Ep 1. Hailstones in your Face

'All ground is holy ground,' says the great John Moriarty, the great Kerryman who was half-carnival huckster, half bottle-eyed druid, with a little bit of narcissistic Catholic bishop thrown in. Listen up as he tells us to 'come home to earth' and to 'enfranchise the universe'. Where else would you get it?

Transcript

Speaker 1  0:00  
Like we have to become kind of children again, because it might be that the fairy stories of the world bring us nearest the world. Maybe the Newton's laws of gravity, or then, or then, or then equals MC squared, or

Unknown Speaker  0:12  
what have you, stems the

Speaker 1  0:13  
words of John Murray Arty, Ireland's most underrated deep thinker, a philosopher of the ditches and the hedgerow a druid or a mad Gaelic Shaman. I don't know what to make of which is the reason for these episodes. I'm not going to give you a biog except to say that Moriarty was born in Kerry in 1938 and neither am I going to try to parse or pull apart any of his big ideas. This podcast is a mere taster, a series of short snippets to introduce you to the work of a wild man whose mind was wide open, whose spirit was pumping with so much good juju, it can be hard to know what to make of him. He's hailstones in your face, like snorting on she gleehead The fairy wind up your nostrils. He's the greatest Irish thinker you've never read. He's a scamp, a rogue, a bit of a trickster, but he's ours. He's Ireland's great philosopher of the 20th century. Welcome to the bog Shaman.

Unknown Speaker  1:13  
Manchan on Moriarty.

Speaker 1  1:16  
Why do I want you to focus on this little known, underappreciated figure who was a failed university lecturer in Canada and an idiosyncratic and not entirely dependable gardener in calamara, an imaginingly rambling and verbose writer, because he says things like this, all ground is holy, ground, even if you're to Stand in the Dublin tips are the Dublin dumps, like it is holy ground. You cannot stand anywhere on the earth and not be standing on holy ground. And every bush is a burning bush, like the old bushes that I see in Connemara, you know the old Scott gal that will meet on a bog road. And it is horizontal, flowing with wind. You know what I mean it is. It is going the wind's way. You know, it is going the prevailing way of the universe. It isn't resisting the universe. It's

Unknown Speaker  2:06  
flowing its way.

Speaker 1  2:07  
I mean, there was all little bushes there in kalamara. They too are burning bushes. They are burning with green fire. In the spring, they're burning with red fire of halls in the in the autumn, they're burning with jewel Blue Fire. They're burning with fire that I haven't eyes far, that I haven't senses far. And it took maybe someone like Van Gogh, like when he painted a few cypresses in Provence, like to show us that at a tree, in fact, is a green column of flame. It is green fire like so every bush is a burning bush, and all ground is holy ground, and it would be an awful shame like never to have spent 70 years on the earth, and never to have put off your shoes, from off your feet and set foot barefoot on holy ground that the earth is now he's the man that we should take advice to go barefoot from, rather than from some online post by the latest snake oil wellness influencer

Unknown Speaker  3:01  
our, God forbid,

Speaker 1  3:02  
some tech bro in Silicon Valley. In fact, when I have my fill of the egomaniacal ravings of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, it's to Moriarty. I turn there's a groundedness, a rootedness, to him beyond all his far flung philosophizing. Just listen to what he's likely to have to say about that crazy Martian obsession, their nature, destroying intergalactic rocket fixation, who we in the West talk about in Excelsis. You know, we look up, don't we now walking to work in Connemara. When I use the word in a Chelsea, I look down because I'm walking in Excelsis, you know? And once you set foot on the earth in that kind of way, then you never want to set foot on the moon. Then you never want to set foot on Mars. Never want to set foot elsewhere in your galaxy than where you actually are. It is no big deal to go into space. We're in space anyway, aren't we,

