The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  What I didn’t know at the time, what Aengus didn’t tell me immediately, was that his joy in life had been robbed from him, and his hope, so important for recovery from cancer, had been stolen by that callous, throwaway remark ‘… the disease is progressing’, which hadn’t sought to match where the patient was at. Aengus had never suffered from denial. As a newspaperman he could accept the horror of reality, and at times he chose to escape from it as well. But now, there was to be no escape from so profound a loss of hope, which attacked at the roots his soaring, human spirit.

  ‘I’m trying to live with what I’ve got,’ was what Aengus had said. I came to value his remarks for their wisdom, and his open acceptance of the human nature which they displayed. He quoted Kant: ‘“The crooked timber of humanity can never be made straight.” I think Marx and the Church both got it wrong on the perfectibility of the human being: it can’t be done,’ was another of his conclusions. Aengus was processing a lifetime of experience, the good and the bad, which he embraced even-handedly. I realised that I was in a very privileged position to have such access to him. The narrative we constructed over several visits had the feel of one long, extended metaphor. Aengus described it to me as ‘a meditation’. Our conversation was picked up where it had left off, coloured only by the mood of the particular afternoon. It was a type of poem, where the chosen words resonated widely through many layers of experience, so that the truth in all of its fullness was built up stroke by delicate stroke, a portrait presented with warmth and great gentleness. Veritas stood framed in the window, looking out shyly from behind a lace curtain of words, which she was in the process of pulling aside, and she was wonderfully beautiful.

  Aengus ranged widely over the present and his past, shining a beam with exquisite felicity on what he chose to show me. When he talked about his meetings with the British actor Oliver Reed, he described him as being ‘an aristocrat, who constructed his bad boy persona purely for the media. He was a most sensitive man.’ On another occasion, Aengus said ‘I don’t believe those various accounts you hear in Dublin about drinking sessions in Paris with Samuel Beckett. He was dedicated to his writing. Beckett was an intensely private man, a recluse.’ Tenderly over time, Aengus was taking me into his confidence, and telling me about himself through the anecdotes and the stories that he told about other people. ‘What is your next book about, Michael?’

  ‘I’ve written about those who appeared in my first book, and brought their stories up to date.’

  ‘I have many stories, but they’re peripheral to the main events. I was never able to write a book myself, although I tried.’ He thought for a moment, and then stated, ‘You can write about this, if you like,’ and he smiled at me, affectionately. At the time, I didn’t know what he was asking me, and I didn’t want to probe. We’d been discussing Joyce earlier, ‘A very selfish, unsympathetic man, although his short story, ‘The Dead’, is a masterpiece,’ and it crossed my mind that Aengus had in mind for me a secretarial role along the lines that Beckett had played for Joyce, and that he was giving me permission to write his biography. It was a formulation of the truth, that our important work was always ancillary to the resolute, loving endurance with which Anne carried him every day. Hers was the conversation which would continue on. Aengus told me that his wife was exceptionally in London, for the first overnight she’d spent away from his side. The visit was for a theatre opening: her daughter Nancy had a new play on in the Bush. ‘Do you know Anne?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve spoken on the phone,’ I admitted.

  ‘She’s a wonderful woman!’

  Aengus had met many well-known figures in the course of his long, twenty-eight-year career at the helm. ‘Being editor must have been a very pressurising job?’

  ‘It was at times, particularly in the early days, from governments, and from individuals. Hector Legge was editor for thirty-one years. He sent me a note when I was appointed that I wouldn’t beat his record.’ Aengus became thoughtful for a moment. He looked over at me from the bed and sought my eyes. ‘I’m going to say something now that I’ve never said before, to anyone, least of all to myself. I don’t think that I’ll ever be editor again.’

  I was seated in the armchair by his bed, with my two hands resting down over the armrests. I didn’t move, fully concentrated on being calm in order to hear what he had to say.

  He continued, ‘It’s very peaceful, don’t you think?’ For a cancer ward in a busy hospital, suddenly there was no noise at all. We savoured the peace, as the reverberating impact of the conclusion Aengus had reached affected both of us profoundly, and changed the solemn atmosphere in the room so that it became noticeably lighter. At that moment, the evening sun came out from behind the barrier of the clouds and streamed into the room. Aengus was letting go, and accepting the possibility of his retirement. ‘D’you know ‘London Snow’ by Robert Bridges? He also had lung disease.’ And he began to recite:

  When men were all asleep the snow came flying,

  In large white flakes falling on the city brown …

  Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs falling;

  Lazily and incessantly floating down and down …

  He paused. ‘Isn’t that a wonderful adjective “brown” that Bridges employs, not black or grey, but brown.’ He was silent again. ‘I think we understand each other, Michael.’ And he smiled at me, crinkling up his eyes, secure that like the gallant knights of old, we’d forged a faithfulness to the truth in the sacred stillness of Aengus’s room, which would see us through to better days. ‘This lunchtime, I had a golden sleep,’ he said, ‘it was recuperative.’

