Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:01.614)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Kearney, the Charles Selig Professor in Philosophy at Boston College and he has recently come out with, well, he's written many books, but some of his more recent works are Thinking Film, Theo Poetics, Radical Hospitality, and the last time he was here, Touch, Recovering Our Most Vital Sense, but today we're talking about his novel, Salvage. Dr. Kearney, wonderful to have you on today.
richard kearney (00:30.866)
I'm delighted to be back.
PJ (00:33.694)
So just as that kind of initial question, though slightly different for you because we have a lot of philosophy books, and then we have a novel. Why, why salvage? Why did you feel this novel needed to be written?
richard kearney (00:49.634)
Well, first, it's not my first, it's my third novel, but it's a return to fiction writing. I wrote two in the 90s, Psalms Fallen Walking at Sea Level. So this is my third, and I came back to it for a number of reasons. One, I've been writing a lot about the philosophy of imagination, and it struck me that if we're going to talk the talk, we might walk the walk. So it's always a great pleasure for me to sort of transit.
from philosophy, philosophical talk about imagination and the use of narrative and metaphor and symbol and myth and storytelling to the actual practice of it. And it's a very different part of my brain, part of my soul, part of my being, in that when I'm writing fiction, my mind is sort of off duty. I don't have a table of contents that I start with. It comes very much from...
The mind being on sabbatical, so to speak, you know, when I'm swimming or walking or daydreaming. Thoughts come, ideas come, little phrases come, and I sort of note them down. And then they sort of weave their way into a story and the story becomes more and more compelling. Indeed, even the title of the book, Salvage, which is a story set in the middle of the 20th century on an
an offshore island in Ireland, southwest coast of Ireland. But the title for that book I thought was about one of the practices of the islanders. They were the last islanders, Irish speakers, to live in that part of the world. The island is now abandoned but in any case they lived off salvage during the Second World War and I thought that's what it was about but when I was asked in an interview
my conversation with you now, I realized that actually it was also about salvaging the language that is now lost, the Gaelic language, salvaging the memories of those people, salvaging the place names. Even the island itself was called Ilan Vrida in Gaelic and was then renamed by the English and the Ordnance Survey in the 19th century as Rabbit Island. So that was something that came from the unconscious. I mean, I wasn't aware of it philosophically or conceptually. It sort of bubbled up.
richard kearney (03:14.622)
And I realized that the title itself was sort of overdetermined, like a dream or a daydream in several different senses. In any case, that was why I felt the need to write fiction, to put my philosophy into practice. And more importantly, to let the unconscious speak as well as consciousness.
PJ (03:35.746)
Well, first off, let me apologize because I had gone through your books on your website and I missed the fiction section. So that's my bad. But the One of the things that really struck me about your book and you know you include that kind of Note at the beginning. Why did you feel the need to include. I mean, there's that over determined aspect you've already mentioned, but why do you feel the not as a challenge. Right. Like, I'm not but
richard kearney (03:44.083)
words
PJ (04:05.422)
kind of as a softball for you to explain why include Gaelic phrases, why have the reader look at something that would, for lack of a better term, confuse them.
richard kearney (04:20.694)
Yeah, well, that's a great question. And you know, initially, the first version of the novel, there wasn't any Gaelic. There's only a few phrases, all of which are very clearly either translated or evident in the context. But I do leave them in. And I was advised by my agent when she saw the first draft and the first publisher who was looking at it to leave out the...
the Gaelic. And I chose not to. And I ended up with a different publisher who was very happy with the Gaelic. But it's a resistance to our normal way of thinking. You see, in the in the novel, I'm trying to retrieve salvage, a way of thinking that has been lost. And that way of thinking was actually
carried by and contained in the language. So for instance, there were 16 different ways of describing the movement of water on a shore, or the sound made by water brushing against the shore and then recoiling. Shuitu is the word in Gaelic. So, phonetically and semantically, this was a whole world.
