Ep. 3 Luring night-walkers and horses to the yard

Moriarty explains how a river can call itself back into the eternity out of which it came, and leads us into a time that is older than the time of chronometers. 
Meet John's mother, a sovereignty goddess, with her womb of turf and eggs, and his father, king of the byre, haggard, and pig sty, basking in the low light of his lantern hanging from a nail in the rafter. 

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
I was told a story there the other evening about a man who was down in England, in the in in the south west of Kerry. And it was a lovely, gorgeous evening, and the mountains were almost heartbreakingly lovely and blue. And it was a silent, silent evening. The only sound was the sound of a stream tumbling down schlieve another. And one man, a visitor, was talking to a local man, and he drew attention like he said, Isn't the sound of the tumbling water wonderful? And the old man, the local man, said, Porsche, a glac or in is darks as of wilshefenoch. I mean, it is calling us into the eternity of which it is, itself coming out of which it is self flowing and like the eternity that stream coming down Shiva and others calling us into isn't an eternity that's behind time. It is an eternity that's right there in front. Do you know what I mean?

Unknown Speaker  0:55  
Foil tiro are welcome back to the profoundly place based mystical musings of John Moriarty, a wise, incantatory and exasperatingly circuitous kerryman Who taught English literature in Manitoba, then immersed himself in the world's myths and sagas before casting it all to the wind, freeing himself from its constraints to become a groundsman, our gardener for hire in the wilds of Connemara. Moriarty often comes across as elusive and Mercurial in his writings and talks, and so maybe it's worth focusing for a bit on where he comes from, who his people were. I have a clip of him here describing his mother. And to understand it fully, you need to bear in mind that in Irish mythology, the original land sovereignty figure, the goddess of creation, who predates the arrival of humans. Our farming on the island was the Caille, the wise Crone, who dropped rocks from her apron on mountaintops to create sacred sites. She appears to be a metaphor for the retreating of ice sheets and how they left heaps of stones in certain areas as they melted back to the sea at the end of the last ice age. And my mother had, I don't know if any of you now would remember a crossover apron. It was one of these aprons that you just fit yourself into and tied round your middle. And it was a complete garment covering you. And it was a very useful garment for for a farmer's wife, because you could catch the two ends of it, the front, the front ends of it, and make a great hollow space. And you could fill it with whatever you wanted to fill it with. And here was my mother, a big woman. My mother wasn't physically that big. She was tall, but there was something about her. You had the sense that she was enormous, in some sense, because she was so psychologically big and psychologically real, that we always had the sense that she was huge woman, but to psychologically that she was big. And I don't know how any of us ever survived. My mother like to grow up with such enormous reality around you all the time. Like, how do we ever how do we ever survive the presence of my mother in that house? Like, how did my father survive the presence of that huge, wonderful woman, you know, you know, she was like, people just come in the night. The old night walkers would come. And my mother was better than Annie, and I liked to read the paper. And she'd read the paper for all these men like and so she was a great presence in the world. But here she was now coming across the yard, and she was past childbearing at this stage, and so she had to cross two ends of crossover apron, holding it in her left hand, and in the Great Depression. And the great, I mean, it was almost like a womb outside her womb, and she was past childbearing, but now she had the womb for crossover apron, and was filled with turf. And on top of the turf was six or seven eggs. And just as I saw her there, coming across from the from the foul house, what was called the foul house, the house of the hens and the ducks. And she was coming across there. She looked like a great, wonderful Earth Mother, you know. And she was so real. I'd been away to universities and libraries and all this kind of stuff. But she remained herself. She was she was totally unchanged. And

