Memory in Paula Meehan's Geomantic

Kathryn Kirkpatrick Memory in Paula Meehan’s Geomantic (2016) Writing in the wake of the calamitous 2016 US election, I find the ongoing project of witness and memory in Paula Meehan’s poems profoundly orienting. Meehan’s work has never acquiesced to neoliberalism’s trickle-down con. From ‘The Statute of the Virgin at Granard Speaks’ (1991) to ‘Death of a Field’ her poems have served as correctives to official narratives by remembering not only people and places forgotten by religious institutions and urban development but also by recalling forgotten ways of knowing and being. As I face the dangerous nostalgia of my own country, now manifested in a white supremacy movement and the denial of climate crisis, I find in Meehan’s seventh and newest collection of poems, Geomantic, not only spirited interventions in global capitalism’s failed narratives but also positive alternatives. Meehan has said that the poems in Geomantic are inspired by the memorial quilts ‘made by family networks who support each other through loss of loved ones’ from drug use in Ireland. An outgrowth of the memorial quilts honoring the memories of those lost to AIDS in the US, they ‘caught on in Ireland because so many intravenous drug users got the virus’ and died from AIDS: Every February 1st, St. Brigid’s Day . . . there’s a memorial service, cross faith, in what was one of the churches of my childhood, Our Lady of Lourdes, Sean McDermott Street. . . . I always try to attend even if I am not there as ‘poet’ – I go to remember my own family members & friends & neighbours who died through addiction. The different family networks (community support groups from all over the island) hang their memorial quilts from the high walls of the church and they are there throughout the service. I think they are the bravest, most powerful, iteration of memory and [they] challenge the official lipservice paid to the deceased.1 Irish University Review 47.1 (2017): 10–14 DOI: 10.3366/iur.2017.0253 # Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/iur 10 MEMORY IN PAULA MEEHAN’S GEOMANTIC (2016) Integrating the visual and symbolic power of these quilts, Geomantic is a series of eighty-one nine-line poetry panels stitched together to form a verbal quilt of memory. The cover design, made from Meehan’s own maturing visual art, echoes the volume’s structure, with nine squares representing stylized landscapes in vivid rainbow colours, three blocks repeating three times each. Public memorial in these poems is stitched to private memory through a matriarchal line in ‘The Quilt’, ‘a simple affair—nine squares / by nine squares . . . my grandmother’s quilt I slept under / the long and winding nights of childhood’.2 The repetition here and elsewhere of the number nine, each nine-line poem with nine syllables per line and the total number of poems divisible by nine, echoes the earth magic of the volume’s title. Meehan gives us the definition of ‘geomantic’ from the Greek as ‘Earth divination’, ‘that interprets markings on the ground or the patterns formed by tossed handfuls of soil, rocks, or sand.’ In this organismic worldview, human futures can be predicted through careful attention to the material conditions of the past, ‘The Handful of Dirt’ ‘being composted of our past lives, / the nine years in this house by the sea’ (93). The volume’s epigraph, Ciaran Carson’s ‘Indefatigable dazzling / terrestrial strangeness’, reinforces the potential for enchantment when confronting a living earth. Meehan suggests in these poems that despite the alienations of modernity, we might remember how to be in dynamic relation with a natural world whose capacity to defamiliarize and dazzle is enduring. Earth memory and magic emerge, Yeatsian fashion, in ‘The Moon Rose Over an Open Field’, where the moon ‘rises with the vowels’ and the resulting poem is ‘muse magic wrought from the power of nine’ (43). Meehan reclaims throughout this volume the mystical power of the number nine, that symbol of wholeness, completion, and fullness throughout world mythology, especially in the stories of the old Norse god, Odin, who gained spiritual insight for transformation by drinking the mead of poetry. Recovering from the past intuitive practices for the present, Meehan in these poems recalls her mentor Gary Snyder’s ars poetica, ‘What You Must Know to Be a Poet’, with its injunction that the poet know, among other things, ‘at least one kind of traditional magic:/ divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot.’3 By embracing ancient practices for intuitive insight, Meehan’s work enacts the kind of generative perspective that ecofeminists Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva have described, combining ‘contemporary science, technologies, and knowledge with ancient wisdom, traditions and even magic.’4 Retrieving the best aspects of premodernity and modernity, the poems in Geomantic imagine a future beyond oppressive dualisms and the arid ecological and social landscapes where modernity has landed us. 11 IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW In these ways Meehan sews the quilt as a powerful material symbol of memory to collective pre-modern memories of magic: Irish mythology incorporates as magical that square root of nine, the number three in the triple spiral of passage graves, the triple goddess Brı́d, the tricolor flag, the shamrock. Shored up by ‘muse magic’, the quilt reverberates as the volume’s source and structure, returning to the past in order to serve the present. For Meehan, the quilts embody the compassion and desperation experienced, especially by the poorer