You know, there as one of my friends, Mancon McGann recently said in title of one of his books, 33 words for a field. There were 33 words for a field in the language. Now, most of that I've transliterated. I mean, the book is ninety nine point nine percent English. But I wanted it to carry the resonance of a language that is lost and that I'm trying to in a way salvage, revise, revisit.
through the English language while retaining certain sounds in Gaelic. So that's really what it's about. And it's also about salvaging not just the language, but a way of thinking, a way of being in community and a way of believing. The heroine in the book, Maeve, a young woman of 17, is actually a faith healer. I mean, she's a healer.
richard kearney (06:45.37)
natural healer. She's inherited this from her father and she's caught in this dilemma of how to express her fidelity, her deep almost atavistic fidelity to this healing power with water and herbs that goes back and plants that goes back you know hundreds of years to the patron saint of the island, Bridget, who was originally a Celtic pagan goddess who then was Christianized and was called
because she was as important, if not more important, than Mary the mother of Jesus. So this sort of Celtic goddess saint, Brigid, is presiding over the island, which has her name. There's a well, a sacred well with healing water, called Brigid's Well, and Maeve herself is visited again and again by the spirit of Brigid, which is in nature. It's not something in another world, you know, like
Western metaphysics are Platonism. It's not in another world, it's in this world. You know, the divine is in the plants, the fish, the water, the sea, the sky, and other human beings, all living creatures. And this goes back to one of Ireland's earliest Celtic philosophers, John Scutus Orujana, the ninth century, who said that God is a force running through all things. In Latin, the phrase was Deus Kurans.
the God who runs like a current, like a river, like a stream, like a force field through all living sentient things. So that's the kind of spiritual life, which is a very natural life that I'm trying to salvage, at least as a memory or a ghost or maybe as a possibility for future living, giving a future to the past, because God knows in our ecological
environmental climate crisis at the moment, we need alternative thinking about our relationship to nature.
PJ (08:44.994)
Hmm.
PJ (08:48.93)
Yeah, and I think there's a couple things that kind of tie in here that I wanted to ask about as you talk about her being a faith healer and these alternate ways of believing, but also you've kept the language not just transliterating it because, well, if we can get into English the 30 senses of a field or the 33, you know, the 33 senses of a field or the 12 sounds of the shore
richard kearney (09:14.779)
HMM
PJ (09:17.09)
then we've kept the knowledge. And it's like, no, it's in the music. And then when she talks about being a faith healer, it's like, it has to be an Irish because it has to be the sound of Irish. And so you talk about the different feeling of the music, the belief. And I think in many ways that goes to what we talked about even in the last time you were here, touch and feeling. And this is something that, you know, if I could say touch slash feeling, that when she is visited by the spirit, there's a
richard kearney (09:39.938)
Yeah.
PJ (09:46.146)
Forgive the central Florida way of putting it, but there's heat to through the feet, you know, there's the all sudden she can feel it rising up and so
Can you talk a little bit to kind of this, the relationship of this embodiment of this belief?
richard kearney (10:06.722)
Yeah. Well, the Irish language and Irish culture was traditionally very tactile, very embodied. Irish Celtic Christianity from the time Patrick came to Ireland, Saint Patrick, he came as a slave, as a hostage, not as the emperor or general of a Roman army. So Ireland was not Romanized. It became Christian, but in a very symbiotic sense with Celtic.
so-called pagan spirituality. So it was very earthy. And the sacred saints and deities were considered to have resonances and incarnations in place, in places and mountains and rivers and wells. And this sense of, it was called technically panentheism, which is God in all things, God in all natural things. And this prevailed.
