At the Edge of Ireland Page 3
We strolled on past the great Dublin landmarks—Christ Church Cathedral, the stately composition of Dublin Castle, the National Gallery, and the architectural extravaganza of Trinity College, meeting and melding place of Ireland’s greatest artists, writers, and statesmen. Finally we circled around to the great O’Connell Bridge. Here we crossed into O’Connell Street, that gloriously broad avenue that is featured so prominently in Dublin’s turbulent history, a history that was now being flaunted from banners and poster and placards declaring the celebration of the ninetieth anniversary of the great Easter Rising of April 24, 1916—one of the most spectacular, if ill-organized, of Ireland’s attempts to throw off the scourge of British imperialism.
And guess what day it was? It was April 12, 2006, and the Easter Rising celebrations had already begun and were an incessant generator of discussions, documentaries, and political diatribes for another three weeks!
And if that wasn’t enough, it was also the centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett, that maverick poet, playwright, and novelist, once described by Nancy Cunard as having “the look of an Aztec eagle and a feeling of the spareness of the desert about him.” His Waiting for Godot and a score of other minimalist productions still confuse the uninitiated, delight his disciples, and create infinitely more pompous pontification and pseudo-intellectual blather than all his own strange pieces combined.
Samuel Beckett
Beckett left the city—“this nothing of a noplace”—without ever adequately explaining any of his work, except to hint that maybe his whole genre and oeuvre was a send-up of the very idea of genre and oeuvre—and pretty much of life and living in general.
And it was ironical that he and fellow Dubliner James Joyce became companions and strong coworkers in Paris during the late 1920s. There was Joyce, renowned with his Ulysses and his impenetrable Finnegans Wake for putting everything into his works (at almost seven hundred pages, Ulysses covers only a single day in Dublin), whereas Beckett took just about everything out. A review of Waiting for Godot, which was running at a city theater during our visit, read: “Each fresh viewing sheds new light—on nothing.”
And yet despite the differences in their works, they were very similar in other odd respects. As one biographer suggests, they were both: “agnostic, polyglot, metaphysical, apolitical, numerologists, superstitious, and humorous.”
So we had arrived in the midst of this zany carnival-like celebration of a key historic and political event, on that fateful day in April 1916, that was in truth an utter confusion in terms of organization, public interest, and comprehension. Then this was coupled with a second event that honored a writer who, according to one critic, epitomized “organized disorganization” and certainly generated enough public incomprehension about “nothing and nothingness” to guarantee his celebrity for a second centennial.
Swimming about for a couple of days in such dichotomous tides of “un-history” and nonsensical rhetorical contradictiveness, we felt we were touching something of the true wacky and audacious spirit of this compact and cohesive city (cohesion that, alas, collapses into utter confusion, of course, when you get behind the wheel of a car).
Joyce, who wrote the ultimate “Dublin novel” in his Ulysses, despite the fact that he lived most of his life out of the country, captures the rambunctious stream of glorious consciousness here. In fact, so richly descriptive of Dublin is the book, that Joyce claimed, if the city were ever destroyed, it could be re-created through the pages of his Ulysses.
So—here are a few fragments of his homage to Dublin:
The gray warm evening descended upon the city…The streets swarmed with a gaily-colored crowd. Like illuminated pearls the lamps shone from the summits of the tall poles upon the living texture below, changing shape and hue unceasingly.
In a second vibrant vignette:
The air without is impregnated with rainbow moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under star-shiny coelum. God’s air, the All Father’s air, scintillant circumambiant cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee.
And from another of his beloved books, Dubliners:
It was noon when we reached the quays and we bought two big currant buns and sat down to eat them on some metal piping by the river. We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce—the barges signal from afar away by their curls of wooly smoke. The brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay…Looking at the high masts I imagine the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance before my eyes…Then we walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of laborers, the shrill litanies of shop boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street singers, who sang a come-all-you, about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me.