Unknown Speaker  3:55  
so this sense of coming home to the earth, coming

Speaker 1  3:58  
home to the earth. That's the stuff that I want to be reminded of. I want my life guru to be half carnival huckster, half bottle eyed druid with a little bit of narcissistic Catholic Bishop thrown in. If you just close your eyes and imagine what John Moriarty looks like. You're probably pretty accurate, wild, white, flowing hair, ruddy cheeks, piercing eyes, incessantly roaming, taking in everything from the dew drop on a budding leaf to distant dimensions far beyond our own. He's the past master of hot takes and insights that seem radically inspiring yet reassuringly common sense. When I've lost my bearings, I just open one of his books, any of them, really or randomly, click on one of his recorded lectures, and I'll get something like, nowadays, women are enfranchising themselves, aren't they? Like in the last century, women didn't have the vote and women didn't have any legal power within in the family farm or whatever it is like. So now. Women have and are and have enfranchised themselves, and are continuing to enfranchise themselves. I just want to say, why don't we also go further and enfranchise the universe? Enfranchise the whole earth and everything in it. And there's practical advice too, like how to survive an Irish winter, but expressed in the most poetic and melodramatic terms. As you know, Kunal is a kind of Aboriginal Earth with the mountains and the great mirroring dimension, which is the lakes, the lakes mirroring the mountains that you look at, and sometimes, like when you see the mountains mirrored in the lakes, you feel that the mountains know they've been mirrored. They're almost they aren't quite Narcissus, like they aren't admiring themselves. They aren't about to drown because they're going to fall into the lakes in admiration of themselves. But like that mirroring dimension, that holy, kind of marvelous dimension that you see in Connemara, anyway it was, it's a kind of savage landscape, and in the winter, can be savage and Aboriginal. And the only way to live in that world is to be aboriginal. I mean, every winter like, like a buffalo, I had to turn in the way that a buffalo turns around and faces into the blizzard, like the buffalo doesn't run from the blizzard. A buffalo grates Japan's being turns around and faces into the blizzard. The other thing you can do is face north northwest like, or west northwest like, and face that no man's land between Iceland and Greenland, where so much of the winter weather is made, and stand there like a buffalo and say,

Unknown Speaker  6:24  
I'm for another winter here.

Speaker 1  6:26  
That's it. We just need to channel our inner buffalo here. I don't overstay my welcome. There's literally an infinity of further Moriartyism for us to explore, but let's leave it there for now. In the meantime, check out his books. His recorded talks are maybe the best place to start. His various snippets you're going to find on YouTube or the RTÉ player. His RTÉ television series from the 1990s the Blackbird and the bell, is safeguarded in the RT archives, and hopefully they'll release them at some point in the meantime, I'll leave you with one final Moriarty tidbit for the road. Now it's a bit of a bootleg recording, so bear with the dodgy sounds in the backgrounds. Enjoy govekame, chivaresh, COG gaboke, take it handy. 

And the whole idea of educuré, like education to lead something out from within, isn't it? I mean, that's the little meaning of education, is it, isn't we? Now talk about input, don't we? I mean, the whole modern theory of education is input. The ancient idea of education was to lead out what is already within after 20 years of input. You know, of Encyclopedia Britannica, input, and of people imagining the brain of Britain is the great thing to be like and to have all the answers, you know what I mean, to all this, to have all the silly answers to all the silly questions, to have all the unnecessary answers to all the unnecessary questions. You know, my head does feel a little bit inputted. It does feel a little bit like I picked it up on a pawn shop. Doesn't like it's full of other people's ideas, you know. And I suppose there might be a suggestion here that Christ, anyway, I've, I've been caught up in the in the rigmarole of incarnation after incarnation after incarnation. So this head has been done around a long, long time. But even though I am all body, all second hand head, I'm a Christian again, but I've opened my mind. I've opened my gates, long ago to dark horses. I'm saying I'm a Christian again, but I'm going to be a Christian now with a difference. I'm going to open my mind and open my life to my animal instincts, to animal nature in me, to sexuality in me, to all the needs of body and soul in me.