Why work for your local community
December 1, 2010
Local Gods
In Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, five sisters and a love child struggle to eke out a living in the iron brown hinterland of Donegal. The eldest is a teacher in town and the rest do odd jobs including knitting gloves for a local purveyor of knitwear in London. Having a missionary uncle gave them prestige in the community, until the now elderly and diseased priest came back from Kenya with a servant and some local animist gods from Africa. Because the priest has “gone native” the family is ostracized from Ballybeg, literally “little town.” The priest’s near constant dialogue with the imported African gods accentuates the presence of the local gods. In the course of the play the uncle and then the sisters find solace in these local gods in the blossoming of dance and celebration. Lughnasa, the month of August in Irish after the mercurial god Lugh, is the festival of high summer. Boys in the hills stain their faces blue with bilberries and jump through the fire brands between halves of goats sacrificed for the occasion. Meanwhile, the sisters were going to name their unpredictable wireless radio “Lugh” after the god but thought better of naming an inanimate object after an animate god and changed the name to that of the inanimate god, “Marconi.”
This joyful episode of life is told from the memory of Michael, the love child now some forty years older looking at his unseen self as a child. That summer was a kind of human harvest gathered into the barns of his memory: the teacher lost her job and the two youngest sisters ended up both homeless and the youngest mad. The vanishing point whereby an ancient culture disappears seemingly overnight is a mystery that Michael carries through his adult life as a latent force. These memories are restless spirits looking for a home. When will they come back, calling after him to get his supper, bursting out with a dance in boots? The memories that exist in us from our youth, so maintained Augustine in Book X of the Confessions, are formed in a harmonious relationship with nature and are able to recall the very origins of creation. With the fading powers of science failing to describe a meaningful contemporary role of human beings in creation memory is filling the gap.
Memory as a new order of reality is what Friel means to point to. Underlining this theme in the stage directions Friel instructs a plot of wheat dispersed with poppies be planted upstage. It not only points out the consequences of harvesting human beings for economic gain or disposing of them when they are worthless without remorse: the revolt of nature, but also the path of rebirth. In the classical myth, Hades abducts Persephone the daughter of the goddess of the harvest Demeter, symbolized by wheat. In her grief she stops all things growing and turns the world to winter. The god of night, Nox, comes with a garland of poppies and breathes over her the sleep of infants to ease her pain. The Olympian gods confer and gain the annual release of Persephone from the house of Hades. Persephone, the poet Seamus Heaney points out, is literally re-membered to her mother, in imitation of which Orpheus, in a related later myth, gains the release of his bride Euridice, though only to lose her permanently to a forbidden glance. Famously, Coco Chanel costumed Cocteau’s version of the myth in his film Orphée.
The intuition that latches onto vintage in the seasonal lexicon of fashion pulls out of the Plutonic night of mortal history a necessary bride. What she will be wearing this year involves a soothsaying that tells the tale of her veiled sojourn. This year, as always, she is wearing social fabric, the stuff that binds us as a human race. The word that is emerging more strongly than ever to describe her is “sustainable.” “Sustainable” is still a veiled word. In founding Goods of Conscience five years ago on the principles of Catholic social teaching, developing a cloth that I trademarked “social fabric” I have been increasingly aligned with the principles of sustainable production.
