The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  There’s another way to achieve the same result. When I work psychoanalytically, sitting composed in the capacious black leather armchair out of sight behind the individual lying on the couch in my consulting room, I listen very carefully to the word for word meaning of what the person is saying, limiting my understanding to the explicit and primary meaning of the words they’re using: à la lettre is the French phrase, I take it literally. That way I’m able to capture the truth, and hear within them the dream which is determining the identity of their being, and ultimately appointing their destiny. I hear an aspect of what’s being worked out inside according to a set pattern, the string in the necklace which is holding the stones together, the gaps in the wall through which their spirit whistles. But for myself, I find it impossible to speak freely using the stream of consciousness technique, while at the same time attempting to listen to myself with the concentrated direction of mind that’s required in order to punctuate my own discourse, and draw my own attention to the surprising truth of what I’m saying. The way around this is to write it down. And I’ve the cancer to thank for catapulting me into the life of an author, and an ongoing analysis that’s causing my life to grow.

  At the end of a morning’s work writing a book at my desk in Spain, the warm wind wafting over my skin from the wide open windows, the light outside the room begging to participate, I can look back on a text that I’ve written as if it were produced by someone else. There are times when I’ve no knowledge of having written it, and certainly no recognition of the way in which it was wrought and worked out. From my psychoanalytic background, I can see clearly embedded in the prose the unconscious forces that are directing how I write. I can see clearly the desire that animates what I’ve written, and identify as nearly as possible what it is that’s writing me, the voice that carries what I want to say, the true voice of the self.

  That voice comes from within the heart, and it’s the medium through which I can go out beyond the limits of my body and touch another person. It’s so deeply personal that at times I’m conscious of skin on skin, as I rub the tips of my fingers over their nakedness, and then embrace them: it’s akin to having sexual relations with the person to whom I’m speaking. My voice seduces. The intimacy of the tone I use, confined to one person, is the link that binds us together, and warns other people off. It’s also the channel for expressing my desire, the hoarsest craving which can be heard in my voice, animating it, and like the poetic writing in my first book, perused for feelings and motives. My voice licks the person from the pubic bone, up over the stomach and chest to seek out the ear, and tastes them with my tongue. That appraisal suspends them within the boundaries of my voice, overpowers them and brings them to me. The voice is naked, vulnerable, obvious, and it demands a response.

  I saw the power of the voice in action, when Terry and I arrived in Malaga from Italy without our luggage, and we were standing in the walkway outside the door of the plane waiting for Terry’s walking aid. A young Spaniard, powerfully well-built, unshaven, with sleepy, honey-brown eyes arrived up the steps and leaned seductively against the entrance. The scuffed shoes and dirty work clothes he inhabited were in sharp contrast to the unappealing peacock males we’d seen in Italy, with their fitted shirts and tight, white trousers. His deep, softly ruminating ‘Hola …’ rumbled out into the night air like a lasso that ensnared everyone, as he presented himself like an unexpected word to the airhostesses, who were delighted to be surprised by him. They were drawn excitedly towards him in their high heels and elegant Vueling outfits. He didn’t change his position, just moved his head with its mop of curling brown hair ever so slightly forward, to be kissed successively on both cheeks, a bead of perspiration coursing down from his temple.

  As I cut open one of the books with my face on the cover, and I read in a finished form what I’d written so many months before, I was surprised to be filled with an encouraging wonder. I have marvelled at the strangeness of the thoughts that were written there. When my friend, Hedwig, was translating what I’d written into German, although she teaches German to English students at the Goethe Institute, she found that the way that I constructed the language, the piling together of the words and the building up of the emotional sense to be not easy, ‘…. almost as if the realities you were creating belonged to the spiritual world of the divine, somehow independent of the sensate existence …’

  I was taken aback. ‘We had one of those at home, Hedwig, but the back wheels fell off …’

  ‘Ach, so!’

