The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  In the forgotten language of the church, the Old Latin gnarus means knowing or skilled, so that this masterly conversation is always completed on the most verbally literal level, which can alter the complexion of what I want to express. I’m led on through unexpected pathways to say what I wouldn’t have said otherwise, through paying attention to the formal characteristics of the words that materialise. The offering of such interpretations has the effect of subverting the conscious meaning of what I want to say, hearing through different emphases what pushes forward from the unconscious to be heard at the same time in a reverberating choral polyphony. Confirmation that the dislocation is correct is more music, a further efflorescence of narrative, the sudden blossoming of living words which continue to adorn the fine and lustrous silks of my soul like wild flowers enchanting my wayside, inviting me to pursue a path that’s opening up before me through the living thicket of language.

  For the speech of a writer comes from elsewhere, the other place: radically other, like the apparition of the Holy Spirit in Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ, a white dove hovering with widespread wings invisible to all but the viewer, like a white afterthought compressed between the Father and the Son, or a sudden slice of gleaming white light on the surface of the sea at the horizon uniting the sky with the ocean, an inspiring sight with which I’m familiar from the terrace in La Mairena. It staggers my steps with shock and upsets the direction of my compass. After having been dazzled by such a divine revelation of the word that has escaped incorporation up to now, it’s no longer possible to approach the everyday routine with equanimity. The feeling is that of an Irish monk in exile on the continent, inscribing beautiful letters of relative application onto a fine parchment prepared from the skin of a calf. I paint decorations, naturally coloured by ochres and iron oxides, with hog’s bristle, sometimes with a sable brush, so that the flapping of ghostly wing beats can be heard to swoosh through my text eternally.

  The light is a constant in the south of Spain. It never loses its surprising intensity, painting the clear blue skies with a highly glossed enamel finish around the green leaves of gnarled Mediterranean oaks, their terracotta trunks denuded of cork bark. The heat lies heavy during those somnolent afternoons in midsummer, when the breath of the wind has been sucked out of the dry air, and the white marble tiles on the terrace, baking under the unrelenting sun, scald the soles of the feet. At such times, I shelter on top of a rumpled bed sheet and doze, with the door to the balcony flung open to encourage the gentlest breeze, which sometimes flaps open the curtains in a blinding flash of light to sidle sideways into the bedroom like a bashful ghost. The Spanish siesta is one of life’s sybaritic pleasures to be savoured with gratitude, especially since I rise at four o’clock in the cool of the early morning to write at my desk. Then the levante, the fresh easterly wind, blows through the open windows of the apartment, dispersing the stagnant warmth with the smell of the sunburnt grasses and caressing my skin with coolness, before a lightening at the horizon throws the black silhouette of a tree outside the balcony into relief, heralding the majestic arrival of the sun, to the sudden hissing accompaniment of the water sprinklers in the gardens.

  At home on my mountaintop in Spain, golden light spilling out from the computer screen at four in the morning to form an illuminated cocoon in the velvet darkness, I accept the opening ‘How are you?’ question symbolically as a deceptive verbal feint, an initial flash of yellow and magenta with the matador’s capote as the powerful black bull charges into the arena. I toss off the gesture without paying undue attention to the impaling power of words. For I also hear that question as the opening ritual of writing, which has to do with the music, with feeling, and the strong incandescent flame of pure being. Always, I’m wary of the power of words. Without adverting consciously to the collective heritage of scratching runes into bark, when the characters were once believed to have a magical significance that possessed supernatural powers to influence events, today I know from my psychoanalytic experience that the ancestors had divined the truth. In an age of unbelief, I can profess those letters up there on my computer screen to be meaningless. But from personal experience of dealing with people who deliberately set out to undermine, I know that when letters are written onto flesh by cruel aggressors, often repeated over time, words can wound and cripple.

  I abstain from speech when somebody shocks me with the power of an unexpected verbal attack, because momentarily I’m blown off my feet by the rotating winds which propel their assault. When I remember, I’ve been able to begin a sentence with an ‘I feel …’, which names the situation I find myself in, even though it leaves me completely exposed to the other’s judgement. ‘I feel …’ seems to place the devastation in a category beyond argument, which can momentarily discomfit the attacker. It gives me time to gather my resources, and face the attacker head-on. But like the sudden thundering forward of the bull, a terrible storm of aggression can erupt at any moment and engulf the finest thread of being, which I know to be tenuous. I tread lightly and live life warily, lest I suddenly lose it, or have being robbed from me, or malignly have it cut off in a castration with a vivid red slash of the sharpest horns. I’ve slung the cape over my shoulder as I stride out towards the centre of the arena, making a statement to the spectators that I’m prepared to try my hardest in the porta gayola, the opening move where courageously I drop to my knees and invite the bull into the arena with no knowledge of how it will behave; but still I’m wary.

