Traditions tell us how to be who we are. This year, for the first time in the history of The Republic, Ireland has had to cancel its St. Patrick’s Day Parades, and even worse, the pubs have been closed as well. At a time when Nanjingers are looking to erudites of similar extraction for hope, David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher of the 18th century, springs to mind as an example of sense and pragmatism in the unsettling “Times of Cholera”. If Covid-19 is going to close the pubs on the Irish, a pox must indeed be upon us.
Writers have long used the concept of plague to explore the depths of Humanity’s compassion and self-awareness. From Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” to Albert Camus’ “The Plague” and Somerset Maughan’s “The Painted Veil”, authors have explored the possibility of life suddenly and permanently ending, and the strange tricks this assertion of finality plays on the human psyche.We contemplate our mortality, and plug our ears to the soul screaming that follows, asking ourselves, “Where is that ghastly noise coming from?” And then?
This is when we summon up our self-reliance and powers of reason and attack the heart of the matter. In a case like Covid-19, a “Coronapocalypse”, we summon up our best self, activate our critical thinking skills and rationally work towards the best solution. Right?
Hume calls hokey.
In his “Treatise on Human Nature” (1739), Hume posits that, “The self is nothing but a bundle of impressions and ideas”. He argues that essentially, any idea of a self or soul that persists through time and change is mere illusion, a fabrication of the mind. Hume believed that the prevalent notion of the self as a solid identity was incorrect, a flat earth to the globe of consistent layers of self laid down over time.
Emotion shapes our responses to stimuli, and these responses are recorded as sensorial memory. If we feel scalded and angry at the sharp sting of a nettle, we avoid the hairy demons in future. However, our memory recall of this responses is also filtered through emotional lenses, so each time the memory of the nettle’s seething white spots exploding on my ankle is conjured up in the mind, it is coloured by the contemporary self who recalls it. Our recollections are shaped by the self that is doing the recalling. Is that self happy? Mad? Amused? Any memory is therefore susceptible to subjective reevaluation over time, as the self constructing and evaluating is also in a constant process of flux, growth and change.
This is important when it comes to dealing with new experiences and challenges. We must be aware of the power of the “passions”, as Hume calls them, to colour our perceptions.
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Now, I mention this because us Irish also know a bit about the self, and tradition. For many years, Ireland struggled to establish a Hibernian identity, learning to navigate a new world, in a new mother tongue. Despite the Penal Laws and the outlawing of the Irish language, the catholic religion and the old ways of life woven into each Gaelic syllable, tradition played a huge role in maintaining the strong Irish sense of identity during the years of occupation.
Hedge schools popped up in the.., erm.. hedges, where subjects were taught in Gaelic, while the world weavers, the Seanachaí, travelled from house to house each dusk, their words shaping the heroes of old, giving them longings and loves and losses, tales from the old country, when we were still a free and noble people.
These stories reminded us of who were, who we used to be. They contained the promise of a better future, when, like the heroes in the stories, we would overcome. Music from our grandfathers’ grandfathers soaked into the smoothed timber of the instruments handed down at wakes.
Our collective past is woven into these stories, these acts of connection with the lifeblood of our cultures. St. Brigid’s crosses made of rush on 1 February to bless the house for the year ahead, the burying of the Child of Prague head-first under an apple tree the night before a wedding to ensure a dry day, sweeping the old year out across the threshold on 31 December and welcoming the new one in with song and laughter a second later. Traditions that make no sense, just like life.
The mothers passed down the songs, the words came to us through women. The songs, the swish of the brush, the crisp cool air at midnight, thick with coal smoke and new year’s resolutions; songs, swish, smoke. Traditions worldwide jump on the ceremonial bandwagon. Here in Nanjing, we burn money on the sidewalk and incense in temples. We sweep away old pig symbols of new years past and paste up new rats for the coming year. We gaze at the moon and ask, like Seán O’Casey’s brave Captain, “What is the stars, what is the stars?”
We acknowledge time, impermanence. Traditions often mirror life in their eclectic randomness. Rolling with the randomness seems to be the way forwards, using traditions as clearings in the brush to hop over life’s nettles.
When it comes to the idea of tradition, we often assume that there’s a bundle of it out there somewhere, a nicely rolled ball of belief, like yarn, stretching from the beginning of time immemorial to now, made up by people who knew what they were doing. The naming of a child when it is born, for example, or the celebration of a birthday or even the ceremonial acknowledgment of the passing of a loved one. Tradition is culture blind. Worldwide, we use it as an umbilical cord to our soul, to reinforce our belief in ourselves. And we made them up as we went along, the same as we are doing right now.
Taking time to sit with ourselves, to contemplate our traditions, lets those traditions remind us of who we are, of our common past and shared present, our anticipated future. They allow a time for introspection and for understanding the natural laws of nature. They permit the mind to kaleidoscope and consider past selves, in different times, the changes that have transpired since last year, or last season or “the last time”. The allow us to craft the narrative of experience that we refer to as “the self”. Myself.
The story is ours to tell.
Right now, Coronapocalypse is upon us. “What should we do? How can we survive this?”, we all ask. When confronted with the end, the human spirit flinches. “Not me”, we say. “Not now.”
To understand the soul screaming, we need to admit to ourselves that life sounds ugly, scraped and frail, sometimes. When life spits in your eye and stomps on your foot, it is not targeting you. It’s just like a child, doing its thing from time to time.
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And just as at times, we react with composure, compassion and calm to the minor gales that blow though our days when raising little people with growing brains, so too, do we respond with equanimity to adverse life circumstances, like scary apocalyptic virus’ that swoop down upon us with the same predictability as a 3-year-old’s temper tantrum. Other times, we lose our sh*t.
Hume argues that destroying the idea that there is a single, enduring, self is the key to empowerment. “The tendency to joy and hope is true happiness.” By allowing that change is life, that we cannot always react optimally to situations that set our emotional kaleidoscopes tripping, we can give space to the waves of justified anxiety and terror, yes, terror, that come with the thought of homeschooling and other calamities of life.
As the west begins its journey through the Coronapocalypse, the memes begin.
“The Irish close the pubs due to Covid-19. The Irish develop new 15-minute test to diagnose Covid-19. Cold fusion by the end of the week, lads, if we can keep sober.”
“The Covid-19 epidemic has been engineered by women to shut down sporting events and close the pubs.”
A man is interviewed by the CDC. They explain that he has two options for quarantine. A solemn voiceover says, “You can A.) Go into quarantine with your wife and child, or B.)…”
“B. B. Mmmhmm. Definitely B,” replies the man, eyebrows like Golden Arches.
Our capacity to see beauty and laugh in these times manifests itself manifold. We stay in. We stay positive. We stay striving.
Traditions are totems and talismans, telling tales of hope, of human endurance and Humanity’s collective ability to overcome and thrive in times of adversity. When the world is spinning so fast that you don’t know whether you’re pushing out of the hurricane or into the eye, don’t stop. But remember, whilst you push, the Scotsman’s advice; “Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them”.
We do have a choice as to how we remember this time, this defining moment in our generation. Let it be contemplated as a mother does her child, as a student does campus, as the Irish shall the re-opening of the Temples of the Lord, Arthur Guinness.
