Seamus Heaney, Poet

Seamus Heaney: Mr. Chairman, friends of Front Line, defenders of human rights, it is a great privilege for Liam O’Flynn and myself to be on this platform. It is an honour to be associated with the cause that you represent a cause that you have served with such fidelity and such courage as individuals. You represent a hope for the people who suffer injustice, a threat to those who inflict injustice, and you remind the rest of us of what our better nature and our best teaching requires of us, namely to tell the truth, do what’s right and not to be afraid.

I’ll read two short extracts of poetry from an ancient source that I have translated, words that give an immemorial endorsement to the tasks that you perform and to the human values that you uphold. But I thought it would be right to say something also about Liam O’Flynn’s piping and his work. He’s a recognised master of the Uileann Pipes (the elbow pipes), and his mastery will be evident, of course, in his musicianship and his control of the instrument, which is amazing. But equally important is the mighty emotional power of his playing. What you’ll hear in the slow air which he will play is a register of the sorrow which lies deep in historical experience everywhere and lies deep also in personal memory. What you hear too is a sympathy for all that suffering and a tragic recognition that it is a part of life and you in this audience, you who respond so utterly to that suffering and who exemplify so heroically that sympathy, you are the best possible audience I can think of for this music.

It requires a certain amount of harnessing

Liam O’Flynn: I’m going to play a piece of music that comes from a period of great oppression in Irish history and in spite of that oppression and out of the darkness surrounding that oppression grew a whole new genre of poetry and music called the aisling. We are talking about the 18th century. The aisling or vision, vision poem, vision poetry, vision music. The verse and music of this period is really the intimate expression of the life of these oppressed and dispossessed people. There is nothing sentimental about this music. As Seamus said it is music of powerful emotion and there is great hope in it and for sure there is great beauty in it.

Liam O’Flynn played a piece of pipe music.

Seamus Heaney: Our colonial masters in Tudor times, 500 years ago, tried to banish the pipers, they were causing too much resistance, and hearing Liam’s music you can understand why. In the literature it’s the woman who most famously speaks the truth to power and reminds power of the limits of its jurisdiction and the danger of going beyond those limits. The name of the ancient Greek heroine, Antigone, is forever associated with the defence of human rights and of human dignity. She is the patron of all those who struggle and protest against tyranny. Antigone’s words and actions bear witness to the belief that certain bonds between people are sacred and inviolate, bonds of love, kinship, religion. The state, she says, has no right to infringe these bonds. So I want to read 2 short extracts, written two and a half thousand years ago, but relevant at this moment because, as Ms. Jilani was saying, this is a moment when the security of the state and the rights of human individuals and citizens within the state are so delicately poised and indelicately, and brutally sometimes, opposed, so the battle in the ancient play between the passion of the individual for her own integrity and the jealousy and sometimes brutality of the state take on a new urgency. First of all, her defiant statement to the king, where she explains why she has disobeyed the laws of the city and defied the power of the ruler, she says:

“… I disobeyed because the law was not the law of the gods above, nor the law ordained by justice. Justice that dwells deep in the foundations of the underworld and in every right decree men recognise. Proclamation”, she says to the king, “the proclamation had your force behind it but it was mortal force, and I also a mortal, I chose to disregard it. I abide by statute utter and immutable, unwritten, original God given laws. What I go into humour you or honour God. You think I am just a reckless woman, but never king forget you yourself could be the reckless one.”

And the second extract, I have translated these myself from Antigone. The second extract is generally known as the ‘Hymn to Man’. It is a chorus spoken by the chorus in the play, about the wonder and the wisdom of human evolution, in praise of the development of cultures, of communities, of social contracts, of cities, of civilisations. But this hymn of celebration ends, takes a turn, where Sophocles sounds a note of warning, and it is the note that you defenders of human rights still sound, a warning to all who would infringe the rights and go beyond the limits of just rule. So the Wonders Chorus from Antigone, and then I thought Liam might play something a little less sombre perhaps to celebrate the radiance and the rightness of your own indispensable work, but first the Wonders Chorus:

“People talk of the Wonders of the World, but is anything more wonderful than man himself. First he was shivering on the shore in skins or hunched in a dugout terrified of drowning. Then he took up oars, put tackle on a mast and steered himself by the stars through gales. Once upon a time from the womb of earth the Gods were born and he bowed down to worship them. He worked the ground, ploughed the furrows and bent the fields. The wind is no more swift or mysterious than his mind and words. He has mastered thinking, roofed his house against hail and rain and worked out laws for living together. Homemaker, thought taker, measure of all things, he can heal with herbs and read the heavens. Nothing seems beyond him. When he yields to his Gods, when truth is the treadle of his loom and justice is shuttled, he’ll be shown respect, the City will reward him. But let him once overstep what the city allows, tramp down right or treat the law as subject to his own will and desire, then let this wonder of the world remember, he’ll have put himself beyond the pale when he comes begging we will turn our backs.”

Liam O’Flynn played another piece of pipe music at this point.