How I discovered heaven was a dead duck

DISPLACED MULLINGAR:'A SAD NIGHT," I muttered into my tiramisu at the end of the last dinner party of the Christmas season. I was clinging to a big oak table in one of Co Westmeath's larger houses, trying not to slide under the tablecloth with boredom, as a German shepherd dog moved between people's legs and gorged on what scraps they flung down at him, writes Michael Harding

The guests were emoting about the sorry state of the nation; about the shocking behaviour of those in power, the scandal of the hospitals, the churches, the builders and the bankers, and the awful plight of the middle classes.

Then the host offered to open another bottle of wine and freshen my glass, but I just muttered into my napkin: "Is it really worth it? Is there any point to wine, or song or fun, if things are so bad?"

"Can we not just rise above it?" someone suggested.

I said: "No, we can't! Because the root of our problem is ontological!"

"We were all right when we believed in heaven," I explained. "The notion that there was a place in the clouds where we all belonged kept us happy, and we could smile at our tormentors. It got us through dark days. But now people believe in nothing."

I remember a time long ago in west Cavan, when people would sing a hymn entitled Going Home at the door of the church, as the coffin was wheeled out into the wind, along the uneven path of weeds and stones, to the graveyard on the hill. Old men at the cemetery gate would joke about what the theological implications might be if a coffin ever fell off the trolley.

When the sods clattered on the coffin lid the earth was still, and people could hear the blade of the shovel occasionally hitting a stone, or some ancestor's skeleton, as the grave was closed in. Those sounds of shovel and coffin lid, and clattering sod, were metaphors alerting the mourners to something else beneath their feet, or beyond the pale moon of morning, or somewhere deeper in the still air; a sheltering place more true than death, that nobody was embarrassed to believe in and call heaven.

All the lovely implications for the universe flooded down on their bare heads as they stood beside that hole in the ground. And the universe too was a limitless thing with holes everywhere, like doors into the invisible.

I knew this idea of an invisible heaven was a dead duck in 1987 when I said to a theatre director that a play was something that should open a door into sacred space; he smiled at me with the benevolence of a superior being and said that, for him, "theatre had evolved a bit since those primitive beginnings". But anyone who ever sat under the hawthorn on the hills above Lough Allen, watching Sliabh an Iarainn turn red at sunset, or listened to bats at evening time come out to feast and clap their wings around the sky above the smoking barbecue, knows well that there is another life; there is a hope at the heart of everything.

At the oak table in Westmeath, the guests guzzled the wine and blathered on about the Lisbon Treaty and Michael O'Leary. There was a hotel owner present, and a banker who works in New York.

The banker said that the only reason the Americans liked us was because they knew we could turn the Europeans around our little finger; but now, since Dustin brought stage-Oirishness to a new level of iconic art, the Yanks are closing us out, because they know the Europeans have found us out for what we are: a bunch of cultural mimics.

Then a row broke out between the hotelier and some upstart from east Galway, who said that Ireland had stepped into the breach as regards the Lisbon Treaty, and saved Europe from itself.

And on the party went, like James Joyce's gramophone, as dead ideas rattled around and around the room. Somewhere outside, a statue of Joe Dolan was raising its arm in the dark. And far away, in Dublin, Parnell was still lifting his dead hand to point at a public house. Beneath the table the dog gnawed the bones of a lamb chop with his enormous jaws; grinding his teeth with a steady rhythm that sounded like the distant crunch of marching feet.

mharding@irishtimes.com