by Frank Gannon
Like Patrick, Columba knew the old ways very well. He was educated in a bardic school, and he stayed on friendly terms with poets his whole life, and when he died, a poet, not a bishop, composed his eulogy. Ireland had presented him a great opportunity to be an “Exile for Christ,” a holy man who lives among “strangers” because he has abandoned his past life, a life among his peers, in his journey toward Christ.
Exiles for Christ
In the Irish countryside one can still find the little solitary cells that men like Saint Columba inhabited. Holy men, men who removed themselves from the world and helped establish the Catholic Church in Ireland, lived in these cells. They were called “exiles for Christ.”
If you walk into one of these today, it is easy to imagine what men like Patrick and Columba felt. They had chosen to spend their whole lives in these little cells, isolated from friends, family, the world. Considering these men, I had an overpowering feeling of the transitory, brief nature of human life. Ireland was becoming, for me, a sort of “God’s waiting room.” I wasn’t hurrying death, but I was aware of it as I had never been. I thought of some lines I hadn’t thought about since college, from Yeats:
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all
In Ireland the spiritual always seemed very close. I realized that I hadn’t thought anything about my own death since I was a kid. Ireland didn’t take me away somewhere; it just brought me home. I seemed to be unable to think without thinking of “the big picture.” I was now thinking Irish.
For the Irish, literacy was almost equivalent to religion. From the beginning, the idea of learning was completely intertwined with religion in Ireland. The leading intellectuals were all monks, and the advanced schools shared their names with monasteries. On the surface Ireland’s collective consciousness was now Christian. But a little bit of the “old ways” still hung on. The Catholic Church as an institution was, of course, centered in Rome. But you never get a sense that the early Roman Church somehow interposed itself in Ireland. Despite the formalities and dogma and rituals of a very organized hierarchical Catholic Church, Christianity in Ireland was a quite distinct thing. No one would have a hard time distinguishing between “Irish Catholicism” and “Roman Catholicism.” In Columba’s life and writings, you can see that calling the Catholic Church in Ireland “the Irish Church” was not a big stretch.
But the Church in Ireland was still the same Latin-based religion with precise strictures, and the Irish bishops kept the “Roman rules” in a hard-nosed fashion. The ritual and dogma stayed almost precisely the same as in Rome. The dates for feast days were slightly different (owing to the Irish adherence to tradition and a spirited defense of “the Irish Way” by Irish bishops, notably Columbanus, who butted heads, quite successfully, with Pope Gregory the Great).
In the early Catholic Church, there was a real fear of classical learning. The entire liturgy was written in Latin, the language of Nero and Commodus, and there is, throughout the Irish clerical writing of the era, an oft-stated warning, a great fear of somehow being swayed toward pagan ways. Since the early Irish Church hung on to a lot of pagan trappings, maybe the fear was well founded.
You find writings warning of “the temptation of grammar and the lure of Apollo.” But in Ireland, the monks seem to have taken to Latin in a very serendipitous way. They played around with it. Latin was a language and the Irish have always seen words as playthings. Many see in the work of the early Irish monks the characteristic “Irish” quality. Even in a very solemn context, the monks found it hard to pass up an opportunity for a little laugh, a little wordplay.
I remember the first time I read anything “religious.” It was the Baltimore Catechism. Almost immediately, I remember making up sacriligious jokes, trying to get a laugh out of the girl next to me. I hadn’t realized that I was just doing what comes naturally to an Irish person.
During Columba’s era in Western culture, when the barbarians went inside the gate, made themselves at home, and redecorated, Ireland became, for a while, the intellectual center of the Western world. In Ireland there was an oasis, a place where words mattered. A place where words were loved and coddled and cherished and fooled around with.
Because Ireland was the center of learning, students from all over Europe went to school there. The Irish monasteries also sent traveling scholars all over Europe. By the ninth century Irish scholars were famous throughout the Western world. Many countries had an Irish “visiting intellect” in their government.
For a while their great kings were saying, “Wait a minute. Let me ask the Irish guy.”
Back home in Ireland the Roman Catholic Church started to have problems. The system was very detail-oriented, and this was impossible in Ireland, a land of very “creative” Catholics. Also, the Roman Catholic Church sent out trained bishops and assigned them to be the absolute religious power in that particular area.
The Roman system really had no chance of success in Ireland. Since people lived miles apart, the idea of a local bishop in charge of a particular area could never possibly work. If the ultimate arbiter is fifty miles away you don’t consult the ultimate arbiter if you need a fast answer. You get creative.
So the monasteries became little self-contained areas, little cities, in a way. This is amazing when you consider that people who had the original impulse to completely remove themselves from society started these minisocieties.
The seed of these monasteries was always one Irishman who, driven by a spiritual impulse, completely removed himself from society because of a spiritual impulse. Such men were called “white martyrs.” They were still alive, but they were “dead” to society. They had chosen to live, and die, completely alone. Now they found themselves surrounded by people who had similar ideas.
So these solitary cells all over the countryside often became monasteries. There might be one single hermit to join the original exile. Then two other guys who rejected secular life would join. Then a dozen. Pretty soon large groups started to live the solitary life. Paradoxically, hermits lived together.
