Quest for Liberation in Paula Meehan's Poetry: Eastern Influence, Western Buddhism and Working Class Struggles

    When Irish famine hit around 1845-49, the city of Dublin witnessed death and poverty on a large scale. People from the inner cities of Dublin migrated to London and other parts in search of employment and food. The people who stayed back suffered a great deal. Most of the girl children were denied secondary education and Catholic Church did little help to save them from penury. This left nothing but disappointment and shattered dreams within people, pushing them further into a life of suffocation and squalor. Paula Meehan lived on the corner of Sean McDermott Street and Gardiner Street (famous working-class area) with her grandparents while her parents went to England looking for work. How did eastern texts and practises influence a poet from such working-class background? Did her poetry convey any politics? Did she blindly follow a path or carved a way for herself? What was her ultimate aim by writing poetry?

       Paula Meehan, born in 1955 as the eldest of six children; is an Irish poet and playwright. During her secondary education at St. Michael's Holy Faith Convent, she organised a protest regarding the right to education for all, against the school management which led to her expulsion. She studied for Intermediate Certificate on her own. During her teenage years she joined a dance drama group, became familiar with band culture and started writing lyrics. She graduated from Trinity College Dublin and did a post graduation from Eastern Washington University. Some of her famous poetry collections are The Man who was Marked by Winter (1991), Pillow Talk (1994), Painting Rain (2001) and Dharmakaya (2009).  She has won several awards like The Butler Literary Award (1998) and Denis Devlin Memorial Award (2001). Her mentor in the poetic field is Eavan Boland.

       Her work Dharmakaya, released in 2001 was based on her experiences with Tibetan Buddhism and Eastern texts. In an interview given to a program called Poetic Synergy, that analysed eastern influences on Irish Poets; she said that her interest in the orient was part of the zeitgeist. The gang with which she hung around in the early 70's were profoundly influenced by Eastern texts and philosophy. She says that so many of her friends became devotees in various ashrams in London and some headed to India seeking an atmosphere to channel their spirituality. Paula Meehan reflected that Catholic Church at that time did no help to guide their emotions and thoughts which left a feeling of being abandoned within the teenagers. It became institutionalised and paid no heed to the working class people. Even the politics of that period hindered their natural spiritual flow which led them to sway towards Buddhism that imposed fewer restrictions and allowed their inner spirit to flow freely. Her main influences were beat poets Allan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, directing her thoughts to a combination of Buddhist and Zen traditions. Paula was attracted very much to American poetry of 50's and 60's. Out of this she developed an affinity towards Western Buddhism thus letting go of some of the exotic and intellectual elements of Tibetan Buddhism.  She wanted practise not just ideas. She says "The emphasis is on mindfulness in every single moment of your conscious being." (03:00) Her poetry channels its energy through breathe patterns. During the writing process she aims to slow down and realise her existence in this world as a mortal. "What keeps you sane or channels the energy is learning on a very practical, mundane, daily level to go in, sit down and make a bit of poetry... it is not always possible to be that mundane about it". (09:10) Through her writing process she constantly tries to astonish herself by letting her unconscious spirit gain power over her. She compares this process to Tai chi where body is focused on a gentle yet continuous body movement followed by deep breathing. She isn't bothered about language barriers since this process "goes beyond the delusionary nature of language in daily life" (03:53) Her recitations of her poems focuses on breath patterns to emphasise the effect of sound on body. Laments read out loud in such a way can bring about transcendental experiences thus forcing a special energy out of our body.  Poetry according to her can be written in two forms, one that demands constant attention during the writing process through its poetic forms and structures; and other that comes to her like a spark of lightening. She feels that the poems that come in "half trance" are the best but poetic structures have its own advantages.

        "Diamond Faceted, His Breath" is a poem that explains to the reader why she still considers poetic forms important. It is written in the form of a villanelle, a slave song system that reminds her of American Blues that combines body and spirit. She rejects the binary of body and spirit that others advocate. She formed this poem in her mind when she was sitting at the hospice hearing about her father's death.

Diamond Faceted, His Breath 

‘Which is heavier – a ton of coal or a ton of feathers?’

My father’s death lay on me like a feather;

his own hard fought for last mortal breath

was diamond in the radiant Samhain weather.

Light as the pages that fell from The Mirror –TOXIC DUMP: BANK BILLIONS LOST: TEST TUBE BIRTH:

– my father’s breath could scarce disturb a feather.

The going was hard at Dundalk, Uttoxeter;

Red Era a horse he believed had some worth,

given the right ground, the right kind of weather.

The half done crossword: ten across, eight letters,

daughter. Nine down, bold – no! – wild. Seven down, hearth.

The words themselves as light as any feather.

I could carry every step of my future

on the smooth or rocky contours of my path, whatever the news, whatever the breaking weather.

In the hospice garden, a child’s laughter

falling like dry leaves to the hard black earth was my father’s death – the weight of a feather,

as I roved out into the coming winter weather.

