Talking to a Wounded Swan

Dr Micheál Ó hAodha, University of Limerick, interviews the bilingual poet, Gabriel Rosenstock

Why are you a poet?

 
Why is a beetroot a beetroot, why is the Pope a Catholic, why is the Dalai Lama a Buddhist, why are you asking these questions? I am a poet because it was decided that I would be a poet - a long, long time ago, before this current incarnation. I had nothing to do with it. The notion of deciding to become a poet strikes me as ridiculous. You recognise you are a poet when you thrill to lines of poetry for the first time – even Mother Goose rhymes! You fly like a poet when you have a transcendent experience as a result of reading poetry:

    Can it be the sun descending o’er the level plain of water
    Or the Red Swan floating flying, wounded by the Magic Arrow . . .

Quoting from memory. That was one of my first flying lessons, aged 10, my instructor had the wonderful name of Longfellow.

If you were to give advice to an aspiring poet in Irish today, what would it be?

 
Mastering the grammar and getting inside the 'dúchas' or soul of the language is very important. You don't have to show off with a vocabulary that sends us scurrying to the dictionaries but do acquire a knowledge of those surviving dialects which still have speakers.

Read widely - go outside the Anglosphere and stay outside for as long as is possible. Brush up on your linguistic acumen by translating something everyday, in to or out of Irish. Never forget what Irish poets (and the populace in general) had to experience in the course of history ever since the poet Spenser advocated the crushing of the Gaelic spirit. I was recently reading about the poet Diarmuid na Bolgaí and the satire he wrote on a priest who was more concerned about buying a new pair of boots than tending to his starving parishioners. Diarmuid himself died of of starvation in 1846. Never forget those poets. Keep their memory alive though everyone around you might say 'Forget them!' Understand such texts as Decolonising the Mind:

Recently I watched a documentary series on the flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla (1950 -1992). The feeling, the emotion he was able to express. Incredible! Much of today’s poetry – in English – is emotionless. My advice to an aspiring poet, in any language, is burn, burn, burn, with passion and emotion. Stop being clever and feel, feel language, feel emotion, feel poetry, write poems with feeling.

Many of your poems can be read in a number of different ways or finish with a question? Why is this?

 
Poetry is not a science which gives us definitive answers ... poetry is really more like a question mark that can look in different directions, rather like a seahorse:
 

For someone not brought up as a native speaker of Irish one might have thought that poetry would be the most difficult (as opposed to prose, drama/tv, or song say) of all the literary forms to forge your writing career in. What attracted you to the poetic form more than any other? 

 
I have tried many genres but the one that comes closest to the condition of the seahorse is poetry, that floating question mark! - it's the male seahorse that bears the young. Did you know that? Poetry in all its forms, including tanka and haiku, and translation of course, is the way to celebrate that question mark. To expect an answer - such as a full stop or an exclamation mark - that would  be blasphemy. I'm glad I'm not writing much in my native language, English. Writing in a second language keeps you alert all the time - at least, that's my experience - and means that people such as Diarmuid na Bolgaí cannot slip from your radar.

Some people who have read your poems say that they are poems in search of some type of enlightenment or a state of “peace”. Would this be true to say?

Maybe the reader is searching for enlightenment. I don't know. My search (in that department) is over. Poetry has a life of its own, whether the poet is ‘enlightened’ or not. Perfecting ‘the life’ or ‘the work’ is an old dilemma; if you are lucky, they can go hand in hand. 
 
Does the poet have a role still in modern society?

 
    A policeman has a role, a baker has a role (even a bread roll), a poet does not have one easily definable role. He has a thousand roles but he doesn't call them that - he calls them poems.

Tell us a bit about the background to the poems in your collection Glengower?

The background is, give or take a decade or two, about five to ten thousand years. Where would you like to begin? Poems are drawn from convoluted strands and to trace each strand back forensically is not something that interests me at all. The Urgrund is for literary critics, philosophers and detectives. I celebrate it – the origin and background of poetry – but I don’t attempt to analyse the mystery.

Both Independence and Nochtadh na Deilbhe are interesting poems. Can you tell us something about how you came to write them?

I have no idea - thank God. I don't even know what you mean by 'interesting'. An article by your favourite newspaper columnist might be interesting, or a guest on George Galloway's TV chat show, Sputnik Orbiting the World, might be interesting, but poetry is not meant to be interesting: the more interesting it tries to be, the more it turns me off. 

