## The End of Art is Peace: Finding Self, Creating Place

In their collective literary repertoire, both Heaney and Deane engender an exploration of being-in-the-world (more specifically, being-in-the-state) that disowns the political melodrama which has delineated the characters and *mise-en-scène* of Northern Ireland. The traditional castings of Northern Irish identity have been not only destructive, but left the society in a stalemate: a mode of discursive arrested political development, so to speak, where the identities and narratives available to the public are circumscribed by an essential impasse in their relationship to each other. Heaney and Deane, through both the content and manner of their art, depict a character with a new identity, who not only thrives in the unraveling melodrama, but also prefigure the world to follow, and is consequently, the hero of political liminality and depression.

In *Cruel Optimism*, Lauren Berlant explores the affective mechanisms of attachment and optimism. Building on Jürgen Habermas' notion of the public sphere in past works, Berlant opts to conceptualize of body publics as "affect worlds" in which affect is the gravitational force around which publics are constructed and therefore orbit. What she calls "cruel optimism," as she exposits it vis-à-vis the political, is continued attached to normative political systems despite the clear impression to the individual that whether they engage in traditional rituals or disengage, they give tacit permission to what is ineffectual normativity to maintain its ongoing recreation. To overcome this, Berlant looks at forms of art as a type of "ambient citizenship," which attempt to retain the desire for the political, without engaging in the pre-determined modalities of discourse or engagement which are "a foregone conclusion."[^1] This, then, is a helpful frame in which to place Deane and Heaney, and the analysis will begin by putting Berlan into discussion with the writers, to draw out the essence of Dean and Heaney's "ambient politics." By reading Berlant slightly against the grain, this analysis hopes to also offer a way of widening what she considers "ambient art."

Through their poetry and literature, Heaney and Deane construct an identity which imagines life in a post-industrial, post-colonial scenario. Their high priority on personhood, in this way, finds its genealogy in archetypal Irish poets like Yeats. Unlike Yeats, however, they depict a modern, ahistorical person who discovers their narrative in neither the land nor history alone (and consequently, neither in institutions which are inexplicably tied to the land i.e. the hegemonic territorial state).[^2] But rather, through the discovery and possession of the self through poetry, and the resonance of self with and through intimate public spheres (as opposed to normative political discourse). Their poetry is not, however, an exercise in sentimental escapism or fantasy. Instead, they gesture toward an aesthetic personalism, that when extrapolated across a body politic, depicts a Northern Irish public can grope at peace because of each individual's unique self-possession of their narrative. This bypasses personal identities which are constructed through traditionally Northern Irish narratives of political identity (i.e. sectarianism), and creates new political norms.

Despite their historical groundedness, this analysis will avoid addressing Deane and Heaney as uniquely "Irish" writers, in part because of their admitted struggle to "refuse the limited destiny of place" (that is Ireland) and write as persons who have the simple authority of being human. As Deane writes and is worth quoting at length:

> In Ireland, where the place has been invested with such political energy, this is a difficult problem. In one sense, it is the struggle to become a writer rather than an Irish writer. You can't be one without the other; yet to be too self-consciously Irish might rob one of the freedom to be a writer, an author. These poets, [Heaney, Kinsella, Montague, Mahon and Muldoon], have to authorize their Irishness by giving primacy to *author*-ity; only then will the place of Ireland become real. Otherwise it is merely a stereotype, *a place that is given, not found.*[^3]

This quote serves as valuable point of departure for this analysis, will be given new life with the concluding remarks of the power of " *author*-ity" in the creation and finding of real places. Both Deane and Heaney seek a way out of the social identity crisis of Northern Ireland in the latter half of the 20th century by side-stepping the existing modes of discourse and discovering a new path forward. The challenge to this, as Deane so aptly puts it here, is that so long as Ireland (as a place and society) is given by prevailing frameworks of discourse and identity, it cannot be found. The narrative is pre-determined and therefore circumscribed by political action taken within it.

