Day 12 - 12th Jan.
I was researching the Fomorians, an ancient Irish race from mythology, which ties into today’s reflections.
While hunting for information, I came across this passage, randomly, from Seamus Heaney. This is an excerpt from his poem The Lost Land, taken from his collection The Spirit Level (1991):
And some time make the time to drive out west
into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
in September or October, when the wind
and the light are working off each other
so that the ocean on one side is wild
with foam and glitter, and inland among stones
the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
their fully grown, headstrong-looking heads
tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
more thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
a hurry through which known and strange things pass
as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
If I look back at yesterday’s poem, I see this DNA running right through it. It has the same mouthfeel. The sentiment feels like my interpretation of what Heaney was getting at. Whether my sense came from actually standing on the Cliffs of Moher, reading these particular lines, or a conflagration of the two makes no matter. Memory is always a cassoulet. Don’t let any overly invested materialist social scientist tell you otherwise—artists understand memory just as profoundly as scientists. Anyone claiming to have a neat, podcast-ready summary of the science of memory is fooling themselves. Artists hold the world’s memory just as much as the smartphone in your pocket.
The latter seeks to dominate the retrospective narrative of your life and family. I strongly encourage parents to—when their hearts swell with emotions too profound to keep bottled—make art for their children. This counters, tempers, and augments the grainy footage of everyday life. Think about that: the collective memory of your family is solely in the hands of Zuckerberg’s descendants unless you intervene.
The books you cherish, the art you create, the heritage you pass down—it all matters. I cannot overstate how even the most materialistic adult child, when confronted with the end of a loved one’s life, often craves emotional connection to their heritage more than fiscal inheritance. Wise families will aim for both, but as Australia faces its great wealth transfer, some families will realise—too late—that they yearn more for their late father’s journal or his sole attempt at an oil painting than the beach house.
At the end, what makes people feel safe is knowing they come from somewhere ineffable.
When I wrote yesterday’s poem, I didn’t consciously reference Heaney’s work. But there it is, clearly embedded in my heart, blowing open my heritage again.
Broadening Influence and Artistic Canon
A significant responsibility of the artist is to expand their scope and sphere of influence. This becomes more challenging as life’s demands increase, turning idle afternoons with friends into rare luxuries. Yet, it is crucial not to dismiss the classic works of so-called “dead white men.”
Heaney is a dead white man. You couldn’t pull him out of my head if you tried. To argue there’s no room in the canon for diverse voices is to operate from a scarcity mindset. Adding new voices, perspectives, genders, and races is the way forward—additive, abundant, cross-pollinating. Those who denigrate the canon of great works of fiction engage in what Christopher Hitchens called “sinister piffle.” It’s not a zero-sum game. DEI departments don’t need to burn the classics to make way for the new—this is antithetical to the true spirit of creation. It is infinite.
It’s also binary thinking to get stuck on either extreme. Some people will only engage with art and culture that ties back to their roots, while others fetishise every indigenous culture they encounter, oblivious to their own problematic relationship with their more proximal cultural ties.
This happens a lot in the psychedelic therapy community. There’s often a denunciation of European heritage in favour of indigenous ones. Why must we choose? This seems silly to me. I think our job is to inherit and cultivate our host culture, while also augmenting and intermingling it with new and different ones.
Art is art. Creativity is creativity. Don’t let anyone—including me—tell you what you can or can’t enjoy. Your muse is your muse. Love what you love. Your great artistic inspirations are not jealous.
Here’s a formula for life: have a pair-bonded, “vanilla” relationship with another human being, and a wild, polyamorous relationship with multiple artists—dead and alive, black, white, and every other colour under the sun. This is your birthright.
Your love of Seamus Heaney doesn’t rob me of my enjoyment of his works. This is the beauty of art. If you can’t afford to go to the west coast of Ireland on holiday, you can still read Heaney’s poem and feel salt off the Atlantic in your nostrils.
Let me see how the world looks, lives, and breathes from your perspective. Give me your memories so that I may love them as my own.
Memory, Art, and Heritage
What excites me—and what I hope excites my clients—is the idea that their cultural heritage, the songs and art they carry from their family, can and should be expanded. Perhaps one day my child will read something back they have written or drawn, and it will evoke the flavour of Tolstoy’s Moscow (a place they may never have been) because they remember me gifting them Anna Karenina when they were ready.
For those with painful upbringings, it’s often necessary to distance themselves from their origins for a time. The metaphor I offer such clients is this: a marine who survived a Japanese POW camp in WWII might never embrace even a shred of Japanese culture later in life. But with family memories, complete detachment is harder.
In trauma recovery, I use “parts therapy” to explore salvaged pieces of joy. I might ask a client’s younger self their favourite ice cream flavour. The question may seem trivial, but it often reveals something untarnished—an aunt’s song, a beloved painting, or a scrap of literature. These moments, preserved by the psyche, hold the seeds of resilience. Rediscovering them through art can unlock new possibilities.
The Year’s Main Artistic Project
My central artistic project this year is finishing the first draft of a novel. It’s titled The Kingdom of Silence, a historical fiction about John Hunter and Charles Byrne. Byrne was an Irish giant who became noteworthy in London prior to a dark demise.
I’ll share more of his story later—it’s too good to cram into a blog post. For now, here’s the first draft of the opening lines of the novel.
Charles looked away from the lantern in his left hand—the gloaming all but gone now. The freezing lough water lapped his shins, shocked at the two great white oaks that had no business being there. His eyes fell to a subtle shimmer just beneath the surface. He loosed the spear, and it plunged down and hit plumb through. As he turned, he heard a faint cheer from the shore as his friends made out the silhouette of the eel thrashing its last.
It may change, it may not—but it will be bookended by the words The End. And this is what I want for you.
So write the shitty first draft of your book already, and stop telling your friends and family about it.
It’s time to loose the spear. Who knows what’s lurking beneath your surface? It’s probably delicious, cooked over a fire of our attention.