Kerri ní Dochartaigh on the mystical everyday
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Kerri ní Dochartaigh on the mystical everyday
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Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s writing rings with a sense of connection between this world and the otherworld, and nowhere is it expressed more clearly than in her latest book, Cacophony of Bone. Here are pages full of subtle signs that are legible only to those who are in the practice of seeking them. It’s a work of plain mysticism, a very personal representation of direct contact with the sacred. At its roots, it’s about perception: how we allow it, honour it, foster it. How we can allow ourselves to encounter beauty and transcendence in the everyday.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Kerri, welcome to How We Live Now. I was just saying to you backstage that you're a repeat guest, our first repeat guest on my podcast.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
[inaudible 00:00:10].
Katherine May:
Official friend of the show.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yes.
Katherine May:
Of course, this season we're talking about how we can re-enchant this world around us. I couldn't not invite you. It's like it's completely your wheelhouse.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Thank you, Katherine. It's an honor. It's always an honor to talk to you, but this topic sounds really up my lane.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Totally, totally. I couldn't exclude you from it. Yeah, I wanted to... I suppose I wanted to start by asking you about your relationship with the mystical and the unknown and the other world, which always seems so entangled with your very being to me from the outside, but I wondered how that came about. Has that always been a stable experience for you or has that developed as you've got older?
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. No, that has been a huge part of how I have existed in the world for as long as I can remember from very, very young. I think it's a number of things. It comes from the context, so the physical places in which I was allowed to spend time and encouraged to spend time, and the creatures, both human and more than human, that were around me, and obviously the Irish landscape, both spiritual as well as geographical is sort of very ripe ground for that. But I think as well there are two more elements to it. I think it's quite a tripartite thing. There's the fact of I do firmly believe that when we come into the world... I'm not a religious person, but I am very spiritual and I believe that we bring something with us. We bring a number of things with us, but one of the things that we bring with us are a set of internal glimmerings.
Katherine May:
Ooh, that's a nice phrase.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. I saw a lovely thing recently how that glimmers are sort of viewed as the opposite of triggers. They're these little moments that... They're jolts maybe from the blue or they're more gentle than that. They're pink threads through the sky. They are geese and swans in a line when you're looking for them. There are these moments that can remind us who we are, what we've brought with us, and what we're looking for. I suppose I believe we all do bring that with us, and I also believe that some things can help us to become more attuned to those or fine-tune our relationship with those glimmerings, so things like how we interact with the landscape, so swimming, meditative walking, and all of those things that we can choose to do or not, listening, being with different types of people of different ages. I think that, I suppose as well as the kind of books that I have read from a very, very young age, they've all kind of come together and I can't separate them out, those three things.
Katherine May:
Yeah. They just all kind of knitted together.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
The people in your life, like in your family, did they see the world in the same way that you do or was it something that you bought yourself?
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
I think that very few people within my family would have been similar to me in that way. My grandfather was a gatherer of light, I suppose, but in a very different way from me. I've spoken in my first book about my grandfather, about how that he would've been very drawn to thin places the same as me, but he was a very religious man so he wouldn't really have had that view of spirituality and of kind of what we bring with us. I don't think anyone else in my family would even now I have that view. I had it as a child. I remember experiences as a very young child, and I remember knowing that they were gifts from somewhere from the earth. I remember moments where... Things like I've spoken about where I would encounter a very particular type of light or a line of beautiful geese or I would find a couple of different flowers together that when I looked at them all together made my whole insides feel really nice. I remember knowing that these were part of me and a part of my interaction with a world that I just continually felt very humbled by and the older I got very challenged by, but also very at one with.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Very connected.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
It always surprises me when people find that unusual, and they seem to do that and seem to look at my encounter with the world and see it as somehow particular and develop somehow. It's like, "Well, no, no, no, that's just my relationship with the world around me. That's how it seems to me. It seems absolutely magnetic and it feels like there's stuff there that I can directly perceive. I'm not going on any journeys for this. This is practical to me."
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. But I wonder if it's part as well of... When I was launching the American copy of Thin Places, I spoke to an incredible woman about these things, these moments that we experience, so things like chancing on a fox, for instance, at a particular moment in life or finding a hagstone at a particular moment in life. We said, myself and this person, how that some of us are more open to the magic that is within every moment than others. It's not that some of us are one-off in any way by having these experiences, it's more like when you begin to really allow them to come, you really welcome them to come. Then you see that they're there for everyone, it's just that it's to do with where we're at in our own relationship with our own self and with this astounding world around us.