There’s something utterly enticing about Joyce’s rich ramblings that resonates here in the city. They are perfectly suited to one another—the prose and the zany realities. You want to go about reciting aloud his observations and celebrations, sharing them with the smiley-faced people on Grafton Street, watching their eyes light up when they see how his bouncing words and rhythms pick up and toss like bright baubles all the sensations, sounds, and sights that surround us. You want to shout out “D’ya see it?” “D’ya feel it?” “D’ya understand what he’s painting in words?”
But instead of shouting we shuffled off instead to a church where, it being the Easter season, one of many services was in progress. Easter is one time in the year when even the most recalcitrant churchgoers finally bow to guilty consciences and bend a humble knee. And we were no exception on this particular occasion. It is also the one time, on Good Friday, when all the eight thousand or so pubs in Ireland are closed and there’s a national panic over booze—or the lack of it.
We entered the church and, despite the excellence of the choir and the rapidity of the Communion that in an Anglican Church with five hundred congregants could have taken a good hour or more to get through, the long service inevitably developed a droney, droopy pace and mood. And I caught myself remembering the flash and flourish of Joyce’s religious revivalist rhetoric in the turbulent middle section of Ulysses, and wondered how this would go down if read aloud here in the church instead of yet another dirgy psalm:
Hush! Sinned against the light and even now that day is at hand when He shall come to judge the world by fire. Pflaap! Elijah is coming! Washed by the blood of the Lamb. Come on, you wine-fizzling, gin-sizzling, booze-guzzling existences. Come on, you dog-gone, bull-necked, beetle-browed, hog-jowled, peanut-brained, weasely-eyed flower flushes, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extracts of infamy. The Deity ain’t no nickel dime bum show. I put it to you that He’s on the square and a corking fine proposition. He’s the grandest thing yet and don’t you forget it. Shout salvation and King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle the Almighty God. Pflaaap!
It didn’t happen, of course. Instead the congregation began one more murmured recitation of the Our Father, and I felt the yawns easing like sleepy cloudscapes over me. A little Joyce would certainly have juiced up and jollied the process along, but as this period is the most sacred of the Catholic calendar, maybe it was best to stick to the tried-and-true. After all, I convinced myself, we were going to need all the blessings we could engender during this new adventure of ours in a new country—and by the sound of it, most particularly on the racetrack roads where we’d been told many drivers were unlicensed, uninsured, and far too often, unsober.
James Joyce
And so back to Beckett, who, like Joyce, spent most of his life out of Ireland and was typically obscure when defining the settings for his works. This fragment possibly captures something of the spirit of Dublin that we sensed during our own brief introduction:
Apologies. As another editor emphasized to me eons ago, authors should not play games with their readers. But—this tease of blank space could be interpreted literally. I honestly couldn’t find, in all of Beckett’s works, a single reference that seemed to have any relevance to our reflections upon Dublin. Or any other recognizable place on our earth, for that matter. On the other hand, this space could be interpreted artistically as a recognition of the minimalist blankness, the emptiness, the near vacuum, the void that permeates almost all of his plays: Acts-Without-Words, Roughs-for-Theatres, Roughs-for-Radios, and even his forty-second contribution to Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta!, “written” in 1969 and titled simply Breath. This work consists of a curtain raised up with a faint light falling on “miscellaneous rubbish” scattered across the stage followed by “a faint brief cry,” an expiration of breath, and then silence, before the curtain drops again. Some claim it’s actually been performed in just over twenty seconds as opposed to the forty seconds estimated by Beckett. Undoubtedly a relief to many in the audience.
