by Brian Doyle
The Old Methodist Church
on Vashon Island
I read aloud from my headlong prose the other night
In a gentle old wooden church on an island and then
People wanted me to sign books and such but I have
Learned that mostly they do not want my scribble as
Much as they want to say something to me. So often
What they have to say is quiet and haunting and just
Enough of their deepest self that you both just stand
There startled and quiet for an instant with that story
Between you like it slid out without any forethought;
A sort of jailbreak where you cannot believe you’ve
Actually made it outside the walls. So this happened,
And I stood there with this guy and his long-lost son,
And neither of us said a word, and I bet we stood for
A minute with the boy between us. He would be five
Years old now, and he would be sleepy, and I would
Goof him and ask him if he was going to have a beer
Before he went to bed and he would shyly say nooo!,
And we would all smile and then his dad would sling
Him on his shoulder and he and I would shake hands,
The dad using his left hand so he didn’t drop the boy,
And I would turn politely to the next reader and offer
To deface their book. I guess what I wanted to say to
You here is that this did not happen but it did happen.
For a moment there was the little boy behind his dad,
Shy and sleepy and clutching his dad’s Sunday pants.
For a minute there was a kid who was and isn’t but is.
III.
We Can Take Off Our Masks, or, If We Can’t Do That, We Can Squawk Through the Holes in Them. A Squawk Is Better Than Nothing
Testimonio
I was at a conference the other day, and there was a reception, and people were making small talk, and I was happily babbling about sports, because one advantage to being a guy is that almost all guys are aware of sports and have an opinion or affiliation or affection or detestation of some team or sport or player thereof, when somehow the conversation swung to politics, which is dangerous ground because people get heated without having the slightest grip on fact, and one guy, why is it always a guy, started sneering courteously about someone else’s opinion, and I made a joke to decaffeinate his sneer, and he sneered slightly too politely that humor is the refuge of cowards, and a synapse popped in my brain, and I delivered a speech that went something like this: Really? So Mark Twain was a coward? And Will Rogers and Robin Williams and the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu were cowards? Bob Hope, who visited a million soldiers where they were huddled under bullets and rockets and mortars and mud and fear, he was a coward? Jesus, with His wry puzzling conundrum remarks, He was a coward? People who try to deflect and defuse moments pregnant with blood and bruises and death are cowards? Is that so? People who use their brains to figure out ways around fists and sticks and iron pipes and knives and guns are cowards? People who get it that we are issued imagination in order to invent new ways to be, other than the old ways where the biggest most sociopathic among us snatched whatever and whoever they wanted, those people are cowards? People who make other people laugh, during which time no one is raped or beaten or imprisoned, those people are cowards? People who consciously and deliberately and with cheerful intent make other people laugh, so that everyone cools out and people start to drop their masks and disguises and defenses and personas and assumptions, those people are cowards? People who foment laughter, knowing that laughter actually no kidding drops blood pressure, and warms up rooms, and urges wallflowers an inch or two away from the wall, those people are cowards? Define coward for me, if you will, because you have me confused and puzzled here about what is cowardly and what is brave. Does brave mean bloody to you? So the antithesis of coward is someone who heats things up, pushes people closer to the wall, elevates their anger, forces masks and disguises and defenses back on tighter than before, that guy is not a coward? Is that right? Because I think a guy who sneers is an arrogant pompous self-absorbed ass, and I think that humor is a great weapon against that sort of arrogance, and I think that arrogance so very often leads to violence, and I think the worst slimy murderers in history were all arrogant pompous fatheads who were convinced that they knew best, and they were the smartest guys in the room, and whatever twisted vision they had of the world and its future was the only right and true one, and they are all roasting in the lowest cellars in hell, and everyone roasting down there with them has one thing in common, a preening sneering narcissistic arrogance that polluted the world for exactly as long as they were allowed to foul it with their presence in this life. Am I making myself clear? Is there any other prim stupid sneering thing you want to say at this juncture? Because I think we have come to the point in this conversation where small talk just scuttled off hurriedly into the distance, and it’s time for you to stride off angrily, or time for us all to start telling entertaining stories in order to see under our masks and maybe get to some common ground in the few minutes we have before the next panel session begins. No cutting remark, to get your sneer back on? No? Good. I’ll start—the eight stupidest things I have ever done in this life, in order, are…
Mea Culpa
