A Poet’s Passing

Today, at 11.30 a.m., in a beautiful church in a suburb of Dublin, the funeral Mass of one of our most dearly beloved citizens will take place. Later this evening, he will be brought for burial to his birthplace, far in the north of my small country – a town in Derry, called Bellaghy.

He is Seamus Heaney, and I can hardly believe we’ve lost him.

Image: theguardian.com

I think I am among good company when I say that my first real introduction to the power of poetry came at school, when we studied Heaney’s ‘Mid-Term Break’. This poem, taken from his first collection Death of A Naturalist (1966), made a massive impression on me, and I think it’s fair to say on most of my peers, too. Telling the true story of the death of a young child from the point of view of his older sibling, it is a slender piece of writing, one that slips between you and your soul and twists, slightly, revealing to you your own fragility. I wept the first time I read it, and even though a great many years have passed since then, the poem’s power is undimmed.

This gentle evisceration was what made Heaney’s work so powerful, to me. His poems looked so delicate on the page, strung together like lacework, but the reading of them went straight to the heart. The images he could create would sometimes take a line or two to fully develop inside your mind – you’d have read past the hook of a particular stanza before the impact would hit you – and then you’d have to re-read, awed by the newness, almost frightened by the sense of unfolding inside your own head. Heaney understood people, and he understood thought, and he understood emotion. He wove his poetry out of all these things, and he added the uniqueness of his own intellect, too. His work is unlike that of any other writer.

There are few poets whose work I love. Poetry very rarely speaks to me: I am a harsh and demanding reader of that particular genre. So much of it seems contrived, or fake, or ‘for the sake of it’, that when I read a poem which rings a bell inside me, I know I’ve found a treasure. Emily Dickinson’s work does this for me, as does Sylvia Plath’s, and I also love the work of Medbh McGuckian and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Seamus Heaney, however, was always top of the pile. His work shaped my introduction to great literature as a child at school, and his work helped to forge me as a medievalist, much later in life, through his translation (or, perhaps more accurately, ‘modernisation’) of the Old English epic poem ‘Beowulf.’ His version of this poem still stands as one of my most dearly loved pieces of writing, despite the issues it has from the point of view of accuracy. In a way, it doesn’t even matter that Heaney doesn’t keep to the exact sense of the Old English, and that he brings in words that are not there in the original, and that he is, or was, not a scholar of Old English. Perhaps one might even say ‘that is the point.’ Heaney brought life to this ancient poem. He woke the sword’s song, and he mapped out the whale-road, and he showed us the battle-lightning. He breathed humanity into Grendel. He made a powerful political statement through his word choices. He made the poem relevant to his own age, and that is worth more, to me, than dryly sticking to the exact sense of the Old English. There are those who hate Heaney’s ‘Beowulf’, and there are those who love it. I love it.

On Friday, when the news of Heaney’s death broke, I sat at my computer and wept. I read the news articles over and over, hoping that it would all be a mistake; I read the words of those who loved him, who knew him, and realised that while I did not know him, I loved him. I think our whole country did. The six o’clock news broadcast on the day of his death was extended in order for us to start coming to terms with our grief, and his funeral will be broadcast on live television. The president of my country, himself an acclaimed poet, was among the first to eulogise our fallen hero, and to speak of the depth of regard in which he was held. His face has been all over the newspapers. People from all over the country, and from all walks of life, have been talking of their sorrow, and how awful it is that he was taken from us so suddenly. He has been taken from us – from Ireland, both north and south – and we shall miss him like no other.

Of course, my thoughts are with his wife Marie and their children, and the rest of his family; the country’s loss is, naturally, secondary to theirs in every way. In a very real sense, though, Heaney’s death has torn a hole right through the heart of Irish intellectual and cultural life, and it is a hole that can never be repaired.

I don’t think there’s a more appropriate way to honour Seamus Heaney than by reproducing his own words. Here is a section of the end of his ‘Beowulf’, after the mighty king has fallen, and his men are left to mourn:

Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb,
Chieftains’ sons, champions in battle,
all of them distraught, chanting in dirges,
mourning his loss as a man and a king.
They extolled his heroic nature and exploits
and gave thanks for his greatness…
So the Geat people, his hearth-companions,
sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.
They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

Heaney may not have been, like Beowulf, a man ‘keen to win fame’ through his good deeds and wisdom (he was both good and wise merely because it came naturally to him, not because he wished to be praised for it), but he was gracious and fair-minded, kindest to his people, and he was a great man. I am sorrowful at his passing, and long will I remember him.