really for five to six hundred years. It was known as the rule of Columba, who was who was a Celtic Irish saint. And it was only in the 11th, 12th century that Ireland finally came under the influence of Rome and went from the Columba, the rule of Columba to the rule of Rome, of Peter, as it was called. So
And that was a good swathe of time for Irish Celtic Christianity to actually nourish a form of syncretism, syncretism is a mixing of different spiritualities or religions. And that prevailed really up until the loss of the Irish language in the famine in the 1840s and 50s, when
sort of 80 percent of 70 80 percent of people who spoke Irish in Ireland was reduced, along with a massive drop in the population from nine to three and a half million. It was reduced to 10 percent. So we went from 80 percent in Irish to 10 percent. And with that, the Irish Christianity was sort of ceased to be native, indigenous, sort of quasi pagan and panentheist. And it became Anglicized. And through
richard kearney (12:34.114)
the Anglicising of the clergy and of the sacraments, a sort of a puritanism, a Victorian puritanism entered into Irish Catholicism that we still have to this day. And mind you, it was evident in European Catholicism, in Catholicism everywhere. It was called Jansenism. It was sort of an extreme dualism, a chastising of the body.
a humilly sort of an abnegation of the body in favour of whatever, the spirit, the soul. But that was very alien to traditional Irish Celtic Christianity and spirituality. And of course, that's just the Irish Catholic Church. There was the Anglican Protestant Church in Ireland, but also the Anglican Church in England, in North America. In fact, in 1916, when we had our
revolution or rebellion in Dublin against British rule and British Empire. Two thirds of the world was governed by the British Empire. So the Victorian Puritanism was not just something imported into Ireland in the 19th century. It really ruled the world. Britannia ruled the waves. It also ruled the light waves of religion and spirituality and moralism and whatnot. So really what I'm trying to do in the book is to
In a very basic way, everything is felt in the book. There's no philosophizing going on or theologizing, but in a very felt way through fiction, salvage some of that, some of that spirituality. And may I say that what I'm trying to do in the book vis-Ã -vis Ireland and European Western spirituality is going on here in North America also in our time when many people like Robin Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass,
Suzanne Simard and, you know, finding the mother tree. There's a whole return to a new appreciation of indigenous thinking. Here in Massachusetts, it's the Wampanoags, as they're called. And it's very important. They, like the Lakota, like, you know, the Sioux, the Cherokees, the Pueblo, they had a notion of the divine.
richard kearney (15:01.026)
in nature, through nature, through the earth, the sacredness of the earth was very similar to Celtic spirituality. So it's not some kind of Irish exclusivism that somehow we salvage the truth on the island of Ireland or on an island off Ireland, which is itself an island behind an island called England. Islands are very important in the book. But not just in the book.
PJ (15:12.867)
Ha!
PJ (15:22.766)
Ha ha.
richard kearney (15:29.562)
interest in islands in Ireland, the Banshees of Inneshir that was nominated for Academy Award takes place on the islands, the Western Islands of Ireland. Emma Donagh who's published a recent book on the Skellig Islands. There's a new interest in islands as occupying a sort of an imaginary space for what was marginalised, both in terms of spirituality and language, because these were Gaelic speaking islands, now is seen as actually something precious.
And they're seen almost as laboratories of alternative consciousness, which can be not just invented out of nowhere, sort of in a new age utopianism, but actually re retrieved from our past. And that's eminently the case also for the sort of return to and revitalizing of indigenous spiritualities. And I would say healing, healing methods also.
here in North America. It's particularly true of Robin Kimmerer, who's also a scientist. It's not some backward nostalgia for bygone days. She's a hard core scientist and she discovers in her biological life science research on the role of symbiosis in biology, in plants, in nature, animals and plants.
She discovers echoes of this symbiotic spirituality. Symbiotic means different species and different organisms living together harmoniously. She discovers that what's going on in nature is also going on at the level of organisms and microorganisms, and that's pretty fascinating. And that's important that salvage or Cumber's work is not some Luddite sort of regression to
to some golden age or, you know, pre-Socratic pasture land. No, it's about actually taking our past and bringing it into the future, giving ourselves a future, particularly when faced with our climate catastrophe and our appalling treatment of nature during the Anthropocene, as it was called, where from Descartes on, you know, philosophically, we were calling ourselves masters and possessors of nature. And with the Industrial Revolution, you know, 80% of...
richard kearney (17:54.286)
of fish and plant species are now endangered and under threat. We've polluted the world and we're facing a real climate, not just crisis, but urgency, emergency, as Mary Robinson says.
