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Irish Eyes: Morrison, O’Donohue, Hansard, Ni Riain
By
Published: Mar 14, 2013
Category:
Beyond Classification
The Fault In Our Stars: A year after I asked you to drop everything and read this novel, The New Yorker has written about "nerdfighters" and "nerdfighteria." (If you’ve read my review, you’re in the know. The rest of you…) And Huffington Post has just chosen "Fault" for its book club. I don’t know what it’s going to take to get this book into the home of every Butler reader, but if I have to go house to house, I will. Don’t make me. Laggards, start here.
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On St. Patrick’s Day in New York, you watch where you walk. Not because the Irish are belligerent, but because so many of the Irish who are drawn to the parade in Manhattan are drunk. On green beer, no less.
These guys are not who I think of when my thoughts turn to Ireland. The names that come up are mystics and seers, dreamers and poets, healers all.
My current favorite: The Last Storyteller: A Story of Ireland. Frank Delaney has been called "the most eloquent man in the world." That’s a high bar, and Bono, I suspect, would contest it. But without question, Delaney has "the gift" — his novel draws on legend and myth, but uses them in the service of a story of love and politics. For once, I don’t begrudge a writer filling 400 pages.
Here are a few of my old favorites….
In l968, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just down the block from Van Morrison. Whenever we passed one another on the street, I would nod. Morrison would just stare. Or glare. "Unpleasant," I concluded.
I have seen Van Morrison in concert many times over the past 35 years. I have never had to reconsider this opinion. Van Morrison is one chilly, angry guy.
But we shouldn’t judge artists on personality, only their work. And so the important thing to know is that, in l968, Morrison went to New York, and, in just two or three days and for a total cost of about $22,000, recorded “Astral Weeks.”
For a record — that’s what we called musical releases back then, so let’s preserve the language here — that’s #19 on the Rolling Stone list of all-time greats, “Astral Weeks” seems almost unknown. On classic rock and alternative radio alike, I never hear it. Over the years, I have bought it for dozens of people, many of them Morrison fans, and not one seemed to know of its existence. [To buy the CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
Clearly, “Astral Weeks” is no “Moondance.”
What it is is much harder to say. A song cycle that’s jazzy, tormented, light years from the psychedelia that dominated rock music in 1968. A visionary meditation that’s both timeless and prescient (its “Madame George” is the first song I ever heard about a drag queen). A mystical space shot hurled aloft on butterfly wings (the backup musicians are an acoustic guitarist, acoustic bassist, a subliminal drummer, a flutist and, from time to time, a string quartet) and anchored by a voice that starts in Ireland, transits to Mississippi and ultimately resides in that place called Genius.
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There are movies that friends tell you about, and if those friends are forceful enough or more people make the same recommendation, you rouse yourself and buy a ticket, and if the movie turns out to be terrific, the next thing you know you’re telling everyone about a film they just have to see.
“Once” stars Glen Hansard, lead singer of a terrific Irish band — The Frames — that’s sadly unappreciated outside of Ireland. His co-star is Markéta Irglová, a 17-year-old Czech high school student who had never acted before.
And it was filmed, in 17 days, for $150,000.
For the longest time, the future of “Once” looked bleak: straight to DVD.
Then the film was invited to Sundance. It won the Audience Award. Fox Searchlight bought it. And as “Once” went out into the world, audiences took to it like a beautiful orphan — they cherished it and made it a cause.
That’s how I came to see it; many people prodded me. What they knew: I’m a sucker for emotion that feels authentic, so I was absolutely enchanted by this little film. [To buy the DVD from Amazon, click here. To rent the video stream and watch it now, click here.]
And I do mean little. He’s a singer. His girlfriend has left him. He’d like to make a record and get out of Dublin. Right now, he repairs vacuum cleaners and sings on the streets. Her situation’s just as dim. She may dream of music, but she’s in an alien culture, separated from her husband; she sells flowers and cleans houses to support her kid and mother. He and She (they are nameless) get together to make music; they become collaborators and friends, their songs propelling the plot. But the big question — for the audience, anyway — isn’t how their demo tape will be received. It’s whether they’ll become lovers. [To buy the soundtrack CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
“Two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note,” A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times.
“Endings seem to lie in wait,” John O’Donohue wrote. His certainly did. He died in his sleep, January 3, 2008, on vacation near Avignon. He was just 53.
I met John O’Donohue only once. I had read Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, the 1997 book that made him deservedly famous. “Read” is wrong. At 100 words a minute, I had, over weeks, absorbed enough of this deceptively simple exploration of “soul friendship” to grasp that here was an original thinker, a gifted poet and, most astonishing of all, a philosopher who had forged a way of looking at the world that was painfully aware of human frailty but insistent on the triumphal power of divine love. And he wrote beautifully.
A book this exciting, you have to talk about it. I mentioned O’Donohue to Sarah Ban Breathnach, the author of the Oprah-annointed Simple Abundance and Moving On. As luck would have it, she and O’Donohue were friends. And when he came through New York, Sarah generously arranged a dinner.
That was the night I learned to drink single malt. And was there ever a better teacher in the art of sipping than an Irish philosopher and mystic who had worn the collar for 19 years? I don’t recall what we talked about, and neither can my wife, who does not drink; all I remember is the cascades of laughter, the unbuckled happiness of people who are thrilled to be alive, and together, and sharing good fellowship with sympathetic souls in a nice restaurant on a rainy New York night.
An evening like that is so rare I think of it as a religious experience. John O’Donohue, a holy man if ever there was one, had a lot of nights like that. A recent interviewer wrote, in memoriam, about a morning when O’Donohue came to breakfast with a hangover, having polished off an entire bottle of single malt with friends the night before. “The bottle didn’t die,” he announced, “without spiritual necessity.”
There are voices that crack glass. That’s impressive, always. Noirin Ni Riain has a voice that stops you in your tracks and fills your eyes with tears and makes all that is holy to you as real as your hand. If you don’t believe that, listen to ten seconds of “Magnificat cum alleluia” and see if you don’t suddenly feel the impulse to drop to your knees.
Noirin Ni Riain — in America, she’d be Noreen O’Ryan — is not much known outside Ireland. There’s a reason. As a child, she learned 1,000 traditional Irish songs in a style that’s hundreds of years old. She made her first recordings with the choir of Benedictine monks at the Glenstal Abbey in Limerick, Ireland in 1979. The monks were, in essence, her record company. A very non-commercial company — the monks filled orders but did not engage in the worldly practice of promotion.
I don’t understand the words she sings. But I don’t need to use the liner notes to know what they say. Her music comes across time, from a place out of time. Her voice is of this earth, and not. (The title of the CD means "voice from a cloud.") There is no arguing with it — this music is truth, beyond judgment. And this is the most wonderful thing about it: There’s no negativity. Noirin Ni Riain may knock you to the floor, but she will never fail to lift your heart to the heavens. [To buy the CD from Amazon for $6.72, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