 What inspires you to write poetry?

 
Inspiration.

How do you think you’ve evolved as a writer over the years?

Oh, I'm devolving. Only way to go!

This is probably a ridiculous question in a way but where do you see yourself going next literature-wise?

Devolving, of course. To be serious: a driver can take a left or a right turn, or pause at a crossroads. The poet in me is flying: there are no left and right turns, no pauses at crossroads, no decision as to take this road or the next. Poetry has its own rules, its own dynamic. Poetry – and language itself – will tell you where to go. Of the many strands of spiritual enquiry I have immersed myself in over the years, such as Zen and Advaita, the devotional path of bhakti is the one which helped me to realize that language itself can be considered as a goddess, a living goddess. I have no interest in Ireland – as in the Thomas Davis doggerel, ‘Ireland, my Sireland’. That Ireland doesn’t even exist for me. The name of the tripartite goddess who gave her name to this country, Éire/ Banba/ Fádla, this is the matriarchal entity whom Gaelic poets have adored all throughout history and through the long colonial period. She is in my book Year of the Goddess/ Bliain an Bhandé. She will advise me how best to proceed. (Though I have also read about a so-called patriarchal entity governing Ireland. Poets get what they need from history and tradition …)

You often define yourself as an anarchist. What do you mean by this – what is an anarchist?

I don’t like defining myself as anything but certainly Anarchism has a moral authority which is lacking in Neo-conservatism and the politics of the right in general. The most interesting Anarchists for me are those in the devolving or primitivist mould.  John Zerzan says, “I would say Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination.” This resonates with me. Do I want to have a rational argument with you so that we can determine why it resonates with me? No, because rational arguments have nothing to do with poetry. Poetry is inspiration. One of the words for inspiration in Irish is tinfidh. The root of the word is tine, fire. The late Francisco X. Alarcón, a Chicano poet, was a dear friend; I translated two of his books, one of which was Cuerpo en llamas, (Body in Flames). A collection of my haiku in Irish is called Géaga Trí Thine, meaning Limbs Aflame. I believe in the purifying flame of inspiration. Here’s a short poem in which there may be a fusion of Anarchist and Buddhist ideas:

 Bratacha Bána

Tá bratach Mheiriceá
ar an ngealach
iompaithe bán,
tuartha ag an ngrian.
Ní faic anois iad
na réaltaí, na stríoca,
brionglóid.
Lá breá gréine
beidh gach brat tréigthe

White Flags

The American flag
on the moon
has turned white,
bleached by the sun.
The stars and stripes
are nothing now,
a dream.
All flags will pale
some sunny day

So, I wouldn’t like to be defined as an Anarchist or a Buddhist. I’m defined (if at all) by hundreds of poems, hundreds of tanka and thousands of haiku and photo-haiku and what goes into each of these creations individually contributes to the totality of my identity – but even that’s not enough to define me or anybody else. We cannot be defined, or labelled or successfully explained – we are the Red Swan, floating, flying, wounded by the magic arrow. I cannot put that in my CV if I go job-searching, can I? Which simply means that the world is false: poetry is true.

Is Irish-language poetry a particularly good medium for an outsider or Anarchist such as yourself?

 It’s ideal, in many ways. Given that the Anglosphere holds the key to so many forms of cultural and political domination, yes, Irish-language poetry is an ideal vehicle for cultural anarchism, cultural resistance.

 Do you think poetry has a purpose? Or to put it another way – “What is good poetry for?” 