Our center of gravity will be Berlant's concluding chapter in *Cruel Optimism* titled "The Desire for the Political."[^4] The goal is to show how both Deane and Heaney prefigure Berlant's conclusions within the confines of affect theory, as to how a constituent in an ineffective political system goes about satisfying their desire for the political, without perpetuating the system through circumscribed modes of engagement (or disengagement.) From here, Deane's *Reading in the Dark*, as well as choice poetry of Deane and Heaney, will foreground the role of self-possession in taking creative authority of one's narrative. Here, their poetic tropes about echoes from a silent center of self contour well with Berlant's notion of ambient citizenship. This ambience from the center of self can return to intimate public spheres through collective affectivity. In conclusion, we will locate Deane and Heaney's aesthetics within the context of Berlant's "double-bind" of cruel optimism. Together, all three promote an individual ethic which has the power to resonate through a constellation of self-possessed autonomous persons who are creating a new collective ordinary, outside the norms of prefigured political engagement.

## Poetry as ambient citizenship

In *The History of Sexuality,* Foucault explicates his paradigm shifting analysis of the circumscription of power relations: "Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power. [...] [Resistances] are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite." Berlant's development of contemporary modes of political discourse runs parallels to Foucault's concern about the discursive nature of power relations.[^5] In the final chapter of *Cruel Optimism*, Berlant turns her attention toward exploring the function of optimism in the public's continued attachment to prevailing modes of politics. She questions why a public persists in attachment to prevailing modes of political engagement even when the polity appears to be a broken, ineffectual system and engagement in its ceremonies and rituals are futile. One is stuck, therefore, in a "double-bind:" on one hand, continue modes of political engagement perpetuate the system, while detachment predominantly functions as a tacit acquiescence to maintaining the normative political world. This is the sense in which Berlant's analysis of cruel optimism runs parallel to the interiority of power relations discussed by Foucault—there is no resistance from the outside.

This is thus the political dimension of cruel optimism: the tendency of the individual to continue in normative political engagement, despite its frustrations, because its life-organizing status is valued over damage provoked by resistance.

> It may be a relation of cruel optimism, when, despite an awareness that the normative political sphere appears as a shrunken, broken, or distant place of activity among elites, members of the body politic return periodically to its recommitment ceremonies and scenes. Voting is one thing; collective caring, listening, and scanning the airwaves, are others. All of these modes of orientation and having a feeling about it confirm our attachment to the system and thereby confirm the system and the legitimacy of the affects that make one feel bound to it, even in the manifest content of the binding has the negative force of cynicism or the dark attenuation of political depression.[^6]

The connections between Berlant's affect theory and the narratives told by Northern Irish writers are numerous. They both wrestle to understand how any individual, or public, can effectively engage in a political system that is laden with prescribed identities and political action which only perpetuate the normativity of the broken enterprise.[^7] Not to mention, there is a strong echoes of what Berlant calls "the negative force of cynicism" and "the dark attenuation of political depression" throughout contemporary Northen Irish literatue in the latter half of the 20th century. What can someone do who cares deeply for the political situation in their home, when (vis-a-vis Foucault) the modes of resistance are already circumscribed by the prevailing power relations? Berlant describes, and cautiously prescribes, what she calls "ambient citizenship by investigating trends in contemporary avant-garde art.

While Heaney and Deane do not engage in modes of expression quite as avant-garde as the artists Berlant considers, there is an essential ground shared with her by Heaney and Deane as "ambient citizens," in that they attempt "break the double-bind of cruel optimism, [by] *not* reentering the normative public sphere while seeking a way, nonetheless, to maintain [their] desire for the political."[^8] Deane and Heaney's poetry is not precisely the ambient art that Berlant considers evocative of the engagement she describes. It is grounded largely in literal ambient and sonic art such as silent protest and surrealist performance pieces which she calls "noise politics."[^9] Nevertheless, Berlant's conceptualization resonates strongly with the way in which Heaney in particular considered his own artistic project. Heaney's poetry, in this way, serves as a proto-Berlantian example of art which seeks political effect (and affect) by bypassing normative modes of political engagement.[^10] Rather, Deane and Heaney sought through aesthetics to "interfere with the feedback loop" engendered by prevailing political discourse, and "affirm a model of civil society that is civil, but in a new manner."[^11]