Seamus Heaney
1939-2013
Image: en.wikipedia.org

Slaying the Dragon*

It’s strange how significant everything becomes when you’re facing a mortal threat. Every step, every breath, every thought, every decision becomes invested with new importance. Everything seems slow. Your breathing sounds too loud, and the rushing of blood in your ears makes you light-headed. The morning breeze ripples through the flags overhead as you make your way into the courtyard, already covered with an inch of sawdust, and you feel the weight of your armour pulling on every muscle and sinew in your body. A few yards ahead of you, a sword is placed, point-first, in the hard earth.

Your guts turn to solid ice as you hear the beast’s first roar, loud as a gash being torn in the face of the earth itself. It makes your knees want to bend of their own accord, and it makes your head want to bow. You have to fight the urge to crumple before it. Inside your metal visor, nobody can see you weep, so you let the tears come. Then you remember there is nobody here to see you, anyway; no friendly faces, nobody to guard your sword-arm.

There is only you, and the dragon, and the dragon is coming fast.

Image: john-howe.com

 

Sometimes, in literature, dragon-slayers live; most of the time, however, they die. Dragons are the ultimate enemy, the one true test of a warrior’s prowess. So powerful that they get the better even of men like Beowulf, the greatest hero of his age (and ours, arguably), dragons are not to be trifled with. At all times, they are to be taken seriously, and they can never be underestimated. Waking one is a complicated business, and slaying one more complicated still. It’s best to leave them unroused altogether, and let them get on with slumbering and you on with living.

Sometimes, though, they wake of their own accord.

Facing doubt, in many ways, reminds me of dragon-slaying. It’s just you and the dragon, eyeballing one another over a sheaf of paper or the thin film of a computer screen; you hear its hissing voice in your mind, laughing at you for having the cheek to think you are worthy of putting words on paper and joining the ranks of ‘those who write’. The dragon is bigger than you, more powerful than you, and far more frightening than you can imagine. ‘I have slain mightier than you,’ it gurgles. ‘I have devoured warriors who could snap you like a twig!’ There’s nothing you can say to this, because you know it’s true.

It’s all too easy to back down from the doubt-dragon, and let it live inside your computer or – worse – inside your mind for the rest of your life. It seems like the simplest thing to just give in and turn away from its jeering, toothy grin, to walk away while doing your best to ignore its taunts of ‘I told you so!’ It can feel like doing anything else is the height of foolishness, like you’re risking your life by engaging with it. The only safe option, you convince yourself, is to give in and move on.

But if you do that, the dragon wins. It doesn’t even have to lift a claw to defeat you – you’ve defeated yourself.

I feel a little like I’ve been swallowed by the doubt-dragon at the moment. I feel like I’m stuck somewhere in its gullet, not quite inside its foul and noisome stomach (where I will surely perish, prithee), but not far off. Everywhere I look, all I see are dead ends, and there doesn’t appear to be a way out.

Instead of giving up and allowing myself to be swallowed, though, I’m really doing my best to understand that I need to make my own way out. If you don’t see a way to escape, then you need to make one.

St Margaret slaying the dragon by attacking it from within.
Image: greenwichworkshop.com

My attack of the doubts has come about because I have to do some unpicking of ‘Tider’. I’ve managed to write myself into a place where the story is no longer interesting or holding my attention; it seems too flabby and far-fetched. As well as this, the setting is poor, the character motivations are illogical, and the structure is wrong. I know I’m writing a first draft, which gives you a bit more leeway to make errors like this, but if it leads to you losing yourself in a morass of darkness, then something has to be done before you reach a point where you can’t find your way back. It’s important to complete the first draft, no matter how hard it is, which means I have to rescue myself from the dragon of doubt before I’m lost forever in the labyrinth of its infernal intestines.

So, there’s only one thing for it. I’m hefting my sword, and I’m picking what looks to be the most efficient way out of this mess, and I’m punching on through. See you on the other side, with any luck…

 

 

*All dragons used in the production of this blog post were unharmed, and all dragon involvement was monitored by the Geatish Dragon-Lovers’ Association. Any encouragement to harm, slay, maim or otherwise interfere with the lives of ordinary, law-abiding dragons inferred through reading this post is unintentional, and regrettable.

