Hello Robin.
Thanks very much for allowing me the opportunity of engaging in some more
speculative discourse.
I have always viewed online as an extension of my formal learning, and have
come to understand that the various practices of the ancient Irish bards and
Robert Sheppard's idea of speculative discourse, are essentially coming out
from the same compositional pool in which extemporised writing leads to some
realisation or understanding as one writes.
Like Columbo in the final scene acting in the moment and a jigsaw falling
into place, a bit like the Frostean ice that begins with us not having a
clue what it is we know, but pushing off and beginning in delight,
extemporise a way to flight and ending up in the general area of poetic wisdom.
~
The manuscript was formerly catagorised as H.3.18, but now has the catalogue
number of 1337.
I wrote to Trinity last week asking if i could have a look but it is only
for the eyes of Irish language scholars. They informed me the poem is on
page 53 and was available to look at online at a Dublin Institute of
Advanced Studies website <a href="http://www.isos.dias.ie/">Irish Script
Onscreen</a>, but they are only showing four pages, 44, 45, 88 and 89.
~
I have just now found a full lowdown on the contents at archive.org, in a
1921 book <a
href="http://www.archive.org/stream/catalogueofirish00trinuoft/catalogueofirish00trinuoft_djvu.txt">"Catalogue
of the Irish manuscripts in the library of Trinity College, Dublin</a>
The details on what's in MS 1337, is about a quarter of the way down my
screen, and as i am scrolling down now, page by page descriptions of what's
in it, see it contains various law tracts, poems, tales and at p53, this is
the description:
"Amergin Glungeal's (Amergin White Knee's) mystical poem, beginning:
nio coipe coip goipiach, with interlinear gloss. The leaves are of the same
size as the preceding, and the second is similarly made up of two pieces
sewn with silk.
The first has also a defect supplied by a piece sewn with parchment."
~
The language in the poem has been dated to 7C Old Irish, but the MS itself
was compiled in the 15C. It will have been transcribed from another source,
(no longer extant, this is the only copy) which was common practice by the
scribes - and as you will see if you go to the link, the material in the
book is very varied including poems, tales and law tracts.
Here's some of the description of the book itself:
"Though bound in quarto form, this volume includes fragments of books of
various sizes and different ages. The first three leaves are not included in
the pagination. The first of these is mutilated, and on the recto wholly
illegible. On the verso it contains part of an Irish Law tract. The second
and third contain part of a Latin Psalter, which seems to have had the two
versions, namely, that of Jerome
and the Vulgate, on alternate pages. The first page is almost illegible, but
we can see that it contained Ps. Ixxi. q~2ia in Jerome's version from the
Hebrew...
Passing to the numbered pages —
Of the first leaf only a very small fragment remains. At the top of p. I is
a memorandum by Edw. Lhwyd, stating that the IMS. consists of 218 ff. (the
same number is given on p. 358), and that he purchased it from Agnew
(hereditary
liard of O'Neill of Clannaboy)."
I am going to buy a reader's ticket (20 euro a year) for the Royal Irish
Academy this week so i can access Liam Breatnach's translation and 48 page
article on it in number 32 of Ériu, 1981.
~
The vatic *eating flesh* you refer to, relates to the druidic rite of <a
href="http://www.fhaoil-choin.org/imbasforosnai.htm">Imbas Forosnai</a>,
which Nora Chadwicks 1937 lengthy article (at the link) explains in some detail.
Imbas forosnai, along with teinm laeda and dichetal di chennaib, according
to various bardic tracts relating to the seven filidh (poet) grades which
culminated with ollamh (phon,ulav - poetry professor) and are all
extemporised methods which where first took on at level five, cli
(ridgepole) or six, anruth (noble stream) in the eighth year of the 12 year
training.
I first came across this term in the final year at college, as part of the
parellel study to American modernist poetry, the 40% ex-curricular part of a
learning programme which self-evolved by instinct and which was basically
trying to fathom Irish myth.
I couldn't get my head round the myth, and at that point after three years,
there wasn't even a skeleton dilineating itself, no datums, no solid base,
no comprehensible shape - just dry academic stuff or online druid types
talking in that floaty self-help tenor which is big on creative
intepretation for self-empowering and getting through the hell of office
life, but low on poetic insight or scholarship.
Starting blind with zero knowledge of Irish myth, for someone of 35 out of
formal education for 20 years, trying to make sense of what i was exposing
myself to, all of it online, was not unlike hitting a tea strainer against
one's head, trying to sieve into some order the seemingly incomprehensible
material, where it is very easy to get the wrong end of the stick, because
the various characters can have two and three Gaelic names, and there are
all sorts of false trails and misleading data - like imbas forosnai.
Chadwick tells us imbas forosnai is glossed by Whitley Stokes, from Cormac's
Glossary in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, as:
""Imbas Forosna, 'Manifestation that enlightens': (it) discovers what thing
soever the poet likes and which he desires to reveal. Thus then is that
done. The poet chews a piece of the red flesh of a pig, or a dog, or a cat,
and puts it then on a flagstone behind the door-valve, and chants an
incantation over it, and offers it to idol gods, and calls them to him, and
leaves them not on the morrow, and then chants over his two palms, and calls
again idol gods to him, that his sleep may not be disturbed. Then he puts
his two palms on his two cheeks and sleeps. And men are watching him that he
may not turn over and that no one may disturb him. And then it is revealed
to him that for which he was (engaged) till the end of a nomad (three days
and nights), or two or three for the long or the short (time?) that he may
judge himself (to be) at the offering."
