AT GLENDALOUGH . . .

Yesterday felt like the climax of our time together in Ireland: for pretty much everyone in our entourage, the visit to Joyce’s Tower—the omphalos!—was the culmination of everything we had engaged with since our first class back at UMass Boston on May 29th.  The literary event in the pub afterward extended the Joycean moment by bringing us into contact with living writers who, no less than Joyce a century ago, write very much out of their own time and their own place.  Today took us into another realm . . .

Like our pilgrimage to Newgrange (via Monasterboice and Mellifont), our trip to Glendalough in Co. Wicklow (about an hour south of Dublin by bus) transported us back in time—in this case to the 6th century when the monastic settlement in this pastoral setting was founded by St. Kevin.  The current site preserves a number of ancient buildings, including a round tower dating probably to the 10th century.  Most of the buildings still standing date to no later than the 12th century.

While our visit to this site was intended mostly to extend our appreciation of Ireland’s deep and rich cultural history, there was also a literary dimension, as Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney has written an evocative poem involving the legend of “St. Kevin and the Blackbird.”  In “Crediting Poetry,” his Nobel address, Heaney describes the poem’s inspiration:

It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough, a monastic site not too far from where we lived in Co. Wicklow, a place which to this day is one of the most wooded and watery retreats in the whole of the country. Anyhow, as Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love the life in all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledglings grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Some of our entourage hiked through the dripping woods to the site of “St. Kevin’s Cell” to stand among the few remaining stones of his prayer hut.  That site is now marked with a plaque and a sculpture depicting the legend that Heaney gave poetic voice to.

I happened to have my iPad with me and so read Heaney’s poem aloud to the assembled members of our class—an apt way, I think, to cap our Irish experience together:

St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

        *

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

THE HIGH KING OF SANDYCOVE . . .

Under ordinary circumstances, today’s highlight would have been our visit to Joyce’s Tower.  But for some of us that may have been trumped by our subsequent several hours spent in “Fitzgerald’s of Sandycove,” a classic old pub with a very tasteful Joycean theme located at 11 Sandycove Road. Before we all crossed the big pond for the old country, I lined up novelist Ferdia Mac Anna to read for us from his recently reissued first novel The Last of the High Kings (originally published in 1991), but I had not figured out a venue for the event. As soon as we got to Dublin, I thought of Fitzgerald’s—which I had seen before but had never been inside—so I fired off an email to the pub. The manager, Will Agar, responded enthusiastically, graciously agreeing to reserve a corner for us—so we were all set.

So . . . after our visit to Joyce’s Tower we headed off en masse to the pub where we were welcomed by plates of Irish smoked salmon, cheeses, and crackers, compliments of Fitzgerald’s—a great start!  Coincidentally, Ferdia Mac Anna lives literally just around the corner from the pub, so he was right in his element . . . and so were we when he began to read from his fine coming-of-age novel reissued by New Island as part of its aptly-labeled Modern Irish Classics series.  The passage Ferdia read was itself “classic”—sweet, funny, subtle.  We were all engaged and enthralled.

Did I mention that Ferdia and I are old friends?  I’ll do so now, because that will help to make some sense out of what happened next.  We first met in 1977 when we were classmates—briefly—in the M.A. Program in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin.  Ferdia left the program to pursue the alternative life of his alter ego, retro rock ‘n’ roller Rocky De Valera.  I was at the debut performance of his band, The Gravediggers, in January of 1978—and we next crossed paths 27 years later, in 2005.  This event was thus another reunion, of sorts.  So why not invite a few more friends to join the mix?  Those friends ranged from a guy named Eugene whom I had just met in the pub, to Brendan whom we had all met a few days earlier at #15 Usher’s Island, to UMass Boston alumna and old friend Rachael (a native Dubliner), to old friend and master photographer Fionán (who provided the snaps for this post), to another old friend from my UCD days, Bairbre.  And there was one more—poet Catherine Phil MacCarthy, who had read at UMass Boston about 15 years ago and will probably read on campus again this coming Fall.  So . . . what happened next was that when Ferdia heard that she had in her bag the galleys for her new book, he invited her to join him in the reading corner and share with us a couple of poems—an unexpected bonus.  We were all smitten by her as well, and everyone subsequently engaged in a very rich Q&A with both Ferdia and Catherine.

