Really enjoying these live performances! I’m gonna hit you with another wall of text:) but it’s so beautiful. It is an excerpt I had to transcribe myself from an audiobook because the written version of the book is so abridged it contains almost nothing of the best parts. The book is called Beauty; The Invisible Embrace, by John O’Donohue. An Irishman, of course.
John O”Donahue Chapter 41 Beauty, The Invisible Embrace
“Beauty shines with the light from beyond itself and love is the name of that light and beauty is attractive because it has at its heart some profound equanimity. It’s not just the preserve of special elite luxury moments, but beauty is also close to the fractured side of experience. Beauty dwells in the palace of broken tenderness. And no life is without its broken empty spaces.
In Ireland we have often, in different villages or country areas, the phenomenon of the haunted house. And the haunted house would be a house in which some room has a presence from another world in it. And it’s a kind of timeless room, that all through years that the strain of this otherworldliness still continues to preside and dominate there. And sometimes in the heart there is often a haunted room too, where old loss gathers together and has that timeless strain of something bearing in on the life. And every life is framed by loss, and pathos awakens in the presence of loss and the presence of grief. And I always think that one of the moments of huge pathos is when somebody you love dies and when you have to come then sometime after their death and take their things and gather up all their different belongings and suddenly you see their clothes and different objects they have and you know they will never wear them again. And there’s huge kind of pathos in that, and pathos is ,I suppose, the enduring witness to where our hearts have dwelt. You know if you love somebody, and you’re together in a beautiful place and then the relationship breaks up and then you are back alone again in the beautiful place. That’s the experience of pathos. The beauty of the place will never be the same to you again. Because of the first way you shared it, in the excitement of love and now that that has vanished there’s some kind of lonesomeness, some kind of trace of past intimacy left from what has now become broken. And ,I suppose, the great force in life which creates most pathos is death. And death is one of the amazing experiences in the world, one of the amazing events and realities, and usually we think of the grief and pathos of death in relation to those who are left behind when the person departs, “you know you’re only grieving for yourself”, but yet that is to be blind, to say that is to be blind to the loss and the pathos that must also be there for the person who is dying, because for the dying one this is the first time that they are about to suffer the loss of the world. And when I think of my own death, I think one of the things that will really find hard, and miss immensely, is the world. Because I love the world so much. I think it’s such a privilege to be here and it’s such an amazing, enthralling, privilege and adventure and to think that you’re letting that slip away from you. You know everything that happened to you during this life, all happened to you in this world and there was no other destination, no other place to go. You had good times, times of great brightening in your life. You had times of shadow and times of darkening, but everything that happened to you, you could always rest assured of the faithfulness of the world around you. You see, the amazing thing is that most of us don’t actually realize how “here” we are, that we are completely here you know, that the world is our home if you like, and we never render that insight explicit but it must be an amazing thing to be coming in to the final time and moment of your own departing and dying and what you’d see then when you’d look out ,you know, that you’d say “all that I’m seeing now, I’m about to take my leave of”. So there is huge pathos in the imminent departure of the world. Secondly, each of us lives in our body, that’s a thing we can’t doubt. And everything that happened to you happened to you in your body, all your feeling, your delight, the danger, the confusion, the beauty, the questioning, the illness, the happiness, the athleticism. Everything happened in your body. Your body is actually your clay house in the world it’s where you live and to think that at the moment of death you’re going to suffer a double loss, the loss of the world and the loss of your body and at the same moment you will be forced out of both worlds. This is why there is no other event in the world like death, there is no severing, no cut like death, because no matter how great a discontinuity might be in your experience, you always take up somewhere else and there is no discontinuity that is total like, well mostly there isn’t, in trauma sometimes there can be, but usually there are always secret tendrils of connection and continuity even between experiences that seem disparate and discontinuous but death is totally different, there’s no continuity, when you look at it, the cut is made and there’s no continuing on. It’s an amazing total kind of discontinuity and it’s very strange for that reason to try to come to terms with the disappearance of a loved one because like a wave that withdraws in one sweep from the shoreline, the persons spirit just departs, and with the departure of the persons spirit everything else collapses. The memory goes, the breath goes, the body goes, the thought goes, Eros, dreams, eyes, touch, they all collapse with the actual vanishing of the spirit and no where else in creation does an ending take so much in one strike. If someone were to say to me, “ What’s the most remarkable thing you’ve ever heard?” I would have to say that the most remarkable thing I’ve ever heard was that there is death.”
