‘Messe ocus Pangur Bán’, written in Old Irish and found in a manuscript in southern Germany, survives from the ninth century. Here is the opening stanza, in Robin Flower’s translation:
Myself and Pangur Ban my cat
‘tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
Scholar and cat – each works within a small space: the cat has an enclosing wall, while the scholar seems confined to his scriptorium, yet the world of the poem is far from claustrophobic. The scholar is part of a long tradition of textual study, much of it scholarship on the Bible and on scriptural commentaries. Each is happy practising his special art. But beyond that special art, behind the poem, is the larger world and the larger art of the poet, the man expert in the formal rules of this craft, but with the wit and the language to create a poem that shows him as so much more than a wrestler with the words of others.
The author is by no means confined to the limited scholarly role he invents for himself. In some sense he is moving towards being both scholar and cat. He refers enigmatically to ‘ar n-óendís’ (lit: our one twosome) and Simon Fraser’s illustration to this poem in An Leabhar Mòr. The Great Book of Gaelic brilliantly captures this oneness, as the two clasp each at respectful distance, with each looking out to the world beyond the painting.
Taking the liberty of entering this writer’s mind and world, I ask what he supposed he was doing? The scholarly delight of pouncing on the meaning of a difficult phrase is recognisably genuine, but he is also part of a collective enterprise. An emigrant Irish monk in a monastery was playing his part in the spread of knowledge, in looking to the past for what could be understood, transformed and transmitted to the future, even if the only fruit of his labours that we know about is a delightful poem rather than a scholarly commentary. Surely Father Golden would have smiled at this, given his encouragement of people to follow where the spirit might lead them, with results that might well surprise themselves and others.
The author took no pains to record his name: the work itself was enough. This interpretation of the ideal of pursuing knowledge for its own sake might have been a logical outcome of our own formation in the Golden years, though I expect that few of us who pursued an academic path would have chosen anonymity except for legal or safety reasons. Still, we were encouraged in the traditional University ideal of support for other scholars, without thought of acknowledgement or reward. I never met the concept of ‘Intellectual property’ until much later.
Shakespeare refers more than once to ‘the dungy earth’, Yeats talks of ‘blood and mire’ or ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. I admire this openness to the messiness of life, but this is the sensual world experienced through the cleaner medium of words. Did our Old Irish scholar get his hands dirty handling the remains of mice? It was hard to get my hands dirty as an English Lecturer, and not so easy to align this activity with urgent calls on my attention as a citizen and parent. The years brought a range of activities, with protests against the Viet Nam War, against nuclear weapons, against apartheid, as well as digging and planting with local conservation groups. Involvement with school bodies led to several years as Council President for Banksia Secondary College. Interest in politics, going back to student days in the ALP Club, led to active membership of the Labor Party, including candidacy for Heidelberg Council and for State Parliament. All of these tended to work in a different category of life from my more professional activities. Then family life was somewhere else again. This separateness might not have been a bad thing, but that habit of working in such disparate areas remains food for thought.
In 1980, I started a course specialising in scriptural studies at Yarra Theological Union with a view to enriching my academic understanding. I now have a very different understanding of the nature of biblical materials and the sort of truth and authority they represent for others or myself. I am astonished to look back at how simplistically we in the early sixties quoted the supposed words of Jesus with very little understanding of context or ancient conventions of composing narratives. Studies of the original languages of the Biblical materials (and complementary studies such as Coptic, Classical Syriac) have been an intellectual pleasure in themselves, as well as enriching my understanding. These have played their part in bringing me closer to accepting a place in the Christian tradition from which I had moved a long way by the later seventies. The eloquent challenges of the Book of Job and Song of Songs were special treasures. Contemplating the prophets, especially in the light of Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia, 1978), is very helpful in considering the tensions between thought and action, between intellectual activities and the calls of citizenship.
“It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one….
In offering symbols, the prophet has two tasks. One is to mine the memory of this people and educate them to use the tools of hope. The other is to recognize how singularly words, speech, language and phrase shape consciousness and define reality.”
Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Philadelphia, 1978), pp.45, 66.
As I think to the future, these words resonate. Importance of literature in the radical re-imagining of the world, in that conflict with those who offer destructive views of what is real.
The imagination and craft of a nameless Medieval English poet bring together a selection of profound, yet almost whimsical-sounding, perspectives on the Incarnation and associated mysteries. Representing God’s coming to Mary as a kingly lover’s visit to a lady’s bower is a feat in itself. Linking this to the fertilising effects of April dew is a further imaginative leap.
I sing of a maiden that is makeless
King of alle kinges to her son she ches.…
He cam al so still ether his moder lay
As dew in Aprille that falleth on the spray.
This is a writer who uses simple words and a simple verse form to illuminate a mystery, in a way that can move deeply, regardless of views about its underlying theology.
