The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  When I was three and a quarter years old, my younger brother Kieran was born, and I was displaced from the unquestioning position I’d held as the only son. I can reconstruct from the nightmares I suffer at 3.15 AM, that they’re an echo of this childhood trauma. A fatal doubt was brought home from the hospital along with the baby with the big head, who took pride of place in my mother’s bedroom, in what had been my cot. My parent’s action undermined the innocent certainties of the world I inhabited, and robbed me of bliss. There’s a painting which captures the moment of alienation perfectly, which is on display in Berlin’s Picture Gallery. It’s of a mother and child by Pieter de Hooch, and shows a mother lacing up her bodice seated on a chair smiling down into a covered cradle. Behind her back in the next room, a young girl stands irresolute in the shadows, pensively looking out through an open doorway at the sunlight. I walked out through that door, and went to live with my Granny; I’d no other means of redress. Mum and Dad laughed heartily at my proposal to them sitting around the big dining table in the kitchen that they send the baby back to where he came from, that we’d no need of him.

  ‘That’s not possible, Michael …’

  Their amusement about such a grave matter to me, and the realisation that inexorably they were closed to any discussion, that there was no reaching out to help me with my difficulties, meant that I could never bring to them again questions that I pondered over, or that were forced upon me. Anxious tentacles began to imprison me at that tender age, a cage that was destined to remain forever in place, and to be reinforced over time. It was plain from their mirth that I’d misspoken, and that I was suffering because of it. As I played alone at their feet, my wounds hidden beneath the long white folds of the linen tablecloth, I saw that I’d been replaced by a younger version of myself, and with terror I understood that it was I who was superfluous.

  From the many children’s storybooks of fairytales and myths that were read to me, and from the pictures that I’d studied, and dreamed over, I knew that the three bears had threatened Goldilocks and that the house of the Three Little Pigs was blown down. Before I was chosen to be slain by one of the Valkyries, who were depicted in colourful paintings flying through the air on their horses, drawn swords at the ready, I determined to withdraw to my Granny’s. I realised that she too was under threat from Red Riding Hood’s wolf, that neither of us was safe, but I believed that since she was older than me, Granny was in a better position to handle it. Psychologically, I needed to put in place a barrier against an overflowing, all-encompassing familial sea which threatened to drown my survival as an individual. Displacement was a happening and a conclusion which I arrived at fully formed. They were part of a piece, a beaten path to be followed through the forest, rather than a logical thinking through of the options. Granny lived alone in the house next door until I arrived there with my pyjamas. I knew that I could retake my rightful, solitary place under her tutelary care, and that I’d live longer there, hidden away in my cottage in the woods.

  The simple time of innocence had passed, leaving a fracture at the heart of how I perceived the world, which has festered over the years. The mask of being a sunny child covered over my dejection. I heard a lens make a sharp, splitting sound, and when I looked through the steel-rimmed spectacles that I wore, I saw a puzzle. The dissected piece of glass bent the light from a straight course, and the strangeness of the world that I inhabited, twisted as it was in different ways, underlined for me the foolishness of relying on an external reality which could change irrevocably in an instant, switch 180 degrees, and on people who professed to love me, but who were capable of betraying me without warning. As I grew more and more the introvert, and tried to negotiate my own ambivalence with greater skill, I saw that I was no longer guiltless, harmless, without blame. When I stood before an altar glittering with candles and decked with boughs of dark-green holly, I sang joyous Christmas carols with my classmates in the choir, but felt no nostalgia for an Eden from which I’d been expelled: ‘Natum videte regem angelorum …’ With sinking heart I’d already seen the bicycle helmet, the board games, and the knitted pullover stacked in my parents’ wardrobe that Santy would bring later on that night. Suddenly, I was too old to be a believer, no longer an innocent.

