Anam Cara

Therefore, true balance in the body is linked to listening, but also metaphorically, true balance is linked to an attentiveness that allows you to engage fully with a situation, a person or your culture or memory so that the hidden balance within can emerge. Listening can actually be a force that elicits the balance and allows it to emerge. Balance is not subjective. Neither is balance to be simply achieved or reached by human beings. True balance is a grace. It is something that is given to you. When you watch somebody walking the high wire, you know that they could tumble any second. That is the way we all are. Though we prefer to forget and repress it, we live every moment in the condition of contingency. There are people who got up this morning, prepared for another normal day, but something happened, some event, news, disappointment or something wonderful, and their lives will never be the same after this day in the world. This is a day they will never forget. Very often our actual balance in the world as we go is totally precarious, without our realizing it. Balance invites us not to take ourselves too seriously.

I spent five years in Germany and I loved German culture, music, thinking and philosophy. But the Germans would not be known as post-graduates in the whole area of humor or spontaneity! There is in the Irish psyche, I think, a kind of flexibility and a grounding humor that actually levels things and balances things out. I have talked to people who worked with Irish people in all kinds of areas in the Third World where there was poverty and war. They often said that the Irish brought a certain humor into the situation that allowed others to forget for a while the awfulness that was around them. This, of course, is a direct derivative of our history. We have had a history of incredible pain, misery, poverty and suffering in this country, which is often forgotten now. In these politically correct and tiger economic times, it is embarrassing to remember what has happened to us. The truth is that terrible things happened to us. And the only way we were able to come through it was to win some distance from it. Often, Irish humor has this subtext of knowing the complete horror, but yet deciding not to bend to its ravages. That is why Beckett is a sublime Irish writer, because he can bring the bleakness and the humor to such incredible balance and harmony.

Balance can be beautifully achieved in the human body, especially in dance. I remember, one night in Lisdoonvarna, watching, in a small little corner of the pub, about thirty-five human bodies starting to dance. There was a band playing and I saw these people and I thought to myself that they could never dance in such a small space. Yet, when the music started and brought rhythm, they were wheeling in and out and nobody crashed into anyone else. So sometimes when another rhythm is present, balance becomes possible in the most unpredictable situations.

Balance and the Millennium

In the concluding section, I want to reflect on balance at the millennium threshold. A millennium threshold is said to be a time of imbalance and disturbance. To be honest, I believe that much of the excitement about the millennium is a result of manipulation. For a few cultures, this is not the millennium. If you could talk to stones and rivers and oceans or even sheep, they would be asking why these humans are getting worked up about the millennium. The earth and the ocean and the rain and the wind and the trees and the cows and the calves have no idea that we are entering a new millennium. But, because we are all fixated on the millennium, there is a lot happening and it is a huge threshold; and in a way we are coming into it vulnerable and very exposed.

There are several agents of imbalance. One is the whole consumerist trend of post-modern culture. In philosophical terms what is going on here is a reduction of the “who” question about presence and person, to the “what” question and the “how” question. It’s an obsession, almost a regression to what Freud called the “oral stage.” The key tenet here is that consumption creates identity. I was over in Atlanta, Georgia, on a book tour early on in the year. I saw a weed there called kudzu; it grows a foot in a day. This weed is set to take over, and if it’s not cut back it will take over completely. It struck me as a profound image for consumerism. Most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot sense the shape of ourselves anymore. Sometimes you meet a writer who gives you a little instrumentation to make a clearance here. For me, such a writer is William Stafford, the wonderful American poet. In the latest book from his estate on the nature of poetry, Crossing Unmarked Snow, here are four sentences:

The things you do not have to say make you rich.

Saying the things you do not have to say

weakens your talk.

Hearing the things you do not need to hear

dulls your hearing.