Katherine May:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which we should feel astounded by.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally.
Katherine May:
But I wonder as well about the permission that we're given to think in that way because I was thinking about this a lot when I was writing Enchantment. I had a chapter that I cut because it didn't fit in with anything else, but I remembered how common it was in my very working class village to be anti-religion but pro... Or not even pro, but to see the thinness of the world as very natural and normal, and so it was quite ordinary for the women in my village to talk about speaking to their dead mothers. People would just say as a matter of fact, "Oh yeah, I was talking to Mum last night. She sat on the end of the bed and we had a little chat about whatever it was on their mind." That was outside of my family culture so I remember being really startled by it at first like, "What is going on? I was led to believe that ghost stories were a kind of children's fantasy thing, and here are adult people talking about something that's totally ordinary to them so they're not explaining it. It's just their continuous experience."
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. [inaudible 00:07:51].
Katherine May:
Yeah, it was weird. It was a weird shift for me of like, "Oh, adults are not all perceiving the same thing in this world."
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Completely. I think... I don't know, this sounds like a really funny thing to say, but I feel like people who live in areas where weather is very extreme can have this even more than others, so places that are affected by the sea in a big way or fog and mist and snow and things not looking quite as they normally do one day or the other and there being an ebbing and flowing in the world around them constantly. I do think that that can play into the permission that we give ourselves to enter into dialogue with the more than human and however it looks. If you think about places within the British Isles that have this, they are a lot of Celtic nations or they're a lot of sort of estuary nations or they're...
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
I often wonder about that, how as we as hurtle even further towards climate crisis... We're hearing that in Ireland, for instance, we will have much less extremity within our weather systems. There'll be a lot more rain at a lot more times, there'll be a lot less [inaudible 00:09:10].
Katherine May:
Oh, great, because you guys needed more rain, didn't you?
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yes.
Katherine May:
Ireland famously lacks rain.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. It's just this kind of sense of there being sort of almost a really drastic change in how we will perceive the world around us because of this change in weather and the sea, how the sea will act differently. I wonder how that will affect our consciousness obviously not just because of it being a crisis, but also just because of how it plays into our lived experience.
Katherine May:
Mm-hmm. And how we make sense of it, how we choose to story tell around it in order to find a way to kind of come to terms with it. Of course, that's always been true of societies who've lived with more risk. I mean, that's why seaside societies have got that incredibly rich mythology around the sea and around the superstitions of sailing and fishing. That's why a town like Whitstable is dotted with tiny churches is because the fishermen needed something and their families needed something to make sense of the sheer level of risk that they were enduring every single day.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. Totally. They had to find a way to marry up what their fears told them with what their lived experience was. It's a form of meaning making, isn't it?
Katherine May:
Yeah, and comfort, I think, on a very basic level, just trying to reassure yourself that all of this makes some kind of sense and that there's a bigger story than just potentially losing your life at sea.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally.
Katherine May:
Mm-hmm. It's a nice segue, actually, into talking about your new book Cacophony of Bone because it struck me that this is a pandemic book, as so many of our books are at the moment. What else could we have written about? But at this time of existential threat and change and risk, you began to record your everyday mystical experience. Is that how you describe it? I'd love to hear about the book in your own words first because I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. I love how you've just described it, thank you, and for giving it your care and time. It's a very hard little book to describe in a-
Katherine May:
Yes. It's unusual. It's a genuinely unusual book, isn't it, I think?
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
It is a very unusual book. I suppose that the journey of writing it was unusual and I think that's kind of gone into its bones and its blood system. I began writing the book just before the pandemic restrictions began and it was supposed to be a very different book in many ways. It was due to be a book about this very odd experience of enforced solitude and isolation, and of course within a number of days, within eight days actually, it became clear that it was no longer going to speak to people in the same way.
Katherine May:
Mm-hmm. In the same way, yeah.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah, so I kind of had to really sit with that for a while and just wander my way through what the book was asking of me as a creaturely object. I suppose that the pandemic... It's an ongoing pandemic, but obviously the sort of height of it.
