Thirty Two Words for Field and Sand Talk – Irish and Indigenous wisdom
May 12, 2023 at 9:17 pm | Posted in arts and health, Australia behind, Blasket islands, Books, capitalism, Common Good, Democracy, Indigenous wisdom, Inequality - Australia, Living creatively, Manchan Magan, mental illness, Nature writing - Irish, rural Ireland, Sand Talk, sustainable living, value of the arts | 1 CommentTags: Indigenous wisdom, Irish wisdom, Julia Louis Dreyfus’ ‘Wiser than Me’, NeoLiberalism dogma versus Indigenous wisdom, our co-dependent relationship with nature, The Voice referendum, Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape by Manchán Magan, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk
Connecting with a better world
Apart from reading some fantastic books, I’ve been having fun with my new Kick-Start creative writing workshops. They’ve been zipping along with the poetic contributions of talented students, filling the BRAG room on Tuesday nights with laughter and creative verve. BRAG stands for Braidwood Regional Arts Group and you can find it here: https://www.bragart.com.au
I’ve also been filling in for someone on a local radio station plus submitting my novel MS, Off the Plan, and making collages out of my painted papers and photographs, even working towards an exhibition with some others. And still dancing the Argentine tango. Brilliant books like Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape by Manchán Magan (Gill Books, 2020) have taken up some time too.
Sounds resonate inside us. If ever you’ve heard a cow lowing after losing her calf, you’ll have felt with her the panicked despair floating out on the air. In Irish there’s a word for the sound: diadhárach – the particular loneliness of a cow bereft of her calf. Before the English suppressed the Irish language, words like this connected the speakers more deeply to the world around them. It’s great that Irelanders learn Irish in school now, reconnecting with their native tongue after centuries of English repression of it.
A deeper truth
Manchán Magan considers in his book ‘how words can be wedges that prise back the surface layer of thought and feeling, revealing a deeper truth.’ (p. 185) He observes in his intriguing book that old languages are rich in words that ‘emphasise our interrelatedness with all life and that reveal the empathy we have with each other and with our surroundings. They acknowledge our co-dependent relationship with nature, revealing almost as much about our inner processes and frailties as about the world around us.’ (p. 311)
You don’t have to know a word of Irish to be totally absorbed by this enchanting book. The author offers 45 words for stones and 4,300 words to describe character traits. He spent summers on the Blaskets with his grandmother where he learnt the many ways to express the changing qualities there of the light, winds and the sea. The language expressed a different way of being, of connecting with the landscape around them. Continue Reading Thirty Two Words for Field and Sand Talk – Irish and Indigenous wisdom…
Reinventing our lives: surviving with the help of literature
December 28, 2019 at 6:11 am | Posted in Andrea Goldsmith, Australia behind, Bookshops, capitalism, Charlotte Wood, creativity, depression, Inequality - Australia, mental illness, optimism, value of the arts, writers' health | Leave a commentTags: David Wallace-Wells, Hidden City: Adventures and explorations in Dublin by Karl Whitney, How to Be Right (in a world gone wrong) by James O’Brien, Invented Lives, Michael Gustafson and Oliver Uberti, Michael Winterbottom, Notes from a Public Typewriter, restore sanity and improve everyone’s well-being by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How more equal societies reduce stress, The Uninhabitable Earth: A story of the future
When I was in Dublin in September I bought some wonderful books. A favourite is the intriguing, personal and beautifully written Hidden City: Adventures and explorations in Dublin by Karl Whitney (Penguin, 2014). (I’ve lent it and others to friends and can’t take a photo of its cover or some other favourites at the moment!)
Stitched Up: The anti-capitalist book of fashion (Pluto Press, London, 2014) is a compelling account of how the fashion industry exploits and damages both the environment and individuals. Tansy E. Hoskins’ exposé was an eye-watering shock to me on both counts.
I had no idea about the toxic chemicals involved in high-fashion clothes production, or how, for instance, models are sometimes treated as they are in the pornography industry – dispensable and beneath contempt.
Continue Reading Reinventing our lives: surviving with the help of literature…
Thinking women, hope and regeneration
June 12, 2019 at 6:56 am | Posted in Andrea Goldsmith, Australia behind, Australian novels, Democracy, Living creatively, Movies, optimism, Toni Jordan | 2 CommentsTags: 2040: Regeneration, Damon Gameau, Invented Lives, Julienne van Loos, Kafka, optimism in depressing times, Rebecca Huntley, Sarah Macdonald al, The Fragments, The Full Catastrophe, the importance of play, The Thinking Woman, Toni Jordan
Am I advocating escapism?
It’s been hard to find anything uplifting to say in the last few weeks. The last time I read John Milton (1608-1674) was in English (Hons) many years ago. But I just came across a quotation from Paradise Lost that seems like a sanity-saver in the world we’re enduring now.
‘The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’
I can imagine a certain homeless lad I see often, camping endlessly outside Dickson Woolworths, waiting for a Government flat to come up – or any of those poor, skinny, desperate blokes on Manus Island or Nauru who find themselves simultaneously in Hell and in Limbo – saying, ‘Yeah, that’s easy for him to say!’
And yes, Milton had his books and his house, music and writing, and his wife (a succession of three) and children.
But everyone has his own trials and Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, and of course when writing poignant poems like ‘When I consider how my light is spent’. His first two wives died, he also lost a son and a daughter, and he had a strained relationship with his remaining daughters.
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