Advent Adhortations, I
‘I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money, there is nothing much wrong with me except dying.’ — Nuala O'Faolain (2008)
Winking at the Milky Way
In the spring of 2008, my onetime Irish Times colleague, Nuala O’Faolain, went on radio to speak about her diagnosis of two terminal brain tumours, and consequent imminent death. This, by way of acknowledging the time of year that is upon us, is a chapter from my 2010 book, Beyond Consolation, inspired by that transfixing interview.
‘I think there's a wonderful rule of life,’ Nuala O’Faolain told Marian Finucane, ‘that means that we do not consider our own mortality. I know we seem to, and remember, “man thou art but dust”, but I don't believe we do. I think there’s an absolute difference between knowing that you are likely to die, let's say within the next year, and not knowing when you are going to die — an absolute difference.’
Yet, there was an odd disproportionality between the interview’s content and the reaction it provoked. People talked about the interview being ‘refreshing’. They said it was good to hear a terminally ill person talking so openly about death. Nobody said why it was ‘refreshing’ or good to hear this. People said they were frightened by the interview, that they felt for Nuala O’Faolain, that they cried listening to the interview, but rarely went much beyond such declarations. It was as though the implication of such observations was agreed to be obvious, but most obvious of all was the phenomenon of avoidance.
People praised Nuala O’Faolain for her ‘courage’ and ‘honesty’, but I do not think they are the dominant elements of her contribution to public awareness in this interview. Most of what was said afterwards was remarkable only for its platitudinous characteristics. By general agreement, the importance of the interview was that this nationally known and beloved woman was prepared to talk at all about the fact that she would soon be dead, to look at some aspects of this situation and utter sentences about what she felt or thought. Most of the reactions conveyed a sense that, though death had placed its hand on the shoulder of Nuala O’Faolain, it was for the rest of us something to be briefly scrutinised and then allowed to slide back into the irrelevancy to which it belonged.
The interview seemed to be more than the sum of its parts. What marked it out was more the idea that someone was sharing such thoughts at all than that there was anything original or enlightening being said, or indeed that there was any great courage or honesty involved in saying it. Indeed it seemed implicit in the exercise and in some of the things Nuala said at the outset that she was speaking out like this in search of some kind of comfort, reaching out to those whose lives she had touched before, perhaps in the hope that someone, somewhere, might be able to extend her some convincing form of consolation.
But it is difficult to say anything with certainty about the meaning of this, unless you were listening to the interview as it happened. Only this could be said to constitute a total encounter with the experience. Reading the interview transcript a day later, I was aware that, having missed the event as it unfolded, I could never reach in myself for the intensity with which those who heard it would have responded. Reading it was enough to fill me with sorrow. I could but feebly imagine what it might have been like to be hearing it as it happened. Still less could I imagine what it might have been like to be Nuala O’Faolain talking as she did about this most fundamental experience of her life.
I subsequently listened repeatedly to the interview, and was moved each time to a new degree — both by the content, which sounded infinitely more intense than I had imagined it from print, and the hushed and tearful tone of Nuala’s voice. But by the time I came to hear it I already knew what it contained, what it was about, and pretty much what it meant. I knew from the beginning where it was going. For those listening as it happened, it would have represented an entirely different experience, the kind of experience that even live radio rarely delivers, closer to a great play than a real-life episode, but lacking the deep-set knowledge you retain when witnessing a great play: that what you are hearing is fiction.
Nuala O’Faolain spoke of her situation before receiving the news. She had been happy. She had been in a relationship with a man who had a 14 year-old daughter, but had moved out to her own little room, which she loved, because she realised that she ‘wasn’t going to be any good of a stepmother’. She had been writing a book and had applied for a fellowship. But then, one day after fitness class about six weeks previously, she had felt a dragging in her right side and had gone to the A&E department of a New York hospital. She said: ‘I was sitting there waiting to hear what was wrong with my right leg when the guy came past and said that “your CAT scan shows that you’ve got two brain tumours and we're going to do X-rays to see where they're from; they're not primaries”. And that is the first ever, ever I knew.’
For a time she had been in shock. Then she decided to come home to Ireland. She had declined the offer of further treatment. ‘Even if I gained time through the chemotherapy, it isn't time I want. Because as soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life.