Afterward we all hung around and talked with the clock turned off.  For perhaps the first time on the whole trip, we all experienced what I call “Irish time”: with no bus or train to catch, and nothing scheduled for later on, we had started the event late and we ended . . . eventually.

ONWARD AND UPWARD . . .

As our days dwindle down to a precious few, every hour seems to be precious too and thus becomes jam-packed. Today—Saturday, our second-to-last full day together in Ireland—we squeezed in more than I thought possible.

We started the day by making our way toward the National Gallery of Ireland, which is only about a 5-minute walk from our digs at Trinity College.  But along the way we decided to stop for a visit at Sweny’s, a “chemist’s shop” that Leopold Bloom steps into in the “Lotus-Eaters” episode of Ulysses: we stepped into it too, and like Bloom most of us bought a bar a lemon soap there!

We then continued around the corner to Merrion Square where we visited a statue of renowned playwright, novelist and wit Oscar Wilde, which is located directly across the street from the house where he grew up.

The next stop was our first crucial destination of the day—the National Gallery of Ireland, which houses many major works of Irish art . . . including a fine collection of paintings by Jack Butler Yeats.  The Gallery also had a special display of paintings linked to Joyce’s Dubliners—those dovetailed nicely with our reading for our course—and an ongoing display of essential works capturing the texture of Irish life in the 19th century in particular.  We also sought out the remarkable Caravaggio painting, “The Taking of Christ,” which is the subject of a best-selling book, The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr.  Missing for almost 200 years, the painting was discovered in a Jesuit residence in Dublin in 1993.  It is now on extended loan to the National Gallery.

But at that point we had only just begun our day—and suddenly it was time to move onward . . . to the National Library.  The “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses is set there, but the main reading room of the Library is not open on a Saturday, so we had to satisfy our inner Stephen Dedalus by pausing in the portico and remembering, as he does, a moment in Joyce’s earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Here I watched the birds for augury.  Aengus of the birds.  They go, they come.  Last night I flew.  Easily flew. . . .”  But our primary reason for visiting the Library was to see the terrific William Butler Yeats exhibit in the basement: arranged in glass cabinets and alcoves, the exhibit comprises books, manuscripts, photographs, videos, memorabilia, ephemera—all things Yeatsian!  This stop had been on our itinerary for earlier in the week but got bumped by our extended visit to #15 Usher’s Island.  We all agreed that we could have doubled our time with this exhibit, but we had to move onward once again . . . if we wanted also to move upward.

And for some students on this 11-day journey, moving literally upward was their very raison d’être—or at least their reason for being on this trip.  So we walked down to Westland Row and boarded the DART train for Sandycove, the location of what is known as “Joyce’s Tower”—also known as the James Joyce Museum.  The Museum is housed in a Martello tower, one of around fifty built along the Irish coast by the British in the early 1800s as lookouts and defense posts against an anticipated (but never realized) Napoleonic invasion of Ireland.  Its importance for Joyceans is twofold.  First of all, Joyce himself lived there briefly in 1904 as a guest of Oliver St. John Gogarty, who became the model for Stephen Dedalus’s nemesis, Buck Mulligan, in Ulysses.  Secondly, it is the setting for the opening episode of Ulysses, “Telemachus,” which we read in class back in Boston.  In that episode, Buck Mulligan refers to the tower as the “omphalos”—the Greek word for “navel” but also in Greek mythology the center of Zeus’s world (generally associated with the Delphic oracle).  Small wonder that it is also the omphalos—the ultimate destination—for Joyceans, whether diehard or casual.

But I would be remiss if I did not mention how fortunate we were to get inside the tower.  Like much of the rest of Europe, Ireland is in the midst of a serious fiscal crisis.  One immediate impact of that crisis is a funding shortage (and thus a staffing shortage) for national treasures like the James Joyce Museum.  In fact, the Museum is now open only by appointment and not usually (if ever) on Saturdays.  Fortunately for us, the longtime curator of the Museum, Robert Nicholson, made an exception and generously opened the doors for us—and also gave us a richly detailed talk on the history and the resonance of the tower.  He made us all feel welcome and at home in this very special place and space.

THE PLAYBOY OF . . . SMOCK ALLEY

Friday was supposed to have been a “free day” for everyone, but because of some scheduling complications it became yet another day involving . . . yet another highlight.