  The following morning at the psychoanalytic practice during a break between clients, Terry called me urgently, flinging open the door of his consulting room, and he approached me holding up his iPhone on loudspeaker mode. ‘Listen!’ he commanded. It was Anne’s voice from London airport. ‘Aengus died an hour ago. He had his shower early, and he was sitting out on his chair when he suddenly leaned forward. They got him back onto the bed, and when Dr Crown asked him, “Are you alright, Aengus?” He said he was, and he just died.’

  I wept, overwhelmed that Aengus was no longer alive, that he was now at one with the sudden silence. He’d been so at peace yesterday afternoon that we’d talked for over an hour and twenty minutes: it was completely absorbing. And I was to see him again on Thursday. I’d left the whole afternoon free for him, I’d even put it into my diary. Now it was over.

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ said Terry.

  ‘I found it very difficult,’ I sobbed. ‘On the way into the hospital, I’d play Bach in the car to calm myself down, and put my mind in order. I’d sit listening to the music in the car in the underground car park until it was time to take the lift to the third floor, and the oncology ward. I never knew what to expect when I’d knock on the door, how he’d be, who’d be there, whether he’d remembered. On one afternoon recently, Aengus was asleep, and when he was woken up by his youngest son, Stephen, to “Michael is here,” I overheard him say from outside the door “I was expecting him on Thursday?” “But today is Thursday,” was the reply. And I walked in, and he apologised to me several times for sleeping. Dreadful, dreadful. I felt I was imposing. Did he feel he had to see me? The indignity of bloody cancer! His son, Dion, said to me yesterday in the corridor that it’s so unfair, and all I could do was repeat what he said, so unfair. It was like visiting my brother Kie in hospital, when he was dying: it brought it all back. I found the emotional demands very troubling. What must it have been like for Aengus? He was such a courageous man, he never complained: he even died like a gentleman … I said “I’ll see you again on Thursday,” and he said, “I don’t know whether I’ll be here, or at home.” And I gave him my word, “Don’t you worry, I’ll find you Aengus, wherever you are.” I am so, so sorry that he’s dead, really sorry, about all of it.’

  And Aengus said:

  For now the doors are open, and war is waged with snow;

  And trains of
sombre men, past tale of number,

  Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go;

  But even for them awhile no cares encumber

  Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,

  The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber

  At the sight of beauty that greets them …

  Part Fourteen

  A Poem for Terry

  ‘Not a wedding!’ corrected Terry.

  I offered as a riposte: ‘You are cordially invited to “not a wedding.”’

  ‘I’d thought I’d go along to a hatch, and sign,’ he said, referring to our civil partnership looming up in June: yet another solution to an Irish problem, this time how not to call a gay union a wedding. We’d queued on the path in the spring downpour outside Teddy’s in Dun Laoghaire for an ice-cream, and when Terry arrived at the window, he asked the girl, ‘Could I have a Civil Partnership, please?’ As she looked nonplussed, to smothered laughter we settled for two 99s.

  Wedding is an old word, over a thousand years old. It means to pledge or to covenant: it’s an engagement to do something, which has within its utterance the idea of a solemn agreement, a promise or a guarantee. Perhaps it does fit the vows criteria of a civil partnership ceremony after all. We’d made an appointment with the registrar to give notification of our intention three months in advance. She was a warm woman, who gently took us through the form filling with a minimum of fuss. One of the impediments to a civil partnership turned out to be heterosexuality, an unexpected and contradictory outcome which we found delightfully ironic, and we chuckled over it. The registrar informed us that we were the 217th couple to apply for a civil partnership in Ireland, and we left her office hoping that she’d be the one to perform the ceremony on the most suitable of the two available days which were offered to us, Tuesday, 14 June 2011. The choice was dictated by the holiday plans of our witnesses, our friends Barbara and Tiernan, who had planned their holidays for later that month.

  In the kitchen, around their generous dinner table, we’d been listening to them with an increasing sense of disjunction, as they fondly recalled their wedding day in Slane Castle, at a time when Dundalk girls held their receptions in the Ballymascanlon Hotel. It sounded to have been a very elaborate affair attended by many business associates of Barbara’s father. We weren’t able to relate to it, possibly because we don’t go to weddings. They got married in 1986, the year after Terry and I had met at the Rutland Centre, where I was making a television documentary about an addiction treatment centre for RTÉ. Properly, Barbara pointed out: ‘At your stage in life—’

  ‘Old!’ I interrupted drily.

  ‘—you don’t have to do it that way. I think the weddings we’ve most enjoyed over the years have been those where the couple were obviously mad about each other, and the people who were there really wished them well.’ She was slicing up a banoffee pie that she’d taken out of the fridge. ‘Warm,’ she concluded briskly, ‘that’s what it was, we went away with the warmth that we’d received that day.’ Honey, the Labrador lying stretched out on the tiles under the table, farted viciously. ‘Out!’ yelled Tiernan, scraping back the chair and thrusting open the patio door, ‘Out: bold dog!’

