22 Of Chandeliers and Plasterwork

Posted by Christine on Nov 16, 2014 in Ireland | 4 comments 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

Posted by Christine on Nov 10, 2014 in Ireland | 1 comment 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

Posted by Christine on Nov 5, 2014 in Ireland | 2 comments 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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19 Wild Swans at Coole

Posted by Christine on Oct 29, 2014 in Ireland | 2 comments “Easter, 1916” is probably William Butler Yeats’s most important poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” his most well known, but for those who read a lot of Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole” may be his most beloved. It is certainly the most popular poem among the students I bring to Ireland every two years: they compete fiercely to read the poem aloud when we visit Coole Park, and sometimes we have to have more than one performance. Over the weekend Ron and I were down in Limerick and North Kerry enjoying several beautiful fall days in the countryside. Though it looked like rain on Sunday, Ron came up with the brilliant idea to drive a little bit out of our way on the way home to stop off at Coole Park, once the home of Yeats’s friend, patron, and collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory, now a property of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. What better way to end our weekend trip than a late October walk in the woods in the rain? When we arrived at Coole, the trees were certainly “in their autumn beauty,” though “the woodland paths” were far from dry. Lady Gregory’s house—where she entertained Yeats, John Millington Synge, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, George Moore, Violet Martin, and many more of the well-known Irish writers of her day—is long gone; only the foundation and the clearing reveal its location “In the Seven Woods” Yeats wrote about, 1000 acres of forest, and today, six kilometers of trails. The presence of so many writers at Coole is confirmed at the Autograph Tree, a glorious copper beech in the walled garden. The tradition began in 1898 when Lady Gregory asked Yeats to carve his name on the tree. I’ve been to Coole many times, most often in the winter with student groups. I’ve seen it flooded, iced over, and on several spring and summer visits, fully abloom in a thousand shades of green. But I’d never been there in the season when the poem was written. We visited in early afternoon, not twilight, and it rained quite a bit during our visit, but the lake was “brimming,” and “among the stones” we did see, if not “nine and fifty,” about thirty or so wild swans, drifting “on the still water, / Mysterious, beautiful.” Yeats wrote “The Wild Swans at Coole” at Coole Park a few months after...
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18 The Belfast Miracle

Posted by Christine on Oct 24, 2014 in Ireland | 2 comments I first visited Belfast, Northern Ireland, with my family in the early days of January, 1998—before the Good Friday Peace Agreement that came about later that year. A ceasefire had been in place for several years. Though the city’s resolute citizens tried to go about their lives in a normal way, the tension was palpable. Police cars that looked more like tanks roamed the streets, and almost every shop had its burly guard at the door. As an American you were forgiven for saying the wrong thing or asking an all too obvious question, but conversations were strained, filled with euphemisms and code words. We stayed in the Europa Hotel, the “most bombed hotel in the world” because there so few hotels in the city and because we thought they were courageous to have stayed open throughout the Troubles and in spite of periodic damage to their premises. When we handed the keys of the rental car to the doorman for valet parking, he kindly suggested that we tuck out of sight the little Republic of Ireland tricolor flags we had given the kids in their Christmas stockings. “I don’t mind,” he said, “but someone might.” I was there to figure out if Belfast should be on the itinerary of the student trip Linda Hubert and I were planning for the following year at Agnes Scott. To see the city, we went on a walking tour with a guide who at least made an attempt to hide his political allegiances. I was impressed with the variety of Victorian architecture, even more so when we learned that because of severe bombing during World War II, most of the buildings were completely new inside, retaining only the facades of the original structures. Imposing structures like City Hall, the Grand Opera House, Belfast Castle, and Stormont (current home of the Northern Ireland Assembly, but then housing the Civil Service) marked the city as a capital of politics and culture. I would have planned a trip only to see the beautiful Victorian Crown Liquor Bar and Saloon with its stained glass windows, snugs, and gas lamps. The Linen Hall Library was a revelation, an oasis of free thinking established during the enlightenment and determined to serve the intellectual interests of all citizens since then. The tall yellow gantries of Harland and Wolff shipbuilders—builders of the Titanic among other famous ships—gave the city’s industrial...
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