Deane opens his *History Lessons* with the poem "Osip Mandelstam:" "'The people need poetry.' That voice / That was last heard asking for warm / Clothes and money, also knew the hunger / We all have for the gold light."[^12] Mandelstam, a Russian Jewish poet, was put to death for activist poetry. Deane eulogizes the poet: "The kerosene flash of his music / Leaps from the black earth," and in the final stanza he asks Mandelstam, "Tell us how to turn into the flash." Deane does not want to write poetry which incites the violence of the institution, but instead, to be the living embodiment of the art which disrupts this the feedback loop of normative power relations. Neither Deane nor Heaney desired to be explicitly political. Instead, they considered their project as a type of political noise created from their own aesthetic "movement." This poetic trope of "movement" is developed by both Heaney and Berlant explicitly.

In his 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, Rose prods Heaney to consider the potentially miscarried political import of his talents:

> Rose: In conversation with you, I'm reluctant to, to exaggerate because you'll slap me. It is the– I think– someone said of Winston Churchill that he mobilized the language and saved a nation. I think John F. Kennedy said that– in World War II. Have, have you used your gifts as best they could be used? Heaney: Yes, I think so. I mean, I do– I mean, I, I'm not a political leader. Rose: I know you're not. Heaney: I didn't have to mobilize anybody. Rose: Yeah. Heaney: But just to– *I had to move truly*.[^13]

By "move truly," Heaney explains that he had to follow his "inner sense" of what was best to do. Heaney never set out to create an explicitly political program. Rather, as his words hum in *The Rain Stick*, "Upend the rain stick and what happens next / Is a music that you never would have known / To listen for."[^14] His "desire for the political" is manifested in the way his poetry functions as a noise intended to be overheard by an intimate public.[^15] The intimacy of those who overhear Heaney's poetry is emphasized by the embodiment required by his intention to simply "move truly" (that is, manifest the poetic by the mere integrity of his being and self-possession). Berlant writes:

> [...] [T]he new crisis ordinary is engendering peculiar forms of something like "ambient citizenship"—politics as a scene in which the drama of the distribution of affect/noise meets up with scenarios of *movement*. In the perspective it opens up on the way the political suffuses the ordinary, ambient citizenship is a complicated thing, a mode of belonging, really, that circulates through and around the political in formal and informal ways, which an affective, emotional, economic and juridical force that is at once clarifying and diffuse.[^16]

Heaney's notion of "moving truly" runs parallel to what Berlant articulates as a "mode of belonging" which carries an ambient and atmospheric power in relation to those who in the vicinity (in Heaney's case, his students, or those who read or hear his poetry). "Mass politics is melodramatic," Berlant notes, "but noise politics is at the heart of the popular: ambient citizenship registers the normative distinctions in terms of who has the formal and informal right to take us soundspace."[^17] It is telling, then, that when Rose asks Heaney how becoming a Nobel Laureate may change him, and Heaney deflects. Even once he has been registered as an institutionally sponsored voice in the "soundspace," he ties the success of his project, to the simple continuity of doing what he has always done—write the best poetry that he can.

In an article in The New Yorker, Deane narrates the history of Heaney and his relationship. While watching the Nobel ceremony, Deane recounts "the sense of unreality" he had:

> What was the emptiness? I felt that I was witnessing two things: the real celebration, the real prize, the real achievement, and a simulacrum of that. [...] Heaney was aware, too, of the chemistry that alters a writer who has gained fame and transforms him from what he is to what his reputation is. I felt as though I were seeing him recede into an abstraction, [...] an object of national pride, a writer reified into a prize. Yes that was the emptiness. Would we ever be as we had been? Would his fame now leave me, and others, feeling that we, I, had nothing left to say except that we had remained ordinary, whereas he had become extraordinary?[^18]

The framework of Deane and Heaney's self-awareness of their own projects is evocative of the Berlant's double-bind, and the lifelong struggle that they had weathered in common, to find a space in which they could make a sound desiring the political, without reentering the normative political sphere whether explicitly, or through tacit silence.[^19] Instead finding solutions to this political stalemate in the modes of discourse which are already established, Deane and Heaney turned inward, and sought for solutions emanating from the interior power of self, and its expression in poetry.

