The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  There are times when I’m occupied with putting up some book shelves in the apartment, changing a plug, or re-potting plants out on the garden balcony, and the actor on stage faces me with an image of my father. He looks wounded from what I’ve said about him in my first book, and I hear his reproach, ‘How could you have done this, Michael?’ And the painful feeling lingers. His face comes near to mine, and I see that the picture I painted is a mirror: it leaves me vulnerable to attack. At the same time I tell myself that courage demands I speak the truth, because I’m defying a faithfulness to the past. I look at myself, and reiterate like a mantra, ‘Self-affirmation, in spite of …’ And the obstacles within take into themselves the gentle, insistent anxiety of doubt, a wavering which I find is not easily entreated.

  I know the codes that regulate behaviour within the family that influence me. It’s a vade mecum I carry around with me in my satchel, a book of rules to which I never have to refer, because I felt that I knew all of them off by heart. If I think to disregard them, I feel anxious, and if I violate them, I know I shall be punished. I’ve a heightened awareness of them in Terry’s company, because when he transgresses familial rules to which he’s indifferent, I feel apprehensive. In all cases, the default setting is fear. My response to these is up at the level of terror, completely out of proportion to what’s happening. It’s a very young one in age, that of the tiny child who’s thunderstruck with fear when faced with a giant who turns into a monster. From the bodily evidence, I can piece together that I must have been terrorised by the potential retributive punishment from my parents and teachers. I remember vividly the many beatings I received from my father. That triangular situation involved my father, my mother, and me. Although I was barely three years old, my father was definitively taking me out of my mother’s sphere of influence, while at the same time he was depriving his wife of enjoying unfettered access to her child. By exercising his power so brutally and beating me to within an inch of my life, he was showing to the both of us that as a rival for her affections, there could be no competition: my father always won. The tensions within that psychological drama are mundane, but the trauma involved seems to have been out of the ordinary.

  Possibly because I grew up elsewhere, still desperate to withdraw from fraught familial situations, those regulations which were inscribed upon my psyche early on weren’t subject to the natural process of change and wearing away, so that I live life within the archetype of a primitive triangulated family, under a feudal system of government. It’s the anxious fee granted to this vassal for maintenance, which I’m fearful is always subject to being withdrawn without warning. Many times Terry has looked into my eyes with a rueful sympathy and said, ‘God, they certainly did a job on you at the Mall in Castlebar!’ I’ve constantly to remind myself that family conversations are historical battlegrounds, dangerous because ownership of the family, certainly where a stranger is concerned, is perpetually in dispute. And yet I feel bound by my surname, and proud of my father’s name.

  Terry is right: a courageous sedition, a going apart is needed of me, to breach the stultifying laws of what’s considered to be acceptable deep down in my psyche. However, the penalty for any infringement of fealty is immediate banishment, at least, that’s how I register it. Once upon a time, an explorer who was three and a quarter years old undertook a bravely impossible journey through the frightening shadows of the forest. He collected his pyjamas from under his pillow, leaving behind all that he had come to know, and went to live with his grandmother in the house next door. He was making his escape from the terrifying, giant woodsman, whose evil axe was following the child and attempting to hack his being in two. When this explorer was older, and before it was too late, the imperative of his soul seems to be that he has to cover the same ground again, this time as an adult with more knowing eyes. It’s an exploration that can only be carried out in the field of words, because the once-upon-a-time of the fairytale is over, and nowhere else exists,

  Terry was reversing into a parking space, when he said, ‘You know that Robbie and your Aunt Mary will never speak to you again if you publish the book. Are you prepared for that?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  He persisted. ‘Are you prepared for that?’ Blue eyes looking straight into mine, momentarily, in the rear-view mirror, locking hard.

  ‘The book has to be punished; there’s no question about that.’

  Terry put his foot on the brake and withdrew the keys. ‘The book has to be punished, or published?’

  I was taken aback. Then we both laughed uproariously by the assent signalled in my Freudian slip: my unconscious thought had told the truth.

  I’ve tended to revere the book that I’ve written as the manifestation in words of a benevolent, wiser personality, who has my best interests at heart. He is pre-eminent above all others, and naturally takes first place. To my mind, he commands unquestioning obedience and devotion. He has certain requirements regarding artistic truth, because words are clearly apprehensible, and I’m able to seize them fearlessly in my hands like bricks, to build a dwelling there for my soul. This person is an emotional taskmaster of late maturity, who makes demands on me to attain the highest possible standards of literary creation. When I’ve achieved those, he requires me to go beyond myself, and to comb through the opening chapters of the text again to take account of the latest chapters I’ve written, and bring all of them into alignment. From the viewpoint of this divine perspective, I can look forward and back in time at my life as it has revealed itself to me through my writing. The text has registered a new amalgam, which opens up further possibilities and also requires a rewriting of what I’d laid down before. As the words slip easily onto the page, they reorganise the memories I have of the past. This sets me up differently inside with regard to my future, which has been altered at a stroke of the keyboard. This is the person who is speaking me, and giving me audible expression.