The mode of early seventeenth century poets, my central interest as a Literature student and teacher, is particularly attractive for the leaps of imagination, the feats of language that we need if we are to understand our lives, or envisage how they might be different. I still find myself coming back to ‘playfulness’ as a term to describe the very serious business of imagining our place in the world. Again, I respond despite my own uncertainties about the underlying doctrines that inform the poem. One appealing feature is that, as in many of Donne’s love poems, the apparently confident beginning is modified by the realisation that the outcome is by no means certain:
Since I am coming to that Holy roome,
Where, with thy Quire of Saints for ever more,
I shall be made thy Musique; As I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.
Emily Dickinson invites us to see afresh the deeply unsettling affect of the sacred:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are.
Gwen Harwood, recalling her childhood, writes of a cat, frogs, girls, and so much more, in a poem with no overt theological references, but offering its own deep spirituality:
In safety by the dripping tankstand
Our frogs with matchstick hands as pale
As the violet stems they lived among
Cuddled their vulnerable bellies
In hands that would not do them wrong.
The list could go on, and Brueggemann is important for me in clarifying how literature has public implications, political and theological, in a more profound way than envisaged by many advocates of political or theological commitment in writing and scholarship.
To return to the ‘prophetic’, I admire those, like Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, that can step outside the main stream and say by word and deed: ‘It doesn’t have to be like this’. But the experiences of the past urge discernment. Beware those groups who think that they exclusively have ‘got it right’. Recently, I studied the recently-published Coptic text from around the third century known as The Gospel of Judas. The Jesus represented there often directs mocking laughter at his disciples: ‘When he approached his disciples, gathered together and seated and offering a prayer of thanksgiving over the bread, he laughed.’ The point of this in effect is to use the authority of Jesus to mock those Christians outside of the small group of selected ones chosen to receive superior knowledge. This is the less attractive face of Gnosticism. In my Hebrew studies, I have read Dead Sea Scrolls coming from a community convinced of its exclusive superiority in the eyes of the LORD, admirable in its steadfastness, repulsive in its exclusivity. We meet such attitudes often in political life, with groups who proclaim loudly that they alone are truly Marxist, truly radical, truly Australian. The movement that called itself the Intellectual Apostolate was not immune from such arrogance. One form of that arrogance was the scorn sometimes directed at the apparently lesser forms of work, like those traditionally described as the corporal works of mercy. I think we were infected by that long-standing Catholic habit of putting things in ranking order of merit, something I meet in medieval commentaries on marriage and virginity, for example.
* * *
At 66, the invitation to be part of the ‘Golden years’ project is an opportunity to take stock of where my life is going. For Erik Erikson ‘Ego Integrity versus Despair’ is the big issue for this stage of life, with characteristic ‘virtues’ of Renunciation and Wisdom. Jung speaks of Individuation as a goal, Progoff of Integration; my old Brigidine teachers talked of ‘Saving my soul’, whatever that might mean. These offer some pointers. Among my guides are Chaucer and Shakespeare, John Donne and George Herbert, Emily Dickinson and W.B. Yeats, Patrick White and Gwen Harwood. In the last 15 years, I have experienced many formative and re-formative events. I have enjoyed brewing, reading, singing and good company, especially within my family. I’ve also had contact directly and indirectly with young people afflicted by addictions, in trouble with the law, going to prison or mental institutions, dying by choice, illness or accident. I was at my mother’s deathbed, had two of my dearest friends die of cancer and another severely disabled by a stroke. Few of these things would have crossed my mind during those formative years we are discussing, but I am interested in how my response to them is influenced by those years. From the many important influences in my life over these recent years, I’ll mention three that look to the future.
1. I left my job as a Lecturer in English at the end of 1996, and subsequently have been employed helping to train civil celebrants. Inspired in the early days by my own teachers like Francis McCarthy, Vincent Buckley and Ian Maxwell, I enjoyed educating students in the joys of literature. I miss this, but I don’t miss the pressure to watch out for every commentary that is produced in my subject, the demands of the publication word-counters, or staff meetings. I enjoy the freedom to attend to other ‘academic’ activities, mostly on topics that University managers are trying to eliminate. Surprisingly, I have returned to Melbourne University in several respects. Last year I took a short course in Classical Syriac and I come each week for reading groups in Old Irish and Medieval Latin. The last conference I attended was on Vikings, to mark the end of a Melbourne University tradition that included my study of Old Icelandic with Ian Maxwell. My last conference paper was at Melbourne, on a nineteenth-century book on the Irish Language. The wheel turns!
Working with Dally Messenger at training civil celebrants involves me in a practical way with the creation of ceremonial activities that befit the lives and values of members of a largely post-Christian society, especially at the crucial stages of their lives – including their deaths. I have also conducted occasional funeral services, some emphatically secular, some firmly Catholic. It is a new way to work with people, using my old loves of teaching and language. I think Father Golden would have agreed with our emphasis on listening and responding to people rather than imposing a format. The titles of two papers I have given at celebrant conferences reflect my own developing interests: “Spiritualities for a secular society” and “Ceremonies for the excluded.” Celebrancy invites reflection on the long history of ceremony in human life, and in this land. We recently farewelled Greg Dening with a Requiem here at Newman College. My way of acknowledging the traditional people of this country is to wonder how many thousands of years of ceremonial farewell might have taken place at this same spot. When I think of the place of ceremony in this land, I recall Jim Bowler’s comments quoted in a Melbourne Age article in 2003:
‘In 1974 he found a second complete skeleton, Mungo Man, buried 300 metres away from the first, with his hands placed over his genital area. Ochre collected from at least 150 kilometres away was used for the ritual burial. “You can imagine the grieving ceremony, to bring in the ochre, to grind it, and distribute it on the body,” says Bowler.’