  I comprehend the ‘How are you?’ question as an invitation to write down anything that occurs to me, uncensored. Freud used the word Einfall for this, literally, what falls into the mind when conscious control is loosened, and unconscious mental processes are allowed to take over so that the full-throated voice can join in the singing of life’s symphony. The freedom of pure being is what it engenders; that’s been my experience. The strong masculinity of machismo, the swagger of that dance with death in the arena without apparent concern for personal safety, and the total absorption in the verbal play of the job in hand, all of these stylish male qualities are in evidence as I settle my pumps into the sand, and with the arched back of a matador, calmly bring forward my position, confidently exposing my groin to gain ground.

  I express thankfulness for having the question in the first place, and its implication of teasing out entanglements, as I settle myself into the wooden carver chair in front of the desk, and take a sip of the strongest coffee, before I begin to tap at the keyboard of the computer, writing out whatever is on my mind. In recounting the happenings and interactions of my days along those meandering byroads of free association that I remember from my childhood in Castlebar, rather than by taking the direct motorways of reasoning and the way that I live now, I’m also recording who I am in a more fulfilling and complete manner. The circular thought processes resemble the delicate way that I lick at an ice-cream cone, turning it round and around to reveal the different layers to my tongue, a habit almost unbeknownst, until eventually I find myself sucking up the core.

  I can be shaken by the sudden truth of what I can uncover through typing a slip of the tongue, or by bringing out a phrase which leaves me hoisted on an ambiguity, or blocked by a pause, a forgetting. All of those crumpling, melting accidents that fall down along the side of the cone in drops leave stains upon my clothes. I always terminate the keyboard session early after such a revelatory windfall and walk away from the desk, out onto the sunlit terrace to gaze at the distant sea, readjusting my eyes, fixing the bounds of what I say with the mistake. Truth is written up there behind me on the screen in a burst of flaring light, until finally the computer dies, and fades into sleep mode; but always the vision returns to haunt the imagination. Although my peregrination, my journey abroad wandered from what was right, what I’ve written is something I never could have envisaged, that never would have existed in time before now: it’s new, it’s a sly visit from the future, and beyond price. Just as the reader acting in my place will subs
titute his own future when confronted with a past that was created in this book. He too will live eternally, creating more amalgams which walk invisibly among men like the angels who inhabit a dream, a reality I’ve come to honour from my work as a psychoanalyst.

  Gerald Byrne, an artist friend who’s a self-taught master of his craft, told me over coffee in his ultra-modern kitchen in Dalkey, that when he’s working on a painting en plein air, gusts of wind buffeting the canvas, or a sudden squall of rain, cause unintentional markings, a desire or a feeling from nature that he incorporates without repair into his finished work, to honour the unplanned and inexplicable aspects of life that affect him, as much as do the planned and intentional ones. The remembrance of my friend’s casual remark continues to lift my spirits, and I feel confirmed in my own strange, aleatory, creative method which also depends on the throw of a dice.

  Now is a three-lettered word that I experience joyfully, shining up there on the computer screen in Spain, like a triptych painting I’d seen in Germany. In Weimar’s Herderkirche, I’d stood in wonderment before a famous Crucifixion, which is surrounded on either side by scenes from the Old Testament dealing with God the Father, and the New Testament dealing with God the Son. The guide explained that the painting was begun by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and brought to completion by his son, and the father’s substitute self, Lucas Cranach the younger. I saw two wing panels depicting the past and the future folding over that larger central one: they apply to the time directly preceding and to the time directly following this central, present moment of mysterious redemption, when all of time is changed in an instant by the direct intervention of God.

  While the painting reflects a sixteenth-century framework of ideas and beliefs through which the Cranachs interpreted their world, I reflected that the central moment of pure being, the now, that fragile pointillist point which they venerated, is all that we have; although more often than not, I’m occupied elsewhere, off somewhere else, preoccupied in the margins of the painting, out on the edge in a different time zone. I’ve been made more conscious of the value of this gift of immediacy, this moment of pure being, since it was nearly taken away from me by the cancer. I turn in my chair and lift the heavy dictionary off the back of the couch and consult volume two. I discover that it was from the open wide wingspan embrace of the earlier word now that issued the later formation meaning of the word new, meaning what was recently brought into being, or nowish. It’s a father and son concept that melds again into the variant now in the sense of newish.

  Out on the terrace in tee-shirt and shorts, the sun stings the flesh of my face, and scorches my arms and my legs. Down below, beyond the parched land, the sea is glittering in the sharp morning light. I’ve come to realise that every word shines with this same, wavering angelic light. Words are shape-shifting and mercurial. They can change perspective as they resonate endlessly across the generations. But always they’re grounded in the momentary present tense of the speaking voice which I can hear in my head, or in the written voice which I read from my computer screen, as I advance to gain ground on myself by giving a clear and detailed account so that I can feel justified. The panoramic view from the terrace of the Mijas mountains on the left, all the way around to the Rock of Gibraltar, hidden now in the August mist, not yet burnt off by the fierce rays of the summer sun, nourishes my spirit with its peace and tranquillity. Down in the plain, the rising heat is visible as the finest, almost inconspicuous mist. A declaration of righteousness will ensue from having written out the poem of my life with as much truthfulness as I can muster, so that it expresses God’s creation. The hope implicit in the ‘How are you?’ question is that like the Cranachs, I too shall create a work of art which has merit, and saves. I turn and go back inside the pleasant coolness, to write some more.