Unknown Speaker  3:53  
her crossover ate with her little pink dots in her pink little flowers in it. And here she was. And I was thinking like she's last year's tuff. Now she has in this womb, and on top of the turf, on top of the fire, are the eggs. And it was a great Easter image, like the fire of life and the newness of life and the eggs. So she was a kind of great earth mother, Woman coming across the ARB. And so I mean seeing that, I knew I'm back. Christ, he was my mother. I knew I'm back. Does that help give you some sense of John Moriarty. He's a man who sees his mother as a woman bearing eggs and turf, symbols of fertility and the land, a force of nature who could attract the night walkers to the yard. But not just the night walkers, the horses too. And a lot of people just come into our house, our house because of my mother. It was mostly because of my mother. People come into our house, and there'd be donkeys and carts going up and down the road, and there'd be horses and carts and ponies and carts going up and down to the primaries and got up and down to the village and things like that. And so many of these horses, like, would naturally, without any direction at all from the drivers, like, would come into our yard because they were so used to me and have cups of tea. And I remember summer days like.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
When these say it must happen, we would come down with his horse and his milk churns, and he would want to go home because he would have hate caught or turf to court or something like that. And he would desperately have to have to wrestle with the horse to keep the horse from going in. And almost always he lost that battle. The horse was so used to coming in, the horse would come into our yard anyway, and they sit down, they discuss the world and the politics and everything my mother and you know, so it was that kind of house, a woman who'd lured the horses to her yard. It's hard to think of a more mythical description of a parent. That is, of course, until you see how he presents his father, we see him not directly, but through his buyer, his barn, his outhouse, which Moriarty regards as the direct opposite of the modern agricultural building of the EEC the European Economic Community. In fact, it's not even the barn we get to see, but the journey across the yard to it an odyssey of sorts, though just a few paces in length. Now, the moment I stood up to go to the stall, and I was aware like that I was going to my father's stall. This isn't an EEC stall. This is a stall that existed long before the EEC was held of and that was, this would now be a sacred journey for me. And out of, out of felt it in every bone of my body and every cell of my being. Out of felt that I'm and this is a sacred journey to me, and I'll cross the yard, because when I was young, the little child imagining the big one, the world's full fairies and full of pookers and full of strangers and full of all kinds of presences and radiances which you might know the names of or know how to handle. I would say my father, on a dark winter's night, he would take down his lantern the last thing around 11 o'clock in the night, he would take down his lantern and he would light it. And if it was a wild night, having lit it, he would unscrew he would wind it back till there was just a little spark of light, and then he would walk out. And I always wondered about sometimes I'd see just half his face in the light of the kitchen, and the other half would be in the darkness. And I often wondered like about him walking out into that dark and that he wasn't afraid. And he would cross the wild yard, and he would go over and hang the lantern up on a nail, an interactor, and then he would wind it up, and he'd have good light now again, and he'd feed the cows hay. And having fed the cows hay, I mean, these were short tartan cows. Now, these were the Frisians that we now have like, these are the wonderful shot tartan cows. Remember them? You know, with a lovely fog that lovely coats, you know, in the winter, I just always loved to see them licked, not the way they'd licked themselves. And there was always waves, whatever they licked themselves. And sometimes you'd see, you see cow pats or cow dung Coulomb. We never called it cow patch. We called it cowmany, or cow dung in the insides of the rotor, in the fields like and they had this wonderful shape. Remember the old shape of cow dung that was like Celtic arch? Is all full of talk shapes, wonderful shapes, you know. But now it's all slurry, isn't it, you know. And you know, you don't hear of cow dung anymore. You heard of slurry, but so I was going over to that stall when my father would have laid down a bed of gold and straw for the cows, and he would have hay at every every cow, every short problem. Cow would know her place, and she would be tied by her manger his 11 cows. And when my father go over and feed them hay in the night, he would sit in his three legged stool behind them, and he would smoke his cigarette there. And my father was from Dingle, so he grew up speaking Irish. And he'd be a smeen of is a mock of them, fain over there, because he loved the sound of the cows chewing and the sound of the cows chewing the cud. And sometimes, like after I went to university, my father would know like that I was studying things like philosophy and the big questions, the big answers my father come in like and he said, Christ John, I've come to Denton thinking, and I still haven't found answers, you know. But of course, like the poor man, he'd be as mean of as a mock of them failing over there in the stalls, you know. So I knew, like that was over there, every cow having a name that was over to that stall. I was going, that's Moriarty, to a T, a man for whom the journey to the cowshed becomes a philosophical exploration of existence, a place of golden torques on Golden straw in the form of muck, cowpis and dung. It was this ancient nature based almost indigenous upbringing combined with a fervid, questioning mind the agony Sweeney somachnov That was forever pondering and cogitating that left him so disorientated with and by modern existence. He frequently talks about dropping out, escaping, going walkabout, a past master at quietly quitting before the term had even been coined. He imagined following his soul's calling and just walking away from the humdrum and what the repercussions of that might be. I