I totally reject the notion of 'purpose' and the entire vocabulary of 'usefulness'. It is a notion much treasured by WASPS and other abject materialists. I toss them all to the purifying flames, with every thought, with every word, with every poem.
A book of poems should be like a pleasurable meal. Enjoy it - take time to digest it. Leave the chef alone. Stop asking him where he gets his ingredients from. Trust him that they are organic and fresh.  This desperate need to break everything down is a disease of the mind –  the need to identify this spice or that herb, quantify the amount of condiments used, or the time it took to prepare the meal and so on.  Many literary academics peddle irrelevancies and thereby contribute to the widespread notion that poetry is irrelevant. So, you might ask, what should academics be doing? I can't speak for them, of course, but shouldn't they begin to question a bit more, ask hard questions of the institutions for which they work? Is poetry alive on the campus?  If not, is it being dissected in their laboratories? Has poetry fled the campus, howling? In University College Cork, many moons ago, I stood in the quadrangle selling our Irish-language poetry journal INNTI. I will never forget the looks I got from some of the staff in their flowing robes as they swanned past me, including a Professor of History who could barely look me in the eye. If poetry is the voice of freedom, as I believe it is, then those who teach it must themselves be imbued with a holy thirst for freedom. I find that this is rarely the case.
But since you are asking these questions, it would be impolite of me to wander off too much. Glengower (meaning 'Glen of Goats') is a pun on where I live, Glenageary (meaning 'Glen of Sheep', a place without a glen and without sheep, by the way). Goats and place names also feature in my English-language novel, My Head is Missing. We have accepted the anglicisation of our place names because as a postcolonial (or neo-colonial) society, we prefer the shame and the meaninglessness of it all to anything else. We are 'evolving', we think, and the last thing we want to do is to 'devolve'. The Glengower section of poems is a satire on aspects of Irish society and the narrow belief systems of  certain types of people in our society; it is but one section of the book, of course, but it also gives the book its title. One of the preliminary pages has the name Glengower painted over and all we can clearly read is the Irish name, Gleann na nGabhar. It's a piece of graffiti in a book - and why not?  It's a page that I like. I'm glad that the Onslaught Press agreed to include it.

Many people (even people who read Irish-language poetry in translation) say that poetry in Irish became overly-academic in the last few decades which isn’t surprising given that many of its writers were academics and scholars involved in the language movement. Would you agree that this turned some people off poetry in Irish given that this wasn’t always the case as regards the Gaelic poetic tradition?

 There's a high tradition and a low tradition, if you like; the bardic tradition, one of baroque ornamentation, and the simple songs of the people, not without their own sophistication, of course. The line between the two styles isn't always very clear. With the collapse of Gaelic society after the Flight of the Earls, poets lost their aristocratic patrons and had to find new champions among big farmers and landlords; thus there was a trickling down of the bardic poetry into the lore and verse  of the peasants and the language of poetry and song was enriched in this way. Modern twentieth-century poets such as L S Gógan and Piaras Béaslaí were steeped in the Gaelic tradition and there's a whiff of the archaic about their work. But the true father of modern poetry in Irish was none other than the 1916 martyr P. H. Pearse and he favoured speech rhythms and straightforward language, thankfully. I'm sure that Pearse would be in perfect agreement with the Dos and Donts of Ezra Pound, such as,     "Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work . . . " 
    "Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something "
    "Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol."
    "Go in fear of abstractions." Makes sense to me.   

Many people (often privately) argue that much present-day Irish-language poetry is firmly rooted in the English-language or Anglophone poetry tradition and has little in common with Gaelic culture or the tradition from which it has allegedly emerged? Are the younger generation of Irish-language poets that you know "well-versed" (pardon the pun) in the tradition which they are writing in?

Again, I must return to Ezra Pound who said that poets should be widely read, in their own tradition and in other literatures. Pound says, 
    "Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover,     preferably in a foreign language [This is for rhythm, his vocabulary must     of course be found in his native tongue], so that the meaning of the     words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g.     Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs . . ." 

 I try as much as possible to read outside of the Anglosphere, though I am grateful to English as a bridge-language which allows me access to so much work in translation. It's none of my business what other poets are up to or what they read or don't read. Amid all the doom and gloom about the future of poetry, a recent survey showed that 12% of the adult population of the USA (28 million) had read poetry in the past year. There may not have been many lovingly thumbed first editions bought by this mass of readers, but that's another matter, and we won't go into the question of social media – the good, the bad and the ugly. I'm a technical dodo: someone else manages my blog (Aonghus Ó hAlmhain), and the ekphrastic tanka and haiku on Pinterest (Derek Ball) and I'm ever so grateful for their assistance in these matters. I wouldn’t have been able to publish the bilingual volume of ekphrastic haiku Stillness of Crows without the technical assistance of Eoin McEvoy.

We know that in Gaelic tradition, similar to many other literary traditions – poetry was meant to be read aloud often as accompanied by music. One always gets the impression that sound and reading your poems aloud is a critical part of your work? Is this a very conscious part of your literary style, would you say?
   