## Self, words from the silent, bottomless center

:::poetry
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,[^20]
:::

Heaney's center, unlike Yeats, is personal and as Deane qualifies, "fictive," to which we will return in the concluding section. Fictive in that it the poetic function which is fundamentally interpretive, and not based any real world social situation or phenomena although it is catalyzed by them. What Yeats sought to find by imbuing Ireland with the latent, ancient powers of lore, Heaney attempts to find by orbiting the silent, ahistorical self through poetry.[^21] Without wandering into an interpretation of Yeat's cryptic *The Second Coming,* Yeats, Berlant, and the majority of thought throughout the past century of war would agree that the center found in the social dimension is fragile and unstable. Deane and Heaney, on the other hand, use poetry and literature to give voice to the silent, elusive self through words. In doing so, they locate the "center" not in the social framework, but in the transitory self.

Deane's *Reading in the Dark*, orbits around this same essential paradox beginning with the opening line: "On the stairs, there was a clear, plain silence."[^22] The narrator, is at first obsessed with discovering the "true" story behind his own identity to find an immovable center. Once he discovers it, he finds the narrative to be not only elusive, but unfulfilling, and instead must lean on his own capacity of self-possession by not allowing his narrative to be given or proscribed by sources other than himself. Deane says of *Reading in the Dark*, "One way of coming into self-possession, of overcoming any kind of oppression, colonial or otherwise, is to take charge of interpretation yourself, not to allow yourself to be interpreted by others."[^23] For Deane, the nature of this self-possession is rooted primarily in the power to represent the essential self. This gestures toward, however, the paradox found in both Foucault and Berlant—when the prevailing social narratives offered are unsatisfactory, how does one detach without "providing tacit permission for the world to reproduce itself as such?"[^24]

The novel ends on an ambiguous note—not with the sudden availability of a center once he has discovered the story as one might expect. Rather, by the end of the story, he watches his parents who have come full circle in this wrestling match with the silent dark:

> Was nothing ever said, in all those years afterwards, as we grew up, as their marriage mutated slowly around the secrets that she kept in a nucleus within herself and that he sensed, even though he also thought he was free of the one secret he knew, since he had told us, false as it was?[^25]

The narrator finds solace in his mothers stroke, because once and for all, the secrets that haunted him would now be "sealed in her silence," and he would "seal it all in too."[^26] The reader is left asking along with the narrator, *has he fully discovered the secrets? Would it have made a difference if he did?* The closure that the novel offers, in this way, is to acquiescence to the essential nature of the silence that lies at the base of the self and search for belonging. He cannot discover a narrative which will possess him— *he must possess himself*. Deane elaborates:

> It's the kind of narrative that is natural to a generation that, because of education, had become much more, or somewhat more, secular, but, because of the formality of that education, *was liable to think facts are coincident with truth*. Then, on the other hand, there was the previous generation, uneducated, who derived their stories from folklore, from legend, and these stories are very subtly coded ways of dealing with trauma and difficulty. *He doesn't recognize at first how these stories actually deal with the very thing that he was trying to pursue.*[^27]

This is the driving question shared by Heaney and Deane's aesthetics (and consequently, their attempts to proceed from the technologies of self proffered by early 20th century artists like Yeats). How are "facts" coincident with the "truth?" More accurately, how are events coincident with an understanding of the self? It is the self—its history, its future, its desires, its meaning—that was "the very thing that he was trying to pursue" in *Reading in the Dark*.

