Under the guise of emptiness, the invisible keeps its secrets to itself. Yet the invisible remains the great background which invests your every gesture and action with possibility and pathos. The artistic imagination brings this out. We see this especially in sculpture. The shape of the sculpture evokes the shape of the emptiness around it. Also in dance we see how the body creates fluent sculpture in the air. It draws out the hospitality of the invisible. There is something quite courageous in the endurance of human presence against the vast canopy of the invisible. We endure the invisible by forgetting it—for as long as we can. When you become aware of the invisible as a live background, you notice how your own body is woven around your invisible soul, how the invisible lives behind the faces of those you love, and how it is always there between you. The invisible is one of the most powerful forms of the unknown. It envelopes our every movement. It is the region out of which we emerged and the state we are destined for, yet we never see it. There is no map with which to discern territories of the invisible. It is without texture. This is probably why we long to ignore the invisible. There is a sense in which the invisible is the home of fear. We tend to be afraid of what we cannot see or know.
In Conamara, when someone asks a child who he is, the child is not simply asked for his name. The question is, “Cé leis thú?” i.e., To whom do you belong? There is a recognition in the language that your identity is not merely your own personal marker. You are both an expression and extension of an already acknowledged family line. This tradition is further intensified in Conamara through the use of patronymics. If a person is called Sean O’Malley and his father was Tom and his grandfather was Páraich, Sean O’Malley could be known as Séan Tom Pháraich. His name becomes an articulation of the line of ancestry to which he belongs. The language is an echo of this belonging. Its constant use reinforces the reference and brings the presence of the ancestors to word. A long chain of belonging comes alive in the clink of a name.
The universe is full of differences. No two stones or flowers or faces are ever the same. There is such an intricate tapestry of differentiation in even the simplest places. On the seashore, no two seashells are ever quite the same. When you focus your attention, the texture and range of the differences in Nature becomes more visible. Against this perspective the discovery of resemblance is startling, especially in human beings. Each individual carries a totally separate world in his or her heart. When you reflect on how differently you feel and think about life, it is a wonder that we can talk to each other at all. Even between the closest people, there are long bridges. This makes us attractive and fascinating to each other. To see a resemblance between people in the one family is interesting, a child’s resemblance to an ancestor. For a moment in a gesture, a way of walking, looking, responding, or saying something, you glimpse the presence of an uncle or grandparent. Resemblance has a certain pathos. You behold the gesture, the looks of one person in another. However, each person is a different world. Although the resemblance indicates continuity, it also reveals the distance of the two lives from each other. Resemblance remains a startling index of the way in which two people can so obviously belong to the same clan. There can sometimes be a striking resemblance between people who do not belong to the same family. An old man I know who has been quite ill was making his first journey to Ireland recently. As his daughter picked him up at the airport, he pointed to a woman who seemed to be his recently deceased mother. When the woman turned around, the resemblance vanished. For a moment, the resemblance had startled both father and daughter.