If the voice is not there, the breath is not there; if the breath is not there, inspiration is not there; if inspiration is not there, the gods (or the Muse) are withholding their influence; if the gods (or the Muse) are withholding their influence, their divine music cannot be heard, so, if you haven’t got it [the voice] try something else, do something useful, become a veterinarian or apply for a job with Wikileaks.

Many of your poems have a subtle but very obvious humour in them that seems to have been ignored for the most part by many literary critics? Where does this come from and would why has it been ignored? 

Homo Ludens! Does anybody refer to that book anymore? The author makes a connection between play and poetry: 

    "Poiesis, in fact, is a play-function. It proceeds within the play-ground of the mind, in a world of its own which the mind creates for it. There things have a different physiognomy from the one they wear in ‘ordinary life’, and are bound by ties other than those of logic and causality."  

I have recently translated over 80 Mother Goose rhymes into Irish. Such anarchic fun, such an exposition of 'the play-ground of the mind'!  I'd like to see some of them as murals, not just in a crèche, but in all those grey car parks bestrewn across the land.  Now, if you will excuse me, it’s time for my Laughter Yoga.

Agallamh

Ceisteanna á gcur ag Ars Poetica na Slóvaice:

1. Poetry, a little alien? Why care about it?

Poetry is an act of renewing the Imagination and reshaping it for our times and maybe even for all time. Poetry always exists, though not necessarily always on the page. It has been around for thousands of years and links us with Reality in a special way, often in a memorable way, and links us as well to ancestors whom we may have forgotten, links us to history and to landscape and renews the language that is on our lips.

2. Who are  you as a poet?

I am a bilingual poet-translator and haikuist working in Irish and English. Writers create national literature, translators create world literature, says Saramago.

3. What kind of literary tradition, particular authors or modes of literary thinking have you found inspirational for your work?

In three volumes of sacred poetry from around the world, fashioned into Irish (Gaelic), saints and sinners rub shoulders with shamans, sages and seers. This is good company for poets. This is the type of poetry I like to read and translate, Sufi poetry, Bhakti poetry, Taoist poetry, tribal poetry from everybody and anybody on earth, Aztec or Inuit. This is timeless poetry. Much of modern poetry in the West is arid and intellectualized and has been so polluted by university learning that the music and the heart has been squeezed out of it, alas.

4. Please give several examples of contemporary European or international poets that you believe are most significant (in any possible sense) and comment briefly on their merit.

I have translated into Irish (using English as a bridge language) poets such as Kristiina Ehin from Estonia and Nikola Madzirov from Macedonia who are not afraid of magical realms. They are in tune with something that is magical and Real.

5. If asked about transnational influences in today’s international or European poetry, what examples would most readily account for? 
   
   Rumi is very popular, as is Hafiz. One might have academic doubts sometimes about the actual translations but the popularity of Rumi is no bad thing, if only to remind us that poetry is essentially a spiritual activity. Turning to poets of our own time, Milosz, too, is quite popular.
6. In all likelihood, some of the innovative patterns in contemporary poetics have not yet reached the acknowledgment of either the national or international literary canon. Can you provide some examples of specific authors or poetics that you believe are still undeservedly flying below the radar screen of broader critical community? What makes these patterns innovative and makes them supersede established modes of writing and/or reading?

Innovation is not all that important. The true voice of poetry is unmistakable, whether innovative or not. The huge problem we have today is the dominance of English and the neglect of poets writing in lesser-spoken languages and also the work of dialect poets. There are a number of poets in former British colonies around the world who write in English and many of them write very badly in English; they should be encouraged to return to the wellsprings of their own culture where they will find the idiom, the colour and the music to serve their aesthetic needs and challenges.

8. Are there any influences or inspirations emanating from the poetries and poets from the former “communist countries” that you have been able to recognize as having an impact in the countries of “the West”? If yes, how would you describe this inspiration and the possible reasons for it receiving acclaim or resonance in certain artistic or social communities?

The only good reason to read poetry is the passion and sincerity behind it which deepens our own sense of humanity and the mysterious layers of the universe within and without and, of course, there are dozens of poets from the former communist block who are outstanding,

9. How do you see the poet–reader relationship’s current state and its evolution in the contemporary cultural landscape? Please share any possible examples of that very relationship as being alienated, or, on the opposite side enlivened, re-energized, or newly franchised.

