by Searles O'Dubhain

In Celtic traditions, truth is not merely a quality of statements but a force that acts in the world. An Act of Truth — a geis sworn and kept — changes reality. Searles O'Dubhain, practitioner and founder of the Summerlands Celtic Pagan network, finds in Wallace Stevens' poetry a precise image for what the Celts meant: poetry captures the "now" of experience, and that "now" is magical in exactly the way truth is magical — transcendent, alive, beyond the body that speaks it.

Writing in 2008 for alt.religion.druid, O'Dubhain draws a bridge between Celtic threshold-consciousness, Tibetan Buddhist Bardo states, and Stevens' vision of the poem as a living city of its occasion. Death as "One's Truth" in Irish tradition; the threshold between life and death as the space where will becomes effective; the strand of poetry wrapped around the laws of order — this is a brief but dense meditation on what it means for speech to be real.

In Robin Skelton's book Poetic Truth, he quotes Wallace Stevens's An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:

"The poem is the city of its occasion..."

In this poem, Stevens demonstrates how poetry is able to capture the now of experiences and to create its own life. The life of the poem is what is kindled in the mind and actions of reader and poet alike and not so much the words (which are like the leaves of a tree or newspapers).

It is the spirit of poetry that brings one to truth and not so much the words — in much the same way that it is spirit that is the truth of a person and not their bodies. This spirit is an eternal now much like poetry. It does not perish but is kindled anew from moment to moment.

The ability of poetry to create makes it magical like truth. Acts of Truth in the traditional ways of Indo-European and Celtic tradition also create new life and change the universe. This power of truth to withstand any other power is inherent to its nature. It is like Nature's nature, a transcendent power that overcomes all things physical while being sensed in part and limitation. The now of any true action and act is beyond understanding in its being, just as life is beyond a body.

Perhaps that is why death is called "One's Truth" in Irish traditions. It takes one beyond the physical limitations of the body into immeasurable realms that are always now. Tibetan Buddhism knows these states of now as the Bardo. In Celtic traditions they are thresholds and in-between, neither one thing or another, the edge of a knife and the breath over it. In the spaces between rationality and irrationality are to be found the opportunities to transcend limitation, just as the place between life and death opens up to the will.

Wrapping a strand of poetry around the laws of order and being allows one to embrace these ideas in a living way, in a magical way, in a way that has truth connecting it and others in much the same way that being flows as a stream of spirit to Spirit and the Universe lives for all as a being. Otherwise, we are left with dead and darkening matter that bursts forth momentarily in a dwindling entropy of original poetry like the leaves and newspapers blowing down the streets of New Haven amid immoveable statues with eyes that do not see.

"And leaves in whirlings in the gutters... in the whole psychology, the self... are the life of the world."

— Wallace Stevens, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

Colophon

Written by Searles O'Dubhain, founder of the Summerlands Celtic Pagan network. Posted to alt.religion.druid, May 2008. O'Dubhain was a practitioner and scholar of Celtic Druidry, known for his work on Ogham, imbas, and the bardic tradition of the Filidh. This brief essay draws on Robin Skelton's Poetic Truth (1975) and Wallace Stevens' late poetry to illuminate the Celtic doctrine of Acts of Truth — the magical efficacy of words that are genuinely meant.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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