Professor Moriarty told a story about a man in Dingle in the south west of Kerry on a lovely gorgeous evening when the mountains were almost heart-breakingly lovely and blue on a silent, silent evening. The only sound was the sound of a stream tumbling down the mountainside. An old man said, “It is calling us down into eternity out of which it is itself coming.” According to Moriarty this eternity is not behind time it is an eternity that is right there in front. It is right in front of you. It is unhidden.
It is the same eternity that Wordsworth talked about in the intimations of Immortality and that Traherne talked about. So the corn is the orient and immortal wheat.
Moriarty contrasts that with the end of the 19th century when white people were scattering around the American continent in pursuit of Manifest Destiny. They came upon the holy sacred mountains of the Sioux Indians. As Moriarty said, “an old life, a sacred life was being destroyed there.” Of course, the same thing was happening everywhere across this great continent. Non-indigenous people were destroying nature in pursuit of economic advantage.
In California a man rose up to the heavens during an eclipse where he learned a sacred dance that later came to be called the Ghost dance. The dancers would fall into a sort of trance. It was an apocalyptic dance, according to Moriarty. They were dancing in circles. According to Moriarty. And they were dong it everywhere.
As Moriarty said,
“they were going to roll up the whole white world that we had brought with us in the way you would roll up a carpet, from the Chicagos and New Yorks and then the North American continent would return to the way it originally was. We know Europeans who treat corn as an economic commodity and have to undertake a ghost dance ourselves. Ghost dance was what Wordsworth called their light of common day out of our eyes. Ghost dance is what Traherne called the dirty devices of the world. The philosophical assumptions and axioms. Ghost dance the Medusa mind set, the European mind set out of our eyes.”
Moriarty wants us to walk “enfranchised on an enfranchised earth.” We need to be liberated. Then we can be in a paradise that is not “out there”, but down here where we are. All we have to do is “ghost dance the dirty devices out of our world.”
Moriarty believes this could bring about a new and reborn agriculture. It would no longer be just an economic thing. According to him, “our eyes have become economic tumours.” When we look at things in that way, we are committing a sin Moriarty says. That is why we must comb them out just the way Takana Kapsalut’s hair had to be combed out of the sins of the people. We need the ghost dance in Europe.
Moriarty railed against the ancient and long-standing tendency of humans to try to shape nature, rather than allowing nature to shape us. “Sometimes,” Moriarty said, “I think we have gone the wrong way. We have gone the disastrous way and the world is paying a terrible price for that.” This is exactly what I have been saying. We desperately need a new attitude to nature. It is like Prometheus who stole technological fire from heaven. The whales and dolphins instead went into the water where there was no fire. They did not want to go the technological way. As Professor Moriarty said, “They did not go the way of technological domination of the earth. They said to the world shape us.”
Moriarty says he has problems with the idea of the transcendence of God and domination of the earth. It often seems that this is now impossible. No one can go the way of the whales and dolphins anymore, though Moriarty hopes that some people can still do this. We believe that somehow, we have given permission to do to the earth what we are doing. Moriarty has problems with that view. He too wants a new attitude to nature.