Code Poetry in Greece recently posted a haiku of mine as stenciled graffiti. That’s one way of doing things as bookshops close down. We have to be innovative and ‘urban guerilla’ tactics with stencils and paint is something I would strongly approve of.

10. What kinds of fresh genres or types of poetry do you see emerging in today’s international landscape? Can you see any identifiable new kinds of “ars poetica”?

Again, the emphasis is on the ‘new’. Why? Good poetry is always ‘new’. It should not try to be new. This is putting the cart before the horse!

11. Both the discourses of poetry and politics seem to carry an aspiration to win human hearts and minds, or even change lives. What examples do you see of fruitful interaction between political and poetic discourses and agenda?

Is capitalism undergoing a crisis? Do groups such as ‘Anarcho-Primitivists’ have something to say about the economic, social and ecological crisis we are living through?

I think Wendell Berry’s Mad Farmer is one type of effective response to the world’s anguish:

The Mad Farmer Revolution

Being a Fragment
of the Natural History of New Eden,
in Homage
To Mr. Ed McClanahan, One of the Locals

The mad farmer, the thirsty one,
went dry. When he had time
he threw a visionary high
lonesome on the holy communion wine.
"It is an awesome event
when an earthen man has drunk
his fill of the blood of a god,"
people said, and got out of his way.
He plowed the churchyard, the
minister's wife, three graveyards
and a golf course. In a parking lot
he planted a forest of little pines.
He sanctified the groves,
dancing at night in the oak shades
with goddesses. He led
a field of corn to creep up
and tassel like an Indian tribe
on the courthouse lawn. Pumpkins
ran out to the ends of their vines
to follow him. Ripe plums
and peaches reached into his pockets.
Flowers sprang up in his tracks
everywhere he stepped. And then
his planter's eye fell on
that parson's fair fine lady
again. "O holy plowman," cried she,
"I am all grown up in weeds.
Pray, bring me back into good tilth."
He tilled her carefully
and laid her by, and she
did bring forth others of her kind,
and others, and some more.
They sowed and reaped till all
the countryside was filled
with farmers and their brides sowing
and reaping. When they died
they became two spirits of the woods.

On their graves were written
these words without sound:
"Here lies Saint Plowman.
Here lies Saint Fertile Ground." 

How would you envisage an optimal cohabitation of the two “pos” (poetry & politics) that would be beneficial to your co-citizens?

I would keep them apart, I’m afraid. The world of politics is a world of patronage and privilege. It corrupts everything it touches. In this I am in agreement with Ed Abbey:

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, & county commissioners."

12. What kinds of values and qualities do you think media poetry (sound poetry, visual poetry, kinetic poetry, digital poetry and poetic performance) can offer in comparison with poetry conceived of as a traditional written fixed text form? Please exemplify.

I like visual poetry and for years now I have been creating Photo-Haiga, haiku in Irish and English in response to nature photography by Ron Rosenstock (no relation). We hope to have an audio-visual show, with a music track, based on this material and present it as an installation in a gallery space near you! The South African composer and musician Eugene Skeef, based in London, is creating the sound track. I’m all for YouTube presentations of poetry as well, such as this one by Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón (one of the first poets I translated into Irish), talking about being bilingual and bicultural:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMBSb_6LjCE

13. How would you describe the difference between the kinds of creative inspiration that you may experience as generated by your imagination as opposed to the potence emanating from the appropriative process of handling meaningful contexts and patterns already existing?

All genuine works of art emanate from the imagination, and the degree to which pre-existing forms are present in the new work is not relevant at all.

14. Would it be fair to say that we have witnessed a gradual shift in a broader understanding of the very notion of (creative) writing due to the rise of the media and programming?

Possibly. But today, everybody is an ‘artist’ and this is boloney because not everybody is an artist!

15. What kind of unique experience does media/experimental poetry mediate to you (your mind and body) that you would not be able to find otherwise?

Every imaginative work of art is a unique experience and media/experimentation are secondary matters.

16. What do you think poetry stands for today? Has the recent advancement in the natural sciences and humanities influenced our very understanding and possibilities of poetry?

Poetry is at a low ebb in our TV-saturated age. Pop songs now provide poetic emotion for the masses. Poets have retreated to academic towers. They should be hunted out of these towers, back in to the fields and the woods and the riverbanks where they might recover their senses.

