Page 149 - Gonzaga at 60
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GONZAGA AT SIXTY: A WORK IN PROGRESS
My neighbour, Chrisine Bergin, asked if God was accreions of meaning. Because, like all Art, it makes me
going to get a menion in my pieces. As the shepherd contemporaneous with itself, contemporaneous with
said in the introducion to Dylan Thomas’s 1952 its making and with all that has been since, as well as
Collected Poems, I’d be a damn fool if He didn’t. all that lies between. I hold it in my hand and my hand
I was walking on a hill-side road in Umbria some recognises it.
years ago with my niece, in that strangely audible silence From before history I build skin-covered boats,
of noon, dropping down through oak-scrub woodland to I make ire, cut designs into one piece of stone with
the shore of Lake Trasimeno, where Hannibal destroyed another, cross Europe from the Indus Valley driving
the Roman army in 217B.C. herds of catle, build vast earthworks, ill the land, salute
So many of the local names there are connected the sun, foretell the seasons.
with Pan – Panicale, Panicarola – and I was trying to
explain the derivaion, the God Pan inhabiing the FIVE: We don’t have to invoke deconstrucionist
woods and hidden places, and how the word Panic came theory to establish that there is no real beginning to
from the same source… how contact with Pan, who is anything, any more than there is a middle or an end.
everything, separates people from themselves. In the words of the 19th century American
And all of a sudden, in that heavy silent Umbrian Naturalist, John Burroughs: “We can conceive of life
noon ime, just as in Louth, or the road in Roscommon, only as something constantly becoming. It plays forever
we were touched – surprised – by it. The irst wind of on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in transitu.
the wings of that elaion that is almost fear, that leads us Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your
into meeing with the other us, our other selves….. hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.”
The recognised but undeinable.. And yet: one day in the early ities, one of our
teachers, a young Jesuit named Stephen Redmond,
FOUR: Like everyone else I ind myself buying items came into our classroom on a sunlit aternoon, bubbling
of clothing on my travels, a pair of socks here, a shirt with excitement.
there. And years ater, looking at the socks say, or a He went to long wall blackboard, wrote the word
T-shirt, usually when they’ve just worn through and G-O-D in capital leters, and then drew a large free-
have to be replaced, I ind myself thinking of Berlin, or hand circle round it, with all the conidence, authority,
Philadelphia, or Belfast, and memories of whichever of Gioto, going over it a few imes: And there, he said,
place it was come looding in. circling away – God lives in the staic Now.
Not so much unedited, as edited by themselves. We And all of a sudden I understood everything.
are clothed in memory, crusted with experience, and Eternity, that point where ime itself stops, where we
there’s no throwing it out as you do old socks. are all held in suspension, together, one. Our daily lives
There is another kind of living that goes on parallel are in the everyday now, the nunc luens – but where
with this one; like those mediaeval cosmologies of circles Understanding is, the stone axe-head, is the nunc stans,
of air and heavens and being, with this earth of ours at that staic now, of existence itself, where God – whoever
the centre. God is – exists.
What, for example, of all the pieces of mater we Surprised, almost drowned, by illuminaion, on
accumulate, keep for the duraion of our tenure here, a sunny Dublin aternoon, somewhere in the ities.
both for the meanings they have in themselves, as well as Contemporaneous with everything, just down the road
the meanings that come from whoever gave them to us? from Euclid of Alexandria.
I have a 4,000 year old stone axe-head on my
shelf, beauiful in itself and for the person who gave Macdara Woods
it to me, and a wonderment – a lodestone – in its November 2003
GONZAGA AT SIXTY: A WORK IN PROGRESS
My neighbour, Chrisine Bergin, asked if God was accreions of meaning. Because, like all Art, it makes me
going to get a menion in my pieces. As the shepherd contemporaneous with itself, contemporaneous with
said in the introducion to Dylan Thomas’s 1952 its making and with all that has been since, as well as
Collected Poems, I’d be a damn fool if He didn’t. all that lies between. I hold it in my hand and my hand
I was walking on a hill-side road in Umbria some recognises it.
years ago with my niece, in that strangely audible silence From before history I build skin-covered boats,
of noon, dropping down through oak-scrub woodland to I make ire, cut designs into one piece of stone with
the shore of Lake Trasimeno, where Hannibal destroyed another, cross Europe from the Indus Valley driving
the Roman army in 217B.C. herds of catle, build vast earthworks, ill the land, salute
So many of the local names there are connected the sun, foretell the seasons.
with Pan – Panicale, Panicarola – and I was trying to
explain the derivaion, the God Pan inhabiing the FIVE: We don’t have to invoke deconstrucionist
woods and hidden places, and how the word Panic came theory to establish that there is no real beginning to
from the same source… how contact with Pan, who is anything, any more than there is a middle or an end.
everything, separates people from themselves. In the words of the 19th century American
And all of a sudden, in that heavy silent Umbrian Naturalist, John Burroughs: “We can conceive of life
noon ime, just as in Louth, or the road in Roscommon, only as something constantly becoming. It plays forever
we were touched – surprised – by it. The irst wind of on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in transitu.
the wings of that elaion that is almost fear, that leads us Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your
into meeing with the other us, our other selves….. hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.”
The recognised but undeinable.. And yet: one day in the early ities, one of our
teachers, a young Jesuit named Stephen Redmond,
FOUR: Like everyone else I ind myself buying items came into our classroom on a sunlit aternoon, bubbling
of clothing on my travels, a pair of socks here, a shirt with excitement.
there. And years ater, looking at the socks say, or a He went to long wall blackboard, wrote the word
T-shirt, usually when they’ve just worn through and G-O-D in capital leters, and then drew a large free-
have to be replaced, I ind myself thinking of Berlin, or hand circle round it, with all the conidence, authority,
Philadelphia, or Belfast, and memories of whichever of Gioto, going over it a few imes: And there, he said,
place it was come looding in. circling away – God lives in the staic Now.
Not so much unedited, as edited by themselves. We And all of a sudden I understood everything.
are clothed in memory, crusted with experience, and Eternity, that point where ime itself stops, where we
there’s no throwing it out as you do old socks. are all held in suspension, together, one. Our daily lives
There is another kind of living that goes on parallel are in the everyday now, the nunc luens – but where
with this one; like those mediaeval cosmologies of circles Understanding is, the stone axe-head, is the nunc stans,
of air and heavens and being, with this earth of ours at that staic now, of existence itself, where God – whoever
the centre. God is – exists.
What, for example, of all the pieces of mater we Surprised, almost drowned, by illuminaion, on
accumulate, keep for the duraion of our tenure here, a sunny Dublin aternoon, somewhere in the ities.
both for the meanings they have in themselves, as well as Contemporaneous with everything, just down the road
the meanings that come from whoever gave them to us? from Euclid of Alexandria.
I have a 4,000 year old stone axe-head on my
shelf, beauiful in itself and for the person who gave Macdara Woods
it to me, and a wonderment – a lodestone – in its November 2003
