This post follows Part 1 and Part 2 of ‘Fionn and the Salmon of Knowledge’ from ‘The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America’
The Dangers of Youth With Youth
Fionn stayed with Call in the swamp, until the older man, mellowed by the renewal of his former family had taught him all he could. With promises of future service, Fionn left Call’s company and journeyed along the byways of Ireland until he came upon a group of boys playing at the edge of a broad river. Elated by their bold play and happy to find boys his own age, he struck up with them.
At first they were glad to have the young stranger with them. His abilities to run, jump, sing, and wrestle were far above them all. He became a hero to them. It is here, in fact, that he earns the name by which we know him—Fionn, which means “the fair one.” Stephens describes the essence of this name-giving in a marvelous way. “His name came by boys, and will in the end, perhaps, be preserved by them.” But soon, as young boys will, they grew jealous of Fionn’s powers in everything he did and began to plot against him.
Having served his initiation with an older man, Fionn is wise to the dangers lurking in a crowd of young boys left to themselves. One of the prices we pay in the segregation of education by age is the self-referential reality that each class year and generation makes for itself. There is nothing more conservative and repressive in this world than the peer pressure of teenagers determined to enforce the unwritten codes of their world. At the first scent of a plot against him, Fionn leaves them to go his own way.
The Soul Chooses Its Time
Having left the mythological equivalent of the street gang or the high school clique, Fionn first makes his way to the land of King Finntraigh, where he impresses the court with his hunting. “The others ran after deer, using the speed of their legs, the noses of their dogs and a thousand well-worn tricks to bring them within reach, and often enough, the animal escaped them . . . But the deer that Fionn got the trak of did not get away, and it seemed even that the animals sought him so many did he catch.” But once again he is recognized.
“If Uail the son of Baiscne has a son,” said the king, “you would surely be that son.”
It is too early yet for Fionn to meet his destiny in the shape of the sons of Morna, and since being recognized publicly by the king makes this too likely, he departs once again, this time to the court of the King of Kerry, the man who had married Fionn’s own mother after Uail’s death.
Noticed immediately for his gifts, Fionn becomes a favorite companion of this new lord, and spends much time at his side. But one day after Fionn had impolitically defeated the king at chess for the seventh time in a row (no mean feat, the story implies), the king said, “Who are you, anyway, by God!” and standing up from the chessboard, stared down intently into Fionn’s face. Seeing Fionn so closely for the first time, he recognized, to his shock, the features of his own wife mirrored back to him. “You are the son that Muirne, my wife, bore to Uail Mac Baiscne. you will not stay here and be killed by the sons of Morna whil you are under my protection.”
This sometimes instinctual, sometimes forced moving on by Fionn is what Joseph Campbell called “the refusal of the call” either through fear of the destiny that beckons or through a deeper intuition preventing us from stepping out prematurely. Often the recognition of our gifts when too young can be too much of a burden for innocence to carry. We simply are not ready. Many would-be mentors have been encouraged by the natural gifts they see in a young protégé, only to be rebuffed because of this unarticulated but instinctual knowledge on the part of the protégé that the time is not right. In other cases, those in positions of power know that their pond is too small to hold their young students—their talents stand too far above those of their peers. Their talents will be wasted if they reveal themselves, and the others in the office may “kill” them if they stay.
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