On Storytelling…

I’m thinking about storytelling this morning, and why we do it; I’m wondering about it because yesterday I came across another book, soon to be published, with a very similar premise to an idea I’ve been working on for a long time.  It’s not my WiP (which is a stroke of luck, sort of!) but something else I’ve written a lot of words on – something like 70,000 – and which I don’t really want to jettison out of hand.  I’m hoping there’s a nugget of story in there, something unique to me, which I can take and build on; something I can make which is different to what exists already.

I blogged recently about a similar theme – i.e. an idea which you’ve cherished and which you then see appearing in the world with a different author’s name on the cover – so I’m trying to take the positive out of it.  The positive is: I must be having good ideas.

But it’s funny, this impulse we have to tell stories, to make things up and to create plots and characters who do things, sometimes things we could or would never do ourselves.  What do we want to achieve as a result?  My ‘previous life’ as an academic who undertook research into texts and stories which were very old – as old as the language itself – means I’ve had an interest in this stuff for a long time.  Nowadays, perhaps, one of the impulses to tell stories is to achieve some sort of fame or immortality – to be remembered as a writer or a storyteller.  That’s a recent thing, in my opinion; so many of the most wonderful stories from the past are completely anonymous, including the vast majority of the medieval romances which I love so much.  I’ve often lamented the fact that we have no idea who wrote most of them, and I wish sometimes that they’d been a little more like modern writers and had thought to ‘sign’ their work.  The few ‘stars’ from the medieval period – Chaucer, Gower, Langland, Hoccleve, Malory, Marie de France (my personal heroine), among a small amount of others known only through the texts they wrote (like ‘the Gawain-poet’) – are vastly outnumbered by the writers of texts which display such skill and talent, and which are entirely free of any trace of their author.  That’s not to mention, of course, the texts which have been entirely lost; there’s no way of knowing how many are no longer in existence, what they were about, and who wrote them.  I lament, at times, for the lost hours of labour and love, sweat and toil, that went into the creation of works like these, of which no trace now remains.

The philosopher Richard Kearney once said something like: ‘We tell each other stories to tell each other who we are’.  If memory serves, he was talking about tales told around campfires by prehistoric men and women, who created the world around them every night after dark through stories and legends, but I think his insight can apply to everyone, and to every time.  In earlier ages, when the court poet (or ‘file’ in Irish) was one of the most important figures in the retinue because he knew the tribe’s history and was responsible for singing it into being, the idea of telling stories to bind a people together or, literally, tell them who they were, was vitally important.  It’s still important now.  It’s little wonder that the mythology of a country is closely guarded by its people, and why we are (or should be) very proud of our ‘national epic’; the English have the majestic Beowulf, the Finns their Kalevala, Icelanders their amazing Sagas and, in Ireland, we have our tales of the Sidhe, the Tuatha de Danann, the Firbolg, the Fomorians, Cuchulainn and Fionn MacCumhaill, among many others.  These sort of tales tell us what was important to our ancestors, what they feared and valued, the principles upon which they founded their societies.  For this reason, as well as the fact that they’re breathtaking works of art, they should be treasured by all of us.

Stories we tell can often say more about us than anything else – the kinds of characters we create betray our own fears and desires, our own loves and dreams; the kinds of situations they get into, and the means by which they make their daring escapes, tell the reader about the adventures dear to the author’s heart.  They might be seen as escapism and fantasy by a modern reader, but to earlier ‘readers’ (I should say ‘audiences’, as most early texts were, of course, recited aloud instead of read in private), they had the added thrill of being real.  When we read Beowulf now, we can caress the words describing the monster Grendel with our eyes and our minds, marvelling at the skill of the poet.  If we were listening to it around a fire in an eighth-century meadhall, we’d probably be more inclined to pull our cloak tighter around ourselves and hope desperately that tonight would not be the night that the monster would come calling.  We’d feel a greater and more passionate loyalty towards our fellow men, and a deep desire to protect our boundaries, our land, and pay homage to our king or liege-lord.  Perhaps that’s the real value of storytelling – it brings people together.  For the brief duration of the tale, every mind listening is focused on the same goal; every eye reading is in the same place, willing the characters on.  Characters, whether the irreproachable heroes of early sagas or the more fleshed-out, flawed human figures of later stories, carry the hopes and deepest desires of every human mind who has come into contact with them – including the mind that made them, and the minds who consume them.

But that’s just my two cents.  What other reasons are there for telling one another tales?  I can’t help but be influenced by my interest in the early periods of the world; has anyone any other thoughts?  Whatever stories you’re telling today, may they be good ones… Happy Tuesday to you all.