Outer Light, Inner Music

It was a Saturday, I was giving another Irish writer a tour of my town. We walked through the flux, everything a vivid clamour. The chats were easy, one thing flowing happily into another. Not only was this a novelist I admire, an artist of huge generosity, experience, and skill, but whenever we discussed the writing process – the nuts and bolts of what actually happens at the desk – it was uncanny: our experiences mirrored and refracted one another, completely. Life as a writer can feel like a monologue, so this conversation felt sudden, genuinely exciting. At lunch, after the usual bitching and moaning all novelists feel obliged to do about their work, I let slip that recently I’d hit on something fertile in the book I’m working on. In practical terms, this means being inside one of those electric seams of time when you’re looking forward to going to the desk every day because, hour by hour, day by day, completely unforeseen and generative things are happening on the page. The work is suddenly there, a mysterious light pulsing beneath your life. People don’t talk about this side of things too much. Possibly out of superstition. Probably because it’s mysterious. But the other novelist recognised my euphoria; any writer would. As I spoke, he became more and more animated, enthusiastically nodding and tapping the table. He leaned forward, eyes wide, and with a madman grin he whispered, “It’s alive.”

When I was four, my parents knelt down by my bed and taught me the Hail Mary. Mam’s breath was sweet, her hands on the bed next to me. Dad explained: praying means speaking to God. It was quiet, intimate. They said the words and I repeated them. We did this many times, till I was reciting the lines so fluently it was like they were saying themselves through me. It felt magical. It was magical. I was being given a language that responded to something from which I already felt a call. This was different from ordinary talk, a sequence of rhythms and sudden images – ‘full of grace,’ ‘fruit of thy womb’ – that lit up cavernous inner spaces. The words gave me a belly-purr feeling, like being tuned to the music that pushes through all things. As a child I didn’t understand this in terms of thoughts you have with your mind. But I did understand it, in terms of the fuller thoughts that happen in the wholeness of yourself, in your marrow.

This happened a lot, especially when I was reading. Here’s the final sentence of George’s Marvellous Medicine: ‘For a few brief moments he had touched with the very tips of his fingers the edge of a magic world.’ As a five-year-old I didn’t exactly ‘understand’ these words. But I clearly remember the core-flash feeling of reading them. Language, not as simple information, but something else. This was the first sentence I read that was literary, not literal. Whenever I reread it, and remembered it, and thought about it, and reread it again, something was happening. Pulse points in my belly, a feeling like opening light, inner elevation. I began to memorise sentences and poems that gave me this feeling. I recited them to myself in the day, the way I recited prayers in bed at night.

I kept a Psalm on my windowsill: ‘Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.’

Much of my twenties was structured by a hungry search for this elevated sensation. There was volatility to this – an agitated longing to be swept up into life at full crescendo. If ordinary consciousness was constituted by separation, an alienated void within and between everything, then I wanted the threshold surge where boundaries between self and other dissolve, linear time collapses, and all disparate things fuse in rapturous, annihilatory union. All my striving and yearning had an essentially Romantic, vertical axis: ordinary existence is all knots and limitation, I want only the cleanness of pure ascension. Everything skyward. I spent time in Sivananda ashrams in the mountains, I went on Vipassana retreats. I read mystics, religious texts, comparative mythology, philosophy. I fasted, I drank very heavily, I practiced Osho’s shaking meditations, I read schematic and didactic novels of ideas. I did long retreats and sweat lodges, I combed my way through the narcotic throb of hot limbs on dancefloors. I put myself into life-threatening situations, over and over, out of the thirst for liminal experience. There was an adolescent impatience at work here, contempt for the compromises and ambivalences of daily living. In the relentless pendulum-swings back and forth between hedonism and asceticism, I was hoping something transcendent would reveal itself to me at the edge of sense.

As time went by, as I saw friends lose themselves forever to the hedonistic hunger for a fleeting epiphany, I began to notice how the thirst for the transcendent often – not always, often – conceals a more obliterative impulse. By then I was seriously studying philosophy, and in its austere intellectual rigor I recognised the same obliterative urge: for both the hedonist and the intellectual ascetic, the search for transcendence is less about moving deeper into life’s mystery than finding trapdoors to escape it.

