equilibrium, brimí.^78 In Seeing Things Heaney attempts to write on the
brim, between ëair and oceaní in the hope of ëequilibriumí. Such an
approach can be described as ëthinking at the limití, as thinking in the
interval or as a sort of double writing.^79 To write from the borderline,
refusing either extreme, in an attempt to resituate limits or lines of
segregation cannot be set apart as a purely aesthetic task since this is
an important political stance for a poet from the North of Ireland to
adopt. In ëFrontiers of Writingí, Heaney concludes via Roy Foster:
that people can reconcile more than one cultural identity may have much to
recommend it [...] I wanted to affirm that within our individual selves we can
reconcile two orders of knowledge which we might call the practical and the
poetic; to affirm also that each form of knowledge redresses the other and that
the frontier between them is there for the crossing.^80Such a re-envisioning or crossing takes place at a representative
level in part eight of ëLighteningsí which writes a channel between
ordinary and imaginative worlds. As the monks at the abbey of
Clonmacnoise are at prayer, a ship in the air appears above them. The
anchor of the ship becomes attached to the chapelís altar rail, and one
of the crew climbs down the rope and struggles to release it. The abbot
suggests that the monks must help in order to save the manís life. As
Murphy suggests: ëThe quotidian world of the monks constitutes the
marvellous for the sailor of the visionary ship, just as his world in
turn, constitutes the marvellous for the monks themselves.í^81
Interaction between the visionary and ordinary, furthers the sense of
liminality or writing from the line of division while at the same time
questioning the positioning of this line. Of course, this might be the
task of every poet. There could be the objection that Seeing Things
simply celebrates: ëMe waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit
marvels.í^82 Nevertheless, it is especially poignant when a poet from a
Catholic minority who once lived in the sectarian context of the North,
78 Heaney, ëSQUARINGSí: ëSettingsí, xxiv, Seeing Things (London: Faber,
1991), p.80.
79 Cf. Hall, Questions of Cultural Identity, p.1. Cf. Jacques Derridaís Positions
(Chicago: University Press, 1981).
80 Heaney, ëFrontiers of Writingí, p.203.
81 Murphy, Seamus Heaney, p.85.
82 Heaney, ëFosterlingí, Seeing Things, p.50.