I laughed at gay people. I did. I snickered at their crew cuts and sashay and flagrancy. I snickered at the way they bristled about their rights. I did. I accused them of inventing disco. I laughed at their thing for feathers and glitter and fragrance and form-fitting uniforms. I grinned at the epic extravagance of gay-pride parades. I laughed at the idea of gay guys battling cops hand-to-hand at Stonewall, noting that that must have been a brief battle. Then I began to stop being such a meathead. Perhaps it was the sight of people weeping over the withering of those they loved with all their hearts and souls that snapped me awake. I stopped laughing. I started weeping too. The first time I saw the quilt I wept. The quilt is the biggest quilt you ever saw. It is more than a million square feet big. It is haunting and beautiful and terrible and lovely and bright and awful. Every panel is someone who died young. Every panel has tears in it. There are more tears in the quilt than there are threads. I started paying attention. I started listening. I stopped sneering and snickering. I began to hear the pummel of blows rained down on people for merely being who they are. How different is that from skin color and religion and ethnicity and nationality and the language that you speak? It is no different. I started listening. I heard stridency and silly demands and self-absorption and prickly neurosis but I also heard honesty and love and sense and logic and reason. If all men are created equal, why do we not act that way? If all women are created equal, why do we not act that way? If someone loves someone else, what do I care what gender or orientation or identity they choose? If they want to be married to each other and enter the deeper confusing thorny wilderness of marriage, what do I care? The marriage of gay people is a slippery slope to what, exactly? More committed love? Is that a bad thing? Is it a bad thing that couples wish to care for children when more children than ever before are without two parents? How exactly is that a bad thing? Aren’t two moms better than one? Who cares what gender the parents are? Isn’t love bigger than gender? Also some people, a lot more than you would think, feel like they are born with the wrong body, and they switch bodies, and as far as I can tell they generally then are thrilled and comfortable and satisfied with their new bodies, and what do I care? This happened to a friend of mine, who spent thirty years as a man and then switched teams, and she has been a woman for fifty years, and you never met a more brilliant, generous, witty, gentle, wise, courteous, erudite, positive soul in your life. What is it exactly that is objectionable about her decision about her life? What do I care? What do we care? Where is there anything political in her decision? What sort of cold cruel arrogant religion would pronounce her decision s
inful? Do not religions advocate love and mercy as the essential virtues? I have stopped sneering and snickering and laughing and teasing and making snide jokes about crew cuts and tight clothes and earrings. I was a fool. I was myself a joke, and not a good one. I said the words mercy and love and attentiveness and humility and tolerance and they were empty withered things in my mouth. No more. I am not gay. I am not bisexual. I am not lesbian. I am not transgender. I am not questioning. I am generally delighted and thrilled and comfortable and deeply satisfied with my body and my gender and my identity, except for some disconcerting spinal issues. But I no longer think that my body type and gender and identity give me license to sneer at other types. I never thought being a pale brown color gave me license to sneer at people who were russet or bronze or copper or taupe or ebony in color. I never thought that being male gave me license to sneer at people who were female. I stopped thinking that not being gay gives me license to sneer at people who are gay. It took me longer than it should have to stop thinking that, for which I apologize here in the last line of this essay. I have done many foolish things in this life, so far, and that was one of the most foolish, and cruel, and sinful. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Never again.
Yes
Lately I have been delving into early Irish literature and language, and so have been raiding cattle in Cuailnge, and pondering the visions of Oenghus, and feasting at Bricriu, and wooing Etain, which last has led to some tension with my wife, who is of Belgian extraction and does not like to hear me tell of the beautiful Etain, the loveliest woman in all Ireland, although Etain was changed to an insect and banished for a thousand years, until she was reborn as the wife of Eochaid Airem, king of the green lands.
I try to explain to my wife that I am wooing only by proxy, as it were, and that Eochaid has the inside track, he being in the story and me only reading it. This line of talk leads me inevitably to Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen and Brian O’Nolan, all of whom I wheel into the conversation, the three men standing all in the same spot, as if they were the same man, which they were, except when O’Nolan was writing, which is when he became one of the others depending on what he was writing—novels as O’Brien, journalism as na gCopaleen (“of the little horses”) or sometimes Count O’Blather, or James Doe, or Brother Barnabas, or George Knowall.
My wife is unmoved; she will not have Etain in the house.
After a while I realize that the problem is the word woo. It is a word that may be applied to your wife and your wife only, if you have a wife, she is saying without saying. She is a subtle woman, which is part of the reason I wooed her years ago, and won her from various rivals, who did not woo so well, and went away, one may say, full of rue.