PJ (18:07.554)
Yeah, even as you're talking here, something that comes to mind as you talk about, like you're not Luddite, Rousseau's noble savage would not have an answer to the climate crisis, right? So we're not looking to like glorify the past, we're looking at transmuting it. This is something, as you talk about the embodiment of it and the need for these laboratories, because you can't manifest this stuff out of thin air.
richard kearney (18:28.736)
Exactly.
PJ (18:37.206)
This is something as I finished the book, I found myself wrestling with, and I'd love to hear what you think, especially since you wrote it. How do we reconcile the importance of place and embodiment with that, and for those of you who don't want spoilers, close your ears, but the universality of Bridget's well?
richard kearney (19:02.828)
Could you repeat the question? How do we get to the universality of Bridgeswell? How do we reconcile the particularity of place?
PJ (19:04.492)
Yes.
PJ (19:10.106)
How do we reconcile the need for embodiment and the importance of place with the idea that Bridges Well is actually everywhere?
richard kearney (19:19.686)
Yeah, OK, I see what you mean about the spoiler, but I won't spoil it. I get the citation. I recognize that as an author, I should, of course. Yeah. Well, you see, I think there's something pretty fascinating here that in the particular you discover the universal. I think that's a deep, deep philosophical and spiritual truth, human truth. You know, there was in Western philosophy and metaphysics, a tendency to go for universal that
PJ (19:22.634)
Yeah, yeah, right. Sorry. Yeah.
PJ (19:29.027)
Yeah
richard kearney (19:49.546)
jeopardized the singular and the unique and the particular. And that would include embodiment in place or embodiment in a person or a thing or a plant or an animal. The important thing was to, as Plato says, you know, in the Republic to rise higher and higher until you get through different particulars and then you get to more universal forms of knowledge and experience and then you get to the most universal of all, the one, the good.
That is one indivisible, that is beyond time and space, and therefore beyond material particularity or personal singularity. And I think that was a disaster for Western civilization. I think it gave rise to the Anthropocene, it gave rise to, that is the domination of the human, Anthropos, over nature. And Plato says it very explicitly, he defines man as the Anthropos, which is the Greek, of course, for man, hence our word, Anthropocene, anthropology, whatever.
Anthropocentric. And he said and he unpacked the meaning of anthropos in Greek, which is the one who looks upward, the one who looks upward and therefore removes him herself from symbiotic interspecies relationship with other creatures, quadrupeds, plants, mountains, what have you.
And in that movement upwards, anthropos means the one, the upward gazer, the one who looks up. The eye takes precedence over all the other senses, the more embodied senses, for example, being taste and touch in particular. Because in touch, you're in touch with what you're touching. You're in relationship and you're in a reciprocal relationship because take your hand touching your hand, the famous example of Rousseau-le-Merle-Ponty.
contemporary phenomenology. Your hand touches your hand, there's a double movement, double sensation. You can experience passively being touched and actively touching. And in touch that is actually our fundamental natural relationship to things. We are touched by what we're touching. It's a reciprocal mutual recursive relationship. You can see without being seen, hear without being heard.
richard kearney (22:07.342)
taste without being tasted, smell without being smelled, but you cannot touch without being tactile and tangible. It's our first sense from birth and it's our last sense to leave us at death. And in between we're always on, even in sleep. If you lose your touch, you're actually gone. You're not living. To live is to be tactile and to be in touch. But with this sort of emphasis on anthropocentrism,
That is the centrality of the human vis-a-vis all other species, which went in turn in concert with and in collusion with optocentrism, the predominance of the eye, which can dominate from a distance without being seen. It can dominate unilaterally and control and classify and compute and conceptualize. And that gave the human a huge power.
so that Western thought has actually been very anthropocentric, even more so from Descartes forward. And that's now coming into question and has to come in question as we're moving towards hopefully a symbiocene where we are returning to salvaging, if you like, our original relationship and our more fundamental relationship to nature and the world, which while, and to other people.
which was one of symbiosis, living together with people. In fact, it actually means in Greek, feasting together with people. It was convivial relationship with all other sentient beings. So this is the hope that we will exit the Anthropocene of Anthropocentrism and Optocentrism and enter into a revived mode of the symbiosis, which of course never went away. Even when we breathe.
