Rolling Rocks
Hello friends - just a little offering before I return in a fortnight to think into the notion of Romanticism, less as a historical movement more a conjuring name for a long mythic road that’s slipped in and out of the centuries for the last couple of thousand years.
What follows here is a short imagining: I keep dreaming of a currach turned on its side atop an Irish beach, about 1600 years ago. The below is a description of what happens as I drift in my slumbering consciousness, it has no claims for historicity.
Afterwards there’s an old Irish folktale and a couple of little Celtic prayers from way, way back. Very personal to the composers they must have been, filled with address, filled with detail.
Very very happy Easter to you. Let all our rocks be rolled away, and something vast emerge.
*
Tell us women of the currach. Sheltered beneath your tipped boat, snug like a song against the whip-winds of the beach. Interrupt our endless talk of horses. Change everything, we are ready. Ossian said you would be coming. We have white gold on our fingers and slim-boned hounds at our side.
Our huts are crammed with skulls as bleached as sails. You talk between tongues, between dialects. Tell us men of the currach, salt-starched beard and merry eyed, with the boom-happy creak of your words. You who sailed the nine waves to bring us stories of the Galilee druid. Of his terrible mercy. Be the first to form his name in spiralling pagan air.
Breathe on us the scent of Yeshua, sweet as the dance of a hundred swallows. Smear his seeing-mud on our death-tired eyes. Every story a smoking herb we inhale into our lungs. We are flung from our bodies with his stories. His words white ponies running in the rain. Our magic people say they knew he would be coming. They try and catch his words in little bronze boxes, clucking and fretting in the grey light.
Tell us of the Immense Mother and of Mary Magdalene and a fish with gold in its mouth. Tell us of the last being first, of corruption overturned, of the surging life of the vine, of Lazarus happenings and visionary eruptions, of a love so strong it turns the stars.
We are blizzard-blue and have need of your words. Tell us of this new Other World so strange, so mad-fresh to our ears. Loosen the chant on this wintering beach, set free the skald-crow from our bellies and shake the nightingale loose in the hut of ourselves.
Stretch us, tender us, toughen us. Tell us of the Lord of the Elements, of the generous host and pummelling freshness of the Holy Spirit. We are parched for this. We shamble to our feet on this Irish beach and we whirl as lifted people to the bright-song of this arriving light.
You who carry a wild goose feather in your belt and a bog-old ember glowing on your storying tongue. You say the new words to us and we curate them in our secret hearts.
Ephphatha – be opened
Ephphatha – be opened
Ephphatha – be opened
Like Elijah, we eat the meat the dark birds bring.
Bring the Ruah – bring the breath.
*
Old Irish Folktale
Conchubar himself, High King, had been scrapping in Connacht and taken a terrible blow to the head, a perilous blow. Fintain the healer had tended the wound, and wrapped Conchubar’s head in gold thread, the same colour as his hair. The maintenance required was a calm disposition for the king, keep the passions on a low heat, no running or riding of horses. Cool minded.
It was seven admirable years he kept this up. He was not caught up in wild dancing, or walloping villains on the jaw. He was discreet in his occasional disturbances, remaining senatorial and diplomatic. The golden thread that bound his wound stayed in place.
But one day of a sudden the sky darkened. The sun disappeared and he saw the moon in the day as if in the midnight. And his heart, the devastation of his heart. The sovereign located a great rip in the innermost temple of himself. He turned to his magic people, teary eyed, and asked what was provoking this awful change:
It is the Galilee arch-druid, the highest, the God-Son, being butchered at this moment, meeting his death. This earth cannot contain its sorrowing.
The king finally lost composure. He started to shake and cradle his gold-bound head.
No, no, no.
Why did he not call for me? For a king?
I would have come to him with the fury of a fighter, the courage of a high champion. And it would have been beautiful too. Beautiful the army that would have protected him, beautiful the overthrowing of his enemies, beautiful the wild shout of my battle cry.
He grabbed his sword and ran into the darkness, weeping and shouting. In an oak grove, as he flailed and attacked no one, his old wound finally overtook him and he fell onto the earth at the exact moment his teacher died.
And how could the druids know of Yeshua? They knew through the movement of stars, the patterning of hare prints, the early fruiting of berries. The earth exulted Yeshua’s arrival if only you knew how to read the hymnal of the wild.
*
Chief of bountiful chiefs,
Please keep me safe
From spell and slander
And trolls up in the dark hills.
Please keep me safe
From the banshee on my back,
Wraith and ghoul camped out
In the dusking glen.
Please keep me safe
From the wolf inside,
It watches as I walk home in
The day-departing light.
*
My face will be washed
In nine rays of the sun,
Like Mary washed her child
In thick and lustrous milk.
My face will have the love-shine,
Mind benevolent and merciful,
Honey-dew on my tongue,
Breath sweet like incense.
I’m going to a bad town,
With bad people there,
But I am a white swan
& a Queen above them.
God is my banner,
I travel with the likeness of deer,
With the likeness of serpent,
Likeness of horse, likeness of king.
The Chief of bountiful chiefs
Will protect me most of all.
Versions Martin Shaw, ©2022
*
A bit of reading:
Carmina Gadelica: Hymns & Incantations - Alexander Carmichael
Gerald Manley Hopkins & the Spell of John Duns Scotus - John Llewelyn
Sun Dancing: A Medieval Vision - Geoffrey Moorhouse
The Religious Songs of Connacht - Douglas Hyde
Conversing with Angels & Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland -
Joseph Falaky Nagy
Happy Easter from St Illtud's, Llantwit Major, where the bells are ringing out this bright glorious morning, (yesterday I was up in the bell tower,) where a 13thC Mary Magdalene is gazing down on the pews, resplendent in red, holding her shimmering pot, daubed on the plaster wall, where the ancient Celtic crosses are quietly holding their own reverie as shafts of golden light hit their knots and scrolls, where once learned holy scribes taught the likes of St David and St Patrick, before he set off in his coracle, some say he was kidnapped from St Illtud's by Irish pirates, or was that the laudenum filled dreamings of Iolo Morganwg, who knew my ancestor in laws in the Vale, (he had his shop in the same street), at the same time Robbie Burns was scratching out poems for my old Grandpa Brown up in Dumfries. Happy Easter from the Golden Vale.
Thanks for your rich words and blessings to chew on. I have just completed a week long pilgrimage to the Holy Island on Friday carrying a cross with a group of Christians all more devout than I. I wanted to walk the old paths of the early Celtic Christian Saints to hear the same songs of the birds and rivers that they would have heard all those years ago. To walk contemplating the deeper story of Easter and Holy Week in the Christian tradition. The tradition & religion that has done more to shape our western worldview than any other this past 1500+ years, for good and ill. There was an original purer message that brought light and hope in a time of darkness building on the riches of the older traditions your dream so powerfully invokes. The blackbird and the bell. It feels as though there is a new weaving needed an invitation to reimagine the future. This Easter in the thin place that is Holy Island that feels more possible. Ephphatha, ephphatha, ephphatha- may we all finds ways to overcome the blockages holding us back individually and collectively at this time.