I spent some time after that saying woo, which is a very fine word, rife with meaning, and emitted with a lift from the lips, like whee and who, or no. By chance I happened to be saying woo in the presence of my new son Joseph, a curious young man three months of age. Like his father he is intrigued by sounds, and soon enough he too was saying woo, and then my other new son Liam, also three months old, picked it up, and the three of us were wooing to beat the band, although then Liam burst into tears, and had to be carried away to another room for milk.
Joe and I kept it up, though; he is an indefatigable fellow. After a while he switched to who, and I went with him, to see where this would go, and it went back and forth between us for a while, and then it went to whee, and then back to woo, and then my wife came back in the room and found us wooing like crazy men. By then it was Joe’s turn for a suckle and off he went, and I went downstairs to raid cattle in Cuailnge, and ponder Oenghus, and feast at Bricriu, and woo Etain, of whom the less said the better.
The wooing of Etain demands a certain familiarity with the Gaelic tongue, which has fascinated me since I was a boy in my grandmother’s lap listening to the swell and swing of Irish from her lips, which more often than you might expect had Gaelic oaths on them, as she was a shy woman with a sharp temper, though gentle as the night is long, and much mourned by many to this day. I still hear her voice on windy nights, banshee nights, saying to me, gently, bí I do bhuachaill maith, be a good boy, or Go mbeannaí Dia tbú, God bless you. So partly in memory of my grandmother, a McCluskey before she was a Clancey giving her daughter to a Doyle, I have been marching through the thickets of the Irish tongue, the second oldest in Europe behind Basque, and the cold hard fact is that the Gaelic language is a most confusing creature, and although I don’t understand very much of it I read about it at every opportunity, and have been able to note several interesting observations on small scraps of paper, which are then distributed willy-nilly in various pants pockets, emerging here and there like crumpled fish, and reminding me that I had meant to write an essay on the topic at, or more accurately in, hand.
Thus this story, which was supposed to be about the fact that there is no way to say the words yes and no in Gaelic, but swerved unaccountably into a disquisition about sounds, of which some are exuberant, like Joe’s woo, and some affirmative, like sea, which is Gaelic for it is, and yes and si and ja and oui, which are English and Spanish and German and French for yes, which there is no way to say in Gaelic, try as you might.
Is it sayable in the Irish?
Nil—it is not.
Nil is as fascinating as sea to me, especially so lately because my daughter, Lily, a rebellious angel, age three, is fixated on no, which she says often, in different accents, with various degrees of vehemence. She says it morning, noon, and night, particularly at night, when she wakes up screaming no no no no no, and answers nooooo when I ask what is the matter. Sometimes she says neuwh, which is a sort of no, which is said usually after she has been watching Mary Poppins and is afflicted with a sort of stiffening of the upper lip which prevents proper pronunciation of simple words like no. It is interesting that she is riveted by no because her brother Liam is riveted by ho, which is the only word he owns at the moment. Like a geyser he emits ho! regularly and then subsides. I expect him to pick up no pretty soon, his sister being a whiz at it and the boys certain to learn at her knee, and then Joe will get no too and then my children will be saying no to beat the band, not to mention the thin stretched rubber of their father’s patience which they hammer upon like a bodhran, the wee drum of my Wicklow ancestors.
But their father is in the basement at the moment musing over the fact that Gaelic always uses tu, or thou, when speaking to one person, or sibh, you, for more than one, which habit, he thinks, reflects a certain native friendliness in the tongue and in its speakers; and he further puzzles over the fact that Irish counts in twenties, not tens; and further he muses that Gaelic, at least in Ireland, has no terms for the Mister and Señor and Herr that English and Spanish and German use as terms of bourgeois respect, which makes him wonder about Irish independence as well as rural isolation. Also he spends a good deal of time pondering ogham, the alphabet used in Ireland for writing on wood and stone before the year 500 or so, when Christianity and the Latin alphabet rode into Ireland together on strong winds, and the fact that Gaelic has perhaps sixty phonemes, which are sounds that convey meaning, and of which there are perhaps forty-four in English, which comparative fact makes him wonder about the width of the respective languages, so to speak, which width is also reflected in the simple spelling and pronunciation of terms in each tongue: I might say of Liam that he is an buachaill, the boy, for example, and roll the former off my tongue and pop the latter out rather like ho, which is what Liam is saying as I am calling him an buachaill.