(The Mirror)

       We must note that usage of word "Diamond" might be inspired from Buddhist Diamond Sutra. "The Diamond Sūtra is a Mahāyāna (Buddhist) sūtra from the Prajñāpāramitā, or "Perfection of Wisdom" genre, and emphasizes the practice of non-abiding and non-attachment." (Wikipedia) She believes that it was the poetic form that managed and structured her emotions that were scattered all over the place due to extreme grief. Thus forms enable us to direct our feelings of conscious mind into words, to talk about something beyond words. Poems based on breath patterns can also be seen as a yearning for Christian orthodoxy and spiritualism of the past, getting satisfaction through clearer spirituality that Buddhism offers and a protest against the corruption of the Church. Readers feel that, Paula through her lessons from the east provides a maternal energy that results in a transformative process with the help of breathing that provides a womb like experience.

       The title of her work Dharmakaya, is taken from The Tibetan Book of the Dead that roughly translates to "truth body", a point between breath and no breath. "The Tibetan text describes, and is intended to guide one through, the experiences that the consciousness has after death, in the bardo, the interval between death and the next rebirth." (Wikipedia) It is described as a guide to liberation. The concept of a point "in between" blends well with the Irish history and concept of Tulpa. Ireland has always stood between two languages and cultures. Paula is standing in between two forms of spirituality, Christian and Buddhist.  Paula believes her exposure to the teachings has helped her gain a confidence to guide her soul through delusions and projections of imagination thus following the light into the next incarnation. Through the poems "My Father Perceived as the Vision of St. Francis" and "The Ghost of my Mother Comforts Me", about her parents, she describes how the realisation of mortality changed her viewpoints. Though images of saints in Catholic textbooks scared Paula as a child, St. Francis had the most peaceful face. By evoking image of her father and ghost of the dead mother, she realises the momentary nature of life and thus gains liberation from fetters of life.

       The inspiration to her poem Dharmakaya was the Scottish actor and street artist in Dublin called Tom McGinty also known as Dice man. Paula says it was him who taught her the true essence of Buddhism and its walking meditation practise through the living statue like pose, extremely slow walks and stillness in the street.

Dharmakaya

When you step out into death with a deep breath,

the last you’ll ever take

in this shape,

remember the first step on the street—

the footfall and the shadow

of its fall—into silence.

Breathe slow-

ly out before the foot finds solid earth again,

before the city rain

has washed all trace

of your step away.

Remember a time in the woods, a path

you walked so gently

no twig snapped

no bird startled.

Between breath and no breath

your hands cupped your own death,

a gift ,a bowl of grace

you brought home to us—

 become a still pool

in the anarchic flow, the street’s

unceasing carnival

of haunted and redeemed.

(An Sionnach)

Annie Mulhall in An Sionnach journal about Paula Meehan's poetry presents an interesting insight into Buddhist elements in the poem.

 " the poem reflects a Buddhist’s perception of the moments of life as intermediate states—between past and present, between life and death, between breaths, between one literal step and another, between sound and silence, word and suffix, stillness and flow, order and carnival, haunted and redeemed. In the intermediate state of the present moment, “between breath and no breath,” McGinty is represented as bringing home the gift of dharmakaya, an awareness of his own death, from moment to moment. The awareness is called a “gift” and “a bowl of grace”; it provides a saving detachment, registered by the pool that remains still in the face of what is “anarchic” and “un-ceasing.” And this seems a state of mind and being that can go anywhere, that does not require the more familiar Western images of respite in secluded sacred or domestic spaces. Rather, the “you” of the poem has his being in the street, the city, and the woods. Other images in the poem register the transitory, insubstantial, and impermanent—the moment ending, the life ending, the footstep erased by rain, the path travelled without evidence one has been there. Remember, breathe, remember, become: the narrator intones imperatives and the four-line stanzas arrange themselves as regularly as breaths. Even the pattern of slant rhymes reinforces the sense of an ordering perspective in the midst of the chaotic. Though the poem’s variable line lengths suggest free verse, the stanzas unfold first in couplets and then in rhyming alternating lines. The poem’s only exact rhyme— death/breath—emphasizes again the close proximity of life and death and of death in life. "(an_sionnach)

      

       Tom McGinty took the fear of dying out of Paula thus enabling her to approach the problems of life from an objective position. This distanced approach allowed her to fight for the people who suffered and felt oppressed. An abused child and oppressed women are recurring motifs in her poems. The poems "Pattern" and "Two Buck Tim from Timbuctoo" of The Man who was Marked by Winter  describe narrators feeling suffocated by their surroundings. "The View from Under the Table" (Dharmakaya) describes about a child traumatised by violence. Paula in her childhood suffered from loneliness, lack of educational opportunities and poverty. She revealed in an interview to "The Writing Life" (HoCoPoLitSo) that she wrote "The Ghost of my Mother Comforts Me" to create a myth about the mother figure. Her own mother who died at the age of 42 due to illness and poverty, was a woman of ferocious intelligence who never got a chance to apply it in her life. Only around the year of her death, Ireland began to welcome women authors and thinkers. Paula believes it was this contained intelligence that led to the death of her mother and several other "ordinary" women of that time period. In this poem the ghost of her mother even gains power to come in between the Catholic god and the narrator to protect her daughter.