More than two decades before *Reading in the Dark*, Dean published his first collection of poetry *Gradual Wars*, and the poem "Knowing It:"

:::poetry
I have been quiet now
For many days. My hands
Lie here, immutable.
Nothing is as opulent
As this freedom.
I am all love
For nothing.
I know objects
As if I were a hand
Holding them.
No one can do
Anything to me.
I'm on my own here,
Alive, exorbitant.[^28]
:::

The silence holds a power and freedom—a freedom from others, and a free unto simply being. Berlant writes of silence:

> Performative silence is therefore not simply political speech that might as well be spoken. It is also really silence, by which I mean noise: that circulating, transpersonal, permeating, viscerally connective affective atmosphere that feels as though it has escaped "the filter" to indicate, for good or for ill, a sensorium for a potential social world now lived as collective affect, or a revitalized political one.[^29]

As she indicates, there is something radical about the power of silence in a world that demands not only our attention but our complicity in its ongoing social and political maintenance. By saying that he is "all love / For nothing," Deane denies that love requires an object, and instead is made alive through the freedom of being in silience, unaffected by any outsider. In this poem, Deane locates the genetics of Berlant's "circulating, transpersonal [...] affective atmosphere that feels as though it has escaped 'the filter'" the power of individual silence. For Deane, as well as Heaney, the power of poetry lies in its power as (what Foucault calls) a technology of self in the midst of a normative political scenario which offers no roles for them to play that are desirable or effective.[^30]

What Foucault develops as a "technology" of fiction and narrative, is rooted in the power of "bringing-forth" through poetic enframement which Heidegger draws out in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology:"

> It is of utmost important that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handicraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance and concrete imagery, is a poesis. [...] Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment.[^31]

Poetry enframes the self by through ordering the phenomena of experience, and placing it back upon the person.[^32] "Technology is a mode of revealing," because it takes what is concealed by nature and unconceals it.[^33] This a conceptual territory in which we locate Deane, Heaney and Berlant with regard to the function of art and poetry as having the capacity for providing meaning and place for both the artist and those who partake of the art.

In "Personal Helicon," Heaney explores the myth of Narcissus. Having decided that the archetype of finding the self in reflections is childish, he instead turns to poetry: "I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing."[^34] The self, for Heaney, is not uncovered in the darkness by poetry as an illumination, but rather, through its power to make the darkness resonate. As he concludes in "Bogland," "The wet centre is bottomless."[^35] The "digging" that Heaney does through poetry is into a silent, bottomless self.[^36] Elsewhere in the eighth movement of "Clearances," Heaney writes, "I thought of walking round and round a space / Utterly empty, utterly a source [...] Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, / A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for."[^37] Poetry, in this way, is the echo from the silent center that resonates, but can never be heard in itself. It is Heidegger's unconcealing of the concealed in order to place it back on the poet as an ordering structure of life. For Heaney, it is the job of the poet to "keep striking / inwards and downwards" never to reach the source, but shake it and capture its reverberations in poetic verse.

In the opening piece of *Gradual Wars*, Deane concludes movement one of "Fourteen Elegies:"

:::poetry
It was not of love. He had a wife
And children. But his fingers
Searched in his shrill typewriter
For the lamentable note for his life,
Lusting lightly for release.
A swift bird-chatter
Like hail on the windows
Or a child sprung out of his sleep...
And so
The poem shudders
On to the sheet
:::

Deane's aesthetic in this poem, embodies the challenge that is inherent in the poetic enterprise of self-possession. It is a groping in the dark for a center that is concealed, until one makes it resonate through poetry and can capture its echoes through the poesis of the words on the page. "Yet the quest for a center," Dean writes, "for what [Heaney] calls an 'omphalos,' is darkly stimulated by his recognition that the idea of a center is fictive."[^38] This fictive, Joycian image of the omphalos, foregrounds the *creative* function of poetry in spite of the power of Heaney and Deane's tropes of the memory and the past.

