Pursuing the artistic impulse while also obeying the Christian injunction to leave all one's possessions, take up one's cross, and follow Him feels conflicted at its core. The call to create the true, the good, the beautiful is no small order, and can feel like a mighty vocation. It takes time, space, emotional commitment. As a writer and poet, I find my attempts at touching the divine through art often frustrated by the earthly demands of children and family, community and parish. But like the poet and priest, R.S. Thomas, who wrote of his parishioner's untimely interruption, I must often put down my pen to attend to my immediate duties before me. Alas, I do not always turn to them gracefully!
It was this particular conflict which struck me in The Banshees of Inisherin, the 2022 film by Martin McDonagh, starring some of my favourite actors: Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell (not to mention Colin Farrell's eyebrows, which deserve an Oscar in their own right). The tragicomedy is one of a triad in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor's violent grace (the others being In Bruges and Calvary, also a favourite of mine); and, like O'Connor's Christ-haunted South, deals with the cultural wasteland in the souls of a people who can neither abandon nor fully enter into the beatific vision.
The end of a friendship
The plot is deceptively simple. On a remote island off the mainland during the Irish Civil War, Colm Sonny Larry breaks with his long-time friend Pádraig, telling him he wants no more contact because, in his own words, he just doesn't like him anymore. The reality is more complex. Pádraig is simple, a bore even. What Colm calls a "limited man." And Colm has a calling, a vocation, to music. With his banjo and fiddle, he wishes to leave something substantial behind, a shining offering remembered in the years to come, transcending death and mortality. It is a noble enough aspiration. But each day spent humouring his dull friend chips away at the time he has left. He longs for "silence," for "peace in [his] heart."
What follows is a humorously outrageous attempt by Colm to get Pádraig to leave him alone. I sympathise. We've all communed with people from time to time who don't "get the message." We may even be tempted to resort to something desperate. Setting boundaries is a reasonable enough ask. In Colm's case, he chooses to cut off a finger every time Pádraig speaks to him. It is shocking. Until you look closer and realize that the exchange is wildly appropriate -- for each precious moment he spends with Pádraig means one less devoted to his art. Might as well cut off a finger. That's how tedious he finds him.
The careful attention paid to the environment is masterful. There's a sense of a place suspended on Inisherin, stalled and stunted. It's the twenties, but the villagers see by the flames of lanterns, and the women cover their heads with shawls to attend Sunday service. The island is a world on its own, and not for the better. Once again, it is reasonable to sympathise with Colm's frustration. Their dwellings underline the juxtaposition between the two aging men. Pádraig depends on his spinster sister, not noticing her loneliness. He surrounds himself with his animals, dumb beasts whom he loves like children -- even letting them into the house! -- and his routine never bores him. In contrast, Colm's sparse cottage houses, not common farm animals, but kabuki masks, marionettes, and other foreign treasures. One can see he has scope. He has knowledge. He is not "limited."
A scene in the confessional reveals Colm's previous struggle with despair. Since putting aside his affiliation with Pádraig and devoting himself to his music, despair's grip is weakened. So when he finishes his composition, one can be excused for thinking perhaps things can return to normal. Pádraig certainly thinks so, and Colm even agrees to their ritual drink. But then Pádraig lets slip in passing that he interfered with one of Colm's students. Colm realizes his first instinct was right -- "I just don't have a place for dullness in me life anymore." He cuts off the remainder of his four fingers and leaves them (hurls them--??) at Pádraig's front door.
Tragedy follows. Pádraig's last friend, Dominic, shuns him for his selfish albeit humorous prank on Colm's music student. ("I used to think you were the nicest of them.") Pádraig's sister Siobhán leaves for a job on the mainland, not intending to return. Pádraig's beloved donkey, Jenny, chokes on one of Colm's bloody digits, and Padráig vows revenge. He tells Colm he will burn down his house at 2 o'clock on Sunday, whether or not he is in it; but to leave Colm's dog outside. He would never hurt a dog. "You're the only nice thing about him."
To me, the film is a requiem, a merry wake for a wholeness striven for and misplaced. In his quest for meaningful things, good things, Colm ruthlessly shuns Pádraig, setting off a chain of events that rob Pádraig of his (naïve, even foolish) innocence. "You used to be nice," Pádraig accuses his ex-friend in a drunken confrontation. And then, with heart-breaking realisation, "Maybe you never used to be."