  ‘Venite, adoremus Dominum …’ After the goodwill of the Midnight Mass, I’d no interest in visiting the church crib to see the baby Jesus in the manger, because ‘… there was no room at the Inn.’ That phrase tortured me because it led in two directions: when baby Kieran arrived in my life unexpectedly, I concluded there was no room for me in my parents’ house; and yet, I too was displaced from my home like the baby Jesus. Which of the two rivals did the story of Jesus represent? And which of the two emphases best represented the truth? Whatever way the sentence was pronounced, I believed there was no room for me; and no further words were available to resolve the conundrum, just the silence of God from without. It was the first of many absences. I had to live within that soundless sentence, and make the best of it: but all the while I was learning, and coming up with my own responses from within. I felt as I did walking home down Chapel Street that Saturday morning in springtime after my first confession in the Church of the Holy Rosary, when I remembered that I’d eaten a sweet during lent and that I’d forgotten to tell that sin to the priest. Others’ violent certainties must have informed me of God’s known will, since I was aware of transgression, and at the time I applied it to myself. The earth underneath the pathway trembled so much that I felt dizzy, and then it roared open. A blast of heat from hell’s furnace scorched the surface of my skin. I oscillated in silhouette over the raging orange chasm which had opened up from underneath the path, and I could see devils that were bigger than me coming towards me, taunting me, and I went cold with fear. They surrounded me with mocking jeers and began to push and to pull at me, kicking my legs with their boots trying to trip me up, mussing up my hair, until a shove to my back sent me sprawling out into the abyss, and they continued on their way, laughing at my shock and humiliation, and the embarrassment which suddenly squeezed tears down my cheeks. The ground became solid again, and I pulled myself up out of the grate into a seated position, and tied my shoelaces which had become undone in the scuffle. I spat into my hanky, and then tried to wash out the grit from my grazed knees, staunching the dripping rivulets of dark blood that were staining the tops of my knitted stockings. There was a sudden painful clatter across my ear from a devil passing back up the path. God was letting me know that I’d failed to let the priest hear the truth. I’d spoken against the Holy Ghost by not telling the full truth in confession, and I’d committed the unforgivable sin. ‘… it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.’ From the start, trying to make sense of my primitive experiences led me to conclude that I was destined to be unforgiven.

  That unforgiven status was a registration which was to have many effects, both good and bad. It served to strengthen my sense of uniqueness: I had no like or equal, I was unrivalled. Because of the recording of that condition onto a list in my soul that I stumbled across in my own psychoanalysis, and which was carried back to me in various interpretations later on, relentlessly repeating in my life, I led a solitary life, moving through the silence of the empty house next door like a monk around a monastery. I tolled the bell announcing the Divine Office, and members of a ghostly community would sweep down polished corridors in their gleaming white habits like great, gliding birds to sing the canonical hours, Lauds and Matins on shadowy winter mornings, and Compline in the yellow warmth of summer evenings. Each of them was a word which had materialised out of the air. They jostled close together in serried rows to express themselves in lays, short sung poems that foretold of the divine.

  Terrorised by the memory of my damnation, which continued to dictate behaviour even as it sank into forgetfulness, I was impelled into confessing the whole truth of experience to myself, naming it aloud in language as if my salvation depended upon it. ‘In the beginning
was the word …’ I whispered to myself the widest range of words which formed incantations on the tongue, magic formulas, a layering of language which I employed to keep me company. They were playmates who defended me, and helped to control the anima mundi of my environment. Up the fields on my own, I was conscious of clambering out among the yellow primroses in hedgerows from which I would materialize as a fox, of being ravished by the bluebells blanketing sun-dappled glades as they took up residence inside me, or getting myself trapped by the sucking sedges which grasped at my wellingtons like the dentist, Billy Bourke, extracting a wisdom tooth with superhuman effort. I was being scratched at by attacking whitethorns, whacked about by the blasts of winter wind in a galleon’s sail, and drenched by sudden summer showers from the cloud static over me and nowhere else, which melted onto the heat of my skin as I sheltered under the warmth of hedges, watching worms burrow holes in the bodies of Spanish mariners, buried where they were felled under a double ditch. Out among the hills I became a sorcerer of language in which the marvellous partook of the real, and the strange adorned the mundane. I painted my world like Caravaggio and Zurbarán and Rubens, adorning the walls of baroque churches and palaces with robustly dramatic and colourful canvases, this time constructed out of words. And that’s the truth.

