When I first entered Evergreen I had a plan of action that consisted of acquiring a Bachelors of Arts and Sciences,
and then applying to the Masters in Teaching program. I had the vision of creating a school, or non-profit
educational foundation, which would counter what I perceived was a danger in American education, that being the
rise of home-school or small community based education, run by conservative Christian groups. I felt that if they
could use their religious status to proselytize both religious and political messages, which run counter to the basic
premises in our constitutional democracy, then it was high time someone began to educate children in the 'pagan'
tradition. The first five weeks of this program have repeatedly assaulted me in regards to this desire. The ancient
customs of the Celtic Irish refocus my intentions. In so many ways they exhibit aspects of a world-view which
compliments all of my own observations. In the A&E Biography of St. Patrick there was a comment about how his
peers were somewhat incensed about his taking a 'druidic' technique and applying it to his own ministry. He was
teaching children, which in retrospect can have only have annoyed his peers because these pupils/converts had no
monetary or political power to aid the infant Christian movement. None the less, Patrick was successful largely due
to his adapting the cultural institutions to his own purposes, rather than attempting to convert from scratch. Not
unlike the Irish ability to take outside influences and adapt them to their own uses.
When I first applied to an institution of higher learning, I wrote an essay about the oral tradition in a round about
way. It contained hints of linguistics taken from Greek, Latin, and Quenya from Tolkien's Silmarillion as
subject headings. I discussed the change from Socratic to Sophist forms of education; I was applying to a Great Books
program, some how I get the feeling the essay was misplaced. I have always been intrigued in the etymology of words,
like history they show where the words have been and how that got to where they are. The movement towards
literacy wasn't an evil act in and of itself, but when coupled with a totalitarian belief in the supremacy of the written
word over the spoken word, a vital connection to our own history was disturbed and in some instances destroyed.
The fact that so much of the Gaelic tradition is, still to this day, not translated is inconceivable. Part of the scholarly
work of this would be educational institution lies in this area, for language is an essential element in education
today. Studying Gaelic offers not just a chance to save a language of antiquity, but more importantly it allows us to
recapture a different world-view, one that we are unused to in our Western literate tradition. One of the educational
systems I intend to utilize in my graduate work is the Wilhelm school. At this time I have no more information on it
than what I can remember from an interview done on Pacifica radio. The principal was discussing the teaching of
language from an etymological standpoint in order to contextualize the language we use. Without studying an
additional language we trap ourselves in a singular world-view, increasing the propensity towards generalizing about
the cultures outside our own, and opening the door to the type of behavior which characterizes cultural conquest.
One of the aspects of the Gaelic culture which has resonated with me, and which Sean put into a wholly new fight,
that being the information technologies of the oral tradition, was the Bardic colleges. Song is a powerful mover in the
spiritual world, and it is an essential element in ritual, especially community ritual The incredible loss suffered by
the eradication of this mentifact both to musicology and to poetics, cannot be put into any context capable of doing
this destruction justice. As Sean pointed out, we only have the most rudimentary of information about the higher
echelons of the Bardic tradition. It would be another aspect of the scholarly work, to look not only into, as Mick
Maloney suggested the history of the Irish harp, but also to begin to attempt to bring together what is left of these
culture bearers ashes, in the hopes the phoenix will one day rise. This of course is not something that can happen
in the short term, it took millennia for these traditions to come to the level of fruition they entailed before their
destruction in the 17th century. Perhaps masters of verse like Yeats or prose like Joyce can prod us along in those
directions with regard to poetics. Alas, the music may never again come to the level of complexity that the Irish
filidh came to after thirteen years of instruction, that at the hands of some of the greatest masters of song
this world has ever seen. The mnemonics of their recital abilities must have been an incredibly effective tool, if as
Charlie posits in regards to similar Hungarian oral traditions that some of the stories in their repertoires were in
the ten thousand plus lines category. Where has our memory gone, and can we retrieve it at this late date in our
history?