This one was the opportunity to see a dress rehearsal of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World—for my money (for whatever that may be worth) the greatest (whatever that may mean) play ever written.  Directed by Patrick Sutton, this production will be launched next week by the Smock Alley Players, a troupe based at a wonderfully renovated space on the site of the Royal Theatre . . . which dates to 1662.  Patrick generously invited us to attend a non-stop dress rehearsal of the entire play, but we arrived in time to catch first a directed rehearsal of the final scene of the play.  Coincidentally, we had focused on that scene in our class discussion of the play before we headed to Dublin, and we had watched just that segment in the Druid Theatre (Galway) DVD version: seeing a seasoned director like Patrick putting his actors through their paces with stops and starts and do-overs of lines and blocking and movement was a real eye-opener for some of us. Clearly, the Smock Alley version is shaping up to be a really fine production.

Also coincidentally, our attending this production of Playboy followed on the heels of our returning the previous evening from the Aran Islands, where Synge got his initial inspiration for the play.  William Butler Yeats describes how Synge “had come / Towards nightfall upon certain set apart / In a most desolate stony place, / Towards nightfall upon a race / Passionate and simple like his heart.”  In his book The Aran Islands, Synge recalls how an anecdote from the oldest man on Inis Meain (the middle island) sowed the seed of what became Playboy: “He often tells me about a Connaught man who killed his father with the blow of a spade when he was in passion, and then fled to this island and threw himself on the mercy of some of the natives with whom he was said to be related.”

When Playboy was first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907 it generated protests both inside and outside the theatre for its depiction of Irish people in a sometimes unflattering—albeit mostly humorous—light.  The review in The Freeman’s Journal typified the temper of the time and the place: “A strong protest must . . . be entered against this unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish men and, worse still, upon Irish girlhood.  The blood boils with indignation as one recalls the incidents, expressions, ideas of this squalid, offensive production, incongruously styled a comedy in three acts.”  Hard to imagine such a response in this day and age!  However, in watching the Smock Alley Players bring the play from the page to the stage, I think that we all came away from the experience with a deepened appreciation for Synge’s accounting of the play in the midst of the controversy in 1907: “There are, it may be hinted, several sides to The Playboy.”

And as a coda, I must note that there are “several sides” to the Smock Alley Theatre as well.  Extending his generosity even further, after the rehearsal Patrick Sutton gave us a tour of the entire Smock Alley facility—which includes a black box theatre and a banquet hall.  He also gave us a historical overview of the site and shared insights into his current directing of The Playboy of the Western World.  Our “free day” turned out to be just as rich as our fullest of days.

STONES OF ARAN . . .

I had planned to title this post “Into the West, Part II,” but decided that “Stones of Aran” would be more apt. I borrow that title from a pair of highly acclaimed books—one with the subtitle “Pilgrimage,” the other with the subtitle “Labyrinth”—by Tim Robinson, who moved to the Islands in 1972 and began to explore them from every perspective and angle possible: geological, topographical, historical, linguistic, literary, cultural . . . These two books have recently been reissued in the New York Review of Books Classics series.

Our own visit to Inis Mór, the largest of the three principal islands comprising the Aran Islands (Inis Mór means “big island”) is a challenge to write about—it was so eye-opening and mind-expanding in so many ways!  As the common title of Robinson’s books hint, the island is made up primarily of solid limestone: the landscape is predominantly 50 shades of gray (as it were!).  Grass and other greenery is sparse, lending the land a sort of moonscape quality.   Stone walls—built to clear plots of land for grazing of cattle and donkeys and Connemara ponies and for planting potatoes--create a patchwork-quilt effect throughout the island . . . or a labyrinth effect, as Robinson’s second subtitle suggests, sometimes for as far as the eye can see.

Irish (Gaeilge) is the official language of the island (The Aran Islands are a designated Gaeltacht area), though English seems to be spoken universally. . . .

Our visit to this unique spot began with a ferry trip from Galway.  We stayed in a hostel—hardly the lap of luxury with six to a room with a shared small bathroom.  But we survived.  The evening of our arrival some of us ate at The American Bar . . . and then made our way up the road to Tí Joe Watty’s for some traditional Irish balladry and a pint or two.  Good craic, as they say!

