Day Off
At Johnny’s suggestion, three of us took a local commuter train 25 minutes east to Howth, a village at the narrow neck of a bulbous peninsula on the seaside. There was a market in the town parking lot with local Irish breads and cheeses and a whole pig on a spit — though by the time we got there, only the head and bones were left. Further on, a path leads around the perimeter of the peninsula, along some spectacular windswept and barren cliffs. When the sun came out, it was gorgeous.
Back in the village, we stopped for Dublin Bay oysters and prawns — both amazingly fresh. I don’t know if I’ve ever had oysters as fresh; in NA restaurants, they’re usually flown in from somewhere — with the exception of Seattle and Vancouver.
In the Beginning Was the Word Image
The next day, at Keith’s suggestion, I went to view the Book of Kells at Trinity College. The book itself was fairly underwhelming — the vellum (calfskin) pages had yellowed somewhat, and those on view were partially transparent. The blown up reproductions on the walls were easier to marvel at, and much more engaging. Wall texts detailed the book’s history: the monastery on the barren and windswept island of Iona, off the Scottish coast, where it was created; the repeated sacking and burning of the monastery by the Danes (Vikings); and how the book was always sequestered and saved.
Some of the symbolism in the elaborate illuminations was explained — for example, the intricate mesh of snakes covering many Celtic objects typically represents rebirth, as snakes do in many cultures, because they shed their skins.
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But even with the various wall texts, diagrams and maps, something — some vital piece of the information puzzle — seemed to be missing. Why does this book (and some others from the same period) look both so Arabic and Pagan to our eyes? To us, it looks as if the Christian “content” is merely a clever way to distract us from the real mystical shit hidden in all those intricate and labyrinthine illuminations. Sounds a bit Da Vinci Code, eh? I suspect that the mystery-in-plain-sight quality is part of the power and attraction of this “book.” “Book” in quotes, because it was always less a book than a sacred object, displayed on the altar on a specially constructed stand rather than read from. It seems the “information” it carries is not just in the text… though the “word” is acknowledged to be a powerful force. One thinks of the passages in the Bible — “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” — and then the bit where God names things. When something is named, and therefore placed in a separate conceptual box and isolated from everything else around it, that power is immense. It allows us to both think abstractly about things and people, and to intellectually manipulate them when they’re not right in front of us — even if they exist somewhere in the future.
These illuminated books seem to celebrate the letter and the word while at the same time rendering them completely meaningless — mere shapes overwhelmed by the deep psychological power of Pagan symbolism.
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Up some stairs, above the Chubb Insurance Company security case that encloses the book, is the Long Room library... there are a lot of words in this room.
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You can see where the Harry Potter stuff came from.
