Nostos

Nostos is one of the great books of the new century, and, as Aidan Carl Matthews says, 'the greatest Irish book since Ulysses'. John Moriarty left a promising career in English literature at the University of Manitoba in 1971 to find his bush soul, returning to his native Connemara, where he worked as a gardener and in hotels while gradually maturing and refining the works that will be his lasting literary legacy. The reason why Nostos is a great work of literature is that Moriarty is not only one of those whose fate is 'to suffer the crisis of their age', but one who articulates the experience with an extraordinary depth of poetic and philosophical insight, drawing on an astonishing erudition. This puts him in the company of writers such as Pascal, Coleridge, Melville and Nietzsche, all of whom are quoted in the course of the book. The crisis that Moriarty suffers is what he calls the attempted reintegration of the psychic ancien regime, which, if not integrated, will destroy us as a culture. The paradox is, as he puts it, that 'the way up that is not also the way down will end in calamity', and that 'we install a statue of Reason in Notre Dame and here we are bogged down in the sometimes very red mud of Flanders'.

Nostos is the Greek for homecoming, a term originally applied to heroic wayfarers like Odysseus. In our modern context it means something rather different. We have lost our contact with the earth and with the old stories and myths that we used to inhabit. Moriarty uses the Aztec expression Year One Reed to describe the loss of this world to the tall ships of Darwin, Freud and Einstein. For him it was the Christian story in which he sheltered, but he had fallen out of it: 'I had fallen out of a world into a universe that seemed infinitely indifferent, even hostile, to my purposes and yearnings', out of a finite astrological cosmos into an infinite astronomical universe. This tips Moriarty into an existential abyss, even if it is a 'disinheritance from delusion'. The mind and soul have unfathomable depths akin to the geological strata of the past, or, as Hopkins put it, 'mind has mountains, cliffs of fall frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed….'.

Our myths are ways in which we have embodied the unfathomable mysteries, but, as Moriarty points out, the many Greek myths that he rehearses are not the answer, but 'at best ways of suffering the questions'. In Greece itself, Moriarty travels the dusty roads rehearsing all manner of Greek myth: Perseus and Andromeda, Demeter and Persephone, Oedipus, the Cyclops, Actaeon, Hippolytus, the labours of Hercules and many more. They spring into life as ancient forms of sensibility and understanding, but they no longer satisfy the modern disinherited psyche. Moriarty has to move on, from a heroism of active Labours to that of suffering Passion, even, as we later find out, to the Passion of Christ in Gethsemane (which means oilpress), the place of the crushed olive and the crushed grape. In modern times we not only need Prometheus Unbound, he maintains, but also Medusa Healed, for, 'to kill a monster is to sow him back into the ground'.

Even today, we see ' heroic St. George of Washington' attempting to slay the evil dragon 'Saddam Hussein of Baghdad', perpetuating the Old Testament eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (already superseded in the Sermon on the Mount), and ignoring his own inner darkness, his own projected shadow, the mote in his own eye that is so visible to the rest of the world. This dualism can only perpetuate the ancient and unredeemed cycle of violence until sufficient numbers of people call a halt, demanding a new world, a new kind of participatory order. A further tension within us, as Moriarty explains, is the tension between the 'thou shalt not' of Mt. Sinai and the 'you may' of Arcadia. This theme was addressed by a figure strangely absent from Moriarty's book, the poet and scientist Goethe, who also challenged the hegemony of Newton's theory of colour while at the same time championing the senses over mathematical abstraction. Moriarty's thesis is that 'we need to deal with inner phylogenetic ancien regime' before we address the outer ancien regime, since, as Montaigne expressed it, 'man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he would act the angel acts the brute'. Can we in doing this imagine a new sacred centre, a 'centre that will hold'?

Our current situation is necessarily post-Cartesian: we are half-blinded to spiritual reality by what Moriarty calls 'the Cartesian cataract'. Here we encounter a central paradox of the book's search, namely that the rational mind is a blind and not a window when it comes to apprehending spiritual realities. The universal testimony of the mystics reinforces this proposition - Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, William Law, Shankara - what Moriarty calls a transcognitive knowing. The irony is that 'the senses with which we would register the presence of God eclipse God' (p. 618). We have to transcend the subject/object or knower/known duality in an attempt to recover the 'barefoot mind and the barefoot heart'. This means that 'the empirical mind is the third eye's blindspot' (p. 680), but 'there is a rare state of mind that makes the head obsolete', 'a wisdom that will not inhabit ideas'. The problem is that 'once educated, a mind is no longer as transformatively available to alternative intuition as it originally was'. Our cosmologies are reflections and projections of our ways of understanding that limit the 'eternal unexplainableness' of the cosmos that is challenged by the Zen koan.

So where does Moriarty go from here in search of his barefoot heart and barefoot brain? How does Western logos deal with the sound of one hand clapping? Who is the explorer? Does Christianity have 'a boat to send'? William James seems to be pointing in the right direction when he says that 'the further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely understandable'. This is our home, our centre, our Nostos. D.H. Lawrence asks: 'Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change'. Change here is transformation, and Moriarty pictures a butterfly giving a sermon to some anxious caterpillars: 'I have good news for ye, ye can and ye will become butterflies'. The caterpillars are horrified at the thought of ceasing to be who and what they are so they turn on the butterfly and kill her. And we do the same to our greatest spiritual teachers: 'crucify him!'. Yet if nature can handle the destruction and reconstruction of the caterpillar, then surely we also can surrender and trust the process.

This is just what Moriarty does in 'suffering the crisis of our age'. He hangs in there, he arrives at a new understanding of Christ in Gethsemane, on Golgotha, at Easter, Christ in the winepress, the olive press, Christ 'Grand Canyon deep in the world's karma', owning the past before moving into the future. Pascal went through the wine press, so did William Law, Gerard Manley Hopkins and D.H. Lawrence. Moriarty has been there too, using their words and his own to evoke the journey into darkness and back to the light. Eventually we may arrive home, only to find that we never really left! Meanwhile, 'to survive, certainly to flourish, we must breathe transcendentally, and that in a sense is what sacraments are, breathing-holes in which we can breathe in blessedness'.

No review of any length could convey the staggering richness of this book. While I have concentrated on some of its main themes, other strands of personal narrative are woven in, along with Moriarty's own poems and humorous observations about people and life. His native Connemara is beautifully evoked, with its historical textures and wild landscapes. Such is the range of erudition in the book that the average reader could do with a glossary and index of sources, so I hope that some scholar, if not Moriarty himself, will produce an annotated edition. One strand missing from Moriarty's odyssey, and which I think would have added to his thesis, is the evolution of the brain, which means that we not only have a psychic but also a biological ancien regime within us. Each reader will find parts of their own journey reflected in Moriarty's epic, and I would advise reading it either in small contemplative doses over a number of weeks or making it your main holiday reading (as I did) over a two-week period. You will not be the same person afterwards as before.