This wasn’t just an Irish phenomenon. The pattern was repeated all over Western Europe, but it seems particularly prevalent in Ireland. Oddly, Ireland started to become a powerful force in many other areas after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Militarily, as well as intellectually, Ireland was a power. For a while, Ireland actually colonized parts of England. These isolated colonies were mostly in Wales and Cornwall. Cormac, an Irish scholar/bishop, wrote of this era: “The power of the Irish over the Britons was great, and they had divided Britain between them into estates…and they were in that control for a long time.”
I, along with a lot of Irish people, like hearing that.
By the 800s Irish learning was well-established and respected and admired throughout Europe. This might have continued, but the Irish were actually riding a streak of what was for them phenomenally good luck. They hadn’t been invaded in centuries, and the “invasions” often resembled unwelcome weekend visitors, more than the massive carnage usually associated with the word “invaded.” Some call this Ireland’s “Golden Age.”
It changed, of course.
The first invaders were Vikings, and they did the usual sacking, pillaging, and raping. Although the Vikings never really succeeded in “conquering” Ireland, they did destroy a great deal of the carefully preserved writing of Ireland’s great period. The nonmilitaristic (compared to the Vikings!), poorly organized Irish didn’t have a chance against the invaders, and the Vikings pretty much did what they wanted to do. They slaughtered the Irish and destroyed their homes and public buildings. What they didn’t destroy, they took back to Scandinavia. Today, historians have to rely on non-Irish sources to piece together a picture of what is left of “the Golden Age.”
Vikings certainly killed a lot of Irish people and destroyed invaluable writings. Viking raids went on until 842, when the Irish and Vikings made an uneasy alliance. This didn’t last long. The tenth century in
Ireland was basically one big raid by the Norsemen, who looked on treaties as “suggestions.”
The Viking influence on the little island wasn’t completely negative. A lot of the larger cities (Waterford, Dublin) were established by Vikings. They established a coin-based economy, which was a big advance from Ireland’s bizarre, cattle-based economy.
Still, there is an ancient Irish prayer that says it all compactly: “From the fury of the Norsemen deliver us.”
But by 1002, Ireland, always a country of hundreds of autonomous tribes, had what some historians call its first real king, Brian Boru. He achieved this, largely, by being the first to even seriously consider the idea that one man could rule the whole of the island. There are many legends about Boru. They all emphasize two sides of his personality. He was a truly vicious warrior who could cut a man in half with one swipe of his sword, but he was, at home, a sensitive, poetic type who loved to play the harp and compose love songs. The two sides of Brian Boru are still pretty much the two sides of the idealized Irishman. He is always something like a “warrior/poet.” The greatest Irish writing, I think, is similarly hard to pigeonhole. It is always profoundly “tragicomic.”
After Boru’s death, there were others who tried to be sole ruler, but Boru was certainly the first. In Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Boru is the Man.
Brian Boru was very aware of the power of Christianity among the people of Ireland. He made his brother abbot of Killaloe, Holy Island, and Terryglass. He threw a lot of money at the Church and it bought him a lot of goodwill among the people and the clergy. This practice is still a good idea in 2002.
Today, there are actually some doggedly Irish people who attempt to trace their genealogy back to Boru. Every Irish kid knows who Brain Boru was, and he’s achieved Santa Claus-like status. Mythic details have attached themselves to his life. His death is also rather myth-influenced.
The story goes that Boru died as an old man, but not in bed. He was watching a battle outside Dublin, and a guy from the other side crept up on him and killed him. The guy who killed him got his later, purportedly dying a painful horrible death. (I’ll spare you the details, but his death made Mel Gibson’s disemboweling death in Braveheart look like euthanasia.) Ancient Irish people weren’t big on torture. They were big on describing torture. So the guy who killed Brian Boru (traditionally named Brodar) probably just got beheaded or something semihumane. For the Irish, unlike a lot of ancient people, executions were not long, drawn out, “Let’s bring lunch!” affairs. For the most part, they executed quickly, by ancient standards.
Ireland has had a very violent past. It deserves a peaceful future and, as I write this, that may finally be the reality. An Irish peace has to be the best peace in the world. It’s been a long time.
NINE
What Are You
Doing for Potatoes?
During the potato famine, I was told, when someone asked you where in Ireland you were from, and you answered, “County Mayo,” the person would respond, automatically, “God Bless You.” (“It was like sneezing,” a dark-humored Mayo man in his seventies told me one night.)
Mayo is the poorest county in Ireland, which, until recently, was pretty damn poor. The unluckiest people in Irish history wound up owning land in Mayo, which supposedly was too rocky and irregular for any major farming. The place seems like one vast contradiction: Its amazing beauty has been the stage for a history of appalling suffering.
“This is the only place that ever suffered because of one miserable tuber,” my landlady told me right before we walked out to our car near the beginning of our trip. That thought stayed with me for the rest of our stay in Ireland. I spent a lot of time in Ireland contemplating potatoes. They’re hard to ignore. They were at the table in some form for every meal we ate.