  I’ve always known that I must consciously facilitate and collaborate with the unconscious daemon that has inspired my writing, because it dispenses my destiny. The Spanish have an impish word for it: duende, which captures the idea of performing like a bullfighter, with the uttermost passion and artistic excellence, right on the edge so that an audience is transported. What emerges on screen is neither an unconscious splurge of material unformed as in the wildest, storm tossed Atlantic ocean, nor the dry, flat land in Tarifa extending the shoreline at the southernmost tip of Spain, a conscious ordering that provides a boundary, and which does justice to the writer’s technique. An equitable fusion drawing on both results in a third text which is new and exciting. My alignment is with the words like stars in the sky that I’ve closely inspected, a universe of thought and activity in which I have my being: scripsi scripsi. The linguistic dwelling in which I was led astray and made a fool of, the written testament of my book witnesses to my soul. It’s a purlieu frequented like the traversal of a fugue, a reiteration of complex musical themes which only cry out to be sung.

  The choral music referenced in my first book, in particular the B Minor Mass, was composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, who pared the quills and ruled the paper in his busy study at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, which hosted journeymen and apprentices and the eleven children from his two marriages. He fluently wrote out the fugal parts that have resounded through the rooms of three centuries, to surface as a soundtrack that has permeated my successive texts, which are written on a palimpsest, each one rubbed smooth to make way for the next. But from the writer’s perspective, Bach’s ordered notation has never been erased. And when I pondered how to give voice to such a heartfelt collaboration between Bach’s music and a modern Irish libretto, the vast forces of the Goethe Institute Choir, steeped in its Germanic tradition, and the trained voices of my newscaster friends, Eileen Dunne, Emer O’Kelly and Eamonn Lawlor, as soloists, came readily to mind for a concert reading of my book, to be given at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, in September 2010. The joint project transformed itself into a type of secular Mass, grounded in the fundamental agricultural theme of death and resurrection. The chosen chapters of my memoir which tell the story of my battle with cancer, a dance with death in the bullfighting arena of life, are counterpointed by the choruses which comment on and carry forward the emotion involved. The wresting involved in this, the forcing away by a pulling or twisting, was begun back in 1751, when Bach, as a devout Lutheran, composed a Catholic mass for the Saxon court in Dresden.

  From my own experience of having been in analysis, lying on a couch and looking out through a window as in the Matisse painting of the Conversation, where the framing of realities gives way successively, one upon another, I can see through my computer screen the individual words that collectively point towards an uncharted world of the imagination. They create further realities that influence in turn the words that I’ve written on the screen. These realities ask me to change or to alter the words, the better to correspond with the truth that’s invisibly pushing forward from behind like a figure elbowing through a crowd, a delicate breath of life that’s forever struggling towards the front to have its say in the sunlight. Three times a week, for fifteen or sixteen years, I excavated the psyche before a silent listener. I trained myself to put what was hoarded there on public display through words, so I know that I don’t lack the courage to be a pioneering pilgrim; that’s been my training. However, I also know that the ut
most courage is needed to give the truth of who I am that final push from the wings, and at the same time uphold my being against the backdrop of emotions that are difficult to carry once they’ve been brought forth and named, another polder of land reclaimed from the ocean of unconsciousness.

  The hiccupping of my sobs on the couch would gently be interrupted from behind by a disembodied voice ‘Can you put those feelings into words?’ I baulked at a puzzling request about semantics that was interrupting my reverie. What does the sound and the suggestive power of the words in a poem mean? I knew from the intensity of language and of imagination that my feelings were a genuine expression that didn’t require a commentary, until I realised I was being asked to encase them in words for an analyst, who could only guess at what was going on until I said so, and that even then, the words were porous, and required further elaboration. So my selection of them had to come from the widest possible constellation, and be precise and explicit, but also intimate, reflecting what is innermost. Shakespeare had twenty-one thousand words at his command; Racine used two thousand.

