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Seamus Heaney, who died ten years ago this week, had been such a presence in Irish and northern Irish culture from before I was born that his death was more shocking than most. His distinction not only as a poet in the traditional sense, but a national wisdom figure had taken on an almost supernatural quality. He helped us know ourselves; and probably more than any other writer of his time, had things to say about the suffering arising from the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. Things to say that transcended us versus them. Words that made things like pens and shovels seem like mythical artefacts, blackberries and skylights like miracles. Part of the point of poetry, of course, is to puncture our mundanity, revealing the beauty potential underneath everything. Heaney, obviously, had a special gift, which he honed; I don't know if he's the best poet Ireland has ever produced, and I'm not sure "best" is a poetic category, but we needed him then, and we need him now, because he took what mattered seriously.
I once briefly worked for BBC radio, presenting an arts show; and when Heaney would appear on it (he was loyally generous to Belfast broadcasters), he communicated by fax. This was long after fax machines were unnecessary - but he didn't do other forms of electronic communication, at least not with us (it's well known that the last message he sent to his beloved was by text, noli timere, be not afraid. The Latin overcomes the digital tendency to superficiality.) Come to think of it, a handwritten fax sent by a Nobel Laureate to thank a production team for a good job felt a good deal more real than email. Perhaps he did consider fax to be necessary after all - it suited the humane depth you would expect from him in conversation.
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Celebrity culture our current status hierarchies tell us that the meaning of our lives is proportionate to how many people are paying attention to our work (or even merely what we wear, or who we are seen with, or how much money we get paid). But that’s a lie. It doesn't serve the common good nor our own individual wellbeing to remember Seamus Heaney as unreachably better than any of us, just because he was famous. Like all publicly successful artists, his prominence started out as luck.
The fact that he was a magnificent poet (which may well be worth aspiring to) had little to do with his fame (which may be worth ignoring). So it is with all of us - your gifts are probably not proportionate to how many people are buying your books or records, or watching your films, or coming to your shows or festivals. "Success" comes through chance, being in the right place at the right time, or having something so awful happen that it attracts the attention of crowds.
Your book sales or social media stats or the number of people attending your community gatherings are not the measure of you - either your inherent value or what you bring to the world.
You are, we are like characters in a play in which all the roles are supporting parts. It's the responsibility of poetry to help us value the lives that are usually out of the spotlight as much as those that are bathed in it.
It moves me to think that Heaney's best known poem, Digging, is about something as small and as cosmic as the relationship between a son and his father; so mundane and astonishing as cutting turf and holding a pen.
I don't know more than most of us about who Seamus Heaney really was. But his way of holding himself in his writing, and in public appearances, and the one time I talked with him - neither light nor heavy, knowing who he was but not letting it get in the way of your own unfolding - was one good answer to what we need right now.
To take life seriously but not take ourselves too seriously.
To breathe before we speak.
To reimagine the places we're from and the people we are in ways that honor both the light and shadow of experience, the shock and solace; and in the way we story them, make them a little better than when they found us.
We are each given a field to tend, and a shovel to dig with.
I am beyond glad that Seamus Heaney tended and dug the way he did. Because of that, he helped me see myself, and to see through the darkness that so often threatened to overwhelm me and my people, and the place I’m from, over and over again. I can imagine a northern Irish upbringing without his voice, but I’m glad I don’t have to.
I am willing to risk saying right here that there is someone who needs your voice, today, as much as I needed Heaney’s then.
So please, keep digging.
If you haven’t started yet, because you don’t believe that your field or your shovel matter, or you didn’t know you had a field or a shovel, please, for the love of life, do us all a favor. Try experimenting with the story that you matter as much as anyone else, and that whether what you do is seen by millions or one person who needs it, the meaning of you may actually be found in interrupting the way you’ve always thought about yourself, and picking up the tool that has been waiting for you.
And just begin.
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PS: Here’s what I wrote the week Heaney died.
I was in Belfast when I read the news that Seamus Heaney, our national poet, singer of hope, and a spiritual father, had died. It’s hard to think of a more significant, and certainly there was no more widely loved, cultural figure in my homeland of northern Ireland than Heaney.
If by invention we mean the process of taking two or more things that had not previously been mingled, and leading them into alchemy, then Seamus Heaney didn’t just speak my language, he invented it. He took the raw material of the Ulster culture, the landscape, the sorrow amidst political struggle, and fashioned a lexicon of desire: to be heard, to make sense of, to wonder why, to define boundaries and to commit to a life of service to the unique vocation to which each of us is invited.
