Live As Large As Homer

The Burning Bush, A Cornwall Angel, & Not Living In A Shrunken World

(Apologies - the final part of Wanderer is next week, not this. I was rabbiting false news last Sunday. )

Friends - I am in Zennor in Cornwall. I’ve come here to recharge before next month’s storytelling tour with Tommy Tiernan. Bit of an in-breath. Zennor is a place of high romance, swooping buzzards and blue, blue sea. Known for spiritual elopements between mermaids and lads of the village. (Read about the Mermaid of Zennor and my last visit in Riders to the Sea.) I have a few biographies of Yeats stashed away with me, preparing for the Dyson lecture at Pembroke College I will be giving on him early next year.

Last evening, around six, I sat outside the Tinners Arms pub and had my supper. An old fella with a stick slowly wandered towards me down the sloped path. He spoke in a long-ago so-sweet northern Irish brogue and asked me if I could “bring the light back”. As I absorbed the profundity of his request I gradually realised he was gesturing to his iPhone.

That bit of business attended to he sat with me and shared some chips. Turned out he was 91 years of age, a psychoanalyst, and still worked three mornings a week. Handsome fellow, wisps of white hair and a good old twinkle. I asked him what the nineties were like. He said the secret to life was to stay present to the moment and, providing you don’t expect the current decade to be just like the last, then you still have plenty to remain interested in. Mr Duncan – that’s his name – had met Seamus Heaney back in the day, and had been at Trinity College. He was erudite, funny and a complete bolt out of the blue. He then recited all of Yeats’s poem ‘When You Are Old’. He teared up slightly, and so did I. He said it was no accident we had met. “However, I mustn’t disturb your food,” he muttered, and the gentleman got up and slowly walked off into the lengthening shadows. Dignified like. Old-world manners. I’d earlier read this quote and felt i’d met the man it describes:

“A bright-eyed old man who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare, he was a great teller of tales and unlike our common romancers knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, fairyland and earth to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world , but knew of no less ample circumstances than did Homer himself.”
W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

This September in particular will be like no other. I will be taking to the lanes of Ireland all the way into October, telling stories with my pal Tommy Tiernan. Six nights a week, with a base we return to most nights on either coast. Tommy is one of the great stand-ups of our time, but with a fierce love of folklore, and is going to be telling stories. The ancient kind. No one has seen him quite do this before. We will both do a set each and see where it takes us. We both love work and the kind of vivid focus that playing intensely can get you. I hope it excites folks. I have a feeling oral storytelling is ready for a great explosion of interest and my fingers are crossed that this helps. There’s a few tickets left here and there, but it’ll soon be sold out and sewn up, including a warm-up night on Inis Oirr, the island you have heard me grind on about endlessly.

Final tickets here: An Evening of Storytelling

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The Burning Bush

Despite all this good stuff, I have been feeling a little flat recently. It comes to us all. Much unrealised. Everything in the rear view mirror. I’m too asleep, bad-tempered, just irritable at the world. James Hillman told me it’s important to just ‘decompose’ every now and then. Don’t make everything alright. Let Saturn and his dry, difficult, Beckett-like thoughts own the house for a minute. Let things get sepia toned. Draw the curtains. Inspect the ruins.

In the words of an old Welsh poem:

What I loved in boyhood, I now hate:
A girl, a stranger, a gray horse.

But love Hillman as I do, I can’t stay there forever (neither did he really, but he worked hard and brilliantly on the legitimacy of melancholy).

And it’s in this kind of mood that God gives me a talking to. Walks me over to my large-font-sized Bible and places his substantial, clean-nailed finger on the story of Moses and God gently sayeth:

Suck it up buttercup.

I’m not sure that quote made it into the Bible, but I’d swear it’s one of God’s frequent subtexts. So I get to reading, and twenty-four hours later – bar several naps – I’m still reading.

So here in Zennor, I’ve been thinking about the Burning Bush.

Some say the Burning Bush is an image of the coming church, others say coming Mary, others coming Yeshua. That it foreshadows all sorts of enormous events. In Orthodoxy a tradition persists that at that moment Moses glimpsed sacred, hidden eternal things, sometimes referred to as God’s Uncreated Energies or Glory. The story in Orthodoxy sometimes has a slightly different title of The Unburnt Bush.