  Nowadays, looking through the screen of the computer, the finality involved in naming is also a consolation, because it puts amorphous feelings beyond question, even beyond the refusal of my denial, that ghostly, elegant sight-hound always at my side, which urgently can set off to another place, away, demonstrating a lack of sound obedience training, heedless of commands to return. There was one occasion in Spain after a bitter argument, when Terry had decided he’d had enough, and he called a halt to our relationship. In the face of Terry’s cold determination, I was helpless. For twenty-four hours I watched my erstwhile partner run wild with freedom, as he prised open the fingers of constraint and carefulness one after the other that had held him fast. He appeared drunk with the potency of his liberation from bondage. The lesson learned caused me to vow then that if ever Terry were to return, I was duty-bound never to deny him his freedom as the distinguishing attribute of his truthful spirit, but to defend its flourishing with my life.

  The naming in the beginning, that mystical, nine-fold repetition of ‘God said …’ in Genesis, has put naming at the centre of literary creation, while at the same time it has given an overwhelming authority to the voice, which has the power to evoke a world out of the deep, silent nothingness. It calls forth a presence out of absence through plucking random words out of the air, and voicing them into the embodied existence of alphabetic signs. Muhammad took that naming a step further when he recited the Koran, because then he was speaking with the direct voice of God. Unlike the reported speech of Genesis, God was present in Muhammad’s voice at the instant he was repeating aloud: the house of purest being. In the face of such poetic assertions which are open to experience, I puzzle over how it could ever be possible for an Irishman to become an unbeliever. The word God derives from the Gaelic root guth, which means voice. And the Irish greeting Dia dhuit invokes God through the warm embrace of saying ‘God be with you!’ Today’s interpretation in a post-Christian context of unbelief preserves at its heart the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of darkness. I have met and been confirmed by the lone voices who bravely sing of hope in the midst of depression and despair, and offer to others fugues of salvation and redemption. These courageous individuals inspired me in my writing, always to enhance, always defend, always to be kind, whilst remaining a heretic in my heart.

  Gloria in Excelsis

  Like a wise man following a star

  I bring my gifts on Christmas day

  To the baby in the crib

  I leave behind anxiety

  Protect the cradled child from life’s pessimism

  If I no longer believe in a divine redeemer

  Surrounded by the smell of pine and evergreens

  I light a silent candle for the dead

  Remembering the candle in the window

  And the long ago welcome home on Christmas Eve

  The children’s story of no room at the inn

  And the superstition of my grown-up sensibilities

  Equally excluded from the humble scene within

  I bring imaginative possibilities to the framing from without

  Of a young mother with her newborn baby

  A practical commitment to the business of the present

  A careful reverence for life continuing on

  Discerning mystery amidst the ordinary straw

  This Christmas day has been born in Bethlehem

  A saviour

  I am my own redeemer

  I whisper a prayer and muster help with hope

  I say to the midwinter gloom of an empty universe

  I am alive thank God

  For those with whom I live and love

  I can try to make things better

  And bring glory to the highest heavens

  Gloria in excelsis

  Part Six

  The Man in the Mirror …

  I spoke to Robbie and Mary on the phone at Christmas. I didn’t ask them anything, because there was nothing that I wanted to know from them. It felt odd, as if I was unable to speak freely, and the conversation limped on awkwardly as a result. My demeanour in holding the receiver away from my ear registered my wariness. They’d have discerned my obvious lack of enthusiasm from the flatness of my voice. It must mean that they won’t feel an urgency to ring me again. I’m sorry it has come to this pass, but there’s a hardness around my heart, a petrification as if the organic material at my centre has been converted into a fossilized form, rock-like and deadened. Terry has urged me to be careful: ‘Make sure that this hardness of spirit isn’t unconfined,’ as though death were a contagious disease. Death has infiltrated my body, and marked me. The surgeon said, ‘We got all of the cancer, except for a piece about the size of my thumb, which was attached.’ Like a ticking bomb, I carry Death around inside me waiting for the cataclysmic boom that signals the horror has happened, and Death is now unconfined.

