2.7.08

Da Shealladh

It means the two sights. Both this and the otherworld. The steeple and the darkness against which steeple stands in all its delusive certainty. Today and tomorrow, shimmering one upon the other, ghosting across the retina. When the otherworld comes it compels attention and so the quotidian recedes; yet without quotidian how would we know the otherness of other world? One takes on the lineaments of other, other predicts or informs upon one. The old seers would see their visions in a stone. A literal stone, held to the eye. That adamant. Stone is stone yet sometimes becomes lens. Stone seeing. Doom approaching from far away, doom of a future imagined in the now to which it will come. Otherwise how would we know it? Second sight is really first. Rarely first. First anyway, not second, second is what comes to pass. Can remember knowing things that did indeed happen. Came to pass. Others did not but might yet. New moon will bring an de shealladh - that is certain. What those two sights may be is still within the whirling of futurity. The imagination of time, at once infinite and confined to what is, was, will be. The (in)finite possibilities of the copula. It means two sights.

2 comments:

deemikay said...

Nice to see the term mentioned... I wrote three poems on it (based on "actual" accounts) some years back at my old blog.

http://deemikay.blogspot.com/search?q=Shealladh+

Martin Edmond said...

Thanks, deemikay - like those poems. been reading Alistair MacLeod, the Canadian - do you know his work? I am myself somewhere a McLeod and there are rumours of second sight in the family line - mysterious and unconfirmed.