‘It amazed me, Marian, how quickly life turned black, immediately almost. For example, I lived somewhere beautiful, but it means nothing to me any more — the beauty. For example, twice in my life I have read the whole of Proust. I know it sounds pretentious, but it's not a bit. It's like a huge soap opera. I tried again the week before last and it was gone, all the magic was gone from it.’
She had decided on dying sooner rather than later. She did not want to prolong the agony for the same thing to happen anyway at the end of an even lenghtier period of misery than she knew she was facing now. ‘You see, the cancer is a very ingenious enemy and when you ask somebody how will I actually die? How do you actually die of cancer?. . . .You know? I don't get an answer because it could be anything. It can move from one organ to the other, it can do this or the other. It's already in my liver, for example. So I don't know how it's going to be. And that overshadows everything. And I don't want six months or a year like that. It's not worth it.’
Marian Finucane put it to her: ‘If there are people who have cancer or loved ones who have cancer and passionately believe that the treatments are going to work for them, there is the possibility that this could cast a despair over them.’
‘My despair’, Nuala replied, ‘is my own. Their hope is their own. Their spirituality is their own. My way of looking at the world is my own. We each end up differently facing this common fate. I wish everybody out there a miracle cure.’
Much of the rest of the interview was about her family and how good they have been to her, about her email reconciliation with her former lover Nell McCafferty, one of the pioneers of Irish feminism, and about her recent trips, since the diagnosis, to Paris and New York, trying to rediscover the joy of living even though she had so little time remaining. She talked about the loneliness at the core of the experience of dying. Sometimes, she said, she prayed for her friends to go away, ‘for the very essence of this experience is aloneness’.
‘So it is two in the morning or four in the morning and you're walking around and all you know is that whatever it is you are feeling or thinking is yours and nobody else's. And there is nobody else to lay it off on and that aloneness is the centre and the thing that you never know when you are well . . .’
At times she brought to the interview the kind of detached clarity about her own feelings that had characterised her two volumes of autobiography. Compared to many others, she said, she was dying ‘comfortably’, compared to the many who had died in Auschwitz and Darfur, or in the Congo, or like her two brothers who had died of drink, exiled and alone. ‘I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money, there is nothing much wrong with me except dying.’
Asked by Marian Finucane if she believed in an afterlife, she replied in a whisper but emphatically: 'No, I do not'. Asked if she believed in a God she said, laughing a little at some deep but perhaps inexpressible irony: ‘Well that's a different matter somehow. I actually don't know how we all get away with our unthinkingness. Often last thing at night I’ve walked the dog down the lane and you look up at the sky illuminated by the moon and behind the moon the Milky Way and the Milky Way and the Milky Way, you know — you are nothing on the edge of one planet compared to this universe unimaginably vast up there and unimaginably mysterious.’
‘And I’ve done that for years, looked up at it and kind of given it a wink and thought “I don't know what's going on”. And I still don't know what's going on, but I can't be consoled by…by… mention of God. I can't.’
Would she like to be so consoled?
‘No.’ In print it might have been anything, but when you heard it, there was no doubt. It was an emphatic No.
‘Oh no I wouldn't. If I start doing that, something really bad is happening to my brain, though I was baptised and I remember my First Communion and I went to Catholic schools and I was in the Legion of Mary and I tried to stick to my pledge. And though I respect and adore the art that arises from the love of God and though nearly everybody I love and respect themselves believe in God, it is meaningless to me, really meaningless.’
At first glance this seems conclusive. But is it? It is interesting that, in response to two questions that the layperson might think of as amounting to the same idea, Nuala O’Faolain gave what might be seen as two conflicting answers. On the one hand, she emphatically dismissed the idea of an afterlife, but, on the other, thought that the issue of God was ‘a different matter somehow’.
