Anam Cara

TASTE AND SPEECH

The sense of taste is subtle and complex. The tongue is the organ of taste and also the organ of speech. Taste is one of the casualties in our modern world. Since we are under such pressure and stress, we have so little time to taste the food we eat. An old friend of mine often says that food is love. At a meal in her house one has to take one’s time and bring patience and mindfulness to the meal.

We have no longer any sense of the decorum appropriate to eating. We have lost the sense of ritual, presence, and intimacy that were elemental to any meal; we no longer sit down to meals in the old way. One of the most famous qualities of the Celtic people was hospitality. A stranger always received a meal. This courtesy was observed before any other business was undertaken. When you celebrate a meal, you also taste flavors of which you are normally unaware. Much modern food lacks flavor completely; even while it is growing, it is forced with artificial fertilizers and sprayed with chemicals. Consequently it has none of the taste of nature. As a result, for most people, their sense of taste has become severely dulled. The fast-food metaphor provides a deep clue to the poverty of sensibility and lack of taste in modern culture. This is also clearly mirrored in our use of language. The tongue, the organ of taste, is also the organ of speech. Many of the words we use are of the fast-food spiritual variety. These words are too thin to echo experience; they are too weak to bring the inner mystery of things to real expression. In our rapid and externalized world, language has become ghostlike, abbreviated to code and label. Words that would mirror the soul carry the loam of substance and the shadow of the divine.

The sense of silence and darkness behind the words in more ancient cultures, particularly in folk culture, is absent in the modern use of language. Language is full of acronyms; nowadays we are impatient of words that carry with them histories and associations. Rural people, and particularly people in the West of Ireland, have a great sense of language. There is a sense of phrasing that is poetic and alert. The force of the intuition and the spark of recognition slip swiftly into deft phrase. One of the factors that makes spoken English in Ireland so interesting is the colorful ghost of the Gaelic language behind it. This imbues the use of English with great color, nuance, and power. Yet the attempt to destroy Gaelic was one of the most destructive acts of violence of the colonization of Ireland by England. Gaelic is such a poetic and powerful language, it carries the Irish memory. When you steal a people’s language, you leave their soul bewildered.

Poetry is the place where language in its silence is most beautifully articulated. Poetry is the language of silence.

If you look at a page of prose, it is crowded with words. If you look at a page of poetry, the slim word shapes are couched in the empty whiteness of the page. The page is a place of silence where the contour of the word is edged and the expression is heightened in an intimate way. It is interesting to look at your language and the words that you tend to use to see if you can hear a stillness or silence. One way to invigorate and renew your language is to expose yourself to poetry. In poetry your language will find cleansing illumination and sensuous renewal.

FRAGRANCE AND BREATH

The sense of smell or fragrance is deft and immediate. Experts tell us that smell is the most faithful of all the senses in terms of memory. The smells of one’s childhood still remain within. It is incredible how a simple scent on a street or in a room can bring you back years to an experience you had long forgotten. Animals, of course, work wonderfully with the sense of smell. To take dogs for a walk is to realize how differently they experience landscape. They are glued to trails of scent and enjoy a complete adventure, tracing invisible smell pathways everywhere. Each day we breathe 23,040 times; we have 5 million olfactory cells. A sheepdog has 220 million such cells. The sense of smell is so powerful in the animal world because it assists survival by alerting the animal to danger. The sense of smell is vital to the sense of life.