Seamus Heaney in Dublin, 1985, protesting against the South African government
The death of Margaret Thatcher should have been a chance to move on, were it not for the apparent idolisation of the former Prime Minister by David Cameron and, in Scotland at least, a competition between Labour and the SNP over who could distance themselves most from the Thatcher legacy.
Then came Heaney. His funeral was broadcast live on TV, not just a poet but a formidable public intellectual. He was a sane voice in the often dysfunctional politics and public life of the North and the Irish Republic. Heaney protested against both South African apartheid and British policy in the North. Two years after Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize, Heaney took home the award for literature. The Nobel committee cited ‘works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past’. What, though, happens when the past stops living?
The death of Mandela is of course a great tragedy, but the curious thing about his passing is the rush to remember events twenty years past without paying attention to the present. The world needs new Mandelas, and not just for the sake of renaming public squares and suburban closes but for the sake of changing a future instead of dwelling on the past. This is, after wall, what Mandela sought to do. It needs more Heaneys too, and whatever the sycophants of various political movements like to say the leaders they happen to have at the time can never be of either sort. You can’t copy greatness any more than teenage boys can become revolutionary leaders by wearing berets. It just ends up as a shallow simulacra of something that once was.
With Thatcher, Mandela and Heaney gone, it feels like now is the time to start living in the present and to leave the past where it belongs. Otherwise we do its giants, its villains and ourselves a disservice by fretting on their legacies.
#1 by Ben Achie on December 9, 2013 - 8:33 pm
The death of Nelson Mandela is a cause of sadness, in the sense that a once shining light has now gone out entirely, but, at 95 years old, and in very poor health, it is no “great tragedy”.
Heaney’s death was a shock, as it came to soon, and I feel he must still have had much to say. There’s a lot more to living a poetic existence than writing poems.
As for Thatcher, her greatest achievement was a vicarious one – persuading Reagan to work with Gorbachev, leading to his seeking total nuclear disarmament at Reykjavík in 1986.
The acute sense of loss that many have following Mandela’s passing is really a lamentation for the dearth of principle and vision currently evident on the world stage.
East German born and educated Merkel, having mastered European financial meltdown, may still pleasantly surprise us, while Obama will forever be the “dog that didn’t bark”.