       It was Paula's grandfather who taught her how to read and write. She believes that the state system would have discouraged her education.  Since she came from a poor community she couldn't get access to books. All her exposure to imagination and literary thoughts came from folksongs, stories of grandparents and dreams that family members shared with each other. Her only book to read at home was the poetry collection of Emily Dickinson. While many trained for seven to twelve years to become established poets, Paula found inspiration from her surrounding areas and situations. This was later interpreted as politics of her work. Paula conducted various workshops for women prisoners to channel their creativity. But many of these prisoners succumbed to illness or committed suicide. Society never accepted women or her creative works. Even in 1970's gender equality and equal pay wasn't prevalent. It was the intervention of European Union that brought some changes regarding this issue. Though men leave schools early and women tend to be more qualified; women were still denied opportunities in private and public sectors. Paula's short sentences convey deep feelings of a women about her hopes, love, passion, marriage and pregnancy mixed with the overall deprivation that Dublin faces. In a note about Paula Meehan, Maurice Harmon says

"There is in Meehan's work a purity of feeling. She is blessed by an instinctive faith in herself, in the powers within her psyche. Her work is permeated with this spiritual energy, in its language and rhythm, in the resonant voice, in the capacity to absorb and transcend life's harshness and to celebrate life's beauty and value." (A Note on Paula Meehan)

       Many poems of Paula that describe threshold experiences, frightened children and women at the verge of insanity, stems from the still existing conditions of unemployment, poverty, failure of education system and rapid urbanization of Dublin. She wants to make her readers know that life is like a feather that can be blown away at any moment. Women in her poetry is sometimes the protector or the destroyer, either way depicting the multifaceted identity they all possess. Dublin now seems to her “a haunted city, haunted not just by my own childhood but through the architecture by all the people who had lived before.”(The Irish Times).

Citations

·         Holdridge, Jefferson." The Wolf Tree: Culture and Nature in Paula Meehan's Dharmakaya and Painting Rain" .An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts. 5(2009). 168. Project Muse. Web. 18 April 2015

·         Argáiz, Pilar Villar. “Telling the truth about time”: The Importance of Local Rootedness in Paula Meehan’s Poetry". Itudes Irlandaises. 30 June 2010. 18 April 2015.

·         Mulhall, Annie. " Memory, Poetry and Recovery: Paula Meehan's Transformational Aesthetics." An Sionnach Special issue on Paula Meehan, ed. Jody Allen Randolph. 5:1&2 (June 2009): 142-155. Academia edu. Web. 18 April 2015

·         Kirkpatrick, Katherine. “Between Breathand No Breath”:Witnessing Class Traumain Paula Meehan’s Dharmakaya" . An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture, and the Arts. 5(2009). 189.Academia edu. Web. 18 April 2015

·         Denman. Peter. "Peopling the place". UCD Scholarcast. 9(2014). 18 April 2015.<http://www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/transcripts/Peopling_the_Place.pdf>

·         "Paula Meehan". Wake Forest University Press. 14 October 2013. 18 April 2015. <http://wfupress.wfu.edu/authors/paula-meehan/>

·         Carty Ciaran. "Paula Meehan: The Poet at 60".The Irish Times. 28 Feb 2015.Web. 18 April 2015. <http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/paula-meehan-the-poet-at-60-1.2115401>

·         HoCoPoLitSo. "Paula Meehan Reads Her Poems and Talks of Her Irish Childhood." YouTube. YouTube, 19 Mar. 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzs8_SDbuuM>.

·         "Paula - The Lost Children." YouTube. Storymap Dublin, 20 Sept. 2013. Web. 19 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZhgzjL0tpM>.

·         "Paula Meehan Reads Her Poem "The Pattern"" YouTube. UCD Library Special Collections, 26 Feb. 2015. Web. 19 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH2D4NVT520>

·         "Paula Meehan Reads "My Father Perceived as a Vision of St. Francis"" YouTube. UCD Special Library Collections, 26 Feb. 2015. Web. 19 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbJxw66sKWE>.

·         "Paula Meehan Interview". YouTube. Poetic Synergy, 18 August 2012. Web.19 April 2015.<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWadeRauZSM>

·         Harmon Maurice. "A Note on Paula Meehan". Web PDF. 18 April 2015. <http://dlm.ffch.usp.br>

·         "Diamond Faceted, His breath". The Mirror. 14 Jan 2015. Web. 18 April 2015 <http://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/staying-in/diamond-faceted-by-paula-meehan-117499>

·         "Diamond Sutra". Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopaedia. Wikimedia  Foundation, Inc.16 September 2014. 17 April 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Sutra>

·         "Tom McGinty". Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopaedia. Wikimedia  Foundation, Inc.12 August 2013. 15 April 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_McGinty>