That is absolutely lovely. It evokes the same...yearning(?) that one feels with so many of the Child Ballads.
I would love to hear it recorded in a studio setting! Actually, I wonder whether there wouldn't be a market for 'new'('old Britain' type) materials such as you write - surely some of the really good folk artists would jump at the opportunity to record stuff that hasn't been done by anyone else?
Thank you for sharing this song, beautifully sad... the lyrics have some reflections of death & graves. I'm always keen on a grave reference as I spend some peaceful time churchyards here in Suffolk. Another reference to graves is in this live performance of Danny Boy I was listening to earlier today by Sinéad O'Conner on Christmas Eve 1993 which also contains a reference to Sophia I believe
Sinéad delivers her own extra verse at the end with the concluding lines: "but say a prayer to God, for our dear S?ireland, I know She'll hear, and hope to set her free"
You'll notice that when she say's 'She'll hear', Sinéad looks square at the camera to deliver this brief public moment of Sophia with the full audience... also when the presenter (of the Late Show) Gay Byrne says in the introduction 'if you behave yourself' it's a direct reference to her ripping her late mothers own photo of the pope live on air a year before. With this performance I think she healed a few minds & hearts, quite a legacy she left behind, both tragedy & hope rolled up in beauty. Powerful
Really enjoying these live performances! I’m gonna hit you with another wall of text:) but it’s so beautiful. It is an excerpt I had to transcribe myself from an audiobook because the written version of the book is so abridged it contains almost nothing of the best parts. The book is called Beauty; The Invisible Embrace, by John O’Donohue. An Irishman, of course.
John O”Donahue Chapter 41 Beauty, The Invisible Embrace
“Beauty shines with the light from beyond itself and love is the name of that light and beauty is attractive because it has at its heart some profound equanimity. It’s not just the preserve of special elite luxury moments, but beauty is also close to the fractured side of experience. Beauty dwells in the palace of broken tenderness. And no life is without its broken empty spaces.
In Ireland we have often, in different villages or country areas, the phenomenon of the haunted house. And the haunted house would be a house in which some room has a presence from another world in it. And it’s a kind of timeless room, that all through years that the strain of this otherworldliness still continues to preside and dominate there. And sometimes in the heart there is often a haunted room too, where old loss gathers together and has that timeless strain of something bearing in on the life. And every life is framed by loss, and pathos awakens in the presence of loss and the presence of grief. And I always think that one of the moments of huge pathos is when somebody you love dies and when you have to come then sometime after their death and take their things and gather up all their different belongings and suddenly you see their clothes and different objects they have and you know they will never wear them again. And there’s huge kind of pathos in that, and pathos is ,I suppose, the enduring witness to where our hearts have dwelt. You know if you love somebody, and you’re together in a beautiful place and then the relationship breaks up and then you are back alone again in the beautiful place. That’s the experience of pathos. The beauty of the place will never be the same to you again. Because of the first way you shared it, in the excitement of love and now that that has vanished there’s some kind of lonesomeness, some kind of trace of past intimacy left from what has now become broken. And ,I suppose, the great force in life which creates most pathos is death. And death is one of the amazing experiences in the world, one of the amazing events and realities, and usually we think of the grief and pathos of death in relation to those who are left behind when the person departs, “you know you’re only grieving for yourself”, but yet that is to be blind, to say that is to be blind to the loss and the pathos that must also be there for the person who is dying, because for the dying one this is the first time that they are about to suffer the loss of the world. And when I think of my own death, I think one of the things that will really find hard, and miss immensely, is the world. Because I love the world so much. I think it’s such a privilege to be here and it’s such an amazing, enthralling, privilege and adventure and to think