Another area where the Irish were more highly evolved socially than their continental counterparts, was in the area
of sexual freedom. Few cultures that we have knowledge of have allowed such an egalitarian relationship towards
feminine power, Crete and Catal Huyuk being exceptions. One of the greatest threats to our planetary survival is
due to this moralization of sexuality and the inequality of patriarchal monotheistic cultures. When we recognize the
importance of our kinship or 'milk ties' we regenerate our healthy reverence for life and fife giving. An unimagianble
danger hovers over all of our heads if we remain trapped in the dialectical materialism of our death culture. The
image of the Mobieus strip turning on itself in Condren's book, from fife to death and birth to war, has to be turned
back. We cannot continue to show our children that they are fodder for sacrifice, and that their blood is more
important to the state only when it is shed in the name of security. The Irish were of the mind that it was
unnecessary to decide between the sides of duality split, that it was more honest to acknowledge the necessity for
both aspects. So many of our health problems in today's society stem from both our inabilities to acknowledge the
dark within our light, or the seed from which we spring. To deny sexuality is to deny life itself, like the schism in the
psychoanalytic community when Freud turned his back on his research into libido and began focusing on the "death
instinct", the image turns on itself and shows a mirror opposite of the original. The polyandry and polygamy of the
early Irish is one of the more problematic ideas for our modem Western minds to grasp, largely due to 1000 years of
dedicated effort by the church to suppress our sexual sides, all in the name of power, power over the feminine. Just
as song and dance are integral aspects of 'pagan' ritual, so to is sexuality an aspect of most ancient religious thought.
Our ancestors knew form whence they sprang, and honored that miracle of creativity, not as the intervention of
some beneficent deity, but as the crossing of boundaries, the combination of dualistic elements into a synthesis
generating a wholism we have all but lost.
One of the main reasons I chose to attend Evergreen and move from Texas was that two of my Permaculture
instructors, one in Colorado and one in Texas insisted that Evergreen was one of the best colleges in the country.
They were speaking specifically of its merit in regards to sustainable organic agriculture. Collins not only uses the
metaphor of a river and its tributaries to describe Irish culture, but also brings up the small farming communities
as a social structure of antiquity, which has relevance today. I was shocked that Condren didn't make more of the
environmental crisis that is as much a threat to our global welfare as is 'Oppenheimer's deadly toy'. In Mick Maloney's
performance I was struck with the continual use of agricultural motifs in the poetry. The natural world was of
primary importance to the early Irish, and the agricultural cycle was the basis for their year-round festivals. In
seminar when we were discussing the Tain, I was struck by the image of the totem animals of the matricentered
and the patriarchal The boar that eats the acorns beneath the trees in a forest, and the cow who grazes on the open
fields of a deforested plain. Personally, I feel one of the only ways we can address the power of death in our culture
is to reintroduce self-sufficiency in our daily lives. To teach children how plants grow by experiencing the growing of
food crops and animal husbandry would be a step in the right direction. Taking the time to teach plant identification
and traditional usage of wildcrafted or foraged food would allow the instruction to respect the natural processes of
food production. Again it isn't an either/or dichotomy, but a synthesis of natural and human forms of sustainable
agriculture. Getting in touch with the cyclic time or timelessness, and moving out of the progressive linearity will
allow us to look at history not as something to know so we don't repeat the same mistakes, but to understand the
cyclic nature of connection in our own lives. We can't escape history but if you can see it coming, you have a better
chance of avoiding its traps and obstacles. Lewis Mumford was quoted in Collins' work, as saying, "In the repeated
breakdown of one civilization after another, one may read the failure to reach an organic solution to the problem of
quantity". We cannot survive into the next millennia without recognizing that Malthusian economics are wrong,
and that cooperation is the only key to our survival R Buckminster Fuller shows in his work Critical Path that we
have the knowledge, and the resources to achieve wealth and leisure greater that all the kings and pharaohs
combined throughout history, if we could only cooperate instead of compete.
Many people in Olympia, and perhaps on the West coast as a whole are fascinated with the idea of creating
community as a means to alleviate our malaise towards the consumer urban sprawl so much a part of our cultural
landscape. All of the aspects I have discussed in regards to the old Gaelic order and this would be educational
institution seem to point in the direction of creating this sense of connection called community As Hilary Clinton
is so found of saying when discussing children's welfare, "It takes a whole village to raise a child," and the concept
of fosterage as seen in the Tain reflects this sentiment. We as a whole culture have to decide whether it is more
important to us to live healthy lives honoring our connection to life or whether we want instead to sacrifice another
generation on the altar of war. We have much to recover in the arena of community interrelationships, almost as
much as we have to recreate in our earth-based spirituality The Irish have much to give us in the way of direction,
for far from being savages, the Irish Gaelic order was an ideal which few other world cultures have or can live up to.
We as a society have to decide if we want to turn the Mobeius strip back to the original image, which can be seen in
the early Irish culture.