  In fellowship with the sharp reflections in my Granny’s sitting room mirror above the fireplace, which caught the cold image from the mirror on the opposite wall and multiplied it, I chanted aloud Shakespeare’s seven ages of man over and over, and gave voice to each of those imitations until I had them off by heart. It was part of my homework from secondary school, but unknowingly I was fathering myself into the various roles that over time would beckon to me successively with crooked finger from outside in the street, broadcaster, psychoanalyst and author, like shapes requiring to be filled: reflecting copper moulds on the kitchen table that my Granny filled with a gelatine mixture over the flesh of chopped fruits on every Saturday evening of my childhood. As I stepped out from the wings of adolescence, I knew that this was going to be the performance of my life. It would be a continual coming-out into the purest truth of words, which eventually would become more and more refined, truer, as I grew to inhabit them; a movement away from the coarse and serviceable sackcloth clothes made from jute into the fine and lustrous silks. It would be a progressive revelation of otherness, the communication of divine knowledge so that more and more I could be imbued with God’s spirit, a breath which I understood could never belong to the unforgiven, but at least it could pass through me to another, filtering the words which were hidden in the air, as Granny would pass the gelatine through a muslin strainer to extract any films of skin that might have formed. I could give them voice, ‘This is my body … This is my blood …’ as one after another the words which I conjured out of nothingness were hurled forward into a future eternity, taking with them as a gift the imperceptible fragments of my being which had made those words my own.

  Back then, even at the beginning, I was aware that the mind full of words could fail. It was borne in on me that there was always the possibility of silence. Inexplicably, I could lose colour until I too would be shining white, suspended, noiseless, and candid, like the whitest dove, from whose vantage point high up on the classroom ceiling I’d see a spinning De La Salle dervish down below dexterously wield a heavy window pole. Brother Flavian was a cogwheel in the life of Castlebar children, clicking around to iambic pentameter: ‘The infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice …’ beating out a lesson, beating it into First Year upper arms and shoulders, beating, beating as he went through the lines of desks, pausing only to beat the terror out of those youngsters who shook with fear in the classroom because they were aware that they’d forgotten the words, words in whose talons the boys were held dangling for an instant within sight of the dawning horizon, and then inexplicably let go of, so that they were helpless, all control gone, plunging, streaking down like stars from the heavens to their lonely fate, at one with the unloving nothingness, derided, worthless as if they never had been, simply because their reach for a future possibility had flown away and left without them, and left them without. There was silence, suddenly: oblivion.

  Part Two

  Live Big Young Man

  I re-formulated versions of the sentence in my mind, relieved that the anguish of my uncle’s insult no longer undid me. The phrase I eventually settled on, ‘I reject out of hand your controlling silence,’ seemed to hold me somehow from caving in. All morning I’d felt scalded by feelings of worthlessness and failure at allowing myself to be given across to him on the generous platter of my openness. I’d rung my uncle and aunt on New Year’s Eve to wish them all the best for the coming year. I said, ‘It’s going to be a great year for me, Robbie: you know I’ve got a publisher for my book …’ and my uncle had changed the subject. He ignored the statement as if it had never been made, and I found myself continuing on a cheerful conversation, at odds with the cutting silence which had just deleted my wonderful news. Initially I was puzzled, thinking that this younger brother of my father, who’s now in his late seventies, had misheard. But as we continued to talk, with a deepening sense of shock I realised that not only had he ignored what I’d said, but that he’d so seamlessly elided it from our conversation, that it had become delusional. We breezily wished each other a happy new year, and I put down the phone, very aware that there was something wrong. ‘I shouldn’t have spoken about the book!’

  ‘What d’you mean,’ Terry interrogated, ‘you shouldn’t have spoken about the book?’

