Opinion

Jarlath Kearney: Seamus Heaney's gift of wisdom is much missed in today's world

Seamus Heaney’s poetry and prose commanded that stunning gift of wisdom
Seamus Heaney’s poetry and prose commanded that stunning gift of wisdom Seamus Heaney’s poetry and prose commanded that stunning gift of wisdom

Seamus Heaney’s untimely death five years ago robbed his family, and Ireland, of a wisely weathered voice; an architect of thoughts framing countless lives and loves. Mine included.

But Seamus’s departure also took a profoundly important quality away from our public discourse. It remains a gaping chasm that we must urgently try to bridge.

For we live in a world today where wise voices of gentle reason, ethical love and courageous witness are too often being silenced and sidelined - whether in politics, religion, media, economics, academia, or perhaps even in personal relations - simply because they pose difficulties for superficial dogma.

Black and white binary certainties are now demanded in almost every scenario, despite the fact that growth in any aspect of life rarely emerges in straight lines or easy ways.

Just look at the roots of trees that interweave communally in forest ecosystems. Their strength lies in their ability to accommodate each other’s differing needs and diversity, and to work around obstacles while sharing finite time in the sun. The trees find growth through mutual cooperation. Otherwise the forest dies.

Yet the opposite is happening across our world. Power is spilling rapidly towards extreme and divisive public agendas that are reminiscent of pre-enlightenment autocracy.

Our social ‘solutions’ increasingly create more problems, turning our generation’s potential in upon itself, cannabilising our future. The issue of climate justice is one critical example, where immoral financial greed is increasing the inevitability of our planet’s environmental death under a marketing canard of modern growth.

Likewise, many people at a personal level are being conditioned by the closed corners of rapidly invasive social media. Vast virtual connections have become like reputational prisons. Lives under constant spotlights. Surrounded by false friendships. Stressed by never switching off. Petrified by social paranoia. Missing the truths that only exist deep within trusting hearts.

And, despite Ireland’s major social changes, some underlying pressures of social tradition still creep like a knotweed strangling freedoms of personal growth. Especially for women, in state, in church, and – still today - ‘in the home’.

Meanwhile the fears (and hopes) in our private memories are constantly splashing into every present moment, falling like millions of individual raindrops on the fast-moving river of daily lives. It becomes all too easy to let those thoughts of yesterday set the limits on our choices of tomorrow.

Externally, angry public agendas are loudly insisting on the cold binary of battle-line certainties, fighting nature’s desire for harmonious evolutionary growth. It’s a retrograde and illogical culture. Anger comes from fear. And fear guarantees failure.

That’s why we must now trade the lure of false certainties for the ambiguity of hope-filled discovery, rewakening our individual and collective dreams.

And we must start ignoring false guarantees of permanence when none – none – can ever possibly exist, with our lives changing forever in split seconds.

Wisdom’s great goal is to embrace all of these apparent ambiguities; constantly seeking truer happiness and progress in life despite hardening fears all around us.

Seamus Heaney’s poetry and prose commanded that stunning gift of wisdom - placing a positive framework of verbal meaning onto the daily confusion of disunity and discord in which we each exist.

His work was comfortable with not having the answers, consonant with the uncertainty of now. Perhaps that’s why its appeal successfully crosses divisions of class, religion and politics.

Seamus’s mastercrafting lay in painting and pondering thoughts formed from his memory for our interpretation; consciously bowling issues of every sort and size onto the green of public consumption, for consideration – never absolutism.

His words found truest richness in their understatement. They became increasingly pitched with the layered expertise of a flat roof that softly invites water to run off it, always but invisibly in the same positive direction. Words that were gently self-assured in their genius trade.

Two weeks before he died, Seamus performed at the Millennium Forum in Derry with the late renowned piper Liam O’Flynn. I was privileged to be there.

And I often think about how I made the right decision to not press the record button on my dictaphone – even though I would thereafter have permanently preserved their last public performance together.

The materialistic urge to record the evening was overpowered by the instinct to live among the immediate beauty of their lyrical reflections. And in any event, it wasn’t mine to capture – merely mine to witness, with privilege.

Seamus Heaney’s anniversary last week reminded me of the memory of his incredible gifts, and the much-missed meanings posed by his wider insights for our lives. And it reminded me of his wisdom too: “Had I not been awake, I would have missed it.”