should get dangerously into celebrating.

There is also a poem from Octavio Paz that I love. It is one of the poems in his amazing collection Eagle or Sun? and it is about old age as a time of liberation from all the falsities that you burdened yourself with:

With great difficulty, advancing by millimeters

each year,

I carve a road out of the rock.

For millennia my teeth have wasted and my

nails broken

to get there, to the other side,

to the light and the open air.

And now that my hands bleed and my teeth

tremble,

unsure, in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust,

I pause and contemplate my work:

I have spent the second part of my life

breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing

the doors,

removing the obstacles I placed between the

light and myself

in the first part of my life.

For Old Age

May the light of your soul mind you.

May all your worry and anxiousness about your age

Be transfigured.

May you be given wisdom for the eyes of your soul

To see this as a time of gracious harvesting.

May you have the passion to heal what has hurt you,

And allow it to come closer and become one with you.

May you have great dignity,

And a sense of how free you are,

Above all, may you be given the wonderful gift

Of meeting the eternal light that is within you.

May you be blessed;

And may you find a wonderful love

In your self for your self.

From To Bless the Space Between Us