Katherine May:
The lockdowns, yeah, the sort of intense phase. Yeah.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
The lockdowns affected all of us in some ways in the same way, but obviously there were... We all are such individuals that we all had our own story, and through recording... Because in Ireland at many points we were locked down to just within two kilometers or five kilometers of our home and-
Katherine May:
Yeah, you were tightly done.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Where I lived was just surrounded by bogland so I only saw the same two fields because even with a five kilometer lockdown, I couldn't go any further. I think there was something really, really huge happening for my relationship with myself as well as with the other than human world in that time, which was born of this change in my relationship with my own species, with other humans. I felt really... I felt like it was very important to place the lockdowns in their greater picture, which is that we had always been hurtling towards, we were already in the throes of great change across the planet, housing crisis, mental health crisis, social injustice, and inequality.
Katherine May:
If you start listing it, you could go on for about five hours. I think this is an intense nexus of change at the moment. It truly is.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. I feel like we were... It was very important for me to place that in its wider context and to really examine what could happen to a very random little person at the end of a laneway who really began to allow themself to be enchanted by the act of being alive. I explore a little in the book how that this was the first time... It's also a book about journey towards [inaudible 00:14:28] and towards motherhood and becoming a mother, which for me and for many other people is very heavy and a very delicate topic. It felt important for me to look at that from the point of view of a female mammal, of an animal within crisis because all of us animals are within crisis at the moment, and this was the first time, really, that I'd properly, properly seen myself as a female mammal.
Katherine May:
Yeah. That kind of creaturely-ness that comes over you when your body is doing this act of reproduction that is so brutal and so far beyond your control. We are so used to thinking we're in control of something.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. I know.
Katherine May:
In pregnancy, wow, it visits you in a very hard way that you are not in control of what this body does. You've got no idea what it's doing. It's wild.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. In the book, as you know, it's 12 chapters. It's January through December, the first into the lockdowns and the first bit of the lockdowns, and then each diary and each journal section is bookended by sort of short little essays that flow into the narrative of the journals. Even that in itself was very conscious. Obviously as writers a lot of what we choose is very conscious and thought through. It was very, very, very important to me that... Because I felt like you did, that our reading habits and our ability to process information of a written format had changed so fully that it felt very important for me to create a safe space within the physical object of the book for readers, many of who are still only finding their way back to the written form regularly.
Katherine May:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah,
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
That felt really important to sort of honor that change in so many of us as to how we feel about our concentration and about what we consume.
Katherine May:
I'd love to dig into that a little, actually, about the reading because there's a part of me that wonders if that isn't a slight resetting of our relationship with the written word that is perhaps even necessary. I mean, I... Oh, I don't know how to phrase this that doesn't sound terrible, but I sometimes look at the way we talk about books online and it feels like an act of consumption-
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Oh, it is, though.
Katherine May:
... rather than an act of reading. Does that make sense?
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. I mean, I'm in an interesting position with it because I've always been a hugely ravenous reader, but this was long, long before I was ever aware of people comparing how many books they'd read or any of that. I've just always... It's been very hard for me and for the caregivers around me to keep up with the amount that I need to [inaudible 00:17:28].
Katherine May:
Just feeding you all these books, yeah.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. My son is actually the same. So I'm wary because I am one of those people who does... That's what I do with my time, I sow seeds and I read. I suppose that in the pandemic, like loads of people, my relationship with reading changed so fully. What I found was that it was the first time in my entire adult life that I gave myself permission to do a number of things when it came to my reading relationship. I allowed myself... If I was reading a book that I didn't like, I allowed myself to stop, which I'd never done before.
Katherine May:
Really? Oh, wow. I'm a terrible dropper of books, I have to say.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
I can trace it back in my primary seven reading session that we had every Friday morning where my very elderly teacher was really old-school and she wouldn't let us stop our book. You had to read the book, and in order to return the book to your school classroom library you had to write a review and give it stars and things.
Katherine May:
Oh my goodness.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
So I know it's inbuilt, so in a way-
Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah. You've been trained very carefully to do that, in fact.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. But the pandemic allowed me to stop that. But also in the lockdowns, if I read a book and I loved it, I really, really loved it and I wanted to read it again straight away, I would do that.
Katherine May:
Right. Yeah, just loop straight back around again. Yeah. Yeah.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. My partner does that. I read books a few times but only if I'm kind of providing a blurb or if I'm reviewing them, but I allowed myself to just do it for pleasure this time and I allowed myself for the first time to read a number of books at the same time, to have a few ongoing, like a nature book in the bath, a memoir if I was [inaudible 00:19:13] and poetry on the loo. It was good.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Well, that's how I always read. I've always got about 15 books going and I certainly don't finish anything. I never have.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Brilliant.