And I am greatly struck by her construction, which appears to have gone unnoticed by Marian Finucane at the time and was overlooked in all the discussion afterwards, that she didn’t know ‘how we all get away with our unthinkingness’. Perhaps she meant in relation to the image she invoked immediately afterwards, about the night sky and the vastness of the universe. Or perhaps she meant something else. If so, what? Our unthinkingness is respect of what? Of God? Although slightly later on she seemed to imply that she had no belief in God, her observation that ‘that’s a different matter somehow’ implied that she was answering ‘Yes’, or a kind of yes to the question about God. Her next sentence, ‘I actually don't know how we all get away with our unthinkingness’, seems to hint at a much deeper set of perceptions, but it is left unexplored. But, then, going on, she seems to harden again, to close down what appeared to be an openness, perhaps even a plea for reassurance to the people listening. No, if she started to think of the consolation offered by the idea of God, something ‘really bad’ would be happening to her brain. She wished people of belief every comfort, but she didn’t think about it. She had never believed in the Christian idea of an individual creator. How could she, knowing, as she did, so many ‘Buddhists and atheists and every kind of thing’. Let ‘poor human beings’ believe what they want, but for her it was meaningless.
A strange thing is that the transcripts of the interview as published in the newspapers on the day after the interview do not contain the phrase ‘give me back yesterday’ [the headline on the Sunday Independent report on the interview]. Neither does the recording of the interview, although it does show that she said something subtly but critically different. Until I heard the interview, that phrase haunted me. Nothing else she said seemed to capture her desperation so comprehensively.
In the Sunday Independent version — and every other written transcript I was able to locate, by googling and otherwise — her words in this section had been ever so slightly but oddly mistranscribed. She had been talking about a song she wanted Marian Finucane to play at the end of the programme: ‘And yet I want to mention one thing you might play at the end, particularly for dying people’, the transcripts have her saying, ‘but I picked up little bits here and there about Ireland, largely at the Merriman Summer School, which is one of the great things in my life, a song I heard a few years ago, 'Thois I Lar an Ghlanna' — a kind of modern song, 1929 I believe — and it’s sung by Albert Fry and I think other Donegal singers. And the last two lines are two things: asking God up there in the heavens, even though you don't believe in him, to send you back, even though you know it can't happen. Those two things sum up where I am now’.
What Nuala O’Faolain said was exactly this: ‘I know you don’t go playing records, particularly for dying people, but still . . . I picked up little bits here and there about Ireland, largely at the Merriman Summer School, which has been one of the great things in my life, a song I heard a few years ago, that everyone else knows except me, and it’s called 'Thois I Lar an Ghlanna' — a kind of modern song, 1929 I believe — and it’s sung by Albert Fry and I think other Donegal singers.’ She mentioned the final lines of the song, making a stab at the Irish but getting it clumsily wrong, and then translating: ‘And it’s two things: asking God up there in the heavens, even though you don't believe in him, to send you back yesterday, even though you know it can't happen. Those two things sum up where I am now.’ At this point she began to weep.
In fact the song is called not ‘Thios i Lar an Ghleanna’ — these being the opening words, meaning ‘down in the middle of the glen’ — but ‘Trathnona Beag Areir’: ‘Late Yesterday Evening’.
The strange thing is that Nuala was mistaken about the meaning of the song. The lyric is ambiguous but appears to be written from the viewpoint of a man who has emigrated, on the day after encountering, ‘late yesterday evening’, a maiden who had ‘the prettiest face and personality’ and ‘made good sense go astray’. The idea that he is departed, in whatever sense, is buried deep within the lyric, which to the casual ear might pass for a conventional love song. He describes the white drops of dew on the grass as he courted his new-found love. The way the song translates into English is odd, because the use of the word ‘God’, introduced in the first line of the second verse, might be a casual taking of the deity’s name in vain: ‘And God, how pleasant our behaviour was . . . ’ But in the Irish version, this interpretation is impossible. The protagonist addresses God as ‘A Ri’ — ‘Oh King!’ — and asks Him to acknowledge the beauty of the encounter.
He speaks also to the ‘love of my heart’, lamenting the brevity of their ‘heart-playing’. It is strange: far from not believing in God, the man seems to believe equally in God and his beloved. Only in the third verse is there the insinuation that something drastic has happened to separate him from his beloved, though exactly what is never specified. There is a sense of exile and separation, suggesting an emigration song, a commonplace convention in Irish music through the ages. If he got permission to return and speak to his love, the protagonist laments, or if he could overcome destiny, what would he care about this life? He would walk with his love ‘through the cotton grass and through the dunes by the edge of the sea’. And he would lose God’s kingdom if he could kiss her mouth.