that you’re letting that slip away from you. You know everything that happened to you during this life, all happened to you in this world and there was no other destination, no other place to go. You had good times, times of great brightening in your life. You had times of shadow and times of darkening, but everything that happened to you, you could always rest assured of the faithfulness of the world around you. You see, the amazing thing is that most of us don’t actually realize how “here” we are, that we are completely here you know, that the world is our home if you like, and we never render that insight explicit but it must be an amazing thing to be coming in to the final time and moment of your own departing and dying and what you’d see then when you’d look out ,you know, that you’d say “all that I’m seeing now, I’m about to take my leave of”. So there is huge pathos in the imminent departure of the world. Secondly, each of us lives in our body, that’s a thing we can’t doubt. And everything that happened to you happened to you in your body, all your feeling, your delight, the danger, the confusion, the beauty, the questioning, the illness, the happiness, the athleticism. Everything happened in your body. Your body is actually your clay house in the world it’s where you live and to think that at the moment of death you’re going to suffer a double loss, the loss of the world and the loss of your body and at the same moment you will be forced out of both worlds. This is why there is no other event in the world like death, there is no severing, no cut like death, because no matter how great a discontinuity might be in your experience, you always take up somewhere else and there is no discontinuity that is total like, well mostly there isn’t, in trauma sometimes there can be, but usually there are always secret tendrils of connection and continuity even between experiences that seem disparate and discontinuous but death is totally different, there’s no continuity, when you look at it, the cut is made and there’s no continuing on. It’s an amazing total kind of discontinuity and it’s very strange for that reason to try to come to terms with the disappearance of a loved one because like a wave that withdraws in one sweep from the shoreline, the persons spirit just departs, and with the departure of the persons spirit everything else collapses. The memory goes, the breath goes, the body goes, the thought goes, Eros, dreams, eyes, touch, they all collapse with the actual vanishing of the spirit and no where else in creation does an ending take so much in one strike. If someone were to say to me, “ What’s the most remarkable thing you’ve ever heard?” I would have to say that the most remarkable thing I’ve ever heard was that there is death.”
I love this—and you
That is absolutely lovely. It evokes the same...yearning(?) that one feels with so many of the Child Ballads.
I would love to hear it recorded in a studio setting! Actually, I wonder whether there wouldn't be a market for 'new'('old Britain' type) materials such as you write - surely some of the really good folk artists would jump at the opportunity to record stuff that hasn't been done by anyone else?
Thanks, Carol. Actually, I am hoping to pull some people together in order to do just that, if I can raise some money to do so.
Thank you for sharing this song, beautifully sad... the lyrics have some reflections of death & graves. I'm always keen on a grave reference as I spend some peaceful time churchyards here in Suffolk. Another reference to graves is in this live performance of Danny Boy I was listening to earlier today by Sinéad O'Conner on Christmas Eve 1993 which also contains a reference to Sophia I believe
Sinéad delivers her own extra verse at the end with the concluding lines: "but say a prayer to God, for our dear S?ireland, I know She'll hear, and hope to set her free"
You'll notice that when she say's 'She'll hear', Sinéad looks square at the camera to deliver this brief public moment of Sophia with the full audience... also when the presenter (of the Late Show) Gay Byrne says in the introduction 'if you behave yourself' it's a direct reference to her ripping her late mothers own photo of the pope live on air a year before. With this performance I think she healed a few minds & hearts, quite a legacy she left behind, both tragedy & hope rolled up in beauty. Powerful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PweUGhCZNiM
This is such a beautiful song, thank you!
Thanks, Kim
Lovely! In the words of the 1752 calendar martyrs: ‘Bring back our 11 days!'
Thanks, Caitlin
Beautiful! Thank you for sharing!