COMHRÁ:
SEÁN
Bóthar is obviously the play on the word 'Bó'.
I was enjoying the opportunity of making a picture of the sacred
cow. It's an image of the goddess. Isis.
She is often represented as Horus; the horned cow with a sun
disk. The sun disk being the Cosmic, the Nature rolling over
us every day, and bringing life and death. I am also interested
in the Táin and the Boyne Valley phenomenon.
GABRIEL
Which is held in common with the Bovinda, another name for Krishna.
RUÁN
The cow was once essential to Irish culture. In the Brehon Laws
everything is based on the cow. That was the currency.
GABRIEL
And of course, the word for road, which is bóthar - thar
bhó. The word referred to the fact that two cows could
pass each other on the road, and that's what made it wide enough
to be called a road.
RUÁN
And look at the poor beleaguered cow now.
GABRIEL
I am not surprised that a child might resent talking Irish, and
might say 'why must I' when no one even explains the etymology
or the root of it.
SEÁN
But if you know the etymology of it, it's very beautiful. And
very informative. It's holographic in that it opens a whole universe
of meaning to you. Also in the picture I tried to make it that
the cow and the earth underneath the road, and the sun above and
the sky, are the reality, and that the cow is whizzing past the
traffic of the day, and that the delusion of human life is an
illusion.
GABRIEL
And it's rather pathetic that this wonderful creature should have
been the subject of so many scandals recently. These tribunals,
and so on. It's a sacrilege in a sense.
SEÁN
I always thought that when human liberation came, it would come
through the liberation of children first, which I think we are
on the path to. Then the liberation of animals. And then we would
start thinking about whether we should be treating each other
better.
RUÁN
I was contacted by a photo editor who asked me was the picture
of a cow in a field. And I said that yes that was the right image,
but the farmer had sold the field to the NRA for 40,000 Euro.
SEÁN
I love to fly. I love that experience, but I always feel that
the earth is somehow infested by human beings. Little creatures
crawling all over the place and concreting over it. I love to
envision landscapes as natural. I like that thing between Voltaire
and Rousseau: Voltaire says that Rousseau wants us to go on all
fours and eat like the animals.
RUÁN
It is an interesting image about the relationship between man
and nature, and to what extent we mould the earth, and to what
extent that moulding is itself a natural process.
GABRIEL
We have demythologised the landscape. You cannot look at the landscape
with any sense of awe if you don't know the myths that are involved
in it.
If you take a town like Athlone: your average teenager there would
probably be able to give you the Irish for that, Baile Átha
Luain. But within that is the name of Luan, and a remarkable love
story involving swans and all sorts of things. And my guess is
that 99 out of 100 teenagers in Athlone do not know who Luan was
in the myth.
SEÁN
And of course, they'd love a bit of romance in the story of a
pop group that they get off a magazine or something.
RUÁN
So another mythology, a far poorer mythology, is replacing the
one we had.
SEÁN
Human beings desperately need depth and meaning in their lives.
They take away one and give you one that is sellable.
RUÁN
Your point is terrifically valid. If we don't revive a sense of
who we were or acknowledge who we were and with it the language,
we do run the risk of just drowning in this new global world,
in 20 or 30 years having no self-identity to speak of. It will
be very hard to engage with the rest of the world on our own terms.
We'll have to do it on their terms.
SEÁN
Actually there are two powerful dynamics going on: One is the
juggernaut of global Capitalism, which is mindful only of profit
and success. On the other hand there is 8 billion human beings
asking 'What the Hell are we up to? Where the hell are we, and
what do we mean?
GABRIEL
I think you are right there. What the acceptable myths are today
are being powered by very wealthy machines. Take the Tolkein thing.
That's a fiction; but there's enough in the Ulster Cycle and the
Tales of the Fianna and all the myths and sagas in the Irish tradition
- Tóraíocht Diarmuid & Gráinne and things
like that - to create a very fine indigenous film industry that
would have universal appeal. And that would appeal with its high
romance and its heroics. We haven't seen the riches at our own
doorstep.
SEÁN
What the whole project is about for me is toying with the representation
of the fact that we have a whole separate reality that is just
there. This project is about trying to reinvigorate the thing;
to put a match under it. Fat chance we have, but it's a comedy,
it's a good game to be at.
GABRIEL
I don't want to be criticising some of my fellow artists, but
there's an awful lot of people going around who are doing adaptations
of Chekov or Aristophanes, or whether it's Greek, or Russian,
or Swedish or Danish. But when are we going to start adapting
our own culture? Our own store house of wealth and narrative.
The character in the Fianna Cycle alone, they are such an incredible
bunch.
You
get people coming along and they say, 'Oh this is a great story,
Clann Lir,' with its changing of swans and that kind of thing.
You then have an English adaptation in which they refer to the
family being called Lir. Lir wasn't his name at all. His name
was Lar! And thus Clann Lir - Lir is a genitive case. So they
are being bastardised.
RUÁN
It's almost as though we have wondered through a vortex or twilight
zone, and entered into another reality. We are running concurrent
with the old Irish culture from which we come from, but we actually
have no understanding of it anymore. We are disassociated from
it.
SEÁN
I definitely still think we are the same people. We have just
lost our roots.
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