Anam Cara

A FRIEND OF MINE WHO OWNS AN ART GALLERY TOLD ME THIS story. There was an exhibition in the gallery and a poet of no small renown had come in to view it. Just when he was finished a farmer arrived. This farmer came to the gallery about once a year. He lived on the shores of Loch Corrib. The gallery owner had great interest in and respect for him and so he introduced him to the poet. The poet then revisited the exhibition with the farmer, pointing out all the intricacies and hidden symbolism of the exhibition. The farmer listened carefully but said nothing. When they were finished, the farmer said to the poet: ‘Thank you very much. That was really interesting. You showed me in those paintings things I would never have noticed myself. You have a wonderful eye; it is a great gift and I envy you your gift. I don’t have that gift myself but I do have Teannalach.’ The poet thanked him but was mystified as to what Teannalach was. The farmer said: ‘I live beside the lake and you always hear the ripple of the waters and the sound of wind on the water; everyone hears that. However, on certain summer days when the lake is absolutely still and everything is silent, I can hear how the elements and the surface of the lake make a magic music together.’ So the story rested until one day a neighbour of the farmer was in the gallery. The owner told him the story and asked him what Teannalach was. The neighbour paused for a while and smiled: ‘They have that word all right up there where he lives. I have never seen the word written down. And it is hard to say what it means. I suppose it means awareness, but in truth it is about seven layers deeper than awareness.’

I love that story for its imaginative richness and its gentle art of displacement. The farmer disclosed his gift, a capacity for profound attention that could pierce the silence and hear the unheard music of the lake. That ‘Teannalach’ is a distinctive and unique local word testifies to a certain tradition of such listening. What kind of echoes might the word hold? Could it be an abbreviation of teanga na locha, the tongue or the language of the lake? Or could it be an tsean loch, the ancient lake – perhaps the lake beneath the lake? The story also underlines the hiddenness of beauty, a beauty that dwells between the worlds which cannot be reached with known language or bare senses. It only reveals itself when the mind’s attention is radical and the imagination is finely tuned.

T

HE

C

ELTIC

I

MAGINATION:

E

XPERIENCE AND THE

‘W

EB OF

B

ETWEENNESS

’

Thus beauty was revealed to man as an occurrence on the boundary.

HERMANN BROCH

BECAUSE WE TEND TO SEE OUR EXPERIENCE AS A PRODUCT, WE have lost the ability to be surprised by experience, the sense of the mind as a theatre where interesting sequences of complex drama are played. Whether we like it or not, the depths in us are always throwing up treasure. For the awakened imagination there is no such thing as inner poverty. It is interesting how contemporary English has the phrase: ‘to have an experience’, with the suggestion of possession, property and ownership. In the folk culture of the Celtic Imagination, experience was not a thing to be produced or to be owned. For the Celtic Imagination the focus was more on the experience as participation in something more ultimate than one’s needs, projection or ego: it was the sacred arena in which the individual entered into contact with the eternal. Experience in this sense was an event of revelation. In such a world, experience was always lit by spirit; the mind was not a closed compartment ‘processing’ its own private impressions, the mind always had at least one window facing the eternal. Through this window wonder and beauty could shine in on a life and illuminate the quiet corners where mystery might be glimpsed. A person’s nature was revealed in experience; it was also the place where gifts arrived from the divine. Naturally, experience was one’s own and not the experiences of someone else. However, it was understood as being much more than the private product and property of an individual. Expressed in another way, there was a sense that the individual life was deeply woven into the lives of others and the life of nature. The individual was not an isolated labourer desperately striving to garner a quota of significance from the world.