The Visor

essay and verse

THE VISOR

I could do the stereotypical “grumpy aul’ git” thing. I could, and I frequently do if I don’t catch myself, thus leading to frequent contention over the “state of today’s youth”. Being born at the fag-end of Gen X or first Millennial flush, I can remember life before total Onlinedom. But kids today have their own memories and their own connection with things and I don’t want to ‘go forth into the night’ as a grouch.

All the above as preface to mentioning an artefact from my own childhood, which might seem bizarre today to have had such affection for; a simple plastic visor….

Or rather, visors; my sister and I had a pair, her’s was red, mine green. We wore them during summer, in days of yore (the mid 1980s.) I was fascinated by how the world turned green when seen though the garish plastic screen. Simple stuff.

An important feature common to some of the various strands of Indo-European wisdom traditions is the notion that we don’t get the real unconditioned reality through the senses or the ordinary or unexamined mind. What we get is an edition suited to human needs and desires, belief in the absolute reality of which not infrequently compounds the suffering inherent in our existence. We see things, including our own place amongst things, through the visor of the embodied form (or embodied reflection of the Form) of the human being, and through the warping effects of human passions- anger, lust, hatred etc.

But – and here begins the spiritual way of working with this ‘envisored’ condition – there is a sense in which we already know, indeed intimately know, the unconditioned reality. Below the line of topsoil so to speak, our roots are already set in that Reality.

In the Platonic tradition, the individual soul is a fragment, or focussing of the Rational World-soul, the God through whom the power of the eternal Forms flows into the shadow-world of ceaseless change (the physical universe). This fragment opens up a region of perceivabilty, a place that appears as the world and the self, and it contains knowledge of the Forms and the realm of eternal Being.

For the Stoics, the God is the creative intelligence of the universe, situated in relation to it just as our own intelligence is to our body – neither separate nor indistinguishable. And for certain avenues of thought within Platonism, Stoicism, Buddhism, even Aristotlianism, and others, a part of us, even the most real part, is already and fully awake to this reality.

That part is in fact Reality aware of itself through us. Socrates and Plato named it (probably in accordance with a common contemporary understanding) the Daimon – a god given by the God to mortals, which manifests as our intelligence. There is a sense even in Aristotle’s philosophy that the Nous to which we have “inward” access is the very Nous which is the object of all thought – the Unmoved Mover, the perfect manifestation of Energeia. And likewise there is the Buddhist teaching of our already enlightened condition which has been covered over with the visor of our passion, aggression, and ignorance.

Midir is the name of a supernatural character from medieval Irish literature, probably a Christianised redaction of a native divinity. He (or his name) is related to the name for “judge”. He is said to dwell in Bri Leith, the grey mound, which is guarded by three magical cranes. As such, and for me, Midir is the god of the mind, ensconced in the grey matter in our skulls and whose true divine nature is barricaded, is envisored by the formidable ‘cranes’, passion, aggression, and ignorance, or time, space, and causality, or the world, the soul, and the gods.

MIDIR’S MOUND (BRÍ LÉITH)

‘Friends, what are you? twining bound,

and where the warlock loom that winds

your semblance, caught to mine, in gown

of room, and hemmed with cloth of time?

***

rise and fall, ne’er standing still,

But blinking both, as though we flare

from sky through chinking cloud, where shrill,

the squalling breeze commands the air

***

See, laid complete- the world in dance

of fire and vapour, place and hour;

embraided curls of need and chance,

to grey entire be traced the power’