(... looking at the sky, speaking without words, reading books ...)

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Turlough, by Brian Keenan

Thank you, Sabine, for bringing Turlough, by Brian Keenan, to my attention recently.  Our public library didn't have a copy, but the interlibrary loan system borrowed a copy for me from the Western Michigan University Library.

From the dedication page to the epigraph by N. Scott Momaday for Part One through the journal entries of Mrs. McDermott-Roe and letters of friends and critics and storytelling and the final part of this quote by Chief Seattle to last page of the book, my attention and emotions were fully engaged in the life of Turlough and with the challenges of life in Ireland in the 1600s and 1700s and the power of music and all the light that the blind can see.



From page 5, from the journal of Mrs. McDermott-Roe who was a lifelong friend, patron and confidante: ... I explained to him how over all these years I have pressed flowers in my journal and how their shape or color transports me back to some incident that my memory had overlooked.  He stopped and turned to me, then said curiously, "Yes, I know, colour has memory, everything has its own color ..." 

From page 21:  ... she (am's note:  Turlough's mother) insisted that anyone who drank the flower's juice would be enabled to write poetry. In his imagination he saw fields of words stretching out into the distance.  When he told his mother she laughed and said he was already a poet without drinking any flowers.

From page 34:  .. Nervously he began chuckling to himself.  The idea came into his head that the fish were singing.  Somehow an outburst of life was coming from the silent fish ..."

From page 104:   ... One day she entered his room and placed a harp in his hands.  "Let this speak for you," she said simply as she turned to leave the room ...

From page 136:  ... He wanted music to convey a sense of the person and of the musician's response.  There would be no tortured plucking of the strings, no bitter regret.  He wanted the harp in his hands to be Bridget.  The music was to be about acceptance, a celebration of love, another way of loving ...

From page 224:  No law, no matter how pernicious, savage or inhuman, can obliterate the culture of a nation ... "

From page 270:  For the dead are not altogether powerless.  Dead did I say?  There is no death, only a change of worlds.

(Chief Seattle of the Duwamish tribe on Puget Sound, Washington Territory)

From page 296:  ... This was the secret that old Fionnuala Quinn (am's note: the teacher who placed a harp in his hands) had tried to impart to him.  Only blindness could release him to see more fully.  Blindness allowed him to stop living in front of things and begin to live with them, as part of them ...

From page 332 of 333, where a friend relates a dream Turlough had related to him:  ... Again he heard the peasant song, plaintive and full of exile and longing.  It seemed more than human.  It was compelling and intense, and pulled him to the great door of the waiting room.  He surveyed the cracked symbols and figures carved on wood.  To him the door was a manuscript of sound.  He seemed to hear its meaning, like a great sounding board reverberating in his senses.  As he stood before it, it opened silently.

Beyond it was a swirling fusion of unformed colour ...

Music is

Thanks to Sabine for her comment and the links to Brian Keenan and his book.

My introduction to Turlough O'Carolan was through a musical friend with Sephardic ancestry who learned to play some of his tunes on her baroque viola.  It was about that time that I found this website. 

“Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST.”

 -- Frank Zappa (1940-1993)