  Our headlamps swept over Barbara and Tiernan waving at the gate, I beeped the horn and saluted, heading for home, subdued within the silent swishing of the car. Terry and I have lived together for twenty-six years. We know every step of the road, every elaboration of the saga that we’ve constructed in each other’s company. Our assessment comes from the perspective of that experience. ‘I want a quiet affair,’ I murmured, glancing over at Terry.

  He squeezed my arm. ‘You need to be more robust,’ he said. ‘He was annoyed that you wanted the spare iPhone, which to be fair I’d promised to him.’ Then, ‘Will you ever use that phone?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘We’re not getting married,’ Terry stated, ‘and we don’t have to use the heterosexual model of a reception. And anyway, I’m a socialist.’

  I looked across at him.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the road!’

  ‘So you won’t be wearing a dickey-bow, then?’

  Terry carries off a bow tie very well.

  A client of mine said she’d a ticket to go and hear the Dalai Lama. ‘D’you mind me asking,’ she said, ‘what d’you believe in?’

  ‘I believe in the goodness of human beings.’ The answer surprised me, but since it was given within the open dynamic of a psychoanalytic session, I valued the statement as the truth. We’d been watching a BBC Panorama programme about Iran on television last night, a theocracy where gang rape is used as an instrument of torture by the security forces. A young homosexual man who’s now living in Turkey spoke about the all-encompassing helplessness and despair he was plunged into from such repeated, inhuman treatment. He was incarcerated in an Iranian jail by the security forces because of his sexuality. A young woman now living in Norway told of the number of operations she’d undergone for the unspeakable pain, following the physical and emotional damage that her Iranian captors did to her. I reflected that terror bubbled just below the fragile surface of our civilisation, like magma waiting to explode.

  I wondered at the revolutionary social changes that had taken place in Ireland over the past twenty years, an apparent liberalisation of outlook that had replaced the catholic theocracy of a failed and abusive Ireland, and questioned how far those changes had penetrated beneath the surface skin of our culture, and whether they were trustworthy and would hold. Our Taoiseach, the Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who had eruditely launched my book in the Castlebar library in a relaxed performance before his home crowd, stood up in the Dáil, the Irish Parliament, and declaimed, ‘For the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago – not three decades ago … The rape and torture of children was downplayed or “managed” to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and reputation.’

  We got the merest hint of the terror in the unanticipated robbery of our suitcases from the hire car at Fiumicino Airport in Rome, an assault which floored us with shock. But I can imagine that when evil rises from out of the depths to incarnate in the blind beliefs of our fellow human beings, the non-negotiable drunkenness of being filled with such power, with the psychotic certainty of righteousness, can ultimately drive some people to kill those with an opposing point of view. No feeling of empathy quickens in their veins, even though the eternal and reverberating effect of murder nullifies our shared humanity. I too experienced the effects of a symbolic murder in relation to my uncle and aunt: first being murdered, and then, murdering in my turn. The evil that lurks within my soul is but a step away, as is the reaction of guilt.

  After the diagnosis of prostate cancer and the subsequent prostatectomy, I often feel that I live my life on borrowed time, and that a day of reckoning is a sudden early-morning knock on the door away when my bail will be revoked. Kafka captured the horror of this reality in the prescient, opening lines of The Trial: ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.’ The theft of our belongings in Rome proves that the protective middle-class certainties I surround myself with and live within are a vulnerable illusion.

  Since the horror of cancer, I never feel safe anymore. The television news about the Arab Spring, those brave young people who are defying the authorities in the Middle East, teaches me how simply an entire people can be held captive by the autocratic few. Jung’s in-depth analysis of the problem was accurate: ‘It is merely incumbent on us to choose the master we wish to serve, so that his service shall be our safeguard against being mastered by the “other” whom we have not chosen.” Yet, I believe in the goodness of my fellow human beings, because daily I experience a reaching out in kindness and fellow-feeling from Terry, with whom I feel totally secure. However, I�
��m also cognizant from my work with clients that from time to time I feel I’ve to explain to them about the hole that exists in our personalities. We’ve a large cushion which we place over the opening that leads to the abyss. It smothers the unbearable harshness of the real, and prevents us from falling through. I know from experience that sometimes, as in the depression that both Aengus and I had suffered from, the cushion is pulled out from under us, and then we simply drop through the hole and fall forever. After the devastating shock from cancer, which threatened to unravel completely the widening rent in the webbing of my existence, I had to take anti-depressives for a period to balance my equilibrium, until such time as my natural composure returned. Like the staples in my belly after the prostatectomy, the medication held that split together, and kept the insanity at bay, while I was healing.