2. We of European descent grapple belatedly with the intertwined business of imagining the aboriginal people’s grief and learning from a spirituality based on many centuries living with this country. In my own attempts to tend a small piece of the land, to feel its rhythms, I might nudge a little closer to imagining something of what so many of Australia’s aboriginal people have lost since European settlement – something which I largely ignored in those formative years.
In 1994, Jan and I bought two degraded paddocks in Korweinguboora, on the edge of Wombat State Forest, south of Daylesford. Since then, we have planted more than a thousand trees and bushes, and had an environmentally sustainable house built there. From one perspective this has been about restoration and healing of a small piece of the land, a redemption of the natural world such as we discussed in those days, although this ‘Fall’ has taken place with the relentless clearing following European settlement in very recent times. Of course, we are also, by our very presence and the building of a house, creating something different from what ever existed before. We seek necessary solitude there, and we offer hospitality to people and to other living creatures that we have implicitly invited to stay or pass through. We did not begin this with a program. In something like the way fostered by Father Golden, we took on something that felt worthwhile, not knowing where it would lead us, and we discover meaning as we go along. In a small way, this is also creating an example of an imagined future, such as Brueggemann discusses in relation to the prophets, one which offers some alternative to our society’s obsession with growth and consumption. Are there remote echoes here of the way of the ways we used to talk of sacraments as effective signs?
3. Whatever the source or sources of blessings, I know that my three grandchildren are among the chief of mine. Like many blessings they can be hard work, from the nappy-changing to what they challenge me to do about their future. I want to offer them, in thought, word and deed, an alternative way of imagining the world to the one promoted by the many exploiters who will try to impose their own vicious notions of what is real and important. The Golden years were important in reassuring us that Christianity was incarnational, that the created world was essentially good. I hope my own descendants are free to respond passionately to the goodness and beauty that they find in their world, a place where ‘the little ones leaped & shouted and laugh’d,/ And all the hills ecchoed”, to quote William Blake – and to recall Allen Ginsberg in the early 70s in the Melbourne Town Hall leading us in a chant of that last line whose significance is only now starting to register as we see what a mess our society has made of its relations with the natural world.
As scholar and cat in my own way, I hope at this stage of life to maintain mental alertness and a playful intellectual curiosity, as well as the urge to leave a better world behind me. Despair is the opposite of hope, a term whose difference from ‘optimism’ needs exploration. Thinking again of Erikson’s “Integrity versus Despair” tension as a description for the options at my stage of life, I feel blessed that so far, there are times of distress and desolation, but not despair.
Our 9th century Irish monk was going about his business of studying abstruse scriptural interpretations and obscure points of grammar, and nobody knows how and whether these left their mark. The anonymous ‘signature’ that we know he left behind was possibly regarded as a frivolous relaxation from his serious work, a poem on a manuscript left to take its chances. This series is subtitled ‘The roots of hope’. One eloquent statement on hope is by a contemporary Irish writer, Nuala ní Dhomnaill who, writing in and about the threatened language of Modern Irish, uses the analogy of Moses put in the river waters in a carefully woven basket. ‘Ceist na Teangan’ is translated by Paul Muldoon as ‘The Language Issue’. It too, in its balanced acknowledgement of the importance of careful preparation, of renunciation, and of reliance on what is uncontrollable – call it Providence perhaps – echoes the spirit of Father Golden.
I place my hope on the water
In this little boat
Of the language, the way a body might
put
An infant
In a basket of intertwined
Iris leaves,
Its underside proofed
With bitumen and pitch,
Then set the whole thing down amidst
The sedge
And bulrushes by the edge
Of a river
Only to have it borne hither and thither,
Not knowing where it might end up;
In the lap perhaps,
Of some Pharaoh’s daughter.
Chris Watson
* * *
Note on sources:
The Old Irish text of ‘Pangur bán’, with a prose translation, is in Gerard Murphy, ed., Early Irish Lyrics: Eighth to Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1956), and in An Leabhar Mòr. The Great Book of Gaelic.
Robin Flower’s translation, used here, is at
http://www.sky-net.org.uk/canals/pangurban/name/
A version by Seamus Heaney is available at
http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0406/poem_177882.html
I gave this talk as part of “The Golden Years” series at Newman College on 30 March 2008. It was part of a group under the heading “Mind”, intended for conversation in a process envisaged by Prof. Greg Dening, who died suddenly earlier in that year. The talks were delivered anyway, and are published in Val Noone et al (eds.), Golden Years: Grounds for Hope (Melbourne, 2008)