Imagining Kells: A Poetic Meditation on the Book of Kells

Imagining Kells:A Poetic Meditation on the Book of Kells1 James Harpur (bio) In 2018 I published a book of poems, The White Silhouette, that mainly focused on Christian spirituality and mysticism. At its centre was a four-part meditative poem inspired by the Book of Kells that took me nineteen years, on and off, to complete. In this essay I hope to describe my fascination with the Book of Kells and some of the themes and questions that emerged in my poem, such as: 'Can sacred art effect a fundamental change of consciousness in the beholder?' 'How much does it help to be a believer to appreciate the Book of Kells?' 'What is the function of the Book of Kells in the twenty-first century?' When Kells was created it had an active life – monks read it aloud and held it up in procession in monastic chapels. It was an object of awe and also a crucial part of the liturgy. Is it now just an extraordinary objet d'art, sending out rays of light from its glass cage in its Long Room bunker in Trinity College Dublin, drawing to it thousands of visitors every week? What sort of experience do they have and how much of it is in the mind, the expectation? Is Kells now just a source of postcards and souvenirs, or can it make us think about our lives in a different way? My poem addresses some of these issues, and many others, including pilgrimage, the nature of 'home', and whether art is a way of reaching the divine or whether it is a distraction from the divine. All life is here My first proper awareness of the Book of Kells occurred in the 1980s, when I was editing a book about the Bible and one of the chosen illustrations was the Kells Chi Rho 'carpet page' – an illumination dominated by the Greek letters for 'Ch' and 'R, which begin the word 'Christi'.2 Like Keats when he first read Chapman's translation of Homer, I felt like 'some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken'. It was as if a match had been dropped into a box of fireworks, or I was looking down on a laboratory of bubbling cauldrons. The letter 'Chi' itself, which resembles a curvy capital 'X', looked [End Page 293] as though it was breaking cover and springing naked from a foliage of geometry: its arms curved, its right leg extended, its left leg kicked up behind – running to incarnate itself. Everything was flowing. It was as if I had been given a time-telescope and had caught the moment of the Big Bang. To the left of Chi's longest prong, the left-hand one, there were three golden-haired angels on their sides. Towards the bottom of the page there was a small black figure, which was in fact an otter diving to snatch a fish. To the left of the otter, there were two mice having a tug of war with the consecrated host, their tails pinned by two cats, who were mounted by two mice. The point was this: Kells was saying that all life was here – from angels to rodents – and all was manifested within a tremendous current of creative energy, as if showing what the essence of life or being was; as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said about existence, 'panta rhei', 'everything is flowing'. Click for larger view View full resolution From then on the Book of Kells, and in particular the Chi Rho page, was lodged in my psyche like a golden carp in a pond, and I knew deep down I was going to write about it one day. As it turned out, the decisive trigger came many years later in 1999, when I received a commission from the UK Poetry Society to write a long poem about 'a place'. I asked speculatively if a book counted as 'a place', and they said it did: the moment was ripe. From the outset I had virtually no idea of how I was going to approach [End Page 294] the poem. I somehow believed that Kells held a...