Simon Mapp revisits Dreamtime by John Moriarty.
Simon Mapp revisits Dreamtime by John Moriarty.
As William Blake writes: ‘Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; ’Tis fourfold in my supreme delight, And threefold in soft Beulah’s night, And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s Sleep.’ 3 John Moriarty was born in Kerry in 1938 and educated at University College Dublin, taught the History of European Ideas at the University of Manitoba in Canada for six years before returning to Ireland in his thirties, where he lived a simple life of gardening, writing and wondering. His first book was named Dreamtime. It is an extraordinary weaving of myths, theology and spirituality – a reimaging of Christianity for the modern world, offered by realigning ourselves back to the Earth.
Science has yet to catch up with Christianity, for man has walked on the moon but so far failed to walk beautifully upon the Earth.
Moriarty’s deepest need in relation to people and society was not to be fenced in. His second need was to explain that, in his view, mythology and poetry should play an equal role in today’s search for meaning. This, John felt, is where western culture can begin to heal itself. To ask if John Moriarty was a philosopher or a mystic is a fair question and maybe he’s a mixture of both, for Moriarty engages in philo-mythology. His words are imaginatively pluralistic, while he is also a man of both wisdom and deep Christian faith. ‘And yes, there are days in Connemara when speechlessness isn’t a choice. You look up from your work, out over a lake to the mountains, and as well as losing your grip on your spade you lose your grip on yourself and on your world. And for as long as it lasts what a wonder it is, having no grip, either with your hands or with your mind, on anything. Having no sense of yourself that you want to hold on to… Having neither a past nor a future that you want to hold on to.’ 4 Central to Moriarty’s thinking is when he talks of being ‘doctrinally poor’. To live a life of faith beyond the doctrines of religion is to live a faith which is more profound. It is an emptying of ourselves, a kenosis – a theme also found in the writings of Kierkegaard.
John Moriarty talks rather beautifully in One Evening in Eden (a collection of recorded public talks) that to have a rock-like faith is arguably to have no faith at all, for you only have a true faith when you don’t know, when you enter the darkness, when you don’t set limits of the numinous deep and you cross over, go beyond, the doctrinal dogmatic boundaries.
The only question Moriarty says we should ask of ourselves is this: Are you still growing, are you still living dangerously? Are you vulnerable to further experiences? Or, do you only rest your head on questions of which you already know the answers? ‘God’s absence or our experience of his absence is now in a most marvellous way a mode of God’s presence. Although God has disappeared as object of awareness, he nonetheless abides as Ground, as Divine Ground, of our being. But until, beyond all empirical means and modes of apprehension, we apprehend this, we are derelict. Everything that could walk out on Christ walked out on him. It might even be that his sufferings walked out on him. For where there are sufferings there is something to hold on to.’ 5 Johannes Tauler (German preacher and mystic) was to write ‘Everything depends on a fathomless sinking in a fathomless nothingness.’ But as John writes in Dreamtime (p.30), this ‘nothingness’ is not a ‘negative emptiness, it’s an infinitely rich emptiness. And it ever and forever heals us of nihil, of nihilism.’ John’s continuation to heal both himself and the West is also to criticise the condition in which it/we only consider an answer satisfactory if it fits comfortably within the framework of our own presuppositions. This is as relevant to the discipline of the sciences as to the theo-philosophers when any discipline is reduced to a precept.
Moriarty tells of the time when on one of his daily walks, seeing a hare leap before him, in an instant he fell to the ground and buried his head into the hare’s form and asked that his European education be taken from him. The insecurity of laying our heads in the hare’s form is to go beyond human awareness into faith – into a Divine-deep outside limits. The West’s E=MC2 education has become, according to Moriarty, a thermometer able to tell the temperature of the water but unable to tell if the water is still or a torrent. This reminds me of Wittgenstein in his Tractatus (6.52): ‘We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are no questions left, and this itself is the answer.’ Moriarty found himself out of step studying philosophy as a postgraduate in Leeds.
He felt that the works of Ayer, Hume and Wittgenstein were no match for the works of Mabinogion (Medieval Welsh folktales of Celtic mythology) and soon moved from philosophy into literature, which he found liberating. ‘In a dream sent to us from within the atom itself, we unstitch its ultimate particle, then we will find what Pascal’s housekeeper found when she unstitched the lining of his waistcoat.
We will find a memorial of its night of fire’. (Dreamtime) Although he did not wish to undermine their valuable contribution, he found science and philosophy were not the liberating discipline some might claim; we need the mythos as well as the logos.: ‘To Plato I say, A Birdreign not a Republic… For a Christian the road to Birdreign begins where it began for Jesus, at the end, below, of Bright Angel Trail.’ (Curlew, p.314.) Birdreign from Irish mythology is Conaire Caomh, the king’s reign where his supernatural father appeared as a bird and took off his bird form to lie with his mother the queen in human form.
Bright Angel Trail is one of the trails that lead down into the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
When the water is a torrent, when the clouds are diluvian and the waves rise, we enter the dereliction and it is here that Moriarty sees as the place where one is closest to God, the Tenebrae – the darkness and the passion; the nothingness or no-thing-ness.
This is what Moriarty calls humanity’s ‘Transtorrentem Destiny’, the evolutionary event many know as Gethsemane. John 18:1: ‘And Jesus went forth with his disciples over a torrent called the Kedron.’ And this small torrent was ‘Colorado-river deep’. John Moriarty offers a unique way of looking at the Gethsemane experience. He asks: ‘Have we Christians closed our account prematurely with what crossing the Kedron might mean?’ (Curlew, p.46) The West defines itself by the maths, but for Moriarty this is wrong for the myth should be our mother tongue: myth opens us up to what it is to be fully human. Re-enchantment comes from our reading of the ancient Celtic, Native American, Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, Indian (and many more) myths and legends; texts should be spiritual exercises, ‘formative not informative’.
One should strive to be in conflict with one’s holy books and to see afresh the sight and wonder of the world: ‘Every bush is a burning bush, Every river is a medicine river, Every stone is a-stone-ishment, Turned inwards on its rose window wonders.’ (Dreamtime) NOTES 1. Published by Lilliput Press (Dublin 1994). 2. John Moriarty, Nostos: An Autobiography (Lilliput Press, 2001). 3. William Blake, Letter to Thomas Butts, 22nd November 1802. 4. What the Curlew Said, (Lilliput Press 2007) p.10. 5. Dreamtime p. 29.
Simon Mapp works as a funeral Chaplain across the Midlands and is active in the Methodist Church.