In the final verse he speaks to his beloved and remarks on how short their lovemaking was. Then, turning to God, he asks the ‘King of the bright glory’ to ‘bring back last night’.
Among the remarkable things about this lyric is that it is based not merely on a belief in God but on a relationship with God that enables the protagonist to speak in almost equally familiar terms to God as to his beloved and to draw God into the intrigue of his romantic adventure of the evening before. The mode of addressing God is reverent but also friendly, and yet there is this provocative assertion that even God’s kingdom might be sacrificed for the opportunity to kiss again the lips of the beloved. The song is a celebration of the heaven-on-earth that romantic love can sometimes seem to deliver. And, recognising God as the architect of this ‘bright glory’, he asks God to use His powers to return them to the night before. Were this to happen, he freely concedes, he would be prepared to lose both Heaven and Earth, in exchange for the bliss of one kiss with his beloved.
It is, in fact, a deeply religious song, in the broadest possible sense. There is no suggestion whatever of a disbelief in God, or of a calling upon a God whose existence is doubted. And yet Nuala O’Faolain, in remembering the song, was convinced that this is what she had heard. Neither is there a sense that the song’s protagonist does not believe it is possible for God to do what he asks. On the contrary, the point of the song seems to be that the protagonist, in whatever exile he now finds himself, finds access to the meaning of the events in question by speaking to a God through Whom he understands reality. His communication with God is affectionate and quite forward. There may even be a sense in the song that the love in question may have been some kind of fleeting illicit affair, now placed out of reach by life and its circumstances, or perhaps by death. The protagonist seems to play with a sense of God as both friendly and judgemental, a force that might help him to reclaim his love and yet might be obliged to exact the prescribed punishment on account of the sinful nature of the enterprise.
It is an intricate, profound and beautiful song, laden with a complex comfort accessible only through paradox and an intuitive sense of rightness that transcends normal understandings. Clearly, at some level, the song had once touched Nuala deeply. Through the prism of a culture that refuses to nurture belief, she had heard its sentiment as the culture might have rendered it if given the opportunity to remake it. Searching now in her desperation for an image to describe her own feelings, she chose this song while seeming to miss both its mischief and the consolation it offers: that there is a loving and loveable God, and that He and his Kingdom exist in a place that seems perched high on the paradox of humankind’s capacity to imagine a meaning that is tender and indulgent and understanding of human weakness.
‘Unthinkingness’, that word Nuala O’Faolain employed, is a good description of our culture in relation to God, the origins of mankind, the related question of creation and all the associated fundamental issues of existence. She included herself in her implicit condemnation of that unthinkingness, but also seemed to be stuck, if not indeed determined to remain stuck, in a mindset that almost perversely refused to look at these essential questions for fear of what this gaze might require one to conclude. Marian Finucane at one point asked her about something she had written some time before: that what matters in life is passion. No, she replied, passion ‘can go and take a running jump at itself’. That seemed a bit silly to her now. ‘What matters now in life is health and reflectiveness. I just shot around. I would like it if I had been a better thinker.’ She was glad now she didn’t have a child to whom she would have to explain and say goodbye. She regretted that she had spent so much time drinking. She had come from a family of drinkers. ‘I drank too much 'til I was forty, which was a waste of my one and only life’.
The cultures of contemporary societies appear to construct themselves or be constructed so as to avoid contemplation of the great questions. This is certainly the case with Irish society. In our public square today, there seems to be more open discussion than ever before about how reality is structured, where human beings emerged from and why we are here. But this discussion exists almost entirely at the level of abstraction, removed from the fundamental reality of the individual human being. It is as if each of us owes his or her existence to something that is somehow unmoored from our human desires and needs. There is much talk about evolution and the idea that we know, up to a point, how mankind developed from an uncertain moment of initiation. But most of us have no more than a crude grasp of this story. The culture we inhabit seems to regard these matters as settled, to feel no need for each of its inhabitants to share this knowledge, even though this knowledge relates to the sense any of us has of the essential meaning of existence. Behind the easily trotted-out ‘rational’ assumptions are the ineffable mysteries: where the first spark of life came from; where the first speck of matter came from; where there might be to ‘come from’; what happened in the aeons of time before everything we know about?