The next morning we began our exploration of the island of Inis Mór . . . and here’s how we went about it.  With a gloriously sunny day for our visit, seven of the twelve members of our party decided to rent bicycles and ride out to the two most famous sites on the island: the 7 Churches, with monastic and ecclesiastical ruins dating back to the 8th century and forward to the 13th century; and Dún Aonghasa, the ruins of a massive Iron Age fort built atop cliffs 300 feet above the roiling north Atlantic.  Built as early as the 2nd century BC, Dún Aonghasa in particular is not only a site to visit but also a sight to see.  Even photos can barely do it justice.

For better or for worse, I was not one of the bicyclists.  I’m sure I would have enjoyed the bone-rattling rubber-to-the-road contact with that limestone scape; but I decided to accompany four others in our party on a tour by minibus with our very capable and very pleasant driver/guide Stephen Joyce.  (He mentioned that there are 19 different unrelated Joyce families on Inis Mór!)  We covered a lot of territory, and as a bonus Stephen dropped us off at the narrow and winding pathway to another ancient site, the Black Fort.  That involved about a 25-minute hike each way: I think it was a bonus!

In anticipation of our visit to Inis Mór we read and watched a video of John Millington Synge’s powerful one-act play Riders to the Sea.  We also read four short stories by Aran Islander Liam O’Flaherty and we watched a clip from Robert Flaherty’s classic documentary film Man of Aran.  These works all dramatize and emphasize the lives of the men and the women of the Islands defined by the fickleness of all-powerful Nature—the land and the sea that we got a close-up and intimate look at for ourselves in all their majesty.

INTO THE WEST, PART I . . .

Into the West--that's the title of an Irish film from 1992 starring Gabriel Byrne. It seems like a good title to borrow to headline the first of our two days of travels and adventures in County Galway in the west of Ireland. . . .

We set off by bus from Dublin at 9:15 a.m. for the city of Galway, two-and-a-half hours away. Galway is a bustling center with a lot of interesting shops, restaurants, and pubs--by all accounts it is a great city in which to be a student. So, aptly enough, our first stop was the National University of Ireland-Galway. But there were two details we didn't factor in: the half-hour walk from the bus station to the campus and the heavy rain that we had to walk through. Rain has been general all over Ireland (an echo of Joyce's "The Dead," of course) during our time in the country so far--but this was rain of a higher power: we arrived at NUI-G's Centre for Irish Studies utterly soaked to the skin. . . .

But we were warmly greeted there by Director of Irish Studies, Louis de Paor--though not in his administrative capacity per se; rather, Louis first put on his scholar's hat to walk us through the tormented history of the Irish language--Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic)--from the first threat to its existence during the Elizabethan Conquest through the Cromwellian Invasion of the later 17th century then through the period of An Gorta Mór--the Great Hunger (the Famine caused by potato blight) of the 1840s--and its aftermath and on into the 20th century, when the vitality of the language was sapped by State and Church trying to force it down the throats (as it were) of the general populace who, if I may borrow and move forward by a century or two the words of iconoclastic bilingual poet Michael Hartnett, had found in the previous century "English a necessary sin / the perfect language to sell pigs in." (Writing in the 1970s, Hartnett was referring specifically to the so-called "dispossessed" Irish-language poets of the 17th and 18th centuries; but his description resonates forward to the dark days of the 19th century as well.)

And then Louis de Paor put on his other hat--that of a major practitioner of poetry in Irish--and proved that the language is still alive and well despite the constant and ongoing threat of extinction over the past 400 years. Louis engaged us for a full hour with his talk and then his rich and wonderful poems (written in Irish but translated by him into poems that any English writer would be proud to claim) and then generously took questions from our group for another 20 minutes or so--really good questions that responded both to his poems and to the implications of poetic language in general and of the Irish language in particular. I think that everyone came away from our visit with Louis both deeply informed by his impromptu lecture and deeply enriched and provoked by his dazzlingly agile and remarkably substantive poems.

RAISING THE DEAD . . .

Today was supposed to be a memorable day just like every other day of this Irish adventure. It turned out to be much more memorable than any one of us could have imagined. Read on. . . .

