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Detail from Gundestrup Cauldron, Celtic, Denmark, circa 150 B.C.
Perhaps, as Thomas Kinsella argued, the whole concept of the
Celtic Twilight was a romantic confabulation. An excellent
translator, he disapproved of the more supernatural elements in
the Tain Bo Cuailnge, which he saw as fanciful interpolations,
and he made a point of restoring the direct references to
"seduction, copulation, urination, the picking of vermin, the
suggestion of incest in 'How Cuchulainn was Begotten,'" and other
such matters of the body. My counterargument is as follows: that
the facts of life do not make a mythology less true, and that
confabulation can be the doorway to an otherwise lost world.
***
How close are the dead? Does the one I call for hear? I reach for
my great-grandfather, Black Jack Shea, a violent youth, whom a
hundred and four years of experience did not improve. Storming
out of the back door after an argument with his wife, as enraged
as ever at her independence, he paid no attention to where he was
going, fell headfirst off the porch, and broke his neck. I can only
wonder what there could have been to fight about after 80 years
of marriage.
They had known each other since 1864, when they had met, both
of them diseased and half-dead, on a boat that docked at Deer
Island, Boston. Nursing their romantic memories, they married
some five years later, when Black Jack had returned from his job
as a gravedigger on the battlefields of the Civil War. The body
count was high. Many corpses had turned to skeletons by the time
that they were buried. The work was not completed for several
years after the war. Good work, if you could get it—better in any
case than starvation.
Twelve-hour workdays were the norm. By the 1880's, Black Jack
had achieved his dream of opening a small livery business. Four
white horses for weddings. Four black horses for funerals. I have
sometimes wondered about the numerological symbolism, and
about whether, all practicality aside, such choices might have
been deliberate on his part.
Neolithic passage tomb, Britany, circa 4200 B.C.
Four plus four: in a magical act yoking the four ages, the two
teams pulled the carriage of the Sun. The eight horses could be
the eight primordial elements of the Cosmos. To all, it was
obvious that Black Jack's first love was these horses. When, for
example, his favorite reared up and crushed his left leg in a stall,
so that he would enter the 20th Century with a limp, he did not
stay angry for more than a few weeks, but simply saw it as a price
that must be paid. As with a Siddha living in a cremation ground,
naked and rubbed with ash, it is possible that his years of working
as a gravedigger had installed in him a kind of out-of-the-box
perspective, a way of looking at things from an angle. Whatever
the origin of his skill, and in spite of his hard edges, Black Jack
also had a reputation as a master reader of the Tarot.
In the Great Year, each life was multiform, and vast; its length
was nonetheless indeterminate, and there was no guarantee that
one would live through the next hour. Perhaps one life picked up
where another one left off, without break, although not
necessarily with awareness, or perhaps, should one suddenly step
back, the ground would fall away from underneath one's feet, so
that direct awareness would be no different than vertigo. Each
fact was a sign. It was possible to interpret every biographical
fluke in terms of this or of the other world.
Thus: Black Jack was good with horses, but temperamental with
his seven sons. He had taught my grandfather to swim by rowing
him out into the middle of Lake Quinsigamond, dumping him in,
and then rowing back. In Ancient Greece, initiates would court
near-death experiences by jumping off of a high cliff into the
ocean. Perhaps this apparently cruel "swimming lesson" too was
the remnant of some long out-of-date tradition, a tradition now
obscure even to its practitioners, and which they must enact in
the realm of the Unconscious.
Celtic Warriors, Theodore de Bry, 1585
In spite of my bad—that is to say, too civilized—habits, do any
threads connect us? Would Black Jack insist on taking me to the
doctor, concerned about the number of books that I had read, as
he did when my grandfather had finished all books in stacks A to
Z at the small Canterbury Square Library? It was not so much that
real men did not read books; it was that real Irishmen should not
need them. To this day in Ireland, a country that does not require
writers to pay taxes, the writer is regarded as a necessary but
somewhat pathetic figure—a storyteller who couldn't make it,
who lacked the charisma to command his audience. Black Jack
was ashamed of his son. He had disappeared into his books,
perhaps never to reemerge.
From a time before the farce of Christianity was invented, any
Shea should be able to spread around himself a wide field of
hypnotic energy, the words turning into shadows as he spoke.
Even dogs should sit up straight and listen, dark magnetism
should charge the atmosphere, and the dead should return from
their trees in the underworld to break bread with the living. Jack,
my youthful grandfather, the seventh son of a master reader of
the Tarot, should not be an exception to the rule. The back of a
father's hand could yet work wonders.
In the mind of Black Jack Shea, nothing had improved from the
day 1600 years ago when Seanchan summoned Fergus from the
megalithic stone, to reinvent the almost forgotten epic of Tain Bo
Cuailnge, which had survived only in a number of disconnected
fragments.
The "Prince of Glauberg," Celtic, Germany, circa 500 B.C
In fact, these fragments had never ceased to be assembled, as
Seanchan showed on that day some 1600 years ago. As a test of
strength, it was sometimes necessary to do a thing just because it
was once thought to be impossible. This was just what it meant to
SEE, and what a seer, such as Seanchan, did. And even now you
could feel the dark magnetism of the poet, as he traded taunts
with the human-headed birds, or gossiped with the dead.
Even now, you could see the mist roll in as it coiled around the
megalith, so that, for three days and nights, Seanchan could not
see his hand when he held it in front of this face, until, in "fierce
majesty," Fergus stepped forth to recite the original version of the
Tain. Even now, you could see the transfigured raiders galloping
as clouds flew across the moon, and hear Donn Cuailnge, the
archetypal bull, bellowing as, by the hundreds, heifers mooed. As
was Seanchan, I am led to reinvent the story of my origins. The
past floats like a vapor on the breath.
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