The Burning House
There are Irish words that function less like labels than like doorways – the word cáithnín, for example, means a speck of dust, a snowflake or a subatomic particle – and also the goosebumps you feel when you understand, briefly, that everything is connected and you are part of it.
Sean O’Riada, the composer who almost single-handedly reawakened Irish traditional music before his death at age 40, wrote about Irish culture and language in a way that was deeply personal and urgent. In a recording from the O Riada archive - surfaced on the Blúiríní Béaloidis Folklore podcast - he speaks about the quiet erosion of Irish language and cultural life. He had come to see it, he said, with sudden clarity: the old house was on fire. Once he saw that clearly, he felt he couldn’t stand aside anymore. His writing became an act of salvage, witness and revival.
Modern philosophy has likewise lost something essential; something needs to be carried through before it disappears. O’ Riada was not so much trying to restore the old house exactly as it was; rather he was trying to keep something alive inside a changing world: he saw a structure collapsing from within.
The paradox tunnel is a work in progress trying to reactivate a lost instrument – the way Euclid’s porisms described not fixed truths but movements: propositions that only exist in the traversal of them. There is a moment when you suddenly realise that the old house is on fire.
O’Riada wrote from within the same moment: the language that he lived in , the structure that carried meaning, memory and form, was fading from within. Once he saw it he could not unsee it. The task was to enter the house: a language still spoken but no longer being heard. Small lives sealed in parcels left in rooms nobody enters anymore; long forgotten passages from the past. It was assumed they were already gone. But they were only hidden. Once you recognise the faint movement and signs of life inside you cannot unsee it. We must halt the progression – long enough to recognise that something is still alive in there.
The old house was already on fire when I realised that piece by piece we must enter the burning structure and carry things out. Only those things that are still alive. Essential things are never lost; they do not decay with the passage of time. The burning house is the collapse of a system; philosophy losing something essential, language dying, inductive knowledge failing, what is often dismissed as a “fallacy” – the Socratic paradox that we do not know what we seek. There is still living knowledge inside supposedly dead structures. Essential things don’t decay through the passage of time: as Kierkegaard says:
“The eternal vaults high above the temporal, quiet as the night sky.”
Not recovered or reconstructed, but re-recognised. The task is to selectively retrieve what is alive from within a failing system. This is exactly what a “poristic analysis” would do: move through the system and extract what still holds (the essential predicate(s) persisting through time).
This is not just true of language or philosophy; you can hear it. In Western music, a melody moves toward a resolution, It is built to arrive somewhere; tension is something to be discharged. But in Irish music, the structure is different. It is recursive and forward-driving: always in motion, always in the threshold state. This isn’t ornamental; it’s structural. Modal music doesn’t resolve tension into a destination: it moves through tension as its native condition. The music turns and returns, moving through time without ever fully arriving. It is continuation, not resolution, that keeps it alive. One of the great contemporary Irish fiddlers (his name escapes me right now) said that it was this eternal tension that kept him going. That is not a personality quirk; it is the structure itself speaking.
Once you see this the task changes. To rush and try to rescue everything is probably to lose everything. We don’t need to preserve the structure; we need to recognise what is still alive within it; the traces of warmth and the movement of something that has not yet gone cold. The eternal does not burn; it does not pass away with the structure that carried it. It persists and can be carried through. And when the time comes we don’t rebuild what was there before; we move forward with what survived.
“To want rightly is a great art, or rather it is a gift. It is what is inexplicable and mysterious about genius; just like the divining rod, to which it never occurs to want except in the presence of what it wants”
- Soren Kierkegaard