Cinema is poetry, not prose, so there is no contradiction about invoking Heaney in a reflection about the movies. Indeed, I wish his voice had been put to direct use in film criticism; I would have loved to read his thoughts on what Norman Mailer called the ‘spooky art’ (so called for the resemblance of the recorded human image to memories of the dead).
But poems we have, and they will be read forever – I learned about mortality from Heaney’s ‘Mid-Term Break’, of the story of his wee brother’s death at four years old; I was comforted by the melancholic prescience of ‘whatever you say, say nothing’ as applied to the secrecy ironically acknowledged by everyone in my country’s civil conflict.
I received an icon through which to interpret the world in ‘The Skylight‘. ‘The Skylight’ is the best poem I’ve read about cinema that isn’t about cinema: Heaney writes about his reluctance the time his wife arranged for a hole to be cut in their roof to let the light in. He declares himself to be grateful once the old ceiling was opened up, moving from skepticism about the project to comparing the experience to nothing less than witnessing a miracle of healing from paralysis.
His work does that to readers, of course; and his death has stirred up for me the poetics of movies that leave me feeling the same way.
So as a tribute to this master of invention, the spiritual binder of my nation’s wounds, a Nobel laureate who once responded to a request for an interview about religion by saying he didn’t feel he had much to say about it, but provided what he called a ‘found poem’ instead, whose riches mined a deeper seam than journalistic interrogation would uncover, this ordinary man from Bellaghy, here, some found moments from the poetics of cinema.
The teenage upstart in Andrei Rublev breaks down, having discovered that his arrogance about his own abilities may have been factually correct, his heart cannot yet contain what it means to be a leader. But he at least now knows how to ask for help.
The prince bangs his crown against his prison wall, while the surrounding peasants hear only music, in Basquiat’s dream of what it means to be an artist.
A film crew becomes a community becomes a family becomes a circus becomes a heavenly dance troupe as Fellini makes a movie out of the struggle to make a movie, in 8 1/2.
In Runaway Train, Jon Voigt giving the second best performance and maybe the best speech in American movies, explaining to Eric Roberts why dignity is found in doing things that you can respect.
A blown out match becomes an astonishing sunrise; a father sits on the porch all night long to protect a man from a racist mob; a grandmother sits on her own porch, for the same duration, to protect children from a preaching monster; a man kisses a woman in a hotel room, and a camera encircles them as if they are themselves the very eye of a tornado; human consciousness and the possibility of compassion is born when a dinosaur withholds violence from another; a spaceship communicates transcendently benign intent by playing music to scientists; an old man becomes an interstellar baby, a planet-sized child, the future of humanity.
Early in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (itself imbued with more than a touch of Heaney), the mother’s narration muses that, “Grace doesn’t try to please itself…[but] nature finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it.” Amidst the acclamations of Seamus Heaney’s astonishing art and facility for expanding the possibilities of language, there continue unanimous evocations of his personal generosity and kindness. He was the antithesis of cynicism, knowing that telling the truth does not have to mean hurting the people: it is not the task of the artist to find reasons to be unhappy.
Movies taught me about death, and about sex, and about guilt, and about love. At their best, movies teach me that I am not alone, that there is nothing I have experienced or can fear that someone else has not already been through. The poetics of movie experience are, it seems to me after over forty years of watching, indivisible from my sense of identity, memory, history and hope.
Heaney, writing of the miracle of political reconciliation that has begun in my hometown, famously defined a moment when ‘hope and history rhyme’. The image is at once ineffable and absolutely practical; and it comes from the same pen that insists that ‘the end of art is peace’.
‘The best music is the music of what happens’, also – one might say that Seamus Heaney had little time for the uselessness of ‘should’. What is is what matters – and what you do with it. The teacher Edwin Friedman suggested that the purpose of all leadership is to help your audience become emotionally mature – not to force feed platitudes or even wisdom but to speak in such a way that it creates the conditions whereby readers, listeners, followers will capture a vision for themselves of what it means to be human, and then start living it.
As I think about how we have loved and lost Seamus Heaney, I am grateful for the consolations of cinema, my favorite kind of poetry, for those consolations do indeed comfort me. I am more grateful still that Heaney’s work, and the witness of his life, and the highest cinema, seem to pull me further onto the path of becoming more human.
Gareth Higgins is an Irish writer and the founder of The Porch.