And there it is -- because Colm merely tolerated the irksome Pádraig until he gave in to the temptation that his time was worth something better. Colm is not a bad man; neither is he a good one. He comes nearest to redemption when he confesses the accidental death of Pádraig's miniature donkey. God doesn't care about miniature donkeys, the priest harangues him. "I fear he doesn't," is Colm's reply, "and I fear that's where it's all gone wrong."
But the truth is that God does care; it is Colm who does not. For in some mystery, fate ordained him the friend of a simple creature, in Pádraig; but Colm decided to no longer suffer fools gladly. Despair returns. Colm could not put aside what he saw as a worthier calling to minister to one of these "little ones." His neglect of the greatest commandment -- to love his neighbour as himself -- robs him his peace and happiness. "If I have the gift [...] but have not love, I am nothing" (1 Corinthians 13:2).
The bigger "picture"
Jenny the donkey is not the only casualty of Colm's pursuit. The kerfuffle shakes out some unpleasant truths about the village dullard Dominic, whose father beats and molests him. After a kindly rejection of his advances from Siobhán, Dominic drowns in a lake -- whether by his own hand or no is unclear. But the dour elderly woman, Mrs. McCormick, has predicted two deaths, and two deaths indeed follow. Colm names his composition, "The Banshees of Inisherin," mostly because he likes the sibilance. But the only banshee on Inisherin is Mrs. McCormick, who "just sit[s] back, amused and observe[s]."
Colm escapes his burning house but hopes that the arson means an end to the feud. Pádraig declines. Colm has, inadvertently, made Pádraig mean. He has corrupted the innocent. He has followed a calling at the expense of his friend.
I do not mean to put art and virtue at odds with one another. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the one who surrenders his life to Christ keeps not only his life, but everything else thrown in with it.
These themes are dealt with with delicacy and deftness by J.R.R. Tolkien, in his late-in-life work Leaf by Niggle. In the shore tale -- the closest Tolkien came to ever writing an allegory -- the little man named Niggle works at painting a leaf but is constantly interrupted by the demands of a neighbour. He does not want to put away his paints and canvass to attend to the helpless Mr. Parish; but he knows it is his duty. He does so, with the result that his painting suffers. At his death (which is referred to throughout the story as a journey for which he is not prepared) Niggle is sent to "convalesce" in a place like a dreary sanitorium. He is let out in the end because of the kindness, however begrudging, he showed to his neighbours. The next place he is sent is much nicer, familiar in fact; for it is the background of his leaf painting only hinted at, come to fruition. He sees "the bigger picture." Niggle continues his purgatorial healing work, where he is eventually joined by Parish, and it dawns on him that his world wouldn't be what it is without Parish. When it is time for him to set out on another journey to the mountains, Niggle leaves Parish awaiting his own wife, the next person who will come to find solace there.
Tolkien's legendarium was his life's work, and he wondered if he dawdled his time on a silly hobby. In the end he trusted to faith, that he gave his God-given talents justice, and that whatever he left unfinished in this life he'd find complete in the next. Like Niggle, Tolkien put aside the craft dear to his heart to minister to those around him: his family, his pupils, his friends. In a letter to his son, Tolkien wrote
There is a place called "heaven" where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories left unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet...
Alas, that Colm did not learn Niggle's lesson. Or learned it too late. Perhaps he will leave a great work of music behind him, something to move souls and strengthen the world in darkness. But what does it matter, in the end, if God does not care for little asses?
Surrender
In writing this article, I have been interrupted at least six times: by children asking for water and to use the potty; by a husband who wants to know what we will do for dinner. It is easy to feel that my art is frustrated, that the calling sown into my soul by the hands of God Himself is thwarted by the mundane daily tasks life demands of me. But I must remember that the good work He asks of me has its place. To put it prosaically, it is not either/or. It is both/and.
The saints nursed this simple truth. Teresa of Ávila, a Doctor of the Church, reminds us that "our Lord moves amidst the pots and pans." Redemption is in the ordinary. Christ plays in ten thousand places -- in the sticky hands and the night feedings, not just the incense-swathed golden Tabernacle and the lofty calling. And St. Frances of Rome advises this housewife, his words bridging the centuries, that "sometimes she must leave God at the altar to find him in her housekeeping."
+JMJ+
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