Philosophy sharpened me to how nothing exists on a single plane of reality or in a single mode of relationship. All things are irreducibly multiple, and every moment is the open-ended encounter of those multiplicities, contradicting and transforming one another in a process of ongoing differentiation. The driving fuse of any moment can’t be neutered through escape into some timeless state of being. But it can be honoured, and intensified, through close attention to the inner becomings of the flux. I’d spent years trying to dissolve everyday irreconcilabilities within various metaphysical architectures, scorning the compromises and ambivalences inherent to ordinary living. Now I recognised that the site of the holy is any moment in which life transformatively buckles or pushes against its own limits.

I wanted to get closer to this. To grasp the immediacy of experience before it falls into the generalising grip of the concept. Philosophy wouldn’t let me do that (it gave me thoughts to think with the mind alone), and hedonism (which ultimately sinks beneath the level of thought) wouldn’t let me do that either.

Cut to the end of 2015. I haven’t read fiction – any fiction – in years. Literally, years. When I buy Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, I’m planning to give it as a Christmas gift. I have no orientation in literature, and I have no intention of reading this 800-page novel. But I do begin to read it. I keep reading. And reading. In its polyphonic storytelling, its surges of violence and longing, its chaotic and gyre-like movement through perspectives and passions, its sheer unrelenting narrative force – the book is a revelation. It rages with the unfalsified depth of reality. Experience has given me a place to stand within its imaginative fireworks, but also to recognise those fireworks as a sudden constellation, a map of symbolic coordinates giving me a position from which to move. This novel genuinely changes my life. When I finish it, I read another, and another, and then another. It’s a frenzy: a hunger that feasts upon its own energies. Some part of me I didn’t realise was starving is suddenly being fed.

Soon after reading A Brief History, I stop studying philosophy. I turn down an offer to do a PhD in America and begin to write my first story the next day. The US move was my immediate financial lifeline. I no longer have any savings, I no longer have any prospects. Week by week, I cobble together money from several odd jobs; for a long time, I have less than 50 euro to myself every month, after rent. Visits to the ATM become a source of dread, and at night I lie awake, worried I have set everything on fire. But somewhere deeper than fear, deeper perhaps than personality, I know I’m doing the right thing. The world is becoming more vivid and visceral. There’s a gleaming edge to everything. I’m teaching myself how to read fiction. I’m teaching myself to write.

As a child, I didn’t interrogate why prayer and reading felt so intertwined. Now I see multiple parallels. Both take a step back from life, in order to step further in. Both begin with language, only to open a space beyond language. Both are self-nourishing activities: the greater your participation, the greater the gift you receive.

I begin to learn that this is also true of writing, only somehow more.

One of the most exciting things about writing is the sense that you’re not alone in the creative moment: you’re pushing into the unknown, and something else is pushing back. The act isn’t merely horizontal; there are depths and within the murk of those depths the work’s energy is stirring. It’s not that the finished piece is already ‘there,’ an inert fossil waiting to be uncovered – more that its particular voltage is alive in you right now and if you push further towards it, and be true to it, it will intensify and transform itself according to the agility and ambition of your effort. Your responsibility is to honour whatever this elusive thing is, not with the confidence of your grasp but the integrity of your reach.

All of this means opening yourself to something very mercurial. Write what you know sounds reassuring, but the reality is more complicated. If you write what you already ‘know’, in the sense of what you’re lazily conscious of knowing with the public-facing part of yourself, you’re almost guaranteed to create work that will be inertly self-coherent. The creative act lies not in writing what you know, but in discovering what you don’t know you know. There are voices and visions and registers of reality and feeling in there, things of which you can have no awareness till you begin diving. The feeling is that you’re not the origin of all this multiplicity – you’re at its centre and yet completely incidental to its unfolding; it’s happening all around you, and you’re being used by it to bring forth something new. When the work is going well, truly well, it feels like you’re the ringmaster of a circus that’s inventing itself. It’s impossible to stand soberly outside this flux and confidently say what it is. But when you’re inside it, and it’s inside you, and you suddenly feel yourself close to the core-flash of energies that move through life the way light moves through a murmuration, you know that whatever this flux is, it’s alive, and that the reason it’s alive is because writing is not a monologue. It is contact with something else.

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