49 To the Lighthouse

“England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.” For several hundred years Irish revolutionaries have clung to this equation—sometimes attributed to Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798)—as their slogan and as justification for the timing of acts of rebellion. If Wolfe Tone, a leader of Ireland’s Rebellion of 1798, did utter those words, he was referring to the French Revolutionary Wars, the spot of bother on the continent that linked the French Revolution to the Napoleonic Wars in a struggle among European monarchies that lasted a quarter of a century and then some. The rebellion Tone led and died for was intended to catch Britain—always called “England” in the language of Irish independence—at their weakest and most distracted while their army and navy were engaged in the larger struggle. The goal was an independent Ireland backed, surprisingly, by Catholic and Protestant leaders who were tired of living in a neglected and mistreated colony. Like rebellions before it and several after it, the 1798 effort was a miserable failure. But the slogan lived on, and the thinking behind it played a role in inspiring the Easter Rising of 1916 during a very dark time for Britain in World War I. The Rising also failed, but it ignited a series of events that did lead, eventually, to an independent Ireland. But even an independent Ireland—the Irish Free State formed in 1922—was not yet ready to forgive and forget, and when the rest of the world went to war again in 1939 and after, Ireland remained neutral, wary of siding with their former colonizer even against as threatening an enemy as Nazi Germany. It’s hard to believe that any European country could remain neutral in the circumstances, and the stance is not the noblest moment in Ireland’s history. But centuries of resentment and hatred–the legacy of imperialism–do not recede in a few decades. We now know that during World War II the Irish government did secretly support the Allied cause in several ways, most notably perhaps in the form of a very significant weather report delivered on a very significant date from the Blacksod Lighthouse on the Mullet Peninsula, County Mayo (see photo at top). Since reading about this important historical moment, Ron and I have been wanting to see the place where on June 3, 1944, lighthouse keeper Ted Sweeney issued the weather report that changed the world. I’m always keen to visit lighthouses. After all, I grew up in...
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48 My Medieval Stoner Friends

The last time I visited Jerpoint Abbey in Thomastown near Kilkenny, I found myself saying to Ron as he headed off to climb the tower, “I’m just going to say ‘hi’ to the Ormond Knight.” The “Ormond Knight” has been dead for over 600 years. A primitive carved effigy of him adorns one of the pillars in the cloister at Jerpoint, a Cistercian abbey established in 1180 and dissolved by Henry VIII in 1540. Ever since I first saw this carving twenty years ago, I’ve been drawn to it. The knight’s puzzled expression, obscured by an oversized helmet, and his ill-proportioned body gained my sympathy and my interest, as did the tiny monkey carved awkwardly in the stone to his right. Thought to be a symbol of the Butler family, dukes of Ormond, the odd little figure was clearly designed by someone who had never seen a monkey before. I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of the Ormond Knight, I visit him as often as I can, and I even have a fake stone copy of him hanging on my office wall at home. I’ve already written about him in this blog (“10 In our arts we find our bliss”), because he is often on my mind. What can I say? He’s a friend. All over Ireland there are women and men—many of them only represented by their heads—along with animals and imaginary creatures whom I visit on a regular basis. I love returning to the abbey, church, or castle where these medieval characters reside knowing I’ll see familiar faces. Greeting them each time is very reassuring, for their expressions never change. Like true friends, they are always what they were the last time I saw them. These stone beings reach across the gulf of centuries with their artistry, their individuality, and their humanity.   If you’ve visited the great cathedrals and churches of Europe—Chartres, Cologne, St. Basil’s, Notre Dame, Salisbury, Florence…the list goes one—Irish cathedrals and churches will seem smaller, less ambitious, even amateurish by comparison. With the exception of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, they are not built on a grand scale, and the surviving stonework is much less elaborate, seemingly primitive in conception and execution. The Golden Age of Irish religious art in the seventh and eighth centuries CE preceded the building of the great churches: the famous illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells and artifacts such...
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47 The Hedge School Culture

Since arriving in Dublin last June, I’ve often noted to visitors and friends my appreciation of the vibrant culture of lifelong learning not only in the city, but throughout Ireland. The array of courses and other educational activities scheduled throughout the year for adults—most of them free—means there’s something for everyone and for every question or mood. Thanks to being on sabbatical, I have been able to take advantage of quite a few of these opportunities. As my hundreds of pages of notes and thousands of photographs attest, I have spent the year being a learner, and it’s been wonderful. With so many intriguing offerings, choosing what to attend is a problem. The universities, colleges of every size and type, museums, libraries and other institutions, and even magazines and various private societies regularly give one-off or multisession courses for adults on a host of academic and practical subjects. By the end of my sabbatical, I’ll have completed three of these with University College Dublin: a course on the Easter Rising of 1916, another on the War of Independence 1919-22, and a third on James Joyce and the National Library. The quality of the teaching and information is very high–I’m quite picky, being a teacher myself–and all three courses have included the latest scholarship. Every week there are new programs and events advertised at venues around the city: lectures and book launches, exhibitions, concerts, poetry and fiction readings, walking tours and house tours, festivals, special events and tours at museums, film screenings and discussions, hands-on activities like art classes or writing classes, panels and debates, and every other sort of program you could imagine. Two nationally sponsored events, “Heritage Week” in August (see “7 Heritage”) and “Culture Night” in September (see “13 Folding Landscapes”), invite the public behind the scenes of history, scholarship, art, music, writing, and architecture for free tours, lectures, and more. I attended twelve different events during Heritage Week and regretted the things I missed. And what’s even more impressive is that almost all of these events are “absolutely jammers,” and many are booked out far in advance. I’ve learned to arrive early and claim my seat. On Easter Monday, the Irish television station RTÉ took over O’Connell Street, a broad avenue at the center of town, for an all day program called “Road to the Rising.” The idea was to host an array of events—some serious, some just for...
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46 Into the Night

A few weeks ago I spent a morning hunting down a dark, forbidding “pit” that is mentioned in passing in a poem by William Butler Yeats. As is well known, I’m mad to see places where literature or history happened and to “walk in the steps” of the people, the events, the images, or the ideas that came into being in a particular set of coordinates. Yeats’s “pit” or “cleft” or “Alt” or “Glen” has been on my mind for a long time. In “Man and the Echo,” one of Yeats’s last poems, the speaker–or speakers, depending on your interpretation of the two voices–reflects on his life and life’s work as illness, death, and “night” approach, using the dialogue between a human voice and its echo to probe these vexing questions. The poem was published in The Atlantic Monthly in January 1939, the same month Yeats died, along with two other moody, self-critical poems. The place where the echo cited in the poem occurs is a real one, a rock-faced incision on the slope of Knocknarea in County Sligo. In the poem, Yeats describes it like this: Man. In a cleft that’s christened Alt Under broken stone I halt At the bottom of a pit That broad noon has never lit…. In Yeats Country around Sligo, literary detectives can easily find the locations of most of the poems that are connected to place. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” from the eponymous poem, Dooney Rock from “The Fiddler of Dooney,” and Sleuth Wood (actually Slish Wood) from “The Stolen Child” are all sites on Lough Gill near Sligo—well-signposted with parking and paths and noted on all tourist maps. The same goes for Glencar Waterfall, also from “The Stolen Child,” located a few miles from Sligo town on Glencar Lake. which even has a staircase to take you up alongside the noisy torrent— Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star… —and back to the parking lot along a wooded path. A few miles on the other side of Sligo town you can visit Lissadell House, once the home of the Gore-Booth family, where the young Yeats visited often. He later commemorated both the place and the two Gore-Booth daughters in his poem “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz”: The light of evening, Lissadell, Great windows open to the...
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