In the final chapter of Tana French’s novel The Trespasser, a character describes reaching a point when he feels as if the rest of his life has already happened. As if he is simply reading from a pre-existing script that won’t now alter, one in which there will be no unexpected twists, no surprises. He describes this as like watching a third-rate film where, half-way through, you just know what’s going to happen next and how it’s all going to end, but not why you’ll be bothered to watch the rest. To his boss he attributes this feeling to going through a midlife crisis. But I suspect that what French has him describe will be familiar to many of us as something more regular, if only by moments, and particularly if we’re over a certain age. That, hopefully brief, sinking feeling that your life is starting to run on fixed rails and can only become increasingly predictable as it moves towards its end. 

At seventy-six I’m aware of this feeling occurring to me more regularly and lasting longer, along with its equally uncomfortable counterpart: the growing sense that, with the global environmental and political situation getting more and more unstable, any unexpected twist or surprise that does occur is very unlikely to be a welcome one. I’m also aware that the best response to these feelings is to make a conscious effort to shift my attention to sensing my bodily presence, to being more aware of just where I am in the here and now. That might be to open into the way that the warmth of the early morning light transforms the wall at the head of the stairs, the particular way the wind shimmers the leaves of the sycamore trees the grow along the river bank, or to notice how our almost twenty-year-old cat chooses where to ensconce himself on the grass in front of the cottage, having first taken account of sun, wind, and the indignation of the family of sparrows that nest in the porch. Having worked for a university for so many years I all too often find myself living in my head, immersed in preoccupations, worries, and abstractions that find subtle but seemingly endless ways to shut me off from the material present of actual living. 

In writing this I’m not setting up an argument to reject my long engagement with work of theoretical or academic thinkers, not least because I’m only too aware that I owe a very real debt to any number of such thinkers. What has increasingly been nagging me, for want of a better term, is that the state of mind I so often fall into is bound up, to a greater or lesser extent, with an underlying academic attitude. One that Ursula K. Le Guin identifies, in her Bryn Mawr Commencement Address –  – as articulated through, aligned with, the ‘father tongue’, the linguistically-embedded mentality that speaks authoritatively ‘from above’. and neither invites nor expects an answer, the ‘language of capital M Man’. It’s a mentality I’ve come to associate with Paulo Friere’s ‘banking model of education’, an understanding of education in which those who are taught are regarded by those who teach as passive, as more or less empty vessels who are expected to receive, file, store, and be able to regurgitate on demand, the information bestowed on them. Le Guin contrasts the ’father tongue with a ‘mother tongue’, language ‘as relation’, language that connects, is predicated on exchange, the ‘language spoken by all children and most women’. Le Guin also speaks of a third language, one that marries ‘public discourse and the private experience’, a third form of language that constitutes ‘a wedding and welding back together of the alienated consciousness’ of ‘the father tongue and the undifferentiated engagement’ of ‘the mother tongue’. (I’ve not able to do justice to Le Guin’s thinking here, so please read her address for yourself). 

I have spent many years reading and writing texts that presuppose the need for attention to the theoretical positioning and argument on which the notion of the “intellectual progress” of academic thinking depends. But I’m now finding it increasingly hard to read or write such texts. Instead, I’m increasingly drawn to reading poetry and the prose of poets, forms of writing that I feel actively engage in wedding and welding back together Le Guin’s “father” and “mother” tongues. I return again and again to Imaginary Bonnets With Real Bees In Them,the texts of three lectures that Paula Meehan gave as the Ireland Chair of Poetry; also to Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, in which I first read her Bryn Mawr Commencement Address. I’ve come to recognise that there’s a very real need behind this shift. 

It’s hard to give an accurate description of that need, but I’m as clear as I can be that it relates to a growing understanding that no number of texts written in the ‘father tongue’ are going to help me meet the endings I must face, not least my death. It’s also becoming increasingly clear that reading poetry, the prose writing of poets, and narratives written in Le Guin’s “third tongue”, might help me do just that. Writing that is able to simultaneously mourn and celebrate the living actualities of our being here, our immersion in this endlessly complex and paradoxical world. Where I once turned to the work of a wide variety of academic thinkers, for example Geraldine Finn, Mary Watkins, Janet Wolff, Paul Ricoeur, Edward S. Casey, or Richard Kearney, to help orient myself, I increasingly turn to poets, to Paula Meehan, Denise Levertov, Grace Wells, Ursula K. Le Guin, Eavan Boland, Philip Casey, Miroslav Holub, Derick Walcott or Adam Zagajewski. A shift that’s changing the whole tenor of how I read more generally.  

Among the various books on my recent reading list have been Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Said The Dead, several novels by Tana French, Suzanne Simard’s When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World and the published version of a PhD thesis for which I was an external examiner. French’s books hold my attention because I sense a very powerful observational and imaginative intelligence informing her narratives. What links the other three books is that they all combine a substantial amount of what any fair-minded academic would regard as serious research, each combining it in different ways with some form of personal narrative. Ní Ghríofa brings a poet’s sensibility to the task of transforming a very extensive body of detailed archival research into a fascinating, and at times heartrending, narrative that shifts between three “voices” – one being that of the author – so as to interweave historical fact reconfigured with something approximating magic realism. Simard’s book is a vivid account of an extensive scientific study concerned with how trees interrelate, the understanding that results and social impact of that understanding, shot through with the intertwined personal narratives of those conducting the project with her and herself. Both books break with the conventions of academic research, in Ní Ghríofa’s case so radically that her archival research could not be extricated from the overall narrative and given an “objective” form as social anthropology. A very patient and skilful editor with the appropriate ecological background, and sufficient grasp of Simard’s scientific field, might perhaps disentangle the scientific for the personal in Simard’s narrative, but to do so would, in my view, be to miss the entire point of her writing the book in the way that she has. The third book, while it is built on a concern with family history and the experience of four journeys undertaken by its author, remains wholly within the standard conventions governing the publication of interdisciplinary academic research. What strikes me is that while Simard, unlike Ní Ghríofa, is no poet, both authors in their very different ways successfully wed and weld back together the alienated consciousness of the father tongue and the undifferentiated engagement of the mother tongue in a way that the author of the third book cannot.

Several poems come to mind as intimations necessary to hold close just now: Paula Meehan’s Of Wrens and Other Singers, Derek Walcott’s Love after Love, Denise Levertov’s September 1961, Theo Dorgan’s Learning Death and more. And I am deeply grateful to the Utopias Bach poetry group for our meetings on the last Friday of each month and for sharing the ways in which poetry helps open us to positive experiments for a better world.