What a bizarre nonworld the Nobel-Prized Beckett offered to a confused public—minimalistic tableaux of suspended heads with frantically chattering mouths; people in overgrown plant pots; characters immersed in sand; two Chaplinesque tramps waiting by a solitary tree for someone or something that never comes; a man feverishly winding and rewinding a recorded tape searching for…the truth, the meaning, or perhaps just the meaninglessness of man’s existence. I find his work irritating, absurd, pretentious, arrogantly elusive (and illusive), ambiguous to the point of total nonsense—and utterly, gloriously enticing. Even if I can’t call up the necessary rigorous attention his plays need, I still sense fundamental truths, humor, and deep eternal perceptions floating by, tantalizingly just out of reach. Or certainly my reach, and certainty, or the lack of it, seems to be the elusive essence of many of his works. As one of the Waiting for Godot characters exclaims: “To have lived is not enough for them…They have to talk about it…To be dead is not enough for them.”
With all the frenzied forelock-tugging of the metropolitan literatae and Habling-bling bloated reverential piety about Beckett mushing around the city, it was refreshing to read one critic who wrote that “the centenary celebrations are almost enough to put most off literature for life.” Nevertheless, a Beckettian spirit was definitely flowing through downtown Dublin that Easter week (you could hardly escape posters and banners of his tumultuously wrinkled and time-worn face), characterized by sequences of bizarre non sequiturs.
First came flurries of little girls frolicking by in neon pink, meticulously embroidered costumes and heavily made up, carrying skirt-shaped bags for all their inordinately expensive outfits. They were here for some important Irish step dancing contest (now thanks to Riverdance and clones, an international passion) and accompanied by proud and occasionally stressed-out parents who seemed far more nervous than their tiny, decked-up offspring.
And then came one of Ireland’s oddest ball games. I’d seen Irish football before and rather liked its odd, rugby-soccer-basketball maneuvers and speedy flow. So different from the lumbering, tough guys’ scrums and touchline tumbles of the traditional rugby games I used to be involved in. But I’d never seen a hurling match before and sat fixated by the TV in our room, which showed one of the fastest, most bizarre, and seemingly most dangerous games I’ve ever experienced. Harry Potter would love it. Fifteen men a side hurtled by and into one another in seemingly total Hogwartian disarray, flailing long cáman paddle-sticks on which they carried—yes, carried—a small white leather ball (sliotar)—although in the truly wild days when the game first emerged I heard it was often a human skull. And then, while running pell-mell, they tossed the ball off the tip of the stick and whacked it with all the force of a top-flight tennis player to another team player fifty yards or more down the field or, if they could, over the posts at the far end of the field to score points.
In minutes I was hooked. The constant frantic pace and ability of the players to avoid regular decapitation by swirling sticks and supersonic-speed sliotars amazed me and left me utterly exhausted by the end of the first half. As a result of watching the game, I fully understood the remark of an elderly gentleman in another of Dublin’s fine Irish pubs, Ryan’s, on Park Gate Street, when he chortled: “Ah well, this game and our other ancient village game of ‘road bowling’ explains it all, d’y’see. You English play cricket, which is a waspocracy gentleman’s game of patience and fair play, and we do the hurling, which is an ancient bogman’s game of pure unrestrained, skull-crushing passion. No wonder we didn’t get along with you lot for centuries!”
“Well—thanks for explaining that…”
“Tá fáilte romhat—you’re very welcome, good sir!”
FINALLY, WE DROVE SOUTH out of Dublin, leaving behind the tortuously tangled one-way traffic systems; the glorious pure-Irish pubs, and the earthy redolence of fresh-poured pints of thick black stout; the pedestrianized people-powered streets full of music and mirth; the sudden passing vehemence of a tanked-up local calling the whole world “ya feckin’ eejits”; the cultivated calm of the St. Steven’s Green gardens; and all the big burly-pillared and porticoed neoclassical public buildings and the dainty, decorous streets of Georgian refinement.