Katherine May:
I think it's often because I'm a non-fiction reader most of all, and therefore I'm often looking for something in there. I'm not... I don't know, it's [inaudible 00:19:35].
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. You don't need there to be a thread. You don't need everything to be in relationship with each other. Yeah.
Katherine May:
I don't need to, yeah. Yeah, that's right. I think that a lot of books get quite repetitive after the first third, if I'm completely honest, without... I would never name any books that I think do that, but I think it's quite common for non-fiction books for their concept to have been stretched into book length in a way that doesn't actually feel inherent to the information that's being given.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. I know myself that I... I'm not naming anybody, but I've been under contract to write things where I've been made to repeat things again and again and again and known that it didn't feel right. Yeah, but this idea of you have to really tell the reader is quite an old-school way, isn't it? But I do think that it's still... There is a lot of it floating around still and having to really explain things within a narrative as well, which I think readers are really much more intelligent than we are [inaudible 00:20:37] let them be.
Katherine May:
Yeah, give them credit for. Yeah. But I think one of the points I was making as well is that I think often when you look at our online discourse about books now, it's so often about quotes rather than whole books. I've noticed that a lot in the discussion about my books, that people... You'll get these things cropping up online where people say, "I found this quote from Katherine May." I'm like, "Oh."
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
I know.
Katherine May:
"Does that mean you read the paragraph around it or did you literally just find the quote online or whatever?" I-
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Find a meme. Yeah. Yeah. The nice colors around it and the shimmery... Yeah.
Katherine May:
Yeah. It becomes like a... Rather than discussion about reading and meaning and the full richness of what we try and put into our books, it literally becomes about the person's ability to identify and visually present a quote.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. It's performative.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I'm a little uneasy about that. I'm also... Yeah, while I'm warming to my subject I'm also uneasy about the number of times I see people presenting stacks of books and talking about how they fit to a color scheme or... I mean, not that I don't massively admire book design, but I think our conversation about what books are has really shifted and it's shifted away from the meaning contained in the books and the full complexity of that.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. I mean, I've had a really interesting thought process around that recently myself because I've noticed that it's very particular styles of books that that happens with. It happens with yearbooks and it happens with Robin Wall Kimmerer's books. I've actually messaged some friends of mine when they've shared something, for instance, from Braiding Sweetgrass maybe on a doula site or on, say, on a yoga site or something like that. I just wanted to know out of curiosity.
Katherine May:
You've checked up on them.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
I just want to know out of curiosity if they have read the book. It really means a lot to me to know if someone has... Yeah, exactly. If they've actually... Because, I mean, I'm... It's embarrassing. I'm such a fangirl. I've read Braiding Sweetgrass I think 15 times.
Katherine May:
I mean, it's an extraordinary book and it deserves to be fully read and fully reflected on before it's passed on. I-
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Completely. No, totally. It's not for regurgitation. I mean, it's brilliant the words can reach a wider audience, and I do love that about social media and about beautiful little memes because I've discovered some books and gone off and read them at least once through the like of that, but I do hear where you're coming from about this idea of... I mean, you know and I know. I get sent a book... I got sent a book three days ago and I had to have a quote in for it by this morning and a blurb. I love doing that. It's a brilliant thing to do, but-
Katherine May:
Yeah. It's not to be rushed. Actually, I mean, I'm... I think because of the autism stuff that I write about, I have to be really, really careful about that because I'm sent a lot of books that reference autism in some way or another and quite often on careful reading, they do not reflect the representation that I would be comfortable with. But I have to read these books incredibly carefully to see exactly what they say about everything.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Completely. I've had instances where I've been sent books and I know I haven't had time to... I know I won't have time to read them in advance of the blurb, and I'm sometimes being put under pressure by a publicist. I've had a few instances where it's like, "Oh, maybe you could just take a nice snap and put it up as an Instagram story." I've actually planned to-
Katherine May:
Not without reading it, I won't.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
No, because actually I've had two very tricky situations where two writers that I really deeply admire, two female writers, have posted those snapshots when they've received a proof. I've read those books and I've had real queries and issues and anxieties around how groups of people, minority groups, have been represented in both of those books. I've had to say to the writer immediately, "Have you read that? If you're supporting this book and associating yourself with this book, have you read it yet?"
