Letter from Paula Meehan

44 Merrion Square

Dublin 2

June 4^th 1995

Greetings from Dublin, Hatto

I’m very much looking forward to the conference in Hania next September. I’m a regular visitor over the years to Crete and a great admirer of, insofar as it can be reconstructed from the evidence, Minoan culture, especially the siting, layout craftiness of the habitations. So Crete as location should help us hold in mind a span from the Bronze Age to the post industrial. And the story of Daedalus as …..finding his way through the Labyrinth and defeating the Beast with the help of female energy (the thread) is a story I’ve been long nourished by as a working poet.

The psychic terrain of citizens in the city is what interests me. As a Dubliner I live in a city that has been extensively mapped by myth makers. Joyce, Beckett, O’Casey would be recognized internationally. They provide imaginative maps, usually more reliable than statistical or sociological maps. And I have lived through a time that only began to take notice of female maps. Boundaries, planes, topographies must be redrawn to allow this female energy free passage or, as happens in Euripides The Bacchae, the kind (surely emblematic of the State) will be forever condemned to have his head ripped off by his Mother. I mean female energy, not as an exclusive attribute of those born into female bodies but as that part of the psyche which is still costest in touch with the mysteries of birth and death, which acknowledges and embraces the animal part of being human, and still sites itself within the natural world. Indeed I would argue that unless we take on board our wildness as a species then we will so endanger our great mother (Crete gave us Gaia) by seeing ourselves as separate to the rest of nature, that we will have neither cities, nor towns, nor even sustaining ecosystems within which to locate the human adventure.

I am told by researchers that if I live to be eighty I’ll see an end of the planet’s accessible oil reserves. This is only forty years way. Do I see any evidence in my city that planners are taking this fact on board? I do not! Eco-warriors are still largely treated as cranks and there is legislation being enacted throughout Europe that severely limits our own and our children’s freedom to contribute to the democratic process. (The Criminal Justice Bill in Britain has been used extensively to prevent people protesting the turning of that island into one large motorway complex). The real problems are ecological. Who owns the earth? How do we treat the great mother, source of all life and nourishment? How do we accommodate our own wild nature in city space and encourage other species of flora and fauna to share the space with us? How do we as members of communities challenge presumptions of those who make decisions in our name? Especially if the communities we are part of or have affinity with are those with the least financial clout? How do we summon the collective will to demand ecological safe and hospitable environments? How do we construct and reconstruct city space that is based on human and natural life cycles, rather than on the profit motive?

It seems to me that nothing less than a radical shift in consciousness can avert the end of human life on the planet. Which is probably where poets come in. Our work, if it can be defined at all, is to remind our communities that we are humans, that we are wild, and that we have responsibility to each other and to other life forms. Poetry is part of the oral transmission of wisdom – (it predates books and will survive the end of the book) – poets are the makers of sustaining myths and part of our work is to be critical of all that is anti-human and life denying, to give heart and comfort to our communities in their struggles and especially to nurture what is wild in us, that part of us which knows it is linked to the great natural cycle.

Paula Meehan

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Letter from Paula Meehan