And we were sad, despite the fact that we’d barely touched the place in our brief stay. As had so many others, our hearts had warmed immediately to the heart of Dublin. We could have done, however, without the endless outer eddies of suburban “semis” financed by the surging economic tsunamis of Ireland’s “Celtic Tiger” affluence, with their pristine privet hedges and eye-blurring stamp of bland sameness and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mundanity. And we also tried hard to ignore the bizarre, carnival-colored bungalow mania that seemed to characterize the outer-outer neighborhoods. The riotous riches of downtown Dublin remained with us as we curled on through the high Wicklow Mountains with the radio playing either endless recountings of the Easter Rising or “let’s pretend we understand” discussions and diatribes about Beckett’s intentionally ambiguous and obscure works that were apparently not meant to be “understood” but rather “un-understood” by the hoi polloi.
“We’ll be back,” said Anne when we finally switched off the natter-chatter.
“I’m still there,” I said. And I meant it.
AND I INDEED FELT we were “still there” a little later that day when we paused on the quay in the pleasant riverside town of Wexford to while away an hour or so over lunch before continuing our drive to County Cork and the Beara Peninsula (a seven-hour drive we managed to stretch into a leisurely three-day backroading odyssey).
Hardly had we ordered a platter of “toasties” (those ubiquitous toasted ham and cheese sandwiches that are a staple of pubs everywhere here) than we became aware of a real Irish brouhaha at a nearby table. The subject (of course) was the Easter Rising again, and the pro-and-con arguments were so complex in the Beckettian sense that I was convinced we were back in one of those gloriously intimate and intense little pubs just outside Trinity College where feisty debates and furious beer-imbibing are the order of the day. Every day.
It quickly became apparent that the distinct lack of concerted conviction on the part of the public in support of the Rising still lingers on today. I tried to keep notes on the group’s arguments, but they spoke far too fast (a frustrating national problem over here) and the dialect was far too thick (another problem). But I did find, the following day, parts of a Sunday Times editorial that seemed to strike a reasoned balance in all the blather and blarney:
Twenty-first Century Ireland is an independent, proud and prosperous republic, and the world’s tenth wealthiest nation. Its economy is thriving, its culture is vibrant. Other societies now look to Ireland as an economic role model and covet its confidence and accomplishments. Irish people no longer need the dubious myths and shibboleths of the past to bolster their identity. [By the sound and fury of the adjoining debate, one could seriously question
such an optimistic statement.] People who see the world today through a republican lens complain that it has taken far too long for the modern Irish state to acknowledge formally the undeniable courage and idealism of the men who led the insurrection on that fateful April morning in 1916. [The debate at the nearby table continued: “It had officially been canceled, for God’s sake! They couldn’t get enough support,” claimed one of the men at the table. “It was only the crazies who kept going, and if the stupid Brits hadn’t executed them in the stonebreaker’s yard at Kilmainhan Jail and made martyrs of them, they’d all be long forgotten today!”] Those who believe this bloody and divisive rebellion had a malign effect on modern Irish history meanwhile argue that the celebrations glorify political violence and send out dangerous signals to unrepentant advocates of the physical force tradition. [At the table again: “We got the freedom we wanted, though!” shouted one of the group. “Only after massive slaughter and a bloody civil war that split the country down the middle for years,” said another. “As the great John Lennon said,” quipped a third man, “‘Time wounds all heels’—and the British heels certainly got their comeuppance!”] Immigration is changing the complexion of our country and with so many diverse cultures now, the ancient quarrel between nationalists and unionists seems increasingly irrelevant, if not absurd. However, the 1916 Proclamation of Independence remains an impressive document and the citizens of 2006 are the first in Irish history fortunate enough to be free to appreciate all that was liberating and outward-looking about the Easter Rising, while rejecting all that was destructive and narrow-minded.
We hoped the editorial writer was correct. We had no desire to spend valuable pub time over the next year or so of our stay in the country listening to incessant replays of domestic Irish history, but only time would tell, and, indeed, the later release of Ken Loach’s film The Wind That Shakes the Barley was indeed one more dramatic and bloody replay of that terrible divisive era. Only time would tell if this would be a major theme of our journey here or whether we could focus happily on the many other intriguing and true aspects of Irish life as it’s lived today here in this utterly captivating little country.