Katherine May:
Yeah. Have you read it. Yeah.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
I know there's a real discussion currently around how far can we go with using a person's biography and their art and do we separate them, do we keep them together, but I do really think it's a fair enough statement to make that if you are willing to post something on your social media as a professional writer, I think what you are clearly saying is, "In some way I'm linked with this. I've accepted this and I'm sharing it."
Katherine May:
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
I think we have to be mindful of those. I would never post an image of something that had just arrived that I hadn't read cover to cover.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I agree.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. I know not all of us feel that way, but I do think it's important.
Katherine May:
It's so important. It's vital.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
It is.
Katherine May:
I mean, I've been kind of slightly caught by it before when I've posted something about a book that I don't love but I don't hate but I'm trying to be nice, and then I've had five people say, "Oh, I bought the book because I know that when you recommend things-"
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
And you're like, "[inaudible 00:26:20]."
Katherine May:
I'm like, "Oh." Yeah, and I was trying to be nice to the author but maybe that's not the right thing to do. It's really complicated.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. Completely. One of the authors that I have loved for so long in a recent book just took a stance that I didn't feel comfortable with about a group of people. It was very tricky for me and I really had to sit with it for a long time, and the thing was that this part only came in the last few pages. The rest of the book was exactly like what their work had been to me before and I remember thinking, "Gosh, so I really do need to read right to the very end." I was interviewed recently by a very big newspaper and the person told me at the very beginning of our interview that they hadn't finished my book, and I felt like refusing the interview because actually I felt like saying, "But what happens if there's something [inaudible 00:27:20] halfway through? What happens if there's something really very, very big there that you're now not going to be able to explore?"
Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Of course I couldn't turn the interview down because it's a contractual thing, isn't it, to [inaudible 00:27:36]?
Katherine May:
Yeah, that's right. Well, I mean, it's absolutely no wonder that our relationship with reading became so disrupted, I think, in that context. I mean, reading is so elemental and for me it's an act of connection not just with the writer, but with the bigger flow of ideas.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
And with myself.
Katherine May:
Completely. That space I think has been invaded actually over a period of years by the way that we've come to handle books online. I don't want to be, "It should be more highbrow." I absolutely don't mean that at all, but I think there's a level of care around our books that we need to start taking again that-
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yes, I agree.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Firmly agree.
Katherine May:
Well, let's move on, but I think there's a whole podcast to be made about book culture itself and how we read.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally.
Katherine May:
But actually that's a nice way to lead into talking about the sort of psychological value of writing as you did. Were you recording this time in your observations as a way of self-soothing or way of processing or connecting or was it simpler than that, were you just writing about it?
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
I think probably all of those things. I feel like I'm someone who really suffers deep anxiety when there's a extreme level of change. I think because I've gone through so much upheaval in my personal life for so long, I respond to change that's really out of my control in a way that brings me back into sort of deep-rooted childhood stuff. I think that by having... I mean, stuff of course across the world was so ever-changing, but I think we did have a very specific situation in Ireland with the way that it was governed. I mean, stuff changed so regularly and promises were made and weren't kept at government level. I think I just... I find that the only way that I could try and mind myself and be okay was to find a way to make sense of things that had their own order and their own cycles and their own regulation that was out with all of these other changes.
Katherine May:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. The more cyclical changes, the changes like the phases of the moon and the seasons and the introduction of new plants and birds and how that flowed its way across your year.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Totally. Exactly. I think that became even more important for me when I was then in a body that had changed so completely as well through pregnancy. My pregnancy involved an awful lot of loss of control because of the maternity restrictions being so extreme in Ireland, and I was quite a high risk pregnancy and I sort of... So much was out of my control, bodily, sort of socially, culturally, all of that. I just feel like something about marking... I've always kept more or less sort of a weather diary as well and I've always found it to be of great solace.
Yeah, I think it was just really an extension of that, just this walking in the same fields and in the same stretch of bogland for such a huge stretch of time. It was something I'd never done before. I'd never been in one place for such a long time and not been away working and not been away traveling and not been sort of running away from my day-to-day existence, so there was a lot of trying to honor the parts of life that I felt were still providing such solace and such nourishment. There was a lot of also just trying to remain grounded enough to make it through.