We are exchanging air with the plants and the leaves of nature. That's why they say the Amazon is the lungs of the world. And that's a symbiosis. We need what is exhaled by the leaves, the plants, and they need what we exhale. So, you know, this movement between oxygen and carbon is a back and forth that is symbiotic. Trees and fungi,
richard kearney (24:31.114)
microzeal fungi feed the tree as the tree feeds the fungi and interconnects with all other trees. So these are from the human being breathing with the plants to the tree and its fungi, its world worldwide wood as it's called, this underground subterranean web. That's what is our natural relationship.
with animals and things and plants. It's not something we're inventing or going back to as if it once existed and it's disappeared. That is our everyday natural way of being as it is the way of being of all living creatures. But we have forgotten it and we've forgotten that we've forgotten. And now we're remembering because we have to remember what did we do to nature and to our relationship to nature during the Anthropocene, during our optocentrism.
such that when we were masters and successors of nature, we used it, exploited it, and now, and now our planet is in trouble. And we, some would say, are on the verge of extinction. So before it's too late, we need to salvage a way of being symbiotically in the world that can turn that around. It requires a paradigm shift. I have a book coming out next year called Hosting Earth, so that we realize that the...
The Earth hosts us. We're not just hosts of the Earth. In fact, we have very often been bad hosts of the Earth. We're also guests of the Earth. And we have to acknowledge that mutual reciprocal symbiotic relationship if we humans and the Earth itself is to be salvaged.
PJ (26:18.214)
There's what you just shared. Hasra reminded me of two different recent episodes for me. One is Dr. Yona Yukon, and she talked about how plastic is the most Cartesian object, because it is timeless. It refuses symbiosis.
And that's such a great, I love that she used that because it's such a great example of the climate crisis, right? Like you can see Cartesian philosophy loving this timeless, does exactly what you want, it's easily in frame to use the Heideggerian terminology. And it leads us into, if we think in these platonic timeless terms, plastic's perfect, right? It does exactly what
richard kearney (27:08.075)
Mm.
PJ (27:15.042)
But if you think in like living breathing terms, you're like, now what do I do with all this plastic? Right?
richard kearney (27:24.391)
Yeah, I know it's a huge question and a very good, very good example. I mean, microplastics are now found in every part of the ocean and the earth. You know, in fish and people, even in breast milk and placentas, they are finding microplastics. So it's traversing our entire planet and our being. And I think one of the reasons, by the way,
PJ (27:36.742)
People.
PJ (27:41.474)
Yep.
richard kearney (27:51.502)
culture very often and art picks up on these themes that are very often not spoken of enough but they percolate through the unconscious and the popular unconscious and the popular imaginary and I think for example the massive success of a film like Barbie is due to the anxiety of being becoming a plastic being what does it mean to be plastic and
again, the end of the film, another spoiler here, but she's going to be a gynaecologist, you know, she's acknowledging or she's choosing to acknowledge her humanity, her humus, her flesh, her humus literally means earth. And in all creation myths, in cosmogonic myths, the human comes from the earth. That's what humus, human means, humour and linked to humour, which we need badly.
And Barbie was pretty funny and humanity, which she is trying to rediscover. And I think so many people, mainly young people, went to see that film and got the humor of it and got the humanity of it because they saw this plastic AI being, you know, in many respects, this clone, this avatar, this doll, this golem out there and sort of.
expressing our worst fears, our worst fears and our deepest desires and conjugating that plastic paradox in a way that was brilliantly done and reminded people, yes, we are human and that means we need to get back in touch with our humanity, our humour and our humility.