The digging is not simply an uncovering, nor an unearthing, it is *creation* —not *merely exposition*. A memory, or the past, or nostalgia might serve as an instigation, but the poetry's beginnings—not unlike life—are fundamentally aleatory like Joyce's epiphany.[^39] It is the creative, and recreative power which the poet attempts to harness spurred on by the "radiance" of an event, or memory.[^40] Heaney harps on this subject while talking to Rose:

> I would make a distinction between, if you like, the totally– the radiance of inner Catholicism as a child and the sense of eternity and the sense of grace and God-filled space. [...] [T]he older I get, the more important I think that inner expansiveness of consciousness and the actual supernatural sense of a universe drenched in, in radiance, you know?"[^41]

Particularly in Heaney's later work, we uncover a reimagined power of the poetic to enchant the world and life the subject between heaven and the ground. The poem being a reverberating echo of the self, is buttresses with the earlier discussion of poetry as "political noise" or "ambient citizenship." The connection between the role of poetry as self-possession and as political noise, is the creative essence of poetry which has the capability of inciting and overcoming the depressing normativity of the political.

## Finding self, creating place

> "There remains the completely improbable and, no doubt, unverifiable hypothesis of a *poetic reversibility of events*, more or less the only evidence for which is the existence of the same possibility in language."[^42]

Much of Heaney's poetry is embedded in a discourse of the ordinary. Through poetry, he brings new meaning and import to the monotony of everyday life, particularly the life which is destabilized in the midst of an ineffectual social climate, and seeks to return to the baseness of work, life, and love. In *The Illusion of the End*, Baudrillard—the infinitely witty and sardonic nihilist—continues his literary lament of all that is real succumbing to hyper-reality. Beaudrillard ends by reflecting on the possibility of a fundamentally creative and recreative power to be harnessed observed in poetry. In one of his last works of poetry, Heaney concerns himself with a consonant question: "How does the real get into the made-up? / Ask me an easier one."[^43] Although Heaney asks the same question as Beaudrillard, he may provides an answer through his aesthetic and poetry. In his address to the Nobel Committee, he quoted his own poem by saying that he would allow himself to "walk on air." This type of spiritual ascent is developed more often in his later poetry. Through his poetry of self-possession, Heaney re-enchants the ordinary for himself and the reader as a way of taking back not only entangled post-colonial narratives of identity *,* but asserting the power of the people inventing life and creating a place of belonging together. Berlant is interested in why persons persist in attachment to constitutively broken systems. At one point she considers, "how detaching from the system could induce many potential losses along with new freedoms."[^44] With this in mind, Heaney's final resounding words—"Don't be afraid"—reveal deep political import. As Berlant discusses, the detachment from familiar places—whether public spheres or the identity provided by geography—is a fundamentally disorienting movement to which we are averse. Both Deane and Heaney gesture toward the possibility of persons who have all stepped fearlessly into the silent beyond— of both the self, and the collective space—and by given it meaning through poesis, creating new place, new norms, and interrupting the feedback loop of a broken political normativity.

In his opening essay to *Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit*, Deane writes, "In Heaney's poetry, as in the political world that subsists with it, there is a need to possess or to repossess a territory that is always there in its specific actuality and yet evades all attempts to seize and hold it in one stabilizing grasp."[^45] Like the self, Ireland as a place is, and remains, as elusive as the land in Heaney's "The Disappearing Island" or the childhood tree in "Clearances." Deane, in "A World without a Name" writes of the world of the past, memory and childhood, "It was a world without a name; / The world we flew from and became." Throughout Deane and Heaney's respective corpuses, the reader experience lives which are governed by the past, but we are free to create of the world what we will, should they choose to accept the challenge of the creative function of self-possession; and this, particularly through art.[^46]