  My uncle and aunt’s two-handed response to the publication of my book, their refusal to notice, and their subsequent attempt to carry on the pleasantries of life while disregarding what’s uppermost in my mind, is all of one seamless garment that conceals the truth like a dustcover. Were I to go along with their ignorance, their passion for the absence of knowing what I’ve written in the final version of my book, then I’d be like them, emptying out my being of the words that have created me, leaving behind a hollow which could never again be filled, as if I’d swallowed one of my own children. At the very least I’d be an accessory to murder, to suicide, and be consigned to Hades, assenting to live life as eidolon, the hollow image. In the Prado in Madrid, I stood in horror before one of Goya’s Black Pictures, Saturn Devouring His Son. The portrait is of a naked old man with straggling grey hair, whose eyes are bulging out of his head in a voracious frenzy, as he holds up a bloodied, headless baby like a side of ham to the black cavern of his wide-open mouth. The picture is a silent scream of pain from a demented Old Testament prophet, which Goya painted onto the wall of the room he lived in when he was in his mid-seventies, and near to madness. He was expressing himself through the truthful myth of the human condition portrayed in his painting, a vision that I could understand in the place where I’m living. My life story incarnates what’s inassimilable, what’s been repudiated, and by bringing it into collision with another’s foreclosed universe, the impulsion is to reach for a blanketing delusion in order to reconstruct it. I’ve no purchase there, and my sanity depends upon not letting this happen. Were I to go along with this misrecognition, that organisation of negations and affirmations which makes people capable of knowing what it is to misrecognise, then I’d be colluding with ignorance, playing the game of cowboys and Indians from my past, hiding behind the tree trunks on the Mall in Castlebar with my brother – ‘I shot you’ ‘No you didn’t’ – and implicitly accepting that I’ve done wrong. I’d be acknowledging to my aunt and my uncle that they’ve a right to punish me, and that I’m grateful for their forbe
arance in permitting normal business to resume. All of this under the seamless blanket of silence, without anything being said. Or maybe the game of cowboys and Indians that I’m playing with them, is a game of make-believe where death has no place, of skirmishing and of circling the wagons with no deadly intention. I’d like to think that I may have just stumbled across the truth, which has the potential to save me.

  My own battle with reality, deleting and ignoring and carrying on with suitable rearrangements so that I wouldn’t offend or be offended by my suffering, was as insane a dream as that real, rogue cancer cell which precipitated the insult of my truth, a disease which had to be eradicated to save my life. Maybe reality is like that: part of it has to be removed, because there’s no way to make it similar; the core resists incorporation. It’s the trauma that can’t be entreated, or brought to an end by an imaginative speech from me, that resists words so completely because it’s unbounded, and runs on forever like a cancer cell, spreading and colonising: what’s impossible to imagine. I know that if I signalled my participation by the flicker of an eyelid, the slightest crook of a little finger, my personality would be overrun silently in a coup d’état, and I’d be turned to stone, and become catatonic.

  I reproach myself bitterly for being abused, and for inhabiting the relaxed, funny, unguarded part of my personality that’s childlike in its trust because it feels ‘you’re at your granny’s’. I question what part of my story was so harshly unpalatable that it engendered unrelenting hostility: the child who was beaten, or the child who was sexually abused, or was the problem that I broke the comforting silence of the status quo and told my truth? It was difficult to own my story, to shoulder the full burden of it, to dispute with myself about whether it was mine, recognising a degree of distancing through the possessive case, or whether this story was me, without the obfuscating protection of being separate. What I was afraid to feel in the past is the undertow washing back now into the present following the breaking of that wave. I received a letter from Declan in Dublin, who said, ‘People have read your book and said it is too stark, too true, too much. And now that I’ve read it, I have learned more about them than you, and question what they say about all other matters.’ If only I could’ve been helped to carry the truth by the freely given encouragement of more people like him, who can recognise and value what’s true. Instead, I made an approximate equation woven out of words, a verbal ambassador who’s my authorised representative, but his credentials weren’t received.