In Celtic thinking the time between one thing and another is sacred. “Sacred” here is something fluid, organic, changing, but also treacherous, unknowable, and wild. It is dusk and dawn, mid-summer and mid-winter, summer and winter solstices. These are times that are neither one thing nor another. Not really both at once or neither but some other thing: time out of time.
Annie Dillard writes of the kosher butcher who would bid his family a fond farewell each day as he left the house because in the time between the act of killing and the cry for mercy, God could smite him: the time between.
The story is that the reason we say “Bless you!” when someone sneezes is because the momentary loss of bodily control leaves the person vulnerable to the soul being snatched: fleeting moments between one thing and another.
When Ireland achieved independence, after centuries of colonialism, a manufactured famine, and the repressions of the Catholic Church, its writers and artists essentially wrote and painted a nation into being. Paintings such as Seån Keating’s Aran Fisherman and His Wife are more than portraits. By depicting these people whose lives are tied to the sea and the islands as heroic, Keating plays a part in defining a new nation’s values and identity. He depicts a time of becoming.
If we as Americans choose to think of ourselves that way, we are in a similar time, a time between Enlightenment values and something yet to be revealed. We have had two and a half centuries of struggle over what we want our nation to be and how we want our government to act. The issues facing us now are not new, except that now the solid ground we all stood on to engage the issues has become soft and treacherous. It is a between-time but also, if we choose, a time of becoming.
The Celtic border time has corresponding border spaces – fords, rivers, boundary lines, hedgerows, marshes – neither one thing nor another. These are liminal spaces, which modern interpretation sees as anonymous places of transit, of crossing – airports, bus depots, hotel lobbies, hospital corridors – places of movement from one point to another, of the temporary intersection of randomly associated lives. With all our American cards thrown up in the air, all the relied-upon assumptions taken away or turned upside down, it is easy to think we have been transported to such a place, negotiating landscapes that are suddenly strange and eerie.
Nevertheless, here we are, thrown together with random traveling companions, crossing open ground, with only a map we are drawing freehand as we go.
Seán Keating
Aran Fisherman and His Wife
oil on canvas, 1916
Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
2 Responses
What shall we call the time between peace and war? Between chaos and stability?
I liked “a time of becoming.”
And the thought of “crossing open ground” as a metaphor.
A friend who studied the French role in Vietnam said that within every war are the seeds of peace. The growing of those seeds would be the time of becoming, partly because there are no guarantees during that time. It is never sure that the efforts will be successful or even what successful efforts would look like. So I would reverse your words “peace and war.” The time between peace and war feels more like entropy or collapse, possibly necessary but not yet a becoming.
I owe the title “Crossing Open Ground” to Barry Lopez, whose book by that name explores the search for connection between the future of humanity and the natural environment. I, too, like the image as metaphor.