Katherine May:
Well, one of the things that I thought about your book was that there was this sense of the value of staying and of repeating and that kind of iterative creativity that shows you the same view every day but highlights how it's changed. I know that you've moved around a lot in your life and you're still moving around probably more than I think you want to quite often because of the housing situation as it is at the moment, and that repetition seemed to be almost like an incantation, like a way of casting a spell.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yes. Completely. Absolutely. All of what you said rings true. I remember very early into keeping these specific journal entries, I remember knowing that I would never go back to who I was before that time, that it was a real way marker, it was a real sort of turning point in the landscape of my existence. It felt very, very important to have these memories written down and these experiences made ceremonial almost, made ritualistic in a way through repetition and through honoring and through making space and giving reverence to.
That would be important for me, and looking back over that time that I would grow less aware and my memories would grow less affected by things like how long we were locked down and how long had gone between seeing people and how long had gone between [inaudible 00:33:30]. Those things would lose their importance for me somehow if I were able to give space in my day and in my inner life and in my writing to the things that felt so powerful, so how many birds visited the inside of our home in that time, how many nests we found, how many bones we found, how many types of seeds pushed through the ground. That felt important.
Katherine May:
Yeah. A confluence is something that comes up in your work over and over again and their meaning's held quite lightly, but these instances of the world presenting you with a symbol that... It seems to me you're very comfortable with that being open to your interpretation, the meanings aren't given to you, but it's that act of meaning making around those things that arrive that are vital
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Completely. Completely. The thing is that it's not been that long. I talk in the book a little bit that it's not been really that long in the scale of human history since all of us would've been in touch with those things and since all of us would have been finding meaning in things like bones and movement of birds above trees or water movements and would've been interacting with the landscape and bringing our own ritual and our own serving of the land and of each other into the landscape around. That wasn't that long ago. I feel really strongly... I think becoming a mother as well has really contributed to that sense in me of how we were raised.
We're here and we have become who we are as a species based on the interaction of person to person, person to landscape, and person to other kinds of non-human. We're still craving that because that's in our makeup, it's in our blood and in our bones. I feel like we are repeatedly given these chances to lean back into that lineage, to lean back into that becoming, because that's what it was. It was us becoming who we are. You hear again and again with particular groups and, say, for instance with new mothers or women who have been unable to become mothers or women who haven't become mothers through choice just this sense of isolation and feeling of separation from other women because of these divides that are created within our society.
It didn't used to be like that. We all feel that ache and we feel that loss and the lack of crossover between elders and the incoming generation. We're all craving it. When my son was born, I remember because he doesn't really have that many family members. He has two grandparents. He doesn't see either of them that much. I remember he would just... We'd be walking down the street or we'd be at the beach or wherever and the second there would be an elder, an older person, he would just be like a moth to flame. He just wanted to be around them, and he still does because it's in him.
Katherine May:
Yeah. I never realized. My son seemed to land in the world with this really strong sense of family, and even family members that he didn't know that well or didn't see very often or hadn't had those opportunities to be around he will gravitate to them and he'll talk about them and he'll kind of rehearse their memory. He keeps them close to him that way. I never realized how innate that was until I watched him do it.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. I find that very moving what you've just shared. I suppose as someone who has estrangement in their biography, I'm conscious of it with bringing up the next part of my lineage, just how I can provide these instances for him to attach to people in a really strong and lasting way. It's why we've moved around a lot to try and find proper community, and finally I feel like we've landed somewhere where we could potentially have that and already I can see the way I'm able to mother him becoming much more impactful because my sense of ease has grown larger by being in a very community-based place. It's important.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's that horrible pressure of having to make everything up from scratch on your own at one of the most vulnerable moments of your life. There's just no need for it to be like that, but that's how so many of us are raising children. It strikes me that when we're in intergenerational groups or groups of people that are just more mixed in general that aren't completely this sort of very narrow group of chosen friends that are just like us, but there's something there about enchantment, about the flow of stories and mythologies and different belief systems that happens in that circumstance that doesn't happen in heterogeneous groups.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Oh, it doesn't. We make... The way we form memories in our brain and the way we make connections is through marrying up things that might not seem as if they're connected in any way, but that are connected for a number of different reasons. It makes sense that if you're surrounded by people who experience lots of different things in lots of different ways but the connections are there through different threads, then that will strengthen the way our understanding of that specific thing works. For instance, I'm thinking of the like of my son is very connected with very particular creatures and one of the creatures that he's very connected with at the moment are spiders.
