The End of Art is Peace: 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:

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.