17. What makes a poem a poem? Has this apparently notorious question been in any sense reinvigorated or revisited in the wake of the rise of the global and globalized civilizational experience?

Nothing that has ever happened, or that will ever happen, can ever change what a poem is. Its essential nature is timeless, unpredictable and inviolable. Here is a Navaho poem taken from the Poetry Chaikhana site. I am unable to appreciate it in its original language and yet it sings to me in a way that few poems from our age do: the refreshing innocence it contains is also in us and actually exists in the core of our own hearts if we knew how to get in there, find it and sing from that space.

Gabriel Rosenstock, Éire (Ireland)

Beauty is Before Me

by Navaho (Anonymous)
Original Language Navaho/Dine

Beauty is before me,
And beauty is behind me.
Above and below me hovers the beautiful.
I am surrounded by it.
I am immersed in it.
In my youth I am aware of it,
And in old age I shall walk quietly
The beautiful trail.

Agallamh le Gabriel mar chuid den Ash Wednesday Poetry Series

Anseo:

ClubLeabhar.com - Agallamh le Gabriel Rosenstock - Ólann mo Mhiúil as an nGainséis

B'é  Ólann mo Mhiúil as an nGainséis leabhar Mí Meithimh 2012 ag ClubLeabhar.com



Gabriel Rosenstock
Ólann mo Mhiúil as an nGainséis
ISBN 1 902420 78 0
Foilsitheoir: Cló Iar-Chonnachta

Nasrudin, Nasrúidín, Nasroodeen

Gabriel Rosenstock in conversation with Mícheál Ó hAodha
(From: Nasrúidín Athinsint, Original Writing 2012)

Nasrudin is not a well-known figure in Ireland. Where did you come across him first?

He’s a composite type of character really and a lot of the Nasrudin humour has made its way by a circuitous route from Afghanistan, India, Turkey, Iraq and so on to vaudeville New York and later on to the big screen. I first came across him in the discourses of Rajneesh (later Osho). If you were reading spiritual discourses by Vivekananda, Yogananda or Krishnamurti, let us say, you  wouldn’t expect to come across too many humorous asides but Osho had a lot of time for humour and spiced up his discourses with Nasrudin tales and other material. And so, I thought, we have versions of Aesop in Irish, why not Nasrudin?

Why not indeed!

Actually, it’s a serious question. There’s an incredible amount of world literature and folklore which never gets a mention in an Irish-language context, not to mention being actually translated into Irish. I think we box ourselves in a lot. We need to get out a bit more – into the big world, I mean.

Strange that it hadn’t been done before.

There’s thousands of things that haven’t been done before (in Irish). Look at the book of Jewish humour I brought out, Greann na nGiúdach (Coiscéim, 2008). How come that hadn’t been donebefore? Or Birbal (CIC, 2011), ancient and medieval tales from India. I also have Native American tales in the pipeline. Yes, I do find it a bit odd that I have to come up with a lot of these ideas myself. Publishing houses should have commissioning editors to create such titles. You might ask, is there a demand for titles with an international flavour.

I was going to ask that!

You’ve got to create a demand. For me, there should be space on the shelf for lots of literary experiences and reading adventures. It doesn’t have to be high literature all the time, it doesn’t have to be hermetic or esoteric. We need all types of literature. I’m reading R K Narayan again. What a wonderfully light touch he had! I don’t think he’s known much in Ireland, is he? Next week I’ll need to read something meatier though. Or write or translate something in a different vein. Maybe I’ll start on another volume of Guthanna Beannaithe an Domhain, an anthology of sacred literature. Two volumes have appeared already. A third, the largest so far, is at the printers. But getting back to Nasrúidín. He’s a great leveller. Himself and his donkey! There’s something quixotic about him. The knight errant wouldn’t be the same without his steed either, would he?

He occurs (as Nasroodeen) in your book The Pleasantries of Krishnamurphy: Revelations from an Irish Ashram (Non-Duality Press, 2012)

That’s a measure of my affection for him. Great characters in literature and folklore are often as alive as real people, don’t you think? In the Krishnamurphy book, he gets to indulge in a bit of Keats & Chapman humour (of sorts) and so, the composite Nasrudin adds another layer to his growing mystery.

Thank you!

Thank Nasrudin. Or Nasreddin. Or Nasr Eddin or whoever the hell he is.