It is interesting to consider balance in terms of the physical human body, in terms of anatomy. The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty has wonderful things to say about the human body. The body is not an object to think about. Rather, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings, which move towards equilibrium. Your body is not just an object, it is actually all the meanings that people have towards your body. It is moving towards equilibrium. The place where your balance is regulated is also the place where your hearing and listening are activated. This is in the fluid of the semicircular canals of the inner ear. The eighth nerve goes through this liquid in the inner ear. It gives the impulses to the brain and tells the brain where you are. For instance, in cases of vertigo, where there is irritation or some damage, you have the feeling that the room has actually moved, but of course it has not. People also have that experience “the morning after the night before,” when you suddenly think that the laws of causality have changed and that the room is shifting around.
Therefore, true balance in the body is linked to listening, but also metaphorically, true balance is linked to an attentiveness that allows you to engage fully with a situation, a person or your culture or memory so that the hidden balance within can emerge. Listening can actually be a force that elicits the balance and allows it to emerge. Balance is not subjective. Neither is balance to be simply achieved or reached by human beings. True balance is a grace. It is something that is given to you. When you watch somebody walking the high wire, you know that they could tumble any second. That is the way we all are. Though we prefer to forget and repress it, we live every moment in the condition of contingency. There are people who got up this morning, prepared for another normal day, but something happened, some event, news, disappointment or something wonderful, and their lives will never be the same after this day in the world. This is a day they will never forget. Very often our actual balance in the world as we go is totally precarious, without our realizing it. Balance invites us not to take ourselves too seriously.
I spent five years in Germany and I loved German culture, music, thinking and philosophy. But the Germans would not be known as post-graduates in the whole area of humor or spontaneity! There is in the Irish psyche, I think, a kind of flexibility and a grounding humor that actually levels things and balances things out. I have talked to people who worked with Irish people in all kinds of areas in the Third World where there was poverty and war. They often said that the Irish brought a certain humor into the situation that allowed others to forget for a while the awfulness that was around them. This, of course, is a direct derivative of our history. We have had a history of incredible pain, misery, poverty and suffering in this country, which is often forgotten now. In these politically correct and tiger economic times, it is embarrassing to remember what has happened to us. The truth is that terrible things happened to us. And the only way we were able to come through it was to win some distance from it. Often, Irish humor has this subtext of knowing the complete horror, but yet deciding not to bend to its ravages. That is why Beckett is a sublime Irish writer, because he can bring the bleakness and the humor to such incredible balance and harmony.
Balance can be beautifully achieved in the human body, especially in dance. I remember, one night in Lisdoonvarna, watching, in a small little corner of the pub, about thirty-five human bodies starting to dance. There was a band playing and I saw these people and I thought to myself that they could never dance in such a small space. Yet, when the music started and brought rhythm, they were wheeling in and out and nobody crashed into anyone else. So sometimes when another rhythm is present, balance becomes possible in the most unpredictable situations.
Balance and the Millennium
In the concluding section, I want to reflect on balance at the millennium threshold. A millennium threshold is said to be a time of imbalance and disturbance. To be honest, I believe that much of the excitement about the millennium is a result of manipulation. For a few cultures, this is not the millennium. If you could talk to stones and rivers and oceans or even sheep, they would be asking why these humans are getting worked up about the millennium. The earth and the ocean and the rain and the wind and the trees and the cows and the calves have no idea that we are entering a new millennium. But, because we are all fixated on the millennium, there is a lot happening and it is a huge threshold; and in a way we are coming into it vulnerable and very exposed.
There are several agents of imbalance. One is the whole consumerist trend of post-modern culture. In philosophical terms what is going on here is a reduction of the “who” question about presence and person, to the “what” question and the “how” question. It’s an obsession, almost a regression to what Freud called the “oral stage.” The key tenet here is that consumption creates identity. I was over in Atlanta, Georgia, on a book tour early on in the year. I saw a weed there called kudzu; it grows a foot in a day. This weed is set to take over, and if it’s not cut back it will take over completely. It struck me as a profound image for consumerism. Most of us are moving through such an undergrowth of excess that we cannot sense the shape of ourselves anymore. Sometimes you meet a writer who gives you a little instrumentation to make a clearance here. For me, such a writer is William Stafford, the wonderful American poet. In the latest book from his estate on the nature of poetry, Crossing Unmarked Snow, here are four sentences:
The things you do not have to say make you rich.
Saying the things you do not have to say
weakens your talk.
Hearing the things you do not need to hear
dulls your hearing.
The things you know before you hear them,
those are you and
this is reason that you are in the world.
There is a massive functionalism at the heart of our times, a huge imbalance in post-modernity, primarily because certain key conversations are not taking place. One conversation that is not taking place is a conversation between the privileged and the poor. We are an immensely privileged minority. We think the Western world is the whole world. Yet, in fact, we are just a tiny minority. The majority of the world is living in the most awful circumstances. A friend of mind in London who has done research on this told me that 80 percent of the people in the world have never used a telephone. It is a sobering statistic. What disturbs me morally is the fact that we are here now in a comfortable setting talking about things we love. At the moment, there is a woman, a young mother, going through a dustbin in some barrio in South America for the tenth time today, for crumbs for her starving children whom she loves just as much as we love our children. The disturbing question is why is that person out there carrying that and why can we be here in comfort? I do not know the answer, but I do know that we are privileged and that the duty of privilege is absolute integrity. That is a huge part of balance, the question of integrity and integration. Without integrity, there can be no true integration.
Another conversation that is not happening, which is a terrifying non-event, is the conversation between the Western culture and Islam. Certain people are making attempts to do it, such as Edward Said, the cultural and literary critic, the NPR reporter Jacki Lyden, the theologian Michael Sells. Yet it is a conversation that is not happening essentially at a cultural level. We have a caricature of what Islam is. They have the same caricature of us. In caricature and false imagery and projection, so much violence, destruction and wars are already seeded. It is bleakly ironic in a culture that is obsessed with communication technology that the actual art and vital content of communication is shrinking all the time. In relation to the Irish context, there is an urgent need for greater dialogue between the forces of city culture and the rural domain. The city has become the power center in Western culture. It is where the most significant powers of media, finance, politics and religion are located. Naturally, then, the media, in reflecting these activities, inevitably does so through an urban filter of language, thought and style. Were one to watch the television every night for a week to see what images from rural life emerge on television, one would find few real references to the life on the land. Also the public language describing rural life is a language determined by the city and it is usually not an understanding language. People who live in the country know that you have to live in the country to know what the country is actually like. The country is not so much a community, it is a network. It has deep, intricate thickets of connection that cannot be seen from outside. Folk-life has depth and shadow that the media never comes near. The language used by the media about the country often reveals its distance from the cut and thrust of the rural sensibility. Even the word “rural” is diminutive. If one looks around for words about farming, to show the beauty and profound dignity of what it is, it is difficult to find any words in the public forum. I think farming is one of the great life callings. It has become very difficult now, but it is a great artistic, creative calling.