  That’s the broad street of the imagination in which I can be inaugurated as a domesticated Archangel. The Spanish poet, Ferderico García Lorca, described the scene:

  San Miguel se estabo quieto

  en la alcoba de su torre,

  con las enaguas cuajadas

  de espejitos y entredoses

  St Michael was resting calmly

  in the alcove of his tower,

  his petticoats frozen

  in spangles and lace.

  Bemused members of the town council in their robes of office, the awestruck parish priest on hand to bless the occasion, bourgeois dignitaries and burghers accompanied by the town’s brass band, assembled on the Mall by the steps of the Castlebar Courthouse. They all took favourable omens from the completely unexpected shock of my soaring flight. The Taoiseach, our Prime Minister Enda Kenny, said, ‘This is a book about the stream of being of its author, a meandering down and across the thought-processes of Michael Murphy … Most of all, this is a book about humanity: your humanity … To write as you do is an act of courage in which you open your soul to the reader and to the world.’ But to cause hurt to anyone has never been asked of me. I was conscious when writing the book of handing back to their rightful owners some of the abuses that had been projected onto me; however, in telling the truth as I saw it, I was never consciously malign. What I apprehended as a child could have been inadequately understood. The truth I made of it at the time, and the inferences I drew, account for the childish blind spots that can still cripple me today. But in matters of feeling, the inner child is intuitively accurate. I still scan the environment instinctively for a place of safety. That childish wonder also feeds into the artistic vision of the literary sage, who’s the only person I take into account when writing. His cloak slides comfortably around the shoulders of my father, fitting him out with ease, because it was he who initially held out the coordinates of literary idealism to his eldest son, through his encouragement. I’m grateful for his patronymic gift of humming wings.

  My pioneering Dad walked with me up
to the Mayo County Library one sunny Thursday afternoon, which was a closed half-day in Castlebar when I was about twelve, so that he could sign out for me in front of the librarian a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Saturday morning before, which was the allocated time for youngsters, she’d refused to let me have the book, and I’d to go and place it back on the shelf. Me and my Dad carried the tome home to the Mall as a spoil of war, replete with its strong and definitive Irish words, which had never been banned by the Irish censor because the book had been published abroad. On the way we paid a visit to Brady’s shop by the post office, where Dad bought two slim bars of Cadbury’s chocolate as a celebration, because, as my father told me, ‘the milk in it is good for you!’ As a health professional, my pharmacist father had foresight. He supported the nourishment of my literary education, and the potential for its unknown and subversive effects. James Joyce, the exile, was the first saint who was righteous in my Dad’s eyes. Later on we were to read together Samuel Beckett’s En Attendant Godot, about which we argued, and which didn’t appeal to him. Mum told me he was disappointed with my eventual decision to live my life in the big city, as opposed to small-town Castlebar. But he passionately understood what the stoic Greek philosopher, Epictetus, pointed out. He quoted him for me, that ‘… the well-educated alone are free.’ I was given an education for which my father had made provision and to which he gave his blessing over the ongoing years.

  I’ve paid for this wreath of words with my life’s experience. It’s a garland, a festoon of summer flowers twisted around my neck which others can see, even if they don’t wish to advert to it, smothering the sight with silence. Terry’s mother, Sarah, was having a row with her twin sister, who withheld mention of the beautiful new outfit that Sarah was wearing especially for the visit. Sitting around the fire in the old family homestead in Laois, and sharing afternoon tea, Sarah could stand the silence no longer, and she asked, ‘Well, Nan, what do you think of my rig-out?’

  Nan looked at it, thought for a few seconds while balancing the best china cup and saucer in one hand, and wiping an invisible crumb off her skirt with the other, said even-handedly, ‘Nice, mind you …’

  On the sharpest of learning curves about writing a book, I’ve come to realise that there are countless steps on the path that I’ve chosen. Every one of them has captured me with surprising changes of perspective, and some of those advances have taken me unawares. As I look back, I seem to have lived life before as a blind and deaf mute, whereas now after the consolidation of writing, all of my senses have come alive to the giving of colour and the making of music: Soli Deo gloria, as J. S. Bach wrote on his manuscripts. What I’ve always prized the most are the vibrant colours which shine with light, the Titian blues I saw in the Prado in Madrid, the brightest vermilion reds of Matisse, and his leaping, dancing figures full of joy which now adorn the walls of the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and the sun-disc yellows of Van Gogh cornfields: these are the vivid, translucent tones with which I paint my life. Strolling through the fields of golden sunflowers that surround Castello di Gabbiano outside Florence, where I was attending my friend Ruth’s fiftieth birthday party, I asked Aaron, a ramrod-straight American Navy SEAL in his early thirties to have an experienced word with her fifteen-year-old cousin, Richard.