Katherine May:
Oh wow. I would never feel connected with a spider so I admire that.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
[inaudible 00:39:29]. When I say connected, I don't necessarily mean that he is... There is a fear there as well, but I suppose that one of the things that... This is maybe difficult to explain and I might not do this very well but I'll try. When I think of spiders, when I think of my memories and the interconnectedness of things, I can see a real variety of different things and they come to the fore straightaway and they involve so many different experiences with so many different people. I can see very clearly... I can see my grandfather in one of my spider memories. I can see someone that I did teacher training course telling a story about a spider's web. I can see tinsel. I can see all these different things, and I know that that's how learning and understanding the world works. I suppose the more we get into these little totally homogenous groups that you've said, the less potential there is for all of these different things to come through. The more we place ourselves in vulnerable positions with strangers and with people that don't hold the same views as us and with people that have got all these different backgrounds and the better that can be.
Katherine May:
Yeah. And how uncomfortable we feel with mediating those relationships when they do come into conflict. I think that within your and my lifetime, a certain amount of conflict was quite normal and now actually it isn't and we're so uncomfortable with it when it happens and we just don't manage it very well. That's a huge concern because we just need to be able to handle disagreeing and closing the narrative arc of our disagreement so that our relationship is still continuous rather than everybody walking off feeling terrible about everything and never speaking again, which is how it seems to work now.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Exactly, and traumatized people are much more likely to be unable to resolve things because of the fact that they process fear and alert in a very different way from people who've been shown regularly how to resolve things and how actually relationships can build through conflict and can become stronger.
Katherine May:
Yeah, that conflict is safe to some extent. Yeah.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Kerri, this has just been such a wonderful conversation.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
[inaudible 00:41:55].
Katherine May:
I'm so grateful for the... Well, yes. We have so few opportunities and I'm so grateful for the way that you just bring all of yourself to this conversation within seconds like, "Here we go. We're going to sort all your life out." I love that. Thank you so much.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Thank you for having me.
Katherine May:
Tell us where everybody can find you if they would love more of your wisdom.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Absolutely. I would love to let you know that the Cacophony of Bone itself, the book, will be out in the UK and Ireland on the 4th of May. You'll be able to order through... In Ireland it's Gutter Bookshop, and it's Waterstones or your local indie in the United Kingdom. Then if you're waiting for an American copy, that's going to be a little bit of a wait, but that's through Milkweed but you're also able to pre-order now. As for more generally, my Instagram and Twitter have links to a lot of my writing. I'm on Substack, like most of us are now. Scéal is on Substack and I post there twice a week.
Katherine May:
Wonderful.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Yeah. I'd love to have some dialogue with readers and [inaudible 00:43:00].
Katherine May:
Yeah. That's right. I'm sure they'll all come to find you. I can hear that your son's patience has run out so I will say thank you so much.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
I'm so awfully sorry for that.
Katherine May:
No, never apologize. It's exactly what children do and nobody should feel embarrassed about it.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
He's had his timer on. He knows it's time.
Katherine May:
He's had enough.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
[inaudible 00:43:19].
Katherine May:
He knows it's half past the hour. Thank you so much.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh:
Have a lovely rest of your day. Thank you, Katherine.
Show Notes
Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s writing rings with a sense of connection between this world and the otherworld, and nowhere is it expressed more clearly than in her latest book, Cacophony of Bone. Here are pages full of subtle signs that are legible only to those who are in the practice of seeking them. It’s a work of plain mysticism, a very personal representation of direct contact with the sacred. At its roots, it’s about perception: how we allow it, honour it, foster it. How we can allow ourselves to encounter beauty and transcendence in the everyday.
But there’s also a hidden political dimension to Kerri’s work. She’s showing us a way of life that’s largely been lost, a mode of perception that has been deliberately crushed and denied. It’s a spiritual mode that’s democratic, resistant, dangerous. These times are ripe for it.
In this interview, we talk about the practice of everyday mysticism, its connection to Kerri’s Irish heritage, and the ways that reading has been warped by contemporary life.
Links from the episode:
Kerri’s instagram
Kerri's book, Cacophony of Bone
Other episodes you might enjoy:
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Enchantment - Available Now
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
