23 Culture Shock and Awe

Last month I was exchanging emails about this blog and other things with Craig Okino, a dear friend from college, when he learned I was returning from Dublin to Atlanta for six days to attend a wedding on November 1. “I’m curious to hear if you experience a little ‘culture shock’ upon your return to the US,” Craig wrote, “…the subject of your next blog, perhaps?” And in a subsequent message, “I’m very interested to hear what happens when you guys return to your old lives.” Living in Hawaii and visiting the mainland every year, Craig knows a lot about culture shock. But while I said I’d give it a try, I wasn’t really sure I’d have enough to say when I got back to Dublin. I’ve only been living in Ireland for four months. No big deal. And I travel a fair amount, so I know there are always adjustments, big and small, when crossing borders, even local ones. I’ve been going back and forth to Ireland regularly for almost thirty years, so there won’t be any surprises, right? Not so fast! Four months in residence is no two-week vacation, I soon realized. From the moment we landed in Atlanta, I felt caught between my two worlds—the sabbatical bubble in Dublin and the hive of activity surrounding my life in Atlanta. Remember the episode of Star Trek in which some of characters are in a speeded up universe, while the rest are in a parallel but slowed down one? To the slow people, the fast ones are only a buzz in the air, while the fast ones see the others moving almost imperceptibly in slow motion around them. Over that long weekend in Atlanta, I seemed to be negotiating both universes at the same time. Committing to live somewhere for a year means you will open yourself more to life in that place than you might during a brief stay with the vacation spirit about it. To prepare for the year away, I made sure that I got out or rotated off of everything I was doing at home: the department chair’s job, committees, my seventeen year journal editorship, volunteer work at the kids’ former school, visiting lecturer gigs, and more. I traded a house in Atlanta for a small rental apartment in Dublin with minimal furnishings, where when something goes wrong, the landlord fixes it. I devised...
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22 Of Chandeliers and Plasterwork

One of the best things about travel is learning to appreciate things—abstract things and thing things—you might never learn to appreciate at home. And by travel I mean a trip to the next town over, or to a café or grocery store on the other side of your own town, as well as travel that includes long distances, strange new ways of doing things, and languages you don’t speak. You just need to change your perspective, look through others’ eyes, ponder assemblages of things and ideas that are not your own. Accompanying students to Ireland every other year as I do, I have lots of opportunities to see them make those leaps of cultural realization that travel brings about, but I also love to see a student kick open a door in her mind when something more everyday about Ireland catches her imagination, whether it’s sitting by a real turf fire, developing a love for the sport of hurling, or learning everything she can about the stone walls that divide the fields throughout the country. Of course I have these experiences, too. Did you know that everywhere I travel I am fascinated by sewer and manhole covers? They are usually designed with care, reflecting the taste and era of the region and the age. I also love to study how items in the grocery store or pharmacy are arranged in different places around the world. I’m mad for china cabinets, especially the kind without doors displaying rows of plates, cups and saucers, and pitchers. The list goes on. Spending a year in Ireland has given me the opportunity to dig a little deeper in my learning about the country and also to develop and explore my own strange interests and obsessions. From recent visits to some of the great houses—of which there are remarkably few here in Ireland, a story I promise to tell in another post—I have been wanting to write about two things that I surprised myself by falling in love with, two art forms that are often seen together: chandeliers and decorative plasterwork. That I love chandeliers probably won’t surprise you. Ireland is the home of Waterford Crystal, and even if you think that crystal glassware is a waste of money on things that easily break, it’s hard to ignore the sparkle and magic of beautiful crystal chandelier, lighting up a room, reflecting and refracting its...
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21 Remembrance

Photo above taken at the Irish National War Memorial Gardens in Dublin, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and completed in 1938 to commemorate the 49,000 Irish (including emigrants) who died in the Great War. Decades of neglect followed, reflecting the struggling economy and politicization of honoring World War I dead. Restoration began in the 1980s funded by organizations in both the Republic and Northern Ireland. The gardens were rededicated in 2006.   Ninety-six years ago at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month, World War I formerly ended, a day universally known as “Armistice Day” but often called “Remembrance Day” or “Poppy Day” in Ireland and the UK and “Veteran’s Day” in the US.” For the Republic of Ireland, though, a new consciousness of the role the Irish played in the “war to end all wars” has emerged in the last few years, and like everything having to do with history and remembrance here, it is fraught with complexity and tortured political and cultural meaning. In 1916, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Britain was at war with Germany and the Central Powers. Trench warfare was devastating the British army, and the need for soldiers was insatiable. Member of Parliament John Redmond and his Irish Parliamentary Party urged the Irish to join up, arguing that the British promise of Home Rule for Ireland would be fulfilled upon defeat of the enemy in a war that promised to secure “the freedom of small nations” like “poor little Catholic Belgium,” with whom Ireland identified. Committed nationalists like the young poet Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917) believed Redmond, seeing their service to the Crown as earning Irish independence after the war. A recruitment campaign aimed at the Irish used religion, stereotypes, and guilt to convince them to enlist. Over 200,000 Irishmen served in the British armed forces, with approximately 30,000 dying in battle, another 19,000 when emigrants were included. Ulstermen were heavily represented in these figures: the north was more British, more protestant than the south then and now. In Northern Ireland there is even an entire museum dedicated to the Battle of the Somme, where many Ulstermen died. But at that time, strongly nationalist Irish people believed in the slogan “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity,” arguing against participating in the war and sometimes publicly shaming those who did. A banner was hung across Liberty Hall,...
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20 More Than Glass

The first story in James Joyce’s Dubliners begins with a child standing in the street, looking in a window to the room where a priest he knows is dying; the boy studies “the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted inthe same way, faintly and evenly.* In one of the most beautiful passages of prose every written, the final story in the collection, “The Dead,” ends with the main character Gabriel Conroy looking out the window of a Dublin hotel to the snow falling on the street below,“falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”** Joyce’s stories are filled with windows and characters looking in and looking out. We readers are, of course, looking in the window at the private lives of the characters in each story and looking out on the Dublin of Joyce’s day from these vantage points. The window is an apt metaphor for fiction—and for nonfiction—both of which frame lives in stories and see into lives and out into the world. As Henry James wrote in the preface to Portait of Lady, “The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million — a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.”As James suggests, windows may in one sense be confined spaces, but they are also sites of endless possibility, but they must be “pierced,” an action far more forceful and intentional than a “gaze”  or an accidental “glance.” Should I have called this blog “The Piercing Individual Vision from Here”? Probably not. Think of “view” as a considered and purposeful act. For a long time my photographs of Ireland and other places have included a remarkable number of window pictures. A quick review of the albums on my computer yielded over forty such photos in the last three years. Most of them are taken from the inside looking out, though I also have quite a few taken from the outside looking in, and many of them are rather poor quality; working with a subject that emanates light while standing in a darkened room is a photographic feat I have not yet mastered. Sometimes that...
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