  ‘I just didn’t think …’

  We looked at each other in disbelief. The revelation for me was that my uncle didn’t wish me well, despite his cheery protestation. And the revelation for Terry was that I’d acquiesced in having my voice silenced. He pointed out that I hadn’t said anything about it during the conversation, or given any indication that something was amiss. He was exasperated that I’d behaved like a shivering pup with its tail between its legs. Breathing strength into my discomfort, he suggested rightly that something would have to be done about my behaviour.

  That briefest altercation over the phone was the first brushstroke of an impressive tenebrist painting, where the large areas of dark colours are relieved with an inspirational shaft of light. The picture would continue to be worked on over the next couple of years in conjunction with Terry’s recommendation. It was way too early for me to have a considered opinion about that first daub of colour on a very large canvas: there wasn’t yet a second one with which to compare it. However, I realise with hindsight, that Michelangelo already knew where he was going with a baroque masterpiece, even though the initial swipe of shadow hit hard and with a sweeping blow. The final portrait, when it emerged, would be balanced in every degree. Despite the blanketing silence from my uncle, I was left even more determined that my words would see the light of day.

  I’d been outmanoeuvred in the field of conversation, and been turned about. I’d registered immediately that this was happening by the imperceptible ripple of disquiet that had passed across the blank canvas sheet of my credulousness. Because nothing was said, because I was presented with silence, it took time to register the event, and to transcribe it into meaning; only then could I evaluate the level of the danger. I remember in particular the silence of the wind that surrounded my sexual abuse as a small child by a young man from the garage next door, when he’d crushed me to him, the strangeness of our situation up against a wall, hidden in the crackling, overgrown thicket of small trees and shrubs at the end of our back garden, the man bending over me supporting me in his arm, his urgency against me in the shadows, the hoarseness of his breathing against my ear fogging up my glasses, and I could see the sunlight way, way off shafting through a gap in the fluttering leaves of ash and their swaying branches, and I imagined that I was a little baby bird, a scaltán, high up at the top of a tree in a nest of twigs, swaying back and forth, back and forth in the breeze. Nothing was ever said then either
, nothing was referred to afterwards as he released me slowly, exhausted now, his other hand supporting himself against the wall, and I gently escaped from under his awkward embrace, out of the shadows and into the silence of that wind washing all about disturbing the peace, walking straight ahead with tentative steps on ground that had suddenly collapsed beneath me, head held high without a backward glance leaving him behind, blinking self-consciously in the sudden sunlight, until the next time that I’d be waylaid. I see now that the emphasis I place on naming, on putting everything into words, is to counter-act the silence of that sexual abuse by telling the truth.

  When complex waves of feelings – strangeness, and intimacy, and sexual curiosity and conflict and shame – were aroused by an older sexual predator in the early years of my childhood, I didn’t have the words with which to paint them, so that the feelings floated away over the ripples of time and out of reach. Only the disturbed traces remained in their wake, lapping gently now at the edges of my mind, so that the memories I conjure up are perilous reconstructions in which the present partakes of the past. And on occasion, feelings of anxiety and anguish have had to be unwillingly walled up alive in a secret panic room inside me. Like a ravening pack of dogs, they went bad, or mad, and took every opportunity to join in the barking proper to other angers.

  Further strips of material attached to the written evidence holding an abuser’s appended seal are more difficult to erase once they’ve been jeeringly stamped, branding-ironed into the flesh of childhood memories that recorded every new moment of the burning horror exactly as it was happening. A heroic effort forced out against the odds is required to close the eyes of the mind, afraid to sleep lest an elaborate spectacle of dreams on a wheeled platform trailing excited children arrives like a thunderbolt in Market Square. It gives to the actor a tragic stature on this stage, and gives a semblance of truth to his performance, which he raises from many sources. His voice has a resonance, which comes not just from reverberating off sinuses, but up, up from the echoing depths of his being. It is sonorous and produces a deep song, a cante jondo, which expresses the purest feeling of his soul, thrilling those children to their core. His face wears a mask: the skin is pulled back tight against the pain. The character in this play mirrors in the shining key light of his eyes that a person’s purchase on the life of the mind is sorely won in a battle against fate, which never will have armistice.