The first item on the agenda for the day was a visit to Glasnevin Cemetery on the north side of Dublin. A cemetery may not seem like a quintessentially literary place to visit . . . but Glasnevin is, in more ways than one. The one that was centermost in some of our minds was its importance to the "Hades" episode in James Joyce's Ulysses. That episode starts with the funeral cortege for Leopold Bloom's friend Paddy Dignam winding its way from Sandymount on the south side of the River Liffey then through the heart of the city and on to Glasnevin. Along the way, the cortege crosses the Grand Canal, the Dodder River, the Liffey, and the Grand Canal, representing four of the rivers one crosses on the descent into the underworld in classical literature. The one Dublin river the cortege does not cross is the Tolka--representing Lethe . . . the river of forgetfulness that needs to be crossed for full passage into Hades. Irishmen don't forget. One of the most frequently quoted lines in all of Irish literature belongs to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." In "Hades," Leopold Bloom, too, would like to awake from his personal nightmares of history--his infant son's death and his father's suicide--but he cannot forget. . . . But I digress (sort of).

To cut to the chase . . . we did not follow the route of the cortege; instead we took the #83 bus via another route . . . and spent a "happy" hour-and-a-half wandering through the vast and densely populated cemetery. We were on the lookout for particular graves related to our class reading list and our survey of modern Irish history. We had a lot of success, finding the graves of (among others): Brendan Behan, Roger Casement, Michael Collins, Eamon De Valera, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Stanislaus Joyce (James Joyce's father), Maud Gonne McBride, Daniel O'Connell, and Charles Stewart Parnell. We were walking in the land of the dead--those gone but not forgotten. . . .

When we came up for air, we naturally felt the need for food and drink as well . . . so we hopped back on the #83 and returned to the Liffey. Crossing that bridge when we got to it (a metaphor made literal!), we went back in time--to the year 1182, to be exact--when we entered The Brazen Head, "the oldest pub in Ireland." Well, at least it's the site of the oldest pub: the current premises could hardly be more than 300 years old! We had a relaxing lunch there, and then three of our students shared with their classmates their "explications/reviews" of some of our activities so far. We commandeered a back room of The Brazen Head for this occasion and had a fine around-the-room discussion. . . .

At that point we had just one more little item on the day's list of essential group activities: we were going to walk a few hundred yards down the River Liffey to Usher's Island Quay to snap the facade of the house (#15) in which Joyce set his iconic short story "The Dead." When we got to the doorstep there was no sign of life (aptly!)--as far as I knew, the house was in disrepair and unused. But there was lettering on the fanlight above the front door, indicating that there was some sort of James Joyce association associated with the place.  I gave the door a touch but it was locked. Then, as I lifted the mail slot to see if I could get a glimpse inside, the door opened and a young fellow invited us in!  He then asked us if we'd like to look around.  Well, sure . . . and then I told him that a long time ago (13 years ago, it seems), I had an email--utterly out of the blue--from the fellow who had just then bought the property: we did not know each other--I assume he just found me online via my Irish Studies label and guessed that I would be interested! I recall that he told me at the time how excited he was and that he planned to rehab the place and to host dinners there.  He invited me to drop in sometime when I might be in Dublin.  I know that I replied to him at the time, thanking him for the invitation . . . but that was all so long ago. Still, when I told the story, the young fellow--let's call him by his proper name, Keith--said, "That would be Brendan Kilty--he's upstairs and I'm sure he'd like to meet you."

3+ hours later . . . we staggered out after a roof to basement tour of the place, tea and biscuits in the dining room (with me playing Gabriel Conroy at the head of the table!) and everyone else feeling just as personally welcome as the Morkan sisters' guests in "The Dead."

Our most gracious host, Brendan Kilty, was speechless (for a minute) when I reminded him of the email invitation he had sent to me all those years earlier.  As it turns out, Brendan is a Senior Counsellor in the Irish Courts (he is one of those fellows who wears robes and a wig); he is also a diehard Joycean, and he described the "epiphany" he experienced in 1979 in which he foresaw himself, a newly minted law school grad at the time, one day owning and restoring the decrepit house of "The Dead." Twenty years later--in 1999--he realized that vision and since then he has been gradually returning the home to its modest grandeur of 1904, when the story is set.

The tour of the house that Brendan gave us was informative and entertaining--and more: I think we would all agree that this experience far exceeded anything we would have imagined happening during our Irish adventure. This raises the notion of "enrichment" to an entirely new level! And it sure made Tuesday, July 3rd, one "Hades" of a memorable day . . .