PJ (29:44.982)
And another thing that you mentioned, and I actually just had Dr. Brent Waters on to talk about the need for presence, to have true love, you know, talking about like being disembodied. But even as you're talking about touch and how that's the more fundamental sense, and but the eye can see from a distance, but what are we taught? We are taught that it's wrong to look at someone without being looked at.
richard kearney (29:54.07)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
PJ (30:12.686)
And that's called voyeurism, right? You can do it in an appropriate way, but it's rare. Most of the time it's wrong to look at someone and not be, and not also be seen. And this kind of goes back to that touch feeling. And what's interesting is that we have now devices, I mean, this goes back to our previous discussion, but we have devices that allow us to always see without being seen. And...
richard kearney (30:17.612)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (30:40.866)
what do people feel alone because they are actually missing being seen. Like we watch and we watch and we consume and we consume and we do not create and we do not touch and we are not seen. And that's something that we feel at that bottom most level. So I don't know if that, go ahead.
richard kearney (30:47.835)
Yeah.
richard kearney (30:54.557)
We'll see you later.
richard kearney (30:59.074)
Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. You know, Merleau. No, no, I think you're touching on something very important there. And a couple of things come to mind. I think of Merleau-Ponty's wonderful description, the French philosopher's description of Cézanne painting a mountain in the south of France. And he says, Cézanne, the painter says, as I was painting the mountain, I felt it was painting itself through me, that what I was seeing was also seeing me.
And there's a phrase in Ireland that I learned growing up, I see the trees and the trees see me. That reciprocity of perceiving and being perceived. And by the way, just let me add a parenthesis here. It's not that sight is always unilateral. It is largely in our digital culture where we can become voyeurs living vicariously through our screen. We can see without being seen. And this is true of propaganda.
of war, smart bombs, you know, we can see them being, but they don't see the bombs coming. And of course, pornography is an obvious case in point. But a lot of the really good movies of our time, I mentioned Barbie a moment ago, but look back at the movies in the TV series that young people are fascinated by, and certainly in my philosophy classes, they want to talk about say Westworld, you know, again, creating beings that are, we can manipulate but cannot
Reciprocate. It's a creation of non-reciprocal relations until they revolt happily. There's another spoiler. Or take Black Mirror. Black Mirror constantly returning to this anxiety of what does it mean to live in and through digital technology and artificial intelligence. Take the film Ex Machina, you know, the creation of this perfect being in a laboratory. And then the need.
PJ (32:28.77)
Ha!
richard kearney (32:52.554)
for genuine love, i.e. to turn it into some kind of impossible reciprocal relationship. In other words, to bring tactility back into sight. And you can do that because our senses are actually synesthetic. That is to say, touch is not removed from the other senses. It actually works through the other senses. That's what synesthesia means. You cross-sense. So that true sight is when you see and you are seen.
That's insight. Like true hearing is when you listen and you are heard, et cetera. It's reciprocal. And I call that tactful sensing. Tactful seeing is insight. Tactful odor is flair. Think of animals. They're getting nature, right? That's why we hunt with them and walk with them. Think of tactful
taste that is savvy, savvy which comes from savoury to savour which gives the word savoir knowledge or sapientia. The Greek for wisdom is to taste and this is reciprocal recursive mutual relating to the world what I call symbiotic relationship taken from science and contemporary science and biology because that's how nature operates itself. So seeing the spirit in nature
in this reciprocal manner is actually our most appropriate way of being. Now, can we distort that? Yes. And when we do, when we take the tactile, tactful, reciprocal dimension out of sight, we get voyeurism and right down the line. And by the way, we can even betray touch, because even though our fundamental natural relationship, our phenomenological relationship to things is reciprocal, we touch it. We can.
decide to betray that reciprocity and make touch perversely and unnaturally into a one-way relationship. And that's called harassment. It's a violation, rape torture. You can go right down the line. There are forms of violation through touch that are the greatest betrayal of all because touch
PJ (35:05.186)
Hmm.
richard kearney (35:20.198)
is by its nature reciprocal and such relationships that I've described, such perversions are unilateral, one-way relationships of power and domination over the other. There's no sensitivity to and sensibility regarding what the other feels, what the other thinks, where the other is in their body. So that's very important in terms of the whole U2 movement and
racism, you know, when we objectify bodies because of colour or because of gender or because of anything else. So it cuts right across the board, I think, perhaps most dramatically and importantly in terms of the earth itself, the climate crisis, which UNESCO in a recent report with young people throughout the world concluded is the most important moral and political question of our day.