In "The Gravel Walks," Heaney implores the reader, "So walk on air against your better judgement / Establishing yourself somewhere in between / Those solid batches mixed with grey cement / And a tune called 'The Gravel Walks' that conjures green."[^47] Heaney evokes the feeling of lightness one gets when doing heavy manual labor with the dream of the green, ancestral Ireland vibrating musically in the background. Throughout the poem, there is a constant swaying between the two that is summed up in the final sentiment of establishing oneself somewhere in between heaven and earth. In so doing, Heaney reenchants the world, by giving the poet the power to create meaningful place in the ordinariness of everyday life. "For Heaney," Deane writes, "this is a linguistic as well as a historical and political drama, an actual place in time, geography intersecting history, in and through which he can gaze at the nub, node, or center his poetry craves."[^48] Heaney writes of the solemn craft that comes from knotting of harvest grains:

:::poetry
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silience in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist [...]
The end of art is peace.
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser[^49]
:::

The reader is urged to mimic the poet himself in their consideration of life, to practice a creative, mimetic poesy that has the linguistic power not only locate the elusive self, but to reflexively assert meaning on the absurd monotony of life in a state of political impasse and dispossession—to recreate the centers that have fallen apart in the everyday.

"[A] new ordinary has emerged," Berlant concludes, "in the displacement of the political from a state-citizen relation to a something else that is always being encountered and invented among people inventing life together, when they can." This epitomizes the distant, but clear, social and political end of Deane and Heaney's aesthetic project in spite of its political muteness. As Deane writes in "Send War in Our Time, O Lord," "History is personal; the age, our age."[^50] Their joint focus on the repossession of the ordinary, and possession of the self through narrative, prescribes an individual aesthetic which, when cultivated through its resonance in intimate public spheres, can carry the power to create new political norms and identities. Dean and Heaney upset normative political engagement, and urge us to do likewise, by attempting to bypass the feedback loop of entrenched political melodrama.

It is not worth saying that it has the power to create "new Northern Irish identities," because, while it does, the import of their work is fundamentally ahistorical and transnational. It is not limited to the crises of Irish identity although it was born from the fruitful work of those like Deane and Heaney who were deeply embedded in a culture of political dispossession and depression. Both of them wrestled with the impenetrable silence underlying their personal and social being, and how to go about getting beyond its paralyzing power, and found hope in the poetry of life.

:::poetry
History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-heating,
The utter self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
And lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky[^51]
:::

[^1]: Lauren Berlant, *Cruel Optimism* (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)., 232.

[^2]: Cf. Catharine Malloy, *Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit* (Univ of Delaware Pr, 1996).,

[^3]: Malloy, *Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit*., 33, ( *emphasis own* ).

[^4]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 224ff.

[^5]: Cf. Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 226.

[^6]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 227, cf. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” *differences* 17, no. 3 (2006)., 21: "Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining and attachment to a problematic object *in advance* of its loss."

[^7]: Cf. Owen McCafferty, *Fire Below (a War of Words)* (Faber & Faber, 2018)., 39f; Tom, Maggie, Rosemary and Gery are all what Berlant might consider "cruel optimists"— somewhat aware that they don't "control the narrative" but at the same time continuing to engage in the categories of discourse that have been prescribed as normative by the political system despire their "political depression;" Berlant, “Cruel Optimism.”, 23: "[...] [T]he politically depressed position is manifest in the difficulty of detaching from the life-building modalities that can no longer be said to be doing their work and that indeed become obstacles to the flourishing of the subjects whose optimism animates them."

[^8]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 230.

[^9]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 230f, cf. Seamus Deane, *Gradual Wars* (Irish University Press, 1972)., 33: "I have been quiet now / For many days. My hands / Lie here, immutable. / Nothing is as opulent / As this freedom."

[^10]: Cf. Seamus Heaney, “Interview With Charlie Rose,” (1996)., 6:04ff: Drawing on his friendship with Derek Wolcott, Heaney notes the complexity of art in a post-colonial crises: "How then do you conduct yourselves? Do you retain the manners, as it were, of the conqueror, [...]– or do you in your usual native resources as you seen them? [...] [T]hat is acted out in terms of styles."

[^11]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 249.

[^12]: Seamus Deane, *History Lessons: Poems* (The Gallery Press, 1983)., 9.

[^13]: Heaney, “Interview With Charlie Rose.”, 34:31-35:15 ( *emphasis own* ).

