This essay is in progress. What follows is the working shape of the third piece in a trilogy of creative nonfiction — the life that rhymed with the tale. Subscribe via Take Flight for the finished work.

The Curse of Sweeney

Trilogy III of III — with Becoming Anchorman and The Quest for Merlin.

Premise

Once I knew the name was mine, Buile Suibhne stopped being a footnote and started being a mirror. The tale’s details haunted me because they rhymed with a life I was already living — and, later, with the mercy that restored it.

What the essay will hold

The frenzy

• PTSD and the anger response — the break after violence, in the tale and in the bloodline
• Father and grandfather: the condition carried forward
• Exile as lived fact: extreme isolation, homelessness
• Addiction; the liminal tension between reality and altered reality
• An innate ability to “see” connections others missed — the geilt’s costly gift

The mercy

• Restoration through the Philokalia and the desert fathers
• Ancient diagnosis of a modern condition; the tradition that saved me
• Parallel to Saint Moling: not curing or caging Suibhne, but receiving him, and writing the story down

Why the novel

• Retelling Buile Suibhne in prose is not antiquarian exercise
• In a metaphorical way, it is my own story — the wound from inside, by one of his name
• How this trilogy authorizes the site: the content it holds, the Vision it maps, the flight it asks the reader to take

Series position

1. Becoming Anchorman — the archetype recognized (1980)
2. The Quest for Merlin — the scholarly hunt and the name that answered (1995–1997)
3. The Curse of Sweeney — the life that rhymed with the tale, and the mercy that restored it