The fundamental error of this increasingly secular/agnostic age is that religion is something imposed — that it is comes from outside and moulds, oppresses, brainwashes. But my religiosity is my very being, my relationship with the entire order of reality. I am connected to everything that ever was and ever will be. I am alive in infinite time and space, which eventually converge in what cosmology calls space-time. This incomprehensible reality is what keeps me alive, keeps me connected, keeps me charged with the human appetites — for hope, beauty, truth, justice, happiness, love, good — for what is called God. This condition pre-exists me. I cannot shake it off. I can deny it, but that won't change my fundamental structure in nature, which is dependent, which is created, which is charged with a unique destiny, and which is fundamentally mysterious, perhaps most of all to myself.
Among the characteristics of this condition are dependence and mendicity — begging. But the fact that I am a beggar strangely makes me less fearful, more balanced, more serene. Knowing that, in a demeanour of humility, it is possible to remain connected to the force that created me, enables me to greet every day as an adventure. I cannot wait to awake and see what happens!
But out in the world I am propositioned by a different and seductive idea: that the hope that drives me can be uprooted from the tradition from which I emerged and replanted in the material world, in my earthly existence only — and that this will make me more free. This is the great lie of our times. It can seem plausible in the joyful, happy moments, but when I encounter sorrow, or age, or sickness, or death, I see that it is a fragile kind of hope that relies on the capricious and erratic capacities of humanity.
Religion is about the fundamental nature of human beings, having grown out of the inescapable facts of reality: humankind, mysterious to itself, seeking to understand its own essential structure and comprehend its place in the universe. The human structure, which remains in spite of all our alleged progress as a species, comprises three ineluctable elements: we have been created, we are dependent, we are mortal. And yet our culture seems to tell us, moment to moment, that we can defy these facts, or ignore them, or hold them in abeyance to be confronted at some vaguely defined future time, perhaps by other people who are somehow less fortunate than we are in being weighed down by these unpalatable limitations.
Perhaps this is what Nuala O’Faolain meant about our unthinkingness. And yet she did not, even in these final weeks and days, seem to wish to go beyond what she had assumed, or what had been assumed on her behalf and with which she had unthinkingly slipped into acquiesence. Even now, gazing at this unthinkingness, she was not disposed to think about it. Though the strands of comfort she might have grasped at were of a different nature to what she had declared herself to believe, she was aware of their existence and yet declined to think about them beyond the level of a certain sentimental engagement. It was as if, even now, she was more concerned with seeming to be consistent in the eyes of the culture than in looking at what she herself might have been feeling deeper down. There would be something really bad happening to her brain, she said, with a seemingly unconscious irony that seemed to understand itself only in one way. The thing is: there was something bad happening to her brain, but even this did not seem to bring her face-to-face with the ultimate questions. She went right up to the front door of the truth but did not knock.
Our societies seem to think and talk about religion a great deal: the damage it has wrought; the sometime dubiousness of its claims; the restrictiveness of its diktats. But, truth to tell, there is hardly any thought, per se, about religion, about God and about the larger mysteries with which religion, for all the shortcomings of organised religions, seeks to engage. The main objective of most public-square discussions about God and religion is either to denounce the influence of religion as an impediment to freedom, or, in response to this impulse, to reinforce existing beliefs as a protection against such heretical endeavours. This constant argument is presented as a struggle between reason and irrationality. Whereas those who question the claims of religion are extended the courtesy of being deemed to operate from the solid ground of reason, those on the other side are at best patronisingly congratulated for the tenacity with which they hold to irrational beliefs. Believers are not regarded as approaching their beliefs through the discipline of thought. The word ‘faith’ is used on both sides of the argument to put an end to the idea that such concepts can be approached by means of human reason.
This is why Nuala O’Faolain’s use of the word ‘unthinkingness’ was interesting: as though she had belatedly come to the idea that there might have been a way into these matters through thought, through reason. It is also perhaps why her odd interjection of the word ‘unthinkingness’ did not result in a discussion. Even to pursue the idea that we do not think about religion would have required a breaking of the pattern of unthinkingness.