[^14]: Seamus Heaney, *100 Poems* (Faber & Faber, 2018)., 115; cf. Berlant, “Cruel Optimism.”, 25: "I am not the subject of a hymn but of a hum, the thing that resonates around me, which might be heaven or bees or desire or electric wires, but whatever it is it involves being in proximity to someone and in becoming lost there, in a hum not where 'we' stood but all around, not in the mapped space of drives and driving, but a space that is lost."

[^15]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 230, cf. 226.

[^16]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 230

[^17]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 231.

[^18]: Seamus Deane, “The Famous Seamus: Growing Up With the Great Irish Poet,” *The New Yorker* (2000)., 79; cf. Heaney, “Interview With Charlie Rose.”, 3:05: Rose asks Heaney how being a Nobel Laureat might change him

[^19]: Cf. Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 230.

[^20]: Heather James et al., *The Norton Anthology of Western Literature, Volume 2* (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005)., 1728.

[^21]: Cf. Liam Harte, “History Lessons: Postcolonialism and Seamus Deane’s,” *Irish University Review* 30, no. 1 (2008)., 159.

[^22]: Seamus Deane, *Reading in the Dark* (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)., 3.

[^23]: Harte, “History Lessons: Postcolonialism and Seamus Deane’s.”, 157.

[^24]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 230.

[^25]: Deane, *Reading in the Dark*., 241.

[^26]: Deane, *Reading in the Dark*., 242.

[^27]: 27. Harte, “History Lessons: Postcolonialism and Seamus Deane’s.”, 159.

[^28]: Deane, *Gradual Wars*., 33.

[^29]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*.

[^30]: Michel Foucault, *Technologies of the Self* (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1988).: "[technologies of the self] permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality."

[^31]: Martin Heidegger and David Farrell Krell, “Basic Writings,” (1980)., 317.

[^32]: Heidegger and Krell, “Basic Writings.”, 330: "Enframing, as a challenging-forth into ordering, sends into a way of revealing. Enframing is an ordaining of destining, as is every way of revealing. Bringing-forth, poesis, is also a destining in this sense."

[^33]: Heidegger and Krell, “Basic Writings.”, 327

[^34]: Heaney, *100 Poems*., 14.

[^35]: Heaney, *100 Poems*., 20f; cf.

[^36]: Cf. Heaney, *100 Poems*., 3; Malloy, *Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit*., 28: Deane writes, "The ground is never firm; like the bog, with its moss and peat and its aqueous nervouce system, it absorbs and preserves the dead it receives, making them like itself but allowing them to retain their own identity, and embrace of vowel and consonant."

[^37]: Seamus Heaney, *Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

[^38]: Malloy, *Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit*., 28

[^39]: Heaney, “Interview With Charlie Rose.”, 19:35-22:54: "But then I went on to write poems about archaeologicla finds and so on, and I mean, I think this is quite a natural image for what poetic activity is because you are in negotiation with the unconscious, with the dream part of yourself, with the underlife of the mind, with the sailor life."

[^40]: Heaney, “Interview With Charlie Rose.”, 21:53.

[^41]: [Source note 41 is blank.]

[^42]: Jean Baudrillard, *The Illusion of the End* (Stanford University Press, 1994)., 120.

[^43]: Seamus Heaney, *Electric Light: Poems* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)., "Known World."

[^44]: Berlant, *Cruel Optimism*., 228.

[^45]: Malloy, *Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit*., 27.

[^46]: Cf. Heidegger and Krell, “Basic Writings.”, 330: "The freedom of the free consists neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraint of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing shimmers the veil that hides the essential occurrence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils."

[^47]: Heaney, *100 Poems*., 126f.

[^48]: Malloy, *Seamus Heaney: The Shaping Spirit*., 28.

[^49]: Heaney, *100 Poems*., 75, ( *emphasis original).*

[^50]: Deane, *History Lessons: Poems*., 12.

[^51]: Heaney, *100 Poems*., 100f, from "The Cure at Troy."