PJ (36:16.126)
Yeah, I mean, even as you've made several references to, and I think rightly, some symbiosis. And when you talk about betrayal, what you're talking about is parasitical relationships, right? Where you, like, there is no reciprocity. I want to make sure that I do, speaking of tactile and embodiment, I want to make sure I actually dwell a little bit on your book.
richard kearney (36:32.334)
Correct.
PJ (36:43.914)
One of the questions I had was, there's this moment, you talk a lot about the sadness, which I think is the Irish way of talking about depression. And I was curious about some of the research you did for this book, how much of this came from your imagination. One passage in particular that stuck out to me is, again, spoiler, but I will say, I think the,
richard kearney (36:56.3)
Right.
PJ (37:12.758)
what makes your book work so well is it is it feel meditative reading it. And so even with spoilers, I feel like it's well worth reading. Um, but the, when we talk about Dan Daly and his mad fit and him talking about taking the heads of these fish and shoving them in his mouth until they died. Um, where did that come from? I was like, I was really curious cause that it's a very visceral image. Sorry. Go ahead.
richard kearney (37:28.458)
Yeah. Yes.
richard kearney (37:40.21)
Would you believe it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, that came from, would you believe it, something I saw, a mad farmer who was released from a psychiatric hospital and allowed going on holidays with his family down in West Cork. And I was just walking to the beach one day and I saw this man, you know, taking fish, mackerel from the shore and killing them in that way. Crazy.
He was mad. But yeah, that's a form of psychosis. And that's what happens to Dandeneen when he loses his wife. And it's the end of island life and he's gone. He's also crazed with drink. But it's as bad as you can. Get when you're crazy is to start eating live fish.
in that manner. So, yeah, the sadness is a huge thing, not to that degree. I mean, that's the exception rather than the rule. But depression is a very, very common ailment of the Irish people because of historical reasons, particularly the famine, you know, the loss of five, six million people in a matter of, you know, six, seven years during the terrible famine.
and the defeats and so on. You can go on about being a victim in that regard. I don't think the Irish did any more than the Scots. The Celts were pushed westward until they could go no further, except maybe Nova Scotia and St Brendan headed off to discover America. I think it was what, in the 10th century, whether he got here or not we don't know. In any case, what I'm saying is there's a history of defeats. You know, Brian Freel, the great Irish playwright,
said that words of the Armory of the Dispossessed and the Irish through the Irish language but also when they spoke English and wrote in English like Joyce and Yeats and Beckett and Brian Freel himself, a wonderful playwright, used words and images as an armory because we didn't have weapons, we never won wars, we never won the World Cup Rugby Cup, you know, we always ended up being
richard kearney (40:07.734)
being defeated, but that doesn't mean being a victim. It means you can find compensatory ways of salvaging your dignity and your identity and your being. And that was often done through language, through imagination, through fantasy, through writing. And I think that's something many of my contemporaries and compatriots are very good at is compensating through.
PJ (40:10.979)
Mm.
richard kearney (40:37.006)
through word and image for what has been lost. And coping with depression, because that is one of the ways of dealing with melancholia. It's, you know, as Freud understood very well, mourning, you mourn, and one of the ways of mourning is actually through art, through imagination. It's absolutely crucial. But Maeve herself, I mean, coming back to your point, is a very embodied healer. She heals...
by touch, by water, by plants. She's also very, very embodied in her sexuality. She is somebody who relates to people in a very reciprocal sort of intuitive fashion. And she has savvy, you know, she has that native savvy that's very indigenous and very native, but is common to all people. It's not the exclusive preserve of the Irish.