  On the computer screen, words become the intricately worked ornamental screen glittering with gold leaf above and behind an altar where today I take communion. Whenever I worship there, I read the portrait I’m painting like Hebrew from right to left, and mark the passage into existence of a particular word, a phrase, even a sentence. Writing has inverted how I experience time, where events now happen for me in reverse. The words that I create at the computer read from an invisible state of potentiality in the future, right through a coming to be on the computer screen in the present, and after that composition, they move on into the final state of a printed existence on paper in the past. Like looking in a mirror, I face myself in this present moment of being, with the future and the past to my right and to my left. The mirror has reversed how I live my life from day to day, where it will be the future, and not the past, which will come for me in the end of time. So that when I confront myself in the moment of writing, on either side of me there’s both a past and a future together, and there’s no difference between them: truly, the now is a moment of the purest being, whose ripples extend outwards into a circular eternity. As a child, I used to solemnly recite a bedtime prayer to the four evangelists:

  There are four corners on my bed

  There are four angels round my head

  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

  God bless the bed that I lie on.

  More properly, it echoes the ancient Hebrew prayer to the four archangels: ‘In the name of the Lord God of Israel, may Michael be at my right hand, Gabriel at my left, Uriel before me, Raphael behind me, and the Shekhinah of God above my head.’ Shekhinah is the radiant presence of God, a form of feminine joy, a jouissance that’s connected to prophesy and creativity.

  Over time I’ve come to realise that the priestly power of the writer derives from the fusion of the now with the new. I raise up a chalice encrusted with precious jewels overflowing with the fruit of the vine before the painted retable, and hold upright between my thumb and forefinger a host of unleavened bread above the golden cup, as I pronounce the mysterious words of transubstantiation, eternal words of great age which are never to be brought to an end. This is a holy Sabbath meal. In the primitive past of Genesis, God spoke the world into existence: his voice created the world. As I type on my keyboard, I’m aware of bringing forward that creation, speaking words that are unconsciously inspired by His breath and giving them form, writing them down and into existence. God sometimes wrestles me to the ground with the turbulent emotion that unexpectedly leaps upon me from what I’ve written, arching out of the dark like a lithe and unruly archangel. Held warmly like a protesting child in his firmly loving embrace until I yield, I realise the disturbance will have landed me into the truth. It seems strange to read it up there before me in all of its blinding glory, an alien being of light, eminent above all others, a new perspective at odds with the established ego view that I’ve had of myself until now.

  At the end of the session, I read and re-read what I’ve written. I give it the time for seeing, yet more time for understanding, and then accord to what I’ve written the length of time required to take the many shining facets of this new information on board in order to act upon them, and finally, to do something about it. The confrontation has assigned impossibly widespread limits, which call for a re-arrangement of the parameters of my being to incorporate what has just been announced: ‘Be it done unto me, according to thy word!’ When I leave the study and enter the loggia of the terrace, I’m like a participant in a Fra Angelico fresco. Although who I am may look the same, I’ve become a different person, substantially changed, a humbled virgin possessed of God, having been ravished by the impulse of his muscular archangel. He bore me apart, covered me by the powerful propulsion of his stripy wings. How I am transported now in a new and unconscious direction, which is other than the old destination I’d consciously set for myself.

  I always marvel that the words are already there to hand. They’re a given, and don’t have to be newly coined. Like ghostly presences, it’s possible to pluck them out of the air and have them materialise on the tongue or on the screen. They have their own personalities, directing thoughts along specified pathways unless they�
�re combined in a poetic way, which causes them to break open and effloresce. Then they can better encapsulate the overflow of the spirit, because like the dry stone walls in the west of Ireland where I come from, the gaps in precision give a freedom to whistle through like the wind and approximate, without collapsing the edifice. There’s room to manoeuvre, building up the stones by hand one after the other, choosing them carefully for their outward form, creating a necklace of liminal shapes across the landscape that protects and exposes, conceals and reveals, that both lies and tells the truth at the same time. The apparent distancing involved in this poetic approach places more creativity into my hands. It allows me to express myself more fully that ever I could through prose, where I’m subjected to the channelling effect of the words on offer, and limited further by the set order in which these words have to be spoken, always with an eye to the future conclusion. By combining them in a manner which disrupts the normal sequencing, whereby some of the words in a sentence are no longer arranged logically or even comprehensibly, it’s possible to allude to unpredictable concepts that are outside the scope of the conventional, outside of space and time. I communicate in a new and more complete way, and say things which I’ve never said before, never could have dreamed possible or true.