~
Imbas itself is also a (bardic) word which means poetic fizz, the mental
jizz and excitement one gets when composing on the fly, caught up in the
writing.
However, when i first read Chadwick's article in 2004, i was just plain
stumped, because it was not exactly the sort of caper we were doing every
Friday with Bob Sheppard when consulting Rothenburg and Joris's Milenium
anthologies.
The rite itself i think is a red herring, because there are two substrands
of imbas forosnai Chadwick goes onto speak of and which i mentioned above:
teinm laeda and dichetal di chennaib, which Celticist Rudolph Thurneysen
(1857 - 1940), glosses as "illumination of song, and "extempore incantation"
respectively.
Thurneyson was part of a group of scholars associated with the Celtic
revival, when all this stuff was first getting translated into English and
being neglected since the Gaelic collapse. The intellegensia of Trinity
college, famously thinking that what was in Galeic manuscript and the poetic
tradition, a rude course pagan load of rubbish with nothing to offer the
civilized folk like themselves.
Along with D. A. Binchy and Osborn Bergin, with Bergin being considered as
the most learned, Thurneyson and the scholars all moved in the same Dublin
milleau as Yeats and his cronies.
There are various bardic tracts on the seven filidh (poet) grades of
Medieval Ireland, and in the one titled Uraicecht Becc (small primer) there
is a maxim:
"...three things which dignify the dignities of a poet, "teinm laeda" 'imbas
forosnai" "dichetal di chennaib."
~
So, to recap
teinm laeda - illumination of song
imbas forosnai - manifestation of knowledge which enlightens
dichetal di chennaib - extemporised incantation
~
As i say, i first came across these three extemporised methods in 2004, but
it wasn't until last year some understanding began taking shape, as i was
approaching the eighth year of my own trawl through the myth. By this time i
had a definite skeleton, the shape of the whole corpus was in place, after
the head-banging began paying off around 2005 as the mist began forming into
a recognisable body, more by sheer persistance than anything else, with the
main points, the curriculum and what it consisted of, clear in my mind.
Illumination of song, i think is fairly obvious, extemporised song, just
start making it up and leading somewhere.
There is a young fella here in Dublin we call God (aka mike), because when
he first turned up at the <a
href="http://www.shitcreekreview.com/issue4/page37.htm?37">Write and
Recite</a> open mic which ran for three years from 2004 - 7, and where the
radz attended weekly to compete, laugh, find friendship and emnity and
everything one associates with a weekly poetry group (and which there is a
very witty Fintan O'Higgins' article about, at the link) - God had long
flowing golden locks and hence his nickname.
God has a unique gift i have never witnessed in anyone else. You say a word
and he starts riffing on it, extemporising and it is really a privilege to
witness because it is genuine and so, illumination by song, if i had never
seen God do it, this form would have remained some abstract bardic practice
existing only on the pages time forgot.
Reading round other scholars, it is also clear that dichetal di chennaib has
an association with bones, holding objects and i read it glossed somewhere as
extemporisation from the tips - which at some point a light went on and i
thought
extemporisation from the tips - of the fingers or tongue.
Obviously taking creative license, but all this gear, we can never
reconstitute bardic practice back to life or know exactly how it worked in
that society, because it is so different now. The way i see it, it is *up
for grabs*, a template whose curriculum offers the sad and lonely spammer
trying to have a laugh, the perfect way into boring the rest of the bores in
this game of appearing to know what Poetry is.
My whole thinking when first starting out as a bloke who was 20 years behind
the competition who started writing at the age of four and knew they wanted
to be poets by their first holy communion - was "how can i be a poet without
anyone pissing on my chips, who will make me feel inferior with that
condenscending mindset?*
This was because though poetry took me early on in my decision to try my
hand at the writing gig, it was obvious that the whole of poetry is riven
with camps, cliques and wars between the bores, which though essentially
comedic, when the theatrics are in full swing and the battles are raging, a
la Earls Court with Cobbing, Mottram and the straights - it's all so
depressingly serious.
So no matter what you did, there would always be the threat of someone
saying, ah yes, but that's not *real* *true* poetry though is it?
And i thought, what's the most *real* poetry to have been that we actually
know about?
The bards, i thought, knowing nothing of them, just that this misty word was
about as British as it got vis a vis poetry, and so i started from there and
it soon became apparent that this wasn't a one semester module to be getting
knowledgable about, but a lifetime's study.
But i had the rest of my life ahead of me, just happy i had found writing
before i died, that i didn't have to be silent as well as a bum. That if i
was going into my approaching middle age as a penniless failure, one last
throw of the dice to chase the dream i had always harboured, which at this
point had, the potential i had as a 16 year old shakespesperean actoary lad
loving life, had shrivelled to a tiny pin prick only i knew was there.
When Jono the whipping boy in fifth form, began wounding me at will in the
local pub with his gob, when i was previously the Oscar Wilde of my gen - i
knew it was time to act.
So, i thought, imagine knowing the reality about the bards, that will
guarantee no one could put a dampener on my dream of being a poet, and what
appealed to me was just the sheer hell of it, devoting the rest of my life
to finding out what was so clearly head distortingly complex and not worth
bothering with, no one was bothering with it. Why would you?
What for, becoming a poet on the basis of knowing the bardic lore, when the
game was so obviously played along the lines of showbiz, get a name for
yourself by appearing in this rag and that rag going higher and higher up
the foodchain until..until what?
Who's the one to beat? Who is the most real of the ture and real poets?
Well, that's the gig, beat the best and hey presto, beam me up scotty.
arghh, too much heroin tonight, mixed with the painkillers and rentboys, i
am getting carried away.
More later..
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