To pursue the point would have involved a process of public thinking out loud. Marian Finucane was interesed only in ‘beliefs’, the standard reductionism employed to initiate whatever limited discussions are enabled to occur about the totality of what reality presents us with. The thing about ‘beliefs’ as conventionally understood in contemporary mass media culture is that there is no reasonable way of getting into them. They may be thinking or unthinking, but the presumption tends to place them closer to the latter than the former, and this requires them to be treated with the courtesy of avoidance. Increasingly, the logic of our ‘rational’ public discussion is that beliefs must be respected, tolerated, accommodated, but not really taken seriously. They are not thoughts, after all, but inherited notions that have more to do with defining a person’s identity than reflecting their conscious engagement with reality.
From the loose way she expressed herself, it is possible to conclude that Nuala O’Faolain appeared to be talking not of the individual private thoughts of human beings, herself included, but of the public thought process of a society talking to itself. If so, she was undoubtedly on to something. The idea of God is not permitted as a response to the unimaginable mystery. It has become too bogged down in ideas of superstition and tribalism and platitude and hypocrisy and manipulation and abuse. Our societies are prepared to concede in public that belief in a deity is something some people hold to, but there is an unspoken understanding that, while there is an obligation on the liberal mindset to be tolerant of such simple-mindedness, this holding to God is an outmoded and rather reactionary outlook on reality and life. All these assumptions, prejudices, ideas, anti-ideas and certainties become live in virtually every public discussion, almost regardless of the ‘beliefs’ of the participants. Even though these subjects relate to the most fundamental aspects of our existence, all the time we allow ourselves be bullied by the culture, the background radiation of thought that governs us without us even realising, seeking to limit our curiosity, or sidetrack us into what seem like important issues but are really just constructions designed to avoid the fathomless nature of reality.
Indeed, it is not necessarily possible to tell the beliefs of any individual from what they might say in public — not because someone will necessarily dissemble or consciously evade the issues, but because, without some resolve to break through the culture, we inevitably fall into a use of language which adopts all the ‘established’ assumptions and prejudices. Is it possible for me to reach any reliable, truthful conclusion about myself if, to arrive at any conclusion at all, I must utilise the tools provided by a culture with a vested interest in directing me towards a conclusion that is already decided in the language I use?
All these subtexts were ‘live’ in the interview between Nuala O’Faolain and Marian Finucane. I do not know what Marian Finucane thinks about God, and can decide nothing about her personal beliefs from this or any other interview she conducted. What I can conclude, however, is that, unconsciously or otherwise, she backed away from the provocation implicit in Nuala O’Faolain’s ambiguous responses, perhaps because she wished to steer clear of controversy in the circumstances in which she found herself; or perhaps because she believes these matters to be clear and already settled; or perhaps because she was mindful of the possible insensitivities of pursuing her friend on these matters at such a fragile and emotional moment for them both.
There was, in other words, a third participant in this interview, an entity inaudible and invisible, but nonetheless ever present throughout. I am thinking of the culture, that ever-present phenonemon of media-saturated societies, which imposes its will on us every moment. Forty of fifty years before, an interview on Irish radio between a radio interviewer and an Irish writer knowingly close to the point of death would have operated to an entirely different set of assumptions. The writer would most likely have been a believer, or presented him- or herself as such. The interviewer, likewise, would have been a believer or would have been sufficiently conscious of the monolith of public piety to remain within a set of assumptions readily triggered by a series of ritualistic invocations and platitudes. Now, however, almost regardless of the private beliefs of the participants, the culture was insinuating a different, close to opposite logic.
Why is this? It is not, surely, that human beings have in the meantime fundamentally altered in structure or needs, or that we have discovered so much more about the universe that we can now look back at these supposedly simplistic positions and smile indulgently, if a little irritatedly, at the things we once believed.
In truth we ‘know’ almost nothing we did not know before, but have fallen prey to cultural developments that circumscribe our capacity to articulate our deepest needs just as surely as, in a different way, did the simple verities of old.
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