I asked a monk one time what his best advice was for a happy life. He looked me in the eye and said, “Be here now”.
He didn’t have much English, so I went to a philosopher and asked him what it means to be or not to be. The philosopher said that the crucial point to understand is that existence is not a private matter. It’s an attempt at conversation with “the other”. But I didn’t understand what he meant by “the other”. So I went to a musician. And the musician couldn’t tell me anything. All the musician could do was play music. And thus for the most part of any day I live a bewildered life.
Despite rumours to the contrary, I’m useless on the flute. It’s something I do alone, and it’s cheaper than therapy, but at least it’s a way of being in the present moment. I send jigs and reels out like signals into the empty universe. Sometimes the tunes I play feel like they were always there in the emptiness.
Clarity of thought
I have a friend with long, black hair and a precious fiddle, and he comes to the house occasionally, up through the fog. He steps into the room and opens up the fiddle case and takes the instrument from the blue silk scarf he always wraps around it. He leans his chin on the fiddle so that his long hair falls over his cheeks, and then he pulls the bow across the low strings, bleeding a deep sound out of them, like a shaman opening a door to the other world. Between tunes he sits lazily waiting for more tunes to come in. Each time a tune lands on his fingertips, I realise that music induces in me a clarity of thought far beyond the fog of religion or philosophy.
One night during the summer I was at a concert in Tyrone. There were men on the stage with banjos, accordions and guitars, and then a woman came on stage, like a lamb, and folded herself around a bodhrán. I thought for a moment she was going to fall asleep. But all of a sudden it was as if someone had plugged her in; as if electricity was running through her body. The song possessed her. It was her toes, curled up under the chair, that caught my attention, however.
In the old days, when I was eating chicken soup at the kitchen table in Cavan my mother would sometimes look at her bowl of broth and say, “This soup will go down to your toes”.
It was a way of describing the effects of good soup. And I was thinking that maybe the songs were having the same effect on the singer, because as she sang her toes curled up and tapped the floor with a dainty but intense energy.
Exuberance for life
My mother never sang, but she danced well. She squeezed her exuberance for life out through her toes on to the floor of the town hall in Cavan, dancing with men who reminded her of Fred Astair; that was until my father came along and seduced her with so much romantic blather that she was blinded to the fact that he danced like a donkey.
Perhaps she still dances in some ballroom of bliss or whatever heavenly realm she was dissolved into. I know it’s not fashionable to believe in heaven any more, but I could no more accept the dogmas of modernity than I could accept a life without music.
I was at her grave recently. I wanted to examine the headstone because I was thinking that it’s about time I got her name engraved on the black marble. It’s not easy to chisel out the hard facts of a death in stone; it seems too final.
But there’s nothing like a graveyard for giving a man an appetite, and so on the way home I stopped for a roast beef dinner in a local hotel where the shambles of a wedding party was strewn all around the lobby, with young men in morning suits slumped on sofas, and girls in pink dresses smoking at the door. And in the corner of the lounge, my old friend with the precious fiddle was providing the music.
“So this is where you are today,” I said, as he played a hornpipe.
“I’ll come visit you soon,” he promised, and I gazed at the blue silk scarf lying in the fiddle case on the floor, as if it were a cloth that had come down from heaven.