Paris – Peter Coles

Heaney, Diogenes and the Hermit

This is another reflection triggered by a charity bookshop find – this time of a first edition (1987) collection of poems by Seamus Heaney. In the poem that gave the collection its title – The Haw Lantern^[1] – Heaney likens the red berry of the Hawthorn, (Haw – Cretaegus monogyna) drooping on its stalk, to the lantern held by Diogenes, the ascetic philosopher of ancient Greece,^[2] who wandered the streets – in daylight – seeking ‘a [wise] man’^[3]

It is a minutely observed poem, with at least one tightly packed aside that could almost be overlooked: ‘Its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you.’ As I enter my senior years and have to keep blood sugar levels under control, that haw-like blood-prick is a daily encounter. And those increasingly frequent visits to the phlebotomist to be bled for this or that test leave me, too, waiting for the all-clear. I wonder whom Heaney had in mind, and for which test, as he was still a youthful 48-year-old at the time. But I digress…

Enter the tarot

Reading Heaney’s poem, the tarot card, L’Hermite, numbered VIIII in the series of 22 (or should I write XXII) major arcana, came to mind. Here, too, is a cloaked, bearded elder, holding a lantern in one hand and a walking stick in the other. Is he seeking truth, like Diogenes? Or is he already enlightened, a beacon showing others the way?

Soon after I moved to Paris in 1986, where I lived for the next 20 years, I stumbled across a weekly improvised lecture-cum-performance by the Chilean cinematographer-mystic tarot-maestro Alejandro Jodorowsky at the Maison des Mines, on the southern fringe of the Latin Quarter. An odd venue, but one that was large enough to hold the 200+ people who would regularly turn up – and cheap enough, as the conférences were free. Someone with a bucket would collect donations, “to pay for a meal”, as the audience filed out.

‘Jodo’ as he was known, would take centre stage, often dressed in purple, flanked by human-scale tarot cards, and would free-associate on a theme, usually linked to the family tree – l‘arbre généalogique. He was (is – he turned 97 in February) convinced that most psychological issues are transgenerational and often linked to what he has called a ‘misreading of sacred texts’.

One or two people from the audience would join him on stage and provide live material for a spontaneous bout of public psycho-magical analysis. Subjects regularly included sibling rivalry, couple problems, financial struggles, stymied creativity…

I became a regular attendee for a while and even spent a few weekends at his extraordinary ‘psycho-magical’ self-inquiry group sessions at a private house in Fontenay-sous-Bois in the eastern suburbs.

Now, while Jodorowsky spent countless hours interpreting the tarot and holding free consultations in cafés, I don’t believe he dwelt on the links between L’Hermite and Diogenes. He is more concerned with the internal logic of Grimaud’s Tarot de Marseille, its imagery, symbolism and, not least, its coherence as a series, with time passing left-to-right, 1 to 22.

So, for Jodorowsky, L’Hermite (VIIII) might be contrasted with the very first major arcanum (is that the right term?), Le Mat, which has no number. Le Mat shows a bearded young man, just starting out in his adult life, with everything before him. In contrast, L’Hermite is looking back, with furrowed brow and a stick crooked with age.

The next arcanum, number X, is La Roue de Fortune, revolving anti-clockwise – a new cycle of trials eventually culminating in XX Le Jugement and the final card, Le Monde, a kind of epiphany or triumph, with the symbols of the evangelists – angel (Matthew), lion (Mark), ox (Luke), and eagle (John) – in the four corners.

Back to Heaney

Heaney, unlike W B Yeats, did not delve much into mysticism or the occult, being more rooted in the imagery of the Irish countryside, Celtic mythology and, of course, the Classics. So, for Heaney it was eyeballing – or rather being eyeballed by – the common haw that evoked Diogenes and the search for truth. However, the haw lantern is a ‘small light for small people’, not there ‘to blind them with illumination’, but simply to remind them ‘to keep the wick of self-respect from dying out’.

When I found The Haw Lantern back in April, it was the paradoxically white blossom of the blackthorn that lit the paths on the daily moonlit walks I made on a silent retreat near Bath, looking inwards for a glimpse of truth. Seeking it neither in the ‘used to be’ of the past, nor the ‘could be’ of the future. So, where is the present moment in the tarot cycle(s)? I think Italo Calvino had a go at answering that in The Castle of Crossed Destinies, but that’s another story

Epilogue

It is now the month of May, another common name for the haw, whose rather fetid-smelling flowers and edible ‘bread-and-cheese’ leaves were so much a part of the hedgerows around my childhood home in the Chilterns.

^[1] The Haw Lantern, Faber and Faber, London, 1987

^[2] Born in Sinope, a town in what is now northern Turkey. Died c. 320 BCE.

^[3] Σοφός (Sophos)

Old Hornbeam coppice, Highgate Wood – this is one tree, the ‘trunks’ growing from a now buried stump

Hornbeam, Carpinus betulus, also known as iron wood, or yoke elm because the wood is so hard it can’t be worked easily. It was mainly used for ox yokes, cogs and cartwheels. The grown-out coppice stools like this one in Highgate wood would also have been used for firewood or charcoal, as it burns slowly and brightly ‘like a candle’. It was used for the tall, dense hedges of the original maze in Hampton Court, although these have since been replaced.

The poet John Clare was fond of hornbeam, which is one of the principal trees in Epping Forest, where he spent four years in the High Beach asylum, from 1837-1841, suffering from severe depression. He was allowed considerable freedom to walk in the forest and, indeed, in July 1841 walked out of the asylum and followed the Great York Road until he reached his home in Northborough, 80 miles away, four days later. That year, while at High Beach, he wrote Child Harold, mentioning the hornbeam:

How beautiful this hill of fern swells on.
So beautiful the chapel peeps between
The hornbeams with its simple bell – alone
I wander here, hid in a palace green.

Seeing the hornbeams, I was reminded of a three-trunked hornbeam in the Bois de Vincennes, just east of Paris, in whose shade for seven years, every Saturday morning, I learned tai chi with my friend and teacher Li Gui Sheng and fellow student and friend Claude.

Every Saturday that is, until, in a few hours after midnight on 26 December 1999, a hurricane blew down the forest. Miraculously ‘our’ tree was spared, though it took us several hours to find it amid the tangled mess of fallen trunks. About a year later we cleared a space beneath the tree again, now sporting a mass of side shoots from its trunk in an all-out fight for survival. But it wasn’t the same. The squirrels had gone, replaced by pheasants, now the forest was more like heathland or scrub. And the dog walker who had shouted after “Whisky” and “Frisky”, as we fought invisible opponents in slow motion, had found another route.