Unknown Speaker  9:31  
remember the times when I was quitting, thinking of quitting in Manitoba, and wondering, is that true? If I walk out of my job, if I walk out of this thing called a career, would I be looked after? If I walked out for the right reasons? Would I be looked after? There is a story that people who did walk out, the Ravens fed them. They went off into the desert, and the Ravens fed them. Would I be looked after? I mean, when I look at the at the laws of gravity, as Newton has elaborated them and spelled them out, I want to say, Are these true of the.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
Universe, and I can, I can, I can, I can, I can go to scientists and he can demonstrate to me how they are true of the universe. Now, is it also true of the universe? Is the universe the kind of place? Is it such a place that if I do walk out and seek the kingdom of God, then all things else should be added unto me? And I was often fascinated by that, is this true of the universe. Would I be an Elijah fed by the Ravens if I did walk out? Will I be looked after? Would Providence look after me if I walk out? So I imagine myself now this day, horse trading with God, standing outside on the road, and I hear the sell all you have give to the pool. So I empty my pockets, all the pockets of my trousers, and all the pockets of my jacket, and I just let everything that's in them fall to the ground. And it isn't only the pockets of my jacket, my coat, that I empty. I empty the pockets of my mind as well. So all my tears and creeds, all my knowing, I empty the lobes of my mind, turning those pockets inside out. So I walk up the road. I have walked out now I walk up the road. I am poor in spirit. Now I'm poor externally and poor inwardly. Now, poor doctrinally and poor materially. And I walk up the road having given all having that, all that I am or have fall to the ground, and five miles up the road, there's a thin wind blowing, and I think, Christ, have I really walked out? And I'm wondering, must I now, never again? Worry where the night falls on me, or where the day breaks on me, where the night falls on me now, where the day breaks in me, must not be a concern of mine. I must no longer ever concern myself with this now, but there's a thin wind blowing as I walk. Continue to walk out, I'm wondering, can I call my own blood now, have I actually walked out? But this thin, cold wind is blowing, and there's a reek of 12, and I sighed. I'll sit down by the reef of 12 for a while. That's my man, born in 1938 and yet asking the questions that we still want answers to today, and actually putting his ideas into practice, tuning in and dropping out, just like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and Gaelic. Alan Ginsberg encouraging us to take a break from it all for a while, from the madness and deception and join him there, sitting by the pile of turf, taking stock, allowing time and space for new insights, new downloads. I am going to leave you with one final musing of his, where he uses mirrors as metaphors for the delusion we surround ourselves with. But before I go, if you want more Moriarty, there's plenty of his talks on YouTube, and the RT radio website has some footage, but the best way of truly engaging with Moriarty is through his books, either the three works of edited extracts published by Lilliput press, the most recent being the brilliant the hut at the edge of the village by Martin Shaw, are his own full length books, some of which can be quite meandering and bewildering unless you dive in deep. These two were published by Lilliput, which has been a champion of John Moriarty for decades. Now, it's Lilliput who put together the recorded talks titled One evening in Eden that I've been able to extract from here. There's also a great memoir by Mary McGillicuddy. Anyway, here's one final clip of him talking about escaping the mirrors and how we can lose ourselves and free ourselves in the world of the night. So we live in this world of mirrors, and it's wonderful sometimes in Connemara to walk out into that dark, into a world from which all mirrors have disappeared, the mirrors of people and ordinary mirrors and the mirrors of lakes, all these mirrors have disappeared. And walking down that road the night behind the night, it isn't a night of stars, and you sense like that. This isn't a night that began with nightfall, and it isn't a night that's going to end with Dawn. It is a deeper kind of darkness altogether. This is a richer, deeper, Stranger kind of darkness. This isn't the darkness that has, that has the ordinary kind of night lights in it.

Unknown Speaker  13:48  
So walking down that road, I mean, I would imagine that if I met Dan Quinn coming up the road, and Dan asked me what time it was like, I would have to say to Dan, the Lord, save us, Dan, I don't know what time it was like. I don't know what time it is at all. Are we in time anymore? Like? Have we left time? I mean, suddenly, if we are in time, it is a time that is older than the time of chronometers. So you know. And if you ask me, who was I, I'd say, Dan. I don't know who am I, because I only know who I am when in a world of mirrors, you know, when mirrors are gone, I don't know who I am at all. But anyway, so it's the wonder and the strangeness of going out into a night, behind the night, into the night when all Mirroring is gone from the world and.