communities, who have, I believe, been abandoned by successive governments in the face of huge crisis, of which addiction is the most harrowing aspect. I felt, in this year of commemoration, 2016, that these quilts would be my inspiration and source, because they mean more to me, and speak more profoundly to me, than many of the ‘official’ or state commemorative gestures. If measured by the aspirations of the founding principles of the Republic, these communities have been betrayed.5 In Geomantic, the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger economic boom is recollected as an abandoned daughter found ‘in the Liffey’s dark water’ on ‘the eve of the new austerity’ in ‘The Trust’ (17); the ‘junk-dazed eyes’ of a ‘life in a black plastic bag’ in ‘The Pinhead’ (29); a grandson ‘hustling for smack’ in ‘The Spank’ (30). Memorial poems for these young lives lost stand alongside poems like ‘The Clouds’ where a young generation risks losing embodied memory itself: ‘the cloud children of the machines’ rely on the technology of the internet cloud to store ‘dream song and secret and story’ (24). The poet grieves for an unmindful cyborgism, digital clouds ‘where the students heads ought to be’ (24). Thus, precisely where memories reside affects not only the quality and kind of memories with which we engage, but also our human capacity to remember at all. As in ‘Death of a Field’, Meehan reverses the usual association of safe storage on hard drives and flash drives by offering as more supple and enduring the poet in the flesh. She alludes to the vocation of the bard as the memory of the tribe, setting the poet as human vessel of memory beside the ‘map memory / In some archive of some architect’s screen.’6 In ‘Death of a Field’, these locations of memory generate quite different realities: the poet’s memory provides an elegy for a living field animated by its flora and fauna as well as its dynamic exchanges with humans – ‘I might possess it or it possess me’ – while the architect’s hard drive gives way to nests ‘of sorrow and chemical’ in yet another housing estate. In Geomantic, ‘The Memory Stick’ reinforces the dangers even to the poet of the new technology as the storing of ‘an ode, an elegy, 12 MEMORY IN PAULA MEEHAN’S GEOMANTIC (2016) a ballad, / a sonnet’ in ‘a square inch / cohesion of metal and plastic’ puts the work at risk, the poet unable to ‘recall where I put it, / the memory stick in its shiny case’ (27). The poems in Geomantic, then, represent memory as embodied, personal, communal, transpersonal, multigenerational, earthly, and cosmic. In ‘The Mother Tongue’ an ancestral memory of Irish collides with the personal memory of being made to learn it – ‘Was it beaten into me or out / of me?’ – a tension ‘that builds and builds and threatens to blow / my head off’ (47). Such tensions inform a volume deeply engaged with how a fully rendered collective memory is a necessary condition for going forward into the increasingly uncertain terrain of the 21st century. Bringing those forgotten to the centre of the Irish poem has been, of course, central to Meehan’s poems from the beginning. Unapologetically embracing the role of shamanic seer, she continues to recuperate pre-modern ways of knowing, integrating, and incorporating what the global capitalism of modernity has cast out. Performance artist Dominic Thorpe observes that one role of the arts is to situate ‘responsibility for action in the present and not only the past’, a practice that moves the arts toward having ‘a central role in advocating for human rights through engaging ethically with memory.’7 Just so, Meehan’s poem, ‘The Commemorations Take Our Minds Off the Now’, addresses the forgetting of the dire circumstances of the present. Focussing on the past makes possible the power relations for increasingly insane current conditions for the poor: ‘A boon to the Government; they rule / in the knowledge that none can keep track’. In the face of this erasure of the now, the narrator restores the present: ‘I commemorate / the poor going round and round the bend. / How mad do you have to be to make / sense of the state of the State we’re in?’ (58). The neoliberal policies that created the financial collapse of 2008 were followed in Ireland and elsewhere by austerity measures, both intentional and de facto, that rewarded elites who continue to plunder both the earth and the populace. The resulting disenfranchisements have created the conditions for dangerous forms of authoritarianism among despairing populations for whom a failure of historical memory could promise social, economic, and ecological catastrophe. Like Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ and ‘The Second Coming’, Meehan’s poems now serve an international community with a widespread need for many kinds of historical memory. Here in the US, we have never been so in need of it. NOTES 1. Paula Meehan, personal email, 29 October 2016. 2. Paula Meehan, Geomantic (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2016), p.90. All other references to this volume are supplied in the body of this essay. 13 IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Gary Snyder, Regarding Wave (New York, NY: New Directions, 1970), p.40. Rosemary Tong, Feminist Thought (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998), p.272. Paula Meehan, personal email, 29 October 2016. Paula Meehan, Painting Rain (Manchester, England: Carcanet, 2009), p.14. See Dominic Thorpe’s contributions to the ‘Memory Roundtable’ in this issue. 14 Copyright of Irish University Review is the property of Edinburgh University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.