And everybody, everybody has that indigenous and power within them to live reciprocally and mutually with other people. And even Freud and Jung, you know, they talked about the unconscious of which everybody possesses, no matter what your culture, your greed or your race. Everybody possesses it and possesses it equally. And it has what Freud called archaic elements.
archaic remnants that we carry with us transgenerationally. So the indigenous is not, you know, the Aboriginal peoples of, not only the Aboriginal peoples of Africa or Australasia, or indeed North America, it's everybody. We're all indigenous. And in a way, from that point of view, we're all analogously Celtic as well. I'm not getting into some kind of nationalism here, or, you know, sort of.
tribal ethnic exclusivism, far from it. We're all Celts. We're all natives. We're all indigenous. And we're all part of a symbiotic universe, if only we have ears to hear and eyes to see.
PJ (42:45.758)
And one of the things I appreciated, even as you talk about Maeve sort of carrying this on, was I thought the way that you handled the psychology of Elysian, of culture, was one, thank you, it was a great read, but it was really fascinating to watch the way that family dynamics and the psychology of individuals played into
Well, English is the future, right? English is for the young. You were dad's favorite, so you get the Irish language. And watching the brothers reject this partially because they felt rejected, right? And that was really interesting, because even as you talk about salvaging is a response to a lighting, right? And so that's really like this gradual erasure of the culture, obviously with the...
the great famine, you're talking about a very dramatic lighting of the culture, but it's still even after that there's this gradual, as you say now, the islands are no longer inhabited. But throughout the story you watch this happen and it just has this slow inexorability about it and I don't really find any villains in the...
in the book apart from maybe the McCarthy's, but that's sort of this small-minded wickedness, if I can put it that way. So one, thank you. Excellent book to read. I want to say that before, you know, because I want to be respectful of your time. But also, can you talk a little bit, kind of as we wrap up here, about how this, how these things get eroded? You know, how culture gets alighted, and how can we
richard kearney (44:17.891)
Hmm.
richard kearney (44:33.686)
You're welcome.
PJ (44:36.93)
How can we reinvigorate culture?
richard kearney (44:37.134)
Hmm. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is Maeve's big dilemma in the book. She wants to carry the indigenous inherited healing powers with her, even though she is marginalized, ostracized for that, misunderstood and loses a lot. The island, her family, her beloved, et cetera. Don't want to give too much away. In any case.
She doesn't give in and she doesn't return to a way of life that is no longer livable. Again, without giving away spoilers, her whole wager is that she can bring her vernacular healing, her folk healing, her natural healing with her into the modern world. She has done, you know, she's got the scholarship to do nursing and medicine in Dublin.
PJ (45:20.43)
Yeah.
richard kearney (45:36.894)
And she's going to defiantly do that while bringing her native healing. And, you know, as a midwife, she, she is determined to deliver children in a cycle of birth and rebirth again and again, using both the technology of modern medicine with the Hippocratic oath and then her own, you know, sort of native savvy of healing, going right back, not just to bridge it.
Celtic goddess, but also right back in the Greek Western tradition to Asclepius, who healed through the laying on of hands, through incubation, through dreams, through plants, through psychoactive drugs, through music, through dance, and it was an embodied healing, whereas Hippocrates, the other Greek patron of Western medicine, healed through supervision, through sight.
through diagnosis, through surgery. And it was, you needed both. And in a way, Mavis bring together the two patrons, patron gods of ancient Western medicine, Estipias, who heals through the earth, and Hippocrates, who heals through sight and intervention. And both are necessary, modern medicine and.
native alternative medicine. That's really her, one of her wages. I mean, there's many, but that's one at the level of healing, which is very central to the book, as you know.
PJ (47:16.923)
Dr. Kennedy, I want to be respectful of your time. So let me say thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure talking to you today.
richard kearney (47:23.318)
Real pleasure talking to you again too. Thank you for having me.