The Native
A native is one who belongs to a place by virtue of birth. The native is from here. The term suggests that somehow your initial belonging to a particular place seeps into your heart in a way that can never be washed out again. This also recognizes that your first years in a place are the time when the main elements of your personality and presence are conditioned by the place, its inhabitants, and the tonality of life and atmosphere of soul that were there. The native is also the one who remains in the place. Others who were born there moved away; the native is faithful to the place and continues the initial belonging. No one knows the feel and memory of a place the way a native does. The one who remains knows the place from the inside and is attuned to the subtle world of longing the native place holds. In past times there was a powerful intimacy between the native and the place; this belonging has been diluted by travel and the voices from outside which have come in through radio, TV, and computers. The belonging has been loosened quite significantly. We are all moving more and more into the middle ground of nowhere in particular. The terrible sameness of the roads we drive has in part abolished place and space. We by-pass place and lose the sense of journeying through space. Consequently, we now find articles and programmes about the particularity and richness of life among indigenous people so fascinating and even exotic. Ironically, together with this general dilution of what is native, there has been the most sinister resurgence of tribalism, for example, in Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and Russia. This is the darkest and most destructive expression of native identity. Belonging is defined narrowly and exclusively in terms of land and tribe. Those who embody anything contrary become targets of hate and violence. Such destructive creeds of belonging become poisonous. True belonging is hospitable to difference for it knows that genuine identity can only emerge from the real conversation between self and otherness. There can be no true self without the embrace of the other.
There is always a complex and subtle network of life among the natives of a place. It has a rhythm and balance of its own. To the arrogant outsider, natives seem simple and naïve. This is always a massive over-simplification. It is only when the outsider comes in to live there that the subtlety and depth of the way of life becomes somewhat clearer. Given the immediacy of belonging among the natives, there is usually a whole roster of unsaid and unexpressed life that never appears on the surface, but that secretly anchors the way of life there. The limitation of the native way of life is that the code of belonging is often quite narrow and tight. Individuals who think differently or pursue a different way of life can be very easily identified, targeted, and marginalized. Yet there are treasures preserved by the natives: ancient rhythms of perception and attunement to the world. This way of seeing life and practicing belonging in the world finds unique expression in the language of the place. In the West of Ireland, for instance, the old people are the custodians of Gaeltacht, the Gaelic language. Each one who dies takes a vocabulary to the grave with him or her that will never be replaced. The continual presence of the native underlines the temporary presence of the visitor.
The Visitor
The visitor is one who belongs somewhere else, but is now here in the world of your belonging. The visit is a powerful and ancient theme. Regardless of the frequency of visits, the visitor remains essentially an outsider, an intruder from another area of belonging. We are made somewhat aware of our different identity by the visit. In earlier cultures when communities were more local and separate, the visitor brought news of a different world. Through the stories told of things seen and heard beyond the horizon, the prospect of other worlds became vicariously tangible. In the time of the oral tradition, the visit would have had an effect that would continue to ripple for a long time after. We who are native also become visitors elsewhere: the courtesies of giving and receiving are essential.
In the broad sense, because each of us lives in a body with so much clear space around us, a large portion of our life is awakened and altered by visitations we have. Most of what happens to us in the world comes up along the empty path to the house of belonging called the body. Great thoughts are not simply manufactured by the mind. They occur; they seem to come from elsewhere. Sublime, illuminating, and original thought seems to be inspired; in classical tradition, the visitation of the muse brings the original gift. Our origin in and affinity with the eternal is confirmed by the fact that what seems to come from the distance of Elsewhere turns out to be the most profound expression of our inner nature. The beyond holds the deepest secrets of here. Angels have always been received and understood as eternal visitors. The Christian story begins with such a visit. When the visitation comes from the eternal world, it disrupts the daily order; such a visitation breaks the predictable frame of experience and opens life up to new and more disturbing directions. This visitation can be dark and frightening. It can bring all the hidden vulnerability to the surface and expose a person to a future of loss and emptiness; this is explored in a sparse and penetrating way in Raymond Carver’s precise and harrowing short story “A Small Good Thing.”
Though the visit is always limited by time, it has a purpose. The visitor comes to see us for a reason. In society, this is often the way a prophet appears. The vision and actions of a prophet visit a great unease on our comfort and complacency. It disturbs us in such a manner that we never regain the ease and amnesia of our old complacency. The prophetic voice disrupts our unreflective belonging and forces us to awaken the awkward questions. When these questions come alive, they retrieve the more humane longings of our nature and force us to disavow our strategies of false satisfaction. For the prophetic spirit, the longing for truth and justice puts every kind of belonging in question.
The visitor and the visitation are ancient motifs. They derive their power from the simple fact that what is most precious to us in the world, namely, our life and presence here, is in the end but a mere visit. Each of us is a temporary visitor to the earth. We spend most of our lives deciphering the purpose and meaning of our visit here. Our time here will end in the embrace of the bleak and irreversible visitor called Death. Meanwhile we live out our longings in the small world of belonging we call our neighbourhood.
The Neighbour
The neighbour is an interesting presence in one’s life. No great significance is ever ascribed to the neighbour. They are the people who happen to live adjacent to you. Yet in contrast to others outside the neighbourhood, we feel we somehow have a claim on the courtesy and friendliness of our neighbours. In former times, when people were not such targets of pressure and impression, people were closer to their neighbours. People were poorer, too, and more dependent on each other. In Conamara, there is the phrase “Is fearr comharsa maith ná mailín airgid,” i.e., A good neighbour is better than a bag of money. Often, when we need something or someone urgently, our friends and family may be far away. The only ones we have near us are our neighbours. They are the individuals with whom we belong in a local place. In the fragmentation of contemporary life, people live in greater isolation and distance from each other. The old image of the neighbourhood as a group of local individuals who knew each other and met with each other has vanished. A neighbour can be dead for weeks next door and we do not notice now. Our post-modern society is like the world of Leibniz’s monadology. Each individual, each home, is an isolated monad with no bridge to the neighbour.