Since we were in County Mayo, not that far from the “Mom” area of part two of our journey, we decided to travel north back to the ocean, and then sort of loop around to the “part two” portion of our trip. We were still meandering: The purposeful section of our journey—the search for my mom and dad—could wait a few days. We didn’t know exactly what we were after, but we were certainly up for it. The Punta looked ready. Nothing had fallen off yet, as far as I could tell.
In an hour or two, we could see the ocean. The clouds momentarily parted. The radio sounded exactly like the radio we had left back home in America: the top forty. But no Kasey Kasem. Nevertheless, it sounded pretty good. We were driving along in Ireland with the windows down listening to that New Radicals song (the one where they keep saying, “You got the music in you”), and we were enjoying it. Ireland! A long-distance dedication for you, Eriu.
We cruised along the northern shore of Clew Bay. The beaches looked pretty good, so we stopped and decided to sample the waters.
Paulette is from Miami. She considers eighty degrees a good water temperature. I consider her a sissy with respect to water temperature. I grew up with the icy waters of the Jersey shore. I have been known to brave water that dipped into the frigid sixties. I’m a workin’-class cool-rockin’ daddy.
We parked the car and headed out for our Celtic Surfin’ Safari.
We had bathing suits with us, but we both considered it premature to change into them. First we would “test the waters.”
The Irish beach wasn’t much like the Jersey shore. There was no boardwalk, no cheese fries, and there were no “I’m With Stupid” T-shirts. There was no smell of frying dough. There were no cheese steaks. Still, it was a beach. When you walked on it, there was the satisfying feeling of the sand between your toes. It was July. Far off in the distance I thought I could hear Sinatra’s “Summer Wind” wafting gently through the air.
July and we’re at the other end of the ocean. This is what my parents were looking at many years ago.
I looked off to the distant horizon. Somewhere out there people were eating cheese steaks and riding the tilt-a-whirl. Somewhere out there was Bruce Springsteen.
I reached the water and took a tentative step.
My God.
I looked at Paulette.
It looked as if she was thinking, “My God.”
We took a step back, but a tiny wave came in and covered our calves with water as cold as the gin in Sinatra’s martini. Another wave came in and we were knee-deep in absolutely numbingly cold water. For a second, I wanted to show Paulette that I was an extremely tough-minded man who is not easily affected by outside stimuli. Then I went “Ahh!” in a high-pitched voice and threw my hands up and ran away from the water.
I was happy to see that Paulette did something similar. Wusses love company.
We ran back with quick short steps and lapsed into self-comforting arms-around-our-own-backs poses and stood there hopping quickly up and down. Paulette was jumping up and down, I believe, more than I was. Good, I thought.
“Shit! This is cold!” I said, unnecessarily.
“No shit,” she said.
We decided to walk along the beach. It was quite beautiful and, after a mile or two, feeling returned to our calves, ankles, and feet.
We drove along, with the “Authentic Irish” station on. We stopped for a light lunch and my mind returned, as it must in Ireland at mealtime, to the potato.
The joke is, of course, “What’s the thinnest book in the world?” The answer is, “Irish Cooking.” “Italian War Heroes.” “Great British Heavyweight Boxers” (until recently, anyway).
This is not really fair. We ate a wide variety of things in Ireland, and most were very good. Ireland isn’t the South of France, but it’s not the home of boiled meat either.
In Dublin there are a dozen world-class restaurants, but there are a surprising number of excellent places all over the Irish countryside. We ate great prawns outside Limerick and some fine lamb in Milltown Malbay. We had turbot in Mayo and memorable poached turkey near Newcastle. And, of course, multiple Irish breakfasts almost everywhere.
There is one item, however, that is on every Irish menu. Pota
toes are served regularly with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We saw boxty (grilled, pancakelike potatoes), champ (mashed with scallions), potato broth (peelings in sauce), potato and celery root puree (I can live without this one), Wicklow Pancakes (onions, potatoes, eggs, seared in olive oil), and Michaelmas salad (beets, scallions, dill, chopped eggs, boiled potatoes).
Paulette ate a lot of these (she passed on celery root puree). I watched her.
I have always hated potatoes. I have not eaten a potato in at least twenty years. The mere sight of a plate of mashed potatoes is often enough to ruin my day. Watching someone else eat mashed potatoes produces, in me, a deep feeling of revulsion. If I watch a television show on which people are eating potatoes, it makes me a little ill, even though I am not in the presence of actual potatoes.
I am a walking illustration of the efficacy of B. F. Skinner’s ideas. Bernard Gannon and Anne Forde conditioned me to hate potatoes. My parents, being from Ireland, were pretty much addicted to potatoes. We would have mashed potatoes at every dinner. We would also have them for lunch. We would also have hash brown potatoes for breakfast. For a snack, there were always potatoes. My mom and dad would munch on a slice of potato while watching television or reading. Sometimes, when we went over someone else’s house for a meal, my parents would look at the table with profound disappointment if the table happened to be lacking the magic ingredient. They would eat, but they would not be happy. In the car on the way home they would mention the lack of potatoes.