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  The teenager had landed a summer job in a diving shop in Marbella, and his payment was to be the free dives, about which he was passionate. Aaron stood tall in front of the younger man, and told him that when he was growing up in the States, he always considered life to be a fairground, and that he was determined to take every ride: ‘Live big, young man, live big,’ was what he counselled.

  This second chance at life after being inoculated by Death means that I’m obliged to make my life count for something. Ten days after the prostatectomy, I asked for my laptop to be brought into the hospital. Writing my first book has been the beacon of hope in the desert that served as an inspiration to lead me on: it goes before me, flaming with the divine light of truth. The fire has aroused my creativity. It has enabled me to continue living life in a new way, so that nothing is wasted, not the pain, nor the suffering, nor the hopelessness, not even the silence that I admit I subscribed to for over half a century, and that now I see coming at me again across the desert like a suffocating wall of sand, which tells me I’m outside it, that I’ve breached through. I’ve cleared my throat to speak out, a step forward into the spotlight that serves to leave others behind in the shadows. The shining light can gather together in clarity all the facets of my life, and then reflect outwards the events that have shaped me in order to advance and create something brilliantly new.

  On an earlier visit to my uncle and aunt, I told them, ‘I’m determined to live as healthily as I can, free from the many forms of cancer that beset all of us, each and every one of us. My stance has to be the positive one of gratefulness for the further gift of life that’s been granted to me. My book will be a celebration of that survival, and be more than any of us can envisage at this moment: I’m certain of that.’ After sifting through the words that made up my preliminary manuscript, I was sure, resolved in my mind that it was good, and that my time is now.

  The Daffodil

  For all those who have been touched by cancer.

  I desire to be free as the daffodil

  For daffodils dance in the wind and the rain

  Like children at play laughing and waving

  Celebrating in the green spring

  Those brilliant yellow Lent lilies

  Are risen from the dead after suffering underground

  And offer the promise of a resurrection

  Nodding their assent to the dream of the impossible

  Their glance is more tenuous from having survived the past

  Fearless of tomorrow they live only for today

  And give prodigally blooming in profusion

  Delighting the soul with yellow brightness

  Inviting me courageously onwards towards the summer

  Illuminating little steps with lighted lanterns

  So changed from having lost

  Aware of limits lacking that much more

  I embrace the cost of a new life

  A second time around

  Another chance to flame with love

  The last dance better than before

  I have endured like the daffodil

  I too am above ground

  And mostly I am childishly grateful

  Shortly after the book was published, Robbie was being brutally definitive, stretched out in his living-room armchair, when he turned his head towards me and declared out of the blue, ‘If anybody asks me what I thought of your book, I’ll tell them I haven’t read it.’

  His words were completely unexpected, but my face remained impassive.

  ‘And that will be the truth!’ he added proudly.

  Mary asked, ‘Can I get anybody more tea?’

  The floor gave way beneath me like the trapdoors of a scaffold under a man who was to be hanged. The shock when Robbie’s words hit home rammed underneath the diaphragm as if my uncle physically collided with me. My throat was constricted, and I found it difficult to breathe. The unspoken text was that his version of the truth would supersede mine, because he’d decided not to grant the acknowledgement of reading what I’d written about my life, about the abuses I’d suffered, and the joy of recovery from cancer. And when asked, he was determined to stand over that rejection publicly. My truth was to be ignored, I presume, so that the status quo ante, the state of affairs that existed both within and without the family before the book was written, could prevail. I’d attempted to write myself into that family history from the exile of the house next door, but the present head of the family was going to expunge that contribution through his foreclosure.

  The unyielding front that Robbie had adopted manifested the tight battle formation with shields joined I faced from both my uncle and my aunt. They balanced five metre lances on the
shoulder to keep me out there, hanging, twisting in the wind at the end of a rope, untouchable. Their solidity of union, the phalanx that confronted, meant that once again I no longer belonged. There was no place to go with this: no reply was expected, no rebuttal was possible, there was no way forward out of this situation. In any case, how to express an opinion about something, which simply didn’t exist? Once again there was silence. I and my book counted for nothing, and Robbie was letting me know that brusquely, sweeping us out of the way with a butcher’s broom like offal. I’d been convicted in criminal proceedings by the hanging cohort sitting in judgement, and Robbie had now formally pronounced the sentence. My unforgivable crime was to have published a book.

  As they cheerfully waved me away from their house in Terenure towards the road for home, the impression remaining was that I was a slave bound hand and foot by the oppressive chains of language, taking part in a triumphal procession honouring a victorious general. I felt deeply aggrieved by Robbie’s contempt. Although at the time the thoroughgoing depths of his denunciation hadn’t fully penetrated, when my powers of speech returned somewhere beyond Rathgar village, in the heat of battle I vowed resolutely never to enter their house again. ‘You’re always welcome here,’ they intone regularly, but it’s a conditional welcome. I’m welcome in their home as long as there’s no reference to the book, or to the exciting events that have followed on its publication, about which they’ve never made enquiry. It’s as if there’s no freedom to begin a sentence with the personal pronoun ‘I’ because Robbie has killed that in me.